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AnonymousBible: Old Testament: English Standard Version
Nonfiction | Scripture | Adult | Published in 1611A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Major Prophets (Isaiah-Daniel)Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Isaiah Summary
The book of Isaiah is one of the longest in the Old Testament. It records the messages delivered by its eponymous prophet, who served in Judah during the eighth century BCE, at the height of the Assyrian crisis. Although the text of Isaiah bears no structural indications of internal divisions, there is a major transition in tone that marks the first part of the book (Chapters 1-39) from the second (Chapters 40-66). The first section carries overtones of warning and judgment, delivering oracles against Israel and other nations, while the second section is replete with assurances of God’s love and beautiful, hope-filled prophecies of the future. Some scholars suggest that the second section reflects a later period of composition, perhaps from an exilic or post-exilic context.
Isaiah is largely poetic, containing only a few narrative sections, many of which narrate details of Isaiah’s life or of Judah’s national situation during the Assyrian crisis. The book contains prophecies not only aimed toward its own time and place, but also a few which appear to foreshadow a coming messianic figure. Many such prophecies are interpreted in later Christian tradition as applying to Jesus. These include the prophecies of a virgin giving birth to a child who is called by the Hebrew appellation “God with us”: “Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). Such prophecies also include the “servant songs” from the later portions of the book, which foretell the coming of a figure whose vicarious suffering becomes the salvation of God’s people: “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Isaiah closes with a set of prophecies foreshadowing a coming age of restoration in which a new heaven and a new earth will be instituted, and the presence of God will bring all things to their fulfillment of peace and joy.
Jeremiah Summary
The book of Jeremiah recounts the story and teachings of its eponymous figure, whom God called to serve as a prophet near the end of the monarchy in Judah. Jeremiah recounts the experience of this calling in the first chapter: “Now the word of LORD came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (1:4-5). Jeremiah is initially hesitant but eventually undertakes his calling at great personal cost. Because of the political situation in Judah during the time of his service—the Babylonian invasion and the dissolution of Judah—his messages are largely words of judgment and warning, and so Jeremiah often finds himself attacked and unappreciated by his contemporaries. Jeremiah offers long prose sections along with the poetic passages, bearing witness to the prophet’s persecution by the kings of Judah, opposition by false prophets, and the rejection of his message by most of his immediate audience.
Although Babylon had already taken captives from Jerusalem into exile two decades before the destruction of the city, many still clung to false hopes about their position. Against those hopes, God made Jeremiah proclaim that not only would the exiles not be able to return soon, but they would face 70 years in Babylon (i.e., their generation would never see Judah again). Unsurprisingly, most of Jerusalem preferred to listen to the optimistic messaging of the false prophet Hananiah, and showered Jeremiah with death threats and abuse. Jeremiah is known to Christian tradition as “the weeping prophet” because of the frequency of his emotional desolations in the face of these experiences. Nonetheless, Jeremiah’s message was not entirely gloomy: he prophesied that when the 70 years were over, the Jews in Babylon would be able to return home again. Further, Jeremiah prophesied a coming age of restoration, a “new covenant” in which every person will know God intimately and will have their sins forgiven: “For they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34).
Lamentations Summary
Lamentations is a very short book, and appears in this order because tradition assigns it to Jeremiah’s authorship. Lamentations is exactly what the name suggests: a lament, reflecting on the fall of Jerusalem to its Babylonian captors. The first two chapters are composed of anguished poetry, mourning the desolation of Jerusalem. With the third chapter, the author turns to his own condition, recounting his many sufferings. Yet even in the middle of the utter catastrophe of his own life and the ruin of the city he loves, his faith in God’s ultimate goodness is unshaken:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will wait for him” (Lamentations 3:22-24).
Ezekiel Summary
Ezekiel is a contemporary of Jeremiah, but whereas Jeremiah served as a prophet in Judah during the cataclysmic years of Babylonian conquest, Ezekiel was with the Jews who had already been taken away in exile. He thus represents part of the exilic material of the Old Testament canon, and all of his visions take place in Mesopotamia rather than in Israel. Ezekiel is notable for the sheer detail of his prophetic visions, as well as, in many cases, their strangeness. These visions begin in the first chapter, as Ezekiel relates a vision of the throne of God:
[…] and seated above the likeness of a throne was a likeness with a human appearance. […] Like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD (Ezekiel 1:26-28).
One of the detailed visions that became central to the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament is the one related in Chapter 37, in which Ezekiel witnesses a valley of dry bones being brought back to life by the power of God, and which is taken to indicate the future outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Christian era. Another sequence of visions, which runs from Chapters 40 to 48, describes a renewed land of Israel and a restored temple with an almost blueprint-like level of detail.
Like Jeremiah, Ezekiel has the unenviable task of relating difficult news to his fellow Jews. In the brief period between the beginning of the exile and the final destruction of Jerusalem, Ezekiel is called to proclaim the imminent demise of the exiles’ holy city. He does this not only through his words, but through extreme acts of ascetic self-denial, as when God instructs him to lie on his left side for 390 days (Ezekiel 4:5). These acts of prophetic theater help Ezekiel to relate the terrible significance of the message he bears. Despite the difficulty of his immediate context and the overtone of judgment in most of his prophecies, the texts of Ezekiel maintain a lasting focus on a brighter era that will one day come, when God establishes an “everlasting covenant” with his people: “[…] when I atone for you and for all that you have done, declares the LORD God” (Ezekiel 16:60-63).
Daniel Summary
The book of Daniel, named after one of its main figures, narrates a period of Jewish history from the forced emigration of the exiles from Jerusalem, through the period of Babylonian rule, and into the rise of Persian sovereignty in the region. Like Ezekiel, its text is set entirely in a Mesopotamian context. It is unique in the Old Testament for its inclusion of long passages in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew, the only other major examples of which occur in sections of Ezra that quote official correspondence. (Aramaic was a related language to Hebrew and was the lingua franca of the region in the period after the Persian ascendancy.) The first half of the book (Chapters 1-6) is centered on stories of the exiles’ ordeals while serving the governments of Babylon and Persia, and the second half (Chapters 7-12) is devoted to Daniel’s prophetic ministry, with accounts and interpretations of his dreams and visions.
The book opens with a brief narration of the exile from Jerusalem as experienced by Daniel and three of his friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They quickly impress the Babylonian officials and are given placements in the administration, with Daniel earning a promotion by successfully interpreting one of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams. Trouble is swift to come for the other three friends, however, who refuse to commit idolatry when they are compelled to worship a large golden idol of the king. In punishment, they are thrown into a fiery furnace, but survive through the appearance of a heavenly figure in the furnace with them. The Babylonian regime is short-lived, and after Nebuchadnezzar’s passing, one of his successor-kings is overthrown by the invading Persian forces. Daniel’s wisdom is recognized by the new rulers and he maintains a high position in government, but he also comes under punishment when he refuses to honor a royal decree which forbids prayer to anyone but the Persian king. As a result, he is thrown into a den of hungry lions, but God intervenes to ensure that none of the lions harm him.
The dreams and visions of the second half of the book (part of a genre of writing known as “apocalyptic”) are vivid and detailed, much as Ezekiel’s are, and represent allegories of coming events. Some of them appear to allude to events in Jewish history which occur in the second century BCE and beyond (such as, in some interpretations, the Maccabean revolt). Others have been taken in Christian tradition to stand as prophecies of Jesus, including the description of a heavenly enthronement of a “son of man” (which is Jesus’s favorite title for himself) in Daniel 7:13-14, and the timeline of 70 prophetic “weeks” of years in Daniel 9:24-27, which appears to point to a fulfillment in the first century CE.
Major Prophets (Isaiah-Daniel) Analysis
The prophets were a class of people who were selected by God on an individual basis and called to his service as bearers of divine messages for the people of Israel. Any Israelite person could be called by God to serve as a prophet. Some of the prophets left their oracles in writing, while others, like Elijah and Elisha, did not. The books that comprise the prophetic writings are representative of the ministry of the prophets, but do not constitute a totality of its teaching. The division between major and minor prophets is not made on the basis of importance, but rather on the length of their works. The books of the major prophets are longer in terms of the total volume of text (though not necessarily the number of chapters), and those of the minor prophets are shorter. The sole exception is Lamentations, a short book included in the major prophets grouping because it was written by Jeremiah, so it is appended to his longer text.
The authorship and dating of the major prophets ranges from simple to complicated, with some texts (Jeremiah and Ezekiel) generally regarded as firsthand works of the eponymous prophets (or their scribal circle), and others (Isaiah and Daniel) sparking wide-ranging disputes amongst scholars. Even in the simple cases, though—like Jeremiah’s—there are complicating factors, since the book of Jeremiah’s transmission through its manuscript tradition produced versions of the book with significant variations in length; not all scholars agree on how to assess those variations. The debates about Isaiah’s authorship are founded mostly on the difference in tone between the first and second parts of the book (Chapters 1-39 and 40-66), with some scholars willing to concede firsthand authorship of the first portion to Isaiah during the period of the monarchy, but find the latter portions more likely to be the product of the exilic and post-exilic Jewish experience. Some theories go further, and divide the latter section as well, creating subdivisions referred to as “First Isaiah” (Chapters 1-39), “Second Isaiah” (40-55), and “Third Isaiah” (56-66). It should be noted, however, that there remain scholars who seek to retain the traditional authorship attribution of the whole book to Isaiah. Daniel is likewise a subject of significant debate, with some traditional scholars arguing for Daniel’s own authorship in the sixth century BCE, while many others point to textual connections with the period of the Maccabees in the second century BCE and thus argue that it is more likely a pseudonymous work.
Like most of the Old Testament’s prophetic works, poetic sections dominate the text, but there are extended sections of prose in the major prophets as well (generally more so than in the minor prophets). The literary features of the text include poetic constructions like oracles (pronouncements of divine messages) and prose constructions which relate historical narratives or prophetic visions. Regarding oracles, it is important to distinguish between prophecies which relate to events yet to come (“foretelling”) and those which relate to the messages of God for his people in their present context (“forthtelling”), both of which constitute major aspects of biblical prophecy. The visions related in the books of the major prophets, most of which are set in prose constructions, are often full of beautiful imagery. They tend to be either visions of heavenly realities, such as depictions of the throne of God, or of apocalyptic events—the unveiling of future realities in highly symbolic language.
The major prophets all relate, in one way or another, to the great catastrophe of Israelite history: the fall of the monarchy and the exile in Babylon. Isaiah predates those events but points toward them based on Isaiah’s own experience during the earlier Assyrian conquest, offering both warnings of coming devastations and the promise of a great restoration that will follow. Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel all center directly on the decades in which Judah experiences its fall, looking at it from both a Jerusalem-centered perspective and one that watches the events unfold from exile in Babylon. Daniel narrates the experience of a few Jewish heroes under Babylonian and Persian rule after the fall of Jerusalem. In each case, the historical pivot-point of Jerusalem’s fall and the exile of the Jews dominate the content of the major prophets.
This historical context brings out the three major themes observed in the Old Testament’s previous books, and binds them together in a profound expression of Jewish faith. The direct experience of conquest, fall, and exile gave the prophets a concrete understanding of the interconnections between The Problem of Sin, Faithfulness to God’s Law, and The Steadfast Love of God, as expressed in the earlier books of the Old Testament, which also feature God’s people navigating conquest, enslavement, and exile. The problem of sin was fundamentally expressed in Judah’s unfaithfulness to God’s law, and thus those two themes formed two sides of the same coin. Nevertheless, in each of the books of the major prophets, the hopeful note of God’s own faithfulness to his covenant, expressed in his steadfast love, is sounded over and over again. Even the darkest of the major prophets’ works—Jeremiah and Lamentations—include sections where they find peace in God’s unshakeable love and in the promise of a restoration yet to come.
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