Jerusalem Has Fallen

When a man lays hold of his brother in his father’s house, saying, “You have a cloak, you shall be our ruler! And these ruins will be under your authority,”  Isaiah 3:6  NASB

These ruins– What are the minimal requirements of a leader in times of anarchy?  Isaiah gives us one.  Any man who has been able to retain basic shelter gets elected.  In other words, leadership in chaos comes down to who has survived with the least amount of loss.  In the NASB translation, the verse suggests that the ruined city will be put under the authority of the first available candidate.  Robert Alter makes an interesting suggestion about a word in this verse:   “There might be a distant play on words between makhshelah ‘stumbling block,’ and memshalah, ‘government.’  In the general state of political decay, government has turned into a stumbling block.”

But wait!  “Stumbling block” isn’t even in the NASB translation.  In fact, it isn’t in the NIV, ESV, NKJV, or a host of other English Bibles.  Instead, most of these translations paint a picture of piles of rubble.  The root is kāšal, “to stumble, to stagger.”  makšēlâ is a derivative, but the derivative still must retain its connection to “stumble, stagger.”  Unfortunately, “a heap of ruins” in English doesn’t make that connection apparent at all.  Hebrew shows us that this scene of decay is related to an action, the staggering and stumbling of the nation over God’s Torah.   “A heap of ruins” is a physical description unrelated to some communal act.  Alter corrects this—and then notices that there is a phonetic allusion to another word, memshalah, “government.”  How much more forceful, and poetic, if Isaiah is hinting that in a world nearing judgment, government itself is “a heap of ruins.”  Once again, we don’t have to use much imagination to see the relevance.

Perhaps you watched the 2013 action movie Olympus Has Fallen, a fictional account of a terrorist take-over of the White House.  The “bad guys” are identifiable terrorists as only Hollywood can portray them.  Perhaps we need a sequel based on Isaiah’s prophecy; Jerusalem Has Fallen.  This time the government itself is the terrorist, wreaking havoc upon its citizens in displays of corruption and abusive power.  Tantrum politics rules the day.  With guns, both real and imaginary, to the heads of the population, every citizen is forced to accept the rule of the ridiculous, children with their fingers on the triggers.

Somewhere behind all this, in Isaiah’s day and I sincerely hope in ours, God is bringing about His intended purposes.  Jerusalem did not escape judgment.  Neither will we.  If God was willing to bring His chosen nation to its knees and send it into captivity for two generations because it refused to honor the Covenant pledge, how much more will He be willing to send a pagan empire to its destruction?  Perhaps we need to pay much closer attention to the political lessons of a sixth-century BCE prophet and stop pretending that all he has to say is confirmation of our ideas about Jesus.

Topical Index: makšēlâ, ruins, memshalah, government, Isaiah 3:6