Isaiah

A prophetic book widely regarded by scholars as composite: an eighth-century core (chapters 1-39) associated with Isaiah ben Amoz, warning the kingdom of Judah of Assyrian conquest and denouncing social injustice and empty ritual, joined to later exilic and post-exilic material (chapters 40-66) written under different, unnamed hands and announcing return from Babylonian exile, the fall of Babylon, and a renewed and glorified Zion. Many critical scholars further divide the later material into a distinct exilic "Second Isaiah" (40-55) and a post-exilic "Third Isaiah" (56-66), each responding to a different historical moment under the same prophetic name. Its images of a suffering servant who bears the sins of others and a coming universal peace among nations made it, by a wide margin, the most quoted prophetic book in later Jewish and Christian tradition.