Isaiah and the Emergence of Biblical Prophecy

This article stresses the distance between the original prophetic messages and the textual compositions that reinterpret them based on outcome-knowledge. Isaiah's prophecies had a supportive intent, aimed at Judah's survival, and as such followed the logic of divination. Composed after 701 B.C.E., Isaiah 6–8 and 28–31 adopt a perspective of general sin and divine punishment in order to explain what had happened. This theological reflection on a political and religious disaster, cast in the prophetic voice, is the emergence of biblical prophecy of judgment as a textual genre.