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Isaiah

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Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion

The Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Scriptures presents the prophecies of Isaiah, an eighth-century BCE Israelite prophet. The book in the form we have today was known to the Jewish writer Ben Sira by 180 BCE and has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Christian New Testament makes much use of Isaiah, notably John 12.38, “spoken by the prophet Isaiah.” Jewish tradition holds that the book consists of the prophecies of Isaiah, written into book form by King Hezekiah of Judah and his scholars (Talmud, Bava Batra 15a). Rabbinic tradition accepts the book of Isaiah as the work of one prophet, although Abraham Ibn Ezra (twelfth century) suggests that some of the later chapters may be from a different hand. Some of the prophecies may have been written down by Isaiah himself (8.1).

Modern Bible criticism beginning with German scholars of the 1780s generally supports the view that the book is the work of two or more people, dividing most sharply between chapters 1 and 39, which deal...

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Correspondence to Kalman J. Kaplan .

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Schwartz, M.B., Kaplan, K.J., Cantz, P. (2020). Isaiah. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_9018

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