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nowhere to be found: Isaiah 41

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on January 18, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The Isaianic vision places its appetite for rhetorical questions in the service of wonderment over YHWH’s redemptive surprises, his new things.

Two prominent examples leap to mind.

First, bereaved and barren Zion finds herself caught up in the sudden appearance of daughters and sons somehow conceived in her time of desolation.

Surely your waste and your desolate places and your devastated land— surely now you will be too crowded for your inhabitants, and those who swallowed you up will be far away.

The children born in the time of your bereavement will yet say in your hearing: ‘The place is too crowded for me; make room for me to settle.’

Then you will say in your heart, ‘Who has borne me these? I was bereaved and barren, exiled and put away— so who has reared these? I was left all alone— where then have these come from?‘

Isaiah 49.19-21 (NRSV, emphasis added)

Contemplating the flow towards Zion of long-lost sons and daughters, YHWH asks on behalf of Mother Zion.

Who are these that fly like a cloud, and like doves to their windows?

Isaiah 60.8 (NRSV, emphasis added)

I mention these two passages in order to illuminate the rhetoric of sudden appearance. In the passage under review, this motif finds its counterpart in the expression of sudden disappearance.

Yes, all who are incensed against you shall be ashamed and disgraced; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish.

You shall seek those who contend with you, but you shall not find them; those who war against you shall be as nothing at all.

(Isaiah 41:11-12 NRSV, emphasis added)

The rhetorical question does not figure in this second motif, nor does the flood-tide of previously unimagined children streaming to their astonished mother. The mode here is not interrogative but plainly descriptive. The subjects in question are not Zion’s children but the people’s enemies.

However, the reversal of sudden appearance in the interest of sudden disappearance hinges on important formal symmetries.

Both traffic in the language of the sudden and the astonishing. Both register their truth from the perspective of the affected observer, who is in fact the same subject if one grants the likelihood that YHWH’s servant in Isaiah 41 and Mother Zion in the previously cited passages are coterminous.

Where have they gone? Where have they come from? Who are they?

Such is the interrogative accent of the redeemed. So rings the perpetual surprise of those whom YHWH has restored.

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slyly taunting YHWH

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 16, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The Assyrian Rabshakeh, taunting the terrified listeners on Jerusalem’s wall, knows exactly what he is doing. Or else the Isaian framer of this menacing dialogue has nearly outdone himself in framing the taunter’s message in ways that will resonate most deeply with Jerusalem’s soul.

In the mix, the Rabshakeh taunts YHWH himself.

The Rabshakeh said to them, ‘Say to Hezekiah: Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: On what do you base this confidence of yours? Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war? On whom do you now rely, that you have rebelled against me? See, you are relying on Egypt, that broken reed of a staff, which will pierce the hand of anyone who leans on it. Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who rely on him. But if you say to me, ‘We rely on the LORD our God,’ is it not he whose high places and altars Hezekiah has removed, saying to Judah and to Jerusalem, “You shall worship before this altar”?

Isaiah 36.4-7 (NRSV, emphasis added)

As quoted, the Rabshakeh’s repetitious deployment of two words that share the root בטח (to trust) is tedium itself. No one talks like that. Yet this very vocabulary lies at the core of Isaiah’s dialect of confidence or trust in YHWH. If Israel can be faulted for anything in this long book, no culpability tears more viciously at the people’s covenant with YHWH than the people’s decision not to trust. I have highlighted the English equivalents of the terms above in plain italics.

It appears that the text frames the matter of a binary decision about whom to trust—Assyria or YHWH—in the starkest possible terms, even at the expense of making the Rabshakeh talk like a six-year-old child.

Yet to these eyes, this is not the passage’s most pungent moment. Rather, it is the framing of Hezekiah’s strategy (so formatted above) with the resonant term עצה and then paraphrasing it immediately thereafter with the claim ‘We rely on the LORD our God’.

Here the Rabshakeh places not just Hezekiah’s panicked option for resistance but most likely the very counsel of YHWH over against the unstoppable might of the Assyrian empire. To read עצה in this context as an unremarkable reference to Hezekiah’s ‘strategy’ and nothing more is to indulge in an atomistic reading of this most poignant text.

This is war. No one present on or below the wall as this intimidating scene unfolds doubts this.

What the prophet knows—whether or not the surely more eloquent Rabshakeh is aware—is that this is a peculiar kind of war. Assyria vs. YHWH himself.

All else is asterisks and footnotes.

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YHWH growls and flies: Isaiah 30

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on January 14, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Hauling from his inventory a curious spate of metaphors, the prophet manufactures a curious animal collage in order to depict YHWH’s defense of Zion’s ‘hill’ (גבעה). One wonders whether that arguably diminutive substitute for the usual ‘mount’ (הר) is intended to express Zion’s hypothetical helplessness in the absence of such divine protection.

For thus the LORD said to me, As a lion or a young lion growls over its prey, and—when a band of shepherds is called out against it— is not terrified by their shouting or daunted at their noise, so the LORD of hosts will come down to fight upon Mount Zion and upon its hill.

Like birds hovering overhead, so the LORD of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it, he will spare and rescue it.’

Isaiah 31.4-5 (NRSV)

YHWH is a lion, unafraid of any who might sally to drive it away. Neither ‘terrified by their shouting or daunted at their noise’, YHWH’s prowling signals the end of a town’s captivity. The prey in his grasp belongs entirely to its predator. Who would brave that growl?

As the metaphor shifts from feline to fowl, so does the imagined time frame experience its own evolution. The lion’s prey is recently captured, its change of hands the thing that alarms all those enraged shepherds who have only just realized their loss. Now, however, YHWH ‘like birds hovering overhead’ becomes the all-seeing protector of a Jerusalem that has fallen entirely into his claim. No sneaky enemy will surprise Jerusalem, nor its overflying Protector. Conquest has become dominion.

Two features of this unexpected, animalesque field of imagery surprise. One is the audacity of depicting YHWH in terms of creaturely specimens. The other is the daring imagination of him in the plural.

Zion is not troubled by these details. Down below the swallows’ vigilant darting, finally, she rests. Protected, delivered, spared, and rescued.

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the mainstream dilemma: Isaiah 29

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on January 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The book of Isaiah is a frustrating text for those weaned on narrow theological orthodoxies. In spite of its place at the core of the biblical canon and over against conclusions that might be drawn from the New Testament’s frequent citation of the book, it challenges theological prescription at every turn. This is evident in its nearly simultaneous assignment of Israel’s declension both to human and to divine causality. The Isaianic tradition is uninterested in parsing out the dilemma to the satisfaction of abstract curiosities.

Stupefy yourselves and be in a stupor, blind yourselves and be blind! Be drunk, but not from wine; stagger, but not from strong drink!

For the LORD has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep; he has closed your eyes, you prophets, and covered your heads, you seers.

The vision of all this has become for you like the words of a sealed document. If it is given to those who can read, with the command, ‘Read this,’ they say, ‘We cannot, for it is sealed.’ And if it is given to those who cannot read, saying, ‘Read this,’ they say, ‘We cannot read.’

Isaiah 29.9-12 (NRSV)

The opening verbal assault assumes a self-inflicted incapacity. The prophet urges his hearers on to drunken blindness in a dialect that assumes a high degree of moral responsibility, indeed of culpability.

The following verses flow without impediment into the language divine causality. This occurs first in the report that it is YHWH himself who has poured upon Israel a sleepy spirit, closed the eyes of prophets and the heads of seers. It continues in the second instance with the picture of helpless, stupid, benighted candidates for redemption by means of the prophetic vision. They are incapable of responding. They are not so much willing and rebellious subjects as they are helpless ignoramuses.

By my lights, one makes sense of this dilemma only by means of the more widespread biblical conviction that idolatry is chosen and then exercises its intensifying influence upon those who have chose aberrant religion. Choice becomes the starting point of a process that eventually makes the chooser incapable of genuine choice.

We become what we worship, goes a modern adaptation of the topic. Indeed.

Who, then, is finally responsibly for the Israel’s pathetic plight in chapter 29. YHWH? Or Israel?

Yes, says the prophet.

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Israel, the spreading vine: Isaiah 27

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on January 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah’s chapter 27, to those who venture into this fearsome corner of the book, is known best for two vigorous images: The first is YHWH’s destruction of a great serpent named ‘Leviathan’. The second is the ensuing, second ‘vineyard poem’, second precisely because it stands as counterpart to the grim first vineyard song of chapter 5.

In my view, the sequence is not casual or unimportant. Leviathan’s death-wish opposition must be dealt with before Israel can flourish like a vineyard.

In the midst comes a little agriculturally grounded oracle that I will argue is specifically viticultural, introduced and lightly set off from its immediate context by a variation on the familiar introductory expression ‘in that day…’:

In days to come Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots, and fill the whole world with fruit.

Isaiah 27.6 (NRSV, emphasis added)

The verse has numerous textual uncertainties, but they do not meaningfully obscure its intent.

Clearly the oracle presents Jacob/Israel as some kind of plant, the metaphor forged of the three verbs I have italicized above. The verse does not precisely name the plant, but three matters encourage the reader to envisage a grapevine. First, the more general tendency to imagine Israel/Jacob as a vineyard sets the stage for such a reading, most famously that much more explicit first vineyard song of chapter 5. Second, the immediately prior context—interrupted only by the temporal clause באים (NRSV: ‘in days to come’)—sets our minds precisely on a vineyard rather than on some other arena of agricultural endeavor. Third, each of the verbs rests well within a metaphorical frame that is not merely agricultural, but specifically viticultural.

These considerations lead us to the grand conclusion of this very diminutive oracle.

…and (this vine, Israel/Jacob shall) fill the whole world with fruit.

Isaiah 27.6 (NRSV, clarification added)

NRSV’s ‘with fruit’ is interpretative, although not objectionably so, since תנובה can mean agricultural produce of nearly any kind. NRSV’s reading merely recognizes the vine metaphor that I am arguing is inevitable.

Importantly, the oracle’s conclusion seems to require us to assume two conclusions that we ignore to our interpretative loss.

First, we are to envisage an expansion that is slow, organic, and in this way inevitable, all of which contrasts with the image of Leviathan’s ways and means, redolent as they are with the suddenness and ordinarily short duration of combat. Leviathan subdued, Jacob/Israel will occupy his real or intended realm, though in a very different manner than the ancient, twisting serpent.

Second, Jacob/Israel will engage, according to this prophetic vision, in something other than mere conquest. One tyrant does not here supplant and replace another. Rather, this vine shall fill the whole world with its fruit. It seems mean to this interpreter to begrudge the implication that inhabitants of that world who are not sons and daughters of Jacob/Israel will taste and be nourished by the fruit of this vine.

So does the prophetic eye imagine an expanding blessing for the nations that is anchored in the YHWH-cultivated vine that is Israel. Other, less generous readings of this verse are of course plausible. But a reading with the grain of the Isaianic vision likely favors this less stingy appropriation of a tiny verse that punches well above its diminutive weight.

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a vineyard stilled: Isaiah 16

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on January 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

In the midst of a chain of ‘oracles against the nations’, the prophet’s condemning voice suddenly collapses in anguished weeping as his eye contemplates the fate of Moab. The turn is bewildering. Prophets raised up on their hind legs in full imprecatory mode do not usually cry. There is, as we have been taught deliciously, no crying in baseball. Nor in oracles against the nations.

The explanation for this collapse into tears that I find most persuasive argues that these are crocodile tears. Schadenfreude. A mocking false weeping that ridicules Moab’s fall and delights in it.

This does not make for inspirational reading, not least for those of us who take up and read from the comfort of remote and peaceful easy chairs, fat in the easy luxury of condemning both violence and the longing to see another brought low because our children have never been snatched away, our spouse violated, our home burnt to the ground, Grandpa murdered in the field with hand on plow.

We should at least have eyes wide open to the preferences and biases that accompany us here in this unthreatened place.

If we are able to do so, we may just find it possible to admire the poetry of the Moabite vineyard, fallen into abandoned silence.

For the fields of Heshbon languish, and the vines of Sibmah, whose clusters once made drunk the lords of the nations, reached to Jazer and strayed to the desert; their shoots once spread abroad and crossed over the sea.

Therefore I weep with the weeping of Jazer for the vines of Sibmah; I drench you with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh; for the shout over your fruit harvest and your grain harvest has ceased.

Joy and gladness are taken away from the fruitful field; and in the vineyards no songs are sung, no shouts are raised; no treader treads out wine in the presses; the vintage-shout is hushed. 

Therefore my heart throbs like a harp for Moab, and my very soul for Kir-heres.

Isaiah 16.8-11 (NRSV)

The vineyard metaphor is mainly Zion’s prerogative in this book. If this chapter is suffused with sarcasm, then the image’s redeployment to speak of this near neighbor Moab may be spoken with curled limp and a defiant twinkle in the eye.

Harvest is in agrarian contexts a moment for sweaty labor married to all manner of delights. The whole community throws itself into the once-a-year frenzy of it all. Everything is motion, promise, sunshine, lust, and future. It is a liminal moment, one that could not—must not—last forever, one that is by definition not the normal grind, but one that unites in order eventually to nourish and sustain.

But not in Moab, per the prophet’s eye. Everything there is still. There’s no one about. Grapes pass their moment for plucking and turn fetid. Vines languish, hang, then drop.

One can lament the community’s absence, the missed celebration. Or one can look ahead to bare tables, the dull eyes of hungry children.

The prophet, if the reading I have suggested holds, looks forward to that moment in an ancient enemy’s life.

We have heard of the pride of Moab —how proud he is!— of his arrogance, his pride, and his insolence; his boasts are false.

Therefore let Moab wail, let everyone wail for Moab. Mourn, utterly stricken, for the raisin-cakes of Kir-hareseth.

Isaiah 16.6-7 (NRSV)

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calamity’s failure to convince: Isaiah 9

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on January 4, 2024| Leave a Comment »

A grim vignette, set off by the ancient reading tradition embedded in the Masoretic text, shows that Israel’s failure was not a poor work ethic.

The Lord sent a word against Jacob, and it fell on Israel  and all the people knew it— Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria— but in pride and arrogance of heart they said: ‘The bricks have fallen, but we will build with dressed stones; the sycamores have been cut down, but we will put cedars in their place.’

So the LORD raised adversaries against them, and stirred up their enemies, the Arameans on the east and the Philistines on the west, and they devoured Israel with open mouth. For all this his anger has not turned away; his hand is stretched out still.  

The people did not turn to him who struck them, or seek the LORD of hosts.

Isaiah 9:8-18 (NRSV, emphasis added)

There is perhaps less indisputable encounter between YHWH and Jacob/Israel than meets the eye. The Masoretes vocalize דבר as דָּבָר, ‘a word’, but the Septuagint attests to a reading of דֶּבֶר, ‘a plague’ or ‘pestilence’. The latter reading accords more naturally with the context of persistent calamity and makes more sense in an oracle that decries the people’s unwillingness to discern the nature of what is going on around them.

In any case, the prophet describes the people as soldiering on with faces set stonily to rebuilding ruins instead of contemplation of causes.

The bricks have fallen, but we will build with dressed stones; the sycamores have been cut down, but we will put cedars in their place.

Isaiah 9.10 (NRSV)

Wartime devastation—for the uprooting of trees virtually obligates us to understand the scene in this way—does not subdue this lion-hearted people’s grim determination to carry on. Rather, it animates them to frenzied reconstruction of what has fallen down around them. The prophet does not admire this energy. He decries it as evasion of the message that fallen bricks and uprooted sycamores carry with them.

It is both tempting and understandable—it may even be correct—to conclude the passage with the familiar refrain about YHWH’s still uplifted hand in verse 12, as modern translations tend to do. However, the ancient reading tradition takes a different path by including verse 13 as this vignette’s final statement.

The people did not turn to him who struck them, or seek the LORD of hosts.

Isaiah 9.13 (NRSV)

Read as a conclusion, this summary in the accent of prophetic dialect levels an exceedingly strong accusation. The people’s frenzied wartime heroism conceals a stubbornness of immense proportions.

For the prophet, besieged Israel/Jacob was incapable of imagining that YHWH was behind the marauding armies that caused them such loss. Or that there was a message implicit in the destruction those armies wrought. Or both.

They did not turn. Nor did they seek.

So, the spokesman of a harsh prophetic realism declares, YHWH’s punishing hand remains raised to strike again.

The book’s programmatic and prefatory first chapter insinuates that scenes like this one will appear, though its vocabulary and inventory of metaphors are distinct.

Why do you seek further beatings? Why do you continue to rebel? The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and bleeding wounds; they have not been drained, or bound up, or softened with oil.

Isaiah 1.5-6 (NRSV)

Who knew that Assyria’s sword was clutched in YHWH’s hand in this searing moment?

Now healing must wait, that hand upraised still.

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exhausting YHWH: Isaiah 1, 7

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on January 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Isaian rhetoric frequently pushes the limits of established theologies. Though it has no particular argument with divine supremacy over history, it will not truck with notions of divine impassibility.

Twice, the book called Isaiah deploys the word לאה—to exhaust or wear out—with YHWH as its wearied subject or object. Only Jeremiah joins the book of Isaiah in this unsettling move, the same number of times (6.11, 15.6).

Isaiah describes this risky divine pathos during the prophet’s confrontation of Judah’s panicked king Ahaz during the Assyrian crisis.

Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test. Then Isaiah said: ‘Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also (כי תלאו גם את־אלהי)?’

Isaiah 7.10-13 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

YHWH’s patience with his recalcitrant people has been sorely taxed, this in a passage that is redolent with hints of divorce. He has been worn down, pushed to exhaustion. The straw that has broken the proverbial camel’s back is Ahaz’ faux-pious refusal to ask YHWH for a sign when the prophet has implored him to do just that.

Other ‘mortals’ have found themselves obliged to put up with Ahaz’ faithless shenanigans. Now it is YHWH’s turn. We glimpse for a moment the disturbing picture of YHWH, hands on knees, fed up.

It would seem the earliest versions sensed the awkwardness of such a pose and did what they could to tidy things up.

The Septuagint makes YHWH marginally less vulnerable.

καὶ εἶπεν Ἀκούσατε δή, οἶκος Δαυιδ· μὴ μικρὸν ὑμῖν ἀγῶνα παρέχειν ἀνθρώποις; καὶ πῶς κυρίῳ παρέχετε ἀγῶνα;

How then do you provoke a fight with the Lord?

Isaiah 7.13 (NETS, emphasis added)

By a different route, the Targum also ameliorates YHWH’s dilemma. By means of the low-profile insertion of ‘the words of’, the targumist embraces the infelicitous notion of ‘weary words’ in order to avoid the still less desirable image of Israel’s exhausted God.

וַאְמַר שְׁמַעוּ כְעַן בֵית דָוִיד הַזְעֵיר דְאַתוּן מַהלַן יָת נְבִיַיָא אְרֵי תַהלוֹן אַף יָת פִתגָמֵי אְלָהִי׃

Then he said, ‘Hear now, O house of David: Is it too little that you weary the prophets, that you weary even the words of my God?

(Isaiah 7.13, Accordance Targum English, emphasis added.)

In its prefatory chapter one, the book has already hinted at the likelihood that things would come to this. There, in fierce denunciation of formally unquestioned worship that is nonetheless offered up by bloody hands, the text has YHWH declaring his own nausea less hypothetically than in chapter 7.

Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them (נלאיתי נשא).

Isaiah 1.14 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

Here, too, the Septuagint and the Targum soften the blow to any presumption that the deity does not feel, indeed does not stagger, under the weight of such hubris.

…as well as your new moons and your feasts, my soul hates. You have made me full (ἐγενήθητέ μοι εἰς πλησμονήν); I will no longer forgive your sins.

Isaiah 1.14 (NETS, emphasis and Greek text added)

The translator’s idiom is unfamiliar. Even if it hints at YHWH being pushed to extremity, it fails to communicate YHWH’s weariness as poignantly as does the Hebrew text.

The targumist allows a greater distance to open between the Hebrew text and his own rendering:

Your new moons and your appointed times, My Memra rejects them. They have become an abomination before Me; I have forgiven much.

Isaiah 1.14 (Accordance Targum English, emphasis added)

What are we to make of the Isaiah scroll’s boldness in describing the effects of human rebellion upon YHWH?

At a bare minimum, the vision will not articulate misalignment between human behavior and the divine counsel in merely theoretical terms. Instead, it dares to suggest that human misconduct disturbs, wearies, and even sickens Israel’s divine Overlord and would-be Redeemer. The prophet somehow manages this understanding of an affected YHWH without diluting his confidence that YHWH’s purpose or counsel will prevail.

Only a superficial reader could paint the redemptive drama of which the book called Isaiah is a witness in abstract or theoretical terms and call it interpretation of the text that lies before us. Not while YHWH leans perspiring, hands on knees, panting for his breath.

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grinding the face of the poor: Isaiah 3

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on January 2, 2024| Leave a Comment »

One of the ironies of prophetic denunciation is that those who are on the receiving end likely did not see their actions and attitudes in the way the prophets’ searing metaphorical rhetoric chooses to frame them.

The LORD rises to argue his case; he stands to judge the peoples.

The LORD enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses.

What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord GOD of hosts.

Isaiah 3.13-15 (NRSV)

A textual issue slightly bedevils the passage. Where the Masoretic text has YHWH rise to judge the peoples, the Greek (LXX) and Syriac (Peshitta) versions align the text with its Judah-facing context and envisage YHWH judging his people. Although this contextual reading self-evidently honors the quoted passage’s wider context, we should probably prefer ‘the peoples’ with the Masoretic presentation as the ‘harder reading’ (lectio difficilior).

By this view, the prophet berates the nations before focusing on Israel/Judah in particular, perhaps in the mix implying that Israel has descended to the level of those unwashed hordes.

It is easy to imagine that ‘the elders and princes of (YHWH’s) people’ did not understand their attention or inattention to the plight of the poor as abject, willful cruelty. They—as we—might rather have preferred an explanation based in sound economic theory or meritocratic appeal to individual responsibility or a steely ethical realism. Inevitably, someone has to lose.

It sounds so reasonable.

The prophet’s perspective is different.

The double rhetorical question of verse 15 would have been forceful enough if it had begun with the more ordinary ‘Why?’. Instead, the text seems to turn the screws on Judah’s powerful by introducing the question with the more indignant ‘What do you mean by…’ (מלכם). The phrase seems to insinuate what is elsewhere declared: the violence (by design or by neglect) of the powerful against the vulnerable is an affront against how things ought to be that offends and will be taken personally.

Independently of this detail, the two verbs that anchor the rhetorical question in the concrete behavior of the powers are exceedingly inculpating.

What do you mean by crushing (תדכאו) my people, by grinding the face of the poor (ופני עניים תטחנו)? says the Lord GOD of hosts.
(Isaiah 3:15 NRSV)

Isaiah 3.15 NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

The violent physicality of the expression converts more passive economic and social moves (or failure to move) into kinetic destruction of the bodies of the poor. The rhetorical framing of the situation invites the hearer and the reader to ask which view of reality—the theoretical and passive appeal to impersonal economic and social inevitabilities or the willful assault of the rich upon the poor—better describes reality.

Even if we are obliged to decide, the prophet in this instant does not stand with us. He has already made up his mind. He claims that YHWH has, too.

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the possibility of turning: Isaiah 1

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , on January 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Much of the judgmental language that falls upon the reader in the book of Isaiah sounds deterministic, fatalistic, and final.

Yet, like all language, it is spoken from and into a context. In this long book—and not least in the preparatory montage that is its first chapter—that context casts light on the possibility of turning. The potential for a non-cataclysmic outcome seems part of the deep structure of the book. If so, then it perhaps lightens the gloom when savage denunciation seems to allow no room for turning, for return, for repentance, for life.

In the book’s first chapter, such grim finality is not absent. Yet the second paragraph of the ancient reading tradition begins and ends with a summons to take hope-engendering action:

Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.  

When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation— I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.

Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.

When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”

Isaiah 1.10-17 (NRSV)

I have italicized the prominent imperatives at both ends of the section. The first could be heard as standard convening language of the kind that introduces final judgement. The last series of imperatives (v. 17) is manifestly invitational. Any coherent reading, then, must condition the finality of the opening summons in a way that allows for the possibility of turning. Among nearer-in benefits, such an interpretation accords perfectly with the wider book’s tenacious practice of turning judgement towards redemptive aims.

In between the bookends of this conceptual inclusio, YHWH dissects the abomination of formally orthodox worship that is not founded upon the practice of justice. Fine liturgy, as the passage would have it, offered up by bloody hands. It is a most quotable jeremiad. Except that it is much more than bare denunciation.

The assault upon the efficacy of such worship is enfolded into invitation. To read the paragraph otherwise is to misgauge intent and so to deform the section’s passionate summons.

The reading I propose here tends also to shut the door on a pessimistic reading of verse 18, the well-known imperative which awaits the reader just over the horizon from this second paragraph of chapter 1, where hope—not sunny optimism, but realistic hope—stubbornly claims space for a future.

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