Watch your back: ruminations on the biblical poetics of hope.

And it shall come to pass in the behind-the-back days ..."--Isaiah 2:2

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It's About Time

There are hints in the literature of the Ancient Near East of an orientation to time quite different from our modern, Western version. (1) Americans are especially prone to talk glibly of "facing the future," and of "turning our backs on the past." We value foresight over hindsight. We forecast, foresee, predict, and prognosticate. We believe in progress towards a goal that is out there in front of us somewhere. We talk as if we were sitting on a train, facing the front, able to anticipate what is to come around every corner.

In contrast, there are expressions from Ancient Near Eastern texts that seem to reflect a cultural construction of time flowing from back to front. (2) If we imagine a person from such a culture traveling on that same train, they would be seated facing the back, watching the landscape flow by, catching glimpses out the window of where they have already been. There is an echo of this conception of time in the temporal phrase introducing Isaiah's vision of an ideal Jerusalem (quoted above). The term usually translated "last" or "latter" ('acharit) is an abstract noun indicating "that which comes after," or "that which results from." It is cognate with words designating the back part, behind, or end of something. There is a convergence of spatial and temporal signifiers reflected in the root word pointing both to that which is located behind, at the backmost extremity, and that which is to take place afterwards, in the future (temporal), or as an outcome of (i.e., logically after). (3) And so it is in the "behind-the-back days," according to the prophet, that the holy mountain will be (re)established, when many peoples will stream to Zion to obtain instruction in Torah.

The concept of time is notoriously difficult to explicate, much less to reconstruct from scattered references in ancient texts. But if such expressions do provide clues to underlying cultural conceptions, the notion of time flowing from back to front correlates well with human experience. We can't really see into the future. All we can "see" are the reflexes and vestiges of what has already happened. We catch glimpses of events that have taken place in the past, images preserved in individual and corporate memory which in panoramic perspective begin to suggest emerging patterns that have shaped us and are likely to continue into the future. In order to understand the present then, and anticipate the future, it is necessary to keep looking foreword at the past, spreading out before us as an emerging landscape. It is this orientation to time, the prophet's temporal construction implies, that enables us to glance over the shoulder, backwards towards the future.

Of course we can't really "see" the past either. We construct it out of the fractured human experiences that happen in fits and starts outside the coherence of ritual time, ritual space, and ritual action. And here finally we begin to approach the complexity of eschatological language and the biblical poetics of hope. It is a commonplace of prophetic diction in the Bible to refer to events that will unfold in the future. The things to come are predicated on the patterns of God's past acts--whether for judgment or deliverance. There are former things that have come to pass, things of old that lie out there before us (qedem). There are also new things that God is about to do, things that are declared ahead of time to those who will listen (Is 42:23). These are the behind-the-back days.

Since at least the 8th century oracles of Amos biblical prophets have given voice to the expectation that the God who created the world, entered into covenant, gave the Torah, and delivered the people from destruction, is about to act again. The coming Day of the LORD was anticipated as a time of deliverance and vindication, when Yahweh would defeat the enemies of Israel. In his prediction of the fall of the Northern Kingdom, Amos turned such expectations on their head, declaring a coming day that would mean darkness rather than light (Am 5:18-20). Prophetic hope does not offer cheap comfort but challenges false hopes, and is never divorced from covenant obligation.

Across the centuries, the biblical poetics of hope have inspired generations of the faithful to "see" beyond the limitations of their own experience, to reconstruct meaning in spite of suffering, and to prepare for the redemption soon to come. Eschatological expectation is an episode in this poetics, built upon the theological foundation of patriarchal promise, covenant loyalty, prophetic pathos, and prolonged divine silences. Eschatology is the heart and soul of religion stretched out in linear form. We both yearn for and dread the behind-the-back days.

Eschatological concerns encompass a variety of beliefs and expectations, each with an implicit ethos. The careful attention devoted in contemporary scholarship to the descriptive language of eschatology has helped us to understand its development and its impact. Generally speaking, eschatological expectation looks toward the end of history brought on by divine intervention. In apocalyptic eschatology the end that is envisioned is a conflagration out of which new orders of heaven and earth will emerge. Messianism often contains eschatological and even apocalyptic elements, but focuses on the idea of a coming universal reign of God coterminous with a transformed community of faith.

Beyond the early Christian conflation of messianic titles for Jesus lie disparate strands of Jewish tradition. Beyond the sloppy semantics and persistent power of popular contemporary (sic!) eschatology (all parasitic on Darby's dispensationalist millennialism), there are ambiguities to be wrestled with. Some are inherent in the ancient texts themselves. But as important as the correct literary and ideological classification of eschatological texts might be, it should not obscure the deeper, underlying continuum of prophetic hope of which it represents a particular development. (4) We must not subordinate the ethical thrust of eschatological speech to the correct delineation of its literary or rhetorical features. It is all about how we are to live in the world today--whether engaged or withdrawn, whether naive or calculating, whether empowered or defenseless.

If we look in particular at the so-called servant songs and explicitly messianic passages of Isaiah of the exile, what we immediately notice is not so much the when and the how of future deliverance, but rather the Who. There is an insistent proclamation that Yahweh alone is the creator and sustainer, the savior of Israel and the only legitimate God of the earth. It is a declaration that is meant both to refute the illicit worship of idols and to instill confidence in the one deliverer they have known. One might also discern in these assertions a response to those of the exilic community who seemed to conclude from recent history that Yahweh no longer gives a damn (40:27).

Some of the temporal references in Second Isaiah emphasize the suddenness with which reversals of fortune will happen (Is 47:9, 11). Others are used to emphasize Yahweh's exclusive knowledge of the former things and their outcome ('acharit), as well as the things to come (41:21-24; 43:9).

Messianism builds on the traditions of anointed kings and priests who mediated God's grace. There is a chosen servant of Yahweh who will bring forth justice to the nations. There are messengers who announce the good news of coming redemption. There are anointed ones who are supported and guided by Yahweh. One of these is even identified as Cyrus, the Persian ruler who was creating a new world order. (5)

The terminological development of messianic expectations in the Qumran community reflects traditions of the royal ideology associated with the Davidic dynasty. Terms like "righteous scion" (Jer 23:5), servant, and king, point to the nationalistic hopes that part of the exilic community embraced. For some, a legitimate royal heir was expected to appear who would re-establish the dynasty and re-establish the body politic upon classical foundations of justice and righteousness.

But for many already in the intertestamental period, messianic hopes, though still Davidic in expression, became disconnected from the politics of revolt, and even from history itself. For them, the expected transformations of the messianic age would supercede the exigencies of politics and economics. These familiar images were taken up into Christianity and became part of Christian eschatological hopes. Not only were traditionally accepted messianic texts applied by those in the early church to Jesus, but also texts that had not been interpreted as messianic before.

The biblical poetics of hope often uses temporal expressions metaphorically to point to qualitative aspects of human experience. The disparity between a generation's perception of reality and the metanarrative it has inherited may lead to mimetic crisis (6) and a heightened sensitivity to the rumblings of tectonic shifts to come in the culture. Now ceases to be just now and takes on the character of that which is to come. The already-but-not-yet-ness of eschatological expectation pervades every aspect of life.

One of the hallmarks of such an age is the interpretation of current events through the reading of old texts in new ways. Note the rubrics used in the gospel of Matthew to introduce OT quotations:

       "All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord
       through the prophet" (1:22; 2:15, 23)
       "For so it has been written by the prophet:" (2:5)
       "Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet
       Jeremiah:" (2:17)
       "This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said:"
       (3:3; 4:14)
       "It is written" (4:4, 6, 7, 10)

And don't forget Peter's Pentecostal sermon, answering charges of intemperate drunkenness with a clarifying midrash: "No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel" (Acts 2:16). The insistent relevance of the old to the new may lead to the deconstruction of conventional literary forms. For example, the exilic voice that cried out in coherent poetic balance:

        In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
        Make straight in the desert a highway for our God (Isaiah 40:3),

is transformed at some point into a prophetic reference to the wild and woolly Baptizer,

        The voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
        Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight [lacuna
        matata!]. (7)

What Time Is It?

Was it Yogi Berra who said "The future isn't what it used to be?" Or was that the prophet Haggai's complaint? It is virtually a truism for the modern skeptic that all prophecy is self-fulfilling prophecy. It is just a matter of manipulating the paraphernalia of whatever verbal divination system is in vogue in such a way that the illusion of fulfillment can be maintained. Our disbelief has been suspended for so long that we forgot we ever had the capacity to believe.

The politics of promise is about persuasion. When things appear bleak, the prophet reminds us that we are in God's hands. When there are those who offer false hope, chirping "Peace, peace" while disaster looms, the visionary messenger must agitate the complacent. It is a form of argument, a felicitous (or infelicitous) speech act subject to the proper conditions whereby it convinces, comforts, inspires, explains, moves to action.

The inner logic of prophetic hope is faith in a God who has acted on behalf of the community in the past, who gives guidance for how to live, who sends messengers to be heeded, who leads through trial and prosperity. It is the loss of that faith that leads to alternative forms of hope, to idolatrous worship of gods fashioned by our own hands.

As I write this we have entered another Advent season, part of the Christian cycle of eschatological reenactment. We manufacture the pregnant expectation of that greatest generation, and reignite the expectation of the second advent, the one remaining a stranger to us. The language of prophetic hope is not so much quantitative as qualitative. The perceived proximity of a given age to "the end" gives expression not just to an expectation, a hope, a yearning for change. It often provides the very impetus to meet and embrace and bring about the successive transformations of culture we call, in retrospect, history.

Returning finally to the hymn of the vision of Jerusalem in the behind-the-back days with which we began these ruminations, we can appreciate anew the qualitative impulse of its vision. In the behind-the-back days the city on the hill will be re-established. Nations and peoples will stream to Zion to be instructed in Torah. Yahweh himself will arbitrate among nations, since to be human and live in community is to have conflicts. The Jerusalem of the days to come does not promise a utopian paradise in which we all just get along. Rather, the master mediator is there among us, helping us to resolve our conflicts, to find nonviolent ways of living together in spite of our differences. The outcome ('acharit!) of this is not so much a principled pacifism as an atrophy of interest in the anachronism of war. Discarded sword blades and spear tips get recycled for use in field, orchard and vineyard. Since nations no longer take up arms against each other, it makes more sense to study each other's languages and cultures and religions. The faculty of the war colleges will be the first to redo their curricula. They will call it: Walking in the Light of Yahweh.

How? we ask. When? That is the fixation of modern futurity. But the real key to prophetic hope is the Who. Look for the new thing that is older than the hills. Prepare now for the coming days. Transformation is afoot. Peer ahead into the past--and watch your back.

Notes

1. With all due respect to James Barr's careful and persistent warnings about moving too quickly from terminology to the cultural constructs of thought that we imagine must have informed them. I have tried to keep my claims modest and suggestive. At the same time, surely texts offer us the opportunity to speculate about the differences between ourselves and those "others" who spoke and thought differently.

2. I was first made aware of this notion of the ANE conception of time by my teacher, Piotr Steinkeller.

3. TDOT, I, 207-212. Note also the cognate reference to the Mediterranean as the "Western" sea (Dt 11:4 et al.), i.e., that body of water "behind," and the Salt Sea as the sea "in front" (Joel 2:20). These designations indicate an ANE geographical orientation analogous to the temporal orientation of "the last days."

4. I take this point from James Brenneman's article entitled "Making Prophecy Come True," in Apocalypticism and Millennialism, ed. Loren Johns (Pandora Press/Herald Press), p. 24.

5. Liz Fried has recently contextualized this rather strange designation for a foreign king. Since Yahweh is the author of order, the ruler whose decreed policy allowed the exiles to return home and rebuild their temple is portrayed as exercising legitimate rule as an anointed instrument of Yahweh's purpose, "though [he] did not know me" (45:4-5). Cyrus was welcomed with similar approbations in Mesopotamia and Egypt as well. BR, 10/2003.

6. Following Girard's notions of mimetic conflict and sacrificial crisis.

7. Mark 1:3. Granted, the gospel writers uniformly quote the Greek Bible here instead of the Hebrew. No surprise there. So who ruined the poetry? And why?