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Posts Tagged ‘Isaiah 57’

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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the lost and the mountain: Isaiah 57

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on December 27, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The book called Isaiah accustoms its reader to blistering oracles against peoples that suddenly turn towards redemption when it seems all hope is lost. But that rough formal parallel is nearly all that Isaiah 57’s opening oracle offers us for orientation.

This is no oracle against some comfortably remote foreign nation. Rather, 57.1-14 (reading with the tradition embedded in the Masoretic Text; RSV initiates a new section at verse 15) appears to address Judah immersed in aberrant rites via accusations that have seldom been hurled at her in these pages.

Probably, we should also read 56.10-12 with the section before us, once again receiving a helpful clue from the Masoretic Text’s reading tradition. That at least provides a suspect for the crimes in question: ‘his sentinels’ (v. 10), perhaps with NRSV ‘Israel’s sentinels’; and ‘shepherds’ (v. 11), though in verse 11 one may be dealing with a corrupt text. In any case, the absence of explicit naming of the perpetrator(s) leaves one assuming that Israel/Judah, its majority, or its leaders stand accused. And not only accused, but reduced to animal status as ‘wild animals’ (v. 9) and ‘dogs’ (vv. 10-11).

It makes for dreary reading, particularly as this text follows immediately upon a stirring welcome of pious gentiles into the holiest places. Yet two details require us to reckon with a faithful minority even among abject Israel/Judah.

First, 57.1 introduces a righteous person, in his singularity so outnumbered by malefactors that his death is a relief. The recourse of translations like the NRSV to the plural for the sake of gender neutrality masks his or her lonely breed of righteousness, so reminiscent of the blessed person of Psalm 1. He is, indeed, one amidst the many.

Then at the oracle’s conclusion—again, following the reading tradition embedded in the Masorete’s labors—we read again of a blessing expressed in the singular, though surely in addition a representative or corporate singular, notwithstanding any attempt to stipulate that the righteous are few.

But whoever takes refuge in me shall possess the land and inherit my holy mountain. It shall be said, ‘Build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction from my people’s way.’

Isaiah 57.13b-14 (NRSV)

Curiously, even this outlier of a jeremiad frames minority blessing in the language of pilgrimage to Zion, or at least in the vocabulary of the outcome of such journeying. And it builds upon the familiar motif of doomed religious activism vis-à-vis the enduring blessing of Yahwistic quietism amid crisis. It is the one who ‘takes refuge in’ YHWH who will inherit his holy mountain. The well-known Isaianic verbal reiteration (סלו־סלו / ‘Build up, build up…’) further ties this strange oracle into its familiar context.

So does judgement cast upon a people whose redemption by this point we have been trained to anticipate prepare us for a dismal set piece of the final of the book’s three sections.

So does YHWH’s mountain endure as the quintessential representation of the destiny of the redeemed, however scarce and storm-tossed they be or however massive their exuberant surge to glory.

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the elevation of YHWH’s servant (Isaiah 52 and 53)

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on December 24, 2023| Leave a Comment »

It is too easy from a comfortably remote position to criticize the versification of the Hebrew Bible that is a legacy of Middle Ages scholarship. Usually, close inspection throws up considerations that explain the decisions that were made, even when they do not entirely justify them.

Still, the bifurcation of the fourth ‘servant song’ and its collocation across two chapters (Isaiah 52.13—53.12) is an indefensible tragedy. The piece simply must be read as a unity.

When one does so—happily, the editors of the NRSV and other modern Bibles encourage the reader in this direction—a number of high-level observations become possible. I deal with just one of them in this moment.

The opening line is breathtaking in its identification of YHWH’s servant with one of the key components of YHWH-elevating vocabulary in Isaiah.

הנה ישכיל עבדי ירום ונשא וגבהּ מאד
See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.

Isaiah 52.13 (NRSV, emphasis added)

In the light of the trauma that YHWH’s servant endures in the subsequent verses, it was perhaps necessary to clarify from the outset that the adventure ends well. Nevertheless, the terms of the exaltation represent a stunning application of Isaianic YHWH descriptors to the servant himself.

I refer here to ירום ונשא (‘he shall be exalted and lifted up’). Apart from ‘the Holy One of Israel’, the language of רם ונשא is the Isaiah tradition’s preferred language for specifying YHWH’s incomparability. The two words are applied to YHWH’s throne in what I consider to be programmatic fashion in the generative vision at 6.1. After dozens of instances in which the two terms (and even more often, one or the other) is artfully maneuvered, רם ונשא becomes something very near to an alternative name for YHWH himself.

For thus says the high and lofty one (כי כה אמר רם ונשא) 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, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite.

Isaiah 57.15 (NRSV, emphasis and interpolated Hebrew text added)

The climactic and most famous fourth servant song—a designation that is unfortunate chiefly for its marginalization of servant motifs that fall outside of their arbitrarily drawn lines—thus declares in its opening syllables a remarkable elevation of the servant. It seems to me best to see this as an inclusion of YHWH’s servant within the counsel or purpose (עצה) of YHWH himself.

The suffering of the servant is then made all the more astonishing, not least his unenviable plight of being crushed by YHWH himself, because it sits so uncomfortably alongside the opening declaration that YHWH’s servant occupies YHWH-like conceptual altitudes and acquires via an eventual elevation YHWH-like majesty (if this is how the yiqtol + v-qatal + v-qatal sequence in 52.12 imply).

No wonder, then, the enduring fascination across religious boundaries of this irrepressibly evocative poem.

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his throne: Isaiah 66

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on August 31, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The final chapter of the book called Isaiah returns to basic matters.

The Generative Vision of chapter six—when the prophet Isaiah finds himself taken up into a vision of YHWH’s royal throne room—is the only prior moment in the book’s trajectory when YHWH’s throne is glimpsed. Until this:

Thus says the LORD: Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is my resting place?

All these things my hand has made, and so all these things are mine, says the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word.

Isaiah 66:1-2 (NRSV)

In that Generative Vision, as now in this glimpse of YHWH Enthroned, the prophet does not describe YHWH. Rather, in good, deflective, prophetic style, he describes all that is around YHWH so that we might deduce YHWH’s grandeur by comparison. Notwithstanding Isaiah’s claim that ‘I saw the LORD’, he does not enter into description of the deity himself. Rather, he occupies himself with flying seraphim, a creaturely voice so loud that the temple trembles on its foundation, the hem of YHWH’s robe which filled the temple’s entirety, and the like. Even the awesome descriptor that in time becomes for the prophet YHWH’s proper name—רם ונשׂא (high and lifted up)—is offered ambiguously. It is not clear whether it describes YHWH or ‘merely’ his throne.

It is fitting, then, that a book so tenaciously and allusively intertextual in its primary instinct, should return to YHWH’s throne room now, as at the beginning.

Just as YHWH’s presence was comprehensive and imperial vis-à-vis creation back in Isaiah 6, so here heaven and earth are merely his throne and footstool. In a different accent, this spatial metaphor of fulness places YHWH most emphatically ‘high and lifted up’.

Yet in context YHWH does not attend to those who would manipulate cultic matters at a different altitude in order to curry his favor (see verses 3-4). Rather, from his very high posture, YHWH looks ‘to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word.’ YHWH stewards strange affections, odd habits of attentiveness, we are asked to believe and not for the first time. The same affirmation about YHWH’s bizarre predilection for those who lie low—those whom life has crushed—troubled the Septuagint translator with his preference for a more stately deity back in 57:15. There, the Hebrew text offers the visions of chapters six and sixty-six in its own accent and its own moment, though with unmistakable echoes and anticipations of the two glimpses of YHWH’s throne room currently under inspection.

For thus says the high and lofty one (רם ונשׁא) who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy (קדושׁ): I dwell in the high and holy place (מרום וקדושׂ), and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit (דכא ושׁפל־רוח), to revive the spirit of the humble (רוח שׁפלים), and to revive the heart of the contrite (לב נדכאים).

Isaiah 57:15 (NRSV)

In the Isaianic vision, it seems almost superfluous to say, YHWH is very, very high. Yet he is also very low, whether in the coin of judgement and eventual redemption (chapter 6) or resident at his second home (chapter 57) or via his untiring attentiveness to those who find themselves way down there (chapter 66).

It seems transparent to the tradition’s curators that this divine habit is unexpected, otherwise there would be no need for them to insist that it is so. Yet it seems equally clear to the prophetic imagination that being in both places at the same time represents for YHWH neither a contradiction nor a challenge.

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