Canter Bridge

The forty-fifth chapter of Isaiah summons up one of the Hebrew Bible’s several ‘sovereignty discourses’. In these a superior—YHWH in most cases—puts in his purported place a lesser who has lodged a complaint. Modern sensitivities are quick to cry ‘Bully!’, and at points this seems a viable charge.

In any case, the discourse describes a moral architecture in which the participants’ relative rank is not in question. The lesser in this arrangement is to practice a certain compliance before the greater. It’s just the ways things are.

Woe to you who strive with your Maker, earthen vessels with the potter! Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, “What are you making”? or “Your work has no handles”?

Woe to anyone who says to a father, “What are you begetting?” or to a woman, “With what are you in labor?”

Thus says the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker: Will you question me about my children, or command me concerning the work of my hands?

Isaiah 45:9-11 (NRSV)

Such rhetoric is transparent enough in the abstract. Yet there is usually a concrete context that lends poignance and occasionally brings a justifying note to its sharp edges.

That is certainly the case here, where the Persian king Cyrus appears both before and after the ‘woes’ and the rhetorical questions that populate this sovereignty discourse. Indeed, it appears that YHWH’s choice to anoint and then deploy a pagan king for the benefit of his ‘servant’ Jacob lies at the very genesis of the quoted passage.

One must admit at the outset that the circumstances portrayed here defy expectation.

In the first verse, YHWH calls Cyrus his anointed one. The Hebrew word משיח (his servant = משיחו) will in due course become the main generator of the English ‘messiah’, which is in fact merely a transcription of the Hebrew noun. What is more, YHWH claims to have grasped Cyrus by the hand. Together the two expressions lay a foundation for the virtually unlimited conquest of the known world which is promised to the Persian king in the ensuing verses.

One might find it agreeable to imagine Israel as subject and object of this description. Israel, YHWH’s anointed, strengthened by YHWH’s own grasp. But Cyrus, the pagan king and Persian successor to Babylon’s empire? The plot has taken a new and disturbing turn.

The only limitation to the intimacy and collaboration that lock YHWH and Cyrus together as imperial co-conspirators is the twice-stated concessive clause ‘though you do not know me’ (verses 4-5), which is spoken of Cyrus. Paradoxically, Cyrus is anointed as YHWH’s own subduer of nations, yet he is not conceded the merit of knowing YHWH that remains somehow Jacob’s prerogative. Indeed, the entire anomaly that is Cyrus takes shape for Jacob’s benefit. Neither Cyrus nor his Persian nation supplants Jacob/Israel. Yet Cyrus is granted both a tactical intimacy with YHWH and strengthening by YHWH, all for the sake of Jacob/Israel.

For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me.

Isaiah 45:4 (NRSV)

If this description of circumstances commends itself, then we return to the question of what generates the sovereignty discourse of this chapter, with its potentially humiliating subjugation of Israel to YHWH in the figures of earthen vessels to potter, clay to divine molder, child to parents.

It appears that Israel’s implicit objection to YHWH redeeming his people in this Cyrus-centric way is the motivation for this dense and complex metaphor. No other dynamic in the context commends itself, it would be uncharacteristically abstract for the comment to come to us as a mere moral instruction, and—once glimpsed with clarity—Israel’s complaint about YHWH’s redemptive methodology fits perfectly with the chapter’s argument.

Even the culminating declaration of the chapter’s first unit (verses 1-7) stands out in sharper profile if YHWH’s deployment of Cyrus is seen to be the centerpoint around which the discourse revolves:

I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.

Isaiah 45:7 (NRSV)

YHWH, it seems, presents himself here as the Lord of Exile as well as of Return, the Master of Cyrus as much as Jacob’s God. The text does not allow YHWH to shirk responsibility for darkness and woe, which in context must involve at least the calamity of exile in a way that excludes neither Babylon’s nor Persia’s role. Indeed, YHWH names himself darkness’ architect and maker.

‘You’re going to redeem Jacob’s children this way?’, one imagines a faithful old Judean man complaining in his most earnest prayers, lips trembling with indignation. ‘Will you sully your hands in clasp with this pagan king?’

‘There is no one like me’, comes YHWH’s reply, failing to conceal a shiver of divine delight.