Hymns based on Isaiah 26

Isaiah 26 has given hymn writers words for 3 hymns in this library, by writers including Horatio Gates Spafford, Georg Weissel; Catherine Winkworth and Benjamin Schmolck; Catherine Winkworth. Each is listed below with the lines that echo the chapter and the verses they draw on, quoted from the World English Bible, a public-domain modern translation.

The verse these hymns return to most is Isaiah 26:2: “Open the gates, that the righteous nation may enter: the one which keeps faith.”

Hymn writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew their Bibles almost by heart, and they wove its phrases into their lines — sometimes as a close paraphrase, as in the metrical psalms, and sometimes as a single image carried into a new setting. Reading the verse beside the line shows what the writer had in mind, and often why a hymn was chosen to be sung alongside a particular reading.