Watchman, When Will the Night be Over?: Ashley Palmer
This message came to me concerning Edom [Dumah]:
Someone from Edom [Seir] keeps calling to me,
“Watchman, how much longer until morning?
When will the night be over?”
The watchman replies,
“Morning is coming, but night will soon return.
If you wish to ask again, then come back and ask.”
(Isaiah 21:11-12, NLT. Translation notes in brackets.)
I am slowly making my way through Isaiah. I started reading knowing that some of my favorite passages of Scripture are found in the second half of the book (Isaiah 40-66). The first half I knew for its Messianic prophecies and vaguely remembered that there were a bunch of prophecies about specific locations. This is one of them, a mere two verses for the land of Edom.
Let’s start with the place name. For clarity, this translation uses Edom, which we know from Genesis means “red” and refers to the red soup for which Esau sold his birthright. So Edom, then, is the land of Esau and his descendants. But the original text uses first Dumah and then Seir.
Seir is the name of the land of Esau’s dwelling before he got there (see Genesis 36). The word means “rough.” One potential interpretation of the use of Seir over Edom in the original text is that the one who’s calling could be a descendant of Esau and therefore Abraham, or they could be entirely unrelated to the Israelites and instead a descendant of one of the non-Abrahamic tribes of Seir, among whom Esau lived. Broadly, the prophecies about the other lands surrounding Israel/Judah often refer to a day that all will worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob after a time of suffering and being humbled (see Isaiah 18 for Ethiopia, Isaiah 19 for Egypt, and Isaiah 23 for Tyre), supporting the better-known Messianic prophecies of the earlier chapters. There is a thread of healing the broken families of mankind that have plagued us since Genesis, through Esau and Ishmael and Cain, and the name of Seir evokes that history.
So a non-Israelite, a neighbor, perhaps a lost sheep (John 10:16), calls out over and over, and the watchman answers. In the previous verses of Isaiah 21, God tells Isaiah to set a watchman on the city wall to look for signs of battle, and the watchman proclaims the fall of Babylon (in metaphorical terms: the rulers, powers, and oppressors of this world—see my previous Harvest post for more on that).
Dumah meanwhile is a wordplay on Edom that means “silence” or “stillness.” So you can also read the first line as “this message came to me concerning the silence, the stillness.”
Sometimes being still and silent is restful. Sometimes we need to be still and silent to hear the voice of God and to confront the things we’ve been using our busyness to ignore, as uncomfortable and unpleasant as that can be.
But there is another edge to the stillness and the silence here highlighted by the yearning of the one who calls: “How much longer until morning? When will the night be over?” The lonely dark has lasted too long for them. I see in this call the aching silence of feeling left alone by human beings and by God. The one who calls knows that morning will come one day—they have hope of that, they know that the earth turns and that all is cyclical. But still, when will our suffering be over? When will God answer? When will we hear His voice? When will He break His seeming silence?
The watchman is the one to answer. It is frustratingly vague, and in some ways confirming what they already know. “Morning is coming, but night will soon return.” In fact, the new information that the watchman gives is that the day won’t last as long as surely the one who calls hoped it would. But he assures the one who calls that they can always come back and ask. The one who calls is no longer alone, not in the same way. Perhaps, then, they can get through the night.
Here as well as in the larger scope of Isaiah (see Isaiah 62:6), the watchmen remind me of the parable of the ten bridesmaids, who wait for the wedding of the Lamb. They remind me of the disciples in Acts who pray day and night for those of their number who have been imprisoned, who wait for Jesus to return and speak the good news boldly in the meantime. The watchman says this: “Day after day I have stood on the watchtower, my lord. Night after night I have remained at my post. Now at last—look! […] Babylon is fallen, fallen! All the idols of Babylon lie broken on the ground!” (Isaiah 21:8-9). And in the shattering of the idols of this world, in Jesus’s victory over death, we can rejoice. In the meantime we wait. Day after day we stand on the watchtower, night after night we remain at our posts.
We as Christians are called to be watchmen. Sometimes we feel as abandoned in the silence as the one who calls out, but the beauty of a Christian community is that we are all watchmen. We can all answer the lonely cries in the night, if we listen for them. So when any of our number cry out, we hear. We answer, just as the Good Shepherd would.
Morning is coming, but night will soon return. In the context of Messianic prophecy, this can be interpreted as a reference to Jesus’s incarnation. We find ourselves now in a second night, waiting in hope for the daybreak of Jesus’s return. And then there will be no night to follow. For after the destruction of the earth:
Then the glory of the moon will wane,
and the brightness of the sun will fade,
for the LORD of Heaven’s Armies will rule on Mount Zion.
(Isaiah 24:23, NLT)
[On this mountain], the LORD of Heaven’s Armies
will spread a wonderful feast
for all the people of the world.
It will be a delicious banquet
with clear, well-aged wine and choice meat.
There he will remove the cloud of gloom,
the shadow of death that hangs over the earth.
He will swallow up death forever!
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away all tears.
He will remove forever all insults and mockery
against his land and people.
The LORD has spoken!
(Isaiah 25:6-8, NLT)
Though we still walk in a world clouded by the shadow of death, we know that the LORD will swallow up death forever. We know that He has already begun that work. Even as we wonder when the night will finally be over, we have hope that the day will come. And we are not alone, for the Sovereign LORD and our fellow watchmen will comfort us.
Ashley Palmer (a recent LA Tech graduate of Computer Science and English) is a blessing to The Wesley. As she continues to live in Ruston, she works as a remote Software Developer for Praeses, LLC in Shreveport. She is also a fantasy novelist currently editing her first novel: Among the Skies. In addition to writing, Ashley enjoys making attractive websites and apps, digital art, reading, and good food. She is kind, knowledgeable, and devoted to her relationship with the Lord. We love her and are thankful to have her in our community!