Righteous King

Isaiah pronounces a woe against those who “add house to house and join field to field, until there is no room” (5:8). He warns that the houses of the land-greedy elites will be left desolate (v. 6).

We can imagine that wealthy landowners took a page from Ahab, who manipulated public opinion to seize Naboth’s ancestral property. Whatever techniques were used, the result was that the poorest were being squeezed from the land.

It wasn’t until Nebuchadnezzar broke through the walls of Jerusalem and took captives into exile that the situation was repaired. He left “some of the poorest people who had nothing” in the land, and “gave them vineyards and fields” (Jeremiah 39:10). Nebuchadnezzar the Gentile brings Jubilee, a return to ancestral land, a restoration that no king of Judah achieved.

In this Nebuchadnezzar is a fulfillment of the vision of Psalm 72, which describes a king who will vindicate the afflicted, save the needy, and crush the oppressor. In this, indeed, Nebuchadnezzar is Yahweh-like, since it was Yahweh who first distributed the land to all Israel.