What Did the Authors of Isaiah 40-55 Really Know About Babylon: Dr Lena Sophia Tiemeyer

Yesterday I had the privilege of hearing from Dr Lena Sophia Tiemeyer, Lecturer in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at the University of Aberdeen, as she presented a paper at our weekly Biblical Studies seminar.  Her study was entitled “What Did the Authors of Isaiah 40-55 Really Know About Babylon?” The timing of this presentation, for the purposes of this blog, is impeccable — if you happened to read it, I just briefly discussed, in my last post, some of the scholarly debates regarding the authorship of these chapters of the Book of Isaiah.  One of the major assumptions of this theory of “Deutero-Isaiah” is that the author(s) of this section were in Babylon. The references to Cyrus, Babylonian gods and religious practices, Akkadian loan words, etc., that are found in these chapters have lead scholars to conclude that this section must have been written during the Babylonian Exile by the Jewish community that was in Babylon. Dr. Tiemeyer’s purpose with this presentation was to show that the “evidence” for this assumption is not strong — leading her to conclude that these chapters of Isaiah were more likely written in Palestine, and not Babylon.  The implications of this study are important and suggest, as Tiemeyer herself noted, a possibility that there is more unity to the Book of Isaiah than scholars have assumed.