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“What is a bruised reed?”

Today’s question comes out of something I heard in a meeting recently. A well-meaning, sincere brother in Christ expressed the opinion that the “bruised reed” mentioned in Isaiah 42:3 was a musical instrument of some sort.

Yeah, it was a first for me too. But it’s always interesting to find that even very smart people make associations that would never occur to you in a month of Sundays.

English speakers use “reed” as a category of wind instrument that includes the clarinet, oboe, bassoon, saxophone and any other musical device in which the vibration of a thin strip of cane produces a sound pleasing to the human ear when you blow on it. If that sounds like a crazy notion, bear in mind that reed instruments date back to around 2700 BC, long before Isaiah.

In case any of our readers doesn’t know the messianic prophecy to which he was referring, Isaiah wrote this about the Lord Jesus hundreds of years before he was born:

“He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.”

Hebrew Reeds

The word he used for “reed” is the Hebrew qānê, which appears 62 times in the Old Testament. One of its accepted meanings is a water plant like a cane. If you were going to build a reed instrument in 742 BC, when Isaiah began to minister, that’s surely the most likely material you’d use. Mind you, the word is also translated “branch”, “bone” and even “calamus”, after a kind of sweet cane from which perfumers made fragrant oils. The one thing it never refers to in the Hebrew Bible is any sort of reed instrument.

David was Israel’s foremost musical instrument designer; however, those mentioned in scripture are all strings or percussion — harps, lyres, trumpets, cymbals and tambourines — not reeds or wind instruments.

So if the reed Isaiah mentions is not something a Hebrew temple musician put in his mouth, what was it?

A Tool on the Trash Heap

The clue is probably in the adjective. It’s not just a “reed”, but a “bruised reed”. The word translated “bruised” does not mean merely yellow, purple or otherwise discolored, but actually broken or crushed. Israelites commonly used reeds as staves for walking or as measuring devices. A bruised reed of either sort would be a tool too damaged to use for its intended purpose.

That expression does not come out of nowhere. An Assyrian propagandist used it to try to discourage Hezekiah, calling his ally Egypt a “bruised reed of a staff, which will pierce the hand of any man who leans on it”. (Sennacherib had just defeated the Egyptians and driven them south, so the image would resonate with Hezekiah.) Isaiah himself quotes the same man from the same incident. So then, when he picked up the “bruised reed” metaphor in a messianic prophecy eight chapters later, he was probably thinking of something of the same sort: a tool so busted up it’s ready for the trash heap. The bruised reed signifies damaged goods.

The Guttering Wick

Likewise, the “faintly burning wick” refers to the flickering light of a lamp about to go out because it has no more fuel available. In Hebrew, a lamp about to go out is also frequently a metaphor for death or discouragement.

So then, Isaiah is not telling us that Messiah would not put an end to musical festivity or would never “turn out the lights” in Judea. He is saying the servant that God would someday send to Israel would be a gentle man, one who would never deliberately make the situation of downtrodden people in a hurting nation worse than it already was. Messiah was not coming to take out the trash, but to restore that which had become useless for its purpose and was almost ready to expire.

Fulfilling the Prophecy

This is how Matthew uses the bruised reed image when he quotes the passage from Isaiah in chapter 12 of his gospel. He first tells us Jesus healed all the desperate, sick people who followed him looking for help. Then, in keeping with his humble spirit, he ordered them not to make known what he had done for them. He was not concerned with publicity, but rather with meeting the needs of those who had just about given up any hope of relief and with giving testimony concerning his relationship with the Father to others in similar need.

These healings, says Matthew, were “to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah”. That should be conclusive.