The commentator Alec Motyer calls the first 2/3 (chapters 1-37) of Isaiah “The Book of the King”. My Sunday School teacher suggests it can be related as “a tale of two kings”: Ahaz and Hezekiah, who were successive kings of Judah, the Southern kingdom. Ahaz was king of Judah (the Southern Kingdom) from 735 BC to 715 BC; Hezekiah, his son, was king from 715 BC to 686 BC.
These individuals and events are confirmed by sources outside of Scripture, by the way. As Kenneth Kitchen relates in his masterful “On the Reliability of the Old Testament”:
Nature of the Sources: The sources themselves show clear affinities in the kind of records used. Ancient kingdoms (large and small) did maintain running records (daybooks, etc.), exactly as were the annals (or daybooks) of Israel and Judah that are regularly cited as references by Kings and Chronicles. … What has survived in the rest of the ancient Near East, as in Kings and Chronicles, is a series of special interest works that have drawn upon the running records… (and he lists them, pg 63, emphasis in original).
During those days, the middle east was a cauldron of anxiety, as kingdoms made war on other kingdoms, and kings made alliances based on who they thought was going to be “the winner” in the various struggles over time. Of course, all of these changed over time, and the records of these kings and their emissaries is long and complicated.
The message of Isaiah to these kings of Judah was, “who are you going to trust? Are you going to trust in foreign kings and alliances? Or are you going to trust me?”
Here is how Ahaz handled things:
