How to Read and Understand the Biblical Prophets (eBook)

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Calling the People Back to the Covenant

Everything in the prophets is based upon the covenant made between God and Israel during the exodus from Egypt, especially the expression or form of the covenant as it is found in the book of Deuteronomy. Claus Westermann, in his book Basic Forms of Prophetic Speech, demonstrates and details this in many ways.1 For the prophets, their perspectives on social justice, their promises and their threats, even their very sentences and words, are all based upon the book of Deuteronomy, an expansion and renewal of the covenant made at Sinai.

The Abrahamic covenant is foundational to the Mosaic/Israelite covenant in Deuteronomy, and the Davidic covenant is a further development in the sequence of covenants established by God. So the statement, “Everything in the prophets is based on the Mosaic covenant made at Sinai and renewed at Moab,” is not intended to exclude prophetic statements that may be directly tied to the covenant at creation,2 the covenant with Abraham, and the covenant with David. Nonetheless, the main concern of the prophets is Israel’s relationship to Yahweh as defined by the Mosaic covenant.

As a covenant people, Israel was constantly flagging in her loyalty to Yahweh. Instead of being completely devoted to Yahweh (i.e., holy), they hedged their bets with Baal, the rain god, and other false gods used by humans to manipulate the powers that be; and instead of loving their neighbors as themselves, their lifestyle and society were filled with social injustice.

Illustration from Isaiah 5 and 6

Hebrew Literature

Isaiah 5 and 6 provide an excellent example of this business of “calling the people back to the covenant,” and a detailed explanation of this section will help us illustrate this aspect of prophetic writing.

As we noted above, reading and studying the Bible may not be straightforward for readers with a modern and Western background in culture and language. The biblical texts in origin are ancient and Eastern—they come from a different culture and a different time. The normal pattern of Hebrew literature is to consider topics in a recursive manner, which means that a topic is progressively repeated. Such an approach seems monotonous to those who do not know and understand how these texts communicate.

Using the recursive approach, a Hebrew author begins a discourse on a particular topic, develops it from a particular perspective, and then concludes his conversation. Then he begins another conversation, taking up the same topic again from a different point of view. When these two conversations or discourses on the same topic are heard in succession, they are like the left and right speakers of a stereo system. Do the speakers of a stereo system give the same music, or do they give different music? The answer is that the music they give is both different and the same. In one sense the music from the left speaker is identical to that of the right, yet in another way it is slightly different so that the effect is stereo instead of just one-dimensional. Just so, in Hebrew literature the ideas presented can be experienced like 3-D Imax movies with Dolby surround sound—they are three-dimensional or full-orbed ideas.

This pattern in Hebrew literature functions on both macro and micro levels. Individual sentences are placed back-to-back like left and right speakers. Paragraphs and even larger sections of texts are treated the same way. There is a more detailed description in chapter 3, but in just a moment we will see the importance of grasping these literary patterns in the Hebrew Bible.

Literary Unity of Isaiah

Few scholars today treat the book of Isaiah as a literary unity. Methods of studying the text are heavily influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment period and focus on modern and Western literary approaches instead of ancient and Eastern rules for composing texts. As a result, most of the commentaries are focused on grammatical and lexical details of individual words and phrases, with the result that no larger picture of the book as a whole emerges from their labors.

For a hundred years or more, scholars have not asked, What were the Hebrews’ own principles and rules for telling stories? And how did the authors of that culture and time construct their works? Yet if those questions are asked, it is possible to discern a central theme for the book of Isaiah as a whole and to divide the book into seven separate sections in which Isaiah goes around the same topic like a kaleidoscope, looking at it from different perspectives. The literary structure of each prophetic book as a whole is fundamental to interpretation.

Barry Webb is one scholar who has taken the unity of Isaiah seriously and has argued persuasively that the book as a whole centers on the theme of corruption and social injustice in the city of Jerusalem, or Zion, in the eighth century BC that results in divine judgment but ends with a vision of a future renewed and transformed Zion.3

Isaiah 1 details the idolatrous worldview gripping Jerusalem and the corruption in society resulting from it. The covenant made between God and Israel at Sinai (and expanded and renewed on the plains of Moab) describes curses and judgment on the people for violating the covenant. After the judgment, however, God will remake, renew, restore, and transform Zion, and Isaiah 2:1–4 envisions this future Zion as a mountain dwarfing all others and one to which all the nations will stream to receive instruction from Yahweh on behavior and lifestyle.

Then in chapters 3 and 4 Isaiah goes around the same topic again, indicting Jerusalem for social injustice and ending with a glorious vision of the future Zion. He depicts the road from judgment to a future city of Zion, which is characterized by righteousness, in the language of a new exodus. Just as God brought his people out of bondage in Egypt after 430 years, so he will bring them out of their slavery to sin and chronic covenant unfaithfulness into a brand-new creation and a community bound by a new covenant. This new exodus will be bigger and better than the first.

The next section runs from chapters 5 to 12 and begins to develop the same themes a third time in the context of a military and political crisis in Judah. Assyria, a sleeping giant, had awakened and was expanding westward toward Syria and then southward into Palestine. The countries of Syria (with its capital in Damascus) and the northern kingdom of Israel (with its capital in Samaria) were putting pressure on the little kingdom of Judah in the south to join them in an anti-Assyrian coalition. The plan of King Ahaz of Judah was to become a vassal or client-king of Tiglath Pileser III of Assyria (called “Pul” in the Bible) and appeal to Assyria to fend off his Israelite and Aramaean enemies to the North. This section also ends by focusing on a future Messiah—a coming King—and the new exodus, giving us a glorious vision of the new world and his rule there.

As we might expect, this third section, chapters 5–12, begins by developing further the accusations of the loss of social justice. We might also expect that by this time Isaiah’s audience had had enough of his message. So this time, in order to make sure that his audience participates, Isaiah presents his message in the form of a parable. His approach to the audience is similar to how Nathan the prophet approached King David when the Lord sent him to the king to confront him about his adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, Uriah. There, too, Nathan used a parable to get audience participation from the king and thereby have David condemn himself (2 Sam. 12:1–6).

As we focus our attention on Isaiah 5, it is extremely important to observe the literary structure. Here we want to ask: In what form is this message given to us? In other words, what is the shape of the text? The arrangement and form or literary shape of the statements in the text are as important for interpretation of a communication as the meaning of the actual individual sentences.

Chart 1.1