ISAIAH
The first of the prophetic books bears the name of Isaiah, a Judæan
prophet, who dates his call "in the year that king Uzziah died," a
year which cannot be fixed with certainty, but was at all events not
very long before 734 B.C., and whose latest dated utterances are from
the time of Sennacherib's invasion in the year 701. His prophecies
thus range over a period of not far from forty years. He witnessed the
humbling of Israel by Tiglath-Pileser in 734, the fall of Samaria in
721, the Assyrian campaigns in the west in 720 and 711, and the
condign punishment Sennacherib inflicted on Judah in 701; and all
these events (of which we have historical knowledge from both Assyrian
and Jewish sources) are reflected in his prophecies.
The book contains, however, much besides the prophecies of Isaiah in
the different periods of his long career. It has already been noted
that Isa. 36-39 are found also, with some variations, in 2 Kings
18-20, where they are an integral part of the narrative. That this
extract from Kings was copied into the Book of Isaiah is explained by
the fact that the prophet is a prominent figure in the story. It does
not stand in immediate connection with the prophecies of Isaiah
during the campaign of Sennacherib in cc. 28-33, from which it is
separated by several oracles of different character and date; and the
natural presumption is that this historical appendix was added at the
end of a roll, just as Jer. 52, also an extract from Kings (2 Kings
xxiv. 18-xxv. 21), is appended at the end of the roll of Jeremiah.
In the present Book of Isaiah, cc. 36-39 are followed by another
prophetic book of considerable length (Isa. 40-66), which has no
title, and in which, from first to last, no prophet's name appears.
The theme which is announced in the first verses of this book and runs
through a large part of it is the approaching deliverance of the Jews
from the Babylonian captivity, their return to their own land, and the
restoration of Zion.
In Isa. 1-35 certain larger divisions are at once apparent; cc. 1-12,
a collection of prophecies, chiefly, as appears from dates and other
indications, from the earlier years of Isaiah's ministry; cc. 13 to
23, a collection of oracles mainly against foreign nations; cc. 24-27,
previsions of a great judgment, in a peculiarly mysterious tone; cc.
28-33, chiefly from the time of Sennacherib, followed by c. 34, in
which God's fury is poured out on Edom, and c. 35, a prophecy of
restoration akin to cc. 40 ff. It is thus evident that the present
book is made up from several older collections of prophecies gathered
by different hands; the peculiar titles in cc. 13-23, for instance,
are most probably to be attributed to the editor of an independent
book of prophecies against the heathen.
The same phenomenon appears on a smaller scale in Isa. 1-12. That
these chapters, at one stage in the history of the collections, formed
a roll by themselves is probable from the fact that they begin with a
grand overture (c. 1), in which the leading motives of Isaiah's
prophecy are heard, and close (c. 12) with a psalm of praise for the
messianic deliverance which is the subject of c. 11. But the order of
the prophecies is not chronological: the inaugural vision and Isaiah's
call to be a prophet stands, not at the beginning, as in Jeremiah and
Ezekiel, but in c. 6 (dated in the year of King Uzziah's death), while
the chapters that precede it (cc. 2 f.; 5), with what was once an
initial title (ii. 1), may confidently be assigned, on internal
grounds, to the reigns of Uzziah's successors. Chapters 7 and 8 (dated
under Ahaz) seem to have originally followed close on c. 6, as they do
now. Whatever may be the reason for this singular arrangement, it
seems evident that the compiler had several smaller groups or loose
leaves of oracles, which he put together for better preservation,
rather, perhaps, by affinity of subject than in order of time.
This must have taken place at a comparatively late time, for not only
does his roll begin with a prophecy (Isa. i. 2-9) which vividly
depicts the devastation of Judah and the isolation of Jerusalem by
Sennacherib in 701 (perhaps the latest oracle of Isaiah preserved in
the book), but it contains passages (e.g. xi. 11-16) which bear all
the marks of a time several centuries after Isaiah's death; the psalm
in c. 12 is perhaps later still. Another indication that the
collection was made at a date remote from the age of the prophet is
the fragmentary character of several of the oracles in cc. 2-5. The
refrain verses here afford a certain clue; they show that prophecies
originally composed with much art in balanced strophes with closing
refrains came into the compiler's hands mutilated and dislocated.
Thus, v. 25 has the refrain of ix. 8-21; x. 4, while x. 1-3 is a "woe"
which has strayed away from v. 18 ff., and the refrain ii. 9, 11, 17
recurs in v. 15.
Fragmentary as many of these prophecies are, enough remains to show
that Isaiah had poetical genius as well as unequalled mastery of the
peculiar literary form of the Hebrew oracle. The parable of the
vineyard (Isa. v. 1-7), or the picture of the swift, resistless
advance of the Assyrian (v. 26-30), or the description of devastated
Judah (i. 2-8), or the oracle against Samaria (ix. 8-21), in the
authorized English Version illustrate in different ways the art with
which Isaiah handles this traditional form.
The earlier prophecies of Isaiah, whether directed against Israel and
its allies or against Judah, are unsparing in their condemnation of
the political and social evils of the time, and predict the imminent
and irremediable ruin of both nations. This is revealed to Isaiah in
the vision which made him a prophet, in terms so drastic that the
closing words were piously erased by some late editor (so in the Greek
Bible), and a meaningless phrase put in their place in the curtailed
sentence by a still later hand (our Hebrew text). With this the tenor
of his utterances in cc. ii. 5-iii. 26; v. 1-30; ix. 8-x. 4, wholly
agrees. These unrelieved forebodings of doom led in later times not
only to excisions such as we have noted in vi. 13, but to
interpolations; hopeful pendants were attached to the prophet's gloomy
pictures, sometimes written for the purpose--a particularly
instructive example is iv. 2-6, after iii. 16-iv. 1--sometimes
borrowed from other prophetic contexts. To the latter class belongs
the famous messianic oracle, ix. 1-7, which is very imperfectly
connected (by changes in viii. 22) with the preceding climactic
denunciation of doom, the end of which is missing. If Isa. ix. 1-7 is
a prophecy by Isaiah, it can only belong to his latest years.
One other feature of Isaiah's message must be signalized. His God
indignantly rejects the sacrifices and all the pompous worship which
are offered him in his temple in Jerusalem (Isa. i. 10-17). Men think
they can thus gain the favour of God and persuade him to overlook or
condone their sins against their fellows! Such worship is an insult
to God. So Amos a few years before had condemned the worship at Bethel
(Amos v. 21-25). So their successors repeat in no uncertain terms (see
Mic. vi. 6-8; Jer. 7, especially vss. 21-23). It is the fundamental
doctrine of prophecy: the will of God is wholly moral. For worship he
cares nothing at all; for justice, fairness, and goodness between man
and man he cares everything. Such a God is capable of destroying the
nation for the wrongs men do their fellow men; he is not capable of
being bribed by offerings, or flattered with psalms, or wheedled with
prayers. He will listen to no intercession (Jer. xv. 1 ff., after c.
14); nothing but complete reformation and reparation will he call
repentance--and there comes a pass where repentance is impossible.
The book of prophecies against the heathen (Isa. 13-23) begins with
two remarkable chapters (xiii. 1-xiv. 23) declaring the imminent
destruction of Babylon by the Medes, whom the prophet sees already in
motion against the doomed city, and exulting over the descent of the
king of Babylon to hell, greeted by the taunts of the mighty of the
earth who were before him there. The two prophecies are connected by a
prediction of the deliverance of captive Israel, which will be
restored to its own land and rule over its oppressors (xiv. 1-4^a).
The situation is not that of Isaiah's time, in which Babylon was a
province of the Assyrian empire, and when, under Merodach Baladan, it
for a while reasserted its independence, seems to have sought an
alliance with Hezekiah against their common oppressor, Assyria (Isa.
39 = 2 Kings xx. 12 ff.). The Medes had been in league with the
Babylonians against Assyria until its fall in 606 B.C.; it was not
until the time of Cyrus that the Medes became a menace to Babylonia,
and only after Cyrus's conquest of Lydia (546 B.C.) that the turn of
Babylon was visibly come. On the other hand, the sack and ruin of
Babylon, pictured with vengeful satisfaction in Isa. 13, did not come
to pass at that time. The Persian armies, after a decisive battle in
northern Babylonia, entered the city in the autumn of 538 without
resistance. Babylonian inscriptions acclaim Cyrus as a deliverer, and
Babylon became one of the capitals of his great empire. On these
grounds the prophecy is generally thought to fall between 546 and 538
B.C.
It is immediately followed by a short oracle (Isa. xiv. 24-27) against
the Assyrians, quite in the tone of the prophecies of Isaiah in the
time of Sennacherib (701 B.C.), and by an enigmatical warning to the
inhabitants of the Philistine cities, said in the title to have come
"in the year that King Ahaz died." Another prophecy concerned with the
inhabitants of these cities, bearing Isaiah's name and definitely
dated (711 B.C.), is Isa. 20. Chapter 17, entitled "The Burden of
Damascus," is in fact chiefly against the kingdom of Israel, and
falls in line with prophecies of Isaiah in the time of the alliance of
the two kingdoms against Judah (ca. 736 B.C.); compare Isa. 7. In Isa.
xxii. 15-25 is a prophecy of Isaiah singular in the fact that it is
launched at an individual, the major domo of King Hezekiah.
Besides these, the collection contains oracles against Moab (Isa. 15
f.), Nubia (c. 18), Egypt (c. 19), another vision of the fall of
Babylon before the armies of Elam and Media (xxi. 1-10), but in a
different spirit from cc. 13-14, the Arabs (xxi. 11 f., 13-17), Tyre
(c. 23), and one with the mysterious (editorial) title "Burden of the
Valley of Vision" (xxii. 1-14). The last-named, in the form of a
vision, depicts a crisis in the history of Jerusalem, and condemns the
frivolous behaviour of its inhabitants on the eve of a siege or, as
some think, during the respite given by a temporary raising of a
siege. It was probably uttered by Isaiah at an early stage in
Hezekiah's revolt against Sennacherib (704 or 703 B.C.), before the
actual appearance of the Assyrian army. The oracle against Tyre (Isa.
xxiii. 1-14--what follows is a later supplement) seems more
appropriate to the thirteen years' siege by Nebuchadnezzar than to the
operations of Shalmanezer or of Sennacherib in Isaiah's days.
Thus Isa. 13-23, like cc. 1-12, contains prophecies of Isaiah from
both the earliest and the latest period of his activity, intermingled
with others having a totally different historical horizon and dating
from a much later time, and to both additions have been made by
editors or scribes. A very interesting example of the latter
phenomenon is Isa. xix. 18 ff. The passage is, in all probability,
from the time of the Greek kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, the name of
the city in the Greek Bible, "City of Righteousness," referring to
Leontopolis, where a Jewish temple was erected about 170 B.C., with
high priests of the legitimate line exiled from Jerusalem. "City of
Destruction" (_heres_) in the Hebrew text is a hostile perversion,
possibly by way of another reading "City of the Sun" (_heres_).
Each of the three large prophetic books has such a group of oracles
about gentile nations, Isa. 13-23; Jer. 46-51; Ezek. 25-32. They are
in part levelled at the immediate neighbours of Judah, in part against
the great powers, Babylon and Egypt. Many of them are in such general
terms--or, if they refer to specific events and situations, our
knowledge of the history is so incomplete--that it is peculiarly
difficult to fix their age. It was also a kind of prophecy which
peculiarly invited imitation. Under the foreign yoke the Jews wore for
so many centuries, it must often have been a relief of soul to repeat
what God was going to do to the heathen; the spirit of the author of
Jonah was not for everybody. Moreover, if there is any place in the
Old Testament where it would be easier than another for oracles of the
"false prophets" to slip in and be preserved, it is in these
collections; about the doom of the enemies of Israel they were as
orthodox and as emphatic as the best. It is not strange, therefore,
that there should be more than usual uncertainty about the origin of
these anathemas on the gentiles.
Isaiah 24-27 contains a series of prophecies of judgment to come which
differ from others in the book in having no particular address. The
vision seems to widen to a judgment of the world, in which the earth
itself reels and sinks under the weight of men's sin, and the
celestial powers (the heavenly bodies, which are the tutelary deities
of the heathen) and the kings of the earth are cast into the pit and
shut up in prison, while the Lord of Hosts reigns gloriously in Zion.
In another passage God, with his great sword, punishes the leviathan,
the swift and winding serpent, and slays the great dragon in the sea.
The mythological eschatology of Judaism made much of such imagery,
which is itself doubtless of mythical ancestry.
The diction and style of these chapters alone would suffice to acquit
Isaiah of responsibility for them; anything more unlike his writing
could not be imagined. The author, whosoever he was, riots in plays on
words, many of them, as is the fate of laborious punsters, forced or
far-fetched. As to the age of the chapters, apart from the language,
prophecy is here plainly making the transition to apocalypse with
those visionary revelations of the last judgment in which Jewish
invention was so fertile. This of itself points to a late time in the
post-exilic period. The historical allusions which have been scented
out in the chapters are too uncertain to reckon with; only, as in c.
19, the way in which Egypt and Assyria (or Syria) are conjoined seems
plainly to point to the divisions of Alexander's empire.
In chapters 28-33 are brought together a number of oracles of Isaiah
from the years of Hezekiah's revolt and Sennacherib's punitive
expedition. These oracles are generally brief and pointed; they agree
in form and spirit with his prophecies in cc. 1-12 quite as closely as
the writing of an aging man ordinarily resembles that of his youth. In
xxviii. 1-4, indeed, an early prophecy against Samaria is made to
serve as text for a counterpart addressed to Jerusalem.
Mingled with these is a series of passages which foretell the
destruction of the foe and the miraculous escape of Judah from
imminent ruin, or, taking higher flight, picture the golden age to
come. To the former class belong, for example, xxx. 27-33; xxxi. 4-9;
to the latter, xxix. 18-24; xxx. 18-26; xxxii. 1-8, 16-20; while c. 33
partakes of both characters. That Isaiah predicted the deliverance of
Jerusalem in the last extremity is reported also in Kings, and need
not be questioned (see also Isa. x. 5-14; xiv. 24-27). Most of the
prophecies of the golden age are, however, alien to their context, and
the unmediated transition from the unsparing predictions of judgment
to these messianic idylls makes them suspicious. It is not to be
believed that the prophet thus took the sting out of his most pungent
oracles, but the position of the passages in question can have no
other intention. If, then, these are utterances of Isaiah at all, they
cannot have been spoken in their present connection. Some of them, at
least, are much more likely by other hands. This is true most
evidently of c. 33, which was probably once the end of this little
book of prophecies from the time of Sennacherib (Isa. 28-33).
Isaiah 34 is a prophecy against all the nations, which at once
concentrates itself upon Edom, and is remarkable for its rancour, in
which, as in other respects, it resembles cc. 13 f. The supernatural
features of the judgment remind us also of Isa. 27: it is too little
that the people are annihilated, its very land is turned into an
uninhabitable waste, and, as by some prodigious volcanic convulsion,
its dust becomes brimstone and its soil burning pitch. This is the
Lord's vengeance for the wrong of Zion. The cause of this unusual
passion is known from other prophets (see Obad. vss. 10-12; Ezek. xxv.
12-14; c. 35): in the life and death struggle against Nebuchadnezzar,
the Edomites, Judah's next neighbours and near kin, had been on the
side of the Babylonians, and were the chief gainers by the ruin of
Judah, occupying permanently the whole south of the country to a line
north of Hebron, making good in this way the part of their own old
territory which had been taken by the Nabatæans. The injury was
lasting and the hatred durable, but the flaming passion of Isa. 34
would incline us to think that it was written while the grief was
still fresh. The pendant to this, Isa. 35, a prophecy of the return of
the dispersion and restoration of Zion, is quite in the manner of Isa.
40 ff., and not improbably by the same author.
Of Isa. 36-39 (2 Kings 18-20) account has already been given (see
above, pp. 112 f.).
There remains the anonymous prophetic book, Isa. 40-66, which not only
has no title, but in which--in striking contrast to the frequency with
which Isaiah's name occurs in the earlier chapters of the book--no
prophet's name appears.
It begins with the announcement that the Jews have now been
sufficiently punished for their sins; their guilt has been expiated by
suffering. The hour of national restoration is at hand. God has
already called the deliverer, who will bring low the pride of Babylon
and set free captive Israel; by his edict Jerusalem shall be rebuilt
and the temple restored. The Jews, not only from Babylonia but from
the wide and distant lands of their dispersion, shall flock back to
their own country, the cities of Judah shall be repeopled, and Zion
shall be too strait for its inhabitants. The deliverer is Cyrus (Isa.
xliv. 28; xlv. 1), who is called God's friend, his anointed one
(messiah); the victories he has already gained have been won in the
might of Jehovah, who, all unknown to him, girds him for the battle,
and will go before him to new conquests.
The prophet's prediction was met with incredulity; the power of
Babylon seemed invincible, the resurrection of the dead nation
impossible. Impossible, maybe, to men, but not to the Almighty God,
the creator of heaven and earth, the sovereign ruler of the nations!
As surely as the words of former prophets have come true, so signally
shall these foretellings be fulfilled. For history is the unfolding of
God's plan from the beginning, which he reveals by chapters to his
servants the prophets.
That this prophecy was delivered by Isaiah of Jerusalem, a century
before the fall of Judah and a century and a half before the time of
Cyrus, would never have entered anybody's head had these chapters not
been appended to a roll which bore at its beginning the name of Isaiah
and contained many oracles of the eighth-century prophet. But this
physical fact, which may be due to no intention more profound than a
desire to economize writing material, cannot count against the
conclusive internal evidence; background and foreground in Isa. 40 ff.
are not merely totally different from those of the prophecies of
Isaiah and his contemporaries, they are alike inconceivable in his
age. Nor is the fact that the Jews in New Testament times, including
the New Testament writers, quoted these chapters as Isaiah and
believed him the author of them, prove anything except that such was
the opinion of the Jews in that age.
The historical situation in Isa. 40 ff. would of itself be conclusive
against Isaiah's authorship; but it is not the only proof of the
contrary. The author of these chapters has not inappropriately been
called the theologian among the prophets. His idea of God is
conspicuously more advanced than that of the prophets of the eighth
century; it lies in the same line with the monotheism of Deuteronomy
and Jeremiah, but lies beyond them. And it is characteristic that, in
contrast to the older prophets, this one reasons about it. He argues
the omnipotence of God in history from his omnipotence in creation,
and makes large use of the evidence from the fulfilment of prophecy to
prove that Jehovah is the only God; he can predict because he
foreordains and brings to pass. With him begins the polemic, not
against the worship of heathen gods, but against their existence. What
the heathen bow down to are naught but helpless, senseless idols, the
work of their own hands. He is fond of inviting his readers to an
image-maker's shop to see how a god is made (see, e.g., Isa. xliv.
9-20). Such are the impotent gods that the Babylonians expect to save
them out of the hands of the creator of the world!
The style of Isa. 40 ff. is not less decisive. Translation necessarily
in large measure effaces the differences, but even in translation a
comparison of two passages on similar themes such as Isa. x. 5-19 and
Isa. 47 may perhaps give some impression of them. The style of Isaiah
and his contemporaries--Amos, Hosea, Micah--is concise and pregnant,
the sentences are short and have often an oracular ring. The author of
Isa. 40 ff. writes with a freer pen in flowing periods; he develops
his thought and his figures more at large; if he is obscure, it is
seldom from compression. Here again, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah, the
whole literature of the seventh century, is an intermediate stage. The
later author is a poet, as Isaiah is, but with other themes and in
other forms; compare, e.g., Isa. 5 with Isa. xlii. 1-9. In short, each
has a highly characteristic style, and the two are totally different.
The historical situation, as it has been defined above, appears most
distinctly in Isa. 40-55. In the following chapters two passages were
long ago seen not to correspond to that situation, viz. lvi. 9-lvii.
13 and c. 65 (especially vss. 1-16), in which the vehement attack on
idolatrous and abominable rites practised by Jews under the prophet's
eyes was thought to indicate a pre-exilic origin. It was a serious
error, however, to conceive that the so-called exile cured all the
Jews once and for all of every inclination to heathenism; the history
of the Seleucid period sufficiently proves the contrary. There is
nothing in the chapters inconsistent with the view, now generally
entertained, that these flaming denunciations were delivered in
Palestine in the Persian or the Greek period; and there is no warrant
for assuming that they were specifically addressed to the half-heathen
population of the old territory of Israel, still less to the so-called
Samaritan sect, that is, the worshippers at the rival temple on
Gerizim.
Other chapters (Isa. lvii. 14-21; 60; 61 f.) resemble in spirit and
manner the prophecies in Isa. 40-55, but are more probably by later
writers under the influence of those prophecies than by their author.
Their optimism contrasts with the depressed tone of lviii. 1-lix.
15^a, in which the sense of sin is borne in on the community by the
delay in the coming of the good times. In lix. 15^b-21, and lxiii. 1-6
God's fury is poured out on foreign nations, in the latter
specifically on Edom; lxiii. 7-lxiv. 12 is a cry for God's
intervention in dire distress (see lxiii. 18; lxiv. 10 f., devastation
of Judah, burning of the temple); c. 66 contains diverse elements,
consolation to Jerusalem of the school of Isa. 40-45, and censures of
abominable rites (lxvi. 3 f., 17 ff.).
Isaiah 56-66 is, therefore, generally regarded as an appendix to the
book of consolation, cc. 40-55, containing very diverse elements.
It would be nothing strange if alien prophecies and editorial
expansions were found in Isa. 40-55 also, and displacements are
probably in more than one passage. The question of authorship is of
peculiar interest in the case of three prophecies which have for their
subject the mission and suffering of the "Servant of Jehovah," Isa.
xlii. 1-9; xlix. 1-13; lii. 13-liii. 12, which are thought by some to
be taken wholly or in part from an older prophet, by others to be
later insertions. The reasons for ascribing the "Servant" passages to
a different author do not seem decisive.
The Book of Isaiah is thus a great collection of prophecies of various
ages, from the middle of the eighth century B.C. down perhaps to the
third, with some minor additions of even later date.