Landy F. The Ghostly Prelude to Deutero-Isaiah

Biblical Interpretation 14, 332-363, 2006.The article is a close reading of Isa. 40:1-11, which focuses on its function as a prologue to Deutero-Isaiah, and hence distinguished by its promise of a new beginning, and on its dependence on, and reversal of, the past, the spectral voices it seeks to repatriate. The complexities of the passage, and hence of the book as a whole, require attention to the detail of each its parts, but also to its fragmentariness, as it seeks to reconstruct a fractured reality.