Isaiah41chapter 41

The chapter is staged as a legal hearing. The coastlands are summoned to be silent and come near; the peoples are told to renew their strength and state their case; let us come together for judgment. Ancient trials were public and oral, and the party who could produce evidence won.

The evidence demanded is prediction. Bring out your case, says the LORD; produce your strong reasons. Tell us the former things, what they were, or declare to us things to come, so we may know that you are gods. Do something, good or bad, so that we may be dismayed. That is the test the whole section runs on, and it is the reason the naming of Cyrus a few chapters later is not an embarrassment to the traditional view but the whole exhibit.

The idol shop appears again, now with the workers encouraging each other. The carpenter cheers on the goldsmith, and the man smoothing with the hammer encourages the man at the anvil; they say of the soldering, it is good; and then they fasten it down with nails so it will not fall over. That last line is the joke: the god has to be secured against gravity.

The threshing image applied to Israel is a real machine. A threshing sledge was a heavy board dragged over the spread sheaves, its underside set with sharp stones or iron teeth to cut the straw and free the grain. God tells the worm Jacob that he will make him a new sharp threshing instrument with teeth — the smallest thing in the field turned into the tool that goes over the mountains.

The desert planting list is a forester's list of what will grow where nothing grew: cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive, cypress, pine, and box tree together, with rivers opened on bare heights and pools in the valley. Nobody plants a cedar and an acacia in the same soil. That is the point.