Make Peace with Me: The Josianic Origins of Isaiah 24–27

How We Got Here

One of the clues to the problems with the existing scholarship on these chapters is that the formation of Isaiah 24–27 has been one of the least settled issues in critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible. Estimates of its date vary by more than five hundred years—from the late eighth century to the early second—even after the discoveries at Qumran ruled out the latest dates proposed. ³ Even among mainstream scholarly views, there is a sizable chasm between two basic schools of thought. One significant contingent dates the section to the sixth century, following William R. Millar’s influential 1976 study. ⁴ Millar demonstrated the chapters’ similarities with West Semitic poetry as far back as Ugarit, with respect to form, prosody, and mythological themes. Those conclusions militated against the latest dates, ⁵ but, influenced by Paul Hanson, Millar concluded from the “they”-versus-“we” language in Isa 24:14–18 that the pericope showed nascent sectarian tendencies, leading him to date it to the “period of the temple controversy of 520.” ⁶

A second contingent of scholars follow a German tradition that was popularized by Bernhard Duhm and runs through the work of Wilhelm Rudolph and Otto Kaiser, as well as the latter’s scholarly heirs. ⁷ This tradition is summarized by Konrad Schmid in the new T & T Clark Handbook of the Old Testament: “[i]t remains doubtful whether any portions of chs. 24–27 originated before the Diadochan era,” namely, the third century. ⁸

It is understandable that these chapters have proven difficult to locate historically. They are nearly bereft of proper nouns and clear historical references. There is not a single personal name, and apart from Jerusalem, Judah, and Zion, the only proper nouns are Egypt and Assyria (Isa 27:13) and the Moabites (25:10), none of which provides a clear horizon for dating. There is no smoking gun; rather, as Jan Joosten has said (on a different topic): “A good scientific theory is one that integrates many data in such a way that a meaningful scenario emerges.” ⁹

The City in Isaiah 24–27

The central interpretive crux of Isaiah 24–27 is the identity of the lofty-but-fallen city that appears repeatedly (referred to as an ‘îr, “city/citadel,” in 24:12; 25:2; 27:10; as a qiryah, “fortress” in 24:10; 25:2, 3; 26:5; and as an ’armôn, “palace,” in 25:2; the fact that all three terms occur in tandem in 25:2 suggests that they all refer to the same thing). Numerous cities have been proposed without any of the proposals generating any sort of consensus, to the point that many scholars have despaired of identifying any historical referent. ¹⁰

With the exception of the explicitly contrasting reference to Jerusalem in Isa 26:1, all the references to the city in chs. 24–27 refer to Ramat Raḥel. The site, identified as biblical Beth Hakkerem, appears to have been a Judahite watchtower before being built up by the Assyrians to serve as an imperial administrative citadel that included a palace and temple. This compound was highly visible to the region and would have been a focal point for local resentment of imperial rule.

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Proto-Ionic capital from the citadel of the kings of Judah at Ramat-Rahel near Jerusalem. Israel Museum (IDAM), Jerusalem, Israel. Photo Credit:Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

The archaeological findings at Ramat Raḥel are consistent with a major disruption of production during the latter half of the seventh century, mostly likely during its final third. ¹¹ It has been argued on historical grounds that the Assyrians abandoned their citadel sometime between 631 and 622 as their empire crumbled and they suffered major uprisings much closer to home. We cannot tell whether the Judahites played any role in forcing them out, but the lack of a significant destruction layer from the late seventh century indicates that any pressure they brought did not rise to the level of a military action. In the relatively brief interim between the Assyrians’ departure and the arrival of the Babylonians in 604, I propose that Ramat Raḥel sat mostly abandoned and likely became somewhat decrepit, although it was not militarily destroyed. The unusual reference in 2 Kgs 23:5 to Josiah’s damaging the high places in “the cities around Jerusalem” may indicate that his sympathizers vandalized Ramat Raḥel after the Assyrians were already gone. It may have reverted to its original Judahite purpose as a watchtower where the military encamped, accounting for the reference in Jer 6:1 to signal fires there.

A new and even more impressive palace compound, which included major terraforming and lavish gardens, replaced the earlier Assyrian one sometime around the end of the seventh century. Unfortunately, a dispute over the interpretation of jar-handle seals used in Judah means that the dating of the second palace complex remains quite uncertain. Since this palace, like the first one, involved architectural techniques and styles not found in any other known Judahite public buildings of the period, it is natural to conclude that it, too, was of foreign design. And since the Egyptians do not seem to have ruled the region of Jerusalem so directly in their brief period of domination in the late seventh century, the Babylonians are the most likely candidates. If they rebuilt Ramat Raḥel as an administrative citadel at the end of the seventh century (after the campaigns of 604 or 597), that would be consistent with the lack of a destruction layer in 586.

Within the Josianic edition of what would become the book of Isaiah, passages about the prospect of the citadel’s overthrow were combined with later ones celebrating the liberation of Judah from its authority. The disaster envisioned in Isa 24:1–12 is only anticipated and not yet real; it is an oracular pronouncement and not an historical description. The somewhat more subdued images of a fallen city in Isa 25:2, 27:10, etc., may also have been somewhat hyperbolic but are well within expectations for ancient Near Eastern prophetic texts.

The author’s rhetoric also draws on mythological motifs. He used the height of the fortress as an opportunity to compare the lofty forces of the Assyrians who overlooked Judah from Ramat Raḥel with the host of heaven. He anticipated that these forces would be overthrown and cast down, an image that was used similarly in intra-Mesopotamian political rhetoric, in which deities symbolizing the power of the foreign nation were cast down and imprisoned. The description of the formerly jubilant and lofty city in Isa 24:7–8 and 26:5 might also have alluded to contemporaneous Assyrian traditions about powerful cities such as Arbela, with the goal of subverting them.

Every chapter of Isa 24–27 points to the fallen Assyrian citadel. In its developed form, the whole composition pointed to the decrepit Ramat Raḥel palace as part of its Judahite author’s appeal to the inhabitants of the former Northern Kingdom: The Assyrians who oppressed you are gone! YHWH has done this! Unite yourselves with us and celebrate!

Isaiah 24 and Apocalyptic

Isaiah 24 opens with imagery of widespread devastation of the land: It will be “utterly devastated; it will be utterly despoiled, for YHWH has spoken this. The land mourns and withers, the earth suffers and withers; the heights suffer with the land.” (Isa 24:3–4). ¹² This reminded earlier scholars of the book of Revelation (e.g., 20:11; 21:1). These early assessments of Isaiah 24–27 as apocalyptic literature have continued to exercise influence, even though the chapter lacks most of the key generic components that characterize apocalypses. ¹³ In fact, eschatological-sounding imagery of widespread destruction is not only shared with other plausibly early biblical texts such as Zeph 1:1–2:3 and Amos 8:8–9, but also is part of a widespread ancient Near Eastern tradition of divine destruction of the natural order that includes the Kuntillet ‘Ajrud 15 inscription from ca. 800 BCE, as well as Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts going back into the Bronze Age, such as the Prophecy of Neferti, Sumerian city laments, and the Erra Epic. There is no reason to suppose that images of the divine disruption of the natural order—through earthquake, darkening of heavenly lights, or failure of water sources and the land’s productivity—are characteristic of a late period.

Such imagery of widespread disorder was commonly used as a precursor to the re-imposition of order by a righteous king. In other words, the rhetoric of chaos was a form of royal propaganda arguing that a current ruler had brought about (or would bring about) the flourishing of his land, as he was supposed to do.

Why would a supposedly royal, propagandistic text not mention the king—in this case, Josiah? It is possible that he was ideologically committed to giving the credit to YHWH instead of claiming it for himself. But there is an instructive comparison to be made with the Potter’s Oracle, a Hellenistic Egyptian text. ¹⁴ Its earliest known edition from the second century BCE functioned as political propaganda, opposing Greek rule of Egypt. ¹⁵ Later copies of the oracle, dating as late as the end of the third century CE, lack any narrative framing—and without that framing, the prophecy came to appear apocalyptic to many readers, just as Isaiah 24–27 did. ¹⁶ It was still being read when the Greeks no longer even ruled Egypt. Similar processes of dehistoricization have been widely observed in other sections of the book of Isaiah but have not generally been hypothesized for Isaiah 24–27 because of its presumed lateness.

Isaiah 25 and Victory Feasts

Another major episode begins as YHWH hosts “a feast of rich food, a feast of aged wines” on Mt. Zion (25:6). Both gods and human kings were frequently portrayed as celebrating their triumphs with feasting, as a further marker of their sovereignty. ¹⁷ The portrayals of divine and human victory, far from being mutually exclusive, were typically synonymous. But not every banquet reflected historical victories; some were aspirational, and some of the aspirations failed.

Peter Altmann has reflected on how feasts like the one in Isa 25:6 actually function to create an envisioned society and the kinship bonds that go with it. ¹⁸ This was observed early on by W. Robertson Smith, ¹⁹ and Seth Sanders has remarked more recently on how, in West Semitic political ritual, “power flows from the ability to recruit people into relationships of alliance and fictive kinship through ritual and persuasion.” ²⁰ The social function of the victory banquet motif in Isaiah 24–27 was to summon the people of the former Northern Kingdom to unite themselves to Judah in an enlarged Israel. Josiah’s vision failed in this respect; the political narrative he championed never became reality. Later scribes appear to have wrestled with and partly salvaged its power.

Altmann argues that Deut 12:13–19 reformulated worship such that “the actors rid themselves of connections to Assyrian and other imperial provision. They become recipients of the divinely-provided blessing, celebrating YHWH’s rich feast.” ²¹ The goals of Isa 25:6–8 and Deut 12:13–19 are in fact quite similar, and they may well be from the same period. It is true that the divine banqueting motif spans various periods, but it so happens that the social function of the banquet in Isa 25:6 presented here is precisely the same as the one Altmann perceives in Deuteronomy 12: to offer YHWH’s yoke to the former Northern Kingdom in place of Assyria’s and to create fictive kinship through political ritual. Josiah was trying to create a new united monarchy, regardless of whether one had ever really existed.

Another striking similarity between Isaiah 24–27 and Deuteronomy more generally is that Josiah is not named in either text. ²² YHWH stands in the place of the king in both instances. There is a strong consensus that certain strata of Deuteronomy functioned as Josianic royal rhetoric, and it would be logically inconsistent to doubt that Isaiah 24–27 could have functioned the same way.

Isaiah 25–26 and Revivification of the Dead as National Deliverance

Images of revivification are attested widely and deeply in ancient Near Eastern history, and such images are often used for political restoration. ²³ In the Amarna Letters, and in Hittite and Neo-Assyrian letters, vassals who have been saved by the emperor regularly write and describe themselves as dead men who have been brought back to life. ²⁴ This enduring motif is also found in the Cyrus Cylinder, in which supportive Babylonian scribes describe Cyrus as the “lord by whose aid the dead were revived.” ²⁵ This royal role was in some way a reflection of divine life-giving, as many deities, from Marduk to Baal, were said to raise the dead. One of the standard roles of the king and gods in the ancient Near East was as to be a giver or restorer of life.

Therefore, biblical passages that deploy the same images offer no inherent grounds for late dating. Revivification imagery is not, in other words, a basis on which to date a passage to a late period. The passages describing YHWH’s power over death in Isa 25:7–8 and 26:19 lack the literary cohesiveness and detail found in Ezek 37:1–14, as well as the references to sectarian differences and eternal fates found in Daniel 12. The less developed Isaiah passages should be considered earlier.

The decision to correlate images such as YHWH’s swallowing up Death or corpses rising with Hellenistic religious ideas ultimately reflects the reader’s discursive universe, not that of the original authors: it is basically an artifact of the Christian interpretive tradition. The resurrection of the dead was a fundamental point in Bernhard Duhm’s dating of Isaiah 24–27. He wrote: “Only when the dogma of the resurrection was already established, indeed in the forefront of the imaginations of his contemporaries, could the author speak of it without mediation.” ²⁶ A similar concern influenced Wilhelm Rudolph in his foundational study of Isaiah 24–27: “Since in the fourth century the belief in resurrection in the form propounded here is something quite singular, we are inclined to take it as a later addition.” ²⁷ Hans Wildberger noted more than fifty years later that it had been a concern ever since. ²⁸

Within the Christian Bible, the resurrection of the dead is noticeably more prominent in the New Testament. So many readers are prone to overlook the larger ancient Near Eastern conversation in which the biblical texts were engaged and therefore to map references to revivification on a simplistic, evolutionary timeline. References to afterlife and revivification appear not just in the latest layers of the Hebrew Bible but in nearly all periods of biblical composition, as they did throughout ancient Near Eastern history.

Josiah and the Remains of the Northern Kingdom

There are multiple indications within the Bible itself that Josiah took an interest in the north; these form a foundation for the argument that Isaiah 24–27 was an overture by Josiah to inhabitants of the former Israelite kingdom. There is a continuing consensus that the basic reports of Josiah’s reforming activities in Bethel in 2 Kgs 23:4–5 were more or less contemporaneous with his reign, which suggests that Judah had increased freedom to operate in the former Northern Kingdom. On the other hand, there is no indication in the Bible or in archaeological findings that Josiah ever conquered or ruled the bulk of the north. He had ambitions, but they went unfulfilled—indeed, they may have cost him his life when Egypt sensed them. From Egypt’s point of view, Judah seems to have been more or less free to inhabit its rocky hill country, but an interest in the more desirable lands farther north or west would not have been well received.

Passages in Jeremiah 3 and 31 summon the north—also variously identified as Israel, Ephraim, Samaria, and Jacob— YHWH, the one “who scattered Israel (and) will gather it” (Jer 31:10). These proclamations by Jeremiah were until recently almost universally held to derive from the reign of Josiah and to be a part of the king’s propagandistic project to reunite the north with Judah. Although these passages were certainly adapted to speak to exilic and postexilic Judean audiences, their internal data, including the terminology used for the north and intertextual references to texts about the north, strongly suggest that they originated in early oracles. ²⁹

Correlating with Josiah’s initiative towards the north is the relatively common conclusion that northern traditions were incorporated into Judah’s Bible in his time. A number of recent studies have pointed to this incorporation as part of an effort to form (or re-form) an all-Israelite identity under Davidic rule.

Recent investigations into the presence of an Israelian Hebrew dialect in the Bible may also indicate that the author of Isaiah 24–27 had in mind a northern audience, since a large number of features in the passage have been identified as Israelian Hebrew, a northern dialect. ³⁰ In some cases, these might have been intended to give a flavor of the speech of northerners, and in other cases it may have been intended to appeal to them. Since the method itself is contested, however, the literary and historical arguments for a northern focus in the passage are more important to the dialectal argument than the reverse.

Various lines of reasoning thus converge on the conclusion that Josiah did have an interest in the remains of the Northern Kingdom—probably both in the land and in the people of northern heritage who might be rallied to his cause. The ways in which Isaiah 24–27 speaks of divine victory and national restoration come into much better focus when set against this historical, political, and rhetorical backdrop, as does its invitation to Jacob/Israel to make peace.

The Language of Isaiah 24–27 in Light of Hebrew Diachrony

Biblical Hebrew is not linguistically monolithic; changes can be perceived over time. The analysis of these changes remains controversial, ³¹ but checking Isaiah 24–27 and a set of control texts against a comprehensive list of late Hebrew features yielded suggestive results. One does not find in Isaiah 24–27 the frequency of typologically Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) forms found in other texts that seem to date from the late sixth century, such as Isaiah 40–55 and Haggai. There is no text from that period that shows a comparably successful avoidance of late features. Still less can a Hellenistic date be seriously entertained: that would take us into the period of the Qumran psalms and the Great Isaiah Scroll, and there is no sign that Standard Biblical Hebrew was being effectively emulated any longer. ³²

Not only is there is not, in Isaiah 24–27, a single one of the sort of obvious neologisms that characterize the works of the middle-to-late Persian period, the overall percentage of late features is also low. However one counts, the rate of late features per word in Isaiah 24–27 is less than that of Isaiah 40–66, Haggai, and Malachi. The comparison at least suggests that Isaiah 24–27 is typologically prior to those compositions. Its percentage is in line with the number of late features in Isaiah 3–6 and Amos. The higher number of LBH features in Micah 1–3 shows that while a text thought to be early may have late features (inviting doubts about its earliness), there are no examples of late texts without elevated numbers of LBH features.

As Tania Notarius has written, texts can be dated linguistically, but they “cannot be dated just linguistically, and additional extra-linguistic data are indispensable for a provisional absolute dating of the literary composition.” ³³ A synthesis of linguistic data and other historical and literary data is necessary. One notes that the culminating summons of Isaiah 24–27 is to “come and worship YHWH on the holy mountain at Jerusalem” (27:13), and YHWH is said to hold a feast on that mountain (25:6) and protect it (25:10). Although the Jerusalem temple is not explicitly mentioned, it is unlikely that this call to a festival would have been issued in what Jill Middlemas has called the “Templeless Age.” ³⁴ It would therefore have come from either the time of the Second Temple (i.e., no earlier than 515) or from that of the First Temple. Indeed, the fact that the city is said to be strongly walled, fortified, and gated (Isa 26:1–2) would make any postexilic date before Nehemiah (probably 445 BCE) hard to explain. One is left, then, with a span of nearly a century and half (586–445) between plausible historical horizons. Because the linguistic data make any postexilic date unlikely, let alone one a century after the return, the scales tip toward the preexilic period. William R. Millar observed some time ago that the prosody of Isa 24–27 is generally classical, ³⁵ and the same can now be said for its Hebrew.

The Story of Isaiah 24–27

In what follows, I present, in an imaginative way, the story of the composition of Isa 24-27. If the previous arguments are cogent, then they should cohere when we talk about real authors who wrote a text at a certain historical moment. It should be possible to tell a plausible story. ³⁶

I have intentionally emphasized a certain thematic or narrative unity even though it was not an entirely unified composition in the sense of being written on (or for) a single occasion, and even though it incorporated existing material and continued to be redacted after its time. ³⁷ It is generally recognized that chapters 24–27, considered form-critically, comprise disparate parts. It is quite possible that the various pieces derived from slightly different “rhetorical situations.” ³⁸ Some of these may have been compiled as a kind of festival liturgy for a Josianic celebration on the Temple Mount—although this speculation is not helpful from either form-critical or comparative perspectives because there are no comparable liturgies from the Bible or the ancient Near East.

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This bas relief from the palace at Nineveh shows the king of Assyria in his chariot, ca. seventh cent. BCE, before his fall from power. Musée du Louvre. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The year, then, is 612 BCE. A messenger arrives at the court in Jerusalem with a letter from the military commander at Geba. It reports that Syrian traders showed up at the city saying that Nineveh had been conquered, and the Assyrian emperor Sin-shar-ishkun had disappeared. A hush falls over the reception hall. Despite all the remarkable news out of the east in recent years—the rise of Babylonian power, the destruction of Calah—the fall of Nineveh still meets with a moment of hesitation, almost disbelief. Then, gradually, the room erupts with jubilation. The new spreads quickly through the palace complex, and not in particularly hushed tones. Eyes shine brighter. Somewhere, off in a side room, the news reaches a scribe; in wonderment, he unbends himself from over his parchment and thinks of an old prophetic oracle: “How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!” Where was that scroll?

Things had not been bad for Judah before Nineveh fell. Quality of life for many in Judah had been improving steadily for years. Really, what more could people have asked of Josiah? Granted, in the early years of his reign the nation had still been firmly under the thumb of Assyria, and the taxes in those days were hard on everyone. But he was just a boy then. Eventually Josiah had delivered everything you could ask of him. Already by the late 620s, there were inklings of change. You could feel it around the Assyrian governor’s citadel in Ramat Rahel. The luxury and excess that it was known for didn’t exactly disappear, but a certain grimness began to overshadow them. Probably the budget was a little tighter with the fighting that Assyria was doing in other parts of the world.

And then one day in 614, Judah awoke to find the Assyrians gone, along with some of the locals who had worked closely with them. Other natives in the royal court went up to the hilltop fortress complex, which stood eerily silent now. They had taken everything that wasn’t nailed down, and had destroyed some of what they left. The Judahites hacked at it a bit more, venting the years of pent-up frustration in largely symbolic vandalism. Some servants who had been sworn to secrecy during the preparations and then left behind now spoke up: The governor’s military detachment had been summoned back to the homeland, where it was needed to fight the Babylonians and Medes. Without any protection, the governor had pleaded that he, his family, and his staff must also return to Assyria for the time being. There would be plenty of time to restore the imperial structures in Judah when the crisis had passed. Even the Judahites anticipated as much, deep down, so there was little celebration then. Things had sat uneasily that way for some time, despite the substantial relief of throwing off the “yoke” of Assyrian taxation.

The aforementioned scribe—let’s call him Shaphan—knew that something similar had been under way in the temple, though few outside the palace were aware of it. A cuneiform treaty tablet had long hung there, in the very holy of holies, with its interminable demands of the emperor and its lists of foreign gods. Recently, though, it had disappeared, along with the symbol of Assur that had haunted the sanctuary. Standing there in the presence of YHWH, it was hard not to believe the kings and priests when they credited the God of Israel with the fall of Assyria—even if it was not clear what exactly Judah had done to bring it about. The temple priests, freed from the impositions of the empire, could be heard shouting praises of glory to God.

* * *

Josiah orders what he calls a “victory feast” at his palace on Mt. Zion. Bring out the aged wines, and don’t spare the fatted cattle; the fall of Assyria only happens once! Characteristically, he emphasizes that it is a divine victory, and he invites everyone from the whole country to partake—and of course to bend the knee in thanks to the God of Israel. Josiah summons the temple scribes to him and asks them to conjure up something good for the special occasion. They take this in stride—a seasoned group who have flourished under a king who understands the importance of history.

Speaking of history: There’s one more thing, he says to them. I want the northerners invited. Now the scribes’ calm veneer cracks. Shaphan, as one of the more senior among them, steps forward gingerly. He explains in the most submissive possible way that that’s not a good idea. The northerners have never accepted Judah’s legitimacy as the true Israel, and it’s hardly likely that they’re going to come bow to YHWH. Those people are not even the sons of Jacob anymore, not really—they were shipped in there by Assyria a century ago from God knows where. They wouldn’t know Bethel from Sheol. Josiah smiles thinly at these objections. He nods to a senior adviser, who firmly escorts the scribes out.

Josiah does not suffer from low self-esteem. He has been king since he was old enough to ride a horse, and has presided over a period of glorious national flourishing, and he has even managed to expand the nation’s power and influence—though, truth be told, not as much as he would like. He has heard the stories of his predecessors: David and the tens of thousands of enemies he killed; Solomon and his wise administration of vast territory. And the wealth—to come down to it, that’s where the new plan comes in. Despite the recent improvements and the fact that Assyria is no longer patrolling the north, Judah’s military is greatly atrophied. The “Assyrian peace” had long ago disarmed most of the local powers. Any great Judahite warriors in recent decades could only have proved themselves in the service of the empire. Judah was not going to overwhelm the north with a few ploughshares beaten into swords. Coercion is not an option for now, but persuasion? It is worth a shot.

All this is conveyed to the scribes, who set aside their grudges and embrace their task. Shaphan has to admit to himself that stories have power, and in this case Josiah can tell a pretty compelling one. After all, the Assyrians have not exactly supported native pride in the north; they’ve crushed it with their constant shuffling of populations. These people barely know who they are or where they are compared to proud Judah. Who would not want to buy into a story about native rule at a time when there’s no ruler in the land? And Josiah treats his people well—he came from the people of the land. But like David, the humble shepherd boy, he could unite a nation!

* * *

Shaphan remembers where that line about the one who laid nations low being cut to the ground came from. He locates a scroll with a few oracles from his grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s time compiled on it. ³⁹ The oracles are attributed to Isaiah ben Amoz. He reads about the defeated king being cast out from his grave. Did this happen to Sin-shar-ishkun after the fall of Nineveh? Or to his forefathers’ graves at Calah, perhaps? This had not been reported to Shaphan, but the rest fit so well. He decides that it is, quite plausibly, a prophecy of these very times.

The passage from Isaiah is in a collection of oracles about foreign nations, and Shaphan, digging further, finds other remarkable resonances with his own time. Eventually he takes up a passage about the utter despoilment of the whole land because it treats everyone the same—Josiah will like that: “It will be the same for the people as for the priest.” This is indeed what it was like when the Assyrians were in control in Judah! The whole world seemed to be literally falling apart, even the natural order of things (Isa 24:1–4). Every wise person knows the land flourishes under good rule and suffers under bad rule. And why did this happen? Shaphan’s mind drifts to Josiah’s tearing his clothes years earlier: because the people had broken the ancient covenant that was found in the temple (24:5–6); because there had been no one to propagate it. Thus Shaphan sets the background for the composition he envisions.

He goes on: the Assyrian citadel that brought chaos to Judah is shattered, its houses shut up (24:10–12). And the people burst into song as at the harvest, giving thanks to YHWH (24:14–16)! Times have been dark indeed, but theday of YHWH is always on the horizon, on which the rulers of the earth will receive God’s justice, and even the heavenly powers thought to be divine by others will pale in comparison (24:17–23).

With the problem established and its solution proclaimed, Shaphan offers a hymn evoking the ancient battle songs of the nation in honor of a victorious Divine Warrior: “O YHWH, you are my God, and I will exalt you!” (25:1) The Lord is the one who has destroyed the enemy oppressors and their fortified palace (25:2–3). YHWH is also the host of the feast that Josiah has ordered (25:6). Foreign domination of Judah has been like a living death for so many years, but now YHWH has turned the tables on Death the mighty mythological swallower, and has himself swallowed it up (25:7–8)!

The scribes compose another song, for Jerusalem itself, which had been dominated, perhaps, but never conquered! The Assyrian citadel has fallen, but not Zion: “We have a strong city,” with fortifications that God himself protects—a rock of ages, worthy of the people’s trust (26:1–5). The people may not be as wealthy or powerful as some whom Shaphan has seen—after decades of watching the Assyrians parade through Judah in their impossible finery, and plant their ostentatious, exotic gardens, this is burned into his mind—but they are righteous, and that’s what matters to God. That’s why he delivers them and consumes their enemies (26:6–11).

On the heels of this celebration, someone decides that confession is necessary as well. In keeping with the perspective of the second scroll of the law, it is important to recognize God’s role in the nation’s history. This is a good time to admit that the people have achieved no victories on their own; rather, it is YHWH who has somehow, in his inscrutable providence, expanded their boundaries (26:12–18). It is, again, YHWH who has saved them from this state of death (26:17–19); who else has the power to kill or give life?

Another old scroll occurs to Shaphan now. He remembers some oracles brought to Jerusalem by a refugee a long time ago, written in a funny dialect from the north. This is his segue! The oracles were meant for northern kings, after all—telling them to “return to the Lord.” These northerners, too, had been raised up from the dead. A natural (and powerful) way to invite the northerners now, it seems to him. Just as Isaiah foresaw the fall of the Assyrians, this prophet, Hosea, foresaw the restoration of the north at just such a time as this (Hos 6:1–3).

Yes, there will be hard times still to come. The Assyrians’ withdrawal from the land will, admittedly, result in some temporary chaos. Someone else will have to step and keep the peace in outlying areas, and until then the roads and even the cities may be dangerous (Isa 26:20–21). It would be wise for people to keep their doors locked until the wrath passes by. But YHWH is to be trusted to overcome the forces of chaos—is he not the one who slew the monsters of watery chaos in primordial times (Isa 27:1)? So he will continue to do.

Shaphan returns to a metaphor that is well used among YHWH’s spokesmen, the land as the vineyard of God. He remembers it is somewhere in the Isaiah material as well (Isa 5:1–7), but he doesn’t look at it; he knows what he needs to say: The south was warned, and punished, and chastened, and returned to YHWH, and has been blessed like a fruitful vineyard, so too must the north if it is to be reunified with God’s true people (27:2–6). It must tear down all the cultic sites and paraphernalia that have long stood in the way of its knowledge of God (27:9–10). And YHWH earnestly desires this: “I have no wrath… let it make peace with me!” (27:4–5). Then they can be regathered, from Assyria, where they had been taken (2 Kgs 17:6), and from Egypt, where they had fled (Isa 27:12). ⁴⁰ They are summoned with the blast of the shofar (27:13), a traditional symbol of the unification of the tribes (Judg 3:27; 6:34; Num 10:3). Imagine what such a nation could achieve—it could be a third great power on the earth, not much less than the Egyptians or the Mesopotamians!

* * *

The “victory feast” at which Shaphan’s scroll was read was a high-spirited affair, though there was scarcely anyone but Judahites in attendance. Arguably, that should have given them a premonition. Later, it was all a bitter memory for Shaphan. To those who met him after Josiah died, he looked older than his years.

To Judah, it felt like no sooner had Assyria collapsed than Egyptian and Babylonian armies were passing through the land. The vision of a new greater Israel had proven a phantom. Even the Egyptians, who had usually been content to let Judah run its own affairs in the past, had apparently decided that Josiah had forgotten his place and become inconvenient. To the few he trusted, Shaphan was prone to grumble darkly about Jehioakim. No spine at all, that one—chasing after whichever foreign nation is in fashion this month. But neither could he look back to Josiah’s reign as a golden age. He had shaken everything up, departed from many of the old ways, and for what? No wonder Judah no longer knew which way to turn; they were torn among so many different worldviews now. Even his own sons and grandsons seemed to have lost their way.

Shaphan was spared seeing his city looted and its temple burned. He died even before the Babylonians first campaigned to Jerusalem. Somewhere in the temple complex, his festival scroll sat among records of the oracles of earlier and later prophets. When the end came, someone gathered them up and saved them from the conflagration. This part of the story is fuzzy, to say the least, but we know that Jehoiachin had courtiers with him in exile in Babylon, because records of their rations has survived. ⁴¹ When Judahites returned from exile after Cyrus’s edict, there was a prophet among them who was inspired by the words of Isaiah. Somewhere along the way, Shaphan’s scroll and the one that inspired it were also combined together, and many similar words were added to them.

The new, enlarged scroll was itself a masterpiece that spoke to new generations—Your dead shall live! But people forgot what the scroll had been about—even the well-intentioned and expert scribes who compiled and re-imagined the words of the prophets forgot. They remembered the great moments in history, like Jerusalem’s survival of a siege in 701, or the war between Judah and the Syro-Ephramitic coalition in the 730s. But the failed hopes of a moment at the end of the reign of Judah’s last great king in 612? Its poetry ensured that it endured, but it was a vanished dream. The north never made peace with Judah and YHWH; the nations never came to the table; Josiah never ruled as a new David. What sense could it all make to readers a hundred years later, let alone twenty-six hundred?

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Conclusion

What we read now in Isaiah 24–27 is not Josiah’s festival scroll, just as the book of Deuteronomy is not Josiah’s law book, and the books of Joshua through Second Kings are not his history. Each one is layered over and reworked, and is ultimately, in its present form, a product of the Persian period if not later. Still, if we excavate each of these literary works like a tel, we find literary remains of the Davidic monarchy.

Scholars will differ about the extent to which these works are shattered pots; some say we have only fragments of their original forms. Having spent many years sifting through the remains of Isaiah and brushing at its pieces as with a toothbrush, I believe I see a coherent story in chs. 24–27 where others have seen only a mess. It certainly needs to be pieced back together in places, and various additions and modifications intrude here and there. It is a matter of interpretive choice to focus on its coherence as a Josianic composition celebrating the end of Assyrian power, confessing the people’s dependence on its God, and summoning the north back to Judah in the name of the Lord.