A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40-66

Abstract

A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40-66, by Benjamin D. Sommer. Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 355. N.P. Eikhah Rabbah (the primary collection of rabbinic commentary on Lamentations) states that the severe prophecies that Jeremiah prophesied against Israel were anticipated and healed by Isaiah. This would seem to be a case in which modern critical scholarship is only belatedly catching up with the rabbis. Thus the past two years have seen the publication of two major studies of Second Isaiah's indebtedness to previous texts-Patricia Tull Willey's 1997 book Remember the Former Things (SBLDS 161) and now the present book by Sommer-both of which demonstrate, among other things, that Second Isaiah's primary precursor was Jeremiah, to whom the exilic prophet makes extensive allusion. Willey and Sommer are not the first of modern scholars to make this claim (their own precursors include Umberto Cassuto, Werner Tannert, Shalom Paul, and William Holladay), but they are the first to marshal such extensive evidence and to analyze in depth the interpretive techniques employed by the later prophet in appropriating the oracles of the earlier. While the two studies have much in common, they also diverge in significant ways, with Sommer taking to include not only chapters 40-55, as Willey and most other scholars do, but more or less the entire block of material in 40-66 and chapter 35 as well. And while Willey organizes her book as an extended reading of Second Isaiah with reference to previous texts as they come up, Sommer organizes his by source text. I mention Willey's book in the context of this review because the two studies prove to be complementary, and anyone who is interested by one will no doubt profit from consulting the other. Sommer makes the case for Jeremianic influence on Second Isaiah as part of his larger project of identifying and analyzing Deutero-Isaiah's pervasive practice of alluding to earlier texts, both prophetic and otherwise. In an introductory chapter on method, Sommer distinguishes between his approach, which is heavily indebted to the work of Michael Fishbane and is concerned with identifiable, intentional reference to a source text, and the literary theoretical concept of intertextuality, which he briefly defines as an offshoot of structural linguistics that is concerned less with intentionality of reference and more with a text's inevitable participation in a larger differential system of meaning (e.g., a corpus of literature or even a language). The four chapters that follow present close readings of key passages from Deutero-Isaiah in relation to the source texts on which they draw. Sommer devotes a full chapter to Jeremiah, one chapter to all other prophets (including Isaiah ben Amoz, Micah, Hosea, Ezekiel, Zephaniah, and Nahum), a chapter to psalms and laments, and a chapter to pentateuchal texts. A concluding chapter recapitulates the thematic and stylistic patterns that Sommer has discerned and attempts to place Deutero-Isaiah in the history of Israelite and Jewish religion, arguing that the prophet's penchant for allusion represents a sort of way-station between a preexilic notion of direct revelation and a postexilic emphasis on interpretation as the locus of revelation. A brief appendix presents the author's case against the hypothesis of a Trito-Isaiah and for the essential unity of chapters 40-66 and 35. Sommer's work is for the most part extraordinarily careful, thorough, and convincing. …