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Listen up!: Isaiah 51

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah’s fifty-first chapter weaves together a refreshingly positive description of its audience with an insistent summons to pay attention. Indeed, the chapter begins in just this fashion, stating its direction from the very outset. In the following extracts from chapter 51, I will italicize the verbal summons and emphasize the addressee descriptions in bold.

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the LORD. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you…

Isaiah 51.1-2a (NRSV)

Then just a few verses later:

Listen to me, my people, and give heed to me, my nation...

Isaiah 51.4a (NRSV)

The third summons elides the expected vocative descriptors:

Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath…

Isaiah 51.6a (NRSV)

Yet the addressee/vocative descriptors soon resume:

Listen to me, you who know righteousness, you people who have my teaching in your hearts; do not fear the reproach of others, and do not be dismayed when they revile you.

Isaiah 51.7 NRSV)

After an interlude where it is ‘the arm of the Lord’ rather than the people that is addressed imperativally, the established pattern is taken up again:

Rouse yourself, rouse yourself! Stand up, O Jerusalem…

Isaiah 51.17a (NRSV)

It is important to observe that the pattern continues well into chapter 52. Its last appearance in the chapter before us initiates a trend towards recognizing the addressees’ trauma and vulnerability, which flows meaningfully toward the famous ‘fourth servant song’, where YHWH’s servant does in fact fall wounded under YHWH’s own blow.

Therefore hear this, you who are wounded, who are drunk, but not with wine…

Isaiah 51.21 (NRSV)

When literature erects structural markers as evident as these, any valid reading must take them into account and bow to their programmatic purpose. The evidence highlighted above invites the reader to contemplate the addressees as the favored people of YHWH, though perhaps more specifically a subsection of that people that has been particularly attentive to instruction and peculiarly concerned with YHWH’s ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice’. Their rescue from calamity is imminent. Though they hope to see it, trepidation in the face of impediments to their redemption may restrain them from bold participation, this against the current of ‘my Torah’ (51.7) which the people have in their hearts. This description is gleaned from the descriptors I highlighted above in bold.

The italicised portions, for their part, seem in the aggregate to summon the people to consider the ancient and enduring purpose of YHWH to bless them. They are urged to interpret their recent calamity not as the elimination of that divine purpose but rather as an especially painful but temporary interruption that will soon be superseded by the resumption of the promise.

If this reading adequately comprehends the text’s structure, then one might see chapter 51 (continuing into chapter 52) as a prophetic broadside against what we moderns call ‘recency bias’. From the soul of the Isaianic vision emerges the claim that YHWH’s purpose has always been to bless, that he has not turned permanently against his people, and that faith in the ancient teaching must now assume the posture of courage.

On the basis of this understanding, the even more vibrant summons that await the reader in chapter 52 find their grounded meaning.

Awake, awake, put on your strength, O Zion! Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; for the uncircumcised and the unclean shall enter you no more.

 Shake yourself from the dust, rise up, O captive Jerusalem; loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter Zion!

Isaiah 52.1-2 (NRSV)

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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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tender no more: Isaiah 47

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on December 21, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The trope ‘daughter (of) Zion’ and others that share the same structure are all but a signature mark of the Isaianic tradition. The parentheses around ‘of’ are required by the fact that ‘daughter’ (בת) appears in the construct state, a phenomenon that commonly links one noun into a possessive relationship with an immediately following noun.

So, if we are to take our cues from ordinary prose usage, בת ציון would mean ‘Zion’s daughter’ or ‘the daughter of Zion’. The construction is used as well with Gallim, Tarshish, Sidon, Babylon, and of course Jerusalem.

Scholars have lingered over the precise meaning we should ascribe to the expression. In my view, the notion of the ‘appositional genitive’ is the most persuasive. This understanding eschews the notion of possession, which places both בת and the subsequent name of a people or place on the same plane. The result is helpfully describe in a recent work on Lamentations in this way:

As an appositional genitive, the phrasing would mean that Zion as a type of daughter is respected and dear, which yields a sense that is more or less equivalent to the metaphorical sense for which Magnar Kartveit has recently argued … In such usage, the poet depicts the city as a vulnerable and devastated young woman, thus heightening once again the pathos of the poetry. Its use intends to evoke emotion rather than description … A translation more along the lines of ’tender or dearest Jerusalem/Zion’, then captures well the vulnerability and defencelessness of the city.

Jill Middlemas, Lamentations: an introduction and study guide. T&T Clark (2021), 27-28.

In the passage before us, it is not Daughter Zion but rather Daughter Babylon/Chaldea that arrests our gaze.

Come down and sit in the dust, virgin daughter Babylon (בתולת בת־בבל)! Sit on the ground without a throne, daughter Chaldea (בת־כשדים)! For you shall no more be called tender and delicate.

Take the millstones and grind meal, remove your veil, strip off your robe, uncover your legs, pass through the rivers.

Your nakedness shall be uncovered, and your shame shall be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will spare no one.

Our Redeemer—the LORD of hosts is his name— is the Holy One of Israel.  

Sit in silence, and go into darkness, daughter Chaldea (בת־כשדים)! For you shall no more be called the mistress of kingdoms (גברת ממלכות).

I was angry with my people, I profaned my heritage; I gave them into your hand, you showed them no mercy; on the aged you made your yoke exceedingly heavy.

You said, ‘I shall be mistress forever (גברת עד),’ so that you did not lay these things to heart or remember their end.

Isaiah 47.1-7 (NRSV, emphasis and interpolated Hebrew added)

A number of details require scrutiny. First, the clustering of ‘daughter of…’ instances is not precisely unprecedented, but it does not fail to be remarkable. Additionally, the first ‘daughter of…’ phrase in verse 1 adds the descriptor ‘virgin’, which produces NRSV’s ‘virgin daughter Babylon’. This addition—again, not unprecedented in the Isaiah scroll—appears to underscore the motif of tenderness, innocence, and vulnerability.

Second, the succession of three instances of ‘(virgin) daughter (Babylon/Chaldea)’ with two of ‘mistress’ (גברת) places both female metaphors in a context where each can only be interpreted in the light of the whole. If, as I have suggested, the daughter metaphor denotes a people’s youth and vulnerability, the deployment of ‘mistress’ depicts the same people’s haughty maturity. The juxtaposition of the two invites the reader to imagine Babylon/Chaldea across the range of her feminine trajectory from a sharply ironic angle. In both cases, the woman in question shall be utterly humiliated.

Third, the tone—as I have intimated just above—is savagely ironic. The entire oracle is an artifact of te vengeance literature. The prophet appears to speak of empathy for a young, vulnerable, tender girl, on the one hand, and admiration for a regal woman, on the other. In fact, the prophet witholds both—empathy and admiration—in the interest of demeaning the Babylonian captor that has been Israel’s tormentor.

In point of fact, Babylon/Chaldea has never in Israel’s experience been tender or vulnerable. Nor has the imperium been the object of admiration, though fear has manifestly been the posture of Judah’s heart as the Babylonian shadow has crept closer. As the ‘mistress of kingdoms’ (גברת ממלכות) and the ‘mistress forever’ (גברת עד, overriding with many the Masoretic accentuation and syntax), Babylon in the prophet’s view is powerful and long-lived only in appearance. In fact, in the face of YHWH’s rage, the empire will soon be brought low. Her inability to respond to Judah’s plight with mercy and her cruelty towards Judah’s most vulnerable (v. 6)—even though it was YHWH who delivered Judah into her hands—has assured her eventual disgrace.

Unaware of her impending doom (v. 7), Lady Babylon for the moment rides high. But not for long. The particularly acid humor of the powerless surges to flood tide in this text, a perspective that claims to know more than appearances claim. If YHWH is indeed ‘our Redeemer’, ‘the Lord of Hosts’, ‘the Holy One of Israel’, (v. 4)—so the prophet exhorts Judah to consider—things could hardly be otherwise. Imperial pretension shall not stand.

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incomparable: Isaiah 45

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on December 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Biblical monotheism pivots on the concept of incomparability.

Its spokespersons seem uninterested in emptying the skies of other beings, indeed we are at points allowed a glimpse of quite populated skies. But none of whoever else may exist ‘out there’ is to be compared with YHWH. He is unique. He is incomparable. He is the only one of his kind.

The book of Isaiah grows quite fierce about the matter.

I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. I arm you, though you do not know me, so that they may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is no one besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other.

 I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.

Isaiah 45.5-7 (NRSV, emphasis added)

YHWH is here addressing Cyrus, the pagan king whom he has taken by the arm as his closest ally. Cyrus is not allowed fully into YHWH’s counsel, indeed he appears largely ignorant of the Big Thing of which he has become a protagonist.

But the prophet is jealous that YHWH’s incomparability be acknowledged from one horizon to the other. This is biblical monotheism at its most assertive. It is common to Isaiah but rather consistent across the biblical text. YHWH’s uniqueness is not merely an abstract point that people who worry about such things might care to ponder. It is instead a reality that must be, will be, universally acknowledged.

I have included in the above quotation the words that are presented to us as the chapter’s seventh verse.

I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.

Isaiah 45.7

It would be easy to read this as a new thought that a piecemeal text has pushed up against an earlier idea with no necessary connection between the two. However, it would be unlike the book of Isaiah to engage in such arbitrariness.

It seems more likely that the kind of monotheism that is here claimed on behalf of reality itself relieves Israel of looking for other powers, the existence of whom might explain the bad stuff that the people have experienced. Or if not relieve, then oblige.

If YHWH in his sovereign mastery over creation and history is unique and incomparable, then one had better seek causality in him rather than in several. Such a totalistic monotheism quite frankly creates philosophical, even ethical dilemmas, that will not be evaded.

But from the prophet’s perspective, at leave one knows where one must go for answers.

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blind witnesses: Isaiah 43

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

There is perhaps no passage in all the Bible that appreciates Jacob/Israel more intensely than Isaiah’s forty-third chapter.

Jacob/Israel is the work of YHWH’s creating hands. She is the object of his deeply felt assurances that she need not fear. She is protected by him through flood and fire. YHWH gives nations as ransom to bring Jacob/Israel home. She is precious, honored, and beloved in YHWH’s sight. The nation is called by his name, comprised of his very sons, his very daughters. Jacob/Israel is YHWH’s servant.

Jacob/Israel are also witnesses to YHWH’s nature and purpose. Yet she is blind. It is in this ironic antithesis that one of this brilliant chapter’s most beguiling textures is to be felt.

Witnesses see things and then report what they have seen. Witnesses, very nearly by definition, can see. One might scarcely imagine that a blind individual might hear the noises of a crime and report to the authorities what she has heard. But this would be an exception to assumptions and would require comment and explanation to bring it into ordinary imagination. In any case, we shall observe that Jacob/Israel is both blind and deaf, though they have (unseeing) eyes and (unhearing) ears.

In this chapter, we have a strange thing: blind and deaf witnesses.

The ancient synagogue readings, attested in our Masoretic text by paragraph markers פ and ס, do not separate verses 1-7 from verses 8-10. In this reading tradition, the profoundly promissory note that rings out in 1-7 is the foundation for the divine summons that is issued in verses 8-10.

Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes, who are deaf, yet have ears!

Let all the nations gather together, and let the peoples assemble. Who among them declared this, and foretold to us the former things? Let them bring their witnesses to justify them, and let them hear and say, ‘It is true.’

You are my witnesses, says the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.

Isaiah 43.8-10 (NRSV)

By my lights, the ‘people’ (עם) whom someone is summoned to bring forth in verse 8 is Jacob/Israel. Then the ‘nations’ (גוים) and ‘peoples’ (לאמים) in the subsequent verse are gentiles. In other words, verses 8 and 9 do not stand in synonymous parallelism. Rather the text is working its way forward across the human landscape, beginning with the erstwhile scattered children of Jacob/Israel and then coming to the nations, which are conveniently located for bringing sons and daughters home.

By my reading, the nations are invited to present witnesses who might account for YHWH’s unexpected and redemptive conduct, an offer tendered with the full assurance that the nations will come up empty. They have no witnesses. They lack understanding of YHWH’s creative-redemptive artistry. They do not fathom it and certainly cannot have predicted it.

By means of the emphatic plural pronoun at the beginning of verse ten (אתם / you), YHWH then presents his own witnesses, unpromising though they be.

You are my witnesses, says the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.

Isaiah 43.10 (NRSV, italics added)

These witnesses to YHWH’s uniqueness are the people of verse 8, none other than the scattered and now rescued sons and daughters of Israel. They are also YHWH’s chosen servant, a body of people who have been let in on YHWH’s otherwise undiscernible purpose to rescue his Israel and, in the mix, enlighten and welcome the nations.

Yet we learned back in verse 8 that this people is blind and deaf.

If one is justified in linking verses 8 and 10 so that Israel/Jacob, the blind and deaf people, and YHWH’s servant are one and the same—I feel confident that this reading is suggested by the text itself—then the irony of blind and deaf witnesses comes to the fore.

In time, we shall become more familiar with YHWH’s servant, a figure who is deeply compromised—one might even say impaired—both by willful incapacity to see and hear and by YHWH’s own striking. One can hardly imagine a more enigmatic persona.

In this passage, YHWH’s witnesses are his servant, now brought into awareness of his redemptive purpose for them with the hint that they had reason to suspect it aforetime. To whom do they testify? It would seem to the watching and listening nations that have participated in—indeed facilitated—their return home.

If in the Isaianic vision, the redemptive purpose of YHWH remains constant, its outworking in space, time, and human history is unfailingly impossible to anticipate. There are hints, of which Jacob/Israel is the curator and steward. But until events take their turn, no more than that.

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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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where power lies: Isaiah 31

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , on December 14, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Egypt incarnates cruel irony across the biblical witness.

On the one hand, Egypt is the face, the strong arms that bound the bodies of Jacob’s children to the Hebrews’ iconic slavery. Moses, the Hebrew Bible’s great liberator, freed his people from Egypt after deconstructing his identity as one of Egypt’s princes on the morning he ambled out from the palace grounds and recognized for the first time his suffering Hebrew brothers. Moses then becomes Egypt’s hunted betrayer, the very Pharoah’s long-form adversary when he screws up his courage and allows his self-deprecating shadow to fall on the stones that lay before the Egyptian throne.

Yet these are brute facts, not ironic nuance.

The irony comes in when Egypt becomes the place to flee both famine and invading armies. The oppressor becomes refuge, yet always at a cost. The Isaianic tradition is acutely aware of that price.

Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely (ישענו) on horses, who trust (ויבטחו) in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look (ולא שעו) to the Holy One of Israel or consult (לא דרשו) the LORD!

Yet he too is wise and brings disaster; he does not call back his words, but will rise against the house of the evildoers, and against the helpers of those who work iniquity.

The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit. When the LORD stretches out his hand, the helper will stumble, and the one helped will fall, and they will all perish together.

Isaiah 31:1-3 (NRSV)

Within the trajectory of this prophetic witness, reliance upon Egypt is time and again framed as rejection of YHWH. You can have Egypt’s protection or YHWH’s, but you cannot have both. This is the binary choice in which we are schooled.

One wonders why. Could Egyptian protection against, say, invading Assyrians not be YHWH’s means of sheltering his threatend Hebrews?

Yet Isaiah’s harsh assessment of the Egyptian temptation will not relent. The four italicized verbal expressions and the corresponding Hebrew clauses in the text quoted above deploy four words that are very important to the Isaianic witness as manifestations the human side of the Israel-YHWH relationship: to lean, to trust, to look, to seek or consult. This bit of ironic artistry drives home the mutual exclusivity of trust in Egypt, on the one hand, and trust in YHWH on the other.

The final italicized clause drives home the point.

The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit.

Isaiah 31.3

The prophet’s intuition insists, for reasons it considers obvious or for other reasons it will not not disclose, that to seek refuge in Egypt is to deify the imperium.

The Isaianic version of what has been called the prophet’s ‘quietism’ in the face of existential threat to the nation is of a muscular, either-or, decision-making kind. The prophet knows—and he claims that YHWH does too—that a convenient appeal to means in a moment when everything is at stake is a return to idolatry.

To analyze the claim in this way is not to understand why it must be so. No wonder the people clamored that the prophet should speak to us smoother things than these.

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Ariel, lion of God: Isaiah 29

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on December 13, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The book called Isaiah is nothing if not disjointed. Yet it is the particular genius of this long scroll that its disjointed nature does not reduce to incoherence. Somehow, at times as though a strong, thrashing swim against the current, Isaiah preserves coherence.

Ariel, or ‘Lion of God’, comes out of nowhere at the outset of Isaiah 29. We are not prepared for this lion’s sudden appearance. Many things about Ariel are unclear, but two will not be dismissed. First, Ariel is a city, ‘the city where David encamped’. Second, Ariel—which we may suspect at the outset is a poignant moniker for Jerusalem—is the object of both the ire and the salvation of YHWH.

Like Israel (ישראל = ‘he struggles with God’ or even ‘God struggles’), Ariel’s is a contested identity.

In the first pericope of chapter 29, as the Hebrew text’s ancient divisions would have it, Ariel meets YHWH’s enmity. In verse two…

Yet I (presumably YHWH) will distress Ariel, and there shall be mourning and lamentation, and (she) shall be to me like an Ariel.

Isaiah 29.2 (NRSV, slightly modified)

Here, God’s lion is stubborn, corralled, perhaps caged. She is a tragicomic figure, no match for YHWH’s might and yet indomitable in her own right.

In time, outside the bounds of this first pericope, Ariel will be rescued by YHWH from the nations that would besiege, ransack, and exterminate her. But Ariel does not yet know this, knows only the self-destructive energy of her leonine verve.

‘Ah, Ariel’, we might groan with the passage’s first words. You fight so long and so hard. You fight against your Maker, who shall in time become your Redeemer.

You are a complex and conflicted city, a lion’s strength and a heart too independent, too rebellious for its own good.

Just over the horizon lies the promise that YHWH will defend Ariel from those imperious nations bent on her dismemberment.

But not yet.

And so, recognizing ourselves in Ariel, in a moment of lucidity, we cry with the text’s opening words …

Ah, Ariel, Ariel…

Lion of God, doomed beast in a cage.

Your redemption draws nigh.

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Isaiah’s serpent: Isaiah 27

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , on December 12, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Readers of these reflections will be familiar with the employment of the serpent to represent personalized evil, not least because such a creature populates the earliest pages of the Hebrew Bible. In a section of the book of Isaiah that seems to stand on the shoulders of discrete ‘oracles against the nations’ in order to glimpse resistance to YHWH’s purpose at more cosmic level, the Isaiah scroll does the same.

Chapter 27 begins with an exceedingly brief oracle, which I quote here both in Hebrew and in English.

בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֡וּא יִפְקֹ֣ד יְהוָה֩ בְּחַרְב֨וֹ הַקָּשָׁ֜ה וְהַגְּדוֹלָ֣ה וְהַֽחֲזָקָ֗ה עַ֤ל לִוְיָתָן֙ נָחָ֣שׁ בָּרִ֔חַ וְעַל֙ לִוְיָתָ֔ן נָחָ֖שׁ עֲקַלָּת֑וֹן וְהָרַ֥ג אֶת־הַתַּנִּ֖ין אֲשֶׁ֥ר בַּיָּֽם׃ ס

On that day the LORD with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.

Isaiah 27:1 (BHS and NRSV)

The oracle begins with the familiar and non-specific glance toward an unspecified future: ביום ההוא // ֹon that day. But instead of the usual particulars about a specific national adversary, we find YHWH armed as a warrior attacking a snake.

One detects a curious three-part symmetry. YHWH’s sword is ‘his cruel and great and strong sword’. His doomed adversary is Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent … the dragon that is in the sea.’ It may be significant that it is not YHWH himself but rather YHWH’s sword that stands parallel to this enemy. Biblical monotheism is usually written in the cursive of incomparability, and incomparability itself can be declared bluntly or subtly.

I assume that twice-named Leviathan and התנִין (NRSV’s the dragon) are one and the same. YHWH here makes war with a principal adversary, not two.

It is the description of the creature that concerns me most: fleeing … twisting … in the sea.

Not a purveyor of arbitrary parallelism but rather a poetic work of subtle interplay, the book called Isaiah is likely saying something important about the nature of cosmic opposition to YHWH’s purpose, something that presses into the serpent metaphor in order to build upon its possibilities.

First, the serpent is ברח / fleeing. When our eyes, figuratively speaking, fall upon Leviathan, YHWH’s might has already landed in force. Second, the serpent is עקלתון / twisting. One might consider that the descriptor aims chiefly to build upon the fear-engendering movement of a snake. I think, however, that the adjective serves to connote that Leviathan the serpent is difficult to subdue. While such a reading may seem to stand in opposition to the three-part invincibility of YHWH’s sword, it could just as well serve as a touch of Isaianic realism about the nature of opposition to YHWH’s counsel, its tenacity and destructiveness more than evident throughout the oracles against the nations and this more ‘apocalyptic’ section that follows upon them.

Finally, we come to התנין / the dragon. This third of three adjectival clauses turns concretely positional or locative. Israelite cosmology famously assigns to the sea the resonance that is proper to a chaotic, threatening, virtually untamable entity. Here it becomes the dragon’s—and, as I have argued, Leviathan’s—home. If this serpent does not customarily live in the sea—an interpretation I think likely reflects the figure’s intention—he flees to it.

Regardless, YHWH’s sword will be the end of it. The verb in question is no longer the semantically open פקד, commonly in contexts like this one, to visit or to punish (so NRSV). Rather, it is הרג / to kill, an unambiguously lethal brand of punishment. Leviathan, we are told in this briefest of oracles, this fleeing, twisting serpent, shall ‘on that day’ be no more.

Then, if editorial sequencing is to be honored, we read of a vineyard like no other. Its attentive viticulturist has no anger. He almost has to cry out for an enemy to dare to present itself, such is the blooming peace of the place.

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the wonder and the counsel: Isaiah 25

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »

In one of the book of Isaiah’s most quoted exclamations, the sixth verse of chapter 9 announces the astonishing birth of a consequential child:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9.6 (ESV)

I have italicized the first of four ‘throne names’, as they are often understood to be, of this royally endowed child. The now very traditional ‘Wonderful Counselor’ represents פלא יועץ, a somewhat enigmatic descriptor that might more literally be rendered ‘a wonder of a counselor’ or even ‘a wonder, a counselor’. ‘Wonderful Counselor’ is not a bad translation, but my interest in making this clarification lies in the juxtaposition of the two Hebrew words, פלא (‘wonder) and יועץ (‘counselor’). A too fast reification of their meaning might us to overlook the supple play of the two words in Isaianic context. It might also be noted that, from an interpretative point of view, the choice of small or capital letters generally corresponds to the theological commitments of the translator(s).

Both words are meaningfully deployed in the first half of the book. With a curious tenacity, the two are repeatedly linked.

In the doxological eruption that begins in chapter 25 and is sustained for several chapters, the combination of wonder and counsel that is established by the linkage of the two words occurs with a certain intensity. This is likely done with programmatic intent, since the paired words appear in the section’s very first verse.

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

Isaiah 25.1 (ESV)

Then, with apparent reference to YHWH’s ‘strange work’ of Zion’s painful redemption, we find the combination once more.

This also comes from the LORD of hosts; he is wonderful in counsel (הפליא עצה) and excellent in wisdom.

Isaiah 28:29 (ESV)

Finally, the sequence is crowned by a verse where the absence of עצה is compensated by the rapid-fire reiteration of פלא.

The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote; so I will again do amazing things (להפליא) with this people, shocking and amazing (הפליא ופלא). The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.

Isaiah 29.13-14 (NRSV)

Any assessment of what I have been describing must take into account two features that cohabitate amidst a tension that is critical to the soul of the Isaianic burden. First, עצה (‘[to]) counsel’) as a verb and as a noun establishes that YHWH’s way with his Israel and his nations aligns with a determined and previously existing purpose. In this sense, YHWH’s purposeful counsel flows from his stable center. It is not chaotic and not—at least from a divine and therefore a prophetic point of view—serendipitous. One thinks here of the use of the verb קום, deployed in Isaiah to announce that human machinations against Zion and other aspects of YHWH’s purpose shall not stand. Such rustlings of rebellious hearts are doomed from the start, no matter impressions to the contrary, precisely because they contravene YHWH’s counsel or purpose.

Second, the outworking of the divine counsel/purpose regularly astonishes human beings, who have no automatic access to it. This is where פלא serves to underscore that the settled, unstoppable purpose of YHWH is a source of continual surprise to those who are caught up in its concretization. This is so particularly for Israel/Jacob, but hints of gentile ‘marveling’ or ‘wondering’ are not absent from the texts.

It is inconceivable to me that we should not read chapter nine’s ‘wonderful counselor’ in the light of this subsequent florescence of the word-pair and ancillary expressions that use just one of the two. The child that ‘has been born to us’ in chapter nine is not merely a particularly gifted advisor or empath, as English translations might lead one to conclude. Rather, he is an agent of the divine purpose, destined in the execution of YHWH’s counsel to surprise and astonish. This scion of the court of David’s house—as Isaiah 9 appears almost certainly to identify him—is drawn into both the premeditation and the redemption of YHWH in ways that make eventual framing of Mary’s son in his light an interesting interpretative move, even perhaps for those who do not share the shepherds’ doxological impulse as they assimilate the news of that baby’s birth (Luke 2.20). Even she, the third evangelist tells us, ‘treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart’ (Luke 2.19, ESV). Perhaps we are not wrong to wonder whether this new mother, though read into the divine purpose by way of angelic visitation, considered its unlikely realization in her own womb and now at her breast the most unimaginable of paths for the divine counsel to tread.

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