Who is speaking in Isa 8:16-18?
These three verses suddenly switch from the third person of the context to the first person, and the commentaries are rife with proposals for who is speaking at this point. There is not even agreement that all of the “I”‘s are spoken by the same person. Some commentators hear two different voices here (Targum, Calvin, Alexander, Young), or even three (Gill, Motyer). Candidates for the speaker include the Lord, Isaiah, or the Messiah.
We’ll approach the question in two parts. First, grammatical analysis shows that the three verses must be spoken by the same person. Second, comparison of different portions of Scripture shows that this person is probably the Messiah. Both parts of the discussion illustrate aspects of our Bible study principles.
A Single Speaker
Our Bible study principle to “Diagram sentences and paragraphs” represents the importance of grammatical analysis. We can apply it to the transition from 8:16 to 8:17, and again from 8:17 to 8:18.
Let’s consider first the transition from 8:16 to 8:17. 8:17 begins with a waw-consecutive and a first person verb, “And I will wait upon the Lord.” Those who understand the speaker to change hear person A giving a command to person B in 8:16, and person B replying in 8:17. Can a response to a command be introduced with waw-consecutive? It’s a simple matter in Bibleworks to search for such a construction in the Westminister morphologically analyzed Hebrew text (WTM). Here’s the query I used:
‘*@v?q1* *5 *@v?v*;2
This query returns 16 instances of the construction. Of these, only four have different speakers in the two verbs: 1 Sam 14:9, 10; Ezek 11:17; 16:52. In all four cases, the verb with waw-consecutive is continuing, not the imperative, but an earlier verb, which is not the case in our text. There is no instance in the Hebrew Bible where someone responds to an imperative using a waw-consecutive.
8:18 begins with the phrase הנה אנכי. A search of WTT shows that this phrase appears 37 times. Whenever the speaker changes (twelve times), the change is marked explicitly by an introductory formula, such as לאמר or ויאמר משהו. Clearly, it would be exceptional for this construction to follow a change of speaker, as well. (Eight out of ten instances of the similar phrase הנה אני are introduced with an introductory formula, and the other two are the same speaker. הנני appears 178 times. I haven’t sorted through them all, but the twelve instances in Genesis and the fifteen instances in Isaiah all follow the same pattern of requiring an introductory formula in the fairly uncommon case that the speaker changes.)
Who is the Speaker?
Now let’s consider the question of who the single speaker of these verses is. Three candidates have been proposed: the Lord, Isaiah, and Messiah. The Bible study principle that comes to the fore here is paying attention to the Bible’s comments on itself.
The Lord is often proposed as the speaker of v. 16, but I have not found any commentator advocating him as the speaker of either of the following verses. 8:17 in particular would not make much sense in the mouth of the Lord. Since all three verses have the same speaker, that speaker cannot be the Lord.
How about Isaiah? This is a very common solution for 8:17,18, going back to the Targum, and is also appropriate for 8:16, which we can understand as the prophet’s prayer to the Lord to care for his disciples. The idea is that the oracle of the Lord, begun in 8:12, ends with 8:15, and Isaiah responds. Thus understood, this passage is a foundation for the notion of a “school of Isaiah.”
The challenge comes in the use of 2:17, 18 in the New Testament in Heb 2:13 alongside Ps 22:23 (ET v. 22) in an argument that the Messiah must be human. It is difficult to see how a statement by Isaiah about his children supports the thesis of the writer to the Hebrews. The argument in Hebrew requires that the first person in Isa 8:16-18 be the voice of the Messiah, who associates himself with the children whom the Lord has given him (John 13:33).
Isaiah 8 already gives us reason to expect messianic references. In 8:12, the Lord exhorts Isaiah and his contemporaries to faithfulness. In the course of this exhortation, at 8:13, the Lord says, “Sanctify the Lord of Hosts.” It is unexpected for the Lord to refer to himself in the third person. He does not hesitate to use the first person in other oracles (cf. 1:2). In the later prophets, such an unexpected change of person is a common sign of a messianic reference. The parade example is the alteration between “me” and “him” in Zech 12:10. So when the Lord goes on to talk in the third person about the stone of stumbling in 8:14, Paul (Rom 9:33) and Peter (1 Pet 2:8) are on good grounds in applying the language to the Messiah.
The broader context in Isaiah also permits us to hear the voice of Messiah breaking in, for the same device characterizes two of the servant songs (49:1-6; 50:4-9).
Still, one may be cautious. Hebrews is written in a polemical environment, in which Jewish believers are under pressure from their former coreligionists to reject their new faith. Wouldn’t their enemies be skeptical about introducing a messianic reference onto these verses, when a reference to Isaiah would fit just as well? Why would the citation be persuasive in its first century context?
The answer lies in a closer consideration of the form of the citation. The writer to the Hebrews is not translating the Hebrew text directly, but quoting from the LXX. If we consider this section in the LXX, we find that 8:16 is construed completely differently, without any first person reference. When the first person voice begins in 8:17, it is introduced with the words, “and he shall say.” This phrase clearly marks the verses as a continuation of what the Lord has been saying since 8:12, and make it impossible to attribute them to Isaiah. In addition, they continue the third-person references of 8:13 and 8:14. “Sanctify the Lord of hosts … and he shall be a sanctuary … and he shall say.” They represent the Lord of hosts as saying, “I will wait patiently for the Lord,” a construct that can only be understood as Messianic.
Methodologically, this argument does not require us to prefer the text of the LXX and emend the MT to include ויאמר at the start of 8:17. We are using the LXX as a commentary, attesting the understanding of the text in the late pre-Christian era. It is entirely possible that the LXX had the same text that we have, and inserted “and he said” to show how they resolved the sudden introduction of the first person speaker, which on any account is abrupt and unexpected.
The LXX rendering of Isa 8:17-18 is thus a strong witness to a pre-Christian messianic interpretation of our text. The application to Christ was not invented by the writer to the Hebrews, but was common among Greek-speaking Jews of the first century. Based on the messianic tendency already evident in the third person references in 8:13,14 and the parallels with the first-person servant songs, Christians need not apologize for hearing the Messiah’s voice in 8:16-18 as well.
