For the head of Syria is Damascus, etc. Syria and Ephraim have merely human heads—the one Rezin, the other (Isaiah 7:9) Pekah; but Judah, it is implied, has a Divine Head, even Jehovah. How, then, should mere mortals think to oppose their will and their designs to God's?
Of course, their designs must come to naught. Within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broken, etc. If this prophecy was delivered, as we have supposed, in B.C. 733 (see note on Isaiah 7:1), sixty-five years later would bring us to B.
C. 669. This was the year in which Esar-haddon, having made his son, Asshur-bani-pal, King of Assyria, transferred his own residence to Babylon, and probably the year in which he sent from Babylonia and the adjacent countries a number of colonists who occupied Samaria, and entirely destroyed the nationality, which, fifty-three years earlier, had received a rude blow from Sargon (comp.
Ezra 4:2, Ezra 4:9, Ezra 4:10, with 2 Kings 17:6-24 and 2 Chronicles 33:11). It is questioned whether, under the circumstances, the prophet can have comforted Ahaz with this distant prospect, and suggested that in the present chapter prophecies pronounced at widely distant periods have been mixed up (Cheyne); but there is no such appearance of dislocation in Isaiah 7:1-25; in its present form, as necessitates any such theory; and, while it may be granted that the comfort of the promise given in Isaiah 7:8 would be slight, it cannot be said that it would be nil; it may, therefore, have been (as it seems to us) without impropriety added to the main promise, which is that of Isaiah 7:7.
The entire clause, from "and within" to "not a people," must be regarded as parenthetic.