by David Plotz
As I circle this oldest Bible book in the world, I am struck again by the very unlikely survival of the Jews. The difference between us and the Canaanites, Moabites, Edomites, and all the other tribes who bedev iled us in the Bible is that we wrote the book, and they didn’t. Jews survived not because we went forth and multiplied—we didn’t— but because we kept going to the library. Again and again, Jews as a people have barely survived extermination at the hands of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Romans. We were scattered by diaspora, savaged by the Inquisition and the Holocaust. If you are religious- minded, you may believe that Jews survived because God chose us. But even if you’re not, you must acknowledge that the holy books are the root of our survival. Jews endured because our book endured. We remained a people because we preserved a culture, and we preserved a culture because we kept a book.
On my only Friday in Israel, I stroll in the late afternoon through Jerusalem’s Old City to the Western Wall. Jews worship at the Western Wall because it is the accessible place closest to where the Temple’s Holy of Holies would have stood, before the Romans destroyed it in AD 70. It’s not a biblical site, or even a very old site, as sites go. Jews have prayed here for only 800 years.
I put on a yarmulke and wiggle my way through the crowds of Sabbath worshippers to the wall itself. It’s an amazing spectacle, a cross section of world Jewry—the men, anyway, since women worship separately—from the vast bearded Hasidic Jews in their black frock coats and fur hats to the orthodox Litvaks in their dark suits and sharp fedoras, to Israeli soldiers with guns and yarmulkes, to Americans celebrating bar mitzvahs in Jerusalem, to ancients rolled up to the wall in their wheelchairs, to tourists in polo shirts like me. I arrive at dusk, as the afternoon sky turns cobalt and then black over the Temple Mount. I find a spot at the wall, put my hand on it, and offer what little prayer I know. I say the Shema. I sing a few verses of “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” my favorite Christian hymn, which seems kosher since it is based on Hebrew Bible verses. I feel holy, calm, and warm.
I also feel like a cheat. In my heart, I know there is no reason for me to treat this as a special place. I don’t believe God ever lived in the Temple here, no matter what it says in my Bible. I don’t believe the God of the Jews is any closer to the Wall than he is to my attic. This is a sacred place only because other people genuinely, truly believe that God chose our people as His, and picked this spot for His home on earth, and because we wrote a book about it. Because they believe, they come here and pray. And because they come here, I come here and am moved. But I am freeloading on the faith of others. I have come to Israel to see the Bible, and I have seen it gloriously—as history, anthropology, and tradition, but not as belief. I leave Israel thrilled— amazed to have had the chance to dig where Judah Maccabee stood, amazed to have seen the first books of the Bible, amazed to have walked through the ruin of the palace where David might have lived—but I leave no more certain that God was here when it happened.
THIRTEEN
The Book of Isaiah
The Jesus Preview
In which the prophet Isaiah predicts disaster for Israel, and redemption on the day of judgment.
chapter 1
he Bible is (mostly) finished with the history of the Israelite people. We’re moving on. The second half of the Hebrew Bible consists of the “Prophets” and “Writings,” books of prophecy, poetry, and wisdom, with occasional stories and short historical books thrown in for leavening.
Isaiah is the first of more than a dozen prophetic books. All of them share a few essential traits. Let’s preview them, to save time later. The author-prophet, channeling a very cantankerous God, exhorts the people and the king of Judah to obey the Lord or else face terrible consequences. (These consequences may include some or all of the following: exile, destruction, devastation, cannibalization, enslavement.) The prophets are a pretty gloomy group—not that you can blame them. They generally lived in bad times, the period between the eighth and sixth centuries BC when Israel was annihilated by Assyria, and Judah was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar and exiled to Babylon.
On to Isaiah, the first, most important, and most famous of the prophets. I mean no disrespect to Isaiah, who seems a mighty good poet and one heck of a prophet, but reading his book sometimes feels like being trapped in an elevator with Al Sharpton. Isaiah won’t stop shouting, issuing an endless string of insults and threats. It’s a bravura per formance, very scary and sometimes quite beautiful, but not a lot of fun.
The book begins with some gloriously bitter bullying from God, who spews at His people: “I reared children and brought them up, and they have rebelled against me. An ox knows its owner . . . Israel does not know. Ah, sinful nation! People laden with iniquity! Brood of evil doers! Depraved children! . . .”—you get the idea. God is particularly annoyed at the Israelites’ superfi cial obedience. They continue to make sacrifices to him and burn incense: “Though you pray at length, I will not listen; your hands are stained with crime.”
Indifferent to the public obedience, God demands that His people change how they treat others. To regain His love, they must “cease to do evil, learn to do good, devote [themselves] to justice, and the wronged, uphold the rights of the orphan, defend the cause of the widow.” Isaiah represents a growing sophistication in biblical theology. As far as I can remember, this is the first time that God has explicitly valued good deeds over professions of faith. Until now, the Israelites got into trouble only for disobeying God’s law—idolatry, scoffing at the Sabbath, etc. But now, they’re dealing with a “good works” God, who requires righteous behavior toward fellow men, rather than disingenuous prayer. The debate over whether God wants faith or deeds still rages today, but this may be the first time the Bible refers to it.
(Incidentally, you’ll notice that God narrates much of the first chapter. Some of the prophetic books are in the voice of the prophet, some in the voice of the Lord, some in the voice of the Lord channeled through the prophet, and some in the voice of a third-person narrator.)
chapter 2
Like Genesis, Isaiah suffers from the Gone with the Wind problem. It’s so widely quoted that it now sounds like one long cliché. For example, at the beginning of Chapter 2, Isaiah looks forward to the establishment of the Lord’s kingdom. “They shall beat their swords into plough-shares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not take up sword against nation, they shall never again know war.”
(What’s a ploughshare, you ask? I certainly did. It’s the metal part of a plow that actually cuts the soil.)
chapter 5
Isaiah wasn’t big on the Jerusalem bar scene, I guess. He indicts those “who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink.” Valiant?
chapters 7–11
Isaiah counsels King Ahaz, “The Lord Himself will give you a sign of his own accord. Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel.” After Immanuel’s arrival, Isaiah says, glorious days will follow. Hmm. What to make of this? Maybe it’s a messianic prediction, maybe not. It’s very ambiguous. The unnamed woman may be King Ahaz’s own wife. Or she may be a metaphor, since the rest of the passage is all metaphor, with the Assyrians represented as bees and the Lord as a razor (don’t ask).
What’s undeniable is that Isaiah is shot through with prophetic language about a Messiah. For example, he predicts a savior who will comfort the meek. He prophesies happy days to come when “a child has been born for us, a son given to us . . . and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless people for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forever more.” Christianity adopted and updated Isaiah’s imagery. This passage about the “Prince of Peace” is one of several from Isaiah included in Handel’s Messiah.
And here’s another famous proto-Christian verse, though it doe
sn’t go the way you remember:
The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with
the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little
child shall lead them.
What’s missing here? Who is not lying down with whom? That’s right: the lion does not lie down with the lamb! The leopard lies down with the kid, and the lion lies with the calf, but no lion and lamb.
The confusion about the lion and the lamb is a fascinating example of the Bible’s extraordinary cultural influence. If you asked 100 people— even 100 literary scholars—ninety-nine of them would say that the lion lying down with the lamb is a line from the Bible. The very educated ones would even know it was from Isaiah. Yet it’s a misquotation, or, perhaps something even better. At some point during the 400 years since the King James Bible was published, a clever soul did a Bible mash-up, tweaking a favorite verse to make it sound a little snazzier, adding alliteration to juice up the phrase. Hmm. Wouldn’t “lion and lamb” sound better than “leopard and kid”? And all I can say to that inventor is: Thanks for the great rewrite.
chapter 12
After eleven chapters of hectoring and screaming, Isaiah pauses for a chapter of quiet contemplation. It’s brief, but very refreshing, like a ten-minute massage: The chapter is just six verses—perhaps the shortest in the Bible. Isaiah says (and I’m using the New Revised Standard translation here, as I will for much of Isaiah):
Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid,
For the Lord God is my strength and my might;
He has become my salvation.
With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you
will say in that day: Give thanks to the Lord.
The language of the chapter—salvation, joy, trust, thanks—is the language of modern worship, and that is probably why I like it. On the other hand, it’s totally at odds with the rest of Isaiah. Isaiah is difficult to read not merely because it’s a plotless prophetic poem, but also because the God of Isaiah is so cruel. He’s God as Jack Nicholson. He has only two settings: angry and furious. Except for this all-too-brief chapter, He is never a God of love or mercy.
chapters 13–14
The first of a series of “pronouncements” by Isaiah. This one is the Babylon pronouncement, to be followed in later chapters by, to name a few, the Moab pronouncement, the Damascus pronouncement, the Egypt pronouncement, the Tyre pronouncement, and the Beasts of the Negeb pronouncement. These pronouncements vary a bit, but they’re generally Isaiah prophesying exactly how an enemy of Israel will be punished by God. They correspond eerily to Israel’s current foreign-policy complications: don’t the Israelis dream of being rid of the problems of Babylon (Iraq), Damascus, Egypt, and Tyre (Lebanon)?
Anyway, back to the Babylon pronouncement. The Lord is really going to give those Babylonians a walloping. “Every human heart will melt. . . . [T]he sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light. . . . I will make mortals more rare than fine gold. . . . Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes and their wives ravished.” And so on. Babylon will be overrun by wild animals: “There ostriches will live, and there goat demons will dance”—how’s that for a spooky image?
As you begin to see from this mouth-frothing above, the pronouncements resemble nothing so much as the obsessive, vindictive, logorrheic rants of sports talk radio. In place of the Babylon pronouncement,
there’s the “coach pronouncement”: Coach Jones is a frigging idiot. I can’t believe he kept Smith in the game that long. He’s going to get fired—he’s definitely got to get fired if they don’t beat the Redskins. A frigging goat demon could do a better job coaching than him. Instead of the Damascus pronouncement, the “quarterback pronouncement”: Are you kidding me? I throw better than that joker. Heck, an ostrich throws better than him. They’ve got to trade him, right now, even if they just get a third-string safety. He’s never going to be an NFL QB.” Think of Isaiah as the world’s angriest fan.
chapter 22
Yet another disaster looms for the Israelites, and the Lord expects them to mourn and wear sackcloth. Instead they rejoice with a bacchanalian feast: “Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Interestingly, this phrase has come down to us as a good thing, a way to seize life in the face of adversity. (See countless war movies, Casablanca, any pop cultural representation of Vikings, etc.) The Lord is not charmed by the frenzied plea sure-seeking. He’s infuriated, and vows not to forgive the feasters.
chapters 24–27
Chapter 24 gives us an end-of-days prophecy that is awesome in its menace. Because we have broken our covenant with God, He will break it with us. Nearly everyone will be wiped out: “Slave and master, handmaid and mistress, buyer and seller.” But all is not lost. After “the gladness of earth is banished,” the Lord will return, punish the wicked kings, and deliver justice to the poor and needy. “The song of the ruthless [will be] stilled.” This is the big one, Judgment Day, when God “will swallow up death forever.” Until Isaiah, the philosophy of the Bible has been that life is for the living; it has been relatively unconcerned with an afterlife. In Isaiah, by contrast, the Lord resurrects the dead, and eternal salvation is offered. This is one key reason why Isaiah feels so much more like the New Testament than other books of the Bible do, and why it’s so popular with Christians.
Even as the Israelites rejoice in God’s Judgment Day and wonder at His awesome achievements, they pause to give the poor Moabites one more kick. After lots of high-flown rhetoric, the final verses of Isaiah 25 gloat that the Moabites “shall be trodden down . . . as straw is trodden down in a dung pit.” That’s Isaiah in a nutshell: All praise to our mighty God! OK, now let’s go rub our enemies’ faces in dung! (Just another way, I suppose, that Isaiah is like football.)
chapters 28–29
Isaiah scorns the schemers and plotters who “scoff” at God:
Ha! Those who would hide their plans deep from the Lord, who do
their work in dark places and say, “who sees us, who takes note of
us?” How perverse of you!
I love this passage. The opening “Ha!” is a favorite rhetorical gimmick of Isaiah’s, and it’s fabulous, a perfect combination of indignation and mockery. The closing “How perverse of you!” also has a wonderful condescending smirk. And the central point—that God is watching all the time, even seeing those who think they’re hiding—is powerful. In Genesis and Exodus, God was everywhere, sniffing every animal sacrifice, smiting every violator of the Sabbath. But in recent books, God has been only an intermittent presence, dropping by occasionally to unleash a plague or two. Isaiah wants to make it clear that God is still watching. (As another great wordsmith wrote about a different religious figure: “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.”)
Here’s an experiment, analogous to the fortune cookie game played in Chinese restaurants: Try adding “You idiots!” to the end of any verse in Isaiah. I guarantee that it will make the verse sound even more Isaiahish. I am doing it now. My finger landed on Isaiah 32:11:
Tremble, you women who are at ease, shudder, you complacent ones;
strip and make yourselves bare,
and put sackcloth on your loins, you idiots!
chapter 41
God mocks rival deities and challenges them to a fight. “Set forth your case, says the Lord; Bring your proofs. . . . Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be afraid and terrified.” They can’t take up his challenge, of course. The Lord dismisses them with a gloating sneer: “You, indeed, are nothing, and your work is nothing at all.”
I know it’s juvenile of me, but I love these catty biblical comments. They show God acting just as we would if we were God. The Good Book feels most real, and most persuasive, when it’s funny, mean, and scornful. It reminds us that the Bible is not an idealization, but a book written by
(and about) real people, who can be both scornful and kind, faithful and cruel, sarcastic and sweet—as their God can be, too. We’ve been sold an idealized Bible that’s blander and kinder than the real thing. Instead, let’s revel in its messiness, humor, and cruelty.
chapters 44–45
These chapters riff on how to make an idol. The carpenter cuts down a tree. He uses wood from the tree to bake his bread and warm himself, etc. It’s not clear where Isaiah is going with this metaphor of carpentry, but then he pulls off a brilliant twist, a triple axel of a move: “The rest of [the wood] he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it.” What kind of moron, Isaiah is asking, would fall on his knees before a block of wood, would think that the kindling that cooks his food is a god?
Sometimes the Bible and modern geopolitics brush against each other. And sometimes they crash head-on as they do in Isaiah 45. The Lord sends a huge shout-out to King Cyrus of Persia. God promises to lead him to victory, “cutting through the bars of iron” to help him.
Why does God want to help this pagan king? Because Cyrus will conquer Babylon, free the Jews, end the Babylonian exile, and allow the Israelites to return home to Zion. There are enough layers of irony and analogy here to make biblical baklava. Cyrus remains a great hero to modern Irani ans as the father of Persia. Cyrus is also a hero to Jews, because he liberated them, redeemed Jerusalem, and was famously tolerant of Judaism. So, you have Iran, a nation led today by an anti- Semite who calls for the destruction of Israel, sharing a hero with Jews, who revere said hero for restoring Israel. And what did Cyrus conquer? Babylon: modern-day Iraq. As I’m writing, Americans are fretting about Tehran’s rising influence in Baghdad and Iraq’s possible transformation into a vassal state of Iran. Twenty-five hundred years later and it’s the same fights, the same land, the same people.
