Isaiah
c. 765–c. 695 BCE · Ancient Israel
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
The lineage through Isaiah
Inspired(3)
who Isaiah shaped
- Blake didn't just admire Isaiah — he sat him down to dinner
- In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me," and Isaiah speaks Blake's own creed: the poetic imagination is the voice of God
- Isaiah's visionary mode is the explicit template for Blake's prophetic poetry — the prophet as poet, the poet as prophet
via Paradise Lost
- Satan's pride and fall come from a single verse here — Isaiah 14:12, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning"
- Milton built his great antagonist out of that line, and in doing so fixed Lucifer-as-Satan in the English imagination for good
- He mines Isaiah for more than the fall — even Paradise Lost's Leviathan simile comes out of these chapters
- Bunyan wrote his allegory with Isaiah open beside him — and he tells you so, citing the book by chapter and verse in his own margins
- Christian's "filthy rags" of human righteousness come straight from Isaiah 64:6; the fiery pit of Tophet from Isaiah 30:33
- The prophet's imagery becomes the furniture of the dream — proof of how directly The Pilgrim's Progress mines this one book
Famous Quotes
“and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”
“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
About Isaiah
Prophet active in Jerusalem during the Assyrian crisis of the 8th century BCE. His oracles of judgment and redemption, including the Suffering Servant passages, became central to both Jewish messianic hope and Christian theology.