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Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.9 O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead.

Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past.

For the LORD comes out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no longer cover its slain. (Isa 26:19-21)

This passage has been quoted throughout Western history, having donated its words to prayers and thanksgivings, as well as to titles of plays and poems, to inspire faith and religious vision, and promise salvation to every Abrahamic faith. Out of context, it seems much more clearly a reference to resurrection than it actually is, when read in its confusing and somewhat ambiguous literary context. Furthermore, making the passage’s interpretation even more difficult, this Isaianic passage has not yielded much to historical analysis: nobody agrees when it was written or to what it refers.

Basing their views as much on its subject matter as anything else, many scholars suspect that chapters 24-27 of Isaiah, the so-called “Isaianic Apocalypse,” are from a much later time than the original Isaiah of chapters 1-39.10 Most of Isaiah 1-39 is from the First Temple period, from the eighth century BCE, written by a Judahite prophet during the Syro-Ephraimite War with the specter of a resurgent Assyria. But chapters 24-27 are in many ways like Isaiah 40-66, which discuss the return from exile (538-515 BCE), though they are angrier and more vehement. We call the nameless prophet of Isaiah 40-66 Second Isaiah (also called Deutero-Isaiah) since his prophecies were combined with the earlier one. There is also a third writer in the later parts of Isaiah 56-66, who can be called, conventionally, Third Isaiah.

But no one is sure who is the author of Isaiah 24-27 nor when he lived; no one can even satisfactorily identify the voice with any of the other authors in the book of Isaiah. Identifying the “Isaianic apocalypse” as contemporary with 2 or 3 Isaiah is only a guess made on the basis of the known composite nature of the volume.

Before speculating on the situation which produced the lines of Isaiah 26:19-21, we should analyze what they say in context. The lines are analogous to the Ezekiel 37. As in Ezekiel 37, there is an underlying ambiguity as to whether the prophet meant us to understand a literal resurrection. Unlike Ezekiel 37, where the prophecy is clearly intended to be metaphorical, here it is quite difficult to tell.

On the one hand, the context suggests a symbolic rather than a literal message. Obviously the writer does not mean that the people will literally give birth. It is again the people and their political, social regeneration that is the subject of the passage, just as it is in Ezekiel 37. The prophet points out the previous failures of the people. They have already tried to return to the LORD. But, unlike in Ezekiel 37, their endeavors are in vain. Like Ezekiel 37, the prophet promises that the people will be renewed with the help of the prophetic spirit, provided by the prophet. So far, the message is similar to Ezekiel, except ritual purity is not the issue, and the historical time and the imagery is unstated.

Unlike Ezekiel 37, whether or not we are dealing with a metaphor or the literal resurrection, the exact event that the prophet describes is obscure. The prophet may in fact be saying that the righteous dead will be the agents of God’s punishment, that the righteous will arise to punish the sinners. If so, the prophet was using Canaanite language in a very ironic way, to say the dead will punish God’s enemies who have ignored His words.

If I had to guess (and I do have to guess, since there are no completely convincing previous analyses of the passage for me to rely on), I would say that the author is actually 1 Isaiah,