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…?’
Canter Bridge 