Catholic Commentary
The Covenant with Death: Jerusalem's Fatal Diplomacy
14Therefore hear Yahweh’s word, you scoffers, that rule this people in Jerusalem:15“Because you have said, ‘We have made a covenant with death, and we are in agreement with Sheol. When the overflowing scourge passes through, it won’t come to us; for we have made lies our refuge, and we have hidden ourselves under falsehood.’”
Isaiah 28:14–15 records a prophetic indictment of Jerusalem's political leaders who have made an alliance with Egypt, which Isaiah characterizes as a covenant with death and Sheol—a deliberate reversal of Israel's sacred covenants with God. Their false confidence in diplomatic maneuvering and lies has displaced God from the center of their national life and represents a fundamental breach of trust in the divine promise.
Jerusalem's rulers have traded covenant with God for a pact with death—and they've named their delusion clearly: "We have made lies our refuge."
Isaiah 28:14 — The Address to the Scoffers
Isaiah pivots from a general warning to a direct, prosecutorial address: "hear Yahweh's word, you scoffers." The Hebrew term for "scoffers" (לֵצִים, lēṣîm) is rich with connotation. These are not merely cynics; they are mockers of the prophetic word itself — men who have heard Isaiah's warnings and met them with contemptuous wit. The term appears pointedly in Wisdom literature (Proverbs 1:22; Psalm 1:1) to describe those who are hardened against instruction. Isaiah is addressing the political leadership of Jerusalem, the "rulers of this people" — likely the court officials and advisors who engineered the ill-fated alliance with Egypt against Assyria under Hezekiah's predecessor Ahaz, or in the context of later Assyrian pressure, those who continued to pursue such strategies.
The phrase "hear Yahweh's word" (šimʿû debar YHWH) is the standard prophetic summons — a juridical call to attention before divine testimony is delivered. By using it here, Isaiah is not inviting dialogue; he is summoning the scoffers to hear the indictment they have earned.
Isaiah 28:15 — The Covenant with Death
Isaiah now quotes the leaders' own speech back to them, and it is devastating in its precision. The quotation "We have made a covenant with death (kāratnû bĕrît ʾet māwet)" is almost certainly not something the rulers literally said. Rather, Isaiah gives prophetic expression to the logical conclusion of their diplomacy: by trusting in political maneuvering — specifically, in an alliance with Egypt (cf. Isaiah 30:1–5; 31:1–3) — they have effectively entered a pact with the powers of chaos and death. The covenant (bĕrît) is sacral language deliberately inverted. The word belonged, above all, to God's relationship with Israel (the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic covenant). To "make a covenant" with death is to invert and desecrate the whole structure of Israel's existence before God.
"Agreement with Sheol" (ḥāzût ʾim šĕʾôl) intensifies the irony. Sheol — the realm of the dead — is precisely where covenant relationship with God is absent (Psalm 88:5; 115:17). To establish a ḥāzût (a vision, agreement, or treaty) with Sheol is to align oneself with the realm of divine absence itself.
"When the overflowing scourge passes through, it won't come to us" — this is the political logic: our deal-making has bought us exemption from catastrophe. The "overflowing scourge" (šôṭ šôṭēp) is the Assyrian military machine, described elsewhere in Isaiah as a flood (Isaiah 8:7–8). The rulers believe their diplomatic ingenuity has placed them above the flood-line of history.
"We have made lies our refuge, and we have hidden ourselves under falsehood" — here Isaiah strips away all pretense. The "lies" (kāzāb) and "falsehood" (šeqer) are not merely the broken promises of foreign powers. They represent the entire architecture of self-deception: the belief that human calculation can substitute for trust in God. The language of "refuge" (miḥseh) is critical — it is the same word used for God himself in the Psalms (Psalm 46:1; 91:2). By making lies their refuge, the rulers have structurally displaced God from the center of their national life.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Fathers read this passage as a prophecy of all who prefer the security of worldly alliances — whether political, moral, or spiritual — to dependence on God. Origen sees in the "covenant with death" a type of the soul's capitulation to sin: the sinner negotiates with corruption, imagining a private exemption from consequences. In the allegorical sense, Jerusalem's ruling class prefigures every community of the baptized that drifts into practical atheism — using the structures of faith while placing ultimate trust elsewhere.
Catholic tradition finds in this passage a profound theology of false security and the inversion of covenant. The Catechism teaches that "the desire for God is written in the human heart" (CCC §27), and that all human beings are ordered toward God as their ultimate refuge. When Jerusalem's rulers construct a pseudo-covenant with death, they dramatize what the Catechism calls the fundamental disorder of sin: placing "one's hope in oneself" rather than in the living God (CCC §1852, on pride as the root of sin).
St. Augustine, in The City of God, provides the deepest Catholic reading of this dynamic. The earthly city is, precisely, the city that orders itself around the love of self — even to the contempt of God (amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei). Jerusalem's ruling scoffers are, in Augustinian terms, citizens of the earthly city wearing the costume of the people of God. Their "covenant with death" is a parable of every political order that absolutizes its own survival.
The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes §19–20 identifies atheism-in-practice — not denial of God's existence, but the organization of life as if God does not matter — as the characteristic spiritual danger of the modern age. Isaiah's scoffers are its ancient type.
Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi §2, insists that hope is not optimism about human arrangements but trust in God's faithfulness across the abyss of death. The "covenant with death" is the anti-hope: the presumption that human cleverness can negotiate around mortality and judgment. St. Jerome, commenting on this text, notes that every mortal who trusts in human power rather than divine promise has, in effect, signed this covenant.
The scoffers of Jerusalem are uncomfortably recognizable. A Catholic today can make a "covenant with death" without a single foreign diplomat: by building one's sense of security entirely on career success, financial planning, social status, or ideological alignment — the contemporary equivalents of the Egyptian cavalry. The specific danger Isaiah names is not that these things are sought, but that they become refuges, substitutes for the trust and prayer that covenant with God demands.
Consider the Catholic who attends Mass but whose actual decisions — about work, family, money, politics — are governed entirely by calculations that leave God out. This is practical scoffer-ship. Isaiah's word is not a call to recklessness but to honest self-examination: Where have I actually placed my trust? What is my real miḥseh — my refuge?
The antidote Isaiah will offer in verse 16 — the tested cornerstone — is Christ himself (1 Peter 2:6). The first concrete step for any Catholic is to bring the "agreements" of one's life before God in prayer, exposing them to prophetic scrutiny before they calcify into covenants with death.