It is perhaps hard for those in the New World, whose politics have bounds defined by the modern era, to appreciate the continuum of history that influences Middle East politics.
The Middle East was the centre of civilization while the foundations of the New World, Greece and Rome, were still a muddy backwater.
The 2 millennium old Isaiah scroll, found in 1947, spoke as much about politics in the modern world as the history of the ancient world. Isaiah Ben Amoz had written somewhat more about the modern word than could be dismissed as a guess. Arabs now seek to claim the Dead Sea Scrolls are theirs. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1262339383479&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
This is a sure sign of the scrolls importance to politics now.
If it was not enough that the Bible recorded history from 'the beginning', where the Torah recorded and memorialised the very ancient beginning of Israel, an Arab an argumentative text was promulgated fourteen hundred years ago that disputed what was, even then, ancient history. The politics of the Middle East, and, due to oil dependence, the world, is therefore related to a fourteen hundred old argument about what happened over three thousand years ago!
The Tanakh, including the writing of Isaiah, covers thousands of years, often in a logical progression from one paragraph to another, connecting what was at the time of writing the immediate future, to a far more distant future.
