Bible Review

From Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995–2002, reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, Sunday May 4, 2003, p. 11.

A more subtle but still disingenuous theory holds that Second Isaiah or his scribe simply used the back of a scroll of Isaiah, since the corpora are of comparable length, with 33 chapters for First Isaiah (minus the historical material in chapters 36–39) and 29 for Second Isaiah, maximally defined. A later reader naturally assumed the two sides constituted one literary work.

Previously, J.L. Palache had identified Meshullam in Isaiah 42:19 with this prince, although not as Second Isaiah; see Christopher R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 89–90.

Rabban argues that Meshullam in fact signed his work not once but twice. Isaiah 49:7 contains God’s address to a figure called by the obscure phrase ‘eved moshelim, literally “servant of rulers.” Since Hebrew was originally written consonantally, without vowels, Rabban infers that ‘vd mshlym is a corruption of an original ‘avbdo meshullam (‘vdw mshlm), “his servant Meshullam.”

A seemingly insuperable obstacle to this theory is the fact that the first-person Isaiah 49:1–3 explicitly calls the servant “Israel.” Rabban regards the prophet as a megalomaniac who claimed to embody the entire nation, at least regarding their relationship to God. But this remains a clear weakness in Rabban’s argument and in all efforts to identify the servant as an individual.

Rabban, Yesha‘;yahu hasheni, p. 31.

See Risa Levitt Kohn and William H.C. Propp, “The Name of ‘;Second Isaiah’: The Forgotten Theory of Nehemiah Rabban,” in Fortunate the Eyes that See (Festschrift for D.N. Freedman: Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 223–235.