In the same chapter that Isaiah predicted the birth and eternal reign of Jesus (Isaiah 9:6-7), he also predicted the effect of Jesus on Zebulun, Jacob’s son. But what was Zebulun’s connection with Jesus?
Isaiah explains in Isaiah 9:1, that one day “there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress” – the people “in distress” being “the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,” both of which God had “humbled in the past” by stirring up the Assyrian king, Tiglath-pileser, to punish them for their evil ways (2 Kings 15:27-29, 1 Chronicles 5:26).
“But,” Isaiah then adds in Isaiah 9:1, the time will come “in the future” when “God will honour Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan.” Galilee was the area along the Jordan where Zebulun and Naphtali were located, so a prophecy is being made here that promises a great blessing for Zebulun and Naphtali too.
And they’d need a blessing too because, as Isaiah explains in verse 2, their “people were walking in darkness,” due to all their kings being so evil that God had the Assyrians bring the Israelite kings reign to an end, and the ten northern tribes of Israel, including Zebulun and Naphtali, carted off into exile (2 Kings 17:5-6).
The “darkness” continued too, because the area of Galilee was stripped of its Israelite population, and was called “Galilee of the Gentiles” instead by Isaiah – and by Matthew too, who repeats Isaiah’s prophecy in Matthew 4:15. Matthew, like Isaiah, also includes the “lands of Zebulun and Naphtali” as part of Galilee, meaning that the people of Galilee in the time of Jesus was a mixture of Jewish and pagan Gentile cultures – in “darkness,” in other words, just as Isaiah had predicted in Isaiah 9:2, that Matthew confirmed in Matthew 4:16.
But this, amazingly, was where Jesus grew up. He was born in Bethlehem, but lived in Nazareth after his family returned from Egypt (Matthew 2:19-23). Nazareth was in “the district of Galilee” (22), where Zebulun was located. To ask what connection Zebulun had with Jesus, then, it starts with Jesus – as far as where he lived as a child – being a Galilean Zebulunite. Not a great place to grow up, though, because on hearing he came from Nazareth the reaction was: “Nazareth? You’ve got to be kidding” (John 1:46). Even to a Jew, nothing good could come from such a dark backwater as the Lower Galilee region of Zebulun where Nazareth was. But something good had come because in “Zebulun, a light has dawned”….(next blog)
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