Isaiah 40:21–24

Isaiah 40:21 — "Have you not known? Have you not heard?" The passage opens in medias res, as the culmination of a cascading series of rhetorical questions that began in verse 18 ("To whom then will you liken God?"). The fourfold interrogation — "Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?" — is a masterpiece of prophetic rhetoric. Isaiah is not merely asking whether Israel lacks data; he is convicting them of willful forgetting. The perfect tenses carry the weight of ancient, settled knowledge: this is not new revelation but primordial truth that Israel has received and suppressed. The four verbs (known, heard, told, understood) evoke four modes of transmission — personal experience, oral tradition, formal instruction, and rational reflection — insisting that no avenue of knowing has been left unexplored. The implicit charge is spiritual amnesia brought on by exile, discouragement, or seduction by the gods of Babylon.

Isaiah 40:22 — "It is he who sits above the circle of the earth" The Hebrew ḥug ha-ʾāreṣ ("circle/vault of the earth") is a cosmological image of God's transcendent enthronement over the created order. The image is not primarily scientific but theological: God is above and over in an ontological sense, not merely spatial. The inhabitants below "are like grasshoppers" — not with contempt, but to establish scale. The Creator's perspective reduces all human pretension to its proper proportion. The second image, God "stretching out the heavens like a curtain / spreading them like a tent to dwell in," continues the creation theology of Genesis 1 and the Psalms: the heavens are not autonomous powers but the LORD's habitation, his tent-cloth, spread at his pleasure. This directly attacks Babylonian cosmology, in which the heavenly bodies — stars, moon, sun — were deities to be feared and placated. Isaiah strips them of divinity: they are God's curtain.

Isaiah 40:23 — "Who brings princes to nothing, who makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness" The word translated "nothing" (ayin) and "emptiness" (tohu) are charged terms. Tohu appears in Genesis 1:2 as the primordial formlessness before creation. By using it here, Isaiah implies that the fall of empires is a kind of un-creation, a return to chaos — not by accident, but by divine will. "Princes" (rozenim) and "rulers" (shofetei aretz) are precisely the Babylonian and Assyrian overlords who seemed invincible to the exilic community. The verse is not abstract political philosophy; it is a direct, pastoral address to a people crushed under imperial power, telling them that Nebuchadnezzar's throne is, from the divine perspective, already vapor.

Isaiah 40:24 — "Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows on them, and they wither" The agricultural metaphor is devastating in its swift compression: plant, sow, root, wither — and the whole sequence takes less time than a human lifetime. The "blowing" (nāšap) of God is a theophanic word, recalling the rûaḥ of God in creation and the divine breath that both gives and withdraws life (cf. Job 34:14–15). The whirlwind (seʿārāh) carries echoes of the divine speech from the whirlwind in Job 38, as well as Elijah's encounter at Horeb. The rulers who seemed to plant themselves permanently — dynasties, empires, ideological hegemonies — are shown to have roots no deeper than grass. This is not gloating but consolation: the community need not despair at what God can dissolve in a breath.

Catholic tradition reads this passage through several interlocking theological lenses.

Creation and Divine Transcendence. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that God "is infinitely greater than all his works" (CCC 300) and that creation is held in existence entirely by his will. Isaiah 40:22 is a scriptural cornerstone for this doctrine: God is not a being among beings but the ground of all being, enthroned above the very cosmos he created. St. Athanasius, combating Arianism, drew on this theology of transcendence to argue that only one who is above all creation could redeem creation from within it — directly anticipating the Incarnation.

The Theology of Providence. Verses 23–24 directly support the Catholic doctrine of Divine Providence articulated in CCC 302–303: God not only creates but governs history, and his governance extends to political structures. The Church Fathers, particularly St. Augustine in The City of God (Books IV–V), read passages like this as the scriptural foundation for his argument that Rome's power — like all empire — was not self-grounding but derived from God's permissive and providential will. Augustine directly cites the withering of rulers as evidence that saeculum history is not the final word.

Typological Reading: Christ as the New Creation. The early Church Fathers, including Origen and St. Cyril of Alexandria, read Isaiah 40 messianically. The "one who stretches out the heavens" is the Logos through whom "all things were made" (John 1:3). The bringing of rulers to tohu (formlessness) is fulfilled in the Cross, where the powers of this age — political, demonic, and spiritual — are publicly disarmed (Col 2:15). Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, notes that the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus is precisely this: the arrival of the true Sovereign before whom all earthly sovereignty must kneel or wither.

Against Idolatry. The Magisterium, from the Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes 36) onward, has insisted that political authority, while legitimate, is not absolute. This passage provides the prophetic grammar for the Church's perennial resistance to totalitarianism: every regime that claims ultimate loyalty is, before the God enthroned above the circle of the earth, no more than a grasshopper.

Contemporary Catholics live under the pressure of political polarization, institutional failure, and the seemingly invincible power of ideological and economic systems that claim comprehensive authority over human life. Isaiah 40:21–24 is not comfort at a safe distance — it is a direct challenge to the despair and the misplaced reverence that afflict Christians today on all sides of the political spectrum.

When a political party, a media ecosystem, a national identity, or a charismatic leader appears indomitable, these verses ask: "Have you not known?" They call the Catholic to actively remember — through liturgy, Scripture, and the Liturgy of the Hours — that every such power has roots no deeper than grass and lasts no longer than it takes God to breathe.

Practically, this passage should reshape Catholic political engagement. It liberates us from both despair (when our side loses) and idolatry (when our side wins). It grounds the Church's prophetic freedom: her willingness to challenge Caesar precisely because she knows who sits above the circle of the earth.

For personal prayer, meditating on the ḥug ha-ʾāreṣ — the vast curve of the earth seen from above — is an act of contemplative deprogramming, a deliberate resizing of what terrifies us and what seduces us with false permanence.