I have been ill on and off the past month, and in the past week, have been bedridden due to near constant migraines, head cold, etc. I have managed to read a few books, although have not managed to write much, so sorry for those who follow this blog for not having been as active in the past few days as I tend to be. Due to my illness, I have lost my voice, so my Webinar on Sola Scriptura, scheduled for this Saturday, has been postponed.
Notwithstanding, I thought I would share some excerpts from one volume I recently acquired:
R.K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (London: Tyndale Press, 1969)
On the mention of “Cyrus” in Isa 44:28 and 45:1
Against the objection—made as a result of the critics’ minimizing of the purely predictive element in prophecy—that it would be without precedent for the name of Cyrus to be mentioned more than a century and a half in advance, it was pointed out that other prophetic utterances also applied to events far of in the future. Conservative scholars cited the prophecy which foretold the name of Josiah more than three centuries prior to his birth (1 Kgs. 13:1f.), the mention of Bethlehem by Micah (Mic. 5:2 = Matt. 2:6), the contemporary of Isaiah, as the birthplace of the Messiah, and the subjugation of Tyre by the Babylonians as promised by Ezekiel (26:2ff.) and Zechariah (9:1ff.). The first of these prophecies was particularly embarrassing to critical scholars, since there was no possibility of textual corruption in loco. However, on the basis of their insistence that there was no predictive element in prophecy, they tried to dismiss the problem, or more commonly, to avert the critical gaze from it. (775-76)
The Book of Isaiah as an “Anthology”
The Book as an anthology. The present writer holds to the view that Isaiah, like the majority of other extant prophetic writings, represents an anthology of utterances given at various times, and as such the work merits no different treatment from that accorded the other major Old Testament prophecies. In this connection it is important to note that arguments based upon differences of style or literary expression are immediately vitiated by this approach, since an anthology may be taken quite fairly as representing the total style of the author over the different periods of his creative activity. Justification for describing the work as an anthology in the best sense of that terms is furnished by the opening verse of the prophecy, which constitutes a heading for the work, and speaks specifically of the revelatory material that Isaiah the son of Amoz received in visions concerning Judah and Jerusalem in days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. As with all anthologies it is fairly evident that the book contained only a selection of the available prophetic oracles and sermons, and it is highly probably that Isaiah produced considerably more material than has survived in his book. The nature of the prophecy as an anthology is further indicated by the presence of superscriptions in Isaiah 2:1 and 13:1, which may have represented, or pointed to the presence of, earlier collections of prophetic utterances.
Although it constitutes a work of this special kind, the prophecy must not be regarded as a rather arbitrary selection of discourses put together in a disconnected form. That a particular device of literary mechanics familiar in antiquity was employed in the construction of the book will be made plain subsequently. For the present, however, it should be noted that there was a certain chronological arrangement apparent in the material as extant, for in the first thirty-nine chapters the prophecies in chapters 2-5 appear to have come from the earlier period of the ministry of Isaiah, while Isaiah 7:1-9:7 probably originated during the Syro-Ephraimite conflict, about 734 B.C. Chapters 18-20 may have been the product of activity between 715 and 711 B.C., though this fact cannot be established with any degree of certainty.
The historical section comprising chapters 36-39, which exhibits only minor variations from 2 Kings 18:13-20:19, has been held to be later than Isaiah, since it mentions the death of Sennacherib (681 B.C.) (Isa. 37:38), which would be later than the time of Isaiah, unless the prophet survived into the reign of Manasseh (687/86-642/41 B.C.), as Jewish tradition has maintained. It may be, of course, that this historical material was assembled by the disciples of Isaiah rather than by the prophet himself, although this is naturally unknown. What does seem more difficult to maintain, however, is the view that chapters 36-39, in which Isaiah played a prominent part, were actually extraneous and specifically non-Isaianic in origin. (780)