Isaiah 45:7 has God say 'I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil, I the LORD do all these things' — apparently making God the direct author of evil.

The verb pair matters: yatsar ('form') is used of light, bara ('create,' the strong term reserved elsewhere almost exclusively for God's sovereign originating acts, cf. Gen 1:1) is used of both darkness and ra. But the noun ra (רַע) has a wide Hebrew semantic range covering calamity/disaster/misfortune as well as moral wickedness (BDB, HALOT); context, not root meaning, decides — compare Amos 3:6, 'shall there be ra in a city and Yahweh hath not done it?', where ra plainly means disaster/judgment, not the citizens' sin. Isaiah 45:7 is a merism (shalom/ra as an inclusive opposite pair, matching light/darkness), and its context is decisive: this is the Cyrus oracle (45:1-7), naming a Persian king generations in advance as Yahweh's instrument, addressed to a people about to live under Persian rule and encounter Zoroastrian dualism — Ahura Mazda (light, order, good) locked in eternal combat with Angra Mainyu/Ahriman (darkness, evil), two co-equal, competing ultimate principles. Isaiah 45:5-7 is a direct polemic against exactly this dualism: 'I am the LORD, and there is none else... that they may know... there is none beside me' — the claim is monotheistic sovereignty over the whole cosmos, including calamity and judgment, denying any independent evil deity/principle rivaling Yahweh — not an assertion that God is the moral author of sin. It should be conceded honestly that the KJV's English 'evil' (1611, when the word's semantic field covered 'harm/misfortune' as readily as 'wickedness,' as in 'deliver us from evil') actively misleads modern readers; modern translations (NASB, ESV, NIV) render ra here as 'calamity/disaster/woe' precisely to correct this false impression — a real translation-history issue, not a dodge.

Classical theism's privation theory of evil (Augustine, Aquinas: evil is not a positive substance but a corruption or absence of a due good) is entirely compatible with, and clarified by, Isaiah 45:7's actual claim: Yahweh sovereignly ordains and permits calamity/judgment as an act of moral governance — as a just judge 'creates' a sentence without being the author of the crime punished — while moral evil itself remains rooted in creaturely will, exactly as Isaiah 1-39 repeatedly grounds the coming ra of chapter 45 in Israel's own sin.