Isaiah’s generative vision, as I see it, loads prophetic shoulders with an almost unbearable weight.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’
And he said, ‘Go and say to this people: “Keep listening (שמעו שמוע), but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.”
Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears (ובאזניו ישמע) and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’
Isaiah 6:8-10 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)
The cessation of visual and aural acuity, even if the theme does not originate in this vision as I believe that it does, flourishes across the book via frequent retouchings. Ordinarily in Isaiah, the predictable result of the people’s sensory loss a tragic is a tragic failure to understand. Willful refusal to see and to hear in the Isaianic vision eventually produces the inability to do so. The people become fools.
But not forever.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me (שמעו שמוע אלי), and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me; listen (שמעו), so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.
Isaiah 55.2-3 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)
Such reiteration, thematic and lexical, does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, the text indulges in classic Isaianic reversal of the earlier theme of lost audition. Now, YHWH’s command through his prophet is not to fail to hear and so to stumble about stupidly into alienation from Jacob’s God. Rather, the listening—notice the same verbal combination around the root שמע and the repetition of ‘ear’ (אזן)—produces a feast and the inclining of the ear overcomes Judah’s erstwhile alienation from YHWH and brings life.
Any close reading of the text will—or should—service this play of concept and of word.
What lingers just below the surface is more easily missed. The trope of the ignorant nation persists and survives into this text, notwithstanding its location fairly late in the book. But now the allusion is fragrant with redemptive development.
See, I made (David) a witness to the peoples (לאומים), a leader and commander for the peoples (לאמים).
See, you shall call nations (גוי) that you do not know (לא־תדע), and nations (וגוי) that do not know you (לא ידוך) shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
Isaiah 55.4-5 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)
Laying aside for the moment consideration of David’s unexpected (and, strictly speaking, unkingly) presence here, both Israel and the nations find themselves joined in ironic ignorance. It is a momentary, indeed imaginary, ignorance, because it is barely named and contemplated before it is erased.
Israel and the nations are viewed as mutually uncomprehending of each other’s reality. One need not imagine that they are unaware of the other’s existence. Rather, one might say that Israel and the nations cannot and do not understand each other.
Yet this mutual inscrutability is glimpsed in its ultimate moment precisely because Israel has now consciously become the Convener of Nations and those peoples, for their part, come running to Israel. The people’s sudden attractiveness is all YHWH’s work: for he has glorified you.
Isaiah’s ironic currents and undercurrents in a text like this run in more than one direction but not at cross purposes.
The picture is a stunning recapacitation of Israel’s ability to see, hear, and comprehend, a glorification of Jacob’s erstwhile deaf and dumb children that restores their Abrahamic purpose and brings the nations running toward them and to their God.
The streaming of the nations to Zion that has been a kind of percussive beat from chapter two forward here takes on the profile of an astonishingly international reconciliation. Israel, true to form, becomes both agent and participant in YHWH’s redemptive purpose without ever, for one moment, losing her accent amid the swirling onrush of suddenly eager peoples.
Canter Bridge 