Isaiah

Comprehensive and understandable, these books bring the relevance of the Old Testament to Bible study participants, teachers, students, preachers, and all readers of the Bible. The series is filled with recent scholarship, provides vital background, and addresses important questions such as authorship and cultural context. Although the circumstances under which the book of Isaiah took its present form remain in scholarly dispute, this commentary highlights its larger purpose to provide the people of Judah and Jerusalem with hope for the future and the will to re-embrace their ancestral religious traditions. Accordingly, the author assumes the composite character of the book and approaches the work as a whole with a literary and theological integrity of its own. Unlike other contemporary commentaries on the book of Isaiah, the divisions of the book adopted here are not those reflecting the history of its composition but its literary shape. Thus the reader will come to recognize that the book of Isaiah is an expression of faith in the Holy One of Israel and in the future of Jerusalem, both of which have decisively shaped the faith of Jewish and Christian believers over the centuries.