1st
and 2nd Isaiah
Start
with Isaiah 1:1 is close to history chapter 6 speaks of the vison in the temple
speaking to God who is above him and the hem of God is in the temple. He hears
God speaking to others who to send, Isaiah wants to be that man to be sent.
Isaiah volunteers his mission commission. He does not want the people of Judea,
Judeans to be doomed. Chapter 10 the enemy of that punishment will be Assyrian.
The Assyrian will rule of Judah and
conquest, military conquest over
Judea and Jerusalem as a punishment. Each of these details, temple, Hezekiah,
Assyria as a foreign empire fit perfect with 8 century date with Isaiah history
Compare
to chapter 40. now the same god is speaking good of Jerusalem. And the old
enemy Assyria is no longer there nor is Babylonia The new enemy is Cyrus of
Persia. Isaiah mentions Cyrus many times, calls him the anointed one his
messiah, his Shepard. The message Isaiah
brings is, the lord aroused Cyrus in order so he can rebuild my city and set my
exiles free. In the first chapter Assyria is a weapon, and in chapter 40 Cyrus
of Persia is used to subdue other nations and to rebuild Jerusalem. This is a
different historical context. These discrepancies in date, tone and style
The
OT Prophet Isaiah lived in the 8th-century BC.
Cyrus, the Emperor of Persia, lived well over one hundred years later: Cyrus (580-529 BC) was the first Achaemenid Emperor.
Yet The Book of Isaiah in Chapters 44 and 45 speaks of Cyrus in no uncertain
terms:
The earliest
manuscript we have of the Book of Isaiah is The
Great Isaiah Scroll:
The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is
one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran in 1947. It is
the largest (734 cm) and best preserved of all the biblical scrolls, and the
only one that is almost complete. The 54 columns contain all 66 chapters of the
Hebrew version of the biblical Book of Isaiah. Dating from ca. 125 BCE, it
is also one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some one thousand years
older than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible known to us before the
scrolls' discovery.
So our oldest extant
copy of Isaiah dates to a much later period than that of Cyrus.
More directly regarding the question at hand:
Supra:
Modern scholarship considers the Book of Isaiah to be an anthology, the two principal compositions of which are the Book of Isaiah proper (chapters 1-39, with some exceptions), containing the words of the prophet Isaiah himself, dating from the time of the First Temple, around 700 BCE, and Second Isaiah (Deutero-Isaiah, chapters 40-66), comprising the words of an anonymous prophet, who lived some one hundred and fifty years later, around the time of the Babylonian exile and the restoration of the Temple in the Persian Period. By the time our Isaiah Scroll was copied (the last third of the second century BCE), the book was already regarded as a single composition. If so, no miracles or prophecies are required to explain the mention of Cyrus in the Book of Isaiah: Chapter 45, where his name is mentioned, was originally written during the time of Cyrus's rule.
While Isa 1-39 has the time of the downfall of Samaria in mind, that is, in the 8th century BC, the author of Isa 40-55 already expects the end of the Babylonian kingdom (Isa 43,14; 46-47) and the rise of the Persian Cyrus (Isa 44,26-27 and others
