Canter Bridge

The Assyrian emissary Rab-Shekah casts public doubt on all that Jerusalemites have learned to believe about themselves, their city, and their guardian deity. Moreover, he refuses to deliver his message in the dulcet tones of diplomatic Aramaic, choosing instead to stop the hearts of the common people on the wall by elaborating his terrifying ultimatum in the common Judahite dialect.

It is a moment when hearts shake like wind-blown trees. Nervous glances are cast in the direct of the king’s palace and the prophet’s house.

In the midst of this, one discerns a most pregnant parallelism. Back in the book’s vision of visions, following the orienting sampler of chapter one and only a few verses into the work’s true startup in chapter two, a glorious picture is drawn of elevated, desirable Zion/Jerusalem, to which the nations flow like one great human river because of their hunger for light and life.

There, we are given a kind of summary explanation of why the whole absurd and impossible scence ought not be discounted but rather treasured precisely by those most committed to history and to truth:

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

For the reader, many chapters have passed since those promissory notes were sounded at the book’s inception. The forecast is dire. Ruinous Assyria is on the march and with eyes for Zion. The prophet has told us that Judah’s decision to ‘lean upon’ Egypt like a sturdy staff in the hand of a weary traveler will only produce a hole in the palm of that very hand.

Yet YHWH also finds himself enraged by the rapacious disinhibition of Assyria, the tool in has hand. The book has him announce that his option is still cast for Judah/Israel, that Assyrian plunder with all the bloody, causuality-filled aftermath that it has left in space and time, is not his final word nor even his preferred one.

In this moment, the text gives us a statement that is eerily similar to the one from chapter two, quoted just above:

The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward; for from Jerusalem a remnant shall go out, and from Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

It seems implausable that such structural symmetry and lexical similarity should occur without in some way linking the two convictions that the prophet would have us hear from YHWH’s own mouth.

Might it be that YHWH’s early declaration about an international crowding of Zion for the sake of filling hearts with YHWH’s instruction might be complemented or even occasioned by the unanticipated survival of a Jerusalemite remnant after Assyria’s rage has passed, distracted, to other objects?

Does Jerusalem, in the Isaianic plot, export both YHWH’s instruction and word—on the one hand—and a committed, commissioned, indelibly scarred remnant of survivors, on the other? If one is meant to read in this way, do the word of YHWH and the testimony of his rescued remnant somehow coincide in the accomplishment of purposes that remain larger and longer than even the foresight of the prophet whose name betitles this book?

Or have similar words accidentally become aligned in this manner without coherence, devoid of meaning, barren of promise?