The Disabled Body Politic in Isaiah 3:1, 8

Abstract

Despite recent interest in disability imagery in Isaiah, few interpreters have recognized that Isa 3:1, 8 metaphorically portrays the nation of Judah as a lame person and its officials and elites as its crutch. Verse 1 announces the removal of these leaders due to their malfeasance, and v. 8 describes how Judah and Jerusalem stumble and fall as a result. This metaphor is consistent with other Isaian texts that associate disability with judgment against ineffective leadership (e.g., Isa 29:10; 56:10). It differs remarkably, however, from texts that imagine the transformation of disabled bodies into able ones (e.g., Isa 32:3-4; 35:5-6). Because Isaiah likely regarded dependence on benevolent governance as an innate human characteristic, the removal of disability would be unthinkable within the metaphor in Isa 3:1, 8. Instead, the text locates disability in the interaction between bodies and their environments-an emphasis found in Isa 56:3-5 and Jer 31:8-9 as well-which resonates with newer cultural or social models of disability. By attending carefully to this metaphor, interpreters gain greater understanding of the critique of leadership in this poem and the construction of disability in the book of Isaiah and the wider prophetic corpus.References to disability in the book of Isaiah have received much study of late. Because the language of blindness and deafness in particular recurs throughout Isaiah, it has attracted attention as a potential source of thematic unity for the book.1 More recently, interpreters with interests in disability studies have noted that these texts offer valuable clues to the construction of disability in ancient Israel and within the Hebrew Bible, even if they do not refer to actual disabled persons but instead use disability as a literary topos.2 Despite the proliferation of such studies, an intriguing reference to lameness in Isaiah has received little attention because it is not typically recognized as such, perhaps because its components are separated by seven verses and because it does not employ standard Biblical Hebrew terms for lameness (e.g., pisseah, limping).3 Situated within a prophetic critique of ineffective religious and political leadership, Isa 3:1 and 8 nonetheless depict the nation of Judah as a person who needs, but ultimately loses, assistance to walk: For the Lord Yhwh of hosts will soon remove from Jerusalem and Judah staff and stay.... [Then] Jerusalem will stumble, and Judah will fall.4 In this article, I will show that these verses represent Judah as a disabled person and its leaders as the crutch upon which it depends for mobility.5 This metaphor has affinities with other portrayals of disability in the book of Isaiah, but strikingly it does not present the disabled body as abnormal or in need of correction, as do many other Isaian texts. Rather, the support technology-the crutch-is judged defective and removed after its malfunctioning leads to the nations literal and figurative collapse. In other words, in keeping with what disability theorists call a social or cultural model of disability, my reading suggests that the metaphor locates the problem of limited mobility not in the disabled body itself but in the failure of its structural accommodations, just as Isaiah blames not the people but their failed leaders for Judah's national crisis in Isaiah 3.Because the image cannot be fully understood apart from the larger poem in which it occurs, I begin with a reading of Isa 3:1-15, emphasizing the contrast between its depictions of Judah's elite leaders and the general populace, who suffer from their oppression. This reading is followed by a closer explication of the metaphor in w. 1,8. In the final section, I situate this metaphor in the contexts of Isaian and other prophetic portrayals of disability, informed by some recent studies of disability in the Hebrew Bible. I contrast the metaphor with the uniquely Isaian representation of the future healing of disabilities, while also comparing it to two other prophetic texts that entertain the possibility of environmental accommodation or support for disabled bodies, Jer 31:8-9 and Isa 56:3-5. …