Canter Bridge

There is perhaps no passage in all the Bible that appreciates Jacob/Israel more intensely than Isaiah’s forty-third chapter.

Jacob/Israel is the work of YHWH’s creating hands. She is the object of his deeply felt assurances that she need not fear. She is protected by him through flood and fire. YHWH gives nations as ransom to bring Jacob/Israel home. She is precious, honored, and beloved in YHWH’s sight. The nation is called by his name, comprised of his very sons, his very daughters. Jacob/Israel is YHWH’s servant.

Jacob/Israel are also witnesses to YHWH’s nature and purpose. Yet she is blind. It is in this ironic antithesis that one of this brilliant chapter’s most beguiling textures is to be felt.

Witnesses see things and then report what they have seen. Witnesses, very nearly by definition, can see. One might scarcely imagine that a blind individual might hear the noises of a crime and report to the authorities what she has heard. But this would be an exception to assumptions and would require comment and explanation to bring it into ordinary imagination. In any case, we shall observe that Jacob/Israel is both blind and deaf, though they have (unseeing) eyes and (unhearing) ears.

In this chapter, we have a strange thing: blind and deaf witnesses.

The ancient synagogue readings, attested in our Masoretic text by paragraph markers פ and ס, do not separate verses 1-7 from verses 8-10. In this reading tradition, the profoundly promissory note that rings out in 1-7 is the foundation for the divine summons that is issued in verses 8-10.

Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet have ears!

Let all the nations gather together, and let the peoples assemble. Who among them declared this, and foretold to us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to justify them, and let them hear and say, ‘It is true.’

You are my witnesses, says the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.

Isaiah 43.8-10 (NRSV)

By my lights, the ‘people’ (עם) whom someone is summoned to bring forth in verse 8 is Jacob/Israel. Then the ‘nations’ (גוים) and ‘peoples’ (לאמים) in the subsequent verse are gentiles. In other words, verses 8 and 9 do not stand in synonymous parallelism. Rather the text is working its way forward across the human landscape, beginning with the erstwhile scattered children of Jacob/Israel and then coming to the nations, which are conveniently located for bringing sons and daughters home.

By my reading, the nations are invited to present witnesses who might account for YHWH’s unexpected and redemptive conduct, an offer tendered with the full assurance that the nations will come up empty. They have no witnesses. They lack understanding of YHWH’s creative-redemptive artistry. They do not fathom it and certainly cannot have predicted it.

By means of the emphatic plural pronoun at the beginning of verse ten (אתם / you), YHWH then presents his own witnesses, unpromising though they be.

You are my witnesses, says the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.

Isaiah 43.10 (NRSV, italics added)

These witnesses to YHWH’s uniqueness are the people of verse 8, none other than the scattered and now rescued sons and daughters of Israel. They are also YHWH’s chosen servant, a body of people who have been let in on YHWH’s otherwise undiscernible purpose to rescue his Israel and, in the mix, enlighten and welcome the nations.

Yet we learned back in verse 8 that this people is blind and deaf.

If one is justified in linking verses 8 and 10 so that Israel/Jacob, the blind and deaf people, and YHWH’s servant are one and the same—I feel confident that this reading is suggested by the text itself—then the irony of blind and deaf witnesses comes to the fore.

In time, we shall become more familiar with YHWH’s servant, a figure who is deeply compromised—one might even say impaired—both by willful incapacity to see and hear and by YHWH’s own striking. One can hardly imagine a more enigmatic persona.

In this passage, YHWH’s witnesses are his servant, now brought into awareness of his redemptive purpose for them with the hint that they had reason to suspect it aforetime. To whom do they testify? It would seem to the watching and listening nations that have participated in—indeed facilitated—their return home.

If in the Isaianic vision, the redemptive purpose of YHWH remains constant, its outworking in space, time, and human history is unfailingly impossible to anticipate. There are hints, of which Jacob/Israel is the curator and steward. But until events take their turn, no more than that.