Who Marries Whom?

Through Isaiah, the Lord promises, “as a young man marries a virgin, so your sons will marry you; and the rejoicing of the bridegroom over the bride, your God will rejoice over you” (62:5).

There are multiple difficulties here. First, sons (plural!) marry their (virgin!) mother. Second, God is the bridegroom to the same bride. 

Some commentators skim past the difficulties, saying that Zion’s sons will marry – be covenantally committed to – Yahweh. Matthew Henry takes the virgin in the first lines as a reference to the land: The sons devote themselves to the land, as Yahweh rejoices over His people. 

Neither of these works grammatically. Yahweh begins addressing some “you” in verse 2, and the only reasonable antecedent is Zion/Jerusalem. Land isn’t mentioned until verse 4, and there the land is “your land” – the land that belongs to Zion/Jerusalem. When verse 5 says that the sons marry “you,” the you must be Zion/Jerusalem, the only mother in Isaiah (cf. 54:1-8).

Perhaps the sons are attendants of the bride who “marry-off” mom. A bit odd, that, a duty usually reserved for the daughters of Jerusalem. Even if that were without difficulty, there would still be the anomaly of the virgin mother.

Obviously, this isn’t to be taken literally, but we can’t wave and hand and pretend that the problems don’t matter. Wisdom is for untying knots. Let’s pick at these and see what we can unravel.

The easiest problem is probably the virgin mother. Mary is the climax of these theme in the Bible, but it’s set up throughout the Old Testament. Israel is no virgin; she is most often a whore. But Yahweh promises to restore her virginity, to “build up” virgin Israel so that she again becomes a wall and not a gate (Jeremiah 31:4; cf. Song of Songs 8:9-10).

That Zion’s sons would marry Zion, becoming the ba’al-lord to their mother is such an odd promise that it seems designed to provoke speculation. What kind of event could possibly fulfill this? If we collapsed the sons into a single son, and that single son was both child of and lord of Zion, it would work. This knot is unraveled (ultimately, at least) Christologically: Jesus is all of Zion’s sons in one Son; He is a child of Zion; and He comes to rescue Zion to become her lord and husband.

Is Isaiah prophesying a polyandrous future for Israel? That seems so, but there’s another possibility. Both Yahweh and the single son-Israel who is also Lord of his mother can be married to the same Zion if the son-Israel is at the same time Yahweh the bridegroom. Again, the knot unravels as typology: Jesus is the single son who becomes Bridegroom-Baal to His mother because He is Yahweh come as son of Zion to become husband of Zion.