Canter Bridge

Though the move from exile to ‘consolation’ in the complex plot of the book called Isaiah is signaled in chapter 35, the door swings all the way open on its hinges in chapter 40.

Yet in between, the experience of Israel at the hands of its Babylonian exilers is prefigured in the mortal illness of Hezekiah and his eventual recovery following YHWH’s response to his prayer for mercy. In his distress, Hezekiah prays these suggestive lines:

Like a swallow or a crane I clamor,
I moan like a dove.
My eyes are weary with looking upward.
O Lord, I am oppressed; be my security!
But what can I say? For he has spoken to me,
and he himself has done it.
All my sleep has fled
because of the bitterness of my soul.

O Lord, by these things people live,
and in all these is the life of my spirit.
Oh, restore me to health and make me live!
Surely it was for my welfare
that I had great bitterness;
but you have held back my life
from the pit of destruction,
for you have cast all my sins
behind your back.

Hezekiah is convinced that YHWH himself is the actor in his bitter illness. Yet he is not content to accept YHWH’s painful stroke as the end of the story. Indeed, Hezekiah finds himself capable of remarkable words that appear to presage the right path for Israel’s exiled soul:

Surely it was for my welfare
that I had great bitterness;
but you have held back my life
from the pit of destruction,
for you have cast all my sins
behind your back.

The rhetoric of the exilic prophets suggests that it was not difficult for this nation-in-exile to evade the matter of its own responsibility for the painful outcome that their lives had become. Nor, conversely, was it difficult to find those who embraced the notion either that their guilt or their fathers’ guilt had brought exile upon them. These latter, of tender conscience, seemed incapable of believing that YHWH would have anything more to do with them.

What the exilic prophets did find difficulty in locating were Judahite exiles who both embraced the narrative that national guilt lay behind exile and that YHWH’s enduring love would find a way to make exile a penultimate feature of the landscape that led Israel to glorious, righteous, extensive service in God’s future.

Hezekiah neatly anticipates such a redemptive function for his own ‘bitterness’. His example would place readers and hearers of the tale in stead to respond similarly to the bitterness of captivity in Babylon.

In this way, the book of Isaiah articulates yet again a feature of its deep structure: YHWH’s comfort is often preceded by well-deserved tears. The night broods at its darkest just before the dawn.