Journal of Bible and Human Transformation

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation The Return from Exile and Second Isaiah: Hopeful Anticipation in the Diaspora Gregory Lee Cuéllar Gcuellar@a...
Author: Jasmin Wiggins
0 downloads 1 Views 318KB Size
Journal of Bible and Human Transformation The Return from Exile and Second Isaiah: Hopeful Anticipation in the Diaspora Gregory Lee Cuéllar [email protected]

Diaspora as a recurring social reality can be understood in terms of a spectrum, wherein its multiple connected points, from antiquity to present-day, tell a story of a specific-lived diasporic experience.1 Indeed, the constitutive force underlying the overwhelming majority of diasporic experiences is power. In writing about diasporic formations, ethnic and cultural studies scholar Juan Flores states the following:

1

I am grateful to the Center for Informed Faith, without whose support this essay could not have been completed.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 1 of 14

By power is meant, first and foremost, economic and political power, the sheer financial wherewithal and governmental—military might required to propel masses of people into geographical movement and then keep them far from their place of origin no matter how deeply they might miss it and hope to return.2 For Flores, the act of geographical displacement intrinsic to the more widespread diasporic experience is typically attributable to conditions of oppression and violence. When factoring in the dimension of empire, diaspora therein most commonly connotes subordination and marginalization rather than collective or individual empowerment.3 Viewing diaspora through the prism of empire also reveals a dynamic process, which in Flores’s words, starts not with the arrival of people to the host setting, but only when the group has begun to develop a consciousness about its new social location, a disposition toward its place of origin, as well as some relation to other sites within the full diasporic formation.4

Alongside a diaporic consciousness is the production of hybrid forms of expression that evoke a counter-narrative of displacement and assert a cultural memory. The generating force out of which such cultural production emerges is often socio-political conflict, life-struggle, and cultural resistance. Flowing through its various expressive forms is a response to empire. Fitting into this category is the lyrical poetry of Second Isaiah (40-55). Rooted in the circumstance of imperially imposed exile, this diasporic cultural production combines and

2

Juan Flores, The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 19. 3

Ibid., 18-19.

4

Ibid., 16.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 2 of 14

transforms traditional forms of speech to engender a diasporic Judean identity that is subversive and counter-hegemonic.5 As Mark G. Brett writes, These oracles are not so much imperialist as counter-imperialist: they imagine a social future which is in some sense shaped by the Babylonian empire but which rises up against it with hope and not with weapons.6 Through a fusion of literary types, Second Isaiah offers a counter-cultural response to the reality of empire and its oppressive impact on the lives of the subordinated Judean exiles.7 A matter of primary significance to the prophet-singer’s counter-message is the hope of return to the restored mother-city, Zion/Jerusalem (Is 49:14-26; Is 54). Constructed on the basis of poetic rhythms and hymnic melodies, Second Isaiah evokes images of an ancestral homeland that not only engender a sense of cultural belonging, but also pose a challenge to imperially sanctioned religious and cultural beliefs. 8

5 James

Muilenburg writes, “one of the effects of the decline and fall of Assyria and the social disintegration which followed was the transformation of literary form and expression.” “The Book of Isaiah: Chapters40-66,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, ed. George Arthur Buttrick, 12 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1956), 391; Roy F. Melugin, The Formation of Isaiah 40-55 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1976), 53; For a discussion of Aramaisms in Isaiah 40-66, See Thomas Kelly Cheyne, Introduction of the Book of Isaiah (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1895), 256-270. 6

John William Rogerson, Margaret Davies and M. Daniel Carroll R, The Bible in Ethics: the Second Sheffield Colloquium (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 158. 7

Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 95; Rolf Rendtorff, Robert A. Kugler, and Sarah Smith Bartel, The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 36; N.K. Gottwald, "Social Class and Ideology in Isaiah 40-55: An Eagletonian Reading," Semeia 59 (1992): 43-57; Walter Brueggemann, “Plannes People/Planned Book?” in Writing and Reading the Scroll of Isaiah: Studies of an Interpretive Tradition, ed. Craig C. Broyles and Craig A. Evans, Vol. 1 (Leiden, NY: Brill, 1997), 33-34; For discussion of a fusion of literary types and a combination of several forms to make a whole, See Muilenburg, “The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 40-66,” 385. 8

Norman K. Gottwald, The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983), 332-334.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 3 of 14

Using a postcolonial optic, this essay will examine the salient images of homeland in the lyrical poetry of Second Isaiah in order to foreground issues of empire and diasporic identity formation. Based on a postcolonial notion of hybridity, the following reading renders the mixed modes used to encode Second Isaiah’s message of homeland as a subversive rhetorical strategy, undermining the ideological claims of the Babylonian empire.9

The Social Text of Second Isaiah

Since the late nineteenth century, the general scholarly consensus views Isaiah 40-55 as largely the response of an anonymous prophet of the exile, who wrote in the late sixth century toward the end of the Babylonian empire.10 In José Severino Croatto’s words, Second Isaiah has an appropriate word to speak to the exiles. The Judahite’s country was dismantled, and their plundered wealth forcibly brought to the center of the Babylonian empire. The country was devastated by war: its economy ruined, its cities destroyed . . . . 9

Ella Shohat writes, “The foregrounding of “hybridity” and “syncretism” in postcolonial studies calls attention to the mutual imbrications of “central” and “peripheral” cultures. “Hybridity” and “syncretism” allow negotiation of the multiplicity of identities and subject positioning that result from displacement, immigration, and exile, without policing the borders of identity along essentialist and originary lines.” Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 244. Referencing Homi Bhabha, Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyma write, “Hybridity is a threat to colonial and cultural authority; it subverts the concept of pure origin or identity of the dominant authority through the ambivalence created by denial, unsettling, repetition, and displacement.” “Introduction: Hybridity Today,” in Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition (Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2007), 9. 10

Marvin A Sweeney, “On the Road to Duhm: Isaiah in Nineteenth-Century Critical Scholarship,” in “As Those Who are Taught” The Interpretation of Isaiah from the LXX to the SBL, eds. Claire Mathews McGinnis and Patricia K. Tull (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 243-51; Thomas Kelly Cheyne, The Book of Isaiah Chronologically Arranged: An Amended Version with Historical and Critical Introductions and Explanatory Notes (London: Macmillan, 1870), xxi-xxviii; 141-44; 277-83; Sir George Adam Smith, The Book of Isaiah: Isaiah XL-LXVI (New York: A.C. Armstrong, 1890), 7-10; Samuel Rolles Driver, Isaiah: His Life and Times and the Writings which Bear His Name (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1888),186-212; Eduard König, The Exiles' Book of Consolation Contained in Isaiah XLLXVI: A Critical and Exegetical Study (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1899), 83; Bernhard Duhm, Das Buch Jesaia (Gӧttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1892), 255-56.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 4 of 14

In this situation, to the exiles in Babylon and to the remnant in Judah, YHWH seemed to be a “defeated God.” 11 This rendering follows a similar line to Daniel L. Smith-Christopher’s assessment, where he describes the Babylonian exile as “being both a historical human disaster and a disaster that gave rise to a variety of social and religious responses with significant social and religious consequences.”12 Indeed, exile by military conquest (cf. Is 51: 12-23) or what Robin Cohen calls “victim disaspora” entails recognizing geographical, historical, socio-political, and psychological notions of human suffering and intergenerational trauma.13 As Cohen argues in his Global Diasporas, The destruction of Jerusalem and razing of the walls of its Temple in 586 BC created the central folk memory of the pessimistic, victim diaspora tradition—in particular the experience of enslavement, exile, and displacement.”14 For some Judean exiles or as Albertz’s describes “a variety of informal groups of theologians of every stripe,”15 their victimization found expression in a combination, if not a fusion, of lyrical and poetic innovations. Hence, as Adele Berlin has elsewhere observed, exilic productions like Second Isaiah constitute new poetic modes of expression, which in her words “arose from a new

11

J. Severino Croatto, “Isaiah 40-55,” in Global Bible Commentary, ed. Daniel Patte (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2004), 196. 12

6.

Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002),

13

Robin Cohen classifies several types of diasporic experiences: victim, labour and imperial, trade, homeland-oriented, and cultural. Cohen views the Jewish exilic experience as the quintessential example of victim diaspora. Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 18, 39. 14

Ibid., 22

15

Rainer Albertz, Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century B.C.E. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 139.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 5 of 14

historical situation and a new theological need.”16 The irreversible disaster of 586/7 BCE and the indelible sting of exile on the captured Judeans provoked what Albertz describes “an almost explosive flowering of theological literature during the exilic period.”17 The generic ingredients that went into exilic texts like Second Isaiah are indeed heterogeneous—sharing generic features common to the Mesopotamian city lament and pre-exilic literary genres.18 Rainer Albertz, by contrast, views Second Isaiah as the collective response of a circle of disciples. Convincingly, he argues that the anonymous prophet of the exile “should be pictured as the leader of a group that took collective responsibility for the good news and continued to set it down in writing even into the postexilic period.”19 He also posits that the fusion of psalmic and prophetic language may derive from the musical tradition of the temple singers, particularly those who expressed a

16 Adele

Berlin suggests that Second Isaiah appropriated the language of Lamentations, which is an innovation based on life in exile. As she writes, exile “provided a terminus ad quem for Lamintations. Lamentations: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 25, 34. 17 Albertz,

Israel in Exile, 139.

18

Ibid., 139-140; Sarah J. Dille, Mixing Metaphors: God as Mother and Father in Deutero-Isaiah (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 131-134; Berlin, Lamentations, 34; Carleen Mandolfo, Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 66-67; F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Roma: Editrice Pontificio Instituto Biblico, 1993), 113. I would argue that the exile necessitated the use of the genre subversively, responding to empire. Such a rhetorical strategy would have been unnecessary in the parochial situation of the Judean homeland. They possibly had contact with it, yet, did not see its usefulness until the exile, adapting it in a subversive way. J. van Seters, "In Babylonisn Exile with J: Between Judgement in Ezekiel and Salvation in Second Isaiah" in The Crisis of Israelite Religion: Transformation of Religious Tradition in Exilic and Post Exilic Times, eds. Bob Becking, Marjo Christina Annette Korpe (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 82. 19 Albertz,

Israel in Exile, 380.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 6 of 14

prophetic message through song (cf. 2 Chronicles 25:1). 20 Other features reflecting a fusion of temple liturgy include the Zion imagery in the book (40:2, 9-11; 41:27; 44:26, 28; 45:13; 46:13; 49:14ff; 51:17-19; 52:1-2; 54: 1-17). For James Muilenburg, the display of hybridized motifs and forms in Second Isaiah are the result of what he claims a poet-prophet, who “is the proclaimer of the Word of God as the other prophets were. But he transfigures the prophetic forms into great artistic compositions.”21 From a postcolonial perspective, however, hybridizing forms of expression by the poetprophet goes beyond just, as Muilenburg calls, “the poet’s Oriental mentality.”22 More appropriately, this is the result of a hybrid or fusion culture that the Judean exiles were forced to create in order to survive and thrive in the diaspora. 23 The climate of antagonism that grew out of the Babylonian invasion and subsequent displacement of many Judeans would be most conducive to the sort of anti-Babylonian message common in Second Isaiah (40-55) (cf.

20

For more discussion devoted to the nature of this prophesying, See D. L. Petersen, Late Israelite Prophecy (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), 67-87; John W. Kleinig, The Lord’s Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993), 154-57; W.M. Schniedewind, The Word of God in Transition: From Prophetic to Exegete in the Second Temple Period (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), 170-88; S. Japhet, I & II Chronicles (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 1993), 440-45. 21

Muilenburg, “The Book of Isaiah,” 386.

22

Ibid., 388

23 Also

evident in the Babylonian personal names carried by a number of prominent exiles, Shenazzar, Sheshbazzar, and Mordecai (1 Chr 3:18; Ezr 1:18; 2:2), whose names are compounded with the divine names Sin, Shamash (shash), and Marduk. Jeremy Hughes, Secrets of the Times: Myth and History in Biblical Chronology (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), 171; Among the Hebrew-Aramaic seals there is a Judean female exile mentioned on a 6thcentury (rcarvvwv tb [mvywhyl) ‘Belonging to Yehoyishma’ daughter of Šawaš-šar-ușur’. Avigad, Nahman, “Seals of Exiles” Israel Exploration Journal, 15 (1965): 228; Avigad dates the seal to ca 540 BCE. Šawaš-šar-ușur’ is a well-known Neo-Babylonian name. The son gave his daughter a Yahwistic name. Avigad suggests that the owner may be second generation exile. Hennie J. Marsman, Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social and Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 651.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 7 of 14

polemics against idolatry: Is 40: 18-26; 41:1-7; 41:21-29; 43:8-15; 44:6-20; 45:15-25; 46:1-13; 48:5, 14). In this message, the Babylonian empire is indicted for its oppressive treatment of the Judean exiles (cf. Is 47:6). 24 As described by the poet-prophet, the conditions of exile consist of robbery and plunder (Is 42:22), slavery (49:7; 52: 2-3), imperial power (49:7; 52:5), suffering (52:14; 53), and economic shortage (55:1). 25 Keying on the injustices perpetuated against the Judean exiles, Second Isaiah creates a counterfactual world wherein return to a restored homeland is not only possible but imminent.

Subverting the Empire with Images of Return The images of returning to a homeland in Second Isaiah are only meaningful to the extent in which they reflect upon the yearnings of the Judean exilic community. Hence, the poetprophets are focused not only on those individuals (i.e. Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and Israel) or events (i.e. creation, exodus, and exile) with a collective symbolic meaning but also on the restored motherland, Jerusalem/Zion (cf. Is 40:2; 49: 14-21; 51:3; 52:1-2; 53:8-9; 54:11-12). As social text, the images of return in Second Isaiah mark a subversive position that the Babylonian empire is not home. The poet-prophets not only articulate the collective experiences (cf. Is 41:11-12, 17-19; 42: 6-7; 51:13-14), beliefs (cf. Is 40:27; 46:5-7; 51:12-13; 55:2), and attitudes (cf. Is 46:12; 48:4) of the exilic community but also empower the exiles to act upon their shared cry for justice and liberation (cf. Is 40:1; 42:1-4; 45:17; 46:13; 51: 4-6). In channeling this 24

Croatto,“La propuesta querigmatica del Segundo Isaías,” Revista Bíblica 54 (1994): 66; Idem., Isaías: la palabra profética y su relectura hermenéutica, vol. 2: 40-55, La liberación es posible (Argentina: Lumen, 1994), 40-55, 20. 25

Ibid.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 8 of 14

collective voice, the poet-prophets lay out a credo, “The oppressed shall speedily be released; they shall not die and go down to the Pit, nor shall they lack bread” (Is 51:14). This counterclaim underpins the poet-prophets’ call to leave the empire, “Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea, declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it, send it forth to the end of the earth; say, “The Lord has redeemed his servant Jacob!” (Is 48:20; cf. 49:9 and 52:11). This subversive call to action, “Go out from” “flee from”, is based on the consensus that the empire is a “tyrant” (Is 49:24b), “who is bent on destruction” (Is 51:13c). The images of return grant the exilic community an alternative vision, dismantling the theological-ideological claims of the Babylonian empire. In Isaiah 40: 3-5, the images of return consist of refashioned desert-spaces and newly forged passageways that lead to Jerusalem/Zion. As it states in v 4, “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” The image of YHWH transfiguring the fickle terrain of the desert serves as a marker to the exilic community that the message conveys the views of an ancestral motherland and not of the present empire. While traversing the desert, YHWH promises to produce water and trees in places long deemed barren:26 I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together. (Is 41:18-19) These return images of transfigured desertscapes stem from Israel’s most distant past, a creation image. This is underscored in verse 20, as Croatto suggests, with the use of the verb “to create” 26

Croatto, Isaías, vol. 2, 52

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 9 of 14

— “the Holy One of Israel has created it.”27 Yet, at the same time, they position YHWH and not Marduk as the God who tames, refashions, contrives, and brings forth life from chaotic desertscapes (cf. 42:16; 43:19-20; 44:27; 48:21; 49:9b; 50:2b; 51:9-11).28 In Isaiah 55:12-13, YHWH transforms unpleasant brush into useful trees, enabling the people to return to Zion/Jerusalem: For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the LORD for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. In contrast to the exiles living in fear “continually all day long because of the fury of the oppressor” (Is 51:13b) is their future jubilant march out of the empire, wherein they are accompanied by a chorus of hills and mountains and applauding trees. In the end, YHWH prevails over the empire.

A Hybridized Exodus-Tradition Typical of Second Isaiah’s exilic style, the return imagery merges creation motifs with the exodus-wilderness tradition. The poet-prophets re-articulate the Exodus narrative in hymnic form, combining along the way hints of creation tradition. Isaiah 43: 16-17, for instance, contain hymnic style clauses that contain both exodus motifs and creation elements:29

27

Ibid., 42

28

Gregory Lee Cuellar, Voices of Marginality: Exile and Return in Second Isaiah 40-55 and the Mexican Immigrant Expereince (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 113. 29

Melugin, Formation of Isaiah 40-55, 111.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 10 of 14

Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters Who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick With boundless otherness, the poet-prophets subversively reach across a whole range of cultural forms in order to craft an image of return that meets the exiles’ contextual present. Indeed, they depend upon an informed audience to decode these images. With temple boundaries dissolved, prophetic texts like Second Isaiah found solace and relevance in an exilic style that embodied the hybrid-otherness of the exilic community. 30 This, in turn, allows for the exodus-narrative genre to be supplanted with a new diasporic-exodus genre: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people. The otherness of this passage is underscored with the phrase “do not remember the former things.” Although God’s “new thing” has elements of “things of old”, like “a way in the wilderness” and “rivers in the desert”, the emerging exodus-genre incorporates a zoological paradise, wherein the exiles drink water alongside tamed “jackals” and “ostriches”. The transgression of “the former things” (cf. Is 42:9) bespeaks the hybrid otherness of the poetprophets, which, in turn, renders possible a subversive image of return/liberation for an ambivalent exilic community (cf. Is 48:20-22; Is 52:11-12).

30

John Van Seters, “Solomon's Temple: Fact and Ideology in Biblical and Near Eastern Historiography,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 59 (1997): 233.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 11 of 14

The Feminization of Return Inscribed into the poet-prophets return imagery is the feminine trope of Mother Zion (cf. 51: 17-52:10; 54:1-17). In Isaiah 49:14, Mother Zion speaks to her husband YHWH about her abandonment, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.”31 Dille posits that this image of mother Zion “is rooted in the features of the city lament, in which the city has been abandoned and the feminine figure laments her loss of children and accuses the destroying god.”32 Yet, as is indicative of a diasporic text, the city lament genre is interwoven with language of salvation, disputation, and metaphor. 33 In verses 15-16, YHWH is imagined as both the husband of Zion and the mother of the exiles: Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me. This poetic display of mixed gender images does not take place in a pure and ideologically neutral setting. Much like the identity of the exiles, their cultural forms of lament, salvation/ disputation, and metaphor had to be adapted to the circumstances of empire and estrangement. As Paul Gilroy observes, these complex processes of adaptation and transformation bespeak the

31

Dille argues that the term Lord (ynwda) also conveys the meaning husband for Second Isaiah. Mixed Metaphors, 139. 32

Dille, Mixed Metaphors, 150.

33

Melugin, Formation of Isaiah 40-55, 149; Hanne Løland, Silent or Salient Gender? : The Interpretation of Gender God-Language in the Hebrew Bible, Exemplified in Isaiah 42, 46 and 49 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 175.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 12 of 14

syncretic qualities of diaspora culture.34 For Gilroy, diasporic identities are inclined to merge received and orthodox foundational-beliefs (i.e. YHWH-husband) with new and fertile promissory expressions (i.e. YHWH-mother). 35 For a population victimized by military conquest and forced expulsion, there is no tidily composed uniformed family or perfectly formed heterosexual pairings. Dille convincingly argues that, “it cannot be imagined that the events of 597 and 587 BCE were anything but disruptive to families, and many family members must have been separated.”36 Indeed, diaspora problematizes the sense of belonging, 37 which for Mother Zion is expressed thusly, “Then you will say in your heart, “Who has borne me these? I was bereaved and barren, exiled and put away—so who has reared these? I was left all alone—where then have these come from?” (Is 49:21) Like the text itself, the exiles returning to Mother Zion appear strange and unrecognizable (vv. 17-18). The return imagery in Is 49:14-26 embody a strangeness, wherein YHWH is husband/mother; children are born of a barren mother; and oppressors eat their own flesh. Yet, it is this strangeness that also marks Second Isaiah as a diasporic text. As mentioned above, the return images in this unit are not naïve inventions but have serious political implications. 38 Within their diasporic sphere of meaning is a response to the 34

Paul Gilroy, 'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 172. 35

Tim Edward Coles, Dallen J. Timothy, Tourism, Diasporas, and Space, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 36. 36

Dille, Mixed Metaphors, 145.

37

Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 123. 38

Croatto views Is 49: 20-21 as a counter response to the satirical depiction of Lady Babylon in Is 47. Isaias, vol 2, 205.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 13 of 14

empire, as stated in v 17, “your builders outdo your destroyers, and those who laid you waste go away from you.” With the return, the colonized dismantle the empire and decolonize Mother Zion. In v 25, YHWH, the mighty hero, acts upon the communal concerns of the exiles (v. 24), liberating them from the oppressive empire, “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken, and the prey of the tyrant be rescued.” Indeed, the heroic deeds of YHWH have a collectively symbolic dimension, wherein, in the end, the empire is forced to engage in self-cannibalism (v. 26): “I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own blood as with wine.”

Conclusion Using a postcolonial optic, the inscriptions of empire in Second Isaiah are the product of the political imagination of a community whose setting was cultural conflict and life struggle. Subverting the empire with images of return is not merely a personal project of the poet-prophets but a communal affair. By actualizing all of the possibilities and strategies of a diasporic counterrhetoric, Second Isaiah imagines for the community a restored motherland and a dismantled empire. Yet, as Croatto would argue, empire is first and foremost a social, economic, political, and ideological reality, which, in turn, also allows its inscription in Second Isaiah to maintain “a profound equivalence with the person reading from the place of the oppressed.”39

39

Croatto, Isaias, vol 2, 13.

Journal of Bible and Human Transformation ©Sopher Press (contact [email protected])

Volume 4, Issue 1 (October 2014) Page 14 of 14