No, I will not execute my fierce anger. I will not destroy Israel, for I am God and not a mortal. I am the Holy One in your midst. I will not come to destroy.
AND TO HOSEA himself, the Lord God said:
Go again and love the woman who has become an adulterer with another man. Love her, Hosea, even as I the Lord love the people of Israel, though they have turned to other gods.
So Hosea bought his wife back again for fifteen shekels of silver and a measure of barley.
And he said to her, “You must live faithfully to me. You cannot belong to another man anymore. And I will be faithful to you.”
So he took her back again and loved her.
And the Lord changed the names of their children. Don’t call your daughter Not Pitied, said the Lord. Call her She Has Obtained Pity. And call your son My People.
AGAIN, THE LORD spoke with the faithful few who lived in Israel, saying:
Plead with your mother. Plead that she put harlotry away from her face, and adultery away from between her breasts!
She has said, “I will go after lovers who give me bread.”
She does not know that it is I who give her grain and wine, who lavish silver upon her.
But now I will allure her. I will lead her again into the wilderness as at the beginning and speak tenderly to her. And even in the desert will I give her vineyards. No other lover can do this thing. Ba’al cannot do this. So she shall answer me again as in the days of her youth.
She shall call me her husband.
O Israel! I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, in steadfast love and in mercy.
For I have pity on Not Pitied!
And I say to Not My People, no! You are my people!
Please answer me now. Please say unto me, “You are our God.”
V
ISRAEL NEVER RETURNED unto the Lord. Jeroboam II never changed his heart. He died believing that his kingdom was a bowl of healthy fruit. But as soon as he died, the rot in the center rose to the surface, and the sweet skin burst its putrefaction.
The time that passed between the day of Jeroboam’s death and the fall of his kingdom was a mere twenty-five years. Six kings reigned in swift succession, not one of whom trusted in the Lord more than he trusted in his sword and the easy promises of nations.
Jeroboam’s son Zechariah was assassinated by a man named Shallum, who reigned one month in Samaria before he himself was murdered by Menahem the son of Gadi.
Menahem ruled for seven years by killing his citizens and by extorting money from them—fifty shekels of silver a year from every family in Israel—in order to buy peace from Assyria.
When Menahem died, his son took the crown, but was immediately murdered by one of his own officers, Pekah the son of Remaliah.
Pekah sought to throw off the Assyrian yoke. With the king of Damascus, he revolted against the eastern empire.
The king of Assyria marched west to Israel, destroying nations in the way and deporting populations to the far reaches of his realm, where they were swallowed by other cultures. This was the Assyrian method of weakening rebellious peoples, to remove them from their homeland and to settle others in their places.
While Judah watched from its isolation in the southern hills, while Jerusalem begged God to protect them from such universal disasters, the king of Assyria turned his forces against the coalition of Israel and Damascus and found it to be no stronger than dry tinder. He crushed it utterly.
King Pekah was murdered by one of his own people, Hoshea, the son of Elah, who surrendered to Assyria, who paid tribute and was allowed to live on a small patch of land around the city of Samaria: thirty miles by forty in size.
For six years Hoshea paid tribute, but when the king of Assyria died, he thought he might, with the help of the armies of Egypt, make a successful revolt.
But when the new king of Assyria marched west to destroy Israel completely, Egypt did not appear.
Hoshea shut himself within his capital. Assyria laid siege to the city, built mighty engines of war, rolled them up to the city gates, dug tunnels beneath the walls to weaken them, and on a summer’s day stormed into Samaria, killing its last king, its final king forever.
Twenty-seven thousand two hundred and ninety persons were deported from Samaria. The leaders, the last best minds of the land, were carried away to Assyria and scattered from Halah to Gozan on the river Habor. Some went to the cities of the Medes.
But none were heard from again.
IN JERUSALEM A PROPHET watched the long departure of the tribes of the north, suffering both pity and fear. He pitied Israel. But he feared for his own tribe, Judah.
“And will my king listen to this word of the Lord?” he said.
The prophet was Isaiah the son of Amoz. His king was Ahaz, who had erected an Assyrian altar in the courts of the Lord, of whom it was rumored, “He offered his son as a sacrifice.”
Isaiah said, “The Lord of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty. Look how those people have cast their idols to the moles and the bats, and have covered themselves in rocks and caverns from the terror of the Lord!
“But the Lord says, Come, let us reason together: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land. But if you refuse and rebel—”
TWENTY-ONE
Isaiah
I
AYOUNG MAN of wealthy dress and a noble bearing walks in solemn procession with seven priests across the courtyard of the temple. He has clear eyes and a soft, well-cut beard. They are moving from the altar of burnt offering toward the eastern gate. It is dawn, just before sunrise. And it is autumn. The early air is sweet and cold. People have crowded the courtyard. Worshipers. Citizens of Jerusalem and Judah. A few come down from scorched Israel. Now, as the priests pass through the crowd eastward from the temple porch to the gate, the people begin to sing. Theirs is the multitudinous voice of the untrained, but they have often sung this song before. They know it well, and they love it. “The earth is the Lord’s,” they sing, “and the fullness thereof, for he has founded it upon the seas—”
At the eastern gate the procession stops. One priest steps forward and takes hold of the knot of the rope that has kept this gate closed the whole year through. The knot is sheathed in a hard clay seal. The priest raises it to the level of his eyes. The young nobleman also steps forward, draws a hammer from the folds of his robe, and with one blow smashes the clay seal.
The rope is pulled from its track.
Six priests lean against the doors, three for either one, and the gates of the temple courtyard swing open, revealing the Mount of Olives just outside of the city. There! Right there over the Mount of Olives, the sun will appear in a few minutes. Already the sky is crimson. This is Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the new year.
Quickly, now, the procession returns across the courtyard. The great doors of the temple are already standing open, flanked on either side by Jachin and Boaz, the two brazen pillars built by Solomon. One strong voice from the people cries, “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place?” And the people boom their answer: “They that have clean hands and a pure heart, they will receive the blessing of the Lord!”
At the great altar the procession separates, priests to the right, priests to the left, followed by the young man who carries the hammer. This man sees everything. He glances backward through the gate to the mount and the rosy sky beyond. He peers forward, deep into the temple. Before they mount the steps, his sight is on a level with the interior floor. His nostrils are flaring. His eyes are wide with anticipation. The priests have paused between the altar and the porch.
Suddenly, sunlight!
A ram’s horn whoops. A trumpet cracks the sky with a long, loud blast.
The people sing a thunderous song: “Lift up your heads, O gates! Be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of
Glory shall come in!”
The sun has broken over the mount. It is sending a single shaft of light through the eastern gate, over the altar, into the temple, down the long nave thick with smoke from the altar of incense, and even to the holiest place, the deep room, the dark recess where the Lord God sits! There! The holy of holies! There!
That spear of sunlight in smoke is a burning thing. It grows brighter and wider, and one voice sings, “Who is the King of Glory?”
And the people answer, “The Lord, strong and mighty—”
Though the seven priests remain unmoving in front of the porch, the young nobleman continues forward as if drawn by bands invisible. Up the porch steps, one by one, gazing into the temple, pierced by sunlight. Then, just between the massive doorposts, he sinks to his knees.
A voice behind him cries, “Who is the King of Glory?”
The people reply, “The Lord of hosts! He is the King of Glory.”
And the sound is so loud, the song and the blowing of trumpets, the shaking of timbrels, the ululation of women’s tongues, that the doorposts tremble in their sockets and the young man murmurs, “Woe is me! I am lost.” He is transfixed where he kneels. His eyes are bright with fear, and his words are uttered in anguish. “I am a man of unclean lips,” he whispers, “but my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
IN HIS WORDS, the vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz:
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up.
The train of his royal robes swirled in the temple.
And around him stood the seraphim, the burning ones that wait on him. Each had six wings. With two they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.
And one was crying to another: “Holy! Holy! Holy is the Lord of hosts! The whole earth is full of his glory!”
At the voice of him who called, the great doors shook in their sockets, and the house of God was filled with smoke.
I said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips! But my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
Then one of the seraphim flew toward me, holding in his hand a burning coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar.
“Behold,” he said, “this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.”
And then I heard the voice of the Lord in the counsels of heaven saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”
Immediately I cried out, “Here am I! Send me!”
And he said, “Go. Speak to this people, even if they will not understand. Show them again and again, though fat hearts and heavy ears and blind eyes are unable to perceive.”
I said, “For how long, O Lord?”
He said:
“Until the cities lie abandoned,
and houses lack inhabitants,
and the fields and hills are desolate,
and the Lord has removed the people far away!
“Though a tenth remain in it,
it will be burned again and again,
like an oak whose stump is standing
after the tree is felled.”
II
DURING THE TWO HUNDRED YEARS of Israel’s existence, the southern kingdom of Judah had been ruled by eleven kings. Every one of them was of the house and lineage of David. His line had not been broken in all these years.
Yet not every king remained faithful to the covenant of God. The present king Ahaz believed that he, not the Lord, had saved Judah from the destruction suffered by the northern ten tribes. For when Assyria came like the bull, goring nations to death, Ahaz took treasures from the temple and from his own house, and sent them as gifts to Assyria, begging protection and offering vassalage.
The prophet Isaiah had urged him to trust the Lord. He told Ahaz to ask a sign of God. “Let it be as deep as Sheol or as high as heaven! Ask anything, that he might prove his strength to you.”
Ahaz had said, “I will not put the Lord to the test.”
Isaiah answered, “Then the Lord will give you a sign without your asking: A maiden will conceive and bear a son, and will call his name Immanuel—and even before the child can choose between good and evil the land whose kings now frighten you will be deserted!”
But Ahaz sent his splendid gift to the Assyrian king, and his nation was not destroyed when Israel was.
In fact, for two centuries, Judah had enjoyed peculiar protections. He had always been poorer than the northern kingdom, his living more austere; but that which impoverished him also preserved him. Judah’s hills were hard to negotiate. No trade routes crossed his soil. Nor did he have goods that others wanted. Therefore, Judah remained relatively isolated from the rest of the world. Luxurious pagan influences were weaker where pagans did not travel.
Judah’s economy was rural. The land was spare. The population was generally pastoral, unwilling to change and fierce in its independence.
And as a capital, Jerusalem was scarcely international: intensely national, rather, hard to get to, culturally separated, devoted unto God, holy. For Judah had a temple where the Lord of heaven and earth had chosen to dwell. Judah had an elaborate ritual of worship. And Judah had a king, a son of David, with whom the Lord had established his covenant forever.
But the word of the Lord came to Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying:
Sons have I reared. Daughters have I raised, but they forget me. The ox knows its own, the ass its master’s crib, but my children do not know and my people do not understand.
THE WIFE OF THE KING of Judah bore a son, and called his name Hezekiah: The Lord Is My Strength.
The boy was sober even from his mother’s womb. He grew up conscious of the elemental changes in the nations around him and in the earth—as though mountains were cracking and crumbling into the sea. Nothing was stable. Judah in particular seemed small among the kingdoms. Edom attacked her from the south. The ancient Philistine cities found strength and weapons and attacked from the west. Even Egypt, as old as deserts and rivers, had shattered into helpless divisions; dynasties were passing away. Hezekiah questioned the advisors of his father, seeking explanations. He sat with the priests in the temple.
And then Assyria marched against the northern kingdom.
Hezekiah was eighteen years old when the Assyrians laid siege to Samaria. He listened intently to the reports that poured down from the north. He heard of the horrors. He went out himself and watched the melancholy deportations, thousands and thousands of those that had been kin to him, the old and the young now trudging away in ropes, their herds and cattle driven eastward, carts filled with goods now bound for the storehouses of Assyria.
When Hezekiah was twenty-five his father Ahaz died, and he was himself anointed king of Judah. There was little joy in the coronation.
The sober king was asking in his heart: How shall I rule? What course is left for a king in Judah?
In the seven years since Israel died, wild animals had begun to prowl the hills of Ephraim. The land was deserted of its old activity and its sunny populations—and the few who lived there now were an alien breed, people of impenetrable behavior and curious dress whom Assyria had imported from other defeated, dispirited cities: Babylon, Cuthah, Hamath, Avva.
If the kingdom of Israel could suffer such defeat, Hezekiah wondered, is the God of Israel diminished? Is the Lord less than Asshur, god of the Assyrians?
How could he ask such questions aloud in the streets of Jerusalem? How could he—a son of David in whose very person rested the covenant God made with David—ask whether the hand of the Lord was weakened? Judah hid in these ancient promises the way the hunted hides in rocks and caves.
But which god was god of the other? Asshur or the Lord?
The Assyrians made pictures of their gods. The people of Judah did not. These pictures were fashioned of wood, plated in gold, given staring white eyes of precious stone. And what did the face of the god of the Assy
rians look like? Why, like the face of the king of Assyria! Here was their leader in heaven and on earth, here visible before them: the one who had destroyed Israel and made Judah bow down with splendid gifts and tribute.
But the God of Judah was invisible. Was he also unreachable? He had an unspeakable name. He was a deity wrapped in thick darkness, a God present in word but not in image, a smoky thing, a thing of the wind. Was he also a thing who, if he did not answer, was not there?
So which was the god of the other god?
In the privacy of his palace, King Hezekiah bent down by the sash of a window and whispered his question. He did not mean it as a prayer. He was too frightened to pray such a thing. He meant it merely as an expression of a mystery which, if it could not be solved, he could not reign.
The king whispered, “What shall we now say of the Lord, the God of Israel?”
Immediately a voice came in the window, saying:
That even from the beginning he has been the God of all creation!
III
ISAIAH HAD CEASED to prophesy when King Ahaz refused to obey the commands of God. He wrote in a scroll all the prophecies he had uttered as a young man, then he retired from public places and was not seen again for seventeen years.
By the wealth and heritage of his family, Isaiah had access to the royal courts. His was noble blood. No one questioned his presence where rich men gathered or his participation in the counsel given to kings. At the invitation of the high priest, he joined the most sacred processions of the temple.
Though his prophecy condemned injustice in the kingdom, yet Isaiah himself was not a brooding fellow. He was educated, polished, articulate, and generally pleasant in the company of others.
People did not, then, understand his sudden withdrawal. Was there some offense they were unaware of?
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 40
