Isaiah 40:1–2: Reading Royal Commission as a Call for Return Migration in the Early Persian Period

Marshall A Cunningham

doi:10.5508/jhs29444

Abstract

This paper offers a new interpretation of Isa 40:1–2 that takes into account the greater rhetorical project of Isa 40–48 as well as evidence of Judean diaspora life from Āl–Yāḫūdu. Rather than a charge to the divine council, the call to comfort Jerusalem is meant to inspire an embedded community of Judeo-Babylonians to return migrate by hailing them as members of Yahweh's royal procession. This new reading gestures towards broader questions of Judean diaspora identity in the 6th century.

Highlights

In the midst of Cyrus the Great’s rise to power in the second half the 6th century BCE, a fervor began to stir among some members of Judean diaspora communities in Babylonia
Displaced following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, their ancestors had been resettled in Mesopotamia some 50 years prior
In the years following the first waves of resettlement, two generations of Judeans had been born and raised in Babylonia, their only access to Jerusalem and its temple through the memories of their parents and grandparents

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the midst of Cyrus the Great’s rise to power in the second half the 6th century BCE, a fervor began to stir among some members of Judean diaspora communities in Babylonia. The answer, I propose, is the stated audience of the composition, a community of Judeans in the Babylonian diaspora, addressed throughout the text by the epithet ‘Jacob-Israel,’[19] a geographically-rooted sobriquet that is employed to invoke the ancestral homeland of the Author’s Judeo-Babylonian compatriots.[20] As such, these imperatives serve as a kind of royal commissioning They are part of a broader rhetorical strategy meant. This means that just as Yahweh had the power to permit (or perhaps cause) its destruction, so too could he effect its restoration Both Yahweh’s reign as transcendent monarch and his plans to restore Jerusalem are announced straightaway in the composition’s prologue, 40:1–11.32 This section, which makes use of ancient Judean and Babylonian motifs drawn from royal processions and deities returning from exile, presents Yahweh as a conquering hero on the march back to his capital city.[33] In the. In support of this conclusion, see the comments of Blenkinsopp: “This introductory apostrophe amounts to an apologia for the message that is to follow in chs. 40–48 and makes a fitting prologue to these chapters.” Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40–55, 178–87, here 179

33 Christina Ehringer has argued persuasively that the imagery in Isa

49 The single exception to Jacob-Israel’s equation with Yahweh’s

52 Jacob-Israel is also called on to deliver Yahweh’s message in

Findings

CONCLUSION