THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE
EDITED BY THE REV.
SIR W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
Editor of "The Expositor," etc.
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH
BY THE REV.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A.
VOLUME 1.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON. MCMX
THE
BOOK OF ISAIAH
BY THE REV.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A., D.D.
Professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College, Glasgow
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.—ISAIAH I.-XXXIX.
TWENTIETH EDITION
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON. MCMX
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury.
As the following Exposition of the Book of Isaiah does not observe the canonical arrangement of the chapters, a short introduction is necessary upon the plan which has been adopted.
The size and the many obscurities of the Book
of Isaiah have limited the common use of it in the
English tongue to single conspicuous passages, the
very brilliance of which has cast their context and
original circumstance into deeper shade. The intensity
of the gratitude with which men have seized upon
the more evangelical passages of Isaiah, as well as the
attention which apologists for Christianity have too
partially paid to his intimations of the Messiah, has
confirmed the neglect of the rest of the Book. But we
might as well expect to receive an adequate conception
of a great statesman's policy from the epigrams and
perorations of his speeches as to appreciate the message,
which God has sent to the world through the
Book of Isaiah, from a few lectures on isolated, and
often dislocated, texts. No book of the Bible is less
susceptible of treatment apart from the history out of
which it sprang than the Book of Isaiah; and it may
be added, that in the Old Testament at least there
is none which, when set in its original circumstance
I have, therefore, designed an arrangement which embraces all the prophecies, but treats them in chronological order. I will endeavour to render their contents in terms which appeal to the modern conscience; but, in order to be successful, such an endeavour presupposes the exposition of them in relation to the history which gave them birth. In these volumes, therefore, narrative and historical exposition will take precedence of practical application.
Every one knows that the Book of Isaiah breaks into two parts between chaps. xxxix. and xl. Vol. I. of this Exposition covers chaps. i.-xxxix. Vol. II. will treat of chaps. xl.-lxvi. Again, within chaps. i.-xxxix. another division is apparent. The most of these chapters evidently bear upon events within Isaiah's own career, but some imply historical circumstances that did not arise till long after he had passed away. Of the five books into which I have divided Vol. I., the first four contain the prophecies relating to Isaiah's time (740-701 B.C.), and the fifth the prophecies which refer to later events (chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23; xxiv.-xxvii.; xxxiv.; xxxv.).
The prophecies, whose subjects fall within Isaiah's
times, I have taken in chronological order, with one
exception. This exception is chap. i., which, although
it published near the end of the prophet's life, I
treat of first, because, from its position as well as its
Of course, any chronological arrangement of Isaiah's prophecies must be largely provisional. Only some of the chapters are fixed to dates past possibility of doubt. The Assyriology which has helped us with these must yield further results before the controversies can be settled that exist with regard to the rest. I have explained in the course of the Exposition my reasons for the order which I have followed, and need only say here that I am still more uncertain about the generally received dates of chaps x. 5-xi., xvii. 12-14 and xxxii. The religious problems, however, were so much the same during the whole of Isaiah's career that uncertainties of date, if they are confined to the limits of that career, make little difference to the exposition of the book.
Isaiah's doctrines, being so closely connected with the life of his day, come up for statement at many points of the narrative, in which this Exposition chiefly consists. But here and there I have inserted chapters dealing summarily with more important topics, such as The World in Isaiah's Day; The Messiah; Isaiah's Power of Prediction, with its evidence on the character of Inspiration; and the question, Had Isaiah a Gospel for the Individual? A short index will guide the student to Isaiah's teaching on other important points of theology and life, such as holiness, forgiveness, monotheism, immortality, the Holy Spirit, etc.
Treating Isaiah's prophecies chronologically as I
I may state that this Exposition is based upon a close study of the Hebrew text of Isaiah, and that the translations are throughout my own, except in one or two cases where I have quoted from the revised English version.
With regard to the Revised Version of Isaiah, which
I have had opportunities of thoroughly testing, I would
like to say that my sense of the immense service which
it renders to English readers of the Bible is only exceeded
by my wonder that the Revisers have not gone
just a very little farther, and adopted one or two simple
contrivances which are in the line of their own improvements
and would have greatly increased our
I have not thought it necessary to discuss the question of the chronology of the period. This has been done so often and so recently. See Robertson Smith's Prophets of Israel, pp. 145, 402, 413, Driver's Isaiah, p. 12, or any good commentary.
I append a chronological table, and an index to the canonical chapters will be found before the index of subjects. The publishers have added a map of Isaiah's world in illustration of chap. v.
B.C.
745. Tiglath-pileser II. ascends the Assyrian Throne.
740. Uzziah dies. Jotham becomes sole King of Judah. Isaiah's
Inaugural Vision (
735. Jotham dies. Ahaz succeeds. League of Syria and Northern Israel against Judah.
734-732. Syrian Campaign of Tiglath-pileser II. Siege and Capture
of Damascus. Invasion of Israel. Captivity of Zebulon,
Naphtali and Galilee (
727. Salmanassar IV. succeeds Tiglath-pileser II. Hezekiah succeeds Ahaz (or in 725?).
725. Salmanassar marches on Syria.
722 or 721. Sargon succeeds Salmanassar. Capture of Samaria.
Captivity of all Northern Israel.
720 or 719. Sargon defeats Egypt at Rafia.
711. Sargon invades Syria (
709. Sargon takes Babylon from Merodach-baladan.
705. Murder of Sargon. Sennacherib succeeds.
701. Sennacherib invades Syria. Capture of Coast Towns. Siege of Ekron and Battle of Eltekeh. Invasion of Judah. Submission of Hezekiah. Jerusalem spared. Return of Assyrians with the Rabshakeh to Jerusalem, while Sennacherib's Army marches on Egypt. Disaster to Sennacherib's Army near Pelusium. Disappearance of Assyrians from before Jerusalem—all happening in this order.
697 or 696. Death of Hezekiah. Manasseh succeeds.
681. Death of Sennacherib.
607. Fall of Nineveh and Assyria. Babylon supreme. Jeremiah.
599. First Deportation of Jews to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar.
588. Jerusalem destroyed. Second Deportation of Jews.
538. Cyrus captures Babylon. First Return of Jewish Exiles, under Zerubbabel, happens soon after.
458. Second Return of Jewish Exiles, under Ezra.
727 B.C.
ISAIAH: | i. The Preface. |
" | ii.-iv. 740-735 B.C. |
" | v., ix. 8-x. 4. 735 B.C. |
" | vi. About 735 B.C. |
" | vii.-ix. 7. 734-732 B.C. |
Isaiah i.—His General Preface.
See p. 343.
Isaiah's preface is in the form of a Trial or Assize.
Ewald calls it "The Great Arraignment." There are
all the actors in a judicial process. It is a Crown case,
and God is at once Plaintiff and Judge. He delivers
both the Complaint in the beginning (vv. 2, 3) and
the Sentence in the end. The Assessors are Heaven
and Earth, whom the Lord's herald invokes to hear the
Lord's plea (ver. 2). The people of Judah are the
Defendants. The charge against them is one of brutish,
ingrate stupidity, breaking out into rebellion. The
Witness is the prophet himself, whose evidence on the
guilt of his people consists in recounting the misery
that has overtaken their land (vv. 4-9), along with their
civic injustice and social cruelty—sins of the upper and
ruling classes (vv. 10, 17, 21-23). The people's Plea-in-defence,
laborious worship and multiplied sacrifice,
is repelled and exposed (vv. 10-17). And the Trial
is concluded—Come now, let us bring our reasoning
That is the plan of the chapter—a Trial at Law. Though it disappears under the exceeding weight of thought the prophet builds upon it, do not let us pass hurriedly from it, as if it were only a scaffolding.
That God should argue at all is the magnificent truth on which our attention must fasten, before we inquire what the argument is about. God reasons with man—that is the first article of religion according to Isaiah. Revelation is not magical, but rational and moral. Religion is reasonable intercourse between one intelligent Being and another. God works upon man first through conscience.
Over against the prophetic view of religion sprawls
and reeks in this same chapter the popular—religion as
smoky sacrifice, assiduous worship, and ritual. The
people to whom the chapter was addressed were not
idolaters. At least those to whom the first twenty-three verses were
addressed. There is distinct blame of worshipping in the groves of
Asherah in the appended oracle (vv. 24-31), which is proof that this
oracle was given at an earlier period than the rest of the chapter—a
fair instance of the very great difficulty we have in determining the
dates of the various prophecies of Isaiah.
But the pressure and stimulus of the prophecy lie in this, that although the people have silenced conscience and are steeped in a stupidity worse than ox or ass, God will not leave them alone. He forces Himself upon them; He compels them to think. In the order and calmness of nature (ver. 2), apart from catastrophe nor seeking to influence by any miracle, God speaks to men by the reasonable words of His prophet. Before He will publish salvation or intimate disaster He must rouse and startle conscience. His controversy precedes alike His peace and His judgements. An awakened conscience is His prophet's first demand. Before religion can be prayer, or sacrifice, or any acceptable worship, it must be a reasoning together with God.
That is what mean the arrival of the Lord, and the
opening of the assize, and the call to know and consider. Les Misérables: "a Tempest in a Brain."
For even religion and religiousness, the common
man's commonest refuge from conscience—not only
in Isaiah's time—cannot exempt from this writ.
Would we be judged by our moments of worship,
by our temple-treading, which is Hebrew for church-going,
by the wealth of our sacrifice, by our
ecclesiastical position? This chapter drags us out
before the austerity and incorruptibleness of Nature.
The assessors of the Lord are not the Temple nor the
Law, but Heaven and Earth—not ecclesiastical conventions,
but the grand moral fundamentals of the universe,
What is this questioning nothing holds away, nothing stills, and nothing wears out? It is the voice of God Himself, and its insistence is therefore as irresistible as its effect is universal. That is not mere rhetoric which opens the Lord's controversy: Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken. All the world changes to the man in whom conscience lifts up her voice, and to the guilty Nature seems attentive and aware. Conscience compels heaven and earth to act as her assessors, because she is the voice, and they the creatures, of God. This leads us to emphasize another feature of the prophecy.
We have called this chapter a trial-at-law; but
it is far more a personal than a legal controversy; of
the formally forensic there is very little about it. Some
But though the living God is Isaiah's one explanation
of conscience, it is God in two aspects,
the moral effects of which are opposite, yet complementary.
In conscience men are defective by forgetting
either the sublime or the practical, but Isaiah's strength
is to do justice to both. With him God is first the
infinitely High, and then equally the infinitely Near.
The Lord is exalted in righteousness! yes, and sublimely
above the people's vulgar identifications of His will with
their own safety and success, but likewise concerned
with every detail of their politics and social behaviour,
This doctrine, that God has an interest in every
detail of practical life and will argue it out with
men, led Isaiah to a revelation of God quite peculiar
to himself. For the Psalmist it is enough that his
soul come to God, the living God. It is enough for
other prophets to awe the hearts of their generations
by revealing the Holy One; but Isaiah, with his intensely
practical genius, and sorely tried by the stupid
inconsistency of his people, bends himself to make
them understand that God is at least a reasonable
Being. Do not, his constant cry is, and he puts it
sometimes in almost as many words—do not act as
if there were a Fool on the throne of the universe,
which you virtually do when you take these meaningless
To these two great articles of conscience, however—God
is high and God is near—the Bible adds a greater
third, God is Love. This is the uniqueness and glory
of the Bible's interpretation of conscience. Other
writings may equal it in enforcing the sovereignty and
detailing the minutely practical bearings of conscience:
the Bible alone tells man how much of conscience is
nothing but God's love. It is a doctrine as plainly
laid down as the doctrine about chastisement, though
not half so much recognised—Whom the Lord loveth
He chasteneth. What is true of the material pains and
penalties of life is equally true of the inward convictions,
frets, threats and fears, which will not leave stupid man
alone. To men with their obscure sense of shame, and
restlessness, and servitude to sin the Bible plainly says,
"You are able to sin because you have turned your
back to the love of God; you are unhappy because you
do not take that love to your heart; the bitterness of
your remorse is that it is love against which you are
But when that understanding of conscience breaks
out in a sinner's heart forgiveness cannot be far away.
Certainly penitence is at hand. And therefore, because
of all books the Bible is the only one which interprets
conscience as the love of God, so is it the only one that
can combine His pardon with His reproach, and as
Isaiah now does in a single verse, proclaim His free
forgiveness as the conclusion of His bitter quarrel.
Come, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the
Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white
as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be
as wool. Our version, Come, and let us reason together,
gives no meaning here. So plain an offer of pardon is
not reasoning together; it is bringing reasoning to an
end; it is the settlement of a dispute that has been in
progress. Therefore we translate, with Mr. Cheyne, Let
us bring our reasoning to an end. And how pardon can
be the end and logical conclusion of conscience is clear
to us, who have seen how much of conscience is love,
But the prophet does not leave conscience alone with its personal and inward results. He rouses it to its social applications. The sins with which the Jews are charged in this charge of the Lord are public sins. The whole people is indicted, but it is the judges, princes and counsellors who are denounced. Judah's disasters, which she seeks to meet by worship, are due to civic faults, bribery, corruption of justice, indifference to the rights of the poor and the friendless. Conscience with Isaiah is not what it is with so much of the religion of to-day, a cul de sac, into which the Lord chases a man and shuts him up to Himself, but it is a thoroughfare by which the Lord drives the man out upon the world and its manifold need of him. There is little dissection and less study of individual character with Isaiah. He has no time for it. Life is too much about him, and his God too much interested in life. What may be called the more personal sins—drunkenness, vanity of dress, thoughtlessness, want of faith in God and patience to wait for Him—are to Isaiah more social than individual symptoms, and it is for their public and political effects that he mentions them. Forgiveness is no end in itself, but the opportunity of social service; not a sanctuary in which Isaiah leaves men to sing its praises or form doctrines of it, but a gateway through which he leads God's people upon the world with the cry that rises from him here: Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.
Before we pass from this form in which Isaiah
figures religion we must deal with a suggestion it
raises. No modern mind can come into this ancient
A temper of this kind, though not strange to the Old
Testament, lies beyond the horizon of Isaiah. The
only challenge of the Almighty which in any of his prophecies
he reports as rising from his own countrymen is
the bravado of certain drunkards (chaps. v. and xxviii.).
Here and elsewhere it is the very opposite temper from
honest doubt which he indicts—the temper that does
not know, that does not consider. Ritualism and sensualism
are to Isaiah equally false, because equally
unthinking. The formalist and the fleshly he classes
together, because of their stupidity. What does it
matter whether a man's conscience and intellect be
stifled in his own fat or under the clothes with which
he dresses himself? They are stifled, and that is the
main thing. To the formalist Isaiah says, Israel doth
not know, my people doth not consider; to the fleshly
(chap. v.), My people are gone into captivity for want of
knowledge. But knowing and considering are just that
of which doubt, in its modern sense, is the abundance,
and not the defect. The mobility of mind, the curiosity,
the moral sensitiveness, the hunger that is not satisfied
with the chaff of formal and unreal answers, the spirit
to find out truth for one's self, wrestling with God—this
is the very temper Isaiah would have welcomed in a
Merely intellectual scepticism, however, is not within Isaiah's horizon. He would never have employed (nor would any other prophet) our modern habits of doubt, except as he employs these intellectual terms, to know and to consider—viz., as instruments of moral search and conviction. Had he lived now he would have been found among those few great prophets who use the resources of the human intellect to expose the moral state of humanity; who, like Shakespeare and Hugo, turn man's detective and reflective processes upon his own conduct; who make himself stand at the bar of his conscience. And truly to have doubt of everything in heaven and earth, and never to doubt one's self, is to be guilty of as stiff and stupid a piece of self-righteousness as the religious formalists whom Isaiah exposes. But the moral of the chapter is plainly what we have shown it to be, that a man cannot stifle doubt and debate about his own heart or treatment of God; whatever else he thinks about and judges, he cannot help judging himself.
Note on the Place of Nature in the Argument of the
Lord.—The office which the Bible assigns to Nature
in the controversy of God with man is fourfold—Assessor,
Witness, Man's Fellow-Convict, and Doomster
or Executioner. Taking these backward:—1. Scripture
Isaiah ii.-iv. (740-735 B.C.).
For more than half a century the kingdom of Judah,
under two powerful and righteous monarchs, had enjoyed
the greatest prosperity. Uzziah strengthened
the borders, extended the supremacy and vastly increased
the resources of his little State, which, it is
well to remember, was in its own size not larger than
three average Scottish counties. He won back for
Judah the port of Elath on the Red Sea, built a navy,
and restored the commerce with the far East, which
Solomon began. He overcame, in battle or by the
mere terror of his name, the neighbouring nations—the
Philistines that dwelt in cities, and the wandering tribes
of desert Arabs. The Ammonites brought him gifts.
With the wealth, which the East by tribute or by
commerce poured into his little principality, Uzziah
fortified his borders and his capital, undertook large
works of husbandry and irrigation, organized a powerful
standing army, and supplied it with a siege artillery
capable of slinging arrows and stones. His name
spread far abroad, for he was marvellously helped till he
was strong. His son Jotham (740-735 B.C.) continued
his father's policy with nearly all his father's success.
He built cities and castles, quelled a rebellion among his
tributaries, and caused their riches to flow faster still
into Jerusalem. But while Jotham bequeathed to his
Isaiah had been born into the flourishing nation
while Uzziah was king. The great events of that
monarch's reign were his education, the still grander
hopes they prompted the passion of his virgin fancy.
He must have absorbed as the very temper of his youth
this national consciousness which swelled so proudly
in Judah under Uzziah. But the accession of such
a king as Ahaz, while it was sure to let loose the
passions and follies fostered by a period of rapid
increase in luxury, could not fail to afford to Judah's
enemies the long-deferred opportunity of attacking her.
It was an hour both of the manifestation of sin and of
the judgement of sin—an hour in which, while the
majesty of Judah, sustained through two great reigns,
was about to disappear in the follies of a third, the
majesty of Judah's God should become more conspicuous
than ever. Of this Isaiah had been privately conscious,
as we shall see, for five years. In the year that king
The word that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw concerning
Judah and Jerusalem. We do not know anything of
Isaiah's family or of the details of his upbringing. He
was a member of some family of Jerusalem, and in
intimate relations with the Court. It has been believed
that he was of royal blood, but it matters little whether
this be true or not. A spirit so wise and masterful as
his did not need social rank to fit it for that intimacy
with princes which has doubtless suggested the legend
of his royal descent. What does matter is Isaiah's
citizenship in Jerusalem, for this colours all his prophecy.
More than Athens to Demosthenes, Rome to Juvenal,
Florence to Dante, is Jerusalem to Isaiah. She is his
immediate and ultimate regard, the centre and return of
all his thoughts, the hinge of the history of his time,
the one thing worth preserving amidst its disasters, the
summit of those brilliant hopes with which he fills the
future. He has traced for us the main features of her
position and some of the lines of her construction, many
If he takes wider observation of mankind, Jerusalem is his watch-tower. It is for her defence he battles through fifty years of statesmanship, and all his prophecy may be said to travail in anguish for her new birth. He was never away from her walls, but not even the psalms of the captives by the rivers of Babylon, with the desire of exile upon them, exhibit more beauty and pathos than the lamentations which Isaiah poured upon Jerusalem's sufferings or the visions in which he described her future solemnity and peace.
It is not with surprise, therefore, that we find the first prophecies of Isaiah directed upon his mother city: The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. There is little about Judah in these chapters: the country forms but a fringe to the capital.
Before we look into the subject of the prophecy,
however, a short digression is necessary on the manner
in which it is presented to us. It is not a reasoned
composition or argument we have here; it is a vision,
it is the word which Isaiah saw. The expression is
vague, often abused and in need of defining. Vision is
not employed here to express any magical display before
the eyes of the prophet of the very words which he
was to speak to the people, or any communication to
Under these three powers of vision Jerusalem, the prophet's city, is presented to us—Jerusalem in three lights, really three Jerusalems. First, there is flashed out (chap. ii. 2-5) a vision of the ideal city, Jerusalem idealized and glorified. Then comes (ii. 6-iv. 1) a very realistic picture, a picture of the actual Jerusalem. And lastly at the close of the prophecy (iv. 2-6) we have a vision of Jerusalem as she shall be after God has taken her in hand—very different indeed from the ideal with which the prophet began. Here are three successive motives or phases of prophecy, which, as we have said, in all probability summarize the early ministry of Isaiah, and present him to us first as the idealist or visionary, second as the realist or critic, and third as the prophet proper or revealer of God's actual will.
I. The Idealist (ii. 1-5).
All men who have shown our race how great things
are possible have had their inspiration in dreaming of
the impossible. Reformers, who at death were content
to have lived for the moving forward but one inch of
some of their fellow-men, began by believing themselves
able to lift the whole world at once. Isaiah
was no exception to this human fashion. His first
vision was that of a Utopia, and his first belief that his
countrymen would immediately realize it. He lifts up
But that is impossible, and Isaiah perceives so as
soon as he turns from the far-off horizon to the city at
his feet, as soon as he leaves to-morrow alone and deals
with to-day. The next verses of the chapter—from
verse 6 onwards—stand in strong contrast to those which
have described Israel's ideal. There Zion is full of the
law and Jerusalem of the word of the Lord, the one
religion flowing over from this centre upon the world.
Here into the actual Jerusalem they have brought
all sorts of foreign worship and heathen prophets; they
are replenished from the East, and are soothsayers like
the Philistines, and strike hands with the children of
strangers. There all nations come to worship at
II. The Realist (ii. 6-iv. 1).
Therefore Isaiah's attitude and tone suddenly change.
The visionary becomes a realist, the enthusiast a cynic,
the seer of the glorious city of God the prophet of
God's judgement. The recoil is absolute in style,
temper and thought, down to the very figures of speech
which he uses. Before, Isaiah had seen, as it were, a
lifting process at work, Jerusalem in the top of the
mountains, and exalted above the hills. Now he beholds
nothing but depression. For the day of the Lord of
hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and haughty,
upon all that is lifted up, and it shall be brought low, and
the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. Nothing in
the great civilization, which he had formerly glorified,
is worth preserving. The high towers, fenced walls,
ships of Tarshish, treasures and armour must all perish,
even the hills lifted by his imagination shall be bowed
down, and the Lord alone be exalted in that day.
This recoil reaches its extreme in the last verse of the
chapter. The prophet, who had believed so much in
man as to think possible an immediate commonwealth
of nations, believes in man now so little that he does
Attached to this general denunciation are some
satiric descriptions, in the third chapter, of the anarchy,
to which society in Jerusalem is fast being reduced
under its childish and effeminate king. The scorn of
these passages is scathing; the eyes of the glory of God
burn through every rank, fashion and ornament in the
town. King and court are not spared; the elders and
princes are rigorously denounced. But by far the most
striking effort of the prophet's boldness is his prediction
of the overthrow of Jerusalem itself (ver. 8).
What it cost Isaiah to utter and the people to hear we
can only partly measure. To his own passionate
patriotism it must have felt like treason, to the blind
optimism of the popular religion it doubtless appeared
the rankest heresy—to aver that the holy city, inviolate
and almost unthreatened since the day David brought
to her the ark of the Lord, and destined by the voice of
her prophets, including Isaiah himself, to be established
upon the tops of the mountains, was now to fall into
ruin. But Isaiah's conscience overcomes his sense of
consistency, and he who has just proclaimed the eternal
glory of Jerusalem is provoked by his knowledge of
her citizens' sins to recall his words and intimate her
destruction. It may have been, that Isaiah was partly
emboldened to so novel a threat, by his knowledge of
the preparations which Syria and Israel were already
making for the invasion of Judah. The prospect of
Jerusalem, as the centre of a vast empire subject to
Jehovah, however natural it was under a successful
ruler like Uzziah, became, of course, unreal when every
one of Uzziah's and Jotham's tributaries had risen in
With increased scorn Isaiah turns lastly upon the
women of Jerusalem (iii. 16-iv. 2), and here perhaps
the change which has passed over him since his opening
prophecy is most striking. One likes to think of how
the citizens of Jerusalem took this alteration in their
prophet's temper. We know how popular so optimist
a prophecy as that of the mountain of the Lord's house
must have been, and can imagine how men and women
loved the young face, bright with a far-off light, and
the dream of an ideal that had no quarrel with the
present. "But what a change is this that has come
over him, who speaks not of to-morrow, but of to-day,
who has brought his gaze from those distant horizons
to our streets, who stares every man in the face (iii. 9),
and makes the women feel that no pin and trimming, no
ring and bracelet, escape his notice! Our loved prophet
has become an impudent scorner!" Ah, men and
women of Jerusalem, beware of those eyes! The glory
of God is burning in them; they see you through
and through, and they tell us that all your armour and
This was the climax of the prophet's judgement. If the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot. If the women are corrupt the state is moribund.
III. The Prophet of the Lord (iv. 2-6).
Is there, then, no hope for Jerusalem? Yes, but not
where the prophet sought it at first, in herself, and not
in the way he offered it—by the mere presentation of
an ideal. There is hope, there is more—there is certain
salvation in the Lord, but it only comes after judgement.
Contrast that opening picture of the new Jerusalem with
this closing one, and we shall find their difference to lie in
two things. There the city is more prominent than the
Lord, here the Lord is more prominent than the city;
there no word of judgement, here judgement sternly
emphasized as the indispensable way towards the
blessed future. A more vivid sense of the Person of
Jehovah Himself, a deep conviction of the necessity of
chastisement: these are what Isaiah has gained during
his early ministry, without losing hope or heart for the
future. The bliss shall come only when the Lord shall
have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and
shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst
Is there not in this threefold vision a parallel and example for our own civilisation and our thoughts about it? All work and wisdom begin in dreams. We must see our Utopias before we start to build our stone and lime cities.
But the light of our ideals dawns upon us only to
show how poor by nature are the mortals who are
called to accomplish them. The ideal rises still as
to Isaiah only to exhibit the poverty of the real.
When we lift our eyes from the hills of vision,
and rest them on our fellow-men, hope and enthusiasm
die out of us. Isaiah's disappointment is
that of every one who brings down his gaze from
the clouds to the streets. Be our ideal ever so
desirable, be we ever so persuaded of its facility,
the moment we attempt to apply it we shall be
To put it another way: All of us who live to
work for our fellow-men or who hope to lift them
higher by our word begin with our own visions of
a great future. These visions, though our youth
lends to them an original generosity and enthusiasm,
are, like Isaiah's, largely borrowed. The
progressive instincts of the age into which we are
born and the mellow skies of prosperity combine with
our own ardour to make our ideal one of splendour.
Persuaded of its facility, we turn to real life to apply
it. A few years pass. We not only find mankind
too stubborn to be forced into our moulds, but we
gradually become aware of Another Moulder at work
upon our subject, and we stand aside in awe to watch
His operations. Human desires and national ideals
are not always fulfilled; philosophic theories are discredited
by the evolution of fact. Uzziah does not
reign for ever; the sceptre falls to Ahaz: progress
is checked, and the summer of prosperity draws
to an end. Under duller skies ungilded judgement
comes to view, cruel and inexorable, crushing even
the peaks on which we built our future, yet purifying
men and giving earnest of a better future, too. And
so life, that mocked the control of our puny fingers,
bends groaning to the weight of an Almighty Hand.
God also, we perceive as we face facts honestly, has
His ideal for men; and though He works so slowly
towards His end that our restless eyes are too impatient
This, then, was Isaiah's apprenticeship, and its net result was to leave him with the remnant for his ideal: the remnant and Jerusalem secured as its rallying-point.
Isaiah v.; ix. 8-x. 4 (735 B.C.).
Besides, opposition has arisen to the prophet's teaching.
We saw that the obscurities and inconsistencies of
chapters ii.-iv. are due to the fact that that prophecy
The point of Isaiah's teaching against which opposition
was directed was of course its main point, that God
was about to abandon Judah. This must have appeared
to the popular religion of the day as the rankest heresy.
To the Jews the honour of Jehovah was bound up with
the inviolability of Jerusalem and the prosperity of
Judah. But Isaiah knew Jehovah to be infinitely more
concerned for the purity of His people than for
their prosperity. He had seen the Lord exalted in
righteousness above those national and earthly interests,
with which vulgar men exclusively identified His will.
Did the people appeal to the long time Jehovah had
graciously led them for proof that He would not
abandon them now? To Isaiah that gracious leading
was but for righteousness' sake, and that God might
make His own a holy people. Their history, so full
of the favours of the Almighty, did not teach Isaiah
as it did the common prophets of his time, the
lesson of Israel's political security, but the far different
one of their religious responsibility. To him it only
meant what Amos had already put in those startling
words, You only have I known of all the families
of the earth: therefore I will visit upon you all your
The chapter is a noble piece of patriotism—one of the
noblest of a race who, although for the greater part of
their history without a fatherland, have contributed
more brilliantly than perhaps any other to the literature
of patriotism, and that simply because, as Isaiah here
illustrates, patriotism was to their prophets identical with
religious privilege and responsibility. Isaiah carries this
to its bitter end. Other patriots have wept to sing their
country's woes; Isaiah's burden is his people's guilt.
To others an invasion of their fatherland by its enemies
has been the motive to rouse by song or speech their
countrymen to repel it. Isaiah also hears the tramp of
the invader; but to him is permitted no ardour of
defence, and his message to his countrymen is that they
must succumb, for the invasion is irresistible and of the
very judgement of God. How much it cost the prophet
to deliver such a message we may see from those few
verses of it in which his heart is not altogether silenced
by his conscience. The sweet description of Judah as
I. The Parable of the Vineyard (v. 1-7).
Isaiah adopts the resource of every misunderstood and
unpopular teacher, and seeks to turn the flank of his
people's prejudices by an attack in parable on their
sympathies. Did they stubbornly believe it impossible
for God to abandon a State He had so long and so
carefully fostered? Let them judge from an analogous
case in which they were all experts. In a picture of
great beauty Isaiah describes a vineyard upon one of
the sunny promontories visible from Jerusalem. Every
care had been given it of which an experienced vine-dresser
could think, but it brought forth only wild
grapes. The vine-dresser himself is introduced, and
appeals to the men of Judah and Jerusalem to judge
between him and his vineyard. He gets their assent
that all had been done which could be done, and
fortified with that resolves to abandon the vineyard.
I will lay it waste; it shall not be pruned nor digged,
but there shall come up briers and thorns. Then the
The lesson enforced by Isaiah is just this, that in a
people's civilization there lie the deepest responsibilities,
for that is neither more nor less than their cultivation
by God; and the question for a people is not how secure
does this render them, nor what does it count for glory,
but how far is it rising towards the intentions of its
Author? Does it produce those fruits of righteousness
for which alone God cares to set apart and cultivate
the peoples? On this depends the question whether
the civilization is secure, as well as the right of the
people to enjoy and feel proud of it. There cannot
be true patriotism without sensitiveness to this, for
however rich be the elements that compose the patriot's
temper, as piety towards the past, ardour of service for
the present, love of liberty, delight in natural beauty
and gratitude for Divine favour, so rich a temper will
grow rancid without the salt of conscience; and the
richer the temper is, the greater must be the proportion
of that salt. All prophets and poets of patriotism have
been moralists and satirists as well. From Demosthenes
to Tourgenieff, from Dante to Mazzini, from Milton to
Russell Lowell, from Burns to Heine, one cannot recall
any great patriot who has not known how to use the
scourge as well as the trumpet. Many opportunities
So, then, the patriotism of all great men has carried a conscience for their country's sins. But while this is always more or less a burden to the true patriot, there are certain periods in which his care for his country ought to be this predominantly, and need be little else. In a period like our own, for instance, of political security and fashionable religion, what need is there in patriotic displays of any other kind? but how much for patriotism of this kind—of men who will uncover the secret sins, however loathsome, and declare the hypocrisies, however powerful, of the social life of the people! These are the patriots we need in times of peace; and as it is more difficult to rouse a torpid people to their sins than to lead a roused one against their enemies, and harder to face a whole people with the support only of conscience than to defy many nations if you but have your own at your back, so these patriots of peace are more to be honoured than those of war. But there is one kind of patriotism more arduous and honourable still. It is that which Isaiah displays here, who cannot add to his conscience hope or even pity, who must hail his country's enemies for his country's good, and recite the long roll of God's favours to his nation only to emphasize the justice of His abandonment of them.
The wild grapes which Isaiah saw in the vineyard of
the Lord he catalogues in a series of Woes (vv. 8-24),
fruits all of them of love of money and love of wine.
They are abuse of the soil (8-10, 17 Ewald happily suggests that verse 17 has dropped out of, and
should be restored to, its proper position at the end of the first "woe,"
where it contributes to the development of the meaning far more
than from where it stands in the text.
During recent agitations in our own country one has
often seen the "land laws of the Bible" held forth by
some thoughtless demagogue as models for land
tenure among ourselves; as if a system which worked
well with a small tribe in a land they had all entered
on equal footing, and where there was no opportunity
After the land-sin Isaiah hurls his second Woe upon
the drink-sin, and it is a heavier woe than the first.
With fatal persistence the luxury of every civilization
has taken to drink; and of all the indictments brought
by moralists against nations, that which they reserve
for drunkenness is, as here, the most heavily weighted.
The crusade against drink is not the novel thing that
many imagine who observe only its late revival among
ourselves. In ancient times there was scarcely a State
in which prohibitive legislation of the most stringent
kind was not attempted, and generally carried out with
a thoroughness more possible under despots than
where, as with us, the slow consent of public opinion
is necessary. A horror of strong drink has in every
age possessed those who from their position as
magistrates or prophets have been able to follow for
any distance the drifts of social life. Isaiah exposes as
powerfully as ever any of them did in what the peculiar
fatality of drinking lies. Wine is a mocker by nothing
more than by the moral incredulity which it produces,
enabling men to hide from themselves the spiritual and
material effects of over-indulgence in it. No one who
has had to do with persons slowly falling from moderate
to immoderate drinking can mistake Isaiah's meaning
when he says, They regard not the work of the Lord;
neither have they considered the operation of His hands.
Nothing kills the conscience like steady drinking to
a little excess; and religion, even while the conscience
is alive, acts on it only as an opiate. It is not, however,
The next three Woes are upon different aggravations of that moral perversity which the prophet has already traced to strong drink. In the first of these it is better to read, draw punishment near with cords of vanity, than draw iniquity. Then we have a striking antithesis—the drunkards mocking Isaiah over their cups with the challenge, as if it would not be taken up, Let Jehovah make speed, and hasten His work of judgement, that we may see it, while all the time they themselves were dragging that judgement near, as with cart-ropes, by their persistent diligence in evil. This figure of sinners jeering at the approach of a calamity while they actually wear the harness of its carriage is very striking. But the Jews are not only unconscious of judgement, they are confused as to the very principles of morality: Who call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
In his fifth Woe the prophet attacks a disposition
to which his scorn gives no peace throughout his ministry.
If these sensualists had only confined themselves
to their sensuality they might have been left alone;
but with that intellectual bravado which is equally
born with "Dutch courage" of drink, they interfered in
In his last Woe Isaiah returns to the drinking habits of the upper classes, from which it would appear that among the judges even of Judah there were "six-bottle men." They sustained their extravagance by subsidies, which we trust were unknown to the mighty men of wine who once filled the seats of justice in our own country. They justify the wicked for a bribe, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him. All these sinners, dead through their rejection of the law of Jehovah of hosts and the word of the Holy One of Israel, shall be like to the stubble, fit only for burning, and their blossom as the dust of the rotten tree.
III. The Anger of the Lord (v. 25; ix. 8-x. 4; v. 26-30).
This indictment of the various sins of the people
occupies the whole of the second part of the
oration. But a third part is now added, in which
the prophet catalogues the judgements of the Lord
upon them, each of these closing with the weird
refrain, For all this His anger is not turned away,
but His hand is stretched out still. The complete
catalogue is usually obtained by inserting between
the 25th and 26th verses of chapter v. the long
passage from chapter ix., ver. 8, to chapter x., ver. 4.
It is quite true that as far as chapter v. itself is concerned
it does not need this insertion; but ix. 8-x. 4
is decidedly out of place where it now lies. Its
paragraphs end with the same refrain as closes v. 25,
From these scenes Isaiah has spared nothing that
is terrible in history or nature, and it is not one of
the least of the arguments for putting them together
that their intensity increases to a climax. Earthquakes,
armed raids, a great battle and the slaughter
of a people; prairie and forest fires, civil strife and
the famine fever, that feeds upon itself; another battle-field,
with its cringing groups of captives and heaps
of slain; the resistless tide of a great invasion; and
then, for final prospect, a desolate land by the sound
of a hungry sea, and the light is darkened in the
clouds thereof. The elements of nature and the
elemental passions of man have been let loose together;
and we follow the violent floods, remembering
that it is sin which has burst the gates of the
universe, and given the tides of hell full course through
it. Over the storm and battle there comes booming like
the storm-bell the awful refrain, For all this His anger
is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.
It is poetry of the highest order, but in him who reads
it with a conscience mere literary sensations are
What Isaiah unfolds, then, is a series of calamities
that have overtaken the people of Israel. It is impossible
for us to identify every one of them with a
particular event in Israel's history otherwise known to
us. Some it is not difficult to recognize; but the
prophet passes in a perplexing way from Judah to
Ephraim and Ephraim to Judah, and in one case,
where he represents Samaria as attacked by Syria
and the Philistines, he goes back to a period at
some distance from his own. There are also passages,
as for instance x. 1-4, in which we are unable to
decide whether he describes a present punishment or
threatens a future one. But his moral purpose, at
least, is plain. He will show how often Jehovah has
already spoken to His people by calamity, and because
they have remained hardened under these warnings,
how there now remains possible only the last,
worst blow of an Assyrian invasion. Isaiah is
justifying his threat of so unprecedented and extreme
a punishment for God's people as overthrow by this
Northern people, who had just appeared upon Judah's
political horizon. God, he tells Israel, has tried everything
short of this, and it has failed; now only this
remains, and this shall not fail. The prophet's purpose,
therefore, being not an accurate historical recital, but
Five great calamities, says Isaiah, have fallen on Israel and left them hardened: 1st, earthquake (v. 25); 2nd, loss of territory (ix. 8-12); 3rd, war and a decisive defeat (ix. 13-17); 4th, internal anarchy (ix. 18-21); 5th, the near prospect of captivity (x. 1-4).
1. The Earthquake (v. 25).—Amos closes his series with an earthquake; Isaiah begins with one. It may be the same convulsion they describe, or may not. Although the skirts of Palestine both to the east and west frequently tremble to these disturbances, an earthquake in Palestine itself, up on the high central ridge of the land, is very rare. Isaiah vividly describes its awful simplicity and suddenness. The Lord stretched forth His hand and smote, and the hills shook, and their carcases were like offal in the midst of the streets. More words are not needed, because there was nothing more to describe. The Lord lifted His hand; the hills seemed for a moment to topple over, and when the living recovered from the shock there lay the dead, flung like refuse about the streets.
2. The Loss of Territory (ix. 8-21).—So awful
a calamity, in which the dying did not die out of sight
nor fall huddled together on some far off battle-field, but Read past tenses, as in the margin of Revised Version, for all the
future tenses, or better, the historical present, down to the end of the
chapter. It is part of the argument for connecting ix. 8 with v. 25 that
this phrase would be very natural after the earthquake described
in v. 25.
3. War and Defeat (ix. 13-17).—The next consequent
calamity passed from the land to the people
themselves. A great battle is described, in which the
nation is dismembered in one day. War and its horrors
are told, and the apparent want of Divine pity and
discrimination which they imply is explained. Israel
has been led into these disasters by the folly of their
leaders, whom Isaiah therefore singles out for blame.
For they that lead these people cause them to err, and they
that are led of them are destroyed. But the real horror
4. Internal Anarchy (ix. 18-21).—Even yet the
people did not repent; their calamities only drove them
to further wickedness. The prophet's eyes are opened
to the awful fact that God's wrath is but the blast that
fans men's hot sins to flame. This is one of those two
or three awful scenes in history, in the conflagration
of which we cannot tell what is human sin and what
Divine judgement. There is a panic wickedness,
sin spreading like mania, as if men were possessed
by supernatural powers. The physical metaphors
of the prophet are evident: a forest or prairie fire,
and the consequent famine, whose fevered victims
feed upon themselves. And no less evident are the
political facts which the prophet employs these metaphors
to describe. It is the anarchy which has beset
more than one corrupt and unfortunate people, when their
misleaders have been overthrown: the anarchy in which
each faction seeks to slaughter out the rest. Jealousy
and distrust awake the lust for blood, rage seizes the
people as fire the forest, and no man spareth his
King Lear, act iv., sc. 2.
5. The Threat of Captivity (x. 1-4).—Turning now from the past, and from the fate of Samaria, with which it would appear he has been more particularly engaged, the prophet addresses his own countrymen in Judah, and paints the future for them. It is not a future in which there is any hope. The day of their visitation also will surely come, and the prophet sees it close in the darkest night of which a Jewish heart could think—the night of captivity. Where, he asks his unjust countrymen—where will ye then flee for help? and where will you leave your glory? Cringing among the captives, lying dead beneath heaps of dead—that is to be your fate, who will have turned so often and then so finally from God. When exactly the prophet thus warned his countrymen of captivity we do not know, but the warning, though so real, produced neither penitence in men nor pity in God. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still.
6. The Assyrian Invasion (v. 26-30).—The prophet
is, therefore, free to explain that cloud which has
appeared far away on the northern horizon. God's hand
of judgement is still uplifted over Judah, and it is that
Thus Isaiah leaves Judah to await her doom. But the tones of his weird refrain awaken in our hearts some thoughts which will not let his message go from us just yet.
It will ever be a question, whether men abuse more
their sorrows or their joys; but no earnest soul can
doubt, which of these abuses is the more fatal. To sin
in the one case is to yield to a temptation; to sin in the
other is to resist a Divine grace. Sorrow is God's last
message to man; it is God speaking in emphasis. He
who abuses it shows that he can shut his ears when God
speaks loudest. Therefore heartlessness or impenitence
after sorrow is more dangerous than intemperance in joy;
its results are always more tragic. Now Isaiah points
out that men's abuse of sorrow is twofold. Men abuse
Men abuse sorrow by mistaking it, when they see in it nothing but a penal or expiatory force. To many men sorrow is what his devotions were to Louis XI., which having religiously performed, he felt the more brave to sin. So with the Samaritans, who said in the stoutness of their hearts, The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones; the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars. To speak in this way is happy, but heathenish. It is to call sorrow "bad luck;" it is to hear no voice of God in it, saying, "Be pure; be humble; lean upon Me." This disposition springs from a vulgar conception of God, as of a Being of no permanence in character, easily irritated but relieved by a burst of passion, smartly punishing His people and then leaving them to themselves. It is a temper which says, "God is angry, let us wait a little; God is appeased, let us go ahead again." Over against such vulgar views of a Deity with a temper Isaiah unveils the awful majesty of God in holy wrath: For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still. How grim and savage does it appear to our eyes till we understand the thoughts of the sinners to whom it was revealed! God cannot dispel the cowardly thought, that He is anxious only to punish, except by letting His heavy hand abide till it purify also. The permanence of God's wrath is thus an ennobling, not a stupefying doctrine.
Men also abuse sorrow by defying it, but the end of
this is madness. "It forms the greater part of the tragedy
of King Lear, that the aged monarch, though he has
given his throne away, retains his imperiousness of
heart, and continues to exhibit a senseless, if sometimes Ulrici: Shakespeare's Dramatic Art.
Isaiah vi. (740 B.C.; WRITTEN 735? OR 725?).
1. The Vision (vv. 1-4).
Several years, then, Isaiah looks back and says,
All men knew of that glorious reign with the ghastly end—fifty years of royalty, and then a lazar-house. There had been no king like this one since Solomon; never, since the son of David brought the Queen of Sheba to his feet, had the national pride stood so high or the nation's dream of sovereignty touched such remote borders. The people's admiration invested Uzziah with all the graces of the ideal monarch. The chronicler of Judah tells us that God helped him and made him to prosper, and his name spread far abroad, and he was marvellously helped till he was strong; he with the double name—Azariah, Jehovah-his-Helper; Uzziah, Jehovah-his-Strength. How this glory fell upon the fancy of the future prophet, and dyed it deep, we may imagine from those marvellous colours, with which in later years he painted the king in his beauty. Think of the boy, the boy that was to be an Isaiah, the boy with the germs of this great prophecy in his heart—think of him and such a hero as this to shine upon him, and we may conceive how his whole nature opened out beneath that sun of royalty and absorbed its light.
Suddenly the glory was eclipsed, and Jerusalem
learned that she had seen her king for the last time:
The Lord smote the king so that he was a leper unto the
day of his death, and dwelt in a several house, and he
was cut off from the house of the Lord. Uzziah
had gone into the temple, and attempted with his
own hands to burn incense. Under a later dispensation
of liberty he would have been applauded as a
We can imagine how such a judgement, the moral of
which must have been plain to all, affected the most
sensitive heart in Jerusalem. Isaiah's imagination was
darkened, but he tells us that the crisis was the enfranchisement
of his faith. In the year King Uzziah died—it
is as if a veil had dropped, and the prophet saw beyond
what it had hidden, the Lord sitting on a throne
high and lifted up. That it is no mere date Isaiah
means, but a spiritual contrast which he is anxious to
impress upon us, is made clear by his emphasis of the
rank and not the name of God. It is the Lord sitting
upon a throne—the Lord absolutely, set over against the
human prince. The simple antithesis seems to speak
of the passing away of the young man's hero-worship
and the dawn of his faith; and so interpreted, this first
verse of chapter vi. is only a concise summary of that
development of religious experience which we have
traced through chapters ii.-iv. Had Isaiah ever
been subject to the religious temper of his time, the
From this contrast the whole vision expands as follows.
Under the mistaken idea that what Isaiah describes
is the temple in Jerusalem, it has been remarked, that
the place of his vision is wonderful in the case of one
who set so little store by ceremonial worship. This,
however, to which our prophet looks is no house
built with hands, but Jehovah's own heavenly palace
(ver. 1—not temple); only Isaiah describes it in terms
of the Jerusalem temple which was its symbol. It was
natural that the temple should furnish Isaiah not only
with the framework of his vision, but also with the
platform from which he saw it. For it was in the temple
that Uzziah's sin was sinned and God's holiness vindicated
upon him. It was in the temple that, when
Isaiah beheld the scrupulous religiousness of the people,
the contrast of that with their evil lives struck him, and
he summed it up in the epigram wickedness and worship
(i. 13). It was in the temple, in short, that the
prophet's conscience had been most roused, and just
where the conscience is most roused there is the vision
of God to be expected. Very probably it was while
brooding over Uzziah's judgement on the scene of its
occurrence that Isaiah beheld his vision. Yet for all
the vision contained the temple itself was too narrow.
The truth which was to be revealed to Isaiah, the holiness
of God, demanded a wider stage and the breaking
down of those partitions, which, while they had been
designed to impress God's presence on the worshipper,
had only succeeded in veiling Him. So while the
seer keeps his station on the threshold of the earthly
A Browning's "Christmas Eve."
Around (not above, as in the English version) were ranged the hovering courtiers, of what shape and appearance we know not, except that they veiled their faces and their feet before the awful Holiness,—all wings and voice, perfect readinesses of praise and service. The prophet heard them chant in antiphon, like the temple choirs of priests. And the one choir cried out, Holy, holy, holy is Jehovah of hosts; and the other responded, The whole earth is full of His glory.
It is by the familiar name Jehovah of hosts—the proper name of Israel's national God—that the prophet hears the choirs of heaven address the Divine Presence. But what they ascribe to the Deity is exactly what Israel will not ascribe, and the revelation they make of His nature is the contradiction of Israel's thoughts concerning Him.
What, in the first place, is HOLINESS? We attach
this term to a definite standard of morality or an unusually
But while we recognize the exhaustiveness of the
series of ideas about the Divine Nature, which develop
from the root meaning of holiness, and to express
which the word holy is variously used throughout
the Scriptures, we must not, if we are to appreciate the
use of the word on this occasion, miss the motive of
recoil which starts them all. If we would hear what
Isaiah heard in the seraphs' song, we must distinguish in
the three-fold ascription of holiness the intensity of
recoil from the confused religious views and low moral
temper of the prophet's generation. It is no scholastic
definition of Deity which the seraphim are giving.
Not for a moment is it to be supposed that to that
But the first line of the seraph's song serves more
than a temporary end. The Trisagion rings, and has
need to ring, for ever down the Church. Everywhere
and at all times these are the three besetting sins of
religious people—callousness in worship, carelessness
in life, and the temper which employs the forms of
religion simply for self-indulgence or self-aggrandisement.
These sins are induced by the same habit of
contentment with mere form; they can be corrected
only by the vision of the Personal Presence who is
behind all form. Our organization, ritual, law and
sacrament—we must be able to see them fall away,
as Isaiah saw the sanctuary itself disappear, before
God Himself, if we are to remain heartily moral and
fervently religious. The Church of God has to learn
that no mere multiplication of forms, nor a more
æsthetic arrangement of them, will redeem her worshippers
from callousness. Callousness is but the shell
which the feelings develop in self-defence when left by
the sluggish and impenetrative soul to beat upon the
hard outsides of form. And nothing will fuse this
shell of callousness but that ardent flame, which is
kindled at the touching of the Divine and human spirits,
when forms have fallen away and the soul beholds
with open face the Eternal Himself. As with worship,
so with morality. Holiness is secured not by ceremonial,
but by a reverence for a holy Being. We
shall rub our consciences trite against moral maxims
or religious rites. It is the effluence of a Presence,
which alone can create in us, and keep in us, a clean heart.
And if any object that we thus make light of ritual and
religious law, of Church and sacrament, the reply is
But while the one verse of the antiphon reiterates what Jehovah of hosts is in Himself, the other describes what He is in revelation. The whole earth is full of His glory. Glory is the correlative of holiness. Glory is that in which holiness comes to expression. Glory is the expression of holiness, as beauty is the expression of health. If holiness be as deep as we have seen, so varied then will glory be. There is nothing in the earth but it is the glory of God. The fulness of the whole earth is His glory, is the proper grammatical rendering of the song. For Jehovah of hosts is not the God only of Israel, but the Maker of heaven and earth, and not the victory of Israel alone, but the wealth and the beauty of all the world is His glory. So universal an ascription of glory is the proper parallel to that of absolute Godhead, which is implied in holiness.
Thus, then, Isaiah, standing on earth, on the place of a great sin, with the conscience of his people's evil in his heart, and himself not without the feeling of guilt, looked into heaven, and beholding the glory of God, heard also with what pure praise and readiness of service the heavenly hosts surround His throne. No wonder the prophet felt the polluted threshold rock beneath him, or that as where fire and water mingle there should be the rising of a great smoke. For the smoke described is not, as some have imagined, that of acceptable incense, thick billows swelling through the temple to express the completion and satisfaction of the seraphs' worship; but it is the mist which ever arises where holiness and sin touch each other. It has been described both as the obscurity that envelops a weak mind in presence of a truth too great for it, and the darkness that falls upon a diseased eye when exposed to the mid-day sun. These are only analogies, and may mislead us. What Isaiah actually felt was the dim-eyed shame, the distraction, the embarrassment, the blinding shock of a personal encounter with One whom he was utterly unfit to meet. For this was a personal encounter. We have spelt out the revelation sentence by sentence in gradual argument; but Isaiah did not reach it through argument or brooding. It was not to the prophet what it is to his expositors, a pregnant thought, that his intellect might gradually unfold, but a Personal Presence, which apprehended and overwhelmed him. God and he were there face to face. Then said I, Woe is me, for I am undone, because a man unclean of lips am I, and in the midst of a people unclean of lips do I dwell; for the King, Jehovah of hosts, mine eyes have beheld.
While the prophet thus passionately gathered his
guilt upon his lips, a sacrament was preparing
on which God concentrated His mercy to meet it.
Sacrament and lips, applied mercy and presented
sin, now come together. Then flew unto me one
of the seraphim, and in his hand a glowing stone—with
tongs had he taken it off the altar—and he
touched my mouth and said, Lo, this hath touched thy
The idea of this function is very evident, and a
scholar who has said that it "would perhaps be quite
intelligible to the contemporaries of the prophet, but is
undoubtedly obscure to us," appears to have said just
the reverse of what is right; for so simple a process
of atonement leaves out the most characteristic details
of the Jewish ritual of sacrifice, while it anticipates in
an unmistakeable manner the essence of the Christian
sacrament. In a scene of expiation laid under the old
covenant, we are struck by the absence of oblation or
sacrificial act on the part of the sinner himself. There
is here no victim slain, no blood sprinkled; an altar is
only parenthetically suggested, and even then in its
simplest form, of a hearth on which the Divine fire is
continually burning. The glowing stone, not live
coal as in the English version, was no part of the
temple furniture, but the ordinary means of conveying
heat or applying fire in the various purposes of household
life. There was, it is true, a carrying of fire in
some of the temple services, as, for example, on the
great Day of Atonement, but then it was effected by a
small grate filled with living embers. In the household,
on the other hand, when cakes had to be baked, or milk
boiled, or water warmed, or in fifty similar applications
of fire, a glowing stone taken from off the hearth was
the invariable instrument. It is this swift and simple
domestic process which Isaiah now sees substituted
for the slow and intricate ceremonial of the temple—a
seraph with a glowing stone in his hand,
with tongs had he taken it off the altar. And yet the
prophet feels this only as a more direct expression of
the very same idea, with which the elaborate ritual was
It has always been remarked as one of the most
powerful proofs of the originality and Divine force of
Christianity, that from man's worship of God, and
especially from those parts in which the forgiveness
of sin is sought and assured, it did away with the
necessity of a physical rite of sacrifice; that it broke the
universal and immemorial habit by which man presented
to God a material offering for the guilt of his
soul. By remembering this fact we may measure the
religious significance of the scene we now contemplate.
Nearly eight centuries before there was accomplished
upon Calvary that Divine Sacrifice for sin, which
abrogated a rite of expiation, hitherto universally
adopted by the conscience of humanity, we find a Jew,
in the dispensation where such a rite was most religiously
enforced, trembling under the conviction of sin,
and upon a floor crowded with suggestions of physical
sacrifice; yet the only sacrifice he offers is the purely
spiritual one of confession. It is most notable. Look
at it from a human point of view, and we can estimate
Isaiah's immense spiritual originality; look at it from a
Divine, and we cannot help perceiving a distinct foreshadow
of what was to take place by the blood of Jesus
under the new covenant. To this man, as to some others
of his dispensation, whose experience our Christian sympathy
recognizes so readily in the Psalms, there was
granted aforetime boldness to enter into the holiest.
For this is the explanation of Isaiah's marvellous disregard
of the temple ritual. It is all behind him. This
man has passed within the veil. Forms are all behind
him, and he is face to face with God. But between two
beings in that position, intercourse by the far off and
Isaiah's sin being taken away, he is able to discern
the voice of God Himself. It is in the most beautiful
accordance with what has already happened that he
hears this not as command, but request, and answers
not of compulsion, but of freedom. And I heard the
voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send? and who
will go for us? And I said, Here am I; send me.
What spiritual understanding alike of the will of God
and the responsibility of man, what evangelic liberty
and boldness, are here! Here we touch the spring of
that high flight Isaiah takes both in prophecy and in
active service for the State. Here we have the secret
of the filial freedom, the life-long sense of responsibility,
the regal power of initiative, the sustained
One cannot pass away from these verses without
observing the plain answer which they give to the
question, What is a call to the ministry of God? In
these days of dust and distraction, full of party cries,
with so many side issues of doctrine and duty presenting
themselves, and the solid attractions of so many other
services insensibly leading men to look for the same
sort of attractiveness in the ministry, it may prove
a relief to some to ponder the simple elements of
Isaiah's call to be a professional and life-long prophet.
Isaiah got no "call" in our conventional sense of the
word, no compulsion that he must go, no articulate
voice describing him as the sort of man needed for the
work, nor any of those similar "calls" which sluggish
and craven spirits so often desire to relieve them of
the responsibility or the strenuous effort needed in
deciding for a profession which their conscience will
not permit them to refuse. Isaiah got no such call.
After passing through the fundamental religious
experiences of forgiveness and cleansing, which are
in every case the indispensable premises of life with
God, Isaiah was left to himself. No direct summons
III. The Commission (vv. 9-13).
A heart so resolutely devoted as we have seen Isaiah's
to be was surely prepared against any degree of discouragement,
but probably never did man receive so
awful a commission as he describes himself to have
done. Not that we are to suppose that this fell upon
Isaiah all at once, in the suddenness and distinctness
with which he here records it. Our sense of its awfulness
will only be increased when we realize that
Isaiah became aware of it, not in the shock of a
single discovery, sufficiently great to have carried
its own anæsthetic along with it, but through a
prolonged process of disillusion, and at the pain
of those repeated disappointments, which are all the
more painful that none singly is great enough to
stupefy. It is just at this point of our chapter,
that we feel most the need of supposing it to have
been written some years after the consecration of
Isaiah, when his experience had grown long enough
to articulate the dim forebodings of that solemn
moment. Go and say to this people, Hearing, hear ye,
but understand not; seeing, see ye, but know not. Make
fat the heart of this people, and its ears make heavy, and
its eyes smear, lest it see with its eyes, and hear with its
ears, and its heart understand, and it turn again and
be healed. Even Calvin, though in order to prove that Isaiah had been
prophesying for some time before his inaugural vision, says that
his commission implies some years' actual experience of the obstinacy
of the people.
But if that clear, bitter way of putting the matter
can have come to Isaiah only with the experience of
some years, why does he place it upon the lips of God,
as they give him his commission? Because Isaiah is
stating not merely his own singular experience, but a
truth always true of the preaching of the word of
God, and of which no prophet at the time of his
consecration to that ministry can be without at least
a foreboding. We have not exhausted the meaning
of this awful commission when we say that it is only
With these instances we can go back to Isaiah and understand why he should have described the bitter fruits of experience as an imperative laid upon him by God. Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears make heavy, and its eyes do thou smear. It is the fashion of the prophet's grammar, when it would state a principle or necessary effect, to put it in the form of a command. What God expresses to Isaiah so imperatively as almost to take our breath away; what Christ uttered with such abruptness that we ask, Does He speak in irony? what Paul laid down as the conviction of a long and patient ministry, is the great truth that the Word of God has not only a saving power, but that even in its gentlest pleadings and its purest Gospel, even by the mouth of Him who came, not to condemn, but to save the world, it has a power that is judicial and condemnatory.
It is frequently remarked by us as perhaps the
most deplorable fact of our experience, that there
exists in human nature an accursed facility for turning
God's gifts to precisely the opposite ends from
those for which He gave them. So common is
man's misunderstanding of the plainest signs, and
so frequent his abuse of the most evident favours
of Heaven, that a spectator of the drama of human
history might imagine its Author to have been a Cynic
or Comedian, portraying for His own amusement the
loss of the erring at the very moment of what might
have been their recovery, the frustration of love at the
point of its greatest warmth and expectancy. Let him
look closer, however, and he will perceive, not a comedy,
but a tragedy, for neither chance nor cruel sport is here
Now there is no more conspicuous instance of this
law, than that which is afforded by the preaching of the
Gospel of God. God's Word, as Christ reminds us,
Now this is one of the first facts to which a young
reformer or prophet awakes. Such an awakening
is a necessary element in his education and apprenticeship.
He has seen the Lord high and lifted
up. His lips have been touched by the coal from off
the altar. His first feeling is that nothing can withstand
that power, nothing gainsay this inspiration. Is
he a Nehemiah, and the hand of the Lord has been
For all of whom the next necessary stage of experience
is one of disappointment, with the hard commission,
Make the heart of this people fat. They must learn that,
if God has caught themselves young, and when it
was possible to make them entirely His own, the
human race to whom He sends them is old, too old
for them to effect much upon the mass of it beyond
the hardening and perpetuation of evil. Fourier finds
that to produce his perfect State he would need to
re-create mankind, to cut down the tree to the very
roots, and begin again. After the first rush of patriotic
fervour, which carried so many of his countrymen with
him, Mazzini discovers himself in "a moral desert,"
confesses that the struggle to liberate his fatherland,
which has only quickened him to further devotion in so
great a cause, has been productive of scepticism in his
A few sentences from the confessions of the Italian patriot may be quoted, with benefit to our appreciation of what the Hebrew prophet must have passed through.
"It was the tempest of doubt, which I believe all who devote their lives to a great enterprise, yet have not dried and withered up their soul—like Robespierre—beneath some barren intellectual formula, but have retained a loving heart, are doomed, once at least, to battle through. My heart was overflowing with and greedy of affection, as fresh and eager to unfold to joy as in the days when sustained by my mother's smile, as full of fervid hope for others, at least, if not for myself. But during these fatal months there darkened round me such a hurricane of sorrow, disillusion and deception as to bring before my eyes, in all its ghastly nakedness, a foreshadowing of the old age of my soul, solitary in a desert world, wherein no comfort in the struggle was vouchsafed to me. It was not only the overthrow for an indefinite period of every Italian hope, ... it was the falling to pieces of that moral edifice of faith and love from which alone I had derived strength for the combat; the scepticism I saw arising round me on every side; the failure of faith in those who had
solemnly bound themselves to pursue unshaken the path we had known at the outset to be choked with sorrows; the distrust I detected in those most dear to me, as to the motives and intentions which sustained and urged me onward in the evidently unequal struggle.... When I felt that I was indeed alone in the world, I drew back in terror at the void before me. There, in that moral desert, doubt came upon me. Perhaps I was wrong, and the world right? Perhaps my idea was indeed a dream?... One morning I awoke to find my mind tranquil and my spirit calmed, as one who has passed through a great danger. The first thought that passed across my spirit was, Your sufferings are the temptations of egotism, and arise from a misconception of life.... I perceived that although every instinct of my heart rebelled against that fatal and ignoble definition of life which makes it to be a search after happiness, yet I had not completely freed myself from the dominating influence exercised by it upon the age.... I had been unable to realize the true ideal of love—love without earthly hope.... Life is a mission, duty therefore its highest law. From the idea of God I descended to faith in a mission and its logical consequence—duty the supreme rule of life; and having reached that faith, I swore to myself that nothing in this world should again make me doubt or forsake it. It was, as Dante says, passing through martyrdom to peace—'a forced and desperate peace.' I do not deny, for I fraternized with sorrow, and wrapped myself in it as in a mantle; but yet it was peace, for I learned to suffer without rebellion, and to live calmly and in harmony with my own spirit. I reverently bless God the Father for what consolations of affection—I can conceive of no other—He has vouchsafed to me in my later years; and in them I gather strength to struggle with the occasional return of weariness of existence. But even were these consolations denied me, I believe I should still be what I am. Whether the sun shine with the serene splendour of an Italian noon, or the leaden, corpse-like hue of the northern mist be above us, I cannot see that it changes our duty. God dwells above the earthly heaven, and the holy stars of faith and the future still shine within our souls, even though their light consume itself unreflected as the sepulchral lamp."
Such sentences are the best commentary we can
offer on our text. The cases of the Hebrew and
Italian prophets are wonderfully alike. We who
have read Isaiah's fifth chapter know how his heart
also was "overflowing with and greedy of affection,"
The meaning of these words is too plain to require
exposition, but we can hardly over-emphasize them.
This is to be Isaiah's one text throughout his career.
"Judgement shall pass through; a remnant shall
remain." All the politics of his day, the movement of
the world's forces, the devastation of the holy land,
the first captivities of the holy people, the reiterated
defeats and disappointments of the next fifty years—all
shall be clear and tolerable to Isaiah as the fulfilling
of the sentence to which he listened in such "forced
and desperate peace" on the day of his consecration.
He has had the worst branded into him; henceforth
no man nor thing may trouble him. He has seen the
worst, and knows there is a beginning beyond. So
when the wickedness of Judah and the violence of
Assyria alike seem most unrestrained—Assyria most
bent on destroying Judah, and Judah least worthy to live—Isaiah
will yet cling to this, that a remnant must
remain. All his prophecies will be variations of this
text; it is the key to his apparent paradoxes. He
will proclaim the Assyrians to be God's instrument,
yet devote them to destruction. He will hail their
advance on Judah, and yet as exultingly mark its limit,
because of the determination in which he asked the
question, O Lord, how long? and the clearness with
which he understood the until, that came in answer
to it. Every prediction he makes, every turn he seeks
to give to the practical politics of Judah, are simply
due to his grasp of these two facts—a withering and
repeated devastation, in the end a bare survival. He has,
indeed, prophecies which travel farther; occasionally he
is permitted to indulge in visions of a new dispensation.
Like Moses, he climbs his Pisgah, but he is like Moses
also in this, that his lifetime is exhausted with the attainment
We have now finished the first period of Isaiah's career. Let us catalogue what are his leading doctrines up to this point. High above a very sinful people, and beyond all their conceptions of Him, Jehovah, the national God, rises holy, exalted in righteousness. From such a God to such a people it can only be judgement and affliction that pass; and these shall not be averted by the fact that He is the national God, and they His worshippers. Of this affliction the Assyrians gathering far off upon the horizon are evidently to be the instruments. The affliction shall be very sweeping; again and again shall it come; but the Lord will finally save a remnant of His people. Three elements compose this preaching—a very keen and practical conscience of sin; an overpowering vision of God, in whose immediate intimacy the prophet believes himself to be; and a very sharp perception of the politics of the day.
One question rises. In this part of Isaiah's ministry there is no trace of that Figure whom we chiefly identify with his preaching, the Messiah. Let us have patience; it is not time for him; but the following is his connection with the prophet's present doctrines.
Isaiah's great result at present is the certainty of
a remnant. That remnant will require two things—they
735-730 B.C.
Up to this point we have been acquainted with
Isaiah as a prophet of general principles, preaching
to his countrymen the elements of righteousness and
judgement, and tracing the main lines of fate along
which their evil conduct was rapidly forcing them. We
are now to observe him applying these principles to the
executive politics of the time, and following Judah's
conduct to the issues he had predicted for it in the
world outside herself. Hitherto he has been concerned
with the inner morals of Jewish society; he is now to
engage himself with the effect of these on the fortunes of
the Jewish State. In his seventh chapter Isaiah begins
that career of practical statesmanship, which not only
made him "the greatest political power in Israel since
David," but placed him, far above his importance to his
own people, upon a position of influence over all ages.
To this eminence Isaiah was raised, as we shall see,
by two things. First, there was the occasion of his
times, for he lived at a juncture at which the vision of
the World, as distinguished from the Nation, opened to
his people's eyes. Second, he had the faith which
enabled him to realize the government of the World by
the One God, whom he has already beheld exalted
The World in Isaiah's day was practically Western Asia. History had not long dawned upon Europe; over Western Asia it was still noon. Draw a line from the Caspian to the mouth of the Persian Gulf; between that line and another crossing the Levant to the west of Cyprus, and continuing along the Libyan border of Egypt, lay the highest forms of religion and civilisation which our race had by that period achieved. This was the World on which Isaiah looked out from Jerusalem, the furthest borders of which he has described in his prophecies, and in the political history of which he illustrated his great principles. How was it composed?
There were, first of all, at either end of it, north-east
and south-west, the two great empires of Assyria and
Egypt, in many respects wonderful counterparts of each
other. No one will understand the history of Palestine,
who has not grasped its geographical position relative
to these similar empires. Syria, shut up between the
Mediterranean sea and the Arabian desert, has its outlets
north and south into two great river-plains, each of them
ending in a delta. Territories of that kind exert a
Next in this world of Western Asia come the Phœnicians. We may say that they connected Egypt and Assyria, for although Phœnicia proper meant only the hundred and fifty miles of coast between Carmel and the bay of Antioch, the Phœnicians had large colonies on the delta of the Nile and trading posts upon the Euphrates. They were gathered into independent but more or less confederate cities, the chief of them Tyre and Sidon; which, while they attempted the offensive only in trade, were by their wealth and maritime advantages capable of offering at once a stronger attraction and a more stubborn resistance to the Assyrian arms, than any other power of the time. Between Phœnicia proper and the mouths of the Nile, the coast was held by groups of Philistine cities, whose nearness to Egypt rather than their own strength was the source of a frequent audacity against Assyria, and the reason why they appear in the history of this period oftener than any other State as the object of Assyrian campaigns.
Behind Phœnicia and the Philistines lay a number of
inland territories: the sister-States of Judah and Northern
Israel, with their cousins Edom, Moab, and Aram or
Syria. Of which Judah and Israel were together about
the size of Wales; Edom a mountain range the size and
shape of Cornwall; Moab, on its north, a broken tableland,
about a Devonshire; and Aram, or Syria, a territory
round Damascus, of uncertain size, but considerable
enough to have resisted Assyria for a hundred and
twenty years. Beyond Aram, again, to the north, lay
the smaller State of Hamath, in the mouth of the pass
Here was a world, with some of its constituents wedged pretty firmly by mutual pressure, but in the main broken and restless—a political surface that was always changing. The whole was subject to the movements of the two empires at its extremes. One of them could not move without sending a thrill through to the borders of the other. The approximate distances were these:—from Egypt's border to Jerusalem, about one hundred miles; from Jerusalem to Samaria, forty-five; from Samaria to Damascus, one hundred and fifteen; from Damascus to Hamath, one hundred and thirty; and from Hamath to the Euphrates, one hundred; in all from the border of Egypt to the border of Assyria four hundred and ninety English statute miles. The main line of war and traffic, coming up from Egypt, kept the coast to the plain of Esdraelon, which it crossed towards Damascus, travelling by the north of the sea of Galilee, the way of the sea. Northern Israel was bound to fall an early prey to armies, whose easiest path thus traversed her richest provinces. Judah, on the other hand, occupied a position so elevated and apart, that it was likely to be the last that either Assyria or Egypt would achieve in their subjugation of the States between them.
Thus, then, Western Asia spread itself out in Isaiah's
day. Let us take one more rapid glance across it.
Assyria to the north, powerful and on the offensive, but
hampered by Babylon; Egypt on the south, weakened
and in reserve; all the cities and States between turning
For a hundred and twenty years before the advent of
Isaiah, the annals of the Assyrian kings record periodical
campaigns against the cities of "the land of the
west," but these isolated incursions were followed by no
permanent results. In 745, however, five years before
King Uzziah died, a soldier ascended the throne of
Assyria, under the title of Tiglath-pileser II., The Pul of
Picture the effect of the onward movement of such a
force upon the imaginations and policies of those
little States that clustered round Judah and Israel.
Settling their own immemorial feuds, they sought
alliance with one another against this common foe.
Tribes, that for centuries had stained their borders
with one another's blood, came together in unions, the
only reason for which was that their common fear had
grown stronger than their mutual hate. Now and then
a king would be found unwilling to enter such an
When we turn to the little we know of the religions of these tribes, we find nothing to arrest their restlessness or broaden their thoughts. These nations had their religions, and called on their gods, but their gods were made in their own image, their religion was the reflex of their life. Each of them employed, rather than worshipped, its deity. No nation believed in its god except as one among many, with his sovereignty limited to its own territory, and his ability to help it conditioned by the power of the other gods, against whose peoples he was fighting. There was no belief in "Providence," no idea of unity or of progress in history, no place in these religions for the great world-force that was advancing upon their peoples.
Now that we have surveyed this world, its politics and
its religion, we can estimate the strength and originality
of the Hebrew prophets. Where others saw the conflicts
of nations, aided by deities as doubtfully matched
as themselves, they perceived all things working together
by the will of one supreme God and serving His
ends of righteousness. It would be wrong to say, that
before the eighth century the Hebrew conception of
God had been simply that of a national deity, for this
would be to ignore the remarkable emphasis placed by
the Hebrews from very early times upon Jehovah's
righteousness. But till the eighth century the horizon
of the Hebrew mind had been the border of their territory;
the historical theatre on which it saw God working
was the national life. Now, however, the Hebrews
were drawn into the world; they felt movements of
which their own history was but an eddy; they saw
the advance of forces against which their own armies,
though inspired by Jehovah, had no chance of material
success. The perspective was entirely changed;
their native land took to most of them the aspect of a
petty and worthless province, their God the rank of a
mere provincial deity; they refused the waters of
Shiloah, that go softly, and rejoiced in the glory of the
king of Assyria, the king of the great River and the
hosts that moved with the strength of its floods. It
was at this moment that the prophets of Israel performed
their supreme religious service. While Ahaz
and the mass of the people illustrated the impotence of
the popular religion, by admitting to an equal place in
the national temple the gods of their victorious foes,
Isaiah vii., viii., ix. 1-8.
735-732 B.C.
And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz, the son of
Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin, the
king of Syria, and Pekah, the son of Remaliah, king of
Israel, went up to Jerusalem to war against it, but could
not prevail against it. This is a summary of the whole
adventure and issue of the war, given by way of introduction.
The narrative proper begins in verse 2, with
the effect of the first news of the league upon Ahaz and
his people. Their hearts were moved, like the trees of
the forest before the wind. The league was aimed so
evidently against the two things most essential to the
national existence and the honour of Jehovah; the
dynasty of David, namely, and the inviolability of Jerusalem.
Judah had frequently before suffered the loss of
her territory; never till now were the throne and city
of David in actual peril. But that, which bent both king
and people by its novel terror, was the test Isaiah expected
for the prophecies he had already uttered. Taking
with him, as a summary of them, his boy with the name
Shear-Jashub—A-remnant-shall-return—Isaiah faced
Ahaz and his court in the midst of their preparation for
the siege. They were examining—but more in panic than
in prudence—the water supply of the city, when Isaiah
delivered to them a message from the Lord, which may
be paraphrased as follows: Take heed and be quiet, keep
your eyes open and your heart still; fear not, neither be
faint-hearted, for the fierce anger of Rezin and Remaliah's
son. They have no power to set you on fire. They are
but stumps of expiring firebrands, almost burnt out.
While you wisely look after your water supply, do so
in hope. This purpose of deposing you is vain. Thus
saith the Lord Jehovah: It shall not stand, neither shall it
come to pass. Of whom are you afraid? Look those There is a play upon words here, which may be reproduced in
English by the help of a North-England term: If ye have not faith,
ye cannot have staith.
This paraphrase seeks to bring out the meaning of a passage confessedly obscure. It seems as if we had only bits of Isaiah's speech to Ahaz and must supply the gaps. No one need hesitate, however, to recognize the conspicuous personal qualities—the combination of political sagacity with religious fear, of common-sense and courage rooted in faith. In a word, this is what Isaiah will say to the king, clever in his alliances, religious and secular, and busy about his material defences: "Take unto you the shield of faith. You have lost your head among all these things. Hold it up like a man behind that shield; take a rational view of affairs. Rate your enemies at their proper value. But for this you must believe in God. Faith in Him is the essential condition of a calm mind and a rational appreciation of affairs."
It is, no doubt, difficult for us to realize that the
truth which Isaiah thus enforced on King Ahaz—the
government of the world and human history by one
supreme God—was ever a truth of which the race stood
in ignorance. A generation like ours cannot be expected
to put its mind in the attitude of those of Isaiah's
The difference, which is made to the character and
habits of men if the country they live in has a powerful
government or not, is well known. If there be no such
central authority, it is a case of every man's hand
against his neighbour. Men walk armed to the teeth.
A constant attitude of fear and suspicion warps the
whole nature. The passions are excited and magnified;
the intelligence and judgement are dwarfed.
For the higher a man looks, the farther he sees: to
us that is the practical lesson of these first nine verses
of the seventh chapter. The very gesture of faith
bestows upon the mind a breadth of view. The man,
who lifts his face to God in heaven, is he whose eyes
sweep simultaneously the farthest prospect of earth,
and bring to him a sense of the proportion of things.
Ahaz, facing his nearest enemies, does not see over their Page 96. Physics and Politics (International Scientific Series), pp. 75
ff. One of the finest modern illustrations of the connection between
faith and common-sense is found in the Letters of General
Gordon to His Sister. Gordon's coolness in face of the slave trade,
the just survey he makes of it, and the sensible advice which
he gives about meeting it stand well in contrast to the haste and rash
proposals of philanthropists at home, and are evidently due to his
conviction that the slave trade, like everything else in the world, is in
the hands of God, and so may be calmly studied and wisely checkmated.
Gordon's letters make very clear how much of his shrewdness
in dealing with men was due to the same source. It is instructive
to observe throughout, how his complete resignation to the will of God
and his perfect obedience delivered him from prejudices and partialities,
from distractions and desires, that make sober judgement impossible
in other men.
The whole course of revelation has been bent
upon this: to render men familiarly and experimentally
acquainted with the character of God, before
laying upon them the duty of homage to His creative
power or submission to His will. In the Old
Testament God is the Friend, the Guide, the Redeemer
of men, or ever He is their Monarch and Lawgiver.
For under the New Testament this also is the
method of revelation. What our King desires before
He ascends the throne of the world is that the
world should know Him; and so He comes down
among us, to be heard, and seen, and handled of us,
that our hearts may learn His heart and know His
But Ahaz would not be persuaded. He had a policy of his own, and was determined to pursue it. He insisted on appealing to Assyria. Before he did so, Isaiah made one more attempt on his obduracy. With a vehemence, which reveals how critical he felt the king's decision to be, the prophet returned as if this time the very voice of Jehovah. And Jehovah spake to Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of Jehovah thy God; ask it either in Sheol below or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.
Isaiah's offer of a sign was one which the prophets
of Israel used to make when some crisis demanded the
immediate acceptance of their word by men, and men
were more than usually hard to convince—a miracle
such as the thunder that Samuel called out of a clear
sky to impress Israel with God's opinion of their folly
in asking for a king; Chap. xxxviii.
In order to follow intelligently the rest of Isaiah's
address, we must clearly understand how the sign which
he now promises differs in nature from the sign he had
implored Ahaz to select, of whatever sort he may have
expected that selection to be. The king's determination
to call in Assyria has come between. Therefore,
while the sign Isaiah first offered upon the spot was
intended for an immediate pledge that God would
establish Ahaz, if only he did not appeal to the
foreigner, the sign Isaiah now offers shall come as a
future proof of how criminal and disastrous the appeal
A Child, he says, shall shortly be born to whom his mother shall give the name Immanu-El—God-with-us. By the time this Child comes to years of discretion, he shall eat butter and honey. Isaiah then explains the riddle. He does not, however, explain who the mother is, having described her vaguely as a or the young woman of marriageable age; for that is not necessary to the sign, which is to consist in the Child's own experience. To this latter he limits his explanation. Butter and honey are the food of privation, the food of a people, whose land, depopulated by the enemy, has been turned into pasture. Before this Child shall arrive at years of discretion not only shall Syria and Ephraim be laid waste, but the Lord Himself will have laid waste Judah. Jehovah shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people and upon thy father's house days, that have not come, from the day that Ephraim departed from Judah; even the king of Assyria. Nothing more is said of Immanuel, but the rest of the chapter is taken up with the details of Judah's devastation.
Now this sign and its explanation would have presented
little difficulty but for the name of the Child—Immanuel.
Erase that, and the passage reads forcibly
enough. Before a certain Child, whose birth is vaguely
But why call the Child Immanuel? The name is evidently part of the sign, and has to be explained in connection with it. Why call a Child God-with-us who is not going to act greatly or to be highly honoured, who is only going to suffer, for whom to come to years of intelligence shall only be to come to a sense of his country's disaster and his people's poverty? This Child who is used so pathetically to measure the flow of time and the return of its revenges, about whom we are told neither how he shall behave himself in the period of privation, nor whether he shall survive it—why is he called Immanuel? or why, being called Immanuel, has he so sordid a fate to contrast with so splendid a name?
It seems to the present expositor quite impossible
to dissociate so solemn an announcement by Jehovah to
the house of David of the birth of a Child, so highly
named, from that expectation of the coming of a
glorious Prince which was current in this royal family
since the days of its founder. Mysterious and abrupt
as the intimation of Immanuel's birth may seem to us
If Ahaz had any conscience left, we can imagine the effect of this upon him. To be punished for sin in one's own body and fortune, this is sore enough; but to see heaven itself blackened and all the gracious future frustrate, this is unspeakably terrible.
Ahaz is thus the Judas of the Old Testament, if that conception of Judas' character be the right one which makes his wilful desire to bring about the kingdom of God in his own violent fashion the motive of his betrayal of Jesus. Of his own obduracy Ahaz has betrayed the Messiah and Deliverer of his people. The assurance of this betrayal is the sign of his obduracy, a signal and terrible proof of his irretrievable sin in calling upon the Assyrians. The king has been found wanting.
The king has been found wanting; but Isaiah will appeal to the people. Chap. viii. is a collection of addresses to them, as chap. vii. was an expostulation with their sovereign. The two chapters are contemporary. In chap. viii. ver. 1, the narrative goes back upon itself, and returns to the situation as it was before Ahaz made his final resolution of reliance on Assyria. Vv. 1-4 of chap. viii. imply that the Assyrian has not yet been summoned by Ahaz to his assistance, and therefore run parallel to chap. vii. vv. 3-9; but chap. viii. ver. 5 and following verses sketch the evils that are to come upon Judah and Israel, consequent upon the arrival of the Assyrians in Palestine, in answer to the appeal of Ahaz. These evils for land and nation are threatened as absolutely to the people, as they had been to the king. And then the people are thrown over (viii. 14), as the king had been; and Isaiah limits himself to his disciples (ver. 16)—the remnant that was foretold in chap. vi.
This appeal from monarch to people is one of the
most characteristic features of Isaiah's ministry. Whatever
be the matter committed to him, Isaiah is not
allowed to rest till he has brought it home to the
popular conscience; and however much he may be
able to charge national disaster upon the folly of
politicians or the obduracy of a king, it is the people
whom he holds ultimately responsible. The statesman,
according to Isaiah, cannot rise far above the level of
his generation; the people set the fashion to their
most autocratic rulers. This instinct for the popular
conscience, this belief in the moral solidarity of a nation
and their governors, was the motive of the most
picturesque passages in Isaiah's career, and inspired
Isaiah was told to take a large, smooth board, and write thereon in the character used by the common people—with the pen of a man—as if it were the title to a prophecy, the compound word "Maher-shalal-hash-baz." This was not only an intelligibly written, but a significantly sonorous, word—one of those popular cries in which the liveliest sensations are struck forth by the crowded, clashing letters, full to the dullest ears of rumours of war: speed-spoil-hurry-prey. The interpretation of it was postponed, the prophet meantime taking two faithful witnesses to its publication. In a little a son was born to Isaiah, and to this child he transferred the noisy name. Then its explanation was given. The double word was the alarm of a couple of invasions. Before the boy shall have knowledge to cry, My father, my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be carried away before the king of Assyria. So far nothing was told the people that had not been told their king; only the time of the overthrow of their two enemies was fixed with greater precision. At the most in a year, Damascus and Samaria would have fallen. The ground was already vibrating to the footfall of the northern hosts.
The rapid political changes, which ensued in Palestine,
are reflected on the broken surface of this eighth chapter.
It is a period of powerful currents, a people wholly
in drift, and the strongest man of them arrested only
by a firm pressure of the Lord's hand. For Jehovah
spake thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed me,
that I should not walk in the way of this people. The
character of the popular movement, the way of this
people, which nearly lifted Isaiah off his feet, is evident.
It is that into which every nation drifts, who have just
been loosened from a primitive faith in God, and by fear
or ambition have been brought under the fascination of
the great world. On the one hand, such a generation
is apt to seek the security of its outward life in things
materially large and splendid, to despise as paltry its
old religious forms, national aspirations and achievements,
and be very desirous to follow foreign fashion
and rival foreign wealth. On the other hand, the
religious spirit of such an age, withdrawn from its
legitimate objects, seeks satisfaction in petty and
puerile practices, demeaning itself spiritually, in a
way that absurdly contrasts with the grandeur of its
material ambitions. Such a stage in the life of a people
has its analogy in the growth of the individual, when
the boy, new to the world, by affecting the grandest
It was natural, that when the people of Judah contrasted
their own estate with that of Assyria, or even
of Damascus, they should despise themselves. For
what was Judah? A petty principality, no larger than
three of our own counties. And what was Jerusalem?
A mere mountain village, some sixty or seventy acres
of barren rock, cut into tongues by three insignificant
valleys, down which there sometimes struggled tiny
threads of water, though the beds were oftener dry,
giving the town a withered and squalid look—no great
river to nourish, ennoble or protect. What were
such a country and capital to compare with the empire
of Assyria?—the empire of the two rivers, whose
powerful streams washed the ramparts, wharves, and
palace stairs of mighty cities! What was Jerusalem
even to the capital of Rezin? Were not Abana and
Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the
waters of Israel, let alone these waterless wâdys,
whose bleached beds made the Jewish capital so
squalid? It was the Assyrian's vast water system—canals,
embankments, sluices, and the wealth of water
moving through them—that most impressed the poor
Jew, whose streams failed him in summer, and who
had to treasure up his scanty stores of rainwater in
the cisterns, with which the rocky surface of his
territory is still so thickly indented. There had,
indeed, been at Jerusalem some attempt to conduct
But woe to the people, whose attachment to their
land is based upon its material advantages, who have
lost their sense for those spiritual presences, from an
appreciation of which springs all true love of country,
with warrior's courage in her defence and statesman's
faith in her destiny! The greatest calamity, which
can befall any people, is to forfeit their enthusiasm for
the soil, on which their history has been achieved and
their hearths and altars lie, by suffering their faith in
the presence of God, of which these are but the tokens,
to pass away. With this loss Isaiah now reproaches
Judah. The people are utterly materialized; their
delights have been in gold and silver, chariots and
Meantime the Assyrian came on. But the infatuated
people of Judah continued to tremble rather before the
doomed conspirators, Rezin and Pekah. It must have
been a time of huge excitement. The prophet tells us
how he was steadied by the pressure of the Lord's
hand, and how, being steadied, the meaning of the word
"Immanuel" was opened out to him. God-with-us is
the one great fact of life. Amid all the possible alliances
and all the possible fears of a complex political situation,
He remains the one certain alliance, the one real
fear. Say ye not, A conspiracy, concerning all whereof Ewald.
The Assyrian came on, and the temper of the
Jews grew worse. Samaria was indeed doomed
from the first, but for some time Isaiah had been
excepting Judah from a judgement for which the guilt of
Northern Israel was certainly riper. He foresaw, of
course, that the impetus of invasion might sweep the
Assyrians into Judah, but he had triumphed in this:
that Judah was Immanuel's land, and that all who
arrayed themselves against her must certainly come to
nought. But now his ideas have changed, as Judah has
Isaiah then at last sees his remnant. But the
point we have reached is significant for more than the
fulfilment of his expectations. This is the first appearance
in history of a religious community, apart from the
forms of domestic or national life. "Till then no one
had dreamed of a fellowship of faith dissociated from
all national forms, bound together by faith in the
Divine word alone. It was the birth of a new era in
religion, for it was the birth of the conception of the
Church, the first step in the emancipation of spiritual
religion from the forms of political life." Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 275.
The plan of the seventh and eighth chapters is now
fully disclosed. As the king for his unworthiness has
to give place to the Messiah, so the nation for theirs
have to give place to the Church. In the seventh
chapter the king was found wanting, and the Messiah
promised. In the eighth chapter the people are found
wanting; and the prophet, turning from them, proceeds
to form the Church among those who accept the Word,
which king and people have refused. Bind thou up
the testimony, and seal the teaching English Version, "law," but not the law of Moses. Isaiah refers
to the word that has come by himself.
This, then, is the situation: revelation concluded, the Church formed upon it, and the nation abandoned. But is that situation final? The words just quoted betray the prophet's hope that it is not. He says: I will wait. He says again: The Lord is only hiding His face from the house of Jacob. I will expect again the shining of His countenance. I will hope for Divine grace and the nation being once more conterminous. The rest of the section (to ix. 7) is the development of this hope, which stirs in the prophet's heart after he has closed the record of revelation.
The darkness deepened across Israel. The Assyrian
had come. The northern floods kept surging among
the little States of Palestine, and none knew what might
be left standing. We can well understand Isaiah
pausing, as he did, in face of such rapid and incontrollable
movements. When Tiglath-pileser swept over the
plain of Esdraelon, casting down the king of Samaria and
the Philistine cities, and then swept back again, carrying
off upon his ebb the populations east of the Jordan,
it looked very like as if both the houses of Israel should
fall. In their panic, the people betook themselves to
morbid forms of religion; and at first Isaiah was obliged
to quench the hope and pity he had betrayed for them
in indignation at the utter contrariety of their religious
practices to the word of God. There can be no Divine
grace for the people as long as they seek unto them
that have familiar spirits, and unto the wizards that
chirp and that mutter. For such a disposition the
prophet has nothing but scorn, Should not a people
The night, however, grew too awful for scorn. There had been no part of the land so given to the idolatrous practices, which the prophet scathed, as the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, by the sea beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. But all the horrors of captivity had now fallen upon it, and it had received at the Lord's hand double for all its sins. The night had been torn enough by lightning; was there no dawn? The darkness of these provinces fills the prophet's silenced thoughts. He sees a people hardly bestead and hungry, fretting themselves, cursing their king, who had betrayed them, and their God, who had abandoned them, turning their faces upwards to heaven and downwards to the sacred soil from which they were being dragged, but, behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and into thick darkness they are driven away. It is a murky picture, yet through the smoke of it we are able to discern a weird procession of Israelites departing into captivity. We date it, therefore, about 732 B.C., the night of Israel's first great captivity. The shock and the pity of this rouse the prophet's great heart. He cannot continue to say that there is no morning for those benighted provinces. He will venture a great hope for their people.
Over how many months the crowded verses, viii.
21-ix. 7, must be spread, it is useless now to
inquire—whether the revulsion they mark arose all at
once in the prophet's mind, or hope grew gradually
brighter as the smoke of war died away on Israel's
When, finally, the prophet inquires what has led his
thoughts through this rapid change from satisfaction
(chap. viii. 16) with the salvation of a small remnant
of believers in the word of God—a little kernel of
patience in the midst of a godless and abandoned
people—to the daring vision of a whole nation redeemed
and established in peace under a Godlike King,
The zeal, translates our English version, but no one English word will give it. It is that mixture of hot honour and affection to which "jealousy" in its good sense comes near. It is that overflow of the love that cannot keep still, which, when men think God has surely done all He will or can do for an ungrateful race, visits them in their distress, and carries them forward into unconceived dispensations of grace and glory. It is the Spirit of God, which yearns after the lost, speaks to the self-despairing of hope, and surprises rebel and prophet alike with new revelations of love. We have our systems representing God's work up to the limits of our experience, and we settle upon them; but the Almighty is ever greater than His promise or than His revelation of Himself.
We have now reached that point of Isaiah's prophesying
at which the Messiah becomes the
most conspicuous figure on his horizon. Let us take
advantage of it, to gather into one statement all that the
prophet told his generation concerning that exalted and
mysterious Person. The Messiah, or Anointed, is used in the Old Testament of many
agents of God: high-priest (
When Isaiah began to prophesy, there was current
among the people of Judah the expectation of a glorious
King. How far the expectation was defined it is impossible
to ascertain; but this at least is historically
certain. A promise had been made to David (
In the first stage of his prophecy, it is remarkable,
Isaiah makes no use of this tradition, although he gives
more than one representation of Israel's future in which
it might naturally have appeared. No word is spoken
of a Messiah even in the awful conversation, in which
Isaiah received from the Eternal the fundamentals of
his teaching. The only hope there permitted to him
is the survival of a bare, leaderless few of the people,
or, to use his own word, a stump, with no sign of a
prominent sprout upon it. In connection, however,
with the survival of a remnant, as we have said on
chap. vi. (p. 89), it is plain that there were two indispensable
conditions, which the prophet could not help
having to state sooner or later. Indeed, one of them he
had mentioned already. It was indispensable that the
people should have a leader, and that they should have
a rallying-point. They must have their King, and they
must have their City. Every reader of Isaiah knows
that it is on these two themes the prophet rises to the
height of his eloquence—Jerusalem shall remain inviolable;
If we consider the moment, chosen by Isaiah for
announcing the Messiah and adding his seal to the
national belief in the advent of a glorious Son of David,
we find some significance in the fact that it was a
moment, when the throne of David was unworthily filled
and David's dynasty was for the first time seriously
threatened. It is impossible to dissociate the birth of
a boy called Immanuel, and afterwards so closely identified
with the fortunes of the whole land (vii. 8),
from the public expectation of a King of glory; and
critics are almost unanimous in recognizing Immanuel
again in the Prince-of-the-Four-Names in chap. ix.
Immanuel, therefore, is the Messiah, the promised King
of Israel. But Isaiah makes his own first intimation of
Him, not when the throne was worthily filled by an
Uzziah or a Jotham, but when a fool and traitor to God
abused its power, and the foreign conspiracy to set up
a Syrian prince in Jerusalem imperilled the whole
dynasty. Perhaps we ought not to overlook the fact,
that Isaiah does not here designate Immanuel as a
descendant of David. The vagueness with which the
It is, however, far less with the origin, than with the experience, of Immanuel that Isaiah is concerned; and those who embark upon curious inquiries, as to who exactly the mother might be, are busying themselves with what the prophet had no interest in, while neglecting that in which really lay the significance of the sign that he offered.
Ahaz by his wilfulness has made a Substitute necessary.
But Isaiah is far more taken up with this: that he
has actually mortgaged the prospects of that Substitute.
The Messiah comes, but the wilfulness of Ahaz has
rendered His reign impossible. He, whose advent has
hitherto not been foretold except as the beginning of
an era of prosperity, and whose person has not been
painted but with honour and power, is represented as a
helpless and innocent Sufferer—His prospects dissipated
by the sins of others, and Himself born only to share
His people's indigence (p. 115). Such a representation
of the Hero's fate is of the very highest interest. We
are accustomed to associate the conception of a suffering
Messiah only with a much later development of prophecy,
when Israel went into exile; but the conception
Through the rest of the prophecies published during the Syro-Ephraitic troubles the Sufferer is slowly transformed into a Deliverer. The stages of this transformation are obscure. In chap. viii. Immanuel is no more defined than in chap. vii. He is still only a Name of hope upon an unbroken prospect of devastation. The stretching out of his wings—i.e., the floods of the Assyrian—shall fill the breadth of Thy land, O Immanuel. But this time that the prophet utters the Name, he feels inspired by new courage. He grasps at Immanuel as the pledge of ultimate salvation. Let the enemies of Judah work their worst; it shall be in vain, for Immanuel, God is with us. And then, to our astonishment, while Isaiah is telling us how he arrived at the convictions embodied in this Name, the personality of Immanuel fades away altogether, and Jehovah of hosts Himself is set forth as the sole sanctuary of those who fear Him. There is indeed a double displacement here. Immanuel dissolves in two directions. As a Refuge, He is displaced by Jehovah; as a Sufferer and a Symbol of the sufferings of the land, by a little community of disciples, the first embodiment of the Church, who now, with Isaiah, can do nothing except wait for the Lord (pp. 124-126).
Then, when the prophet's yearning thoughts, that
will not rest upon so dark a closure, struggle once
more, and struggling pass from despair to pity, and from
pity to hope, and from hope to triumph in a salvation
These Four Names do certainly not invite us to
grudge them meaning, and they have been claimed as
incontrovertible proofs, that the prophet had an absolutely
Divine Person in view. Some distinguished
scholars insist that the promised Deliverer is nothing
less than a God in the metaphysical sense of the
word. I regret very much that in previous editions I should have
erroneously imputed this opinion to Dr. Hermann Schultz—through
a mistranslation of his words on pp. 726, 727 of his A. T. Theologie.
We fall back with greater confidence on other arguments of a more general kind, which apply to all Isaiah's prophecies of the Messiah. If Isaiah had one revelation rather than another to make, it was the revelation of the unity of God. Against king and people, who crowded their temple with the shrines of many deities, Isaiah presented Jehovah as the one only God. It would simply have nullified the force of his message, and confused the generation to which he brought it, if either he or they had conceived of the Messiah, with the conceiving of Christian theology, as a separate Divine personality.
Again, as Mr. Robertson Smith has very clearly
explained, Prophets of Israel, p. 306.
There is a third argument in the same direction, the
force of which we appreciate only when we come to
discover how very little from this point onwards Isaiah
had to say about the promised king. In chaps. i.-xxxix.
only three other passages are interpreted as describing
the Messiah. The first of these, xi. 1-5, dating perhaps
from about 720, when Hezekiah was king, tells us, for
the first and only time by Isaiah's lips, that the Messiah
is to be a scion of David's house, and confirms what we
have said: that His duties, however perfectly they were
to be discharged, were the usual duties of Judah's
monarchy. See further on this passage pp. 180-183. As is there pointed
out, while these passages on the Messiah are indeed infrequent
and unconnected, there is a very evident progress through them of
Isaiah's conception of his Hero's character.
On these grounds, then, we decline to believe that Isaiah saw in the king of the future "a God in the metaphysical sense of the word." Just because we know the proofs of the Divinity of Jesus to be so spiritual, do we feel the uselessness of looking for them to prophecies, that manifestly describe purely earthly and civil functions.
But such a conclusion by no means shuts us out
from tracing a relation between these prophecies and
the appearance of Jesus. The fact, that Isaiah allowed
them to go down to posterity, proves that he himself
did not count them to have been exhausted in Hezekiah.
And this fact of their preservation is ever so much the
more significant, that their literal truth was discredited
by events. Isaiah had evidently foretold the birth and
bitter youth of Immanuel for the near future. Immanuel's
childhood was to begin with the devastation
of Ephraim and Syria, and to be passed in circumstances
consequent on the devastation of Judah, which was to
follow close upon that of her two enemies. But although
Ephraim and Syria were immediately spoiled, as Isaiah
foresaw, Judah lay in peace all the reign of Ahaz and
This boldness, to entrust to future ages a prophecy
discredited by contemporary history, argues a
profound belief in its moral meaning and eternal
significance; and it is this boldness, in face of disappointment
continued from generation to generation in
Israel, that constitutes the uniqueness of the Messianic
hope among that people. To sublimate this permanent
meaning of the prophecies from the contemporary
material, with which it is mixed, is not difficult.
Isaiah foretells his Prince on the supposition that
certain things are fulfilled. When the people are
reduced to the last extreme, when there is no more a
king to rally or to rule them, when the land is in
captivity, when revelation is closed, when, in despair
of the darkness of the Lord's face, men have taken
to them that have familiar spirits and wizards that peep Stanton: The Jewish and Christian Messiah.
Men do not ask when they drink of a streamlet high
up on the hills, "Is this going to be a great river?"
They are satisfied if it is water enough to quench their
thirst. And so it was enough for Old Testament
believers if they found in Isaiah's prophecy of a
Deliverer—as they did find—what satisfied their own
religious needs, without convincing them to what
volumes it should swell. But this does not mean that
in using these Old Testament prophecies we Christians
should limit our enjoyment of them to the measure of
the generation to whom they were addressed. To
have known Christ must make the predictions of the
Messiah different to a man. You cannot bring so
infinite an ocean of blessing into historic connection
with these generous, expansive intimations of the Old
Testament without its passing into them. If we may
use a rough figure, the Messianic prophecies of the
Old Testament are tidal rivers. They not only run, as
we have seen, to their sea, which is Christ; they feel
His reflex influence. It is not enough for a Christian
to have followed the historical direction of the prophecies,
or to have proved their connection with the New
Testament as parts of one Divine harmony. Forced
back by the fulness of meaning to which he has found
With all this, however, we must not forget that, beside these prophecies of a great earthly ruler, there runs another stream of desire and promise, in which we see a much stronger premonition of the fact that a Divine Being shall some day dwell among men. We mean the Scriptures in which it is foretold that Jehovah Himself shall visibly visit Jerusalem. This line of prophecy, taken along with the powerful anthropomorphic representations of God,—astonishing in a people like the Jews, who so abhorred the making of an image of the Deity upon the likeness of anything in heaven and earth,—we hold to be the proper Old Testament instinct that the Divine should take human form and tabernacle amongst men. But this side of our subject—the relation of the anthropomorphism of the Old Testament to the Incarnation—we postpone till we come to the second part of the book of Isaiah, in which the anthropomorphic figures are more frequent and daring than they are here.
Isaiah:— |
xxviii. 725 B.C. |
x. 5-34. 721 B.C. |
xi., xii. About 720 B.C.? |
xx. 711 B.C. |
xxi. 1-10. 710 B.C. |
xxxviii., xxxix. Between 712 and 705 B.C. |
The prophecies with which we have been engaged (chaps. ii.-x. 4) fall either before or during the great Assyrian invasion of Syria, undertaken in 734-732 by Tiglath-pileser II., at the invitation of King Ahaz. Nobody has any doubt about that. But when we ask what prophecies of Isaiah come next in chronological order, we raise a storm of answers. We are no longer on the sure ground we have been enjoying.
Under the canonical arrangement the next prophecy
is "The Woe upon the Assyrian" (x. 5-34). In
the course of this the Assyrian is made to boast of
having overthrown Samaria (vv. 9-11): Is not Samaria
as Damascus?... Shall I not, as I have done unto
Samaria and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and her idols?
If Samaria mean the capital city of Northern Israel—and
the name is never used in these parts of Scripture
for anything else—and if the prophet be quoting a boast
which the Assyrian was actually in a position to make,
and not merely imagining a boast, which he would be
likely to make some years afterwards (an entirely
improbable view, though held by one great scholar Delitzsch, who fancies that the fall of Samaria is a completed
affair only in the vision of the prophet, not in reality.
It was evidently this complete overthrow of Samaria
by Sargon in 722-721, which Isaiah had behind him
when he wrote x. 9-11. We must, therefore, date the
Was Isaiah, then, silent these ten years? Is there
no prophecy lying farther on in his book that treats of
Samaria as still standing? Besides an address to the
fallen Damascus in xvii. 1-11, which we shall take later
with the rest of Isaiah's oracles on foreign states, there
is one large prophecy, chap. xxviii., which opens with
a description of the magnates of Samaria lolling in
drunken security on their vine-crowned hill, but God's
storms are ready to break. Samaria has not yet fallen,
but is threatened and shall fall soon. The first part
of chap. xxviii. can only refer to the year, in which
Salmanassar advanced upon Samaria—726 or 725.
There is nothing in the rest of it to corroborate this
date; but the fact, that there are several turns of
thought and speech very similar to turns of thought
and speech in x. 5-34, makes us the bolder to take
Here then is our next group of prophecies, all dating from the first seven years of the reign of Hezekiah: xxviii., a warning addressed to the politicians of Jerusalem from the impending fate of those of Samaria (date 725); x. 5-34, a woe upon the Assyrian (date about 720), describing his boasts and his progress in conquest till his sudden crash by the walls of Jerusalem; xi., of date uncertain, for it reflects no historical circumstance, but standing in such artistic contrast to x. that the two must be treated together; and xii., a hymn of salvation, which forms a fitting conclusion to xi. With these we shall take the few fragments of the book of Isaiah which belong to the fifteen years 720-705, and are as straws to show how Judah all that time was drifting down to alliance with Egypt—xx., xxi. 1-10, and xxxviii.-xxxix. This will bring us to 705, and the beginning of a new series of prophecies, the richest of Isaiah's life, and the subject of our third book.
Isaiah xxviii. (ABOUT 725 B.C.)
Some time when the big, black cloud was gathering
again on the north, Isaiah raised his voice to the
magnates of Jerusalem: "Lift your heads from your
The chapter with this argument falls into four divisions.
I. The Warning from Samaria (vv. 1-6).
They had always been hard drinkers in North Israel.
Fifty years before, Amos flashed judgement on those
who trusted in the mount of Samaria, lolling upon their
couches and gulping their wine out of basons, women as
well as men. Upon these same drunkards of Ephraim,
Isaiah's intention is manifest, and his effort a great
one. It is to rob passion of its magic and change
men's temptations to their disgusts, by exhibiting
how squalid passion shows beneath disaster, and
how gloriously purity shines surviving it. It is to
strip luxury and indulgence of their attractiveness by
drenching them with the storm of judgement, and then
not to leave them stunned, but to rouse in them a moral
admiration and envy by the presentation of certain
grand survivals of the storm—unstained justice and
victorious valour. Isaiah first sweeps the atmosphere,
hot from infective passion, with the cold tempest from
the north. Then in the clear shining after rain he points
to two figures, which have preserved through temptation
and disaster, and now lift against a smiling sky, the
ideal that those corrupt judges and drunken warriors
have dragged into the mire—him that sitteth for justice
and him that turneth back the battle at the gate. The
When God has put a conscience into the art or
literature of any generation, they have followed this
method of Isaiah, but not always to the healthy end
which he reaches. To show the slaves of Circe the
physical disaster impending—which you must begin
by doing if you are to impress their brutalized minds—is
not enough. The lesson of Tennyson's "Vision of
Sin" and of Arnold's "New Sirens," that night and
frost, decay and death, come down at last on pampered
sense, is necessary, but not enough. Who stops there
remains a defective and morbid moralist. When you
have made the sensual shiver before the disease that
inevitably awaits them, you must go on to show that
there are men who have the secret of surviving the most
terrible judgements of God, and lift their figures calm
and victorious against the storm-washed sky. Preach
the depravity of men, but never apart from the possibilities
that remain in them. It is Isaiah's health as a
moralist that he combines the two. No prophet ever
threatened judgement more inexorable and complete
than he. Yet he never failed to tell the sinner, how
possible it was for him to be different. If it were
necessary to crush men in the mud, Isaiah would not
leave them there with the hearts of swine. But he put
conscience in them, and the envy of what was pure,
and the admiration of what was victorious. Even as
they wallowed, he pointed them to the figures of men
II. God's Commonplace (vv. 7-13).
But Isaiah has cast his pearls before swine. The
men of Jerusalem, whom he addresses, are too deep in
sensuality to be roused by his noble words. Even
priest and prophet stagger through strong drink; and the
class that should have been the conscience of the city,
responding immediately to the word of God, reel in
vision and stumble in judgement. They turn upon Isaiah's
earnest message with tipsy men's insolence. Verses
9 and 10 should be within inverted commas, for they
are the mocking reply of drunkards over their cups.
Whom is he going to teach knowledge, and upon whom is
he trying to force "the Message," as he calls it? Them
that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the
breasts? Are we school-children, that he treats us with
his endless platitudes and repetitions— Ewald. The original runs thus: "Ki tsav la-tsav, tsav la-tsav
qav la-qav, qav la-qav; z'eir sham z'eir sham."
But Isaiah turns upon them with their own words:
"You call me, Stammerer! I tell you that God, Who
speaks through me, and Whom in me you mock, will
one day speak again to you in a tongue that shall indeed
sound stammering to you. When those far-off barbarians
have reached your walls, and over them taunt
you in uncouth tones, then shall you hear how God can
stammer. For these shall be the very voice of Him,
and as He threatens you with captivity it shall be your
bitterness to remember how by me He once offered
you a rest and refreshing, which you refused. I tell
you more. God will not only speak in words, but in
deeds, and then truly your nickname for His message
shall be fulfilled to you. Then shall the word of the
Lord be unto you precept upon precept, precept upon
precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and
there a little. For God shall speak with the terrible
simplicity and slowness of deeds, with the gradual
growth of fate, with the monotonous stages of decay,
till step by step you go, and stumble backward, and
be broken, and snared, and taken. You have scorned
my instruction as monosyllables fit for children! By
This is not only a very clever and cynical retort,
but the statement of a moral principle. We gather
from Isaiah that God speaks twice to men, first in
words and then by deeds, but both times very simply and
plainly. And if men deride and abuse the simplicity of
the former, if they ignore moral and religious truths
because they are elementary, and rebel against the
quiet reiteration of simple voices, with which God sees
it most healthy to conduct their education, then they shall
be stunned by the commonplace pertinacity, with which
the effects of their insolence work themselves out in life.
God's ways with men are mostly commonplace; that is
the hardest lesson we have to learn. The tongue of
conscience speaks like the tongue of time, prevailingly
by ticks and moments; not in undue excitement of
soul and body, not in the stirring up of our passions
nor by enlisting our ambitions, not in thunder nor in
startling visions, but by everyday precepts of faithfulness,
honour and purity, to which conscience has to rise
unwinged by fancy or ambition, and dreadfully weighted
with the dreariness of life. If we, carried away upon the
rushing interests of the world, and with our appetite
spoiled by the wealth and piquancy of intellectual knowledge,
despise the simple monitions of conscience and
Scripture, as uninteresting and childish, this is the risk
we run,—that God will speak to us in another, and
this time unshirkable, kind of commonplace. What that
is we shall understand, when a career of dissipation or
unscrupulous ambition has bereft life of all interest and
joy, when one enthusiasm after another grows dull, and
one pleasure after another tasteless, when all the little
things of life preach to us of judgement, and
III. Covenants with Death and Hell (vv. 14-22).
To Isaiah's threats of destruction, the politicians of Jerusalem replied, We have bought destruction off! They meant some treaty with a foreign power. Diplomacy is always obscure, and at that distance its details are buried for us in impenetrable darkness. But we may safely conclude that it was either the treaty of Ahaz with Assyria, or some counter-treaty executed with Egypt since this power began again to rise into pretentiousness, or more probably still it was a secret agreement with the southern power, while the open treaty with the northern was yet in force. Isaiah, from the way in which he speaks, seems to have been in ignorance of all, except that the politician's boast was an unhallowed, underhand intrigue, accomplished by much swindling and false conceit of cleverness. This wretched subterfuge Isaiah exposes in some of the most powerful sentences he ever uttered. A faithless diplomacy was never more thoroughly laid bare, in its miserable mixture of political pedantry and falsehood.
Therefore hear the word of Jehovah, ye men of scorn, rulers of this people, which is in Jerusalem!
Because ye have said, We have entered into a covenant
And I will set justice for a line, and righteousness for a plummet, and hail shall sweep away the subterfuge of lies, and the secrecy shall waters overflow. And cancelled shall be your covenant with Death, and your bargain with Hell shall not stand.
"The Overflowing Scourge," indeed! When it passeth over, then ye shall be unto it for trampling. As often as it passeth over, it shall take you away, for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night. Then shall it be sheer terror to realize "the Message"! Too late then for anything else. Had you realized "the Message" now, what rest and refreshing! But then only terror.
For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch
himself upon it, and the covering narrower than that he
can wrap himself in it. This proverb seems to be
struck out of the prophet by the belief of the politicians,
that they are creating a stable and restful policy for
For Jehovah shall arise as on Mount Peratsim; He shall be stirred as in the valley of Gibeon, to do His deed—strange is this deed of His, and to bring to pass His act—strange is His act.
Now, therefore, play no more the scorner, lest your bands be made tight, for a consumption, and that determined, have I heard from the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, upon the whole earth. This finishes the matter. Possibility of alliance there is for sane men nowhere in this world of Western Asia, so evidently near convulsion. Only the foundation-stone in Zion shall be left. Cling to that!
When the pedantic members of the General Assembly
of the Kirk of Scotland, in the year 1650, were clinging
with all the grip of their hard logic, but with very little
heart, to the "Divine right of kings," and attempting
an impossible state, whose statute-book was to be the
Westminster Confession, and its chief executive officer
King Charles II., Cromwell, then encamped at Musselburgh,
sent them that letter in which the famous
sentence occurs: "I beseech you in the bowels of
Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. Precept
may be upon precept, line may be upon line," he goes
on to say, "and yet the Word of the Lord may be to
some a word of Judgement; that they may fall backward,
and be broken, and be snared, and be taken!
There may be a spiritual fulness, which the world may
"I pray you read the Twenty-eighth of Isaiah, from
the fifth to the fifteenth verse. And do not scorn to
know that it is the Spirit that quickens and giveth
life." Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Letter cxxxvi.
Cromwell, as we have said, is the best commentator
Isaiah has ever had, and that by an instinct born, not
only of the same faith, but of experience in tackling
similar sorts of character. In this letter he is dealing,
like Isaiah, with stubborn pedants, who are endeavouring
to fasten the national fortunes upon a Procrustean
policy. The diplomacy of Jerusalem was very clever;
the Covenanting ecclesiasticism of Edinburgh was
logical and consistent. But a Jewish alliance with
Assyria and the attempt of Scotsmen to force their
covenant upon the whole United Kingdom were
equally sheer impossibilities. In either case the bed
was shorter than that a man could stretch himself on it,
and the covering narrower than that he could wrap himself
in it. Both, too, were covenants with Death and Hell;
for if the attempt of the Scots to secure Charles II.
It may be wondered why we spend so much argument on comparing the attempt to force Charles II. into the Solemn League and Covenant with the impious treaty of Judah with the heathen. But the argument has not been wasted, if it have shown how even sincere and religious men may make covenants with death, and even Church creeds and constitutions become beds too short that a man may lie upon them, coverings narrower than that he can wrap himself in them. Not once or twice has it happened that an old and hallowed constitution has become, in the providence of God, unfit for the larger life of a people or of a Church, and yet is clung to by parties in that Church or people from motives of theological pedantry or ecclesiastical cowardice. Sooner or later a crisis is sure to arrive, in which the defective creed has to match itself against some interest of justice; and then endless compromises have to be entertained, that discover themselves perilously like bargains with hell. If we of this generation have to make a public application of the twenty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, it lies in this direction. There are few things, to which his famous proverb of the short bed can be applied more aptly, than to the attempt to fasten down the religious life and thought of the present age too rigorously upon a creed of the fashion of two or three hundred years ago.
But Isaiah's words have wider application. Short of
faith as he exemplified it, there is no possibility for the
spirit of man to be free from uneasiness. It is so all
along the scale of human endeavour. No power of
patience or of hope is his, who cannot imagine possibilities
IV. The Almighty the All-methodical (vv. 23-29).
The patience of faith, which Isaiah has so nobly
preached, he now proceeds to vindicate by reason. But
the vindication implies that his audience are already in
another mood. From confidence in their clever diplomacy,
heedless of the fact that God has His own purposes
concerning them, they have swung round to despair
before His judgements. Their despair, however, is
due to the same fault as their careless confidence—the
forgetfulness that God works by counsel and
method. Even a calamity, so universal and extreme as
that, of whose certainty the prophet has now convinced
them, has its measure and its term. To persuade the
crushed and superstitious Jews of this, Isaiah employs
a parable. "You know," he says, "the husbandman.
Have you ever seen him keep on harrowing and breaking
the clods of his land for mere sport, and without
farther intention? Does not the harrowing time lead
to the sowing time? Or again, when he threshes his
crops, does he thresh for ever? Is threshing the end
he has in view? Look, how he varies the rigour of his
instrument by the kind of plant he threshes. For
delicate plants, like fitches and cummin, he does not
use the threshing sledge with the sharp teeth, or the
lumbering roller, but the fitches are beaten out with a
staff and the cummin with a rod. And in the case of
bread corn, which needs his roller and horses, he does
not use these upon it till it is all crushed to dust."
The application of this parable is very evident. If
the husbandman be so methodical and careful, shall
the God who taught him not also be so? If the
violent treatment of land and fruits be so measured
and adapted for their greater fruitfulness and purity,
ought we not to trust God to have the same intentions
We have said this is one of the finest prophecies of
Isaiah. His political foresight was admirable, when he
alone of his countrymen predicted the visitation of
Assyria upon Judah. But now, when all are convinced
of it, how still more wonderful does he seem facing that
novel disaster, with the whole world's force behind it, and
declaring its limit. He has not the temptation, so
strong in prophets of judgement, to be a mere disaster-monger,
and leave judgement on the horizon unrelieved.
Nor is he afraid, as other predicters of evil have been,
of the monster he has summoned to the land. The
secret of this is that from the first he predicted the
Assyrian invasion, not out of any private malice nor
merely by superior political foresight, but because he
knew—and knew, as he tells us, by the inspiration of
God's own Spirit—that God required such an instrument
To this enemy we are now to see Isaiah turn with the same message he has delivered to the men of Jerusalem.
Isaiah x. 5-34 (ABOUT 721 B.C.).
In the tenth chapter Isaiah turns with this truth to
defy the Assyrian himself. It is four years later.
Samaria has fallen. The judgement, which the prophet
spoke upon the luxurious capital, has been fulfilled. All
Ephraim is an Assyrian province. Judah stands for
the first time face to face with Assyria. From Samaria
to the borders of Judah is not quite two days' march,
to the walls of Jerusalem a little over two. Now shall
the Jews be able to put to the test their prophet's
There was a very fallacious human reason, and there was a very sound Divine one.
The fallacious human reason was the alliance which Ahaz had made with Assyria. In what state that alliance now was, does not clearly appear, but the most optimist of the Assyrian party at Jerusalem could not, after all that had happened, be feeling quite comfortable about it. The Assyrian was as unscrupulous as themselves. There was too much impetus in the rush of his northern floods to respect a tiny province like Judah, treaty or no treaty. Besides, Sargon had as good reason to suspect Jerusalem of intriguing with Egypt, as he had against Samaria or the Philistine cities; and the Assyrian kings had already shown their meaning of the covenant with Ahaz by stripping Judah of enormous tribute.
So Isaiah discounts in this prophecy Judah's treaty
with Assyria. He speaks as if nothing was likely to prevent
the Assyrian's immediate march upon Jerusalem.
He puts into Sargon's mouth the intention of this, and
makes him boast of the ease with which it can be
accomplished (vv. 7-11). In the end of the prophecy
he even describes the probable itinerary of the invader
from the borders of Judah to his arrival on the heights,
over against the Holy City (vv. 27 last clause to 32). It will be noticed that in the above version a different reading
is adopted from the meaningless clause at the end of verse 27 in
the English version, out of which a proper heading for the subsequent
itinerary has been obtained by Robertson Smith (Journal of Philology,
1884, p. 62).
Cometh up from the North the Destroyer.
They have passed through the Pass; "Let Geba be our bivouac."
Terror-struck is Ramah; Gibeah of Saul hath fled.
Make shrill thy voice, O daughter of Gallim! Listen, Laishah! Answer her, Anathoth!
In mad flight is Madmenah; the dwellers in Gebim gather their stuff to flee.
This very day he halteth at Nob; he waveth his hand at the Mount of the Daughter of Zion, the Hill of Jerusalem.
This is not actual fact; but it is vision of what may take place to-day or to-morrow. For there is nothing—not even that miserable treaty—to prevent such a violation of Jewish territory, within which, it ought to be kept in mind, lie all the places named by the prophet.
But the invasion of Judah and the arrival of the Assyrian on the heights over against Jerusalem does not mean that the Holy City and the shrine of Jehovah of hosts are to be destroyed; does not mean that all the prophecies of Isaiah about the security of this rallying-place for the remnant of God's people are to be annulled, and Israel annihilated. For just at the moment of the Assyrian's triumph, when he brandishes his hand over Jerusalem, as if he would harry it like a bird's nest, Isaiah beholds him struck down, and crash like the fall of a whole Lebanon of cedars (vv. 33, 34).
Behold the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, lopping the topmost boughs with a sudden crash,
And the high ones of stature hewn down, and the lofty are brought low!
Yea, He moweth down the thickets of the forest with iron, and Lebanon by a Mighty One falleth.
The Assyrian expected to take Jerusalem. But he
is not his own master. Though he knows it not, and
his only instinct is that of destruction (ver. 7), he
is the rod in God's hand. And when God shall have
used him for the needed punishment of Judah, then will
God visit upon him his arrogance and brutality. This
man, who says he will exploit the whole earth as
he harries a bird's nest (ver. 14), who believes
in nothing but himself, saying, By the strength of my
hand I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I am prudent,
is but the instrument of God, and all his boasting is
that of the axe against him that heweth therewith and of
the saw against him that wieldeth it. As if, says the
prophet, with a scorn still fresh for those who make
material force the ultimate power in the universe—
This prophecy of Isaiah contains a great Gospel and two great Protests, which the prophet was enabled to make in the strength of it: one against the Atheism of Force, and one against the Atheism of Fear.
The Gospel of the chapter is just that which we have already emphasized as the gospel par excellence of Isaiah: the Lord exalted in righteousness, God supreme over the supremest men and forces of the world. But we now see it carried to a height of daring not reached before. This was the first time that any man faced the sovereign force of the world in the full sweep of victory, and told himself and his fellow-men: "This is not travelling in the greatness of its own strength, but is simply a dead, unconscious instrument in the hand of God." Let us, at the cost of a little repetition, get at the heart of this. We shall find it wonderfully modern.
Belief in God had hitherto been local and circumscribed.
Each nation, as Isaiah tells us, had walked in
Isaiah's problem was thus the fundamental one between faith and atheism; but we must notice that it did not arise theoretically, nor did he meet it by an abstract proposition. This fundamental religious question—whether men are to trust in the visible forces of the world or in the invisible God—came up as a bit of practical politics. It was not to Isaiah a philosophical or theological question. It was an affair in the foreign policy of Judah.
Except to a few thinkers, the question between
materialism and faith never does present itself as one
of abstract argument. To the mass of men it is always
a question of practical life. Statesmen meet it in their
policies, private persons in the conduct of their fortunes.
Few of us trouble our heads about an intellectual
atheism, but the temptations to practical atheism abound
unto us all day by day. Materialism never presents
itself as a mere ism; it always takes some concrete
form. Our Assyria may be the world in Christ's sense,
that flood of successful, heartless, unscrupulous, scornful
forces which burst on our innocence, with their challenge
to make terms and pay tribute, or go down
straightway in the struggle for existence. Beside their
frank and forceful demands, how commonplace and
irrelevant do the simple precepts of religion often seem;
and how the great brazen laugh of the world seems to
bleach the beauty out of purity and honour! According
to our temper, we either cower before its insolence, whining
that character and energy of struggle and religious
Or our Assyria may be the forces of nature, which
have swept upon the knowledge of this generation with
the novelty and impetus, with which the northern hosts
burst across the horizon of Israel. Men to-day, in the
course of their education, become acquainted with laws
and forces, which dwarf the simpler theologies of their
Otherwise we are left with the intolerable paradox, that truth and honesty, patience and the love of man to man, are after all but the playthings and victims of force; that, to adapt the words of Isaiah, the rod really shakes him who lifts it up, and the staff is wielding that which is not wood.
Isaiah xi., xii. (ABOUT 720 B.C.?)
The picture of this future, which fills the eleventh
chapter, is one of the most extensive that Isaiah has
drawn. Three great prospects are unfolded in it: a
prospect of mind, a prospect of nature and a prospect
of history. To begin with, there is (vv. 2-5) the
geography of a royal mind in its stretches of character,
knowledge and achievement. We have next (vv. 5-9)
a vision of the restitution of nature, Paradise regained.
And, thirdly (vv. 9-16), there is the The authenticity of this hymn has been called in question.
I. The Messiah and the Spirit of the Lord (xi. 1-5).
The first form, in which Isaiah sees Israel's longed-for
future realised, is that which he so often exalts and
makes glistering upon the threshold of the future—the
form of a king. It is a peculiarity, which we cannot
fail to remark about Isaiah's scattered representations
of this brilliant figure, that they have no connecting
link. They do not allude to one another, nor employ a
common terminology, even the word king dropping
out of some of them. The earliest of the series
bestows a name on the Messiah, which none of the
others repeat, nor does Isaiah say in any of them,
This is He of whom I have spoken before. Perhaps
the disconnectedness of these oracles is as strong a
proof as is necessary of the view we have formed that
Dean Plumptre has plausibly suggested, that these
verses may represent the programme which Isaiah set
before his pupil Hezekiah on his accession to the charge
of a nation, whom his weak predecessor had suffered to
lapse into such abuse of justice and laxity of morals. Dean Plumptre notes the identity of the ethical terminology of
this passage with that of the book of Proverbs, and conjectures that
the additions to the original nucleus, chaps. x.-xxiv., and therefore
the whole form, of the book of Proverbs, may be due to the editorship
of Isaiah, and perhaps was the manual of ethics, on which he sought
to mould the character of Hezekiah (Expositor, series ii., v., p. 213). Perhaps for land—'arets—we ought, with Lagarde, to read tyrant—'arits.
This, though a fuller and more ethical picture of the
Messiah than even the ninth chapter, is evidently
wanting in many of the traits of a perfect man.
Isaiah has to grow in his conception of his Hero,
and will grow as the years go on, in tenderness. His
thirty-second chapter is a much richer, a more gracious
and humane picture of the Messiah. There the
Victor of the ninth and righteous Judge of the
eleventh chapters is represented as a Man, who shall
not only punish but protect, and not only reign but
inspire, who shall be life as well as victory and justice
to His people—an hiding-place from the wind and a
A conception so limited to the qualifications of an
earthly monarch, as this of chap. xi., gives us no ground
for departing from our previous conclusion, that Isaiah
had not a "supernatural" personality in his view. The
Christian Church, however, has not confined the application
of the passage to earthly kings and magistrates, but
has seen its perfect fulfilment in the indwelling of Christ's
human nature by the Holy Ghost. But it is remarkable,
that for this exegesis she has not made use of the most
"supernatural" of the details of character here
portrayed. If the Old Testament has a phrase for
sinlessness, that phrase occurs here, in the beginning
of the third verse. In the authorized English version
it is translated, and shall make him of quick understanding
in the fear of the Lord, and in the Revised
Version, His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord, and on
the margin the literal meaning of delight is given as scent.
But the phrase may as well mean, He shall draw his
breath in the fear of the Lord; and it is a great pity, that
our revisers have not even on the margin given to English
readers any suggestion of so picturesque, and probably
so correct, a rendering. It is a most expressive definition
of sinlessness—sinlessness which was the attribute of
Christ alone. We, however purely intentioned we be, are
compassed about by an atmosphere of sin. We cannot
help breathing what now inflames our passions, now
chills our warmest feelings, and makes our throats
incapable of honest testimony or glorious praise. As
oxygen to a dying fire, so the worldliness we breathe is
to the sin within us. We cannot help it; it is the atmosphere
into which we are born. But from this Christ
alone of men was free. He was His own atmosphere,
But draughts of this atmosphere are possible to us also, to whom the Holy Spirit is granted. We too, who sicken with the tainted breath of society, and see the characters of children about us fall away and the hidden evil within leap to swift flame before the blasts of the world—we too may, by Christ's grace, draw breath, like Him, in the fear of the Lord. Recall some day when, leaving your close room and the smoky city, you breasted the hills of God, and into opened lungs drew deep draughts of the fresh air of heaven. What strength it gave your body, and with what a glow of happiness your mind was filled! What that is physically, Christ has made possible for us men morally. He has revealed stretches and eminences of life, where, following in His footsteps, we also shall draw for our breath the fear of God. This air is inspired up every steep hill of effort, and upon all summits of worship. In the most passion-haunted air, prayer will immediately bring this atmosphere about a man, and on the wings of praise the poorest soul may rise from the miasma of temptation, and sing forth her song into the azure with as clear a throat as the lark's.
And what else is heaven to be, if not this? God, we
are told, shall be its Sun; but its atmosphere shall be
II. The Seven Spirits of God (xi. 2, 3).
This passage, which suggests so much of Christ, is
also for Christian Theology and Art a classical passage
on the Third Person of the Trinity. If the texts
in the book of Revelation (chaps. i. 4; iii. 1; iv. 5;
v. 6) upon the Seven Spirits of God were not themselves
founded on this text of Isaiah, it is certain that
the Church immediately began to interpret them by its
details. While there are only six spirits of God named
here—three pairs—yet, in order to complete the perfect
number, the exegesis of early Christianity sometimes
added the Spirit of the Lord at the beginning of verse 2
as the central branch of a seven-branched candlestick;
or sometimes the quick understanding in the fear of the
Lord in the beginning of verse 3 was attached as the
seventh branch. (Compare
It is remarkable that there is almost no single text of
Scripture, which has more impressed itself upon Christian
doctrine and symbol than this second verse of the
eleventh chapter, interpreted as a definition of the
Seven Spirits of God. In the theology, art and
worship of the Middle Ages it dominated the expression
of the work of the Holy Ghost. First, and most native
to its origin, arose the employment of this text at the Didron, Christian Iconography, Engl. trans., i., 432. Didron, Christian Iconography, Engl. trans., i., 426.
But the influence of our passage may be followed to
that wider definition of the Spirit's work, which made
Him the Fountain of all intelligence. The Spirits of the
Lord mentioned by Isaiah are prevailingly intellectual;
and the mediæval Church, using the details of this passage
to interpret Christ's own intimation of the Paraclete as
the Spirit of truth,—remembering also the story of
Pentecost, when the Spirit bestowed the gifts of
tongues, and the case of Stephen, who, in the triumph
of his eloquence and learning, was said to be full of
the Holy Ghost,—did regard, as Gregory of Tours
expressly declared, the Holy Spirit as the "God of the
intellect more than of the heart." All Councils were
opened by a mass to the Holy Ghost, and few, who
have examined with care the windows of mediæval
churches, will have failed to be struck with the frequency
with which the Dove is seen descending upon
the heads of miraculously learned persons, or presiding
at discussions, or hovering over groups of figures representing
the sciences. See Didron for numerous interesting instances of this.
III. The Redemption of Nature (xi. 6-9).
But Isaiah will not be satisfied with the establishment
of a strong government in the land and the
redemption of human society from chaos. He prophesies
the redemption of all nature as well. It is one of
those errors, which distort both the poetry and truth of
the Bible, to suppose that by the bears, lions and
We, who live in countries, from which wild beasts
have been exterminated, cannot understand the insecurity
and terror, that they cause in regions where
they abound. A modern seer of the times of regeneration
would leave the wild animals out of his
vision. They do not impress any more the human
conscience or imagination. But they once did so most
terribly. The hostility between man and the beasts
not only formed once upon a time the chief material
obstacle in the progress of the race, but remains still
to the religious thinker the most pathetic portion of that
groaning and travailing of all creation, which is so heavy
a burden on his heart. Isaiah, from his ancient point of
view, is in thorough accord with the order of civilisation,
when he represents the subjugation of wild animals
as the first problem of man, after he has established a
strong government in the land. So far from rhetorizing
or allegorizing—above which literary forms it
But Isaiah would solve the grim problem of the warfare
between man and his lower fellow-creatures in a
very different way from that, of which these heroes
have set the example to humanity. Isaiah would not
have the wild beasts exterminated, but tamed. There
our Western and modern imagination may fail to follow
him, especially when he includes reptiles in the regeneration,
and prophesies of adders and lizards as the playthings
of children. But surely there is no genial man,
who has watched the varied forms of life that sport in the
Southern sunshine, who will not sympathize with the prophet
in his joyous vision. Upon a warm spring day in
Palestine, to sit upon the grass, beside some old dyke
or ruin with its face to the south, is indeed to obtain a
rapturous view of the wealth of life, with which the
bountiful God has blessed and made merry man's
dwelling-place. How the lizards come and go among
the grey stones, and flash like jewels in the dust! And
the timid snake rippling quickly past through the grass,
and the leisurely tortoise, with his shiny back, and the
chameleon, shivering into new colour as he passes from
twig to stone and stone to straw,—all the air the while
Nor is this Bible answer,—of which the book of Genesis
gives us the one end, and this text of Isaiah the other,—a
mere pious opinion, which the true history of man's
dealing with wild beasts by extermination proves to be
impracticable. We may take on scientific authority a
few facts as hints from nature, that after all man is to
blame for the wildness of the beasts, and that through
his sanctification they may be restored to sympathy with
himself. Charles Darwin says: "It deserves notice,
that at an extremely ancient period, when man first
entered any country the animals living there would
have felt no instinctive or inherited fear of him, and
would consequently have been tamed far more easily
than at present." And he gives some very instructive
facts in proof of this with regard to dogs, antelopes, Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,
pp. 20, 21.
How much the appeal of suffering animals to man—the
look of a wounded horse or dog with a meaning
which speech would only spoil, the tales of beasts of
prey that in pain have turned to man as their physician,
the approach of the wildest birds in winter to our feet
as their Providence—how much all these prove Paul's
saying that the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth
for the manifestation of the sons of God. And we have
other signals, than those afforded by the pain and
pressure of the beasts themselves, of the time when
they and man shall sympathize. The natural history
of many of our breeds of domesticated animals teaches Galton, quoted by Darwin.
These facts, if few, certainly bear in the direction of Isaiah's prophecy, that not by extermination of the beasts, but by the influence upon them of man's greater force of character, may that warfare be brought to an end, of which man's sin, according to the Bible, is the original cause.
The practical "uses" of such a passage of Scripture
as this are plain. Some of them are the awful responsibility
of man's position as the keystone of
creation, the material effects of sin, and especially the
religiousness of our relation to the lower animals.
More than once do the Hebrew prophets liken the
Almighty's dealings with man to merciful man's
dealings with his beasts.
Our relation to the lower animals is one of the three great relations of our nature. For God our worship; for man our service; for the beasts our providence, and according both to Isaiah and Paul, the mediation of our holiness.
IV. The Return and Sovereignty of Israel (xi. 10-16).
In passing from the second to the third part of this
prophecy, we cannot but feel that we descend to a
lower point of view and a less pure atmosphere of
spiritual ambition. Isaiah, who has just declared
peace between man and beast, finds that Judah must
clear off certain scores against her neighbours before
there can be peace between man and man. It is
an interesting psychological study. The prophet, who
has been able to shake off man's primeval distrust and
loathing of wild animals, cannot divest himself of the
political tempers of his age. He admits, indeed, the
reconciliation of Ephraim and Judah; but the first act
of the reconciled brethren, he prophesies with exultation,
will be to swoop down upon their cousins Edom,
Moab and Ammon, and their neighbours the Philistines.
The prophet, however, is more occupied with an event preliminary to Israel's sovereignty, namely the return from exile. His large and emphatic assertions remind the not yet captive Judah through how much captivity she has to pass before she can see the margin of the blessed future which he has been describing to her. Isaiah's words imply a much more general captivity than had taken place by the time he spoke them, and we see that he is still keeping steadily in view that thorough reduction of his people, to the prospect of which he was forced in his inaugural vision. Judah has to be dispersed, even as Ephraim has been, before the glories of this chapter shall be realized.
We postpone further treatment of this prophecy, along with the hymn (chap. xii.), which is attached to it, to a separate chapter, dealing with all the representations, which the first half of the book of Isaiah contains, of the return from exile.
Isaiah xx.; xxi. 1-10; xxxviii.; xxxix.
(720-705 B.C.).
Years of quietness for Palestine followed this
decisive battle. Sargon, whose annals engraved on
the great halls of Khorsabad enable us to read the
history of the period year by year, tells us that his
next campaigns were to the north of his empire, and
till 711 he alludes to Palestine only to say that
tribute was coming in regularly, or to mention the
deportation to Hamath or Samaria of some tribe he
had conquered far away. Egypt, however, was everywhere
busy among his feudatories. Intrigue was
Egypt's forte. She is always represented in Isaiah's
pages as the talkative power of many promises. Her
fair speech was very sweet to men groaning beneath
the military pressure of Assyria. Her splendid past,
in conjunction with the largeness of her promise,
The centre of the Explosion of 711 was Ashdod,
a city of the Philistines. The king had suddenly
refused to continue the Assyrian tribute, and Sargon
had put another king in his place. But the people—in
Ashdod, as everywhere else, it was the people who
were fascinated by Egypt—pulled down the Assyrian
puppet and elevated Iaman, a friend to Pharaoh. The
other cities of the Philistines, with Moab, Edom and
Judah, were prepared by Egyptian promise to throw
in their lot with the rebels. Sargon gave them no
time. "In the wrath of my heart, I did not divide
my army, and I did not diminish the ranks, but I
marched against Asdod with my warriors, who did
not separate themselves from the traces of my sandals.
I besieged, I took, Asdod and Gunt-Asdodim....
I then made again these towns. I placed the people
whom my arm had conquered. I put over them my
lieutenant as governor. I considered them like
Assyrians, and they practised obedience." Records of the Past, vii., 40.
In this we are told that in the year the Tartan, the
Assyrian commander-in-chief, came to Ashdod when
Sargon king of Assyria sent him [that is to be
supposed the year of the first revolt in Ashdod, to
which Sargon himself did not come], and he fought
against Ashdod and took it:—in that time Jehovah had
spoken by the hand of Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying,
Go and loose the sackcloth, the prophet's robe, from off
thy loins, and thy sandal strip from off thy foot; and he
did so, walking naked, that is unfrocked, and barefoot.
For Egyptian intrigue was already busy; the temporary
success of the Tartan at Ashdod did not discourage it,
and it needed a protest. And Jehovah said, As My
servant Isaiah hath walked unfrocked and barefoot three
years for a sign and a portent against Egypt and against
Ethiopia [note the double name, for the country was
now divided between two rulers, the secret of her
impotence to interfere forcibly in Palestine] so shall
the king of Assyria lead away the captives of Egypt and
exiles of Ethiopia, young and old, stripped and barefoot,
and with buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt.
And they shall be dismayed and ashamed, because of
Ethiopia their expectation and because of Egypt their
boast. And the inhabitant of this coastland [that is, all
Palestine, and a name for it remarkably similar to the
phrase used by Sargon, "the people of Philistia, Judah,
Edom and Moab, dwelling by the sea" Cheyne.
This parade of Isaiah for three years, unfrocked and
barefoot, is another instance of that habit on which we
remarked in connection with chap. viii. 1: the habit
of finally carrying everything committed to him before
the bar of the whole nation. It was to the mass of the
people God said, Come and let us reason together. Let
us not despise Isaiah in his shirt any more than we do
Diogenes in his tub, or with a lantern in his hand,
seeking for a man by its rays at noonday. He was
bent on startling the popular conscience, because he
held it true that a people's own morals have greater
influence on their destinies than the policies of their
statesmen. But especially anxious was Isaiah, as we
shall again see from chap. xxxi., to bring this Egyptian
policy home to the popular conscience. Egypt was a
big-mouthed, blustering power, believed in by the mob:
to expose her required public, picturesque and persistent
advertisement. So Isaiah continued his walk
for three years. The fall of Ashdod, left by Egypt to
itself, did not disillusion the Jews, and the rapid disappearance
of Sargon to another part of his empire
where there was trouble, gave the Egyptians audacity
to continue their intrigues against him. W. R. Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 282.
Sargon's new trouble had broken out in Babylon,
and was much more serious than any revolt in Syria.
Merodach Baladan, king of Chaldea, was no ordinary
vassal, but as dangerous a rival as Egypt. When he
rose, it meant a contest between Babylon and Nineveh
for the sovereignty of the world. He had long been
preparing for war. He had an alliance with Elam, and
Isaiah's prediction of the exile of Israel to Babylon
is a matter of difficulty. The difficulty, however, is
not that of conceiving how he could have foreseen
an event which took place more than a century later.
Even in 711 Babylon was not an unlikely competitor
for the supremacy of the nations. Sargon himself felt
that it was a crisis to meet her. Very little might have
transferred the seat of power from the Tigris to the
Euphrates. What, therefore, more probable than that
when Hezekiah disclosed to these envoys the whole
state of his resources, and excused himself by saying
that they were come from a far country, even Babylon,
Isaiah, seized by a strong sense of how near Babylon
stood to the throne of the nations, should laugh to
In this prophecy Isaiah regards Babylon as he has
been regarding Egypt—certain to go down before
Assyria, and therefore wholly unprofitable to Judah.
If the Jews still thought of returning to Egypt when
Sargon hurried back from completing her discomfiture
in order to beset Babylon, Isaiah would tell them it was
no use. Assyria has brought her full power to bear on
the Babylonians; Elam and Media are with her. He
travails with pain for the result. Babylon is not expecting
a siege; but preparing the table, eating and drinking,
when suddenly the cry rings through her, "Arise, ye
princes; anoint the shield. The enemy is upon us." So
terrible and so sudden a warrior is this Sargon! At
his words nations move; when he saith, Go up, O Elam!
Besiege, O Media! it is done. And he falls upon his
foes before their weapons are ready. Then the prophet
shrinks back from the result of his imagination of how
it happened—for that is too painful—upon the simple
certainty, which God revealed to him, that it must
happen. As surely as Sargon's columns went against
Babylon, so surely must the message return that
Babylon has fallen. Isaiah puts it this way. The
Lord bade him get on his watchtower—that is his
phrase for observing the signs of the times—and speak
whatever he saw. And he saw a military column on the
Sargon entered Babylon before the year was out, and
with her conquest established his fear once more down
to the borders of Egypt. In his lifetime neither Judah
nor her neighbours attempted again to revolt. But
Egypt's intrigue did not cease. Her mines were once
more laid, and the feudatories of Assyria only waited
for their favourite opportunity, a change of tyrants on
the throne at Nineveh. This came very soon. In the
fifteenth year of his reign, having finally established his
empire, Sargon inscribed on the palace at Khorsabad
the following prayer to Assur: "May it be that I,
Sargon, who inhabit this palace, may be preserved by
destiny during long years for a long life, for the happiness
of my body, for the satisfaction of my heart, and
may I arrive to my end! May I accumulate in this
palace immense treasures, the booties of all countries,
Isaiah:— |
xxix. About 703. |
xxx. A little later. |
xxxi. " " |
xxxii. 1-8. |
xxxii. 9-20. Date uncertain. |
————— |
xiv. 28-xxi. 736-702. |
xxiii. About 703. |
We now enter the prophecies of Isaiah's old age, those which he published after 705, when his ministry had lasted for at least thirty-five years. They cover the years between 705, the date of Sennacherib's accession to the Assyrian throne, and 701, when his army suddenly disappeared from before Jerusalem.
They fall into three groups:—
1. Chaps. xxix.-xxxii., dealing with Jewish politics while Sennacherib is still far from Palestine, 704-702, and having Egypt for their chief interest, Assyria lowering in the background.
2. Chaps. xiv. 28-xxi. and xxiii., a group of oracles on foreign nations, threatened, like Judah, by Assyria.
3. Chaps. i., xxii., and xxxiii., and the historical narrative in xxxvi., and xxxvii., dealing with Sennacherib's invasion of Judah and siege of Jerusalem in 701; Egypt and every foreign nation now fallen out of sight, and the storm about the Holy City too thick for the prophet to see beyond his immediate neighbourhood.
The first and second of these groups—orations on
the intrigues with Egypt and oracles on the foreign
nations—delivered while Sennacherib was still far
The prophecies on the siege of Jerusalem are sufficiently numerous and distinctive to be put by themselves, along with their appendix (xxxviii., xxxix.), in our Fourth Book.
Isaiah xxix. (about 703 B.C.).
While he did so the smaller States prepared to resist him. Too small to rely on their own resources, they looked to Egypt, and among others who sought help in that quarter was Judah. There had always been, as we have seen, an Egyptian party among the politicians of Jerusalem; and Assyria's difficulties now naturally increased its influence. Most of the prophecies in chaps. xxix.-xxxii. are forward to condemn the alliance with Egypt and the irreligious politics of which it was the fruit.
Chap. xxix. is an obscure oracle, but its obscurity is
designed. Isaiah was dealing with a people, in whom
political security and religious formalism had stifled
both reason and conscience. He sought to rouse them
Ho! Ari-El, Ari-El! City David beleaguered! Add
a year to a year, let the feasts run their round, then will I
bring straitness upon Ari-El, and there shall be moaning
and bemoaning, Cheyne.
The general bearing of this enigma became plain
enough after the sore siege and sudden deliverance of
Jerusalem in 701. But we are unable to make out one
or two of its points. Ari-El may mean either The
Lion of God (
The next few verses (3-8) expand this warning. In
plain words, Jerusalem is to undergo a siege. God
Himself shall encamp against thee—round about reads
our English version, but more probably, as with the
Jerusalem, then, shall be reduced to the very dust,
and whine and whimper in it (like a sick lion, if this be
the figure the prophet is pursuing), when suddenly it
is the surge of her foes—literally thy strangers—whom the
prophet sees as small dust, and as passing chaff shall
the surge of tyrants be; yea, it shall be in the twinkling
of an eye, suddenly. From Jehovah of hosts shall she be
visited with thunder and with earthquake and a great
noise,—storm-wind, and tempest and the flame of fire
devouring. And it shall be as a dream, a vision of
the night, the surge of all the nations that war against
Ariel, yea all that war against her and her stronghold,
and they that press in upon her. And it shall be as if
the hungry had been dreaming, and lo! he was eating;
but he hath awaked, and his soul is empty: and as if the
thirsty had been dreaming, and lo! he was drinking; but
he hath awaked, and lo! he is faint, and his soul is
ravenous: thus shall be the surge of all the nations
that war against Mount Zion. Now that is a very
Isaiah foretells a great event and some details. The event is a double one: the reduction of Jerusalem to the direst straits by siege and her deliverance by the sudden disappearance of the besieging army. The details are that the siege will take place after a year (though the prophet's statement of time is perhaps too vague to be treated as a prediction), and that the deliverance will come as a great natural convulsion—thunder, earthquake and fire—which it certainly did not do. The double event, however, stripped of these details, did essentially happen.
Now it is plain that any one with a considerable
knowledge of the world at that day must easily have
been able to assert the probability of a siege of Jerusalem
by the mixed nations who composed Sennacherib's
armies. Isaiah's orations are full of proofs of his close
acquaintance with the peoples of the world, and Assyria,
who was above them. Moreover, his political advice,
given at certain crises of Judah's history, was conspicuous
not only for its religiousness, but for what we
should call its "worldly-wisdom:" it was vindicated by
events. Isaiah, however, would not have understood
But it has not been found that such talents by themselves
enable statesmen calmly to face the future, or
clearly to predict it. Such knowledge of the past,
such vigilance for the present, by themselves only
embarrass, and often deceive. They are the materials
for prediction, but a ruling principle is required to
arrange them. A general may have a strong and well-drilled
force under him, and a miserably weak foe in
front; but if the sun is not going to rise to-morrow, if
the laws of nature are not going to hold, his familiarity
with his soldiers and expertness in handling them will
not give him confidence to offer battle. He takes
certain principles for granted, and on these his soldiers
become of use to him, and he makes his venture.
Even so Isaiah handled his mass of information by the
grasp which he had of certain principles, and his facts
fell clear into order before his confident eyes. He
believed in the real government of God. I also saw
the Lord sitting, high and lifted up. He felt that
God had even this Assyria in His hands. He knew
that all God's ends were righteousness, and he was
still of the conviction that Judah for her wickedness
required punishment at the Lord's hands. Grant
The prediction of the sudden raising of this siege was the equally natural corollary to another religious conviction, which held the prophet with as much intensity, as that which possessed him with the need of Judah's punishment. Isaiah never slacked his hold on the truth that in the end God would save Zion, and keep her for Himself. Through whatever destruction, a root and remnant of the Jewish people must survive. Zion is impregnable because God is in her, and because her inviolateness is necessary for the continuance of true religion in the world. Therefore as confident as his prediction of the siege of Jerusalem is Isaiah's prediction of her delivery. And while the prophet wraps the fact in vague circumstance, while he masks, as it were, his ignorance of how in detail it will actually take place by calling up a great natural convulsion, yet he makes it abundantly clear—as, with his religious convictions and his knowledge of the Assyrian power, he cannot help doing—that the deliverance will be unexpected and unexplainable by the natural circumstances of the Jews themselves, that it will be evident as the immediate deed of God.
It is well for us to understand this. We shall get
rid of the mechanical idea of prophecy, according to
which prophets made exact predictions of fact by some
particular and purely official endowment. We shall feel
that prediction of this kind was due to the most unmistakeable
inspiration, the influence upon the prophet's
Into the easy, selfish politics of Jerusalem, then, Isaiah sent this thunderbolt, this definite prediction: that in a year or more Jerusalem would be besieged and reduced to the direst straits. He tells us that it simply dazed the people. They were like men suddenly startled from sleep, who are too stupid to read a message pushed into their hands (vv. 9-12).
Then Isaiah gives God's own explanation of this stupidity. The cause of it is simply religious formalism. This people draw nigh unto Me with their mouth, and with their lips do they honour Me, but their heart is far from Me, and their fear of Me is a mere commandment of men, a thing learned by rote. This was what Israel called religion—bare ritual and doctrine, a round of sacrifices and prayers in adherence to the tradition of the fathers. But in life they never thought of God. It did not occur to these citizens of Jerusalem that He cared about their politics, their conduct of justice, or their discussions and bargains with one another. Of these they said, taking their own way, Who seeth us, and who knoweth us? Only in the Temple did they feel God's fear, and there merely in imitation of one another. None had an original vision of God in real life; they learned other men's thoughts about Him, and took other men's words upon their lips, while their heart was far away. In fact, speaking words and listening to words had wearied the spirit and stifled the conscience of them.
For such a disposition Isaiah says there is only one
cure. It is a new edition of his old gospel, that God
speaks to us in facts, not forms. Worship and a lifeless
Such is the meaning of this strong chapter. It is instructive in two ways.
First, it very clearly declares Isaiah's view of the method of God's revelation. Isaiah says nothing of the Temple, the Shechinah, the Altar, or the Scripture; but he points out how much the exclusive confinement of religion to forms and texts has deadened the hearts of his countrymen towards God. In your real life, he says to them, you are to seek, and you shall find, Him. There He is evident in miracles,—not physical interruptions and convulsions, but social mercies and moral providences. The quickening of conscience, the dispersion of ignorance, poor men awakening to the fact that God is with them, the overthrow of the social tyrant, history's plain refutation of the atheist, the growth of civic justice and charity—In these, said the Hebrew prophet to the Old Testament believer, Behold your God!
Wherefore, secondly, we also are to look for God in
events and deeds. We are to know that nothing can
compensate us for the loss of the open vision of God's
For these He has given us three theatres—the Bible, our country's history, and for each man his own life.
We have to take the Bible, and especially the life of Christ, and to tell ourselves that these wonderful events did really take place. In Christ God did dwell; by Christ He spoke to man; man was converted, redeemed, sanctified, beyond all doubt. These were real events. To be convinced of their reality were worth a hundred prayers.
Then let us follow the example of the Hebrew
prophets, and search the history of our own people
for the realities of God. Carlyle says in a note to
Cromwell's fourth speech to Parliament, that "the Bible
of every nation is its own history." This note is drawn
But for each man there is the final duty of turning to himself.
Browning's Christmas Eve.
Isaiah xxx. (ABOUT 702 B.C.).
Isaiah begins with the bad politics. In order to understand how bad they were, we must turn for a little to this Egypt, with whom Judah was now seeking an alliance.
In our late campaign on the Upper Nile we heard a great deal of the Mudir of Dongola. His province covers part of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia; and in Meirawi, the village whose name appeared in so many telegrams, we can still discover Meroe, the capital of Ethiopia. Now in Isaiah's day the king of Ethiopia was, what the Mudir of Dongola was at the time of our war, an ambitious person of no small energy; and the ruler of Egypt proper was, what the Khedive was, a person of little influence or resource. Consequently there happened what might have happened a few years ago but for the presence of the British army in Egypt. The Ethiopian came down the Nile, defeated Pharaoh and burned him alive. But he died, and his son died after him; and before their successor could also come down the Nile, the legitimate heir to Pharaoh had regained part of his power. Some years ensued of uncertainty as to who was the real ruler of Egypt.
Woe to the rebellious children, saith the Lord, executing a policy, but it is not from Me; and weaving a web, but not of My spirit, that they may heap sin upon sin; who set themselves on the way to go down to Egypt, and at My mouth they have not inquired, to flee to the refuge of Pharaoh, and to hide themselves in the shadow of Egypt. But the refuge of Pharaoh shall be unto you for shame, and the hiding in the shadow of Egypt for confusion! How can a broken Egypt help you? When his princes are at Zoan, and his ambassadors are come to Hanes, they shall all be ashamed of a people that cannot profit them, that are not for help nor for profit, but for shame, and also for reproach.
Then Isaiah pictures the useless caravan which Judah has sent with tribute to Egypt, strings of asses and camels struggling through the desert, land of trouble and anguish, amid lions and serpents, and all for a people that shall not profit them (ver. 6).
What tempted Judah to this profitless expenditure of
time and money? Egypt had a great reputation, and
was a mighty promiser. Her brilliant antiquity had
given her a habit of generous promise, and dazzled
other nations into trusting her. Indeed, so full were
Egyptian politics of bluster and big language, that the
Hebrews had a nickname for Egypt. They called her
Rahab—Stormy-speech, Blusterer, Braggart. It was the
term also for the crocodile, as being a monster, so that
there was a picturesqueness as well as moral aptness in
the name. Ay, says Isaiah, catching at the old name
Knowing how sometimes the fate of a Government is affected by a happy speech or epigram, we can understand the effect of this cry upon the politicians of Jerusalem. But that he might impress it on the popular imagination and memory as well, Isaiah wrote his epigram on a tablet, and put it in a book. We must remind ourselves here of chap. xx., and remember how it tells us that Isaiah had already some years before this endeavoured to impress the popular imagination with the folly of an Egyptian alliance, walking unfrocked and barefoot three years for a sign and a portent upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia (see p. 199).
So that already Isaiah had appealed from politicians
to people on this Egyptian question, just as he appealed
thirty years ago from court to market-place on the
question of Ephraim and Damascus. Chap. viii. 1 (p. 119).
This is what Isaiah now drives home (xxx. 9 ff.).
He tracks the bad politics to their source in bad
religion, the Egyptian policy to its roots in the prevailing
tempers of the people. The Egyptian policy
was doubly stamped. It was disobedience to the word
of God; it was satisfaction with falsehood. The
statesmen of Judah shut their ears to God's spoken
word; they allowed themselves to be duped by the
Egyptian Pretence. But these, says Isaiah, are
precisely the characteristics of the whole Jewish people.
For it is a rebellious people, lying children, children that
will not hear the revelation of the Lord. It was these
national failings—the want of virtues which are the
very substance of a nation: truth and reverence or
obedience—that had culminated in the senseless and
suicidal alliance with Egypt. Isaiah fastens on their
falsehood first: Which say to the seers, Ye shall not see,
and to the prophets, Ye shall not prophesy unto us right
things; speak to us smooth things: prophesy deceits. No
wonder such a character had been fascinated by
But reverence is truth's other self, for reverence is
simply loyalty to the supremest truth. And it is
against the truth that the Jews have chiefly sinned.
They had shut their eyes to Egypt's real character, but
that was a small sin beside this: that they turned
their backs on the greatest reality of all—God
Himself. Get you out of the way, they said to
the prophets, turn out of the path; keep quiet in
our presence about the Holy One of Israel. Isaiah's
effort rises to its culmination when he seeks to
restore the sense of this Reality to his people. His
spirit is kindled at the words the Holy One of Israel,
and to the end of chap. xxxi. leaps up in a series
of brilliant and sometimes scorching descriptions of
the name, the majesty and the love of God. Isaiah
is not content to have used his power of revelation
to unveil the political truth about Egypt. He will
make God Himself visible to this people. Passionately
does he proceed to enforce upon the Jews what God
thinks about their own condition (vv. 12-14), then to
These brilliant prophecies may not have been given all at the same time: each is complete in itself. They do not all mention the negotiations with Egypt, but they are all dark with the shadow of Assyria. Chap. xxx. vv. 19-26 almost seem to have been written in a time of actual siege; but vv. 27-33 represent Assyria still upon the horizon. In this, however, these passages are fitly strung together: that they equally strain to impress a blind and hardened people with the will, the majesty and the love of God their Saviour.
I. The Bulging Wall (vv. 12-14).
Starting from their unwillingness to listen to the
voice of the Lord in their Egyptian policy, Isaiah tells
the people that if they refused to hear His word for
guidance, they must now listen to it for judgement.
Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel: Because
ye look down on this word, and trust in perverseness
and crookedness, and lean thereon, therefore this iniquity
shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, bulging
out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at
an instant. This iniquity, of course, is the embassy
to Egypt. But that, as we have seen, is only the
II. Not Alliances, but Reliance (vv. 15-18).
At this point, either Isaiah was stung by the demands
of the politicians for an alternative to their restless
Egyptian policy which he condemned, or more likely
he rose, unaided by external influence, on the prophet's
native instinct to find some purely religious ground on
which to base his political advice. The result is one
of the grandest of all his oracles. For thus saith the
Lord Jehovah, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and
rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall
be your strength; and ye would not. But ye said, No, for
upon horses will we flee; wherefore ye shall flee: and upon
the swift will we ride; wherefore swift shall be they that
pursue you! One thousand at the rebuke of one—at the
rebuke of five shall ye flee: till ye be left as a bare pole
on the top of a mountain, and as a standard on an hill.
A God of judgement is the Lord is an unfortunately ambiguous translation. We must not take judgement here in our familiar sense of the word. It is not a sudden deed of doom, but a long process of law. It means manner, method, design, order, system, the ideas, in short, which we sum up under the word "law." Just as we say of a man, He is a man of judgement, and mean thereby not that by office he is a doomster, but that by character he is a man of discernment and prudence, so simply does Isaiah say here that Jehovah is a God of judgement, and mean thereby not that He is One, whose habit is sudden and awful deeds of penalty or salvation, but, on the contrary, that, having laid down His lines according to righteousness and established His laws in wisdom, He remains in His dealings with men consistent with these.
Now it is a great truth that the All-mighty and
All-merciful is the All-methodical too; and no religion
is complete in its creed or healthy in its influence, which
does not insist equally on all these. It was just the want
of this third article of faith which perverted the souls
of the Jews in Isaiah's day, which (as we have seen
under Chapter I.) allowed them to make their worship
so mechanical and material—for how could they have
been satisfied with mere forms if they had but once
conceived of God as having even ordinary intelligence?—and
III. God's Table in the Midst of the Enemies (vv. 19-26).
This patient purpose of God Isaiah now proceeds to describe in its details. Every line of his description has its loveliness, and is to be separately appreciated. There is perhaps no fairer prospect from our prophet's many windows. It is not argument nor a programme, but a series of rapid glimpses, struck out by language, which often wants logical connection, but never fails to make us see.
To begin with, one thing is sure: the continuance of
the national existence. Isaiah is true to his original
vision—the survival of a remnant. For a people in
Zion—there shall be abiding in Jerusalem. So the brief
essential is flashed forth. Thou shalt surely weep no
more; surely He will be gracious unto thee at the voice
of thy crying; with His hearing of thee He will answer
thee. Thus much of general promise had been already
given. Now upon the vagueness of the Lord's delay
Isaiah paints realistic details, only, however, that he
may make more vivid the real presence of the Lord.
The siege shall surely come, with its sorely concrete
privations, but the Lord will be there, equally distinct.
And though the Lord give you the bread of penury and
the water of tribulation—perhaps the technical name for
siege rations—yet shall not thy Teacher hide Himself any
more, but thine eyes shall ever be seeing thy Teacher; and
thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is
the way: walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand or
IV. The Name of the Lord (vv. 27-33).
But Isaiah lays down "the oaten pipe" and lifts again a brazen trumpet to his lips. Between him and that sunny landscape of the future, of whose pastoral details he has so sweetly sung, roll up now the uncouth masses of the Assyrian invasion, not yet fully gathered, far less broken. We are back in the present again, and the whole horizon is clouded.
The passage does not look like one from which
comfort or edification can be derived, but it is of
extreme interest. The first two verses, for instance,
The Name of Jehovah is the phrase the prophets use
when they wish to tell us of the personal presence of
God. When we hear a name cried out, we understand
immediately that a person is there. So when the
prophet calls, Behold, the Name of Jehovah, in face of
the prodigious advance of Assyria, we understand that
he has caught some intuition of God's presence in
that uplifting of the nations of the north at the word
of the great King and their resistless sweep southward
upon Palestine. In that movement God is personally
present. The Divine presence Isaiah then describes in
curiously mingled metaphor, which proves how gradually
it was that he struggled to a knowledge of its purpose
there. First of all he describes the advance of
Assyria as a thunderstorm, heavy clouds and darting,
devouring fire. His imagination pictures a great face
of wrath. The thick curtains of cloud as they roll
over one another suggest the heavy lips, and the
lightnings the fiery tongue. Then the figure passes
from heaven to earth. The thunderstorm has burst, and
becomes the mountain torrent, which speedily reaches the
necks of those who are caught in its bed. But then
the prophet's conscience suggests something more than
sudden and sheer force in this invasion, and the tossing
This gradual progress from the sense of sheer wild force, through that of personal wrath, to discipline and sparing is very interesting. Vague and chaotic that disaster rolled up the horizon upon Judah. It cometh from afar. The politicians fled from it to their refuge behind the Egyptian Pretence. But Isaiah bids them face it. The longer they look, the more will conscience tell them that the unavoidable wrath of God is in it; no blustering Rahab will be able to hide them from the anger of the Face that lowers there. But let them look longer still, and the unrelieved features of destruction will change to a hand that sifts and checks, the torrent will become a sieve, and the disaster show itself well held in by the power of their own God.
So wildly and impersonally still do the storms of
sorrow and disaster roll up the horizon on men's eyes,
and we fly in vague terror from them to our Egyptian
refuges. So still does conscience tell us it is futile to
flee from the anger of God, and we crouch hopeless
beneath the rush of imaginations of unchecked wrath,
blackening the heavens and turning every path of life
to a tossing torrent. May it then be granted us to
have some prophet at our side to bid us face our
disaster once more, and see the discipline and judgement
of the Lord, the tossing only of His careful sieve,
in the wild and cruel waves! We may not be poets like
Of the angel who led Israel to the land of promise, God said, My Name is in him. Our faith is not perfect till we can, like Isaiah, feel the same of the blackest angel, the heaviest disaster, God can send us, and be able to spell it out articulately: The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth.
For delivery, says Isaiah, shall come to the people of God in the crisis, as sudden and as startling into song as the delivery from Egypt was. Ye shall have a song as in the night when a holy feast is kept, and gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe to come into the mountain of the Lord, to the Rock of Israel.
After this interval of solemn gladness, the storm and
fire break out afresh, and rage again through the passage.
But their direction is reversed, and whereas they had
been shown rolling up the horizon as towards Judah,
they are now shown rolling down the horizon in pursuit
of the baffled Assyrian. The music of the verses
is crashing. And the Lord shall cause the peal So Dr. B. Davis, quoted by Cheyne. So Bredenkamp in his recent commentary on Isaiah.
We postpone remarks on Isaiah's sense of the fierceness of the Divine righteousness till we reach his even finer expression of it in chap. xxxiii.
Isaiah xxxi. (ABOUT 702 B.C.).
I. Yet He also is Wise (vv. 1-3).
We must suppose the negotiations with Egypt to
have taken for the moment a favourable turn, and the
Isaiah simply answers their self-congratulation with the utterance of a new Woe, and it is in this that the first of the three extraordinary descriptions of God is placed. Woe unto them that go down to Egypt for help; upon horses do they stay, and trust in chariots because they are many, and in horsemen because they are very strong: but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, and Jehovah they do not seek. Yet He also is wise. You have been clever and successful, but have you forgotten that God also is wise, that He too has His policy, and acts reasonably and consistently? You think you have been making history; but God also works in history, and surely, to put it on the lowest ground, with as much cleverness and persistence as you do. Yet He also is wise, and will bring evil, and will not call back His words, but will arise against the house of the evil-doers, and against the help of them that work iniquity.
This satire was the shaft best fitted to pierce the
folly of the rulers of Judah. Wisdom, a reasonable
plan for their aims and prudence in carrying it out,
was the last thing they thought of associating with
God, whom they relegated to what they called their
religion—their temples, worship and poetry. When
their emotions were stirred by solemn services, or
under great disaster, or in the hour of death, they
remembered God and it seemed natural to them
The forgetfulness, against which Isaiah directs this shaft of satire, is the besetting sin of very religious people, of very successful people, and of very clever people.
It is the temptation of an ordinary Christian,
church-going people, like ourselves, with a religion
so full of marvellous mercies, and so blessed with
regular opportunities of worship, to think of God
only in connection with these, and practically to
ignore that along the far greater stretches of life He
has any interest or purpose regarding us. Formally-religious
people treat God as if He were simply a
constitutional sovereign, to step in at emergencies,
and for the rest to play a nominal and ceremonial
part in the conduct of their lives. Ignoring
the Divine wisdom and ceaseless providence of God,
and couching their hearts upon easy views of His
benevolence, they have no other thought of Him, than
as a philanthropic magician, whose power is reserved
to extricate men when they have got past helping
themselves. From the earliest times that way of
regarding God has been prevalent, and religious
teachers have never failed to stigmatize it with the
hardest name for folly. Fools, says the Psalmist, are
afflicted when they draw near unto the gates of death;
then, only then, do they cry unto the Lord in their trouble.
But the temptation to refuse to God even ordinary
wisdom is also the temptation of very successful and
very clever people, such as these Jewish politicians
fancied themselves to be, or such as the Rich Fool in
the parable. They have overcome all they have
matched themselves against, and feel as if they were
to be masters of their own future. Now the Bible
and the testimony of men invariably declare that
God has one way of meeting such fools—the way
Isaiah suggests here. God meets them with their
own weapons; He outmatches them in their own
fashion. In the eighteenth Psalm it is written, With
the pure Thou wilt show Thyself pure, and with the
perverse Thou wilt show Thyself froward. The Rich
Fool congratulates himself that his soul is his own;
says God, This night thy soul shall be required of thee.
The Jewish politicians pride themselves on their
wisdom; Yet God also is wise, says Isaiah significantly.
Yea, the Egyptians are men, and not God, and their horses flesh, and not spirit; and when Jehovah shall stretch out His hand, both he that helpeth shall stumble, and he that is holpen shall fall, and they all shall perish together.
II. The Lion and his Prey (ver. 4).
But notwithstanding what he has said about God
destroying men who trust in their own cleverness, Isaiah
goes on to assert that God is always ready to save what
is worth saving. The people, the city, His own city—God
will save that. To express God's persistent grace
For thus saith Jehovah unto me: Like as when the lion growleth, and the young lion over his prey, if a mob of shepherds be called forth against him, from their voice he will not shrink in dismay, nor for their noise abase himself; so shall Jehovah of hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion and the hill thereof. A lion with a lamb in his claws, growling over it, while a crowd of shepherds come up against him; afraid to go near enough to kill him, they try to frighten him away by shouting at him. But he holds his prey unshrinking.
It is a figure that startles at first. To liken God with
a saving hold upon His own to a wild lion with his
claws in the prey! But horror plays the part of a good
emphasis; while if we look into the figure, we shall feel
our horror change to appreciation. There is something
majestic in that picture of the lion with the
shouting shepherds, too afraid to strike him. He will
not be dismayed at their voice, nor abase himself for the
noise of them. Is it, after all, an unworthy figure of the
Divine Claimant for this city, who kept unceasing
hold upon her after His own manner, mysterious and
lionlike to men, undisturbed by the screams, formulas,
and prayers of her mob of politicians and treaty-mongers?
For these are the shepherds Isaiah means—sham
shepherds, the shrieking crew of politicians,
There is more than the unyielding persistency of
Divine grace taught here. There is that to begin with.
God will never let go what He has made His own: the
souls He has redeemed from sin, the societies He has
redeemed from barbarism, the characters He has hold
of, the lives He has laid His hand upon. Persistency
of saving grace—let us learn that confidently in the
parable. But that is only half of what it is meant to
teach. Look at the shepherds: shepherds shouting
round a lion; why does Isaiah put it that way, and not
as David did—lions growling round a brave shepherd,
with the lamb in his arms? Because it so appeared
then in the life Isaiah was picturing, because it often
looks the same in real life still. These politicians—they
seemed, they played the part of, shepherds; and Jehovah,
who persistently frustrated their plans for the salvation
of the State—He looked the lion, delivering Jerusalem
to destruction. And very often to men does this
arrangement of the parts repeat itself; and while human
friends are anxious and energetic about them, God
Himself appears in providences more lionlike than
shepherdly. He grasps with the savage paw of death
some one as dear to us as that city was to Isaiah. He
rends our body or soul or estate. And friends and
our own thoughts gather round the cruel bereavement
or disaster with remonstrance and complaint. Our
hearts cry out, doing, like shepherds, their best to
scare by prayer and cries the foe they are too weak to
kill. We all know the scene, and how shabby and
mean that mob of human remonstrances looks in face of
In addition then to remembering, when men seem by their cleverness and success to rule life, that God is wiser and His plans more powerful than theirs, we are not to forget, when men seem more anxious and merciful than His dark providence, that for all their argument and action His will shall not alter. But now we are to hear that this will, so hard and mysterious, is as merciful and tender as a mother's.
III. The Mother-bird and her Nest (ver. 5).
As birds hovering, so will Jehovah of hosts cover
Jerusalem, He will cover and deliver it: He will pass
over and preserve it. At last we are through dark
providence, to the very heart of the Almighty. The
meaning is familiar from its natural simplicity and
frequent use in Scripture. Two features of it our
version has not reproduced. The word birds means
the smaller kind of feathered creatures, and the word
hovering is feminine in the original: As little mother-birds
hovering, so will Jehovah of hosts protect Jerusalem.
We have been watching in spring the hedge where we
know is a nest. Suddenly the mother-bird, who has
been sitting on a branch close by, flutters off her perch,
passes backwards and forwards, with flapping wings
With such fountains in Scripture, we need not, as
some have done, exalt the Virgin, or virtually make a
fourth person in the Godhead, and that a woman, in
order to satisfy those natural longings of the heart
which the widespread worship of the mother of Jesus
tells us are so peremptory. For all fulness dwelleth in
God Himself. Not only may we rejoice in that pity and
wise provision for our wants, in that pardon and generosity,
which we associate with the name of father, but
also in the wakefulness, the patience, the love, lovelier
with fear, which make a mother's heart so dear and
indispensable. We cannot tell along what wakened
nerve the grace of God may reach our hearts; but
Scripture has a medicine for every pain. And if any
feel their weakness as little children feel it, let them
know that the Spirit of God broods over them, as a
mother over her babe; and if any are in pain or anxiety,
How these three descriptions meet the three failings of our faith! We forget that God is ceaselessly at work in wisdom in our lives. We forget that God must sometimes, even when He is saving us, seem lionlike and cruel. We forget that "the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind."
Having thus made vivid the presence of their Lord to the purged eyes of His people, patient, powerful in order, wise in counsel, persistent in grace, and, last of all, very tender, Isaiah concludes with a cry to the people to turn to this Lord, from whom they have so deeply revolted. Let them cast away their idols, and there shall be no fear of the result of the Assyrian invasion. The Assyrian shall fall, not by the sword of man, but the immediate stroke of God. And his rock shall pass away by reason of terror, and his princes shall be dismayed at the ensign, saith the Lord, whose fire is in Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem. And so Isaiah closes this series of prophecies on the keynote with which it opened in the first verse of chap. xxix.: that Jerusalem is Ariel—the hearth and altar, the dwelling-place and sanctuary, of God.
Isaiah xxxii. 1-8 (ABOUT 702 B.C.?).
The first eight verses of chap. xxxii. belong to a class
of prophecies which we may call Isaiah's "escapes."
Like St. Paul, Isaiah, when he has finished some
exposition of God's dealings with His people or
argument with the sinners among them, bursts upon
an unencumbered vision of the future, and with roused
conscience, and voice resonant from long debate, takes
his loftiest flights of eloquence. In Isaiah's book we
have several of these visions, and each bears a
character of its own according to the sort of sinners
from whom the prophet shook himself loose to describe
it and the kind of indignation that filled his heart at
the time. We have already seen, how in some of
Isaiah's visions the Messiah has the chief place, while
In ver. 1 we have the presupposition of the whole
prophecy: Behold, in righteousness shall a king reign,
and princes—according to justice shall they rule. A just
government is always the basis of Isaiah's vision of the
future. Here he defines it with greater abstractness
than he has been wont to do. It is remarkable, that
a writer, whose pen has already described the figure
Nor is the vagueness of the first verse corrected by
the terms of the second: And a man shall be as an
hiding-place from the wind, etc. We have already
spoken of this verse as an ethical advance upon
Isaiah's previous picture of the Messiah (see p. 182).
But while, of course, the Messiah was to Isaiah the
ideal of human character, and therefore shared whatsoever
features he might foresee in its perfect development,
it is evident that in this verse Isaiah is not
thinking of the Messiah alone or particularly. When
he says with such simplicity a man, he means any man,
he means the ideal for every man. Having in ver. 1
laid down the foundation for social life, he tells us in
ver. 2 what the shelter and fountain force of society
are to be: not science nor material wealth, but personal
influence, the strength and freshness of the human
personality. A man shall be as an hiding-place from the
wind and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water
in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land. After just government (ver. 1) great characters
I. A Man (ver. 2).
Isaiah has described personal influence on so grand a scale that it is not surprising that the Church has leapt to his words as a direct prophecy of Jesus Christ. They are indeed a description of Him, out of whose shadow advancing time has not been able to carry the children of men, who has been the shelter and fertility of every generation since He was lifted up, and to whom the affections of individual hearts never rise higher than when they sing—
Such a rock was Christ indeed; but, in accordance with what we have said above, the prophet here has no individual specially in his view, but is rather laying down a general description of the influence of individual character, of which Christ Jesus was the highest instance. Taken in this sense, his famous words present us, first, with a philosophy of history, at the heart of which there is, secondly, a great gospel, and in the application of which there is, thirdly, a great ideal and duty for ourselves.
1. Isaiah gives us in this verse a Philosophy of History. Great men are not the whole of life, but they are the condition of all the rest; if it were not for the big men, the little ones could scarcely live. The first requisites of religion and civilisation are outstanding characters.
Now that is exactly how great men benefit human life. A great man serves his generation, serves the whole race, by arresting the drift. Deadly forces, blind and fatal as the desert wind, sweep down human history. In the beginning it was the dread of Nature, the cold blast which blows from every quarter on the barbarian, and might have stunted men to animals. But into some soul God breathed a great breath of freedom, and the man defied Nature. Nature has had her revenge by burying the rebel in oblivion. On the distant horizon of history we can see, merely in some old legend, the evidence of his audacity. But the drift was arrested; behind the event men took shelter, in the shelter grew free, and learned to think out what the first great resister felt.
When history had left this rock behind, and the drift
had again space to grow, the same thing happened; and
the hero this time was Abraham. He laid his back to
When Isaiah, while all his countrymen were rushing down the mad, steep ways of politics, carried off by the only powers that were as yet known in these ways, fear of death and greed to be on the side of the strongest—when Isaiah stood still amid that panic rush, and uttered the memorable words, In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength; in returning and rest shall ye be saved, he stopped one of the most dangerous drifts in history, and created in its despite a shelter for those spiritual graces, which have always been the beauty of the State, and are now coming to be recognized as its strength.
When, in the early critical days of the Church, that dark drift of Jewish custom, which had overflown the barriers set to the old dispensation, threatened to spread its barrenness upon the fields of the Gentile world, already white to the harvest of Christ, and Peter and Barnabas and all the Apostles were carried away by it, what was it that saved Christianity? Under God, it was this: that Paul got up and, as he tells us, withstood Peter to the face.
And, again, when the powers of the Roman Church
and the Roman Empire, checked for a little by the
efforts which began the Reformation, gathered themselves
together and rose in one awful front of emperor,
cardinals, and princes at the Diet of Worms, what was
it that stood fast against that drift of centuries, and
So that Isaiah is right. A single man has been as an hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest. History is swept by drifts: superstition, error, poisonous custom, dust-laden controversy. What has saved humanity has been the upraising of some great man to resist those drifts, to set his will, strong through faith, against the prevailing tendency, and be the shelter of the weaker, but not less desirous, souls of his brethren. "The history of what man has accomplished in the world is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked there." Under God, personal human power is the highest force, and God has ever used it as His chief instrument.
2. But in this philosophy of history there is a GOSPEL. Isaiah's words are not only man's ideal; they are God's promise, and that promise has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the most conspicuous example—none others are near Him—of this personal influence in which Isaiah places all the shelter and revival of society. God has set His seal to the truth, that the greatest power in shaping human destiny is man himself, by becoming one with man, by using a human soul to be the Saviour of the race. A man, says Isaiah, shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; and the Rock of ages was a Man. The world indeed knew that personal character could go higher than all else in the world, but they never knew how high till they saw Jesus Christ, or how often till they numbered His followers.
For what is sin? Sin is simply the longest, heaviest drift in human history. It arose in the beginning, and has carried everything before it since. "The oldest custom of the race," it is the most powerful habit of the individual. Men have reared against it government, education, philosophy, system after system of religion. But sin overwhelmed them all.
Only Christ resisted, and His resistance saves the world. Alone among human lives presented to our view, that of Christ is sinless. What is so prevalent in human nature that we cannot think of a human individual without it never stained Christ's life. Sin was about Him; it was not that He belonged to another sphere of things which lay above it. Sin was about Him. He rose from its midst with the same frailty as other men, encompassed by the same temptations; but where they rose to fall, He rose to stand, and standing, became the world's Saviour. The great tradition was broken; the drift was arrested. Sin never could be the same again after the sinless manhood of Christ. The old world's sins and cruel customs were shut out from the world that came after. Some of them ceased so absolutely as scarcely to be afterwards named; and the rest were so curbed that no civilised society suffered them to pass from its constraint, and no public conscience tolerated them as natural or necessary evils.
What the surface of the world's life bears so deeply,
that does every individual, who puts his trust in Jesus,
3. But there is not only a philosophy of history
and a gospel in this promise of a man. There is a
great DUTY and IDEAL for every one. If this prophecy
distinctly reaches forward to Jesus Christ as its only
perfect fulfilment, the vagueness of its expression
permits of its application to all, and through Him its
fulfilment by all becomes a possibility. Now each of
us may be a rock, a shelter and a source of fertility to
the life around him in three modes of constant influence.
We can be like Christ, the Rock, in shutting out from our
neighbours the knowledge and infection of sin, in keeping
our conversation so unsuggestive and unprovocative
of evil, that, though sin drift upon us, it shall never drift
through us. And we may be like Christ, the Rock, in
shutting out blame from other men; in sheltering them
from the east wind of pitiless prejudice, quarrel or controversy;
in stopping the unclean and bitter drifts of
scandal and gossip. How many lives have lost their
fertility for the want of a little silence and a little
shadow! Some righteous people have a terribly north-eastern
exposure; children do not play about their
doors, nor the prodigal stop there. And again, as
there are a number of men and women who fall in
struggling for virtue simply because they never see it
successful in others, and the spectacle of one pure,
heroic character would be their salvation, here is another
way in which each servant of God may be a rock. Of
II. Capacity to Distinguish Character (vv. 3-8).
But after the coming of this ideal, it is not paradise that is regained. Paradise is farther off. We must have truth to begin with: truth and the capacity to discriminate character. The sternness with which Isaiah thus postpones his earlier vision shows us how sore his heart was about the lying temper of his people. We have heard him deploring the fascination of their false minds by the Egyptian Pretence. Their falseness, however, had not only shown itself in their foreign politics, but in their treatment of one another, in their social fashions, judgements and worships. In society there prevailed a want of moral insight and of moral courage. At home also the Jews had failed to call things by their right names (cf. p. 226). Therefore next in their future Isaiah desires the cure of moral blindness, haste and cowardice (vv. 3, 4), with the explosion of all social lies (ver. 5). Men shall stand out for what they are, whether they be bad—for the bad shall not be wanting (vv. 6, 7)—or good (ver. 8). On righteous government (ver. 1) and influence of strong men (ver. 2) must follow social truthfulness (vv. 3-8). Such is the line of the prophet's demands. The details of vv. 3-8 are exceedingly interesting.
And not closed shall be the eyes of them that see, and
the ears of them that hear shall be pricked up. The context
makes it clear that this is spoken, not of intellectual,
but of moral, insight and alertness. And the heart of
the hasty shall learn how to know, and the tongue of the
stammerer be quick (the verb is the same as the hasty of
In illustration Isaiah takes the conventional abuse of
certain moral terms, exposes it and declares it shall
cease: The vile person shall no more be called liberal, nor
the churl said to be bountiful. Liberal and bountiful were
conventional names. The Hebrew word for liberal
originally meant exactly that—open-hearted, generous,
magnanimous. In the East it is the character which
above all they call princely. So like our words
"noble" and "nobility," it became a term of rank,
lord or prince, and was often applied to men who were
not at all great-hearted, but the very opposite—even to
the vile person. Vile person is literally the faded or the
exhausted, whether mentally or morally—the last kind of
character that could be princely. The other conventional
term used by Isaiah refers to wealth rather than rank.
The Hebrew for bountiful literally means abundant, a man
blessed with plenty, and is used in the Old Testament
both for the rich and the fortunate. Its nearest English
equivalent is perhaps the successful man. To this Isaiah
fitly opposes a name, wrongly rendered in our version
churl, but corrected in the margin to crafty—the fraudulent,
the knave. When moral discrimination comes, says
Isaiah, men will not apply the term princely to worn-out
characters, nor grant them the social respect implied by
the term. They will not call the fraudulent the fortunate,
nor canonise him as successful, who has gotten his wealth
by underhand means. The worthless character shall no
more be called princely, nor the knave hailed as the successful.
But men's characters shall stand out true in their
After great characters, then, what society needs is capacity to discern character, and the chief obstacle in the way of this discernment is the substitution of a conventional morality for a true morality, and of some distinctions of man's making for the eternal difference which God has set between right and wrong.
Human progress consists, according to Isaiah, of
getting rid of these conventions; and in this history
bears him out. The abolition of slavery, the recognition
of the essential nobility of labour, the abolition of infanticide,
the emancipation of woman—all these are due
to the release of men's minds from purely conventional
notions, and the courageous application in their place
of the fundamental laws of righteousness and love. If
progress is still to continue, it must be by the same
method. In many directions it is still a false conventionalism,—sometimes
the relic of barbarism, sometimes
the fruit of civilisation,—that blocks the way. The
But, above all, as Isaiah tells us, we need to look
to our use of language. It is one of the standing
necessities of pure science to revise the terminology, to
reserve for each object a special name, and see that all
men understand the same object by the same name.
Otherwise confusion comes in, and science is impossible.
The necessity, though not so faithfully recognized,
is as imperative in morals. If we consider the disgraceful
mistakes in popular morals which have been
produced by the transference and degradation of names,
we shall feel it to be a religious duty to preserve
for these their proper meaning. In the interests of
morality, we must not be careless in our use of moral
terms. As Socrates says in the Phædo: "To use
words wrongly and indefinitely is not merely an error
in itself; it also creates evil in the soul." Cf. further with this passage F. J. Church, Trial and Death of
Socrates, Introd. xli. ff.
We must not forget, however, Isaiah's chief means
for the abolition of this conventionalism and the substitution
of a true moral vision and terminology. These
results are to follow from the presence of the great
character, A Man, whom he has already lifted up.
Conventionalism is another of the drifts which that
Rock has to arrest. Setting ourselves to revise our dictionaries
or to restore to our words their original meanings
out of our memories is never enough. The
rising of a conspicuous character alone can dissipate
the moral haze; the sense of his influence will alone
fill emptied forms with meaning. So Christ Jesus
judged and judges the world by His simple presence;
men fall to His right hand and to His left. He calls
things by their right names, and restores to each term
of religion and morals its original ideal, which the
vulgar use of the world had worn away. Cf. with the fifth and sixth verses of chap. xxxii. the forcible
passage in the introduction to Carlyle's Cromwell's Letters, beginning,
"Sure enough, in the Heroic Century, as in the Unheroic, knaves
and cowards ... were not wanting. But the question always
remains, Did they lie chained?" etc.
Isaiah xxxii. 9-20 (DATE UNCERTAIN).
The new points are—that it is the women who are threatened, that Jerusalem itself is pictured in ruin, and that the pouring out of the Spirit is promised as the cause of the blessed future.
I. The Charge to the Women (vv. 9-12)
is especially interesting, not merely for its own terms, but because it is only part of a treatment of women which runs through the whole of Scripture.
Isaiah had already delivered against the women of
Jerusalem a severe diatribe (chap. iii.), the burden
of which was their vanity and haughtiness. With
the satiric temper, which distinguishes his earlier prophecies,
he had mimicked their ogling and mincing
gait, and described pin by pin their fashions and
ornaments, promising them instead of these things
rottenness and baldness, and a girdle of sackcloth and
branding for beauty. But he has grown older, and
penetrating below their outward fashion and gait, he
charges them with thoughtlessness as the besetting sin
of their sex. Ye women that are at ease, rise up, and
hear my voice; ye careless daughters, give ear to my speech.
For days beyond a year shall ye be troubled, O careless
women, for the vintage shall fail; the ingathering shall
not come. Tremble, ye women that are at ease; be troubled,
ye careless ones. By a pair of epithets he describes
their fault; and almost thrice does he repeat the pair,
as if he would emphasize it past all doubt. The
But Isaiah more than hints that these besetting sins
of women are but the defects of their virtues. The
literal meaning of the two adjectives he uses, at ease and
careless, is restful and trustful. Scripture throughout
employs these words both in a good and a bad sense.
Isaiah does so himself in this very chapter (compare
these verses with vv. 17, 18). In the next chapter he
describes the state of Jerusalem after redemption as a
state of ease or restfulness, and we know that he never
ceased urging the people to trustfulness. For such
truly religious conditions he uses exactly the same
names as for the shallow optimism with which he now
charges his countrywomen. And so doing, he reminds
us of an important law of character. The besetting
sins of either sex are its virtues prostituted. A man's
greatest temptations proceed from his strength; but
the glory of the feminine nature is repose, and trust
is the strength of the feminine character, in which
very things, however, lies all the possibility of woman's
degradation. Woman's faith amounts at times to real
intuition; but what risks are attached to this prophetic
power—of impatience, of contentment with the first
glance at things, "the inclination," as a great moralist
has put it, "to take too easily the knowledge of the
problems of life, and to rest content with what lies
nearest her, instead of penetrating to a deeper foundation."
Women are full of indulgence and hope; but
what possibilities lie there of deception, false optimism,
and want of that anxiety which alone makes progress
possible. Women are more inclined than men to
Scripture insists repeatedly on this truth of Isaiah's
about the besetting sin of women. The prophet Amos
has engraved it in one of his sharpest epigrams, declaring
that thoughtlessness is capable of turning women
into very brutes, and their homes into desolate ruins:
Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain
of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the
needy, which say unto their lords, Bring and let us drink.
The Lord Jehovah hath sworn by His holiness that, lo, the
days shall come upon you that they shall take you away
with hooks, and your residue with fish-hooks, and ye shall
go out at the breaches, every one straight before her, and
ye shall cast yourselves into Harmon, saith Jehovah.
It is a cowherd's picture of women: a troop of cows,
heavy, heedless animals, trampling in their anxiety for
food upon every frail and lowly object in the way.
There is a cowherd's coarseness in it, but a prophet's
insight into character. Not of Jezebels, or Messalinas,
or Lady-Macbeths is it spoken, but of the ordinary
matrons of Samaria. Thoughtlessness is able to make
brutes out of women of gentle nurture, with homes and
a religion. For thoughtlessness when joined to luxury
or beauty plays with cruel weapons. It means greed,
arrogance, indifference to suffering, wantonness, pride
of conquest, dissimulation in love, and revenge for
little slights; and there is no waste, unkind sport, insolence,
brutality, or hysterical violence to which it will
not lead. Such women are known, as Amos pictured
But when we turn from the degradation of woman
as thus exposed by the prophets to her glory as lifted
up in the New Testament, we find that the same note
is struck. Woman in the New Testament is gracious
according as she is thoughtful; she offends even when
otherwise beautiful by her feeling overpowering her
thought. Martha spoils a most estimable character by
one moment of unthinking passion, in which she accuses
the Master of carelessness. Mary chooses the better
part in close attention to her Master's words. The
Ten Virgins are divided into five wise and five foolish.
Paul seems to have been struck, as Isaiah was, with the
natural tendency of the female character, for the first
duty he lays upon the old women is to teach the young
women to think discreetly, and he repeats the injunction,
putting it before chastity and industry—Teach them, he
says, teach them discretion ( Cf. Newman, Oxford University Sermons, xv.
So does all Scripture declare, in harmony with the oracle of Isaiah, that thoughtlessness and easy contentment with things as they be, are the besetting sins of woman. But her glory is discretion.
II. The next new point in this prophecy is the
Destruction of Jerusalem (vv. 13-15).
Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and
briers; yea, upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city:
for the palace shall be forsaken; the populous city shall be
deserted; Ophel and the Watch-tower shall be for dens
for ever, a joy of wild asses, a pasture of flocks. The
attempt has been made to confine this reference to the
III. The Spirit Outpoured (vv. 15-20).
The rest of the prophecy is luminous rather than
lucid, full of suffused rather than distinct meanings.
The date of the future regeneration is indefinite—another
feature more in harmony with Isaiah's earlier
prophecies than his later. The cause of the blessing is
the outpouring of the Spirit of God (ver. 15). Righteousness
It appears that Isaiah looked for the fruits of
the Spirit both as material and moral. He bases the
quiet resting-places and regular labours of the future
not on righteousness only, but on fertility and righteousness.
The wilderness shall become a fruitful field, and
what is to-day a fruitful field shall be counted as a forest.
That this proverb, used by Isaiah more than once, is
not merely a metaphor for the moral revolution he
describes in the next verse, is proved by his having
already declared the unfruitfulness of their soil as part
of his people's punishment. Fertility is promised for
itself, and as the accompaniment of moral bountifulness.
And there shall dwell in the wilderness justice, and
righteousness shall abide in the fruitful field. And the
work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect, or
service, of righteousness, quietness and confidence for
ever. And my people shall abide in a peaceable habitation,
and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting-places.
There is not a prophecy more characteristic of Isaiah. It unfolds what for him were the two essential and equal contents of the will of God: a secure land and a righteous people, the fertility of nature and the purity of society. But in those years (705-702) he did not forget that something must come between him and that paradise. Across the very middle of his vision of felicity there dashes a cruel storm. In the gap indicated above Isaiah wrote, But it shall hail in the downfall of the forest, and the city shall be utterly laid low. A hailstorm between the promise and fulfilment of summer! Isaiah could only mean the Assyrian invasion, which was now lowering so dark. Before it bursts we must follow him to the survey which he made, during these years before the siege of Jerusalem, of the foreign nations on whom, equally with Jerusalem, that storm was to sweep.
Isaiah xiv. 24-32, xv.-xxi., and xxiii. (736-702 B.C.).
But in order to understand the Book of Isaiah, in order to understand Isaiah himself in some of the largest of his activities and hopes, we must traverse this thicket. It would be tedious and unprofitable to search every corner of it. We propose, therefore, to give a list of the various oracles, with their dates and titles, for the guidance of Bible-readers, then to take three representative texts and gather the meaning of all the oracles round them.
First, however, two of the prophecies must be put aside. The twenty-second chapter does not refer to a foreign State, but to Jerusalem itself; and the large prophecy which opens the series (chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23) deals with the overthrow of Babylon in circumstances that did not arise till long after Isaiah's time, and so falls to be considered by us along with similar prophecies at the close of this volume. (See Book V.)
All the rest of these chapters—xiv.-xxi. and xxiii.—refer to Isaiah's own day. They were delivered by the prophet at various times throughout his career; but the most of them evidently date from immediately after the year 705, when, on the death of Sargon, there was a general rebellion of the Assyrian vassals.
1. xiv. 24-27. Oath Of Jehovah that the Assyrian shall be broken. Probable date, towards 701.
2. xiv. 28-32. Oracle For Philistia. Warning
to Philistia not to rejoice because one Assyrian king is
3. xv.-xvi. 12. Oracle for Moab. A long
prophecy against Moab. This oracle, whether originally
by himself at an earlier period of his life, or more
probably by an older prophet, Isaiah adopts and ratifies,
and intimates its immediate fulfilment, in xvi. 13, 14.
This is the word which Jehovah spake concerning Moab
long ago. But now Jehovah hath spoken, saying, Within
three years, as the years of an hireling, and the glory of
Moab shall be brought into contempt with all the great
multitude, and the remnant shall be very small and of no
account. The dates both of the original publication
of this prophecy and of its reissue with the appendix
are quite uncertain. The latter may fall about 711,
when Moab was threatened by Sargon for complicity in
the Ashdod conspiracy (p. 198), or in 704, when, with
other States, Moab came under the cloud of Sennacherib's
invasion. The main prophecy is remarkable
for its vivid picture of the disaster that has overtaken
Moab and for the sympathy with her which the Jewish
prophet expresses; for the mention of a remnant of
Moab; for the exhortation to her to send tribute in her
adversity to the mount of the daughter of Zion (xvi. 1);
for an appeal to Zion to shelter the outcasts of Moab
and to take up her cause: Bring counsel, make a decision,
4. xvii. 1-11. Oracle for Damascus. One of the earliest and most crisp of Isaiah's prophecies. Of the time of Syria's and Ephraim's league against Judah, somewhere between 736 and 732.
5. xvii. 12-14. Untitled. The crash of the peoples
upon Jerusalem and their dispersion. This magnificent
piece of sound, which we analyse below, is
usually understood of Sennacherib's rush upon Jerusalem.
Verse 14 is an accurate summary of the
sudden break-up and "retreat from Moscow" of his
army. The Assyrian hosts are described as nations, as
they are elsewhere more than once by Isaiah (xxii. 6,
xxix. 7). But in all this there is no final reason for
referring the oracle to Sennacherib's invasion, and it
may just as well be interpreted of Isaiah's confidence
of the defeat of Syria and Ephraim (734-723). Its
proximity to the oracle against Damascus would then
be very natural, and it would stand as a parallel
prophecy to viii. 9: Make an uproar, O ye peoples, and
ye shall be broken in pieces; and give ear, all ye of the
distances of the earth: gird yourselves, and ye shall be
6. xviii. Untitled. An address to Ethiopia, land of a rustling of wings, land of many sails, whose messengers dart to and fro upon the rivers in their skiffs of reed. The prophet tells Ethiopia, cast into excitement by the news of the Assyrian advance, how Jehovah is resting quietly till the Assyrian be ripe for destruction. When the Ethiopians shall see His sudden miracle, they shall send their tribute to Jehovah, to the place of the name of Jehovah of hosts, Mount Zion. It is difficult to know to which southward march of Assyria to ascribe this prophecy—Sargon's or Sennacherib's? For at the time of both of these an Ethiopian ruled Egypt.
7. xix. Oracle for Egypt. The first fifteen verses
describe judgement as ready to fall on the land of the
Pharaohs. The last ten speak of the religious results
to Egypt of that judgement, and they form the
most universal and "missionary" of all Isaiah's prophecies.
Although doubts have been expressed of the
Isaian authorship of the second half of this chapter on
the score of its universalism, as well as of its literary
style, which is judged to be "a pale reflection" of
Isaiah's own, there is no final reason for declining the
credit of it to Isaiah, while there are insuperable
difficulties against relegating it to the late date which is
sometimes demanded for it. On the date and authenticity
of this prophecy, which are of great importance
for the question of Isaiah's "missionary" opinions, see
Cheyne's introduction to the chapter and Robertson
Smith's notes in The Prophets of Israel (p. 433). The
latter puts it in 703, during Sennacherib's advance
8. xx. Untitled. Also upon Egypt, but in narrative and of an earlier date than at least the latter half of xix. Tells how Isaiah walked naked and barefoot in the streets of Jerusalem for a sign against Egypt and against the help Judah hoped to get from her in the years 711-709, when the Tartan, or Assyrian commander-in-chief, came south to subdue Ashdod. See pp. 198-200.
9. xxi. 1-10. Oracle for the Wilderness of the Sea, announcing but lamenting the fall of Babylon. Probably 709. See pp. 202, 203.
10. xxi. 11, 12. Oracle for Dumah. Dumah, or
Silence—in Our translation, though picturesque, is misleading. The
voice does not inquire, "What of the night?" i.e., whether it be fair
or foul weather, but "How much of the night is passed?" literally
"What from off the night?" This brings out a pathos that our
English version has disguised. Edom feels that her night is lasting
terribly long.
11. xxi. 13-17. Oracle For Arabia. From Edom the prophet passes to their neighbours the Dedanites, travelling merchants. And as he saw night upon Edom, so, by a play upon words, he speaks of evening upon Arabia: in the forest, in Arabia, or with the same consonants, in the evening. In the time of the insecurity of the Assyrian invasion the travelling merchants have to go aside from their great trading roads in the evening to lodge in the thickets. There they entertain fugitives, or (for the sense is not quite clear) are themselves as fugitives entertained. It is a picture of the grievousness of war, which was now upon the world, flowing down even those distant, desert roads. But things have not yet reached the worst. The fugitives are but the heralds of armies, that within a year shall waste the children of Kedar, for Jehovah, the God of Israel, hath spoken it. So did the prophet of little Jerusalem take possession of even the far deserts in the name of his nation's God.
12. xxiii. Oracle For Tyre. Elegy over its fall, probably as Sennacherib came south upon it in 703 or 702. To be further considered by us (pp. 288 ff.).
These then are Isaiah's oracles for the Nations, who tremble, intrigue and go down before the might of Assyria.
We have promised to gather the circumstances and meaning of these prophecies round three representative texts. These are—
1. Ah! the booming of the peoples, the multitudes, like
the booming of the seas they boom; and the rushing of the
2. What then shall one answer the messengers of a nation? That Jehovah hath founded Zion, and in her shall find refuge the afflicted of His people (xiv. 32).
3. In that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts hath blessed them, saying, Blessed be My people Egypt, and the work of My hands Assyria, and Mine inheritance Israel (xix. 24, 25).
1. The first of these texts shows all the prophet's prospect filled with storm, the second of them the solitary rock and lighthouse in the midst of the storm: Zion, his own watchtower and his people's refuge; while the third of them, looking far into the future, tells us, as it were, of the firm continent which shall rise out of the waters—Israel no longer a solitary lighthouse, but in that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth. These three texts give us a summary of the meaning of all Isaiah's obscure prophecies to the foreign nations—a stormy ocean, a solitary rock in the midst of it, and the new continent that shall rise out of the waters about the rock.
The restlessness of Western Asia beneath the
Assyrian rule (from 719, when Sargon's victory at
Rafia extended that rule to the borders of Egypt)
found vent, as we saw (p. 198), in two great Explosions,
for both of which the mine was laid by Egyptian
intrigue. The first Explosion happened in 711, and
was confined to Ashdod. The second took place
on Sargon's death in 705, and was universal. Till
How well fitted Jerusalem then was to be the world's
watchtower, the traveller may see to this day. The
city lies upon the great central ridge of Palestine,
at an elevation of two thousand five hundred feet
above the level of the sea. If you ascend the hill
behind the city, you stand upon one of the great
view-points of the earth. It is a forepost of Asia. To
the east rise the red hills of Moab and the uplands
of Gilead and Bashan, on to which wandering tribes of
the Arabian deserts beyond still push their foremost
camps. Just beyond the horizon lie the immemorial
paths from Northern Syria into Arabia. Within a few
hours' walk along the same central ridge, and still
within the territory of Judah, you may see to the
north, over a wilderness of blue hills, Hermon's
snowy crest; you know that Damascus is lying just
beyond, and that through it and round the base of
Hermon swings one of the longest of the old world's
But Isaiah was more than a spectator of this vast
theatre. He was an actor upon it. The court of Judah,
of which during Hezekiah's reign he was the most
prominent member, stood in more or less close connection
with the courts of all the kingdoms of Western Asia; and
in those days when the nations were busy with intrigue
against their common enemy this little highland town
and fortress became a gathering place of peoples. From
Babylon, from far-off Ethiopia, from Edom, from
Philistia, and no doubt from many other places also,
embassies came to King Hezekiah, or to inquire of his
prophet. The appearance of some of them lives for
us still in Isaiah's descriptions: tall and shiny figures
of Ethiopians (xviii. 2), with whom we are able to
identify the lithe, silky-skinned, shining-black bodies
of the present tribes of the Upper Nile. Now the
prophet must have talked much with these strangers,
We have said that in nothing is the regal power of
our prophet's style so manifest as in the vast horizons,
which, by the use of a few words, he calls up before us.
Some of the finest of these revelations are made in this
part of his book, so obscure and unknown to most.
Who can ever forget those descriptions of Ethiopia in
the eighteenth chapter?—"Ah! the land of the rustling of
wings, which borders on the rivers of Cush, which sendeth
heralds on the sea, and in vessels of reed on the face of
the waters! Travel, fleet messengers, to a people lithe and
shining, to a nation feared from ever it began to be, a
people strong, strong and trampling, whose land the rivers
divide; or of Tyre in chapter xxiii.?—"And on great
waters the seed of Shihor, the harvest of the Nile, was her
revenue; and she was the mart of nations. What expanses
of sea! what fleets of ships! what floating loads
Yet these are only segments of horizons, and perhaps the prophet reaches the height of his power of expression in the first of the three texts, which we have given as representative of his prophecies on foreign nations (p. 278). Here three or four lines of marvellous sound repeat the effect of the rage of the restless world as it rises, storms and breaks upon the steadfast will of God. The phonetics of the passage are wonderful. The general impression is that of a stormy ocean booming in to the shore and then crashing itself out into one long hiss of spray and foam upon its barriers. The details are noteworthy. In ver. 12 we have thirteen heavy M-sounds, besides two heavy B's, to five N's, five H's, and four sibilants. But in ver. 13 the sibilants predominate; and before the sharp rebuke of the Lord the great, booming sound of ver. 12 scatters out into a long yish-shā 'oon. The occasional use of a prolonged vowel amid so many hurrying consonants produces exactly the effect now of the lift of a storm swell out at sea and now of the pause of a great wave before it crashes on the shore. "Ah, the booming of the peoples, the multitudes, like the booming of the seas they boom; and the rushing of the nations, like the rushing of the mighty waters they rush: nations, like the rushing of many waters they rush. But He checketh it—a short, sharp word with a choke and a snort in it—and it fleeth far away, and is chased like chaff on mountains before wind, and like swirling dust before a whirlwind."
So did the rage of the world sound to Isaiah as
it crashed into pieces upon the steadfast providence
of God. To those who can feel the force of such
2. But amid this storm Zion stands immovable. It is upon Zion that the storm crashes itself into impotence. This becomes explicit in the second of our representative texts: What then shall one answer the messengers of a nation? That Jehovah hath founded Zion, and in her shall find a refuge the afflicted of His people (xiv. 32). This oracle was drawn from Isaiah by an embassy of the Philistines. Stricken with panic at the Assyrian advance, they had sent messengers to Jerusalem, as other tribes did, with questions and proposals of defences, escapes and alliances. They got their answer. Alliances are useless. Everything human is going down. Here, here alone, is safety, because the Lord hath decreed it.
With what light and peace do Isaiah's words break out across that unquiet, hungry sea! How they tell the world for the first time, and have been telling it ever since, that, apart from all the struggle and strife of history, there is a refuge and security of men, which God Himself has assured. The troubled surface of life, nations heaving uneasily, kings of Assyria and their armies carrying the world before them—these are not all. The world and her powers are not all. Religion, in the very teeth of life, builds her refuge for the afflicted.
The world seems wholly divided between force and
fear. Isaiah says, It is not true. Faith has her
abiding citadel in the midst, a house of God, which
neither force can harm nor fear enter.
This then was Isaiah's Interim-Answer to the Nations—Zion at least is secure for the people of Jehovah.
3. Isaiah could not remain content, however, with so narrow an interim-answer: Zion at least is secure, whatever happens to the rest of you. The world was there, and had to be dealt with and accounted for—had even to be saved. As we have already seen, this was the problem of Isaiah's generation; and to have shirked it would have meant the failure of his faith to rank as universal.
Isaiah did not shirk it. He said boldly to his people,
and to the nations: "The faith we have covers this
vaster life. Jehovah is not only God of Israel. He
rules the world." These prophecies to the foreign
nations are full of revelations of the sovereignty and
providence of God. The Assyrian may seem to be
growing in glory; but Jehovah is watching from the
heavens, till he be ripe for cutting down (xviii. 4).
Egypt's statesmen may be perverse and wilful; but
Jehovah of hosts swingeth His hand against the land:
they shall tremble and shudder (xix. 16). Egypt shall
obey His purposes (17). Confusion may reign for a
time, but a signal and a centre shall be lifted up, and
the world gather itself in order round the revealed will
of God. The audacity of such a claim for his God
becomes more striking when we remember that Isaiah's
faith was not the faith of a majestic or a conquering
people. When he made his claim, Judah was still tributary
to Assyria, a petty highland principality, that could
not hope to stand by material means against the forces
which had thrown down her more powerful neighbours.
It was no experience of success, no mere instinct of
being on the side of fate, which led Isaiah so resolutely
to pronounce that not only should his people be secure,
How spiritual this faith of Isaiah was, is seen from the next step the prophet took. Looking out on the troubled world, he did not merely assert that his God ruled it, but he emphatically said, what was a far more difficult thing to say, that it would all be consciously and willingly God's. God rules this, not to restrain it only, but to make it His own. The knowledge of Him, which is to-day our privilege, shall be to-morrow the blessing of the whole world.
When we point to the Jewish desire, so often expressed in the Old Testament, of making the whole world subject to Jehovah, we are told that it is simply a proof of religious ambition and jealousy. We are told that this wish to convert the world no more stamps the Jewish religion as being a universal, and therefore presumably a Divine, religion than the Mohammedans' zeal to force their tenets on men at the point of the sword is a proof of the truth of Islam.
Now we need not be concerned to defend the Jewish
religion in its every particular, even as propounded by
an Isaiah. It is an article of the Christian creed that
Judaism was a minor and imperfect dispensation, where
truth was only half revealed and virtue half developed.
But at least let us do the Jewish religion justice; and
Firstly then, there is something in the very manner
of Isaiah's treatment of foreign nations, which causes
the old charges of religious exclusiveness to sink in our
throats. Isaiah treats these foreigners at least as men.
Take his prophecies on Egypt or on Tyre or on Babylon—nations
which were the hereditary enemies of his
nation—and you find him speaking of their natural misfortunes,
their social decays, their national follies and
disasters, with the same pity and with the same purely
moral considerations, with which he has treated his
own land. When news of those far-away sorrows
comes to Jerusalem, it moves this large-hearted prophet
to mourning and tears. He breathes out to distant
lands elegies as beautiful as he has poured upon Jerusalem.
He shows as intelligent an interest in their
social evolutions as he does in those of the Jewish State.
He gives a picture of the industry and politics of Egypt
as careful as his pictures of the fashions and statecraft
of Judah. In short, as you read his prophecies upon
foreign nations, you perceive that before the eyes of this
man humanity, broken and scattered in his days as it
was, rose up one great whole, every part of which was
subject to the same laws of righteousness, and deserved
from the prophet of God the same love and pity. To
some few tribes he says decisively that they shall
certainly be wiped out, but even them he does not
address in contempt or in hatred. The large empire
of Egypt, the great commercial power of Tyre, he
speaks of in language of respect and admiration; but
that does not prevent him from putting the plain issue
But, secondly, he, who thus treated all nations with the same strict measures of justice and the same fulness of pity with which he treated his own, was surely not far from extending to the world the religious privileges, which he has so frequently identified with Jerusalem. In his old age, at least Isaiah looked forward to the time when the particular religious opportunities of the Jew should be the inheritance of humanity. For their old oppressor Egypt, for their new enemy Assyria, he anticipates the same experience and education, which has made Israel the firstborn of God. Speaking to Egypt, Isaiah concludes a missionary sermon, fit to take its place beside that which Paul uttered on the Areopagus to the younger Greek civilisation, with the words, In that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts hath blessed them, saying, Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands and Israel Mine inheritance.
Isaiah xxiii. (702 B.C.).
But we must first impress ourselves with the utter contrast between Phœnicia and Judah in the matter of commercial experience, or we shall not feel the full force of this excursion which the prophet of a high, inland tribe of shepherds makes among the wharves and warehouses of the great merchant city on the sea.
The Phœnician empire, it has often been remarked,
presents a very close analogy to that of Great Britain;
but even more entirely than in the case of Great
Britain the glory of that empire was the wealth of its
trade, and the character of the people was the result
of their mercantile habits. A little strip of land, one
hundred and forty miles long, and never more than
fifteen broad, with the sea upon one side and the
mountains upon the other, compelled its inhabitants to
become miners and seamen. The hills shut off the
narrow coast from the continent to which it belongs,
and drove the increasing populations to seek their
destiny by way of the sea. These took to it kindly,
for they had the Semite's born instinct for trading.
Planting their colonies all round the Mediterranean,
exploiting every mine within reach of the coastland,
But upon trade the Phœnicians had built an empire.
At home their political life enjoyed the freedom, energy
and resources which are supplied by long habits of
an extended commerce with other peoples. The constitution
of the different Phœnician cities was not, as is
sometimes supposed, republican, but monarchical; and
the land belonged to the king. Yet the large number
of wealthy families at once limited the power of the
throne, and saved the commonwealth from being
dependent upon the fortunes of a single dynasty. The
colonies in close relation with the mother country
assured an empire with its life in better circulation
and with more reserve of power than either Egypt or
But trade with political results so splendid had
an evil effect upon the character and spiritual temper
of the people. By the indiscriminating ancients the
Phœnicians were praised as inventors; the rudiments
of most of the arts and sciences, of the alphabet and
of money have been ascribed to them. But modern
research has proved that of none of the many elements
of civilisation which they introduced to the West were
they the actual authors. The Phœnicians were simply
carriers and middlemen. In all time there is no instance
of a nation so wholly given over to buying and selling,
who frequented even the battlefields of the world that
they might strip the dead and purchase the captive.
Phœnician history—though we must always do the
people the justice to remember that we have their history
only in fragments—affords few signs of the consciousness
that there are things which a nation may strive
after for their own sake, and not for the money they
bring in. The world, which other peoples, still in the
reverence of the religious youth of the race, regarded
as a house of prayer, the Phœnicians had already
turned into a den of thieves. They trafficked even with
the mysteries and intelligences; and their own religion
Now let us turn to the experience of the Jews, whose faith had to face and account for this world-force.
The history of the Jews in Europe has so identified
them with trade that it is difficult for us to imagine a
Jew free from its spirit or ignorant of its methods. But
the fact is that in the time of Isaiah Israel was as little
acquainted with commerce as it is possible for a civilised
nation to be. Israel's was an inland territory. Till
Solomon's reign the people had neither navy nor harbour.
Their land was not abundant in materials for trade—it
contained almost no minerals, and did not produce a
greater supply of food than was necessary for the consumption
of its inhabitants. It is true that the ambition of
Solomon had brought the people within the temptations
of commerce. He established trading cities, annexed
harbours and hired a navy. But even then, and again
in the reign of Uzziah, which reflects much of Solomon's
commercial glory, Israel traded by deputies, and the
mass of the people remained innocent of mercantile
habits. Perhaps to moderns the most impressive proof
of how little Israel had to do with trade is to be found
in their laws of money-lending and of interest. The
absolute prohibition which Moses placed upon the
charging of interest could only have been possible
among a people with the most insignificant commerce.
To Isaiah himself commerce must have appeared alien.
Human life, as he pictures it, is composed of war,
But all Isaiah's future is full of gardens and busy fields, of irrigating rivers and canals:—
Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest.... Blessed are ye, that sow beside all waters, that send forth the feet of the ox and the ass.
And He shall give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground withal, and bread-corn, the increase of the ground; and it shall be juicy and fat: in that day shall thy cattle feed in large pastures.
Conceive how trade looked to eyes which dwelt
with enthusiasm upon scenes like these! It must have
seemed to blast the future, to disturb the regularity of
life with such violence as to shake religion herself!
With all our convictions of the benefits of trade, even
we feel no greater regret or alarm than when we observe
the invasion by the rude forces of trade of some scene
of rural felicity: blackening of sky and earth and
stream; increasing complexity and entanglement of life;
enormous growth of new problems and temptations;
strange knowledge, ambitions and passions, that throb
through life and strain the tissue of its simple constitution,
like novel engines, which shake the ground and
the strong walls, accustomed once to re-echo only the
simple music of the mill-wheel and the weaver's shuttle.
Isaiah did not fear an invasion of Judah by the habits
First of all, Isaiah, as we might have expected from
his large faith and broad sympathies, accepts and
acknowledges this great world-force. His noble spirit
shows neither timidity nor jealousy before it. Before
his view what an unblemished prospect of it spreads!
His descriptions tell more of his appreciation than long
laudations would have done. He grows enthusiastic
upon the grandeur of Tyre; and even when he prophesies
that Assyria shall destroy it, it is with the feeling
that such a destruction is really a desecration, and as if
there lived essential glory in great commercial enterprise.
Certainly from such a spirit we have much to learn.
How often has religion, when brought face to face with
the new forces of a generation—commerce, democracy
or science—shown either a base timidity or baser
jealousy, and met the innovations with cries of detraction
or despair! Isaiah reads a lesson to the modern
Church in the preliminary spirit with which she should
meet the novel experiences of Providence. Whatever
judgement may afterwards have to be passed, there is
the immediate duty of frankly recognising greatness wherever
It is almost an unnecessary task to apply Isaiah's
meaning to the commerce of our own day. But let us
not miss his example in this: that the right to criticise
the habits of trade and the ability to criticise them
healthily are alone won by a just appreciation of trade's
world-wide glory and serviceableness. There is no use
preaching against the venal spirit and manifold temptations
and degradations of trade, until we have realised
the indispensableness of trade and its capacity for disciplining
and exalting its ministers. The only way to correct
the abuses of "the commercial spirit," against which
many in our day are loud with indiscriminate rebuke,
is to impress its victims, having first impressed yourself,
with the opportunities and the ideals of commerce. A
thing is great partly by its traditions and partly by its
opportunities—partly by what it has accomplished and
partly by the doors of serviceableness of which it holds
the key. By either of these standards the magnitude
of commerce is simply overwhelming. Having discovered
the world-forces, commerce has built thereon
the most powerful of our modern empires. Its exigencies
compel peace; its resources are the sinews of
war. If it has not always preceded religion and science
in the conquest of the globe, it has shared with them
their triumphs. Commerce has recast the modern world,
so that we hardly think of the old national divisions in
Therefore let all merchants and their apprentices believe, "Here is something worth putting our manhood into, worth living for, not with our brains only or our appetites, but with our conscience, with our imagination, with every curiosity and sympathy of our nature. Here is a calling with a healthy discipline, with a free spirit, with unrivalled opportunities of service, with an ancient and essential dignity." The reproach which is so largely imagined upon trade is the relic of a barbarous age. Do not tolerate it, for under its shadow, as under other artificial and unhealthy contempts of society, there are apt to grow up those sordid and slavish tempers, which soon make men deserve the reproach that was at first unjustly cast upon them. Dissipate the base influence of this reproach by lifting the imagination upon the antiquity and world-wide opportunities of trade—trade, whose origin, as Isaiah so finely puts it, is of ancient days; and her feet carry her afar off to sojourn.
So generous an appreciation of the grandeur of commerce does not prevent Isaiah from exposing its besetting sin and degradation.
The vocation of a merchant differs from others in this,
that there is no inherent nor instinctive obligation in it
to ends higher than those of financial profit—emphasized
in our days into the more dangerous constraint of
immediate financial profit. No profession is of course
absolutely free from the risk of this servitude; but other
professions offer escapes, or at least mitigations, which
To this spirit, which treats all things and men, high or low, as matters simply of profit, Isaiah gives a very ugly name. We call it the mercenary or venal spirit. Isaiah says it is the spirit of the harlot.
The history of Phœnicia justified his words. To-day we remember her by nothing that is great, by nothing that is original. She left no art nor literature, and her once brave and skilful populations degenerated till we know them only as the slave-dealers, panders and prostitutes of the Roman empire. If we desire to find Phœnicia's influence on the religion of the world, we have to seek for it among the most sensual of Greek myths and the abominable practices of Corinthian worship. With such terrible literalness was Isaiah's harlot-curse fulfilled.
What is true of Phœnicia may become true of Britain,
Now for a very vain delusion upon this subject! It
is often imagined in our day that if a man seek atonement
for the venal spirit through the study of art,
through the practice of philanthropy or through the
cultivation of religion, he shall surely find it. This is
false—plausible and often practised but utterly false.
Unless a man see and reverence beauty in the very
workshop and office of his business, unless he feel those
whom he meets there, his employés and customers,
as his brethren, unless he keep his business methods
free from fraud, and honestly recognise his gains
as a trust from the Lord, then no amount of devotion
elsewhere to the fine arts, nor perseverance in
philanthropy, nor fondness for the Church evinced by
ever so large subscriptions, will deliver him from the
devil of mercenariness. That is a plea of alibi that shall
A nation with such a spirit was of course foredoomed to destruction. Isaiah predicts the absolute disappearance of Tyre from the attention of the world. Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years. Then, like some poor unfortunate whose day of beauty is past, she shall in vain practise her old advertisements on men. After the end of seventy years it shall be unto Tyre as in the song of the harlot: Take an harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many songs, that thou mayest be remembered.
But Commerce is essential to the world. Tyre must
revive; and the prophet sees her revive as the minister
of Religion, the purveyor of the food of the servants of
the Lord, and of the accessories of their worship. It
All this is another proof of the sanity and far sight of our prophet. Again we find that his conviction that judgement is coming does not render his spirit morbid, nor disturb his eye for things of beauty and profit in the world. Commerce, with all her faults, is essential, and must endure, nay shall prove in the days to come Religion's most profitable minister. The generosity and wisdom of this passage are the more striking when we remember the extremity of unrelieved denunciation to which other great teachers of religion have allowed themselves to be hurled by their rage against the sins of trade. But Isaiah, in the largest sense of the expression, is a man of the world—a man of the world because God made the world and rules it. Yet even from his far sight was hidden the length to which in the last days Commerce would carry her services to man and God, proving as she has done, under the flag of another Phœnicia, to all the extent of Isaiah's longing, one of Religion's most sincere and profitable handmaids.
Isaiah:— | |
xxxvi. 1. | Early in 701. |
i. | " " |
xxii. | " " |
xxxiii. | A little later. |
xxxvi. 2-xxxvii. | " " |
—— | —— |
xxxviii.-xxxix. | Date uncertain. |
Into this fourth book we put all the rest of the prophecies of the Book of Isaiah, that have to do with the prophet's own time: chaps. i., xxii. and xxxiii., with the narrative in xxxvi., xxxvii. All these refer to the only Assyrian invasion of Judah and siege of Jerusalem: that undertaken by Sennacherib in 701.
It is, however, right to remember once more, that many authorities maintain that there were two Assyrian invasions of Judah—one by Sargon in 711, the other by Sennacherib in 701—and that chaps. i. and xxii. (as well as x. 5-34) belong to the former of these. The theory is ingenious and tempting; but, in the silence of the Assyrian annals about any invasion of Judah by Sargon, it is impossible to adopt it. And although chaps. i. and xxii. differ very greatly in tone from chap. xxxiii., yet to account for the difference it is not necessary to suppose two different invasions, with a considerable period between them. Virtually, as will appear in the course of our exposition, Sennacherib's invasion of Judah was a double one.
1. The first time Sennacherib's army invaded Judah
they took all the fenced cities, and probably invested
Jerusalem, but withdrew on payment of tribute and the
surrender of the casus belli, the Assyrian vassal Padi,
whom the Ekronites had deposed and given over to the It is confusing to find this date attached to Sennacherib's invasion
of 701, unless, with one or two critics, we place Hezekiah's accession
in 715. But Hezekiah acceded in 728 or 727, and 701 would therefore
be his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year. Mr. Cheyne, who takes
727 as the year of Hezekiah's accession, gets out of the difficulty by
reading "Sargon" for "Sennacherib" in this verse and in
2. But scarcely had the tribute been paid when
Sennacherib, himself advancing to meet Egypt, sent
back upon Jerusalem a second army of investment, with
which was the Rabshakeh; and this was the army
that so mysteriously disappeared from the eyes of the
besieged. To the treacherous return of the Assyrians
and the sudden deliverance of Jerusalem from their
grasp refer
To the history of this double attempt upon Jerusalem
in 701—xxxvi. and xxxvii.—there has been appended in
xxxviii. and xxxix. an account of Hezekiah's illness and
of an embassy to him from Babylon. These events
probably happened some years before Sennacherib's
invasion. But it will be most convenient for us to take
Isaiah i. and xxii. (701 B.C.).
The stage is thus narrow and the time short, but the
action one of the most critical in the history of Israel,
taking rank with the Exodus from Egypt and the Return
from Babylon. To Isaiah himself it marks the summit
of his career. For half a century Zion has been preparing
for, forgetting and again preparing for, her first
and final struggle with the Assyrian. Now she is to
meet her foe, face to face across her own walls. For
forty years Isaiah has predicted for the Assyrian an
In the end, by the mysterious disappearance of the Assyrian, Jerusalem was saved, the prophet was left with his remnant and the future still open for Israel. But at the beginning of the end such an issue was by no means probable. Jewish panic and profligacy almost prevented the Divine purpose, and Isaiah went near to breaking his heart over the city, for whose redemption he had travailed for a lifetime. He was as sure as ever that this redemption must come, but a collapse of the people's faith and patriotism at the eleventh hour made its coming seem worthless. Jerusalem appeared bent on forestalling her deliverance by moral suicide. Despair, not of God but of the city, settled on Isaiah's heart; and in such a mood he wrote chap. xxii. We may entitle it therefore, though written at a time when the tide should have been running to the full, "At the Lowest Ebb."
We have thus stated at the outset the motive of this
chapter, because it is one of the most unexpected and
startling of all Isaiah's prophecies. In it "we can
discern precipices." Beneath our eyes, long lifted by the
prophet to behold a future stretching very far forth, this
chapter suddenly yawns, a pit of blackness. For utterness
of despair and the absolute sentence which it passes
on the citizens of Zion we have had nothing like it
from Isaiah since the evil days of Ahaz. The historical
portions of the Bible which cover this period are not cleft Records of the Past, i. 33 ff. vii.; Schrader's Cuneiform Inscriptions
and the Old Testament (Whitehouse's translation).
In a Syrian campaign Sennacherib's path was plain—to
begin with the Phœnician cities, march quickly
south by the level coastland, subduing the petty
chieftains upon it, meet Egypt at its southern end,
and then, when he had rid himself of his only formidable
foe, turn to the more delicate task of warfare
among the hills of Judah—a campaign which he could
scarcely undertake with a hostile force like Egypt on
his flank. This course, he tells us, he followed. "In
my third campaign, to the land of Syria I went.
Luliah (Elulæus), King of Sidon—for the fearful splendour
of my majesty overwhelmed him—fled to a
distant spot in the midst of the sea. His land I
entered." City after city fell to the invader. The
princes of Aradus, Byblus and Ashdod, by the coast,
and even Moab and Edom, far inland, sent him
their submission. He attacked Ascalon, and captured
its king. He went on, and took the Philistine cities of
Beth-dagon, Joppa, Barka and Azor, all of them
within forty miles of Jerusalem, and some even visible
from her neighbourhood. South of this group, and a little
over twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, lay Ekron; and
Ten years before this Sargon had set Padi, a vassal
of his own, as king over Ekron; but the Ekronites had
risen against Padi, put him in chains, and sent him to
their ally Hezekiah, who now held him in Jerusalem.
"These men," says Sennacherib, "were now terrified
in their hearts; the shadows of death overwhelmed
them." Records of the Past, i. 38; vii. 62. Ibid., i., 40; Schrader, i., 286.
Here, then, we have material for a graphic picture of Jerusalem and her populace, when chaps. i. and xxii. were uttered by Isaiah.
At Jerusalem we are within a day's journey of any part of the territory of Judah. We feel the kingdom throb to its centre at Assyria's first footfall on the border. The nation's life is shuddering in upon its capital, couriers dashing up with the first news; fugitives hard upon them; palace, arsenal, market and temple thrown into commotion; the politicians busy; the engineers hard at work completing the fortifications, leading the suburban wells to a reservoir within the walls, levelling every house and tree outside which could give shelter to the besiegers, and heaping up the material on the ramparts, till there lies nothing but a great, bare, waterless circle round a high-banked fortress. Across this bareness the lines of fugitives streaming to the gates; provincial officials and their retinues; soldiers whom Hezekiah had sent out to meet the foe, returning without even the dignity of defeat upon them; husbandmen, with cattle and remnants of grain in disorder; women and children; the knaves, cowards and helpless of the whole kingdom pouring their fear, dissoluteness and disease into the already-unsettled populace of Jerusalem. Inside the walls opposing political factions and a weak king; idle crowds, swaying to every rumour and intrigue; the ordinary restraints and regularities of life suspended, even patriotism gone with counsel and courage, but in their place fear and shame and greed of life. Such was the state in which Jerusalem faced the hour of her visitation.
Gradually the Visitant came near over the thirty
miles which lay between the capital and the border. Chap. i. 7-9.
There were, however, two supports, on which that distracted populace within the walls still steadied themselves. The one was the Temple-worship, the other the Egyptian alliance.
History has many remarkable instances of peoples betaking themselves in the hour of calamity to the energetic discharge of the public rites of religion. But such a resort is seldom, if ever, a real moral conversion. It is merely physical nervousness, apprehension for life, clutching at the one thing within reach that feels solid, which it abandons as soon as panic has passed. When the crowds in Jerusalem betook themselves to the Temple, with unwonted wealth of sacrifice, Isaiah denounced this as hypocrisy and futility. To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? saith Jehovah.... I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear (i. 11-15).
Isaiah might have spared his scornful orders to the
people to desist from worship. Soon afterwards they
abandoned it of their own will, but from motives very
different from those urged by him. The second
support to which Jerusalem clung was the Egyptian
alliance—the pet project of the party then in power.
They had carried it to a successful issue, taunting
Isaiah with their success. See p. 238.
We are aware what happened. Egypt was beaten at Eltekeh; the alliance was stamped a failure; Jerusalem's last worldly hope was taken from her. When the news reached the city, something took place, of which our moral judgement tells us more than any actual record of facts. The Government of Hezekiah gave way; the rulers, whose courage and patriotism had been identified with the Egyptian alliance, lost all hope for their country, and fled, as Isaiah puts it, en masse (xxii. 3). There was no battle, no defeat at arms (id. 2, 3); but the Jewish State collapsed.
Then, when the last material hope of Judah fell, fell her religion too. The Egyptian disappointment, while it drove the rulers out of their false policies, drove the people out of their unreal worship. What had been a city of devotees became in a moment a city of revellers. Formerly all had been sacrifices and worship, but now feasting and blasphemy. Behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die (id. 13. The reference of ver. 12 is probably to chap. i.).
Now all Isaiah's ministry had been directed just against
these two things: the Egyptian alliance and the purely
formal observance of religion—trust in the world and
trust in religiousness. And together both of these
had given way, and the Assyrian was at the gates.
Truly it was the hour of Isaiah's vindication. Yet—and
this is the tragedy—it had come too late. The
prophet could not use it. The two things he said
What aileth thee now—and in these words we can hear the old man addressing his fickle child, whose changefulness by this time he knew so well—what aileth thee now that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops—we see him standing at his door watching this ghastly holiday—O thou that art full of shoutings, a tumultuous city, a joyous town? What are you rejoicing at in such an hour as this, when you have not even the bravery of your soldiers to celebrate, when you are without that pride which has brought songs from the lips of a defeated people as they learned that their sons had fallen with their faces to the foe, and has made even the wounds of the dead borne through the gate lips of triumph, calling to festival! For thy slain are not slain with the sword, neither are they dead in battle.
Urge not your mad holiday upon me! For a day
of discomfiture and of breaking and of perplexity hath
the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, in the valley of vision, a
On the brink of the precipice, Isaiah draws back for
a moment, to describe with some of his old fire the
appearance of the besiegers (vv. 6-8a). And this
suggests what kind of preparation Jerusalem had made
for her foe—every kind, says Isaiah, but the supreme
one. The arsenal, Solomon's forest-house, with its cedar
pillars, had been looked to (ver. 8), the fortifications inspected
and increased, and the suburban waters brought
within them (vv. 9-11a). But ye looked not unto Him
that had done this, who had brought this providence
upon you; neither had ye respect unto Him that fashioned
it long ago, whose own plan it had been. To your
alliances and fortifications you fled in the hour of
calamity, but not to Him in whose guidance the course
of calamity lay. And therefore, when your engineering
and diplomacy failed you, your religion vanished with
Back forty years the word had been, Go and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again and be healed. What happened now was only what was foretold then: And if there be yet a tenth in it, it shall again be for consumption. That radical revision of judgement was now being literally fulfilled, when Isaiah, sure at last of his remnant within the walls of Jerusalem, was forced for their sin to condemn even them to death.
Nevertheless, Isaiah had still respect to the ultimate
survival of a remnant. How firmly he believed in it
could not be more clearly illustrated than by the fact
The mayor of the palace at this time was one Shebna, also called minister or deputy (lit. friend of the king). That his father is not named implies perhaps that Shebna was a foreigner; his own name betrays a Syrian origin; and he has been justly supposed to be the leader of the party then in power, whose policy was the Egyptian alliance, and whom in these latter years Isaiah had so frequently denounced as the root of Judah's bitterness. To this unfamilied intruder, who had sought to establish himself in Jerusalem, after the manner of those days, by hewing himself a great sepulchre, Isaiah brought sentence of violent banishment: Behold, Jehovah will be hurling, hurling thee away, thou big man, and crumpling, crumpling thee together. He will roll, roll thee on, thou rolling-stone, like a ball thrown out on broad level ground; there shall thou die, and there shall be the chariots of thy glory, thou shame of the house of thy lord. And I thrust thee from thy post, and from thy station do they pull thee down. This vagabond was not to die in his bed, nor to be gathered in his big tomb to the people on whom he had foisted himself. He should continue a rolling-stone. For him, like Cain, there was a land of Nod; and upon it he was to find a vagabond's death.
To fill this upstart's place, Isaiah solemnly designated
a man with a father: Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. The
But a family is a temptation, and the weight of
it may drag even the man of the Lord's own hammering
out of his place. This very year we find
Eliakim in Shebna's post,
So we have not one, but a couple of tragedies. Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, follows Shebna, the son of Nobody. The fate of the overburdened nail is as grievous as that of the rolling stone. It is easy to pass this prophecy over as a trivial incident; but when we have carefully analysed each verse, restored to the words their exact shade of signification, and set them in their proper contrasts, we perceive the outlines of two social dramas, which it requires very little imagination to invest with engrossing moral interest.
Isaiah xxii., contrasted with xxxiii. (701 B.C.).
In spite of her collapse, as pictured in chap. xxii., Jerusalem
was not taken. Her rulers fled; her people, as if
death were certain, betook themselves to dissipation; and
yet the city did not fall into the hands of the Assyrian.
Sennacherib himself does not pretend to have taken Schrader, Cuneiform Inscriptions, O.T., i., p. 286.
And now upon the redeemed city Isaiah could proceed to rebuild the shattered faith and morals of her people. He could say to them, "Everything has turned out as, by the word of the Lord, I said it should. The Assyrian has come down; Egypt has failed you. Your politicians, with their scorn of religion and their confidence in their cleverness, have deserted you. I told you that your numberless sacrifices and pomp of unreal religion would avail you nothing in your day of disaster, and lo! when this came, your religion collapsed. Your abounding wickedness, I said, could only close in your ruin and desertion by God. But one promise I kept steadfast: that Jerusalem would not fall; and to your penitence, whenever it should be real, I assured forgiveness. Jerusalem stands to-day, according to my word; and I repeat my gospel. History has vindicated my word, but Come now, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow: though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. I call upon you to build again on your redeemed city, and by the grace of this pardon, the fallen ruins of your life."
It was the hour of the prophet's triumph, but the nation had as yet only trials before it. God has not done with nations or men when He has forgiven them. This people, whom of His grace, and in spite of themselves, God had saved from destruction, stood on the brink of another trial. God had given them a new lease of life, but it was immediately to pass through the furnace. They had bought off Sennacherib, but Sennacherib came back.
When Sennacherib got the tribute, he repented of
On what free, exultant wings the spirit of Isaiah
must have risen to the sublime occasion! We know
him as by nature an ardent patriot and passionate
lover of his city, but through circumstance her pitiless
critic and unsparing judge. In all the literature of
patriotism there are no finer odes and orations than
those which it owes to him; from no lips came
stronger songs of war, and no heart rejoiced more in
the valour that turns the battle from the gate. But till
now Isaiah's patriotism had been chiefly a conscience
Thus, then, do we propose to bridge the gulf which lies between chaps. i. and xxii. on the one hand and chap. xxxiii. on the other. If they are all to be dated from the year 701, some such bridge is necessary. And the one we have traced is both morally sufficient and in harmony with what we know to have been the course of events.
The forgiveness of God is the foundation of every
bridge from a hopeless past to a courageous present.
That God can make the past be for guilt as though
it had not been is always to Isaiah the assurance
of the future. An old Greek miniature Didron Christian Iconography, fig. 52.
But the absoluteness of God's pardon, making the
past as though it had not been, is not the only lesson
which the spiritual experience of Jerusalem in that
awful year of 701 has for us. Isaiah's gospel of
forgiveness is nothing less than this: that when God
gives pardon He gives Himself. The name of the
blessed future, which is entered through pardon—as
in that miniature, a child—is Immanuel: God-with-us.
And if it be correct that we owe the forty-sixth Psalm
to these months when the Assyrian came back upon
Jerusalem, then we see how the city, that had
abandoned God, is yet able to sing when she is pardoned,
God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help
in the midst of troubles. And this gospel of forgiveness
is not only Isaiah's. According to the whole Bible,
there is but one thing which separates man from God—that
is sin, and when sin is done away with, God
cannot be kept from man. In giving pardon to man,
God gives back to man Himself. How gloriously
But if forgiveness mean all this, then the objections
frequently brought against a conveyance of it so unconditioned
as that of Isaiah fall to the ground.
Forgiveness of such a kind cannot be either unjust
or demoralising. On the contrary, we see Jerusalem
permoralised by it. At first, it is true, the sense of
weakness and fear abounds, as we learn from the
narrative in chaps. xxxvi. and xxxvii. But where
there was vanity, recklessness and despair, giving way
to dissipation, there is now humility, discipline and a
leaning upon God, that are led up to confidence and
exultation. Jerusalem's experience is just another proof
that any moral results are possible to so great a process
as the return of God to the soul. Awful is the
responsibility of them who receive such a Gift and
such a Guest; but the sense of that awfulness is the
atmosphere, in which obedience and holiness and the
courage that is born of both love best to grow. One
can understand men scoffing at messages of pardon so
unconditioned as Isaiah's, who think they "mean no
more than a clean slate." Taken in this sense, the
gospel of forgiveness must prove a savour of death
unto death. But just as Jerusalem interpreted the
message of her pardon to mean that
Upon one other point connected with the forgiveness of sins we get instruction from the experience of Jerusalem. A man has difficulty in squaring his sense of forgiveness with the return on the back of it of his old temptations and trials, with the hostility of fortune and with the inexorableness of nature. Grace has spoken to his heart, but Providence bears more hard upon him than ever. Pardon does not change the outside of life; it does not immediately modify the movements of history, or suspend the laws of nature. Although God has forgiven Jerusalem, Assyria comes back to besiege her. Although the penitent be truly reconciled to God, the constitutional results of his fall remain: the frequency of temptation, the power of habit, the bias and facility downwards, the physical and social consequences. Pardon changes none of these things. It does not keep off the Assyrians.
But if pardon means the return of God to the soul,
then in this we have the secret of the return of the
foe. Men could not try nor develop a sense of the
former except by their experience of the latter. We
have seen why Isaiah must have welcomed the perfidious
reappearance of the Assyrians after he had
helped to buy them off. Nothing could better test the
sincerity of Jerusalem's repentance, or rally her dissipated
forces. Had the Assyrians not returned, the
Jews would have had no experimental proof of God's
restored presence, and the great miracle would never
That is why the Assyrians came back to Jerusalem, and that is why temptations and penalties still pursue the penitent and forgiven.
Isaiah xxxiii. (701 B.C.).
There is no doubt that chap. xxxiii. refers to the sudden disappearance of the Assyrian from the walls of Jerusalem. It was written, part perhaps on the eve of that deliverance, part immediately after morning broke upon the vanished host. Before those verses which picture the disappearance of the investing army, we ought in strict chronological order to take the narrative in chaps. xxxvi. and xxxvii.—the return of the besiegers, the insolence of the Rabshakeh, the prostration of Hezekiah, Isaiah's solitary faith, and the sudden disappearance of the Assyrian. It will be more convenient, however, since we have already entered chap. xxxiii., to finish it, and then to take the narrative of the events which led up to it.
After an application of this same fire of God's
righteousness to the sinners within Jerusalem, to which
we shall presently return, the rest of the chapter
pictures the stunned populace awaking to the fact that
they are free. Is the Assyrian really gone, or do the
Jews dream as they crowd the walls, and see no trace
of him? Have they all vanished—the Rabshakeh, Chap. xxxvii.
Such were the feelings aroused in Jerusalem by the sudden relief of the city. Some of the verses, which we have scarcely touched, we will now consider more fully as the expression of a doctrine which runs throughout Isaiah, and indeed is one of his two or three fundamental truths—that the righteousness of God is an all-pervading atmosphere, an atmosphere that wears and burns.
For forty years the prophet had been preaching to
the Jews his gospel, God-with-us; but they never
awakened to the reality of the Divine presence till they
saw it in the dispersion of the Assyrian army. Then
We are familiar with Isaiah's fundamental God-with-us,
and how it was spoken not for mercy only, but for
judgement (chap. viii.). If God-with-us meant love with
us, salvation with us, it meant also holiness with us,
judgement with us, the jealousy of God breathing upon
what is impure, false and proud. Isaiah felt this so
hotly, that his sense of it has broken out into some of
the fieriest words in all prophecy. In his younger days
he told the citizens not to provoke the eyes of God's
glory, as if Heaven had fastened on their life two
gleaming orbs, not only to pierce them with its vision,
but to consume them with its wrath. Again, in the
lowering cloud of calamity he had seen lips of indignation,
a tongue as a devouring fire, and in the overflowing
stream which finally issued from it the hot Chaps. iv. 4; xxx. 33.
Isaiah's Vision of Fire suggests two thoughts to us.
1. Have we done well to confine our horror of the
consuming fires of righteousness to the next life? If we
would but use the eyes which Scripture lends us, the rifts
of prophetic vision and awakened conscience by which
the fogs of this world and of our own hearts are rent, we
should see fires as fierce, a consumption as pitiless,
about us here as ever the conscience of a startled
2. The second thought suggested by Isaiah's Vision of Life is a comparison of it with the theory of life which is fashionable to-day. Isaiah's figure for life was a burning. Ours is a battle, and at first sight ours looks the truer. Seen through a formula which has become everywhere fashionable, life is a fierce and fascinating warfare. Civilised thought, when asked to describe any form of life or to account for a death or survival, most monotonously replies, "The struggle for existence." The sociologist has borrowed the phrase from the biologist, and it is on everybody's lips to describe their idea of human life. It is uttered by the historian when he would explain the disappearance of this national type, the prevalence of that one. The economist traces depression and failures, the fatal fevers of speculation, the cruelties and bad humours of commercial life, to the same source. A merchant with profits lessening and failure before him relieves his despair and apologizes to his pride with the words, "It is all due to competition." Even character and the spiritual graces are sometimes set down as results of the same material process. Some have sought to deduce from it all intelligence, others more audaciously all ethics; and it is certain that in the silence of men's hearts after a moral defeat there is no excuse more frequently offered to conscience by will than that the battle was too hot.
But fascinating as life is when seen through this
formula, does not the formula act on our vision
precisely as the glass we supposed, which when we
look through it on a conflagration shows us the solid
matter and the changes through which this passes,
but hides from us the real agent? One need not
We shall best learn the truth of this in the way the sinners in Jerusalem learned it—each man first looking into himself. Who among us shall dwell with the everlasting burnings? Can we attribute all our defeats to the opposition that was upon us at the moment they occurred? When our temper failed, when our charity relaxed, when our resoluteness gave way, was it the hotness of debate, was it the pressure of the crowd, was it the sneer of the scorner, that was to blame? We all know that these were only the occasions of our defeats. Conscience tells us that the cause lay in a slothful or self-indulgent heart, which the corrosive atmosphere of Divine righteousness had been consuming, and which, sapped and hollow by its effect, gave way at every material shock.
With the knowledge that conscience gives us, let us
now look at a kind of figure which must be within the
horizon of all of us. Once it was the most commanding
stature among its fellows, the straight back and
broad brow of a king of men. But now what is the
last sight of him that will remain with us, flung out
there against the evening skies of his life? A bent back
(we speak of character), a stooping face, the shrinking
We can explain much with the outward eye, but the most of the explanation lies beyond. Where our knowledge of a man's life ends, the great meaning of it often only begins. All the vacancy beyond the outline we see is full of that meaning. God is there, and God is a consuming fire. Let us not seek to explain lives only by what we see of them, the visible strife of man with man and nature. It is the invisible that contains the secret of what is seen. We see the shoulders stoop, but not the burden upon them; the face darken, but look in vain for what casts the shadow; the light sparkle in the eye, but cannot tell what star of hope its glance has caught. And even so when we behold fortune and character go down in the warfare of this world, we ought to remember that it is not always the things we see that are to blame for the fall, but that awful flame which, unseen by common man, has been revealed to the prophets of God.
Righteousness and retribution, then, are an atmosphere—not lines or laws that we may happen to stumble upon, not explosives, that, being touched, burst out on us, but the atmosphere—always about us and always at work, invisible and yet more mighty than aught we see. God, in whom we live and move and have our being, is a consuming fire.
Isaiah xxxvi. (701 B.C.).
This historical narrative has also its moral. It is not
annals, but drama. The whole moral of Isaiah's prophesying
is here flung into a duel between champions of
the two tempers, which we have seen in perpetual conflict
throughout his book. The two tempers are—on Isaiah's
side an absolute and unselfish faith in God, Sovereign of
the world and Saviour of His people; on the side of
the Assyrians a bare, brutal confidence in themselves, in
human cleverness and success, a vaunting contempt of
righteousness and of pity. The main interest of Isaiah's
book has consisted in the way these tempers oppose each
other, and alternately influence the feeling of the Jewish
community. That interest is now to culminate in the
scene which brings near such thorough representatives
of the two tempers as Isaiah and the Rabshakeh, with
the crowd of wavering Jews between. Most strikingly,
Assyria's last assault is not of force, but of speech, delivering
upon faith the subtle arguments of the worldly
The Rabshakeh.
This word is a Hebrew transliteration of the Assyrian
Rab-sak, chief of the officers. Though there is some
doubt on the point, we may naturally presume from the
duties he here discharges that the Rabshakeh was a
civilian—probably the civil commissioner or political
officer attached to the Assyrian army, which was commanded,
In all the Bible there is not a personage more clever than this Rabshakeh, nor more typical. He was an able deputy of the king who sent him, but he represented still more thoroughly the temper of the civilisation to which he belonged. There is no word of this man which is not characteristic. A clever, fluent diplomatist, with the traveller's knowledge of men and the conqueror's contempt for them, the Rabshakeh is the product of a victorious empire like the Assyrian, or, say, like the British. Our services sometimes turn out the like of him—a creature able to speak to natives in their own language, full and ready of information, mastering the surface of affairs at a glance, but always baffled by the deeper tides which sway nations; a deft player upon party interests and the superficial human passions, but unfit to touch the deep springs of men's religion and patriotism. Let us speak, however, with respect of the Rabshakeh. From his rank (Sayce calls him the Vizier), as well as from the cleverness with which he explains what we know to have been the policy of Sennacherib towards the populations of Syria, he may well have been the inspiring mind at this time of the great Assyrian empire—Sennacherib's Bismarck.
The Rabshakeh had strutted down from the great
centre of civilisation, with its temper upon him, and all
its great resources at his back, confident to twist these
poor provincial tribes round his little finger. How
petty he conceived them we infer from his never styling
Hezekiah the king. This was to be an occasion for
the Rabshakeh's own glorification. Jerusalem was to
fall to his clever speeches. He had indeed the army
The Rabshakeh spoke extremely well. With his
first words he touched the sore point of Judah's policy:
her trust in Egypt. On this he spoke like a very Isaiah.
But he showed a deeper knowledge of Judah's internal
affairs, and a subtler deftness in using it, when he
referred to the matter of the altars. Hezekiah had
abolished the high places in all parts of the land, and
gathered the people to the central sanctuary in Jerusalem.
The Assyrian knew that a number of Jews must look
upon this disestablishment of religion in the provinces
as likely to incur Jehovah's displeasure and turn Him
against them. Therefore he said, But if thou say unto
me, We trust in Jehovah our God, is not that He whose
high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath taken away, and
hath said to Judah and to Jerusalem, Ye shall worship
before this altar? And then, having shaken their religious
confidence, he made sport of their military strength. And
finally he boldly asserted, Jehovah said unto me, Go up
against this land and destroy it. All this shows a master
in diplomacy, a most clever demagogue. The scribes
and elders felt the edge, and begged him to sheathe it
in a language unknown to the common people. But he,
conscious of his power, spoke the more boldly, addressing
himself directly to the poorer sort of the garrison, on
whom the siege would press most heavily. His second
speech to them is a good illustration of the policy pursued
by Assyria at this time towards the cities of Palestine.
We know from the annals of Sennacherib that his customary
policy, to seduce the populations of a hostile State
So clever were the speeches of the Rabshakeh. We see why he was appointed to this mission. He was an expert both in the language and religion of this tribe, perched on its rock in the remote Judæan highlands. For a foreigner he showed marvellous familiarity with the temper and internal jealousies of the Jewish religion. He turned these on each other almost as adroitly as Paul himself did in the disputes between Sadducees and Pharisees. How the fellow knew his cleverness, strutting there betwixt army and town! He would show his soldier friends the proper way of dealing with stubborn barbarians. He would astonish those faith-proud highlanders by exhibiting how much he was aware of the life behind their thick walls and silent faces, for the king's commandment was, Answer him not.
And yet did the Rabshakeh, with all his raking,
know the heart of Judah? No, truly. The whole
interest of this man is the incongruity of the expertness
and surface-knowledge, which he spattered on
Jerusalem's walls, with the deep secret of God, that, as
some inexhaustible well, the fortress of the faith carried
within her. Ah, Assyrian, there is more in starved
Jerusalem than thou canst put in thy speeches! Suppose
Heaven were to give those sharp eyes of thine
power to look through the next thousand years, and see
this race and this religion thou puffest at, the highest-honoured,
hottest-hated of the world, centre of mankind's
regard and debate, but thou, and thy king and
all the glory of your empire wrapped deep in oblivion.
To this little fortress of highland men shall the heart of
great peoples turn: kings for its nursing-fathers and
queens for its nursing-mothers, the forces of the
The Rabshakeh's plausible futility and Jerusalem's
faith, greatly distressed before him, are typical. Still as
men hang moodily over the bulwarks of Zion, doubtful
whether life is worth living within the narrow limits
which religion prescribes, or righteousness worth fighting
for with such privations and hope deferred, comes
upon them some elegant and plausible temptation, loudly
calling to give the whole thing up. Disregarding the
official arguments and evidences that push forward to
parley, it speaks home in practical tones to men's real
selves—their appetites and selfishnesses. "You are
foolish fellows," it says, "to confine yourselves to such
narrowness of life and self-denial! The fall of your
faith is only a matter of time: other creeds have gone;
yours must follow. And why fight the world for the
sake of an idea, or from the habits of a discipline?
Such things only starve the human spirit; and the
In our day what has the greatest effect on the faith
of many men is just this mixture, that pervades the
Rabshakeh's address,—of a superior culture pretending
to expose religion, with the easy generosity, which
offers to the individual a selfish life, unchecked by
any discipline or religious fear. That modern Rabshakeh,
Ernest Rénan, with the forces of historical
criticism at his back, but confident rather in his own
skill of address, speaking to us believers as poor
picturesque provincials, patronising our Deity, and
telling us that he knows His intentions better than
we do ourselves, is a very good representative of
the enemies of the Faith, who owe their impressiveness
upon common men to the familiarity they display
with the contents of the Faith, and the independent, easy
life they offer to the man who throws his strict faith off.
Superior knowledge, with the offer on its lips of a life
on good terms with the rich and tolerant world—pretence
of science promising selfishness—that is to-day,
as then under the walls of Jerusalem, the typical
enemy of the Faith. But if faith be held simply as
the silent garrison of Jerusalem held it, faith in a
Lord God of righteousness, who has given us a conscience
to serve Him, and has spoken to us in plain explanation
of this by those whom we can see, understand
and trust—not only by an Isaiah, but by a Jesus—then
neither mere cleverness nor the ability to promise
comfort can avail against our faith. A simple
conscience of God and of duty may not be able to answer
subtle arguments word for word, but she can feel the
incongruity of their cleverness with her own precious
In spite of scorn and sensuous promise from Rabshakeh to Rénan, let us lift the hymn which these silent Jews at last lifted from the walls of their delivered city: Walk about Zion and go round about her; tell ye the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, and consider her palaces, that ye may tell it to the generation to come. For this God is our God for ever and ever. He will be our Guide even unto death.
Isaiah xxxvii. (701 B.C.).
Hezekiah's complaint reminds us that in this silence
and distress we have no occasional perplexity of
faith, but her perpetual burden. Faith is inarticulate
because of her greatness. Faith is courageous and
imaginative; but can she convert her confidence and
visions into fact? Said Hezekiah, This is a day of
trouble, and rebuke and contumely, for the children are
It is a miscarriage we are always deploring. Wordsworth
has said, "Through love, through hope, through
faith's transcendent dower, we feel that we are greater
than we know." Yes, greater than we can articulate,
greater than we can tell to men like the Rabshakeh, even
though he talk the language of the Jews; and therefore,
on the whole, it is best to be silent in face of his
argument. But greater also, we sometimes fear, than
we can realise to ourselves in actual character and
victory. All life thrills with the pangs of inability to
bring the children of faith to the birth of experience.
The man, who has lost his faith or who takes his faith
easily, never knows, of course, this anguish of Hezekiah.
But the more we have fed on the promises of the Bible,
the more that the Spirit of God has engendered in our
pure hearts assurances of justice and of peace, the more
we shall sometimes tremble with the fear that in outward
fact there is no life for these beautiful conceptions
of the soul. Do we really believe in the Fatherhood
of God—believe in it till it has changed us
inwardly, and we carry a new sense of destiny, a new
conscience of justice, a new disgust of sin, a new pity
And then over these disappointments there faces us
all the great miscarriage itself—black, inevitable death.
Hezekiah cried from despair that the Divine assurance
of the permanence of God's people in the world was
about to be wrecked on fact. But often by a deathbed
we utter the same lament about the individual's
immortality. There is everything to prove a future
life except the fact of it within human experience.
This life is big with hopes, instincts, convictions of immortality;
and yet where within our sight have these
ever passed to the birth of fact? Cf. Browning's La Saisiaz.
And yet within the horizon of this life at least—the
latter part of the difficulty we postpone to another
chapter—faith is the substance of things hoped for, as
Isaiah did now most brilliantly prove. For the miracle
of Jerusalem's deliverance, to which the narrative
proceeds, was not that by faith the prophet foretold
it, but that by faith he did actually himself succeed in
bringing it to pass. The miracle, we say, was not that A still more striking analogy may be found in the case of
Napoleon I. when in the East in 1799. He had just achieved a
small victory which partly masked the previous failure of his
campaign, when "Sir Sydney Smith now contrived that he should
receive a packet of journals, by which he was informed of all that
had passed recently in Europe and the disasters that France had
suffered. His resolution was immediately taken. On August 22nd
he wrote to Kleber announcing that he transferred to him the
command of the expedition, and that he himself would return to
Europe.... After carefully spreading false accounts of his intentions,
he set sail on the night of the same day" (Professor Seeley, article
"Napoleon" in the Ency. Brit.).
The baffled Rabshakeh returned to his master,
whom he found at Libnah, for he had heard that he
had broken up from Lachish. Sennacherib, the
narrative would seem to imply, did not trouble
himself further about Jerusalem till he learned that
Tirhakah, the Ethiopian ruler of Egypt, was marching
to meet him with probably a stronger force than that
which Sennacherib had defeated at Eltekeh. Then,
feeling the danger of leaving so strong a fortress as
Jerusalem in his rear, Sennacherib sent to Hezekiah one
more demand for surrender. Hezekiah spread his
enemy's letter before the Lord. His prayer that follows
Hezekiah's lofty prayer drew forth through the prophet
an answer from Jehovah (vv. 21-32). This is one of
the most brilliant of Isaiah's oracles. It is full of much,
with which we are now familiar: the triumph of the
inviolable fortress, the virgin daughter of Zion, and her
scorn of the arrogant foe; the prophet's appreciation of
Asshur's power and impetus, which only heightens his
conviction that Asshur is but an instrument in the hand
of God; the old figure of the enemy's sudden check as
of a wild animal by hook and bridle; his inevitable
retreat to the north. But these familiar ideas are flung
off with a terseness and vivacity, which bear out the
opinion that here we have a prophecy of Isaiah, not
revised and elaborated for subsequent publication, like
The new feature of this prophecy is the sign added to it (ver. 30). This sign reminds us of that which in opposite terms described to Ahaz the devastation of Judah by the approaching Assyrians (chap. vii.). The wave of Assyrian war is about to roll away again, and Judah to resume her neglected agriculture, but not quite immediately. During this year of 701 it has been impossible, with the Assyrians in the land, to sow the seed, and the Jews have been dependent on the precarious crop of what had fallen from the harvest of the previous year and sown itself—saphîah, or aftergrowth. Next year, it being now too late to sow for next year's harvest, they must be content with the shahîs—wild corn, that which springs of itself. But the third year sow ye, and reap, and plant vineyards and eat the fruit thereof. Perhaps we ought not to interpret these numbers literally. The use of three gives the statement a formal and general aspect, as if the prophet only meant, It may be not quite at once that we get rid of the Assyrians; but when they do go, then they go for good, and you may till your land again without fear of their return. Then rings out the old promise, so soon now to be accomplished, about the escaped and the remnant; and the great pledge of the promise is once more repeated: The zeal of Jehovah of hosts will perform this. With this exclamation, as in ix. 7, the prophecy reaches a natural conclusion; and vv. 33-35 may have been uttered by Isaiah a little later, when he was quite sure that the Assyrian would not even attempt to repeat his abandoned blockade of Jerusalem.
At last in a single night the deliverance miraculously
For details of this disaster we look in vain, of course,
to the Assyrian annals, which only record Sennacherib's
abrupt return to Nineveh. But it is remarkable that
the histories of both of his chief rivals in this campaign,
Judah and Egypt, should contain independent reminiscences
of so sudden and miraculous a disaster to his
The neighbourhood in which the Assyrian army
suffered this great disaster The statement of the Egyptian legend, that it was from a point
in the neighbourhood of Pelusium that Sennacherib's army commenced
its retreat, is not contradicted by anything in the Jewish
records, which leave the locality of the disaster very vague, but,
on the contrary, receives some support from what Isaiah expresses
as at least the intention of Sennacherib (chap. xxxvii. 25). Gibbon, Decline and Fall, xliii. Arnold, Lectures on Modern History, 177, quoted by Stanley.
The amount of the Assyrian loss is enormous, and
implies of course a much higher figure for the army
which was vast enough to suffer it; but here are some
instances for comparison. In the early German invasions
of Italy whole armies and camps were swept away
by the pestilential climate. The losses of the First
Crusade were over three hundred thousand. The soldiers
of the Third Crusade, upon the scene of Sennacherib's
war, were reckoned at more than half a million, and their
losses by disease alone at over one hundred thousand. Gibbon, xlii.; lix.
What we are concerned with, however, is neither
the immediate occasion nor the exact amount of
Sennacherib's loss, but the bare fact, so certainly
Nevertheless, the story of Jehovah's triumph cannot
be justly recounted without including the reaction
which followed upon it within the same generation.
Before twenty years had passed from the day, on which
Jerusalem, with the forty-sixth Psalm on her lips,
sought with all her heart the God of Isaiah, she relapsed
into an idolatry, that wore only this sign of the uncompromising
The parallel, which we are pursuing, does not, however,
close here. "As soon," says an English historian,
"as the wild orgy of the Restoration was over, men began
For the principles of Isaiah and their victory we may
make a claim as much larger than this claim, as Israel's
influence on the world has been greater than England's.
Israel never wholly lost the grace of the baptism wherewith
she was baptized in 701. Even in her history there
was no event in which the unaided interposition of God
was more conspicuous. It is from an appreciation of
the meaning of such a Providence that Israel derives
her character—that character which marks her off so
distinctively from her great rival in the education of the
human race, and endows her ministry with its peculiar
value to the world. If we are asked for the characteristics
of the Hellenic genius, we point to the august
temples and images of beauty in which the wealth and
art of man have evolved in human features most
glorious suggestions of divinity, or we point to Thermopylæ,
where human valour and devotion seem grander
even in unavailing sacrifice than the almighty Fate, that
renders them the prey of the barbarian. In Greece
the human is greater than the divine. But if we are
asked to define the spirit of Israel, we remember the
worship which Isaiah has enjoined in his opening
chapter, a worship that dispenses even with temple and
with sacrifice, but, from the first strivings of conscience
to the most certain enjoyment of peace, ascribes all
man's experience to the word of God. In contrast with
Thermopylæ, we recall Jerusalem's Deliverance, effected
apart from human war by the direct stroke of Heaven.
In Judah man is great simply as he rests on God. The
rocks of Thermopylæ, how imperishably beautiful do
In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence is your strength. How divine Isaiah's message is, may be proved by the length of time mankind is taking to learn it. The remarkable thing is, that he staked so lofty a principle, and the pure religion of which it was the temper, upon a political result, that he staked them upon, and vindicated them by, a purely local and material success—the relief of Jerusalem from the infidel. Centuries passed, and Christ came. He did not—for even He could not—preach a more spiritual religion than that which He had committed to His greatest forerunner, but He released this religion, and the temper of faith which Isaiah had so divinely expressed, from the local associations and merely national victories, with which even Isaiah had been forced to identify them. The destruction of Jerusalem by the heathen formed a large part of Christ's prediction of the immediate future; and He comforted the remnant of faith with these words, to some of which Isaiah's lips had first given their meaning: Ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem worship the Father. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
Again centuries passed—no less than eighteen from
Isaiah—and we find Christendom, though Christ had
come between, returning to Isaiah's superseded problem,
and, while reviving its material conditions, unable to
apply to them the prophet's spiritual temper. The
Have we learned this lesson yet? O God of Israel, God of Isaiah, in returning to whom and resting upon whom alone we are saved, purge us of self and of the pride of life, of the fever and the falsehood they breed. Teach us that in quietness and in confidence is our strength. Help us to be still and know that Thou art God.
As we have gathered together all that Isaiah prophesied concerning the Messiah, so it may be useful for closer students of his book if we now summarise (even at the risk of a little repetition) the facts of his marvellous prediction of the siege and delivery of Jerusalem. Such a review, besides being historically interesting, ought to prove of edification in so far as it instructs us in the kind of faith by which the Holy Ghost inspired a prophet to foretell the future.
1. The primary conviction with which Isaiah felt himself inspired by the Spirit of Jehovah was a purely moral one—that a devastation of Judah was necessary for her people's sin, to which he shortly added a religious one: that a remnant would be saved. He had this double conviction as early as 740 B.C. (vi. 11-13).
2. Looking round the horizon for some phenomenon
with which to identify this promised judgement, Isaiah
described the latter at first without naming any single
people as the invaders of Judah (v. 26 ff.). It may have
been that for a moment he hesitated between Assyria
and Egypt. Once he named them together as
equally the Lord's instruments upon Judah (vii. 18),
3. But over against this moral conviction, that Judah must be devastated for her sin, and this political, that Assyria is to be the instrument, even to the extreme of a siege of Jerusalem, the prophet still holds strongly to the religious assurance that God cannot allow His shrine to be violated or His people to be exterminated. At first it is only of the people that Isaiah speaks—the remnant (vi.; viii. 18). Jerusalem is not mentioned in the verses that describe the overflowing of all Judah by Assyria (viii. 7). It is only when at last, in 721, the prophet realizes how near a siege of Jerusalem may be (x. 11, 28-32), that he also pictures the sudden destruction of the Assyrian on his arrival within sight of her walls (x. 33). In 705, when the siege of the sacred city once more becomes imminent, the prophet again reiterates to the heathen that Zion alone shall stand among the cities of Syria (xiv. 32). To herself he says that, though she shall be besieged and brought very low, she shall finally be delivered (xxix. 1-8; xxx. 19-26; xxxi. 1, 4, 5). It is true, this conviction seems to be broken—once by a prophecy of uncertain date (xxxii. 14), which indicates a desolation of the buildings of Jerusalem, and once by the prophet's sentence of death upon the inhabitants in the hour of their profligacy (xxii.)—but when the city has repented, and the enemy have perfidiously come back to demand her surrender, Isaiah again asseverates, though all are hopeless, that she shall not fall (xxxvii.).
4. Now, with regard to the method of Jerusalem's
deliverance, Isaiah has uniformly described this as happening
not by human battle. From the beginning he
said that Israel should be delivered in the last extremity
It is only in very little details that these predictions differ. The thunderstorm and torrents of fire are, of course, but poetic variations. In 721, however, the prophet hardly anticipates the very close siege, which he pictures after 705; and while from 705 to 702 he identifies the relief of Jerusalem with a great calamity to the Assyrian army about to invade Judah, yet in 701, when the Assyrians are actually on the spot, he suggests that nothing but a rumour shall cause their retreat and so leave Jerusalem free of them.
5. In all this we see a certain FIXITY and a certain
FREEDOM. The freedom, the changes and inconsistencies
in the prediction, are entirely limited to those
of Isaiah's convictions which we have called political,
and which the prophet evidently gathered from his
observation of political circumstances as these developed
6. This "Bible-reading" in Isaiah's predictive prophecies
reveals very clearly the nature of inspiration
under the old covenant. To Isaiah inspiration was
nothing more nor less than the possession of certain
strong moral and religious convictions, which he felt he
owed to the communication of the Spirit of God, and
according to which he interpreted, and even dared to
foretell, the history of his people and the world. Our
study completely dispels, on the evidence of the Bible
itself, that view of inspiration and prediction, so long
held in the Church, which it is difficult to define, but
which means something like this: that the prophet
beheld a vision of the future in its actual detail and
read this off as a man may read the history of the
past out of a book or a clear memory. This is a very
simple view, but too simple either to meet the facts
of the Bible, or to afford to men any of that intellectual
and spiritual satisfaction which the discovery
of the Divine methods is sure to afford. The literal
view of inspiration is too simple to be true, and too
simple to be edifying. On the other hand, how
profitable, how edifying, is the Bible's own account
of its inspiration! To know that men interpreted,
predicted and controlled history in the power of the
purest moral and religious convictions—in the knowledge
of, and the loyalty to, certain fundamental laws of God—is
to receive an account of inspiration, which is not
only as satisfying to the reason as it is true to the facts
There is thus, with great modifications, an analogy between the prophet and the scientific observer of the present day. Men of science are able to affirm the certainty of natural phenomena by their knowledge of the laws and principles of nature. Certain forces being present, certain results must come to pass. The Old Testament prophets, working in history, a sphere where the problems were infinitely more complicated by the presence and powerful operation of man's free-will, seized hold of principles as conspicuous and certain to them as the laws of nature are to the scientist; and out of their conviction of these they proclaimed the necessity of certain events. God is inflexibly righteous, He cannot utterly destroy His people or the witness of Himself among men: these were the laws. Judah shall be punished, Israel shall continue to exist: these were the certainties deduced from the laws. But for the exact conditions and forms both of the punishment and its relief the prophets depended upon their knowledge of the world, of which, as these pages testify, they were the keenest and largest-hearted observers that ever appeared.
This account of prophecy may be offered with advantage
But, to turn from the apologetic value of this account of prophecy to the experimental, we maintain that it brings out a new sacredness upon common life. If it be true that Isaiah had no magical means for foretelling the future, but simply his own spiritual convictions and his observation of history, that may, of course, deprive some eyes of a light which they fancied they saw bursting from heaven. But, on the other hand, does it not cast a greater glory upon daily life and history, to have seen in Isaiah this close connection between spiritual conviction and political event? Does it not teach us that life is governed by faith; that the truths we profess are the things that make history; that we carry the future in our hearts; that not an event happens but is to be used by us as meaning the effect of some law of God, and not a fact appears but is the symbol and sacrament of His truth?
Isaiah xxxviii.; xxxix. (DATE UNCERTAIN).
We have given to this chapter the title "An Old
Testament Believer's Deathbed; or, The Difference
Christ has made," not because this is the only spiritual
suggestion of the story, but because it seems to the
present expositor as if this were the predominant feeling
Here is a man, who, although he lived more than twenty-five centuries ago is brought quite close to our side. Death, who herds all men into his narrow fold, has crushed this Hebrew king so close to us that we can feel his very heart beat. Hezekiah's hymn gives us entrance into the fellowship of his sufferings. By the figures he so skilfully uses he makes us feel that pain, the shortness of life, the suddenness of death and the utter blackness beyond were to him just what they are to us. And yet this kinship in pain, and fear and ignorance only makes us the more aware of something else which we have and he has not.
Again, here is a man to whom religion gave all it could give without the help of Christ; a believer in the religion out of which Christianity sprang, perhaps the most representative Old Testament believer we could find, for Hezekiah was at once the collector of what was best in its literature and the reformer of what was worst in its worship; a man permeated by the past piety of his Church, and enjoying as his guide and philosopher the boldest prophet who ever preached the future developments of its spirit. Yet when we put Hezekiah and all that Isaiah can give him on one side, we shall again feel for ourselves on the other what a difference Christ has made.
This difference a simple study of the narrative will make clear.
In those days Hezekiah became sick unto death. They
were critical days for Judah—no son born to the king
(
There is difficulty in the strange story which follows.
The dial was probably a pyramid of steps on the top of
which stood a short pillar or obelisk. When the sun
rose in the morning, the shadow cast by the pillar would
fall right down the western side of the pyramid to the
bottom of the lowest step. As the sun ascended the
shadow would shorten, and creep up inch by inch to the
foot of the pillar. After noon, as the sun began to
descend to the west, the shadow would creep down
the eastern steps; and the steps were so measured that
While recognising for our own faith the uselessness of a discussion on this sign offered to a sick man, let us not miss the moral lessons of so touching a narrative, nor the sympathy with the sick king which it is fitted to produce, and which is our best introduction to the study of his hymn.
Isaiah had performed that most awful duty of doctor or minister the telling of a friend that he must die. Few men have not in their personal experience a key to the prophet's feelings on this occasion. The leaving of a dear friend for the last time; the coming out into the sunlight which he will nevermore share with us; the passing by the dial; the observation of the creeping shadow; the feeling that it is only a question of time, the passion of prayer into which that feeling throws us that God may be pleased to put off the hour and spare our friend; the invention, that is born, like prayer, of necessity: a cure we suddenly remember; the confidence which prayer and invention bring between them; the return with the joyful news; the giving of the order about the remedy—cannot many in their degree rejoice with Isaiah in such an experience? But he has, too, a conscience of God and God's work to which none of us may pretend: he knows how indispensable to that work his royal pupil is, and out of this inspiration he prophesies the will of the Lord that Hezekiah shall recover.
Then the king, with a sick man's sacramental longing,
asks a sign. Out through the window the courtyard is
visible; there stands the same step-dial of Ahaz, the
long pillar on the top of the steps, the shadow creeping
down them through the warm afternoon sunshine.
To the sick man it must have been like the finger
The shadow returned, and Hezekiah got his sign.
But when he was well, he used it for more than a sign.
He read a great spiritual lesson in it. The time, which
upon the dial had been apparently thrown back, had in
his life been really thrown back; and God had given
him his years to live over again. The past was to be as
if it had never been, its guilt and weakness wiped out.
Thou hast cast behind Thy back all my sins. As a newborn
child Hezekiah felt himself uncommitted by the
past, not a sin's-doubt nor a sin's-cowardice in him,
with the heart of a little child, but yet with the
strength and dignity of a grown man, for it is the
magic of tribulation to bring innocence with experience.
I shall go softly, or literally, with dignity or caution, as
in a procession, all my years because of the bitterness of
my soul. O Lord, upon such things do men live; and
altogether in them is the life of my spirit.... Behold,
for perfection was it bitter to me, so bitter. And through
it all there breaks a new impression of God. What
shall I say? He hath both spoken with me, and Himself
hath done it. As if afraid to impute his profits to the
mere experience itself, In them is the life of my spirit,
he breaks in with Yea, Thou hast recovered me; yea,
Thou hast made me to live. And then, by a very
pregnant construction, he adds,
Forgiveness, a new peace, a new dignity and a visit from the living God! Well might Hezekiah exclaim that it was only through a near sense of death that men rightly learned to live. Ah, Lord, it is upon these things that men live; and wholly therein is the life of my spirit. It is by these things men live, and therein I have learned for the first time what life is!
In all this at least we cannot go beyond Hezekiah, and he stands an example to the best Christian among us. Never did a man bring richer harvest from the fields of death. Everything that renders life really life—peace, dignity, a new sense of God and of His forgiveness—these were the spoils which Hezekiah won in his struggle with the grim enemy. He had snatched from death a new meaning for life; he had robbed death of its awful pomp, and bestowed this on careless life. Hereafter he should walk with the step and the mien of a conqueror—I shall go in solemn procession all my years because of the bitterness of my soul—or with the carefulness of a worshipper, who sees at the end of his course the throne of the Most High God, and makes all his life an ascent thither.
Count especially the young man blessed, who has looked into the grave before he has faced the great temptations of the world, and has not entered the race of life till he has learned his stride in the race with death. They tell us that on the outside of civilisation, where men carry their lives in their hands, a most thorough politeness and dignity are bred, in spite of the want of settled habits, by the sense of danger alone; and we know how battle and a deadly climate, pestilence or the perils of the sea have sent back to us the most careless of our youth with a self-possession and regularity of mind, that it would have been hopeless to expect them to develop amid the trivial trials of village life.
But the greatest duty of us men is not to seek nor to
pray for such combats with death. It is when God has
It is easier to win spoils from death than to keep
them untarnished by life. Shame burns warm in a
soldier's heart when he sees the arms he risked life to
win rusting for want of a little care. Ours will not burn
less if we discover that the strength of character we
brought with us out of some great tribulation has been
slowly weakened by subsequent self-indulgence of
II.
So far then Hezekiah is an example and warning to us all. With all our faith in Christ, none of us, in the things mentioned, may hope to excel this Old Testament believer. But notice very particularly that Hezekiah's faith and fortitude are profitable only for this life. It is when we begin to think, What of the life to come? that we perceive the infinite difference Christ has made.
We know what Hezekiah felt when his back was
turned on death, and he came up to life again. But
what did he feel when he faced the other way, and his
back was to life? With his back to life and facing deathwards,
Hezekiah saw nothing, that was worth hoping
for. To him to die was to leave God behind him,
to leave the face of God as surely as he was leaving
the face of man. I said, I shall not see Jah, Jah in
the land of the living; I shall gaze upon man no more
with the inhabitants of the world. The beyond was
not to Hezekiah absolute nothingness, for he had his
conceptions, the popular conceptions of his time, of a
sort of existence that was passed by those who had
been men upon earth. The imagination of his people
figured the gloomy portals of a nether world—Sheol,
the Hollow (Dante's "hollow realm"), or perhaps the
Craving—into which death herds the shades of men,
bloodless, voiceless, without love or hope or aught that
Of this then at the best Hezekiah was sure: a respite of fifteen years—nothing beyond. Then the shadow would not return upon the dial; and as the king's eyes closed upon the dear faces of his friends, his sense of the countenance of God would die too, and his soul slip into the abyss, hopeless of God's faithfulness.
It is this awful anticlimax, which makes us feel the difference Christ has made. This saint stood in almost the clearest light that revelation cast before Jesus. He was able to perceive in suffering a meaning and derive from it a strength not to be exceeded by any Christian. Yet his faith is profitable for this life alone. For him character may wrestle with death over and over again, and grow the stronger for every grapple, but death wins the last throw.
It may be said that Hezekiah's despair of the future
is simply the morbid thoughts of a sick man or the
exaggerated fancies of a poet. "We must not," it is
urged, "define a poet's language with the strictness of a
theology." True, and we must also make some allowance
for a man dying prematurely in the midst of his
Now compare all this with the Psalms of Christian
hope; with the faith that fills Paul; with his ardour
who says, To me to depart is far better; with the glory
which John beholds with open face: the hosts of the
redeemed praising God and walking in the light of
His face, all the geography of that country laid down,
and the plan of the new Jerusalem declared to the
very fashion of her stones; with the audacity since of
Christian art and song: the rapture of Watts' hymns
and the exhilaration of Wesley's praise as they contemplate
death; and with the joyful and exact anticipations
of so many millions of common men as they turn their
faces to the wall. In all these, in even the Book of the
Revelation, there is of course a great deal of pure fancy.
But imagination never bursts in anywhither till fact
has preceded. And it is just because there is a great
fact standing between us and Hezekiah that the pureness
of our faith and the richness of our imagination
of immortality differ so much from his. That fact is
And we shall know the difference if we lose our faith in that fact. For except Christ be risen from the dead and gone before to a country which derives all its reality and light for our imagination from that Presence, which once walked with us in the flesh, there remains for us only Hezekiah's courage to make the best of a short reprieve, only Hezekiah's outlook into Hades when at last we turn our faces to the wall. But to be stronger and purer for having met with death, as he was, only that we must afterwards succumb, with our purity and our strength, to death—this is surely to be, as Paul said, of all men the most miserable.
Better far to own the power of an endless life, which Christ has sealed to us, and translate Hezekiah's experience into the new calculus of immortality. If to have faced death as he did was to inherit dignity and peace and sense of power, what glory of kingship and queenship must sit upon those faces in the other world who have been at closer quarters still with the King of terrors, and through Christ their strength have spoiled him of his sting and victory! To have felt the worst of death and to have triumphed—this is the secret of the peaceful hearts, unfaltering looks and faces of glory, which pass in solemn procession of worship through all eternity before the throne of God.
We shall consider the Old Testament views of a future life and resurrection more fully in chaps. xxvii. and xxx. of this volume.
The two narratives, in which Isaiah's career culminates—that
of the Deliverance of Jerusalem
(xxxvi.; xxxvii.) and that of the Recovery of Hezekiah
(xxxviii.; xxxix.)—cannot fail, coming together as they
do, to suggest to thoughtful readers a striking contrast
between Isaiah's treatment of the community and his
treatment of the individual, between his treatment of
the Church and his treatment of single members. For
in the first of these narratives we are told how an
illimitable future, elsewhere so gloriously described by
the prophet, was secured for the Church upon earth;
but the whole result of the second is the gain for a
representative member of the Church of a respite of
fifteen years. Nothing, as we have seen, is promised
to the dying Hezekiah of a future life; no scintilla of
the light of eternity sparkles either in Isaiah's promise
or in Hezekiah's prayer. The net result of the incident
is a reprieve of fifteen years: fifteen years of a character
strengthened, indeed, by having met with death, but,
it would sadly seem, only in order to become again the
prey of the vanities of this world (chap. xxxix.). So
meagre a result for the individual stands strangely out
against the perpetual glory and peace assured to the
community. And it suggests this question: Had
First of all, we must remember that God in His
providence seldom gives to one prophet or generation
more than a single main problem for solution. In
Isaiah's day undoubtedly the most urgent problem—and
Divine problems are ever practical, not philosophical—was
the continuance of the Church upon
earth. It had really got to be a matter of doubt
whether a body of people possessing the knowledge
of the true God, and able to transfuse and transmit it,
could possibly survive among the political convulsions
of the world, and in consequence of its own sin.
Isaiah's problem was the reformation and survival of the
Church. In accordance with this, we notice how many
of his terms are collective, and how he almost never
addresses the individual. It is the people, upon whom
he calls—the nation, Israel, the house of Jacob My vineyard,
the men of Judah His pleasant plantation. To these
we may add the apostrophes to the city of Jerusalem,
under many personifications: Ariel, Ariel, inhabitress of
Zion, daughter of Zion. When Isaiah denounces sin, the
sinner is either the whole community or a class in the
community, very seldom an individual, though there are
some instances of the latter, as Ahaz and Shebna. It is
This people hath rejected, or The people would not. When
Jerusalem collapsed, although there must have been
many righteous men still within her, Isaiah said, What
aileth thee that all belonging to thee have gone up to the
housetops? (xxii. 1). His language is wholesale. When
he is not attacking society, he attacks classes or groups:
the rulers, the land-grabbers, the drunkards, the sinners,
the judges, the house of David, the priests and the prophets,
the women. And the sins of these he describes in their
Similarly when Isaiah speaks of God's grace and salvation the objects of these are again collective—the remnant; the escaped (also a collective noun); a holy seed; a stock or stump. It is a restored nation whom he sees under the Messiah, the perpetuity and glory of a city and a State. What we consider to be a most personal and particularly individual matter—the forgiveness of sin—he promises, with two exceptions, only to the community: This people that dwelleth therein hath its iniquity forgiven. We can understand all this social, collective and wholesale character of his language only if we keep in mind his Divinely appointed work—the substance and perpetuity of a purified and secure Church of God.
Had Isaiah then no gospel for the individual? This will indeed seem impossible to us if we keep in view the following considerations:—
1. Isaiah himself had passed through a powerfully
individual experience. He had not only felt the solidarity
of the people's sin—I dwell among a people of unclean
lips—he had first felt his own particular guilt: I
am a man of unclean lips. One who suffered the private
experiences which are recounted in chap. vi.; whose
own eyes had seen the King, Jehovah of hosts; who had
gathered on his own lips his guilt and felt the fire come
from heaven's altar by an angelic messenger specially to
purify him; who had further devoted himself to God's
service with so thrilling a sense of his own responsibility,
and had so thereby felt his solitary and individual
2. But, again, Isaiah had an Individual for his
ideal. To him the future was not only an established
State; it was equally, it was first, a glorious king.
Isaiah was an Oriental. We moderns of the West
place our reliance upon institutions; we go forward upon
ideas. In the East it is personal influence that tells,
persons who are expected, followed and fought for.
The history of the West is the history of the advance
of thought, of the rise and decay of institutions, to
which the greatest individuals are more or less subordinate.
The history of the East is the annals of
personalities; justice and energy in a ruler, not political
principles, are what impress the Oriental imagination.
Isaiah has carried this Oriental hope to a distinct and
lofty pitch. The Hero whom he exalts on the margin
of the future, as its Author, is not only a person of
great majesty, but a character of considerable decision.
3. If any details of character are wanting in the picture of Isaiah's Hero, they are supplied by Hezekiah's Self-analysis (chap. xxxviii.). We need not repeat what we have said in the previous chapter of the king's appreciation of what is the strength of a man's character, and particularly of how character grows by grappling with death. In this matter the most experienced of Christian saints may learn from Isaiah's pupil.
Isaiah had then, without doubt, a gospel for the individual; and to this day the individual may plainly read it in his book, may truly, strongly, joyfully live by it—so deeply does it begin, so much does it help to self-knowledge and self-analysis, so lofty are the ideals and responsibilities which it presents. But is it true that Isaiah's gospel is for this life only?
The Hebrew belonged to a branch of humanity—the
Semitic—which, as its history proves, was unable
to develop any strong imagination of, or practical
interest in, a future life apart from foreign influence
or Divine revelation. The pagan Arabs laughed at
Mahommed when he preached to them of the Resurrection;
and even to-day, after twelve centuries of
Moslem influence, their descendants in the centre of
Arabia, according to the most recent authority, Doughty's Arabia Deserta: Travels in Northern Arabia, 1876-1878.
If these, then, were the wings by which a believing
soul under the Old Testament soared over the grave,
Isaiah may be said to have contributed to the hope of
personal immortality just in so far as he strengthened
them. By enhancing as he did the value and beauty of
individual character, by emphasizing the indwelling of
God's Spirit, he was bringing life and immortality to light,
even though he spoke no word to the dying about the
fact of a glorious life beyond the grave. By assisting to
create in the individual that character and sense of God,
which alone could assure him he would never die, but
pass from the praise of the Lord in this life to a nearer
enjoyment of His presence beyond, Isaiah was working
along the only line by which the Spirit of God seems to
But further in his favourite gospel of the Reasonableness
of God—that God does not work fruitlessly, nor
create and cultivate with a view to judgement and destruction—Isaiah
was furnishing an argument for personal
immortality, the force of which has not been exhausted.
In a recent work on The Destiny of Man By Professor Fiske.
From the same argument Isaiah drew only the
former of these two conclusions. To him the certainty
that God's people would survive the impending deluge
We, therefore, answer the question we put at the beginning of the chapter thus:—Isaiah had a gospel for the individual for this life, and all the necessary premises of a gospel for the individual for the life to come.
Isaiah:— |
xiii.-xiv. 23 |
xxiv.-xxvii. |
xxxiv. |
xxxv. |
In the first thirty-nine chapters of the Book of Isaiah—the half which refers to the prophet's own career and the politics contemporary with that—we find four or five prophecies containing no reference to Isaiah himself nor to any Jewish king under whom he laboured, and painting both Israel and the foreign world in quite a different state from that in which they lay during his lifetime. These prophecies are chap. xiii., an Oracle announcing the Fall of Babylon, with its appendix, chap. xiv. 1-23, the Promise of Israel's Deliverance and an Ode upon the Fall of the Babylonian Tyrant; chaps. xxiv.-xxvii., a series of Visions of the breaking up of the universe, of restoration from exile, and even of resurrection from the dead; chap. xxxiv., the Vengeance of the Lord upon Edom; and chap. xxxv., a Song of Return from Exile.
In these prophecies Assyria is no longer the dominant
world-force, nor Jerusalem the inviolate fortress of God
and His people. If Assyria or Egypt is mentioned, it
is but as one of the three classical enemies of Israel;
and Babylon is represented as the head and front of
the hostile world. The Jews are no longer in political
freedom and possession of their own land; they are
either in exile or just returned from it to a depopulated
country. With these altered circumstances come
another temper and new doctrine. The horizon is
With such differences, it is not wonderful that many
have denied the authorship of these few prophecies to
Isaiah. This is a question that can be looked at calmly.
It touches no dogma of the Christian faith. Especially
it does not involve the other question, so often—and,
we venture to say, so unjustly—started on this point,
Could not the Spirit of God have inspired Isaiah to
foresee all that the prophecies in question foretell, even
though he lived more than a century before the people
were in circumstances to understand them? Certainly,
God is almighty. The question is not, Could He have
done this? but one somewhat different: Did He do
it? and to this an answer can be had only from the
prophecies themselves. If these mark the Babylonian
hostility or captivity as already upon Israel, this is
a testimony of Scripture itself, which we cannot overlook,
and beside which even unquestionable traces of
similarity to Isaiah's style or the fact that these oracles
are bound up with Isaiah's own undoubted prophecies
have little weight. "Facts" of style will be regarded
with suspicion by any one who knows how they are
Only one of the prophecies in question confirms the tradition that it is by Isaiah, viz., chap. xiii., which bears the title Oracle of Babylon which Isaiah, son of Amoz, did see; but titles are themselves so much the report of tradition, being of a later date than the rest of the text, that it is best to argue the question apart from them.
On the other hand, Isaiah's authorship of these prophecies, or at least the possibility of his having written them, is usually defended by appealing to his promise of the return from exile in chap. xi. and his threat of a Babylonish captivity in chap. xxxix. This is an argument that has not been fairly met by those who deny the Isaianic authorship of chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23, xxiv.-xxvii., and xxxv. It is a strong argument, for while, as we have seen (p. 201), there are good grounds for believing Isaiah to have been likely to make such a prediction of a Babylonish captivity as is attributed to him in chap. xxxix. 6, almost all the critics agree in leaving chap. xi. to him. But if chap. xi. is Isaiah's, then he undoubtedly spoke of an exile much more extensive than had taken place by his own day. Nevertheless, even this ability in xi. to foretell an exile so vast does not account for passages in xiii.-xiv. 23, xxiv.-xxvii., which represent the Exile either as present or as actually over. No one who reads these chapters without prejudice can fail to feel the force of such passages in leading him to decide for an exilic or post-exilic authorship (see pp. 429 ff.)
Still, let the question of the eschatology be as obscure as we have shown, there remains this clear issue. In some chapters of the Book of Isaiah, which, from our knowledge of the circumstances of his times, we know must have been published while he was alive, we learn that the Jewish people has never left its land, nor lost its independence under Jehovah's anointed, and that the inviolateness of Zion and the retreat of the Assyrian invaders of Judah, without effecting the captivity of the Jews, are absolutely essential to the endurance of God's kingdom on earth. In other chapters we find that the Jews have left their land, have been long in exile (or from other passages have just returned), and that the religious essential is no more the independence of the Jewish State under a theocratic king, but only the resumption of the Temple worship. Is it possible for one man to have written both these sets of chapters? Is it possible for one age to have produced them? That is the whole question.
Isaiah xiii. 2-xiv. 23 (DATE UNCERTAIN).
I. The Wicked City (xiii. 2-xiv. 23).
The first part is a series of hurried and vanishing scenes—glimpses of ruin and deliverance caught through the smoke and turmoil of a Divine war. The drama opens with the erection of a gathering standard upon a bare mountain (ver. 2). He who gives the order explains it (ver. 3), but is immediately interrupted by Hark! a tumult on the mountains, like a great people. Hark! the surge of the kingdoms of nations gathering together. Jehovah of hosts is mustering the host of war. It is the day of Jehovah that is near, the day of His war and of His judgement upon the world.
This Old Testament expression, the day of the Lord,
starts so many ideas that it is difficult to seize any one
of them and say this is just what is meant. For day
with a possessive pronoun suggests what has been appointed
aforehand, or what must come round in its
turn; means also opportunity and triumph, and also swift
performance after long delay. All these thoughts are
excited when we couple a day with any person's name.
And therefore as with every dawn some one awakes
From ver. 17 the mist lifts a little. The vague turmoil clears up into a siege of Babylon by the Medians, and then settles down into Babylon's ruin and abandonment to wild beasts. Finally (xiv. 1) comes the religious reason of so much convulsion: For Jehovah will have compassion upon Jacob, and choose again Israel, and settle them upon their own ground; and the foreign sojourner shall join himself to them, and they shall associate themselves to the house of Jacob.
This prophecy evidently came to a people already
in captivity—a very different circumstance of the
Church of God from that in which we have seen her
under Isaiah. But upon this new stage it is still the
same old conquest. Assyria has fallen, but Babylon
has taken her place. The old spirit of cruelty and
The lessons of the passage are two: that the
II. The Tyrant (xiv. 3-23).
To the prophecy of the overthrow of Babylon there
is annexed, in order to be sung by Israel in the
hour of her deliverance, a satiric ode or taunt-song
(Heb. mashal, Eng. ver. parable) upon the King of
Babylon. A translation of this spirited poem in the
form of its verse (in which, it is to be regretted, it
has not been rendered by the English revisers) will
be more instructive than a full commentary. But the
following remarks of introduction are necessary. The
word mashal, by which this ode is entitled, means
"Those principles of natural philosophy which smothered the
religions of the East with their rank and injurious growth are almost
entirely absent from the religion of the Hebrews. Here the motive-power
of development is to be found in ethical ideas, which, though
not indeed alien to the life of other nations, were not the source from
which their religious notions were derived."—(Lotze's Microcosmos,
Eng. Transl., il., 466.)
For this purpose he employs the idea of the Underworld
which was prevalent among the northern Semitic
peoples. Sheol—the gaping or craving place—which we
shall have occasion to describe in detail when we come
to speak of belief in the resurrection, P. 447 ff. It is, however, only just to add that, as Mr. Sayce has pointed out
in the Hibbert Lectures for 1887 (p. 365), the claims of Babylonian
kings and heroes for a seat on the mountain of the gods were not
always mere arrogance, but the first efforts of the Babylonian mind to
emancipate itself from the gloomy conceptions of Hades and provide a
worthy immortality for virtue. Still most of the kings who pray
for an entrance among the gods do so on the plea that they have been
successful tyrants—a considerable difference from such an assurance
as that of the sixteenth Psalm. The popular Semitic conception of Hades contained within it
neither grades of condition, according to the merits of men, nor any
trace of an infernal torment in aggravation of the unsubstantial state
to which all are equally reduced. This statement is true of the
Old Testament till at least the Book of Daniel. Sheol is lit by no
lurid fires, such as made the later Christian hell intolerable to the lost.
That life is unsubstantial; that darkness and dust abound; above all,
that God is not there, and that it is impossible to praise Him, is all
the punishment which is given in Sheol. Extraordinary vice is
punished above ground, in the name and family of the sinner. Sheol,
with its monotony, is for average men; but extraordinary piety can
break away from it (
Thus, by the help of only a few fragments from the
popular mythology, the sacred satirist achieves his
He who has heard that laughter sees no comedy in
aught else. This is the one unfailing subject of Readers will remember a parallel to this ode in Carlyle's famous
chapter on Louis the Unforgotten. No modern has rivalled Carlyle
in his inheritance of this satire, except it be he whom Carlyle called
"that Jew blackguard Heine."
The only other remarks necessary are these. In ver. 9 the Authorized Version has not attempted to reproduce the humour of the original satire, which styles them that were chief men on earth chief-goats of the herd, bell-wethers. The phrase they that go down to the stones of the pit should be transferred from ver. 19 to ver. 20.
And thou shalt lift up this proverb upon the King of Babylon, and shalt say,—
10. All of them answer and say to thee,—
Isaiah xxiv. (DATE UNCERTAIN).
vv. 14-16, which are very perplexing. In 14 a company
is introduced to us very vaguely as those or yonder ones, who are
represented as seeing the bright side of the convulsion which is
the subject of the chapter. They cry aloud from the sea; that is, from
the west of the prophet. He is therefore in the east, and in
captivity, in the centre of the convulsion. The problem is to find
any actual historical situation, in which part of Israel was in the
east in captivity, and part in the west free and full of reasons for
praising God for the calamity, out of which their brethren saw no
escape for themselves.
With the very first verse the prophecy leaps far
beyond all particular or national conditions: Behold,
Jehovah shall be emptying the earth and rifling it; and He
shall turn it upside down and scatter its inhabitants.
This is expressive and thorough; the words are those
which were used for cleaning a dirty dish. To the
completeness of this opening verse there is really
nothing in the chapter to add. All the rest of the
verses only illustrate this upturning and scouring of
the material universe. For it is with the material
universe that the chapter is concerned. Nothing is
said of the spiritual nature of man—little, indeed, about
man at all. He is simply called the inhabitant of the
earth, and the structure of society (ver. 2) is introduced
only to make more complete the effect of the
convulsion of the earth itself. Man cannot escape
those judgements which shatter his material habitation.
It is like one of Dante's visions. Terror, and Pit and
Snare upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth! And it shall
come to pass that he who fleeth from the noise of the Terror
shall fall into the Pit, and he who cometh up out of the
midst of the Pit shall be taken in the Snare. For the
windows on high are opened, and the foundations of the
earth do shake. Broken, utterly broken, is the earth;
shattered, utterly shattered, the earth; staggering, very
staggering, the earth; reeling, the earth reeleth like a
drunken man: she swingeth to and fro like a hammock.
And so through the rest of the chapter it is the
material life of man that is cursed: the new wine,
What awful truth is this for illustration of which we see not man, but his habitation, the world and all its surroundings, lifted up by the hand of the Lord, broken open, wiped out and shaken, while man himself, as if only to heighten the effect, staggers hopelessly like some broken insect on the quaking ruins? What judgement is this, in which not only one city or one kingdom is concerned, as in the last prophecy of which we treated, but the whole earth is convulsed, and moon and sun confounded?
The judgement is the visitation of man's sins on his material surroundings—The earth's transgression shall be heavy upon it; and it shall rise, and not fall. The truth on which this judgement rests is that between man and his material circumstance—the earth he inhabits, the seasons which bear him company through time and the stars to which he looks high up in heaven—there is a moral sympathy. The earth also is profaned under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.
The Bible gives no support to the theory that matter
itself is evil. God created all things; and God saw
everything that He had made; and, behold, it was very good.
The Old Testament is not contented with a general
statement of this great principle, but pursues it to all
sorts of particular and private applications. The curses
of the Lord fell, not only on the sinner, but on his
dwelling, on his property and even on the bit of ground
these occupied. This was especially the case with regard
to idolatry. When Israel put a pagan population to the
sword, they were commanded to raze the city, gather
its wealth together, burn all that was burnable and put
the rest into the temple of the Lord as a thing devoted
It is just this principle which chap. xxiv. extends
to the whole universe. What happened in Jericho
because of its inhabitants' idolatry is now to happen to
the whole earth because of man's sin. The earth also
is profane under her inhabitants, because they have
transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the
everlasting covenant. In these words the prophet takes
us away back to the covenant with Noah, which he
properly emphasizes as a covenant with all mankind.
With a noble universalism, for which his race and their
literature get too little credit, this Hebrew recognises
that once all mankind were holy unto God, who had
included them under His grace, that promised the fixedness
and fertility of nature. But that covenant, though
of grace, had its conditions for man. These had been
broken. The race had grown wicked, as it was before
the Flood; and therefore, in terms which vividly recall
that former judgement of God—the windows on high are
opened—the prophet foretells a new and more awful
catastrophe. One word which he employs betrays how
close he feels the moral sympathy to be between man
and his world. The earth, he says, is profane. This is a
word, whose root meaning is that which has fallen away
or separated itself, which is delinquent. Sometimes, perhaps,
it has a purely moral significance, like our word
"abandoned" in the common acceptance: he who has
fallen far and utterly into sin, the reckless sinner. But
mostly it has rather the religious meaning of one who
has fallen out of the covenant relation with God and
The whole earth is to be broken up and dissolved. What then is to become of the people of God—the indestructible remnant? Where are they to settle? In this new deluge is there a new ark? For answer the prophet presents us with an old paradise (ver. 23). He has wrecked the universe; but he says now, Jehovah of hosts shall dwell in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem. It would be impossible to find a better instance of the limitations of Old Testament prophecy than this return to the old dispensation after the old dispensation has been committed to the flames. At such a crisis as the conflagration of the universe for the sin of man, the hope of the New Testament looks for the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, but there is no scintilla of such a hope in this prediction. The imagination of the Hebrew seer is beaten back upon the theatre his conscience has abandoned. He knows "the old is out of date," but for him "the new is not yet born;" and, therefore, convinced as he is that the old must pass away, he is forced to borrow from its ruins a provisional abode for God's people, a figure for the truth which grips him so firmly, that, in spite of the death of all the universe for man's sin, there must be a visibleness and locality of the Divine majesty, a place where the people of God may gather to bless His holy name.
To grant that the moral and physical universes are
from the same hand is to affirm a sympathy and mutual
reaction between them. This affirmation is confirmed by
experience, and this experience is of two kinds. To the
guilty man Nature seems aware, and flashes back from her
larger surfaces the magnified reflection of his own self-contempt
and terror. But, besides, men are also unable
to escape attributing to the material instruments or surroundings
of their sin a certain infection, a certain power
of recommunicating to their imaginations and memories
the desire for sin, as well as of inflicting upon them the
pain and penalty of the disorder it has produced among
themselves. Sin, though born, as Christ said, in the
heart, has immediately a material expression; and we
may follow this outwards through man's mind, body and
estate, not only to find it "hindering, disturbing, complicating
all," but reinfecting with the lust and odour
of sin the will which gave it birth. As sin is put forth
by the will, or is cherished in the heart, so we find
error cloud the mind, impurity the imagination, misery
the feelings, and pain and weariness infect the flesh and
bone. God, who modelled it, alone knows how far man's
physical form has been degraded by the sinful thoughts
When we pass from a man's body, the wrapping we
find next nearest to his soul is his property. It has
always been an instinct of the race, that there is nothing
a man may so infect with the sin of his heart as his
handiwork and the gains of his toil. And that is a true
instinct, for, in the first place, the making of property
perpetuates a man's own habits. If he is successful in
business, then every bit of wealth he gathers is a confirmation
of the motives and tempers in which he conducted
his business. A man deceives himself as to
this, saying, Wait till I have made enough; then I will
put away the meanness, the harshness and the dishonesty
with which I made it. He shall not be able.
Just because he has been successful, he will continue in
his habit without thinking; just because there has been
But the instinct of humanity has also been quick to
this: that the curse of ill-gotten wealth passes like bad
blood from father to child. What is the truth in this
matter? A glance at history will tell us. The accumulation
of property is the result of certain customs, habits
and laws. In its own powerful interest property perpetuates
these down the ages, and infects the fresh air
of each new generation with their temper. How often in
the history of mankind has it been property gained under
unjust laws or cruel monopolies which has prevented the
abolition of these, and carried into gentler, freer times
the pride and exclusiveness of the age, by whose rude
habits it was gathered. This moral transference, which
we see on so large a scale in public history, is repeated
to some extent in every private bequest. A curse does
not necessarily follow an estate from the sinful producer
of it to his heir; but the latter is, by the bequest itself
generally brought into so close a contact with his predecessor
as to share his conscience and be in sympathy
with his temper. And the case is common where an
heir, though absolutely up to the date of his succession
separate from him who made and has left the property,
nevertheless finds himself unable to alter the methods,
or to escape the temper, in which the property has been
managed. In nine cases out of ten property carries
When we pass from the effect of sin upon property
to its effect upon circumstance, we pass to what we
can affirm with even greater conscience. Man has
the power of permanently soaking and staining his
surroundings with the effect of sins in themselves
momentary and transient. Sin increases terribly by
the mental law of association. It is not the gin-shop
and the face of wanton beauty that alone tempt men
to sin. Far more subtle seductions are about every
one of us. That we have the power of inflicting our
character upon the scenes of our conduct is proved
by some of the dreariest experiences of life. A failure
in duty renders the place of it distasteful and enervating.
Are we irritable and selfish at home? Then home
is certain to be depressing, and little helpful to our
spiritual growth. Are we selfish and niggardly in the
interest we take in others? Then the congregation
we go to, the suburb we dwell in, will appear insipid
and unprofitable; we shall be past the possibility
of gaining character or happiness from the ground
where God planted us and meant us to grow.
Students have been idle in their studies till every
time they enter them a reflex languor comes down
like stale smoke, and the room they desecrated takes
its revenge on them. We have it in our power to make
our workshops, our laboratories and our studies places
of magnificent inspiration, to enter which is to receive
a baptism of industry and hope; and we have power
to make it impossible ever to work in them again at
full pitch. The pulpit, the pew, the very communion-table,
come under this law. If a minister of God have
made up his mind to say nothing from his accustomed
Such considerations give a great moral force to the doctrine of the Old Testament that man's sin has rendered necessary the destruction of his material circumstances, and that the Divine judgement includes a broken and a rifled universe.
The New Testament has borrowed this vision from
the Old, but added, as we have seen, with greater
distinctness, the hope of new heavens and a new earth.
We have not concluded the subject, however, when we
have pointed this out, for the New Testament has
another gospel. The grace of God affects even the
material results of sin; the Divine pardon that converts
the sinner converts his circumstance also; Christ Jesus
sanctifies even the flesh, and is the Physician of the body
as well as the Saviour of the soul. To Him physical
evil abounds only that He may show forth His glory
in curing it. Neither did this man sin nor his parents,
but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
Isaiah xxv.-xxvii. (DATE UNCERTAIN).
The mention of Moab (xxv. 10, 11) is also consistent with a pre-exilic
date, but does not necessarily imply it. E.g., xxv. 6-8, 10, 11; xxvii. 10, 11, 9, 12, 13.
This bare statement of the allusions of the prophecy
will give the ordinary reader some idea of the difficulties
of Biblical criticism. What is to be made of a
prophecy uttering the catch-words and breathing the
experience of three distinct periods? One solution of
the difficulty may be that we have here the composition
of a Jew already returned from exile to a desecrated
sanctuary and depopulated land, who has woven
through his original utterances of complaint and hope
the experience of earlier oppressions and deliverances,
using even the names of earlier tyrants. In his immediate
past a great city that oppressed the Jews has
fallen, though, if this is Babylon, it is strange that
he nowhere names it. But his intention is rather
religious than historical; he seeks to give a general
If this character which we attribute to the prophecy
be correct—viz., that it is a summary or ideal account
of the attitude of the alien world to Israel, and of
the judgement God has ready for the world—then,
though itself be exilic, its place in the Book of Isaiah
is intelligible. Chaps. xxiv.-xxvii. fitly crown the
long list of Isaiah's oracles upon the foreign nations;
We shall perceive this at once as we now turn
to see what is the religious value of our prophecy.
Chaps. xxv.-xxvii. stand in the front rank of evangelical
prophecy. In their experience of religion, their
characterisations of God's people, their expressions of
faith, their missionary hopes and hopes of immortality,
Among the names applied to God's people there are
three which were destined to play an enormous part in
the history of religion. In the English version these
appear as two: poor and needy; but in the original
they are three. In chap. xxv. 4:
If there is one thing which distinguishes the people
of the revelation from other historical nations, it is the
evidence afforded by their dictionaries of the power to
transmute the most afflicting experiences of life into
virtuous disposition and effectual desire for God. We
see this most clearly if we contrast the Hebrews' use of
their words for poor with that of the first language which
was employed to translate these words—the Greek in
the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. In
the Greek temper there was a noble pity for the unfortunate;
the earliest Greeks regarded beggars as
the peculiar protegés of Heaven. Greek philosophy
developed a capacity for enriching the soul in misfortune;
Stoicism gave imperishable proof of how
bravely a man could hold poverty and pain to be things
indifferent, and how much gain from such indifference
he could bring to his soul. But in the vulgar opinion
of Greece penury and sickness were always disgraceful;
and Greek dictionaries mark the degradation of terms,
which at first merely noted physical disadvantage, into
Let us see how this conscience was developed. In the East poverty scarcely ever means physical disadvantage alone: in its train there follow higher disabilities. A poor Eastern cannot be certain of fair play in the courts of the land. He is very often a wronged man, with a fire of righteous anger burning in his breast. Again, and more important, misfortune is to the quick religious instinct of the Oriental a sign of God's estrangement. With us misfortune is so often only the cruelty, sometimes real sometimes imagined, of the rich; the unemployed vents his wrath at the capitalist, the tramp shakes his fist after the carriage on the highway. In the East they do not forget to curse the rich, but they remember as well to humble themselves beneath the hand of God. With an unfortunate Oriental the conviction is supreme, God is angry with me; I have lost His favour. His soul eagerly longs for God.
A poor man in the East has, therefore, not only
a hunger for food: he has the hotter hunger for justice,
the deeper hunger for God. Poverty in itself, without
extraneous teaching, develops nobler appetites. The
physical, becomes the moral, pauper; poor in substance,
he grows poor in spirit. It was by developing, with the
Till the Exile, however, the poor were only a portion
of the people. In the Exile the whole nation became
poor, and henceforth "God's poor" might become
synonymous with "God's people." This was the time
when the words received their spiritual baptism.
Israel felt the physical curse of poverty to its extreme
of famine. The pains, privations and terrors, which
the glib tongues of our comfortable middle classes, as
they sing the psalms of Israel, roll off so easily for
symbols of their own spiritual experience, were felt
by the captive Hebrews in all their concrete physical
effects. The noble and the saintly, the gentle and the
cultured, priest, soldier and citizen, woman, youth and
child, were torn from home and estate, were deprived
of civil standing, were imprisoned, fettered, flogged
and starved to death. We learn something of what
it must have been from the words which Jeremiah
addressed to Baruch, a youth of good family and
fine culture: Seekest thou great things for thyself?
Seek them not, for, behold, I will bring evil upon all
flesh, saith the Lord; only thy life will I give unto thee
for a prey in all places whither thou goest. Imagine
a whole nation plunged into poverty of this degree—not
born into it having known no better things, nor
stunted into it with sensibility and the power of expression
sapped out of them, but plunged into it, with
the unimpaired culture, conscience and memories of the
flower of the people. When God's own hand sent
Thy lovingkindness is better than life!—is the secret
of it all. There is that which excites a deeper hunger
in the soul than the hunger for life, and for the food
and money that give life. This spiritual poverty is
It is at this time, as we have seen, that
1. We have already seen how strong the sense of sin is in chap. xxiv. This POVERTY of PEACE is not so fully expressed in the following chapters, and indeed seems crowded out by the sense of the iniquity of the inhabitants of the earth and the desire for their judgement (xxvi. 21).
2. The feeling of the POVERTY of JUSTICE is very
strong in this prophecy. But it is to be satisfied; in
part it has been satisfied (xxv. 1-4). A strong city,
probably Babylon, has fallen. Moab shall be trodden
down in his place, even as straw is trodden down in the
water of the dunghill. The complete judgement is to come
when the Lord shall destroy the two Leviathans and the
great Dragon of the west (xxvii. 1). It is followed by the
restoration of Israel to the state in which Isaiah (chap.
v. 1) sang so sweetly of her.
Perhaps the wildest cries that rose from Israel's
famine of justice were those which found expression in
chap. xxxiv. This chapter is so largely a repetition of
feelings we have already met with elsewhere in the
Book of Isaiah, that it is necessary now only to mention
its original features. The subject is, as in chap.
xiii., the Lord's judgement upon all the nations; and
as chap. xiii. singled out Babylon for special doom,
so chap. xxxiv. singles out Edom. The reason of this
distinction will be very plain to the reader of the Old
Testament. From the day the twins struggled in their
mother Rebekah's womb, Israel and Edom were either at
open war or burned towards each other with a hate, which
was the more intense for wanting opportunities of gratification.
It is an Eastern edition of the worst chapters
in the history of England and Ireland. No bloodier
massacres stained Jewish hands than those which
3. Poverty of the Exile. But as fair flowers
bloom upon rough stalks, so from Israel's stern challenges
of justice there break sweet prayers for home.
Chap. xxxiv., the effusion of vengeance on Edom, is
followed by chap. xxxv., the going forth of hope to the
return from exile and the establishment of the ransomed
of the Lord in Zion. Even at the risk of incurring Canon Cheyne's charge of "ineradicable
error," I feel I must keep to the older view of chap. xxxv.
which makes it refer to the return from exile. No doubt the chapter
covers more than the mere return, and includes "the glorious condition
of Israel after the return;" but vv. 4 and 10 are undoubtedly
addressed to Jews still in exile and undelivered.
4. So Israel was to come home. But to Israel
An Arctic explorer was once asked, whether during eight months of slow starvation which he and his comrades endured they suffered much from the pangs of hunger. No, he answered, we lost them in the sense of abandonment, in the feeling that our countrymen had forgotten us and were not coming to the rescue. It was not till we were rescued and looked in human faces that we felt how hungry we were. So is it ever with God's poor. They forget all other need, as Israel did, in their need of God. Their outward poverty is only the weeds of their heart's widowhood. But Jehovah of hosts shall make to all the peoples in this mountain a banquet of fat things, a banquet of wines on the lees, fat things bemarrowed, wines on the lees refined.
We need only note here—for it will come up for
detailed treatment in connection with the second half
of Isaiah—that the centre of Israel's restored life is to
be the Temple, not, as in Isaiah's day, the king; that her
dispersed are to gather from all parts of the world at
These then were four aspects of Israel's poverty of heart: a hunger for pardon, a hunger for justice, a hunger for home, and a hunger for God. For the returning Jews these wants were satisfied only to reveal a deeper poverty still, the complaint and comfort of which we must reserve to another chapter.
Isaiah xxvi. 14-19; xxv. 6-9.
Hezekiah's expression for death, xxxviii. 12.
It must have been thoughts like these, which led to the expression of one of the most abrupt and powerful of the few hopes of the resurrection which the Old Testament contains. This hope, which lightens chap. xxv. 7, 8, bursts through again—without logical connection with the context—in vv. 14-19 of chap. xxvi.
The English version makes ver. 14 to continue the
reference to the lords, whom in ver. 13 Israel confesses
to have served instead of Jehovah. "They are dead;
they shall not live: they are deceased; they shall not rise." I think this must be the meaning of ver. 16, if we are to allow
that it has any sympathy with vv. 14 and 15. Bredenkamp suggests
that the persons meant are themselves the dead. Jehovah has glorified
the Church on earth; but the dead below are still in trouble, and
pour out prayers (Virgil's "preces fundunt," Æneid, vi., 55), beneath this
punishment which God causes to pass on all men (ver. 14). Bredenkamp
bases this exegesis chiefly on the word for "prayer," which means
chirping or whispering, a kind of voice imputed to the shades by the
Hebrews and other ancient peoples. But while this word does
originally mean whispering, it is never in Scripture applied to the
dead, but, on the other hand, is a frequent name for divining or incantation.
I therefore have felt compelled to understand it as used in
this passage of the living, whose only resource in face of death—Goa's
discipline par excellence—is to pour out incantations. If it be objected
that the prophet would scarcely parallel the ordinary incantations on
behalf of the dead with supplications to Jehovah, the answer is that
he is talking poetically or popularly. English version, fallen; i.e., like our expression for the birth of
animals, dropped.
The figures are bold. Israel achieves, through God's grace, everything but the recovery of her dead; this, which alone is worth calling salvation, remains wanting to her great record of deliverances. The living Israel is restored, but how meagre a proportion of the people it is! The graves of home and of exile do not give up their dead. These are not born again to be inhabitants of the upper world.
The figures are bold, but bolder is the hope that
breaks from them. Like as when the Trumpet shall Technical Hebrew word for the inhabitants of the underworld—the
shades.
If one has seen a place of graves in the East, he will
appreciate the elements of this figure, which takes dust
for death and dew for life. With our damp graveyards
mould has become the traditional trappings of death;
but where under the hot Eastern sun things do not rot
into lower forms of life, but crumble into sapless powder,
that will not keep a worm in life, dust is the natural
symbol of death. When they die, men go not to feed
fat the mould, but down into the dust; and there the
foot of the living falls silent, and his voice is choked, and
the light is thickened and in retreat, as if it were
creeping away to die. The only creatures the visitor
starts are timid, unclean bats, that flutter and whisper
about him like the ghosts of the dead. There are no
Hence the Semitic conception of the underworld was
dominated by dust. It was not water nor fire nor
frost nor altogether darkness, which made the infernal
prison horrible, but that upon its floor and rafters,
hewn from the roots and ribs of the primeval mountains,
dust lay deep and choking. Amid all the horrors he
imagined for the dead, Dante did not include one more
awful than the horror of dust. The picture which the
northern Semites had before them when they turned
their faces to the wall was of this kind. Extracted from the Assyrian Descent of Istar to Hades (Dr.
Jeremias' German translation, p. 11, and Records of the Past, i., 145).
Either, then, an Eastern sepulchre, or this its infernal double, was gaping before the prophet's eyes. What more final and hopeless than the dust and the dark of it?
But for dust there is dew, and even to graveyards
the morning comes that brings dew and light together.
The wonder of dew is that it is given from a clear
heaven, and that it comes to sight with the dawn. If the
Oriental looks up when dew is falling, he sees nothing
to thank for it between him and the stars. If he sees
dew in the morning, it is equal liquid and lustre; it
seems to distil from the beams of the sun— Cf.
Attempts are so often made to trace the hopes of
resurrection, which break the prevailing silence of the
Old Testament on a future life, to foreign influences
experienced in the Exile, that it is well to emphasize
the origin and occasion of the hopes that utter themselves
so abruptly in this passage. Surely nothing
could be more inextricably woven with the national
fortunes of Israel, as nothing could be more native and
original to Israel's temper, than the verses just expounded.
We need not deny that their residence among
a people, accustomed as the Babylonians were to belief
in the resurrection, may have thawed in the Jews
If the occasion of these hopes was thus an event in
Israel's own national history, and if the impulse to them
was given by so natural an instinct of her own heart,
Israel was equally indebted to herself for the convictions
that the instinct was not in vain. Nothing is more
clear in our passage than that Israel's first ground of
hope in a future life was her simple, untaught reflection
upon the power of her God. Death was His chastening.
Death came from Him, and remained in His power.
Surely He would deliver from it. This was a very old
belief in Israel. The Lord killeth and maketh alive;
He bringeth down to Sheol and bringeth up. Such words,
of course, might be only an extreme figure for recovery
from disease, and the silence of so great a saint as
Thus in its foundation the Old Testament doctrine of the resurrection is but the conviction of the sufficiency of God Himself, a conviction which Christ turned upon Himself when He said, I am the Resurrection and the Life. Because I live, ye shall live also.
If any object that in this picture of a resurrection we
have no real persuasion of immortality, but simply the
natural, though impossible, wish of a bereaved people
that their dead should to-day rise from their graves to
share to-day's return and glory—a revival as special and
extraordinary as that appearing of the dead in the streets
of Jerusalem when the Atonement was accomplished,
but by no means that general resurrection at the last
day which is an article of the Christian faith—if any
one should bring this objection, then let him be referred
to the previous promise of immortality in chap. xxv.
The universal and final character of the promise made
there is as evident as of that for which Paul borrowed
its terms in order to utter the absolute consequences of
the resurrection of the Son of God: Death is swallowed
up in victory. For the prophet, having in ver. 6 described
the restoration of the people, whom exile had
Almighty God, we praise Thee that, in the weakness of all our love and the darkness of all our knowledge before death, Thou hast placed assurance of eternal life in simple faith upon Thyself. Let this faith be richly ours. By Thine omnipotence, by Thy righteousness, by the love Thou hast vouchsafed, we lift ourselves and rest upon Thy word. Because I live, ye shall live also. Oh keep us steadfast in union with Thyself, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
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