Some Answered Questions: The Prophecies of Isaiah

Among the table-talks of Some Answered Questions recorded by Laura Clifford Barney is an extended treatment of the prophecies of Isaiah, the Hebrew prophet of the eighth century before the common era whose oracles have been a foundational text in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions.

Miss Barney had asked the Master a question about the specific passages in the Book of Isaiah that, in the Bahá'í understanding, were addressed to the present age. The Master's response unfolds across the chapter as a substantial commentary on several principal passages.

The first passage He considered was the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, with its celebrated vision of the peaceable kingdom. The chapter prophesies a time when the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. The Master's treatment was patient. The passage, He explained, is not a prophecy of a literal change in the diet of carnivorous animals. It is a prophecy of the coming time when the human race, having entered its spiritual maturity, will achieve the condition of inner peace that allows the natural antipathies of the various human groupings to give way to fellowship.

The wolf and the lamb are, in this reading, symbolic designations of the various human peoples. The peoples who were once natural enemies — the conqueror and the conquered, the oppressor and the oppressed, the religion that has dominated and the religion that has been suppressed — will, in the age of the coming manifestation, lie down together in unity.

The Master went on to address the further passage of chapter eleven, in which the root of Jesse is named as a banner to the peoples. This image, He explained, prophesies the standing of the new Manifestation as an ensign by which the various peoples of the earth will be gathered.

A second principal passage He treated was Isaiah's account of the Mountain of the Lord's House, in chapter two. The mountain to which all the nations of the earth shall flow is, in His reading, the spiritual mountain of the new Revelation — the centre toward which the divided peoples of the earth will, in the coming age, turn.

A third passage was the prophecy of the Servant of the Lord in the latter chapters of Isaiah. The figure of the suffering servant, despised and rejected, was treated by the Master as a prophetic image of the long succession of the prophets of God — culminating, in the present Dispensation, in the figures of the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh, both of whom suffered the rejection of their own peoples and the imprisonment by their own governments.

The treatment closed with a brief reflection on the practical force of the prophecies. They are not, in the Master's framing, predictions in the manner of ordinary fortune-telling. They are descriptions of the spiritual reality that the divine Manifestations bring into the world. The believer's task, on encountering the prophecies, is to recognise the reality that has appeared and to participate, by his or her own life, in the unfolding that the prophecies have described.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions (1908). Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19289.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1908). *Some Answered Questions*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/some-answered-questions/