What Do Led Zeppelin and Isaiah have in Common?
A New Commentary on Isaiah (Part Three)
If it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break, If it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break, When the levee breaks, I have no place to stay.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, oh, Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, It’s got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home
Oh well, oh well, oh well, ooh-ooh. -”When the Levee Breaks,”Led Zeppelin, 1971
“Led Zeppelin used the same technique as Isaiah!” When this dawned on me I said it out loud, but looked around to see if anyone heard me. Is a pastor allowed to make such a comparison? But it was true.
I stumbled on “When the Levee Breaks,” a lesser-known Led Zeppelin song whose beat spoke to something deep within me.
Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good
No, crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move, ooh-ooh.
“How,” I wondered, “did they come up with lyrics so far removed from the standard fare of ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’ that permeated the music of the late 60s and early 70s? How did it relate to anything the members of this British band had ever experienced? It turns out that those were the wrong questions. Led Zeppelin didn’t create this powerful message of a flood; they translated a decades-old song so it could be heard in their own time. That is a technique that Isaiah, and all of the prophets for that matter, used in their own art.
“When the Levee Breaks” was first written by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929.
If it keeps on rainin’ levee’s goin’ to break, If it keeps on rainin’ levee’s goin’ to break, And the water gonnna come in and we’ll have no place to stay,
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan, Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan, Thinkin’ ‘bout my baby and my happy home.
Their country blues song was written just two years after the Great Mississippi flood, which spread across 26,000 square miles of the Mississippi Delta, killing hundreds and forcing thousands to evacuate. But even McCoy and Minnie weren’t the first to write a song about this disaster. Both “Backwater Blues” by Bessie Smith and “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues” by Barbecue Bob were written in the years prior. When we read the Bible we are dealing with a similar genealogy.
Isaiah has been called the 5th gospel because so many of the themes of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John can be traced back to the words of that prophet. This could lead us to believe that Isaiah, inspired by God, came up with these concepts himself. But Isaiah, like Led Zeppelin, wasn’t the creator of the concepts found in the book that bears his name. If we are going to understand Isaiah’s “song,” we have to familiarize ourselves with the original context and words he was working with to write the fresh language and imagery of his translation.
Isaiah’s primary sources, then, were a few texts of the Pentateuch outlining the promises and commitments between God and Israel:
Leviticus 26:1-39
Deuteronomy 4:15-40
Deuteronomy 28:1-32:42
If we are going to go deeper with Isaiah, we need to be familiar with these passages. One of the key themes of the agreement between God and Israel are the stipulations of blessings if the covenant is followed and the penalties if Israel doesn’t follow through on the commitment that was made.1
Blessings: Leviticus 26:1-13, Deuteronomy 4:32-80, Deuteronomy 28:1-14.
Curses: Leviticus 26:14-39, Deuteronomy 4:15-28, Deuteronomy 28:15-32:42.
Isaiah’s back and forth between blessings and curses, with more time spent on the curses than the blessings, isn’t something that begins with the prophets. His translation, though novel and creative, still reflects the passages from Leviticus and Deuteronomy that he is applying to his generation. For example a theme of Leviticus 26 is developed by Isaiah in chapter 1:
But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, and if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and sap your strength. You will plant seed in vain, because your enemies will eat it. -Lev. 26:14-16
Your country is desolate, your cities burned with fire; your fields are being stripped by foreigners right before you, laid waste as when overthrown by strangers. Daughter Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a cucumber field, like a city under siege. Unless the Lord Almighty had left us some survivors, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah. -Isaiah 1:7-9
The curses and blessings of the covenant and of the book of Isaiah are corporate rather than individual. Blessings for the community include health, life, prosperity, agricultural abundance, safety, protection, and the respect of others. The curses for the people include disease, drought, danger, death, destruction, defeat, deportation, destitution, and disgrace. The people of God have a choice to make which will affect their destiny:
See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. -Deuteronomy 30:15
I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things. -Isaiah 45:7
Take a break from writing out Isaiah, say halfway through, and write out these passages from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, noting how you have seen Isaiah creatively translating the blessings and curses of the Mosaic covenant into the context of the present generation of people.
Then, as those who have benefitted from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have the opportunity to take an additional step. We can now go deeper in our reading of the New Testament, because Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, not to mention Paul, often used images and language from Isaiah and Isaiah’s sources in their translations of what God did through Jesus. Compare these two passages, for example, here is Isaiah’s riff on the relationship between God and Israel in his day.
I will sing for the one I love, a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard, on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones, and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it, and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit. “Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyard, than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad? Now I will tell you, what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated, and briers and thorns will grow there. I will command the clouds, not to rain on it.” The vineyard of the Lord Almighty, is the nation of Israel, and the people of Judah, are the vines he delighted in. And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress. -Isaiah 5:1-7
And here is Jesus’ riff on the same theme in his day:
Jesus then began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. But they seized him, beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully. He sent still another, and that one they killed. He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed.
“He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’
“But the tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.
“What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others. Haven’t you read this passage of Scripture:
“‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’ ?”Then the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders looked for a way to arrest him because they knew he had spoken the parable against them. But they were afraid of the crowd; so they left him and went away. -Mark 12:1-12
How would you develop this theme in our own day?
