"They are soothsayers like the Philistines. Their land also is full of idols."-2: 6, 8. "Thus saith the Lord, thy redeemer, That frustrateth the tokens of the liars, -44: 25. "But ye are they that forsake the Lord, That forget my holy mountain, That prepare a table for that Troop, And offer a drink-offering unto that Number."-65: 11. The reign of Hezekiah, honored by surrounding nations, and zealous for Jehovah, had been distinguished -as that of Solomon was before, and that of Josiah afterwards-by a large accession of proselytes of alien birth; and their attachment to their new faith was stronger than that of many Israelites. They were faithful, while others swam with the stream of evil. Among these were some officers of the king's hârem, who, like Ebed-melech, the Ethiopian eunuch, in the reign of Zedekiah (Jerem. 38: 7), were conspicuous for their steadfastness. For both such classes the prophet, rising above all national and traditional feeling, has words of the fullest sympathy. "Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying, The Lord hath utterly separated me from his people: Neither let the eunuch say, *The words Gad and Mem, thus rendered in the English version; are probably names of the planets now known as Jupiter and Saturn, the givers of good or evil fortune. It is. I think, at least probable that we may see in Eliakim, of whom such glorious praise is spoken in 2 Kings 18: 20-25, one of this class. He is described as being over the house" (2 Kings 18: 18; Isaiah 36: 3), and is told that he shall one day succeed Shebna in the office of scribe (18: 21). Now, in the later history of the kingdom of Judah, as in other Eastern monarchies, the confidential officers over the king's household were, for the most part, as the case of Ebedmelech shows, eunuchs, and in the monuments of Assyria the beardless face of the scribe at once identifies him. On this hypothesis we get once again a striking coincidence between the earlier and later utterances. The man who has no hope of children of his own, to whom is promised place and a name better than of sons and of daughters" (55: 5), is to have a "sure place" (22: 23), is to be "a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the house of Judah" (22: 22). a Behold, I am a dry tree. For thus saith the Lord unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, And choose the things that please me, Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls A place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off."-56:3-5. Idolatry was becoming darker and more cruel. Moloch worship was revived (2 Kings 16: 3, 4). They shall be ashamed of the oaks which ye have desired, And ye shall be confounded for the gardens that ye have chosen."-1:29. "Against whom do ye sport yourselves, Inflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, Slaying the children in the valleys in the clifts of the rocks?"-57: 5. As the prophet saw the men of his own generation falling asleep, he looked, half wistfully, at their end." "The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: And merciful men are taken away, None considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He shall enter into peace: They shall rest in their beds, each one walking in their uprightness." -57: 1, 2. The sense of being left alone, the last witness for righteousness in an evil generation, mocked and taunted, was almost more than he could bear. "Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil is accounted mad: * And the Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no judgment. And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor."-59: 15, 16. The witness which he bore against the sins of nobles and priests and people exposed him to shame and contumely. He who had been the honored counsellor of kings was treated as the vilest out cast. "The Lord God hath opened mine ear, *The marginal rendering of the English version. Ewald's translation, became rare," gives nearly as good a meaning, and is etymologically truer. And I was not rebellious, neither turned were made perfect by suffering, as they away back. I gave my back to the smiters, the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spit ting."-50: 5, 6. -50: 8, 9. As one after another of that noble army was led forth to die by all the strange tortures that Eastern cruelty could invent, we may well think of the prophet's mind as learning new lessons which nothing else could have so clearly taught him. His expectations of the coming Christ were colored and modified by this new experience as they had been by former ones. If he had been led to pass from the weakness and cowardice of Ahaz to the thought of the great battle and the mighty Conqueror whose name shall be called Wonderful" (9: 5-7); if, in contrast with man's injustice, there had risen before him the vision of a righteous king, "the rod out of the stem of Jesse," upon whom should rest "the spirit of the Lord, the spirit of wisdom and understanding" (11: 19); if the hopes of Hezekiah's youth had formed and fashioned his hopes of one greater than Hezekiah in the far future, as the Psalmist's hopes (Psalms 45 and 72) had had their historical starting-point in the glory of Solomon, it might well be that the Divine Education through which the Eternal Spirit was leading him made the latter end of his life as fruitful as the beginning, and gave him yet deeper insight into the mysteries of God. So it was that he learnt to see that as he and his fellow-prophets found that the road to the fullest victory and the most perfect blessedness was through pain and sorrow, there must be a like discipline, a like pathway to the throne for Him, the greater Prophet, the and felt in the reign of Manasseh he was redeeming King. Through what he saw taught to think of the Christ that was to come as one "whose visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men" (52:14), growing up "as a tender plant, and as form nor comeliness" a root out of a dry ground," with "no had been true in part of those who were (53:2). What now bearing His reproach, suffering for sins not their own, should be true in its completeness of Him. "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrOWS: Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities." -53: 4, 5. The patient, silent suffering of the martyr-prophets presented the type of the higher, more wonderful silence: "He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, Yet he opened not his mouth: He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, So opened he not his mouth."-53: 7. It may at first seem strange that the volume which contains such notes of woe, pitched, as it were, in the sad minor of a plaintive sorrow, should open as this opens with such exulting consolation: "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God" (40: 1). It may be that we shall never know the full meaning of each separate portion of this prophecy, or the reasons of its change from joy to sorrow, and back again to joy. To do that we ought to be able to connect each section with the events of the prophet's life, and the thoughts which were working in his heart, and these we have no data to decide on, and can but suggest more or less probable conjectures. Thus much, however, may be said, that the contrast between the gloom and the brightness had been the same throughout. Out of the disasters and defeat and guilt of Ahaz rose the wonderful prophecies of chapters 9 and 11 and 25. Was it strange, if he had been sustained in the midst of suffering, foreseeing the captivity of his people, by the thought of their restoration, that he should begin now with words which would give to others the same help and comfort with which he himself had been comforted of God? Was it not in harmony with all his previous history that the strength of the consolation should be proportionate to the depth of the distress, that through the thickest night there should pierce the rays of the far-off golden dawn? "It shall come to pass in the last days, And shall be exalted above the hills; and And many people shall go and say, And he will teach us of his ways, and we For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people : And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: Nation shall not lift up sword against na tion, neither shall they learn war any more is a verbal reproduction of what had been spoken by Micah 4: 1-3. Other instances of a like connection are as follows: "Behold, the Lord cometh "Behold, the Lord cometh come down."-Mic. 1: 3. out of his place to punish out of his place, and will the inhabitants of the earth Is. 26: 21. "To what purpose is the unto me? saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offer in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats... to do well; seek judgment, "Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”—Mic. 6: 7, S. Other points indicating at once a continuity of thought such as was natural in the writings of the same man, and the influence as natural of new circumstances, can only, within the limits of the present paper, be touched on sparingly. The instances given will, how ever, be enough to show that there is no difficulty in tracing the same man in the two volumes of the prophecies that bear his name, and may help others to continue the comparison for themselves. (1.) Among the influences which were at work on the mind of Isaiah in his earlier life, a very high place must be assigned to the writings of Micah the Morasthite. Living at the same time, witnessing the same evils, we find the seer of Moresheth uttering noble words which the more conspicuous adviser of Hezekiah took up and repeated. It would almost seem as if the one prophet, living not in the capital city, but in an ob-cure village, speaking, not in the lofty language of Isaiah's poetry, but in In their outward mode of teaching, in half-humorous allusions to the names of the strange, portentous disregard of conthe towns of Judah (1:10-16), and inventional order, the one prophet reproimagery drawn from the scenery and duced the acted symbolism of the other: occupations of shepherd-life, had been to the other as one who suggests thoughts afterwards to be developed, and sets an example of courage in denouncing evil afterwards to be followed. The bold words of Micah in the days of Hezekiah, which a hundred years afterwards were appealed to as a precedent (Jerem. 26: 18), may well be thought of as influencing the thoughts and teaching of Isaiah. Certain it is that the parallelisms between them are more numerous and striking than between any other two writers in the Old or New Testament. The first great vision of a better time in Isaiah 2: 2-4: NEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 1. relieve the oppressed, judge widow."—Is. 1 : 11, 16, 17. "At the same time spake "Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked."-Mic. 1: 8. Both bear their testimony against the same evils in all but the same words: "Thy princes are rebel- "The heads thereof judge lious, and companions of for reward, and the priests thieves every one loveth thereof teach for hire." gifts, and followeth after Mic. 3: 11. rewards."-Is. 1: 28. Both look to the house of David as the stock from which the deliverer shall come: 5 "There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots." Is. 11: 1. "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah. out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel." Mic. 5: 2. Materials for a sufficient induction have been given as to the connection between the Prophet Micah and the chaps. 1-39 of Isaiah. Can we trace any like connection with the remaining chaps. 40-66? The following passages give the answer: "Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small." Is. 41: 15. "The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart."-Is. 57: 1. "And dust shall be the serpent's meat." Is. 65: 25. "His watchmen are blind. They are greedy dogs which can never have enough Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink." Is. 56: 10-12. "Arise and thresh, O I will make thy hoofs "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.”—Is. 65 : 25. "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leop ard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fathing together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea."-Is. 11: 6, 7, 9. The list might be enlarged indefinitely, make thine horn iron, and but these are sufficient for our present purpose. One instance only may be added as obscured by the mistranslation "The good man is per of the received English version. ished out of the earth; and They shall lick the dust like a serpent." as a It will be a familiar fact to most students of Scripture, that at one period in the history of Hebrew literature, the word Rahab, signifying "the proud, the haughty," makes its appearance poetical synonyme for Egypt. Thus in Ps. 87 4, 5, belonging probably to this period, and describing the admission of proselytes from many countries, we find Egypt mentioned. "I will think upon Rahab and Babylon, with them that know me."* In what we have called Isaiah's second volume, the name occurs in the same signification: "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; Awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art not thou it that hath cut Rahab (sc. the haughty one), and wounded the dragon?"-51: 9. But in the first forty chapters as we read them in the Authorized Version we do not find it. In the Hebrew, however, it meets us in a very remarkable, often-quoted passage. This, in English, stands thus: "The Egyptians shall help in vain and to no purpose, Therefore I have cried concerning this, 'Their strength is to sit still."" But the true rendering, in the judgment of nearly all critics, would be this: * I cannot refrain from noticing the singular agreement of this with Isaiah 19: 24. "In that day shall Israel be third with Egypt and Assyria." Was the prophet, or some contemporary of his, the writer of the psalm, rejoicing that in his own time, or in the time to come, natives of both these countries, and even of Philistia, Tyre, and Ethiopia, should be counted among the citizens of Zion, "when the Lord writeth up the people"? "Therefore I have cried concerning her, She is Rahab, sitting still," (haughty, that is, and impotent.) The self same characteristic word, with the characteristic play upon the etymology, is thus seen to recur in both volumes of the prophecy.* sarily belonging to words originating in inspiration. In this case, however, I believe there is no sufficient grounds for rejecting the received belief. The difficulties connected with it, though at first sight they may appear formidable, are not so great as those which attend the rival hypothesis. Into those difficulties it is not my intention within these limits to enter at any length. That which has been relied on as decisive, the occurrence of the individual name of Cyrus, as the future king of Persia, has been already met by anticipation. Another, and, I am compelled to admit, a more serious one, is found in 64:10, 11: "His holy cities are a wilderness; Zion is a wilderness, Judah a desolation; Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire, And all our pleasant things are laid waste." The object which I have chiefly aimed at in this paper has been to make the later prophecies more intelligible and more interesting by connecting them with the life and feelings of a living man. They are not Sibylline oracles, devoid of all impress of human character, but are, ast the utterances of a true prophet should be, full of it to overflowing. But it would be idle to conceal that another end besides this has been kept in view. It is well known to all scholars-it can scarcely be unknown to many readers of this article -that the chapters which have furnished the materials for this picture of the old age of Isaiah have by very many critics, English as well as foreign, been assigned words is, of course, that they refer to the The first impression made by such to a different and later writer. The open-destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple ing words, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my The man who people," have thus with many lost their wrote them, we say, must have seen the old divine power. They have come to desolation of which he speaks. But here be associated with the discomfort of per- again the close connection which we have plexity and controversy. Instead of seeing, in the whole prophecy which they usher in, the completion of the divine education which had up to that time led the prophet to ever new heights of spiritual insight and more glorious visions of the future, men have been taught to ascribe them to some 66 great unknown,' as already completed. seen between the book of Isaiah and his contemporary Micah supplies the answer. The self-same calamities of which the former speaks had been foretold by the latter in words which no one has thought of questioning as a prophecy after the event. 29 to a pseudo (false) — or, where men shrank from that epithet, to a deutero (second)-Isaiah. I have no desire to charge all such critics with irreverence or unbelief. Inquiries whether the books which we find in the Old or New Testament were written altogether by the writers whose names are affixed to them cannot be excluded as lying outside the province of legitimate criticism. The titles and superscriptions given to books, and, in many cases, the assignment of this or that book to an individual writer, were the work of later compilers, and cannot be thought of in any case as neces "Therefore shall Zion for your sake be And Jerusalem shall become heaps, Assume these words to have been known to Isaiah, remember that he, here also following Micah (4: 10,) had a clear view of the coming exile in Babylon, remember that he already saw the sanctuary profaned by the foul image which Manasseh had set up (2 Chron. 33: 2) and the Assyrian armies ready to revenge, as they afterwards did revenge, the disastrous retreat of Sennacherib (2 *I am anxious to acknowledge my obligations Chron. 33: 11,) and we shall hardly wonto the writer of A Plea for a new English Ver-der that the desolation should seem to his sion of the Scriptures, by a Licentiate of the Church of Scotland" (Macmillans), for having recalled this fact to my remembrance, and so suggested the argument which rests upon it. prophetic vision as actually present, the long-delayed judgment as already executed. The fact that Josiah on his acces |
