Canter Bridge

The prophets poke at the sanctimony that assumes material blessing is YHWH’s endorsement. To be rich is to be good, people too easily assume. Isaiah, among others of his peers, will have none of this moral non sequitur.

For you have rejected your people, the house of Jacob, because they are full of things from the east and of fortune-tellers like the Philistines, and they strike hands with the children of foreigners. Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures; their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots. Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made. (Isaiah 2:6–8 ESV)

The irony—with Isaiah, there is always irony—pivots upon the Hebrew verb מלא, ‘to be full’. The prophet peppers his denunciation of false religion with this verb as though there’s no tomorrow.

The first and the last of the italicized מלא-phrases point to the lazy amplitude of their religion. Their very piety is an act of wandering, their religiosity a rejection of the exclusive Israelite God who has named himself to be unlike all others. The middle two italicized phrases refer to their wealth.

They are not good, because rich. They are, at the same time, very bad and very rich.

Idolatry, for the prophets, is not open-mindedness, not sophistication, not the cologne of the worldly-wise. It is treason, rebellion, the spiritual equivalent of getting stupidly hot and horny with a neighbor’s hungry wife. There is nothing good in it.

It is possible to gild it with gold, to ornament it with silver. Yet it remains the pathway to a world of eventual hurt.

Riches, declares the text, are not God’s endorsement. Sometimes wealth is just wealth, the shiny trinkets of the doomed.