My favourite book among the Old Testament prophets is Isaiah. It’s the longest and in many ways the richest. Many words from it are familiar to us from Handel’s Messiah and Christmas and Easter services. It is quoted and associated with Jesus so many times in the New Testament that it is often called “the Fifth Gospel”.
It’s a book of complex origins. Chapter 6 tells the story of Isaiah’s call to be a prophet in “the year that King Uzziah died”, i.e., 742 BC. Chapters 36-37 tell the story of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem which, as we know from Assyrian history, happened in 701 BC. This means he was active as a prophet for over 40 years.
It was a time of turbulence and fear in that region, just as it is today. The Israelites were divided into two kingdoms, Samaria in the north and Judah in the south. The Assyrian Empire, whose capital was Nineveh (now Mosul, in northern Iraq) was spreading out towards the Mediterranean and as far as the borders of Egypt. Samaria was combining with Syria to fight off the Assyrians and wanted Judah to join them. They had gone so far as to threaten to invade Judah and replace King Ahaz with someone more prepared to agree with them. The nation was in a state of panic. Isaiah, as an advisor to the king, warned him that this was a hopeless plan and pleaded with him to trust in God for defence. Shortly afterwards, in 721 BC, the Assyrians destroyed Samaria, deported many of its citizens, and settled the land with a mixture of people from other parts of their empire, thus bringing that kingdom to an end. Judah held out and kept its independence.
The last story we have of Isaiah is twenty years later, when the Assyrians were besieging Jerusalem. Once again, Isaiah advised the king to stand firm and trust in God because better times were coming soon. His prophecy turned out to be true – the Assyrian army was suddenly devastated by a plague. Isaiah’s last appearance in the book named after him is in chapters 38-39, where he is still advising King Hezekiah.
The rest of the book, from chapter 40 onwards, reflects a situation nearly two hundred years later. The Assyrian Empire is no more. Jerusalem has been destroyed by the still greater empire of Babylon and most of the people of Judah have lived for seventy years in exile there. That empire has been peacefully taken over by the Medes and Persians. The new emperor, Cyrus, has a new way of governing an empire. Instead of moving people around and obliterating borders, as the Assyrians and Babylonians did, he believes in devolution: building nations with their own governments and cultures under his rule. There is now a real possibility of the Jews being able to return to Judah and rebuild Jerusalem and its Temple.
Chapters 40-55, starting with those well-known words, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God”, make one of the most joyful parts of the Bible – a glorious celebration of the renewal of Jerusalem and the universal sovereignty of God. The rest of the book, chapters 56-66, seem to belong to a slightly later time, when the returning exiles are facing a more problematic reality.
How do these different writings from different times come to be joined together in the book of Isaiah? What probably happened was that Isaiah had a loyal group of disciples (see Isa 8:16) who preserved the record of his prophecies. As situations changed, what Isaiah had said still seemed relevant, sometimes in new and unexpected ways. Later prophets were imagining what Isaiah might have said if he were living in their time, just as preachers do today when they take a biblical text and apply it to the present day.
Prophets, thinkers and scholars worked over all these writings and eventually formed the very complex book we have in our Bible today. The different times and situations are often mixed up, but there are themes that run through the whole book, giving it a rich and inspiring unity. Jesus and his disciples gave it new meaning, and we are still discovering its remarkable relevance to the twenty-first century.
Ray Vincent is an Associate Chaplain at the University of South Wales
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