Texts in Conversation
In Isaiah 28, God announces that he will now speak the language of foreign invaders to a people who refused plain language. Paul quotes this warning in his discussion of tongues, in a form that does not matches the Hebrew text nor the Greek version.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Isaiah 28:11
Hebrew Bible
9 Who is the Lord trying to teach? To whom is he explaining a message? To those just weaned from milk! To those just taken from their mother’s breast! 10 Indeed, they will hear meaningless gibberish, senseless babbling, a syllable here, a syllable there. 11 For with mocking lips and a foreign tongue he will speak to these people. 12 In the past he said to them, “This is where security can be found. Provide security for the one who is exhausted. This is where rest can be found.” But they refused to listen. 13 So the Lord’s message to them will sound like meaningless gibberish, senseless babbling, a syllable here, a syllable there. As a result, they will fall on their backsides when they try to walk, and be injured, ensnared, and captured.
1 Corinthians 14:21
New Testament
20 Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking. Instead, be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. 21 It is written in the law: “By people with strange tongues and by the lips of strangers I will speak to this people, yet not even in this way will they listen to me,” says the Lord. 22 So then, tongues are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers. Prophecy, however, is not for unbelievers but for believers. 23 So if the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and unbelievers or uninformed people enter, will they not say that you have lost your minds? 24 But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or uninformed person enters, he will be convicted by all, he will be called to account by all.
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Notes and References
“... In 14:21 Paul quotes Isa. 28:11–12: “‘By people of other tongues and by the lips of others I will speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me,’ says the Lord.” [...] Isaiah 28:1–29 consists of an oracle against the political and religious leadership of God’s people (Samaria and Jerusalem). They had rejected God’s counsel to rest and trust in him as being naïve and had gone ahead in a policy marked by a drunken madness and formed other alliances. The leadership (rulers, priests, and prophets [cf. 28:1, 3, 7, 14–15]) refused to listen when God clearly and plainly explained to them what it meant to rest in him and to give rest to the weary (28:12), so now God’s voice of judgment will be heard in the barbarian language of the Assyrian invaders (28:11). [...] “Determining the precise relationship between the wording of 1 Cor. 14.21 and the text of the LXX is one of the greatest challenges in the entire corpus of Pauline citations” because of “the distance of the Pauline wording from both the LXX and the Masoretic Hebrew textual traditions” (Stanley 1992: 198). Paul leaves out most of Isa. 28:12, evidently because he sees those clauses as irrelevant to his argument. His text appears to be an interpretive rendering, perhaps dependent upon an earlier Greek version that sought to conform more closely to the Hebrew text than the LXX (see Stanley 1992). ...”
Ciampa, Roy E. and Brian S. Rosner
"1 Corinthians" in Beale, G. K., and D. A. Carson, editors. Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament
(pp. 1711-1712) Baker Academic, 2007
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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