In
the first place, the Hebrew words for ‘live’, ‘arise’ and awake’ carry
unmistakable eschatological overtones, especially in a context where terms for
‘dead’, ‘corpse’, ‘dust’ and ‘shades’ (רפאים) also appear. The closest parallel
in biblical Hebrew is Daniel 12.2. The concentration of such vocabulary and
imagery in this one verse also separates it from passages about national
restoration and revival such as Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones.
The
wider context also opposes the fate of the wicked (vv. 11-14, 21) to that of
the righteous (vv. 19-20), just as in Dan. 12.1-3, and vv. 20-21 in particular
point to a Day of Judgement outside history, a rate those on whom the dew of
light falls (the righteous) from the wicked whose fate is to be sent to Gehenna
(‘the land of shades’) (Stenning 1949: 82).
But
there are two other links with Daniel that are even more significant. The two
main subjects in the verse, as it stands in MT, have pronominal suffixes: מתיך
‘your dead’ and נבלית ‘my (dead) body’. The force of the first pronoun is to
identify a special relationship between these particular dead people and their
God. Jewish and Christian commentators have recognized here a reference to the
martyrs, a special group among the dead who died for their faith, and as this
is one of the main themes of Daniel, we are entitled to ask whether this is how
we are intended to understand Isa. 26.19 as well.
The
other word נבלית again follows Daniel in introducing an autobiographical
element into the description of the resurrection of the dead. The grammar is
odd but not impossible: ‘together with my dead body’ (AV). The noun has the
same kind of adverbial function as the word ארץ later in the same verse. But
once again the meaning is unambiguous: the author, either out of piety or not
inconceivably out of fear of imminent martyrdom, wishes to stress that the
reference here is to individual resurrection, not national revival, and that he
for one believes in it and trusts in God’s power to rescue him even in death.
Some
of the ancient versions, including the Septuagint quoted above, have the plural
‘corpses’. Syriac and Aramaic have ‘their corpses’. This provides textual
critics with the authority to remove the more difficult singular ‘my corpse’,
explaining the suffix ‘my’ as the result of a scribal error (dittography). But
the Qumran Isaiah scroll, which originated in the context of a variety of ancient
Judaism well-known to have had a developed eschatology, has the same first
person singular term as the Masoretic Text, and gives all the evidence we need
for the view that ancient Hebrew texts from the time of Daniel at the latest,
including the received text of Isa. 26.19, contain a highly developed
eschatology which the Masoretes painstakingly preserved. (J. F. A. Sawyer, “’My
Secret is With Me’ (Isaiah 24.16): Some Semantic Links between Isaiah 24-27 and
Daniel,” in Understanding Poets and Prophets: Essays in Honour of George
Wishart Anderson, ed. A. Graeme Auld [Journal for the Study of the Old
Testament Supplement Series 152; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993], 314-15)
