Isaiah’s Issue
Hear , O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the LORD has spoken. Sons I have nurtured and raised but they rebelled against Me. Isaiah 1:2 Robert Alter
Nurtured and raised – Let’s look at Isaiah. For centuries believers have turned to the prophecies of the son of Amoz for understanding and inspiration: understanding God’s claim on human life and inspiration in the fact that God forgives grievous rebellion. But these emotional comforts might well be disturbed if we approach Isaiah from a scholarly point of view. Robert Alter warns us: “The Book of Isaiah may well be the greatest challenge that modern readers will find in the biblical corpus to their notions of what constitutes a book.”[1]
Why would he write such a thing? He answers in the next paragraph:
“The bewildering fact is that the prophecies of Isaiah son of Amoz have been editorially mingled with a welter of prophecies by other hands and from later periods. In an era millennia before printing and the concept of authorial claim to texts, all the books of the Bible are open-ended affairs, scrolls in which could be inserted, whether for ideological purposes or simply through editorial predilection, writings that came from other sources . . .”[2]
So, it appears that Isaiah isn’t the author of all this material. In fact, we have no idea who or why parts were added to the original prophecy of Isaiah. Does this make you uncomfortable? Are you a victim of “the book,” that is, the false belief that the Bible was always a construction of defined texts put together from cover to cover just the way we have it today? Oh, you might reply, “Well, of course it wasn’t a book. It was scrolls.” But then your picture of “scrolls” might just be the same idea of continuous pages from beginning to end all rolled together—and that is still a modern view of ancient material.
We know that most believing communities had only parts of what we now call “the Bible” until after the Babylonian captivity. We also know that as late at the 4th Century C.E. there were debates among believers about what “books” were included in the scared canon. But today we usually ignore all this historical data and act as if the “Bible” that we have was the same Bible ancient believers had. Not so. Fortunately, redaction, addition, and editing usually doesn’t change God’s message. Here, at the opening of this collection called Isaiah, we find the expression of God’s attitude toward us. Distress, disappointment, and dismay. We need to appreciate this background before we encounter those great passages about forgiveness.
It starts with a cry for the Creation itself to witness the tragic outcome of human self-will. Men don’t or won’t listen, but the earth and the heavens will. God nurtured and raised with the intention of producing sons, those like Him in image and purpose. gādal (to raise up, to grow up) and rûm (to be high, to rise up) are the verbs God has in mind. Unlike pagan deities, God never intended humanity to be His slaves. He intended human beings to be His vice-regents, His hands and feet in creation, and to alter the course of the universe in the process. Such a lofty goal failed to inspire obedience and Man’s infernal obsession with self propelled him away from God’s divine-human syncopation. Nothing grieves God more.
At the beginning of this collection of prophecy, we must first encounter the despairing God, the God who has no comforter and whose only listener is the heavens and the earth. Only then can we understand the rest of this great “book.” Of course, our lives are but a miniature of the cosmic design. God’s despair rests on each of us. “I had such great things planned for you,” He says. Are we listening?
Topical Index: nurture, raise up, gādal, rûm, despair, design, book, Isaiah 1:2
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible Volume 2 Prophets, p. 617.
[2] Ibid.
