Reading Isaiah

Towards the end of my time studying theology, and after a great internal struggle, I resolved to take a longer-term approach to reading scripture. In doing so I absolved myself of the expectation that I would read scripture ‘devotionally’ every day, and instead started setting longer term goals about my reading of scripture. The first of these was to map out the structure of the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke).

I don’t recall the exact order after that, but one of the things I did next was to map out the use of the Old Testament in the synoptic Gospels, and then identify the books that they quoted the most. The top four were (1) Isaiah, (2) Psalms, (3) Deuteronomy, and (4) Exodus.

I decided that, in order to better understand the synoptic Gospels, I wanted to better understand the passages that they quoted. As such, I started mapping out the structure of these books (did I mention I like literary structures? 😛). I started with Exodus — not too hard; then Deuteronomy — manageable; I decided to skip Psalms for the time being, so that left me with Isaiah…

Isaiah is rather large (66 chapters) and it’s fairly complex from a literary point of view. While there is a general scholarly consensus about the overall structure of Isaiah, in my opinion things get pretty hairy after the first 40 chapters.

I put a fair bit of effort into understanding Isaiah: I met up with a mentor who is a retired Old Testament scholar; I bought myself a big Bible so that I could highlight different structural markers; I got some books out — a really serious book on the literary structure of the Hebrew, and a few commentaries. I worked on Isaiah like this for awhile, and then I gave up. Then I came back to it, then I gave up again. I think I may have even made a third attempt, but it’s still not finished… From what I can see it looks like I started working on Isaiah in 2019, and last worked on it early this year (2023). Currently I don’t have any plans to return for another attempt.

So what have I learned from reading Isaiah? How has it changed how I approach scripture?

Well, I certainly learned a lot — although how much I’ve retained from my efforts may be a different question. I think the things that have particularly stood out to me are the place of ‘the nations’ in God’s rescue plan, and some of the suffering servant imagery. I understand now why some people refer to Isaiah as the ‘fifth Gospel’.

As to how I approach scripture — well… I think grappling with Isaiah’s structure has helped to blunt my optimism about my ability to fit the whole Bible into a set of neatly organised boxes 😛. There’s definitely a whole bunch of structure in Isaiah, but a lot of the structures seem to meld into each other and defy clean-cut lines. While I still think that looking at the structure of different biblical books is useful, I think I am now more conscious of the fact that a structural approach is not necessarily a silver bullet.

What Next?

I’m not sure that I’m far enough away from my enthusiasm about literary structures to know what comes next yet. That said, there are still a few things that I’d like to reflect on before I declare this series ‘up to date’. 📆