Russian Icon of Isaiah, 17th C.
In case you’re wondering where I’ve been (all ten of you who read this), two weeks ago I broke my leg and had surgery, and was in the hospital for 6 days.
Since coming home I’ve had a lot of opportunity to read our next work, the Book of Isaiah. I’ve read it three times, and read lots of commentary online. It’s hard going, because I’m trying not to have a flip response to it, e.g., “Well, that was weird,”.
I’m also trying not to be content to just summarize it. There are real summaries available by actual scholars who can read the ancient Hebrew and who have deeper contextual understanding of where and how this book was written.
They can describe differences in rhetoric between proto-Isaiah and deutero-Isaiah (and trito-Isaiah, of course: most reputable scholars agree that three authors wrote the thing). I can’t do that. I’m trying to learn a little bit about that, of course, but I’m also trying to relate to it as a general reader. And it’s tough.
Michelangelo's Isaiah, Sistine Chapel, 1509
I think it’s just that prophecy is so alien to me, probably to many Westerners like me. Like a lot of people, I have prior knowledge of this book (my religious upbringing aside). If there were a “Greatest Hits of The Bible” compilation, Isaiah would be way up there. Isaiah is the book that foretells, among other things, the coming of the Messiah. St. Matthew actually quotes it in his Gospel later to prove Christ’s divinity. And I understand the purpose of that: people want answers. They want certainty. They want to know what’s going to happen next.
This was driven home to me by a book I was re-reading concurrently with Isaiah (I don’t sleep well when I can’t exercise; I’ve been revisiting a lot of books): Under The Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer. It describes a 1984 murder case committed by some religious fundamentalists who believed they were acting on God’s orders. They happened to be Mormon, and so Krakauer also gives descriptions of the history and origins of Mormonism.
The angel Moroni gives Joseph Smith the golden plates containing the Book of Mormon. Edward Stevenson, 1893.
If you don’t know, the Latter-Day Saints believe that Joseph Smith, their founder, received an additional Biblical testament from divine agents of God. This testament– much of it prophecy– is the Book of Mormon, and the pivotal event of the book is a visit by Jesus Christ to North America following his resurrection.
The accounts given of how this book was revealed to Joseph Smith are fascinating to me. I don’t personally believe that an angel came down and gave him engraved golden plates. I think he just said that because he needed to justify the testament he dictated as supernaturally miraculous, rather than the more ordinary miracle of a human soul burning to say something, and doing so in writing.
He felt that he had been given answers somehow (or, if you are less forgiving towards him, he felt he had a good con going). He needed to share the answers. And enough people wanted to believe his answers badly enough that they followed Joseph, and then his successors, to the ends of the earth.
That rock-solid certainty, or the deep, gnawing hunger for it, that underlies the dissemination and consumption of prophecy is what seems so strange to me. The Universe is vast. We can never understand it (though it is glorious to try). We can never predict what will happen tomorrow, much less determine whether or not there is an Afterlife, or who gets into what club once there.
I think I can live with that.
