Canter Bridge

The ire of biblical prophets is not seldom directed at those who are ‘at rest’. What is in play here is not restorative inactivity much less that deep contentment that often passes under the Hebrew descriptor shalom.

Rather, the prophets have in mind a singular arrogance that advertizes itself by luxurious self-satisfaction, often at the cost of less fortunate individuals or even nations that race about tending to the lavish needs of the sedentary.

Although the condemnation of such self-centered good fortune is common, it is rare to see it articulated in such quasi-blasphemous words as we find in the second chapter of the prophet Zephaniah. There, speaking of the Assyrian capital Nineveh, the prophet writes this:

And he will stretch out his hand against the north,
and destroy Assyria;
and he will make Nineveh a desolation,
a dry waste like the desert.
Herds shall lie down in it,
every wild animal;
the desert owl and the screech owl
shall lodge on its capitals;
the owl shall hoot at the window,
the raven croak on the threshold;
for its cedar work will be laid bare.
Is this the exultant city
that lived secure,
that said to itself,
‘I am, and there is no one else’?
What a desolation it has become,
a lair for wild animals!
Everyone who passes by it
hisses and shakes the fist.

By italicizing Nineveh’s alleged self-speak, I intend to highlight what within the imagined readerships of the Hebrew Bible could hardly be taken for anything but self-deification, which is within the ideological parameters of this book necessarily a chant de’guerre against YHWH himself. As though the bare fact of self-deification were not enough, Zephaniah articulates it by means of the very vocabulary that YHWH uses elsewhere—in the book of Isaiah for example—to declare his own sovereign incomparability in the anti-idol(atry) diatribes that produce some of classical monotheism’s favorite quotes: I am, and there is no other.

Now it is difficult to imagine a setting in which human beings would make precisely such a claim on behalf of their personified Assyrian city. More likely the Hebrew prophet is gathering up the insufferable arrogance of an imperial elite and expressing what he understands to be its true scandal in words that explicitly make a claim against the sovereignty that YHWH has arrogated for himself.

Zephaniah is no mere stringer together of quotations. He is penetrating, rather, to the deep darkness of imperial pride and hinting at its impending humiliation.

The inhabitants of powerful capitals and imperial centers, everywhere and always, do well to shudder or at least to ask the twelfth disciple’s question: ‘Is it I, Lord?’