[CatherineTorpey]

Our Rev. Jacqui will be preaching on “Gonna Study War No More,” and her text is Isaiah 2:1-5.

As you may recall, our book of Isaiah was written by several authors. The “real” Isaiah (“First Isaiah” or Isaiah son of Amoz) was from Jerusalem (capital of the Southern Kingdom) and he began his prophetic career before the Assyrians had conquered the Northern Kingdom (whose capital was Samaria). His career continued after that, when the Southern Kingdom was also under threat from invasion. He wrote chapters 1-39. (I’m using the term “wrote” loosely, since we don’t know if he “wrote” them, or if he spoke and his followers wrote down his words.) The second half of the book of Isaiah was written by Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah, during later centuries. As with almost all of the Hebrew scriptures, the language of Isaiah is Hebrew.

Here’s a video from the YouTube channel BibleProject, whose videos I have suggested before, because I find them to take a faithful Christian approach, but also to incorporate good scholarship (sadly, it’s a rarity to have both!):

Robert Alter translated the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures (the “Old Testament”) and is a very reliable authority on the scriptures. Here is my heavily edited version of his introduction to the book of Isaiah:
“Isaiah son of Amoz, a Jerusalemite, began his career as prophet in the 730s B.C.E. He was still active and regarded as an authoritative figure 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 prophecies of Isaiah son of Amoz have been editorially mingled with a welter of prophecies by other hands and from later periods. One may surmise that texts of individual prophecies circulated in scrolls during Isaiah’s lifetime and afterward. 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. Nothing from chapter 40 to the end of the book is the work of Isaiah son of Amoz.

“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).

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 as a palpably realized historical fact. The relatively long poem in chapter 2 (which runs from verse 6 to the end of the chapter) evokes a scary picture of the day when God comes to exact retribution, when 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).
Isaiah son of Amoz is particularly adept in thematically pointed wordplay. Thus, the scathing conclusion of the Parable of the Vineyard (5:7), has ‘justice’ (mishpat) flipped into mispaḥ, ‘blight,’ and ‘righteousness’ (tsedaqah) into tseʿaqah, “scream,” to express the perversion of values by the Judahites. I try to approximate this in my translation this way: ‘He hoped for justice, and, look, jaundice, / for righteousness, and, look, wretchedness.’

“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.”

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