One of the most fascinating and strange texts in the Old Testament (and that’s saying something) is the second half of Isaiah’s call narrative. In the context it seems to provide justification for the prophet’s ongoing work even as his words are not heeded. But from a Christian perspective it takes on an added dimension as Jesus uses it to explain his teaching in parables (Mark 4, Matthew 13, Luke 8). Before we can have an idea of how these words may have functioned for Jesus, we need a better understanding of how they work in the context of Isaiah. And so this post will be an integral study of Isaiah 6.9-13 with a view to its later use in the Gospels.

Text

While the focus of today’s study will be the second half of the call, narrative, it’s worth looking at in full:

[6.1] 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. [2] 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. [3] And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ [4] The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.

[5] 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!’

[6] Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. [7] 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.’ [8] 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!’ [9] And he said, ‘Go and say to this people:

“Keep listening, but do not comprehend; / keep looking, but do not understand.”
[10] 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.’

[11] 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;
[12] until the LORD sends everyone far away, / and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
[13] 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. [NRSV]

Experience & Encounter

What I notice immediately upon reading the passage is how quickly it turns. It starts as a typical prophetic call narrative, and one described with incredible beauty. But it quickly turns: Isaiah’s message is to flip the normal script: Not a message for Judah’s leaders to repent, but a message to confound them so that they won’t. Their doom is to be inescapable and complete.

This is clearly not an easy message to hear; it doesn’t sound like the God we know from elsewhere in the prophets, desperate for his people to return and avoid devastation. The God we encounter in this text is hard and unyielding, determined on the present course of action that will see an independent Judah wiped off the map forever.

We also encounter Isaiah here, at first eager to live into his vocation but then horrified by it. His cry in 6.11, “How long?” suggests a combination of wonder, awe, and terror.

While all this raises a lot of questions for me, with the specific focus of this study being 6.9-13 and its eventual appropriation by Jesus, really only two questions that rise to the surface:

  • What is God really saying in this message?
  • Is there any hope at all here?

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Isaiah 6 in Context

Isaiah 6 has long presented a problem for biblical scholarship. Not only is its message difficult, but it also seems a bit out of place, covering the prophet’s call narrative despite the fact that there have already been five chapters of the prophet’s message. As always, there are different ways scholars have tried to make sense of this.

It is assumed by most scholars of Isaiah that it is a composite text covering material from various individual prophets, associated by a common lineage or school of thought, across several hundreds of years ranging from the Syro-Ephraimite crisis of the 730s BCE, through the Babylonian defeat of Judah in 587, to the end of the Babylonian Exile in the 530s. In this sense we might think of an Isaianic tradition in the way we think of the Platonist tradition in Greek philosophy, which also went through many hands and evolved significantly over the many centuries. While it’s generally felt that the oracles were kept in a largely chronological order, it’s likely that there was some curation, particularly around the beginning and end of the book as we know it. So in light of this, it is often suggested that block of chapters 1-5 serves as an introduction or summary of the message of Isaiah, with chapter 6 starting the chronological treatment (Witherington 57).* Alternately, some have thought of chapter 6 as representing a second calling of the prophet, his recommitment in light of the difficult message God wants him to proclaim (Witherington 54). Either way, the placement of chapter 6 is intentional, so it’s helpful to look at how it relates to the material that comes before and after it.

Isaiah 1-4 alternates repeatedly between oracles of judgment and salvation against Judah. The section ends with a resounding message of God’s blessing of a remnant in the aftermath of destruction and God’s ongoing presence in and solidarity with Jerusalem and its people. Chapter 5 introduces the Song of the Vineyard, an extended metaphor in which Judah is imagined as a vineyard lovingly planted and tended to by God and yet which does not produce the good fruit expected of it. This image recurs throughout Isaiah and features again in some of Jesus’ most famous parables. Isaiah 5 then leaves the metaphor behind and enters into a diatribe against the bad fruit Judah’s leadership has been bearing, namely their rampant injustice and luxury against a backdrop of rampant dispossession and poverty. The section ends with an oracle about a foreign invasion. These chapters before Isaiah 6 read almost like a weigh scale, with God’s faithfulness and love and ultimate salvation of the people on one side being balanced against God’s judgment upon the people’s faithlessness and injustice on the other.

It’s at this point that we get the call narrative, with Isaiah having a vision of the thrice-holy God enthroned in the heavenly temple and receiving a commission to preach a message the people will be unable to understand, or even disabled from understanding. Nothing but complete destruction can be the outcome. Yet even here, it’s more complicated, since it ends with a seed remaining to sprout even after the foretold devastation.

Also mitigating the hopeless interpretation of Isaiah 6 is that the next chapters, which refer to the Syro-Ephraimite invasion of Judah, offer some of the most stunning oracles of hope in all the prophetic literature, including the Immanuel oracle (7.10-25), the prophecy of the light in darkness (9, best known to us from Handel’s Messiah), and the shoot from the branch of Jesse (11.1-9).

In light of all this, it seems best to understand Isaiah 6 as contributing to the book’s dynamic tension between judgment and salvation.

Judah’s Failed Perception

That said, Isaiah 6 leans heavily into the judgment side of this equation. We get a sense of this even from the start of the commission, which refers to Judah as “this people.” While this expression starts off being used neutrally in the Scriptures (as in Exodus 3.21), it quickly takes on negative connotations, ceasing to contrast ‘this people’ (Israel) from ‘that people’ (Gentile nation), and contrasting instead “this people” from “My people.” Bartlett notes the expression’s “ominous, even pejorative tone” (Bartlett 438). Kaiser similarly refers to it as “detached” and “disparaging” (Kaiser 131).

This sense of disconnection between God and God’s people becomes more fixed when God outlines what is to be Isaiah’s message: though hearing, they will not understand what is being said, and though seeing, they will not perceive what is happening. This is not judgment conceived as God’s absence or silence, but something far more insidious and tragic: God will still be there, reaching out to them, but they will be rendered unable to understand and respond.

But how exactly should we interpret this? Is this prescriptive — with God actively acting to prevent them from understanding — or simply descriptive of a people who have already rendered themselves incapable of understanding God? This is the main question confronting us in both this text and in how Jesus will later use it. The problem is that neither seems to capture the whole spirit of the oracle.

In favour of a descriptive approach, both Jeremiah and Ezekiel use similar language in a way that is clearly descriptive:

  • “Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear” (Jeremiah 5.21)
  • “Mortal, you are living in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see but do not see, who have ears to hear but do not hear” (Ezekiel 12.2)

As Rabbi Frank Stern notes, this was clearly a popular expression among the prophets of the Exile (F Stern 29). Also supporting this approach is that the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation that was very commonly used by Jews in Jesus’ day) changes the verbs in 6.10 from the imperative to the indicative mood (Williams 35; Seitz 55).

Despite this, more seems to be in play than simple description. There is an emphasis in these verses on the hardening of Judah’s condition that is reminiscent of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in the Exodus story (Bartlett 438; cf., Williams 34; Witherington 61; SBL). While that parallel isn’t perfect (see Bartlett 438), it is helpful conceptually, as Pharaoh, like Judah here, has his existing attitude strengthened rather than changed by his interaction with God’s prophet. But while Pharaoh’s heart is hardened by becoming stronger, here Judah is presented as being almost drugged or anaesthetized to its circumstances: their ears are to be ‘fattened’ and their eyes clasped shut so as to willfully not see (Brueggemann 61).

That this seems to be counter to the ‘normal’ prophetic message may be the whole point (Williams 34; Brueggemann 61). The people (or at least their leaders) have grown too comfortable and self-satisfied in their assumption of God’s faithfulness that it’s ceased to be a two-way street: They simply expect the rights of being God’s people without any of the responsibilities (Williams 34).  And so the ruling elite enlarge their estates by dispossessing and dislocating the poor (5.8), and spend their time partying without stopping to remember their responsibilities before God (5.12). And so God has given up on this generation completely and any prophetic message only serves to reinforce its blindness and deafness. As Bartlett points out, there seems to be an intentional irony here:

Paraphrased, the command suggests, “If they want fat, make them fat,” as though they will eventually suffer from the effects of their own indulgence, certainly in terms of spiritual flabbiness and of morbid (potentially mortal) obesity, but possibly also in a physical sense. (Bartlett 441; cf. Seitz 56; Kaiser 131f)

And again, noting a wordplay in the Hebrew that’s lost in translation in which the ‘glory’ of God in 6.3 is mirrored by the weighing down of ears and eyes in 6.10 (both being from the Hebrew root kbd), Bartlett comments:

But here, instead of appreciating true substance in relationship to God’s “glory,” the verb indicates a “heaviness” that leads to ears being stopped up (ef. Zech 7:11), far worse than an overabundance of rich foods leading to weight gain …. This may imply that the command to dull their senses in 6:10a exposes their own false priorities of “fatness,” “false glory,” and materialistic false “substance” and a plastering over of eyes that turns the goodness of godly gifts into perversion. (Bartlett 442)

He summarizes the irony of the passage thus:

“If you think you know it all, as confirmed by your lifestyles of excess, then be fat and heavy, and show your hearts and ears and eyes to be what they are, dull and unresponsive, so that you cannot by your own reason or strength rightly understand and claim healing even one more time!” (Bartlett 444).

I think this is a helpful approach that bridges the gap between the wholly descriptive and prescriptive interpretations of this difficult passage. In Otto Kaiser’s words, “Anyone whose heart is hardened has his condition made even worse by the call to repent” (Kaiser 132).

A Hopeless Situation?

So far we have hints that, while Jerusalem’s situation is dire (and indeed fatal) there is still hope — not for a reprieve but for something new to arise in an undefined ‘after’ (Kaiser 133; ). In addition to the expressions of hope found in the chapters that follow Isaiah 6, the oracle itself ends by saying that while yes, “if even a tenth part remains in it, it will be burned again,” still “the holy seed is its stump” (Isaiah 6.13): In Jerusalem’s destruction will lie the seed for rebirth (Kaiser 133; Bartlett 444). God may have given up on this version of Judah, but not on the whole ‘Israel project’. Judgment is total, but “temporal and temporary” (Witherington 62). The axe is coming; the tree will be chopped down to barely a stump. But a shoot will grow from that stump (Witherington 62).

Challenge

This part of the study generally looks at marginalized viewpoints, or perspectives that aren’t as likely to let the text off the hook. For this text, we have to wonder whether it is just for God simply to give up on God’s people, especially when it’s the ‘normal’ everyday people that will bear the brunt of their leaders’ neglect?

This is not a question either we or the Bible can answer for us. But it is a genuine one. As so often seems to be the case with the Bible, when we actually might want God to intervene with power, God holds back. In this case, God’s answer to Judah’s leaders not providing justice for the people is not to step in and force justice (as if that were possible), but to allow foreign rulers to take the place of the existing ones, leaving the status of the everyday people even more perilous and insecure. There is still hope, albeit in some distant future and not until the nation’s destruction has been as thorough as possible. But the question of theodicy — how God can be just in a world such as ours — remains one of our faith’s greatest challenges.

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We always want to leave our study of the Scriptures with an interpretation that inspires spiritual growth and good fruit. This is a challenging text to do this with, since it’s an oracle of destruction and judgment. But I do think the interpretation that emerged in this study is a helpful one. We want so badly to focus on the question of God’s agency here: Is God or is God not making the people unresponsive to the message of judgment? But it seems better to come at it from the other direction: Covenant relationships are a two-way street, involving the faithful adherence to both rights and responsibilities for all parties. Here it is not God but the leaders’ own arrogance, self-satisfaction, and over-confidence that render them unable to truly see and hear. Isaiah’s message does not create this state of affairs, but will compound a problem that already exists, largely by laying it bare for the world to see.

With this shift in perspective, our interpretation opens up our hearts and minds to asking how receptive we are to hearing God’s judgment upon the injustices of our own societies. Like the vineyard in Isaiah 5, we too will be judged on the quality of the fruit our lives bear. That should be both a wonderful source of comfort and a wake-up call for us — lest we, like Judah’s leadership of old, render ourselves incapable of hearing the cries of the poor, injured, sick, and oppressed, and unable to see the injustice sitting before our very eyes.

Concluding Thoughts

This study hasn’t really made Isaiah’s commission any less jarring or disturbing. However, there is good reason to suggest there is more at play than simply God calling it quits on God’s people. We saw, for example, that Isaiah often swings in between poles of judgment and salvation, and even this text’s commitment to total destruction on account of the leadership’s inability to perceive the reality of their circumstances, ends with the promise of a shoot of new life. So, it seems best to understand Isaiah 6 as contributing to the book’s dynamic tension between judgment and salvation, desolation and hope. All is not lost, even as everything is lost. The death and destruction of Judah will be real and yet are not the end of the story. As Andrew Bartlett puts it:

Amos had already warned that “the Day of Yahweh” would be a day of “darkness and not light” (Amos 5:18). At this point, there is no light without first understanding the reality of darkness. This is what needed to be proclaimed, whether the people recognized it or not. Theologically, this is the “alien work” (Is 28:21) of God’s judgment and justice. It is the action of a God who kills in order to make alive (Deut 32:39; 1 Sam 2:6; 2 Ki 5:7; Hos 6:1-2; Ezek 37:1-14). (Bartlett 444)

To Christian eyes and ears, this rings familiar. For that is the precise story of salvation revealed in and through Jesus. This is all the more interesting, since Jesus uses this passage to explain why he taught in parables. There is something important here, but it’s beyond the scope of this study. For a look at Jesus’ use of this text, see the post here.

 

* See the series bibliography for details.