📖 Isaiah

יְשַׁעְיָהוּ Yesha'yahu — 'Jehovah is salvation' — built from yasha, to save or deliver, and the divine name; the same elements, reversed, give Joshua and Jesus. It is a fitting name for a book in which the noun yeshu'ah, 'salvation,' occurs more often than in the whole rest of the prophets combined.
Ἠσαΐας (Ēsaias) — The Septuagint's Isaiah is a comparatively free translation, and several of its readings became load-bearing in the New Testament — most famously 7:14, where the Hebrew almah ('young woman') is rendered parthenos, 'virgin,' the reading Matthew 1:23 quotes. ⚠ The New Testament quotes Isaiah more than any other book except Psalms, and usually in the Greek.

Sixty-six chapters that begin with a lawsuit against a corrupt city and end with a new heavens and a new earth — the prophet of the Holy One of Israel, the remnant, the servant, and the child who is called Mighty God.

Chapters

1 of 66 chapters translated · 1.5%

Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.

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Chapter by chapter

Isaiah 1Isaiah opens not with a sermon but with a LAWSUIT: heaven and earth are summoned as witnesses — the same two the covenant calls in Deuteronomy — and the charge is read. An ox knows who feeds it; Israel does not. Then the hardest passage in the prophets: God says he is sick of the sacrifices HE COMMANDED — ‘who asked this of your hand?’ — because the hands lifted in prayer are full of blood, and the courts will not hear an orphan. Verse 8 can be dated: Jerusalem left ‘like a booth in a vineyard,’ which is 701 BC, and Sennacherib’s own prism says he shut Hezekiah up there ‘like a bird in a cage.’ And then the most quoted verse in the book — though your sins are like scarlet — which in Hebrew may not be a promise at all, but a prosecutor’s question. The dye, incidentally, was a worm, and it was famous for not washing out.

About the book

Where it sits

The first of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew canon, before Jeremiah and Ezekiel; the first of the 'Major Prophets' in Christian Bibles. ⚠ Isaiah has the best manuscript attestation of any book of the Hebrew Bible: the GREAT ISAIAH SCROLL (1QIsa-a) from Qumran Cave 1 is a complete copy of all sixty-six chapters dated to about 125 BC — a thousand years older than the oldest complete Masoretic manuscripts — and a second copy (1QIsa-b) and some twenty fragmentary ones were found with it. The scroll differs in orthography and in hundreds of small readings and agrees with the received text in substance throughout, which is the single most important control we have on the transmission of the Hebrew Bible.

Genre

PROPHETIC ORACLE, overwhelmingly in POETRY, with prose narrative embedded at the hinge points (chs 6-8, 20, 36-39). The forms are legal and liturgical: the covenant lawsuit (ch 1), the woe-oracle, the oracle against foreign nations (13-23), the taunt-song, the trial speech, the hymn, and — uniquely — the four Servant Songs (42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12). The poetry is the most sustained and formally ambitious in the Hebrew Bible, and its imagery (vineyard, highway, water in the desert, the potter, the arm of Jehovah) has furnished Western religious language ever since.

Author

⚠ The most argued question in Old Testament study. The book names ISAIAH SON OF AMOZ (1:1; 2:1; 13:1) and the New Testament quotes from all parts of it as his. Since Johann Döderlein (1775) and above all Bernhard Duhm (1892), most critical scholarship has divided it in three: chapters 1-39 substantially from the 8th-century prophet; 40-55 ('Deutero-Isaiah') from an anonymous voice at the end of the Babylonian exile; 56-66 ('Trito-Isaiah') from after the return. The evidence offered is that from chapter 40 the exile is over rather than threatened, Babylon has replaced Assyria as the enemy, and CYRUS is named twice (44:28; 45:1) — a Persian king born a century and a half after Isaiah. Against the division stand the vocabulary shared across the seams (the Holy One of Israel most of all), the unbroken text of the Qumran scroll, and the New Testament's usage. The honest position is that the question is genuinely open, that most of the argument is about what prophecy is rather than about the text, and that this translation takes no side — it prints the book.

Date written

The prophet's ministry is dated by the book itself to c. 740-700 BC (the four kings of 1:1; the year of Uzziah's death in 6:1; the Syro-Ephraimite crisis of 734 in ch 7; Sennacherib's siege of 701 in chs 36-37). Where and when the later chapters were composed depends on the authorship question above. The whole was fixed in essentially its present form well before 125 BC, the date of the Qumran scroll.

Place

JERUSALEM — the prophet's city, its temple, its palace, its water conduits, and its politics. The horizon widens outward from there: Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Moab, Tyre, the coastlands, and finally 'all flesh.'

Audience

A small kingdom trying to survive between empires, whose leaders kept looking for salvation in alliances — with Assyria against Syria, with Egypt against Assyria, with anyone against Babylon — and whose worship was scrupulous and whose courts were for sale. Isaiah's answer is the same for two hundred years of it: the problem is not the empires, and the solution is not a treaty.

How it's laid out

1-12JUDAH AND JERUSALEM — the opening lawsuit, the vineyard song (5), the throne vision and commission (6), the sign of Immanuel and the Assyrian crisis (7-8), and the child who is called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God (9), with the shoot from the stump of Jesse (11).

13-23ORACLES AGAINST THE NATIONS — Babylon, Assyria, Philistia, Moab, Damascus, Cush, Egypt, Edom, Arabia, Jerusalem itself, and Tyre.

24-27THE 'ISAIAH APOCALYPSE' — the earth undone, the feast on the mountain, and death swallowed up forever.

28-35WOES against those who trust Egypt, and the highway of the ransomed through a blooming desert.

36-39PROSE INTERLUDE — Sennacherib at the gate, Hezekiah's prayer and the deliverance of Jerusalem, the king's illness, and the Babylonian envoys who are shown the treasury.

40-48'COMFORT, COMFORT MY PEOPLE' — the incomparability of God, the mockery of idols, and CYRUS named as his anointed shepherd.

49-55THE SERVANT — the songs of the servant who brings justice and is despised, wounded 'for our transgressions' (52:13-53:12); then the invitation: 'everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.'

56-66AFTER THE RETURN — foreigners and eunuchs brought in, the fast God chooses, the year of favour proclaimed (61), and, at the end, NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH.

What it's about

THE HOLY ONE OF ISRAEL — the book's own title for God, some twenty-five times, and the thread that runs from the first chapter to the last. Holiness here is not moral fastidiousness but sheer otherness, and its nearness is dangerous: the throne vision of chapter 6 is a man saying he is undone.
JUSTICE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS — mishpat and tzedaqah, paired constantly, and the measure by which the city is judged in chapter 1 and redeemed in 1:27. The vineyard song puts it in a pun: God looked for mishpat and found mispach, bloodshed (5:7).
TRUST, AND WHAT IT IS PLACED IN — the recurring political question of chapters 7-39, always the same: Assyria, Egypt, chariots, treaties, or God. 'In returning and rest you will be saved; in quietness and confidence will be your strength' (30:15).
THE REMNANT — the handful left in 1:9, made a doctrine and a child's name in chapter 7, and carried through the whole book: judgment does not end the story, but it does not spare most of those in it either.
THE SERVANT — four songs about a figure who is Israel, and is sent to Israel; who brings justice to the nations without raising his voice; and who is 'pierced for our transgressions' and 'makes many righteous.' Christian reading has taken this as the book's centre since the New Testament; Jewish reading has generally understood the servant as Israel itself. Both are old, and both are argued from the text.
A NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH — the book ends where nothing else in the prophets ends: not with a restored kingdom but with a remade world, and with worship offered by all flesh.

Key words & people

Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:

qedosh Yisraelsaridmishpat / shaphattzedaqaheikhah

People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:

Isaiah Zion Jerusalem Judah

The source text

Translated from the pointed Hebrew Masoretic Text (as printed by Mechon-Mamre), with the readings of the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a) noted where they matter. ⚠ Isaiah's Hebrew is difficult: dense, allusive, full of wordplay that survives no translation (mishpat/mispach at 5:7; tokhelu/te'ukkelu at 1:19-20), and carrying a number of words that occur only here. The Septuagint diverges from the Hebrew more in Isaiah than in most books, and its choices — parthenos at 7:14 above all — have their own history in the New Testament. This translation follows the Masoretic text and records the alternatives rather than choosing silently.

Looking forward

No book is quoted more often in the New Testament except Psalms, and none has shaped Christian language about Jesus more. Matthew takes Immanuel from 7:14 and Galilee of the nations from 9:1-2; all four Gospels open John the Baptist with 'a voice crying in the wilderness' from 40:3; Jesus reads 61:1-2 in the Nazareth synagogue and says it is fulfilled; Philip finds the Ethiopian reading chapter 53 and 'beginning from this scripture, told him the good news of Jesus.' ⚠ It is worth being exact about what that does and does not settle. The Servant Songs do not name anyone, and Judaism has read the servant as Israel since antiquity with real textual warrant (the servant is called Israel outright at 49:3). The New Testament does not argue that the identification is obvious; it argues that it is now visible. This library prints the Hebrew, records the Greek, and leaves the reader with both.

Where the debates are

THE UNITY OF THE BOOK — one prophet, two, three, or a school, and what the answer implies about predictive prophecy. THE IDENTITY OF THE SERVANT — Israel, the prophet, a future figure, or more than one at once. 7:14 — almah, 'young woman' or 'virgin,' and whether the sign was for Ahaz in his own century, for a later fulfilment, or both. THE MEANING OF 6:9-10, the commission to make the people's hearts fat, quoted in all four Gospels and Acts. THE 'ISAIAH APOCALYPSE' (24-27), whether it is early or very late. And the ordinary, recurring question of chapter 1: whether the prophets rejected sacrifice itself or sacrifice offered by hands full of blood.