The prophetic texts are the most difficult parts of the Bible to understand. And, when it comes to baffling the reader, they are no respecter of persons, perplexing even the studied scholars with their Delphic wiles.
It has been said that one third of the Bible is prophecy. This claim is tough to verify, but if we include all of the Old Testament prophets along with the prophetic portions of the New Testament (especially the utterly notorious Book of Revelation) a huge percentage of the Word of God is bewildering at worst and a bit obscure at best. Even when we are able to interpret it in general terms, the author’s choice of imagery and his arrangement of the content remain a riddle.
The problem is so serious that we have not even figured out why the prophets are so opaque. The good thing is that the answer to the riddle is—quite literally—not serious at all. If we had to boil that answer down to a single sentence, it would be that when we read the prophets, we do not get their jokes!
That statement sounds disrespectful, even blasphemous, when we first hear it, but once the role of the prophet is fully understood, it becomes clear that this is precisely the reason why so much of their work goes over our heads.
However, there is some good news. Because these passages employ exactly the same devices used by movies, novels, TV shows, and, of course, comedians, we already have the skills we need to understand them. All we need is somebody to show us how to “plug them in” as we read. And it really is “plug and play.” After a little practice, our eyes are opened, and we are “in on the jokes.”
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One reason why it is tricky to identify how much of the Bible is prophecy is because that depends on how we define it. If prophecy were simply the act of predicting the future, then that would exclude a lot of what the prophets had to say. Much of their writing is a condemnation of people who are sinning against God and against each other.
The truth is that the role of the prophets included both of these elements because they were, in modern parlance, God’s “repo men.” Just as agents come to your door to repossess whatever goods you agreed to pay for if you have failed to keep up with the payments, everything they did was done in the context of legal covenants that were made between God and Man.
Perhaps the most obvious example—although we do not realize it—is the destruction and plundering of Egypt in the Book of Exodus. Under the supervision of Joseph, who was under the inspiration of God, Egypt became extremely wealthy and powerful. As the famine increased in severity, Joseph sold the grain that had been wisely stored, and he gathered the money for Pharaoh.
When the starving people ran out of money, he sold them grain in exchange for their livestock. Then, when they ran out of livestock, he took possession of their land and made them servants of his master. They served him gratefully, knowing that their lives had been saved, and Pharaoh took a fifth of everything these lands produced.
These events near the end of Genesis are the context for the beginning of Exodus. Whereas Joseph did not put the priests under tribute but gave them an allowance (much like the Levites under the Law), the Hebrews who were recognized as a priestly people by Joseph’s Pharoah were now the slaves of the Egyptians. This situation was also a potential reversal of the prophecy of Noah concerning the future of his sons. The Egyptians were descended from Ham (Genesis 10:6; Psalm 105:23; 105:22), whose sons via Canaan were condemned to be servants to their brothers. Canaan’s land had now been promised to Israel, but they were enslaved by his “brother.”
The Lord had blessed Egypt because He shows no partiality when it comes to good and evil (Romans 2:9-11). But now that Egypt had forgotten Joseph’s God, his God sent Moses and Aaron to repossess all of the good things that He had given to them at Joseph’s hand. The fertility of the land and the womb was destroyed by the plagues, and the glory of its silver, gold, and raiments was given to the Israelites as plunder.
Likewise, when the nation of Israel finally came to take possession of the Promised Land, the use of the sword was not unjust. The nations of Canaan had been warned by Abraham that their inheritance would be given to these sons of Shem. Melchizedek submitted to this decree and endorsed Abraham as a spiritual “son.” But Melchizedek’s eventual successor, Adonizedek, went to war against Israel and was destroyed.
The reason that “all flesh”—as well as all the plunder—in the city of Jericho was devoted to God (herem) was because this vengeance was His. And the Lord had made it clear that if Israel sinned in the same way as the Canaanites, they would suffer the same fate. Again, He would show no partiality.
Context
The warnings in the Law of Moses are the context of the biblical prophets, whom God sent to Israel as repo men. While God always held the Gentile nations accountable for their sins, the nation that He had set apart to teach them was subject to stricter judgment, and its rulers even more so (James 3:1; Psalm 82). If Israel would not be blessed by God to teach the nations of God’s goodness, then Israel would be cursed by God as an example of His severity (Romans 11:22).
When Israel not only appropriated the gods and practices of the heathen but became worse than those whom they had supplanted, the blessings of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 would be repossessed and replaced with their curses.
The Law and the Prophets are, thus, as inseparable as Moses and Elijah. This is because, in very basic terms, the Law says “Do not!” and the Prophet says “Look what you did!” Like the two dowels on a Hebrew scroll, these legal “bookends” served as the two witnesses required by the Law for a judgment to be made (Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15).
This is why Jesus said (via the mouth of Abraham in Luke 16:29) that the Jewish rulers were without excuse. Having not only the Law but also the Prophets, they knew that Yahweh had previously brought Gentile invaders against Israel, just as He warned their ancestors through Moses.
So, when we read in Revelation about “two witnesses” with the powers of Moses (over the waters below) and Elijah (over the waters above), we should not be puzzled. Although the literal prophets appeared at Jesus’ transfiguration, their legal authority—the “Do not!” and the “Look what you did!”—was combined in the Son of God as “the testimony of Jesus.” That means that these two “accusers” are a symbolic representation of the legal testimony of the Church against Jerusalem, the city that had killed her prophets in the past and was doing it again. Blaspheming the Spirit is not unforgiveable because it is the worst sin but because it is the last sin—the rejection of the warnings of God’s “repo men” by those who harden their hearts like Pharaoh (Matthew 12:31-32; Hebrews 3:8).
The Book of Revelation is the culmination of the apostolic “lawsuit” against Jerusalem and its Temple, which is why it reprises so much of the imagery from the prophets. While this is obvious, what is not so obvious is that this was also the practice of those prophets themselves, who drew their imagery from the Books of Moses.
What this means is that the prophets’ original audiences would have understood the allusions to the earlier “bookend.” In the case of Isaiah, the Law is one dowel, the Prophet is the other, and the Davidic king stands between them, as Jesus did on the mount. The question is, will the king be condemned by the corroborated testimony of these two witnesses, or will the prophet’s authority be given to him by God, an anointing from heaven upon his faithful obedience which results in a judicial and practical “Solomonic” wisdom that astounds the nations?
The authority that was delegated to Jesus is now His to delegate, even in matters of church discipline. In Matthew 18:15-20, He alludes to the need for a minimum of two or three witnesses in His threefold process of calling an apostate to account in the court of God on earth. The faithful saints now have the power of “Do not!” and “Look what you did!”
“Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” (Matthew 18:19-20)
Symbolism
With the covenant context explained, the prophets’ use of imagery from the Law in their legal cases against those who have broken it makes perfect sense. Many of us are unfamiliar with their source material, so we do not understand the references. This means that even the imagery that is not actually presented as irony functions in the same way as a joke. Peter Leithart writes:
The historical-grammatical method has fallen short because although it is helpful as far as it goes, it simply does not have the bandwidth to cope with the virtual “theoscape” of the biblical text. God has given us a multimedia presentation and the modern academy is tuned in for Morse code.
Without a “typological eye,” the reason for the inclusion of certain details and statements cannot be discerned, so most of what is implicitly communicated sounds to the untrained ear like background noise. The exegete can have all the data at his fingertips and yet not be able to make much sense of it.
The subtlety is lost on the scientific mind because, as Leithart has written elsewhere, it lacks the hermeneutical equivalent of a good sense of humor.
If interpretation is more like getting a joke than it is like dissecting a frog, then only certain kinds of people will be good interpreters.”3
However, while it is encouraging to see biblical typology coming back into fashion, it is also discouraging to see hints of the same sorts of errors and abuses that caused it to fall out of favor in the first place.
Anyone who has read James B. Jordan’s Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World and appreciated it as a revelation of how God communicates in symbols and types—both in His Word and in the created order—understands what it is like to actually see through new eyes. Suddenly everything in the Bible and in the world is packed with meaning, and those locked down in the cautious modernist mindset of the historical-grammatical method now seem almost biblically illiterate. And they are. Expertise in the original languages is a necessary foundation, but without a fluency in the Bible’s “cinematic” language, the modern interpreter is little more than a cipher for the transmission of the raw data.
That said, while we now see everything in this wonderful new way, we are “reading” this visual communication with the comprehension level of children who are speaking their first words. Our renewed enthusiasm for the Word is a gift from God, but our practice remains amateurish and undisciplined. It is disturbingly hit and miss.
To rub salt into the wound, our naive approach treats typology like a game of “Snap”—any two things that share a descriptor or bear even a passing similarity are hastily tagged and tacked together as type and antitype. Sometimes it is a successful match, but sometimes it is not, and even when it is correct, our scattershot methodology is so crude and prone to error that it prevents us from making wider connections.
Our practice is more like clumsy transliteration than a translation of symbols that faithfully expresses the author’s intended meaning. Their message is so often not only lost in translation but entirely replaced with bungling speculation.
Such speculation might still illustrate a sound biblical principle, but it is not what the text was saying. It is being used as a sounding board for the exegete’s own assumptions.4
This leaves biblical typology wide open to the attacks of the woodenheads who claim that all such drawing out of implicit meaning is mere eisegesis. Just because our French is bad does not mean that French is bad, but we really must do better.
If greater credibility for typological exegesis is to be gained, then superior, empirical, and repeatable results need to be demonstrated. We must maintain some of the caution of the historical-grammatical method if we are to avoid the whimsical free-for-all that characterized the interpretation of types in premodern times.
So it is not as though we have learned nothing from the desire for a standard of verification. The only way to achieve such a standard is to establish a better methodology. But since the biblical authors repeatedly confound all of our man-made rules, it must be one based instead upon the way in which they themselves used, interpreted, and reused biblical imagery.
Like mastering a language, mastering biblical typology is more complex than we might like. Recognizing the references to earlier Scriptures is one step towards transforming our experience of Isaiah from enduring to enjoying, but biblical symbols never occur in isolation.
While we might understand the meaning of a few isolated “words,” we have not yet mastered the “grammar” employed by all of the biblical writers. Grammar, when used properly, eliminates ambiguities and prevents misinterpretations of a sentence, and there is an equivalent system that governs the use of symbolism in the Bible. This symbolic “syntax” is good news for both camps because it means that we are freed from the constraints of a minimalist human system, but constrained by the guidelines that are built into the text itself.
God does not speak in isolated words, and neither does He prefigure things in isolated symbols. Biblical imagery is given to us in typological “sentences,” but because we do not recognize this, many of our interpretations, while plausible, are incorrect. Our awareness of typology is an advance on the blinkered academics tripping over each other on the lower slopes of the mountain of God, but our ignorance of the grammatical rules of biblical typology only make us “illiterate” in a fresh way. If we are intent on using our “new eyes,” we must use both of them, and advance beyond the two-dimensional bungling that got hermeneutics into the current minimalist myopia in the first place.
Arranged in literary chains and spatial networks, biblical symbols communicate much more than mere relationships between things in a “this is that” fashion. Like good jokes and the best literary references, they recapitulate a familiar progression that takes place within a previously-established, and thus recognizable, scenario or tableau. This hybrid “liturgy-literature” technique is what makes the references so powerful, and the jokes so amusing, especially when our expectations—based on the source material—are defied in some way. Jesus did this all the time. But we, in our ignorance, have few expectations to defy.
Structure
The Word of God, like the creation, is alive. It is not static but dynamic. We cannot understand a biblical symbol if it is isolated and inanimate, observed like a specimen preserved in a lab or a museum. This means that a “dictionary” of Bible symbols will only be of limited help.
The only way to truly interpret a symbol is to observe its behavior over time in the wild. How does it relate to its environment? How does it relate to other symbols within that environment?
These are all principles that sound biblical theologians agree upon, but, like playing the violin, the gap between doing it and doing it well can be worlds apart. When it comes to our practice, too often we sound like a midnight catfight instead of “The Lark Ascending.”
As mentioned, Bible symbolism is not a game of Snap. It is a safari, so the “game” is alive and kicking. Like the animals on Noah’s ark, even the type-and-antitype “pairs” that we successfully recognize do not exist in isolation, but among other “pairs.” These symbols live, grow, and coexist within environments that function as literary ecosystems.
For example, not only must we identify what each item of furniture in the Tabernacle meant, we must also identify how they all relate to each other, both as one-to-one items and also as a complete architectural “sequence.”
In this way, the symbols appear, and travel, in “family groups.” These groups even have “dwellings,” whether wild (as Creation) or domesticated (as Temple). Again, like the animals on Noah’s ark, they are “housed” and arranged within suitable literary structures. These structures are given to us as sequences in the text, either in symmetrical chevrons like the overall structure of the book of Isaiah, or in living temple pillars as sacred literary “trees.”
The Pentateuch is full of architecture, and while the long and tedious instructions for the Tabernacle come to mind, the original blueprint for all of the sacred houses in the Bible is the pattern of construction in Genesis 1. Indeed, the Creation Week is the heptamerous sequence that undergirds the sevenfold pattern of the Book of Isaiah.
While there are many sevenfold sequences within the prophecy, there are also many tenfold sequences, and these all allude to the Ten Commandments in some way.
The Ten Commandments themselves—according to the Jewish scroll division—are five dyads that correspond to the five Books of Moses. And those five books themselves correspond to the three domains of the Tabernacle with the two “barriers” that separated them.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, do not worry. All of these patterns are variations on the same blueprint, and they will be presented and explained in the next chapter. And even if you do not grasp them entirely at that point, they will become very familiar through repeated exposure as you read through the commentary. The priceless bonus is that these structures are ubiquitous in God’s Word, so after you have become accustomed to their use in Isaiah, you will begin to see them everywhere else as you read and study.
Once we have a handle on the structural rubric that governs the prophecy, we will understand why Isaiah uses the images that he does, and why he puts them where he does.
In most cases, the “placement” of an item within a particular literary architecture is what reveals its full meaning. Occasionally, the image that is placed is the total opposite of what we should expect, and this sort of ironic inversion is another device that the prophets used to make their point. But if we do not know what to expect, we do not “get the joke.”
Polemic
Symbols are objects that exist in places, but they also exist in time. So, additionally, we must observe how the symbols and their environments change, develop, and mature. This means we must read cumulatively, keeping in mind what we have read as we continue to read. This is how we ready any book of the Bible, and indeed any book. But we must treat the Bible as a single work if we are to better understand it.
An obvious symbolic environment to “track” through the Bible is the Sanctuary of God. The fundamental blueprint of the Garden of Eden (as nature) became a man-made Tabernacle (as culture), which was then itself enlarged and augmented over time, from glory to glory, until the spiritual Jerusalem—a temple-city—was revealed at the Bible’s end.
But when we are reading the prophets, we are also dealing with polemic, a word derived from the Greek word for war. As the Bible continues, the symbols are modified, rearranged, and repurposed for new situations, including literary herem, that is, as rhetoric designed for spiritual war—not the circumcision of walled cities like Jericho but the hearts of rebellious men and women. The prophetic books were verbal “attacks” upon the status quo, and the prophet’s tongue was a two-edge sword, reminding the hearers of both the curses and the blessings of the covenant. This is why Isaiah bore both condemnation to the oppressor and comfort to the oppressed. It is also why Jesus proclaimed blessings upon those whose hearts were humbled by the Law of Moses (Matthew 5:2-12) and curses upon the religious hypocrites whose circumcision was only outward (Matthew 23).
As legal “avengers,” the prophets weaponized images from the Torah to shoot as flaming arrows at those who had exalted themselves against God and misled and oppressed His people.
Such totalitarians are fragile because their stolen power is never grounded in reality. Like The Emperor’s New Clothes, the official narrative is as vulnerable to a single dissenting voice as a balloon is to a tiny pin. In this way, the words of the prophets were the political cartoons or “internet memes” of the ancient world, serving as an effective means of using pointed jester-jokes to bypass the gatekeepers of those in power.5
The word “meme” derives from “mimetic” which means to copy or imitate. In a biological context, it refers to the copying of genes, so in some sense, prophetic literature, like modern memes, was also intended to “go viral.”
The most concentrated example of prophetic “meme warfare” is the book of Revelation. All of the images have a long history. Every single detail is a hyperlink to previous Scriptures and thus is, in some sense, a joke.
The jibes from the prophets were not effective because they were straightforward pronouncements of judgment, but because they were ridicule rooted in Israel’s history. By employing Scriptural allusions as Bible memes, the prophet’s barbs not only stuck in people’s minds, they also brought previous events to bear upon the crimes of the day.
A Bible history meme says, “And look how that turned out!” The weight of this history could be compressed into a typologically loaded shorthand and delivered with a few strokes of a pen. The allusions drew upon the collective cultural subconscious and, thus, easily captured the imaginations of the people—especially their targets, whose minds would have been haunted by the application of famous conquests and catastrophes as threats to their own kingdoms.
Structured in the same way as jokes, these weaponized symbols are complex, because one must be familiar with the entire canonical repertoire up to that point to understand each reprise. But for those who were “in the know,” this complexity did not dull their impact in any way. In fact, it magnified the collateral damage because it worked like a cluster bomb, hitting many related points at once—every location within whatever networked symbolic environment the prophet had chosen to employ.
Memes today work with the same nebulous precision, making a direct retort from the target impossible. Since the length of Isaiah’s prophecy was an extended act of meme warfare—a deliberate, relentless campaign of “truth bomblets” in a strategy of symbolic saturation—by the end of the lesson every mouth would be stopped. By this legal notice, soft hearts would be softened, and hard hearts hardened, so God could be fully—and more obviously—justified in both His goodness and His severity (Revelation 22:11-12).
This is the purpose of God speaking through any prophet and, as we shall see, Isaiah is no exception.
Further reading: The Unity of Isaiah: One Body in Sickness and in Health.
Thanks to Jared Leonard for his continued, tireless polishing of my work.
The Shape of Isaiah: A Covenant-literary Analysis will be available in 2022. If you would like to support this project you can become a subscriber or make a one-off donation via Paypal to mbull [at] bullartistry.com.au
- Michael Bull, The End of Israel: Jesus, Paul & AD70, 257-258.
- Peter J. Leithart, Interpretation and Jokes, Leithart blog, April 2, 2005.
- Peter J. Leithart, Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture, 139.
- For more discussion see T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, 47-50.
- For more discussion, see “Apocalyptic Meme War” in The End of Israel.
