_AT THE LOWEST EBB._
ISAIAH i. and xxii. (701 B.C.).
In the drama of Isaiah's life we have now arrived at the final act--a
short and sharp one of a few months. The time is 701 B.C., the fortieth
year of Isaiah's ministry, and about the twenty-sixth of Hezekiah's
reign. The background is the invasion of Palestine by Sennacherib. The
stage itself is the city of Jerusalem. In the clear atmosphere before
the bursting of the storm Isaiah has looked round the whole world--his
world--uttering oracles on the nations from Tyre to Egypt and from
Ethiopia to Babylon. But now the Assyrian storm has burst, and all
except the immediate neighbourhood of the prophet is obscured. From
Jerusalem Isaiah will not again lift his eyes.
The stage is thus narrow and the time short, but the action one of the
most critical in the history of Israel, taking rank with the Exodus from
Egypt and the Return from Babylon. To Isaiah himself it marks the summit
of his career. For half a century Zion has been preparing for,
forgetting and again preparing for, her first and final struggle with
the Assyrian. Now she is to meet her foe, face to face across her own
walls. For forty years Isaiah has predicted for the Assyrian an
uninterrupted path of conquest to the very gates of Jerusalem, but
certain check and confusion there. Sennacherib has overrun the world,
and leaps upon Zion. The Jewish nation await their fate, Isaiah his
vindication, and the credit of Israel's religion, one of the most
extraordinary tests to which a spiritual faith was ever subjected.
In the end, by the mysterious disappearance of the Assyrian, Jerusalem
was saved, the prophet was left with his remnant and the future still
open for Israel. But at the beginning of the end such an issue was by no
means probable. Jewish panic and profligacy almost prevented the Divine
purpose, and Isaiah went near to breaking his heart over the city, for
whose redemption he had travailed for a lifetime. He was as sure as ever
that this redemption must come, but a collapse of the people's faith and
patriotism at the eleventh hour made its coming seem worthless.
Jerusalem appeared bent on forestalling her deliverance by moral
suicide. Despair, not of God but of the city, settled on Isaiah's heart;
and in such a mood he wrote chap. xxii. We may entitle it therefore,
though written at a time when the tide should have been running to the
full, "At the Lowest Ebb."
We have thus stated at the outset the motive of this chapter, because it
is one of the most unexpected and startling of all Isaiah's prophecies.
In it "we can discern precipices." Beneath our eyes, long lifted by the
prophet to behold a future _stretching very far forth_, this chapter
suddenly yawns, a pit of blackness. For utterness of despair and the
absolute sentence which it passes on the citizens of Zion we have had
nothing like it from Isaiah since the evil days of Ahaz. The historical
portions of the Bible which cover this period are not cleft by such a
crevasse, and of course the official Assyrian annals, full as they are
of the details of Sennacherib's campaign in Palestine, know nothing of
the moral condition of Jerusalem.[54] Yet if we put the Hebrew and
Assyrian narratives together, and compare them with chaps. i. and xxii.
of Isaiah, we may be sure that the following was something like the
course of events which led down to this woeful depth in Judah's
experience.
[54] _Records of the Past_, i. 33 ff. vii.; Schrader's _Cuneiform
Inscriptions and the Old Testament_ (Whitehouse's translation).
In a Syrian campaign Sennacherib's path was plain--to begin with the
Phoenician cities, march quickly south by the level coastland,
subduing the petty chieftains upon it, meet Egypt at its southern end,
and then, when he had rid himself of his only formidable foe, turn to
the more delicate task of warfare among the hills of Judah--a campaign
which he could scarcely undertake with a hostile force like Egypt on his
flank. This course, he tells us, he followed. "In my third campaign, to
the land of Syria I went. Luliah (Elulæus), King of Sidon--for the
fearful splendour of my majesty overwhelmed him--fled to a distant spot
in the midst of the sea. His land I entered." City after city fell to
the invader. The princes of Aradus, Byblus and Ashdod, by the coast, and
even Moab and Edom, far inland, sent him their submission. He attacked
Ascalon, and captured its king. He went on, and took the Philistine
cities of Beth-dagon, Joppa, Barka and Azor, all of them within forty
miles of Jerusalem, and some even visible from her neighbourhood. South
of this group, and a little over twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, lay
Ekron; and here Sennacherib had so good a reason for anger, that the
inhabitants, expecting no mercy at his hands, prepared a stubborn
defence.
Ten years before this Sargon had set Padi, a vassal of his own, as king
over Ekron; but the Ekronites had risen against Padi, put him in chains,
and sent him to their ally Hezekiah, who now held him in Jerusalem.
"These men," says Sennacherib, "were now terrified in their hearts; the
shadows of death overwhelmed them."[55] Before Ekron was reduced,
however, the Egyptian army arrived in Philistia, and Sennacherib had to
abandon the siege for these arch-enemies. He defeated them in the
neighbourhood, at Eltekeh, returned to Ekron, and completed its siege.
Then, while he himself advanced southwards in pursuit of the Egyptians,
he detached a corps, which, marching eastwards through the mountain
passes, overran all Judah and threatened Jerusalem. "And Hezekiah, King
of Judah, who had not bowed down at my feet, forty-six of his strong
cities, his castles and the smaller towns in their neighbourhood beyond
number, by casting down ramparts and by open attack, by battle--_zuk_,
of the feet; _nisi_, hewing to pieces and casting down (?)--I besieged,
I captured.... He himself, like a bird in a cage, inside Jerusalem, his
royal city, I shut him up; siege-towers against him I constructed, for
he had given command to renew the bulwarks of the great gate of his
city."[56] But Sennacherib does not say that he took Jerusalem, and
simply closes the narrative of his campaign with the account of large
tribute which Hezekiah sent after him to Nineveh.
[55] _Records of the Past_, i. 38; vii. 62.
[56] _Ibid._, i., 40; Schrader, i., 286.
Here, then, we have material for a graphic picture of Jerusalem and her
populace, when chaps. i. and xxii. were uttered by Isaiah.
At Jerusalem we are within a day's journey of any part of the territory
of Judah. We feel the kingdom throb to its centre at Assyria's first
footfall on the border. The nation's life is shuddering in upon its
capital, couriers dashing up with the first news; fugitives hard upon
them; palace, arsenal, market and temple thrown into commotion; the
politicians busy; the engineers hard at work completing the
fortifications, leading the suburban wells to a reservoir within the
walls, levelling every house and tree outside which could give shelter
to the besiegers, and heaping up the material on the ramparts, till
there lies nothing but a great, bare, waterless circle round a
high-banked fortress. Across this bareness the lines of fugitives
streaming to the gates; provincial officials and their retinues;
soldiers whom Hezekiah had sent out to meet the foe, returning without
even the dignity of defeat upon them; husbandmen, with cattle and
remnants of grain in disorder; women and children; the knaves, cowards
and helpless of the whole kingdom pouring their fear, dissoluteness and
disease into the already-unsettled populace of Jerusalem. Inside the
walls opposing political factions and a weak king; idle crowds, swaying
to every rumour and intrigue; the ordinary restraints and regularities
of life suspended, even patriotism gone with counsel and courage, but in
their place fear and shame and greed of life. Such was the state in
which Jerusalem faced the hour of her visitation.
Gradually the Visitant came near over the thirty miles which lay between
the capital and the border. Signs of the Assyrian advance were given in
the sky, and night after night the watchers on Mount Zion, seeing the
glare in the west, must have speculated which of the cities of Judah was
being burned. Clouds of smoke across the heavens from prairie and forest
fires told how war, even if it passed, would leave a trail of famine;
and men thought with breaking hearts of the villages and fields,
heritage of the tribes of old, that were now bare to the foot and the
fire of the foreigner. _Your country is desolate; your cities are burned
with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is
desolate as the overthrow of strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left
as a booth in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers. Except
Jehovah of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have
been as Sodom, we should have been like unto Gomorrah._[57] Then came
touch of the enemy, the appearance of armed bands, vistas down
Jerusalem's favourite valleys of chariots, squadrons of horsemen
emerging upon the plateaus to north and west of the city, heavy
siege-towers and swarms of men innumerable. _And Elam bare the quiver,
with troops of men and horsemen; and Kir uncovered the shield._ At last
they saw their fears of fifty years face to face! Far-away names were
standing by their gates, actual bowmen and flashing shields! As
Jerusalem gazed upon the terrible Assyrian armaments, how many of her
inhabitants remembered Isaiah's words delivered a generation
before!--_Behold, they shall come with speed swiftly; none shall be
weary or stumble among them; neither shall the string of their loins be
lax nor the latchet of their shoes be broken; whose arrows are sharp,
and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs shall be counted like
flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind; their roaring shall be like a
lion: they shall roar like young lions. For all this His anger is not
turned away, but His hand is stretched out still._
[57] Chap. i. 7-9.
There were, however, two supports, on which that distracted populace
within the walls still steadied themselves. The one was the
Temple-worship, the other the Egyptian alliance.
History has many remarkable instances of peoples betaking themselves in
the hour of calamity to the energetic discharge of the public rites of
religion. But such a resort is seldom, if ever, a real moral conversion.
It is merely physical nervousness, apprehension for life, clutching at
the one thing within reach that feels solid, which it abandons as soon
as panic has passed. When the crowds in Jerusalem betook themselves to
the Temple, with unwonted wealth of sacrifice, Isaiah denounced this as
hypocrisy and futility. _To what purpose is the multitude of your
sacrifices unto Me? saith Jehovah.... I am weary to bear them. And when
ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when ye
make many prayers, I will not hear_ (i. 11-15).
Isaiah might have spared his scornful orders to the people to desist
from worship. Soon afterwards they abandoned it of their own will, but
from motives very different from those urged by him. The second support
to which Jerusalem clung was the Egyptian alliance--the pet project of
the party then in power. They had carried it to a successful issue,
taunting Isaiah with their success.[58] He had continued to denounce
it, and now the hour was approaching when their cleverness and
confidence were to be put to the test. It was known in Jerusalem that an
Egyptian army was advancing to Sennacherib, and politicians and people
awaited the encounter with anxiety.
[58] See p. 238.
We are aware what happened. Egypt was beaten at Eltekeh; the alliance
was stamped a failure; Jerusalem's last worldly hope was taken from her.
When the news reached the city, something took place, of which our moral
judgement tells us more than any actual record of facts. The Government
of Hezekiah gave way; the rulers, whose courage and patriotism had been
identified with the Egyptian alliance, lost all hope for their country,
and fled, as Isaiah puts it, _en masse_ (xxii. 3). There was no battle,
no defeat at arms (_id._ 2, 3); but the Jewish State collapsed.
Then, when the last material hope of Judah fell, fell her religion too.
The Egyptian disappointment, while it drove the rulers out of their
false policies, drove the people out of their unreal worship. What had
been a city of devotees became in a moment a city of revellers. Formerly
all had been sacrifices and worship, but now feasting and blasphemy.
_Behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh
and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die_ (_id._
13. The reference of ver. 12 is probably to chap. i.).
Now all Isaiah's ministry had been directed just against these two
things: the Egyptian alliance and the purely formal observance of
religion--trust in the world and trust in religiousness. And together
both of these had given way, and the Assyrian was at the gates. Truly it
was the hour of Isaiah's vindication. Yet--and this is the tragedy--it
had come too late. The prophet could not use it. The two things he said
would collapse had collapsed, but for the people there seemed now no
help to be justified from the thing which he said would remain. What was
the use of the city's deliverance, when the people themselves had
failed! The feelings of triumph, which the prophet might have expressed,
were swallowed up in unselfish grief over the fate of his wayward and
abandoned Jerusalem.
_What aileth thee now_--and in these words we can hear the old man
addressing his fickle child, whose changefulness by this time he knew so
well--_what aileth thee now that thou art wholly gone up to the
housetops_--we see him standing at his door watching this ghastly
holiday--_O thou that art full of shoutings, a tumultuous city, a joyous
town?_ What are you rejoicing at in such an hour as this, when you have
not even the bravery of your soldiers to celebrate, when you are without
that pride which has brought songs from the lips of a defeated people as
they learned that their sons had fallen with their faces to the foe, and
has made even the wounds of the dead borne through the gate lips of
triumph, calling to festival! _For thy slain are not slain with the
sword, neither are they dead in battle._
_All thy chiefs fled in heaps;
Without bow they were taken:
All thine that were found were taken in heaps;
From far had they run.
Wherefore I say, Look away from me;
Let me make bitterness bitterer by weeping.
Press not to comfort me
For the ruin of the daughter of my people._
Urge not your mad holiday upon me! _For a day of discomfiture and of
breaking and of perplexity hath the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, in the
valley of vision, a breaking down of the wall and a crying to the
mountain._ These few words of prose, which follow the pathetic elegy,
have a finer pathos still. The cumulative force of the successive
clauses is very impressive: _disappointment_ at the eleventh hour; the
sense of a being _trampled_ and overborne by sheer brute force; the
counsels, courage, hope and faith of fifty years crushed to blank
_perplexity_, and all this from Himself--_the Lord, Jehovah of
hosts_--in the very _valley of vision_, the home of prophecy; as if He
had meant of purpose to destroy these long confidences of the past on
the floor where they had been wrestled for and asserted, and not by the
force of the foe, but by the folly of His own people, to make them
ashamed. The last clause crashes out the effect of it all; every
spiritual rampart and refuge torn down, there is nothing left but an
appeal to the hills to fall and cover us--_a breaking down of the wall
and a crying to the mountain_.
On the brink of the precipice, Isaiah draws back for a moment, to
describe with some of his old fire the appearance of the besiegers (vv.
6-8_a_). And this suggests what kind of preparation Jerusalem had made
for her foe--every kind, says Isaiah, but the supreme one. The arsenal,
Solomon's _forest-house_, with its cedar pillars, had been looked to
(ver. 8), the fortifications inspected and increased, and the suburban
waters brought within them (vv. 9-11_a_). _But ye looked not unto Him
that had done this_, who had brought this providence upon you; _neither
had ye respect unto Him that fashioned it long ago_, whose own plan it
had been. To your alliances and fortifications you fled in the hour of
calamity, but not to Him in whose guidance the course of calamity lay.
And therefore, when your engineering and diplomacy failed you, your
religion vanished with them. _In that day did the Lord, Jehovah of
hosts, call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding
with sackcloth; but, behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing
sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we shall die._ It was the dropping of the mask. For half a
century this people had worshipped God, but they had never trusted Him
beyond the limits of their treaties and their bulwarks. And so when
their allies were defeated, and their walls began to tremble, their
religion, bound up with these things, collapsed also; they ceased even
to be men, crying like beasts, _Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die_. For such a state of mind Isaiah will hold out no promise; it is
the sin against the Holy Ghost, and for it there is no forgiveness. _And
Jehovah of hosts revealed Himself in mine ears. Surely this iniquity
shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, Jehovah of
hosts._
Back forty years the word had been, _Go and tell this people, Hear ye
indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make
the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their
eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and
understand with their heart, and turn again and be healed._ What
happened now was only what was foretold then: _And if there be yet a
tenth in it, it shall again be for consumption._ That radical revision
of judgement was now being literally fulfilled, when Isaiah, sure at
last of his remnant within the walls of Jerusalem, was forced for their
sin to condemn even them to death.
* * * * *
Nevertheless, Isaiah had still respect to the ultimate survival of a
remnant. How firmly he believed in it could not be more clearly
illustrated than by the fact that when he had so absolutely devoted his
fellow-citizens to destruction he also took the most practical means for
securing a better political future. If there is any reason, it can only
be this, for putting the second section of chap. xxii., which advocates
a change of ministry in the city (vv. 15-22), so close to the first,
which sees ahead nothing but destruction for the State (vv. 1-14).
The _mayor of the palace_ at this time was one Shebna, also called
_minister_ or _deputy_ (lit. _friend_ of the king). That his father is
not named implies perhaps that Shebna was a foreigner; his own name
betrays a Syrian origin; and he has been justly supposed to be the
leader of the party then in power, whose policy was the Egyptian
alliance, and whom in these latter years Isaiah had so frequently
denounced as the root of Judah's bitterness. To this unfamilied
intruder, who had sought to establish himself in Jerusalem, after the
manner of those days, by hewing himself a great sepulchre, Isaiah
brought sentence of violent banishment: _Behold, Jehovah will be
hurling, hurling thee away, thou big man, and crumpling, crumpling thee
together. He will roll, roll thee on, thou rolling-stone, like a ball_
thrown out _on broad level ground; there shall thou die, and there shall
be the chariots of thy glory, thou shame of the house of thy lord. And I
thrust thee from thy post, and from thy station do they pull thee down_.
This vagabond was not to die in his bed, nor to be gathered in his big
tomb to the people on whom he had foisted himself. He should continue a
_rolling-stone_. For him, like Cain, there was a land of Nod; and upon
it he was to find a vagabond's death.
To fill this upstart's place, Isaiah solemnly designated a man with a
father: Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. The formulas he uses are perhaps
the official ones customary upon induction to an office. But it may be
also, that Isaiah has woven into these some expressions of even greater
promise than usual. For this change of office-bearers was critical, and
the overthrow of the "party of action" meant to Isaiah the beginning of
the blessed future. _And it shall come to pass that in that day I will
call My servant Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah; and I will clothe him with
thy robe, and with thy girdle will I strengthen him, and thine
administration will I give into his hand, and he shall be for a father
to the inhabitant of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will set
the key of the house of David upon his shoulder; and he shall open, and
none shut: and he shall shut, and none open. And I will hammer him in, a
nail in a firm place, and he shall be for a throne of glory to his
father's house._ Thus to the last Isaiah will not allow Shebna to forget
that he is without root among the people of God, that he has neither
father nor family.
But a family is a temptation, and the weight of it may drag even the man
of the Lord's own hammering out of his place. This very year we find
Eliakim in Shebna's post,[59] and Shebna reduced to be secretary; but
Eliakim's family seem to have taken advantage of their relative's
position, and either at the time he was designated, or more probably
later, Isaiah wrote two sentences of warning upon the dangers of
nepotism. Catching at the figure, with which his designation of Eliakim
closed, that Eliakim would be a peg in a solid wall, a throne on which
the glory of his father's house might settle, Isaiah reminds the
much-encumbered statesman that the firmest peg will give way if you hang
too much on it, the strongest man be pulled down by his dependent and
indolent family. _They shall hang upon him all the weight of his
father's house, the scions and the offspring_ (terms contrasted as
degrees of worth), _all the little vessels, from the vessels of cups to
all the vessels of flagons_. _In that day, saith Jehovah of hosts, shall
the peg that was knocked into a firm place give way, and it shall be
knocked out and fall, and down shall be cut the burden that was upon it,
for Jehovah hath spoken._
[59] Isa. xxxvi. 3.
So we have not one, but a couple of tragedies. Eliakim, the son of
Hilkiah, follows Shebna, the son of Nobody. The fate of the overburdened
nail is as grievous as that of the rolling stone. It is easy to pass
this prophecy over as a trivial incident; but when we have carefully
analysed each verse, restored to the words their exact shade of
signification, and set them in their proper contrasts, we perceive the
outlines of two social dramas, which it requires very little imagination
to invest with engrossing moral interest.