What Does Isaiah 17:10 Mean?
Because you have forgotten the God of your deliverance, and have not remembered the rock of your stronghold; therefore you shall plant pleasant plantings, and sow it with a stranger's slips.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips:THE KEY
Forgetting the source of deliverance does not stop your hands from planting; it changes what you plant.
THE MEANING
When you forget the One who delivers and the rock that is your stronghold, your efforts to make things grow continue. But what you plant comes from elsewhere: the verse shows lovely growth taking root from a foreign source.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that attractive growth can replace the source of deliverance and refuge.
THE ROOT
יִשְׁעֵךָ
yishʿekha
GROWS FROM
ישע
y-sh-ʿ
To deliver, bringing someone out of danger and into safety and spaciousness.
The word for salvation holds the movement of deliverance: being brought out of a constricted place. What is forgotten here is not merely a belief, but the source of that release.
ALSO GROWS
yeshuah: Deliverance
יְשׁוּעָה
It names the rescue whose source the verse says has been forgotten.
moshia: Deliverer
מוֹשִׁיעַ
It names the one who brings a person out, linking deliverance to its source.
מָעוֹז
maʿoz
GROWS FROM
עזז
ʿ-z-z
To be strong or mighty; the noun family includes strength and a stronghold or refuge.
The word rendered “strength” is maʿoz, also used for a stronghold or refuge. Joined to “rock,” it pictures strength as shelter to lean against, not simply force held within oneself.
ALSO GROWS
ʿoz: Strength or might
עֹז
It shows the force contained in the word family behind the strength named in the verse.
maʿoz: Stronghold or refuge
מָעוֹז
It reveals the sheltering sense in “the rock of thy strength.”
THE PATTERN
When the source of life and refuge is forgotten, effort continues but turns toward substitutes with a different source.
For my people have done two evils; they have let go of me, the spring of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, shattered cisterns that cannot grip water.But now, after you have known God, or rather have been known by God, how do you turn back again to the weak and emptied elements, to which you desire to serve again?But he answered and said, Every planting that my heavenly Father did not plant will be rooted out.THE THREAD
You have looked away from the Rock who bore you, and you have forgotten the God who labored you.Isaiah’s “forgotten” and Deuteronomy’s “forgotten” carry the same Hebrew verb, שָׁכַח (shakhach), meaning “forget.” Deuteronomy places that forgetting directly beside the Rock, sharpening Isaiah’s pairing of the forgotten deliverer and the forgotten refuge.
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