Highways

A highway in scripture is rarely just a road. The literal thoroughfares between cities — when they are safe enough to use — quickly become the figure for everything else: the route Yahweh takes through history, the moral road of the upright, the crooked detour of the wicked, the way Christ opens through his flesh, and the long pilgrimage of those who have no abiding city. The vocabulary moves easily between the road under the feet and the road of the soul, because the conditions are the same: a highway is either prepared and walkable, or it is overgrown and abandoned.

When the Highways Were Unoccupied

The literal highway is the first thing that fails in a time of oppression. Deborah's song dates the disorder of the judges by the state of the roads: "In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, In the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, And the travelers walked through byways" (Jg 5:6). Travelers no longer dared the open road and were driven onto back-paths.

The same instability shows up in the city. The Levite at Gibeah finds that no household will receive him, and an old man notices "the wayfaring man in the street of the city" (Jg 19:17) — a traveler exposed because hospitality has broken down. Nathan's parable assumes a different and gentler economy of the road, in which "there came a traveler to the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man who came to him" (2Sa 12:4); the rich man's failure of hospitality is what makes the parable bite.

Wisdom literature treats the experienced traveler as a different kind of person from the one who has stayed home: "He who has no experience knows [but] few things, But he who has wandered multiplies his skill" (Sir 34:10), and "I have seen many things in my travels, And many things have befallen me; Often I was in danger even to death, But was saved thanks to these things" (Sir 34:12-13). The road is dangerous, but it forms its travelers.

The Highway in the Wilderness

The prophets take the figure and turn it eschatological. Highways do not just exist; they are built for a purpose. Isaiah promises a road home for the exiles: "And there will be a highway for the remnant of his people, who will remain, from Assyria; like there was for Israel in the day that he came up out of the land of Egypt" (Isa 11:16). The new exodus uses the same kind of road as the old.

The most explicit oracle is Isaiah 35. "And a highway will be there, and a way, and it will be called The Way of Holiness; the unclean will not pass over it; but it will be for [the redeemed]: the wayfaring men, yes fools, will not err [in it]" (Isa 35:8). The hazards of the literal highway — predators and disorientation — are removed: "No lion will be there, nor will any ravenous beast go up on it; they will not be found there; but the redeemed will walk [there]" (Isa 35:9). The destination is Zion: "and the ransomed of Yahweh will return, and come with singing to Zion; and everlasting joy will be on their heads: they will obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing will flee away" (Isa 35:10).

Isaiah 40 issues the construction order. "The voice of one who cries, Prepare⁺ in the wilderness the way of Yahweh; make level in the desert a highway for our God" (Isa 40:3). The plural-you imperative makes it corporate work, and the next verse describes what road-building actually involves: "Every valley will be exalted, and every mountain and hill will be made low; and the uneven will be made level, and the rough places a plain" (Isa 40:4). A highway requires cut and fill.

Even Yahweh, in Jeremiah's lament, can be addressed as a wayfaring man: "O you hope of Israel, its Savior in the time of trouble, why should you be as a sojourner in the land, and as a wayfaring man who turns aside to tarry for a night?" (Jer 14:8). The complaint is that Yahweh travels through Israel as if he were only passing through, not staying — a reversal of the highway-builder image.

The Ways of Yahweh

If a highway has a builder, the highways of Yahweh have a character that matches him. "As for God, his way is perfect: The word of Yahweh is tried; He is a shield to all those who take refuge in him" (Ps 18:30). "Yahweh is righteous in all his ways, And gracious in all his works" (Ps 145:17). Hosea makes the same claim and adds the consequence: "For the ways of Yahweh are right, and the just will walk in them; but transgressors will fall in them" (Hos 14:9). The road is the same road; what differs is the traveler.

Even Nebuchadnezzar comes to this confession after his humiliation: "all his works are truth, and his ways justice; and those who walk in pride he is able to abase" (Dan 4:37). Habakkuk's hymn pushes the road further back in time: "His goings were [as] of old" (Hab 3:6). The Apocalypse keeps the language: "Great and marvelous are your works, Yahweh, the God of hosts; righteous and true are your ways, King of the nations" (Rev 15:3).

Yahweh's highways are also higher than human highways. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your⁺ ways, and my thoughts than your⁺ thoughts" (Isa 55:9). And they are not always traceable from below: "Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out!" (Rom 11:33).

The Path of the Upright

For the human walker, the figure narrows to a personal road. Proverbs calls it "the highway of the upright": "The highway of the upright is to depart from evil: He who keeps his way preserves his soul" (Pr 16:17). The same book teaches that "I have led you in paths of uprightness" (Pr 4:11) and that "the path of the righteous is as the dawning light, That shines more and more to the perfect day" (Pr 4:18). Wisdom is a road that brightens as it goes.

The psalter prays this road into existence under the feet of the worshipper. "He restores my soul: He guides me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake" (Ps 23:3). "All the paths of Yahweh are loving-kindness and truth To such as keep his covenant and his testimonies" (Ps 25:10). "You will show me the path of life: In your presence is fullness of joy" (Ps 16:11). And the petition becomes direct: "Make me to go in the path of your commandments; For in it I delight" (Ps 119:35).

Isaiah ties uprightness to road-straightness: "The way of the just is uprightness: you who are upright direct the path of the just" (Isa 26:7). Jeremiah, in the crisis after the fall of Jerusalem, asks for the same direction: "that Yahweh your God may show us the way in which we should walk, and the thing that we should do" (Jer 42:3). The new covenant writer applies the figure to the assembly: "make straight paths for your⁺ feet, that that which is lame not be turned out of the way, but rather be healed" (Heb 12:13). Isaiah's eschatological pilgrimage — "let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh… and we will walk in his paths" (Isa 2:3) — is the same image read forward.

The Crooked Way

Set against the highway of the upright is the road that looks straight but isn't. "There is a way which seems right to a man; But its end are the ways of death" (Pr 14:12). "The way of a fool is right in his own eyes" (Pr 12:15); "the way of betrayers is hard" (Pr 13:15); "the way of the wicked is disgusting to Yahweh" (Pr 15:9). The crooked traveler builds his own road and then walks on it: "Who are crooked in their ways, And wayward in their paths" (Pr 2:15); "they have made crooked paths for themselves; whoever goes in them does not know peace" (Isa 59:8). Sirach captures the deception in one line: "The way of sinners is made smooth without stones, And at its end is the pit of Hades" (Sir 21:10).

The New Testament keeps the verb "walk" for the same figure. The Gentiles, before Christ, walked in "sexual depravity, erotic desires, winebibbings, revelings, carousings, and horrible idolatries" (1Pe 4:3). The Ephesians once "walked according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the powers of the air" (Eph 2:2). Mockers come "walking after their own desires" (2Pe 3:3; Jude 1:18). False teachers "walk after the flesh in the desire of defilement" (2Pe 2:10). Paul weeps over those who "walk… [as] the enemies of the cross of Christ" (Php 3:18). Behind all of these stands Deuteronomy's diagnosis of the man who "blesses himself in his heart, saying, I will have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart" (Deut 29:19) and Jeremiah's: "they… walked in [their own] counsels [and] in the stubbornness of their evil heart" (Jer 7:24).

The New and Living Way

In the New Testament the highway figure converges on a person. "Jesus says to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one comes to the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). Hebrews describes that way as a road only recently opened: "by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh" (Heb 10:20). The Isaian construction language — prepare a highway, level the rough places — is fulfilled in a body. The road to the Father is a person, and his flesh is the cut and fill.

Sojourners on the Road

Those who walk this way do not yet live at its destination. They are travelers in the older Israelite sense: dependent on hospitality, exposed, without a settled city. Jacob calls his life a pilgrimage: "the days of the years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty years: few and evil have been the days of the years of my life" (Gen 47:9). David prays the same self-understanding into the assembly: "we are strangers before you, and sojourners, as all our fathers were: our days on the earth are as a shadow" (1Ch 29:15). The psalmist twice calls himself a sojourner before Yahweh (Ps 39:12; Ps 119:19). The patriarchs themselves only ever held Canaan as "the land of their sojournings" (Ex 6:4).

Hebrews makes this the New Testament posture toward the highway as well: the patriarchs "died in faith, not having received the promises… and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth" (Heb 11:13). "For we do not have a city that stays here, but we seek after [the city] which is to come" (Heb 13:14). Peter applies the same logic to ethics: "Beloved, I urge you⁺ as sojourners and pilgrims, to abstain from fleshly desires, which war against the soul" (1Pe 2:11). The Epistle to Diognetus extends the figure to the social existence of Christians: "They dwell in their own countries, but as sojourners; they partake of all things as citizens, and endure all things as strangers; every foreign land is their country, and every country a foreign land" (Gr 5:5). "They dwell on earth, but have citizenship in heaven" (Gr 5:9). "The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle; and Christians sojourn among corruptible things, looking for incorruption in the heavens" (Gr 6:8).

The highway thus runs from the disused roads of Shamgar's day through the prepared way of Yahweh in the wilderness, through the highway of the upright in the proverbs, through the new and living way opened in Christ's flesh, and out into the long pilgrim road of those whose city is not here.