Word: isaiah
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...historian Isaiah Berlin is reported to have said that Yitzhak Shamir is like a wall and that while walls have uses, being talked to is not one of them. Listening to Shamir, however, is revelatory. For in common with several other world leaders (Saddam Hussein comes quickly to mind), the Israeli Prime Minister has always said exactly what he thinks and more often than not has done exactly what he has said he was going...
...Isaiah...
...fragment of poetry by the Greek Archilochus recorded these enigmatic lines: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing." In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin described Tolstoy as a fox who knew many things and Dostoyevsky as a hedgehog who knew one big thing. The Old Paradigm knew one big thing (centralized government, one organizing ideology, one big idea). The New Paradigm is a fox that accommodates many things -- it is decentralized, undoctrinaire, pragmatic, multifaceted...
...sound especially odd to modern ears, such as "I will accept no bull from your house" (referring to animal sacrifice in Psalm 50) and "once I was stoned" (St. Paul in II Corinthians 11, speaking of his stoning). Gone as well are some tongue twisters ("you who hew" in Isaiah 22) and ambiguities, like Zechariah 3's "Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed in filthy garments." (Joshua's garb was filthy, not the angel's.) The poetic exclamation "behold" has given way to the prosaic "look." Sex is bluntly called "intercourse...
...Exodus not Joshua or Samuel, That the Jews make their covenant with God and receive the divine laws, and it is in Exodus that God tells the Jews, "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (22:21) Isaiah urges us to "learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression" (1:17), and the 82nd Psalm echoes the religious responsibility to "Give justice to the weak...maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute...