Sec Def Hegseth is evidently out on a “Send Me” tour telling people how the bible justifies all manner of war and destruction. The current video has him quoting Isaiah.<\/p>\n
Using \u201csend me\u201d as a slogan for literal war against ideological or religious enemies rips v. 8 out of its literary and theological setting. Isaiah 6:1\u201313 is a prophetic commissioning narrative, not a military<\/em> commission. The chapter\u2019s structure is important: vv. 1\u20134 present Isaiah\u2019s throne-room vision of God\u2019s holiness; vv. 5\u20137 move to Isaiah\u2019s confession of uncleanness and ritual purification; only then, in v. 8, does the divine question \u201cWhom shall I send?\u201d appear, to which Isaiah responds, \u201cHere am I; send me.\u201d In context, the verb \u201csend\u201d marks prophetic dispatch\u2014Isaiah is commissioned as a spokesman, not as an agent of physical coercion.<\/p>\n That becomes explicit in vv. 9\u201313, where the content of his mission is to speak <\/em>a message of judgment. Isaiah is told the people of Judah will hear but not understand. Will see but not perceive.\u00a0 He is not being sent to win a campaign or wage violence; he is being sent to proclaim an unwelcome truth in the face of disbelief, judgment, and national crisis. It is an especially strange prooftext for militarized rhetoric because Isaiah is sent on a mission defined, at least from a human perspective, by rejection rather than success. The point of Isaiah 6 is not heroic conquest but prophetic witness under judgment.<\/p>\n In parallel with the passage\u2019s description of those who \u201chear but do not understand,\u201d Hegseth seems to read but not comprehend: he extracts words from the text and repurposes them to sanctify his own commitments without reckoning with what the passage actually means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sec Def Hegseth is evidently out on a “Send Me” tour telling people how the bible justifies all manner of war and destruction. The current video has him quoting Isaiah. Using \u201csend me\u201d as a slogan for literal war against ideological or religious enemies rips v. 8 out of its literary and theological setting. Isaiah …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2227,2228],"class_list":["post-12549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-biblical-misappropriation","tag-crusade-nonsense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12549"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12552,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12549\/revisions\/12552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}