Book of Isaiah 6-30

Book of Isaiah begins to really pick up with the sixth chapter.  He becomes the latest biblical personality to say "Here I am!" to God, whom he meets here.  God says Israel must be reduced to a stump.  Back into smiting mode!

7 is the the Immanuel ("God is with us") prophecy.

9 contains famous prophetic words such as, "and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."  11 contains more of that, such as, "There will come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse."  If you take the two instances of "stump" very literally, you add up Jesus as the last of the true Jews, which gave birth to Christianity.  Some more extrapolating I'll do here is that according to the Bible, the Jews were necessarily bad every time bad things happened to them.  If they were in a bad position, it necessarily follows that they were being bad.  I'm not saying these are actual correlations, but that this is what the Bible says, repeatedly.  Going so far as the time of Jesus, when Jews were under the yoke of Romans, would it not follow that they were being bad, or that it would not be a bad thing to say Jews at that time were being bad, and that whatever the New Testament has to say about their involvement in the Crucifixion does not condemn all Jews but rather specifically Jews that by definition were being bad?  Of course, by the same logic, you'd have to assume Jews were very bad indeed at the time of the Holocaust.  And by that logic we can perhaps put aside the direct correlations of bad times and bad behavior.  To be clear, I'm saying that the Holocaust is the most direct contradiction of biblical logic.  I'm saying if you need a reason to not take everything in the Bible literally and not look like a very bad person yourself, that would be a good place to start, and most of us in the 21st century are hopefully willing to agree with that.

Good, so we'll move on.

14 includes the classic tale of the fall of Lucifer, "Day Star, son of Dawn."  However, the rest of what Isaiah has to say about him certainly doesn't correlate with everything else we say about Satan now.  So that's more of how things develop.

22: "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."  This just happens to remind me of the movie 300, one of the many things Gerard Butler's Leonidas bellows: "Spartans!  Ready your breakfast and eat hearty.  For tonight, we dine in hell!"

In 27 Leviathan is described as a serpent.  I think I'm not alone in always assuming the name referred to whales.  Either way, hardly the first time something in the Bible is mistaken for one of those..."And he will slay the dragon that is in the sea."  Dragon that's in the sea?  I had no idea about that either!

In 30 both fire and brimstone are referenced in relation to punishment.  And they both become staples of old-timey (and scary!) preachers from the 19th century...