Moses and Isaiah Named the Same Failure Three Centuries Apart

The Poem Moses Left Them

Moses composed Ha'azinu before he died, and it is not a gentle poem. The opening images are sky and rain and dew and tender grass. Then it turns. By verse six it is an accusation: do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and unwise people? The Hebrew word translated as foolish carries the weight of moral obtuseness, the incapacity to learn from what has already happened. Unwise means something more specific: unable to extrapolate, unable to see where current behavior leads.

Moses was not speaking to enemies. He was speaking to the people he had led for forty years, the people he would die for, the people he had argued with God to preserve after the golden calf. He called them ignorant and unwise in his farewell poem, and he meant it as a diagnosis, not an insult. The difference between a diagnosis and an insult is that a diagnosis can be treated.

The Same Words in Isaiah

The teachers of Roman Palestine who worked through Deuteronomy noticed that the terms Moses used in verse six appeared in another prophet's mouth, in a different century, in a different crisis. Isaiah 1:3: Israel did not know; my people did not understand.

The structure is identical. Two clauses, two failings, parallel to Moses's two terms. The Sifrei Devarim read them together and made the glosses precise: ignorant, in Moses, means ignorant of the past. Not wise means unable to foresee the future. In Isaiah: did not know points to the past. Did not understand points to the future. The same double blindness named by two different prophets at least three centuries apart. Moses at the edge of the wilderness in the thirteenth century BCE, Isaiah in Jerusalem during the Assyrian crisis in the eighth.

Two witnesses to the same condition. The tradition read this as confirmation, not coincidence.

What Learning From the Past Would Have Required

The past that Israel was ignorant of was not obscure. The Exodus was living memory for the generation Moses addressed. The plagues, the sea, the manna, the water from the rock, the cloud and the fire, the giving of the Torah on Sinai, the consequences of the golden calf, the forty years of wilderness as a consequence of the scouts' report. Israel had experienced more direct divine action than any people in its era and perhaps any people since.

To be ignorant of this past was not to have forgotten the events. It was to have failed to integrate them, to live as though they had not happened, to make decisions without reference to the pattern they revealed. The events were available. The lessons were not absorbed. Moses's poem was his last attempt to make the connection land.

What Seeing the Future Would Have Required

The failure to foresee is related to but distinct from the failure to remember. A person who remembers that straying brought suffering in the past should be able to project the same outcome onto current straying. The connection is not difficult. If this happened before under these conditions, and these conditions are present again, this will happen again.

Moses argued with God about forgiveness. After the golden calf, he stood before God and said: You forgave this people before when they sinned. He was using the past as an argument for future grace. That was legitimate. But the people themselves, who had been forgiven, continued in the same patterns rather than treating the forgiveness as the foundation of a different life. The forgiveness was real. The change it should have produced was absent. The same diagnosis in the generation of Moses and the generation of Isaiah: the past is known, the future is not projected, the present goes on as though neither matters.