NOTES for Isa 1:16-20

People have reflected on communion with God and on what is needed for it in every age, even when they remembered God poorly and remembered poorly what He wants from them. With Abraham's calling a new era began: God Himself spoke to people, and not only spoke, but also began to create His people, raising it from a small tribe. Now, it would appear, there could be no questions concerning communion with God: God Himself could answer any question and resolve any uncertainty; one only had to ask Him. But people tend to cling to traditional paradigms, whether in behavior or in thinking.

Sacrifices had long been regarded as a form of communion with higher powers, as a shared meal of gods and people. But fallen man has always tended to seek convenience and emotional comfort more than spiritual renewal. Communion with higher powers created obligations; their nearness at times began to feel burdensome. Sacrifices ceased to be communion with higher powers and turned into a treat by which people tried to appease those powers so that they would leave in peace those who prepared the treat for them. The history of Yahwism began from a clean slate, but fallen man, even when receiving revelation from God, remains fallen man. And in Yahwism too, especially when it spread widely and became, as it was in the time of Isaiah of Jerusalem, the state religion, sacrifice, which in the days of Abraham and Moses had been a shared meal of God and people, also became a means that allowed religious but not very believing people to buy God off.

The logic was simple: keeping the commandments is difficult and often inconvenient, while it is easy to organize a splendid festival with many sacrifices so that God will be satisfied. Will a multitude of sacrifices replace keeping the commandments? Through the mouth of His prophet God answers: no, it will not. Stop doing evil, learn to do good, and then come to Me, He says to those who hoped that sacrifices could replace the path of righteousness.

And the point here is not even that God is repelled by violators of the commandments, though their choice can hardly please Him. The point is that the sacrificial meal has meaning only as a form of communion with God. That communion with God is impossible without keeping the commandments. And the arithmetic of offense and ransom, violation and penalties that remove guilt from the violator, is out of place here. God offers man only one choice. Nothing else can replace it.