Sunday Sermon: Zion Shall Be Redeemed Through Justice, not Judgment

This is a story about, among other things, how reading the Bible in different translations can open up vistas that the church-approved King James Version closes down—not by being wrong or inaccurate, but by being more than 400 years old in a language, and a culture, that continue to change.

It is also a story about how slight changes in meaning can have huge implications for how we understand both God and our responsibility to each other.

But mostly it is a story about Zion and how we are supposed to make it.

But let me start with Robert Alter’s epic translation of the Hebrew Bible with commentary. I have resisted buying the three-volume complete set, not because I don’t like Alter’s work, but because I have already bought and read the five incremental volumes that he produced while completing the work. But last week I gave in (a $100 Amazon gift certificate for taking a survey helped) and bought the full set. Mainly because the earlier volumes did not include the Later Prophets, and I wanted to read Alter’s Isaiah.

Yesterday I started reading Isaiah in this new translation. I have struggled with Isaiah for years, read it in a half a dozen translations, and I still don’t feel that I understand at all. And in the first chapter of Alter’s version, I came across something that I have never noticed before:

Zion shall be redeemed through justice, and those who turn back in her through righteousness. –Isaiah 1:27

This caught my attention because my whole point in reading Isaiah again is to try to understand what he means by “Zion.” As a Latter-day Saint, the concept has always fascinated me, and as a Bible reader, I have grappled a lot with the differences in the ways that the term in used in the various standard works. Like Joseph Smith, Isaiah was obsessed with Zion. But what exactly does that mean?

For Isaiah, as I understand it, Zion is what will be restored after Jerusalem is destroyed. Jerusalem destroyed is Babylon; Jerusalem redeemed is Zion. Babylon and Zion are complete opposites in this regard: both have their own civic cultures, social assumptions, and economic structures. And they are incompatible with each other. Zion is what the City of God was supposed to be all along, what it was destroyed for not beng, and what it is always able to become. And, according to the Alter translation, the thing that will restore it is “justice.”

But that’s not quite how it comes out in the King James Version, whiich reads “Zion shall be redeemed with judgment,” not justice. The difference is extremely important, since “judgment” in the Bible usually refers to something that God does, whereas “justice” refers to something that human beings are supposed to create.

This difference goes throughout the two versions in the writings of the prophets about justice and/or judgment. Here is a quick test chart of places where it seems to matter.

	KJV	Alter Translation
Isaiah 1:27	Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness. 	Zion shall be redeemed through justice, and those who turn back in her through righteousness.
Isaiah 30:18	And therefore will the LORD wait, that he may be gracious unto you, and therefore will he be exalted, that he may have mercy upon you: for the LORD is a God of judgment: blessed are all they that wait for him.	And therefore the Lord shall wait to grant you grace, and therefore He shall rise to show you mercy. For a God of justice is the Lord.
Isaiah 61:8	For I the LORD love judgment, I hate robbery for burnt offering; and I will direct their work in truth, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. 	For I, the Lord, love justice, hate robbery and vice.
Amos 5:24	But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. 	But let justice well up like water and righteousness like a steady stream.
Zechariah 7:9	Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother: 	Thus sayeth the Lord of Armies, saying: Judge true justice, and do kindness and mercy each man with his fellow.

It is the KJV, and not the Alter translation, that is the outlier. Nearly ever other modern translation of the five verses above uses “justice” rather than “judgment” to render the Hebrew word mishpat into English. The word itself can take both meanings, along with “rightness,” “propriety,” “ordinance,” and its modern Hebrew meaning of “law.”

But these particular uses of mishpat occur in contexs that make it very clear what the prophets mean. Not only do Isaiah, Amos, and Zechariah use the term to describe what we would call “justice”; they use it to describe what people today call “social justice,” or the structural elements of our social institutions that either empower, or disenfranchise, the poor.

This is not a hippie-dippy liberal re-writing of sacred writ. It is the plain meaning of the text. Consider the charge that Amos makes against Jerusalem:

And thus sayeth the Lord:
For three tresspasses of Israel,
and for four, I will not turn it back—
for their selling the just man for silver
and the needy for sandles.
Who trample the head of the needy
in the dust of the ground
and pervert the way of the poor. (Amos 2:6-7)

Or Isaiah

Woe, who inscribe crime’s inscriptions
and writs of wretchedness write,
to tilt from their cause the poor
and rob justice from my people’s needy
making widows with their booty
and despoiling or[phans. (Isaiah 10:1-2)

We do not have to search very far to realize that, when the Hebrew prophets say “justice,” they mean social justice. They scream about it constantly, and they confront their people with the consequences of ignoring it.

So, why does this not come out in the King James Version of the Bible? Why do the KJV scholars insist on turning mishpat into “judgment” in spite of all of the textual evidence that it means something different?

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the fact that English has changed over the last 400 years. The word “justice,” especially, has taken on many connotations that it did not have in 1611. At the time, “justice” and “judgment” would both have been understood as a vehicle for God’s punishment. People back then thought a lot about God’s punishment, and “social justice” wasn’t really a thing.

But King James himself, along with commissioning a major translation of the Bible, was also the architect of Stuart abosolutism, or the idea that Kings ruled absolutely with the consent of God. It would not have been common at the time—and it certainly would not have been wise—to suggest that people in a society had a responsibility to make that society more just, and less economically stratified. All justice came from God, through the King, and economic stratification was the backbone of society.

That is not the world we live in today. As citizens of a democracy, we, not the King, shape the social and ecomomic structures in which our fellow human beings live, work, suffer, and die. How we shape those structures matters. If they tilt to favor the rich, then they, and we, earn the same condemnation that Amos and Isaiah had for the people of Jerusalem. And if they both care for and empower the poor, we have created a just society.

But either way, the responsibility is ours, not God’s. This is the difference between justice and judgment where the redemption of Zion is concerned. If we say that Zion will be redeemed by judgment, then it is all up to God. He has to sweep in and destroy the wicked and then set up a truly just melinneal society where lions lie down with lambs and there are neither rich nor poor. No point in trying to do anythying about justice now; we have to wait for God to go “poof.”

But if we say that Zion will be redeemed by justice, we are saying that Zion will be created by people willing to devote their time and treasure to creating a just society. It matters, in this case, how we set things up. It matters what happens to poor people, oppressed people, vulnerable people, and everybody else. Zion is a constituitive enterprise: it exists only, and only to the extent that, we do the hard work necessary to create it. And it will never get here until we do.