In today’s chapter Isaiah’s taking on the danger of drunk driving - enraged with the people of Israel and Judah who are so drunk with power and with actual wine, that they lose sight of their responsibleness and endangering themselves and others.
He may not have known of the drunk perils of modern day cars, road rage and the death toll due to drunk drivers (who txt) but the words he uses are as much a perfect fit to today’s careless behavior, as that of the people he talks to 2,800 years ago.
The Kingdom of the North has begun its tragic descent - many are already exiled and the Assyrians are about to return and complete the ruin of the kingdom- but in Samaria the people who remain refuse to see the danger, living in oblivion, drinking all night long. And the same is in Judea. The prophet mocks their stupor, laying in taverns, with “tables that are covered with vomit and shit everywhere.”
But he’s no fool and he knows that they won’t listen to reason or to what he has to say. He even quotes what they are saying to him - drunk gibberish, words that don’t mean anything - unless, perhaps they do?
The drunken ridicule is echoed in this chapter - and he will talk back to them with the exact same words. Translators have struggled to make sense of this peculiar poetic string of words that rings like rhyme in Hebrew and somehow works in English too. Listen to the drinkers of Jerusalem, asking - who is this man to tell us what to do? Are we children? Listen to how he talks —
כִּ֣י צַ֤ו לָצָו֙ צַ֣ו לָצָ֔ו קַ֥ו לָקָ֖ו קַ֣ו לָקָ֑ו זְעֵ֥יר שָׁ֖ם זְעֵ֥יר שָֽׁם׃
“That same mutter upon mutter,
Murmur upon murmur,
Now here, now there!”
Or in another translation:
“Precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little”
Isaiah 28:10
But Isaiah talks back to the rebukers, moving their mockery that he is talking “as one who speaks to that people in a stammering jargon and an alien tongue.”
He answers with the same words - quoting YHWH who will use their very words against them when the city falls and their wine and luck runs out.
Robert Alter reads these cryptic lines from an entirely different perspective, imagining the gibberish for what it is and for its stark rudeness:
“For it is filth-pilth, filth-pilth, vomit-momit, vomit-momit, a little here, a little there.”
Wildly divergent interpretations have been proposed for these worlds [JPS has “mutter upon mutter, Murmur upon murmur, Now here, now there!” - ed.]. The literal sense would seem to be: “precept precept, line line.” But if precepts are at issue here, they are precepts that have been turned into gibberish by these drunkards. The phonetic kinship between tsav, precept or command, and tso’ah, filth or excrement, and between qav, line, and qi’, vomit is surely not accidental. The translation seeks to convey both this correspondence and the effect of gibberish.”
So what he would say to us today - as so many are drinking on deck as the climate gets hotter and the seas rise and the ship is sinking, as drunk driving and power games dictate dramatic shifts and ancient patterns of rebuke, mockery and denial, lies that look away from what the better life for all is all about?
He will continue with these harsh words in the chapters yet to come. And it’s on us to put down our glass, after toasting his wisdom, and listening with respect and love to the words of wisdom that will help us, maybe, get beyond the the bubble of pretending that everything, as is, is perfectly alright. At least it is on to get a designated driver, and to support the ones who have stepped up to make sure we all make it home alive.
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Wow! I never got that translation from my teachers in Israeli high school! This is so much more powerful!! Thank you!