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a banner for the nations: Isaiah 62

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on January 29, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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.

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Now that they can hear again…: Isaiah 55

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 25, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah’s generative vision, as I see it, loads prophetic shoulders with an almost unbearable weight.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’

And he said, ‘Go and say to this people: “Keep listening (שמעו שמוע), but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.”

Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears (ובאזניו ישמע) and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’

Isaiah 6:8-10 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

The cessation of visual and aural acuity, even if the theme does not originate in this vision as I believe that it does, flourishes across the book via frequent retouchings. Ordinarily in Isaiah, the predictable result of the people’s sensory loss a tragic is a tragic failure to understand. Willful refusal to see and to hear in the Isaianic vision eventually produces the inability to do so. The people become fools.

But not forever.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me (שמעו שמוע אלי), and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.

Incline your ear, and come to me; listen (שמעו), so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

Isaiah 55.2-3 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

Such reiteration, thematic and lexical, does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, the text indulges in classic Isaianic reversal of the earlier theme of lost audition. Now, YHWH’s command through his prophet is not to fail to hear and so to stumble about stupidly into alienation from Jacob’s God. Rather, the listening—notice the same verbal combination around the root שמע and the repetition of ‘ear’ (אזן)—produces a feast and the inclining of the ear overcomes Judah’s erstwhile alienation from YHWH and brings life.

Any close reading of the text will—or should—service this play of concept and of word.

What lingers just below the surface is more easily missed. The trope of the ignorant nation persists and survives into this text, notwithstanding its location fairly late in the book. But now the allusion is fragrant with redemptive development.

See, I made (David) a witness to the peoples (לאומים), a leader and commander for the peoples (לאמים).

See, you shall call nations (גוי) that you do not know (לא־תדע), and nations (וגוי) that do not know you (לא ידוך) shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.

Isaiah 55.4-5 (NRSV, emphasis and Hebrew text added)

Laying aside for the moment consideration of David’s unexpected (and, strictly speaking, unkingly) presence here, both Israel and the nations find themselves joined in ironic ignorance. It is a momentary, indeed imaginary, ignorance, because it is barely named and contemplated before it is erased.

Israel and the nations are viewed as mutually uncomprehending of each other’s reality. One need not imagine that they are unaware of the other’s existence. Rather, one might say that Israel and the nations cannot and do not understand each other.

Yet this mutual inscrutability is glimpsed in its ultimate moment precisely because Israel has now consciously become the Convener of Nations and those peoples, for their part, come running to Israel. The people’s sudden attractiveness is all YHWH’s work: for he has glorified you.

Isaiah’s ironic currents and undercurrents in a text like this run in more than one direction but not at cross purposes.

The picture is a stunning recapacitation of Israel’s ability to see, hear, and comprehend, a glorification of Jacob’s erstwhile deaf and dumb children that restores their Abrahamic purpose and brings the nations running toward them and to their God.

The streaming of the nations to Zion that has been a kind of percussive beat from chapter two forward here takes on the profile of an astonishingly international reconciliation. Israel, true to form, becomes both agent and participant in YHWH’s redemptive purpose without ever, for one moment, losing her accent amid the swirling onrush of suddenly eager peoples.

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reversal of fortunes: Isaiah 49

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on December 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The reading tradition reflected in our Masoretic Text separates 49.7 off from 49.1-6. Additionally, 49.7 begins with a ‘speaker marker’ (‘Thus says YHWH…’) that has evidently been regarded as a gentle separator of what follows from what has gone before.

Nevertheless, the content of 49.7 all but clamors to be read in relationship with verses 1-6.

The chapter’s first section presents the servant of YHWH protesting his own fatigue and incapacity for large tasks.

And (YHWH) said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.’

But I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God.’

Isaiah 49.3-4 (NRSV)

Curiously, YHWH’s response is to inform his servant of the even larger mission that lies before him.

And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength—he says, ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’

Isaiah 49.5-6

The displacement of the ‘tribes of Jacob’ as the be-all and end-all of the servant’s commission in favor of a greater mission to illuminate ‘the nations’ is so radical a departure from expectation that the translator of Septuagint Isaiah will not abide it. The Greek translation of Hebrew Isaiah was executed for the sake of Greek-speaking Jewish communities in Egypt at about 150 years B.C.E. The individual charged with the monumental task of rendering the Hebrew Isaiah scroll in Greek evidently can not bring himself to disparage the mission of YHWH’s servant to dispersed Jews. Instead of the Hebrew text’s vision of the servant’s restoration of Israel as a ‘small thing’, the Septuagint translator offers us:

καὶ εἶπέν μοι Μέγα σοί ἐστιν τοῦ κληθῆναί σε παῖδά μου τοῦ στῆσαι τὰς φυλὰς Ιακωβ καὶ τὴν διασπορὰν τοῦ Ισραηλ ἐπιστρέψαι· 

And he said to me, ‘It is a great thing for you to be called my servant so that you may set up the tribes of Iakob and turn back the dispersion of Israel.’

Isaiah 49.6 (NETS, emphasis added to reflect emphasis in Greek text)

Returning to the Hebrew text, verse 7—the indication of a new paragraph notwithstanding—appears to address the conundrum that is established when a global commission is laid upon such weary shoulders. After all, it is not merely the case that the servant has protested his own exhaustion, admittedly alongside his confidence that YHWH’s provision is sufficient (v. 4). It is also the case that the servant in his profound identification with Jacob’s exiled tribes cannot claim much credibility among the nations whom his exertions are meant to enlighten.

Notwithstanding, the prophet has YHWH adumbrate yet another Isaianic reversal of fortunes that will implicate the servant’s exhaustion and his lack of credibility among gentiles.

Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, ‘Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.’

Isaiah 49.7 (NRSV)

One senses here the innate tension between restoration of a lost and longed-for stasis, on the one hand, and the incursion of an entirely new arrangement, on the other. The prophet intuits a reversal so profound that the servant cum Israel will soon stand at the very head of the now submissive nations.

Yet the tensions are felt in multiple directions rather than just one. If it seemed for a moment that restoration of Jacob/Israel was too small a matter, it now appears that Jacob is to be quite grand as kings and princes stand to honor her and bow to submit to her.

What is more, the relationship between the illumination of the nations and their submission to Jacob/Israel is a complex matter, one that I think plays a part in a wider argument that the gentile nations’ reconfigured and submissive relationship to Israel is intended for their well-being and is therefore to be welcomed by them.

In the light of such a complex and radical promise, it is no wonder that Isaiah’s recurring plea is that little Jacob should forget the former things and open heart and mind to a new thing. The prophet’s imagined future, it would seem, could not exist without the remembered past. Yet neither can it remain defined by what Israel has known thus far. Or experienced. Or been.

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unmitigated fury: Isaiah 34

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 15, 2023| Leave a Comment »

As the first half of Isaiah draws near to the narrative chapters 36-39—which ominously foreshadow the Babylonian storm that will fall upon Judah—we come upon a chapter of unbroken darkness.

Chapter 34 is not by the book’s standards a long chapter. Yet the reading of these 17 verses feels wearisomely long, for their unceasing pronouncement of doom upon all nations (v. 2) never finds its way to the pivot towards mercy that is so characteristic of this book’s oracles. For an interpreter like this one, alive to the nuanced judgement of YHWH against the nations that becomes a severe mercy for them rather than their mere destruction, this chapter proves difficult to fathom.

Probably, chapter 35 is its pivot, which would explain the lack of a redemptive turning within the bounds of chapter 34 itself. But the hopefulness that blossoms there is directed towards ‘Zion’s cause’. There is no evident inclusion of the nations in its song of restoration and of return.

So, the dark cloud that Isaiah 34 suspends over the nations seems to remain in place. I find this difficult to fit within the trajectory of the book itself. Here one senses the appeal of the bald bifurcation of hope for Zion vis-à-vis judgement for the nations that some readers of Isaiah have seen as its inescapably binary and nationalistic message.

The passage, then, simply summons the people to YHWH’s judgement of them.

Draw near, O nations, to hear; O peoples, give heed! Let the earth hear, and all that fills it; the world, and all that comes from it.

For the LORD is enraged against all the nations, and furious against all their hoards; he has doomed them, has given them over for slaughter.

Isaiah 34.1-2 (NRSV)

The nations are to be slaughtered and their landscape is to be populated by wild animals rather than human beings. And that is all.

If the book of Isaiah, as I believe to be the case, has a bright future for the nations that pivots on their bittersweet but redemptive incorporation into YHWH’s plan for Israel, that hope will not be found in this chapter. In the biblical witness, glorious things are rarely easy and never automatic.

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sequencing glory, anchoring light: Isaiah 60

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

A Christian reading of the book called Isaiah should not occasion constant surprise. And yet it does.

Jesus is remembered quite famously as having told a Samaritan woman that ‘salvation is of the Jews’.

You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews (ε͗κ τῶν Ἰουδαίων).

John 4:22 (NRSV, emphasis and inserted Greek text added)

In context, the deep impression Jesus leaves upon this Samaritan woman’s neighbors belies the idea that non-Jews are excluded from the salvation in question. Yet the origins of this ’salvation’—humanly speaking—are hardly in doubt for the writer of the Fourth Gospel.

This assertion of a salvific sequence worth careful consideration is hardly an outlier. The New Testament’s most famous apostle, in the midst of one of his recurring wrestlings with the interrelationship of Jews and Gentiles in the economy of Jacob’s God, deploys a phrase that he will find useful more than once.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Ἰουδαίῳ τε πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι).

Romans 1:16 (NRSV, emphasis and Greek text added)

Here the collective singular stands in twice for masses of people. Likely, this signals the apostle’s confidence that this is an ingrained way of things independent of human manipulation that plays itself out in individual cases over and over again.

It is all too easy to imagine that this soteriological sequencing somehow takes the place of a prior ingrained Jewish nationalism in early Christian proclamation, opening a door that had previously remained closed to non-Jews while assuring that the privilege of it not be understated. In fact, my students tell me all that the time that this is the way of things.

Yet this seems not to be the manner in which early Christian theologizers read their sources in the Hebrew Bible.

Rather, it seems that early Christian hermeneutics discovered this sequence—this anchoring of expansive salvation in Jewish particularity—in the massively influential book of Isaiah as well as in other Jewish texts. For example, Isaiah’s sixtieth chapter fixes its gaze and addresses its promise to the restored Zion that it imagines in some of the book’s most soaring and lyric poetry.

The turning of tables to Zion’s benefit is named late in the chapter:

The descendants of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the LORD, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

Whereas you have been forsaken and hated, with no one passing through, I will make you majestic forever, a joy from age to age.

You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breasts of kings; and you shall know that I, the LORD, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.

Isaiah 60:14-16 (NRSV)

Yet this stirring reversal ought not be read as a transformation that occurs to the detriment of those nations that now nourish Zion.

Rather, the chapter’s opening verses address Zion lit up and glorified in a manner that attracts the peoples in the manner of secondary promise and sequenced blessing. The second-person singular addressee is most certainly the restored city.

Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Isaiah 60:1-3 (NRSV)

Passages like this steward the sequence and anchor the illumination of ‘the nations’ in a way that might easily have inspired, informed, and even shaped the New Testament proclamation of a Jesus movement that by appearances surprised itself at every turn by the response of non-Jews, then turned its hand to the hard work of how such ’new folks’ ought to be integrated into a family that began as a branch of Judaism.

Difficult times would come in that process which scholars often identify as ’the parting of the ways’. Yet it is both sobering and fascinating to observe the way in which early preachers and evangelists of the Jesus movement found themselves reading the Jewish Scriptures in a way that seems coherent even to (some) modern historians of the Way.

The stewards of those new wineskins that early Jewish followers of Jesus found necessary for the preservation of new wine did not, it turns out, imagine that everything had become something other than it had been. The vigor of their newfound regard for the risen Jesus led them back to old books like the one they called ‘Isaiah’, there to find the same sequencing of salvation, the very anchoring of light in YHWH’s disclosure to Israel itself that infused the teaching of their Lord and the writing of their apostles.

The notion that ‘salvation is from the Jews’ would be tested and often discarded in ensuing centuries, up to and including our own. Yet it seems difficult to this Christian reader of Isaiah to imagine that this sequence, this anchoring of ‘Jesus faith’ in Jewish experience can be discarded without inventing a new religion that is or will eventually become cast adrift from its moorings.

Dragons be there.

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global feasting, B: Isaiah 25

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on October 12, 2022| Leave a Comment »

If verses 1-5 hint that YHWH’s subjugation of ’strong peoples’ and ‘ruthless nations’ might in fact be for their own benefit, the wide embrace at which it hints becomes all but indisputable in verses 6-10.

In the text that follows, I have added emphasis to each reference to all (Hebrew כל), together with the nouns that are implicated by this descriptor.

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.

Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.

It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

 For the hand of the LORD will rest on this mountain.

Isaiah 25:6-10 (NRSV, emphasis added)

In spite of this broad redemptive result, the text does not loose its grip on a tenacious particularity. We see this in at least three respects.

First, Mount Zion remains the scene. YHWH will destroy ‘on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples…’ (7). The passage’s culminating declaration—if we see the immediately following and rather more sullen address against Moab as in some way separate—declares the YHWH’s hand will rest on this mountain’ (10).

Second, Jacob/Israel remains at the center of causality. The universal banquet that is here described is it seems contingent upon YHWH’s removal of ‘the disgrace of his people … from all the earth’. There is no reason to imagine that ‘his people’ bears a meaning different than its conventional one. Yet when he remove’s Jacob’s disgrace the wide world is the beneficiary. In parallel with surrounding clauses that are more explicit about the nations’ blessed fate, ‘from all the earth’ very likely refers to those people as well as to Jacob itself.

Finally, the refrain that is anticipated ‘on that day’ must describe Jacob/Israel’s experience retrospectively rather than the latter jubilant inclusion of ‘all peoples’:

It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

Isaiah 25:9 (NRSV)

As often and in so many ways across the long book called Isaiah, here Jacob’s restoration represents in some way the restoration of all the nations. Or perhaps, of all save one. Moab’s dire subjection follows in 10b-12. NRSV’s editorial separation of that darkness from the earlier light of this oracle is performed without support from the Masoretic Text. It may be that Isaiah’s Vision is viscerally resistant to utopias that avert their glance from a kind of final, dire, depressing resistance that can in the end be put down only by reluctant force.

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global feasting, A: Isaiah 25

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on October 11, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The polyvalent perspective of the book called Isaiah with respect to the nations raises its head again in the broad horizon celebrated by the hymn that is the book’s twenty-fifth chapter.

The first five verses appear to present a kind of conversion narrative in connection with ‘strong peoples’ and ‘cities of ruthless nations’ who seem to have been moved to their turning by YHWH’s care for the poor.

O LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you, I will praise your name; for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.

For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the palace of aliens is a city no more, it will never be rebuilt.

Therefore strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you.

For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat. When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, the noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; the song of the ruthless was stilled.

Isaiah 25:1-5 (NRSV, emphasis added)

The text does not leave in doubt the reality of the subjugation of ‘strong peoples’ and ‘ruthless nations’.

Indeed, they find themselves on ‘the mountain of the Lord’ (verse 6, just following) precisely because their city and palace have been leveled. Verse 5’s verbs conclude the first section of this oracle with divine activities that leave no doubt about the matter. YHWH subdued the short-lived heat of the peoples (תכניע) and stilled the song of the ruthless (יענה, rendered by NRSV somewhat lyrically by the passive ‘was stilled’ for the Masoretic Text’s 3ms active deployment of a verb often rendered more prosaically as to humiliate).

Clearly, these peoples are considered to be nations that YHWH has subjugated as the outworking of his ancient purpose (25.1).

Yet is not at all apparent that this outcome is one that the peoples themselves lament. Indeed, verse 3 could be read as the vocabulary of mere conquest, forced upon unwilling victims. But in context, particularly the context provided by the oracle from verse 6 forward, there seems to be yet again an element of willing participation in the deportment of the conquered.

Therefore strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you.

Isaiah 25:3 NRSV)

Verses 6-10 will fill in the picture, if indeed those verses are to be read as a unity with verses 1-5, as appears to me to be the case. Its scattering of ‘all’ across the range of its protagonists insinuates a banquet where all—past historical enemies included—lift their cups together and tuck into the feast with the careless abandon of friends.

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the nations’ eager humility: Isaiah 2

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , on October 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah’s Vision of Visions (2.1-5) is shared by the book of Micah in its fourth chapter. It is much disputed whether one borrowed from the other or whether both drew their visionary waters from a common well. In the book called Isaiah, this short glimpse of a prophetically imagined future becomes the deeply driven pillar of the entire adventure. It is Isaiah’s very Vision of Visions.

Both editions, that of Micah and that of Isaiah, speak identically of the nations’ animated conversation as they flow on their riverine course all the way up to recently elevated Zion. A feature of the exchange appears to bear out the wider impression that in Isaiah salvation is from the Jews and for the nations.

I refer to the combination of the verb ירה (to teach) with the preposition מן (conventionally, from) mediating the verb’s relationship with its direct object דרכיו (his ways). Nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, outside of Micah’s and Isaiah’s shared vision, does this construction appear.

In my view, the preposition is best understood as partitive מן, an established manner of communicating ‘part of’, ‘some of’, or ‘a portion of’. If we apply what we know of the expression to its appearance in Isaiah’s Vision of Visions (and of course Micah’s version of the same), verse two comes to read as follows:

Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us some of his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

Isaiah 2:3 (NRSV, adapted for partitive מן)

There is nothing in the ebullient eagerness of the nations that suggests a limited appetite for YHWH’s instruction. Rather, the limit seems to apply to their expectation.

In the turned-on-its-head world that the prophet glimpses, aliens stream to lowly Zion now elevated above the vastness of the world’s topography, hungering and thirsting after righteousness as a later prophet might have described them. Yet even they cannot imagine that the God of Jacob might slake their entire thirst, might lay out the full banquet for such unwashed late arrivals.

So, in a reading of the text that appears to me entirely defensible, they hedge their bets.

…that he may teach us some of his ways…

‘Perhaps we’ll be allowed some tasty crumbs’, one almost imagines them to hope.

Little do they know.

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motley crew: Isaiah 60

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on September 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah 60 must figure in anyone’s list of the most powerfully lyrical of this long book’s offerings. This chapter’s vision of Zion’s restoration is breathtakingly beautiful.

Along the way, it gathers up the components of the book’s multi-faceted view of ‘the nations’ and their destiny and presents a composite—a hopeful reader might dare say coherent—picture that is not reductive and therefore demands patient rather than dismissive reading or radical reconstruction.

In the paragraphs that follow, I attempt to enumerate the pertinent allusions to those nations and to abbreviate the nature of the light that each casts on what I am persuaded is indeed a coherent if complex presentation.

First, restored Zion is brightly lit. By contrast, the nations live in darkness but are drawn (והלכו, shall come).

Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Isaiah 60:1-3 (NRSV)

Second, the nations exercise important agency in transporting Zion’s sons and daughters back to their maternal city. The nations’ wealth accompanies them to Zion. Their animals (camels, young camels, flocks, rams) perform oddly anthropomorphic deeds: they ‘proclaim the praise of the Lord’ and ‘minister to you’. In spite of their alien provenance in nations near and far, those animals are also rendered acceptable on YHWH’s altar in a way that appears to connect with YHWH’s glorification of his ‘house’.

Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you; your sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses’ arms.

Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice, because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you, the wealth of the nations shall come to you.

A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the LORD.

All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered to you, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister to you; they shall be acceptable on my altar, and I will glorify my glorious house.

Isaiah 60:4-7 (NRSV)

The long section from verse 8 to verse 16 presents the most mixed picture of the lot. A posture of willing anticipation is likely signaled in the expression ‘the coastlands shall wait for me… to bring…’. Non-Jews are described in their complementary roles of transportation, construction, and urban enrichment. As counterpoise to the aforementioned anticipation, there appears to occur a less than comprehensive embrace of new realities on the part of the nations. For example, ‘kings shall be led in procession’, an image of military conquest by almost any light. Further, ‘the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste’. And then, the ‘descendants of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, all who despised you shall bow at your feet; they shall call you the City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel’.

This last, complex image clearly denotes subjugation. Does it also suggest conversion from one perspective to another that is wholly new and perhaps not the product of sudden persuasion alone? I suspect that it does.

Finally, a maternal-filial metaphor merits particular scrutiny: ‘You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breasts of kings’. At the risk of pressing the metaphor too rudely, it appears in the light of other quite positive maternal imagery in this book that the nursing mother that is ‘nations’ and ‘kings’ executes her maternal labors with the tenderness and even fulfillment that are so often native to the experience.

The passage in full reads as follows:

Who are these that fly like a cloud, and like doves to their windows?

For the coastlands shall wait for me, the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your children from far away, their silver and gold with them, for the name of the LORD your God, and for the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you.

Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you; for in my wrath I struck you down, but in my favor I have had mercy on you.

Your gates shall always be open; day and night they shall not be shut, so that nations shall bring you their wealth, with their kings led in procession.

For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste.

The glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the cypress, the plane, and the pine, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will glorify where my feet rest.

The descendants of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the LORD, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

Whereas you have been forsaken and hated, with no one passing through, I will make you majestic forever, a joy from age to age.

You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breasts of kings; and you shall know that I, the LORD, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.

Isaiah 60:8-16 (NRSV)

How is one to assimilate the breadth of expression with regard to nations and kings that is gathered into this single chapter?

An interpretation that is consonant with the wider picture in the Vision of Isaiah of the peoples’ destiny and at the same time accomplishes an attentive reading of chapter sixty would seem to produce the follow conclusion: Zion’s restoration will turn the tables on the historic power relationships that have exalted some nations over Israel/Jacob. Some nations will welcome this revolution. Some will reject it. The preponderance of expression addresses the former group and suggests they will undertake their new role vis-à-vis Zion with some combination of anticipation, fulfillment, and tenderness. This vision is consonant with the Vision of Visions in Isaiah 2.1-5, though its imagery represents an alternative expression of that succinct description of the prophet’s imagined future.

Isaiah 60 is therefore a hopeful declaration for all peoples except those (few?) who will resolutely resist the divine purpose it propounds.

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Clipping: Faust and Christ

Posted in Clippings, nations, tagged , on April 3, 2018| Leave a Comment »

The alt-right seeks an account of what we are meant to be and serve as a people, invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds. It is not alone; identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging. But race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots. Nation, however, is biblical. In the Book of Acts, St. Paul tells his Gentile listeners, ‘God has made all the nations [ethnos].’ The Bible speaks often of God’s creation, judgment, and redemption of the nations. In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, yet God calls us into his life not only as individuals but as members of communities for which we are responsible.

Today there are bespoke theologies for most every identity in American life. Meanwhile, we lack a compelling civic theology for the twenty-first century—a theology of the nation, not for the nation. In its absence the alt-right will continue to grow. Young men like Dan need the gospel. But they also need an account of nationhood that teaches them about their past, without making them fear the future; an account of civic life that opens them to transcendence, rather than closing them to their neighbors. In his last book, Memory and Identity, John Paul II reflected movingly on the Christian meaning of our earthly homelands. He denied that Christians have no ‘native land’ in this life and defended the nation as a natural community. Against those seeking a post-national world, he urged Western nations to preserve their languages, histories, and religious traditions. The ‘spiritual  self-defense’ of our homelands, he wrote, is part of our moral obligation, commanded by God, to honor our fathers and mothers.

A nation will become an idol, however, if its cultural inheritance is not oriented toward, and inwardly transformed by, a divine inheritance. ‘The inheritance we received from Christ,’ the late pope argued, ‘orients the patrimony of human native lands and cultures towards an eternal home land.’ The church midwifed many nations into existence, and it can renew their cultures still. For now it must suffice to say the alt-right cannot. It speaks of tradition, while transmitting no traditions. It guards a false patrimony, while destroying real ones. Its mistake is fundamental and tragic. Race offers no inheritance, and its mere preservation reflects no human achievement. Our stories, art, music, institutions, and religious traditions—unlike race—are transmitted only through special efforts of human intelligence and love. They are a bequest of the spirit, not blood.

The alt-right speaks a seductive language. Where liberalism offers security and comfort, the alt-right promises sacrifice and conflict. Although the struggle its intellectuals and activists envision is imaginary, it does not matter: Theirs is a sounder view of human needs. Human beings desire more than small pleasures in the routines of life. We also seek great challenges in the face of d death. And here Christianity speaks another, more necessary, and no less demanding language. ‘When Christ calls a man,’ wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘he bids him come and die,’ and in dying, to receive true life. For Christians, the problem with Faustian man is not the vaunting heroism of his aims. It is the pitiable smallness of his goals. We are not meant to merely aspire to the infinite. We are called to participate in it—to be, in a word, deified. Faust could not overcome death. Through Christ, Christians already have.

— Matthew Rose, ‘The Anti-Christian Alt-Right’ in First Things (March 2018)

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