Canter Bridge

The resonant monotheism of the second half of Isaiah is not, contrary to much received wisdom, where ‘prophetic monotheism’ is born. Recent scholars, not least Matthew Lynch in his First Isaiah and the Disappearance of the Gods (Eisenbrauns, 2021) demonstrates how the prophets must be allowed to speak their own dialect. When they do so, the uniqueness of YHWH among the powers becomes a broader and more sustained conviction, not the novelty of an outlier called Second Isaiah.

That having been said, Second Isaiah is uniquely vehement and combative in its denial of existence to imagined pretenders to YHWH’s category of being.

I, I am the LORD, and besides me there is no savior.

I declared and saved and proclaimed, when there was no strange god among you; and you are my witnesses, says the LORD.

I am God, and also henceforth I am He; there is no one who can deliver from my hand; I work and who can hinder it?

Isaiah 43.11-13 (NRSV, emphasis added)

But my point is not to explore the grand scheme of biblical monotheism. Rather, my attention is captured by the italicized claim in 43.12. NRSV renders it within a temporal frame: ‘when there was no strange god among you’. Other translations ancient and modern nuance this denial in different ways, but the point remains that none of the salvation announced in chapter 43 came about via the will or force of other deities.

I am interested in the word זר, which NRSV correctly renders with ‘strange’ rather than the more prosaic ‘other’. Isaiah is not involved principally in mathematics. He is arguing YHWH’s faithfulness to his Israel, even when they can be most charitably described as ‘blind’ and ‘deaf’.

What is at stake is a divine uniqueness that includes YHWH’s tenacious upholding of his covenant with Israel, even amid circumstances that suggest the betrayal or at least the cancelation of that pact. YHWH may in fact turn out be stupendously capable of becoming the god of other nations. But he refuses to become the former god of Israel.

זר all but demands the nuance of ‘strange’ or ‘alien’. It comes in the middle of the passage’s three-fold denial that anyone accompanied or assisted YHWH in saving his servant Israel. Yet this denial could have been forcefully placed with merely mathematical language. The momentary glimpse of the possibility that a strange god might have been involved traffics in a potentiality that is less numerical than religious.

It is not only YHWH alone who acts to save his servant. It is in fact Israel’s long-known Savior acting again rather than an alternative religious actor to whom credit might have mistakenly been paid by hearts groaning or grateful.

‘You know me’, YHWH seems to say in this text. ‘We know each other. Let the gathering of alien nations and peoples not be interpreted to mean that other powers have anything to say about your future, my servant.’

Even as the book called Isaiah becomes every more daring in describing YHWH’s reach, in broadening what can be known of his redemptive purpose, there remains a steely insistence that it is Israel’s YHWH and no other whom the nations desire. Should they find themselves making pilgrimage or stumbling towards Israel’s God, they are allowed no religious baggage, no tawdry syncretism, no exotic artifacts that might tempt Israel to imagine that YHWH from time to time requires from other corners a bit of a nudge.

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