[CatherineTorpey]

Hello Bibliophiles!

Our Rev. Darrell Hamilton will be preaching on “Thus Says the Lord.” His text is Isaiah 43:16-21

See last week’s notes for a bit about this section of the book of Isaiah, which was written by a person scholars refer to as “Second Isaiah.” It was written in Hebrew during and toward the end of the time of the Babylonian Exile (6th century BCE).

Here’s a bit from Robert Alter’s introduction to the book of Isaiah. Alter is a scholar of the Hebrew scriptures and has translated them all. Here, he discusses a bit about the poetry of Isaiah:

While there are occasional brief prose passages, the bulk of the prophecies are cast in poetry. There are two reasons for the use of poetry, one theological and the other pragmatic.

In most of these texts, the prophet represents himself as the mouthpiece for God’s words—“thus said Yahweh [the LORD]” is the frequently invoked “messenger-formula” of introduction — and it is perfectly fitting that God should address Israel not in prose, which is closer to the language of everyday human intercourse, but in the elevated and impressive diction of poetry.

The more pragmatic reason for the use of verse is that… poetry is memorable…: its formal devices facilitate committing the words to memory. In the case of biblical poetry, this mnemonic function is realized chiefly through the structuring of the line in semantically paired halves, or versets, usually reinforced by an equal number of stressed syllables in each half of the line:

“Woe, offending nation, / people weighed down with crime” (1:4).

Once the first half of this line has been registered in memory, the second half readily follows, with the more compact Hebrew exhibiting three strong stresses in each of the two halves.

…The idea articulated in the first verset is driven home through a concretization of it in the second verset: the “offending nation” is realized physically as a “people weighed down with crime” (in the Hebrew, just three words, five syllables, ʿam keved ʾawon).

…Prophetic poetry, like other poetic genres, has its recurrent formulas and clichés. Nevertheless, [the book of Isaiah] exhibits the work of at least three poets of the first order of originality (perhaps even more, depending on how one attributes authorship to certain individual poems). Thus, the pounding rhythms and the powerful images of the book’s opening poem (1:2–9) convey a riveting vision of Judah devastated by Assyrian incursion as divine punishment for its collective crimes. The trope of Israel as a second Sodom comes to seem through the poetry as a palpably realized historical fact. The relatively long poem in chapter 2… evokes a scary picture of the day when God comes to exact retribution…, in which all that is high will be brought low and God alone will loom on high.

In counterpoint to such dire visions stand the luminous imaginings of an ideal age to come when the land will be governed in peace and justice and the nations will come to Zion to be instructed in the ways of God….

Second Isaiah [chapters 40 – 55] preserves the memory of these glowing prophecies, but his poetry recasts the vision of a grand future in more national and historical terms, conjuring up a landscape in which a highway is cleared in the wilderness for the triumphant passage of the exiles back to their land. He is the most tender of biblical poets, tracing images of nursing mothers and dandled babes (upon which Third Isaiah will elaborate [in chapters 56-66]) and appropriately beginning his prophecies with the words “Comfort, O comfort My people.”

All three of the principal poets in [the book of Isaiah] exhibit a good deal of technical virtuosity, and, of course, this will often not be visible in translation….

Surely these prophecies continue to speak to us because of the ethical imperatives they embody, their cries for social justice, their hopeful visions of a future of harmony after all the anguish inflicted through historical violence. But they also engage us through the power and splendor of the poetry. Perhaps the Israelites who clung to the parchment records of these sundry prophecies in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E. cherished them not only because they saw in them the urgent word of God but also because they somehow sensed that these were great poems.

Hope to see you at Bible in the Middle at 10am New York time!

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