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Posts Tagged ‘Servant’

everbody’s slave: Isaiah 49

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on January 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Deep into one of the densest of Isaiah’s ‘servant songs’, the second paragraph reveals that YHWH’s servant is everybody’s slave.

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, emphasis added)

The italicized phrase turns the structure of the now familiar ‘servant of YHWH’—עבד יהוה—in a direction that context has anticipated but vocabulary has thus far not reached. Jacob/Israel, who belongs to the Redeemer of Israel, Israel’s ‘Holy One’, is also the עבד משלים: the servant/slave of rulers.

Israel’s vocation is a heavy load to bear.

Clearly, this servitude is temporary, but context suggests that it is of longue durée. Kings and princes shall stand in honor and prostrate themselves in abjection. Eventually. But not just yet.

Meanwhile, the servant of YHWH is ‘deeply despised, abhorred by nations, the slave of rulers’.

Convenient as it is for the reader to seek her repose in Jacob’s destination, the text demands that we contemplate the long, anguished road that in due course finally arrives there.

No one would choose this vocation, this identity, this forlorn victimhood. It is assigned, not by some impersonal force of nature or history, but by YHWH, who claims to cherish his servant and in this same passage to comfort and have passion upon his people (v. 13).

No wonder, then, the servant’s protest in the paragraph that already brightens the horizon, or perhaps rather darkens it.

‘But Zion said, ‘The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.’

Isaiah 49.14 (NRSV)

Every interpretive maneuver that levels the paradox of this servant of YHWH and of rulers betrays it instead.

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substitution: Isaiah 61

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on December 28, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Following the splendidly unilateral YHWH-work of chapter 60, an anointed figure bursts exuberantly upon the scene in chapter 61. He is perhaps to be seen as a further adumbration of the servant-of-YHWH figure. He bears YHWH’s own spirit, the oil of anointing still fresh upon his forehead. His attention turns already toward those who need YHWH-work most.

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’S favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn…’

Isaiah 61.1-2a (NRSV)

It is a profoundly moving chapter, not least for those who see in Jesus of Nazareth a concretization of the profile of this rescuing agent of YHWH.

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

 ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

Luke 4.14-21 (NRSV)

In two places, though by different means in each, the prophet describes the anointed figure’s work in terms of substitution. Those who benefit from his YHWH-work will find their condition so materially transformed that they shall receive for each aspect of their disgrace its opposing counterpart. The figure, speaking in the first person, claims that he has come …

…to provide for those who mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

Isaiah 61.3a (NRSV, emphasis added)

Two distinct pinpoints of alliteration accentuate the delight expressed by the Hebrew text: פאר תחת אפר (‘a garland instead of ashes’) playfully inverts two of each noun’s three consonants and שמן ששון piles identical sibilants together.

The picture is one of radical transformation rather than mere amelioration of the plight of ‘those who mourn in Zion’. The substitution of one experience for another is both extreme and complete.

This type of polarity reverberates through the chapter. However in one other moment it approaches the concreteness that I have sketched out for the three oppositional pairs in verse 3.

Because their shame was double, and dishonor was proclaimed as their lot, therefore they shall possess a double portion; everlasting joy shall be theirs.

Isaiah 61.7 (NRSV)

NRSV’s translation obscures a fresh use of תחת (‘instead of’), the preposition that separates each experience from its opposite in verse 3. This prepares the reader to expect further oppositional pairing. It does indeed occur, as I read the verse, though this time more subtly. The word משנה appears in both halves of verse 7, possibly with a play upon its alternative meanings: (a) a double quota and (b) the corresponding counterpart.

‘Their shame was double (משנה)…’ we read, this affirmation of a copious burden of shame fortified by the immediately following claim that ‘dishonor was proclaimed (or ‘sung out’) as their lot’. Then, in the second half of the verse, we learn that ‘they shall possess a double portion (משנה)’, this claim again strengthened by the supportive but differently configured phrase ‘everlasting joy shall be theirs’. (Curiously, NRSV does not translate בארצם, which would normally be glossed by ‘in their land’.)

It seems to me that 7b accentuates first one meaning of משנה to depict the outsized shame or double portion of shame that Zion’s mourners have suffered. Then the second meaning of the same word underscores that their eventual, everlasting joy shall be every bit as extravagant. The latter shall displace and substitute for the former.

So does the prophetic text in one of its most lyrical moments reverse the fate of its protagonists. YHWH’s anointed and spirit-endowed agent shall accomplish, we who know of Zion’s mourning are encouraged to believe, complete and total transformation.

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the elevation of YHWH’s servant (Isaiah 52 and 53)

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on December 24, 2023| Leave a Comment »

It is too easy from a comfortably remote position to criticize the versification of the Hebrew Bible that is a legacy of Middle Ages scholarship. Usually, close inspection throws up considerations that explain the decisions that were made, even when they do not entirely justify them.

Still, the bifurcation of the fourth ‘servant song’ and its collocation across two chapters (Isaiah 52.13—53.12) is an indefensible tragedy. The piece simply must be read as a unity.

When one does so—happily, the editors of the NRSV and other modern Bibles encourage the reader in this direction—a number of high-level observations become possible. I deal with just one of them in this moment.

The opening line is breathtaking in its identification of YHWH’s servant with one of the key components of YHWH-elevating vocabulary in Isaiah.

הנה ישכיל עבדי ירום ונשא וגבהּ מאד
See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.

Isaiah 52.13 (NRSV, emphasis added)

In the light of the trauma that YHWH’s servant endures in the subsequent verses, it was perhaps necessary to clarify from the outset that the adventure ends well. Nevertheless, the terms of the exaltation represent a stunning application of Isaianic YHWH descriptors to the servant himself.

I refer here to ירום ונשא (‘he shall be exalted and lifted up’). Apart from ‘the Holy One of Israel’, the language of רם ונשא is the Isaiah tradition’s preferred language for specifying YHWH’s incomparability. The two words are applied to YHWH’s throne in what I consider to be programmatic fashion in the generative vision at 6.1. After dozens of instances in which the two terms (and even more often, one or the other) is artfully maneuvered, רם ונשא becomes something very near to an alternative name for YHWH himself.

For thus says the high and lofty one (כי כה אמר רם ונשא) who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite.

Isaiah 57.15 (NRSV, emphasis and interpolated Hebrew text added)

The climactic and most famous fourth servant song—a designation that is unfortunate chiefly for its marginalization of servant motifs that fall outside of their arbitrarily drawn lines—thus declares in its opening syllables a remarkable elevation of the servant. It seems to me best to see this as an inclusion of YHWH’s servant within the counsel or purpose (עצה) of YHWH himself.

The suffering of the servant is then made all the more astonishing, not least his unenviable plight of being crushed by YHWH himself, because it sits so uncomfortably alongside the opening declaration that YHWH’s servant occupies YHWH-like conceptual altitudes and acquires via an eventual elevation YHWH-like majesty (if this is how the yiqtol + v-qatal + v-qatal sequence in 52.12 imply).

No wonder, then, the enduring fascination across religious boundaries of this irrepressibly evocative poem.

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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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the unexpected: Isaiah 53

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on October 24, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The famous Fourth Servant Song (Isaiah 52.13-53.12) is peppered with three rhetorical questions. In combination, they forcefully present the entirely unanticipated phenomenon that is the ‘Servant of YHWH’. Because the Song insistently personifies and individualizes the Servant figure, which has up to this point been clearly identified as Jacob/Israel, I will use the pronoun ‘he’ to represent the Servant in this context.

Although it is not the initial verse of the Song per se, the first verse of chapter 53 looses two of the three rhetorical questions to which I have referred.

Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

Isaiah 53:1 (NRSV)

This reflective duo accomplishes two objectives. First, it establishes the unanticipated nature of the Servant’s person and/or project. Curiously, the Servant’s identify is not the only conundrum presented in this song. That noteworthy ambiguity is complemented by the identity of the first-person plural protagonists represented here by we?

And then, the second of the two questions launched here appears to identify the Servant and/or his career with ‘the arm of the Lord’. There are other ways of reading the relationship between YHWH’s arm and the Servant himself, but this one is in my judgement the most coherent of the available options.

Somehow, the awful, YHWH-imposed suffering of the Servant seems to represent YHWH’s own powerful engagement with Jacob/Israel and perhaps even of the startled ‘kings’ and ‘nations’ of 52.15. This is perhaps paradox in its deepest form.

Verse 8 then serves up the third of the aforementioned rhetorical questions:

By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.

Isaiah 53:8 (NRSV, emphasis added)

NRSV’s reference to ‘his future’ is rather speculative. The Hebrew text does not specify an object for the verb to imagine/consider (Hebrew polel, שיח), leaving the particle כי that follows immediately to be rendered either as providing the content of the referenced ‘imagining’ or as the beginning of an explanation of the strangeness of the Servant’s circumstances. The English Standard Version provides an example of the former approach:

By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?

Isaiah 53:8 (ESV, emphasis added)

The New King James Bible exemplifies the latter interpretation:

He was taken from prison and from judgment, And who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.

Isaiah 53:8 (NKJV, emphasis added)

By any reconfiguration of the syntax, the Fourth Servant Song affirms that YHWH accomplishes in the Servant a forceful and even militant achievement. At the same time, the Song suggests that the Servant embodies no foreseeable tactic on the part of YHWH himself. He is a complete and total, indeed a jaw-dropping surprise.

No one saw this coming, this battered and crushed survivor. This bearer of others’ guilt. This puzzling, redeeming Servant. This victim and accomplisher of YHWH’s purpose.

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servants and a division: Isaiah 65

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The stirring presentation of the Servant of YHWH (עבד יהוה) in the famous Fourth Servant Song (52.13-53.12) comprises the most intense and personified individualization of the Servant motif that is to be encountered in this long book. It is not difficult to see why messianic interpretation of the passage has been considered such a natural interpretation and has persisted among Christian readings of the book of Isaiah since earliest times.

What is less obvious in the book’s stewardship of the servant motif is the immediate pluralization of the metaphor that ensues. Already, 54.17 can claim the following on behalf of plural servants of YHWH (עבדי יהוה), naming it ‘their vindication from me (YHWH)’ in a manner that may well link the passage to the famous Servant’s experience in the Fourth Song:

No weapon that is fashioned against you shall prosper, and you shall confute every tongue that rises against you in judgment. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD and their vindication from me, says the LORD.

Isaiah 54:17 (NRSV)

Isaiah 56:6 offers a passing glance, though no less poignant for its brevity, at ‘foreigners’ whose love for YHWH’s name makes them welcomed servants of his alongside ‘eunuchs’ who in return for similar fealty will be granted ‘a monument and a name better than sons and daughters’ (56:5). In 63.17, a plea that the heat of divine judgment might soon cool begs YHWH to ‘(t)urn back for the sake of your servants, for the sake of the tribes that are your heritage’.

Each of these pluralizes the servant in a manner that hearkens back to the collective singular represented by ‘my servant Jacob’ prior to the Fourth Song’s intense individualization of the servant metaphor.

Now, in chapter 65, we encounter a new development. In the face of persistent idolatry on the part of practitioners of aberrant cult who appear to be members of the Community of the Return, YHWH laments the agile love that he has extended to them, unrequited. The result is a division of YHWH’s erstwhile people into a population whose unrelenting provocation of him will finally exhaust his patience, on the one hand, and a population of ‘servants’ who now become the recipients of his restorative mercies, on the other.

The chapter’s first seven verses profile the first of these two increasingly differentiated populations:

I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that did not call on my name.

I held out my hands all day long to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices; a people who provoke me to my face continually, sacrificing in gardens and offering incense on bricks; who sit inside tombs, and spend the night in secret places; who eat swine’s flesh, with broth of abominable things in their vessels; who say, ‘Keep to yourself, do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.’ These are a smoke in my nostrils, a fire that burns all day long.

 See, it is written before me: I will not keep silent, but I will repay; I will indeed repay into their laps their iniquities and their ancestors’ iniquities together, says the LORD; because they offered incense on the mountains and reviled me on the hills, I will measure into their laps full payment for their actions.

Isaiah 65:1-7 (NRSV)

It is important to observe that such a denunciation might well lead into the narrative of a failed restoration project and a severe judgement of the people in toto. Yet this is manifestly not what follows. Instead the passage pivots resolutely towards the existence of an obedient population of ‘servants’ in a fashion that binds the servant motif to the erstwhile theme of a remnant.

A subsequent oracle beginning at verse 8 drives the contrast between this freshly recruited band of ‘my servants’ and the doomed population from which they have been brought forth (‘from Jacob … from Judah’, v. 9) as deeply as can be imagined.

Thus says the LORD: As the wine is found in the cluster, and they say, ‘Do not destroy it, for there is a blessing in it,’ so I will do for my servants’ sake, and not destroy them all. I will bring forth descendants from Jacob, and from Judah inheritors of my mountains; my chosen shall inherit it, and my servants shall settle there.

Sharon shall become a pasture for flocks, and the Valley of Achor a place for herds to lie down, for my people who have sought me.

But you who forsake the LORD, who forget my holy mountain, who set a table for Fortune and fill cups of mixed wine for Destiny;

 I will destine you to the sword, and all of you shall bow down to the slaughter; because, when I called, you did not answer, when I spoke, you did not listen, but you did what was evil in my sight, and chose what I did not delight in.

Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: My servants shall eat, but you shall be hungry; my servants shall drink, but you shall be thirsty; my servants shall rejoice, but you shall be put to shame; my servants shall sing for gladness of heart, but you shall cry out for pain of heart, and shall wail for anguish of spirit.

You shall leave your name to my chosen to use as a curse, and the Lord GOD will put you to death; but to his servants he will give a different name.

Then whoever invokes a blessing in the land shall bless by the God of faithfulness, and whoever takes an oath in the land shall swear by the God of faithfulness; because the former troubles are forgotten and are hidden from my sight.

Isaiah 65:8-16 (NRSV)

It is rather arbitrary to pause consideration of this motif without venturing into the explanatory (כי־הנני בורא…) oracle that begins at verse 17. Yet its entirely new cluster of creational imagery perhaps justifies one in doing so here, if momentarily.

If we take stock of how this chapter and its suggestive precursors (54.17, 56.6, 63.17) have begun to develop the Servant motif after its white-hot personalization and individualization in the Fourth Song, we will observe the return—if this is not too tendentious a term—to a collective identity. However, this newly named community of servants is no longer merely ‘Jacob’ or ‘Israel’. Rather, these servants comprise an obedient population within a divinely threatened nation, now become a kind of stay on YHWH’s hand, which might otherwise have struck the nation hard in response to its provocative defiance.

In the unfolding Isaianic drama of YHWH’s servant(s), the future now lies with this new collective, bearers of a new and genuine penchant for both obedience and gratitude. The former troubles forgotten to both YHWH and humankind, this community that bears an as yet unrevealed ‘different name’.

One senses that the Isaianic trajectory one struggles to follow, though not without steadily crystallizing instruction, has still more to declare.

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a most stubborn stump: Isaiah 53

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on August 24, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Arguably, the famous ‘parting of the ways’ between synagogue and church—between those Jewish communities that did not see in Jesus of Nazareth a reason for altering the evolving trajectory of Israel and those who saw it as that and more—can be mapped over a handful of biblical texts. If so, then the famous Servant Song that is Isaiah 53 (more precisely, 52.13-53.12) must figure prominently among its peers in such a collection.

Yet our too fast and our contextually inattentive readings of this text blind us to veiled allusions and subdued connections with other Isaianic texts.

Take, for example, the Song’s brief survey of the Servant’s unpromising origins in 53.2. Though not the beginning of the poem, it is the first reversion to incipience after an opening series of three verses (52.13-15) that capture midpoints and endings as a kind of orientational prelude.

(more…)

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