Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Isaiah, without question the most skilful wordsmith and the most moving writer among the prophets (and indeed of the entire Hebrew canon), began his mission, according to his own account, in the year that King Uzziah died – around 740 BC. By tradition he was the nephew of King Amaziah of Judah and was well-connected to the politicians of his day.⁸⁵ But he got out among the people and had a sizeable following – a popularity that endured, as may be gauged from the fact that among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, twenty-three feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew. As a result of his pressure on Hezekiah, the king at the time, the Temple in Jerusalem turned back to Yahweh-worship and the sanctuaries in the provinces were closed and public worship centralised in the capital.⁸⁶ Isaiah condemned Judah as a land of unbridled, irresponsible luxury, a sensual society without concern for the spirit, divine or human.⁸⁷ He explicitly singled out for condemnation the monopoly in land that had ‘borne such evil fruit in Judah’.⁸⁸ Isaiah was pushing the Israelite religion to a new spirituality and a new interiority, still more divorced from time and place than Hosea had imagined, more and more a religion of conscience, when men are thrown back on themselves as the only way to achieve social justice. Men and women, he was saying, must turn away from the pursuit of wealth as the chief aim in life. ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.’⁸⁹

But there was another side to Isaiah, and equally important. In his religion, sacrifice is not enough but repentance is always possible, the Lord is always forgiving and, if enough people repent, he foresees an age of peace, when men and women ‘shall beat swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’. This, as many scholars have noted, for the first time gives history a linear quality. God gives history a direction and here Isaiah introduces an even more radical idea: ‘Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ This special son shall advance the age of peace: ‘The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.’ But he will also be a great ruler: ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.’ Christians attach more to this passage than Jews do. Matthew saw this as a prophecy of Jesus; Jews do not interpret Isaiah messianically.⁹⁰ The book of Isaiah is above all concerned with the individual soul – though that is not the right word. For Isaiah, each of us has the ‘still small voice’ of conscience, and that marks out Judaism. The Jews had no real belief in the afterlife, so the nearest they could come to a soul was the conscience.

In the last days before Jerusalem finally fell, Isaiah was followed by Jeremiah, who could not have been more different. Equally critical of the establishment, equally blunt and perhaps even more acid, Jeremiah became an outcast, forbidden to enter – or even to go near – the Temple. He was probably as unstable as he was unpopular: his family turned against him and no woman would marry him.⁹¹ (He did, however, have and keep a secretary. When others went into exile he remained for a while in Mizpah, a modest town north of Jerusalem.) Yet his writings were preserved – for his prophecies of doom came true. In 597 BC and again in 586 BC, the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem, and after the second siege the Temple and the walls of the city were destroyed and most of the rest of the city was set ablaze. Jeremiah was among those who fled but thousands of Israelites were carried off into exile in Babylon. Traumatic as it was, exile would prove invigorating for the transformation of Judaism.