HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL?
The two narratives, in which Isaiah's career culminates--that of the
Deliverance of Jerusalem (xxxvi.; xxxvii.) and that of the Recovery of
Hezekiah (xxxviii.; xxxix.)--cannot fail, coming together as they do, to
suggest to thoughtful readers a striking contrast between Isaiah's
treatment of the community and his treatment of the individual, between
his treatment of the Church and his treatment of single members. For in
the first of these narratives we are told how an illimitable future,
elsewhere so gloriously described by the prophet, was secured for the
Church upon earth; but the whole result of the second is the gain for a
representative member of the Church of a respite of fifteen years.
Nothing, as we have seen, is promised to the dying Hezekiah of a future
life; no scintilla of the light of eternity sparkles either in Isaiah's
promise or in Hezekiah's prayer. The net result of the incident is a
reprieve of fifteen years: fifteen years of a character strengthened,
indeed, by having met with death, but, it would sadly seem, only in
order to become again the prey of the vanities of this world (chap.
xxxix.). So meagre a result for the individual stands strangely out
against the perpetual glory and peace assured to the community. And it
suggests this question: Had Isaiah any real gospel for the individual?
If so, what was it?
First of all, we must remember that God in His providence seldom gives
to one prophet or generation more than a single main problem for
solution. In Isaiah's day undoubtedly the most urgent problem--and
Divine problems are ever practical, not philosophical--was the
continuance of the Church upon earth. It had really got to be a matter
of doubt whether a body of people possessing the knowledge of the true
God, and able to transfuse and transmit it, could possibly survive among
the political convulsions of the world, and in consequence of its own
sin. Isaiah's problem was the reformation and survival of the Church. In
accordance with this, we notice how many of his terms are collective,
and how he almost never addresses the individual. It is the _people_,
upon whom he calls--_the nation, Israel, the house of Jacob My vineyard,
the men of Judah His pleasant plantation_. To these we may add the
apostrophes to the city of Jerusalem, under many personifications:
_Ariel, Ariel, inhabitress of Zion, daughter of Zion_. When Isaiah
denounces sin, the sinner is either the whole community or a class in
the community, very seldom an individual, though there are some
instances of the latter, as Ahaz and Shebna. It is _This people hath
rejected_, or _The people would not_. When Jerusalem collapsed, although
there must have been many righteous men still within her, Isaiah said,
_What aileth thee that all belonging to thee have gone up to the
housetops?_ (xxii. 1). His language is wholesale. When he is not
attacking society, he attacks classes or groups: _the rulers_, the
land-grabbers, the drunkards, _the sinners_, _the judges_, _the house of
David_, _the priests and the prophets_, _the women_. And the sins of
these he describes in their social effects, or in their results upon
the fate of the whole people; but he never, except in two cases, gives
us their individual results. He does not make evident, like Jesus or
Paul, the eternal damage a man's sin inflicts on his own soul.
Similarly when Isaiah speaks of God's grace and salvation the objects of
these are again collective--_the remnant; the escaped_ (also a
collective noun); a _holy seed_; a _stock_ or _stump_. It is a _restored
nation_ whom he sees under the Messiah, the perpetuity and glory of a
_city_ and _a State_. What we consider to be a most personal and
particularly individual matter--the forgiveness of sin--he promises,
with two exceptions, only to the community: _This people that dwelleth
therein hath its iniquity forgiven_. We can understand all this social,
collective and wholesale character of his language only if we keep in
mind his Divinely appointed work--the substance and perpetuity of a
purified and secure Church of God.
Had Isaiah then no gospel for the individual? This will indeed seem
impossible to us if we keep in view the following considerations:--
1. ISAIAH HIMSELF had passed through a powerfully individual experience.
He had not only felt the solidarity of the people's sin--_I dwell among
a people of unclean lips_--he had first felt his own particular guilt:
_I am a man of unclean lips_. One who suffered the private experiences
which are recounted in chap. vi.; whose _own eyes_ had _seen_ the _King,
Jehovah of hosts_; who had gathered on his own lips his guilt and felt
the fire come from heaven's altar by an angelic messenger specially to
purify him; who had further devoted himself to God's service with so
thrilling a sense of his own responsibility, and had so thereby felt his
solitary and individual mission--he surely was not behind the very
greatest of Christian saints in the experience of guilt, of personal
obligation to grace and of personal responsibility. Though the record of
Isaiah's ministry contains no narratives, such as fill the ministries of
Jesus and Paul, of anxious care for individuals, could he who wrote of
himself that sixth chapter have failed to deal with men as Jesus dealt
with Nicodemus, or Paul with the Philippian gaoler? It is not
picturesque fancy, nor merely a reflection of the New Testament temper,
if we realize Isaiah's intervals of relief from political labour and
religious reform occupied with an attention to individual interests,
which necessarily would not obtain the permanent record of his public
ministry. But whether this be so or not, the sixth chapter teaches that
for Isaiah all public conscience and public labour found its necessary
preparation in personal religion.
2. But, again, Isaiah had an INDIVIDUAL FOR HIS IDEAL. To him the future
was not only an established State; it was equally, it was first, a
glorious king. Isaiah was an Oriental. We moderns of the West place our
reliance upon institutions; we go forward upon ideas. In the East it is
personal influence that tells, persons who are expected, followed and
fought for. The history of the West is the history of the advance of
thought, of the rise and decay of institutions, to which the greatest
individuals are more or less subordinate. The history of the East is the
annals of personalities; justice and energy in a ruler, not political
principles, are what impress the Oriental imagination. Isaiah has
carried this Oriental hope to a distinct and lofty pitch. The Hero whom
he exalts on the margin of the future, as its Author, is not only a
person of great majesty, but a character of considerable decision. At
first only the rigorous virtues of the ruler are attributed to Him
(chap. xi. 1 ff.), but afterwards the graces and influence of a much
broader and sweeter humanity (xxxii. 2). Indeed, in this latter oracle
we saw that Isaiah spoke not so much of his great Hero, as of what any
individual might become. _A man_, he says, _shall be as an hiding-place
from the wind_. Personal influence is the spring of social progress, the
shelter and fountain force of the community. In the following verses the
effect of so pure and inspiring a presence is traced in the
discrimination of individual character--each man standing out for what
he is--which Isaiah defines as his second requisite for social progress.
In all this there is much for the individual to ponder, much to inspire
him with a sense of the value and responsibility of his own character,
and with the certainty that by himself he shall be judged and by himself
stand or fall. _The worthless person shall be no more called princely,
nor the knave said to be bountiful._
3. If any details of character are wanting in the picture of Isaiah's
Hero, they are supplied by HEZEKIAH'S SELF-ANALYSIS (chap. xxxviii.). We
need not repeat what we have said in the previous chapter of the king's
appreciation of what is the strength of a man's character, and
particularly of how character grows by grappling with death. In this
matter the most experienced of Christian saints may learn from Isaiah's
pupil.
Isaiah had then, without doubt, a gospel for the individual; and to this
day the individual may plainly read it in his book, may truly, strongly,
joyfully live by it--so deeply does it begin, so much does it help to
self-knowledge and self-analysis, so lofty are the ideals and
responsibilities which it presents. But is it true that Isaiah's gospel
is for this life only?
Was Isaiah's silence on the immortality of the individual due wholly to
the cause we have suggested in the beginning of this chapter--that God
gives to each prophet his single problem, and that the problem of Isaiah
was the endurance of the Church upon earth? There is no doubt that this
is only partly the explanation.
The Hebrew belonged to a branch of humanity--the Semitic--which, as its
history proves, was unable to develop any strong imagination of, or
practical interest in, a future life apart from foreign influence or
Divine revelation. The pagan Arabs laughed at Mahommed when he preached
to them of the Resurrection; and even to-day, after twelve centuries of
Moslem influence, their descendants in the centre of Arabia, according
to the most recent authority,[73] fail to form a clear conception of, or
indeed to take almost any practical interest in, another world. The
northern branch of the race, to which the Hebrews belonged, derived from
an older civilisation a prospect of Hades, that their own fancy
developed with great elaboration. This prospect, however, which we shall
describe fully in connection with chaps. xiv. and xxvi., was one
absolutely hostile to the interests of character in this life. It
brought all men, whatever their life had been on earth, at last to a
dead level of unsubstantial and hopeless existence. Good and evil,
strong and weak, pious and infidel, alike became shades, joyless and
hopeless, without even the power to praise God. We have seen in
Hezekiah's case how such a prospect unnerved the most pious souls, and
that revelation, even though represented at his bedside by an Isaiah,
offered him no hope of an issue from it. The strength of character,
however, which Hezekiah professes to have won in grappling with death,
added to the closeness of communion with God which he enjoyed in this
life, only brings out the absurdity of such a conclusion to life as the
prospect of Sheol offered to the individual. If he was a pious man, if
he was a man who had never felt himself deserted by God in this life, he
was bound to revolt from so God-forsaken an existence after death. This
was actually the line along which the Hebrew spirit went out to victory
over those gloomy conceptions of death, that were yet unbroken by a
risen Christ. _Thou wilt not_, the saint triumphantly cried, _leave my
soul in Sheol, nor wilt Thou suffer Thine holy one to see corruption_.
It was faith in the almightiness and reasonableness of God's ways, it
was conviction of personal righteousness, it was the sense that the Lord
would not desert His own in death, which sustained the believer in face
of that awful shadow through which no light of revelation had yet
broken.
[73] Doughty's _Arabia Deserta: Travels in Northern Arabia_, 1876-1878.
If these, then, were the wings by which a believing soul under the Old
Testament soared over the grave, Isaiah may be said to have contributed
to the hope of personal immortality just in so far as he strengthened
them. By enhancing as he did the value and beauty of individual
character, by emphasizing the indwelling of God's Spirit, he was
bringing life and immortality to light, even though he spoke no word to
the dying about the fact of a glorious life beyond the grave. By
assisting to create in the individual that character and sense of God,
which alone could assure him he would never die, but pass from the
praise of the Lord in this life to a nearer enjoyment of His presence
beyond, Isaiah was working along the only line by which the Spirit of
God seems to have assisted the Hebrew mind to an assurance of heaven.
But further in his favourite gospel of the REASONABLENESS OF GOD--that
God does not work fruitlessly, nor create and cultivate with a view to
judgement and destruction--Isaiah was furnishing an argument for
personal immortality, the force of which has not been exhausted. In a
recent work on _The Destiny of Man_[74] the philosophic author maintains
the reasonableness of the Divine methods as a ground of belief both in
the continued progress of the race upon earth and in the immortality of
the individual. "From the first dawning of life we see all things
working together towards one mighty goal--the evolution of the most
exalted and spiritual faculties which characterize humanity. Has all
this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that
bursts, a vision that fades? On such a view the riddle of the universe
becomes a riddle without a meaning. The more thoroughly we comprehend
the process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are,
the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence
of the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole process of its
meaning. It goes far towards putting us to permanent intellectual
confusion. For my own part, I believe in the immortality of the soul,
not in the sense in which I accept demonstrable truths of science, but
as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work."
[74] By Professor Fiske.
From the same argument Isaiah drew only the former of these two
conclusions. To him the certainty that God's people would survive the
impending deluge of Assyria's brute force was based on his faith that
the Lord is _a God of judgement_, of reasonable law and method, and
could not have created or fostered so spiritual a people only to destroy
them. The progress of religion upon earth was certain. But does not
Isaiah's method equally make for the immortality of the individual? He
did not draw this conclusion, but he laid down its premises with a
confidence and richness of illustration that have never been excelled.
We, therefore, answer the question we put at the beginning of the
chapter thus:--Isaiah had a gospel for the individual for this life, and
all the necessary premises of a gospel for the individual for the life
to come.
BOOK V.
_PROPHECIES NOT RELATING TO ISAIAH'S TIME._
ISAIAH:--
xiii.-xiv. 23
xxiv.-xxvii.
xxxiv.
xxxv.
BOOK V.
In the first thirty-nine chapters of the Book of Isaiah--the half which
refers to the prophet's own career and the politics contemporary with
that--we find four or five prophecies containing no reference to Isaiah
himself nor to any Jewish king under whom he laboured, and painting both
Israel and the foreign world in quite a different state from that in
which they lay during his lifetime. These prophecies are chap. xiii., an
Oracle announcing the Fall of Babylon, with its appendix, chap. xiv.
1-23, the Promise of Israel's Deliverance and an Ode upon the Fall of
the Babylonian Tyrant; chaps. xxiv.-xxvii., a series of Visions of the
breaking up of the universe, of restoration from exile, and even of
resurrection from the dead; chap. xxxiv., the Vengeance of the Lord upon
Edom; and chap. xxxv., a Song of Return from Exile.
In these prophecies Assyria is no longer the dominant world-force, nor
Jerusalem the inviolate fortress of God and His people. If Assyria or
Egypt is mentioned, it is but as one of the three classical enemies of
Israel; and Babylon is represented as the head and front of the hostile
world. The Jews are no longer in political freedom and possession of
their own land; they are either in exile or just returned from it to a
depopulated country. With these altered circumstances come another
temper and new doctrine. The horizon is different, and the hopes that
flush in dawn upon it are not quite the same as those which we have
contemplated with Isaiah in his immediate future. It is no longer the
repulse of the heathen invader; the inviolateness of the sacred city;
the recovery of the people from the shock of attack, and of the land
from the trampling of armies. But it is the people in exile, the
overthrow of the tyrant in his own home, the opening of prison doors,
the laying down of a highway through the wilderness, the triumph of
return and the resumption of worship. There is, besides, a promise of
the resurrection, which we have not found in the prophecies we have
considered.
With such differences, it is not wonderful that many have denied the
authorship of these few prophecies to Isaiah. This is a question that
can be looked at calmly. It touches no dogma of the Christian faith.
Especially it does not involve the other question, so often--and, we
venture to say, so unjustly--started on this point, Could not the Spirit
of God have inspired Isaiah to foresee all that the prophecies in
question foretell, even though he lived more than a century before the
people were in circumstances to understand them? Certainly, God is
almighty. The question is not, Could He have done this? but one somewhat
different: Did He do it? and to this an answer can be had only from the
prophecies themselves. If these mark the Babylonian hostility or
captivity as already upon Israel, this is a testimony of Scripture
itself, which we cannot overlook, and beside which even unquestionable
traces of similarity to Isaiah's style or the fact that these oracles
are bound up with Isaiah's own undoubted prophecies have little weight.
"Facts" of style will be regarded with suspicion by any one who knows
how they are employed by both sides in such a question as this; while
the certainty that the Book of Isaiah was put into its present form
subsequently to his life will permit of,--and the evident purpose of
Scripture to secure moral impressiveness rather than historical
consecutiveness will account for,--later oracles being bound up with
unquestioned utterances of Isaiah.
Only one of the prophecies in question confirms the tradition that it is
by Isaiah, viz., chap. xiii., which bears the title _Oracle of Babylon
which Isaiah, son of Amoz, did see_; but titles are themselves so much
the report of tradition, being of a later date than the rest of the
text, that it is best to argue the question apart from them.
On the other hand, Isaiah's authorship of these prophecies, or at least
the possibility of his having written them, is usually defended by
appealing to his promise of the return from exile in chap. xi. and his
threat of a Babylonish captivity in chap. xxxix. This is an argument
that has not been fairly met by those who deny the Isaianic authorship
of chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23, xxiv.-xxvii., and xxxv. It is a strong
argument, for while, as we have seen (p. 201), there are good grounds
for believing Isaiah to have been likely to make such a prediction of a
Babylonish captivity as is attributed to him in chap. xxxix. 6, almost
all the critics agree in leaving chap. xi. to him. But if chap. xi. is
Isaiah's, then he undoubtedly spoke of an exile much more extensive than
had taken place by his own day. Nevertheless, even this ability in xi.
to foretell an exile so vast does not account for passages in xiii.-xiv.
23, xxiv.-xxvii., which represent the Exile either as present or as
actually over. No one who reads these chapters without prejudice can
fail to feel the force of such passages in leading him to decide for an
exilic or post-exilic authorship (see pp. 429 ff.).
Another argument against attributing these prophecies to Isaiah is that
their visions of the last things, representing as they do a judgement on
the whole world, and even the destruction of the whole material
universe, are incompatible with Isaiah's loftiest and final hope of an
inviolate Zion at last relieved and secure, of a land freed from
invasion and wondrously fertile, with all the converted world, Assyria
and Egypt, gathered round it as a centre. This question, however, is
seriously complicated by the fact that in his youth Isaiah did
undoubtedly prophesy a shaking of the whole world and the destruction of
its inhabitants, and by the probability that his old age survived into a
period, whose abounding sin would again make natural such wholesale
predictions of judgement as we find in chap. xxiv.
Still, let the question of the eschatology be as obscure as we have
shown, there remains this clear issue. In some chapters of the Book of
Isaiah, which, from our knowledge of the circumstances of his times, we
know must have been published while he was alive, we learn that the
Jewish people has never left its land, nor lost its independence under
Jehovah's anointed, and that the inviolateness of Zion and the retreat
of the Assyrian invaders of Judah, without effecting the captivity of
the Jews, are absolutely essential to the endurance of God's kingdom on
earth. In other chapters we find that the Jews have left their land,
have been long in exile (or from other passages have just returned), and
that the religious essential is no more the independence of the Jewish
State under a theocratic king, but only the resumption of the Temple
worship. Is it possible for one man to have written both these sets of
chapters? Is it possible for one age to have produced them? That is the
whole question.
CHAPTER XXVII.
BABYLON AND LUCIFER.
ISAIAH xiii. 2-xiv. 23 (DATE UNCERTAIN).
This double oracle is against the City (xiii. 2-xiv. 2) and the Tyrant
(xiv. 3-23) of Babylon.
I. THE WICKED CITY (xiii. 2-xiv. 23).
The first part is a series of hurried and vanishing scenes--glimpses of
ruin and deliverance caught through the smoke and turmoil of a Divine
war. The drama opens with the erection of a gathering _standard upon a
bare mountain_ (ver. 2). He who gives the order explains it (ver. 3),
but is immediately interrupted by _Hark! a tumult on the mountains, like
a great people. Hark! the surge of the kingdoms of nations gathering
together. Jehovah of hosts is mustering the host of war._ It is the _day
of Jehovah_ that is _near_, the day of His war and of His judgement upon
the world.
This Old Testament expression, _the day of the LORD_, starts so many
ideas that it is difficult to seize any one of them and say this is just
what is meant. For _day_ with a possessive pronoun suggests what has
been appointed aforehand, or what must come round in its turn; means
also opportunity and triumph, and also swift performance after long
delay. All these thoughts are excited when we couple _a day_ with any
person's name. And therefore as with every dawn some one awakes saying,
This is my day; as with every dawn comes some one's chance, some soul
gets its wish, some will shows what it can do, some passion or principle
issues into fact: so God also shall have His day, on which His justice
and power shall find their full scope and triumph. Suddenly and simply,
like any dawn that takes its turn on the round of time, the great
decision and victory of Divine justice shall at last break out of the
long delay of ages. _Howl ye, for the day of Jehovah is near; as
destruction from the Destructive does it come._ Very savage and quite
universal is its punishment. _Every human heart melteth._ Countless
faces, white with terror, light up its darkness like flames. Sinners are
_to be exterminated out of the earth; the world is to be punished for
its iniquity_. Heaven, the stars, sun and moon aid the horror and the
darkness, heaven shivering above, the earth quaking beneath; and
between, the peoples like shepherdless sheep drive to and fro through
awful carnage.
From ver. 17 the mist lifts a little. The vague turmoil clears up into a
siege of Babylon by the Medians, and then settles down into Babylon's
ruin and abandonment to wild beasts. Finally (xiv. 1) comes the
religious reason of so much convulsion: _For Jehovah will have
compassion upon Jacob, and choose again Israel, and settle them upon
their own ground; and the foreign sojourner shall join himself to them,
and they shall associate themselves to the house of Jacob_.
This prophecy evidently came to a people already in captivity--a very
different circumstance of the Church of God from that in which we have
seen her under Isaiah. But upon this new stage it is still the same old
conquest. Assyria has fallen, but Babylon has taken her place. The old
spirit of cruelty and covetousness has entered a new body; the only
change is that it has become wealth and luxury instead of brute force
and military glory. It is still selfishness and pride and atheism. At
this, our first introduction to Babylon, it might have been proper to
explain why throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation this one
city should remain in fact or symbol the enemy of God and the stronghold
of darkness. But we postpone what may be said of her singular
reputation, till we come to the second part of the Book of Isaiah where
Babylon plays a larger and more distinct role. Here her destruction is
simply the most striking episode of the Divine judgement upon the whole
earth. Babylon represents civilisation; she is the brow of the world's
pride and enmity to God. One distinctively Babylonian characteristic,
however, must not be passed over. With a ring of irony in his voice, the
prophet declares, _Behold, I stir up the Medes against thee, who regard
not silver and take no pleasure in gold_. The worst terror that can
assail us is the terror of forces, whose character we cannot fathom, who
will not stop to parley, who do not understand our language nor our
bribes. It was such a power, with which the resourceful and luxurious
Babylon was threatened. With money the Babylonians did all they wished
to do, and believed everything else to be possible. They had subsidised
kings, bought over enemies, seduced the peoples of the earth. The foe
whom God now sent them was impervious to this influence. From their pure
highlands came down upon corrupt civilisation a simple people, whose
banner was a leathern apron, whose goal was not booty nor ease but power
and mastery, who came not to rob but to displace.
The lessons of the passage are two: that the people of God are
something distinct from civilisation, though this be universal and
absorbent as a very Babylon; and that the resources of civilisation are
not even in material strength the highest in the universe, but God has
in His armoury weapons heedless of men's cunning, and in His armies
agents impervious to men's bribes. Every civilisation needs to be told,
according to its temper, one of these two things. Is it hypocritical?
Then it needs to be told that civilisation is not one with the people of
God. Is it arrogant? Then it needs to be told that the resources of
civilisation are not the strongest forces in God's universe. Man talks
of the triumph of mind over matter, of the power of culture, of the
elasticity of civilisation; but God has natural forces, to which all
these are as the worm beneath the hoof of the horse: and if moral need
arise, He will call His brute forces into requisition. _Howl ye, for the
day of Jehovah is near; as destruction from the Destructive does it
come._ There may be periods in man's history when, in opposition to
man's unholy art and godless civilisation, God can reveal Himself only
as destruction.
II. THE TYRANT (xiv. 3-23).
To the prophecy of the overthrow of Babylon there is annexed, in order
to be sung by Israel in the hour of her deliverance, a _satiric ode_ or
_taunt-song_ (Heb. _mashal_, Eng. ver. _parable_) upon the King of
Babylon. A translation of this spirited poem in the form of its verse
(in which, it is to be regretted, it has not been rendered by the
English revisers) will be more instructive than a full commentary. But
the following remarks of introduction are necessary. The word _mashal_,
by which this ode is entitled, means comparison, _similitude_ or
_parable_, and was applicable to every sentence composed of at least two
members that compared or contrasted their subjects. As the great bulk of
Hebrew poetry is sententious, and largely depends for rhythm upon its
parallelism, _mashal_ received a general application; and while another
term--_shîr_--more properly denotes lyric poetry, _mashal_ is applied to
rhythmical passages in the Old Testament of almost all tempers: to mere
predictions, proverbs, orations, satires or taunt-songs, as here, and to
didactic pieces. The parallelism of the verses in our ode is too evident
to need an index. But the parallel verses are next grouped into
strophes. In Hebrew poetry this division is frequently effected by the
use of a refrain. In our ode there is no refrain, but the strophes are
easily distinguished by difference of subject-matter. Hebrew poetry does
not employ rhyme, but makes use of assonance, and to a much less extent
of alliteration--a form which is more frequent in Hebrew prose. In our
ode there is not much either of assonance or alliteration. But, on the
other hand, the ode has but to be read to break into a certain rough and
swinging rhythm. This is produced by long verses rising alternate with
short ones falling. Hebrew verse at no time relied for a metrical effect
upon the modern device of an equal or proportionate number of syllables.
The longer verses of this ode are sometimes too short, the shorter too
long, variations to which a rude chant could readily adapt itself. But
the alternation of long and short is sustained throughout, except for a
break at ver. 10 by the introduction of the formula _And they answered
and said_, which evidently ought to stand for a long and a short verse
if the number of double verses in the second strophe is to be the same
as it is--seven--in the first and in the third.
The scene of the poem, the Underworld and abode of the shades of the
dead, is one on which some of the most splendid imagination and music of
humanity has been expended. But we must not be disappointed if we do not
here find the rich detail and glowing fancy of Virgil's or of Dante's
vision. This simple and even rude piece of metre, liker ballad than
epic, ought to excite our wonder not so much for what it has failed to
imagine as for what, being at its disposal, it has resolutely stinted
itself in employing. For it is evident that the author of these lines
had within his reach the rich, fantastic materials of Semitic mythology,
which are familiar to us in the Babylonian remains. With an austerity,
that must strike every one who is acquainted with these, he uses only so
much of them as to enable him to render with dramatic force his simple
theme--the vanity of human arrogance.[75]
[75] "Those principles of natural philosophy which smothered the
religions of the East with their rank and injurious growth are almost
entirely absent from the religion of the Hebrews. Here the motive-power
of development is to be found in ethical ideas, which, though not indeed
alien to the life of other nations, were not the source from which their
religious notions were derived."--(Lotze's _Microcosmos_, Eng. Transl.,
il., 466.)
For this purpose he employs the idea of the Underworld which was
prevalent among the northern Semitic peoples. Sheol--the _gaping_ or
_craving_ place--which we shall have occasion to describe in detail when
we come to speak of belief in the resurrection,[76] is the state after
death that craves and swallows all living. There dwell the shades of men
amid some unsubstantial reflection of their earthly state (ver. 9), and
with consciousness and passion only sufficient to greet the arrival of
the new-comer and express satiric wonder at his fall (ver. 9). With the
arrogance of the Babylonian kings, this tyrant thought to scale the
heavens to set his throne in the _mount of assembly_ of the immortals,
_to match the Most High_.[77] But his fate is the fate of all
mortals--to go down to the weakness and emptiness of Sheol. Here, let us
carefully observe, there is no trace of a judgement for reward or
punishment. The new victim of death simply passes to his place among his
equals. There was enough of contrast between the arrogance of a tyrant
claiming Divinity and his fall into the common receptacle of mortality
to point the prophet's moral without the addition of infernal torment.
Do we wish to know the actual punishment of his pride and cruelty? It is
visible above ground (strophe 4); not with his spirit, but with his
corpse; not with himself, but with his wretched family. His corpse is
unburied, his family exterminated; his name disappears from the
earth.[78]
[76] P. 447 ff.
[77] It is, however, only just to add that, as Mr. Sayce has pointed out
in the Hibbert Lectures for 1887 (p. 365), the claims of Babylonian
kings and heroes for a seat on the mountain of the gods were not always
mere arrogance, but the first efforts of the Babylonian mind to
emancipate itself from the gloomy conceptions of Hades and provide a
worthy immortality for virtue. Still most of the kings who pray for an
entrance among the gods do so on the plea that they have been successful
tyrants--a considerable difference from such an assurance as that of the
sixteenth Psalm.
[78] The popular Semitic conception of Hades contained within it neither
grades of condition, according to the merits of men, nor any trace of an
infernal torment in aggravation of the unsubstantial state to which all
are equally reduced. This statement is true of the Old Testament till at
least the Book of Daniel. Sheol is lit by no lurid fires, such as made
the later Christian hell intolerable to the lost. That life is
unsubstantial; that darkness and dust abound; above all, that God is not
there, and that it is impossible to praise Him, is all the punishment
which is given in Sheol. Extraordinary vice is punished above ground, in
the name and family of the sinner. Sheol, with its monotony, is for
average men; but extraordinary piety can break away from it (Ps. xvi.).
Thus, by the help of only a few fragments from the popular mythology,
the sacred satirist achieves his purpose. His severe monotheism is
remarkable in its contrast to Babylonian poems upon similar subjects. He
will know none of the gods of the underworld. In place of the great
goddess, whom a Babylonian would certainly have seen presiding, with her
minions, over the shades, he personifies--it is a frequent figure of
Hebrew poetry--the abyss itself. _Sheol shuddereth at thee._ It is the
same when he speaks (ver. 13) of the deep's great opposite, that _mount
of assembly_ of the gods, which the northern Semites believed to soar to
a silver sky _in the recesses of the north_ (ver. 14), upon the great
range which in that direction bounded the Babylonian plain. This Hebrew
knows of no gods there but One, whose are the stars, who is the Most
High. Man's arrogance and cruelty are attempts upon His majesty. He
inevitably overwhelms them. Death is their penalty: blood and squalor on
earth, the concourse of shuddering ghosts below.
_The kings of the earth set themselves,
And the rulers take counsel together,
Against the Lord and against His Anointed.
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh;
The Lord shall have them in derision._
He who has heard that laughter sees no comedy in aught else. This is the
one unfailing subject of Hebrew satire, and it forms the irony and the
rigour of the following ode.[79]
[79] Readers will remember a parallel to this ode in Carlyle's famous
chapter on Louis the Unforgotten. No modern has rivalled Carlyle in his
inheritance of this satire, except it be he whom Carlyle called "that
Jew blackguard Heine."
The only other remarks necessary are these. In ver. 9 the Authorized
Version has not attempted to reproduce the humour of the original
satire, which styles them that were chief men on earth _chief-goats_ of
the herd, bell-wethers. The phrase _they that go down to the stones of
the pit_ should be transferred from ver. 19 to ver. 20.
_And thou shalt lift up this proverb upon the King of Babylon, and shalt
say,_--
I.
Ah! stilled is the tyrant,
And stilled is the fury!
Broke hath Jehovah the rod of the wicked,
Sceptre of despots:
Stroke of (the) peoples with passion,
Stroke unremitting,
Treading in wrath (the) nations,
Trampling unceasing.
Quiet, at rest, is the whole earth,
They break into singing;
Even the pines are jubilant for thee,
Lebanon's cedars!
"Since thou liest low, cometh not up
Feller against us."
II.
Sheol from under shuddereth at thee
To meet thine arrival,
Stirring up for thee the shades,
All great-goats of earth!
Lifteth erect from their thrones
All kings of peoples.
10. _All of them answer and say to thee,_--
"Thou, too, made flaccid like us,
To us hast been levelled!
Hurled to Sheol is the pride of thee,
Clang of the harps of thee;
Under thee strewn are (the) maggots
Thy coverlet worms."
III.
How art thou fallen from heaven
Daystar, son of the dawn
(How) art thou hewn down to earth,
Hurtler at nations.
And thou, thou didst say in thine heart,
"The heavens will I scale,
Far up to the stars of God
Lift high my throne,
And sit on the mount of assembly,
Far back of the north,
I will climb on the heights of (the) cloud,
I will match the Most High!"
Ah! to Sheol thou art hurled,
Far back of the pit!
IV.
Who see thee at thee are gazing;
Upon thee they muse:
Is this the man that staggered the earth,
Shaker of kingdoms?
Setting the world like the desert,
Its cities he tore down;
Its prisoners he loosed not
(Each of them) homeward.
All kings of peoples, yes all,
Are lying in their state;
But thou! thou art flung from thy grave,
Like a stick that is loathsome.
Beshrouded with slain, the pierced of the sword,
Like a corpse that is trampled.
They that go down to the stones of a crypt,
Shalt not be with them in burial.
For thy land thou hast ruined,
Thy people hast slaughtered.
Shall not be mentioned for aye
Seed of the wicked!
Set for his children a shambles,
For guilt of their fathers!
They shall not rise, nor inherit (the) earth,
Nor fill the face of the world with cities.
V.
But I will arise upon them,
Sayeth Jehovah of hosts;
And I will cut off from Babel
Record and remnant,
And scion and seed,
Saith Jehovah:
Yea, I will make it the bittern's heritage,
Marshes of water!
And I will sweep it with sweeps of destruction,
Sayeth Jehovah of hosts.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
_THE EFFECT OF SIN ON OUR MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCE._
ISAIAH xxiv. (DATE UNCERTAIN).
The twenty-fourth of Isaiah is one of those chapters, which almost
convince the most persevering reader of Scripture that a consecutive
reading of the Authorized Version is an impossibility. For what does he
get from it but a weary and unintelligent impression of destruction,
from which he gladly escapes to the nearest clear utterance of gospel or
judgement? Criticism affords little help. It cannot clearly identify the
chapter with any historical situation. For a moment there is a gleam of
a company standing outside the convulsion, and to the west of the
prophet, while the prophet himself suffers captivity.[80] But even this
fades before we make it out; and all the rest of the chapter has too
universal an application--the language is too imaginative, enigmatic and
even paradoxical--to be applied to an actual historical situation, or to
its development in the immediate future. This is an ideal description,
the apocalyptic vision of a last, great day of judgement upon the whole
world; and perhaps the moral truths are all the more impressive that the
reader is not distracted by temporary or local references.
[80] vv. 14-16, which are very perplexing. In 14 a company is introduced
to us very vaguely as _those_ or _yonder ones_, who are represented as
seeing the bright side of the convulsion which is the subject of the
chapter. _They cry aloud from the sea_; that is, _from the west_ of the
prophet. He is therefore in the east, and in captivity, in the centre of
the convulsion. The problem is to find any actual historical situation,
in which part of Israel was in the east in captivity, and part in the
west free and full of reasons for praising God for the calamity, out of
which their brethren saw no escape for themselves.
With the very first verse the prophecy leaps far beyond all particular
or national conditions: _Behold, Jehovah shall be emptying the earth and
rifling it; and He shall turn it upside down and scatter its
inhabitants_. This is expressive and thorough; the words are those which
were used for cleaning a dirty dish. To the completeness of this opening
verse there is really nothing in the chapter to add. All the rest of the
verses only illustrate this upturning and scouring of the material
universe. For it is with the material universe that the chapter is
concerned. Nothing is said of the spiritual nature of man--little,
indeed, about man at all. He is simply called _the inhabitant of the
earth_, and the structure of society (ver. 2) is introduced only to make
more complete the effect of the convulsion of the earth itself. Man
cannot escape those judgements which shatter his material habitation. It
is like one of Dante's visions. _Terror, and Pit and Snare upon thee, O
inhabitant of the earth! And it shall come to pass that he who fleeth
from the noise of the Terror shall fall into the Pit, and he who cometh
up out of the midst of the Pit shall be taken in the Snare. For the
windows on high are opened, and the foundations of the earth do shake.
Broken, utterly broken, is the earth; shattered, utterly shattered, the
earth; staggering, very staggering, the earth; reeling, the earth
reeleth like a drunken man: she swingeth to and fro like a hammock._ And
so through the rest of the chapter it is the material life of man that
is cursed: _the new wine_, _the vine_, _the tabrets_, _the harp_, _the
song_, and the merriness in men's hearts which these call forth. Nor
does the chapter confine itself to the earth. The closing verses carry
the effect of judgement to the heavens and far limits of the material
universe. _The host of the high ones on high_ (ver. 21) are not
spiritual beings, the angels. They are material bodies, the stars.
_Then, too, shall the moon be confounded, and the stars ashamed_, when
the Lord's kingdom is established and His righteousness made gloriously
clear.
What awful truth is this for illustration of which we see not man, but
his habitation, the world and all its surroundings, lifted up by the
hand of the Lord, broken open, wiped out and shaken, while man himself,
as if only to heighten the effect, staggers hopelessly like some broken
insect on the quaking ruins? What judgement is this, in which not only
one city or one kingdom is concerned, as in the last prophecy of which
we treated, but the whole earth is convulsed, and moon and sun
confounded?
The judgement is the visitation of man's sins on his material
surroundings--_The earth's transgression shall be heavy upon it; and it
shall rise, and not fall_. The truth on which this judgement rests is
that between man and his material circumstance--the earth he inhabits,
the seasons which bear him company through time and the stars to which
he looks high up in heaven--there is a moral sympathy. _The earth also
is profaned under the inhabitants thereof, because they have
transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting
covenant._
The Bible gives no support to the theory that matter itself is evil. God
created all things; _and God saw everything that He had made; and,
behold, it was very good_. When, therefore, we read in the Bible that
the earth is cursed, we read that it is cursed for man's sake; when we
read of its desolation, it is as the effect of man's crime. The Flood,
the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Egypt and other
great physical catastrophes happened because men were stubborn or men
were foul. We cannot help noticing, however, that matter was thus
convulsed or destroyed, not only for the purpose of punishing the moral
agent, but because of some poison which had passed from him into the
unconscious instruments, stage and circumstance of his crime. According
to the Bible, there would appear to be some mysterious sympathy between
man and Nature. Man not only governs Nature; he infects and informs her.
As the moral life of the soul expresses itself in the physical life of
the body for the latter's health or corruption, so the conduct of the
human race affects the physical life of the universe to its farthest
limits in space. When man is reconciled to God, the wilderness blossoms
like a rose; but the guilt of man sullies, infects and corrupts the
place he inhabits and the articles he employs; and their destruction
becomes necessary, not for his punishment so much as because of the
infection and pollution that is in them.
The Old Testament is not contented with a general statement of this
great principle, but pursues it to all sorts of particular and private
applications. The curses of the Lord fell, not only on the sinner, but
on his dwelling, on his property and even on the bit of ground these
occupied. This was especially the case with regard to idolatry. When
Israel put a pagan population to the sword, they were commanded to raze
the city, gather its wealth together, burn all that was burnable and put
the rest into the temple of the Lord as a thing _devoted_ or
_accursed_, which it would harm themselves to share (Deut. vii. 25, 26;
xiii. 7). The very site of Jericho was cursed, and men were forbidden to
build upon its horrid waste. The story of Achan illustrates the same
principle.
It is just this principle which chap. xxiv. extends to the whole
universe. What happened in Jericho because of its inhabitants' idolatry
is now to happen to the whole earth because of man's sin. _The earth
also is profane under her inhabitants, because they have transgressed
the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant._ In
these words the prophet takes us away back to the covenant with Noah,
which he properly emphasizes as a covenant with all mankind. With a
noble universalism, for which his race and their literature get too
little credit, this Hebrew recognises that once all mankind were holy
unto God, who had included them under His grace, that promised the
fixedness and fertility of nature. But that covenant, though of grace,
had its conditions for man. These had been broken. The race had grown
wicked, as it was before the Flood; and therefore, in terms which
vividly recall that former judgement of God--_the windows on high are
opened_--the prophet foretells a new and more awful catastrophe. One
word which he employs betrays how close he feels the moral sympathy to
be between man and his world. _The earth_, he says, _is profane_. This
is a word, whose root meaning is _that which has fallen away_ or
_separated itself_, which is _delinquent_. Sometimes, perhaps, it has a
purely moral significance, like our word "abandoned" in the common
acceptance: he who has fallen far and utterly into sin, _the reckless
sinner_. But mostly it has rather the religious meaning of one who has
fallen out of the covenant relation with God and the relevant benefits
and privileges. Into this covenant not only Israel and their land, but
humanity and the whole world, have been brought. Is man under covenant
grace? The world is also. Does man fall? So does the world, becoming
with him _profane_. The consequence of breaking the covenant oath was
expressed in Hebrew by a technical word; and it is this word which,
translated _curse_, is applied in ver. 6 to the earth.
The whole earth is to be broken up and dissolved. What then is to become
of the people of God--the indestructible remnant? Where are they to
settle? In this new deluge is there a new ark? For answer the prophet
presents us with an old paradise (ver. 23). He has wrecked the universe;
but he says now, _Jehovah of hosts shall dwell in Mount Zion and in
Jerusalem_. It would be impossible to find a better instance of the
limitations of Old Testament prophecy than this return to the old
dispensation after the old dispensation has been committed to the
flames. At such a crisis as the conflagration of the universe for the
sin of man, the hope of the New Testament looks for the creation of a
new heaven and a new earth, but there is no scintilla of such a hope in
this prediction. The imagination of the Hebrew seer is beaten back upon
the theatre his conscience has abandoned. He knows "the old is out of
date," but for him "the new is not yet born;" and, therefore, convinced
as he is that the old must pass away, he is forced to borrow from its
ruins a provisional abode for God's people, a figure for the truth which
grips him so firmly, that, in spite of the death of all the universe for
man's sin, there must be a visibleness and locality of the Divine
majesty, a place where the people of God may gather to bless His holy
name.
In this contrast of the power of spiritual imagination possessed
respectively by the Old and New Testaments we must not, however, lose
the ethical interest which the main lesson of this chapter has for the
individual conscience. A breaking universe, the great day of judgement,
may be too large and too far off to impress our conscience. But each of
us has his own world--body, property and environment--which is as much
and as evidently affected by his own sins as our chapter represents the
universe to be by the sins of the race.
To grant that the moral and physical universes are from the same hand is
to affirm a sympathy and mutual reaction between them. This affirmation
is confirmed by experience, and this experience is of two kinds. To the
guilty man Nature seems aware, and flashes back from her larger surfaces
the magnified reflection of his own self-contempt and terror. But,
besides, men are also unable to escape attributing to the material
instruments or surroundings of their sin a certain infection, a certain
power of recommunicating to their imaginations and memories the desire
for sin, as well as of inflicting upon them the pain and penalty of the
disorder it has produced among themselves. Sin, though born, as Christ
said, in the heart, has immediately a material expression; and we may
follow this outwards through man's mind, body and estate, not only to
find it "hindering, disturbing, complicating all," but reinfecting with
the lust and odour of sin the will which gave it birth. As sin is put
forth by the will, or is cherished in the heart, so we find error cloud
the mind, impurity the imagination, misery the feelings, and pain and
weariness infect the flesh and bone. God, who modelled it, alone knows
how far man's physical form has been degraded by the sinful thoughts
and habits of which for ages it has been the tool and expression; but
even our eyes may sometimes trace the despoiler, and that not only in
the case of what are preferably named sins of the flesh, but even with
lusts that do not require for their gratification the abuse of the body.
Pride, as one might think the least fleshly of all the vices, leaves yet
in time her damning signature, and will mark the strongest faces with
the sad symptoms of that mental break-down, for which unrestrained pride
is so often to blame. If sin thus disfigures the body, we know that sin
also infects the body. The habituated flesh becomes the suggester of
crime to the will which first constrained it to sin, and now wearily,
but in vain, rebels against the habits of its instrument. But we recall
all this about the body only to say that what is true of the body is
true of the soul's greater material surroundings. With the sentence
_Thou shalt surely die_, God connects this other: _Cursed is the ground
for thy sake_.
When we pass from a man's body, the wrapping we find next nearest to his
soul is his property. It has always been an instinct of the race, that
there is nothing a man may so infect with the sin of his heart as his
handiwork and the gains of his toil. And that is a true instinct, for,
in the first place, the making of property perpetuates a man's own
habits. If he is successful in business, then every bit of wealth he
gathers is a confirmation of the motives and tempers in which he
conducted his business. A man deceives himself as to this, saying, Wait
till I have made enough; then I will put away the meanness, the
harshness and the dishonesty with which I made it. He shall not be able.
Just because he has been successful, he will continue in his habit
without thinking; just because there has been no break-down to convict
of folly and suggest penitence, so he becomes hardened. Property is a
bridge on which our passions cross from one part of our life to another.
The Germans have an ironical proverb: "The man who has stolen a hundred
thousand dollars _can afford_ to live honestly." The emphasis of the
irony falls on the words in italics: he can afford, but never does. His
property hardens his heart, and keeps him from repentance.
But the instinct of humanity has also been quick to this: that the curse
of ill-gotten wealth passes like bad blood from father to child. What is
the truth in this matter? A glance at history will tell us. The
accumulation of property is the result of certain customs, habits and
laws. In its own powerful interest property perpetuates these down the
ages, and infects the fresh air of each new generation with their
temper. How often in the history of mankind has it been property gained
under unjust laws or cruel monopolies which has prevented the abolition
of these, and carried into gentler, freer times the pride and
exclusiveness of the age, by whose rude habits it was gathered. This
moral transference, which we see on so large a scale in public history,
is repeated to some extent in every private bequest. A curse does not
necessarily follow an estate from the sinful producer of it to his heir;
but the latter is, _by the bequest itself_ generally brought into so
close a contact with his predecessor as to share his conscience and be
in sympathy with his temper. And the case is common where an heir,
though absolutely up to the date of his succession separate from him who
made and has left the property, nevertheless finds himself unable to
alter the methods, or to escape the temper, in which the property has
been managed. In nine cases out of ten property carries conscience and
transfers habit; if the guilt does not descend, the infection does.
When we pass from the effect of sin upon property to its effect upon
circumstance, we pass to what we can affirm with even greater
conscience. Man has the power of permanently soaking and staining his
surroundings with the effect of sins in themselves momentary and
transient. Sin increases terribly by the mental law of association. It
is not the gin-shop and the face of wanton beauty that alone tempt men
to sin. Far more subtle seductions are about every one of us. That we
have the power of inflicting our character upon the scenes of our
conduct is proved by some of the dreariest experiences of life. A
failure in duty renders the place of it distasteful and enervating. Are
we irritable and selfish at home? Then home is certain to be depressing,
and little helpful to our spiritual growth. Are we selfish and niggardly
in the interest we take in others? Then the congregation we go to, the
suburb we dwell in, will appear insipid and unprofitable; we shall be
past the possibility of gaining character or happiness from the ground
where God planted us and meant us to grow. Students have been idle in
their studies till every time they enter them a reflex languor comes
down like stale smoke, and the room they desecrated takes its revenge on
them. We have it in our power to make our workshops, our laboratories
and our studies places of magnificent inspiration, to enter which is to
receive a baptism of industry and hope; and we have power to make it
impossible ever to work in them again at full pitch. The pulpit, the
pew, the very communion-table, come under this law. If a minister of God
have made up his mind to say nothing from his accustomed place, which
has not cost him toil, to feel nothing but a dependence on God and a
desire for souls, then he will never set foot there but the power of the
Lord shall be upon him. But there are men who would rather set foot
anywhere than in their pulpit--men who out of it are full of fellowship,
information, and infective health, but there they are paralysed with the
curse of their idle past. How history shows us that the most sacred
shelters and institutions of man become tainted with sin, and are
destroyed in revolution or abandoned to decay by the intolerant
conscience of younger generations! How the hidden life of each man feels
his past sins possessing his home and hearth, his pew, and even his
place at the Sacrament, till it is sometimes better for his soul's
health to avoid these!
Such considerations give a great moral force to the doctrine of the Old
Testament that man's sin has rendered necessary the destruction of his
material circumstances, and that the Divine judgement includes a broken
and a rifled universe.
The New Testament has borrowed this vision from the Old, but added, as
we have seen, with greater distinctness, the hope of new heavens and a
new earth. We have not concluded the subject, however, when we have
pointed this out, for the New Testament has another gospel. The grace of
God affects even the material results of sin; the Divine pardon that
converts the sinner converts his circumstance also; Christ Jesus
sanctifies even the flesh, and is the Physician of the body as well as
the Saviour of the soul. To Him physical evil abounds only that He may
show forth His glory in curing it. _Neither did this man sin nor his
parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him._ To
Paul the _whole creation groaneth and travaileth with_ the sinner _till
now_, the hour of the sinner's redemption. The Gospel bestows an
evangelic liberty which permits the strong Christian to partake of meats
offered to idols. And, finally, _all things work together for good to
them that love God_, for although to the converted and forgiven sinner
the material pains which his sins have brought on him may continue into
his new life, they are experienced by him no more as the just penalties
of an angry God, but as the loving, sanctifying chastisements of his
Father in heaven.
CHAPTER XXIX.
_GOD'S POOR._
ISAIAH xxv.-xxvii. (DATE UNCERTAIN).
We have seen that no more than the faintest gleam of historical
reflection brightens the obscurity of chap. xxiv., and that the disaster
which lowers there is upon too world-wide a scale to be forced within
the conditions of any single period in the fortunes of Israel. In chaps.
xxv.-xxvii., which may naturally be held to be a continuation of chap.
xxiv., the historical allusions are more numerous. Indeed, it might be
said they are too numerous, for they contradict one another to the
perplexity of the most acute critics. They imply historical
circumstances for the prophecy both before and after the exile. On the
one hand, the blame of idolatry in Judah (xxvii. 9), the mention of
Assyria and Egypt (xxvii. 12, 13), and the absence of the name of
Babylon are indicative of a pre-exilic date.[81] Arguments from style
are always precarious; but it is striking that some critics, who deny
that chaps. xxiv.-xxvii. can have come as a whole from Isaiah's time,
profess to see his hand in certain passages.[82] Then, secondly, through
these verses which point to a pre-exilic date there are woven, almost
inextricably, phrases of actual exile: expressions of the sense of
living on a level and in contact with the heathen (xxvi. 9, 10); a
request to God's people to withdraw from the midst of a heathen public
to the privacy of their chambers (20, 21); prayers and promises of
deliverance from the oppressor (_passim_); hopes of the establishment of
Zion, and of the repopulation of the Holy Land. And, thirdly, some
verses imply that the speaker has already returned to Zion itself: he
says more than once, _in this mountain_; there are hymns celebrating a
deliverance actually achieved, as--God _has done a marvel. For Thou hast
made a citadel into a heap, a fortified city into a ruin, a castle of
strangers to be no city, not to be built again._ Such phrases do not
read as if the prophet were creating for the lips of his people a psalm
of triumph against a far future deliverance; they have in them the ring
of what has already happened.
[81] The mention of Moab (xxv. 10, 11) is also consistent with a
pre-exilic date, but does not necessarily imply it.
[82] _E.g._, xxv. 6-8, 10, 11; xxvii. 10, 11, 9, 12, 13.
This bare statement of the allusions of the prophecy will give the
ordinary reader some idea of the difficulties of Biblical criticism.
What is to be made of a prophecy uttering the catch-words and breathing
the experience of three distinct periods? One solution of the difficulty
may be that we have here the composition of a Jew already returned from
exile to a desecrated sanctuary and depopulated land, who has woven
through his original utterances of complaint and hope the experience of
earlier oppressions and deliverances, using even the names of earlier
tyrants. In his immediate past a great city that oppressed the Jews has
fallen, though, if this is Babylon, it is strange that he nowhere names
it. But his intention is rather religious than historical; he seeks to
give a general representation of the attitude of the world to the
people of God, and of the judgement which God brings on the world. This
view of the composition is supported by either of two possible
interpretations of that difficult verse xxvii. 1: _In that day Jehovah
with His sword, the hard and the great and the strong, shall perform
visitation upon Leviathan, Serpent Elusive, and upon Leviathan, Serpent
Tortuous; and He shall slay the Dragon that is in the sea._ Cheyne
treats these monsters as mythic personifications of the clouds, the
darkness and the powers of the air, so that the verse means that, just
as Jehovah is supreme in the physical world, He shall be in the moral.
But it is more probable that the two Leviathans mean Assyria and
Babylon--the _Elusive_ one, Assyria on the swift-shooting Tigris; the
_Tortuous_ one, Babylon on the winding Euphrates--while _the Dragon that
is in the sea_ or _the west_ is Egypt. But if the prophet speaks of a
victory over Israel's three great enemies all at once, that means that
he is talking universally or ideally; and this impression is further
heightened by the mythic names he gives them. Such arguments, along with
the undoubted post-exilic fragments in the prophecy, point to a late
date, so that even a very conservative critic, who is satisfied that
Isaiah is the author, admits that "the _possibility_ of exilic
authorship does not allow itself to be denied."
If this character which we attribute to the prophecy be correct--viz.,
that it is a summary or ideal account of the attitude of the alien world
to Israel, and of the judgement God has ready for the world--then,
though itself be exilic, its place in the Book of Isaiah is
intelligible. Chaps. xxiv.-xxvii. fitly crown the long list of Isaiah's
oracles upon the foreign nations; they finally formulate the purposes
of God towards the nations and towards Israel, whom the nations have
oppressed. Our opinions must not be final or dogmatic about this matter
of authorship; the obscurities are not nearly cleared up. But if it be
ultimately found certain that this prophecy, which lies in the heart of
the Book of Isaiah, is not by Isaiah himself, that need neither startle
nor unsettle us. No doctrinal question is stirred by such a discovery,
not even that of the accuracy of the Scriptures. For that a book is
entitled by Isaiah's name does not necessarily mean that it is all by
Isaiah; and we shall feel still less compelled to believe that these
chapters are his when we find other chapters called by his name while
these are not said to be by him. In truth there is a difficulty here,
only because it is supposed that a book entitled by Isaiah's name must
necessarily contain nothing but what is Isaiah's own. Tradition may have
come to say so; but the Scripture itself, bearing as it does
unmistakable marks of another age than Isaiah's, tells us that tradition
is wrong: and the testimony of Scripture is surely to be preferred,
especially when it betrays, as we have seen, sufficient reasons why a
prophecy, though not Isaiah's, was attached to his genuine and undoubted
oracles. In any case, however, as even the conservative critic whom we
have quoted admits, "for the religious value" of the prophecy "the
question" of the authorship "is thoroughly irrelevant."
We shall perceive this at once as we now turn to see what is the
religious value of our prophecy. Chaps. xxv.-xxvii. stand in the front
rank of evangelical prophecy. In their experience of religion, their
characterisations of God's people, their expressions of faith, their
missionary hopes and hopes of immortality, they are very rich and
edifying. Perhaps their most signal feature is their designation of the
people of God. In this collection of prayers and hymns the people of God
are not regarded as a political body. They are only once called the
_nation_ and spoken of in connection with a territory (xxvi. 15). Only
twice are they named with the national names of Israel and Jacob (xxvii.
6, 9, 12). We miss Isaiah's promised king, his pictures of righteous
government, his emphasis upon social justice and purity, his interest in
the foreign politics of his State, his hopes of national grandeur and
agricultural felicity. In these chapters God's people are described by
adjectives signifying spiritual qualities. Their nationality is no more
pleaded, only their suffering estate and their hunger and thirst after
God. The ideals that are presented for the future are neither political
nor social, but ecclesiastical. We saw how closely Isaiah's prophesying
was connected with the history of his time. The people of this prophecy
seem to have done with history, and to be interested only in worship.
And along with the assurance of the continued establishment of Zion as
the centre for a secure and holy people, filling a secure and fertile
land,--with which, as we have seen, the undoubted visions of Isaiah
content themselves, while silent as to the fate of the individuals who
drop from this future through death,--we have the most abrupt and
thrilling hopes expressed for the resurrection of these latter to share
in the glory of the redeemed and restored community.
Among the names applied to God's people there are three which were
destined to play an enormous part in the history of religion. In the
English version these appear as two: _poor and needy_; but in the
original they are three. In chap. xxv. 4: _Thou hast been a stronghold
to the poor and a stronghold to the needy, poor_ renders a Hebrew word,
"d[=a]l," literally _wavering_, _tottering_, _infirm_, then _slender_ or
_lean_, then _poor_ in fortune and estate; _needy_ literally renders the
Hebrew "'ebhyôn," Latin _egenus_. In chap. xxvi. 6: _the foot of the
poor and the steps of the needy, needy_ renders "d[=a]l," while _poor_
renders "'[=a]nî," a passive form--_forced_, _afflicted_, _oppressed_,
then _wretched_, whether under persecution, poverty, loneliness or
exile, and so _tamed_, _mild_, _meek_. These three words, in their root
ideas of _infirmity_, _need_ and positive _affliction_, cover among them
every aspect of physical poverty and distress. Let us see how they came
also to be the expression of the highest moral and evangelical virtues.
If there is one thing which distinguishes the people of the revelation
from other historical nations, it is the evidence afforded by their
dictionaries of the power to transmute the most afflicting experiences
of life into virtuous disposition and effectual desire for God. We see
this most clearly if we contrast the Hebrews' use of their words for
_poor_ with that of the first language which was employed to translate
these words--the Greek in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.
In the Greek temper there was a noble pity for the unfortunate; the
earliest Greeks regarded beggars as the peculiar protegés of Heaven.
Greek philosophy developed a capacity for enriching the soul in
misfortune; Stoicism gave imperishable proof of how bravely a man could
hold poverty and pain to be things indifferent, and how much gain from
such indifference he could bring to his soul. But in the vulgar opinion
of Greece penury and sickness were always disgraceful; and Greek
dictionaries mark the degradation of terms, which at first merely noted
physical disadvantage, into epithets of contempt or hopelessness. It is
very striking that it was not till they were employed to translate the
Old Testament ideas of poverty that the Greek words for "poor" and
"lowly" came to bear an honourable significance. And in the case of the
Stoic, who endured poverty or pain with such indifference, was it not
just this indifference that prevented him from discovering in his
tribulations the rich evangelical experience which, as we shall see,
fell to the quick conscience and sensitive nerves of the Hebrew?
Let us see how this conscience was developed. In the East poverty
scarcely ever means physical disadvantage alone: in its train there
follow higher disabilities. A poor Eastern cannot be certain of fair
play in the courts of the land. He is very often a wronged man, with a
fire of righteous anger burning in his breast. Again, and more
important, misfortune is to the quick religious instinct of the Oriental
a sign of God's estrangement. With us misfortune is so often only the
cruelty, sometimes real sometimes imagined, of the rich; the unemployed
vents his wrath at the capitalist, the tramp shakes his fist after the
carriage on the highway. In the East they do not forget to curse the
rich, but they remember as well to humble themselves beneath the hand of
God. With an unfortunate Oriental the conviction is supreme, God is
angry with me; I have lost His favour. His soul eagerly longs for God.
A poor man in the East has, therefore, not only a hunger for food: he
has the hotter hunger for justice, the deeper hunger for God. Poverty in
itself, without extraneous teaching, develops nobler appetites. The
physical, becomes the moral, pauper; poor in substance, he grows poor in
spirit. It was by developing, with the aid of God's Spirit, this quick
conscience and this deep desire for God, which in the East are the very
soul of physical poverty, that the Jews advanced to that sense of
evangelical poverty of heart, blessed by Jesus in the first of His
Beatitudes as the possession of the kingdom of heaven.
Till the Exile, however, the poor were only a portion of the people. In
the Exile the whole nation became poor, and henceforth "God's poor"
might become synonymous with "God's people." This was the time when the
words received their spiritual baptism. Israel felt the physical curse
of poverty to its extreme of famine. The pains, privations and terrors,
which the glib tongues of our comfortable middle classes, as they sing
the psalms of Israel, roll off so easily for symbols of their own
spiritual experience, were felt by the captive Hebrews in all their
concrete physical effects. The noble and the saintly, the gentle and the
cultured, priest, soldier and citizen, woman, youth and child, were torn
from home and estate, were deprived of civil standing, were imprisoned,
fettered, flogged and starved to death. We learn something of what it
must have been from the words which Jeremiah addressed to Baruch, a
youth of good family and fine culture: _Seekest thou great things for
thyself? Seek them not, for, behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh,
saith the LORD; only thy life will I give unto thee for a prey in all
places whither thou goest._ Imagine a whole nation plunged into poverty
of this degree--not born into it having known no better things, nor
stunted into it with sensibility and the power of expression sapped out
of them, but plunged into it, with the unimpaired culture, conscience
and memories of the flower of the people. When God's own hand sent
fresh from Himself a poet's soul into "the clay biggin'" of an Ayrshire
ploughman, what a revelation we received of the distress, the discipline
and the graces of poverty! But in the Jewish nation as it passed into
exile there were a score of hearts with as unimpaired an appetite for
life as Robert Burns; and, worse than he, they went to feel its pangs
away from home. Genius, conscience and pride drank to the dregs in a
foreign land the bitter cup of the poor. The Psalms and Lamentations
show us how they bore their poison. A Greek Stoic might sneer at the
complaint and sobbing, the self-abasement so strangely mixed with fierce
cries for vengeance. But the Jew had within him the conscience that will
not allow a man to be a Stoic. He never forgot that it was for his sin
he suffered, and therefore to him suffering could not be a thing
indifferent. With this, his native hunger for justice reached in
captivity a famine pitch; his sense of guilt was equalled by as sincere
an indignation at the tyrant who held him in his brutal grasp. The
feeling of estrangement from God increased to a degree that only the
exile of a Jew could excite: the longing for God's house and the worship
lawful only there; the longing for the relief which only the sacrifices
of the Temple could bestow; the longing for God's own presence and the
light of His face. _My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth after
Thee, in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is, as I have looked
upon Thee in the sanctuary, to see Thy power and Thy glory. For Thy
lovingkindness is better than life!_
_Thy lovingkindness is better than life!_--is the secret of it all.
There is that which excites a deeper hunger in the soul than the hunger
for life, and for the food and money that give life. This spiritual
poverty is most richly bred in physical penury, it is strong enough to
displace what feeds it. The physical poverty of Israel which had
awakened these other hungers of the soul--hunger for forgiveness, hunger
for justice, hunger for God--was absorbed by them; and when Israel came
out of exile, _to be poor_ meant, not so much to be indigent in this
world's substance as to feel the need of pardon, the absence of
righteousness, the want of God.
It is at this time, as we have seen, that Isa. xxiv.-xxvii. was written;
and it is in the temper of this time that the three Hebrew words for
"poor" and "needy" are used in chaps. xxv. and xxvi. The returned exiles
were still politically dependent and abjectly poor. Their discipline
therefore continued, and did not allow them to forget their new lessons.
In fact, they developed the results of these further, till in this
prophecy we find no fewer than five different aspects of spiritual
poverty.