Panel essay · Isaiah 58–66 · October 12–18, 2026 · Academic scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a non-Latter-day-Saint Hebrew Bible academic — not a real scholar.
Since Bernhard Duhm's 1892 commentary, most critical scholars have divided the book of Isaiah into three blocks: chapters 1–39, rooted in the eighth-century prophet of Jerusalem; chapters 40–55 ("Second Isaiah"), addressed to Judeans in Babylon around the time of Cyrus's conquest in 539 BCE; and chapters 56–66 ("Third" or "Trito-Isaiah"), set back in Judah after the return. The evidence is internal: the exile is over, the audience lives in the land, Jerusalem is unwalled and partly ruined (58:12; 60:10; 61:4), and people are arguing about fasting, Sabbath, sacrifice, and who belongs. The confident announcement of 40–55 ("Comfort ye") has given way to complaint: "Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not?" (58:3).
Mainstream scholarship places most of it in the early Persian period, the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Some passages likely predate the Second Temple's completion around 515 BCE; the lament still describes "our holy and our beautiful house" as "burned up with fire" (64:11). Other passages assume a working cult and attack it (66:1–3). How many hands are involved is disputed. Claus Westermann's Old Testament Library commentary and Joseph Blenkinsopp's Anchor Yale volume treat 56–66 as a collection that grew over time. Jacob Stromberg's Isaiah After Exile argues that the main author of Third Isaiah was also a reader and editor of the whole book, helping give Isaiah its final shape. Brevard Childs reads 56–66 as an intentional continuation of the earlier chapters, not a separate book bolted on. Shalom Paul's Eerdmans commentary treats all of 40–66 as the work of one anonymous sixth-century prophet, so even among critical scholars "Third Isaiah" is not unanimous. Outside critical scholarship, conservative Christian and Jewish interpreters, and many Latter-day Saint scholars, reject the multiple-Isaiah division altogether; the reasons critics see a later setting are concrete, and the rest of this essay sets them out.
Many readers have noticed that 56–66 is arranged concentrically:
Andrew Abernethy's The Book of Isaiah and God's Kingdom builds on this ring and reads its center as God enthroned in Zion. The hinge is visible in the wording. God "wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation unto him" (59:16); "I wondered that there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me" (63:5). Two nearly identical warrior scenes bracket chapters 60–62.
Many redaction critics conclude that 60–62 is the oldest layer. In their view it is the kernel closest in tone to Second Isaiah, and the angrier material in 56–59 and 63–66 grew up around it as hopes went unmet (see Jakub Slawik's survey of the redaction-critical discussion of chapter 61). Either way, the radiant chapters this week's lesson highlights sit inside a frame of conflict.
Stromberg's thesis is easy to test, because the text quotes Isaiah constantly. Isaiah 62:11 says "his reward is with him, and his work before him," which is word for word from 40:10. The call to "prepare ye the way… cast up, cast up the highway" in 62:10 reworks 40:3 and 57:14. The promise that "the glory of the LORD shall be thy rearward" in 58:8 adapts 52:12.
The clearest example is 65:25, "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock." This is a compressed citation of 11:6–9, ending with that passage's own line, "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain." The writer inserts one clause, "and dust shall be the serpent's meat," from the curse of Genesis 3:14: the peaceable kingdom returns, and Eden's serpent stays under sentence.
The new material also revises the old. In Second Isaiah, "my servant" is usually a single figure, whether Israel or an individual (42:1; 49:3; 52:13). In 65:8–15 and 66:14 the word has become plural, "my servants," set against "ye that forsake the LORD." Most scholars read the shift as a sign that the community has split. Isaiah 66:5 addresses "ye that tremble at his word" (Hebrew ḥărēdîm, the term later taken up by ultra-Orthodox Jews) and their opponents, "your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name's sake." The same rare label appears for a rigorist group in Ezra 9:4 and 10:3.
Paul Hanson's The Dawn of Apocalyptic (1975) gave the most influential answer. He saw a marginalized "visionary" party, heir to Second Isaiah, opposed by a "hierocratic" Zadokite priesthood controlling the rebuilt temple. On Hanson's reading, 66:1 ("where is the house that ye build unto me?") is a dissenting broadside against the temple-building program associated with Haggai and Zechariah. Their defeat, he argued, pushed prophecy toward apocalyptic.
Hanson's model has been heavily criticized. Brooks Schramm's The Opponents of Third Isaiah rejects the prophet-versus-priest split. He argues that the polemic targets syncretistic Yahwistic practice instead. Isaiah 65:3–4 and 66:17 support that reading with their concrete details: sacrifices in gardens, incense on bricks, nights among tombs, eating swine and mouse, and offerings "for that troop" and "that number" (65:11). Those last two phrases are the Hebrew divine names Gad (Fortune) and Meni (Destiny). Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer's Priestly Rites and Prophetic Rage takes a middle position. She reads Isaiah 56–66, Haggai, Zechariah 1–8, and Malachi as prophetic criticism of the priesthood that still envisions a more righteous priesthood, not the abolition of one. The current consensus: the conflict was real, but Hanson's neat sociology outruns the evidence.
Chapter 58 makes most sense against this background. The complainers are diligent: they "seek me daily, and delight to know my ways" (58:2). The rebuttal targets not fasting but fasting alongside exploitation: "in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours" (58:3). The fast God chooses is defined through release: "to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free" (58:6). Nehemiah 5 describes this very economy in the same period, with Judeans pledging fields and selling children to pay debts to fellow Judeans. Isaiah 57:14–58:14 is read as the haftarah on the morning of Yom Kippur, the one fast the Torah commands. The Sabbath verses that follow (58:13–14) give rabbinic tradition its phrase ʻōneg šabbāt, "Sabbath delight."
"The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me" (61:1). The speaker is unnamed. The verse echoes the servant who receives the spirit (42:1) and opens prisons (42:7), though the word "servant" never appears in chapter 61. Many critical scholars take the "me" to be the prophet himself, claiming the earlier servant's commission; "anointed" (māšaḥ) is metaphorical here, not yet the technical royal "messiah."
The decisive phrase is liqrōʼ lišbûyîm dĕrôr, "to proclaim liberty to the captives." Dĕrôr is the technical term of the jubilee law: "proclaim liberty throughout all the land" (Leviticus 25:10). Jeremiah 34:8 uses it for a release of debt-slaves later revoked. Isaiah 61, with its "acceptable year," is a jubilee proclamation for an economy of debt.
Later readers noticed. The Qumran Melchizedek text, 11Q13 (around 100 BCE), is an eschatological commentary on the jubilee of Leviticus 25 and the release of Deuteronomy 15, in which Isaiah 61's "liberty to the captives" is fulfilled in a final jubilee led by a heavenly Melchizedek against Belial. 4Q521 (the "Messianic Apocalypse") combines Psalm 146 with Isaiah 61:1: when God's anointed comes, the Lord will heal the wounded, revive the dead, and bring good news to the poor. Luke 7:22 lists nearly the same signs.
In Luke 4:16–21 Jesus reads the passage at Nazareth, and Luke follows the Septuagint. That is why Luke 4:18 has "recovering of sight to the blind," where the Hebrew has pĕqaḥ-qôaḥ ("opening," most likely of a prison, for "them that are bound"). Luke also splices in a line that is not in Isaiah 61 at all: "to set at liberty them that are bruised." That line comes from the Septuagint of Isaiah 58:6, the true-fast chapter. The reading also stops after "the acceptable year of the Lord" and leaves out "the day of vengeance of our God." Whether the shaping is Jesus's or Luke's, it is deliberate: it binds the jubilee of chapter 61 to the true fast of chapter 58 and leaves vengeance out, though the block itself returns to "the day of vengeance" in 63:4.
Isaiah 63:1–6 is a dramatic dialogue. A voice asks, "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?" The answer turns on wordplay. Edom (ʼĕdôm) sounds like "red" (ʼādōm), and Bozrah (boṣrāh) sounds like "grape-gatherer" (bôṣēr). The red is not wine: "their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment" (63:3). Edom, accused of exploiting Jerusalem's fall (Obadiah 10–14; Psalm 137:7), is already the LORD's "sacrifice" at Bozrah in 34:5–6.
The divine warrior is among Israel's oldest motifs. Frank Moore Cross's Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic traced how the storm-god warrior of Ugaritic myth was taken up into Yahwistic poetry and then revived in late prophecy and apocalyptic. A vivid Ugaritic parallel to 63:3 is the goddess Anat in the Baal Cycle (KTU 1.3 ii), who wades knee-deep through the blood of warriors. A parallel, not a source. In 59:17 the same warrior "put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation." That armor later passes to the believer in Wisdom of Solomon 5:17–20 and Ephesians 6:14–17.
Gili Kugler, in a 2026 Journal of Hebrew Scriptures article reading 63:1–6 with the lament and divine reply that follow, draws an uncomfortable conclusion: vengeance here works as "a rhetorical substitute for actual redemption." A community that cannot see its restoration is given a vision of its enemies trampled. Whether or not one accepts this, it explains why a song of blood is followed at once by "I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the LORD" (63:7).
Isaiah 63:7–64:12 is a communal lament akin to Psalms 44, 74, and 79, with two textual knots that matter.
The first is 63:9, "In all their affliction he was afflicted." The consonantal Hebrew text (the ketiv) reads lōʼ ṣār, "he was not afflicted." The marginal reading (the qere) is lô ṣār, "to him it was affliction," which is the reading the KJV follows. The Septuagint read the consonants differently, as ṣîr, "envoy," and translated "not an ambassador nor an angel, but he himself saved them." Early Christian writers used the Greek as a proof-text for God's personal presence. The Hebrew reading speaks of divine sympathy with suffering; the Greek denies that any intermediary did the saving.
The second is 64:6 (64:5 in Hebrew numbering), "all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags." The Hebrew is kĕbeged ʻiddîm, "like a garment of menstruation." The image is ritual impurity, not dirt, inside the confession of a community that believes God has hidden his face (64:7): a lament's cry of collective unworthiness, not a doctrine of human nature. The next verse replies in the language of family and craft: "thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter" (64:8). The same lament says "Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us" (63:16). Addressing God this directly as "father" is rare in the Hebrew Bible; here it is the plea of people whose ancestors no longer seem to know them.
A smaller case shows what the Dead Sea Scrolls add. In 60:19 the Masoretic Text reads "neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee." The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ), the Septuagint, and the Targum add "by night," which completes the parallel with "by day." Some modern translations, the NRSV among them, adopt it. Minor, but typical: 1QIsaᵃ sides with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text in more than two dozen places.
"I create new heavens and a new earth" (65:17) uses bārāʼ, the verb of Genesis 1:1. What follows is surprisingly ordinary: no infant deaths, and "the child shall die an hundred years old" (65:20). People live in the houses they build and eat from the vineyards they plant (65:21–22). The lines reverse, almost phrase for phrase, the futility curse of Deuteronomy 28:30: "thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof." This is not a world without death; it is Jerusalem without early death or dispossession. Revelation 21 later moves the image toward the transcendent: "a new heaven and a new earth" (21:1), "no more… crying" (21:4, echoing 65:19), a city with no need of sun or moon (21:23, echoing 60:19), gates never shut (21:25, echoing 60:11).
Isaiah 66:1–2 sets an anti-temple statement ("where is the house that ye build unto me?") right next to texts that glorify the sanctuary (60:7, 13). Whether this rejects the Second Temple itself (Hanson) or rejects a particular group's worship there (Schramm, Tiemeyer) is still debated. Stephen's speech quotes it against the temple (Acts 7:49–50). The ending then surprises in another way: of the nations God says "I will also take of them for priests and for Levites" (66:21). This matches the welcome of the foreigner and the eunuch in 56:1–8, and it closes the outer ring.
Then comes 66:24. The worshipers "go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh." The word for "abhorring," dērāʼôn, appears only one other time in the Hebrew Bible: in Daniel 12:2, the first clear biblical text about resurrection to "everlasting contempt." The image of unburied, unconsumed corpses outside Jerusalem became the raw material for Gehenna. Mark 9:48 quotes it almost exactly of hell. Jewish practice responded differently. When the chapter is read in synagogue, as it is on a Sabbath that falls on the new moon, verse 23 ("from one new moon to another… shall all flesh come to worship before me") is repeated after verse 24, so the reading does not end on corpses. (Graham Ogden and Jan Sterk's UBS handbook notes the custom; the same is done at the end of Malachi, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes.) The book's final editors ended on judgment, and its liturgical readers chose to end on worship.
That contrast sums up these chapters as scholarship sees them: written in a disappointed restoration by people arguing over who the real Israel was, reworking the older Isaiah's promises, and setting some of the Bible's most quoted hopes beside some of its most violent images. The same chapters gave Luke his jubilee, Qumran its Melchizedek, Revelation its new Jerusalem, and later tradition its picture of hell.