Isaiah 3

The Book of Isaiah tells the story of the beginning of the end of ancient Israel. It is set between 742-688 BC, when the Assyrians conquered the northern Jewish kingdom and came this close to destroying the Jewish people entirely. Things went from bad to worse over the next century. The Babylonians finished the job in 597 BC, conquering the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah, and deporting the survivors to their homeland in modern-day Iraq.

Those defeats represented an existential threat to the Jewish belief system. Warfare in the ancient Middle East was seen as a proxy for spiritual battle. Each tribe was fighting for its gods so a god who could not help his people win a war was one who could hardly be worthy of worship. If the Jewish people were fighting on behalf of the almighty Creator of the universe, why were they being defeated and killed by pagans?

Isaiah gave them an answer, one that went back to the founding texts of their religion. God was punishing them:

Jerusalem staggers, Judah is falling; their words and deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence. The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it. Woe to them! They have brought disaster upon themselves.

- Isaiah 3:8-9 

In Isaiah’s telling, Jewish society had not lived up to its principles. The issue wasn’t outward belief. Judah was still nominally religious. The massive temple in the heart of Jerusalem was at the heart of their cultural and political life. Jews living abroad still made pilgrimages home, and priests still made daily and annual sacrifices for the sins of the people.

The issue was that few actually believed any of it. Their customs were more about tradition than any real desire to follow and serve God. They followed the letter of the law but not the spirit of it.

The proof was in the way Jewish society functioned:

The Lord takes his place in court; he rises to judge the people. The Lord enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people: “It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?”

- Isaiah 3:13-15 

Isaiah began preaching after the death of Uzziah, whose reign (782-743 BC) was a time of widespread and prosperity. A lot of money came into Jewish society, and that money corrupted the people at the top. The rich got richer and grew more powerful to the point where they were no longer accountable to everyone else. It probably didn’t look too different from modern-day America. When Isaiah curses those “who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left” (5:8) and declares that “the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants” (5:10), he sounds like Bernie Sanders.

Judah, instead of being different than its pagan neighbors, was as unjust and corrupt as everyone around them. Even worse, Jewish society was supposed to be a reflection of the character of God. They were using His name to justify the way they mistreated the less fortunate and crushed the poor under their feet. He could not allow that to continue. The answer for why their armies were being crushed despite fighting for God is that they weren't actually fighting for Him. They were fighting for themselves.

When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood!

Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.

- Isaiah 1:15-17

Isaiah, like the other Old Testament prophets, warned his people about what would happen if they didn’t repent and change their ways. The relationship between God and His people wasn’t a one-way street. It was a covenant. God had promised them that He would help them defeat their enemies and establish their own kingdom -- but the price of that help was obedience. The same power that had lifted them up could just as easily bring them down.

Isaiah wasn’t saying anything that Moses hadn’t said hundreds of years before as the Jews were leaving Egypt:

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed.

-- Deuteronomy 30:15-18

For Isaiah, the Assyrian army marching towards Jerusalem was the representation of the warnings that Moses had given so many years ago. The Jewish people had stopped listening to God. Now they were getting a harsh lesson in the consequences.

These types of lessons are uncomfortable. The God of the Old Testament didn’t turn the other cheek. He was a God of blood and iron who marshaled armies and fought wars to the death. A lot of Christians over the years have tried to separate the actions of God in the Old Testament with the more peaceful teachings of Jesus. Marcion, an early heretic who lived between 85-160 AD, formalized the distinction, creating an edited Bible that wrote most of the Old Testament out of the picture.

The origin story of the Jewish people is fairly problematic. God had promised them a land of their own even though there were already a lot of people living there. The solution was simple, if not exactly appealing to modern sensibilities: God told the Jews to drive those inhabitants out of their land. Driving people out of their land is a harsh and ugly business. Another word for it is ethnic cleansing.

For many Americans, the founding of ancient Israel is an ugly reminder of the founding of our own country. You aren’t going to find many people these days who will defend the Trail of Tears. And they want nothing to do with a God who would tell people to kill their neighbors in His name.

The reality is more complicated. While Americans may be ashamed of what our ancestors did to the Indians, there is plenty of violence and bloodshed from our history that we can still get behind.

Look at William Sherman’s March to the Sea, which many historians believe was the beginning of the modern concept of “total warfare”. Sherman conquered and destroyed Atlanta, the economic center of the Confederacy, in 1864. From there, he marched his army almost 300 miles to the Atlantic Ocean port of Savannah, destroying everything in its path. The goal was to end the Civil War by teaching the South a harsh lesson in the consequences of rebellion. The days of the North treating them like gentlemen were over. The gloves were coming off.

“We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hand of war.”

- William Sherman 

Innocent people die all the time in war, even when the military is doing everything in its power to save lives. It can get really ugly really fast when those same troops believe they are punishing guilty people.

 
The problem is that collective punishment means punishing individual people who were completely innocent of the crimes of their countrymen. The South was fighting a war for slavery, but every person in the South wasn't a slave owner. Did some poor 10-year old boy in rural Georgia deserve to die because of the decisions of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee? War always comes with ugly consequences. Yet the vast majority of Americans would agree that the deaths of the people who stood in the way of Sherman’s March to the Sea were for the greater good.

The firebombing of Dresden in World War II is another example. Dresden was a major German city that the Allied armies burned to the ground in 1945. Over the course of a few days, more than 1,000 U.S. and British bombers dropped more than 2,000 tons of incendiaries on Dresden. The destruction was so total that there is no real way to estimate the dead. Historians have pegged the number at somewhere between 25,000-135,000.

The bombing was immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war in Dresden, wrote about what he saw in the aftermath:

Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire-storm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. 

It's hard to believe that all of those people deserved to die for the crimes of Adolf Hitler. Yet few modern Americans would call World War II, and all that we had to do to win such a titanic conflict, unjust.

The same logic applies in the days of the Old Testament. The Canaanites whom the Jews drove out of the Promised Land didn’t have clean hands. Their most shocking crime was the worship of Molech, a bull-shaped idol with a massive furnace in its chest. They placed their own children in its hands and burned them alive in order to gain the favor of their god.

This was not just propaganda. Historians have found a lot of extra-Biblical evidence for the worship of Molech:

Oxford Professor John Day wrote that “We have independent evidence that child sacrifice was practiced in the Canaanite (Carthaginian and Phoenician) world from many classical sources, Punic inscriptions and archaeological evidence, as well as Egyptian depictions of the ritual occurring in Syria-Palestine, and from a recently discovered Phoenician inscription in Turkey.”

If they were willing to do that to their own kids to earn the favor of Molech, imagine what they were doing to people who weren’t related to them!

It wasn’t that God gave the Jews land of their own because he didn’t care about the people already living there. They were an instrument that He was using to punish the Canaanites for their crimes.

The same thing was happening again hundreds of years later, except the shoe was on the other foot. Now it was the Jews who had sinned against God, forcing him to raise up another people (the Assyrians) to strip them of their land. The God of the Old Testament was harsh, but He was also fair.

The most important thing for modern readers to remember is that there is a massive difference between the way God acted in BC and the way that He acts in AD. Something vitally important happened in between that split human history in half, changing not only the way that God related to His people, but all of mankind. Over the course of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet reveals how that process will occur.