No book of the Old Testament speaks of God as one who forms and enacts plans (עצה, מעשׂה, etc.) in the world as much as Isaiah. Such theologically pregnant language, of course, has inspired a variety of constructs. Some equate references to Yhwh’s עצה with the notion of an eternal divine decree that unfolds indelibly in history (e.g. E. Young, J. Alexander) or the fruit of an incipiently deterministic outlook that budded among certain Yehudite (i.e., post-exilic) scribal groups (e.g. W. Werner, B. Scheuer). Another stream of thought detects discrepant accounts of divine and human agency in the book (e.g. J. Berlinerblau), explaning the co-existence of deterministic and non-deterministic theologies in psychological and social terms. Yet a third group of scholars (e.g. H. Wildberger, T. Mettinger) propounds that Isaiah’s rhetoric about divine and human plans reflects a dialectic understanding of history.
The existence of such variegated explanations invites further reflection. What is the theological freight of references to Yhwh’s עצה in the Book of Isaiah? In pursuit of this question, this paper draws attention to the frame-semantic import of the noun עצה, observes plan-related divine portraits, and considers the role of human responses to God’s plan(s) in Isaiah. The investigation shows that the Book of Isaiah offers a complex account of history that eludes both deterministic and libertarian paradigms. Isaianic plan texts portray a regal God who demolishes all opposition to his program for Zion, Israel, and the nations, but who also accounts for human attitudes and actions—proper and improper—in the process. This biblical-theological appraisal invites more nuanced dogmatic/systematic characterizations of providence in Isaiah and the Hebrew Bible as a whole.
(This paper is a byproduct of my recently defended dissertation.)