THERE are many ways of reading scripture, and Francis Landy has a sensitivity to a poetic reading that is original and powerful. His topic is Isaiah — the whole book rather than an individual prophet — and he is sensitised to the overall progression and movement of the book, with its peaks and troughs, its trauma and its joy.
For Landy, the prophet is a liminal figure, a person, but also a tradition; a shaman who experiences extraordinary states of consciousness and articulates visions in poetry; and even an unstable figure in regard to gender in that the prophet takes on both male and female roles, including the maternal. Landy explores the complex traditions that pervade the book — those of the catastrophe of exile and its resultant trauma, those of David and Zion, and, in the midst of it all, the complex personality of the God of Israel, who is both real and a symbol.
One of the enigmas of Isaiah is that the prophet is told to speak to a people who will not understand — “And he [the voice of the LORD] said “Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend. . .” (Isaiah 6.9) — which Landy explains in terms of “the constitutive enigma”, a deliberate obfuscation that ultimately leads to a profound revelation, analogous to blindness but then eventual illumination.
Landy is not trying to resolve tensions in this long, strange, and complex book. He draws out themes such as truth, resolution, death, exile, new heaven, and new earth. For him, the prophetic gaze sees all and expresses it poetically in order to convey its depth and contradiction, using literary techniques of metaphor, symbol, word-play, and poetry itself. Landy sees dialectic in the book and the unstable entities that make it up. He also recognises the subjectivity of all readings of the book, and so unapologetically pursues his own interpretation.
His focus is on close readings of texts, especially from Isaiah 1-39 and certain key passages within that, such as Isaiah 6, the great vision of angelic beings and the call. He arrives at Second Isaiah — the more hopeful exilic voice — in chapter 8, where judgement and catastrophe gives way to beauty and joy. His reading is ultimately a very personal one: Landy is himself somewhat of a poet, in that sense a poet reading another prophet-poet. His take on Isaiah is fascinating and almost spiritual at times, elevating us above more mundane readings. Although it is an unusual approach, it is a stimulating one that brings this complex prophetic book alive in new ways.
Dr Katharine J. Dell is Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and Professor in Old Testament Literature and Theology in the University of Cambridge.
Poetry, Catastrophe and Hope in the Vision of Isaiah
Francis Landy
OUP £120
(978-0-19-885669-6)
Church Times Bookshop £108
