Isaiah: The Scroll They Handed Me

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Chapters 1 to 39 are largely the work of Isaiah son of Amoz, a prophet in Jerusalem. Most scholars think chapters 40 to 55 come from a later prophet in his tradition, during the exile, and chapters 56 to 66 from after the return. Some scholars still hold that one prophet wrote it all.

When: From about 740 BC to the late 500s BC or later.

Where it fits: The first part belongs to Judah under Assyria, in the years of 2 Kings 15 to 20, before and after the north fell in 722 BC. The later parts speak to the exile in Babylon and the years after.

Where I quote it: At Nazareth (Luke 4:18–19; Isaiah 61:1–2). In the Temple (Mark 11:17; Isaiah 56:7). On why I spoke in parables (Mark 4:12; Isaiah 6:9–10). On empty worship (Mark 7:6–7; Isaiah 29:13). My vineyard parable (Mark 12:1; Isaiah 5:1–2). My answer to John (Matthew 11:5; Isaiah 35:5–6; 61:1). The night before I died (Luke 22:37; Isaiah 53:12). The undying worm (Mark 9:48; Isaiah 66:24).

If you only read three chapters: Isaiah 1, Isaiah 53 and Isaiah 61.

Words to Know

Servant — a mysterious figure in chapters 42 to 53, called by God to suffer and to bring justice to the nations.

Immanuel — God with us, the name of a child promised as a sign to King Ahaz.

Zion — the hill of Jerusalem where the Temple stood, and so a name for Jerusalem itself.

Remnant — the few who survive a disaster, from whom the people will be rebuilt.

Great Isaiah Scroll — the complete scroll of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, copied about a century before I was born.

The Book in Brief

Isaiah is a long scroll of poems, sermons and warnings, with a few stories. It has three main parts, and each speaks to a different time.

Chapters 1 to 39 are set in Jerusalem, in the days of four kings of Judah, while Assyria swallows its neighbors. The book opens with a charge against Judah: the people offer sacrifices, but they cheat the poor, and God has had enough. A vision follows of nations coming to Jerusalem to learn God’s ways and beat their swords into plowshares. In chapter 6, Isaiah sees God on a throne in the Temple and is sent to people who will not listen. In chapters 7 to 12, King Ahaz is terrified of an attack by Syria and northern Israel, and Isaiah offers him a sign, a child to be named Immanuel. Chapters 13 to 35 are messages to other nations, to the whole earth, and to Judah’s leaders, who trust Egypt’s horses instead of God. In chapters 36 to 39, an Assyrian army surrounds Jerusalem, King Hezekiah prays, and the Assyrian camp is found full of dead men. Hezekiah falls sick and recovers, then shows envoys from Babylon all his treasures. Isaiah tells him that one day all of it will be carried off to Babylon.

Chapters 40 to 55 jump ahead. The people are now in exile in Babylon, and the section begins with a call to comfort them. God made everything, and the idols are made by workmen. Cyrus, king of Persia, is named as the man who will let God’s people go home. A servant of God appears in several poems. In the last, in chapters 52 and 53, he is despised and killed for the wrongs of others, and then honored. Babylon is brought low, and the exiles are told to leave. Chapter 55 invites everyone who is thirsty, even without money, to come and eat.

Chapters 56 to 66 speak to a Jerusalem still waiting for God to set things right. Foreigners and eunuchs who keep God’s covenant are welcomed into his house, but the leaders are blind watchmen who care only for themselves. Chapter 58 says the fast God wants is to free the oppressed and feed the hungry. In chapter 60, Jerusalem is told to rise and shine, for nations are coming to its light. In chapter 61, someone anointed by God’s Spirit brings good news to the poor. After a prayer for God to tear open the heavens, God answers in chapters 65 and 66 with new heavens and a new earth. The scroll ends with all nations gathered to see God’s glory, and a last look at the bodies of those who rebelled.

At the start of my work, I went home to Nazareth and went to the synagogue on the Sabbath, as I always did. I stood up to read. The attendant handed me the scroll of Isaiah. I unrolled it and found this:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to deliver those who are crushed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18–19).

I rolled up the scroll, gave it back and sat down. Every eye in the room was on me. And I said, Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing (Luke 4:21).

If you want to know what I thought I was doing, that is the passage I chose.

Two honest notes about it. The line to deliver those who are crushed is not in Isaiah 61. It comes from Isaiah 58:6, where it reads to let the oppressed go free, and Luke’s account joins the two. And in Isaiah, the sentence goes on: the year of the LORD’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God (Isaiah 61:2). In Luke, the reading stops before the vengeance.¹

A scroll like mine

In 1947, a shepherd boy found clay jars in a cave near the Dead Sea. In one of them was a complete scroll of Isaiah, all sixty-six chapters, written on leather sewn into one long roll more than seven meters long. It was copied about a century before I was born.²

Before that, the oldest complete copy of Isaiah in Hebrew was about a thousand years younger. When scholars compared them, they found spelling differences and many small variations, but the book was recognizably the same.

That scroll is the closest thing you can see today to the one the attendant handed me.

Go deeperWhat the Great Isaiah Scroll looks like

The scroll is made of seventeen sheets of leather sewn edge to edge into one roll, with fifty-four columns of Hebrew writing. Unrolled, it is about 7.3 meters (24 feet) long.² It was not a fancy copy. The scribe made slips, and the scroll shows words squeezed in above the line or in the margin where something had been left out.³

Isaiah was one of the books most often copied by the community that kept its library in the caves near the Dead Sea. The caves held about twenty copies of it, whole or in pieces. The Great Isaiah Scroll is the one that survives nearly whole.⁴ There are no chapter or verse numbers in it. Those were added to Bibles centuries later.

When scholars set it beside the standard Hebrew text, which comes from medieval copies, they found the same book. Most of the differences are spelling. The scribe spells many words with extra letters that help a reader pronounce them. In a few places, though, the wording changes the sense. One is Isaiah 53:11. In the standard Hebrew, the servant sees and is satisfied, and the reader is left to wonder what he sees. The Great Isaiah Scroll and the oldest Greek translation both have one more word: light. The English Bible quoted in this book follows them: he will see the light and be satisfied (Isaiah 53:11).⁵

The Isaiah my people read was a hand-copied scroll like this one. The care that went into every copy is why the book reaches you almost unchanged.

One scroll, three times

Isaiah son of Amoz preached in Jerusalem from around 740 to 700 BC, while the Assyrian Empire swallowed the northern kingdom and threatened Judah.

Then, at chapter 40, the world changes. Jerusalem has already fallen. The people are in exile in Babylon. A voice says, Comfort, comfort my people (Isaiah 40:1). And a few chapters later, the Persian king Cyrus is named, the man who would conquer Babylon in 539 BC (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1).

Since the late 1700s, scholars have argued that chapters 40 onward were written by a prophet living in that later time, in Isaiah’s tradition. Since the 1890s, most have also treated chapters 56 to 66 as coming from after the return.⁶ Some scholars still argue for one author. Either way, the scroll carries a tradition that kept speaking for two hundred years.

Go deeperCyrus, and the clay cylinder from Babylon

Isaiah names Cyrus twice (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1), and the second time he calls him God’s anointed. That word usually belonged to a king of Israel. Here it is given to a foreigner, a Persian. Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, more than a century and a half after the time of Isaiah son of Amoz.

That gap is one reason many scholars think chapters 40 to 55 were written in the exile, by someone who watched Cyrus rise. Others hold that God showed Isaiah the future. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the first century AD, told it that way. He says Cyrus read the prophecy, was struck by it, and was moved to send the Jews home.⁷

In 1879, diggers working for the British Museum at Babylon found a baked clay cylinder about 23 centimeters (9 inches) long, covered with tiny Babylonian writing. It is now in London.⁸ Cyrus tells his own story on it. The god Marduk, it says, was angry with Babylon’s last king, Nabonidus, and chose Cyrus to set things right. Cyrus enters the city without a fight, sends captured gods back to their temples, and lets uprooted peoples go home. A Babylonian chronicle agrees that the city fell without a battle in the autumn of 539.⁹

The Cylinder never mentions Jerusalem, the Temple or the Jews. It shows a policy toward exiles in general. The book of Ezra tells the Jewish side: Cyrus orders the Temple rebuilt (Ezra 1:1–4).

Notice who gets the credit. On the Cylinder, Marduk chooses Cyrus. In Isaiah, the LORD calls him by name though you have not known me (Isaiah 45:4).

Wash yourselves

Isaiah’s first chapter goes straight at the Temple. He calls the rulers of Jerusalem you rulers of Sodom (Isaiah 1:10). Then God speaks:

What are the multitude of your sacrifices to me? … I have had enough of the burnt offerings … When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Yes, when you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves. Make yourself clean … Cease to do evil. Learn to do well. Seek justice. Relieve the oppressed. Defend the fatherless. Plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:11–17).

That was the first page of the scroll I was handed.

The vineyard

In Isaiah 5, the prophet sings a love song about a vineyard. His friend digs it, clears the stones, plants the best vines, builds a watchtower and cuts out a wine press. And it yields only wild grapes.

Then the song says what the vineyard is. It is Israel. He looked for justice, but, behold, oppression; for righteousness, but, behold, a cry of distress (Isaiah 5:7). In Hebrew it is a pun. Justice is mishpat; oppression is mispach. Righteousness is tsedaqah; a cry of distress is tse’aqah. God looked for one word and found another that sounded almost the same.

The next verse says who did it: Woe to those who join house to house, who lay field to field, until there is no room, and you are made to dwell alone in the middle of the land! (Isaiah 5:8). The rich were buying up the land.

When I told my parable in the Temple about the tenants who killed the owner’s son, I began with Isaiah’s vineyard, in nearly the same words: a man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press and built a watchtower (Mark 12:1). The chief priests knew the song. They knew who the tenants were.

Here I am

In Isaiah 6, the prophet sees God in the Temple, enthroned, with heavenly beings calling Holy, holy, holy. He cries out that he is a man of unclean lips. A coal from the altar touches his mouth. And God asks, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?

Here I am. Send me! (Isaiah 6:8).

Then God tells him something terrible. Go and speak to this people, but they will not understand. You hear indeed, but don’t understand. You see indeed, but don’t perceive (Isaiah 6:9).

When my friends asked me why I spoke in parables, I gave them this verse (Mark 4:11–12). It is one of the hardest things I said. Isaiah found that a message could be spoken plainly and still not be heard. So did I.

The young woman

In Isaiah 7, the kings of Aram and northern Israel are marching on Jerusalem, and King Ahaz is shaking with fear. Isaiah tells him not to be afraid and offers a sign:

Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14). Before the child is old enough to know right from wrong, Isaiah says, the two kings Ahaz fears will be gone.

In Isaiah, it is a sign for Ahaz, in his own time. The Hebrew word, almah, means a young woman. The Greek translation used parthenos, which usually means a virgin. Matthew read the Greek and saw my birth in it (Matthew 1:23). Many English Bibles, including the one quoted in this book, print virgin in Isaiah as well.

When an American Bible translation printed young woman in 1952, a pastor in North Carolina publicly burned it.¹⁰ People have strong feelings about this verse. You should know what both languages say.

Go deeperWhat the Assyrian kings wrote about Judah

Isaiah’s kings were not the only ones keeping records. The Assyrians carved theirs in stone and baked them in clay, and several have been dug up.

Ahaz. A list of tribute from Tiglath-pileser III, the Assyrian king who crushed Damascus and attacked Israel, names Jehoahaz of Judah among the kings who paid him. Jehoahaz is the longer form of the name Ahaz.¹¹ The Bible says the same: Ahaz sent Tiglath-pileser the silver and gold from the Temple and asked to be rescued (2 Kings 16:7–8).

Sargon. The only place the Bible names King Sargon of Assyria is Isaiah 20:1. For centuries, that verse was the only record of him anyone could read. Then in 1843 the French consul Paul-Émile Botta began digging at Khorsabad, in what is now Iraq, and uncovered Sargon’s palace, with his name written all over it.¹²

Sennacherib. A six-sided clay prism found at Nineveh in 1830, now in the British Museum, records Sennacherib’s march into Judah in 701 BC. He says he captured forty-six of Hezekiah’s walled towns and shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage. He says Hezekiah paid tribute. He does not say he took the city.¹³ The Bible agrees about the towns, the siege and the tribute (2 Kings 18:13–17), and tells why the army left: the LORD’s angel went out and struck one hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the camp of the Assyrians (Isaiah 37:36). The prism is silent about that.

Sennacherib also had the siege of Lachish, a Judean city, carved on the walls of his palace at Nineveh. Those panels are in the British Museum too.¹⁴

Swords into plowshares

Isaiah also gives you the most famous promise of peace ever written:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:4).

The same words are in Micah (Micah 4:3). They are carved on a wall across from the United Nations in New York, and the Soviet Union gave the United Nations a statue of a man beating a sword into a plow.¹⁵

A child is born

Isaiah 9 says, For a child is born to us. A son is given to us; and the government will be on his shoulders. His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6).

It was probably written for the birth or crowning of a king of Judah. Christians have heard me in it ever since, and you have heard it in Handel.

Read the next verse too. That king’s kingdom will be upheld with justice and with righteousness (Isaiah 9:7). And in chapter 11, when the shoot grows from the stump of Jesse, he will judge the poor with righteousness, and decide with equity for the humble of the earth (Isaiah 11:4).

Laws that rob the poor

Here is a verse every lawmaker should have on his wall:

Woe to those who decree unrighteous decrees, and to the writers who write oppressive decrees; to deprive the needy from justice, and to rob the poor among my people of their rights, that widows may be their plunder, and that they may make the fatherless their prey! (Isaiah 10:1–2).

Isaiah saw that the robbing was being done legally. The law itself was the weapon.

The servant

In the second part of the book, a figure appears called the servant.

Behold, my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights: I have put my Spirit on him. He will bring justice to the nations … He won’t break a bruised reed. He won’t quench a dimly burning wick (Isaiah 42:1–3).

When I came up out of the Jordan, the voice from heaven said, You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased (Mark 1:11). Many readers hear this servant in it. Matthew quotes the passage outright about me (Matthew 12:18–21).

Then comes Isaiah 53:

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering and acquainted with disease … Surely he has borne our sickness and carried our suffering … But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities … As a lamb that is led to the slaughter … so he didn’t open his mouth (Isaiah 53:3–7).

Who is the servant? In some places Isaiah says plainly: You are my servant, Israel (Isaiah 49:3). Many Jewish readers have understood the suffering servant as Israel in exile, suffering for the nations. My followers saw me.¹⁶

On the night I was arrested, I said one line from that chapter: I tell you that this which is written must still be fulfilled in me: ‘He was counted with transgressors.’ (Luke 22:37; Isaiah 53:12). The next day I was crucified between two criminals.

Go deeperFour songs, and who the servant might be

In 1892 a German scholar, Bernhard Duhm, pointed out four passages in chapters 40 to 55 that seem to stand a little apart. They are roughly Isaiah 42:1–4, 49:1–6, 50:4–9 and 52:13–53:12. He called them the Servant Songs, and the name stuck. Scholars still argue about where each one begins and ends, and whether one poet wrote them all.¹⁷

The argument over who the servant is is older than Duhm. Around the songs, the answer is given outright: But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen (Isaiah 41:8). Yet in the second song the servant is called Israel and is also sent to bring Israel back to God (Isaiah 49:3, 5–6). So readers have proposed many answers: the whole people, a faithful few within it, the prophet himself, a king, or someone still to come.

Even the earliest translators took sides. Where the Hebrew of Isaiah 42:1 says only my servant, the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars in Egypt reads “Jacob is my servant … Israel is my chosen.” When Matthew quotes that passage about me, he leaves those names out (Matthew 12:18–21).¹⁸

The question was asked in the first years of my movement. A eunuch from Ethiopia, reading Isaiah 53 in his chariot, asked Philip, Who is the prophet talking about? About himself, or about someone else? (Acts 8:34). The poem does not name the sufferer. That is part of why it has been read so many ways for so long.

Come without money

Hey! Come, everyone who thirsts, to the waters! Come, he who has no money, buy, and eat! Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price (Isaiah 55:1).

A feast that costs nothing, for people who have nothing. I fed crowds on a hillside. I told stories of a banquet where the host sends his servants into the streets to bring in the poor and the lame. Isaiah had already laid that table.

The eunuch and the foreigner

The last part of Isaiah opens a door the Law had closed.

Deuteronomy says that a man whose body has been mutilated may not enter the assembly of the LORD (Deuteronomy 23:1). Isaiah says that the eunuchs who keep God’s covenant will be given a memorial and a name better than of sons and of daughters (Isaiah 56:4–5).

And foreigners who join themselves to the LORD will be brought to God’s holy mountain, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples (Isaiah 56:7).

When I overturned the tables of the money-changers in the Temple, those were the words I used: Isn’t it written, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations?’ But you have made it a den of robbers! (Mark 11:17). The first part was Isaiah. The second was Jeremiah.

In the book of Acts, one of the first foreigners baptized by my followers is a eunuch from Ethiopia, and he is sitting in his chariot reading Isaiah when Philip meets him (Acts 8:26–39).

The fast God chooses

Isaiah 58 may be the finest chapter on religion in the scriptures. The people complain that God ignores their fasting. God answers:

Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to release the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Isn’t it to distribute your bread to the hungry, and that you bring the poor who are cast out to your house? When you see the naked, that you cover him (Isaiah 58:6–7).

That is the line Luke wove into my reading at Nazareth, where it reads to deliver those who are crushed.

My answer to John

When my kinsman John was in prison, he sent his followers to ask me whether I was the one, or whether they should wait for another.

I did not say yes or no. I told them to tell John what they saw: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them (Matthew 11:4–5).

That is Isaiah: the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Then the lame man will leap like a deer (Isaiah 35:5–6), and good news to the humble (Isaiah 61:1).

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls there is a text, written before me, that speaks of God’s messiah and says that in those days the Lord will heal the wounded, give life to the dead, and preach good news to the poor.¹⁹ Even raising the dead, which is not in Isaiah’s lists in chapters 35 and 61, was on that list. John knew what I meant.

The last verse

Isaiah ends with a terrible picture. The faithful go out of Jerusalem and look at the bodies of the rebels: for their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched (Isaiah 66:24).

I used those words when I warned about Gehenna (Mark 9:48). In Isaiah, the worm and the fire are working on dead bodies outside the city. It is a picture of shame and ruin.

My people found that last verse so hard that, when they read Isaiah aloud in the synagogue, they repeated the verse before it so the reading would not end there. That verse says that all flesh shall come to worship before God.²⁰

They chose to end on the promise.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Isaiah 61:1–2, then Luke 4:16–21.

You will find: the passage I chose at Nazareth, and where Luke’s reading stops.

Then read Isaiah 58:1–9. It is the fast God chooses.

The Short Version

• Isaiah is the scroll I was handed at Nazareth. I read good news to the poor and release to the captives from it.
• The Great Isaiah Scroll, copied a century before me, shows the book almost as I knew it.
• The scroll grew over two centuries. Chapters 40 and on speak to the exile and name Cyrus.
• It attacks worship without justice, land-grabbing and laws that rob the poor, and promises swords into plowshares.
• Its suffering servant was read by my followers as me. On my last night I quoted one line: “counted with transgressors.”