Chapter 35 begins with a beautiful oracle of joyful divine redemption. Gone now is the stench of death, the skulking beasts of night, the landscape of desolation. The air is crystal clear, sweet with the scent of followers. The heavy silence and absence of further deaths have given way to the music of a re-created world, the fields bright with blossom and “every common bush afire with God.” This is the land prepared for God’s returning people. “History indeed might be written as the epic of the road.” says one commentator. The Hebrew people were always on the road. They never settled down for long. Is that not the ways our spiritual path is? If we are growing, we are always on the move, always asking the questions for which we do not have the answers. Chapter 36 is a prose narrative of three historical events. According to the scholars, there is little prophecy nor was Isaiah their author. The Assyrians pretend that Hezekiah’s removal of the high places and altars (illegal sanctuaries) was taken by the Lord as an insult. They declare to Jerusalem’s emissaries that the city therefore on longer has a right to the Lord’s protection and that they are the ones who truly carry out his will. The Jewish emissaries ask that the conversation be carried on in Aramaic, not in Judean, for they fear the effect of the Assyrian claims upon the morale of the people. In contrast to the empty boasting of the Assyrians, with a finely written prayer Hezekiah proclaims the Lord as God over all the kingdoms of the earth. Divine deliverance follows. The destruction of Sennacherib’s army was probably due to the bubonic plague, but the sacred author attributes it to its ultimate cause, God through his angel. Sennucherib died a violent death twenty years after his invasion of Judea.
Chapter 35 begins with a beautiful oracle of joyful divine redemption. Gone now is the stench of death, the skulking beasts of night, the landscape of desolation. The air is crystal clear, sweet with the scent of followers. The heavy silence and absence of further deaths have given way to the music of a re-created world, the fields bright with blossom and “every common bush afire with God.” This is the land prepared for God’s returning people. “History indeed might be written as the epic of the road.” says one commentator. The Hebrew people were always on the road. They never settled down for long. Is that not the ways our spiritual path is? If we are growing, we are always on the move, always asking the questions for which we do not have the answers. Chapter 36 is a prose narrative of three historical events. According to the scholars, there is little prophecy nor was Isaiah their author. The Assyrians pretend that Hezekiah’s removal of the high places and altars (illegal sanctuaries) was taken by the Lord as an insult. They declare to Jerusalem’s emissaries that the city therefore on longer has a right to the Lord’s protection and that they are the ones who truly carry out his will. The Jewish emissaries ask that the conversation be carried on in Aramaic, not in Judean, for they fear the effect of the Assyrian claims upon the morale of the people. In contrast to the empty boasting of the Assyrians, with a finely written prayer Hezekiah proclaims the Lord as God over all the kingdoms of the earth. Divine deliverance follows. The destruction of Sennacherib’s army was probably due to the bubonic plague, but the sacred author attributes it to its ultimate cause, God through his angel. Sennucherib died a violent death twenty years after his invasion of Judea.
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