How Many Isaiahs Wrote Isaiah?

Skeptics who don’t believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God have a few problems, not the least of which is that it successfully prophesies major world events before they took place. And I’m not just talking about end-times prophecies that haven’t occurred yet.

Isaiah and Daniel are the two starkest examples. I’ve already written about Daniel in my previous blog, “The Daniel Lynchpin,” which you can read here. This week I want to talk about Isaiah, why it’s come under fire by Bible critics, and resolve the “multiple authors” controversy.

Isaiah’s prophetic ministry started in around 740 BC, during a dark time in the history of the Jewish people. The Assyrian empire was growing while Egypt was shrinking, with Israel and Judah caught in the middle. The Assyrians were some of the most brutal conquerors in history. They were known to flay their enemies alive and hang the skins on the wall surrounding the capital, Nineveh. The city was also decorated with amputated arms and legs and piles of severed “head pyramids” of their victims. Perhaps worst of all, the Assyrians perfected the art of “assimilation;” forcing out a city’s inhabitants to either be brutally executed or sold into slavery, then occupying their homes for themselves.

This is exactly the fate suffered by the Northern kingdom of Israel. In 722, the Assyrians invaded and conquered the ten tribes of the North, scattering them in exile across the empire. This tragedy is covered in II Kings 17 and II Chronicles 22. With Israel in ruins, the Assyrians now gathered at the border, ready to invade Judah.

The theme of Isaiah is two-fold: forsake idolatry and turn back to worship of the One True God to be saved from Assyria. Isaiah 10:24-25: Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD of hosts, O my people that dwellest in Zion, be not afraid of the Assyrian: he shall smite thee with a rod, and shall lift up his staff against thee, after the manner of Egypt. For yet a very little while, and the indignation shall cease, and mine anger in their destruction.

But Isaiah doesn’t stop there. Not only does God promise to spare Jerusalem if they return to Him, He also foretells major world events that took place well after the eighth century BC.

While Jerusalem was spared from Sennacherib, one hundred years later, a new menace would arise to take its place, Babylon. But this time, the results would be very different. Jeremiah’s warnings went unheeded until God removed His protection and Nebuchadnezzar broke the city walls. In 586 BC, Babylon totally destroyed Jerusalem, razing Solomon’s temple to the ground and burning the city. The Jews were taken into captivity that would last seventy years.

However, Babylon itself wouldn’t last. Not long after Nebuchadnezzar’s death, his grandson Belshazzar would oversee its downfall when Babylon was invaded by a new empire, a union between Media and Persia. The Medo-Persians breeched its defensive walls and killed its king, bringing Babylon to ruin. Daniel 5:30-31: In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old.

The fall of Babylon to the Medo-Persians occurred in 539 BC, but was prophesied by Isaiah about 150 years beforehand. Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: (Isaiah 45:1-2). This likely refers to Cyrus II, who lived from 576-530 BC. While Daniel calls the conqueror “Darius the Median,” this could be a misnomer: history doesn’t have record of a king “Darius” during the time of the Babylonian invasion. However, Cyrus the Great did have a military general named Gobryas who oversaw the conquest, so this is probably the “Darius the Median” identified by Daniel.

There’s much controversy over Isaiah specifically naming “Cyrus” years before the man existed, leading to the charge by some critics that this is a later addition by scribes tampering with the text. But even if that is the case, it doesn’t change the point: Isaiah clearly promises that the gates of Babylon will be opened by a king the Lord had anointed to break the kingdom.

In “The Daniel Lynchpin,” I mentioned a 19th century textual critic named JG Eichhorn who first proposed that Daniel was a fictional book created during the Maccabean revolt to inspire the Jews into believing that God and destiny was on their side. This was Eichhorn’s way of getting around the fact that Daniel prophesies so many world events, such as the rise and sudden death of Alexander the Great and the Six Syrian wars of chapter 11.

I’ve already written on this extensively, but to sum it up: Eichhorn’s date for Daniel can be dismissed if we find copies of Daniel from before the Maccabean period (137 BC), and sure enough, multiple copies of Daniel from the Dead Sea scrolls date back from thirty to sixty years prior (160-200 BC at the earliest). Furthermore, it’s clear that Daniel was a highly revered prophet among the radical Essenic Jews that formed the Qumranite community, as there are several meticulously copied Daniel scrolls; this would not be the case if he were a fictional character.

But it’s moot anyway, because Eichhorn’s proposal fails spectacularly in another gigantic way; placing Daniel during the Maccabean revolt doesn’t explain how the book prophesies world events that took place after the Maccabean revolt! Daniel doesn’t just predict Alexander the Great and the Six Syrian wars: he also predicts the rise of Rome. The two iron legs from Nebuchadnezzar’s statue represent a world kingdom founded by two brothers (Romulus and Remus), as does the great beast with iron claws emerging from the seas in Daniel 7 (he also predicts the destruction of the second temple at the hands of Emperor Titus in Daniel 9:24-27; this occurred in 70 AD).

Eichhorn was committing the classic fatal error of atheism. He presumed philosophical naturalism (the belief that physical matter is all there is in the universe, rejecting the existence of the supernatural or God), then judged all theology as if naturalism were the truth, dismissing miraculous events as described in the Bible. But he never established why naturalism is the truth. Because inconveniently for the nonbeliever, naturalism has never been proven, and is actually scientifically problematic.

But I digress. Eichhorn’s presumption that the supernatural doesn’t exist left him at a loss to explain prophesies in Daniel and Isaiah. So he had to come up with naturalistic explanations. And even when his explanations have been disproven by recent discoveries, academia, under the same philosophical bias towards naturalism, refuses to abandon them.

Eichhorn is also responsible for the “multiple authors of Isaiah” theory. Isaiah 45 predicts the fall of Babylon to the Medo-Persians. So to address that, Eichhorn proposed that it has more than one author. Isaiah 1-39 all consist of a similar pattern: it takes place in a particular time period (pre-Assyrian invasion) and Isaiah references himself several times. Chapter 39 ends with Sennacherib’s forces being smitten by the angel of the Lord just outside the gates of Jerusalem. But the final 27 chapters of Isaiah seem different. They aren’t contained within a story, don’t claim to be written during the reign of any particular king, are much more poetic, and Isaiah doesn’t mention himself. Some scholars have taken this a step further, isolating chapters 40-55 and calling them “Deutero-Isaiah.”

The most well-preserved Dead Sea scroll has been called the “Great Isaiah scroll,” a near flawless copy of Isaiah found in Cave 1. It is the first of 22 ancient copies of the book discovered near the Dead Sea, from a variety of different time periods. At the very latest, the Great Isaiah scroll is from the late second century BC, maybe even earlier. If Eichhorn’s proposal is true, evidence for it should be found here of all places.

This isn’t just because of the scroll’s age; it’s also because the Essenic scribes were extremely diligent in their copying. They Great Isaiah scroll contains thorough footnotes and commentary from whoever compiled it. These notes are so myopic that they even focus heavily on a slight inconsistency between the account of Hezekiah’s healing in Isaiah 38 and II Kings 20. Yet there is absolutely no mention of multiple authors. Chapter 39 transitions effortlessly into chapter 40; and believe me, had there been any hint of a discrepancy within the text, the Dead Sea copyist would have spotted and wrote extensively on it in the margins.

So we can say with certainty that the no one was aware of a second author for Isaiah as far back as at least the second century BC. And since the Essenes were copying older scrolls, there was clearly no evidence for this going back much further in time.

But just like with Daniel, I have another contribution to the argument that blows Eichhorn’s proposal out of the water. In short, he was assuming that Isaiah 45 was the only reference to the fall of Babylon. But if there’s a prophecy of it in the clearly unified text of Isaiah 1-39, that undeniably was written by Isaiah, his entire premise falls apart. And sure enough, we do have such a direct prediction in the thirteenth chapter: Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it…And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah (Isaiah 13:17,19).

Here once again, Isaiah gives an exact prophecy: God will destroy the Babylonians through the hands of the Medo-Persians. And unlike chapter 45, there is no question that this was written 150 or so years beforehand. As I stand back and look at the Bible as a whole, I am in awe of how well it stacks up despite the world of criticism aimed at it over the centuries. No other document from ancient history could endure so much yet still be so immovable. As we honestly assess the evidence, its supernatural nature becomes undeniable. This blog hasn’t even begun to address the Messianic prophesies of the suffering servant and how they are fulfilled by Jesus. Perhaps those who have tried so hard to discredit the book of Isaiah are missing one of its most dire warnings: There is no peace, saith the LORD, unto the wicked (Isaiah 48:22).

There’s a reason for the notion of Deutero-Isaiah that has nothing to do with denying the predictive power of Isaiah; after all, Isaiah tells us the most about Christ. It’s that much of Deutero-Isaiah is written not in the form of prediction, but in the form of the present tense. (Granted, Revelations is written as if describing strictly present-tense matters.)

This is a sharp change from the first 39 chapters. And yes, the transition is VERY abrupt, contrary to the original post.

“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.”

Isaiah doesn’t seem to write this to people being taken away in bondage, or else it would seem more likely to read, “her warfare shall be accoplished, eve though she shall received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins, her iniquity shall be pardoned.”

If Isaiah’s ministry began in the reign of Uzziah, perhaps in the middle of the 8th century, B.C. These words speak in the present tense of events which happened four centuries later.

The notion of two authors is not a declaration of fraud. One supposition is that the first 35 chapters are the works of Isaiah. The rest are the works of a later prophet who sought to remind his people that all of the suffering of the exile had been predicted, and goes on to make glorious predictions as to their purpose. So he began by recounting Isaiah’s life (ch 36-39), then moving forward (ch. 40-66).

We see this very sort of writing in the Gospel of John and Revelation: both contain previous works which have been expanded upon. John 1:1-18 predates Christ, for instance. But if John the Apostle includes the work of John the Baptist in the Revelation of John, does that make either John a fraud? Of course not. Is one of them not “John?” Of course not.

P. S.

Thirty years ago, I worked with a fellow whose family had been located in Iraq since the time of the Nebuchadnezzar-instituted exile, until this century in which the Moslems were persecuting the Hebrew residents until his family (and he) had to leave on pain of death. They resettled in the newly formed state of Israel.

In 1967 he was an NCO in the Israeli army (IDF), and was wounded in the capture of the Temple Mount.

His preliminary degrees were from Hebrew University, and his PhD was from Brown. We had some good chats, but nothing about the Samaritans, a small community of them that apparently still exists.

He claimed that his descent was from the tribe of Manasseh. Apparently there are now numbers of Israelis that came back from centuries of being citizens of the lands to which they had been resettled from the Assyrian conquest and on. It was while out there that they realized the greatness of the sins of their ancestors, and gradually came back to their faith through the establishments of synagogues ("Little sanctuaries"; Ezek. 11:16 AV) wherever they went. Lacking a Temple and hence Priests, the Levites instituted study centers to try to recapture the true religion that they had profaned.

After the fall of Jerusalem, Babylonia (modern day Iraq), would become the focus of Judaism for more than a thousand years. (click here)

After a few generations and with the conquest of Babylonia in 540 BC by the Persian Empire, some adherents led by prophets Ezra and Nehemiah, returned to their homeland and traditional practices. Other Judeans[13] did not permanently return and remained in exile and developed somewhat independently outside of the Land of Israel, especially following the Muslim conquests of the Middle East in the 7th century CE

It is not too great a stretch to presume that the general epistle 1 Peter was written from Babylon, Peter having been entrusted with the sphere of the ministry to the Circumcision, perhaps having gone there to attempt a presentation of the Gospel to the greatest and longest existing Talmudic shul for many centuries.

1 Pet. 5:13 AV, written to all the Hebrews in the Diaspora:

"The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son."

Peter was accompanied by the more learned assistants Silvanus (who was his amanuensis writing out the letter), and John Mark, who wrote the second Gospel, probably largely based on Peter's reminisces to him.

Yes, it is an absurd stretch to think that Peter was in Babylon, Iraq, which had been long deserted, the fact that Jews may have persisted in Babylonia notwithstanding.

I know there’s a wierd school of Protestant apologetics which has to disbelieve everything Catholics and Orthodox believe, but Peter really did die just outside Rome, which he, like John, called Babylon. (In fact, the papacy refers to Rome as Babylon; the Vatican Hill was across the Tiber from the ancient city of Rome. The papacy resides in the Vatican so as to remain in exile from Babylon.)

Peter’s death in Rome was attested to by Clement, whom he named Bishop, in the first century. Peter’s actual burial place was found in a City of the Dead beneath the Vatican in 1942, complete with the inscription, “Here Lies Peter.”

You have a reasonable point, I am not going to argue with you on it. Let the chips fall where they may.

But it would be very difficult to convince me that any of the deuterocanonical books were counted as inspired in the estimate of those chosen to preserve Scripture at the time.

It is true that, say, Jesus, and Jude, made reference to books not included in the OT canon;; and Paul, from his years of preparation to understand Greek culture, quoted the Stoics. The portions of writings quoted may have been ascribed the value of absolute truth, but that does not make the remainder of the rest of the document document also inspired.

Also, I don't recall any reference to Zachariah, Elisabeth, Anna, or Simeon as being prophets other than what we find in Luke; and there he calls them "eyewitnesses" or "ministers of the truth," not "prophets." You may not agree, but where does that make any difference to the rest of what I wrote?

But thanks for waving a flag. You are helping to remind me to stay on topic, as Sergeant Joe Friday did for his witnesses in the old-time "Dragnet" series.

I don't believe I said anything about Peter and the city Rome. I do know that subsequent to the Romans' clearing of Hebrews from Jerusalem that Peter did reside in Antioch of Syria for some time. The theory of Rome being figuratively "Babylon" is supported in Rev. 17:5 and 9, but why would Peter say that the church of Babylon was sending greetings, if it should have been located in the Vaticanus region, according to your thesis?

It is clear that Peter's ministry was to the Circumcision, the Hebrews, whose main locus was in Mesopotamia with the main Talmud shul at Babylon, literally.

Paul wrote to the church at Rome in late AD 57/early 58, and if Peter were there, I would think among the many people in the church that he specifically named, Peter would have been one of them.

Peter's First General Epistle was written in the winter if 65-66, at the time Paul was in Macedonia.

In 68, Paul was again in Rome, and wrote to Timothy to come there and bring Mark with Him. Where was Peter then? Where was Mark? They were not in Rome, were they? If Mark was accompanying Peter, and Peter was in Antioch, probably Mark was with him. It seems much more likely they had come back from Babylon (near what is now Baghdad) after a stint trying to evangelize the Jewish population of the Mideast.

I do not think it is necessary to create a figurative location when the plain-literal will do just fine. The first and simplest rule of hermeneutics is "If the plain sense of a passage makes common sense, seek no other sense."

Peter wrote his Second General Epistle in the summer of 67, and Paul wrote again to Timothy from Rome in the spring of 68. Were they playing hide and seek with one another in Rome, or ignoring one another . . . or was it that simply their paths did not cross. And if that is true, Peter, at the time his epistles were written, he was elsewhere than Rome. In the first case, he, with Mark and Silvanus (=Silas, also known by Paul) were in Babylon.

I don't accept your "Babylon" = Rome hypothesis for this interpretation.

In fact, there is no Scriptural support whatsoever that Simon Peter was ever in Rome, actually, and plenty of evidence that he was situated in the geographic middle of his "see" throughout after leaving Jerusalem.

Pick, pick, pick. My Bible, and many other versions, call the last Book of the Bible "The Revelation" (erroneously, by some, "Revelations") because the translation into King James English says:

"The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; . . ."

Apo (away from) + kaluptoh (to hide, to veil) = to unveil

Apokalupsis = an act of unveiling = revelation

Revelation is good enough for most English-speaking Bible students, and they don't need a Greek-English lexicon to get it. No one, including Romanists, customarily refers to the Book, the Bible (from biblos), as The Revelation.

If you want to, go ahead, but everyone will be confused until you "correct" him/her.

To note: Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: (Isaiah 45:1-2).

The great King of the Persian -- Khorush (Cyrus) shows that Iranians and Israel will be friends. There's just the little problem of gettingIran away from Izlam -- not insurmountable when you consider that the mosque attendance in Iran falls every year (its at France's Church attendance levels) and the more the Ayatollahs stick to power, the more people look back to their glorious Zoroastrian pre-Izlamik past.

I didn’t mean to controvert your entire thesis. I was only pointing out an error within it.

>> It is clear that Peter’s ministry was to the Circumcision, the Hebrews, whose main locus was in Mesopotamia with the main Talmud shul at Babylon, literally. <<

The Hebrew center in diaspora — centuries after Peter, by the way — was called Babylonian in reference to the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom, to reference their previous exile. They were not in Babylon, but in places as far Nusbayin, in what is now Turkey. There is no biblical or extra-biblical evidence that Peter was ever in any of the Jewish centers that had anything to do with the Babylonian talmud. And if Peter’s mission was to the Hebrews, why did he write in Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire?

>> if it should have been located in the Vaticanus region, according to your thesis? <<

No, his ministry wasn’t in the Vaticanus region; his body was dumped outside of the city.

>> In 68, Paul was again in Rome, and wrote to Timothy to come there and bring Mark with Him. Where was Peter then? <<

Dead. He was most likely crucified following the great Roman fire of A.D. 64. Possibly, he was killed as late as 67. In 2 Peter, Peter references his approaching death.

The problem with your claim is that all the evidence is internal. That is, within the text itself. This isn't to completely discount circumstantial internal evidence, of course. But while the change in tense and narrative is indeed abrupt, there's any number of reasonable explanations why Isaiah would have changed writing styles. For one, his book isn't written all at once; it was a magnum opus collection of writings that spanned his entire prophetic ministry.

There are too many possible variables. Chapter 39 concludes shortly after the fall of Assyria. Would he have immediately started work on chapter 40? If not, how many years later did he resume work? This would have been written during the reign of Manasseh. People's writing styles change over time. Honestly, I can't even recognize my own writing in some of my earlier blogs from just three years ago. Maybe Isaiah's vision was failing in his older years and he needed secretaries to dictate what to write to.

My faith doesn't depend on a single author of Isaiah, because clearly the Messianic prophesies of the later chapters were in existence centuries prior to Jesus' life (I refer back to the Great Isaiah scroll, the earliest copy we've found so far).

My problem is that internal evidence just isn't sufficient to conclude multiple authors yet. EXTERNAL evidence will help settle the matter. But as of yet, the oldest copies of Isaiah still indicate a unified book with no mention of several authors.

And since the multiple authors theory originates from an 18th century Bible critic with a bias against the supernatural elements of the book, we should still reserve judgment until more is found (and it may never be).

We see this very sort of writing in the Gospel of John and Revelation: both contain previous works which have been expanded upon. John 1:1-18 predates Christ, for instance.

I'm not familiar with this. To my knowledge, the earliest copy of John 1 comes from papyrus 75, part of the Bodmer collection, which is dated at about 175 AD. How exactly could we determine something like that?

Oh, no denying there ARE many doctrines with which I do not agree with Catholicism and, though I have fewer disagreements with the Orthodox, I don't swallow everything they have "developed" over the years either. What I meant, of course, were those basic tenets of Christianity with regard to Jesus Christ - His virgin birth, His deity, His propitiatory sacrifice on the cross for our sins, His resurrection, His coming again to judge the living and the dead and His eternal reign at the right hand of the Father. Additionally, the doctrine of the Trinity - though I seldom see much defense of it from them when the topic comes up on the RF from time to time.

I'm going to presume that Dangus was NOT really suggesting that "some" Protestants disagree with Catholics/Orthodox on everything but was being hyperbolic. For the record, there are numerous doctrines where Catholics and the Orthodox don't agree.

Yes, I was being hyperbolic. But it does seem like if Catholics say “A,” SOME Protestants will insist “B” just to reject Catholicism. The perpetual virginity of Mary, the date of Christmas (from Maccabees), the day of the resurrection, the day of the crucifixion, the location of the tomb of Christ just about every historical detail which has been handed down about the disciples, and so on.

I get that alot of these aren’t biblical, or are merely alluded to biblically. But it does seem kinda ridiculous when there’s a Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox location for every last thing in Israel/the West Bank. It’s like come on, Constantine’s Mom, Helena may be somewhat legendized and certainly are not obligatory for belief (being that they aren’t part of “universal revelation,*” that is, scripture), but it’s not as if every last thing she investigated was pure fraud; the more legendized she is the more likely a site actually was venerated BEFORE she went there.

Thanks to imardmd1 for interpreting me charitably.

* Contrary to many Protestants’ understandings, no Catholic is obliged to believe anything which is not scripturally based. Catholics distinguish between universal revelation, which is scripture, and private revelation, which may be witnessed by thousands, but still is merely a matter of private belief. Sadly, much is being lost to history even now, as anything which is not scriptural is being dismissed as mere legend, and therefore not worthy of preserving.

From "The Fundamentals" RA Torrey editor 1915, shows the specious roots of the Biblical skeptic movement of the late 18th through 19th century. Most skeptics today parrot the old refuted German and Dutch skeptics. Here's an excerpt from one essay from The Fundamentals:

The Views of the Continental Critics Regarding the views of the Continental Critics, three things can be confidently asserted of nearly all, if not all, of the real leaders.

1. They were men who denied the validity of miracle, and the validity of any miraculous narrative. What Christians consider to be miraculous they considered legendary or mythical; “legendary exaggeration of events that are entirely explicable from natural causes.”

2. They were men who denied the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetical statement. What Christians have been accustomed to consider prophetical, they called dexterous conjectures, coincidences, fiction, or imposture.

3. They were men who denied the reality of revelation, in the sense in which it has ever been held by the universal Christian Church. They were avowed unbelievers of the supernatural.

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