Fashion-ista

Moreover, the Lord said, “Because the daughters of Zion are haughty
and walk with heads held high and seductive eyes, and go along with mincing steps and jingle the anklets on their feet, the Lord will afflict the scalp of the daughters of Zion with scabs, and the Lord will make their foreheads bare.”  Isaiah 3:16-17 NASB

Make their foreheads bare – Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Hermès, Versace, just to name a few.  Fashion.  How to turn heads when walking the street.  In Isaiah’s day, God wasn’t too pleased with such displays.  His threat is much more humiliating than our usual English translations communicate.  The Hebrew word pōt translated as “foreheads” in the NASB literally means “sockets” or “aperture.”  Robert Alter explains:

Though some modern translations understand the rare Hebrew word pot as “head,” a word close to it occurs elsewhere in the sense of “aperture” or “socket,” and here indicates an orifice, as the King James Version understood (“secret parts”), in keeping with traditional Hebrew commentators.  The verb used is a term for the exposing of nakedness.  Pot is the word for “vagina” in modern Hebrew.[1]

God intends to take those women of Judah who act with superior arrogance and disdain for the poor and strip them bare.  He intends to humiliate them.  Why?  Not because they are females.  He has just as much ire with the male leaders of the community.  Not because they are fashionable.  God doesn’t seem to have an issue with fine clothes.  After all, the priest’s robes were quite spectacular.  No, it’s the attitude that brings out God’s wrath.  The description of these women reveals their desire to be noticed, to publicly display their superiority without regard for social responsibility for others.  They want to turn the street into ego enhancement.  It’s all about the motive, not the material.  God threatens to reduce their pride to a scene of public embarrassment.  Alter is right.  We need to recognize the personal shame in this verse, and what could be more shameful to such women than to be completely exposed.  When Israel is at the verge of collapse because of its refusal to live according to God’s instructions, what the community needs is women of prayer and repentance.  But they act as if their status is the most important thing in life.  God tells them the correction is coming.

What do we do with the implications of this verse?  Do you boycott Gucci?  Do we protest Chanel?  I don’t think that is the answer, although I do think that there is an element of social responsibility that cannot be ignored when fashion becomes display.  It isn’t the price of the luxury item.  It’s the “look at me” attitude.  The women that Isaiah criticizes were living at the end of the society.  Babylon was on the horizon.  And yet they were preoccupied with their own egos.  They were self-absorbed.  This is the real issue.  We don’t have to wear sackcloth and ashes.  That can be just as much an ego display as a Versace dress.  What we have to ask with each of these choices is “Why?”  As Luzzatto reminds us, “ . . . the question we ask ourselves in this meditative process is: ‘How did our success or failure to realize this middah affect the other person?’ not ‘How did this make me feel?’”[2]  “How does this display affect the other person?  What does it say to them about my care and concern, about my commitment to their well-being?”

Topical Index: fashion, pōt, vagina, humiliation, attitude, Isaiah 3:16-17

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible Volume 3 The Writings, p. 632, fn. 17.

[2] Ira F. Stone, “Introduction,” in Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Upright, p. xix..