given to a theme that will hold center stage in conjunction with God’s more specific attention to “Judah and Jerusalem” (1:1; 2:1) or even the vineyard of Israel more broadly conceived (5:1). That theme—of God’s sovereignty over the nations of the earth, over Assyria and Babylon and finally Persia—extends beyond chapters 13–27 to take in the fuller presentation of chapters 40–55 and the Book of Isaiah as a whole. This is surely the other reason why the Book of Isaiah is so frequently cited in the
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