Isaiah · ספר ישעיהו
Section: Neviim · נביאים (Later Prophets) | Chapters: 66 | Days: 148-213
About the Book of Isaiah
The Book of Isaiah (ספר ישעיהו) contains the prophecies of Yeshayahu ben Amotz, who prophesied in Yehudah during the reigns of Uzziyahu, Yotam, Achaz, and Chizkiyahu. Spanning judgment, consolation, and Messianic hope, it is the most quoted wellspring of comfort in Tanakh — and the prophet the tradition placed last among the major prophets so that prophecy itself would close on the sound of nachamu.
Yeshayahu: An Introduction
The prophet commissioned to fail
In the sixth chapter of his book, in the year King Uzziyahu died, Yeshayahu ben Amotz is lifted into the throne room of heaven. He sees the Master seated on a throne high and exalted, the hem of His robe filling the Temple, and the fiery Seraphim wheeling above with their six wings, calling one to another the words that every Jew has since carried into the heart of his prayer: kadosh, kadosh, kadosh Hashem Tzeva’ot, melo chol ha’aretz kevodo — “holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” A coal is taken from the altar and touched to the prophet’s lips. His sin is burned away. And then the voice asks whom it shall send, and Yeshayahu answers with the most willing words in all of prophecy — hineni, shelacheini, “here I am, send me” — and receives in return the cruelest commission ever handed to a navi. Go, he is told, and tell this people: shim’u shamo’a v’al tavinu — “hear, but do not understand; see, but do not perceive.” Dull their hearts, stop their ears, seal their eyes, lest they see and hear and understand and repent and be healed.
Here is the paradox that governs the entire book. The prophet whose words have been recited, longed for, and woven into Jewish liturgy more deeply than those of almost any other figure in Tanakh is commissioned, at the moment of his calling, to speak words that will not be heard. The navi sent to harden is the navi who gave the tradition its vocabulary of comfort. The mouth purified by the coal will utter both hashmen lev ha’am ha-zeh, “make the heart of this people fat,” and nachamu nachamu ami, “comfort, comfort My people.” Yeshayahu contains within a single scroll the harshest indictment and the tenderest consolation in the prophetic corpus, and the tension between them is not a flaw in the book but its very architecture. To read Yeshayahu is to watch a single voice hold together the God who hides His face and the God who cannot, in the end, abandon the children He reared.
The vision of Yeshayahu son of Amotz
The book opens not with narrative but with a summons to the cosmos: shim’u shamayim v’ha’azini eretz — “hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for Hashem has spoken.” It is a courtroom scene, the heavens and the earth called as witnesses to a covenant lawsuit, and the charge is the most intimate kind of betrayal: banim gidalti v’romamti v’hem pash’u bi — “children I raised and exalted, and they rebelled against Me.” The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s trough, the prophet says, but Israel does not know; My people does not consider. The opening verse names the four kings under whom Yeshayahu prophesied — Uzziyahu, Yotam, Achaz, and Chizkiyahu — a span of roughly half a century straddling the catastrophe of the northern kingdom’s destruction by Assyria. The prophet stands at one of history’s hinges, watching the Assyrian empire swallow the ten tribes and press in upon Yehudah, and reading in that geopolitical terror a theological summons.
Jewish tradition treats Yeshayahu as a man of the royal house. The Gemara in Megillah preserves a tradition received from the ancestors that Amotz, the prophet’s father, and Amatzyahu, king of Yehudah, were brothers — making Yeshayahu a grandson of the Davidic line and a cousin to the throne he addressed. The same tradition reads his lineage back through Tamar, who covered her face in modesty in her father-in-law’s house and merited that kings and prophets descend from her. This is no incidental genealogy. It places Yeshayahu’s Messianic visions in the mouth of a man of David’s own blood, so that when he prophesies the shoot that will spring from the stump of Yishai, he speaks of his own family’s future as much as the nation’s.
The early chapters move through Yerushalayim’s corruption with a fierce particularity — the bribed judges, the grasping landlords who join house to house until there is no room left, the women of Zion walking with outstretched necks and mincing steps. Yet the indictment is never the prophet’s last word. Already in the second chapter comes the vision that has become the property of all humanity: in the end of days the mountain of Hashem’s house will be established at the top of the mountains, and all nations will stream to it to learn His ways, and v’kittetu charvotam l’ittim — they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and nation will not lift sword against nation, neither will they learn war anymore. The prophet who opens by calling heaven and earth to witness Israel’s guilt has, within a chapter, lifted his eyes to a world without war. The two registers — judgment and consolation — are braided from the very start.
Immanu El and the shoot from the stump
The middle chapters of the first half of the book are dominated by the Assyrian crisis and the figures of two kings. To the faithless Achaz, terrified by the alliance of Aram and the northern kingdom pressing against Yerushalayim, Yeshayahu offers a sign the king refuses to ask for: hinei ha-almah harah v’yoledet ben v’karat shemo Immanu El — the young woman will conceive and bear a son and call his name Immanu El, “God is with us.” The classical meforshim read this as a sign anchored in Yeshayahu’s own moment — Rashi and Radak understand the child as a near-term assurance that before the boy is old enough to choose good from evil the threatening kings will be gone — even as the name itself, “God is with us,” radiates the larger faith the chapter means to instill. Against Achaz’s failure of nerve stands the later trust of Chizkiyahu, who in the face of Sancheriv’s siege and the Rav-Shakeh’s taunts spreads the Assyrian letter before Hashem in the Temple and is answered: the angel goes out and strikes the Assyrian camp, and the empire that had devoured nations withdraws broken.
It is in this stretch that Yeshayahu’s Messianic vision reaches its height. A child is born, the prophet declares, and the government rests upon his shoulder, and his name is called Pele Yo’etz, El Gibbor, Avi Ad, Sar Shalom — wonder of counsel, mighty God, eternal father, prince of peace — and of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David. And then the image the tradition has never let go of: v’yatza choter mi-geza Yishai — a shoot will come forth from the stump of Yishai, and a branch will grow from his roots, and the spirit of Hashem will rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and might. In his days the wolf will dwell with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion together, and a little child will lead them. They will not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of Hashem as the waters cover the sea. These are the verses from which the daily Amidah’s hope for the flourishing of David’s branch ultimately draws its breath, the bedrock of the Messianic faith that Yeshayahu, more than any prophet, gave to Israel.
The first half of the book widens, too, beyond Yehudah and Yisrael. There are oracles against the nations — Bavel, Moav, Damascus, Mitzrayim, Tzor — and the great apocalyptic chapters in which Hashem’s hand stretches over the whole earth, death is swallowed up forever, and the tears are wiped from every face. The God of Yeshayahu is never a merely national deity. From the throne-vision onward, the refrain is melo chol ha’aretz kevodo — His glory fills the whole earth — and the prophet’s gaze is correspondingly global, taking in the rise and fall of empires as movements within a single divine design.
Comfort, comfort My people
Then, at the fortieth chapter, the book turns, and the turn is so complete that it has shaped Jewish liturgy for two millennia. Nachamu nachamu ami yomar Elohechem — “comfort, comfort My people, says your God; speak to the heart of Yerushalayim and proclaim to her that her term of service is fulfilled, that her iniquity is pardoned.” The voice that once sealed eyes now opens them; the prophet who was sent to harden is sent to console. A voice cries in the wilderness to clear the way of Hashem, to make straight in the desert a highway for our God; every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain made low, and the glory of Hashem shall be revealed, and all flesh together shall see it. The chapters that follow are the summit of the Hebrew prophetic imagination — the incomparability of the Creator who measures the waters in the hollow of His hand and weighs the mountains in scales, before whom the nations are as a drop in a bucket; the promise that those who wait for Hashem will renew their strength, will mount up with wings as eagles, will run and not be weary.
It is from this second movement of the book that the tradition drew the sheva d’nechemta, the seven haftarot of consolation read on the Shabbatot between Tisha b’Av and Rosh Hashanah. For seven weeks, as the Jewish year climbs from the depth of mourning toward the days of awe, the synagogue reads almost exclusively from these chapters — nachamu, the comfort; va-tomer Tziyon, Zion’s complaint that Hashem has forsaken her, answered with the unbearable tenderness of a mother who cannot forget the child of her womb; aniyah so’arah, the storm-tossed and unconsoled city whose stones will be set in fair colors; anochi anochi hu menachemchem, “I, even I, am He who comforts you”; until the climbing sequence arrives at sos asis ba-Hashem, the soul that exults in its God. The architecture of the Jewish year’s most delicate emotional passage — the slow road from catastrophe to renewal — is built almost entirely out of the back half of Yeshayahu. No other prophet supplies the calendar with so sustained an arc of comfort.
Woven through these chapters is the most haunting and most debated figure in the book: the servant of Hashem, the eved, who is at once despised and exalted, who is led like a lamb to the slaughter and yet justifies the many, who is crushed and bears the iniquity of others and is in the end raised high. The classical commentators of the tradition read the suffering servant overwhelmingly as Israel itself — the people who bear exile and contempt among the nations and whose suffering is not meaningless but redemptive, whose vindication will astonish the kings who once despised them. Rashi and Radak develop this national reading with care, and it became the anchor of the Jewish understanding against later interpretations the tradition firmly resisted. The servant is the people Israel in its long night, and the song of his vindication is the promise that the night will end.
A single vision, end to end
A question hovers over the book for any thoughtful reader: how does the navi of the harsh early chapters become the navi of nachamu, and why does the consolation seem to address an exile in Bavel that lay more than a century beyond Yeshayahu’s lifetime? The Jewish tradition has always read the book as a single prophetic whole, the vision of one man — chazon Yeshayahu ben Amotz — whose gaze, granted from the throne-room of heaven, was not bounded by his own generation. A prophet who could see the end of days could surely see the Babylonian exile and the return under Koresh, whom Yeshayahu names by name generations before his birth. The Gemara in Bava Batra preserves the tradition that “Chizkiyahu and his circle wrote Yeshayahu” — that the king and his scholars gave the prophecies their final redacted form — which is why the book sits where it does in the prophetic order. By rights of chronology Yeshayahu preceded Yirmiyahu and Yechezkel and ought to come first; instead the Sages placed him last among the major prophets, reasoning that Melachim ends in destruction and Yirmiyahu is all destruction and Yechezkel begins in destruction and ends in consolation — and Yeshayahu is consolation from end to end. Semichin churban l’churban u-nechamah l’nechamah: we join ruin to ruin and comfort to comfort. The book closes the run of the major prophets because the tradition wanted the prophetic corpus to end on Yeshayahu’s note of hope.
This placement is itself a reading of the book. To call Yeshayahu “consolation from end to end” is to insist that even the searing judgments of the early chapters are spoken in the service of return — that the God who hardens hearts does so as a father disciplines a son he has no intention of casting off. The lawsuit of the opening chapter, banim gidalti, “children I raised,” already contains the whole theology: the relationship is filial, and a father’s anger is not a father’s abandonment. The book that begins with rebellious children ends, across its sixty-six chapters, with new heavens and a new earth, and with all flesh coming to bow before Hashem from one new moon to another and one Shabbat to the next.
The death of the prophet and the endurance of his words
Tradition holds that Yeshayahu did not die in his bed. The Gemara in Yevamot, citing a scroll of lineages found in Yerushalayim, records starkly that Menashe killed Yeshayahu — that the wicked grandson of the righteous Chizkiyahu put the prophet on trial and condemned him. The aggadah elaborates with terrible vividness: Menashe charged the prophet with contradicting the Torah of Moshe, and Yeshayahu, knowing the king would accept no answer and not wishing to make him a deliberate sinner, pronounced a divine name and was swallowed into a cedar tree. They sawed through the cedar, and when the saw reached his mouth, he died — and the tradition reads even this as measure for measure, punishment for the one moment the prophet had spoken of his people as am tmei sefatayim, a people of unclean lips, in the very chapter of his calling. It is a strange and dark coda: the prophet of consolation martyred by his own king, his death located precisely at the mouth that had both blessed and accused.
And yet the words outlived the cedar. No prophet has lent more language to Jewish prayer and Jewish hope. The Seraphim’s kadosh kadosh kadosh stands at the center of the Kedushah, recited in every public Amidah, so that the angelic chorus Yeshayahu overheard in his vision becomes the congregation’s own thrice-daily song. The seven weeks of consolation that carry the Jewish year from mourning to renewal are his. The Messianic vocabulary of the wolf and the lamb, the shoot from the stump of Yishai, the swords beaten into plowshares, the knowledge of Hashem covering the earth as the waters cover the sea — all of it is Yeshayahu, returned to in every generation of exile as the promise that the long night has an end. The prophet was told at his commissioning that his words would not be heard. History rendered the opposite verdict. The book sealed to its own generation became, for all the generations after, the most quoted wellspring of comfort in the Hebrew Bible — the scroll the tradition placed last among the prophets precisely so that prophecy itself would close on the sound of nachamu.
Chapters
- Chapter 1 — The opening vision: heaven and earth summoned as witnesses to Israel’s rebellion; empty sacrifice and the call to cease evil and learn to do good
- Chapter 2 — The mountain of the Lord’s house in the end of days, swords beaten into plowshares; the day of the Lord against all human pride
- Chapter 3 — The collapse of leadership in Yerushalayim and Yehudah; God’s lawsuit against the elders who plundered the poor; the haughty daughters of Zion
- Chapter 4 — The turn from judgment to consolation: the branch of the Lord, the holy remnant, and the cloud-and-fire canopy of glory restored over Zion
- Chapter 5 — The Song of the Vineyard and its bitter harvest: six woes against greed, drunkenness, and corrupted justice; the distant nation summoned to judgment
- Chapter 6 — The throne vision: the seraphim’s thrice-holy call, the coal that purges the prophet’s lips, ‘Hineni, send me,’ and the holy seed in the stump
- Chapter 7 — The Syro-Ephraimite crisis: two smoking firebrands, the sign of Immanu El offered to faithless Achaz, and the hired razor of Assyria
- Chapter 8 — Maher Shalal Chash Baz on the witnessed tablet: the gentle Shiloach spurned for the flooding River, ‘utzu etzah v’tufar ki Immanu El,’ and the sealed testimony of the disciples
- Chapter 9 — The people walking in darkness see a great light: the child named Sar Shalom and the throne of David; then the refrain of judgment on Efrayim — ‘His hand is stretched out still’
- Chapter 10 — ‘Woe, Assyria, rod of My anger’: the axe that boasts over the hewer, the march on Yerushalayim town by town, and the felling of the Levanon by a mighty one
- Chapter 11 — A shoot from the stump of Yishai: the spirit-endowed king, the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the earth full of the knowledge of Hashem, and the second ingathering from the four corners of the earth
- Chapter 12 — The song of the redeemed: ‘I thank You for You were angry with me,’ drawing water with joy from the springs of salvation, and the Holy One of Israel great in the midst of Tzion
- Chapter 13 — Massa Bavel opens the oracles against the nations: the mustering of the Medes, the dark day of Hashem, and the beauty of kingdoms overturned like Sedom, left to the desert beasts
- Chapter 14 — The taunt-song over the king of Bavel: Sheol stirs to greet the fallen Heilel ben Shachar, the corpse flung from its grave, the oath sworn on Assyria’s fall, and Tzion founded as the refuge of the poor
- Chapter 15 — Massa Moav, the lament: Ar and Kir sacked by night, wailing from town to town, ‘my heart cries out for Moav,’ and the waters of Dimon full of blood
- Chapter 16 — Massa Moav concluded: send the lamb to the ruler in Tzion, shelter the outcasts, a throne established in chesed in the tent of David — and three hireling-years until Moav’s glory is disgraced
- Chapter 17 — Massa Damesek: Aram and Efrayim share one doom, the harvest and the two-three berries on the topmost bough, man turns to his Maker, and the roaring nations vanish between evening and morning
- Chapter 18 — The land of whirring wings: swift messengers sent by sea to Cush, God watching quietly from His dwelling, the shoots pruned before the harvest, and tribute brought to Har Tzion
- Chapter 19 — Massa Mitzrayim: Egyptian against Egyptian, the Nile dried and Pharaoh’s wise men confounded — then the pivot: an altar to Hashem in Egypt’s midst and the highway joining Egypt, Assyria, and Israel
- Chapter 20 — The year Tartan took Ashdod: Yeshayahu walks stripped and barefoot three years, a sign that Assyria will lead Egypt and Cush captive — and the coastland asks, ‘How can we escape?’
- Chapter 21 — Three night-burdens: the watchman cries ‘Fallen, fallen is Bavel’; the call from Seir, ‘Watchman, what of the night?’; and Kedar’s glory finished within a year
- Chapter 22 — Massa Gei Chizayon: Yerushalayim’s rooftop revelry — ‘eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’; Shevna hurled like a ball from his hewn tomb, and Elyakim given the key of the house of David