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Posts Tagged ‘biblical reflection’

a banner for the nations: Isaiah 62

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on January 29, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The lyrical sixty-second chapter of the book called Isaiah is nothing if not Zion-centric.

Yet the nations, as ever, are not absent. Theirs is largely a passive role in this chapter.

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch.

The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory; and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give.

Isaiah 62.1-2 (NRSV, emphasis added)

The nations figure as spectators of what YHWH has done for Zion. Yet when the reader comes to the second of two sections of this chapter, the text imposes upon her a judgement decision regarding the peoples’ precise role in this redemptive drama.

Go through, go through the gates, prepare the way for the people; build up, build up the highway, clear it of stones, lift up an ensign (נס) over the peoples.

The LORD has proclaimed to the end of the earth: Say to daughter Zion, ‘See, your salvation comes; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him.’

They shall be called, ‘The Holy People, The Redeemed of the LORD’; and you shall be called, ‘Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken.’

Isaiah 62.10-12 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

Is this ensign or banner, italicized above, a sign of Zion’s dominance over the peoples? The preponderance of evidence suggest otherwise.

The word נס (banner, ensign) appears ten times in Isaiah. It is generally a quasi-military signal that summons a force or people from a distant location in order to take up a formidable task. In those cases where the banner is raised in order to capture the attention of one or more distant peoples, the particular circumstances surrounding this move require our attention.

In 5.26, YHWH summons a foreign people with a banner—likely Assyria—even as he whistles for that same nation to come speedily in response to Israel’s rebellion. In 11.10, the ‘root of Jesse’ stands as a נס ‘to the peoples’, who respond by inquiring of him, hardly a threatening or unpleasant occupation for the nations involved. Two verses later, the nations are summoned by a נס in order that they might bring back the ‘dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth’. The burden of the nations’ summoning at 49.22 is very much the same.

When therefore we read of a raised banner in 62.10, the word’s final appearance in Isaiah, we have been prepared to expect that the nations’ will be summoned to some critical task vis-à-vis Zion. It is unlikely that the nations are taking up an errand that is adversarial to Zion, since the text is so emphatically pro-Zion in every line.

It seems likely, though the immediate context does not say so explicitly, that 62.10’s ensign raised ‘over the peoples’ convenes the nations for the same task that is mentioned explicitly at 49.22 and implicitly elsewhere. That is, the peoples have been dignified by the responsibility of returning dispersed Judahites to the restored mother city. They are summoned to serve Zion rather than to besiege her.

Their role is emphatically subordinate to Zion’s celebrated restoration, the recovery of its lost daughters and sons. Yet nowhere is this reunion painted in colors that humiliate those who make it happen in obedience to YHWH’s call, loaning their camels and their carts, bending strong shoulders in service of the people they once loathed, though that hatred seems now quite hard to remember.

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YHWH of life, heart, spirit, and breath

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on January 26, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Initiated by one of the book’s most luminous and audacious declarations, Isaiah 57.15-21 implicates YHWH deeply in the realia of life. YHWH is the originator and sustainer of life, and in this case particularly of human life. He is on the side of life. He is for those whose life seems to drain from their weakened bodies. YHWH is Vivifier. He is Life-Giver.

For thus says the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit (ושפל־רוח), to revive (להחיות) the spirit of the humble (רוח שפלים), and to revive (ולהחיות) the heart of the contrite (לב נדכאים).

For I will not continually accuse, nor will I always be angry; for then the spirits (in Hebrew singular, spiritְ; כי־רוח) would grow faint before me, even the souls (or breath, ונשמות) that I have made.

Isaiah 57.15-16 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

I have italicized the persistent references to spirit (רוח), reviving (חיה), heart (לב), and souls (better breath, נשמה), with the result that roughly a third of the passage is emphasized in this way. Indeed YHWH’s commitment to revive (חיה) is so emphatic in verse 15 that the same verb is repeated in the exact grammatical form in what is essentially a parallel declaration, temporarily suspending the Hebrew language’s resistance to this very kind of redundancy.

The divine self-disclosure that results is clear: YHWH is so exceedingly concerned with preserving the life of the lowly—perhaps a subset of his broader enchantment with life itself—that he will restrain his anger rather than risk the spirit, the heart, the breath of those whom life has brought low.

This attentiveness to the life of the shattered does not represent a wider commitment to preserve life at at all costs.

There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.

Isaiah 57.21 (NRSV)

Yet the prophet will not be stymied in his determination to uproot from Israel’s self-understanding any level moral mutuality that would tie YHWH’s heart or hands when his undying instinct is to draw near to the low, the crushed, and the fading.

Because of their wicked covetousness I was angry; I struck them, I hid and was angry; but they kept turning back to their own ways.

I have seen their ways, but I will heal them…

Isaiah 57.17-18a (NRSV)

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comforted: Isaiah 51

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on January 23, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Just as the prophet’s commissioning via the throne-room vision—the book’s generative vision—reverberates through the book, so does the renewed commissioning of prophetic voices at 40.1-2 whisper and thunder through the second half of the book called Isaiah.

Promissory words are of course not absent in chapters 1-39. But they do not flourish there.

Then comes the famous proclamation at the outset of Second Isaiah, which changes all that.

Comfort, O comfort (נחמו נחמו) my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’S hand double for all her sins.

Isaiah 40.1-2 (NRSV, Hebrew text added)

The ancient reading tradition embedded in our Masoretic text separates for particular attention a corresponding announcement, a move with all the virtue of effective highlighting and all the risk of removing the declaration from the long oracle of national resurrection that is its home:

For the LORD will comfort Zion (כי־נחם יהוה ציון); he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.

Isaiah 51.3 (NRSV, Hebrew text added)

NRSV’s choice of the future-tense ‘will comfort’ attempts to align the qatal/perfect verb נחם with the context’s declaration of imminent divine action. Other English translations prefer ‘has comforted’, a more conventional representation of the Hebrew that on balance effectively renders the fixity of the divine decision even if its realization in time and space has yet to be seen.

In any case, the nature of YHWH’s comforting ought not to be understood principally as sentimental or therapeutic, though the plethora of joyful expression indicates that it certainly does not exclude this reality. It is not only Zion that is comforted, but also ‘all her waste places’. Clearly a comprehensive restoration is in view.

The transformation of ‘wilderness’ into ‘Eden’ and ‘desert’ into ‘the garden of YHWH’ upends both the desolation and the barrenness that Jacob/Israel is understood to have endured. ‘Joy and gladness’, complemented by ‘thanksgiving and the voice of song’, speak for themselves, touching as they do upon both the felt and the expressed euphoria with which YHWH’s comfort will endow resurrected Zion.

Only a myopic or atomistic reading will miss the detail that this restoration is for something that goes beyond Zion’s glee. Yet one must not hurry too quickly into that broader re-comissioning of this Abrahamic people (vv. 1-2).

The reader does well to linger here for a while, here where new life and new song burst from the desert like vibrant colors after a first rain. Here, where joy and gladness make their conquest of the beleaguered heart. Here where it is just a little early for ‘What next…?’

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everbody’s slave: Isaiah 49

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on January 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Deep into one of the densest of Isaiah’s ‘servant songs’, the second paragraph reveals that YHWH’s servant is everybody’s slave.

Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, ‘Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.’

Isaiah 49.7 (NRSV, emphasis added)

The italicized phrase turns the structure of the now familiar ‘servant of YHWH’—עבד יהוה—in a direction that context has anticipated but vocabulary has thus far not reached. Jacob/Israel, who belongs to the Redeemer of Israel, Israel’s ‘Holy One’, is also the עבד משלים: the servant/slave of rulers.

Israel’s vocation is a heavy load to bear.

Clearly, this servitude is temporary, but context suggests that it is of longue durée. Kings and princes shall stand in honor and prostrate themselves in abjection. Eventually. But not just yet.

Meanwhile, the servant of YHWH is ‘deeply despised, abhorred by nations, the slave of rulers’.

Convenient as it is for the reader to seek her repose in Jacob’s destination, the text demands that we contemplate the long, anguished road that in due course finally arrives there.

No one would choose this vocation, this identity, this forlorn victimhood. It is assigned, not by some impersonal force of nature or history, but by YHWH, who claims to cherish his servant and in this same passage to comfort and have passion upon his people (v. 13).

No wonder, then, the servant’s protest in the paragraph that already brightens the horizon, or perhaps rather darkens it.

‘But Zion said, ‘The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.’

Isaiah 49.14 (NRSV)

Every interpretive maneuver that levels the paradox of this servant of YHWH and of rulers betrays it instead.

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familiarity breeds contempt: Isaiah 43

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on January 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The resonant monotheism of the second half of Isaiah is not, contrary to much received wisdom, where ‘prophetic monotheism’ is born. Recent scholars, not least Matthew Lynch in his First Isaiah and the Disappearance of the Gods (Eisenbrauns, 2021) demonstrates how the prophets must be allowed to speak their own dialect. When they do so, the uniqueness of YHWH among the powers becomes a broader and more sustained conviction, not the novelty of an outlier called Second Isaiah.

That having been said, Second Isaiah is uniquely vehement and combative in its denial of existence to imagined pretenders to YHWH’s category of being.

I, I am the LORD, and besides me there is no savior.

I declared and saved and proclaimed, when there was no strange god among you; and you are my witnesses, says the LORD.

I am God, and also henceforth I am He; there is no one who can deliver from my hand; I work and who can hinder it?

Isaiah 43.11-13 (NRSV, emphasis added)

But my point is not to explore the grand scheme of biblical monotheism. Rather, my attention is captured by the italicized claim in 43.12. NRSV renders it within a temporal frame: ‘when there was no strange god among you’. Other translations ancient and modern nuance this denial in different ways, but the point remains that none of the salvation announced in chapter 43 came about via the will or force of other deities.

I am interested in the word זר, which NRSV correctly renders with ‘strange’ rather than the more prosaic ‘other’. Isaiah is not involved principally in mathematics. He is arguing YHWH’s faithfulness to his Israel, even when they can be most charitably described as ‘blind’ and ‘deaf’.

What is at stake is a divine uniqueness that includes YHWH’s tenacious upholding of his covenant with Israel, even amid circumstances that suggest the betrayal or at least the cancelation of that pact. YHWH may in fact turn out be stupendously capable of becoming the god of other nations. But he refuses to become the former god of Israel.

זר all but demands the nuance of ‘strange’ or ‘alien’. It comes in the middle of the passage’s three-fold denial that anyone accompanied or assisted YHWH in saving his servant Israel. Yet this denial could have been forcefully placed with merely mathematical language. The momentary glimpse of the possibility that a strange god might have been involved traffics in a potentiality that is less numerical than religious.

It is not only YHWH alone who acts to save his servant. It is in fact Israel’s long-known Savior acting again rather than an alternative religious actor to whom credit might have mistakenly been paid by hearts groaning or grateful.

‘You know me’, YHWH seems to say in this text. ‘We know each other. Let the gathering of alien nations and peoples not be interpreted to mean that other powers have anything to say about your future, my servant.’

Even as the book called Isaiah becomes every more daring in describing YHWH’s reach, in broadening what can be known of his redemptive purpose, there remains a steely insistence that it is Israel’s YHWH and no other whom the nations desire. Should they find themselves making pilgrimage or stumbling towards Israel’s God, they are allowed no religious baggage, no tawdry syncretism, no exotic artifacts that might tempt Israel to imagine that YHWH from time to time requires from other corners a bit of a nudge.

There was no alien god among you…

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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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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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