History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Hosea had written of the power of love and called for a change in men’s hearts. A younger contemporary of his, a southerner, carried these ideas further. Isaiah lived at the time when the northern kingdom was under sentence of death. Unlike most of the heroic figures in the Bible, he was not born poor: according to the tradition of the Babylonian Talmud, he was the nephew of King Amaziah of Judah.215 But his ideas were populist or democratic. He put no faith in armies and walls, kings and magnificent temples. His work marks the point at which the Israelite religion began to spiritualize itself, to move from a specific location in space and time on to the universalist plane. It is divided into two parts: Chapters 1 to 39 deal with his life and prophesyings in the period 740–700 BC; Chapters 44–66, or Deutero-Isaiah, date from much later, and the historical connection between the two is not clear, though the development of the ideas is logical enough. Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we po...