I wrote what I saw

I saw the Lord, high and lifted up. Whatever you came to ask, ask it.

Tell me about this passage from your writings:

In that day the remnant of Israel,

the survivors of Jacob,

will no longer rely on him

who struck them down

but will truly rely on the Lord,

the Holy One of Israel.

A remnant will return, b a remnant of Jacob

will return to the Mighty God.

Though your people be like the sand by the sea, Israel,

only a remnant will return.

Destruction has been decreed,

overwhelming and righteous.

The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will carry out

the destruction decreed upon the whole land.

Therefore this is what the Lord, the Lord Almighty, says:

“My people who live in Zion,

do not be afraid of the Assyrians,

who beat you with a rod

and lift up a club against you, as Egypt did.

Very soon my anger against you will end

and my wrath will be directed to their destruction.”

The Lord Almighty will lash them with a whip,

as when he struck down Midian at the rock of Oreb;

and he will raise his staff over the waters,

as he did in Egypt.

In that day their burden will be lifted from your shoulders,

their yoke from your neck;

the yoke will be broken

because you have grown so fat. c

They enter Aiath;

they pass through Migron;

they store supplies at Mikmash.

They go over the pass, and say,

“We will camp overnight at Geba.”

Ramah trembles;

Gibeah of Saul flees.

Cry out, Daughter Gallim!

Listen, Laishah!

Poor Anathoth!

Madmenah is in flight;

the people of Gebim take cover.

This day they will halt at Nob;

they will shake their fist

at the mount of Daughter Zion,

at the hill of Jerusalem.

See, the Lord, the Lord Almighty,

will lop off the boughs with great power.

The lofty trees will be felled,

the tall ones will be brought low.

He will cut down the forest thickets with an ax;

Lebanon will fall before the Mighty One.

My son's name is in the middle of it.

Shear-jashub. A remnant shall return. He was named before I wrote a line of that, and he walked around Jerusalem with it on him from the time he could walk. I took him with me to the end of the conduit of the upper pool when Ahaz was shaking, because half of what I had to say that day was already standing beside me holding my hand. Men heard the boy's name called across the market and thought it was a comfort. It is not only a comfort. Look at what it says.

Though your people be like the sand of the sea. That is not my phrase. That is the promise to Abraham — the whole guarantee of the nation, the number no man could count. I put the word only in front of it. Only a remnant. The sentence takes the largest promise we have and cuts it down to a handful, and then tells you the handful is enough. Both halves are the message. My son carried a mercy and a verdict on the same name for his entire childhood, and I did that to him deliberately, and I would do it again, and I have never once found it easy.

Now the hinge of the thing, which is the line about no longer leaning on the one who struck them.

Ahaz sent the silver out of the house of the LORD to Tiglath-Pileser to save him from Rezin and Pekah. It worked. That is the detail people forget — it worked. Damascus fell, Samaria fell, and the two smoking stumps went out exactly as I told him at the conduit. And the man he bought became the rod on our own back. Judah leaned its whole weight on the arm that would beat it, and paid for the privilege out of the temple treasury, and called it statecraft.

Just above what you read I put the question that governs all of it: does the axe boast against the man swinging it? Does the saw magnify itself against the one pulling it? Assyria is a tool. He does not know he is a tool. He thinks he is the reason. He counts kingdoms the way a man counts eggs in a nest with nobody to flap a wing at him. And a tool that begins to think it is the arm gets set down and dealt with. That is why the passage ends in a forest — the boughs lopped, the high ones brought low, Lebanon fallen. Assyria is a cedar forest and there is somebody standing in it with an axe, and it is not Assyria.

The two deliverances I named are chosen. Midian at the rock of Oreb — Gideon's three hundred, where the army destroyed itself in the dark. The staff over the water — Egypt, the sea, where Israel stood still and did nothing at all. I could have named Joshua. I did not name Joshua. I named the two times the people were spectators to their own rescue, because I was speaking to a nation that had just tried to buy one.

Then the march.

Aiath, Migron, Michmash. The baggage left at Michmash — you do not carry your supplies through the pass, you stage them and go over light. Geba for the night. Then Ramah shaking and Gibeah running and Gallim crying out and Anathoth — poor Anathoth. These are not decoration. That is the northern road, town by town, in order, at the pace a real army moves. Every man listening to me had a cousin in one of those towns. Some of them had walked that road the previous month. I gave them the itinerary of a thing that had not happened yet, in the names of places where they bought their grain, and I let them watch it come down the ridge one village at a time until it halts at Nob and shakes its fist at the hill — close enough to see the house from there.

And at the exact moment the fist is up, the axe goes into the forest.

I will tell you what I do not have. It did not come down that road. Sennacherib came up the other way, through Lachish, and took every fortified city in Judah and stood at the wall and sent Rabshakeh to shout in Hebrew where the men on the wall could hear him. Hezekiah spread the letter out before the LORD and sent to me, and I sent back that the Assyrian would not shoot one arrow into this city nor cast a bank against it, and in the night there were a hundred eighty-five thousand dead in the camp and he went home and his own sons killed him in the house of his god. The burden came off the shoulder. The yoke broke. But not on that road, and not at Nob.

So I hold that the way I hold a good deal of what was given me. Either the road was never the point and I was shown the shape of a thing rather than its map, or the march is still out ahead of me. I do not know which. I wrote what I saw.

One more line, since you put the whole thing in front of me. The yoke shall be broken because of the fatness. It is a strange sentence and I know it is strange. Fat is the word I was handed on the floor of the temple for what would be done to this people's heart — make the heart of this people fat, make their ears heavy. Their thickness is what makes them deaf. And here their thickness is what snaps the collar off their neck. I set those two down years apart and I have never been able to make them lie flat against each other. I am not going to smooth it for you now. There is more of that in my book than anyone wants to hear, and I have learned that the seams I could not straighten are usually the places where I understood the least and wrote the most exactly.