The Fifth Consolation, Repeating an Image From Earlier in the Year

This is the fifth of the Seven Haftarot of Consolation, its calendar position the reason it accompanies Parashah Ki Teitzei, whose own material covers a wide range of civil and family laws with no particular thematic tie to Isaiah's barren woman image, continuing the pattern already established across the earlier consolation haftarot in this account.

What makes this specific reading distinctive is its close overlap with the haftarah for Parashah Noach many months earlier in the same annual cycle: both open with the identical image of a barren woman told to sing and both invoke the identical flood covenant comparison, so that a congregation that has followed the whole year's reading hears this same striking image twice, once tied to the flood narrative directly and once folded into the consolation sequence's broader arc of comfort after Tisha B'Av.

That repetition is not an oversight in how the readings were assembled but a feature of how richly this particular passage of Isaiah gets used across the year, its imagery flexible enough to serve two entirely different pairing purposes, a covenant permanence argument earlier in the cycle and a general note of restored hope here in the run up to the New Year.