Their animals (camels, young camels, flocks, rams) perform oddly anthropomorphic deeds: they ‘proclaim the praise of the Lord’ and ‘minister to you’. The nations’ wealth accompanies them to Zion. Second, the nations exercise important agency in transporting Zion’s sons and daughters back to their maternal city. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. By contrast, the nations live in darkness but are drawn (והלכו, shall come).Īrise, shine for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.įor darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. In the paragraphs that follow, I attempt to enumerate the pertinent allusions to those nations and to abbreviate the nature of the light that each casts on what I am persuaded is indeed a coherent if complex presentation.įirst, restored Zion is brightly lit. This chapter’s vision of Zion’s restoration is breathtakingly beautiful.Īlong the way, it gathers up the components of the book’s multi-faceted view of ‘the nations’ and their destiny and presents a composite-a hopeful reader might dare say coherent-picture that is not reductive and therefore demands patient rather than dismissive reading or radical reconstruction. Isaiah 60 must figure in anyone’s list of the most powerfully lyrical of this long book’s offerings. ‘Perhaps we’ll be allowed some tasty crumbs’, one almost imagines them to hope. So, in a reading of the text that appears to me entirely defensible, they hedge their bets. Yet even they cannot imagine that the God of Jacob might slake their entire thirst, might lay out the full banquet for such unwashed late arrivals. In the turned-on-its-head world that the prophet glimpses, aliens stream to lowly Zion now elevated above the vastness of the world’s topography, hungering and thirsting after righteousness as a later prophet might have described them. Rather, the limit seems to apply to their expectation. There is nothing in the ebullient eagerness of the nations that suggests a limited appetite for YHWH’s instruction. Isaiah 2:3 (NRSV, adapted for partitive מן) Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob that he may teach us some of his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. If we apply what we know of the expression to its appearance in Isaiah’s Vision of Visions (and of course Micah’s version of the same), verse two comes to read as follows: In my view, the preposition is best understood as partitive מן, an established manner of communicating ‘part of’, ‘some of’, or ‘a portion of’. Nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, outside of Micah’s and Isaiah’s shared vision, does this construction appear. I refer to the combination of the verb ירה ( to teach) with the preposition מן (conventionally, from) mediating the verb’s relationship with its direct object דרכיו ( his ways). A feature of the exchange appears to bear out the wider impression that in Isaiah salvation is from the Jews and for the nations. It is Isaiah’s very Vision of Visions.īoth editions, that of Micah and that of Isaiah, speak identically of the nations’ animated conversation as they flow on their riverine course all the way up to recently elevated Zion. In the book called Isaiah, this short glimpse of a prophetically imagined future becomes the deeply driven pillar of the entire adventure. It is much disputed whether one borrowed from the other or whether both drew their visionary waters from a common well. Isaiah’s Vision of Visions (2.1-5) is shared by the book of Micah in its fourth chapter.
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