CRACKING ISAIAH:
SOLVING THE MOST CONFUSING PROPHET
Tony Malone Jan 2007
Introduction: Why I Did It This Way and What I Found

Why is Isaiah so difficult to read? Why have scholars argued for centuries about what he means? Why are his words so important to the Israelite religion? Who is Isaiah? Who ELSE is Isaiah?

Arguably the most confusing and chaotic of the Biblical "prophets", Isaiah's book simply doesn't make sense - as it is presented in the Bible. But if there really was an Isaiah, and he could be brought forward in time and shown his "book" as it is read today, how would he react? Would he say, "Yes this is exactly how I wrote it and I can explain everything" - or - would he gasp at how his words had been edited and turned into something totally alien to his own reality? This essay will posit that the latter would be the case.

Why is Isaiah nearly impossible to make sense of? Because he seems to directly contradict himself over and over again. A closer study only makes things worse; the better you understand what is being said, the more subtle contradictions reveal themselves, and Isaiah becomes even more confusing.

However, if you separate the conflicting agendas in Isaiah, and rope each together into their own separate pieces of writing, a miracle of clarity occurs. Isaiah becomes an easy read; simple, direct, focused. What are these agendas and why have they been wrapped together - and why should we even consider this idea? The reason Isaiah is so difficult to reconcile with logic is because he not only contradicts himself, but he regularly and diametrically reverses his position. "Was he insane?" many students and even scholars have asked, with good reason - if they accept his whole book as the writing of one man.

Curiously, scholars have always agreed that there are two writers in the Book of Isaiah. They separate the text into two chunks: Chapters 1-39, and Chapters 40-66, believing that the first author was the genuine Isaiah writing before the Babylonian "exile", and the second author (who they call Deutero-Isaiah) was anonymous and writing after the return. There will be no argument here that Isaiah Part 2 is a distinctly different piece of writing from Isaiah Part 1. There are scholarly theories about how and why the two manuscripts became attached and called by one name. Again there will be no argument here on those theories, which are quite acceptable. For now we will ignore chapters 40 to 66.

Our concern is to unlock the first 39 chapters of Isaiah.

The Hezekiah Papers

Before we even start, a great piece of confusion glares at us. The four chapters from 36 to 39, describing Isaiah's encounters with King Hezekiah of Jerusalem (who reigned 724-696 BCE), are taken from the second Book of Kings.

Specifically:
Isaiah chapters 36 and 37 are identical (except for a few words) to 2Kings 18:17 to 19:37.
Isaiah chapter 38 is a re-ordered and modified version of 2Kings 20:1-11.
Isaiah chapter 39 is identical to 2Kings 20:12-19.

Why are these chapters here? There's nothing like them anywhere else in Isaiah, Parts 1 or 2, although their style fits comfortably in the Books of Kings. We might assume that Isaiah made his greatest (or only) impact during the time of Hezekiah, and that these chapters have been sewn into his book to emphasize this.

There is a piece of apocryphal Christian writing called Ascension of Isaiah (click for R.H. Charles' translation). It says that King Hezekiah had Isaiah sawed in half because of his prophecies! This is a delight to many Christians because it reinforces the idea that the Jews were very bad people. Not only did they reject Jesus, they sawed the prophets of God in half! It isn't a believable piece of reporting, steeped as it is in early Christian delusion, but it also isn't a Christian invention.

The Jewish rabbis wrote centuries earlier in the Talmud that Isaiah was abused by the king (click for Jewish commentary). In their story, Isaiah was about to be killed, but The Lord saved him - a cedar tree swallowed him up and protected him. BUT, the king's men then sawed the tree into pieces. When the saw hit Isaiah's mouth, he died (indicating that his words were the living thing within him).

Both Jewish and Christian traditions say that Hezekiah had Isaiah killed for his prophecies, but that hardly makes sense to begin with. If a king calls a prophet to prophesy, he must believe the prophet's words are from his god. If the prophet prophesies bad things, shouldn't killing him only make things worse? Wouldn't the god be doubly mad? ...and shouldn't the prophet have seen this coming?

Yet, even if it were logical to kill a prophet for having negative visions, the story still makes no sense. Isaiah's encounters with Hezekiah aren't negative at all:

1) The Assyrians threaten and taunt Jerusalem. Isaiah sends a blessing. Yahweh starts a war in another town with Ethiopians against the Assyrians, and diverts them from their attack on Jerusalem (36:1 to 37:9).

2) Later the taunts continue, but Isaiah sends another blessing, and Yahweh wipes out most of the Assyrian army overnight. The rest go home and abandon their plans against the Israelites (37:9-38).

3) Isaiah and Yahweh get credit for healing Hezekiah of a supposedly life-threatening illness and giving him another fifteen years of life. The version in Isaiah adds a prayer of thanks to Yahweh from Hezekiah (ch 38).

4) Their only unpleasant encounter (ch 39) comes after Hezekiah welcomes Babylonian dignitaries into his home, makes agreements with them, and shows them all his treasures. Isaiah is angry and tells the king that awful things will happen, even to his own family, as a result. But Hezekiah merely says, "So what? At least we'll have peace as long as I live." (2Kings 20:12-19 / Isaiah 39:1-8). And they did.

Hezekiah bought peace for his people, saved them from the battering ram, and was quite level-headed about it. He ignored Isaiah's warning. The reader is supposed to feel indignant toward Hezekiah, and to resent him for rejecting the words of a prophet. But the encounters were positive, there is no raging disagreement, no fury from the king at Isaiah, no reason to believe that this prophecy or any of the others in these encounters got the prophet killed. And these are the only encounters, in fact the only stories, that occur in the Book of Isaiah. The rest is all conceptual talk.

It seems Isaiah was abused in some way for something. The traditions that attempt to explain why it happened indicate that it happened. But the reasons they offer are weak. Leaving these four chapters aside, why else might Isaiah have been killed by the rulers of Jerusalem?

The Priests of Jerusalem

We should recall that the real rulers of Jerusalem under Hezekiah were the Levite priests. Remember who the most favoured kings in the Bible were: David, Solomon, Hezekiah, and the child-king Josiah. Each was a king of Jerusalem, and each had praise lavished on him because he supported the Levite priesthood. Also recall that Jeroboam and all who came after him on the Northern throne (Samaria) were hated because Jeroboam permanently rejected the Levite priests (1Kings 12:26-33 & 14:7-16).

David (c1020 BCE) was the first king who granted the Levites total religious and legal control, and that's why he was consistently given the highest accolades in spite of his wild, murderous and dishonest behaviour. Solomon (c990 BCE) was also loved by the Levites, but he allowed shrines to be built to other gods, so he wasn't quite as loved as David (1Kings 3:3).

Hezekiah (c720 BCE) was the next king really loved by the Levites (2Kings 18:5 / 2Chronicles 30:22 & 32:22, 23, 32). His great reviews indicate that he personally paid attention to the priests. They loved him because he had all shrines to other gods destroyed, and even tore down private shrines to Yahweh, making the temple the only place where legal worship could take place (2Kings 18:22), in turn making the Levite religion the only legal religion during his reign. We are reminded of this after his death, when his "evil" son took the throne and rebuilt all those shrines, rejecting Levite control (2Kings 21:3). Hezekiah's only flaw was in his dealings with the Assyrian army. When the Assyrians insulted the Levite god in public (2Kings 18:28-35), Hezekiah didn't stand up for him. Instead, recognizing reality, he took money from the temple treasury and paid the Assyrian king to spare Jerusalem and its people. It seems the Levites had trouble forgiving this, but later only said that Hezekiah was haughty at times and had brought God's punishment on Jerusalem (2Chron 32:24-25). Then they point out that he repented and God protected Jerusalem (2Chron 32:26); so the last word on him is positive.

The only other leader that the Levites specially favoured was the eight-year-old boy king Josiah (c635 BCE), who they themselves placed on the throne and guided. His government tore down all shrines to other gods and "defiled" them - burned human bones in their rubble - and slaughtered the non-Levite priests (2Kings 23:1-15, 19-24). Josiah gets the same glowing review that Hezekiah got (2Kings 23:25).

Knowing that the Levite priests held tremendous sway with Hezekiah and that the legal system was controlled from the temple; and allowing that Isaiah was killed by Hezekiah's regime; we can assume that the Levites themselves were against Isaiah. Could there be any reason for this revealed in Isaiah's writing? Yes, absolutely.

Why Isaiah Was Hated

Removing those four benign chapters we looked at (we are now dealing with chapters 1-35), we find Isaiah cursing Jerusalem's leaders and specifically the priests many, many times. And for these curses it makes sense that the priests would be infuriated. And yet, as soon as he curses them, he turns right around and says they will always be blessed. And after cursing all the people of Jerusalem and Judah, which he also does many times, he also turns around and tells them that they will always be loved by their god and there will always be a way out. Not only will there be a way out, he promises a fantastic dream world that will be given to the Israelites...who he has just cursed.

It is the juxtaposition of the fury and finality of his curses, against the overwhelming sweetness and hopefulness of his prophesied future for Israel, that makes no sense. These two ideas constantly grapple with each other and never resolve. It makes no sense either, that Isaiah should have been killed for his curses against Jerusalem if he was also writing the hopeful counter-prophecies that promised great things and ensured the priests a permanent future as God's intermediaries. It is chaos, and that's why Isaiah's message is impossible to pierce. He says one thing and then he turns around and says the opposite. A hundred times.

The editor's agenda is clear. Isaiah is made to seem like he is giving Israel a warning. His curses are reduced from predictions to a bunch of "if's". "If you don't do this, here's what will happen to you." The counter-prophecies then promise great and wonderful things for Israel IF the people would just turn back to follow their god Yahweh (and his Levite priests).

But the editor's work, though fascinating and creative, is hardly seamless. Even the early church fathers, when they were separating texts into chapters and "verses", silently acknowledged this. Isaiah is cut into chapters of varying lengths, in attempt to separate his words by agenda - a chapter of curses against Jerusalem, a chapter of hope, a chapter of curses against the Israelites' enemies, and so on. It's not as tidy as that, but they had an impossible job; sometimes Isaiah's words are so interwoven with his contradictions that they require surgery - no obvious chapter breaks occur in those parts. But curiously, the characters of the writer who curses Jerusalem and the writer who blesses Jerusalem never overlap. They don't seem at all like the same person, and their words can be easily separated according to their agendas.

I will posit here three authors whose works, woven together by a later editor, comprise Isaiah Chapters 1 to 35.

1) The first author I will call The Real Isaiah. This author relentlessly curses Jerusalem and its leaders, and particularly the priests, for leading their people astray. He curses them all, priest and follower, for their lies, arrogance, foolishness, bloodlust, powerlust, hypocrisy, and for being basically rotten. He offers no hope at all, except the hope that everything he sees will be completely destroyed. He is utterly disgusted, and his curses come with a flashing light that screams, "And what's coming will serve you all right!" He writes with the passion of a man who has been angry about this for a long time, but who has not been heeded, and who truly wants to see it all fall. And he says it WILL fall.

It's logical that this is the man who the priests and leaders of Jerusalem would want to get rid of. He makes them all look very bad.

2) The first author whose work is woven all through Isaiah's writing I will call The Levite. Who would be more threatened by the curses of The Real Isaiah? Those curses signal the end of Israel, the end of the Chosen People promises, the end of what was hoped would be a permanent, world-dominating Israelite religion - in short, the end of the Levite dream of being permanently at the top. And The Real Isaiah blames Jerusalem's leaders - its priests and king - for the whole mess. The Levite reverses many of Isaiah's predictions, and assures the reader that Yahweh's promises (to the Levite priests, to King David's family, to the Israelite people) are still intact and dependable. Then he builds hopeful and even gloriously beautiful dreams of the future for Israel, under Yahweh and his religion (quietly reclaiming the Levite place of power). He hates other religions; they are threats and to be despised - and all his visions glorify Yahweh's supremacy (which guarantees Levite supremacy).

It hardly seems logical that this pro-Israel, pro-Levite writer should be arrested and killed for his prophecies. His words could not have been an original part of Isaiah, but must have been added after his death.

3) The second author whose work is woven into Isaiah's I will call The Curser. He makes it his business to curse all of Israel's chosen enemies. His writing is distinct and separate from the other two. Like The Levite, he is undoubtedly a priest, but unlike The Levite, his writing does not interfere directly with the statements made by The Real Isaiah. Rather his curses are used to bolster The Levite's spin, and to express the violent, vengeful fury Yahweh feels for all the people who the Israelites hate. For instance, Isaiah curses Jerusalem, and then The Levite deflects the curse and shows how the Israelites can overcome it, and then The Curser comes in and re-fires the curse at (for instance) the Moabites. To the reader it almost seems like Yahweh himself has redirected his own curse. It is literary sleight of hand, and very inventive.

As in so much of today's cut and paste art, like creative sound and film editing, or like a cleverly crafted piece of propaganda, these three characters flash in and out of view, their words chopped into each other's, one taking up where the other left off, until all their scripts run out. The end effect is that the listener does not hear each of the three separate scripts, but instead absorbs the idea that the editor wanted him to hear. We'll separate the three scripts.

The Three Texts

Several translations of the Bible were used in process of cracking Isaiah. However, for the sake of convenience and easy editing, and also as a test of my theory, the text used for the following reconstruction was taken from bible.com (copy and paste). The New American Standard Bible version was chosen arbitrarily - it's not necessarily the finest English translation, but for our purpose it serves and is very easy to read. The most satisfying result of this test was the discovery that even when Isaiah is brought down to a common English version by a translator who had no interest in helping our thesis, we find that the three authors are surprisingly strong and distinct from each other, their voices virtually unhindered by the long trip across time and language barriers.

Below are the breakdowns of chapters and verses for each author. Following that are all three authors' full texts.

Chapters 21 and 22 were particularly obscure and resistant to analysis, so they've been left aside. They'll be dealt with in another paper, which will also dissect Deutero-Isaiah chapters 40-66. Except for chapters 21 and 22, every verse of Isaiah 1-35 has been distributed among the three authors.