The life of St Isaiah
His call to prophetic service came in the reign of King Uzziah, through a vision in which he saw the Lord seated on a high throne, surrounded by six-winged seraphim; one of them touched his mouth with a live coal taken from the altar, a sign that his guilt was lifted and he was made fit to speak on God's behalf. From that moment Isaiah prophesied for some sixty years, across the reigns of four further kings of Judah.
His book, running to sixty-six chapters, has long been counted first among the writings of the greater prophets, prized above the rest for the reach and beauty of its language. Scripture itself says nothing of how his life ended, but a tradition preserved outside the Bible, in both Jewish and early Christian sources, holds that he was put to death by being sawn in two during the reign of the wicked King Manasseh, after hiding from his pursuers inside a tree; some later readers have connected a phrase in the Letter to the Hebrews about the righteous being sawn asunder to this same account, though the biblical text itself never names him, and the connection remains one of tradition rather than certainty.
