Isa 6:8-13
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Questions
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Lexical notes
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Exegesis
Verse 11
Isaiah responds to the overwhelming clarification of verses 9-10 with a rather simple question: "how long?" literally, "until when?" But Isaiah's question betrays a sort of freedom Isaiah feels with the Lord he addresses: a freedom marked less by Isaiah's boldness than by the Lord's grace. The prophet's question, in fact, draws out of the narrative an aspect of it that might all too easily be missed: the prophet is here given, from the very outset, an opportunity to have laid out for him in detail the call he is being given. The Old Testament is filled with prophets who are called and sent with little--or usually no--explanation of the task whatsoever. These many examples, in fact, are the ground out of which grows the so-called "complaint literature" of the OT, literature in which a jaded prophet rebukes the Lord for His inattentiveness to His prophet, His covenant, His people, His responsibility. Only after the fact does understanding come--if it then comes at all: much of complaint literature ends in a sort of prophetic aporia. Isaiah's narrative answers the question before it arises, thereby either undercutting all complaint literature in advance or (and this option is very intriguing) becoming the most radical version of complaint literature. At any rate, Isaiah is given to understand the Lord's silence (his "inattentiveness") from the very beginning.
This last point might be elaborated briefly before returning to the content of verse 11. Isaiah has long been recognized--by authors of scripture as much as by scholars of scripture--as somehow different from other prophets. He is characterized with a sort of boldness, certainly an incredible complexity, an outstanding poetic ability, and a beligerently unapologetic style. Perhaps more self-conscious than any other prophet, he recognizes these traits in himself and on occasion comments on them. All of these details might be explained with reference to this chapter of Isaiah. Isaiah is given to understand before he prophesies that he will not often (if ever) be understood, that his writings are themselves only to be interpreted according to the tongue of angels (by the power of the Holy Ghost; cf. 2 Ne 32:3, 2 Ne 25:4). He recognizes in advance that the gift he offers all too often results only in closed eyes, shut ears, hard hearts: while the same might be said of the other prophets, only Isaiah seems reconciled to the fact. It seems, in the end, to be this little question-and-answer session that makes Isaiah the different prophet, the other among the prophets: he recognizes from the very start what his prophetic calling entails.
The question Isaiah asks the Lord, and the Lord's response in turn with it, confirms the above reading: Isaiah desires to know how long he is to work such an unfruitful task, and he is told that he must do it until men have been destroyed and scattered (the eyes, ears, and hearts of the people being, apparently, closed, shut, and hard). But more than the mere gloom of the end of such a task is in question here. Isaiah asks "until when?" and the Lord responds with a specific time, an event that lies on the horizon: Isaiah is given a very specific answer, and that answer (which spills over into verse 12) deserves close attention.
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