Introduction and Survey of Scholarship

In this introductory chapter, a hypothesis is put forward that a series of programmatic additions were made to the oracles against the nations in Isa 13-23 by the same circle of writers who were responsible for putting together chs 40-55 in the late-exilic period. Various views on the formation of chs 13-23 are surveyed because many critics suspect that there was a merger between a series of oracles belonging to the Isaiah tradition and an extra-Isaianic collection of oracles against the nations sometime in the post-exilic period – a theory that a priori negates the present study’s proposal. There are, however, not a few who prefer to envisage a more gradual growth of materials found in chs 13-23 and it is such an approach that this study adopts and attempts to build on.