Message to Israel

The historical allusions in the scattered chapters of Isaiah’s work agree with the title verse, according to which he was a contemporary of the Judaean kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. His prophetic call is precisely dated by him “in the year that King Uzziah died.” At least a part of chapter 7 refers to the event of the year 734 when Ephraim and Syria jointly threatened King Ahaz of Judah. In 732 Tiglath-pileser conquered Damascus, the fall of which Isaiah had anticipated. In 722 Samaria, the capital of Ephraim, fell to King Sargon of Assyria, which event Isaiah had also foreseen. By the end of the century (701) Sennacherib had laid siege to Jerusalem—and had subsequently withdrawn. Chapters 1:4–8; 10:27–34; 28:14–22; 30:1–7; and 31:1–4 point to those difficult days when Jerusalem was beleaguered and King Hezekiah feverishly sought help from Egypt. Isaiah brought sparse comfort to his kings—even when the siege was lifted, as noted in the passage cited from chapter 22.

It would be wrong to suppose that Isaiah came to Israel simply to announce the approaching disaster. Painfully sensitive to the rottenness of his society, Isaiah foresaw its consequent collapse. But he also knew and offered an alternative to tragedy: his people’s survival depended on their acceptance again of the ancient moral demands. By returning they might be saved. To obtain their return was his program. Or, differently and more properly stated, because he spoke for God and of God, his goal was to redirect his people into the ways acceptable to the God whom by their conduct they had alienated, and so to save them from catastrophe. He screamed dread warnings and pleaded for amendment. He gave way to despair only because his program had no success. His people seemed to him bent on self-destruction; that was the sickening course of their destiny as he saw it unfolding.

His impossible program comes through in the crisis of 701, during which he stands in violent opposition to the generals ready to go to Egypt for help against the Assyrians laying siege to Zion. Isaiah looked neither to allies nor to armaments for security. If it is God who decides the destiny of nations, security is for God to grant and for humans to deserve. Isaiah held the daring view that the best defense is no defense—none other than the reconciling response to the moral demand. No one is secure when some are denied security. “This,” he said, “is rest [i.e., security]: give rest to the weary.”

A case can be made for a theory that Isaiah drew back at the brink, incapable of conceiving a world wholly emptied of his people. What supports this view is a paradox: the observation that, irrationally, he entrusted his rejected message to his disciples and preserved it in a book for the instruction of the survivors of a people doomed to leave no survivors.

There is no consensus as concerns the precise limits of the words of the 8th-century Isaiah or the degree of consistency with which he sustained his tragic monotone. Certainly in his book as it has come down, his nature is elusive—both stern and tender. Magnificently hopeful passages constantly mingle with the prevailing atmosphere of doom. Probably his son’s name, Shear-yashuv, means something like “a mere fragment will survive,” but possibly it has a hopeful ring: no total disaster—some shall survive. Possibly the name Immanuel (God Is with Us), prophesied for the child who shall be a sign from God that Judah will not be overcome by Israel and Syria, expresses the confidence that God will never forsake his people. And possibly other such assurances are in fact words of Isaiah himself, compelled by his love to palliate the blow.

But there is an alternative solution. Although Isaiah was far from popular in his day, he does appear to have attracted some followers: “Seal the teaching among my disciples.” These may have been the circle that kept alive his name and his words—in writing or learned “by heart”—the nucleus of what was to become, through a developing tradition, the biblical Book of Isaiah. And quite possibly successive generations of such Isaiah-men, piously keeping his words alive through radically changing times, added the sustaining messages of hope, well designed to seize the fancy of suffering humanity down the centuries.

Later interpretations of Isaiah’s message

Ironically, perhaps, the Book of Isaiah is most widely known and loved just for those comforting words—which may not be his. A passage in the Babylonian Talmud (one of the two Talmud compilations, the other being Palestinian) can say that from beginning to end the book is consolation. The presence of Isaiah scrolls in the archives of the Qumrān (Dead Sea) community is not surprising. By that time (c. 1st century bce) it had become the fashion to assume that prophets spoke not to their times only but of things to come, and in times of stress men studied prophetic texts intent on learning when redemption was to come.

The Greek translation of Isaiah by Jewish scholars (the Septuagint), accomplished before the Christian Era, reflects a developing tradition of interpretation; it renders the Hebrew ʿalma (“young woman”) as parthenos (“virgin”) in the verse (7:14) about Immanuel, thus drawing Isaiah further into the messianic ring. Now it is a virgin who “shall conceive and bear a son.” The promise of a more than ordinary king, a “messiah,” was enticing. According to the New Testament accounts, when Jesus entered a synagogue in Nazareth and got up to read, they handed him a scroll of Isaiah. He read the beginning of chapter 61, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me…,” and he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.”

The Gospels lean more heavily on the Book of Isaiah than on any other prophetic text. Beyond any denominational differences is the utopian dream, the “swords-into-plowshares” passage in Isaiah 2. These and many gleaming words from the expanded Book of Isaiah live on in the present day and today’s culture. The word “prophetic” has now become a value-term, closely associated with the primacy of the moral demand and the bearing of justice on the stability of nations, quite in accord with the emphasis of the early Isaiah.