Jerusalem's sons: There are none that can guide her?

74x12 said:

Isaiah 51:18
18 There is no one to guide her among all the sons to whom she has given birth;
and there is no one who takes her by the hand among all the sons who she has brought up.

Jerusalem is the best we've seen; yet no one came from her who was able to save her. Explain it.

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Tumah said:

It appears to me as though you may not understand the context of this verse.

The context here is prophecy about the impending exile. Jerusalem the city, will have been ransacked and it's inhabitants exiled. Here - as is often seen, the city is referred to in an anthropomorphic sense. The beginning of the passage begins with the the "city" having drunk a cup of poison or strong alcohol and is currently stumbling through the streets in a drunken or poisonous stupor. This is a metaphor for the sacking of the city.

There is no one to guide her because all of her "sons" the city's inhabitants, have been pillaged and exiled as well. Everything is broken: the city is destroyed, the inhabitants, dead, dying or exiled. The only one who can help at this point is G-d who at the end of the passage promises to repair the destruction of Jerusalem and it's inhabitants and return vengeance on those who destroyed her.

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74x12 said:

Thank you. However are you sure that's all there is to it? "for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean." ... How can they stop all the uncircumcised or the unclean from coming into Jerusalem? BTW that never happened. Even in modern times still the uncircumcised and the unclean go into Jerusalem. So it's all metaphorical more or less.

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Lots of prophecies haven't happened yet. We don't reinterpret them to make it as though they occurred, we wait for it to happen as described.

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