Isaiah's life

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Isaiah

In this section Professor Hugh Williamson of the Oriental Institute, Christ Church, University of Oxford explains what we know about Isaiah's life and times.

The prophets whose books we have in the Bible suddenly started to appear in the eighth century BC. Of course, there had been prophets before that-people like Nathan and Elijah-but their story had always been included in the wider history of the people, which we have in the books of Samuel and Kings. Now, however, something seems to have happened which made such a difference that it was necessary for their words to be recorded separately in books of their own, not wrapped up with the historical narrative.

Map of the locations in Isaiah's story

The first of these prophets was Amos, and very soon after there also came Hosea, Isaiah and Micah. They are all quite different from each other, so what can it be that unites them in having books named after them?

In the past, prophets like Elijah and Elisha were quite as committed and passionate as Amos and Hosea, and they too could utter condemnations of those who broke God's law, oppressed the poor and so on. But they only ever envisaged the judgment of individuals or groups within the nation. It never occurred to them that things could have got to such a point that God would have to destroy the nation as a whole. For the first time with Amos, however, that possibility is envisaged; indeed, it is actually announced! (Amos 5:2, Amos 8:1-2)

And so it happened; within a generation or two at the most, Israel was no more. The Assyrians had defeated her and absorbed the territory into their own Greater Assyria. Only the southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, remained to carry forward the story which we now have in the Bible.

Isaiah the man

We do not know as much as we should like about the prophet Isaiah himself. He is not mentioned anywhere outside the Bible, and although he is referred to in the books of Kings and Chronicles, it is only in material which is duplicated in his book. So effectively all we have to go on is contained in the one book - Isaiah.

From that book, we can suppose that he lived in Jerusalem; although of course other places are mentioned, Jerusalem is the only place where Isaiah himself is said to have been present (e.g. in the narratives in chapters 6-8, 20, and 36-39). What is more, he seems to have had easy access to the royal court (see especially chapter 7), and to be well informed about the affairs of state. It is therefore generally assumed that he came from a family that would have been included in the ruling classes; whether he was in fact related to the royal family in some way is possible, though entirely unknown.

From the way he writes we can see that he was well educated in the best traditions of the time. It is not just his fine use of language which impresses, but also the way that he incorporates insights from the distilled wisdom of the Israelite people. It is probable that such material will have formed an important part of the national curriculum of the time. Only a few families, whose children were destined to follow their fathers into the court bureaucracy or other positions of responsibility, will have received a formal education, including learning to read and write. It looks very much as though Isaiah should be included among them.

Isaiah the book

Not everything in the long book which bears his name was necessarily written by Isaiah, however. From chapter 40 onwards, first, everything relates historically not to the Jerusalem of Isaiah's own day, but to the situation of the Jewish exiles in Babylon over 150 years later. Similarly, chapters 56-66 find us back again in Jerusalem, not in Isaiah's time, however, but rather in the period of the restoration after the Babylonian exile-the times of which we read in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, for instance.

Finally, even within the first part of the book, there is material (such as chapters 24-27 and 34-35) which seems to refer to these later periods as well, and not to the times of Isaiah. And while chapters 36-39 certainly relate stories about Isaiah, it is unlikely that they were actually written by him. When elsewhere he talks about himself, as in chapters 6 and 8, for example, it is as 'I'; he does not refer to himself in the third-person 'he', as we find in 36-39 and some other places.

For these and other reasons, scholars believe that the book of Isaiah is a collection of the work of a number of prophets and other writers. That does not in the least lessen their importance or value, of course, but it does suggest that their inspired words which have come down to us are ultimately more important than the individuals who wrote them.