Saturday, January 18, 2014

Book of Isaiah 31-66

Isaiah 34 includes the phrase "day of vengeance" (the first of two such instances).  This comment has nothing particularly biblical to say, unless the comic book people were inspired biblically, but there was a min-series called Day of Vengeance about six years back.  It features the so-called Spirit of Vengeance otherwise known as the Spectre, who is said to be God's agent of wrath.  When tethered to a human, he can be fairly rational.  However, in such instances as Day of Vengeance, he can get a little smite-happy.  Spectre was used very overtly in a religious sense in another comic, Kingdom Come.  Comics have more of a religious connection than you might think.  As reflected in the popular and critically acclaimed Michael Chabon book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were a pair of Jewish boys (Superman, it may be said, is often seen as an allegory for Moses).

This chapter also includes the phrase, "none shall pass," which is also a line uttered by Sheldon Cooper in an episode of The Big Bang Theory.  Sheldon's use might be said to be an homage to Gandalf uttering, "You shall not pass!" in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Gandalf, it might be said, is a Jesus figure, although a little less blatantly than Aslan).

36 and 37 recap Hezekiah versus the threat of the Assyrians.  Surprisingly that happens.  Most of Isaiah is extrapolations of bad things coming to the Jews, and also some hopeful messages, and of course as far as Christians are concerned prophetic talk about the upcoming messiah that turns out to be Jesus, as well as some apocalyptic language that is later echoed in other such writings, including Revelation.  But there's also some straight narrative in there.

37 also includes "the people of Eden, who were in Telassar," though not apparently a reference in anyway to the Eden of Genesis.  It's just interesting to see Eden pop up as a name again.

39 makes it explicit, as I'd interpreted previously, that Hezekiah showing the Babylonians Judah's goods was all but an invitation to begin the latest and most famous (because of all the prophets) captivity era.  Book of Isaiah, by the way, is not nearly as keen on Hezekiah as Sirach apparently is.

40: "A voice cries: 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.'"  This is something John the Baptist later evokes.

53 is the last of the classic prophetic passages concerning Isaiah's suffering servant, such as the line, "He was despised and rejected by men," which evokes Jesus's execution and the events surrounding it.

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