By Robert E. Cruickshank, Jr. with Daniel E. Harden
Daniel E. Harden (Editor)
Copyright © Robert E. Cruickshank, Jr. (April 11, 2025)
All Rights Reserved
“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; And the former things will not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I create; For behold, I create Jerusalem for rejoicing and her people for gladness” (Isa. 65:17-18).
As explained in two previous articles,[1] the Biblical prophets used the original creation narrative (order out of chaos) to frame their own narrative regarding judgment and restoration. A return to sin = a return to chaos, and a return to the Lord = a return to order. This being the case, judgment is often expressed in de-creation language, and restoration is often expressed in re-creation language. Hence the prophets used de-creation language to denounce the sinful state that would send God’s Old Testament people into exile, and Isaiah uses re-creation language to demonstrate their renewed state after the return from exile. He says, God will create a “new heavens and new earth,” and the “former things will not be remembered or come to mind.”[2]
Many today read this passage and think that it’s talking about “a complete memory wipe” in the “Christian eternal future.”[3] As Richard Middleton reminds us, however, this passage is part of Isaiah’s “prophetic visions of God’s renewal of people and land after the exile”[4] – so believers today need not worry about their hard drives crashing and spending eternity as blank slates. Neither did the returning Jewish exiles, for that matter.
The “former (ri’shon) things” being contrasted with the “new heavens and new earth” are fairly easy to identify. Isaiah had introduced these “things” earlier in the chapter and identified them as “former (ri’shon)” twice already (Isa. 65:7, 16). The “former (ri’shon) things” are the pagan practices which would send the Israelites into exile, and the “new heavens and new earth” would be the new beginning after the return from exile – the restoration period.
The Former Things
In verses 3-4, Isaiah speaks of those who offer sacrifices in gardens, burn incense on the bricks, spend the night among the graves in secret places, and drink the broth of unclean meat (Isa. 65:3-4). These are the very “things” that sent both houses into exile. Rather than being the light to the nations around them as they should have been (Deut. 4:7-10), the opposite happened. The Israelites had let those nations drag them down into darkness, apostasy, and rebellion.
In the pagan cultures surrounding ancient Israel, sacrifices “offered in gardens and orchards”[5] was a common practice.[6] Here in chapter 65, Isaiah picks up on an earlier theme of disdain for these rituals. In the opening chapter, the prophet hits the ground running by expressing Yahweh’s extreme displeasure in this regard:
“You certainly will be ashamed of the oaks which you have desired,
and you will be embarrassed by the gardens which you have chosen” (Isa. 1:29).
Isaiah also mentions spending the night among the graves in secret places (Isa. 65:4). This highlights ancient Israel’s penchant toward necromancy, a pagan practice strictly forbidden by Moses (Deut. 18:11). As Paul Shalom comments, “They would sit for vigils at burial sites so that they may inquire of the dead.”[7] Once again, Isaiah is reiterating an earlier theme. In chapter 28, Judah is warned against making a covenant with death and a pact with Sheol in secret places (Isa. 28:15, 17-18).[8] Isaiah had already called God’s people to task on necromancy. For example, Isaiah notes that people were turning to necromancy instead of God:
“And when they say to you, ‘Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,” should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?’” (Isaiah 8:19).
In 65:11, Isaiah hones in on another pagan practice that the Israelites had adopted, namely, the festal celebrations in honor of Gad and Meni – “the deities of fortune and destiny.”[9] As George Mitrov writes, “The prophet deepens the nation’s forsaking of Yhwh via the worship of Gad and Meni, both pan-Semitic deities.”[10] Whereas the previous indictments mentioned are associated with the “Baalistic practices of Canaanite religion,” Gad (Fortune) and Meni (Destiny) were most popular among the gods of the “Babylonian pantheon.”[11]
The trajectory of the two forced exile events would reflect the directional points from which these pagan influences came, i.e., Assyria to the north and Babylon to the east.[12] It is as if the Lord was saying, “If you want to worship these gods, fine. I’ll exile you to the lands where those gods are worshipped.” These are the “things” that God’s people were spending their time doing, and these are the “things” for which God would be sending them into exile. These were the “former (ri’son) things.”
From Former Things to New Things
Dovetailing with the “former (ri’son) things” of verse 17, Isaiah calls these pagan practices their “former (ri’shon) works” in verse 7 and their “former (ri’shon) troubles” in verse 16 (Isa. 65:7, 16). But those “former (ri’shon) troubles” would one day be “forgotten” (Isa. 65:16). The Hebrew word Isaiah uses for “forgotten,” shakach, refers to the act of hiding, neglecting, or disregarding something. The “former troubles” would be disregarded or put out of mind.
This is where the framework of the chapter draws us as the “new heavens and new earth,” which God is going to “create,” are contrasted with the “former” (ri’shon) things” in verse 17. The context has everything to do with the two upcoming exiles (Israel in 722 BC and Judah in 586 BC) and the reasons for those exiles. In verse 17, Isaiah begins to look forward to the restoration after the return from exile that will begin with the declaration of Cyrus – calling the exiles back home from all over his kingdom in 536 BC (Ezra 1:1-7). This is what Isaiah’s prophecy of “new heavens and new earth” was all about.
As John D. Watts comments, Isaiah’s “new heavens and new earth” refers to the “new age with Cyrus and his successors” and “the new order that is being created.”[13] It is the age “in which Persia holds sway over the entire area so that Jerusalem can be rebuilt.”[14] It is “the new order,” continues Watts, “divinely instituted, which chaps. 40–66 have revealed, and in which the Persian Empire has YHWH’s sanction, and Israel is called to be a worshiping and pilgriming people with Jerusalem as its focus.”[15]
Jerusalem indeed became that focus, with Isaiah mentioning it six times in the prophecy that follows (Isa. 65:18, 19; 66:8, 10, 13,20). The creation of the new heavens and new earth in Isaiah 65:17 is synonymous with the creation of Jerusalem in verse 18. The theme of Jerusalem being rebuilt was introduced earlier in Isaiah, in the same chapter and verse where Cyrus is introduced. God calls Cyrus his “shepherd” who “will perform all my desire” and declares of Jerusalem, “she shall be built” (Isa. 44:28).
The Voice of Weeping
After the city is rebuilt and reinhabited under Cyrus, Isaiah says, “There will no longer be heard in her the voice of weeping (be’khi) and the sound of crying” (Isa. 65:19). These words immediately remind us of Jeremiah’s words coming on the cusp of the exile:
“This is what the Lord says:
‘A voice is heard in Ramah,
Lamenting and bitter weeping (be’khi) .
Rachel is weeping (be’khi) for her children;
She refuses to be comforted for her children,
Because they are no more’” (Jer. 31:15).[16]
Ramah was “the place where Nebuzara-dan collected all the Jews in chains, previous to their removal to Babylon (Jer 40:1).”[17] It was the “deportation point for the second exile on the road north from Jerusalem to Babylon.”[18] The rhetorical Rachel (representing the mother of Israel and Judah, just as Jacob was their father in Isaiah 65:9) is weeping because her children, who were taken to Ramah, “are no more.” The fact that the Babylonians killed Judean children (a tactic of warfare at the time) is evident in Isaiah 47. In Isaiah 47:3, God says that he will enact na’qam against the “daughter of Babylon” (cf. Isa. 47:1). Usually translated as “vengeance,” the full force of the word conveys the idea of “restoring justice” by bringing “consequences in the form of proportionate evil upon those who enacted them.”[19] In other words, there is a sense that the punishment would follow in a similar manner to the crime that was committed – let the punishment fit the crime (to borrow a line from the music of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado). This being the case, part of Babylon’s daughter’s punishment would be that she would incur “loss of children and widowhood” (Isa. 47:9). This implies that the Babylonians did in fact kill Jewish children during the deportation process as they were traversed through Ramah on their way to Babylon, hence Rachel’s weeping for the loss of her children in that place.
Isaiah and Jeremiah, therefore, are both tracking on the same theme and, as such, the historical circumstances match. Upon the deportation, Rachel’s children would either be killed or they’d live out the rest of their lives in the fields of Babylon rather than the streets of their homeland. Neither outcome was desirable, and she’d be laboring “in vain” and bearing her children “for calamity” (Isa. 65:23). Conversely, both prophets also look forward in hope to the restoration after the return from exile when such would no longer be the case. Jeremiah promises that Rachel’s children “shall return to their own territory” (Jer. 31:17) and Isaiah assures his readers that the time will come when the weeping and crying will “no longer be heard” (Isa. 65:19).
Long Life and A New Hope
Not only were their children once again to be born back in their homeland and live their lives out there, but their lives were going to be meaningful and full of purpose. Isaiah employs a common literary trope of the ancient world where quantity of life symbolizes quality of life:
“No longer will there be in it an infant who lives only a few days,
Or an old person who does not live out his days;
For the youth will die at the age of a hundred,
And the one who does not reach the age of a hundred
Will be thought accursed” (Isa. 65:20).
The most well-known example of this length-of-life motif would, of course, be the Sumerian King’s Lists. In these lists, various kings were said to have had impossibly long reigns, to the tune of 28,000 years, 36,000 years, 43,000 years, etc. Obviously, everyone in the ancient world understood that these kings didn’t actually live, much less reign, for tens of thousands of years. Rather, this was a rhetorical device meant to highlight the importance of their time on the throne. The stated duration of their reign symbolized the significance of their reign; it was not intended to be understood literally. This rhetorical device, where length of life signifies strength of life, was frequently employed in the literature of the time.
In ancient Egypt, for example, the phrase “he died at the age of 110” referred to someone who lived life to the fullest and offered important contributions to society. Craig Olson summarizes the usage of the phrase:
“When you were alive, they would say, ‘I hope you live to 110.’ After you died—if you were an honorable person—they said, ‘He lived to be 110,’ even though you probably only made it to 40, if you were lucky… So, in Egypt, the people knew what a normal lifespan would be, yet they consistently spoke of 110 as an ideal age and exaggerated even more the lifespan of kings…”[20]
With this in mind, it’s no small coincidence that the Egyptian ideal age makes its way into the pages of Scripture in conjunction with the Israelites’ time in Egypt. Olson explains:
“The lifespans of Joseph (Gen 50:22, 26) and Joshua (Josh 24:29, Judg 2:8), who represent the first generation and last generation of Israelites in Egypt, seems an obvious use of the symbolic Egyptian lifespan of 110 years.”[21]
When the Biblical writers said that Joseph and Joshua both “died being 110 years old,” their point may not have been simply that these two men literally lived almost three times as long as the average lifespan back then. Their point may also have been polemical in nature. It was to say that the peace, order, and stability of the Egyptian society came through the presence of God’s people, rather than through Pharoah or the Egyptian people themselves – specifically, that peace, order, and stability came with Joseph and left with Joshua. God blesses His people with lives of substance and significance, and it overflows to all with whom they interact. Olson captures the significance of the possible use of this rhetorical device in the Bible, when he writes:
“Many people do not appreciate that there is a biblical purpose behind the use of hyperbolic lifespans. The exaggerated lifespans make sense when we realize that the Bible itself presents long lifespans as intentional representations of honor.”[22]
Looping back to the Sumerian King’s Lists, Olson notes that a “regular person” could not “wish” for his/her life’s worth to be expressed with numbers this large.[23] But Isaiah says, “For as the lifetime of a tree, so shall be the days of my people” (Isa. 65:22). This telegraphs the idea that God’s faithful people are all kings and priests in His eyes.
Kings and Priests Then and Now
Isaiah is picking up on a common literary device of his time, in his 65th chapter, to drive his point home. The blessings upon the faithful returning at the restoration are typified through the long-lifespan imagery. This is similar to Jesus’s statement in the New Testament: “The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy, but I have come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). This does not mean that believers will necessarily live longer lives than non-believers. In many cases, the Lord’s faithful servants on this earth are “gone too soon,” to borrow a line from Scott Stapp’s fantastic song.[24] But believers in Jesus live a lifetime in His abundant grace and mercy, and those who don’t know him never really live at all. To quote Psalm 23:6,
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
So, the good news is that we won’t be getting our memories wiped in eternity after all! And while this passage has been historically fulfilled in the past, Isaiah packed it full of meaning that would last. We can live life to the fullest when we serve God to the fullest. Like the Israelites being sent into exile for idolatry, we need to forsake our own “former things” which “amount to idolatry” (Col. 3:5) – so we can live that life and be all that God wants us to be. In our next installment, we’ll continue to examine how God blessed his people after the exile, and how these passages still speak to us today.
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[1] Robert E. Cruickshank, Jr, Zephaniah at World’s End: A Modern Misunderstanding of an Ancient Motif – The Burros of Berea https://bit.ly/3Ethj9Q ; Robert E. Cruickshank Jr., A Walk Through Psalm 102 – The Burros of Berea https://bit.ly/42DMtVf
[2] Many thanks to Abe Kline, Dr. Jordan Grant, Brett Prieto, Scot Brandon, Shelly Sangrey, Brian Godawa, and Rick Welch for their review and feedback on the early draft of this article.
[3] What Will We Remember in the New Creation? | Desiring God https://bit.ly/4i4DgtD
[4] Middleton, J. Richard. A new heaven and a new earth: Reclaiming biblical eschatology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014): 109.
[5] Paul, Shalom M.. Isaiah 40-66: A Commentary (The Eerdmans Critical Commentary (ECC)) (p. 593). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
[6] For the cultic significance of these gardens, see I. Cornelius, “The Garden in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East: A Study of Related Material from Egypt,” Journal of Semitics 1 (1989): 204-28, esp. 206-12; D. J. Wiseman, “Mesopotamian Gardens,” Anatolian Studies 33 (1983): 137-44. .
[7] Shalom, Isaiah 40-66, 594.
[8] See: Blenkinsopp, Joseph. “Judah’s covenant with death (Isaiah XXVIII 14-22).” Vetus Testamentum 50.4 (2000): 472-483; Van der Toorn, Karel. “Echoes of Judaean Necromancy in Isaiah 28, 7—22.” (1988): 199-217.
[9] Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Isaiah (Oxford University Press, 2020): 329.
[10] Mitrov, George. “Isaiah 65-66. New Heavens & New Earth.” https://bit.ly/3RHOgCx
[11] Hanson, Paul D. Isaiah 40-66: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Loisville: John Knox Press, 2012): 199; See also: STEP Bible (Tyndale House) entries for Gad and Meni
[12] For the reason Babylon is considered a foe from the north, even though it was located to the east of Israel, see: Robert E. Cruickshank, Jr., Gog and Magog, Part 9: The Direction of the Attack – The Burros of Berea https://bit.ly/4jxp9OW. In short, to get from Babylon to Jerusalem, one had to travel up and around, and would thereby approach Jerusalem from the north.
[13] John D. Watts, Isaiah 34-66: Word Biblical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005): 924.
[14] John D. Watts, Isaiah 34-66, 924.
[15] John D. Watts, Isaiah 34-66, 924.
[16] After citing Hosea 11:1 in conjunction with the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt (Matt. 2:15), Matthew then cites this passage with regard to Herod’s massacre in Bethlehem (Matt. 2:17-18). This may seem perplexing to believers who want a 1:1 correspondence between an OT text and a NT citation. As R.T France famously complained, “Ramah is not Bethlehem” (France, Richard T. “Herod and the Children of Bethlehem.” Novum Testamentum 21.Fasc. 2 [1979]: 104). Robert H. Gundry provides the solution: “Jesus is the representative Israelite in whose individual history the history of the whole nation, apart from its sin and apostasy, is recapitulated and anticipated. Like Israel in the Messianic times he receives the homage of Gentiles (2:11). He is preserved in and comes out of Egypt (2:15) .Just as the mourning of the Israelite mothers for the Babylonian exiles preluded a brighter future through divine preservation in a foreign land and restoration to Palestine, so the mourning by the mothers of the Bethlehem innocents is a prelude to the Messianic future through divine preservation of the infant Messiah in a foreign land and his later restoration to Palestine” (Robert Horton Gundry, The Use of the Old Testament in St. Matthew’s Gospel: With Special Reference to the Messianic Hope [Netherlands: Brill, 1967] :210).
[17] Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871): Jer. 31:15. See also Matthew Poole’s Commentary on the same verse: “In Ramah therefore a voice was heard, that is, in Canaan, and particularly in Ramah, where Nebuzaradan, Jeremiah 40:1, disposed of the prisoners he had taken, setting some at liberty, (as Jeremiah in particular,) ordering others to death, and carrying the rest away to Babylon, which caused a bitter weeping and lamentation.”
[18] Tan, Belinda Ching Sueng. “The Use of Jeremiah 31:15 in Matthew 2: 17–18.” (2014): 17 https://bit.ly/43HXmXh
[19] Frechette, Christopher G. “Daughter Babylon Raped and Bereaved (Isaiah 47): Symbolic violence and meaning-making in recovery from Trauma.” Bible through the Lens of Trauma (2016): 69-70. https://bit.ly/3G1sya6 . See also: h. g. l. Peels, The Vengeance of God: The Meaning of the Root NQM and the Function of the NQM-Texts in the Context of Divine Revelation in the Old Testament Otst 31 (Leiden: Brill, 1995); and Erich Zenger, A God of Vengeance? Understanding the Psalms of Divine Wrath, trans. Linda m. Maloney (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).
[20] Olson, Craig. How Old Was Father Abraham?: The Genesis Lifespans in Light of Archaeology (p. 98). Trowel Press. Kindle Edition.
[21] Olson, Craig. How Old Was Father Abraham?: The Genesis Lifespans in Light of Archaeology (p. 98). Trowel Press. Kindle Edition.
[22] Olson, Craig. How Old Was Father Abraham?: The Genesis Lifespans in Light of Archaeology (p. 115). Trowel Press. Kindle Edition.
[23] Olson, Craig. How Old Was Father Abraham?: The Genesis Lifespans in Light of Archaeology (p. 97). Trowel Press. Kindle Edition.
[24] Scott Stapp – Gone Too Soon https://bit.ly/43Psnsq
