Emergency Exit
43:19–20 God was going to do a new thing for Israel, something that would appear unexpectedly, like a sprout from barren soil. The Israelites would become aware of it even though they had no knowledge of it at that time. He would do for the captives in Babylon what He had done for their ancestors in Egypt, namely, make a highway for them through the wilderness and provide them with water (cf. Exod. 17). Instead of turning a sea into dry land He would turn the dry land into waterways (cf. 35:6–7). These images picture a second Exodus. Even the animals would acknowledge God’s greatness as they observed His acts and benefited from His goodness to His people.
“Here we see the acts of God bringing the whole world into harmony, a feature which will be perfected in the Messianic day (11:6–9[; 65:25]). Here, the journeying people are met by a transformed world (19cd) into which the animal creation gladly enters with benefit.”
Has the prophet here introduced a glaring contradiction into the divine word? How does one reconcile a string of divine epithets that epitomize the core of Israel’s historical memory and describe the moment of its birth in the exodus with a blunt command not to remember the events of the past?
Like the slaves in Egypt, the Jews in Babylon are in bondage to a foreign power. But we know from epigraphic evidence that many Jews were prospering in that environment. Evidence from within the Bible indicates that many were reluctant to return to the uncertainty of a destroyed homeland. Geographically, the way through the wilderness over which the exiles would have to pass was fraught with dangers and hazards.
Now that the advent of Cyrus had lifted the shackles of imposed bondage and was holding out the promise of political release, the newest threat to freedom was the prison of the people’s own lethargy, and one bar in that prison was the wistful sort of memory of the past that dulls one’s alertness to the present. Israel needed to be shocked out of such lethargy. And Isaiah heard a God whose presence was not limited to the past but who was active in contemporary events say to Israel:
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
What is the new thing that God is about to do? “Way in the wilderness” and “rivers in the desert” present images that call to mind the exodus, as if we have come full circle.