Day Four
Movement II — The Ground
Springs
Read the end of Isaiah 39 before you read the beginning of Isaiah 40, because the seam between them is the whole point.
Hezekiah has just been told that everything in his house will be carried off to Babylon and his sons will serve in a foreign palace. His response is one of the bleakest sentences a king ever spoke: good is the word of the LORD which thou hast spoken — because, he reasons, there will be peace in my days. Not in my children’s. In mine.
The chapter ends there. And then, with no transition at all:
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Isaiah 40:1, KJV
The exile has not happened yet. The people being comforted have not yet been carried away, have not yet wept by the rivers, have not yet asked how to sing in a strange land. The comfort is spoken over them anyway, generations early, into a silence they had not yet filled with crying.
Today’s morsel
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.”
Then add, out loud: before I asked.
Wells
The Hebrew is nachamu nachamu ammi, and three things in it are easy to miss in English.
Nachamu is an imperative. God is not observing that his people feel comforted, nor instructing them to cheer up. He is giving an order. Comfort here is something dispatched.
The imperative is plural — you all, comfort. Whoever is being commanded, it is not the exiles. God is speaking to messengers, to a heavenly council, to prophets, to whoever will carry it. Which means the burden of Isaiah 40:1 has never rested on the person in the dark. Your job in this verse is not to produce comfort. Your job is to be the recipient of an errand somebody else was sent to run.
Sit with that if you have been trying to manufacture your own consolation and failing.
Hebrew has no italics and no underline. To lean on a thing, it says the thing twice. Nachamu nachamu. He said it, and then he said it again, before anyone answered.
And the possessives are the covenant formula, reasserted at the exact moment it looks broken: my people, your God. To a nation about to lose the land, the temple, and the throne, the one thing not in question is whose they are.
Aquifer
The Greek carries the doubling. The Septuagint renders it parakaleite parakaleite — the same verb Paul will build on in 2 Corinthians 1. This is the clearest single place to see the bridge: Isaiah’s Hebrew imperative becomes the Greek verb behind the God of all comfort. Paul is quoting a vocabulary, not inventing one.
Isaiah 40–66 and the authorship question. Chapters 40 onward are often called the Book of Comfort, and their setting shifts to address an exile still future in chapter 39. Critical scholarship has widely read this as a second (and third) hand writing later; the traditional position holds to Isaiah of Jerusalem writing prophetically. Both camps read chapter 40 as the hinge. This study takes no position, because nothing in the exegesis of these verses depends on one — the comfort is spoken to people who are not yet in the trouble either way.