Isaiah

(fl. 742–701 b.c.)



Old Testament prophet in whose work a predictive element first becomes conspicuous and who was believed by early Christians to have foretold the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Isaiah is the greatest of the literary prophets whose poems and prose utterances were written down, by themselves or by disciples. The book bearing his name, which has sixty-six chapters, contains nothing authentically his after the thirty-ninth. Up to that point, most of it is by him, though there has been interpolation and rehandling. The chapters that follow are attributed to a later prophet known to biblical scholars as “Deutero-Isaiah” or “Second Isaiah,” a very important author who is discussed in a separate entry.
The prophet lived in Jerusalem, the capital of the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah. He was active over several decades in the latter part of the eighth century b.c. To judge from his writings, he was well educated, perhaps a professional teacher. His wife is described as a prophetess herself, and he gave their children symbolic names. God summoned him first in a visionary experience in the Temple. He remained a prominent figure and became an adviser to Hezekiah, one of Judah’s more competent kings.
His prophecies show a widening of horizons that had just begun to appear in his prophetic precursors. He is aware of foreign countries such as Babylon and Assyria and has messages for them. Addressing his fellow Israelites, he continues a trend that seems to have begun with Elijah, in the reign of Ahab. The Israelite tribes had had prophets for a long time before him—soothsayers and minstrels who claimed to be divinely inspired. As a rule, they were innocuous and obliging toward those who consulted them… and paid them. In public life, they tended to be compliant with the establishment, assuring rulers and priests that all was well, whether it was or not. Elijah, however, defied Ahab and his Phoenician queen, Jezebel, and denounced wickedness in high places, as when Jezebel judicially murdered a subject named Naboth and enabled her husband to seize his vineyard. Since that time, two of Isaiah’s forerunners, Amos and Hosea, had assailed injustice, religious corruption, and war, unlike the complacent pseudo prophets who still flourished. Isaiah himself was uncompromising in affirming the Lord’s will against a backsliding people, engrossed in materialism and superstition. According to legend, he aroused so much resentment that he was put to death.
His religious and moral stance and his consciousness of the world outside Palestine combined in prophecies foreshadowing a somber future. Again, he found hints in previous prophets, again, he went further. The people are not to imagine that God is limited or circumscribed: if they forsake his covenant and stray from his commandments, he will not only afflict them with domestic misfortune, he will bring foreign conquerors against them. Isaiah interprets current events, such as an Assyrian invasion, in the light of God’s providence. These prophecies are apt to be conditional rather than absolute: if present trends continue, then something will happen. But the converse holds: if the trends do not continue, something else will happen. If Israel—or, at any rate, a significant remnant—lives up to its divine vocation, its enemies

will fall, warfare will pass away, there will be a golden age under a glorious king of David’s line. Despite much doom and denunciation, a survey of Isaiah 1–39 gives a rather hopeful impression. The prophet foresees disasters for hostile nations, and the prospective good times are never altogether lost sight of.
A prophecy of a different kind is famous because of its reappearance in the New Testament, with a Christian application. The author of the First Gospel, traditionally Matthew, begins his story with the pregnancy of Jesus’ mother, Mary. It was a Christian tenet that she conceived with no sexual relationship; Jesus, as the divine Son of the heavenly Father, had no human progenitor; Mary was a virgin, and her husband, Joseph, was a foster parent only. To confirm this miracle, Matthew (as we may call him) finds it predicted in Isaiah 7:14, which he quotes: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” Which, Matthew correctly explains, means “God with us.” Isaiah says it, almost exactly, but the word translated “virgin” does not necessarily mean that. He uses a rare Hebrew noun, ‘almah, denoting simply a young woman. The few others who are called so do happen to be virgins, but virginity is not inherent. The Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, has parthenos, which is generally rendered “virgin,” but the meaning of the text remains imprecise, and

the meaning Matthew discerns in it was never demonstrably there.
In the context, Isaiah is not looking ahead to a miracle 700 years hence; he is proclaiming a divine pledge about the normal birth of a royal heir, who will carry on the line of King David. Nevertheless, here, as in some other scriptural prophecies, there may be a sort of inspired ambiguity. The attention drawn to the unusually described “young woman,” the mother, is a little curious; so is “God with us,” not strictly a name but a designation, more apt to Jesus than to anyone in Isaiah’s day. Christians could claim justification in detecting a second, deeper meaning, elucidated by the advent of Mary’s son. The same happens in other Christian applications of older texts. These are seen as containing prophecies of Christ that are, so to speak, encoded. No one at the time would have seen them as prophetic of him—in some cases, no one would have seen them as prophetic at all—but their complete sense is held to emerge when they are read with him in mind, and therefore they are considered to be foreshadowings of him.