The Isaiah Project: Chapter 41, or, Maggots and Little Men
Happy 2020! We begin what will probably be the final year of the Isaiah Project with Chapter 41. Below as always are a translation and contemplative essay.
The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 411. Fall mute in my presence, you islands. Peoples of the world, grow strong again. Let them come closer and make their proclamation: let us draw near together to each other and to justice.
2. Who was it that awakened a man from the land of the rising sun? He called him in righteousness to his feet and presented the nations before him, gave him dominion over monarchs. He makes them like dust with his sword; like dry scattered wheat with his bow and arrow.
3. He hunts them down and passes by in peace, on the road where feet had never traveled.
4. Who did this? Who made it? Him, calling forth from the first generation on down, ‘I, God, am the first. And with each one after till the end, I am he.
5. The islands saw, and they were afraid. The ends of the earth shuddered. They came near. They approached.
6. To a man, every one of them helped his friends, and said to his brother, ‘be strong.’
7. The artisan strengthened the smith, and the one who pounds things flat with hammers strengthened the one who beats on the anvil — about the soldering they said, ‘it’s good’ — and they strengthened it with bolts, so it wouldn’t slip.
8. And you — Israel, my servant; Jacob, you, the one I choose; offspring of Abraham who loved me,
9. Whom I made strong; whom I grasped and took from the ends of the Earth, whose noblemen I called forth, and said, ‘my service is yours; I chose you. I don’t reject you.
10. ‘Don’t be afraid: I am with you. Don’t be downcast: I am your god. I’ll fortify you, yes, I’ll help you, yes, I’ll support you with the right hand of my righteousness.
11. Look: they’ll all be humiliated and put to shame, inflamed with anger against you as they are. They’ll be practically non-existent; the men who go up against you will perish.
12. You’ll go looking, but you won’t find the ones that fought you: they’ll be practically non-existent; the men who did battle with you will be less than nothing.
13. Because I am God, your god, who clasps your right hand firmly and gives it strength; who says to you, ‘don’t be afraid: I’ll help you.
14. Don’t be afraid, maggot! Jacob, and you little men of Israel — I’ll help you, declares God, your redeemer, Israel’s Sacred One.
15. Look: I am making you a slick new blade — sharp, serrated, with teeth for threshing. You’ll slice through mountains and pulverize them; you’ll make hillsides like brittle wheat.
16. You’ll sift them, and a gust of wind will carry them off — they’ll scatter in swirling dust devils, and you’ll be joyous, delighted in God, exulting in Israel’s Sacred One.
17. When the impoverished, the destitute go hunting for water, and there’s nothing — when their tongues shrivel, dry with thirst — I, God, will respond to them. Israel’s God will not abandon them.
18. I will burst open waterways on the jutting peaks, and wellsprings within valley crevices. I’ll make the desert wasteland into a pool of water, and the parched places into sources where water pours forth.
19. I’ll give trees in the wasteland: cedars, acacias, myrtles, and olives. I’ll put fir trees and cypress and box trees down in the desert, all side by side.
20. So they’ll see, and know, and consider, and come all together to understand — that the hand that did this is God’s. That Israel’s Sacred One created it.
21. ‘Gather your accusations,’ says God, ‘present your arguments for the prosecution,’ says Jacob’s King.
22. Let them present, and tell us what’s going to happen, the origins of it all — what are they? Let them tell us, and we’ll take them to heart, and come to know their final outcome. Or else let us hear what’s coming.
23. Tell what’s coming next, so we’ll know that you’re gods! Oh yes, do something — good or bad, so we can consider it, and see all at once.
24. See: you’re less than nothing. What you do is less than empty air. Whoever chooses you is a travesty.
25. I’ve riled up someone from the dark North, and he’s coming. From the sunrise at dawn he will call on my name, and he will approach rulers like you approach the mud you use for bricks; like a potter stomps on clay.
26. Who’s told it all from the beginning, so we’ll know? From the time before, so we can call him righteous? No indeed, there’s no one telling that, no, no one hearing it, indeed, no one hears what you’re saying.
27. The beginnings on Zion — look! look, see them. I will give to Jerusalem one who brings good news.
28. I look — not one man. Not one mentor among them, whom I could ask and have the answer proclaimed.
29. See: all of them, nothing but inanity and empty air. Their works, their sculpted gods — wind and void.
God is very big, and you are very small, and everything depends on how you feel about that.
'Every gorge will be lifted up. Every mountain, every hillside, laid low. What’s twisted will be straightened out, and the rough rocks will be smoothed into plains,' said Isaiah in the previous chapter (verse 4). It is easy, for me at least, to assume that this means God will spend time on the last day rearranging the major power structures of the world, demoting some and promoting others. But in fact, looking at these sections of Isaiah's prophecy, I think it's more likely that God will simply make all such promotions and demotions irrelevant in relation to his own huge importance.
In other words, when salvation comes, the enormity of that event will render insignificant by comparison every major distinction and divide that currently defines the topography of human society. Mighty kings and powerless wretches will look identical -- will be identical -- in the face of an as-yet unimaginable strength. Rich and poor will be meaningless distinctions when it becomes plain how spiritually impoverished the entire world is, and how abundant with riches is God. And so God will 'present the nations' to his Messiah and give him 'dominion over monarchs.' He will '[make] them like dust with his sword; like dry scattered wheat with his bow and arrow,' says Isaiah in our present chapter (verse 2).
It strikes me that God prepared Israel for exactly this moment of redemption by allowing it to become battered and oppressed. To say this is is not to diminish the horror of the Jewish exile. It is only to observe that, upon losing their homeland at the hands of Babylon, the Israelites were perfectly positioned to welcome a cataclysmic reorientation of the world's priorities.
For Babylon -- for any power clambering its way to the top of the world's geopolitical ladder -- the shattering of that ladder and the obsolescence of its hierarchy would come as terrible news. It would mean all they had worked to achieve was pointless. But for Israel, grieving and in chains, the prediction that God would obviate all worldly strength must have been unspeakably welcome. It meant the wiping from existence of their apparently towering oppressors: 'they'll all be humiliated and put to shame,' says Isaiah: all the taskmasters and petty kings of Babylon will seem like nothing in light of what is to come. 'You'll go looking, but you won't find the ones who fought you: they'll be practically non-existent; the men who did battle with you will be less than nothing' (verses 11-12).
That is why God, somewhat shockingly, calls Israel 'maggot' and her people 'little men' in verse 14: difficult though it may be to hear, this is a reassurance. It is God telling his people that even the immensity of their suffering will soon seem like a trifle. If they only hold out hope, they will be exalted in ways they cannot presently imagine, ways that make their anguish now look laughable. Blessed are the poor, the weak, the hungry and thirsty: only they will be glad to see the chess board of the world upended.
For this promise to hold good, it must be utterly beyond our comprehension what God has in store. The terror, the physical misery, the emotional desolation that Israel suffered was no less real and intense than the worst of what we suffer today. Wars and rumors of wars, famine, bereavement, loss: let no part of what I say imply that they are anything other than torture. But it is acknowledgement of this fact that allows me to stand in awe of what must await us. Since I cannot at the moment conceive of anything that would make up for the piteous suffering of our present world; and since I am promised that in fact God will not only make up for that suffering but cause it to appear risibly small and insignificant; I can only say to myself, as Isaiah said to the Jews: take heart, for you are very small. And God is very big.
Rejoice evermore,Spencer