The Revised Book of Isaiah

First Upload: Wednesday March 13, 2019
Last Modified: Thursday September 30, 2021

The Revised Book of Isaiah

I grant the entire contents of this webpage including all the Revision Files to the public domain

Introduction

The project of attempting to revise the entire Book of Isaiah came to mind on the heels of finishing this old webpage. It has taken several months and a lot of hard work to complete. During the course of the work it became apparent that the Book of Isaiah has two authors. One is Isaiah son of Amoz who wrote most of the first half of the book during the monarchies of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. The second is a mysterious figure who produced most of the second half of the book in Babylon during the exile of the house of Judah.

The chapters written in whole or in part by Isaiah son of Amoz are often a ball of spaghetti, a hodgepodge of scripts whose verses are themselves entangled. The task of disentangling the mess met with varying success. There are verses that fit only in one spot (e.g. Isaiah 29:17) but there are verses which set well in several places (e.g. Isaiah 42:18).

Happily the Babylonian Isaiah left a substantial number of mostly pristine narratives, and this provided relief and encouragement to persevere to the end. The results of the project are presented below in the section named "The Revised Book."

Layout of Revision Files

There are sixty-one files below in the section entitled, "The Revised Book," corresponding to sixty-one revised chapters of the Book of Isaiah. Historical chapters 20, 36-39 were not examined.

Every file begins with the canonical text of a chapter. This is followed immediately by a short comment under the heading, "Synopsis." The Synopsis will inform the reader whether or not all the canonical verses were exported. If they were, that particular file will own no revised text and will bear the tag, "Blank." There are fifteen such files corresponding to canonical chapters 12, 16, 28, 31, 32, 35, 43, 44, 47, 52, 56, 57, 59, 61 and 65. A reader interested in the revised text alone can ignore them. A reader interested in ascertaining why or whereto a particular verse or block of verses was exported should not.

A file may interpose up to four sections between a Synopsis and a Revised Chapter. These sections are:

How To Access A Revision File

Forty-six files in the section entitled, "The Revised Book," contain revised text. Every file has a unique title which is also the hyperlink on which the reader must click to open that file.

Verse Numbers

Every revision numbers its verses in the standard fashion. For example the double-number tag 65:8 points to canonical chapter 65 and verse 8. Single-number tags point to the current chapter.

The Disorder Index

All non-sequential verses of a revised chapter are highlighted in yellow to let a reader compute the disorder index easily. The disorder index of a revised chapter is its number of yellow highlights divided by its number of verses. Thus Revised Chapter 24 has a disorder index of 61.7%, a high value signaling a choppy canonical text and/or a revision that imports many scattered verses. In contrast Revised Chapter 34 does not have yellow highlights, its disorder index is zero: the revised and the canonical chapter are identical.

The Revised Book