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Posts Tagged ‘Isaiah 51’

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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Listen up!: Isaiah 51

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah’s fifty-first chapter weaves together a refreshingly positive description of its audience with an insistent summons to pay attention. Indeed, the chapter begins in just this fashion, stating its direction from the very outset. In the following extracts from chapter 51, I will italicize the verbal summons and emphasize the addressee descriptions in bold.

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the LORD. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you…

Isaiah 51.1-2a (NRSV)

Then just a few verses later:

Listen to me, my people, and give heed to me, my nation...

Isaiah 51.4a (NRSV)

The third summons elides the expected vocative descriptors:

Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath…

Isaiah 51.6a (NRSV)

Yet the addressee/vocative descriptors soon resume:

Listen to me, you who know righteousness, you people who have my teaching in your hearts; do not fear the reproach of others, and do not be dismayed when they revile you.

Isaiah 51.7 NRSV)

After an interlude where it is ‘the arm of the Lord’ rather than the people that is addressed imperativally, the established pattern is taken up again:

Rouse yourself, rouse yourself! Stand up, O Jerusalem…

Isaiah 51.17a (NRSV)

It is important to observe that the pattern continues well into chapter 52. Its last appearance in the chapter before us initiates a trend towards recognizing the addressees’ trauma and vulnerability, which flows meaningfully toward the famous ‘fourth servant song’, where YHWH’s servant does in fact fall wounded under YHWH’s own blow.

Therefore hear this, you who are wounded, who are drunk, but not with wine…

Isaiah 51.21 (NRSV)

When literature erects structural markers as evident as these, any valid reading must take them into account and bow to their programmatic purpose. The evidence highlighted above invites the reader to contemplate the addressees as the favored people of YHWH, though perhaps more specifically a subsection of that people that has been particularly attentive to instruction and peculiarly concerned with YHWH’s ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice’. Their rescue from calamity is imminent. Though they hope to see it, trepidation in the face of impediments to their redemption may restrain them from bold participation, this against the current of ‘my Torah’ (51.7) which the people have in their hearts. This description is gleaned from the descriptors I highlighted above in bold.

The italicised portions, for their part, seem in the aggregate to summon the people to consider the ancient and enduring purpose of YHWH to bless them. They are urged to interpret their recent calamity not as the elimination of that divine purpose but rather as an especially painful but temporary interruption that will soon be superseded by the resumption of the promise.

If this reading adequately comprehends the text’s structure, then one might see chapter 51 (continuing into chapter 52) as a prophetic broadside against what we moderns call ‘recency bias’. From the soul of the Isaianic vision emerges the claim that YHWH’s purpose has always been to bless, that he has not turned permanently against his people, and that faith in the ancient teaching must now assume the posture of courage.

On the basis of this understanding, the even more vibrant summons that await the reader in chapter 52 find their grounded meaning.

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)

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the rare look back: Isaiah 51

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on August 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Rarely does the book called Isaiah indulge in retrospect. Particularly in the second half of the book, the operational summons is to sing a new song, to forget the former things, to embrace YHWH’s penchant for doing something shockingly novel.

In this light, the first section of the book’s fifty-first chapter raises a readerly eyebrow.

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the LORD. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.

Isaiah 51:1-2 (NRSV)

This chain of three imperatives is manifestly retrospective, although it would be wrong to call it nostalgic.

There must be something about ‘Abraham your father and … Sarah who bore you’ that elevates the ancestral couple as worthy of the exilic community’s contemplation. Indeed, the immediate text signals wherein that virtue lies and the context further ornaments the allusion.

First, the text of these two verses gives every indication of alluding to the famous calling of Abraham, with its promised of remarkably multiplied progeny.

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Genesis 12:1-3 (NRSV)

Besides the naming of Abraham and Sarah, the Isaiah text picks up the notion of blessing (ברכה and verbal ברך). Additionally, both texts emphasize the dimension of multiplication towards vastness. In Genesis, this notion manifests as promissory: ‘I will make you a great nation’ (ואעשׁך לגוי גדול) and ‘and make your name great’ (ואגדלה שׁמך). In the allusive Isaiah text, the language is slightly different:

…for he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.

Isaiah 51:2 (NRSV)

One discovers, then, in both texts the notion of blessing towards vastness.

So much for the evident textual links that make Isaiah 51.1-2 a recontextualized echo of Genesis 12.1-3.

Yet the Abrahamic motif has not been concluded just yet. In the hands of the Isaianic interpretation of the exiles’ plight, there is more to say.

The clear and immediate insistence is that YHWH is still capable of multiplying his people via blessing towards vastness. What became true of Abraham and Sarah represents an invitation for the exiles to trust YHWH’s intention to multiply them in similar fashion.

Yet it is striking that the ensuing verses are thick with reference to the paradoxical but intensely Isaianic notion of subjugating the nations in those peoples’ own interest.

Listen to me, my people, and give heed to me, my nation; for a teaching will go out from me, and my justice for a light to the peoples.

I will bring near my deliverance swiftly, my salvation has gone out and my arms will rule the peoples; the coastlands wait for me, and for my arm they hope.

Isaiah 51:4-5 (NRSV)

It appears, then, that this forward-looking book finds Abraham and Sarah to be worthy objects for a bit of retrospective pondering. This is so precisely because in the experience of the iconic patriarch and matriarch one discerns YHWH’s purpose to bless his people towards vastness in a way that has global implications for those nations who find themselves conjoined to YHWH’s little tribe.

If the Isaianic tradition constitutes exilic prophets coaxing out the meaning of the prophetic deposit that has become their treasure and also of conjuring the bracing concept of an imminent New Exodus, then it is also true that the tradition can reach even farther back into Israel’s long memory. When it does so, it becomes a summons to trust that YHWH’s stubborn insistence upon blessing not only Abraham and Sarah but also those nations who will look favorably upon them has survived the storm of exile.

In the hands of Isaiah’s interpreters, retrospect becomes prospect and memory, instruction.

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