Isaiah: Imagining Messianic Hope

Isaiah, which in Lectionary Year A comprises four Sundays of Advent’s Old Testament readings, is a book of Messianic Hope, preparing us for the arrival of the promised King, but we read it differently than Isaiah’s immediate audience. Isaiah was written in a tumultuous time in Israel’s already eventful history. The frame of reference spans nearly 400 years, beginning in the 740s BCE and culminating in a final edit at around 350 BCE, addressing specific events of the Assyrian crisis, the Syro-Ephraim war, the fall of Israel, the Babylonian Crisis, the fall of Judah, the Babylonian Exile, and the return under the Persian Empire. It would be hard to imagine that all that material was written by one prophet.  Therefore, you may hear people speak of First, Second, and Third Isaiah. This is because most Biblical scholars accept that Isaiah can be divided into three potential periods, of which only the first, the Proto-Isaiah or First Isaiah, is accepted as legitimately written by the Prophet. The rest were likely written by others or a school of prophets influenced and perhaps even formed by Isaiah.

That said, Isaiah, as a unified book, has influenced Jewish culture and expectations through the ages. Isaiah is perhaps the premier prophetic writer in both Judaism and Christianity. Isaiah’s belief that Jerusalem, or at least a remnant, would remain was affirmed during the Assyrian Siege of 701 BCE, when the Assyrian army, after decimating town after town in Judah, suddenly abandoned the siege of Jerusalem. It is not hard to imagine Isaiah’s influence on the Reforms instituted by King Josiah in the 600s BCE, which sought to eradicate all religious cultic sites in favor of the temple in Jerusalem. With the ideal Messianic Davidic king, Isaiah was most likely imagining Hezekiah, but the text leaves enough ambiguity to allow transferability. This Messianic expectation was later reinterpreted for the Persian King Cyrus and, of course, even later, for Jesus. Moreover, while Isaiah emphasized the exclusivity of Jerusalem’s temple, he also emphasized a moral obligation to care for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. This Temple exclusivity strengthened their identity as God’s chosen people, but the moral dimension prepared them for the Babylonian exile and the Diaspora, when the temple was no longer accessible.

From this perspective, Isaiah was a living tradition. His Prophecies were reinterpreted and reworked for new and changing times. The book of Isaiah as we have it today is likely the result of multiple reedits and reordering. This makes reading Isaiah a practice of unfolding layers, but the original text was often left intact and names and references unchanged, but sometimes just rearranged with later editorial material inserted to emphasize the current context.

We, as would be expected, and in this long tradition of reinterpretation, see Jesus in nearly every word of Isaiah. Next to Psalms, Isaiah is the single most-quoted and alluded-to text in the New Testament. Isaiah’s words ring through Luke’s Nativity story, in the words of the Magnificat and the Song of Simeon, and the Benedictus. It seems Advent without Isaiah would hardly be Advent.