It is now 10 Ab in my timezone, so to my fellow Semites I hope your fast was easy. Let's talk Shabbat Nachamu.
Pump Up The Volume (mis)cast a twentysomething Christian Slater as highschool student Mark. That is a portentious name; the evangelist we call "Mark" (and this blog holds as authentic) started his "gospel of Christ" with reference to Isaiah 40, in the form of a voice crying out in the wilderness. The Mark in that movie, we learn, is a Yankee lately transported to the "wave of mutilation" which was 1990 suburban Arizona.
R. David Freidenreich in TheTorah is arguing that the movie got it wrong. He admits in all fairness that it's not just a Christian interpretation; the Aggadah of Genesis had elided the same verse by the time of the movie. Although I'll suggest here that this text still depended upon the Christians' base.
That base was the Leontopolitan Isaiah. It was in Onias IV's interest to remove the Prophets from Zion.
2 Isaiah, like the prophet of most Isaiah 1-33, was a man of Zion. The Lord was coming to His Mountain and it was time to prepare His way - and, soon, His House which is the Temple to come. The rabbi here cites Joseph Blenkinsopp, that this passage intended the ceremonial path to the Lord's Advent. (It might further nod to the Persian highways, and to Cyrus II's call for the exiles' return; although Blenkinsopp and the rabbi dismiss both.) Zion was not, itself, a wilderness in God's sight. Either Isaiah would find absurd to build paths to a place that didn't yet exist.
Tell you what was a place of no particular value to the Lord, as of the second century BC: Leontopolis. Where Onias was stuck.
It would make sense to tweak this verse so that, in the "elder" days, the Prophet was calling from the desert that is, not Zion. The Lord is coming where He pleases and we must house Him there.
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