Canter Bridge

In a book as saturated with the concept of justice as this book called Isaiah, it is challenging to reconcile that commitment with a harsh passage like this:

On that day the LORD with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.

Isaiah 27:1 (NRSV)

It is essential at the first to recognize that this oracle occurs just before two more extended declarations of Jacob/Israel’s restoration, the first of which is a resounding reversal of an earlier parable of the vineyard that was painted in much darker hues. Arguably, the verse before us clears a space for those two agriculturally-imaged visions that await their moment.

Additionally, two considerations may at least place us in a position to engage verse 1 of this twenty-seventh chapter with a measure of methodological sympathy.

The first is the Isaianic conviction that enmity with YHWH’s purpose is both real and enduring. In a world less intoxicated by comfortable relativism than our own, this hardly requires expression. But in our day, it can be a truth we glimpse only dimly and from a distance. Nonetheless, the persistence of iniquitous rebellion is a conviction of deep rooting in the text before us. Little sympathy is expended on YHWH’s most insistent foes, even when there are muscular mercies available to those who find it in themselves to ‘return’ to YHWH and to his governance.

Second, judgement in Isaiah and even the wider biblical purview is not in my view primarily punitive. It is rather a necessary precursor to shalom, wherever this breaks out or is installed or becomes the object of divine or human cultivation. Judgement is itself a space-clearing exercise, taken in hand when those who resist YHWH’s determination to create communities of shalom become so recalcitrant that the project requires their removal.

This, in the context of Isaiah’s vision, is true of Leviathan, the fleeing and twisting serpent.

Leviathan stands in for all those nations, all those people, who will not have Jacob’s restoration except over their dead bodies, as the dismal expression runs.

Then does YHWH unsheath his ‘cruel and great and strong sword’. Then does YHWH of Armies—YHWH Seba’ot—gird on the full armor of that title.

Tragically, Leviathan will have it no other way. And there is a vineyard that needs tending.

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The fourth of the carefully sequenced oracles regarding the blessing of Egypt is the shortest. Yet in terms of the breadth of vision that these visions unfold before the readers eyes, it is the widest to date. This observation hinges on this verse’s inclusion of the other threatening empire that it now brings into the embrace of YHWH’s purposeful blessing: Assyria, the loathed and the feared.

Indeed, the brevity masks remarkable poignance, the illumination of which will require some historical comment.

On that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians.

Isaiah 19:23 (NRSV)

Egypt and Assyria serve in the Israelite imagination as the opposing poles of imperial menace. When one casts its menacing shadow over the Levant, the other becomes a sought-after ally in an attempt to manage the moment’s Realpolitik. As human beings travel, though not as birds fly, Egypt and Assyria stand spatially at those same two poles. Mobility imitates politics, or the reverse.

Indeed, more must be said to that point. This diminutive oracle punches above its weight via an unstated assumption: A highway from Egypt to Assyria and the promised passage of one empire’s emissaries to the other will necessary lead such travelers through Israel. Judah will by no means be a bystander to the imagined circumstances.

Seen in this light, the oracle contains stirring assumptions about a pacified political and natural geography. Only a world at peace could see the kinds of transit in both directions that is in view.

So far, the language of verse 23 envisages political, commercial, and cultural exchange. The to-ing-and-fro-ing of these hitherto adversarial empires conjures a new world, one never glimpsed by human eyes, one that imitates the counter-experiential promise in the Vision of Visions (chapter 2) that nations shall flow like a river up hill to Zion, in that vision the world’s highest promontory.

Yet there is more, and it is stated in the syllables of classic Isaianic paradox.

The clause just quoted represents an ambiguous Hebrew expression, one that is once again placed in a kind of emphatic position as the oracle’s summary declaration.

In the normal discourse of imperial politics, this declaration would most naturally be read as a description of Egypt’s subjugation to Assyria. That is to say, the verb עבד would denote the Egyptians’ service of Assyria as the latter empire’s underlings. The particle את would serve as the direct object marker of the verb. The entire expression would then be represented in English as ‘…and the Egyptians will serve Assyria’.

Yet in context two transformations of this ‘obvious’ reading are almost certainly placed before the reader’s eyes. First עבד seems to intend religious service rather than political subservience, this in keeping with the cultic altar and pillar as well as the sacrifice and burnt offering that Egyptians find themselves rendering to YHWH in the oracle just prior to this one.

Second, את appears to be placed quite ironically to represent not the familiar direct object marker but rather the preposition that means ‘with’. The two words are homographs and were presumably also homophones. The direct object marker occurs far more frequently than the preposition, though both are standard components of biblical Hebrew discourse.

Here the meaning must be, as most modern translations suggest, that…

The forty syllables of this fourth and almost miniature oracle of blessing have stood the known world on its head. Much like the fourth chapter’s Vision of Visions, they portray an impossible world, one that is almost inconceivable to the Ancient Near Eastern mind, as to ours.

The nations have experienced a complete religious transformation; the word ‘conversion’ falls far short of what is here described. Additionally, their relationships with each other have moved from enmity and competition to cooperative interaction of the most existentially profound kind.

Although the vocabulary and imagery could hardly be more different that those of the Vision of Visions, the nations have indeed streamed to and now through Zion with YHWH’s instruction and the worship of him as features of those peoples’ engagement with Jacob’s God. Swords have indeed been beaten into plowshares, spears become pruning hooks.

It is all quite impossible. Unless, the prophet urges his readers to conjecture, it is not.

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When the reader arrives at the third of five oracles, all of which develop the image of an Egypt that has somehow found its way to service of the God of Jacob, the evocative ambiguity of the first two visions has faded almost to the vanishing point.

On that day there will be an altar to the LORD in the center of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the LORD at its border. It will be a sign and a witness to the LORD of hosts in the land of Egypt; when they cry to the LORD because of oppressors, he will send them a savior, and will defend and deliver them. The LORD will make himself known to the Egyptians; and the Egyptians will know the LORD on that day, and will worship with sacrifice and burnt offering, and they will make vows to the LORD and perform them. The LORD will strike Egypt, striking and healing; they will return to the LORD, and he will listen to their supplications and heal them.

Isaiah 19:19–22 (NRSV)

One might read the first two of the four verses as standard, quasi-imperial boasting on Israel’s part. The liturgy in such a reading is carried out by Judahite occupiers cum conquerors of Egypt. If we had no context, it might even be ventured that such an interpretation fits more naturally than any other. The unspecified ‘they’ and ‘them’ of the latter clauses would need to be read as Hebrew ancestors in a reprise of the Exodus events. The latter is the only detail in such a reading that might stretch credulity if indeed we are dealing with occupiers.

On that day there will be an altar to the LORD in the center of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the LORD at its border. It will be a sign and a witness to the LORD of hosts in the land of Egypt; when they cry to the LORD because of oppressors, he will send them a savior, and will defend and deliver them.

Isaiah 19:19–20 (NRSV)

But the final verses of this vignette rule out such a reading. Here the language of mutual knowledge between YHWH and the Egyptians clearly identifies the worshipers as both authentic rather than forced and as Egyptian rather than Judahite. So does the transparent evocation of Egyptians worshiping YHWH ‘with sacrifice and burnt offering’ and their taking and performance of vows to YHWH.

We are now far clear of what I have argued is the studied ambiguity of the first two oracles of Egyptian’s turning. We have even moved beyond the vestigial allusiveness of this oracle’s first two verses into a spectacular scene of Egyptian worship of YHWH that can scarcely be imagined from the perspective of Jewish nationalism.

Yet it is the final verse that anchors this extraordinary oracle in the established rhythm of striking and healing that is a signature feature of the Isaianic burden.

The LORD will strike Egypt, striking and healing; they will return to the LORD, and he will listen to their supplications and heal them.

Isaiah 19:22 (NRSV)

By any measure that makes the biblical canon its point of departure, this is a breathtaking declaration. It alludes, in my view, to a pattern inherent in the relationship of YHWH vis-à-vis Israel that is apparent from as early as the book’s introductory chapter. There, no thought of Egypt or any other alien nation is in view. In the text of that first chapter and in its context, YHWH’s enmity is directed against Jerusalem and Judah and only against them. An extended quote is necessary.

How the faithful city has become a whore! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her— but now murderers!

Your silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water.

Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them.  

Therefore says the Sovereign, the LORD of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: Ah, I will pour out my wrath on my enemies, and avenge myself on my foes!

I will turn my hand against you; I will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy.

And I will restore your judges as at the first, and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city.

Isaiah 1:21-26 (NRSV)

This remarkable feature of an introductory chapter that establishes multiple themes that will be developed throughout the sixty-five ensuing chapters presents the same kind of redemptive ‘striking’ that we glimpse in Isaiah chapter 19. YHWH executes his wrath and vengeance on his own people, understood to be Judah and Jerusalem. Yet when he turns his hand against them, the result is not lethal but rather remedial. They are not exterminated. Instead, they are purified. The city is restored to the righteousness and faithfulness that were her purported beginning.

The third restoration oracle of Isaiah 19 deploys this same divine penchant to Egypt’s fate. There, YHWH’s enmity strikes in order to heal. The process is accompanied by promised divine attentiveness to the cry of Egyptian hearts. The oracle’s brief and summary declaration is simple but hardly one that is easily to be anticipated of the nation whose erstwhile Pharaonic ruler is recalled in Jewish homes and hearts as the iconic oppressor of the people’s mothers and fathers:

The Isaianic vision of Egypt’s turning in the two remaining blessing oracles will broaden still further the fate of Israel’s proverbial oppressor on the Nile. It will embrace even Assyria, that other great evil empire, in its redemptive grasp. Yet it would be a shame to rush on too quickly from what the prophet has invited us to imagine while Egypt still holds our gaze.

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Chapters 24 to 27 of the book called Isaiah seems to gather up the motifs of the preceding oracles against the nations and splash them in broad brush across a canvas of unrestrained and predictive exhilaration.

A passage in chapter 25 serves up a parade example of a broadly global reconciliation. It is Zion-centric but not ethnocentric. It is cosmic without being universal. An extended quote will introduce us:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

 And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.

 Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.

 It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

 For the hand of the LORD will rest on this mountain.

Isaiah 25:6–10 (NRSV)

I have italicized the recurring locative expression ‘on this mountain’ in order to underscore the Zion-centrism of this vision. Running counter to the intense localism of the passage is the inclusion of ‘all peoples’, ‘all nations’, ‘all faces’, and ‘all the earth’. Curiously it is the disgrace of his people that the text promises YHWH will eradicate from all the earth. Yet the beneficiaries of this cleansing seem to include all who are invited to this—shall we say eschatological?—feast.

Indeed, the profound inclusiveness of the vision seems likely to integrate those non-Hebraic nations into the moving first-person-plural declarations of the redeemed. Again, I italicize:

It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”

Isaiah 25:9 (NRSV)

Arguably, this is already so in the near context. Then if we read this passage as one of several adumbrations of the Vision of Visions in chapter four, with its pilgrim nations streaming eagerly to Zion, then the presence of foreign dialects amid the grateful crowds on Zion’s holy hill in chapter 25 seems all the more likely.

In that same spirit of intertextual attentiveness, the reader ought not to miss the deeply significant summary statement in verse 10:

It appears that this explanatory declaration picks up and re-purposes two features of preceding texts. First, the יד יהוה (hand of the Lord) has been a recurring element of the savage enmity between YHWH and the nations in the preceding passages. It has been raised against delinquent Jacob (1.25, 5.25 2x; 9.12, 17, and 21; 10.4) as well as Egypt (11.15, 19.16), Assyria and the nations (14.26-27), and a diverse knot of nations (23.11). The repetition of YHWH’s hand raised, extended, and waved against peoples and nations recurs with sufficient regularity to justify its recognition as a prominent motif.

In 10.25 the importance of the יד יהוה is intensified by its location in a powerfully summarizing statement, YHWH’s hand is a feature of the landscape, yet it is not raised. It rests.

This brings us to the second feature of preceding texts that appears here in re-purposed fashion: the verb נוח, to rest. Although it is enticing to consider the three-fold occurrence of this verb in the redemptive abundance of chapter 14 (1, 3, and 7), it seems to me that the critical antecedent to this feature of our chapter occurs near the outset of the quasi-Davidic portrait of chapter 11. The reader will recall that chapter 11 shares with chapter 25 a declarative summary that is at the same time Mount-Zion-centric and a portrait of redeemed nations:

They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Isaiah 11:9-10 (NRSV)

A responsible reading of chapter 25 will not overlook the antecedents I am attempting to identify, although of course my reconstruction of the relationships among them cannot escape a measure of conjecture.

It appears that this text in Isaiah chapter 25 echoes many others in the book when it conjures a future where YHWH’s hand—long raised in enmity against his Israel and his nations—has been lowered and now rests upon the freshly inhabited space of an enlarged Zion. There the nations find their longings fulfilled. There they feast alongside Israel’s scrubbed-up sons and daughters, together not as one ethnos but rather as banqueting guests of a suddenly welcoming Host.

The prophetic voice that resonates throughout the book called Isaiah urges its readers to consider that what they have known is not all that shall be. He invites them to contemplate a moment when YHWH’s hand has finally been lowered. In that day, as the prophet has introduced such novelties over and over again, humanity’s long wait has ended. The nations rejoice.

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By the time Isaiah’s ‘oracles against the nations’ have meandered their way to Tyre’s denunciation in the book’s twenty-third chapter, the reader has learned to anticipate a sudden turn from woe to weal in each chapter’s concluding lines.

Throughout the chapter, the glories produced by Tyre’s ceaseless commercial journeying have been defiled. The sea itself has turned against Tyre and Sidon, her sister city. Tyre herself will be ‘forgotten for seventy years, the lifetime of one king’ (v. 15). Her ambitious energies have been compared to those of a street-walking prostitute. In the prophet’s rhetoric at least, Tyre has like so many others of Israel’s neighbors been brought low.

Yet one hopes for better things upon arriving at the expected hinge language in verse 17: והיה מקץ שׁבעים שׁנה / ‘At the end of seventy years…’ This, after all, is where horizons nearly always grow brighter.

But if we expect an oracle of blessing at the end of this chapter, we are left scratching our heads over its details.

At the end of seventy years, the LORD will visit Tyre, and she will return to her trade, and will prostitute herself with all the kingdoms of the world on the face of the earth. Her merchandise and her wages will be dedicated to the LORD; her profits will not be stored or hoarded, but her merchandise will supply abundant food and fine clothing for those who live in the presence of the LORD.

Isaiah 23:17–18 (NRSV)

Oddly, we find no splendid, redeemed Tyre in white linen, blessed by YHWH and blessing the earth. At least not exactly.

Instead, her activity is still presented as that of a woman who ‘prostitute(s) herself with all the kingdoms of the world on the face of the earth.’ Tyre has not gone still. Her incessant wanderings have not grown obsolete during those seventy years forgotten.

Only the purpose has changed, and this dramatically. The judgement oracle against Tyre had described her thus:

Who has planned this against Tyre, the bestower of crowns, whose merchants were princes, whose traders were the honored of the earth?

Isaiah 23:8 (NRSV)

It seems that none of her commercial prowess has been lost. In the restoration oracle—if that is what it is—her relentless buying and selling are still styled as prostitution. However, its beneficiaries have been supplanted by new and nobler ones.

Her merchandise and her wages will be dedicated to the LORD; her profits will not be stored or hoarded, but her merchandise will supply abundant food and fine clothing for those who live in the presence of the LORD.

Isaiah 23:18 (NRSV)

If the well-established pattern in Isaiah’s oracles against the nations is our interpretive North Star, then it is possible that the pattern has been sustained even here. The description of Tyre after her seventy years is then likely to be a depiction of blessing and even of service to YHWH. Perhaps, then, Tyre’s ‘prostitution’ is now a wry rather than a barbed description of her commercial activism. The form of it remains unchanged but its purpose is transformed.

No longer hoarded for her own glory, the ‘profits’ of Tyre’s ‘prostitution’ now feed and clothe the Lord’s own.

If such a reading captures the chapter’s deeply ironic burden, then we might look backward to the nations’ beating of swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. We might also glance forward to the parade of the nations’ cultural product into Zion the beautified and the beautifying. We might discover in those disparately populated metaphors a template for this chapter’s odd transformation of a pagan city’s commercial ‘prostitution’ into bread, wine, and wool for the daughters and sons of Zion’s wide and welcoming embrace.

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We’ve considered the sudden turning in Isaiah’s nineteenth chapter from a bleak oracle of judgement against Egypt to a declaration about her healing and indeed her unlikely integration into Yahwistic faith. Some would categorize the ambiguous vignette at verses 16-17 with the preceding doom oracle against that nation. I’ve argued on the basis of the overwhelming note of blessing in the five oracles and the precisely repeated introductory clause ביום ההוא (‘In that day…’) that those two verses are best understood as a first of five oracles of blessing rather than a dismal prelude to them.

When we come to the chapter’s second declaration of good fortune for Egypt, the sunnier disposition of the oracle occasions relatively less doubt. I understand it to be the second of five parallel oracles of blessing.

On that day there will be five cities in the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to the LORD of hosts. One of these will be called the City of the Sun.

Isaiah 19:18 (NRSV)

Curiously, there is a crescendoing of the element of blessing from the first of the five oracles—where it is seen only through the prism of the happier declarations that follow it—to the fifth and culminating vision. In that culminating version of events, not only Egypt but also Assyria will be placed before Israel as nations that are the beneficiaries of YHWH’s blessing.

When verse 18 is seen in this wider context, it makes its own contribution to the gradual clarifying of Egypt’s enviable plight. Taken by itself, this second oracle of blessing might be read as conventional imperial rhetoric of an Israelite type. Those ‘five cities in the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan and wear allegiance to the YHWH Sebaoth’ could quite naturally be understood as settlements of occupying Israelites within Egypt.

It is only as we continue to read on into the third oracle and then the fourth and fifth that such an understand loses its viability. In the third, a deep rapprochement between Egypt and YHWH himself will become evident. If we read the oracles together—as the ביום הוא mechanism seems to suggest that we must—then these five cities are Egyptian cities peopled by Egyptian inhabitants living on Egyptian land. Yet they speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to Israel’s deity. Whether this vow is understood as an initial feature of faith by conversion or as an ongoing Yahwistic piety is almost immaterial. In either case, we view Egyptians worshiping YHWH and participating in the ongoing identity that is represented by dialect.

Elsewhere, the book called Isaiah will traffic in the language and concept of a new name and of re-naming. Here we have all of that in a different key that does not depend upon the mention of a new name but rather by reference to two activities: swearing of allegiance and language. Indeed, as we shall see, these Egyptians manifestly remain Egyptians.

Still, upon looking below the surface, one thing becomes clear: everything has changed.

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