Canter Bridge

In the majestic YHWH-speech that is chapter 45 of the book called Isaiah, the focus falls upon Cyrus and YHWH’s servant Jacob/Israel. Cyrus is daringly called ‘my anointed’, employing the Hebrew term משיח in a way that developing messianisms will find close to scandalous after the title ‘messiah’ becomes attached to messiahs of both short and long duration.

In the midst, the oracle that comprises the first seven verses the chapter plays artfully upon the theme of knowing and not knowing. The very ידע, to know, appears no fewer than four times, a phenomenon that I elucidate by italicizing and interposition of the Hebrew vocabulary in question:

Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes, to open doors before him— and the gates shall not be closed:

I will go before you and level the mountains, I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through the bars of iron, I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know (למען תדע) that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name.

For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me (ולא ידעתני).

I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. I arm you, though you do not know me (ולא ידעתני), so that they may know (למען ידעו), from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is no one besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other.

I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.”

Isaiah 45:1-7 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

Though the world’s most powerful figure comes across as rather clueless, Cyrus is respected for the dignity that falls to him as a redemptive tool in YHWH’s hand. Yet this elevation owes nothing to an awareness of the redemptive gravity of his liberation of Persia’s Jewish exiles. He remains ignorant, except for the hint of an eventual awakening of his calling by YHWH, the God of Israel:

…so that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name.

Isaiah 45:3 (NRSV)

This fragment of illumination, however, seems to be a detail of a wider global awakening to YHWH’s incomparability in which the role Cyrus plays is dumbly instrumental rather than heroic.

I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. I arm you, though you do not know me, so that they may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is no one besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other.

Isaiah 45:5-6)

Momentarily, his knowledge is subordinated to the wider marvel that the nations will come to know YHWH’s uniqueness.

Cyrus is a pawn in YHWH’s redemptive game. He is not humiliated in assuming this unchosen role. He was, as it were, minding his own imperial business. Cyrus is no hard-hearted Pharaoh, standing up to YHWH by oppressing his first-born son and absorbing the cruel consequences in the loss of his own.

Rather, he is a somewhat bemused figure in the plot of Isaiah’s vision. He was called to a worthy task and he performed it in something of a haze as to the full import of his actions. Maybe, somehow, he came to ‘know’ that he was part of something larger than himself.

Maybe not.

There is honor in it all. Redemption for Israel. An awakening for the whole world.

Glory for YHWH alone.

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The forty-fifth chapter of Isaiah summons up one of the Hebrew Bible’s several ‘sovereignty discourses’. In these a superior—YHWH in most cases—puts in his purported place a lesser who has lodged a complaint. Modern sensitivities are quick to cry ‘Bully!’, and at points this seems a viable charge.

In any case, the discourse describes a moral architecture in which the participants’ relative rank is not in question. The lesser in this arrangement is to practice a certain compliance before the greater. It’s just the ways things are.

Woe to you who strive with your Maker, earthen vessels with the potter! Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, “What are you making”? or “Your work has no handles”?

Woe to anyone who says to a father, “What are you begetting?” or to a woman, “With what are you in labor?”

Thus says the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker: Will you question me about my children, or command me concerning the work of my hands?

Isaiah 45:9-11 (NRSV)

Such rhetoric is transparent enough in the abstract. Yet there is usually a concrete context that lends poignance and occasionally brings a justifying note to its sharp edges.

That is certainly the case here, where the Persian king Cyrus appears both before and after the ‘woes’ and the rhetorical questions that populate this sovereignty discourse. Indeed, it appears that YHWH’s choice to anoint and then deploy a pagan king for the benefit of his ‘servant’ Jacob lies at the very genesis of the quoted passage.

One must admit at the outset that the circumstances portrayed here defy expectation.

In the first verse, YHWH calls Cyrus his anointed one. The Hebrew word משיח (his servant = משיחו) will in due course become the main generator of the English ‘messiah’, which is in fact merely a transcription of the Hebrew noun. What is more, YHWH claims to have grasped Cyrus by the hand. Together the two expressions lay a foundation for the virtually unlimited conquest of the known world which is promised to the Persian king in the ensuing verses.

One might find it agreeable to imagine Israel as subject and object of this description. Israel, YHWH’s anointed, strengthened by YHWH’s own grasp. But Cyrus, the pagan king and Persian successor to Babylon’s empire? The plot has taken a new and disturbing turn.

The only limitation to the intimacy and collaboration that lock YHWH and Cyrus together as imperial co-conspirators is the twice-stated concessive clause ‘though you do not know me’ (verses 4-5), which is spoken of Cyrus. Paradoxically, Cyrus is anointed as YHWH’s own subduer of nations, yet he is not conceded the merit of knowing YHWH that remains somehow Jacob’s prerogative. Indeed, the entire anomaly that is Cyrus takes shape for Jacob’s benefit. Neither Cyrus nor his Persian nation supplants Jacob/Israel. Yet Cyrus is granted both a tactical intimacy with YHWH and strengthening by YHWH, all for the sake of Jacob/Israel.

For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me.

Isaiah 45:4 (NRSV)

If this description of circumstances commends itself, then we return to the question of what generates the sovereignty discourse of this chapter, with its potentially humiliating subjugation of Israel to YHWH in the figures of earthen vessels to potter, clay to divine molder, child to parents.

It appears that Israel’s implicit objection to YHWH redeeming his people in this Cyrus-centric way is the motivation for this dense and complex metaphor. No other dynamic in the context commends itself, it would be uncharacteristically abstract for the comment to come to us as a mere moral instruction, and—once glimpsed with clarity—Israel’s complaint about YHWH’s redemptive methodology fits perfectly with the chapter’s argument.

Even the culminating declaration of the chapter’s first unit (verses 1-7) stands out in sharper profile if YHWH’s deployment of Cyrus is seen to be the centerpoint around which the discourse revolves:

I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.

Isaiah 45:7 (NRSV)

YHWH, it seems, presents himself here as the Lord of Exile as well as of Return, the Master of Cyrus as much as Jacob’s God. The text does not allow YHWH to shirk responsibility for darkness and woe, which in context must involve at least the calamity of exile in a way that excludes neither Babylon’s nor Persia’s role. Indeed, YHWH names himself darkness’ architect and maker.

‘You’re going to redeem Jacob’s children this way?’, one imagines a faithful old Judean man complaining in his most earnest prayers, lips trembling with indignation. ‘Will you sully your hands in clasp with this pagan king?’

‘There is no one like me’, comes YHWH’s reply, failing to conceal a shiver of divine delight.

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