Isaiah’s theology

It is in his theology that Isaiah leans most heavily on Israelite tradition and shows an acquaintance with the thoughts of Amos. Isaiah shared with him and with the people the long-standing tradition that a special bond united Israel and its God. Since patriarchal times there had been an agreement, a solemn “Covenant” between them: Israel was to be God’s people and he their God. He had chosen them and cared for them. His solicitude for their welfare had been clearly established. Such was the traditional message. Isaiah knew and honoured this ancient tradition, but, more significantly, he also shared the conviction of Amos that this arrangement was wholly conditional, contingent on the people’s conduct. Behaviour such as Amos saw about him in Samaria and Isaiah saw about him in Jerusalem could cancel that Covenant—had in fact done so; that is the meaning of the vineyard parable in the fifth chapter of Isaiah. There God is compared to the careful and industrious cultivator of a vineyard—Israel—who, angry at the “wild grapes” of injustice and violence that is his crop, threatens to take away his care and protection.

As Isaiah knew him, Israel’s God did not fit into the picture of utter injustice and consequent misery rampant in 8th-century Israel. To that people’s God, as Isaiah knew him, persons mattered. God was, in fact, more concerned about people than about how his subjects performed for him their oft-rehearsed rituals. A literal interpretation of the 13th verse of chapter 29 and verses 10 to 15 of chapter 1 would suggest that God finds the motions of worship repugnant, and this may well have been Isaiah’s meaning. He was overawed by the holiness—the otherness—of his God and must have thought that the customary gifts of meat, grain, and flattery were unseemly or, at the least, irrelevant. Although, like Amos, Isaiah appears most often to speak in absolutes, it is indeed possible to interpret these two passages less strictly (as some scholars do) and to say that he spoke in relative terms and that, in his scale of religious values, he merely ranked moral conduct above ritual conformity.

Isaiah’s theology included the sometimes comforting view that God shapes history, traditionally entering the human scene to rescue his people from national peril. But, according to Isaiah’s discomfiting surmise, God could intervene quite as properly to chastise his own aberrant nation, and he could employ a human agent (e.g., a conquering foe) to that end.

More readily than Amos, perhaps because a decade had passed, Isaiah could identify the agent: Assyria. Isaiah’s call to prophecy roughly coincides with the beginning—after a period of relative inactivity—of the westward expansion of the Assyrian empire under the victorious generalship of Tiglath-pileser III (reigned 745–727 bce). Current events did not escape the prophet’s attention. Isaiah appears to have read the omens, as Amos had done; he could clearly see in Assyria the instrument of God’s wrath: “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury! Against a godless nation I send him…” (10:5–6).

Prophetic mission

If, then, Isaiah was prepared by schooling in tradition and life for the vision that set him on his prophetic course, the preparation involved the mingling in his nature of such elements as those sketched above. In the year that King Uzziah died (742 bce), according to chapter 6, Isaiah was one of a crowd gathered for an occasion at the Jerusalem Temple when of a sudden it occurred—and he became a prophet: “Go, and say to this people….” The experiences that had gone into the shaping of his young life—his acquaintance with the arrogant rich and the suffering poor; his seeming knowledge of Amos and his heritage of tradition, ethnic and religious; his dismay at the threat of Assyria; above all, perhaps, a new and overwhelming sense of the majestic holiness of God—all merged, coalesced, and he knew that his God was sending him with words for his people and that, reluctant or not, he was compelled to go. From the start or retrospectively, he was aware of a frantic need—impossible to satisfy—to call his people back from the brink of peril. His vision was his moment of insight and resolve when, with complete clarity and instantaneously, he knew what he must do and say.

In its present sophisticated form the record of this experience is hardly contemporary with the event; he did not go home from the Temple and write down chapter 6. The record is the reflection not of a confident and eager youth but of a man buffeted by long experience, embittered and despairing. Three times in other chapters the prophet says of his people that they have “refused” to hear him; it was as though he, a messenger, had been ordered irrationally to “close their minds, plug their ears, veil their eyes,” as he says in chapter 6 of his errand to those to whom he was sent. The message that he had to deliver was bad news—unwelcome tidings. And when he spoke of it, as repeatedly he did, he chose such unambiguous language and spoke with so much moral certainty that, as people normally do, his hearers tuned him out; he was foredoomed to speak unheard. A great deal of anguished living intervened between the vision itself and the writing of it. His words “How long, O Lord?” are an expression of utter weariness.

If chapter 6 marks the beginning of his career as prophet, the judgment oracle about the conquest of Jerusalem in chapter 22 probably brings his grim story to a close. It is at any rate the latest Isaianic product that can be dated with any degree of certainty. The last recorded words of Isaiah, in chapter 22, do nothing to relieve the sombre tone of his message, but they do shed further light on his mood and personality. After he had exclaimed in the vision in chapter 6, “How long, O Lord?” he learned to his dismay that even a last remaining 10th of the populace must in turn succumb; just so here the oracle ends with assurance of total disaster: the nation’s guilt can be purged by nothing short of death—“Surely this iniquity will not be forgiven you until you die….” Chapters 6 and 22 set the tone of his message and the hue of his mood, and from the first to the last the gloom has not lifted.

This 22nd chapter contains the most personally revealing of all Isaiah’s words. Quite unexpectedly, the Assyrians have lifted the siege and departed, and the amazed defenders of Jerusalem, flushed and jubilant, give way to celebration; Isaiah cannot share the holiday spirit since for him there has been only a postponement. Nothing has changed, and in his “valley of vision” he sees the day of rout and confusion that God yet has in store for Zion. And so it is that he lays bare his private grief:

Look away from me, let me weep bitter tears; do not try to comfort me for the destruction of my beloved people.