Canter Bridge

A little oracle that dares to bring its low profile into the struggle of titans during Judah’s Syro-Ephraimite and Assyrian Crises deploys classic Isaianic irony and then a puzzle.

The LORD spoke to me again: Because this people has refused the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, and melt in fear before Rezin and the son of Remaliah; therefore, the Lord is bringing up against it the mighty flood waters of the River, the king of Assyria and all his glory; it will rise above all its channels and overflow all its banks; it will sweep on into Judah as a flood, and, pouring over, it will reach up to the neck; and its outspread wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel.  

Band together, you peoples, and be dismayed; listen, all you far countries; gird yourselves and be dismayed; gird yourselves and be dismayed!

Take counsel together, but it shall be brought to naught; speak a word, but it will not stand, for God is with us.

Isaiah 8:5-10 (NRSV)

The irony is a play on two kinds of waters. The Syrio-Ephraimite conspiracy has shaken the House of David to its core. One recalls reference to hearts shaking as do leaves before a wind. Mindless, purposeless, pitiful trembling.

Here the prophet probes at cause.

Trust in YHWH’s purposes for his Jerusalem has not been forthcoming. The operation of that purpose is represented here by a watery metaphor: the waters of Shiloah that flow gently. It appears that the spirit of Realpolitik has convinced Judah’s powers—such as they are—that gentleness is of no worth in such belligerent days.

One might wonder at precisely what kind of quietism Isaiah has in mind here. We know only a little about this, but we can certainly learn something by considering its opposite: the fearful search for a defending coalition among nations that do not name Zion-committed YHWH as their god.

In any case, Judah’s choice is defined as rejection or refusal (יען כי מאס) rather than by any gentler representation of choosing an alternative option. Even when speaking relatively quietly, the Isaianic tradition knows how to deploy its severer mercies.

The irony comes in when consequence is bolted onto cause. The refusal of quieter waters will now subject Judah to a raging flood.

(T)herefore, the Lord is bringing up against it the mighty flood waters of the River (את־מי הנהר העצומים והרבים), the king of Assyria and all his glory; it will rise above all its channels and overflow all its banks; it will sweep on into Judah as a flood, and, pouring over, it will reach up to the neck; and its outspread wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel.

Isaiah 8:7-8 (NRSV)

The discourse itself makes the contrast all the more severe, dedicating just a few words to Shiloah’s quiet waters while multiplying clause upon clause in a tumbling effort to portray Assyria’s capacity to overwhelm.

Then the puzzle.

The oracle ends with a peculiar expression, rendered by the NRSV as a cry of mingled desperation and hope: O Immanuel. The Hebrew meaning is less that completely clear. עמנו אל has no explicit particle that might render NRSV’s ‘O’. I think the NRSV has captured the meaning here, but this is not to say the translation it has provided is an obvious one.

Context helps a little, but not with determination.

Just a chapter prior to this oracle, a child is given the name that exactly anticipates the cry in 8.10. It will be important for the moment not to race too quickly to meaning when reading any one of these verses, whenever עמנו אל is in view.

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel (עמנו אל).

Isaiah 7:14 (NRSV)

Then, just two verses after the occurrence at 8.8 that is currently under scrutiny, the expression is used again.

Take counsel together, but it shall be brought to naught; speak a word, but it will not stand, for God is with us (כי עמנו אל).

Isaiah 8:10 (NRSV)

Here the frequently explanatory particle כי lends considerable assistance, virtually locking down the notion that NRSV provides with its translation by obliging an English reader to supply the verb is.

So what exactly is happening at the end of 8.8, serving as it does in the Massoretic tradition as the conclusion of the oracle quoted earlier?

Perhaps here, too, one must supply some version of the verb to be. Perhaps the oracle cries out affirmingly in its conclusion that ‘God is with us!’, lodging this formidable truth against the conspiratorial agonies of the moment.

Or perhaps it is not a declaration but rather a forlorn hope: ‘God be with us!’

In my view, each of these is grammatically and contextually possible and can be defended.

However, I prefer to read אמנו אל at 8.8 in a slightly different manner. It is an evocation of an earlier moment, indeed of the very public prophetic act of naming a child with this ambiguous but resonant expression.

Why this interpretive hedging of bets? It seems to me that the same powerfully suggestive ambiguity of the naming of the child at 7:14 carries over into the cry at the end of 8:8—in context, a necessarily allusive and evocative one—and bears all the same ambiguity.

Does it mean ‘God is with us!’? Perhaps it does, placing faith over against fear in a moment where the choice of one or the other is in the prophetic view determinative for the people’s future.

Or is it a humbler plea, ‘O God, be with us!’ Perhaps, underscoring the painful fact that results are not yet known?

NRSV’s ‘O, Emmanuel!’ preserves the ambiguity while opening its flanks to a new vulnerability, that of reading the cry as an invocation of a person named ‘Emmanuel’. I am not persuaded that in context it can be exactly that.

The oracle at 8:6-8 ends, in my reading, as in part a summons to pay attention while YHWH’s strangely invisible but substantially present hand moves among the conspiring players in this moment of critical and decisive Realpolitik. This book is, after all, חזון ישעיהו (the vision of Isaiah). True to form, it claims here that the prophet sees things that others do not yet contemplate, unless they join him in resolutely quiet consideration of unraveling events.

In the Isaianic vision, YHWH’s inventory of weapons bulges in its closet.

This deity of what remains of little Jacob can anoint Cyrus the Persian emperor in order to restore YHWH’s people in a cross between chess played out on the stage of international affairs and puppetry guided by an expert master.

If this is so in blessing, it is also true in judgement. In this part of the Isaianic vision, mighty Assyria and Egypt are wielded—though for different purposes—as effortless as Cyrus will in future perform YHWH’s bidding ‘though he not know him’.

On that day the LORD will whistle for the fly that is at the sources of the streams of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. And they will all come and settle in the steep ravines, and in the clefts of the rocks, and on all the thornbushes, and on all the pastures.

On that day the Lord will shave with a razor hired beyond the River—with the king of Assyria—the head and the hair of the feet, and it will take off the beard as well.

Isaiah 7:18-20 (NRSV)

We have perhaps grown too accustomed to reading this sort of thing to feel the shocking confidence required of the Jerusalemite prophet who would say it or write it. The nerve of such a little man amidst his tiny people, speaking of these two éminences grises of the Great Game! Who does he think he is?

Both of the these twin oracles are placed firmly in the sphere of YHWH’s sovereignty over the nations. ‘On that day the Lord…’ locates the envisaged events out of reach both of the prophet’s calendar and his capacity. These nearly identical introductions cement the prophet’s role as YHWH’s spokesman but emphatically not as his military attaché.

Then one must reckon with the denigration of the two empires’ identity. In the first oracle, YHWH’s whistle for the Egyptian fly and the Assyrian bee clearly communicates a vertical power structure. YHWH commands, his empires-cum-insects respond.

In the second oracle, Assyria is a razor, an inert implement with no functionality of its own, entirely dependent on the hand that wields it.

In this Isaianic vision of international events, YHWH brings the difficult matter of Israel’s disciplining to an unpleasant head. Yet he gives nothing away to those supposed powers that he will use in order to accomplish this dark phase of his purpose.

A Judahite prophet has the nerve to say so.

The final chapter of the book called Isaiah returns to basic matters.

The Generative Vision of chapter six—when the prophet Isaiah finds himself taken up into a vision of YHWH’s royal throne room—is the only prior moment in the book’s trajectory when YHWH’s throne is glimpsed. Until this:

Thus says the LORD: Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is my resting place?

All these things my hand has made, and so all these things are mine, says the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word.

Isaiah 66:1-2 (NRSV)

In that Generative Vision, as now in this glimpse of YHWH Enthroned, the prophet does not describe YHWH. Rather, in good, deflective, prophetic style, he describes all that is around YHWH so that we might deduce YHWH’s grandeur by comparison. Notwithstanding Isaiah’s claim that ‘I saw the LORD’, he does not enter into description of the deity himself. Rather, he occupies himself with flying seraphim, a creaturely voice so loud that the temple trembles on its foundation, the hem of YHWH’s robe which filled the temple’s entirety, and the like. Even the awesome descriptor that in time becomes for the prophet YHWH’s proper name—רם ונשׂא (high and lifted up)—is offered ambiguously. It is not clear whether it describes YHWH or ‘merely’ his throne.

It is fitting, then, that a book so tenaciously and allusively intertextual in its primary instinct, should return to YHWH’s throne room now, as at the beginning.

Just as YHWH’s presence was comprehensive and imperial vis-à-vis creation back in Isaiah 6, so here heaven and earth are merely his throne and footstool. In a different accent, this spatial metaphor of fulness places YHWH most emphatically ‘high and lifted up’.

Yet in context YHWH does not attend to those who would manipulate cultic matters at a different altitude in order to curry his favor (see verses 3-4). Rather, from his very high posture, YHWH looks ‘to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word.’ YHWH stewards strange affections, odd habits of attentiveness, we are asked to believe and not for the first time. The same affirmation about YHWH’s bizarre predilection for those who lie low—those whom life has crushed—troubled the Septuagint translator with his preference for a more stately deity back in 57:15. There, the Hebrew text offers the visions of chapters six and sixty-six in its own accent and its own moment, though with unmistakable echoes and anticipations of the two glimpses of YHWH’s throne room currently under inspection.

For thus says the high and lofty one (רם ונשׁא) who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy (קדושׁ): I dwell in the high and holy place (מרום וקדושׂ), and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit (דכא ושׁפל־רוח), to revive the spirit of the humble (רוח שׁפלים), and to revive the heart of the contrite (לב נדכאים).

Isaiah 57:15 (NRSV)

In the Isaianic vision, it seems almost superfluous to say, YHWH is very, very high. Yet he is also very low, whether in the coin of judgement and eventual redemption (chapter 6) or resident at his second home (chapter 57) or via his untiring attentiveness to those who find themselves way down there (chapter 66).

It seems transparent to the tradition’s curators that this divine habit is unexpected, otherwise there would be no need for them to insist that it is so. Yet it seems equally clear to the prophetic imagination that being in both places at the same time represents for YHWH neither a contradiction nor a challenge.