One Scroll, and the Argument Over How Many Hands Wrote It

The question of how many authors wrote Isaiah is among the longest running and best evidenced debates in Hebrew Bible scholarship. The turn from judgment to comfort at chapter 40 coincides exactly with a change of historical horizon, the earlier chapters address the 8th century Assyrian threat, while chapters 40 onward speak as though the Babylonian exile is already underway and, strikingly, name the Persian king Cyrus by name as a living ruler about to free Israel, a specificity scholars find far easier to explain as a prophet speaking to his own contemporaries than as prediction more than a century in advance. This observation, developed across 18th and 19th century German biblical criticism and formalized by Bernhard Duhm's 1892 commentary into the now standard three part division, First, Deutero and Trito Isaiah, remains the dominant scholarly position, while a minority of scholars, more often working from within confessional Jewish or Christian commitments, continue to defend single authorship, arguing that Isaiah's prophetic gift could plausibly extend to naming a future deliverer and that the book's consistent vocabulary and imagery across all sixty six chapters argue for one hand rather than several. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran settles one part of the question decisively: whatever the book's compositional history, it was already read and copied as a single unified work by at least the 2nd century BCE, centuries before any of these critical arguments were made.