Month: April 2021

Week 17 Isaiah

I don’t know how many names there are in the OT. Enough that it’s a relief to see a familiar one.
So when Isaiah mentions Rahab a Name Recognition light switches on in my head – the Jericho-ite woman who helped the spies!
But the light’s only on for a second because Isaiah isn’t talking about Rahab of Jericho. Isaiah is advising Israel to steer-clear of dumb alliances – with Egypt in particular: Egypt’s help is vain and empty. Therefore I called her Rahab.
Egypt is called Rahab? I check what another version says about Egypt. Their help: is utterly useless. Therefore I call her Rahab the Do-Nothing.
I check another version: Egypt’s promises are worthless! I call her the Harmless Dragon (the footnote says: Rahab is the name of a mythical sea-monster that represents chaos in ancient literature).
So Rahab is a name used for Egypt. And/or a Sea Monster.
I look at a word book and see that Jericho-Rahab is named five times in Joshua. Then another Rahab is used six times in the OT – twice each in Job Psalms & Isaiah. They all use Rahab to refer to either Egypt or a Sea Monster.
I guess it’s possible that in the original language that Isaiah was using Rahab (Jericho) and Rahab (Egypt/Sea Monster) were two different words. But in English they’re not. So it’s a little detail to keep in mind.

Note: quote from Isaiah 30:7 (NASB NIV & NLT)

Week 17 Isaiah

Today a man named Cyrus showed up for the first time in my reading this year.
Isaiah said: he (Cyrus) will command that Jerusalem be rebuilt and that the Temple be restored.
Isaiah’s audience would have been wondering a) who Cyrus was and b) why he would want to rebuild structurally intact buildings.
I checked a word book. Cyrus’ name appears in the bible for the first time in the last paragraph of 2 Chronicles (when I turned the page I saw that Ezra mentions Cyrus too).
I think back…
Near the end of Isaiah’s life the Assyrian empire (unsuccessfully) threatened to demolish Jerusalem.
Many years after Isaiah died the Babylonian empire did demolish Jerusalem and the temple.
About seventy years later the Persian empire demolished Babylon.
So then Cyrus the Persian let Jewish exiles return and rebuild demolished Jerusalem.
So Isaiah made a very specific hard-to-believe forecast about the distant future.
It would be like me saying that in 2203 a man named Joe will recapture the territory that southern Alberta lost to Montana and that Joe will re-establish Medicine Hat as the capital of Western Canada. Something like that.
I guess one way of managing Isaiah’s incredible prediction would be to say that some guy who was a contemporary of Cyrus fraudulently wrote up Cyrus’ edict as a forecasted event and pre-dated it back to Isaiah’s time.
Another way would be to accept Isaiah’s startling prediction.

Note: quote from Isaiah 44:28 (NLT)

Week 17 Isaiah

The Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem.
As the story unfolds it becomes more clear that the Assyrians were working with an information constraint.
They were chalking up their battlefield successes to their own military superiority – fierce destructive incontestable empire-builders. But Isaiah was trying to qualify that view – to explain its limitations. He quotes the Lord: have you not heard? It was I, the Lord, who decided this long ago. Long ago I planned what I am now causing to happen, that you (Assyria) should crush fortified cities into heaps of rubble.
So it wasn’t that the Lord was caught off-guard when he suddenly saw the Assyrian juggernaut, realized what was about to happen and had to zoom in on a rescue mission. Isaiah said the reality was that the Lord had designed that event – and all the million other events leading up to it – a long time before.
How long before? For all I know the Lord could just as easily have told David or Samuel or Moses or Abraham or Noah. The Jerusalem attack, the whole Assyrian Imperial Program was a small detail in a big design made long ago.
Of course the Assyrians didn’t care much about God. They were small-plan guys – focussed on their own interests agendas and cultural predispositions. But while they were hammering out their own preferred national business plan they were doing exactly what the Lord had designed for them to do.

Note: quote from Isaiah 37:26 (NLT).

Week 17 Isaiah

Halfway through his book Isaiah launches into the story of the Assyrian threat against Jerusalem.
The Assyrians began with a bit of Bronze Age psychological warfare – a long public address telling Judah why they should surrender. The Rabshakeh offered several reasons-to-give-up. His last one was: don’t let Hezekiah mislead you by saying ‘the Lord will rescue us!’ Have the gods of any other nations ever saved their people from the king of Assyria? What happened to the gods of Hamath and Arpad? And what about the gods of Sepharvaim?…What god of any nation has ever been able to save its people from my power? Name just one!
His argument was…
a) states depend on their gods for protection
b) Assyria had conquered every state
c) Assyria had therefore bested the local gods, and
d) the Jerusalem-god would fail too.
If he had quit after point (c) the Rabshakeh would have been on safe historical ground. But he went on to predict that what happened before would happen again.
Hezekiah thought it was a convincing speech. He was petrified.
Isaiah was less impressed. He told Hezekiah: do not be disturbed by this blasphemous speech against me (i.e. against the Lord).
The big difference between Hezekiah and Isaiah was that Hezekiah was worried that something that wasn’t necessarily true was. By contrast Isaiah stood outside propaganda’s borders. Out where you don’t get to call a lie the truth.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 36:18-20 & 37:6 (NLT)

Week 17 Isaiah

“Though the Lord is very great and lives in heaven, he will make Jerusalem his home of justice and righteousness. In that day he will be your sure foundation, providing a rich store of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge” – those are Isaiah’s words and then he says that residents of Zion are people:
Who are honest and fair
Who reject making a profit by fraud
Who stay far away from bribes
Who refuse to listen to those who plot murder
Who shut their eyes to all enticements to do wrong.
These people sound like contestants for the Citizen of the Year Award – honest upstanding law-abiding people.
But there’s a key difference between garden-variety good citizens in – let’s say – Medicine Hat and good citizens in Zion. Isaiah says that Zion’s a place of good citizens and it’s also: a place of worship and celebration…(where) the Lord is our judge, our lawgiver, and our king.
So Isaiah distinguishes between normal Good Citizens and Zion-quality Good Citizens. The first are good citizens who are good citizens because (a) being a good citizen is good, and (b) being a good citizen is preferable to being a bad citizen. The second are good citizens who are good citizens because (a) being a good citizen is good, (b) being a good citizen is preferable to being a bad citizen, and (c) the Lord is their judge, their lawgiver, and their king.
Almost the same but different.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 33:5-6, 15 & 20-22 (NLT).

Week 16 Isaiah

Isaiah prophesied during the reigns of four kings of Judah – Uzziah Jotham Ahaz and Hezekiah – so he spent a lot of his book talking to or about the reigns of those four.
But there’s a section of the book – taking up maybe 14% of the total – where Isaiah makes prophecies about other states in the region: Babylon Assyria Philistia Moab Damascus Ethiopia Egypt Edom Arabia & Tyre. Eleven chapters of international predictions.
When I started reading chapter nineteen I wasn’t too surprised to see that a lot of gloom-and-doom things would be showing up on Egypt’s horizon: fear civil-war confusion military-conquest economic-collapse delusion helplessness oppression.
But then I was surprised: in that day the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians…The Lord will strike Egypt in a way that will bring healing. For the Egyptians will turn to the Lord, and he will listen to their pleas and heal them.
I wondered when that would happen. Egypt was the traditional enemy of Israel and lots of times in the OT Egypt is code for Bad-Guys. But Isaiah predicted that at some future time the Lord would embrace Egypt.
Reading-through the OT I routinely get a strong sense of Israel-centrism. So this forecast about Egypt turning to the Lord is a nice example of inclusion in what usually seems like an exclusive text.

Note: quote from Isaiah 19:21-22 (NLT)

Week 16 Psalm 101

My main goal in reading-through is to read all 1189 chapters of the bible by the end of the year. That doesn’t mean my main goal is my only goal. Secondary goals are legitimate. And one secondary goal is the pretty personal one of ferreting-out guidelines that help me understand myself and live my life. [Obviously an easier way to understand myself and live my life would be to just absorb the standard 21st-century southern-Alberta cultural norms for self-understanding and life-living. But the one downside there is that I’d have to assume our contemporary Alberta standards are definitive.]
Anyway I was reading Psalm 101. I saw that David had listed about fifteen Intentionality Goals. A few of them sounded like guidelines for political rulers – not so interesting for me. But others sound like guidelines for anyone looking for pretty practical directions for self-understanding and life-living.
I will be careful to live a blameless life
I will lead a life of integrity in my own home
I will refuse to look at anything vile and vulgar
I will reject perverse ideas
I will not tolerate people who slander their neighbors
I will not endure conceit and pride
When I look at the list I don’t exactly feel giddy with excitement – even though I am looking for reliable pointers for living my life. But I don’t guess the writer was writing to promote my happy feelings. And maybe happy’s not a necessary requirement for life-living.

Note: quotes from Psalm 101:2-5 (NLT)

Week 16 Isaiah

Adjectives are a big help when you’re reading through.
I got this reminder in chapter ten when Isaiah tells Israel that they’re going to get clobbered by Assyria!
Isaiah says: the Lord, the Lord Almighty, has already decided to consume (Israel) (another version says destroy). So the Lord had decided to destroy Israel and that plan would happen soon enough. It’s an unhappy forecast and Isaiah’s graphic death-and-destruction language make a lot of his prophesies hard to digest.
I know what the word destroy means and on the surface I tend to dislike what the Lord plans to do here. So that’s why it’s a bit of a relief that verse twenty-two tips me off that destruction isn’t just anything I think or want it to be.
Isaiah says the destruction he’s talking about here is a fairly specific class of destruction. He calls it destruction that’s: overflowing with righteousness.
So…righteous destruction – a helpful adjective for a word that needs help. I’m not left with figure-it-out-for-yourself destruction. Isaiah says that the Lord’s destructive capacity isn’t just a free-wheeling random destructiveness. It’s not wanton unthinking casual aimless remorseless mindless angry unreflective detached destructiveness. It’s a pretty specific kind of destruction.
Of the different categories of destruction in the world this one is in the righteous class of destructions. Good and necessary destruction.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 10:23, 22 (NLT & NASB)

Week 16 2 Kings

I finished reading Kings yesterday which means I’ve spent about five weeks in the Samuels and the Kings.
The stories were good right up until the end of the Elisha section. Then the last fifteen chapters of 2 Kings bogged me down a bit. It’s the account of the two kingdoms told in parallel – first the one king and then the other, back-and-forth, interweaving the events, giving barebones data about when the king came to power, his age, length of reign, some character description, his death and burial.
For some reason the thought of starting in on Chronicles today seemed too weighty so I’ve decided not to keep reading in bible order.
[I’m telling myself I just want a bit of a change. The reason why I want a bit of a change might be something worth asking but I’m not asking it. The main thing is that I’m going to keep reading. Which book is less of a concern.]
Anyway I’ve decided to jump to Isaiah. I most likely chose Isaiah because near the end of 2 Kings his name showed up a few times. He fits right into the 2 Kings timeline. His story coincides with four kings of Judah – Uzziah Jotham Ahaz & Hezekiah.
So today I started reading Isaiah. If I read three chapters-a-day I’ll be reading Isaiah until May 10 – about three weeks. So I’ll try to speed up a bit and finish by May 1.

Week 16 2 Kings

There’s a nice bible-reader’s story near the end of the book.
It’s about Josiah – one of Judah’s best kings and a bit like David. When he was a young king he started to renovate the temple. During that clean-up a priest found the Book of the Law. [It’s pretty hard to imagine how it got lost in the first place since it was supposed to be the foundational text of the Jewish religion.]
Anyway a scribe read the book to the king and: when (Josiah) heard what was written in the Book of the Law, he tore his clothes in despair – which meant he was upset fearful distraught anxious disconcerted and like that. It was obvious that contemporary religious practices didn’t line up with the Book and Josiah concluded: the Lord’s anger is burning against us because our ancestors have not obeyed the words in this scroll.
So he adopted the Book of the Law as his new Procedures Manual. He did two things: a) he got rid of religious practices not prescribed in the book, and b) he reinstituted things that were in it. Josiah’s religious revamp was summed up this way: he did this in obedience to all the laws written in the scrolls that Hilkiah the priest had found in the Lord’s temple.
Josiah reminded me that the Book is best used as an Assessment Evaluation & Operations Guide.
Otherwise it’s basically just a lost book.

Note: quotes from 2 Kings 22: 11, 13 & 23:24 (NLT)