Information AboutIsaiah |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ISAIAH | |
| jewish prophets | |
| prophets of the hebrew bible | |
| new testament | |
| prophets in judaism | |
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Isaiah or '''Yeshayáhu''' ('''יְשַׁעְיָהוּ''' "Salvation of/is and therefore of Royal Lineage , suggests he was of a family of high rank. Isaiah was married to a woman referred to as "the prophetess" (8:3). Why she is called this is disputed. Some believe she may have carried out a prophetic ministry in her own right, like , 'To speed the spoil he hasteneth the prey' or, 'Destruction is imminent'(8:1-4). He exercised the functions of his office during the reigns of . Uzziah reigned fifty-two years in the middle of the 8th Century BC , and Isaiah must have begun his career a few years before Uzziah's death, probably in the 740s BC . He lived till the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, and in all likelihood outlived that monarch (who died 698 BC ), and may have been contemporary for some years with Manasseh . Thus Isaiah may have prophesied for the long period of at least sixty-four years. His first call to the prophetical office is not recorded. A second call came to him "in the year that and Hosea preceded Isaiah (Amos 1:1; Hosea 1:1) and they prophesied mainly against the Northern tribes of Israel. In early youth Isaiah must have been moved by the invasion of 5:26). Soon after this in Greece, Sennacherib never recovered from the shock of the disaster in Judah. He made no more expeditions against either southern Palestine or Egypt." The remaining years of Hezekiah's reign were peaceful (2 Chr. 32:23, 27-29). Isaiah probably lived to its close, and possibly into the reign of Manasseh, but the time and manner of his death are not specified in either the ), which states that some prophets were "sawn in two". It is also mentioned in the book of The Martyrdom of Isaiah that he lived into the days of Manasseh, and was also sawn in half with a wooden saw. CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP The noticeable break between the first part of Isaiah (Is. 1-39) versus the latter half of the book (Is. 40-66) caught the eye of eighteenth century critical scholars Doderlein (1789) and Eichhorn (1783), who advocated a source-critical reading of the book, seeing chapters 40-66 as later, post-exilic additions, or even totally separate works artificially appended to the earlier composition. The term "Deutero-Isaiah" described the anonymous later writer, to whom some ascribed some redactionary roles as well. Some more recent commentators have further divided 40-66 by adding a third Isaiah, Trito-Isaiah, who wrote 56-66. The provenance of the text in the latter half of the book seemed to support a post-exilic timeframe, with direct references to Cyrus, King of Persia (44:28; 45:1, 13), a lament for the ruined temple, and other details. Also, the tone of the two halves is different; the first seems to warn erring Judah of impending divine judgement through foreign conquest, while the second seems to provide comfort to a broken people. Other scholars, such as Margalioth (1964) challenged the view of multiple authorship by pointing out the remarkable unity of the book Isaiah in terms of theme, message, and vocabulary. Even certain verbal formulas unique to Isaiah, such as "the mouth of the Lord has spoken," appears in both halves of Isaiah but in no other Hebrew prophetic literature. While clear differences between the two halves of the book were evident, thematically the two halves are remarkably similar, certainly more similar to each other than to any other existing prophetic literature. Recent trends in critical scholarship have focused on synchronic approaches, which advocate a whole-text reading, rather than the traditional historical-critical diachronic approaches, which tend to be directed at taking the text apart, looking for sources, redactional seams, etc. Inspired by Hebrew Bible literary criticism done by Robert Alter, recent scholars have tended to circumscribe authorship and historical-critical questions and look at the final form of the book as a literary whole, a product of the post-exilic era which is characterized by literary and thematic unity. EXTERNAL LINKS |