Tuesday, March 5, 2024

David Davage on Isaiah Being Sawed in Two

  

Sawed in Two

 

Starting with circumstances under which the prophet Isaiah died, there is a well-known martyrdom tradition that probably originated sometime during the last centuries BCE that recounts how the prophet Isaiah was sawed in two. It is alluded to in Heb 11:37, which refers to those “sawn in two” (επρισθησαν) in a list of fates that had come up upon heroes from the past. It is also mentioned in Justin’s Dial. 120, by Tertullian (Pat. 14; Scorp. 8), and in the Apocalypse of Paul 49, and it picked up and renarrated in b. Yebam. 49b and y. Sanh. 10:2 (cf. B. Sanh. 103b, where the death of the prophet Isaiah is related to 21 Kings 21:16 and the shedding of innocent blood by Manasseh). In all of these references—except for some of the rabbinic texts—only a very brief mention of the fate of the prophet Isaiah is made, but a more expanded narrative has been preserved in the early Christan apocalypse Ascension of Isaiah, which is commonly dated to 70-120 CE. (David Davage, How Isaiah Became an Author: Prophecy, Authority, and Attribution [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022], 248-49)

 

Interestingly, Justin accuses Jews of having deleted that passage (cf. “Origen and Echtheitskritik” above) and says that they would have done the same with passages from the ‘book’ called Jeremiah and the Psalms had they only understood them. Regarding the Psalms, he likely refers to Ps 96:10 (for a discussion, see Anni Maria Laato 2020; Antti Laato 2020), and as for Jeremiah, the passage is quoted in Dial. 72 and referred to several times by Irenaeus, with various attributions. It is related to the prophet Isaiah(!) once, in Haer. 3.20.4; to Jeremiah twice, in Haer. 4.22.1 and Epid. 78; to an unidentified “prophet” once, in Haer. 5.31.1; to “Others” once, in Haer. 4.33.12 (possibly both the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah?) and quoted without introduction once, in Haer. 4.33.1. (Ibid., 249 n. 71)