[CatherineTorpey]

Hello all! Thank you Marty for leading the last couple of weeks!

This Sunday’s scripture is once again from the Hebrew Scriptures (“Old Testament”), from good ol’ Isaiah.

Jacqui is preaching on “Forging Independence from Guns” – I can’t wait for this powerful message on our Independence Day weekend. Her scripture is Isaiah 2:1-5. In Bible in the Middle, we’ll read chapters 1 and 2 of Isaiah.

Rather than me saying my bit about Isaiah, I am cutting and pasting here an edited portion of the introduction to Isaiah from the translator Robert Alter from “The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary”:

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. Isaiah son of Amoz, a Jerusalemite, began his career as prophet in the 730s B.C.E. He was still active and clearly regarded as an authoritative figure, as we learn from the account in 2 Kings 19… when the Assyrians besieged Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E.

Like the other biblical prophets, he claimed (and very likely believed) that his pronouncements came to him on the direct authority of God. These included vehement castigations of social and economic injustices in Judahite society and of a corrupt and drunken ruling class, as well as the excoriation of paganizing practices. Isaiah also took political stances, objecting in particular to policies that favored an alliance with Egypt against Assyria.

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…. [and] Isaiah is an extreme case of this phenomenon.

One may surmise that texts of individual prophecies, or small clusters of his prophecies, circulated in scrolls during Isaiah’s lifetime and afterward, whether in the hands of his followers or of private collectors of prophetic revelation. Chapters 1–39 in the book that has come down to us incorporate the prophecies of Isaiah but also include much disparate material that is clearly later, some of it reflecting the imminent or actual fall of the Babylonian empire to the Persians in 539 B.C.E.

…

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 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, as in all poetic systems, poetry is memorable…. Biblical poetry [structures lines] in semantically paired halves…, 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.

And as usually is the case in lines of biblical poetry, 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).

…

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 that runs from verse 6 to the end of the chapter evokes a scary picture of the day when God comes to exact retribution, playing on a complex series of images of verticality 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 (2:2–5, 4:2–6, 9:1–6, 11:11–16, to cite the most famous of such passages).

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