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Posts Tagged ‘Assyria’

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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flattery and naiveté: Isaiah 39

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on October 17, 2022| Leave a Comment »

It is widely recognized that the prose chapters of Isaiah 36-39 prepare the way for a quite different posture from chapter 40 forward. The days when a facile division of the long book called Isaiah into three neatly divided and generally unrelated parts seemed self-evident have passed. Yet the reality of the book’s two very different postures, if I may repeat the word so soon, is undeniable. Chapters 1-35 represent one and chapters 40-66 the other.

Chapters 36-39 mediate the difference.

One key element that appears on the roster of items to be mediated is the movement from the period of Assyrian domination to that of the exiling Babylonian overlord. Chapters 36-39 help to negotiate that passage, not least by way of the story of the visiting Babylonian emissaries in chapter 39.

If this is not King Hezekiah’s finest moment, we can perhaps recognize in the dynamic of Babylonian flattery and Hezekiah’s naiveté the operating principles of this dark moment, insinuating as it does that Babylonians will in time have more to say than flattering words.

At that time King Merodach-baladan son of Baladan of Babylon sent envoys with letters and a present to Hezekiah, for he heard that he had been sick and had recovered. Hezekiah welcomed them; he showed them his treasure house, the silver, the gold, the spices, the precious oil, his whole armory, all that was found in his storehouses. There was nothing in his house or in all his realm that Hezekiah did not show them. Then the prophet Isaiah came to King Hezekiah and said to him, ‘What did these men say? From where did they come to you?’ Hezekiah answered, ‘They have come to me from a far country, from Babylon.’ He said, ‘What have they seen in your house?’ Hezekiah answered, They have seen all that is in my house; there is nothing in my storehouses that I did not show them.’

Isaiah 39:1-4 (NRSV)

At the time, neither Merodach-baladan nor Babylon are imperial powers. Indeed, both are subject to Assyria, a common circumstance that Babylon and Judah likely experienced in different ways. However the text and its reader are aware that Babylon will become that suffocating empire, bent on the suppression of little Judah, to whose king they now present flattering gifts upon the occasion of his recovery from illness.

Verse two captures Hezekiah’s response in terms of both sentiment and performance.

Hezekiah welcomed them; he showed them his treasure house, the silver, the gold, the spices, the precious oil, his whole armory, all that was found in his storehouses. There was nothing in his house or in all his realm that Hezekiah did not show them.

Isaiah 39:2 (NRSV, emphasis added)

NRSV veils the ostensible sentiment of Hezekiah’s welcome, perhaps correctly capturing an idiom or—less enviably—obscuring a key element of the description. The Hebrew expression—וישמח עליהם ישעיהו—reports that Hezekiah became delighted or happy because of them. It appears to this reader that the writer shines a light upon Hezekiah’s culpable penchant for flattery, a byproduct perhaps of a kind of negligent naiveté.

The king’s prophetic confidant will, of course, be unamused.

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