Reading the Bible again for the First Time
Page 13
The elites are addressed not only (or even largely) because they had the power to change things, but because it is they who were primarily responsible for Israel’s becoming a radically unjust domination system—one hardly different from Egypt. They had deformed Israel, changing her from the exodus vision of an alternative community living under the lordship of God to just another kingdom living under the lordship of a native pharaoh.
Thus the prophets are not saying that all or most Israelites were equally guilty of social injustice, as if the victims of the system were as responsible as the perpetrators. Rather, they indict the elites of power and wealth at the top of the system on behalf of the victims and in the name of God. These God-intoxicated figures were utterly convinced that what they saw happening in their midst could not be the will of the God who had liberated Israel from bondage in Egypt.
I also have realized that the conflict between domination systems and the will of God runs through the Hebrew Bible as a whole. According to the first book of Samuel, the conflict does not begin in the time of the prophets but goes back to the origin of the monarchy in Israel in the late eleventh century BCE. First Samuel contains two very different traditions about the emergence of kingship—one anti-monarchical, the other pro-monarchical.
According to the anti-monarchical tradition, the people ask Samuel to appoint a king over them.33 Their request displeases both Samuel and God. Indeed, their desire for a king is said to be a rejection of God’s kingship. Nevertheless, God grants their request, but with a stern and remarkably precise warning about what a king will do to them: he will take their sons as warriors; conscript them into labor battalions to work his fields and produce weapons; take their daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers; take the best of their fields and vineyards and orchards and give them to his friends; take one-tenth of their grain and their flocks; take their male and female slaves and the best of their animals and put them to his work; and, God says to them, “You shall be his slaves.”34
According to the second and pro-monarchical tradition, God’s intervention established the monarchy with Saul as its first king. In a charming folktale that begins with some lost donkeys, God discloses to Samuel that a certain man (Saul) will come to him whom God has chosen to be king and that Samuel is to anoint him as such. A confirming sign from God follows.35
The pro-monarchical tradition surfaces again in II Samuel in the promise given by God to King David. David is told that God will establish an everlasting dynasty for him: the throne of his son’s kingdom will last forever. Indeed, the king is no less than a son of God: “I will be a father to him, and he will be a son to me.”36 In this tradition, Israelite kingship is not only a gift of God but guaranteed by God to last forever. The social order—the domination system—is ordained by God.
The pro-monarchical tradition obviously reflects the vantage point and self-interest of the elites. Sometimes called “royal theology,” it shows the way the world looks from the elite point of view. The anti-monarchical tradition reflects prophetic theology: the domination system is not the will of God, but a betrayal of God. It is a rejection of God’s kingship.
Both points of view are in the Bible, going back to the time of the exodus. The central conflict of the exodus—between the domination system of the pharaoh and an alternative and much more egalitarian social vision grounded in the character of God—is replicated in the conflict between royal theology and prophetic theology within Israel itself.
It is important to note that the conflict is not between law and prophets, as if it were “the law” versus “the prophets,” as scholars of an earlier generation sometimes saw it. From that earlier point of view, the prophets were good and the law was bad. Rather, the conflict is between the law and prophets together against the royal theology of the domination system.
Prophetic Energizing: The Language of Hope
The third main feature of how I hear the prophets now is a greater appreciation for prophetic energizing. To explain: Walter Brueggemann names the two primary dimensions of prophetic activity as prophetic criticizing and prophetic energizing.37
So far in this chapter, we have seen much of the former. Prophetic energizing sounds a different note: it uses language to generate hope, affirm identity, and create a new future.
The predestruction prophets—those who spoke before the destruction of Israel and Judah—were mostly engaged in prophetic criticism, indicting and warning the elites of what would soon happen unless they abandoned their privilege and sought justice. The postdestruction prophets, on the other hand—those who spoke during and after the exile—were primarily engaged in prophetic energizing. The distinction is relative, however, not absolute. The predestruction prophets also used the language of energizing, and the postdestruction prophets also used the language of criticizing. Nevertheless, in general the predestruction prophets spoke against the perpetrators of the native domination system on behalf of the victims. The postdestruction prophets spoke to the victims of a new imperial domination system that now ruled over the Jewish people.
In my second phase of hearing the prophets, most of my attention was drawn to prophetic criticizing, largely because of the time in our own society’s history. Though I continue to regard that message as vitally important, I am now also very much struck by prophetic energizing.
Second Isaiah and the Experience of Exile We see the language of prophetic energizing used with great power and beauty in the second part of the book of Isaiah, commonly called “Second Isaiah” or “Deutero-Isaiah.”38
The first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah are primarily from the predestruction prophet Isaiah, who spoke to Judah in the eighth century. Chapters forty through fifty-five contain the words of Second Isaiah, a Jewish prophet whose name is unknown and who spoke to the Jewish people in exile beginning around the year 539 BCE.
To appreciate the energizing power of Second Isaiah’s language, it is illuminating to set it in the historical context of the Jewish experience of exile. The Babylonian conquest of Judah and Jerusalem in 586 BCE not only brought massive death and destruction, as attested by archaeological and literary evidence alike. It also caused widespread desperation and despair among the survivors, many of whom were exiled to Babylon.
The experience seared itself into the memory of the Jewish people and left its mark in the Hebrew Bible. A number of the psalms reflect the experience of exile. Psalm 137 is especially poignant. Recall that Zion is the mountain in Jerusalem where the now-destroyed temple once stood:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
How could we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?39
The book of Lamentations is a sustained expression of grief and pain. The author personifies Jerusalem as a woman and mourns her desolation:
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal. She weeps bitterly in the night with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers, she has no one to comfort her. . . .
All her people groan as they search for bread;
they trade their treasures for food. . . .
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow.40
Much of the book describes the lives of the survivors with precision and anguish. Its concluding chapter begins:
Remember, O LORD, what has befallen us;
look and see our disgrace.
Our inheritance [the promised land] has been turned over to strangers,
our homes to aliens.
We have become orphans, father
less; our mothers are like widows.
We must pay for the water we drink;
the wood we get must be bought.
With a yoke on our necks we are hard-driven;
we are weary, we are given no rest. . . .
Women are raped in Zion,
virgins in the towns of Judah.
Our princes are hung up by their hands;
no respect is shown to the elders.
Young men are compelled to grind,
and boys stagger under loads of wood.
The old men have left the city gate,
the young men their music.
The joy of our hearts has ceased;
our dancing has been turned to mourning. . . .
Mt. Zion lies desolate; jackals prowl over it.41
The last three verses of Lamentations express with great power the hive of emotions felt in exile: the bitter pain of feeling abandoned, the desperate desire for restoration, the gnawing apprehension of having been forsaken and forgotten forever, the anxious fear that things will always be the same and never get better:
Why have you forgotten us completely?
Why have you forsaken us these many days?
Restore us to yourselves, O LORD, that we may be restored;
renew our days as of old—
unless you have utterly rejected us,
and are angry with us beyond measure.
Second Isaiah and the Return from Exile In this historical setting, Second Isaiah spoke his message of prophetic energizing. He is the prophet of the return from exile.
The return from exile became politically possible when the Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Persian Empire in 539 BCE. Persian imperial policy permitted the return of exiled peoples to their homelands. But the return from exile could not be taken for granted.
The Jewish exiles were a weakened community—weakened in power, wealth, identity, and spirit. Most of them had been born in exile in Babylon. Only a few were still alive who remembered Jerusalem and Zion. For most, life in the promised land was a faint and secondhand memory. They had put down roots, even if the roots were in Babylon. Moreover, the journey would be long and difficult: about a thousand miles through a mostly empty semidesert landscape. It would be on foot. Undertake this journey? It was no small thing.
Second Isaiah’s task is to announce and encourage, to proclaim and empower, the return from exile. His energizing language is among the most magnificent in the Bible. It is no accident that much of it is familiar to us from Handel’s Messiah.
The primary content of his message is announced in a passage that probably reflects his call to be a prophet. The tone and content are very different from the predestruction prophets:
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.42
Second Isaiah’s message is that God is preparing the way of return. Using metaphors of a superhighway being built in the desert, he declares to the exiles victimized by the domination system of Babylon:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places plain.43
Second Isaiah recognizes the exiles’ despairing sense of having been forgotten by God and recites their lament:
Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God.”44
He counters their despondency with energizing affirmations of their identity. He reminds them of who they are in God’s sight: precious, honored, loved, remembered.
But now, thus says the LORD,
the one who created you, O Jacob,
the one who formed you, O Israel.
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, and you are mine. . . .
You are precious in my sight, and honored,
and I love you. . . .
Do not be afraid, for I am with you.45
He assures them that God will not forget even one of them, for they and their offspring are sons and daughters of God:
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
I will say to the north, “Give them up.”
And to the south, “Do not withhold;
bring my sons from far away
and my daughters from the end of the earth—
everyone who is called by name.”46
The imagery of God as parent and Israel as God’s sons and daughters continues in a passage that boldly compares God to a mother nursing her child. The gnawing fear of the exiles surfaces again: “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” In the name of God, Second Isaiah says:
Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.47
He not only assures the exiles that they are remembered by God, but promises God’s empowering presence on the difficult journey of return:
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is an everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
God does not faint or grow weary.
God gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not be faint.48
God is the shepherd of Israel:
God will feed the flock like a shepherd,
gather the lambs, carry them,
and gently lead those who are with young.49
To the community of exiles, newness seemed impossible. But Second Isaiah announces that God is doing a new thing:
See, the former things have come to pass,
and new things I now declare.50
The new thing is nothing less than a new exodus. In language that recalls the exodus from Egypt:
I am the LORD, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your king.
Thus says the LORD,
who makes a way in the sea,
a path in the mighty waters,
who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior;
they lie down, they cannot rise,
they are extinguished,
quenched like a wick.
Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.51
The energizing language of Second Isaiah worked. The words that went forth from his mouth did not return empty, but accomplished that which God purposed:
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace.
The mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.52
A significant number of the Jewish exiles returned to their homeland, though some remained in Babylon. Within a generation, the returning remnant had rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem—a temple that, because of the relatively impoverished status of the exiles, was much more modest in size and splendor than the earlier temple built by King Solomon (and destroyed by the Babylonians).
Though the exiles continued for several centuries to be under the political control of a series of foreign empires, they were back in the promised land. They were home.