Canter Bridge

The Bible is not a book of syrupy pieties.

It would never have survived these many centuries if it were not for its idiosyncratic qualities, one of which is a persistent and stark realism.

When Judah’s King Hezekiah steps as unlikely protagonist into the bridging portion of the book of Isaiah, where the main linkage between Judah’s anticipation of exile and eventual restoration from exile is established, he would not be mistaken as a spokesman for orthodox biblical faith. He simply is what he is, in all his glory and all his tragedy. For some readers, he stands in as an icon of the nation itself.

Regardless of how such details are settled, Isaiah’s depiction of his coming to terms with death bears a dismal tone. The sudden ordinariness of the images is striking.

I must depart; I am consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years. I said, I shall not see the Lord, the Lord in the land of the living; I shall look on man no more among the inhabitants of the world. My dwelling is plucked up and removed from me like a shepherd’s tent; like a weaver I have rolled up my life; he cuts me off from the loom; from day to night you bring me to an end; I calmed myself until morning; like a lion he breaks all my bones; from day to night you bring me to an end.

Like a swallow or a crane I chirp; I moan like a dove. My eyes are weary with looking upward. O Lord, I am oppressed; be my pledge of safety! What shall I say? For he has spoken to me, and he himself has done it. I walk slowly all my years because of the bitterness of my soul. (Isaiah 38:10–15 ESV)

The sufferer of long illness or one who has borne up under prolonged delay before death will not struggle to find her own experience in Hezekiah’s words.

Hezekiah cannot speak, in this moment, of legacy, of faith, of expectation. Rather, ‘from day to night’—unremarkably and without fuss—he imagines himself departing life as he has known it.

There is no more drama to the king’s expected demise that there is to a shepherd breaking camp for the next pasture over or a weaver wrapping things up at the end of his day.

Contemporary readers may find a certain thin comfort in the ordinariness of death. It is ‘just a part of life’, as we attempt to persuade ourselves.

Hezekiah does not see things so cheerily.

Realism indeed.

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Chapter 35 of the book of Isaiah initiates a bridge of sorts between the large section of the book that precedes it and the section or sections that follow. This short chapter is intensely lyrical, profoundly hopeful, and unshrinkingly exuberant.

As any large bridging element must do, it features themes that are familiar to us from glimpses we’ve enjoyed in the darker first section, themes that are developed widely and at times wildly in the chapters that follow.

Consisting of only ten verses, chapter 35 demands quotation in full.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus; it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.’

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down, the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it. It shall belong to those who walk on the way; even if they are fools, they shall not go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. (Isaiah 35:1–10 ESV)

The chapter is a hymn to the return home of an exiled community that by all rights should have perished in captivity, as exiled peoples of the day were expected to cooperate in doing. It takes up and luxuriates in themes that have become the best-known tropes for readers of Isaiah. In so doing, it hints that those early glimpses of such promise are to become agenda-setting and panoramic in short order.

At the risk of singling out just one or two of these themes, the chapter transforms the death-dealing barrier between here and there that is a desert into a security-assured highway back home. All that is dead and dry blooms and waters. What once murdered the innocent with its savage heat now beautifies their path home and hydrates their dry tongues.

Yet it is a particularly tender turn of phrase that I wish to highlight here:

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.’

This declaration shows that the news of return—brilliant and catalyzing as it looks from our distance—was not necessarily to be welcomed by those who had made their discouraged peace with exile. Such people, who deserve our sympathy, are possessed of ‘weak hands’ and ‘feeble knees’ that will require some strengthening if Return is to become more than a promising song. The devil ya’ knows, after all, looks better than the one ya’ don’t.

But hands and knees are not the only deficient body parts among captive Judah. The text reaches out to those who have an anxious heart (so ESV). A more literal reading might produce this:

Say to the hurried of heart (alternatively, ‘the racing of heart‘), ‘Be strong; fear not!  (Hebrew: נמהרי־לב)

To some readers, this rather poetic diagnosis will sound instantly familiar.

YHWH’s promise comes to anxiety-ridden, racing-hearted captives. It becomes good news to the adrenaline-rushed, panic-attacked little ones, the cowering and the self-sheltering. It dares them to reconsider the terms they have negotiated with their terrifying world and to accept a new and rather boisterous name, one with a slightly in-your-face confidence over against the jackals and bandits who used to patrol this road: the Redeemed.

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Because the first step toward a body’s healing is an accurate diagnosis, the physician is forgiven for laboring on with his details to the point of our fatigue. So do Isaiah’s prophetic oracles press again and again into the behaviors that are the very stuff of national illness. If Israel/Judah is to be healed, the prophet Isaiah insists, she must assent to understanding the mortal affliction that has brought her low.

She must see. She must hear.

For they are a rebellious people, lying children, children unwilling to hear the instruction of the Lord; who say to the seers, ‘Do not see,’ and to the prophets, ‘Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.’ (Isaiah 30:9–11 ESV)

Isaiah’s rhetoric brings children to the fore on two accounts. First, in the dark diagnoses of the book’s earlier chapters, when adults who should know better are described as willful children.

Second, when the book’s redemptive promise comes to full bloom, a now adult Israel—having imagined herself a woman bereft of children—is stunned to see how many children return to her from afar.

In the passage just quoted, the ‘children’ are YHWH’s ‘rebellious people’, impatient with any word that might curtail their freedom to self-destroy, whether that word be instruction or correction.

Though here they make no effort to silence the seer and the prophet, they would coopt his message. They would turn the sharp and surgical edge of Yahwistic faith—an instrument whose blade is all about life and healing—into the soft coziness of religious self-absorption.

Whether silencing the prophet or buying out his message, the result is the same.

Rebellious children give the orders, in Isaiah’s survey, while those to whose word they ought to submit are ordered about like entry-level employees. The commands come in perfect chiasm (even here the prophet is an artisan), staccato-like:

Do not see!

Do not prophecy to us what is right!

Speak to us smooth things!

Prophecy illusions.

We prefer, too often, to have our piety in this way.

Absent some force, we would have the prophet be our comforter, our entertainer, our self-image coach.

Only because YHWH is willing to subject his own to pain in order that they might fall into redemption does our hope remain alive. And we with it.

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The Book of Isaiah is shot through with the dual theme of weariness and rest.

YHWH is seen as the one who offers rest to the weary, most typically in the context of return from exile and repose within one’s own natural space. The subtext is of a willfully agitated people who will not receive what is given—that which is kindly offered to them by YHWH—and instead will be shoe-horned out of their place and scattered to nations that have no regard for the weary homeless.

Even the eventual placement of returning captives in the land that had once been lost to them is regularly phrased via a verb that bears the resonance of ‘causing to rest’ (Hebrew: נוח).

Israel/Judah’s chosen idols are seen to be heavy to carry, thus weary-making. Yet YHWH bears his returning children, or causes them to be borne by others, back to their land in a way that renders weariness a fading memory. Indeed, such people shall rise up on wings like eagles, they shall run and not grow weary, they shall walk and not faint.

How strange, then, to find in the midst of a harsh Isaianic judgement oracle that the terrible plight of YHWH’s people in exile is distilled down to a refusal to rest, a chosen deafness against the offer of repose. The prophet suggests that it is only Judah’s alien captors who will finally talk sense into YHWH’s rebellious children, even if in truth it is YHWH himself who borrows their strange babbling in order to do so.

For by people of strange lips and with a foreign tongue the Lord will speak to this people, to whom he has said, ‘This is rest; give rest to the weary; and this is repose’; yet they would not hear. (Isaiah 28:11–12 ESV)

Since the book of Isaiah and the canon in which it stands as a pillar allows one to extend this dynamic beyond its historic origins and into the borders of our own ongoing wrestling with God and the world in which he has placed us, one might ask:

How then have we become this nervous, this shattered, this far from home?

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Upon occasion, the prophets relax the Hebrew Bible’s notable silence regarding what we might call ‘the unseen world’. The texts of the Old Testament do not spend any time denying that there might be a flurry of activity out there beyond what we can see and hear by conventional means.

Simply put, the texts remain agnostic and suggestive on that point, providing only the briefest glimpses of an unseen world that is at war as we are so often at war here below. Deuteronomy 29.29 seems to capture this posture, which is at the same time self-aware, disciplined, and sustained.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” (Deuteronomy 29:29 ESV)

Spiritual passion in our day quite regularly coincides with a penchant for speculation about the unseen ‘spiritual world’ that is at odds with this approach. Yet we may feel some sympathy for a spirituality that pushes back against the suffocating materialism that has been our official ideology for a century or two.

Over against this cautionary preamble, we encounter at a break in one of the prophet Isaiah’s ‘oracles against the nations’ this fascinating glimpse into his presumed split-level creation.

On that day the Lord will punish the host of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on the earth. (Isaiah 24:21 ESV)

This Isaiah text is not alone in identifying a certain correlation between what ‘the nations’ do in the world we know, on the one hand, and the rebellion and sometimes intra-celestial warfare of—what shall we call them?—heavenly powers, on the other.

The verse’s unique and bifold repetition—’the host of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on earth’—appears to underscore a prophetic insistence that reality comes in two flavors and that the activities in the two spheres do in fact correlate.

The book of Isaiah is at least as insistent as any other portion of the Old Testament literature on the point that YHWH is incomparable, and therefore unique. His authority is not the only authority, yet it is unlike any other.

Here, the prophet’s assurance to little Judah unassumingly speaks to a latent fear in national or existential underdogs: that rescue or redemption might come, but be only partial.

No, says the prophet, laying hand upon the all-inclusive poles called ‘heaven and earth’. On that day, all shall be touched, all made subject, all brought to heel.

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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.

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Two extraordinary facets of Isaiah’s discourse show their face in this brief oracle.

For the Lord will have compassion on Jacob and will again choose Israel, and will set them in their own land, and sojourners will join them and will attach themselves to the house of Jacob. And the peoples will take them and bring them to their place, and the house of Israel will possess them in the Lord’s land as male and female slaves. They will take captive those who were their captors, and rule over those who oppressed them. (Isaiah 14:1–2 ESV)

Yet it would be useless to appreciate them without first taking into account a very large fact on the ground: Peoples were not meant to survive the Ancient Near Eastern experience of exile.

On the contrary, exile meant the erasure of a nation from the face of the earth, from the future, indeed from memory. By murder and mayhem, by assimilation both forced and unforced, an ethnic group had no reasonable hope of emerging from the experience of exile at, say, the hands of the biblical Babylonians.

Against this dismal backdrop, YHWH in the book of Isaiah repeatedly promises to have compassion upon and to choose again his captive people Israel/Judah. It is a claim that spits in the face of all historical probability to say nothing of the might of Babylon itself.

Only a lord who stands outside of and over history could make this claim without being laughed out of court. And even then, YHWH would need to show his stuff in sweaty space and time before such a promise would be taken seriously by all but the most desperate of Zion’s captives.

This divine turning towards captive Judah is the first of the two extraordinary feats of the Isaianic message to which I’ve alluded. This merciful turning stands behind and gives credibility to the prophet’s call that Judah should both turn (in repentance) and re-turn (physically to Zion). Without YHWH’s prior turning towards this people, there is no sense in any such heroic measures on their part. It would be a simple historical insanity, a brief burst of enthusiasm that history would fail to record.

Second, the ‘nations’ find an ambiguous place in this rhetoric. The text claims that sojourners ‘will join’ Judah and ‘will attach themselves to’ the house of Jacob, expressions with a strong whiff of conversion and engrafting clinging to them.

Further, ‘the peoples’—reprehensible pagans, in the main—will themselves bring Judah/Israel back to her land and then become the nation’s servants and slaves within it. Again, Isaiah is trafficking in impossibilities, unless YHWH is credible.

The place of the nations in Isaiah’s vision is a much discussed problem. At moments, the book  permits us a glimpse of non-Israelites as virtual equals of Judahites themselves in the company of their redeeming Lord. More commonly, the doors are opened generously to non-Jews even as the text maintains a kind of subordination of ‘gentiles’ (the people of the non-Jewish nations) to the returning Judahites themselves. That is certainly the case in this passage. The reader remains uninformed about just how comfortable the nations will become as Israel’s domestic servants. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot.

When these features of the text are taken into account, it becomes clear that this is anything but a prosaic and naive optimism that things will turn out OK in the end.

To the contrary, Isaiah would have us gasp—perhaps even to cuss just a little in disbelief—before a known world undone. And a new one just beginning.

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Empires are so very vulnerable to hubris. It always gets them, eventually.

When YHWH whistles for the Assyrian bee to inflict his burning but redemptive sting upon Judah, which has earned for itself the title ‘a godless people’, Assyria fails to grasp the part about redemption.

Against a godless nation (Judah) I (YHWH) send him (Assyria), and against the people of my wrath I command him, to take spoil and seize plunder, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets. But he does not so intend, and his heart does not so think; but it is in his heart to destroy, and to cut off nations not a few. (Isaiah 10:6–7 ESV)

The distance between ‘to take spoil and plunder’ and ‘to tread (Judah) down like the mire of the streets’, on the one hand, and ‘to destroy and to cut off nations’ on the other may seem like a trifle leading only to a nuance. But for this text, it represents a world of difference between YHWH’s intention and  Assyria’s end-game. It manifests a distinction of purpose and of character that means everything. YHWH purposes (only…) to wound in order to heal. Assyria, the almost unchallengeable superpower of the moment, intends to exterminate.

If YHWH’s apparent surprise at Assyria’s severity raises ethical questions of its own about the divine comportment, that matter must await another day.

For now, it is Assyria’s imperial hubris that catches that eye.

For he says: ‘Are not my commanders all kings? Is not Calno like Carchemish? Is not Hamath like Arpad? Is not Samaria like Damascus? As my hand has reached to the kingdoms of the idols, whose carved images were greater than those of Jerusalem and Samaria, shall I not do to Jerusalem and her idols as I have done to Samaria and her images?’ (Isaiah 10:8–11 ESV)

Sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, success persuades the powerful that the past predicts the future. It does not. The system is not so closed.

There is always cause for humility, not least the stalking about of unseen personalities, one of whom dares to suggest that the nations are before him like dust on a scale.

Assyria, as the text quotes that great nation’s inner thoughts here, expects that a certain set of answers to its arrogant barrage of rhetorical questions is obvious.

Are not my commanders all kings? Indeed!

Is not Calno not like Carchemish? Of course, my liege.

Is not Hamath like Arpad? Not a stroke of difference between them, my king.

Is not Samaria like Damascus? Without doubt.

Shall my hand not then take Jerusalem and her idols? Go for it and be glorious!

What the biblical text knows is that empire becomes both blind and forgetful to the reality that it is not alone on the field of greatness. Others become restless, and fidget for the moment when this self-absorbed pretender shall be put down.

And for Isaiah, a most important word remains yet to be spoken:

One of them is no idol.

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