by
Damien F. Mackey
As I have a tendency to do, to multi-identify, I have by
now variously identified the great prophet Isaiah
as:
- the Isaiah of the entire Book of Isaiah;
- the prophet Hosea;
- the Simeonite “Uzziah” of the Book of Judith; and
- the martyred prophet Uriah (Urijah) of the Book of Jeremiah.
- As Isaiah
If the Book of Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” is directly a
description of the prophet Jeremiah, as argued in my:
Prophet
Jeremiah pre-figures the perfect ‘Suffering Servant’
which article is chronologically supported in my six-part
series, beginning with:
then the traditional view that the one prophet Isaiah was
the author of the entire Book of Isaiah is further strengthened, whilst the
fragmentary notion of a Deutero-Isaiah, as well as a Trito-Isaiah, begins to be
exposed as - what I believe it to be - an artificial Procrustean-ised chopping
up into pieces of an original one
prophet.
Now, drawing from (iv) above, Isaiah as the martyred
Uriah, we can finally name a home town for the prophet Isaiah, who is generally
considered to have been of the kingdom of Judah.
According to Jeremiah 26:20, “… Uriah [was from] Kiriath Jearim”.
With Kiriath Jearim facing Jeremiah’s home town of
Anathoth, only a few miles away,
then we can the better appreciate Isaiah’s ‘neighbourly’
words about the “Suffering Servant” (53:2): “For he grew up
before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no
form or majesty that we should look at
him”.
Isaiah
and his relatives were apparently well familiar with the young prophet and his
appearance.
Presumably from
his base of Kiriath Jearim near
Jerusalem Isaiah was able to go forth to meet, now king Ahaz, now Ahaz’s son,
Hezekiah.
In the case of
Ahaz, Isaiah was commanded (7:3): “Then the LORD said to Isaiah, ‘Go out now to
meet Ahaz, you and your son Shear-jashub, at the end of the conduit of the
upper pool, on the highway to the fuller's field …’.”
For this specific
location, which is also to where the Rabshakeh
of the Assyrian army will come to harangue the Jews at a later time, see my:
The Conduit of the
Upper Pool on the Highway to the Fuller’s Field
https://www.academia.edu/11677294/The_Conduit_of_the_Upper_Pool_on_the_Highway_to_the_Fuller_s_Field
In the case of
Hezekiah, during the king’s serious illness, a miracle will also be worked to
accompany the king’s release form his sickness (Isaiah 38:4-8):
“Then the
word of the Lord came to Isaiah: “Go
and tell Hezekiah, ‘This is what the Lord,
the God of your father David, says: I have heard your prayer and seen your
tears; I will add fifteen years to your life. And I will deliver you and this
city from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city.
‘This is
the Lord’s sign to you that the Lord will do what he has promised: I will
make the shadow cast by the sun go back the ten steps it has gone down on the
stairway of Ahaz.’” So the sunlight went back the ten steps it had gone down”.
- As Hosea
I wrote about this likely (as I think) connection in my
university thesis:
A Revised
History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
And its
Background
(EXCURSUS: LIFE AND TIMES OF HEZEKIAH’S CONTEMPORARY, ISAIAH) as follows (here modified, and with some
comments added):
Isaiah and his
Father Amos
….
Amos began his prophetic ministry
in the latter days of the Jehu-ide king, Jeroboam II of Israel (c. 785-743 BC,
conventional dates …). …. Amos was called to leave Judah and testify in the
north against the injustices of Samaria. (Cf. Micah 1:2-7). … Amos was to be
found preaching in the northern Bethel …. Not unexpectedly, Amos’ presence
there at the time of Jeroboam II was not appreciated by the Bethelite
priesthood, who regarded him as a conspirator from the southern kingdom (Amos
7:10). Being the man that he was, though, Amos would unlikely have been frightened
away by Jeroboam’s priest, Amaziah, when he had urged Amos (vv.12-13):
‘O seer, go, flee away to the
land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again
prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is the temple of the
kingdom’.
….
Comment: I then speculated that Isaiah,
young at the time, had accompanied his father Amos to the northern kingdom, to
Bethel.
… Isaiah must … have accompanied
his father to the north and he, too, must have been prophesying, as Hosea, in
the days of Jeroboam II (Hosea 1:1). His prophesying apparently began in the
north: …. “When the Lord first spoke through Hosea ...” (1:2).
He would continue prophesying right down to the time of king Hezekiah (cf.
Hosea 1:1; Isaiah 1:1). The names Isaiah and Hosea are indeed of very
similar meaning, being basically derived from the same Hebrew root for
‘salvation’, יֵ֫שַׁע
- “Hosea” (Hebrew הוֹשֵׁעַ) means
practically the same: “Yahweh (the Lord) is saviour”.
….
Hosea’s/Isaiah’s
Family
Though no doubt young, the
prophet was given the strange command by God to marry an ‘unfaithful’ woman:
“‘Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the
land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord’. So he went and took Gomer the
daughter of Diblaim …” (Hosea 1:2-3). Biblical scholars have agonised over the
type of woman this Gomer might have been: adulteress? harlot? temple-prostitute? But essentially
the clue is to be found in the statement above that she was a citizen of the ‘land
of great harlotry’: namely, the northern kingdom of Israel.
Comment: Still requiring work is yet to
sort out the wife (or wives) of Isaiah and of Hosea.
A further likeness between Isaiah
and Hosea was the fact that ‘their names’ and those of ‘their’ children were
meant to be, in their meanings, prophetic signs.
….
- The prophet Isaiah tells us:
“Behold, I and the children whom the Lord has given me are for signs and
portents ...” (Isaiah 8:18).
- Similarly, the names of the
children of the prophet Hosea were meant to be prophetic (Hosea 1:4, 6, 9).
Boutflower, who has written
perceptively on Isaiah’s children, has rightly noted the prophetic
significance of their names and those of Hosea’s children, without however connecting
Isaiah and Hosea as one: …. “Isaiah like Hosea had three known children, all of
whose names were prophetic”. It is most unlikely, one would have to think, to
have two great prophets contemporaneously operating over such a substantial
period of time, and each having three children whose names were prophetic. The
fact is I believe that it was just the one prophet, who may possibly have had
six children in all. And Irvine has, in the course of his detailed study of the
so-called Isaianic Denkschrift [‘personal memoir’] (Isaiah 6:1-9:6) of the
Syro-Ephraimitic crisis, written extensively on the chronological significance
of Isaiah’s children and their names in connection with this crisis for Judah…..
I also appreciate Irvine’s concern for scholars to study the prophets (thus
Isaiah) according to the “historical events and politics” of their time…..
Comment: Again, the children of Isaiah and
of Hosea yet need to be properly co-ordinated.
We now encounter a difficult regarding patronymics.
Isaiah’s father was, as we have read,
Amos.
Hosea’s father was Beeri (Hosea 1:1): “The
word of the LORD that came to Hosea son of Beeri during the reigns of Uzziah,
Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and during the reign of Jeroboam son
of Jehoash king of Israel”.
Judith - with whom I shall associate
Isaiah-Hosea as fellow-townspeople, and fellow-Simeonites, in Part Three - called herself “the
daughter of Merari” (Judith 16:7).
Now, as I wrote in my thesis (loc. cit.):
We saw that Jewish legend names
Judith’s father as Beeri. Now the names Beeri and Merari are very
similar if Conder’s principle, “supposing the substitution of M for B, of which
there are occasional instances in Syrian nomenclature” (as quoted back on p.
70), be allowable here. This vital piece of information, that Judith’s father
was Beeri,
now
enables for the prophet Hosea, an exact contemporary of Isaiah in the north,
whose father was also Beeri (Hosea 1:1), to be identified
with Isaiah….
Comment: Despite my optimism here, it
still properly needs to be determined who was this (presumably Simeonite)
ancestor, Merari, and whether or not
he were the same as Beeri, and
whether or not there is a family relationship between Isaiah (Hosea) and
Judith.
- As Uzziah
We are first introduced to Uzziah in Judith 6:14-16:
“Later, when the
Israelites came down from Bethulia, they untied Achior, brought him into the
town, and took him before the town officials, who
at that time were Uzziah son of Micah, of the tribe of Simeon, Chabris son of
Gothoniel, and Charmis son of Melchiel. The officials
called together the town elders, and all the women and the young men also ran
to the assembly. Achior was brought before the people, and Uzziah began
questioning him …”.
The fact that this Uzziah is the chief town official in
Bethulia, and that he is a son of Micah, turns out to be most convenient for my
developing thesis.
And, the fact that he is a Simeonite provides us with
some bonus information.
Isaiah was, as we know, the son of Amoz (Amos).
But Uzziah was, according to the Judith text above, the
“son of Micah”.
What might immediately look like a further complication,
having both Amos and Micah, actually works perfectly into my scheme wherein I
have identified the:
Prophet Micah
as Amos
The prophet Micah is so like the prophet Amos, as we read
in this article, that he has been called “Amos redivivus”.
From the above quote from the Book of Judith (chapter 6)
we can now determine new things about the prophet Isaiah:
(i)
He, the son of Amos, was, as Uzziah, the son of Amos’s alter ego, Micah the prophet.
(ii)
He was of the tribe of Simeon, not of Judah as is often thought.
(iii)
He resided in Bethulia, which must now be identified as the Bethel to where his
father Amos had been sent.
Having struggled with the identification of the Judith’s
city of “Bethulia”, I have lately accepted Charles C. Torrey’s view that it
must be the highly strategic Shechem, which others identify with the northern
Bethel:
In my thesis I wrote about Uzziah of Bethulia (Volume
Two, beginning p. 60):
Northern Simeonites
The
magistrates of the town of Bethulia before
whom Achior appeared are
named: “…Uzziah son of Micah, of the tribe of Simeon, and Chabris son of
Gothoniel, and Charmis son of Melchiel” (v.15). I intend to argue in the next
chapter that this Uzziah (var. Ozias)
was none other than Isaiah himself. In [the Book of Judith] chapter 8 we shall
be told that Judith too was - like Uzziah -
of the tribe of Simeon. Now, with Simeon being one of the southernmost tribes
of Judah, with enclaves even in the Negev (1 Chronicles 4:28), is it a
peculiarity having a bastion of Simeonites situated in Ephraïm? It certainly
would have been in the earliest periods of Israel’s settlement in Canaan, but
it would be quite allowable from the time of king Asa of Judah (c. C9th BC)
onwards; for it is recorded in 2 Chronicles 15:9 that, at the time of Asa,
Simeonites were residing in the north “as aliens” amongst the Ephraïmites and
Manasseh-ites. Bruns has elaborated on this in his context of trying to locate
[the Book of Judith] to the Persian era: ….
Nor ... is the
most important geographical detail in the book [of Judith], namely the
reference to a Jewish (Simeonite) settlement on the border of the valley of
Dothan, a fabrication. For a combination of various sources (Meg. Ta’an, for 25
Marheshvan (chap. 8); Jos., Ant. 13:275f., 379f; Wars 1:93f.; and also
apparently I Macc. 5:23) shows that at the time of the return in the region of
Samaria, in the neighbourhood of what was known as “the cities of Nebhrakta,”
there was a Jewish-Simeonite settlement (which may in
effect have existed as early as in the days of the First Temple and being of
Semite origin: cf. II Chron. 34:6, 15:9; and also I Chron. 4:31) ....
Thus there were
Simeonites dwelling in this northern part of the land during, and
beyond, the era of the Divided Kingdom.
On pp. 63-64 I wrote of a crisis even for the
great prince, Uzziah:
For
“thirty-four days” (v. 20) this terrible situation of [Assyrian] blockade
prevailed, until the Bethulians’ water
containers were all empty. Charles, who has provided the differing figures for
this period according to various versions of [the Book of Judith] … has
concluded that: “The long siege by this large army is meant to emphasize the
importance of Bethulia”. Certainly Bethulia will
be found in the next chapter to have been a city of ‘importance’. The citizens
of the town now turned angrily on their leaders (vv. 23-25). They demanded
surrender, with its attendant slavery, as being preferable to a certain death
by thirst. And they added: ‘We call to witness against you heaven and earth and
our God …’ (vv. 26, 27, 28). Thus Uzziah found
himself faced with a Moses-like situation, with the people rebelling on account
of water and thirst (Numbers 20:2-13). And Uzziah’s response
– at least as Judith will later interpret it (8:9-27) – was likewise flawed as
was that of Moses (vv. 30-31; cf. Numbers 20:1-2). Uzziah
had responded: ‘Courage my brothers and sisters! Let us hold out
for five days more; by that time the Lord our God will turn his mercy to us
again …. But if these days pass by, and no help comes for us, I will do as you
say’. The people returned to their posts, but “in great misery” (v. 32).
However, a recent prayer of theirs (v. 19) was about to be heard, for despite
their despairing, ‘we have no one to help us’, effective help was now at hand.
….
How did a Simeonite, Isaiah-Hosea-Uzziah,
acquire such princely attributes?
Possibly due to his father Amos, who,
according to legend was related to the great Amaziah king of Judah. “The rabbis of the Talmud
declared, based upon a rabbinic tradition, that Amoz was the brother of Amaziah (אמציה) …”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoz
It would be more likely, though,
chronologically, that Amos was related to the king of Judah through marriage,
rather than being his actual brother.
The fact that Uzziah of Bethulia was a
“prince”, not only of Judah, but also of Israel, is supported by his activities
amongst both the kings of Judah (e.g. Ahaz and Hezekiah) and his governorship
over the northern Bethel.
(iv) As
Uriah (Urijah)
As I wrote in:
Identifying Isaiah 53's 'Suffering Servant' may involve a major
chronological review. Part Five: Towards a fusion of eras of Isaiah and Jeremiah
….
There appears to be no biblical evidence for
the strong tradition of Isaiah’s martyrdom during the reign of king Manasseh.
My tentative suggestion would be - given the proposed
overlap of the reign of Manasseh with the descendants of king Josiah - that Isaiah
was the otherwise unknown martyred prophet Uriah (Urijah) (Jeremiah 26:20-23):
There
was also a man named Uriah, Shemaiah’s son from Kiriath-jearim, who prophesied
in the LORD’s name. He prophesied about this city and this land in words
similar to those of Jeremiah. King Jehoiakim, all his troops, and all the
officials heard his words, and the king sought to kill him. Uriah heard about
this and was afraid, so he fled and went to Egypt. King Jehoiakim sent men to
Egypt. He sent Achbor’s son Elnathan, along with a contingent of men into
Egypt. They brought Uriah out of Egypt and brought him to King Jehoiakim, who
killed him with a sword. Then they threw his body into a common grave.
The name “Uriah”, was, as I have noted in:
Sobna (Shebna) the High Priest. Part Two: “Azriyahu of
Yaudi”
compatible with “Azariah” – the latter, in
turn, being interchangeable with Uzziah: “In
Hebrew, the name Uzziah or Azariah means “Yahweh is my strength”.
This man was noted as one of the Kingdom of Judah's finest kings”.
Now Uzziah was, as we have learned, another
name by which the prophet Isaiah was known whilst he was living in the north.
[The prophet Hosea
(var. Osee) identifies with
both the prophet Isaiah
and Uzziah (var. Ozias)
of Judith’s Bethulia]
But how to explain the other terms of Jeremiah
26:20: “There was also a man named Uriah, Shemaiah’s son from Kiriath-jearim
…”?
For Isaiah was, as we read above, the son of Amoz
(Amos).
According to the above article, “Family of
Prophet Isaiah”, Isaiah was of Simeonite stock, tracing its ancestry back to contemporaries
of Moses, Shelumiel and Sarasadai (Judith 8:1). Now, the name Shelumiel is
compatible with Shelemiah, according to Abarim:
And this may perhaps be the background for “Shemaiah”
of Jeremiah 26:20.
As for Kiriath-jearim, which “served as a boundary
marker between the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin” (http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2009/02/e2809cWe-are-Standing-on-e28098Holy-Grounde28099e2809d-at-Kiriath-Jearim.aspx), this would finally provide us with a city for
the great prophet Isaiah, who - despite his sojourn in the northern kingdom - is
considered to have been of the southern kingdom of Judah. ….
