Old Testament Plagiarism?

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I received the following question by regular email. I thought it would be advisable t post it for others as well:


Hi Steve,
What is your answer and how should I respond to the accusation of plagiarism between 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37?

Thanks
Travis

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Hi Travis,

Plagiarism is when one author dishonestly seeks to pass off somebody else's work as his own, in order to take credit for it as original. This is an unethical practice.

There is no reason to believe that it was ever considered to be unethical for an ancient historian (who was not writing in order to make money or to make a name for himself) to quote his sources without attribution—especially if his source was well-known to all his readers.

It is believed that Jeremiah wrote the books of Kings. He lived about a hundred years after Isaiah. If the material was originally written by Isaiah—a very famous prophet of a previous century—then Jeremiah's "lifting" of certain passages from that well-known work and using them as the source of his recounting of Judah's history would not have any of the connotations of the modern practice of plagiarism.

Isaiah's work was famous enough to allow even another local contemporary prophet (Micah) to essentially quote one of his oracles without attribution (compare Isa.2:2-4 with Micah 4:1-3). It never occurred to the Jews, who read and preserved both works, to accuse Micah of plagiarism.

When some piece of literature has become so famous in the culture that it is readily recognized by most ordinary people, it is not unethical (nor unusual) for others to quote from it without mentioning its original author. Lines from Shakespeare, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Bible are often cited in this manner without attribution in our culture. There is every reason to believe that the Jews who read the books of Kings were equally familiar of Isaiah's work.

That historians, as a matter of course, must borrow from earlier sources is a given, and all scholars believe that the biblical historians (like all other historians) had sources for much of their material. Some of those sources have been lost, but some (like Isaiah) still exist, allowing us to identify the source of the information...in this case, a very reliable one.