Isaiah

Isaiah (Hebrew Yeshayahu, "the LORD is salvation" — rendered Esaias in the Greek of the New Testament) was the son of Amoz and the foremost of the writing prophets. He prophesied in Jerusalem across the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, a ministry of roughly forty years (c. 740–700 BC) in the shadow of the rising Assyrian empire (Isaiah 1:1). A man of evident learning with access to the royal court, he was married to a "prophetess" and gave his sons sign-names embodying his message (Isaiah 7:3; Isaiah 8:3–4). His own name, and those signs, announce the book's great theme: that salvation and judgment alike belong to the LORD.

Isaiah's prophetic commission came in the year King Uzziah died, when he saw the LORD "high and lifted up" and the seraphim crying "Holy, holy, holy"; undone by the vision, his lips were cleansed with a coal from the altar and he answered, "Here I am! Send me" (Isaiah 6:1–8). From this encounter flows his favourite name for God — "the Holy One of Israel." In the Syro-Ephraimite crisis he summoned the faithless Ahaz to trust rather than fear, giving the sign of a child called Immanuel, "God with us" (Isaiah 7:14), and foretelling the coming royal child on whom government would rest, the "Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6–7), and the righteous shoot from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1–9).

When Sennacherib's armies besieged Jerusalem under Hezekiah, Isaiah stood at the centre of the crisis, counselling the king to rely on the LORD rather than on Egypt and prophesying the city's deliverance — fulfilled when the angel of the LORD struck the Assyrian camp (Isaiah 37:33–36; 2 Kings 19:32–36). The latter chapters, often called the "Book of Comfort," lift the people's eyes beyond exile in Babylon to the LORD who is incomparable Creator and Redeemer (Isaiah 40:1–11). There rise the four Servant Songs, climaxing in the suffering servant "pierced for our transgressions" who bears the sin of many (Isaiah 52:13–53:12), and the closing vision of "new heavens and a new earth" (Isaiah 65:17; Isaiah 66:22). Jewish tradition (echoed in the New Testament's roll of martyrs) holds that he was sawn in two under the wicked king Manasseh (cf. Hebrews 11:37).

No prophet is quoted more often in the New Testament, where he regularly appears as Esaias. John the Baptist is the "voice" of Isaiah 40:3; Jesus opens his ministry by reading Isaiah 61:1–2 and declaring it fulfilled (Luke 4:17–21); and the Ethiopian eunuch is reading the servant song when Philip "told him the good news about Jesus" (Acts 8:32–35). Because Isaiah sets forth the virgin's son, the Spirit-anointed Messiah, the atoning servant, and the new creation with such clarity, he has long been called "the evangelical prophet" — the gospel proclaimed centuries before its dawn, and a cornerstone for understanding the person and saving work of Christ.