The Wisdom of God in Isaiah

by Olivia A. Blanchette, S.J.

Isaiah's message to eighth century Juda was in many respects like that of the other prophets before him who warned of the coming wrath of Yahweh. Like them he inveighed against social injustice and religious hypocrisy; like them he called the nation back from its pagan practices to singleness of heart toward the Lord. But in his message Isaiah also sounded a new note. Amos had called his people unjust. Hosea had termed them unfaithful. Now Isaiah accused them of ignorance and stupidity: "An ox knows its owner, and an ass, its master's manger; but Israel does not know, my people has not understood."¹ Isaiah proposed an ideal not only of justice and of fidelity, but also of wisdom and intelligence. With him faith in the Lord was to be the source of new wisdom. He wanted his people not only to obey, but also to understand. The two went together. "Unless you believe, you shall not understand"² —according to the Septuagint version which perhaps saw the prophet's more profound intention better than other translations.

By fostering this sense of wisdom and intelligence, the greatest of the eighth century prophets was broadening Israel's religious perspective and giving the people fuller understanding of its God. For Isaiah, Yahweh was not only a just God, nor only a loving God; He was also a God with a purpose and with a plan, a wise God as well as a just and loving one. Faith in the Lord had to include at least some appreciation of the Lord's planning. There was a divine purpose at work in the world, a purpose rooted in the loving care of Yahweh and conditioned on the response of men but nonetheless truly a purpose. There were two sides to this purpose: punishment for those who abandoned the way of the Lord, salvation for those who trusted in this way; and Israel should have perceived how this divine plan was being worked out. The Lord was punishing her, but still she did not turn from her ways. After having placed her trust in riches, she now placed it in alliances and not in Yahweh. Isaiah's mission was to call attention to the Lord's purpose and to exhort his people to have confidence in His power and wisdom: "For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: By waiting and by calm you shall be saved, in quiet and in trust your strength lies. But this you did not wish."³ Israel failed to conform to the divine plan; her lack of confidence in the Lord was for Isaiah unreasonable and stupid.

The theme of blindness, of drunken-spiritedness, of sheer unintelligence, recurred constantly in Isaiah's preaching. It formed an important part of his personal vision. Indeed, the perversion of intelligence among his people appears to have been a foretold part of his very mission:

Go and say to this people,
Listen carefully, but you shall not understand!
Look intently, but you shall know nothing!
You are to make the heart of this people sluggish,
to dull their ears and close their eyes;
Else their eyes will see, their ears hear, their heart understand,
and they will turn and be healed!⁴

The harshness of this oracle makes us wonder why Isaiah presented his mission in this seemingly shocking manner. Was it not his purpose precisely to make his people hearken and see and understand? Did he really proffer this oracle at the beginning of his career? Or is this only a reflection of the disillusioned reformer contemplating the net result of his preaching? Whatever can be said in answer to these questions, it does not seem that we can deal adequately with the passage unless we keep in mind Isaiah's ideal of wisdom and its correlative notion of stupidity; for he is alluding here to the ultimate blindness of those who would not heed his warning, their failure to perceive and understand God's plan. Perhaps an appreciation of Isaiah's use of the two themes, wisdom and stupidity, his manner of playing them one against the other, will take the shock out of this oracle.

Isaiah’s Complaint

"Therefore my people go into exile, because they do not understand,"⁵ he said early in his preaching. But he described this want of understanding as indifference to the work of the Lord. They "join house to house . . . connect field with field . . . with harp and lyre, timbrel and flute, they feast on wine; but what the Lord does, they regard not, the work of his hands they see not."⁶ Completely taken up with their own projects and their merrymaking, the Israelites failed to see what the Lord was doing in the world. In their waywardness they could still exclaim: "Let him make haste and speed his work, that we may see it; on with the plan of the Holy One of Israel! let it come to pass, that we may know it!"⁷ But they did not know what they were asking for. They were confusing the Lord's plan with their own, calling "evil good, and good evil," changing "darkness into light, and light into darkness"; they thought they were wise but "woe to those who are wise in their own sight, and prudent in their own esteem!"⁸

Wise and shrewd as they might have been in their greed, the Israelites were not so wise with regard to the things of the Lord. Yet, so thick were they in their own wisdom that they thought the day of the Holy One would bring no surprise for them. They wanted Him to speed His work that they might see and know it, thinking that it would correspond to their own designs, not suspecting that it would be the opposite of what they expected, that it would entail punishment for their infidelity.

This was stupidity for Isaiah. "Be irresolute, stupefied"; he proclaimed years later to the unbelieving Judeans; "blind yourselves and stay blind! Be drunk, but not from wine, stagger, but not from strong drink! For the Lord has poured out on you a spirit of deep sleep. He has shut your eyes [the prophets] and covered your heads [the seers]."⁹ The association of blindness with a sort of drunkenness suggests a nation stumbling aimlessly, but the prophet is careful to point out the reason for this stupor: the leaders of the nation, so-called prophets and seers, have lost their power to grasp the profound sense of events in the world. Of course, Isaiah does not number himself among those self-styled prophets. He is there to give the true vision and to read for those who will not or who cannot. For he points out:

For you revelation of all this has become like the words of a sealed scroll. When it is handed to one who can read, with the request, "Read this," he replies, "I cannot; it is sealed." When it is handed to one who cannot read, with the request, "Read this," he replies, "I cannot read."¹⁰

The false prophets and the priests "stagger from strong drink, overpowered by wine; led astray by strong drink, staggering in their visions, tottering when giving judgment."¹¹ Hence the spectacle of a people led astray by party-goers who prattle nonsense—the blind leading the blind.¹² The nation was as if drunk because the leaders were drunk; and Isaiah's use of the metaphor undoubtedly suggested itself from a sight he witnessed more than once.

The Plan Of The Lord

Underlying this depiction of blindness and confusion there is the supposition that something is there to be seen which the worldly-wise do not see—a line, an order, a design by which the nation can steady itself, Yahweh's own design for Israel. This is the prophet's constant point of reference. If it is not always in the forefront of his indictments, it comes through quite explicitly at certain times. After showing how the Lord empties out the spirit of the Egyptians within them and how He confounds their plans,¹³ Isaiah berates their leaders in these terms:

Utter fools are the princes of Saon!
the wisest of Pharao's advisers give stupid counsel.

How can you say to Pharao,
"I am a disciple of wise men, of ancient kings?"

Where then are your wise men?
Let them tell you and make known

What the Lord of hosts has planned against Egypt.

The princes of Saon have become fools;
the princes of Memphis have been deceived.

The chiefs of her tribes
have led Egypt astray.

The Lord has prepared among them
a spirit of dizziness,

And they have made Egypt stagger in whatever she does,
as a drunkard staggers in his vomit.¹⁴

This oracle on Egypt parallels Isaiah's descriptions of Israel in practically every line. The allusion to the Lord's plan is thus significant in that it gives us explicitly what the prophet has in mind when he charges his countrymen with blindness and stupidity. No matter how shrewd or perspicacious men may be in their planning, if they ignore the designs of the Lord they can only go astray, confused and staggering as a drunken man.

Man attains the height of stupidity when he begins to think he is self-sufficient, independent of the Lord. The arrogant king of Assyria could boast: "By my own power I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I am shrewd."¹⁵ But Isaiah knew that Assyria was only the rod of the Lord's anger against Israel and he could retort:

Will the axe boast against him who hews with it?
Will the saw exalt itself above him who wields it?

As if a rod could sway him who lifts it,
or a staff him who is not wood!¹⁶

Assyria was stepping beyond the bounds set by the Lord and He would destroy its glory. By vaunting his own wisdom and intelligence the Assyrian was setting himself up in opposition to Yahweh's purposes—as if a tool could operate apart from him who wields it. Isaiah's sarcasm leaves no room for the supposition that a human agency might remain outside the divine plan. The Lord's hand is "outstretched over all nations,"¹⁷ and before the Lord's plan man must either humble himself and make it his own or magnify himself and try to substitute his own plan for it. But, in the end, the Lord will not brook arrogance. The Jews themselves could try to act as if the Lord did not see them, but Isaiah warns them:

Your perversity is as though the potter
were taken to be the clay:

As though what is made should say of its maker:
"He made me not!"

Or the vessel should say of the potter,
"He does not understand."¹⁸

Implicit in the refusal to hearken to the law of the Lord is the denial of the Lord's wisdom in making man as he is and demanding conformity to the divine purposes, as well as assertion of another wisdom, a worldly wisdom that sets itself up in opposition to the Lord's and dares to scorn Him as unintelligent.

Wisdom And Stupidity

In this paroxysm of self-sufficiency, Isaiah's notion of wisdom and of stupidity becomes transparent. Intelligence is conformity to a purpose; stupidity is the absence of conformity to that same purpose. Thus Isaiah, who has embraced the purpose of the Lord, will mock the blindness and stupidity of those who ignore this purpose and follow their own; and those who follow a worldly purpose presume, at least implicitly, that the Lord himself is blind and without understanding. The latter "look intently" but they "know nothing" of God's hidden designs; they see only their own design for riches and security; they are wise in their own eyes but not in the eyes of those who follow the way of the Lord.

If the prophet could berate his people for their blindness and stupidity, it was only because the vision, which he possessed, was one of ordered purposefulness. There is a wisdom in the peasant who knows when to plow and when to sow, what to thresh and what to grind; this wisdom, however, is but a distant reflection of the divine wisdom which knows how to work the world to attain its purposes. The peasant's wisdom "comes from the Lord of hosts; wonderful is his counsel and great his wisdom."¹⁹ Even when the nation is in the throes of disaster, the Lord is still dealing with her according to His wisdom: "Yet he too is wise, and will bring disaster; he shall not turn from what he has threatened to do. He will rise up against the house of the wicked and against those who help evildoers."²⁰

Thus, when the nation paid no attention to the prophet's warning and placed her trust only in ramparts and in alliances, instead of falling back upon the saving hand of Yahweh, she was drawing ever further from the plan laid down by divine wisdom. Yahweh was calling her back to His way, but in her feverish preparations she "did not look to the city's Maker, nor . . . consider him who built it long ago."²¹

But in the end the Lord "will again deal with this people in surprising and wondrous fashion."²² Beyond the punishments, what wondrous things did He have in store for his people? How would he surprise them when He rose "to carry out his work, his singular work, to perform his deed, his strange deed?"²³

To begin with, the self-sufficiency of the worldly-wise would be demolished: "The wisdom of its wise men shall perish and the understanding of its prudent men be hid."²⁴ This kind of shrewdness will be exposed for what it really is and in its place true wisdom will blossom:

On that day the deaf shall hear
the words of a book;

And out of gloom and darkness
the eyes of the blind shall see.

The lowly will ever find joy in the Lord,
and the poor rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.

For the tyrant will be no more
and the arrogant shall have gone;

All who are alert to do evil will be cut off,
those whose mere word condemns a man,

Who ensnare his defender at the gate,
and leave the just man with an empty claim.²⁵

In the end, all this conniving will disappear and a new kind of intelligence will prevail. The poor and the oppressed will be raised from the darkness where they are kept by the wise of this world. No more will their teachers and their judges deceive them: "Those who err in spirit shall acquire understanding, and those who find fault shall receive instruction."²⁶

Fidelity To The Lord

After we have noted the theme of blindness and deafness in Isaiah, it becomes interesting to watch the occurrence of the opposite theme in his oracles about the day of the Lord: "Then will the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared."²⁷ Is the prophet here taking back or modifying something of the harshness we saw in an earlier oracle? Perhaps not, perhaps he is only presenting the other side of the judgment he came to announce. To the obdurate, to those who saw and heard the things of this world only, to the worldly-wise he could still promise ultimate blindness and deafness and lack of understanding from the heart. By his preaching he had made known the issues so that everyone could know on what side the shrewd ones of this world stood.

As Christ would later say of another group of self-styled wise men, "This is the judgment, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their works were evil."²⁸ To the faithful, however, to those who perhaps had neither eye nor ear for the things of this world but only for the things of the Lord, to those who hoped only in Him, the prophet promised final enlightenment in the name of the Lord to whom they clung in spite of their seeming blindness and stupidity: "The eyes of those who see will not be closed; the ears of those who hear will be attentive. The flighty will become wise and capable, and the stutterers will speak fluently and clearly."²⁹ The simple ones of this world will confound the wise by their wisdom and intelligence: "No more will the fool be called noble, nor the trickster be considered honorable."³⁰

The last of the three Emmanuel poems crystallizes this vision vividly in the person of One who shall possess this new wisdom and understanding:

But a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse,
and from his roots a bud shall blossom.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him:
a spirit of wisdom and of understanding,

A spirit of counsel and of strength,
a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord,
and his delight shall be the fear of the Lord.

Not by appearance shall he judge,
nor by hearsay shall he decide,

But he shall judge the poor with justice,
and decide aright for the land's afflicted.

He shall strike the ruthless with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked.

Justice shall be the band around his waist,
and faithfulness a belt upon his hips.³¹

The judges of Isaiah's world judged by what their greedy eyes saw and decided by what their conniving ears heard. But not so this new judge who will have the spirit of true wisdom and knowledge deriving from the fear of the Lord. He shall not be impressed by the proud and the mighty. He will judge righteously and with equity even the poor and the meek of the earth who may have nothing for the eyes to see, but who trust in the Lord. Then will peace reign over the world: "There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord, as water covers the sea."³² We see here the proof that the Septuagint was not misrepresenting the prophet when it said "Unless you believe, you shall not understand," for, in the mind of Isaiah, true knowledge of the Lord is the foundation of security: "Unless your faith is firm, you shall not be firm."³³

Isaiah's prophetic vision was not completely new. But into the vision of Amos and Hosea he did introduce a new dimension, a new light: "The Lord is exalted, enthroned on high," he wrote; "he fills Sion with right and justice [Amos' part of the vision]. That which makes her seasons lasting [Hosea's part], the riches that save her, are wisdom and knowledge [Isaiah's addition]."³⁴

What precisely led Isaiah to insist on this further aspect of salvation we can only conjecture. Was it a ferment of sapiential interests beginning to make itself felt in the higher classes of society of his day? Was it an intense desire to show that, even from the point of view of wisdom and intelligence, it was those who feared and served the Lord who were ultimately the more wise and intelligent? A new influence was making itself known in Israel's religious life because of closer contacts with Egypt and Assyria. The seer and the wise man were coming into their own. It would be a long time before they would replace the prophet in Israel, but perhaps it was the task of Isaiah to open the way for them in the religious growth of God's people, by excoriating the self-sufficient and false wisdom of earth-bound man and by proposing another kind of wisdom. At any rate, the new note Isaiah struck in the song of God's dealings with his people would resound time and again in the Psalms and in the sapiential writings until, in the fullness of time, it would ring through in all its clarity:

The foolish things of the world has God chosen to put to shame the "wise," and the weak things of the world has God chosen to put to shame the strong, and the base things of the world and the despised has God chosen, and the things that are not, to bring to naught the things that are; lest any flesh should pride itself before him. From him you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us God-given wisdom, and justice, and sanctification, and redemption. . .³⁵

Olivia A. Blanchette, S.J.

Notes

1 Isaiah 1:3. We are using the new Confraternity translation throughout.

2 Isaiah 7:9.

3 Isaiah 30:15.

4 Isaiah 6:9-10.

5 Isaiah 5:13.

6 Isaiah 5:8, 12.

7 Isaiah 5:19.

8 Isaiah 5:20-21.

9 Isaiah 29:9-10.

10 Isaiah 29:11-12.

11 Isaiah 28:7.

12 Cf. Isaiah 28:9-13.

13 Isaiah 19:3.

14 Isaiah 19:11-14.

15 Isaiah 10:13.

16 Isaiah 10:15.

17 Isaiah 14:26.

18 Isaiah 29:16.

19 Isaiah 28:29.

20 Isaiah 31:2.

21 Isaiah 22:11.

22 Isaiah 29:14.

23 Isaiah 28:21.

24 Isaiah 29:14.

25 Isaiah 29:18-21.

26 Isaiah 29:24.

27 Isaiah 35:5.

28 John 3:19.

29 Isaiah 32:3-4.

30 Isaiah 32:5.

31 Isaiah 11:1-5.

32 Isaiah 11:9.

33 Isaiah 7:9.

34 Isaiah 33:5-6.

35 1 Cor. 1:27-30.

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