Prophets Series at St Bride's
Three Isaiahs - notes from Steve Shakespeare's Talk on 31st July 2011
Isaiah 6
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.’
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’ And he said, ‘Go and say to this people:
“Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.”
Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed.’
Then I said, ‘How long, O Lord?’ And he said:
‘Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;
until the Lord sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
Even if a tenth part remains in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled.’
The holy seed is its stump.
Notes
It’s become a truism to say that the Bible is a library of books. What is less accepted is that many of the individual books in the Bible are the work of many hands. The overwhelming likelihood is that they’ve often been composed from earlier sources, and edited by many hands over decades if not hundreds of years. And this has to make us ask questions about what we mean when we talk about the inspiration and authority of the Bible. Clearly it was not as if God just talked into the ancient equivalent of a Dictaphone for someone to copy out.
This is especially relevant to us when we think about the prophets. In our imagination, the prophet is usually an inspired individual, with a burning need to communicate a word from God which has been given to them personally. It’s not as if there is no truth in this picture, but like all such projections, it’s too simple. It supports a myth – the myth of the great individual who comes to tell us the truth and save us (or punish us).
The reality is likely to be more messy: great individual figures existed but as parts of a complex tradition, in which there were schools of prophecy, and literary models were handed down (for a clear example, it’s worth noting that the famous passage about beating swords into ploughshares is found both in Micah and in Isaiah.). The words of prophets could be edited, expanded (and probably deleted too).
The book of Isaiah is a good example. Scholars have questioned whether it had a single author from the 12th century on. From 1775, it’s been argued that chapters 40-66 are written by someone else than chapters 1-39, and many scholars now accept that chapters 56-66 are from a different hand too. So there are at least three Isaiahs, or three authors using Isaiah’s name. And that’s not all, since each part of the book has probably been edited. So there are a whole company of voices being heard in this one book.
The arguments for this are a lot to do with language and themes, but most obviously they have to do with history. The Isaiah of chapters 1-39 starts prophesying in about 742 BCE. It deals with the threat from Assyria, that eventually resulted in invasion of Israel and of Judah (the two kingdoms were separate and sometimes at war). Chapters 40-55 assume that the people of Judah have been taken captive by Babylon, an event that occurred in 587. It preaches consolation and hope. The last ten chapters address the exiles returned to Jerusalem with the Temple rebuilt, sometime after 515. It is less hopeful, looking to future glory but only through a remnant of Israel and possibly Gentiles too. So unless Isaiah was blessed with extraordinary long life . . .
What do we make of this? I think there are actually some positive things about this shift in perception. But we can’t deny that it puts a hole in some dogmatic ideas about how the Bible was written. It turns out to be a human, messy book, with a real history. A history in which people ‘borrowed’ the names and reputations of former greats, a history in which they – shock! horror! – made stuff up.
But on one level that’s OK, because people at the time knew what was going on. When the second Isaiah wrote his or her material, nobody thought the original guy had come back to life. They accepted that prophecy was a living tradition. And like any real tradition (rather than our fantasy idea of a tradition), it lives through change, adaptation, getting things wrong, trying new things out.
This does however raise a question about how Christians use these books. We still tend to fall into the assumption that the prophets were all looking forward to . . . us! But they were deeply rooted in the events of their day, and their dreams of the future were guiding lights of inspiration, not crystal ball predictions.
Take the famous Isaiah passage: ‘the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel’. Note that first this says nothing about the woman being a virgin; and second, in context it refers to the immediate history of the time it was written: The point made is that the child will not be very old before the land is devastated by Assyria. Another example concerns the famous ‘servant songs’ in the later parts of the book. Christians apply these to Jesus, but the original songs veer between seeing the servant as the community of Israel, or as a prophet-like figure who will console those who have experienced the exile to Babylon and the disappointing return.
None of this stops us using this imagery to think about Jesus, but we have to be aware that we are using or misusing it creatively. That is always a risk, never a guarantee that we are right.
So in the light of all of this, I have some things to suggest that we should challenge ourselves about:
Prophecy is not just about individual inspiration. It is about how inspiration is nurtured, passed on and shared. It is a community event – even when it challenges the very basis of what that community is about.
Authority in prophecy, the Bible and elsewhere doesn’t just drop from above (that makes it open to all sorts of abuse). It has to be earned and recognised.
Prophecies are not just predictions about the future, but imaginative, creative challenges to us to see things differently. As such, they can be rightly interpreted in different ways – of which the traditional Christian way is only one (and sometimes not the best, given the way Christians have claimed a superior insight into Hebrew scriptures, often to the detriment of the Jewish people).
Questions:
How do we become a prophetic community?
Where do we find authentic inspiration and authority?
What is the role of prophecy today?