Isaiah

Isaiah was a prophet in Jerusalem in the eighth century BC, active from about 740 BC through the Assyrian crisis that nearly destroyed the kingdom of Judah. The book that carries his name is the most quoted of the prophetic books in the New Testament, and it contains the vision of the thrice-holy God in the Temple, the promise of Immanuel, and the four Servant Songs that the Church reads as a description of the passion of Christ. St Jerome wrote that Isaiah should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet, and the nickname "the fifth Gospel" grew out of that judgment.

Prophet of Judah Active c. 740 to c. 700 BC Jerusalem 66 chapters Read through Advent

1. The Vision of Holiness

Isaiah dates his call precisely: "In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up" (Is 6:1). Uzziah reigned in Judah for roughly half a century and died around 740 BC, so the vision comes at the end of a long stable reign and at the beginning of a terrifying one, as Assyria began pressing west.

What he saw was the Temple filled with the hem of a robe, and above the throne seraphim who covered their faces and called to one another, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" (Is 6:3). The threefold repetition is the Hebrew way of forming a superlative, and it is the only attribute of God that Scripture states this way. The Church took the line into the Mass. The Sanctus sung at every Eucharist is Isaiah 6:3 joined to the crowd's cry at the entry into Jerusalem (Mt 21:9).

Isaiah's first reaction was dread. "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips" (Is 6:5). A seraph took a burning coal from the altar with tongs and touched his mouth, and his guilt was taken away. Only then does the question come, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?", and only then the answer, "Here am I! Send me" (Is 6:8).

The order matters. Purification precedes commission. Isaiah is sent after he has been cleansed by an act done to him, and the passage is one of the clearest scriptural pictures of how God prepares a person for a task they could not qualify for on their own.

The commission itself is bleak. Isaiah is told to speak to a people who will hear and not understand, and he asks how long, and is told: until the cities lie waste and the land is desolate, and even then a stump will remain, and the stump is holy seed (Is 6:11-13). The idea of the remnant, the surviving fragment out of which God rebuilds, runs through the whole book from that point. Isaiah gave one of his sons the name Shear-jashub, "a remnant shall return" (Is 7:3).

2. "The Fifth Gospel"

St Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin and knew Hebrew better than any other Latin Father, wrote in the preface to his commentary on Isaiah that Isaiah should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet, because he describes the mysteries of Christ and the Church so plainly that he seems to be writing history rather than prophecy. Later writers compressed that into the title "the fifth Gospel."

The texts that earned it are concentrated in the first half of the book. To King Ahaz, who was refusing to ask God for a sign during a siege, Isaiah gives one anyway: "the young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Is 7:14). The Hebrew word is almah, which means a young woman of marriageable age. The Greek translators who produced the Septuagint two centuries before Christ rendered it parthenos, virgin, and Matthew quotes the Greek when he applies the verse to the conception of Jesus (Mt 1:22-23). Both facts belong in an honest account. The Church reads the verse as having an immediate eighth-century reference and a fuller meaning disclosed in Christ, which is how Catholic interpretation handles prophecy generally.

Isaiah 9:6 names the child born to us: "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." Isaiah 11:1-2 promises a shoot from the stump of Jesse on whom the Spirit of the Lord rests, and the list of the Spirit's endowments in that passage, as it came through the Greek and Latin versions, is the source of the traditional seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Isaiah 11 goes on to the wolf living with the lamb and a child playing over the adder's den, an image of restored creation that Christian art has never let go of.

Isaiah also supplies the language of the second half of Advent and of Christian hope generally: the mountain of the Lord raised above the hills and the nations streaming to it, swords beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Is 2:2-4); the highway in the desert and the voice crying "Prepare the way of the Lord" (Is 40:3); the new heavens and the new earth (Is 65:17).

3. The Suffering Servant

Four passages in Isaiah 40 to 55 are known as the Servant Songs: Isaiah 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-9, and 52:13 to 53:12. They describe a figure called the servant of the Lord who is chosen and upheld by God, who brings justice to the nations, who is taught and does not turn back, and who in the fourth song is rejected, disfigured, killed, and vindicated.

The fourth song is the one that stops readers. The servant "had no form or comeliness that we should look at him" (Is 53:2). "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" (Is 53:3). "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed" (Is 53:5). "Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth" (Is 53:7). "He was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors" (Is 53:12).

Jewish interpretation has read the servant in several ways, most often as Israel itself, personified, suffering among the nations. That reading has real support in the text, since Isaiah 49:3 says "You are my servant, Israel." Christian reading holds that the servant is fulfilled in Christ, and the New Testament makes the identification directly. In Acts 8:32-33 the Ethiopian official is reading Isaiah 53 aloud when Philip meets him and asks whom the prophet is speaking about, and Philip "beginning with this scripture, told him the good news of Jesus." The Church reads the whole of Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12 as the first reading of the Good Friday liturgy every year.

What makes the passage weigh so much is that it was written centuries before crucifixion existed as a Roman punishment, and it describes an innocent death understood as substitution and offering. Christian readers meet in it the vocabulary the Church later used for the Cross, already in place.

4. Isaiah's World: Judah Between Assyria and Babylon

The book opens by dating Isaiah's ministry to the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah (Is 1:1). That places him roughly from 740 to shortly after 700 BC, and it puts him in Jerusalem in the worst decades of the Assyrian expansion.

Around 734 BC the kings of Israel and Damascus tried to force Ahaz of Judah into an anti-Assyrian coalition and marched on Jerusalem to replace him. Isaiah told Ahaz to hold still and trust God, and warned him against buying Assyrian protection (Is 7). Ahaz bought it anyway, and Judah became an Assyrian vassal.

In 722 BC Assyria destroyed Samaria and ended the northern kingdom of Israel, deporting its population. Judah survived, watching.

In 701 BC Sennacherib of Assyria invaded Judah, took its fortified towns, and besieged Jerusalem under King Hezekiah. Isaiah told Hezekiah the city would not fall, and the Assyrian army withdrew. The episode is narrated twice in Scripture, in 2 Kings 18-19 and again in Isaiah 36-37, and it is also recorded from the other side in Sennacherib's own annals, which boast of shutting Hezekiah up "like a bird in a cage" and say nothing about taking the city. Two independent accounts agreeing that the siege was lifted is unusually good evidence for an event of that period.

Isaiah's message across all of it is consistent and politically unwelcome: security comes from the holiness of God rather than from alliances, tribute or cavalry from Egypt (Is 31:1). He also attacks the social order relentlessly. Judah's worship is worthless while the courts are corrupt and the poor are stripped. "Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean... seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow" (Is 1:16-17). The Catholic tradition of social teaching reads that line as a foundation text, and the site's page on Catholic social justice follows the thread forward.

5. Who Wrote the Book of Isaiah

The book of Isaiah has sixty-six chapters, and readers notice a break. Chapters 1 to 39 address eighth-century Judah under Assyrian threat. From chapter 40 the setting shifts: Jerusalem has already fallen, the people are in Babylon, and the message is comfort and return. Chapters 44:28 and 45:1 name Cyrus, the Persian king who let the exiles go home, and call him the Lord's anointed. Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, roughly a century and a half after Isaiah's own lifetime.

Most scholars today, Catholic and otherwise, account for this by holding that the book grew in stages within a continuing tradition: chapters 1 to 39 substantially from Isaiah of Jerusalem and his circle, chapters 40 to 55 from an anonymous prophet of the exile often called Second Isaiah, and chapters 56 to 66 from the period after the return. A minority position holds that the whole book is the work of the eighth-century prophet, with the later material given by prophetic foresight.

The Catholic Church has not defined the question. What the Church teaches is that God is the author of Sacred Scripture, working through human writers who used their own faculties and powers, and that Scripture teaches without error the truth God willed for the sake of our salvation (CCC 105-107). Whether that truth reached the page through one prophet or through a school carrying his name across two centuries is a historical question, and the canonical book is inspired either way. Anyone who reads Isaiah devotionally can hold the whole sixty-six chapters as one book and one message, which is how the liturgy uses it and how the New Testament quotes it.

6. The Great Isaiah Scroll

Among the manuscripts found in the caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea in 1947 was a nearly complete copy of Isaiah in Hebrew, now called the Great Isaiah Scroll. It is dated to roughly the second century BC, which makes it about a thousand years older than the medieval Hebrew manuscripts that had previously been the oldest witnesses to the text.

Its importance is straightforward. When scholars compared it to the received Hebrew text, the two matched closely. There are spelling differences, some variant readings, and scribal features you would expect across a millennium of copying, and the substance of the book is the same book. For a reader who wonders whether the words of Isaiah 53 might have been adjusted by Christians after the fact, the scroll settles the question: a complete copy of that chapter was sitting in a cave in Judea before Christ was born, and it reads as we have it.

The scroll is held at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem and has been photographed and published in full.

7. Isaiah in the New Testament

Isaiah is quoted more often in the New Testament than any other prophetic book, and the quotations sit at the load-bearing points.

All four Gospels introduce John the Baptist with Isaiah 40:3, the voice crying in the wilderness (Mt 3:3; Mk 1:2-3; Lk 3:4-6; Jn 1:23). Jesus opens his public ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth by reading Isaiah 61:1-2, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, and then saying, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Lk 4:16-21). Matthew applies Isaiah 42:1-4, the first Servant Song, to Jesus directly (Mt 12:17-21). Matthew also applies Isaiah 53:4 to the healings, "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases" (Mt 8:17).

Isaiah 6:9-10, the hard commission to a people who will not understand, is quoted by Jesus to explain the parables (Mt 13:14-15) and by Paul at the very end of Acts (Acts 28:26-27). Paul builds much of Romans 9 to 11 out of Isaiah, including the remnant. 1 Peter 2:22-25 rewrites Isaiah 53 as a description of Christ's passion for a persecuted congregation. Revelation draws its new heavens and new earth from Isaiah 65.

8. Isaiah in the Liturgy

A Catholic hears Isaiah constantly without necessarily knowing it.

The Sanctus at every Mass is Isaiah 6:3. Advent's weekday and Sunday first readings are dominated by Isaiah, which is why the season sounds the way it does: the shoot from the stump of Jesse, the desert blooming, the wolf and the lamb, the people who walked in darkness. Christmas Mass during the day uses Isaiah 52:7-10. The Good Friday liturgy reads the fourth Servant Song in full. The Chrism Mass uses Isaiah 61. Baptismal and Easter Vigil readings draw on Isaiah 54 and 55.

Outside the liturgy, Handel's Messiah takes the majority of its Part One and much of Part Two from Isaiah in the King James Version, which is why phrases from a Hebrew prophet of the eighth century BC are among the best-known English sentences in the world.

9. How Isaiah Died, and What the Record Actually Says

The Bible does not record Isaiah's death. The last dated event in the book is the reign of Hezekiah, and the narrative simply stops following him.

A tradition preserved in Jewish and early Christian sources says that he was executed under Hezekiah's son Manasseh by being sawn in two. The fullest version appears in the Ascension of Isaiah, a Jewish and Christian composite work of the first or second century AD, and the tradition is also referred to in rabbinic literature. Readers often connect it to Hebrews 11:37, which lists among the sufferings of the faithful that "they were stoned, they were sawn in two." The letter to the Hebrews does not name Isaiah there, and the connection is an inference rather than a statement.

So the honest position is this. Isaiah's execution under Manasseh is old and widespread tradition, attested outside the canonical Scriptures, and it is not part of the biblical record. It is worth knowing and worth labelling correctly. The distinction between what Scripture reports and what later devotion added is one a reader should keep in hand for every ancient figure, and it costs the tradition nothing to be honest about it.

Isaiah's father is named as Amoz (Is 1:1), a different person from the prophet Amos. He was married to a woman the book calls "the prophetess" (Is 8:3), and had at least two sons with symbolic names, Shear-jashub and Maher-shalal-hash-baz. Beyond that, nothing about his personal life is recorded.

10. Feast Day and Devotion

The general Roman calendar has no feast for Isaiah. The Byzantine churches, Greek and Slavic, keep his feast on 9 May, and the Coptic and other Eastern churches also commemorate him.

In the Latin Church devotion to Isaiah runs through the liturgy rather than through a saint's day. He is the prophet of Advent, and the O Antiphons sung in the final week before Christmas are stitched together largely out of his images: Wisdom, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring, King of the Nations, Emmanuel. In Christian art he is usually shown holding a scroll with the Immanuel prophecy, and often with a saw, the instrument of the traditional account of his death.

There is no widespread cult of relics or shrines for Isaiah in the Western Church. What Christians have of him is the text, which is the form of presence he would presumably have chosen.

11. What a Reader Can Take From Isaiah

Start with holiness, then look at yourself. Isaiah's first response to the vision was to name his own uncleanness. Sin becomes visible in the light of God rather than in the light of comparison with other people. Confession works on the same principle, and the site's page on confession sets out what the sacrament does.

Say yes before you know the assignment. "Here am I, send me" comes before Isaiah is told that nobody will listen. That is the shape of every real vocation.

Worship and justice stand or fall together. Isaiah 1 is the sharpest thing in Scripture on the subject: God refuses the sacrifices of people whose hands are full of blood, and tells them to defend the widow and the orphan first. Any devotional life that leaves the way you treat people untouched has failed Isaiah's test.

Hope is not optimism. Isaiah told Judah the truth about the catastrophe coming and told them a remnant would return, in the same breath. Christian hope works the same way, refusing both denial and despair.

Read Isaiah 53 in one sitting, out loud. Then read Acts 8:26-40. That is the whole method of Christian reading of the Old Testament in two passages.

For how the Church reads the Old Testament as a whole, see the Old Testament and the New, and for the structure and canon of the Bible, see the Bible.

12. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was the prophet Isaiah?

Isaiah, son of Amoz, was a prophet in Jerusalem active from about 740 BC into the reign of Hezekiah, during the Assyrian threat to Judah. He was called in a vision of God enthroned in the Temple, advised kings Ahaz and Hezekiah, and preached that Judah's security lay in God rather than in foreign alliances, alongside relentless criticism of injustice at home.

Why is Isaiah called the fifth Gospel?

St Jerome wrote in the preface to his commentary that Isaiah should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet, because he sets out the mysteries of Christ and the Church so clearly that he seems to be writing history. Later writers compressed that into "the fifth Gospel." The Servant Songs, especially Isaiah 53, and the Immanuel and Prince of Peace prophecies are the texts behind the title.

Did Isaiah write the whole book of Isaiah?

Most scholars today hold that the book grew in stages: chapters 1 to 39 substantially from Isaiah of Jerusalem, chapters 40 to 55 from an anonymous prophet during the Babylonian exile, and chapters 56 to 66 from after the return. A minority holds that the whole book is the eighth-century prophet's work. The Catholic Church has not defined the question, and the canonical book is inspired Scripture either way.

Does Isaiah 7:14 say "virgin" or "young woman"?

The Hebrew word is almah, which means a young woman of marriageable age. The Greek Septuagint, translated roughly two centuries before Christ, rendered it parthenos, virgin, and Matthew 1:22-23 quotes the Greek when applying the verse to the conception of Jesus. The Church reads the verse as having an immediate eighth-century reference and a fuller meaning disclosed in Christ.

Who is the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53?

Jewish interpretation has most often read the servant as Israel personified, which has support in Isaiah 49:3. Christian interpretation identifies the servant with Christ, and the New Testament makes that identification directly in Acts 8:32-35, where Philip explains the passage to the Ethiopian official as the good news of Jesus. The Church reads Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12 in full on Good Friday.

Was Isaiah sawn in two?

The Bible does not record Isaiah's death. A tradition preserved in the Ascension of Isaiah and in rabbinic literature says he was executed under King Manasseh by being sawn in two, and readers often connect it to Hebrews 11:37, which mentions people who were sawn in two without naming him. The account is old and widespread tradition rather than part of the biblical record.