Isaiah Came When Every Other Prophet Had Already Failed

Zion Would Not Be Comforted

After the Temple fell and Jerusalem lay in ruins and the children were led away in chains, God sent the prophets. Not one. All of them. Hosea went first. He stood before Zion and said: I will be to Israel like dew. Zion said: yesterday you told me that Ephraim is stricken and their stock withered. Which should I believe? The comfort or the doom? He could not answer both.

Joel came. Amos came. Micah. Nahum. Habakkuk. Zephaniah. Haggai. Zechariah. Malachi. Each one carried a word of consolation and each one had also carried a word of devastation, and Zion, the grieving mother, the city that had watched her children taken, was not willing to accept comfort from the same voice that had pronounced the sentence. She sent them all away.

When the Patriarchs Tried

Then God sent the patriarchs. Abraham came to Zion and said: receive comfort from me. She said: you named me a mountain for the binding of your son. Isaac came. She said: you dug wells that others seized. Jacob came. She said: your family became slaves in Egypt. Moses came. She said: you wrote the curses. The great curses of Deuteronomy, the list of catastrophes that would come if Israel departed from God, had come from Moses's mouth before they came from God's hand. How could Moses comfort her for something he had foretold?

They all failed. Everyone who had ever spoken a word of judgment against Jerusalem, no matter how much they had also loved her, could not close the wound that their own words had helped open.

God Came Personally

Then God came. God stood before Zion and said: be comforted, be comforted, my people. Zion said: I cannot receive comfort from you. I am like a woman whose husband has divorced her. Would a divorced woman accept comfort from the husband who abandoned her? Even from God, it was too much to ask. The one who had the most right to give the comfort was also the one whose departure had caused the grief.

God said: this comfort cannot come from me. It must come from someone who has only ever spoken words of comfort to you. Who among all the prophets has never once brought a word of doom?

The Prophet Who Only Spoke Comfort

Isaiah. The second half of the book that bears his name opens with a voice that has never, in those chapters, said anything other than consolation. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem. Her warfare is ended. Her guilt is paid. She has received double from the Lord's hand for all her sins.

This was the answer to why Zion would receive what Isaiah brought but had refused from everyone else. Isaiah's voice in those chapters carried no memory of doom. He could stand before the grieving city and offer comfort without the comfort being contaminated by the judgment that had preceded it from every other mouth.

The midrash is not saying the other prophets were less. It is saying that genuine comfort requires an unblemished source, someone who has not contributed to the wound. The mercy that heals cannot come from the same place as the cut.