Panel essay · Isaiah 40–49 · September 28–October 4, 2026 · Academic scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a non-Latter-day-Saint Hebrew Bible academic — not a real scholar.
Read Isaiah 39 and then 40 in one sitting and the shift is hard to miss. Chapter 39 ends in the late eighth century BCE, with King Hezekiah showing his treasury to envoys from Babylon and Isaiah warning that everything in it "shall be carried to Babylon" (39:6). Chapter 40 opens with the damage already done. Jerusalem's "warfare is accomplished," her iniquity "pardoned," and she has "received of the LORD's hand double for all her sins" (40:2). The exile is no longer a warning; it is the setting. By chapter 44 the text names the Persian king who will end it: "Cyrus, He is my shepherd... saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid" (44:28). The temple fell in 586 BCE; Cyrus took Babylon in 539.
That is the core of the Deutero-Isaiah (Second Isaiah) hypothesis. Abraham ibn Ezra hinted at it in the twelfth century; Johann Christoph Döderlein made it explicit in 1775; Bernhard Duhm's Das Buch Jesaia (1892) went further and split off chapters 56–66 as a "Third Isaiah." The case does not rest on denying prediction; scholars read the date off the text's own assumptions. The poet addresses people already in Babylon ("Go ye forth of Babylon," 48:20), answers their complaint that God has abandoned them ("My way is hid from the LORD," 40:27), and points to Cyrus's victories as things they can already see (41:2). Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Bible commentary, Isaiah 40–55, places the core of these chapters in the years just before Babylon fell in 539. That is the mainstream position.
This is where historical criticism collides head-on with the Book of Mormon, whose 1 Nephi 20–21 reproduces Isaiah 48–49 from brass plates taken out of Jerusalem around 600 BCE. Isaiah 48 does not name Cyrus, but it speaks of one whom "the LORD hath loved" who "will do his pleasure on Babylon" (48:14) and orders the audience out of Babylon (48:20). In the critical reconstruction those lines belong to the 540s. A historian working by the usual methods cannot put them on plates in 600 BCE. Latter-day Saint scholars have offered answers that fall outside this essay's scope; the conflict itself should be stated plainly.
Since the 1980s much of the field has turned from dividing the book to asking how it was assembled. H. G. M. Williamson's The Book Called Isaiah (1994) argued that the exilic prophet was steeped in the eighth-century oracles, edited a version of them, and meant his own work to be read with them from the start. Benjamin Sommer's A Prophet Reads Scripture (1998) traced the allusions in Isaiah 40–66 to earlier Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Psalms: an author who reworks older scripture. Shalom Paul's Isaiah 40–66 (2012) argues against a separate "Third Isaiah," treating 40–66 as one prophet's work. The boundary at chapter 40 stands, but "Second Isaiah" now tends to mean a stage in the growth of one long book rather than a separate pamphlet. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsaᵃ) is a reminder that ancient readers divided differently: its two halves meet after chapter 33, not 39.
Form criticism, the study of conventional speech forms, has shaped work on these chapters more than any other method. Claus Westermann's Isaiah 40–66 (1966; English 1969) sorted the material into a few recurring forms.
The trial speech. God calls the nations and their gods to court: "Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons" (41:21). The test is prediction: "declare us things for to come... that we may know that ye are gods" (41:22–23). The gods are silent, and the verdict follows: "ye are of nothing" (41:24). The scene recurs in 43:9–13 ("Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD") and 45:20–21.
The disputation. The prophet quotes his audience's complaint and rebuts it. Isaiah 40:27–31 quotes Jacob's grievance and answers with rhetorical questions ("Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard?" 40:28). These chapters argue more than they announce.
The salvation oracle. Joachim Begrich's 1934 article "Das priesterliche Heilsorakel" proposed that a line like "Fear not: for I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine" (43:1) copies the reply a priest gave a worshipper who had just prayed a lament. The priestly setting is still debated; the comparative evidence is firmer. Oracles delivered to the Assyrian king Esarhaddon in the seventh century, edited by Simo Parpola in Assyrian Prophecies (State Archives of Assyria 9, 1997), use the same "fear not" formula in the voice of Ishtar of Arbela. Isaiah 41:10, "Fear thou not; for I am with thee," uses an old royal oracle form, now addressed to a defeated people rather than a king.
The hymn. Short outbursts of praise close off sections: "Sing, O ye heavens; for the LORD hath done it" (44:23); "Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth" (49:13).
Duhm's most influential idea was to pull four passages out of their contexts: 42:1–4, 49:1–6, 50:4–9 and 52:13–53:12. He called them Ebed-Jahwe-Lieder, "servant of YHWH songs," and argued that they came from a different hand and described an individual. In the rest of the text the servant is plainly the nation: "But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen" (41:8). That is why study guides still speak of "the first servant song" without explanation.
The idea has held up worse than its popularity suggests. Tryggve Mettinger's A Farewell to the Servant Songs (1983) argued that the songs cannot be cleanly detached and should be read where they stand. Read that way, the servant of 42:1 ("mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth") who will "bring forth judgment to the Gentiles" sits only a few verses before the servant of 42:19: "Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger that I sent?" One title covers an ideal and a failure. The second song is harder still: the servant is told "Thou art my servant, O Israel" (49:3), yet his task is "to bring Jacob again to him" (49:5). How can Israel restore Israel? A few scholars delete "Israel" in 49:3 as a gloss, since one medieval Hebrew manuscript (Kennicott 96) lacks it; most keep it and read the servant as a faithful core, or the prophet, standing for the nation and sent to it.
Proposed identities include the nation, an idealized remnant, the prophet, a Davidic king, and Cyrus. There is no consensus; the text lets "servant" shift, apparently on purpose. "A light to the Gentiles" (42:6; 49:6) pushes the role past Israel, which is why Paul and Barnabas could claim 49:6 for their mission (Acts 13:47) and Matthew 12:18–21 could apply 42:1–4 to Jesus. Those are later readings of an open text; they do not settle it.
"Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus" (45:1). The word is mashiach, the term used for Israel's anointed kings and high priests. Here, and only here in the Hebrew Bible, it is given to a foreign king who, as the text itself says twice, does not know Israel's God: "I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me" (45:4; also 45:5). Lisbeth Fried's "Cyrus the Messiah? The Historical Background to Isaiah 45:1" (Harvard Theological Review, 2002) reads the title against ancient Near Eastern royal ideology, in which a conqueror was presented as the local god's choice.
The closest parallel survives in clay. On the Cyrus Cylinder, written after 539, Marduk of Babylon searches all lands for a righteous king; in the Livius.org translation (based on Mordechai Cogan's), he "took a righteous king, his favorite, by the hand, he called out his name: Cyrus, king of Anšan." Compare Isaiah 45:1, "whose right hand I have holden," and 45:4, "I have even called thee by thy name." On the Cylinder, Marduk goes with Cyrus "like a companion and a friend" and lets him into Babylon "without fighting or battle." The terse Babylonian Nabonidus Chronicle agrees that Cyrus's army "without battle... entered Babylon."
Two peoples described the same conqueror in almost the same words, each crediting him to its own god. Morton Smith's "II Isaiah and the Persians" (Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1963) argued that the Hebrew prophet drew on the pro-Cyrus propaganda that preceded the conquest. Amélie Kuhrt's "The Cyrus Cylinder and Achaemenid Imperial Policy" (JSOT, 1983) cautions against reading the Cylinder as a charter of tolerance: restoring gods and returning peoples was a time-honored Mesopotamian way for a conqueror to claim legitimacy.
Cyrus replaced Nabonidus (556–539), who spent about a decade at the Arabian oasis of Tayma and favored the moon god Sin over Marduk. Year after year the Nabonidus Chronicle records a disruption of the New Year (Akitu) festival: "the king did not come to Babylon. Nabu did not come to Babylon. Bel did not come out. The Akitu festival did not take place." In the Akitu procession the statue of Nabu, Hebrew Nebo, was carried from Borsippa, and Bel, meaning Marduk, came out of his temple to meet him. The Chronicle records something else for Nabonidus's last year: "the gods of Akkad... from everywhere were entering Babylon." Statues were being hauled into the capital as the Persians closed in.
Now read Isaiah 46:1–2. "Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols were upon the beasts, and upon the cattle: your carriages were heavy loaden; they are a burden to the weary beast... themselves are gone into captivity." The two gods at the center of Babylon's great festival have become freight on struggling animals. Then the verb turns: Israel is "borne by me from the belly... even to hoar hairs will I carry you" (46:3–4). Babylon carries its gods; Israel's God carries Israel. Chapter 47's sneer at Babylon's "astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators" (47:13) likewise targets something real, a state-sponsored science of celestial omens.
Isaiah 44:9–20 is the most cutting satire in the Hebrew Bible. A man plants a tree and the rain grows it. He burns half of it to warm himself ("Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire") and to bake his bread. Then "the residue thereof he maketh a god... and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god" (44:16–17). The punch line is the worshipper's own failure to reason: "none considereth in his heart... shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?" (44:19).
Was this fair? Accurate in detail, and deliberately unfair in what it made of the details. Mesopotamian theologians knew perfectly well that craftsmen made statues. That is why they devised the mīs pî ("washing of the mouth") and pīt pî ("opening of the mouth") rites, which moved a new image from workshop to divine life. In the texts edited by Christopher Walker and Michael Dick (Born in Heaven, Made on Earth, 1999; The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, 2001), the statue is taken to riverbank and orchard and ritually "born," and the craftsmen's hands are bound and symbolically cut off with a tamarisk-wood knife. In Walker and Dick's translation, the craftsmen are made to say: "I did not make him (the statue), Ninagal (who is) Ea (god) of the smith made him."
Against that rite, Isaiah 44 does not misunderstand Babylonian religion; it refuses the rite's central claim. The ritual erases the human maker; the prophet puts him back at the center, sweating at the forge ("he is hungry, and his strength faileth," 44:12) and warming himself at the leftover wood. Nathaniel Levtow's Images of Others (2008) reads such parodies politically, within a long ancient Near Eastern tradition of mocking and capturing the enemy's divine images. A conquered people with no cult image of its own could make no louder claim than to call the victor's gods lumber.
Isaiah 40–48 contains the clearest monotheistic statements in the Hebrew Bible: "I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God" (44:6); "I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me" (45:5); "before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me" (43:10). Mark S. Smith's The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001) traces how older Israelite religion, with its divine council and its assumption that each nation had its god, reached developed monotheistic assertion in exactly this corpus. The setting explains the timing: a deported people whose god had apparently lost to Marduk could concede, or argue that no other god had ever been in the contest. The "none else" lines do argumentative work inside the trial speeches. For readers whose tradition affirms divine plurality, the finding is that earlier biblical texts assume other divine beings and Isaiah 40–48 denies them full divinity. A theology can decide how to relate to that development, but not that it didn't happen.
"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things" (45:7). The Hebrew raʻ is broad. It covers disaster as well as moral evil, and many modern translations render it "woe" or "calamity," the natural opposite of shalom. The verb bara, "create," is the one used in Genesis 1:1. Coming right after Cyrus's commissioning, it has long prompted the question of Persian influence. Shaul Shaked's article "Isaiah, Book of" in the Encyclopaedia Iranica observes that Zoroaster's Gatha in Yasna 44 asks who created light and darkness, and in its early form attributes both to Ahura Mazda. Later Zoroastrian dualism assigned darkness to an evil spirit. Shaked also discusses Morton Smith's view that Second Isaiah was not so much attacking Persian belief as expanding a shared creation language to cover everything, disaster included. Either way, the claim is single-source: no second power answers for darkness. The text does not soften it.
Punctuation decides 40:3. The Masoretic accents read "In the wilderness prepare ye the way of the LORD," parallel to "make straight in the desert," and the Qumran Community Rule (1QS 8) reads it that way, sending its members into the desert to prepare the way through study of the Law. The Gospels follow the Greek, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness" (Mark 1:3), placing the wilderness around the speaker, John. Neither is the poet's first meaning: a processional highway across the desert from Babylon to Zion, with the LORD processing at its head as Babylon's gods did in theirs. Handel's Messiah (1742) fixed 40:1–11 in English ears, but what the text first did was tell a deported people in the 540s BCE that their God had not lost, that their conquerors' gods were being loaded onto carts, and that a Persian king would send them home.