Isaiah 40 – 42: The Breath of Yhwh Scorching, Confounding, Anointing1

W. A. M. Beuken describes mishpat (usually translated “justice,” “right,” or “judgment”) as the key word in Isa 40:12 – 42:13; it comes in 40:14, 27; 41:1; 42:1, 3, 4.2 Arguably, in 40:1 – 42:17 as a whole the word ruach has as central a role. In each of these opening three chapters of Second Isaiah, ruach comes twice and plays a significant part in the prophecies’ message (at two significant points it comes in association with mishpat). Unlike mishpat, it occurs in the prologue (40:1-11) as well as in each of the three major sections that follow (40:12-31; 41:1-20; 41:21 – 42:17). The chapters utilize all its suggestive and powerful range of meanings. Like mishpat, ruach is difficult to translate. In English, it is unfortunate that we have to choose between “wind,” “breath,” and “spirit,” because Hebrew (like Greek) commonly plays on the links between the three meanings. In particular, the use of the word for the “spirit” of Yhwh can keep reminding hearers of the resonances of the words “breath and “wind.” Wind stands for power and dynamic, enough to blow down trees or race a boat across an ocean. It combines energy and mystery; we cannot see where it is coming from and we cannot see the thing itself, but we can certainly see its effects. Breath stands for life and vitality; again it is something invisible, mysterious and powerful. Where there is breath, there is life. Where there is not, life has gone. If you sit beside a dying person, you know the solemnity of that moment when the breathing stops. It indeed means the end. If you stand in a labor room and watch with equal awe as a doctor or a midwife lifts up a baby and it takes its first gulp of air and for the first time fills its lungs and yells, you know that life has begun. The wind is like God’s breath, like God letting forth divine power in the world, in order to achieve something.

In Isaiah 40 – 42 the ruach of Yhwh has scorched, but the prophet promises that this is not the end. The ruach of Yhwh confounds, being so much more wise than the nations that will be carried away by ruach. Being so much more powerful than images that are mere ruach, the ruach of Yhwh equips for servant ministry and breathes into all the people on the earth that Yhwh spreads out.

Scorching: Isaiah 40:1-11

Grass withers, a flower fades, when the breath of Yhwh breathes on it (40:7)

On 15 March in the year 587 BC the Babylonian army finally took the city of Jerusalem. The king fled, as kings do, but the Babylonians chased him and caught him. They killed his two sons before his eyes and then blinded the king himself, so that the last picture his eyes took with them to their sightlessness was the scene of these young men dying. It would have been designed to ensure that this recalcitrant leader could never have descendants on the throne of David. If Babylonians treated children like this, it is no wonder Israelites wished someone would batter their babies’ heads against a rock. Here is the bereft cry of the Book of Lamentations out of the torture and grief of that experience and its aftermath.

How she sits alone, the city that was full of people.

She has become like a widow,

1 First published in Journal of Pentecostal Theology 11 (1997): 5–15.2 See “The First Servant Song and its Context,” Vetus Testamentum 22 (1972): 1-30.

she that was great among the nations.She that was a princess among the provinces

has become a vassal.She weeps and weeps in the night,

tears on her cheeks.She has no comforter among

all her lovers. All her friends have betrayed her;

they have become her enemies.Judah has gone into exile

with affliction and long servitude.She lives among the nations;

she finds no resting place.Her pursuers have all overtaken her

in the midst of her distress.

For fifty years that cry was uttered. Then a prophet receives a new word from God, a word that confronts or terminates the lament. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Encourage Jerusalem and call out to her: she has completed her service, her penalty has been paid, she has accepted from Yhwh’s hand double for all her failings. “She has no comforter,” Lamentations had said. “Comfort, comfort my people,” says Isaiah of Babylon. “She weeps and weeps in the night,” Lamentations had said. “Encourage Jerusalem,” says the prophet. “Judah has gone into exile with affliction and long servitude,” Lamentations had said. “She has completed her service, her penalty has been paid,” God now declares. Here are messages to the people of God in exile.

Today in the First World, at least, the church is not in a geographical exile. We are not under physical attack or banned from meeting. Our leaders are not arrested; our buildings are not subject to appropriation. Yet in a more subtle sense it may seem to live in an exile of spirit and mind, a long exile that we are rarely able to own as such. “How she sits alone, the city that was full of people. She has she become like a widow.” To such a community in exile a prophet is sent. “Comfort, comfort, my people, says your God.” “My people, your God” sound obvious, trite words, but they are not. Two centuries before, Hosea had felt scandalized by the faithlessness of God’s people and had heard God telling them, “This is not my people and I am not your God.” Like a woman who has finally tired of her husband’s philandering, God gets out the marriage certificate and tears it up, because morally that is what the people have done already. The relationship is dead. “This is not my people and I am not your God.” When people have affairs, it is said that it is nearly always the man who wants it both ways – wants to keep the outward form of his marriage going but wants to keep the extra relationship going as well. Rather than leaving their wives, if they can they keep their lovers on a piece of string for as long as they will stay there. Jerusalem did the same. It risked its relationship with Yhwh for the sake of its other lovers, but then found itself thrown out, and discovered that among all those lovers there were none to comfort it. Now the community is told that its original lover has not given up on the relationship after all. “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.” Tell Jerusalem that its exile is over.

I have no word from God parallel to the one Isaiah of Babylon had received. I do not know whether a moment when God turns the tide in the affairs of the church in the First World has arrived. I am not absolutely sure it will ever arrive (after all, churches have died out before). The sixth century prophet could see light at the end of the tunnel in the form of the religious and political chaos into which Babylon had fallen, and perhaps the religious, philosophical, political, and social chaos of the late second millennium West will turn out to have parallel significance; it is a nice idea. Religiously Babylon had become the scene of hopeless conflict between the devotees of a god called Marduk and one called Sin. Politically Babylon was ever more closely threatened by the pincer that the Persian king Cyrus was forming around Babylon. The prophet had perhaps

asked what those two facts meant in the light of the reality of God, knew the answer, and only had the problem of how to convince the community that Yhwh really was not only in control but in the midst of acting. Exile, failure, and rundown can come to seem the only realities for the people of God. Israel was inclined to forget the reality of God, to lose sight of the fact that God had proved faithful and at work in the world and in working out Israel’s destiny in the past. The reality of God and of God’s purpose is the ultimate reality. The times when God is inactive for one reason or another are the times when it is most important to hold onto the reality of God and of that purpose. Otherwise, when God rises from the heavenly sofa and acts again, we may have dropped off and we may not notice. Our eyes are downcast so we do not see what is going on.

There is another reason why the moment when things look discouraging is the moment when we most need to give our minds and spirits to the times when God has been active and the places where God is acting. It is what some sociologists call an exercise in world-building. When we bring home to ourselves that the world of exile, rundown, and discouragement is not the ultimate world, that the ultimate world is one in which God is active, the gospel is carrying conviction, the church is growing, and justice is being done, then we can go out into the everyday world and church in which we live, the non-ultimate, not-as-God-eventually-means-it-to-be world and church, and more likely be able to do something about it. When we have a vision of the world and the church as God intends they shall be, then we can work with the grain of that vision, work in such a way that if God chooses to act through us, we are in the right place doing the right thing.

“Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Encourage Jerusalem and call out to her: she has completed her service, her penalty has been paid, she has accepted from Yhwh’s hand double for all her failings.” There is a real relationship between God and the community, and nothing is ever going to terminate it, though our failures have a serious attempt. The phrase “my people – your God” suggests that the relationship is as real as the best friendship, marriage, or family relationships. It is real because both parties are real. One piece of good news for the exiles is that a real God is there. God is not a figment of our imagination, or the name we give to the thing that has ultimate meaning for us. The God of whom Isaiah of Babylon spoke was the independent, tumultuous, unpredictable, awesome, caring, active, alive, lively, speaking, loyal, condescending, consistent, secure, humorous God of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Miriam, Moses, Joshua, Rahab, Deborah, Hannah, Samuel, Saul, David and people who followed, a God who takes initiatives, makes promises, takes part in theological arguments, speaks when spoken to, compromises, storms, laughs, confronts, sleeps, wakes, goes away and returns. This God is not one who lives by the rules, but one who behaves in rather an odd way towards Sarah and Hagar in little matters to do with their children, and Moses in a little matter of attempted murder (God’s attempt, not Moses’, though that is an interesting story, too), and Saul in a little matter of an evil spirit, and Job in a little matter of too much rope given to an Adversary and never telling Job what was going on....

When people stop believing in God, it is not this interesting God of Israel’s, this real person, but some figment of the imagination of the church’s boring and bored dogma and spirituality. One of my colleagues mentioned to me once how she found she was asking herself in the middle of taking a service what on earth was going on here, whether it had any point of contact with reality outside the church building. (Another has just given us an account of a Pentecostal service that involved ministers throwing custard pies in each other’s faces, so it is not only Anglicans who have problems.) Not that this means that the gospel is out of touch with reality, but that what we do in church sometimes seems to relate neither to the world nor to the gospel. I was reminded of a book by James Smart with the wonderful title The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church where he comments on the need for us as preachers to be people who live in two worlds, the world of the Bible and our present world, instead of the aseptic third sphere in which it can seem that preachers live.

Isaiah of Babylon reminds God’s people of the reality of God. It was not necessarily easier to be so convinced of that than it is for us. Or perhaps the ease and the difficulty had a different

profile. The prophet’s world was full of gods. The question was not whether people believed but who they believed in. Perhaps the Israelites could not be blamed for finding Babylonian gods more believable than Yhwh, and what their prophet has to do is remind them of the facts about their God that tended to get overlaid by the experience of exile or by the fact that another plausibility structure imposed itself upon them there in Babylon. They are reminded of who God is, and invited once more to stake their lives on the reality of that God. They cannot be given quasi-mathematical proofs of that God’s reality. They can be given grounds for acknowledging Yhwh and grounds for questioning the Babylonian consensus on deity that they are easily sucked into. What the gospel offers them and us is a real alternative to whatever is the shaky consensus on meaning and reality in any particular day.

Alongside the reality of this God was the reality of Israel. The phrase “my people – your God” presupposes that the people was intrinsic to Yhwh’s purpose from the beginning. When things went wrong in the world, this was not just a matter of individuals” relationships with God, though it was that. The comprehensive story of the unfolding of human failure in Genesis embraces families and communities, the world and society, and when God formulates that ill-fated plan to do something about it, the community was integral to it.

It was always supposed to be an egalitarian and secular community. Abraham and Sarah had no kings or priests, and their worship had no fixed permanent place, times, or forms. The story of the introduction and development of all of these does not inspire huge confidence in their being a good idea. It is hardly surprising that the gospel attempted to abolish them, nor very surprising that it failed, so that we reinvented priests, sacred buildings, and sabbaths, and turned eucharist and baptism into holy eucharist and holy baptism. God had taken a fancy for no apparent rational reason to an old man from Babylon and his barren wife and decided to turn them into a community that would show the difference it could make to have God in your life. God was committed to this community, no matter what happened, because God does not give up on us individually, and God does not give up on Israel or on the church. The direct message of Isaiah of Babylon was that God does not give up on Israel, even at the moment when it looks as if that is the case, when its own faithlessness seems terminal and seems to have been treated that way by God. That is not the end of the story. Israel has not been written out of the script. Here is its next episode. Indeed, Israel cannot be written out of the script.

There are pointers in the New Testament that could be read as indicating that the church has taken Israel’s place in the story. It is significant that the New Testament never describes the church as the new Israel, but when the Fathers began to talk like that they were not starting from nothing. But alongside the New Testament’s pointers towards replacement theology, as it is sometimes called, the idea that the church replaced Israel in God’s purpose, there are expressions of awareness that replacement theology could not be right. The most systematic is in Rom 9 – 11, a key part of Romans that was often ignored thirty years ago but that New Testament experts now see as quite central to Paul’s theology. Karl Barth’s monumental exposition of the chapters in Church Dogmatics II/2 brings out a key point as far as we are concerned, that if God could abandon the Jewish people and replace them by a gentile church, this could happen again. The church’s security disappears. As Paul puts it, the faithfulness of God disappears. No, he says, “My people” still applies to Israel. But Paul also picks up the fact that God can say “my people” to a people who were not “my people” before. And God has done that with us Gentiles. The largely-gentile church is part of the people of God, with Israel. We share Israel’s security. God says to us and of us, “my people – your God.” The church belongs to God. It is secure with God, whatever may happen to individual churches. Such language about being God’s people could seem comfortably but unwisely cozy. It need not have exclusive implications. When God says “You are my people” it is the language of love. It need not be a rejection of other peoples. Indeed, it cannot be, because the reason for saying it was that it should be a means of God’s reaching others. The people of God was designed to be inclusive, not exclusive. “My people – your God” implies a real God, a real people, and a relationship that will survive every threat to it. Israel’s relationship with God has been under

huge threat, under monumental strain. Sometimes that was so for reasons that did not seem attributable to Israel itself, and in situations like that Israel took God to task. The exile, they all knew, was not one of those moments. They had failed their God.

It is difficult to talk about failure in an adult way, in a constructive way. On its own a mere sense of failure may be neurotic. It is a neat trick if one can make an acknowledgment of failure creative. Isaiah of Babylon invites the community to look its failure in the eye, but does that in the context of inviting it to look beyond that failure, to stop being paralyzed by it. “You have completed your service.” “Service” is a military word, the ordinary Hebrew word for an army, the word used on the back of a military truck in Israel today. Military service involves among other things the experience of counting the days until one can escape what was at best frustration and boredom, or hardship and bullying, at worst dehumanization and death. The Israelites knew those experiences. Now God says “It’s over.” Service or servitude is not the people of God’s final experience.

“Your penalty has been paid” puts it more solemnly. It makes explicit that Israel was not in exile for the same reason that Job lost his health and his family, because of some mysterious purpose of God’s that had nothing to do with failures on Job’s part. Israel was in exile because it had failed to mirror God in its life, because its politics had emerged from human logic (flawed human logic too), because it had turned its back on its lover and gone off with others. It had failed and it had been paying the price. The reasons for the church’s bondage will include features for which we are responsible. When we look back at the relationship between church and society or church and politics and at the way we have gone about the church’s mission and the way we have ignored that, we can get only too familiar with the failures. This can easily issue in a neurotic, destructive sense of failure. It is a neat trick to make it creative. But if there is some sin that an individual needs to acknowledge, that person will be held back in life with God and life for God unless it is acknowledged and it ceases to be an unnamed boulder between them and their God and their calling. The same is true with the church. Some of its exile is attributable to its failure. But there comes a time when God says “Enough.”

God may even say “More than enough.” “You have received from Yhwh’s hand double for all your sins.” Perhaps that might be so for the church, too. Our failures work hard at terminating the relationship between God and the community, but nothing is ever going to terminate it. Therefore at this moment a voice on God’s behalf says, “In the wilderness prepare Yhwh’s road, level a highway for our God in the desert.” It is too prosaic to think that Yhwh is merely referring to the creation of a literal superhighway for the Israelites to return across the literal desert that separates Babylon from Israel. Indeed, this is not primarily a highway for Israel to travel at all, but a highway for Yhwh to travel. Jerusalem’s deepest problem was not that its human leadership, its princes, civil servants, and priests, had been taken off as refugees to Babylon. It was that its God had abandoned it. What the exilic Isaiah declares is that Yhwh has not finished with Jerusalem, and is on the way back. Israel goes too, but goes on God’s coattails, among God’s baggage. God is on the way back to Jerusalem, and nothing will stop that return. The splendor of Yhwh is going to be manifested in such a way that everyone will see it all at once, and we know this is true because God has said so (40:5).

To say it never happened would be to exaggerate. Yhwh did return, and the exiles were free to do so too. But things were never as splendiferous as this vision. This is perhaps one reason why the prophecy was open to being picked up in Jesus’ day. Down on the shores of the Dead Sea at Qumran the Essenes set up their community to prepare the way for Yhwh in the wilderness. Just upstream from there was where John set about baptizing, and Mark, with one eye on the Qumran community, declares that John brings the real fulfillment of the Isaianic prophecy, here is the place and now is the moment when Yhwh’s splendor is indeed about to be being revealed to everyone. For us too that remains promise. The partial fulfillments like the return from the exile and the serious down-payment in the coming of Jesus are the guarantee that real fulfillment will come, but it remains ahead. The way the Qumran community and Mark talk, preparing the way becomes a

human responsibility, something we have to do, by repentance. We have to take that seriously. But what the exilic Isaiah is talking about is something God is going to do. The good news for Jerusalem is that times of failure, bondage, and abandonment come to an end. Times of God’s absence do not last for ever. God is commissioning a way whereby to kick-start a purpose for the world, and it finally depends on God’s determination to succeed.

It is tempting to believe that times of God’s absence do last for ever. After the commission to build a highway, there is another commission in Isaiah 40, and it is now that we explicitly hear of Yhwh’s breath, though the scorching of that breath has been the presupposition behind vv. 1-5. “A voice says, ‘Cry out.”” “Proclaim.” “Preach.” “And I said, ‘Preach what?’” You say that everyone is going to see Yhwh’s glory, but everyone is like grass that’s been blasted by the hot mistral wind of Yhwh’s wrath, so how can they see anything?

These last words are often taken as what Yhwh says, telling the prophet to preach that all flesh is grass, but there is no indication of that and it makes better sense to see them as the prophet’s protest. The prophet, like any proper preacher, knows the people who have to be preached to, knows something of where they are and what they are thinking and feeling, knows that they do not need God or a prophet to tell them that they are like grass that has been blasted by the searing wind from the desert. That is how they describe themselves in their prayers. “If that’s where they are, how can I preach to them?” asks the prophet. Or at least, “What can I preach to them?” The breath of God might seem to be a prophet and a people’s key resource at this moment in their lives; so it was according to Ezek 37. Actually the breath of God is their problem (for ruach as wind in this context, compare Ps 103:15-16). The reference is to the sirocco, the extraordinarily hot, dry wind from the desert that comes for a few days at the beginning and end of summer in Palestine, powerful enough to parch and destroy the winter grass in the spring and – if it comes early – to damage growing crops, as it draws away all moisture from everything. The passage plays on that threefold link between spirit, breath, and wind: the searing wind/spirit that God breathes out scorches all that lives.

The wind as a supreme manifestation of divine power exercised upon God’s foes and on behalf of those God favors has a long history within Israel (within Isaiah, cf. 11:15; 30:28; 44:27; 51:10); reference to God witheringly blowing upon people reappears in a similar connection in 40:24, using different terminology. But the wind had provided an image for the threatened Babylonian devastation of Judah (Jer 4:11-12; 18:17; Ezek 17:10; 19:12; Hab 1:9; cf. Hos 13:15); now the figure is again explicitly linked with Yhwh and it becomes a protest at Yhwh’s having done just what was warned. Israel has not unreasonably come to turn the image against itself (cf. 27:8).

God’s response is not to deny their objection. Yes, the people are like grass. Yes, grass dries up and flowers wither. But that is not all there is to take account of. There is something that even the preacher can forget, something that especially the preacher can forget. “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God stands for ever.” When God has said something, it stands. When God has spoken, that fixes it. If God says that comfort is now to succeed confrontation, that encouragement is to replace criticism, that servitude is over, the penalty is paid, and enough is enough, that a highway is to be carved out for the divine return to Jerusalem, that the glory of Yhwh is going to be revealed - that fixes it and they had better believe it. The return of Yhwh to Zion-Jerusalem can therefore be proclaimed (vv. 9-11).

The function of the prophet’s protest was to bring out into the open important facts about how the people of God feel and how they indeed are. People, prophet, and God can afford to acknowledge them because there is a counter-statement regarding God’s word that can be put against them. In due course there will also be counter-statements about God’s breath.

Confounding: Isaiah 40:12-41:20Who has directed Yhwh’s spirit? (40:13)

The wind will carry them away (41:16)

Israel in the prophet’s day has to battle with a double temptation arising from its political experience. It is tempted to come to the conclusion that Yhwh lacks the motivation to care about its destiny and also the capacity to do anything about it. Israel is assailed by the impressiveness of imperial nation, religion, monarchy, and theology that Babylon exemplifies. The later part of chapter 40 addresses that issue, asking whether these are really so impressive given who Yhwh is. They challenge people to reaffirm their theoretical conviction of faith that Yhwh is vastly superior to the nations that seem so powerful, the images that represented their gods, the rulers who led the nations, and the gods who lay behind all these (Isa 40:12-17, 18-20, 21-24, 25-26).

The despairing question in 40:27 provides the key to understanding vv. 12-31 as a whole. It explicitly declares the doubting lament that the people are uttering, which corresponds to the cry in vv. 6-7 that they are withered by Yhwh’s ruach. Here the cry declares that Yhwh has forgotten their mishpat. To the claim that Yhwh has the ability to restore them is added the declaration that Yhwh also has the will (vv. 28-31). Isaiah 41 then deconstructs the power of Babylon and attempts to reconstruct the morale of the exilic community from a different angle. In the way it does the latter, Abraham has a key place. He shows something of the pattern of Yhwh’s activity in the world and of the pattern of Yhwh’s commitment to Israel (and the church). That links in part with the fact that these prophecies are addressed to a refugee community in Babylon, for Babylon was where Abraham had originally come from. Israel’s story had begun in Babylon and in due course had gone full circle. They had ended up back where Abraham had started. Yet perhaps precisely that might make Abraham’s story illuminating for them. Either end of these two sections of the Isaiah (40:12-31 and 41:1-20) are two threatening statements about breath/wind/spirit, threatening for people who do not believe in Yhwh, reassuring for people who do. Israel has to make up its mind which group it belongs to.

Isaiah 40:12-31 is concerned with the question who really rules in the world, and near the beginning asks the rhetorical question

Who has directed the spirit of Yhwh,and as for his consultant who could make things known to him?

With whom has he consulted so that he has enabled him to understand and taught him the way of judgment, taught him knowledge and could make known to him the path of understanding?

Parallels within Isa 40 – 66 would suggest that “spirit” denotes Yhwh’s active, life-giving power: e.g. 42:1; 44:3; 61:1; 63:14. But LXX takes it to mean “mind” (nous), which would parallel the way Proverbs uses it as object of this verb; the word has been used in such a sense earlier in Isaiah (see 11:2; 29:24; 30:1). That meaning could naturally be suggested by the wisdom context of v. 13 and in particular by the parallel colon, v. 13b. Ezekiel, too, who frequently speaks of “spirit” in the more dynamic sense, also uses it with this meaning (11:5; 20:32). Yhwh’s spirit is Yhwh’s inner being, Yhwh’s mind. No one tells Yhwh’s spirit what to do in running the world. The Targum interestingly construes the question “Who has directed the spirit? Yhwh”; so also MT accents. It may be that they are shying away from the slightest hint of the heretical suggestion that anyone might direct Yhwh.3 Certainly Isa 40 – 66 would affirm that it is Yhwh who measures and directs the human spirit, not vice versa.

Near the end of the subsequent section, 41:1-20, comes the further promise/warning that worm Jacob is to be turned into a sharp, multi-teethed threshing sledge such as can pulverize the

3 So M. B. Cohen, “Masoretic Accents as a Biblical Commentary,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 4 (1972): 2-11 (see 6-7).

highest mountains and turn them into mere chaff such as the wind can carry away. Once more the prophet picks up Israel’s temptation to believe that the Babylonians and their gods are the ones who have real power in events. This is the other side of the community’s demoralized disillusion with their faith that Yhwh had real power in the world and was exercising such power in the world to lead them to their destiny.

But I anticipate. Chapter 41 begins with a challenge and an invitation.

Be quiet for me, foreign shores; peoples must get fresh strength.

They must approach, then speak; together let us draw near for judgment.”

It is an invitation to argue something out in court. In metaphorical court scenes like this in the Bible, usually God is the accuser and Israel the accused. In Isa 41, in contrast the nations are under interrogation. The question is this: “Who aroused from the east one whom right calls to its heel [to its service]? Who gives up nations before him and makes him subjugate kings?” It is a question about something they are all reading about in the newspapers, a question about current political events. Yhwh challenges the nations to answer this theological question, but it is really addressed to the Israelite community. It concerns events in the Middle-Eastern world as they are about to affect Babylon, and therefore about to affect Israelite refugees there. The prophet knows that the events in question provide the solution to the people’s problem, though in the short term they exacerbate it.

It is all very well to agree to some theory about how God is Lord of the world, but how do you cash that out? The prophet’s question concerns not theology of history in general but some specific events and how they can be linked with differing theological convictions. The prophet fears that even if Israel finds it possible to reaffirm the theory that in principle Yhwh has acted in history, it will turn out to be unenthusiastic about that idea with regard to specific current events that directly concern the community. Does Yhwh’s spirit shape history, as 40:12 implies? And does that apply specifically as well as generally, in practice as well as in theory?

So Isaiah 41 needs to be read at two levels. At one level it is a discussion between Yhwh and the nations regarding the powers active in certain historical events. The nations are challenged to offer some theological account of their meaning -- or rather to accept the plaintiff’s case that only one theological account is possible. Succeeding events, their attempt to do something about the situation by adding to their stock of divine images or shoring these up more securely, indicate that any reply they might have made would indeed have been unsatisfactory. The questioning invites the nations to insight but drives them deeper into self-deceit; as is the case with Israel itself, the word of God renders those who could not see even more blind. The nations are thus the overt participants in this drama. But at another level exiled Israel is its real audience. Prophet and people look at political events in quite different ways. The prophet seeks to utilize the Abraham story from their distant past as a means of changing their attitude to their urgent present.

It may be easy enough to think about the affairs of the nations from an ethical viewpoint, or at least to make statements about peace and justice that have the advantage or disadvantage of linking with the statements of other enlightened, slightly left (or very left) people. Looking at these from a theological viewpoint, looking at them in the light of scripture and the church’s history and tradition, is a different matter. What place do events have in God’s scheme of things? The question matters, because praxis reflects theory, and if we have not thought out our theory, our ideology, our theology of political events, then our praxis will likely just reflect the conventional wisdom of the day. A while ago Francis Fukuyama caused a controversy with an extraordinary book called The End of History and the Last Man4 in which he attempted to give what might be

4 New York: Perennial, 2002.

called a theological interpretation of history as it has come to take a new turn with the collapse of Marxism. Now subsequent events may have already discredited him, but at least he was trying to think about politics from what might indeed be called a theological angle. We may not like the view that capitalist liberal democracy is the culmination of the story of humanity; if so, let us have another one.

Isaiah of Babylon is raising that question in the context of the events of the sixth century BC. But the precise question about who aroused a figure from the east is a trick question. It sounds as if it is a question about who did this arousing, who set this conqueror going. But this, too, is really only a rhetorical question. Every Israelite knows the answer is supposed to be “Yhwh.” The statement about Yhwh’s spirit in 40:13 has already implied it.

The rhetorical question draws attention away from another question. Who is the person being aroused? Ancient and modern interpreters usually assume his identity is also obvious, but the way they disagree over who he is suggests that there is more to this matter than meets the eye. Abraham walks in the shadows here, but he is not alone. The Persian king Cyrus, about to conquer Babylon, is also there. In 558 Cyrus had been crowned King of Persia, to the east of Babylon, and in the 540s had won a series of spectacular victories over the Medes to the north of Babylon, and then over Croesus of Lydia in Turkey, to the west. He was developing that threatening pincer movement around Babylon itself. The rise of Cyrus is the most urgent topic for theological reflection in the exilic community, for Israelites as well as for Babylonians. How is God involved with it?

The prophet takes the same scandalously positive stance in relation to this question as Jeremiah once took in relation to Nebuchadnezzar, that Cyrus is Yhwh’s own agent, that Cyrus is the means of fulfilling the divine purpose. Like Jeremiah, Isaiah of the exile knows the community will take some convincing about this stance.

The prophet also sees parallels between the story of Cyrus and the story of Abraham (and Israel as a whole), parallels in their origins, their actions, and their place in Yhwh’s purpose. In one sense the parallels are scant and shallow, but they provide hermeneutical clues regarding the theological question, and homiletical clues regarding how to communicate an approach to it. So Yhwh asks, “Who brought this person from the east?” If the person is to be identified as Abraham, Israel will have no difficulty in saying it was Yhwh. Given the other understanding, it will be reluctant. But the ambiguity of the prophet’s question invites Israel to see a link between two parallel political events: they are acts of the same Yhwh and are designed to fulfill a parallel place in the outworking of Israel’s destiny.

Chapter 40 has suggested that for theological reasons the exilic community need not be as impressed by Babylon as it was. What chapter 41 then does is add some political reasons for that. It points to a political victor (or two) who is more powerful than Babylon and behind whom is Yhwh acting in power and love on Israel’s behalf. The east was where Abraham came from, and where Cyrus came from, and where the Israelites would come from on their way back home. Right or righteousness or justice was what Abraham was supposed to be about, and what Israel was supposed to be about, and what Cyrus was supposed to be about because he was unwittingly an agent of Yhwh’s righteous purpose. This conqueror pursues kings, as Abraham once did, and as Israel sometimes did, and as Cyrus did. Isaiah of the exile talks both about what God does in political events and about what human kings do. The human power is important, and so is the supernatural power. Both are real activities, and events can be looked at from an angle that emphasizes the supernatural or one that emphasizes the human. The prophet will not have single-strand understandings of events, as if either divine activity or human activity alone counted. The two form a synergism, they work together. Yhwh arouses the victor, but the victor’s exploits are real and they are his own. Yhwh’s spirit shapes history, but it works via the human spirit.

The prophet invites the community to find out what God is doing in the events of its own day by looking at these in the light of what God has done in its story in the past, back at the beginning. Its contemporary destiny is guaranteed by its link with a figure from the east. One of

the better modern commentators on Isaiah 40 – 55 suggested that this passage could hardly be referring to Abraham’s calling all those centuries ago, because this would be consummately irrelevant to the people being addressed in this court case.5 When we take account of the fact that the indirect but real audience of this court case was the refugee Israelite community, theologically and pastorally it is not at all irrelevant. Their prophet looks at the newspapers in the light of what God has been doing with Israel over the centuries. Abraham shows the pattern of God’s activity in history, and the prophet invites people to look at events in their own day in the light of that. But the passage does not actually say whether it is referring to Abraham, or Israel, or Cyrus. It teases its hearers with the links between these that enable it to invite them to perceive the parallels and so to be open to the possibility of seeing Yhwh as involved in a parallel way in all three. Yet not overtly identifying the reference leaves hearers free to decline this invitation without at this point turning their backs on the prophetic message as a whole.

For the notion of seeing Cyrus in this way may seem scandalous. Is it really believable that God is behind him, that he is God’s means of restoring Israel? The prophecy is like a parable. It can work on people subliminally, by not making explicit the point it presupposes and by thereby not requiring them formally to accept or reject it at this point, but rather allowing them to stay with the argument that will unfold over coming paragraphs. Abraham would be pleased that the story of his adventures in the past enabled Yhwh to coax Israel towards recognizing the divine activity in the present. That is all implicit in Isa 41:1-7. It involves reading between the lines. It is in Isa 41:8-9 that Abraham gets explicit mention. There Abraham’s story shows the hearers the pattern of God’s commitment as well as the pattern of God’s activity in history. The picture was of Yhwh challenging foreign peoples to account for the rise of Abraham/Cyrus, and they had no clue how to do so. They might have responded to the challenge to a debate by opening their eyes to the facts, but they prefer to keep them tight shut and hold onto their fear of the political future. “Foreign shores have seen and become afraid. Earth’s furthest bounds tremble. They have drawn near and come,” says the prophet. So what do they do? Attempt to prop up their religious resources, the images of their gods, says Isaiah of Babylon. The prophet pictures them encouraging each other in the refurbishing of these images: “Everyone supports their neighbor and says to their brother, ‘Hold firm.’ Craft-worker bids smith hold firm, one who flattens with a forge-hammer bids one who strikes with a mallet; one who says of the joint ‘That’s fine’ holds it firm with nails so that it does not wobble” (vv. 5-7). It is, of course, very embarrassing if your god falls over. It is bad for morale.

The Babylonians hold onto their fear, and wonder what to do about it. The prophecy’s implied actual audience of refugee Israelites might be subject to the same temptation. The “but” that comes next in the prophecy (v. 8) draws attention to the very different position Israel actually occupies.

A famous British preacher used to say that the whole message of the gospel was contained in words like “but” and “therefore” in the Bible. The “but” introduces an encouragement of Israel that contrasts with the fear of the foreign shores. The basis for this encouragement is in an expansive description of the community’s status. “But you are Israel and you are my servant. You are Jacob and you are my chosen.” And then at the highpoint “You are Abraham’s offspring and you are my friend.” We have seen that so far Israel has been the implicit audience of this prophecy, but only now is Israel explicitly addressed. Yhwh says “you” to them, and what Yhwh goes on to say again indicates that a personal relationship lies at the basis of the prophet’s message. It will be taken up in the repeated “I” and “my” of these verses. Yhwh turns to Israel as the one known as “you,” known in relationship. It is a form of speech that presupposes a long history in relationship and is thus full of hope for the audience and for Yhwh personally. “You are Israel,” “you are 5 See C. R. North, The Second Isaiah (London/New York: OUP, 1964; 1967), on the passage; and see further my paper “You are Abraham’s Offspring, My Friend,” in He Swore an Oath (Donald Wiseman Festschrift, ed. R. S. Hess and others; Cambridge: Tyndale House, 1993; Carlisle: Paternoster/Grand Rapids: Baker, 2nd ed., 1994), pp. 29-54.

Jacob,” “you are Abraham’s offspring,” says Yhwh, not very controversially. To declare that the community is Israel/Jacob/Abraham’s offspring is to say something straightforward and well-known (at least in the case of the first two titles), though that in itself would not stop a prophet saying it, and it would not stop the declaration being powerfully effective, especially in a context such as the present one. Reminding people who they are is often a very powerful thing to do.

But here each statement of familiar though important fact is followed by a declaration of something more revolutionary (my servant/my chosen/my friend). These are the emphatic statements in verse 8. “You are my servant”: like a slave, or a subject, or a civil servant, or a vassal king, or a soldier on military service. The term clearly indicates an obligation to accept the authority of the superior party and to serve their interests. But paradoxically it also contains a hint of power and privilege. The servant of a king is an important person by virtue of that position. A certain security can come to a weak person through “belonging” to a stronger one. The servant has a claim on the superior.

This aspect of servant-hood is important in the present context in Isaiah. Take David or his successors. The king was Yhwh’s servant; in relation to God that puts David in a subordinate position, but in relation to the people it puts him in an exalted position because of the special relationship with Yhwh that it implies. Thus a claim to being God’s servant is open to ideological misuse, whether made by the king, or the seminary principal, or the senior minister, or the bishop. Here the term “my servant” is democratized. As happens with priesthood in the New Testament (returning to Yhwh’s intention in Exod 19:6), and with ministry in general, it does not belong to individuals within the community but to the people as a whole. “As Israel you are my servant.”

In its beginnings Israel was what Norman Gottwald in his book The Tribes of Yahweh called a liberated community of egalitarianism.6 They were a community freed from the oppressive structures of Egypt or Canaan, freed to be a community in which some people were not more important than others and did not have more power than others and did not live in better houses than others. That understanding was compromised by the monarchy. Now it is reaffirmed. It is the whole community that has the privileged position of being servant of Yhwh. Of course the community can turn that conviction into an ideological one as easily as can the individual, as the next chapter will imply. Israel was founded by people who rejected the world of Egyptian (and Canaanite) totalitarianism. And they were people who were rejected by it. Israel was a social movement of the failures and rejects who de-legitimated the rationality of the empire and de-legitimated the way it saw the world and the values it affirmed. They de-legitimated the coherence of the gods who supported those structures. Those gods and those structures could make no allowance for the possibility of graciousness and forgiveness. They had no room for a move towards newness that may come “from below” and out of pain (the pain of Egypt, for instance) in a way that questions the established order. That is exodus faith. It challenges our order and its world, whatever our individual political persuasion.

End-of-exile faith has parallel features. Once again the people is a community of failures and rejects, now promised a possibility of grace and newness out of the pain of Babylon. Once again its prophecy has de-legitimated the rationality of the empire and the coherence of its gods, neither of that can handle the arrival of the conqueror. But at the moment the community itself is still in metaphorical Egypt and its prophets struggle like Moses for its conscientization. To it, Yhwh says “You are Israel and you are my servant.”

In addition, “You are Jacob and you are one I chose.” In 40:27 the reference to Israel-Jacob was more painful: this entity was querying whether Yhwh was really still involved with it. Here the terms are much more affirming. They remind people of their longstanding relationship

6 For what follows, see W. Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, i,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 47 (1985): 28-46 = Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), pp. 1-21.

with Yhwh. It is a little like the church in our weakness and pathetic-ness being reminded “You are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people God called out of darkness into God’s glorious light.”

“You are Jacob, you are the one I chose.” Isaiah 41 has already talked about choice. Making an idol that would not rot or wobble involved choosing appropriate wood; and the prophecy will soon once more scorn people who are foolish enough to choose such inactive, speechless deities. There the movement of choice is from humanity to deity, as is often the case in the modern world where people think in terms of which religion to choose. In Isa 41:8-9 the movement of choice is from God to humanity. God is the one who does the choosing. One key place where the language of choice comes in scripture is again in connection with David, and specifically with David as God’s servant. David was Yhwh’s chosen. That seems particularly significant in the light of the description of Israel as God’s servant here, which pointed to the theme of the democratization of God’s commitment to David. It is not merely the king who is Yhwh’s chosen, but the (kingless) people.

Whether the idea of Yhwh choosing was applied first to people or king, once they had kings the temptation would be for the choice of kings to overlay the choice of the people, as for us the priesthood or ministry of the clergy that does not come in the New Testament overlays the priesthood and ministry of the church that does. Here that tendency is put firmly in reverse. Leadership is theologically subordinate to people. It is Israel that is Yhwh’s chosen. If earlier prophets had to avoid talk about the people being chosen because it could be used ideologically, Isaiah of Babylon is now prepared to follow Deuteronomy and risk it. “You are Jacob, you are my chosen.”

And “You are Abraham’s offspring and you are my friend.” Here we come to the explicit reference to Abraham. He is the very first person to be called Yhwh’s servant, and they are his offspring. “You are the offspring of Abraham my friend” contains an ambiguity. Is it just Abraham who is God’s friend, or is the offspring God’s friend too? It makes best sense to assume that what God says comes to a climax when something new is said about the people and not merely about their ancestor. As Abraham’s offspring the exilic community is God’s friend, too. There is a telling movement from ‘servant” to “chosen” to “friend.” Perhaps Isa 41 assumes in advance of John 15 that it is better to be a friend than a servant.

“You are my servant, my chosen, my friend”; and, the prophet goes on, you are a people “whom I took hold of from earth’s furthest bounds and called from its corners, and said to you "You are my servant,” I chose you and did not spurn you.” The church is not entitled to steal those titles from Israel. The Jewish people is still God’s servant, God’s chosen, God’s friend. But what God wanted to do in Jesus was to extend the people they belonged to. “You too,” God says to the church, “you belong to that people that has the privilege of being my servant, my chosen, my friend.” Isaiah of Babylon made those affirmations to a community that seemed and was a futureless, insignificant group of refugees, a people who were finished. If that is how the church looks, God makes those affirmations to us, too.

Yet all those very moving, significant and potentially renewing declarations about the relationship between Yhwh and Israel have not yet brought us to the heart of the matter, the point of it, the application of the sermon. Here it is. In the light of all that, “Do not be afraid, because I am with you. Do not be alarmed, because I am your God.” The encouragement not to be afraid is a central and distinctive feature of this prophecy. When God says “Do not be afraid” to people, it is designed to stiffen resolve when they might hesitate over a worrying situation or task. The first person in the Bible who is urged and encouraged not to be afraid is again Abraham. The next is Hagar, and then it happens to Isaac, and Jacob, and there, too, there are situations of conflict, danger, or insecurity. Later, “Do not be afraid” is something God sometimes says to a king, so that when Isaiah of Babylon has God saying it to the whole people, this may be another example of that “democratization” feature of these prophecies.

“Do not be afraid,” Yhwh says. The church has many reasons to be afraid, and this invitation encourages us and challenges us. Then Yhwh adds, “I am with you.” That does not just

mean statically present, invisibly and imperceptibly there. It denotes a reality that is dynamic, occasional, extraordinary, visible, and unexpected rather than static, regular, orderly, and permanent. It implies taking someone’s side in a way that brings protection, support, deliverance, and success, and engenders the response of confidence and courage rather than fear, and obedience rather than resistance. It encourages people to live in history and to live with apparent uncertainty. It is a another declaration normally made not to groups but to individuals, so that here once again a commitment to an individual is “democratized” in its application to the exiles. God says “I am with you” not only to special individuals such as Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, and Jeremiah, but to the exilic community as a whole; and to the church. Abraham suggests the pattern of God’s activity in the world. We are invited to take his story as offering us clues in the task of perceiving what God is on about in the world. And Abraham suggests the pattern of God’s commitment to us. In Abraham God says to us, you are my servant, my chosen, my friend; you have nothing to be afraid of, you can face the future with confidence.

To back up these encouragements Yhwh includes the promise that Israel will be turned from worm into threshing sledge for the obstacles that confront it. The promise involves ruach: “You will winnow them and the wind will carry them off. A storm will scatter them.” The context makes a number of links with Isa 40: for instance, Yhwh is in control of the dust of the earth and of mountains and hills (40:12). The audience could hardly be blamed for inferring that the wind of v. 16 is again the very breath/spirit/wind of Yhwh (40:7, 13). The wind of Yhwh that has been turned against them can be turned back to work their way again in prosecution of the purpose that the spirit of Yhwh still pursues.

Anointing: Isaiah 41:21-42:17Their images are breath and emptiness (41:29)I put breath on him (42:1)I give breath to people (42:5)

If we should be tempted to assume that any occurrence of ruach must imply dynamic power and/or must be a reference to Yhwh, the end of Isa 41 quickly disabuses us. The gods themselves are now directly challenged to prove their sovereignty in political events but turn out as helpless as their representatives in vv. 1-7. The judgment on them is that they are ruach and tohu, mere breath and emptiness. It is unusual for ruach to have this dismissive sense (contrast 31:3). A telling parallel is 26:18, significant because it uses the image of childbirth that will recur in an equivalent position near the end of this major section in 42:13, as the actual word ruach will recur in a positive sense in 42:1. In 26:18 the people invite Yhwh to see a comparison between them and a woman who gives birth to nothing but ruach, breath or wind: “there was no other parallel to childbirth except the pain.”7

Elsewhere ruach as mere breath is an image for the empty, useless speech of counselors or prophets, a telling analogy in the present context (Job 16:3; 15:2; cf. 6:26; 7:7; Jer 15:3; also the frequent use in Qohelet, e.g. 1:14, 17; also Ps 78:39). To describe the gods finally as tohu is a nice complementary touch. Far from being creative powers like Yhwh they are merely part of the emptiness that Yhwh as creator fills.

“There is my servant,” Isa 42 then famously opens. In what direction is the prophet pointing? Who is the servant of Yhwh in these chapters? It has been a deeply frustrating issue in First Testament study. There seems no means of coming to an answer that is not a matter of one subjective scholarly opinion against another. Fortunately there is a way out of the problem, indeed two or three.

One is to turn the problem into an asset. The apparent problem is that the servant is not named. Suppose we turn the matter on its head, accept that the servant is not named, and treat that

7 J. A. Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah (Leicester: IVP, 1993), p. 218.

as an important positive feature of Isa 42 rather than an unfortunate accident that would have been put right if the prophet had had a half-decent secretary to point out that the matter was unclear. How might it be a positive feature of the passage?

We might infer that the servant picture is really a description of a role to be fulfilled. The key point about the passage is not what the servant image refers to but what it means. Considerations of ideology and suspicion might then make it rather fishy that scholarship focuses on unanswerable questions about who the servant is and avoids uncomfortable questions about what the role involves and how it might make demands on its readers. What the passage is doing is describing a role to be fulfilled and asking us whether we are willing to fulfill it. It is a job-description for a servant of God. Any reader who reckons to be a servant of God is then invited to take it as their instructions. The point is not who the servant is but what the servant does.

Another significance that emerges from the fact that the passage describes a role to be fulfilled is that we might take it as virtually a promise about something that Yhwh intends shall happen. That is hinted by the way the passage leads on from chapter 41. The Book of Isaiah is one where the chapter divisions (which were only inserted into the Bible in the Middle Ages) tend not to come in very sensible places. Here (as my section heading has presupposed) the chapter division would better have come at what we call 41:21. What follows in 42:1-9 carries directly on from 41:21-29. Yhwh continues speaking; there is no new “thus says Yhwh” or any such marker, and the logic carries straight on. In 41:21-29 Yhwh has again been taking the nations to court, challenging them to make some sense of what people are all reading in the papers about that pincer movement Cyrus is shaping relentlessly around Babylon, but has been getting no answers to straight questions about who had said this was going to happen, and who could say what would happen next. “Well Yhwh can do that,” says Second Isaiah. “You read what my uncle First Isaiah said about how God would restore Israel and put Babylon in its place – he even said Yhwh would use the Medes to do it. (Incidentally, if those prophecies in Isa 13 – 14 came from before Second Isaiah’s day – though that is controverted – we can see here part of the logic whereby the Book of Isaiah puts together the work of several “Isaiahs.” They are not of wholly independent origin. Second Isaiah is taking up the ministry of First Isaiah and taking it further.) Who can give some account of what has happened and what is going to happen? Yhwh can meet the challenge. But when CNN asks the so-called gods of Babylon for a comment, all it gets is an embarrassed shuffling of feet and silence. Hence that conclusion to chapter 41: “There, they are all a delusion. Their works are nothing. Their images are empty wind.” There is ruach that is powerful and ruach that accomplishes nothing.

Chapter 42 carries straight on from that, with a contrast. “There, they are all a delusion” leads into “There is my servant.” The impressive religious resources of Babylon are reduced to silence when the gods are subpoenaed to debate what is going on and who is in control. In contrast, “there is my servant.” He is the one though whom I am going to achieve the purpose that I formulated long ago in Abraham. “He will issue justice to the nations.” “I have shown that it is my purpose that is at work and I am committed to seeing this come about.”

There is another possible strategy for handling the fact of the servant’s being anonymous in Isa 42:1-4. The father of modern study of these chapters is Bernhard Duhm. It was Duhm who invented the servants songs, formulating the idea that four particular passages in Isa 42, 49, 50, and 52 – 53 belonged together and were really separate from the rest of the material. There are some insights to be gained from comparing these passages with each other, but there are some holes in the idea, such as the fact that these four passages are no more songs than other servant passages in these chapters, and much less like songs than some other passages, and it is a disadvantage of the theory that the result of working with it is the phenomenon I noted: there are countless theories about the servant’s identity and there is no way of deciding between them because the basis for making a decision has been removed. This is fine for the PhD industry but not for people who merely want to know what the Bible says. By definition the so-called songs are to be taken out of their context, so we have no context for understanding them, so there is no answer.

The way forward is backward, trying again to understand these so-called songs by considering them in their context, testing out the possibility that these chapters were put together purposefully rather than by using the ‘songs” to fill empty spaces on scrolls (as Duhm was inclined to think). If we read Isa 42:1-4 after Isa 41 and before the rest of Isa 42, who is then the servant of Yhwh?

The book is quite clear in its answer. “You, Israel, are my servant,” said Isa 41. “Who is blind but my servant?,” says the end of Isa 42, and goes on to talk about how Israel still has not come to understand the way Yhwh is dealing with it. The job description is one to be fulfilled by Israel as God’s servant. If we see the church as invited through Jesus to share in Israel’s relationship to God, then this is what the church is also supposed to look like.

One reason why Israel is not named in these verses is precisely this fact that the end of the chapter will make explicit, that Israel is in no position to fulfill the calling. But it is still Israel’s calling, and later chapters will reaffirm it. Yet the fact that the verses are a job description looking for someone to fulfill it means that they do not have to be limited to an application to the people of God. They have an openness that invites application beyond that, to the activity of a leader (for the Davidic king is God’s servant) or a prophet (for Isaiah was God’s servant) or a politician (for Nebuchadnezzar was God’s servant).

“There is my servant, whom I will support, my chosen, whom I myself accepted.” The logic of much of that description falls into place in the light of the considerations we have just noted, because these are descriptions of Israel as Yhwh’s servant that we have already read in chapter 41. As servant, Israel is supported by Yhwh. As servant, Israel is chosen by Yhwh. As servant, Israel is accepted by Yhwh: that actual word was not used in chapter 41, but the negative was. “I did not spurn you,” chapter 41 said; chapter 42 now simply puts it positively, “I myself accepted you.” In effect Isaiah of Babylon begins this prophecy by saying, “You know that servant Israel we were talking about just now, the one I support and chose and accepted? Well, now I am going to tell you a few more things about him.”

The few more things are more than slight glosses on what was said before. These chapters in Isaiah have an attractive spiral way of proceeding. The same topics recur, but never in mere repetition. The prophet continually comes back to the same subjects, but what has been said in between means that they have new significance, and anyway what is said the next time tends not to be quite the same as what was said the last time; there is something new there. The chapters form a spiral, not a circle. So here those first phrases in the chapter make the link back with chapter 41, but the next phrases somersault into new territory. “You know that servant we were talking about just now? I put my breath on him. He will issue a decision to the nations.”

“I put my breath on him.” We have noted that it is a shame that in English we have the special word “spirit” for contexts such as this, because Hebrew uses the ordinary word for breath or wind, which can keep reminding hearers of the resonances of those words, their suggesting that God is letting forth divine power and life in the world, in order to achieve something. “I have put spirit/breath/wind on this servant”; he will become like Elijah whom the divine wind picked up here and dumped there so that he could fulfill God’s commissions, he will behave like someone inspired, as we put it, doing things that you would never have believed were possible, as if he has had an injection of new life, a breath-transfusion. That is what God promises to the servant people.

The aim is that “he will bring forth justice to the nations,” the translations tend to say, but that is somewhat abstract. The word the prophet uses is the term mishpat that we noticed is an important word in these chapters. It is not an abstract word like English “justice.” It is indeed one that comes from the court room, but it is more a word that suggests the taking of an actual legal decision or the taking of decisive action. It recalls the judges in the Book of Judges. What made them judges was the fact that they did something decisive on behalf of the community when it was in trouble. They took action when action was needed in order to put things right. What they had in common with judges in our sense is the reality of taking decisions to see that the needy have their needs met. That is what judgment is for. Judges took decisions in court, decisions that saw that

truth was honored and that the weak were protected rather than deprived of legal rights. The same idea is involved when the Old Testament talks about God’s judgment. God’s “judging the world with righteousness” does not mean condemning the world and punishing it. It means seeing that God’s just and gentle judgment is effective in the world, seeing that God’s decisions regarding the life of the world are put into effect, seeing that the nations in their need are protected from violence and oppression. In this sense, the Day of Judgment is good news not bad news. It is something the needy and powerless can look forward to.

So mishpat suggests making proper decisions and implementing them. The servant’s task is to see that a decision is issued to the nations. Both senses of decision, of judgment, have a place here, to judge from the context. The broad meaning is that Yhwh is one who is able to take key decisions about the world’s destiny. Yhwh knows the mess the nations are in, and does not intend to leave them there. Yhwh knows the fear and hopelessness, the political and religious chaos, extending from Babylon to the ends of the earth, and like those judges in the Book of Judges in relation to Israel, Yhwh does not intend to leave the matter there, but intends to take decisive action to do something about the situation. That broad idea of God’s taking the key decisions about the world works well in the context.

The word is also used of legal decisions, and the context in Isaiah 41 – 42 presupposes a court setting. At the beginning of chapter 41, Yhwh challenged the nations to come to court in order that a decision could be taken, a decision about who told the truth about the world, about who was really in charge, who deserved to be called God. The argument has been going on at the opening of chapter 41 and at its close, and Yhwh reckons to have established conclusively who it is who effects a purpose in history. To put it another way, what Yhwh is talking about is a decision about who takes the decisions.

If are focusing on the motif of Yhwh’s ruach, then a way to re-express this is to recall that no-one instructs Yhwh’s ruach about how to take decisions: indeed, 40:13-14 indicated as much, for when the prophet implicitly ridiculed the notion of instructing Yhwh’s ruach, the instruction related directly to the way in which Yhwh should make decisions in the world (mishpat again, 40:14). The link between Yhwh’s ruach and Yhwh’s capacity for mishpat is taken up in the link between the servant’s being endowed with Yhwh’s ruach and his being entrusted with Yhwh’s mishpat. In both senses of mishpat, Yhwh says “My servant will issue a decision to the nations.”

Something of this sort is said three times in 42:1-4, and this shows what the key theme here is. These verses directly concern not so much the servant as the decision and its publication. The picture is that the servant of Yhwh is the one who will be the means of the nations coming to know this decision that brings them good news. That has often been pictured as the calling of the servant to go out as a missionary to the nations. That way of picturing it, a natural Christian reading back into the passage, involves forgetting that the passage is about a dispute in court. It involves a metaphor. In the metaphor, the servant has the task of announcing the court decision to the people who are supposed to benefit from it. The chapter never actually moves from metaphor to literal reality, to what Israel was literally expected to do. It again resembles a parable or a poem. We have to stay inside the prophecy or parable or poem and not want to be too prosaic too soon.

In this imaginative picture, how does the servant go about fulfilling the task? There are two key aspects to it. He will not get discouraged, and he will not be discouraging.

His not being discouraging is pictured as involving not snapping a broken cane or quenching a flickering flame. That is peculiar. If someone has a stick that is broken, the sensible thing is to throw it away. It cannot be relied on anymore. One could not risk putting one’s weight on it. If the length of flax in a lamp has burnt right down low so that one can hardly see by it, the sensible thing is to blow it out and start again with another.

First Isaiah has already described Egypt as a broken cane, something that might look or pretend to be strong but easily gave way and was actually rather dangerous. Later, Isaiah of Babylon will also use the snuffing of a wick as a simile for the death of an army, also apparently the army of Egypt. The broken cane and the flickering wick are thus elsewhere figures for peoples

who might seem strong but are actually weak, an understanding that makes entire sense here. Third Isaiah, too, talks about people whose spirit is “flickering.”

Kings, armies, and ordinary people can become broken canes and flickering flames, and the natural reaction is then to throw them away, to blow them out. That is not how this servant operates. For all the polemic against foreign peoples and their overrated gods, Isaiah of Babylon is also aware of the tragic side to their dilemma, their fear and hopelessness. The servant of Yhwh is not interested in rejoicing in their downfall but in seeing if he can fan the flicker to a flame and support the broken reed. He is in the business of encouragement not discouragement.

The same point emerges in 42:5-9 by mean of different images. The prophet first draws attention to the fact that Yhwh is one who gives ruach to people. The prophecy’s hearers could naturally have assumed that “the people” meant themselves; the word usually refers to Israel, and it is Israel that is the special recipient of Yhwh’s breath. This is so in 44:3, but it is so implicitly in 42:1 where the servant, implicitly Israel, receives Yhwh’s breath for the task Yhwh intends for it. V. 5b thus repeats v. 1b; vv. 6-7 will then reaffirm the content of vv. 2-4, though in different imagery. Yet v. 5 begins with God’s creating the whole world, and this context rather suggests that the gift of breath is one that applies to all the people on earth. Yhwh’s ruach is then not something that distinguishes the people of God from others. It links the people of God and others. When the ruach of Yhwh comes to fill the peoples, this completes their humanity. It is quite natural that the Yhwh who is indeed ruach (cf. 31:3) should be concerned to reach out to the peoples who have Yhwh’s ruach in them. Yhwh intends to do this through his servant, who works for the sake of Yhwh’s ruach as well as by means of Yhwh’s ruach.

The reference to the creation of humanity is then another new feature here; in 40:12-31 the specific references to creation concern heaven and earth. Over against heaven and earth in v. 5a, here humanity gets a bicolon to itself. And compared with Genesis with its reference to the inbreathing of Yhwh’s ruach, Isa 42 is more corporate, referring to the human race as a whole rather than to the creating or forming of individuals. In this context, the recurrence of ruach involves the word’s having a third sense different from that in 41:29 where it denotes mere breath as something insubstantial and in 42:1 where it denotes Yhwh’s breath as powerful and dynamic. The usage here compares with Ps 104:29-30; Gen 6:17; 7:15, 22; Ezek 37:5-10. In connection with Yhwh’s creating and inbreathing of the whole world, Yhwh’s servant is told “I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.” The prisoners at least include the powerful and the rich, people out of relationship, in the dark, blind, captives. To put it the other way, the people who look enlightened and free are actually deluded and enslaved.

If so, the prophet has an extraordinary vision. If Israel is the servant, what exilic Isaiah is talking about is a ministry of the poor and the powerless to the powerful and rich, which presupposes that the latter actually lack real wealth as they may already feel they lack real power. At about the time of the ending of apartheid, my wife and I spent five weeks in South Africa. Two images from there often come together in my mind. One is the barbed wire and the burglar alarms in the white suburbs in Johannesburg. The other is the relaxedness and the joy of many black people whom we met, especially in the Transkei. We kept asking ourselves who was better off. In different ways both were broken canes, flickering flames. Our calling is not merely to despise the rich, but to grieve for them. It is not to be discouraging. The other characteristic of this servant is that he does not become discouraged himself. One way in which the prophet makes that point is by recycling the image of flickering and breaking. “He will not flicker or break” (v. 4). He will not come to be overcome by the weaknesses of those he ministers to. “He will not cry out or raise his voice or make it heard in public” (v. 2). This is not a proof text to put down noisy evangelists or healers. The word for crying out is the word for crying out in protest and pain, the word used of the Israelites in Egypt when they cried out under their oppression.

It is the word Isaiah of Jerusalem used when he told a parable about a man with a vineyard who did his best to tend his vineyard and give it the proper treatment; when he came to look for the

fruit he found that all it produced was wild grapes, the kind from which you cannot make wine. Yhwh has been cultivating Israel as a vineyard, has come to look at it to see what the fruit is like, and does not like what appears. To make this point there is a double pun in the punch line, a pun that involves this word for crying out under oppression, and also involves the word for a judge taking a decision that we have already considered. “I looked for mishpat (for legal decisions being taken in the right way, not being biased in favor of the wealthy and powerful) and there instead was bloodshed (mispach). I looked for justice (tsedaqah), and there instead was a cry (tse‘aqah, a cry of pain and protest because decisions were not being taken in that way, so that the lot of the poor, needy, and vulnerable got worse rather than better) (5:7).

Second Isaiah declares that this servant of Yhwh will not have to cry out in pain and protest in this way. His task is to minister to people who do cry out thus, and he will not get sucked into it himself. He will not flicker or break till he has established the decision in the world and the far coasts wait for his teaching.

The fact that this is Israel’s calling as God’s servant gives a solemn side to this statement. We already know that Israel is itself crying out in pain. The prophet has told us about that cry that says they are like grass withered by the blast of the desert wind, the blast of Yhwh’s ruach, and has told us about the cry that asks whether Yhwh has either the power or the will to get involved with Israel’s destiny any more. The servant will not cry out, will not be overcome by discouragement? So how can Israel function as the servant?

The same point emerges from 42:5-9. You are a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open blind eyes, to free captives. But how can Israel fulfill that calling? A covenant people? Their covenant is broken. A light to nations? They stand in need of enlightenment; they do not understand what Yhwh is doing. Opening blind eyes? They are blind themselves. Freeing captives? They are in captivity.

When you see yourself as God’s servant, that can become pure ideology. It simply supports you. The point becomes explicit in the last paragraph of the chapter. “Who is blind but my servant? He looks but he does not see, he hears but he does not listen.” In practice, the servant does come to share the weaknesses of those he is supposed to minister to. So what is Yhwh to do? Obviously, cast this servant off and employ another one.

What Second Isaiah hears God saying denies this. The prophet keeps repeating through these chapters that Israel is still to be God’s servant, still to be God’s witness. When it is clear that the people of God have failed, God does not cast us off and start again. It is precisely having looked in the eye our failures that God then says, but you are still my servant, I still intend to use you, I have not cast you off, do not be afraid, I have redeemed you, you are mine, I still intend to use you as my witnesses. The servant is not discouraging, and not discouraged. He will not flicker or break, till he establishes God’s decision in the world and the furthest coasts wait for his teaching. That is God’s promise about us and to us. The scorching ruach is also the confounding ruach and the anointing ruach.