Isaiah

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Isaiah is one of the major prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, sixty-six chapters of oracle, vision, and poetry placed first among the books named for the writing prophets. Its opening verse attributes the whole to Isaiah son of Amoz, a prophet active in Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE, through the reigns of several kings of Judah. The book ranges from threats of judgment against Judah and its neighbors to some of the most exalted hope-language in the canon — the wolf lying down with the lamb, swords beaten into plowshares, a servant who suffers on behalf of others.

For most of its history the book was read as the unified work of that one eighth-century prophet. Since the late eighteenth century critical scholarship has read it otherwise. The chapters fall into sections that differ markedly in tone, setting, and historical horizon: an early body of material rooted in eighth-century Jerusalem; a stretch addressed to exiles in Babylon, presupposing that the city has already fallen and that release is near; and later chapters concerned with a restored community back in the land. The conventional names for these layers are First, Second, and Third Isaiah, and the prevailing view holds that the book grew over more than two centuries, gathered under the prophet’s name. How sharply to divide it, and how much one editorial vision shapes the whole, remains argued.

The book’s reach into later religion is hard to overstate. Jewish tradition kept it as the foremost of the Latter Prophets and drew its haftarot — the prophetic readings paired with the Torah — heavily from its consolations. Early Christianity read it as prophecy of Jesus to a degree matched by no other Old Testament book: the child called Immanuel, the shoot from the stump of Jesse, and above all the servant of the later chapters, wounded for the transgressions of others, were taken as foretelling the passion. The New Testament quotes Isaiah more than almost any other scripture, and the church came to call it a kind of fifth gospel.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a nearly complete Isaiah manuscript from around the second century BCE survives — far older than any Hebrew biblical text previously known, and remarkably close to the version transmitted for the following thousand years. The find anchored debate about how stable the text had been, and it sits among the oldest substantial witnesses to any book of the Hebrew Bible.

Whether read as the voice of a single seer or as a tradition layered across generations, Isaiah holds together threat and comfort in the same book — the ruin foretold and the restoration promised — and it is that double note, more than any single oracle, that later readers kept returning to.

→ Related: Jeremiah · Ezekiel · Amos · Book Of Joel · Book Of Malachi