An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 148: A Mysterious Figure in Red ™. Plus; Damn You, Filthy Mice-Eaters! (Isaiah 61-66)

Isaiah 61-66
A Mysterious Figure in Red ™. Plus; Damn You, Filthy Mice-Eaters!

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Isaiah 61

“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound”

The speaker is moved by the spirit of God to prophesy a time of plenty for the Israelites. This is couched in some very nice poetry and similes, but for all that is nothing new to this book – the Israelites will get twice as much joy as they did suffering, and this is also turned around for their oppressors. Although some previous chapters have implied that the Gentiles will also come to worship God, here they are reduced to servants of the Israelites.

What I did find quite interesting is that opening line about the spirit of God causing the writer to speak out, which has a very Pentecostal feel to it. I’m trying to remember if we’ve seen that kind of thing before; in older interactions between God and prophets He’s tended to visit them in a vision or pillar of fire, not so much this type of possession almost.

Isaiah 62

“For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.”

More on the restoration of Zion/Jerusalem, with God setting a watchmen on the walls and all within enjoying peace and plenty, and awing kings of other nations. God gives the people and the land a new name, the people “Hephzibah” and the land “Beulah” (“my delight is in her” and “married”) – these evidently don’t stick as apart from various places called Beulah I can’t recall it being used elsewhere, unlike, say, Zion, which is used in a variety of contexts with the same kind of meaning.

The reason for these names, however, is continued in the next verse with a slightly tortured metaphor about the land being a bride to her people, and God watching over the land like a groom watches over his bride. I think, perhaps, it loses something in translation via language, culture and time.

Isaiah 63
“Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat?”

This chapter starts with a little question and answer session, with the writer first as interlocutor, asking about the red apparel of one approaching, and then as the person in red, who claims to be coming to spread the word of God. They wear red because they have been trampling the winepress alone, and the red is also a metaphor for blood that will be spilled from God’s vengeance. I was really, really, hoping for the phrase “grapes of wrath” to be mentioned here, but maybe that’s from the hymn, inspired by this image.

The chapter then looks back on how God helped Moses during the exodus, and there’s a strange twist here, in that the humans (probably this red-robed prophet, it’s not clear) ask God to return to them. In prior chapters it has all been told from God’s point of view, how He turned away from the Israelites as a punishment, but now He’s returned to them forever. Here, the people blame God for making them turn away from him “O LORD, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear? Return for thy servants' sake, the tribes of thine inheritance” which, although theologically slightly jarring, is actually quite a neat way of showing both sides of the relationship. And it’s interesting that God and the people see the breakdown slightly differently; it’s a nice psychological insight.

Isaiah 64

“Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence”

This feels like some of the psalms attributed to David on the run. The writer is essentially saying, “come on God, show yourself, do some miracles for us” while at the same time acknowledging that the people have become unworthy of this. There is an attempt at reconciliation from the mortal side of the relationship, with the writer admitting that people have not been as pious as they could have been, but still asking God for help and forgiveness.

This does, however, feel chronologically out of step with the rest of Isaiah since most of the preceding chapters have been of God telling the people that He forgives them and will lead them into a time of peace and prosperity.

Isaiah 65

“I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts”

God’s rebuttal to the accusations of last chapter, in which He essentially says “I was always here, it was you lot that turned away and started worshipping trees, and the dead, and yourselves.” I guess it is from this chapter that we get the expression “holier than thou”, used here as spoken by a person that thinks themselves better than God, or at least better than a loyal worshipper. The sense of hypocrisy is plain in either case.

There’s some very good use of rhetoric devices in this chapter, some lovely repeat patterns, but it doesn’t tread new ground; it’s more like a return to the beginning of Isaiah, with God stating that the people will be punished with only a remnant to be saved. But we’ve kind of done that bit, with the exile and the return, it’s like this was tacked on. Either that or there’s a very clever structuring where the last few chapters run back to the beginning as a reminder of how the book started.

Isaiah 66
“For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, saith the LORD, so shall your seed and your name remain.”

There’s a definite reversal in time going on here. In this chapter, God proclaims a fire and brimstone ending for all those who have turned apostate in their religion – worshipping sacred groves, eating pork and ... mice? Hints at a strange ritual practice, I wonder? There’s not a lot new in this chapter, and at times it feels like the writer is delighting in the torments of the sinners overmuch, especially that last verse “And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.”

Which is also the last line of the book, and considering for the past ten-twenty chapters it’s been moving towards a time of forgiveness for sins, seems a little incongruous, like somebody is writing their own misguided fan fiction of Isaiah.

And that concludes the book of Isaiah. I can see why this is considered important in Christianity; there’s an intriguing mix of prophecies that could be interpreted as pointing to Jesus as the Messiah, as well as the inclusion of some new concepts in the worship of Yahweh that I can only guess are as a result of the Babylonian exile. Taken together these factors give a kind of proto-Christianity; my assumption for the moment is that Jesus and/or Paul (and maybe the gospel authors and other epistolories) took inspiration from some of the ideas in Isaiah of a forgiving God, and “redemption” and “salvation” and used them to forge a new direction in the Yahweh religion. But that is for much later on. In the meantime, that was the largest book left to read. Jeremiah and Ezekiel are both pretty large, after that the remaining OT books are maximum 12 chapters, and the longest NT book (Acts) is a relatively tiny 28 chapters. In terms of chapter content we are well over halfway through the bible, even if in terms of books we are only just over a third of the way.