Woe in Isaiah 5

Many have been quoting Isaiah 5:20 lately in reference to the Obama Administration's new stance on gay marriage.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! 

The NET translates it this way.

5:20 Those who call evil good and good evil are as good as dead,

who turn darkness into light and light into darkness,

who turn bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter. 

The NET translation rightly points out that this is a temporal "woe".  Isaiah continues.

5:21 Those who think they are wise are as good as dead,

those who think they possess understanding.

5:22 Those who are champions at drinking wine are as good as dead,

who display great courage when mixing strong drinks.

5:23 They pronounce the guilty innocent for a payoff,

they ignore the just cause of the innocent.

5:24 Therefore, as flaming fire devours straw,

and dry grass disintegrates in the flames,

so their root will rot,

and their flower will blow away like dust.

For they have rejected the law of the Lord who commands armies,

they have spurned the commands of the Holy One of Israel.

5:25 So the Lord is furious with his people;

Isaiah promises un-buried corpses.
This picture is from the Hatian Earthquake where 230,000 died. [1]

he lifts his hand and strikes them.

The mountains shake,

and corpses lie like manure in the middle of the streets.

Despite all this, his anger does not subside,

and his hand is ready to strike again.

5:26 He lifts a signal flag for a distant nation,

he whistles for it to come from the far regions of the earth.

Look, they come quickly and swiftly.

5:27 None tire or stumble,

they don’t stop to nap or sleep.

They don’t loosen their belts,

or unstrap their sandals to rest.

5:28 Their arrows are sharpened,

and all their bows are prepared.

The hooves of their horses are hard as flint,

and their chariot wheels are like a windstorm.

5:29 Their roar is like a lion’s;

they roar like young lions.

They growl and seize their prey;

they drag it away and no one can come to the rescue.

5:30 At that time they will growl over their prey,

it will sound like sea waves crashing against rocks.

One will look out over the land and see the darkness of disaster,

clouds will turn the light into darkness.


When people quote Isaiah in context, people are forecasting a temporal "woe" that involves lots and lots of bodies.  However, I realize that most people quote this verse out of context, because it is chilling and trendy.  

world population

Modern Israel size comparison.[3]

Here are a couple of quick notes.  

• When this warning was made to Judah, there were less than a 100 million people globally. 
• Sennacherib claims to have deported 200,150 people in the 8th century.  While this may have been an exaggeration, Judah was left with only an estimated 110,000 people.[2]  
• Israel today is bigger than 8th century Judah, but this predicted "woe" was directed at a smaller surface area.  

The United States is a nation of about 300 million people.  This is more than three times the world population when Isaiah was written.  Not only were there less possible people to turn into corpses, there was less surface area.  

I am not saying that God could not fill the US streets with corpses like manure, but the disaster would be beyond the scale that Isaiah prophesied to Judah.  (More than 230,000 died in the Haitian earthquake of 2010.)   

Martin Luther King Jr and Gay Rights?

What did MLK think about gay people?

...Those who say King would have championed gay rights also point to King’s treatment of one of the movement’s most important leaders, Bayard Rustin.

Rustin was an openly gay civil rights leader who is widely credited with organizing the 1963 March on Washington. He was an organizational genius, the man who insisted that King speak last on the program, giving his “I Have a Dream” speech the resonance it would not have had otherwise, says Jerald Podair, author of “Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer.”

“He was the kind of guy who could tell you how many portable toilets you needed for 250,000 people in a demonstration," Podair says. “He was a details guy. King needed him for that march.”

But Rustin could do more than arrange a demonstration. He was also a formidable thinker and debater. He was born to a 15-year-old single mother and never graduated from college.

The movement was led by intellectual heavyweights like King, but even among them, Rustin stood out, Podair says. He read everything and was a visionary. One aide to President Lyndon Johnson described him as one of the five smartest men in America, says Podair, a history professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

“People who heard him speak were transfixed,” Podair says.

Rustin became one of the movement’s most eloquent defenders of its nonviolent philosophy, says Saladin Ambar, a political scientist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania...

America the Beautiful

I have written a little before about Irving Berlin, the author of such classic songs as Happy Holidays, White Christmas, and God Bless America.  Berlin, a Jew, wrote White Christmas and Happy Holidays as more secular Christmas songs.  His limited religious convictions hindered him from writing too much about Jesus Christ.  The freedom to have his own limited religious convictions infused him with such patriotism that he also wrote, God Bless America.

In my more cynical moments, I sometimes mock the fact that Happy Holidays has become the annoyance of some religious conservatives in the so called "War on Christmas".  I certainly like the song as much as I like any Christmas music and I generally am welcome to any season's greeting.  Still, if someone is offended by "Happy Holidays", why would you wish it to someone ?  Likewise, if someone is offended by "Merry Christmas", why would you wish to offend them?  Personally, either is fine.  The greeting was even popularized by the man who wrote God Bless America. (Even if this was not an evangelical God song)  Merry Christmas, God bless America, and Happy Holidays.

Given the background behind God Bless America, sometimes I wonder if people understand the purpose of the song.  I know when I sang  God Bless America at church, I thought of an evangelical God/Jesus Christ.  Still the title of this blog is "America the Beautiful", so what about America the Beautiful?



O beautiful . . .

Returning in 1894 from an inspiring trip to Pikes Peak in Colorado, a minor New England poet named Katharine Lee Bates wrote a verse she titled ''America.'' It was printed the following year in a church publication in Boston to commemorate the Fourth of July.

Lynn Sherr, the ABC News correspondent, has written a timely and deliciously researched book about how that verse was written and edited and how it was fitted to a hymn called ''Materna,'' written about the same time by Samuel Augustus Ward, whom the poet never met. In ''America the Beautiful: The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation's Favorite Song'' (Public Affairs, $25), Sherr reveals the rewriting by Bates that shows the value of working over a lyric.

''O beautiful for halcyon skies,'' the poem began. Halcyon is a beautiful word, based on the Greek name for the bird, probably a kingfisher, that ancient legend had nesting in the sea during the winter solstice and calming the waves. It means ''calm, peaceful'' and all those happy things, but the word is unfamiliar and does not evoke the West. Spacious, however, not only describes Big Sky country but also alliterates with skies, so she changed it.

The often-unsung third stanza contained a zinger at the acquisition of wealth: ''America! America!/God shed his grace on thee/Till selfish gain no longer stain/The banner of the free!'' Sherr writes that Bates, disillusioned with the Gilded Age's excesses, ''wanted to purify America's great wealth, to channel what she had originally called 'selfish gain' into more noble causes.'' The poet took another crack at the line that der-ogated the profit motive, and the stanza now goes: ''America! America!/May God thy gold refine/Till all success be nobleness/And every gain divine!''

The line that needed editing the most was the flat and dispiriting conclusion: ''God shed his grace on thee/Till nobler men keep once again/Thy whiter jubilee!'' That cast an aspersion on the current generation, including whoever was singing the lyric. The wish for ''nobler men'' to come in the future ended the song, about to be set to Ward's hymn, on a self-deprecating note.

In 1904, 10 years after her first draft, Katharine Lee Bates revised the imperfect last lines of the final stanza. The new image called up at the end not only reminds the singers of the ''spacious skies'' that began the song but also elevates the final theme to one of unity and tolerance. Her improvement makes all the difference, especially in times like these:

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea! [1]

There is somewhat of a debate over Bates' sexual orientation.  Bates never married, but did live intimately with Katharine Coman for twenty-five years.  In the late 19th century, this is what was known as a "Boston Marriage."[2]  Likely some "Boston Marriages" were sexual, but perhaps not all were.  In her poems Bates confessed a deep love for Coman and her death shattered Bates' heart.  However, it can be difficult to assume our modern sensibilities on their relationship.[3][4][5][6]  

An ardent feminist and possible lesbian, Bates wrote America the Beautiful to challenge selfish gain not going to noble causes.  (Till selfish gain no longer stain/The banner of the free!) When we sing her song in church or in public, seldom does the word, feminist, come to mind.  What does the song mean?  What do songs mean?  When we sing old songs, we almost never know the original meaning or even the author.  Where does the meaning within our breast come?  It comes from us.  It comes from whatever we think the song means or have been taught that it means.  Perhaps most of those that sang Healer, knew nothing of Guglielmucci's cancer.  Perhaps most did not know that he lied about his cancer.  Definitely most that sing Healer today do not have cancer.  The singers invest the lyrics with whatever meaning they find appropriate.  

All Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim. That is just a fact.

The Patriot Update says it is a "news source" that provides "timely, accurate news about what concerns patriotic Americans."  They have a new web series call PatriotChicks.  I took notes, but I do not know when I will be able to fact check it.

Ellen Muehlberger,  an assistant professor of Near Eastern studies and
 history at U-M who is writing a book about angels in late ancient times

• "Islam says kill gay people that's why I don't get why liberals are pro-Muslim, and pro-gay. ~ Victoria Jackson
• Snopes.com is owned by George Soros
• Frank Gaffney is one of the experts on Islamization of America
• Oklahoma a man was allowed to beat his wife, because "Sharia said it was OK? (Honestly what I think she did here was take a blog post about the UAE saying something was "OK". She saw "OK" and thought it meant Oklahoma.)
• We are not allowed to say "in Jesus name, Amen", because of Separation of Church and State, but they're allowed to beat of their wives because we are open to all religions. True?
• They are given special foot washing baths on the state campuses on the University of Michigan.
• We can't have our Christmas Trees.
• Muslims are asking for a Catholic University to provide them a place to pray devoid of crosses
• Muslims have more rights in schools than Christians
• The Bible can be used a literature and history in schools, but now we are seeing school use the Quran.
• America was founded on Christian principles not Islamic principles.
• Christians are being tortured, crucified, and murdered in Egypt, because the Muslims are in control.
• Islam is not a religion of peace, because what is peaceful believing that your mission in life is to murder?
• "My Dad said, 'we're lucky that most Muslims are lukewarm or we'd all be dead.'" ~ Victoria Jackson
• "All Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim.  That is just a fact."  (Seriously that was a quote)
• Islam is the opposite of the Bible and it is a religion of death.
• Everyone can say what they want unless you love the country and God.
• These women say that none of what they said is hateful.
• Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano have dead eyes
• Gay marriage is the government trying to force the church to bend its beliefs.  
• Gay marriage is the government trying to take over the churches, but civil unions are OK
• They are bring suits against priests and pastors who will not marry a gay couple