Isaiah

Michael introduces the Major Prophets and teaches an overview on the book of Isaiah.  We transition into the Prophetic books, with Isaiah the 1st of 5 major prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel followed by the 12 minor prophets.  Isaiah is perhaps one of the most loved and, in a way, important prophets of the Old Testament. Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was great controversy around the book of Isaiah because it’s such a beautiful Biblical Hebrew piece. Some argued it must have had multiple authors or been written across multiple timestamps, but the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrated a unity in Isaiah as well as a dating much earlier than liberal scholarship had proposed. It’s the oldest manuscript we have. The Dead Sea Scrolls copy of Isaiah is a thousand years older than the oldest manuscript we had, but proved to be word for word accurate with our standard Hebrew Bible upon their discovery in 1947 with very slight variation (around 5%, mostly attributed to misspellings and slips of the pen).  This discovery also ultimately offered strong evidence that the entire canonized Old Testament that we have today was completed by 450 B.C. The Greek Translation of the Old Testament – the Septuagint – is dated to about 250 years B.C.