Overstepping

I ended my last blog post with a reference to the speech of the Assyrian king’s ambassador in Isaiah 36.  The ambassador challenges Israel’s claim that Yahweh is their God and will act on their behalf; instead, he claims that Yahweh has ordained the Assyrian military in their march on Jerusalem.  These sorts of claims are part and parcel of the political rhetoric used by the Assyrian Empire, and they served to cast doubt on an opposing city, its king, and its army.  In fact, a great deal has been said about Assyrian propaganda — the use of ideological symbols, religious subversion, and intense fear tactics to undermine a city’s hope and encourage submission (of course, when all else failed, they surrounded the city and leveled it to the ground).  Isaiah 10:5-15 appears to contain elements of exactly this kind of rhetoric.  Only here, the language used by the Assyrian king is creatively adapted (a bit of reading like a prophet!) in order to pit Assyrian ambition against the will of Yahweh — and the former is found woefully lacking.

The specific strokes of chapter 10 point to a single broad point: The Assyrian king has acted arrogantly by asserting himself over Yahweh.  But let’s look at 4 ways that he does this:

The first is blatant: “By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I have understanding…” (v. 13).   Notice the rapid repetition of the first-person pronouns!  And more importantly, notice the king’s claim to wisdom and insight — kingly qualities valued by Israel, but only as gifts given by God for ruling justly among the people.  The Assyrian kings were not known for their just rule, in spite of their explicit claims to the contrary.

A second characteristic of Assyria’s arrogance is evident in the king’s next claim: “I have removed the boundaries of peoples…”  But, as Deuteronomy puts it, it is “Elyon [the Most High]” who “established the boundaries of the peoples.”  Now Isaiah’s claims against the king of Assyria are getting quite serious.  Not only has he ruled unjustly (the very opposite of wisdom that comes from Yahweh), but he has usurped the authority to apportion the nations — an authority that belongs to God alone!  Interestingly, Yahweh had granted a certain amount of authority to Assyria: “Against a godless nation I send him, and against the people of my wrath I command him to take spoil and seize plunder” (v. 6).  But Assyria took far more than they were given.  Rather than assume the role of punisher granted by Yahweh, “it was in his heart to destroy and to cut off nations not a few.”  By removing the boundaries of the nations, the king of Assyria overstepped his bounds.

The third part of the king’s boast is rendered by the NRSV: “[I] have plundered their treasures.”  But this is an inadequate translation, for “treasures” is really a more generic word for storehouses.  Of course the king looted the treasures of nations — that’s what kings do, and it even appears to be within the bounds granted by Yahweh in v. 6.  A more accurate translation might read: “I have stolen their stores,” with the implication that the king went above and beyond the expectations for warfare.  He destroyed the very means for livelihood, literally the “prepared things” that people of these nations had set aside for food and shelter.  Once again, Assyria overstepped, this time resulting in excessive cruelty and oppression.

A fourth characteristic of the Assyrian king’s arrogance concerns the title he attributes to himself.  Once again, I think the NRSV translation misses the point.  The Hebrew word rendered “like a bull” (all one word in Hebrew) is actually the same word used in Isaiah 1:24 to describe Yahweh as “the Mighty One.”  Now he’s not just doing things that are only properly the behavior of Yahweh, but the king of Assyria has actually adopted for himself the very title of God!  (It may be that both translations are correct.  Assyrian kings occasionally depicted themselves or their troops as bulls trampling on their victims.  So Isaiah is playing on the word to show how ridiculous are these claims of the king.  Clever, and unfortunately, impossible to capture in our translations.)

Just to drive home the absurdity of the king of Assyria claiming priority over Yahweh, Isaiah employs some metaphors: “Shall the ax vaunt itself over the one who wields its, or the saw magnify itself against the one who wields it?” (v. 15).  As if a tool could master its master!

So let the “reading like a prophet” begin.  How do the empires of today overstep their bounds?  And what are those bounds?  As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the Old Testament Prophets do not automatically associate empire(s) with evil.  Empires, rather, are tools in the hands of God as is any other human institution.  The ethical question facing an empire is: Have we been a good empire?  Have we been merciful (see my older post on Avatar and Empire)?  Have we been just?  Have we overstepped our (God-given) bounds?  And then I think we have to ask ourselves, as the people of God: Are we faced with propaganda today that claims too much or oversteps?  What is it?  How can we name this propaganda and, as Isaiah does, expose it for the utter absurdity that it is?

Isaiah and History (as written by the Empire)

Well, Week 2 and I already failed to post.  This is a recap of last week’s class…

We spent most of the time surveying several generations of 8th century (BCE) Judahite kings and their dealings with the Assyrians.  Our sources were 2 Kings 15-20; Isaiah 1:1; 7-8; and 36-37.  Broadly speaking, Isaiah 1-39 constitutes the first major section of the book and deals primarily with Judah/Jerusalem in a world dominated by the ruthless Assyrian Empire.  Isaiah ben Amoz (the Isaiah of the first verse) lived during this time, and most of the folks who write the books about Isaiah insist that he only wrote chapters 1-39; the rest was written by a disciple (or disciples) of the First Isaiah.  (For the curious: I agree with the folks who write the books).

Two events in Isa 1-37 are worth noting: First, Yahweh delivers King Ahaz of Judah from a conspiracy to replace him as king.  The kings of Israel (Northern Kingdom) and Aram (Syria) wanted Ahaz to join their anti-Assyrian coalition.  When he refused, they threatened war, and Ahaz appealed to the king of Assyria.  Assyria answered, crushed Israel and Aram, and then began collecting tribute from Jerusalem as payment for their salvific intervention.  See Isaiah 7-8.

Second, 20-30 years after Ahaz, Hezekiah took the throne of Jerusalem.  He refused to pay the tribute demanded by Assyria, so King Sennacherib of Assyria marched through Judah killing and burning everything in his path.  He made his way all the way to the gates of Jerusalem and surrounded the city to besiege it.  Hezekiah appealed to Isaiah and to Yahweh, and God intervened in a miraculous way to preserve Jerusalem.  See Isaiah 36-37.

These two events serve as the major external crises that motivated much of Isaiah’s prophetic work.  His sermons exhort the people of God in Jerusalem towards a particular foreign policy that reflects their allegiance to Yahweh alone — not to military power, diplomatic strategy (like paying tribute), or most emphatically not to the Assyrian king or deity.  This conflict between Yahweh and Empire comes to a head in the speech of the Rab-Shakeh to the now-surrounded inhabitants of the Holy City: “Is it without Yahweh that I have come up against this land to destroy it?  Yahweh said to me, Go up against this land and destroy it” (Isaiah 36:10).  Speaking on behalf of King Sennacherib himself, this Assyrian ambassador (in Judah’s own language, no less) declares that Yahweh has ordered Assyria to march on Jerusalem.  The question for Jerusalem and Hezekiah is not merely “In whom shall I trust?” but more confusingly “Whose God is this?  And how do we know?”  Hezekiah’s subsequent appeal and Yahweh’s remarkable response are answer enough.

The subject of Yahweh’s squaring off against the Empire is a major part of the book of Isaiah, and I believe teaches us a great deal about the relationship between the people of God and the dominant power of any historical era.  And the questions are magnified for those of us today who find ourselves claiming citizenship of both the Kingdom of God and our era’s dominant historical power.  Is it possible to sing “In Christ alone my hope is found” on Sunday morning and later recite “I pledge allegiance to the flag”?  These questions — and Isaiah’s answers — will be the subject of the next couple weeks.  This week we’ll read Isaiah 10:5-15 and discuss the folly of imperial propaganda.

Stay tuned.  I hope to post a preview tomorrow.

Reading Like a Prophet

Tomorrow I start teaching a 12-week Sunday School series at First Mennonite Church Champaign-Urbana.  My goal is to post a preview of each week here on first things first, so follow along if you’re interested.

The title of the class is “The Gospel of Isaiah,” although it’s kind of a bait-and-switch.  I want to use passages from Isaiah to talk broadly about the Old Testament, its value as Scripture, the nature of prophecy, and especially ways we can approach the text in order to grasp its richness and depth.  An alternate title might be: “How to Read Scripture Like a Prophet.”  Let me try and explain.

The Lord, the Lord,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
but visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children
and the children’s children,
to the third and the fourth generation.
(Exodus 34:6-7)

The prophets of the Bible were masters of their tradition.  They knew their world, their people, their history inside and out.  One might say it’s part of what made them so capable of rendering God’s words in such palpable, raw, and often beautiful ways.  Most importantly, they were discerning individuals; they read their own context with eyes illuminated by a keen insight into the will of God for their specific time and place (many call this inspiration).  Take the passage from Exodus 34 quoted above.  It’s a formula, developed sometime during Israel’s walk with God (no need to speculate when), and used again and again in different contexts in order to say something about the God with whom they walk (for example, Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9-10; Jeremiah 32:28).  In each of these different contexts, the formula is given certain emphases or slight revisions that change its meaning.

Look at how Nahum uses part of the formula:

A jealous and avenging God is the Lord,
the Lord is avenging and wrathful;
the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries
and rages against his enemies.
The Lord is slow to anger but great in power,
and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.
(Nahum 1:2-3)

The last two lines resemble the second half of the Exodus formula, but the first two lines have changed drastically!  Nahum is a short prophetic book condemning the behavior of Nineveh, the capital city of the great Assyrian empire, and it begins by citing a very traditional part of Israel’s faith: “The Lord is slow to anger…”  But, says Nahum, “great in power.”

The book of Jonah uses this formula in a similar way.  His citation is even closer to the Exodus text (Jonah 4:2), but Jonah employs it in a completely different context — he’s not at all happy that these are God’s ways.  Jonah knew that, if he called Nineveh to repentance, they would repent and God would spare them.  So, he says: “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”  Jonah was responsible for God’s sparing of Israel’s greatest enemy!

The point here is that “reading like a prophet” looks something like a recycling of traditional material in new contexts.  But (and here’s the scary/exciting part), that recycling is often critical or even tradition-altering.  The author of Jonah knew that Israel was prone to think of their “gracious and merciful” God when it came to their own relationship with him.  But others?  The vast and horrible Assyrian Empire?  Prophets are no doubt outside-the-box thinkers, but they get all their material from inside the box.

I borrowed a lot of this argument from one of my favorite OT theologians, Phyllis Trible.  Trible calls this context-sensitive recycling of material “the hermeneutical clue within the text.”  She wants us to see that new contexts serve as the motive for comprehending the religious tradition in new ways.  As she puts it, “context altered text.”  Isaiah does this too.  He expresses God’s frustration with practices like sacrifice and fasting in order to re-cast the tradition in more meaningful ways for his time and place.  After all, what use are sacrifices when people go hungry?  And he and the prophet Joel both employ what looks like a traditional metaphor (swords/plowshares; Isaiah 2:4; Joel 3:10), but in opposite ways for different purposes.

So, to read like a prophet we must immerse ourselves in the box (in our case, Isaiah) and discover exciting ways in which it takes on new life in our own time and place.  As Trible puts it, biblical metaphors are on a “journey” through Scripture, and one of our interpretive goals is to discover how that metaphor is shaped by its varied uses along the journey.  The prophetic word declares something new in relation to something old.  So our task of “reading like a prophet” is twofold: First, we want to discover the new thing that Isaiah declared and how it relates to the old; and second (this is the part too often overlooked), we have to relate the old (Isaiah) to a new declaration of our own!  We haven’t finished reading until we’ve done both of these things.

In our Sunday School class, we’re going to look at different ways that such declarations are made.  What sorts of new declarations does Isaiah make?  Do we see development and “newness” even within the book of Isaiah itself?  How do different interpretive communities today take up Isaiah’s work, claim it as their own, and recycle it in order to make new proclamations for the people of God?

Next week:  Historical overview.  Texts: Isaiah 1:1; 7:1-9; 36-39; 2 Kgs 15-20