Canter Bridge

The early verses of Isaiah’s fiftieth chapter are pregnant with enigma and resistant to simple theodicy.

Thus says the Lord: ‘Where is your mother’s certificate of divorce, with which I sent her away? Or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities you were sold, and for your transgressions your mother was sent away. Why, when I came, was there no man; why, when I called, was there no one to answer? Is my hand shortened, that it cannot redeem? Or have I no power to deliver? Behold, by my rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a desert; their fish stink for lack of water and die of thirst. I clothe the heavens with blackness and make sackcloth their covering.’ (Isaiah 50:1–3 ESV)

On the one hand, the passage contains elements of that familiar prophetic explanation of national calamity. ‘It was for your iniquities that you were sold, and for your transgressions that your mother was sent away.’

According to Isaiah, YHWH does not simply visit exile’s calamity upon his people for the hell of it. His is not some truculent divine nature, seeking attention even if by bad behavior.

Indeed, it would be very much like Isaian rhetoric for the passage’s first two questions (‘Where is …’, ‘Or which of …’) to be quoting or at least alluding to the exiles’ self-pitying, YHWH-blaming reflection upon their plight. ‘OK, we weren’t perfect, but he was really harsh’, we can almost hear them grumbling to each other by the rivers of Babylon. If that is the case, YHWH here does not actually admit to divorcing the people’s mother or given them up to his creditors. Rather he ironically honors their own faulty explanation of calamity’s causes, though for a moment.

But on the other hand, the prophet hears YHWH claiming compete freedom in this passage with a kind of independence from human causation. The language of rivers drying up probably refers to liberating activity that opens the way for exiles to return from Babylon’s grip to Jerusalem’s freedom.

However, the passage seems not to stop there. Rather, it transgresses any straight-line logic of human action and divine response in a way that draws the reader into further reflection, as it no doubt did for its earliest listeners.

I clothe the heavens with blackness and make sackcloth their covering.

YHWH extends his claim even to the most terrifying of phenomena.

While it is reasonably clear where the logic of this passage makes its start, it soon enough takes flight into more remote levels. There is more to calamity than what meets the eye, the prophet appears to insist. Or at least there may be.

YHWH has his way even with ominous skies and despondent heavens, as we peer fearfully at them from down here, wondering what they will rain down on us. More of him remains to be found even in our darkest hour.