Isaiah 13

Isaiah got so many things right about the future that most scholars think he was cheating. It's not just his prophecies about Jesus. He was three steps ahead of everyone else when it came to politics, too. The Book of Isaiah contains unbelievably accurate information about things that happened hundreds of years after it was written.

That, at least, is what the Bible tells you. Modern scholarship has a different answer. Read about "Isaiah" in a history book and you will find that he was actually a composite character created by multiple authors over a huge span of time.

It all comes down to belief. Isaiah makes Nostradamus look like a blind man reading a Ouija board. There only two possible explanations for how:

1. He was a genuine prophet who heard the voice of God.
2. He was cheating.

Believing Christians, Muslims, and Jews have no trouble with #1. But people who don't believe in God aren't going to believe in prophets, either.

The most popular theory about the Book of Isaiah is that it has three authors: the Original Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 1-39 around 700 BC), Deutero-Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 40-55 during the Exile) and Trito-Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 56-66 during the restoration of Judah after the Exile). So instead of Original Isaiah eerily predicting the future, Deutero and Trito-Isaiah were just describing what they saw around them.

Those predictions or descriptions, depending on how you want to look at it, begin in Chapter 13. That's when the Book of Isaiah moves from talking about the Messiah and the fate of all mankind to focusing on its corner of the world. The first clue that something is off is the way that it describes Babylon:

Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Babylonians, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.

 - Isaiah 13:19

Babylon was not the "jewel of kingdoms" during Isaiah's lifetime. Like the rest of the ancient Middle East, it existed in the shadow of Assyria. The Babylonians didn't gain their independence until well after his death.

Then, after breaking free in 626 BC, they created an even more dominant empire of their own. They eventually finished what the Assyrians started, sacking Jerusalem in 597 BC and deporting the survivors as part of what became known as the Babylonian Exile.

Not only did Isaiah predict their rise, he also predicted their fall:

See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold. 

- Isaiah 13:17

The Medes were an obscure group of tribes in modern-day Iran on the very fringes of the Assyrian Empire in his lifetime:

You can already guess what happened next. The people in that area coalesced into a group whom we now know as the Persians, who then conquered Babylon in 539 BC.

Predicting all that 200 years in advance is insane enough. But where the Book of Isaiah really loses scholars comes in Chapter 45, when it specifically gives the name of the Persian king who frees the Jews and lets them return to Jerusalem:

"I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness: I will make all his ways straight. He will rebuild my city and set my exiles free, but not for a price or reward, says the Lord Almighty." 

- Isaiah 45:13

The general scholarly consensus with this prediction can be summed up in six words: "Get the f*** out of here". Non-religious scholars who study the Bible for a living tend to be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt on a lot of things. But this is too much. There had to be someone giving messages from the future to the past to get a name right.

No one actually knows. The beauty of that type of theory is that it's impossible to prove a negative. How can you prove in 2020 that someone didn't add chapters in 500 BC to something that was written in 700 BC?

The only proof that could exist is a copy of the complete version of the Book of Isaiah that can be dated to a specific point of time. The closes thing we have to that is the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient manuscripts that were preserved in the Israeli desert around 200 BC and then discovered in the 1940s. That's the point where we know the Book was "finished". Everything before that is just speculation.

You can raise doubt about the available evidence in either direction.

People who believe in a unitary Isaiah will point to phrases that exist throughout every section of the Book (most notably "the Holy One of Israel") and appear nowhere else in the Bible, as well as descriptions of things like plants and animals native to ancient Israel and the lack of the same descriptions of things from ancient Babylon, where Deutero-Isaiah was supposed to exist. But the proponents of the multiple Isaiah theory respond by saying that Deutero and Trito-Isaiah were just covering their tracks.

Beyond the eerily precise predictions, they also point out that the subject matter changes between the three sections, as does the style of writing. But that doesn't prove anything, either. Writers change topics and write in different styles all the time. Just because I normally write about basketball doesn't mean this blog was written by someone else.

There's a thin line between historical speculation and conspiracy theory. You can use computer analysis to "prove" that multiple people wrote the Book of Isaiah, but you can also use it to "prove" that Barack Obama didn't actually write his memoir.

Nor is there an obvious place to stop once you start dividing a book into sections. There are some scholars who believe there were at least seven different authors -- 1-12, 13-23, 24-35, 36-39, 40-48, 49-57, and 58-66. There are others who think there are dozens, if not hundreds. Maybe the Book of Isaiah was just the first Wikipedia page?

The lack of concrete proof means that both sides are building their arguments on faith. It's obvious enough to see that with the unitary Isaiah people. But the same thing holds true for their counterparts.

The book "A History of The Bible" by John Barton, a liberal Christian theologian, is a perfect example. His section on Isaiah is a well-written review of what everyone "knows" that seems convincing at first glance.

You will notice something interesting if you read through his book as closely as he reads through the Bible. In eight pages about Isaiah, Barton uses the word "probably" six times and "may" (as in "we may assume" or "whom we may guess") four. That doesn't even count phrases like "we must assume" and "seems likely".

He's guessing, just like everyone else.

It all comes back to first principles. If your worldview doesn't allow for supernatural explanations, than cheating is the only possible explanation for Isaiah's predictions and "you must assume" certain things about how it was written. If you do believe in God, than believing that Isaiah could see into the future is nothing. The seraphim that he describes seeing in the throne room of God are way crazier than his predictions.

There are two sets of prophecies in the Book of Isaiah that we can all agree are real, regardless of worldview. The first are the ones about the Messiah. Even if there was an eighth or ninth or tenth or thirteenth Isaiah sneaking in prophecies in 210 BC, right before the Dead Sea Scrolls were frozen in time, it's still incredible to see how much he anticipated about Jesus.

The second are the ones about things that are still happening:

[Babylon] will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; there no nomads will pitch their tents, there no shepherds will rest their flocks.

But desert creatures will lie there, jackals will fill her houses; there the owls will dwell, and there the wild goats will leap about.

Hyenas will inhabit her strongholds, jackals her luxurious places. Her time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged.

- Isaiah 13:20-23 

Human civilization began in Babylon. It was New York City, London, and Beijing all rolled up into one. Historians believe that it had two stretches separated by over 1,000 years (1770-1670 BC and 600-300 BC) where it was the most populated city in the world. Jerusalem, where Isaiah lived, was a shabby collection of huts in comparison.

Here's what Babylon looks like now:

It has not been inhabited in thousands of years. Some people in the region believe there was a curse put on Babylon, and that anyone who tries to rebuild it will be destroyed. Just ask Saddam Hussein.

So how did Isaiah know that would happen?