Friday, November 21, 2025

Isaiah's poetic successor

Samuel Koser is calling shens on Isaiah 40-55's date. Davila points out that the "Classical Biblical Hebrew" / "Late Biblical Hebrew" distinction relies on a short dataset: the Hebrew Bible literally fits into one Book, and the various Judaean ostraca wouldn't add much of an appendix. Koser illustrates how, with a few Psalms here and a few Proverbs there, we can get wildly different vocabulary in each bucket.

Mind, if you'd been reading this my blog: you'd know that. We should be sequestering Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah into their own dialect bucket, which is indeed late, but doesn't define all the Hebrew spoken then. Esther - sharing a late basis - gets flagged as making deliberate reference to the elder language. Same for Daniel.

In 2 Isaiah's case, reference is made to Jeremiah MT 31 and to Isaiah 28. The crosspollinations to Hezeqiah's time (חזק), that earlier great deliverance from Mesopotamian tyranny, assuredly inspired late-Persian copyists to keep the two Isaiahs together (and away from the Prophet of Lament).

Given the intertext, we should hardly be surprised to hear 2 Isaiah's narrator sing in the same prophetic register as his predecessors. Our man really did want to be the second Isaiah. As far as I'm concerned he's earned it.

As for Koser, arguing for 2 Isaiah's place before the exile is wrongheaded. A better tack for his argument is as a "Steel Man" for 2 Isaiah apologists, to explain how certain old arguments have been too facile. Overall they were still right, though.

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