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Trustworthy with the whole wide world: Isaiah 11.1-16

Posted in logos, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 22, 2025| Leave a Comment »

A sermon delivered to the family of Wethersfield (CT) Evangelical Free Church, 22 December 2025


if you’ve been with us over the last few weeks, you know that we are immersed in a sermon series entitled In God We Trust. Today’s message is the last installment in that series. I’ve given it the title ‘Trustworthy with the whole wide world’.

In the interest of time, I’m going to read just the first ten verses of today’s Bible passage.Is. 11:1 There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. 2 And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. 3 And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, 4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5 Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

Is. 11:6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

Is. 11:10 In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.

Is. 11:11 In that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that remains of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Cush, from Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea.

Is. 11:12 He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. 13 The jealousy of Ephraim shall depart, and those who harass Judah shall be cut off; Ephraim shall not be jealous of Judah, and Judah shall not harass Ephraim. 14 But they shall swoop down on the shoulder of the Philistines in the west, and together they shall plunder the people of the east. They shall put out their hand against Edom and Moab, and the Ammonites shall obey them. 15 And the LORD will utterly destroy the tongue of the Sea of Egypt, and will wave his hand over the River with his scorching breath, and strike it into seven channels, and he will lead people across in sandals. 16 And there will be a highway from Assyria for the remnant that remains of his people, as there was for Israel when they came up from the land of Egypt.

There are snakes in that passage!

I don’t like snakes. 

Actually, I should probably be a little more specific before I go writing off all 3,400 species of snakes in a couple of words. And I actually love the big Eastern Garter Snakes that appear in our yard and the woods just beyond when the Spring sun warms up their cold, clammy bodies and they begin looking for rodents and toads to fill their tummies.

So let me give you a new version of this opening declaration: I don’t like poisonous snakes. For many years, I had recurring nightmares about them.

You see, I spent five months during my college years living out in the jungles of Costa Rica, way too up close and personal with one kind of poisonous sake. It was called the Terciopelo, a word that in Spanish means ‘velvet’. It’s a pit viper, sometimes known as Fer-de-lance. I knew an indigenous family in our little Assemblies of God church who had lost their young mother one dark night as they made their way home from church along the trail that let to their thatch-roofed house. She felt a little pinprick on her ankle, went home, lay down, and never woke up. She’d been bitten by a Terciopelo.

And I remember some older Bribri indigenous women on a different day, washing their families’ clothes in a deep part of the creek, savagely hacking away with their machetes at a Terciopelo that had dared to invade their washing area. I hope they got him…



Years later, when I moved back to Costa Rica with a young family as missionaries, another snake contributed to one of the most troubling memories of my life.

My boys, Christopher and Johnny, are only thirteen months apart. They’re big dudes now, both wearing the uniform of US Army majors in point-of-the-0spear military vocations, so it feels a little strange to be talking about them as vulnerable little boys. But that’s what they were back then.

We had driven down to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica on a little end-of-year vacation. I had Christopher in my arms out in the surf, which was kind of loud that day. I could see little Johnny, a toddler, walking back and forth on the beach. Then suddenly I could also see a snake on the beach. Johnny was oblivious to the snake, and no adults were paying attention. I watched in horror as Johnny and the snake approached each other. I don’t remember whether I was able to cry out, but nobody would have heard me over the surf anyway. At the last minute, a young man saw what was happening, grabbed Johnny by the hand, and led him to a safe distance. Then a crowd gathered. I suspect the poor snake didn’t live long after that. 

And now Pastor Scott assigns me a text with this verse at its core:

(8) The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

I can feel my snake-related PTSD kicking in, even as we speak.

And now that I’m complaining about things I don’t like, here’s another one: people who dream, even on Christian grounds, of paradise … people who try to call this broken, bleeding world of ours a paradise … people who look away from all that’s wrong because it’s scary out there. And yet this messianic text from the Old Testament book of Isaiah utilizes the language of paradise to describe the Savior we have come to know as Jesus.

Let’s try to figure out what’s going on here and what God would say to us this morning through his Word.

Now, in order to get a grip on this passage, we need to look back in two ways.

First, we have to realize that back in chapter 2, the book of Isaiah gives us its vision of visions. That’s the frame that today’s chapter 11 and a host of other chapters in Isaiah are coloring in. Today’s chapter is not the first look into the Lord’s purpose for his world. In the book of Isaiah, chapter 11 is not the first word in that conversation.

Chapter 2’s vision of visions is that first word. It sets the direction of the book of Isaiah by describing an eventual world that only the God of Israel could create. It’s short, just four very compact verses. I’d like to read Isaiah’s vision of visions for you, and then we’ll come back to our passage for today, Isaiah 11.

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the teaching (law), and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

 He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore (Isaiah 2:2-4 ESV)

I mentioned that we need to look back in two ways. Absorbing chapter two’s vision of visions is the first one.

 Here’s the second one: we have to realize that a conversation about a mysterious survivor that will crawl out of the ashes of God’s exiled people is also a conversation that started some time ago in this book. Scripture loves to talk about t his re-born remnant by using the image of a tree that’s been felled and is presumed dead. And then a tiny shoot emerges from it that will be for the blessing of the whole world. If we were reading consecutively through Isaiah, we’d realize this. We would have already gathered those threads together. But we don’t have that privilege, so part of my job this morning is to bring us up to speed so we can be good hearers of this passage, Isaiah 11.

Now, fast forward to Isaiah 11 and here comes that image again: 

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. (Isaiah 11:1 ESV)

Isaiah is looking forward to something like a Holocaust for Israel, a national tragedy so horrifying that it buy all right should have exterminated this chosen people. Yet out of the national mutilation that we call the Babylonian exile, the prophet says, some little bud of life will emerge and will grow up to become a blessing to all nations … to all flesh … to many peoples.

Now hang in with me here, because this is not easy stuff: Over centuries, the writers of Christian Scripture came to the conclusion that in addition to speaking of a re-born nation, this image of a shoot out of a dead tree also captured the essence of Jesus our Messiah, our anointed Savior.

Let’s look at a few of our passage’s most compelling claims about him.

First … He is absolutely saturated with the Lord’s Spirit:

(2) And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.

This resting of the Spirit of the Lord upon his anointed savior is like the resting of a heavy snowfall upon the landscape. Or like a layer of thick fog that comes to rest on the Connecticut River. You look down on it as you driver over a bridge or descend into Bradley Airport and you realize how lush and full the covering is. Close readers of this passage over the centuries have not missed the fact that the Spirit of the Lord is mentioned here seven times … seven being the perfect number. Jesus, we are invited to understand, is perfectly saturated with God’s Spirit.

We should also understand that the presence of the Lord’s Spirit is not primarily ornamental or aesthetic. Rather, it equips him, it empowers him to see reality and respond to reality and then shape reality with tremendous perception. 

Do you see it there in verses 3-5?

And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, 4but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

This anointed agent of God’s redemption gets reality. He sees through charades and distractions. He is committed to justice even when human beings become very adept at disguising injustice as justice … and lies as truth … and self-interest as just the way things are. And he’s clearly on the side of and involved in the fate of the most vulnerable. He gets involved with the poor and the meek (v. 4). He is a lethal enemy of the wicked.

So not exactly Jesus meek and mild here, though certainly a kind of meekness will be apparent in the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth. This is our Christmas season’s baby Jesus, that much is true, but Jesus ‘all growed up’—as my Father would have said—and serving as his Father’s own anointed Son in this world, forging a world that aligns with God’s own purpose rather than lurching bloodily off in its own directions.

Now let’s get to that paradise scene­—snakes and all—that is the result of this Spirit-anointed person’s work … this survivor of devastation … this shoot out of a dead, fallen tree:

 6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

Now in a moment I’m going to ask you to take on faith something that’s not evident in this paradise package itself. However, it would become very clear if we had the time for me to take you back into that vision of visions of chapter 2. If in some other space and time we had that luxury, I’d be able to show you the subtle connections between chapter 2 and chapter 11. One after the other, they pile up on each other to make it all but indisputable that … here comes the thing I want to tell you: this is not about animals!!!

These are nations. This is metaphor. It’s a kind of little parable. It’s not really about wolves and lambs, it’s about Russia and Ukraine. It’s not really about leopards and goats, it’s about the US and Venezuela. It’s not really about a nursing child and a cobra, it’s Palestine and Israel. It’s not really about cows and bears, it’s about Democrats and Republicans. It’s not really about calves and lions, it’s about progressives and conservatives.

Something about this anointed figure’s engagement with the nations will create a kind of just peace that is scarcely imaginable on this 21st of December, 2025, in this familiar place of ours, Wethersfield, Connecticut.

But Scripture is not trafficking in illusions or false paradises or spiritual abstractions that have nothing to do with the real world. This is not as mystical and other-worldly as you might imagine. Rather, it is fleshing out the Lord’s purpose for his messiah and his world. The messiah whose birth we celebrate on Thursday of this week, the world in which you and I love our brief but critically important lives.

This passage culminates in what may for me be the most meaningful declaration in all of Scripture:

They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9 ESV)

Here, in verse 9, Isaiah drops his guard. He steps outside of his parable of the animal paradise and speaks about people openly. More accurately, he speaks about nations. It tells us that in some undated future, these nations will no longer oppose the God of Israel, hurting and destroying on his holy mountain. This is a glance back to the vision of visions in Isaiah 2, where they become eager students of his teaching upon that holy mountain.

It also says this: 

For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Now again, I have to ask you to take something I’m going to say on faith: as a forty-year student of the Hebrew Bible—our Old Testament—I can tell you what this does not mean and suggest to you what it does mean.

It doesn’t mean that some abstract spiritual reality—the knowledge of God—will cover this earth as the waters cover the sea. The Hebrew Bible doesn’t talk like that … in mystical attractions. Those are not its native tongue. It means that people who know the Lord … nations who know the Lord … will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

But sometimes we don’t see that so much…

If you can back away from the current moment and take in the wide scope of human history since Pentecost, you can glimpse quite a bit of it. I recommend you read Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Holland, who does not claim Christian faith, is an historian who documents the way Christianity that during twenty centuries has nourished and sustained the values that most of us in the Western world would affirm as just and beautiful. Values that generate and sustain things like … democracy … hospitals … orphanges … respect for women and children … the crazy notion that every human being is a reflection, an image of Creator God and should be treated as such.

These ideas, these values, these practices do not occur in nature. They are not features of the jungle. No, they reside downstream from centuries of Christianity’s leavening and even redeeming influence upon cultures.

Because of Karen’s and my particular calling to emerging Christian leaders in the Global South, we regularly find ourselves as observes of the promise in today’s passage. May I tell you about Mohammed, Lifa, and Miryam?

These are not their real names because this message is being recorded. In October they were three of my students at a seminary in Beirut, Lebanon, where I teach a class every year. Mohammed is Moroccan, a Muslim-background follower of Jesus. Lifa, also a Muslim-background follower of Jesus, is a Kurdish woman from Syria who’s been forcibly displaced with her family to Lebanon, courtesy of the Sunni extremists who we short-hand as ISIS. Miryam is an Armenian Christian believer, also from Syria. All of them have suffered.

Mohammed looks so much like the Celtics’ injured Jason Tatum that, when I put a picture of JT up on the screen in October, we all laughed for two minutes. At a certain poignant moment in our Isaiah class, I asked my students—again, these are people who have suffered at the hands of others—if they hate, Mohammed said ‘I used to’. Jesus has drained the hate from his heart, and he is an evangelist among both his Muslim neighbors and online conversation partners.

Lifa is a thirty-something mother and wife, shy and unassuming. She describes without any sense of pride the group of 80 Muslim women whom she shepherds in Beirut, many of them already followers of Jesus, some of them on their way to embracing Jesus, all of them from Muslim backgrounds as she is.

To understand Miryam, it would help if you know something of the Armenian Genocide, one of the twentieth century’s most awful experiences of ethnic cleansing. Miryam spoke with me about how her church fed and housed Turkish-speaking refugees when the ISIS-inspired violence in her region became particularly brutal. I asked her how that happened. She said quietly, ‘Well, we were both suffering the same way. We used to hate the Turks because of what they did to our people, but not anymore. Jesus changed us.’

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

But we don’t live in Syria or Morocco or Lebanon …. or Colombia or Venezuela. What are we to do with Isaiah 11?

I have just a few suggestions to leave with you today in the face of that question. The gospel of course is all of grace. But it’s not cheap grace, not an inert, passive grace. It’s a grace that empowers and shapes our lives. It points us in a certain direction and then promises the power of God so that we can follow through. In that spirit, I’ll allow myself three ‘musts’.

  1. We must not lose hope based on any momentary darkness.
    1. Jewish theology is correct when it says that despair is the sin of all sins. It demolishes our perspective. It captivates our hope. It quenches our love.
  2. We must believe that the Lord has not relented on his purpose to see all nations redeemed.
    1. If it’s tempting to think so from our perspective, then we need somehow to broaden our perspective. We need to look around at believers who are different than us or from other parts of the world. We need to sit at their feet and learn from them. They have often suffered so much and maintained their confidence in the triumph of God’s redeeming love.
  3. We must become gritty, tenacious, resilient peacemakers.
    1. We must identify and call out hatred in our own hearts and, sometimes, in the hearts of our brothers and sisters. When it occurs, we must name it. The Proverbs assure us that the rebuke of a friend is like a kiss on the lips.
    1. Ours are difficult times. But they are not uniquely difficult, they are just difficult. We flatter ourselves if we think our circumstances are that special. It has not become impossible to be a peacemaking follower of our Messiah. It’s just hard.
    1. Our task, as the apostle Paul puts it, is to be God’s own co-workers in a day that brings with it a certain darkness. We can do this. And it’s worth doing it. Because one day … in God’s own way … the earth will be full of those who know the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

May it be so. And merry Christmas.

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Festejo global, parte B: Isaías 25

Posted in texturas, tagged , , , , , , on October 21, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Si los versículos 1-5 insinúan que la subyugación por parte de YHVH de los ‘pueblos fuertes’ y las ‘naciones despiadadas’ podría ser en realidad para su propio beneficio, el amplio alcance que insinúa se hace casi indiscutible en los versículos 6-10. 

En el texto que sigue, he añadido énfasis a cada referencia a todos/as (en hebreo כל), junto con los sustantivos implicados por este descriptor.

Y el Señor de los ejércitos preparará en este monte para todos los pueblos un banquete de manjares suculentos, un banquete de vino añejo, pedazos escogidos con tuétano, y vino añejo refinado. 

Y destruirá en este monte la cobertura que cubre todos los pueblos, el velo que está extendido sobre todas las naciones.
Él destruirá la muerte para siempre; el Señor Dios enjugará las lágrimas de todos los rostros, y quitará el oprobio de su pueblo de sobre toda la tierra, porque el Señor ha hablado.

Y en aquel día se dirá: He aquí, este es nuestro Dios a quien hemos esperado para que nos salvara; este es el Señor a quien hemos esperado; regocijémonos y alegrémonos en su salvación.


Porque la mano del Señor reposará en este monte.

Isaías 25.6-10 (LBLA, énfasis añadido).

A pesar de este amplio resultado redentor, el texto no pierde de vista una tenaz particularidad. Lo vemos al menos en tres aspectos.

En primer lugar, el monte Sión sigue siendo el escenario. YHVH destruirá ‘en este monte la cobertura que cubre todos los pueblos…’ (7). La declaración culminante del pasaje -si consideramos el discurso inmediatamente posterior y bastante más hosco contra Moab como algo separado- declara que ‘la mano de YHVH se reposará en este monte’ (10).

En segundo lugar, Jacob/Israel sigue estando en el centro de la causalidad. El banquete universal que se describe aquí parece estar supeditado a que YHVH quite ‘el oprobio de su pueblo… de sobre toda la tierra’. No hay razón para imaginar que ‘su pueblo’ tenga un significado distinto del convencional. Sin embargo, cuando quita el oprobio de Jacob, el beneficiario es todo el mundo. Paralelamente a las cláusulas circundantes que son más explícitas sobre el destino bendito de las naciones, ‘de toda la tierra’ se refiere muy probablemente a esos pueblos, así como al propio Jacob.

Por último, el estribillo que se anticipa ‘en aquel día’ debe describir retrospectivamente la experiencia de Jacob/Israel, en lugar de la última inclusión jubilosa de ‘todos los pueblos’:

Y en aquel día se dirá: He aquí, este es nuestro Dios a quien hemos esperado para que nos salvara; este es el Señor a quien hemos esperado; regocijémonos y alegrémonos en su salvación.

Isaías 25.9 (LBLA)

Como tantas veces y de tantas maneras a lo largo del extenso libro llamado Isaías, aquí la restauración de Jacob representa de algún modo la restauración de todas las naciones. O quizá de todas menos una. En 10b-12 sigue el terrible sometimiento de Moab. La separación editorial de la NBLA de esa oscuridad de la luz anterior de este oráculo se realiza sin apoyo del Texto Masorético. Puede que la Visión de Isaías se resista visceralmente a las utopías que apartan su mirada de una especie de resistencia final, funesta y deprimente que al final sólo puede ser sofocada por la fuerza renuente.

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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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