“Thus says the Lord…..
Behold I am doing a new thing,
Even now it is springing to light.
Do you not perceive it?
A way will I make in the wilderness
And rivers in the desert.” Isaiah 43.16, 18, 19

It is 587 BCE. After suicidal political and spiritual choices by Judah’s weak corrupt puppet king, the tiny country has been overrun for the second time in ten years by Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II (of ‘hanging gardens fame’) and virtually everybody forced into exile in Babylonia. For 460 years, from the midpoint of the Age of Aries, most of the kings of Israel and Judah after David have proved to be poor ‘shepherds’. By 587, as the second wave of exiles are herded into Babylonia and both the Temple and the city of Jerusalem are destroyed, the Davidic dynasty has run its course. Jewish independence and ‘kingdom’ have ended, though it will take some time for this to register on the Jewish people.

It is into this situation that the prophet Isaiah speaks, somewhere between the eighth and sixth century BCE, in that period we now know as the Axial Age. God is ‘doing a new thing’. What could the pronouncement have meant, to the Jews and to humanity as a whole?