Isaiah — themes & analysis

The standard scholarly division of Isaiah goes back to Bernhard Duhm's 1892 commentary and has been refined but not overturned in more than a century of scholarship. First Isaiah (chapters 1–39) is associated with the 8th-century prophet Isaiah ben Amoz, a member of the Jerusalem aristocracy active under four kings of Judah, who preached judgement against social injustice and political idolatry and whose oracles were preserved by his disciples. Second Isaiah (40–55) comes from a hundred and fifty years later, during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century, addressed to a community whose temple had been destroyed and whose city was in ruins, announcing the coming return under Cyrus the Persian — named in 45:1 in a way that would be impossible for an 8th-century prophet. Third Isaiah (56–66) comes from after the return, in the early decades of Persian rule, addressed to a community struggling to rebuild and divided over questions of inclusion, ritual, and identity.

The differences are not minor. The vocabulary is different. The God-language is different. The historical references are different. The rhetorical situation is different: judgement before exile in the first section, comfort during exile in the second, contested rebuilding after exile in the third. And yet the book is one book. The editors who gave it its final form — probably in the 5th or 4th century BCE — were not unaware of the differences; they preserved them while binding the material into a sustained theological vision in which Israel's judgement, exile, and restoration are stages of a single divine purpose.

The reader who comes to the book knowing about the three layers reads better, because the differences in tone and emphasis stop being puzzles and become structural features. The reader who treats the book as a unified composition by the 8th-century prophet will find passages that simply do not fit, and will end up minimising what the book is actually doing. The historical-critical reading and the canonical reading are not opposed; they are stages in coming to know what kind of book Isaiah is.

Where to follow it: Isaiah 1 (First Isaiah opens), Isaiah 40 (Second Isaiah opens), Isaiah 56 (Third Isaiah opens).

In the year King Uzziah died — about 740 BCE — Isaiah is in the Jerusalem temple and he sees. He sees the Lord seated on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe fills the temple. Above the throne are seraphim, six-winged creatures who cover their faces and their feet and cry to one another: holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory. The doorposts shake. The house fills with smoke. Isaiah's response is immediate: woe is me, I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.

A seraph flies to him with a coal from the altar, touches his lips with it, and declares his iniquity taken away and his sin purged. Then he hears the voice of the Lord asking whom shall I send, and who will go for us. He answers: here am I, send me. The vision is the founding theological moment of the book and one of the most concentrated descriptions of religious experience in any literature. The threefold cry of holiness — kadosh, kadosh, kadosh — is the most concentrated affirmation of God's holiness in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah's response — I am undone, my lips are unclean — is the recognition that no preparation makes one ready for what he has seen.

The cleansing by the coal is the divine answer: God himself provides what one cannot provide for oneself. The commissioning that follows is structurally important: the prophet is sent only after the cleansing, and the cleansing happens at God's initiative, not the prophet's. Holy, holy, holy has entered the liturgy of every Christian tradition and the Jewish kedushah, and the chapter has become one of the deepest wells of religious art in Western culture.

Where to follow it: Isaiah 6 (the vision itself), Isaiah 11 (the peaceable kingdom), Isaiah 40 (comfort my people).

The four Servant Songs in Second Isaiah — 42:1–9, 49:1–6, 50:4–9, and 52:13–53:12 — depict a figure whom God calls his servant, who is chosen, given a mission to the nations, who suffers, who is rejected and afflicted, and through whose suffering many are made righteous. The fourth and longest of these — chapter 53 — is among the most quoted passages in the Hebrew Bible: he is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.

Who the Servant is has been one of the longest-running interpretive questions in the history of biblical scholarship. The dominant later Jewish reading has identified the Servant with Israel — the people of Israel as a corporate figure, suffering at the hands of the nations and through that suffering bringing knowledge of God to them. The corporate identification is supported by the explicit statement in 49:3: thou art my servant, O Israel. The Christian reading from the New Testament onward has identified the Servant with Jesus; the chapter is quoted directly in Acts 8 and has shaped Christian atonement theology from Paul onward.

The most careful contemporary scholarship reads the Servant as a figure who carries within him both meanings — corporate and individual — and through whom Second Isaiah is working out a new theology of redemptive suffering. The Christian reading, on this view, is one ancient appropriation of a figure who was already polysemous in his original setting. The chapter is too rich for any single reading to exhaust it, and the most fruitful approach is to listen to the passage with all its readers — Jewish, Christian, and modern — at once.

Where to follow it: Isaiah 42 (First Servant Song), Isaiah 49 (Second and Third Songs), Isaiah 53 (the Suffering Servant).

The Holy One of Israel occurs about twenty-five times in Isaiah and only a handful of times in the rest of the Hebrew Bible. The title concentrates the book's whole theology into four words. To call God holy is to insist on his radical otherness, his transcendence, his separation from everything created and everything fallen. To call him the Holy One of Israel is to insist that this transcendent God has bound himself to a particular people, has entered into covenant with them, has acted in their history, and remains involved in it.

The title runs across the three compositional layers and is one of the strongest threads of theological continuity between First, Second, and Third Isaiah. In First Isaiah it appears in oracles of judgement: Israel has rebelled against the Holy One of Israel and the consequences will be terrible. In Second Isaiah it appears in oracles of comfort and redemption: the Holy One of Israel as Redeemer, the one who will bring the people back from exile. In Third Isaiah it appears in oracles of restoration. The book moves between the language of awe — the seraphim crying holy, holy, holy in chapter 6 — and the language of intimate care — comfort, comfort my people in chapter 40 — and the title is the theological hinge that makes the same God the source of both.

A merely transcendent God could not redeem; he could only judge and remain inaccessible. A merely immanent God could not redeem either; he would be no more than a tribal patron. The God of Isaiah is both transcendent enough to judge with absolute justice and immanent enough to act in history with covenant fidelity. Once the reader hears the title, the book's whole rhetorical structure begins to make sense.

Where to follow it: Isaiah 1 (first use in judgement), Isaiah 41 (Holy One as Redeemer), Isaiah 60 (Third Isaiah, restoration).

The closing chapters of the book — Third Isaiah, 56–66, addressed to the post-exilic community — culminate in one of the most extraordinary visions of the future in any ancient text. In 65:17 God declares: behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. The vision unfolds across the rest of the chapter and into chapter 66. Jerusalem will be a place of joy. The voice of weeping will not be heard there any more, nor the voice of crying. The infant will not die in infancy, the old man will live out his days. They will build houses and inhabit them, plant vineyards and eat their fruit. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, the lion will eat straw like the ox. None will hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.

The vision draws on language from earlier in the book — the peaceable kingdom of chapter 11, the comfort of chapter 40 — and pushes it further. What is described is not merely a restored Jerusalem but a re-creation of the cosmos in which the conditions of fallen life have been undone. The vision has been one of the most influential single passages in the development of biblical eschatology. It runs through the Jewish tradition of the world to come, through the apocalyptic literature of the late Second Temple period, through the New Testament: Revelation 21:1 quotes it directly — I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

The careful reader notices how the vision is grounded. It is not a vision of escape from the world; it is a vision of the world remade. The new earth is still earth. There are still houses and vineyards and infants and old men. The redemption Third Isaiah envisages is not the abandonment of the material conditions of human life but their healing. This is one of the deepest theological gifts of the prophetic tradition to its later inheritors: the conviction that what God will do at the end is not the negation of creation but its perfection.

Where to follow it: Isaiah 11 (peaceable kingdom, First Isaiah), Isaiah 65 (new heavens and new earth), Isaiah 66 (all flesh shall worship).