Canter Bridge

The long book called Isaiah displays a complex understanding of ‘the nations’.

One one extreme, it is capable of seeing them as naked adversaries to God’s chosen Israel. On the other, they are welcomed into the center of YHWH’s redemptive purposes.

In between, one can only admire the dexterity with which their existence, their behavior, and their destiny are so deftly explored. As with everything else in this book, their definition comes via an artful layering of truth upon truth. Each fresh level does not eradicate what has gone before, but rather reframes it. Continue Reading »

Isaiah turns often to speak of the storied, shadow-kept ‘servant of YHWH’ with clear indication that what the figure represents is a people. In about equal measure, the ‘servant’ is figured as a person. Continue Reading »

Are those who die unjustly simply to be forgotten?

In a world like ours—battered and bleeding—it is for too many the farthest thing from an arcane question. The rubble of battlefield and broken neighborhood covers far too many lifeless bodies for that.

It has become for us, as it was in the beginning, a question most real. Continue Reading »

The book called Isaiah quietly places layer atop rhetorical layer as it ambles forward in the general direction of glorified Zion.

By the time one arrives at the stirring reversal of fortunes that takes the steering wheel firmly in hand at chapter 40, we have encountered the expression רעהו with a suffixed preposition multiple times. It has described the action of a derelict or judged person to his fellow or to his companion. In the Isaianic way, this otherwise neutral expression has accrued with each new layer a discernibly negative connotation. Continue Reading »