Isaiah for Everyone

John Goldingay

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611645606
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Commento della Bibbia

Westminster John Knox Press is pleased to present the seventeen-volume Old Testament for Everyone series. Internationally respected Old Testament scholar John Goldingay addresses Scripture from Genesis to Malachi in such a way that even the most challenging passages are explained simply and concisely. The series is perfect for daily devotions, group study, or personal visits with the Bible.

In this volume on Isaiah, Goldingay explores the first of the great prophetic books. Isaiah is a compilation of the prophetic messages of several prophets. Their messages to the people of Judah and Jerusalem included a call for injustice to be recognized, a message of liberation and hope from the oppressors of the people, and a message of the coming day of judgment. These separate messages are held together by the promise of a new age of redemption and peace that lies beyond the crisis of judgment.

INTRODUCTION

As far as Jesus and the New Testament writers were concerned, the Jewish Scriptures that Christians call the “Old Testament” were the Scriptures. In saying that, I cut corners a bit, as the New Testament never gives us a list of these Scriptures, but the body of writings that the Jewish people accept is as near as we can get to identifying the collection that Jesus and the New Testament writers would have worked with. The church also came to accept some extra books such as Maccabees and Ecclesiasticus that were traditionally called the “Apocrypha,” the books that were “hidden away”—a name that came to imply “spurious.” They’re now often known as the “Deuterocanonical Writings,” which is more cumbersome but less pejorative; it simply indicates that these books have less authority than the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. The precise list of them varies among different churches. For the purposes of this series that seeks to expound the “Old Testament for Everyone,” by the “Old Testament” we mean the Scriptures accepted by the Jewish community, though in the Jewish Bible they come in a different order, as the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.

They were not “old” in the sense of antiquated or out-of-date; I sometimes like to refer to them as the First Testament rather than the Old Testament to make that point. For Jesus and the New Testament writers, they were a living resource for understanding God, God’s ways in the world, and God’s ways with us. They were “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person who belongs to God can be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). They were for everyone, in fact. So it’s strange that Christians don’t read them very much. My aim in these volumes is to help you do so.

My hesitation is that you may read me instead of the Scriptures. Don’t fall into that trap. I like the fact that this series includes much of the biblical text. Don’t skip over it. In the end, that’s the bit that matters.

An Outline of the Old Testament

The Christian Old Testament puts the books in the Jewish Bible in a distinctive order:

Genesis to Kings: A story that runs from the creation of the world to the exile of Judahites to Babylon

Chronicles to Esther: A second version of this story, continuing it into the years after the exile

Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs: Some poetic books

Isaiah to Malachi: The teaching of some prophets

Here is an outline of the history that lies at the books’ background. (I give no dates for events in Genesis, which involves too much guesswork.)

1200s	Moses, the exodus, Joshua
1100s	The “judges”
1000s	King Saul, King David
900s	King Solomon; the nation splits into two, Ephraim and Judah
800s	Elijah, Elisha
700s	Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah; Assyria the superpower; the fall of Ephraim
600s	Jeremiah, King Josiah; Babylon the superpower
500s	Ezekiel; the fall of Judah; Persia the superpower; Judahites free to return home
400s	Ezra, Nehemiah
300s	Greece the superpower
200s	Syria and Egypt, the regional powers pulling Judah one way or the other
100s	Judah’s rebellion against Syrian power and gain of independence
000s	Rome the superpower

Isaiah

Isaiah is the first of the great prophetic books, though Isaiah was not the first of the great prophets. The first to have a book named after him was Amos. Neither did prophets such as Amos and Isaiah fulfill their ministries by writing books. Prophets fulfilled their ministry by showing up in a public place such as the temple courtyards in Jerusalem and declaiming to anyone who would listen and also to the people who didn’t wish to listen. You can get an idea from reading the book of Jeremiah, which includes a number of stories about Jeremiah doing so, or from reading the Gospels, which portray the prophet Jesus doing so. Isaiah 8 and Jeremiah 36 include accounts of how these prophets came to have some of their messages written down, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the actual books of Isaiah and Jeremiah ultimately go back to these acts of writing down.

The fact that the material in a book such as Isaiah goes back to prophetic preaching explains the way the book doesn’t unfold in a systematic way like a normal book. It’s a collection of separate messages that have been strung together. Often the same themes recur, as they do in Jesus’ parables, because the same themes recurred in the prophet’s preaching. There’s a story about a Christian preacher whose people accused him of always repeating the same message; when they took notice of that one, he responded, he would preach another.

But the fact that the book is a compilation of prophetic messages doesn’t mean it has no structure. At a macro level, it’s rather clearly arranged.

Isaiah 1–12: Messages about Judah and Jerusalem, with references to King Ahaz

Isaiah 13–23: Messages about the nations around, with a reference King Ahaz

Isaiah 24–27: Messages about the destiny of the world around, with no reference to specific kings

Isaiah 28–39: Messages about Judah and Jerusalem, with references to King Hezekiah

Isaiah 40–55: Messages about Judah and Jerusalem, with references to King Cyrus

Isaiah 56–66: Messages about Judah and Jerusalem, with no reference to specific kings

One feature emerging from this outline is that at the macro level the book is arranged chronologically. Ahaz was king of Judah about 736 to 715. Hezekiah was king about 715 to 686. The last part of Isaiah 28—39 looks forward to the fall of Jerusalem and the exile of its leadership to Babylon, which happened in 587. Cyrus was the king of Persia who took over the Babylonian empire in 539 and allowed the Judahites in Babylon to go back home and rebuild the temple. The last chapters of the book make sense when understood in relation to the community in Judah after that event.

One implication of that outline is as follows. While Isaiah 39 speaks of the exile as something to happen in the future, the messages in Isaiah 40–55 speak of it as something that happened quite a while ago. The future they refer to is that promise that God is about to make it possible for people to return to Jerusalem. The implication is that the Isaiah of chapters 1–39 isn’t the prophet whose preaching appears in chapters 40–55 or chapters 56–66. The book called Isaiah is a compilation of the messages of several prophets. Something of this sort may well be true of most of the prophetic books. It doesn’t mean they’re random compilations; one can see links between chapters 40–66 and chapters 1–39. As the outline above indicates, the last part of the book concerns itself with Judah and Jerusalem as much as the first part does. The most distinctive link between the parts is the description of God as “the holy one of Israel.” That title, or a variant, comes twenty-eight times in Isaiah (only six times in the whole of the rest of the Old Testament), half in chapters 1–39 and half in chapters 40–66. The whole of the book called Isaiah is a message about the holy one of Israel.

Although the book’s macro-structure divides it up neatly, there’s also some mixing of prophecies within the major sections. For instance, the opening chapter is a compilation of prophecies that look as if they come from different contexts and have been brought together to form an introduction to the book as a whole. From time to time we will draw attention to other points where something of this kind happens, but generally it’s hard to be sure whether it is so.

ISAIAH 1:1–20
I’m Fed Up to the Teeth with Your Worship

¹ The vision of Isaiah ben Amoz which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

² Listen, heavens, and give ear, earth,

because Yahweh has spoken.

I raised children and brought them up,

but they— they rebelled against me.

³ An ox acknowledges its owner,

a donkey its master’s manger.

Israel doesn’t acknowledge,

my people doesn’t take any notice.

⁴ Hey, offending nation,

a people heavy with waywardness!

Offspring of evil people, decadent children,

they’ve abandoned Yahweh.

They’ve disdained Israel’s holy one,

they’ve become estranged, backwards.

⁵ Why will you be beaten more,

continue rebelling?

The whole head [has come] to sickness,

the whole heart is faint.

⁶ From the sole of the foot to the head,

there’s no soundness in it.

Bruise, blotch, fresh wound—

they haven’t been pressed out,

they haven’t been bandaged,

it hasn’t been softened with oil.

⁷ Your country is a waste,

your cities are burned with fire.

Your land...