And why I love them.

What is it about the Book of Isaiah? You may be saying, “Nolan, I’ve never even heard of the book of Isaiah.” Or you may be saying, “I didn’t know there was anything about the Book of Isaiah.”

I’m here to tell you, there is something to this book. Don’t take my word for it. Have a listen to Max Romeo, alongside 14:12: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” And against 59:17: “For he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation upon his head; and he put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and was clad with zeal as a cloke.”

Or read Ginsberg’s “Howl” and compare Ginsberg’s hellish poetry to the hellish poetry of Isaiah: “Howl ye; for the day of the Lord is at hand.” (12:6). I didn’t count, but “Howl” appears in Isaiah at least a dozen times. Or take Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which alludes to Isaiah 21:9, where the riders are approaching a city with the message that Babylon has fallen. (And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.)

The nation of Babylon conquered Judah in 586 BC and took many of the Jews into slavery for a few hundred years, until the 300s BC: most of Isaiah is concerned with the impending, ongoing, or recently ended Babylonian captivity. It’s pretty easy to guess that both Bob Dylan and Ginsberg are drawing parallels between America and Babylon.

In Melville’s King James Bible, the following verse from Isaiah was underlined and annotated: “In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (27:1). He probably made this annotation around the time he was drafting Moby Dick.

Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman takes its title from Isaiah 21. And certainly you recognize this iconic verse from Isaiah 2:4: “And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

But I’m not here to talk about the artistic wellspring of Isaiah. Instead, I want to talk, and rank, the weirdest verses in the book. In some of the verses below, there is fiery, disturbing, muscular poetry. But also, the manifold weirdnesses of the KJV translators and the Hebrew writers are on full display, and that is the criterion by which I ranked the following eleven verses. Yes, I gave you a bonus verse.

#11: And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city (1:8). This gets a spot on the list because of one word: cucumbers. Also because I don’t know what this prediction is supposed to metaphorically mean. Isaiah seems to use “daughter” regularly throughout the book to refer to the whole population and the land itself, and also to highlight the vulnerability of Israel and Judah in the midst of other powerful nations: Egypt, Assyria, Babylon. Israel and Judah sat on a very desirable trade route between nations on the Tigris and Euphrates, and Egypt on the Nile. I’m not sure if this verse fits into Isaiah’s regular pattern of characterizing Israel and Judah with disturbing, misogynistic imagery, but I do wonder: is the cucumber suggesting penises?

#10: The Lord hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof: and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit (19:14). When Isaiah isn’t comparing Israel or the surrounding nations to young women in danger of sexual violence, he is comparing them to drunks. Isaiah also never does things halfway. Egypt is not just drunk: he is staggering(eth) in his vomit. Milan Kundera, in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, defines kitsch as any art that ignores the presence of shit, whether literal or metaphorical. One thing I will say for most of the Bible is, it is not kitsch. The shit is everywhere.

#9: The burden of the beasts of the south: into the land of trouble and anguish, from whence come the young and old lion, the viper and the fiery flying serpent, they will carry their riches upon the shoulders of young asses, and their treasures upon the bunches of camels, to a people that shall not profit them (30:6). See number 8.

#8: But wild beast of the desert shall dwell there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there (13:21). See number 2. Furthermore note the writers’ willingness to repeat words and phrases for a sonorous effect.

#7: Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, and my inward parts for Kir-haresh (16:11). Isaiah is predicting God’s destruction of Israel’s neighbors. Apparently this makes the prophet flatulent.

#6: And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den (11:8). You may be familiar with Revelation’s verses about the lion lying down with the lamb. Like most of Revelation, that imagery is borrowed. In Isaiah 11, we get a string of predator and prey animals cooperatively living as vegetarians. But this picture of children playing on top of snake’s dens is perversely funny to me. Also the growth from sucking to weaned suggests that a child has to graduate from playing on the asp’s hole to putting his hand on the cockatrice den. Just bizarre. In fact, this should be higher on the list.

#5: Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. (6:2-7). This is weird and hallucinatory, but mostly I love the strangeness, the fear of the prophet in this moment, and the thematic imagery of this live coal from God’s altar sanctifying Isaiah’s unclean lips through fire. Although he might need another coal after he gets done delivering these dirty messages.

#4: The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again (24:20). See number 10. This gets placed higher on the list because now the whole earth is drunk.

#3: For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean (28:8). Just nasty. Where is that hot coal, God? Isaiah needs another treatment.

#2: For my sword shall be bathed in heaven: behold, it shall come down upon Idumea, and upon the people of my curse, to judgment. The sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made fat with fatness, and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams: for the Lord hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Idumea. And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness (34:5-7). Apart from the horror of the above verses, I would like to call your attention to the word “unicorn.” The Hebrew writers were likely referring to an aurochs, a now extinct ancestor of domestic cattle. But I respect the KJV translators willingness to put in a fictional animal. I read one person’s comment online about disliking the KJV because it includes fantastic beasts. The person said something like, “I couldn’t take the King James Bible seriously when it started talking about unicorns.” I can’t help but thinking, “Dude, it was the unicorns that bothered you?

#1: But Rabshakeh said, Hath my master sent me to thy master and to thee to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men that sit upon the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you? (36:12). Here is the justification for all these awful images and predictions. Prophecy, like religion, is a response to overwhelming terror. Sometimes this terror is metaphysical; sometimes it is a response to the real threat of violence. Rabshekah, here, is an emissary from Assyria, offering the cities of Judah terms of a surrender. He meets a few Judahite ambassadors outside the city wall. Above them, on the wall, the citizens of the city are listening in on the negotiations. For this reason, the ambassadors from Judah ask Rabshekah to speak Assyrian: they don’t want the other citizens hearing what is happening and being terrified. Rabshekah, however, speaks Hebrew to them, explaining that he is there precisely to terrify them. Drinking piss and eating dung, in this case, is what will happen to the cities of Judah if they resist an Assyrian siege: Assyria will starve them out.

This is just cold as ice to me. And I know this is at least partly propaganda, but some of these events that the Hebrew writers report really happened. Israel was conquered by Assyria in the 700s BC (forgive me if I get the date wrong) and Judah was conquered by Babylon shortly thereafter. The prophets, which sound totally deranged, and use imagery that make any sane modern reader uncomfortable, are just expressing their own horror at the world they live in. So even though I mock the above verses, I mock them with reverence. Okay, I’m ready for my hot coal now.

Photo credit seedsoffaith.cph.org