Hey 👋. Bible Sleuth here 🕵️‍♂️. Don’t get all excited 🤩🥳. I wasn’t lost. I didn’t go anywhere. You just didn’t notice me. That’s my job, you know? To blend in 🚶‍♂️🚶‍♂️🚶‍♂️, move in the shadows 👥, be invisible 🫥.  I’ve been watching and waiting, see? I said I’d give you another set of cases, and I’m one of those old-school throw-back types who thinks his word’s his word. I don’t make any promises, and I keep every single one of ’em. Know what I mean 🤨? So here I am. Here we are.

The toughest nuts 🥜 for a sleuth to crack are the Prophets. We sleuths go around wearing out our shoes 🥾🥾 trying to track down 🐾 the pieces of the past 🧩🧩 and put them back together. Meanwhile, these Prophets are busting our ball-bearings turning things the other way around and picturing the future 🎨✍️!

Now these Prophetic works are trickier than crosstown traffic on Thursday at 5, when there are 4️⃣ lanes of cars in 2️⃣-lane streets 🚦. And they’re trickier than you’d expect from a god who is giving a warning 🚧 🚷 so people change their ways and get back to walking his way 👉🚏. The works are mostly poetry, which is already puzzling and exactly what we’re all about. But there’s also a bunch more tangled knots 🪢, loose ends 🧶, and balls of wax 🌔. Here’s a few of the things that a sleuth has to deal with:

👉 Sometimes in these books the Prophets are speaking like they heard the speech from Yahweh beforehand and they are giving it sometime later 🧙‍♂️. But other times they’re speaking as if Yahweh is speaking through them right now 🫨. (Hey, if you don’t remember who Yahweh is, he the god who became “God.” Take a look at the old case file on Psalm 82. I won’t take it personally, but I can’t speak for him. I’m no Prophet, you know.)

👉 Sometimes in the books the Prophets are speaking like they are quoting Yahweh’s exact words 🗣️. But other times they are speaking as if they know how Yahweh feels and what he thinks but they are saying it in their own words 🎤.

👉 The books go on and on without saying when one speech ends and another begins, cascading over each other 🌊, so you completely lose the train of thought 🚃, like a lost tourist 🤳 wandering the chaotic alleys of Naples on a Friday night and wondering, where the heck am I 🗺️, how did I get here 🧭, and what’s it all mean 😩? To make a sticky problem into chewed gum in your kid’s impossibly long and tangled hair, ancient books didn’t have chapters, paragraphs, sentence endings, or any punctuation at all, just a runaway train of words 🚆. So books didn’t give any cues at all about the speeches. A sleuth has to figure them out from the clues that are in the speeches themselves. That’s like having no shred of evidence except what suspects and other “persons of interest” say. Clues without cues, that’s our business, see? (Rashomon 🎥, anyone? Every sleuth has their Rashomon.)

👉 Sometimes the prophecies seem like they are written in the book but existed beforehand. So the book preserves a prophecy. But other times prophecies seem like they were written to begin with, never spoken as a speech. That makes the book itself prophecy and the author of the book a Prophet — and that brings up ✌️big BUTs.

BUT #☝️. The Prophetic books introduce the Prophets as the people who gave the speeches that are in the books, but never as the people who wrote the books. In that case — now follow me here, okay? — the unnamed author of a book is the Prophet and the named prophet that is in the book is just a character in it 😵‍💫.

BUT #✌️. The way that the speeches run into each other so that you cannot tell them apart means that you have no way of knowing which speech means what and what situations it is talking about.

What a holy mess 🙏. Now you get why I disappeared for so long getting this set of cases worked out, right?

So let me show you what we’re up against 🦹‍♂️. The case comes from the Book of Isaiah. The book is named for a prophet named Isaiah who appears in the first half. The scene is Judah-Judea in the 8th–7th centuries BCE. This is when the Assyrians (in northern Iraq) 𒑡𒑰𒑰𒑢 were campaigning against the kingdoms of Israel and Judea to control them (and try to get to Egypt 🐎🐎🐎). Eventually the Assyrians ended the kingdom of Israel and made a new province out of it (720 BCE). They nearly ended Judea too (701 BCE), but it managed to hold on as a kingdom for another 115 years.

Now, in our case, Isaiah is quoting Yahweh who is speaking about the Assyrians. Yahweh is angry that he sent Assyria to punish Israel and Judea by plundering them, but the king of Assyria did two things. ☝️ He did not recognize that Yahweh sent him and made it all about himself. ✌️ He was more violent than Yahweh intended, destroying nations in Syria all along the way. You know the scenario. You’ve seen it once, you’ve seen them all. The hired gun that forgot its place 🔫. It’s a personal insult that the weapon (Assyria) ⚔️ mistakes itself for the warrior (Yahweh) 🥷 who actually wields it. Yahweh can’t have a loose cannon on the loose, so he’ll wreck it. 

For a sleuth like me, what makes this case interesting is its confusing levels of quotation and interruption. A sleuth has to straighten this stuff out. Isaiah quotes Yahweh who quotes the king of Assyria; and Yahweh interrupts the king of Assyria’s speech, Yahweh interrupts his own speech, and Isaiah interrupts Yahweh’s speech. It makes a cascading effect of people talking over each other. You know the types. They’re in boardrooms and in classrooms.

Anyway, I added line-breaks, punctuation, and font-stuff to help organize the text.

Isaiah 10:5–19

5   Whoa! Assyria, rod of My anger!

        And staff — it is in [My] hand! — of My fury!

6   Against a polluting nation I send him

        And over My provoking people I charge him

     To take its spoil and to seize its booty

        And to make it a trampling like street-muck.

7   But he (= Assyria) not rightly plans

          And his heart not rightly designs,

      For to destroy is in his heart

         And to wipe out nations not a few. 

Yahweh speaks in pairs, but most of the time he is repeating himself in other words, sometimes in a way that sharpens the thought.

• Assyria is the “rod of his anger” and “the staff of his fury.” Yahweh has one stick, Assyria, not two; the rod of anger is the staff fury. 
• Assyria is “sent” and “charged,” namely, he is sent with a mission to carry out, not given two missions.
• Assyria is sent against “a polluting nation” and “a provoking people:” their polluting ways are a provocation to Yahweh. Behavior that is toxic and stinks (pollution) provokes a sharp response (snapping your nose and face away with a strong “ugh!”).
• Assyria’s charge is to “take spoil and booty” and “to trample through the streets.” This is one scene, not two. They go through the city and plunder so thoroughly that they wreck the street. They go back and forth as many times as they need to get all the spoils that they want and there is no stopping them.
• The “king of Assyria evilly plans” and his “heart evilly designs:” the evil planning and designing are the same thing.
• He means to “destroy” and to “wipe out.” Same thing, sharper words.

Yahweh also interrupts his own thought, and, weird as it sounds, he does it with the very same thought that he is in the middle of expressing. We all have our share of clients like this. Anyway, he is saying that Assyria is Yahweh’s rod-staff of anger-fury. The image is Yahweh swinging the rod-staff fiercely. But he interrupts the expression “staff of fury,” saying “it is in MY hand:” “And staff — it is in [My] hand! — of My fury!” Mentioning that the rod-staff is in his hand makes the image more vivid. It also emphasizes his main point: he is the one holding the rod-staff, not anyone else, and the rod-staff is certainly not holding itself up. Interrupting himself shows how emotional he is about the point. He can’t finish the thought that he planned without blurting out a more forceful version of it.

(Hey, showing all my cards, which is how this sleuth does things 🃏🃏: The original actually says “it is in their hand,” but that makes no sense. There is no “they” to refer to or that could be holding Yahweh’s rod-staff. Sleuths have to do that sometimes, you know, judge something to be contaminated evidence and figure out what must have been there originally. A sleuth needs an active imagination and the courage 💜 of a lion 🦁.)

OK, so next, Yahweh quotes the king of Assyria’s plans and designs (in red), what the king says to himself about all the conquests in the region that he is enjoying and taking pride in (Syria down to Israel and Judea). Here too Yahweh interrupts the quote with that same thought of his again.

Isaiah 10:5–19

8   For he (= the king of Assyria) says, “Yo! My captains are all (former) kings! 

9      Yo! Like Carchemish is Calno!

     Isn’t like Arpad Hamath?

        Isn’t like Damascus Samaria?”

10  —When My hand seized those other-god kingdoms and their statues

         from Jerusalem and from Samaria!—

11  “Yo! What I have done to Samaria and its gods

           I will do to Jerusalem and its sculptures!”

Yahweh quotes the king of Assyria boasting that each place falls like another before it did as he marches south down the Levant. When Yahweh gets to where the king of Assyria says that he captured Samaria capital of Israel and will go on to capture Jerusalem capital of Judea, Yahweh blurts out in the middle that it is his hand that wields Assyria, his hand that stretched from Samaria and from Jerusalem all the way to Assyria to bring the king and wield him.

Here are a couple more pieces of the puzzle that sleuths get, or at least they ought to.

• Yahweh lives in the capitals of two kingdoms at once, Samaria and Jerusalem. He does not say that he lives in the sky above those kingdoms and reached to Assyria from up there. His arm reached from Samaria and from Jerusalem. This is a common idea in those times, that a god can live in two places and be in each at the same time: Yahweh-of-Samaria, as one jug has written on it 🏺, and Yahweh-of-Teman, as another jug has 🏺.
• The king of Assyria says he took Samaria’s gods and expects to take Jerusalem’s sculptures. These are all idols 🗿. This is a common idea too, that gods inhabit sculptures, “idols,” and that kings capture them to control the peoples they took them from.
• Now get this. The speech has to be imagined because there wasn’t one Assyrian king who captured all those places in one continuous campaign! King Sargon captured Samaria, and twenty years later King Sennacherib wrecked Judea and besieged Jerusalem. In this text, Yahweh collapses separate campaigns and kings all into a single event with a single king.

In the next part, 2️⃣ things happen. ☝️ Yahweh continues quoting the king of Assyria’s arrogance and he elaborates on what he feels about it and how he’ll handle it. ✌️ Isaiah slips some of his words into his quote of Yahweh at both ends of it. At the beginning, it’s not a complete sentence, just a half sentence, and he finishes that sentence by getting back to Yahweh’s direct speech. At the end, this guy’s mouth runs away with him (almost like the Prophetic tool is getting a mind of its own)! In any case, we have Isaiah (in blue) quoting Yahweh (in black again) quoting the king of Assyria (in red again):

Isaiah 10:5–19

12   But when my Lord executes his plan on Mount Zion and Jerusalem,

       I will punish the prideful heart of the king of Assyria 

          And the haughty height of his eyes.

13   For, he said, “By the might of my hand have I done

          And by my skill, for I am most clever.

       I have erased the borders of peoples;

          And their treasures I have plundered,

       And I have downed like a champion inhabitants.

14      My hand seized, like (from) a nest, 

       The wealth of peoples;

          And like gathering abandoned eggs

       So did I gather all the earth.

          And none flapped a wing or opened a mouth to peep.”

15   Will the ax glorify itself over the one hewing with it!?

         Will the saw magnify itself over the one wielding it!?

      Like the rod raising the one lifting it!?

          Like the staff lifting the non-wood (person)!?

16   Therefore, the Lord Yahweh of Legions will send leanness against his luxury;

          And under his bulk will burn a burning like fire burns

18   Consuming body and flesh,

          Like the sick wasting away.

17   The Light of Israel will be a fire

          And its Holy One a flame

       It will burn and consume its thorns

          And its thistles in a single day 

       And the bulk of its forest and its farmland.

19       And what trees remain of its forest

       Will be so few that a child may record them.

The king of Assyria says that he gathers the wealth of nations like eggs from a nest with none so much as chirping about it. Yahweh asks rhetorical questions about the king of Assyria’s willful ignorance: how could he think himself in control!? Isaiah says that when Yahweh finishes using the king of Assyria against Judea and Jerusalem he will pay him back for his ignorance, insolence, and violence. His fatted body will have a raging fever and decompose from within. And Yahweh’s fire will rage through Assyria like a forest, leaving it a scorched earth.

(More cards to show: The original has two verses copied out of order. Now don’t get all bent out of shape about this. Sleuths bump into this all the time. The text at v. 18 should follow that at v. 16, and the speech at v. 17 should come right before that at v. 19, and that’s how I presented them to you. Switch them back and see what it’s like!)

Talk about pride 🙌. Now I don’t usually go shooting my mouth off 🗣️ or tilting my hat back 🎓, but you’ve seen some of my best sleuthing here. How the quotations work, how the interruptions work, and what they all say has been a cold case 🗄️ for decades, centuries, maybe even millennia. But a sleuth can’t outshine their client. Let’s forget I ever said anything.