Wednesday Bible Study: It gets complicated

Chapter 14 contains some famous language, but it's pretty much universally misrepresented. First, I need to correct what was apparently a mistake in my previous post. When Isaiah refers to Babylon, as he does here and in the previous chapter, he really means Assyria. Sargon, the Assyrian king, established his throne in Babylon in 710 BC. At the time, Babylon was a tributary kingdom of Assyria. The tables were turned later. So this probably was written at about that time. 

The entity described beginning at verse 12, called Lucifer in the KJV and "morning star" in the NIV, is presumed by Christians to be Satan. However, this is actually a reference to a Canaanite myth of the gods Morning Star and Dawn -- two different beings -- who fall from heaven as a result of a rebellion. Isaiah also prophecies that other peoples will become slaves of Judah. That never happened, obviously. Finally, Isaiah warns the Philistines, Judah's perennial enemy, not to celebrate the death of king Azaz, because Judah is going to defeat them anyway. So, once again, this is all about current events in the Levant. It is not about a Messiah coming 700 years later.

14 The Lord will have compassion on Jacob;
    once again he will choose Israel
    and will settle them in their own land.
Foreigners will join them
    and unite with the descendants of Jacob.
² Nations will take them
    and bring them to their own place.
And Israel will take possession of the nations
    and make them male and female servants in the Lord’s land.
They will make captives of their captors
    and rule over their oppressors.

³ On the day the Lord gives you relief from your suffering and turmoil and from the harsh labor forced on you, ⁴ you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon:

How the oppressor has come to an end!
    How his fury^[a] has ended!
⁵ The Lord has broken the rod of the wicked,
    the scepter of the rulers,
⁶ which in anger struck down peoples
    with unceasing blows,
and in fury subdued nations
    with relentless aggression.
⁷ All the lands are at rest and at peace;
    they break into singing.
⁸ Even the junipers and the cedars of Lebanon
    gloat over you and say,
“Now that you have been laid low,
    no one comes to cut us down.”

⁹ The realm of the dead below is all astir
    to meet you at your coming;
it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you—
    all those who were leaders in the world;
it makes them rise from their thrones—
    all those who were kings over the nations.
¹⁰ They will all respond,
    they will say to you,
“You also have become weak, as we are;
    you have become like us.”
¹¹ All your pomp has been brought down to the grave,
    along with the noise of your harps;
maggots are spread out beneath you
    and worms cover you.

¹² How you have fallen from heaven,
    morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
    you who once laid low the nations!
¹³ You said in your heart,
    “I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
    above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
    on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.^[b]
14 I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
    I will make myself like the Most High.”
¹⁵ But you are brought down to the realm of the dead,
    to the depths of the pit.

¹⁶ Those who see you stare at you,
    they ponder your fate:
“Is this the man who shook the earth
    and made kingdoms tremble,
¹⁷ the man who made the world a wilderness,
    who overthrew its cities
    and would not let his captives go home?”

¹⁸ All the kings of the nations lie in state,
    each in his own tomb.
¹⁹ But you are cast out of your tomb
    like a rejected branch;
you are covered with the slain,
    with those pierced by the sword,
    those who descend to the stones of the pit.
Like a corpse trampled underfoot,
²⁰     you will not join them in burial,
for you have destroyed your land
    and killed your people.

Let the offspring of the wicked
    never be mentioned again.
²¹ Prepare a place to slaughter his children
    for the sins of their ancestors;
they are not to rise to inherit the land
    and cover the earth with their cities.

²² “I will rise up against them,”
    declares the Lord Almighty.
“I will wipe out Babylon’s name and survivors,
    her offspring and descendants,”
declares the Lord.
²³ “I will turn her into a place for owls
    and into swampland;
I will sweep her with the broom of destruction,”
    declares the Lord Almighty.

²⁴ The Lord Almighty has sworn,

“Surely, as I have planned, so it will be,
    and as I have purposed, so it will happen.
²⁵ I will crush the Assyrian in my land;
    on my mountains I will trample him down.
His yoke will be taken from my people,
    and his burden removed from their shoulders.”

²⁶ This is the plan determined for the whole world;
    this is the hand stretched out over all nations.
²⁷ For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him?
    His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?

A Prophecy Against the Philistines

²⁸ This prophecy came in the year King Ahaz died:

²⁹ Do not rejoice, all you Philistines,
    that the rod that struck you is broken;
from the root of that snake will spring up a viper,
    its fruit will be a darting, venomous serpent.
³⁰ The poorest of the poor will find pasture,
    and the needy will lie down in safety.
But your root I will destroy by famine;
    it will slay your survivors.

³¹ Wail, you gate! Howl, you city!
    Melt away, all you Philistines!
A cloud of smoke comes from the north,
    and there is not a straggler in its ranks.
³² What answer shall be given
    to the envoys of that nation?
“The Lord has established Zion,
    and in her his afflicted people will find refuge.”

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 14:4 Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint and Syriac; the meaning of the word in the Masoretic Text is uncertain.
2. Isaiah 14:13 Or of the north; Zaphon was the most sacred mountain of the Canaanites.

For your enlightenment, presenting Mr. Fallows

 He's giving this away, so read it. After discussing the sanewashing  compulsion of the corporate media:

But let’s move beyond the things that editors and headline-writers might directly influence. Let’s move on to the much larger threat—which is apparently beyond control by anyone who might want to change it in a positive way. That threat is the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes… or any other terms to describe the gulf between “reality” as human beings have evolved to understand it, and the artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens. . . .

In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience2; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News, as those I’ve linked to above all argue. Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did.3 People had “heard” that the economy was terrible and no one could find a job and illegal immigrants were everywhere and Kamala Harris was an affirmative-action cipher. And they could see that eggs were expensive—and that Donald Trump had come up, fist-first, after the bullet whizzed by. No contest.

The result explains a lot about these past week in public affairs. If nothing matters, if everything is terrible, if elections are just about swapping one liar for another, why not just shake it all up? Or burn it all down? At least it will be entertaining along the way.

 

I know this leaves people feeling helpless.  Don't. Keep communicating. Keep organizing. The truth will penetrate more minds in time. I'm still working at it. So should you.

Sunday Sermonette: Cut and paste?

Chapter 12 is a mercifully fairly brief song of praise, something that could have been found in Psalms. Whether the original author decided to insert it at this point, or some scribe did later on, we cannot know. But generally, the book seems to be something of a patchwork -- we've seen what look like variant versions of metaphors or prophecies. 

 

Although I haven't come across any scholarship that affirms it, to me it seems pretty obvious that Chapter 13 is a later interpolation, written after the Babylonian exile along with the latter part of the book. Since they tacked stuff on at the end, they could just as easily have stuck this in the middle. Up until now, Isaiah has been talking about the Assyrian empire; he wouldn't have had any reason even to think about Babylon, which at the time was under Assyrian dominance. It wasn't until the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, more than 100 years later, that Babylon overthrew Syrian dominance and then sacked Jerusalem and took the Judean royalty into captivity. Since this has the Medes (Persians) as the instruments of Babylon's fall it must have been written in the post-exilic period.

12 In that day you will say:

“I will praise you, Lord.
    Although you were angry with me,
your anger has turned away
    and you have comforted me.
² Surely God is my salvation;
    I will trust and not be afraid.
The Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my defense^[a];
    he has become my salvation.”
³ With joy you will draw water
    from the wells of salvation.

⁴ In that day you will say:

“Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name;
    make known among the nations what he has done,
    and proclaim that his name is exalted.
⁵ Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things;
    let this be known to all the world.
⁶ Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion,
    for great is the Holy One of Israel among you.”

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 12:2 Or song

 

13 A prophecy against Babylon that Isaiah son of Amoz saw:

² Raise a banner on a bare hilltop,
    shout to them;
beckon to them
    to enter the gates of the nobles.
³ I have commanded those I prepared for battle;
    I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath—
    those who rejoice in my triumph.

⁴ Listen, a noise on the mountains,
    like that of a great multitude!
Listen, an uproar among the kingdoms,
    like nations massing together!
The Lord Almighty is mustering
    an army for war.
⁵ They come from faraway lands,
    from the ends of the heavens—
the Lord and the weapons of his wrath—
    to destroy the whole country.

⁶ Wail, for the day of the Lord is near;
    it will come like destruction from the Almighty.^[a]
7 Because of this, all hands will go limp,
    every heart will melt with fear.
⁸ Terror will seize them,
    pain and anguish will grip them;
    they will writhe like a woman in labor.
They will look aghast at each other,
    their faces aflame.

⁹ See, the day of the Lord is coming
    —a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—
to make the land desolate
    and destroy the sinners within it.
¹⁰ The stars of heaven and their constellations
    will not show their light.
The rising sun will be darkened
    and the moon will not give its light.
¹¹ I will punish the world for its evil,
    the wicked for their sins.
I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty
    and will humble the pride of the ruthless.
¹² I will make people scarcer than pure gold,
    more rare than the gold of Ophir.
¹³ Therefore I will make the heavens tremble;
    and the earth will shake from its place
at the wrath of the Lord Almighty,
    in the day of his burning anger.

¹⁴ Like a hunted gazelle,
    like sheep without a shepherd,
they will all return to their own people,
    they will flee to their native land.
¹⁵ Whoever is captured will be thrust through;
    all who are caught will fall by the sword.
¹⁶ Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes;
    their houses will be looted and their wives violated.

¹⁷ See, I will stir up against them the Medes,
    who do not care for silver
    and have no delight in gold.
¹⁸ Their bows will strike down the young men;
    they will have no mercy on infants,
    nor will they look with compassion on children.
¹⁹ Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms,
    the pride and glory of the Babylonians,^[b]
will be overthrown by God
    like Sodom and Gomorrah.
²⁰ She will never be inhabited
    or lived in through all generations;
there no nomads will pitch their tents,
    there no shepherds will rest their flocks.
²¹ But desert creatures will lie there,
    jackals will fill her houses;
there the owls will dwell,
    and there the wild goats will leap about.
²² Hyenas will inhabit her strongholds,
    jackals her luxurious palaces.
Her time is at hand,
    and her days will not be prolonged.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 13:6 Hebrew Shaddai
2. Isaiah 13:19 Or Chaldeans

1.  

Psychoanalysis

As the president elect is manifestly insane, it behooves us to try to diagnose his motives and logic. Robert Kennedy Junior as secretary of HHS,  Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense are all completely ludicrous. While the expectation that they would be toadies of the Great Pumpkin may be a factor, it would be possible to find flunkies who are otherwise less absurd. 

In my unprofessional opinion, the real reason for these preposterous nominations is twofold. One is just the enjoyment of transgression and outrage. He can get away with anything, and that's fun. The second and probably more important motive is to force the Republican senators to demonstrate their absolute fealty by voting to turn the federal government into a clown car. I do believe that is a mistake, because it will be possible to find three or four Republican senators who won't go along with such a travesty. 

That's what gives me hope. The guy is so sick at soul that it renders him incompetent. Yes, slightly more than half the voters apparently like the idea of lunatic as president, but now that he's gotten the votes, he has to wield power. I'm thinking maybe he can't manage that.

Wednesday Bible Study: Let's be clear about what this really says

Chapter 11 is about the clearest messianic prophecy in Isaiah. Again, it is very clear that it is about the restoration of the power and greatness of the Kingdom of Judah. A couple of notes:

Jesse was David's father, so this is about a future king of Judah and it assumes that the Davidian dynasty will continue.

Ephraim is one of the 10 "lost tribes of Israel," in other words a synechdoche for tribes that inhabited the northern kingdom and were dispersed by the Assyrian conquest. The idea in verse 13 is that the enmity between Judah and the northern tribes will end. They will return from exile, the Davidian king, they will return from exile, and they will join with Judah to conquer the other nations of the region, the same old Moabites and Philistines and Edomites and Ammonites they were warring with throughout the Deuteronomistic history. And no, this has nothing to do with the appearance of some guy 700 years later who will do none of what is prophesied here.

The "gulf of the Egyptian sea" is the Red Sea. So far it has not been dried up.

11 A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
    from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
² The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
    the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
    the Spirit of counsel and of might,
    the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
³ and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
    or decide by what he hears with his ears;
⁴ but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
    with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
    with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
⁵ Righteousness will be his belt
    and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

⁶ The wolf will live with the lamb,
    the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling^[a] together;
    and a little child will lead them.
⁷ The cow will feed with the bear,
    their young will lie down together,
    and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
    and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
⁹ They will neither harm nor destroy
    on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

¹⁰ In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious. ¹¹ In that day the Lord will reach out his hand a second time to reclaim the surviving remnant of his people from Assyria, from Lower Egypt, from Upper Egypt, from Cush,^[b] from Elam, from Babylonia,^[c] from Hamath and from the islands of the Mediterranean.

¹² He will raise a banner for the nations
    and gather the exiles of Israel;
he will assemble the scattered people of Judah
    from the four quarters of the earth.
¹³ Ephraim’s jealousy will vanish,
    and Judah’s enemies^[d] will be destroyed;
Ephraim will not be jealous of Judah,
    nor Judah hostile toward Ephraim.
¹⁴ They will swoop down on the slopes of Philistia to the west;
    together they will plunder the people to the east.
They will subdue Edom and Moab,
    and the Ammonites will be subject to them.
¹⁵ The Lord will dry up
    the gulf of the Egyptian sea;
with a scorching wind he will sweep his hand
    over the Euphrates River.
He will break it up into seven streams
    so that anyone can cross over in sandals.
¹⁶ There will be a highway for the remnant of his people
    that is left from Assyria,
as there was for Israel
    when they came up from Egypt.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 11:6 Hebrew; Septuagint lion will feed
2. Isaiah 11:11 That is, the upper Nile region
3. Isaiah 11:11 Hebrew Shinar
4. Isaiah 11:13 Or hostility

 

What happens next?

Here's the thing. You don't know. Neither do I. Here Barry Ritholz is giving advice to investors back in 2016, but he's using decisions by movie studios and the primary elections of that year as his evidentiary basis. 

There is an enormous degree of serendipity and good fortune that goes into a blockbuster movie. The same seems to be true of just about everything in life, from marriage to careers to stock portfolios.

How easy is it to mistake good luck and randomness for skill? How readily do we convince ourselves we understand what is going on, that we are in control of our destinies, when nothing could be further from the truth?

 Consider this election cycle’s primary contests. Bernie Sanders, a 74-year old Jewish Socialist was widely expected to drop out almost immediately. Despite the delegate math, he’s still in the race. And almost all of the pundits had proclaimed — quite loudly, too — that Trump had absolutely no shot at winning the GOP nomination. You were admonished to beware their calls of “Peak Trump” last year, because (say it with me, people) nobody knows nuthin’.

 

I don't know what the next four years will hold, but there are likely to be surprises. One datum I do consider is Dump's obvious and apparently accelerating mental and physical deterioration. I certainly don't look forward to a Vance presidency, but I really don't know what it would be like. Nor do I know what will happen with an insane demented clown trying to be president. But as Ritholtz concludes:

 

We have discussed the futility of soothsayers trying to forecast too many times (see this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this). Attempting to accurately assess complex systems filled with random and interrelated variables, exogenous factors and unknown human behavior is a fool’s errand.

We don’t like to admit it, but nobody knows anything — and that includes me and you.

 

Sunday Sermonette: Summary

Chapter 10 essentially summarizes the basic idea of what Isaiah has been saying. He probably could have cut to the chase sooner. Remember that the Assyrian empire has been rampaging in the Levant. It has already destroyed many small kingdoms, and Judah is threatened. 

1) God must want this to happen. He is using Assyria as his instrument to a) destroy the idolaters in other kingdoms and b) punish the kings of Judah and the people for their errant ways. 

2) Although the Assyrian emperor is an instrument of God, he doesn't understand this. He's just doing it for the sake of his own greed.

3) So, once Assyria has carried out the program, God will turn on Assyria.

4) A remnant of the faithful will then rebuild Judah. 

That's it. However, it didn't exactly happen that way. Assyria did fall to Babylon, but then Judah did as well. Isaiah failed to predict the whole thing with Babylon, a problem that gets cleaned up with later accretions to the book. As I say, I'll skip ahead at some point as this gets repetitive.

10 Woe to those who make unjust laws,
    to those who issue oppressive decrees,
² to deprive the poor of their rights
    and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey
    and robbing the fatherless.
³ What will you do on the day of reckoning,
    when disaster comes from afar?
To whom will you run for help?
    Where will you leave your riches?
⁴ Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives
    or fall among the slain.

Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
    his hand is still upraised.

God’s Judgment on Assyria

⁵ “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger,
    in whose hand is the club of my wrath!
⁶ I send him against a godless nation,
    I dispatch him against a people who anger me,
to seize loot and snatch plunder,
    and to trample them down like mud in the streets.
⁷ But this is not what he intends,
    this is not what he has in mind;
his purpose is to destroy,
    to put an end to many nations.
⁸ ‘Are not my commanders all kings?’ he says.
⁹     ‘Has not Kalno fared like Carchemish?
Is not Hamath like Arpad,
    and Samaria like Damascus?
¹⁰ As my hand seized the kingdoms of the idols,
    kingdoms whose images excelled those of Jerusalem and Samaria—
¹¹ shall I not deal with Jerusalem and her images
    as I dealt with Samaria and her idols?’”

¹² When the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, “I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes. ¹³ For he says:

“‘By the strength of my hand I have done this,
    and by my wisdom, because I have understanding.
I removed the boundaries of nations,
    I plundered their treasures;
    like a mighty one I subdued^[a] their kings.
¹⁴ As one reaches into a nest,
    so my hand reached for the wealth of the nations;
as people gather abandoned eggs,
    so I gathered all the countries;
not one flapped a wing,
    or opened its mouth to chirp.’”

¹⁵ Does the ax raise itself above the person who swings it,
    or the saw boast against the one who uses it?
As if a rod were to wield the person who lifts it up,
    or a club brandish the one who is not wood!
¹⁶ Therefore, the Lord, the Lord Almighty,
    will send a wasting disease upon his sturdy warriors;
under his pomp a fire will be kindled
    like a blazing flame.
¹⁷ The Light of Israel will become a fire,
    their Holy One a flame;
in a single day it will burn and consume
    his thorns and his briers.
¹⁸ The splendor of his forests and fertile fields
    it will completely destroy,
    as when a sick person wastes away.
¹⁹ And the remaining trees of his forests will be so few
    that a child could write them down.

The Remnant of Israel

²⁰ In that day the remnant of Israel,
    the survivors of Jacob,
will no longer rely on him
    who struck them down
but will truly rely on the Lord,
    the Holy One of Israel.
²¹ A remnant will return,^[b] a remnant of Jacob
    will return to the Mighty God.
²² Though your people be like the sand by the sea, Israel,
    only a remnant will return.
Destruction has been decreed,
    overwhelming and righteous.
²³ The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will carry out
    the destruction decreed upon the whole land.

²⁴ Therefore this is what the Lord, the Lord Almighty, says:

“My people who live in Zion,
    do not be afraid of the Assyrians,
who beat you with a rod
    and lift up a club against you, as Egypt did.
²⁵ Very soon my anger against you will end
    and my wrath will be directed to their destruction.”

²⁶ The Lord Almighty will lash them with a whip,
    as when he struck down Midian at the rock of Oreb;
and he will raise his staff over the waters,
    as he did in Egypt.
²⁷ In that day their burden will be lifted from your shoulders,
    their yoke from your neck;
the yoke will be broken
    because you have grown so fat.^[c]

²⁸ They enter Aiath;
    they pass through Migron;
    they store supplies at Mikmash.
²⁹ They go over the pass, and say,
    “We will camp overnight at Geba.”
Ramah trembles;
    Gibeah of Saul flees.
³⁰ Cry out, Daughter Gallim!
    Listen, Laishah!
    Poor Anathoth!
³¹ Madmenah is in flight;
    the people of Gebim take cover.
³² This day they will halt at Nob;
    they will shake their fist
at the mount of Daughter Zion,
    at the hill of Jerusalem.

³³ See, the Lord, the Lord Almighty,
    will lop off the boughs with great power.
The lofty trees will be felled,
    the tall ones will be brought low.
³⁴ He will cut down the forest thickets with an ax;
    Lebanon will fall before the Mighty One.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 10:13 Or treasures; / I subdued the mighty,
2. Isaiah 10:21 Hebrew shear-jashub (see 7:3 and note); also in verse 22
3. Isaiah 10:27 Hebrew; Septuagint broken / from your shoulders

Before I get to Barry . . .

 See this via Dean Baker:

 

Sure, there's still the question of why people believe lies.  We'll get to that.

What I've been trying to formulate . . .

 Morgan Housel, interviewed here by Barry Ritholtz, says it just right: 

It has . . . always been the case that people look back and say, look, it’s not as good as it, as it used to be. . . . I think . . . that people’s incomes grow, but their expectations grow by even more. The average middle-class American today is living a life that John D. Rockefeller could not fathom. They have technologies and medicines that Rockefeller, the richest man in the world in his day, could not fathom. But you cannot say that the average American should feel richer than Rockefeller because that’s not how people’s brains work.

All wealth is just relative to what other people have around you. You measure your life relative to your neighbors and your coworkers and everybody else. And in that situation, you can have a world where people’s incomes grow, their assets grow, and they live a longer life; but if everyone else is doing the same, you don’t feel any better off. . . .

When you realize that all wealth and happiness is just comparison to other people, you realize that the gap between your expectations and reality is really what you want to go for. . . . It used to be that you compared yourself to your neighbors and your coworkers. Now you compare yourself to a curated highlight reel of a bunch of strangers, fake performative lives. And so no matter how well you’re doing, you can open up Instagram and be bombarded with hundreds of people who appear to be doing better and look better and are look happier than you are, even if it’s all BS.

 

When I studied political science in college, a billion years ago, the sages would refer to "the revolution of rising expectations."  We got very frustrated during the recent political campaign by polling and interviewing and focus groups telling us that people thought the U.S. economy was disastrous, even though in reality is was and is the envy of the world. People are feeling oppressed by the price of groceries even though in fact as a percentage of income food in the U.S. is cheaper than it's ever been and the cheapest in the world. But that doesn't matter. 

What does matter is inequality. And that's what progressive politicians need to talk about. 

For those of you who are stressing right now, I'll have another important commentary from Barry next time.

Wednesday Bible Study: I'm carrying on

We'll discuss the state of the nation soon, but I'm not going to stop living my life and Isaiah 9 also happens to be relevant. Again, it's been coopted by Christians who pretend that verse 6 is a prophecy of Jesus. Obviously, it is not any such thing. The author is predicting that Judah will fall on hard times (the second half of the chapter), but that it will be restored to peace, prosperity and glory by a future king. That obviously does not describe the life of Jesus. Presumably the reference is to the same child mentioned in the previous two chapters, which means that his mother is already pregnant, or that he is already alive, and he will take command in young adulthood, i.e. just a couple of decades from the time this is written.

9 ^[a]Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the nations, by the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan—

² The people walking in darkness
    have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
    a light has dawned.
³ You have enlarged the nation
    and increased their joy;
they rejoice before you
    as people rejoice at the harvest,
as warriors rejoice
    when dividing the plunder.
⁴ For as in the day of Midian’s defeat,
    you have shattered
the yoke that burdens them,
    the bar across their shoulders,
    the rod of their oppressor.
⁵ Every warrior’s boot used in battle
    and every garment rolled in blood
will be destined for burning,
    will be fuel for the fire.
⁶ For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given,
    and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
    Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
⁷ Of the greatness of his government and peace
    there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
    and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
    with justice and righteousness
    from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty
    will accomplish this.

The Lord’s Anger Against Israel

⁸ The Lord has sent a message against Jacob;
    it will fall on Israel.
⁹ All the people will know it—
    Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria—
who say with pride
    and arrogance of heart,
¹⁰ “The bricks have fallen down,
    but we will rebuild with dressed stone;
the fig trees have been felled,
    but we will replace them with cedars.”
¹¹ But the Lord has strengthened Rezin’s foes against them
    and has spurred their enemies on.
¹² Arameans from the east and Philistines from the west
    have devoured Israel with open mouth.

Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
    his hand is still upraised.

¹³ But the people have not returned to him who struck them,
    nor have they sought the Lord Almighty.
¹⁴ So the Lord will cut off from Israel both head and tail,
    both palm branch and reed in a single day;
¹⁵ the elders and dignitaries are the head,
    the prophets who teach lies are the tail.
¹⁶ Those who guide this people mislead them,
    and those who are guided are led astray.
¹⁷ Therefore the Lord will take no pleasure in the young men,
    nor will he pity the fatherless and widows,
for everyone is ungodly and wicked,
    every mouth speaks folly.

Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
    his hand is still upraised.

¹⁸ Surely wickedness burns like a fire;
    it consumes briers and thorns,
it sets the forest thickets ablaze,
    so that it rolls upward in a column of smoke.
¹⁹ By the wrath of the Lord Almighty
    the land will be scorched
and the people will be fuel for the fire;
    they will not spare one another.
²⁰ On the right they will devour,
    but still be hungry;
on the left they will eat,
    but not be satisfied.
Each will feed on the flesh of their own offspring^[b]:
²¹     Manasseh will feed on Ephraim, and Ephraim on Manasseh;
    together they will turn against Judah.

Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
    his hand is still upraised.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 9:1 In Hebrew texts 9:1 is numbered 8:23, and 9:2-21 is numbered 9:1-20.
2. Isaiah 9:20 Or arm

A bit of wonkery on polling

I'm going out on a limb here, since we'll know pretty soon whether the presidential election polling has been reasonably accurate. But I will say that if it is correct, and we have a very close election, that will be more luck than science. 

When I was getting my M.A. in environmental policy at Tufts back in the 1980s, I took a course in survey research. We even did our own poll of one of the state elections, I forget which one now. Anyway, that wasn't really so long ago, even though there are people who have been old enough to vote for 20 years now who weren't even born then. So in case you didn't know, or haven't really thought about it lately, in 1984 we weren't ruled by Big Brother, but we also didn't have cell phones. Telephones were plugged into the wall. Also, the area code and first three digits of your phone number specified the location of the wall into which your telephone was plugged -- either a town, or a specific neighborhood within a larger city.

Voicemail did not exist. Answering machines -- tape recorders -- existed but were quite uncommon. There was no called ID either. This means that when the phone rang, people answered it. There was very little telemarketing. There wasn't the technology to do it robotically, so you had to pay people and it wasn't much worth it. People weren't perpetually annoyed by spam calls and they weren't predisposed to blow off pollsters. So we could draw a good quality probability sample of households, stratified by location, and expect people to answer the phone and talk to us. That meant we could confidently assume that the data we started with was representative of the population we wanted to describe.

Those days are gone. Phone numbers don't correspond to locations, most people don't answer the phone when they don't recognize the caller's number. They just assume it's spam and they let it go to voicemail. Obviously, the proclivity to do this is not randomly distributed in the population. The result is that pollsters have no confidence that the people they manage to speak to constitute a representative sample. So they are forced to weight their sample by whatever variables they think will make it more like the actual population of likely voters. Those can only be variables they ask people about, since they have no other way of knowing anything about them, which means that questions like income and education may not get honest answers. They also don't know if their sample is representative in terms of the likelihood of voting, and answers to that question may also be wrong, either because people don't want to answer it honestly or genuinely don't know themselves that well. So they have to try to use respondent characteristics to predict that as well.

So nowadays, pollsters are factoring all sorts of assumptions into their predictions, and by tweaking any or many of them just a bit they could get a very different result. If their result looks a lot different from other reputable pollsters, that will make them nervous and worry that their assumptions are off, so they're likely to recast their predictions to look more like the consensus. That we started out with a near tie and the polls barely moved from that since Harris became the Democratic nominee suggests that what we are seeing is a herd effect. I don't have any way of directly unskewing the polls, but I do believe based on other information that the outcome of this election will not actually be very close. Then maybe the corporate media will decide they need to come up with a different way of covering elections in the future.

Sunday Sermonette: Holy Fornication!

Chapter 8 is extremely weird. Scholars have a lot of opinions about it which I won't bother to discuss, because what's the point? We'll never know what this guy was really thinking or what exactly all this is supposed to be a metaphor for, if that's what it is. One thing we do know for sure is that this is not predicting anything that will happen in the far future concerning somebody named Jesus. It's all about the here and now threat from Assyria. However obscure the imagery, Isaiah is clearly predicting that Judah will suffer depredations from Assyria but if the people remain faithful to Yahweh the kingdom will eventually be restored. 

The similarity between verse 4, concerning Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, and verse 16 of the previous chapter concerning Imanuel is striking:

4 For before the boy knows how to say ‘My father’ or ‘My mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria will be carried off by the king of Assyria.”

13 for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. [by the king of Assyria, specified in the following verse]

Some people think this is a variant of the story in Chapter 7, although the idea that Isaiah himself fathers the boy by boinking a prophetess is unique to Chapter 8. Either way, this is not about Jesus, and the cooptation of this bizarre tale by Christianity is utterly nonsensical.

8 The Lord said to me, “Take a large scroll and write on it with an ordinary pen: Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.”^{[a] 2} So I called in Uriah the priest and Zechariah son of Jeberekiah as reliable witnesses for me. ³ Then I made love to the prophetess, and she conceived and gave birth to a son. And the Lord said to me, “Name him Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. ⁴ For before the boy knows how to say ‘My father’ or ‘My mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria will be carried off by the king of Assyria.”

⁵ The Lord spoke to me again:

⁶ “Because this people has rejected
    the gently flowing waters of Shiloah
and rejoices over Rezin
    and the son of Remaliah,
⁷ therefore the Lord is about to bring against them
    the mighty floodwaters of the Euphrates—
    the king of Assyria with all his pomp.
It will overflow all its channels,
    run over all its banks
⁸ and sweep on into Judah, swirling over it,
    passing through it and reaching up to the neck.
Its outspread wings will cover the breadth of your land,
    Immanuel^[b]!”

⁹ Raise the war cry,^[c] you nations, and be shattered!
    Listen, all you distant lands.
Prepare for battle, and be shattered!
    Prepare for battle, and be shattered!
¹⁰ Devise your strategy, but it will be thwarted;
    propose your plan, but it will not stand,
    for God is with us.^[d]

¹¹ This is what the Lord says to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way of this people:

¹² “Do not call conspiracy
    everything this people calls a conspiracy;
do not fear what they fear,
    and do not dread it.
¹³ The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy,
    he is the one you are to fear,
    he is the one you are to dread.
¹⁴ He will be a holy place;
    for both Israel and Judah he will be
a stone that causes people to stumble
    and a rock that makes them fall.
And for the people of Jerusalem he will be
    a trap and a snare.
¹⁵ Many of them will stumble;
    they will fall and be broken,
    they will be snared and captured.”

¹⁶ Bind up this testimony of warning
    and seal up God’s instruction among my disciples.
¹⁷ I will wait for the Lord,
    who is hiding his face from the descendants of Jacob.
I will put my trust in him.

¹⁸ Here am I, and the children the Lord has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the Lord Almighty, who dwells on Mount Zion.

The Darkness Turns to Light

¹⁹ When someone tells you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? ²⁰ Consult God’s instruction and the testimony of warning. If anyone does not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. ²¹ Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God. ²² Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 8:1 Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz means quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil; also in verse 3.
2. Isaiah 8:8 Immanuel means God with us.
3. Isaiah 8:9 Or Do your worst
4. Isaiah 8:10 Hebrew Immanuel