Isaiah 66:24

Isaiah 66:24. And they shall go forth — Namely, those who had joined themselves to the communion of the church spoken of in the preceding verses; and look upon the carcasses of the men that have sinned against me — Meaning chiefly the unbelieving Jews who rejected Christ and his gospel, including, however, all impenitent sinners, and especially all the enemies and persecutors of God’s truth and people. By looking upon their carcasses is meant beholding the dreadful vengeance taken on them. This is here represented in figurative language. The misery is described by an allusion to the frightful spectacle of a field of battle covered with the carcasses of the slain, which lie rotting upon the ground, full of worms, crawling about them, and feeding on them. It seems the Lord, by his prophet, first intends to set forth the dreadful temporal calamities that should come upon the Jews, in the destruction of their city and nation by the Romans; in which destruction, as has been intimated in the note on Isaiah 66:16 , not less than between two and three millions, first and last, were cut off by the sword, famine, and pestilence. But when it is added, for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, it is certain the punishment of the wicked in the world to come is chiefly intended.

These words, it is well known, are applied by our Saviour, ( Mark 9:44 ,) to express the everlasting punishment of the wicked in Gehenna, or hell, so called, in allusion to the valley of Hinnom, the place where the idolatrous Jews celebrated that horrible rite of making their children pass through the fire, that is, of burning them in sacrifice to Moloch; concerning which place see note Isaiah 30:33 . “Our Saviour,” says Bishop Lowth, expressed the state of the blessed by sensible images; such as paradise, Abraham’s bosom, or, which is the same thing, a place to recline next to Abraham at table, in the kingdom of heaven; (see Matthew 8:11 ; John 13:23 ;) for we could not possibly have any conception of it, but by analogy from worldly objects: in like manner he expressed the place of torment under the image of Gehenna; and the punishment of the wicked by the worm, which there preyed on the carcasses, and the fire, which consumed the wretched victims.

And they shall go forth, and look upon the {k} carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their {l} worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorrence {m} to all flesh. (k) As he who declared the happiness that will be within the Church for the comfort of the godly, so does he show what horrible calamity will come to the wicked, that are out of the Church. (l) Meaning, a continual torment of conscience, which will always gnaw them, and never permit them to be at rest, Mr 9:44. (m) This is the just recompense for the wicked, who contemning God and his word, will be by God's just judgments abhorred by all his creatures.

24. go forth, and look—as the Israelites looked at the carcasses of the Egyptians destroyed at the Red Sea (Ex 14:30; compare Isa 26:14-19; Ps 58:10; 49:14; Mal 4:1-3). carcasses, &c.—(Isa 66:16), those slain by the Lord in the last great battle near Jerusalem (Zec 12:2-9; 14:2-4); type of the final destruction of all sinners. worm … not die—(Mr 9:44, 46, 48). Image of hell, from bodies left unburied in the valley of Hinnom (whence comes Gehenna, or "hell"), south of Jerusalem, where a perpetual fire was kept to consume the refuse thrown there (Isa 30:33). It shall not be inconsistent with true love for the godly to look with satisfaction on God's vengeance on the wicked (Re 14:10). May God bless this Commentary, and especially its solemn close, to His glory, and to the edification of the writer and the readers of it, for Jesus' sake!

Either the Gentiles, or the sincerer part of the Jews, shall go forth from their places, or from Jerusalem, or go out of their graves, at the last day, and look upon the vengeance I have taken upon these vile idolaters and formalists, for their satisfaction, Psalm 58:10 ; they shall see none of them alive, but they shall see their carcasses. For the worms that feed on their slain carcasses shall not suddenly die, and the enemy’s fire burning upon their habitations shall not go out till they be wholly consumed; and after this life, and at the day of judgment, they shall go into eternal torments; see Mark 9:44,46,48 ; where they will feel a worm of conscience that shall never die, and a fiery wrath of God upon their souls and bodies that shall never go out.

24 . And they (the worshippers) shall go forth ] to some place in the vicinity of Jerusalem, no doubt the Valley of Hinnom, Nehemiah 11:30 ; cf. Joshua 15:8 ; Joshua 18:16 ; 2 Chronicles 28:3 ; Jeremiah 7:32 ; 2 Kings 23:10 . (See below.) the men that rebelled against me ] The apostates so often referred to in the last two chapters. for their worm shall not die, &c. ] (see below) Jdt 16:17 ; Sir 7:17 ; Mark 9:44 ff. an abhorring ] The Hebrew word ( dçrâ’ôn ) occurs again only in Daniel 12:2 . This verse is the basis of the later Jewish conception of Gehenna as the place of everlasting punishment (see Salmond, Christian Doctrine of Immortality , pp. 355–360). Gehenna is the Hebrew Gê-Hinnôm (Valley of Hinnom), the place where of old human sacrifices were offered to Molech ( Jeremiah 7:31 f., et passim ), and for this reason desecrated by king Josiah ( 2 Kings 23:10 ). Afterwards it became a receptacle for filth and refuse, and Rabbinical tradition asserts that it was the custom to cast out unclean corpses there, to be burned or to undergo decomposition. This is in all probability the scene which had imprinted itself on the imagination of the writer, and which was afterwards projected into the unseen world as an image of endless retribution. The Talmudic theology locates the mouth of hell in the Valley of Hinnom. But how much of the later theology lies in this passage it is difficult to say.

Nothing is expressly said of torment endured by the dead, but only of the loathsome spectacle they present to the living; although the former idea may be implied and is suggested by a comparison with ch. Isaiah 50:11 . “If this passage is of too early a date, as Dillmann thinks, to admit of a reference to the horrors of the Valley of Gehinnom, the double figure of the worm and the fire may be due to the two ways of disposing of the dead, by interment and by cremation. The immediate object of the description of the worm as never dying and the fire as never being quenched, appears to be to mark the destination of those men as a perpetual witness to the consuming judgements of God, and one which all flesh may see. The incongruity of the idea of a fire burning a dead body and never going out, is supposed, however, to point to something more.… It may be that the dead body is poetically conceived to be conscious of the pains of the worm and the fire, as Dillmann supposes [cf. Job 14:22 ]. But even that goes beyond the immediate object, which is to present the men in question as a perpetual spectacle of shame to all beholders” (Salmond, l.c. p. 212). The view thus expressed is reasonable if the passage was written by the author of the preceding chapters.

Verse 24. - And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases , etc. Here is more imagery, which it is impossible to understand literally. The carcases could not remain always to be looked at, nor while they remained could the sight of them be otherwise than loathsome to God's redeemed saints. Again, they could not be at the same time burnt with fire and eaten by worms. "The prophet, by the very mode of description adopted by him, precludes the possibility of our conceiving of the thing set forth as realized in any material form in this present state. He is speaking of the future state, but in figures drawn from the present world" (Delitzsch). Does he mean more than this - that the redeemed shall have in their thoughts, at any rate from time to time, the fact that, while they have by God's great mercy been saved and brought into His kingdom, there are those who have not been saved, but lie for ever under the awful sentence of God's wrath? This is a knowledge which the redeemed must have, and which may well produce a salutary effect on them, intensifying their gratitude and maintaining in them a spirit of reverent fear . Their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched (comp. Mark 9:44, 46, 48 ). It cannot be by chance that the evangelical prophet concludes his glorious prophecy with this terrible note of warning.