“The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” (Isaiah 40:3-8)
The horns blew and the tambourines shook. On the high hilltop, in a space cleared amid the rubble of long-ago wars, there stood a new, broad foundation of stone, the beginnings of a monumental construction. All the people of Jerusalem had come to celebrate this beginning. It represented a rebirth. Generations after the Babylonians had thrown down the first temple – King Solomon’s temple – the people of Israel had finally reclaimed their city.
There was much to be done, and fewer hands than there had been to do it with – only a remnant of the inhabitants of Israel before the devastation had returned from exile in Babylon. But the people sang undaunted. They were home, and the holy mountain was theirs once more. It was more than the site of a place of worship.
Before Solomon built the temple, he and his father David had built an altar on the same spot. Before David, Abraham had come there and built an altar on which he expected to sacrifice his son, Isaac, until God reprieved him. Before Abraham, Noah had touched dry land there after leaving the ark, and before Noah, the Lord himself had moulded the clay that became Adam, the first man.
The holy mountain was a place consecrated and re-consecrated again and again by offerings to the Lord from the people of his covenant. And now it was the turn of this generation to begin yet another consecration. In their exile, they had held fast to the hope that they would see it again. This was not an idle hope: it was a hope foretold to them by a prophet, who said:
“Thus saith the Lord, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb . . . that saith to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be inhabited; and to the cities of Judah, Ye shall be built, and I will raise up the decayed places thereof . . . even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation will be laid.” (Portions of Isa. 44:24-28)
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 24: The Book of Isaiah, Part 1 – A Voice in the Wilderness. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
Welcome back. Before we get started properly, I’ve had my first-ever listener correction, and boy is it a doozy. In our last episode, I mistakenly said John Locke was the author of Leviathan. That is completely incorrect; Thomas Hobbes wrote that book. In my defence, I’m still a good 2100 years away from the early modern period in my reading list (and a good 20 years away from undergrad, where I read that book), so I’m fuzzy on the details. Thanks to the commenter who flagged that up for me, and was pretty nice about it, to boot. My apologies to all of you.
Onward. This week, we return to the Hebrew bible, to the 66-chapter book of prophecy known as the Book of Isaiah. This is an incredibly rich work full of phrases and ideas which you probably know even if you’re not at all religious, because Isaiah has been a major influence on the English language and on the development of Christianity – two incredibly powerful forces that shape the Western society in which I, and many of you, live (no disrespect to our listeners in Asia and the Middle East).
Like so many of the works we’ve encountered during our first year together, evidence tells us that Isaiah was written by different people over a period of centuries. Scholars tend to agree that there were at least two, and most likely three, different periods of composition spanning a roughly 350-year period.
The first, deepest strata of Isaiah – chapters 1 through 39 – emerged during the 8th century BCE and appears to have been the work of an actual holy man named Isaiah ben Amoz – Isaiah, son of Amoz – who lived in Jerusalem and had access to elite society there. As we’ll see, most of what we know about Isaiah ben Amoz comes from what he tells us about himself, and judging from the kings whose reigns he says he lived through, he probably died right before the end of the eighth century BCE.
The second layer of the book, chapters 40 through 55, was added during the 6th century BCE, around the time of the Babylonian conquest of Judah and Israel which we discussed in our episodes on Genesis and Exodus. The third layer, which is chapters 56 through 66, may have been written as late as 400 BCE, and that is where I’ve positioned Isaiah on our reading list as a result. It’s worth mentioning that these three divisions aren’t solid walls: scholars have identified (and frequently argue about) passages in the earlier parts of the book which show signs of having been inserted by later writers, and passages in the later pages which have language that seems to suggest they were drawn from an older source.
In the 2003 book An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination, scholar Walter Brueggemann walks through the historical context of the three Isaiahs and attempts to describe how they achieve a thematic cohesiveness in spite of having been composed and recomposed over a period of centuries. That shared theme, Brueggemann explains, is a “[preoccupation] with the destiny of Jerusalem into the crises of exile and the promise of Jerusalem out of exile into new well-being.” (Brueggemann 159)
You’ll recall from our episodes on Genesis and Exodus (way back in August, now) that the kingdoms of Israel and Judah – the nations out of which today’s Jewish faith eventually grew – were sort of sitting ducks between the empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and that they were constantly subject to cycles of violent conquest by one group or another throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Isaiah is a warning, a meditation, and, frequently, a song about those cycles. Sometimes it’s a lamentation. Other times it’s what historian Simon Schama calls in his book The Story of the Jews, “an anthem of consolation . . . expectation, and patient hope.” (Schama 48) Re-reading it for the first time in years, I frequently felt swept up in the urgent rush of words.
To read Isaiah, even as someone who is not Jewish or actively Christian, is to hear the crackle of holy fire; the rushing of waters that lead away from destruction and exile toward renewed promise. The words that come down through the centuries are spiritually rejuvenating, even if you’re very jaded on the very idea of spirituality.
Let’s walk through it section-by-section, together.
[Music]
So, as I mentioned, “First Isaiah” – that is, the section of the text likely drawn from work by the original 8th century BCE prophet and his most immediate disciples – covers the first 39 chapters of the book. Like the later authors of Genesis and Exodus, who had just been exiled by the Babylonians, the writers of First Isaiah were also under threat, from the Babylonians’ neighbours the Assyrians.
We’ve met Assyrians before: King Ashurbanipal, whose wonderful palace was rediscovered in the 1840s, along with the Epic of Gilgamesh, by Hormuzd Rassam and company, was an Assyrian ruler, though he lived about a century after Isaiah ben Amoz received his call to preach. The king giving Judah a hard time in Isaiah’s day was Sennacherib, who, when not expanding his territory through violent conquest, enjoyed building aqueducts, planning gardens, and introducing new cash crops, such as cotton from Egypt, into his domain.
According to Michael D. Coogan, author of The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction, says that we can date the events in Isaiah as ending in 701 BCE. “There is much archaeological evidence for this traumatic event,” he writes, “And it features prominently in the book of Kings and in the book of Isaiah.” (Coogan 121)
The first several chapters of Isaiah are mostly taken up by dire oracles about the sins Israel and Judah have committed, and the destruction awaiting them as a result. We also get some biographical details about Isaiah woven throughout. For example, in chapter one, verse one, he very handily gives us some historical details – names of kings whose reigns we can pin down in time – to date him with:
“The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.” (Isaiah 1:1-2)
That’s God speaking, that last bit. How have Judah and Jerusalem rebelled against God, you ask? By various dissipations that make a mockery of their religious observances. God is very, very tired of their hollow play-acting at worshiping him:
“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? Saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts . . . Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.” (Isa. 1:11, 13)
It’s giving Zeus, right? But where Zeus would pop off to the nearest town to find some maidens to ruin, the God of Israel has more high-minded purposes. He says:
“Learn to do well; seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” (Isa. 1:17)
Chapter two opens with a vision that seems promising: God manifests himself in Jerusalem, and all the people of the earth go there to worship and learn, and be judged.
“And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” (Isa. 2:4)
I told you this was full of familiar phrases, right? The tone soon turns dark again: before this utopia, there must be destruction of what has gone before. Chapters three and four describe in great detail the disasters, chaos, and general social breakdown God has planned to cleanse Jerusalem of wrongdoing.
There will be starvation and drought. There will be invasion from without, bodies in the streets, and men will be in such short supply that women will fall to fighting over them so they can have husbands to give them children. As you might expect with a patriarchal society, women get quite a kicking in this part of the text for contributing to Judah’s downfall through immodest and licentious behaviour. To wit:
“Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the vails. And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well-set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.” (Isa. 3:17-24)
That is some very precise observation, Isaiah, sir. Minutely detailed. Tell me, how long did you stare at those women, those skanky, sexy, sinful women, to get all that down?
Moving on, we come to chapter 5, which takes us out of the carnage in the streets on a detour into parable – or fable, if you will. Isaiah tells us about a vineyard planted by his “wellbeloved,” for which there were high hopes: a tower and winepress were built to store and process the harvest. But what grows there is wild (or “sour”, or even “rotten”, depending on which translation you read).
This vineyard must therefore be abandoned. The vineyard, Isaiah explains, represents Israel and Judah; the underwhelming fruit its people, or their sins, possibly. The planter – the Lord – must tear up all his work and let it run wild again. Then, at least, some animals may be nourished by what grows there.
Isaiah then goes on to enumerate various woes – sins the people have committed which are bringing down God’s punishment. These include unjust hoarding of land and wealth so that the poor cannot maintain themselves and drunkenness and partying at the expense of religious practice and good honest work. God is also very clear that twisting language to your own ends is also sinful:
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!” (Isa. 5:20-21)
Chapter five closes with the declaration that foreign invaders will come as instruments of God’s justice to punish Israel.
Beginning in chapter six, we get Isaiah’s prophetic origin story and an account of his ministry. He tells us that he had a vision in the temple toward the end of the reign of King Uzziah – probably sometime in the 740s BCE. In this vision, Isaiah saw God seated on a throne above the temple, and above him hovered two seraphim. We picture seraphim as angels – handsome men with robes and a pair of white eagle’s wings – but Isaiah tells us otherwise:
“Each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” (Isa. 6:2-3)
Six wings and hidden faces – you begin to understand why angels in other parts of scripture often open with “fear not!” when they meet a human being. At any rate, Isaiah is in despair upon realizing that he has seen God: mere mortals must die if they do this. He cries aloud in his anguish that he’s not worthy, and one of the seraphim comes down, plucks a burning ember from the altar before God’s throne, and says his sins are purged.
Just then, God speaks: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah asks God to send him for whatever it is he needs. God explains that Isaiah must go forth and warn the nation about what is coming and why (he must also write down his visions and doings). Don’t expect to be believed, God tells him, and don’t be discouraged: it’s all part of my plan for them.
So Isaiah goes to King Ahaz, telling him “Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy,” (Isa 7:3) because the only joy men have in his kingdom is greed. Judah and Israel must be punished and laid low by Assyria, God’s chosen tool of destruction.
“O Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in their hand is mine indignation. I will send him against a hypocritical nation . . . to take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.” (Isa. 10:5-6)
In addition to warning Ahaz about the destruction Assyria will bring to him, Isaiah tells him that this will all go better for the people if he sets about renewing God’s law now. The king should reaffirm the covenant he made with Israel long ago, and trust in his care for them – not in alliances, or in calling on fortune-tellers and “wizards that peep.” (Isa. 8:19) Isaiah is, of course, ignored for his pains.
Isaiah also declares that God says Assyria and other foreign nations will be destroyed in their turn, and eventually the survivors of Israel will return home, to flourish again under a new ruler of the house of David. How will they know this ruler has arrived? Well:
“Therefore the lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isa 7:14)
Aha. That’s got to ring some bells for most of you. This miracle child is brought up multiple times:
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” (Isa 8:6)
This is the messiah, the anointed one, the deliverer of the nation. Proto-Isaiah is vague about who this is, possibly because the words God has given him are all he has to go on. Second Isaiah will have more specific ideas. More on that in a bit, but for now, here’s a clue: in The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction, scholar Michael D. Coogan writes that, “It may surprise Christian readers to learn that in the Hebrew Bible the title Messiah . . . is never used of a future leader, only of previous and present ones.” (Coogan 120)
Right, so the reign of the Messiah, per First Isaiah, will be heavenly and peaceful and just. Chapter 11 tells us how even vicious animals will become meek in his day: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid . . . and a little child shall lead them.” (Isa. 11:6)
From chapter 11 onward what we mostly get are oracles presaging destruction for many of Judah and Israel’s neighbours: not only Assyria, but also Babylon and Egypt, Elam and Moab. Per Brueggemann, these amount to “the pronouncement of a prophetic lawsuit against [the other nations], thus insisting that even non-Israelite peoples are fully subject to the rule of YHWH.” (Brueggemann 163)
By chapters 24 to 27, God has promised to destroy the whole world and then judge it. Brueggemann says biblical scholars refer to this section as “the Little Apocalypse of Isaiah” for the destruction it envisages. (Brueggemann 164)
That term makes it sound almost cuddly – just a smol apocalypse, just an itsy-bitsy one – but the content of these chapters affirms the cosmic power and majesty of God, Here’s chapter 24, verses 4 to 6:
“The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinances, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth.”
Not great! However, in keeping with Simon Schama’s characterization of Isaiah as full of consolation, the prophet offers hope. For the first time in Hebrew scripture, we have a promise that, after a day of judgement, the dead will be bodily resurrected to live in the light of God’s glory. Over and over again, Isaiah assures his listeners that the tribulations to come are inescapable, because they are divinely ordained. But they are never, ever permanent.
Here is one example of Isaiah trying to convince his listeners that their trials won’t last forever:
“Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been in thy sight, O Lord. We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth; neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen. Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.” (Isa. 26:17-19)
Yahweh is truly a great god, because out of the most terrible devastation he can restore all that is lost, even the dead.
[pause]
Okay, obviously I have to address the “wind” thing. I was deeply engaged with the extended metaphor in this chapter, comparing the pain and anguish of childbirth to the experience of hard times and how they can eventually lead to something beautiful, and I was pulled up short by a euphemism for farting.
I couldn’t help but giggle. I couldn’t help but think of how the committee of British philologists who produced the King James Version of the Bible must have handled this back in the 1600s. “Fart” has been used for about a thousand years in English, so you wonder why the translators didn’t bother to use it here. I can only guess it was too vulgar for their tastes. Still, it’s kind of comforting, isn’t it, to think that on the timescales of eternity all our troubles amount to little more than a fart during childbirth. No? You’re right, it’s not.
Moving on from the resurrection, we swing back and forth between portents of doom, exhortations to repent before the Lord, and reassurances that the people of Israel are still God’s chosen ones, even as the armies of Sennacherib raid and pillage their way east. I particularly felt this passage from chapter 33, about surviving the coming time of tribulation:
“The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil; he shall dwell on high.” (Isa. 33:14-16)
Shaketh thine hands from the holding of bribes, friends, if you wish to dwell with the devouring fire.
The final chapters of First Isaiah return to narrative, taking us into the court of King Hezekiah. Isaiah arrives to counsel the king as the Assyrians send a threatening proclamation from Sennacherib. Hezekiah is distraught: he goes and prays to God for deliverance from Sennacherib, and this God delivers, after a fashion – Sennacherib is murdered by his own sons and never sets foot in the city. The Assyrian war machine rolls on, however.
Isaiah repeats God’s promise of redemption: war and destruction and exile are coming, King Hezekiah, but a remnant of our people will survive, remember, and return. “Good is the word of the Lord which thou hast spoken,” Hezekiah says to the prophet. He is resigned to the fate which awaits him.
[music]
There’s a jump in time between chapters 39 and 40. That jump is in the composition – we are now in the hands of a writer who was in exile in Babylon – not Assyria, mind you, we are in a new exile caused by a different enemy, Nebuchadnezzar – after 586 BCE sometime. That jump also occurs in the rough line of narrative that exists within Isaiah: the devastation God warned of has happened off the page. Now we are ready to lament what we have lost, then return and rebuild.
Second Isaiah is lauded for the exceptional quality of its poetry by many scholars and critics (and at least one podcaster). “The poetry of chapters 44 to 55,” writes Tod Linafelt, author of The Hebrew Bible as Literature: A Very Short Introduction, “is one of the great literary achievements of ancient Israel.” (Linafelt 99) Being that I’m reading the KJV, I get blank verse instead, but still: the phrases roll and roll like thunder. Here’s the start of chapter 40:
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.” (Isa. 40:1-4)
This entire section of Isaiah is a vision of how the great liberation of the Israelites will come about. In addition to the poetry, Second Isaiah also serves a theological purpose: the affirmation of a new kind of faith.
Back in Exodus chapter 20 verse 3, when God is dictating the Ten Commandments to Moses, he begins with, “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me.” As Simon Schama puts it, even when not in translation, this statement from God, “presuppose[es] that there were others – a matter of seniority rather than exclusiveness.” (Schama 76)
Second Isaiah makes it exclusive. God is the only God there is: all others are false, and all other nations are deluded to believe otherwise. In the first four chapters we go from lyrical praise of God’s greatness as the origin of all creation, like this:
“Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his counsellor hath taught him?” (Isa 40:12-13)
To hyping up God as capable of giving humiliating smackdowns to the false idols of other nations, like this:
“Thus saith the Lord, your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; For your sake I have sent to Babylon, and have brought down all their nobles, and the Chaldeans, whose cry is in the ships. . .. Thus saith the Lord, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters; Which bringeth forth the chariot and horse, the army and the power; they shall lie down together, they shall not rise: they are extinct, they are quenched.” (Isa 43:14-17)
There is even a big chunk of chapter 44 which mocks the work that goes into creating a false idol: the metalwork and the carpentry, the sculpting and the hewing down of beautiful trees – all that effort for nothing! Not for nothing does Simon Schama observe that, quote, “Much of the writing is evidently a response to living in a world of pagan colossi and the reverence of cult images and statuary.” (Schama 47) The nation of Israel needs nothing so crude: their God is everywhere, or so Second Isaiah tells them.
Second Isaiah tells his listeners that God has not forgotten them. Their deliverance is at hand. The shepherd is come among them, God’s anointed, the messiah: Cyrus the Great, King of Persia.
Not what you were expecting? No, really, it’s right there: chapter 44 verse 28: “[God] saith to Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure.” And in chapter 45 verse 1: “Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden.” God elaborates further in chapter 45 verse 4: “For Jacob my servant’s sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called the by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me.”
Basically, what God says here is that, as the Assyrians were the unbelievers he used as an instrument to punish Israel, so Cyrus is the unbeliever (“thou hast not known me”) who will be used as the instrument of Israel’s deliverance from the Babylonians – a deliverance that is imagined in lavish detail in chapters 46 and 47.
Cyrus – the founder of an empire so large, even Alexander the Great couldn’t quite top it – was certainly quite the instrument. In 539 BCE, his armies sacked the city of Babylon, breaking its dominance over the Levant. There was a group of exiled elites from Jerusalem being held under house arrest in Babylon, and once he took over the management of the city, Cyrus agreed to let them return home and rebuild their temple. So ends Second Isaiah:
“For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” (Isa. 55:12-23)
[music]
Now we come to Third Isaiah. Brueggemann writes that, “Whereas Second Isaiah is preoccupied with emancipation from Babylon, Third Isaiah is concerned with internal communal life and the tensions that must have arisen.” (Brueggemann 170) Chapters 55 through 57 are very much about who gets to count as a member of the nation of Israel as it’s now constituted – surely in the generation-plus that the Israelites were in exile, they picked up some foreign adherents – “strangers” in the parlance of the King James Bible – who made some of the Israelites uneasy.
God says foreigners are welcome if they adhere to his commandments:
“Also the sons of the stranger that join themselves to the Lord, to serve him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant; even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer.” (Isa. 56:6-7)
This inclusiveness seems to be of a piece with another main theme of Third Isaiah: God wants the nation of Israel to be an example to the world. Here’s the opening of chapter 61:
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified. And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations.” (Isa 61:1-4)
The nation that was forsaken will be blessed; the blasted mountain replanted; its temple rebuilt, and all the other nations of the earth will come forth to worship there, too.
“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice forever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy . . . and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.” (Isa 65:17-19)
Israel, for so long a victim of the empires of the earth, will establish an empire of the spirit, and Jerusalem will be its heart.
That at least was the hope of the prophets who gave us the book of Isaiah. It is a work of generations. It is also a work for the generations; a testament to centuries of loss and resilience. Remember what you suffered, the voice in the wilderness cries, and remember that you survived through hope in a day of restoration. You may yet need that hope again.
[music]
That is my summary of the Book of Isaiah. I obviously recommend that you have a go at reading it in whatever translation seems best to you. As I’ve said, I quite like the language of the King James Version, but if it distracts you or just annoys you, there are many other English-language versions out there.
There is so much more I could say about this work – take, for instance, the influence it has had just on music. There’s the famous Christmas hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”, the tune of which dates back to the 8th or 9th centuries CE. Or George Fredrich Handel’s 1741 masterwork Messiah – you know, the one with the big hallelujah chorus in the middle of it. Huge portions of its libretto (its lyrics) of it come directly from Isaiah.
Bob Dylanologists (of whom there are many) claim that portions of the lyrics to All Along the Watchtower allude to Isaiah 21, in which riders come to a watchtower to tell the inhabitants that Babylon has fallen. And the Christian hair metal band Stryper takes its name from Isaiah chapter 53 verse 5: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”
We will be coming back to the Book of Isaiah in many meta-episodes to come – its connections to both the Christian Gospels and the Book of Revelation are legion. In fact, several times during my re-reading of it, I would come across a passage I had mis-remembered as actually being in Revelation. For its own meta-episode, however, we are going to do something a bit different. We are going to investigate the whole idea of prophecy.
We’re also going to look more closely at divination practices mentioned in some of the works covered in this show – everything from reading the oracles in nature to reading the steaming organs of the sacrificial animal bleeding out on the altar. Join me on Thursday, February 6th for episode 25: “Isaiah, Part 2: Wizards That Peep and That Mutter.”
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Brueggemann, Walter, and Tod Linafelt. An Introduction to the Old Testament,: The Canon and Christian Imagination. Westminster John Knox Press, 2020.
Campbell, Gordon, editor. “Isaiah.” King James Bible: 400th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press USA – OSO, Oxford, 2010.
Coogan, Michael David. The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Linafelt, Tod. The Hebrew Bible as Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Schama, Simon. The Story of the Jews. Volume One, Finding the Words: 1000 BC-1492 AD. Ecco, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.
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