Isaiah 35
Based on Wikipedia: Isaiah 35
A Desert Bursting Into Song
Picture a parched wasteland suddenly erupting with flowers. Imagine a barren valley, cracked and lifeless, transformed overnight into a garden so lush it rivals the famous forests of Lebanon. This is the vision that opens Isaiah chapter thirty-five, one of the most beautiful passages in all of Hebrew scripture, and one that has echoed through religious music and theology for more than two thousand years.
The chapter is short. Just ten verses. But in those verses, the ancient prophet paints a picture of cosmic restoration that captured imaginations from the Dead Sea caves to the concert halls of eighteenth-century London.
Understanding the Landscape
To appreciate what Isaiah is describing, you need to understand the terrain he's talking about. The Hebrew text uses three distinct words for desolate places, each with its own shade of meaning.
The first is midbar, translated as wilderness. This isn't necessarily a sandy desert. It's land that receives less than twelve inches of rain annually. Sometimes it can support grazing, but barely. It's marginal country, the kind of place where survival is never guaranteed.
The second term is tsiyyah, which the King James Version renders as "solitary place" but really means something closer to "dry land" or "arid region." Of the three terms Isaiah uses, this one most clearly evokes true desert conditions.
The third is aravah, the rift valley. This refers to the great geological gash that runs from the Sea of Galilee down through the Jordan Valley to the Dead Sea and beyond. Even today, this region has a reputation for desolation, especially in its southern reaches near the Dead Sea, where the salt content is so high that almost nothing can survive.
When Isaiah says these places will bloom like a rose, he's making an outrageous claim. He's saying the impossible will happen.
The Mystery of the Rose
Speaking of that rose, there's actually quite a debate about what flower Isaiah had in mind. The Hebrew word chavatzelet appears only twice in the entire Bible. Once here, and once in the Song of Songs, where it's part of the famous line "I am the rose of Sharon."
Translators over the centuries have taken wildly different approaches. The ancient Greek translation called the Septuagint, produced a few centuries before Christ, rendered it as a lily. The Latin Vulgate followed suit. But modern translators have suggested it might be a jonquil, a crocus, or some other bulb flower that blooms brilliantly in the Mediterranean spring.
The exact species matters less than the image. Whatever this flower was, it represented something spectacular emerging from something barren.
The Glory of Lebanon and Carmel
Isaiah reaches for his culture's most powerful images of natural beauty. Lebanon was famous throughout the ancient world for its cedar forests. These weren't just pretty trees. Lebanese cedar was the premium building material of antiquity, used in Solomon's Temple and in the palaces of Egyptian pharaohs. The forests of Lebanon represented the pinnacle of what nature could produce.
Carmel, meanwhile, was a fertile mountain ridge on the coast of what is now Israel. Its name literally means "garden" or "orchard." When Isaiah says the desert will receive the glory of Lebanon and the splendor of Carmel, he's saying the worst land will become the best.
Sharon, also mentioned in this passage, was a coastal plain known for its fertile soil and abundant flowers. It represented agricultural prosperity at its finest.
Strengthening Weak Hands
The chapter then pivots from landscape to people. "Strengthen the weak hands," Isaiah writes, "and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have a fearful heart, 'Be strong, do not fear.'"
There's a phrase in the Hebrew that describes people "of a hasty heart." Commentators have interpreted this to mean those who are panicked, ready to flee at the first sign of danger. The nineteenth-century biblical scholar Albert Barnes connected this to people "disposed to flee before their enemies."
Isaiah tells these frightened people to stand firm. Why? Because God is coming. And when God arrives, everything changes.
Eyes That Open, Ears That Hear
Here comes the heart of the chapter, and the verses that would resonate most powerfully through later history.
"Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy."
These images of physical healing became central to how later generations understood what it meant for God to act in the world. When Jesus of Nazareth performed miracles of healing, his followers looked back to this chapter as a kind of checklist.
In the Gospel of Matthew, when John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus whether he really is the promised one, Jesus replies by pointing to exactly these kinds of healings. The blind receive sight. The lame walk. The deaf hear. It's as if Jesus is saying, "Look at Isaiah thirty-five. That's what's happening right now."
The book of Acts records Peter healing a lame man at the Temple gate, and the text seems to deliberately echo Isaiah's imagery of the lame leaping like a deer.
The Highway Through the Wilderness
Isaiah describes a sacred road cutting through the transformed desert. He calls it "the Way of Holiness." This highway would allow the ransomed and redeemed to return home with joy.
This image of a highway through the wilderness connects to other parts of the Book of Isaiah, particularly the later chapters that scholars often call Second Isaiah or Deutero-Isaiah. The famous opening of chapter forty, "Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God," picks up the same imagery.
The promise is that the path home won't be dangerous. No lion will prowl there. No ravenous beast will threaten the travelers. The way will be safe, clear, and joyful.
Everlasting Joy
The chapter ends with one of the most beautiful verses in the entire Hebrew Bible.
"And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."
There's a subtle wordplay in the Hebrew here. The phrase "upon their heads" uses the same construction as an ancient mourning practice where people would pour dust or earth on their heads as a sign of grief. Isaiah inverts this. Instead of dust and ashes, joy becomes the crown.
The final phrase about sorrow and sighing fleeing away appears again in Isaiah chapter sixty-five, creating a literary link between this chapter and the book's later visions of a renewed creation.
Ancient Manuscripts and Textual History
How do we know what Isaiah originally wrote? The text has come down to us through multiple manuscript traditions, and scholars compare them to reconstruct the most accurate version possible.
The most famous source is the Great Isaiah Scroll, discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. This remarkable document, designated 1QIsa-a, dates to sometime between 356 and 100 before the common era. It contains the complete text of Isaiah and is the oldest complete copy of any biblical book.
Other important Hebrew manuscripts include the Aleppo Codex from the tenth century and the Leningrad Codex from 1008, both part of what scholars call the Masoretic text tradition. The Masoretes were medieval Jewish scholars who meticulously preserved and transmitted the Hebrew scriptures, adding vowel markings to the consonantal text to ensure correct pronunciation.
There's also the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures made in Alexandria, Egypt, during the last few centuries before Christ. Ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint version include Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, both from the fourth century, and Codex Alexandrinus from the fifth century.
The Chapter in Christian Music
Isaiah thirty-five left its mark on some of the most celebrated sacred music in the Western tradition.
George Frideric Handel, the German-born composer who became a British citizen, incorporated verses five and six into his famous oratorio "Messiah," composed in 1741. The work, catalogued as HWV 56, remains one of the most frequently performed choral pieces in the world. When audiences hear the aria about the eyes of the blind being opened, they're hearing Isaiah's ancient Hebrew poetry filtered through Handel's baroque musical sensibility.
In German Catholic tradition, the theologian Friedrich Dörr composed an Advent hymn called "Kündet allen in der Not" (roughly "Proclaim to All in Distress") based on verses from this chapter. The season of Advent, which prepares for Christmas, has long drawn on Isaiah's imagery of preparation and transformation.
Where This Chapter Fits
Isaiah thirty-five sits at a significant transition point in the book. It's the final chapter in a collection that began at chapter twenty-eight, a sequence that the Jerusalem Bible describes as "poems on Israel and Judah." The New King James Version gives chapter thirty-five the title "The Future Glory of Zion."
What makes this chapter particularly interesting to scholars is how its imagery anticipates the later portions of Isaiah. The themes of God's glory, the healing of the blind and lame, and the highway through the desert all appear in expanded form in chapters forty through sixty-six.
This has led some scholars to see chapter thirty-five as a bridge, possibly composed or edited to connect the earlier portions of Isaiah to the later ones. Others view it as evidence of thematic unity across the book, with the same images and concerns recurring in different forms.
A Vision of Complete Restoration
What makes Isaiah thirty-five endure is its comprehensive vision of renewal. It's not just that the land will be restored. The people will be healed. The journey home will be safe. Joy will replace sorrow permanently.
This isn't incremental improvement. It's total transformation. The very categories of existence shift. What was barren becomes abundant. What was broken becomes whole. What was dangerous becomes secure.
For readers across millennia, whether they've encountered this text in Hebrew scrolls, Greek codices, Latin manuscripts, or modern translations, the vision remains striking. A world where the desert blooms with the glory of Lebanon, where the blind see and the lame leap, where an open highway leads to everlasting joy.
It's a vision that has sustained hope through exiles and persecutions, through long winters and dark nights. And it remains, twenty-six centuries after it was first written down, one of the most powerful images of redemption in all of world literature.