Don’t You Get It?
The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s stall. Israel did not know, my people did not pay heed. Isaiah 1:3 Robert Alter
Did not pay heed – Robert Alter’s translation captures the urgency of God’s warning. Most translations render bîn with the usual “understand” or “perceive,” but that isn’t strong enough. It’s not that Israel didn’t understand. They got the message. They just didn’t care! God’s frustration isn’t about their ignorance. It’s about their aggressive rejection. In Hebrew parlance, bîn isn’t fact-gathering. It’s application. If you don’t put God’s words to use, then you never understood them at all. The proof is in the doing. And if you once did, but now you don’t, well, that proves only that you are rebellious because you did know what God wanted you to do, but now you refuse to do it. The hammer doesn’t fall on the ignorant. It falls on the arrogant.
Alter provides another insight. “The verse first puts forth the general relation of beast to owner; the second verset . . . then focuses on the place of nurture connecting beast and master.”[1] From God’s perspective (is there any other?), He is the owner of all creation. That means He can do what He wants with what He creates and owns. But, amazingly, what He wants to do is to nurture, not use. The donkey’s stall is a place where the animal finds food and shelter. Even a donkey knows this. But not us. We have adopted a “use it or lose it” model, thinking—most terribly incorrectly—that the prime objective of “fruitful and multiply” meant “take and destroy.” Humanity’s history, as Heschel noted, is a nightmare. It is fundamentally and irrevocably opposed to God’s purposes and intentions. Could anything be more tragic?
Look around you. Wherever you see use without nurture, you’re witnessing idolatry, that is, the disruption of God’s purposes for self-aggrandizement. It doesn’t matter how small the act, nor how justifiable it might seem. God’s plan is nurture. We’re back to verse 2: gādal. Note the full scope of this Hebrew word: “The root is used for physical growth of people and other living things as well as for the increase of things tangible and intangible whether objects, sounds, feelings or authority.”[2] Here it is in the Piel stem, that is, a factual or declaring statement. In other words, the truth about things.
Why is this so important that we would spend a day looking at it? In the ancient world, the gods use men. They create them for the sole purpose of doing what they themselves do not want to do. Men are the sweepers, keepers, and toilet cleaners of the gods’ world. And women? Oh, they don’t even count. There are no ancient pagan mythologies about the creation of women. They are simply the property of men to be used as men wish. This, by the way, is why wedding ceremonies give the bride to the man (and in the past, for a bride price). But not so with YHVH. He turns the entire divine world upside down. He is the cleaner and keeper, the caretaker, nourisher, and provider. In a word, the ʿēzer, the same word used when God describes the role of the woman (Genesis 2:18). Nurture, not use. Is that your operating model?
Topical Index: gādal, nurture, ʿēzer, woman, use, bîn, understand, Isaiah 1:3
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible Volume 2 Prophets, p. 621.
[2] Smick, E. B. (1999). 315 גָּדַל. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 151). Chicago: Moody Press.
Emet, Skip.
It is the nature of man, since the fall by transgression against God, to understand and act upon his own self-reflected, self-conscious subjective self-orientation through responding to God by self-assertion. While the purpose of the law was an act of God’s protection and preservation, that the objective reality of his own being and nature might be made manifest in the fulness of the God-man, Jesus Christ, even now both Christians and Jews do not have the mind of Christ, but rather continue to respond in relation to God by subjective self-assertion.
Thereby, God is in himself set aside from the true worship and honor and glory that inherently belongs only to him as the object of such affections and is displaced by the subjective, self-reflected worship of the creature, as opposed to the Creator, through “the disruption of God’s purposes for self-aggrandizement.” This is the nature of idolatry, and apart from having a true union in Christ with the True Object and the True Reality of God’s being— being made manifest in Christ— through faith/belief/trust in the gracious Gift of God, who is Christ, man will always idolize himself, regardless of the form this idolatry takes… but particularly in its religious forms.
So it is that each one of us will give an account concerning himself. For it is written (as spoken by God himself) “As I live, says the LORD, every knee will bow to me , and every tongue will testify” to the praise of Yahweh, for I AM, and only in Yahweh “are righteousnes and strength.” “All of the hands will hang limp, and all of the knees will be wet with urine.”
“Therefore also God exalted him and graciously granted him the name above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven and of those on earth and of those under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”