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 recognize that they have been long removed from that land, the spiritual promised land that Canaan represents, which has remained desolate and without inhabitant, can Isaiah’s prophecies be fully understood.
1. Joseph Addison Alexander. Isaiah translated and explained. 1851. pp. 91-92.
2. J. A. Alexander, Isaiah translated and explained. Volume 2. John Wiley, NY. 1851. pp. 331-332.
3. Ebenezer Henderson. The book of the prophet Isaiah. London: Hamilton, Adams. 1857. p. 54.
5. Otto Kaiser. Isaiah 1-12: A Commentary. Westminster John Knox Press. 1983. p. 132.
6. Johann Peter Lange. A commentary on the Holy Scriptures: critical, doctrinal, and homiletical, Volume 11 . Scribner, 1878. p. 110.
7. George Wöosung Wade. The Book of the Prophet Isaiah: with introduction and notes. London: Methuen. 1911. p. 42.
8. Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown. Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible. 1871.