Canter Bridge

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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The sad descriptions of YHWH’s people in their darkest moments serve to illuminate what YHWH wants for and from those people when health is restored.

The text of the Bible’s Book of Isaiah probes at matters of knowing and understanding, sometimes from the dark side of its absence, at others from the side of health and blessing.

In the book’s programmatic first chapter, Judah/Israel is contrasted with farm animals when it comes to knowing and understanding.

The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. (Isaiah 1:3 ESV)

Mere habit, the raw animal instinct for having physical needs met, is enough for ox and donkey to claim the advantage over what Isaiah describes as a willfully imperceptive people. The Hebrew words at play are ידע and בין. If the reader will tolerate a cheap pun, Isaiah will make hay with these words as the book presses his argument forward.

Isaiah underscores the extremity of Judah’s imperception by choosing not to attach the expected direct object to each of these verbs. It is not that they do not know this, not understand that. Tragically, they neither know nor understand at all.

In the book’s unique ordering of events, the infamous prophetic commissioning of the prophet does not occur until certain things have first been placed on record. In chapter six, finally, Isaiah meets ‘the King’ in a temple vision. He is, he says, undone by the sight. Soon the severe mercy of Isaiah’s prophetic calling takes shape. It must have seemed all severity and no mercy.

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here I am! Send me.’ And he said, ‘Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.”’ (Isaiah 6:8–9 ESV)

The book will soon make clear that this savage scraping of the barrel’s perceptive bottom has redemptive ends. Israel will re-learn to see, to hear, to know, to understand. First, though, she must be led to the awful extreme of her self-chosen logic. She must experience the blunt force of true blindness, of genuine deafness.

The words again are ידע and בין, their order reversed this time. Israel/Judah must stop knowing and seeing so that she can—in time and by way of the Lord’s mercy and justice—learn again how to know, how to understand.

One can imagine a people where such knowledge and understanding lie at character’s core. A community in which seeing and hearing produce their full perceptive fruit by leading their subjects to deeply accurate and empathetic engagement with each other and with their world.

How the heart longs to belong to such a people, to stand in its middle—surrounded by the wise, the just, the merry—with knowledge and understanding.

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If a book like the biblical Isaiah can rightly be considered inexhaustible, the claim pivots in part upon the sheer poetic nuance of its language.

The book’s third chapter fiercely denounces a leaderless people. Those who have not abdicated entirely the burden of leadership govern like children. Indeed the line after line of severe dissection of Judah’s body politic is almost too much to bear in the wake of a cartoonish electoral season when childishness became a political virtue.

Yet in contrast the prophet himself sustains a very adult command of his language.

Two conventional verbs come into play in the twelfth verse. I have italicized and underlined them, and italicized the words immediately surrounding.

My people—infants are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, your guides mislead you and they have swallowed up the course of your paths. (Isaiah 3:12 ESV)

English translators, when they note the lyrical play, are forced by their target language to drop it from their hands. But a brief foray into the Hebrew text is a tool for recovery.

The verb here rendered guides is given the form of a noun. It is the Hebrew אשר, a word that certainly does mean guide. But that meaning is only derivative. The action at its heart is a making straight, a keeping true, a straightening out. This is what guides are meant to do. They conduct those they lead along a course that leads them to a destination they’d be hard pressed to find on their own, efficiently and without detour. In the essence of things, they are path-straighteners. Isaiah notes their presence here, among a surrounding thicket of hapless leaders.

Yet these ‘guides’ do precisely that which one hires a guide in order to avoid. They make Judah wander. They put the people on a wrong course. They lead them astray.

Hebrew תעה is a conventional and therefore familiar word for this kind of action. You might expect it of a trickster, of a bandit well prepared in ambush, even of one’s wily enemy. But never of a guide.

Never of a path-straightener.

Isaiah returns to this very theme in the book’s ninth chapter.

… for those who guide this people have been leading them astray, and those who are guided by them are swallowed up. (Isaiah 9:16 ESV)

It is in these quiet juxtapositions of two conventional words that Isaiah’s rhetoric achieves its incomparable and enduring force. Presumably, it is here too that a remnant in Judah heard a persuasive voice and took measures to repent, to return, to come back onto a track that promised future instead of ashes. It is here in the small turn of a phrase, in the knowing juxtaposition of two common words to express an uncommon truth, that the book manifests some of the beauty that explains its survival, indeed its inexhaustible appeal.

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