NOTES for Isa 43:1-28
Speaking of the people's past and future, God, through His prophet, reminds those willing to listen of former times, of times of widespread apostasy in practice. Evidently, this preaching took place while they were still in Babylon, before the Persian conquest of Babylonia and before the decree of Cyrus the Great giving the Jews the right to return to the land of their fathers. Apparently, the main problem lay not only, or even chiefly, in the past, but in the present. By the end of the Exile, the Jewish community had put down roots in Babylon, taking an active part in local economic, political and cultural life.
Within Yahwism, a new religion had taken shape in the Babylonian community: Judaism, well adapted to life in the diaspora and enabling people to preserve their Jewish national and religious identity in almost any environment, sometimes even a fairly hostile one. Moreover, a generation had already grown up in Babylon that effectively regarded it as its homeland and knew Judea only from their parents' stories. They did not, of course, reject what the pre-exilic prophets had said, but those prophecies apparently did not shape their everyday lives.
So when a new prophet appeared in Babylon and began saying that the end of the Exile was near, that God had redeemed His people and that their return to the land of their fathers would soon begin, he was not readily believed, especially since there were no outward signs of any imminent change in the situation. It was then that God's words about His people's lack of faith were spoken. Indeed, the age had changed, a new religion had been born, and the Jewish community's life in Babylon resembled its pre-exilic life so little that, when the returning exiles arrived in Judea, the local inhabitants who had not been deported regarded them as strangers.
The spiritual problems, however, remained the same as before the Exile. Chief among them was distrust of living revelation. People trusted tradition, and trusted the pre-exilic prophets because they had already become part of that tradition. But when a new prophet appeared, it became clear that, apart from religious forms, nothing had changed since pre-exilic times: at the end of the Exile, people trusted God and His living word just as little as at its beginning. Of course, after Cyrus's decree and the start of the return, attitudes to Isaiah's words changed. But this was already acceptance of an accomplished fact, not of God's word.