The first thirty-nine chapters of the Book of Isaiah are regarded as coming from the hand of Isaiah ben Amoz. He wrote before the conquest of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, and the exile of its population to Babylon. That catastrophe befell Jerusalem in the year 586 before the Christian Era. Chapter forty marks the beginning of the work of an anonymous prophet who wrote in the period when the Persian King Cyrus defeated the last Babylonian ruler, King Nabonidus, in the year 539.[1] Cyrus allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem. Second Isaiah begins with these words: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.”[2]
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