Canter Bridge

The books of Micah and Isaiah co-host a vision of nations thronging Jerusalem in anticipation of finding there divine instruction. In consequence, YHWH shall ‘reprove between nation and nation’, a judicial intervention that induces previously bellicose peoples to ‘beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks’.

So does Jerusalem/Zion stand in as the inspiring destination of a polyglot mass who can scarcely in the moment the vision was spoken have been imagined to participate in such pilgrimage. The highways to Jerusalem will be clogged with both Jews and Gentiles in this act of prophetic imagination.

The book of Zechariah offers a quite similar vision of restored Jerusalem as international destination-of-choice:

Thus says the LORD of hosts: Peoples shall yet come, the inhabitants of many cities; the inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, ‘Come, let us go to entreat the favor of the LORD, and to seek the LORD of hosts; I myself am going.’ Many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem, and to entreat the favor of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts: ‘In those days ten men from nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying,”Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”‘

One is struck by the correspondences between this Zion-centered picture and the previous ones. The similarity of content is patent. But even in detail there is remarkable alignment. The expressions ‘Come, let us go’ and ‘let us go with you’––spoken by the nations and in the latter case by individuals of those peoples to a Jew whom they encounter in the streets––puts on in mind of Isaiah’s exhortation to his own generation: ‘Come, let us go …’. In the text, this summons follows upon the description of Gentiles encouraging each other to head in a Jerusalem direction and appears to suggest that Jews—if they are not careful—might with violent irony be left out of the colloquy with Jacob’s God.

The vision in Zechariah emphasizes the liturgical nature of pilgrimage. The nations go to Jerusalem in order to entreat and to seek (Hebrew chalah, biqqesh). In this they behave just like Jews making their calendarized or occasion-based journey to Jerusalem to meet with YHWH.

In point of fact, they seek relationship, for those ten gentiles who grasp an overrun Jew by the collar in the street and plead for permission to ‘go with you’, do so because they have heard that ‘God is with you’. This is the language of covenant, writ small in a miniscule drama of ten-against-one, no longer fueled by the pogrom-ish rage of the mob but hungering to experience what a Jewish man is supposed to know.

It is almost too much to be imagined.

Imagine that.