In “The Formation of the Book of Isaiah: Foundations and Current Issues,” Marvin A. Sweeney analyzes the history of scholarship about the editorial processes that gave rise to the Hebrew text as we have it. As scholars have long done, he takes Bernhard Duhm’s nineteenth-century commentary as a starting point, but then shows the myriad ways in which more recent scholars have challenged his presuppositions and greatly improved on his findings. In the process, he identifies many of the themes and features in the book that have led him and other interpreters to perceive a redactional shaping of the book in four major phases—broadly one per century in the eighth through fifth centuries bce. Sweeney’s most significant contributions to the study of Isaiah, reflected here, have been his demonstration of the Davidic covenant in the final form of the book and his refinement of our understanding of the Josianic layer from the late seventh century bce.

Lucas L. Schulte analyzes “The Book of Isaiah in the Persian Period.” This was a crucial time in the book’s overall development. He shows how Persian emperors were able to enlist scribal elites in various subject nations and win their support. The well-known Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon may be the most prominent example, but Isa 40–66 also reflects its own interpretation of this international Persian Royal Propaganda Model. This chapter also shows how the later parts of the book of Isaiah interacted with religious and sociopolitical issues in the postexilic Persian province, comparing and contrasting it with the viewpoints of Ezra and Nehemiah in particular.

The opening chapter presents an overview of some of the historical-critical issues that shape a theological reading of the text. A better understanding of literary, historical, and social issues provides an interpretive control for theological articulation.

This chapter proposes that Louis Zukofsky’s ongoing work on his long poem “A” was animated by a strong investment in restoring a sense of language’s historical and material situatedness – its social ontology – as a means of combatting what Zukofsky and other contemporary writers saw as its vulgarization within an emerging commodity culture. I argue that in the eighth and ninth sections of “A,” written between mid 1935 and early 1940, Zukofsky equates labor and language, revealing both to be historically contingent and socially produced. I begin the chapter by returning to the debate between Zukofsky and Ezra Pound over the concept of the commodity to reveal an under-discussed aspect of their quarrel, namely its basis in the two poets’ attitudes concerning language’s relation to materiality. I then move on to align the treatment of the commodity in “A”-8 and (the first half of) “A”-9, an often-discussed aspect of these sections, with their seldom noted but equally important thematization of language. Focusing on the equivalences the poem draws between labor and language, I claim that the project of restoring both to their concrete historical conditions of social production furnishes a key to reading Zukofsky’s long poem.

What happens to productive continence after the turn of the twentieth century? The medical profession ceased to mention it as belief in the dangers of sex (and indeed, many of its actual risks) began to wane; but it never quite disappeared from the popular imagination. The Conclusion asks in what further directions the book’s work could be taken and proposes a particular relevance to studies of artistic ethics outside of Decadent literature, for instance, in the work of Henry James and Ezra Pound. It suggests that a similar approach to other texts and discourses can complicate and revitalize our approach to Victorian sexuality.

After an introduction (§5.1), this chapter investigates the uses of metaphorical seed language in the Hebrew scriptures (§5.2), Greco-Roman Judaism (§5.3), the New Testament (§5.4), and finally 1 Peter (§5.5). In the Hebrew scriptures, seed language is completely human, though invested with divine promise. This chapter will then look at how the concept of “holy seed” was democratized to all Israel in Ezra and Jubilees (§5.2.4 - 3.3.1). This democratization went hand in hand with the strong concern for Israel’s corporate holiness. The New Testament (§5.4) usage of the seed idiom reflects contemporary Jewish usage. However, a new question was on the table for early Christians: how were Gentiles to be brought into the people of God and included as Abraham’s seed? Philo seems to be the first Jew to actively discuss divine seed, but with Stoic influences (§5.3.2). Divine seed is rare in the New Testament (§5.4). Despite claims (cf. Jn 3:5, 1 Jn 3:9), 1 Peter is the only New Testament text to discuss seed endowed with divine qualities that generates believers (§5.5). This chapter examines 1 Peter’s continuity with tradition, but also its innovation.