Places the four gospels in the scriptural environment of Israel’s story. Taking each gospel in turn, Hays and Blumhofer show that the scriptures constitute the gospels’ ‘generative milieu’. The stories about Jesus gain their full intelligibility within the context of the textual tradition and the larger scriptural story of God’s dealings with Israel.

Images of revivification are attested widely and deeply in ancient Near Eastern history, and such images are often used for political restoration. In the Amarna Letters, and in Hittite and Neo-Assyrian letters, vassals who have been saved by the emperor regularly write and describe themselves as dead men who have been brought back to life; the same enduring motif is also found in the Cyrus Cylinder. This royal role was in some way a reflection of divine life-giving, as many deities, from Marduk to Baal, were said to raise the dead. One of the standard roles of the king and gods in the ancient Near East was as a giver or restorer of life.

Therefore, biblical passages that deploy the same images offer no inherent grounds for late dating. Revivification imagery is not, in other words, a basis on which to date a passage to a late period. The passages describing Yhwh’s power over death in Isa 25:7-8 and 26:19 lack the literary cohesiveness and detail found in Ezek 37:1–14, as well as the references to sectarian differences and eternal fates found in Dan 12. The less developed Isaiah passages should be considered earlier.

This chapter has demonstrated that both gods and human kings were frequently portrayed as celebrating their triumphs with feasting, as a further marker of their sovereignty. The portrayals of divine and human victory, far from being mutually exclusive, were typically synonymous. But not every banquet reflected historical victories; some were aspirational, and some of the aspirations failed. The social function of the victory banquet motif in Isa 24–27 was to summon the people of the former Northern Kingdom to unite themselves to Judah in an enlarged Israel. Josiah’s vision failed in this respect; the political narrative he championed never became reality. As discussed in this chapter and the previous one, however, later scribes appear to have wrestled with and partly salvaged its power.

This book presents a new understanding of the composition of Isa 24–27. Originally, these chapters celebrated the crumbling of the Neo-Assyrian empire as an act of divine deliverance and exhorted the former Northern Kingdom to reunite itself with Judah at a moment when that was a plausible choice for the first time in centuries. The withdrawal of Neo-Assyrian forces from the Levant in the 620s would have left the door open for new political ideas, and it would have been quite natural for a Davidic monarch like Josiah to imagine reunifying the kingdoms.

There are multiple indications within the Bible itself that Josiah took an interest in the north; these form a foundation for the argument that Isa 24–27 was an overture by Josiah to inhabitants of the former Israelite kingdom. It has demonstrated the continuing consensus that the basic reports of Josiah’s reforming activities in Bethel were more or less contemporaneous with his reign, which suggests that Judah had increased freedom to operate in the former Northern Kingdom. Yet it has also observed that there is no indication in the Bible or in archaeological findings that Josiah ever conquered or ruled the bulk of the north. He had ambitions, but they went unfulfilled – indeed, they may have cost him his life when Egypt sensed them. From Egypt’s point of view, Judah seems to have been more or less free to inhabit its rocky hill country, but an interest in the more desirable lands farther north or west would not have been well received.

Isa 24–27 is lacking many of the generic components that characterize apocalypses, but early assessments of it as such have continued to exercise influence. Eschatological imagery of widespread destruction not only is shared with other early biblical texts such as Zephaniah and Amos but also is part of a widespread ANE tradition of divine destruction of the natural order. There is no reason to suppose that images of the divine disruption of the natural order are characteristic of a late period.

Such imagery of widespread disorder was commonly used as a precursor to the reimposition of order by a righteous king. In other words, the rhetoric of chaos was a form of royal propaganda arguing that a current ruler had brought about (or would bring about) the flourishing of his land, as he was supposed to do. As for why a supposedly royal, propagandistic text does not mention the king. It has pointed out that a similar text, the Potter’s Oracle, can be empirically shown to have started out as political propaganda and to have been stripped of its original historical context so that it came to appear apocalyptic in a similar way to Isa 24–27.