CONTENTS
3. Compositional Issues Related to 40-55
The various methodological approaches to understanding the composition of portions of Isaiah (several sources, a prophetic school, redactional editing, rhetorical argumentation, and canonical formation) were introduced in my introduction to chaps. 1-39,7 but there is a need to describe how these approaches uniquely deal with the literature in chaps. 40-55 so that each methodology can be evaluated. The reader needs to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches used by the commentaries they might consult. This survey is not an exhaustive introduction to each methodology but a summary of a few of the key compositional issues that interpreters of chaps. 40-55 have addressed over the years.
Primary attention is given to the present state of discussion in more recent commentaries; this is not an historical account of how each approach arose and developed.
(1) Early Perspectives
The high regard that later Hebrew authors had for the prophecies within the book of Isaiah is evidenced by the frequent allusions to what the prophet said. For example, (a) the phrase “I am, and there is no God besides me” in Zeph 2:15 seems to be based on the common use of this phrase in Isaiah (45:5,6,18,21; 47:8); (b) Mal 3:1 picks up the idea of one who will come to “clear a way before the Lord” from Isa 40:3 and develops this idea even further; (c) Jer 31:35 refers to God stirring up the sea and making its waves roar, similar to Isa 51:15; and (d) there are several allusions in Nahum that seem to come from Isaiah 40-66.8 None of these authors indicate that they are quoting from the book of Isaiah and some modern scholars have
questioned who is quoting whom.9 Nevertheless, when one looks at the number of times later prophets allude to or quote from the book of Isaiah, it is clear that these messages had a powerful impact on the theological thinking of later biblical and nonbiblical writers.
The value and high esteem for the book of Isaiah is very evident from the number of manuscripts that were found in the caves in the general vicinity of the Dead Sea.10 These excavations resulted in the discovery of numerous Isaiah scrolls (probably 21) and many small fragments that contain only a few words or verses from Isaiah. These are among the more important longer documents:11
1. 1QIsa known as the “Great Isaiah Scroll,” dates to around 200- 150 BC. It contains most of the 66 chapters in Isaiah.
2. 1QIsb contains portions of 7:22-66:24 (though many chapters are only partially preserved) that comes from the Herodian period.
Within chaps. 40-66 it specifically includes 40:2-3; 41:3-23;
43:1-13,23-27; 44:21-28; 45:1-13; 46:3-13; 47:1-14; 48:17-22;
49:1-15; 50:7-11; 51:1-10; 52:7-15; 53:1-13; 55:2-13; 56:1-12;
57:1-4,17-21; 58:1-14; 59:1-8,20-21; 60:1-22; 61:1-12; 63:1-19;
64:1,6-8; 65:17-25; 66:1-24.
3. 4QIsb includes chaps. 1-3, 5, 9, 11-13, 17-22, 24, 26, 35-37; plus within chaps. 40-66 it contains 40:1-4,22-26; 41:8-11; 42:2-7,9- 12; 43:12-15; 44:19-28; 45:20-25; 46:1-3; 48:6-8; 49:21-23; 51:1- 2,14-16; 52:2,7; 53:11-12; 61:1-3; 64:5-65:1; 66:24. It can be dated around 35 BC.
4. 4QIsc is an Herodian text that has some Paleo-Hebrew script (for the name of God) and includes chaps. 9-12, 14, 22-26, 28, 30, 33, and specifically 44:3-7,23; 45:1—4,6-8; 46:8-13; 48:10-15,17-19;
49:22; 51:8-16; 52:10-15; 53:1-3,6-8; 54:3-5,7-17; 55:1-7; 66:20- 24.
5. 4QIsd includes portions from chaps. 45:20; 46:10-13; 47:1-6,8-9;
48:8-22; 49:1-15; 52:4-7; 53:8-12; 54:1-11; 57:9-58:3,5-7.
In addition to these early biblical manuscripts, numerous nonbiblical documents that describe the life, culture, and beliefs of the
Qumran community contain quotations of verses from Isaiah 40-66 to justify their theology and their way of life. For example, within the Sectarian Laws in 4Q265, fragment 1, is the statement, “it is written in the b[ook,] of Isaiah the prophet … shout you who have not been in labor, for the children of your desolation will be more” from Isa 54:1- 2.12 The Damascus Document, column 6, claims that the “rod” in Num 21:18 refers to the interpreter of the law and it justifies this interpretation by stating that “Isaiah said, ‘he brings out a tool for his work’”13 from Isa 54:16. 4Q176 tan umîm quotes from 40:1-5; 41:8-9;
43:1-6; 49:7,13-17; 51:22-23; 52:1-3; and 54:4—10. These few examples show how highly these people regarded the writing of the prophet Isaiah, but they do not provide much information about key issues related to the actual composition of the book of Isaiah.
Josephus (around AD 75) speaks about the writing of the prophecies in the book of Isaiah. After he describes Isaiah's interaction with Hezekiah about Sennacherib's failed attack (chaps.
36-37 and 38-39), he indicates that Isaiah “out of the assurance that he had never written what was false, wrote down all his prophecies and left them behind him in books.”14 This statement affirms his beliefs about the authorship and the authority of the messages within the book of Isaiah. It does not describe how many books Isaiah wrote, what the title of each book was, what topics were covered in each of them; and it says nothing specific about the manner in which he composed these books.
The New Testament writers frequently quote verses from the book of Isaiah and some of these are connected directly to the prophet Isaiah. The following quotes have an introduction that attributes the quoted material to Isaiah:
40:3-5 Matt 3:3; Mark 1:2-3; Luke 3:4-6; John 1:23
42:1-4 Matt 12:18-21
53:1 John 12:38; Rom 10:16 53:4 Matt 8:17
53:6-8 Acts 8:28,32-33 61:1-2 Luke 4:17-19 65:1-2 Rom 10:20-21
Some of the introductions to these quotations merely claim that the man “Isaiah said” what is quoted (Rom 10:20-21; 15:12), although Luke 3:4 refers to what “is written in the book of the words of Isaiah.”
These quotations indicate that at that time early Christians viewed these words as the authoritative words spoken by the prophet Isaiah.
Of course, there are numerous other quotations from the book of Isaiah that are found in the New Testament that do not specifically mention that they are quotations from the prophet Isaiah or from the book of Isaiah.15
Many early Christian writings quote or allude to the book of Isaiah to justify some conclusion. The “General Epistle of Barnabas”
was written shortly after the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in AD 70.
It admonishes Gentile Christians not to be led astray by those who were teaching that Christians must follow the Old Testament laws. It claims that even the ancient Hebrews perceived these physical requirements (circumcision, sacrifices, food laws, etc.) were really meant to be spiritual ways to mortify the passions of the flesh and to encourage the sanctification of the body.16 In making his case, this author repeatedly refers to passages throughout Isaiah, quoting extensive portions to prove his point.17 There is no question about the authority, unity, or practical wisdom of Isaiah's writings. This was the general attitude toward the book of Isaiah throughout the Early Church period. It does not matter if one looks at the allegorical use of Isaiah in Irenaeus's (AD 130-200) Demonstrations of Apostolic
Preaching or the nonallegorical study of Isaiah by Theodoret of Cyrus (AD 393-460);18 all were focused on explaining what the text meant and how it related to their own Christian faith.
In Baba Bathra 15a the Talmud expresses the opinion that
“Hezekiah and his company wrote Isaiah, Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes,” but it is hard to know what it meant by the statement that they “wrote” these books. Certainly one would not expect them to claim that Hezekiah's scribes were inspired prophets or that they wrote what the text attributes to Solomon and Isaiah. This idea may have originated from Prov 25:1, where it says that the “men of Hezekiah” copied or compiled the proverbs of Solomon. Of course the historical basis and the veracity of this opinion is unknown, so it is difficult to judge its historical value. Many years later the great Jewish exegete Ibn Ezra (AD 1092-1167) refers to the heretical views of Moses ben Samuel Ibn Geketilla who questioned if Isaiah wrote the second half of the book of Isaiah, but it does not appear that Ibn Ezra followed this opinion.19 In spite of a few questions like these, up until the rise of the critical approaches in the eighteenth century, most people thought that Isaiah was the one who wrote down his prophecies, so there was little talk about the place, the time, or the actual process of composition.
The great reformer J. Calvin notes that 40:1 introduces a new subject that relates to a future time (the time of the captivity in Babylon, the deliverance, and the reign of Christ) after the death of the prophet. When he came to chap. 56 apparently he did not see a major break in the flow of thought between chaps. 55 and 56. He rejected the allegorical method of exegesis that was so popular in his day because he believed that an historical approach that was built on a good understanding of the grammar would provide the best understanding of the original author's meaning.20
(2) More Recent Scholarly Approaches
Critical questions about the composition of the book of Isaiah began in earnest when J. C. Döderlein published a Latin translation of Isaiah with notes in 1775.21 He concluded that the prophet Isaiah did not write chaps. 40-66; instead, an exilic prophet who knew about Cyrus and the fall of Babylon wrote them. J. G. Eichhorn thought that the oracles in Isaiah were in chronological order and that later exilic and postexilic oracles were added to this collection as appendices. He identified these later writings based on messages that indicate a Babylonian setting and different Hebrew forms of expression. He noted that Isaiah's oracles were focused on moral themes, while later writings refer to the exile, the coming of Cyrus, and the fall of Babylon.22
M. A. Sweeney has traced the development of these critical views that led to B. Duhm's commentary. Based on five principles, W.
Gesenius's 1821 commentary on Isaiah attributed the second half of the book of Isaiah to an exilic author he calls “Pseudo-Jesaia” who lived in Babylon.23 F. Hitzig's 1833 commentary on Isaiah attributed chaps. 40-66 to an author who wrote at the conclusion of the exile,24 while H. G. A. Ewald's 1840 book on the prophets claims that a whole series of oracles (chaps. 13-14; 21; 40-48; 49-66) were added to the writings of Isaiah by a less-gifted anonymous writer sometime after the fall of Babylon.25 A. Dillmann's 1890 commentary on Isaiah hailed Isaiah as a great hero of the faith who proclaimed God's majesty. He breaks the oracles within Isaiah into a series of collections (1-12; 13-23; 24-27; 28-33) but assigned most of chaps.
40-66 to an anonymous exilic prophet who depended on the vocabulary of 1-39 when he wrote just before the fall of Babylon.
Chapters 63-66 were a later appendix that describes the postexilic return of the people to their land.26 Because of these developments before the time of Duhm, Sweeney concludes that Duhm's 1892 epic
work on Isaiah was based on a fairly firm consensus of critical scholarship at that time.
Duhm not only argued that parts of Isaiah were composed at a later time; he separated chaps. 56-66 from 40-55 and attributed 56-66 to a “Third-Isaiah” figure in the postexilic era of Ezra and Nehemiah, long after the exiles returned to Jerusalem. He thought that a prophet in Lebanon wrote chaps. 40-55 around 540 BC while another prophet composed chaps. 56-66 in Jerusalem during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (450 BC). Duhm concluded that later insertions were added to these writings all the way down to the Hasmonean period (first century BC).27 He did not think that the servant poems fit into the contexts where they were placed; therefore, he attributed the servant passages to a different author living around 500-450 BC. Although each present-day scholar has his own unique variation of these issues, Duhm's basic approach to chaps. 40-66 is still being followed in many critical commentaries today.
S. R. Driver presents this theory in what might be called its classical form in 1897. His approach is based on the “analogy of prophecy,” which states that most prophets lived in the era that they describe and preach to the people in that setting. Prophets do not abandon their historical setting but speak about it and to it. He believes there is no prophecy of an exile in chaps. 40-66; it is presupposed as a thing of the past. Thus the future predictions are about the release from exile. He contends that it is completely contrary to the nature of prophecy for a prophet to speak to a future people and abandon his contemporaries.28 This is not a complete denial of prophetic ability but a limitation of it to a very narrow period of time. He provided three arguments to support his understanding of 40-66.
1. The internal evidence shows that Jerusalem is ruined and deserted
(44:26b; 58:12; 61:4; 63:18; 64:10), the Hebrew people are suffering under the Chaldeans (42:22,25; 47:6; 52:5), and a return from exile is very imminent (40:2; 46:13; 48:20). Thus in these chapters the prophet was speaking to those people who were living in the Babylonian exile.
2. The literary style and subject matter of chaps. 40-66 is different from 1-39. Driver presents a list of words that appear only (or primarily) in chaps. 40-66 and a few stylistic characteristics (e.g.
the duplication of words). These factors support his conclusion that the author of chaps. 1-39 did not write 40-66.
3. The theology of chaps. 40-66 presents a distinctive emphasis by a different prophet. For example, chaps. 1-39 describe God's majesty, while 40-66 emphasize his infinitude.29
Since the time of Driver several criticisms of this approach have appeared, and less value is now given to small stylistic changes or the introduction of a new topic (point 2). Although most would find some changes in the theology of chap. 40-66, much more attention is being given to the common theological themes that can be traced throughout all sections of the book (point 3). Thus the historical evidence for a change in the location and setting of the prophet and his audience in chaps. 40-55 and 56-66 seems to be the lasting legacy of this approach (point 1). Although some still find much to be valued in this traditional critical method of analyzing Isaiah based on the analogy of prophecy, new ways of understanding chaps. 40-55 have developed in the intervening years. So a brief survey of some of the main alternative methodologies will help inform the reader about the nature of the present debate concerning the composition of chaps. 40-55.
DRAMATIC. The two-volume commentary on the whole book of Isaiah by J. D. W. Watts30 and Klaus Baltzer's one-volume commentary on chaps. 40-55 employ a dramatic interpretation of the book of Isaiah; thus, they have a focus that is quite different from the assumptions and methodologies of S. R. Driver. Watts takes a
“reader-oriented approach” to understanding the messages in Isaiah.
He identifies 12 long acts within the vision of Isaiah (acts VII-XII are found in chaps. 40-66),31 with several scenes within each act, and a few episodes within each scene. Watts attempts to assign each verse of the text to a speaker in the drama (God, the heavens, the earth, a herald, a messenger, a chorus, Cyrus, Darius, or Tattenai). He dates the completion of the book to 435 BC and the authorship to one of the persecuted people mentioned in 66:3-5.32 This unknown author identified with the historical prophet Isaiah (chaps. 1-39), with the suffering of the persecuted servant of the Lord (chaps. 42-53), and with the final group of servants in 54:17; 65:9-16, so he used older traditions about these people from earlier times to present this grand vision of God's strategy for the world. Watts does not employ the common critical concepts of a first, second, and third Isaiah, but deals with the whole book more as a grand unified vision. This vision for Zion and the rest of the world addresses the people of Jerusalem who were struggling with the influence of syncretistic tendencies and the fragmentation of their community into separate parties (people of the land, exiles, priests, the governor). Watts attempts to correlate each chapter with some historical period, but this leads to some very unusual conclusions. For example, the servant in chap. 42 is actually the Persian king Cyrus, the servant in chaps. 49, 52-53 refers to the Persian king Darius, the servant in chap. 50 is Zerubbabel, and the Anointed One in 61:1-3 is the Persian king Artaxerxes.33 This unified conception of the book as one unified vision is very helpful because it tends to reduce the excessive fragmentation of the diverse messages in the book of Isaiah by connecting them with a central idea: God's strategy for establishing his plans for the world. Nevertheless, his classification of these speeches as a series of dramas and his identification of the characters who speak within these dramas are very suspect. In addition, few would accept his identification of certain acts or speeches with the specific historical periods he identifies, nor would they identify the persecuted servant with the
historical figures he proposes. There is very little indication that chaps. 40-66 are describing a drama that was presented by a cast of characters.
The work of K. Baltzer is based on the traditional critical conclusion that the book of Isaiah should be divided into three unique sections, though he believes that the emphasis on Zion/Jerusalem acts as a unifying factor that draws these three unique parts together.34 Baltzer recognizes the possibility of later redactional additions to the text, but he believes they were relatively minor.35 He identifies various form-critical genres but is much more interested in how these shorter messages were put together into the larger literary units and how they function within the drama. The fundamental thesis of the commentary is that “DtIs's work is a liturgical drama”36 that was performed with people acting in multiple scenes with an audience listening in a worship setting. Baltzer points to similar ancient dramas in the Babylonian New Years (akitu) festival, the coronation of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom ruler Sesostris I (1972-1928 BC), and the drama of a struggle between the gods Horus and Seth (713-698 BC).37 Baltzer admits that the drama in Isaiah is “strikingly different from the Attic texts,”38 but he is still able to infer several actors plus a chorus who performed this play at the seven-day pilgrimage festival of Passover on the southeast slope of Jerusalem in the time of Nehemiah (450-400 BC).39 This drama had six acts (chap. 40 was the prologue and 55 was the epilogue), with three scenes per act, and each act ended with a hymn (except one, 53:12). The dramatic action includes processions of people (45:14-17), throne scenes (44:24-45:25), law- court scenes (41:1-5a;21-29), a battle scene (43:11-16; 51:9-11), an artisan scene (44:9-20), a marriage scene (54:14-17), and musical acts with dance, mime, and singing.40 Some acts take place on earth, others in the underworld, and several happen in heaven. Baltzer does view chaps. 40-55 as a homogeneous literary unit; that is, it is one unified drama. Baltzer connects the “Servant of God” with Moses because the
Servant and Moses both functioned as teachers appointed to “bring out” the people, were sent by God, and were put in a grave (Deut 34;
Isa 53). But one wonders about his conclusion. Did Moses bring justice to the nations (42:1-4)? Was he beaten and killed by persecutors (53:1-9)? Did he pay the penalty for other people's sins (53:4-9)? Was he a covenant to the nations (49:6)?
A major criticism of Watts and Baltzer is that the speeches by Isaiah lack theatrical directions or named actors, so the basic methodology is primarily a series of imaginative recreations of what might have happened if this was used as a drama. The whole underpinning of this hypothesis about the existence of ancient dramas is rather precarious, for the Babylonian New Year festival was not a drama conducted in public before an audience; it was a private royal ritual of the king. Although rituals have people acting in certain predictable ways, it is a gross misrepresentation to describe the coronation of a king as a drama. One of the positive aspects of this approach is that it enables these authors to view chaps. 40-55 as a unified whole.
TRADITIONAL. J. N. Oswalt's two commentaries on Isaiah do not follow the traditional critical division of Isaiah into three separate authors (stylistic and theological difference are not that great), and a strong part of his logic is his rejection of the critical conclusion that
“predictive prophecy is impossible.”41 Although many critical scholars would object to Oswalt's characterization of their perspective and say that they do believe in certain types of prophecy, it is true that most critical works follow the understanding of prophecy that prophets primarily gave speeches to and about the people in their own setting. Oswalt does allow for some editorial work by Isaiah or one of his followers to arrange and add transitional statements when producing the final form of his book.42 Oswalt agrees with critical interpretations when he interprets the setting of the audience in chaps.