I heard from the priest in church today that there were two Issaiahs. One that the book was written by (based on) and one that came later that is also in scripture. I could be wrong but I don’t think this is commonly known. Has anyone heard this and can you give some backstory?
It may not be ‘commonly’ known, but this is actually an old theory.
The idea goes that Isaiah is actually made up of two or three distinct sections: chapters 1-39, aka
Proto-Isaiah, which contains the words of the historical Isaiah (8th-7th century BC); Deutero-Isaiah (chapters 40-55), the work of an anonymous 6th-century prophet writing during the Babylonian Exile; and
Trito-Isaiah (chapters 56-66), a short anthology composed after the return from exile. Scholars point out that there is a sort of ‘continuity error’ between chapters 1-39 and 40-66: Isaiah’s name suddenly stops being used after chapter 39, there are differences in style (choices of key words and phraseology) and theology between the earlier and later sections of the book, chapters 40-55 seem to presuppose that Jerusalem has already been destroyed (they are not framed as prophecy) and the Babylonian exile is already in effect - it even mentions the Persian king Cyrus by name (44:28; 45:1). (Chapters 56-66 meanwhile seem to assume an even later situation: the exiles have returned and the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple is underway).
It’s not just early modern scholars who noticed this: a medieval Spanish Jewish commentator, Abraham ibn-Ezra (1089-1164), in his
commentary on Isaiah, already expressed hints that chapters 40-66 may have been written by a later prophet, and quotes a contemporary exegete,
Moses ibn Chiquitilla ha-Kohen, as holding a similar idea.
These first comforting promises, with which the second part of the book of Isaiah begins, refer, as R. Moses Hakkohen believes, to the restoration of the temple by Zerubbabel; according to my opinion to the coming redemption from our present exile; prophecies concerning the Babylonian exile are introduced only as an illustration, showing how Cyrus, who allowed the captive Jews to return to Jerusalem, … About the last section of the book there is no doubt, that it refers to a period yet to come, as I shall explain.—It must be borne in mind, that the opinion of the orthodox, that the book of Samuel was written by Samuel, is correct as regards to the first part, till the words “And Samuel died” (1 Sam. 25:1); this remark is confirmed by the act that the book of Chronicles contains the names (of the descendants of David) in genealogical order down to Zerubbabel.—The words “Kings shall see and arise, princes and shall worship” (49:7) support this view, though they might be also explained as follows: “Kings and princes will arise, etc., when they head the name of the prophet, even after his death.” The reader will adopt the opinion which recommends itself most to his judgment.
Older scholars treated the book as independent collections of sayings by three or more individual prophets, brought together at a much later period. But nowadays, the idea is undergoing some modification. A current idea is that the three sections cannot be so neatly divided; the author of Deutero-Isaiah is thought to have likely redacted Proto-Isaiah and added in some material
within the Proto-Isaiah section (chapters 34-35 are in Deutero-Isaiah’s style, for instance). In fact, some scholars question whether there was a ‘Trito-Isaiah’ at all (since they point out the similarities between the two sections kind of outweigh the supposed differences); couldn’t it be just Deutero-Isaiah all along? In which case, there would only be really two distinct sections: Proto-Isaiah (much of the first half of the book) and Deutero-Isaiah (chapters 34-35, 40-66; possibly also a few other passages within the Proto-Isaiah section).
Whereas the older understanding of the book sees it as three separate, fairly discrete sections, the more recent understanding (which points out as I noted above that we actually cannot neatly divide the book as we would like) emphasizes more the
unity of the book as a whole: Isaiah could well have been an amalgamation of prophecies by two or more people (the historical Isaiah and some later prophet/s), but the work as we have it now is deliberately arranged such that it gives an overarching theological message: in other words, it is an extended meditation on the destiny of Jerusalem into
and after the Exile. In this view, the book has two sections: chapters 1-34 (warnings of judgment and promises of subsequent restoration), and chapters 35-66 (judgment has already taken place and restoration is imminent).
