Introduction to Isaiah

Title and authorship

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah Isaiah 1:1.

The name means Yahweh saves, and it is the book's subject stated in a word. Its author is named in the first line, given a father, a jurisdiction and four reigns to work in, and he appears in the narrative of Kings as a man who advised a king to his face 2 Kings 19:2. He was married to a woman called a prophetess and had at least two sons, both given names that were themselves sermons Isaiah 7:3 Isaiah 8:3.

The book is read here as the work of that one man, and the reason is that the New Testament reads it that way in a place where the point could not be accidental. John quotes Isaiah 53:1 and then Isaiah 6:10 in consecutive sentences, attributes both to Isaiah the prophet, and adds: Isaiah said these things when he saw his glory, and spoke of him John 12:38–41. Two passages from opposite ends of the book, one prophet, one vision. The scroll handed to Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth was a single book, and he found the place in it Luke 4:17.

The division of the book among two or three authors is proposed chiefly because Cyrus is named a century and a half before he was born Isaiah 44:28 Isaiah 45:1. The difficulty is real and the book anticipates it. Its central argument against the idols is precisely that they cannot do this — let them declare to us what will happen... show us things to come, that we may know that you are gods Isaiah 41:22–23, and I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning Isaiah 46:9–10. A book whose case for God rests on announcing the future in advance cannot have the announcements removed without removing the case.

Sixty-six chapters, and the two halves have been noticed since antiquity: judgment through chapter thirty-nine, comfort from chapter forty. The four chapters of narrative between them are the hinge, and they are placed where they are on purpose.

Date

The heading gives four kings and the call gives a year. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne Isaiah 6:1 — about 740 before Christ, which places the beginning of the ministry at a moment when a long and prosperous reign had just ended and nobody knew what came next.

The last dated event in the book is Sennacherib's invasion and the destruction of his army, 701 Isaiah 37:36–38, with the account of Sennacherib's own death some twenty years later added as a postscript. A ministry running from 740 to at least 681 is more than half a century, across four reigns, and the man who began it under a king with leprosy was still writing when Assyria had come and gone.

What the period contains explains most of the book. Assyria rose from a regional power to an empire; the northern kingdom made an alliance against Judah, was invaded, and fell in 722; Judah survived by paying tribute and then by being rescued. Babylon appears at the end as a rising power to whom Hezekiah showed his treasury, and the sentence pronounced on that visit Isaiah 39:6–7 is what the second half of the book addresses.

That second half speaks to people already in exile, addressing a situation a hundred and fifty years off as though it were present. The prophets do this regularly and this book does it at length, which is the difficulty its authorship question turns on and which the book itself treats as the point rather than the problem.

Backgrounds

An empire on the northern road. Assyria is the fact behind the first thirty-nine chapters. Its method was deportation — moving conquered populations wholesale to break them as nations — and its records boast of it. Judah watched the northern kingdom absorbed in 722 and spent the next twenty years deciding whether to buy safety from Egypt, from Assyria, or from neither. The prophet's answer never changes and is never taken.

The Syro-Ephraimite war. Around 735 Syria and the northern kingdom allied against Assyria and tried to force Judah to join, planning to replace its king Isaiah 7:6. That crisis produces chapters seven to twelve and the sign of Immanuel, and the young king who refused the prophet's counsel in it is the reason Assyria was ever invited south.

Prosperity and its religion. Uzziah's long reign left Judah wealthy, and the book's opening chapters describe a nation with a full sacrificial calendar and a corrupt court at the same time. The complaint is never that the offerings stopped: I have had enough of burnt offerings Isaiah 1:11 is said to people who were bringing them.

Poetry, and a great deal of it. Most of this book is verse, built on the parallelism the Psalter uses, and much of its argument is carried by image rather than by statement — a vineyard, a highway, a potter, a woman in labor, a servant. Reading it as prose flattens it.

The Holy One of Israel. The title occurs about twenty-five times here and barely at all elsewhere in Scripture. It comes out of chapter six and it holds the book's two halves together: the God whose holiness undid the prophet is the same one who comforts.

Theology and purpose

Holiness, and what it does to a man who sees it. The book turns on chapter six. A prophet already in the trade sees the throne, hears the seraphim, and says woe is me! For I am undone Isaiah 6:5 — and what undoes him is not God's power but his purity. Everything the book says about sin, judgment, atonement and comfort proceeds from that room, and the coal from the altar that touches his mouth is the pattern of everything that follows.

Judgment is real and it is not the end. The first half is unsparing about a nation that had confused religious activity with obedience, and it is equally unsparing about the empires sent to discipline it — Assyria is the rod in God's hand and is judged for how it enjoyed the work Isaiah 10:5–15. But no oracle of doom in this book is final. A remnant survives, a shoot comes out of a cut stump, and the second half opens with the word comfort.

The Servant. Four passages describe a figure who is God's servant, who brings justice to the nations, who is despised and rejected, and who is pierced for our transgressions Isaiah 53:5. Sometimes the servant is Israel by name; sometimes he does for Israel what Israel cannot do for itself. The New Testament identifies him, and does it by reading the passage aloud in a chariot on the Gaza road and asking whom the prophet is speaking of Acts 8:32–35.

The nations. The book begins with an oracle against Judah and ends with foreigners brought to God's holy mountain, foreigners made priests Isaiah 66:21, and God's house called a house of prayer for all peoples Isaiah 56:7 — the sentence Jesus quoted in the temple. Between them lie eleven chapters of oracles against the nations, and even those contain Egypt and Assyria called God's people alongside Israel Isaiah 19:24–25.

And a new creation. The book that opens by calling heaven and earth to witness against a rebellious people closes with new heavens and a new earth, a permanent worshiping population, and the worm that does not die Isaiah 66:22–24. It does not end comfortably; it ends completely.

Additional notes

Cyrus by name. The Persian king is named twice, a century and a half before his birth Isaiah 44:28 Isaiah 45:1, and this is the single reason the book's unity is disputed. The book's own position is that announcing the future is the test it invites the idols to take and they cannot Isaiah 41:23. Honest readers differ about the composition of this book; the reading here follows the New Testament's, which cites both halves as one prophet's.

The virgin at 7:14. The Hebrew word describes a young woman of marriageable age and does not by itself settle the question of virginity, and the sign was given to a king with a crisis in front of him. The Greek translation made three centuries before Christ rendered it with the unambiguous word, and Matthew quotes that rendering of the birth of Jesus Matthew 1:23. The sign had a horizon in Ahaz's lifetime and a horizon beyond it, which is how this book's signs generally work.

The Servant's identity. The songs are not uniform. In one place the servant is named as Israel Isaiah 49:3; three verses later he is sent to bring Jacob again to him Isaiah 49:5, which Israel cannot do for itself. Both are allowed to stand here, because the book allows them to stand.

Isaiah 14:12-14. The passage sits inside a taunt-song addressed to the king of Babylon, and its language runs past any human king. The profile is laid out where it occurs — the ascent, the five I wills, the throne above the stars, the fall — and no name is supplied, because the passage supplies none. What is described is described; what Scripture leaves unnamed is left unnamed.

The last verse. The book ends with corpses, an undying worm and an unquenched fire Isaiah 66:24. Jesus quotes the line three times in one passage Mark 9:48. The imagery is of a rubbish fire outside a city where what is thrown out is consumed rather than kept burning, and the note is handled where it occurs.

Quotation. No book of the Old Testament is quoted more often in the New. Where a New Testament writer has already interpreted a passage, that reading is followed here.

Outline

How the book is built

Heaven and earth, called and then remade inclusio 1:2-66:24

• A 1:2-4 Heaven and earth summoned as witnesses to a father's charge that the children he raised have rebelled.
• A′ 66:22-24 New heavens and a new earth made to remain, and the people's name guaranteed to last as long as they do.

The book opens by summoning the two oldest witnesses there are: hear, heavens, and listen, earth; for Yahweh has spoken Isaiah 1:2. The formula is legal, and it is borrowed from the covenant lawsuit of Deuteronomy 32:1 — heaven and earth are called because they were present when the agreement was made and will outlast everyone on trial. What they are called to hear is a father's complaint that the children he raised have rebelled.

Sixty-five chapters later the same two are named again, and they have been replaced: as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me... so your offspring and your name shall remain Isaiah 66:22. The witnesses to the indictment become the guarantee of the promise, and their permanence — the reason they were qualified to testify — is now the measure of how long the people will last.

Read together the two ends state the book's whole movement without any of its intervening argument. It begins with a courtroom and finishes with a creation, and the same pair of things stands at both. Nothing in between softens the charge of chapter one; what changes is that the court is not the last scene.

The servant song turns on one sentence chiasm 52:13-53:12

• A 52:13-15 The servant raised very high, his appearance marred beyond men, and kings silenced before him.
• B 53:1-3 No form or majesty, despised and rejected, a man of suffering from whom people hid their faces.
• C 53:4-6 The center: he bore our sickness, was pierced for our transgressions, and Yahweh laid on him the iniquity of us all.
• B′ 53:7-9 Oppressed and silent, cut off out of the land of the living, and his grave assigned with the wicked.
• A′ 53:10-12 He sees his offspring, prolongs his days, is satisfied, and divides the spoil with the great.

The fourth and longest of the Servant Songs is built in five movements, and the shape can be checked line by line. It opens with the servant exalted so high that kings shut their mouths at him Isaiah 52:13–15, and it closes with him dividing spoil with the great and seeing the result of the anguish of his soul Isaiah 53:10–12 — exaltation at both ends, and both times the exaltation is stated as something done to him rather than achieved by him.

Inside those stand two panels of rejection. He is despised and rejected by men Isaiah 53:3, and then oppressed, silent, cut off out of the land of the living and buried Isaiah 53:7–9. The first panel is what people thought of him; the second is what was done to him.

And at the center, alone, is the only paragraph that explains why. Surely he has borne our sickness and carried our suffering... he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities Isaiah 53:4–5, resolving into the sentence the whole shape exists to hold: all we like sheep have gone astray. Everyone has turned to his own way; and Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all Isaiah 53:6.

Everything else in the song is observation — what he looked like, what was done, what followed. Only the center says whose sin it was and who put it on him, and it is the hinge in the grammar as well as in the structure: the verse begins with all we and ends with us all, closing round the one person in the middle.

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