Canter Bridge

One of the many paradoxes that the book called Isaiah places before us lies almost hidden in the binary choice that the prophet declares in the book’s eight chapter.

And when they say to you, ‘Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,’ should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living? To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn. (Isaiah 8:19–20 ESV)

It might seem, even to a reader who is committed to the view of things that the biblical text advances, that the choice here is that of living, breathing, even activist religion over against a reliable deposit. That is, between a religiosity that is brewing with live mischief although patently opposed to YHWH’s way over against an orthodox faith that is solid, if a little inert.

It might seem to others, perhaps less inclined to look with favor on ‘what the Bible teaches’, that the most advantageous choice is not exactly an easy one to discern.

Yet the prophet’s language here, upon slow reading and closer inspection, shows that the field of play is not quite so ambiguous. The choice, when things are seen as they are, is not a difficult one to decide.

Here is paradox, indeed, but not much ambiguity.

In fact, the prophet fills the left column of his legal pad with all things deathly, the right with all things alive.

The chirping and muttering of the necromancers, the presumed rumination of the mediums, are for all their apparent vocal dexterity nothing more than death dressed up in the ‘got-your-attention-didn’t-I’ robes of death itself. Isaiah considers the consultation of them a sit-down visit with darkness and decay. People who engage in such doomed conversation ‘have no dawn’.

On the other side of the page, the ‘life’ column fills up with ‘God’, with ‘the living’ themselves, and then—this is where we might stray off course when tracking the prophet’s logic—with ‘the law and the testimony’ and with ‘this word’.

Let’s suppose for the moment that ‘the law and the testimony’ and ‘this word’ roughly abbreviate the accumulated declarations of the prophet in YHWH’s name. More than this is likely insinuated, but we can do without that complication for now.

The prophet aligns these written-down words not with stultifying tradition or a ‘dead letter’, but rather with a God who is very much alive and—the detail is critical—aligned with and active among ‘the living’ who surround the prophet and who are in this terrifying moment scared a little witless.

In the prophet’s view, YHWH has spoken—through him and others—an accumulated deposit of reality that can be declared in street or temple but in awful moments of imminent doom like this one can be written down, consulted, whispered aloud, and treasured.

Far from being inert, we are to understand this ‘law (better, ‘instruction’) and testimony’ as life-containing and life-giving. If other sources of supposed counsel require the dead and lead only to death, this ‘instruction and testimony’ hints at new growth, at fresh eruptions of life, at possibilities still unknown. Though quiet and even silent in this moment, this little reservoir of truth holds the promise of shouting, of dance, of song when the night has faltered and the dawn has come.

If this is how things really are, then why should a people consult the dead on behalf of the living?

Just so.