Introduction
Isaiah 21 can only be understood in the light of its placement in the architecture of the second “volume” of the prophecy (chapters 13–27). The contents are arranged in twin sevenfold “columns” that represent the great bronze pillars of Solomon’s Temple: Jachin and Boaz, priest and king.
The priestly first column slaughters the nations whose gods have been adopted by Israel and Judah, and the kingly second column re-establishes the kingdom of Israel through a tumultuous ritual cleansing of the Land. Together, they form a death and resurrection narrative. The first sequence “ends the world”—at least, the world as everyone knew it. The second sequence quakes the now-barren earth to raise Israel from the grave of captivity.
The first column (Isaiah 13–20) demolishes the old order by reversing Israel’s history and taking it back to Egypt. To do so, it runs the pattern of the days of Creation backwards, ordering the judgments according to well-known characteristics of the nations. For example, the Assyrian eagle god Nisroch and the Philistine fish god Dagon sit in the Day 5 step (Isaiah 14:3–23), corresponding to the creation of birds and fish. This pillar thus wipes out the nations that have “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:23).
The second column (Isaiah 21–27) re-creates what was destroyed, so the Creation pattern now runs forwards. Both pillars begin with Babylon; Jachin rummages through the past in its demolition of the old order, wiping the slate of rebellious man clean as in the days of Noah. Meanwhile Boaz looks to the future of Israel’s renewed dominion of the earth. Their “re-creation” is a spiritual reconquest of the Land.
The Oracles against Babylon, Edom and Arabia
The phrase “desert of the sea” in Isaiah 21:1 casts an anti-Garden, anti-Creation pall over the entire wilderness region through which the Euphrates flows to the Persian Gulf. The oracle’s journey south, from Babylon, to Edom, to Kedar, is a geographical tumble, an Adamic Fall.
The prophet links—or chains—the three nations together in a reprise of the condemnation of the primeval Garden, Land, and World. The two-part vision mulls over the “cosmic” interplay between light and darkness in the moral realm, and riffs on the twin Edenic curses upon the fruit of the land and of the womb. Even more enlightening is the fact that this oracle not only harkens back to the Bible’s beginning, but is also a premonition of its end: the judgment of Babylon will be reprised in the judgment of the spiritual Babylon of the Pharisees and the Herods.
For the murder of his brother, Adam’s firstborn, his natural heir, was cursed with barren ground. So this arid eastern strip of the symbolic “dry land” represents the universal spiritual barrenness in the time of Isaiah. This divine sanction likewise resulted from the shedding of innocent blood—the practice of child sacrifice.
The so-called “birthplace of civilization” had a long history of human sacrifice, including children, especially in its later years. So the likening of bloodthirsty Babylon’s sudden fear to the distress of a woman suffering birth pangs is a bitter mockery.
In verse 6, the action shifts from the approaching whirlwind of desolating Medes to the swift-as-wind horsemen who bring the “gospel” of Babylon’s fall to the watchman stationed by the prophet at God’s command.
In verse 10, the “threshed son on the threshing floor” who is comforted by this news is the dynasty of David, the line of the Messiah, whose house has been threshed of its idolatrous chaff under the curses of the Law of Moses.
This “son,” the lineage of David, was “conceived” on the threshing floor of Boaz (Ruth 3:2; 4:21), and he purchased a threshing floor on Mount Moriah (2 Samuel 24:15-25). Solomon, the son of David, built the Temple on this site, the Temple that had been razed by the Babylonians. So Mount Moriah, the place where Abraham offered Isaac (Genesis 22:2), was also now a barren ruin.
As a symbol of sight—light amidst the darkness, or a vision in the night—the watchtower motif established in verse 6 is also the bridge to the final part of the oracle, beginning in verse 10. But the message now is not one of comfort for the sons of Jacob. It is a warning of desolation for the sons of Esau.
As in Genesis 12, the focus has shifted from the global to the local. Via the watchman in Judah, the action moves to judgments upon the descendants of Esau and Ishmael. These were the first of the natural heirs of Abraham who were overlooked by God in favor of spiritual heirs—younger brothers like Jacob, Joseph, and David.
The prophecy is not two oracles but one of two distinct parts: darkness despite immanent light, then a tragic enlightenment in the darkness. This “evening and morning”—or is it “morning and evening”?—Day of the Lord is a coruscating twofold angelic sword. It epitomizes the rejection of the warnings of the prophets and the subsequent vindication of their words when judgment falls. And its call for a man to discern between moral light and darkness in a world where truth is deliberately laced with serpentine falsehoods is highlighted by its punctuation with twinkling ambiguities.
The error concerning the unity of this two-episode oracle stems from each internal part having its own title. But while the first use of massa is the “burden” of the prophet, the second is a pun—the “journey” or “breaking camp” of the very same inquisitive Edomite as a scout into the desert. There he will lodge with Dedanites and witness King Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of the desert traders—including the sons of the Ishmaelites who sold Jacob’s spiritual firstborn, Joseph, into slavery (Genesis 37:25–28).
The second twist is also in the main title. “Dumah” is a pun on Idumea (Edom) that means “silence.” The watchman gives the man no answer but a directive that amounts to “Go see for yourself.” Like King Saul who consulted the prophets when the Philistine armies approached, the Lord refuses to answer him (1 Samuel 28:6, 15). Since he has never listened (that is, obeyed) in the past, he receives no light from God in the present distress. Instead, like Saul in the witch’s dark domain, he is given a vision of his doom. Isaiah and his sons were sent as signs to enlighten Israel, not the mediums and necromancers. For ignoring the prophets, the nations would all be thrust into a thick gloom (Isaiah 8:16–22).
The watchman makes an example of the seeker from Seir as a warning to all the nations who were willfully dwelling in darkness. This “great light” that dawned in the words of Isaiah was not a salvation but a condemnation. The rebel himself—in a terrifying irony—is made the “son” through whom the prophetic fiat lux that he desired will be spoken (John 1:1–5). The man is made the Man who was called to be the light of the world but insisted on learning the hard way. This Edenic barb continues the prophets’ punning of Edom with Adam. Like Esau, Edom is a symbol of the natural man.
This biblical trope also explains why the offspring of Jacob’s natural firstborn is singled out for special vengeance later in the book. God makes an example of Edom in a terrifying parody of child sacrifice. Just as Israel was “God’s firstborn,” Edom as the spiritual “anti-firstborn” is put to the sword and passed through the fire at a divine gathering of all the pagan nations (Isaiah 34; 63:1–6).
This theme culminates in Jesus’ anti-sacrificial vengeance upon first-century Jerusalem. Having slain the Christians, the Sons of God, the Edomite-ruled city at the end of the “Adamic” world has become a spiritual Babylon, the barren harlot seated upon many waters. In response, Christ makes an example of “Edom” before a gathering of idolatrous nations for an anti-Feast of Booths.
The sevenfold pattern of the Book of Revelation not only subtly recapitulates Israel’s annual harvest calendar (Leviticus 23), but also the steps of the ascension offering in Leviticus 1, which in turn “makes all things new” by recapitulating Genesis 1 (See James B. Jordan, “Re-creation in the Ascension Offering”). In this way, the prophecy portrays the ritual slaughter of the Herodian “anti-Christ” as a “son of the herd” in a scathing parody of the work of the Aaronic priesthood. The blood of those who rejected the atoning blood of Christ would be upon their own heads (Matthew 27:25; Acts 18:6). This human sacrifice defiled and destroyed the corrupted Temple, annihilated the priesthood, and finished forever the stream of sacrificial blood in the Garden of God; it also avenged the blood of Abel and all the subsequent “little brothers” of history.
This scenario also sheds light upon the Apostle Paul’s pairing of Esau and Pharaoh in Romans 9:6–17. The rulers of Jerusalem would be “hated” (an idiom for the rejection of a natural heir), yet God had raised them up for the same reason He raised up Pharaoh, the king whose nation’s firstborn the Lord slew in a single night: “…that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”
In the blazing fires of its utter destruction, Mount Moriah was “un-Zioned” and transmogrified into Mount Sinai in Arabia. Like the seeker from Seir, “Edomite” Jerusalem magnified the severity of God and unwittingly was made into a glorious light to the world.
The watchman’s replacement of morning with night inverts the order in Genesis 1, and the prophet puns Arab (Arabia) with ereb (evening). The Edomite would lodge “by evening” or “in Arabia” and see the face of the God of Jacob (Genesis 33:9–10).
Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:18–20).
The hidden meanings of The Oracle of Edom and The Oracle of Arabia are thus The Burden of Silence and The Journey to Darkness.
As a unit, Isaiah 21 describes a windswept world of dumb idols and fruitless spirituality where there is no true word and no true light. In Hebrew, “If you will enquire, enquire” evokes the sound of the Hebrew for “formless and void” in Genesis 1:1.
As in the Book of Revelation, Babylon is like Babel, and Edom is like Adam, the foolish man who lacked the light of the Spirit of God, and who failed to foresee the coming wind of judgment that would scatter Mankind from the Gate of God.
The oracle ends with a command for Edom to provide bread and water to the remnant of the Kedarites. It is a veiled reminder of his mistreatment of brother Israel in the wilderness (Numbers 20:14–21), his recent gloating over the razing of Jerusalem and his wicked betrayal of the survivors (Obadiah 1:10–14).
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
(Psalm 137:7–8)
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Under Babylon, both geographically and militarily, these two rejected heirs of Abraham, Ishmael and Esau (the curse upon the womb) would be disinherited of their kingdoms (the curse upon the land).
Just as Isaiah 21 wipes the slate clean from Babylon in the north to the desert in the south, so the first section of the Boaz column of the construct (Isaiah 21–23) wipes from the east to the west like the rising of the sun. In doing so, it is not only a “Noahic” cleansing of the territory, but also an ironic reprise of Abraham walking the length and the breadth of the land of Canaan at God’s command (Genesis 13:17).
From the desert regions of the east (Babylon, Edom and Arabia, chapter 21) it moves via Israel (Judah and Jerusalem, chapter 22) to the coastlands of the sea in the west (Tyre and Sidon, chapter 23). In Edenic terms, these three steps erase the gate of God in the Garden (Genesis), the house of David in the Land (Exodus), and the intermarriage with Jezebel in the World (Leviticus).
This almighty wipe also recapitulates, in broad historical terms, the “rise” or ascension of Israel to the present day in the time of Isaiah. Like Abram, it leaves Ur of the Chaldees to dwell in tents, then travels to Salem, the city of Melchizedek, to receive God’s endorsement. The old rulers are eventually thrown out and replaced with the dynasty of King David. But after the apostasy of Solomon, the faith of Hiram of Tyre ultimately degenerates into the idolatry of Jezebel of Sidon.
As a result of this sacrificial offering, the remainder of the Boaz column is relatively straightforward. The entire “World” is purified in judgment (chapter 24, Numbers), Israel rises again from the “Great Flood” of Babylonian troops as a “resurrection body,” a holy host (chapter 25, Deuteronomy). Israel’s song of redemption celebrates both the goodness and severity of God in His just and merciful cleansing of the Land (chapter 26, Joshua). And finally, Israel’s spiritual ministry of teaching and testimony among the nations, now restored and expanded in these latter days, is described in terms of the natural promises to Abraham—a reversal of the Edenic curse upon the land and the womb (chapter 27, Judges).
This article is adapted from the forthcoming second book in a series, The Shape of Isaiah. The first book is available on Amazon here.
Michael Bull is a graphic designer in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney in Australia, and author, most recently, of A Lodge for Owls: Raw Theological Twitter. He blogs at Bible Matrix.