Canter Bridge

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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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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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:

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