The splendid redemption oracle that is the book’s fifty-second chapter begins with a series of imperatives to Zion/Jerusalem. Together form a comprehensive picture of her erstwhile degradation as well as of a glorious new identity. They restore agency to the downtrodden personified city. Zion becomes an actor rather than merely acted upon.
Awake, awake, put on your strength, O Zion! Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; for the uncircumcised and the unclean shall enter you no more.
Shake yourself from the dust, rise up, O captive Jerusalem; loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter Zion!
Isaiah 52:1-2 (NRSV)
The exhortation’s rhetoric is worthy of careful attention.
First, it initiates with the double-cognate-imperative that is a signature of the book’s second half from the moment it announces itself in the very first words of Isaiah 40.1:
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.
נחמו נחמו עמי, יאמר אלהיכם
Isaiah 40.1 (NRSV)
Then the passage draws the reader’s intention to its intensely vocative address to the recipient of its imperatives:
O Zion … O Jerusalem, the holy city … O captive Jerusalem … O captive daughter Zion!
ציון … ירושלים עיר הקדש … שבי ירושלם … שביה בת ציון
Arguably, however, the most striking feature of summons is the manner in which it returns agency to the community of the exiles in the figure of the personified city. There is no mention of anyone doing anything for her. Rather, she is exhorted to rouse herself in a way that embodies a new reality, indeed a new identity. The imperatives, six of them if double imperatives are counted as one, flow as follows:
Awake, awake! עורי עורי
Put on your strength! לבשי עזך
Put on your beautiful garments! לבשי בגדי תפארתך
Shake yourself from the dust! התנערי מעפר
Rise up! קומי
Loose the bonds from your neck! התפתחי מוסרי צוארך
Zion is addressed as able, as capable, as possessing the resources utterly to change her lot.
Where she has lain sleeping, she is urged to wake up. Where she has been weak, she is summoned to strength. Where she has been disheveled and unkempt, she is is ordered to put on the garments of her glory. Where she has crouched in the dust, she is commanded to shake herself clean. Where she has crouched passively, the imperative is to rise up. Where she has been enchained, she herself—as though her captors were no more—now removes the iron restraints from about her own neck.
The Vision of Isaiah will eventually assign to Zion a series of new and empowering names. In the light of this astonishing oracle, they seem almost an afterthought. Zion is here summoned to become already what those new names will signify.
The city hitherto acted upon with barbaric cruelty becomes in the prophetic imagination the actor. Even YHWH stands aside, as it were, before the stunning protagonist of a new reality impregnated with strength, dignity, beauty, and freedom.
Canter Bridge 