Second Isaiah Lands in Washington, DC: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” as Biblical Narrative and Biblical Hermeneutic∗

∗Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr, c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, NY.

Abstract

Even though Martin Luther King, Jr. constantly cited the Bible, no one has seriously examined his rhetoric as biblical hermeneutic. Here I argue that in “I Have a Dream,” King explodes closed memories of the Exodus by reconceptualizing a hermeneutic of (Second) Isaiah as he interprets African-Americans' experience of oppression and exile in Babylon/America and their hope for a new Exodus. Drawing on African-American political rhetoric, King spotlights biblical writers' dialogue with each other and extends the arc of biblical narrative into the present. He also anticipates certain forms of liberation theology of the 1970s and beyond.

Notes

∗Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr, c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, NY.

¹I thank RR reviewers Jacqueline Jones Royster and Mark Gellis. For their encouragement and criticism while I was drafting this essay, I thank Randel Helms, Drew Hansen, and Ralph Luker. I also pour a libation for Elizabeth Vander Lei, David Jolliffe, Beth Daniell, and others at a conference called Inquiries into Rhetoric and Christianity that was held at DePaul University in May 2005.

²For an investigation of King's use of sources for his sermons, see Miller, Voice.

³For an analysis of this sermon, see Salvatore 148–52.

⁴For a study of Robinson, see Fleming. For an examination of Baker, see Ransby. For an exploration of Robert Moses, see Burner.

⁵For an analysis of this sermon, see Salvatore 158–64.

⁶See Barr, Scope 107. James Barr had earlier complained that churchgoers “doubted” the importance of the entire Hebrew scripture (Old and New 139). In 1979 another prominent scholar, Brevard Childs, growled that the First Testament should not be “ignored” or treated merely as “background material” for the Second Testament (671). Focusing on white churches, Barr and Childs utterly failed to notice that African Americans had, for over one hundred years, placed enormous emphasis on the story of the Exodus and on other narratives of the Hebrew Bible. Among other contemporary scholars of the First Testament, Walter Brueggemann now welcomes interpretations from a wide variety of perspectives, including those from people who struggle against oppression (Theology). In an effort supported by Cone, Vincent Wimbush recently edited African Americans and the Bible, a collection of sixty-two scholarly essays that analyze and champion African-American interpretations of scripture. In two other recent books, Charles Marsh thoughtfully explores the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Alabama as a source of Christian theology and biblical hermeneutics.

⁷For King's use of biblical metaphors at a rally in Birmingham, see Miller, “City.”Isaiah appears in the Bible as a single book. In the late eighteenth century, however, scholars began to argue that Isaiah 1–39 was written during the eighth century BCE, before the period of Hebrew captivity in Babylon, and that later portions of Isaiah were written roughly two hundred years later during the period of captivity and exile in Babylon that began in 587 BCE. Critics therefore began to distinguish between First Isaiah, the author of chapters 1–39, and Second Isaiah, the later author of subsequent chapters. In the 1920s, scholars began to decide that Isaiah 55–66 was written by someone after Second Isaiah and began to refer to the author(s) of those chapters as Third Isaiah. Although virtually all scholars now accept these divisions, distinguishing among the sections of Isaiah took centuries in part because biblical editors worked assiduously to connect the three segments of Isaiah thematically and (in some ways) lexically, combining the three texts into a single document that partly succeeded in fusing the texts produced by First Isaiah, Second Isaiah, and Third Isaiah. Because Isaiah is and is not a unified text, I use the phrase “(First) Isaiah” to designate Isaiah 1–39 and the phrase “(Second) Isaiah” indicate Isaiah 40–55.

⁸For Moses as the initial and most outstanding prophet, see Numbers 12: 6–8 and Deuteronomy 34:10. He also figures prominently in Christian scripture. See, for example, Acts 7:17–50 and Hebrews 11:23–30.

⁹See Fosdick 25, 38. See also King, Testament 37–38.

¹⁰James Sanders claims that the Babylonian exile prompted biblical editors to choose not to preserve Davidic-Solomonic statutes, which must have existed, and instead to follow the prophets in hallowing Mosaic law and the Mosaic covenant as the foundation for Hebrew religion. The views of Childs, Gowan, and Brueggemann are consistent with Sanders's argument.

¹¹See Gilkey 113; Brueggemann, Theology 634–35; and Brueggemann, “Trajectories” 313.

¹²Although “voice in the wilderness” is now a familiar phrase in everyday conversation, the more accurate translation of the Hebrew does not speak of a “voice in the wilderness” but rather of the wilderness as the place for preparing “the way of the Lord.”

¹³It is not clear whether Second Isaiah had available a written text of the Exodus or relied on an oral tradition. But, in either case, the story was already valorized.

¹⁴See Deuteronomy 4:20 and Jeremiah 11:4.

¹⁵See Exodus 14:21–26; Psalms 107:31–35; and (Second) Isaiah 51:9–10.

¹⁶See Joshua 3:5–7, 4:22–23; Psalms 107:31–35; (First) Isaiah 10:24–27, 11:11–16, 35:5–10; Micah 7:14–15; Hosea 2:14–23; Jeremiah 16:14, 23:7; Zephaniah 3:13–20; Ezekiel 5:22, 5:40; Ezra 1:4–6; Amos 9:7; and (First) Isaiah 19:19–25.

¹⁷Much of Malcolm X's critique of King is, however, quite cogent. See Miller, “‘Plymouth.’” For a valuable general discussion of King and Malcolm X, see Cone, Martin.

¹⁸For narrative theology, see Hauerwas and Jones.

¹⁹For the political context for “I Have a Dream,” see Garrow and Branch. (For a critique of the best-selling Branch, however, see Luker.) For “I Have a Dream” as a jeremiad, see Howard-Pitney, Vander Lei and Miller. For a Burkean analysis of the speech, see Bobbitt. For the evolution of its motifs, see Hansen.