Isaiah

Isaiah () and Huldah (; see ); and again, twenty years later, when he had already entered on his office, by the invasion of Tiglath-Pileser and his career of conquest. Ahaz, king of Judah, at this crisis refused to co-operate with the kings of Israel and Syria in opposition to the Assyrians, and was on that account attacked and defeated by Rezin of Damascus and Pekah of Israel (; ).

; , 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 judgment 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.

Since the late 20th century, 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, scholars have since 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.

References

External links

* [http://www.sermonsfortoday.org/browse/sermonsinseries.php?series=Series%20on%20Isaiah Sermons on Isaiah]
* [http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08179b.htm Isaiah (Isaias)] at the Catholic Encyclopedia
* [http://www.isaiahdecoded.com] Avraham Gileadi's new translation and commentary on Isaiah
* [http://ocafs.oca.org/FeastSaintsViewer.asp?SID=4&ID=1&FSID=101331 Prophet Isaiah] Orthodox icon and synaxarion