ferred to the Babylonian captivity, but the references in the New Testament show that the enlightenment that was promised when the land was utterly desolate had not come. He wrote: 
As the answer shows, the prophet’s question, ‘How long, O Lord?’ in v. 11a, which has its parallel in the lament, relates not so much to the duration of his activity, which is to advance the hardening of people’s hearts, as to the duration of that hardening. Here it is again clear that the narrator is looking beyond the lifetime of Isaiah to the catastrophe of 587. Because the so-called memorial introduced by ch. 6 ends in a word of hope (cf. 8:17), God’s answer envisages the end of the hardening and the possibility given with it of a new beginning to his history.
Johann Peter Lange thought that Isaiah’s prophecy meant there would be a complete desolation of the land. He wrote: 
5. Then said I —
Vers. 11-13. The announcement of the judgment of hardening in vers. 9, 10 sounds quite absolute. Yet the Prophet hears underneath all that it is not so intended. It is impossible that the Lord should quite and forever reject His people, and abrogate the promises given to the fathers. He asks, therefore, “How long, Lord?” (соmр. Ps. vi. 4; xc. 13; Hab. ii. 6). He would say: What are to be quantitively and qualitatively the limits of that judgment of hardening? The answer is: First there must be an entire desolation and depopulating of the land; and when at last still a tenth of the inhabitants is in the land, that tenth part also must be decimated till nothing is left but the stump of a root or stem. That shall then be the seed of a holy future. The meaning of the words is perfectly clear.
The construction is as follows: and still there is in it (the land) a tenth part, and this is again decimated—after the manner of or in resemblance to the terebinth and oak, in which, when felled, a stump remains, its stump (of the tenth) is holy seed. Therefore a stump always remains, and that suffices to guarantee a new life and a new glorious future. This has been steadily verified in the people Israel, both in a corporeal and spiritual respect. After every overthrow, yea, after the most fearful visitations, that aimed at the very extinction of the people, a stump or stem was still always left in the ground. This people is even not to be destroyed. There is nothing tougher than the life of this everlasting Jew. And in spiritual respects it is just the same. Though every knee seems to bow to the old or the new Baal, yet the Lord has preserved always a fragment (7,000 it is called, 1 Kings xix. 18) in faithfulness.
George Wöosung Wade (1858-1941) focused on the “perversity” of the Israelites that in his view was to result in their “extermination by death or exile.” He wrote: 
11. Until, etc. i.e. the nation’s perversity will be brought to an end by nothing short of its extermination by death or exile: cf. xxii. 14.
become utterly waste. Better (with the LXX. and Vulg.), be left waste …
12. removed men, etc. i.e. caused them to be deported by a foreign enemy: cf v. 13.
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown supposed the prophecy was fulfilled by the Babylonian captivity or by the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. But if that were so, the Jews would no longer be blinded to the Gospel after that event. They stated:
11. how long–will this wretched condition of the nation being hardened to its destruction continue?
until— (Isa 5:9) –fulfilled primarily at the Babylonish captivity, and more fully at the dispersion under the Roman Titus.
12. (2Ki 25:21).
forsaking–abandonment of dwellings by their inhabitants (Jer 4:29).
The comments above demonstrate that blindness and hardness of heart that Isaiah’s prophecy described affects Christians, as well as the unbelieving Jews. Two world wars in the 20th century, in which Christians fought and killed other Christians, illustrate that this is true. The people are estranged from the spiritual land of promise, that the literal land represents. Thus, they do not understand the message of Isaiah.
Only when the people recogni