Canter Bridge

As the first half of Isaiah draws near to the narrative chapters 36-39—which ominously foreshadow the Babylonian storm that will fall upon Judah—we come upon a chapter of unbroken darkness.

Chapter 34 is not by the book’s standards a long chapter. Yet the reading of these 17 verses feels wearisomely long, for their unceasing pronouncement of doom upon all nations (v. 2) never finds its way to the pivot towards mercy that is so characteristic of this book’s oracles. For an interpreter like this one, alive to the nuanced judgement of YHWH against the nations that becomes a severe mercy for them rather than their mere destruction, this chapter proves difficult to fathom.

Probably, chapter 35 is its pivot, which would explain the lack of a redemptive turning within the bounds of chapter 34 itself. But the hopefulness that blossoms there is directed towards ‘Zion’s cause’. There is no evident inclusion of the nations in its song of restoration and of return.

So, the dark cloud that Isaiah 34 suspends over the nations seems to remain in place. I find this difficult to fit within the trajectory of the book itself. Here one senses the appeal of the bald bifurcation of hope for Zion vis-à-vis judgement for the nations that some readers of Isaiah have seen as its inescapably binary and nationalistic message.

The passage, then, simply summons the people to YHWH’s judgement of them.

Draw near, O nations, to hear; O peoples, give heed! Let the earth hear, and all that fills it; the world, and all that comes from it.

For the LORD is enraged against all the nations, and furious against all their hoards; he has doomed them, has given them over for slaughter.

Isaiah 34.1-2 (NRSV)

The nations are to be slaughtered and their landscape is to be populated by wild animals rather than human beings. And that is all.

If the book of Isaiah, as I believe to be the case, has a bright future for the nations that pivots on their bittersweet but redemptive incorporation into YHWH’s plan for Israel, that hope will not be found in this chapter. In the biblical witness, glorious things are rarely easy and never automatic.