This collection of 36 essays provides a telling profile of the state of Isaiah studies following the breakdown of the paradigm constructed by B. Duhm and generations of his followers. This first volume of a twin set is divided by subject matter into two parts: ‘The Formation and Leitmotifs of the Book of Isaiah’ and ‘Oracles and Passages’. When viewed as a snapshot of Isaiah studies at the end of the century just ended, however, the articles helpfully record clustering of a different nature. Most of them published here for the first time, these essays illuminate the methodological and sometimes ideological divergences which characterise both the speciality in question and biblical studies in general.
Whether this represents a post-modern flourishing of variety which is to be celebrated or a fragmentation of the discipline which ought rather to be lamented will depend upon the perspective of the reader.
I
It is precisely the reader’s perspective which comes under analysis in a first group of articles. A number of the essays emphasise the work of ‘configuring’ which falls to the reader of biblical materials, not excluding the biblical scholar. The focus lies not upon excavating or reconstructing the mental, social, religious, and linguistic world of the personalities behind the scroll of Isaiah, but rather upon the book’s reception by its readers. The volume’s title announces its intention to explore this side of the conversation, a promise which its editors make good.
E.W. Conrad (‘Reading Isaiah and the Twelve as Prophetic Books’, 3–17), taking his nod from Philip Davies’ historiographical work, sees these prophetic books ‘creating a prophetic past by piecing together existing materials available to its scribes.’ Both Isaiah and the Twelve can be read (independently or intertextually) as a literary collage, which reading necessarily involves a ‘configuring’ on the part of both ancient readers and those poised at the turn of our millennium.
R. Melugin (‘The Book of Isaiah and the Construction of Meaning’, 39–55) reviews several modern arguments for unity in Isaiah, arguing that each is a ‘construction’ of its scholarly creator rather than a ‘discovery’. Though meanings for texts like Isaiah change, they need not be capricious, since some constructions ‘fit’ the text better than others.
By holding onto some accessible measure of the correspondence between the artefact (the book of Isaiah) and its description by the scholar, Melugin occupies the more traditional wing of the self-consciously ‘post-modern’ cadre of writers who contribute to this collection of essays. By contrast, the late R.P. Carroll (‘Blindsight and the Vision Thing: Blindness and Insight in the Book of Isaiah’, 79–93) appears rather to represent the ‘readers in search of mind-bending encounters with the text’ which he describes, embracing the ‘reflective puzzlement’ that its intertextuality offers to such (post-)modern ponderers. Carroll finds the book of Isaiah (‘whatever the sign “Isaiah” stands for’) to be about ‘seeing and perceiving, lacking understanding and being blind’ from start to finish, though he assures us that his is just one of (infinitely?) many possible readings. Carrying out his thoroughly post-modern engagement of the text, Carroll twice justifies his own approach simply by acknowledging that ‘it suits my purpose.’ Suggestively, the book of Isaiah styles itself a ‘vision’ (1.1, 2.1). The blindness and insight topoi permeate the book with reference to many different subjects (e.g. YHWH, prophets, communities, the ‘servant’), all of which summons Carroll and readers like him to attempt ‘profoundly imaginative acts of reading’.
The irrepressible resonance of the ‘swords to plowshares’ text in Isaiah 2 (Micah 4) is surveyed in J. Limburg’s ‘Swords to Plowshares: Texts and Contexts’ (279–293). Limburg identifies a core text which is subsequently modified and/or applied to a variety of contexts, from the editorial exhortation of Isa 2.5 (‘Come! Let us walk …’) to the Micah setting and through to various novel contexts, ancient and recent. It is indicative of Limburg’s approach that his final contexts are not found within the bounds of the Hebrew canon but rather in a modern Protestant lectionary and aboard a Greenpeace launch.
II
To judge by a second group of these essays, a more classical approach to the Isaiah text is still alive and well, even if its attentiveness to issues of rhetoric show it to be thoroughly conversant with some of the themes more commonly found in those articles which I have chosen to locate in the first section of this review article.
W. Brueggemann (‘Planned People/Planned Book?’, 19–37) surveys various notions of YHWH’s ‘plan’ in Isaiah, settling on the idea of ‘Yahweh’s intention that will surely prevail’. The architecture of Isaiah emphases this plan over against that of all competitors, offering to Israel a ‘rhetoric’ inside of which she finds life. Brueggemann’s deliberations in search of the book’s plan highlight the difficulty of finding a ‘centre’ in so large a corpus, each competing candidate apparently marked by some inherent inadequacy.
Y. Gitay (‘Why Metaphors? A Study of the Texture of Isaiah’, 57–65) identifies the book’s speeches as argumentative discourse whose images are used not only to denounce but also to persuade. Metaphor serves—sometimes daringly—to adjust the audience’s positions to those of the speech-maker, accomplishing this end by presenting the argument as a fact of life, as self-evident as the images that are utilised.
J.K. Kuntz (‘The Form, Location, and Function of Rhetorical Questions in Deutero-Isaiah’, 121–141) uses the field of linguistic pragmatics as a lens through which to view questions in Deutero-Isaiah, noting that the versatility of the form makes for complex and polyvalent exchanges. Kuntz sides with those who consider rhetorical question such as those in the text at hand to be true questions which insist upon an information-bearing response, and lines up with Y. Gitay (cf. Prophecy and Persuasion and his essay in this volume) with regard to the rhetorical function such inquiries play.
Kuntz’ occasionally over-wrought prose presents an illuminating view of interrogative form and function in Deutero-Isaiah, a poet whom he considers a master of the craft. It is difficult to imagine a scholar of biblical rhetoric or of Deutero-Isaiah who would not be well served by this careful treatment.
John T. Willis (‘Isaiah 2:2–5 and the Psalms of Zion’, 295–316) applies himself to the same text as Limburg in the essay which precedes his, but from a different angle. Willis explores the remarkable similarity between Isa 2.2–5 (= Micah 4.1–5) and the ‘Psalms of Zion’. Even if editorial considerations have required the title of Willis’ essay to refer only to Isaiah among the prophets, students of Micah will also find this a study not to be overlooked.
Willis details nine correspondences which unite the prophetic and psalms texts in question, nodding respectfully in the direction of scholars who have preceded him along this path. His contribution is not so much to uncover unknown similarities as to place recognised ones and the scholars who have dedicated extensive studies to them in an ordered and accessible scheme, and then to do the same more briefly with scholarly reconstructions of the relationship between the Isaiah and Micah texts. The service is well rendered.
Following his own 1969 study (ZAW 81), Willis is on more innovative ground when he explores the structural similarity between the two prophetic texts, each in its own immediate context. After delineating the (at least) three-way web of relationships which unite Isa 2, Mal 4, and the Zion psalms, Willis sides with von Rad, Levenson, and others in favour of the antiquity of the theological concepts found in the three texts. The statement of the two prophetic texts, placed within the psalms, ‘would pass for one of the Songs of Zion, or at least for a prophetic oracle which borrowed heavily from such a song’. The prophetic texts take up the same Zion-exalting confession of the psalms in order to resist the ‘fundamental hindrance’ which in time the prophets recognise in Judah’s ethical declension.
Willis’ contribution is two-fold. Having already recognised the favour of ‘ordering’ that he has paid us, one now mentions only the glimpse he has given us of the relocation of the Zion songs in prophetic texts. What was celebrated unconditionally in the Psalter is now reframed within the ethical conditionality to which Isaiah and Micah give passionate testimony.
The juxtaposition of the Limburg and Willis essays produces a fine photograph of divergent, though hardly contradictory, tendencies in Isaiah studies. While Limburg touches upon similar OT passages on his way to NT and modern contexts for the same phraseology, Willis remains within OT literature to produce a more detailed sketch of the relationship among the voices which are there to be heard.
III
A third series of contributions, not sharply to be distinguished from those I have surveyed in section two, take up the matter of ‘unity’ which has kept Isaiah scholars busy in the past two decades. These studies illuminate issues of structural, compositional, and thematic unity from a remarkable number of angles. Often ‘unity’ is a subtext which never quite fades from view as an author goes about some different task.
J. Barton (‘Ethics in the Book of Isaiah’, 67–77) observes that not since Duhm have the scroll’s Proto-, Deutero-, and Trito- components endured such subordination to constructions of its unity. Barton sketches the essential quietism of the prophet’s ethics, as well as his concern with the ‘attitudinal’ issues of pride, folly and a kind of noblesse oblige which counteracts these. Finally, Isaiah’s ethics are thoroughly theological, deriving from a fixed order which Yahweh’s pre-eminence justifies and sustains. Barton queries whether this coherent system of ethics extends into chapters 40–55, concluding that most of it does. The ideas which comprise Deutero-Isaiah’s ‘ethical monotheism’ are strikingly ‘present in embryo’ in Isaiah of Jerusalem, though Barton would not push these commonalities to the point of denying the books ‘obvious dislocations and signs of complex growth’. Suggestively, Barton suggests a parallel to recognisable deuteronomic/deuteronomistic ‘flavour’ in the equally acquirable ability to discern ‘Isaianic’ seasoning. Thus, from a thematic angle, Barton fills out the picture provided by Williamson (Book Called Isaiah), whom he admires.
J.J. Schmitt (‘The City as Woman in Isaiah 1–39’, 95–119) justifies at the outset the workmanlike pace of his selection when he announces his purpose to ‘simply study, in the book’s sequence, those passages where the city appears as a woman’. He does no less, availing us of a neat survey of Isaiah texts on ‘a subject that comes up more readily today’ than in, say, von Rad’s time, when an extended study of the Zion traditions could get away with not engaging the city’s feminine imagery. Grammar requires that the city be talked about as feminine, but Schmitt’s interest lies in those texts where ‘the prophet goes beyond … (grammatical) gender .. into a depiction of the city as a woman’.
In dialogue with feminist Isaiah scholarship but focusing persistently on his chosen texts, Schmitt shows that the city-as-woman motif was important for both Isaiah and his editor(s). Indeed, the book’s redactor is at pains to develop this imagery, which makes plain its importance for both prophet and tradition. Schmitt concludes, arguably with more caution than his evidence requires, that ‘we perhaps do not need to attribute to Isaiah anti-feminine feelings’.
J. Blenkinsopp (‘The Servant and the Servants in Isaiah and the Formation of the Book’, 155–175) takes up a topic he has treated elsewhere, this time to see what light it can shed on the scroll’s composition in the ‘unsettled climate’ following Bernhard Duhm’s dethronement. If the classical tripartite division of Isaiah no longer commands assent as an explication of the book’s evolutionary stages, it at least serves the more modest purpose of identifying empirical ‘points of departure’ at the literary level. From that point forward, however, scholarly reconstructions of the book’s compositional process occupy a level playing field, since conventional fixed points like the break between chs 55 and 56 no longer qualify as ‘assured results’.
Blenkinsopp raises the issue of an equally defensible unit comprising chs 40–48. He is less keen to argue in favour of one arrangement of the text at the expense of another than he is to establish the point that ‘different emphases, perceptions and concerns have been embodied sequentially in different literary structures laid down in successive layers throughout the editorial lifespan of the book, with the result that no one solution can adequately account for the arrangement of the book as we have it.’
As Blenkinsopp shows, current Isaiah scholars do not find the flight from the ‘assured results’ of the tripartite structure and the concerns about unity which frequently accompany this to be a march towards simplicity. Rather, this movement often includes the implicit criticism that well-worn models—far from being too abstruse—are too simplistic to account for the scroll’s dizzying complexity.
The reader would be mistaken were he to conclude that Blenkinsopp’s introductory critique was setting the stage for an abandonment of compositional concerns in favour of an angle more in line with the first group of essays mentioned in this review. To the contrary, Blenkinsopp’s approach is stubbornly historical. He insists upon engaging the old questions, though from a fresh angle and without undue reverence for the classical solutions. Blenkinsopp notices that the use of db[ language varies as one moves, respectively, from chs 40–48 to 49–55 and then on to 56–66. In the first section, the ‘servant’ is the entire Jacob community. In the second, the term is used with an individual, prophetic referent, in keeping with Deuteronomistic theory and perhaps referring to Jeremiah. In the third, the reference is again plural, though now referring to a minority, even sectarian group within the community of the Return. Blenkinsopp explains the relationship between chs 49–55 and 56–66 along master-disciple lines, pressing the literary evidence into the service of social-historical reconstruction. In his words, the sectarian thinking present in the last section ‘draws an invisible line through the community as a whole, and yet is intelligible only when we postulate a social coordinate in the form of an actual group apt to generate such ideas.’ For Blenkinsopp, the evidence encourages us to envisage a relationship between text and history whereby the work of a prophetic figure (the db[ of chs 49–55) produced an eschatologically-oriented, sectarian community (the µydb[ of chs 56–66) at odds with the people’s official leadership.
Apart from the considerable force of Blenkinsopp’s particular argument, the value of this essay lies in the methodology it exemplifies. Having sketched out the almost impenetrable density of the text, Blenkinsopp might well have stressed the text’s final form or its effect upon readers as the only accessible ‘datum’. He does not. Rather, he engages vigorously in old-fashioned literary analysis and then hustles on to the even more speculative terrain that historical reconstruction necessarily inhabits. The self-evident quality of this piece is, unfortunately, blemished by typographical errors in the Hebrew quotations.
J.N. Oswalt’s particular reach for unity (‘Righteousness in Isaiah: A Study of The Function of Chapters 55–66 [sic] in the Present Structure of the Book’, 177–191) is argued upon ‘logical’ rather than ‘historic’ grounds. One might just as well substitute ‘biblical-theological” for Oswalt’s preferred adjective, for he explains the scroll’s tripartite structure in terms of its nuanced theological dialectic. The focus is upon the qdx word-group and the well-worn observation that it is used differently in chs 40–55 than in 1–39. According to Oswalt, but against J. Scullion’s 1971 study, the word is used differently yet again in 56–66. It is a commonplace that ‘righteousness’ in the early chapters refers to the people’s moral conduct, whereas the referent in chs 40–55 is the covenant-keeping and faithful deliverance which YHWH achieves on behalf of his errant ones.
Oswalt’s proposal identifies the concept of righteousness in chs 56–66 as the reconciling notion which sets righteousness as described in the preceding sections in its proper and non-self-contradictory context. Without these final chapters, the book would present an election (40–55) and an obedience (1–39) that are mutually exclusive. Indeed, qdx in 56–66 is the ‘synthesizing element’ which brings both concerns together in ways which neither of the first two sections on its own can do.
With respect to the implications for the scroll’s composition, Oswalt teases rather than informs—he has been explicit elsewhere—but his silence on the issue is compensated for by what is a rich, theologically-inclined treatment. If he ultimately charges a single concept with too large an explanatory task, this can be welcomed as a challenge to complement this particular study with others which trace the same kinds of conceptual development within the Isaiah scroll.
Oswalt’s synthetic reading inhabits the opposite end of the spectrum from the speculative reconstruction of P. Hanson, who appears as Oswalt’s foil in two footnotes. Yet his departure is not in a direction which requires the modern reader completely to configure form and meaning. Rather, Oswalt clearly believes meaning is ‘there’ in the text, though not adequately exposed by the kind of historicist interpretation he deplores. References to ‘chapters 55–66’ in an essay and volume of this calibre (even in the article’s title!) are unfortunate and avoidable.
In his characteristically fine prose, W.L. Holladay asks, ‘Was Trito-Isaiah Deutero-Isaiah After All?’ (193–217) and then argues on the basis of a stylistic ‘signature’ that the two are indeed just one. In the wake of the breakdown of certainty about the division between chs 40–55 and 56–66, numerous proposals for explaining the relationship have emerged. Holladay reviews these, suggesting in the end that what differences there are reflect two stages in the career of a single prophet, one Babylonian, the other Jerusalemite.
The burden of Holladay’s article is to prove the singular authorship of the two sections (plus ch. 35) by way of a ‘signature’ which anyone—even a prophet’s disciples—would have found difficult to reproduce. Defensible methodology demands that such a signature be suitably obscure or complex. For Holladay, that the ‘creative expansion of short sequences of poetry in Jeremiah’ occurs in both 40–55 and 56–66 is evidence enough, especially in the light of the intricacy of such developmental borrowing.
The mere use of similar language by both texts would, of course, fall short of the goal. It is, rather, a pattern of re-use of Jeremiah material by Isaiah 40–66 that constitutes Holladay’s proof. This not only occurs in a variety of genres, but the adaptation sometimes transfers phraseology from an ‘original’ use in one genre in Jeremiah and employs it in a fresh genre in Isaiah. For example, Jer 2.32 is a disputation text that is used in Isa 49.14–18 to dispute ‘Israel’s assertion of dereliction by YHWH and continues with a proclamation of salvation.’ Holladay provides several more examples which are straight-forward enough not to depend on reconstruction of texts from either corpus, each calculated to demonstrate re-use of Jeremiah material in novel ways, even as a ‘witty reversal’ of a traditional expression (of Jer 2.25 in Isa 57.10).
In these and in his supplementary examples, where extraneous considerations would not produce proof of literary relationship if these cases were not bolstered by less ambiguous ones elsewhere, Holladay attempts to demonstrate that ‘the diction of Jeremiah … entered deeply into the phraseology of Deutero-Isaiah’. Again, each pair of prophetic texts relates in some ‘inimitable’ way, once in an uncanny ‘raggedness of style’ which takes one form in Jeremiah’s idol-parody and a slightly different one in Deutero-Isaiah’s.
Holladay finds these modes of ‘creative expansion’ scattered throughout Isaiah 40–55 and 56–66 and again in ch. 35, a passage which he joins Torrey, Scott, McKenzie, and Ackroyd in relating very closely to Deutero-Isaiah. Importantly, he finds them nowhere else in the Isaianic corpus, nor does he find any other antecedent material which is similarly re-shaped in the latter two sections of Isaiah. This creative dependency, typically by way of complex expansion, is thus understood as Deutero-Isaiah’s signature. Presumably, for Holladay, the prophet reshaped earlier preached material—largely to be found in chs 40–55—in order to respond to the changing circumstances of exile and restoration. This latter block, 56–66 and perhaps 35, is now ‘brought into the orbit of Deutero-Isaiah’.
Holladay’s study, marred only by an absent scheva on p.206 and an unfortunate typo in the dates in his concluding statement on p. 217, stands out in this volume. This is not only because linguistic and literary skills mesh without flaw, but also because Holladay performs, with a self-effacing lack of comment, the kind of intertextual work urged in other of this volume’s contributions. Holladay’s work, however, is historically focused, representing a current within Isaiah studies that embraces the break-up of the conventional paradigms whilst holding onto confidence that carefully argued historical judgements remain possible and worthwhile.
From a fresh angle, Holladay has reaffirmed that there is a pattern of correspondences between Deutero-Isaiah and Jeremiah. That the line of dependence runs from Deutero-Isaiah directly back to Jeremiah rather than through a populated prophetic neighbourhood is assumed by Holladay, where perhaps it might have been briefly argued. If so compelling a rhetorician as Deutero-Isaiah could evade historical notice, it may be possible that others who expressed themselves similarly to Jeremiah achieved the same, even if by accident. Deutero-Isaiah might then have applied his considerable skill by developing the stock-in-trade of a prophetic guild rather than that of just one individual. However, Holladay’s assumptions about dependence upon Jeremiah are, beyond doubt, the economical ones given the available date. To insist would be to quibble and to ask Holladay to re-state what he has worked out previously.
H.G.M. Williamson in 1994 described O.H. Steck as ‘grappling seriously with the kind of questions which Duhm and his successors left unanswered’. He might have been writing a preface to Steck’s lengthy contribution to this volume (‘Autor Und/Oder Redaktor in Jesaja 56–66’, 219–259), for Steck’s essay is peppered with both questions and exclamation marks. The former relentlessly press the case for his brand of empiricist text observation. The latter register ironic surprise at the persistence of the ‘herrkömmliche Vorverständnisse’ to which he finds recent scholars returning time and again as though by force of habit.
Steck labels his own 1985 monograph on the composition of Isaiah a ‘radikaler Vorschlag’. Indeed he has little patience for more timid approaches which fail fully to reckon with the calamitous, post-Duhmian ‘Zussamenbruch aller Gewißheiten’ in research on the prophets, Trito-Isaiah before all others. Steck’s appraisal of the current situation is that ‘nichts von alledem ist klar’, a circumstance that pleads for ‘Gegebene’ in place of what Steck will label, in turn, ‘Abstraktionsprodukte’, ‘herkömmlichen Erwartungen’, ‘Vormeinungen’, ‘Vorentscheidungen’, ‘Grundvoraussetzungen’, ‘fraglose Prämisse’, ‘Dekret’, ‘textferne Spekulationene’ and ‘Vorurteil’. All of these refer to the habits of scholars who, in Steck’s view, enter the text of Trito-Isaiah knowing already what forms, boundaries, and compositional processes are there to be found. A frequent object of his ire is the notion of small, isolated textual units that derive from a speaking prophet and which were later developed into larger, though still often isolated, textual units. Wolfgang Lau’s Schriftgelehrte Prophetie in Jes 56–66 is singled out for special attention as a classic example of inquiry into the books’ composition which from the outset knows too much. Steck savages Lau’s notion of small, independent units which are built upon by later redactors as the product of the ‘disastrous presupposition’ that we know what authors and redactors in the transmission of prophetic texts were and did. Steck is adamant that we do not, though at points his own reconstruction suggests that he does. He is especially unsettled by Lau’s failure to read chs 65–66 as a coherent piece which both closes the book that existed as chs 1–64 and represents God’s answer to the prayer of chs 63–64.
Apart from his own detailed explanation of the compositional process, Steck thinks that very little can yet be known about the process behind the text. He argues for an ‘historische Synchronlesung’ of the entire work that takes the book’s final form in the early second century BCE as its starting point and reads all sixty-six chapters as a coherently worked-out ‘sinntragendes Buchganze’.
With regard to the state of Isaiah studies, it is instructive that Steck—who is not averse to using polarising language to separate himself from traditional scholars—marches in a direction far removed from that of others of the guild’s ‘rebels’. For him, the problem with conventional Isaiah scholarship is not that it holds to an obsolete historicist paradigm, but that it is not historical enough. His intention is not to understand ‘wie man Jesaja in späteren Zeiten bis hin zu heute gar anhand neuer literaturwissenschaftlicher Methoden verstehen kann, sondern wie das Jesajabuch in Finalformation zu seiner Zeit verstanden werden will und verstanden worden ist.’ In the light of Steck’s wider essay and other writings, it would be difficult to overestimate the confidence which the final clause of this sentence represents. The question to be engaged by current scholarship is ‘eine historische Frage’ that can only be answered with suitably historical methods.
In spite of Steck’s sharp distinctions between his own well-documented ‘Vorschlag’ and the work of both older critical and more recent scholars, it would be wrong to see him as an anomaly on the current scene. However reluctantly, he claims common cause with current scholars who trace the indications of conscious and intelligent unity in the long and diverse book called Isaiah. The final form of Isaiah is the product of a professional, scribal ‘Tradentenmilieu’ whose creative textual custodians produced a coherent extension of Isaianic insights to the different periods of the book’s compilation, from the eight to the second centuries. Indeed, the Isaiah scroll is not alone in this regard and must be studied together with other prophetic works which have undergone similar treatment. For example, Steck wonders whether the prayer of chs 63-64 was not formulated specifically to close off a penultimate form of a ‘Jesajabuch’, in rough parallel with the role of Lamentations (esp. ch. 5) with Jeremiah.
Steck is concerned to demonstrate that the classical critical distinction between author(s) and redactor(s) does not emerge from the evidence which the text yields up. Rather, ‘Verfasserschaft und Redaktion von Anfang an ineinander übergehen.’ Alluding to his earlier work, Steck argues once more against the notion of authored text units which are then redacted by compilers. In place of this model, he suggests that the scribal practice of ‘productive relecture/Weitergabe’ is capable of composing large literary pieces (Isaiah 35, for example) with the self-conscious purpose of joining and expanding upon existing (prophetic) works which are also large and heretofore self-standing.
Steck’s essay may—like those approaches which he critiques—be too sure of itself. Yet it is a welcome addition to the snapshot of Isaiah scholarship which this volume presents. To his credit, Steck is able to press towards the fuller consequences of the bell which tolls over Duhm and his disciples. If he occasionally fails the discipline of methodological agnosticism that he proposes, his programme nonetheless has a purifying effect on a field of study which is wont to fall back upon premises that it has officially discarded.
Having noted the attention Steck gives to chs 65–66 and his criticism of Lau, it is appropriate here to jump ahead to the last essay of this volume, M.A. Sweeney’s ‘Prophetic Exegesis in Isaiah 65–66’ (pp. 455–474). As the author of a definitive study of the Isaiah scroll’s beginning, Sweeney is the obvious candidate to write the ‘full study of Isaiah 65–66 … that demonstrates the role of these chapters as the conclusion to the book of Isaiah’, a task which Sweeney believes has been heretofore neglected. Accepting with Lau that these chapters represent ‘scribal prophecy’, Sweeney identifies their purpose as ‘to announce the creation of a new world order centered around Zion, to define the character of those who will be a part of the new world order, and to exhort the audience to join in the new creation.’
These final chapters gather up previous citations from the scroll in an effort to exhort readers to become the ‘seed’ which shall possess such a future, thus functioning as the conclusion to the book as a whole rather than to any particular component piece, an over-arching purpose which Lau’s study fails adequately to appreciate. Indeed, ‘the authors of Isaiah 56–66, and many who preceded them, treated the earlier Isaianic writings as a source of revelation that stood at the basis of the creation of new prophecy in the final form of the book.’
Sweeney’s tone echoes that of many of this volume’s contributors, for he seeks and locates intelligence and purpose across larger units of Isaiah, an approach which characterises the reach for unity which vigorously presents itself in these essays. More particularly, he affirms the principle of ‘scribal prophecy’ which Lau, among others, advances, though without embracing the more atomistic elements of Lau’s presentation.
Starting at the other end, H.G.M. Williamson (‘Relocating Isaiah 1:2–9’, 263–277) takes ‘traditional source-and-redaction analysis’ onto admittedly speculative terrain. Williamson observes that ch. 1 of Isaiah is unsatisfactorily understood as a summary, since it actually quite selective of the themes scattered throughout the book which it takes up. It reads better as a summons to active and responsive reading. However, scholars arrived at the ‘summary’ conclusion precisely because it is in some sense representative of a book which has its own proper introduction at the beginning of chapter two.
Williamson justifies his reconstruction of the sources of chapter one by noting a tension in the developing scholarly consensus regarding the nature of ch. 1. On the one hand, the introduction was likely compiled and placed in its current location at a late date, rendering it unlikely that it ever existed as an independent piece. On the other, most or all of the material in ch. 1 derives from Isaiah himself.
From this consensual and unremarkable point of departure, Williamson leads his reader down a far less familiar path. The argument which animates this journey is that the editor of ch. 1 used the rest of the book as his source, carefully choosing those elements which usefully contributed to his hortatory introduction of the book. Three separate units (vv. 2b–3, 4, and 5–9) are identified and a search is then undertaken in Proto-Isaiah material for contexts which might have made these words available to the editor of ch. 1.
Williamson’s method is a ‘reach for unity’ of the kind that has flourished in recent years. He is at pains to recognise the ‘precarious’ nature of his reconstruction, and to differentiate this from exegesis of the text, though he believes that the former contributes helpfully to the latter. Having stated his caveats, however, Williamson presents an argument which is always attractive and at points compelling, at least for those who are willing to grant the validity of such speculative forays into the process of composition which underlies this ‘scroll of Isaiah’.
Alongside the satisfaction of reading such a carefully argued reconstructive analysis, one is plagued by a fundamental question which may have an obvious answer but which Williamson does not entertain in this article: Might not the editor responsible for compiling this introduction more likely have borrowed from his source text (the rest of Isaiah) rather than ‘taken’ or ‘extracted’ from it? By removing the material now found in ch. 1 from its original contexts, the editor has sufficiently disturbed those contexts so as to allow Williamson to identify precisely those points as the source of the ch. 1 material. Might an editor not have been expected to copy rather than to extract, leaving the original material in situ, whilst employing it for a different purpose in ch. 1?
Taken in conjunction with his Book Called Isaiah, essays like this and others from Williamson’s pen continue to fill out a coherent if admittedly speculative theory of the composition of Isaiah, one which must be taken into account by any who presents an alternative. More to the point of this review article, Williamson represents the more daring edge of the guild of traditional source-critical practitioners who continue to mull over Isaiah’s complex-yet-unified text. Perhaps less cautiously than, say, Holladay—though self-consciously so—Williamson’s curiosity focuses on the ancient past rather than the modern reader’s present. Indeed, his subject of enquiry is the pre-history of the canonical text, which requires of its practitioner the confidence that the process is accessible to the modern scholar. This volume does us the service of presenting some of the best work currently emerging from this venturously ‘traditional’ sector of Isaiah studies.
The attempt to read this volume as a snapshot of Isaiah studies at the end of the 1990s is complicated by the decision, nearly two decades on, to reissue J. Day’s still serviceable but also widely available study of the Isaiah Apocalypse under an almost identical title (originally published as ‘A Case of Inner Scriptural Interpretation: The Dependence of Isaiah 26:13–27:11 on Hosea 13:14–14:10 and its Relevance to Some Theories of the Redaction of the “Isaiah Apocalypse”’, JTS 30 [1980], 309–319; republished without the first part of the title, 357–368). The ‘slightly revised and updated’ essay is, so far as I can see, altered only by the reformatting of verse and bibliographical references; the original Hebrew formatting is superior. Presented as a revision, it pays the author no service to find that ‘the latest commentary dealing with Isaiah 24–27’ is Wildberger’s 1978 publication.
Still, Day’s article remains cogent and pertinent in this day of unity studies. If, as he argues, Isa 26.13–27.11 depends upon and restates the Hosea text, then at least this portion of the Isaiah Apocalypse ought not to be dissected and attributed to different authors.
Like Day, W.A.M. Beuken (‘Isaiah 30: A Prophetic Oracle Transmitted in Two Successive Paradigms’, 369–397) is concerned to discover the coherence of a relatively small section of text. From the start, Beuken reminds his reader of recent scholars’ predilection for discerning ‘well-wrought constructions which are mutually related’ where critical scholars who, tellingly, are now routinely labelled ‘traditional’ found no ‘purposive development’. Beuken, searching for coherence in modest spaces if not unity across grander ones, strikes a quite modern pose.
His pages are a fine exegetical treatise which manages to sharpen the lines that separate Isaiah scholarship today from those which held the field, say, a quarter of a century ago. Honouring his recent forebears, Beuken accepts the threefold division of ch. 30 which the guild has been wont to receive as assured results. Moving beyond them, however, he dismisses the notion of three unrelated oracles in favour of an Isaianic deposit (1–17) which was then developed by the tradition in two complementary ways. First, Isaiah ben Amoz’ own verses are actualised and expanded into an initial paradigm, called ‘the journey of the stubborn children to Egypt and back home’ and occupying vv. 1–26. Second, the tradition proffers a second paradigm—‘the theophany on the mountain of YHWH’, 27–33—which answers an ‘unavoidable question’ left unattended by the first: ‘How can the exiles return to a land that the Assyrian super-power, and other nations in its wake, has taken in possession?’
Far from passively juxtaposing irreconcilable oracles, an intelligent and cohesive redactional process ‘has completed the transmission of the prophetic message by placing it in the recognizable and flexible framework of “the great narratives” which have led Israel on its way through history.’
Beuken’s piece illuminates the contemporary landscape of Isaiah scholarship by its comfortable dismissals of ‘traditional opinion’ and ‘old assumption’ at the same time as he builds his case for coherence upon exegetical argument that freely claims the insights of those past masters. As one charts the movement which this volume reflects, one ought to speak of evolution rather than revolution. But if the harsher word were in order, Beuken’s method would require that it be a velvet one.
D.W. Van Winkle’s survey of how the communities represented by 1QIsaa, 1QIsab, LXX and the Vulgate received the striking universalism of Isa 56.6 would fit more suitably in Volume II of this work (‘An Inclusive Authoritative Text in Exclusive Communities’, 423–440). The relevance for the volume in which it stands is perhaps to be found in the author’s concluding ‘questions which merit further attention’, since these touch upon the placement of this problematic text within the larger book.
Van Winkle argues that 1QIsaa omits trç and inserts hwhy µç ta ˚rblw because the community could envisage foreigners neither executing cultic service nor loving God. He may be right, but the evidence is not so straight-forward as he appears to believe. In fact, µv ta ˚rb ≥≥≥ trv is standard language for exactly the kind of cultic service which Van Winkle suspects the Qumran community of resisting (cf. Deut. 10.8, 21.5). If in fact 1QIsaa takes away proximity to God with one hand via the omission of trç and bha, it restores it with the other by the provision of µv ˚rb.
Van Winkle argues that the Covenantors saw themselves as sons of Zadok and ‘privileged’ texts that demoted both foreigner and Levites to non-priestly rungs of the ladder. If 1QIsaa 56.6 is up to anything at all, could it then be allowing the ‘radical equivalency’ of 56.6 to bring foreigners in as far as the Levites, but not as far as truly Zadokite priests? On balance, E. Tov’s explanation of the change as a concession to ‘general usage’, as in Ps. 113.2, is to be preferred.
Van Winkle’s plausible case that the toned-down readings in three of these documents (excluding 1QIsab) represents particularistic exegesis is marred by a considerable number of orthographic and editorial errors, not least in the biblical texts presented for analysis. In addition, his identification of the LXX’s provision of douleuvein for trv as ‘odd’ on the basis of wider LXX patterns fails to mention that the translator of LXX Isaiah is habitually resistant to virtually all known translational norms, only some of which represent theological exegesis. These criticisms are far from emptying the article of value. It merely awaits refinement.
R.E. Clements’ exploration of Isa 60.1-22 in the light of the developing Isaiah tradition (‘“Arise, Shine; For Your Light has Come”: A Basic Theme of the Isaianic Tradition’) reveals Duhm to have been not only an aid to understanding the scroll, but an impediment as well. Thus, the collapse of his critical legacy is not only an end, but also a hopeful beginning.
The rise of the critical approach to Isaiah studies brought a ‘new preoccupation with the history-related significance’ of the book, a concern that was to block attention to definitions of ‘unity’ which have only recently claimed the stage. Over against tight identification of concrete texts with particular historical circumstances, however, the ‘highly poetic and metaphorical nature’ of the prophetic piece under review reveals how ‘very broad and open the actual message it contains really is’. Clements finds his passage to be devoid of precise indications of its origin, an observation which might have troubled both pre-critical and Duhmian interpreters, though for distinct reasons. Better, then, to begin ‘with the recognition that the prophecy belongs within a very long tradition of promissory assurances and expectations concerned with Jerusalem and Mount Zion.’ It is a midrashic compilation upon a theme, elaborately connected with earlier material.
Further, the ‘undue confidence’ afforded Duhm’s clearly defined tripartite structure dimmed insight into interrelations between and among the different sections of the book that are more complex than Duhm imagined. En route to affirming that the artfully allusive authors of chs 56-66 (‘the case for believing that these eleven chapters originated from a single author has effectively collapsed’) had access to a written version of chs 1-55, Clements helpfully contrasts his view to others (e.g. Steck’s) which focus more narrowly upon chs 40-55. The authors have in view statements made as far back as chs 1-39, even if these are viewed through the lens of chs 40-55. Far from being a literary product whose genesis can be traced to a single moment, the passage recasts one central focus of the Isaiah scroll (roughly, chs 1-55) ‘to make it relevant to the city’s role within the widely dispersed Jewish communities of the Persian era and the future of these among the nations’. Events compel this new vision of a complex ‘Israel’ to combine the honouring of a ‘Jerusalem community’ with the recognition of Diaspora as an enduring reality.
Here Clements’ approach is at its most pleasing, for it links literary analysis of text and allusion with exilic historical survey to provide a plausible understanding not only of one chapter in Isaiah (62), but also of the reflective reading of an earlier form of the book from exile or beyond. ‘In its finished form’, Clements eventually tells us, ‘the prophecy serves as a résumé of the words of hope which have appeared at intervals in the long literary journey which constitutes the book of Isaiah. This is not because it did not relate to a genuine historical city and community, but is due to the manner in which it addresses itself to a long-lived situation.’
One sub-text to the search for unity in Isaiah studies is the recognition of (inner-)biblical exegesis as a driving force within the development of biblical texts. After M. Fishbane, this is nearly a commonplace, but its employment in Clements’ analysis of Isaiah 60 makes a plausible case for seeing the text as a prophecy which preserves an earlier Isaianic theme while adding to it something fresh. This development takes place in the quest to come to grips with a reality that contemplates both Jerusalem’s longed-for greatness and a status quo that continued, in the authors’ time, to fall short.
IV
Finally, this volume contains a number of thematic studies, some of which incline in the direction of biblical theology on a chastened scale.
T.N.D. Mettinger (‘In Search of the Hidden Structure: YHWH as King in Isaiah 40–55’, 143–154) updates a previous study which asks how central is the concept of YHWH as king in Deutero-Isaiah. More specifically, Mettinger asks whether the ‘tripartite mythopoetic pattern comprised of battle-kingship-palace is to be found in the words of the Prophet of Consolation, warning us in advance that his study is limited to the search for literary motifs and so will not follow Mowinckel in asking whether the passages under study witness to an actual Thronbesteigungsfest.
That notions of battle (e.g. 51.9–11), kingship (e.g. 52.7), and temple (e.g. 44.26–28) occur in Deutero-Isaiah is indisputable. Mettinger’s burden is to discover whether disparate references and allusions to these concepts occur because of an underlying ‘hidden’ structure which unites the three in recognisable ANE fashion. His literary analysis suggests that they do.
Though it is perilous to label anything ‘uniquely Israelite’ these days, Mettinger does so with the ‘historicization’ of the mythopoetic battle motif to the Exodus and its repeat performance in the deliverance from Babylon. Mettinger is adventurous enough to explain this move as a function of a change in Israel’s liturgical calendar, shifting in the process from literary analysis to historical reconstruction and back again in a way that sharpens the contrast between his methodology and that of other contributors to this volume. Where others find ideology projected back onto a past that was inaccessible to post-exilic imagination and remains so to modern scholars, Mettinger considers that the Isaiah scroll still has something to say about its writers and the historical processes and communities which produced them. The ‘YHWH malak’ psalms do the same, Deutero-Isaiah alluding purposefully to them in order to ‘strike chords that were well known to his listeners, chords that they would associate with the joyful celebration of YHWH as king’.
A confessional stance, otherwise not easily visible in this compendium, is represented by M.C. Lind’s contribution (‘Political Implications of Isaiah 6’, 317–338). Lind’s point of departure is his observation that each prophetic call narrative in the HB represents ‘a response to Israel’s crisis occasioned by the threat of Near Eastern empires’. Isaiah 6 is no exception, coming as it does in the context of Ahaz’ lurch towards Assyria under pressure from Aram-Ephraim.
Lind’s conviction is that prophetic call narratives serve as a kind of ‘centre’. In Isaiah, the genre as it appears in ch. 6 presents a quietistic concept of political power which casts its judgmental shadow over Judah’s internal (chs 2–5) and external (chs 7–8) politics.
In an argument that is suggestive when not convincing and mildly marred by a number of unfortunate vocalisations, Lind articulates an Isaianic rejection of the politics of power and militarism as an incursion into the sacred space of Yahweh’s rule. The ‘gentle politics of Shiloah, a prophetic politics of divine wisdom based upon Yahweh’s war’, is the acceptable alternative. Only by overt revelation (ch. 6) and the pressure of Yahweh’s strong hand was Judah able to discern the virtue of the latter. By and large, biblical Judah-Israel failed in her task as exemplar to the nations of such Yahweh-dependent politics.
In a postscript, Lind traces the prophetic call into the NT and onward to an exhortation to today’s Christian church, perhaps justified by the universalistic intention of Israel’s role as exemplar. As represented by this compendium, the guild of Isaiah scholars preserves a space for theologically argued paranesis.
While J. Jensen’s study of the mysterious figure whose overreaching ambition and consequent casting down to Sheol occasions some fine poetry and encasing prose in Isaiah 14 breaks no new ground, it expertly assembles the biblical, extra-biblical, and secondary literature which a lengthier study would require (‘Helel Ben Shah5ar [Isaiah 14:12–15] in Bible and Tradition’, 339–356). Opaque features of this taunt-song—‘a magnificent composition, rich in imagination and allusive force’—insure that ‘virtually every aspect of the piece presents a problem, and … none of them has found a sure solution.’
Nor does Jensen provide any. Rather, his achievement is to have classified proposed solutions of those difficulties, in the mix availing us of a rich bibliography, and to have delineated the ‘triangular’ relationship that exists between the text under review, Ezek 28.1–19, and Gen 2.7–3.24. If Helel’s identity is not transparent in the Isaiah text, it becomes less foggy in the deuterocanonical and extrabiblical ‘Bible and tradition’ to which Jensen’s title refers, not excluding the New Testament. In that diverse literature, the three mentioned texts are increasingly read in the light of each other, producing a ‘fallen angel(s)’ theologoumenon which goes some way towards explaining the presence of evil in a monotheistically created world. Any student of the themes mentioned here need look no further for a convenient and suggestive point of departure.
C.C. Broyles complements his editorial role by contributing a refinement of the truism that Isaiah 40–55 shares liturgical language which can be found in the Psalter (‘The Citations of Yahweh in Isaiah 44:26–28’, 399–421). At the end of Isaiah 44, Yahweh’s self-presentation begins with lk hc[ hwhy ykna. In the MT, eight lines of mostly bicola follow, largely introduced by further participles and ending with four descriptions of Yahweh as …rmeaoh;. Broyles queries whether the expression might refer to statements rehearsed on Yahweh’s behalf in liturgical settings, their content reflected in well-known exilic psalms. If so, the prophet is ‘pointing to what the people have heard of Yahweh in their public worship’.
In order to justify his positive answer, Broyles first demonstrates the peculiarly close parallels—both thematic and lexical—between the Isaiah text and the pertinent psalms. He then attempts to confirm that these psalms are exilic in content, if not in final composition, so that they would have been known to an exilic public and available to an exilic prophet.
The scattered nature of the shared language across ‘several psalms, each of which reflects distinct concerns’ and, conversely, their clustering in the Isaiah text persuade Broyles that the direction of borrowing is from Psalms to Isaiah. Deutero-Isaiah is ‘concentrating key, scattered psalmic phrases into this climactic “Cyrus oracle”’, a good-news, bad-news ploy that affirms the imminent reality of confidences voiced liturgically, but which applies Moses and David imagery with sharpish irony to the pagan Cyrus.
Broyles’ proposal is hedged as ‘very conceivable’ and shares the vulnerability of cumulative argument. In addition, he might have addressed the possibility that his cited psalms and the Isaiah text independently refer to a shared liturgical deposit. However, his modesty may take the edge off what is in fact a satisfying argument. In an arena where final proof of compositional questions is not to be had, he has produced a plausible explanation of the repeated rmah which does justice to the relevant texts from two distinct literatures. In the effort, he adds colour to the Isaianic portrait of Cyrus and conceivable background to the perception and reception (or not) of this odd saviour by a curious Golah.
V
If this volume is representative of the guild—one senses that it is—then the high quality of most of these contributions should be enough to persuade the sceptic that Isaiah studies are robust. The ‘new paradigm’ rhetoric suggests a consciousness of having reached a cross-roads and of having veered off in promising new directions, though the product is frequently less revolutionary than its packaging. Further, the footnotes in this work render evident the role which many of these writers have played in sustaining prior scholarly discourse within Isaiah studies rather than dismissing it. What is more, unity—far from tidying up the stage—can be a complicated phenomenon.
What is positively encouraging is the amount of energetic prowess being applied to compositional and close exegetical issues, particularly with regard to the Isaiah scroll’s interaction with other biblical traditions. Somehow, such excavatory labours co-exist with a more recent attention to the reader, whether playfully bewildered or immersed the solemn labour of configuring meaning.
Where once Duhm reigned, the king’s death now is loudly proclaimed. Yet his ghost still haunts the party, even as the guests seek a successor. The king is dead. Long live the king!
Canter Bridge 
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