Wisdom in Isaiah

Abstract

The history of research on wisdom in Isaiah reveals the story of what scholars initially understood to be two separate domains—wisdom and prophecy—becoming intertwined. As the prophetic book most infiltrated by the wisdom tradition, the book of Isaiah has been the primary resource for probing the nature of the relationship between prophecy and wisdom. For the most part, studies on wisdom in Isaiah focus narrowly on the prophet’s social location in relationship to wisdom or on wisdom in one section of the book (Isa 1–39 or 40–55). In conjunction with the concern within scholarship on Isaiah to understand the book as a unity, this chapter offers an overview of wisdom across the major sections of the book, with an eye toward similarities and differences between sections and diachronic questions that emerge from a synchronic reading.