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In last week’s teaching, we examined Isaiah’s prophecy in couplets:

“The pronouncement concerning Edom:

One keeps calling to me from Seir,

‘Watchman, how far gone is the night?

Watchman, how far gone is the night?’

The watchman says, ‘Morning comes but also night.

If you would inquire, inquire;

Come back again.’” (Is 21:11-12)

The third couplet urges the inquirer to ask twice, or “come back again.” Return from the second exile, the long exile of The Red One, Edom of Seir.

In a layer of Jewish understanding about King Messiah’s hiding place, Isaiah implies that not only are those in exile calling, anxious for the night of exile to end, so is Messiah, who has been tying and untying the bandages of the sick outside the gates of Rome, anxiously awaiting the Father’s appointed time for his return, to “come back again.” The midrash is not to be taken literally, but illustratively.