Canter Bridge

Readers of this blog will be familiar with Isaianic irony. The work of Israelite prophecy that we abbreviate as The Book of Isaiah does not instruct only with straight-forward words. Rather, its artistry drives its message home with relentless subtlety, some of which is inevitably lost when the book’s soulful poetry is translated into English or another modern language.

Nowhere is the subtlety more powerfully deployed than in the prophet’s anti-idolatry polemic. He finds the veneration of idols not only enslaving, but also astonishingly stupid. Idolatry, he insists, is a religious practice that wearies rather than invigorates the worshipper.

In chapters 44 and 45, the book indulges in a lengthy run of such sarcasm-with-a-purpose. YHWH’s creative abilities are articulated via a plethora of vocabulary that occurs with frequency in those moments when divine creation becomes the subject of the Hebrew Bible’s discourse. One verb stands out for its repetition in these two chapters: יצר or yatsar.  The word is commonly translated as to shape, to form, or to fashion. The reader with little command of Biblical Hebrew will recognize the verb’s three consonants ( צ , י , and ר ) in the verses quoted below.

No fewer than nine times in chapters 44 and 45, YHWH is seen to form or fashion important created works. The high-level persuasive task of the passage is to convince the reader that YHWH has been able to form Israel, his servant because he is unimpeded in all his creative whimsy. If he is free to form and shape whatever he wants to create, then he can certainly create and re-create Israel against all the odds of historical precedent and human calculation. For this reason, Judah/Israel’s demoralizing captivity in Babylon does not mean that she is doomed. On the contrary, she can become YHWH’s newest new thing. This otherwise despairing nation can become, in a national sense, born again.

Thus says the Lord who made you, who formed you (ויצרך) from the womb and will help you: Fear not, O Jacob my servant, Jeshurun whom I have chosen. (Isaiah 44:2 ESV)

Remember these things, O Jacob, and Israel, for you are my servant; I formed you (יצרתיך); you are my servant; O Israel, you will not be forgotten by me. (Isaiah 44:21 ESV)

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you (ויצרך) from the womb: ‘I am the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself … ‘ (Isaiah 44:24 ESV)

I form (יוצר) light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things. (Isaiah 45:7 ESV)

Woe to him who strives with him who formed him (את־יצרו), a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it (ליצרו), ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’? (Isaiah 45:9 ESV)

Thus says the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, and the one who formed him ((i.e., perhaps, Israel; ויצרו): ‘Ask me of things to come; will you command me concerning my children and the work of my hands?’ (Isaiah 45:11 ESV)

For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed (יצר) the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it (יצרה) to be inhabited!): ‘I am the Lord, and there is no other.’ (Isaiah 45:18 ESV)

The prophet-poet would have made his point if this were all he had to say about the matter. But his sardonic wit wants to make a further point. It runs something like this: YHWH is the sovereign shaper of Israel and of all things. Yet idolators insist upon sweating over the forming and shaping of their own pathetic little gods, tiring themselves out in the ‘creation’ of gods who do them absolutely no good.

Idolatry makes the creature the creator and the creator the creature.

Taken from the same two chapters, the following three verses make the point.

All who fashion idols (יצרי־פסל) are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame. Who fashions (מי־יצר) a god or casts an idol that is profitable for nothing? (Isaiah 44:9–10 ESV)

The ironsmith takes a cutting tool and works it over the coals. He fashions it (יצרהו) with hammers and works it with his strong arm. He becomes hungry, and his strength fails; he drinks no water and is faint. (Isaiah 44:12 ESV)

The idolator makes himself a little YHWH, so he imagines. He creates his own god.

Still, the prophet’s satire has not exhausted itself, for in 44.9 he takes up the commonplace that the idols are nothing and extends it to the self-important idol-maker: All who fashion idols are nothing.

The modern reader who begins to discover the layers of sophisticated irony that make the book of Isaiah an enduring object of our contemplation might pause here to chuckle at those pathetic ancients who did such things and so became the butt of prophetic irony.

Yet one imagines that Isaiah’s sophisticated understanding of idolatry is as pertinent now as then, today as in pre-Christian antiquity. We modern and post-modern sophisticates labor hard over the things we worship, the constructs we assemble, the images we shape. Then we bow down to them, conceding to our pathetic little monsters mastery over our own very lives, our own destiny.

Imagining ourselves skillful and wise, we—like they—become nothing.

All the while, YHWH goes on forming and fashioning as he likes, via a simple word and with an implicit invitation that we should become the beauty he is creating in his world.

‘It cannot be!’, we decide, then return to our busy sanding and polishing, arms a bit sore and fingers worn almost to the bone.