A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

-- Isaiah 40: 1-3 (KJV)

What we mean by "a voice crying in the wilderness" today is "a warning voice no one heeds" -- the wilderness is metaphorical, a lack of sense or reason. What no one seems to have heeded in early translations of Isaiah, however, is that the voice doesn't cry in the wilderness at all. In Hebrew, the voice instructs some unnamed prophet to prepare a "highway" through the wilderness. The line was botched both in the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, and the King James Version follows suit.

In truth, these verses are pretty confusing, so we shouldn't blame the translators too much. After all, the authors of the Gospels, citing Isaiah, made the same mistake (John the Baptist is the "voice crying in the wilderness" at Matthew 3: 3, etc. Other problems with the passage are harder to deal with -- for example, identifying the "ye" whom God commands to comfort Jerusalem.

Whoever the speaker and whoever the audience, the message is clear. This portion of the Book of Isaiah -- from chapter 40 to chapter 55 -- is called "Second Isaiah" because it is unquestionably of a different period from chapters 1 to 39 ("First Isaiah") and by a different author or authors. (Chapters 56 to 66 are different still and are known collectively as "Third Isaiah.") Where First Isaiah addresses the Judeans in their plight at the turn of the seventh century b.c., Second Isaiah addresses Jews who had been exiled to Babylon after Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century b.c.

Anticipating the exiles' return home under the guidance of Cyrus II, Persian conqueror of Babylon, the author of these verses harks back to the Hebrews' escape from Egypt to the promised land of Canaan some seven centuries before. Then as now, Yahweh's people had to pass through a "wilderness," but this time the Jews, better supplied and trained, will build in advance a path or "highway" through the rocky desert.

Whoever cried out, the people listened, returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding Solomon's temple, which had been leveled by Babylon. (The result is known as the Second Temple.) So the phrase was not only mistranslated, it's almost always quoted out of context. But to try changing that would be crying in the wilderness.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!