John Through the Centuries
Mark Edwards
Revelation Through the Centuries
Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland
Judges Through the Centuries
David M. Gunn
Exodus Through the Centuries
Scott M. Langston
Ecclesiastes Through the Centuries
Eric S. Christianson
Esther Through the Centuries
Jo Carruthers
Psalms Through the Centuries: Volume I
Susan Gillingham
Galatians Through the Centuries
John Riches
Pastoral Epistles Through the Centuries
Jay Twomey
1 & 2 Thessalonians Through the Centuries
Anthony C. Thiselton
Six Minor Prophets Through the Centuries
By Richard Coggins and Jin H. Han
Lamentations Through the Centuries
Paul M. Joyce and Diana Lipton
James Through the Centuries
David Gowler
The Acts of the Apostles Through the Centuries
Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons
Chronicles Through the Centuries
Blaire French
Isaiah Through the Centuries
John F. A. Sawyer
1 & 2 Samuel Through the Centuries
David M. Gunn
1 & 2 Kings Through the Centuries
Martin O’Kane
This edition first published 2018
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Cover Image: P.128-1950.p5 Satan going forth from the presence of the Lord, and Job’s charity from the ‘Book of Job’, 1825 (engraving), Blake, William (1757–1827) / Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK / Bridgeman Images
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For Jean
The Wiley Blackwell Bible Commentaries series, the first to be devoted primarily to the reception history of the Bible, is based on the premise that how people have interpreted, and been influenced by, a sacred text like the Bible is often as interesting and historically important as what it originally meant. The series emphasizes the influence of the Bible on literature, art, music and film, its role in the evolution of religious beliefs and practices, and its impact on social and political developments. Drawing on work in a variety of disciplines, it is designed to provide a convenient and scholarly means of access to material until now hard to find and a much‐needed resource for all those interested in the influence of the Bible on Western culture.
Until quite recently this whole dimension was for the most part neglected by biblical scholars. The goal of a commentary was primarily if not exclusively to get behind the centuries of accumulated Christian and Jewish tradition to one single meaning, normally identified with the author’s original intention.
The most important and distinctive feature of the Wiley Blackwell Commentaries is that they will present readers with many different interpretations of each text, in such a way as to heighten their awareness of what a text, especially a sacred text, can mean and what it can do, what it has meant and what it has done, in the many contexts in which it operates.
The Wiley Blackwell Bible Commentaries will consider patristic, rabbinic (where relevant) and medieval exegesis as well as insights from various types of modern criticism, acquainting readers with a wide variety of interpretative techniques. As part of the history of interpretation, questions of source, date, authorship and other historical‐critical and archaeological issues will be discussed, but since these are covered extensively in existing commentaries, such references will be brief, serving to point readers in the direction of readily accessible literature where they can be followed up.
Original to this series is the consideration of the reception history of specific biblical books arranged in commentary format. The chapter‐by‐chapter arrangement ensures that the biblical text is always central to the discussion. Given the wide influence of the Bible and the richly varied appropriation of each biblical book, it is a difficult question which interpretations to include. While each volume will have its own distinctive point of view, the guiding principle for the series as a whole is that readers should be given a representative sampling of material from different ages, with emphasis on interpretations that have been especially influential or historically significant. Though commentators will have their preferences among the different interpretations, the material will be presented in such a way that readers can make up their own minds on the value, morality and validity of particular interpretations.
The series encourages readers to consider how the biblical text has been interpreted down the ages and seeks to open their eyes to different uses of the Bible in contemporary culture. The aim is to write a series of scholarly commentaries that draw on all the insights of modern research to illustrate the rich interpretative potential of each biblical book.
Over the twenty years that have passed between the publication of The Fifth Gospel (1996) and the completion of this volume, an enormous number of people have given me advice, ideas, suggestions and encouragement, colleagues, students, friends – too many to mention by name. I am extremely grateful to you all. But I would like to say a special word of thanks to Martin O’Kane, Francis Landy, Miriam Talisman, Stuart Leyden, Jimmy Russell, Bernhard Lang, Max Sussman, Howard Clarke, Karen Langton, Siobhán Dowling Long and Jean Sawyer.
I would also like to thank the library staff at the Warburg Institute in London, the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, the Bill Bryson and Palace Green Libraries in Durham, Newcastle University Library and the University and New College Libraries in Edinburgh, and a special word of thanks to Rebecca Harkin at Wiley Blackwell for all she did for the whole series, not just this volume.
Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 5, 6 and 21 were published in Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play: Studies in Biblical Poetry and Prophecy in Honour of Francis Landy, ed. E. Ben Zvi et al. (London: Bloomsbury Press 2015), pp. 161–174 and parts of chapters 1, 14, 15–16, 37 and 65 in Reading the Sacred Scriptures: From Oral Tradition to Written Documents and their Reception, ed. F. Long and S. Dowling Long (London: Routledge 2017), 249–262.
A text has more than one meaning, depending as much on who is reading it as on what the original author intended. This is not a new idea – already the rabbis and the Church Fathers distinguished between literal and allegorical or mystical meanings – and it was particularly true of ancient texts where, before the revolution in eighteenth‐century scholarship, we knew next to nothing about the original author. But over the last 250 years, archaeological discoveries, comparative philology, palaeography, textual criticism and the like, have made it possible to draw ever nearer to the original author’s intention, and historical‐critical commentaries were designed to present one meaning for every text, the correct meaning, the one nearest to the original author’s intention. The many other meanings the text has had down the centuries in the church and the synagogue, in sermons, hymns, liturgy, literature, art and music, were simply ignored by biblical scholars. Later meanings were considered irrelevant because ‘that is not what the original Hebrew meant.’ In a modern critical commentary on Isaiah it was inappropriate to mention the sacrament of Baptism (Isa 1:16) or the Trinity (6:3) or Lucifer (14:12) or Muhammad (21:7) or the Lamedvavniks (30:18) or China (49:12) or the Holocaust (56:5) because such material usually has little or nothing to do with the ‘original meaning.’
The Wiley Blackwell Bible Commentary series was created to redress the balance and enable us to hear some of the voices of readers from the beginning down to the present. It is increasingly being realized that, whether you are trying to get back to the original meaning or whether you are interested in how medieval and modern readers have interpreted it in literature or music or worship or politics, the story of how it has been understood down the centuries can be a source of scholarly interest and inspiration. What Jerome or Rashi or Luther or Milton or William Blake or Charles Wesley or Martin Buber or Benjamin Britten or Bob Dylan made of a text can be exegetically interesting. The Bible is a text sacred to many people and institutions, and what people believe it means may often be more important, historically and theologically, than what it originally meant. What is equally important, is that this way we learn how to listen to other people’s interpretations, however odd they may appear at first, however different from our own, and, when deciding which meaning or interpretation is best, we can try to avoid generalizations and dogmatism. It may be less a matter of what it originally meant or which interpretation is more beautiful or more convincing: what matters ‘at the other end of the hermeneutical process is how many spirits are impoverished and how many filled’ (Boyarin 2000: 246).
The book of Isaiah has always had a particularly high profile in both Jewish and Christian tradition, while in medieval Islam, Isaiah takes pride of place among the biblical prophets in foretelling the coming of Muhammad and the spread of Islam (Adang 1996: 146). Already in the Kings narrative, Isaiah is far more prominent than any of the other Writing Prophets (2 Kgs 19–20), and, apart from Psalms and Deuteronomy, there are more quotations from the Book of Isaiah in Second Temple Jewish literature, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, than from any other book in the Bible (Lange and Weigold 2011). At Qumran, evidence of at least twenty manuscripts of Isaiah was found, as well the famous 7.3‐metre long Isaiah Scroll.
In the New Testament, not only is Isaiah more often quoted than any other part of scripture, again apart from Psalms, but New Testament writers often give his name when they quote him, and Paul introduces quotations with phrases like ‘Isaiah cried out …’ (Rom 9:27) or ‘Isaiah is so bold as to say …’ (Rom 10:20), a further indication that Isaiah held a special position in Paul’s heart as he clearly did in the hearts of other first‐century Jews as well. He is far more often quoted in the Mishnah than any other prophet, as he is in at least one large anthology of rabbinic literature (Montefiore and Loewe 1963), and in Jewish lectionaries more haftarot (readings from the Prophets) come from Isaiah than from any other prophet. He is also the subject of a popular martyrdom tradition according to which he was ‘sawn asunder’ (Heb 11:37), recorded in a first‐ or second‐century BCE Jewish text and an elaborately developed Christian version known as the Ascension of Isaiah (Knibb 1985: 143–176) (Isa 1:10).
Cited already by Clement of Rome to provide scriptural authority for bishops (Isa 60:17) and by Justin Martyr in his attacks on the blindness of the Jews (Isa 6:9–10), Isaiah soon became a mainstay of patristic exegesis. Origen wrote a huge commentary on the first thirty chapters, now lost, while commentaries that have survived include those of Eusebius of Caesarea, Cyril of Alexandria and John Chrysostom in Greek, and Ephrem the Syrian in Syriac. Jerome introduces his massive eighteen‐volume commentary in Latin by explaining that Isaiah is more an evangelist than a prophet since he often uses past tenses: ‘For to us a child is born (9:6) … he was wounded for our transgressions (53:5)’. This is how Isaiah has been interpreted by Christian writers and artists right down to the present. ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive …’ (Isa 7:14 LXX; cf. Matt 1:23), in Greek, Latin and other languages rapidly became the text most frequently associated with him. Matthew stands on Isaiah’s shoulders (Cowan 1979: 14–15), but all four Gospels begin with ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness’ (Isa 40:3; cf. Matt 3:3; Mark 1:3; Luke 3:4; John 1:23). Isidore of Seville in his polemical work De Fide Catholica found in Isaiah an allusion to almost every detail in the gospel narrative, from the mystery of the birth of Christ (Isa 53:8; cf. 66:7–9) to his resurrection (Isa 33:10), Ascension (Isa 52:13) and Second Coming (Isa 49:14). Images of the Good Shepherd (Isa 40:11) and Alpha and Omega (Isa 44:6; cf. Rev 1:8; 21:6) were common in early Christian iconography, as were the ox and the ass (Isa 1:3) and the camels (Isa 60:6) from the nativity story. The wolf and the lamb (Isa 11:6) appear too but more rarely.
The patristic exegetical tradition continued into the medieval period in works like the Glossa Ordinaria, the Bible Moralisée and the Biblia Pauperum. A new interest in the Passion is evident in Christian iconography, so that Isa 7:14 is sometimes replaced as Isaiah’s motto by ‘truly (he bore) our weaknesses’ (Isa 53:4) or ‘like a lamb before its shearers’ (Isa 53:7). The wine press imagery in Isaiah 63, interpreted as a reference to the crucifixion, becomes common, and the wood of the Jesse Tree (Isa 11:1, 10) is occasionally transformed into the wood of the cross. Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra for the most part follow patristic exegetical tradition, with occasional historical, theological or other insights of their own.
In Judaism down the centuries, Isaiah is first and foremost the prophet of consolation. Already in Ben Sira he is remembered as the one who ‘comforted those who mourned in Zion’ (Sir 48:24), and, according to the Talmud, Ezekiel’s consolation is like the speech of a villager, Isaiah’s like that of a courtier (bḤagigah 14a). In Jewish lectionaries seven passages, beginning with chapter 40, are known as the ‘consolation readings’ read on the seven Sabbaths after the Fast of 9th Ab commemorating the Destruction of the Temple, and in the orthodox Jewish prayer book, the prayer to be recited in a house of mourning ends with three verses from Isaiah (Isa 66:13; 60:19; 25:8).
There is also a legend that Isaiah was rebuked by God for calling his people ‘unclean’ (Isa 6:5), and chapter 1 contains some of the strongest language used by any prophet to criticize his people. The passage was used by Jews to explain why the Temple had been destroyed, but Christians used such passages as scriptural authority for anti‐Jewish polemic, which was a persistent feature of Christian interpretations of Isaiah right down to modern times (e.g. Isa 1:15; 65:2–3). The great medieval Jewish commentators Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Kimḥi occasionally refer to such hostile gentile attitudes towards them (Isa 53:3–4), and Isaiah provided the poet Ephraim of Bonn with the image of angels weeping (Isa 33:7) when they saw the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Crusaders. The Book of Isaiah was a battleground for Jewish–Christian debate, notably in the great Disputation in Barcelona in 1263 (Isa 2:4; 41:8–9).
In the sixteenth century, Renaissance scholarship, the Reformation and vernacular translations of the Bible led to a break with medieval tradition evident in Luther’s Lectures on Isaiah and Calvin’s commentary on Isaiah. Anti‐Judaism is joined by anti‐papism in a fresh quest for the true, literal or historical meaning of scripture, aided by philology and largely unencumbered by ecclesiastical tradition. Vitringa, Lowth, Matthew Henry and others followed this new direction, but the medieval tradition continued in the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Milton, Byron and Tennyson, motets by William Byrd, cantatas by Bach, Handel’s Messiah and Brahms’ German Requiem, and in paintings by Grünewald, Mantegna and Rubens.
In the modern period historical‐critical concerns about date, authorship and literary form became ever more prominent and led to the identification of more than one author (Döderlein) and the four ‘Servant Songs’ (Isa 42:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12) (Duhm), but the book continued to play a significant role in Judaism and Christianity. In the twentieth century there were Jewish translations of Isaiah into Yiddish (Yehoash in 1910; Orlinsky in 1941), German (Buber/Rosenzweig in 1934) and English (JPS in 1917, 1978). The language and images of Isaiah crop up very frequently in journals (8:6), organizations (2:5) and place names (40:9; 41:27) associated with Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel. Isaiah has inspired numerous Hebrew songs and dances (Isa 12:3; 41:19; 52:7) as well as larger compositions including Robert Starer’s cantata Ariel (1963) and has made important contributions to the language and theology of post‐holocaust Judaism (Isa 43:12; 45:15; 56:5) and the iconography of world peace (Isa 2:4; 11:6–9). He also played an important role in the Church’s seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century missionary enterprise (54:2–3; 60:9), Hindu–Christian dialogue (Ghose 1982: 644–647, 651), ecumenism (32:18) and liberation theology (Isa 32:17; 61:1–2), as well as more recently in both Jewish and Christian feminism (Isa 34:14; 66:13).
‘Reception history’ and Wirkungsgeschichte (impact history) (Gadamer 1975) are concerned with the afterlife of the text as an end in itself. Rezeptionsästhetik (reception criticism) (Jauss 1982) shifts attention somewhat away from history to critical analysis, but here again the focus is often more on the literature, music, works of art and the like where the text has been contextualized, than on the biblical text itself. ‘Reception exegesis’, a term first coined by Paul Joyce and Diana Lipton in their Lamentations volume (2013), is concerned primarily with the biblical text and how the history of its reception helps us to appreciate what it has meant in all kinds of different contexts. In a commentary motivated by an interest in reception exegesis, reception history is the handmaid of exegesis and is not an end in itself. Both are concerned with the Wirkungsgeschichte of the text over time, but the method of handling, selecting and arranging the material is different.
In other words, while The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Sawyer 1996) gave a historical account of how Isaiah was used and interpreted in the early Church, medieval art, the Reformation, English literature, Church music and so on, the present volume uses the reception history to write an exegetical work, a commentary, not a history, working though the text, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, illustrating how each phrase or passage has been used and interpreted in all kinds of different contexts from its earliest context down to the present day. A historical context is given for every use or interpretation discussed, and essential background information on authors, artists, musicians and the like is provided in the Glossary and Brief Biographies at the end of the volume. But historical details are kept down to a minimum to leave as much room as possible to discuss exegetical matters. The material is arranged thematically rather than historically. Discussion of a passage may begin, for example, with a comment about where the passage features in the lectionaries (Isa 40) or a reference to a piece of music (Isa 45:8) rather than with its most ancient context. Jerome, Rashi, Luther and Childs are grouped together if they all interpret a text in the same way (Isa 3:13), rather than in chronological order, which could lead to repetition, and no attempt is made to cite all the sources for any one interpretation: theoretically one authority is sufficient for exegetical purposes, and the relative frequency of a particular interpretation is not always discussed.
The biggest problem facing anyone attempting to write such a commentary is the sheer volume of the material – in literature, art, music, liturgy, theology, politics, popular culture, etc. over two thousand years. Thanks to the Internet, which of course was not available to me when I was working on The Fifth Gospel, texts, visual images and musical interpretations are now easily accessible online. I have beside me, on my computer, the commentaries of Eusebius, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Lyra, Calvin, Oecolampadius, Vitringa, Matthew Henry, Ibn Ezra, Luzzatto and others. I also have a small library of printed commentaries of my own including those of Martin Luther (Lectures on Isaiah) and Bishop Lowth, as well as Rashi, Kimḥi and David Altschuler (‘Metzudat David,’ ‘Metzudat Zion’) in my Miqra’ot Gedolot, and many of the modern commentaries from Cheyne (1895), George Adam Smith (1888–1890, 1.408) and Duhm (1892) to Clements (1980), Childs (2001) and Roberts (2015).
The Isaiah volumes in the Ancient Christian Commentaries Series (McKinion 2004; M. W. Elliott 2007) and The Church’s Bible (Wilken 2007) are valuable resource, as is Isaiah through the Ages (Manly 1995), an interesting Eastern Orthodox commentary with an English translation of the Greek text and a selection of examples from patristic, modern and Judaic literature. A very useful ground‐breaking article, ‘Isaiah, Book and Person’, has recently been published in Volume 13 of EBR (2016). Many works of reference have valuable indexes of biblical texts, including the Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture (Sawyer 2006), The Bible in Music (Dowling Long and Sawyer 2015) and the New Cambridge History of the Bible (4 vols., 2012–2016). Other important works with indexes of biblical references include Danby’s Mishnah, the Soncino translation of the Babylonian Talmud and Montefiore and Loewe’s Rabbinic Anthology.
Between the Text and the Canvas: The Bible and Art in DialogueBiblical Art from WalesThe Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible
There remains the question of whether it is desirable, or indeed possible in practice, to let the interpretations speak for themselves without privileging any particular ones. The eighteen authors of the Blackwell Bible Commentaries published so far have tackled the problem in different ways. Most aim at no more than a ‘representative sampling’ and acknowledge at the outset that they have approached their task from a particular perspective. I gladly acknowledge that I am white, male, old and Scottish Presbyterian and that this may have influenced my judgement in ways of which I am not always aware. I make no apology for occasionally describing interpretations as beautiful or ugly, convincing or far‐fetched. I struggled with the special issue of how to handle the anti‐Jewish polemic in so many Christian inerpretations of Isaiah, and decided that, like other interpretations, it should be allowed to speak for itself as an integral part of Christian biblical interpretation and a monument to the appalling attitude that persisted till comparatively recently in the Church towards the Jewish people.
Constraints of space made it impossible for me to include more than a relatively small selection of examples from the two thousand years’ reception history of Isaiah in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ancient, medieval and modern, worldwide. I have tried to focus on interpretations and uses of the text that are exegetically interesting or that have been historically important or influential in some way. The place of each passage in the liturgy, and especially in the lectionaries, is given some prominence, not only because it throws light on how a passage has been traditionally interpreted in Judaism and Christianity but also because it can sometimes explain why a particular verse is better known and more often quoted in religious literature and other social and political contexts than other texts. Western European and North American culture has had the lion’s share of my attention, mainly because it is easier to access and I am better able to handle it. I am well aware how much I have neglected in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and how little space is given to Isaiah in postcolonial Christianity despite the pioneering work of scholars like Musa Dube, Gerald West and R.S. Sugirtharajah. There is much more to say on what the ‘Prophet of Consolation’ has given to Jews through the centuries worldwide, and the ‘Fifth Evangelist’ to Christians. I hope this commentary, along with The Fifth Gospel (1996), will encourage others to fill in the gaps.