Investigation: Inclusion, Exclusion and the Poor

"Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow" (1:17). "What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord GOD of hosts" (3:15). "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place" (5:8). "Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees… To turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey" (10:1–2).

"In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: Whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance" (19:24–25). "Neither let the son of the stranger… speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree" (56:3).

"Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness… Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry?" (58:6–7). "And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites, saith the LORD" (66:21).

Who are "the poor"?

Isaiah uses several words: ani and anav ("afflicted, humble"), dal ("weak, poor"), evyon ("needy"). In the 8th-century oracles they are the victims of land accumulation and corrupt courts (3:14–15; 5:8; 10:2; 32:7). In 40–66 the same words come to describe the whole humiliated people and the faithful within it (41:17; 49:13; 61:1; 66:2), and "the poor" became a religious self-description in later Judaism (the Qumran community called itself "the poor"). Both senses are present, and the second does not erase the first: 58:7 still means bread for the hungry.

Inclusion and the Persian-period debate

The most explicit inclusion texts (56:1–8; 66:18–21) probably come from Persian-period Judah, when the returned community argued about who belonged. Ezra 9–10 and Nehemiah 13 describe a policy of separation from "the peoples of the lands," including the dissolution of marriages with foreign women and the exclusion of Ammonites and Moabites according to Deuteronomy 23. Isaiah 56 uses the same vocabulary ("separate," "son of the foreigner," "eunuch") to opposite effect. Many scholars therefore read the two as voices in one debate; others think they addressed different questions (converts to Israel's worship versus mixed marriages and land rights). The site does not decide between them. It notes that the Bible preserves both voices, and that the book of Ruth, about a Moabite woman who becomes David's ancestor, is often read as another voice in the same debate (see the Echo "Foreign women and belonging").

Zion as a woman: honest analysis

Isaiah personifies cities as women: "daughter of Zion" (1:8), the faithful city become a harlot (1:21), the daughters of Zion stripped (3:16–4:1), Babylon exposed (47:1–3), the barren wife restored (54), the bride (62), the mother in labor and nursing (66:7–11). The positive images are among the most tender in the Bible. The negative ones depict punishment as the sexual exposure and humiliation of women, a convention of ancient warfare and of prophetic rhetoric (compare Nahum 3:5; Ezekiel 16; 23). Readers have reasonably asked what such imagery taught about real women. The site reports the images accurately, explains their political use (cities, not individual women, are the targets), and does not pretend the imagery is neutral (ISA-C9). In the same chapters God is compared to a woman in labor (42:14), a nursing mother (49:15) and a comforting mother (66:13).

The wealth of the nations

Chapters 60–61 promise that the nations' wealth will come to Zion: gold, incense, flocks, timber, "the milk of the Gentiles" (60:16), "the riches of the Gentiles" (61:6). For a small, poor community under Persian rule this was a picture of reversal: those who had plundered would now give. Read critically, it reverses the direction of tribute without ending tribute itself. Other texts in the book imagine the nations coming not to pay but to learn (2:2–4) and to share (19:23–25; 25:6). The book holds several pictures of the future relation between Israel and the nations, and they are not identical.

Bodies and disability

Isaiah uses blindness and deafness both as images of spiritual failure (6:9–10; 29:9–10; 42:18–20; 56:10) and as conditions to be healed in the restoration (29:18; 35:5–6; 42:7, 16). It promises that "the lame man [shall] leap as an hart" (35:6), and welcomes the eunuch whose body the law excluded (56:3–5). Modern readers from disability studies have noted that metaphors of blindness for sin can stigmatize real blind people, and that the welcome of the eunuch is a counter-voice in the same book. The site notes both (ISA-C9).