Good Book

by David Plotz

  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 performance, 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’ superficial 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 ploughshares, 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 doesn’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 pleasure-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 Iranians 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.

  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 afflicted, 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 ha
s 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 finally reap the benefits of being God’s Chosen People. For Israelites, these end times will be like being a senior during Senior 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?