Isaiah
The Book of Isaiah: An Introduction
The short answer
The book of Isaiah spans centuries of crisis—Assyrian threat, Babylonian exile, and the hard work of coming home—but it reads as one long argument. The argument is this: the future God intends is not manufactured out of the failed past. It is something genuinely new.
You can hear this most clearly near the end. In Isaiah 65:17, God declares, "I create new heavens and a new earth," and promises that the former things "will not be remembered." That word "former" is doing deliberate work. It reaches all the way back to the book's opening chapter, where Israel's early days of faithfulness and its long alienation from God were first named. The poetry of chapter 65 answers chapter 1: the old troubles are not repaired or renovated. They are eclipsed. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, the creator God can evoke a "radical newness"—a future not derived from what is old or failed.
But Isaiah refuses to let that newness float off into abstraction. Chapter 56 asks a bruisingly practical question: now that the exiles have returned, who gets in? Who belongs to the worship community? Those who had been deported and those who had stayed behind? Those who had cooperated with the empire and those who had resisted? The book of Isaiah insists that God's new creation shows up first as a decision about membership—about widening the circle rather than policing it.
Read together, these two threads reveal what kind of hope Isaiah offers. It is not a soothing promise that things will settle back to normal. It is a promise that unsettles normal. The new heavens and new earth begin, concretely, with a community learning to welcome people its old instincts would have excluded.
What scholars say
Walter Brueggemann shows both edges of Isaiah's hope: how the promise of newness in 65:17 echoes and overturns language from the book's first chapter, and how Isaiah 56 finds the post-exile community facing its most urgent question—who could be admitted to worship, including those who had cooperated with imperial authorities.
“Further, the phrase "former [ riʾšōnôt ] troubles" sounds like an echo of "our judges at the first [ riʾšōnāh ]" (Isaiah 1:26). All that remains from former vexed times when Israel was alienated from YHWH will be forgotten amid the rush of God's generous newness. And then, in 65:17, the poet has YHWH break out in wondrous, surging new possibility. The one who speaks is the creator God. This is the God who can actually evoke a radical newness, something not derived from what is old, alienated, or failed. This doxological formulation does not pause to quibble over ex nihilo , that is, whether the newness from God is "out of nothing" or by a reconfiguration of what had previously been.”
“In Isaiah 56, a text that apparently is much later than the text in Deuteronomy, the community returns to the vexed issue of membership. The text reflects the “recovery program” of Jews who had returned from Babylonian deportation and were now determined “to get it right.” The community had a number of difficult issues to negotiate, as can be seen in the larger corpus of Isaiah 56–66. But no issue was more urgent than that of membership. Among the questions to be faced was the matter of admission of Jews to the worship community, those who had been deported and those who had not been deported, those who had cooperated with imperial authorities and those who had not cooperated.”
What it means for you
Most of us assume the future will be an extension of our past—the same wounds, the same patterns, the same walls between people. Isaiah pushes back on that assumption. If God can create rather than merely recycle, then your history, however alienated or failed, does not get the last word on your future.
But Isaiah also asks something of us. Hope that costs nothing and changes nothing isn't Isaiah's hope. The test of believing in God's newness, in this book, is whether we let it reorder our present arrangements—especially who we're willing to welcome, forgive, and count as belonging.
In context
Isaiah falls roughly into three movements. Chapters 1–39 confront Judah with judgment during the Assyrian era, opening with a portrait of a people alienated from God. Chapters 40–55 speak comfort to exiles in Babylon, announcing homecoming. Chapters 56–66 address the community after the return, when hard practical questions—like who may join the worshiping community—had to be settled. The declaration of new heavens and a new earth in chapter 65 comes near the book's climax, deliberately echoing chapter 1 so the ending answers the beginning.