‘Repetition is, I would guess, the feature of biblical narrative that looks most “primitive”” to the casual modern eye, reflecting, we may imagine, a mentality alien to our own and a radically different approach to ordering experience from the ones familiar to us.’
(Robert Alter. The Art of Biblical Narrative. p. 88)
With this in mind the prophet Isaiah begins with not just an announcement but a warning to the king that is to stand again multiple nations facing potential destruction. He says the words of God to the king, “If you do not stand firm in your faith, you will not stand firm at all” (7.9). Jeremiah says a similar thing years later to another king, “Do not break down before them, or I will break you before them” (1.17). There is this warning to be obedient while at the same time an invitation to be delivered. They are loaded ‘if-then’ statements that are a summons to a kind of leadership that involves trusting and imagining a future where there is, as the eyes can see, void and dangerous ending if action is not taken.
I want to say Isaiah’s call a chapter backwards has similar themes. In chapter 5 Isaiah starts in with the typical prophet verses the world kind of language.
Woe to you who add house to house…
Woe to those who rise early to run after drinks…
Woe to those who draw sin along with cords of deceit…
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil…
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes…
Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine…
He lists six woes or judgments or announcements and covers several categories of social life. People are hoarding resources and using their own wisdom to support their actions and then celebrating this kind of life that chooses ignorance over justice. The situation looks pretty hopeless actually. The national sense is that because their king was able to team up with another nation, whose soul ingredient in ruling was injustice and the oppression and marginalisation of peoples under their rule, their deliverance was invitation to continue in unsustainable living situations and celebrate the conquer of their brother and sisters in the global village (Syria, Ephriam). And so Isaiah’s call in chapter six has all of this as a backdrop-at least the way I am reading it. Notice the echoing exclamation that lands on Isaiah’s lips when he sees God in a vision…’Woe’. But this time it is not ‘woe to those’ or ‘woe to you’ it is ‘woe is me’. Isaiah the prophet is not removed from his context rather he is addressing the context of which he is apart. And so as God in his righteousness brings him into his holiness the kind of holiness that embraces rather than excludes Isaiah is invited to imagine a future of God’s design. Trusting and leaning into the redemptive chaos that is going to ensue and perhaps effect his world in ways he hadn’t wish on anyone.
And so the seventh woe completes the picture of the prophet being included in the grind of it all and a character in a drama that is played on a set as big as the world.
