Maher-shalal-hash-baz: A Name Written Before the Child Was Born

A boy with two verses

Maher-shalal-hash-baz, written in the original as מַהֵר שָׁלָל חָשׁ בַּז, is a son of the prophet Isaiah, a man living in the era of the divided kingdom, an age placed around 975 BC to 586 BC on Ussher's chronology (1650). Everything the record holds about him fits into two verses, Isaiah 8:1 and Isaiah 8:3. He has one named brother, Shear-jashub (Isaiah 7:3). He speaks no word, takes no journey, and performs no act. What he does, entirely, is carry a name.

The name before the child

The first of the two verses does not describe a birth at all. It describes a writing task: "Yahweh said to me, 'Take a large tablet, and write on it with a man's pen, "For Maher Shalal Hash Baz"'" (Isaiah 8:1). The name is commanded before the child appears in the account. It is to be written large, on a large tablet, with an ordinary pen, the sort of writing a person can walk up to and read.

So the first thing this son is, in the order of the text, is public lettering. Before there is a boy there is a placard. Whatever the name means, and the two verses that mention him do not stop to translate it, the point of Isaiah 8:1 is that it should be legible and out where people can see it.

The name given to the child

The second verse supplies the child: "I went to the prophetess, and she conceived, and bore a son. Then Yahweh said to me, 'Call his name "Maher Shalal Hash Baz"'" (Isaiah 8:3). The sequence is compressed to almost nothing. A prophet goes to a prophetess; she conceives; she bears a son; Yahweh names him with the same words already written on the tablet.

The woman is called the prophetess, and that is all the two verses say of her. Isaiah's role here is as father and as writer, and both roles are obedient ones: he writes what he is told to write, and he names what he is told to name. The child himself is passive in every clause. He is conceived, he is borne, he is called. Isaiah 8:3 gives him a name and nothing else.

Where there is no scene

It is worth saying plainly what kind of mentions these are. Isaiah 8:1 is an instruction to a prophet; Isaiah 8:3 is a birth notice with a naming attached. There is no scene in which Maher-shalal-hash-baz acts. He does not grow up on the page. He is not shown before a king, in a battle, at an altar, or in a household. Every mention of him is a passing note inside his father's account, and the two verses are the whole of him.

Readers used to characters with arcs will feel the shortness of this. But brevity is not absence. The record keeps him, and keeps him precisely: two verses, one name, twice set down, once on a tablet and once over a newborn.

Failures

Here honesty runs in an unusual direction. The text reports no sin of Maher-shalal-hash-baz, but it also reports no obedience, no faith, and no word of his. He is too young in the record to have done anything at all. There is no fall to tell and no virtue to praise. To claim either would be to invent a man the text does not give us. The only conduct on display in these two verses belongs to his father, who writes and names as he is told.

What we do not know

We do not know what became of him. No children of his are named. No tribe or people is assigned to him. We are not told how long he lived, whether he ever read the tablet that bore his name, or what he made of being a walking inscription. The record does not describe his appearance, his character, or his death.

We should also not pretend to more than we have about his family. His father is Isaiah; his brother is Shear-jashub (Isaiah 7:3). His mother is called the prophetess in Isaiah 8:3 and is not named there. Beyond that, the two verses are silent, and silence in a record this short is not an invitation to guess.

Reading a name

What this small entry leaves us is a picture of how Yahweh works through a household. Isaiah's obedience in Isaiah 8:1 is a matter of ink and tablet; his obedience in Isaiah 8:3 is a matter of a son given a name he did not choose. The word entrusted to the prophet and the life of this family are pressed into the same syllables. A tablet can be taken down or turned to the wall. A child cannot. He goes where his parents go, and everyone who calls him calls out the message.

That is the whole of him as the record has it: a son of Isaiah, a brother of Shear-jashub, born in the days of the divided kingdom, named twice by Yahweh, and otherwise wholly silent.