Isaiah stained glass window, Charleston, SC. Wikimedia
Deutero-Isaiah Reworks Past Prophecies to Comfort Israel
The practice of studying older texts and composing new ones based on them goes all the way back to the Bible itself. The haftarot from the second part of the Book of Isaiah that we read for the next seven shabbatot are an outstanding example of this practice.
Published August 8, 2016
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Last Updated September 7, 2026
I put the word secular in scare quotes because the frequent use of biblical and rabbinic sources by these authors shows them to be in a creative dialogue with Jewish religious teachings, in which case we should perhaps term them not “secular” but “alternatively religious.”
Yehuda Amichai, Gam Ha’egrof Haya Pa‘am Yad Pĕtuḥa Wĕ’eṣba‘ot (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Schocken, 1989), 61. For an English translation, see Robert Alter, ed., The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 383.
See Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Yair Zakovitch,An Introduction to Inner-Biblical Interpretation (Even-Yehuda: Reches Publishing House, 1992) [Heb.]. For a brief introduction, see my essay in The Jewish Study Bible, ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1st ed.] and 2014 [2d ed.]), pp. 1829–35 of the first edition and 1835–1841 of the second edition.
This was already recognized by the great medieval commentator Abraham ibn Ezra in his comment on Isaiah 40:3. Many modern scholars speculate that the prophet who wrote chapters 40–55 did not write 56–66, which these scholars refer to as “Trito-Isaiah.” I regard 40–66 as a single literary unit, and I refer to the author of that whole unit as “Deutero-Isaiah.” For more information on ibn Ezra’s approach to the authorship of Isaiah 40-66, see Uriel Simon, “Ibn Ezra Between Medievalism and Modernism; the Case of Isaiah 40–66,” Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 36 (1985):257–71
The vast majority of prophets in ancient Israel were male, but females also served in this role according to the Bible. An especially important example just two or three generations before Deutero-Isaiah is Huldah, who verified the holiness and authority of the Book of Deuteronomy; see 2 Kings 22.14–20; 2 Chronicles 34.22–29. Because we do not know the gender of Deutero-Isaiah, I do not use pronouns when referring to this prophet. It is perhaps relevant to note that Deutero-Isaiah is the only biblical author who repeatedly uses feminine metaphors and similes when referring to God; see Mayer Gruber, “Feminine Similes Applied to the LORD in Second Isaiah,” Beer Sheva 2 (1985): 75–84 [in Hebrew], available in English as Mayer Gruber, The Motherhood of God and Other Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 3–15; and Hanne Løland, Silent or Salient Gender?: The Interpretation of Gendered God-Language in the Hebrew Bible, Exemplified in Isaiah 42, 46, and 49, Forschungen Zum Alten Testament 32 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).
On the way the prophet both presents and undercuts these and other metaphors, see Marc Zvi Brettler, “Incompatible Metaphors for Yhwh in Isaiah 40–66,” JSOT 78 (1998): 97–120 (available at https://www.academia.edu/
8171294/Incompatible_ ).Metaphors_for_YHWH_in_Isaiah_ 40-66 For a lengthier study of Deutero-Isaiah’s allusions, see my book A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40–66(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). The first and second chapters of the book lay out a detailed method for judging when a similarity is likely a borrowing and when it is a coincidence. For a more detailed analysis of the texts discussed in this essay, including arguments for viewing them as true cases of allusion, see chapters two and three. On the implications of the rabbis’ decision to choose haftarot between Tisha B’Av and Rosh Hashanah exclusively from what modern scholars identify as Deutero-Isaiah, see my remarks in “The Scroll of Isaiah as Jewish Scripture, Or, Why Jews Don’t Read Books,” in Society of Biblical Literature 1996 Seminar Papers(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 225–42 (available at http://jtsa.academia.edu/BenjaminSommer).
In biblical Hebrew, כי can function as an adverb meaning “Indeed, really.” Hence my translation here, “It’s true.”
Note also the uses of משנה and ארץ in Isaiah 65:7.
Deutero-Isaiah borrows and reworks phrasing from several pre-exilic prophets. Even though scribes at some later point put Deutero-Isaiah on the same scroll as the prophecies of First Isaiah, the most frequent source for Deutero-Isaiah is in fact Jeremiah.
Not to be confused with the homonym צבי, meaning “deer.”
See note 9.
