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Posts Tagged ‘Isaiah 55’

Now that they can hear again…: Isaiah 55

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 25, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah’s generative vision, as I see it, loads prophetic shoulders with an almost unbearable weight.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’

And he said, ‘Go and say to this people: “Keep listening (שמעו שמוע), but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.”

Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears (ובאזניו ישמע) and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’

Isaiah 6:8-10 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

The cessation of visual and aural acuity, even if the theme does not originate in this vision as I believe that it does, flourishes across the book via frequent retouchings. Ordinarily in Isaiah, the predictable result of the people’s sensory loss a tragic is a tragic failure to understand. Willful refusal to see and to hear in the Isaianic vision eventually produces the inability to do so. The people become fools.

But not forever.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me (שמעו שמוע אלי), and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.

Incline your ear, and come to me; listen (שמעו), so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

Isaiah 55.2-3 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

Such reiteration, thematic and lexical, does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, the text indulges in classic Isaianic reversal of the earlier theme of lost audition. Now, YHWH’s command through his prophet is not to fail to hear and so to stumble about stupidly into alienation from Jacob’s God. Rather, the listening—notice the same verbal combination around the root שמע and the repetition of ‘ear’ (אזן)—produces a feast and the inclining of the ear overcomes Judah’s erstwhile alienation from YHWH and brings life.

Any close reading of the text will—or should—service this play of concept and of word.

What lingers just below the surface is more easily missed. The trope of the ignorant nation persists and survives into this text, notwithstanding its location fairly late in the book. But now the allusion is fragrant with redemptive development.

See, I made (David) a witness to the peoples (לאומים), a leader and commander for the peoples (לאמים).

See, you shall call nations (גוי) that you do not know (לא־תדע), and nations (וגוי) that do not know you (לא ידוך) shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.

Isaiah 55.4-5 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

Laying aside for the moment consideration of David’s unexpected (and, strictly speaking, unkingly) presence here, both Israel and the nations find themselves joined in ironic ignorance. It is a momentary, indeed imaginary, ignorance, because it is barely named and contemplated before it is erased.

Israel and the nations are viewed as mutually uncomprehending of each other’s reality. One need not imagine that they are unaware of the other’s existence. Rather, one might say that Israel and the nations cannot and do not understand each other.

Yet this mutual inscrutability is glimpsed in its ultimate moment precisely because Israel has now consciously become the Convener of Nations and those peoples, for their part, come running to Israel. The people’s sudden attractiveness is all YHWH’s work: for he has glorified you.

Isaiah’s ironic currents and undercurrents in a text like this run in more than one direction but not at cross purposes.

The picture is a stunning recapacitation of Israel’s ability to see, hear, and comprehend, a glorification of Jacob’s erstwhile deaf and dumb children that restores their Abrahamic purpose and brings the nations running toward them and to their God.

The streaming of the nations to Zion that has been a kind of percussive beat from chapter two forward here takes on the profile of an astonishingly international reconciliation. Israel, true to form, becomes both agent and participant in YHWH’s redemptive purpose without ever, for one moment, losing her accent amid the swirling onrush of suddenly eager peoples.

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(un)king David: Isaiah 55

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on August 25, 2022| Leave a Comment »

David and Zion go together.

Such an affirmation might seem quite the yawn when describing the general outlook of those parts of the Hebrew Bible that are most concerned with Jerusalem. Yet here we have a book called Isaiah, passionately and stubbornly concerned with the fate of Zion, in which we find a sustained reticence to speak of the great man.

Leaving aside for the moment King David’s patent absence from most of the text of Isaiah and turning to its few mentions of him, where is David in the famous paradisiacal vision of a great anointed ruler in chapter 11? The figure is clearly ‘davidic’ in some meaningful sense. Yet the global ruler who emerges there, saturated with YHWH’s spirit, springs not from David’s loins but from ‘the stump of Jesse’, the great monarch’s father. This seems clearly to be a move intended to deflect attention from the historical David.

Then, in chapter 55, David appears by name. He figures here as a reassuring presence, a man whose legacy testifies to YHWH’s commitment to his people and his city. Indeed, David’s significance in this brief and bracing appearance in a chapter that fairly pleads with its readers not to settle for idolatrous transactions but rather to trust in YHWH’s far more compelling purpose, is global. Now he is not merely Judah’s monarch or remembered Israel’s king. Rather, he is a ‘witness to the peoples’, indeed ‘a leader and commander for the peoples’.

Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples.

See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.

Isaiah 55:3-5 (NRSV)

Yet strangely David is not called a king, not summoned as Israel’s מלך, a word that might have quite naturally flowed from the pen of the writer. Instead—even in connection with the nations—he is a witness (עד), a leader (נגיד), and a commander (מצוה). The text looks back to YHWH’s covenant with David, here seen as enduring and therefore affirming of new possibilities for Israel. The text looks forward to a moment when ‘nations that you do not know shall run to you (plural)’, a reality that is also linked with YHWH’s ‘steadfast, sure love for David’.

Yet he is not called king.

Is this a slip of the pen or perhaps a mere aesthetic preference for diversity of expression? This seems unlikely.

Rather, it appears that the book called Isaiah treasures the generative friendship that manifestly links YHWH and his purpose to his agent, to this ‘man after my own heart’, to his covenantal partner. Yet the re-start, the future that YHWH holds in store for ‘Zion’ if its daughters and sons will only shake off their collective depression and throw themselves into it, is not a mere retrieval of past forms and functions.

It is, in context, one of those new things to which the prophet summons his hearers to become alert. It is, in the words of another prophet, a matter of new wineskins.

Endzeit, it turns out is not merely Urzeit again.

It is more. Far more.

Nations shall run to you, the prophet challenge his audience to imagine in clear allusion to the Vision of Visions back in chapter two, where the people flow like a river up to elevated Zion. Here, Zion is not so much elevated, though that sense does not lie too remote. Rather, the peoples’ sudden appetite for Zion and eagerness to get there has a different cause, one that must have beggared belief:

…because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.

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like nothing you’ve ever seen: Isaiah 55

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on April 25, 2017| Leave a Comment »

There is no measured reciprocity in YHWH’s mercy as this is sketched out in the book of Isaiah. The logic of quid pro quo has no place here, in this landscape of abundant pardon.

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:6–9 ESV)

The call not to let the opportunity of experiencing YHWH’s mercy—forgiving and restorative—is based in part on the perhaps limited window of its availability. One should seek him ‘while he may be found’ and call upon him ‘while he is near’. (more…)

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