Isaiah

Isaiah is presented as a prophet of Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE, active under several kings of Judah, whose call, the vision of the Lord high and lifted up, the seraphim, the coal that touches his lips, opens the sixth chapter of the book that bears his name. The historical prophet spoke into the crises of Assyrian power, counselling trust in God amid the threats to Judah.

But the book of Isaiah, one of the longest and most influential in the Hebrew Bible, is understood by most scholars to be the work of more than one hand across more than two centuries. First Isaiah (chapters 1-39) contains the core of the eighth-century prophet's message. Deutero-Isaiah (chapters 40-55) presupposes a much later situation, the Babylonian exile and the rise of Cyrus of Persia, named as God's instrument, and is assigned to an anonymous prophet of the sixth century. Trito-Isaiah (chapters 56-66) addresses the community after the return.

The division rests on differences of historical setting, style and theology within the book, not on any external tradition, and it is among the assured results of modern biblical criticism, though the traditional view of a single author persists in some religious readings. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, a nearly complete copy a thousand years older than the previously oldest Hebrew manuscript, shows the book already in its full form by the second century BCE.

No prophetic book has been read more intently by Christianity, and the reason lies chiefly in Deutero-Isaiah. Its four Servant Songs portray a servant of the Lord who suffers, is despised and rejected, is wounded for our transgressions, and bears the sins of many, a figure the New Testament and the whole Christian tradition read as a prophecy of the suffering and death of Christ. In their original setting these songs are more plausibly read as describing the prophet, or the people of Israel personified, and Jewish interpretation has generally understood the servant as Israel; the two readings have been debated for two millennia.

First Isaiah supplied other seams mined by later readers: the Immanuel prophecy of a child to be born, taken up in Matthew's nativity; the vision of a shoot from the stump of Jesse on whom the spirit of the Lord rests; and the picture of a future peace in which the wolf lies down with the lamb and nations beat their swords into ploughshares.

A persistent legend, reflected in the letter to the Hebrews and elaborated in the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah, holds that the prophet was martyred under the wicked king Manasseh by being sawn in two. Between the historical prophet, the exilic poet of the servant, and the martyr of legend, Isaiah names one of the deepest wells from which the later traditions drew.