Isaiah 58 · a question people ask
Who is speaking in this chapter, and who is told to cry aloud?
The chapter opens with a command to one person: "Cry aloud! Don’t spare! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Declare to my people their disobedience, and to the house of Jacob their sins" (58:1). In Hebrew Cry is singular, said to one person, and aloud is begaron, a form of garon, which Brown-Driver-Briggs gives as "neck, throat". The chapter doesn't name the one who is told to cry, and these notes don't either. The speaker calls them "my people" (58:1), says "they seek me daily" (58:2), and speaks of "the fast that I have chosen" (58:5-6) and "my holy day" (58:13). The WEB closes its quotation marks just before the chapter's last words, and those words say whose they are: "for the LORD’s mouth has spoken it" (58:14).
The verses
““Cry aloud! Don’t spare! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Declare to my people their disobedience, and to the house of Jacob their sins. Yet they seek me daily, and delight to know my ways. As a nation that did righteousness, and didn’t forsake the ordinance of their God, they ask of me righteous judgments. They delight to draw near to God.”
“Is this the fast that I have chosen? A day for a man to humble his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under himself? Will you call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the LORD? “Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to release the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke?”
““If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, and the holy of the LORD honorable, and honor it, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you will delight yourself in the LORD, and I will make you to ride on the high places of the earth, and I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father;” for the LORD’s mouth has spoken it.”