Aster’s comparative method examines statements in the book of Isaiah that reflect a reaction against the ideology of the Assyrian Empire found in texts from Tiglath-pileser III through Sennacherib. Aster believes the ideology of Assyria was to expand the empire of the king so that it corresponds to the god Assur’s worldwide empire. Aster says the “main goal of this book is to express a third level of interaction, which shows that whole passages in Isaiah were constructed as a reaction to Assyrian imperial ideology” (p. 7), and sometimes they do this by subverting an Assyrian motif. A second goal was “to correlate this polemic to the historical events of the period of Assyrian domination of Judah” (p. 7), an objective that seems much more difficult to accomplish with any certainty.

One problem with this approach is that it is difficult to know how much a biblical author and the...

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