Essays on Yeshaya (Isaiah)

The world at large sings the praises of the beauty and profundity of Isaiah’s great teachings. Jewish tradition assigns the prophet’s words very great authority. Primary Torah sources draw on his wisdom to illuminate the most sensitive and critical matters.

But understanding the book is certainly not easy. Even identifying its themes requires making significant and difficult procedural choices. With which interpretation of Isaiah should we work? Many – if not most – passages are complex and ambiguous enough to allow for multiple translations. More than that, the precise subjects of many of Isaiah’s analogies and the targets of much of his criticism are disputed even among Judaism’s traditional commentators (to which I restricted myself in this project).

What we need is a comprehensive methodology. These essays are the product of one such system.