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blind witnesses: Isaiah 43

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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.

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first and last: Isaiah 41

Posted in textures on December 18, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The language of ‘first and last’, of ‘before and after’, lies near the spinal column of Isaianic dialect. It is deployed throughout the book, though it comes into its own only after the pivot towards redemption that famously occurs in chapter 40.

In the midst of YHWH’s unanticipated cooption of the pagan monarch Cyrus and his ongoing astonishment of the nations, chapter 41 gives us this rendition of the expression to which I refer:

Who has performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning? I, the LORD, am first, and will be with the last.

Isaiah 41.4 (NRSV)

Perhaps owing to the work’s preference for creative reiteration over redundant repetition, chapter 41’s fourth verse tosses in the preposition את in the second of its two temporal affirmations. Thus, we have ואת־אחרנים // ‘(I am) with the last’ rather than the anticipated ‘I am the last’. There is an alternative view that sees את as a kind of deictic particle rather than the well-known preposition, but let us leave that possibility on the margins for now.

What does YHWH accomplish with this kind of first-and-last assertion of his existence, presence, and activity? It would seem that the claim asserts his mastery over history and therefore the creative privilege that generates the astonishment and marveling which ensue. Theologians might find ‘sovereignty’ preferable to ‘mastery’, though the two affirmations do not lie far from each other.

What it asserts on YHWH’s behalf is not so much the staccato claim that he is ‘in control’, which arguably is fueled more by modern concepts of automation. Rather, YHWH is present in creative orchestration of the events of history, more prone than anyone would expect to introduce unknown instruments, unfamiliar melodies, and unexpected rhythm in the execution of a continually self-enriching kind of artistry.

It would be difficult to exaggerate how noisily this notion of YHWH’s mastery over history collides with pieties that render him predictable and schematizable on the assumption that his future can be mapped out in concrete fashion. Such a reduction of prophetic imagination evacuates YHWH’s purpose of the astonishing and marvelous qualities that prophetic literature and particularly the Isaianic vision claims for it.

YHWH is present from before our retrospective vision fades to the vanishing point and until after our ability to imagine the future’s course evaporates into thin air. This, it seems to me, is the burden of the ‘I am the first and I am the last’ discourse. It urges us to trust in YHWH’s good presence and redemptive activity, while waving us away from the presumption that we know with any precision his ways and means.

The slight variation I have mentioned—which we might gloss as ‘and I am the one who will be with the latter things’—lays the stress on his presumed accompaniment of future events or, more properly, generations. Those events, those generations, are here glimpsed with a curious degree of independence. ‘They will be what they shall be’, we are encouraged to understand, ‘but I will be there, still orchestrating, baton still firmly in hand’.

I find this dynamic and profoundly theocentric view of history and of future, of retrospect and of prospect, a potent theological foundation for theological assessment of the past and for faithful expectation of the future. Like most affirmations that approach credal status, it is generative both in what it says and in that which it refuses to say.

In its shadow, its emaciated imitators look faintly ridiculous.

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unmitigated fury: Isaiah 34

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 15, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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.

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where power lies: Isaiah 31

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 14, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Egypt incarnates cruel irony across the biblical witness.

On the one hand, Egypt is the face, the strong arms that bound the bodies of Jacob’s children to the Hebrews’ iconic slavery. Moses, the Hebrew Bible’s great liberator, freed his people from Egypt after deconstructing his identity as one of Egypt’s princes on the morning he ambled out from the palace grounds and recognized for the first time his suffering Hebrew brothers. Moses then becomes Egypt’s hunted betrayer, the very Pharoah’s long-form adversary when he screws up his courage and allows his self-deprecating shadow to fall on the stones that lay before the Egyptian throne.

Yet these are brute facts, not ironic nuance.

The irony comes in when Egypt becomes the place to flee both famine and invading armies. The oppressor becomes refuge, yet always at a cost. The Isaianic tradition is acutely aware of that price.

Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely (ישענו) on horses, who trust (ויבטחו) in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look (ולא שעו) to the Holy One of Israel or consult (לא דרשו) the LORD!

Yet he too is wise and brings disaster; he does not call back his words, but will rise against the house of the evildoers, and against the helpers of those who work iniquity.

The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit. When the LORD stretches out his hand, the helper will stumble, and the one helped will fall, and they will all perish together.

Isaiah 31:1-3 (NRSV)

Within the trajectory of this prophetic witness, reliance upon Egypt is time and again framed as rejection of YHWH. You can have Egypt’s protection or YHWH’s, but you cannot have both. This is the binary choice in which we are schooled.

One wonders why. Could Egyptian protection against, say, invading Assyrians not be YHWH’s means of sheltering his threatend Hebrews?

Yet Isaiah’s harsh assessment of the Egyptian temptation will not relent. The four italicized verbal expressions and the corresponding Hebrew clauses in the text quoted above deploy four words that are very important to the Isaianic witness as manifestations the human side of the Israel-YHWH relationship: to lean, to trust, to look, to seek or consult. This bit of ironic artistry drives home the mutual exclusivity of trust in Egypt, on the one hand, and trust in YHWH on the other.

The final italicized clause drives home the point.

The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit.

Isaiah 31.3

The prophet’s intuition insists, for reasons it considers obvious or for other reasons it will not not disclose, that to seek refuge in Egypt is to deify the imperium.

The Isaianic version of what has been called the prophet’s ‘quietism’ in the face of existential threat to the nation is of a muscular, either-or, decision-making kind. The prophet knows—and he claims that YHWH does too—that a convenient appeal to means in a moment when everything is at stake is a return to idolatry.

To analyze the claim in this way is not to understand why it must be so. No wonder the people clamored that the prophet should speak to us smoother things than these.

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Ariel, lion of God: Isaiah 29

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on December 13, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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.

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Isaiah’s serpent: Isaiah 27

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on December 12, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Readers of these reflections will be familiar with the employment of the serpent to represent personalized evil, not least because such a creature populates the earliest pages of the Hebrew Bible. In a section of the book of Isaiah that seems to stand on the shoulders of discrete ‘oracles against the nations’ in order to glimpse resistance to YHWH’s purpose at more cosmic level, the Isaiah scroll does the same.

Chapter 27 begins with an exceedingly brief oracle, which I quote here both in Hebrew and in English.

בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֡וּא יִפְקֹ֣ד יְהוָה֩ בְּחַרְב֨וֹ הַקָּשָׁ֜ה וְהַגְּדוֹלָ֣ה וְהַֽחֲזָקָ֗ה עַ֤ל לִוְיָתָן֙ נָחָ֣שׁ בָּרִ֔חַ וְעַל֙ לִוְיָתָ֔ן נָחָ֖שׁ עֲקַלָּת֑וֹן וְהָרַ֥ג אֶת־הַתַּנִּ֖ין אֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּיָּֽם׃ ס

On that day the LORD with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.

Isaiah 27:1 (BHS and NRSV)

The oracle begins with the familiar and non-specific glance toward an unspecified future: ביום ההוא // ֹon that day. But instead of the usual particulars about a specific national adversary, we find YHWH armed as a warrior attacking a snake.

One detects a curious three-part symmetry. YHWH’s sword is ‘his cruel and great and strong sword’. His doomed adversary is Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent … the dragon that is in the sea.’ It may be significant that it is not YHWH himself but rather YHWH’s sword that stands parallel to this enemy. Biblical monotheism is usually written in the cursive of incomparability, and incomparability itself can be declared bluntly or subtly.

I assume that twice-named Leviathan and התנִין (NRSV’s the dragon) are one and the same. YHWH here makes war with a principal adversary, not two.

It is the description of the creature that concerns me most: fleeing … twisting … in the sea.

Not a purveyor of arbitrary parallelism but rather a poetic work of subtle interplay, the book called Isaiah is likely saying something important about the nature of cosmic opposition to YHWH’s purpose, something that presses into the serpent metaphor in order to build upon its possibilities.

First, the serpent is ברח / fleeing. When our eyes, figuratively speaking, fall upon Leviathan, YHWH’s might has already landed in force. Second, the serpent is עקלתון / twisting. One might consider that the descriptor aims chiefly to build upon the fear-engendering movement of a snake. I think, however, that the adjective serves to connote that Leviathan the serpent is difficult to subdue. While such a reading may seem to stand in opposition to the three-part invincibility of YHWH’s sword, it could just as well serve as a touch of Isaianic realism about the nature of opposition to YHWH’s counsel, its tenacity and destructiveness more than evident throughout the oracles against the nations and this more ‘apocalyptic’ section that follows upon them.

Finally, we come to התנין / the dragon. This third of three adjectival clauses turns concretely positional or locative. Israelite cosmology famously assigns to the sea the resonance that is proper to a chaotic, threatening, virtually untamable entity. Here it becomes the dragon’s—and, as I have argued, Leviathan’s—home. If this serpent does not customarily live in the sea—an interpretation I think likely reflects the figure’s intention—he flees to it.

Regardless, YHWH’s sword will be the end of it. The verb in question is no longer the semantically open פקד, commonly in contexts like this one, to visit or to punish (so NRSV). Rather, it is הרג / to kill, an unambiguously lethal brand of punishment. Leviathan, we are told in this briefest of oracles, this fleeing, twisting serpent, shall ‘on that day’ be no more.

Then, if editorial sequencing is to be honored, we read of a vineyard like no other. Its attentive viticulturist has no anger. He almost has to cry out for an enemy to dare to present itself, such is the blooming peace of the place.

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the wonder and the counsel: Isaiah 25

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »

In one of the book of Isaiah’s most quoted exclamations, the sixth verse of chapter 9 announces the astonishing birth of a consequential child:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9.6 (ESV)

I have italicized the first of four ‘throne names’, as they are often understood to be, of this royally endowed child. The now very traditional ‘Wonderful Counselor’ represents פלא יועץ, a somewhat enigmatic descriptor that might more literally be rendered ‘a wonder of a counselor’ or even ‘a wonder, a counselor’. ‘Wonderful Counselor’ is not a bad translation, but my interest in making this clarification lies in the juxtaposition of the two Hebrew words, פלא (‘wonder) and יועץ (‘counselor’). A too fast reification of their meaning might us to overlook the supple play of the two words in Isaianic context. It might also be noted that, from an interpretative point of view, the choice of small or capital letters generally corresponds to the theological commitments of the translator(s).

Both words are meaningfully deployed in the first half of the book. With a curious tenacity, the two are repeatedly linked.

In the doxological eruption that begins in chapter 25 and is sustained for several chapters, the combination of wonder and counsel that is established by the linkage of the two words occurs with a certain intensity. This is likely done with programmatic intent, since the paired words appear in the section’s very first verse.

O LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things (כי עשית פלא עצות), plans formed of old, faithful and sure.

Isaiah 25.1 (ESV)

Then, with apparent reference to YHWH’s ‘strange work’ of Zion’s painful redemption, we find the combination once more.

This also comes from the LORD of hosts; he is wonderful in counsel (הפליא עצה) and excellent in wisdom.

Isaiah 28:29 (ESV)

Finally, the sequence is crowned by a verse where the absence of עצה is compensated by the rapid-fire reiteration of פלא.

The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote; so I will again do amazing things (להפליא) with this people, shocking and amazing (הפליא ופלא). The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.

Isaiah 29.13-14 (NRSV)

Any assessment of what I have been describing must take into account two features that cohabitate amidst a tension that is critical to the soul of the Isaianic burden. First, עצה (‘[to]) counsel’) as a verb and as a noun establishes that YHWH’s way with his Israel and his nations aligns with a determined and previously existing purpose. In this sense, YHWH’s purposeful counsel flows from his stable center. It is not chaotic and not—at least from a divine and therefore a prophetic point of view—serendipitous. One thinks here of the use of the verb קום, deployed in Isaiah to announce that human machinations against Zion and other aspects of YHWH’s purpose shall not stand. Such rustlings of rebellious hearts are doomed from the start, no matter impressions to the contrary, precisely because they contravene YHWH’s counsel or purpose.

Second, the outworking of the divine counsel/purpose regularly astonishes human beings, who have no automatic access to it. This is where פלא serves to underscore that the settled, unstoppable purpose of YHWH is a source of continual surprise to those who are caught up in its concretization. This is so particularly for Israel/Jacob, but hints of gentile ‘marveling’ or ‘wondering’ are not absent from the texts.

It is inconceivable to me that we should not read chapter nine’s ‘wonderful counselor’ in the light of this subsequent florescence of the word-pair and ancillary expressions that use just one of the two. The child that ‘has been born to us’ in chapter nine is not merely a particularly gifted advisor or empath, as English translations might lead one to conclude. Rather, he is an agent of the divine purpose, destined in the execution of YHWH’s counsel to surprise and astonish. This scion of the court of David’s house—as Isaiah 9 appears almost certainly to identify him—is drawn into both the premeditation and the redemption of YHWH in ways that make eventual framing of Mary’s son in his light an interesting interpretative move, even perhaps for those who do not share the shepherds’ doxological impulse as they assimilate the news of that baby’s birth (Luke 2.20). Even she, the third evangelist tells us, ‘treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart’ (Luke 2.19, ESV). Perhaps we are not wrong to wonder whether this new mother, though read into the divine purpose by way of angelic visitation, considered its unlikely realization in her own womb and now at her breast the most unimaginable of paths for the divine counsel to tread.

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La mano de YHVH: Isaías 25

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on October 26, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Los capítulos 24 a 27 del libro llamado Isaías parecen recoger los motivos de los oráculos precedentes contra las naciones y salpicarlos con brocha gorda sobre un lienzo de alborozo desenfrenado y predictivo.

Un pasaje del capítulo 25 es un ejemplo paradigmático de reconciliación global. Está centrada en Sión, pero no es etnocéntrica. Es cósmica sin ser universal. Una extensa cita nos servirá de introducción:

Y el Señor de los ejércitos preparará en este monte para todos los pueblos un banquete de manjares suculentos, un banquete de vino añejo, pedazos escogidos con tuétano, y vino añejo refinado.
Y destruirá en este monte la cobertura que cubre todos los pueblos, el velo que está extendido sobre todas las naciones. Él destruirá la muerte para siempre.
El Señor Dios enjugará las lágrimas de todos los rostros, y quitará el oprobio de su pueblo de sobre toda la tierra, porque el Señor ha hablado.


Y en aquel día se dirá: He aquí, este es nuestro Dios a quien hemos esperado para que nos salvara; este es el Señor a quien hemos esperado; regocijémonos y alegrémonos en su salvación.

Porque la mano del Señor reposará en este monte.

Isaías 25:6-10 (LBLA)

He puesto en cursiva la expresión locativa recurrente ‘en este monte’ para subrayar el sioncentrismo de esta visión. En contraposición al intenso localismo del pasaje está la inclusión de ‘todos los pueblos’, ‘todas las naciones’, ‘todos los rostros’ y ‘toda la tierra’. Curiosamente es la desgracia de su pueblo lo que el texto promete que YHVH erradicará de toda la tierra. Sin embargo, los beneficiarios de esta limpieza parecen incluir a todos los invitados a este banquete ¿escatológico?.

De hecho, la profunda inclusividad de la visión parece integrar a las naciones no hebraicas en las conmovedoras declaraciones en primera persona del plural de los redimidos. De nuevo, lo pongo en cursiva:

Y en aquel día se dirá: He aquí, este es nuestro Dios a quien hemos esperado para que nos salvara; este es el Señor a quien hemos esperado; regocijémonos y alegrémonos en su salvación.

Isaías 25:9 (LBLA)

Podría argumentarse que esto ya es así en el contexto cercano. Entonces, si leemos este pasaje como una de las diversas insinuaciones de la Visión de Visiones del capítulo cuatro, con sus naciones peregrinas que acuden ansiosas a Sión, la presencia de dialectos extranjeros entre las multitudes agradecidas de la colina santa de Sión en el capítulo 25 parece aún más probable.

En ese mismo espíritu de atención intertextual, el lector no debería pasar por alto la declaración resumida del versículo 10, que es profundamente significativa:

Porque la mano del Señor reposará en este monte.

Isaías 25:10 (LBLA)

Parece que esta declaración explicativa retoma y reutiliza dos rasgos de los textos precedentes. En primer lugar, la יד יהוה (mano del Señor) ha sido un elemento recurrente de la salvaje enemistad entre YHVH y las naciones en los pasajes precedentes. Se ha levantado contra el delincuente Jacob (1:25, 5:25 2x; 9:12, 17 y 21; 10:4), así como contra Egipto (11:15, 19:16), Asiria y las naciones (14:26-27), y un variado nudo de naciones (23:11). La repetición de la mano de YHVH levantada, extendida y agitada contra pueblos y naciones se repite con suficiente regularidad como para justificar su reconocimiento como motivo destacado. En 10:25, la importancia de la יד יהוה se intensifica por su ubicación en un enunciado poderosamente resumidor, La mano de YHVH es un rasgo del paisaje, pero no está levantada. Está en reposo.

Esto nos lleva a la segunda característica de los textos precedentes que aparece aquí de forma reutilizada: el verbo נוח, reposar. Aunque es tentador considerar la triple aparición de este verbo en la abundancia redentora del capítulo 14 (1, 3 y 7), me parece que el antecedente crítico de este rasgo de nuestro capítulo se produce cerca del comienzo del retrato cuasi-davídico del capítulo 11. El lector recordará que el capítulo 11 comparte con el capítulo 14 el mismo rasgo de la abundancia redentora. El lector recordará que el capítulo 11 comparte con el capítulo 25 un resumen declarativo que es, al mismo tiempo, centrado en el Monte Sión y un retrato de las naciones redimidas:

No dañarán ni destruirán en todo mi santo monte, porque la tierra estará llena del conocimiento del Señor como las aguas cubren el mar.

Acontecerá en aquel día que las naciones acudirán a la raíz de Isaí, que estará puesta como señal para los pueblos, y será gloriosa su morada. 

Isaías 11:9-10 (LBLA)

Una lectura responsable del capítulo 25 no pasará por alto los antecedentes que intento identificar, aunque, por supuesto, mi reconstrucción de las relaciones entre ellos no puede escapar a cierta medida de conjetura.

Parece que este texto del capítulo 25 de Isaías se hace eco de muchos otros del libro cuando evoca un futuro en el que la mano de YHVH -largamente levantada en enemistad contra su Israel y sus naciones- ha sido bajada y ahora descansa sobre el espacio recién habitado de una Sión ampliada. Allí las naciones ven cumplidos sus anhelos. Allí celebran un banquete junto a los hijos e hijas de Israel, juntos no como una etnia, sino como invitados a un banquete de un anfitrión súbitamente acogedor.

La voz profética que resuena a lo largo del libro llamado Isaías insta a sus lectores a considerar que lo que han conocido no es todo lo que será. Les invita a contemplar un momento en que la mano de YHVH haya bajado por fin. En ese día, como el profeta ha introducido tales novedades una y otra vez, la larga espera de la humanidad ha terminado. Las naciones se regocijan.

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sequencing glory, anchoring light: Isaiah 60

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

A Christian reading of the book called Isaiah should not occasion constant surprise. And yet it does.

Jesus is remembered quite famously as having told a Samaritan woman that ‘salvation is of the Jews’.

You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews (ε͗κ τῶν Ἰουδαίων).

John 4:22 (NRSV, emphasis and inserted Greek text added)

In context, the deep impression Jesus leaves upon this Samaritan woman’s neighbors belies the idea that non-Jews are excluded from the salvation in question. Yet the origins of this ’salvation’—humanly speaking—are hardly in doubt for the writer of the Fourth Gospel.

This assertion of a salvific sequence worth careful consideration is hardly an outlier. The New Testament’s most famous apostle, in the midst of one of his recurring wrestlings with the interrelationship of Jews and Gentiles in the economy of Jacob’s God, deploys a phrase that he will find useful more than once.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Ἰουδαίῳ τε πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι).

Romans 1:16 (NRSV, emphasis and Greek text added)

Here the collective singular stands in twice for masses of people. Likely, this signals the apostle’s confidence that this is an ingrained way of things independent of human manipulation that plays itself out in individual cases over and over again.

It is all too easy to imagine that this soteriological sequencing somehow takes the place of a prior ingrained Jewish nationalism in early Christian proclamation, opening a door that had previously remained closed to non-Jews while assuring that the privilege of it not be understated. In fact, my students tell me all that the time that this is the way of things.

Yet this seems not to be the manner in which early Christian theologizers read their sources in the Hebrew Bible.

Rather, it seems that early Christian hermeneutics discovered this sequence—this anchoring of expansive salvation in Jewish particularity—in the massively influential book of Isaiah as well as in other Jewish texts. For example, Isaiah’s sixtieth chapter fixes its gaze and addresses its promise to the restored Zion that it imagines in some of the book’s most soaring and lyric poetry.

The turning of tables to Zion’s benefit is named late in the chapter:

The descendants of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the LORD, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

Whereas you have been forsaken and hated, with no one passing through, I will make you majestic forever, a joy from age to age.

You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breasts of kings; and you shall know that I, the LORD, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.

Isaiah 60:14-16 (NRSV)

Yet this stirring reversal ought not be read as a transformation that occurs to the detriment of those nations that now nourish Zion.

Rather, the chapter’s opening verses address Zion lit up and glorified in a manner that attracts the peoples in the manner of secondary promise and sequenced blessing. The second-person singular addressee is most certainly the restored city.

Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Isaiah 60:1-3 (NRSV)

Passages like this steward the sequence and anchor the illumination of ‘the nations’ in a way that might easily have inspired, informed, and even shaped the New Testament proclamation of a Jesus movement that by appearances surprised itself at every turn by the response of non-Jews, then turned its hand to the hard work of how such ’new folks’ ought to be integrated into a family that began as a branch of Judaism.

Difficult times would come in that process which scholars often identify as ’the parting of the ways’. Yet it is both sobering and fascinating to observe the way in which early preachers and evangelists of the Jesus movement found themselves reading the Jewish Scriptures in a way that seems coherent even to (some) modern historians of the Way.

The stewards of those new wineskins that early Jewish followers of Jesus found necessary for the preservation of new wine did not, it turns out, imagine that everything had become something other than it had been. The vigor of their newfound regard for the risen Jesus led them back to old books like the one they called ‘Isaiah’, there to find the same sequencing of salvation, the very anchoring of light in YHWH’s disclosure to Israel itself that infused the teaching of their Lord and the writing of their apostles.

The notion that ‘salvation is from the Jews’ would be tested and often discarded in ensuing centuries, up to and including our own. Yet it seems difficult to this Christian reader of Isaiah to imagine that this sequence, this anchoring of ‘Jesus faith’ in Jewish experience can be discarded without inventing a new religion that is or will eventually become cast adrift from its moorings.

Dragons be there.

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reassurance against vulnerability: Isaiah 44

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on November 20, 2022| Leave a Comment »

From the moment YHWH’s servant is introduced in 42.1, there is a hint that the servant’s career will be an arduous one. Indeed, the presentation formula at 42.1 says as much with its first breath:

הן עבדי אתמך־בו
Here is my servant, whom I uphold…

Isaiah 42:1 (NRSV)

YHWH’s pledge to uphold (תמך) all but requires that we imagine resistance to the servant’s work, the potential weakness of the servant himself, or both.

Not surprisingly, then, the passages that follow abound in promises by YHWH to supply all that the servant will require in order that he should persevere to the conclusion of his assigned agenda.

Chapter forty-four continues this sequence of promises, holding tight to the communal or collective identity of the curiously named ‘servant’ while painting with new color the circumstances of his adventure.

But now hear, O Jacob my servant, Israel whom I have chosen!

Thus says the LORD who made you, who formed you in the womb and will help you: Do not fear, O Jacob my servant, Jeshurun whom I have chosen.

For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my spirit upon your descendants, and my blessing on your offspring.

They shall spring up like a green tamarisk, like willows by flowing streams. This one will say, ‘I am the LORD’S,’ another will be called by the name of Jacob, yet another will write on the hand, ‘The LORD’S,’ and adopt the name of Israel.

Isaiah 44:1-5 (NRSV)

The chapter’s opening oracle, quoted just above, provides essential elements for a comprehensive understanding of the servant figure in the book called Isaiah. Characteristically, it does so incrementally and in a dialect of rich and complex metaphor.

First, we find further assurance in a classic summons to overcome fear—‘Do not fear, O Jacob my servant…!’—that an evident danger ought not to be given more weight than it is due in the context of YHWH’s presence and provision. This continues the tone of reassurance that has accompanied the servant discourse from its beginning.

Additionally, we find overlapping imagery regarding the provision of water in a desert, on the one hand, and descendants/offspring, on the other. These are introduced sequentially, then blended a moment later when the aforementioned descendants/offspring spring up like tamarisk and willows in consequence of YHWH’s irrigation of the desert.

This interplay of images is further enriched by the realization that YHWH’s spirit and the water he provides appear to be two ways of speaking about the same thing.

Finally, the text drops plant imagery as quickly has it had introduced it in order to return to the matter of people. When it does so, we learn that the servant Jacob/Israel’s suddenly appearing children are in fact the offspring of other nations who now—remarkably—adopt the name of Israel.

The overall impact of this oracle’s supplementation of preceding servant discourse is extraordinary. The reference of YHWH’s spirit seems certain to echo that saturating spirit that comes to rest upon the Jesse-king of chapter 11, perhaps linking the collective Jacob/Israel servant with that quite individual, regal figure. And the servant’s YHWH-provisioned return—if this is the movement we are meant to imagine—somehow creates a more complex Jacob/Israel in the very act of its potentially wearying desert crossing.

The children are descended from their parents, yet they are from a different people. YHWH, supporting and sustaining his servant, will see to it. The task is hard, yet the outcome assured. The servant is vulnerable, yet strangely enriched by daughters and sons it did not bear in Babylon nor bring from that soon-to-be-forgotten place. Yet here they are, calling themselves by YHWH-names, more sons and daughters than new-found cousins.

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