Summary: Bible - Book of Isaiah

The GIST

Isaiah, a book of the Bible, is the first of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the first of the major prophets in the Christian Old Testament: sixty-six chapters of warning, vision and consolation centred on one city, Jerusalem. Its opening line presents it as "The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz", a prophet who lived in the kingdom of Judah in the eighth century BCE, under the kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. Scholars widely accept that such a prophet stood at the root of the book, and just as widely that he did not write all of it. Much of it appears to come from the time of the Babylonian exile and afterwards, added by writers who left no names.

Read whole, it has been called a long meditation on the destiny of Jerusalem: a city that must be judged and cleansed, and that will then become the place from which God rules the world and to which the nations come to learn. Few books of the Bible have been read as intently. It was a favourite among Jews of the Second Temple period, and Christians valued it so highly that they called it the Fifth Gospel.

What It Says

The charge against Judah (chapters 1 to 5). The book begins in a courtroom with heaven and earth as witnesses: "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the LORD hath spoken". The complaint is that of a parent: "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me." Even farm animals know who feeds them: "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know". Yet almost at once the horizon opens. In days to come the mountain of the LORD's house will be raised above the hills, "and all nations shall flow unto it", and the nations "shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks". Between the charge and the hope lies judgment. God will strip Jerusalem of its supports and its leaders, because "the spoil of the poor is in your houses". Chapter 5 turns the accusation into a love song about a vineyard. Its owner did everything for it, fenced it, cleared it, planted the choicest vine, and it gave him wild grapes. Then the riddle is solved: "For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel". He looked for justice and found oppression.

The vision and the kings (chapters 6 to 12). "In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple." Six-winged seraphims call to one another, "Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory", and the doorposts shake and the house fills with smoke. That vision of holiness governs the rest. Again and again the book calls God "the Holy One of Israel".

Politics follows. In the days of Ahaz, the kings of Syria and of Israel march on Jerusalem, and the king's heart shakes "as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind". Isaiah goes to meet him with his son Shearjashub and a plain message: "Take heed, and be quiet; fear not". The sign he gives has echoed ever since: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." Isaiah names another child, Mahershalalhashbaz, as a sign that Damascus and Samaria will soon fall to the king of Assyria. Out of the gloom comes a promise: "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light", and "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder". Chapter 10 pronounces woe on those who write unjust laws to rob widows and the fatherless. Chapter 11 pictures the ruler to come, a shoot from David's family tree: "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots". The spirit of the LORD rests on him, he judges the poor with righteousness, and nature itself is at peace: "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb". The section ends with a song: "Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid".

The nations (chapters 13 to 27). A series of oracles, each headed a "burden", takes the world in turn: Babylon, Moab, Damascus, Egypt, Tyre and others. The king of Babylon will be taunted, "How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!" Moab will howl in sackcloth. At God's command Isaiah himself walks "naked and barefoot three years" as a sign of what Assyria will do to Egypt and Ethiopia. A voice calls out of the dark, "Watchman, what of the night?" Then the scale widens to the whole earth, which God "maketh" empty and "turneth it upside down". Out of that ruin rises one of the book's greatest promises: "He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces". Judah will sing of a strong city, and of the one God keeps "in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee".

Woes and a king to come (chapters 28 to 35). Isaiah turns on "the drunkards of Ephraim" and on leaders who look south for rescue: "Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots". His reason is blunt: "Now the Egyptians are men, and not God; and their horses flesh, and not spirit." Against failed alliances he sets a different future: "Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment." Chapter 34 summons the nations to hear their sentence, and chapter 35 answers with a blooming wilderness: "the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." The weak are told, "Be strong, fear not".

Hezekiah and the siege (chapters 36 to 39). The book turns to narrative. In the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, Sennacherib king of Assyria takes the fortified cities of Judah and sends his officer Rabshakeh to Jerusalem with a great army and a taunt: "What confidence is this wherein thou trustest?" Hezekiah tears his clothes, puts on sackcloth, goes into the house of the LORD and sends to Isaiah. Later, sick and told to set his house in order, he turns his face to the wall, prays and weeps, and the answer comes: "I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will add unto thy days fifteen years." Then envoys arrive from the king of Babylon, and Hezekiah shows them everything in his treasuries.

Comfort (chapters 40 to 55). With chapter 40 the voice changes, and Isaiah's name is not used again. "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God." Jerusalem's warfare is over, her iniquity pardoned. A voice cries in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God", and valleys rise and mountains sink to make a road. People are as fragile as grass, "but the word of our God shall stand for ever."

These chapters speak to exiles. God tells them, "Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine", and promises to be with them through water and fire. He claims to be the only God, the first and the last; the idols Bel and Nebo are loads carried on weary animals. And he names his instrument, a foreign emperor: "Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus". Babylon is told to "sit in the dust". The return is pictured as a second Exodus across a desert turned to pools.

Woven through are the passages about a servant. "Behold my servant, whom I uphold", gentle enough that "A bruised reed shall he not break". The servant speaks of being called from the womb, and of labouring, it seems, for nothing. Then comes the most searching passage in the book: "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief", one who "was wounded for our transgressions" and by whose stripes "we are healed". The section closes with an open invitation, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters", and a reminder of distance: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD."

After the return (chapters 56 to 66). The last chapters press for justice and widen the circle. Foreigners and eunuchs who hold to the covenant are welcome, "for mine house shall be called an house of prayer". Fasting that goes with strife is rejected. The people's wrongs, not any weakness in God, stand between them and him: "Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save". Then light breaks: "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee." A speaker anointed by the Spirit is sent "to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives", and to give mourners "beauty for ashes". Zion gets a new name and is no longer called Forsaken. The book ends with God declaring, "The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool", and looking to the one who is "poor and of a contrite spirit".

Why It Matters

How the book came to be is the first thing scholars say about it. Since the eighteenth century it has been argued that more than one prophet speaks here, and for most of the twentieth the standard view found three collections: chapters 1 to 39, holding the words of the eighth-century Isaiah; chapters 40 to 55, from an unnamed writer during the exile; and chapters 56 to 66, from after the return. A newer approach reads it as a work in two halves, dividing after chapter 33, and attends to its unity. Both readings have support.

Its ideas ran deep. The declaration that there is no God but one, with its mockery of the craftsman bowing to what he has carved, is described as the first clear statement of monotheism, the belief that came to define Judaism after the exile and to underlie Christianity and Islam. Unlike some other prophets, Isaiah grounds righteousness in God's holiness.

The servant has been read in several ways. Some Second Temple writings took him to be a group, the wise who lead many to righteousness; others read him as a messiah. The earliest Christians read the last servant passage as a prophecy of the death and exaltation of Jesus, took the Immanuel sign as the basis for the teaching of the virgin birth in Matthew, and applied the voice in the wilderness to John the Baptist. Scholars identify the anointed deliverer of the middle chapters as Cyrus. The book's language has passed into the libretto of Handel's Messiah and into everyday speech.

Who Should Read It

Readers who want the Bible's poetry at full strength, and anyone curious about where so much later Jewish and Christian hope came from. It asks for patience in the oracles against the nations and repays it many times over from chapter 40 onward.