Rhetoric and Redaction in Trito-Isaiah attempts to integrate the insights of rhetorical criticism into a diachronic study of Isaiah 56-66. Whereas previous, redaction-critical approaches to these chapters have tended to be strongly fissive in their treatment of this material, insights from rhetorical and stylistic criticism are used here to emphasize the elements of unity and coherence in longer sections of text, and to provide additional criteria by which to delimit and structure sections of this poetry. On this basis, a number of new proposals will be presented concerning the structure and extent of the poems in Isaiah 56-59 and 65-66.
The two concluding chapters, building upon the insights from the preceding section, develop a whole series of new suggestions concerning the old problems of the authorship and historical background of Isaiah 56-66.