As the west, led by the US and prodded by France, rattles
its saber at Bashar al-Assad, some in the Christian community are looking to
the Bible to see what it might say about these events. They are turning to
Isaiah 17:1-2 which is an oracle against Damascus.See, Damascus will cease to be a city, and will become a heap of ruins.Her towns will be deserted forever; they will be places for flocks, which will lie down, and no one will make them afraid.
Some Christians,
and apparently some Muslims too, see this as sign of the second coming of Jesus
Christ. But there are a couple of
problems with this interpretation.
- The Damascus referred to in Isaiah 17 is the one from 732 BC. It is the one that was mostly destroyed by the Assyrians for rebelling against their Assyrian overlords.
- If we are going to read 17:1-2 as a prophecy about the 21st century, then we need to do the same with Isaiah 17:3-14, which has some rather negative things to say about Israel. In fact, if you read those verses you see the destruction of Israel is described in far more detail than that of Damascus. Some have looked at these verses and conclude that it is describing a chemical attack by Syria on Israel. But in reality, it is about God judging Israel because they have forgotten God. The events described there seem to reflect the way the Assyrian army moved into Israel in 720 BC.
A major problem
with this sort of interpretation is that it completely ignores the context of
the oracle. This oracle was written at a specific time for a specific people.
It doesn’t have on going predictive powers. This type of interpretation is the result
of a very egocentric reading of the Bible. It happens when we think that
everything written therein is about us and for us. All that we need to do is
solve the code, connect the dots and we have the secret road map to how the
world will end. But as I said, this ignores the fact that what is described
here has already happened.
Over at the
Time Blog Walter Bruggemann has what is probably a more responsible way to
understand this passage, 2800 years after it happened. He says
“You cannot read the Bible that way. It is an ancient poem about an ancient context,” he said. “If we are going to contemporize it with such an easy connection then we have to learn to read the text against the United States as well because the United States now plays the role of Babylon and all those ancient superpowers. We have to tread very gently about making such silly connections.”
A better interpretation of the passage, Bruggemann explains, would be that all nations are answerable to the God of justice, even nations like Syria and Babylon. “No nation has high moral ground,” he says. “That is a bite against every exceptionalism, including American exceptionalism.”
Bruggemann’s point is one for Christian Americans to consider seriously. Our egocentric way of reading the Bible often neglects to ponder the possibility that perhaps we are playing the role of a modern day Assyria, Babylon or Rome. And while the Bible suggests that God used those nations at various points in history, it wasn't because God thought they were “his people.” In fact, they are the nations that eventually met their own destruction. We should remember that God's justice has no favorites. Even ancient Israel found that out.
