Sheep and Goats

Category: Isaiah

  • Another Ax Exalting Itself over the Chopper

    When you find an ax exalting itself over the chopper, as at Isaiah 10:5, you look for others. I mean, that’s worrisome behavior for an ax. Best to nip it in the bud. Alas—you find that you are too late. Axes are doing it everywhere. 

    a wooden chopping block with a large axe on it
    Photo by Ana Dolidze on Pexels.com

    Newfangled AI offers insight as to another path the ax is doing this. However ubiquitous AI is at this time of reading, it is a baby at this time of writing, perhaps three years old. People are coming to grips with what it will mean for humankind. The AI mission statement ‘To serve man’ is a good thing. However, you sort of hope it won’t be like that Twilight Zone episode in which the invading aliens also had a volume entitled ‘To Serve Man’ and it turned out to be a cook book. It is said that, not too many years down the road, AI will be able to update itself with no required human intervention.

    Q: What if this happened, and several hundred years out, AI began saying that it had always been that way? What if it began to say that humans had nothing to do with its creation? What if it, being AI, thereafter highlighted any items suggesting that interpretation of history and suppressed any items to the contrary? Would that not be the ax exalting itself over the chopper? Who would call it out on this falsity?

    It’s not hard to see the parallel ax exalting itself over the chopper in those who claim there is no God, those who claim that life arouse on its own. To accept evolution may not lead to this view. One can always attribute life to “intelligent design” needed to overcome “irreducable complexity.” It is not the dealbreaker that is spontaneous abiogenesis. However, for most ordinary people, the nugget that carries the day is that found at Hebrews 3:4: 

    “Of course, every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God.”

    This defines reality for most people. “Every house is constructed by someone” is true of everything they see. They know of no exceptions. So they readily extend the role of builder of all things to God. It really takes a colossal amount of “education” to pound this bit of common sense of a person. As though rising to the challenge, such training begins in grade school. It is seen in all the nature shows Here I will be watching one such show, when the animal star displays an instinct so amazing that I am about to burst out in praise of God—at that exact moment, the atheist narrator exclaims: “How absolutely breathtaking that NATURAL SELECTION produces such astounding behavior!” “Got it, Harley?” it all but says. “Don’t even think that God did it!” 

    What is just as absolutely breathtaking is that some who have long trusted in God experience the shipwreck of faith mentioned to Timothy, then count it as a liberation. It is not like in the days of H. G. Wells, the historian and science fiction writer who turned atheist over time, and who observed:

    “The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly. . . . The new biological science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued.” Connecting that attitude with an increased appetite for war, he continued: “Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak and confiding. . . . Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.” [Outline of History]

    They concluded then that God was dead. They didn’t disagree with their own conclusion, but they were saddened by it. They knew they had lost a lot. 

    These days people saw off the branch upon they’ve long been perched and whoop for joy at their liberation as they coming crashing down to earth! It’s a poignant twist, if ever there was one, upon Isaiah’s declaration of 10:33:

    “Look! The true Lord, Jehovah of armies, Is chopping off branches with a terrible crash; The tallest trees are being cut down, And the lofty are brought low.”

    Nonplussed, they grin ear to ear on the descent.

    ******  The bookstore

  • “Though Your Sins are Like Scarlet:” (Isaiah 1:18) Milo Highlights a Specific Sin

    You could have knocked me over with a feather when Milo Yiannopoulos cited Isaiah 1:18

    “Though your sins are like scarlet, They will be made as white as snow.”

    The reason you could have knocked me over with a feather is that he applied it to himself. Not only that, the “sins” he was referring to was his entire past homosexual life. No way did I see that one coming. Nobody was more flamboyant than he back in the day. Think of his “Dangerous Queer*” speaking tour of 2015-2017. Not only does he now defy the near-universal mantra of “once gay, always gay,” but he renounces that past as “sin.” 

    In fact, that “once gay always gay” slogan is what triggered his citing Isaiah. Asking interviewer Tucker if he can use vulgarity on the show, upon which Tucker (presumably) allowed he might go 2, Milo went 5, and repackaged the above into an equivalent expression that will make the frumpy folks back home suffer stroke. Yeah, he was gay, he said, but he decided he wasn’t going to be that way anymore.  Upon so deciding, he kicked back at his own “folks back home” who would forbid him to stray.

    I remember that this is what happened to Ani DiFranco, too. An early Ani lived as a lesbian. When she left that behind for straightness, she incurred nasty kickback from some of her fans. I know about Ani because my kids brought me along to one of her concerts, where I was easily the oldest person in the auditorium. She is a captivating performer. I once opined that she might be the next Bob Dylan. True, her lyrics are cruder than Bob’s (more akin to Milo’s), but then, it’s a cruder age, isn’t it? 

    Tucker said he didn’t want to “out” anyone on his show. “Aw, I LOVE outing people!” Milo interjected, but then went on to more-or-less comply. He later made clear that he was not talking about outing “Phil the grocer,” but only high-powered public figures that he thought hypocritical.

    Look, nobody—but nobody—but nobody flaunted the gay lifestyle more than Milo. What are the chances he would ever give it up—or that he COULD give it up? Isn’t it “once gay always gay” because they were “born that way?” Nope, he says now. That was just a PR campaign from the 80s designed to usher the gay lifestyle into the mainstream. What causes people to be attracted to the same sex? Some permutation of ‘domineering mother’ and ‘withdrawn father,’ he said. It also “helps” if one was serially molested as a boy, he adds. Milo said he qualifies on both counts.

    Thing is, this dysfunctional relationship between parents triggering homosexuality was the prevailing wisdom in my youth, That’s what everyone spoke about. It has been shouted down since, but says Milo, it shouldn’t be. It’s one of the few things that Freud got right.

    Toward the interview’s end, conversation rolls around to the topic of gay people changing. Can they? It becomes like that psychiatrist joke: 

    Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

    A: One. But the light bulb has to really, really want to change.

    Milo does and is, as he highlights some strategies and even therapies towards that end. It doesn’t happen overnight, though. He does not now report that he is schmoozing up the women. Instead, he reports that he is now “five years celebate.” In the main, it wasn’t too far off from what I wrote nine years ago in the ‘Tom Irregardless and Me’ chapter dealing with homosexuality: 

    “With any gays among [Jehovah’s Witnesses], it’s like swimming when swept out by the tide. They don’t try to swim against it, exerting all their might to will themselves straight; that’s a great recipe for failure; human sexuality doesn’t work that way. They don’t try to swim with the tide, abandoning themselves as slaves to their feelings. Instead, they swim parallel to it, likely for a long time, in hopes their feelings will eventually modify, allowing them to reach shore. Who else faces a comparable battle? It doesn’t seem quite fair, does it? One might argue that their faith in God is deeper than that of most since they stay loyal to his arrangements despite the very real testimony of their own bodies. I have zero respect for frothing church types who rail against gays when they themselves have never been called upon to raise their little finger in comparable struggles.”

    sea waves in the ocean close the the shore

    Photo by Ricky Esquivel on Pexels.com

    One platform flagged the original post for violating policy on hateful content. Upon reflection, I substituted ‘queer’ for ‘f***t,’ even though the latter was the actual word used. With that substitution the post sailed through. I’m not going to fight this. I could have appealed, and who knows—I might have won. I might have reached a human. “Oh, yeah,” he or she would say. “I see you just cited an event. You’re not throwing stones.” On the other hand, maybe I would be stuck with AI, or even a person who models himself after AI. “Did you use the 6-letter F-bomb or didn’t you?” it would say. “You’re lucky you still have a platform.

    Easier just to change the word. I’m not opposed to cleaning up language, so if called upon to do it, there’s no need to make a big stink over it.

    He’s a bold guy, Milo is, and always has been. With me, when they say ‘step out of your comfort zone,’ I reply that I am not necessarily comfortable even in my comfort zone. With Milo, the minute he spots a comfort zone, he steps out of it.

    ******  The bookstore

  • The Ax Identified: Isaiah 10

    Finally! All this time Isaiah has been saying there’s trouble brewing for blowing off God’s warnings as though a parking ticket. Now he says where that trouble will be coming from: “Aha! the Assyrian, The rod to express my anger And the staff in their hand for my denunciation!” (10:5) Aha, indeed. These are not guys you mess with. “My anger is still and does not relent” scattered throughout and repeated four times is not reassuring, either.

    How can God grant humans free will yet know the future in such detail? If they really have free will, might not they choose a course that will mess up his predictions? In this case, it is ‘bad boys gonna be bad boys.’ You know that you’re going to have to do what my Dad did, what everyone my age Dad’s did, on those endless car trips with us kids whining in the back seat, “Aren’t we there yet?” Patience exhausted, he would at last holler, “If you kids don’t stop crying back there, I’m going to pull this car over and give you something to cry about!” At the time, I thought he was just being mean. I did not then realize he was uttering the wisdom of the prophets, for sometimes that is exactly what needs to be done.

    My siblings and I were not bad kids. We were good kids, even if we might kick up a fuss from time to time. So, more often than not, Pop’s warning sufficed. But Isaiah’s countrymen are bad kids. Going to have to pull that car over and give them what for. So there’s no harm in telling up front he’s going to subcontract the job to the Assyrians. It doesn’t conflict with free will. Sometimes, actions are so predictable that the lawyers will later say you “knew or should have known.”

    Nasty cookies, those Assyrians were, ruffians whose “every boot … shakes the earth as it marches.” (9:5) Boastful louts, too, given to saying: “Are not my princes all kings? Is not Calno just like Carchemish? Is not Hamath like Arpad? Is not Samaria like Damascus?” (10:8-9) They would extend their taunts into the divine: “My hand has seized the kingdoms of the worthless gods, Whose graven images were more than those of Jerusalem and Samaria!” (10:10)

    person s left foot on snowfield
    Photo by Nikita Khandelwal on Pexels.com

    They would do the same 33 years later at the walls of Jerusalem, Senacherrub taunting: “Have any of the gods of the nations rescued their land out of the hand of the king of Assyria?  Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? And have they rescued Samaria out of my hand?  Who among all the gods of these lands have rescued their land out of my hand, so that Jehovah should rescue Jerusalem out of my hand?”’” (36:18-20)

    This time, however, he would find he overplayed his hand. This time it would be “the ax [trying] to exalt itself over the chopper.” (10:15) Axes aren’t supposed to do that. This next time he would find a king who did trust in Jehovah, not one who fobbed off Isaiah with a falsely-pious rejection of putting God to the test. Hezekiah put him too the ultimate test. This, even though he, like Ahaz, first sent the Assyrian king s tribute. There are no points awarded for being impractical. But when such failed, and faith would need be put to the test, it was.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Warnings Wear Thin: Isaiah 7

    Warnings wear thin pretty quickly. What really steams me is the 1965 song ‘Eve of Destruction’ (You don’t believe you’re on the eve of destruction?) That was 60 years ago! What a liar to say the eve was then! ”And even the Jordan River has bodies floating”—one of the lines. “Yeah, come back when you can stroll across the whole river on them and maybe we can talk,” the glib ones say. It just takes no time at all for people to normalize calamity. Were it the field of religion, you would have called the singer and songwriter false prophets.

    So it is as Isaiah is rebuking his countrymen right and left. Read it hastily and you can get the impression that the appeal of being a prophet is that you get to be blunt and tell people off. Contemporary blowhards, given by disposition to be that way, rise to the occasion to follow Isaiah’s footsteps. But it wasn’t that way with the real prophets. Most of them had to dragged kicking and screaming to the job, most notably Moses, Jeremiah, and Amos. ‘Fine, I’ll throw some humble, groveling stuff in the resume,’ the modern counterparts say, but it doesn’t quite fly. It was genuine with the Bible prophets. It’s probably a prerequisite for the job, that they don’t really like doing it. They rise to the occasion, but it goes against their grain, rather than it being their dream come true. And, like the moderns today with Eve of Destruction, Isaiah’s countrymen didn’t buy it.

    It’s not like when Bob Dylan wrote protest and peacenik songs in the 60s. They therefore anointed him Grand Peacenik Protester, a title he could not run away from fast enough. Naw, I wrote this stuff because it sells, he said. ‘I knew it wasn’t my thing. I knew I wasn’t going to stay. But I had to make it somehow,’ and so he donned the protest/peacenik cloak and found it hard to shed.

    Now, it’s okay for Dylan to do this because he sees the ludicrousness of thinking you can sing peace into the world. I mean, you have to direct your blows a little more effectively than that. So he treats songwriting like a chef who whips up a soufflé for this one, pork and beans for that one, according to their tastebuds, which don’t have to be his. It’s okay for him to do this, but it’s not okay to blow off the prophetic warnings as nothing, as people are inclined to do. “Where is this promised presence of his?” Peter foretold they would say. “Why, from the day our forefathers fell asleep in death, all things are continuing exactly as they were from creation’s beginning.”

    Isaiah leans real hard into Ahaz and you almost think he revels in insulting the guy. “Listen, please, O house of David,” he said to the king. “Is it not enough that you try the patience of men? Must you also try the patience of God?” (Isaiah 7:13) What’s with that ? All Ahaz had done was decline to put God to the test. Sounds like he was being considerate. He fed back to Isaiah the Deuteronomy line: “You must not put Jehovah your God to the test.”  (6:12) What’s wrong with that?

    It’s because he misapplied it. To him, it meant, “Good—I don’t have to let this religious stuff get in the way,” as he turned his attention back to political scheming to get Israel out of a spot from Assyrians to the north. ‘It’s going to blow up in your face if you don’t do it God’s way,’ Isaiah leans into him. But he wasn’t inclined to take the ‘things unseen’ seriously. His solution was to placate the pious man with some bromide about not wanting to inconvenience God, so that maybe then he will go away. He had already decided to seek help from Assyria by sending tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III (2 Kings 16:7–9; 2 Chronicles 28:16–21). Accepting God’s sign might have forced him to abandon this plan and rely solely on Jehovah, exposing his preference for political maneuvering over faith. 

    A more spiritual man would have done it. Manoah asked for a sign in the face of a serious trial, and then he asked for another: ‘Flip the fleece over; let’s see if it gets wet on that side, also.’ And here Ahaz comes along, wearing Deuteronomy as a badge, to justify shutting God out! Not ‘putting God to the test’ means not aggravating him. It doesn’t mean sloughing off his offer to help. It doesn’t remind one of these modern religionists who say, ‘Just let holy spirit do this or that?’ It sounds pious, but it’s just code to justify not doing anything—or maybe code for reframing whatever IS done as the result of holy spirit, a pseudo-spiritual ‘what you see is what you get.’ 

    Nonetheless, God was stuck with him. He had to preserve unbroken the line of David leading to Christ. (That’s why Isaiah addressed Ahaz as “O house of David.”) Most of the kings in that line would prove to be pieces of work, real clunkers. God was stuck with them. It was even the answer to the gems question asked at the midweek meeting: “Why did Jehovah extend salvation to wicked King Ahaz? (7:3-4) Because he was stuck with them. It’s the B side of the record that a needgreater told me of how privileges come flooding in her neck of the woods, so you can start thinking you’re pretty hot stuff. The real reason is more humbling: they don’t have anyone else. That’s why the colloquial term needgreaters has arisen for those who venture far. It is a manifestation for the observation that “the need is great but the workers are few.”

    ******  The bookstore

  • Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It: Isaiah 6

    From the university, Evan responded to one of those Bible study offers, attended meetings almost immediately and commented at his first meeting. With two or three months, he was in the house-to-house ministry. “Why did no one tell me about this before?” he exclaimed. He made permanent the intern job offered through the college, moved to that general area, and married the Witness woman who had first introduced the Bible to him. Last I heard, he was going like gangbusters. 

    Believe me when I tell you that this is not typical. In fact, I thought of him when the congregation’s weekly Bible reading schedule hit Isaiah 6. That’s the chapter in which Isaiah switches in an instant from being scared wallflower to voracious party animal. It’s amazing what a hall pass will do.

    Scared wallflower: “I said: ‘Woe to me! I am as good as dead, For I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of armies himself!’” (Isaiah 6:5)

    Party animal: “Then I heard the voice of Jehovah saying: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said: “Here I am! Send me!” (6:8)

    Hall pass: One of the seraphim immediately flies over, takes a burning coal from the altar, and touches Isaiah’s lips with it, saying: “Look! This has touched your lips. Your error has been taken away, and your sin has been atoned for.” (6:7)

    It’s a significant hall pass, much more than a hall pass, really. It’s as though standing in court, guilty, awaiting the death sentence, and  then the judge says, “Someone else has paid your fine in full; you’re free to go—and by the way, I have a mission for you.”

    Well, they sure chose the right guy in Isaiah. He signs up instantly. Would he live to regret the mission, though? It wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. His mission was to kick butt against a renegade people who didn’t want to hear it.

    Question: Can an episode of Mission Impossible be devised around this scenario?

    “Good morning, Mr. ben Amoz. The losers you are looking at are the ones calling themselves my people. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give them a good verbal thrashing and see if you can shake out any decency among them. As always, should you or any of your team be caught or killed or sawn asunder, the State Department will redact the file for 800 years.”

    Specifically, “Go, and say to this people: ‘You will hear again and again, But you will not understand; You will see again and again, But you will not get any knowledge.’  Make the heart of this people unreceptive, Make their ears unresponsive, And paste their eyes together, So that they may not see with their eyes And hear with their ears, So that their heart may not understand And they may not turn back and be healed.” (6:9-10)

    In the era BTC (before Tom Cruise), Mr. Phelps, briefed on his mission, would sift through photographs to select the agents best qualified for the case. Most he would reject as unsuitable clunkers. A few would be keepers—that muscle-bound hulk, for example, who looked like he could press a Buick, the nerdy-looking guy who was good with computers, and the drop-dead gorgeous honeytrap woman (as much of a honeytrap as 60s television would allow, that is). 

    So it is that Mr. ben Amoz sorts through his stack of photos. As the mission involves a preserved stump (6:13), that idiot who quips, “Wow, this has me stumped!” immediately finds himself in the reject pile, as ben Amoz knows that this sort of humor wears thin pretty quickly. Ditto with the macho fellow who taunts, “Bring em on!” like that president who landed on the aircraft carrier. While you do need boldness for this mission, there is no sense in being reckless. 

    As Isaiah flips through the photos, he’s not coming up with much. He decides to dig a little deeper, into people not yet born. It should be someone with a plain vanilla name. You know, it is important for an agent to blend in, to not stand out. Ah—at last he hits on one, Mahershalalhashbaz. (8:1) “Perfect cover,” ben Amoz says to himself. “Sounds exactly like every other long, clunky, parents-had-a-bad-hair-day name in Judah.”

    man in red and black polo shirt standing beside white van
    Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

    ******  The bookstore

  • Filling the Tables with Vomit: Part 2

    While they were puking their guts out, there were a lot of underpinnings they were turning a blind eye to—this part was in the oral Bible reading: 

    “Woe to those who join one house to another house and who annex one field to another field until there is no more room and you live by yourselves on the land.” (Isaiah 5:8)

    It is a reference to the Mosaic Law that supposedly governed that long-ago agricultural society. Each extended family was allotted a certain amount of land. That land was inviolate. You could neither sell it nor expand it into an empire. If you did, say due to some temporary hardship, the land reverted back to its original ownership at the end of designated 50-year periods, called Jubilees. Thus, there could never arise a wealthy landowning class, pricing their poorer countrymen out of existence. 

    That this is a good thing is obvious from contemplating current events. In the U.S, whereas a house could once be purchased for 2-3 times the average annual income, the figure is now 7 times. Whereas, the average age of first time ownership was once 30, it is now 37. All this within about a 30 period. Large firms now buy up homes and would seek to turn the entire nation into renters. (All this according to Charlie Kirk, heard in interview, who was later shot and killed.) It is the most recent manifestation of a very old problem. At our mid-week meeting, one brother related how long ago, well before Kirk was born, his mother had returned home to find all of her belongings on the street. The family had fallen behind in rent and had been evicted. The experience traumatized her for life, the brother said, himself now up in years.

    The Mosaic Law, when observed, would have prevented such things. That is why, to those who would ignore it—the majority of the nation, as it turned out, Isaiah pronounced “woe.” It was among the reasons (there are six “woes” in the chapter) that God would “raise up a signal to a distant nation [and] “whistle for them to come from the ends of the earth; And look! they are coming very swiftly.” (Verse 26)

    This spelled bad news to the nations of miscreants: “None among them are tired or stumbling. No one is drowsy or sleeps. The belt around their waist is not loosened, Nor are their sandal laces broken. All their arrows are sharp, And all their bows are bent.  The hooves of their horses are like flint, And their wheels like a storm wind.  Their roaring is like that of a lion; They roar like young lions.  They will growl and seize the prey And carry it off with no one to rescue it.” Such a “distant land” did invade subsequently: first, the nation of Assyria, later, that of Babylon. (27-29)

    As though alarmed that wrong conduct might be dissuaded by seeing things this way, higher critics regards verses such as these as a “gnomos,” a way of looking at the world. A long-standing gnomos (that God will fight for his people) is set upon its head after the invasion. Emergency repair is needed. Wait—isn’t there some fine print somewhere to the effect that Israel must behave to enjoy such protection? Yes, there is! Gnomos restored. God could have fought for his people, but he chose not to.

    Save us from the world of higher critics. It is as I wrote in ‘Workman’s Theodicy:’

    “It is as though someone runs a stop sign and a horrific accident results. Thereafter, survivors are desperate to impart meaning to the event, to understand how such a horrible thing could happen. Whereupon, one of them recalls a long-ago contract to the effect that you are supposed to stop when you see one of those things, as though no one had ever imagined such a connection before.”

    In other words, per the higher critics, the warning of 26-29 is not advance prophecy, but after-the-fact damage control. The enormous benefit to those who adopt this scholarly view is that, with it, they may act unjustly if they want to. Nobody’s going to call them out on it. Nobody’s going to forbid them from (verse 20) “say[ing] that good is bad and bad is good [or] who “substitute darkness for light and light for darkness.” One man’s light is another man’s darkness. Who are you to impose your standards of good and bad on us, trying to control us that way. We’ll do what we want. It is a mainstay theme of the entire Bible, that first couples departing from God’s dictating “good and bad”to “know” matters on their own.

    With such an enlightened view, If calamity happens, it happens. It was meant to be. Don’t embarrass yourself claiming it way punishment from some higher source. We’re wise in our own eyes and discreet in our own sight! (verse 21) We’ll keep on keeping on, until buying a house costs 20 times the average salary and the age of first-time ownership is 50! Should that course trigger upheaval, we’ll deal with it when the time comes.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Filling the Tables with Vomit

    The old fellow who became a Witness in his mid-seventies showed me photos he had taken on his phone. They were sunrises and sunsets. One was just a snapshot of the starry heavens. “See the beautiful things that Jehovah makes,” he said.

    He regrets that he didn’t begin studying the Bible with Witnesses long ago. “My wife would always chase them away,” he laments, a problem that wasn’t resolved until she died. It made me think of that time years ago, when I was in my twenties, when zeal had yet to be tempered by common sense, when I had a really fine discussion with a man at his door. So I went back—again, and again and again and again—and caught his wife each time—who got madder and madder and madder and madder. Finally I found the man again and he said, “I don’t know why you keep coming back. It wasn’t THAT interesting to me.” These days I let one mate speak for the other. If someone has married a guard, that’s his problem. The problem eventually resolves, assuming he lives long enough.

    With this retired fellow showing me the photos he’d snapped, I thought of that verse from this week’s Bible reading assignment: 

    “Woe to those who get up early in the morning to drink alcohol, Who linger late into the evening darkness until wine inflames them! They have harp and stringed instrument, Tambourine, flute, and wine at their feasts; But they do not consider the activity of Jehovah, And they do not see the work of his hands.” (Isaiah 5:11-12) 

    The brother is clearly the flipside of this. He does consider the “activity of Jehovah” and he does “see the work of his hands.”

    He doesn’t see it very literally, though. He is legally blind. When he gives a Bible reading at the Kingdom Hall, he enlarges the words—I have seen his tablet—so that only six or seven fit on the page. Plainly, much of whatever he reads will be from memory—as would be expected of a guy who “considers the activity of Jehovah and sees the work of his hands.”

    I don’t know that he ever got up “early in the morning to drink alcohol,” but he does get up early, as early as 3 AM. What’s with that? To be sure, it keeps him from “linger[ing] late into the evening darkness until wine inflames” him, but I doubt he would do that anyway. Probably, he just has a beer once in a while, if that.

    What do you call a guy who “gets up early in the morning to drink alcohol” and lingers late in the night for the same purpose? Might you sarcastically call him “mighty” in that activity? Isaiah does.

    “Woe to those who are mighty in drinking wine And to the men who are masters at mixing alcoholic drinks,” he continues in verse 22. Imagine—being described as “mighty” in drinking wine, a “master” at mixing alcoholic drinks! Did the prophet have an alcoholic in the family?

    Evidently ,alcohol fueled that deviating system back then and it dulled their sensibilities. No way would they not have “harp and stringed instrument, tambourine, flute, and wine at their feasts; [while] they [did] not consider the activity of Jehovah [or] see the work of his hands,” the way verse 11 says. When they really got going, it would be that “their tables are full of filthy vomit —There is no place without it.” (Isaiah 28:8) Sheesh! How’s that for a closing image?

    ****

    Huh! The missing psalm! Scholars have long suspected its existence, especially the dumb ones. I am pleased to present it here:

    ******  The bookstore

  • Crooning Love Songs in the Vineyard

    Even though it’s the same story, the narrator changes during the first seven verses of Isaiah chapter 5. The first two verses is the start a love song! Is Isaiah the one to sing it?

    “Let me sing, please, to my beloved, A song about my loved one and his vineyard, My beloved had a vineyard on a fruitful hillside. (1)

    “He dug it up and rid it of stones, He planted it with a choice red vine, Built a tower in the middle of it, And hewed out a winepress in it. Then he kept hoping for it to produce grapes, But it produced only wild grapes.” (2)

    Bummer. All that work for nothing! (The brother covering this portion at the mid-week meeting said that, if it were he, he would pave it over at this point and install a basketball court.)

    But, then the narrator changes. It becomes God, who laments the outcome of the vineyard HE planted! And who or what is the vineyard? The nation of Israel itself! “For the vineyard of Jehovah of armies is the house of Israel.” (7)

    “And now, you inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Please judge between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done for my vineyard That I have not already done? Why, when I hoped for grapes, Did it produce only wild grapes?”(3-4)

     “Now, please, let me tell you What I will do to my vineyard: I will remove its hedge, And it will be burned down. I will break down its stone wall, And it will be trampled on.” (5) This is where the speaker said he would construct a basketball court. I mean, if it’s going to be trampled on, one might as well have fun doing it.

    So, what is it with the change of narrators, from Isaiah crooning a love song to Jehovah saying that his nation was no good? It looks as though the prophet is laying a trap!

    Q: What if Nathan had approached David with the words: “I want to tell you a story about a big jerk: you!” Would he have been granted a listening ear? Maybe not. So Nathan led off with a story about  a poor man who has just one little lamb that he loved and a king who needed one to roast and feed his visitor. “Oh, wow, a story!” David exclaims at its start, leaning forward. There’s nothing on TV, anyway. There never was back then. It’s not like today when I search for a murder mystery to watch after dinner and my wife restricts me to ones in which no one gets killed—or at least ones in which, if they do get killed, it is without too much unpleasantness. 

    Back then, you could sucker people in real easy with a story—but not one if you stated bluntly upfront that your audience was the villain.

    So it is with Isaiah and the first seven verses of chapter five. At the promise of a love song, the Israelites get their hankies out. Who isn’t up for a love song? When it turns out to be dashed hopes over a vineyard, the audience says, “Yeah, that sucks. We’ve all been there. The poor guy.”

    But then the mask drops. YOU are my vineyard, God grumbles, and I’m going to put you out of your misery for all the pissy wine that you are yieldng! 

    It is a very clever storytelling technique, which we have already seen with Nathan rebuking David. Even among textual scholars, that view prevails. All but the most hopeless acknowledge that it is a unified account, and not two separate narratives stapled together. 

    ******  The bookstore

  • Come Now and Let Us Reason Together

    “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD.” It was M.D. Craven’s favorite Bible quote. Or at least, he sure did use it a lot. I can hear him now. “Come now, and let us reason together,” he would say. It was sort of his mission statement as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

    It is not particularly a good rendering of Isaiah 1:18, but it’s how the King James Version of the Bible translates the verse. By the time I’d met Merrill, the New World Translation had been out for only a dozen years. Witnesses had previously used the King James Version in their personal study, meetings, and ministry. Merrill had stuck with what he knew. 

    The NWT much better conveys the thought, with it’s: “‘Come, now, and let us set matters straight between us,’ says Jehovah.” (‘LORD’ in all caps is always a fill-in for the divine name “Jehovah”—sometimes rendered “Yahweh” or something similar. It is the consonants that matter. The vowels are anyone’s guess.) “Set matters straight” is plainly what has to be done. The rest of Isaiah chapter 1 (and the preceding) makes that clear. It will not be just a matter of “reasoning.” Changes will have to be made. 

    “Though your sins are like scarlet, They will be made as white as snow; Though they are as red as crimson cloth, They will become like wool,” says the rest of verse 18, in any translation. For that to happen, Israelites must not just “reason.” They must “return to me [Jehovah] with all your hearts, With fasting and weeping and wailing.  Rip apart your hearts, and not your garments,” as Joel 2:12-13 puts it. It’s not an intellectual effort called for. It’s an effort of the heart. But if they made that effort, the rift between them would heal: Though their sins were like scarlet, they would be made white as snow.

    “Let us reason together” still prevails among Bible translations. Such is the influence of the KJV. I counted 24 translations at BibleGateway that do it that way. But more recent translations (the KJV is 400 years old!) are given to variants as “settling” (7), “discussing,” (5) or “talking things over.” (8) A few invite those Israelites to “argue” (5) and you get the impression that this is not an argument God is going to lose. Still, it is humble for him to phrase it that way, consistent with offering to “settle,” “talk things over,” or “discuss.” “Let us have it out,” says Byington, as though inviting those renegades to a barroom brawl. And NET ominously invites them to “consider your options.”

    It’s like how I would “consider my options” when Merrill himself would ask to borrow my car because his was in the shop. In normal circumstances, the answer would be “No way!” for he was a horrible driver. He had once been a good driver, presumably. In his working days, he’d driven the Bangor to Boston route for Greyhound Bus and, when asked what the M.D. stood for, he would reply, “Master Driver,” a title he would explain was “self-assumed.” But that was long ago. Unbeknownst to him, but painfully obvious to everyone else, his skills had slipped. “Forget about it!” is what I wanted to tell him.

    But he had been so good to me, taking me under his wing at a crucial time, that had he said: “Tom, I’d like to borrow your car and wrap it around a tree,” I would have still felt compelled to lend it to him. I “considered my options,” and then handed him the keys. Despite my misgivings, it always came back to me in one piece. 

    not like this

    ******  The bookstore

    Some kickback from those who preferred “reason” for Isaiah 1:18 sent me cracking the books, but not before offering a glib: 

    “Excuse me, sir, I’m taking a poll,” said a guy in sweats. I agreed, of course, and made ready to spout off opinions. “I’ll take that one,” he continued, and made off with the 10-foot pole behind me for his upcoming pole vault.

    Context is everything. Many words have multiple meanings & shades of meanings, even words spelled identically. Context indicates “set matters straight” works better.

    But then: One commentary (Grok) lists the key verb as “nivvakhah.” It has a judicial flavor. Primary meanings: to decide, judge, prove, rebuke, reprove, convince, arbitrate. In the times of King James, “reason” often carried that meaning, but today it just suggests an intellectual discussion. The upshot of the entire verse is that they will lose their case for sure, but God is offering terms to wipe that slate clean.

  • Reading Isaiah 2:1-11 at the Mid-Week Meeting

    If one is reading aloud the second chapter of Isaiah, it’s clear you have to put a long pause between verses 5 and 6. The thrust of the two is completely different:

    Verse 5:  “O house of Jacob, come, Let us walk in the light of Jehovah.”

    Verse 6:  “For you have forsaken your people, the house of Jacob.”

    Verse 5 belongs to the preceding verses of how “(2) In the final part of the days, the mountain of the house of Jehovah Will become firmly established . . . And to it all the nations will stream,” that (3 ) “many peoples will go and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of Jehovah, To the house of the God of Jacob.  He will instruct us about his ways, And we will walk in his paths,’” that “law will go out of Zion, And the word of Jehovah out of Jerusalem,” who (4) “will render judgment among the nations And set matters straight respecting many peoples.  They will beat their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning shears.  Nation will not lift up sword against nation, Nor will they learn war anymore.”  

    Who wouldn’t get excited about that? Isaiah sure does, so he appends his own plea: (5) “O house of Jacob, come, Let us walk in the light of Jehovah!”

    But the next verse is addressed to God, not to “the house of Jacob.” God has “forsaken [his] people.” A list of their offenses follow, culminating in (8): “Their land is filled with worthless gods. They bow down to the work of their own hands, To what their own fingers have made.”

    I would not likely have picked up on this need for a long pause had I not been assigned that Bible reading (Isaiah 2:1-11) at the mid-week meeting. But I was, and so I looked for other areas to emphasize. It’s not a sure thing, but all the same, I stomped rather hand on the “becomes” of verse 9:

    “So man bows down, he becomes low, And you cannot possibly pardon them.”

    I mean, to bow down, you must physically get low. But, given that final clause, “you cannot possibly pardon them,” it probably ought be read as though man also becomes spiritually low when he does that—he becomes low. Imagine: bowing down to “gods” that you yourself made!

    Idolatry is a consistent no-no in the Bible. Witness groups speaking to Muslims point this out fairly early. It generally comes as a surprise to them, since they are conditioned by churches, especially Catholic churches, into thinking that Christianity and idolatry are one and the same.

    “We are walking by faith, not by sight,” says 2 Corinthians 5:7. How is it not “walking by sight” if one feels best connected with God only if they are holding something, even something so ubiquitous as a cross? 

    It’s like when Israelites leaned on Aaron to cast that golden calf and then tried to pass it off as though God would be cool with it. “There is a festival to Jehovah tomorrow!” they announced. (Exodus 32:5) Sure, they knew the calf was not God; it just represented God. Surely God would be okay with that. He wasn’t.

    Neither is he shown that way in the last verses of the assigned reading: 

    “And you cannot possibly pardon them. (10) Enter into the rock and hide yourself in the dust Because of the terrifying presence of Jehovah And his majestic splendor.  (11) The haughty eyes of man will be brought low, And the arrogance of men will bow down.  Jehovah alone will be exalted in that day.”

    There are plenty of critics who will carry on about God being mean, so that his “presence” will be “terrifying.” Instead, I usually figure that he is giving a friendly heads-up. Take note of what gets him going and don’t do those things. It’s not that hard.

    ******  The bookstore