The Book of Isaiah contains the most astounding prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. Ostensibly, the Prophet Isaiah, who flourished in the eighth century B.C.E., according to Isaiah 1:1, accurately foresaw events that occurred a couple hundred years later: He predicted that after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed and the Jewish people exiled, a foreign king named Cyrus would rise up and restore the scattered nation and authorize the rebuilding of the Temple—an event that actually did occur in 538 B.C.E.:
Thus says Yahweh, Your redeemer and fashioner from the womb: “I am Yahweh the All-doer, Sole Sky-stretcher, Earth-beater. Who beside me? … Who says of Jerusalem: ‘She’ll be inhabited,’ And of Judah’s cities, ‘They’ll be rebuilt; For I’ll erect her ruins.’ Who says to the Deep: ‘Dry up, For I’ll parch your channels!’ Who says of Cyrus: ‘My shepherd!’ For he’ll accomplish all my will By saying to Jerusalem: ‘She’ll be rebuilt And the Temple refounded.’ Thus says Yahweh to his Anointed, To Cyrus whose right hand I grasp, To trample nations before him, I’ll loosen kings’ loins. To open doors before him, And gates won’t be closed: ‘It is I who’ll walk before you, And I’ll flatten mountains, … So that you’ll know That I am Yahweh, Who calls you by name, Israel’s God. For my servant Jacob’s sake, And my chosen, Israel’s. I have called you by name, Nominated you, though you know me not …’”
How did Isaiah know what would happen 200 years later? Why did he pronounce oracles that made no sense to his contemporaries?
For the Bible’s pre-modern devotees, the answer was obvious. How better for God to prove his omniscience and his power than to impart oracles, however mysterious, to Isaiah and his contemporaries, that would be clarified and accomplished in the fullness of time? How better to reassure his people that, despite their suffering in Exile, God was fully in control and indeed planned for their redemption?
For many, these answers are still fully satisfying.
For academic scholars, however, such an explanation violates the “rules of the game” by invoking the supernatural. Secular scholars instead conclude that Isaiah did not in fact pen these oracles. Rather they were written later and attributed to him. Chapters 40 to 66 of the Book of Isaiah address Exilic and post-Exilic Jews and hence must stem from the period of the Babylonian Exile after Jerusalem was destroyed—or even later.
Why would anyone do this, attribute words uttered in Exilic or post-Exilic times to an author hundreds of years earlier? Wasn’t the Exilic or post-Exilic author proud of what he’d written?
To ask these questions is to import assumptions foreign to the world of antiquity. We in the West regard the story of civilization as one of upward growth; perched upon our ancestors’ shoulders, we see even farther than they. On the other hand, traditional societies, by definition, conceive of culture as undergoing a continuous decline; the ancients knew much that we have forgotten. Thus, while a modern physicist would be crazy to attribute original research to Sir Isaac Newton in order to lend it greater credibility, that is exactly what an ancient author might do. His work would achieve all the greater currency if its true author’s name were forgotten. For many writers, the trade-off was worth it.
This literary genre is called pseudepigraphy, from the Greek for “false writing.” Early Jewish literature abounds with documents attributed to ancient figures such as Adam, Enoch, Abraham, Jacob’s twelve sons, Moses, Solomon, Ezra, and Ezekiel.2 Not all pseudepigrapha are out-and-out forgeries. Some were probably circulated anonymously and only later attributed to sages of old. But all contain clear evidence, such as anachronistic language, betraying their relatively late date of composition.
So, too, with Isaiah 40–66. If these chapters are not by the eighth-century Isaiah of Jerusalem, they must be by a later anonymous prophet or prophets whose work was imputed to the ancient seer. Scholars call this corpus “Second Isaiah” (or more often “Second and Third Isaiah” because they identify it as the work of two separate anonymous authors—see below).3 This namelessness is all the more frustrating because, in the opinion of most, Isaiah 40–66 contains much of the Bible’s sublimest poetry.4 Would that we could restore its author to his rightful place in Hebrew literature!
The quest for Second Isaiah may not be utterly vain, however. Decades ago, a little known Israeli amateur biblical scholar, Nehemiah Rabban, wrote a manuscript published posthumously under the title Second Isaiah: His Prophecy, His Personality and His Name.5 This work is a defense of the unity of Isaiah 40–66, a psychological profile of the prophetic author, and, most provocatively, a plausible identification of the prophet by name. Because the work is in Hebrew, it is rarely if ever cited by American researchers, but it well repays reading.6
As noted above, not all agree that Isaiah 40–66 is by a single author. Some identify a Third Isaiah as well, and credit this nameless seer with writing chapters 56 to 66. That is the current majority view against which Rabban mounts a spirited attack. He admits there are numerous differences in style and terminology between chapters 40–55 and 56–66, but he also stresses the equally striking continuities. Rabban concludes, “There is an undoubted change in basic tone in chapters 55–66, which are more fiercely zealous than the prior chapters. One gets the impression that the prophet, finding his preaching to be ineffectual, grew angry at those who refused to heed him.”7 In other words, we must allow for developments in the writer’s style and thought.8
A recurrent theme in Isaiah 40–66 relates to the Lord’s servant or servants. Chapters 40–55, the corpus on which Rabban bases his argument and which all attribute to Second Isaiah, speak repeatedly of a particular servant.9 He is God’s appointed teacher and judge of all nations. Elected from birth and entrusted with the special mission of restoring Israel and illuminating the nations, he is God’s secret weapon. But the servant’s efforts seem fruitless, for he is meek, unprepossessing and generally reviled. He suffers, is adjudged guilty and finally dies, his death atoning for the multitude. The language varies between the third person (“he”) and the first person (“I”).
Who is this servant? In some passages, the servant 035is explicitly all Israel personified: “But you, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I chose … you whom I drew from the earth’s edges and called from its extremities …” (Isaiah 41:8–9; see also Isaiah 43:10, 44:1–2, 21, 45:4, 48:20, 49:3). But elsewhere he seems to be an individual, as we have seen. Christian tradition anachronistically identifies the servant with Jesus. Modern scholars have suggested several more appropriate candidates among Second Isaiah’s contemporaries and predecessors, including Moses, the exiled king Jehoiachin and his grandson Zerubbabel, who became governor of Judah when the Jews returned home from Babylon. But for Rabban, the servant is none other than Second Isaiah himself, based on passages 036like Isaiah 49:1–6 (see also 50:4–9):
Listen, O coastlands, to me, And attend, nations afar: Yahweh summoned me since the womb, Since my mother’s belly he named my name. He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, In his hand’s shadow he concealed me, He made me a polished arrow; In his quiver he hid me. He said to me, You are my servant, Israel, through whom I am glorified. But I said: “In vain I have toiled, For nothing and naught spent my strength. But surely my award is from Yahweh, My wage from my God.” And now, says Yahweh— My creator since the womb to be his servant, To return Jacob to him, So that Israel will be gathered to him, And I will become honored in Yahweh’s eyes, And my God will be my strength— He says: It is too little for you to be my slave, To raise up Jacob’s tribes, And Israel’s preserved to restore. So I shall make you a light of nations, That my victory may be to the earth’s edge.10
Rabban devotes special attention to Isaiah 42:18–19: “Hear, you deaf; and look, you blind, that you may see. Who is blind but my servant, or deaf as my messenger whom I have sent? Who is blind as meshullam or blind as the Lord’s servant?”
What or who is meshullam? According to Rabban, this is simply the servant’s given name.
Although this is not the conventional reading of meshullam, it seems inescapable. Traditionally, the term has been viewed as a kind of symbolic nickname, supposedly meaning “perfected,” “submissive,” “covenanted” or “repaid.” Admittedly, the Bible does contain symbolic epithets: In the Book of Isaiah, various figures are called “A remnant shall return,” “God is with us” and “Spoil speeds; prey hastens” (Isaiah 7:3, 14, 8:3). Hosea refers to people as “Jezreel,” “Not pitied” and “Not my people” (Hosea 1:4, 6, 9); and Zechariah calls the man who shall rebuild the Temple “Branch” (Zechariah 6:12). But, as Rabban stresses, all these expressions are easy to understand, whereas meshullam is not, which is why it has elicited such forced interpretations and even textual emendations from modern commentators.
Moreover, none of the foregoing symbolic epithets can be taken as a true name. But, as it happens, the name Meshullam is found 24 times in the Bible, almost always in Exilic and post-Exilic contexts, just the period when Second Isaiah flourished. The name is also borne by at least 11 individuals in Persian-era Jewish documents from Elephantine, Egypt.a For Rabban, the most natural explanation is that, in the Book of Isaiah, Meshullam is the name of the servant-prophet himself. How else would a Persian-era Jew have understood the question, “Who is blind as Meshullam or blind as the Lord’s servant?”11
If Rabban is correct, and Meshullam is Second Isaiah’s name, the odds are that one or more of the 23 other references to Meshullam in the Bible are actually references to Second Isaiah.
Rabban does not seek further to identify Second Isaiah. But if, following Rabban’s analysis, we seek a prominent Meshullam with delusions of grandeur, liable to equate the nation’s fate with his own, and sufficiently educated to quote older Israelite literature and compose great poetry—the chief suspect would have to be Meshullam son of Zerubbabel, heir to the house of David (1 Chronicles 3:19).12 Although nothing is known about this Meshullam, the Books of Ezra, Haggai and 046Zechariah present his father as a royal pretender who might restore the kingdom.
But even if Rabban is right, and Meshullam is Second Isaiah, a big question remains. If Meshullam named himself, how was he forgotten? How did his oracles become attached to Isaiah?
Rabban believes that Meshullam was a great admirer of Isaiah of Jerusalem, and that what we call Isaiah 40–66 is really Meshullam’s annotations to the original Book of Isaiah. This strikes me as disingenuous. Twenty-six chapters of dense poetry hardly qualify as annotations.13 Although Rabban does not think that Meshullam intended his words to be attributed to Isaiah, I am less trusting. In the Book of Isaiah as it now stands, the reference or references to Meshullam function as prophecies of a future servant, fully comparable to the oracles naming Cyrus. That is, Meshullam may have tried to legitimate his own ministry by appending predictions of himself to the Book of Isaiah. Such chutzpah would be the more understandable if, as suggested above, Meshullam was a legitimate pretender to the throne, reliant on Yahweh’s “eternal covenant [and] steadfast fidelity to David” (Isaiah 55:3). We would, admittedly, have to attribute a rather long career to Second Isaiah = Meshullam, if he was already an active prophet around 538 B.C.E., when Cyrus released the Jews from Exile, and he was younger than his father Zerubbabel, who was still active around 518 B.C.E.14
As Rabban himself would probably acknowledge, the affair cannot really be settled. Absent a signed manuscript, “Second Isaiah” must remain our clumsy designation for Israel’s greatest poet of the restoration. But one cannot help wishing for a new edition of the Bible giving the man due credit. Between the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, could we not find a place for the Book of Meshullam?
The Book of Isaiah contains the most astounding prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. Ostensibly, the Prophet Isaiah, who flourished in the eighth century B.C.E., according to Isaiah 1:1, accurately foresaw events that occurred a couple hundred years later: He predicted that after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed and the Jewish people exiled, a foreign king named Cyrus would rise up and restore the scattered nation and authorize the rebuilding of the Temple—an event that actually did occur in 538 B.C.E.: Thus says Yahweh,Your redeemer and fashioner from the womb:“I am Yahweh the All-doer,Sole Sky-stretcher,Earth-beater. Who beside me?…Who says of […]
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My translation of the Hebrew is not certain in every respect, but on the whole the oracle is quite clear.
2.
For a collection of such works, see James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985).
3.
More formal scholars use “Deutero-Isaiah” and “Trito-Isaiah.” This terminology avoids perplexing students who are familiar with Second Samuel and Second Kings and search their Bibles in vain for Second Isaiah.
4.
Because of similarities in style and content, many scholars also attribute Isaiah 34–35 to Second Isaiah. These chapters supposedly were connected to chapter 40 before the insertion of historical material in chapters 36–39.
5.
Nehemiah Rabban, Yesha‘yahu hasheni: nevu’ato, ’ishiyuto ushemo (Jerusalem: Kirath Sepher, 1971). Rabban also published a work on Jeremiah.
6.
See Risa Levitt Kohn and William H.C. Propp, “The Name of ‘;Second Isaiah’: The Forgotten Theory of Nehemiah Rabban,” in Fortunate the Eyes that See (Festschrift for D.N. Freedman: Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 223–235.
7.
Rabban, Yesha‘;yahu hasheni, p. 31.
8.
It is my impression that some interpreters have distinguished between the two sections on the grounds that chapters 40–55 sound more “Christian,” stressing God’s universalism and the redemptive power of suffering, while chapters 56–66 sound more “Jewish,” focused on ritual and vengeance. This is a notorious false dichotomy with deep roots in the field. But since other arguments against the unity of chapters 40–66 retain their force, the matter is best left open.
A seemingly insuperable obstacle to this theory is the fact that the first-person Isaiah 49:1–3 explicitly calls the servant “Israel.” Rabban regards the prophet as a megalomaniac who claimed to embody the entire nation, at least regarding their relationship to God. But this remains a clear weakness in Rabban’s argument and in all efforts to identify the servant as an individual.
11.
Rabban argues that Meshullam in fact signed his work not once but twice. Isaiah 49:7 contains God’s address to a figure called by the obscure phrase ‘eved moshelim, literally “servant of rulers.” Since Hebrew was originally written consonantally, without vowels, Rabban infers that ‘vd mshlym is a corruption of an original ‘avbdo meshullam (‘vdw mshlm), “his servant Meshullam.”
12.
Previously, J.L. Palache had identified Meshullam in Isaiah 42:19 with this prince, although not as Second Isaiah; see Christopher R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 89–90.
13.
A more subtle but still disingenuous theory holds that Second Isaiah or his scribe simply used the back of a scroll of Isaiah, since the corpora are of comparable length, with 33 chapters for First Isaiah (minus the historical material in chapters 36–39) and 29 for Second Isaiah, maximally defined. A later reader naturally assumed the two sides constituted one literary work.
14.
This line of conjecture raises another tantalizing possibility. What if Meshullam son of Zerubbabel is not the author but only the subject of Second Isaiah? In fact, “Isaiah” is a fairly rare name in the Bible, borne by approximately seven individuals. One of these is a member of the post-Exilic house of David and the nephew of our Meshullam (1 Chronicles 3:21). Is it conceivable that the misattribution of chapters 40–66 to Isaiah of Jerusalem was just an innocent mistake—for both were written by men named “Isaiah?”
