Was the book of Isaiah written by one author or three?

Question 1144

The prophecy of Isaiah is one of the towering books of the Old Testament, quoted again and again in the New and treasured by the church for its vision of the suffering Servant who was pierced for our transgressions. Yet many modern textbooks divide it among two or three different authors writing across centuries, speaking of a first Isaiah, a second, and sometimes a third.

The believer who loves this book will want to know whether it is the work of one prophet or a collection stitched together by later hands, and what hangs on the answer. This is no idle academic dispute, because the integrity of the book is bound up with one of its own central arguments for the living God. Let us see why the question arose, what the evidence for a single author is, and why the matter is worth contending for.

Why the Question Arose

The theory of multiple authors grew out of a particular assumption rather than out of the text itself. Critics noticed that the later chapters of Isaiah, from the fortieth onward, speak as though the exile in Babylon has already happened and address a people who need comforting in their captivity. More striking still, these chapters name Cyrus, the Persian king who would let the exiles return home, and they name him generations before he was born. Working from the premise that detailed prediction of the distant future is impossible, scholars concluded that these chapters must have been written by a later prophet, or two, living near the events described.

So they proposed a second Isaiah for the chapters of comfort and return, and sometimes a third for the closing section with its concern for worship and the restored community. Notice carefully what drives this conclusion. It is not a manuscript that breaks the book into parts, for no such manuscript has ever existed. It is not a heading announcing a new author, for there is none. It is a prior decision that genuine predictive prophecy cannot occur. For the Christian who believes that God declares the end from the beginning, that decision is the very thing in question, and naming Cyrus in advance is exactly the kind of thing the living God says He can do and the idols cannot.

The Case for One Isaiah

The positive evidence for a single author is strong. The book carries the title of Isaiah the son of Amoz and never names another author anywhere in its sixty-six chapters. Themes and phrases run through the whole work, binding the early and later chapters together as the product of one prophetic mind. The most famous of these is the title the Holy One of Israel, which appears a dozen times in the first half and a dozen times in the second, and almost nowhere else in the whole Old Testament. A single distinctive title, woven evenly through both supposed halves, is the signature of one author.

The unity of vision points the same way. The same lofty view of God as the exalted and holy King, the same concern with true and false worship, the same movement from judgement to comfort, run from the opening chapters to the close. The book reads as one great composition with a single sweep, not as an anthology of separate writers awkwardly joined.

The Witness of the New Testament

For those who receive the authority of the New Testament, the matter is settled by how the apostles and the Lord Jesus treat the book. The Gospel writers and the apostles quote freely from both halves of Isaiah and attribute the words simply to Isaiah the prophet, with no hint that more than one man stands behind them. John records that Isaiah saw the glory of the Lord and spoke of Him, and in the same passage he quotes from both the earlier and the later parts of the book, calling both the words of the one prophet Isaiah.

When Philip met the Ethiopian official on the desert road, the man was reading from the Servant passage in the later chapters, and Luke calls the scroll simply the prophet Isaiah. Paul quotes from across the book and names Isaiah as the speaker. The whole apostolic witness knows one Isaiah, and to divide the book is to set this testimony aside.

The Witness of the Manuscripts

The early manuscript evidence agrees with the witness of the New Testament. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran was the Great Isaiah Scroll, a complete copy of the book dating from around two centuries before Christ. It presents Isaiah as a single continuous work, with no break, no gap, and no new heading at the supposed seam between the thirty-ninth and fortieth chapters. The scribe simply continued from one column to the next. The oldest substantial witness we possess to the text knows nothing of a divided Isaiah, and treats the book as the unity the church has always confessed it to be.

What Is at Stake

This is more than a contest over a name. Part of Isaiah’s own argument for the true God against the idols of the nations is that He alone can foretell what is to come. The Lord challenges the false gods to declare the future and prove themselves, and He sets His own ability to name Cyrus and announce the return as the very proof of His deity. If the predictions of Cyrus and the return were written after the fact, then the argument the book itself makes is hollowed out, and the God who stakes His honour on prophecy is robbed of His proof.

To keep the book whole is therefore to keep its message whole, that the Holy One of Israel knows and rules the future and can be trusted with ours. The same God who named a Persian king a century and a half early also set out the cross in such detail seven centuries before it happened, and that is a God worth trusting with the things still hidden from us.

So, now what?

Read Isaiah as one book by one prophet, the man whom the Lord Jesus and His apostles called Isaiah. When others tell you it was written by two or three hands, you can answer that the theory rests on ruling out prophecy before the evidence is weighed, that a single distinctive vocabulary runs through the whole, that the New Testament knows only one Isaiah, and that the oldest complete scroll shows no division at all.

When you reach the chapters about the Servant who was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, marvel that such a portrait of the cross was given so long before Calvary. The God who can do that is the God who holds your own unknown future in His hands, and you may rest in Him with a quiet and trusting heart.

“Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done.” Isaiah 46:9-10

For Further Study

Those who wish to dig deeper will be served well by the commentary work of J. Alec Motyer on Isaiah, which defends the unity of the book with great care and warmth. The Old Testament introductions of Gleason Archer, R. K. Harrison, and Edward J. Young all answer the critical theory in detail, and Young in particular wrote a substantial study devoted to the question of who wrote Isaiah.