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Posts Tagged ‘Isaiah 7’

exhausting YHWH: Isaiah 1, 7

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on January 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Isaian rhetoric frequently pushes the limits of established theologies. Though it has no particular argument with divine supremacy over history, it will not truck with notions of divine impassibility.

Twice, the book called Isaiah deploys the word לאה—to exhaust or wear out—with YHWH as its wearied subject or object. Only Jeremiah joins the book of Isaiah in this unsettling move, the same number of times (6.11, 15.6).

Isaiah describes this risky divine pathos during the prophet’s confrontation of Judah’s panicked king Ahaz during the Assyrian crisis.

Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test. Then Isaiah said: ‘Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also (כי תלאו גם את־אלהי)?’

Isaiah 7.10-13 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

YHWH’s patience with his recalcitrant people has been sorely taxed, this in a passage that is redolent with hints of divorce. He has been worn down, pushed to exhaustion. The straw that has broken the proverbial camel’s back is Ahaz’ faux-pious refusal to ask YHWH for a sign when the prophet has implored him to do just that.

Other ‘mortals’ have found themselves obliged to put up with Ahaz’ faithless shenanigans. Now it is YHWH’s turn. We glimpse for a moment the disturbing picture of YHWH, hands on knees, fed up.

It would seem the earliest versions sensed the awkwardness of such a pose and did what they could to tidy things up.

The Septuagint makes YHWH marginally less vulnerable.

καὶ εἶπεν Ἀκούσατε δή, οἶκος Δαυιδ· μὴ μικρὸν ὑμῖν ἀγῶνα παρέχειν ἀνθρώποις; καὶ πῶς κυρίῳ παρέχετε ἀγῶνα;

How then do you provoke a fight with the Lord?

Isaiah 7.13 (NETS, emphasis added)

By a different route, the Targum also ameliorates YHWH’s dilemma. By means of the low-profile insertion of ‘the words of’, the targumist embraces the infelicitous notion of ‘weary words’ in order to avoid the still less desirable image of Israel’s exhausted God.

וַאְמַר שְׁמַעוּ כְעַן בֵית דָוִיד הַזְעֵיר דְאַתוּן מַהלַן יָת נְבִיַיָא אְרֵי תַהלוֹן אַף יָת פִתגָמֵי אְלָהִי׃

Then he said, ‘Hear now, O house of David: Is it too little that you weary the prophets, that you weary even the words of my God?

(Isaiah 7.13, Accordance Targum English, emphasis added.)

In its prefatory chapter one, the book has already hinted at the likelihood that things would come to this. There, in fierce denunciation of formally unquestioned worship that is nonetheless offered up by bloody hands, the text has YHWH declaring his own nausea less hypothetically than in chapter 7.

Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them (נלאיתי נשא).

Isaiah 1.14 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

Here, too, the Septuagint and the Targum soften the blow to any presumption that the deity does not feel, indeed does not stagger, under the weight of such hubris.

…as well as your new moons and your feasts, my soul hates. You have made me full (ἐγενήθητέ μοι εἰς πλησμονήν); I will no longer forgive your sins.

Isaiah 1.14 (NETS, emphasis and Greek text added)

The translator’s idiom is unfamiliar. Even if it hints at YHWH being pushed to extremity, it fails to communicate YHWH’s weariness as poignantly as does the Hebrew text.

The targumist allows a greater distance to open between the Hebrew text and his own rendering:

Your new moons and your appointed times, My Memra rejects them. They have become an abomination before Me; I have forgiven much.

Isaiah 1.14 (Accordance Targum English, emphasis added)

What are we to make of the Isaiah scroll’s boldness in describing the effects of human rebellion upon YHWH?

At a bare minimum, the vision will not articulate misalignment between human behavior and the divine counsel in merely theoretical terms. Instead, it dares to suggest that human misconduct disturbs, wearies, and even sickens Israel’s divine Overlord and would-be Redeemer. The prophet somehow manages this understanding of an affected YHWH without diluting his confidence that YHWH’s purpose or counsel will prevail.

Only a superficial reader could paint the redemptive drama of which the book called Isaiah is a witness in abstract or theoretical terms and call it interpretation of the text that lies before us. Not while YHWH leans perspiring, hands on knees, panting for his breath.

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hired guns: Isaiah 7

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on September 3, 2022| Leave a Comment »

In the Isaianic vision, YHWH’s inventory of weapons bulges in its closet.

This deity of what remains of little Jacob can anoint Cyrus the Persian emperor in order to restore YHWH’s people in a cross between chess played out on the stage of international affairs and puppetry guided by an expert master.

If this is so in blessing, it is also true in judgement. In this part of the Isaianic vision, mighty Assyria and Egypt are wielded—though for different purposes—as effortless as Cyrus will in future perform YHWH’s bidding ‘though he not know him’.

On that day the LORD will whistle for the fly that is at the sources of the streams of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. And they will all come and settle in the steep ravines, and in the clefts of the rocks, and on all the thornbushes, and on all the pastures.

On that day the Lord will shave with a razor hired beyond the River—with the king of Assyria—the head and the hair of the feet, and it will take off the beard as well.

Isaiah 7:18-20 (NRSV)

We have perhaps grown too accustomed to reading this sort of thing to feel the shocking confidence required of the Jerusalemite prophet who would say it or write it. The nerve of such a little man amidst his tiny people, speaking of these two éminences grises of the Great Game! Who does he think he is?

Both of the these twin oracles are placed firmly in the sphere of YHWH’s sovereignty over the nations. ‘On that day the Lord…’ locates the envisaged events out of reach both of the prophet’s calendar and his capacity. These nearly identical introductions cement the prophet’s role as YHWH’s spokesman but emphatically not as his military attaché.

Then one must reckon with the denigration of the two empires’ identity. In the first oracle, YHWH’s whistle for the Egyptian fly and the Assyrian bee clearly communicates a vertical power structure. YHWH commands, his empires-cum-insects respond.

In the second oracle, Assyria is a razor, an inert implement with no functionality of its own, entirely dependent on the hand that wields it.

In this Isaianic vision of international events, YHWH brings the difficult matter of Israel’s disciplining to an unpleasant head. Yet he gives nothing away to those supposed powers that he will use in order to accomplish this dark phase of his purpose.

A Judahite prophet has the nerve to say so.

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picturesque fear: Isaiah 7

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on August 3, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The book called Isaiah insists on counterposing fear to faith. Or, better put, fear to trust in YHWH.

It is arguably the most persistent binary in the book. If Israel could manage a reliable glimpse of how things actually work, we are led to believe in a hundred places, they would quite naturally trust this sovereign YHWH who has called them his own and vowed to secure their survival and their eventual flourishing.

But Israel (in the dialect of ‘Jacob’, ‘Judah’, ‘Zion’, ‘Jerusalem’, ’the house of David’, and similar monikers) does not acquire that view, does not give herself to such trust, cannot cease to fear one overlord or another.

She does not earn the prophet’s sympathy for this shortcoming. Instead, Isaiah holds his people accountable for what the book considers a culpable failure rightly to decide where she will place her trust.

The book’s portrayal of misplaced fear becomes, at turns, quite impressive.

In the days of Ahaz son of Jotham son of Uzziah, king of Judah, King Rezin of Aram and King Pekah son of Remaliah of Israel went up to attack Jerusalem, but could not mount an attack against it. When the house of David heard that Aram had allied itself with Ephraim, the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.”

Isaiah 7:1–2 (NRSV)

The mindless shaking of trees against the wind becomes picturesque foil and contrast to the solid reliability of YHWH, on the one hand, and the anchored steadiness of a people who trusts in him, on the other.

Soon we hear YHWH’s prophet declare with regard to the conspiracy of the neighboring nations that unsettle the Davidic king and his subjects in this moment…

It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass.

In its context, this declaration does not bring good news, for Ahaz and his court find themselves incapable of responding aright.

For the moment we are left with the unsettling image of Judah, light as a feather, set to trembling by the slightest breeze, self-victimizing object rather than decisive subject.

The image shapes its reader to understand what constitutes the opposite of faith in the Isaianic vision: Israel trusts. Or Israel trembles.

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