Justified True Belief

(●) The prophet who saw the throne of God, and who described a servant crushed for other people’s wrongdoing seven centuries before Calvary. + If you have ever sat through a performance of Handel’s Messiah, you have spent most of an evening listening to Isaiah. The opening tenor line, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people," is his. So is the voice crying in the wilderness, and the child born to us on whose shoulders the government will rest, and the man despised and rejected. Handel and the man who assembled his texts reached for one Old Testament book more than any other, and it was this one. Isaiah the son of Amoz was a prophet in Jerusalem in the eighth century before Christ, working across the reigns of four kings of Judah (Isaiah 1:1). Judah is the southern of the two kingdoms the Israelites had split into a couple of centuries earlier, after Solomon died: ten tribes in the north kept the old name Israel, and two in the south kept Jerusalem, the temple, and the family of David. Isaiah belonged to the south, and he lived to watch the north die. For Christian readers he is the prophet the whole New Testament leans on: he is quoted there more often than any other prophet, and the chapter he is best known for, the fifty-third, is the passage an Ethiopian court official was reading in his chariot when Philip climbed up beside him and, "beginning from this Scripture," preached Jesus to him (Acts 8:35). Whatever else is argued about Isaiah, and a great deal is argued, the earliest Christians read him as the man who had described their Lord in advance, seven hundred years before Calvary, the hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified. Neither the year of his birth nor the year of his death is recorded anywhere. The dates conventionally attached to his name are estimates and nothing more. Two fixed points hold the rest in place: he was called "in the year that King Uzziah died" (Isaiah 6:1), which the standard chronologies put around 740 BC, and the last dated event in his book is the murder of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, which Assyrian records place in 681 BC (Isaiah 37:38). A man old enough to be commissioned as a prophet in 740 was probably born in the 760s, and a man whose book runs down to an event in 681 is normally reckoned to have lived at least that long. Anything more precise is a guess dressed up as a date.

(●) c. 765 BC: Born, most likely in Jerusalem, to a man named Amoz, in a kingdom that was rich and about to be frightened. + Of his childhood there is nothing. The book opens by naming his father, Amoz (Isaiah 1:1), who is not the prophet Amos; the two names are different words in Hebrew, and nothing links the two men beyond the accident of English spelling. Two things about the grown man point back at the boy. His Hebrew is among the finest in the Old Testament, the work of someone who had been educated rather than someone who taught himself, and he walks in and out of the palace all his life as though the corridors held no terror for him. A later rabbinic tradition (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 10b) makes Amoz a brother of King Amaziah, which would make Isaiah first cousin to a king. That is tradition, recorded more than a thousand years after the fact, and it explains the palace access a little too neatly to lean on. The Judah he grew up in was doing well. Uzziah had reigned more than half a century, the borders were wide, the trade routes were open, and the temple was busy. What almost nobody in Jerusalem had yet taken in was that far to the northeast a king named Tiglath-pileser III had taken the Assyrian throne in 745 BC and begun turning a regional power into an empire of a new kind, one that annexed the countries it beat and deported their populations. Isaiah’s entire working life would be lived under that shadow.

(●) c. 740 BC: In the year King Uzziah died he saw the Lord in the temple, and volunteered before he heard the errand. + Isaiah tells it himself in the sixth chapter of his book, and the timing is the part that is easy to read past. The king who had been on the throne for fifty-two years, longer than most people in Jerusalem had been alive, was dead. In a year when the visible throne stood empty, Isaiah saw a different one: "I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple" (Isaiah 6:1). Six-winged creatures called seraphim, a name built on the Hebrew word for burning, covered their faces and called to one another, and the foundations shook, and the house filled with smoke. What he says next is not what a religious man is supposed to say at the high point of a religious experience. He does not feel privileged. He feels finished: "Woe is me! For I am lost!" (Isaiah 6:5). One of the seraphim then flies to him with a live coal from the altar, touches his mouth with it, and tells him his guilt is taken away and atonement is made for his sin. Atonement is the word for a debt settled rather than a debt waved away, and it matters here that the settling is done to him while he stands there saying he is finished. Only after that does he hear the voice asking who will go, and answer, "Here am I. Send me!" Then he was told what the errand was, and it was brutal. He would preach to people who would keep on listening without understanding, and he would go on preaching until "cities lie waste without inhabitant" (Isaiah 6:9-11). He said yes to a commission whose stated outcome was failure, and he kept it for something like sixty years.

(●) c. 735 BC: He met King Ahaz at the end of a water channel and told him to stop being frightened of two burnt-out sticks. + Two small kingdoms to Judah’s north had decided to stand together against Assyria. One was Aram, ruled from Damascus by a king named Rezin. The other was Israel, the ten northern tribes, under a king named Pekah. They wanted Judah in the coalition, and when the young king Ahaz refused they marched on Jerusalem to pull him off the throne and put in a man who would say yes. The news reached the palace and, in one of the most human lines in the book, the king’s heart and his people’s hearts "shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind" (Isaiah 7:2). Isaiah was sent to meet him, and where he was sent matters. "At the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the Washer’s Field" (Isaiah 7:3) is where a king would be found in the days before a siege: out at the waterworks, checking whether the city could drink. A fuller was a launderer, and his trade needed running water and open ground to spread the cloth on, so the fuller’s field lay out along the water supply, which is exactly where a frightened king would be. Isaiah took his young son along, a boy whose name was a sermon. Shear-jashub means "a remnant will return," which is either a threat or a promise depending on how you hear it. The message was contempt for the crisis. Those two invading kings are "two smoldering stumps of firebrands" (Isaiah 7:4), the burnt ends left in a fire pit in the morning, all smoke and no heat. Then comes the hinge of the whole encounter: "If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all" (Isaiah 7:9). Ahaz was offered any sign he liked, refused it in language so pious it curdles, and was given one anyway: a virgin would conceive and bear a son called Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14), a name Matthew later renders "God with us" (Matthew 1:23). What Ahaz actually did was strip the temple of silver and gold, send it to Tiglath-pileser, and buy Assyrian protection. It worked, in the way such purchases work. Aram and Israel were crushed, and Judah spent the next century as somebody’s vassal: a country left with its own king and its own capital, paying a yearly sum to a stronger one and taking its foreign policy from him.

(●) 722 BC: Assyria wiped the northern kingdom off the map, and the man nobody had listened to was suddenly worth listening to. + Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, fell after a siege of about three years. The Assyrian king Sargon II claimed in his annals, the year-by-year record he had kept of his own reign, to have carried off 27,290 of its people and to have settled others in their place. That was how the empire made rebellion not worth attempting. It did not merely beat a nation, it dissolved one, moving the survivors somewhere they had no fields, no shrine and few neighbors who spoke their language. Ten of the twelve tribes went into the mist of history at that moment. Judah survived, and Jerusalem filled with refugees from the north; archaeologists working on the city’s western hill have found it expanding sharply in exactly this period. For Isaiah the fall of Samaria was not a vindication to enjoy. He had said the north would be swept away, and it had been, but the lesson Judah drew was the wrong one. Jerusalem concluded that the Assyrian alliance had been shrewd. Isaiah kept saying that the empire everyone was busy appeasing was itself a tool in another hand, "the rod of my anger" (Isaiah 10:5), and that a tool does not get to congratulate itself on the work.

(●) c. 711 BC: He walked through Jerusalem stripped and barefoot for three years, to show what an Egyptian alliance was worth. + The Philistine city of Ashdod revolted against Assyria, counting on Egyptian help, and sent envoys to Judah to bring her in. Egypt did not come. Sargon’s commander took Ashdod, and its king ran for the far side of Egypt, where the Nubian ruler he had counted on eventually handed him over in irons. In the year that commander marched on Ashdod, Isaiah was told to take the sackcloth off his hips and the sandals off his feet, "and he did so, going naked and barefoot" for three years "as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Cush" (Isaiah 20:2-3). Sackcloth is the coarse dark cloth a man wore when he was in mourning, and it was the working uniform of a prophet. Cush is the kingdom up the Nile beyond Egypt, in what is now Sudan, and its royal house was sitting on the Egyptian throne in these years, which is why the two names travel together. The Hebrew word rendered "naked" is used elsewhere of men stripped to a loincloth rather than of men wearing nothing at all, which is the point: this was the dress of a prisoner of war being marched away from a burnt city. A respected figure in Jerusalem spent three years walking about dressed as a deportee, and everyone who saw him was meant to think of the Egyptian embassy currently being entertained at court. Prophets were not primarily predictors, and they were not only preachers. Isaiah named his children as messages, walked the streets as a visual aid, and once wrote a headline on a large tablet and had it witnessed (Isaiah 8:1-4). The word came in whatever form would get past the hearer’s guard.

(●) 701 BC: Sennacherib took forty-six of Judah’s cities and did not take Jerusalem. + Hezekiah, Ahaz’s son, stopped sending the tribute his father had bought peace with, the yearly payment a vassal made to keep the empire on the far side of the horizon, and the Assyrian king Sennacherib came west to collect. He reduced the fortified town of Lachish and had the siege carved in relief for his palace at Nineveh, where the panels can still be seen in the British Museum, complete with the assault ramp, the battering ram, and the prisoners being led out. Then he sent an officer up to Jerusalem, who stood at the very spot where Isaiah had once met Ahaz, "the conduit of the upper pool" (Isaiah 36:2), and shouted at the men on the wall in Hebrew so that ordinary soldiers would understand him. Hezekiah did what his father had not. He went into the temple with the Assyrian letter and spread it out before God. Isaiah’s answer was that Sennacherib would not so much as shoot an arrow into the city, and would go home the way he came (Isaiah 37:33-34). That night, the book says, the angel of the Lord struck 185,000 in the Assyrian camp, and Sennacherib withdrew. The other side of this story survives too, which is rare in ancient history. Sennacherib’s own account was inscribed on hexagonal clay prisms; copies are in Chicago, London and Jerusalem. He boasts of taking forty-six of Hezekiah’s walled cities and of shutting the king up in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage." What he never says, in a document written to make him look invincible, is that he took the city.

(●) c. 680 BC: His death goes unrecorded, and the oldest story about it may be the one the letter to the Hebrews had in mind. + The last dated event in his book is the murder of Sennacherib by two of his own sons while he worshiped in the house of his god (Isaiah 37:38), which Assyrian records place in 681 BC. So Isaiah outlived the great invasion by twenty years at least. After that the record simply stops. Jewish tradition fills the silence with a grim story. According to the Babylonian Talmud (Yevamot 49b), Isaiah fled from King Manasseh, Hezekiah’s son, and hid inside a cedar tree, and Manasseh had the tree sawn through, killing him. The same tradition appears in the Lives of the Prophets and is told at length in the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah. All of these are centuries later than the events they describe, and the Hebrew Bible says nothing at all about how he died. There is one tantalizing detail. The roll call of the faithful in Hebrews 11 lists people who "were stoned, they were sawn in two" (Hebrews 11:37), and nobody in the Old Testament is recorded as dying that way. Many readers, ancient and modern, have taken that as a nod toward Isaiah. It is a reasonable guess and it is not proof, because the writer of Hebrews names nobody.

What He Taught

(T1) God is holy, and the sight of it undoes a person before it sends them. + Think of the way an ordinary kitchen looks when sunlight comes through the window at a low angle. Nothing in the room has changed. The dust on the shelf was always there. What has changed is the light, and now you can see it. That is close to what "holy" means in Isaiah. The Hebrew word is qadosh, and its root sense is not "very good" but "set apart," belonging to another order entirely, the way a surgeon’s sterile field is not merely a cleaner part of the room but a different kind of space. When the seraphim call "Holy, Holy, Holy," the repetition is doing work: Hebrew has no separate words for "holier" and "holiest," so it says a thing three times to reach the top of the scale, and no other quality of God is given that treatment anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah’s favorite name for God comes straight out of that morning. He calls him "the Holy One of Israel" about two dozen times, far more often than the rest of the Old Testament put together, and the phrase holds two ideas that do not sit easily side by side: utterly other, and bound by covenant to one small nation. The order of events in the temple is the part Christian theology has leaned on ever since. Isaiah does not clean himself up and then get commissioned. He is undone, then cleansed by a coal he did not fetch, then asked to go. Grace arrives before the work rather than as a reward for it. The same God who is too holy to look at is the one who says, earlier in the same book, "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isaiah 1:18).

(Q) "Woe to me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of armies." + Source: Isaiah 6:5 (English Standard Version). Isaiah’s first recorded words, spoken in the temple vision. "Unclean lips" is the confession of a man whose trade is words, said in a room where creatures with six wings are using theirs perfectly (T1).

(T2) A nation is saved by trusting God, not by buying the strongest army on the market. + Isaiah spent his career telling frightened politicians the least useful thing a politician can hear, which is that the emergency in front of them is not the real problem. He got two test cases, one for each answer. Ahaz, with two armies marching on him, bought Assyria with temple silver, and Judah was a vassal state for a century afterward. Hezekiah, with the Assyrian army actually at the gate, took the enemy’s letter into the temple and prayed, and the army went home. Isaiah’s standing verdict on the alternative is blunt: "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many" (Isaiah 31:1). Horses and chariots were the armor of the ancient world, and Egypt was the arms dealer. You might reasonably think, "So he wanted them to do nothing and wait for a miracle." He did not. Hezekiah cut a tunnel more than five hundred meters through solid rock to bring the Gihon spring inside the walls before the siege, and you can walk through it today; the workmen left an inscription describing the moment the two digging teams heard each other’s picks through the last of the stone. Isaiah’s quarrel was never with the digging. When he does mention Jerusalem’s water works he watches the reservoir go in and then names the one thing missing: "But you did not look to him who did it" (Isaiah 22:11). What he attacked was where a nation puts its confidence, and the tell was always the same: the alliance was negotiated first and God was consulted afterward, if at all. The principle scales down to one person without much adjustment. The question is not whether you take sensible precautions. It is what you are actually resting on when the precautions fail.

(Q) "In repentance and rest you will be saved, In quietness and trust is your strength. But you were not willing." + Source: Isaiah 30:15 (English Standard Version). Spoken while Judah’s envoys were on the road to Egypt to buy protection. The last four words are the sting, and Isaiah leaves them in (T2).

(T3) There is one God, and he offers the future as his evidence. + The middle chapters of Isaiah stage a courtroom scene with no close parallel in the religious literature of the ancient Near East. God summons the gods of the nations into a courtroom and cross-examines them, and the question he puts to them is a question about evidence: "Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods" (Isaiah 41:23). Most of the ancient world was henotheistic, which means it granted that many gods existed and simply preferred its own. Isaiah will not have it. The claim in these chapters is monotheism in the strict sense, that there is exactly one God and the rest are not junior deities but nothing at all. He makes the case partly by argument and partly by comedy. A man goes out and cuts down a tree, Isaiah says; he burns half of it to warm himself and roast his meat, and out of what is left he carves an image, bows down to it, and prays, "Deliver me, for you are my god" (Isaiah 44:17). The satire works because it is a description. Half the log is fuel and half the log is a deity, and the man cannot see the problem. The positive claim is the one that matters for anyone weighing whether the Bible is what it says it is. God’s stated proof of his own uniqueness is that he can say in advance what will happen and then have it happen. That is a test with a fail condition attached, which is more than most religious claims offer.

(Q) "Remember the former things long past, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things which have not been done." + Source: Isaiah 46:9-10 (English Standard Version). The conclusion of the courtroom sequence that runs through chapters 41 to 46: the one God is identified by the fact that he announces things before they happen (T3).

(T4) God’s servant would be crushed for wrongdoing that was not his own. + A man walks into the clerk’s office with somebody else’s fine in his hand and pays it. The money leaves his account, the ticket is marked settled, and the person who earned it walks free without having produced a cent. Nothing has been overlooked. Something has been transferred. That is the idea the second half of Isaiah keeps circling. Four passages there stand slightly apart from what surrounds them (Isaiah 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-9, and 52:13 through 53:12); scholars call them the Servant Songs, and the fourth of them runs from Isaiah 52:13 to the end of chapter 53. It is fifteen verses long, and it has probably been argued over more than any other page of the Hebrew Bible. The word for what it describes is substitution: one party bearing what another party had coming. Ancient Israel knew the idea from the sacrificial system, where an animal died in a worshiper’s place, and Isaiah reaches for exactly that vocabulary when he says the servant renders himself "an offering for guilt" (Isaiah 53:10). The Hebrew is asham, the particular offering brought when a real debt had to be repaid rather than merely regretted, which is the fine on the counter rather than the apology. What is strange about the passage is who is speaking. The voice is a "we" who admit they got him wrong. They had assumed he was being punished by God for his own sins, which is what everyone assumed about suffering, and they now realize the punishment was theirs and he was carrying it. That reversal, from "he must have deserved it" to "that was mine," is the engine of the chapter. The passage never names anyone, and the identity of the servant is genuinely disputed, by Jewish and Christian readers who have both thought hard about it. Whoever he is, though, the shape of him is unmistakable: an innocent sufferer, silent under injustice, dying among criminals and buried with a rich man, whose death somehow works for other people, and who afterward looks on the outcome and is satisfied.

(Q) "But He was pierced for our offenses, He was crushed for our wrongdoings; The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him, And by His wounds we are healed. All of us, like sheep, have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the Lord has caused the wrongdoing of us all To fall on Him." + Source: Isaiah 53:5-6 (English Standard Version). The center of the fourth Servant Song. The Great Isaiah Scroll, copied around 125 BC and found in a cave at Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, carries these lines in a form a modern reader can follow verse by verse (T4).

(T5) God’s rescue was never meant to stop at Israel’s border. + There is a wall in a small park across First Avenue from the United Nations headquarters in New York with a line from Isaiah carved on it about beating swords into plowshares. The full sentence is about many nations walking up one mountain to be taught by one God, and about him settling their quarrels so that "neither shall they learn war" (Isaiah 2:4). It is not a general hope for peace. It is a specific claim about where peace comes from. This runs through the whole book, and it is startling in a national prophet of a small threatened kingdom. Isaiah’s God tells the servant that restoring Israel is "too small a thing" for him and appoints him "a light for the nations" (Isaiah 49:6). The temple is to be "a house of prayer for all peoples" (Isaiah 56:7), the line Jesus quoted when he cleared the courts. Most startling of all, in a passage almost nobody expects, Isaiah looks forward to a day when God says, "Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance" (Isaiah 19:25). Egypt was the house of slavery and Assyria was the empire that had just eaten half the nation, and Isaiah puts them in the same sentence as Israel, in the same relation to God. Paul later built a large part of his defense of the Gentile mission out of this material, quoting Isaiah again and again in Romans to argue that the reach beyond Israel had been the plan all along and not an afterthought.

(Q) "It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant To raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the protected ones of Israel; I will also make You a light of the nations So that My salvation may reach to the end of the earth." + Source: Isaiah 49:6 (English Standard Version). From the second Servant Song. Paul and Barnabas quoted this verse at Antioch in Pisidia to explain why they were turning to the Gentiles (Acts 13:47), and Simeon echoed it over the infant Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:32) (T5).

(Q) "For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace." + Source: Isaiah 9:6 (English Standard Version). Written to a people walking in darkness under Assyrian pressure. The titles pile up past anything a court poet would say of a king, and centuries of carol singing have not worn them smooth: whoever this child is, he is called Mighty God.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The New Testament reaches for him more than for any other prophet. + Jesus opened his public ministry with Isaiah. In the synagogue at Nazareth he was handed the scroll, found the place about the Spirit of the Lord being upon him to bring good news to the humble (Isaiah 61:1-2), rolled it up, sat down, and said, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21). Matthew introduces the birth of Jesus with the Immanuel sign that had been given to Ahaz (Matthew 1:22-23). John, explaining why so many would not believe, quotes Isaiah 53:1 and Isaiah 6:10 back to back and then says something remarkable about the temple vision: Isaiah said these things "because he saw his glory and spoke of him" (John 12:41). The scene that shows the early Christian instinct most clearly is on a desert road. An Ethiopian treasury official is riding home reading the fifty-third chapter aloud, at the verse about a sheep led to slaughter, and asks Philip whether the prophet is talking about himself or someone else. Philip, "beginning from this Scripture," preaches Jesus to him (Acts 8:32-35). Nobody has to argue him into the connection. Isaiah 53 is where a first-century Christian went to explain what had happened at the cross.

(†) The church called him an evangelist, and a scroll from a cave let scholars check the text they had been reading. + Jerome, who spent years in Bethlehem translating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Latin that Western Europe would read for a thousand years, opened the prologue to his commentary on Isaiah by asking leave to explain him in such a way as to show "that he was not only a prophet, but an evangelist and an apostle as well" (prologue to the Commentary on Isaiah, in the translation the Church prints in its Office of Readings). The judgment stuck. Origen, Eusebius, Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret all wrote commentaries on the book, and Christian usage came to speak of its author as the fifth evangelist. Then, in 1947, Bedouin shepherds found jars in a cave above the Dead Sea, and one of them held a leather scroll about seven meters long, seventeen sheets sewn end to end, fifty-four columns, containing the whole book of Isaiah. It is known as the Great Isaiah Scroll, and the handwriting is dated to about 125 BC. Before that find, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah in existence were medieval, roughly a thousand years younger. The result mattered because it could have gone badly. A thousand years of hand copying is a long time for a text to drift. What the scroll showed instead is a text that a reader of a modern Hebrew Bible recognizes at once: differences in spelling throughout, a scattering of variant words and phrases, and a handful of places worth an argument, such as Isaiah 53:11, where the scroll adds that the servant "will see light." Nothing in it disturbs the substance of the book. Christians reading Isaiah 53 today are reading, within very small tolerances, what a Jewish scribe copied out before Christ was born.

(†) Serious readers still divide over who his servant is, how many hands wrote his book, and what two of his most famous verses actually say. + No prophet has been argued over harder, and the sharpest arguments are not the ones between believers and skeptics. They are between people who take the book seriously and read it differently, and there are four of them worth knowing about. - Who the servant is. The Jewish reading, which is ancient and not a modern evasion, takes the servant of chapter 53 to be Israel herself, suffering among the nations. The text gives it real support: God calls Israel "My servant" by name more than once (Isaiah 41:8; 49:3). The Christian answer is that in the same stretch of the book the servant has a mission to Israel, to "raise up the tribes of Jacob" (Isaiah 49:6), which is hard to do if he simply is Israel, and that the servant of chapter 53 is innocent while Israel in the same book plainly is not. Neither side is being stupid, and the disagreement is genuinely about how to read a difficult text. - How many Isaiahs. Since Bernhard Duhm’s commentary of 1892 it has been the majority position in critical scholarship that the book is the work of at least three hands: chapters 1 to 39 from the eighth-century prophet, chapters 40 to 55 from an anonymous writer among the Babylonian exiles two centuries later, and chapters 56 to 66 later still. The case is not frivolous. From chapter 40 the audience is in exile, Jerusalem is already in ruins, and the Persian king Cyrus is named twice (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1) roughly a century and a half before he took Babylon. Those who hold to a single author answer that naming in advance is exactly what the book offers as evidence for its God (Isaiah 41:22-23; 46:9-10), that the Great Isaiah Scroll runs straight from chapter 39 into chapter 40 with no break at all, its one conspicuous gap falling instead at the end of chapter 33, and that the New Testament quotes both halves as "Isaiah," most pointedly in John 12:38-41, where a line from chapter 53 and a line from chapter 6 are attributed to the same prophet. The dispute is real, it is not settled by wanting an answer, and it leaves the content of the servant passage exactly where it was. - "Lucifer". For centuries English readers took Isaiah 14:12 as a description of Satan’s fall, because the Latin Vulgate, the translation Jerome made in Bethlehem and the Bible of Western Europe for a thousand years, rendered the Hebrew for "morning star" as lucifer, "light-bearer," and the King James Version carried the Latin word over as though it were a name. The passage itself says who it is about, eight verses earlier: it is a taunt song against "the king of Babylon" (Isaiah 14:4), a human tyrant whose pride brought him down. The devil may be an application. He is not the subject. - The virgin. Isaiah 7:14 uses the Hebrew almah, a young woman of marriageable age. It is not the narrowest available word for virginity, which is betulah, and the sign was given to Ahaz about a crisis in his own lifetime, which suggests a child born in his own day. What Christians can point to, and it is not nothing, is that when Jewish scholars in Egypt put Isaiah into Greek in the second century BC, in the translation known as the Septuagint, they chose the Greek parthenos, which does mean virgin. They had no Christian stake in the outcome, and Matthew was quoting their work rather than inventing his own. A prophecy with a near fulfillment and a fuller one later is a pattern Isaiah uses often, and it is a fairer description of chapter 7 than either side’s slogan.