Exploring the Old Testament

A Guide to the Prophets

J. Gordon McConville

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830898244
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Prophets considers the often misunderstood prophetic books of the Old Testament, including an exploration of their historical context, their artful use of language and their place within the chorus of Old Testament voices. This critically informed and theologically sensitive introduction to the Prophets introduces students to- issues in critical interpretation- the place of the prophetic books in the Old Testament canon- the social location of biblical prophets- contemporary applications of the prophetic books- dates and destinations of the prophecies of each of the books- theological contributions of the prophetic books- an overview of literary criticism on the ProphetsIn this textbook you will find double-column formatting for ease of use, annotated bibliographies for further reading, sidebar explorations of select historical and textual topics in greater detail, a glossary of terms, and relevant charts and maps.

Chapter 1

ISAIAH

The Book of Isaiah is perhaps the best known of the prophetic books because of its prophecies of the child called Immanuel (Isa. 7:14), a Suffering Servant (in Isa. 40—55) and a messianic king (Isa. 9:2–7; 11:1–9). These are certainly important in any reading of the book, especially if we want to relate the message of the book to the New Testament. However, as we have seen, prophetic books must be understood first in the world in which they were written. So we will now consider some matters to do with its background, and the way in which it came to be a book.

DATE AND DESTINATION

The Book of Isaiah is attributed in its heading (1:1) to Isaiah son of Amoz, who, we are told, worked in the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. To judge by the book’s contents, Isaiah’s main activity seems to have taken place in the reigns of Ahaz (735–715 BC) and Hezekiah (715–687 BC). However, he may have begun to preach in the last years of King Uzziah (who died in 742 BC. For these dates, which are uncertain, see Dates of Kings and Prophets, also Hayes and Irvine 1987). (This would mean assuming that the famous vision in 6:1–13 was not his first ‘call’ to be a prophet.) And he continued until at least 701 BC, the year of the Assyrian king Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah.

The first narrative about Isaiah records a meeting between him and King Ahaz (7:1–17). The time is 734–733 BC. King and people face a crisis, because of a threat to the region from the growing power of Assyria. The nation, with its power centre in Nineveh, Asshur and Calah on the River Tigris, was in the process of becoming a great power, since the accession of a new king, Tiglath-Pileser III, in 745 BC. When Isaiah meets Ahaz, the immediate problem is to know how to respond to an attack on Judah by an alliance of Israel (the northern kingdom, which had split from Judah after the reign of Solomon in 930 BC) and Syria (also called Aram). The story is told more fully in 2 Kings 16. There we find that Judah was in danger on several sides, losing territory in the south to Edom and threatened in the north by this so-called Syro-Ephraimite alliance (the northern kingdom was sometimes called Ephraim). The uncertainty caused by Assyria’s advance was perhaps an opportunity to settle old scores. When Edom recovered Elath (2 Kgs 16:6) they reversed its capture by King Uzziah about forty years earlier (2 Kgs 14:22). It is often said that Israel and Syria may have wanted to secure Judah as part of an alliance against Assyria, but there is no strong evidence for this. Their advance looks more like a war of conquest (Isa. 7:6). It is possible that the pictures of Jerusalem under siege in Isaiah 1 come from this time.

Ahaz’ response to the crisis was to turn to the great power itself for help, submitting to Tiglath-Pileser as an obedient vassal, and presenting treasure plundered from Solomon’s temple as tribute (2 Kgs 16:7–8). The plan apparently worked (v. 9), although it is likely that Assyria would have gone against Syria in any case! Ahaz’ involvement with the empire, however, went beyond simply asking for help, for he deliberately introduced aspects of Assyrian worship in the Jerusalem temple (vv. 10–20). This was the cause of Isaiah’s clash with Ahaz, for he maintained that the king and people should not trust an alliance with a foreign power for its survival and prosperity, but rather trust in God (Isa. 7:9b).

The question of making alliances as a means of self-defence continued to be an issue in the reign of Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz. People in Judah knew that rebellion against Assyria could cost them dear, for it was when the northern kingdom, under King Hoshea, turned to Egypt for help against their overlord (2 Kgs 17:1–4), that the Assyrians, under Sargon II, came down heavily and destroyed that kingdom for ever. Even so, later in Sargon’s reign, Hezekiah joined other small states (Ashdod, Edom, Moab) in a rebellion against Assyria in 713–711 BC, and these again looked to Egypt for help. Some of Isaiah’s sayings, against making alliances with Egypt, were probably given in this situation, for example, Isaiah 18—19, with their mockery of Egyptian pretensions to power and grandeur; note the reference to Ashdod in the immediately following 20:1.

The final important phase of Isaiah’s work was in Judah’s revolt in the time of Sennacherib (705–701). Here again, Isaiah counselled trust in Yahweh, and prophesied in this case that Sennacherib would be destroyed (Isa. 37:21–38). In addition to the narrative about this event, the sayings of chs 30—31 may belong to this time. (It is possible they could go back to 713–711, but the later occasion is usually preferred; see Sweeney 1996, p. 397.) When Isaiah proclaims that Yahweh will fight for Jerusalem to protect it (31:4–5), the point is that he alone can do this, not the merely human power of other kings (31:8). Isaiah’s complaint about the securing of the city’s defences without trusting in God (22:8b–11) was probably addressed to Hezekiah in the same situation.

The threat from Assyria was always in the background during Isaiah’s ministry. The constant menace of it was the setting in which the prophet called for faithfulness. Yahweh could secure Judah if they trusted him; but equally, if they did not, Assyria could come and overwhelm them. These two possibilities are both presented in the main passages we have noticed concerning both Ahaz and Hezekiah. The negative possibility – of Judah being engulfed by Assyria (Isa. 8:5–8) – became a reality when King Sennacherib devastated the land in 701 BC (2 Kgs 18). Conversely, the possibility of salvation became a reality too, when the same invasion was cut short by the miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem (2 Kgs 19:35–37; Isa. 37:36–38).

A reading of Isaiah makes it clear, however, that the Assyrian period is not the only time in which the book is interested. If anything, Babylon is even more prominent. This means that a major focus of the book is a time well after Isaiah’s own life, since Babylon succeeded Assyria as the leading power in the region only in 605 BC, when its forces overcame those of Egypt at the Battle of Carchemish. When Judah fell and went into Babylonian exile in 587 BC, Isaiah had been dead for about a century.

Yet Isaiah 40—55 concerns the people of Judah in the exile (587–539 BC). It tells its hearers that the time of their banishment is almost over, because they have more than paid for the sins that caused it (40:1–2). It promises deliverance, naming Cyrus, the Persian king who would oust the last Babylonian king, as the agent who would bring it about (45:1). And it foresees the release of the exiles from Babylon (48:20–21; 52:11–12; 55:12) and their return to Jerusalem (52:7–10), where Yahweh would again be worshipped, in place of the fallen Babylonian gods (46:1). Finally, it seems that Isaiah 56—66 is concerned with events after the exiles have returned, when worship has again begun to deteriorate (e.g. Isa. 58).

This means that the first hearers of Isaiah’s words in his lifetime were not the only intended audience of the message of the book. The point of Isaiah 40—55 is to persuade the people in the exile that they would soon be set free and able to go home. This leads to authorship questions: who wrote this part of the book? And indeed, who was responsible for bringing the book into its finished form? We will come to these questions in a moment. Let us notice for now that the underlying contention in all parts of Isaiah remains the same – it is Yahweh, the true God, who is the only power behind the events of history.

CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF ISAIAH

IDENTIFYING ISAIAH OF JERUSALEM

We have seen from our look at the historical events behind the prophecy, that the book of Isaiah cannot have been written all at one time. Individual sayings came from different dates, and so must have circulated originally in contexts different from those in which we now find them. What is more, as most writers believe, many of the words recorded apparently came from situations after the prophet’s own lifetime. This is because it is assumed that prophets directed their messages to people and issues in their own time. The sayings about trusting Egypt, for example, come out of the prophet’s passionate involvement with things that were unfolding before his eyes.

So we have to ask two questions: by what process did separate sayings come to be formed into a single book? And how did this book come to bear the name of Isaiah of Jerusalem?

The traditional view (sometimes called ‘pre-critical’) was that Isaiah did indeed write the whole book. He wrote down his prophecies as he made them (Isa. 8:16 might be regarded as evidence for this). And he did indeed make predictions about events long in the future (in Isa. 40—66). This view is maintained in the recent commentaries of Motyer and Oswalt. One advantage of it is that it provides an explanation for the unity of theme in the book (see below), and of its attribution to the prophet. Its disadvantage is that it involves a view of the prophet in which he is detached from his immediate situation. In Isaiah, the question is not strictly whether a prophet might speak accurately about the future, but why he should address himself to people two centuries after his own time. This would sit oddly with the passionate engagement we see in the prophecies that belong to Isaiah’s own time. And on the other hand, the prophetic passion of Isaiah 40—66 (for example in 48:1–11) would seem to fit better in the mouth of a prophet in Babylon.

In the early nineteenth century readers of Isaiah began to think that it fell into two parts (chs 1—39, from Isaiah of Jerusalem, and chs 40—66, from a prophet in the exile). Since the commentary of B. Duhm (1892), however, chs 56—66 have been marked off from chs 40—55, and attributed to another prophet who worked after the exiles had returned home. (For an account of the history of interpretation, see Hayes and Irvine 1987, pp. 387–400.)

However, the threefold division is not so simple, for much of 1—39 is also thought to be from a later time than the writer. For example, the sayings against Babylon in 13:1—14:23 are usually assigned to the time when Babylon was powerful, that is, close to the time of Isaiah 40—55. Furthermore, many of the hopeful sayings in chs 1—12, such as 2:2–4, have been thought to be later than Isaiah, because they are more like the hopeful sayings in chs 40—55. Chapters 24—27, called the mini-apocalypse, are often given a late date because they have a view of history that resembles other late writings (especially the idea of a final victory of Yahweh over all other powers, and individual resurrection).

It must be admitted that conclusions of this sort involve making judgements as to what a prophet in the eighth century might have said. It is one thing to notice signs of a particular historical setting (for example, when a prophecy speaks about the end of the Babylonian exile), but quite another to suppose that an eighth-century prophet could not have had a vision of a future in which nations would seek the God of Israel in Jerusalem (2:2–4). A related question is the problem of knowing what a particular saying actually means. That is, one might be convinced that Isaiah never gave unconditional promises of salvation, and that might mean ruling out a passage like 29:5–8. However, it may be that 29:5–8 was only intended to be an alternative possibility to the destruction pictured in 29:1–4, and that together the two sayings imply that God will save Jerusalem if it returns to him in faithfulness. In that case one could regard 29:5–8 as authentic on the grounds that it is not an unconditional promise after all.

Behind these questions lies the question we discussed in the Introduction: what is the background, or world of thought, of the prophets? On what theological grounds did any prophet presume to speak to his contemporaries at all about how they should behave and what they could expect to happen in the future? How we answer that question will have a big effect on how much of Isaiah 1—39 we will think belongs to Isaiah himself. Since scholars differ on this, it is not surprising that they differ enormously over which sayings may be attributed to Isaiah and which may not. Hayes and Irvine, for example, allow most of Isaiah 1—39 to Isaiah, while O. Kaiser 1983, 1974, denies most of it to him.

THE MESSAGE OF ISAIAH OF JERUSALEM

From what we have just said, it will be clear that there is no certain way of working out ‘the’ message of Isaiah, once the assumption has been made that he did not say everything written in the book named after him. We will shortly ask whether it is even essential that we should try to do so, since what we have to understand, in the end, is the book that has come down to us as a whole. However, it is important for our p...