Biblical texts generate multiple interpretations. The rabbinic description for this phenomenon is shiva panim l’Torah, “seventy faces to the Torah.” The image suggests that each verse, each phrase, is like a beautifully cut gem with intensely shining facets. When we read Scripture, we should see multiple facets, and so discover multiple meanings.
Scripture will always yield different meanings, since we always bring different perspectives to it. Jews in exile in Babylon, the people to whom Isaiah spoke, received a different message than people hearing Isaiah in first-century Galilee, or twenty-first century Poland. Jews will understand Isaiah’s words differently from Christians.
Our Scriptures also generate different meanings because words change meaning over time and because those ancient texts contain no punctuation.
For Jews in 6th-century BCE Babylon, and for Jews today, Isaiah’s message concerns the importance of the national Jewish homeland. Isaiah speaks of a voice – perhaps of an angel, or a prophet – telling the Jews in Babylon to “prepare the way of the Lord… Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our G-d.” Otherwise put, Isaiah exhorts them to build a road, because they are going home.
Further, when the way is prepared, “Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.” How? Because “All people shall see” the power of G-d in repatriating the covenant community.
Today, for Jews, Isaiah 40, with its message of Nachamu, “comfort,” is the haftarah, the passage from prophets, read on the Sabbath after Tisha b’Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the Two Temples in Jerusalem, the first Crusade in which Christians massacred Jews in France and Rhineland, the expulsion from Christian England in 1290, Christian France in 1306, and Christian Spain in 1492, the Shoah, and other tragedies that have befallen Jews over two and a half millennia. This is the first of seven successive Sabbath haftarot from Isaiah, all concerning comforting. Then comes Rosh HaShanah, the new year. The Jewish liturgical cycle insists that national tragedy is not the end of the story: comfort and restoration will occur, whether in our own time or in the messianic age.
For Mark, Isaiah speaks not about return from exile but about the Baptizer proclaiming Jesus’s advent.
Mark’s words, “Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, he will prepare your way” paraphrases Malachi 3.1, “Behold, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me.” Malachi ends with the prediction of the return of the Prophet Elijah, the role Mark assigns to the Baptizer. Then Mark inserts Isaiah 40.3. While Isaiah spoke of a voice telling Jews in exile to build a road in the wilderness, Mark describes John as a voice calling in the wilderness. Grammatically, Mark moves the comma: Isaiah mentions “A voice crying out COMMA ‘In the wilderness, prepare the way’”; Mark presents “a voice crying out in the wilderness, COMMA ‘prepare the way.’”
Words also change connotations. Here are two examples. First, Isaiah’s “Lord” –in Hebrew the tetragrammaton, YHWH – is in Mark’s Greek, kyrios, a title for Jesus. Second, the Hebrew for “way” or “road” is derekh, which can also refer to how one walks or the manner in which one lives. The Greek translation is hodos. The earliest followers of Jesus were not called Christians; they were called “followers of the hodos,” the “way.” Thus, Isaiah’s “Prepare the way of the Lord” has for Mark Christological import: the “way” is discipleship, and the “lord” is Jesus.
For Mark and so for Christians, Isaiah speaks of John and Jesus and their followers. Christians should also recognize how Isaiah spoke to the Jews of his own time, and how Isaiah speaks to Jews subsequently. With this broader knowledge, Christians can therefore better understand the Jewish attachment to the homeland, the fidelity of Israel’s G-d to the people Israel, and the need of all people for messages of comfort.
About the author:
Amy-Jill Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. She is also Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. In the spring of 2019, she became the first Jew to teach a course on the New Testament at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome; in 2021, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.