"You have heard what the kings of Assyria have done"

Theodore Lewis

pp. 75-100

in: Raymond Cohen, Raymond Westbrook (eds), Isaiah's vision of peace in biblical and modern international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

Our charge is to evaluate Isaiah's rhetoric in the light of reality. Our task is to understand Isaiah's 'swords into plowshares"⁵ disarmament speech neither as it reads at the UN headquarters in New York City nor as it is incarnated on the nearby bronze sculpture by Evgeniy Vuchetich, but rather in Isaiah's Iron Age context as he was living in the Realpolitik world of the ancient Near East. Having done so, we may then consider whether Isaiah's words are as visionary for today's world as they were for his.