Isaiah 30:33

For Tophet is ordained of old,.... The place long ago appointed for the ruin of the Assyrian army, which pitched here: this was a valley near Jerusalem, the valley of the son of Hinnom; so called,

For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared; he hath made it deep and large: the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.

Tophet was a place near Jerusalem, in which the idolatrous Israelites used cruelly to offer up their children to Moloch, 33:6; see also 19:6; and it may be put synecdochically for any place of torment or misery; and particularly it is put for hell, as well in the writings of the ancient Jewish doctors as in Holy Scripture, as ,9 23:15 ,44. And so this place may be understood either, 1. Literally, of Tophet in the valley of Hinnom, in which the Assyrian host was either slain by the angel, as Josephus reports, or buried or burnt. For although the Assyrians did not make any great attempt upon Jerusalem, , yet Rabshakeh came very near it with a great army, . Or, 2. Figuratively, of hell. Is ordained; or, was ordered or prepared. And it might be said, in some sort, to be prepared by Hezekiah for this end, by the care which he took to purge this and other places abused to idolatry, which made them more fit to receive so great a favour mid deliverance from God. But for hell, that doubtless was ordained or prepared by God for the punishment of impenitent sinners. Of old, Heb. from yesterday; which phrase is sometimes used of a time but lately past, as , and sometimes of any time past, without limitation. For the king; for the king of Assyria; either, 1. For the kings, the singular number being put for the plural, whereby he may understand the princes or chief commanders of the host, by comparing , Are not my princes altogether kings? Or, 2. For Rabshakeh, the general of this army, who, according to the style of Scripture, might very well be called king. Or, 3. Sennacherib, for whom this place might be said to be ordained or prepared, partly because it was ordained for the destruction of his host; nothing being more ordinary, both in sacred and profane writers, than to entitle the king or general of the army to all the victories procured, or losses or slaughter sustained, by his army; and partly because the sudden destruction of the Assyrian army, supposed to be in this place, was the occasion of the conspiracy of that king’ s sons, and so of the king’ s death. But if this Tophet design hell, this is emphatically denounced against him, to intimate, that although he escaped that sudden plague which cut off his army, yet there was a more terrible judgment appointed for him, which he should be utterly unable to escape. He; the Lord, who is oft designed by this pronoun, as in the next foregoing verse, and elsewhere; and who is expressed in the following words. Or it is an indefinite expression, for, it is made deep and large.

Isaiah 30:33 For Tophet [is] ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared; he hath made [it] deep [and] large: the pile thereof [is] fire and much wood; the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.Ver. 33. For Tophet is ordained.] Heb., Tophteh which some derive of Pathah, to entice or seduce, because hell draweth customers; and is called also infernus ab inferendo, from the great resort that is to it. But others fetch the name from toph, a drum, because those idolaters who sacrificed their children to Moloch or Saturn, in the valley of Hinnom, struck up drums to drown the cries of those poor tortured children. Hence it is here used for hell, together with that eternity of extremity which the damned there endure; and this the Assyrians are here threatened with, yea, their very king, whose preservation from the stroke of the angel was but a reservation to a worse mischief here and hereafter. For patentes potenter torquebunter, great men, if not good, shall be greatly tormented; and the more they have of the fat of the earth, the more they are sure to fry in hell. Such, therefore, had need to add true grace to their high places, else they shall prove but as a high gibbet to bring them to more disgrace in this world, and torment in the next. Of old.] Heb., From yesterday. Hence some infer that hell torments are always fresh and new, as if they had begun but yesterday; and "every sacrifice there is salted with fire," that is, it burneth, but consumeth not; fire being of a burning, but salt of a preserving nature. He hath made it deep and large.] Capacious enough to receive a world full of wicked ones. The pile thereof is fire and much wood.] Hell fire is no metaphorical thing, but a material, true, proper, real, and corporeal fire. For vehemency of heat, saith Augustine, it exceedeth ours as far as our fire doth exceed fire painted on the wall. That friar said too little of it who said that one might feel it burn seven miles off. Etna, Vesuvius, Pietra Mala (which is a mountain in the highest part of the Apennines that perpetually burns), come not near it. Some gross Papists have imagined Etna to be the place of purgatory. Odilo, abbot of Cluniscum, persuaded Pope John XIX that he had there seen the tormented souls wailing: whereupon that pope appointed the feast of All-souls. The breath of the Lord, as a stream of brimstone.] This formidable fire, then, is fed with most tormenting temper, rivers of brimstone, and kindled with the breath of the Almighty throughout all eternity. Simile quiddam videmus in thermis, ubi sulphureae scaturigines magno fremitu effervescunt. Some resemblance hereof we have in the hot baths, &c.

(33) Tophet is ordained of old.—Literally, the Tophet, or place of burning, with perhaps the secondary sense of “a place of loathing.” Tophet was the name given to the Valley of Hinnom, outside Jerusalem, where, within the memory of living men, Ahaz had made his son to pass through the fire to Moloch (2 Kings 16:3), and where like sacrifices had taken place up to the time of Hezekiah’s accession. “The king” is, of course, the king of Assyria; but the Hebrew, “for the melek,” suggests a sarcastic reference to the god there worshipped, as if it were “for Moloch.” There was to be a great sacrifice of the Melek to the Moloch, who was as a mighty king (the name of the Ammonite god being a dialectic form of the Hebrew Melek) exulting in his victims. (Comp. for the idea Isaiah 31:9.) The pile thereof is fire and much wood.—The word seems partly literal, and partly figurative. The king of Assyria, though he did not die at Jerusalem, is represented as burnt with stately ceremonial in Tophet. Probably, as a matter of fact, it was the burial place of the corpses that were lying round the city after the pestilence had destroyed the Assyrian army, and they were literally burnt there. For such a Moloch funeral, making the valley of Hinnom then, as it afterwards became, a fit type of Gehenna, a trench deep and wide and a mighty pyre were needed. Comp. Jeremiah 19:12, where like words are spoken of Jerusalem.

Verse 33. For Tophet is ordained] Tophet is a valley very near to Jerusalem, to the southeast, called also the valley of Hinnom or Gehenna; where the Canaanites, and afterwards the Israelites, sacrificed their children, by making them pass through the fire, that is, by burning them in the fire, to Molech, as some suppose. It is therefore used for a place of punishment by fire; and by our blessed Saviour in the Gospel for hell-fire, as the Jews themselves had applied it. See Chald. on Isaiah 33:14, where מוקדי עלם mokedey olam is rendered "the Gehenna of everlasting fire." Here the place where the Assyrian army was destroyed is called Tophet by a metonymy; for the Assyrian army was destroyed probably at a greater distance from Jerusalem, and quite on the opposite side of it: for Nob is mentioned as the last station, from which the king of Assyria should threaten Jerusalem, Isaiah 10:32, where the prophet seems to have given a very exact chorographical description of his march in order to attack the city; which however he never reached. - L.

33. For Tophet is ordained of old] Render: For a burning-place is already laid out. Tophet is the name of a spot in the valley of the son of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem, where human sacrifices were offered to the god Melek or Molek (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31 f., Isaiah 19:6; Isaiah 19:13). According to Prof. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, p. 377) the word was originally pronounced Tμphath, and, like its equivalents in Aramaic and Arabic, meant simply “fireplace.” This view seems preferable to the common derivation, which explains it as a term of contempt (“spitting” Job 17:6); and it accounts for the generic sense which the word undoubtedly has in this passage (where, however, a bye-form tophteh is used). “The Tophet” was so-called because the most distinctive feature of the revolting rites there practised was the burning of the victims in a great pit dug in the ground, which constituted the “fireplace.” yea, for the king it is prepared] lit. “even it is prepared for the king” (not “even for the king it is prepared”). The “king” might be either the king of Assyria, or the god “Melek” (Molech), or a play of words alluding to both. But a “witty allusion” in such a passage leads us to suspect the hand of a glossator. The objection to understanding it of the king of Assyria is that the emphasis rests on “it” and not on “the king.” the pile thereof] Cf. Ezekiel 24:9. For “fire” some other word must have been used; perhaps “coals of fire” (πημι omitted before ΰωׁ).

For Tophet - The same idea is conveyed in this verse as in the preceding, but under another form, and with a new illustration.

33. Tophet — This word occurs here possibly because “tabret” had just been used, from a habit of our prophet of indulging in paronomasia. Both words are from the same root, or from roots nearly identical.