Canter Bridge

The Bible’s prophetic denunciations are usually not read for inspiration. Their bleakness and their savagery alert and alarm rather than console or inspire. Indeed, that is their purpose, though it makes for hard reading.

The oracle concerning the wilderness of the sea. As whirlwinds in the Negeb sweep on, it comes from the desert, from a terrible land. A stern vision is told to me; the betrayer betrays, and the destroyer destroys. Go up, O Elam, lay siege, O Media; all the sighing she has caused I bring to an end. (Isaiah 21:1–2 NRSV)

Isaiah 21 is one member of a cluster of ‘oracles against the nations’, this one evidently directed against Babylon, Judah’s captor. Little Judah might have found some hope in them, if only because they turn all too visible power structures on their head. They show that the big dogs are, contrary to all claim, not in charge. They dare to suggest that no human power is invincible.

The verses quoted above deploy a feature of prophetic oracles that subtly makes a terrible claim: that there is a point of inevitability beyond which rebels of any stripe can pass. Despite YHWH’s long patience, at that point everything has been said and will soon be done.

Translators struggle to capture the repetition represented in the two italicized phrases. I’ve had to search a while to find an English version of the Bible that uses the same word for each pair of the repetitive duo. The NRSV does nicely, if one can use that word in the company of this subject matter: the betrayer betrays and the destroyer destroys (Hebrew: הבוגד בוגד והשודד שודד).

The climactic book of the New Testament borrows this technique, perhaps thus showing its debt to the book of Isaiah. That would not be strange in a work so compenetrated with the Isaianic spirit and so persuaded that ‘Babylon’ abbreviates a doomed arrangement that has forever wanted to crush YHWH’s little ones under its feet. Another twinned cry of doom (‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon!’, Isa. 21.9 // ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!, Rev. 18.2) likely complements this two-beat cadence of inevitability.

If anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if anyone is to be slain with the sword, with the sword must he be slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints. (Revelation 13:10 ESV)

Inevitability does not make a frequent appearance in the biblical account of YHWH’s dealings with his people and his world. To the contrary, the relationship is usually open, pregnant with promise, and desirous of the richest kind of human protagonism.

But there is a point, the prophetic oracles would instruct us, beyond which there is no turning. There is a point when human opposition to the divine will becomes itself so willful and comprehensive that the die has been cast and destruction become inevitable.

God forbid.

Yet beyond a certain trespassed point, he does not.