The Poetic Vision of Isaiah

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to meet Robert Carroll’s challenge to account for and imaginatively interpret the visionary quality of Isaiah’s poetry. It begins with a discussion of biblical poetry and eschews formalistic definitions, showing how parallelism, like other formal devices, is a technique for generating meaning. It then considers the visionary quality of the poetry, as a divine message, and the trajectory from the vision to the book. The book can be read and reread in many different ways, and it tells several intertwining stories, all centering on the aporia of the exile and the hope of restoration. The chapter focuses on one of these stories, that of the family romance, which concerns especially issues of gender, including the gender of God.