Who was the prophet Isaiah?

A prophet of the city

The book opens with its author’s name and his time.

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

His Hebrew name, Yeshayahu, means “Yahweh is salvation.” His father Amoz is not the prophet Amos; the names are spelled differently in Hebrew. The Talmud even passes on a tradition that Amoz was a brother of King Amaziah, which would make Isaiah a cousin of kings (Megillah 10b). Whether or not that is so, he moves easily in palace and Temple. He walks up to a king at a water channel and tells him to keep calm. Chronicles says he wrote the history of Uzziah’s reign (2 Chronicles 26:22).

He was married to a woman the book calls “the prophetess,” and he gave his sons names that were sermons: Shear-jashub, “a remnant will return,” and Maher Shalal Hash Baz, “swift to the plunder” (7:3; 8:3).

Behold, I and the children whom Yahweh has given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel from Yahweh of Armies, who dwells in Mount Zion.

When did Isaiah live?

His forty years run alongside the rise of Assyria, the empire that swallowed his world.

1. About 740 BC: in the year Uzziah dies, he sees the Lord enthroned in the Temple and answers “Here I am. Send me!” (Isaiah 6).
2. About 734 BC: Damascus and Israel march on Jerusalem; Isaiah offers King Ahaz the sign of Immanuel, and Ahaz pays Assyria instead (Isaiah 7; 2 Kings 16:7–8).
3. 722 BC: Assyria takes Samaria, and the northern kingdom of Israel ends.
4. About 711 BC: when Sargon’s general takes Ashdod, Isaiah walks “naked and barefoot” for three years as a warning against trusting Egypt (Isaiah 20:1–3). It is the Bible’s only mention of Sargon, whose palace was not dug up until 1843.
5. 701 BC: Sennacherib besieges Jerusalem, and Isaiah tells Hezekiah not to be afraid (2 Kings 19:6). He also brings the sick king his fifteen extra years (2 Kings 20).

After Hezekiah he disappears from the record; the legend of his death under Manasseh is in how Isaiah died.

What he is known for

Isaiah is a poet of justice. He scorns sacrifices offered by people with blood on their hands and tells them: “Learn to do well. Seek justice. Relieve the oppressed” (1:17). Then he offers a deal: “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (1:18). His most famous line imagines a world without war: nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (2:4). A statue of that scene, given by the Soviet Union in 1959, stands at the United Nations in New York.

Christians know him best through texts they read as pointing to Jesus: the virgin who will bear Immanuel, “God with us” (7:14), and the servant who “was pierced for our transgressions” (53:5). Jewish readers hear a child of Ahaz’s own time in the first and Israel itself in the second. In Luke, Jesus begins his ministry by reading from Isaiah’s scroll in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:17–19), and no prophet is quoted more in the New Testament.

One Isaiah or several?

From chapter 40 the book speaks to exiles in Babylon, around 540 BC, and names the Persian king Cyrus (who Cyrus was). Most scholars therefore credit chapters 40 to 66 to later prophets in Isaiah’s tradition, often called Second and Third Isaiah. Traditional readers hold that Isaiah foresaw it all. The oldest complete copy, the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, copied around 125 BC, already has all 66 chapters as one book.