We've come to the end of the deuteronomistic history,
Which I'm sure is heartbreaking for most of you and I believe at this point you've taken a test,
Unless I've rearranged things since I recorded this. now we get to move into a different kind of literature all together.
we're going to start with the Book of Isaiah and
With Isaiah We're moving into prophetic literature.
Now just before we do that, I do want to recap where we left off.
We left off with the end of Judah. this really heartbreaking scene
In which we have Assyria falling to Babylon. That's how we had our cats switch places
So we had Assyria as the primary cat for the longest time and then Babylon comes in and takes over in 612.
this is how the deuteronomistic history ended and then
Judah fails to be faithful to Babylon and that's not going to go well because in the three different exile
Babylon is going to come in and
Take the people out of Judah. the primary one that we focused on was the second Exile.
That's where we really would say the Exile proper has begun because in this exile
Jerusalem, where Yahweh lived, was destroyed and
Everything all all hope is kind of lost here
It's a very discouraging time and this is right around the time where the deuteronomistic history ends. now
We've been over this a million times, but I'm just gonna leave you with it one more time.
we've got the end of the deuteronomistic history with the people of God living in exile and we've got
This question of where are we now? We'll we're in Babylon. This is bad
This is not where we're supposed to be. the status of the three covenants is just totally in flux.
We mentioned that we've got the Mosaic Covenant
Present and that helps explain why we're in exile and we've also got the Abrahamic covenant and the Davidic covenant
which offer hope to the people in that they may be able to return from exile and
Restart their lives under Yahweh's rule once again
And so we've got these two kind of working in tension. number one, we know why we're in exile. number two,
We have hope that Yahweh will restore us even from exile
So those two are kind of in tension but as far as where we're at with the three covenants,
We had that I talked about the center of that covenant sandwich with Moses just completely exploding the whole thing
and so the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with Moses, and the covenant with David are all just
Completely in question by the time we end the deuteronomistic history. now
one thing that we have to ask is well, what's the role of the prophets in all of this historical time period? so
What I'm going to walk you through right now is what prophetic literature is
We've seen a type of literature called the law. That's what we looked at When we looked at Deuteronomy and Leviticus
and
Prophetic literature is not law. It's also not history. with the deuteronomistic history
We were talking about history or at least ancient history
And that's not what prophetic literature is
In fact prophetic literature isn't even narrative and that's what we've been dealing with for the most part except for when we dealt with law.
Now we're moving into poetry.
prophetic literature is poetic and
importantly prophetic literature is
a message from God
To a human being and that human being is the spokesperson for God. So one way to look at this is here's your prophet and
Oh that's hard to see, there's a cloud right here, for lack of a better way if they key about this
Um, this is going the cloud is going to represent God
So God
Speaks to a person and the person reports that to the people of God. That's how
prophecy works and
Usually prophecy is in poetic form
um
today we're going to look at the Book of Isaiah and
Isaiah, the literature in Isaiah is unusual.
you've read about it already in Bandstra and Bandstra suggests to you that there are either two Isaiah's or three Isaiah's because Isaiah
The book deals with either two depending on how you look at it or three very different time periods
How we're going to look at it for the purpose of this class
Is that Isaiah the book primarily deals with the time before the exile,
Right here in the 700s. That's why you've got we've got a star right here.
Isaiah deals with the time in the 700s and then right after the exile has ended. so we've got two
primary time periods that we're dealing with in Isaiah
the first time periods is a time period is in the
700s and the second time period is in the
500s after the people of God have returned or are beginning to return from exile
I'll get into that a little bit more with you in our next little lecture
But that's what I want you to have in mind right now
so the whole book of Isaiah deals with two primary time periods, the
700s when Judah is under the authority of Assyria, and then the
500s where the people of God who have already been in exile have been allowed to return under a
Persian king named Cyrus
So we've had in the 700s all of this trouble with the north and with Assyria
Then finally the fall of the South to Babylon and then we have the return from exile
under the Persian king Cyrus
So now Persia is our big cat rather than Babylon. Persia comes in takes over Babylon
Those are our two primary time periods as we start to think about Isaiah.
I'm gonna walk you through in the next lecture, four pivotal moments in Isaiah
Those are what I want you to be familiar with from the prophet Isaiah. So come back for that one