(BA) Isaiah

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2 July 2022

Isaiah is one of the big three prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. The other two are Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and The Twelve are a dozen smaller prophetic works.

It was traditionally held that Isaiah was a single work by a single author. Later analysis showed indications that the work has multiple authors. Without claiming to know for certain how the book was composed, I can tell you that one common scheme for understanding. This scheme is basically accepted by most scholars.^[1]

Part one, chapters 1-39, sometimes called Proto-Isaiah, is largely the work of the eighth-century Isaiah son of Amoz. This section is written about the concerns of the 700's BCE, and uses the name "Isaiah" repeatedly.

Part two, sometimes called Deutero-Isaiah or Second Isaiah, was written by someone around the end of the Babylonian exile. For one thing, the style of this is very different from first Isaiah. The exile is not predicted in this section, but assumed as a past event, and the name "Isaiah" appears nowhere.^[2] This is chapters 40-55.

Part three, chapters 56-66, sometimes called Trito-Isaiah or Third Isaiah, are a collection of even later works by several authors, who treat rebuilding of Jerusalem as an accomplished event.

However, while allowing for multiple authorship, it is possible to read the book as a literary whole. The argument can be made the Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah are deliberately built to continue Proto-Isaiah, and that the earlier materials in the book were edited by the later writers and editors in order to tie the book together into a whole. Proto-Isaiah, as we have it today, looks forward to a disaster in which Jerusalem will be destroyed, and toward its eventual restoration. Deutero-Isaiah is written in a time when Jerusalem has, in fact, been destroyed, and Trito-Isaiah looks back from a time when the Persian Empire has restored Jerusalem to a substantial extent, though without restoring its independence as a capital city.