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.
Canter Bridge 