The Spectral Mother

Abstract

Abstract The chapter concerns exile, both as a historical trauma and a metaphor for all human alienation. It begins with prefigurations of exile in Proto-Isaiah (chs 1–39), the vertiginous pun between the words for exile and revelation, and typological figures who proleptically embody the deportation, such as the king and the prophet. The rest of the chapter focuses on the mission of Cyrus as YHWH’s anointed in ch. 45, the displacement of the Davidic promise onto Israel, the servant and the prophet in chs 55.3–5 and 61.1–3, and the figure of Zion as the spectral mother in ch. 49. Zion is the mother whose dead children return to her; however, it is those very children who mourn for her. The message is that the dead come back to life, but that one cannot erase the past. Presiding over this change is the exiled, maternal figure of God.