by David Plotz
chapter 48
The line so nice God uses it twice: “ ‘There is no peace,’ says the Lord, ‘for the wicked.’ ” This is the closing verse of Isaiah 48, and of Isaiah 57.
You’ll notice I’m racing through Isaiah, skipping long passages of exhortation, threat, and apocalyptic prophecy. These are the junk DNA of the Bible. It’s not that they’re bad, but they are repetitive, they serve no clear purpose after the fourth iteration, and they take up a lot of space.
chapters 49–53
Until Isaiah, the Bible has addressed itself only to a small tribe of Israelites, embattled, struggling for survival. It never bothered to speak to the rest of the world: non-Israelites were usually enemies and always irrelevant to God’s covenant. But Isaiah makes God a universal God. In Isaiah 49, for example, God chooses a “servant” whose job is to speak to the whole world. “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Moses and David did not care an iota about universal salvation or the end of the Earth: they sought the survival of the Israelites in Canaan. Isaiah has repurposed God’s mission for everyone. Not to belabor a point made by a million people before me, but it’s certainly no surprise that Isaiah is popular with Christians, since the book teaches a proto-Christian, universalist theology, one very different from the insular, exclusionary message of the Bible’s earlier books.
We have come to the most overt proto-Christian prophecy yet: The servant chosen by God is “despised and rejected by others.” He is:
wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities . . . and by his bruises we are healed. . . . The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was affl icted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter. . . . Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin . . . through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
The earlier language in Isaiah that seemed to anticipate Christ was nothing compared with this. The notion of God sending a servant and making him suffer for our sins, so that we may be redeemed—the essential Christian idea about the redemptive suffering of Jesus—starts here in Isaiah.
chapter 56
God promises eternal glory to “the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths.” Eunuchs? Where do the eunuchs come from?
chapter 59
Isaiah asks a question that has plagued almost every child. If God is omnipotent, why doesn’t He heed our prayers? If you’ve read Isaiah 1–58, you know how God is going to answer that one. I don’t pay attention because your sins are too great, your tongues too wicked, your hands too bloody. Shape up, and maybe I’ll listen. God’s scathing denunciation is followed by this breast-beating passage, one of the most hauntingly beautiful in the Bible, in which the author acknowledges our failures:
We stumble at noon as in the twilight,
Among the vigorous as though we were dead.
We all growl like bears;
Like doves we moan mournfully.
We wait for justice, but there is none;
For salvation, but it is far from us.
For our transgressions before you are many,
And our sins testify against us.
“We stumble at noon as in the twilight.” That’s a powerful image!
chapters 60–62
Another description of Judgment Day. It will be good news for everyone, and particularly for the Israelites, who will fi nally reap the benefits of being God’s Chosen People. For Israelites, these end times will be like being a se nior during Se nior Week, or a senator at a Washington cocktail party. All the other peoples of the world will pay tribute to the Israelites, tend their flocks, and treat them as God’s own ministers on Earth. Speaking as a Jew, I must say: All right! Can we set a firm date? How’s next Thursday?
chapter 65
In the glorious, post-redemption Jerusalem, someone who dies at age 100 will be “considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.” Sort of like Denmark.
chapter 66
This final chapter nicely encapsulates the rest of the book. It includes marvelous verses about God’s greatness and the super-fabulous
post–Judgment Day future. But, of course, it also revels in carnage. After an ecstatic description of the coming of God’s kingdom, the lucky survivors will go outside—to look upon “the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against [God].” That’s Isaiah: God, glory, and guts.
FOURTEEN
The Book of Jeremiah
The Prophet and the Lustful She-Camel
In which the prophet Jeremiah repeatedly predicts the destruction of Judah, and is shunned by his people; Babylon sacks Jerusalem and exiles most of the population; a few surviving Jews emigrate to Egypt.
ike Isaiah, Jeremiah is not a kittens, rainbows, and unicorns kind of guy. These two let-it-bleed prophets share a style (emphatic, metaphoric poetry) and a sensibility (gloom). But they’re not identical twins—they’re more like first cousins. Isaiah is bipolar, prone to wild mood swings, joyful when pleased, and a holy terror when angry. You might not always like Isaiah, but he’d often be entertaining company, especially if you could get him ragging on the Babylonians.
Jeremiah, on the other hand, is not the prophet you want to share a beach house with. He’s entirely morbid. (They don’t call them jeremiads for nothing.)
chapters 1–3
A century or so after Isaiah, around 600 BC, God summons Jeremiah to serve Him. Jeremiah aims to hector, nag, badger, noodge, and otherwise harass the increasingly unfaithful people of Judah to return to God before it’s too late. Jeremiah is living during the darkest of times—the final few years before Babylon conquers Jerusalem and exiles the Jews— and he ultimately fails.
Jeremiah’s endless rage may be explained by the hopelessness of his cause. He’s warning the Judeans that the end is nigh, and they’re still drinking date wine and worshipping idols. It infuriates him that the Judean people don’t share his sense of urgency. As a result, Jeremiah suffers from the flaws that plague all whistle-blowers. Almost without exception, whistle-blowers are self-righteous and resentful. When they turn out to be right—and boy, does Jeremiah turn out to be right— everyone regrets not having listened to them. But there’s a reason no one listens. Who wants to pay attention to a cantankerous rageaholic shouting doom in the bazaar?
In Jeremiah’s first speech, he unloads on the wild, heedless idolatry of the Israelites, describing them as: “a lustful she-camel, restlessly running about.” Now I personally have never seen a lustful she-camel or he-camel, but that is one vivid metaphor.
It’s not just lusty camels that preoccupy Jeremiah. He has sex on the brain. A few verses before the she-camel, for example, he spews out that Israel “recline[s] as a whore.” Chapter 3 begins with him frothing about Israel’s “whoring and debauchery. He inveighs against the Israelites, “You had the brazenness of a street woman,” and in Chapter 5 declares them “lusty stallions.” (Are they camels? Are they stallions?) A few chapters later, they’re harlots again. Then a few chapters after that:
I behold your adulteries,
Your lustful neighing
Your unbridled depravity, your vile acts.
His combination of scorn and sex is very Church Lady—at once prudish and obsessed.
chapter 4
God is disappointed with us not just because we’re unfaithful, but also because we’re idiots. “My people are stupid. . . . They are foolish children. They are not intelligent.” This may be Jeremiah’s cruelest cut of all, since we know how much the Lord values intelligence. God always rewards brainy people, even when they’re wicked. His disillusionment about IQ is somehow more disturbing than His dismay over idolatry. He expects infidelity. But stupidity?
chapters 8–9
Jeremiah laments the suffering of his countrymen. He’s miserable on their behalf and asks: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” He promises he would “weep day an
d night” for his people, moans at how heartbroken he is at their agony. Yet Jeremiah’s histrionic mourning for the Jews becomes suspect once you notice how much delight he takes in enumerating their sins and threatening them. He’s thrilled to be the bearer of bad tidings to Judah. He’s like the gossipy classmate who, with a long face and a big hug, tells you that she saw your boyfriend making out with your best friend. You can be very sure that her glee outweighs her sympathy.
chapter 13
A curious episode in which God orders Jeremiah to buy a loincloth, wear it for a while, and then hide it in a rock by the Euphrates River. Jeremiah is instructed to return to the loincloth some days later, at which point he discovers it is ruined. This loincloth, God tells us, is Judah. Judah was supposed to cling to God, the way the cloth clings to the loins—no boxer shorts back in the day, I guess—but because it has been ruined by sin, it’s now just a worthless rag.
Jeremiah says the Judahites can’t save themselves from their terrible fate because they have become evil to their core. The book asks, “Can the Cushite change his skin or the leopard his spots?” This is another example of a famous biblical phrase that isn’t quite what I remember it to be. “Cushite” is a biblical term for Ethiopians or Nubians, and it complicates the passage for modern readers. Referring to the Cushites’ skin does not mean the verse is racist—it’s descriptive of skin color rather than derogatory. But it does muddy the cliché. I’m not surprised we’ve kept only the leopard. Can you imagine saying in conversation “Can the Ethiopian change his skin color?” That would be awkward.
chapters 18–20
Jeremiah is genuinely hurt that no one likes him. As soon as he curses a priest for arresting him, he chants a self-pitying lament, ruing the day he was born. He moans that he has become a laughingstock. (“Everyone mocks me.”) He complains that whenever he’s around, he hears people whispering, “Let us denounce him!”
Come on, Jeremiah! You must be kidding! You show up at the capital city, tell people that they’re going to be disemboweled corpses in couple of years and that there’s nothing they can do to prevent it. And then you’re surprised that they don’t like you?
chapters 26–28
The Lord instructs Jeremiah to wear a yoke and visit the kings of Moab, Tyre, Edom, and Judah. Jeremiah tells them that they must submit to the Babylonians, or else be annihilated. Let’s linger here for a minute, because this is the passage where I finally recognize why Jeremiah bothers me so much. He’s a Quisling, a Tokyo Rose. Jeremiah feels no loyalty to his land or his people. He’s prodding his own countrymen to surrender to their mortal enemy.
In hindsight, Jeremiah picks the winners. The Babylonians do sack and slaughter, and the Jews are marched off into exile. But that almost makes Jeremiah’s naysaying worse. He is rewarded by Babylon while his people suffer: King Nebuchadnezzar orders that Jeremiah is to be treated like a VIP, further evidence that he was an enemy of his own people. Perhaps Jeremiah was just a prophet, guided by God, who predicted Judah’s fall. But maybe Jeremiah’s predictions functioned as propaganda, weakening Jewish morale and hastening the Babylonian victory.
The Bible discovers a principled lesson in Jeremiah’s betrayal of country, which is that all our quotidian bonds—to family, nation, and tribe—are nothing compared with our connection with God. Jeremiah believes Judah deserves to fall for failing God. But this doesn’t solace me. I’m not strong enough in my faith to set aside family and country for God. And I wouldn’t want to be. Jeremiah is a righteous prophet, but I can’t help feeling that he’s also a terrible traitor.
Random question: why was Jeremiah a bullfrog?
chapter 29
From Babylon to Brooklyn, Jews have always found a way to prosper. It’s pretty remarkable: No matter where we’ve been, and no matter what dreadful conditions we’ve lived under, Jews have thrived as traders, shopkeepers, bankers, and doctors—without losing our distinct identity as Jews. Why is our religion so mobile? Let me offer three theories. First, necessity: when you’re being exiled and pogrommed you learn to adapt fast. Second, culture: because Judaism is a religion founded on writing and argument, Jews have always had high literacy rates and well-developed analytical skills, which have served them in business. And, third—this is right here in Jeremiah 29—our fl exibility: it’s built into the religion. Read this extraordinary passage from Jeremiah’s letter to Judeans exiled in Babylon.
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. . . . Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
Modern victimology theory teaches that you can’t move forward until you avenge a past wrong. But Jeremiah is saying, essentially, get over it, and find a new way to live for God. The passage anticipates the next 2,500 years of Jewish history. Jews have always found ways to be at home away from home, to be at once Jewish and American—waiting for Zion, but planting a garden in Babylon today.
chapter 32
Just before the Babylonian conquest, one of his countrymen asks Jeremiah if he should sign a contract to purchase land—a chancy proposition given that Nebuchadnezzar is about to ransack Judah. But the Lord tells Jeremiah that the land sale should proceed. Jeremiah is understandably befuddled. He lavishly and sycophantically praises God for His wisdom and greatness—a sucking-up that goes on forever—and then at the end of it, asks: What the heck are you talking about? Why should the Jews do land deals when they’re about to get obliterated? The Lord, sounding a bit like James Brown, first replies, “Behold I am the Lord. . . . Is anything too wondrous for me?”
Then He goes on to tell the prophet that, yes, Jerusalem is about to be obliterated, but this will be only a brief interruption of the Jews’ time in Israel. This land purchase should go through, because after God has revenged himself on Babylon, the Jews will return to Zion, and all their old contracts and land arrangements will apply.
If you’re seeking scriptural support for Jews’ divine right to the land of Israel, it doesn’t get any stronger than this passage. Even more than God’s original grant of land to Abraham or the conquest of the Promised Land after Exodus, this passage guarantees permanent, divinely authorized inhabitation in Zion. No interruption—whether Babylonian or, presumably, Arab, whether 70 years or 700 years— cancels Jewish ownership.
chapter 36
At God’s command, Jeremiah writes a scroll of all his prophecies, then has his sidekick Baruch recite it at the Temple. The king of Judah’s advisers seize the scroll, and the king orders that it be read to him. As each page is finished, the king tears it out and tosses it into the fire. Nice try, king! Jeremiah simply rewrites the scroll. This is a profound notion: no matter what kings may do, the book will survive. God’s word endures, stronger than fire.
chapters 40–43
A historical interlude. When the Babylonians conquer and sack Jerusalem, they leave a Jewish regent, Gedaliah, to run the place. He promises the few Judeans who haven’t been exiled that they will keep farming and thrive.
Gedaliah turns out to be a fool, laughing off reports that Ishmael (another bad Ishmael) plans to assassinate him. Ishmael promptly murders him, plunging Judea into a brutal civil war. Ishmael slaughters Temple pilgrims and tosses their bodies into a cistern. Finally, the noble Johanan rallies the army and overthrows Ishmael. I love this story because I have a beloved uncle-in-law named Johanan, who would also rally an army against tyranny, given half a chance.
Johanan asks Jeremiah whether the surviving Jews should remain in Zion under Babylonian rule or flee. Jeremiah prays for ten days, at the end of which God tells him that the Jews must stay in the Promised Land. If they remain, He promises to “rebuild” them and make them a great people once again. If they run away, He threatens, they will be afflicted by famine, war, and pestilence.
But Johanan doesn’t believe Jeremiah. “You are lying,” he tells the prophet. Johanan s
uspects that Jeremiah is setting him up, that as soon as Johanan tries to remain in Judea, the Babylonians will slay him and his small band of followers. So, Johanan and his remnant move to Egypt, leaving the Holy Land empty of Israelites. God vows to exterminate the emigrants for their disobedience.
We have to ask ourselves: Why would Johanan dismiss Jeremiah as a liar and assume the prophet was actually laying a Babylonian trap? The answer, I again suspect, is the troublesome personality of Jeremiah. The superficial lesson of this episode is that Johanan doubted God’s prophet, and that his doubt caused him to disobey God’s will. But the more profound lesson is about Jeremiah’s tragic character. He’s a terribly ineffec tive prophet, not because he’s wrong, but because he fails to sell his message. He doesn’t know how to win friends and infl uence people. He has been so negative and so unpleasant with the Judeans that he has squandered all his social capital. He has no buddies, no allies, no supporters. Is it any surprise the Judeans view him with suspicion? So what if he’s always right? He’s rotten to deal with. Moreover, he has a long history of siding with the Babylonians, so it’s understandable that Johanan suspects him of being a double agent. The book of Jeremiah is supposed to be about our failure. Really, it’s about his.
FIFTEEN
The Book of Ezekiel
God’s Whole-Grain Hippie Prophet
In which Ezekiel has groovy, psychedelic dreams, then lies on his side for a year to symbolize the coming conquest of Jerusalem; Ezekiel tells stories about God’s rage at His people; Ezekiel’s wife dies; God leads Ezekiel to a valley of dry bones; and the dead are brought back to life.
chapters 1–3
zekiel—who has clearly been sprinkling something special on his matzo and brisket—has a vision of winged cherubim with four faces: one human, one lion, one ox, and one ea gle. They’re riding on gigantic beryl wheels, and inside each wheel is a “tall and awesome” rim that moves independently from the wheel. (Why do I linger on this detail, you ask? Because these self-propelled rims are a milestone in automobile and hip-hop history: They are the world’s first spinners.)
