How did Isaiah die?

What the Bible says

Nothing. The book dates Isaiah’s visions to four kings of Judah, “Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah” (Isaiah 1:1). His last scene is with Hezekiah, after the envoys from Babylon, when the king hears a hard prophecy and answers with relief that at least there will be “peace and truth” in his own days (2 Kings 20:19). Chronicles adds that Isaiah wrote the acts of Uzziah and of Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 26:22; 32:32). Then he disappears.

Hezekiah’s son was another matter. Manasseh became king at twelve and reigned fifty-five years (2 Kings 21:1), the longest reign in Judah and, in the book’s eyes, the worst. Kings remembers one thing in particular.

Moreover Manasseh shed innocent blood very much, until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another

Kings names no victims. Josephus, in the first century AD, says Manasseh killed prophets day after day, and still names none (Antiquities 10.38). Later tradition supplied the name.

The Ascension of Isaiah

The fullest version is in the Ascension of Isaiah, a Christian work of the first or second century AD that may reuse an older Jewish legend. It survives complete only in Ge’ez, the old church language of Ethiopia. Its first five chapters tell the martyrdom. A false prophet named Belkira accuses Isaiah before Manasseh, and the king has him seized and sawn in two with a wooden saw. Isaiah neither cries out nor weeps, the text says; his lips go on speaking with the Holy Spirit until he is cut in two. The second half of the book is Isaiah’s vision of a journey up through the seven heavens.

The Talmud’s version

The rabbis tell it with a twist (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 49b). Manasseh puts Isaiah on trial for contradicting Moses. Moses heard God say, “man may not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20), yet Isaiah wrote, “I saw the Lord” (Isaiah 6:1). Isaiah offers no defense. He speaks a holy name and is swallowed up by a cedar tree. Manasseh has the cedar sawn through, and when the saw reaches Isaiah’s mouth, he dies. Why the mouth? Because, the rabbis say, he had called his own people “a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5).

The line in Hebrews

By the first century the story was known widely enough to leave a trace in the New Testament. Hebrews 11 lists the heroes of faith, and near the end comes a line that names no one.

They were stoned. They were sawn apart. They were tempted. They were slain with the sword.

No hero in the pages of the Old Testament dies that way, so many readers, ancient and modern, hear Isaiah there. Other early witnesses agree. The Lives of the Prophets, a Jewish collection from about the same era, opens with him: he died under Manasseh, sawn in two. Around AD 160 Justin Martyr writes, in his Dialogue with Trypho, that Isaiah was sawn asunder with a wooden saw (chapter 120).

Is it history?

Perhaps, but no one can check it. The timing is possible: called around 740 BC, Isaiah would have been an old man in Manasseh’s early years, half a century later. But the story first appears centuries after the fact, and every version adds details of its own. What it shows clearly is how Isaiah was remembered, as the prophet who saw God and paid for what he said. In Christian art he often holds a saw. His words outlived the king who silenced him: no prophet is quoted more often in the New Testament.