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    Isaiah Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics
    Isaiah Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics
    Isaiah Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics
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    Isaiah Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics

    By Ben Witherington III

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    Reading the Book of Isaiah in its original context is the crucial prerequisite for reading its citation and use in later interpretation, including the New Testament writings, argues Ben Witherington III. Here he offers pastors, teachers, and students an accessible commentary to Isaiah, as well as a reasoned consideration of how Isaiah was heard and read in early Christianity. By reading “forward and backward” Witherington advances the scholarly discussion of intertextuality and opens a new avenue for biblical theology.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFortress Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2017
    ISBN9781506420561
    Isaiah Old and New: Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics
    Author

    Ben Witherington III

    Ben Witherington III is professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world and has written over forty books, including The Brother of Jesus (co-author), The Jesus Quest, and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. Witherington has been interviewed on NBC Dateline, CBS 48 Hours, FOX News, top NPR programs, and major print media including the Associated Press and the New York Times. He was featured with N.T. Wright on the recent BBC Easter special entitled, The Story of Jesus. Ben lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

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      Book preview

      Isaiah Old and New - Ben Witherington III

      Isaiah Old and New

      Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics

      Ben Witherington, III

      Fortress Press

      Minneapolis

      ISAIAH OLD AND NEW

      Exegesis, Intertextuality, and Hermeneutics

      Copyright © 2017 Ben Witherington III, admin. Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email copyright@1517.media or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

      Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations from the translation of the Masoretic Text of Isaiah are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®, copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc™. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide (see www.zondervan.com). The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc™.

      All translations from the LXX are taken from A New English Translation of the Septuagint, © 2007 by the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Inc.  Used by permission of Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

      Cover image: Public Domain image: Edward Hicks – The Peaceable Kingdom. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Hicks_-_The_Peaceable_Kingdom_-_Google_Art_Project_(723124).jpg.

      Cover design: Joe Reinke

      Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-2055-4

      eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-2056-1

      The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984.

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      This book was produced using Pressbooks.com.

      Do you understand what you are reading? Philip asked.

      How can I, he said, unless someone explains it to me?

      . . .

      The eunuch [then] asked Philip, Tell me please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?

      Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture [Isaiah 52‒53] and told him the Good News about Jesus. (Acts 8:30–31, 34–35)

      Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.

      (1 Pet 1:10–12)

      Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Pet 1:20–21)

      Without the New Testament, the Old Testament would be a labyrinth without a clue, a syllogism without a conclusion, a torso without a heart, a moon without a sun, since Christ is the proper interpreter of the Old Testament. (Franz Delitzsch[1])

      Old Testament texts do not first derive their truth from the New Testament. That would be totally out of keeping with the spirit of Acts 8.34–35. For Philip did not answer, ‘This word is fulfilled in Jesus!’ Or ‘The Servant of Isaiah 53 is Jesus Christ!’ Rather he took Isaiah 53:7–8 as the starting point of his proclamation, which in turn led him beyond this Scripture passage. His preaching about Jesus the Christ is, so to speak, a continuation of the book of Isaiah. (Bernd Janowski[2])

      THE ORACLE

      Call them forth,

      Call them forth,

      From the passive past.

      The soothsayers and truth sayers

      The yea sayers and nay sayers

      The foretellers and forthtellers,

      Scanning the skies,

      Hoping for the horizon,

      Acting out the plan

      Signing forth the ban

      Boon or bane

      Commendation or condemnation

      Blessing or curse,

      Let them wrap their mantles

      ’Round their hoary heads

      And cry: Thus sayeth the Lord

      Once more.

      –Ben Witherington, III

      Franz Delitzsch, Must We Follow the New Testament Interpretation of the Old Testament Text, in The Old Testament Student, 6 (1886): 77–78. ↵

      Bernd Janowski, He Bore Our Sins: Isaiah 53 and the Drama of Taking Another’s Place, in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources, ed. Bernd Janowski and Peter Stuhlmacher (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 74. ↵

      Contents

      Epigraphs

      Acknowledgments

      Abbreviations

      The Past Is but Prologue?

      1. Isaianic Fingerprints Everywhere

      2. Early Isaiah—Isaiah 1–12

      3. Later Isaiah—Isaiah 13–39

      4. Eschatological Isaiah, Part One: Isaiah 40–55

      5. Eschatological Isaiah, Part Two: Isaiah 56–66

      6. Isaiah Old and New: Conclusions

      Appendix A: Intertextuality of a Different Sort

      Appendix B: Forward Thinking on Reading Backwards

      Dialogue and Review

      Appendix C: Isaiah as Christian Scripture: What Should We Think about That Idea?

      A Detailed Synopsis and Critique of Brevard Childs, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture

      Appendix D: A Key to the Isaianic Authorship Puzzle?

      Appendix E: A Review of Richard Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels

      Appendix F: What Should We Think of Intertexuality?

      Appendix G: Isaiah as Architect

      The Use of Isaiah by the Evangelists to Structure their Gospels (and Acts)

      Select Bibliography

      Acknowledgments

      A plethora of people have helped me understand Isaiah and its relationship to the New Testament over the last almost fifty years now. Dr. Bernard Boyd, my Bible Professor at UNC lit the fire, and Dr. Marvin Wilson at Gordon fanned the flame. John Rogerson at Durham showed me how to put more logs on the fire and keep it burning, and many OT colleagues along the way have kept handing me more Isaiah kindling—Bill Arnold, Lawson Stone, Daniel Hawk, Daniel Johnson, John Oswalt, Sandy Richter, Katie Heffelfinger, John Cook, Michael Matlock, and so many more that I’ve read over the many years of studying and teaching Isaiah. In regard to the issue of intertextuality I must thank my old friend Richard Hays and also Ross Wagner for pushing the envelope and making me open it in the first place.

      This book would not have been completed in good time and in good order had it not been for the tireless services of my teaching assistant Joy Vaughan, who helped me so much with the revisions to the second edition of my Invitation to the New Testament. I must also thank Debbie Endean, another of our doctoral students, for weighing in on a part of this manuscript, and Kennedy Ekeocha, who provided two of the charts. Kudos to my old friend Todd Still and to Truett Seminary at Baylor for having me as a visiting professor during my sabbatical and for helping me find some hard-to-get resources for this book. The gaps and errors in this study are entirely mine. I hope that at least in a small way Isaiah 61 was true about me as I tried to write this book—namely, that the Spirit of the Lord was upon me to proclaim good news.

      Pentecost 2016

      Abbreviations

      The Past Is but Prologue?

      There is a tide in the affairs of men.

      Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

      Omitted, all the voyage of their life

      Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

      On such a full sea are we now afloat,

      And we must take the current when it serves,

      Or lose our ventures.

      — Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3, 218–24

      The writers of the New Testament[1] were persons who believed that the time had fully come, that the hopes and fears of all the years were coming to fruition, that the age of the fulfillment of all God’s promises and prophecies had dawned. Why, then, was it that they focused so heavily on certain OT texts as being fulfilled in the Christ event and its aftermath, and not others?

      For a very long time now, I’ve been pondering why it is that in the NT the two most cited, alluded to, or echoed OT books are Isaiah and the Psalms, and by a lot. The statistics are quite staggering, and I intend to lay those out for Isaiah in what follows in the first chapter.[2] Here it will suffice to repeat what John F. A Sawyer says: Around one hundred verses from forty-five of the sixty-six chapters of Isaiah are either quoted directly or clearly alluded to mainly in the Gospels (forty-six), Paul (thirty) and Revelation (thirty).[3] In those same books we also have a plethora of quotes and allusions to the Psalms. Put the other way around, there are over 400 quotations or allusions to Isaiah in the NT. It is with good reason that Richard Hays has recently referred to the hermeneutical centrality of Isaiah for Luke’s account of Israel’s eschatological destiny.[4] In fact, one can make a strong case for the hermeneutical centrality of Isaiah for the majority of NT books, and not just in regard to the future of Israel.

      Once you’ve been studying the use of Isaiah in the NT for a while, it’s hard not to start seeing Isaiah and Psalms references almost everywhere. Accordingly, I have asked myself the question: What do Isaiah and the Psalms have in common to have caused them to be the preferred OT texts for various writers of the NT when they wanted to speak about the Christ and things eschatological using their sacred Scriptures, the only Scriptures they had? Obviously it has something to do with the content of these two books, but that cannot be the whole story. If it was just a matter of content, one might have expected far more references to the suffering servant passage in Isaiah 52–53 than we find in the NT. We might especially have expected more from Isaiah 52–53 in the passion narratives.

      Let us bear in mind from the outset that there was no NT in the NT era. Though the teachings of Jesus and of Paul and other eyewitnesses and apostles came to be seen as the inspired word of God, orally proclaimed, even during the first century AD,[5] and though toward the end of the apostolic era, the literary residue of such teaching began to be seen as sacred texts on a par with the OT (see 2 Pet 3:15–16, ὡς καὶ τὰς λοιπὰς γραφάς), still it must be stressed that the only universally recognized sacred Jewish texts ready to hand for the NT writers were texts from the OT itself. But again, why Isaiah and why the Psalms? What do these two books in particular have in common?

      One could argue that these texts were both used in an eschatological and messianic manner in some segments of early Judaism, and then hypothesize that what we find in the NT is like what we find, for instance, in some texts at Qumran. The ethos or gestalt of that age led certain hopeful and forward-looking Jews to treat such texts as prophetic in character, referencing things happening in their own era and beyond. This still is not an adequate explanation for all the use of Isaiah and the Psalms in the NT.

      By way of reminder, in various of my earlier studies,[6] I have especially emphasized that distant future prophecy in the OT tends to use more universal and generic language as opposed to some prophecies that were speaking about the immediate present or what was on the very near horizon. Contrast, for example, the Cyrus oracles in Second Isaiah with the material in Isaiah 65–66 about the new heavens and new earth. Near-horizon prophecy is sometimes more specific and particularistic in character. In short, future prophecy, that is, prophecy not referring to something believed to be imminent, tends to be more metaphorically poetic in character, and therefore more malleable, or readily serviceable for all sorts of homiletical and practical uses by later generations pondering these sacred texts.

      Yes, other OT prophetic books besides Isaiah 40–66 were poetic in character. Indeed, we find plenty of poetry in the oracles in Isaiah 1–39, but those earlier oracles were largely speaking to the present or immediate future of God’s people, not primarily or exclusively to the more distant future. It is almost exclusively the exilic and postexilic material that really focuses on the more remote, if not the final, future as well as on the afterlife, or better said, addresses both their own immediate situation and also the more distant horizon. Thus, I think there is some truth to the thesis that content, particularly far-horizon content, dictates form, but it falls far short of explaining everything.

      In particular, it really doesn’t explain why we see the repeated focus on Isaiah and the Psalms in the NT, not least because the Psalms are not inherently prophetic in terms of their literary genre and character. They are poems, often lyrics to songs, if you will. While one can argue that the whole OT was viewed as in one sense prophetic and forward-looking in character, this doesn’t help us much when it comes to explaining why these two books in particular, Isaiah and the Psalms, were singled out so often to explain the Christ event and its aftermath. Nor is it enough to suggest that the earliest Christians were simply following the example of Jesus himself, since in fact Jesus seems to have mainly used other prophets, notably Daniel and in particular Daniel 7, to explain himself or figure forth the character of his mission.[7]

      While not wanting to discount or neglect such factors as those just mentioned, I think there is another major factor in play that has been too often overlooked. I am referring to the fact that in the case of both Isaiah (and especially Isaiah 40–66) and the Psalms, we are dealing with poetry, poetry that is inherently metaphorical, multivalent, more universal in character and content.[8] As J. J. M. Roberts has recently said, Good poetry is not that univocal.[9] Indeed it is not. The very character of this language naturally lent itself more easily to being used in various ways, including in the ways it is used in the NT.

      But why should oracles be in poetic form? Is it just because of the aesthetics—it makes them more memorable and even memorizable? Is that all there is to it? And why does it appear that Israel is nearly unique in preserving prophetic oracles in written form?[10] Furthermore, why does it take the form of nonnarrative or nondramatic poetry, by which I mean lyric poetry? Lyric poems do not depend on plot as an organizing principle, or on character development. They are instead characterized by repetition, juxtaposition, and richly imagaic language.[11]

      The unifying factor is that the oracle involves the utterances of a particular voice, in this case God’s or Isaiah speaking for God. An I is speaking in direct address to some particular you, and usually the you is plural, not singular. The thing about lyric poetry, since it does not in the main seek to persuade by means of argumentation, is that it works to convey its message and convince its audience through the expression of emotion and through emotionally charged imagery.[12] This is not just a matter of expressing emotion, but it intends to elicit an emotional response by the audience. The prophet seems to be trying to speak in a manner that gives the audience the impression of having an unmediated encounter with their God who is directly speaking to them, but in poetic form. The oracle as lyric poetry conveys not just the content of a message, but also the emotional character of the message.

      So we should ask: Does the imagery suggest the speaker is angry or approving, speaking urgently or at leisure, urging a prompt response or prompting reflection? Is the oracle meant to be reassuring or to put the fear of God in the audience (and so on)? Is the speaker trying to humble the audience or to comfort them? Woe or judgment oracles seem to aim at the former, whereas salvation oracles strive to inculcate the latter (see, e.g., Isaiah 40). The intended outcome is not only to prompt an encounter between God and his people, but to promote an ongoing series of encounters—a relationship between the two. The rhetoric of prophetic oracles in lyric poetry is not merely meant to change the audience’s ideas, though that is part of the aim, it is just as certainly meant to affect and change their hearts, hence the emotive verbiage.[13]

      Poetry is not merely a matter of form, it is also a matter of content, and so analyzing the rhythm, the meter, and poetic devices in general is only scratching the surface of things. What the form tells us, or at least intimates, is that one is not meant to evaluate the content in the same way one would a prose text or even narrative poetry. Lyric poetry involves analogy, metaphor, hyperbolic images, not least because it is imaging forth something that often cannot be literally described—in this case the being, character, very nature, and will of God. Furthermore, it is not accidental that this lyric poetic quality of the prophetic oracles has much in common with songs, laments, hymns, love poems, and so with the Psalms as well.[14]

      This similarity in lyric quality is one reason some of the material in Isaiah 40–55 is often mistaken for songs rather than prophetic oracles. They share various common traits. Poetry lets us hear the sound of the soul, or put another way, lets us sense what is on the heart of God. But the aim of a prophetic oracle in lyrical form is not merely to allow us to put a stethoscope to God’s heart. The idea is to listen intently, have a heart-to-heart talk and so further, restart, or heal a relationship. When listening this way, one is meant to ask oneself hard questions, not merely ask God for information.

      In a helpful discussion, John Oswalt has put the matter this way: "it is improper to attempt to make poetry fit into a wholly cognitive mode. Poetry speaks to the affective side of the personality. This is not to say that it is worth less than purely cognitive materials. It may well be worth more in its power to shape our thinking and motivate us to action. But it is to say that any attempt to reduce the imagery to simple literal statements is an inappropriate method of interpretation."[15] I am in basic agreement with what Oswalt is saying here.

      In his recent landmark study, Richard B. Hays stresses the following:

      Metaphors do not deal in direct statement, rather they intensify meaning precisely by concealing it, by speaking in an indirect mode and saying something other than what is meant. Robert Frost phrased this insight simply: Poetry is the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. And the literary critic Frank Kermode in his penetrating study of the hermeneutics of Mark’s Gospel, observed Parable, it seems, may proclaim truth as a herald does, and at the same time conceals truth like an oracle.[16]

      This notion of deliberate hiddenness or concealment is more true of apocalyptic oracles than of ordinary poetic prophetic oracles, but the point about the use of figurative and thus indirect language is right on the mark and critical.

      But of course, the proof of such a poetic thesis must come through a detailed examination of the relevant texts. Accordingly, this study intends to pick a variety of texts from Isaiah that recur in some form in the NT or seem to influence the thinking of NT writers and their discourse. Our modus operandi will be to examine these texts in their original contexts, as best we can determine them, and see what they meant then and there, and then examine them as they recur or are reused in various NT contexts and assess the meaning in the later contexts.[17] The results of the two contextual studies will be compared and contrasted. We will be dealing with both the Masoretic Text (MT) and the Septuagint (LXX) of the passages of Isaiah in question, and of course there are notable differences in various ways and places between these two sources.[18]

      And perhaps here is the point in time for a definition. I am in agreement with Benjamin Sommer and Kelli S. O’Brien that when we are talking about citations or allusions, we are talking about authorial intentions.[19] I also agree with Michael Fishbane when he says of inner-biblical exegesis that it requires conscious interpretation of the referent text.[20] This stands in contradiction to those who would want to define intertexuality as: (1) not involving authorial intent, and (2) assuming a theory of meaning that is audience-centered or even audience-created. I also agree with O’Brien that an allusion must involve a verbal correspondence and thematic interplay between two or more texts.[21]

      This, then, is not merely a study of intertextuality, but also of exegesis and hermeneutics. Indeed, what we have in this book is primarily a commentary on Isaiah in its original context, compared to the way the same material is used in its various NT contexts. This is not a technical monograph on this fascinating material; it is an attempt in commentary form to introduce my readers to and distill for them some of the crucial scholarly discussion about the meaning of Isaiah in both its original and later contexts. Furthermore, it is a study in the weaving together of many OT threads into a remarkable christological and eschatological tapestry. Most of the time we look at life from the backside of the tapestry and see loose threads and tangled knots. But the writers of the NT believed they were now getting a glimpse of God’s larger providential design of the final things because of the light of Christ shining through the tapestry of life and illuminating both its true meaning and its ultimate goal.[22]

      A word about my motive and modus operandi is in order here. I have observed over my career that Christians, not surprisingly, have a tendency not to pay attention to the text of Isaiah as holy writ in and of itself. This is the case even though Isaiah existed long before the books of the NT were written and had a meaning in its various original contexts. Indeed, the book of Isaiah may well be the book Christians least try to hear in its original settings.

      Nor do most Christians try very hard to wrestle with the meaning of the text in its original contexts, but rather simply follow the lead of various NT writers, read backwards from the NT use of the OT, and never get beyond that. They never give the Hebrew Bible a fair listen quite apart from all sorts of NT categories such as Christology, eschatology, and the like. They also seldom ask questions about how the OT is used in the NT, and why. This book is meant in part to help overcome some of these natural tendencies of the interpretation of Isaiah. It is my view that the first task of any good interpreter of the Bible is to hear the text in its original historical contexts to the best of our ability before we turn to the later use and reaudiencing and reapplying of the material by the NT writers. This, I think, is job one when dealing with the OT. Having said that, I do think we can and should follow the lead of the NT writers, and read the OT in the light of the Christ event. I do think that retrospective or figural readings of the OT with christological glasses are appropriate, not least because the writers of the NT followed this practice and encouraged us, by their example, to do likewise. In other words, the Christian must learn to read the Bible both forward and backwards for fuller understanding.

      Accordingly, a large portion of what follows is a careful working through of Isaiah, trying to understand its meaning in its original contexts first, before then asking and answering the question of how this same material is used by Jesus and the writers of the NT. I think the latter question is crucial for any Christian, but it should not be the starting point. In other words, exegesis of Isaiah comes first, then intertextual and hermeneutical considerations. I am interested in what Richard Hays, in his recent magisterial study entitled Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, calls an intertextuality of production as well as an intertextuality of reception.[23] By an intertextuality of production I am referring in part to how Second and Third Isaiah reuse material from First Isaiah. I am not just concerned with how the OT was received by the NT writers and used by them, I am also interested in what the writers of Isaiah meant and intended in their own contexts, not least because the NT writers also reflect interest in such things.

      I do not agree with those who suggest that what is going on in the NT is simply a realizing of a new significance or application of the text of Isaiah, because its meaning is assumed to be confined to its original historical settings.[24] I think there is more than enough rich meaning in the poetic text of Isaiah to speak of the text having both an intended meaning in its original contexts and more than that, from the outset. In fact, I even think God intended it that way from the outset when he inspired the writing of these oracles in Isaiah. Of course, much depends on how we view prophecy and fulfillment, type and antitype, before and after, salvation history, progressive revelation, and not least poetry! I haven’t even mentioned canonical and biblical theology.

      Second, since I have written a commentary on each of the books of the NT, I do not intend to rehearse all that material again here. The reader wanting more exegesis of the NT material may turn to those commentaries. I will focus here on what the text of Isaiah originally meant, and on how the OT is used in the NT, and deal with how that affects the meaning of the NT text. As we shall see, the OT text of Isaiah is used in a considerable variety of ways, ranging from actual contextual exegesis all the way to the allegorizing of OT narrative and prophecy.

      For ease of reference for the reader, I am deliberately including with each major passage of Isaiah treated both a translation of the Hebrew MT and of the Greek text of the LXX. There are differences between these two texts of Isaiah, and not infrequently significant differences, and yet various of the writers of the NT felt comfortable using the LXX as their sacred text for a variety of kinds of expositions. We will be dealing with cases where the NT author more nearly follows the MT or more nearly the LXX (usually the latter), and cases where he feels free to do his own creative paraphrasing and using of the OT text. Shortly, I will discuss what I mean by the term LXX, when in fact there were various Old Greek texts, and indeed some of the original LXX texts had undergone revisions before the writing of any of the NT books. So at the outset of the next chapter, I will seek to lead the reader through the mare’s nest of issues surrounding the various Greek texts of the OT, and the task of figuring out which one or ones the NT writers were following, if they were not doing their own translations of the Hebrew text.

      At the end of the book, a series of appendices deal at greater length with particular topics of importance and relevance to the larger discussion in the book, but in a more detailed way than could be incorporated into the text of the chapters without appearing to be long digressions.

      A very long time ago, over thirty years ago, I began teaching both the OT and NT at the graduate level, including teaching Isaiah. It is a delight during the autumn of my teaching career to return to this material, hopefully with more insight, more understanding, more wisdom, and more desire to learn from God’s word. There is fresh light to be found in these Isaianic texts that are over 2,700 years old! May the Spirit spoken of in Isaiah 61:1 guide the study of these sacred texts.[25]

      Hereafter NT and OT for the New and Old Testaments. ↵

      A volume on the Psalms, entitled Psalms Old and New, is forthcoming in 2017. ↵

      John F. A. Sawyer, The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30. ↵

      Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 274. ↵

      See my detailed study of this in Ben Witherington, III, The Living Word of God: Rethinking the Theology of the Bible (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009). ↵

      See, e.g., my commentary on Revelation: Ben Witherington, III, Revelation, NCBC (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). ↵

      On which see Ben Witherington, III, The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); Ben Witherington, III, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000); and especially Ben Witherington, III, Jesus the Seer: The Progress of Prophecy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014). ↵

      As Katie Heffelfinger, More than Mere Ornamentation: Poetics and Biblical Prophecy, Irish Biblical Association, 36–37 (2014): 36–54 points out, almost all of First and Second Isaiah are poetic in character, the exceptions being the call narrative in Isaiah 6, the interactions with Ahaz in Isaiah 8–9 and with Hezekiah in Isaiah 36–39. All the oracular utterances where Isaiah speaks on behalf of God either in his own voice, or quoting God are in poetic form. ↵

      J. J. M. Roberts, First Isaiah, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 71. ↵

      The exceptions to this rule come almost entirely from the reigns of two Assyrian kings between 681–626 BC, which is to say not long after the historical Isaiah seems to have produced most of his oracles. See Heffelfinger, Mere Ornamentation, 38–39. ↵

      Ibid., 42. ↵

      Ibid., 44. ↵

      See rightly ibid., 53. ↵

      It is interesting that already in the eighteenth century, Robert Lowth, a bishop of the church of England and a first rate scholar of the Hebrew Bible, recognized these poetic qualities in Isaiah and sought to carefully render these oracles in a poetic and metrical way in English. The results were quite good, as we will see in due course. ↵

      John Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 1–39, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1986), 621 (emphasis added). ↵

      Hays, Echoes of Scripture, 101. ↵

      And here I must partially disagree with my old friend Richard Hays. Reading backwards does not necessarily need to be done first if one is a Christian following the example of various NT writers. Indeed, I would say that in an age in which Christians are increasingly less and less familiar with the OT in itself and are apt to read things into the OT which aren’t there (e.g., the angel of the Lord in the OT is not the preincarnate Jesus, as the book Hebrews makes clear in ch. 1), this approach does not allow Christians to hear those OT texts as they were originally given in at least their original literary contexts first. The backwards approach forgets that many of the earliest followers of Jesus and most of the NT writers were Jews who had read or heard the OT sacred texts long before they had encountered Jesus or reread the OT after Easter with new christological glasses. They had read the text forwardbefore they read it figurally and backwards. Besides all that, there were specific hermeneutical and apologetical goals to figural reading, namely to explain the Christ event, to explain his new community, to explain an Israel that had largely rejected Christ. The writers of the NT, when they use a figural approach to the OT, have a specific purpose in mind, and they are not suggesting this is the only way a follower of Jesus should read the OT if they wish to understand it. Indeed, as the quote from 1 Peter 1:10–12 cited above says, we must look at the patterns of prediction and fulfillment as well, which is a forward-reading approach, not just at the allusions and echoes and evidence of metalepsis. In short, I think Hays has correctly demonstrated the legitimacy and necessity of a figural reading of the NT for Christians and he is right to reject those who think the NT writers approach was wrong or cannot be duplicated. Clearly Hays has shown very well it can be duplicated and if one believes what the NT writers believed about Jesus, it should be practiced. It is however a mistake to suggest this is the only way the NT writers read the OT, or the only way they would want us to do so. ↵

      A useful starting place to understand the Christian use of the LXX and how it became overwhelmingly the dominant form of the OT used by the early church is Martin Hengel’s fine study, The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: The Prehistory and the Problem of Its Canon, OTS (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002). For an interesting study on how the LXX has been used to do NT research particularly in the modern era see R. Timothy McLay, The Use of the Septuagint in New Testament Research (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). The LXX was an evolving entity in the second century AD with Jews seeking to make it more in conformity with the Hebrew text, and Christians beginning to deal with its text as well. ↵

      See Kelli S. O’Brien, The Use of Scripture in the Markan Passion Narrative, LNTS 384 (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 25; Benjamin D. Sommer, A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40–66 (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1998), 8, 15, 32. Sommer even requires that the audience recognize the allusion, but it may be asked: Since we don’t know exactly how the document was originally understood by its intended audience, how could we assess this? At least we have a product of the author by which to judge his intentions and receptivity of the OT. ↵

      Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 13, 19. In other words, the citations and allusions are not there in the text by accident. For a discussion of the problems with postmodern intertexuality theory, especially as applied to the Bible see Appendix F below. ↵

      O’Brien, The Use of Scripture, 46. ↵

      I saw a quotation something like this when hiking many years ago in the Linville Gorge and my memory was it was attributed to John Muir. Having now consulted a Muir expert, it appears it was an anonymous quotation by some other naturalist (Ansel Adams perhaps?). It is attributed online to a pastor at two sites, but he seems to have gotten it from my use of the quotation in my book Incandescence: Light Shed through the Word (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) and is not the author of this quotation. ↵

      We will be interacting a great deal with his landmark study throughout our discussion of the echoes, allusions, and quotes from the OT in the Gospels. See Hays, Echoes of Scripture. Our study has a broader scope and focus. ↵

      See rightly ibid., 136: the meaning of a text cannot be strictly delimited by the original intentions of the author. Precisely because the text participates in an intertextual field and activates different encyclopedias of reception in different reading communities, there is always a possibility of a fresh reading that discloses layers of significance of which the author was unaware. Hays is speaking about Gospels texts here, including narrative ones, but I would say that when it is poetry to begin with, lyrical poetry of an oracular nature, the open-ended character of the meaning and the possibility of the prophet saying more than he realized through image and metaphor is all the more clear. ↵

      For those eager to see how Isaiah has been interpreted in the church in the past, I refer you to the long synopsis and review of Brevard Child’s important book on the church’s struggle to see Isaiah as Christian Scripture, in Appendix C below. ↵

      1

      Isaianic Fingerprints Everywhere

      Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus’s glory and spoke about him.

      —John 12:41

      Almost everywhere one turns in the NT, one finds the fingerprints of Isaiah. In some 300 pages of most any translation of the NT, there are over 400 quotes, paraphrases, or allusions to Isaiah. That’s more than one per page on even a conservative estimate. More strikingly, precisely in regard to the subjects that we find most central and crucial to the NT, having to do with Christology, eschatology, and soteriology, Isaiah is drawn on again and again to articulate the good news. There is a good reason why John F. A. Sawyer entitled his book The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity.[1] Even a cursory survey of the evidence produces impressive results.

      Charting Isaiah

      For example, consider the following two charts that give one a feel for the impact of Isaiah on the NT:

      If we take matters a bit further we can learn some things by figuring out whether our NT authors are following and using some Greek OT text or some form of the Hebrew text when they draw on Isaiah.[4]

      These charts beg many questions, however, and here is the point where we must address in earnest what I mean by such terms as the LXX, the Greek OT, and the like. We can only give a thumbnail sketch of the complex issues here, and point the reader to more detailed studies in the footnotes. First of all the term LXX, which is Roman numerals for the number seventy, comes from the tradition that seventy or seventy-two people translated the Hebrew OT into Greek. The story about this process is first recorded in the Letter of Aristeas, obviously writing after the process was concluded. In fact, the Letter of Aristeas probably dates to as much as one hundred years later than when the process of translation was first concluded.

      So, if we date the Greek translation of at least the Pentateuch (if not much more of the OT) to about 275 BC then the letter comes from about 175 BC. This process was set in motion because Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283–246 BC) wanted a Greek translation of the OT for his library. According to Aristeas, he enlisted translators from Jerusalem, six from each of the twelve tribes, to produce the volume, hence seventy-two. According to the story, they miraculously managed to do this whole job in short order with divine help.

      In fact, while scholars are mostly in agreement that the time frame for the beginning of this translation is correctly identified, and its probable location in Alexandria is correct, a place where there were many Greek-speaking Jews, clearly a fair bit of this story is a myth of origins. It is a myth repeated by Philo (Moses 2.25–41) who even suggests that the translators all worked independently but miraculously produced the exact same translation of the work, word for word, because of the divine inspiration of them all. In his view the Greek OT is just as divinely inspired as the original Hebrew, and presumably by divine dictation. Interestingly, this also seems to have become the opinion of various later Greek church fathers once the Greek OT had de facto become the Christian OT, particularly in the Eastern Church.

      The historical evidence however does not confirm this myth of origins in various respects. For one thing, it seems clear that the translating took place over several centuries, and though it was completed before the time of Christ, nonetheless, it was not completed by an original group of translators working under the edict by Ptolemy.

      Happily, it can be said that a good deal of the LXX reflects an attempt to give a rather literal rendering of the Hebrew text into Greek; some books, such as Ecclesiastes, were rendered more literally, and others, such as Proverbs, were rendered more freely. When it comes to the Greek translation of Isaiah, the judgment of Ross Wagner deserves to be followed. He says, for instance, that the translator supplies particles, fashions word plays, and enhances parallelism, all in an effort to clarify for the hearer the logical development of the prophet’s vision. Rather than pass on ambiguities and aporias to the audience, the translator normally attempts to resolve them[5] Wagner is clear that the translator is not trying to tailor the text in some way to show its fulfillment in his own age,[6] but he does reflect some of the concerns of his own age, highlighting the problems caused in the postexilic situation by the sharp divide between rich and poor, between those who trust in their wealth and those who trust in the Lord, and which of these groups more nearly is adhering to the dictates of the Torah.

      As Wagner stresses, the translator of Isaiah writes in good Greek, with a good respect for his source text, following the contours of his source text closely.[7] This is all well and good, but were the writers of the NT following this same OG text? Or were they sometimes following a text that seems to be more like the translation of, for example, Theodotion?

      In a study of some 275 passages comparing the MT to the LXX and to the quoted material in the NT, all three agree about 20% of the time, but in the 80% of the time they don’t all agree, in only 5% of the cases is there an agreement with the MT against the LXX, whereas at least one third of the time the writers of the NT agree with the LXX over against the Hebrew (think, e.g., of the citation of Isa 7:14 in Matt 1:23). It is not exactly clear which Greek OT text they are following in various cases.

      We might have expected more agreement with the LXX, except, it would appear that there were several recensions of OG Isaiah in play in the time of the NT writers, not even mentioning the later Greek translations of the OT by Aquila (around AD 140) Theodotion (perhaps later second century AD), and Symmachus (perhaps around AD 200).[8] While these later translators could not have influenced the NT writers, we must remember that the full codices of the Bible do not show up until the third and fourth centuries (e.g., Vaticanus, Sinaiticus), and they include the Greek OT. By then, many Christian scribes had likely been influenced by these later Greek translations of the MT, which in turn influenced the later composite document we call the Greek NT, both the one produced by Erasmus, and more modern versions of the Greek New Testament which rely so heavily on the major codices of the entire Bible. As I intimated before, this is a very complex matter, not least because we have so few fragments of the NT from before the time that these later Greek scribes did their work, producing the great codices.[9] Both Vaticanus and Sinaiticus include the LXX/OG text of Isaiah.

      For clarity’s sake, I want to suggest here that while I will use the term LXX to refer to the oldest Greek versions of the Hebrew text, I am not referring to a single volume called the LXX, but rather to the various early scrolls and translators’ works that contributed to what became in the Christian era a full Greek OT. As Leonard Greenspoon stresses, there were numerous ongoing revisions of the original Greek translations over the years, for example the original translation of Daniel was considered defective enough that it was completely replaced by a later translation perhaps in the second century AD (by Aquila?).

      We should not think of the LXX as a unified manuscript but rather a stream of tradition, a series of translations and revisions reflecting a long history of modification over various centuries.[10] Furthermore, the process of revision of the oldest Greek text began before NT times, with one of the clear goals to make sure it was closer to the original Hebrew text than some of the translations (for example, Proverbs) originally were. Both Philo and Josephus of course mention that there had always been warnings against textual alteration of the Greek OT, but in fact the revisions went on anyway.

      The fact of the matter is that the NT writers sometimes cite Isaiah nearly verbatim in the Greek, sometimes give an edited version, sometimes paraphrase, and sometimes, though rarely, may be giving their own translation of the Hebrew. In general most of the NT writers are not doing the last of these things, and some of them do not even seem to have known any Hebrew or Aramaic or have been capable of translating Semitic languages (e.g., Luke). In other words, there are various reasons why the NT text of quoted Isaiah doesn’t always match up with the OG/LXX text of Isaiah. In some ways it doesn’t really matter what the source is that one or another NT writer used in their quoting or paraphrasing Isaiah. What really matters is: (1) what they take the Isaianic text to mean, and (2) that they are prepared to treat some Greek translation of Isaiah as Scripture, even if it disagrees at some points with the Hebrew text.

      Let me illustrate this matter from an example that Jobes and Silva discuss, found in Romans 9 and 10. In Romans 9:33, Isaiah 28:16 is cited without the word all in the quote, but in Romans 10:11 the word all is included. Now, neither the MT nor the OG text of Isaiah include the word all. Are we to assume that Paul has added the word in Romans 10? Or is he following a different Greek translation than what we call the LXX? It is impossible to be sure.[11] What we can say is that the writers of the NT assumed a rather stable text of the Greek OT, a text that could be consulted apart from their own writings, and so sometimes they felt free to paraphrase or edit the Greek OT to make a point. Paul may have taken the implicit universalistic thrust of various Isaianic texts as a warrant to add the word all to this specifically cited verse.

      For the sake of convenience, I’m going to use the most familiar term, LXX, to refer to a Greek translation of the entire OT, plus additional books, such as Wisdom of Solomon, which were originally composed in Greek, rather than using the term OG text, which is preferred by various scholars. What I mean by LXX is some Greek text that was available to the NT writers and from which they drew in the composition of their own documents. Accordingly, I will be following the LXX translation by Moisés Silva when we compare and contrast the Hebrew original with the LXX/OG and with the ways the text is used in the NT. From time to time I will use the abbreviation LXX/OG just to remind the reader I am not talking about a single document, for instance, the Greek OT found in Codex Vaticanus.

      Particular Isaianic Passages in the NT

      In their introduction to the book Isaiah in the New Testament, Steve Moyise and Maarten J. J. Menken give us a survey of the main uses of Isaiah in most of the NT (surprisingly a good deal of Paul, James, and 2 Peter are basically left out). They note, for example, that in the Synoptics, the use of the following passages is noteworthy: Isaiah 5:1–2; 6:9–10; 29:13; 34:4; 40:3; and 56:7 in Mark. The additional Isaiah material drawn from some unique source found in Matthew includes Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1:23; Isaiah 8:23b–9:1 in Matthew 4:15–16; Isaiah 53:4 in Matthew 8:17 and Isaiah 42:1–4 in Matthew 12:18–21. Luke’s use of Isaiah 61:1 combined with Isaiah 58:6 can be highlighted, as can the influence of Isaiah 53 in various places in Luke-Acts (see, e.g., Acts 8 drawing on Isaiah 53:12 and its context). There are in addition quotations from Isaiah 66:1–2 in Acts 7:49, Isaiah 55:3 in Acts 13:34, Isaiah 49:6 in Acts 13:47, and the extended quote of Isaiah 6:9–10 in Acts 28.

      In addition to the common use along with the Synoptics of Isaiah 6:10 and 40:3 in John, there are also explicit quotations from Isaiah 54:13 in John 6:45, and Isaiah 53:1 in John 12:38. The extensive use of Isaiah in Romans includes the following obvious main texts: Isaiah 1:9 in Romans 9:29; Isaiah 8:14 in Romans 9:23; Isaiah 10:22–23 in Romans 9:27–28; Isaiah 11:10 in Romans 15:12; Isaiah 27:9 in Romans 11:26–27; Isaiah 28:16 in Romans 9:33 and 10:11; Isaiah 28:22 in Romans 9:27–28; Isaiah 29:10 in Romans 11:8; Isaiah 45:23 in Romans 14:11; Isaiah 52:5 in Romans 2:24; Isaiah 52:7 in Romans 10:15; Isaiah 52:15 in Romans 15:21; Isaiah 53:1 in Romans 10:16; Isaiah 59:7–8 in Romans 3:15–17; Isaiah 59:20–21 in Romans 11:26–27; and Isaiah 65:1–2 in Romans 10:21. In the Corinthian correspondence we find four marked quotations (Isaiah 29:14 in 1 Corinthians 1:19; Isaiah 28:11–12 in 1 Corinthians 14:21; Isaiah 25:8 in 1 Corinthians 15:54; Isaiah 49:8 in 2 Corinthians 6:2) and four quotation-like allusions (Isaiah 40:13 in 1 Corinthians 2:16; Isaiah 45:14 in 1 Corinthians 14:25; Isaiah 22:13 in 1 Corinthians 15:32; and Isaiah 9:1–2 in 2 Corinthians 4:6). The use of Isaiah 54:1 in Galatians 4 is also mentioned in this study. Of the twenty-four explicit OT quotations in Hebrews, only one comes from Isaiah—Isaiah 8:17–18 in Hebrews 2:13, but there are some important allusions (Isaiah 1:1 in Hebrews 9:13; Isaiah 26:20 in Hebrews 10:37; Isaiah 35:3 in Hebrews 12:12; Isaiah 45:7 in Hebrews 5:9; and Isaiah 53:12 in Hebrews 9:28). First Peter is said to be on par with Romans in its frequency of use of Isaiah, drawing mainly from Isaiah 8, 11, 28, 40, and 53, uses we have already

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