Canter Bridge

The bright and promissory nature of chapter 48 begins by rehearsing the sequence of warning-and-calamity that comprise ‘the former things’ (48.3) which the prophet now considers to lie behind Jacob/Israel while the horizon brightens just ahead. I discuss that retrospective view here.

The striking pivot towards the redemptive future that awaits is initiated at verse 6 by two principal means. First, the earlier and retrospective identifier the former things (הרשאנות) at 48.3 meets its counterpart in the prospective reference to new things (חדשות) at 48.6. It is critical to observe the degree to which both expressions are ‘empty’ identifiers; that is to say, they establish a sequence but their content must be provided by additional text and context. This does in fact occur, and so establishes a base of meaning that can travel with both identifiers into new and different contexts.

Second, the adverbial expression מעתה (from this time forward) establishes a new temporal baseline for the aforementioned new things. It states that these novelties in Jacob/Israel’s experienced will be announced now and from this point forward.

You have heard; now see all this; and will you not declare it? From this time forward I make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known.

They are created now, not long ago; before today you have never heard of them, so that you could not say, ‘I already knew them.’

You have never heard, you have never known, from of old your ear has not been opened. For I knew that you would deal very treacherously, and that from birth you were called a rebel.

Isaiah 48:6-8 (NRSV, emphasis added)

There are a number of contrasts between the former things and the promised new things, some of which are obvious while others are less so. One that is often missed pertains to the prehistory of both elements. In the case of the former things, the text describes a long prehistory of warning that anticipated the actual, sudden calamity of Zion’s destruction and the people’s exile. By contrast, the new things that are here introduced are described as unimaginable. Jacob never saw them coming, indeed could not have been trusted to steward news of them appropriately. They were hidden from both humans and their idols, as we shall see. YHWH alone knew of them. YHWH alone creates them now.

Curiously, there is no suggestion here that the prophet Isaiah had known of them either. The smelting (48.10-11) and returning remnant motifs are of course embedded deeply in the eighth-century prophet’s words. Both of these presage a kind of future beyond the storm. Yet in chapter 48 detailed foreknowledge of the new things is not claimed on the prophet’s behalf, including the role to be played by the here unnamed Cyrus, whom YHWH loves, calls, and brings to Zion’s aid (48.14-15).

There is a touch of regret in YHWH’s address, yet he seems to lament a misfortune that has in any case now passed.

Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am the LORD your God, who teaches you for your own good, who leads you in the way you should go.

O that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your prosperity would have been like a river, and your success like the waves of the sea; your offspring would have been like the sand, and your descendants like its grains; their name would never be cut off or destroyed from before me.”

Isaiah 48:17-19 (NRSV)

This backward glance at the sad necessity of those former things is soon overcome by the summons to an unspecified plural audience energetically to proclaim ‘this’ to the end of the earth. Presumably ’this’ (זאת) alludes to the whole trajectory of YHWH’s engagement with Jacob/Israel, and most certainly the very recent news that YHWH ‘has redeemed his servant Jacob’—to the end of the earth. Declared as though an accomplished fact, it seems to indicate more precisely an imminent result of a decision that YHWH has taken. It is the unexpected agency of the unnamed Cyrus that renders YHWH’s new things not only sequentially new but also entirely unforeseeable.

On the strength of all this, the exiles are encouraged to…

…(g)o out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea,

declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it,

send it forth to the end of the earth;

say, ‘The LORD has redeemed his servant Jacob!’