Isaiah
Isaiah was an 8th-century BC Israelite prophet, and his name carries a meaning: "Yahweh is salvation." He is also known as Isaias or Esaias, and the Book of Isaiah is named after him. That much seems simple. The trouble begins with the book itself. Its 66 chapters have been read for centuries as the work of one man, written possibly in two periods between 740 BC and around 686 BC. But another view splits the book apart. It suggests the first chapters trace back to the historical prophet, while later portions belong to the era around the end of the 6th-century BC exile in Babylon, almost two centuries later. So who was the man behind the name? How did a prophet end up sawn in two inside a cedar tree? And why, in 2018, did an archaeologist's tiny clay seal reopen the question of whether Isaiah ever existed at all? The answers run through Jerusalem under siege, through three world religions, and through a small lump of stamped earth found ten feet from a king's mark.
Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah: the first verse of the Book of Isaiah names these four kings of Judah as the rulers under whom Isaiah prophesied. Uzziah's reign lasted 52 years in the middle of the 8th century BC, and Isaiah must have begun his ministry shortly before that king died, probably in the 740s BC. Stretching across these reigns, and perhaps overlapping with Manasseh, Isaiah may have prophesied for as long as 64 years.
His family appears in the text alongside him. Some modern interpretations call Isaiah's wife "the prophetess," either because she shared the prophetic gift, like Deborah and Huldah, or simply because she was the wife of the prophet. The couple had two sons, and Isaiah gave them names that doubled as messages. The elder was Shear-Jashub, meaning "A remnant shall return." The younger was Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, meaning "Quickly to spoils, plunder speedily."
A third name has divided readers for centuries. According to the Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah and his wife also had a son named Immanuel. Christians read that same verse very differently, treating it as a prophecy of the virgin birth of Jesus. One verse, one name, and two faiths that part ways over what it means.
Shalmaneser V set out to subdue the northern Kingdom of Israel, capturing and destroying Samaria and beginning the Assyrian captivity. While Ahaz sat on the throne of Judah, Assyrian power left his kingdom untouched. Everything changed when Hezekiah became king. Encouraged to rebel against the king of Assyria, Hezekiah formed an alliance with the king of Egypt, and the response came fast.
Sennacherib's campaign in the Levant carried his army into Judah. Threatened and then invaded, Hezekiah fell into despair and submitted to the Assyrians. The peace did not hold. After a brief interval, war broke out again, and Sennacherib led a second army into Judah, with one detachment moving against Jerusalem itself. This was the moment Isaiah stepped forward, urging Hezekiah to resist.
Sennacherib answered with a threatening letter, which Hezekiah spread before God. Then Isaiah son of Amoz sent word back. Speaking for the God of Israel, the message mocked the Assyrian king: "Fair Maiden Zion despises you, She mocks at you; Fair Jerusalem shakes Her head at you." It pressed the charge further: "Whom have you blasphemed and reviled? Against whom made loud your voice And haughtily raised your eyes? Against the Holy One of Israel!"
What followed reads like catastrophe from the Assyrian side. According to the account in 2 Kings 19, with its derivative version in 2 Chronicles 32, an angel of God fell on the Assyrian army and slew 185,000 of its men in a single night. One reflection draws a parallel to the wider ancient world: "Like Xerxes in Greece, Sennacherib never recovered from the shock of the disaster in Judah. He made no more expeditions against either Judea or Egypt."
The remaining years of Hezekiah's reign were peaceful, and Isaiah probably lived to see them close, perhaps surviving into the reign of Manasseh. Neither the Bible nor other primary sources records the time or manner of his death. Into that silence stepped one of the most vivid death traditions in scripture. The Talmud holds that Isaiah suffered martyrdom by being sawn in two under the orders of Manasseh.
The Talmud preserves the scene in detail. Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai found an account in Jerusalem stating that King Manasseh killed Isaiah. The king confronted the prophet with apparent contradictions, including Moses saying "No man may see God and live" against Isaiah's claim "I saw the Lord seated upon his throne." Isaiah, reasoning that the king would never accept his explanations, chose not to increase Manasseh's guilt. He uttered the tetragrammaton, a cedar-tree opened, and he vanished inside it. Manasseh ordered the cedar sawn asunder, and when the saw reached Isaiah's mouth, he died, punished for having said "I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips."
The Jerusalem Talmud tells a slightly different tale, in which a frightened Isaiah hides in the cedar but is betrayed by the fringes of his garment. A passage of the Targum to Isaiah, quoted by Jolowicz, adds that when the tree was sawn in half, the prophet's blood spurted forth. This martyrdom spread far beyond Jewish tradition, reaching the Arabs and the Christians. Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria around 318, wrote simply, "Isaiah was sawn asunder."
Gregory of Nyssa, who lived around 335 to 395, believed that the Prophet Isaiah "knew more perfectly than all others the mystery of the religion of the Gospel." Jerome, around 342 to 420, went further, calling him "more of an Evangelist than a Prophet." Isaiah, Jerome wrote, described the Mysteries of the Church of Christ so vividly that "you would assume he was not prophesying about the future, but rather was composing a history of past events."
The songs of the Suffering Servant sit at the center of this Christian reading. Christians treat them as a direct prophetic revelation of the nature, purpose, and detail of the death of Jesus Christ. New Testament writers reached for the Book of Isaiah again and again. The Gospel of John states that Isaiah "saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him."
Beyond scripture, an early Christian text expanded his story. The Ascension of Isaiah, a pseudepigraphical work dated to sometime between the end of the 1st century and the beginning of the 3rd, narrates Isaiah confronting an evil false prophet before his martyrdom. None of that drama appears in the original Biblical account. The Eastern Orthodox Church honors Saint Isaiah the Prophet alongside Saint Christopher on May 9, the same date on which the Roman martyrology of the Roman Catholic Church also lists him.
Isaiah is not named in the Quran or the Hadith, yet he appears often as a prophet in Muslim sources, including the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ and various tafsirs. Al-Tabari, who died in 310 of the Islamic calendar, or 923, supplies the typical accounts for these traditions. Isaiah is listed among the prophets in the book of salawat Dalail al-Khayrat, and scholars such as ibn Kathir, Abu Ishaq al-Tha'labi, and al-Kisa'i accepted him, as did the modern writers Muhammad Asad and Abdullah Yusuf Ali.
Islamic literature divides his narrative into three sections. The first establishes Isaiah as a prophet of Judea during the reign of Hezekiah. The second relates his actions during the siege of Jerusalem in 597 BC by Sennacherib. The third warns the nation of coming doom. In this tradition, Hezekiah was a righteous man who heard and obeyed Isaiah's advice but could not quell the turbulence in Israel, which worsened after his death. When Isaiah later warned the people to cease their sin and disobedience, the unrighteous of Judea sought to kill him. In a death resembling the one found in Lives of the Prophets, Muslim exegesis recounts the Israelites sawing him asunder.
One courtroom debate gives Isaiah a starring role. In the courts of al-Ma'mun, the seventh Abbasid caliph, the scholar Ali al-Ridha, the great-grandson of Muhammad, was challenged by the Exilarch to prove from the Torah that both Jesus and Muhammad were prophets. Al-Ridha quoted Isaiah's vision of two riders, "One of them was on a donkey and the other was on a camel." He identified the rider of the donkey as Jesus and the rider of the camel as Muhammad, then asked, "Do you deny that this (statement) is in the Torah?" The Rabbi answered, "No, I do not deny it."
According to the ancient rabbis, Isaiah descended from Judah and Tamar, and his father Amoz was the brother of King Amaziah. Jewish rabbinic literature surrounds the prophet with expansions and inferences that reach well past the Biblical text. One Midrash stages his calling as a conversation. Walking up and down in his study, Isaiah heard God ask, "Whom shall I send?" and answered, "Here am I; send me!"
God's reply set a hard condition. "My children are troublesome and sensitive," God warned; if Isaiah was ready to be insulted and even beaten by them, he could accept the message. Isaiah accepted, and the rabbis remember him as the most forbearing and most patriotic of the prophets, always defending Israel and pleading forgiveness for its sins. Yet even he was rebuked. When he said "I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips," God reproached him for speaking that way of His people.
Family ties bind him to the royal house in another rabbinic account. There Isaiah is the maternal grandfather of King Manasseh, which would make Queen Consort Hephzibah of 2 Kings 21:1 his daughter and King Hezekiah his son-in-law. Hephzibah's name means "my delight is in her," and that same name served as a symbolic title for Zion when it was restored to the favor of Yahweh in Isaiah 62.
In February 2018, the archaeologist Eilat Mazar announced a find that pulled Isaiah out of legend and into the soil. During the Ophel excavations, just south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, her team uncovered a small seal impression reading "belonging to Isaiah nvy." Reconstructed, that could be read as "belonging to Isaiah the prophet." The tiny bulla, a stamped lump of clay, suddenly offered the possibility of physical evidence for the man himself.
Location made the discovery electric. The seal turned up only 10 feet from where the same team, in 2015, had found an intact bulla inscribed "belonging to King Hezekiah of Judah." The prophet and his king, named together across the source as ministry and crown, seemed to surface side by side in the ground.
The earth, however, kept part of its secret. The name "Isaiah" appears unmistakably in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, but damage to the bottom left of the seal makes it hard to confirm the word "prophet" or whether the letters spell a name, "Navi." That single broken corner leaves open the question the whole subject keeps circling. Whether this clay carries the seal of the prophet Isaiah, or of someone else entirely, still cannot be said for certain.
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Common questions
Who was Isaiah the prophet?
Isaiah was an 8th-century BC Israelite prophet after whom the Book of Isaiah is named. His name means "Yahweh is salvation," and he is also known as Isaias or Esaias. He prophesied during the reigns of the kings of Judah Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.
When did Isaiah the prophet live and prophesy?
Isaiah began his ministry probably in the 740s BC, a few years before the death of King Uzziah, whose reign lasted 52 years in the middle of the 8th century BC. He may have prophesied for as long as 64 years, possibly into the reign of Manasseh.
How did Isaiah the prophet die?
The Bible and other primary sources do not specify the time or manner of Isaiah's death. The Talmud says he suffered martyrdom by being sawn in two under the orders of King Manasseh, in a tradition where he hid inside a cedar tree that was then sawn asunder.
What did Isaiah the prophet do during the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem?
Isaiah encouraged King Hezekiah to resist the Assyrians when Sennacherib's army threatened Jerusalem. According to the account in 2 Kings 19, an angel of God fell on the Assyrian army and slew 185,000 of its men in one night, after which Sennacherib made no more expeditions against Judea or Egypt.
How is Isaiah viewed in Christianity and Islam?
In Christianity, figures such as Jerome called Isaiah "more of an Evangelist than a Prophet," and the songs of the Suffering Servant are read as prophecy of the death of Jesus Christ. In Islam, Isaiah is not named in the Quran or Hadith but appears as an accepted prophet in sources such as the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ and tafsirs.
What was the Isaiah seal discovered in 2018?
In February 2018, archaeologist Eilat Mazar announced the discovery of a small seal impression reading "belonging to Isaiah nvy" during the Ophel excavations south of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was found only 10 feet from a bulla bearing the inscription of King Hezekiah of Judah, though damage to the seal casts doubt on whether it confirms the word "prophet".
All sources
24 references cited across the entry
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- 4BookLongman pronunciation dictionaryJohn C. Wells — Longman — 1990
- 12St. Isaiah the Prophet, Pray for Us9 May 2018
- 14Isaiah
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- 18BookThe life of Imam 'Ali Bin Musa al-RidhaBaqir Shareef al-Qurashi — Ansariyan Publications — 2001
- 21BookOn the IncarnationAthanasius — GLH Publishing — 2018