V. Ch. liii. 10-12. We have heard the awful tragedy. The innocent

Servant was put to a violent and premature death. Public apathy closed

over him and the unmarked earth of a felon's grave. It is so utter a

perversion of justice, so signal a triumph of wrong over right, so

final a disappearance into oblivion of the fairest life that ever

lived, that men might be tempted to say, God has forsaken His own. On

the contrary--so strophe v. begins--God's own will and pleasure have

been in this tragedy: _Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him_. The line

as it thus stands in our English version has a grim, repulsive sound.

But the Hebrew word has no necessary meaning of pleasure or enjoyment.

All it says is, God so willed it. His purpose was in this tragedy.

Deus vult! It is the one message which can render any pain tolerable or

light up with meaning a mystery so cruel as this: _The LORD_ Himself

_had purposed to bruise_ His Servant, _the LORD Himself had laid on him

sickness_ (the figure of disease is resumed).

God's purpose in putting the Servant to death is explained in the

rest of the verse. It was in order that _through his soul making a

guilt-offering, he might see a seed, prolong his days, and that the

pleasure of the Lord might prosper by his hand_.

What is a guilt-offering? The term originally meant guilt, and is so

used by a prophet contemporary to our own.[231] In the legislation,

however, both in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel, it is applied to

legal and sacrificial forms of restitution or reparation for guilt.

It is only named in Ezekiel along with other sacrifices.[232] Both

Numbers and Leviticus define it, but define it differently. In

Numbers (v. 7, 8) it is the payment, which a transgressor has to

make to the human person offended, of the amount to which he has

harmed that person's property: it is what we call damages. But in

Leviticus it is the ram, exacted over and above damages to the

injured party (v. 14-16; vi. 1-7), or in cases where no damages were

asked for (v. 17-19), by the priest, the representative of God, for

satisfaction to His law; and it was required even where the offender

had been an unwitting one. By this guilt-offering _the priest made

atonement_ for the sinner and _he was forgiven_. It was for this

purpose of reparation to the Deity that the plagued Philistines

sent a guilt-offering back with the ark of Jehovah, which they had

stolen.[233] But there is another historical passage, which though

the term _guilt-offering_ is not used in it, admirably illustrates

the idea.[234] A famine in David's time was revealed to be due to

the murder of certain Gibeonites by the house of Saul. David asked

the Gibeonites what reparation he could make. They said it was not

a matter of damages. But both parties felt that before the law of

God could be satisfied and the land relieved of its curse, some

atonement, some guilt-offering, must be made to the Divine Law. It

was a wild kind of satisfaction that was paid. Seven men of Saul's

house were hung up before the Lord in Gibeon. But the instinct,

though satisfied in so murderous a fashion, was a true and a grand

instinct,--the conscience of a law above all human laws and rights,

to which homage must be paid before the sinner could come into true

relations with God, or the Divine curse be lifted off.

It is in this sense that the word is used of the Servant of Jehovah,

the Ideal, Representative Sufferer. Innocent as he is, he gives his

life as satisfaction to the Divine law for the guilt of his people.

His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in

God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it

was an expiatory sacrifice.[235] By his death the Servant did homage

to the law of God. By dying for it He made men feel that the supreme

end of man was to own that law and be in a right relation to it, and

that the supreme service was to help others to a right relation. As

it is said a little farther down, _My Servant, righteous himself,

wins righteousness for many, and makes their iniquities his load_.

It surely cannot be difficult for any one, who knows what sin is, and

what a part vicarious suffering plays both in the bearing of the sin

and in the redemption of the sinner, to perceive that at this point the

Servant's service for God and man reaches its crown. Compare his death

and its sad meaning, with the brilliant energies of his earlier career.

It is a heavy and an honourable thing to come from God to men, laden

with God's truth for your charge and responsibility; but it is a far

heavier to stoop and take upon your heart as your business and burden

men's suffering and sin. It is a needful and a lovely thing to assist

the feeble aspirations of men, to put yourself on the side of whatever

in them is upward and living,--to be the shelter, as the Servant was,

of the bruised reed and the fading wick; but it is more indispensable,

and it is infinitely heavier, to seek to lift the deadness of men, to

take their guilt upon your heart, to attempt to rouse them to it, to

attempt to deliver them from it. It is a useful and a glorious thing to

establish order and justice among men, to create a social conscience,

to inspire the exercise of love and the habits of service, and this the

Servant did when _he set Law on the Earth, and the Isles waited for his

teaching_; but after all man's supreme and controlling relation is his

relation to God, and to this their _righteousness_ the Servant restored

guilty men by his death.

And so it was at this point, according to our prophecy, that the

Servant, though brought so low, was nearest his exaltation; though

in death, yet nearest life, nearest the highest kind of life, _the

seeing of a seed_, the finding of himself in others; though despised,

rejected and forgotten of men, most certain of finding a place among

the great and notable forces of life,--_therefore do I divide him a

share with the great, and the spoil he shall share with the strong_.

Not because as a prophet he was a sharp sword in the hand of the

Lord, or a light flashing to the ends of the earth, but in that--as

the prophecy concludes, and it is the prophet's last and highest word

concerning him--in that _he bare the sin of the many, and interposed

for the transgressors_.

* * * * *

We have seen that the most striking thing about this prophecy is the

spectral appearance of the Servant. He haunts, rather than is present

in, the chapter. We hear of him, but he himself does not speak. We

see faces that he startles, lips that the sight of him shuts, lips

that the memory of him, after he has passed in silence, opens to

bitter confession of neglect and misunderstanding; but himself we see

not. His aspect and his bearing, his work for God and his influence

on men, are shown to us, through the recollection and conscience of

the speakers, with a vividness and a truth that draw the consciences

of us who hear into the current of the confession, and take our

hearts captive. But when we ask, Who was he then? What was his name

among men? Where shall we find himself? Has he come, or do you still

look for him?--neither the speakers, whose conscience he so smote,

nor God, whose chief purpose he was, give us here any answer. In some

verses he and his work seem already to have happened upon earth, but

again we are made to feel that he is still future to the prophet,

and that the voices, which the prophet quotes as speaking of having

seen him and found him to be the Saviour, are voices of a day not yet

born, while the prophet writes.

But about five hundred and fifty years after this prophecy was written,

a Man came forward among the sons of men,--among this very nation from

whom the prophecy had arisen; and in every essential of consciousness

and of experience He was the counterpart, embodiment and fulfilment

of this Suffering Servant and his Service. Jesus Christ answers the

questions, which the prophecy raises and leaves unanswered. In the

prophecy we see one, who is only a spectre, a dream, a conscience

without a voice, without a name, without a place in history. But in

Jesus Christ of Nazareth the dream becomes a reality; He, whom we have

seen in this chapter only as the purpose of God, only through the eyes

and consciences of a generation yet unborn,--He comes forward in flesh

and blood; He speaks, He explains Himself, He accomplishes almost to

the last detail the work, the patience and the death that are here

described as Ideal and Representative.

The correspondence of details between Christ's life and this

prophecy, published five hundred and fifty years before He came, is

striking; if we encountered it for the first time, it would be more

than striking, it would be staggering. But do not let us do what so

many have done--so fondly exaggerate it as to lose in the details of

external resemblance the moral and spiritual identity.

For the external correspondence between this prophecy and the life

of Jesus Christ is by no means perfect. Every wound that is set

down in the fifty-third of Isaiah was not reproduced or fulfilled

in the sufferings of Jesus. For instance, Christ was not the sick,

plague-stricken man, whom the Servant is at first represented to be.

The English translators have masked the leprous figure, that stands

out so clearly in the original Hebrew,--for _acquainted with grief,

bearing our griefs, put him to grief_, we should in each case read

_sickness_. Now Christ was no Job. As Matthew points out, the only

way He could be said _to bear our sicknesses and to carry our pains_

was by healing them, not by sharing them.

And again, exactly as the judicial murder of the Servant, and the

entire absence from his contemporaries of any idea that he suffered

a vicarious death, suit the case of Christ, the next stage in

the Servant's fate was not true of the Victim of Pilate and the

Pharisees. Christ's grave was not with the wicked. He suffered as

a felon without the walls on the common place of execution, but

friends received the body and gave it an honourable burial in a

friend's grave. Or take the clause, _with the rich in his death_.

It is doubtful whether the word is really _rich_, and ought not

to be a closer synonym of _wicked_ in the previous clause; but if

it be _rich_, it is simply another name for _the wicked_, who in

the East, in cases of miscarried justice, are so often coupled

with the evildoers. It cannot possibly denote such a man as Joseph

of Arimathea; nor, is it to be observed, do the Evangelists in

describing Christ's burial in that rich and pious man's tomb take any

notice of this line about the Suffering Servant.

But the absence of a complete incidental correspondence only renders

more striking the moral and spiritual correspondence, the essential

likeness between the Service set forth in ch. liii. and the work of

our Lord.

The speakers of ch. liii. set the Servant over against themselves,

and in solitariness of character and office. They count him alone

sinless where all they have sinned, and him alone the agent of

salvation and healing where their whole duty is to look on and

believe. But this is precisely the relation which Christ assumed

between Himself and the nation. He was on one side, all they on the

other. Against their strong effort to make Him the First among them,

it was, as we have said before, the constant aim of our Lord to

assert and to explain Himself as The Only.

And this Onlyness was to be realised in suffering. He said, _I must

suffer_; or again, _It behoves the Christ to suffer_. Suffering is

the experience in which men feel their oneness with their kind.

Christ, too, by suffering felt His oneness with men; but largely in

order to assert a singularity beyond. Through suffering He became

like unto men, but only that He might effect through suffering a

lonely and a singular service for them. For though He suffered in all

points as men did, yet He shared none of their universal feelings

about suffering. Pain never drew from Him either of those two voices

of guilt or of doubt. Pain never reminded Christ of His own past, nor

made Him question God.

Nor did He seek pain for any end in itself. There have been men who

have done so; fanatics who have gloried in pain; superstitious minds

that have fancied it to be meritorious; men whose wounds have been

as mouths to feed their pride, or to publish their fidelity to their

cause. But our Lord shrank from pain; if it had been possible He

would have willed not to bear it: _Father, save Me from this hour;

Father, if it be Thy will, let this cup pass from Me_. And when He

submitted and was under the agony, it was not in the feeling of it,

nor in the impression it made on others, nor in the manner in which

it drew men's hearts to Him, nor in the seal it set on the truth,

but in something beyond it, that He found His end and satisfaction.

Jesus _looked out of the travail of His soul and was satisfied_.

For, _firstly_, He knew His pain to be God's will for an end

outside Himself,--_I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how

am I straitened till it be accomplished: Father, save Me from this

hour, yet for this cause came I to this hour: Father, Thy will be

done_,--and all opportunities to escape as temptations.

And, _secondly_, like the Servant, Jesus _dealt prudently, had

insight_. The will of God in His suffering was no mystery to Him. He

understood from the first why He was to suffer.[236]

The reasons He gave were the same two and in the same order as are

given by our prophet for the sufferings of the Servant,--first,

that fidelity to God's truth could bring with it no other fate in

Israel;[237] then that His death was necessary for the sins of men, and

as men's ransom from sin. In giving the first of these reasons for His

death, Christ likened Himself to the prophets who had gone before Him

in Jerusalem; but in the second He matched Himself with no other, and

no other has ever been known in this to match himself with Jesus.

When men, then, stand up and tell us that Christ suffered only for

the sake of sympathy with His kind, or only for loyalty to the truth,

we have to tell them that this was not the whole of Christ's own

consciousness, this was not the whole of Christ's own explanation.

Suffering, which leads men into the sense of oneness with their

kind, only made Him, as it grew the nearer and weighed the heavier,

more emphatic upon His difference from other men. If He Himself, by

His pity, by His labours of healing (as Matthew points out), and by

all His intercourse with His people, penetrated more deeply into the

participation of human suffering, the very days which marked with

increasing force His sympathy with men, only laid more bare their

want of sympathy with Him, their incapacity to follow into that

unique conscience and understanding of a Passion, which He bore not

only _with_, but, as He said, _for_ His brethren. _Who believed that

which we heard, and to whom was the arm of the Lord revealed? As to

His generation, who reflected ... that for the transgression of my

people He was stricken?_ Again, while Christ indeed brought truth

to earth from heaven, and was for truth's sake condemned by men to

die, the burden which He found waiting Him on earth, man's sin, was

ever felt by Him to be a heavier burden and responsibility than the

delivery of the truth; and was in fact the thing, which, apart from

the things for which men might put Him to death, remained the reason

of His death in His own sight and in that of His Father. And He told

men why He felt their sin to be so heavy, because it kept them so

far from God, and this was His purpose, He said, in bearing it--that

He might bring us back to God; not primarily that He might relieve

us of the suffering which followed sin, though He did so relieve

some when He pardoned them, but that He might restore us to right

relations with God,--might, like the Servant, _make many righteous_.

Now it was Christ's confidence to be able to do this, which

distinguished Him from all others, upon whom has most heavily fallen

the conscience of their people's sins, and who have most keenly felt

the duty and commission from God of vicarious suffering. If, like

Moses, one sometimes dared for love's sake to offer his life for the

life of his people, none, under the conscience and pain of their

people's sins, ever expressed any consciousness of thereby making

their brethren righteous. On the contrary, even a Jeremiah, whose

experience, as we have seen, comes so wonderfully near the picture

of the Representative Sufferer in ch. liii.,--even a Jeremiah feels,

with the increase of his vicarious pain and conscience of guilt,

only the more perplexed, only the deeper in despair, only the less

able to understand God and the less hopeful to prevail with Him. But

Christ was sure of His power to remove men's sins, and was never more

emphatic about that power than when He most felt those sins' weight.

And _He has seen His seed_; He _has made many righteous_. We found it

to be uncertain whether the penitent speakers in ch. liii. understood

that the Servant by coming under the physical sufferings, which were

the consequences of their sins, relieved them of these consequences;

other passages in the prophecy would seem to imply, that, while the

Servant's sufferings were alone valid for righteousness, they did

not relieve the rest of the nation from suffering too. And so it

would be going beyond what God has given us to know, if we said that

God counts the sufferings on the Cross, which were endured for our

sins, as an equivalent for, or as sufficient to do away with, the

sufferings which these sins bring upon our minds, our bodies and

our social relations. Substitution of this kind is neither affirmed

by the penitents who speak in the fifty-third of Isaiah, nor is

it an invariable or essential part of the experience of those who

have found forgiveness through Christ. Every day penitents turn to

God through Christ, and are assured of forgiveness, who feel no

abatement in the rigour of the retribution of those laws of God,

which they have offended; like David after his forgiveness, they

have to continue to bear the consequences of their sins. But dark as

this side of experience undoubtedly is, only the more conspicuously

against the darkness does the other side of experience shine. By

_believing what they have heard_, reaching this belief through a

quicker conscience and a closer study of Christ's words about His

death, men, upon whom conscience by itself and sore punishment have

worked in vain, have been struck into penitence, have been assured of

pardon, have been brought into right relations with God, have felt

all the melting and the bracing effects of the knowledge that another

has suffered in their stead. Nay, let us consider this--the physical

consequences of their sins may have been left to be endured by such

men, for no other reason than in order to make their new relation

to God more sensible to them, while they feel those consequences no

longer with the feeling of penalty, but with that of chastisement

and discipline. Surely nothing could serve more strongly than this

to reveal the new conscience towards God that has been worked

within them. This inward _righteousness_ is made more plain by the

continuance of the physical and social consequences of their sins

than it would have been had these consequences been removed.

Thus Christ, like the Servant, became a force in the world,

inheriting in the course of Providence a _portion with the great_ and

_dividing the spoils_ of history _with the strong_. As has often been

said, His Cross is His Throne, and it is by His death that He has

ruled the ages. Yet we must not understand this as if His Power was

only or mostly shown in binding men, by gratitude for the salvation

He won them, to own Him for their King. His power has been even

more conspicuously proved in making His fashion of service the most

fruitful and the most honoured among men. If men have ceased to turn

from sickness with aversion or from weakness with contempt; if they

have learned to see in all pain some law of God, and in vicarious

suffering God's most holy service; if patience and self-sacrifice

have come in any way to be a habit of human life,--the power in this

change has been Christ. But because these two--to say, _Thy will be

done_, and to sacrifice self--are for us men the hardest and the most

unnatural of things to do, Jesus Christ, in making these a conscience

and a habit upon earth, has indeed shown Himself able to divide the

spoil with the strong, has indeed performed the very highest Service

for Man of which man can conceive.

FOOTNOTES:

[203] Thus Ewald supposed ch. lii. 13-liii. to be an elegy upon some

martyr in the persecutions under Manasseh. Professor Briggs, as we

have noticed before, claims to have discovered that all the passages

in the Servant are parts of a trimeter poem, older than the rest of

the prophecy, which he finds to be in hexameters. See p. 315.

[204] I may quote Dillmann's opinion on this last point:

"Andererseits sind nicht blos die Grundgedanken und auch einzelne

Wendungen wie 52, 13-15. 53, 7. 11. 12 durch 42, 1 ff. 49, 1 ff.

50, 3 ff. so wohl vorbereitet und so sehr in Übereinstimmung damit,

dass an eine fast unveränderte Herübernahme des Abschnitts aus

einer verlornen Schrift (_Ew._) nicht gedacht werden kann, sondern

derselbe doch wesentlich als Werk des Vrf. angesehen werden muss"

(_Commentary_ 4th ed., 1890, p. 453).

[205] This verb best gives the force of the Hebrew, which means both

_to deal prudently_ and to _prosper_ or succeed. See p. 346.

[206] Vulgate finely: "extolletur, sublimis erit et valde elatus."

[207] "The term rendered 'startle' has created unnecessary difficulty

to some writers. The word means to 'cause to spring or leap;' when

applied to fluids, to spirt or sprinkle them. The fluid spirted

is put in the _accusative_, and it is spirted _upon_ the person.

In the present passage the person, 'many nations,' _is_ in the

_accusative_, and it is simply treason against the Hebrew language

to render 'sprinkle.' The interpreter who will so translate will 'do

anything.'"--A. B. Davidson, _Expositor_, 2nd series, viii., 443. The

LXX. has θαυμασονται εθνη πολλα. The Peschitto and Vulgate render

_sprinkle_.

[208] And not _our report_, or _something we caused to be heard_, as

in the English Version,--מועהש is the passive participle of מעש, to

hear, and not of השמיע, to cause to hear. The speakers are now the

penitent people of God who had been preached to, and not the prophets

who had preached.

[209] _Tender shoot._ Masculine participle, meaning _sucker_, or

_suckling_. Dr. John Hunter (_Christian Treasury_) suggests succulent

plant, such as grow in the desert. But in Job viii. 16; xiv. 7; xv.

30, the feminine form is used of any tender shoot of a tree, and the

feminine plural in Ezek. xvii. 22 of the same. The LXX. read παιδιον,

_infant_. _Before Him_, i.e. Jehovah. Cheyne, following Ewald, reads

_before us_. So Giesebrecht.

[210] _Took for his burden._ _Loaded_ himself with them. The same

grievous word which God uses of Himself in ch. xlvi. See p. 180.

[211] There is more than _afflicted_ (Authorised Version) in this

word. There is the sense of being _humbled_, punished for his own

sake.

[212] The possessive pronoun has been put to the end of the lines,

where it stands in the original, producing a greater emphasis and

even a sense of rhyme.

[213] לנוכ Kūllanū so rendered instead of "all of us," in order to

be assonant with the close of the verse, as the original is, which

closes with kullam.

[214] That is, by a form of law that was tyranny, a judicial crime.

[215] Cut off violently, prematurely, unnaturally.

[216] See p. 368.

[217] The verbs, hitherto in the perfect in this verse, now change

to the imperfect; a sign that they express the purpose of God. _Cf._

Dillmann, _in loco_.

[218] _From the travail of his soul shall he see, and by his

knowledge be satisfied._ Taking דעתוב with שבעי instead of with

יצדיק. This reading suggested itself to me some years ago. Since

then I have found it only in Prof. Briggs's translation, _Messianic

Prophecy_, p. 359. It is supported by the frequent parallel in which

we find _seeing_ and _knowing_ in Hebrew.

[219] Some translate _many_, _i.e._, the many to whom he brings

righteousness, as if he were a victor with a great host behind him.

[220] Jer. xxiii. 5.

[221] Hitzig (among others) held that it is the prophets who are the

speakers of ver. 1, and that the voices of the penitent people come in

only with ver. 2 or ver. 3. In that case מועתינוש would mean _what we

heard from God_ (מועהש is elsewhere used for the prophetic message) and

delivered to the people. This interpretation multiplies the dramatis

personæ, but does not materially alter the meaning, of the prophecy.

It merely changes part of the penitent people's self-reproach into a

reproach cast on them by their prophets. But there is no real reason

for introducing the prophets as the speakers of ver. 1.

[222] For the argument that it is Israel who speaks here, see

Hoffmann (_Schriftbeweis_), who was converted from the other view,

and Dillmann, 4th ed., _in loco_. A very ingenious attempt has been

made by Giesebrecht (_Beiträge zur Jesaia Kritik_, 1890, p. 146 ff.),

in favour of the interpretation that the heathen are the speakers.

His reasons are these: 1. It is the heathen who are spoken of in

lii. 13-15, and a change to Israel would be too sudden. Answer: The

heathen are not exclusively spoken of in lii. 13-15; but if they

were a change in the next verse to Israel would not be more rapid

than some already made by the prophet. 2. The words in liii. 1 suit

the heathen. They have already received the news of the exaltation

of the Servant, which in lii. 15 was promised them. This is the

שמועתינו, that is _news we have just heard_. האמין is a pluperfect

of the subjunctive mood: _Who could_ or who _would have believed_

this news of the exaltation _we have_ just _heard, and the arm of

Jehovah to whom was it revealed_! _i.e._, it was revealed to nobody.

Answer: besides the precariousness of taking האמין as a pluperfect

subjunctive, this interpretation is opposed to the general effort of

the prophecy, which is to expose unbelief before the exaltation, not

after it. 3. To get rid of the argument--that, while the speakers

own that the Servant bears their sins, it is said the Servant was

stricken for the sins of _my people_, and that therefore the speakers

must be the same as "my people":--Giesebrecht would utterly alter the

reading of ver. 8 from למו ננע עמו מפשע, _for the transgression of

my people was the stroke to him_ to יְנֻנַּע מִפִּשְׁעָם, _for their

stroke was he smitten_.

[223] נשׂא and סבל. In speaking of his country's woes, Jeremiah (x. 19)

says: _This is sickness_, or _my sickness, and I must bear it_, חלי זה

ואשׂאני. Ezekiel (iv. 4) is commanded to lie on his side, and in that

symbolic position to _bear the iniquity of His people_, עונם תשא. One

of the Lamentations (v. 7) complains: _Our fathers have sinned and are

not, and we bear_ (סבל) _their iniquities._ In these cases the meaning

of both נשא and סבל is simply to feel the weight of, be involved in.

The verbs do not convey the sense of _carrying off_ or _expiating_.

But still it had been said of the Servant that in his suffering he

would be practical and prosper; so that when we now hear that he bears

his people's sins, we are ready to understand that he does not do

this for the mere sake of sharing them, but for a practical purpose,

which, of course, can only be their removal. There is, therefore, no

need to quarrel with the interpretation of ver. 4, that the Servant

_carries away_ the suffering with which he is laden. Matthew makes

this interpretation (viii. 17) in speaking of Christ's healing. But

it is a very interesting fact, and not without light upon the free

and plastic way in which the New Testament quotes from the Old, that

Matthew has ignored the original and literal meaning of the quotation,

which is that the Servant shared the sicknesses of the people: a sense

impossible in the case for which the Evangelist uses the words.

[224] But they do not tell us, whether they were totally exempted

from suffering by the Servant's pains, or whether they also suffered

with him the consequence of their misdeeds. For that question is not

now present to their minds. Whether they also suffer or not (and

other chapters in the prophecy emphasize the people's bearing of the

consequences of their misdeeds), they know that it was not their own,

but the Servant's suffering, which was alone the factor in their

redemption.

[225] _Mystery of Pain_, by James Hinton, p. 27.

[226] Psalm cvi. 23; _cf._ also ver. 32, where the other side of the

solidarity between Moses and the people comes out. _They angered Him

also at the waters of Strife, so that it went ill with Moses for

their sakes ... he spake unadvisedly with his lips._

[227] See p. 352.

[228] Isa. xlvi. 3, 4. See pp. 179, 180 of this volume.

[229] Ch. xlii. 25.

[230] If we remember this we shall also feel more reason than ever

against perceiving the Nation, or any aspect of the Nation, in the

Sufferer of ch. liii. For he suffers, as the individual suffers,

sickness and legal wrong. Tyrants do not put whole nations through a

form of law and judgement. Of course, it is open to those, who hold

that the Servant is still an aspect of the Nation, to reply, that

all this is simply evidence of how far the prophet has pushed his

personification. A whole nation has been called "The Sick Man" even

in our prosaic days. But see pp. 268-76.

[231] Jer. li. 4.

[232] xl. 39; xlii. 13; xliv. 29; xlvi. 20.

[233] 1 Sam. vi. 13.

[234] _Cf._ Wellhausen's _Prolegomena_, ch. ii., 2.

[235] There is no exegete but agrees to this. There may be

differences of opinion about the syntax,--whether the verse should

run, _though Thou makest his soul guilt_, or _a guilt-offering_;

or, _though his soul make a guilt-offering_; or (reading ישים for

תשים), _while he makes his soul a guilt-offering_,--but all agree to

the fact that by himself or by God the Servant's life is offered an

expiation for sin, a satisfaction to the law of God.

[236] _Cf._ Baldensperger (_Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu_, p. 119 ff.)

on the genuineness of Christ's predictions and explanations of His

sufferings.

[237] _Cf._ p. 330.

BOOK IV.

_THE RESTORATION._

BOOK IV.

We have now reached the summit of our prophecy. It has been a long,

steep ascent, and we have had very much to seek out on the way, and

to extricate and solve and load ourselves with. But although a long

extent of the prophecy, if we measure it by chapters, still lies

before us, the end is in sight; every difficulty has been surmounted

which kept us from seeing how we were to get to it, and the rest of

the way may be said to be down-hill.

To drop the figure--the Servant, his vicarious suffering and

atonement for the sins of the people, form for our prophet the

solution of the spiritual problem of the nation's restoration, and

what he has now to do is but to fill in the details of this.

We saw that the problem of Israel's deliverance from Exile, their

Return, and their Restoration to their position in their own land

as the Chief Servant of God to humanity, was really a double

problem--political and spiritual. The solution of the political side

of it was Cyrus. As soon as the prophet had been able to make it

certain that Cyrus was moving down upon Babylon, with a commission

from God to take the city, and irresistible in the power with which

Jehovah had invested him, the political difficulties in the way of

Israel's Return were as good as removed; and so the prophet gave,

in the end of ch. xlviii., his great call to his countrymen to

depart. But all through chs. xl.-xlviii., while addressing himself

to the solution of the political problems of Israel's deliverance,

the prophet had given hints that there were moral and spiritual

difficulties as well. In spite of their punishment for more than

half a century, the mass of the people were not worthy of a return.

Many were idolaters; many were worldly; the orthodox had their own

wrong views of how salvation should come (xlv. 9 ff.); the pious

were without either light or faith (l. 10). The nation, in short,

had not that inward _righteousness_, which could alone justify God

in vindicating them before the world, in establishing their outward

righteousness, their salvation and reinstatement in their lofty

place and calling as His people. These moral difficulties come upon

the prophet with greater force after he has, with the close of ch.

xlviii., finished his solution of the political ones. To these moral

difficulties he addresses himself in xlix.-liii., and the Servant and

his Service are his solution of them:--the Servant as a Prophet and a

Covenant of the People in ch. xlix. and in ch. l. 4 ff.; the Servant

as an example to the people, ch. l. ff.; and finally the Servant as a

full expiation for the people's sins in ch. lii. 13-liii. It is the

Servant who is to _raise up the land, and to bring back the heirs to

the desolate heritages_, and rouse the Israel who are not willing

to leave Babylon, _saying to the bound, Go forth; and to them that

sit in darkness, Show yourselves_ (xlix. 8, 9). It is he who is _to

sustain the weary_ and to comfort the pious in Israel, who, though

pious, have no light as they walk on their way back (l. 4, 10). It

is the Servant finally who is to achieve the main problem of all

and _make many righteous_ (liii. 11). The hope of restoration, the

certainty of the people's redemption, the certainty of the rebuilding

of Jerusalem, the certainty of the growth of the people to a great

multitude, are, therefore, all woven by the prophet through and

through with his studies of the Servant's work in xlix., l., and

lii. 13-liii.,--woven so closely and so naturally that, as we have

already seen (pp. 313 f., 336 ff.), we cannot take any part of chs.

xlix.-liii. and say that it is of different authorship from the

rest. Thus in ch. xlix. we have the road to Jerusalem pictured in

vv. 9_b_-13, immediately upon the back of the Servant's call to go

forth in ver. 9_a_. We have then the assurance of Zion being rebuilt

and thronged by her children in vv. 14-23, and another affirmation

of the certainty of redemption in vv. 24-26; In l. 1-3 this is

repeated. In li.-lii. 12 the petty people is assured that it shall

grow innumerable again; new affirmations are made of its ransom and

return, ending with the beautiful prospect of the feet of the heralds

of deliverance on the mountains of Judah (lii. 7_b_) and a renewed

call to leave Babylon (vv. 11, 12). We shall treat all these passages

in our Twenty-First Chapter.

And as they started naturally from the Servant's work in xlix. 1-9_a_

and his example in l. 4-11, so upon his final and crowning work in

ch. liii. there follow as naturally ch. liv. (the prospect of _the

seed_ that liii. 10 promised he should see), and ch. lv. (a new call

to come forth). These two, with the little pre-exilic prophecy, ch.

lvi. 1-8, we shall treat in our Twenty-Second Chapter.

Then come the series of difficult small prophecies with pre-exilic

traces in them, from lvi. 9-lix. They will occupy our Twenty-Third

Chapter. In ch. lx. Zion is at last not only in sight, but radiant

in the rising of her new day of glory. In chs. lxi. and lxii. the

prophet, having reached Zion, "looks back," as Dillmann well remarks,

"upon what has become his task, and in connection with that makes

clear once more the high goal of all his working and striving." In

lxiii. 1-6 the Divine Deliverer is hailed. We shall take lx.-lxiii. 6

together in our Twenty-Fourth Chapter.

Ch. lxiii. 7-lxiv. is an Intercessory Prayer for the restoration of

_all_ Israel. It is answered in ch. lxv., and the lesson of this

answer, that Israel must be judged, and that all cannot be saved, is

enforced in ch. lxvi. Chs. lxiii. 7-lxvi. will therefore form our

Twenty-Fifth and closing Chapter.

Thus our course is clear, and we can overtake it rapidly. It is, to

a large extent, a series of spectacles, interrupted by exhortations

upon duty; things, in fact, to see and to hear, not to argue about.

There are few great doctrinal questions, except what we have already

sufficiently discussed; our study, for instance, of the term

righteousness, we shall find has covered for us a large part of the

ground in advance. And the only difficult literary question is that

of the pre-exilic and post-exilic pieces, which are alleged to form

so large a part of chs. lvi.-lix. and lxiii.-lxvi.

CHAPTER XXI.

_DOUBTS IN THE WAY._

ISAIAH xlix.-lii. 12.

Chapters xlix.-liii. are, as we have seen, a series of more or less

closely joined passages, in which the prophet, having already made

the political redemption of Israel certain through Cyrus, and having

dismissed Cyrus from his thoughts, addresses himself to various

difficulties in the way of restoration, chiefly moral and spiritual,

and rising from Israel's own feelings and character; exhorts the people

in face of them by Jehovah's faithfulness and power; but finds the

chief solution of them in the Servant and his prophetic and expiatory

work. We have already studied such of these passages as present

the Servant to us, and we now take up those others, which meet the

doubts and difficulties in the way of restoration by means of general

considerations drawn from God's character and power. Let it be noticed

that, with one exception (ch. l. 11),[238] these passages are meant for

earnest and pious minds in Israel,--for those Israelites, whose desires

are towards Zion, but chill and heavy with doubts.

The form and the terms of these passages are in harmony with their

purpose. They are a series of short, high-pitched exhortations,

apostrophes and lyrics. One, ch. lii. 9-12, calls upon the arm

of Jehovah, but all the rest address Zion,--that is, the ideal

people in the person of their mother, with whom they ever so fondly

identified themselves; or _Zion's children_; or _them that follow

righteousness_, or ye _that know righteousness_; or _my people_, _my

nation_; or again Zion herself. This personification of the people

under the name of their city, and under the aspect of a woman, whose

children are the individual members of the people, will be before us

till the end of our prophecy. It is, of course, a personification

of Israel, which is complementary to Israel's other personification

under the name of the Servant. The Servant is Israel active,

comforting, serving his own members and the nations; Zion, the

Mother-City, is Israel passive, to be comforted, to be served by her

own sons and by the kings of the peoples.

We may divide the passages into two groups. _First_, the songs

of return, which rise out of the picture of the Servant and his

redemption of the people in ch. xlix. 9_b_, with the long promise

and exhortation to Zion and her children, that lasts till the second

picture of the Servant in ch. lii. 4; and _second_, the short pieces

which lie between the second picture of the Servant and the third, or

from the beginning of ch. li. to ch. lii. 12.

I.

In ch. xlix. 9_b_ God's promise of the return of the redeemed

proceeds naturally from that of their ransom by the Servant. It is

hailed by a song in ver. 13, and the rest of the section is the

answer to three doubts, which, like sobs, interrupt the music. But

the prophecy, stooping, as it were, to kiss the trembling lips

through which these doubts break, immediately resumes its high flight

of comfort and promise. Two of these doubts are: ver. 14, _But Zion

hath said, Jehovah hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me_;

and ver. 24, _Shall the prey be taken from the mighty or the captives

of the terrible be delivered_? The third is implied in ch. l. 1.

The promise of return is as follows: _On roads shall they feed, and

on all bare heights shall be their pasture. They shall not hunger

nor thirst, nor shall the mirage nor the sun smite them: for He that

yearneth over them shall lead them, even by springs of water shall

He guide them. And I will set all My mountains for a way, and My

high ways shall be exalted. Lo, these shall come from far: and, lo,

these from the North and from the West, and these from the land of

Sinim._[239] _Sing forth, O heavens; and be glad, O earth; let the

mountains break forth into singing: for Jehovah hath comforted His

people, and over His afflicted He yearneth._

Now, do not let us imagine that this is the promise of a merely

material miracle. It is the greater glory of a purely spiritual one, as

the prophet indicates in describing its cause in the words, _because

He that yearneth over them shall lead them_. The desert is not to

abate its immemorial rigours; in itself the way shall still be as

hard as when the discredited and heart-broken exiles were driven down

it from home to servitude. But their hearts are now changed, and that

shall change the road. The new faith, which has made the difference,

is a very simple one, that God is Power and that God is Love. Notice

the possessive pronouns used by God, and mark what they put into His

possession: two kinds of things,--powerful things, _I will make all My

mountains a way_; and sorrowful things, _Jehovah hath comforted His

people, and will have compassion on His afflicted_.[240] If we will

steadfastly believe that everything in the world which is in pain, and

everything which has power, is God's, and shall be used by Him, the

one for the sake of the other, this shall surely change the way to our

feet, and all the world around to our eyes.

1. Only it is so impossible to believe it when one looks at real

fact; and however far and swiftly faith and hope may carry us for a

time, we always come to ground again and face to face with fact. The

prophet's imagination speeding along that green and lifted highway of

the Lord lights suddenly upon the end of it,--the still dismantled

and desolate city. Fifty years Zion's altar fires have been cold and

her walls in ruin. Fifty years she has been bereaved of her children

and left alone. The prophet hears the winds blow mournfully through

her fact's chill answer to faith. _But Zion said, Forsaken me hath

Jehovah, and my Lord hath forgotten me!_ Now let us remember, that

our prophet has Zion before him in the figure of a mother, and we

shall feel the force of God's reply. It is to a mother's heart God

appeals. _Doth a woman forget her sucking child so as not to yearn

over the son of her womb? yea, such may forget, but I will not forget

thee_, desolate mother that thou art![241] Thy life is not what thou

art in outward show and feeling, but what thou art in My love and

in My sight. _Lo, upon both palms have I graven thee; thy walls are

before Me continually._ The custom, which to some extent prevails in

all nations, of puncturing or tattooing upon the skin a dear name one

wishes to keep in mind, is followed in the East chiefly for religious

purposes, and men engrave the name of God or some holy text upon the

hand or arm for a memorial or as a mark of consecration. It is this

fashion which God attributes to Himself. Having measured His love

by the love of a mother, He gives this second human pledge for His

memory and devotion. But again He exceeds the human habit; for it is

not only the name of Zion which is engraved on His hands, but her

picture. And it is not her picture, as she lies in her present ruin

and solitariness, but her restored and perfect state: _thy walls are

continually before Me_. For this is faith's answer to all the ruin

and haggard contradiction of outward fact. Reality is not what we

see: reality is what God sees. What a thing is in His sight and to

His purpose, that it really is, and that it shall ultimately appear

to men's eyes. To make us believe this is the greatest service the

Divine can do for the human. It was the service Christ was always

doing, and nothing showed His divinity more. He took us men and He

called us, unworthy as we were, His brethren, the sons of God. He

took such an one as Simon, shifting and unstable, a quicksand of a

man, and He said, _On this rock I will build My Church_. A man's

reality is not what he is in his own feelings, or what he is to the

world's eyes; but what he is to God's love, to God's yearning, and in

God's plan. If he believe that, so in the end shall he feel it, so in

the end shall he show it to the eyes of the world.

Upon those great thoughts, that God's are all strong things and all

weak things, and that the real and the certain in life is His will,

the prophecy breaks into a vision of multitudes in motion. There is

a great stirring and hastening, crowds gather up through the verses,

the land is lifted and thronged. _Lift up thine eyes round about,

and behold: all of them gather together, they come unto thee. As I

live, saith Jehovah, thou shalt surely clothe thyself with them all

as with an ornament, and gird thyself with them, like a bride. For

as for thy waste places and thy desolate ones and thy devastated

land--yea, thou wilt now be too strait for the inhabitants, and far

off shall be they that devoured thee. Again shall they speak in thine

ears,--the children of thy bereavement_ (that is, those children

who have been born away from Zion during her solitude), _Too strait

for me is the place, make me room that I may dwell. And thou shalt

say in thine heart, Who hath borne me these_,--not begotten, as our

English version renders, because the question with Zion was not who

was the father of the children, but who, in her own barrenness, could

possibly be the mother,--_Who hath borne me these, seeing I was_

first _bereft of my children, and_ since then have been _barren, an

exile and a castaway! And these, who hath brought them up! Lo, I was

left by myself. These,--whence are they!_ Our English version, which

has blundered in the preceding verses, requires no correction in the

following; and the first great Doubt in the Way being now answered,

for _they that wait on the Lord shall not be ashamed_, we pass to

the second, in ver. 24.

2. _Can the prey be taken from the mighty, or the captives of the

tyrant_[242] _be delivered?_ Even though God be full of love and

thought for Zion, will these tyrants give up her children? _Yea, thus

saith Jehovah, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken, and

the prey of the tyrant be delivered; and with him that quarreleth

with thee will I quarrel, and thy children will I save. And I will

make thine oppressors to eat their own flesh, and as with new wine

with their blood shall they be drunken, that all flesh may know that

I am Jehovah thy Saviour, and thy Redeemer the Mighty One of Jacob._

3. But now a third Doubt in the Way seems to have risen. Unlike the two

others, it is not directly stated, but we may gather its substance from

the reply which Jehovah makes to it (l. 1). _Thus saith Jehovah, What

is this bill of divorce of your mother whom I have sent away, or which

of My creditors is it to whom I have sold you?_ The form, in which

this challenge is put, assumes that the Israelites themselves had been

thinking of Jehovah's dismissal of Israel as an irrevocable divorce and

a bankrupt sale into slavery.[243]

"What now is this letter of divorce,--this that you are saying I have

given your mother? You say that I have sold you as a bankrupt father

sells his children,--to which then of my creditors is it that I have

sold you?"

The most characteristic effect of sin is that it is always reminding

men of law. Whether the moral habit of it be upon them or they

are entangled in its material consequences, sin breeds in men the

conscience of inexorable, irrevocable law. Its effect is not only

practical, but intellectual. Sin not only robs a man of the freedom

of his own will, but it takes from him the power to think of freedom

in others, and it does not stop till it paralyses his belief in the

freedom of God. He, who knows himself as the creature of unchangeable

habits or as the victim of pitiless laws, cannot help imputing his

own experience to what is beyond him, till all life seems strictly

lawbound, the idea of a free agent anywhere an impossibility, and God

but a part of the necessity which rules the universe.

Two kinds of generations of men have most tended to be necessitarian

in their philosophy,--the generations which have given themselves

over to do evil, and the generations whose political experience

or whose science has impressed them with the inevitable physical

results of sin. If belief in a Divine Redeemer, able to deliver man's

nature from the guilt and the curse of sin, is growing weak among

us to-day, this is largely due to the fact that our moral and our

physical sciences have been proving to us what creatures of law we

are, and disclosing, especially in the study of disease and insanity,

how inevitably suffering follows sin. God Himself has been so much

revealed to us as law, that as a generation we find it hard to

believe that He ever acts in any fashion that resembles the reversal

of a law, or ever works any swift, sudden deed of salvation.

Now the generation of the Exile was a generation, to whom God

had revealed Himself as law. They were a generation of convicts.

They had owned the justice of the sentence which had banished and

enslaved them; they had experienced how inexorably God's processes

of judgement sweep down the ages; for fifty years they had been

feeling the inevitable consequences of sin. The conscience of Law,

which this experience was bound to create in them, grew ever more

strong, till at last it absorbed even the hope of redemption, and

the God, who enforced the Law, Himself seemed to be forced by it.

To express this sense of law these earnest Israelites--for though

in error they were in earnest--went to the only kind of law, with

which they were familiar, and borrowed from it two of its forms,

which were not only suggested to them by the relations in which the

nation and the nation's sons respectively stood to Jehovah, as wife

and as children, but admirably illustrated the ideas they wished to

express. There was, first, the form of divorce, so expressive of the

ideas of absoluteness, deliberateness and finality;--of absoluteness,

for throughout the East power of divorce rests entirely with the

husband; of deliberateness, for in order to prevent hasty divorce

the Hebrew law insisted that the husband must make a bill or writing

of divorce instead of only speaking dismissal; and of finality, for

such a writing, in contrast to the spoken dismissal, set the divorce

beyond recall. The other form, which the doubters borrowed from their

law, was one, which, while it also illustrated the irrevocableness of

the act, emphasized the helplessness of the agent,--the act of the

father, who put his children away, not as the husband put his wife in

his anger, but in his necessity, selling them to pay his debts and

because he was bankrupt.

On such doubts God turns with their own language. "I have indeed put

your mother away, but _where is the bill_ that makes her divorce

final, beyond recall? You indeed were sold, but was it because I was

bankrupt? _To which_, then, of _My creditors_ (note the scorn of the

plural) _was it that I sold you? Nay, by means of your iniquities

did you sell yourselves, and by means of your transgressions were

you put away._ But I stand here ready as ever to save, I alone. If

there is any difficulty about your restoration it lies in this, that

I am alone, with no response or assistance from men. _Why when I came

was there no man? when I called was there none to answer? Is My hand

shortened at all that it cannot redeem? or is there in it no power

to deliver?_" And so we come back to the truth, which this prophecy

so often presents to us, that behind all things there is a personal

initiative and urgency of infinite power, which moves freely of its

own compassion and force, which is hindered by no laws from its own

ends, and needs no man's co-operation to effect its purposes. The

rest of the Lord's answer to His people's fear, that He is bound

by an inexorable law, is simply an appeal to His wealth of force.

This omnipotence of God is our prophet's constant solution for the

problems which arise, and he expresses it here in his favourite

figures of physical changes and convulsions of nature. _Lo, with

My rebuke I dry up the sea, I make rivers a wilderness: their fish

stinketh, because there is no water, and dieth for thirst. I clothe

the heavens with blackness, and sackcloth I set for their covering._

The argument seems to be: if God can work those sudden revolutions

in the physical world, those apparent interruptions of law in that

sphere, surely you can believe Him capable of creating sudden

revolutions also in the sphere of history, and reversing those laws

and processes, which you feel to be unalterable. It is an argument

from the physical to the moral world, in our prophet's own analogical

style, and like those we found in ch. xl.

II. li.-lii. 12.

Passing over the passage on the Servant, ch. l. 4-11, we reach a

second series of exhortations in face of Doubts in the Way of the

Return. The first of this new series is li. 1-3.

Their doubts having been answered with regard to God's mindfulness of

them and His power to save them, the loyal Israelites fall back to

doubt themselves. They see with dismay how few are ready to achieve

the freedom that God has assured, and upon how small and insignificant

a group of individuals the future of the nation depends. But their

disappointment is not made by them an excuse to desert the purpose

of Jehovah: their fewness makes them the more faithful, and the

defection of their countrymen drives them the closer to their God.

Therefore, God speaks to them kindly, and answers their last sad doubt.

_Hearken unto Me, ye that follow righteousness, that seek Jehovah._

_Righteousness_ here might be taken in its inward sense of conformity

to law, personal rightness of character; and so taken it would well

fall in with the rest of the passage. Those addressed would then be

such in Israel, as in face of hopeless prospects applied themselves

to virtue and religion. But _righteousness_ here is more probably

used in the outward sense, which we have found prevalent in "Second

Isaiah," of vindication and victory; the "coming right" of God's people

and God's cause in the world, their justification and triumph in

history.[244] They who are addressed will then be they who, in spite

of their fewness, believe in this triumph, _follow it_, make it their

goal and their aim, and _seek Jehovah_, knowing that He can bring it to

pass. And because, in spite of their doubts, they are still earnest,

and though faint are yet pursuing, God speaks to comfort them about

their fewness. Their present state may be very small and unpromising,

but let them look back upon the much more unpromising character of

their origin: _look unto the rock whence ye were hewn, and the hole

of the pit whence ye were digged_. To-day you may be a mere handful,

ridiculous in the light of the destiny you are called to achieve, but

remember you were once but one man: _look unto Abraham your father, and

to Sarah who bare you: for as one I called him and blessed him, that I

might make of him many_.

When we are weary and hopeless it is best to sit down and remember.

Is the future dark: let us look back and see the gathering and

impetus of the past! We can follow the luminous track, the

unmistakable increase and progress, but the most inspiring sight of

all is what God makes of the individual heart; how a man's heart

is always His beginning, the fountain of the future, the origin of

nations. Lift up your hearts, ye few and feeble; your father was but

one when I called him, and I made him many!

Having thus assured His loyal remnant of the restoration of Zion, in

spite of their fewness, Jehovah in the next few verses (4-8) extends

the prospect of His glory to the world: _Revelation shall go forth from

Me, and I will make My Law to light on the nations._ Revelation and Law

between them summarise His will. As He identified them both with the

Servant's work (ch. xl. 11), so here He tells the loyal in Israel, who

were in one aspect His Servant, that they shall surely come to pass;

and in the next little oracle, vv. 7, 8, He exhorts them to do that in

which the Servant has been set forth as an example: _fear ye not the

reproach of men, neither be dismayed at their revilings. For like a

garment the moth shall eat them up, and like wool shall the worm devour

them._ It is a response in almost the same words to the Servant's

profession of confidence in God in ch. l. 7-9. By some it is used as

an argument to show that the Servant and the godly remnant are to our

prophet still virtually one and the same; but we have already seen (ch.

l. 10) the godfearing addressed as distinct from the Servant, and can

only understand here that they are once more exhorted to take him as

their example. But if the likeness of the passage on the Servant to

this passage on the suffering Remnant does not prove that Remnant and

Servant are the same, it is certainly an indication that both passages,

so far from being pieced together out of different poems, are most

probably due to the same author and were produced originally in the

same current of thought.

When all Doubts in the Way have now been removed, what can remain but

a great impatience to achieve at once the near salvation? To this

impatience the loosened hearts give voice in vv. 9-11: _Awake, awake,

put on strength, Arm of Jehovah; awake as in the days of old, ages far

past!_ Not in vain have Israel been called to look back to the rock

whence they were hewn and the hole of the pit whence they were digged.

Looking back, they see the ancient deliverance manifest: _Art thou not

it that hewed Rahab in pieces, that pierced_ the _Dragon! Art thou

not it that dried up the sea, waters of the great flood; that did set

the hollows of the sea a way for the passage of the redeemed._ Then

there breaks forth the March of the Return, which we heard already

in the end of ch. xxxv.,[245] and to His people's impatience Jehovah

responds in vv. 9-16 in strains similar to those of ch. xl. The last

verse of this reply is notable for the enormous extension which it

gives to the purpose of Jehovah in endowing Israel as His prophet,--an

extension to no less than the renewal of the universe,--_in order to

plant the heavens and found the earth_; though the reply emphatically

concludes with the restoration of Israel, as if this were the cardinal

moment in the universal regeneration,--_and to say to Zion, My people

art thou_. The close conjunction, into which this verse brings words

already applied to Israel as the Servant and words which describe

Israel as Zion, is another of the many proofs we are discovering of the

impossibility of breaking up "Second Isaiah" into poems, the respective

subjects of which are one or other of these two personifications of the

nation.[246]

But the desire of the prophet speeds on before the returning exiles to

the still prostrate and desolate city. He sees her as she fell, the

day the Lord made her drunken with the cup of His wrath. With urgent

passion he bids her awake, seeking to rouse her now by the horrid tale

of her ruin, and now by his exultation in the vengeance the Lord is

preparing for His enemies (li. 17-23). In a second strophe he addresses

her in conscious contrast to his taunt-song against Babel. Babel was to

sit throneless and stripped of her splendour in the dust; but Zion is

to shake off the dust, rise, sit on her throne and assume her majesty.

For God hath redeemed His people. He could not tolerate longer _the

exulting of their tyrants_, the _blasphemy of His name_ (lii. 1-6). All

through these two strophes the strength of the passion, the intolerance

of further captivity, the fierceness of the exultation of vengeance,

are very remarkable.

But from the ruin of his city, which has so stirred and made

turbulent his passion, the prophet lifts his hot eyes to the dear

hills that encircle her; and peace takes the music from vengeance.

Often has Jerusalem seen rising across that high margin the spears

and banners of her destroyers. But now the lofty skyline is the

lighting place of hope. Fit threshold for so Divine an arrival, it

lifts against heaven, dilated and beautiful, the herald of the Lord's

peace, the publisher of salvation.

_How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth

good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings of

good, that publisheth salvation! Hark thy watchmen! they lift up the

voice, together they break into singing; yea, eye to eye do they see

when Jehovah returneth to Zion._

The last verse is a picture of the thronging of the city of the

prophets by the prophets again--so close, that they shall look each

other in the face. For this is the sense of the Hebrew _to see eye

in eye_, and not that meaning of reconciliation and agreement which

the phrase has come to have in colloquial English. The Exile had

scattered the prophets and driven them into hiding. They had been

only voices to one another, like Jeremiah and Ezekiel with the desert

between the two of them, or like our own prophet, anonymous and

unseen. But upon the old gathering-ground, the narrow but the free

and open platform of Jerusalem's public life, they should see each

other face to face, they should again be named and known. _Break out,

sing together, ye wastes of Jerusalem: for Jehovah has comforted His

people, has redeemed Jerusalem. Bared has Jehovah His holy arm to

the eyes of all the nations, and see shall all ends of the earth the

salvation of our God._

Thus the prophet, after finishing his long argument and dispelling

the doubts that still lingered at its close, returns to the first

high notes and the first dear subject with which he opened in ch. xl.

In face of so open a way, so unclouded a prospect, nothing remains

but to repeat, and this time with greater strength than before, the

call to leave Babylon:

_Draw off, draw off, come forth from there, touch not the unclean;

Come forth from her midst; be ye clean that do bear the vessels of

Jehovah.

Nay, neither with haste shall ye forth, nor in flight shall ye go,

For Jehovah goeth before thee, and Israel's God is thy rearward._

FOOTNOTES:

[238] See p. 334.

[239] The question whether this is the land of China is still an

open one. The possibility of intercourse between China and Babylon

is more than proved. But that there were Jews in China by this time

(though they seem to have found their way there by the beginning of

the Christian era) is extremely unlikely. Moreover, the possibility

of such a name as Sinim for the inhabitants of China at that date has

not been proved. No other claimants for the name, however, have made

good their case. But we need not enter further into the question. The

whole matter is fully discussed in Canon Cheyne's excursus, and by

him and Terrien de Lacouperie in the _Babylonian and Oriental Record_

for 1886-87. See especially the number for September 1887.

[240] His _humbled_, _His poor_ in the exilic sense of the word. See

_Isaiah i.-xxxix._, pp. 432 ff.

[241] On the "Motherhood of God" cf. _Isaiah i.-xxxix._, p. 245 ff.

[242] For צדיק, the _righteous_ or _just_, which is in the text, the

Syr., Vulg., Ewald, and others read עריץ, as in the following verse,

_terrible_ or _terribly strong_. Dillmann, however (5th ed., 1890,

p. 438), retains צדיק takes the terms _mighty_ and _just_ as used of

God, and reads the question, not as a question of despair uttered by

the people, but as a triumphant challenge of the prophet or of God

Himself. He would then make the next verse run thus: _Nay, for the

captives of the mighty may be taken, and the prey of the delivered,

but with him who strives with thee I will strive._

[243] The English version, _Where is the bill_, is incorrect. The

phrase is the same as in lxvi. ver. 1, _What is this house that ye

build for Me? what is this place for My rest?_ It implies a house

already built; and so in the text above _What is this bill of

divorce_ implies one already thought of by the minds of the persons

addressed by the question.

[244] _Cf._ p. 221. Dillmann's view that _righteousness_ means here

personal character is contradicted by the whole context, which

makes it plain that it is something external, the realisation of

which those addressed are doubting. What troubles them is not that

they are personally unrighteous, but that they are so few and

insignificant. And what God promises them in answer is something

external, the establishment of Zion. _Cf._ also the external meaning

of _righteousness_ in vv. 5, 6.

[245] _Isaiah. i.-xxxix._, p. 441.

[246] _Cf._ p. 315.

CHAPTER XXII.

_ON THE EVE OF RETURN._

ISAIAH liv.-lvi. 8.

One of the difficult problems of our prophecy is the relation and

grouping of chs. liv.-lix. It is among them that the unity of "Second

Isaiah," which up to this point we have seen no reason to doubt,

gives way. Ch. lvi. 9-lvii. is evidently pre-exilic, and so is ch.

lix. But in chs. liv., lv., and lvi. 1-8 we have three addresses,

evidently dating from the Eve of the Return. We shall, therefore,

treat them together.

I. THE BRIDE THE CITY (ch. liv.).

We have already seen why there is no reason for the theory that ch.

liv. may have followed immediately on ch. lii. 12.[247] And from Calvin

to Ewald and Dillmann, critics have all felt a close connection between

ch. lii. 13-liii. and ch. liv. "After having spoken of the death of

Christ," says Calvin, "the prophet passes on with good reason to the

Church: that we may feel more deeply in ourselves what is the value and

efficacy of His death." Similar in substance, if not in language, is

the opinion of the latest critics, who understand that in ch. liv. the

prophet intends to picture that full redemption which the Servant's

work, culminating in ch. liii., could alone effect. Two keywords of

ch. liii. had been _a seed_ and _many_. It is _the seed_ and the

_many_ whom ch. liv. reveals. Again, there may be, in ver. 17 of ch.

liv., a reference to the earlier picture of the Servant in ch. l.,

especially ver. 8. But this last is uncertain; and, as a point on the

other side, there are the two different meanings, as well as the two

different agents, of _righteousness_ in ch. liii. 11, _My Servant shall

make many righteous_, and in ch. liv. 17, _their righteousness which

is of Me, saith Jehovah_. In the former, righteousness is the inward

justification; in the latter, it is the external historical vindication.

In ch. liv. the people of God are represented under the double

figure, with which the Book of Revelation has made us familiar,

of Bride and City. To imagine a Nation or a Land as the spouse of

her God is a habit natural to the religious instinct at all times;

the land deriving her fruitfulness, the nation her standing and

prestige, from her connection with the Deity. But in ancient times

this figure of wedlock was more natural than it is among us, in so

far as the human man and wife did not then occupy that relation

of equality, to which it has been the progress of civilisation to

approximate; but the husband was the lord of his wife,--as much her

Baal as the god was the Baal of the people,--her law-giver, in part

her owner, and with full authority over the origin and subsistence

of the bond between them. Marriage thus conceived was a figure for

religion almost universal among the Semites. But as in the case of so

many other religious ideas common to the Hebrews and their heathen

kin, this one, when adopted by the prophets of Jehovah, underwent a

thorough moral reformation. Indeed, if one were asked to point out

a supreme instance of the operation of that unique conscience of the

religion of Jehovah, which was spoken of before,[248] one would have

little difficulty in selecting its treatment of the idea of religious

marriage. By the neighbours of Israel, the marriage of a god to his

people was conceived with a grossness of feeling and illustrated

by a foulness of ritual, which thoroughly demoralised the people,

affording, as they did, to licentiousness the example and sanction of

religion. So debased had the idea become, and so full of temptation

to the Hebrews were the forms in which it was illustrated among

their neighbours, that the religion of Israel might justly have been

praised for achieving a great moral victory in excluding the figure

altogether from its system. But the prophets of Jehovah dared the

heavier task of retaining the idea of religious marriage, and won the

diviner triumph of purifying and elevating it. It was, indeed, a new

creation. Every physical suggestion was banished, and the relation

was conceived as purely moral. Yet it was never refined to a mere

form or abstraction. The prophets fearlessly expressed it in the

warmest and most familiar terms of the love of man and woman. With a

stern and absolute interpretation before them in the Divine law, of

the relations of a husband to his wife, they borrowed from that only

so far as to do justice to the Almighty's initiative and authority

in His relation with mortals; and they laid far more emphasis on the

instinctive and spontaneous affections, by which Jehovah and Israel

had been drawn together. Thus, among a people naturally averse to

think or to speak of God as _loving_[249] men, this close relation

to Him of marriage was expressed with a warmth, a tenderness and a

delicacy, that exceeded even the two other fond forms in which the

Divine grace was conveyed,--of a father's and of a mother's love.

In this new creation of the marriage bond between God and His church,

three prophets had a large share,--Hosea, Ezekiel and the author of

"Second Isaiah." To Hosea and Ezekiel it fell to speak chiefly of

unpleasant aspects of the question,--the unfaithfulness of the wife and

her divorce; but even then, the moral strength and purity of the Hebrew

religion, its Divine vehemence and glow, were only the more evident

for the unpromising character of the materials with which it dealt. To

our prophet, on the contrary, it fell to speak of the winning back of

the wife, and he has done so with wonderful delicacy and tenderness.

Our prophet, it is true, has not one, but two, deep feelings about the

love of God: it passes through him as the love of a mother, as well as

the love of a husband. But while he lets us see the former only twice

or thrice, the latter may be felt as the almost continual undercurrent

of his prophecy, and often breaks to hearing, now in a sudden, single

ripple of a phrase, and now in a long tide of marriage music. His

lips open for Jehovah on the language of wooing,--_speak ye to the

heart of Jerusalem_; and though his masculine figure for Israel as

the Servant keeps his affection hidden for a time, this emerges again

when the subject of Service is exhausted, till Israel, where she is

not Jehovah's Servant, is Jehovah's Bride. In the series of passages

on Zion, from ch. xlix. to ch. lii., the City is the Mother of His

children, the Wife who though put away has never been divorced. In ch.

lxii. she is called Hephzi-Bah, _My-delight-is-in-her_, and Beulah,

or _Married,--for Jehovah delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be

married. For as a youth marrieth a maiden, thy sons shall marry thee;

and with the joy of a bridegroom over a bride, thy God shall joy over

thee._[250] But it is in the chapter now before us that the relation

is expressed with greatest tenderness and wealth of affection. _Be not

afraid, for thou shalt not be shamed; and be not confounded, for thou

shalt not be put to the blush: for the shame of thy youth thou shalt

forget, and the reproach of thy widowhood thou shalt not remember

again. For thy Maker is thy Husband, Jehovah of Hosts is His name;

and thy Redeemer the Holy of Israel, God of the whole earth is He

called. For as a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit thou art called

of Jehovah, even a wife of youth, when she is cast off, saith thy God.

For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will

I gather thee. In an egre of anger_[251] _I hid My face a moment from

thee, but with grace everlasting will I have mercy upon thee, saith thy

Redeemer Jehovah._

In this eighth verse we pass from the figure of the Bride to that of

the City, which emerges clear through flood and storm in ver. 11.

_Afflicted, Storm-beaten, Uncomforted, Lo, I am setting in dark metal_

(_antimony_, used by women for painting round the eyes, so as to set

forth their brilliance more) _thy stones_,--that they may shine from

this setting like women's eyes,--_and I will found thee in sapphires_:

as heaven's own foundation vault is blue, so shall the ground-stones

be of the New Jerusalem. _And I will set rubies for thy pinnacles, and

thy gates shall be sparkling stones,_[252] _and all thy borders stones

of delight,--stones of joy, jewels._ The rest of the chapter paints the

_righteousness_ of Zion as her external security and splendour.

II. A LAST CALL TO THE BUSY (ch. lv.).

The second address upon the Eve of Return is ch. lv. Its pure gospel

and clear music render detailed exposition, except on a single point,

superfluous. One can but stand and listen to those great calls to

repentance and obedience, which issue from it. What can be added

to them or said about them? Let one take heed rather to let them

speak to one's own heart! A little exploration, however, will be of

advantage among the circumstances from which they shoot.

The commercial character of the opening figures of ch. lv. arrests the

attention. We saw that Babylon was the centre of the world's trade,

and that it was in Babylon that the Jews first formed those mercantile

habits, which have become, next to religion, or in place of religion,

their national character. Born to be priests, the Jews drew down their

splendid powers of attention, pertinacity and imagination from God upon

the world, till they equally appear to have been born traders. They

laboured and prospered exceedingly, gathering property and settling in

comfort. They drank of the streams of Babylon, no longer made bitter

by their tears, and ceased to think upon Zion.

But, of all men, exiles can least forget that there is that which

money can never buy. Money and his work can do much for the banished

man,--feed him, clothe him, even make for him a kind of second home,

and in time, by the payment of taxes, a kind of second citizenship;

but they can never bring him to the true climate of his heart, nor

win for him his real life. And of all exiles the Jew, however free

and prosperous in his banishment he might be, was least able to find

his life among the good things--the water, the wine and the milk--of

a strange country. For home to Israel meant not only home, but duty,

righteousness and God.[253] God had created the heart of this people

to hunger for His word, and in His word they could alone find the

_fatness of their soul_. Success and comfort shall never satisfy

the soul which God has created for obedience. The simplicity of the

obedience that is here asked from Israel, the emphasis that is laid

upon mere obedience as ringing in full satisfaction, is impressive:

_hearken diligently, and eat that which is good; incline your ear

and come unto Me, hear and your soul shall live_. It suggests the

number of plausible reasons, which may be offered for every worldly

and material life, and to which there is no answer save the call of

God's own voice to obedience and surrender. To obedience God then

promises influence. In place of being a mere trafficker with the

nations, or, at best, their purveyor and money-lender, the Jew, if

he obeys God, shall be the priest and prophet of the peoples. This

is illustrated in vv. 4_b_-6, the only hard passage in the chapter.

God will make His people like David; whether the historical David or

the ideal David described by Jeremiah and Ezekiel is uncertain.[254]

God will conclude an _everlasting covenant_ with them, equivalent to

the _sure favours_ showered on him. As God set him for a _witness_

(that is, a prophet) to _the peoples_, a _prince and a leader to

the peoples_, so (in phrases that recall some used by David of

himself in the eighteenth Psalm) shall they as prophets and kings

influence strange nations--_calling a nation thou knowest not, and

nations that have not known thee shall run unto thee_. The effect

of the unconscious influence, which obedience to God, and surrender

to Him as His instrument, are sure to work, could not be more

grandly stated. But we ought not to let another point escape our

attention, for it has its contribution to make to the main question

of the Servant. As explained in the note to a sentence above, it is

uncertain whether _David_ is the historical king of that name, or the

Messiah still to come. In either case, he is an individual, whose

functions and qualities are transferred to the people, and that is

the point demanding attention. If our prophecy can thus so easily

speak of God's purpose of service to the Gentiles passing from the

individual to the nation, why should it not also be able to speak of

the opposite process, the transference of the service from the nation

to the single Servant? When the nation were unworthy and unredeemed,

could not the prophet as easily think of the relegation of their

office to an individual, as he now promises to their obedience that

that office shall be restored to them?

The next verses urgently repeat calls to repentance. And then comes

a passage which is grandly meant to make us feel the contrast of its

scenery with the toil, the money-getting and the money-spending from

which the chapter started. From all that sordid, barren, human strife

in the markets of Babylon, we are led out to look at the boundless

heavens, and are told that _as they are higher than the earth, so

are God's ways higher than our ways, and God's reckonings than our

reckonings_; we are led out to see the gentle fall of rain and snow

that so easily _maketh the earth to bring forth and bud, and give

seed to the sower and bread to the eater_, and are told that it is

a symbol of God's word, which we were called from our vain labours

to obey; we are led out _to the mountains and to the hills breaking

before you into singing_, and to the free, wild natural trees[255]

tossing their unlopped branches; we are led to see even the desert

change, for _instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree, and

instead of the nettle shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to

Jehovah for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut

off_. Thus does the prophet, in his own fashion, lead the starved

worldly heart, that has sought in vain its fulness from its toil,

through scenes of Nature, to that free omnipotent Grace, of which

Nature's processes are the splendid sacraments.

III. PROSELYTES AND EUNUCHS (ch. lvi. 1-8).

The opening verse of this small prophecy, _My salvation is near

to come, and My righteousness to be revealed_, attaches it very

closely to the preceding prophecy. If ch. lv. expounds the grace

and faithfulness of God in the Return of His people, and asks from

them only faith as the price of such benefits, ch. lvi. 1-8 adds the

demand that those who are to return shall keep the law, and extends

their blessings to foreigners and others, who though technically

disqualified from the privileges of the born and legitimate

Israelite, had attached themselves to Jehovah and His Law.

Such a prophecy was very necessary. The dispersion of Israel had

already begun to accomplish its missionary purpose; pious souls in

many lands had felt the spiritual power of this disfigured people,

and had chosen for Jehovah's sake to follow its uncertain fortunes.

It was indispensable that these Gentile converts should be comforted

against the withdrawal of Israel from Babylon, for they said, _Jehovah

will surely separate me from His people_, as well as against the time

when it might become necessary to purge the restored community from

heathen constituents.[256] Again, all the male Jews could hardly

have escaped the disqualification, which the cruel custom of the East

inflicted on some, at least, of every body of captives. It is almost

certain that Daniel and his companions were eunuchs, and if they, then

perhaps many more. But the Book of Deuteronomy had declared mutilation

of this kind to be a bar against entrance to the assembly of the Lord.

It is not one of the least interesting of the spiritual results of the

Exile, that its necessities compelled the abrogation of the letter of

such a law. With a freedom that foreshadows Christ's own expansion of

the ancient strictness, and in words that would not be out of place

in the Sermon on the Mount, this prophecy ensures to pious men, whom

cruelty had deprived of the two things dearest to the heart of an

Israelite,--a present place, and a perpetuation through his posterity,

in the community of God,--that in the new temple a _monument_[257]

_and a name_ should be given, _better_ and more enduring _than sons or

daughters_. This prophecy is further noteworthy as the first instance

of the strong emphasis which "Second Isaiah" lays upon the keeping of

the Sabbath, and as first calling the temple the _House of Prayer_.

Both of these characteristics are due, of course, to the Exile, the

necessities of which prevented almost every religious act save that of

keeping fasts and Sabbaths and serving God in prayer. On our prophet's

teaching about the Sabbath there will be more to say in the next

chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[247] _Cf._ pp. 336 ff.

[248] See pp. 247 ff.

[249] "Das eigentliche Wort 'Liebe' kommt im A. T. von Gott fast gar

nicht vor,--und wo es, bei einem späten Schriftsteller, vorkommt,

ist es Bezeichnung seiner besondren Bundes-liebe zu Israel,

deren natürliche Kehrseite der Hass gegen die feindlichen Völker

ist."--Schultz, _A. T. Theologie_, 4th ed., p. 548.

[250] The reserve of this--the limitation of the relation to one of

feeling--is remarkable in contrast to the more physical use of the

same figure in other religions.

[251] _Egre_, or sudden rush of the tide, or spate, or freshet. The

original is assonant: B^eshesseph qesseph.

[252] So literally; LXX. crystals, carbuncles or diamonds.

[253] Cf. _Isaiah i.-xxxix._, pp. 440 ff.

[254] The structure of this difficult passage is this. Ver. 3 states

the equation: the everlasting covenant with the people Israel=the

sure, unfailing favours bestowed upon the individual David. Vv. 4 and

5 unfold the contents of the equation. Each side of it is introduced

by a _Lo_. Lo, on the one side, what I have done to David; Lo, on the

other, what I will do to you. As David was a _witness of peoples_,

a _prince_ and _commander of peoples_, so shalt thou call to them

and make them obey thee. This is clear enough. But who is David? The

phrase the _favours_ of _David_ suggests 2 Chron. vi. 42, _remember

the mercies of David thy servant_; and those in ver. 5 recall Psalm

xviii. 43 f.: _Thou hast made me the head of nations; A people I

know not shall serve me; As soon as they hear of me they shall obey

me; Strangers shall submit themselves to me._ Yet both Jeremiah and

Ezekiel call the coming Messiah David. Jer. xxx. 9: _They shall serve

Jehovah their God and David their King._ Ezek. xxxiv. 23: _And I will

set up a shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, and he shall be

their shepherd. And I Jehovah will be their God, and My servant David

prince among them._ After these writers, our prophet could hardly

help using the name David in its Messianic sense, even though he also

quoted (in ver. 5) a few phrases recalling the historical David. But

the question does not matter much. The real point is the transference

of the favours bestowed upon an individual to the whole people.

[255] English version, _trees of the field_, but the field is the

country beyond the bounds of cultivation; and as beasts of the field

means _wild beasts_, so this means _wild trees_,--unforced, unaided

by man's labour.

[256] Neh. xiii.

[257] The original is _a hand_; a term applied (perhaps because

it consisted of tapering stones) to an _index_, or _monument_ of

victory, 1 Sam. xv. 12; or to a sepulchral monument, 2 Sam. xviii. 18.

CHAPTER XXIII.

_THE REKINDLING OF THE CIVIC CONSCIENCE._

ISAIAH lvi. 9-lix.

It was inevitable, as soon as their city was again fairly in sight,

that there should re-awaken in the exiles the civic conscience;

that recollections of those besetting sins of their public life,

for which their city and their independence were destroyed, should

throng back upon them; that in prospect of their again becoming

responsible for the discharge of justice and other political duties,

they should be reminded by the prophet of their national faults in

these respects, and of God's eternal laws concerning them. If we keep

this in mind, we shall understand the presence in "Second Isaiah" of

the group of prophecies at which we have now arrived, ch. lvi. 9-lix.

Hitherto our prophet, in marked contrast to Isaiah himself, has said

almost nothing of the social righteousness of his people. Israel's

righteousness, as we saw in our fourteenth chapter, has had the very

different meaning for our prophet of her pardon and restoration to

her rights. But in ch. lvi. 9-lix. we shall find the blame of civic

wrong, and of other kinds of sin of which Israel could only have been

guilty in her own land; we shall listen to exhortations to social

justice and mercy like those we heard from Isaiah to his generation.

Yet these are mingled with voices, and concluded with promises,

which speak of the Return as imminent. Undoubtedly exilic elements

reveal themselves. And the total impression is that some prophet of

the late Exile, and probably the one, whom we have been following,

collected these reminiscences of his people's sin in the days of

their freedom, in order to remind them, before they went back again

to political responsibility, why it was they were punished and how

apt they were to go astray. Believing this to be the true solution of

a somewhat difficult problem, we have ventured to gather this mixed

group of prophecies under the title of the Rekindling of the Civic

Conscience. They fall into three groups: first, ch. lvi. 9-lvii.;

second, ch. lviii.; third, ch. lix. We shall see that, while there

is no reason to doubt the exilic origin of the whole of the second,

the first and third of these are mainly occupied with the description

of a state of things that prevailed only before the Exile, but they

contain also exilic observations and conclusions.

I. A CONSCIENCE BUT NO GOD (ch. lvi. 9-lvii.).

This is one of the sections which almost decisively place the literary

unity of "Second Isaiah" past possibility of belief. If ch. lvi. 1-8

flushes with the dawn of restoration, ch. lvi. 9-lvii. is very dark

with the coming of the night, which preceded that dawn. Almost none

dispute, that the greater part of this prophecy must have been composed

before the people left Palestine for exile. The state of Israel, which

it pictures, recalls the descriptions of Hosea, and of the eleventh

chapter of Zechariah. God's flock are still in charge of their own

shepherds (lvi. 9-12),--a description inapplicable to Israel in exile.

The shepherds are sleepy, greedy, sensual, drunkards,--victims to

the curse, against which Amos and Isaiah hurled their strongest woes.

That sots like them should be spared while the righteous die unnoticed

deaths (lvii. 1) can only be explained by the approaching judgement.

_No man considereth that the righteous is taken away from the Evil. The

Evil_ cannot mean, as some have thought, persecution,--for while the

righteous are to escape it and enter into peace, the wicked are spared

for it. It must be a Divine judgement,--the Exile. But _he entereth

peace, they rest in their beds, each one that hath walked straight

before him_,--for the righteous there is the peace of death and the

undisturbed tomb of his fathers. What an enviable fate when emigration,

and dispersion through foreign lands, are the prospect of the nation!

Israel shall find her pious dead when she returns! The verse recalls

that summons in Isa. xxvi., in which we heard the Mother Nation calling

upon the dead she had left in Palestine to rise and increase her

returned numbers.

Then the prophet indicts the nation for a religious and political

unfaithfulness, which we know was their besetting sin in the days

before they left the Holy Land. The scenery, in whose natural objects

he describes them seeking their worship, is the scenery of Palestine,

not of Mesopotamia,--_terebinths_ and _wâdies_, and _clefts of the

rocks_, and _smooth stones of the wâdies_. The unchaste and bloody

sacrifices with which he charges them bear the appearance more of

Canaanite than of Babylonian idolatry. The humiliating political

suits which they paid--_thou wentest to the king with ointment, and

didst increase thy perfumes, and didst send thine ambassadors afar

off, and didst debase thyself even unto Sheol_ (ver. 9)--could not

be attributed to a captive people, but were the sort of degrading

diplomacy that Israel learned from Ahaz. While the painful pursuit

of strength (ver. 10), the shabby political cowardice (ver. 11),

the fanatic sacrifice of manhood's purity and childhood's life

(ver. 5), and especially the evil conscience which drove their

blind hearts through such pain and passion in a sincere quest for

righteousness (ver. 12), betray the age of idolatrous reaction from

the great Puritan victory of 701,--a generation exaggerating all the

old falsehood and fear, against which Isaiah had inveighed, with

the new conscience of sin which his preaching had created.[258]

The dark streak of blood and lust that runs through the condemned

idolatry, and the stern conscience which only deepens its darkness,

are sufficient reasons for dating the prophecy after 700. The very

phrases of Isaiah, which it contains, have tempted some to attribute

it to himself. But it certainly does not date from such troubles as

brought his old age to the grave. The evil, which it portends, is, as

we have seen, no persecution of the righteous, but a Divine judgement

upon the whole nation,--presumably the Exile. We may date it,

therefore, some time after Isaiah's death, but certainly--and this is

the important point--before the Exile. This, then, is an unmistakably

pre-exilic constituent of "Second Isaiah."

Another feature corroborates this prophecy's original independence

of its context. Its style is immediately and extremely rugged. The

reader of the original feels the difference at once. It is the

difference between travel on the level roads of Mesopotamia, with

their unchanging horizons, and the jolting carriage of the stony

paths of Higher Palestine, with their glimpses rapidly shifting from

gorge to peak. But the remarkable thing is that the usual style of

"Second Isaiah" is resumed before the end of the prophecy. One cannot

always be sure of the exact verse at which such a literary change

takes place. In this case some feel it as soon as the middle of ver.

11, with the words, _Have not I held My peace even of long time,

and thou fearest Me not?_[259] It is surely more sensible, however,

after ver. 14, in which we are arrested in any case by an alteration

of standpoint. In ver. 14 we are on in the Exile again--before ver.

14 I cannot recognise any exilic symptom--and the way of return is

before us. _And one said_,--it is the repetition to the letter of the

strange anonymous voice of ch. xl. 6,--_and one said, Cast ye up,

Cast ye up, open up, or sweep open, a way, lift the stumbling block

from the way of My people_. And now the rhythm has certainly returned

to the prevailing style of "Second Isaiah," and the temper is again

that of promise and comfort.

These sudden shiftings of circumstance and of prospect are enough

to show the thoughtful reader of Scripture how hard is the problem

of the unity of "Second Isaiah." On which we make here no further

remark, but pass at once to the more congenial task of studying the

great prophecy, vv. 14-21, which rises one and simple from these

fragments as does some homogeneous rock from the confusing _débris_

of several geological epochs.

For let the date and original purpose of the fragments we have

considered be what they may, this prophecy has been placed as their

conclusion with at least some rational, not to say spiritual,

intention. As it suddenly issues here, it gathers up, in the usual

habit of Scripture, God's moral indictment of an evil generation, by

a great manifesto of the Divine nature, and a sharp distinction of

the characters and fate of men. Now, of what kind is the generation,

to whose indictment this prophecy comes as a conclusion? It is a

generation which has lost its God, but kept its conscience. This

sums up the national character which is sketched in vv. 3-13. These

Israelites had lost Jehovah and His pure law. But the religion

into which they fell back was not, therefore, easy or cold. On the

contrary, it was very intense and very stern. The people put energy

in it, and passion, and sacrifice that went to cruel lengths. Belief,

too, in its practical results kept the people from fainting under

the weariness in which its fanaticism reacted. _In the length of

thy way thou wast wearied, yet thou didst not say, It is hopeless;

life for thy hand_--that is, real, practical strength--_didst thou

find: wherefore thou didst not break down_. And they practised their

painful and passionate idolatry with a real conscience. They were

seeking to work out righteousness for themselves (ver. 12 should

be rendered: _I will expose your righteousness_, the caricature of

righteousness which you attempt). The most worldly statesman among

them had his sincere ideal for Israel, and intended to enable her, in

the possession of her land and holy mountain, to fulfil her destiny

(ver. 13). The most gross idolater had a hunger and thirst after

righteousness, and burnt his children or sacrificed his purity to

satisfy the vague promptings of his unenlightened conscience.

It was indeed a generation which had kept its conscience, but lost

its God; and what we have in vv. 15 to 21 is just the lost and

forgotten God speaking of His Nature and His Will. They have been

worshipping idols, creatures of their own fears and cruel passions.

But He is the _high and lofty one_--two of the simplest adjectives

in the language, yet sufficient to lift Him they describe above the

distorting mists of human imagination. They thought of the Deity as

sheer wrath and force, scarcely to be appeased by men even through

the most bloody rites and passionate self-sacrifice. But He says,

_The high and the holy I dwell in, yet with him also that is contrite

and humble of spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to

revive the heart of the contrite ones_. The rest of the chapter is

to the darkened consciences a plain statement of the moral character

of God's working. God always punishes sin, and yet the sinner is

not abandoned. Though he go in his own way, God _watches his ways

in order to heal him. I create the fruit of the lips_, that is,

_thanksgivings: Peace, peace, to him that is far off and him that is

near, saith Jehovah, and I will heal him_. But, as in ch. xlviii. and

ch. l., a warning comes last, and behind the clear, forward picture

of the comforted and restored of Jehovah we see the weird background

of gloomy, restless wickedness.

II. SOCIAL SERVICE AND THE SABBATH (ch. lviii.).

Several critics (including Professor Cheyne) regard ch. lviii. as

post-exilic, because of its declarations against formal fasting

and the neglect of social charity, which are akin to those of

post-exilic prophets like Zechariah and Joel, and seem to imply

that the people addressed are again independent and responsible for

the conduct of their social duties. The question largely turns on

the amount of social responsibility we conceive the Jews to have

had during the Exile. Now we have seen that many of them enjoyed

considerable freedom: they had their houses and households; they had

their slaves; they traded and were possessed of wealth. They were,

therefore, in a position to be chargeable with the duties to which

ch. lviii. calls them. The addresses of Ezekiel to his fellow-exiles

have many features in common with ch. lviii., although they do not

mention fasting; and fasting itself was a characteristic habit of the

exiles, in regard to which it is quite likely they should err just as

is described in ch. lviii. Moreover, there is a resemblance between

this chapter's comments upon the people's enquiries of God (ver. 2)

and Ezekiel's reply when certain of the elders of Israel came to

enquire of Jehovah.[260] And again vv. 11 and 12 of ch. lviii. are

evidently addressed to people in prospect of return to their own

land and restoration of their city. We accordingly date ch. lviii.

from the Exile. But we see no reason to put it as early as Ewald

does, who assigns it to a younger contemporary of Ezekiel. There is

no linguistic evidence that it is an insertion, or from another hand

than that of our prophet. Surely there were room and occasion for

it in those years which followed the actual deliverance of the Jews

by Cyrus, but preceded the restoration of Jerusalem,--those years

in which there were no longer political problems in the way of the

people's return for our prophet to discuss, and therefore their moral

defects were all the more thrust upon his attention; and especially,

when in the near prospect of their political independence, their

social sins roused his apprehensions.

Those, who have never heard an angry Oriental speak, have no idea of

what power of denunciation lies in the human throat. In the East, where

a dry climate and large leisure bestow upon the voice a depth and

suppleness prevented by our vulgar haste of life and teasing weather,

men have elaborated their throat-letters to a number unknown in any

Western alphabet; and upon the lowest notes they have put an edge,

that comes up shrill and keen through the roar of the upper gutturals,

till you feel their wrath cut as well as sweep you before it. In the

Oriental throat, speech goes down deep enough to echo all the breadth

of the inner man; while the possibility of expressing within so supple

an organ nearly every tone of scorn or surprise preserves anger from

that suspicion of spite or of exhaustion, which is conveyed by too

liberal a use of the nasal or palatal letters. Hence in the Hebrew

language _to call with the throat_ means to call with vehemence, but

with self-command; with passion, yet as a man; using every figure of

satire, but earnestly; neither forgetting wrath for mere art's sake,

nor allowing wrath to escape the grip of the stronger muscles of the

voice. It is _to lift the voice like a trumpet_,--an instrument, which,

with whatever variety of music its upper notes may indulge our ears,

never suffers its main tone of authority to drop, never slacks its

imperative appeal to the wills of the hearers.

This is the style of the chapter before us, which opens with the words,

_Call with the throat, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet_.

Perhaps no subject more readily provokes to satire and sneers than the

subject of the chapter,--the union of formal religion and unlovely

life. And yet in the chapter there is not a sneer from first to last.

The speaker suppresses the temptation to use his nasal tones, and

utters, not as the satirist, but as the prophet. For his purpose is

not to sport with his people's hypocrisy, but to sweep them out of it.

Before he has done, his urgent speech, that has not lingered to sneer

nor exhausted itself in screaming, passes forth to spend its unchecked

impetus upon final promise and gospel. It is a wise lesson from a

master preacher, and half of the fruitlessness of modern preaching is

due to the neglect of it. The pulpit tempts men to be either too bold

or too timid about sin; either to whisper or to scold; to euphemise or

to exaggerate; to be conventional or hysterical. But two things are

necessary,--the facts must be stated, and the whole manhood of the

preacher, and not only his scorn or only his anger or only an official

temper, brought to bear upon them. _Call with the throat, spare not,

like a trumpet lift up thy voice, and publish to My people their

transgression, and to the house of Jacob their sin._

The subject of the chapter is the habits of a religious people,--the

earnestness and regularity of their religious performance contrasted

with the neglect of their social relations. The second verse, "the

descriptions in which are evidently drawn from life,"[261] tells

us that _the people sought God daily, and had a zeal to know His

ways, as a nation that had done righteousness_,--fulfilled the legal

worship,--_and had not forsaken the law_[262] _of their God: they

ask of Me laws[262] of righteousness_,--that is, a legal worship,

the performance of which might make them righteous,--_and in drawing

near to God they take delight_. They had, in fact, a great greed for

ordinances and functions,[263]--for the revival of such forms as

they had been accustomed to of old. Like some poor prostrate rose,

whose tendrils miss the props by which they were wont to rise to the

sun, the religious conscience and affections of Israel, violently

torn from their immemorial supports, lay limp and windswept on a

bare land, and longed for God to raise some substitute for those

altars of Zion by which, in the dear days of old, they had lifted

themselves to the light of His face. In the absence of anything

better, they turned to the chill and shadowed forms of the fasts

they had instituted.[264] But they did not thereby reach the face

of God. _Wherefore have we fasted_, say they, _and Thou hast not

seen? we have humbled our souls, and Thou takest no notice?_ The

answer comes swiftly: Because your fasting is a mere form! _Lo, in

the very day of your fast ye find a business to do, and all your

workmen you overtask._ So formal is your fasting that your ordinary

eager, selfish, cruel life goes on beside it just the same. Nay, it

is worse than usual, for your worthless, wearisome fast but puts a

sharper edge upon your temper: _Lo, for strife and contention ye

fast, to smile with the fist of tyranny_. And it has no religious

value: _Ye fast not_ like _as_ you are fasting _to-day so as to make

your voice heard on high_. _Is such the fast that I choose,--a day

for a man to afflict himself? Is it to droop his head like a rush,

and grovel on sackcloth and ashes? Is it this thou wilt call a fast

and a day acceptable to Jehovah?_ One of the great surprises of the

human heart is, that self-denial does not win merit or peace. But

assuredly it does not, if love be not with it. Though I give my body

to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Self-denial

without love is self-indulgence. _Is not this the fast that I

choose? to loosen the bonds of tyranny, to shatter the joints of the

yoke, to let the crushed go free, and that ye burst every yoke. Is

it not to break to the hungry thy bread, and that thou bring home

wandering poor?_[265] _when thou seest one naked that thou cover

him, and that from thine own flesh thou hide not thyself? Then shall

break forth like the morning thy light, and thy health_[266] _shall

immediately spring. Yea, go before thee shall thy righteousness,

the glory of Jehovah shall sweep thee on_, literally, _gather thee

up. Then thou shalt call, and Jehovah shall answer; thou shalt

cry, and He shall say, Here am I. If thou shalt put from thy midst

the yoke, and the putting forth of the finger, and the speaking of

naughtiness_--three degrees of the subtlety of selfishness, which

when forced back from violent oppression will retreat to scorn

and from open scorn to backbiting,--_and if thou draw out to the

hungry thy soul_,--tear out what is dear to thee in order to fill

his need, the strongest expression for self-denial which the Old

Testament contains,--_and satisfy the soul that is afflicted, then

shall uprise in the darkness thy light, and thy gloom shall be as

the noonday. And guide thee shall Jehovah continually, and satisfy

thy soul in droughts, and thy limbs make lissom; and thou shalt be

like a garden well-watered,_[267] _and like a spring of water whose

waters fail not. And they that are of thee shall build the ancient

ruins; the foundations of generation upon generation thou shalt

raise up, and they shall be calling thee Repairer-of-the-Breach,

Restorer-of-Paths-for-habitation._[268] Thus their _righteousness_ in

the sense of external vindication and stability, which so prevails

with our prophet, shall be due to their _righteousness_ in that

inward moral sense in which Amos and Isaiah use the word. And so

concludes a passage, which fills the earliest, if not the highest,

place in the glorious succession of Scriptures of Practical Love, to

which belong the Sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, the Twenty-fifth of

Matthew and the Thirteenth of First Corinthians. Its lesson is,--to

go back to the figure of the draggled rose,--that no mere forms of

religion, however divinely prescribed or conscientiously observed,

can of themselves lift the distraught and trailing affections of man

to the light and peace of Heaven; but that our fellow-men, if we

cling to them with love and with arms of help, are ever the strongest

props by which we may rise to God; that character grows rich and life

joyful, not by the performance of ordinances with the cold conscience

of duty, but by acts of service with the warm heart of love.

And yet such a prophecy concludes with an exhortation to the

observance of one religious form, and places the keeping of the

Sabbath on a level with the practice of love. _If thou turn from

the Sabbath thy foot_, from _doing thine own business on My holy

day;_[269] _and callest the Sabbath Pleasure_,--the word is a strong

one, _Delight, Delicacy, Luxury,--Holy of Jehovah, Honourable; and

dost honour it so as not to do thine own ways, or find thine own

business, or keep making talk: then thou shalt find thy pleasure_,

or _thy delight, in Jehovah_,--note the parallel of pleasure in the

Sabbath and pleasure in Jehovah,--_and He shall cause thee to ride on

the high places of the land, and make thee to feed upon the portion

of Jacob thy father: yea, the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken_.

Our prophet, then, while exalting the practical Service of Man at the

expense of certain religious forms, equally exalts the observance of

Sabbath; his scorn for their formalism changes when he comes to it

into a strenuous enthusiasm of defence. This remarkable fact, which is

strictly analogous to the appearance of the Fourth Commandment in a

code otherwise consisting of purely moral and religious laws, is easily

explained. Observe that our prophet bases his plea for Sabbath-keeping,

and his assurance that it must lead to prosperity, not on its physical,

moral or social benefits, but simply upon its acknowledgment of God.

Not only is the Sabbath to be honoured because it is the _Holy of

Jehovah_ and _Honourable_, but _making it one's pleasure_ is equivalent

to _finding one's pleasure in Him_. The parallel between these two

phrases in ver. 13 and ver. 14 is evident, and means really this:

Inasmuch as ye do it unto the Sabbath, ye do it unto Me. The prophet,

then, enforces the Sabbath simply on account of its religious and

Godward aspect. Now, let us remember the truth, which he so often

enforces, that the Service of Man, however ardently and widely pursued,

can never lead or sum up our duty; that the Service of God has,

logically and practically, a prior claim, for without it the Service

of Man must suffer both in obligation and in resource. God must be

our first resort--must have our first homage, affection and obedience.

But this cannot well take place without some amount of definite and

regular and frequent devotion to Him. In the most spiritual religion

there is an irreducible minimum of formal observance. Now, in that

wholesale destruction of religious forms, which took place at the

overthrow of Jerusalem,[270] there was only one institution, which was

not necessarily involved. The Sabbath did not fall with the Temple and

the Altar: the Sabbath was independent of all locality; the Sabbath was

possible even in exile. It was the one solemn, public and frequently

regular form in which the nation could turn to God, glorify Him and

enjoy Him. Perhaps, too, through the Babylonian fashion of solemnising

the seventh day, our prophet realised again the primitive institution

of the Sabbath, and was reminded that, since seven days is a regular

part of the natural year, the Sabbath is, so to speak, sanctioned by

the statutes of Creation.

An institution, which is so primitive, which is so independent of

locality, which forms so natural a part of the course of time, but

which, above all, has twice--in the Jewish Exile and in the passage

of Judaism to Christianity--survived the abrogation and disappearance

of all other forms of the religion with which it was connected, and

has twice been affirmed by prophecy or practice to be an essential

part of spiritual religion and the equal of social morality,--has

amply proved its Divine origin and its indispensableness to man.

III. SOCIAL CRIMES (ch. lix.).

Ch. lix. is, at first sight, the most difficult of all of "Second

Isaiah" to assign to a date.[271] For it evidently contains both

pre-exilic and exilic elements. On the one hand, its charges of guilt

imply that the people addressed by it are responsible for civic justice

to a degree, which could hardly be imputed to the Jews in Babylon. We

saw that the Jews in the Exile had an amount of social freedom and

domestic responsibility which amply accounts for the kind of sins they

are charged with in ch. lviii. But ver. 14 of ch. lix. reproaches

them with the collapse of justice in the very seat and public office

of justice, of which it was not possible they could have been guilty

except in their own land and in the days of their independence. On the

other hand, the promises of deliverance in ch. lix. read very much as

if they were exilic. _Judgement_ and _righteousness_ are employed in

ver. 9 in their exilic sense,[272] and God is pictured exactly as we

have seen Him in other chapters of our prophet.

Are we then left with a mystery? On the contrary, the solution is

clear. Israel is followed into exile by her old conscience. The

charges of Isaiah and Ezekiel against Jerusalem, while Jerusalem was

still a "civitas," ring in her memory. She repeats the very words.

With truth she says that her present state, so vividly described in

vv. 9-11, is due to sins of old, of which, though perhaps she can

no longer commit them, she still feels the guilt. Conscience always

crowds the years together; there is no difference of time in the eyes

of God the Judge. And it was natural, as we have said already, that

the nation should remember her besetting sins at this time; that her

civic conscience should awake again, just as she was again about to

become a civitas.[273][274]

The whole of this chapter is simply the expansion and enforcement

of the first two verses, that keep clanging like the clangour of a

great, high bell: _Behold, Jehovah's hand is not shortened that it

cannot save, neither is His ear heavy that it cannot hear; but your

iniquities have been separators between you and your God, and your

sins have hidden_ His _face from you, that He will not hear._ There

is but one thing that comes between the human heart and the Real

Presence and Infinite Power of God; and that one thing is Sin. The

chapter labours to show how real God is. Its opening verses talk of

_His Hand_, _His Ear_, _His Face_. And the closing verses paint Him

with the passions and the armour of a man,--a Hero in such solitude

and with such forward force, that no imagination can fail to see

the Vivid, Lonely Figure. _And He saw that there was no man, and He

wondered that there was none to interpose; therefore His own right

arm brought salvation unto Him, and His righteousness it upheld Him.

And He put on righteousness like a breastplate and salvation for

an helmet upon His head; and He put on garments of vengeance for

clothing, and wrapped Himself in zeal like a robe._ Do not let us

suppose this is mere poetry. Conceive what inspires it,--the great

truth that in the Infinite there is a heart to throb for men and a

will to strike for them. This is what the writer desires to proclaim,

and what we believe the Spirit of God moved his poor human lips

to give their own shape to,--the simple truth that there is One,

however hidden He may be to men's eyes, who feels for men, who feels

hotly for men, and whose will is quick and urgent to save them. Such

an One tells His people, that the only thing which prevents them

from knowing how real His heart and will are--the only thing which

prevents them from seeing His work in their midst--is their sin.

The roll of sins to which the prophet attributes the delay of the

people's deliverance is an awful one; and the man who reads it with

conscience asleep might conclude that it was meant only for a period

of extraordinary violence and bloodshed. Yet the chapter implies that

society exists, and that at least the forms of civilisation are in

force. Men sue one another before the usual courts. But none _sueth

in righteousness or goeth to the law in truth. They trust in vanity

and speak lies._ All these charges might be true of a society as

outwardly respectable as our own. Nor is the charge of bloodshed to

be taken literally. The Old Testament has so great a regard for the

spiritual nature of man, that to deny the individual his rights or to

take away the peace of God from his heart, it calls the shedding of

innocent blood. Isaiah reminds us of many kinds of this moral murder

when he says, _your hands are full of blood: seek justice, relieve the

oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow_. Ezekiel reminds

us of others when he tells how God spake to him, that if he _warn not

the wicked, and the same wicked shall die in his iniquity, his blood

will I require at thy hand_. And again a Psalm reminds us of the time

_when the Lord maketh inquisition for blood, He forgetteth not the cry

of the poor_.[275] This is what the Bible calls murder and lays its

burning words upon,--not such acts of bloody violence as now and then

make all humanity thrill to discover that in the heart of civilisation

there exist men with the passions of the ape and the tiger, but such

oppression of the poor, such cowardice to rebuke evil, such negligence

to restore the falling, such abuse of the characters of the young

and innocent, such fraud and oppression of the weak, as often exist

under the most respectable life, and employ the weapons of a Christian

civilisation in order to fulfil themselves. We have need to take

the bold, violent standards of the prophets and lay them to our own

lives,--the prophets that call the man who sells his honesty for gain,

_a harlot_, and hold him _blood-guilty_ who has wronged, tempted or

neglected his brother. Do not let us suppose that these crimson verses

of the Bible may be passed over by us as not applicable to ourselves.

They do not refer to murderers or maniacs: they refer to social crimes,

to which we all are in perpetual temptation, and of which we all are

more or less guilty,--the neglect of the weak, the exploitation of

the poor for our own profit, the soiling of children's minds, the

multiplying of temptation in the way of God's little ones, the malice

that leads us to blast another's character, or to impute to his action

evil motives for which we have absolutely no grounds save the envy

and sordidness of our own hearts. Do not let us fail to read all such

verses in the clear light which John the Apostle throws on them when

he says: _He that loveth not abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his

brother is a murderer._

FOOTNOTES:

[258] See vol. i., pp. 363, 364.

[259] So Ewald, Cheyne and Briggs. Ewald takes lvi. 9-lvii. 11_a_

as an interruption, borrowed from an earlier prophet in a time of

persecution, of the exilic prophecy, which goes on smoothly from lvi.

8 to lvii. 11_b_. We have seen that it is an error to suppose that

lvi. 9-lvii. rose from a time of persecution.

[260] Ezek. xxi.; _cf._ xxxiii. 30 f.

[261] Delitzsch.

[262] Mishpat and mishpatim, _cf._ p. 299.

[263] Such as is also expressed by exiles in Psalms xlii., xliii. and

lxiii., but there with what spiritual temper, here with what a hard

legal conception of righteousness.

[264] For these see p. 61.

[265] Literally, _the poor, the wandering_. It was a frequent

phrase in the Exile: Lam. iii. 19, _Remember mine affliction and my

homelessness_; i. 7, Jerusalem in the day _of her affliction and her

homelessness_. LXX. αστεγοι, roofless.

[266] Probably the fresh flesh which appears through a healing wound.

Made classical by Jeremiah, who uses it thrice of Israel,--in the

famous text, _Is there no balm_, etc., x. 22; and in xxx. 17; xxxiii. 6.

[267] Jer. xxxi. 12.

[268] _Cf._ Job xxiv. 13.

[269] _Cf._ Amos viii. 5.

[270] See pp. 43 f.

[271] Ewald conceives chs. lviii., lix. to be the work of a younger

contemporary of Ezekiel, to which the chief author of "Second Isaiah"

has added words of his own: lviii. 12, lix. 21. The latter is

evidently an insertion; _cf._ change of person and of number, etc.

Delitzsch puts the passage down to the last decade of the Captivity,

when for a little time Cyrus had turned away from Babylon, and the

Jews despaired of his coming to save them.

[272] See pp. 219 ff.

[273] Another slight trace reveals the conglomerate nature of the

chapter. If, as the earlier verses indicate, it was Israel that

sinned, then it is the rebellious in Israel who should be punished.

In ver. 18_a_, therefore, the _adversaries_ or _enemies_ ought to be

Israelites. But in 18_b_ the foreign _islands_ are included. The LXX.

has not this addition. Bredenkamp takes the words for an insertion.

Yet the consequences of Israel's sin, according to the chapter, are

not so much the punishment of the rebellious among the people as

the delay of the deliverance for the whole nation,--a deliverance

which Jehovah is represented as rising to accomplish, the moment the

people express the sense of their rebellion and are penitent. The

_adversaries_ and _enemies_ of ver. 18, therefore, are the oppressors

of Israel, the foreigners and heathen; and 18_b_ with its _islands_

comes in quite naturally.

[274] _Note on mishpat and Ssedhaqah in ch. lix._ This chapter is a

good one for studying the various meanings of mishpat. In ver. 4 the

verb shaphat is used in its simplest sense of going to law. In vv.

8 and 14 mishpat is a quality or duty of man. But in ver. 9 it is

rather what man expects from God, and what is far from man because of

his sins; it is _judgement_ on God's side, or God's saving ordinance.

In this sense it is probably to be taken in ver. 15,--Ssedhaqah

follows the same parallel. This goes to prove that we have two

distinct prophecies amalgamated, unless we believe that a play upon

the words is intended.

[275] Isa. i. 17; Ezek. ii. 18; Psalm ix. 12.

CHAPTER XXIV.

_SALVATION IN SIGHT._

ISAIAH lx.-lxiii. 7.

The deliverance from Babylon has long been certain, since ch.

xlviii.; all doubts in the way of Return have been removed, ch.

xlix.-lii. 12; the means for the spiritual Restoration of the people

have been sufficiently found, ch. liii. and preceding chapters on

the Servant; Zion has been hailed from afar, ch. liv.; last calls to

leave Babylon have been uttered, ch. lv.; last councils and comforts,

lvi. 1-8; and the civic conscience has been rekindled, ch. lvi.

9-lix. There remains now only to take possession of the City herself;

to rehearse the vocation of the restored people; and to realise all

the hopes, fears, hindrances and practical problems of the future.

These duties occupy the rest of our prophecy, chs. lx.-lxvi.

Ch. lx. is a prophecy as complete in itself as ch. liv. The

City, which in liv. was hailed and comforted from afar, is in

ch. lx. bidden rise and enjoy the glory that has at last reached

her. Her splendours, hinted at in ch. liv., are seen in full and

evident display. In chs. lxi.-lxii. her prophet, her genius and

representative, rehearses to her his duties, and sets forth her

place among the peoples. And in ch. lxiii. 1-7 we have another of

those theophanies or appearances of the--Sole Divine Author of His

people's salvation, which, abrupt and separate as if to heighten

the sense of the solitariness of their subject--occur at intervals

throughout our prophecy,--for instance, in ch. xlii., vv. 10-17, and

in ch. lix. 16-19. These three sections, ch. lx., chs. lxi.-lxii. and

ch. lxiii. 1-7, we will take together in this chapter of our volume.