I Just Can’t Imagine

How has the faithful town become a whore?  Filled with justice where righteousness did lodge,  and now—murderers.  Isaiah 1:21  Robert Alter

How – אֵיכָכָה (ʾêkākâh) how?  There doesn’t appear to be anything remarkable about this, right?  It’s just an interrogative.  After all God’s pleading with Israel, it doesn’t seem strange to ask how all this could have come about.

But wait!  ʾêkākâh typically begins a dirge or lamentation.  It’s not a simple request for explanation.  It’s the introduction of unimaginable exasperation at a funeral.  “How could this have happened?  She was so young, so full of life.  I just don’t understand.”  That kind of question doesn’t invite a coroner’s report.  In fact, it doesn’t invite an answer at all.  It’s an expression of emotional despair, not biological mortality.  Once again we discover that this passage isn’t about God’s declaration of judgment.  It’s about God’s broken heartedness.

What God can’t understand is how this redeemed, nurtured, loved nation of deliberately chosen people could end up the sexual rental property of false gods.   Who could have imagined such a thing?  Here was a group of ex-slaves formed into a nation by the Creator Himself, given the world’s most important purpose, to demonstrate God’s sovereignty and love to a needy world.  Here was a nation coddled, nourished, protected, educated, and cherished through all kinds of circumstances, held faithfully in the arms of the One True God for centuries.  Here was a community redeemed and restored time and again.  And yet . . . and yet, somehow, someway, it has prostituted itself to the degrading sexual lust of pagan deities.  In the end, it looks as if Hosea has failed to redeem Gomer.  She just can’t stay away from other sexual encounters.

Once faithful, says the text.  The Hebrew is ʾēmūnah, “trusting, fidelity, steadfastness.”  The quintessential term of Covenant commitment.  Despite the fact that even from the beginning there are ripples of disobedience and rumors of unfaithfulness, God sees Israel’s past as wonderfully accepted.  Once there was ʾēmūnah.  Not anymore.

Before we proceed with the implications of ʾēmūnah, let’s notice the second part of this verse.  As usual, Hebrew provides an amplification and explanation of the first thought with a second rephrasing.  Here the secondary words are mišpāṭ and ṣedeq, indicating there is more in the indictment than simply legal and ethical issues.  mišpāṭ is about total governance.  In this case, you can think of it as God’s assignment to Israel to bring order to the fallen world.  How?  By being His representative agents.  By being the holy nation and royal priesthood He intended.  And, according to the thought here, once upon a time Israel did just that.  But not now.

The second term is ṣedeq, the root of those who are righteous, the ṣedeqah.  God says that once Israel displayed such behavior.  We might have a hard time determining just when that was true, but apparently God thinks it was.  Basically this word means that at some time or times in the past Israel displayed conformity to the ethical and moral standards of the Torah.  You can forget the typical Christian assessment that Israel’s history was nothing but rebellion.  Isaiah says “No.”  But now those standards have fallen away.  Now Israel is possessed by a lust for intimacy with other gods.  She has become a whore (the language is quite graphic).  Gomer unleashed.

And yet . . . as you will recall, God redeems Gomer despite her unfaithfulness.  He renames her children with expressions of care and inclusion.   Now Isaiah’s prophecy suggests the same.  God has not given up.  The circumstances are dire, but the God of the Bible remains consistent.  That’s a very important clue for our understanding of ʾēmūnah.  ʾēmūnah is about the certainty of relationship, in particular, about the absolute confidence in God’s commitment.  We knew it once, perhaps a long time ago.  Once we bathed in the assurance of His love.  Perhaps today that feeling isn’t quite as strong.  Perhaps it has even faded near to black.  But our perception doesn’t diminish His commitment.  That’s the real hope here.

“Awaken!  Come back to Me.  How can you not?”

Topical Index: ʾēmūnah, mišpāṭ, ṣedeq, ʾêkākâh, how, Isaiah 1:21