Isaiah 40 to 66

Read Isaiah 39 and then Isaiah 40 without a break and you will feel something shift. Chapter 39 ends with Hezekiah showing Babylonian envoys his treasury, Isaiah telling him it will all be carried off to Babylon, and Hezekiah replying, with a candour the narrator does not disguise, that at least there will be peace in his own days. Chapter 40 opens with a voice: 'Comfort, comfort My people,' says your God. Jerusalem's forced labour, the Hebrew tsava, a term of hard service like a soldier's, has been completed. The iniquity is pardoned. A highway is to be built through a desert.

Four things change at once. The addressee changes: chapters 1 to 39 largely speak to a kingdom that still stands, under threat from Assyria; chapters 40 onward speak to people whose city is already destroyed and whose exile is treated as a present fact in need of ending. The named enemy changes from Assyria to Babylon. The genre changes: the dominant note becomes announcement of salvation rather than indictment, and the poetry lengthens and becomes more sustained. And the theological emphases change, with creation, the uselessness of manufactured idols, the incomparability of God, and a figure called the servant of the LORD all moving to the centre.

Some things do not change. The title Holy One of Israel, which is nearly a signature phrase of this book and rare elsewhere in the Bible, is distributed across both halves. The way, the highway, the remnant and Zion run through the whole. The vocabulary of blindness and deafness set up in chapter 6 is picked up in chapter 42. Whoever composed these chapters, and however they came together, they were meant to be read as one scroll, and the connections are too many and too deliberate to be accidental.

The material after chapter 40 also has a shape worth mapping before you argue about who wrote it. Chapters 40 to 48 are dominated by Babylon, idols and Cyrus, and they end with Babylon's fall and a call to come out of her. Chapters 49 to 55 drop Cyrus and Babylon almost entirely and concentrate on the servant and on Zion as a bereaved woman whose children return. Chapters 56 to 66 read as though the return has begun and disappointed: there is a community in place, worship is happening, and the conflicts are internal.

The question is whether all sixty-six chapters come from Isaiah son of Amoz, who was called in the year King Uzziah died, around 740 BC. The classic alternative, proposed by Bernhard Duhm in 1892 and still the standard critical map, divides the book into 1 to 39 from the eighth-century prophet, 40 to 55 from an anonymous exilic writer conventionally called Deutero-Isaiah, and 56 to 66 from a later Judean setting, Trito-Isaiah. The case for a second author had been argued in detail by Johann Christoph Döderlein in 1775, and the twelfth-century Jewish commentator Abraham ibn Ezra is usually cited as the earliest hint of it, though his remarks are brief and how far he meant to go is itself debated.

The strongest case for multiple authors runs like this, and it is not a denial that God can tell the future. Every serious participant in this argument grants that the question is what these particular chapters are doing, not what God is able to do. The chapters from 40 onward never name Isaiah; the last mention of him is in chapter 39. They address an audience in exile as though present, comforting people whose punishment is complete, which is a strange thing to say to eighth-century Jerusalem. They name Cyrus of Persia, who took Babylon in 539, as a present or imminent actor. Their vocabulary, syntax and preferred divine titles differ measurably from the first half, with go'el, redeemer, and the sustained anti-idol polemic concentrated here. And the division does not stop at two: chapters 56 to 66 presuppose a community already back in the land, with a functioning cult, fasts being kept and the conflicts internal, which is a different situation again from the one chapters 40 to 55 address, and it is why the critical map has three parts rather than two. Prophecy's general pattern, addressing one's own generation, would make 40 to 66 intelligible the same way it makes 1 to 39 intelligible.

The strongest case for a single author runs like this, and it is not merely an appeal to tradition. First, the text makes its own predictive claim the centre of its argument. In 41:21 to 29, 44:6 to 8, 46:9 to 10 and 48:3 to 5, God's case against the idols is precisely that he declares the end from the beginning and they cannot; 41:26 asks, 'Who has declared this from the beginning, so that we may know?' On this reading a name supplied after the event is the very trick the chapters mock. Second, the specificity has precedent: 1 Kings 13:2 names Josiah roughly three centuries in advance. Third, the ancient evidence attaches the whole book to Isaiah. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, copied around 125 BC, contains all sixty-six chapters continuously with no break at chapter 40. Ben Sira, writing around 180 BC, credits Isaiah with comforting those who mourned in Zion and revealing hidden things before they came to pass, which is language from the second half. And John 12:38 to 41 quotes Isaiah 53:1 and Isaiah 6:10 in a single breath and says Isaiah said these things.

Each side has an answer to the other's best point, and a student should hear those too. On Cyrus, the multiple-author reading observes that the surrounding argument appeals to things the audience can check, former things already fulfilled, which works if Cyrus is visible and is weakened if he is three centuries off; the single-author reading answers that this is exactly why the passage distinguishes former things from new things and stakes God's deity on the latter. On 1 Kings 13:2, critical scholars note that this verse is itself widely regarded as a later insertion, so it cannot serve as neutral evidence; defenders of unity reply that the argument then becomes circular, since the insertion is proposed on the same assumption being tested. On the Isaiah Scroll, it is fair to add that although the scroll's one notable feature of this kind, a three-line gap at the end of chapter 33, does not fall where the critical division falls, and although recent work argues that gap is a manufacturing join between two originally separate scrolls, continuity in a manuscript copied around 125 BC shows what one scribe inherited as a single book, not who composed its parts. On the New Testament formula, it is fair to note that nothing in Mark settles what John 12 intends, and equally fair to note that Mark 1:2 to 3 attributes to Isaiah a quotation that begins in Malachi, which shows that such a formula can name a scroll rather than a man.

Between the two poles there is serious middle ground that a student should not be allowed to miss. Isaiah 8:16 speaks of binding up the testimony and sealing the law, the Hebrew torah or teaching, among the prophet's disciples, which gives the idea of an Isaianic school an internal warrant: a tradition carried, applied and extended by people who understood themselves as the prophet's heirs, so that the book is authentically Isaianic without every line being composed in the eighth century. Hugh Williamson has argued in detail that the writer of chapters 40 to 55 knew the first half intimately and edited it deliberately, which would explain the cross-links on either view of dating. And a substantial body of work associated with Brevard Childs, Rolf Rendtorff and Christopher Seitz reads the sixty-six chapters as a deliberately unified whole whatever its compositional history. The old picture of two hostile camps is out of date: scholars who accept multiple authors now write books about the unity of Isaiah, and scholars who hold single authorship engage the linguistic arguments on their merits, with Oswald Allis, Edward Young, Alec Motyer and John Oswalt among those who have defended unity in print, and Claus Westermann, Joseph Blenkinsopp and Shalom Paul among the major commentators who work with the critical division. Two things follow for how to hold all this. Nothing in the chapters themselves claims Isaiah as author, so a reader who concludes that they are anonymous has not contradicted a statement of scripture; the Old Testament contains a great deal of anonymous material that no one thinks less inspired for it. And nothing in the multiple-author case requires denying that God can announce a name in advance. State the strongest version of both to your students, tell them which considerations you personally find weightiest if they ask you directly, and do not let either answer become the price of admission to reading the book.

Duhm also isolated four passages in which a figure called the servant is the subject, and the grouping has stuck: 42:1 to 4, 49:1 to 6, 50:4 to 9 and 52:13 to 53:12. Read them in sequence and a progression appears. In the first the servant is presented by God, endowed with the Spirit, and will bring justice to the nations without shouting or breaking a bruised reed. In the second he speaks, says his mouth was made a sharp sword, admits that his labour has felt futile, and is given a mission that extends to the ends of the earth. In the third he is struck and spat on and does not turn back. In the fourth he is disfigured, rejected, killed, and then vindicated.

Who is he? The book gives two answers and does not reconcile them for you. In 41:8, 44:1, 44:21, 45:4 and 48:20 the servant is named outright as Jacob and Israel, and 49:3 says it as plainly as possible: 'You are My Servant, Israel.' The capitals there are the BSB's, which capitalises words it takes to refer to God or to Christ, and it is worth noticing that it keeps them even in the verse that names the servant as the nation. Yet two verses later, in 49:5 to 6, the servant's assignment is to bring Jacob back to God, to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the protected ones of Israel, which means the servant is doing something to Israel and therefore cannot be simply identical with Israel. This is not a puzzle invented by interpreters. It is sitting in the text a line apart.

The proposals fall into three families. Corporate readings take the servant as Israel throughout, with 49:5 to 6 explained as the nation's mission to its own scattered members or as an idealised Israel addressing the empirical one. Representative readings take the servant as a faithful group or remnant within Israel, which does for the nation what the nation was called to do. Individual readings take him as a person: the prophet himself, a royal or Davidic figure, a new Moses on the strength of the parallels with Moses as servant of the LORD and intercessor, or, in various Jewish proposals, Jeremiah, Hezekiah or Josiah. A number of scholars describe the identity as deliberately oscillating between the nation and an individual representative, and argue that the oscillation is a feature rather than a defect, because a representative is by definition both.

One candidate is worth excluding carefully, because students propose it. Cyrus is called God's shepherd in 44:28 and his anointed in 45:1, which is startling enough given that no other foreigner is called that, but he is never called the servant in the songs, and the servant's silence under suffering is the opposite of anything said about Cyrus. The comparison is illuminating precisely as a contrast: God uses an emperor who does not know him, and God works through a servant who is crushed.

Whatever else you do with them, teach what the songs say about method. The servant does not shout or lift up his voice or break what is already bruised. He teaches with a tongue given to him morning by morning to sustain the weary. He achieves justice for the nations by absorbing injury rather than inflicting it. In a module full of oracles announcing armies and judgment, these four poems describe a completely different mechanism, and they are placed in the middle of chapters about the rise of the greatest empire yet.

This is the most argued-over chapter in the Bible, and the argument is not a misunderstanding that better exegesis will clear up. Two traditions read it coherently and differently, and a teacher's job is to make sure a student could argue either side in a room containing people who hold it. Take the text first, and take a warning with it. The BSB, the translation this course quotes, prints every pronoun for the servant in this chapter with a capital, He, Him and His, because its translators capitalise pronouns they take to refer to God or Christ. Hebrew has no capital letters. The capitals are the Christian reading built into the typography, and a student who reads the chapter only in the BSB has had the question answered before it was asked. Read it once in the KJV or the WEB, both free and both in lower case here, before you weigh anything below. Now the text. A speaking group, the we of the chapter, reports that they saw someone with no beauty, despised and avoided, and assumed he was being struck by God for his own sins. They then say they were wrong: he was pierced for their transgressions, the LORD laid on him the iniquity of them all, he was silent, he was cut off from the land of the living, he was assigned a grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth. Then vindication: he sees offspring, he prolongs days, he is satisfied, he will justify many.

The Jewish reading at its strongest identifies the servant as Israel. Its first argument is context, and it is a strong one: in the chapters on either side the servant is explicitly and repeatedly named Jacob and Israel, and nothing in chapter 53 renames him, so the burden falls on anyone who changes the referent mid-sequence. On this reading the we are the nations and their kings, who in 52:15 are astonished and shut their mouths, and who now confess that the people they despised had been suffering at their hands, and that they had misread the suffering as divine punishment. The phrase in 53:8, stricken for the transgression of my people, is then the prophet's own voice about his own people, or the confession of Gentiles about a people not their own. Notice that the BSB's capital in 'My people' has already decided that God is the speaker, which the Hebrew does not mark. There is a philological argument attached: the Hebrew behind the 'He' of 'He was stricken' in that clause is lamo, literally 'to him' or 'to them', which is normally a plural form, which corporate readings press hard, though it is also used as a poetic singular elsewhere in the book, so the point is contested rather than decisive. The innocence of the servant is the strongest point pressed against this reading, and it has two answers on this side. The first is that the innocence is relative to the accusation: the chapter's no violence and no deceit are said in a courtroom where the nations are the accusers, so the claim is that Israel did nothing to deserve what those nations did to it, not that Israel was sinless before God, which is what 42:18 to 25 is about and a different question. The second is representative: the sufferers are the faithful within Israel, the ones this same book calls those who tremble at his word in 66:5, so that the guilt catalogued in the earlier chapters falls on the nation while the suffering falls on its righteous. And 53:10, seeing offspring and prolonging days, reads naturally of a nation that survives and multiplies. Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Joseph and David Kimhi, and Nahmanides all expounded the chapter of Israel, and it is the dominant Jewish reading today. Two qualifications. The corporate reading hardened into the standard Jewish position partly under Christian polemical pressure, which is history and not refutation. And Jewish tradition is more varied than one answer suggests: Targum Jonathan inserts Messiah at 52:13, Sanhedrin 98b discusses the Messiah in connection with 53:4, and Moses Alshekh read the chapter messianically, though the Targum's Messiah is triumphant and none of these sources reads the suffering as substitutionary atonement, so citing them as a concession misrepresents them.

The Christian reading at its strongest identifies the servant as one person, and its arguments are textual before they are theological. The servant is innocent, with no deceit in his mouth, which is difficult to say of the nation that this same book calls blind, deaf, robbed and plundered, and whose sins it catalogues in 42:18 to 25 and 43:22 to 28. The suffering is explicitly for others and in their place, not merely alongside them: 'the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him'. In 53:10 his life is made an asham, the guilt offering of the Levitical system, which is sacrificial and priestly vocabulary applied to a person. The sequence is death and then vindication, in that order, which a nation surviving persecution does not require. And the earliest Christian use is not a late allegory: Acts 8 shows an official reading 53:7 to 8 and being told the passage is about Jesus, and 1 Peter 2:22 to 25, Matthew 8:17, Luke 22:37 and Romans 10:16 all quote the chapter. The strongest form of this case concedes what it must, which is that the chapter never names Jesus, and that the Christian identification is retrospective, made in the light of the resurrection rather than derived from the Hebrew alone. The Christian reading needs qualifications of its own. Its confidence is retrospective in a way that changes what counts as evidence: every New Testament use of the chapter was written by people who already believed Jesus was risen, so the chapter is being read back through an event rather than forward out of the Hebrew, and that is a different operation from anything a reader without the resurrection could have performed. The tradition has also repeatedly strengthened its case by tidying the text. The asham of 53:10 is the reparation offering, with a restitution procedure attached to it in Leviticus 5, not a general sin offering. My people in 53:8 most naturally means the prophet's own people. And the singular he of the chapter sits inside a sequence that names the servant Jacob or Israel five times in the surrounding chapters. A christological reading that carries those three facts is stronger than one that needs them suppressed. One more: the we who confess in this chapter have to be somebody inside the book, and the candidates the book supplies are Israel or the watching nations, not a later church, so a Christian reader is borrowing a voice rather than being addressed in one.

Three notes to finish. There is a real text-critical detail here that both traditions know: at 53:11 the Masoretic text says only that he will see, while the Isaiah scrolls from Qumran and the ancient Greek add light. The BSB adopts the longer reading in its text, 'He will see the light of life and be satisfied', and footnotes that the Masoretic text lacks 'the light of life'. A committee does that because the longer reading has early and independent support, Hebrew scrolls from Qumran and the Greek translation agreeing against the later Masoretic codices, and because a verb of seeing with no object reads awkwardly. The case for the shorter Masoretic text is real too: it is the received Hebrew, and a scribe faced with a verb that seemed to lack an object is more likely to have supplied one than to have deleted one, so the shorter, harder reading may be the original and 'light' an early explanation. Other modern translations divide the same way, some adopting the longer reading and others, the ESV among them, keeping the shorter one and footnoting the alternative. The difference matters to anyone reading the verse for a resurrection, so know that your translation has chosen here. Second, 52:13 to 53:12 does not appear in the annual cycle of prophetic readings in the synagogue, while 54:1 to 10 does; that is sometimes asserted to be deliberate concealment, and there is no evidence for that claim, since the cycle is built thematically around consolation. Third, the history of this chapter's use is genuinely ugly in places. It was a standard weapon in medieval forced disputations, and conversionary pressure through it is still experienced as coercive. A Christian teacher who holds the christological reading with conviction should be able to state the Jewish reading so accurately that a Jewish reader would recognise it, and should know what has been done with this chapter by people who did not bother.

Chapters 56 to 66 are the least taught part of Isaiah and they contain some of its most startling material. They read as though the return from exile has happened and has not delivered what the poetry of chapter 40 promised: there is a community, there is worship, there are fasts being kept, and there is bitter internal conflict about who belongs and whether God has noticed.

The opening move is astonishing and worth spending real time on. Isaiah 56:3 to 8 admits to the worshipping community two categories of person who had been excluded. The foreigner who joins himself to the LORD is not to say that the LORD will surely separate him from his people. The eunuch who keeps the sabbath is promised a monument and a name better than sons and daughters. Deuteronomy 23:1 had excluded the emasculated from the assembly; this passage reverses it by name. Then verse 7 gives the temple its widest description in the Old Testament: 'for My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations.' Whatever you concluded in section 2 about authorship, this is a passage in which scripture visibly revises scripture, in the same way Ezekiel 18 does, and the honest response is to say so rather than to harmonise it quietly.

Chapter 58 then hands the module its bookend. A people complain that they have fasted and God has not noticed. The answer is that on their fast days they oppress their workers and quarrel, and then this: 'Isn't this the fast that I have chosen: to break the chains of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and tear off every yoke? Isn't it to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into your home'. That is Amos 5 and Isaiah 1 and Micah 6, two centuries later, on the far side of exile, still needing to be said. Nothing about the catastrophe fixed the thing the prophets had been sent about.

Chapter 61 opens with the Spirit of the LORD upon a figure anointed to bring good news to the poor, bind up the broken-hearted, proclaim liberty to captives and announce the year of the LORD's favour, and then the day of vengeance of our God. Jesus reads this passage in the synagogue at Nazareth in Luke 4 and stops mid-sentence, before the vengeance clause, which is a reading decision worth pointing out to students who think citation is neutral. And the vengeance is not absent from the chapters themselves: 63:1 to 6 is a short and terrible poem about a figure coming from Edom with crimson-stained garments, who has trodden the winepress alone. Do not hide it. These chapters hold comfort and fury in the same hand, which is one of the reasons they read as a unity with what precedes them.

The book ends where the Bible ends. Isaiah 65:17 and 66:22 promise new heavens and a new earth, a city where infants do not die and builders live in what they build, and that promise is taken up directly in 2 Peter 3:13 and Revelation 21. But the last verse of Isaiah is not that. Isaiah 66:24 ends on corpses, worms and unquenchable fire. In the synagogue, where 66:1 to 24 is read on certain sabbaths, verse 23 is repeated after verse 24 so that the reading does not finish there, exactly as happens at the end of Lamentations. That custom, twice over in this module, is worth leaving with your students. The tradition that preserved these books did not delete the endings it could not bear. It read them, and then said the better verse again.