From the Narrow Desert

Last night, while in the hypnagogic state (i.e. in the process of falling asleep), I heard a woman's voice repeating "Pika thlein, pika thlein" -- which I recognized as the Elvish words so similar in sound and meaning to Prika-Vlein, the name of the Little Skinny Planet. (See "Prika-vlein . . . is Elvish?")

And wo unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord! And their works are in the dark; and they say: Who seeth us, and who knoweth us? And they also say: Surely, your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay. But behold, I will show unto them, saith the Lord of Hosts, that I know all their works. For shall the work say of him that made it, he made me not? Or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, he had no understanding? (2 Ne. 27:27)

Here's the biblical version, modified from the King James Version to correct what is universally considered today to have been a translation error:

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? Surely you turn things upside down! Shall the potter be esteemed as the clay? or shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? (Isa. 29:15-16)

The difference is quite significant: In the biblical version of Isaiah, it is the workers in darkness who are accused of turning things upside down. In Nephi's version, they accuse the Lord of doing so. The accusation of turning things upside down is itself turned upside down!

Two lines from "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat" in particular caught my imagination:

The bark now commands the trees
The queen is overruled by the bees

One of the witnesses, a woman named Maria Carreira, testified that she saw nothing when the children suddenly knelt and began talking to an unseen entity, but she did hear a peculiar sound -- like the buzzing of a bee.

Oh, hot bee

Queen of heaven

With glossy trunk

Buzz to me

One of the girls was named Lucia Abobora. She was born on March 22, 1907, and she was to become one of the central figures in the earthshaking drama to follow.

Six young Canadian girls, ranging from seven to thirteen years old, allegedly saw the Virgin Mary on the evening of Monday, July 22, 1968.

As regular readers will know, reading in restaurants is something I like to do. Sometimes total silence is best, but sometimes background noise is a must. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

Unless I happen to be reading a big hardback that's bulky enough to stay open on its own, it's not convenient to read a physical codex while actually eating. What I usually do is read a book while I wait for my order, switch to reading something on my phone while I eat, and then switch back to the book after I finish. Today the book I brought was William Weaver's English translation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I read this before my meal:

You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says -- such as "wolf," "sister," "hidden treasure," "battle," "scabies," "lovers" -- the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox (pp. 36-37).

Hidden Treasures (the breakfast cereal) have come up on this blog before, so that got my attention. I also thought it a bit surprising that wolf was the first item on the list, a list of words presumably chosen because they reflect universal experience and would evoke some memory or other in just about everyone. Do you have any tales of wolves to tell, reader? Neither do I. But I suppose things were different in the 13th century, when Invisible Cities is set.

When my food arrived, I switched to reading the Book of Isaiah on my phone. I read this:

And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations (Isa. 61:4).

At that moment, I happened to glance up at the television on the wall, and the screen was filled with the phrase "RAISED BY WOLVES" repeated many times. Since I had just read about wolves in Calvino and raising-up in Isaiah, this caught my attention. There followed a rapid series of wolf- and moon-related images, interspersed with images of basketball players, and it became apparent that the whole thing was about an NBA team called the Minnesota Timberwolves. At one point, there was a city skyline along the bottom of the screen, an upside-down version of the same skyline at the top, and a full moon suspended in the sky between them. The whole thing then rotated 180 degrees, with the moon remaining stationary, until the city and its gravity-defying inversion had traded places.

The idea of being "raised by wolves" synched in a general way with something I had read the night before in Colin Wilson's Spider World novel The Magician, about how "Human babies were taken from their parents and brought up as spiders." This idea of being raised by animals other than wolves made me think of Raised by Swans, a rock band prominently featured in a not-very-good Liam Neeson movie I had seen some years ago. I couldn't remember the name of the movie, so I looked it up. It's called Chloe.

After I'd finished eating, I went back to the Calvino book, only to find myself reading, "In Chloe, the great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. . ." (p. 51). Then, just two pages later:

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake . . . . Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside-down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror . . . (p. 53).

The name Chloe, juxtaposed with the mirrored-city imagery seen in the "Raised by Wolves" spot, made me think again about Raised by Swans. I remembered that I had mentioned swans recently, in "Assorted syncs: Finnegans Wake, Kubla Khan, dayholes." I had mentioned that Alph, the name of the "sacred river" in Kubla Khan, is also an Elvish word meaning "swan," and that I remembered this from childhood without having to look it up. Kublai Khan is one of the two main characters in Invisible Cities, and I mention that at the end of the post.

This restaurant is located near a used bookstore, and I rarely patronize the one without visiting the other. The synchronistic context described above made me pick up a book that would not otherwise have interested me at all: a very long novel called Swan Song by Robert McCammon. The teaser on the back cover begins "In a wasteland born of rage and fear," echoing the Isaiah passage quoted above, and it introduces a character called Swan and another called Sister. Sister, you will recall, comes right after wolf in Calvino's list.

Just now, as I was writing this post, I ran a search for timberwolves raised by wolves and clicked on the first result. I was greeted by this image:

I suppose that's a reference to the "alpha" as the leader of a pack of wolves, but it's also pretty close to the sacred river in Kubla Khan and the Elvish for "swan."

Note added: Just after posting this, I checked a few blogs. A recent Vox Day post mentions Minnesota and High Elves and links a site called Alpha News.

This jumped out at me yesterday as I was reading Isaiah:

Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy redeemer, the Holy One of Israel (Isa. 41:14).

Due to current events, it was "Yemen of Israel" that first caught my eye, but my interest pretty quickly shifted to "thou worm Jacob."

From a very early age, maybe six or seven, I've used the old-fashioned abbreviation Wm for my first name. (Jas was added much later, when I started blogging.) From time to time, people jokingly pronounce it as it's written, as /wəm/, which is very close to how worm is pronounced in the non-rhotic New England accent I grew up speaking in Derry, New Hampshire. Jas is for James, of course, which derives, via French and Latin, from the name Jacob. So, in a fairly straightforward way, Worm Jacob = Wm Jas.

Thinking about this jogged loose a half-remembered factoid I'd picked up somewhere ages ago: Doesn't Isaiah use the same Hebrew word for "worm" and "crimson"? Indeed he does:

This word appears as worm in Isa. 41:14. A different form of the same word appears as crimson in one of Isaiah's most famous lines:

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool (Isa. 1:18).

Isaiah juxtaposes crimson with wool, which got my attention because Woolly was a nickname of mine in my late teens and early twenties -- an alteration of Willy, but also inspired by my appearance at that time. As hard as it may be to believe now, there was a time when I not only had hair but had enough of it that a photo of me from back then is being used to this day as an illustration in the Hebrew Wikipedia article for "Hair." (I know this because some random Israeli dude once emailed me about it.)

The caption reads "blond hair and red beard." Of course it had to be Hebrew Wikipedia, and they chose me because I had a woolly red beard. In what I've written above, I started with something that reminded me of my name, looked up the Hebrew behind it, and was led to Isaiah talking about something red becoming like wool.

The Hebrew word in question means both "red" and "worm." This made me think of the red serpent I mentioned in my recent post "Red chameleons, manticores, and vampires":

the esotericists of the 19th and 20th centuries associated Teth with the serpent, and specifically with the red serpent. (This is why Oswald Wirth, who mapped Teth to the Hermit card, added a red serpent to his otherwise traditional version of that trump.)

(Like my past self, Wirth's Hermit seems to have gone a bit overboard with the beard.)

So Worm Jacob leads us to the red worm or serpent, which leads us to Teth, one of the two Hebrew letters transliterated as T. Is that a link not only to Wm Jas but to my surname as well? At first I thought probably not. Teth evolved into Theta, while the Greek and Latin letter T, as used in the Greek word from which my surname derives, evolved from a different Semitic letter, Tav. Hebrew Wikipedia changed my mind:

That's Tycho Brahe, another man who loved facial hair not wisely but too well. As you can see, Tycho is transliterated into Hebrew with Teth, not Tav. I can assume that Tychonievich would be similarly rendered.

Incidentally, I have one other link to Tycho besides the name and the fashion sense. Tycho famously lost part of his nose in a duel and used to wear false noses made of gold, silver, or brass. Some years ago, one of my young students asked me if I'd ever broken a bone. When I told him I'd broken my nose once, he looked at me in amazement and said, "So, that's not your real nose?"

One of the main sources of William Wright's unusual ideas is what he calls "words" -- strings of text which he receives in what I guess is something of a dream-like manner, and which appear to be strange multilingual concoctions incorporating English, the fictional languages created by Tolkien, and sometimes other languages such as Spanish and German. He tries to decipher these and extract a story from them. Although I sometimes enjoy this kind of sleuthing (I was a big Finnegans Wake reader in my early twenties), and although I find William's ideas stimulating, I haven't been able to muster much interest in his "words" themselves. On December 22, he posted "Jan-Feb 2022 Words Part 1" -- the type of post that typically makes my eyes glaze over -- but in this case one of his "words" (literally just one word) captured my imagination:

Feb. 5

Milkommen

Commentary:

It was just this one word, kind of just hanging there, and I took it to be perhaps a play on words of the German "Wilkommen" (Welcome), but now with Milk, since the German language had been part of my 2019 words.  The Promised Land is associated with Milk and Honey, and so that is where my mind went, whether that accurate or not.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye [kommen] to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

[The aphids] were farmed like cattle, and milked of their honeydew several times a day; the honeydew was one of the most important food sources in the "palace."

To complete Kubla as a Proper Man, perched precariously on the folds of Kubla’s dark cloak are two mysterious Entirely Separate Beings depicted as two tiny cute small kittens, one white and one black, that he has taken in and sheltered in his cloak from the bitter cold. The two harmless-looking kittens make quite a contrast with the stern and barbaric and pitiless visage of Kubla himself. When Kubla returns to a mortal world and sees the two kittens in portraits of himself and realizes who they represent, he also snorts, but somewhat fondly, as if the portraits reminds him of a great Cosmic Joke that the painter is not fully aware of.

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely.

This same chessboard imagery appears in the Ava Max music video "Kings & Queens," on which I have recently posted:Lest the Masonic connotations of the black-and-white tiling be lost on the audience, we have a couple of pillars thrown in for good measure. Later, Ava demonstrates a Masonic penal sign while singing "Off with your head" -- a phrase with Lewis Carroll resonances.

'Meanwhile, we'll drink your health -- Queen Alice's health!' she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces -- others upset the decanters and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table . . . .

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (vv. 10-11).

Who on the bread of life will feed,

will live forever -- so we read

in that same book which oft is read

as if it were itself that bread.

But in that book is also told

how manna stinks when it is old,

in but a day breeds worms and reeks --

Then what if it were kept for weeks?

Or months? Or many a yawning year?

How would the manna then appear?

When centuries had past it paced,

how would the bread of life then taste?

And were it served at such a date,

what would become of them that ate?

An attributive modifier such as an adjective can be restrictive or non-restrictive. For example, in such phrases as Holy Land and holy water, the modifier holy is restrictive; it restricts the scope of reference to a particular land and a particular type of water, in contrast to other lands and ordinary water. In Holy Bible and Holy Trinity, the same modifier is non-restrictive; Bible and Holy Bible have the same scope of reference. Holy does not specify a particular type of Bible but adds extra or parenthetical information -- "the Bible (which by the way is holy)."

Some languages mark restrictiveness with grammatical rules. For example, in Spanish, a restrictive adjective generally comes after the noun it modifies (e.g. Tierra Santa, agua bendida), while a non-restrictive one comes before it (e.g. Santa Biblia, Santísima Trinidad).

In English, restrictiveness is often grammatically unmarked. In appositives and relative clauses, non-restrictiveness is marked by the use of commas, and restrictiveness can optionally be marked by the use of that rather than which or who, but there are no corresponding rules for adjectives. Holy Land and Holy Bible have the same grammatical form, the only distinction being that in restrictive phrases like the former, the adjective is usually stressed (HOLY Land), while the noun is typically stressed in non-restrictive phrases (Holy BIBLE); there are many exceptions to this, though (e.g. Holy GHOST, cf. Spanish Espíritu Santo), and in any case the distinction is invisible in writing.

This is all by way of preface to a discussion of holy prophets, a phrase that appears four times in the New Testament and a whopping 26 in the Book of Mormon. I had always assumed that this was a non-restrictive honorific, analogous to putting Saint before a saint's name, but in my most recent reading of Abinadi's words in Mosiah, I noticed this verse. The context is that Abinadi is explaining Isaiah's statement that the Suffering Servant (understood to be Christ) "shall see his seed."

Yea, and are not the prophets -- every one that has opened his mouth to prophesy, that has not fallen into transgression -- I mean all the holy prophets ever since the world began -- I say unto you that they are his seed (Mosiah 15:13).

The standard Spanish version of the Book of Mormon has the non-restrictive santos profetas here, but I think profetas santos is surely correct. As mentioned above, relative clauses with that are always restrictive in English. "Every one that has opened his mouth to prophesy, that has not fallen into transgression" implies that not all have opened their mouths, and that some have fallen into transgression. Abinadi is singling out a subset of prophets -- namely, holy prophets, defined as those who have opened their mouths to prophesy and have not fallen into transgression -- and saying that they, and not prophets more generally, can be considered the metaphorical "seed" of the Suffering Servant. (It is somewhat odd that Isaiah twice emphasizes that the Servant "opened not his mouth," while Abinadi identifies the Servant's seed among the prophets as those who do open their mouths.)

Not all prophets are holy; in fact, it must be extraordinarily difficult to be a holy prophet. The first temptation is to keep quiet and not share the message -- like Jonah before the whale interrupted his plans, or Jeremiah before the fire shut up in his bones compelled him. For those who do speak out, the temptation is to use one's status as prophet for self-serving ends.

In "Phonics with Jeremiah, and the grapes of wrath," I proposed an interpretation of Jeremiah's strange expression "a shout, as they that tread the grapes" (25:30). Given the many places in the Bible where treading or pressing grapes is used figuratively to refer to bloodshed, I suggested that this metaphor may have been become so embedded in the language that they that tread the grapes referred primarily to soldiers (figuratively treading the "grapes of wrath") and only secondarily to literal workers in a vineyard. I felt that this interpretation was supported by the context of Jeremiah 25, of which I quote some relevant passages below.

For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me: "Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad, because of the sword that I will send among them."

Then took I the cup at the Lord's hand, and made all the nations to drink, unto whom the Lord had sent me: . . . [a long list of nations follows]

Therefore thou shalt say unto them, "Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Drink ye, and be drunken, and spue, and fall, and rise no more, because of the sword which I will send among you."

And it shall be, if they refuse to take the cup at thine hand to drink, then shalt thou say unto them, "Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Ye shall certainly drink."

For, lo, I begin to bring evil on the city which is called by my name, and should ye be utterly unpunished? Ye shall not be unpunished: for I will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth, saith the Lord of hosts.

Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words, and say unto them, "The Lord shall roar from on high, and utter his voice from his holy habitation; he shall mightily roar upon his habitation; he shall give a shout, as they that tread the grapes, against all the inhabitants of the earth. A noise shall come even to the ends of the earth; for the Lord hath a controversy with the nations, he will plead with all flesh; he will give them that are wicked to the sword, saith the Lord" (Jer. 25:15-17, 27-31).

Given the extended metaphor in which drinking from the "wine cup of fury" represents being punished by violence and slaughter, I thought a martial understanding of they that tread the grapes made sense, and that it was soldiers, not wine-makers, that were proverbially associated with shouting.

Having just listened to Jeremiah 48, though, I am forced to reconsider that reading and conclude that people in Jeremiah's time literally used to shout when they trod the grapes to make wine.

O vine of Sibmah, I will weep for thee with the weeping of Jazer: thy plants are gone over the sea, they reach even to the sea of Jazer: the spoiler is fallen upon thy summer fruits and upon thy vintage. And joy and gladness is taken from the plentiful field, and from the land of Moab, and I have caused wine to fail from the winepresses: none shall tread with shouting; their shouting shall be no shouting (Jer. 48:32-33).

This seems pretty clearly to be referring to viticulture, not war. The wine failing from the winepresses is paired with joy and gladness being taken from the plentiful field. Those who tread the grapes shout, and no shouting means there has been no grape harvest.

Searching the Bible for similar references, I found a few possibilities.

Psalm 78:65 reads, "Then the Lord awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine." I had always assumed this referred to a drunken man shouting, and that still seems the likeliest interpretation, but a "treading the grapes" reading is also possible. The next verse has the Lord smiting his enemies, which is often connected in the Bible with such imagery.

Here's a very clear reference in Isaiah.

Therefore I will bewail with the weeping of Jazer the vine of Sibmah: I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon, and Elealeh: for the shouting for thy summer fruits and for thy harvest is fallen. And gladness is taken away, and joy out of the plentiful field; and in the vineyards there shall be no singing, neither shall there be shouting: the treaders shall tread out no wine in their presses; I have made their vintage shouting to cease (Isa. 16:9-10).

As in Jeremiah 48, the "vintage shouting" is here clearly connected with joy and plenty, not with war and bloodshed.

It seems inescapable that it really was the custom to shout while treading the grapes. My hunch is that it may have been a bit of sympathetic magic, to endue the wine with greater potency. I will be on the lookout for this now when I read other ancient authors.

I’ve been told to post this right away, as a message to some particular person, though I don’t know who or why. I hope he or she gets it in time. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith:

Even  the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Whatever will be, will be. I'm done making predictions. I'm also done documenting the Liararchy's lies. I think it's been pretty well established by now that they lie about everything and that everything is fake. Pointing that out again and again is a distraction and a waste of energy. It's time to let the dead bury their dead and focus on what really matters.

The voice said, "Cry."

And he said, "What shall I cry?"

"All flesh is grass,

and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:

because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it:

surely the people is grass.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:

but the word of our God shall stand for ever."

Behold, I have created the smith

that bloweth the coals in the fire,

and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work;

and I have created the waster to destroy.

No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper;

and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn.

This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord,

and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord.

I, like others, am content to ignore the (supposed!) fact that Isaiah never actually made this iconic juxtaposition.

Isaiah's main Messianic prophecy constitutes Chapter 11 of the book that bears his name, with a shorter, possibly Messianic passage in 9:6-7. (Isaiah 7:14 is also commonly cited as a Messianic prophecy, but it is very obviously nothing of the kind, and I shall dismiss it without further ado.) Nowhere does Isaiah actually say "the Messiah," but that is the conventional title that was later applied to the ruler whose coming is prophesied in passages such as these.


Isaiah 9:6-7

[6] 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. [7] Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

"Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace" is one possible translation of a long prophetic name (Pele-joez-el-gibbor-abi-ad-sar-shalom) of the same sort as Maher-shalal-hash-baz. Like many Hebrew names, it contains theophoric elements, but no Jewish reader would understand this name to indicate that the child would be God himself. However, once we have decided this prophecy refers to Jesus, that meaning can certainly be read into it in retrospect.

As it reads, this is clearly a prophecy of a political leader: "the government shall be upon his shoulder." His sitting "upon the throne of David" refers to ruling over a reunited kingdom of Israel and Judah. He will reestablish Israel as a kingdom and establish a a just and peaceful government that will endure forever.

Against reading this as a Messianic prophecy, we have the fact that v. 6 refers to the child as having already been born, although his reign is still in the future. In this, he is similar to the other children who are given prophetic names in Isaiah 7-9, Immanuel and Maher-shalal-hash-baz, both of whom were clearly born in Isaiah's own days. Rashi's commentary in fact interprets this passage as referring to Ahaz's son Hezekiah, later to rule over Judah (including David's ancient capital, Jerusalem) in peace and righteousness, and understands "for ever" to mean "all the days of his life," as when it is said of Samuel (in 1 Samuel 1:22) that he will "abide for ever" in the Temple.

(Rashi also, I regret to report, reads the second part of v. 6 as "his name shall be called -- by the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father -- 'the Prince of Peace'" -- thus demonstrating the sort of tin-eared obtuseness which has, alas, so often been typically rabbinical.)


Isaiah 11

While Rashi believes 9:6-7 to be a non-Messianic prophecy about Hezekiah, he does see Chapters 11 as being about the Messiah.

[1] And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:

Jesse was the father of David, so this refers to someone of the Davidic line.

[2] And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; [3] And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears: [4] But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth: with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. [5] And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

While the reader might naturally assume that a king is being described, nothing in this passage says that directly. He will judge and reprove and smite, but it is not said that he will rule or reign. The obviously metaphorical bit about his smiting and slaying "with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips" leaves open the possibility that this Messiah will be primarily a teacher or prophet rather than an actual king.

[6] The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. [7] And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. [8] And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den. [9] They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

I would tend to interpret this is a hyperbolic way of saying that the Messiah will bring peace -- and he will bring it by spreading "the knowledge of the Lord" over the earth, not by exercising political power. Again, this is consistent with the Messiah's being a teacher and not a king.

[10] And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.

Commentators generally understand "his rest" to mean "the place where he lives" -- i.e., Judah.

[11] And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. [12] And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. [13] The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off: Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim. [14] But they shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the west; they shall spoil them of the east together: they shall lay their hand upon Edom and Moab; and the children of Ammon shall obey them. [15] And the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian sea; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams, and make men go over dryshod. [16] And there shall be an highway for the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria; like as it was to Israel in the day that he came up out of the land of Egypt.

The Israelites will leave the lands where they now live scattered and will return to Israel, as happened in the Exodus. There is even a reference to the Red Sea being parted again. This seems to connect the Messiah with the prophet like unto Moses, suggesting that they are after all the same person.


Applicability to Jesus

The only thing about Isaiah 9:6-7 that would bring Jesus to mind is the name itself, with its implication that a child could be born who would be God himself. As I have said, I don't think it actually implies that in context, though, and nothing else in this brief prophecy has anything to do with Jesus. All in all, I think I agree with Rashi that, pace Handel, this was never intended to be a Messianic prophecy at all.

Isaiah 11 is indisputably Messianic in character, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how little in it suggests a literal king on the throne of David. Everything in vv. 2-5 is more or less consistent with Jesus. However, vv. 6-9, describing a peaceable kingdom in which even predators will cease to prey, is harder to apply to Jesus, who did not after all bring anything resembling world peace. The bit about how "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea" seems to have been at least partly fulfilled by Jesus. Knowledge of the God of the Hebrews is now virtually universal -- that is, very nearly everyone in the world has heard of him and knows a bit about him -- and that happened because of Jesus. However, Isaiah seems to be predicting a "knowledge of the Lord" that runs deeper than mere information -- seems to be saying that people will really know the Lord and will thus become peaceful -- and that has not happened. In v. 10, we are told that the gentiles will turn their attention to the Messiah and his homeland, and that certainly came true because of Jesus. The remainder of the chapter, which is about the return of the scattered Israelites to their ancient homeland, arguably began to be fulfilled with the creation of the modern state of Israel, but that was long after Jesus' time. Many of the details of this prophecy refer to nations that were already irrelevant even in the time of Jesus, to say nothing of the 20th century.

I think it's safe to say that if Isaiah had consciously foreseen Jesus' life and work with any degree of clarity or accuracy, this isn't what he would have written. At best, he had a vague intuition that a "savior" was coming -- but what exactly that meant, and what he would save people from, was filled in by his own preconceptions, or possibly by prophetic inklings of other things to come, not directly related to the life of Jesus, which unintentionally got mixed up with his Messianic vision.

The 21st chapter of Numbers records this episode:

[6] And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. 

[7] Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. 

[8] And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. 

[9] And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.

In the King James Version, the phrase "fiery serpent" translates the Hebrew word saraph (plural seraphim), while the unmodified word "serpent" translates nahash -- this latter word being the usual Hebrew word for "serpent," as used, for example, in the Garden of Eden story. The two words are pretty clearly being used interchangeably here, as when "the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, . . . And Moses made a serpent." Going from this passage alone, we would assume that a saraph is simply a snake, or perhaps a particular kind of snake. Etymologically, saraph means "burning one," which is where the translation "fiery" comes from. Most commentators see this as a reference to the burning sensation caused by the snake's venom, which seems reasonable enough to me; the fire-breathing dragon of Western folklore may have originated as a similar symbolic representation of a snake's "fiery" bite.

(Incidentally, the emphasis on brass as the material of Moses' serpent is perhaps a bit of wordplay, since the Hebrew word for copper, brass, or bronze is nehosheth -- or, elsewhere in the Bible, nehushah or nahush -- calling to mind the word nahash, "serpent," and apparently deriving from the same primitive root, meaning "to practice divination." In 2 Kings 18:4, we are told that the serpent of Moses was called by the name Nehushtan, which many translations gloss as "thing of bronze," though "old serpent" has also been proposed.)

The next time the seraphim turn up in the Bible is in Deuteronomy 8:15, where it is said that the Lord "brought thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought." Again the usage is consistent with a saraph being a kind of venomous snake.

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Isaiah is the only other book of the Bible to mention seraphim, and it is Isaiah 6, where the Hebrew word is left untranslated, that is responsible for the popular image of a seraph as a kind of angel. Certainly Isaiah seems to be describing something very different from a poisonous snake.

[1] In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. [2] 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. [3] And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. [. . .] [6] 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: [7] 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.

These seraphim have hands, feet, and six wings; they are able to speak and use tongs; and one is scarcely able to imagine them biting anyone. In other words, nothing in the description suggests they have anything in common with a poisonous snake.

Based on the passages we have looked at thus far, the most natural conclusion is that the word saraph simply has two different meanings, that the epithet "burning ones" is applied to two classes of beings -- snakes with fiery venom, and angels blazing with glory -- which have nothing else in common. However, references to seraphim elsewhere in Isaiah do suggest a possible connection between the serpents of the Torah and the winged creatures of Isaiah 6.

out of the serpent's root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent (Isaiah 14:29) 

the land of trouble and anguish, from whence come the young and old lion, the viper and fiery flying serpent (Isaiah 30:6)

Both verses refer to a "flying saraph" -- but in a context that clearly connects seraphim with dangerous serpents and vipers, not angels. Obviously, the idea of literal flying serpents in the Negev is a bit hard to swallow, though some young-earth creationists do cite the seraphim as evidence for the survival of (apparently venomous) pterodactyls into historic times. More likely, "flying" is a figurative reference to the snake's great speed. John Pratt makes a pretty good case (qv) for the Israeli saw-scale viper as the original "flying saraph," citing its fiery color, the burning sensation caused by its venom, its lightning-fast strike, and its ability to leap off the ground for a "flying" attack.

Even if we're not talking about actual winged dragons here, a snake known as a "flying saraph" might naturally have been portrayed in art as winged, which later generations might have misinterpreted as a straightforward representation of the saraph's anatomy. At any rate, the idea of the saraph as a "flying" snake -- regardless of how metaphorical that designation may or may not have been -- makes a connection between the reptilian and angelic seraphim more likely. Just as the cherubim of the Bible appear to have been basically ox-like creatures rather than humanoid "angels," the seraphim of Isaiah may have been -- for all their wings and hands and so on -- basically celestial serpents.