Williamson, `Pre-Exilic Isaiah'
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methods in critical biblical scholarship, that of historical literary analysis. This
approach, though being used in defence of a pre-exilic Isaiah, is thus paradoxically
not available to ultra-conservative scholars. For them, however, everything in Isaiah
1-39 derives from Isaiah in any case, so they may not feel its loss too acutely. For the
remainder, such a unitary view of authorship is contradicted by the many tensions
and signs of literary, historical and ideological unevenness which they uncover by a
careful reading of the text which seeks to do justice to it in all its dimensions. I share
this latter view along with those who use the method in part to argue that virtually
the whole of the work comes from the post-exilic period.
Unlike these latter scholars, however, it seems to me that the historical depth
which is thereby shown to lie behind the present form of the text, especially when
that is related to the likely causes which triggered the later growth, points rather
firmly to a pre-exilic origin for the whole process. Unless the reflections which
literary criticism has shown to be developments of the original core are understood
as looking back on something said previously through the prism of exile and
restoration, then the raison-d' tre for the whole procedure seems to disappear
without a satisfactory alternative explanation.
The generally agreed growth of chapter 6 once again furnishes a clear example,
and it serves the present purpose well as the stages in that growth which are of
concern to us for this argument are shared also by Kaiser and Becker. We are
therefore all singing from the same hymn-sheet, at least to start with.
First, the final clause of the chapter is an added gloss. Although verses 12-13a
seem certainly to have been originally entirely negative about the future,
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the gloss
has exploited the potential inherent in the notion of a felled tree that there will be
renewed growth from the stump (cf. Job 14:7-9), and it identifies this with the `holy
seed'. This phrase is found elsewhere only at Ezra 9:2, where it is the result of a
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See the full summary and discussion of the textual and linguistic difficulties by J.A. Emerton, `The
Translation and Interpretation of Iaiah vi. 13', in Interpreting the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honour of E.I.J.
Rosenthal (UCOP 32; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 85-118.