The book called Isaiah is nothing if not disjointed. Yet it is the particular genius of this long scroll that its disjointed nature does not reduce to incoherence. Somehow, at times as though a strong, thrashing swim against the current, Isaiah preserves coherence.
Ariel, or ‘Lion of God’, comes out of nowhere at the outset of Isaiah 29. We are not prepared for this lion’s sudden appearance. Many things about Ariel are unclear, but two will not be dismissed. First, Ariel is a city, ‘the city where David encamped’. Second, Ariel—which we may suspect at the outset is a poignant moniker for Jerusalem—is the object of both the ire and the salvation of YHWH.
Like Israel (ישראל = ‘he struggles with God’ or even ‘God struggles’), Ariel’s is a contested identity.
In the first pericope of chapter 29, as the Hebrew text’s ancient divisions would have it, Ariel meets YHWH’s enmity. In verse two…
Yet I (presumably YHWH) will distress Ariel, and there shall be mourning and lamentation, and (she) shall be to me like an Ariel.
Isaiah 29.2 (NRSV, slightly modified)
Here, God’s lion is stubborn, corralled, perhaps caged. She is a tragicomic figure, no match for YHWH’s might and yet indomitable in her own right.
In time, outside the bounds of this first pericope, Ariel will be rescued by YHWH from the nations that would besiege, ransack, and exterminate her. But Ariel does not yet know this, knows only the self-destructive energy of her leonine verve.
‘Ah, Ariel’, we might groan with the passage’s first words. You fight so long and so hard. You fight against your Maker, who shall in time become your Redeemer.
You are a complex and conflicted city, a lion’s strength and a heart too independent, too rebellious for its own good.
Just over the horizon lies the promise that YHWH will defend Ariel from those imperious nations bent on her dismemberment.
But not yet.
And so, recognizing ourselves in Ariel, in a moment of lucidity, we cry with the text’s opening words …
Ah, Ariel, Ariel…
Lion of God, doomed beast in a cage.
Your redemption draws nigh.
Canter Bridge 
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