The prophet Isaiah, son of Amoz, lived in Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE. He wrote mostly poetry and spoke at the intersection of spirituality, social collapse, and cultural conflict. We live in a similar time. He might have something to say to us. I have heard his echos in recent books like At Work in the Ruins, Hospicing Modernity, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, The Matter with Things, The Human Condition, End Times, We Are Free to Change the World, daily posts from Richard Rohr et al. at the Center for Action and Contemplation, and a London conference I recently attended called The Future of Humanity. However, only a few of you would be interested in what Isaiah had to say about ancient conflicts between the Hebrew kingdom of Judah and neighboring nations like Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt.
I have summarized much of Isaiah’s poetry largely leaving out comments and prophesies about ancient empires. I plan to post the poetic summaries I have written over the course of 2025 sometimes with my own reflections on the poetry. These posts will be on my Prophet Margins blog (https://morph-e-art.com/prophet-margins-blog/) with references on Facebook and Substack at the rate of 2-3 a month for the year. If you are interested, you might want to sign up for the blog posts or follow me on Substack.
Finally I need to say something about the title of this series, Spoken through the Prophets. “Prophets” is plural because there is more than one Isaiah. Very few Biblical scholars doubt this. The original Isaiah, son of Amoz, probably died at the beginning of the Babylonian captivity, but his poetry was much loved by his followers and taken to Babylon by them. There were likely at least three Isaiahs writing over the course of at least two centuries. There were also active groups of followers, writers, and editors of the Book of Isaiah who were active from the beginning of the Babylonian captivity, around 700 BCE, to the middle of the first century AD, in the form of the monastic community at Qumran. But the plural in the title is only a secondary reason for its choice. The phrase comes from the Nicene Creed as in, “We believe in the Holy Spirit who has spoken through the prophets.” It tickles my sense of irony that a creed written for empire might have something to do with an empire’s reform.
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