Theopedia

Book of Isaiah

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

— Isaiah 9:6

Overview

Isaiah is a book of Old Testament prophecy, standing first among the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew canon and traditionally ascribed to the prophet Isaiah, son of Amoz, who ministered in Judah in the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah (Isa. 1:1).1 Among the Hebrew prophets, Isaiah holds first place in the extent of his writings and in the fullness of his prophecies concerning the Messiah and his kingdom.2 The book divides broadly between oracles of judgment against Judah, Jerusalem, and the surrounding nations (chs. 1-39) and oracles of comfort promising Zion’s future redemption (chs. 40-66), a turn the book itself announces: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God” (Isa. 40:1).

Author and Date

Jewish and Christian tradition has held that Isaiah, son of Amoz, wrote the book bearing his name. Of his private life little is recorded beyond his marriage and two sons, given symbolic names as living signs to Judah (Isa. 7:3; 8:1-4, 18). He entered his prophetic office toward the close of Uzziah’s reign and continued through the reign of Hezekiah, a span of some sixty-two years or more, and Jewish tradition, echoed perhaps at Hebrews 11:37, held that he was martyred under Manasseh.1

The book presents itself as a unified composition. It opens under a single superscription naming Isaiah as the prophet who received “the vision” that follows (Isa. 1:1), unlike the Book of the Twelve, which names twelve different prophets, or the Psalter, which gathers works by many hands.3 Nineteenth-century defenders of this traditional position argued the case chiefly from continuity of style across the whole book and from the New Testament’s own practice of citing material from both halves of Isaiah, sometimes within a single breath, as the words of one prophet (John 12:38-41; compare Matt. 3:3; 8:17; 12:17-21; Acts 8:28-33).4 No manuscript evidence exists for shorter, separately circulating portions of the book: the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, dated no later than 125 BC, already contains the sixty-six chapters as a single continuous work.3

Since the late nineteenth century, following the commentary of Bernhard Duhm, critical scholarship has generally attributed chapters 40-55 to an anonymous prophet writing near the close of the Babylonian exile, commonly called Deutero-Isaiah, and has often further divided chapters 56-66 to a still later, postexilic writer or writers, Trito-Isaiah, rather than to Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century BC.56 Nineteenth-century apologetic answered this view by pointing to the purity of the Hebrew in the later chapters, which matches the earlier rather than a period some 150 years on; to allusions presupposing a still-standing temple and its sacrifices (Isa. 43:23-24) and to the sin of seeking heathen alliances (Isa. 57:9), both features suited to Isaiah’s own pre-exilic setting; and to the singling out of Cyrus by name (Isa. 44:28; 45:1) as a mark of predictive prophecy rather than after-the-fact description.4 On the traditional view taken here, the whole book comes from Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century BC; on the critical view, its final form is the product of multiple hands across several centuries.

Historical and Literary Context

Isaiah’s ministry unfolded across two crises that shaped much of the book’s first half. Under Ahaz, the allied kings of Israel and Syria invaded Judah, and Ahaz, rather than trusting the Lord, hired Assyria to defend him (Isa. 7:1-9); Isaiah’s Immanuel prophecies belong to this setting, warning that the same Assyrian power Judah had purchased would later overrun the land (chs. 7-12).7 Later, under Hezekiah, the Assyrian king Sennacherib invaded Judah and besieged Jerusalem, an episode the book narrates directly and which closes with the introduction of a further, more distant threat: Babylon (chs. 36-39).8

The book’s second half addresses a later crisis it does not narrate but anticipates: the Babylonian captivity of Judah, still future in Isaiah’s own day (Isa. 39:6-7). Its message of comfort promises the exiles a deliverance through Cyrus of Persia (Isa. 44:28-45:4), whom it names some 150 years before he issued the decree freeing the Jewish captives (Ezra 1:2), and treats that deliverance as itself a shadow of the fuller redemption still to come through the Messiah, the true servant of the Lord.9

Structure

Isaiah divides into two major parts.2

Judgment oracles (chs. 1-39). After an introductory chapter, this part gathers prophetic messages delivered on various occasions across Isaiah’s ministry:7

  • Chapters 2-6: Oracles against Judah and Jerusalem from the latter part of Uzziah’s reign, and the prophet’s vision of the Lord in the temple.
  • Chapters 7-12: Prophecies connected with the Syro-Ephraimite invasion of Ahaz’s reign, including the Immanuel prophecies, closing with a song of Zion’s future deliverance.
  • Chapters 13-23: Oracles against the surrounding heathen nations, including Babylon, Philistia, Moab, Syria, Egypt, Edom, Tyre, and others.
  • Chapters 24-27: General oracles exhibiting the Lord as the avenger and deliverer of his people.
  • Chapters 28-35: Oracles delivered in view of the approaching Assyrian invasion under Hezekiah, denouncing Judah’s trust in Egypt and describing Zion’s future peace under the Messiah’s reign.
  • Chapters 36-39: A historical narrative of Sennacherib’s invasion and overthrow, Hezekiah’s illness and recovery, and his dealings with the Babylonian envoys of Merodach-baladan.

Comfort oracles and the closing section (chs. 40-66). The nineteenth-century Old Testament scholar Carl Friedrich Keil described the shape of these twenty-seven chapters, divisible into three sections of nine chapters each:

The first of these sections (chaps. 40-48) portrays the relation of Israel to the heathen nations; and from the redemption of Israel effected through Cyrus, the servant of God, it unfolds the certain victory of the Theocracy over the gods and powers of the heathen world. The second section (chaps. 49-57) exhibits Israel as the seat of salvation for the world. This it does by carrying out the thought that, just as Cyrus is to redeem Israel from the Babylonish captivity, so must the true servant of Jehovah, by his vicarious suffering and death, make expiation for sin, raise the covenant people to true glory, and make them… the centre of salvation for the whole world. Finally in the third section (chaps. 58-66), after an exhortation in which the sins of the people are acknowledged and rebuked, the prophet foretells… how the Theocracy shall be glorified when it shall become, in connection with the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, the perfected kingdom of God.10

Major Themes

The Holy One of Israel. Isaiah applies this title to the Lord more often than the rest of Scripture combined, displaying his holiness in the people he forms for himself, “his Israel,” as a new creation answering to the rectitude given the creature at the first creation.11 The second half of the book puts special emphasis on the doctrine that this Holy One is the one and only God, tracing Israel’s return from Babylon and the restoration of their homeland directly to his work, and recalling his creation of the nation through Abraham together with his creation of heaven and earth.12

Judgment and restoration. Isaiah’s oracles of judgment against Judah’s sin, and against the Assyrian and Babylonian powers that would carry out that judgment, are set within a larger movement toward comfort and restoration. The prophet’s visions of Zion’s future glory were given not at the height of the kingdom’s outward splendor under David and Solomon but during its decline, so that the hope of the pious would be turned from the darkness of the present toward the brightness of the last days still to come.13

The Servant Songs and their fulfillment in Christ. Since the nineteenth-century commentary of Bernhard Duhm, interpreters have identified four passages within chapters 41-53 as the Servant Songs, though the theme of the Lord’s servant runs continuously through that section of the book.5 The New Testament apostles quoted Isaiah extensively and structured their own account of Jesus’s death and resurrection using Isaiah’s pattern of a twofold coming of the Messiah, as both suffering servant and coming conqueror.14 The portrait of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53 gives Scripture’s most powerful picture of Christ’s own mediatorial suffering, prefigured already in the ram that substituted for Isaac (Gen. 22) and in the Day of Atonement’s transfer of sin to the sacrificial animal (Lev. 16:21).15 The chapter’s language of substitution, that the Lord “hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” and that he was “wounded for our transgressions” (Isa. 53:5-6), so shaped the New Testament’s own vocabulary for Christ’s atoning death that its expressions color nearly all the language the New Testament uses to describe it.16

Immanuel. Isaiah’s prophecy that a virgin would bear a son called Immanuel, “God with us” (Isa. 7:14), belongs to a wider pattern of messianic prophecy authentic to Isaiah’s own pre-exilic century, naming supernatural traits including a miraculous birth and divine names such as “Mighty God” (Isa. 9:6).17 John Gill read Isaiah’s naming of the child as bearing on both natures of Christ’s person: he “is called the child born, with respect to his human nature, and the Son given, with respect to his divine nature.”18

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 22, “The Greater Prophets,” 299. ↩ ↩2

  2. Barrows, 303-304. ↩ ↩2

  3. Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 3, “Interpreting Isaiah 40-48 Theologically”: “The book of Isaiah presents itself as a unified work from one prophet… Isaiah is a single book with a named author, which strongly implies that it has a coherent theme and message.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Barrows, 308-309. ↩ ↩2

  5. Carter, chap. 5, “God as the Sovereign Lord of History (Isa. 41-48),” n. 3: “Identifying these four passages as the Servant Songs has been a staple of Isaiah commentaries since the work of Bernhard Duhm in the late nineteenth century… the theme of the ‘servant of the LORD’ runs throughout chapters 41-53.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Carter, chap. 3, n. 4: historical-critical scholarship “for the most part tended to divide chapters 40-55 from 56-66 and to view the former as exilic and the latter as postexilic.” ↩

  7. Barrows, 300. ↩ ↩2

  8. Barrows, 301-302. ↩

  9. Barrows, 304-305. ↩

  10. Carl Friedrich Keil, Introduction to the Old Testament, sec. 65, quoted in Barrows, 302-303. ↩

  11. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XI: On the Holiness of God,” 108: “He is called the Holy One of Israel more in Isaiah, that evangelical prophet, in erecting Zion, and forming a people for himself, than in the whole Scripture besides.” ↩

  12. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 3, “The Lord Our God Is One,” 28: “The preaching recorded in the second half of the book of Isaiah puts a special emphasis on proclaiming the doctrine of the one God.” ↩

  13. Barrows, 297-298. ↩

  14. Carter, chap. 3: the New Testament apostles “structured their interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection using Isaiah’s schema of the twofold coming of the messiah as both suffering servant and anointed conqueror.” ↩

  15. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior: Christ’s Humiliation”: “the portrait of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 provides the most powerful portrait in Scripture of our Lord’s mediatorial suffering.” ↩

  16. James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XXVIII. The Atonement of Christ,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing, 1st published ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 323: “the prophetic language of Isaiah, relative to Christ’s sufferings, was felt to be so completely fulfilled in them, that almost all the language in the New Testament, which speaks of his atonement, is tinged by the expressions there used.” ↩

  17. Bavinck, chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father”: “the Old Testament image of the Messiah is able to come into its own, including such supernatural traits as the miraculous birth (Isa. 7:14; Mic. 5:2), the divine names (Isa. 9:6).” ↩

  18. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 1, chap. 28: “he must be the Immanuel, the child to be born, the Son given, &c. prophesied of in Isaiah 7:14, 9:6 where he is called the ‘child born’, with respect to his human nature, and the ‘Son given’, with respect to his divine nature.” ↩