What Does Isaiah 60:15 Mean?
Whereas you were left and hated, so that no one passed through you, I will set you as the rising of the ages, a leaping of generation after generation.
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
Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through thee, I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations.THE KEY
The forsaken one is given a new identity: a joy that reaches across generations.
THE MEANING
You are not finally named by abandonment or hatred. The one spoken to becomes an enduring joy, shared across generations.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that being abandoned permanently defines what your life can become.
THE ROOT
מָשׂוֹשׂ
māsōs
GROWS FROM
שׂושׂ
שׂוּשׂ (sūs) means to rejoice, to exult.
“leaping” in this verse is māsōs. The word translated “joy” grows from the verb “to rejoice”: the verse names more than a passing feeling; it names a rejoicing quality the forsaken one becomes. Its reach across generations gives that change a horizon beyond the present moment.
ALSO GROWS
sās: Rejoicing; exulting.
שָׂשׂ
This verbal form makes clear that the joy in the verse carries the root’s sense of rejoicing.
sāsōn: Gladness; exultation.
שָׂשׂוֹן
This related noun appears in Isaiah 51:3, where joy is found in a landscape transformed from waste to garden.
THE PATTERN
A condition of sorrow or abandonment does not have to remain the final identity; it can give way to lasting joy.
In a flood of anger, in a blink, I hid my face from you, but with faithful love of the ages I will show you compassion, says the LORD your Redeemer.You overturned the beating of my breast into a dance. You untied my sackcloth and girded me with gladness.Truly, truly, I say to you, that you will weep and wail, but the world will rejoice; you will be pained, but your pain will become joy.THE THREAD
For the LORD will comfort Zion. He will comfort all her dry ruins, and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert plain like the garden of the LORD. Joy and gladness will be found in it, thanksgiving, and the voice of song.Isaiah 51:3 uses the same root, שׂושׂ (sūs, “to rejoice”), for the joy found in places that were waste. It opens this verse further: the joy named here belongs even where abandonment once seemed to define the landscape.
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