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Title: The Expositor's Bible - The Book of Isaiah, Volume II
Author: Smith, George Adam, 1856-1942
Language: English
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THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE.
EDITED BY THE REV.
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.,
_Editor of "The Expositor," etc._
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH.
VOL. II.
BY THE REV.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A.,
=London:=
HODDER AND STOUGHTON,
27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
MDCCCXC.
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE.
EDITED BY THE REV. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
_Crown 8vo, cloth, price_ 7s. 6d. _each vol._
FIRST SERIES, 1887-88.
Colossians.
By A. MACLAREN, D.D.
St. Mark.
By Very Rev. the Dean of Armagh.
Genesis.
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
Samuel, I.
By Prof. W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D.
Samuel, II.
By the same Author.
Hebrews.
By Principal T. C. EDWARDS, D.D.
SECOND SERIES, 1888-89.
Galatians.
By Prof. G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.
The Pastoral Epistles.
By Rev. A. PLUMMER, D.D.
Isaiah I.-XXXIX.
By G. A. SMITH, M.A. Vol. I.
The Book of Revelation.
By Prof. W. MILLIGAN, D.D.
1 Corinthians.
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D.
The Epistles of St. John.
By Rt. Rev. W. ALEXANDER, D.D.
THIRD SERIES, 1889-90.
Judges and Ruth.
By Rev. R. A. WATSON, M.A.
Jeremiah.
By Rev. C. J. BALL, M.A.
Isaiah XL.-LXVI.
By G. A. SMITH, M.A. Vol. II.
St. Matthew.
By Rev. J. MONRO GIBSON, D.D.
Exodus.
By Very Rev. the Dean of Armagh.
St. Luke.
By Rev. H. BURTON, B.A.
FOURTH SERIES, 1890-91.
Ecclesiastes.
By Rev. SAMUEL COX, D.D.
St. James and St. Jude.
By Rev. A. PLUMMER, D.D.
Proverbs.
By Rev. R. F. HORTON, M.A.
Leviticus.
By Rev. S. H. KELLOGG, D.D.
St. John.
By Prof. MARCUS DODS, D.D. Vol. I.
The Acts of the Apostles.
By Rev. Prof. G. T. STOKES, D.D.
LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
THE
BOOK OF ISAIAH
BY THE REV.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A.,
_Minister of Queen's Cross Church, Aberdeen_
_IN TWO VOLUMES._
VOL. II.--ISAIAH XL.-LXVI.
_WITH A SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL FROM ISAIAH
TO THE EXILE._
=LONDON:=
HODDER AND STOUGHTON,
27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
MDCCCXC.
_Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
TABLE OF DATES viii
INTRODUCTION ix
BOOK I.
_THE EXILE._
CHAP.
I. THE DATE OF ISAIAH XL.-LXVI. 3
II. FROM ISAIAH TO THE FALL OF JERUSALEM 26
701-587 B.C.
III. WHAT ISRAEL TOOK INTO EXILE 36
IV. ISRAEL IN EXILE 48
FROM 597 TILL ABOUT 550 B.C.
BOOK II.
_THE LORD'S DELIVERANCE._
V. THE PROLOGUE: THE FOUR HERALD VOICES 71
ISAIAH xl. 1-11.
VI. GOD: A SACRAMENT 87
ISAIAH xl. 12-31.
VII. GOD: AN ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 106
ISAIAH xli.
VIII. THE PASSION OF GOD 132
ISAIAH xlii. 13-17.
IX. FOUR POINTS OF A TRUE RELIGION 143
ISAIAH xliii.-xlviii.
X. CYRUS 162
ISAIAH xli. 2, 25; xliv. 28-xlv. 13;
xlvi. 11; xlviii. 14, 15.
XI. BEARING OR BORNE 177
ISAIAH xlvi.
XII. BABYLON 189
ISAIAH xlvii.
XIII. THE CALL TO GO FORTH 205
ISAIAH xlviii.
XIV. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ISRAEL AND THE
RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD 214
ISAIAH xl.-lxvi.
BOOK III.
_THE SERVANT OF THE LORD._
XV. ONE GOD, ONE PEOPLE 236
ISAIAH xli. 8-20, xlii.-xliii.
XVI. THE SERVANT OF THE LORD 252
ISAIAH xli. 8-20; xlii. 1-7, 18 ff.;
xliii. 5-10; xlix. 1-9; l. 4-11;
lii. 13-liii.
XVII. THE SERVANT OF THE LORD IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 278
XVIII. THE SERVICE OF GOD AND MAN 290
ISAIAH xlii. 1-7.
XIX. PROPHET AND MARTYR 313
ISAIAH xlix. 1-9; l, 4-11.
XX. THE SUFFERING SERVANT 336
ISAIAH lii. 13-liii.
BOOK IV.
_THE RESTORATION._
XXI. DOUBTS IN THE WAY 381
ISAIAH xlix.-lii. 12.
XXII. ON THE EVE OF RETURN 397
ISAIAH liv.-lvi. 8.
XXIII. THE REKINDLING OF THE CIVIC CONSCIENCE 408
ISAIAH lvi. 9-lix.
XXIV. SALVATION IN SIGHT 428
ISAIAH lx.-lxiii. 7.
XXV. A LAST INTERCESSION AND THE JUDGEMENT 445
ISAIAH lxiii. 7-lxvi.
INDEX OF CHAPTERS 469
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 471
TABLE OF DATES.
B.C.
721. Fall of Samaria. Captivity of Northern Israel.
701. Deliverance of Jerusalem from Sennacherib.
696?-641. Reign of Manasseh. Supposed time of Isaiah's death.
630. Josiah's Reformation begun.
629 or 628. Jeremiah called to be a prophet.
621. The Book of Deuteronomy discovered.
607. Fall of Nineveh and Assyria. Babylon supreme.
THE EXILE.
599-598. Siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar. First Captivity of
the Jews.
594. Ezekiel begins to prophesy in Chaldea.
587. Destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar. Second Captivity
of the Jews. Flight of many Jews with Jeremiah to Egypt.
585. Battle of the Eclipse. Triple League: Babylon, Media, Lydia.
561. Nebuchadrezzar dies. Evil-Merodach succeeds.
559. Neriglissar succeeds Evil-Merodach.
554. Nabunahid or Nabonidos usurps the throne of Babylon. Harder
times for the Jews.
549. Fall of Median monarchy before Cyrus.
545. Cyrus attacks Babylonia from the north, and is repulsed.
Invades Lydia, and takes Sardis and King Crœsus.
538. Cyrus captures Babylon.
Permission to the Jews to return and rebuild Jerusalem. Zerubbabel,
Joshua.
* * * * *
529. Cyrus dies. Cambyses sole king.
522. Cambyses dies.
521. Babylon revolts. Retaken by Darius.
486. Xerxes succeeds Darius.
466. Artaxerxes Longimanus.
458. Second great return of Jews. Ezra.
401. Revolt and defeat of Cyrus. The Anabasis. #/
INTRODUCTION.
This volume upon Isaiah xl.-lxvi. carries on the exposition of the
Book of Isaiah from the point reached by the author's previous volume
in the same series. But as it accepts these twenty-seven chapters,
upon their own testimony, as a separate prophecy from a century and
a half later than Isaiah himself, in a style and on subjects not
altogether the same as his, and as it accordingly pursues a somewhat
different method of exposition from the previous volume, a few words
of introduction are again necessary.
The greater part of Isaiah i.-xxxix. was addressed to a nation upon
their own soil,--with their temple, their king, their statesmen,
their tribunals and their markets,--responsible for the discharge of
justice and social reform, for the conduct of foreign policies and the
defence of the fatherland. But chs. xl.-lxvi. came to a people wholly
in exile, and partly in servitude, with no civic life and few social
responsibilities: a people in the passive state, with occasion for the
exercise of almost no qualities save those of penitence and patience,
of memory and hope. This difference between the two parts of the Book
is summed up in their respective uses of the word _Righteousness_. In
Isaiah i.-xxxix., or at least in such of these chapters as refer to
Isaiah's own day, righteousness is man's moral and religious duty, in
its contents of piety, purity, justice and social service. In Isaiah
xl.-lxvi. righteousness (except in a very few cases) is something
which the people expect from God--their historical vindication by His
restoral and reinstatement of them as His people.
It is, therefore, evident that what rendered Isaiah's own
prophecies of so much charm and of so much meaning to the modern
conscience--their treatment of those political and social questions
which we have always with us--cannot form the chief interest of
chapters xl.-lxvi. But the empty place is taken by a series of
historical and religious questions of supreme importance. Into the
vacuum created in Israel's life by the Exile, there comes rushing
the meaning of the nation's whole history--all the conscience of
their past, all the destiny with which their future is charged. It
is not with the fortunes and duties of a single generation that
this great prophecy has to do: it is with a people in their entire
significance and promise. The standpoint of the prophet may be the
Exile, but his vision ranges from Abraham to Christ. Besides the
business of the hour,--the deliverance of Israel from Babylon,--the
prophet addresses himself to these questions: What is Israel? What
is Israel's God? How is Jehovah different from other gods? How is
Israel different from other peoples? He recalls the making of the
nation, God's treatment of them from the beginning, all that they and
Jehovah have been to each other and to the world, and especially the
meaning of this latest judgement of Exile. But the instruction and
the impetus of that marvellous past he uses in order to interpret and
proclaim the still more glorious future,--the ideal, which God has
set before His people, and in the realisation of which their history
shall culminate. It is here that the Spirit of God lifts the prophet
to the highest station in prophecy--to the richest consciousness of
spiritual religion--to the clearest vision of Christ.
Accordingly, to expound Isaiah xl.-lxvi. is really to write the
religious history of Israel. A prophet whose vision includes both
Abraham and Christ, whose subject is the whole meaning and promise of
Israel, cannot be adequately interpreted within the limits of his own
text or of his own time. Excursions are necessary both to the history
that is behind him, and to the history that is still in front of
him. This is the reason of the appearance in this volume of chapters
whose titles seem at first beyond its scope--such as From Isaiah to
the Fall of Jerusalem: What Israel took into Exile: One God, One
People: The Servant of the Lord in the New Testament. Moreover, much
of this historical matter has an interest that is only historical.
If in Isaiah's own prophecies it is his generation's likeness to
ourselves, which appeals to our conscience, in chs. xl.-lxvi. of the
Book called by his name it is Israel's unique meaning and office for
God in the world, which we have to study. We are called to follow an
experience and a discipline unshared by any other generation of men;
and to interest ourselves in matters that then happened once for all,
such as the victory of the One God over the idols, or His choice of
a single people through whom to reveal Himself to the world. We are
called to watch work, which that representative and priestly people
did for humanity, rather than, as in Isaiah's own prophecies, work
which has to be repeated by each new generation in its turn, and
to-day also by ourselves. This is the reason why in an exposition of
Isaiah xl.-lxvi., like the present volume, there should be a good
deal more of historical recital, and a good deal less of practical
application, than in the exposition of Isaiah i.-xxxix.
At the same time we must not suppose that there is not very much in
Isaiah xl.-lxvi. with which to stir our own consciences and instruct
our own lives. For, to mention no more, there is that sense of sin
with which Israel entered exile, and which has made the literature
of Israel's Exile the confessional of the world; there is that great
unexhausted programme of the Service of God and Man, which our
prophet lays down as Israel's duty and example to humanity; and there
is that prophecy of the virtue and glory of vicarious suffering for
sin, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ and His Cross.
I have found it necessary to devote more space to critical questions
than in the previous volume. Chs. xl.-lxvi. approach more nearly
to a unity than chs. i.-xxxix.: with very few exceptions they lie
in chronological order. But they are not nearly so clearly divided
and grouped: their connection cannot be so briefly or so lucidly
explained. The form of the prophecy is dramatic, but the scenes
and the speakers are not definitely marked off. In spite of the
chronological advance, which we shall be able to trace, there are no
clear stages--not even, as we shall see, at those points at which
most expositors divide the prophecy, the end of ch. xlix. and of ch.
lviii. The prophet pursues simultaneously several lines of thought;
and though the close of some of these and the rise of others may be
marked to a verse, his frequent passages from one to another are
often almost imperceptible. He everywhere requires a more continuous
translation, a closer and more elaborate exegesis, than were
necessary for Isaiah i.-xxxix.
In order to effect some general arrangement and division of Isa.
xl.-lxvi. it is necessary to keep in view that the immediate problem
which the prophet had before him was twofold. It was political,
and it was spiritual. There was, first of all, the deliverance of
Israel from Babylon, according to the ancient promises of Jehovah:
to this were attached such questions as Jehovah's omnipotence,
faithfulness and grace; the meaning of Cyrus; the condition of the
Babylonian Empire. But after their political deliverance from Babylon
was assured, there remained the really larger problem of Israel's
spiritual readiness for the freedom and the destiny to which God was
to lead them through the opened gates of their prison-house: to this
were attached such questions as the original calling and mission of
Israel; the mixed and paradoxical character of the people; their need
of a Servant from the Lord, since they themselves had failed to be
His Servant; the coming of this Servant, his methods and results.
This twofold division of the prophet's problem will not, it is true,
strike his prophecy into separate and distinct groups of chapters.
He who attempts such a division simply does not understand "Second
Isaiah." But it will make clear to us the different currents of
the sacred argument, which flow sometimes through and through one
another, and sometimes singly and in succession; and it will give us
a plan for grouping the twenty-seven chapters very nearly, if not
quite, in the order in which they lie.
On these principles, the following exposition is divided into Four
Books. The First is called THE EXILE: it contains an argument for
placing the date of the prophecy about 550 B.C., and brings the
history of Israel down to that date from the time of Isaiah; it
states the political and spiritual sides of the double problem to
which the prophecy is God's answer; it describes what Israel took
with them into exile, and what they learned and suffered there,
till, after half a century, the herald voices of our prophecy broke
upon their waiting ears. The Second Book, THE LORD'S DELIVERANCE,
discusses the political redemption from Babylon, with the questions
attached to it about God's nature and character, about Cyrus and
Babylon, or all of chs. xl.-xlviii., except the passages about
the Servant, which are easily detached from the rest, and refer
rather to the spiritual side of Israel's great problem. The Third
Book, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD, expounds all the passages on that
subject, both in chs. xl.-xlviii. and in chs. xlix.-liii., with the
development of the subject in the New Testament, and its application
to our life to-day. The Servant and his work are the solution of all
the spiritual difficulties in the way of the people's Return and
Restoration. To these latter and their practical details the rest of
the prophecy is devoted; that is, all chs. xlix.-lxvi., except the
passages on the Servant, and these chapters are treated in the Fourth
Book of this volume, THE RESTORATION.
As much as possible of the merely critical discussion has been put
in Chapter I., or in the opening paragraphs of the other chapters,
or in foot-notes. A new translation from the original (except where
a few verses have been taken from the Revised English Version) has
been provided for nearly the whole prophecy. Where the rhythm of the
original is at all discernible, the translation has been made in it.
But it must be kept in mind that this reproduction of the original
rhythm is only approximate, and that in it no attempt has been made
to elegance; its chief aim being to make clear the order and the
emphases of the original. The translation is almost quite literal.
Having felt the want of a clear account of the prophet's use of his
great key-word Righteousness, I have inserted for students, at the end
of Book II., a chapter on this term. Summaries of our prophet's use of
such cardinal terms as Mishpat, R'ishonoth, The Isles, etc., will be
found in notes. For want of space I have had to exclude some sections
on the Style of Isaiah, xl.-lxvi., on the Influence of Monotheism on
the Imagination, and on What Isaiah xl.-lxvi. owes to Jeremiah. This
debt, as we shall be able to trace, is so great that "Second Jeremiah"
would be a title no less proper for the prophecy than "Second Isaiah."
I had also wished to append a chapter on Commentaries on the Book of
Isaiah. No Scripture has been so nobly served by its commentaries. To
begin with there was Calvin, and there is Calvin,--still as valuable
as ever for his strong spiritual power, his sanity, his moderation,
his sensitiveness to the changes and shades of the prophet's meaning.
After him Vitringa, Gesenius, Hitzig, Ewald, Delitzsch, all the great
names of the past in Old Testament criticism, are connected with
Isaiah. In recent years (besides Nägelsbach in Lange's _Bibelwerk_)
we have had Cheyne's two volumes, too well known both here and in
Germany to need more than mention; Bredenkamp's clear and concise
exposition, the characteristic of which is an attempt--not, however,
successful--to distinguish authentic prophecies of Isaiah in the
disputed chapters; Orelli's handy volume (in Strack and Zöckler's
compendious Commentary, and translated into English by Professor
Banks in Messrs. Clarks' Foreign Theological Library), from the
conservative side, but accepting, as Delitzsch does in his last
edition, the dual authorship; and this year Dillmann's great work,
replacing Knobel's in the "Kurzgefasstes Exegetisches Handbuch"
series. I regret that I did not receive Dillmann's work till more
than half of this volume was written. English students will have all
they can possibly need if they can add Dillmann to Delitzsch and
Cheyne, though Calvin and Ewald must never be forgotten. Professor
Driver's _Isaiah: His Life and Times_ is a complete handbook to the
prophet. On the theology, besides the relevant portions of Schultz's
_Alt-Testamentliche Theologie_ (4th ed., 1889), and Duhm's _Theologie
der Propheten_, the student will find invaluable Professor Robertson
Smith's _Prophets of Israel_ for Isaiah i.-xxxix., and Professor A.
B. Davidson's papers in the _Expositor_ for 1884 on the theology
of Isaiah xl.-lxvi. There are also Krüger's able and lucid _Essai
sur la Théologie d'Isaïe xl.-lxvi._ (Paris, 1882), and Guthe's _Das
Zukunftsbild Jesaias_, and Barth's and Giesebrecht's respective
_Beiträge zur Jesaiakritik_, the latter published this year.
In conclusion, I have to express my thanks for the very great
assistance which I have derived in the composition of both volumes from
my friend the Rev. Charles Anderson Scott, B.A., who has sought out
facts, read nearly all the proofs and helped to prepare the Index.
BOOK I.
_THE EXILE._
CHAPTER I.
_THE DATE OF ISAIAH XL.-LXVI._
The problem of the date of Isaiah xl.-lxvi. is this: In a book called
by the name of the prophet Isaiah, who flourished between 740 and 700
B.C., the last twenty-seven chapters deal with the captivity suffered
by the Jews in Babylonia from 598 to 538, and more particularly with
the advent, about 550, of Cyrus, whom they name. Are we to take for
granted that Isaiah himself prophetically wrote these chapters, or
must we assign them to a nameless author or authors of the period of
which they treat?
Till the end of last century it was the almost universally accepted
tradition, and even still is an opinion retained by many, that Isaiah
was carried forward by the Spirit, out of his own age to the standpoint
of one hundred and fifty years later; that he was inspired to utter
the warning and comfort required by a generation so very different
from his own, and was even enabled to hail by name their redeemer,
Cyrus. This theory, involving as it does a phenomenon without parallel
in the history of Holy Scripture, is based on these two grounds:
_first_, that the chapters in question form a considerable part--nearly
nine-twentieths--of the "Book of Isaiah;" and _second_, that portions
of them are quoted in the New Testament by the prophet's name. The
theory is also supported by arguments drawn from resemblances of style
and vocabulary between these twenty-seven chapters and the undisputed
oracles of Isaiah; but, as the opponents of the Isaian authorship also
appeal to vocabulary and style, it will be better to leave this kind of
evidence aside for the present, and to discuss the problem upon other
and less ambiguous grounds.
The first argument, then, for the Isaian authorship of chapters
xl.-lxvi. is that they form part of a book called by Isaiah's name.
But, to be worth anything, this argument must rest on the following
facts: that everything in a book called by a prophet's name is
necessarily by that prophet, and that the compilers of the book
intended to hand it down as altogether from his pen. Now there is no
evidence for either of these conclusions. On the contrary, there is
considerable testimony in the opposite direction. The Book of Isaiah
is not one continuous prophecy. It consists of a number of separate
orations, with a few intervening pieces of narrative. Some of these
orations claim to be Isaiah's own: they possess such titles as _The
vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz_.[1] But such titles describe only
the individual prophecies they head, and other portions of the book,
upon other subjects and in very different styles, do not possess
titles at all. It seems to me, that those, who maintain the Isaian
authorship of the whole book, have the responsibility cast upon them
of explaining why some chapters in it should be distinctly said to
be by Isaiah, while others should not be so entitled. Surely this
difference affords us sufficient ground for understanding, that the
whole book is not necessarily by Isaiah, nor intentionally handed
down by its compilers as the work of that prophet.[2]
Now, when we come to chs. xl.-lxvi., we find that, occurring in a
book which we have just seen no reason for supposing to be in every
part of it by Isaiah, these chapters nowhere claim to be his. They
are separated from that portion of the book, in which his undisputed
oracles are placed, by a historical narrative of considerable length.
And there is not anywhere upon them nor in them a title nor other
statement that they are by the prophet, nor any allusion which could
give the faintest support to the opinion, that they offer themselves
to posterity as dating from his time. It is safe to say, that, if
they had come to us by themselves, no one would have dreamt for an
instant of ascribing them to Isaiah; for the alleged resemblances,
which their language and style bear to his language and style, are
far more than overborne by the undoubted differences, and have never
been employed, even by the defenders of the Isaian authorship, except
in additional and confessedly slight support of their main argument,
viz. that the chapters must be Isaiah's because they are included in
a book called by his name.
Let us understand, therefore, at this very outset, that in discussing
the question of the authorship of "Second Isaiah," we are not
discussing a question, upon which the text itself makes any statement,
or into which the credibility of the text enters. No claim is made by
the Book of Isaiah itself for the Isaian authorship of chs. xl.-lxvi.
A second fact in Scripture, which seems at first sight to make
strongly for the unity of the Book of Isaiah, is that in the New
Testament, portions of the disputed chapters are quoted by Isaiah's
name, just as are portions of his admitted prophecies. These
citations are nine in number.[3] None is by our Lord Himself. They
occur in the Gospels, Acts and Paul. Now if any of these quotations
were given in answer to the question, Did Isaiah write chs. xl.-lxvi.
of the book called by his name? or if the use of his name along
with them were involved in the arguments which they are borrowed to
illustrate (as, for instance, is the case with David's name in the
quotation made by our Lord from Psalm cx.), then those who deny the
unity of the Book of Isaiah would be face to face with a very serious
problem indeed. But in none of the nine cases is the authorship of
the Book of Isaiah in question. In none of the nine cases is there
anything in the argument, for the purpose of which the quotation has
been made, that depends on the quoted words being by Isaiah. For
the purposes, for which the Evangelists and Paul borrow the texts,
these might as well be unnamed, or attributed to any other canonical
writer. Nothing in them requires us to suppose that Isaiah's name is
mentioned with them for any other end than that of reference, viz.,
to point out that they lie in the part of prophecy usually known
by his name. But, if there is nothing in these citations to prove
that Isaiah's name is being used for any other purpose than that of
reference, then it is plain--and this is all that we ask assent to at
the present time--that they do not offer the authority of Scripture
as a bar to our examining the evidence of the chapters in question.
It is hardly necessary to add that neither is there any other
question of doctrine in our way. There is none about the nature of
prophecy, for, to take an example, ch. liii., as a prophecy of Jesus
Christ, is surely as great a marvel if you date it from the Exile
as if you date it from the age of Isaiah. And, in particular, let
us understand that no question need be started about the ability
of God's Spirit to inspire a prophet to mention Cyrus by name one
hundred and fifty years before Cyrus appeared. The question is not,
_Could_ a prophet have been so inspired?--to which question, were it
put, our answer might only be, God is great!--but the question is,
_Was_ our prophet so inspired? does he himself offer evidence of the
fact? Or, on the contrary, in naming Cyrus does he give himself out
as a contemporary of Cyrus, who already saw the great Persian above
the horizon? To this question only the writings under discussion can
give us an answer. Let us see what they have to say.
Apart from the question of the date, no chapters in the Bible are
interpreted with such complete unanimity as Isa. xl.-xlviii. They
plainly set forth certain things as having already taken place--the
Exile and Captivity, the ruin of Jerusalem, and the devastation of
the Holy Land. Israel is addressed as having exhausted the time of
her penalty, and is proclaimed to be ready for deliverance. Some of
the people are comforted as being in despair because redemption
does not draw near; others are exhorted to leave the city of their
bondage, as if they were growing too familiar with its idolatrous
life. Cyrus is named as their deliverer, and is pointed out as
already called upon his career, and as blessed with success by
Jehovah. It is also promised that he will immediately add Babylon to
his conquests, and so set God's people free.
Now all this is not predicted, as if from the standpoint of a previous
century. It is nowhere said--as we should expect it to be said, if
the prophecy had been uttered by Isaiah--that Assyria, the dominant
world-power of Isaiah's day, was to disappear and Babylon to take her
place; that then the Babylonians should lead the Jews into an exile
which they had escaped at the hands of Assyria; and that after nearly
seventy years of suffering God would raise up Cyrus as a deliverer.
There is none of this prediction, which we might fairly have expected
had the prophecy been Isaiah's; because, however far Isaiah carries
us into the future, he never fails to start from the circumstances of
his own day. Still more significant, however--there is not even the
kind of prediction that we find in Jeremiah's prophecies of the Exile,
with which indeed it is most instructive to compare Isa. xl.-lxvi.
Jeremiah also spoke of exile and deliverance, but it was always with
the grammar of the future. He fairly and openly predicted both; and,
let us especially remember, he did so with a meagreness of description,
a reserve and reticence about details, which are simply unintelligible
if Isa. xl.-lxvi. was written before his day, and by so well-known
a prophet as Isaiah. No: in the statements, which our chapters make
concerning the Exile and the condition of Israel under it, there is
no prediction, not the slightest trace of that grammar of the future
in which Jeremiah's prophecies are constantly uttered. But there is
a direct appeal to the conscience of a people already long under the
discipline of God; their circumstance of exile is taken for granted;
there is a most vivid and delicate appreciation of their present fears
and doubts, and to these the deliverer Cyrus is not only named, but
introduced as an actual and notorious personage already upon the midway
of his irresistible career.
These facts are more broadly based than just at first sight appears.
You cannot turn their flank by the argument that Hebrew prophets were
in the habit of employing in their predictions what is called "the
prophetic perfect"--that is, that in the ardour of their conviction
that certain things would take place they talked of these, as the
flexibility of the Hebrew tenses allowed them to do, in the past or
perfect as if the things had actually taken place. No such argument
is possible in the case of the introduction of Cyrus. For it is not
only that the prophecy, with what might be the mere ardour of vision,
represents the Persian as already above the horizon and upon the
flowing tide of victory; but that, in the course of a sober argument
for the unique divinity of the God of Israel, which takes place
throughout chs. xli.-xlviii., Cyrus, alive and irresistible, already
accredited by success, and with Babylonia at his feet, is pointed out
as the unmistakable proof that _former_ prophecies of a deliverance for
Israel are at last coming to pass. Cyrus, in short, is not presented as
a prediction, but as the proof that a prediction is being fulfilled.
Unless he had already appeared in flesh and blood, and was on the point
of striking at Babylon, with all the prestige of unbroken victory, a
great part of Isa. xli.-xlviii. would be utterly unintelligible.
This argument is so conclusive for the date of Second Isaiah, that it
may be well to state it a little more in detail, even at the risk of
anticipating some of the exposition of the text.
Among the Jews at the close of the Exile there appear to have been
two classes. One class was hopeless of deliverance, and to their
hearts is addressed such a prophecy as ch. xl.: _Comfort ye, comfort
ye My people_. But there was another class, of opposite temperament,
who had only too strong opinions on the subject of deliverance. In
bondage to the letter of Scripture and to the great precedents of
their history, these Jews appear to have insisted that the Deliverer
to come must be a Jew, and a descendant of David. And the bent of
much of the prophet's urgency in ch. xlv. is to persuade those
pedants, that the Gentile Cyrus, who had appeared to be not only
the biggest man of his age, but the very likely means of Israel's
redemption, was of Jehovah's own creation and calling. Does not such
an argument necessarily imply that Cyrus was already present, an
object of doubt and debate to earnest minds in Israel? Or are we to
suppose that all this doubt and debate were foreseen, rehearsed and
answered one hundred and fifty years before the time by so famous a
prophet as Isaiah, and that, in spite of his prediction and answer,
the doubt and debate nevertheless took place in the minds of the very
Israelites, who were most earnest students of ancient prophecy? The
thing has only to be stated to be felt to be impossible.
But besides the pedants in Israel, there is apparent through these
prophecies another body of men, against whom also Jehovah claims the
actual Cyrus for His own. They are the priests and worshippers of the
heathen idols. It is well known that the advent of Cyrus cast the
Gentile religions of the time and their counsellors into confusion. The
wisest priests were perplexed; the oracles of Greece and Asia Minor
either were dumb when consulted about the Persian, or gave more than
usually ambiguous answers. Over against this perplexity and despair
of the heathen religions, our prophet confidently claims Cyrus for
Jehovah's own. In a debate in ch. xli., in which he seeks to establish
Jehovah's righteousness--that is, Jehovah's faithfulness to His word,
and power to carry out His predictions--the prophet speaks of ancient
prophecies which have come from Jehovah, and points to Cyrus as their
fulfilment. It does not matter to us in the meantime what those
prophecies were. They may have been certain of Jeremiah's predictions;
we may be sure that they cannot have contained anything so definite
as Cyrus' name, or such a proof of Divine foresight must certainly
have formed part of the prophet's plea. It is enough that they could
be quoted; our business is rather with the evidence which the prophet
offers of their fulfilment. That evidence is Cyrus. Would it have been
possible to refer the heathen to Cyrus as proof that those ancient
prophecies were being fulfilled, unless Cyrus had been visible to the
heathen,--unless the heathen had been beginning already to feel this
Persian "from the sunrise" in all his weight of war? It is no esoteric
doctrine which the prophet is unfolding to initiated Israelites about
Cyrus. He is making an appeal to men of the world to face facts. Could
he possibly have made such an appeal unless the facts had been _there_,
unless Cyrus had been within the ken of "the natural man"? Unless
Cyrus and his conquests were already historically present, the argument
in xli.-xlviii. is unintelligible.
If this evidence for the exilic date of Isa. xl.-xlviii.--for all these
chapters hang together--required any additional support, it would
find it in the fact that the prophet does not wholly treat of what is
past and over, but makes some predictions as well. Cyrus is on the
way of triumph, but Babylon has still to fall by his hand. Babylon
has still to fall, before the exiles can go free. Now, if our prophet
were predicting from the standpoint of one hundred and forty years
before, why did he make this sharp distinction between two events which
appeared so closely together? If he had both the advent of Cyrus and
the fall of Babylon in his long perspective, why did he not use "the
prophetic perfect" for both? That he speaks of the first as past and
of the second as still to come, would most surely, if there had been
no tradition the other way, have been accepted by all as sufficient
evidence, that the advent of Cyrus was behind him and the fall of
Babylon still in front of him, when he wrote these chapters.
Thus the earlier part, at least, of Isa. xl.-lxvi.--that is, chs.
xl.-xlviii.--compels us to date it between 555, Cyrus' advent, and
538, Babylon's fall. But some think that we may still further narrow
the limits. In ch. xli. 25, Cyrus, whose own kingdom lay east of
Babylonia, is described as invading Babylonia from the north. This,
it has been thought, must refer to his union with the Medes in 549,
and his threatened descent upon Mesopotamia from their quarter of
the prophet's horizon.[4] If it be so, the possible years of our
prophecy are reduced to eleven, 549-538. But even if we take the
wider and more certain limit, 555 to 538, we may well say that there
are very few chapters in the whole of the Old Testament whose date
can be fixed so precisely as the date of chs. xl.-xlviii.
If what has been unfolded in the preceding paragraphs is recognised
as the statement of the chapters themselves, it will be felt that
further evidence of an exilic date is scarcely needed. And those, who
are acquainted with the controversy upon the evidence furnished by
the style and language of the prophecies, will admit how far short
in decisiveness it falls of the arguments offered above. But we
may fairly ask whether there is anything opposed to the conclusion
we have reached, either, _first_, in the local colour of the
prophecies; or, _second_, in their language; or, _third_, in their
thought--anything which shows that they are more likely to have been
Isaiah's than of exilic origin.
1. It has often been urged against the exilic date of these
prophecies, that they wear so very little local colour, and one
of the greatest of critics, Ewald, has felt himself, therefore,
permitted to place their home, not in Babylonia, but in Egypt, while
he maintains the exilic date. But, as we shall see in surveying the
condition of the exiles, it was natural for the best among them,
their psalmists and prophets, to have no eyes for the colours of
Babylon. They lived inwardly; they were much more the inhabitants
of their own broken hearts than of that gorgeous foreign land; when
their thoughts rose out of themselves it was to seek immediately the
far-away Zion. How little local colour is there in the writings of
Ezekiel! Isa. xl.-lxvi. has even more to show; for indeed the absence
of local colour from our prophecy has been greatly exaggerated.
We shall find as we follow the exposition, break after break of
Babylonian light and shadow falling across our path,--the temples,
the idol-manufactories, the processions of images, the diviners
and astrologers, the gods and altars especially cultivated by the
characteristic mercantile spirit of the place; the shipping of that
mart of nations, the crowds of her merchants; the glitter of many
waters, and even that intolerable glare, which so frequently curses
the skies of Mesopotamia (xlix. 10). The prophet speaks of the
hills of his native land with just the same longing, that Ezekiel
and a probable psalmist of the Exile[5] betray,--the homesickness
of a highland-born man whose prison is on a flat, monotonous plain.
The beasts he mentions have for the most part been recognised as
familiar in Babylonia; and while the same cannot be said of the
trees and plants he names, it has been observed that the passages,
into which he brings them, are passages where his thoughts are
fixed on the restoration to Palestine.[6] Besides these, there are
many delicate symptoms of the presence, before the prophet, of a
people in a foreign land, engaged in commerce, but without political
responsibilities, each of which, taken by itself, may be insufficient
to convince, but the reiterated expression of which has even betrayed
commentators, who lived too early for the theory of a second Isaiah,
into the involuntary admission of an exilic authorship. It will
perhaps startle some to hear John Calvin quoted on behalf of the
exilic date of these prophecies. But let us read and consider this
statement of his: "Some regard must be had to the time when this
prophecy was uttered; for since the rank of the kingdom had been
obliterated, and the name of the royal family had become mean and
contemptible, during the captivity in Babylon, it might seem as if
through the ruin of that family the truth of God had fallen into
decay; and therefore he bids them contemplate by faith the throne of
David, which had been cast down."[7]
2. What we have seen to be true of the local colour of our prophecy,
holds good also of its style and language. There is nothing in
either of these to commit us to an Isaian authorship, or to make an
exilic date improbable; on the contrary, the language and style,
while containing no stronger nor more frequent resemblances to the
language and style of Isaiah than may be accounted for by the natural
influence of so great a prophet upon his successors, are signalised by
differences from his undisputed oracles, too constant, too subtle, and
sometimes too sharp, to make it at all probable that the whole book
came from the same man. On this point it is enough to refer our readers
to the recent exhaustive and very able reviews of the evidence by Canon
Cheyne in the second volume of his Commentary, and by Canon Driver in
the last chapter of _Isaiah: His Life and Times_, and to quote the
following words of so great an authority as Professor A. B. Davidson.
After remarking on the difference in vocabulary of the two parts of
the Book of Isaiah, he adds that it is not so much words in themselves
as the peculiar uses and combinations of them, and especially "the
peculiar articulation of sentences and the movement of the whole
discourse, by which an impression is produced so unlike the impression
produced by the earlier parts of the book."[8]
3. It is the same with the thought and doctrine of our prophecy.
In this there is nothing to make the Isaian authorship probable,
or an exilic date impossible. But, on the contrary, whether we
regard the needs of the people or the analogies of the development
of their religion, we find that, while everything suits the Exile,
nearly everything is foreign both to the subjects and to the methods
of Isaiah. We shall observe the items of this as we go along, but
one of them may be mentioned here (it will afterwards require a
chapter to itself), our prophet's use of the terms _righteous_ and
_righteousness_. No one, who has carefully studied the meaning which
these terms bear in the authentic oracles of Isaiah, and the use to
which they are put in the prophecies under discussion, can fail to
find in the difference a striking corroboration of our argument--that
the latter were composed by a different mind than Isaiah's, speaking
to a different generation.[9]
* * * * *
To sum up this whole argument. We have seen that there is no evidence
in the Book of Isaiah to prove that it was all by himself, but much
testimony which points to a plurality of authors; that chs. xl.-lxvi.
nowhere assert themselves to be by Isaiah; and that there is no
other well-grounded claim of Scripture or of doctrine on behalf of
his authorship. We have then shown that chs. xl.-xlviii. do not only
present the Exile as if nearly finished and Cyrus as if already come,
while the fall of Babylon is still future; but that it is essential to
one of their main arguments that Cyrus should be standing before Israel
and the world, as a successful warrior, on his way to attack Babylon.
That led us to date these chapters between 555 and 538. Turning then to
other evidence,--the local colour they show, their language and style,
and their theology,--we have found nothing which conflicts with that
date, but, on the contrary, a very great deal, which much more agrees
with it than with the date, or with the authorship, of Isaiah.
It will be observed, however, that the question has been limited to
the earlier chapters of the twenty-seven under discussion, viz., to
xl.-xlviii. Does the same conclusion hold good of xlix. to lxvi.? This
can be properly discovered only as we closely follow their exposition;
it is enough in the meantime to have got firm footing on the Exile. We
can feel our way bit by bit from this standpoint onwards. Let us now
merely anticipate the main features of the rest of the prophecy.
A new section has been marked by many as beginning with ch. xlix.
This is because ch. xlviii. concludes with a refrain: _There is no
peace, saith Jehovah, to the wicked_, which occurs again at the end
of ch. lvii., and because with ch. xlviii. Babylon and Cyrus drop
out of sight. But the circumstances are still those of exile, and,
as Professor Davidson remarks, ch. xlix. is parallel in thought to
ch. xlii., and also takes for granted the restoration of Israel
in ch. xlviii., proceeding naturally from that to the statement
of Israel's world-mission. Apart from the alternation of passages
dealing with the Servant of the Lord, and passages whose subject
is Zion--an alternation which begins pretty early in the prophecy,
and has suggested to some its composition out of two different
writings[10]--the first real break in the sequence occurs at ch. lii.
13, where the prophecy of the sin-bearing Servant is introduced. By
most critics this is held to be an insertion, for ch. liv. 1 follows
naturally upon ch. lii. 12, though it is undeniable that there is
also some association between chs. lii. 13-liii., and ch. liv.[11] In
chs. liv.-lv. we are evidently still in exile. It is in commenting on
a verse of these chapters that Calvin makes the admission of exilic
origin which has been quoted above.
A number of short prophecies now follow, till the end of ch. lix.
is reached. These, as we shall see, make it extremely difficult to
believe in the original unity of "Second Isaiah." Some of them,
it is true, lie in evident circumstance of exile; but others are
undoubtedly of earlier date, reflecting the scenery of Palestine,
and the habits of the people in their political independence, with
Jehovah's judgement-cloud still unburst, but lowering. Such is ch.
lvi. 9-lvii., which regards the Exile as still to come, quotes the
natural features of Palestine, and charges the Jews with unbelieving
diplomacy--a charge not possible against them when they were in
captivity. But others of these short prophecies are, in the opinion
of some critics, post-exilic. Cheyne assigns ch. lvi. to after the
Return, when the temple was standing, and the duty of holding fasts
and sabbaths could be enforced, as it was enforced by Nehemiah. I
shall give, when we reach the passage, my reasons for doubting his
conclusion. The chapter seems to me as likely to have been written
upon the eve of the Return as after the Return had taken place.
Ch. lvii., the eighteenth of our twenty-seven chapters, closes with
the same refrain as ch. xlviii., the ninth of the series: _There is no
peace, saith Jehovah, to the wicked._ Ch. lviii. has, therefore, been
regarded as beginning the third great division of the prophecy. But
here again, while there is certainly an advance in the treatment of the
subject, and the prophet talks less of the redemption of the Jews and
more of the glory of the restoration of Zion, the point of transition
is very difficult to mark. Some critics[12] regard ch. lviii. as
post-exilic; but when we come to it we shall find a number of reasons
for supposing it to belong, just as much as Ezekiel, to the Exile. Ch.
lix. is perhaps the most difficult portion of all, because it makes
the Jews responsible for civic justice in a way they could hardly be
conceived to be in exile, and yet speaks, in the language of other
portions of "Second Isaiah," of a deliverance that cannot well be other
than the deliverance from exile. We shall find in this chapter likely
marks of the fusion of two distinct addresses, making the conclusion
probable that it is Israel's earlier conscience which we catch here,
following her into the days of exile, and reciting her former guilt
just before pardon is assured. Chs. lx., lxi., and lxii. are certainly
exilic. The inimitable prophecy, ch. lxiii. 1-6, complete within
itself, and unique in its beauty, is either a promise given just before
the deliverance from a long captivity of Israel under heathen nations
(ver. 4), or an exultant song of triumph immediately after such a
deliverance has taken place. Ch. lxiii. 7-lxiv. implies a ruined temple
(ver. 10), but bears no traces of the writer being in exile. It has
been assigned to the period of the first attempts to rebuild Jerusalem
after the Return. Ch. lxv. has been assigned to the same date, and its
local colour interpreted as that of Palestine. But we shall find the
colour to be just as probably that of Babylon, and again I do not see
any certain proofs of a post-exilic date. Ch. lxvi., however, betrays
more evidence of being written after the Return. It divides into two
parts. In verses 1 to 4 the temple is still unbuilt, but the building
would seem to be already begun. In verses 5 to 24, the arrival of the
Jews in Palestine, the resumption of the life of the sacred community,
and the disappointments of the returned at the first meagre results,
seem to be implied. And the music of the book dies out in tones of
warning, that sin still hinders the Lord's work with His people.
* * * * *
This rapid survey has made two things sufficiently clear. _First_,
that while the bulk of chs. xl.-lxvi. was composed in Babylonia during
the Exile of the Jews, there are considerable portions which date from
before the Exile, and betray a Palestinian origin; and one or two
smaller pieces that seem--rather less evidently, however--to take for
granted the Return from the Exile. But, _secondly_, all these pieces,
which it seems necessary to assign to different epochs and authors,
have been arranged so as to exhibit a certain order and progress--an
order, more or less observed, of date, and a progress very apparent (as
we shall see in the course of exposition) of thought and of clearness
in definition. The largest portion, of whose unity we are assured and
whose date we can fix, is found at the beginning. Chs. xl.-xlviii.
are certainly by one hand, and may be dated, as we have seen, between
555 and 538--the period of Cyrus' approach to take Babylon. There
the interest in Cyrus ceases, and the thought of the redemption from
Babylon is mainly replaced by that of the subsequent Return. Along
with these lines, we shall discover a development in the prophecy's
great doctrine of the Servant of Jehovah. But even this dies away, as
if the experience of suffering and discipline were being replaced by
that of return and restoration; and it is Zion in her glory, and the
spiritual mission of the people, and the vengeance of the Lord, and the
building of the temple, and a number of practical details in the life
and worship of the restored community, which fill up the remainder of
the book, along with a few echoes from pre-exilic times. Can we escape
feeling in all this a definite design and arrangement, which fails to
be absolutely perfect, probably, from the nature of the materials at
the arranger's disposal?
We are, therefore, justified in coming to the provisional conclusion,
that Second Isaiah is not a unity, in so far as it consists of a
number of pieces by different men, whom God raised up at various
times before, during, and after the Exile, to comfort and exhort
amid the shifting circumstance and tempers of His people; but that
it is a unity, in so far as these pieces have been gathered together
by an editor very soon after the Return from the Exile, in an order
as regular both in point of time and subject as the somewhat mixed
material would permit. It is in this sense that throughout this
volume we shall talk of "our prophet," or "the prophet;" up to ch.
xlix., at least, we shall feel that the expression is literally true;
after that it is rather an editorial than an original unity which
is apparent. In this question of unity the dramatic style of the
prophecy forms, no doubt, the greatest difficulty. Who shall dare to
determine of the many soliloquies, apostrophes, lyrics and other
pieces that are here gathered, often in want of any connection save
that of dramatic grouping and a certain sympathy of temper, whether
they are by the same author or have been collected from several
origins? We must be content to leave the matter uncertain. One great
reason, which we have not yet quoted, for supposing that the whole
prophecy is not by one man, is that if it had been his name would
certainly have come down with it.
Do not let it be thought that such a conclusion, as we have been led
to, is merely a dogma of modern criticism. Here, if anywhere, the
critic is but the patient student of Scripture, searching for the
testimony of the sacred text about itself, and formulating that.
If it be found that such a testimony conflicts with ecclesiastical
tradition, however ancient and universal, so much the worse for
tradition. In Protestant circles, at least, we have no choice. _Litera
Scripta manet_. When we know that the only evidence for the Isaian
authorship of chs. xl.-lxvi. is tradition, supported by an unthinking
interpretation of New Testament citations, while the whole testimony
of these Scriptures themselves denies them to be Isaiah's, we cannot
help making our choice, and accepting the testimony of Scripture. Do
we find them any the less wonderful or Divine? Do they comfort less?
Do they speak with less power to the conscience? Do they testify with
more uncertain voice to our Lord and Saviour? It will be the task of
the following pages to show that, interpreted in connection with the
history out of which they themselves say that God's Spirit drew them,
these twenty-seven chapters become only more prophetic of Christ, and
more comforting and instructive to men, than they were before.
But the remarkable fact is, that anciently tradition itself appears
to have agreed with the results of modern scholarship. The original
place of the Book of Isaiah in the Jewish canon seems to have been
after both Jeremiah and Ezekiel,[13] a fact which goes to prove that
it did not reach completion till a later date than the works of these
two prophets of the Exile.
If now it be asked, Why should a series of prophecies written in
the Exile be attached to the authentic works of Isaiah? that is a
fair question, and one which the supporters of the exilic authorship
have the duty laid upon them of endeavouring to answer. Fortunately
they are not under the necessity of falling back, for want of other
reasons, on the supposition that this attachment was due to the error
of some scribe, or to the custom which ancient writers practised
of filling up any part of a volume, that remained blank when one
book was finished, with the writing of any other that would fit the
place.[14] The first of these reasons is too accidental, the second
too artificial, in face of the undoubted sympathy which exists among
all parts of the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah himself plainly prophesied of
an exile longer than his own generation experienced, and prophesied
of a return from it (ch. xi.). We saw no reason to dispute his claims
to the predictions about Babylon in chs. xxi. and xxxix. Isaiah's,
too, more than any other prophet's, were those great and final hopes
of the Old Testament--the survival of Israel and the gathering of
the Gentiles to the worship of Jehovah at Jerusalem. But it is for
the express purpose of emphasizing the immediate fulfilment of such
ancient predictions, that Isa. xl.-lxvi. were published. Although our
prophet has _new things to publish_, his first business is to show
that the _former things have come to pass_, especially the Exile,
the survival of a Remnant, the sending of a Deliverer, the doom of
Babylon. What more natural than to attach to his utterances those
prophecies, of which the events he pointed to were the vindication
and fulfilment? The attachment was the more easy to arrange that the
authentic prophecies had not passed from Isaiah's hand in a fixed
form. They do not bear those marks of their author's own editing,
which are borne by the prophecies both of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. It
is impossible to be dogmatic on the point. But these facts--that
our chapters are concerned, as no other Scriptures are, with the
fulfilment of previous prophecies; that it is the prophecies of
Isaiah which are the original and fullest prediction of the events
they are busy with; and that the form, in which Isaiah's prophecies
are handed down, did not preclude additions of this kind to
them--contribute very evident reasons why Isa. xl.-lxvi., though
written in the Exile, should be attached to Isa. i.-xxxix.[15]
* * * * *
Thus we present a theory of the exilic authorship of Isa. xl.-lxvi.
within itself complete and consistent, suited to all parts of the
evidence, and not opposed by the authority of any part of Scripture.
In consequence of its conclusion, our duty, before proceeding to the
exposition of the chapters, is twofold: first, to connect the time
of Isaiah with the period of the Captivity, and then to sketch the
condition of Israel in Exile. This we shall undertake in the next
three chapters.
NOTE TO CHAPTER I.
Readers may wish to have a reference to other passages of this
volume, in which the questions of the date, authorship and
structure of Isaiah xl.-lxvi. are discussed. See pp. 65-68, 112,
146 f., 212, 223; Introduction to Book III.; opening paragraphs
of ch. xviii. and of ch. xix., etc.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Chs. i., ii., etc. The only title that could be offered as
covering the whole book is that in ch. i., ver. 1: _The vision of
Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem,
in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah._
But this manifestly cannot apply to any but the earlier chapters, of
which Judah and Jerusalem are indeed the subjects.
[2] There are, it will be remembered, certain narratives in the Book
of Isaiah, which are not by the prophet. They speak of him in the
third person (chs. vii., xxxvi.-xxxix.), while in other narratives
(chs. vi. and viii.) he speaks of himself in the first person. Their
presence is sufficient proof that the Book of Isaiah, in its extant
shape, did not come from Isaiah's hands, but was compiled by others.
[3] Matt. iii. 3, viii. 17, xii. 17; Luke iii. 4, iv. 17; John i. 23,
xii. 38; Acts viii. 28; Rom. x. 16-20.
[4] Driver's _Isaiah_, pp. 137, 139.
[5] Psalm cxxi.
[6] Driver's _Isaiah: His Life and Times_, p. 191.
[7] Calvin on Isa. lv. 3.
[8] So quoted by Driver (_Isaiah_, etc., p. 200), from the _British
and Foreign Evangelical Review_, 1879, p. 339.
[9] See p. 223.
[10] Professor Briggs' _Messianic Prophecy_, 339 ff.
[11] Ewald is very strong on this.
[12] Including Professor Cheyne, _Encyc. Britann._, article "Isaiah."
[13] According to the arrangement given in the Talmud (Baba bathra,
f. 14, col. 2): "Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, the Twelve." Cf. Bleek,
_Introduction to Old Testament_, on Isaiah; Orelli's _Isaiah_, Eng.
ed., p. 214.
[14] Robertson Smith, _The Old Testament in Jewish Church_, 109.
[15] It is the theory of some, that although Isa. xl.-lxvi. dates
as a whole from the Exile, there are passages in it by Isaiah
himself, or in his style by pupils of his (Klostermann in Herzog's
_Encyclopædia_ and Bredenkamp in his _Commentary_). But this, while
possible, is beyond proof.
CHAPTER II.
_FROM ISAIAH TO THE FALL OF JERUSALEM._
701-587 B.C.
At first sight, the circumstances of Judah in the last ten years of
the seventh century present a strong resemblance to her fortunes
in the last ten years of the eighth. The empire of the world, to
which she belongs, is again divided between Egypt and a Mesopotamian
power. Syria is again the field of their doubtful battle, and the
question, to which of the two shall homage be paid, still forms the
politics of all her states. Judah still vacillates, intrigues and
draws down on herself the wrath of the North by her treaties with
Egypt. Again there is a great prophet and statesman, whose concern is
righteousness, who exposes both the immorality of his people and the
folly of their politics, and who summons the _evil from the North_
as God's scourge upon Israel: Isaiah has been succeeded by Jeremiah.
And, as if to complete the analogy, the nation has once more passed
through a puritan reformation. Josiah has, even more thoroughly than
Hezekiah, effected the disestablishment of idols.
Beneath this circumstantial resemblance, however, there is one
fundamental difference. The strength of Isaiah's preaching was bent,
especially during the closing years of the century, to establish the
inviolableness of Jerusalem. Against the threats of the Assyrian
siege, and in spite of his own more formidable conscience of his
people's corruption, Isaiah persisted that Zion should not be taken,
and that the people, though cut down to their roots, should remain
planted in the land,--the stock of an imperial nation in the latter
days. This prophecy was vindicated by the marvellous relief of
Jerusalem on the apparent eve of her capture in 701. But its echoes
had not yet died away, when Jeremiah to his generation delivered the
very opposite message. Round him the popular prophets babbled by
rote Isaiah's ancient assurances about Zion. Their soft, monotonous
repetitions lapped pleasantly upon the immovable self-confidence of
the people. But Jeremiah called down the storm. Even while prosperity
seemed to give him the lie, he predicted the speedy ruin of Temple
and City, and summoned Judah's enemies against her in the name of
the God, on whose former word she relied for peace. The contrast
between the two great prophets grows most dramatic in their conduct
during the respective sieges, of which each was the central figure.
Isaiah, alone steadfast in a city of despair, defying the taunts of
the heathen, rekindling within the dispirited defenders, whom the
enemy sought to bribe to desertion, the passions of patriotism and
religion, proclaiming always, as with the voice of a trumpet, that
Zion must stand inviolate; Jeremiah, on the contrary, declaring the
futility of resistance, counselling each citizen to save his own
life from the ruin of the state, in treaty with the enemy, and even
arrested as a deserter,--these two contrasting figures and attitudes
gather up the difference which the century had wrought in the
fortunes of the City of God. And so, while in 701 Jerusalem triumphed
in the Lord by the sudden raising of the Assyrian siege, three years
after the next century was out she twice succumbed to the Assyrian's
successor, and nine years later was totally destroyed.
What is the reason of this difference, which a century sufficed
to work? Why was the sacredness of Judah's shrine not as much an
article of Jeremiah's as of Isaiah's creed,--as much an element of
Divine providence in 600 as in 700 B.C.? This is not a very hard
question to answer, if we keep in our regard two things--firstly,
the moral condition of the people, and, secondly, the necessities of
the spiritual religion, which was identified for the time with their
fortunes.
The Israel, which was delivered into captivity at the word of
Jeremiah, was a people at once more hardened and more exhausted
than the Israel, which, in spite of its sin, Isaiah's efforts had
succeeded in preserving upon its own land. A century had come and
gone of further grace and opportunity, but the grace had been
resisted, the opportunity abused, and the people stood more guilty
and more wilful than ever before God. Even clearer, however, than the
deserts of the people was the need of their religion. That local and
temporary victory--after all, only the relief of a mountain fortress
and a tribal shrine--with which Isaiah had identified the will and
honour of Almighty God, could not be the climax of the history of
a spiritual religion. It was impossible for Monotheism to rest on
so narrow and material a security as that. The faith, which was to
overcome the world, could not be satisfied with a merely national
triumph. The time must arrive--were it only by the ordinary progress
of the years and unhastened by human guilt--for faith and piety
to be weaned from the forms of an earthly temple, however sacred;
for the individual--after all, the real unit of religion--to be
rendered independent of the community and cast upon his God alone;
and for this people, to whom the oracles of the living God had been
entrusted, to be led out from the selfish pride of guarding these
for their own honour--to be led out, were it through the breaches
of their hitherto inviolate walls, and amid the smoke of all that
was most sacred to them, so that in level contact with mankind they
might learn to communicate their glorious trust. Therefore, while the
Exile was undoubtedly the penance, which an often-spared but ever
more obdurate people had to pay for their accumulated sins, it was
also for the meek and the pure-hearted in Israel a step upwards even
from the faith and the results of Isaiah--perhaps the most effectual
step which Israel's religion ever took. Schultz has finely said: "The
proper Tragedy of History--doom required by long-gathering guilt,
and launched upon a generation which for itself is really turning
towards good--is most strikingly consummated in the Exile." Yes: but
this is only half the truth. The accomplishment of the moral tragedy
is really but one incident in a religious epic--the development of a
spiritual faith. Long-delaying Nemesis overtakes at last the sinners,
but the shock of the blows, which beat the guilty nation into
captivity, releases their religion from its material bonds. Israel on
the way to Exile is on the way to become Israel after the Spirit.
With these principles to guide us, let us now, for a little, thread
our way through the crowded details of the decline and fall of the
Jewish state.
Isaiah's own age had foreboded the necessity of exile for Judah.
There was the great precedent of Samaria, and Judah's sin was not
less than her sister's. When the authorities at Jerusalem wished
to put Jeremiah to death for the heresy of predicting the ruin of
the sacred city, it was pointed out in his defence that a similar
prediction had been made by Micah, the contemporary of Isaiah. And
how much had happened since then! The triumph of Jehovah in 701,
the stronger faith and purer practice, which had followed as long
as Hezekiah reigned, gave way to an idolatrous reaction under his
successor Manasseh. This reaction, while it increased the guilt of
the people, by no means diminished their religious fear. They carried
into it the conscience of their former puritanism--diseased, we might
say delirious, but not dead. Men felt their sin and feared Heaven's
wrath, and rushed headlong into the gross and fanatic exercises
of idolatry, in order to wipe away the one and avert the other.
It availed nothing. After an absence of thirty years the Assyrian
arms returned in full strength, and Manasseh himself was carried
captive across the Euphrates. But penitence revived, and for a time
it appeared as if it were to be at last valid for salvation. Israel
made huge strides towards their ideal life of a good conscience
and outward prosperity. Josiah, the pious, came to the throne. The
Book of the Law was discovered in 621, and king and people rallied
to its summons with the utmost loyalty. All the nation _stood to
the covenant_. The single sanctuary was vindicated, the high places
destroyed, the land purged of idols. There were no great military
triumphs, but Assyria, so long the accepted scourge of God, gave
signs of breaking up; and we can feel the vigour and self-confidence,
induced by years of prosperity, in Josiah's ambition to extend his
borders, and especially in his daring assault upon Necho of Egypt
at Megiddo, when Necho passed north to the invasion of Assyria.
Altogether, it was a people that imagined itself righteous, and
counted upon a righteous God. In such days who could dream of exile?
But in 608 the ideal was shivered. Israel was threshed at Megiddo,
and Josiah, the king after God's own heart, was slain on the field.
And then happened, what happened at other times in Israel's history
when disillusion of this kind came down. The nation fell asunder
into the elements of which it was ever so strange a composition. The
masses, whose conscience did not rise beyond the mere performance
of the Law, nor their view of God higher than that of a Patron of
the state, bound by His covenant to reward with material success the
loyalty of His clients, were disappointed with the results of their
service and of His providence. Being a new generation from Manasseh's
time, they thought to give the strange gods another turn. The idols
were brought back, and after the discredit which righteousness
received at Megiddo, it would appear that social injustice and crime
of many kinds dared to be very bold. Jehoahaz, who reigned for
three months after Josiah, and Jehoiakim, who succeeded him, were
idolaters. The loftier few, like Jeremiah, had never been deceived
by the people's outward allegiance to the Temple or the Law, nor
considered it valid either to atone for the past or now to fulfil
the holy demands of Jehovah; and were confirmed by the disaster at
Megiddo, and the consequent reaction to idolatry, in the stern and
hopeless views of the people which they had always entertained. They
kept reiterating a speedy captivity. Between these parties stood
the formal successors of earlier prophets, so much the slaves of
tradition that they had neither conscience for their people's sins
nor understanding of the world around them, but could only affirm in
the strength of ancient oracles that Zion should not be destroyed.
Strange is it to see how this party, building upon the promises of
Jehovah through a prophet like Isaiah, should be taken advantage of
by the idolaters, but scouted by Jehovah's own servants. Thus they
mingle and conflict. Who indeed can distinguish all the elements of
so ancient and so rich a life, as they chase, overtake and wrestle
with each other, hurrying down the rapids to the final cataract? Let
us leave them for a moment, while we mark the catastrophe itself.
They will be more easily distinguished in the calm below.
It was from the North that Jeremiah summoned the vengeance of God
upon Judah. In his earlier threats he might have meant the Scythians;
but by 605, when Nebuchadrezzar, Nabopolassar of Babylon's son, the
rising general of the age, defeated Pharaoh at Carchemish, all men
accepted Jeremiah's nomination for this successor of Assyria in the
lordship of Western Asia. From Carchemish Nebuchadrezzar overran
Syria. Jehoiakim paid tribute to him, and Judah at last felt the grip
of the hand that was to drag her into exile. Jehoiakim attempted
to throw it off in 602; but, after harassing him for four years by
means of some allies, Nebuchadrezzar took his capital, executed him,
suffered Jehoiachin, his successor, to reign only three months, took
Jerusalem a second time, and carried off to Babylon the first great
portion of the people. This was in 598, only ten years from the death
of Josiah, and twenty-one from the discovery of the Book of the Law.
The exact numbers of this first captivity of the Jews it is
impossible to determine. The annalist sets the soldiers at seven
thousand, the smiths and craftsmen at one thousand; so that, making
allowance for other classes whom he mentions, the grown men must
alone have been over ten thousand;[16] but how many women went, and
how many children--the most important factor for the period of the
Exile with which we have to deal--it is impossible to estimate. The
total number of persons can scarcely have been less than twenty-five
thousand. More important, however, than their number was the quality
of these exiles, and this we can easily appreciate. The royal family
and the court were taken, a large number of influential persons,
_the mighty men of the land_, or what must have been nearly all the
fighting men, with the necessary artificers; priests also went,
Ezekiel among them, and probably representatives of other classes not
mentioned by the annalist. That this was the virtue and flower of the
nation is proved by a double witness. Not only did the citizens, for
the remaining ten years of Jerusalem's life, look to these exiles for
her deliverance, but Jeremiah himself counted them the sound half of
Israel--_a basket of good figs_, as he expressed it, beside _a basket
of bad ones_. They were at least under discipline, but the remnant of
Jerusalem persisted in the wilfulness of the past.
For although Jeremiah remained in the city, and the house of David
and a considerable population, and although Jeremiah himself held a
higher position in public esteem since the vindication of his word
by the events of 598, yet he could not be blind to the unchanged
character of the people, and the thorough doom which their last
respite had only more evidently proved to be inevitable. Gangs of
false prophets, both at home and among the exiles, might predict a
speedy return. All the Jewish ability of intrigue, with the lavish
promises of Egypt and frequent embassies from other nations, might
work for the overthrow of Babylon. But Jeremiah and Ezekiel knew
better. Across the distance which now separated them they chanted,
as it were in antiphon, the alternate strophes of Judah's dirge.
Jeremiah bade the exiles not to remember Zion, but "let them settle
down," he said, "into the life of the land they are in, building
houses, planting gardens, and begetting children, and _seek the peace
of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives,
and pray unto Jehovah for it, for in the peace thereof ye shall have
peace_--the Exile shall last seventy years." And as Jeremiah in Zion
blessed Babylon, so Ezekiel in Babylon cursed Zion, thundering back
that Jerusalem must be utterly wasted through siege and famine,
pestilence and captivity. There is no rush of hope through Ezekiel.
His expectations are all distant. He lives either in memory or in
cold fancy. His pictures of restoration are too elaborate to mean
speedy fulfilment. They are the work of a man with time on his hands;
one does not build so colossally for to-morrow. Thus reinforced
from abroad, Jeremiah proclaimed Nebuchadrezzar as _the servant of
Jehovah_, and summoned him to work Jehovah's doom upon the city. The
predicted blockade came in the ninth year of Zedekiah. The false
hopes which still sustained the people, their trust in Egypt, the
arrival of an Egyptian army in result of their intrigue, as well as
all their piteous bravery, only afforded time for the fulfilment of
the terrible details of their penalty. For nearly eighteen months the
siege closed in--months of famine and pestilence, of faction and
quarrel and falling away to the enemy. Then Jerusalem broke up. The
besiegers gained the northern suburb and stormed the middle gate.
Zedekiah and the army burst their lines only to be captured on an
aimless flight at Jericho. A few weeks more, and a forlorn defence by
civilians of the interior parts of the city was at last overwhelmed.
The exasperated besiegers gave her up to fire--_the house of
Jehovah, the king's house, and every great house_--and tore to the
stones the stout walls that resisted the conflagration. As the city
was levelled, so the citizens were dispersed. A great number--and
among them the king's family--were put to death. The king himself
was blinded, and, along with a host of his subjects, impossible
for us to estimate, and with all the temple furniture, was carried
to Babylon. A few peasants were left to cultivate the land; a few
superior personages--perhaps such as, with Jeremiah, had favoured the
Babylonians, and Jeremiah was among them--were left at Mizpah under a
Jewish viceroy. It was a poor apparition of a state; but, as if the
very ghost of Israel must be chased from the land, even this small
community was broken up, and almost every one of its members fled to
Egypt. The Exile was complete.
FOOTNOTE:
[16] The figure actually mentioned in 2 Kings xxiv. 14, but, as
Stade points out (_Geschichte_, p. 680), vv. 14, 15 interrupt the
narrative, and may have been intruded here from the account of the
later captivity.
CHAPTER III.
_WHAT ISRAEL TOOK INTO EXILE._
Before we follow the captives along the roads that lead to exile, we
may take account of the spiritual goods which they carried with them,
and were to realise in their retirement. Never in all history did
paupers of this world go forth more richly laden with the treasures
of heaven.
1. First of all, we must emphasize and define their MONOTHEISM. We must
emphasize it as against those who would fain persuade us that Israel's
monotheism was for the most part the product of the Exile; we must
analyse its contents and define its limits among the people, if we
would appreciate the extent to which it spread and the peculiar temper
which it assumed, as set forth in the prophecy we are about to study.
Idolatry was by no means dead in Israel at the fall of Jerusalem.
On the contrary, during the last years which the nation spent
within those sacred walls, that had been so miraculously preserved
in the sight of the world by Jehovah, idolatry increased, and
to the end remained as determined and fanatic as the people's
defence of Jehovah's own temple. The Jews who fled to Egypt applied
themselves to the worship of the Queen of Heaven, in spite of all
the remonstrances of Jeremiah and him they carried with them, not
because they listened to him as the prophet of the One True God,
but superstitiously, as if he were a pledge of the favour of one
of the many gods, whom they were anxious to propitiate. And the
earliest effort, upon which we shall have to follow our own prophet,
is the effort to crush the worship of images among the Babylonian
exiles. Yet when Israel returned from Babylon the people were wholly
monotheist; when Jerusalem was rebuilt no idol came back to her.
That this great change was mainly the result of the residence in
Babylon and of truths learned there, must be denied by all who
remember the creed and doctrine about God, which in their literature
the people carried with them into exile. The law was already written,
and the whole nation had sworn to it: _Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our
God; Jehovah is One, and thou shalt worship Jehovah thy God with
all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength._
These words, it is true, may be so strictly interpreted as to mean
no more than that there was one God for Israel: other gods might
exist, but Jehovah was Sole Deity for His people. It is maintained
that such a view receives some support from the custom of prophets,
who, while they affirmed Jehovah's supremacy, talked of other gods
as if they were real existences. But argument from this habit of
the prophets is precarious: such a mode of speech may have been
a mere accommodation to a popular point of view. And, surely, we
have only to recall what Isaiah and Jeremiah had uttered concerning
Jehovah's Godhead, to be persuaded that Israel's monotheism, before
the beginning of the Exile, was a far more broad and spiritual faith
than the mere belief that Jehovah was the Sovereign Deity of the
nation, or the satisfaction of the desires of Jewish hearts alone.
Righteousness was not coincident with Israel's life and interest;
righteousness was universally supreme, and it was in righteousness
that Isaiah saw Jehovah exalted.[17] There is no more prevailing
witness to the unity of God than the conscience, which in this matter
takes far precedence of the intellect; and it was on the testimony of
conscience that the prophets based Israel's monotheism. Yet they did
not omit to enlist the reason as well. Isaiah and Jeremiah delight
to draw deductions from the reasonableness of Jehovah's working in
nature to the reasonableness of His processes in history,--analogies
which could not fail to impress both intellect and imagination with
the fact that men inhabit a universe, that One is the will and mind
which works in all things. But to this training of conscience and
reason, the Jews, at the beginning of the Exile, felt the addition of
another considerable influence. Their history lay at last complete,
and their conscience was at leisure from the making of its details
to survey it as a whole. That long past, seen now by undazzled eyes
from under the shadow of exile, presented through all its changing
fortunes a single and a definite course. One was the intention of it,
one its judgement from first to last. The Jew saw in it nothing but
righteousness, the quality of a God, who spake the same word from the
beginning, who never broke His word, and who at last had summoned to
its fulfilment the greatest of the world-powers. In those historical
books, which were collected and edited during the Exile, we observe
each of the kings and generations of Israel, in their turn,
confronted with the same high standard of fidelity to the One True
God and His holy Law. The regularity and rigour, with which they are
thus judged, have been condemned by some critics as an arbitrary and
unfair application of the standard of a later faith to the conduct
of ruder and less responsible ages. But, apart from the question of
historical accuracy, we cannot fail to remark that this method of
writing history is at least instinct with the Oneness of God, and the
unvarying validity of His Law from generation to generation. Israel's
God was the same, their conscience told them, down all their history;
but now as He summoned one after another of the great world-powers
to do His bidding,--Assyria, Babylon, Persia,--how universal did He
prove His dominion to be! Unchanging through all time, He was surely
omnipotent through all space.
This short review--in which, for the sake of getting a complete view
of our subject, we have anticipated a little--has shown that Israel
had enough within themselves, in the teaching of their prophets and
in the lessons of their own history, to account for that consummate
expression of Jehovah's Godhead, which is contained in our prophet,
and to which every one allows the character of an absolute monotheism.
We shall find this, it is true, to be higher and more comprehensive
than anything which is said about God in pre-exilic Scriptures. The
prophet argues the claims of Jehovah, not only with the ardour that is
born of faith, but often with the scorn which indicates the intellect
at work. It is monotheism, treated not only as a practical belief or
a religious duty, but as a necessary truth of reason; not only as the
secret of faith and the special experience of Israel, but also as an
essential conviction of human nature, so that not to believe in One
God is a thing irrational and absurd for Gentiles as well as Jews.
God's infinitude in the works of creation, His universal providence in
history, are preached with greater power than ever before; and the gods
of the nations are treated as things, in whose existence no reasonable
person can possibly believe. In short, our great prophet of the Exile
has already learned to obey the law of Deuteronomy as it was expounded
by Christ. Deuteronomy says, _Thou shalt love Jehovah thy God with all
thine heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength_. Christ
added, _and with all thy mind_. This was what our prophet did. He held
his monotheism _with all his mind_. We shall find him conscious of it,
not only as a religious affection, but as a necessary intellectual
conviction; which if a man has not, he is less than a man. Hence the
scorn, which he pours upon the idols and mythologies of his conquerors.
Beside his tyrants, though in physical strength he was but a worm to
them, the Jew felt that he walked, by virtue of his faith in One God,
their intellectual master.
We shall see all this illustrated later on. Meantime, what we are
concerned to show is, that there is enough to account for this high
faith within Israel themselves--in their prophecy and in the lessons
of their history. And where indeed are we to be expected to go in
search of the sources of Israel's monotheism, if not to themselves?
To the Babylonians? The Babylonians had nothing spiritual to teach
to Israel; our prophet regards them with scorn. To the Persians, who
broke across Israel's horizon with Cyrus? Our prophet's high statement
of monotheism is of earlier date than the advent of Cyrus to Babylon.
Nor did Cyrus, when he came, give any help to the faith, for in his
public edicts he owned the gods of Babylon and the God of Israel with
equal care and equal policy. It was not because Cyrus and his Persians
were monotheists, that our prophet saw the sovereignty of Jehovah
vindicated, but it was because Jehovah was sovereign that the prophet
knew the Persians would serve His holy purposes.
2. But if in Deuteronomy the exiles carried with them the Law of the
One God, they preserved in Jeremiah's writings what may be called the
charter of the INDIVIDUAL MAN. Jeremiah had found religion in Judah
a public and a national affair. The individual derived his spiritual
value only from being a member of the nation, and through the public
exercises of the national faith. But, partly by his own religious
experience, and partly by the course of events, Jeremiah was enabled
to accomplish what may be justly described as the vindication of the
individual. Of his own separate value before God, and of his right
of access to his Maker apart from the nation, Jeremiah himself was
conscious, having belonged to God before he belonged to his mother,
his family, or his nation. _Before I found thee in the belly I knew
thee, and before thou camest out of the womb I consecrated thee._ His
whole life was but the lesson of how _one_ man can be for God and
all the nation on the other side. And it was in the strength of this
solitary experience, that he insisted, in his famous thirty-first
chapter, on the individual responsibility of man and on every man's
immediate communication with God's Spirit; and that, when the ruin of
the state was imminent, he advised each of his friends to _take his
own life_ out of it _for a prey_.[18] But Jeremiah's doctrine of the
religious value and independence of the individual had a complement.
Though the prophet felt so keenly his separate responsibility and
right of access to God, and his religious independence of the
people, he nevertheless clave to the people with all his heart. He
was not, like some other prophets, outside the doom he preached.
He might have saved himself, for he had many offers from the
Babylonians. But he chose to suffer with his people--he, the saint of
God, with the idolaters. More than that, it may be said that Jeremiah
suffered for the people. It was not they, with their dead conscience
and careless mind, but he, with his tender conscience and breaking
heart, who bore the reproach of their sins, the anger of the Lord,
and all the agonizing knowledge of his country's inevitable doom. In
Jeremiah one man did suffer for the people.
In our prophecy, which is absorbed with the deliverance of the nation
as a whole, there was, of course, no occasion to develop Jeremiah's
remarkable suggestions about each individual soul of man. In fact,
these suggestions were germs, which remained uncultivated in Israel
till Christ's time. Jeremiah himself uttered them, not as demands for
the moment, but as ideals that would only be realised when the New
Covenant was made.[19] Our prophecy has nothing to say about them. But
that figure, which Jeremiah's life presented, of One Individual--of
One Individual standing in moral solitude over against the whole
nation, and in a sense suffering for the nation, can hardly have been
absent from the influences, which moulded the marvellous confession of
the people in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where they see the
solitary servant of God on one side and themselves on the other, _and
Jehovah made to light on him the iniquities of us all_. It is true that
the exiles themselves had some consciousness of suffering for others.
_Our fathers_, cried a voice in their midst, when Jerusalem broke
up, _Our fathers have sinned, and we have borne their iniquities_.
But Jeremiah had been a willing sufferer for his people; and the
fifty-third chapter is, as we shall see, more like his way of bearing
his generation's guilt for love's sake than their way of bearing their
fathers' guilt in the inevitable entail of sin.[20]
3. To these beliefs in the unity of God, the religious worth of the
individual and the virtue of his self-sacrifice, we must add some
experiences of scarcely less value rising out of the DESTRUCTION
OF THE MATERIAL AND POLITICAL FORMS--the temple, the city, the
monarchy--with which the faith of Israel had been so long identified.
Without this destruction, it is safe to say, those beliefs could not
have assumed their purest form. Take, for instance, the belief in the
unity of God. There is no doubt that this belief was immensely helped
in Israel by the abolition of all the provincial sanctuaries under
Josiah, by the limitation of Divine worship to one temple and of valid
sacrifice to one altar. But yet it was well that this temple should
enjoy its singular rights for only thirty years and then be destroyed.
For a monotheism, however lofty, which depended upon the existence
of any shrine, however gloriously vindicated by Divine providence,
was not a purely spiritual faith. Or, again, take the individual. The
individual could not realise how truly he himself was the highest
temple of God, and God's most pleasing sacrifice a broken and a
contrite heart, till the routine of legal sacrifice was interrupted and
the ancient altar torn down. Or, once more, take that high, ultimate
doctrine of sacrifice, that the most inspiring thing for men, the most
effectual propitiation before God, is the self-devotion and offering up
of a free and reasonable soul, the righteous for the unrighteous--how
could common Jews have adequately learned that truth, in days when,
according to immemorial practice, the bodies of bulls and goats bled
daily on the one valid altar? The city and temple, therefore, went up
in flames that Israel might learn that God is a Spirit, and dwelleth
not in a house made with hands; that men are His temple, and their
hearts the sacrifices well-pleasing in His sight; and that beyond
the bodies and blood of beasts, with their daily necessity of being
offered, He was preparing for them another Sacrifice, of perpetual and
universal power, in the voluntary sufferings of His own holy Servant.
It was for this Servant, too, that the monarchy, as it were, abdicated,
yielding up to Him all its title to represent Jehovah and to save and
rule Jehovah's people.
4. Again, as we have already hinted, the fall of the state and city of
Jerusalem gave scope to ISRAEL'S MISSIONARY CAREER. The conviction,
that had inspired many of Isaiah's assertions of the inviolableness
of Zion, was the conviction that, if Zion were overthrown and the
last remnant of Israel uprooted from the land, there must necessarily
follow the extinction of the only true testimony to the living God
which the world contained. But by a century later that testimony was
firmly secured in the hearts and consciences of the people, wheresoever
they might be scattered; and what was now needed was exactly such a
dispersion,--in order that Israel might become aware of the world
for whom the testimony was meant, and grow expert in the methods by
which it was to be proclaimed. Priesthood has its human as well as its
Godward side. The latter was already sufficiently secured for Israel
by Jehovah's age-long seclusion of them in their remote highlands--a
people peculiar to Himself. But now the same Providence completed its
purpose by casting them upon the world. They mixed with men face to
face, or, still more valuably to themselves, on a level with the most
downtrodden and despised of the peoples. With no advantage but the
truth, they met the other religions of the world in argument, debating
with them upon the principles of a common reason and the facts of a
common history. They learned sympathy with the weak things of earth.
They discovered that their religion could be taught. But, above all,
they became conscious of martyrdom, the indispensable experience of a
religion that is to prevail; and they realised the supreme influence
upon men of a love which sacrifices itself. In a word, Israel, in
going into exile, put on humanity with all its consequences. How real
and thorough the process was, how successful in perfecting their
priesthood, may be seen not only from the hopes and obligations towards
all mankind, which burst in our prophecy to an urgency and splendour
unmatched elsewhere in their history, but still more from the fact that
when the Son of God Himself took flesh and became man, there were no
words oftener upon His lips to describe His experience and commission,
there are no passages which more clearly mirror His work for the world,
than the words and the passages in which these Jews of the Exile,
stripped to their bare humanity, relate their sufferings or exult in
their destiny that should follow.
5. But with their temple in ruins, and all the world before them for
the service of God, the Jews go forth to exile upon the distinct
PROMISE OF RETURN. The material form of their religion is suspended,
not abolished. Let them feel religion in purely spiritual aspects,
unassisted by sanctuary or ritual; let them look upon the world and
the oneness of men; let them learn all God's scope for the truth
He has entrusted to them,--and then let them gather back again and
cherish their new experience and ideas for yet awhile in the old
seclusion. Jehovah's discipline of them as a nation is not yet
exhausted. They are no mere band of pilgrims or missionaries, with
the world for their home; they are still a people, with their own
bit of the earth. If we keep this in mind, it will explain certain
apparent anomalies in our prophecy. In all the writings of the Exile
the reader is confused by a strange mingling of the spiritual and the
material, the universal and the local. The moral restoration of the
people to pardon and righteousness is identified with their political
restoration to Judah and Jerusalem. They have been separated from
ritual in order to cultivate a more spiritual religion, but it is to
this that a restoration to ritual is promised for a reward. While
Jeremiah insists upon the free and immediate communication of every
believer with Jehovah, Ezekiel builds a more exclusive priesthood,
a more elaborate system of worship. Within our prophecy, while one
voice deprecates a house for God built with hands, affirming that
Jehovah dwells with every one who is of a poor and contrite spirit,
other voices dwell fondly on the prospect of the new temple and
exult in its material glory. This double line of feeling is not
merely due to the presence in Israel of those two opposite tempers
of mind, which so naturally appear in every national literature.
But a special purpose of God is in it. Dispersed to obtain more
spiritual ideas of God and man and the world, Israel must be gathered
back again to get these by heart, to enshrine them in literature,
and to transmit them to posterity, as they could alone be securely
transmitted, in the memories of a nation, in the liturgies and canons
of a living Church.
Therefore the Jews, though torn for their discipline from Jerusalem,
continued to identify themselves more passionately than ever with
their desecrated city. A prayer of the period exclaims: _Thy saints
take pleasure in her stones, and her dust is dear to them._[21] The
exiles proved this by taking her name. Their prophets addressed
them as _Zion_ and _Jerusalem_. Scattered and leaderless groups of
captives in a far-off land, they were still that City of God. She had
not ceased to be; ruined and forsaken as she lay, she was yet _graven
on the palms of Jehovah's hands; and her walls were continually
before Him_.[22] The exiles kept up the register of her families;
they prayed towards her; they looked to return to build her bulwarks;
they spent long hours of their captivity in tracing upon the dust of
that foreign land the groundplan of her restored temple.
* * * * *
With such beliefs in God and man and sacrifice, with such hopes and
opportunities for their world-mission, but also with such a bias back
to the material Jerusalem, did Israel pass into exile.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] See vol. i., p. 100 f.
[18] Jer. xlv.
[19] This is especially clear from ch. xxxi.
[20] Having read through the Book of Jeremiah once again since I
wrote the above paragraph, I am more than ever impressed with the
influence of his life upon Isa. xl.-lxvi.
[21] Psalm cii. 14.
[22] Isa. xlix. 16.
CHAPTER IV.
_ISRAEL IN EXILE._
FROM 589 TILL ABOUT 550 B.C.
It is remarkable how completely the sound of the march from Jerusalem
to Babylon has died out of Jewish history. It was an enormous
movement: twice over within ten years, ten thousand Jews, at the
very least, must have trodden the highway to the Euphrates; and
yet, except for a doubtful verse or two in the Psalter, they have
left no echo of their passage. The sufferings of the siege before,
the remorse and lamentation of the Exile after, still pierce our
ears through the Book of Lamentations and the Psalms by the rivers
of Babylon. We know exactly how the end was fulfilled. We see most
vividly the shifting panorama of the siege,--the city in famine,
under the assault, and in smoke; upon the streets the pining
children, the stricken princes, the groups of men with sullen,
famine-black faces, the heaps of slain, mothers feeding on the bodies
of the infants whom their sapless breasts could not keep alive; by
the walls the hanging and crucifixion of multitudes, with all the
fashion of Chaldean cruelty, the delicate and the children stumbling
under heavy loads, no survivor free from the pollution of blood.
Upon the hills around, the neighbouring tribes are gathered to jeer
at _the day of Jerusalem_, and to cut off her fugitives, we even
see the departing captives turn, as the worm turns, to curse _those
children of Edom_. But there the vision closes. Was it this hot hate
which blinded them to the sights of the way, or that weariness and
depression among strange scenes, that falls upon all unaccustomed
caravans, and has stifled the memory of nearly every other great
historical march? The roads which the exiles traversed were of
immemorial use in the history of their fathers; almost every day they
must have passed names which, for at least two centuries, had rung
in the market-place of Jerusalem--the Way of the Sea, across Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles, round Hermon, and past Damascus; between
the two Lebanons, past Hamath, and past Arpad; or less probably by
Tadmor-in-the-Wilderness and Rezeph,--till they reached the river
on which the national ambition had lighted as the frontier of the
Messianic Empire, and whose rolling greatness had so often proved
the fascination and despair of a people of uncertain brooks and
trickling aqueducts. Crossing the Euphrates by one of its numerous
passages--either at Carchemish, if they struck the river so high, or
at the more usual Thapsacus, Tiphsah, _the passage_, where Xenophon
crossed with his Greeks, or at some other place--the caravans
must have turned south across the Habor, on whose upper banks the
captives of Northern Israel had been scattered, and then have
traversed the picturesque country of Aram-Naharaim, past Circesium
and Rehoboth-of-the-River, and many another ancient place mentioned
in the story of the Patriarchs, till through dwindling hills they
reached His--that marvellous site which travellers praise as one
of the great view-points of the world--and looked out at last upon
the land of their captivity, the boundless, almost level tracts of
Chaldea, the first home of the race, the traditional Garden of Eden.
But of all that we are told nothing. Every eye in the huge caravans
seems to have been as the eyes of the blinded king whom they carried
with them,--able to weep, but not to see.
One fact, however, was too large to be missed by these sad, wayworn
men; and it has left traces on their literature. In passing from home
to exile, the Jews passed from the hills to the plain. They were
highlanders. Jerusalem lies four thousand feet above the sea. From
its roofs the skyline is mostly a line of hills. To leave the city
on almost any side you have to descend. The last monuments of their
fatherland, on which the emigrants' eyes could have lingered, were
the high crests of Lebanon; the first prospect of their captivity
was a monotonous level. The change was the more impressive, that to
the hearts of Hebrews it could not fail to be sacramental. From the
mountains came the dew to their native crofts--the dew which, of
all earthly blessings, was likest God's grace. For their prophets,
the ancient hills had been the symbols of Jehovah's faithfulness.
In leaving their highlands, therefore, the Jews not only left the
kind of country to which their habits were most adapted and all
their natural affections clung; they left the chosen abode of God,
the most evident types of His grace, the perpetual witnesses to His
covenant. Ezekiel constantly employs _the mountains_ to describe his
fatherland. But it is far more with a sacramental longing than a mere
homesickness that a psalmist of the Exile cries out, _I will lift up
mine eyes to the hills: from whence cometh mine help?_ or that our
prophet exclaims: _How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of
him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that saith
unto Zion, Thy God reigneth_.
By the route sketched above, it is at least seven hundred miles from
Jerusalem to Babylon--a distance which, when we take into account
that many of the captives walked in fetters, cannot have occupied
them less than three months. We may form some conception of the
aspect of the caravans from the transportations of captives which
are figured on the Assyrian monuments, as in the Assyrian basement
in the British Museum. From these it appears as if families were not
separated, but marched together. Mules, asses, camels, ox-waggons,
and the captives themselves carried goods. Children and women
suckling infants were allowed to ride on the waggons. At intervals
fully-armed soldiers walked in pairs.[23]
I.
Mesopotamia, the land "in the middle of the rivers," Euphrates and
Tigris, consists of two divisions, an upper and a lower. The dividing
line crosses from near Hit or His on the Euphrates to below Samarah
on the Tigris. Above this line the country is a gently undulating
plain of secondary formation at some elevation above the sea. But
Lower Mesopotamia is absolutely flat land, an unbroken stretch of
alluvial soil, scarcely higher than the Persian Gulf, upon which it
steadily encroaches. Chaldea was confined to this Lower Mesopotamia,
and was not larger, Rawlinson estimates, than the kingdom of
Denmark.[24] It is the monotonous level which first impresses the
traveller; but if the season be favourable, he sees this only as the
theatre of vast and varied displays of colour, which all visitors vie
with one another in describing: "It is like a rich carpet;" "emerald
green, enamelled with flowers of every hue;" "tall wild grasses and
broad extents of waving reeds;" "acres of water-lilies;" "acres of
pansies." There was no such country in ancient times for wheat,
barley, millet, and sesame;[25] tamarisks, poplars, and palms; here
and there heavy jungle; with flashing streams and canals thickly
athwart the whole, and all shining the more brilliantly for the
interrupting patches of scurvy, nitrous soil, and the grey sandy
setting of the desert with its dry scrub. The possible fertility
of Chaldea is incalculable. But there are drawbacks. Bounded to
the north by so high a tableland, to the south and south-west by
a superheated gulf and broad desert, Mesopotamia is the scene of
violent changes of atmosphere. The languor of the flat country, the
stagnancy and sultriness of the air, of which not only foreigners but
the natives themselves complain, is suddenly invaded by southerly
winds, of tremendous force and laden with clouds of fine sand, which
render the air so dense as to be suffocating, and "produce a lurid
red haze intolerable to the eyes." Thunderstorms are frequent, and
there are very heavy rains. But the winds are the most tremendous.
In such an atmosphere we may perhaps discover the original shapes
and sounds of Ezekiel's turbulent visions--_the fiery wheels; the
great cloud with a fire infolding itself; the colour of amber_, with
_sapphire_, or lapis lazuli, breaking through; _the sound of a great
rushing_. Also the Mesopotamian floods are colossal. The increase of
both Tigris and Euphrates is naturally more violent and irregular
than that of the Nile.[26] Frequent risings of these rivers spread
desolation with inconceivable rapidity, and they ebb only to leave
pestilence behind them. If civilisation is to continue, there is need
of vast and incessant operations on the part of man.
Thus, both by its fertility and by its violence, this climate--before
the curse of God fell on those parts of the world--tended to develop
a numerous and industrious race of men, whose numbers were swollen
from time to time both by forced and by voluntary immigration. The
population must have been very dense. The triumphal lists of Assyrian
conquerors of the land, as well as the rubbish mounds which to-day
cover its surface, testify to innumerable villages and towns; while
the connecting canals and fortifications, by the making of them and
the watching of them, must have filled even the rural districts with
the hum and activity of men. Chaldea, however, did not draw all her
greatness from herself. There was immense traffic with East and West,
between which Babylon lay, for the greater part of antiquity, the
world's central market and exchange. The city was practically a port
on the Persian Gulf, by canals from which vessels reached her wharves
direct from Arabia, India and Africa. Down the Tigris and Euphrates
rafts brought the produce of Armenia and the Caucasus; but of greater
importance than even these rivers were the roads, which ran from Sardis
to Shushan, traversed Media, penetrated Bactria and India, and may be
said to have connected the Jaxartes and the Ganges with the Nile and
the harbours of the Ægean Sea. These roads all crossed Chaldea and met
at Babylon. Together with the rivers and ocean highways, they poured
upon her markets the traffic of the whole ancient world.
It was, in short, the very centre of the world--the most populous
and busy region of His earth--to which God sent His people for
their exile. The monarch, who transplanted them, was the genius
of Babylonia incarnate. The chief soldier of his generation,
Nebuchadrezzar will live in history as one of the greatest builders
of all time. But he fought as he built--that he might traffic. His
ambition was to turn the trade with India from the Red Sea to the
Persian Gulf, and he thought to effect this by the destruction of
Tyre, by the transportation of Arab and Nabathean merchants to
Babylon, and by the deepening and regulation of the river between
Babylon and the sea.
There is no doubt that Nebuchadrezzar carried the Jews to Babylon not
only for political reasons, but in order to employ them upon those
large works of irrigation and the building of cities, for which his
ambition required hosts of labourers. Thus the exiles were planted,
neither in military prisons nor in the comparative isolation of
agricultural colonies, but just where Babylonian life was most busy,
where they were forced to share and contribute to it, and could not
help feeling the daily infection of their captors' habits. Do not let
us forget this. It will explain much in what we have to study. It
will explain how the captivity, which God inflicted upon the Jews as
a punishment, might become in time a new sin to them, and why, when
the day of redemption arrived, so many forgot that their citizenship
was in Zion, and clung to the traffic and the offices of Babylon.
The majority of the exiles appear to have been settled within the city,
or, as it has been more correctly called, "the fortified district,"
of Babylon itself. Their mistress was thus constantly before them, at
once their despair and their temptation. _Lady of Kingdoms_ she lifted
herself to heaven from broad wharves and ramparts, by wide flights
of stairs and terraces, high walls and hanging gardens, pyramids and
towers--so colossal in her buildings, so imperially lavish of space
between! No wonder that upon that vast, far-spreading architecture,
upon its great squares and between its high portals guarded by giant
bulls, the Jew felt himself, as he expressed it, but a poor _worm_. If,
even as they stand in our museums, captured and catalogued, one feels
as if one crawled in the presence of the fragments of these striding
monsters, with how much more of the feeling of the worm must the abject
members of that captive nation have writhed before the face of the
city, which carried these monsters as the mere ornaments of her skirts,
and rose above all kingdoms with her strong feet upon the poor and the
meek of the earth?
Ah, the despair of it! To see _her_ every day so glorious, to be
forced to help _her_ ceaseless growth,--and to think how Jerusalem,
the daughter of Zion, lay forsaken in ruins! Yet the despair
sometimes gave way to temptation. There was not an outline or horizon
visible to the captive Jew, not a figure in the motley crowds in
which he moved, but must have fascinated him with the genius of his
conquerors. In that level land no mountain, with its witness of God,
broke the skyline; but the work of man was everywhere: curbed and
scattered rivers, artificial mounds, buildings of brick, gardens torn
from their natural beds and hung high in air by cunning hands to
please the taste of a queen; lavish wealth and force and cleverness,
all at the command of one human will. The signature ran across the
whole, "_I_ have done this, and with mine own hand have I gotten me
my wealth;" and all the nations of the earth came and acknowledged
the signature, and worshipped the great city. It was fascinating
merely to look on such cleverness, success and self-confidence; and
who was the poor Jew that he, too, should not be drawn with the
intoxicated nations to the worship of this glory that filled his
horizon? If his eyes rose higher, and from these enchantments of
men sought refuge in the heavens above, were not even they also a
Babylonian realm? Did not the Chaldean claim the great lights there
for his patron gods? were not the movements of sun, moon, and planets
the secret of his science? did not the tyrant believe that the very
stars in their courses fought for him? And he was vindicated; he was
successful; he did actually rule the world. There seemed to be no
escape from the enchantments of this sorceress city, as the prophets
called her, and it is not wonderful that so many Jews fell victims to
her worldliness and idolatry.
II.
The social condition of the Jews in Exile is somewhat obscure, and
yet, both in connection with the date and with the exposition of
some portions of "Second Isaiah," it is an element of the greatest
importance, of which we ought to have as definite an idea as possible.
What are the facts? By far the most significant is that which faces us
at the end of the Exile. There, some sixty years after the earlier, and
some fifty years after the later, of Nebuchadrezzar's two deportations,
we find the Jews a largely multiplied and still regularly organised
nation, with considerable property and decided political influence.
Not more than forty thousand can have gone into exile, but forty-two
thousand returned, and yet left a large portion of the nation behind
them. The old families and clans survived; the social ranks were
respected; the rich still held slaves; and the former menials of the
temple could again be gathered together. Large subscriptions were
raised for the pilgrimage, and for the restoration of the temple; a
great host of cattle was taken. To such a state of affairs do we see
any traces leading up through the Exile itself? We do.
The first host of exiles, the captives of 598, comprised, as we
have seen, the better classes of the nation, and appear to have
enjoyed considerable independence. They were not scattered, like
the slaves in North America, as domestic bondsmen over the surface
of the land. Their condition must have much more closely resembled
that of the better-treated exiles in Siberia; though of course, as
we have seen, it was not a Siberia, but the centre of civilisation,
to which they were banished. They remained in communities, with
their own official heads, and at liberty to consult their prophets.
They were sufficiently in touch with one another, and sufficiently
numerous, for the enemies of Babylon to regard them as a considerable
political influence, and to treat with them for a revolution against
their captors. But Ezekiel's strong condemnation of this intrigue
exhibits their leaders on good terms with the government. Jeremiah
bade them throw themselves into the life of the land; buy and sell,
and increase their families and property. At the same time, we cannot
but observe that it is only religious sins, with which Ezekiel
upbraids them. When he speaks of civic duty or social charity, he
either refers to their past or to the life of the remnant still in
Jerusalem. There is every reason to believe, therefore, that this
captivity was an honourable and an easy one. The captives may have
brought some property with them; they had leisure for the pursuit
of business and for the study and practice of their religion. Some
of them suffered, of course, from the usual barbarity of Oriental
conquerors, and were made eunuchs; some, by their learning and
abstinence, rose to high positions in the court.[27] Probably to
the end of the Exile they remained _the good figs_, as Jeremiah had
called them. Theirs was, perhaps, the literary work of the Exile; and
theirs, too, may have been the wealth which rebuilt Jerusalem.
But it was different with the second captivity, of 589. After the
famine, the burning of the city, and the prolonged march, this
second host of exiles must have reached Babylonia in an impoverished
condition. They were a lower class of men. They had exasperated
their conquerors, who, before the march began, subjected many of
them to mutilation and cruel death; and it is, doubtless, echoes of
their experience which we find in the more bitter complaints of our
prophet. _This is a people robbed and spoiled; all of them snared
in holes, and hid in prison-houses: they are for a prey, and for a
spoil._ _Thou_, that is, Babylon, _didst show them no mercy; upon the
aged hast thou very heavily laid thy yoke_.[28] Nebuchadrezzar used
them for his building, as Pharaoh had used their forefathers. Some of
them, or of their countrymen who had reached Babylonia before them,
became the domestic slaves and chattels of their conquerors. Among
the contracts and bills of sale of this period we find the cases of
slaves with apparently Jewish names.[29]
In short, the state of the Jews in Babylonia resembled what seems to
have been their fortune wherever they have settled in a foreign land.
Part of them despised and abused, forced to labour or overtaxed;
part left alone to cultivate literature or to gather wealth. Some
treated with unusual rigour--and perhaps a few of these with reason,
as dangerous to the government of the land--but some also, by the
versatile genius of their race, advancing to a high place in the
political confidence of their captors.
Their application to literature, to their religion, and to commerce
must be specially noted.
1. Nothing is more striking in the writings of Ezekiel than the
air of large leisure which invests them. Ezekiel lies passive; he
broods, gazes and builds his visions up, in a fashion like none
of his terser predecessors; for he had time on his hands, not
available to them in days when the history of the nation was still
running. Ezekiel's style swells to a greater fulness of rhetoric;
his pictures of the future are elaborated with the most minute
detail. Prophets before him were speakers, but he is a writer. Many
in Israel besides Ezekiel took advantage of the leisure of the Exile
to the great increase and arrangement of the national literature.
Some Assyriologists have lately written, as if the schools of Jewish
scribes owed their origin entirely to the Exile.[30] But there were
scribes in Israel before this. What the Exile did for these, was to
provide them not only with the leisure from national business which
we have noted, but with a powerful example of their craft as well.
Babylonia at this time was a land full of scribes and makers of
libraries. They wrote a language not very different from the Jewish,
and cannot but have powerfully infected their Jewish fellows with the
spirit of their toil and of their methods. To the Exile we certainly
owe a large part of the historical books of the Old Testament, the
arrangement of some of the prophetic writings, as well as--though the
amount of this is very uncertain--part of the codification of the Law.
2. If the Exile was opportunity to the scribes, it can only have
been despair to the priests. In this foreign land the nation was
unclean; none of the old sacrifice or ritual was valid, and the
people were reduced to the simplest elements of religion--prayer,
fasting and the reading of religious books. We shall find our
prophecy noting the clamour of the exiles to God for _ordinances
of righteousness_--that is, for the institution of legal and valid
rites.[31] But the great lesson, which prophecy brings to the people
of the Exile, is that pardon and restoration to God's favour are
won only by waiting upon Him with all the heart. It was possible,
of course, to observe some forms; to gather at intervals to inquire
of the Lord, to keep the Sabbath, and to keep fasts. The first
of these practices, out of which the synagogue probably took its
rise, is noted by our prophet,[32] and he enforces Sabbath-keeping
with words, that add the blessing of prophecy to the law's ancient
sanction of that institution. Four annual fasts were instituted in
memory of the dark days of Jerusalem--the day of the beginning of
Nebuchadrezzar's siege in the tenth month, the day of the capture in
the fourth month, the day of the destruction in the fifth month, and
the day of Gedaliah's murder in the tenth month. It might have been
thought, that solemn anniversaries of a disaster so recent and still
unrepaired would be kept with sincerity; but our prophet illustrates
how soon even the most outraged feelings may grow formal, and how on
their days of special humiliation, while their captivity was still
real, the exiles could oppress their own bondsmen and debtors. But
there is no religious practice of this epoch more apparent through
our prophecies than the reading of Scripture. Israel's hope was
neither in sacrifice, nor in temple, nor in vision nor in lot, but
in God's written Word; and when a new prophet arose like the one
we are about to study, he did not appeal for his authorisation, as
previous prophets had done, to the fact of his call or inspiration,
but it was enough for him to point to some former word of God, and
cry, "See! at last the day has dawned for the fulfilment of that."
Throughout Second Isaiah this is what the anonymous prophet cares to
establish--that the facts of to-day fit the promise of yesterday. We
shall not understand our great prophecy unless we realise a people
rising from fifty years' close study of Scripture, in strained
expectation of its immediate fulfilment.
3. The third special feature of the people in exile is their
application to commerce. At home the Jews had not been a commercial
people.[33] But the opportunities of their Babylonian residence seem
to have started them upon those habits, for which, through their
longer exile in our era, the name of Jew has become a synonym. If
that be so, Jeremiah's advice _to build and plant_[34] is historic,
for it means no less than that the Jews should throw themselves into
the life of the most trafficking nation of the time. Their increasing
wealth proves how they followed this advice,--as well as perhaps such
passages as Isa. lv. 2, in which the commercial spirit is reproached
for overwhelming the nobler desires of religion. The chief danger,
incurred by the Jews from an intimate connection with the commerce
of Babylonia, lay in the close relations of Babylonian commerce with
Babylonian idolatry. The merchants of Mesopotamia had their own
patron gods. In completing business contracts, a man had to swear
by the idols,[35] and might have to enter their temples. In Isa.
lxv. 11, Jews are blamed _for forsaking Jehovah, and forgetting My
holy mountain; preparing a table for Luck, and filling up mixed wine
to Fortune_. Here it is more probable that mercantile speculation,
rather than any other form of gambling, is intended.
III.
But while all this is certain and needing to be noted about the
habits of the mass of the people, what little trace it has left
in the best literature of the period! We have already noticed in
that the great absence of local colour. The truth is that what we
have been trying to describe as Jewish life in Babylon was only
a surface over deeps in which the true life of the nation was at
work--was volcanically at work. Throughout the Exile the true Jew
lived inwardly. _Out of the depths do I cry to Thee, O Lord._ He was
the inhabitant not so much of a foreign prison as of his own broken
heart. _He sat by the rivers of Babylon_; but _he thought upon Zion_.
Is it not a proof of what depths in human nature were being stirred,
that so little comes to the surface to tell us of the external
conditions of those days? There are no fossils in the strata of the
earth, which have been cast forth from her inner fires; and if we
find few traces of contemporary life in these deposits of Israel's
history now before us, it is because they date from an age in which
the nation was shaken and boiling to its centre.
For if we take the writings of this period--the Book of Lamentations,
the Psalms of the Exile, and parts of other books--and put them
together, the result is the impression of one of the strangest
decompositions of human nature into its elements which the world has
ever seen. Suffering and sin, recollection, remorse and revenge,
fear and shame and hate--over the confusion of these the Spirit of
God broods as over a second chaos, and draws each of them forth in
turn upon some articulate prayer. Now it is the crimson flush of
shame: _our soul is exceedingly filled with contempt_. Now it is the
black rush of hate; for if we would see how hate can rage, we must
go to the Psalms of the Exile, which call on the God of vengeance
and curse the enemy and dash the little ones against the stones. But
the deepest surge of all in that whirlpool of misery was the surge
of sin. To change the figure, we see Israel's spirit writhing upward
from some pain it but partly understands, crying out, "What is this
that keeps God from hearing and saving me?" turning like a wounded
beast from the face of its master to its sore again, understanding
as no brute could the reason of its plague, till confession after
confession breaks away and the penalty is accepted, and acknowledged
guilt seems almost to act as an anodyne to the penalty it explains.
_Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment
of his sins? If thou, Jehovah, shouldest mark iniquity, who shall
stand?_ No wonder, that with such a conscience the Jews occupied
the Exile in writing the moral of their delinquent history, or that
the rest of their literature which dates from that time should have
remained ever since the world's confessional.
But in this awful experience, there is still another strain, as
painful as the rest, but pure and very eloquent of hope--the sense
of innocent suffering. We cannot tell the sources, from which this
considerable feeling may have gathered during the Exile, any more
than we can trace from how many of the upper folds of a valley the
tiny rivulets start, which form the stream that issues from its
lower end. One of these sources may have been, as we have already
suggested, the experience of Jeremiah; another very probably sprang
with every individual conscience in the new generation. Children
come even to exiles, and although they bear the same pain with
the same nerves as their fathers, they do so with a different
conscience. The writings of the time dwell much on the sufferings
of the children. The consciousness is apparent in them, that souls
are born into the wrath of God, as well as banished there. _Our
fathers have sinned and are not, and we bear their iniquities._ This
experience developed with great force, till Israel felt that she
suffered not under God's wrath, but for His sake; and so passed from
the conscience of the felon to that of the martyr. But if we are to
understand the prophecy we are about to study, we must remember how
near akin these two consciences must have been in exiled Israel,
and how easy it was for a prophet to speak--as our prophet does,
sometimes with confusing rapidity of exchange--now in the voice of
the older and more guilty generation, and now in the voice of the
younger and less deservedly punished.
* * * * *
Our survey of the external as well as the internal conditions of Israel
in Exile is now finished. It has, I think, included every known feature
of their experience in Babylonia, which could possibly illustrate our
prophecy--dated, as we have felt ourselves compelled to date this, from
the close of the Exile. Thus, as we have striven to trace, did Israel
suffer, learn, grow and hope for fifty years--under Nebuchadrezzar till
561, under his successor Evil-merodach till 559, under Neriglassar till
554, and then under the usurper Nabunahid. The last named probably
oppressed the Jews more grievously than their previous tyrants, but
with the aggravation of their yoke there grew evident, at the same
time, the certainty of their deliverance. In 549, Cyrus overthrew the
Medes, and became lord of Asia from the Indus to the Halys. From that
event his conquest of Babylonia, however much delayed, could only be a
matter of time.
It is at this juncture that our prophecy breaks in. Taking for
granted Cyrus' sovereignty of the Medes, it still looks forward to
his capture of Babylon. Let us, before advancing to its exposition,
once more cast a rapid glance over the people, to whom it is
addressed, and whom in their half century of waiting for it we have
been endeavouring to describe.
_First_ and most manifest, they are a People with a Conscience--a
people with the most awful and most articulate conscience that ever
before or since exposed a nation's history or tormented a generation
with the curse of their own sin and the sin of their fathers. Behind
them, ages of delinquent life, from the perusal of the record of
which, with its regularly recurring moral, they have just risen:
the Books of Kings appear to have been finished after the accession
of Evil-merodach in 561. Behind them also nearly fifty years of
sore punishment for their sins--punishment, which, as their Psalms
confess, they at last understand and accept as deserved.
But, _secondly_, they are a People with a Great Hope. With their
awful consciousness of guilt, they have the assurance that their
punishment has its limits; that, to quote ch. xl., ver. 2, it is a
_set period of service_: a former word of God having fixed it at not
more than seventy years, and having promised the return of the nation
thereafter to their own land.
And, _thirdly_, they are a People with a Great Opportunity. History
is at last beginning to set towards the vindication of their hope:
Cyrus, the master of the age, is moving rapidly, irresistibly, down
upon their tyrants.
But, _fourthly_, in face of all their hope and opportunity, they are
a People Disorganised, Distracted, and very Impotent--_worms and not
men_, as they describe themselves. The generation of the tried and
responsible leaders of the days of their independence are all dead,
for _flesh is like grass_; no public institutions remain in their
midst such as ever in the most hopeless periods of the past proved a
rallying-point of their scattered forces. There is no king, temple,
nor city; nor is there any great personality visible to draw their
little groups together, marshal them, and lead them forth behind
him. Their one hope is in the Word of God, for which they _wait more
than they that watch for the morning_; and the one duty of their
nameless prophets is to persuade them, that this Word has at last
come to pass, and, in the absence of king, Messiah, priest, and great
prophet, is able to lift them to the opportunity that God's hand has
opened before them, and to the accomplishment of their redemption.
Upon Israel, with such a Conscience, such a Hope, such an
Opportunity, and such an unaided Reliance on God's bare Word, that
Word at last broke in a chorus of voices.
Of these the first, as was most meet, spoke pardon to the people's
conscience and the proclamation that their set period of warfare was
accomplished; the second announced that circumstances and the politics
of the world, hitherto adverse, would be made easy to their return; the
third bade them, in their bereavement of earthly leaders, and their
own impotence, find their eternal confidence in God's Word; while the
fourth lifted them, as with one heart and voice, to herald the certain
return of Jehovah, at the head of His people, to His own City, and His
quiet, shepherdly rule of them on their own land.
These herald voices form the prologue to our prophecy, ch. xl. 1-11,
to which we will now turn.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] If we would construct for ourselves some more definite idea
of that long march from Judah to Babylon, we might assist our
imagination by the details of the only other instance on so great a
scale of "exile by administrative process"--the transportation to
Siberia which the Russian Government effects (it is said, on good
authority) to the extent of eighteen thousand persons a year. Every
week throughout the year marching parties, three to four hundred
strong, leave Tomsk for Irkutsk, doing twelve to twenty miles daily
in fetters, with twenty-four hours' rest every third day, or three
hundred and thirty miles in a month (_Century Magazine_, Nov. 1888).
[24] For the above details, see Rawlinson's _Five Great Monarchies of
the Ancient Eastern World_, vol. i.
[25] _Herodotus_, Bk. I.; "Memoirs by Commander James Felix Jones, I.
N.," in _Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government_, No.
XLIII., New Series, 1857; Ainsworth's _Euphrates Valley Expedition_;
Layard's _Nineveh_.
[26] Perrot and Chipiez, _Histoire de l'Art d'Antiquité_, vol. ii.;
Assyrie p. 9.
[27] The Book of Daniel.
[28] Isa. xlii. 22, xlvii. 6.
[29] _Records of the Past_, second series, vol. i., M. Oppert's
Translations.
[30] Mr. St. Chad Boscawen's recent lectures, of which I have been
able to see only the reports in the _Manchester Guardian_.
[31] Ch. lviii. 2.
[32] Ch. lviii. 13, 14.
[33] See vol. i., p. 292 ff.
[34] Jer. xxix.
[35] _Records of the Past_, first series, ix., 95 _seq._
BOOK II.
_THE LORD'S DELIVERANCE._
CHAPTER V.
_THE PROLOGUE: THE FOUR HERALD VOICES._
ISAIAH xl. 1-11.
It is only Voices which we hear in this Prologue. No forms can be
discerned, whether of men or angels, and it is even difficult to
make out the direction from which the Voices come. Only one thing is
certain--that they break the night, that they proclaim the end of a
long but fixed period, during which God has punished and forsaken
His people. At first, the persons addressed are the prophets, that
they may speak to the people (vv. 1, 2); but afterwards Jerusalem
as a whole is summoned to publish the good tidings (ver. 9). This
interchange between a part of the people and the whole--this
commission to prophesy, made with one breath to some of the nation
for the sake of the rest, and with the next breath to the entire
nation--is a habit of our prophet to which we shall soon get
accustomed. How natural and characteristic it is, is proved by its
appearance in these very first verses.
The beginning of the good tidings is Israel's pardon; yet it seems
not to be the people's return to Palestine which is announced in
consequence of this, so much as their God's return to them. _Prepare
ye the way of Jehovah, make straight a highway for our God. Behold the
Lord Jehovah will come._ We may, however, take _the way of Jehovah in
the wilderness_ to mean what it means in the sixty-eighth Psalm,--His
going forth before His people and leading of them back; while the
promise that He will come to _shepherd His flock_ (ver. 11) is, of
course, the promise that He will resume the government of Israel upon
their own land. There can be no doubt, therefore, that this chapter
was meant for the people at the close of their captivity in Babylon.
But do not let us miss the pathetic fact, that Israel is addressed not
in her actual shape of a captive people in a foreign land, but under
the name and aspect of her far-away, desolate country. In these verses
Israel is _Jerusalem_, _Zion_, _the cities of Judah_. Such designations
do not prove, as a few critics have rather pedantically supposed, that
the writer of the verses lived in Judah and addressed himself to what
was under his eyes. It is not the vision of a Jew at home that has
determined the choice of these names, but the desire and the dream of
a Jew abroad: that extraordinary passion, which, however distant might
be the land of his exile, ever filled the Jew's eyes with Zion, caused
him to feel the ruin and forsakenness of his Mother more than his own
servitude, and swept his patriotic hopes, across his own deliverance
and return, to the greater glory of her restoration.[36] There is
nothing, therefore, to prevent us taking for granted, as we did in the
previous chapter, that the speaker or speakers of these verses stood
among the exiles themselves; but who they were--men or angels, prophets
or scribes--is lost in the darkness out of which their music breaks.[37]
Nevertheless the prophecy is not anonymous. By these impersonal
voices a personal revelation is made. The prophets may be nameless,
but the Deity who speaks through them speaks as already known and
acknowledged: _My people, saith your God._
This is a point, which, though it takes for its expression no more
than these two little pronouns, we must not hurriedly pass over.
All the prophecy we are about to study may be said to hang from
these pronouns. They are the hinges, on which the door of this new
temple of revelation swings open before the long-expectant people.
And, in fact, such a conscience and sympathy as these little words
express form the necessary premise of all revelation. Revelation
implies a previous knowledge of God, and cannot work upon men, except
there already exist in them the sense that they and God somehow
belong to each other. This sense need be neither pure, nor strong,
nor articulate. It may be the most selfish and cowardly of guilty
fears,--Jacob's dread as he drew near Esau, whom he had treacherously
supplanted,--the vaguest of ignorant desires, the Athenians' worship
of the Unknown God. But, whatever it is, the angel comes to wrestle
with it, the apostle is sent to declare it; revelation in some form
takes it as its premise and starting-point. This previous sense of
God may also be fuller than in the cases just cited. Take our Lord's
own illustration. Upon the prodigal in the strange country there
surged again the far-ebbed memory of his home and childhood, of
his years of familiarity with a Father; and it was this tide which
carried back his penitent heart within the hearing of his Father's
voice, and the revelation of the love that became his new life. Now
Israel, also in a far-off land, were borne upon the recollection of
home and of life in the favour of their God. We have seen with what
knowledge of Him and from what relations with Him they were banished.
To the men of the Exile God was already a Name and an Experience, and
because that Name was _The Righteous_, and that Experience was all
grace and promise, these men waited for His Word more than they that
wait for the morning; and when at length the Word broke from the long
darkness and silence, they received it, though its bearers might be
unseen and unaccredited, because they recognised and acknowledged in
it Himself. He who spoke was _their God_, and they were _His people_.
This conscience and sympathy was all the title or credential which
the revelation required. It is, therefore, not too much to say, as
we have said, that the two pronouns in ch. xl., ver. 1, are the
necessary premise of the whole prophecy which that verse introduces.
* * * * *
With this introduction we may now take up the four herald voices of
the Prologue. Whatever may have been their original relation to one
another, whether or not they came to Israel by different messengers,
they are arranged (as we saw at the close of the previous chapter) in
manifest order and progress of thought, and they meet in due succession
the experiences of Israel at the close of the Exile. For the first
of them (vv. 1 and 2) gives the _subjective assurance_ of the coming
redemption: it is the Voice of Grace. The second (vv. 3-5) proclaims
the _objective reality_ of that redemption: it may be called the
Voice of Providence, or--to use the name by which our prophecy loves
to entitle the just and victorious providence of God--the Voice of
Righteousness. The third (vv. 6-8) uncovers the pledge and earnest
of the redemption: in the weakness of men this shall be the Word of
God. While the fourth (vv. 9-11) is the Proclamation of Jehovah's
restored kingdom, when He cometh as a shepherd to shepherd His people.
To this progress and climax the music of the passage forms a perfect
accompaniment. It would be difficult to find in any language lips that
first more softly woo the heart, and then take to themselves so brave
a trumpet of challenge and assurance. The opening is upon a few short
pulses of music, which steal from heaven as gently as the first ripples
of light in a cloudless dawn--
Năhămu, năhămu ammi:
_Comfort ye, comfort ye my people_:
Dabbĕru `al-lev Yerushālaîm.
_Speak upon the heart of Jerusalem._[38]
But then the trumpet-tone breaks forth, _Call unto her_; and on that
high key the music stays, sweeping with the second voice across hill
and dale like a company of swift horsemen, stooping with the third
for a while to the elegy upon the withered grass, but then recovering
itself, braced by all the strength of the Word of God, to peal from
tower to tower with the fourth, upon the cry, _Behold, the Lord
cometh_, till it sinks almost from sound to sight, and yields us,
as from the surface of still waters, that sweet reflection of the
twenty-third Psalm with which the Prologue concludes.
1. _Comfort ye, comfort ye My people, saith your God.
Speak ye home to the heart of Jerusalem, and call unto her,_
_That accomplished is her warfare, that absolved is her iniquity;
That she hath received of Jehovah's hand double for all her sins._
This first voice, with the music of which our hearts have been
thrilled ever since we can remember, speaks twice: first in a
whisper, then in a call--the whisper of the Lover and the call of the
Lord. _Speak ye home to the heart of Jerusalem, and call unto her._
Now Jerusalem lay in ruins, a city through whose breached walls all
the winds of heaven blew mournfully across her forsaken floors. And
the _heart of Jerusalem_, which was with her people in exile, was
like the city--broken and defenceless. In that far-off, unsympathetic
land it lay open to the alien; tyrants forced their idols upon it,
the peoples tortured it with their jests.
_For they that led us captive required of us songs,_
_And they that wasted us required of us mirth._
But observe how gently the Divine Beleaguerer approaches, how softly
He bids His heralds plead by the gaps, through which the oppressor
has forced his idols and his insults. Of all human language they
might use, God bids His messengers take and plead with the words
with which a man will plead at a maiden's heart, knowing that he
has nothing but love to offer as right of entrance, and waiting
until love and trust come out to welcome him. _Speak ye_, says the
original literally, _on to_, or _up against_, or _up round the heart
of Jerusalem_,--a forcible expression, like the German "An das Herz,"
or the sweet Scottish, "It cam' up roond my heart," and perhaps best
rendered into English by the phrase, _Speak home to the heart_.
It is the ordinary Hebrew expression for wooing. As from man to
woman when he wins her, the Old Testament uses it several times. To
_speak home to the heart_ is to use language in which authority and
argument are both ignored, and love works her own inspiration. While
the haughty Babylonian planted by force his idols, while the folly
and temptations of heathendom surged recklessly in, God Himself, the
Creator of this broken heart, its Husband and Inhabitant of old,[39]
stood lowly by its breaches, pleading in love the right to enter. But
when entrance has been granted, see how He bids His heralds change
their voice and disposition. The suppliant lover, being received,
assumes possession and defence, and they, who were first bid whisper
as beggars by each unguarded breach, now leap upon the walls to
call from the accepted Lord of the city: _Fulfilled is thy time of
service, absolved thine iniquity, received hast thou of Jehovah's
hand double for all thy sins._
Now this is no mere rhetorical figure. This is the abiding attitude
and aim of the Almighty towards men. God's target is our heart. His
revelation, whatever of law or threat it send before, is, in its own
superlative clearness and urgency, Grace. It comes to man by way of
the heart; not at first by argument addressed to the intellect, nor by
appeal to experience, but by the sheer strength of a love laid _on to
the heart_. It is, to begin with, a subjective thing. Is revelation,
then, entirely a subjective assurance? Do the pardon and peace which
it proclaims remain only feelings of the heart, without anything to
correspond to them in real fact? By no means; for these Jews the
revelation now whispered to their heart will actually take shape in
providences of the most concrete kind. A voice will immediately call,
_Prepare ye the way of the Lord_, and the way will be prepared. Babylon
will fall; Cyrus will let Israel go; their release will appear--most
concrete of things!--in "black and white" on a Persian state-parchment.
Yet, before these events happen and become part of His people's
experience, God desires first to convince His people by the sheer
urgency of His love. Before He displays His Providence, He will speak
in the power and evidence of His Grace. Afterwards, His prophets shall
appeal to outward facts; we shall find them in succeeding chapters
arguing both with Israel and the heathen on grounds of reason and the
facts of history. But, in the meantime, let them only feel that in His
Grace they have something for the heart of men, which, striking home,
shall be its own evidence and force.
Thus God adventures His Word forth by nameless and unaccredited men
upon no other authority than the Grace, with which it is fraught for
the heart of His people. The illustration, which this affords of
the method and evidence of Divine revelation, is obvious. Let us,
with all the strength of which we are capable, emphasize the fact
that our prophecy--which is full of the materials for an elaborate
theology, which contains the most detailed apologetic in the whole
Bible, and displays the most glorious prospect of man's service and
destiny--takes its source and origin from a simple revelation of
Grace and the subjective assurance of this in the heart of those to
whom it is addressed. This proclamation of Grace is as characteristic
and dominant in Second Isaiah, as we saw the proclamation of
conscience in ch. i. to be characteristic of the First Isaiah.
Before we pass on, let us look for a moment at the contents of this
Grace, in the three clauses of the prophet's cry: _Fulfilled is her
warfare, absolved her guilt, received hath she of Jehovah's hand
double for all her sins._ The very grammar here is eloquent of grace.
The emphasis lies on the three predicates, which ought to stand in
translation, as they do in the original, at the beginning of each
clause. Prominence is given, not to the warfare, nor to the guilt,
nor to the sins, but to this, that _accomplished_ is the warfare,
_absolved_ the guilt, _sufficiently expiated_ the sins. It is a great
AT LAST which these clauses peal forth; but an At Last whose tone is
not so much inevitableness as undeserved grace. The term translated
warfare means _period of military service_, _appointed term of
conscription_; and the application is apparent when we remember that
the Exile had been fixed, by the Word of God through Jeremiah, to a
definite number of years. _Absolved_ is the passive of a verb meaning
to _pay off what is due_.[40] But the third clause is especially
gracious. It declares that Israel has suffered of punishment more
than double enough to atone for her sins. This is not a way of
regarding either sin or atonement, which, theologically speaking, is
accurate. What of its relation to our Articles, that man cannot give
satisfaction for his sins by the work of his hands or the pains of
his flesh? No: it would scarcely pass some of our creeds to-day. But
all the more, that it thus bursts forth from strict terms of dealing,
does it reveal the generosity of Him who utters it. How full of
pity God is, to take so much account of the sufferings sinners have
brought upon themselves! How full of grace to reckon those sufferings
_double the sins_ that had earned them! It is, as when we have seen
gracious men make us a free gift, and in their courtesy insist that
we have worked for it. It is grace masked by grace. As the height of
art is to conceal art, so the height of grace is to conceal grace,
which it does in this verse.
Such is the Voice of Grace. But,
2. _Hark, One calling!
In the wilderness prepare the way of Jehovah!
Make straight in the desert an highway for our God!
Every valley shall be exalted,
And every mountain and hill be made low:
And the crooked grow straight,
And rough places a plain:
And the glory of Jehovah be revealed,
And see it shall all flesh together;
For the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken._
The relation of this Voice to the previous one has already been
indicated. This is the witness of Providence following upon the
witness of Grace. Religion is a matter in the first place between
God and the heart; but religion does not, as many mock, remain an
inward feeling. The secret relation between God and His people issues
into substantial fact, visible to all men. History vindicates faith;
Providence executes Promise; Righteousness follows Grace. So, as
the first Voice was spoken _to the heart_, this second is for the
hands and feet and active will. _Prepare ye the way of the Lord._ If
you, poor captives as you are, begin to act upon the grace whispered
in your trembling hearts, the world will show the result. All
things will come round to your side. A levelled empire, an altered
world--across those your way shall lie clear to Jerusalem. You shall
go forth in the sight of all men, and future generations looking back
shall praise this manifest wonder of your God. _The glory of Jehovah
shall be revealed, and see it shall all flesh together._
On which word, how can our hearts help rising from the comfort of
grace to the sense of mastery over this world, to the assurance of
heaven itself? History must come round to the side of faith--as it
has come round not in the case of Jewish exiles only, but wheresoever
such a faith as theirs has been repeated. History must come round
to the side of faith, if men will only obey the second as well as
the first of these herald voices. But we are too ready to listen to
the Word of the Lord, without seeking to prepare His way. We are
satisfied with the personal comfort of our God; we are contented to
be forgiven and--oh mockery!--left alone. But the word of God will
not leave us alone, and not for comfort only is it spoken. On the
back of the voice, which sets our heart right with God, comes the
voice to set the world right, and no man is godly who has not heard
both. Are we timid and afraid that facts will not correspond to
our faith? Nay, but as God reigneth they shall, if only we put to
our hands and make them; _all flesh shall see it_, if we will but
_prepare the way of the Lord_.
Have we only ancient proofs of this? On the contrary, God has done like
wonders within the lives of those of us who are yet young. During our
generation, a people has appealed from the convictions of her heart to
the arbitrament of history, and appealed not in vain. When the citizens
of the Northern States of the American Republic, not content as they
might have been with their protests against slavery, rose to vindicate
these by the sword, they faced, humanly speaking, a risk as great
as that to which Jew was ever called by the word of God. Their own
brethren were against them; the world stood aloof. But even so, unaided
by united patriotism and as much dismayed as encouraged by the opinions
of civilisation, they rose to the issue on the strength of conscience
and their hearts. They rose and they conquered. Slavery was abolished.
What had been but the conviction of a few men, became the surprise, the
admiration, the consent of the whole world. _The glory of the Lord was
revealed, and all flesh saw it together._
3. But the shadow of death falls on everything, even on the way of the
Lord. By 550 B.C.--that is, after thirty-eight years of exile--nearly
all the strong men of Israel's days of independence must have been
taken away. Death had been busy with the exiles for more than a
generation. There was no longer any human representative of Jehovah
to rally the people's trust; the monarchy, each possible Messiah who
in turn held it, the priesthood, and the prophethood--whose great
personalities so often took the place of Israel's official leaders--had
all alike disappeared. It was little wonder, then, that a nation
accustomed to be led, not by ideas like us Westerns, but by personages,
who were to it the embodiment of Jehovah's will and guidance, should
have been cast into despair by the call, _Prepare ye the way of the
Lord_. What sort of a call was this for a people, whose strong men were
like things uprooted and withered! How could one be, with any heart, a
herald of the Lord to such a people!
_Hark one saying "Call."_[41]
_And I said:_
"_What can I call?_
_All flesh is grass,_
_And all its beauty like a wild-flower!_
_Withers grass, fades flower,_
_When the breath of Jehovah blows on it._
_Surely grass is the people._"
Back comes a voice like the east wind's for pitilessness to the
flowers, but of the east wind's own strength and clearness, to
proclaim Israel's everlasting hope.
_Withers grass, fades flower,_
_But the word of our God endureth for ever._
Everything human may perish; the day may be past of the great
prophets, of the priests--of the King in his beauty, who was
vicegerent of God. But the people have God's word; when all their
leaders have fallen, and every visible authority for God is taken
away, this shall be their rally and their confidence.
All this is too like the actual experience of Israel in Exile not
to be the true interpretation of this third, stern Voice. Their
political and religious institutions, which had so often proved the
initiative of a new movement, or served as a bridge to carry the
nation across disaster to a larger future, were not in existence. Nor
does any Moses, as in Egypt of old, rise to visibleness from among
his obscure people, impose his authority upon them, marshal them, and
lead them out behind him to freedom. But what we see is a scattered
and a leaderless people, stirred in their shadow, as a ripe cornfield
is stirred by the breeze before dawn--stirred in their shadow by the
ancient promises of God, and everywhere breaking out at the touch
of these into psalms and prophecies of hope. We see them expectant
of redemption, we see them resolved to return, we see them carried
across the desert to Zion, and from first to last it is the word of
God that is their inspiration and assurance.
They, who formerly had rallied round the Ark or the Temple, or who had
risen to the hope of a glorious Messiah, do not now speak of all these,
but their _hope_, they tell us, _is in His word_; it is the instrument
of their salvation, and their destiny is to be its evangelists.
4. To this high destiny the fourth Voice now summons them, by a vivid
figure.
_Up on a high mountain, get thee up,_
_Heraldess of good news, O Zion!_
_Lift up with strength thy voice,_
_Heraldess of good news, Jerusalem!_
_Lift up, fear not, say to the cities of Judah:--_
_Behold, your God._
_Behold, my Lord Jehovah, with power He cometh,_
_And His arm rules for Him._
_Behold, His reward with Him,_
_And His recompense before Him._
_As a shepherd His flock He shepherds;_
_With His right arm gathers the lambs,_
_And in His bosom bears them._
_Ewe-mothers He tenderly leads._
The title which I have somewhat awkwardly translated _heraldess_--but
in English there is really no better word for it--is the feminine
participle of a verb meaning to _thrill_, or _give joy, by means of
good news_. It is used generally to tell such happy news as the birth
of a child, but mostly in the special sense of carrying tidings of
victory or peace home from the field to the people. The feminine
participle would seem from Psalm lxviii., _the women who publish
victory to the great host_, to have been the usual term for the
members of those female choirs, who, like Miriam and her maidens,
celebrated a triumph in face of the army, or came forth from the city
to hail the returning conqueror, as the daughters of Jerusalem hailed
Saul and David. As such a chorister, Zion is now summoned to proclaim
Jehovah's arrival at the gates of the cities of Judah.
The verses from _Behold, your God_, to the end of the Prologue
are the song of the heraldess. Do not their mingled martial and
pastoral strains exactly suit the case of the Return? For this is
an expedition, on which the nation's champion has gone forth, not
to lead His enemies captive to His gates, but that He may gather
His people home. Not mailed men, in the pride of a victory they
have helped to win, march in behind Him,--_armour and tumult and
the garment rolled in blood_,--but a herd of mixed and feeble folk,
with babes and women, in need of carriage and gentle leading,
wander wearily back. And, therefore, in the mouth of the heraldess
the figure changes from a warrior-king to the Good Shepherd. _With
His right arm He gathers the lambs, and in His bosom bears them.
Ewe-mothers He gently leads._ How true a picture, and how much it
recalls! Fifty years before, the exiles left their home (as we
can see to this day upon Assyrian sculptures) in closely-driven
companies, fettered, and with the urgency upon them of grim soldiers,
who marched at intervals in their ranks to keep up the pace, and who
tossed the weaklings impatiently aside. But now, see the slow and
loosely-gathered bands wander back, just as quickly as the weakest
feel strength to travel, and without any force or any guidance save
that of their Almighty, Unseen Shepherd.
We are now able to appreciate the dramatic unity of this Prologue.
How perfectly it gathers into its four Voices the whole course of
Israel's redemption: the first assurance of Grace whispered to the
heart, co-operation with Providence, confidence in God's bare Word,
the full Return and the Restoration of the City.
But its climax is undoubtedly the honour it lays upon the whole
people to be publishers of the good news of God. Of this it speaks
with trumpet tones. All Jerusalem must be a herald-people. And how
could Israel help owning the constraint and inspiration to so high
an office, after so heartfelt an experience of grace, so evident a
redemption, so glorious a proof of the power of the Word of God? To
have the heart thus filled with grace, to have the will enlisted in
so Divine a work, to have known the almightiness of the Divine Word
when everything else failed--after such an experience, who would not
be able to preach the good news of God, to foretell, as our prophet
bids Israel foretell, the coming of the Kingdom and Presence of
God--the day when the Lord's flock shall be perfect and none wanting,
when society, though still weary and weak and mortal, shall have no
stragglers nor outcasts nor reprobates.
O God, so fill us with Thy grace and enlist us in Thy work, so manifest
the might of Thy word to us, that the ideal of Thy perfect kingdom may
shine as bright and near to us as to Thy prophet of old, and that we
may become its inspired preachers and ever labour in its hope. Amen.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] See p. 47.
[37] From the sequence of the voices, it would seem that we had in
ch. xl. not a mere collection of anonymous prophecies arranged by
an editor, but one complete prophecy by the author of most of Isa.
xl.-lxvi., set in the dramatic form which obtains through the other
chapters.
[38] Every one who appreciates the music of the original will agree
how incomparably Handel has interpreted it in those pulses of music
with which his _Messiah_ opens.
[39] See ch. liv., where this figure is developed with great beauty.
[40] Lev. xxvii.
[41] The technical word to preach or proclaim.
CHAPTER VI.
_GOD: A SACRAMENT._
ISAIAH xl. 12-31.
Such are the Four Voices which herald the day of Israel's redemption.
They are scarcely silent, before the Sun Himself uprises, and horizon
after horizon of His empire is displayed to the eyes of His starved
and waiting people. From the prologue of the prophecy, in ch. xl.
1-11, we advance to the presentation, in chs. xl. 12-xli., of its
primary and governing truth--the sovereignty and omnipotence of God,
the God of Israel.
We may well call this truth the sun of the new day which Israel is
about to enter. For as it is the sun which makes the day, and not the
day which reveals the sun; so it is God, supreme and almighty, who
interprets, predicts and controls His people's history, and not their
history, which, in its gradual evolution, is to make God's sovereignty
and omnipotence manifest to their experience. Let us clearly understand
this. The prophecy, which we are about to follow, is an argument not
so much from history to God as from God to history. Israel already
have their God; and it is because He is what He is, and what they
ought to know Him to be,[42] that they are bidden believe that their
future shall take a certain course. The prophet begins with God,
and everything follows from God. All that in these chapters lends
light or force, all that interprets the history of to-day and fills
to-morrow with hope, fact and promise alike, the captivity of Israel,
the appearance of Cyrus, the fall of Babylon, Israel's redemption, the
extension of their mission to the ends of the earth, the conversion
of the Gentiles, the equipment, discipline and triumph of the Servant
Himself,--we may even say the expanded geography of our prophet, the
countries which for the first time emerge from the distant west within
the vision of a Hebrew seer,--all are due to that primary truth about
God with which we are now presented. It is God's sovereignty which
brings such far-off things into the interest of Israel; it is God's
omnipotence which renders such impossible things practical. And as
with the subjects, so with the style of the following chapters. The
prophet's style is throughout the effect of his perfect and brilliant
monotheism. It is the thought of God which everywhere kindles his
imagination. His most splendid passages are those, in which he soars
to some lofty vision of the Divine glory in creation or history; while
his frequent sarcasm and ridicule owe their effectiveness to the sudden
scorn, with which, from such a view, scattering epigrams the while,
he sweeps down upon the heathen's poor images, or Israel's grudging
thoughts of his God. The breadth and the force of his imagination, the
sweep of his rhetoric, the intensity of his scorn, may all be traced
to his sense of God's sovereignty, and are the signs to us of how
absolutely he was possessed by this as his main and governing truth.
This, then, being the sun of Israel's coming day, we may call what
we find in ch. xl. 11-xli. the sunrise--the full revelation and
uprising on our sight of this original gospel of the prophet. It is
addressed to two classes of men; in ch. xl. 12-31 to Israel, but
in ch. xli. (for the greater part, at least) to the Gentiles. In
dealing with these two classes the prophet makes a great difference.
To Israel he presents their God, as it were, in sacrament; but to
the Gentiles he urges God's claims in challenge and argument. It is
to the past that he summons Israel, and to what they ought to know
already about their God; it is to the future, to history yet unmade,
that he proposes to the Gentiles they should together appeal, in
order to see whether his God or their gods are the true Deity. In
this chapter we shall deal with the first of these--God in sacrament.
* * * * *
The fact is familiar to all, that the Old Testament nowhere feels the
necessity of proving the existence of God. That would have been a proof
unintelligible to those to whom its prophets addressed themselves. In
the time when the Old Testament came to him, man as little doubted the
existence of God as he doubted his own life. But as life sometimes
burned low, needing replenishment, so faith would grow despondent and
morbid, needing to be led away from objects which only starved it, or
produced, as idolatry did, the veriest delirium of a religion. A man
had to get his faith lifted from the thoughts of his own mind and the
works of his own hand, to be borne upon and nourished by the works of
God,--to kindle with the sunrise, to broaden out by the sight of the
firmament, to deepen as he faced the spaces of night,--and win calmness
and strength to think life into order as he looked forth upon the
marshalled hosts of heaven, having all the time no doubt that the God
who created and guided these was his God. Therefore, when psalmist or
prophet calls Israel to lift their eyes to the hills, or to behold how
the heavens declare the glory of God, or to listen to that unbroken
tradition, which day passes to day and night to night, of the knowledge
of the Creator, it is not proofs to doubting minds which he offers: it
is spiritual nourishment to hungry souls. These are not arguments--they
are sacraments. When we Christians go to the Lord's Supper, we go not
to have the Lord proved to us, but to feed upon a life and a love
of whose existence we are past all doubt. Our sacrament fills all
the mouths by which needy faith is fed--such as outward sight, and
imagination, and memory, and wonder, and love. Now very much what the
Lord's Supper is to us for fellowship with God and feeding upon Him,
that were the glory of the heavens, and the everlasting hills, and the
depth of the sea, and the vision of the stars to the Hebrews. They were
the sacraments of God. By them faith was fed, and the spirit of man
entered into the enjoyment of God, whose existence indeed he had never
doubted, but whom he had lost, forgotten, or misunderstood.
Now it is as such a minister of sacrament to God's starved and
disheartened people that our prophet appears in ch. xl. 12-31.
There were three elements in Israel's starvation. Firstly, for nearly
fifty years they had been deprived of the accustomed ordinances
of religion. Temple and altar had perished; the common praise and
the national religious fellowship were impossible; the traditional
symbols of the faith lay far out of sight; there was at best only
a precarious ministry of the Word. But, in the second place, this
famine of the Word and of Sacraments was aggravated by the fact that
history had gone against the people. To the baser minds among them,
always ready to grant their allegiance to success, this could only
mean that the gods of the heathen had triumphed over Jehovah. It is
little wonder that such experience, assisted by the presentation,
at every turn in their ways, of idols and a splendid idol-worship,
the fashion and delight of the populations through whom they were
mixed, should have tempted many Jews to feed their starved hearts at
the shrines of their conquerors' gods. But the result could only be
the further atrophy of their religious nature. It has been held as a
reason for the worship of idols that they excite the affection and
imagination of the worshipper. They do no such thing: they starve
and they stunt these. The image reacts upon the imagination, infects
it with its own narrowness and poverty, till man's noblest creative
faculty becomes the slave of its own poor toy. But, thirdly, if the
loftier spirits in Israel refused to believe that Jehovah, exalted
in righteousness, could be less than the brutal deities whom Babylon
vaunted over Him, they were flung back upon the sorrowful conviction
that their God had cast them off; that He had retreated from the
patronage of so unworthy a people into the veiled depths of His own
nature. Then upon that heaven, from which no answer came to those
who were once its favourites, they cast we can scarcely tell what
reflection of their own weary and spiritless estate. As, standing
over a city by night, you will see the majestic darkness above
stained and distorted into shapes of pain or wrath by the upcast
of the city's broken, murky lights, so many of the nobler exiles
saw upon the blank, unanswering heaven a horrible mirage of their
own trouble and fear. Their weariness said, He is weary; the ruin
of their national life reflected itself as the frustration of His
purposes; their accusing conscience saw the darkness of His counsel
relieved only by streaks of wrath.
But none of these tendencies in Israel went so far as to deny that
there was a God, or even to doubt His existence. This, as we have
said, was nowhere yet the temptation of mankind. When the Jew lapsed
from that true faith, which we have seen his nation carry into
exile, he fell into one of the two tempers just described--devotion
to false gods in the shape of idols, or despondency consequent upon
false notions of the true God. It is against these tempers, one after
another, that ch. xl. 12-31 is directed. And so we understand why,
though the prophet is here declaring the basis and spring of all
his subsequent prophecy, he does not adopt the method of abstract
argument. He is not treating with men, who have had no true knowledge
of God in the past, or whose intellect questions God's reality. He
is treating with men, who have a national heritage of truth about
God, but they have forgotten it; who have hearts full of religious
affection, but it has been betrayed; who have a devout imagination,
but it has been starved; who have hopes, but they are faint unto
death. He will recall to them their heritage, rally their shrinking
convictions by the courage of his own faith, feed their hunger after
righteousness[43] by a new hope set to noble music, and display to
the imagination that has been stunted by so long looking upon the
face of idols the wide horizons of Divine glory in earth and heaven.
His style corresponds to his purpose. He does not syllogize; he
exhorts, recalls and convicts by assertion. The passage is a series
of questions, rallies and promises. _Have ye not known? have ye not
heard?_ is his chief note. Instead of arranging facts in history or
nature as in themselves a proof for God, he mentions them only by way
of provoking inward recollections. His sharp questions are as hooks
to draw from his hearers' hearts their timid and starved convictions,
that he may nourish these upon the sacramental glories of nature and
of history.
Such a purpose and style trust little to method, and it would
be useless to search for any strict division of strophes in the
passage.[44] The following, however, is a manifest division of subject,
according to the two tempers to which the prophet had to appeal. Verses
12 to 25, and perhaps 26, are addressed to the idolatrous Jews. But in
26 there is a transition to the despair of the nobler hearts in Israel,
who, though they continued to believe in the One True God, imagined
that He had abandoned them; and to such vv. 27 to 31 are undoubtedly
addressed. The different treatment accorded to the two classes is
striking. The former of these the prophet does not call by any title of
the people of God; with the latter he pleads by a dear double name that
he may win them through every recollection of their gracious past,
_Jacob_ and _Israel_ (ver. 27). Challenge and sarcasm are his style
with the idolaters, his language clashing out in bursts too loud and
rapid sometimes for the grammar, as in ver. 24; but with the despondent
his way is gentle persuasiveness, with music that swells and brightens
steadily, passing without a break from the minor key of pleading to the
major of glorious promise.
1. AGAINST THE IDOLATERS. A couple of sarcastic sentences upon
idols and their manufacture (vv. 19, 20) stand between two majestic
declarations of God's glory in nature and in history (vv. 12-17
and 21-24). It is an appeal from the worshippers' images to their
imagination. _Who hath measured in his hollow hand the waters, and
heaven ruled off with a span? Or caught in a tierce the dust of the
earth, and weighed in scales mountains, and hills in a balance?
Who hath directed the spirit of Jehovah, and as man of His counsel
hath helped Him to know? With whom took He counsel, that such an
one informed Him and taught Him in the orthodox path, and taught
Him knowledge and helped Him to know the way of intelligence?_ The
term translated _orthodox path_ is literally _path of ordinance or
judgement, the regular path_, and is doubtless to be taken along
with its parallel, _way of intelligence_, as a conventional phrase
of education, which the prophet employed to make his sarcasm the
stronger. _Lo nations! as a drop from a bucket, and like dust in
a balance, are they reckoned. Lo the Isles!_[45] _as a trifle He
lifteth. And Lebanon is by no means enough for burning, nor its
brute-life enough for an offering. All the nations are as nothing
before Him, as spent and as waste are they reckoned for Him._
When he has thus soared enough, as on an archangel's wings, he swoops
with one rapid question down from the height of his imagination upon
the images.
_To whom then will ye liken God, and what likeness will ye range by
Him?_
_The image! A smith cast it, and a smelter plates it with gold, and
smelts silver chains. He that is straitened for an offering--he
chooseth a tree that does not rot, seeks to him a cunning carver to
set up an image that will not totter._[46]
The image shrivels up in face of that imagination; the idol is
abolished by laughter. There is here, and for almost the first time
in history, the same intellectual intolerance of images, the same
burning sense of the unreasonableness of their worship, which has
marked all monotheists, and turned even the meekest of their kind
into fierce scorners and satirists--Elijah, Mohammed, Luther, and
Knox.[47] We hear this laughter from them all. Sometimes it may sound
truculent or even brutal, but let us remember what is behind it. When
we hear it condemned--as, in the interests of art and imagination,
its puritan outbursts have often been condemned--as a barbarian
incapacity to sympathise with the æsthetic instincts of man, or to
appreciate the influence of a beautiful and elevating cult, we can
reply that it was the imagination itself which often inspired both
the laughter at, and the breaking of, images, and that, because the
iconoclast had a loftier vision of God than the image-maker, he has,
on the whole, more really furthered the progress of art than the
artist whose works he has destroyed. It is certain, for instance,
that no one would exchange the beauties of the prophecy now before
us, with its sublime imaginations of God, for all the beauty of all
the idols of Babylonia which it consigned to destruction. And we dare
to say the same of two other epochs, when the uncompromising zeal of
monotheists crushed to the dust the fruits of centuries of Christian
art. The Koran is not often appealed to as a model of poetry, but
it contains passages whose imagination of God, broad as the horizon
of the desert of its birth, and swift and clear as the desert dawn,
may be regarded as infinitely more than compensation--from a purely
artistic point of view--for the countless works of Christian ritual
and imagery which it inspired the rude cavalry of the desert to
trample beneath the hoofs of their horses. And again, if we are to
blame the Reformers of Western Christendom for the cruelty with which
they lifted their hammers against the carved work of the sanctuary,
do not let us forget how much of the spirit of the best modern art
is to be traced to their more spiritual and lofty conceptions of
God. No one will question how much Milton's imagination owed to his
Protestantism, or how much Carlyle's dramatic genius was the result
of his Puritan faith. But it is to the spirit of the Reformation,
as it liberated the worshipper's soul from bondage to artificial
and ecclesiastical symbols of the Deity, that we may also ascribe
a large part of the force of that movement towards Nature and the
imagination of God in His creation which inspired, for example,
Wordsworth's poetry, and those visual sacraments of rainbow, storm,
and dawn to which Browning so often lifts our souls from their
dissatisfaction with ritual or with argument.
From his sarcasm on the idols our prophet returns to his task of
drawing forth Israel's memory and imagination. _Have ye not known?
Have ye not heard? Hath it not been told you from the beginning?
Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? He that is
enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its dwellers are before
Him as grasshoppers; who stretcheth as a fine veil the heavens, and
spreadeth them like a dwelling tent_--that is, as easily as if they
were not even a pavilion or marquee, but only a humble dwelling
tent. _He who bringeth great men to nothing, the judges of the earth
He maketh as waste. Yea, they were not planted; yea, they were not
sown; yea, their root had not struck in the earth, but_ immediately
_He blew upon them and they withered, and a whirlwind like stubble
carried them away. To whom, then, will ye liken Me, that I may match
with him? saith the Holy One._ But this time it is not necessary to
suggest the idols; they were dissolved by that previous burst of
laughter. Therefore, the prophet turns to the other class in Israel
with whom he has to deal.
2. TO THE DESPAIRERS OF THE LORD. From history we pass back to nature
in ver. 26, which forms a transition, the language growing steadier
from the impetuosity of the address to the idolaters to the serene
music of the second part. Enough rebuke has the prophet made. As he
now lifts his people's vision to the stars, it is not to shame their
idols, but to feed their hearts. _Lift up on high your eyes and see!
Who hath created these? Who leads forth by number their host, and all
of them calleth by name, by abundance of might, for He is powerful in
strength, not one is amissing._ Under such a night, that veils the
confusion of earth only to bring forth all the majesty and order of
heaven, we feel a moment's pause. Then as the expanding eyes of the
exiles gaze upon the infinite power above, the prophet goes on. _Why
then sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel? Hidden is my way
from Jehovah, and from my God my right hath passed._
Why does the prophet point his people to the stars? Because he is
among Israel on that vast Babylonian plain, from whose crowded and
confused populations, struggling upon one monotonous level, there
is no escape for the heart but to the stars. Think of that plain
when Nebuchadrezzar was its tyrant; of the countless families of
men torn from their far homes and crushed through one another upon
its surface; of the ancient liberties that were trampled in that
servitude, of the languages that were stifled in that Babel, of the
many patriotisms set to sigh themselves out into the tyrant's mud and
mortar. Ah heaven! was there a God in thee, that one man could thus
crush nations in his vat, as men crushed shell-fish in those days,
to dye his imperial purple? Was there any Providence above, that
he could tear peoples from the lands and seas, where their various
gifts and offices for humanity had been developed, and press them
to his selfish and monotonous servitude? In that medley of nations,
all upon one level of captivity, Israel was just as lost as the most
insignificant tribe; her history severed, her worship impossible,
her very language threatened with decay. No wonder, that from the
stifling crowd and desperate flatness of it all she cried, _Hidden is
my way from Jehovah, and from my God my right hath passed._
But from the flatness and the crowd the stars are visible; and it was
upon the stars that the prophet bade his people feed their hearts.
There were order and unfailing guidance; _for the greatness of His
might not one is missing_. And He is your God. Just as visible as those
countless stars are, one by one, in the dark heavens, to your eyes
looking up, so your lives and fortunes are to His eyes looking down
on this Babel of peoples. _He gathereth the outcasts of Israel....
He telleth the number of the stars._[48] And so the prophet goes on
earnestly to plead: _Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard? that
an everlasting God is Jehovah, Creator of the ends of the earth.
He fainteth not, neither is weary. There is no searching of His
understanding. Giver to the weary of strength! And upon him that is
of no might, He lavisheth power. Even youths may faint and be weary,
and young men utterly fall; but they who hope in Jehovah shall renew
strength, put forth pinions like eagles, run and not weary, walk and
not faint._ Listen, ears, not for the sake of yourselves only, though
the music is incomparably sweet! Listen for the sake of the starved
hearts below, to whom you carry the sacraments of hope, whom you lift
to feed upon the clear symbols of God's omnipotence and unfailing grace.
This chapter began with the assurance to the heart of Israel of their
God's will to redeem and restore them. It closes with bidding the
people take hope in God. Let us again emphasize--for we cannot do so
too often, if we are to keep ourselves from certain errors of to-day
on the subject of Revelation--the nature of this prophecy. It is not
a reading-off of history; it is a call from God. No deed has yet been
done pointing towards the certainty of Israel's redemption; it is not
from facts writ large on the life of their day, that the prophet bids
the captives read their Divine discharge. That discharge he brings from
God; he bids them find the promise and the warrant of it in their God's
character, in their own convictions of what that character is. In order
to revive those convictions, he does, it is true, appeal to certain
facts, but these facts are not the facts of contemporary history which
might reveal to any clear eye, that the current and the drift of
politics was setting towards the redemption of Israel. They are facts
of nature and facts of general providence, which, as we have said, like
sacraments evidence God's power to the pious heart, feed it with the
assurance of His grace, and bid it hope in His word, though history
should seem to be working quite the other way.
This instance of the method of revelation does not justify two
opinions, which prevail at the present day regarding prophecy. In
the first place, it proves to us, that those are wrong who, too
much infected by the modern temper to judge accurately writers so
unsophisticated, describe prophecy as if it were merely a philosophy
of history, by which the prophets deduced from their observation of
the course of events their idea of God and their forecast of His
purposes. The prophets had indeed to do with history; they argued
from it, and they appealed to it. The history that was past was full
of God's condescension to men, and shone like Nature's self with
sacramental signs of His power and will: the history that was future
was to be His supreme tribunal, and to afford the vindication of the
word they claimed to have brought from Him. But still all this--their
trust in history and their use of it--was something secondary in
the prophetic method. With them God Himself was first; they came
forth from His presence, as they describe it, with the knowledge
of His will gained through the communion of their spirits with His
Spirit. If they then appealed to past history, it was to illustrate
their message; or to future, it was for vindication of this. But God
Himself was the Source and Author of it; and therefore, before they
had facts beneath their eyes to corroborate their promises, they
appealed to the people, like our prophet in ch. xl., to _wait on
Jehovah_. The day might not yet have dawned so as to let them read
the signs of the times. But in the darkness they _hoped in Jehovah_,
and borrowed for their starved hearts from the stars above, or other
sacrament, some assurance of His unfailing power.
Jehovah, then, was the source of the prophets' word: His character
was its pledge. The prophets were not mere readers from history, but
speakers from God.
But the testimony of our chapter to all this enables us also to
arrest an opinion about Revelation, which has too hurriedly run off
with some Christians, and to qualify it. In the inevitable recoil
from the scholastic view of revelation as wholly a series of laws and
dogmas and predictions, a number of writers on the subject have of
late defined Revelation as a chain of historical acts, through which
God uttered His character and will to men. According to this view,
Revelation is God manifesting Himself in history, and the Bible is
the record of this historical process. Now, while it is true that
the Bible is, to a large extent, the annals and interpretation of
the great and small events of a nation's history--of its separation
from the rest of mankind, its miraculous deliverances, its growth,
its defeats and humiliations, its reforms and its institutions; in
all of which God manifested His character and will--yet the Bible
also records a revelation, which preceded these historical deeds;
a revelation the theatre of which was not the national experience,
but the consciousness of the individual; which was recognised and
welcomed by choice souls in the secret of their own spiritual life,
before it was realised and observed in outward fact; which was
uttered by the prophet's voice and accepted by the people's trust in
the dark and the stillness, before the day of the Lord had dawned
or there was light to see His purposes at work. In a word, God's
revelation to men was very often made clear in their subjective
consciousness, before it became manifest in the history about them.
And, for ourselves, let us remember that to this day true religion is
as independent of facts as it was with the prophet. True religion is a
conviction of the character of God, and a resting upon that alone for
salvation. We need nothing more to begin with; and everything else, in
our experience and fortune, helps us only in so far as it makes that
primary conviction more clear and certain. Darkness may be over us, and
we lonely and starved beneath it. We may be destitute of experience to
support our faith; we may be able to discover nothing in life about us
making in the direction of our hopes. Still, let _us wait on the Lord_.
It is by bare trust in Him, that we _renew our strength, put forth
wings like eagles, run and not weary, walk and not faint_.
_Put forth wings--run--walk!_ Is the order correct? Hope swerves from
the edge of so descending a promise, which seems only to repeat
the falling course of nature--that droop, we all know, from short
ambitions, through temporary impulsiveness, to the old commonplace
and routine. Soaring, running, walking--and is not the next stage, a
cynic might ask, standing still?
On the contrary, it is a natural and a true climax, rising from the
easier to the more difficult, from the ideal to the real, from dream to
duty, from what can only be the rare occasions of life to what must be
life's usual and abiding experience. History followed this course. Did
the prophet, as he promised, think of what should really prove to be
the fortune of his people during the next few years?--the great flight
of hope, on which we see them rising in their psalms of redemption as
on the wings of an eagle; the zeal and liberality of preparation for
departure from Babylon; the first rush at the Return; and then the long
tramp, day after day, with the slow caravan, at the pace of its most
heavily-laden beasts of burden, when _they shall walk and not faint_
should indeed seem to them the sweetest part of their God's promise.
Or was it the far longer perspective of Israel's history that bade
the prophet follow this descending scale? The spirit of prophecy
was with himself to soar higher than ever before, reaching by truly
eagle-flight to a vision of the immediate consummation of Israel's
glory: the Isles waiting for Jehovah, the Holy City radiant in His
rising, and open with all her gates to the thronging nations; the
true religion flashing from Zion across the world, and the wealth
of the world pouring back upon Zion. And some have wondered, and
some scoff, that after this vision there should follow centuries of
imperceptible progress--five-and-a-half centuries of preparation
for the coming of the Promised Servant; and then--Israel, indeed
gone forth over the world, but only in small groups, living upon
the grudged and fitful tolerance of the great centres of Gentile
civilisation. The prophet surely anticipates all this, when he
places the _walking_ after the _soaring_ and the _running_. When he
says last, and most impressively, of his people's fortunes, that
they _shall walk and not faint_, he has perhaps just those long
centuries in view, when, instead of a nation of enthusiasts taking
humanity by storm, we see small bands of pioneers pushing their way
from city to city by the slow methods of ancient travel,--Damascus,
Antioch, Tarsus, Iconium, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth and
Rome,--everywhere that Paul and the missionaries of the Cross found
a pulpit and a congregation ready for the Gospel; toiling from day
to day at their own trades, serving the alien for wages, here and
there founding a synagogue, now and then completing a version of
their Scriptures, oftentimes achieving martyrdom, but ever living a
pure and a testifying life in face of the heathen, with the passion
of these prophecies at their hearts. It was certainly for such
centuries and such men that the word was written, _they shall walk
and not faint_. This persistence under persecution, this monotonous
drilling of themselves in school and synagogue, this slow progress
without prize or praise along the common highways of the world and
by the world's ordinary means of livelihood, was a greater proof of
indomitableness than even the rapture which filled their hearts on
the golden eve of the Return, under the full diapason of prophecy.
And so must it ever be. First the ideal, and then the rush at it with
passionate eyes, and then the daily trudge onward, when its splendour
has faded from the view, but is all the more closely wrapped round
the heart. For glorious as it is to rise to some great consummation
on wings of dream and song, glorious as it is, also, to bend that
impetus a little lower and take some practical crisis of life by
storm, an even greater proof of our religion and of the help our God
can give us is the lifelong tramp of earth's common surface, without
fresh wings of dream, or the excitement of rivalry, or the attraction
of reward, but with the head cool, and the face forward, and every
footfall upon firm ground. Let hope rejoice in a promise, which does
not go off into the air, but leaves us upon solid earth; and let
us hold to a religion, which, while it exults in being the secret
of enthusiasm and the inspiration of heroism, is daring and Divine
enough to find its climax in the commonplace.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] See xl. 21, _Have ye not known?_
[43] That is in the sense, in which our prophet uses the word, of
salvation. See Ch. XIV. of this volume.
[44] Some intention of division undoubtedly appears. Notice the
double refrain, _To whom will ye liken_, etc., of vv. 18 and 25;
and then at equal distance from either occurrence of this challenge
the appeal, _Dost thou not know_, etc., vv. 21 and 28. But though
these signs of a strict division appear, the rest is submerged by
the strong flood of feeling which rushes too deep and rapid for any
hard-and-fast embankments.
[45] See p. 109.
[46] If an idol leant over or fell that was the very worst of omens;
_cf._ the case of Dagon.
[47] When John Knox was a prisoner in France, "the officers brought
to him a painted board, which they called Our Lady, and commanded
him to kiss it. They violently thrust it into his face, and put it
betwixt his hands, who, seeing the extremity, took the idol, and
advisedly looking about, he cast it into the river, and said, 'Let
Our Lady now save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to
swim!' After that was no Scotsman urged with that idolatry."--Knox,
_History of the Reformation_.
[48] Psalm cxlvii.
CHAPTER VII.
_GOD: AN ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY._
ISAIAH xli.
Having revealed Himself to His own people in ch. xl., Jehovah now
turns in ch. xli. to the heathen, but, naturally, with a very
different kind of address. Displaying His power to His people in
certain sacraments, both of nature and history, He had urged them to
_wait upon Him_ alone for the salvation, of which there were as yet
no signs in the times. But with the heathen it is evidently to these
signs of the times, that He can best appeal. Contemporary history,
facts open to every man's memory and reason, is the common ground on
which Jehovah and the other gods can meet. Ch. xli. is, therefore,
the natural complement to ch. xl. In ch. xl. we have the element in
revelation that precedes history: in ch. xli. we have history itself
explained as a part of revelation.
Ch. xli. is loosely cast in the same form of a Trial-at-Law, which
we found in ch. i. To use a Scotticism, which exactly translates
the Hebrew of ver. 1, Jehovah goes _to the law_ with the idols. His
summons to the Trial is given in ver. 1; the ground of the Trial is
advanced in vv. 2-7. Then comes a digression, vv. 8-20, in which the
Lord turns from controversy with the heathen to comfort His people.
In vv. 21-29 Jehovah's plea is resumed, and in the silence of the
defendants--a silence, which, as we shall presently see by calling in
the witness of a Greek historian, was actual fact--the argument is
summed up and the verdict given for the sole divinity of Israel's God.
The main interest of the Trial lies, of course, in its appeal to
contemporary history, and to the central figure Cyrus, although it is
to be noted that the prophet as yet refrains from mentioning the hero
by name. This appeal to contemporary history lays upon us the duty
of briefly indicating, how the course of that history was tending
outside Babylon,--outside Babylon, as yet, but fraught with fate both
to Babylon and to her captives.
* * * * *
Nebuchadrezzar, although he had virtually succeeded to the throne of
the Assyrian, had not been able to repeat from Babylon that almost
universal empire, which his predecessors had swayed from Nineveh.
Egypt, it is true, was again as thoroughly driven from Asia as
in the time of Sargon: to the south the Babylonian supremacy was
as unquestioned as ever the Assyrian had been. But to the north
Nebuchadrezzar met with an almost equal rival, who had helped him
in the overthrow of Nineveh, and had fallen heir to the Assyrian
supremacy in that quarter. This was Kastarit or Kyaxares, an Aryan,
one of the pioneers of that Aryan invasion from the East, which,
though still tardy and sparse, was to be the leading force in
Western Asia for the next century. This Kyaxares had united under
his control a number of Median tribes,[49] a people of Turanian
stock. With these, when Nineveh fell, he established to the north of
Nebuchadrezzar's power the empire of Media, with its western boundary
at the river Halys, in Asia Minor, and its capital at Ecbatana under
Mount Elwand. It is said that the river Indus formed his frontier
to the east. West of the Halys, the Mede's progress was stopped by
the Lydian Empire, under King Alyattis, whose capital was Sardis,
and whose other border was practically the coast of the Ægean. In
585, or two years after the destruction of Jerusalem, Alyattis and
Kyaxares met in battle on the Halys. But the terrors of an eclipse
took the heart to fight out of both their armies, and, Nebuchadrezzar
intervening, the three monarchs struck a treaty among themselves,
and strengthened it by intermarriage. Western Asia now virtually
consisted of the confederate powers, Babylonia, Media and Lydia.[50]
Let us realise how far this has brought us. When we stood with Isaiah
in Jerusalem, our western horizon lay across the middle of Asia Minor
in the longitude of Cyprus.[51] It now rests upon the Ægean; we are
almost within sight of Europe. Straight from Babylon to Sardis runs a
road, with a regular service of couriers. The court of Sardis holds
domestic and political intercourse with the courts of Babylon and
Ecbatana; but the court of Sardis also lords it over the Asiatic
Greeks, worships at Greek shrines, will shortly be visited by Solon
and strike an alliance with Sparta. In the time of the Jewish exile
there were without doubt many Greeks in Babylon; men may have spoken
there with Daniel, who had spoken at Sardis with Solon.
This extended horizon makes clear to us what our prophet has in
his view, when in this forty-first chapter he summons _Isles_ to
the bar of Jehovah: _Be silent before me, O Isles, and let Peoples
renew their strength_,--a vision and appeal which frequently recur
in our prophecy. _Listen, O Isles, and hearken, O Peoples from afar_
(xlix. 1); _Isles shall wait for His law_ (xlii. 4); _Let them give
glory to Jehovah, and publish His praise in the Isles_ (xlii. 12);
_Unto me Isles shall hope_ (li. 5); _Surely Isles shall wait for
me, ships of Tarshish first_.[52] The name is generally taken by
scholars--according to the derivation in the note below--to have
originally meant _habitable land_, and so _land_ as opposed to water.
In some passages of the Old Testament it is undoubtedly used to
describe a land either washed, or surrounded, by the sea.[53]
But by our prophet's use of the word it is not necessarily
_maritime provinces_ that are meant. He makes _isles_ parallel
to the well-known terms _nations_, _peoples_, _Gentiles_, and in
one passage he opposes it, as dry soil, to water.[54] Hence many
translators take it in its original sense of _countries_ or _lands_.
This bare rendering, however, does not do justice to the sense of
_remoteness_, which the prophet generally attaches to the word,
nor to his occasional association of it with visions of the sea.
Indeed, as one reads most of his uses of it, one is quite sure that
the island-meaning of the word lingers on in his imagination; and
that the feeling possesses him, which has haunted the poetry of all
ages, to describe as _coasts_ or _isles_ any land or lighting-place
of thought which is far and dim and vague; which floats across the
horizon, or emerges from the distance, as strips and promontories
of land rise from the sea to him who has reached some new point of
view. I have therefore decided to keep the rendering familiar to the
English reader, _isles_, though, perhaps, _coasts_ would be better.
If, as is probable, our prophet's thoughts are always towards the new
lands of the west as he uses the word, it is doubly suitable; those
countries were both maritime and remote; they rose both from the
distance and from the sea.
"The sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea
And laugh their pride, where the light wave lisps, 'Greece.'"
But if Babylonia lay thus open to Lydia, and through Lydia to
the _isles_ and _coasts_ of Greece, it was different with her
northern frontier. What strikes us here is the immense series of
fortifications, which Nebuchadrezzar, in spite of his alliance with
Astyages, cast up between his country and Media. Where the Tigris and
Euphrates most nearly approach one another, about seventy miles to
the north of Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar connected their waters by four
canals, above which he built a strong bulwark, called by the Greeks
the Median wall. This may have been over sixty miles long; Xenophon
tells us it was twenty feet broad by one hundred high.[55] At Sippara
this line of defence was completed by the creation of a great bason
of water to flood the rivers and canals on the approach of an enemy,
and of a large fortress to protect the bason. Alas for the vanity of
human purposes! It is said to have been this very bason which caused
the easy fall of Babylon. By turning the Euphrates into it, the enemy
entered the capital through the emptied river-bed.
The triple alliance--Lydia, Media, Babylonia--stood firm after its
founders passed away. In 555, Crœsus and Astyages, who had succeeded
their fathers at Sardis and Ecbatana respectively, and Nabunahid, who
had usurped the throne at Babylon, were still at peace, and contented
with the partition of 585. But outside them and to the east, in a
narrow nook of land at the head of the Persian Gulf, the man was
already crowned, who was destined to bring Western Asia again under
one sceptre. This was Kurush or Cyrus II. of Anzan, but known to
history as Cyrus the Great or Cyrus the Persian. Cyrus was a prince
of the Akhæmenian house of Persia, and therefore, like the Mede, an
Aryan, but independent of his Persian cousins, and ruling in his own
right the little kingdom of Anzan or Anshan, which, with its capital
of Susan, lay on the rivers Choaspes and Eulæus, between the head of
the Persian Gulf and the Zagros Mountains.[56]
Cyrus the Great is one of those mortals whom the muse of history,
as if despairing to do justice to him by herself, has called in her
sisters to aid her in describing to posterity. Early legend and later
and more elaborate romance; the schoolmaster, the historian, the
tragedian and the prophet, all vie in presenting to us this hero "le
plus sympathique de l'antiquité"[57]--this king on whom we see so
deeply stamped the double signature of God, character and success. We
shall afterwards have a better opportunity to speak of his character.
Here we are only concerned to trace his rapid path of conquest.
He sprang, then, from Anshan, the immediate neighbour of Babylonia to
the east. This is the direction indicated in the second verse of this
forty-first chapter: _Who hath raised up one from the east?_ But the
twenty-fifth verse veers round with him to the north: _I have raised
up one from the north, and he is come._ This was actually the curve,
from east to north, which his career almost immediately took.
For in 549 Astyages, king of Media, attacked Cyrus,[58] king of
Anshan; which means that Cyrus was already a considerable and an
aggressive prince. Probably he had united by this time the two
domains of his house, Persia and Anshan, under his own sceptre, and
secured as his lieutenant Hystaspes, his cousin, the lineal king of
Persia. The Mede, looking south and east from Ecbatana, saw a solid
front opposed to him, and resolved to crush it before it grew more
formidable. But the Aryans among the Medes, dissatisfied with so
indolent a leader as Astyages, revolted to Cyrus, and so the latter,
with characteristic good fortune, easily became lord of Media. A
lenient lord he made. He spared Astyages, and ranked the Aryan Medes
second only to the Persians. But it took him till 546 to complete his
conquest. When he had done so he stood master of Asia from the Halys
to perhaps as far east as the Indus. He replaced the Medes in the
threefold power of Western Asia, and thus looked down on Babylon, as
v. 25 says, _from the north_ (xli. 25).
In 545, Cyrus advanced upon Babylonia, and struck at the northern
line of fortifications at Sippara. He was opposed by an army under
Belshazzar, Bel-shar-uzzur, the son of Nabunahid, and probably by
his mother's side grandson of Nebuchadrezzar. Army or fortifications
seem to have been too much for Cyrus, and there is no further mention
of his name in the Babylonian annals till the year 538. It has been
suggested that Cyrus was aware of the discontent of the people with
their ruler Nabunahid, and, with that genius which distinguished
his whole career for availing himself of the internal politics of
his foes, he may have been content to wait till the Babylonian
dissatisfaction had grown riper, perhaps in the meantime fostering it
by his own emissaries.
In any case, the attention of Cyrus was now urgently demanded on the
western boundary of his empire, where Lydia was preparing to invade
him. Crœsus, king of Lydia, fresh from the subjection of the Ionian
Greeks, and possessing an army and a treasure second to none in
the world, had lately asked of Solon, whether he was not the most
fortunate of men; and Solon had answered, to count no man happy till
his death. The applicability of this advice to himself Crœsus must
have felt with a start, when, almost immediately after it, the news
came that his brother-in-law Astyages had fallen before an unknown
power, which was moving up rapidly from the east, and already touched
the Lydian frontier at the Halys. Crœsus was thrown into alarm. He
eagerly desired to know Heaven's will about this Persian and himself,
who now stood face to face. But, in that heathen world, with its
thousand shrines to different gods, who knew the will of Heaven?
In a fashion only possible to the richest man in the world, Crœsus
resolved to discover, by sending a test-question, on a matter of fact
within his own knowledge, to every oracle of repute: to the oracles
of the Greeks at Miletus, Delphi, Abæ; to that of Trophonius; to the
sanctuary of Amphiaraus at Thebes; to Dodona; and even to the far-off
temple of Ammon in Libya. The oracles of Delphi and Amphiaraus
alone sent an answer, which in the least suggested the truth. "To
the gods of Delphi and Amphiaraus, Crœsus, therefore, offered great
sacrifices,--three thousand victims of every kind; and on a great
pile of wood he burned couches plated with gold and silver, golden
goblets, purple robes and garments, in the hope that he would thereby
gain the favour of the god yet more.... And as the sacrifice left
behind an enormous mass of molten gold, Crœsus caused bricks to be
made, six palms in length, three in breadth and one in depth; in
all there were 117 bricks.... In addition there was a golden lion
which weighed ten talents. When these were finished, Crœsus sent
them to Delphi; and he added two very large mixing bowls, one of
gold, weighing eight talents and a half and twelve minæ, and one of
silver (the work of Theodorus of Samos, as the Delphians say, and
I believe it, for it is the work of no ordinary artificer), four
silver jars, and two vessels for holy water, one of gold, the other
of silver, circular casts of silver, a golden statue of a woman three
cubits high, and the necklace and girdles of his queen."[59] We can
understand, that for all this Crœsus got the best advice consistent
with the ignorance and caution of the priests whom he consulted. The
oracles told him that if he went against Cyrus he would destroy a
great empire; but he forgot to ask, whether it was his own or his
rival's. When he inquired a second time, if his reign should be long,
they replied: "When a mule became king of the Medes," then he might
fly from his throne; but again he forgot to consider that there might
be mules among men as among beasts.[60] At the same time, the oracles
tempered their ambiguous prophecies with some advice of undoubted
sense, for when he asked them who were the most powerful among the
Greeks, they replied the Spartans, and to Sparta he sent messengers
with presents to conclude an alliance. "The Lacedæmonians were
filled with joy; they knew the oracle which had been given Crœsus,
and made him a friend and ally, as they had previously received many
kindnesses at his hands."[61]
This glimpse into the preparations of Crœsus, whose embassies compassed
the whole civilised world, and whose wealth got him all that politics
or religion could, enables us to realise the political and religious
excitement into which Cyrus' advent threw that generation. The oracles
in doubt and ambiguous; the priests, the idol-manufacturers, and
the crowd of artisans, who worked in every city at the furniture of
the temple, in a state of unexampled activity, with bustle perhaps
most like the bustle of our government dockyards on the eve of war;
hammering new idols together, preparing costly oblations, overhauling
the whole religious "ordnance," that the gods might be propitiated and
the stars secured to fight in their courses against the Persian; rival
politicians practising conciliation, and bolstering up one another with
costly presents to stand against this strange and fatal force, which
indifferently threatened them all. What a commentary Herodotus' story
furnishes upon the verses of this chapter, in which Jehovah contrasts
the idols with Himself. It may actually have been Crœsus and the Greeks
whom the prophet had in his mind when he wrote vv. 5-7: _The isles have
seen, and they fear; the ends of the earth tremble: they draw near
and they come. They help every man his neighbour, and to his brother
each sayeth, Be strong. So carver encourageth smelter, smoother with
hammer, smiter on anvil; one saith of the soldering, It is good: and
he fasteneth it with nails lest it totter._ The irony is severe, but
true to the facts as Herodotus relates them. The statesmen hoped to
keep back Cyrus by sending sobbing messages to one another, Be of good
courage; the priests "by making a particularly good and strong set of
gods."[62]
While the imbecility of the idolatries was thus manifest, and the
great religious centres of heathendom were reduced to utter doubt
that veiled itself in ambiguity and waited to see how things would
issue, there was one religion in the world, whose oracles gave no
uncertain sound, whose God stepped boldly forth to claim Cyrus for
His own. In the dust of Babylonia lay the scattered members of a
nation captive and exiled, a people civilly dead and religiously
degraded; yet it was the faith of this worm of a people, which
welcomed and understood Cyrus, it was the God of this people who
claimed to be his author. The forty-first chapter looks dreary and
ancient to the uninstructed eye, but let our imagination realise all
these things: the ambiguous priests, oracles that would not speak
out, religions that had no articulate counsel nor comfort in face
of the conqueror who was crushing up the world before him, but only
sobs, solder and nails; and our heart will leap as we hear how God
forces them all into judgement before Him, and makes His plea as loud
and clear as mortal ear may hear. Clatter of idols, and murmur of
muffled oracles, filling all the world; and then, hark how the voice
of JEHOVAH crashes His oracle across it all!
_Keep silence towards Me, O Isles, and let the peoples renew their
strength: let them approach; then let them speak: to the Law let us
come._
_Who hath stirred up from the sunrise Righteousness, calleth it to
his foot? He giveth to his face peoples, and kings He makes him to
trample; giveth_ them _as dust to his sword, as driven stubble to
his bow. He pursues them, and passes to peace a road that he comes
not with his feet. Who has wrought_ it _and done_ it? _Summoner of
generations from the source,_[63] _I Jehovah the First, and with the
Last; I am He._
Crœsus would have got a clear answer here, but it is probable that he
had never heard of the Hebrews or of their God.
After this follows the satiric picture of the heathen world, which has
already been quoted. And then, after an interval during which Jehovah
turns to His own people (vv. 8-20),--for whatever be His business or
His controversy, the Lord is mindful of His own,--He directs His speech
specially against the third class of the leaders of heathendom. He has
laughed the foolish statesmen and imagemakers out of court (vv. 5-7);
He now challenges, in ver. 21, the oracles and their priests.
We have seen what these were, which this vast heathen world--heathen
but human, convinced as we are that at the back of the world's life
there is a secret, a counsel and a governor, and anxious as we are
to find them--had to resort to. Timid waiters upon time, whom not
even the lavish wealth of a Crœsus could tempt from their ambiguity;
prophets speechless in face of history; oracles of meaning as dark
and shifty as their steamy caves at Delphi, of tune as variable
as the whispering oak of Dodona; wily-tongued Greeks, masters of
ambiguous phrase, at Miletus, Abæ, and Thebes; Egyptian mystics in
the far off temple of "Lybic Hammon,"--these are what the prophet
sees standing at the bar of history, where God is Challenger.
_Bring here your case, saith Jehovah; apply your strong grounds, saith
the King of Jacob. Let them bring out and declare unto us what things
are going to happen; the first things_[64] _announce what they are,
that we may set our heart on them, and know the issue of them; or the
things that are coming, let us hear them. Announce the things that are
to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods. Yea, do good or
do evil, that we may stare and see it together. Lo! ye are nothing, and
your work is of nought; an abomination is he who chooseth you._
Which great challenge just means, Come and be tested by facts. Here
is history needing an explanation, and running no one knows whither.
Prove your divinity by interpreting or guiding it. Cease your
ambiguities, and give us something we can set our minds to work upon.
Or do something, effect something in history, be it good or be it
evil,--only let it be patent to our senses. For the test of godhead
is not ingenuity or mysteriousness, but plain deeds, which the senses
can perceive, and plain words, which the reason and conscience can
judge. The insistance upon the senses and mental faculties of man
is remarkable: _Make us hear them, that we may know, stare, see all
together, set our mind to them._
But as we have learned from Herodotus, there was nobody in the world
to answer such a challenge. Therefore Jehovah Himself answers it. He
gives His explanation of history, and claims its events for His doing.
_I have stirred up from the north, and he hath come; from the rising
of the sun one who calleth upon My Name: and he shall trample satraps
like mortar, and as the potter treadeth out clay._
_Who hath announced on-ahead_[65] _that we may know, and beforehand
that we may say, "Right!" Yea, there is none that announced, yea,
there is none that published, yea, there is none that heareth your
words._ But _a prediction_--or _predicter_, literally a _thing_ or
_man on-ahead_ (r'ishôn corresponding to the me-r'osh of ver. 26)--_a
prediction to Zion, "Behold, behold them," and to Jerusalem a herald
of good news--I am giving_. The language here comes forth in jerks,
and is very difficult to render. _But I look and there is no man even
among these, and no counsellor, that I might ask them and they return
word. Lo, all of them vanity! and nothingness their works; wind and
waste their molten images._
* * * * *
Let us look a little more closely at the power of PREDICTION, on which
Jehovah maintains His unique and sovereign Deity against the idols.
Jehovah challenges the idols to face present events, and to give
a clear, unambiguous forecast of their issue. It is a debatable
question, whether He does not also ask them to produce previous
predictions of events happening at the time at which He speaks.
This latter demand is one that He makes in subsequent chapters; it
is part of His prophet's argument in chs. xlv.-xlvi., that Jehovah
intimated the advent of Cyrus by His servants in Israel long before
the present time. Whether He makes this same demand for previous
predictions in ch. xli. depends on how we render a clause of ver. 22,
_declare ye the former things_. Some scholars take _former things_
in the sense, in which it is used later on in this prophecy, of
_previous predictions_. This is very doubtful. I have explained in
a note, why I think them wrong; but even if they are right, and
Jehovah be really asking the idols to produce former predictions of
Cyrus' career, the demand is so cursory, it proves so small an item
in His plea, and we shall afterwards find so many clearer statements
of it, that we do better to ignore it now and confine ourselves to
emphasizing the other challenge, about which there is no doubt,--the
challenge to take present events and predict their issue.[66] Crœsus
had asked the oracles for a forecast of the future. This is exactly
what Jehovah demands in ver. 22, _declare unto us what things are
going to happen_; in ver. 23, _declare the things that are to come
hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods_; in ver. 26 (spoken
from the standpoint of the subsequent fulfilment of the prediction),
_who declared it on-ahead that we may know, and beforehand that we
may now say, "Right!" Yea, there is none that declared, yea, there
is none that published, yea, there is none that heareth your words_.
But _a prediction unto Zion, "Behold, behold them," and to Jerusalem
a herald of good news--I give. I give_ is emphatically placed at the
end,--"I Jehovah alone, through my prophets in Israel, give such a
prediction and publisher of good news."
We scarcely require to remind ourselves, that this great challenge and
plea are not mere rhetoric or idle boasting. Every word in them we
have seen to be true to fact. The heathen religions were, as they are
here represented, helpless before Cyrus, and dumb about the issue of
the great movements which the Persian had started. On the other hand,
Jehovah had uttered to His people all the meaning of the new stir and
turmoil in history. We have heard Him do so in ch. xl. There He _gives
a herald of good news to Jerusalem_,--tells them of their approaching
deliverance, explains His redemptive purposes, proclaims a gospel. In
addition, He has in this chapter accepted Cyrus for His own creation
and as part of His purpose, and has promised him victory.
The God of Israel, then, is God, because He alone by His prophets
claims facts as they stand for His own deeds, and announces what
shall become of them.
Do not let us, however, fall into the easy but vulgar error of
supposing, that Jehovah claims to be God simply because He can
predict. It is indeed prediction, which He demands from the
heathen; for prediction is a minimum of godhead, and in asking it
He condescends to the heathen's own ideas of what a god should be
able to do. When Crœsus, the heathen who of all that time spent most
upon religion, sought to decide which of the gods was worthiest to
be consulted about the future and propitiated in face of Cyrus, what
test did he apply to them? As we have seen, he tested them by their
ability to predict a matter of fact: the god who told him what he,
Crœsus, should be doing on a certain day was to be his god. It is
evident, that, to Crœsus, divinity meant to be able to divine. But
the God, who reveals Himself to Israel, is infinitely greater than
this. He is not merely a Being with a far sight into the future;
He is not only Omniscience. In the chapter preceding this one His
power of prediction is not once expressed; it is lost in the two
glories by which alone the prophet seeks to commend His Godhead to
Israel,--the glory of His power and the glory of His faithfulness.
Jehovah is Omnipotence, Creator of heaven and earth; He leads forth
the stars _by the greatness of His might_; Supreme Director of
history, it is He _who bringeth princes to nothing_. But Jehovah is
also unfailing character: _the word of the Lord standeth for ever_;
it is foolishness to say of Him that He has forgotten His people,
or that _their right has passed_ from Him; He disappoints none who
wait upon Him. Such is the God, who steps down from ch. xl. into the
controversy with the heathen in ch. xli. If in the latter He chiefly
makes His claim to godhead to rest upon specimens of prediction,
it is simply, as we have said, that He may meet the gods of the
heathen before a bar and upon a principle, which their worshippers
recognise as practical and decisive. What were single predictions,
here and there, upon the infinite volume of His working, who by
His power could gather all things to serve His own purpose, and in
His faithfulness remained true to that purpose from everlasting to
everlasting! The unity of history under One Will--this is a far more
adequate idea of godhead than the mere power to foretell single
events of history. And it is even to this truth that Jehovah seeks
to raise the unaccustomed thoughts of the heathen. Past the rude
wonder, which is all that fulfilled predictions of fact can excite,
He lifts their religious sense to Himself and His purpose, as the one
secret and motive of all history. He not only claims Cyrus and Cyrus'
career as His own work, but He speaks of Himself as _summoner of the
generations from aforehand; I Jehovah, the First, and with the Last;
I am He_. It is a consummate expression of godhead, which lifts us
far above the thought of Him as a mere divining power.
Now, it is well for us--were it only for the great historic interest
of the thing, though it will also further our argument--to take
record here that, although this conception of the unity of life under
One Purpose and Will was still utterly foreign, and perhaps even
unintelligible, to the heathen world, which the prophecy has in view,
the first serious attempt in that world to reach such a conception
was contemporary with the forty-first chapter of Isaiah. It is as
miners feel, when, tunnelling from opposite sides of a mountain, they
begin to hear the noise of each other's picks through the dwindling
rock. We, who have come down the history of Israel towards the great
consummation of religion in Christianity, may here cease for a moment
our labours, to listen to the faint sound from the other side of the
wall, still separating Israel from Greece, of a witness to God and an
argument against idolatry similar to those with which we have been
working. Who is not moved by learning, that, in the very years when
Jewish prophecy reached its most perfect statement of monotheism,
pouring its scorn upon the idols and their worshippers, and in the
very _Isles_ on which its hopes and influence were set, the first
Greek should be already singing, who used his song to satirize
the mythologies of his people, and to celebrate the unity of God?
Among the Ionians, whom Cyrus' invasion of Lydia and of the Ægean
coast in 544 drove across the seas, was Xenophanes of Colophon.[67]
After some wanderings he settled at Elea in South Italy, and became
the founder of the Eleatic school, the first philosophic attempt
of the Greek mind to grasp the unity of Being. How far Xenophanes
himself succeeded in this attempt is a matter of controversy. The
few fragments of his poetry which are extant do not reveal him as a
philosophical monotheist, so much as a prophet of "One greatest God."
His language (like that of the earlier Hebrew prophets in praising
Jehovah) apparently implies the real existence of lesser divinities:--
"One God, 'mongst both gods and men He is greatest,
Neither in shape is He like unto mortals, nor thought."[68]
Xenophanes scorns the anthropomorphism of his countrymen, and the
lawless deeds which their poets had attributed to the gods:--
"Mortals think the gods can be born, have their feelings, voice and
form; but, could horses or oxen draw like men, they too would make
their gods after their own image."[69]
"All things did Homer and Hesiod lay on the gods,
Such as with mortals are full of blame and disgrace,
To steal and debauch and outwit one another."[70]
Our prophet, to whose eyes Gentile religiousness was wholly of the
gross Crœsus kind, little suspected that he had an ally, with such
kindred tempers of faith and scorn, among the very peoples to whom he
yearns to convey his truth. But ages after, when Israel and Greece
had both issued into Christianity, the service of Xenophanes to the
common truth was recounted by two Church writers--by Clement of
Alexandria in his _Stromata_, and by Eusebius the historian in his
_Præparatio Evangelica_.
We find, then, that monotheism had reached its most absolute expression
in Israel in the same decade, in which the first efforts towards
the conception of the unity of Being were just starting in Greece.
But there is something more to be stated. In spite of the splendid
progress, which it pursued from such beginnings, Greek philosophy
never reached the height on which, with Second Isaiah, Hebrew prophecy
already rests; and the reason has to do with two points on which we
are now engaged,--the omnipotence and the righteousness of God.
Professor Pfleiderer remarks: "Even in the idealistic philosophy of
the Greeks ... matter remains, however sublimated, an irrational
something, with which the Divine power can never come to terms.
It was only in the consciousness, which the prophets of Israel
had of God, that the thought of the Divine omnipotence fully
prevailed."[71] We cannot overvalue such high and impartial testimony
to the uniqueness of the Hebrew doctrine of God, but it needs to be
supplemented. To the prophets' sense of the Divine omnipotence, we
must add their unrivalled consciousness of the Divine character. To
them Jehovah is not only the _Holy_, the incomparable God, almighty
and sublime; He is also the true, consistent God. He has a great
purpose, which He has revealed of old to His people, and to which
He remains for ever faithful. To express this the Hebrews had one
word,--the word we translate _righteous_. We should often miss our
prophet's meaning, if by _righteousness_ we understood some of
the qualities to which the term is often applied by us: if, for
instance, we used it in the general sense of morality, or if we gave
it the technical meaning, which it bears in Christian theology, of
justification from guilt. We shall afterwards devote a chapter to
the exposition of its meaning in Second Isaiah, but let us here look
at its use in ch. xli. In ver. 26, it is applied to the person whose
prediction turns out to be correct: men are to say of him "_right_"
or "_righteous_." Here it is evident that the Hebrew--ssaddîq--is
used in its simplest meaning, like the Latin rectus, and our "right,"
of what has been shown to be in accordance with truth or fact. In
ver. 2, again, though the syntax is obscure, it seems to have the
general sense of _good faith with the ability to ensure success_.
Righteousness is here associated with Cyrus, because he has not been
called for nothing, but in good faith for a purpose which will be
carried through. Jehovah's righteousness, then, will be His trueness,
His good faith, His consistency; and indeed this is the sense which
it must evidently bear in ver. 10. Take it with the context: _But
thou, Israel, My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, seed of Abraham
who loved Me, whom I took hold of from the ends of the earth and
its corners, I called thee and said unto thee, Thou art My servant.
I have chosen thee, and will not cast thee away. Fear not, for I
am with thee. Look not round in despair, for I am thy God. I will
strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with
the right hand of My righteousness_. Here _righteousness_ evidently
means that Jehovah will act _in good faith_ to the people He has
called, that He will act _consistently_ with His anciently revealed
purpose towards them. Hitherto Israel has had nothing but the memory
that God called them, and the conscience that He chose them. Now
Jehovah will vindicate this conscience in outward fact. He will carry
through His calling of His people, and perform His promise. How He
will do this, He proceeds to relate. Israel's enemies shall become as
nothing (vv. 11, 12). Israel himself, though a poor worm of a people,
shall be changed to the utmost conceivable opposite of a worm--even
_a sharp threshing instrument having teeth_--a people who shall leave
their mark on the world. They shall overcome all difficulties and
_rejoice in Jehovah_. Their redemption shall be accomplished in a
series of evident facts. _The poor and the needy are seeking water,
and there is none, their tongue faileth for thirst; I, Jehovah, will
answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them._ And this
shall be done on such a scale, that all the world will wonder and
be convinced, vv. 18-19: _I will open on the bare heights rivers,
and in the midst of the plains fountains. I will make the desert a
pool of water, and the dry ground water-springs. I will plant in the
wilderness cedars and acacias and myrtles and oil-trees; I will plant
in the desert pines, planes and sherbins together._ Do not let us
spoil the meaning of this passage by taking these verses literally,
or even as illustrative of the kind of restoration which Israel was
to enjoy. This vast figure of a well-watered and planted desert the
prophet uses rather to illustrate the scale on which the Restoration
will take place: its evident extent and splendour. _That they may
see and know and consider and understand together, that Jehovah hath
done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it._ The whole
passage, then, tells us what God means by His righteousness. It is
His fidelity to His calling of Israel, and to His purpose with His
people. It is the quality by which He cannot forsake His own, but
carries through and completes His promises to them; by which He
vindicates and justifies, in facts so large that they are evident to
all mankind, His ancient word by His prophets.[72]
This lengthened exposition will not have been in vain, if it has made
clear to us, that Hebrew monotheism owed its unique quality to the
emphasis, which the prophets laid upon the two truths of the Power
and the Character of God. There was One Supreme Being, infinite
in might, and with one purpose running down the ages, which He had
plainly revealed, and to which He remained constant. The people,
who knew this, did not need to wait for the fulfilment of certain
test-predictions before trusting Him as the One God. Test-predictions
and their fulfilment might be needful for the heathen, from whose
minds the idea of One Supreme Being with such a character had
vanished; the heathen might need to be convinced by instances of
Jehovah's omniscience, for omniscience was the most Divine attribute
of which they had conceived. But Israel's faith rested upon glories
in the Divine nature of which omniscience was the mere consequence.
Israel knew God was Almighty and All-true, and that was enough.
NOTE UPON JEHOVAH'S CLAIM TO CYRUS.
In ver. 25 a phrase is used of Cyrus which is very obscure, and
to which, considering its vagueness even upon the most definite
construction, far too much importance has been attached. The
meaning of the words, the tenses, the syntax--perhaps even the
original text itself--of this verse are uncertain. The English
revisers give, _I have raised up one from the north, and he
is come; from the rising of the sun one that calleth upon My
Name_. This is probably the true syntax.[73] But in what tense
is the verb _to call_, and what does _calling upon My name_
mean? In the Old Testament the phrase is used in two senses,--to
_invoke or adore_, and to _proclaim_ or _celebrate the name_
of a person.[74] As long as scholars understood that Cyrus was
a monotheist, there was a temptation to choose the former of
these meanings, and to find in the verse Jehovah's claim upon
the Persian, as a worshipper of Himself, the One True God. But
this interpretation received a shock from the discovery of a
proclamation of Cyrus after his entry into Babylon, in which
he invokes the names of Babylonian deities, and calls himself
their "servant."[75] Of course his doing so in the year 538 does
not necessarily discredit a description of him as a monotheist
eight years before. Between 548 and 546--the probable date of
ch. xli.--a prophet might in all good faith have hailed as a
worshipper of Jehovah a Persian who still stood in the _rising
of the sun_,--who had not yet issued from the east and its
radiant repute of a religion purer than the Babylonian; although
eight years afterwards, from motives of policy, the same king
acknowledged the gods of his new subjects. This may be; but
there is a more natural way out of the difficulty. Is it fair
to lay upon the expression, _calleth on My name_, so precise a
meaning as that of a strict monotheism? Some have turned to the
other use of the verb, and, taking it in the future tense, have
translated, _who shall proclaim_ or _celebrate My name_,--which
Cyrus surely did, when, in the name of Jehovah, he drew up
the edict for the return of the Jews to Palestine.[76] But do
we need to put even this amount of meaning upon the phrase?
In itself it is vague, but it also stands parallel to another
vague phrase: _I have raised up one from the north, and he is
come; from the sunrising one who calleth on My name._ Taken
in apposition to the phrase _he is come, calleth on My name_
may mean no more than that, answering to the instigation of
Jehovah, and owning His impulse, Cyrus by his career proclaimed
or celebrated Jehovah's name. In any case, we have said enough
to show that, in our comparative ignorance of what Cyrus' faith
was, and in face of the elastic use of the phrase _to call on
the name of_, it is quite unwarrantable to maintain that the
prophet must have meant a strict monotheist, and therefore
absurd to draw the inference that the prophet was incorrect.
A way has been attempted out of the difficulty by slightly
altering the text, and so obtaining the version, _I have raised
up one from the north, and he is come; from the sunrise I call
him by name_.[77] This is a change which is in harmony with ch.
xlv. 3, 4, but has otherwise no evidence in its favour.
FOOTNOTES:
[49] Media simply means "the country." It is supposed, that of the
six Median tribes only one was Aryan, holding the rest, which were
Turanian, under its influence.
[50] There were, besides, a few small independent powers in Asia
Minor, such as Cilicia, whose prince also intervened at the Battle of
the Eclipse; and the Ionian cities in the west. But all these, with
perhaps the exception of Lycia, were brought into subjection to Lydia
by Crœsus, son of Alyattis.
[51] Vol. i., p. 92.
[52] Other passages are: xli. 5, _Isles saw and feared, the ends of
the earth trembled_; xlii. 10, _The sea and its fulness, Isles and
their dwellers_; lix. 18, _He will repay, fury to His adversaries,
recompence to His enemies: to the Isles He will repay recompence_;
lxvi. 19, _The nations, Tarshish, Pul, Lud, drawers of the bow,
Tubal, Javan, the Isles afar off that have not heard my fame_. The
Hebrew is יא 'î, and is supposed to be from a root אוה awah, _to
inhabit_, which sense, however, never attaches to the verb in Hebrew,
but is borrowed from the cognate Arabic word.
[53] Of the Philistine coast, Isa. xx. 6; of the Tyrian coast, Isa.
xxiii. 2, 6; of Greece, Ezek. xxvii. 7; of Crete, Jer. xlvii. 4; of
the islands of the sea, Isa. xi. 11 and Esther x. 1.
[54] xlii. 15: Eng. version, _I will turn rivers into islands_.
[55] _Anabasis_ 2, 4.
[56] There were two branches of the Persian royal family after
Teispes, the son of Akhæmenes, the founder. Teispes annexed Anshan
on the level land between the north-east corner of the Persian Gulf
and the mountains of Persia. Teispes' eldest son, Cyrus I., became
king of Anshan; his other, Ariaramnes, king of Persia. These were
succeeded by their sons, Kambyses I. and Arsames. Kambyses I. was the
father of Cyrus II., the great Cyrus, who rejoined Persia to Anshan,
to the exclusion of his second cousin, Hystaspes. Cyrus the Great was
succeeded by his son, Kambyses II., with whom the Anshan line closed,
and the power was transferred to Darius, son of Hystaspes. _Cf._
Ragozin's _Media_, in the "Story of the Nations" series.
[57] Halévy, "Cyrus et le Retour de l'Exil," _Études Juives_, I.
[58] Inscription of Nabunahid.
[59] Herodotus, Book I.
[60] Herodotus explains this by his legend of Cyrus' birth, according
to which Cyrus was a hybrid--half Persian, half Mede.
[61] Herodotus, Book I.
[62] Sir Edward Strachey.
[63] Lit. _from the head_, "da capo." I am not sure, however, that it
does not rather mean _beforehand_, like our on ahead.
[64] See p. 121.
[65] This seems to me to be more likely to be the meaning of the
prophet, than the absolute _from the beginning_. It suits its
parallel _beforehand_, and it is more in line with the general demand
of the chapter for anticipation of events. It is literally from the
head, "da capo," _cf._ p. 117.
[66] ראשנות r'ishonôth is a relative term, meaning _head things_,
_things ahead_, _first things_, _prior things_, whether in rank
or time. Here of course the time meaning is undoubted. But _ahead
of_ what? _prior_ to what?--this is the difficulty. Ewald, Hitzig,
A. B. Davidson, Driver, etc., take it as prior to the standpoint
of the speaker; things that happened or were uttered previous to
him,--a sense in which the word is used in subsequent chapters. But
Delitzsch, Hahn, Cheyne, etc., take it to be things prior to other
things that will happen in the later future, early events, as opposed
to הבאות of the next clause, which they take to mean subsequent
things, _things that are to come_ afterwards. I think Dr. Davidson's
reasons (see _Expositor_, second series, vol. vii., p. 256) are quite
conclusive against this view of Delitzsch, that in this clause the
idols are being asked to predict events in the near future. It is
difficult, as he says, to see why the idols should be given a choice
between the earlier and the later future: nor does the הבאות of the
contrasted clause at all suggest a later future; it simply means
_things coming_, a term which is as applicable to the near as to the
far future. Nevertheless, I am not persuaded that Dr. Davidson's own
view of _r'ishonôth_ is the correct one. The rest of the context
(see above) is occupied with predictions of the future only. And
_r'ishonôth_ does not necessarily mean previous predictions, although
used in this sense in the subsequent chapters. It simply means, as
we have seen, _head things_, _things ahead_, _things beforehand_, or
_fountain-things_, _origins_, _causes_. That we are to understand it
here in some such general and absolute sense is suggested, I think,
by the word אחריתן which follows it, _their result_ or _issue_, and
is confirmed by ראשון, r'ishôn (masc. singular) of ver. 27, which is
undoubtedly used in a general sense, meaning _something_ or _somebody
on ahead_, an anticipator, predicter, _forerunner_ (as Cheyne
gives it), or as I have rendered it above, neuter, a _prediction_.
If _r'ishôn_ in ver. 27 means a thing or a man given beforehand,
then r'ishonôth in ver. 22 may also mean things given beforehand,
predictions made now, or at least things selected and announced as
causes now, whose issue, אחריתן, may be recognised in the future. In
a word, r'ishonôth would mean things not necessarily _previous_ to
the speech in which they were allowed, but simply things _previous_
to certain results, or anticipating certain events, either as their
prediction or as their cause.
[67] Ueberweg, _History of Philosophy_, English translation, i., 51.
[68] Quoted by Clement of Alexandria, _Stromata_, Bk. V., ch. iv.,
and by Eusebius, _Præp. Evang._ xiii., 13.
[69] Ibid.
[70] Quoted by Ueberweg, as above.
[71] Pfleiderer, _Philosophy of Religion: Contents of the Religious
Consciousness_, ch. i. (Eng. trans., vol. iii., p. 291).
[72] See further on the subject the chapter on the Righteousness of
Israel and of God, Chapter XIV. of this volume.
[73] And that which runs: _... he is come, from the rising of the sun
he calleth upon My name_ (Bredenkamp) is wrong.
[74] The former of these in ch. lxiv. 7; the latter in xliv. 5.
[75] Translation of the Cyrus-cylinder in "Cyrus et le Retour de
l'Exil," by Halévy, _Revue des Études Juives_, No. 1, 1880.
[76] Ezra i. 2; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 22, 23.
[77] בשמו קראא for בשמי יקֹרא.
CHAPTER VIII.
_THE PASSION OF GOD._
ISAIAH xlii. 13-17.
At the beginning of ch. xlii. we reach one of those distinct stages,
the frequent appearance of which in our prophecy assures us, that,
for all its mingling and recurrent style, the prophecy is a unity
with a distinct, if somewhat involved, progress of thought. For
while chs. xl. and xli. establish the sovereignty and declare the
character of the One True God before His people and the heathen, ch.
xlii. takes what is naturally the next step, of publishing to both
these classes His Divine will. This purpose of God is set forth in
the first seven verses of the chapter. It is identified with a human
Figure, who is to be God's agent upon earth, and who is styled _the
Servant of Jehovah_. Next to Jehovah Himself, the Servant of Jehovah
is by far the most important personage within our prophet's gaze.
He is named, described, commissioned and encouraged over and over
again throughout the prophecy; his character and indispensable work
are hung upon with a frequency and a fondness almost equal to the
steadfast faith, which the prophet reposes in Jehovah Himself. Were
we following our prophecy chapter by chapter, now would be the time
to put the question, Who is this Servant, who is suddenly introduced
to us? and to look ahead for the various and even conflicting
answers, which rise from the subsequent chapters. But we agreed, for
clearness' sake,[78] to take all the passages about the Servant,
which are easily detached from the rest of the prophecy, and treat
by themselves, and to continue in the meantime our prophet's main
theme of the Power and Righteousness of God as shown forth in the
deliverance of His people from Babylon. Accordingly, at present we
pass over xlii. 1-9, keeping this firmly in mind, however, that
God has appointed for His work upon earth, including, as it does,
the ingathering of His people and the conversion of the Gentiles,
a Servant,--a human figure of lofty character and unfailing
perseverance, who makes God's work of redemption his own, puts his
heart into it, and is upheld by God's hand. God, let us understand,
has committed His cause upon earth to a human agent.
God's commission of His Servant is hailed by a hymn. Earth answers
the proclamation of the _new things_ which the Almighty has declared
(ver. 9) by _a new song_ (vv. 10-13). But this song does not sing of
the Servant; its subject is Jehovah Himself.
_Sing to Jehovah a new song,_
_His praise from the end of the earth;_
_Ye that go down to the sea, and its fulness,_
_Isles, and their dwellers!_
_Let be loud,--the wilderness and its townships,_
_Villages that Kedar inhabits!_
_Let them ring out,--the dwellers of Sela!_
_From the top of the hills let them shout!
Let them give to Jehovah the glory,_
_And publish His praise in the Isles!_
_Jehovah as hero goes forth,_
_As a man of war stirs up zeal,_
_Shouts the alarm and battle cry,_
_Against his foes proves Himself hero._
The terms of the last four lines are military. Most of them will be
found in the historical books, in descriptions of the onset of Israel's
battles with the heathen. But it is no human warrior to whom they are
here applied. They who sing have forgotten the Servant. Their hearts
are warm only with this, that Jehovah Himself will come down to earth
to give the alarm, and to bear the brunt of the battle. And to such a
hope He now responds, speaking also of Himself and not of the Servant.
His words are very intense, and glow and strain with inward travail.
_I have long time kept my peace,_
_Am dumb and hold myself in:_
_Like a woman in travail I gasp,_
_Pant and palpitate together._
Remember it is God who speaks these words of Himself, and then think
what they mean of unshareable thought and pain, of solitary yearning
and effort. But from the pain comes forth at last the power.
_I waste mountains and hills,_
_And all their herb I parch;_
_And I have set rivers for islands,_
_And marshes I parch._
Yet it is not the passion of a mere physical effort that is in God;
not mere excitement of war that thrills Him. But the suffering of men
is upon Him, and He has taken their redemption to heart. He had said
to His Servant (vv. 6, 7): _I give thee ... to open the blind eyes,
to bring out from prison the bound, from the house of bondage the
dwellers in darkness._ But here He Himself puts on the sympathy and
strain of that work.
_And I will make the blind to walk in a way they know not,
By paths they know not I will guide them;
Turn darkness before them to light,
And serrated land to level.
These are the things that I do, and do not remit them.
They fall backwards, with shame are they shamed,
That put trust in a Carving,
That do say to a Cast, Ye are our Gods._[79]
Now this pair of passages, in one of which God lays the work of
redemption upon His human agent, and in another Himself puts on its
passion and travail, are only one instance of a duality that runs
through the whole of the Old Testament. As we repeatedly saw in the
prophecies of Isaiah himself,[80] there is a double promise of the
future through the Old Testament:--_first_, that God will achieve
the salvation of Israel by an extraordinary human personality, who
is figured now as a King, now as a Prophet and now as a Priest; but,
_second_ also, that God Himself, in undeputed, unshared power, will
come visibly to deliver His people and to reign over them. These two
lines of prophecy run parallel, and even entangled, through the Old
Testament, but within its bounds no attempt is made to reconcile
them. They pass from it still separate, to find their synthesis, as
we all know, in One of whom each is the incomplete prophecy. While
considering the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, which run upon the
first of these two lines, we pointed out, that, though standing in
historical connection with Christ, they were not prophecies of His
divinity. Lofty and expansive as were the titles they attributed to
the Messiah, these titles did not imply more than an earthly ruler of
extraordinary power and dignity. But we added that in the other and
concurrent line of prophecy, and especially in those well-developed
stages of it which appear in Isa. xl.-lxvi., we should find the true
Old Testament promise of the Deity in human form and tabernacling
among men. We urged that, if the divinity of Christ was to be seen
in the Old Testament, we should more naturally find it in the line
of promise, which speaks of God Himself descending to battle and to
suffer by the side of men, than in the line that lifts a human ruler
almost to the right hand of God. We have now come to a passage, which
gives us the opportunity of testing this connection, which we have
alleged between the so-called anthropomorphism of the Old Testament,
and the Incarnation, which is the glory of the New.
When God presents Himself in the Old Testament as His people's
Saviour, it is not always as Isaiah mostly saw Him, in awful power
and majesty--a _King high and lifted up_, or _as coming from far,
burning and thick-rising smoke, and overflowing streams; causing the
peal of His voice to be heard, and the lighting down of His arm to be
seen, in the fury of anger and devouring fire--bursting and torrent
and hailstones_.[81] But in a large number of passages, of which
the one before us and the famous first six verses of ch. lxiii.
are perhaps the most forcible, the Almighty is clothed with human
passion and agony. He is described as loving, hating, showing zeal
or jealousy, fear, repentance and scorn. He bides His time, suddenly
awakes to effort, and makes that effort in weakness, pain and
struggle, so extreme that He likens Himself not only to a solitary
man in the ardour of battle, but to a woman in her unshareable
hour of travail. To use a technical word, the prophets in their
descriptions of God do not hesitate to be anthropopathic--imparting
to Deity the passions of men.
In order to appreciate the full effect of this habit of the Jewish
religion, we must contrast it with some principles of that religion,
with which at first it seems impossible to reconcile it.
No religion more necessarily implies the spirituality of God than
does the Jewish. It is true that in the pages of the Old Testament,
you will nowhere find this formally expressed. No Jewish prophet
ever said in so many words what Jesus said to the woman of Samaria,
_God is spirit_. In our own prophecy, _spirit_ is frequently used,
not to define the nature of God, but to express His power and
the effectiveness of His will. But the Jewish Scriptures insist
throughout upon the sublimity of God, or, to use their own term, His
holiness. He is the Most High, Creator, Lord,--the Force and Wisdom
that are behind nature and history. It is a sin to make any image of
Him; it is an error to liken Him to man. _I am God and not man, the
Holy One._[82] We have seen how absolutely the Divine omnipotence and
sublimity are expressed by our own prophet, and we shall find Him
again speaking thus: _My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are
your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than
your thoughts._[83] But perhaps the doctrine of our prophet which
most effectively sets forth God's loftiness and spirituality is his
doctrine of God's word. God has but to speak and a thing is created
or a deed done. He calls and the agent He needs is there; He sets
His word upon him and the work is as good as finished. _My word that
goeth forth out of My mouth, it shall not return unto Me void, but
it shall accomplish that which I please, and shall prosper in the
thing whereto I sent it._[84] Omnipotence could not farther go. It
would seem that all man needed from God was a word,--the giving of a
command, that a thing must be.
Yet it is precisely in our prophecy, that we find the most extreme
ascriptions to the Deity of personal effort, weakness and pain. The
same chapters which celebrate God's sublimity and holiness, which
reveal the eternal counsels of God working to their inevitable ends
in time, which also insist, as this very chapter does, that for the
performance of works of mercy and morality God brings to bear the
slow creative forces that are in nature, or which again (as in other
chapters) attribute all to the power of His simple word,--these same
Scriptures suddenly change their style and, after the most human
manner, clothe the Deity in the travail and passion of flesh. Why
is it, that instead of aspiring still higher from those sublime
conceptions of God to some consummate expression of His unity, as
for instance in Islam, or of His spirituality, as in certain modern
philosophies, prophecy dashes thus thunderously down upon our hearts
with the message, scattered in countless, broken words, that all this
omnipotence and all this sublimity are expended and realised for men
only in passion and in pain?
It is no answer, which is given by many in our day, that after all the
prophets were but frail men, unable to stay upon the high flight to
which they sometimes soared, and obliged to sacrifice their logic to
the fondness of their hearts and the general habit of man to make his
god after his own image. No easy sneer like that can solve so profound
a moral paradox. We must seek the solution otherwise, and earnest minds
will probably find it along one or other of the two following paths.
1. The highest moral ideal is not, and never can be, the
righteousness that is regnant, but that which is militant and
agonizing. It is the deficiency of many religions, that while
representing God as the Judge and almighty executor of righteousness,
they have not revealed Him as its advocate and champion as well.
Christ gave us a very plain lesson upon this. As He clearly
showed, when He refused the offer of all the kingdoms of the
world, the highest perfection is not to be omnipotence upon the
side of virtue, but to be there as patience, sympathy and love.
To will righteousness, and to rule life from above in favour of
righteousness, is indeed Divine; but if these were the highest
attributes of divinity, and if they exhausted the Divine interest in
our race, then man himself, with his conscience to sacrifice himself
on behalf of justice or of truth,--man himself, with his instinct to
make the sins of others his burden, and their purity his agonizing
endeavour, would indeed be higher than his God. Had Jehovah been
nothing but the righteous Judge of all the earth, then His witnesses
and martyrs, and His prophets who took to themselves the conscience
and reproach of their people's sins, would have been as much more
admirable than Himself, as the soldier who serves his country on the
battle-field or lays down his life for his people is more deserving
of their gratitude and more certain of their devotion, than the king
who equips him, sends him forth--and himself stays at home.
The God of the Old Testament is not such a God. In the moral warfare
to which He has predestined His creatures, He Himself descends to
participate. He is not abstract--that is, withdrawn--Holiness, nor
mere sovereign Justice enthroned in heaven. He is One who _arises and
comes down_ for the salvation of men, who makes virtue His Cause and
righteousness His Passion. He is no whit behind the chiefest of His
servants. No seraph burns as God burns with ardour for justice; no
angel of the presence flies more swiftly than Himself to the front
rank of the failing battle. The human Servant, who is pictured in our
prophecy, is more absolutely identified with suffering and agonizing
men than any angel could be; but even he does not stand more closely
by their side, nor suffer more on their behalf, than the God who sends
him forth. _For the Lord stirreth up jealousy like a man of war; in all
His people's affliction He is afflicted; against His enemies He beareth
Himself as a hero._ So much from the side of righteousness.
2. But take the equally Divine attribute of love. When a religion
affirms that God is love, it gives immense hostages. What is love
without pity and compassion and sympathy? and what are these but
self-imposed weakness and pain? Christ has told us of the greatest
love. _Greater love than this hath no man, that a man lay down his
life for his friends_; and the cost and sacrifice in which He thus
outmatched man is one that the prophets before He came did not
hesitate to impute to God. As far as human language is adequate for
such a task, they picture God's love for men as costing Him so much.
He painfully pleads for His people's loyalty; He travails in pain
for their new birth and growth in holiness; in all their affliction
He is afflicted; and He meets their stubbornness, not with the swift
sentence of outraged holiness, but with longsuffering and patience, if
so in the end He may win them. But the pain, that is thus essentially
inseparable from love, reaches its acme, when the beloved are not only
in danger but in sin, when not only the future of their holiness is
uncertain, but their guilty past bars the way to any future at all.
We saw how Jeremiah's love thus took upon itself the conscience and
reproach of Israel's sin; how much distress and anguish, how much
sympathy and self-sacrificing labour, and at last how much hopeless
endurance of the common calamity, that sin cost the noble prophet,
though he might so easily have escaped it all. Now even thus does God
deal with His people's sins; not only setting them in the light of His
awful countenance, but taking them upon His heart; making them not only
the object of His hate, but the anguish and the effort of His love.
Jeremiah was a weak mortal, and God is the Omnipotent. Therefore, the
issue of His agony shall be what His servant's never could effect,
the redemption of Israel from sin; but in sympathy and in travail the
Deity, though omnipotent, is no whit behind the man.
* * * * *
We have said enough to prove our case, that the true Old Testament
prophecy of the nature and work of Jesus Christ is found not so much
in the long promise of the exalted human ruler, for whom Israel's
eyes looked, as in the assurance of God's own descent to battle with
His people's foes and to bear their sins. In this God, omnipotent,
yet in His zeal and love capable of passion, who before the
Incarnation was afflicted in all His people's affliction, and before
the Cross made their sin His burden and their salvation His agony, we
see the love that was in Jesus Christ. For Jesus, too, is absolute
holiness, yet not far off. He, too, is righteousness militant at
our side, militant and victorious. He, too, has made our greatest
suffering and shame His own problem and endeavour. He is anxious for
us just where conscience bids us be most anxious about ourselves. He
helps us, because He feels when we feel our helplessness the most.
Never before or since in humanity has righteousness been perfectly
victorious as in Him. Never before or since, in the whole range of
being, has any one felt as He did all the sin of man with all the
conscience of God. He claims to forgive, as God forgives; to be
able to save, as we know only God can save. And the proof of these
claims, apart from the experience of their fulfilment in our own
lives, is that the same infinite love was in Him, the same agony and
willingness to sacrifice Himself for men, which we have seen made
evident in the Passion of God.
FOOTNOTES:
[78] See Introduction.
[79] So the grammar of the original.
[80] Vol. i., pp. 144, 334.
[81] Isa. xxxi.
[82] Hosea xi. 9.
[83] Ch. lv. 8, 9.
[84] _Ibid._ ver. 11.
CHAPTER IX.
_FOUR POINTS OF A TRUE RELIGION._
ISAIAH xliii.-xlviii.
We have now surveyed the governing truths of Isa. xl.-xlviii.: the
One God, omnipotent and righteous; the One People, His servants and
witnesses to the world; the nothingness of all other gods and idols
before Him; the vanity and ignorance of their diviners, compared with
His power, who, because He has a purpose working through all history,
and is both faithful to it and almighty to bring it to pass, can
inspire His prophets to declare beforehand the facts that shall be.
He has brought His people into captivity for a set time, the end of
which is now near. Cyrus the Persian, already upon the horizon, and
threatening Babylon, is to be their deliverer. But whomever He raises
up on Israel's behalf, God is always Himself their foremost champion.
Not only is His word upon them, but His heart is among them. He bears
the brunt of their battle, and their deliverance, political and
spiritual, is His own travail and agony. Whomever else He summons on
the stage, He remains the true hero of the drama.
Now, chs. xliii.-xlviii. are simply the elaboration and more urgent
offer of all these truths, under the sense of the rapid approach of
Cyrus upon Babylon. They declare again God's unity, omnipotence
and righteousness, they confirm His forgiveness of His people, they
repeat the laughter at the idols, they give us nearer views of Cyrus,
they answer the doubts that many orthodox Israelites felt about this
Gentile Messiah; chs. xlvi. and xlvii. describe Babylon as if on
the eve of her fall, and ch. xlviii., after Jehovah more urgently
than ever presses upon reluctant Israel to show the results of her
discipline in Babylon, closes with a call to leave the accursed city,
as if the way were at last open. This call has been taken as the mark
of a definite division of our prophecy. But too much must not be put
upon it. It is indeed the first call to depart from Babylon; but it
is not the last. And although ch. xlix., and the chapters following,
speak more of Zion's Restoration and less of the Captivity, yet ch.
xlix. is closely connected with ch. xlviii., and we do not finally
leave Babylon behind till ch. lii. 12. Nevertheless, in the meantime
ch. xlviii. will form a convenient point on which to keep our eyes.
Cyrus, when we last saw him, was upon the banks of the Halys, 546 B.C.,
startling Crœsus and the Lydian Empire into extraordinary efforts,
both of a religious and political kind, to avert his attack. He had
just come from an unsuccessful attempt upon the northern frontier of
Babylon, and at first it appeared as if he were to find no better
fortune on the western border of Lydia. In spite of his superior
numbers, the Lydian army kept the ground on which he met them in
battle. But Crœsus, thinking that the war was over for the season, fell
back soon afterwards on Sardis, and Cyrus, following him up by forced
marches, surprised him under the walls of the city, routed the famous
Lydian cavalry by the novel terror of his camels, and after a siege
of fourteen days sent a few soldiers to scale a side of the citadel
too steep to be guarded by the defenders; and so Sardis, its king and
its empire, lay at his feet. This Lydian campaign of Cyrus, which is
related by Herodotus, is worth noting here for the light it throws on
the character of the man, whom according to our prophecy, God chose to
be His chief instrument in that generation. If his turning back from
Babylonia, eight years before he was granted an easy entrance to her
capital, shows how patiently Cyrus could wait upon fortune, his quick
march upon Sardis is the brilliant evidence that when fortune showed
the way, she found this Persian an obedient and punctual follower. The
Lydian campaign forms as good an illustration as we shall find of these
texts of our prophet: _He pursueth them, he passeth in safety; by a
way he_ almost _treads not with his feet. He cometh upon satraps as on
mortar, and as the potter treadeth upon clay_ (xli. 3, 25). _I have
holden his right hand to bring down before him nations, and the loins
of kings will I loosen_,--poor ungirt Crœsus, for instance, relaxing
so foolishly after his victory!--_to open before him doors, and gates
shall not be shut_,--so was Sardis unready for him,--_I go before thee,
and will level the ridges; doors of brass I will shiver, and bolts of
iron cut in sunder. And I will give to thee treasures of darkness,
hidden riches of secret places_ (xlv. 1-3). Some have found in this
an allusion to the immense hoards of Crœsus, which fell to Cyrus with
Sardis.
With Lydia, the rest of Asia Minor, including the cities of the Greeks,
who held the coast of the Ægean, was bound to come into the Persian's
hands. But the process of subjection turned out to be a long one. The
Greeks got no help from Greece. Sparta sent to Cyrus an embassy with a
threat, but the Persian laughed at it and it came to nothing. Indeed,
Sparta's message was only a temptation to this irresistible warrior to
carry his fortunate arms into Europe. His own presence, however, was
required in the East, and his lieutenants found the thorough subjection
of Asia Minor a task requiring several years. It cannot have well been
concluded before 540, and while it was in progress we understand why
Cyrus did not again attack Babylonia. Meantime, he was occupied with
lesser tribes to the north of Media.
Cyrus' second campaign against Babylonia opened in 539. This time
he avoided the northern wall from which he had been repulsed in
546. Attacking Babylonia from the east, he crossed the Tigris, beat
the Babylonian king into Borsippa, laid siege to that fortress and
marched on Babylon, which was held by the king's son, Belshazzar,
Bil-sar-ussur. All the world knows the supreme generalship by which
Cyrus is said to have captured Babylon without assaulting the walls
from whose impregnable height their defenders showered ridicule upon
him; how he made himself master of Nebuchadrezzar's great bason at
Sepharvaim, and turned the Euphrates into it; and how, before the
Babylonians had time to notice the dwindling of the waters in their
midst, his soldiers waded down the river bed, and by the river gates
surprised the careless citizens upon a night of festival. But recent
research makes it more probable that her inhabitants themselves
surrendered Babylon to Cyrus.
Now it was during the course of the events just sketched, but before
their culmination in the fall of Babylon, that chs. xliii.-xlviii.
were composed. That, at least, is what they themselves suggest. In
three passages, which deal with Cyrus or with Babylon, some of the
verbs are in the past, some in the future. Those in the past tense
describe the calling and full career of Cyrus or the beginning of
preparations against Babylon. Those in the future tense promise
Babylon's fall or Cyrus' completion of the liberation of the Jews.
Thus, in ch. xliii. 14 it is written: _For your sakes I have sent
to Babylon, and I will bring down as fugitives all of them, and
the Chaldeans in the ships of their rejoicing_. Surely these words
announce that Babylon's fate was already on the way to her, but not
yet arrived. Again, in the verses which deal with Cyrus himself, xlv.
1-6, which we have partly quoted, the Persian is already _grasped
by his right hand by God, and called_; but his career is not over,
for God promises to do various things for him. The third passage is
ver. 13 of the same chapter, where Jehovah says, _I have stirred him
up in righteousness, and_, changing to the future tense, _all his
ways will I level; he shall build My city, and My captivity shall he
send away_. What could be more precise than the tenor of all these
passages? If people would only take our prophet at his word; if with
all their belief in the inspiration of the text of Scripture, they
would only pay attention to its grammar, which surely, on their own
theory, is also thoroughly sacred, then there would be to-day no
question about the date of Isa. xl.-xlviii. As plainly as grammar
can enable it to do, this prophecy speaks of Cyrus' campaign against
Babylon as already begun, but of its completion as still future. Ch.
xlviii., it is true, assumes events as still farther developed, but
we will come to it afterwards.
During Cyrus' preparations, then, for invading Babylonia, and in
prospect of her certain fall, chs. xliii.-xlviii. repeat with greater
detail and impetuosity the truths, which we have already gathered
from chs. xl.-xlii.
1. And first of these comes naturally the omnipotence, righteousness
and personal urgency of Jehovah Himself. Everything is again assured
by His power and purpose; everything starts from His initiative.
To illustrate this we could quote from almost every verse in the
chapters under consideration. _I, I Jehovah, and there is none beside
Me a Saviour. I am God_--El. _Also from to-day on I am He._[85]
_I will work, and who shall let it? I am Jehovah. I, I am He that
blotteth out thy transgressions. I First, and I Last; and beside Me
there is no God_--Elohim. _Is there a God,_ Eloah, _beside Me? yea,
there is no Rock; I know not any. I Jehovah, Maker of all things.
I am Jehovah, and there is none else; beside Me there is no God. I
am Jehovah, and there is none else. Former of light and Creator of
darkness, Maker of peace and Creator of evil, I am Jehovah, Maker
of all these. I am Jehovah, and there is none else, God,_ Elohim,
_beside Me, God-Righteous,_ El Ssaddîq, _and a Saviour: there is none
except Me. Face Me, and be saved all ends of the earth; for I am
God,_ El, _and there is none else. Only in Jehovah--of Me shall they
say--are righteousnesses and strength. I am God,_ El, _and there is
none else; God,_ Elohim, _and there is none like Me. I am He; I am
First, yea, I am Last. I, I have spoken. I have declared it._
It is of advantage to gather together so many passages--and they
might have been increased--from chs. xliii.-xlviii. They let us
see at a glance what a part the first personal pronoun plays in
the Divine revelation. Beneath every religious truth is the unity
of God. Behind every great movement is the personal initiative
and urgency of God. And revelation is, in its essence, not the
mere publication of truths about God, but the personal presence
and communication to men of God Himself. Three words are used for
Deity--El, Eloah, Elohim--exhausting the Divine terminology. But
besides these, there is a formula which puts the point even more
sharply: _I am He_. It was the habit of the Hebrew nation, and indeed
of all Semitic peoples, who shared their reverent unwillingness
to name the Deity, to speak of Him simply by the third personal
pronoun. The Book of Job is full of instances of the habit, and it
also appears in many proper names, as Eli-hu, "My God-is-He," Abi-hu,
"My-Father-is-He." Renan adduces the practice as evidence that the
Semites were "naturally monotheistic,"[86]--as evidence for what was
never the case! But if there was no original Semitic monotheism for
this practice to prove, we may yet take the practice as evidence
for the personality of the Hebrew God. The God of the prophets is
not the _it_, which Mr. Matthew Arnold so strangely thought he had
identified in their writings, and which, in philosophic language,
that unsophisticated Orientals would never have understood, he
so cumbrously named "a tendency not ourselves that makes for
righteousness." Not anything like this is the God, who here urges
His self-consciousness upon men. He says, _I am He_,--the unseen
Power, who was too awful and too dark to be named, but about whom,
when in their terror and ignorance His worshippers sought to describe
Him, they assumed that He was a Person, and called Him, as they would
have called one of themselves, by a personal pronoun. By the mouth
of His prophet this vague and awful _He_ declares Himself as _I, I,
I_,--no mere tendency, but a living Heart and urgent Will, personal
character and force of initiative, from which all tendencies move and
take their direction and strength. _I am He._
History is strewn with the errors of those, who have sought from
God something else than Himself. All the degradation, even of the
highest religions, has sprung from this, that their votaries forgot
that religion was a communion with God Himself, a life in the power
of His character and will, and employed it as the mere communication
either of material benefits or of intellectual ideas. It has been
the mistake of millions to see in revelation nothing but the telling
of fortunes, the recovery of lost things, decision in quarrels,
direction in war, or the bestowal of some personal favour. Such are
like the person, of whom St. Luke tells us, who saw nothing in Christ
but the recoverer of a bad debt: _Master, speak unto my brother that
he divide the inheritance with me_; and their superstition is as far
from true faith as the prodigal's old heart, when he said, _Give
me the portion of goods that falleth unto me_, was from the other
heart, when, in his poverty and woe, he cast himself utterly upon his
Father: _I will arise and go to my Father_. But no less a mistake do
those make, who seek from God not Himself, but only intellectual
information. The first Reformers did well, who brought the common
soul to the personal grace of God; but many of their successors, in a
controversy, whose dust obscured the sun and allowed them to see but
the length of their own weapons, used Scripture chiefly as a store
of proofs for separate doctrines of the faith, and forgot that God
Himself was there at all. And though in these days we seek from the
Bible many desirable things, such as history, philosophy, morals,
formulas of assurance of salvation, the forgiveness of sins, maxims
for conduct, yet all these will avail us little, until we have found
behind them the living Character, the Will, the Grace, the Urgency,
the Almighty Power, by trust in whom and communion with whom alone
they are added unto us.
Now the deity, who claims in these chapters to be the One, Sovereign
God, was the deity of a little tribe. _I am Jehovah, I Jehovah am
God, I Jehovah am He._ We cannot too much impress ourselves with the
historical wonder of this. In a world, which contained Babylon and
Egypt with their large empires, Lydia with all her wealth, and the
Medes with all their force; which was already feeling the possibilities
of the great Greek life, and had the Persians, the masters of the
future, upon its threshold,--it was the god of none of these, but
of the obscurest tribe of their bondsmen, who claimed the Divine
Sovereignty for Himself; it was the pride of none of these, but the
faith of the most despised and, at its heart, most mournful religion of
the time, which offered an explanation of history, claimed the future
and was assured that the biggest forces of the world were working for
its ends. _Thus saith Jehovah, King of Israel, and his Redeemer Jehovah
of Hosts, I First, and I Last; and beside Me there is no God. Is there
a God beside Me? yea, there is no Rock; I know not any._
By itself this were a cheap claim, and might have been made by any
idol among them, were it not for the additional proofs by which it
is supported. We may summarise these additional proofs as threefold:
Laughter, Gospel and Control of History,--three marvels in the
experience of exiles. People, mournfullest and most despised, their
mouths were to be filled with the laughter of Truth's scorn upon the
idols of their conquerors. Men, most tormented by conscience and filled
with the sense of sin, they were to hear the gospel of forgiveness.
Nation, against whom all fact seemed to be working, their God told
them, alone of all nations of the world, that He controlled for their
sake the facts of to-day and the issues of to-morrow.
2. A burst of laughter comes very weirdly out of the Exile. But
we have already seen the intellectual right to scorn which these
crushed captives had. They were monotheists and their enemies were
image worshippers. Monotheism, even in its rudest forms, raises men
intellectually,--it is difficult to say by how many degrees. Indeed,
degrees do not measure the mental difference between an idolater
and him who serves with his mind, as well as with all his heart and
soul, One God, Maker of heaven and earth: it is a difference that is
absolute. Israel in captivity was conscious of this, and therefore,
although the souls of those sad men were filled beyond any in the world
with the heaviness of sorrow and the humility of guilt, their proud
faces carried a scorn they had every right to wear, as the servants of
the One God. See how this scorn breaks forth in the following passage.
Its text is corrupt, and its rhythm, at this distance from the voices
that utter it, is hardly perceptible; but thoroughly evident is its
tone of intellectual superiority, and the scorn of it gushes forth in
impetuous, unequal verse, the force of which the smoothness and dignity
of our Authorised Version has unfortunately disguised.
1.
_Formers of an idol are all of them waste,_
_And their darlings are utterly worthless!_
_And their confessors_[87]--_they! they see not and know not_
Enough _to feel shame._
_Who has fashioned a god, or an image has cast?_
_'Tis to be utterly worthless._
_Lo! all that depend on't are shamed,_
_And the gravers are less than men:_
_Let all of them gather_ and _stand._
_They quake and are shamed in the lump._
2.
_Iron-graver_--he takes[88] _a chisel,_
_And works with hot coals,_
_And with hammers he moulds;_
_And has done it with the arm of his strength._
_--Anon hungers, and strength goes;_
_Drinks no water, and wearies!_
3.
_Wood-graver--he draws a line,_
_Marks it with pencil,_
_Makes it with planes,_
_And with compasses marks it._
_So has made it the build of a man,_
_To a grace that is human--_
_To inhabit a house, cutting it cedars._[89]
4.
_Or one takes an ilex or oak,_
_And picks for himself from the trees of the wood;_
_One has planted a pine, and the rain makes it big,_
_And 'tis there for a man to burn._
_And one has taken of it, and been warmed;_
_Yea, kindles and bakes bread,--_
_Yea, works out a god, and has worshipped it!_
_Has made it an idol, and bows down before it!_
_Part of it burns he with fire,_
_Upon part eats flesh,_
_Roasts roast and is full;_
_Yea, warms him and saith,_
_"Aha, I am warm, have seen fire!"_
_And the rest of it--to a god he has made--to his image!_
_He bows to it, worships it, prays to it,_
_And says, "Save me, for my god art thou!"_
5.
_They know not and deem not!_
_For He hath bedaubed, past seeing, their eyes,_
_Past thinking, their hearts._
_And none takes to heart,
Neither has knowledge nor sense to say,_
_"Part of it burned I in fire--_
_Yea, have baked bread on its coals,_
_Do roast flesh that I eat,--_
_And the rest o't, to a Disgust should I make it?_
_The trunk of a tree should I worship?"_
_Herder of ashes,_[90] _a duped heart has sent him astray,_
_That he cannot deliver his soul, neither say,_
_"Is there not a lie in my right hand?"_
Is not the prevailing note in these verses surprise at the mental
condition of an idol-worshipper? _They see not and know not_ enough
_to feel shame. None takes it to heart, neither has knowledge nor
sense to say, Part of it I have burned in fire ... and the rest,
should I make it a god?_ This intellectual confidence, breaking out
into scorn, is the second great token of truth, which distinguishes
the religion of this poor slave of a people.
3. The third token is its moral character. The intellectual truth of
a religion would go for little, had the religion nothing to say to
man's moral sense--did it not concern itself with his sins, had it
no redemption for his guilt. Now, the chapters before us are full
of judgement and mercy. If they have scorn for the idols, they have
doom for sin, and grace for the sinner. They are no mere political
manifesto for the occasion, declaring how Israel shall be liberated
from Babylon. They are a gospel for sinners in all time. By this they
farther accredit themselves as a universal religion.
God is omnipotent, yet He can do nothing for Israel till Israel put
away their sins. Those sins, and not the people's captivity, are the
Deity's chief concern. Sin has been at the bottom of their whole
adversity. This is brought out with all the versatility of conscience
itself. Israel and their God have been at variance; their sin has
been, what conscience feels the most, a sin against love. _Yet not
upon Me hast thou called, O Jacob; how hast thou been wearied with
Me, O Israel.... I have not made thee to slave with offerings, nor
wearied thee with incense ... but thou hast made Me to slave with thy
sins, thou hast wearied Me with thine iniquities_ (xliii. 22-24). So
God sets their sins, where men most see the blackness of their guilt,
in the face of His love. And now He challenges conscience. _Put Me
in remembrance; let us come to judgement together; indict, that thou
mayest be justified_ (ver. 26). But it had been agelong and original
sin. _Thy father, the first had sinned; yea, thy representative
men_--literally _interpreters, mediators--had transgressed against
Me. Therefore did I profane consecrated princes, and gave Jacob to
the ban, and Israel to reviling_ (vv. 27, 28). The Exile itself was
but an episode in a tragedy, which began far back with Israel's
history. And so ch. xlviii. repeats: _I knew that thou dost deal very
treacherously, and Transgressor-from-the-womb do they call thee_
(ver. 8). And then there comes the sad note of what might have been.
_O that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments! then had thy peace
been as the river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea_
(ver. 18). As broad Euphrates thou shouldst have lavishly rolled, and
flashed to the sun like a summer sea. But now, hear what is left.
_There is no peace, saith Jehovah, to the wicked_ (ver. 22).
Ah, it is no dusty stretch of ancient history, no long-extinct
volcano upon the far waste of Asian politics, to which we are led by
the writings of the Exile. But they treat of man's perennial trouble;
and conscience, that never dies, speaks through their old-fashioned
letters and figures with words we feel like swords. And therefore,
still, whether they be psalms or prophecies, they stand like some
ancient minster in the modern world,--where, on each new soiled day,
till time ends, the heavy heart of man may be helped to read itself,
and lift up its guilt for mercy.
They are the confessional of the world, but they are also its gospel,
and the altar where forgiveness is sealed. _I_, even _I, am He that
blotteth out thy transgressions for Mine own sake, and will not
remember thy sins. O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of Me. I
have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a cloud
thy sins; turn unto Me, for I have redeemed thee. Israel shall be
saved by Jehovah with an everlasting salvation; ye shall not be
ashamed nor confounded world without end._[91] Now, when we remember
who the God is, who thus speaks,--not merely One who flings the word
of pardon from the sublime height of His holiness, but, as we saw,
speaks it from the midst of all His own passion and struggle under
His people's sins,--then with what assurance does His word come home
to the heart. What honour and obligation to righteousness does the
pardon of such a God put upon our hearts. One understands why Ambrose
sent Augustine, after his conversion, first to these prophecies.
4. The fourth token, which these chapters offer for the religion
of Jehovah, is the claim they make for it to interpret and to
control history. There are two verbs, which are frequently repeated
throughout the chapters, and which are given together in ch. xliii.
12: _I have published and I have saved._ These are the two acts by
which Jehovah proves His solitary divinity over against the idols.
The _publishing_, of course, is the same prediction, of which ch.
xli. spoke. It is _publishing_ in former times things happening now;
it is _publishing_ now things that are still to happen. _And who,
like Me, calls out and publishes it, and sets it in order for Me,
since I appointed the ancient people? and the things that are coming,
and that shall come, let them publish. Tremble not, nor fear: did
I not long ago cause thee to hear? and I published, and ye are My
witnesses. Is there a God beside Me? nay, there is no Rock; I know
none_ (xliv. 7, 8).
The two go together, the doing of wonderful and saving acts for His
people and the publishing of them before they come to pass. Israel's
past is full of such acts. Ch. xliii. instances the delivery from
Egypt (vv. 16, 17), but immediately proceeds (vv. 18, 19): _Remember
ye not the former things_--here our old friend ri'shonôth occurs
again, but this time means simply _previous events_--_neither
consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; even
now it springs forth. Shall ye not know it? Yea, I will set in the
wilderness a way, in the desert rivers._ And of this new event of the
Return, and of others which will follow from it, like the building
of Jerusalem, the chapters insist over and over again, that they are
the work of Jehovah, who is therefore a Saviour God. But what better
proof can be given, that these saving facts are indeed His own and
part of His counsel, than that He foretold them by His messengers
and prophets to Israel,--of which previous _publication_ His people
are the witnesses. _Who among the peoples can publish thus, and let
us hear predictions?_--again ri'shonôth, _things ahead_--_let them
bring their witnesses, that they may be justified, and let them hear
and say, Truth. Ye are my witnesses, saith Jehovah_, to Israel
(xliii. 9, 10). _I have published, and I have saved, and I have
shewed, and there was no strange god among you; therefore_--because
Jehovah was notoriously the only God who had to do with them during
all this prediction and fulfilment of prediction--_ye are witnesses
for Me, saith Jehovah, that I am God_ (_id._ ver. 12). The meaning
of all this is plain. Jehovah is God alone, because He is directly
effective in history for the salvation of His people, and because
He has published beforehand what He will do. The great instance of
this, which the prophecy adduces, is the present movement towards
the liberation of the people, of which movement Cyrus is the most
conspicuous factor. Of this xlv. 19 ff. says: _Not in secret have
I spoken, in a place of the land of darkness. I have not said to
the seed of Jacob, In vanity seek ye Me. I Jehovah am a speaker of
righteousness,_[92] _a publisher of things that are straight. Be
gathered and come in; draw together, ye survivors of the nations:
they have no knowledge that carry about the log of their image, and
are suppliants to a god that cannot save. Publish, and bring it here;
nay, let them advise together; who made this to be heard_,--that is,
_who published this_,--_of ancient time?_ Who _published this of old?
I Jehovah, and there is none God beside Me: a God righteous_,--that
is, consistent, true to His published word,--_and a Saviour, there is
none beside Me_. Here we have joined together the same ideas as in
xliii. 12. There _I have declared and saved_ is equivalent to _a God
righteous and a Saviour_ here. _Only in Jehovah are righteousnesses_,
that is, fidelity to His anciently published purposes; _and
strength_, that is, capacity to carry these purposes out in history.
God is righteous because, according to another verse in the same
prophecy (xliv. 26), _He confirmeth the word of His servant, and the
advice of His messengers He fulfilleth._
Now the question has been asked, To what predictions does the
prophecy allude as being fulfilled in those days when Cyrus was so
evidently advancing to the overthrow of Babylon? Before answering
this question it is well to note, that, for the most part, the
prophet speaks in general terms. He gives no hint to justify that
unfounded belief, to which so many think it necessary to cling, that
Cyrus was actually named by a prophet of Jehovah years before he
appeared. Had such a prediction existed, we can have no doubt that
our prophet would now have appealed to it. No: he evidently refers
only to those numerous and notorious predictions by Isaiah, and by
Jeremiah, of the return of Israel from exile after a certain and
fixed period. Those were now coming to pass.
But from this new day Jehovah also predicts for the days to come,
and He does this very particularly, xliv. 26, _Who is saying of
Jerusalem, She shall be inhabited; and of the cities of Judah, They
shall be built; and of her waste places, I will raise them up. Who
saith to the deep, Be dry, and thy rivers I will dry up. Who saith of
Koresh, My Shepherd, and all My pleasure he shall fulfil: even saying
of Jerusalem, She shall be built, and the Temple shall be founded._
Thus, backward and forward, yesterday, to-day and for ever, Jehovah's
hand is upon history. He controls it: it is the fulfilment of His
ancient purpose. By predictions made long ago and fulfilled to-day,
by the readiness to predict to-day what will happen to-morrow, He is
surely God and God alone. Singular fact, that in that day of great
empires, confident in their resources, and with the future so near
their grasp, it should be the God of a little people, cut off from
their history, servile and seemingly spent, who should take the big
things of earth--Egypt, Ethiopia, Seba--and speak of them as counters
to be given in exchange for His people; who should speak of such a
people as the chief heirs of the future, the indispensable ministers
of mankind. The claim has two Divine features. It is unique, and
history has vindicated it. It is unique: no other religion, in that
or in any other time, has so rationally explained past history or
laid out the ages to come upon the lines of a purpose so definite,
so rational, so beneficent--a purpose so worthy of the One God and
Creator of all. And it has been vindicated: Israel returned to their
own land, resumed the development of their calling, and, after the
centuries came and went, fulfilled the promise that they should be
the religious teachers of mankind. The long delay of this fulfilment
surely but testifies the more to the Divine foresight of the promise;
to the patience, which nature, as well as history, reveals to be, as
much as omnipotence, a mark of Deity.
* * * * *
These, then, are the four points, upon which the religion of Israel
offers itself. _First_, it is the force of the character and grace
of a personal God; _second_, it speaks with a high intellectual
confidence, whereof its scorn is here the chief mark; _third_, it is
intensely moral, making man's sin its chief concern; and _fourth_, it
claims the control of history, and history has justified the claim.
FOOTNOTES:
[85] _From to-day on_, Ez. xlviii. 35; but others take it _Also
to-day I am He_.
[86] Renan's theory of the "natural monotheism" of the Semites was
first published in his _Histoire des Langues Semitiques_ some forty
years ago. Nearly every Semitic scholar of repute found some occasion
or other to refute it. But with Renan's charming genius for neglecting
all facts that disturb an artistic arrangement of his subject, the
overwhelming evidence against the natural monotheism of the Semite
has been ignored by him, and he repeats his theory unmodified in his
_Histoire du Peuple d'Israel_, i., 31, published 1888.
[87] Literally _witnesses_--_i.e._, of the idols.
[88] This word is wanting in the text, which is corrupt here. Some
supply the word sharpeneth, imagining that חדד has fallen away from
the beginning of the verse, through confusion with the יחד which ends
the previous verse; or they bring יחד itself, changing it to חדד. But
evidently ברזל חרשׁ begins the verse; _cf._ the parallel עצים רשׁח
which begins ver. 13.
[89] Here, again, the text is uncertain. With some critics I have
borrowed for this verse the first three words of the following verse.
[90] Perhaps _feeder on ashes_.
[91] Chs. xliii. 25; xliv. 21, 22; xlv. 17.
[92] See ch. xiv. of this volume.
CHAPTER X.
_CYRUS._
ISAIAH xli. 2, 25; xliv. 28-xlv. 13; xlvi. 11; xlviii. 14, 15.
Cyrus, the Persian, is the only man outside the covenant and people
of Israel, who is yet entitled the LORD'S Shepherd, and the LORD'S
Messiah or Christ. He is, besides, the only great personality, of
whom both the Bible and Greek literature treat at length and with
sympathy. Did we know nothing more of him than this, the heathen who
received the most sacred titles of Revelation, the one man in history
who was the cynosure of both Greece and Judah, could not fail to be
of the greatest interest to us. But apart from the way, in which he
impressed the Greek imagination and was interpreted by the Hebrew
conscience, we have an amount of historical evidence about Cyrus,
which, if it dissipates the beautiful legends told of his origin
and his end, confirms most of what is written of his character by
Herodotus and Xenophon, and all of what is described as his career
by the prophet whom we are studying. Whether of his own virtue, or
as being the leader of a new race of men at the fortunate moment of
their call, Cyrus lifted himself, from the lowest of royal stations,
to a conquest and an empire achieved by only two or three others in
the history of the world. Originally but the prince of Anshan, or
Anzan,[93]--a territory of uncertain size at the head of the Persian
Gulf,--he brought under his sway, by policy or war, the large and
vigorous nations of the Medes and Persians; he overthrew the Lydian
kingdom, and subjugated Asia Minor; he so impressed the beginnings
of Greek life, that, with all their own great men, the Greeks never
ceased to regard this Persian as the ideal king; he captured Babylon,
the throne of the ancient East, and thus effected the transfer of
empire from the Semitic to the Aryan stock. He also satisfied the
peoples, whom he had beaten, with his rule, and organised his realms
with a thoroughness unequalled over so vast an extent till the rise
of the Roman Empire.
We have scarcely any contemporary or nearly contemporary evidence
about his personality. But his achievements testify to extraordinary
genius, and his character was the admiration of all antiquity. To
Greek literature Cyrus was the Prince pre-eminent,--set forth as
the model for education in childhood, self-restraint in youth, just
and powerful government in manhood. Most of what we read of him in
Xenophon's _Cyropædia_ is, of course, romance; but the very fact,
that, like our own King Arthur, Cyrus was used as a mirror to flash
great ideals down the ages, proves that there was with him native
brilliance and width of surface as well as fortunate eminence of
position. He owed much to the virtue of his race. Rotten as the
later Persians have become, the nation in those days impressed its
enemies with its truthfulness, purity and vigour. But the man, who
not only led such a nation, and was their darling, but combined
under his sceptre, in equal discipline and contentment, so many
other and diverse peoples, so many powerful and ambitious rulers,
cannot have been merely the best specimen of his own nation's
virtue, but must have added to this, at least much of the original
qualities--humanity, breadth of mind, sweetness, patience and genius
for managing men--which his sympathetic biographer imputes to him in
so heroic a degree. It is evident that the _Cyropædia_ is ignorant of
many facts about Cyrus, and must have taken conscious liberties with
many more, but nobody--who, on the one hand, is aware of what Cyrus
effected upon the world, and who, on the other, can appreciate that
it was possible for a foreigner (who, nevertheless, had travelled
through most of the scenes of Cyrus' career) to form this rich
conception of him more than a century after his death--can doubt that
the Persian's character (due allowance being made for hero-worship)
must have been in the main as Xenophon describes it.
Yet it is very remarkable, that our Scripture states not one
moral or religious virtue as the qualification of this Gentile to
the title of _Jehovah's Messiah_. We search here in vain for any
gleam of appreciation of that character, which drew the admiring
eyes of Greece. In the whole range of our prophecy there is not a
single adjective, expressing a moral virtue, applied to Cyrus. The
_righteousness_, which so many passages associate with his name, is
attributed, not to him, but to God's calling of him, and does not
imply justice or any similar quality, but is, as we shall afterwards
see when we examine the remarkable use of this word in Second Isaiah,
a mixture of good faith and thoroughness,--all-rightness.[94] The
one passage of our prophet, in which it has been supposed by some
that Jehovah makes a religious claim to Cyrus, as if the Persian were
a monotheist--_he calleth on My name_--is, as we have seen,[95] too
uncertain, both in text and rendering, to have anything built upon
it. Indeed, no Hebrew could have justly praised this Persian's faith,
who called himself the "servant of Merodach," and in his public
proclamations to Babylonia ascribed to the Babylonian gods his power
to enter their city.[96] Cyrus was very probably the pious ruler,
described by Xenophon, but he was no monotheist. And our prophet
denies all religious sympathy between him and Jehovah, in words too
strong to be misunderstood: _I woo thee, though thou hast not known
Me.... I gird thee, though thou hast not known Me_ (ch. xlv. 4, 5).
On what, then, is the Divine election of CYRUS grounded by our
prophet, if not upon his character and his faith? Simply and barely
upon God's sovereignty and will. That is the impressive lesson of
the passage: _I am Jehovah, Maker of everything; that stretch forth
the heavens alone, and spread the earth by Myself ... that say of
Koresh, My shepherd, and all My pleasure he shall accomplish_ (xliv.
24, 28). Cyrus is Jehovah's, because all things are Jehovah's; of
whatsoever character or faith they be, they are His and for His uses.
_I am Jehovah, and there is none else: Former of light and Creator
of darkness, Maker of peace and Creator of evil; I, Jehovah, Maker
of all these._ God's sovereignty could not be more broadly stated.
All things, irrespective of their character, are from Him and for
His ends. But what end is dearer to the Almighty, what has He more
plainly declared, than that His people[97] shall be settled again in
their own land? For this He will use the fittest force. The return of
Israel to Palestine is a political event, requiring political power;
and the greatest political power of the day is Cyrus. Therefore,
by His prophet, the Almighty declares Cyrus to be His people's
deliverer, His own anointed. _Thus saith Jehovah to His Messiah, to
Koresh: ... That thou mayest know that I am Jehovah, Caller of thee
by thy name, God of Israel, for the sake of My servant Jacob and
Israel My chosen. And I have called thee by thy name. I have wooed
thee, though thou hast not known Me_ (xlv. 1, 3, 4).
Now to this designation of Cyrus, as the Messiah, great objections
rose from Israel. We can understand them. People, who have fallen
from a glorious past, cling passionately to its precedents. All
the ancient promises of a deliverer for Israel represented him as
springing from the house of David. The deliverance, too, was to have
come by miracle, or by the impression of the people's own holiness
upon their oppressors. The LORD Himself was to have made bare His arm
and Israel to go forth in the pride of His favour, as in the days of
Egypt and the Red Sea. But this deliverer, who was announced, was
alien to the commonwealth of Israel; and not by some miracle was the
people's exodus promised, but as the effect of his imperial word--a
minor incident in his policy! The precedents and the pride of Israel
called out against such a scheme of salvation, and the murmurs of the
people rose against the word of God.
Sternly replies the Almighty: _Woe to him that striveth with his
Moulder, a potsherd among the potsherds of the ground! Saith clay to
its moulder, What doest thou? or thy work_ of thee, _No hands hath he?
Woe to him that saith to a father, What begettest thou? or to a woman,
With what travailest thou? Thus saith Jehovah, Holy of Israel and his
Moulder: The things that are coming ask of Me; concerning My sons, and
concerning the work of My hands, command ye Me! I have made Earth,_[98]
_and created man upon her: I, My hands, have stretched Heaven, and all
its host have I ordered._ In that universal providence, this Cyrus is
but an incident. _I have stirred him up in righteousness, and all his
ways shall I make level. He_--emphatic--_shall build My City, and My
Captivity he shall send off--not for price and not for reward, saith
Jehovah of Hosts_ (xlv. 9-13).
To this bare fiat, the passages referring to Cyrus in ch. xlvi. and ch.
xlviii. add scarcely anything. _I am God, and there is none like Me....
Who say, My counsel shall stand, and all My pleasure will I perform.
Who call from the sunrise a Bird-of-prey, from a land far-off the Man
of My counsel. Yea, I have spoken, yea, I will bring it to pass. I have
formed, yea, will do it_ (xlvi. 9, 10, 11). _Bird-of-prey_ here has
been thought to have reference to the eagle, which was the standard of
Cyrus. But it refers to Cyrus himself. What God sees in this man to
fulfil His purpose is swift, resistless force. Not his character, but
his swoop is useful for the Almighty's end. Again: _Be gathered, all of
you, and hearken; who among them hath published these things? Jehovah
hath loved him: he will do His pleasure on Babel, and his arm_ shall
be on _the Chaldeans. I, I have spoken; yea, I have called him: I have
brought him, and will cause his way to prosper,_ or, _I will pioneer
his way_ (xlviii. 14, 15). This verb _to cause to prosper_ is one often
used by our prophet, but nowhere more appropriately to its original
meaning, than here, where it is used of _a way_. The word signifies _to
cut through_; then _to ford a river_--there is no word for bridge in
Hebrew; then _to go on well, prosper_.[99]
In all these passages, then, there is no word about character. Cyrus
is neither chosen for his character nor said to be endowed with one.
But that he is there, and that he does so much, is due simply to
this, that God has chosen him. And what he is endowed with is force,
push, swiftness, irresistibleness. He is, in short, not a character,
but a tool; and God makes no apology for using him but this, that he
has the qualities of a tool.
Now we cannot help being struck with the contrast of all this, the
Hebrew view of Cyrus, with the well-known Greek views of him. To the
Greeks he is first and foremost a character. Xenophon, and Herodotus
almost as much as Xenophon, are less concerned with what Cyrus did
than with what he was. He is the King, the ideal ruler. It is his
simplicity, his purity, his health, his wisdom, his generosity, his
moral influence upon men, that attract the Greeks, and they conceive
that he cannot be too brightly painted in his virtues, if so he may
serve for an example to following generations. But bring Cyrus out
of the light of the eyes of this hero-worshipping people, that light
that has so gilded his native virtues, into the shadow of the austere
Hebrew faith, and the brilliance is quenched. He still moves forcibly,
but his character is neutral. Scripture emphasizes only his strength,
his serviceableness, his success: _Whose right hand I have holden, to
subdue nations before him, and I will loosen the loins of kings; to
open doors before him, and gates shall not be shut. I will go before
thee, and make the rugged places plain. I will shiver doors of brass,
and bars of iron will I sunder_ (xlv. 1, 2). That Cyrus is doing a work
in God's hand and for God's end, and therefore forcibly, and sure of
success--that is all the interest Scripture takes in Cyrus.
Observe the difference. It is characteristic of the two nations. The
Greek views Cyrus as an example; therefore cannot too abundantly
multiply his morality. The Hebrew views him as a tool; but with
a tool you are not anxious about its moral character, you only
desire to be convinced of its force and its fitness. The Greek mind
is careful to unfold the noble humanity of the man,--a humanity
universally and eternally noble. By the side of that imperishable
picture of him, how meagre to Greek eyes would have seemed the
temporary occasion, for which the Hebrew claimed that Cyrus had been
raised up--to lead the petty Jewish tribe back to their own obscure
corner of the earth. Herodotus and Xenophon, had you told them that
this was the chief commission of Cyrus from God, to restore the Jews
to Palestine, would have laughed. "Identify him, forsooth, with those
provincial interests!" they would have said. "He was meant, we lift
him up, for mankind!"
What judgement are we to pass on these two characteristic pictures of
Cyrus? What lessons are we to draw from their contrast?
They do not contradict, but in many particulars they corroborate
one another. Cyrus would not have been the efficient weapon in
the Almighty's hand, which our prophet panegyrises, but for that
thoughtfulness in preparation and swift readiness to seize the
occasion, which Xenophon extols. And nothing is more striking to one
familiar with our Scriptures, when reading the _Cyropædia_, than
the frequency with which the writer insists on the success that
followed the Persian. If to the Hebrew Cyrus was the called of God,
upheld in righteousness, to the Greek he was equally conspicuous as
the favourite of fortune. "I have always," Xenophon makes the dying
king say, "seemed to feel my strength increase with the advance of
time, so that I have not found myself weaker in my old age than in
my youth, nor do I know that I have attempted or desired anything in
which I have not been successful."[100] And this was said piously,
for Xenophon's Cyrus was a devout servant of the gods.
The two views, then, are not hostile, nor are we compelled to choose
between them. Still, they make a very suggestive contrast, if we put
these two questions about them: Which is the more true to historical
fact? Which is the more inspiring example?
Which is the more true to historical fact? There is no difficulty
in answering this: undoubtedly, the Hebrew. It has been of far
more importance to the world that Cyrus freed the Jews than that
he inspired the _Cyropædia_. That single enactment of his, perhaps
only one of a hundred consequences of his capture of Babylon, has
had infinitely greater results than his character, or than its
magnificent exaggeration by Greek hero-worship. No one who has read
the _Cyropædia_--out of his school-days--would desire to place it
in any contrast, in which its peculiar charm would be shadowed,
or its own modest and strictly-limited claims would not receive
justice. The charm, the truth of the _Cyropædia_, are eternal; but
the significance they borrow from Cyrus--though they are as much
due, perhaps, to Xenophon's own pure soul as to Cyrus--is not to be
compared for one instant to the significance of that single deed
of his, into which the Bible absorbs the meaning of his whole
career,--the liberation of the Jews. The _Cyropædia_ has been the
instruction and delight of many,--of as many in modern times,
perhaps, as in ancient. But the liberation of the Jews meant the
assurance of the world's religious education. Cyrus sent this people
back to their land solely as a spiritual people. He did not allow
them to set up again the house of David, but by his decree the Temple
was rebuilt. Israel entered upon their purely religious career, set
in order their vast stores of spiritual experience, wrote their
histories of grace and providence, developed their worship, handed
down their law, and kept themselves holy unto the Lord. Till, in
the fulness of the times, from this petty and exclusive tribe, and
by the fire, which they kept burning on the altar that Cyrus had
empowered them to raise, there was kindled the glory of an universal
religion. To change the figure, Christianity sprang from Judaism as
the flower from the seed; but it was the hand of Cyrus, which planted
the seed in the only soil, in which it could have fructified. Of
such an universal destiny for the Faith, Cyrus was not conscious,
but the Jews themselves were. Our prophet represents him, indeed, as
acting for _Jacob My servant's sake, and Israel's My chosen_, but the
chapter does not close without proclamation to _the ends of the earth
to look unto Jehovah and be saved_, and the promise of a time _when
every knee shall bow and every tongue swear unto the God of Israel_.
Now put all these results, which the Jews, regardless of the
character of Cyrus, saw flowing from his policy, as the servant of
God on their behalf, side by side with the influence which the Greeks
borrowed from Cyrus, and say whether Greek or Jew had the more true
and historical conscience of this great power,--whether Greek or Jew
had his hand on the pulse of the world's main artery. Surely we see
that the main artery of human life runs down the Bible, that here we
have a sense of the control of history, which is higher than even the
highest hero-worship. Some may say, "True, but what a very unequal
contest, into which to thrust the poor _Cyropædia_!" Precisely; it
is from the inequality of the contrast, that we learn the uniqueness
of Israel's inspiration. Let us do all justice to the Greek and his
appreciation of Cyrus. In that, he seems the perfection of humanity;
but with the Jew we rise to the Divine, touching the right hand of
the providence of God.
There is a moral lesson for ourselves in these two views about Cyrus.
The Greeks regard him as a hero, the Jews as an instrument. The Greeks
are interested in him that he is so attractive a figure, so effective
an example to rouse men and restrain them. But the Jews stand in wonder
of his subjection to the will of God; their Scriptures extol, not his
virtues, but his predestination to certain Divine ends.
Now let us say no word against hero-worship. We have need of all
the heroes, which the Greek, and every other, literature can raise
up for us. We need the communion of the saints. To make us humble
in our pride, to make us hopeful in our despair, we need our big
brothers, the heroes of humanity. We need them in history, we need
them in fiction; we cannot do without them for shame, for courage,
for fellowship, for truth. But let us remember that still more
indispensable--for strength, as well as for peace, of mind--is the
other temper. Neither self nor the world is conquered by admiration
of men, but only by the fear and obligation of God. I speak now
of applying this temper to ourselves. We shall live fruitful and
consistent lives only in so far as we hear God saying to us, _I gird
thee_, and give ourselves into His guidance. Admire heroes if thou
wilt, but only admire them and thou remainest a slave. Learn their
secret, to commit themselves to God and to obey Him, and thou shalt
become a hero too.
God's anointing of Cyrus, the heathen, has yet another lesson to
teach us, which religious people especially need to learn.
This passage about Cyrus lifts us to a very absolute and awful faith.
_I am Jehovah, and none else: Former of light and Creator of darkness,
Maker of peace and Creator of mischief; I Jehovah, Maker of all these
things._ The objection at once rises, "Is it possible to believe this?
Are we to lay upon providence everything that happens? Surely we
Westerns, with our native scepticism and strong conscience, cannot be
expected to hold a faith so Oriental and fatalistic as that."
But notice to whom the passage is addressed. To religious people, who
professedly accept God's sovereignty, but wish to make an exception
in the one case against which they have a prejudice--that a Gentile
should be the deliverer of the holy people. Such narrow and imperfect
believers are reminded that they must not substitute for faith in God
their own ideas of how God ought to work; that they must not limit
His operations to their own conception of His past revelations; that
God does not always work even by His own precedents; and that many
other forces than conventional and religious ones--yea, even forces as
destitute of moral or religious character as Cyrus himself seemed to
be--are also in God's hands, and may be used by Him as means of grace.
There is frequent charge made in our day against what are called the
more advanced schools of theology, of scepticism and irreverence. But
this passage reminds us that the most sceptical and irreverent are
those old-fashioned believers, who, clinging to precedent and their own
stereotyped notions of things, deny that God's hands are in a movement,
because it is novel and not orthodox. _Woe unto him that striveth with
his Moulder; shall the clay say to its moulder, What makest thou?_ God
did not cease _moulding_ when He gave us the canon and our creeds, when
He founded the Church and the Sacraments. His hand is still among the
clay, and upon time, that great "potter's wheel," which still moves
obedient to His impulse. All the large forward movements, the big
things of to-day--commerce, science, criticism--however neutral, like
Cyrus, their character may be, are, like Cyrus, grasped and anointed
by God. Therefore let us show reverence and courage before the great
things of to-day. Do not let us scoff at their novelty or grow fearful
because they show no orthodox, or even no religious, character. God
reigns, and He will use them, for what has been the dearest purpose
of His heart, the emancipation of true religion, the confirmation of
the faithful, the victory of righteousness. When Cyrus rose and the
prophet named him as Israel's deliverer, and the severely orthodox in
Israel objected, did God attempt to soothe them by pointing out how
admirable a character he was, and how near in religion to the Jews
themselves? God did no such thing, but spoke only of the military and
political fitness of this great engine, by which He was to batter
Babylon. That Cyrus was a quick marcher, a far shooter, an inspirer of
fear, a follower up of victory, one who swooped like a _bird-of-prey_,
one whose weight of war burst through every obstruction,--this is what
the astonished pedants are told about the Gentile, to whose Gentileness
they had objected. No soft words to calm their bristling orthodoxy,
but heavy facts,--an appeal to their common-sense, if they had any,
that this was the most practical means for the practical end God had
in view. For again we learn the old lesson the prophets are ever so
anxious to teach us, _God is wise_. He is concerned, not to be orthodox
or true to His own precedent, but to be practical, and effective for
salvation.
And so, too, in our own day, though we may not see any religious
character whatsoever about certain successful movements--say in
science, for instance--which are sure to affect the future of the
Church and of Faith, do not let us despair, neither deny that they,
too, are in the counsels of God. Let us only be sure that they
are permitted for some end--some practical end; and watch, with
meekness but with vigilance, to see what that end shall be. Perhaps
the endowment of the Church with new weapons of truth; perhaps her
emancipation from associations which, however ancient, are unhealthy;
perhaps her opportunity to go forth upon new heights of vision, new
fields of conquest.
FOOTNOTES:
[93] Identified by Delitzsch as East, Halévy as West, and Winckler
as North, Elam. Cyrus, though reigning here, was a pure Persian, an
Akhæmenid or son of the royal house of Persia.
[94] The parallel which Professor Sayce (_Fresh Light from the
Ancient Monuments_, p. 147) draws between the statement of the
Cyrus-cylinder, that Cyrus "governed in justice and righteousness,
and was righteous in hand and heart," and Isa. xlv. 13, "Jehovah
raised him up in righteousness," is therefore utterly unreal. It
is very difficult to see how the Deputy-Professor of Comparative
Philology at Oxford could have been reminded of the one passage by
the other, for in Isa. xlv. 13 _righteousness_ neither is used of
Cyrus, nor signifies the moral virtue which it does on the cylinder.
[95] See note to ch. vii.
[96] The following are extracts from the Cylinder of Cyrus
(see Sayce's _Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments_, pp.
138-140):--"Cyrus, king of Elam, he (Merodach) proclaimed by name for
the sovereignty.... Whom he had conquered with his hand, he governed
in justice and righteousness. Merodach, the great lord, the restorer
of his people, beheld with joy the deeds of his vicegerent, who was
righteous in hand and heart. To Babylon he summoned his march, and
he bade him take the road to Babylon; like a friend and a comrade he
went at his side. Without fighting or battle he caused him to enter
into Babylon, his city of Babylon feared. The god ... has in goodness
drawn nigh to him, has made strong his name. I Cyrus ... I entered
Babylon in peace.... Merodach the great lord (cheered) the heart
of his servant.... My vast armies he marshalled peacefully in the
midst of Babylon; throughout Sumer and Accad I had no revilers....
Accad, Marad, etc., I restored the gods who dwelt within them to
their places ... all their peoples I assembled and I restored their
lands. And the gods of Sumer and Accad whom Nabonidos, to the anger
of the lord of gods (Merodach), had brought into Babylon, I settled
in peace in their sanctuaries by command of Merodach, the great lord.
In the goodness of their hearts may all the gods whom I have brought
into their strong places daily intercede before Bel and Nebo, that
they should grant me length of days; may they bless my projects with
prosperity, and may they say to Merodach my lord, that Cyrus the
king, thy worshipper, and Kambyses his son (deserve his favour)."
[97] Why so sovereign a God should be in such peculiar relations with
one people, we will try to see in ch. xv. of this volume.
[98] Earth here without the article, but plainly _the earth_, and not
_the land_ of Judah.
[99] _Cf._ with this Hebrew word צלח the Greek προκοπτειν, to beat
or cut a way through like pioneers; then to forward a work, advance,
prosper (Luke ii. 52; Gal. i. 14; 2 Tim. ii. 16).
[100] _Cyropædia_, Book VIII., ch. vii., 6.
CHAPTER XI.
_BEARING OR BORNE._
ISAIAH xlvi.
Chapter xlvi. is a definite prophecy, complete in itself. It repeats
many of the truths which we have found in previous chapters, and we
have already seen what it says about Cyrus. But it also strikes out a
new truth, very relevant then, when men made idols and worshipped the
works of their hands, and relevant still, when so many, with equal
stupidity, are more concerned about keeping up the forms of their
religion than allowing God to sustain themselves.
The great contrast, which previous chapters have been elaborating, is
the contrast between the idols and the living God. On the one side
we have had pictures of the busy idol-factories, cast into agitation
by the advent of Cyrus, turning out with much toil and noise their
tawdry, unstable images. Foolish men, instead of letting God undertake
for them, go to and try what their own hands and hammers can effect.
Over against them, and their cunning and toil, the prophet sees the
God of Israel rise alone, taking all responsibility of salvation to
Himself--_I, I am He: look unto Me, all the ends of the earth, and be
ye saved_. This contrast comes to a head in ch. xlvi.
It is still the eve of the capture of Babylon; but the prophet
pictures to himself what will happen on the morrow of the capture.
He sees the conqueror following the old fashion of triumph--rifling
the temples of his enemies and carrying away the defeated and
discredited gods as trophies to his own. The haughty idols are
torn from their pedestals and brought head foremost through the
temple doors. _Bel crouches_--as men have crouched to Bel; _Nebo
cowers_--a stronger verb than _crouches_, but assonant to it, like
_cower_ to _crouch_.[101] _Their idols have fallen to the beast and
to the cattle._ _Beast_, "that is, tamed beast, perhaps elephants
in contrast to _cattle_, or domestic animals."[102] The _things
with which ye burdened yourselves_, carrying them shoulder high in
religious processions, _are things laden_, mere baggage-bales, _a
burden for a hack_, or _jade_. The nouns are mostly feminine--the
Hebrew neuter--in order to heighten the dead-weight impression of the
idols. So many baggage-bales for beasts' backs--such are your gods,
O Babylonians! _They cower, they crouch together_ (fall limp is the
idea, like corpses); _neither are they able to recover the burden_,
and _themselves_!--literally _their soul_, any real soul of deity
that ever was in them--_into captivity are they gone_.
This never happened. Cyrus entered Babylon not in spite of the native
gods, but under their patronage, and was careful to do homage to them.
Nabunahid, the king of Babylon, whom he supplanted, had vexed the
priests of Bel or Merodach; and these priests had been among the many
conspirators in favour of the Persian. So far, then, from banishing
the idols, upon his entry into the city, Cyrus had himself proclaimed
as "the servant of Merodach," restored to their own cities the idols
that Nabunahid had brought to Babylon, and prayed, "In the goodness of
their hearts may all the gods whom I have brought into their strong
places daily intercede before Bel and Nebo, that they should grant me
length of days. May they bless my projects with prosperity, and may
they say to Merodach, my lord, that Cyrus the king, thy worshipper, and
Kambyses, his son (deserve thy favour)."[103]
Are we, then, because the idols were not taken into captivity, as
our prophet pictures, to begin to believe in him less? We shall be
guilty of that error, only when we cease to disallow to a prophet
of God what we do allow to any other writer, and praise him when he
employs it to bring home a moral truth--the use of his imagination.
What if these idols never were packed off by Cyrus, as our prophet
here paints for us? It still remains true that, standing where they
did, or carried away, as they may have been later on, by conquerors,
who were monotheists indeed, they were still mere ballast, so much
dead-weight for weary beasts.
Now, over against this kind of religion, which may be reduced to so
many pounds avoirdupois, the prophet sees in contrast the God of
Israel. And it is but natural, when contrasted with the dead-weight
of the idols, that God should reveal Himself as a living and a
lifting God: a strong, unfailing God, who carries and who saves.
_Hearken unto Me, O House of Jacob, and all the remnant of the House
of Israel; burdens from the womb, things carried from the belly.
Burdens, things carried_, are the exact words used of the idols in
ver. 1. _Even unto old age I am He, and unto grey hairs I will
bear_--a grievous word, used only of great burdens. _I have made, and
I will carry; yea, I will bear, and will recover._ Then follow some
verses in the familiar style. _To whom will ye liken Me, and match
Me, and compare Me, that we may be like? They who pour gold from a
bag, and silver they measure off with an ellwand_--gorgeous, vulgar
Babylonians!--_they hire a smelter, and he maketh it a god_--out of
so many ells of silver!--_they bow down to it, yea, they worship
it! They carry him upon the shoulder, they bear him,_--again the
grievous word,--_to bring him to his station; and he stands; from
his place he never moves. Yea, one cries unto him, and he answers
not; from his trouble he doth not save him. Remember this, and show
yourselves men_--the playing with these gilded toys is so unmanly
to the monotheist (it will be remembered what we said in ch. iii.
about the exiles feeling that to worship idols was to be less than
a man[104])--_lay it again to heart, ye transgressors. Remember the
former things of old: for I am God_, El, _and there is none else;
God_, Elohim, _and there is none like Me. Publishing from the origin
the issue, and from ancient times things not yet done; saying, My
counsel shall stand, and all My pleasure shall I perform; calling
out of the sunrise a Bird-of-prey, from the land that is far off the
Man of My counsel. Yea, I have spoken; yea, I will bring it in. I
have purposed; yea, I will do it. Hearken unto Me, ye obdurate of
heart_--that is, _brave, strong, sound_, but too sound to adapt their
preconceived notions to God's new revelation;--_ye that are far from
righteousness_, in spite of your _sound_ opinions as to how it ought
to come. _I have brought near My righteousness_, in distinction to
yours. _It shall not be far off_, like your impossible ideas, _and
My salvation shall not tarry, and I will set in Zion salvation, for
Israel My glory_. It is evident that from the idolaters Jehovah has
turned again, in these last verses, to the pedants in Israel, who
were opposed to Cyrus because he was a Gentile, and who cherished
their own obdurate notions of how salvation and righteousness should
come. Ah, their kind of righteousness would never come, they would
always be far from it! Let them rather trust to Jehovah's, which He
was rapidly bringing near in His own way.
Such is the prophecy. It starts a truth, which bursts free from local
and temporal associations, and rushes in strength upon our own day
and our own customs. The truth is this: it makes all the difference
to a man how he conceives his religion--whether as something that he
has to carry, or as something that will carry him. We have too many
idolatries and idol manufactories among us to linger longer on those
ancient ones. This cleavage is permanent in humanity--between the
men that are trying to carry their religion, and the men that are
allowing God to carry them.
Now let us see how God does carry. God's carriage of man is no mystery.
It may be explained without using one theological term; the Bible gives
us the best expression of it. But it may be explained without a word
from the Bible. It is broad and varied as man's moral experience.
1. The first requisite for stable and buoyant life is ground, and
the faithfulness of law. What sends us about with erect bodies and
quick, firm step is the sense that the surface of the earth is sure,
that gravitation will not fail, that our eyes and the touch of our
feet and our judgement of distance do not deceive us. Now, what the
body needs for its world, the soul needs for hers. For her carriage
and bearing in life the soul requires the assurance, that the moral
laws of the universe are as conscience has interpreted them to her,
and will continue to be as in experience she has found them. To
this requisite of the soul--this indispensable condition of moral
behaviour--God gives His assurance. _I have made_, He says, _and I
will bear_.[105] These words were in answer to an instinct, that
must have often sprung up in our hearts when we have been struggling
for at least moral hope--the instinct which will be all that is
sometimes left to a man's soul when unbelief lowers, and under its
blackness a flood of temptations rushes in, and character and conduct
feel impossible to his strength--the instinct that springs from
the thought, "Well, here I am, not responsible for being here, but
so set by some One else, and the responsibility of the life, which
is too great for me, is His." Some such simple faith, which a man
can hardly separate from his existence, has been the first rally
and turning-point in many a life. In the moral drift and sweep he
finds bottom there, and steadies on it, and gets his face round, and
gathers strength. And God's Word comes to him to tell him that his
instinct is sure. _Yea, I have made, and I will bear._
2. The most terrible anguish of the heart, however, is that it
carries something, which can shake a man off even that ground. The
firmest rock is of no use to the paralytic, or to a man with a broken
leg. And the most steadfast moral universe, and most righteous moral
governor, is no comfort--but rather the reverse--to the man with a
bad conscience, whether that conscience be due to the guilt, or to
the habit, of sin. Conscience whispers, "God indeed made thee, but
what if thou hast unmade thyself? God reigns; the laws of life are
righteousness; creation is guided to peace. But thou art outlaw of
this universe, fallen from God of thine own will. Thou must bear
thine own guilt, endure thy voluntarily contracted habits. How canst
thou believe that God, in this fair world, would bear thee up, so
useless, soiled, and infected a thing?" Yet here, according to His
blessed Word, God does come down to bear up men. Because man's
sunkenness and helplessness are so apparent beneath no other burden
or billows, God insists that just here He is most anxious, and just
here it is His glory, to lift men and bear them upward. Some may
wonder what guilt is or the conviction of sin, because they are
selfishly or dishonestly tracing the bitterness and unrest of their
lives to some other source than their own wicked wills; but the
thing is man's realest burden, and man's realest burden is what God
stoops lowest to bear. The grievous word for _bear_, "sabal," which
we emphasized in the above passage, is elsewhere in the writings of
the Exile used of the bearing of sins, or of the result of sins. _Our
fathers have sinned, and are not, and we bear their iniquities_,[106]
says one of the Lamentations. And in the fifty-third of Isaiah it is
used twice of the Servant, _that He bore our sorrows_, and _that He
bare their iniquities_.[107] Here its application to God--to such a
God as we have seen bearing the passion of His people's woes--cannot
fail to carry with it the associations of these passages. When it is
said, God _bears_, and this grievous verb is used, we remember at
once that He is a God, who does not only set His people's sins in the
awful light of His countenance, but takes them upon His heart. Let us
learn, then, that God has made this sin and guilt of ours His special
care and anguish. We cannot feel it more than He does. It is enough:
we may not be able to understand what the sacrifice of Christ meant
to the Divine justice, but who can help comprehending from it that in
some Divine way the Divine love has made our sin its own business and
burden, so that that might be done which we could not do, and that
lifted which we could not bear?
3. But this gospel of God's love bearing our sins is of no use to a
man unless it goes with another--that God bears him up for victory
over temptation and for attainment in holiness. It is said to be a
thoroughly Mohammedan fashion, that when a believer is tempted past
the common he gives way, and slides into sin with the cry, "God is
merciful;" meaning that the Almighty will not be too hard on this
poor creature, who has held out so long. If this be Mohammedanism,
there is a great deal of Mohammedanism in modern Christianity. It is
a most perfidious distortion of God's will. _For this is the will
of God, even our sanctification_; and God never gives a man pardon
but to set him free for effort, and to constrain him for duty. And
here we come to what is the most essential part of God's bearing of
man. God, as we have seen, bears us by giving us ground to walk on.
He bears us by lifting those burdens from our hearts that make the
firmest ground slippery and impossible to our feet. But He bears us
best and longest by being the spirit and the soul and the life of our
life. Every metaphor here falls short of the reality. By inspired
men the bearing of God has been likened to a father carrying his
child, to an eagle taking her young upon her wings, to the shepherd
with the lamb in his bosom. But no shepherd, nor mother-bird, nor
human father ever bore as the Lord bears. For He bears from within,
as the soul lifts and bears the body. The Lord and His own are one.
_To me_, says he who knew it best, _To me to live is Christ_. It is,
indeed, difficult to describe to others what this inward sustainment
really is, seating itself at the centre of a man's life, and thence
affecting vitally every organ of his nature. The strongest human
illustration is not sufficient for it. If in the thick of the battle
a leader is able to infuse himself into his followers, so is Christ.
If one man's word has lifted thousands of defeated soldiers to an
assault and to a victory, even so have Christ's lifted millions:
lifted them above the habit and depression of sin, above the weakness
of the flesh, above the fear of man, above danger and death and
temptation more dangerous and fatal still. And yet it is not the
sight of a visible leader, though the Gospels have made that sight
imperishable; it is not the sound of Another's Voice, though that
Voice shall peal to the end of time, that Christians only feel.
It is something within themselves; another self--purer, happier,
victorious. Not as a voice or example, futile enough to the dying,
but as a new soul, is Christ in men; and whether their exhaustion
needs creative forces, or their vices require conquering forces, He
gives both, for He is the fountain of life.
4. But God does not carry dead men. His carrying is not mechanical, but
natural; not from below, but from within. You dare not be passive in
God's carriage; for as in the natural, so in the moral world, whatever
dies is thrown aside by the upward pressure of life, to rot and
perish. Christ showed this over and over again in His ministry. Those
who make no effort--or, if effort be past, feel no pain--God will not
stoop to bear. But all in whom there is still a lift and a spring after
life: the quick conscience, the pain of their poverty, the hunger and
thirst after righteousness, the sacredness of those in their charge,
the obligation and honour of their daily duty, some desire for eternal
life--these, however weak, He carries forward to perfection.
Again, in His bearing God bears, and does not overbear, using a man,
not as a man uses a stick, but as a soul uses a body,--informing,
inspiring, recreating his natural faculties. So many distrust
religion, as if it were to be an overbearing of their originality,
as if it were bound to destroy the individual's peculiar freshness
and joy. But God is not by grace going to undo His work by nature.
_I have made, and I will bear--will bear_ what I have made. Religion
intensifies the natural man.
And now, if that be God's bearing--the gift of the ground, and the
lifting of the fallen, and the being a soul and an inspiration of
every organ--how wrong those are who, instead of asking God to carry
them, are more anxious about how He and His religion are to be
sustained by their consistency or efforts!
To young men, who have not got a religion, and are brought face to
face with the conventional religion of the day, the question often
presents itself in this way: "Is this a thing I can carry?" or
"How much of it can I afford to carry? How much of the tradition
of the elders can I take upon myself, and feel that it is not mere
dead weight?" That is an entirely false attitude. Here you are,
weak, by no means master of yourself; with a heart wonderfully full
of suggestions to evil; a world before you, hardest where it is
clearest, seeming most impossible where duty most loudly calls; yet
mainly dark and silent, needing from us patience oftener than effort,
and trust as much as the exercise of our own cleverness; with death
at last ahead. Look at life whole, and the question you will ask will
not be, Can I carry this faith? but, Can this faith carry me? Not,
Can I afford to take up such and such and such opinions? but, Can I
afford to travel at all without such a God? It is not a creed, but a
living and a lifting God, who awaits your decision.
At the opposite end of life, there is another class of men, who are
really doing what young men too often suppose that they must do if
they take up a religion,--carrying it, instead of allowing it to carry
them; men who are in danger of losing their faith in God, through
over-anxiety about traditional doctrines concerning Him. A great deal
is being said just now in our country of upholding the great articles
of the faith. Certainly let us uphold them. But do not let us have
in our churches that saddest of all sights, a mere ecclesiastical
procession,--men flourishing doctrines, but themselves with their
manhood remaining unseen. We know the pity of a show, sometimes seen
in countries on the Continent, where they have not given over carrying
images about. Idols and banners and texts will fill a street with their
tawdry, tottering progress, and you will see nothing human below, but
now and then jostling shoulders and a sweaty face. Even so are many
of the loud parades of doctrines in our day by men, who, in the words
of this chapter, show themselves _stout of heart_ by holding up their
religion, but give us no signs in their character or conduct that their
religion is holding up them. Let us prize our faith, not by holding it
high, but by showing how high it can hold us.
Which is the more inspiring sight,--a banner carried by hands, that
must sooner or later weary; or the soldier's face, mantling with the
inexhaustible strength of the God who lives at his heart and bears
him up?
FOOTNOTES:
[101] _Crouches_, Kara`; _cowers_, Kores.
[102] Bredenkamp.
[103] Sayce, _Fresh Light_, etc., p. 140.
[104] See p. 39 f.
[105] There is a play on the words 'anî `asîthî, wa'anî, 'essā'--_I
have made, and I will aid_.
[106] Lam. v. 7.
[107] Ver. 4, second clause, and vii.
CHAPTER XII.
_BABYLON._
ISAIAH xlvii.
Throughout the extent of Bible history, from Genesis to Revelation,
One City remains, which in fact and symbol is execrated as the enemy
of God and the stronghold of evil. In Genesis we are called to see
its foundation, as of the first city that wandering men established,
and the quick ruin, which fell upon its impious builders. By the
prophets we hear it cursed as the oppressor of God's people, the
temptress of the nations, full of cruelty and wantonness. And in the
Book of Revelation its character and curse are transferred to Rome,
and the New Babylon stands over against the New Jerusalem.
The tradition and infection, which have made the name of Babylon
as abhorred in Scripture as Satan's own, are represented as the
tradition and infection of pride,--the pride, which, in the audacity
of youth, proposes to attempt to be equal with God: _Go to, let us
build us a city and a tower, whose top_ may touch _heaven, and let
us make us a name_; the pride, which, amid the success and wealth
of later years, forgets that there is a God at all: _Thou sayest
in thine heart, I am, and there is none beside me_. Babylon is the
Atheist of the Old Testament, as she is the Antichrist of the New.
That a city should have been originally conceived by Israel as the
arch-enemy of God is due to historical causes, as intelligible
as those which led, in later days, to the reverse conception of
a city as God's stronghold, and the refuge of the weak and the
wandering. God's earliest people were shepherds, plain men dwelling
in tents,--desert nomads, who were never tempted to rear permanent
structures of their own except as altars and shrines, but marched
and rested, waked and slept, between God's bare earth and God's high
heaven; whose spirits were chastened and refined by the hunger and
clear air of the desert, and who walked their wide world without
jostling or stunting one another. With the dear habits of those early
times, the truths of the Bible are therefore, even after Israel has
settled in towns, spelt to the end in the images of shepherd life.
The Lord is the Shepherd, and men are the sheep of His pasture. He
is a Rock and a Strong Tower, such as rise here and there in the
desert's wildness for guidance or defence.[108] He is rivers of water
in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. And
man's peace is to lie beside still waters, and his glory is, not
to have built cities, but to have all these things put under his
feet--sheep and oxen and the beasts of the field, the fowls of the
air and the fish of the sea.
Over against that lowly shepherd life, the first cities rose, as we
can imagine, high, terrible and impious. They were the production of
an alien race,[109] a people with no true religion, as it must have
appeared to the Semites, arrogant and coarse. But Babylon had a special
curse. Babylon was not the earliest city,--Akkad and Erekh were famous
long before,--but it is Babylon that the Book of Genesis represents
as overthrown and scattered by the judgement of God. What a contrast
this picture in Genesis,--and let it be remembered that the only other
cities to which that book leads us are Sodom and Gomorrah,--what a
contrast it forms to the passages in which classic poets celebrate the
beginnings of their great cities! There, the favourable omens, the
patronage of the gods, the prophecies of the glories of civil life; the
tracing of the temple and the forum; visions of the city as the school
of industry, the treasury of wealth, the home of freedom. Here, but a
few rapid notes of scorn and doom: man's miserable manufacture, without
Divine impulse or omen; his attempt to rise to heaven upon that alone,
his motive only to make a name for himself; and the result--not, as in
Greek legend, the foundation of a polity, the rise of commerce, the
growth of a great language, by which through the lips of one man the
whole city may be swayed together to high purposes, but only scattering
and confusion of speech. To history, a great city is a multitude of men
within reach of one man's voice. Athens is Demosthenes; Rome is Cicero
persuading the Senate; Florence is Savonarola putting by his word one
conscience within a thousand hearts. But Babylon, from the beginning,
gave its name to Babel, confusion of speech, incapacity for union and
for progress. And all this came, because the builders of the city, the
men who set the temper of its civilisation, did not begin with God,
but in their pride deemed everything possible to unaided and unblessed
human ambition, and had only the desire to make a name upon earth.
The sin and the curse never left the generations, who in turn
succeeded those impious builders. Pride and godlessness infested the
city, and prepared it for doom, as soon as it again gathered strength
to rise to heaven. The early nomads had watched Babylon's fall from
afar; but when their descendants were carried as captives within her
in the time of her second glory,[110] they found that the besetting
sin, which had once reared its head so fatally high, infected the city
to her very heart. We need not again go over the extent and glory of
Nebuchadrezzar's architecture, or the greatness of the traffic, from
the Levant to India, which his policy had concentrated upon his own
wharves and markets.[111] It was stupendous. But neither walls nor
wealth make a city, and no observant man, with the Hebrew's faith
and conscience, could have lived those fifty years in the centre
of Babylon, and especially after Nebuchadrezzar had passed away,
without perceiving, that her life was destitute of every principle
which ensured union or promised progress. Babylon was but a medley
of peoples, without common traditions or a public conscience, and
incapable of acting together. Many of her inhabitants had been brought
to her, like the Jews, against their own will, and were ever turning
from those glorious battlements they were forced to build in their
disgust, to scan the horizon for the advent of a deliverer. And many
others, who moved in freedom through her busy streets, and shared her
riches and her joys, were also foreigners, and bound to her only so
long as she ministered to their pleasure or their profit. Her king
was an usurper, who had insulted her native gods; her priesthood was
against him. And although his army, sheltered by the fortifications of
Nebuchadrezzar, had repulsed Cyrus upon the Persian's first invasion
from the north, conspiracies were now so rife among his oppressed and
insulted subjects, that, on Cyrus' second invasion, Babylon opened
her impregnable gates and suffered herself to be taken without a
blow. Nor, even if the city's religion had been better served by
the king, could it in the long run have availed for her salvation.
For, in spite of the science with which it was connected,--and this
"wisdom of the Chaldeans" was contemptible in neither its methods nor
its results,--the Babylonian religion was not one to inspire either
the common people with those moral principles, which form the true
stability of states, or their rulers with a reasonable and consistent
policy. Babylon's religion was broken up into a multitude of wearisome
and distracting details, whose absurd solemnities, especially when
administered by a priesthood hostile to the executive, must have
hampered every adventure of war, and rendered futile many opportunities
of victory. In fact, Babylon, for all her glory, could not but be
short-lived. There was no moral reason why she should endure. The
masses, who contributed to her building, were slaves who hated her;
the crowds, who fed her business, would stay with her only so long
as she was profitable to themselves; her rulers and her priests had
quarrelled; her religion was a burden, not an inspiration. Yet she sat
proud, and felt herself secure.
It is just these features, which our prophet describes in ch. xlvii.,
in verses more notable for their moral insight and indignation, than
for their beauty as a work of literature. He is certain of Babylon's
immediate fall from power and luxury into slavery and dishonour (vv.
1-3). He speaks of her cruelty to her captives (ver. 6), of her
haughtiness and her secure pride (vv. 7, 8). He touches twice upon her
atheistic self-sufficiency, her "autotheism,"--"_I am, and there is
none beside me_," words which only God can truly use, but words which
man's ignorant, proud self is ever ready to repeat (vv. 8-10). He
speaks of the wearisomeness and futility of her religious magic (vv.
10-14). And he closes with a vivid touch, that dissolves the reality of
that merely commercial grandeur on which she prides herself. Like every
association that arises only from the pecuniary profit of its members,
Babylon shall surely break up, and none of those, who sought her for
their selfish ends, shall wait to help her one moment after she has
ceased to be profitable to them.
Here now are his own words, rendered literally except in the case of
one or two conjunctions and articles,--rendered, too, in the original
order of the words, and, as far as it can be determined, in the
rhythm of the original. The rhythm is largely uncertain, but some
verses--1, 5, 14, 15--are complete in that measure which we found in
the Taunt-song against the king of Babylon in ch. xiii.,[112] and
nearly every line or clause has the same metrical swing upon it.
_Down! and sit in the dust, O virgin,_
_Daughter of Babel!_
_Sit on the ground, with no throne,_
_Daughter of Khasdîm!
For not again shall they call thee_
_Tender and Dainty._
_Take to thee millstones, and grind out the meal,_
_Put back thy veil, strip off the garment,_
_Make bare the leg, wade through the rivers;_
_Bare be thy nakedness, yea, be beholden thy shame!_
_Vengeance I take, and strike treaty with none._
_Our Redeemer! Jehovah of Hosts is His Name,_
_Holy of Israel!_
_Sit thou dumb, and get into darkness,_
_Daughter of Khasdîm!_
_For not again shall they call thee_
_Mistress of Kingdoms._
_I was wroth with My people, profaned Mine inheritance,_
_Gave them to thy hand:_
_Thou didst show them no mercy, on old men thou madest_
_Thy yoke very sore._
_And thou saidst, For ever I shall be mistress,_
_Till thou hast set not these things to thy heart,_
_Nor thought of their issue._
_Therefore now hear this, Voluptuous,_
_Sitting self-confident:_
_Thou, who saith in her heart, "I am: there is none else._
_I shall not sit a widow, nor know want of children."_
_Surely shall come to thee both of these, sudden, the same
day,_
_Childlessness, widowhood!
To their full come upon thee, spite of the mass of thy
spells,_
_Spite of the wealth of thy charms--to the full!_
_And thou wast bold in thine evil; thou saidst,_
_"None doth see me."_
_Thy wisdom and knowledge--they have led thee astray,_
_Till thou hast said in thine heart, "I am: there is none
else."_
_Yet there shall come on thee Evil,_
_Thou know'st not to charm it._
_And there shall fall on thee Havoc,_
_Thou canst not avert it._
_And there shall come on thee suddenly,_
_Unawares, Ruin._
_Stand forth, I pray, with thy charms, with the wealth of thy
spells--_
_With which thou hast wearied thyself from thy youth up--_
_If so thou be able to profit,_
_If so to strike terror!_
_Thou art sick with the mass of thy counsels:_
_Let them stand up and save thee--_
_Mappers of heaven, Planet-observers, Tellers at new moons--_
_From what must befall thee!_
_Behold, they are grown like the straw!_
_Fire hath consumed them;_
_Nay, they save not their life_
_From the hand of the flame!_
_--'Tis no fuel for warmth,_
_Fire to sit down at!--_
_Thus are they grown to thee, they who did weary thee,_
_Traders of thine from thy youth up;_
_Each as he could pass have they fled;_
_None is thy saviour!_
We, who remember Isaiah's elegies on Egypt and Tyre,[113] shall be
most struck here by the absence of all appreciation of greatness or
of beauty about Babylon. Even while prophesying for Tyre as certain a
judgement as our prophet here predicts for Babylon, Isaiah spoke as
if the ruin of so much enterprise and wealth were a desecration, and
he promised that the native strength of Tyre, humbled and purified,
would rise again to become the handmaid of religion. But our prophet
sees no saving virtue whatever in Babylon, and gives her not the
slightest promise of a future. There is pity through his scorn: the
way in which he speaks of the futility of the mass of Babylonian
science; the way in which he speaks of her ignorance, though served
by hosts of counsellors; the way in which, after recalling her
countless partners in traffic, he describes their headlong flight,
and closes with the words, _None is thy saviour_,--all this is most
pathetic. But upon none of his lines is there one touch of awe or
admiration or regret for the fall of what is great. To him Babylon is
wholly false, vain, destitute--as Tyre was not destitute--of native
vigour and saving virtue. Babylon is sheer pretence and futility.
Therefore his scorn and condemnation are thorough; and mocking
laughter breaks from him, now with an almost savage coarseness, as
he pictures the dishonour of the virgin who was no virgin--_Bare thy
nakedness, yea, be beholden thy shame_; and now in roguish glee,
as he interjects about the fire which shall destroy the mass of
Babylon's magicians, astrologers and haruspices: _No coal this to
warm oneself at, fire to sit down before._ But withal we are not
allowed to forget, that it is one of the Tyrant's poor captives, who
thus judges and scorns her. How vividly from the midst of his satire
does the prisoner's sigh break forth to God:--
"_Our Redeemer! Jehovah of Hosts is His Name,_
_Holy of Israel!_"
Not the least interesting feature of this taunt-song is the expression
which it gives to the characteristic Hebrew sense of the wearisomeness
and immorality of that system of divination, which formed the mass of
the Babylonian and many other Gentile religions. The worship of Jehovah
had very much in common with the rest of the Semitic cults. Its ritual,
its temple-furniture, the division of its sacred year, its terminology,
and even many of its titles for the Deity and His relations to men, may
be matched in the worship of Phœnician, Syrian and Babylonian gods,
or in the ruder Arabian cults. But in one thing the "law of Jehovah"
stands by itself, and that is in its intolerance of all augury and
divination. It owed this distinction to the unique moral and practical
sense which inspired it. Augury and divination, such as the Chaldeans
were most proficient in, exerted two most evil influences. They
hampered, sometimes paralysed, the industry and politics of a nation,
and they more or less confounded the moral sense of a people. They
were, therefore, utterly out of harmony with the practical sanity and
Divine morality of the Jewish law, which strenuously forbade them;
while the prophets, who were practical men as well as preachers of
righteousness, constantly exposed the fatigue they laid upon public
life, and the way they distracted attention from the simple moral
issues of conduct. Augury and divination wearied a people's intellect,
stunted their enterprise, distorted their conscience. _Thy spells,--the
mass of thy charms, with which thou hast wearied thyself from thy
youth. Thou art sick with the mass of thy counsels. Thy wisdom and thy
knowledge! they have led thee astray._ When "the Chaldean astrology"
found its way to the New Babylon, Juvenal's strong conscience expressed
the same sense of its wearisomeness and waste of time.[114]
Ashes and ruins, a servile and squalid life, a desolate site
abandoned by commerce,--what the prophet predicted, that did imperial
Babylon become. Not, indeed, at the hand of Cyrus, or of any other
single invader; but gradually by the rivalry of healthier peoples, by
the inevitable working of the poison at her heart, Babylon, though
situated in the most fertile and central part of God's earth, fell
into irredeemable decay. Do not let us, however, choke our interest
in this prophecy, as so many students of prophecy do, in the ruins
and dust, which were its primary fulfilment. The shell of Babylon,
the gorgeous city which rose by Euphrates, has indeed sunk into
heaps; but Babylon herself is not dead. Babylon never dies. To the
conscience of Christ's seer, this _mother of harlots_, though dead
and desert in the East, came to life again in the West. To the city
of Rome, in his day, John transferred word by word the phrases of
our prophet and of the prophet who wrote the fifty-first chapter
of the Book of Jeremiah. Rome was Babylon, in so far as Romans were
filled with cruelty, with arrogance, with trust in riches, with
credulity in divination, with that waste of mental and moral power
which Juvenal exposed in her. _I sit a queen_, John heard Rome say
in her heart, _and am no widow, and shall in no wise see mourning.
Therefore in one day shall her plagues come, death and mourning and
famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire, for strong is
the Lord God which judged her._[115] But we are not to leave the
matter even here: we are to use that freedom with John, which John
uses with our prophet. We are to pass by the particular fulfilment
of his words, in which he and his day were interested, because it
can only have a historical and secondary interest to us in face of
other Babylons in our own day, with which our consciences, if they
are quick, ought to be busy. Why do some honest people continue to
confine the reference of those chapters in the Book of Revelation
to the city and church of Rome? It is quite true, that John meant
the Rome of his day; it is quite true, that many features of his
Babylon may be traced upon the successor of the Roman Empire, the
Roman Church. But what is that to us, with incarnations of the
Babylonian spirit so much nearer ourselves for infection and danger,
than the Church of Rome can ever be. John's description, based upon
our prophet's, suits better a commercial, than an ecclesiastical
state,--though self-worship has been as rife in ecclesiasticism,
Roman or Reformed, as among the votaries of Mammon. For every phrase
of John's, that may be true of the Church of Rome in certain ages,
there are six apt descriptions of the centres of our own British
civilisation, and of the selfish, atheistic tempers that prevail in
them. Let us ask what are the Babylonian tempers and let us touch our
own consciences with them.
Forgetfulness of God, cruelty, vanity of knowledge (which so easily
breeds credulity) and vanity of wealth,--but the parent of them
all is idolatry of self. Isaiah told us about this in the Assyrian
with his war; we see it here in Babylon with her commerce and her
science; it was exposed even in the orthodox Jews,[116] for they
put their own prejudices before their God's revelation; and it is
perhaps as evident in the Christian Church as anywhere else. For
selfishness follows a man like his shadow; and religion, like the
sun, the stronger it shines, only makes the shadow more apparent. But
to worship your shadow is to turn your back on the sun; selfishness
is atheism, says our prophet. Man's self takes God's word about
Himself and says, _I am, and there is none beside me_. And he, who
forgets God, is sure also to forget his brother; thus self-worship
leads to cruelty. A heavy part of the charge against Babylon is her
treatment of the Lord's own people. These were God's convicts, and
she, for the time, God's minister of justice. But she unnecessarily
and cruelly oppressed them. _On the aged thou hast very heavily laid
thy yoke._ God's people were given to her to be reformed, but she
sought to crush the life out of them. God's purpose was upon them,
but she used them for her aggrandisement. She did not feel that she
was responsible to God for her treatment even of the most guilty and
contemptible of her subjects.
In all this Babylon acted in accordance with what was the prevailing
spirit of antiquity; and here we may safely affirm that our Christian
civilisation has at least a superior conscience. The modern world
does recognise, in some measure, its responsibility to God for the
care even of its vilest and most forfeit lives. No Christian state
at the present day would, for instance, allow its felons to be
tortured or outraged against their will in the interests either of
science or of public amusement. We do not vivisect our murderers nor
kill them off by gladiatorial combats. Our statutes do not get rid
of worthless or forfeit lives by condemning them to be used up in
dangerous labours of public necessity. On the contrary, in prisons we
treat our criminals with decency and even with comfort, and outside
prisons we protect and cherish even the most tainted and guilty
lives. In all our discharge of God's justice, we take care that the
inevitable errors of our human fallibility may fall on mercy's side.
Now it is true that in the practice of all this we often fail, and
are inconsistent. The point at present is that we have at least a
conscience about the matter. We do not say, like Babylon, "_I am, and
there is none beside me_. There is no law higher than my own will
and desire. I can, therefore, use whatever through its crime or its
uselessness falls into my power, for the increase of my wealth or
the satisfaction of my passions." We remember God, and that even the
criminal and the useless are His. In wielding the power which His Law
and Providence put into our hands towards many of His creatures, we
remember that we are administering His justice, and not satisfying
our own revenge, or feeding our own desire for sensation, or
experimenting for the sake of our science. They are His convicts, not
our spoil. In our treatment of them we are subject to His laws,--one
of which, that fences even His justice, is the law against cruelty;
and another, for which His justice leaves room, is that to every man
there be granted, with his due penalty, the opportunity of penitence
and reform. There are among us Positivists, who deny that these
opinions and practices of modern civilisation are correct. Carrying
out the essential atheism of their school--_I am_ man, _and there
is none else_: that in the discharge of justice and the discharge
of charity men are responsible only to themselves--they dare to
recommend that the victims of justice should be made the experiments,
however painful, of science, and that charity should be refused to
the corrupt and the useless. But all this is simply reversion to the
Babylonian type, and the Babylonian type is doomed to decay. For
history has writ no surer law upon itself than this--that cruelty is
the infallible precursor of ruin.
But while speaking of the state, we should remember individual
responsibilities as well. Success, even where it is the righteous
success of character, is a most subtle breeder of cruelty. The best of
us need most strongly to guard ourselves against censoriousness. If
God does put the characters of sinful men and women into our keeping,
let us remember that our right of judging them, our right of punishing
them, our right even of talking about them, is strictly limited.
Religious people too easily forget this, and their cruel censoriousness
or selfish gossip warns us that to be a member of the Church of Christ
does not always mean that a man's citizenship is in heaven; he may well
be a Babylonian and carry the freedom of that city upon his face. To
"be hard on those who are down" is Babylonian; to make material out of
our neighbours' faults, for our pride, or for love of gossip, or for
prurience, is Babylonian. There is one very good practical rule to
keep us safe. We may allow ourselves to speak about our erring brothers
to men, just as much as we pray for them to God. But if we pray much
for a man, he will surely become too sacred to be made the amusement of
society or the food of our curiosity or of our pride.
The last curse on Babylon reminds us of the fatal looseness of a
society that is built only upon the interests of trade; of the
loneliness and uselessness that await, in the end, all lives, which
keep themselves alive simply by trafficking with men. If we feed life
only by the news of the markets, by the interest of traffic, by the
excitement of competition, by the fever of speculation, by the passions
of cupidity and pride, we may feel healthy and powerful for a time. But
such a life, which is merely a being kept brisk by the sense of gaining
something or overreaching some one, is the mere semblance of living;
and when the inevitable end comes, when they that have trafficked with
us from our youth depart, then each particle of strength with which
they fed us shall be withdrawn, and we shall fall into decay. There
never was a truer picture of the quick ruin of a merely commercial
community, or of the ultimate loneliness of a mercenary and selfish
life, than the headlong rush of traders, _each as he could find
passage_, from the city that never had other attractions even for her
own citizens than those of gain or of pleasure.
FOOTNOTES:
[108] _Cf._ Doughty, _Arabia Deserta_.
[109] The Turanians, who occupied Mesopotamia before the Semitic
invasion, were the first builders of cities.
[110] Babylon, as far as we can learn, first rose to power about the
time of that Amraphel who fought in the Mesopotamian league against
the neighbours and friends of Abraham. Amraphel is supposed to have
been the father of Hammurabis, who first made Babylon the capital
of Chaldea. It scarcely ever again ceased to be such; but it was
not till the fall of Assyria, about 625 B.C., and the rebuilding
of Babylon by Nebuchadrezzar (604-561), that the city's second and
greatest glory began.
[111] See ch. iv., pp. 53-56.
[112] Vol. i., pp. 409-315.
[113] Vol. i., pp. 275, 286, 294.
[114] See especially _Satires III._ and _VI._, and _cf._ Bagehot's
_Physics and Politics_.
[115] Rev. xvii., xviii.
[116] Ch. xlv.
CHAPTER XIII.
_THE CALL TO GO FORTH._
ISAIAH xlviii.
On the substance of ch. xlviii. we have already encroached, and now it
is necessary only to summarise its argument, and to give some attention
to the call to go forth from Babylon, with which it concludes.
Chapter xlviii. is addressed, as its first verse declares, to the
exiles from Judah[117]: _Hear this, Oh House of Jacob, that call
yourselves by the name of Israel, and from the waters of Judah have
come forth_: that is, you so-called Israelites, who spring from
Judah. But their worship of Jehovah is only nominal and unreal: _They
who swear by the name of Jehovah, and celebrate the God of Israel,
not in truth and not in righteousness; although by the Holy City they
name themselves, and upon the God of Israel they lean--Jehovah of
Hosts is His Name!_
_The former things I published long ago;_[118] _from My mouth they
went forth, and I let them be heard--suddenly I did them, and they
came to pass. Because I knew how hard thou wert, and a sinew of
iron thy neck, and thy brow brass. And I published to thee long
ago; before it came to pass I let thee hear it, lest thou shouldest
say: Mine idol hath wrought them, and my Image and my Casting hath
commanded them. Thou didst hear it: look at it whole_,--now that it
is fulfilled,--_and you! should ye not publish it?_ All the past lies
as a unity, prediction and fulfilment together complete; all of it
the doing of Jehovah, and surely enough of it to provide the text of
confession of Him by His people. But now,--
_I let thee hear new things_--in contrast with the former things--_from
now, and hidden things, and thou knewest them not. Now are they
created, and not long ago; and before to-day thou hadst not heard them,
lest thou shouldest say, Behold I knew them. Verily,_[119] _thou hadst
not heard, verily, thou hadst not known, verily, long since thine ear
was not open; because I knew thou art thoroughly treacherous, and
Transgressor-from-the-womb do they call thee._
The meaning of all this is sufficiently clear. It is a reproach
addressed to the formal Israelites. It divides into two parts,
each containing an explanation _Because I knew that_, etc.: vv.
3-6_a_, and vv. 6_b_-9. In the first part Jehovah treats of history
already finished, both in its prediction and fulfilment. Many of
the wonderful things of old Jehovah predicted long before they
happened, and so left His stubborn people no excuse for an idolatry
to which otherwise they would have given themselves (ver. 5). Now
that they see that wonderful past complete, and all the predictions
fulfilled, they may well publish Jehovah's renown to the world. In
the first part of His reproach, then, Jehovah is dealing with stages
of Israel's history that were closed before the Exile. The _former
things_ are wonderful events, foretold and come to pass before the
present generation. But in the second part of His reproach (vv.
6_b_-9) Jehovah mentions _new things_. These new things are being
created while His prophet speaks, and they have not been foretold (in
contradistinction to the former things of ver. 3). What events fulfil
these two conditions? Well, Cyrus was on his way, the destruction of
Babylon was imminent, Israel's new destiny was beginning to shape
itself under God's hands: these are evidently the things that are
in process of creation while the prophet speaks. But could it also
be said of them, that they had not been foretold? This could be
said, at least, of Cyrus, the Gentile Messiah. A Gentile Messiah was
something so new to Israel, that many, clinging to the letter of the
old prophecies, denied, as we have seen, that Cyrus could possibly
be God's instrument for the redemption of Israel. Cyrus, then, as a
Gentile, and at the same time the Anointed of Jehovah, is the new
thing which is being created while the prophet speaks, and which has
not been announced beforehand.
How is it possible, some may now ask, that Cyrus should be one of
the unpredicted _new things_ that are happening while the prophet
speaks, when the prophet has already pointed to Cyrus and his
advance on Babylon as a fulfilment of ancient predictions? The answer
to this question is very simple. There were ancient predictions of
a deliverance and a deliverer from Babylon. To name no more, there
were Jeremiah's[120] and Habakkuk's; and Cyrus, in so far as he
accomplished the deliverance, was the fulfilment of these ancient
r'ishonôth. But in so far as Cyrus sprang from a quarter of the
world, not hinted at in former prophecies of Jehovah--in so far as
he was a Gentile and yet the Anointed of the Lord, a combination
not provided for by any tradition in Israel--Cyrus and his career
were the _new things not predicted beforehand, the new things_ which
caused such offence to certain tradition-bound parties in Israel.
We cannot overestimate the importance of this passage. It supplies
us with the solution of the problem, how the presently-happening
deliverance of Israel from Babylon could be both a thing foretold
from long ago, and yet so new as to surprise those Israelites who
were most devoted to the ancient prophecies. And at the same time
such of us as are content to follow our prophet's own evidence, and
to place him in the Exile, have an answer put into our mouths, to
render to those, who say that we destroy a proof of the Divinity of
prophecy by denying to Isaiah or to any other prophet, so long before
Cyrus was born, the mention of Cyrus by name. Let such objectors, who
imagine that they are more careful of the honour of God and of the
Divinity of Scripture, because they maintain that Cyrus was named two
hundred years before he was born, look at verse 7. There God Himself
says, that there are some things, which, for a very good reason,
He does not foretell before they come to pass. We believe, and have
shown strong grounds for believing, that the selection of Cyrus, the
mention of his name, and the furtherance of his arms against Babylon,
were among those _new things_, which God says He purposely did not
reveal till the day of their happening, and which, by their novel and
unpredicted character, offended so many of the traditional and stupid
party in Israel. Must there always be among God's people, to-day as
in the day of our prophet, some who cannot conceive a thing to be
Divine unless it has been predicted long before?
In vv. 3-8, then, God claims to have changed His treatment of His
people, in order to meet and to prevent the various faults of their
character. Some things He told to them, long before, so that they
might not attribute the occurrence of these to their idols. But other
things He sprang upon them, without predictions, and in an altogether
novel shape, so that they might not say of these things, in their
familiarity with them, We knew of them ourselves. A people who were
at one time so stubborn, and at another so slippery, were evidently
a people who deserved nothing at God's hand. Yet He goes on to say,
vv. 9-11, that He will treat them with forbearance, if not for their
sake, yet for His own: _For the sake of My Name I defer Mine anger,
and for My praise_--or _renown_, or _reputation_, as we would say
of a man--_I will refrain for thee, that I cut thee not off. Behold
I have smelted thee, but not as silver: I have tested thee in the
furnace of affliction. For Mine own sake, for Mine own sake, I am
working;--for how was My Name being profaned!_[121]--_and My glory to
another I will not give._
Then he gathers up the sum of what He has been saying in a final
appeal.
_Hearken unto Me, O Jacob, and Israel My Called: I am He; I am First,
yea, I am Last. Yea, My hand hath founded Earth,_[122] _and My right
hand hath spread Heaven; when I call unto them they stand together._
_Be gathered, all of you, and hearken, Who among them_--that is,
the Gentiles--_hath published these things_?--that is, such things
as the following, the prophecy given in the next clause of the
verse: _Whom Jehovah loveth shall perform His pleasure on Babylon,
and his arm_ shall be on _the Chaldeans_. This was the sum of
what Jehovah promised long ago;[123] not Cyrus' name, not that a
Gentile, a Persian, should deliver God's people, for these are among
the new things which were not published beforehand, at which the
traditional Israelites were offended,--but this general fiat of God's
sovereignty, _that whomever Jehovah loves_, or _likes, he shall
perform His pleasure on Babylon. I, even I, have spoken_--this, in
ver. 14_b_, was My speaking. _Yea, I have called him; I have brought
him, and he will make his way to prosper._ Again emphasize the change
of tense. Cyrus is already called, but, while the prophet speaks, he
has not yet reached his goal in the capture of Babylon.
Some ambassador from the Lord, whether the prophet or the Servant of
Jehovah, now takes up the parable, and, after presenting himself,
addresses a final exhortation to Israel, summing up the moral meaning
of the Exile. _Draw near to me, hear this; not from aforetime in
secret have I spoken; from the time that it was, there am I: and now
my Lord, Jehovah, hath sent me with His Spirit._[124]
_Thus saith Jehovah, thy Redeemer, Holy of Israel, I am Jehovah thy
God, thy Teacher to profit, thy Guide in the way thou shouldest go:
Would that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments, then were like
the River thy peace, and thy righteousness like the waves of the sea!
Then were like the sand thy seed, and the offspring of thy bowels
like its grains!_[125] _He shall not be cut off, nor shall perish his
name from before Me._
And now at last it is time to be up. Our salvation is nearer than
when first we believed. Day has dawned, the gates are opening, the
Word has been sufficiently spoken.
_Go forth from Babel, fly from the Chaldeans;
With a ringing voice publish and let this be heard,
Send ye it out to the end of the earth,
Say, Redeemed hath Jehovah His Servant Jacob.
And they thirsted not in the deserts He caused them to walk;
Waters from a rock He let drop for them,
Clave a rock and there flowed forth waters!
No peace, saith Jehovah, for the wicked._
We have arrived at the most distinct stage of which our prophecy
gives trace. Not that a new start is made with the next passage.
Ch. xlix. is the answer of the Servant himself to the appeal made
to him in xlviii. 20; and ch. xlix. does not introduce the Servant
for the first time, but simply carries further the substance of the
opening verses of ch. xlii. Nor is this urgent appeal to _Go forth
from Babylon_, which has come to Israel, the only one, or the last,
of its kind. It is renewed in ch. lii. 11-12. So that we cannot
think that our prophet has even yet got the Fall of Babylon behind
him. Nevertheless, the end of ch. xlviii. is the end of the first
and chief stage of the prophecy. The fundamental truths about God
and salvation have been laid down; the idols have been thoroughly
exposed; Cyrus has been explained; Babylon is practically done with.
Neither Babylon, nor Cyrus, nor, except for a moment, the idols, are
mentioned in the rest of the prophecy. The Deliverance of Israel is
certain. And what now interests the prophet is first, how the Holy
Nation will accomplish the destiny for which it has been set free,
and next, how the Holy City shall be prepared for the Nation to
inhabit. These are the two themes of chs. xlix. to lxvi. The latter
of them, the Restoration of Jerusalem, has scarcely been touched by
our prophet as yet. But he has already spoken much of the Nation's
Destiny as the Servant of the Lord; and now that we have exhausted
the subject of the deliverance from Babylon, we will take up his
prophecies on the Servant, both those which we have passed over in
chs. xl.-xlviii. and those which still lie ahead of us.
Before we do this, however, let us devote a chapter to a study of our
prophet's use of the word righteousness, for which this seems to be
as convenient a place as any other.
FOOTNOTES:
[117] Bredenkamp will have it, that the prophet here mentions first
Northern Israel and then Judah: _O House of Jacob_, the general term,
both _those that are called by the name of Israel, and that have
come forth from the waters of Judah_. But this is entirely opposed
to the syntax, and I note the opinion simply to show how precarious
the arguments are for the existence of pre-exilic elements in Isa.
xl.-xlviii. The point, which Bredenkamp makes by his rendering of
this verse, is that it could only be a pre-exilic prophet, who would
distinguish between Judah and Northern Israel; and that, therefore,
it might be Isaiah himself who wrote the verse!
[118] _Former things_ (ri'shonôth). It is impossible to determine
whether these mean _predictions_ which Jehovah published long ago,
and which have already come to pass, or _former events_ which He
foretold long ago, and which have happened as He said they would. The
distinction, however, is immaterial.
[119] Literally, _also_. But נם, a cumulative conjunction, when it
is introduced to repeat the same thought as preceded it, means _yea,
truly_, profecto, imo.
[120] Ch. xxv., which is undoubtedly an authentic prophecy of Jeremiah.
[121] The Hebrew has not the words _My Name_. The LXX. has them.
[122] A second time without article though applied to the whole world.
[123] Giesebrecht takes this as an actual quotation from some former
prophet: a specimen of the ancient prophecies which Jehovah sent to
Israel, and which were now being fulfilled. At least it is the sum of
what Jehovah's prophets had often predicted.
[124] This very difficult verse has been attributed either to
Jehovah in the first three clauses and to the Servant in the fourth
(Delitzsch); or in the same proportion to Jehovah and the prophet
(Cheyne and Bredenkamp); or to the Servant all through (Orelli); or
to the prophet all through (Hitzig, Knobel, Giesebrecht. See the
latter's _Beiträge zur Kritik Jesaia's_, p. 136). It is a subtle
matter. The present expositor thinks it clear that all four clauses
must be understood as the voice of one speaker, but sees nothing
in them to decide finally whether that speaker is the Servant, the
people Israel, in which case _I am there_ would have reference to
Israel's consciousness of every deed done by God since the beginning
of their history (_cf._ ver. 6_a_); or whether the speaker is the
prophet, in which case _I am there_ would mean that he had watched
the rise of Cyrus from the first. But _cf._ Zech. ii. 10-11, Eng.
Ver., and iv. 9.
[125] Or _like its bowels_, referring to the sea.
CHAPTER XIV.
_THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ISRAEL AND THE
RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD._
ISAIAH xl.-lxvi.
In the chapters which we have been studying we have found some
difficulty with one of our prophet's keynotes--_right_ or
_righteousness_. In the chapters to come we shall find this difficulty
increase, unless we take some trouble now to define how much the word
denotes in Isa. xl.-lxvi. There is no part of Scripture, in which
the term _righteousness_ suffers so many developments of meaning. To
leave these vague, as readers usually do, or to fasten upon one and
all the technical meaning of righteousness in Christian theology, is
not only to obscure the historical reference and moral force of single
passages,--it is to miss one of the main arguments of the prophecy. We
have read enough to see that _righteousness_ was the great question
of the Exile. But what was brought into question was not only the
righteousness of the people, but the righteousness of their God.
In Isa. xl.-lxvi. righteousness is more often claimed as a Divine
attribute, than enforced as a human duty or ideal.[126]
I. RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Ssedheq, the Hebrew root for righteousness, had, like the Latin
"rectus," in its earliest and now almost forgotten uses, a physical
meaning. This may have been either _straightness_, or more probably
_soundness_,--the state in which a thing is _all right_.[127] _Paths
of righteousness_, in Psalm xxiii., ver. 4, are not necessarily
straight paths, but rather sure, genuine, safe paths.[128] Like all
physical metaphors, like our own words "straight" and "right," the
applicability of the term to moral conduct was exceedingly elastic.
It has been attempted to gather most of its meaning under the
definition of _conformity to norm_;[129] and so many are the instances
in which the word has a forensic force,[130] as of _vindication_ or
_justification_, that some have claimed this for its original, or,
at least, its governing sense. But it is improbable that either of
these definitions conveys the simplest or most general sense of the
word. Even if _conformity_ or _justification_ were ever the prevailing
sense of ssedheq, there are a number of instances in which its
meaning far overflows the limits of such definitions. Every one can
see how a word, which may generally be used to express an abstract
idea, like _conformity_, or a formal relation towards a law or person,
like _justification_, might come to be applied to the actual virtues,
which realise that idea or lift a character into that relation. Thus
righteousness might mean justice, or truth, or almsgiving, or religious
obedience,--to each of which, in fact, the Hebrew word was at various
times specially applied. Or righteousness might mean virtue in general,
virtue apart from all consideration of law or duty whatsoever. In the
prophet Amos, for instance, _righteousness_ is applied to a goodness so
natural and spontaneous that no one could think of it for a moment as
conformity to norm or fulfilment of law.[131]
In short, it is impossible to give a definition of the Hebrew
word, which our version renders as _righteousness_, less wide than
our English word _right_. _Righteousness_ is _right_ in all its
senses,--natural, legal, personal, religious. It is to be all right,
to be right-hearted, to be consistent, to be thorough; but also to be
in the right, to be justified, to be vindicated; and, in particular,
it may mean to be humane (as with Amos), to be just (as with Isaiah),
to be correct or true to fact (as sometimes with our own prophet), to
fulfil the ordinances of religion, and especially the command about
almsgiving (as with the later Jews).
Let us now keep in mind that righteousness could express a relation,
or a general quality of character, or some particular virtue. For we
shall find traces of all these meanings in our prophet's application
of the term to Israel and to God.
II. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ISRAEL.
One of the simplest forms of the use of _righteousness_ in the Old
Testament is when it is employed in the case of ordinary quarrels
between two persons; in which for one of them _to be righteous_ means
_to be right_ or _in the right_.[132] Now to the Hebrew all life and
religion was based upon covenants between two,--between man and man
and between man and God. Righteousness meant fidelity to the terms
of those covenants. The positive contents of the word in any single
instance of its use would, therefore, depend on the faithfulness and
delicacy of conscience by which those terms were interpreted. In
early Israel this conscience was not so keen as it afterwards came
to be, and accordingly Israel's sense of their righteousness towards
God was, to begin with, a comparatively shallow one. When a Psalmist
asseverates his righteousness and pleads it as the ground for God
rewarding him, it is plain that he is able with sincerity to make a
claim, so repellent to a Christian's feeling, just because he has not
anything like a Christian's conscience of what God demands from man.
As Calvin says on Psalm xviii., ver. 20, "David here represents God
as the President of an athletic contest, who had chosen him as one of
His champions, and David knows that so long as he keeps to the rules
of the contest, so long will God defend him." It is evident that in
such an assertion righteousness cannot mean perfect innocence, but
simply the good conscience of a man, who, with simple ideas of what
is demanded from him, feels that on the whole "he has" (slightly to
paraphrase Calvin) "played fair."
Two things, almost simultaneously, shook Israel out of this primitive
and naïve self-righteousness. History went against them, and the
prophets quickened their conscience.[133] The effect of the former of
these two causes will be clear to us, if we recollect the judicial
element in the Hebrew righteousness,--that it often meant not so
much to be right, as to be vindicated or declared right. History, to
Israel, was God's supreme tribunal. It was the faith of the people,
expressed over and over again in the Old Testament, that the godly
man is vindicated or justified by his prosperity: _the way of the
ungodly shall perish_. And Israel felt themselves to be in the
right, just as David, in Psalm xviii., felt himself, because God
had accredited them with success and victory. But when the decision
of history went against the nation, when they were threatened with
expulsion from their land and with extinction as a people, that just
meant that the Supreme Judge of men was giving His sentence against
them. Israel had broken the terms of the Covenant. They had lost
their right; they were no longer _righteous_. The keener conscience,
developed by prophecy, swiftly explained this sentence of history.
This declaration, that the people were unrighteous, was due, the
prophet said, to the people's sins. Isaiah not only exclaimed, _Your
country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire_; he added, in
equal indictment, _How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was
full of justice, righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers: thy
princes are rebellious, they judge not the fatherless, neither doth
the cause of the widow come before them_. To Isaiah and the earlier
prophets Israel was unrighteous because it was so immoral. With their
strong social conscience, righteousness meant to these prophets the
practice of civic virtues,--truth-telling, honesty between citizens,
tenderness to the poor, inflexible justice in high places.
Here then we have two possible meanings for Israel's righteousness
in the prophetic writings, allied and necessary to one another,
yet logically distinct,--the one a becoming righteous through the
exercise of virtue, the other a being shown to be righteous by the
voice of history. In the one case righteousness is the practical
result of the working of the Spirit of God; in the other it is
vindication, or justification, by the Providence of God. Isaiah and
the earlier prophets, while the sentence of history was still not
executed and might through the mercy of God be revoked, incline to
employ righteousness predominantly in the former sense. But it will
be understood how, after the Exile, it was the latter, which became
the prevailing determination of the word. By that great disaster God
finally uttered the clear sentence, of which previous history had
been but the foreboding. Israel in exile was fully declared to be in
the wrong--to be unrighteous. As a church, she lay under the ban; as
a nation, she was discredited before the nations of the world. And
her one longing, hope and effort during the weary years of Captivity
was to have her right vindicated again, was to be restored to right
relations to God and to the world, under the Covenant.
This is the predominant meaning of the term, as applied to Israel, in
Isa. xl.-lxvi. Israel's unrighteousness is her state of discredit and
disgrace under the hands of God; her righteousness, which she hopes
for, is her restoral to her station and destiny as the elect people.
To our Christian habit of thinking, it is very natural to read the
frequent and splendid phrases, in which _righteousness_ is attributed
or promised to the people of God in this evangelical prophecy, as
if righteousness were that inward assurance and justification from
an evil conscience, which, as we are taught by the New Testament,
is provided for us through the death of Christ, and inwardly sealed
to us by the Holy Ghost, irrespective of the course of our outward
fortune. But if we read that meaning into _righteousness_ in Isa.
xl.-lxvi., we shall simply not understand some of the grandest
passages of the prophecy. We must clearly keep in view, that while
the prophet ceaselessly emphasizes the pardon of God _spoken home
to the heart_ of the people, as the first step towards their
restoral, he does not apply the term righteousness to this inward
justification,[134] but to the outward vindication and accrediting
of Israel by God before the whole world, in their redemption from
Captivity, and their reinstatement as His people. This is very clear
from the way in which _righteousness_ is coupled with _salvation_ by
the prophet, as (lxii. 1): _I will not rest till her righteousness
go forth as brightness, and her salvation as a lamp that burneth_.
Or again from the way in which righteousness and glory are put in
parallel (lxii. 2): _And the nations shall see thy righteousness,
and all kings thy glory_. Or again in the way that _righteousness_
and _renown_ are identified (lxi. 11): _The Lord Jehovah will cause
righteousness and renown to spring forth before all the nations_.
In each of these promises the idea of an external and manifest
splendour is evident; not the inward peace of justification felt
only by the conscience to which it has been granted, but the outward
historical victory appreciable by the gross sense of the heathen.
Of course the outward implies the inward,--this historical triumph
is the crown of a religious process, the result of forgiveness and
a long purification,--but while in the New Testament it is these
which would be most readily called a people's righteousness, it is
the former (what the New Testament would rather call _the crown of
life_), which has appropriated the name in Isa. xl.-lxvi. The same is
manifest from another text (xlviii. 18): _O that thou hadst hearkened
to My commandments; then had thy peace been as the River, and thy
righteousness like the waves of the sea_. Here _righteousness_ is not
only not applied to inward morality, but set over against this as its
external reward,--the health and splendour which a good conscience
produces. It is in the same external sense that the prophet talks of
the _robe of righteousness_ with its bridal splendour, and compares
it to the appearance of _Spring_ (lxi. 10-11).
For this kind of righteousness, this vindication by God before the
world, Israel waited throughout the Exile. God addresses them as
_they that pursue righteousness, that seek Jehovah_ (li. 1). And
it is a closely allied meaning, though perhaps with a more inward
application, when the people are represented as praying God to give
them _ordinances of righteousness_ (lviii. 2),--that is, to prescribe
such a ritual as will expiate their guilt and bring them into a right
relation with Him. They sought in vain. The great lesson of the Exile
was that not by works and performances, but through simply waiting
upon the Lord, their righteousness should shine forth. Even this
outward kind of justification was to be by faith.
The other meaning of righteousness, however,--the sense of social
and civic morality, which was its usual sense with the earlier
prophets,--is not altogether excluded from the use of the word in
Isa. xl.-lxvi. Here are some commands and reproaches which seem to
imply it. _Keep judgement, and do righteousness_,--where, from what
follows, righteousness evidently means observing the Sabbath and
doing no evil (lvi. 1 ff). _And justice is fallen away backward, and
righteousness standeth afar off, for truth is fallen in the street,
and steadfastness cannot enter_ (lix. 14). These must be terms for
human virtues, for shortly afterwards it is said: _Jehovah was
displeased because there was no justice_. Again, _They seek Me as
a nation that did righteousness_ (lviii. 2); _Hearken unto Me, ye
that know righteousness, a people--My law is in their hearts_ (li.
7); _Thou meetest him that worketh righteousness_ (lxiv. 5); _No
one sues in righteousness, and none goeth to law in truth_ (lix.
4). In all these passages _righteousness_ means something that man
can know and do, his conscience and his duty, and is rightly to
be distinguished from those others, in which _righteousness_ is
equivalent to the salvation, the glory, the peace, which only God's
power can bring. If the passages, that employ _righteousness_ in the
sense of moral or religious observance, really date from the Exile,
then the interesting fact is assured to us that the Jews enjoyed
some degree of social independence and responsibility during their
Captivity. But it is a very striking fact that these passages all
belong to chapters, the exilic origin of which is questioned even by
critics, who assign the rest of Isa. xl.-lxvi. to the Exile. Yet,
even if these passages have all to be assigned to the Exile, how
few they are in number! How they contrast with the frequency, with
which, in the earlier part of this book,--in the orations addressed
by Isaiah to his own times, when Israel was still an independent
state,--_righteousness_ is reiterated as the daily, practical duty
of men, as justice, truthfulness and charity between man and man!
The extreme rarity of such inculcations in Isa. xl.-lxvi. warns us
that we must not expect to find here the same practical and political
interest, which formed so much of the charm and the force of Isa.
i.-xxxix. The nation has now no politics, almost no social morals.
Israel are not citizens working out their own salvation in the
market, the camp and the senate; but captives waiting a deliverance
in God's time, which no act of theirs can hasten. It is not in the
street that the interest of Second Isaiah lies: it is on the horizon.
Hence the vague feeling of a distant splendour, which, as the reader
passes from ch. xxxix. to ch. xl., replaces in his mind the stir of
living in a busy crowd, the close and throbbing sense of the civic
conscience, the voice of statesmen, the clash of the weapons of war.
There is no opportunity for individuals to reveal themselves. It is
a nation waiting, indistinguishable in shadow, whose outlines only
we see. It is no longer the thrilling practical cry, which sends
men into the arenas of social life with every sinew in them strung:
_Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the
fatherless, plead for the widow_. It is rather the cry of one who
still waits for his working day to dawn: _I will lift up mine eyes to
the hills, from whence cometh my help?_ Righteousness is not the near
and daily duty, it is the far-off peace and splendour of skies, that
have scarce begun to redden to the day.
III. THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD.
But there was another Person, whose righteousness was in question
during the Exile, and who Himself argues for it throughout our
prophecy. Perhaps the most peculiar feature of the theology of Isa.
xl.-lxvi. is its argument for _the righteousness of Jehovah_.
Some critics maintain that righteousness, when applied to Jehovah,
bears always a technical reference to His covenant with Israel.
This is scarcely correct. Jehovah's dealings with Israel were no
doubt the chief of His dealings, and it is these, which He mainly
quotes to illustrate His righteousness; but we have already studied
passages, which prove to us that Jehovah's righteousness was an
absolute quality of His Godhead, shown to others besides Israel, and
in loyalty to obligations different from the terms of His covenant
with Israel. In ch. xli. Jehovah calls upon the heathen to match
their righteousness with His; righteousness was therefore a quality
that might have been attributed to them as well as to Himself. Again,
in xlv. 19,--_I, Jehovah, speak righteousness, I declare things that
are right_,--righteousness evidently bears a general sense, and not
one of exclusive application to God's dealing with Israel. It is the
same in the passage about Cyrus (xlv. 13): _I have raised him up in
righteousness, I will make straight all his ways_. Though Cyrus was
called in connection with God's purpose towards Israel, it is not
that purpose which makes his calling righteous, but the fact that God
means to carry him through, or, as the parallel verse says, _to make
straight all his ways_. These instances are sufficient to prove that
the righteousness, which God attributes to His words, to His actions
and to Himself, is a general quality not confined to His dealings
with Israel under the covenant,--though, of course, most clearly
illustrated by these.
If now we enquire, what this absolute quality of Jehovah's Deity
really means, we may conveniently begin with His application of
it to His Word. In ch. xli. He summons the other religions to
exhibit predictions that are true to fact. _Who hath declared it
on-ahead that we may know, or from aforetime that we may say, He is
ssaddîq._[135] Here ssaddîq simply means _right_, _correct_, true
to fact. It is much the same meaning in xliii. 9, where the verb is
used of heathen predicters, _that they may be shown to be right_, or
_correct_ (English version, _justified_). But when, in ch. xlvi.,
the word is applied by Jehovah to His own speech, it has a meaning,
of far richer contents, than mere correctness, and proves to us that
after all the Hebrew ssedheq was almost as versatile as the English
"right." The following passage shows us that the righteousness of
Jehovah's speech is its clearness, straightforwardness and practical
effectiveness: _Not in secret have I spoken, in a place of the
land of darkness_,--this has been supposed to refer to the remote
or subterranean localities in which heathen oracles mysteriously
entrenched themselves,--_I have not said to the seed of Jacob, In
Chaos seek Me. I am Jehovah, a Speaker of righteousness, a Publisher
of straight things. Be gathered and come, draw near together, O
remnants of the nations. They know not that carry the log of their
image, and pray to a god who does not save. Publish and bring near,
yea, let them take counsel together. Who caused this to be heard of
old? long since hath published it? Is it not I, Jehovah, and there
is none else God beside Me; a God righteous and a Saviour, there is
none except Me. Turn unto Me and be saved, all ends of Earth,_[136]
_for I am God, and there is none else. By Myself have I sworn, gone
forth from My mouth hath righteousness: a word and it shall not turn;
for to Me shall bow every knee, shall swear every tongue. Truly in
Jehovah, shall they say of Me, are righteousnesses and strength. To
Him shall it come,_[137] _and shamed shall be all that are incensed
against Him. In Jehovah shall be righteous and renowned all the seed
of Israel_ (xlv. 19-25).
In this very suggestive passage _righteousness_ means far more
than simple correctness of prediction. Indeed, it is difficult to
distinguish how much it means, so quickly do its varying echoes
throng upon our ear, from the new associations in which it is
spoken. A word such as _righteousness_ is like the sensitive tones
of the human voice. Spoken in a desert, the voice is itself and
nothing more; but utter it where the landscape is crowded with novel
obstacles, and the original note is almost lost amid the echoes
it startles. So with the _righteousness of Jehovah_; among the
new associations in which the prophet affirms it, it starts novel
repetitions of itself. Against the ambiguity of the oracles, it is
echoed back as _clearness_, _straightforwardness_, _good faith_ (ver.
19); against their opportunism and want of foresight, it is described
as equivalent to the capacity for arranging things beforehand and
predicting what must come to pass, therefore as _purposefulness_;
while against their futility, it is plainly _effectiveness and power
to prevail_ (ver. 23). It is the quality in God, which divides His
Godhead with His power, something intellectual as well as moral, the
possession of a reasonable purpose as well as fidelity towards it.
This intellectual sense of righteousness, as reasonableness or
purposefulness, is clearly illustrated by the way in which the
prophet appeals, in order to enforce it, to Jehovah's creation of
the world. _Thus saith Jehovah, Creator of the heavens--He is the
God--Former of the Earth and her Maker, He founded her; not Chaos did
He create her, to be dwelt in did He form her_ (xlv. 18). The word
_Chaos_ here is the same as is used in opposition to _righteousness_
in the following verse. The sentence plainly illustrates the truth,
that whatever God does, He does not so as to issue in confusion,
but with a reasonable purpose and for a practical end. We have here
the repetition of that deep, strong note, which Isaiah himself so
often sounded to the comfort of men in perplexity or despair, that
God is at least reasonable, not working for nothing, nor beginning
only to leave off, nor creating in order to destroy. The same God,
says our prophet, who formed the earth in order to see it inhabited,
must surely be believed to be consistent enough to carry to the
end also His spiritual work among men. Our prophet's idea of God's
righteousness, therefore, includes the idea of reasonableness;
implies rational as well as moral consistency, practical sense as
well as good faith; the conscience of a reasonable plan, and, perhaps
also, the power to carry it through.
To know that this great and varied meaning belongs to _righteousness_
gives us new insight into those passages, which find in it all the
motive and efficiency of the Divine action: _It pleased Jehovah for His
righteousness' sake_ (xlii. 21); _His righteousness, it upheld Him; and
He put on righteousness as a breastplate_ (lix. 16, 17).
With such a righteousness did Jehovah deal with Israel. To her
despair that He has forgotten her He recounts the historical events
by which He has made her His own, and affirms that He will carry
them on; and you feel the expression both of fidelity and of the
consciousness of ability to fulfil, in the words, _I will uphold thee
with the right hand of My righteousness. Right hand_--there is more
than the touch of fidelity in this; there is the grasp of power.
Again, to the Israel who was conscious of being His Servant, God
says, _I, Jehovah, have called thee in righteousness_; and, taken
with the context, the word plainly means good faith and intention to
sustain and carry to success.
It was easy to transfer the name _righteousness_ from the character of
God's action to its results, but always, of course, in the vindication
of His purpose and word. Therefore, just as the salvation of Israel,
which was the chief result of the Divine purpose, is called Israel's
righteousness, so it is also called _Jehovah's righteousness_.
Thus, in xlvi. 13, _I bring near My righteousness_; and in li. 5,
_My righteousness is near, My salvation is gone forth_; ver. 6,
_My salvation shall be for ever, and My righteousness shall not be
abolished._ It seems to be in the same sense, of finished and visible
results, that the skies are called upon _to pour down righteousness,
and the earth to open that they may be fruitful in salvation, and let
her cause righteousness to spring up together_ (xlv. 8; _cf._ lxi. 10,
_My Lord Jehovah will cause righteousness to spring forth_).
One passage is of great interest, because in it _righteousness_ is
used to play upon itself, in its two meanings of human duty and
Divine effect--lvi. 1, _Observe judgement_--probably religious
ordinances--_and do righteousness; for My salvation is near to come,
and My righteousness to be revealed_.
* * * * *
To complete our study of _righteousness_ it is necessary to touch
still upon one point. In Isa. xl.-lxvi. both the masculine and
feminine forms of the Hebrew word for righteousness are used, and it
has been averred that they are used with a difference. This opinion
is entirely dispelled by a collation of the passages. I give the
particulars in a note, from which it will be seen that both forms are
indifferently employed for each of the many shades of meaning which
_righteousness_ bears in our prophecies.[138]
That the masculine and feminine forms sometimes occur, with the same
or with different meanings, in the same verse, or in the next verse
to one another, proves that the selection of them respectively cannot
be due to any difference in the authorship of our prophecy. So that
we are reduced to say that nothing accounts for their use, except, it
might be, the exigencies of the metre. But who is able to prove this?
FOOTNOTES:
[126] It is only by confining his review of the word to its
applications to God, and overlooking the passages which attribute it to
the people, that Krüger, _Essai sur la Théologie d'Isaïe xl.-lxvi._,
can affirm that the prophet holds throughout to a single idea of
righteousness (p. 36). On this, as on many other points, it is Calvin's
treatment, that is most sympathetic to the variations of the original.
[127] In Arabic the cognate word is applied to a lance, but this
may mean a sound or fit lance as well as a straight one. "Originem
Schult. de defect. hodiernis § 214-224 ponit in _rigore_, _duritia_,
coll. [Arabic: **] lancea dura, al. aequabilis" (Gesenii _Thesaurus_,
art. צדק).
[128] It is not certain whether righteousness is here used in a
physical sense; and in all other cases in which the root is applied
in the Old Testament to material objects, it is plainly employed in
some reflection of its moral sense, _e.g._, _just_ weights, _just_
balance, Lev. xix. 36.
[129] "Der Zustand welcher der Norm entspricht." Schultz, _Alt. Test.
Theologie_, 4th ed., p. 540, n. 1.
[130] _Cf._ Robertson Smith, _Prophets of Israel_, p. 388, and
Kautzsch's paper, which is there quoted.
[131] "Die Begriffe צדקה und צדק ... bedeuten nun wirklich bei
Amos mehr als die juristische Gerechtigkeit. Indirect gehen die
Forderungen des Amos über die blos rechtliche Sphäre hinaus" (Duhm,
_Theologie der Propheten_, p. 115).
[132] Gen. xxxviii. 26. _Cf._ 2 Sam. xv. 4.
[133] The first chapter of Isaiah is a perfect summary of these two.
[134] But the verb to _make righteous_ or _justify_ is used in a
sense akin to the New Testament sense in liii. 11. See our chapter on
that prophecy.
[135] At first sight this is remarkably like the cognate Arabic root,
which is continually used for truthful. But the Hebrew word never meant
truthful in the moral sense of truth, and here is _right_ or _correct_.
[136] _Earth_ again without article, though obviously referring to
the world.
[137] Sense doubtful here. Bredenkamp translates by a slight change
of reading: _Only speaking by Jehovah: Fulness of righteousness and
might come to Him, and ashamed, etc._
[138] דקצ, the masculine, is used sixteen times; צדקה, twenty-four.
Both are used of Jehovah: xlii. 21 צדקו, and lix. 16 צדקתו. Both of His
speech: masc. in xlv. 19, fem. in xlv. 23 and lxiii. 1. Perhaps the
passage in which their identity is most plain is li. 5, 6, where they
are both parallel to salvation: ver. 5, My righteousness (m.) is near;
ver. 6, My righteousness (f.) shall not be abolished. Both are used of
the people's duty: lix. 4, None sueth in righteousness (m.); xlviii. 1,
But not in truth nor in righteousness (f.); lvi. 1, Keep justice and do
righteousness (f.) And both are used of the people's saved and glorious
condition: lviii. 8, Thy righteousness (m.) shall go before thee;
lxii. 1, Until her righteousness (m.) go forth as brightness; xlviii.
18, Thy righteousness (f.) as the waves of the sea; liv. 17, Their
righteousness (f.) which is of Me. Both are used with prepositions
(_cf._ xlii. 6 with xlviii. 1), and both with possessive pronouns. In
fact, there is absolutely no difference made between the two.
BOOK III.
_THE SERVANT OF THE LORD._
BOOK III.
Having completed our survey of the fundamental truths of our prophecy,
and studied the subject which forms its immediate and most urgent
interest, the deliverance of Israel from Babylon, we are now at liberty
to turn to consider the great duty and destiny which lie before the
delivered people--the Service of Jehovah. The passages of our prophecy
which describe this are scattered both among those chapters we have
already studied and among those which lie before us. But, as was
explained in the Introduction, they are all easily detached from their
surroundings; and the continuity and progress, of which their series,
though so much interrupted, gives evidence, demand that they should be
treated by us together. They will, therefore, form the Third of the
Books, into which this volume is divided.
The passages on the Servant of Jehovah, or, as the English reader is
more accustomed to hear him called, the Servant of the Lord, are as
follows: xli. 8 ff; xlii. 1-7, 18-25; xliii. _passim_, especially 8-10;
xliv. 1, 21; xlviii. 20; xlix. 1-9; l. 4-11; lii. 13-liii. The main
passages are those in xli., xlii., xliii., xlix., l., and lii.-liii.
The others are incidental allusions to Israel as the Servant of the
Lord, and do not develop the character of the Servant or the Service.
Upon the questions relevant to the structure of these prophecies--why
they have been so scattered, and whether they were originally
from the main author of Isa. xl.-lxvi., or from any other single
writer,--questions on which critics have either preserved a discreet
silence, or have spoken to convince nobody but themselves,--I have no
final opinions to offer. It may be that these passages formed a poem
by themselves before their incorporation with our prophecy; but the
evidence, which has been offered for this, is very far from adequate.
It may be that one or more of them are insertions from other authors,
to which our prophet consciously works up with ideas of his own about
the Servant; but neither for this is there any evidence worth serious
consideration. I think that all we can do is to remember that they
occur in a dramatic work, which may, partly at least, account for the
interruptions which separate them; that the subject of which they treat
is woven through and through other portions of Isa. xl.-liii., and
that even those of them which, like ch. xlix., look as if they could
stand by themselves, are led up to by the verses before them; and that,
finally, the series of them exhibits a continuity and furnishes a
distinct development of their subject. See pp. 313, 314, and 336 ff.
It is this development which the following exposition seeks to
trace. As the prophet starts from the idea of the Servant as being
the whole, historical nation Israel, it will be necessary to devote,
first of all, a chapter to Israel's peculiar relation to God. This
will be ch. xv., "One God, One People." In ch. xvi. we shall trace
the development of the idea through the whole series of the passages;
and in ch. xvii. we shall give the New Testament interpretation and
fulfilment of the Servant. Then will follow an exposition of the
contents of the Service and of the ideal it presents to ourselves,
_first_, as it is given in Isa. xlii. 1-9, as the service of God and
man, ch. xviii. of this volume; then as it is realised and owned by
the Servant himself, as prophet and martyr, Isa. xlix.-l., ch. xix.
of this volume; and finally as it culminates in Isa. lii. 13-liii.,
ch. xx. of this volume.
CHAPTER XV.
_ONE GOD, ONE PEOPLE._
ISAIAH xli. 8-20, xlii.-xliii.
We have been listening to the proclamation of a Monotheism so
absolute, that, as we have seen, modern critical philosophy, in
surveying the history of religion, can find for it no rival among the
faiths of the world. God has been exalted before us, in character so
perfect, in dominion so universal, that neither the conscience nor
the imagination of man can add to the general scope of the vision.
Jesus and His Cross shall lead the world's heart farther into the
secrets of God's love; God's Spirit in science shall more richly
instruct us in the secrets of His laws. But these shall thereby only
increase the contents and illustrate the details of this revelation
of our prophet. They shall in no way enlarge its sweep and outline,
for it is already as lofty an idea of the unity and sovereignty of
God, as the thoughts of man can follow.
Across this pure light of God, however, a phenomenon thrusts itself,
which seems for the moment to affect the absoluteness of the
vision and to detract from its sublimity. This is the prominence
given before God to a single people, Israel. In these chapters the
uniqueness of Israel is as much urged upon us as the unity of God.
Is He the One God in heaven? they are His only people on earth,
_His elect, His own, His witnesses to the end of the earth_. His
guidance of them is matched with His guidance of the stars, as if,
like the stars shining against the night, their tribes alone moved to
His hand through an otherwise dark and empty space. His revelation
to humanity is given through their little language; the restoration
of their petty capital, that hill fort in the barren land of Judah,
is exhibited as the end of His processes, which sweep down through
history and affect the surface of the whole inhabited world. And His
very righteousness turns out to be for the most part His faithfulness
to His covenant with Israel.
Now to many in our day it has been a great offence to have "the
curved nose of the Jew" thus thrust in between their eyes and the
pure light of God. They ask, Can the Judge of all the earth have been
thus partial to one people? Did God confine His revelation to men to
the literature of a small, unpolished tribe? Even most uncritical
souls have trouble to understand why _salvation is of the Jews_.
The chief point to know is that the election of Israel was an election,
not to salvation, but to service. To understand this is to get rid of
by far the greater part of the difficulty that attaches to the subject.
Israel was a means, and not an end; God chose in him a minister, not
a favourite. No prophet in Israel failed to say this; but our prophet
makes it the burden of his message to the exiles. _Ye are My witnesses,
My Servant whom I have chosen. Ye are My witnesses, and I am God. I
will also give thee for a light to the nations, to be My salvation to
the end of the earth_ (xliii. 10). Numbers of other verses might be
quoted to the same effect, that "there is no God but God, and Israel
is His prophet."[139] But if the election of Israel is thus an election
to service, it is surely in harmony with God's usual method, whether
in nature or history. So far from such a specialisation as Israel's
being derogatory to the Divine unity, it is but part of that order and
division of labour which the Divine unity demands as its consequence
throughout the whole range of Being. The universe is diverse. _To
every man his own work_ is the proper corollary of _God over all_, and
Israel's prerogative was but the specialisation of Israel's function
for God in the world. In choosing Israel to be His mediator with
mankind, God did but do for religion what in the exercise of the same
practical discipline He did for philosophy, when He dowered Greece with
her gifts of subtle thought and speech, or with Rome when He trained
her people to become the legislators of mankind. And how else should
work succeed but by specialisation,--the secret as it is of fidelity
and expertness? Of fidelity--for the constraint of my duty surely lies
in this, that it is due from me and no other; of expertness--for he
drives best and deepest who drives along one line. In lighting a fire
you begin with a kindled faggot; and in lighting a world it was in
harmony with all His law, physical and moral, for God to begin with a
particular portion of mankind.
The next question is, Why should this particular portion of mankind
be a nation, and not a single prophet, or a school of philosophers,
or a church universal? The answer is found in the condition of
the ancient world. Amid its diversities of language and of racial
feeling, a missionary prophet travelling like Paul from people to
people is inconceivable; and almost as inconceivable is the kind
of Church which Paul founded among various nations, in no other
bonds than the consciousness of a common faith. Of all possible
combinations of men the nation was the only form, which in the
ancient world stood a chance of surviving in the struggle for
existence. The nation furnished the necessary shelter and fellowship
for personal religion; it gave to the spiritual a habitation upon
earth, enlisted in its behalf the force of heredity, and secured
the continuity of its traditions. But the service of the nation to
religion was not only conservative, it was missionary as well. It
was only through a people that a God became visible and accredited
to the world. Their history supplied the drama in which He played
the hero's part. At a time when it was impossible to spread a
religion, by means of literature, or by the example of personal
holiness, the achievements of a considerable nation, their progress
and prestige, furnished a universally understood language, through
which the God could publish to mankind His power and will; and in
choosing, therefore, a single nation to reveal Himself by, God was
but employing the means best adapted for His purpose. The nation was
the unit of religious progress in the ancient world. In the nation
God chose as His witness, not only the most solid and permanent, but
the most widely intelligible and impressive.[140]
The next question is, Why Israel should have been this singular and
indispensable nation? When God selected Israel to serve His purpose,
He did so, we are told, of His sovereign grace. But this strong
thought, which forms the foundation of our prophet's assurance about
his people, does not prevent him from dwelling also on Israel's
natural capacity for religious service. This, too, was of God. Over
and over again Israel hears Jehovah say: _I have created thee, I
have formed thee, I have prepared thee_. One passage describes
the nation's equipment for the office of a prophet; another their
discipline for the life of a saint; and every now and then our
prophet shows how far back he feels this preparation to have begun,
even when the nation, as he puts it, was _still in the womb_. How
easily these well-worn phrases slip over our lips! Yet they are not
mere formulas. Modern research has put a new meaning into them,
and taught us that Israel's _creation_, _forming_, _election_,
_polishing_, _carriage_, and _defence_ were processes as real and
measurable as any in natural or political history. For instance, when
our prophet says that Israel's preparation began _from the womb,--I
am thy moulder, saith Jehovah, from the womb_,--history takes us
back to the pre-natal circumstance of the nation, and there exhibits
it to us as already being tempered to a religious disposition and
propensity. The Hebrews were of the Semitic stock. The _womb_ from
which Israel sprang was a race of wandering shepherds, upon the
hungry deserts of Arabia, where man's home is the flitting tent,
hunger is his discipline for many months of the year, his only arts
are those of speech and war, and in the long irremediable starvation
there is nothing to do but to be patient and dream. Born in these
deserts, the youth of the Semitic race, like the probation of their
greatest prophets, was spent in a long fast, which lent their spirit
a wonderful ease of detachment from the world and of religious
imagination, and tempered their will to long suffering--though it
touched their blood, too, with a rancorous heat that breaks out
through the prevailing calm of every Semitic literature.[141] They
were trained also in the desert's august style of eloquence. _He hath
made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand hath
He hid me._[142] A "natural prophecy," as it has been called, is
found in all the branches of the Semitic stock. No wonder that from
this race there came forth the three great universal religions of
mankind--that Moses and the prophets, John, Jesus Himself and Paul,
and Mohammed were all of the seed of Shem.
This racial disposition the Hebrew carried with him into his calling
as a nation. The ancestor, who gave the people the double name by
which they are addressed throughout our prophecy, _Jacob-Israel_,
inherited with all his defects the two great marks of the religious
temper. Jacob could dream and he could wait. Remember him by the side
of the brother, who could so little think of the future, that he was
willing to sell its promise for a mess of pottage; who, though God
was as near to him as to Jacob, never saw visions or wrestled with
angels; who seemed to have no power of growth about him, but carrying
the same character, unchanged through the discipline of life, finally
transmitted it in stereotype to his posterity;--remember Jacob by the
side of such a brother, and you have a great part of the secret of the
emergence of his descendants from the life of wandering cattle-breeders
to be God's chief ministers of religion in the world. Their habits,
like their father's, might be bad, but they had the tough and malleable
constitution, which it was possible to mould to something better.
Like their father, they were false, unchivalrous, selfish, "with the
herdsman's grossness in their blood," and much of the rancour and
cruelty of their ancestors, the desert-warriors, but with it all they
had the two most potential of habits--they could dream and they could
wait. In his love and hope for promised Rachel, that were not quenched
or soured by the substitution, after seven years' service for her, of
her ill-favoured sister, but began another seven years' effort for
herself, Jacob was a type of his strange, tenacious people, who, when
they were brought face to face with some Leah of a fulfilment of their
fondest ideals, as they frequently were in their history, took up again
with undiminished ardour the pursuit of their first unforgettable
love. It is the wonder of history, how this people passed through the
countless disappointments of the prophecies to which they had given
their hearts, yet with only a strengthening expectation of the arrival
of the promised King and His kingdom. If other peoples have felt a gain
in character from such miscarriages of belief, it has generally been at
the expense of their faith. But Israel's experience did not take faith
away or even impair faith's elasticity. We see their appreciation of
God's promises growing only more spiritual with each postponement,
and patience performing her perfect work upon their character; yet
this never happens at the cost of the original buoyancy and ardour.
The glory of it we ascribe, as is most due, to the power of the Word
of God; but the people who could stand the strain of the discipline
of such a word, its alternate glow and frost, must have been a people
of extraordinary fibre and frame. When we think of how they wore for
those two thousand years of postponed promise, and how they wear
still, after two thousand years more of disillusion and suffering, we
cease to wonder why God chose this small tribe to be His instrument on
earth. Where we see their bad habits, their Creator knew their sound
constitution, and the constitution of Israel is a thing unique among
mankind.
From the racial temper of the elect nation we pass to their history,
on the singularity of which our prophet dwells with emphasis.
Israel's political origin had no other reason than a call to God's
service. Other peoples grew, as it were, from the soil; they were the
product of a fatherland, a climate, certain physical environments:
root them out of these, and, as nations, they ceased to be. But
Israel had not been so nursed into nationality on the lap of nature.
The captive children of Jacob had sprung into unity and independence
as a nation at the special call of God, and to serve His will in
the world,--His will that so lay athwart the natural tendencies of
the peoples. All down their history it is wonderful to see how it
was the conscience of this service, which in periods of progress
was the real national genius in Israel, and in times of decay or of
political dissolution upheld the assurance of the nation's survival.
Whenever a ruler like Ahaz forgot that Israel's imperishableness
was bound up with their faithfulness to God's service, and sought to
preserve his throne by alliances with the world-powers, then it was
that Israel were most in danger of absorption into the world. And,
conversely, when disaster came down, and there was no hope in the
sky, it was upon the inward sense of their election to the service
of God that the prophets rallied the people's faith and assured them
of their survival as a nation. They brought to Israel that sovereign
message, which renders all who hear it immortal: "God has a service
for you to serve upon earth." In the Exile especially, the wonderful
survival of the nation, with the subservience of all history to that
end, is made to turn on this,--that Israel has a unique purpose to
serve. When Jeremiah and Ezekiel seek to assure the captives of their
return to the land and of the restoration of the people, they commend
so unlikely a promise by reminding them that the nation is the
Servant of God. This name, applied by them for the first time to the
nation as a whole, they bind up with the national existence. _Fear
thou not, O My Servant Jacob, saith Jehovah; neither be dismayed,
O Israel: for, lo, I will save thee from afar, and thy seed from
the land of their captivity._[143] These words plainly say, that
Israel as a nation cannot die, for God has a use for them to serve.
The singularity of Israel's redemption from Babylon is due to the
singularity of the service that God has for the nation to perform.
Our prophet speaks in the same strain: _Thou, Israel, My Servant,
Jacob whom I have chosen, seed of Abraham My lover, whom I took hold
of from the ends of the earth and its corners_. _I have called thee
and said unto thee, My Servant art thou, I have chosen thee and have
not cast thee away_ (ch. xli. 8 ff). No one can miss the force of
these words. They are the assurance of Israel's miraculous survival,
not because he is God's favourite, but because he is God's servant,
with a unique work in the world. Many other verses repeat the same
truth.[144] They call _Israel the Servant_, and _Jacob the chosen_,
of God, in order to persuade the people that they are not forgotten
of Him, and that their seed shall live and be blessed. Israel
survives because he serves--_Servus servatur._
Now for this service,--which had been the purpose of the nation's
election at first, the mainstay of its unique preservation since,
and the reason of all its singular pre-eminence before God,--Israel
was equipped by two great experiences. These were Redemption and
Revelation.
On the former redemptions of Israel from the power of other nations
our prophet does not dwell much. You feel, that they are present
to his mind, for he sometimes describes the coming redemption
from Babylon in terms of them. And once, in an appeal to the _Arm
of Jehovah_, he calls out: _Awake like the days of old, ancient
generations! Art thou not it that hewed Rahab in pieces, that pierced
the Dragon? Art thou not it which dried up the sea, the waters of
the great deep; that made the depths of the sea a way of passage for
the redeemed?_[145] There is, too, that beautiful passage in ch.
lxiii., which _makes mention of the lovingkindnesses of Jehovah,
according to all that He hath bestowed upon us_; which describes the
_carriage of the people all the days of old_, how _He brought them
out of the sea, caused His glorious arm to go at the right hand of
Moses, divided the water before them, led them through the deeps as a
horse on the meadow, that they stumbled not_. But, on the whole, our
prophet is too much engrossed with the immediate prospect of release
from Babylon, to remember that past, of which it has been truly said,
_He hath not dealt so with any people_. It is the new glory that is
upon him. He counts the deliverance from Babylon as already come; to
his rapt eye it is its marvellous power and costliness, which already
clothes the people in their unique brilliance and honour. _Thus saith
Jehovah, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: For your sake have
I sent to Babylon, and I will bring down their nobles, all of them,
and the Chaldeans, in the ships of their exulting._[146] But it is
more than Babylon that is balanced against them. _I am Jehovah, thy
God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour. I am giving as thy ransom,
Egypt, Cush and Seba in exchange for thee, because thou art precious
in mine eyes, and hast made thyself valuable_ (lit., _of weight_);
_and I have loved thee, therefore do I give mankind for thee, and
peoples for thy life._[147] _Mankind for thee, and peoples for thy
life_,--all the world for this little people? It is intelligible
only because this little people are to be for all the world. _Ye are
My witnesses that I am God. I will also give thee for a light to
nations, to be My salvation to the end of the earth._
But more than on the Redemption, which Israel experienced, our
prophet dwells on the Revelation, that has equipped them for their
destiny. In a passage, in ch. xliii., to which we shall return,
the present stupid and unready character of the mass of the people
is contrasted with the _instruction_ which God has lavished upon
them. _Thou hast seen many things, and wilt not observe; there is
opening of the ears, but he heareth not. Jehovah was pleased for
His righteousness' sake to magnify the Instruction and make it
glorious_,--_but that_--the result and the precipitate of it all--_is
a people robbed and spoiled_. The word _Instruction_ or _Revelation_
is that same technical term, which we have met with before, for
Jehovah's special training and illumination of Israel. How special
these were, how distinct from the highest doctrine and practice
of any other nation in that world to which Israel belonged, is an
historical fact that the results of recent research enable us to
state in a few sentences.
Recent exploration in the East, and the progress of Semitic philology,
have proved that the system of religion, which prevailed among the
Hebrews, had a very great deal in common with the systems of the
neighbouring and related heathen nations. This common element included
not only such things as ritual and temple-furniture, or the details of
priestly organization, but even the titles and many of the attributes
of God, and especially the forms of the covenant in which He drew near
to men. But the discovery of this common element has only thrown into
more striking relief the presence at work in the Hebrew religion of an
independent and original principle. In the Hebrew religion historians
observe a principle of selection operating upon the common Semitic
materials for worship,--ignoring some of them, giving prominence to
others, and with others again changing the reference and application.
Grossly immoral practices are forbidden; forbidden, too, are those
superstitions, which, like augury and divination, draw men away
from single-minded attention to the moral issues of life; and even
religious customs are omitted, such as the employment of women in
the sanctuary, which, however innocent in themselves, might lead men
into temptations, not desirable in connection with the professional
pursuit of religion.[148] In short, a stern and inexorable conscience
was at work in the Hebrew religion, which was not at work in any of
the religions most akin to it. In our previous volume we saw the same
conscience inspiring the prophets. Prophecy was not confined to the
Hebrews; it was a general Semitic institution; but no one doubts the
absolutely distinct character of the prophecy, which was conscious of
having the Spirit of Jehovah. Its religious ideas were original, and
in it we have, as all admit, a moral phenomenon unique in history.
When we turn to ask the secret of this distinction, we find the answer
in the character of the God, whom Israel served. The God explains the
people; Israel is the response to Jehovah. Each of the laws of the
nation is enforced by the reason, _For I am holy_. Each of the prophets
brings his message from a God, _exalted in righteousness_. In short,
look where you will in the Old Testament,--come to it as a critic or
as a worshipper,--you discover the revealed character of Jehovah to be
the effective principle at work. It is this Divine character, which
draws Israel from among the nations to their destiny, which selects and
builds the law to be a wall around them, and which by each revelation
of itself discovers to the people both the measure of their delinquency
and the new ideals of their service to humanity. Like the pillar of
cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, we see it in front of
Israel at every stage of their marvellous progress down the ages.
So that when Jehovah says that _He has magnified the Revelation and
made it glorious_, He speaks of a magnitude of a real, historical
kind, that can be tested by exact methods of observation. Israel's
_election_ by Jehovah, their _formation_, their unique _preparation_
for service, are not the mere boasts of an overweening patriotism,
but sober names for historical processes as real and evident as any
that history contains.
To sum up, then. If Jehovah's sovereignty be absolute, so also is the
uniqueness of Israel's calling and equipment for His Service. For, to
begin with, Israel had the essential religious temper; they enjoyed a
unique moral instruction and discipline; and by the side of this they
were conscious of a series of miraculous deliverances from servitude
and from dissolution. So singular an experience and career were not,
as we have seen, bestowed from any arbitrary motive, which exhausted
itself upon Israel, but in accordance with God's universal method
of specialisation of function, were granted to fit the nation as an
instrument for a practical end. The sovereign unity of God does not
mean equality in His creation. The universe is diverse. There is one
glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of
the stars; and even so in the moral kingdom of Him, who is Lord of
the Hosts of both earth and heaven, each nation has its own destiny
and function. Israel's was religion; Israel was God's specialist in
religion.
For confirmation of this we turn to the supreme witness. Jesus was
born a Jew, He confined His ministry to Judæa, and He has told
us why. By various passing allusions, as well as by deliberate
statements, He revealed His sense of a great religious difference
between Jew and Gentile. _Use not vain repetitions as the Gentiles
do.... For after all these things do the nations of the world seek;
but your Father knoweth that you have need of these things._ He
refused to work except upon Jewish hearts: _I am not sent but to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel. And He charged His disciples,
saying, Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any
city of the Samaritans; but go rather to the lost sheep of the House
of Israel._ And again He said to the woman of Samaria: _Ye worship ye
know not what; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews_.
These sayings of our Lord have created as much question as the
pre-eminence given in the Old Testament to a single people by a God,
who is described as the one God of Heaven and earth. Was He narrower of
heart than Paul, His servant, who was debtor to Greek and Barbarian?
Or was He ignorant of the universal character of His mission till it
was forced upon His reluctant sympathies by the importunity of such
heathen as the Syrophenician woman? A little common-sense dispels
the perplexity, and leaves the problem, over which volumes have been
written, no problem at all. Our Lord limited Himself to Israel,
not because He was narrow, but because He was practical; not from
ignorance, but from wisdom. He came from heaven to sow the seed of
Divine truth; and where in all humanity should He find the soil so
ready as within the long-chosen people? He knew of that discipline of
the centuries. In the words of His own parable, the Son when He came
to earth directed His attention not to a piece of desert, but to _the
vineyard_ which His Father's servants had so long cultivated, and where
the soil was open. Jesus came to Israel because He expected _faith in
Israel_. That this practical end was the deliberate intention of His
will, is proved by the fact that when He found faith elsewhere, either
in Syrian or Greek or Roman hearts, He did not hesitate to let His love
and power go forth to them.
In short, we shall have no difficulty about these Divine methods
with a single, elect people, if we only remember that to be Divine
is to be practical. _Yet God also is wise_, said Isaiah to the Jews
when they preferred their own clever policies to Jehovah's guidance.
And we need to be told the same, who murmur that to confine Himself
to a single nation was not the ideal thing for the One God to do;
or who imagine that it was left to one of our Lord's own creatures
to suggest to Him the policy of His mission upon earth. We are
shortsighted: and the Almighty is past finding out. But this at least
it is possible for us to see, that, in choosing one nation to be His
agent among men, God chose the type of instrument best fitted at the
time for the work for which He designed it, and that in choosing
Israel to be that nation, He chose a people of temper singularly
suitable to His end.
Israel's election as a nation, therefore, was to Service. To be a
nation and to be God's Servant was pretty much one and the same thing
for Israel. Israel were to survive the Exile, because they were to
serve the world. Let us carry this over to the study of our next
chapter--The Servant of Jehovah.
FOOTNOTES:
[139] Wellhausen.
[140] "Revelation is never revolutionary.... As a rule, revelation
accepts the fragments of truth and adopts the methods of religion
already existing, uniting the former into a whole, and purifying
the latter for its own purposes."... For instance, "in the East
each people had its particular god. The god and the people were
correlative ideas, that which gave the individuals of a nation unity
and made them a people was the unity of its god; as, on the other
hand, that which gave a god prestige was the strength and victorious
career of his people. The self-consciousness of the nation and its
religion re-acted on one another, and rose and fell simultaneously.
This conception was not repudiated, but adopted by revelation; and,
as occasion demanded, purified from its natural abuses."--Professor
A. B. Davidson, _Expositor_, Second Series, vol. viii., pp. 257-8.
[141] Mr. Doughty, in his most interesting account of the nomads of
Central Arabia, the unsophisticated Semites on their native soil,
furnishes ample material for accounting for the strange mixture of
passion and resignation in these prophet-peoples of the world.
[142] Ch. xlix. 2.
[143] Jer. xxx. 10, cf. xlvi. 27; also Ezek. xxxvii. 25: _And they
shall dwell in the land that I have given My servant Jacob_. Cf.
xxviii. 25.
[144] xliv. 1, 21; xlviii. 20, etc.
[145] Ch. li. 9, 10.
[146] Ch. xliii. 14.
[147] _Ib._ 3, 4.
[148] Robertson Smith, Burnett Lectures in Aberdeen, 1889-90.
CHAPTER XVI.
_THE SERVANT OF THE LORD._
ISAIAH xli. 8-20; xlii. 1-7, 18 ff; xliii. 5-10; xlix. 1-9; l. 4-10;
lii. 13-liii.
With chapter xlii. we reach a distinct stage in our prophecy. The
preceding chapters have been occupied with the declaration of the
great, basal truth, that Jehovah is the One Sovereign God. This has
been declared to two classes of hearers in succession--to God's own
people, Israel, in ch. xl., and to the heathen in ch. xli. Having
established His sovereignty, God now publishes His will, again
addressing these two classes according to the purpose which He has for
each. Has He vindicated Himself to Israel, the Almighty and Righteous
God, Who will give His people freedom and strength: He will now define
to them the mission for which that strength and freedom are required.
Has He proved to the Gentiles that He is the one true God: He will
declare to them now what truth He has for them to learn. In short, to
use modern terms, the apologetic of chs. xl.-xli. is succeeded by the
missionary programme of ch. xlii. And although, from the necessities
of the case, we are frequently brought back, in the course of the
prophecy, to its fundamental claims for the Godhead of Jehovah, we are
nevertheless sensible that with ver. 1 of ch. xlii. we make a distinct
advance. It is one of those logical steps which, along with a certain
chronological progress that we have already felt, assures us that
Isaiah, whether originally by one or more authors, is in its present
form a unity, with a distinct order and principle of development.
The Purpose of God is identified with a Minister or Servant, whom He
commissions to carry it out in the world. This Servant is brought
before us with all the urgency with which Jehovah has presented
Himself, and next to Jehovah he turns out to be the most important
figure of the prophecy. Does the prophet insist that God is the only
source and sufficiency of His people's salvation: it is with equal
emphasis that He introduces the Servant as God's indispensable agent
in the work. Cyrus is also acknowledged as an elect instrument. But
neither in closeness to God, nor in effect upon the world, is Cyrus
to be compared for an instant to the Servant. Cyrus is subservient
and incidental: with the overthrow of Babylon, for which he was
raised up, he will disappear from the stage of our prophecy. But
God's purpose, which uses the gates opened by Cyrus, only to pass
through them with the redeemed people to the regeneration of the
whole world, is to be carried to this Divine consummation by the
Servant: its universal and glorious progress is identified with his
career. Cyrus flashes through these pages a well-polished sword: it
is only his swift and brilliant usefulness that is allowed to catch
our eye. But the Servant is a Character, to delineate whose immortal
beauty and example the prophet devotes as much space as he does
to Jehovah Himself. As he turns again and again to speak of God's
omnipotence and faithfulness and agonising love for His own, so
with equal frequency and fondness does he linger on every feature of
the Servant's conduct and aspect: His gentleness, His patience, His
courage, His purity, His meekness; His daily wakefulness to God's
voice, the swiftness and brilliance of His speech for others, His
silence under His own torments; His resorts--among the bruised, the
prisoners, the forwandered of Israel, the weary, and them that sit
in darkness, the far-off heathen; His warfare with the world, His
face set like a flint; His unworldly beauty, which men call ugliness;
His unnoticed presence in His own generation, yet the effect of His
face upon kings; His habit of woe, a man of sorrows and acquainted
with sickness; His sore stripes and bruises, His judicial murder,
His felon's grave; His exaltation and eternal glory--till we may
reverently say that these pictures, by their vividness and charm,
have drawn our eyes away from our prophet's visions of God, and have
caused the chapters in which they occur to be oftener read among
us, and learned by heart, than the chapters in which God Himself is
lifted up and adored. Jehovah and Jehovah's Servant--these are the
two heroes of the drama.
Now we might naturally expect that so indispensable and fondly
imagined a figure would also be defined past all ambiguity, whether
as to His time or person or name. But the opposite is the case.
About Scripture there are few more intricate questions than those
on the Servant of the Lord. Is He a Person or Personification? If
the latter, is He a Personification of all Israel? Or of a part of
Israel? Or of the ideal Israel? Or of the Order of the Prophets? Or
if a Person--is he the prophet himself? Or a martyr who has already
lived and suffered, like Jeremiah? Or One still to come, like the
promised Messiah? Each of these suggestions has not only been made
about the Servant, but derives considerable support from one or
another of our prophet's dissolving views of his person and work.
A final answer to them can be given only after a comparative study
of all the relevant passages; but as these are scattered over the
prophecy, and our detailed exposition of them must necessarily be
interrupted, it will be of advantage to take here a prospect of them
all, and see to what they combine to develop this sublime character
and mission. And after we have seen what the prophecies themselves
teach concerning the Servant, we shall inquire how they were
understood and fulfilled by the New Testament; and that will show us
how to expound and apply them with regard to ourselves.
I.
The Hebrew word for _Servant_ means a person at the disposal of
another--to carry out his will, do his work, represent his interests.
It was thus applied to the representatives of a king or the
worshippers of a god.[149] All Israelites were thus in a sense the
_servants of Jehovah_; though in the singular the title was reserved
for persons of extraordinary character or usefulness.
But we have seen, as clearly as possible, that God set apart for
His chief service upon earth, not an individual nor a group of
individuals, but a whole nation in its national capacity. We have
seen Israel's political origin and preservation bound up with that
service; we have heard the whole nation plainly called, by Jeremiah
and Ezekiel, the Servant of Jehovah.[150] Nothing could be more clear
than this, that in the earlier years of the Exile the Servant of
Jehovah was Israel as a whole, Israel as a body politic.
It is also in this sense that our prophet first uses the title in a
passage we have already quoted (xli. 8); _Thou Israel, My Servant,
Jacob whom I have chosen, seed of Abraham My lover, whom I took
hold of from the ends of the earth and its corners! I called thee
and said unto thee, My Servant art thou. I have chosen thee, and
not cast thee away._ Here the _Servant_ is plainly the historical
nation, descended from Abraham, and the subject of those national
experiences which are traced in the previous chapter. It is the
same in the following verses:--xliv. 1 ff: _Yet now hear, O Jacob
My servant; and Israel, whom I have chosen: thus saith Jehovah thy
Maker, and thy Moulder from the womb, He will help thee. Fear not, My
servant Jacob; and Jeshurun, whom I have chosen.... I will pour My
spirit upon thy seed, and My blessing upon thine offspring._ xliv.
21: _Remember these things, O Jacob; and Israel, for My servant art
thou: I have formed thee; a servant for Myself art thou; O Israel,
thou shalt not be forgotten of Me._ xlviii. 20: _Go ye forth from
Babylon; say ye, Jehovah hath redeemed His servant Jacob._ In all
these verses, which bind up the nation's restoration from exile with
the fact that God called it to be His Servant, the title _Servant_
is plainly equivalent to the national name _Israel_ or _Jacob_. But
_Israel_ or _Jacob_ is not a label for the mere national idea, or the
bare political framework, without regard to the living individuals
included in it. To the eye and heart of Him, _Who counts the number
of the stars_, Israel means no mere outline, but all the individuals
of the living generation of the people--_thy seed_, that is, every
born Israelite, however fallen or forwandered. This is made clear
in a very beautiful passage in ch. xliii. (vv. 1-7): _Thus saith
Jehovah, thy Creator, O Jacob; thy Moulder, O Israel.... Fear not,
for I am with thee; from the sunrise I will bring thy seed, and from
the sunset will I gather thee; ... My sons from far, and My daughters
from the end of the earth; every one who is called by My name, and
whom for My glory I have created, formed, yea, I have made him._ To
this Israel--Israel as a whole, yet no mere abstraction or outline
of the nation, but the people in mass and bulk--every individual of
whom is dear to Jehovah, and in some sense shares His calling and
equipment--to this Israel the title _Servant of Jehovah_ is at first
applied by our prophet.
2. We say "at first," for very soon the prophet has to make a
distinction, and to sketch the Servant as something less than the
actual nation. The distinction is obscure; it has given rise to a
very great deal of controversy. But it is so natural, where a nation
is the subject, and of such frequent occurrence in other literatures,
that we may almost state it as a general law.
In all the passages quoted above, Israel has been spoken of in the
passive mood, as the object of some affection or action on the part
of God: _loved_, _formed_, _chosen_, _called_, and _about to be
redeemed by Him_. Now, so long as a people thus lie passive, their
prophet will naturally think of them as a whole. In their shadow
his eye can see them only in the outline of their mass; in their
common suffering and servitude his heart will go out to all their
individuals, as equally dear and equally in need of redemption. But
when the hour comes for the people to work out their own salvation,
and they emerge into action, it must needs be different. When they
are no more the object of their prophet's affection only, but pass
under the test of his experience and judgement, then distinctions
naturally appear upon them. Lifted to the light of their destiny,
their inequality becomes apparent; tried by its strain, part of them
break away. And so, though the prophet continues still to call on
the nation by its name to fulfil its calling, what he means by that
name is no longer the bulk and the body of the citizenship. A certain
ideal of the people fills his mind's eye--an ideal, however, which is
no mere spectre floating above his own generation, but is realised in
their noble and aspiring portion--although his ignorance as to the
exact size of this portion, must always leave his image of them more
or less ideal to his eyes. It will be their quality rather than their
quantity that is clear to him. In modern history we have two familiar
illustrations of this process of winnowing and idealising a people in
the light of their destiny, which may prepare us for the more obscure
instance of it in our prophecy.
In a well-known passage in the _Areopagitica_, Milton exclaims,
"Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself
and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle mewing
her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday
beam, ... while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with
those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she
means." In this passage the "nation" is no longer what Milton meant by
the term in the earlier part of his treatise, where "England" stands
simply for the outline of the whole English people; but the "nation"
is the true genius of England realised in her enlightened and aspiring
sons, and breaking away from the hindering and debasing members of the
body politic--"the timorous and flocking birds with those also that
love the twilight"--who are indeed Englishmen after the flesh, but form
no part of the nation's better self.
Or, recall Mazzini's bitter experience. To no man was his Italy more
really one than to this ardent son of hers, who loved every born
Italian because he was an Italian, and counted none of the fragments
of his unhappy country too petty or too corrupt to be included in
the hope of her restoration. To Mazzini's earliest imagination,
it was the whole Italian seed, who were ready for redemption, and
would rise to achieve it at his summons. But when his summons came,
how few responded, and after the first struggles how fewer still
remained,--Mazzini himself has told us with breaking heart. The
real Italy was but a handful of born Italians; at times it seemed
to shrink to the prophet alone. From such a core the conscience
indeed spread again, till the entire people was delivered from
tyranny and from schism, and now every peasant and burgher from the
Alps to Sicily understands what Italy means, and is proud to be an
Italian. But for a time Mazzini and his few comrades stood alone.
Others of their blood and speech were Piedmontese, Pope's men,
Neapolitans,--merchants, lawyers, scholars,--or merely selfish and
sensual. They alone were Italians; they alone were Italy.
It is a similar winnowing process, through which we see our prophet's
thoughts pass with regard to Israel. Him, too, experience teaches
that _the many are called, but the few chosen_. So long as his people
lie in the shadow of captivity, so long as he has to speak of them
in the passive mood, the object of God's call and preparation, it
is _their seed_, the born people in bulk and mass, whom he names
Israel, and entitles _the Servant of Jehovah_. But the moment that he
lifts them to their mission in the world, and to the light of their
destiny, a difference becomes apparent upon them, and the Servant of
Jehovah, though still called Israel, shrinks to something less than
the living generation, draws off to something finer than the mass
of the people. How, indeed, could it be otherwise with this strange
people, than which no nation on earth had a loftier ideal identified
with its history, or more frequently turned upon its better self,
with a sword in its hand. Israel, though created a nation by God
for His service, was always what Paul found it, divided into an
_Israel after the flesh_, and an _Israel after the spirit_. But it
was in the Exile that this distinction gaped most broad. With the
fall of Jerusalem, the political framework, which kept the different
elements of the nation together, was shattered, and these were left
loose to the action of moral forces. The baser elements were quickly
absorbed by heathendom; the nobler, that remained loyal to the divine
call, were free to assume a new and ideal form. Every year spent in
Babylonia made it more apparent that the true and effective Israel
of the future would not coincide with all the _seed of Jacob_, who
went into exile. Numbers of the latter were as contented with
their Babylonian circumstance as numbers of Mazzini's "Italians"
were satisfied to live on as Austrian and Papal subjects. Many, as
we have seen, became idolaters; many more settled down into the
prosperous habits of Babylonian commerce, while a large multitude
besides were scattered far out of sight across the world. It required
little insight to perceive that the true, effective Israel--the
real _Servant of Jehovah_--must needs be a much smaller body than
the sum of all these: a loyal kernel within Israel, who were still
conscious of the national calling, and capable of carrying it out;
who stood sensible of their duty to the whole world, but whose first
conscience was for their lapsed and lost countrymen. This Israel
within Israel was the real _Servant of the Lord_; to personify it in
that character--however vague might be the actual proportion it would
assume in his own or in any other generation--would be as natural to
our dramatic prophet as to personify the nation as a whole.
All this very natural process--this passing from the historical
Israel, the nation originally designed by God to be His Servant, to
the conscious and effective Israel, that uncertain quantity within
the present and every future generation--takes place in the chapters
before us; and it will be sufficiently easy for us to follow if we
only remember that our prophet is not a dogmatic theologian, careful
to make clear each logical distinction, but a dramatic poet, who
delivers his ideas in groups, tableaux, dialogues, interrupted by
choruses; and who writes in a language incapable of expressing such
delicate differences, except by dramatic contrasts, and by the one
other figure of which he is so fond--paradox.
Perhaps the first traces of distinction between the real Servant
and the whole nation are to be found in the Programme of his Mission
in ch. xlii. 1-7. There it is said that the Servant is to be for a
_covenant of the people_ (ver. 6). I have explained below why we are
to understand _people_ as here meaning Israel.[151] And in ver. 7 it
is said of the Servant that he is _to open blind eyes_, _bring forth
from prison the captive_, _from the house of bondage dwellers in
darkness_: phrases that are descriptive, of course, of the captive
Israel. Already, then, in ch. xlii. the Servant is something distinct
from the whole nation, whose Covenant and Redeemer he is to be.
The next references to the Servant are a couple of paradoxes, which
are evidently the prophet's attempt to show _why_ it was necessary
to draw in the Servant of Jehovah from the whole to a part of the
people. The first of these paradoxes is in ch. xlii. ver. 18.
_Ye deaf, hearken! and ye blind, look ye to see!
Who is blind but My Servant, and deaf as My Messenger_ whom _I send?
Who is blind as Meshullam, and blind as the Servant of Jehovah?
Vision of many things--and thou dost not observe,
Opening of ears and he hears not!_
The context shows that the Servant here--or Meshullam, as he is
called, the _devoted_ or _submissive one_, from the same root, and of
much the same form as the Arabic Muslim[152]--is the whole people;
but they are entitled _Servant_ only in order to show how unfit
they are for the task to which they have been designated, and what
a paradox their title is beside their real character. God had given
them every opportunity by _making great His instruction_ (ver. 21,
cf. p. 247), and, when that failed, by His sore discipline in exile
(vers. 24, 25). _For who gave Jacob for spoil and Israel to the
robbers? Did not Jehovah? He against whom we sinned, and they would
not walk in His ways, neither were obedient to His instruction. So
He poured upon him the fury of His anger and the force of war._ But
even this did not awake the dull nation. _Though it set him on fire
round about, yet he knew not; and it kindled upon him, yet he laid
it not to heart._ The nation as a whole had been favoured with God's
revelation; as a whole they had been brought into His purifying
furnace of the Exile. But as they have benefited by neither the one
nor the other, the natural conclusion is that as a whole they are no
more fit to be God's Servant. Such is the hint which this paradox is
intended to give us.
But a little further on there is an obverse paradox, which plainly
says, that although the people are blind and deaf as a whole, still
the capacity for service is found among them alone (xliii. 8, 10).
_Bring forth the blind people--yet eyes are there!
And the deaf, yet ears have they!...
Ye are My witnesses, saith Jehovah, and My Servant whom I have
chosen._
The preceding verses (vv. 1-7) show us that it is again the whole
people, in their bulk and scattered fragments, who are referred to.
Blind though they be, _yet are there eyes_ among them; deaf though
they be, yet _they have ears_. And so Jehovah addresses them all, in
contradistinction to the heathen peoples (ver. 9), as His Servant.
These two complementary paradoxes together show this: that while
Israel as a whole is unfit to be the Servant, it is nevertheless
within Israel, alone of all the world's nations, that the true
capacities for service are found--_eyes are there, ears have they_.
They prepare us for the Servant's testimony about himself, in which,
while he owns himself to be distinct from Israel as a whole, he is
nevertheless still called Israel. This is given in ch. xlix. _And He
said unto me, My Servant art thou; Israel, in whom I will glorify
Myself. And now saith Jehovah, my moulder from the womb to be a
Servant unto Him, to turn again Jacob to Him, and that Israel might
not be destroyed; and I am of value in the eyes of Jehovah, and my
God is my strength. And He said, It is too light for thy being My
Servant,_ merely _to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the
preserved of Israel; I will also set thee for a light of nations,
to be My salvation to the end of the earth_ (xlix. 3-6). Here the
Servant, though still called Israel, is clearly distinct from the
nation as a whole, for part of his work is to raise the nation up
again. And, moreover, he tells us this as his own testimony about
himself. He is no longer spoken of in the third person, he speaks
for himself in the first. This is significant. It is more than a
mere artistic figure, the effect of our prophet's dramatic style--as
if the Servant now stood opposite him, so vivid and near that he
heard him speak, and quoted him in the direct form of speech. It is
more probably the result of moral sympathy: the prophet speaks out
of the heart of the Servant, in the name of that better portion of
Israel which was already conscious of the Divine call, and of its
distinction in this respect from the mass of the people.
It is futile to inquire what this better portion of Israel actually
was, for whom the prophet speaks in the first person. Some have
argued, from the stress which the speaker lays upon his gifts of
speech and office of preaching, that what is now signified by the
Servant is the order of the prophets; but such forget that in these
chapters the proclamation of the Kingdom of God is the ideal, not
of prophets only, but of the whole people. Zion as a whole is to be
_heraldess of good news_ (xl. 9). It is, therefore, not the official
function of the prophet-order which the Servant here owns, but the
ideal of the prophet-nation. Others have argued from the direct form
of speech, that the prophet puts himself forward as the Servant. But
no individual would call himself Israel. And as Professor Cheyne
remarks, the passage is altogether too self-assertive to be spoken
by any man of himself as an individual; although, of course, our
prophet could not have spoken of the true Israel with such sympathy,
unless he had himself been part of it. The writer of these verses may
have been, for the time, as virtually the real Israel as Mazzini was
the real Italy. But still he does not speak as an individual. The
passage is manifestly a piece of personification. The Servant is
_Israel_--not now the nation as a whole, not the body and bulk of the
Israelites, for they are to be the object of his first efforts, but
the loyal, conscious and effective Israel, realised in some of her
members, and here personified by our prophet, who himself speaks for
her out of his heart, in the first person.
By ch. xlix., then, the Servant of Jehovah is a personification of
the true, effective Israel as distinguished from the mass of the
nation--a Personification, but not yet a Person. Something within
Israel has wakened up to find itself conscious of being the Servant
of Jehovah, and distinct from the mass of the nation--something that
is not yet a Person. And this definition of the Servant may stand
(with some modifications) for his next appearance in ch. l. 4-9.
In this passage the Servant, still speaking in the first person,
continues to illustrate his experience as a prophet, and carries
it to its consequence in martyrdom. But let us notice that he now
no longer calls himself _Israel_, and that if it were not for the
previous passages it would be natural to suppose that an individual
was speaking. This supposition is confirmed by a verse that follows
the Servant's speech, and is spoken, as chorus, by the Prophet
himself. _Who among you is a fearer of Jehovah, obedient to the voice
of His Servant, who walketh in darkness, and hath no light. Let him
trust in the name of Jehovah, and stay himself upon his God._ In
this too much neglected verse, which forms a real transition to ch.
lii. 13-liii., the prophet is addressing any individual Israelite,
on behalf of a personal God. It is very difficult to refrain from
concluding that therefore the Servant also is a Person. Let us,
however, not go beyond what we have evidence for; and note only that
in ch. l. the Servant is no more called Israel, and is represented
not as if he were one part of the nation, over against the mass of
it, but as if he were one individual over against other individuals;
that in fine the Personification of ch. xlix. has become much more
difficult to distinguish from an actual Person.
3. This brings us to the culminating passage--ch. lii. 13-liii. Is
the Servant still a Personification here, or at last and unmistakably
a Person?
It may relieve the air of that electricity, which is apt to charge
it at the discussion of so classic a passage as this, and secure us
calm weather in which to examine exegetical details, if we at once
assert, what none but prejudiced Jews have ever denied, that this
great prophecy, known as the fifty-third of Isaiah, was fulfilled in
One Person, Jesus of Nazareth, and achieved in all its details by
Him alone. But, on the other hand, it requires also to be pointed
out that Christ's personal fulfilment of it does not necessarily
imply that our prophet wrote it of a Person. The present expositor
hopes, indeed, to be able to give strong reasons for the theory
usual among us, that the Personification of previous passages is at
last in ch. liii. presented as a Person. But he fails to understand,
why critics should be regarded as unorthodox or at variance with
New Testament teaching on the subject, who, while they acknowledge
that only Christ fulfilled ch. liii., are yet unable to believe
that the prophet looked upon the Servant as an individual, and who
regard ch. liii. as simply a sublimer form of the prophet's previous
pictures of the ideal people of God. Surely Christ could and did
fulfil prophecies other than personal ones. The types of Him, which
the New Testament quotes from the Old Testament, are not exclusively
individuals. Christ is sometimes represented as realising in His
Person and work statements, which, as they were first spoken, could
only refer to Israel, the nation. Matthew, for instance, applies to
Jesus a text which Hosea wrote primarily of the whole Jewish people:
_Out of Egypt have I called My Son_.[153] Or, to take an instance
from our own prophet--who but Jesus fulfilled ch. xlix., in which,
as we have seen, it is not an individual, but the ideal of the
prophet people, that is figured? So that, even if it were proved
past all doubt--proved from grammar, context, and every prophetic
analogy--that in writing ch. liii. our prophet had still in view that
aspect of the nation which he has personified in ch. xlix., such a
conclusion would not weaken the connection between the prophecy and
its unquestioned fulfilment by Jesus Christ, nor render the two less
evidently part of one Divine design.
But we are by no means compelled to adopt the impersonal view of
ch. liii. On the contrary, while the question is one, to which all
experts know the difficulty of finding an absolutely conclusive
answer one way or the other, it seems to me that reasons prevail,
which make for the personal interpretation. . Let us see what exactly
are the objections to taking ch. lii. 13-liii. in a personal sense.
First, it is very important to observe, that they do not rise out
of the grammar or language of the passage. The reference of both of
these is consistently individual. Throughout, the Servant is spoken
of in the singular.[154] The name Israel is not once applied to him:
nothing--except that the nation has also suffered--suggests that he
is playing a national _rôle_; there is no reflection in his fate
of the features of the Exile. The antithesis, which was evident in
previous passages, between a better Israel and the mass of the people
has disappeared. The Servant is contrasted, not with the nation as a
whole, but with His people as individuals. _All we like sheep have
gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord
hath laid on him the iniquity of us all._ As far as grammar can,
this surely distinguishes a single person. It is true, that one or
two phrases suggest so colossal a figure--_he shall startle many
nations, and kings shall shut their mouths at him_--that for a moment
we think of the spectacle of a people rather than of a solitary
human presence. But even such descriptions are not incompatible with
a single person.[155] On the other hand, there are phrases which
we can scarcely think are used of any but a historical individual;
such as that he was taken from _oppression and judgement_, that is
from a process of law which was tyranny, from a judicial murder, and
that he belonged to a particular generation--_As for his generation,
who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living_.
Surely a historical individual is the natural meaning of these words.
And, in fact, critics like Ewald and Wellhausen, who interpret the
passage, in its present context, of the ideal Israel, find themselves
forced to argue, that it has been borrowed for this use from the
older story of some actual martyr--so individual do its references
seem to them throughout.
If, then, the grammar and language of the passage thus conspire to
convey the impression of an individual, what are the objections to
supposing that an individual is meant? Critics have felt, in the
main, three objections to the discovery of a historical individual in
Isa. lii. 13-liii.
The _first_ of these that we take is chronological, and arises from the
late date to which we have found it necessary to assign the prophecy.
Our prophet, it is averred, associates the work of the Servant with
the restoration of the people; but he sees that restoration too close
to him to be able to think of the appearance, ministry and martyrdom
of a real historic life happening before it. (Our prophet, it will be
remembered, wrote about 546, and the Restoration came in 538.) "There
is no room for a history like that of the suffering Servant between the
prophet's place and the Restoration."[156]
Now, this objection might be turned, even if it were true that the
prophet identified the suffering Servant's career with so immediate
and so short a process as the political deliverance from Babylon.
For, in that case, the prophet would not be leaving less room for the
Servant, than, in ch. ix., Isaiah himself leaves for the birth, the
growth to manhood, and the victories of the Prince-of-the-Four-Names,
before that immediate relief from the Assyrian, which he expects
the Prince to effect. But does our prophet identify the suffering
Servant's career with the redemption from Babylon and the Return?
It is plain that he does not--at least in those portraits of the
Servant, which are most personal. Our prophet has really two
prospects for Israel--one, the actual deliverance from Babylon;
the other, a spiritual redemption and restoration. If, like his
fellow prophets, he sometimes runs these two together, and talks
of the latter in the terms of the former, he keeps them on the
whole distinct, and assigns them to different agents. The burden
of the first he lays on Cyrus, though he also connects it with
the Servant, while the Servant is still to him an aspect of the
nation (see xlix. 8_a_, 9_b_). It is temporary, and soon passes
from his thoughts, Cyrus being dropped with it. But the other, the
spiritual redemption, is confined to no limits of time; and it is
with its process--indefinite in date and in length of period--that
he associates the most personal portraits of the Servant (ch. l. and
lii. 13-liii.). In these the Servant, now spoken of as an individual,
has nothing to do with that temporary work of freeing the people
from Babylon, which was over in a year or two, and which seems to be
now behind the prophet's standpoint. His is the enduring office of
prophecy, sympathy, and expiation--an office in which there is all
possible "room" for such a historical career as is sketched for him.
His relation to Cyrus, before whose departure from connection with
Israel's fate the Servant does not appear as a person, is thus most
interesting. Perhaps we may best convey it in a homely figure. On the
ship of Israel's fortunes--as on every ship and on every voyage--the
prophet sees two personages. One is the Pilot through the shallows,
Cyrus, who is dropped as soon as the shallows are past; and the
other is the Captain of the ship, who remains always identified with
it--the Servant. The Captain does not come to the front till the
Pilot has gone; but, both alongside the Pilot, and after the Pilot
has been dropped, there is every room for his office.
The _second_ main objection to identifying an individual in ch. lii.
13-liii. is, that an individual with such features has no analogy in
Hebrew prophecy. It is said that, neither in his humiliation, nor
in the kind of exaltation, which is ascribed to him, is there his
like in any other individual in the Old Testament, and certainly not
in the Messiah. Elsewhere in Scripture (it is averred) the Messiah
reigns, and is glorious; it is the people who suffer, and come
through suffering to power. Nor is the Messiah's royal splendour at
all the same as the very vague influence, evidently of a spiritual
kind, which is attributed to the Servant in the end of ch. liii.
The Messiah is endowed with the military and political virtues. He
is a warrior, a king, a judge. He _sits on the throne of David, He
establishes David's kingdom. He smites the land with the rod of His
mouth, and with the breath of His lips He slays the wicked._ But very
different phrases are used of the Servant. He is not called king,
though kings shut their mouths at him,--he is a prophet and a martyr,
and an expiation; and the phrases, _I will divide him a portion with
the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong_, are simply
metaphors of the immense spiritual success and influence with which
His self-sacrifice shall be rewarded; as a spiritual power He shall
take His place among the dominions and forces of the world. This is
a true prophecy of what Israel, that _worm of a people_, should be
lifted to; but it is quite different from the political throne, from
which Isaiah had promised that the Messiah should sway the destinies
of Israel and mankind.
But, in answer to this objection to finding the Messiah, or any other
influential individual, in ch. liii., we may remember that there
were already traces in Hebrew prophecy of a suffering Messiah:
we come across them in ch. vii. There Isaiah presents Immanuel,
whom we identified with the Prince-of-the-Four-Names in ch. ix.,
as at first nothing but a sufferer--a sufferer from the sins of
His predecessors.[157] And, even though we are wrong in taking the
suffering Immanuel for the Messiah, and though Isaiah meant him only
as a personification of Israel suffering for the error of Ahaz, had
not the two hundred years, which elapsed between Isaiah's prophecy of
Israel's glorious Deliverer, been full of room enough, and, what is
more, of experience enough, for the ideal champion of the people to
be changed to something more spiritual in character and in work? Had
the nation been baptized, for most of those two centuries, in vain,
in the meaning of suffering, and in vain had they seen exemplified in
their noblest spirits the fruits and glory of self-sacrifice?[158]
The type of Hero had changed in Israel since Isaiah wrote of his
Prince-of-the-Four-Names. The king had been replaced by the prophet;
the conqueror by the martyr; the judge who smote the land by the rod
of his mouth, and slew the wicked by the breath of his lips,--by
the patriot who took his country's sins upon his own conscience.
The monarchy had perished; men knew that, even if Israel were set
upon their own land again, it would not be under an independent king
of their own; nor was a Jewish champion of the martial kind, such
as Isaiah had promised for deliverance from the Assyrian, any more
required. Cyrus, the Gentile, should do all the campaigning required
against Israel's enemies, and Israel's native Saviour be relieved for
gentler methods and more spiritual aims. It is all this experience,
of nearly two centuries, which explains the omission of the features
of warrior and judge from ch. liii., and their replacement by those
of a suffering patriot, prophet and priest. The reason of the change
is, not because the prophet who wrote the chapter had not, as much
as Isaiah, an individual in his view, but because, in the historical
circumstance of the Exile, such an individual as Isaiah had promised,
seemed no longer probable or required.
So far, then, from the difference between ch. liii. and previous
prophecies of the Messiah affording evidence that in ch. liii. it
is not the Messiah who is presented, this very change, that has
taken place, explicable as it is from the history of the intervening
centuries, goes powerfully to prove that it is the Messiah, and
therefore an individual, whom the prophet so vividly describes.
The _third_ main objection to our recognising an individual in
ch. liii. is concerned only with our prophet himself. Is it not
impossible, say some--or at least improbably inconsistent--for the
same prophet first to have identified the Servant with the nation,
and then to present him to us as an individual? We can understand the
transference by the same writer of the name from the whole people to
a part of the people; it is a natural transference, and the prophet
sufficiently explains it. But how does he get from a part of the
nation to a single individual? If in ch. xlix. he personifies, under
the name Servant, some aspect of the nation, we are surely bound
to understand the same personification when the Servant is again
introduced--unless we have an explanation to the contrary. But we
have none. The prophet gives no hint, except by dropping the name
Israel, that the focus of his vision is altered,--no more paradoxes
such as marked his passage from the people as a whole to a portion of
them,---no consciousness that any explanation whatever is required.
Therefore, however much finer the personification is drawn in ch.
liii. than in ch. xlix., it is surely a personification still.
To which objection an obvious answer is, that our prophet is not a
systematic theologian, but a dramatic poet, who allows his characters
to disclose themselves and their relation without himself intervening
to define or relate them. And any one who is familiar with the
literature of Israel knows, that no less than the habit of drawing
in from the whole people upon a portion of them, was the habit of
drawing in from a portion of the people upon one individual. The
royal Messiah Himself is a case in point. The original promise to
David was of a seed; but soon prophecy concentrated the seed in
one glorious Prince. The promise of Israel had always culminated
in an individual. Then, again, in the nation's awful sufferings,
it had been one man--the prophet Jeremiah--who had stood forth
singly and alone, at once the incarnation of Jehovah's word, and the
illustration in his own person of all the penalty that Jehovah laid
upon the sinful people. With this tendency of his school to focus
Israel's hope on a single individual, and especially with the example
of Jeremiah before him, it is almost inconceivable that our prophet
could have thought of any but an individual when he drew his portrait
of the suffering Servant. No doubt the national sufferings were in
his heart as he wrote; it was probably a personal share in them
that taught him to write so sympathetically about the Man of pains,
who was familiar with ailing. But to gather and concentrate all
these sufferings upon one noble figure, to describe this figure as
thoroughly conscious of their moral meaning, and capable of turning
them to his people's salvation, was a process absolutely in harmony
with the genius of Israel's prophecy, as well as with the trend of
their recent experience; and there is, besides, no word in that
great chapter, in which the process culminates, but is in thorough
accordance with it. So far, therefore, from its being an impossible
or an unlikely thing for our prophet to have at last reached his
conception of an individual, it is almost impossible to conceive of
him executing so personal a portrait as ch. lii. 13-liii., without
thinking of a definite historical personage, such as Hebrew prophecy
had ever associated with the redemption of his people.
4. We have now exhausted the passages in Isa. xl.-lxvi. which
deal with the Servant of the Lord. We have found that our prophet
identifies him at first with the whole nation, and then with some
indefinite portion of the nation--indefinite in quantity, but most
marked in character; that this personification grows more and
more difficult to distinguish from a person; and that in ch. lii.
13-liii. there are very strong reasons, both in the text itself and
in the analogy of other prophecy, to suppose that the portrait of an
individual is intended. To complete our study of this development of
the substance of the Servant, it is necessary to notice that it runs
almost stage for stage with a development of his office. Up to ch.
xlix., that is to say, while he is still some aspect of the people,
the Servant is a prophet. In ch. l., where he is no longer called
Israel, and approaches more nearly to an individual, his prophecy
passes into martyrdom. And in ch. liii., where at last we recognise
him as intended for an actual personage, his martyrdom becomes an
expiation for the sins of the people. Is there a natural connection
between these two developments? We have seen that it was by a very
common process that our prophet transferred the national calling from
the mass of the nation to a select few of the people. Is it by any
equally natural tendency that he shrinks from the many to the few, as
he passes from prophecy to martyrdom, or from the few to the one, as
he passes from martyrdom to expiation? It is a possibility for all
God's people to be prophets: few are needed as martyrs. Is it by any
moral law equally clear, that only one man should die for the people?
These are questions worth thinking about. In Israel's history we have
already found the following facts with which to answer them. The
whole living generation of Israel felt themselves to be sinbearers:
_Our fathers have sinned, and we bear their iniquities_. This
conscience and penalty were more painfully felt by the righteous in
Israel. But the keenest and heaviest sense of them was conspicuously
that experienced by one man--the prophet Jeremiah.[159] And yet all
these cases from the past of Israel's history do not furnish more
than an approximation to the figure presented to us in ch. liii. Let
us turn, therefore, to the future to see if we can find in it motive
or fulfilment for this marvellous prophecy.
FOOTNOTES:
[149] A king's courtiers, soldiers, or subjects are called _his
servants_. In this sense Israel was often styled the _servants of
Jehovah_, as in Deut. xxxii. 36; Neh. i. 10, where the phrase is
parallel to _His people_. But _Jehovah's servants_ is a phrase also
parallel to His worshippers (Psalm cxxxiv. 1, etc.); to those who trust
Him (Psalm xxxiv. 22); and to those who love His name (Psalm lxix. 36).
The term is also applied in the plural to the prophets (Amos iii. 7);
and in the singular, to eminent individuals--such as Abraham, Joshua,
David and Job; also by Jeremiah to the alien Nebuchadrezzar, while
engaged on his mission from God against Jerusalem.
[150] See p. 244.
[151] The definite article is not used here with the word people, and
hence the phrase has been taken by some in the vaguer sense of _a
people's covenant_, as a general expression, along with its parallel
clause, of the kind of influence the Servant was to exert, not on
Israel, but on _any_ people in the world; he was to be _a people's
covenant_, and _a light for nations_. So practically Schultz, _A. T.
Theologie_, 4th ed., p. 284. But the Hebrew word for people עם is
often used without the article to express _the_ people Israel, just
as the Hebrew word for land רץא is often used without the article
to express _the_ land of Judah. (הארץ with the article, is in Isa.
xl.-lxvi. _the Earth_.) And in ch. xlix. the phrase a _covenant of
the people_ again occurs, and in a context in which it can only mean
_a covenant_ of _the_ people, Israel. Some render עם ברית a _covenant
people_. But in xlix. 8 this is plainly an impossible rendering.
[152] Meshullam is found as a proper name in the historical books of
the Old Testament, especially Nehemiah, _e.g._, iii. 4, 6, 30.
[153] Hosea xi. 1; Matt. ii. 15
[154] Of all the expressions used of him the only one which shows
a real tendency to a plural reference is _in his deaths_ (ver. 9),
and even it (if it is the correct reading) is quite capable of
application to an individual who suffered such manifold martyrdom as
is set forth in the passage.
[155] Not one word in them betrays any sense of a body of men or an
ideal people standing behind them, which sense surely some expression
would have betrayed, if it had been in the prophet's mind.
[156] A. B. D., in a review of the last edition of Delitzsch's
_Isaiah_, in the _Theol. Review_, iv., p. 276.
[157] _Isaiah I._ i.-xxxix., pp. 134, 135.
[158] See p. 42.
[159] See ch. ii. of this volume.
CHAPTER XVII.
_THE SERVANT OF THE LORD IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT._
In last chapter we confined our study of the Servant of Jehovah to
the text of Isa. xl.-lxvi., and to the previous and contemporary
history of Israel. Into our interpretation of the remarkable Figure,
whom our prophet has drawn for us, we have put nothing which cannot
be gathered from those fields and by the light of the prophet's own
day. But now we must travel further, and from days far future to
our prophet borrow a fuller light to throw back upon his mysterious
projections. We take this journey into the future for reasons he
himself has taught us. We have learned that his pictures of the
Servant are not the creation of his own mind; a work of art complete
"through fancy's or through logic's aid." They are the scattered
reflections and suggestions of experience. The prophet's eyes have
been opened to read them out of the still growing and incomplete
history of his people. With that history they are indissolubly bound
up. Their plainest forms are but a transcript of its clearest facts;
their paradoxes are its paradoxes (reflections now of the confused
and changing consciousness of this strange people, or again of the
contrast between God's design for them and their real character):
their ideals are the suggestion and promise which its course reveals
to an inspired eye. Thus, in picturing the Servant, our prophet
sometimes confines himself to history that has already happened to
Israel; but sometimes, also, upon the purpose and promise of this,
he outruns what has happened, and plainly lifts his voice from the
future. Now we must remember that he does so, not merely because
the history itself has native possibilities of fulfilment in it,
but because he believes that it is in the hands of an Almighty and
Eternal God, who shall surely guide it to the end of His purpose
revealed in it. It is an article of our prophet's creed, that the God
who speaks through him controls all history, and by His prophets _can
publish beforehand_ what course it will take; so that, when we find
in our prophet anything we do not see fully justified or illustrated
by the time he wrote, it is only in observance of the conditions he
has laid down, that we seek for its explanation in the future.
Let us, then, take our prophet upon his own terms, and follow the
history, with which he has so closely bound up the prophecy of the
Servant, both in suggestion and fulfilment, in order that we may
see whether it will yield to us the secret of what, if we have read
his language aright, his eyes perceived in it--the promise of an
Individual Servant. And let us do so in his faith, that history is
one progressive and harmonious movement under the hand of the God in
whose name he speaks. Our exploration will be rewarded, and our faith
confirmed. We shall find the nation, as promised, restored to its
own land, and pursuing through the centuries its own life. We shall
find within the nation what the prophet looked for,--an elect and
effective portion, with the conscience of a national service to the
world, but looking for the achievement of this to such an Individual
Servant, as the prophet seemed ultimately to foreshadow. The world
itself we shall find growing more and more open to this service.
And at last, from Israel's national conscience of the service we
shall see emerge One with the sense that He alone is responsible and
able for it. And this One Israelite will not only in His own person
exhibit a character and achieve a work, that illustrate and far excel
our prophet's highest imaginations, but will also become, to a new
Israel infinitely more numerous than the old, the conscience and
inspiration of their collective fulfilment of the ideal.
* * * * *
1. In the Old Testament we cannot be sure of any further appearance
of our prophet's Servant of the Lord. It might be thought, that in a
post-exilic promise, Zech. iii. 8, _I will bring forth My Servant_
the _Branch_, we had an identification of the hero of the first part
of the Book of Isaiah, _the Branch out of Jesse's roots_ (xi. 1),
with the hero of the second part; but _servant_ here may so easily
be meant in the more general sense in which it occurs in the Old
Testament, that we are not justified in finding any more particular
connection. In Judaism beyond the Old Testament the national and
personal interpretations of the Servant were both current. The Targum
of Jonathan, and both the Talmud of Jerusalem and the Talmud of
Babylon, recognise the personal Messiah in ch. liii.; the Targum also
identifies him as early as in ch. xlii. This personal interpretation
the Jews abandoned only after they had entered on their controversy
with Christian theologians; and in the cruel persecutions, which
Christians inflicted upon them throughout the middle ages, they were
supplied with only too many reasons for insisting that ch. liii. was
prophetic of suffering Israel--the martyr-people--as a whole.[160]
It is a strange history--the history of our race, where the first
through their pride and error so frequently become the last, and the
last through their sufferings are set in God's regard with the first.
But of all its strange reversals none surely was ever more complete
than when the followers of Him, who is set forth in this passage, the
unresisting and crucified Saviour of men, behaved in His Name with
so great a cruelty as to be righteously taken by His enemies for the
very tyrants and persecutors whom the passage condemns.
2. But it is in the New Testament that we see the most perfect
reflection of the Servant of the Lord, both as People and Person.
In the generation, from which Jesus sprang, there was, amid national
circumstances closely resembling those in which the Second Isaiah
was written, a counterpart of that Israel within Israel, which our
prophet has personified in ch. xlix. The holy nation lay again in
bondage to the heathen, partly in its own land, partly scattered
across the world; and Israel's righteousness, redemption and
ingathering were once more the questions of the day. The thoughts
of the masses, as of old in Babylonian days, did not rise beyond
a political restoration; and although their popular leaders
insisted upon national righteousness as necessary to this, it was
a righteousness mainly of a ceremonial kind--hard, legal, and often
more unlovely in its want of enthusiasm and hope than even the
political fanaticism of the vulgar. But around the temple, and in
quiet recesses of the land, a number of pious and ardent Israelites
lived on the true milk of the word, and cherished for the nation
hopes of a far more spiritual character. If the Pharisees laid their
emphasis on the law, this chosen Israel drew their inspiration rather
from prophecy; and of all prophecy it was the Book of Isaiah, and
chiefly the latter part of it, on which they lived.
As we enter the Gospel history from the Old Testament, we feel at once
that Isaiah is in the air. In this fair opening of the new year of the
Lord, the harbinger notes of the book awaken about us on all sides
like the voices of birds come back with the spring. In Mary's song,
the phrase _He hath holpen His Servant Israel_; in the description
of Simeon, that he waited for the _consolation of Israel_, a phrase
taken from the _Comfort ye, comfort ye My people_ in Isa. xl. 1; such
frequent phrases, too, as _the redemption of Jerusalem_, _a light
of the Gentiles and the glory of Israel_, _light to them that sit
in darkness_, and other echoed promises of light and peace and the
remission of sins, are all repeated from our evangelical prophecy.
In the fragments of the Baptist's preaching, which are extant, it is
remarkable that almost every metaphor and motive may be referred to
the Book of Isaiah, and mostly to its exilic half: _the generation
of vipers_,[161] the _trees and axe laid to the root_,[162] _the
threshing floor and fan_,[163] _the fire_,[164] _the bread and clothes
to the poor_,[165] and especially the proclamation of Jesus, _Behold
the Lamb of God that beareth the sin of the world_.[166] To John
himself were applied the words of Isa. xl.: _The voice of one crying
in the wilderness, Make ye ready the way of the Lord, make His paths
straight_; and when Christ sought to rouse again the Baptist's failing
faith it was of Isa. lxi. that He reminded him.
Our Lord, then, sprang from a generation of Israel, which had a
strong conscience of the national aspect of the Service of God,--a
generation with Isa. xl.-lxvi. at its heart. We have seen how He
Himself insisted upon the uniqueness of Israel's place among the
nations--_salvation is of the Jews_--and how closely He identified
Himself with His people--_I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel_. But all Christ's strong expression of Israel's
distinction from the rest of mankind, is weak and dim compared with
His expression of His own distinction from the rest of Israel. If
they were the one people with whom God worked in the world, He
was the one Man, whom God sent to work upon them, and to use them
to work upon others. We cannot tell how early the sense of this
distinction came to the Son of Mary. Luke reveals it in Him, before
He had taken His place as a citizen and was still within the family:
_Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?_ At His
first public appearance He had it fully, and others acknowledged
it. In the opening year of His ministry it threatened to be only a
Distinction of the First--_they took Him by force, and would have
made Him King_. But as time went on it grew evident that it was to
be, not the Distinction of the First, but the Distinction of the
Only. The enthusiastic crowds melted away: the small band, whom He
had most imbued with His spirit, proved that they could follow Him
but a certain length in His consciousness of His Mission. Recognising
in Him the supreme prophet--_Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast
the words of eternal life_--they immediately failed to understand,
that suffering also must be endured by Him for the people: _Be it
far from Thee, Lord_. This suffering was His conscience and His
burden alone. Now, we cannot overlook the fact, that the point at
which Christ's way became so solitary was the same point at which
we felt our prophet's language cease to oblige us to understand
by it a portion of the people, and begin to be applicable to a
single individual,--the point, namely, where prophecy passes into
martyrdom. But whether our prophet's pictures of the suffering and
atoning Servant of the Lord are meant for some aspect of the national
experience, or as the portrait of a real individual, it is certain
that in His martyrdom and service of ransom Jesus felt Himself to be
absolutely alone. He who had begun His Service of God with all the
people on His side, consummated the same with the leaders and the
masses of the nation against Him, and without a single partner from
among His own friends, either in the fate which overtook Him, or in
the conscience with which He bore it.
Now all this parallel between Jesus of Nazareth and the Servant of
the Lord is unmistakable enough, even in this mere outline; but the
details of the Gospel narrative and the language of the Evangelists
still more emphasize it. Christ's herald hailed Him with words which
gather up the essence of Isa. liii.: _Behold the Lamb of God_. He read
His own commission from ch. lxi.: _The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me_.
To describe His first labours among the people, His disciples again
used words from ch. liii.: _Himself bare our sicknesses_. To paint His
manner of working in face of opposition they quoted the whole passage
from ch. xlii.: _Behold My Servant ... He shall not strive._ The name
Servant was often upon His own lips in presenting Himself: _Behold,
I am among you as one that serveth_. When His office of prophecy
passed into martyrdom, He predicted for Himself the treatment which
is detailed in ch. l.,--the _smiting_, _plucking_ and _spitting_: and
in time, by Jew and Gentile, this treatment was inflicted on Him to
the very letter.[167] As to His consciousness in fulfilling something
more than a martyrdom, and alone among the martyrs of Israel offering
by His death an expiation for His people's sins, His own words are
frequent and clear enough to form a counterpart to ch. liii. With them
before us, we cannot doubt that He felt Himself to be the One of whom
the people in that chapter speak, as standing over against them all,
sinless, and yet bearing their sins. But on the night on which He was
betrayed, while just upon the threshold of this extreme and unique
form of service, into which it has been given to no soul of man, that
ever lived, to be conscious of following Him--as if anxious that His
disciples should not be so overwhelmed by the awful part in which
they could not imitate Him as to forget the countless other ways in
which they were called to fulfil His serving spirit--_He took a towel
and girded Himself, and when He had washed their feet, He said unto
them, If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you
also ought to wash one another's feet_--thereby illustrating what is
so plainly set forth in our prophecy, that short of the expiation, of
which only One in His sinlessness has felt the obligation, and short
of the martyrdom, which it has been given to but few of His people to
share with Him, there are a thousand humble forms rising out of the
needs of everyday life, in which men are called to employ towards one
another the gentle and self-forgetful methods of the true Servant of
God.
With the four Gospels in existence, no one doubts or can doubt that
Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled the cry, _Behold My Servant_. With Him
it ceased to be a mere ideal, and took its place as the greatest
achievement in history.
3. In the earliest discourses of the Apostles, therefore, it is not
wonderful that Jesus should be expressly designated by them as the
Servant of God,--the Greek word used being that by which the Septuagint
specially translates the Hebrew term in Isa. xl.-lxvi.[168]: _God hath
glorified His Servant Jesus. Unto you first, God, having raised up His
Servant, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from
your iniquities.... In this city against Thy holy Servant Jesus, whom
Thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and
the peoples of Israel, were gathered together to do whatsoever Thy hand
and Thy counsel foreordained to pass. Grant that signs and wonders may
be done through the name of Thy Holy Servant Jesus._[169] It must also
be noticed, that in one of the same addresses, and again by Stephen
in his argument before the Sanhedrim, Jesus is called _The Righteous
One_,[170] doubtless an allusion to the same title for the Servant
in Isa. liii. 11. Need we recall the interpretation of Isa. liii. by
Philip?[171]
It is known to all how Peter develops this parallel in his First
Epistle, borrowing the figures but oftener the very words of Isa.
liii. to apply to Christ. Like the Servant of the Lord, Jesus
is _as a lamb_: He is a patient sufferer in silence; He _is the
Righteous_--again the classic title--_for the unrighteous_; in exact
quotation from the Greek of Isa. liii.: _He did no sin, neither
was found guile in His mouth, ye were as sheep gone astray, but He
Himself hath borne our sins, with whose stripes ye are healed_.[172]
Paul applies two quotations from Isa. lii. 13-liii. to Christ: _I
have striven to preach the Gospel not where Christ was named; as it
is written, To whom He was not spoken of they shall see: and they
that have not heard shall understand_; and _He hath made Him to be
sin for us who knew no sin._[173] And none will doubt that when he so
often disputed that the _Messiah must suffer_, or wrote _Messiah died
for our sins according to the Scriptures_, he had Isa. liii. in mind,
exactly as we have seen it applied to the Messiah by Jewish scholars
a hundred years later than Paul.
4. Paul, however, by no means confines the prophecy of the Servant
of the Lord to Jesus the Messiah. In a way which has been too much
overlooked by students of the subject, Paul revives and reinforces
the collective interpretation of the Servant. He claims the Servant's
duties and experience for himself, his fellow-labourers in the
gospel, and all believers.
In Antioch of Pisidia, Paul and Barnabas said of themselves to the
Jews: _For so hath the Lord_ commanded us saying, _I have set thee to
be a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation to the
ends of the earth._[174] Again, in the eighth of Romans, Paul takes the
Servant's confident words, and speaks them of all God's true people.
_He is near that justifieth me, who is he that condemneth me?_ cried
the Servant in our prophecy, and Paul echoes for all believers: _It is
God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth?_[175] And again, in his
second letter to Timothy, he says, speaking of that pastor's work, _For
the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle towards all_;
words which were borrowed from, or suggested by, Isa. xlii. 1-3.[176]
In these instances, as well as in his constant use of the terms
_slave_, _servant_, _minister_, with their cognates, Paul fulfils the
intention of Jesus, who so continually, by example, parable, and direct
commission, enforced the life of His people as a Service to the Lord.
5. Such, then, is the New Testament reflection of the Prophecy of the
Servant of the Lord, both as People and Person. Like all physical
reflections, this moral one may be said, on the whole, to stand
reverse to its original. In Isa. xl.-lxvi. the Servant is People
first, Person second. But in the New Testament--except for a faint
and scarcely articulate application to Israel in the beginning of
the gospels--the Servant is Person first and People afterwards. The
Divine Ideal which our prophet saw narrowing down from the Nation
to an Individual, was owned and realised by Christ. But in Him it
was not exhausted. With added warmth and light, with a new power of
expansion, it passed through Him to fire the hearts and enlist the
wills of an infinitely greater people than the Israel for whom it
was originally designed. With this witness, then, of history to the
prophecies of the Servant, our way in expounding and applying them is
clear. Jesus Christ is their perfect fulfilment and illustration. But
we who are His Church are to find in them our ideal and duty,--our
duty to God and to the world. In this, as in so many other matters,
the unfulfilled prophecy of Israel is the conscience of Christianity.
FOOTNOTES:
[160] _Cf._ _The Jewish Interpreters on Isa. liii._, Driver and
Neubauer, Oxford, 1877. Abravanel, who himself takes ch. liii. in a
national sense, admits, after giving the Christian interpretation,
that "in fact Jonathan ben Uziel, 'the Targumist,' applied it to the
Messiah, who was still to come, and this is likewise the opinion of
the wise in many of their Midrashim." And R. Moscheh al Shech, of
the sixteenth century, says: "See, our masters have with one voice
held as established and handed down, that here it is King Messiah
who is spoken of." (Both these passages quoted by Bredenkamp in his
commentary, p. 307.)
[161] Isa. lix. 5.
[162] _Id._ vi. 13; ix. 18; x. 17, 34; xlvii. 14.
[163] _Id._ xxi. 10; xxviii. 27; xl. 24; xli. 15 ff.
[164] _Id._ i. 31; xlvii. 14.
[165] Isa. lviii. 7.
[166] Undoubtedly taken from Isa. liii.
[167] _Cf._ with the Greek version of Isa. l. 4-7, Luke xviii. 31,
32; Matt. xxvi. 67.
[168] In Isa. xl.-lxvi. the Septuagint translates the Hebrew for
Servant by one or other of two words--παις and δουλος. Παις is used in
xli. 8; xlii. 1; xliv. 1 ff.; xliv. 21; xlv. 4; xlix. 6; l. 10; lii.
13. But δουλος is used in xlviii. 20; xlix. 3 and 5. In the Acts it is
παις that is used of Christ: "An apostle is never called παις (but only
δουλος) Θεου" (Meyer). But David is called παις (Acts iv. 25).
[169] Acts iii. 13, 26; iv. 27-30.
[170] Acts iii. 14; vii. 52.
[171] Acts viii. 30 ff.
[172] 1 Peter i. 19; ii. 22, 23; iii. 18.
[173] Rom. xv. 20 f.; 2 Cor. v. 21.
[174] Acts xiii. 47, after Isa. xlix. 6.
[175] Isa. l. 8, and Rom. viii. 33, 34.
[176] 2 Tim. ii. 24. We may note, also, how Paul in Eph. vi. takes
the armour with which God is clothed in Isa. lix. 17, breastplate
and helmet, and equips the individual Christian with them; and how,
in the same passage, he takes for the Christian from Isa. xl. the
Messiah's girdle of truth and the _sword of the Spirit,--he shall
smite the land with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his
lips shall he slay the wicked_.
CHAPTER XVIII.
_THE SERVICE OF GOD AND MAN._
ISAIAH xlii. 1-7.
We now understand, whom to regard as the Servant of the Lord. The
Service of God was a commission to witness and prophesy for God upon
earth, made out at first in the name of the entire nation Israel.
When their unfitness as a whole became apparent, it was delegated to
a portion of them. But as there were added to its duties of prophecy,
those of martyrdom and atonement for the sins of the people, our
prophet, it would seem, saw it focussed in the person of an individual.
In history Jesus Christ has fulfilled this commission both in its
national and in its personal aspects. He realised the ideal of
the prophet-people. He sacrificed Himself and made atonement for
the sins of men. But having illustrated the service of God in the
world, Christ did not exhaust it. He returned it to His people, a
more clamant conscience than ever, and He also gave them grace to
fulfil its demands. Through Christ the original destination of these
prophecies becomes, as Paul saw, their ultimate destination as well.
That Israel refused this Service or failed in it only leaves it more
clearly to us as duty; that Jesus fulfilled it not only confirms that
duty, but adds hope and courage to discharge it.
Although the terms of this Service were published nearly two thousand
five hundred years ago, in a petty dialect that is now dead, to a
helpless tribe of captives in a world, whose civilisation has long
sunk to ruin, yet these terms are so free of all that is provincial
or antique, they are so adapted to the lasting needs of humanity,
they are so universal in their scope, they are so instinct with
that love which never faileth, though prophecies fail and tongues
cease, that they come home to heart and conscience to-day with as
much tenderness and authority as ever. The first programme of these
terms is given in ch. xlii. 1-7. The authorised English version is
one of unapproachable beauty, but its emphasis and rhythm are not
the emphasis and rhythm of the original, and it has missed one at
least of the striking points of the Hebrew. The following version,
which makes no attempt at elegance, is almost literal, follows the
same order as the original that it may reproduce the same emphasis,
and, as far as English can, repeats the original rhythm. The point,
which it rescues from the neglect of the Authorised Version, is this,
that the verbs used of the Servant in ver. 4, _He shall not fade nor
break_, are the same as are used of the wick and the reed in ver. 3.
_Lo, My Servant! I hold by him;_
_My Chosen! Well-pleased is My soul!_
_I have set My Spirit upon him;_
_Law to the Nations he brings forth._
_He cries not, nor lifts up,_[177]
_Nor lets his voice be heard in the street.
Reed_ that is _broken he breaks not off,_
_Wick_ that is _fading he does not quench:_
_Faithfully brings he forth Law._
_He shall not fade neither break,_
_Till he have set in the Earth_[178] _Law;_
_And for his teaching the Isles are waiting._
_Thus saith the God, Jehovah,_
_Creator of the heavens that stretched them forth,_
_Spreader of Earth and her produce,_
_Giver of breath to the people upon her,_
_And of spirit to them that walk therein:_
_I, Jehovah, have called thee in righteousness,_
_To grasp thee fast by thy hand, and to keep thee,_
_And to set thee for a covenant of the People,_
_For a light of the Nations:_
_To open blind eyes,_
_To bring forth from durance the captive,_
_From prison the dwellers in darkness._
I. THE CONSCIENCE OF SERVICE.
As several of these lines indicate, this is a Service to Man, but what
we must first fasten upon is that before being a Service to Man it is
a Service for God. _Behold, My Servant_, says God's commission very
emphatically. And throughout the prophecy the Servant is presented as
chosen of God, inspired of God, equipped of God, God's creature, God's
instrument; useful only because he is used, influential because he is
influenced, victorious because he is obedient; learning the methods
of his work by daily wakefulness to God's voice, a good speaker only
because he is first a good listener; with no strength or courage but
what God lends, and achieving all for God's glory. Notice how strongly
it is said that God _holds by him, grasps him by the hand_. We shall
see that his Service is as sympathetic and comprehensive a purpose
for humanity as was ever dreamed in any thought or dared in any life.
Whether we consider its tenderness for individuals, or the universalism
of its hope for the world, or its gentle appreciation of all human
effort and aspiration, or its conscience of mankind's chief evil,
or the utterness of its self-sacrifice in order to redeem men,--we
shall own it to be a programme of human duty, and a prophecy of human
destiny, to which the growing experience of our race has been able to
add nothing that is essential. But the Service becomes all that to man,
because it first takes all that from God. Not only is the Servant's
sense of duty to all humanity just the conscience of God's universal
sovereignty,--for it is a remarkable and never-to-be-forgotten fact,
that Israel recognised their God's right to the whole world, before
they felt their own duty to mankind,--but the Servant's character
and methods are the reflection of the Divine. Feature by feature
the Servant corresponds to His Lord. His patience is but sympathy
with Jehovah's righteousness,--_I will uphold thee with the right
hand of My righteousness_. His gentleness with the unprofitable and
the unlovely--_He breaks not off the broken reed nor quenches the
flickering wick_--is but the temper of _the everlasting God, who giveth
power to the faint, and to them that have no might He increaseth
strength_. His labour and passion and agony, even they have been
anticipated in the Divine nature, for _the LORD stirreth up seal like
a man of war; He saith, I will cry out like a travailing woman_. In no
detail is the Servant above his Master. His character is not original,
but is the impress of his God's: _I have put My spirit upon him_.
There are many in our day, who deny this indebtedness of the human
character to the Divine, and in the Service of Man would have us turn
our backs upon God. Positivists, while admitting that the earliest
enthusiasm of the individual for his race did originate in the love
of a Divine Being, assert nevertheless that we have grown away from
this illusory motive; and that in the example of humanity itself we
may find all the requisite impulse to serve it. The philosophy of
history, which the extreme Socialists have put forward, is even more
explicit. According to them, mankind was disturbed in a primitive,
tribal socialism--or service of each other--by the rise of spiritual
religion, which drew the individual away from his kind and absorbed
him in selfish relations to God. Such a stage, represented by the
Hebrew and Christian faiths, and by the individualist political
economy which has run concurrent with the later developments of
Christianity, was (so these Socialists admit) perhaps necessary for
temporary discipline and culture, like the land of Egypt to starved
Jacob's children; but like Egypt, when it turned out to be the house
of bondage, the individualist economy and religion are now to be
abandoned for the original land of promise,--Socialism once more, but
universal instead of tribal as of old. Out of this analogy, which is
such Socialists' own, Sinai and the Ten Commandments are, of course,
omitted. We are to march back to freedom without a God, and settle
down to love and serve each other by administration.
But can we turn our backs on God, without hurting man? The natural
history of philanthropy would seem to say that we cannot. This
prophecy is one of its witnesses. Earliest ideal as it is, of a
universal service of mankind, it starts in its obligation from
the universal Sovereignty of God; it starts in every one of its
affections from some affection of the Divine character. And we have
not grown away from the need of its everlasting sources. Cut off
God from the Service of man, and the long habit and inherent beauty
of that Service may perpetuate its customs for a few generations;
but the inevitable call must come to subject conduct to the altered
intellectual conditions, and in the absence of God every man's ideal
shall surely turn from, How can I serve my neighbour? to, How can I
make my neighbour serve me? As our prophet reminds us in his vivid
contrast between Israel, the Servant of the Lord, and Babylon, _who
saith in her heart: I am, and there is none beside me_, there are
ultimately but two alternative lords of the human will, God and
Self. If we revolt from the Authority and Example of the One, we
shall surely become subject, in the long run, to the ignorance, the
short-sightedness, the pedantry, the cruelty of the other. These
words are used advisedly. With no sense of the sacredness of every
human life as created in the image of God, and with no example of an
Infinite Mercy before them, men would leave to perish all that was
weak, or, from the limited point of view of a single community or
generation, unprofitable. Some Positivists and those Socialists, who
do not include God in the society they seek to establish, admit that
they expect something like that to follow from their denial of God.
In certain Positivist proposals for the reform of charity, we are
told that the ideal scheme of social relief would be the one which
limited itself to persons judged to be of use to the community as a
whole; that is, that in their succour of the weak, their bounty to
the poor, and their care of the young, society should be guided, not
by the eternal laws of justice and of mercy, but by the opinions of
the representatives of the public for the time being and by their
standard of utility to the commonwealth. Your atheist-Socialist is
still more frank. In the state, which he sees rising after he has got
rid of Christianity, he would suppress, he tells us, all who preached
such a thing as the fear of the future life, and he would not repeat
the present exceptional legislation for the protection of women and
children, for whom, he whines, far too much has been recently done in
comparison with what has been enacted for the protection of men.[179]
These are, of course, but vain things which the heathen imagine
(and some of us have an ideal of socialism very different from the
godlessness which has usurped the noble name), but they serve to
illustrate what clever men, who have thrown off all belief in God,
will bring themselves to hope for: a society utterly Babylonian,
without pity or patience,--if it were possible for these eternal
graces to die out of any human community,--subject to the opinion of
pedants, whose tender mercies would be far more fatal to the weak and
poor than the present indifference of the rich; seriously fettering
liberty of conscience and destitute of chivalry. It may be that our
Positivist critics are right, and that the interests of humanity
have suffered in Christian times from the prevalence of too selfish
and introspective a religion; but whether our religion has looked
too intensely inward or not, we cannot, it is certain, do without a
religion that looks steadily up, owning the discipline of Divine Law
and the Example of an Infinite Mercy and Longsuffering.
But, though we had never heard of Positivism or of the Socialism
that denies God, our age, with its popular and public habits, would
still require this example of Service, which our prophecy enforces:
it is an age so charged with the instincts of work, with the ambition
to be useful, with the fashion of altruism; but so empty of the
sense of God, of reverence, discipline and prayer. We do not need
to learn philanthropy,--the thing is in the air; but we do need to
be taught that philanthropy demands a theology both for its purity
and its effectiveness. When philanthropy has become, what it is
so much to-day, the contest of rival politicians, the ambition of
every demagogue, who can get his head above the crowd, the fitful
self-indulgence of weak hearts, the opportunity of vain theorists,
and for all a temptation to work with lawless means for selfish
ends,--it is time to remember that the Service of Man is first of
all a great Service for God. This faith alone can keep us from the
wilfulness, the crotchets and the insubordination, which spoil so
many well-intentioned to their kind, and so wofully break up the
ranks of progress. Humility is the first need of the philanthropist
of to-day: humility, discipline and the sense of proportion; and
these are qualities, which only faith in God and the conscience of
law are known to bestow upon the human heart. It is the fear of God
that will best preserve us from making our philanthropy the mere
flattery of the popular appetite. To keep us utterly patient with
men we need to think of God's patience with ourselves. While to us
all there come calls to sacrifice, which our fellow-men may so
little deserve from us, and against which our self-culture can plead
so many reasons, that unless God's will and example were before us,
the calls would never be obeyed. In short, to be most useful in this
life it is necessary to feel that we are used. Look at Christ. To Him
philanthropy was no mere habit and spontaneous affection; even for
that great heart the love of man had to be enforced by the compulsion
of the will of God. The busy days of healing and teaching had between
them long nights of lonely prayer; and the Son of God did not pass to
His supreme self-sacrifice for men till after the struggle with, and
the submission to, His Father's will in Gethsemane.
II. THE SUBSTANCE OF SERVICE.
The substance of the Servant's work is stated in one word, uttered
thrice in emphatic positions. _Judgement for the nations shall he bring
forth.... According to truth shall he bring forth judgement.... He
shall not flag nor break, till he set in the earth_[180] _judgement._
The English word _judgement_ is a natural but misleading translation
of the original, and we must dismiss at once the idea of judicial
sentence, which it suggests. The Hebrew is "mishpat," which means,
among other things, either a single statute, or the complete body of
law which God gave Israel by Moses, at once their creed and their
code; or, perhaps, also the abstract quality of justice or right.
We rendered it as the latter in Isa. i.-xxxix. But, as will be seen
from the note below,[181] when used in Isa. xl.-lxvi. without the
article, as here, it is the "mishpat" of Jehovah,--not so much
the actual body of statutes given to Israel, as the principles
of _right_ or _justice_ which they enforce. In one passage it is
given in parallel to the civic virtues _righteousness_, _truth_,
_uprightness_, but--as its etymology compared with theirs shows
us--it is these viewed not in their character as virtues, but in
their obligation as ordained by God. Hence, _duty_ to Jehovah as
inseparable from His religion (Ewald), _religion_ as the law of
life (Delitzsch), _the law_ (Cheyne, who admirably compares the
Arabic ed-Dîn) are all good renderings. Professor Davidson gives
the fullest exposition. "It can scarcely," he says, "be rendered
'religion' in the modern sense, it is the equity and civil right
which is the result of the true religion of Jehovah; and though
comprehended under religion in the Old Testament sense, is rather,
according to our conceptions, religion applied in civil life. Of
old the religious unit was the state, and the life of the state was
the expression of its religion. Morality was law or custom, and
both reposed upon God. A condition of thought such as now prevails,
where morality is based on independent grounds, whether natural law
or the principles inherent in the mind apart from religion, did not
then exist. What the prophet means by 'bringing forth right' is
explained in another passage, where it is said that Jehovah's 'arms
shall judge the peoples,' and that the 'isles shall wait for His arm'
(ch. li. 5). 'Judgment' is that pervading of life by the principles
of equity and humanity which is the immediate effect of the true
religion of Jehovah."[182] In short, "mishpat" is not only the civic
righteousness and justice, to which it is made parallel in our
prophecy, but it is these with God behind them. On the one hand it is
conterminous with national virtue, on the other it is the ordinance
and will of God.
This, then, is the burden of the Servant's work, to pervade and
instruct every nation's life on earth with the righteousness and
piety that are ordained of God. _He shall not flag nor break, till he
have set in the earth Law_,--till in every nation justice, humanity
and worship are established as the law of God. We have seen that
the Servant is in this passage still some aspect or shape of the
people,--the people who are not a people, but scattered among the
brickfields of Babylonia, a horde of captives. When we keep that in
mind, two or three things come home to us about this task of theirs.
First, it is no mere effort at proselytism. It is not an ambition
to Judaise the world. The national consciousness and provincial
habits, which cling about so many of the prophecies of Israel's
relation to the world, have dropped from this one, and the nation's
mission is identified with the establishment of law, the diffusion
of light, the relief of suffering. _I will give thee for a light
to the nations: to open blind eyes, to bring out from durance the
bound, from the prison the dwellers in darkness._[183] Again, it is
no mere office of preaching, to which the Servant's commission is
limited, no mere inculcation of articles of belief. But we have here
the same rich, broad idea of religion, identifying it with the whole
national life, which we found so often illustrated by Isaiah, and
which is one of the beneficial results to religion of God's choice
for Himself of a nation as a whole.[184] What such a Service has to
give the world, is not merely testimony to the truth, nor fresh views
of it, nor artistic methods of teaching it; but social life under
its obligation, the public conscience of it, the long tradition and
habit of it, the breed--what the prophets call the _seed_--of it. To
establish true religion as the constitution, national duty, and regular
practice of every people under the sun, in all the details of order,
cleanliness, justice, purity and mercy, in which it had been applied
to themselves,--such was the Service and the Destiny of Israel. And
the marvel of so universal and political an ideal was, that it came
not to a people in the front ranks of civilisation or of empire,
but to a people that at the time had not even a political shape for
themselves,--a mere herd of captives, despised and rejected of men.
When we realise this, we understand that they never would have dared to
think of it, or to speak of it to one another, unless they had believed
it to be the purpose and will of Almighty God for them; unless they had
recognised it, not only as a service desirable and true in itself, and,
needed also by humanity, but withal as His "mishpat," His _judgement_
or _law_, who by His bare word can bring all things to pass. But before
we see how strongly He impressed them with this, that His creative
force was in their mission, let us turn to the methods by which He
commanded them to achieve it,--methods corresponding to its purely
spiritual and universal character.
III. THE TEMPER OF SERVICE.
1. _He shall not cry, nor lift up,
Nor make his voice to be heard in the street._
There is nothing more characteristic of our prophecy than its belief
in the power of speech, its exultation in the music and spell of
the human voice. It opens with a chorus of high calls: none are so
lovely to it as heralds, or so musical as watchmen when they lift up
the voice; it sets the preaching of glad tidings before the people
as their national ideal; eloquence it describes as a sharp sword
leaping from God's scabbard. The Servant of the Lord is trained in
style of speech; his words are as pointed arrows; he has the mouth of
the learned, a voice to command obedience. The prophet's own tones
are superb: nowhere else does the short sententiousness of Hebrew
roll out into such long, sonorous periods. He uses speech in every
style: for comfort, for bitter controversy, in clear proclamation,
in deep-throated denunciation: _Call with the throat_, _spare not_,
_lift up the voice like a trumpet_. His constant key-notes are,
_speak a word_, _lift up the voice with strength_, _sing_, _publish_,
_declare_. In fact, there is no use to which the human voice has ever
been put in the Service of Man, for comfort's sake, or for justice,
or for liberty, for the diffusion of knowledge or for the scattering
of music, which our prophet does not enlist and urge upon his people.
When, then, he says of the Servant that _he shall not cry, nor lift
up, nor make his voice to be heard in the street_, he cannot be
referring to the means and art of the Service, but rather to the
tone and character of the Servant. Each of the triplet of verbs he
uses shows us this. The first one, translated _cry_, is not the cry
or call of the herald voice in ch. xl., the high, clear Kārā; it
is ssa`aḳ, a sharper word with a choke in the centre of it meaning
_to scream_, especially under excitement. Then _to lift up_ is the
exact equivalent of our "to be loud." And if we were seeking to
translate into Hebrew our phrase "to advertise oneself," we could
not find a closer expression for it than to _make his voice be
heard in the street_. To be "screamy," to be "loud," to "advertise
oneself,"--these modern expressions for vices that were ancient as
well as modern render the exact force of the verse. Such the Servant
of God will not be nor do. He is at once too strong, too meek and
too practical. That God is with him, _holding him fast_, keeps him
calm and unhysterical; that he is but God's instrument keeps him
humble and quiet; and that his heart is in his work keeps him from
advertising himself at its expense. It is perhaps especially for the
last of these reasons that Matthew (in his twelfth chapter) quotes
this passage of our Lord. Jesus had been disturbed in His labours
of healing by the disputatious Pharisees. He had answered them,
and then withdrawn from their neighbourhood. Many sick were brought
after Him to His privacy, and He healed them all. But _He charged
them that they should not make Him known; that it might be fulfilled
which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, Behold, My Servant
... he shall not strive, nor cry aloud, neither shall any one hear
his voice in the streets._ Now this cannot be, what some carelessly
take it for, an example against controversy or debate of all kinds,
for Jesus had Himself just been debating; nor can it be meant as
an absolute forbidding of all publishing of good works, for Christ
has shown us, on other occasions, that such advertisement is good.
The difficulty is explained, by what we have seen to explain other
perplexing actions of our Lord, His intensely practical spirit.
The work to be done determined everything. When it made argument
necessary, as that same day it had done in the synagogue, then our
Lord entered on argument: He did not only heal the man with the
withered hand, but He made him the text of a sermon. But when talking
about His work hindered it, provoked the Pharisees to come near with
their questions, and took up His time and strength in disputes with
them, then for the work's sake He forbade talk about it. We have
no trace of evidence that Christ forbade this advertisement also
for His own sake,--as a temptation to Himself and fraught with evil
effects upon His feelings. We know that it is for this reason we
have to shun it. Even though we are quite guiltless of contributing
to such publication ourselves, and it is the work of generous and
well-meaning friends, it still becomes a very great danger to us.
For it is apt to fever us and exhaust our nervous force, even when
it does not turn our heads with its praise,--to distract us and to
draw us more and more into the enervating habit of paying attention
to popular opinion. Therefore, as a man values his efficiency in the
Service of Man, he will not _make himself to be heard in the street_.
There is an amount of _making to be heard_ which is absolutely
necessary for the work's sake; but there is also an amount which can
be indulged in only at the work's expense. Present-day philanthropy,
even with the best intentions, suffers from this over-publicity, and
its besetting sins are "loudness" and hysteria.
What, then, shall tell us how far we can go? What shall teach us
how to be eloquent without screaming, clear without being loud,
impressive without wasting our strength in seeking to make an
impression? These questions bring us back to what we started with, as
the indispensable requisite for Service--some guiding and religious
principles behind even the kindliest and steadiest tempers. For many
things in the Service of Man no exact rules will avail; neither
logic nor bye-laws of administration can teach us to observe the
uncertain and constantly varying degree of duty, which they demand.
Tact for that is bestowed only by the influence of lofty principles
working from above. This is a case in point. What rules of logic
or "directions of the superior authority" can, in the Service of
Man, distinguish for us between excitement and earnestness, bluster
and eloquence, energy and mere self-advertisement; on whose subtle
differences the whole success of the service must turn. Only the
discipline of faith, only the sense of God, can help us here. The
practical temper by itself will not help us. To be busy but gives
us too great self-importance; and hard work often serves only to
bring out the combative instincts. To know that we are His Servants
shall keep us meek; that we are held fast by His hand shall keep us
calm; that His great laws are not abrogated shall keep us sane. When
for our lowliest and most commonplace kinds of service we think no
religion is required, let us remember the solemn introduction of the
evangelist to his story of the foot-washing. _Jesus knowing that the
Father had given all things into His hands, and that He came forth
from God and goeth unto God, riseth from supper, and layeth aside His
garments; and He took a towel, and girded Himself; then He poureth
water into the bason, and began to wash His disciples' feet._
2. But to meekness and discipline the Servant adds gentleness.
_Reed that is broken he breaks not off,_
_Wick that is fading he does not quench;_
_Faithfully brings he forth law._
The force of the last of these three lines is, of course,
qualificative and conditional. It is set as a guard against the abuse
of the first two, and means that though the Servant in dealing with
men is to be solicitous about their weakness, yet the interests of
religion shall in no way suffer. Mercy shall be practised, but so
that truth is not compromised.
The original application of the verse is thus finely stated by
Professor Davidson: "This is the singularly humane and compassionate
view the Prophet takes of the Gentiles,--they are bruised reeds
and expiring flames.... What the prophet may refer to is the human
virtues, expiring among the nations, but not yet dead; the sense of
God, debased by idolatries, but not extinct; the consciousness in
the individual soul of its own worth and its capacities, and the
glimmering ideal of a true life and a worthy activity almost crushed
out by the grinding tyranny of rulers and the miseries entailed by
their ambitions--this flickering light the Servant shall feed and
blow into a flame.[185]... It is the future relation of the 'people'
Israel to other peoples that he describes. The thought which has now
taken possession of statesmen of the higher class, that the point
of contact between nation and nation need not be the sword, that
the advantage of one people is not the loss of another but the gain
of mankind, that the land where freedom has grown to maturity and
is worshipped in her virgin serenity and loveliness should nurse
the new-born babe in other homes, and that the strange powers of
the mind of man and the subtle activities of his hand should not be
repressed but fostered in every people, in order that the product may
be poured into the general lap of the race--this idea is supposed to
be due to Christianity. And, immediately, it is; but it is older than
Christianity. It is found in this Prophet. And it is not new in him,
for a Prophet, presumably a century and a half his senior, had said:
_The remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many peoples as a dew
from the Lord, as showers upon the grass_ (Micah v. 7)."[186]
But while this national reference may be the one originally meant,
the splendid vagueness of the metaphor forbids us to be content
with it, or with any solitary application. For the two clauses are
as the eyes of the All-Pitiful Father, that rest wherever on this
broad earth there is any life, though it be so low as to be conscious
only through pain or doubt; they are as the healing palms of Jesus
stretched over the multitudes to bless and gather to Himself the
weary and the poor in spirit. We contrast our miserable ruin of
character, our feeble sparks of desire after holiness, with the
life, which Christ demands and has promised, and in despair we tell
ourselves, this can never become that. But it is precisely this that
Christ has come to lift to that. The first chapter of the Sermon on
the Mount closes with the awful command, _Be ye perfect, as your
Father in Heaven is perfect_; but we work our way back through
the chapter, and we come to this, _Blessed are they that hunger
and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled_; and to
this, _Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven._ Such is Christ's treatment of the bruised reed and the
smoking flax. Let us not despair. There is only one kind of men,
for whom it has no gospel,--the dead and they who are steeped in
worldliness, who have forgotten what the pain of a sore conscience
is, and are strangers to humility and aspiration. But for all who
know their life, were it only through their pain or their doubt, were
it only in the despair of what they feel to be a last struggle with
temptation, were it only in contrition for their sin or in shame
for their uselessness, this text has hope. _Reed that is broken he
breaketh not off, wick that is fading he doth not quench._
This objective sense of the Servant's temper must always be the first
for us to understand. For more than he was, we are, mortal, ready
ourselves to _break and to fade_. But having experienced the grace,
let us show the same in our service to others. Let us understand
that we are sent forth like the great Servant of God, that man _may
have life, and have it more abundantly_. We need resolutely and
with pious obstinacy to set this temper before us, for it is not
natural to our hearts. Even the best of us, in the excitement of
our work, forget to think of anything except of making our mark, or
of getting the better of what we are at work upon. When work grows
hard, the combative instincts waken within us, till we look upon the
characters God has given us to mould as enemies to be fought. We are
passionate to convince men, to overcome them with an argument, to
wring the confession from them that we are right and they wrong. Now
Christ our Master must have seen in every man He met a very great
deal more to be fought and extirpated than we can possibly see in
one another. Yet He largely left that alone, and addressed Himself
rather to the sparks of nobility He found, and fostered these to a
strong life, which from within overcame the badness of the man,--the
badness which opposition from the outside would but have beaten into
harder obduracy. We must ever remember that we are not warriors but
artists,--artists after the fashion of Jesus Christ, who came not
to condemn life because it was imperfect, but to build life up to
the image of God. So He sends us to be artists; as it is written,
_He gave some apostles, and some prophets, and some pastors and
teachers_. For what end? For convincing men, for telling them what
fools they mostly are, for crushing them in the inquisition of their
own conscience, for getting the better of them in argument?--no, not
for these combative purposes at all, but for fostering and artistic
ones: _for the perfecting of the saints, for the building up of the
body of Christ; till we all come unto a full grown man, unto the
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ_.
He who, in his Service of Man, practises such a temper towards the
breaking and the fading, shall never himself break or fade, as this
prophecy implies when it uses the same verbs in verses _three_ and
_four_. For he who is loyal to life shall find life generous to him;
he who is careful of weakness shall never want for strength.
IV. THE POWER BEHIND SERVICE.
There only remains now to emphasize the power that is behind Service.
It is, say verses _five_ and _six_, the Creative Power of God.
_Thus saith The God, Jehovah,_
_Creator of the heavens, that stretched them forth,_
_Spreader of the earth and her produce,_
_Giver of breath to the people upon her,_
_And of spirit to them that walk thereon,_
_I Jehovah have called thee in righteousness,_
_That I may grasp thee by thy hand, and keep thee._
Majestic confirmation of the call to Service! based upon the
fundamental granite of this whole prophecy, which here crops out into
a noble peak, firm station for the Servant, and point for prospect
of all the future. It is our easy fault to read these words of the
Creator as the utterance of mere ceremonial commonplace, blast of
trumpets at the going forth of a hero, scenery for his stage, the
pomp of nature summoned to assist at the presentation of God's
elect before the world. Yet not for splendour were they spoken, but
for bare faith's sake. God's Servant has been sent forth, weak and
gentle, with quiet methods and to very slow effects. _He shall not
cry, nor lift up, nor make his voice to be heard in the streets._
What chance has such, our service, in the ways of the world, where
to be forceful and selfish, to bluster and battle, is to survive
and overcome! So we speak, and the panic ambition rises to fight
the world with its own weapons, and to employ the kinds of debate,
advertisement and competition by which the world goes forward. For
this, the Creator calls to us, and marshals His powers before our
eyes. We thought there were but two things,--our own silence and the
world's noise. There are three, and the world's noise is only an
interruption between the other two. Across it deep calleth unto deep;
the immeasurable processes of creation cry to the feeble convictions
of truth in our hearts, We are one. Creation is the certificate that
no moral effort is a forlorn hope. When God, after repeating His
results in creation, adds, I have called thee in _righteousness_,
He means that there is some consistency between His processes in
creation, rational and immense as they are, and those poor efforts
He calls on our weakness to make, which look so foolish in face of
the world. Behind every moral effort there is, He says, Creative
force. Right and Might are ultimately one. Paul sums up the force of
the passage, when, after speaking of the success of his ministry, he
gives as its reason that the God of Creation and of Grace are the
same. _Therefore seeing we have received this ministry we faint not.
For God, who hath commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath
shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of God in
the face of Jesus Christ._
The spiritual Service of Man, then, has creative forces behind it; work
for God upon the hearts and characters of others has creative force
behind it. And nature is the seal and the sacrament of this. Let our
souls, therefore, dilate with her prospects. Let our impatience study
her reasonableness and her laws. Let our weak wills feel the rush of
her tides. For the power that is in her, and the faithful pursuance
of purposes to their ends, are the power and the character that work
behind each witness of our conscience, each effort of our heart for
others. Not less strong than she, not less calm, not less certain of
success, shall prove the moral Service of Man.
FOOTNOTES:
[177] The English equivalent is, _nor is loud_.
[178] This time with the article, so not _the land_ of Judah only,
but _the Earth_.
[179] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_.
[180] This time "arets" with the article. So not the _land_ of Judah
only but the world.
[181] The following are the four main meanings of "mishpat" in Isa.
xl.-lxvi.: 1. In a general sense, a legal process, xli. 1, _let us
come together to the judgement_, or _the law_ (with the article),
_cf._ l. 8, _man of my judgement_, _i.e._, my fellow-at-law, my
adversary; liii. 8, oppression and _judgement_, _i.e._, a judgement
which was oppressive, a legal injustice. 2. A person's _cause_ or
_right_, xl. 27, xlix. 4. 3. _Ordinance_ instituted by Jehovah
for the life and worship of His people, lviii. 2, _ordinances_ of
righteousness, _i.e._, either canonical _laws_, or ordinances by
observing which the people would make themselves righteous. 4. In
general, the sum of the laws given by Jehovah to Israel, _the Law_,
lviii. 2, _Law_ of their God; li. 4, Jehovah says _My Law_ (Rev. Ver.
_judgement_), parallel to "Torah" or Revelation (Rev. Ver. _law_).
Then absolutely, without the article or Jehovah's name attached,
xlii. 1, 3, 4. In lvi. 1 parallel to righteousness; lix. 14 parallel
to righteousness, truth and uprightness. In fact, in this last use,
while represented as equivalent to civic morality, it is this, not as
viewed in its character, _right_, _upright_, but in its obligation as
ordained by God: _morality_ as _His Law_. The absence of the article
may either mean what it means in the case of _people_ and _land_,
_i.e._, the _Law_, too much of a proper name to need the article, or
it may be an attempt to abstract the quality of the Law; and if so
mishpat is equal to _justice_.
[182] _Expositor_, second series, vol. viii., p. 364.
[183] This might, of course, only mean what the Servant had to do for
his captive countrymen. But coming as it does after the _light of
nations_, it seems natural to take it in its wider and more spiritual
sense.
[184] See ch. xv. of this volume.
[185] _Expositor_, second series, viii., pp. 364, 365, 366.
[186] _Ibid._, p. 366.
CHAPTER XIX.
_PROPHET AND MARTYR._
ISAIAH xlix. 1-9; l. 4-11.
The second great passage upon the Servant of the Lord is ch. xlix.
1-9, and the third is ch. l. 4-11. In both of these the servant
himself speaks; in both he speaks as prophet; while in the second
he tells us that his prophecy leads him on to martyrdom. The two
passages may, therefore, be taken together.
Before we examine their contents, let us look for a moment at the
way in which they are woven into the rest of the text. As we have
seen, ch. xlix. begins a new section of the prophecy, in so far
that with it the prophet leaves Babylon and Cyrus behind him, and
ceases to speak of the contrast between God and the idols. But,
still, ch. xlix. is linked to ch. xlviii. In leading up to its
climax,--the summons to Israel to depart from Babylon,--ch. xlviii.
does not forget that Israel is delivered from Babylon in order to be
the Servant of Jehovah: _say ye, Jehovah hath redeemed His Servant
Jacob_. It is this service, which ch. xlix. carries forward from the
opportunity, and the call, to go forth from Babylon, with which ch.
xlviii. closes. That opportunity, though real, does not at all mean
that Israel's redemption is complete. There were many moral reasons
which prevented the whole nation from taking full advantage of the
political freedom offered them by Cyrus. Although the true Israel,
that part of the nation which has the conscience of service, has
shaken itself free from the temptation as well as from the tyranny
of Babel, and now sees the world before it as the theatre of its
operations,--ver. 1, _Hearken, ye isles, unto Me; and listen, ye
peoples, from far_,--it has still, before it can address itself to
that universal mission, to exhort, rouse and extricate the rest of
its nation, _saying to the bounden, Go forth; and to them that are
in darkness, Show yourselves_ (ver. 9). Ch. xlix., therefore, is
the natural development of ch. xlviii. There is certainly a little
interval of time implied between the two--the time during which it
became apparent that the opportunity to leave Babylon would not be
taken advantage of by all Israel, and that the nation's redemption
must be a moral as well as a political one. But ch. xlix. 1-9 comes
out of chs. xl.-xlviii., and it is impossible to believe that in it
we are not still under the influence of the same author.
A similar coherence is apparent if we look to the other end of ch.
xlix. 1-9. Here it is evident that Jehovah's commission to the Servant
concludes with ver. 9_a_; but then its closing words, _Say to the
bound, Go forth; to them that are in darkness, Show yourselves_, start
fresh thoughts about the redeemed on their way back (vv. 9_b_-13); and
these thoughts naturally lead on to a picture of Jerusalem imagining
herself forsaken, and amazed by the appearance of so many of her
children before her (vv. 14-21). Promises to her and to them follow in
due sequence down to ch. l. 3, when the Servant resumes his soliloquy
about himself, but abruptly, and in no apparent connection with what
immediately precedes. His soliloquy ceases in ver. 9, and another
voice, probably that of God Himself, urges obedience to the Servant
(ver. 10), and judgement to the sinners in Israel (ver. 11); and ch.
li. is an address to the spiritual Israel, and to Jerusalem, with
thoughts much the same as those uttered in xlix. 14-l. 3.
In face of these facts, and taking into consideration the dramatic
form in which the whole prophecy is cast, we find ourselves unable
to say that there is anything which is incompatible with a single
authorship, or which makes it impossible for the two passages on the
Servant to have originally sprung, each at the place at which it now
stands, from the progress of the prophet's thoughts.[187]
* * * * *
Babylon is left behind, and the way of the Lord is prepared in the
desert. Israel have once more the title-deeds to their own land, and
Zion looms in sight. Yet with their face to home, and their heart
upon freedom, the voice of this people, or at least of the better
half of this people, rises first upon the conscience of their duty to
the rest of mankind.
_Hearken, O Isles, unto Me;_
_And listen, O Peoples, from far!_
_From the womb Jehovah hath called me,_
_From my mother's midst mentioned my name._[188]
_And He set my mouth like a sharp sword,_
_In the shadow of His hand did He hide me;_
_Yea, He made me a pointed arrow,_
_In His quiver He laid me in store,_
_And said to me, My Servant art thou,_
_Israel, in whom I shall break into glory.
And I--I said, In vain have I laboured,_
_For waste and for wind my strength have I spent!_
_Surely my right's with Jehovah,_
_And the meed of my work with my God!_
_But now, saith Jehovah--_
_Moulding me from the womb to be His own Servant,_
_To turn again Jacob towards Him,_
_And that Israel be not destroyed._[189]
_And I am of honour in the eyes of Jehovah,_
_And my God is my strength!_
_And He saith,_
_'Tis too light for thy being My Servant,_
_To raise up the tribes of Jacob,_
_Or gather the survivors of Israel._
_So I will set thee a light of the Nations,_
_To be My salvation to the end of the earth._
_Thus saith Jehovah,_
_Israel's Redeemer, his Holy,_
_To_ this _mockery of a life, abhorrence of a nation, servant
of tyrants,_[190]
_Kings shall behold and shall stand up,_
_Princes shall also do homage,_
_For the sake of Jehovah, who shows Himself faithful,_
_Holy of Israel, and thou art His chosen.
Thus saith Jehovah,_
_In a favourable time I have given thee answer,_
_In the day of salvation have helped thee,_
_To keep thee, to give thee for covenant of the people,_
_To raise up the land,_
_To give back the heirs to the desolate heirdoms,_
_Saying to the bounden, Go forth!_
_To them that are in darkness, Appear!_
"Who is so blind as not to perceive that the consciousness of the
Servant here is only a mirror in which the history of Israel is
reflected--first, in its original call and design that Jehovah
should be glorified in it; second, in the long delay and apparent
failure of the design; and, thirdly, as the design is now in the
present juncture of circumstances and concurrence of events about
to be realized?"[191] Yes: but it is Israel's calling, native
insufficiency, and present duty, as owned by only a part of the
people, which, though named by the national name (ver. 3), feels
itself standing over against the bulk of the nation, whose redemption
it is called to work out (vv. 8 and 9) before it takes up its
world-wide service. We have already sufficiently discussed this
distinction of the Servant from the whole nation, as well as the
distinction of the moral work he has to effect in Israel's redemption
from Babylon, from the political enfranchisement of the nation, which
is the work of Cyrus. Let us, then, at once address ourselves to the
main features of his consciousness of his mission to mankind. We
shall find these features to be three. The Servant owns for his chief
end the glory of God; and he feels that he has to glorify God in two
ways--by Speech, and by Suffering.
I. THE SERVANT GLORIFIES GOD.
_He did say to me, My servant art thou,
Israel, in whom I shall break into glory._
The Hebrew verb, which the Authorised Version translates _will be
glorified_, means to _burst forth_, _become visible_, break like the
dawn into splendour. This is the scriptural sense of Glory. Glory
is God become visible. As we put it in Volume I.,[192] glory is the
expression of holiness, as beauty is the expression of health. But,
in order to become visible, the Absolute and Holy God needs mortal
man. We have felt something like a paradox in these prophecies.
Nowhere else is God lifted up so absolute, and so able to effect
all by His mere will and word; yet nowhere else is a human agency
and service so strongly asserted as indispensable to the Divine
purpose. But this is no more a paradox, than the fact that physical
light needs some material in which to become visible. Light is
never revealed of itself, but always when shining from, or burning
in, something else. To be seen, light requires a surface that will
reflect, or a substance that will consume. And so, to _break into
glory_, God requires something outside Himself. A responsive portion
of humanity is indispensable to Him,--a people who will reflect Him
and spend itself for Him. Man is the mirror and the wick of the
Divine. God is glorified in man's character and witness,--these are
His mirror; and in man's sacrifice,--that is His wick.
And so we meet again the central truth of our prophecy, that in order
to serve men it is necessary first to be used of God. We must place
ourselves at the disposal of the Divine, we must let God shine on
us and kindle us, and break into glory through us, before we can
hope either to comfort mankind or to set them on fire. It is true
that ideas very different from this prevail among the ranks of the
servants of humanity in our day. A large part of our most serious
literature professes for "its main bearing this conclusion, that
the fellowship between man and man, which has been the principle of
development, social and moral, is not dependent upon conceptions of
what is not man, and that the idea of God, so far as it has been
a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely
human."[193] But such theories are possible only so long as the
still unexhausted influence of religion upon society continues to
supply human nature, directly or indirectly, with a virtue which
may be plausibly claimed for human nature's own original product.
Let religion be entirely withdrawn, and the question, Whence comes
virtue? will be answered by virtue ceasing to come at all. The savage
imagines that it is the burning-glass which sets the bush on fire,
and as long as the sun is shining it may be impossible to convince
him that he is wrong; but a dull day will teach even his mind that
the glass can do nothing without the sun upon it. And so, though men
may talk glibly against God, while society still shines in the light
of His countenance, yet, if they and society resolutely withdraw
themselves from that light, they shall certainly lose every heat and
lustre of the spirit which is indispensable for social service.[194]
On this the ancient Greek was at one with the ancient Hebrew.
_Enthusiasm_ is just _God breaking into glory_ through a human life.
Here lies the secret of the buoyancy and "freshness of the earlier
world," whether pagan or Hebrew, and by this may be understood the
depression and pessimism which infects modern society. They had God
in their blood, and we are anæmic. _But I, I said, I have laboured in
vain; for waste and for wind have I spent my strength._ We must all
say that, if our last word is _our strength_. But let this not be our
last word. Let us remember the sufficient answer: _Surely my right is
with the Lord, and the meed of my work with my God_. We are set, not
in our own strength or for our own advantage, but with the hand of
God upon us, and that the Divine life may _break into glory_ through
our life. Carlyle said, and it was almost his last testimony, "The
older I grow, and I am now on the brink of eternity, the more comes
back to me the first sentence of the catechism, which I learned when
a child, and the fuller does its meaning grow--'What is the chief end
of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.'"
* * * * *
It was said above, that, as light breaks to visibleness either from a
mirror or a wick, so God _breaks to glory_ either from the witness of
men,--that is His mirror,--or from their sacrifice--that is His wick.
Of both of these ways of glorifying God is the Servant conscious. His
service is Speech and Sacrifice, Prophecy and Martyrdom.
II. THE SERVANT AS PROPHET.
Concerning his service of Speech, the Servant speaks in these two
passages--ch. xlix. 2 and l. 4-5:
_He set my mouth like a sharp sword,_
_In the shadow of His hand did He hide me,_
_And made me a pointed arrow;_
_In His quiver He laid me in store._
_My Lord Jehovah hath given me_
_The tongue of the learners,_
_To know how to succour the weary with words._
_He wakeneth morning by morning, He wakeneth mine ear_
_To hear as the learners._
_My Lord Jehovah hath opened mine ear._
_I was not rebellious,_
_Nor turned away backward._
At the bidding of our latest prophet we have become suspicious of
the power of speech, and the goddess of eloquence walks, as it
were, under surveillance among us. Carlyle reiterated, "All speech
and rumour is short-lived, foolish, untrue. Genuine work alone is
eternal. The talent of silence is our fundamental one. The dumb
nations are the builders of the world." Under such doctrine some have
grown intolerant of words, and the ideal of to-day tends to become
the practical man rather than the prophet. Yet, as somebody has
said, Carlyle makes us dissatisfied with preaching only by preaching
himself; and you have but to read him with attention to discover that
his disgust with human speech is consistent with an immense reverence
for the voice as an instrument of service to humanity. "The tongue
of man," he says, "is a sacred organ. Man himself is definable in
philosophy as an 'Incarnate Word;' the Word not there, you have no
man there either, but a Phantasm instead."
Let us examine our own experience upon the merits of this debate
between Silence and Speech in the service of man. Though beginning
low, it will help us quickly to the height of the experience of the
Prophet Nation, who, with nought else for the world but the voice
that was in them, accomplished the greatest service that the world
has ever received from her children.
One thing is certain,--that Speech has not the monopoly of falsehood
or of any other presumptuous sin. Silence does not only mean
ignorance,--by some supposed to be the heaviest sin of which Silence
can be guilty,--but many things far worse than ignorance, like
unreadiness, and cowardice, and falsehood, and treason, and base
consent to what is evil. No man can look back on his past life, however
lowly or limited his sphere may have been, and fail to see that not
once or twice his supreme duty was a word, and his guilt was not to
have spoken it. We all have known the shame of being straitened in
prayer or praise; the shame of being, through our cowardice to bear
witness, traitors to the truth; the shame of being too timid to say No
to the tempter, and speak out the brave reasons of which the heart was
full; the shame of finding ourselves incapable of uttering the word
that would have kept a soul from taking the wrong turning in life; the
shame, when truth, clearness and authority were required from us, of
being able only to stammer or to mince or to rant. To have been dumb
before the ignorant or the dying, before a questioning child or before
the tempter,--this, the frequent experience of our common life, is
enough to justify Carlyle when he said, "If the Word is not there, you
have no man there either, but a Phantasm instead."
Now, when we look within ourselves we see the reason of this. We
perceive that the one fact, which amid the mystery and chaos of our
inner life gives certainty and light, is a fact which is a Voice.
Our nature may be wrecked and dissipated, but conscience is always
left; or in ignorance and gloom, but conscience is always audible; or
with all the faculties strong and assertive, yet conscience is still
unquestionably queen,--and conscience is a Voice. It is a still, small
voice, which is the surest thing in man, and the noblest; which makes
all the difference in his life; which lies at the back and beginning
of all his character and conduct. And the most indispensable, and the
grandest service, therefore, which a man can do his fellow-men, is
to get back to this voice, and make himself its mouthpiece and its
prophet. What work is possible till the word be spoken? Did ever order
come to social life before there was first uttered the command, in
which men felt the articulation and enforcement of the ultimate voice
within themselves? Discipline and instruction and energy have not
appeared without speech going before them. Knowledge and faith and hope
do not dawn of themselves; they travel, as light issued forth in the
beginning, upon the pulses of the speaking breath.
It was the greatness of Israel to be conscious of their call as a
nation to this fundamental service of humanity. Believing in the
Word of God as the original source of all things,--_In the beginning
God said, Let there be light; and there was light_,--they had the
conscience, that, as it had been in the physical world, so must it
always be in the moral. Men were to be served and their lives to be
moulded by the Word. God was to be glorified by letting His Word break
through the life and the lips of men. There was in the Old Testament,
it is true, a triple ideal of manhood: _prophet_, _priest and king_.
But the greatest of these was the prophet, for king and priest had to
be prophets too. Eloquence was a royal virtue,--with persuasion, the
power of command and swift judgement. Among the seven spirits of the
Lord which Isaiah sees descending in the King-to-Come is the spirit
of counsel, and he afterwards adds of the King: _He shall smite the
earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall
he slay the wicked_. Similarly, the priests had originally been the
ministers, not so much of sacrifice, as of the revealed Word of God.
And now the new and high ideal of priesthood, the laying down of one's
life a sacrifice for God and for the people, was not the mere imitation
of the animal victim required by the priestly law, but was the natural
development of the prophetic experience. It was (as we shall presently
see) the prophet, who, in his inevitable sufferings on behalf of the
truth he uttered, developed that consciousness of sacrifice for others,
in which the loftiest priesthood consists. Prophecy, therefore, the
Service of Men by the Word of God, was for Israel the highest and
most essential of all service. It was the individual's and it was
the nation's ideal. As there was no true king and no true priest, so
there was no true man, without the Word. _Would to God_, said Moses,
_that all the Lord's people were prophets_. And in our prophecy Israel
exclaims: _Listen, O Isles, unto me; and hearken, ye peoples from far.
He hath made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of His hand
hath He hid me._
At first it seems a forlorn hope thus to challenge the attention of
the world in the dialect of one of its most obscure provinces,--a
dialect, too, that was already ceasing to be spoken even there. But
the fact only serves more forcibly to emphasize the belief of these
prophets, that the word committed to what they must have known to
be a dying language was the Word of God Himself,--bound to render
immortal the tongue in which it was spoken, bound to re-echo to the
ends of the earth, bound to touch the conscience and commend itself
to the reason of universal humanity. We have already seen, and will
again see, how our prophet insists upon the creative and omnipotent
power of God's Word; so we need not dwell longer on this instance
of his faith. Let us look rather at what he expresses as Israel's
preparation for the teaching of it.
To him the discipline and qualification of the prophet nation--and
that means, of every Servant of God--in the high office of the Word,
are threefold.
1. First, he lays down the supreme condition of Prophecy, that
behind the Voice there must be the Life. Before he speaks of his
gifts of Speech, the Servant emphasizes his peculiar and consecrated
life. _From the womb Jehovah called me, from my mother's midst
mentioned my name._ Now, as we all know, Israel's message to the
world was largely Israel's life. The Old Testament is not a set of
dogmas, nor a philosophy, nor a vision; but a history, the record
of a providence, the testimony of experience, the utterances called
forth by historical occasions from a life conscious of the purpose
for which God has called it and set it apart through the ages. But
these words, which the prophet nation uses, were first used of an
individual prophet. Like so much else in "Second Isaiah," we find a
suggestion of them in the call of Jeremiah. _Before I formed thee
in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth from the
womb I consecrated thee: I have appointed thee a prophet unto the
nations._[195] A prophet is not a voice only. A prophet is a life
behind a voice. He who would speak for God must have lived for God.
According to the profound insight of the Old Testament, speech is
not the expression of a few thoughts of a man, but the utterance of
his whole life. A man blossoms through his lips;[196] and no man is
a prophet, whose word is not the virtue and the flower of a gracious
and a consecrated life.
2. The second discipline of the prophet is the Art of Speech. _He hath
made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of His hand hath He
hid me: He hath made me a polished shaft, in His quiver hath He laid
me in store._ It is very evident, that in these words the Servant does
not only recount technical qualifications, but a moral discipline as
well. The edge and brilliance of his speech are stated as the effect
of solitude, but of a solitude that was at the same time a nearness
to God. Now solitude is a great school of eloquence. In speaking of
the Semitic race, of which Israel was part, we pointed out that,
prophet-race of the world as it has proved, it sprang from the desert,
and nearly all its branches have inherited the desert's clear and
august style of speech; for, in the leisure and serene air of the
desert, men speak as they speak nowhere else. But Israel speaks of a
solitude, that was the shadow of God's hand, and the fastness of God's
quiver; a seclusion, which, to the desert's art of eloquence, added a
special inspiration by God, and a special concentration upon His main
purpose in the world. The desert sword felt the grasp of God; He laid
the Semitic shaft in store for a unique end.[197]
3. But in ch. l., vv. 4-5, the Servant unfolds the most beautiful and
true understanding of the Secret of Prophecy, that ever was unfolded
in any literature,--worth quoting again by us, if so we may get it by
heart.
_My Lord Jehovah hath given me_
_The tongue of the learners,_
_To know how to succour the weary with words._
_He wakeneth, morning by morning He wakeneth mine ear_
_To hear as the learners._
_My Lord Jehovah hath opened mine ear,_
_I was not rebellious,_
_Nor turned away backward._
The prophet, say these beautiful lines, learns his speech, as the
little child does, by listening. Grace is poured upon the lips
through the open ear. It is the lesson of our Lord's Ephphatha. When
He took the deaf man with the impediment in his speech aside from
the multitude privately, He said unto him, not, Be loosed, but, _Be
opened; and_ first _his ears were opened, and_ then the _bond of his
tongue was loosed, and he spake plain_. To speak, then, the prophet
must listen; but mark to what he must listen! The secret of his
eloquence lies not in the hearing of thunder, nor in the knowledge of
mysteries, but in a daily wakefulness to the lessons and experience
of common life. _Morning by morning He openeth mine ear._ This is
very characteristic of Hebrew prophecy and Hebrew wisdom, which
listened for the truth of God in the voices of each day, drew their
parables from things the rising sun lights up to every wakeful eye,
and were, in the bulk of their doctrine, the virtues, needed day
by day, of justice, temperance and mercy, and in the bulk of their
judgements the results of everyday observation and experience. The
strength of the Old Testament lies in this its realism, its daily
vigilance and experience of life. It is its contact with life--the
life, not of the yesterday of its speakers, but of their to-day--that
makes its voice so fresh and helpful to the weary. He whose ear is
daily open to the music of his current life will always find himself
in possession of words that refresh and stimulate.
But serviceable speech needs more than attentiveness and experience.
Having gained the truth, the prophet must be obedient and loyal to
it. Yet obedience and loyalty to the truth are the beginnings of
martyrdom, of which the Servant now goes on to speak as the natural
and immediate consequence of his prophecy.
III. THE SERVANT AS MARTYR.
The classes of men, who suffer physical ill-usage at the hands of
their fellow-men, may roughly be described as three,--the Military
Enemy, the Criminal, and the Prophet; and of these three we have
only to read history to know that the Prophet fares by far the
worst. However fatal men's treatment of their enemies in war or of
their criminals may be, it is, nevertheless, subject to a certain
order, code of honour or principle of justice. But in all ages
the Prophet has been the target for the most licentious spite and
cruelty; for torture, indecency and filth past belief. Although our
own civilisation has outlived the system of physical punishment
for speech, we even yet see philosophers and statesmen, who have
used no weapons but exposition and persuasion, treated by their
opponents--who would speak of a foreign enemy with respect--with
execration, gross epithets, vile abuse and insults, that the
offenders would not pour upon a criminal. If we have this under
our own eyes, let us think how the Prophet must have fared before
humanity learned to meet speech by speech. Because men attacked it,
not with the sword of the invader or with the knife of the assassin,
but with words, therefore (till not very long ago) society let
loose upon them the foulest indignities and most horrible torments.
Socrates' valour as a soldier did not save him from the malicious
slander, the false witness, the unjust trial and the poison,
with which the Athenians answered his speech against themselves.
Even Hypatia's womanhood did not awe the mob from tearing her to
pieces for her teaching. This unique and invariable experience of
the Prophet is summed up and clenched in the name Martyr. Martyr
originally meant a _witness or witness-bearer_, but now it is the
synonym for every shame and suffering which the cruel ingenuity of
men's black hearts can devise for those they hate. A Book of Battles
is horrible enough, but at least valour and honour have kept down
in it the baser passions. A Newgate Chronicle is ugly enough, but
there at least is discipline and an hospital. You have got to go to
a Book of Martyrs to see to what sourness, wickedness, malignity,
pitilessness and ferocity men's hearts can lend themselves. There is
something in the mere utterance of truth, that rouses the very devil
in the hearts of many men.
Thus it had always been in Israel, nation not only of prophets, but
of the slayers of prophets. According to Christ, prophet-slaying
was the ineradicable habit of Israel. _Ye are the sons of them that
slew the prophets.... O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killer of prophets
and stoner of them that are sent unto her!_ To them who bare it the
word of Jehovah had always been _a reproach_: cause of estrangement,
indignities, torments, and sometimes of death. Up to the time of our
prophet there had been the following notable sufferers for the Word:
Elijah; Micaiah the son of Imlah; Isaiah, if the story be true that
he was slain by Manasseh; but nearer, more lonely and more heroic
than all, Jeremiah, a _laughing-stock_ and _mockery_, _reviled_,
_smitten_, fettered, and condemned to death. In words which recall
the experience of so many individual Israelites, and most of which
were used by Jeremiah of himself, the Servant of Jehovah describes
his martyrdom in immediate consequence from his prophecy.
_And I--I was not rebellious,_
_Nor turned away backward._
_My back I have given to the smiters,_
_And my cheek to tormenters;_
_My face I hid not from insults and spitting._
These are not national sufferings. They are no reflection of the hard
usage which the captive Israel suffered from Babylon. They are the
reflection of the reproach and pains, which, for the sake of God's
word, individual Israelites more than once experienced from their own
nation. But if individual experience, and not national, formed the
original of this picture of the Servant as Martyr, then surely we
have in this another strong reason against the objection to recognise
in the Servant at last an individual. It may be, of course, that
for the moment our prophet feels that this frequent experience of
individuals in Israel is to be realised by the faithful Israel, as a
whole, in their treatment by the rest of their cruel and unspiritual
countrymen. But the very fact that individuals have previously
fulfilled this martyrdom in the history of Israel, surely makes it
possible for our prophet to foresee, that the Servant, who is to
fulfil it again, shall also be an individual.
But, returning from this slight digression on the person of the Servant
to his fate, let us emphasize again, that his sufferings came to him as
the result of his prophesying. The Servant's sufferings are not penal,
they are not yet felt to be vicarious. They are simply the reward with
which obdurate Israel met all her prophets, the inevitable martyrdom
which followed on the uttering of God's Word. And in this the Servant's
experience forms an exact counterpart to that of our Lord. For to
Christ also reproach and agony and death--whatever higher meaning they
evolved--came as the result of His Word. The fact that Jesus suffered
as our great High Priest must not make us forget, that His sufferings
fell upon Him because He was a Prophet. He argued explicitly He must
suffer, because so suffered the prophets before Him. He put Himself
in the line of the martyrs: as they had killed the servants, He said,
so would they kill the Son. Thus it happened. His enemies sought _to
entangle Him in His talk_: it was for His talk they brought Him to
trial. Each torment and indignity which the Prophet-Servant relates,
Jesus suffered to the letter. They put Him to shame and insulted
Him;[198] His helpless hands were bound; they spat in His face and
smote Him with their palms; they mocked and they reviled Him; scourged
Him again; teased and tormented Him; hung Him between thieves; and
to the last the ribald jests went up, not only from the soldiers and
the rabble, but from the learned and the religious authorities as
well, to whom His fault had been that He preached another word than
their own. The literal fulfilments of our prophecy are striking, but
the main fulfilment, of which they are only incidents, is, that like
the Servant, our Lord suffered directly as a Prophet. He enforced and
He submitted to the essential obligation, which lies upon the true
Prophet, of suffering for the Word's sake. Let us remember to carry
this over with us to our final study of the Suffering Servant as the
expiation for sin.
In the meantime, we have to conclude the Servant's appearance as
Martyr in ch. l. He has accepted his martyrdom; but he feels it is
not the end with him. God will bring him through, and vindicate him
in the eyes of the world. For the world, in their usual way, will say
that because he gives them a new truth he must be wrong, and because
he suffers he is surely guilty and cursed before God. But he will not
let himself be confounded, for God is his help and advocate.
_But my Lord Jehovah shall help me;_
_Therefore, I let not myself be rebuffed:
Therefore, I set my face like a flint,_
_And know that I shall not be shamed._
_Near is my Justifier; who will dispute with me?_
_Let us stand up together!_
_Who is mine adversary?_[199]
_Let him draw near me._
_Lo! my Lord Jehovah shall help me;_
_Who is he that condemns me?_
_Lo! like a garment all of them rot;_
_The moth doth devour them._
These lines, in which the Holy Servant, the Martyr of the Word,
defies the world and asserts that God shall vindicate his innocence,
are taken by Paul and used to assert the justification, which every
believer enjoys through faith in the sufferings of Him, who was
indeed the Holy Servant of God.[200]
The last two verses of ch. l. are somewhat difficult. The first of them
still speaks of the Servant,[201] and distinguishes him--a distinction
we must note and emphasize--from the God-fearing in Israel.
_Who is among you that feareth Jehovah,_
_That hearkens the voice of His Servant,_
_That walks in dark places,_
_And light he has none?_
_Let him trust in the name of Jehovah,_
_And lean on his God._
That is, every pious believer in Israel is to take the Servant for an
example; for the Servant in distress _leans upon his God_. And so
Paul's application of the Servant's words to the individual believer is
a correct one. But if our prophet is able to think of the Servant as an
example to the individual Israelite, that surely is a thought not very
far from the conception of the Servant himself as an individual.
If ver. 10 is addressed to the pious in Israel, ver. 11 would seem to
turn with a last word--as the last words of the discourses in Second
Isaiah so often turn--to the wicked in Israel.
_Lo! all you, players with fire,_[202]
_That gird you with firebrands!_
_Walk in the light of your fire,_
_In the firebrands ye kindled._
_This from my hand shall be yours;_
_Ye shall lie down in sorrow._
It is very difficult to know, who are meant by this warning. An old
and almost forgotten interpretation is, that the prophet meant those
exiles who played with the fires of political revolution, instead of
abiding the deliverance of the Lord. But there is now current among
exegetes the more general interpretation that these incendiaries are
the revilers and abusers of the Servant within Israel: for so the
Psalms speak of the slingers of burning words at the righteous. We
must notice, however, that the metaphor stands over against those in
Israel who _walk in dark places and have no light_. In contrast to
that kind of life, this may be the kind that coruscates with vanity,
flashes with pride, or burns and scorches with its evil passions.
We have a similar name for such a life. We call it a display of
fireworks. The prophet tells them, who depend on nothing but their
own false fires, how transient these are, how quickly quenched.
But is it not weird, that on our prophet's stage, however brilliantly
its centre shines with figures of heroes and deeds of salvation, there
should always be this dark, lurid background of evil and accursed men?
FOOTNOTES:
[187] This, of course, goes against Prof. Briggs's theory of the
composition of Isa. xl.-lxvi. out of two poems (see p. 18).
[188] This line is full of the letter m.
[189] This is as the text is written; but the Massoretic reading
gives, _that Israel to Him may be gathered_.
[190] So it seems best to give the sense of this difficult line, but
most translators render _despised of soul_, or _thoroughly despised_,
_abhorred by peoples_, or _by a people_, etc. The word for _despised_
is used elsewhere only in ch. liii. 3.
[191] Prof. A. B. Davidson, _Expositor_, Second Series, viii., 441.
[192] Page 68.
[193] So George Eliot wrote of her own writings shortly before her
death. See _Life_, iii., 245.
[194] Lady Ponsonby, to whom George Eliot wrote the letter quoted
above, confessed that, with the disappearance of religious faith from
her soul, there vanished also the power of interest in, and of pity
for, her kind.
[195] Jer. i. 5.
[196] See vol. i., p. 70.
[197] See p. 240 f.
[198] How all their meanness, how all the sense of shame from which
He suffered, breaks forth in these words: _Are ye come out as against
a robber?_
[199] Literally, _lord of my cause_; my adversary or opponent at law.
[200] Epistle to the Romans, viii., 31 ff.
[201] Though Cheyne takes _His Servant_ in ver. 10 to be, not the
Servant, but the prophet.
[202] _Kindlers of fire_ is the literal rendering. But the word is
not the common word to kindle, and is here used of wanton fireraising.
CHAPTER XX.
_THE SUFFERING SERVANT._
ISAIAH lii. 13-liii.
We are now arrived at the last of the passages on the Servant of the
Lord. It is known to Christendom as the Fifty-third of Isaiah, but
its verses have, unfortunately, been divided between two chapters,
lii. 13-15 and liii. Before we attempt the interpretation of this
high and solemn passage of Revelation, let us look at its position in
our prophecy, and examine its structure.
The peculiarities of the style and of the vocabulary of ch. lii.
13-liii., along with the fact, that, if it be omitted, the prophecies
on either side readily flow together, have led some critics to
suppose it to be an insertion, borrowed from an earlier writer.[203]
The style--broken, sobbing and recurrent--is certainly a change from
the forward, flowing sentences, on which we have been carried up till
now, and there are a number of words that we find quite new to us.
Yet surely both style and words are fully accounted for by the novel
and tragic nature of the subject, to which the prophet has brought
us: regret and remorse, though they speak through the same lips as
hope and the assurance of salvation, must necessarily do so with a
very different accent and set of terms. Criticism surely overreaches
itself, when it suggests that a writer, so versatile and dramatic as
our prophet, could not have written ch. lii. 13-liii. along with,
say, ch. xl. or ch. lii. 1-12 or ch. liv. We might as well be asked
to assign to different authors Hamlet's soliloquy, and the King's
conversation, in the same play, with the ambassadors from Norway. To
aver that if ch. lii. 13-liii. were left out, no one who had not seen
it would miss it, so closely does ch. liv. follow on to ch. lii. 12,
is to aver what means nothing. In any dramatic work you may leave
out the finest passage,--from a Greek tragedy its grandest chorus,
or from a play of Shakespeare's the hero's soliloquy,--without
seeming, to eyes that have not seen what you have done, to have
disturbed the connection of the whole. Observe the juncture in our
prophecy at which this last passage on the Servant appears. It is
one exactly the same as that at which another great passage on the
Servant was inserted (ch. xlix. 1-9), viz., just after a call to
the people to seize the redemption achieved for them and to come
forth from Babylon. It is the kind of climax or pause in their tale,
which dramatic writers of all kinds employ for the solemn utterance
of principles lying at the back, or transcending the scope, of the
events of which they treat. To say the least, it is surely more
probable that our prophet himself employed so natural an opportunity
to give expression to his highest truths about the Servant, than
that some one else took his work, broke up another already extant
work on the Servant and thrust the pieces of the latter into the
former. Moreover, we shall find many of the ideas, as well as of the
phrases, of ch. lii. 13-liii. to be essentially the same as some we
have already encountered in our prophecy.[204]
There is then no evidence that this singular prophecy ever stood apart
from its present context, or that it was written by another writer than
the prophet, by whom we have hitherto found ourselves conducted. On
the contrary, while it has links with what goes before it, we see good
reasons, why the prophet should choose just this moment for uttering
its unique and transcendent contents, as well as why he should employ
in it a style and a vocabulary, so different from his usual.
Turning now to the structure of ch. lii. 13-liii., we observe that,
as arranged in the Canon, there are fifteen verses in the prophecy.
These fifteen verses fall into five strophes of three verses each,
as printed by the Revised English Version. When set in their own
original lines, however, the strophes appear, not of equal, but of
increasing length. As will be seen from the version given below, the
first (ch. lii. 13-15) has nine lines, the second (ch. liii. 1-3) has
ten lines, the third (vv. 4-6) has eleven lines, the fourth (vv. 7-9)
thirteen lines, the fifth (vv. 10-12) fourteen lines. This increase
would be absolutely regular, if, in the fourth strophe, we made
either the first two lines one, or the last two one, and if in the
fifth again we ran the first two lines together,--changes which the
metre allows and some translators have adopted. But, in either case,
we perceive a regular increase from strophe to strophe, that is not
only one of the many marks with which this most artistic of poems has
been elaborated, but gives the reader the very solemn impression of
a truth that is ever gathering more of human life into itself, and
sweeping forward with fuller and more resistless volume.
Each strophe, it is well to notice, begins with one word or two
words which summarise the meaning of the whole strophe and form a
title for it. Thus, after the opening exclamation _Behold_, the
words _My Servant shall prosper_ form, as we shall see, not only a
summary of the first strophe, in which his ultimate exaltation is
described, but the theme of the whole prophecy. Strophe ii. begins
_Who hath believed_, and accordingly in this strophe the unbelief
and thoughtlessness of them who saw the Servant without feeling
the meaning of his suffering is confessed. _Surely our sicknesses_
fitly entitles strophe iii., in which the people describe how the
Servant in his suffering was their substitute. _Oppressed yet he
humbled himself_ is the headline of strophe iv., and that strophe
deals with the humility and innocence of the Servant in contrast to
the injustice accorded him. While the headline of strophe v., _But
Jehovah had purposed_, brings us back to the main theme of the poem,
that behind men's treatment of the Servant is God's holy will; which
theme is elaborated and brought to its conclusion in strophe v. These
opening and entitling words of each strophe are printed, in the
following translation, in larger type than the rest.
As in the rest of Hebrew poetry, so here, the measure is neither
regular nor smooth, and does not depend on rhyme. Yet there is an
amount of assonance, which at times approaches to rhyme. Much of the
meaning of the poem depends on the use of the personal pronouns--_we_
and _he_ stand contrasted to each other--and it is these coming in a
lengthened form at the end of many of the lines that suggest to the
ear something like rhyme. For instance, in liii. 5, 6, the second
and third verses of the third strophe, two of the lines run out on
the bisyllable -ênū, two on înu, and two on the word lānū, while the
third has ênu, not at the end, but in the middle; in each case, the
pronominal suffix of the first person plural. We transcribe these
lines to show the effect of this.
W^ehu' m^eholal mipp^esha'ênū
M^edhukka' me`ăwōnōthênū
Mūṣar sh^elōmēnū `alaw
Ubhahăbhurātho nirpa'-lānū
Kullānū kass-ss'on ta`înū
'îsh l^edharko panînū
Wa Jahweh hiphgî`a bô 'eth-`awon kullānū.
This is the strophe in which the assonance comes oftenest to rhyme;
but in strophe i. êhū ends two lines, and in strophe ii. it ends
three. These and other assonants occur also at the beginning and in
the middle of lines. We must remember that in all the cases quoted
it is the personal pronouns, which give the assonance,--the personal
pronouns on which so much of the meaning of the poem turns; and
that, therefore, the parallelism primarily intended by the writer is
one rather of meaning than of sound. The pair of lines, parallel in
meaning, though not in sound, which forms so large a part of Hebrew
poetry, is used throughout this poem; but the use of it is varied
and elaborated to a unique degree. The very same words and phrases
are repeated, and placed on points, from which they seem to call to
each other; as, for instance, the double _many_ in strophe i., the
_of us all_ in strophe iii., and _nor opened he his mouth_ in strophe
iv. The ideas are very few and very simple; the words _he_, _we_,
_his_, _ours_, _see_, _hear_, _know_, _bear_, _sickness_, _strike_,
_stroke_, and _many_ form, with prepositions and particles, the
bulk of the prophecy. It will be evident how singularly suitable
this recurrence is for the expression of reproach, and of sorrowful
recollection. It is the nature of grief and remorse to harp upon the
one dear form, the one most vivid pain. The finest instance of this
repetition is verse 6, with its opening keynote "kullanu"--_of us all
like sheep went astray_, with its close on that keynote _guilt of us
all_, "kullanu." But throughout notes are repeated, and bars recur,
expressive of what was done to the Servant, or what the Servant did
for man, which seem in their recurrence to say, You cannot hear too
much of me: I am the very Gospel. A peculiar sadness is lent to the
music by the letters h and l in "holie" and "hehelie," the word for
sickness or ailing (ailing is the English equivalent in sense and
sound), which happens so often in the poem. The new words, which
have been brought to vary this recurrence of a few simple features,
are mostly of a sombre type. The heavier letters throng the lines:
grievous _bs_ and _ms_ are multiplied, and syllables with long vowels
before _m_ and _w_. But the words sob as well as tramp; and here and
there one has a wrench and one a cry in it.
Most wonderful and mysterious of all is the spectral fashion in which
the prophecy presents its Hero. He is named only in the first line
and once again: elsewhere He is spoken of as He. We never hear or
see Himself. But all the more solemnly is He there: a shadow upon
countless faces, a grievous memory on the hearts of the speakers. He
so haunts all we see and all we hear, that we feel it is not Art, but
Conscience, that speaks of Him.
Here is now the prophecy itself, rendered into English quite
literally, except for a conjunction here and there, and, as far as
possible, in the rhythm of the original. A few necessary notes on
difficult words and phrases are given.
I.
lii. 13: _Behold, my Servant shall prosper,_[205]
_Shall rise, be lift up, be exceedingly high._[206]
_Like as they that were astonied before thee were many,_
_--So marred from a man's was his visage,_
_And his form from the children of men!--_
_So shall the nations he startles_[207] _be many,_
_Before him shall kings shut their mouths._
_For that which had never been told them they see,_
_And what they had heard not, they have to consider._
II.
_Who gave believing to that which we heard,_[208]
_And the arm of Jehovah to whom was it bared?_
_For he sprang like a sapling before Him,_[209]
_As a root from the ground that is parched;_
_He had no form nor beauty that we should regard him,_
_Nor aspect that we should desire him._
_Despised and rejected of men,_
_Man of pains and familiar with ailing,_
_And as one we do cover the face from,_
_Despised, and we did not esteem him._
III.
_Surely our ailments he bore,_
_And our pains he did take for his burden._[210]
_But we--we accounted him stricken,_
_Smitten of God and degraded._[211]
_Yet he--he was pierced for crimes that were ours,_[212]
_He was crushed for guilt that was ours,_[212]
_The chastisement of our peace was upon him,_
_By his stripes healing is ours._[212]
_Of us all_[213] _like to sheep went astray,_
_Every man to his way we did turn,_
_And Jehovah made light upon him_
_The guilt of us all._
IV.
_Oppressed, he did humble himself,_
_Nor opened his mouth--_
_As a lamb to the slaughter is led,_
_As a sheep 'fore her shearers is dumb--_
_Nor opened his mouth._
_By tyranny and law was he taken;_[214]
_And of his age who reflected,_
_That he was wrenched_[215] _from the land of the living,_
_For My people's transgressions the stroke was on him?_
_So they made with the wicked his grave,_
_Yea, with the felon_[216] _his tomb._
_Though never harm had he done,_
_Neither was guile in his mouth._
V.
_But Jehovah had purposed to bruise him,_
_Had laid on him sickness;
So_[217] _if his life should offer guilt offering,_
_A seed he should see, he should lengthen his days._
_And the purpose of Jehovah by his hand should prosper,_
_From the travail of his soul shall he see,_[218]
_By his knowledge be satisfied._
_My Servant, the Righteous, righteousness wins he for many,_
_And their guilt he takes for his load._
_Therefore I set him a share with the great,_[219]
_Yea, with the strong shall he share the spoil:_
_Because that he poured out his life unto death,_
_Let himself with transgressors be reckoned;_
_Yea, he the sin of the many hath borne,_
_And for the transgressors he interposes._
Let us now take up the interpretation strophe by strophe.
I. Ch. lii. 13-15. When last our eyes were directed to the Servant,
he was in suffering unexplained and unvindicated (ch. l. 4-6).
His sufferings seemed to have fallen upon him as the consequence
of his fidelity to the Word committed to him; the Prophet had
inevitably become the Martyr. Further than this his sufferings were
not explained, and the Servant was left in them, calling upon God
indeed, and sure that God would hear and vindicate him, but as yet
unanswered by word of God or word of man.
It is these words, words both of God and of man, which are given in
Isaiah ch. lii. 13-liii. The Sufferer is explained and vindicated,
first by God in the first strophe, ch. lii. 13-15, and then by the
Conscience of Men, His own people, in the second and third (liii.
1-6); and then, as it appears, the Divine Voice, or the Prophet
speaking for it, resumes in strophes iv. and v., and concludes in a
strain similar to strophe i.
God's explanation and vindication of the Sufferer is, then, given in
the first strophe. It is summed up in the first line, and in one very
pregnant word. Jeremiah had said of the Messiah, _He shall reign as
a King and deal wisely_ or _prosper_;[220] and so God says here of
the Servant, _Behold he shall deal wisely_ or _prosper_. The Hebrew
verb does not get full expression in any English one. In rendering
it _shall deal wisely_ or _prudently_ our translators undoubtedly
touch the quick of it. For it is originally a mental process or
quality: _has insight_, _understands_, _is farseeing_. But then it
also includes the effect of this--_understands so as to get on_,
_deals wisely so as to succeed_, _is practical_ both in his way of
working and in being sure of his end. Ewald has found an almost exact
equivalent in German, "hat Geschick;" for Geschick means both _skill_
or _address_ and _fate_ or _destiny_. The Hebrew verb is the most
practical in the whole language, for this is precisely the point
which the prophecy seeks to bring out about the Servant's sufferings.
They are practical. He is practical in them. He endures them, not for
their own sake, but for some practical end of which he is aware and
to which they must assuredly bring him. His failure to convince men
by his word, the pain and spite which seem to be his only wage, are
not the last of him, but the beginning and the way to what is higher.
So _shall he rise and be lift up and be very high_. The suffering,
which in ch. l. seemed to be the Servant's misfortune, is here seen
as his wisdom which shall issue in his glory.
But of themselves men do not see this, and they need to be convinced.
Pain, the blessed means of God, is man's abhorrence and perplexity.
All along the history of the world the Sufferer has been the
astonishment and stumbling-block of humanity. The barbarian gets rid
of him; he is the first difficulty with which every young literature
wrestles; to the end he remains the problem of philosophy and the
sore test of faith. It is not native to men to see meaning or profit
in the Sufferer; they are staggered by him, they see no reason or
promise in him. So did men receive this unique Sufferer, this Servant
of Jehovah. _The many were astonied at him; his visage was so marred
more than men, and his form than the children of men._ But his life
is to teach them the opposite of their impressions, and to bring them
out of their perplexity into reverence before the revealed purpose of
God in the Sufferer. _As they that were astonied at thee were many,
so shall the nations he startles be many; kings shall shut their
mouths at him, for that which was not told them they see, and that
which they have heard not they have to consider_,--viz., the triumph
and influence to which the Servant was consciously led through
suffering. There may be some reflection here of the way in which the
Gentiles regarded the Suffering Israel, but the reference is vague,
and perhaps purposely so.
The first strophe, then, gives us just the general theme. In contrast
to human experience God reveals in His Servant that suffering is
fruitful, that sacrifice is practical. Pain, in God's service, shall
lead to glory.
II. Ch. liii. 1-3. God never speaks but in man He wakens conscience,
and the second strophe of the prophecy (along with the third)
is the answer of conscience to God. Penitent men, looking back
from the light of the Servant's exaltation to the time when his
humiliation was before their eyes, say, "Yes: what God has said
is true of us. We were the deaf and the indifferent. We heard,
but _who_ of us _believed what we heard, and to whom was the
arm of the Lord_--His purpose, the hand He had in the Servant's
sufferings--_revealed_?"[221]
Who are these penitent speakers? Some critics have held them to be
the heathen, more have said that they are Israel. But none have
pointed out that the writer gives himself no trouble to define them,
but seems more anxious to impress us with their consciousness of
their moral relation to the Servant. On the whole, it would appear
that it is Israel, whom the prophet has in mind as the speakers of
vv. 1-6. For, besides the fact that the Old Testament knows nothing
of a bearing by Israel of the sins of the Gentiles, it is expressly
said in ver. 8, that the sins for which the Servant was stricken
were the sins of _my people_; which people must be the same as the
speakers, for they own in vv. 4-6 that the Servant bore their sins.
For these and other reasons the mass of Christian critics at the
present day are probably right when they assume that Israel are the
speakers in vv. 1-6;[222] but the reader must beware of allowing
his attention to be lost in questions of that kind. The art of the
poem seems intentionally to leave vague the national relation of the
speakers to the Servant, in order the more impressively to bring out
their moral attitude towards him. There is an utter disappearance of
all lines of separation between Jew and Gentile,--both in the first
strophe, where, although Gentile names are used, Jews may yet be
meant to be included, and in the rest of the poem,--as if the writer
wished us to feel that all men stood over against that solitary
Servant in a common indifference to his suffering and a common
conscience of the guilt he bears. In short, it is no historical
situation, such as some critics seem anxious to fasten him down upon,
that the prophet reflects; but a certain moral situation, ideal in
so far as it was not yet realised,--the state of the quickened human
conscience over against a certain Human Suffering, in which, having
ignored it at the time, that conscience now realises that the purpose
of God was at work.
In vv. 2 and 3 the penitent speakers give us the reasons of their
disregard of the Servant in the days of his suffering. In these
reasons there is nothing peculiar to Israel, and no special
experience of Jewish history is reflected by the terms in which
they are conveyed. They are the confession, in general language, of
an universal human habit,--the habit of letting the eye cheat the
heart and conscience, of allowing the aspect of suffering to blind
us to its meaning; of forgetting in our sense of the ugliness and
helplessness of pain, that it has a motive, a future and a God. It
took ages to wean mankind from those native feelings of aversion
and resentment, which caused them at first to abandon or destroy
their sick. And, even now, scorn for the weak and incredulity in the
heroism or in the profitableness of suffering are strong in the best
of us. We judge by looks; we are hurried by the physical impression,
which the sufferer makes on us, or by our pride that we are not as
he is, into peremptory and harsh judgements upon him. Every day
we allow the dulness of poverty, the ugliness of disease, the
unprofitableness of misfortune, the ludicrousness of failure, to keep
back conscience from discovering to us our share of responsibility
for them, and to repel our hearts from that sympathy and patience
with them, which along with conscience would assuredly discover to us
their place in God's Providence and their special significance for
ourselves. It is this original sin of man, of which these penitent
speakers own themselves guilty.
But no one is ever permitted to rest with a physical or intellectual
impression of suffering. The race, the individual, has always been
forced by conscience to the task of finding a moral reason for pain;
and nothing so marks man's progress as the successive solutions he
has attempted to this problem. The speakers, therefore, proceed in
the next part of their confession, strophe iii., to tell us what they
first falsely accounted the moral reason of the Servant's suffering
and what they afterwards found to be the truth.
III. liii. 4-6. The earliest and most common moral judgement, which
men pass upon pain, is that which is implied in its name--that it is
penal. A man suffers because God is angry with him and has stricken
him. So Job's friends judged him, and so these speakers tell us they
had at first judged the Servant. _We had accounted him stricken,
smitten of God and afflicted_,--_stricken_, that is, with a plague
of sickness, as Job was, for the simile of the sick man is still
kept up; _smitten of God and degraded_ or _humbled_, for it seemed
to them that God's hand was in the Servant's sickness, to punish and
disgrace him for his own sins. But now they know they were wrong. The
hand of God was indeed upon the Servant, and the reason was sin; yet
the sin was not his, but theirs. _Surely our sicknesses he bore,
and our pains he took as his burden. He was pierced for iniquities
that were ours. He was crushed for crimes that were ours._ Strictly
interpreted, these verses mean no more than that the Servant was
involved in the consequences of his people's sins. The verbs _bore_
and _made his burden_ are indeed taken by some to mean necessarily,
removal or expiation; but in themselves, as is clear from their
application to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the whole of the generation
of Exile, they mean no more than implication in the reproach and
the punishment of the people's sins.[223] Nevertheless, as we have
explained in a note below, it is really impossible to separate the
suffering of a Servant, who has been announced as practical and
prosperous in his suffering, from the end for which it is endured. We
cannot separate the Servant's bearing of the people's guilt from his
removal of it. And, indeed, this practical end of his passion springs
forth, past all doubt, from the rest of the strophe, which declares
that the Servant's sufferings are not only vicarious but redemptive.
_The discipline of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we
are healed._ Translators agree that _discipline of our peace_ must
mean discipline which procures our peace. The peace, the healing,
is ours, in consequence of the chastisement and the scourging that
was his. The next verse gives us the obverse and complement of the
same thought. The pain was his in consequence of the sin that was
ours. _All we like sheep had gone astray, and the Lord laid on him
the iniquity of us all_,--literally _iniquity_, but inclusive of its
guilt and consequences. Nothing could be plainer than these words.
The speakers confess, that they know that the Servant's suffering was
both vicarious and redemptive.[224]
But how did they get this knowledge? They do not describe any special
means by which it came to them. They state this high and novel truth
simply as the last step in a process of their consciousness. At first
they were bewildered by the Servant's suffering; then they thought
it contemptible, thus passing upon it an intellectual judgement;
then, forced to seek a moral reason for it, they accounted it as
penal and due to the Servant for his own sins; then they recognised
that its penalty was vicarious, that the Servant was suffering for
them; and finally, they knew that it was redemptive, the means of
their own healing and peace. This is a natural climax, a logical
and moral progress of thought. The last two steps are stated simply
as facts of experience following on other facts. Now our prophet
usually publishes the truths, with which he is charged, as the very
words of God, introducing them with a solemn and authoritative
_Thus saith Jehovah._ But this novel and supreme truth of vicarious
and redemptive suffering, this passion and virtue which crowns the
Servant's office, is introduced to us, not by the mouth of God, but
by the lips of penitent men; not as an oracle, but as a confession;
not as the commission of Divine authority laid beforehand upon the
Servant like his other duties, but as the conviction of the human
conscience after the Servant has been lifted up before it. In short,
by this unusual turn of his art, the prophet seeks to teach us, that
vicarious suffering is not a dogmatic, but an experimental truth. The
substitution of the Servant for the guilty people, and the redemptive
force of that substitution, are no arbitrary doctrine, for which God
requires from man a mere intellectual assent; they are no such formal
institution of religion as mental indolence and superstition delight
to have prepared for their mechanical adherence: but substitutive
suffering is a great living fact of human experience, whose outward
features are not more evident to men's eyes than its inner meaning
is appreciable by their conscience, and of irresistible effect upon
their whole moral nature.
Is this lesson of our prophet's art not needed? Men have always been
apt to think of vicarious suffering, and of its function in their
salvation, as something above and apart from their moral nature, with a
value known only to God and not calculable in the terms of conscience
or of man's moral experience; nay, rather as something that conflicts
with man's ideas of morality and justice. Whereas both the fact and
the virtue of vicarious suffering come upon us all, as these speakers
describe the vicarious sufferings of the Servant to have come upon
them, as a part of inevitable experience. If it be natural, as we saw,
for men to be bewildered by the first sight of suffering, to scorn it
as futile and to count it the fault of the sufferer himself, it is
equally natural and inevitable that these first and hasty theories
should be dispelled by the longer experience of life and the more
thorough working of conscience. The stricken are not always bearing
their own sin. "Suffering is the minister of justice. This is true in
part, yet it also is inadequate to explain the facts. Of all the sorrow
which befalls humanity, how small a part falls upon the specially
guilty; how much seems rather to seek out the good! We might almost
ask whether it is not weakness rather than wrong that is punished in
this world."[225] In every nation, in every family, the innocent suffer
for the guilty. Vicarious suffering is not arbitrary or accidental;
it comes with our growth; it is of the very nature of things. It is
that part of the Service of Man, to which we are all born, and of the
reality of which we daily grow more aware.
But even more than its necessity life teaches us its virtue.
Vicarious suffering is not a curse. It is Service--Service for God.
It proves a power where every other moral force has failed. By it men
are redeemed, on whom justice and their proper punishment have been
able to effect nothing. Why this should be is very intelligible. We
are not so capable of measuring the physical or moral results of our
actions upon our own characters or in our own fortunes as we are upon
the lives of others; nor do we so awaken to the guilt and heinousness
of our sin as when it reaches and implicates lives, which were not
partners with us in it. Moreover, while a man's punishment is apt to
give him an excuse for saying, I have expiated my sin myself, and so
to leave him self-satisfied and with nothing for which to be grateful
or obliged to a higher will; or while it may make him reckless or
plunge him into despair; so, on the contrary, when he recognises that
others feel the pain of his sin and have come under its weight, then
shame is quickly born within him, and pity and every other passion
that can melt a hard heart. If, moreover, the others who bear his
sin do so voluntarily and for love's sake, then how quickly on the
back of shame and pity does gratitude rise, and the sense of debt
and of constraint to their will! For all these very intelligible
reasons, vicarious suffering has been a powerful redemptive force in
the experience of the race. Both the fact of its beneficence and the
moral reasons for this are clear enough to lift us above a question,
which sometimes gives trouble regarding it,--the question of its
justice. Such a question is futile about any service for man, which
succeeds as this does where all others have failed, and which proves
itself so much in harmony with man's moral nature. But the last shred
of objection to the justice of vicarious suffering is surely removed
when the sufferer is voluntary as well as vicarious. And, in truth,
human experience feels that it has found its highest and its holiest
fact in the love that, being innocent itself, stoops to bear its
fellows' sins,--not only the anxiety and reproach of them, but even
the cost and the curse of them. _Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends_; and greater Service
can no man do to man, than to serve them in this way.
Now in this universal human experience of the inevitableness and
the virtue of vicarious suffering, Israel had been deeply baptized.
The nation had been _served_ by suffering in all the ways we have
just described. Beginning with the belief that all righteousness
prospered, Israel had come to see the righteous afflicted in her
midst; the best Israelites had set their minds to the problem, and
learned to believe, at least, that such affliction was of God's
will,--part of His Providence, and not an interruption to it. Israel,
too, knew the moral solidarity of a people: that citizens share each
other's sorrows, and that one generation rolls over its guilt upon
the next. Frequently had the whole nation been spared for a pious
remnant's sake; and in the Exile, while all the people were formally
afflicted by God, it was but a portion of them whose conscience was
quick to the meaning of the chastisement, and of them alone, in their
submissive and intelligent sufferance of the Lord's wrath, could the
opening gospel of the prophecy be spoken, that they _had accomplished
their warfare, and had received of the Lord's hand double for all
their sins_. But still more vivid than these collective substitutes
for the people were the individuals, who, at different points in
Israel's history, had stood forth and taken up as their own the
nation's conscience and stooped to bear the nation's curse. Far away
back, a Moses had offered himself for destruction, if for his sake
God would spare his sinful and thoughtless countrymen. In a psalm of
the Exile it is remembered that,
_He said, that He would destroy them,
Had not Moses His chosen stood before Him in the breach,
To turn away His wrath, lest He should destroy._[226]
And Jeremiah, not by a single heroic resolve, but by the slow agony
and martyrdom of a long life, had taken Jerusalem's sin upon his own
heart, had felt himself forsaken of God, and had voluntarily shared
his city's doom, while his generation, unconscious of their guilt and
blind to their fate, despised him and esteemed him not. And Ezekiel,
who is Jeremiah's far-off reflection, who could only do in symbol
what Jeremiah did in reality, was commanded to lie on his side for
days, and so _bear the guilt_ of his people.[227]
But in Israel's experience it was not only the human Servant who
served the nation by suffering, for God Himself had come down to
_carry_ His distressed and accursed people, and _to load Himself with
them_. Our prophet uses the same two verbs of Jehovah as are used of
the Servant.[228] Like the Servant, too, God _was afflicted in all
their affliction_; and His love towards them was expended in passion
and agony for their sins. Vicarious suffering was not only human, it
was Divine.
Was it very wonderful that a people with such an experience, and
with such examples, both human and Divine, should at last be led
to the thought of One Sufferer, who would exhibit in Himself all
the meaning, and procure for His people all the virtue, of that
vicarious reproach and sorrow, which a long line of their martyrs
had illustrated, and which God had revealed as the passion of His
own love? If they had had every example that could fit them to
understand the power of such a sufferer, they had also every reason
to feel their need of Him. For the Exile had not healed the nation;
it had been for the most of them an illustration of that evil effect
of punishment to which we alluded above. Penal servitude in Babylon
had but hardened Israel. _God poured on him the fury of anger, and
the strength of battle: it set him on fire round about, yet he knew
not; and it burned him, yet he laid it not to heart._[229] What the
Exile, then, had failed to do, when it brought upon the people their
own sins, the Servant, taking these sins upon himself, would surely
effect. The people, whom the Exile had only hardened, his vicarious
suffering should strike into penitence and lift to peace.
IV. Ch. liii. 7-9. It is probable that with ver. 6 the penitent
people have ceased speaking, and that the parable is now taken up
by the prophet himself. The voice of God, which uttered the first
strophe, does not seem to resume till ver. 11.
If strophe iii. confessed that it was for the people's sins the
Servant suffered, strophe iv. declares that he himself was sinless,
and yet silently submitted to all which injustice laid upon him.
Now Silence under Suffering is a strange thing in the Old
Testament--a thing absolutely new. No other Old Testament personage
could stay dumb under pain, but immediately broke into one of two
voices,--voice of guilt or voice of doubt. In the Old Testament the
sufferer is always either confessing his guilt to God, or, when
he feels no guilt, challenging God in argument. David, Hezekiah,
Jeremiah, Job, and the nameless martyred and moribund of the Psalms,
all strive and are loud under pain. Why was this Servant the unique
and solitary instance of silence under suffering? Because he had a
secret which they had not. It had been said of him: _My Servant shall
deal wisely_ or _intelligently_, shall know what he is about. He had
no guilt of his own, no doubts of his God. But he was conscious of
the end God had in his pain, an end not to be served in any other
way, and with all his heart he had given himself to it. It was not
punishment he was enduring; it was not the throes of the birth
into higher experience, which he was feeling: it was a Service he
was performing,--a service laid on him by God, a service for man's
redemption, a service sure of results and of glory. Therefore _as a
lamb to the slaughter is led, and as a sheep before her shearers is
dumb, he opened not his mouth_.
The next two verses (8, 9) describe how the Servant's Passion was
fulfilled. The figure of a sick man was changed in ver. 5 to that of
a punished one, and the punishment we now see carried on to death.
The two verses are difficult, the readings and renderings of most of
the words being very various. But the sense is clear. The Servant's
death was accomplished, not on some far hill top by a stroke out of
heaven, but in the forms of human law and by men's hands. It was
a judicial murder. _By tyranny and by judgement_,--that is, by a
forced and tyrannous judgement,--_he was taken_. To this abuse of
law the next verse adds the indifference of public opinion: _and
as for his contemporaries, who of them reflected that he was cut
off from_, or _cut down in, the land of the living_,--that in spite
of the form of law that condemned him he was a murdered man,--that
_for the transgression of my people the stroke was his_? So, having
conceived him to have been lawfully put to death, they consistently
gave him a convict's grave: _they made his grave with the wicked, and
he was with the felon in his death_, though--and on this the strophe
emphatically ends--he was an innocent man, _he had done no harm,
neither was guile in his mouth_.
Premature sickness and the miscarriage of justice,--these to
Orientals are the two outstanding misfortunes of the individual's
life. Take the Psalter, set aside its complaints of the horrors of
war and of invasion, and you will find almost all the rest of its
sighs rising either from sickness or from the sense of injustice.
These were the classic forms of individual suffering in the age and
civilisation to which our prophet belonged, and it was natural,
therefore, that when he was describing an Ideal or Representative
Sufferer, he should fill in his picture with both of them. If we
remember this,[230] we shall feel no incongruity in the sudden change
of the hero from a sick man to a convict, and back again in ver. 10
from a convict to a sick man. Nor, if we remember this, shall we feel
disposed to listen to those interpreters, who hold that the basis of
this prophecy was the account of an actual historical martyrdom. Had
such been the case the prophet would surely have held throughout to
one or the other of the two forms of suffering. His sufferer would
have been either a leper or a convict, but hardly both. No doubt the
details in vv. 8 and 9 are so realistic that they might well be the
features of an actual miscarriage of justice; but the like happened
too frequently in the Ancient East for such verses to be necessarily
any one man's portrait. Perverted justice was the curse of the
individual's life,--perverted justice and that stolid, fatalistic
apathy of Oriental public opinion, which would probably regard such
a sufferer as suffering for his sins the just vengeance of heaven,
though the minister of this vengeance was a tyrant and its means were
perjury and murder. _Who of his generation reflected that for the
transgression of my people the stroke was on him!_
V. Ch. liii. 10-12. We have heard the awful tragedy. The innocent
Servant was put to a violent and premature death. Public apathy closed
over him and the unmarked earth of a felon's grave. It is so utter a
perversion of justice, so signal a triumph of wrong over right, so
final a disappearance into oblivion of the fairest life that ever
lived, that men might be tempted to say, God has forsaken His own. On
the contrary--so strophe v. begins--God's own will and pleasure have
been in this tragedy: _Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him_. The line
as it thus stands in our English version has a grim, repulsive sound.
But the Hebrew word has no necessary meaning of pleasure or enjoyment.
All it says is, God so willed it. His purpose was in this tragedy.
Deus vult! It is the one message which can render any pain tolerable or
light up with meaning a mystery so cruel as this: _The LORD_ Himself
_had purposed to bruise_ His Servant, _the LORD Himself had laid on him
sickness_ (the figure of disease is resumed).
God's purpose in putting the Servant to death is explained in the
rest of the verse. It was in order that _through his soul making a
guilt-offering, he might see a seed, prolong his days, and that the
pleasure of the Lord might prosper by his hand_.
What is a guilt-offering? The term originally meant guilt, and is so
used by a prophet contemporary to our own.[231] In the legislation,
however, both in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel, it is applied to
legal and sacrificial forms of restitution or reparation for guilt.
It is only named in Ezekiel along with other sacrifices.[232] Both
Numbers and Leviticus define it, but define it differently. In
Numbers (v. 7, 8) it is the payment, which a transgressor has to
make to the human person offended, of the amount to which he has
harmed that person's property: it is what we call damages. But in
Leviticus it is the ram, exacted over and above damages to the
injured party (v. 14-16; vi. 1-7), or in cases where no damages were
asked for (v. 17-19), by the priest, the representative of God, for
satisfaction to His law; and it was required even where the offender
had been an unwitting one. By this guilt-offering _the priest made
atonement_ for the sinner and _he was forgiven_. It was for this
purpose of reparation to the Deity that the plagued Philistines
sent a guilt-offering back with the ark of Jehovah, which they had
stolen.[233] But there is another historical passage, which though
the term _guilt-offering_ is not used in it, admirably illustrates
the idea.[234] A famine in David's time was revealed to be due to
the murder of certain Gibeonites by the house of Saul. David asked
the Gibeonites what reparation he could make. They said it was not
a matter of damages. But both parties felt that before the law of
God could be satisfied and the land relieved of its curse, some
atonement, some guilt-offering, must be made to the Divine Law. It
was a wild kind of satisfaction that was paid. Seven men of Saul's
house were hung up before the Lord in Gibeon. But the instinct,
though satisfied in so murderous a fashion, was a true and a grand
instinct,--the conscience of a law above all human laws and rights,
to which homage must be paid before the sinner could come into true
relations with God, or the Divine curse be lifted off.
It is in this sense that the word is used of the Servant of Jehovah,
the Ideal, Representative Sufferer. Innocent as he is, he gives his
life as satisfaction to the Divine law for the guilt of his people.
His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in
God's intent and purpose, but also by its own voluntary offering, it
was an expiatory sacrifice.[235] By his death the Servant did homage
to the law of God. By dying for it He made men feel that the supreme
end of man was to own that law and be in a right relation to it, and
that the supreme service was to help others to a right relation. As
it is said a little farther down, _My Servant, righteous himself,
wins righteousness for many, and makes their iniquities his load_.
It surely cannot be difficult for any one, who knows what sin is, and
what a part vicarious suffering plays both in the bearing of the sin
and in the redemption of the sinner, to perceive that at this point the
Servant's service for God and man reaches its crown. Compare his death
and its sad meaning, with the brilliant energies of his earlier career.
It is a heavy and an honourable thing to come from God to men, laden
with God's truth for your charge and responsibility; but it is a far
heavier to stoop and take upon your heart as your business and burden
men's suffering and sin. It is a needful and a lovely thing to assist
the feeble aspirations of men, to put yourself on the side of whatever
in them is upward and living,--to be the shelter, as the Servant was,
of the bruised reed and the fading wick; but it is more indispensable,
and it is infinitely heavier, to seek to lift the deadness of men, to
take their guilt upon your heart, to attempt to rouse them to it, to
attempt to deliver them from it. It is a useful and a glorious thing to
establish order and justice among men, to create a social conscience,
to inspire the exercise of love and the habits of service, and this the
Servant did when _he set Law on the Earth, and the Isles waited for his
teaching_; but after all man's supreme and controlling relation is his
relation to God, and to this their _righteousness_ the Servant restored
guilty men by his death.
And so it was at this point, according to our prophecy, that the
Servant, though brought so low, was nearest his exaltation; though
in death, yet nearest life, nearest the highest kind of life, _the
seeing of a seed_, the finding of himself in others; though despised,
rejected and forgotten of men, most certain of finding a place among
the great and notable forces of life,--_therefore do I divide him a
share with the great, and the spoil he shall share with the strong_.
Not because as a prophet he was a sharp sword in the hand of the
Lord, or a light flashing to the ends of the earth, but in that--as
the prophecy concludes, and it is the prophet's last and highest word
concerning him--in that _he bare the sin of the many, and interposed
for the transgressors_.
* * * * *
We have seen that the most striking thing about this prophecy is the
spectral appearance of the Servant. He haunts, rather than is present
in, the chapter. We hear of him, but he himself does not speak. We
see faces that he startles, lips that the sight of him shuts, lips
that the memory of him, after he has passed in silence, opens to
bitter confession of neglect and misunderstanding; but himself we see
not. His aspect and his bearing, his work for God and his influence
on men, are shown to us, through the recollection and conscience of
the speakers, with a vividness and a truth that draw the consciences
of us who hear into the current of the confession, and take our
hearts captive. But when we ask, Who was he then? What was his name
among men? Where shall we find himself? Has he come, or do you still
look for him?--neither the speakers, whose conscience he so smote,
nor God, whose chief purpose he was, give us here any answer. In some
verses he and his work seem already to have happened upon earth, but
again we are made to feel that he is still future to the prophet,
and that the voices, which the prophet quotes as speaking of having
seen him and found him to be the Saviour, are voices of a day not yet
born, while the prophet writes.
But about five hundred and fifty years after this prophecy was written,
a Man came forward among the sons of men,--among this very nation from
whom the prophecy had arisen; and in every essential of consciousness
and of experience He was the counterpart, embodiment and fulfilment
of this Suffering Servant and his Service. Jesus Christ answers the
questions, which the prophecy raises and leaves unanswered. In the
prophecy we see one, who is only a spectre, a dream, a conscience
without a voice, without a name, without a place in history. But in
Jesus Christ of Nazareth the dream becomes a reality; He, whom we have
seen in this chapter only as the purpose of God, only through the eyes
and consciences of a generation yet unborn,--He comes forward in flesh
and blood; He speaks, He explains Himself, He accomplishes almost to
the last detail the work, the patience and the death that are here
described as Ideal and Representative.
The correspondence of details between Christ's life and this
prophecy, published five hundred and fifty years before He came, is
striking; if we encountered it for the first time, it would be more
than striking, it would be staggering. But do not let us do what so
many have done--so fondly exaggerate it as to lose in the details of
external resemblance the moral and spiritual identity.
For the external correspondence between this prophecy and the life
of Jesus Christ is by no means perfect. Every wound that is set
down in the fifty-third of Isaiah was not reproduced or fulfilled
in the sufferings of Jesus. For instance, Christ was not the sick,
plague-stricken man, whom the Servant is at first represented to be.
The English translators have masked the leprous figure, that stands
out so clearly in the original Hebrew,--for _acquainted with grief,
bearing our griefs, put him to grief_, we should in each case read
_sickness_. Now Christ was no Job. As Matthew points out, the only
way He could be said _to bear our sicknesses and to carry our pains_
was by healing them, not by sharing them.
And again, exactly as the judicial murder of the Servant, and the
entire absence from his contemporaries of any idea that he suffered
a vicarious death, suit the case of Christ, the next stage in
the Servant's fate was not true of the Victim of Pilate and the
Pharisees. Christ's grave was not with the wicked. He suffered as
a felon without the walls on the common place of execution, but
friends received the body and gave it an honourable burial in a
friend's grave. Or take the clause, _with the rich in his death_.
It is doubtful whether the word is really _rich_, and ought not
to be a closer synonym of _wicked_ in the previous clause; but if
it be _rich_, it is simply another name for _the wicked_, who in
the East, in cases of miscarried justice, are so often coupled
with the evildoers. It cannot possibly denote such a man as Joseph
of Arimathea; nor, is it to be observed, do the Evangelists in
describing Christ's burial in that rich and pious man's tomb take any
notice of this line about the Suffering Servant.
But the absence of a complete incidental correspondence only renders
more striking the moral and spiritual correspondence, the essential
likeness between the Service set forth in ch. liii. and the work of
our Lord.
The speakers of ch. liii. set the Servant over against themselves,
and in solitariness of character and office. They count him alone
sinless where all they have sinned, and him alone the agent of
salvation and healing where their whole duty is to look on and
believe. But this is precisely the relation which Christ assumed
between Himself and the nation. He was on one side, all they on the
other. Against their strong effort to make Him the First among them,
it was, as we have said before, the constant aim of our Lord to
assert and to explain Himself as The Only.
And this Onlyness was to be realised in suffering. He said, _I must
suffer_; or again, _It behoves the Christ to suffer_. Suffering is
the experience in which men feel their oneness with their kind.
Christ, too, by suffering felt His oneness with men; but largely in
order to assert a singularity beyond. Through suffering He became
like unto men, but only that He might effect through suffering a
lonely and a singular service for them. For though He suffered in all
points as men did, yet He shared none of their universal feelings
about suffering. Pain never drew from Him either of those two voices
of guilt or of doubt. Pain never reminded Christ of His own past, nor
made Him question God.
Nor did He seek pain for any end in itself. There have been men who
have done so; fanatics who have gloried in pain; superstitious minds
that have fancied it to be meritorious; men whose wounds have been
as mouths to feed their pride, or to publish their fidelity to their
cause. But our Lord shrank from pain; if it had been possible He
would have willed not to bear it: _Father, save Me from this hour;
Father, if it be Thy will, let this cup pass from Me_. And when He
submitted and was under the agony, it was not in the feeling of it,
nor in the impression it made on others, nor in the manner in which
it drew men's hearts to Him, nor in the seal it set on the truth,
but in something beyond it, that He found His end and satisfaction.
Jesus _looked out of the travail of His soul and was satisfied_.
For, _firstly_, He knew His pain to be God's will for an end
outside Himself,--_I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how
am I straitened till it be accomplished: Father, save Me from this
hour, yet for this cause came I to this hour: Father, Thy will be
done_,--and all opportunities to escape as temptations.
And, _secondly_, like the Servant, Jesus _dealt prudently, had
insight_. The will of God in His suffering was no mystery to Him. He
understood from the first why He was to suffer.[236]
The reasons He gave were the same two and in the same order as are
given by our prophet for the sufferings of the Servant,--first,
that fidelity to God's truth could bring with it no other fate in
Israel;[237] then that His death was necessary for the sins of men, and
as men's ransom from sin. In giving the first of these reasons for His
death, Christ likened Himself to the prophets who had gone before Him
in Jerusalem; but in the second He matched Himself with no other, and
no other has ever been known in this to match himself with Jesus.
When men, then, stand up and tell us that Christ suffered only for
the sake of sympathy with His kind, or only for loyalty to the truth,
we have to tell them that this was not the whole of Christ's own
consciousness, this was not the whole of Christ's own explanation.
Suffering, which leads men into the sense of oneness with their
kind, only made Him, as it grew the nearer and weighed the heavier,
more emphatic upon His difference from other men. If He Himself, by
His pity, by His labours of healing (as Matthew points out), and by
all His intercourse with His people, penetrated more deeply into the
participation of human suffering, the very days which marked with
increasing force His sympathy with men, only laid more bare their
want of sympathy with Him, their incapacity to follow into that
unique conscience and understanding of a Passion, which He bore not
only _with_, but, as He said, _for_ His brethren. _Who believed that
which we heard, and to whom was the arm of the Lord revealed? As to
His generation, who reflected ... that for the transgression of my
people He was stricken?_ Again, while Christ indeed brought truth
to earth from heaven, and was for truth's sake condemned by men to
die, the burden which He found waiting Him on earth, man's sin, was
ever felt by Him to be a heavier burden and responsibility than the
delivery of the truth; and was in fact the thing, which, apart from
the things for which men might put Him to death, remained the reason
of His death in His own sight and in that of His Father. And He told
men why He felt their sin to be so heavy, because it kept them so
far from God, and this was His purpose, He said, in bearing it--that
He might bring us back to God; not primarily that He might relieve
us of the suffering which followed sin, though He did so relieve
some when He pardoned them, but that He might restore us to right
relations with God,--might, like the Servant, _make many righteous_.
Now it was Christ's confidence to be able to do this, which
distinguished Him from all others, upon whom has most heavily fallen
the conscience of their people's sins, and who have most keenly felt
the duty and commission from God of vicarious suffering. If, like
Moses, one sometimes dared for love's sake to offer his life for the
life of his people, none, under the conscience and pain of their
people's sins, ever expressed any consciousness of thereby making
their brethren righteous. On the contrary, even a Jeremiah, whose
experience, as we have seen, comes so wonderfully near the picture
of the Representative Sufferer in ch. liii.,--even a Jeremiah feels,
with the increase of his vicarious pain and conscience of guilt,
only the more perplexed, only the deeper in despair, only the less
able to understand God and the less hopeful to prevail with Him. But
Christ was sure of His power to remove men's sins, and was never more
emphatic about that power than when He most felt those sins' weight.
And _He has seen His seed_; He _has made many righteous_. We found it
to be uncertain whether the penitent speakers in ch. liii. understood
that the Servant by coming under the physical sufferings, which were
the consequences of their sins, relieved them of these consequences;
other passages in the prophecy would seem to imply, that, while the
Servant's sufferings were alone valid for righteousness, they did
not relieve the rest of the nation from suffering too. And so it
would be going beyond what God has given us to know, if we said that
God counts the sufferings on the Cross, which were endured for our
sins, as an equivalent for, or as sufficient to do away with, the
sufferings which these sins bring upon our minds, our bodies and
our social relations. Substitution of this kind is neither affirmed
by the penitents who speak in the fifty-third of Isaiah, nor is
it an invariable or essential part of the experience of those who
have found forgiveness through Christ. Every day penitents turn to
God through Christ, and are assured of forgiveness, who feel no
abatement in the rigour of the retribution of those laws of God,
which they have offended; like David after his forgiveness, they
have to continue to bear the consequences of their sins. But dark as
this side of experience undoubtedly is, only the more conspicuously
against the darkness does the other side of experience shine. By
_believing what they have heard_, reaching this belief through a
quicker conscience and a closer study of Christ's words about His
death, men, upon whom conscience by itself and sore punishment have
worked in vain, have been struck into penitence, have been assured of
pardon, have been brought into right relations with God, have felt
all the melting and the bracing effects of the knowledge that another
has suffered in their stead. Nay, let us consider this--the physical
consequences of their sins may have been left to be endured by such
men, for no other reason than in order to make their new relation
to God more sensible to them, while they feel those consequences no
longer with the feeling of penalty, but with that of chastisement
and discipline. Surely nothing could serve more strongly than this
to reveal the new conscience towards God that has been worked
within them. This inward _righteousness_ is made more plain by the
continuance of the physical and social consequences of their sins
than it would have been had these consequences been removed.
Thus Christ, like the Servant, became a force in the world,
inheriting in the course of Providence a _portion with the great_ and
_dividing the spoils_ of history _with the strong_. As has often been
said, His Cross is His Throne, and it is by His death that He has
ruled the ages. Yet we must not understand this as if His Power was
only or mostly shown in binding men, by gratitude for the salvation
He won them, to own Him for their King. His power has been even
more conspicuously proved in making His fashion of service the most
fruitful and the most honoured among men. If men have ceased to turn
from sickness with aversion or from weakness with contempt; if they
have learned to see in all pain some law of God, and in vicarious
suffering God's most holy service; if patience and self-sacrifice
have come in any way to be a habit of human life,--the power in this
change has been Christ. But because these two--to say, _Thy will be
done_, and to sacrifice self--are for us men the hardest and the most
unnatural of things to do, Jesus Christ, in making these a conscience
and a habit upon earth, has indeed shown Himself able to divide the
spoil with the strong, has indeed performed the very highest Service
for Man of which man can conceive.
FOOTNOTES:
[203] Thus Ewald supposed ch. lii. 13-liii. to be an elegy upon some
martyr in the persecutions under Manasseh. Professor Briggs, as we
have noticed before, claims to have discovered that all the passages
in the Servant are parts of a trimeter poem, older than the rest of
the prophecy, which he finds to be in hexameters. See p. 315.
[204] I may quote Dillmann's opinion on this last point:
"Andererseits sind nicht blos die Grundgedanken und auch einzelne
Wendungen wie 52, 13-15. 53, 7. 11. 12 durch 42, 1 ff. 49, 1 ff.
50, 3 ff. so wohl vorbereitet und so sehr in Übereinstimmung damit,
dass an eine fast unveränderte Herübernahme des Abschnitts aus
einer verlornen Schrift (_Ew._) nicht gedacht werden kann, sondern
derselbe doch wesentlich als Werk des Vrf. angesehen werden muss"
(_Commentary_ 4th ed., 1890, p. 453).
[205] This verb best gives the force of the Hebrew, which means both
_to deal prudently_ and to _prosper_ or succeed. See p. 346.
[206] Vulgate finely: "extolletur, sublimis erit et valde elatus."
[207] "The term rendered 'startle' has created unnecessary difficulty
to some writers. The word means to 'cause to spring or leap;' when
applied to fluids, to spirt or sprinkle them. The fluid spirted
is put in the _accusative_, and it is spirted _upon_ the person.
In the present passage the person, 'many nations,' _is_ in the
_accusative_, and it is simply treason against the Hebrew language
to render 'sprinkle.' The interpreter who will so translate will 'do
anything.'"--A. B. Davidson, _Expositor_, 2nd series, viii., 443. The
LXX. has θαυμασονται εθνη πολλα. The Peschitto and Vulgate render
_sprinkle_.
[208] And not _our report_, or _something we caused to be heard_, as
in the English Version,--מועהש is the passive participle of מעש, to
hear, and not of השמיע, to cause to hear. The speakers are now the
penitent people of God who had been preached to, and not the prophets
who had preached.
[209] _Tender shoot._ Masculine participle, meaning _sucker_, or
_suckling_. Dr. John Hunter (_Christian Treasury_) suggests succulent
plant, such as grow in the desert. But in Job viii. 16; xiv. 7; xv.
30, the feminine form is used of any tender shoot of a tree, and the
feminine plural in Ezek. xvii. 22 of the same. The LXX. read παιδιον,
_infant_. _Before Him_, i.e. Jehovah. Cheyne, following Ewald, reads
_before us_. So Giesebrecht.
[210] _Took for his burden._ _Loaded_ himself with them. The same
grievous word which God uses of Himself in ch. xlvi. See p. 180.
[211] There is more than _afflicted_ (Authorised Version) in this
word. There is the sense of being _humbled_, punished for his own
sake.
[212] The possessive pronoun has been put to the end of the lines,
where it stands in the original, producing a greater emphasis and
even a sense of rhyme.
[213] לנוכ Kūllanū so rendered instead of "all of us," in order to
be assonant with the close of the verse, as the original is, which
closes with kullam.
[214] That is, by a form of law that was tyranny, a judicial crime.
[215] Cut off violently, prematurely, unnaturally.
[216] See p. 368.
[217] The verbs, hitherto in the perfect in this verse, now change
to the imperfect; a sign that they express the purpose of God. _Cf._
Dillmann, _in loco_.
[218] _From the travail of his soul shall he see, and by his
knowledge be satisfied._ Taking דעתוב with שבעי instead of with
יצדיק. This reading suggested itself to me some years ago. Since
then I have found it only in Prof. Briggs's translation, _Messianic
Prophecy_, p. 359. It is supported by the frequent parallel in which
we find _seeing_ and _knowing_ in Hebrew.
[219] Some translate _many_, _i.e._, the many to whom he brings
righteousness, as if he were a victor with a great host behind him.
[220] Jer. xxiii. 5.
[221] Hitzig (among others) held that it is the prophets who are the
speakers of ver. 1, and that the voices of the penitent people come in
only with ver. 2 or ver. 3. In that case מועתינוש would mean _what we
heard from God_ (מועהש is elsewhere used for the prophetic message) and
delivered to the people. This interpretation multiplies the dramatis
personæ, but does not materially alter the meaning, of the prophecy.
It merely changes part of the penitent people's self-reproach into a
reproach cast on them by their prophets. But there is no real reason
for introducing the prophets as the speakers of ver. 1.
[222] For the argument that it is Israel who speaks here, see
Hoffmann (_Schriftbeweis_), who was converted from the other view,
and Dillmann, 4th ed., _in loco_. A very ingenious attempt has been
made by Giesebrecht (_Beiträge zur Jesaia Kritik_, 1890, p. 146 ff.),
in favour of the interpretation that the heathen are the speakers.
His reasons are these: 1. It is the heathen who are spoken of in
lii. 13-15, and a change to Israel would be too sudden. Answer: The
heathen are not exclusively spoken of in lii. 13-15; but if they
were a change in the next verse to Israel would not be more rapid
than some already made by the prophet. 2. The words in liii. 1 suit
the heathen. They have already received the news of the exaltation
of the Servant, which in lii. 15 was promised them. This is the
שמועתינו, that is _news we have just heard_. האמין is a pluperfect
of the subjunctive mood: _Who could_ or who _would have believed_
this news of the exaltation _we have_ just _heard, and the arm of
Jehovah to whom was it revealed_! _i.e._, it was revealed to nobody.
Answer: besides the precariousness of taking האמין as a pluperfect
subjunctive, this interpretation is opposed to the general effort of
the prophecy, which is to expose unbelief before the exaltation, not
after it. 3. To get rid of the argument--that, while the speakers
own that the Servant bears their sins, it is said the Servant was
stricken for the sins of _my people_, and that therefore the speakers
must be the same as "my people":--Giesebrecht would utterly alter the
reading of ver. 8 from למו ננע עמו מפשע, _for the transgression of
my people was the stroke to him_ to יְנֻנַּע מִפִּשְׁעָם, _for their
stroke was he smitten_.
[223] נשׂא and סבל. In speaking of his country's woes, Jeremiah (x. 19)
says: _This is sickness_, or _my sickness, and I must bear it_, חלי זה
ואשׂאני. Ezekiel (iv. 4) is commanded to lie on his side, and in that
symbolic position to _bear the iniquity of His people_, עונם תשא. One
of the Lamentations (v. 7) complains: _Our fathers have sinned and are
not, and we bear_ (סבל) _their iniquities._ In these cases the meaning
of both נשא and סבל is simply to feel the weight of, be involved in.
The verbs do not convey the sense of _carrying off_ or _expiating_.
But still it had been said of the Servant that in his suffering he
would be practical and prosper; so that when we now hear that he bears
his people's sins, we are ready to understand that he does not do
this for the mere sake of sharing them, but for a practical purpose,
which, of course, can only be their removal. There is, therefore, no
need to quarrel with the interpretation of ver. 4, that the Servant
_carries away_ the suffering with which he is laden. Matthew makes
this interpretation (viii. 17) in speaking of Christ's healing. But
it is a very interesting fact, and not without light upon the free
and plastic way in which the New Testament quotes from the Old, that
Matthew has ignored the original and literal meaning of the quotation,
which is that the Servant shared the sicknesses of the people: a sense
impossible in the case for which the Evangelist uses the words.
[224] But they do not tell us, whether they were totally exempted
from suffering by the Servant's pains, or whether they also suffered
with him the consequence of their misdeeds. For that question is not
now present to their minds. Whether they also suffer or not (and
other chapters in the prophecy emphasize the people's bearing of the
consequences of their misdeeds), they know that it was not their own,
but the Servant's suffering, which was alone the factor in their
redemption.
[225] _Mystery of Pain_, by James Hinton, p. 27.
[226] Psalm cvi. 23; _cf._ also ver. 32, where the other side of the
solidarity between Moses and the people comes out. _They angered Him
also at the waters of Strife, so that it went ill with Moses for
their sakes ... he spake unadvisedly with his lips._
[227] See p. 352.
[228] Isa. xlvi. 3, 4. See pp. 179, 180 of this volume.
[229] Ch. xlii. 25.
[230] If we remember this we shall also feel more reason than ever
against perceiving the Nation, or any aspect of the Nation, in the
Sufferer of ch. liii. For he suffers, as the individual suffers,
sickness and legal wrong. Tyrants do not put whole nations through a
form of law and judgement. Of course, it is open to those, who hold
that the Servant is still an aspect of the Nation, to reply, that
all this is simply evidence of how far the prophet has pushed his
personification. A whole nation has been called "The Sick Man" even
in our prosaic days. But see pp. 268-76.
[231] Jer. li. 4.
[232] xl. 39; xlii. 13; xliv. 29; xlvi. 20.
[233] 1 Sam. vi. 13.
[234] _Cf._ Wellhausen's _Prolegomena_, ch. ii., 2.
[235] There is no exegete but agrees to this. There may be
differences of opinion about the syntax,--whether the verse should
run, _though Thou makest his soul guilt_, or _a guilt-offering_;
or, _though his soul make a guilt-offering_; or (reading ישים for
תשים), _while he makes his soul a guilt-offering_,--but all agree to
the fact that by himself or by God the Servant's life is offered an
expiation for sin, a satisfaction to the law of God.
[236] _Cf._ Baldensperger (_Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu_, p. 119 ff.)
on the genuineness of Christ's predictions and explanations of His
sufferings.
[237] _Cf._ p. 330.
BOOK IV.
_THE RESTORATION._
BOOK IV.
We have now reached the summit of our prophecy. It has been a long,
steep ascent, and we have had very much to seek out on the way, and
to extricate and solve and load ourselves with. But although a long
extent of the prophecy, if we measure it by chapters, still lies
before us, the end is in sight; every difficulty has been surmounted
which kept us from seeing how we were to get to it, and the rest of
the way may be said to be down-hill.
To drop the figure--the Servant, his vicarious suffering and
atonement for the sins of the people, form for our prophet the
solution of the spiritual problem of the nation's restoration, and
what he has now to do is but to fill in the details of this.
We saw that the problem of Israel's deliverance from Exile, their
Return, and their Restoration to their position in their own land
as the Chief Servant of God to humanity, was really a double
problem--political and spiritual. The solution of the political side
of it was Cyrus. As soon as the prophet had been able to make it
certain that Cyrus was moving down upon Babylon, with a commission
from God to take the city, and irresistible in the power with which
Jehovah had invested him, the political difficulties in the way of
Israel's Return were as good as removed; and so the prophet gave,
in the end of ch. xlviii., his great call to his countrymen to
depart. But all through chs. xl.-xlviii., while addressing himself
to the solution of the political problems of Israel's deliverance,
the prophet had given hints that there were moral and spiritual
difficulties as well. In spite of their punishment for more than
half a century, the mass of the people were not worthy of a return.
Many were idolaters; many were worldly; the orthodox had their own
wrong views of how salvation should come (xlv. 9 ff.); the pious
were without either light or faith (l. 10). The nation, in short,
had not that inward _righteousness_, which could alone justify God
in vindicating them before the world, in establishing their outward
righteousness, their salvation and reinstatement in their lofty
place and calling as His people. These moral difficulties come upon
the prophet with greater force after he has, with the close of ch.
xlviii., finished his solution of the political ones. To these moral
difficulties he addresses himself in xlix.-liii., and the Servant and
his Service are his solution of them:--the Servant as a Prophet and a
Covenant of the People in ch. xlix. and in ch. l. 4 ff.; the Servant
as an example to the people, ch. l. ff.; and finally the Servant as a
full expiation for the people's sins in ch. lii. 13-liii. It is the
Servant who is to _raise up the land, and to bring back the heirs to
the desolate heritages_, and rouse the Israel who are not willing
to leave Babylon, _saying to the bound, Go forth; and to them that
sit in darkness, Show yourselves_ (xlix. 8, 9). It is he who is _to
sustain the weary_ and to comfort the pious in Israel, who, though
pious, have no light as they walk on their way back (l. 4, 10). It
is the Servant finally who is to achieve the main problem of all
and _make many righteous_ (liii. 11). The hope of restoration, the
certainty of the people's redemption, the certainty of the rebuilding
of Jerusalem, the certainty of the growth of the people to a great
multitude, are, therefore, all woven by the prophet through and
through with his studies of the Servant's work in xlix., l., and
lii. 13-liii.,--woven so closely and so naturally that, as we have
already seen (pp. 313 f., 336 ff.), we cannot take any part of chs.
xlix.-liii. and say that it is of different authorship from the
rest. Thus in ch. xlix. we have the road to Jerusalem pictured in
vv. 9_b_-13, immediately upon the back of the Servant's call to go
forth in ver. 9_a_. We have then the assurance of Zion being rebuilt
and thronged by her children in vv. 14-23, and another affirmation
of the certainty of redemption in vv. 24-26; In l. 1-3 this is
repeated. In li.-lii. 12 the petty people is assured that it shall
grow innumerable again; new affirmations are made of its ransom and
return, ending with the beautiful prospect of the feet of the heralds
of deliverance on the mountains of Judah (lii. 7_b_) and a renewed
call to leave Babylon (vv. 11, 12). We shall treat all these passages
in our Twenty-First Chapter.
And as they started naturally from the Servant's work in xlix. 1-9_a_
and his example in l. 4-11, so upon his final and crowning work in
ch. liii. there follow as naturally ch. liv. (the prospect of _the
seed_ that liii. 10 promised he should see), and ch. lv. (a new call
to come forth). These two, with the little pre-exilic prophecy, ch.
lvi. 1-8, we shall treat in our Twenty-Second Chapter.
Then come the series of difficult small prophecies with pre-exilic
traces in them, from lvi. 9-lix. They will occupy our Twenty-Third
Chapter. In ch. lx. Zion is at last not only in sight, but radiant
in the rising of her new day of glory. In chs. lxi. and lxii. the
prophet, having reached Zion, "looks back," as Dillmann well remarks,
"upon what has become his task, and in connection with that makes
clear once more the high goal of all his working and striving." In
lxiii. 1-6 the Divine Deliverer is hailed. We shall take lx.-lxiii. 6
together in our Twenty-Fourth Chapter.
Ch. lxiii. 7-lxiv. is an Intercessory Prayer for the restoration of
_all_ Israel. It is answered in ch. lxv., and the lesson of this
answer, that Israel must be judged, and that all cannot be saved, is
enforced in ch. lxvi. Chs. lxiii. 7-lxvi. will therefore form our
Twenty-Fifth and closing Chapter.
Thus our course is clear, and we can overtake it rapidly. It is, to
a large extent, a series of spectacles, interrupted by exhortations
upon duty; things, in fact, to see and to hear, not to argue about.
There are few great doctrinal questions, except what we have already
sufficiently discussed; our study, for instance, of the term
righteousness, we shall find has covered for us a large part of the
ground in advance. And the only difficult literary question is that
of the pre-exilic and post-exilic pieces, which are alleged to form
so large a part of chs. lvi.-lix. and lxiii.-lxvi.
CHAPTER XXI.
_DOUBTS IN THE WAY._
ISAIAH xlix.-lii. 12.
Chapters xlix.-liii. are, as we have seen, a series of more or less
closely joined passages, in which the prophet, having already made
the political redemption of Israel certain through Cyrus, and having
dismissed Cyrus from his thoughts, addresses himself to various
difficulties in the way of restoration, chiefly moral and spiritual,
and rising from Israel's own feelings and character; exhorts the people
in face of them by Jehovah's faithfulness and power; but finds the
chief solution of them in the Servant and his prophetic and expiatory
work. We have already studied such of these passages as present
the Servant to us, and we now take up those others, which meet the
doubts and difficulties in the way of restoration by means of general
considerations drawn from God's character and power. Let it be noticed
that, with one exception (ch. l. 11),[238] these passages are meant for
earnest and pious minds in Israel,--for those Israelites, whose desires
are towards Zion, but chill and heavy with doubts.
The form and the terms of these passages are in harmony with their
purpose. They are a series of short, high-pitched exhortations,
apostrophes and lyrics. One, ch. lii. 9-12, calls upon the arm
of Jehovah, but all the rest address Zion,--that is, the ideal
people in the person of their mother, with whom they ever so fondly
identified themselves; or _Zion's children_; or _them that follow
righteousness_, or ye _that know righteousness_; or _my people_, _my
nation_; or again Zion herself. This personification of the people
under the name of their city, and under the aspect of a woman, whose
children are the individual members of the people, will be before us
till the end of our prophecy. It is, of course, a personification
of Israel, which is complementary to Israel's other personification
under the name of the Servant. The Servant is Israel active,
comforting, serving his own members and the nations; Zion, the
Mother-City, is Israel passive, to be comforted, to be served by her
own sons and by the kings of the peoples.
We may divide the passages into two groups. _First_, the songs
of return, which rise out of the picture of the Servant and his
redemption of the people in ch. xlix. 9_b_, with the long promise
and exhortation to Zion and her children, that lasts till the second
picture of the Servant in ch. lii. 4; and _second_, the short pieces
which lie between the second picture of the Servant and the third, or
from the beginning of ch. li. to ch. lii. 12.
I.
In ch. xlix. 9_b_ God's promise of the return of the redeemed
proceeds naturally from that of their ransom by the Servant. It is
hailed by a song in ver. 13, and the rest of the section is the
answer to three doubts, which, like sobs, interrupt the music. But
the prophecy, stooping, as it were, to kiss the trembling lips
through which these doubts break, immediately resumes its high flight
of comfort and promise. Two of these doubts are: ver. 14, _But Zion
hath said, Jehovah hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me_;
and ver. 24, _Shall the prey be taken from the mighty or the captives
of the terrible be delivered_? The third is implied in ch. l. 1.
The promise of return is as follows: _On roads shall they feed, and
on all bare heights shall be their pasture. They shall not hunger
nor thirst, nor shall the mirage nor the sun smite them: for He that
yearneth over them shall lead them, even by springs of water shall
He guide them. And I will set all My mountains for a way, and My
high ways shall be exalted. Lo, these shall come from far: and, lo,
these from the North and from the West, and these from the land of
Sinim._[239] _Sing forth, O heavens; and be glad, O earth; let the
mountains break forth into singing: for Jehovah hath comforted His
people, and over His afflicted He yearneth._
Now, do not let us imagine that this is the promise of a merely
material miracle. It is the greater glory of a purely spiritual one, as
the prophet indicates in describing its cause in the words, _because
He that yearneth over them shall lead them_. The desert is not to
abate its immemorial rigours; in itself the way shall still be as
hard as when the discredited and heart-broken exiles were driven down
it from home to servitude. But their hearts are now changed, and that
shall change the road. The new faith, which has made the difference,
is a very simple one, that God is Power and that God is Love. Notice
the possessive pronouns used by God, and mark what they put into His
possession: two kinds of things,--powerful things, _I will make all My
mountains a way_; and sorrowful things, _Jehovah hath comforted His
people, and will have compassion on His afflicted_.[240] If we will
steadfastly believe that everything in the world which is in pain, and
everything which has power, is God's, and shall be used by Him, the
one for the sake of the other, this shall surely change the way to our
feet, and all the world around to our eyes.
1. Only it is so impossible to believe it when one looks at real
fact; and however far and swiftly faith and hope may carry us for a
time, we always come to ground again and face to face with fact. The
prophet's imagination speeding along that green and lifted highway of
the Lord lights suddenly upon the end of it,--the still dismantled
and desolate city. Fifty years Zion's altar fires have been cold and
her walls in ruin. Fifty years she has been bereaved of her children
and left alone. The prophet hears the winds blow mournfully through
her fact's chill answer to faith. _But Zion said, Forsaken me hath
Jehovah, and my Lord hath forgotten me!_ Now let us remember, that
our prophet has Zion before him in the figure of a mother, and we
shall feel the force of God's reply. It is to a mother's heart God
appeals. _Doth a woman forget her sucking child so as not to yearn
over the son of her womb? yea, such may forget, but I will not forget
thee_, desolate mother that thou art![241] Thy life is not what thou
art in outward show and feeling, but what thou art in My love and
in My sight. _Lo, upon both palms have I graven thee; thy walls are
before Me continually._ The custom, which to some extent prevails in
all nations, of puncturing or tattooing upon the skin a dear name one
wishes to keep in mind, is followed in the East chiefly for religious
purposes, and men engrave the name of God or some holy text upon the
hand or arm for a memorial or as a mark of consecration. It is this
fashion which God attributes to Himself. Having measured His love
by the love of a mother, He gives this second human pledge for His
memory and devotion. But again He exceeds the human habit; for it is
not only the name of Zion which is engraved on His hands, but her
picture. And it is not her picture, as she lies in her present ruin
and solitariness, but her restored and perfect state: _thy walls are
continually before Me_. For this is faith's answer to all the ruin
and haggard contradiction of outward fact. Reality is not what we
see: reality is what God sees. What a thing is in His sight and to
His purpose, that it really is, and that it shall ultimately appear
to men's eyes. To make us believe this is the greatest service the
Divine can do for the human. It was the service Christ was always
doing, and nothing showed His divinity more. He took us men and He
called us, unworthy as we were, His brethren, the sons of God. He
took such an one as Simon, shifting and unstable, a quicksand of a
man, and He said, _On this rock I will build My Church_. A man's
reality is not what he is in his own feelings, or what he is to the
world's eyes; but what he is to God's love, to God's yearning, and in
God's plan. If he believe that, so in the end shall he feel it, so in
the end shall he show it to the eyes of the world.
Upon those great thoughts, that God's are all strong things and all
weak things, and that the real and the certain in life is His will,
the prophecy breaks into a vision of multitudes in motion. There is
a great stirring and hastening, crowds gather up through the verses,
the land is lifted and thronged. _Lift up thine eyes round about,
and behold: all of them gather together, they come unto thee. As I
live, saith Jehovah, thou shalt surely clothe thyself with them all
as with an ornament, and gird thyself with them, like a bride. For
as for thy waste places and thy desolate ones and thy devastated
land--yea, thou wilt now be too strait for the inhabitants, and far
off shall be they that devoured thee. Again shall they speak in thine
ears,--the children of thy bereavement_ (that is, those children
who have been born away from Zion during her solitude), _Too strait
for me is the place, make me room that I may dwell. And thou shalt
say in thine heart, Who hath borne me these_,--not begotten, as our
English version renders, because the question with Zion was not who
was the father of the children, but who, in her own barrenness, could
possibly be the mother,--_Who hath borne me these, seeing I was_
first _bereft of my children, and_ since then have been _barren, an
exile and a castaway! And these, who hath brought them up! Lo, I was
left by myself. These,--whence are they!_ Our English version, which
has blundered in the preceding verses, requires no correction in the
following; and the first great Doubt in the Way being now answered,
for _they that wait on the Lord shall not be ashamed_, we pass to
the second, in ver. 24.
2. _Can the prey be taken from the mighty, or the captives of the
tyrant_[242] _be delivered?_ Even though God be full of love and
thought for Zion, will these tyrants give up her children? _Yea, thus
saith Jehovah, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken, and
the prey of the tyrant be delivered; and with him that quarreleth
with thee will I quarrel, and thy children will I save. And I will
make thine oppressors to eat their own flesh, and as with new wine
with their blood shall they be drunken, that all flesh may know that
I am Jehovah thy Saviour, and thy Redeemer the Mighty One of Jacob._
3. But now a third Doubt in the Way seems to have risen. Unlike the two
others, it is not directly stated, but we may gather its substance from
the reply which Jehovah makes to it (l. 1). _Thus saith Jehovah, What
is this bill of divorce of your mother whom I have sent away, or which
of My creditors is it to whom I have sold you?_ The form, in which
this challenge is put, assumes that the Israelites themselves had been
thinking of Jehovah's dismissal of Israel as an irrevocable divorce and
a bankrupt sale into slavery.[243]
"What now is this letter of divorce,--this that you are saying I have
given your mother? You say that I have sold you as a bankrupt father
sells his children,--to which then of my creditors is it that I have
sold you?"
The most characteristic effect of sin is that it is always reminding
men of law. Whether the moral habit of it be upon them or they
are entangled in its material consequences, sin breeds in men the
conscience of inexorable, irrevocable law. Its effect is not only
practical, but intellectual. Sin not only robs a man of the freedom
of his own will, but it takes from him the power to think of freedom
in others, and it does not stop till it paralyses his belief in the
freedom of God. He, who knows himself as the creature of unchangeable
habits or as the victim of pitiless laws, cannot help imputing his
own experience to what is beyond him, till all life seems strictly
lawbound, the idea of a free agent anywhere an impossibility, and God
but a part of the necessity which rules the universe.
Two kinds of generations of men have most tended to be necessitarian
in their philosophy,--the generations which have given themselves
over to do evil, and the generations whose political experience
or whose science has impressed them with the inevitable physical
results of sin. If belief in a Divine Redeemer, able to deliver man's
nature from the guilt and the curse of sin, is growing weak among
us to-day, this is largely due to the fact that our moral and our
physical sciences have been proving to us what creatures of law we
are, and disclosing, especially in the study of disease and insanity,
how inevitably suffering follows sin. God Himself has been so much
revealed to us as law, that as a generation we find it hard to
believe that He ever acts in any fashion that resembles the reversal
of a law, or ever works any swift, sudden deed of salvation.
Now the generation of the Exile was a generation, to whom God
had revealed Himself as law. They were a generation of convicts.
They had owned the justice of the sentence which had banished and
enslaved them; they had experienced how inexorably God's processes
of judgement sweep down the ages; for fifty years they had been
feeling the inevitable consequences of sin. The conscience of Law,
which this experience was bound to create in them, grew ever more
strong, till at last it absorbed even the hope of redemption, and
the God, who enforced the Law, Himself seemed to be forced by it.
To express this sense of law these earnest Israelites--for though
in error they were in earnest--went to the only kind of law, with
which they were familiar, and borrowed from it two of its forms,
which were not only suggested to them by the relations in which the
nation and the nation's sons respectively stood to Jehovah, as wife
and as children, but admirably illustrated the ideas they wished to
express. There was, first, the form of divorce, so expressive of the
ideas of absoluteness, deliberateness and finality;--of absoluteness,
for throughout the East power of divorce rests entirely with the
husband; of deliberateness, for in order to prevent hasty divorce
the Hebrew law insisted that the husband must make a bill or writing
of divorce instead of only speaking dismissal; and of finality, for
such a writing, in contrast to the spoken dismissal, set the divorce
beyond recall. The other form, which the doubters borrowed from their
law, was one, which, while it also illustrated the irrevocableness of
the act, emphasized the helplessness of the agent,--the act of the
father, who put his children away, not as the husband put his wife in
his anger, but in his necessity, selling them to pay his debts and
because he was bankrupt.
On such doubts God turns with their own language. "I have indeed put
your mother away, but _where is the bill_ that makes her divorce
final, beyond recall? You indeed were sold, but was it because I was
bankrupt? _To which_, then, of _My creditors_ (note the scorn of the
plural) _was it that I sold you? Nay, by means of your iniquities
did you sell yourselves, and by means of your transgressions were
you put away._ But I stand here ready as ever to save, I alone. If
there is any difficulty about your restoration it lies in this, that
I am alone, with no response or assistance from men. _Why when I came
was there no man? when I called was there none to answer? Is My hand
shortened at all that it cannot redeem? or is there in it no power
to deliver?_" And so we come back to the truth, which this prophecy
so often presents to us, that behind all things there is a personal
initiative and urgency of infinite power, which moves freely of its
own compassion and force, which is hindered by no laws from its own
ends, and needs no man's co-operation to effect its purposes. The
rest of the Lord's answer to His people's fear, that He is bound
by an inexorable law, is simply an appeal to His wealth of force.
This omnipotence of God is our prophet's constant solution for the
problems which arise, and he expresses it here in his favourite
figures of physical changes and convulsions of nature. _Lo, with
My rebuke I dry up the sea, I make rivers a wilderness: their fish
stinketh, because there is no water, and dieth for thirst. I clothe
the heavens with blackness, and sackcloth I set for their covering._
The argument seems to be: if God can work those sudden revolutions
in the physical world, those apparent interruptions of law in that
sphere, surely you can believe Him capable of creating sudden
revolutions also in the sphere of history, and reversing those laws
and processes, which you feel to be unalterable. It is an argument
from the physical to the moral world, in our prophet's own analogical
style, and like those we found in ch. xl.
II. li.-lii. 12.
Passing over the passage on the Servant, ch. l. 4-11, we reach a
second series of exhortations in face of Doubts in the Way of the
Return. The first of this new series is li. 1-3.
Their doubts having been answered with regard to God's mindfulness of
them and His power to save them, the loyal Israelites fall back to
doubt themselves. They see with dismay how few are ready to achieve
the freedom that God has assured, and upon how small and insignificant
a group of individuals the future of the nation depends. But their
disappointment is not made by them an excuse to desert the purpose
of Jehovah: their fewness makes them the more faithful, and the
defection of their countrymen drives them the closer to their God.
Therefore, God speaks to them kindly, and answers their last sad doubt.
_Hearken unto Me, ye that follow righteousness, that seek Jehovah._
_Righteousness_ here might be taken in its inward sense of conformity
to law, personal rightness of character; and so taken it would well
fall in with the rest of the passage. Those addressed would then be
such in Israel, as in face of hopeless prospects applied themselves
to virtue and religion. But _righteousness_ here is more probably
used in the outward sense, which we have found prevalent in "Second
Isaiah," of vindication and victory; the "coming right" of God's people
and God's cause in the world, their justification and triumph in
history.[244] They who are addressed will then be they who, in spite
of their fewness, believe in this triumph, _follow it_, make it their
goal and their aim, and _seek Jehovah_, knowing that He can bring it to
pass. And because, in spite of their doubts, they are still earnest,
and though faint are yet pursuing, God speaks to comfort them about
their fewness. Their present state may be very small and unpromising,
but let them look back upon the much more unpromising character of
their origin: _look unto the rock whence ye were hewn, and the hole
of the pit whence ye were digged_. To-day you may be a mere handful,
ridiculous in the light of the destiny you are called to achieve, but
remember you were once but one man: _look unto Abraham your father, and
to Sarah who bare you: for as one I called him and blessed him, that I
might make of him many_.
When we are weary and hopeless it is best to sit down and remember.
Is the future dark: let us look back and see the gathering and
impetus of the past! We can follow the luminous track, the
unmistakable increase and progress, but the most inspiring sight of
all is what God makes of the individual heart; how a man's heart
is always His beginning, the fountain of the future, the origin of
nations. Lift up your hearts, ye few and feeble; your father was but
one when I called him, and I made him many!
Having thus assured His loyal remnant of the restoration of Zion, in
spite of their fewness, Jehovah in the next few verses (4-8) extends
the prospect of His glory to the world: _Revelation shall go forth from
Me, and I will make My Law to light on the nations._ Revelation and Law
between them summarise His will. As He identified them both with the
Servant's work (ch. xl. 11), so here He tells the loyal in Israel, who
were in one aspect His Servant, that they shall surely come to pass;
and in the next little oracle, vv. 7, 8, He exhorts them to do that in
which the Servant has been set forth as an example: _fear ye not the
reproach of men, neither be dismayed at their revilings. For like a
garment the moth shall eat them up, and like wool shall the worm devour
them._ It is a response in almost the same words to the Servant's
profession of confidence in God in ch. l. 7-9. By some it is used as
an argument to show that the Servant and the godly remnant are to our
prophet still virtually one and the same; but we have already seen (ch.
l. 10) the godfearing addressed as distinct from the Servant, and can
only understand here that they are once more exhorted to take him as
their example. But if the likeness of the passage on the Servant to
this passage on the suffering Remnant does not prove that Remnant and
Servant are the same, it is certainly an indication that both passages,
so far from being pieced together out of different poems, are most
probably due to the same author and were produced originally in the
same current of thought.
When all Doubts in the Way have now been removed, what can remain but
a great impatience to achieve at once the near salvation? To this
impatience the loosened hearts give voice in vv. 9-11: _Awake, awake,
put on strength, Arm of Jehovah; awake as in the days of old, ages far
past!_ Not in vain have Israel been called to look back to the rock
whence they were hewn and the hole of the pit whence they were digged.
Looking back, they see the ancient deliverance manifest: _Art thou not
it that hewed Rahab in pieces, that pierced_ the _Dragon! Art thou
not it that dried up the sea, waters of the great flood; that did set
the hollows of the sea a way for the passage of the redeemed._ Then
there breaks forth the March of the Return, which we heard already
in the end of ch. xxxv.,[245] and to His people's impatience Jehovah
responds in vv. 9-16 in strains similar to those of ch. xl. The last
verse of this reply is notable for the enormous extension which it
gives to the purpose of Jehovah in endowing Israel as His prophet,--an
extension to no less than the renewal of the universe,--_in order to
plant the heavens and found the earth_; though the reply emphatically
concludes with the restoration of Israel, as if this were the cardinal
moment in the universal regeneration,--_and to say to Zion, My people
art thou_. The close conjunction, into which this verse brings words
already applied to Israel as the Servant and words which describe
Israel as Zion, is another of the many proofs we are discovering of the
impossibility of breaking up "Second Isaiah" into poems, the respective
subjects of which are one or other of these two personifications of the
nation.[246]
But the desire of the prophet speeds on before the returning exiles to
the still prostrate and desolate city. He sees her as she fell, the
day the Lord made her drunken with the cup of His wrath. With urgent
passion he bids her awake, seeking to rouse her now by the horrid tale
of her ruin, and now by his exultation in the vengeance the Lord is
preparing for His enemies (li. 17-23). In a second strophe he addresses
her in conscious contrast to his taunt-song against Babel. Babel was to
sit throneless and stripped of her splendour in the dust; but Zion is
to shake off the dust, rise, sit on her throne and assume her majesty.
For God hath redeemed His people. He could not tolerate longer _the
exulting of their tyrants_, the _blasphemy of His name_ (lii. 1-6). All
through these two strophes the strength of the passion, the intolerance
of further captivity, the fierceness of the exultation of vengeance,
are very remarkable.
But from the ruin of his city, which has so stirred and made
turbulent his passion, the prophet lifts his hot eyes to the dear
hills that encircle her; and peace takes the music from vengeance.
Often has Jerusalem seen rising across that high margin the spears
and banners of her destroyers. But now the lofty skyline is the
lighting place of hope. Fit threshold for so Divine an arrival, it
lifts against heaven, dilated and beautiful, the herald of the Lord's
peace, the publisher of salvation.
_How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth
good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings of
good, that publisheth salvation! Hark thy watchmen! they lift up the
voice, together they break into singing; yea, eye to eye do they see
when Jehovah returneth to Zion._
The last verse is a picture of the thronging of the city of the
prophets by the prophets again--so close, that they shall look each
other in the face. For this is the sense of the Hebrew _to see eye
in eye_, and not that meaning of reconciliation and agreement which
the phrase has come to have in colloquial English. The Exile had
scattered the prophets and driven them into hiding. They had been
only voices to one another, like Jeremiah and Ezekiel with the desert
between the two of them, or like our own prophet, anonymous and
unseen. But upon the old gathering-ground, the narrow but the free
and open platform of Jerusalem's public life, they should see each
other face to face, they should again be named and known. _Break out,
sing together, ye wastes of Jerusalem: for Jehovah has comforted His
people, has redeemed Jerusalem. Bared has Jehovah His holy arm to
the eyes of all the nations, and see shall all ends of the earth the
salvation of our God._
Thus the prophet, after finishing his long argument and dispelling
the doubts that still lingered at its close, returns to the first
high notes and the first dear subject with which he opened in ch. xl.
In face of so open a way, so unclouded a prospect, nothing remains
but to repeat, and this time with greater strength than before, the
call to leave Babylon:
_Draw off, draw off, come forth from there, touch not the unclean;
Come forth from her midst; be ye clean that do bear the vessels of
Jehovah.
Nay, neither with haste shall ye forth, nor in flight shall ye go,
For Jehovah goeth before thee, and Israel's God is thy rearward._
FOOTNOTES:
[238] See p. 334.
[239] The question whether this is the land of China is still an
open one. The possibility of intercourse between China and Babylon
is more than proved. But that there were Jews in China by this time
(though they seem to have found their way there by the beginning of
the Christian era) is extremely unlikely. Moreover, the possibility
of such a name as Sinim for the inhabitants of China at that date has
not been proved. No other claimants for the name, however, have made
good their case. But we need not enter further into the question. The
whole matter is fully discussed in Canon Cheyne's excursus, and by
him and Terrien de Lacouperie in the _Babylonian and Oriental Record_
for 1886-87. See especially the number for September 1887.
[240] His _humbled_, _His poor_ in the exilic sense of the word. See
_Isaiah i.-xxxix._, pp. 432 ff.
[241] On the "Motherhood of God" cf. _Isaiah i.-xxxix._, p. 245 ff.
[242] For צדיק, the _righteous_ or _just_, which is in the text, the
Syr., Vulg., Ewald, and others read עריץ, as in the following verse,
_terrible_ or _terribly strong_. Dillmann, however (5th ed., 1890,
p. 438), retains צדיק takes the terms _mighty_ and _just_ as used of
God, and reads the question, not as a question of despair uttered by
the people, but as a triumphant challenge of the prophet or of God
Himself. He would then make the next verse run thus: _Nay, for the
captives of the mighty may be taken, and the prey of the delivered,
but with him who strives with thee I will strive._
[243] The English version, _Where is the bill_, is incorrect. The
phrase is the same as in lxvi. ver. 1, _What is this house that ye
build for Me? what is this place for My rest?_ It implies a house
already built; and so in the text above _What is this bill of
divorce_ implies one already thought of by the minds of the persons
addressed by the question.
[244] _Cf._ p. 221. Dillmann's view that _righteousness_ means here
personal character is contradicted by the whole context, which
makes it plain that it is something external, the realisation of
which those addressed are doubting. What troubles them is not that
they are personally unrighteous, but that they are so few and
insignificant. And what God promises them in answer is something
external, the establishment of Zion. _Cf._ also the external meaning
of _righteousness_ in vv. 5, 6.
[245] _Isaiah. i.-xxxix._, p. 441.
[246] _Cf._ p. 315.
CHAPTER XXII.
_ON THE EVE OF RETURN._
ISAIAH liv.-lvi. 8.
One of the difficult problems of our prophecy is the relation and
grouping of chs. liv.-lix. It is among them that the unity of "Second
Isaiah," which up to this point we have seen no reason to doubt,
gives way. Ch. lvi. 9-lvii. is evidently pre-exilic, and so is ch.
lix. But in chs. liv., lv., and lvi. 1-8 we have three addresses,
evidently dating from the Eve of the Return. We shall, therefore,
treat them together.
I. THE BRIDE THE CITY (ch. liv.).
We have already seen why there is no reason for the theory that ch.
liv. may have followed immediately on ch. lii. 12.[247] And from Calvin
to Ewald and Dillmann, critics have all felt a close connection between
ch. lii. 13-liii. and ch. liv. "After having spoken of the death of
Christ," says Calvin, "the prophet passes on with good reason to the
Church: that we may feel more deeply in ourselves what is the value and
efficacy of His death." Similar in substance, if not in language, is
the opinion of the latest critics, who understand that in ch. liv. the
prophet intends to picture that full redemption which the Servant's
work, culminating in ch. liii., could alone effect. Two keywords of
ch. liii. had been _a seed_ and _many_. It is _the seed_ and the
_many_ whom ch. liv. reveals. Again, there may be, in ver. 17 of ch.
liv., a reference to the earlier picture of the Servant in ch. l.,
especially ver. 8. But this last is uncertain; and, as a point on the
other side, there are the two different meanings, as well as the two
different agents, of _righteousness_ in ch. liii. 11, _My Servant shall
make many righteous_, and in ch. liv. 17, _their righteousness which
is of Me, saith Jehovah_. In the former, righteousness is the inward
justification; in the latter, it is the external historical vindication.
In ch. liv. the people of God are represented under the double
figure, with which the Book of Revelation has made us familiar,
of Bride and City. To imagine a Nation or a Land as the spouse of
her God is a habit natural to the religious instinct at all times;
the land deriving her fruitfulness, the nation her standing and
prestige, from her connection with the Deity. But in ancient times
this figure of wedlock was more natural than it is among us, in so
far as the human man and wife did not then occupy that relation
of equality, to which it has been the progress of civilisation to
approximate; but the husband was the lord of his wife,--as much her
Baal as the god was the Baal of the people,--her law-giver, in part
her owner, and with full authority over the origin and subsistence
of the bond between them. Marriage thus conceived was a figure for
religion almost universal among the Semites. But as in the case of so
many other religious ideas common to the Hebrews and their heathen
kin, this one, when adopted by the prophets of Jehovah, underwent a
thorough moral reformation. Indeed, if one were asked to point out
a supreme instance of the operation of that unique conscience of the
religion of Jehovah, which was spoken of before,[248] one would have
little difficulty in selecting its treatment of the idea of religious
marriage. By the neighbours of Israel, the marriage of a god to his
people was conceived with a grossness of feeling and illustrated
by a foulness of ritual, which thoroughly demoralised the people,
affording, as they did, to licentiousness the example and sanction of
religion. So debased had the idea become, and so full of temptation
to the Hebrews were the forms in which it was illustrated among
their neighbours, that the religion of Israel might justly have been
praised for achieving a great moral victory in excluding the figure
altogether from its system. But the prophets of Jehovah dared the
heavier task of retaining the idea of religious marriage, and won the
diviner triumph of purifying and elevating it. It was, indeed, a new
creation. Every physical suggestion was banished, and the relation
was conceived as purely moral. Yet it was never refined to a mere
form or abstraction. The prophets fearlessly expressed it in the
warmest and most familiar terms of the love of man and woman. With a
stern and absolute interpretation before them in the Divine law, of
the relations of a husband to his wife, they borrowed from that only
so far as to do justice to the Almighty's initiative and authority
in His relation with mortals; and they laid far more emphasis on the
instinctive and spontaneous affections, by which Jehovah and Israel
had been drawn together. Thus, among a people naturally averse to
think or to speak of God as _loving_[249] men, this close relation
to Him of marriage was expressed with a warmth, a tenderness and a
delicacy, that exceeded even the two other fond forms in which the
Divine grace was conveyed,--of a father's and of a mother's love.
In this new creation of the marriage bond between God and His church,
three prophets had a large share,--Hosea, Ezekiel and the author of
"Second Isaiah." To Hosea and Ezekiel it fell to speak chiefly of
unpleasant aspects of the question,--the unfaithfulness of the wife and
her divorce; but even then, the moral strength and purity of the Hebrew
religion, its Divine vehemence and glow, were only the more evident
for the unpromising character of the materials with which it dealt. To
our prophet, on the contrary, it fell to speak of the winning back of
the wife, and he has done so with wonderful delicacy and tenderness.
Our prophet, it is true, has not one, but two, deep feelings about the
love of God: it passes through him as the love of a mother, as well as
the love of a husband. But while he lets us see the former only twice
or thrice, the latter may be felt as the almost continual undercurrent
of his prophecy, and often breaks to hearing, now in a sudden, single
ripple of a phrase, and now in a long tide of marriage music. His
lips open for Jehovah on the language of wooing,--_speak ye to the
heart of Jerusalem_; and though his masculine figure for Israel as
the Servant keeps his affection hidden for a time, this emerges again
when the subject of Service is exhausted, till Israel, where she is
not Jehovah's Servant, is Jehovah's Bride. In the series of passages
on Zion, from ch. xlix. to ch. lii., the City is the Mother of His
children, the Wife who though put away has never been divorced. In ch.
lxii. she is called Hephzi-Bah, _My-delight-is-in-her_, and Beulah,
or _Married,--for Jehovah delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be
married. For as a youth marrieth a maiden, thy sons shall marry thee;
and with the joy of a bridegroom over a bride, thy God shall joy over
thee._[250] But it is in the chapter now before us that the relation
is expressed with greatest tenderness and wealth of affection. _Be not
afraid, for thou shalt not be shamed; and be not confounded, for thou
shalt not be put to the blush: for the shame of thy youth thou shalt
forget, and the reproach of thy widowhood thou shalt not remember
again. For thy Maker is thy Husband, Jehovah of Hosts is His name;
and thy Redeemer the Holy of Israel, God of the whole earth is He
called. For as a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit thou art called
of Jehovah, even a wife of youth, when she is cast off, saith thy God.
For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will
I gather thee. In an egre of anger_[251] _I hid My face a moment from
thee, but with grace everlasting will I have mercy upon thee, saith thy
Redeemer Jehovah._
In this eighth verse we pass from the figure of the Bride to that of
the City, which emerges clear through flood and storm in ver. 11.
_Afflicted, Storm-beaten, Uncomforted, Lo, I am setting in dark metal_
(_antimony_, used by women for painting round the eyes, so as to set
forth their brilliance more) _thy stones_,--that they may shine from
this setting like women's eyes,--_and I will found thee in sapphires_:
as heaven's own foundation vault is blue, so shall the ground-stones
be of the New Jerusalem. _And I will set rubies for thy pinnacles, and
thy gates shall be sparkling stones,_[252] _and all thy borders stones
of delight,--stones of joy, jewels._ The rest of the chapter paints the
_righteousness_ of Zion as her external security and splendour.
II. A LAST CALL TO THE BUSY (ch. lv.).
The second address upon the Eve of Return is ch. lv. Its pure gospel
and clear music render detailed exposition, except on a single point,
superfluous. One can but stand and listen to those great calls to
repentance and obedience, which issue from it. What can be added
to them or said about them? Let one take heed rather to let them
speak to one's own heart! A little exploration, however, will be of
advantage among the circumstances from which they shoot.
The commercial character of the opening figures of ch. lv. arrests the
attention. We saw that Babylon was the centre of the world's trade,
and that it was in Babylon that the Jews first formed those mercantile
habits, which have become, next to religion, or in place of religion,
their national character. Born to be priests, the Jews drew down their
splendid powers of attention, pertinacity and imagination from God upon
the world, till they equally appear to have been born traders. They
laboured and prospered exceedingly, gathering property and settling in
comfort. They drank of the streams of Babylon, no longer made bitter
by their tears, and ceased to think upon Zion.
But, of all men, exiles can least forget that there is that which
money can never buy. Money and his work can do much for the banished
man,--feed him, clothe him, even make for him a kind of second home,
and in time, by the payment of taxes, a kind of second citizenship;
but they can never bring him to the true climate of his heart, nor
win for him his real life. And of all exiles the Jew, however free
and prosperous in his banishment he might be, was least able to find
his life among the good things--the water, the wine and the milk--of
a strange country. For home to Israel meant not only home, but duty,
righteousness and God.[253] God had created the heart of this people
to hunger for His word, and in His word they could alone find the
_fatness of their soul_. Success and comfort shall never satisfy
the soul which God has created for obedience. The simplicity of the
obedience that is here asked from Israel, the emphasis that is laid
upon mere obedience as ringing in full satisfaction, is impressive:
_hearken diligently, and eat that which is good; incline your ear
and come unto Me, hear and your soul shall live_. It suggests the
number of plausible reasons, which may be offered for every worldly
and material life, and to which there is no answer save the call of
God's own voice to obedience and surrender. To obedience God then
promises influence. In place of being a mere trafficker with the
nations, or, at best, their purveyor and money-lender, the Jew, if
he obeys God, shall be the priest and prophet of the peoples. This
is illustrated in vv. 4_b_-6, the only hard passage in the chapter.
God will make His people like David; whether the historical David or
the ideal David described by Jeremiah and Ezekiel is uncertain.[254]
God will conclude an _everlasting covenant_ with them, equivalent to
the _sure favours_ showered on him. As God set him for a _witness_
(that is, a prophet) to _the peoples_, a _prince and a leader to
the peoples_, so (in phrases that recall some used by David of
himself in the eighteenth Psalm) shall they as prophets and kings
influence strange nations--_calling a nation thou knowest not, and
nations that have not known thee shall run unto thee_. The effect
of the unconscious influence, which obedience to God, and surrender
to Him as His instrument, are sure to work, could not be more
grandly stated. But we ought not to let another point escape our
attention, for it has its contribution to make to the main question
of the Servant. As explained in the note to a sentence above, it is
uncertain whether _David_ is the historical king of that name, or the
Messiah still to come. In either case, he is an individual, whose
functions and qualities are transferred to the people, and that is
the point demanding attention. If our prophecy can thus so easily
speak of God's purpose of service to the Gentiles passing from the
individual to the nation, why should it not also be able to speak of
the opposite process, the transference of the service from the nation
to the single Servant? When the nation were unworthy and unredeemed,
could not the prophet as easily think of the relegation of their
office to an individual, as he now promises to their obedience that
that office shall be restored to them?
The next verses urgently repeat calls to repentance. And then comes
a passage which is grandly meant to make us feel the contrast of its
scenery with the toil, the money-getting and the money-spending from
which the chapter started. From all that sordid, barren, human strife
in the markets of Babylon, we are led out to look at the boundless
heavens, and are told that _as they are higher than the earth, so
are God's ways higher than our ways, and God's reckonings than our
reckonings_; we are led out to see the gentle fall of rain and snow
that so easily _maketh the earth to bring forth and bud, and give
seed to the sower and bread to the eater_, and are told that it is
a symbol of God's word, which we were called from our vain labours
to obey; we are led out _to the mountains and to the hills breaking
before you into singing_, and to the free, wild natural trees[255]
tossing their unlopped branches; we are led to see even the desert
change, for _instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree, and
instead of the nettle shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to
Jehovah for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut
off_. Thus does the prophet, in his own fashion, lead the starved
worldly heart, that has sought in vain its fulness from its toil,
through scenes of Nature, to that free omnipotent Grace, of which
Nature's processes are the splendid sacraments.
III. PROSELYTES AND EUNUCHS (ch. lvi. 1-8).
The opening verse of this small prophecy, _My salvation is near
to come, and My righteousness to be revealed_, attaches it very
closely to the preceding prophecy. If ch. lv. expounds the grace
and faithfulness of God in the Return of His people, and asks from
them only faith as the price of such benefits, ch. lvi. 1-8 adds the
demand that those who are to return shall keep the law, and extends
their blessings to foreigners and others, who though technically
disqualified from the privileges of the born and legitimate
Israelite, had attached themselves to Jehovah and His Law.
Such a prophecy was very necessary. The dispersion of Israel had
already begun to accomplish its missionary purpose; pious souls in
many lands had felt the spiritual power of this disfigured people,
and had chosen for Jehovah's sake to follow its uncertain fortunes.
It was indispensable that these Gentile converts should be comforted
against the withdrawal of Israel from Babylon, for they said, _Jehovah
will surely separate me from His people_, as well as against the time
when it might become necessary to purge the restored community from
heathen constituents.[256] Again, all the male Jews could hardly
have escaped the disqualification, which the cruel custom of the East
inflicted on some, at least, of every body of captives. It is almost
certain that Daniel and his companions were eunuchs, and if they, then
perhaps many more. But the Book of Deuteronomy had declared mutilation
of this kind to be a bar against entrance to the assembly of the Lord.
It is not one of the least interesting of the spiritual results of the
Exile, that its necessities compelled the abrogation of the letter of
such a law. With a freedom that foreshadows Christ's own expansion of
the ancient strictness, and in words that would not be out of place
in the Sermon on the Mount, this prophecy ensures to pious men, whom
cruelty had deprived of the two things dearest to the heart of an
Israelite,--a present place, and a perpetuation through his posterity,
in the community of God,--that in the new temple a _monument_[257]
_and a name_ should be given, _better_ and more enduring _than sons or
daughters_. This prophecy is further noteworthy as the first instance
of the strong emphasis which "Second Isaiah" lays upon the keeping of
the Sabbath, and as first calling the temple the _House of Prayer_.
Both of these characteristics are due, of course, to the Exile, the
necessities of which prevented almost every religious act save that of
keeping fasts and Sabbaths and serving God in prayer. On our prophet's
teaching about the Sabbath there will be more to say in the next
chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[247] _Cf._ pp. 336 ff.
[248] See pp. 247 ff.
[249] "Das eigentliche Wort 'Liebe' kommt im A. T. von Gott fast gar
nicht vor,--und wo es, bei einem späten Schriftsteller, vorkommt,
ist es Bezeichnung seiner besondren Bundes-liebe zu Israel,
deren natürliche Kehrseite der Hass gegen die feindlichen Völker
ist."--Schultz, _A. T. Theologie_, 4th ed., p. 548.
[250] The reserve of this--the limitation of the relation to one of
feeling--is remarkable in contrast to the more physical use of the
same figure in other religions.
[251] _Egre_, or sudden rush of the tide, or spate, or freshet. The
original is assonant: B^eshesseph qesseph.
[252] So literally; LXX. crystals, carbuncles or diamonds.
[253] Cf. _Isaiah i.-xxxix._, pp. 440 ff.
[254] The structure of this difficult passage is this. Ver. 3 states
the equation: the everlasting covenant with the people Israel=the
sure, unfailing favours bestowed upon the individual David. Vv. 4 and
5 unfold the contents of the equation. Each side of it is introduced
by a _Lo_. Lo, on the one side, what I have done to David; Lo, on the
other, what I will do to you. As David was a _witness of peoples_,
a _prince_ and _commander of peoples_, so shalt thou call to them
and make them obey thee. This is clear enough. But who is David? The
phrase the _favours_ of _David_ suggests 2 Chron. vi. 42, _remember
the mercies of David thy servant_; and those in ver. 5 recall Psalm
xviii. 43 f.: _Thou hast made me the head of nations; A people I
know not shall serve me; As soon as they hear of me they shall obey
me; Strangers shall submit themselves to me._ Yet both Jeremiah and
Ezekiel call the coming Messiah David. Jer. xxx. 9: _They shall serve
Jehovah their God and David their King._ Ezek. xxxiv. 23: _And I will
set up a shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, and he shall be
their shepherd. And I Jehovah will be their God, and My servant David
prince among them._ After these writers, our prophet could hardly
help using the name David in its Messianic sense, even though he also
quoted (in ver. 5) a few phrases recalling the historical David. But
the question does not matter much. The real point is the transference
of the favours bestowed upon an individual to the whole people.
[255] English version, _trees of the field_, but the field is the
country beyond the bounds of cultivation; and as beasts of the field
means _wild beasts_, so this means _wild trees_,--unforced, unaided
by man's labour.
[256] Neh. xiii.
[257] The original is _a hand_; a term applied (perhaps because
it consisted of tapering stones) to an _index_, or _monument_ of
victory, 1 Sam. xv. 12; or to a sepulchral monument, 2 Sam. xviii. 18.
CHAPTER XXIII.
_THE REKINDLING OF THE CIVIC CONSCIENCE._
ISAIAH lvi. 9-lix.
It was inevitable, as soon as their city was again fairly in sight,
that there should re-awaken in the exiles the civic conscience;
that recollections of those besetting sins of their public life,
for which their city and their independence were destroyed, should
throng back upon them; that in prospect of their again becoming
responsible for the discharge of justice and other political duties,
they should be reminded by the prophet of their national faults in
these respects, and of God's eternal laws concerning them. If we keep
this in mind, we shall understand the presence in "Second Isaiah" of
the group of prophecies at which we have now arrived, ch. lvi. 9-lix.
Hitherto our prophet, in marked contrast to Isaiah himself, has said
almost nothing of the social righteousness of his people. Israel's
righteousness, as we saw in our fourteenth chapter, has had the very
different meaning for our prophet of her pardon and restoration to
her rights. But in ch. lvi. 9-lix. we shall find the blame of civic
wrong, and of other kinds of sin of which Israel could only have been
guilty in her own land; we shall listen to exhortations to social
justice and mercy like those we heard from Isaiah to his generation.
Yet these are mingled with voices, and concluded with promises,
which speak of the Return as imminent. Undoubtedly exilic elements
reveal themselves. And the total impression is that some prophet of
the late Exile, and probably the one, whom we have been following,
collected these reminiscences of his people's sin in the days of
their freedom, in order to remind them, before they went back again
to political responsibility, why it was they were punished and how
apt they were to go astray. Believing this to be the true solution of
a somewhat difficult problem, we have ventured to gather this mixed
group of prophecies under the title of the Rekindling of the Civic
Conscience. They fall into three groups: first, ch. lvi. 9-lvii.;
second, ch. lviii.; third, ch. lix. We shall see that, while there
is no reason to doubt the exilic origin of the whole of the second,
the first and third of these are mainly occupied with the description
of a state of things that prevailed only before the Exile, but they
contain also exilic observations and conclusions.
I. A CONSCIENCE BUT NO GOD (ch. lvi. 9-lvii.).
This is one of the sections which almost decisively place the literary
unity of "Second Isaiah" past possibility of belief. If ch. lvi. 1-8
flushes with the dawn of restoration, ch. lvi. 9-lvii. is very dark
with the coming of the night, which preceded that dawn. Almost none
dispute, that the greater part of this prophecy must have been composed
before the people left Palestine for exile. The state of Israel, which
it pictures, recalls the descriptions of Hosea, and of the eleventh
chapter of Zechariah. God's flock are still in charge of their own
shepherds (lvi. 9-12),--a description inapplicable to Israel in exile.
The shepherds are sleepy, greedy, sensual, drunkards,--victims to
the curse, against which Amos and Isaiah hurled their strongest woes.
That sots like them should be spared while the righteous die unnoticed
deaths (lvii. 1) can only be explained by the approaching judgement.
_No man considereth that the righteous is taken away from the Evil. The
Evil_ cannot mean, as some have thought, persecution,--for while the
righteous are to escape it and enter into peace, the wicked are spared
for it. It must be a Divine judgement,--the Exile. But _he entereth
peace, they rest in their beds, each one that hath walked straight
before him_,--for the righteous there is the peace of death and the
undisturbed tomb of his fathers. What an enviable fate when emigration,
and dispersion through foreign lands, are the prospect of the nation!
Israel shall find her pious dead when she returns! The verse recalls
that summons in Isa. xxvi., in which we heard the Mother Nation calling
upon the dead she had left in Palestine to rise and increase her
returned numbers.
Then the prophet indicts the nation for a religious and political
unfaithfulness, which we know was their besetting sin in the days
before they left the Holy Land. The scenery, in whose natural objects
he describes them seeking their worship, is the scenery of Palestine,
not of Mesopotamia,--_terebinths_ and _wâdies_, and _clefts of the
rocks_, and _smooth stones of the wâdies_. The unchaste and bloody
sacrifices with which he charges them bear the appearance more of
Canaanite than of Babylonian idolatry. The humiliating political
suits which they paid--_thou wentest to the king with ointment, and
didst increase thy perfumes, and didst send thine ambassadors afar
off, and didst debase thyself even unto Sheol_ (ver. 9)--could not
be attributed to a captive people, but were the sort of degrading
diplomacy that Israel learned from Ahaz. While the painful pursuit
of strength (ver. 10), the shabby political cowardice (ver. 11),
the fanatic sacrifice of manhood's purity and childhood's life
(ver. 5), and especially the evil conscience which drove their
blind hearts through such pain and passion in a sincere quest for
righteousness (ver. 12), betray the age of idolatrous reaction from
the great Puritan victory of 701,--a generation exaggerating all the
old falsehood and fear, against which Isaiah had inveighed, with
the new conscience of sin which his preaching had created.[258]
The dark streak of blood and lust that runs through the condemned
idolatry, and the stern conscience which only deepens its darkness,
are sufficient reasons for dating the prophecy after 700. The very
phrases of Isaiah, which it contains, have tempted some to attribute
it to himself. But it certainly does not date from such troubles as
brought his old age to the grave. The evil, which it portends, is, as
we have seen, no persecution of the righteous, but a Divine judgement
upon the whole nation,--presumably the Exile. We may date it,
therefore, some time after Isaiah's death, but certainly--and this is
the important point--before the Exile. This, then, is an unmistakably
pre-exilic constituent of "Second Isaiah."
Another feature corroborates this prophecy's original independence
of its context. Its style is immediately and extremely rugged. The
reader of the original feels the difference at once. It is the
difference between travel on the level roads of Mesopotamia, with
their unchanging horizons, and the jolting carriage of the stony
paths of Higher Palestine, with their glimpses rapidly shifting from
gorge to peak. But the remarkable thing is that the usual style of
"Second Isaiah" is resumed before the end of the prophecy. One cannot
always be sure of the exact verse at which such a literary change
takes place. In this case some feel it as soon as the middle of ver.
11, with the words, _Have not I held My peace even of long time,
and thou fearest Me not?_[259] It is surely more sensible, however,
after ver. 14, in which we are arrested in any case by an alteration
of standpoint. In ver. 14 we are on in the Exile again--before ver.
14 I cannot recognise any exilic symptom--and the way of return is
before us. _And one said_,--it is the repetition to the letter of the
strange anonymous voice of ch. xl. 6,--_and one said, Cast ye up,
Cast ye up, open up, or sweep open, a way, lift the stumbling block
from the way of My people_. And now the rhythm has certainly returned
to the prevailing style of "Second Isaiah," and the temper is again
that of promise and comfort.
These sudden shiftings of circumstance and of prospect are enough
to show the thoughtful reader of Scripture how hard is the problem
of the unity of "Second Isaiah." On which we make here no further
remark, but pass at once to the more congenial task of studying the
great prophecy, vv. 14-21, which rises one and simple from these
fragments as does some homogeneous rock from the confusing _débris_
of several geological epochs.
For let the date and original purpose of the fragments we have
considered be what they may, this prophecy has been placed as their
conclusion with at least some rational, not to say spiritual,
intention. As it suddenly issues here, it gathers up, in the usual
habit of Scripture, God's moral indictment of an evil generation, by
a great manifesto of the Divine nature, and a sharp distinction of
the characters and fate of men. Now, of what kind is the generation,
to whose indictment this prophecy comes as a conclusion? It is a
generation which has lost its God, but kept its conscience. This
sums up the national character which is sketched in vv. 3-13. These
Israelites had lost Jehovah and His pure law. But the religion
into which they fell back was not, therefore, easy or cold. On the
contrary, it was very intense and very stern. The people put energy
in it, and passion, and sacrifice that went to cruel lengths. Belief,
too, in its practical results kept the people from fainting under
the weariness in which its fanaticism reacted. _In the length of
thy way thou wast wearied, yet thou didst not say, It is hopeless;
life for thy hand_--that is, real, practical strength--_didst thou
find: wherefore thou didst not break down_. And they practised their
painful and passionate idolatry with a real conscience. They were
seeking to work out righteousness for themselves (ver. 12 should
be rendered: _I will expose your righteousness_, the caricature of
righteousness which you attempt). The most worldly statesman among
them had his sincere ideal for Israel, and intended to enable her, in
the possession of her land and holy mountain, to fulfil her destiny
(ver. 13). The most gross idolater had a hunger and thirst after
righteousness, and burnt his children or sacrificed his purity to
satisfy the vague promptings of his unenlightened conscience.
It was indeed a generation which had kept its conscience, but lost
its God; and what we have in vv. 15 to 21 is just the lost and
forgotten God speaking of His Nature and His Will. They have been
worshipping idols, creatures of their own fears and cruel passions.
But He is the _high and lofty one_--two of the simplest adjectives
in the language, yet sufficient to lift Him they describe above the
distorting mists of human imagination. They thought of the Deity as
sheer wrath and force, scarcely to be appeased by men even through
the most bloody rites and passionate self-sacrifice. But He says,
_The high and the holy I dwell in, yet with him also that is contrite
and humble of spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to
revive the heart of the contrite ones_. The rest of the chapter is
to the darkened consciences a plain statement of the moral character
of God's working. God always punishes sin, and yet the sinner is
not abandoned. Though he go in his own way, God _watches his ways
in order to heal him. I create the fruit of the lips_, that is,
_thanksgivings: Peace, peace, to him that is far off and him that is
near, saith Jehovah, and I will heal him_. But, as in ch. xlviii. and
ch. l., a warning comes last, and behind the clear, forward picture
of the comforted and restored of Jehovah we see the weird background
of gloomy, restless wickedness.
II. SOCIAL SERVICE AND THE SABBATH (ch. lviii.).
Several critics (including Professor Cheyne) regard ch. lviii. as
post-exilic, because of its declarations against formal fasting
and the neglect of social charity, which are akin to those of
post-exilic prophets like Zechariah and Joel, and seem to imply
that the people addressed are again independent and responsible for
the conduct of their social duties. The question largely turns on
the amount of social responsibility we conceive the Jews to have
had during the Exile. Now we have seen that many of them enjoyed
considerable freedom: they had their houses and households; they had
their slaves; they traded and were possessed of wealth. They were,
therefore, in a position to be chargeable with the duties to which
ch. lviii. calls them. The addresses of Ezekiel to his fellow-exiles
have many features in common with ch. lviii., although they do not
mention fasting; and fasting itself was a characteristic habit of the
exiles, in regard to which it is quite likely they should err just as
is described in ch. lviii. Moreover, there is a resemblance between
this chapter's comments upon the people's enquiries of God (ver. 2)
and Ezekiel's reply when certain of the elders of Israel came to
enquire of Jehovah.[260] And again vv. 11 and 12 of ch. lviii. are
evidently addressed to people in prospect of return to their own
land and restoration of their city. We accordingly date ch. lviii.
from the Exile. But we see no reason to put it as early as Ewald
does, who assigns it to a younger contemporary of Ezekiel. There is
no linguistic evidence that it is an insertion, or from another hand
than that of our prophet. Surely there were room and occasion for
it in those years which followed the actual deliverance of the Jews
by Cyrus, but preceded the restoration of Jerusalem,--those years
in which there were no longer political problems in the way of the
people's return for our prophet to discuss, and therefore their moral
defects were all the more thrust upon his attention; and especially,
when in the near prospect of their political independence, their
social sins roused his apprehensions.
Those, who have never heard an angry Oriental speak, have no idea of
what power of denunciation lies in the human throat. In the East, where
a dry climate and large leisure bestow upon the voice a depth and
suppleness prevented by our vulgar haste of life and teasing weather,
men have elaborated their throat-letters to a number unknown in any
Western alphabet; and upon the lowest notes they have put an edge,
that comes up shrill and keen through the roar of the upper gutturals,
till you feel their wrath cut as well as sweep you before it. In the
Oriental throat, speech goes down deep enough to echo all the breadth
of the inner man; while the possibility of expressing within so supple
an organ nearly every tone of scorn or surprise preserves anger from
that suspicion of spite or of exhaustion, which is conveyed by too
liberal a use of the nasal or palatal letters. Hence in the Hebrew
language _to call with the throat_ means to call with vehemence, but
with self-command; with passion, yet as a man; using every figure of
satire, but earnestly; neither forgetting wrath for mere art's sake,
nor allowing wrath to escape the grip of the stronger muscles of the
voice. It is _to lift the voice like a trumpet_,--an instrument, which,
with whatever variety of music its upper notes may indulge our ears,
never suffers its main tone of authority to drop, never slacks its
imperative appeal to the wills of the hearers.
This is the style of the chapter before us, which opens with the words,
_Call with the throat, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet_.
Perhaps no subject more readily provokes to satire and sneers than the
subject of the chapter,--the union of formal religion and unlovely
life. And yet in the chapter there is not a sneer from first to last.
The speaker suppresses the temptation to use his nasal tones, and
utters, not as the satirist, but as the prophet. For his purpose is
not to sport with his people's hypocrisy, but to sweep them out of it.
Before he has done, his urgent speech, that has not lingered to sneer
nor exhausted itself in screaming, passes forth to spend its unchecked
impetus upon final promise and gospel. It is a wise lesson from a
master preacher, and half of the fruitlessness of modern preaching is
due to the neglect of it. The pulpit tempts men to be either too bold
or too timid about sin; either to whisper or to scold; to euphemise or
to exaggerate; to be conventional or hysterical. But two things are
necessary,--the facts must be stated, and the whole manhood of the
preacher, and not only his scorn or only his anger or only an official
temper, brought to bear upon them. _Call with the throat, spare not,
like a trumpet lift up thy voice, and publish to My people their
transgression, and to the house of Jacob their sin._
The subject of the chapter is the habits of a religious people,--the
earnestness and regularity of their religious performance contrasted
with the neglect of their social relations. The second verse, "the
descriptions in which are evidently drawn from life,"[261] tells
us that _the people sought God daily, and had a zeal to know His
ways, as a nation that had done righteousness_,--fulfilled the legal
worship,--_and had not forsaken the law_[262] _of their God: they
ask of Me laws[262] of righteousness_,--that is, a legal worship,
the performance of which might make them righteous,--_and in drawing
near to God they take delight_. They had, in fact, a great greed for
ordinances and functions,[263]--for the revival of such forms as
they had been accustomed to of old. Like some poor prostrate rose,
whose tendrils miss the props by which they were wont to rise to the
sun, the religious conscience and affections of Israel, violently
torn from their immemorial supports, lay limp and windswept on a
bare land, and longed for God to raise some substitute for those
altars of Zion by which, in the dear days of old, they had lifted
themselves to the light of His face. In the absence of anything
better, they turned to the chill and shadowed forms of the fasts
they had instituted.[264] But they did not thereby reach the face
of God. _Wherefore have we fasted_, say they, _and Thou hast not
seen? we have humbled our souls, and Thou takest no notice?_ The
answer comes swiftly: Because your fasting is a mere form! _Lo, in
the very day of your fast ye find a business to do, and all your
workmen you overtask._ So formal is your fasting that your ordinary
eager, selfish, cruel life goes on beside it just the same. Nay, it
is worse than usual, for your worthless, wearisome fast but puts a
sharper edge upon your temper: _Lo, for strife and contention ye
fast, to smile with the fist of tyranny_. And it has no religious
value: _Ye fast not_ like _as_ you are fasting _to-day so as to make
your voice heard on high_. _Is such the fast that I choose,--a day
for a man to afflict himself? Is it to droop his head like a rush,
and grovel on sackcloth and ashes? Is it this thou wilt call a fast
and a day acceptable to Jehovah?_ One of the great surprises of the
human heart is, that self-denial does not win merit or peace. But
assuredly it does not, if love be not with it. Though I give my body
to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Self-denial
without love is self-indulgence. _Is not this the fast that I
choose? to loosen the bonds of tyranny, to shatter the joints of the
yoke, to let the crushed go free, and that ye burst every yoke. Is
it not to break to the hungry thy bread, and that thou bring home
wandering poor?_[265] _when thou seest one naked that thou cover
him, and that from thine own flesh thou hide not thyself? Then shall
break forth like the morning thy light, and thy health_[266] _shall
immediately spring. Yea, go before thee shall thy righteousness,
the glory of Jehovah shall sweep thee on_, literally, _gather thee
up. Then thou shalt call, and Jehovah shall answer; thou shalt
cry, and He shall say, Here am I. If thou shalt put from thy midst
the yoke, and the putting forth of the finger, and the speaking of
naughtiness_--three degrees of the subtlety of selfishness, which
when forced back from violent oppression will retreat to scorn
and from open scorn to backbiting,--_and if thou draw out to the
hungry thy soul_,--tear out what is dear to thee in order to fill
his need, the strongest expression for self-denial which the Old
Testament contains,--_and satisfy the soul that is afflicted, then
shall uprise in the darkness thy light, and thy gloom shall be as
the noonday. And guide thee shall Jehovah continually, and satisfy
thy soul in droughts, and thy limbs make lissom; and thou shalt be
like a garden well-watered,_[267] _and like a spring of water whose
waters fail not. And they that are of thee shall build the ancient
ruins; the foundations of generation upon generation thou shalt
raise up, and they shall be calling thee Repairer-of-the-Breach,
Restorer-of-Paths-for-habitation._[268] Thus their _righteousness_ in
the sense of external vindication and stability, which so prevails
with our prophet, shall be due to their _righteousness_ in that
inward moral sense in which Amos and Isaiah use the word. And so
concludes a passage, which fills the earliest, if not the highest,
place in the glorious succession of Scriptures of Practical Love, to
which belong the Sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, the Twenty-fifth of
Matthew and the Thirteenth of First Corinthians. Its lesson is,--to
go back to the figure of the draggled rose,--that no mere forms of
religion, however divinely prescribed or conscientiously observed,
can of themselves lift the distraught and trailing affections of man
to the light and peace of Heaven; but that our fellow-men, if we
cling to them with love and with arms of help, are ever the strongest
props by which we may rise to God; that character grows rich and life
joyful, not by the performance of ordinances with the cold conscience
of duty, but by acts of service with the warm heart of love.
And yet such a prophecy concludes with an exhortation to the
observance of one religious form, and places the keeping of the
Sabbath on a level with the practice of love. _If thou turn from
the Sabbath thy foot_, from _doing thine own business on My holy
day;_[269] _and callest the Sabbath Pleasure_,--the word is a strong
one, _Delight, Delicacy, Luxury,--Holy of Jehovah, Honourable; and
dost honour it so as not to do thine own ways, or find thine own
business, or keep making talk: then thou shalt find thy pleasure_,
or _thy delight, in Jehovah_,--note the parallel of pleasure in the
Sabbath and pleasure in Jehovah,--_and He shall cause thee to ride on
the high places of the land, and make thee to feed upon the portion
of Jacob thy father: yea, the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken_.
Our prophet, then, while exalting the practical Service of Man at the
expense of certain religious forms, equally exalts the observance of
Sabbath; his scorn for their formalism changes when he comes to it
into a strenuous enthusiasm of defence. This remarkable fact, which is
strictly analogous to the appearance of the Fourth Commandment in a
code otherwise consisting of purely moral and religious laws, is easily
explained. Observe that our prophet bases his plea for Sabbath-keeping,
and his assurance that it must lead to prosperity, not on its physical,
moral or social benefits, but simply upon its acknowledgment of God.
Not only is the Sabbath to be honoured because it is the _Holy of
Jehovah_ and _Honourable_, but _making it one's pleasure_ is equivalent
to _finding one's pleasure in Him_. The parallel between these two
phrases in ver. 13 and ver. 14 is evident, and means really this:
Inasmuch as ye do it unto the Sabbath, ye do it unto Me. The prophet,
then, enforces the Sabbath simply on account of its religious and
Godward aspect. Now, let us remember the truth, which he so often
enforces, that the Service of Man, however ardently and widely pursued,
can never lead or sum up our duty; that the Service of God has,
logically and practically, a prior claim, for without it the Service
of Man must suffer both in obligation and in resource. God must be
our first resort--must have our first homage, affection and obedience.
But this cannot well take place without some amount of definite and
regular and frequent devotion to Him. In the most spiritual religion
there is an irreducible minimum of formal observance. Now, in that
wholesale destruction of religious forms, which took place at the
overthrow of Jerusalem,[270] there was only one institution, which was
not necessarily involved. The Sabbath did not fall with the Temple and
the Altar: the Sabbath was independent of all locality; the Sabbath was
possible even in exile. It was the one solemn, public and frequently
regular form in which the nation could turn to God, glorify Him and
enjoy Him. Perhaps, too, through the Babylonian fashion of solemnising
the seventh day, our prophet realised again the primitive institution
of the Sabbath, and was reminded that, since seven days is a regular
part of the natural year, the Sabbath is, so to speak, sanctioned by
the statutes of Creation.
An institution, which is so primitive, which is so independent of
locality, which forms so natural a part of the course of time, but
which, above all, has twice--in the Jewish Exile and in the passage
of Judaism to Christianity--survived the abrogation and disappearance
of all other forms of the religion with which it was connected, and
has twice been affirmed by prophecy or practice to be an essential
part of spiritual religion and the equal of social morality,--has
amply proved its Divine origin and its indispensableness to man.
III. SOCIAL CRIMES (ch. lix.).
Ch. lix. is, at first sight, the most difficult of all of "Second
Isaiah" to assign to a date.[271] For it evidently contains both
pre-exilic and exilic elements. On the one hand, its charges of guilt
imply that the people addressed by it are responsible for civic justice
to a degree, which could hardly be imputed to the Jews in Babylon. We
saw that the Jews in the Exile had an amount of social freedom and
domestic responsibility which amply accounts for the kind of sins they
are charged with in ch. lviii. But ver. 14 of ch. lix. reproaches
them with the collapse of justice in the very seat and public office
of justice, of which it was not possible they could have been guilty
except in their own land and in the days of their independence. On the
other hand, the promises of deliverance in ch. lix. read very much as
if they were exilic. _Judgement_ and _righteousness_ are employed in
ver. 9 in their exilic sense,[272] and God is pictured exactly as we
have seen Him in other chapters of our prophet.
Are we then left with a mystery? On the contrary, the solution is
clear. Israel is followed into exile by her old conscience. The
charges of Isaiah and Ezekiel against Jerusalem, while Jerusalem was
still a "civitas," ring in her memory. She repeats the very words.
With truth she says that her present state, so vividly described in
vv. 9-11, is due to sins of old, of which, though perhaps she can
no longer commit them, she still feels the guilt. Conscience always
crowds the years together; there is no difference of time in the eyes
of God the Judge. And it was natural, as we have said already, that
the nation should remember her besetting sins at this time; that her
civic conscience should awake again, just as she was again about to
become a civitas.[273][274]
The whole of this chapter is simply the expansion and enforcement
of the first two verses, that keep clanging like the clangour of a
great, high bell: _Behold, Jehovah's hand is not shortened that it
cannot save, neither is His ear heavy that it cannot hear; but your
iniquities have been separators between you and your God, and your
sins have hidden_ His _face from you, that He will not hear._ There
is but one thing that comes between the human heart and the Real
Presence and Infinite Power of God; and that one thing is Sin. The
chapter labours to show how real God is. Its opening verses talk of
_His Hand_, _His Ear_, _His Face_. And the closing verses paint Him
with the passions and the armour of a man,--a Hero in such solitude
and with such forward force, that no imagination can fail to see
the Vivid, Lonely Figure. _And He saw that there was no man, and He
wondered that there was none to interpose; therefore His own right
arm brought salvation unto Him, and His righteousness it upheld Him.
And He put on righteousness like a breastplate and salvation for
an helmet upon His head; and He put on garments of vengeance for
clothing, and wrapped Himself in zeal like a robe._ Do not let us
suppose this is mere poetry. Conceive what inspires it,--the great
truth that in the Infinite there is a heart to throb for men and a
will to strike for them. This is what the writer desires to proclaim,
and what we believe the Spirit of God moved his poor human lips
to give their own shape to,--the simple truth that there is One,
however hidden He may be to men's eyes, who feels for men, who feels
hotly for men, and whose will is quick and urgent to save them. Such
an One tells His people, that the only thing which prevents them
from knowing how real His heart and will are--the only thing which
prevents them from seeing His work in their midst--is their sin.
The roll of sins to which the prophet attributes the delay of the
people's deliverance is an awful one; and the man who reads it with
conscience asleep might conclude that it was meant only for a period
of extraordinary violence and bloodshed. Yet the chapter implies that
society exists, and that at least the forms of civilisation are in
force. Men sue one another before the usual courts. But none _sueth
in righteousness or goeth to the law in truth. They trust in vanity
and speak lies._ All these charges might be true of a society as
outwardly respectable as our own. Nor is the charge of bloodshed to
be taken literally. The Old Testament has so great a regard for the
spiritual nature of man, that to deny the individual his rights or to
take away the peace of God from his heart, it calls the shedding of
innocent blood. Isaiah reminds us of many kinds of this moral murder
when he says, _your hands are full of blood: seek justice, relieve the
oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow_. Ezekiel reminds
us of others when he tells how God spake to him, that if he _warn not
the wicked, and the same wicked shall die in his iniquity, his blood
will I require at thy hand_. And again a Psalm reminds us of the time
_when the Lord maketh inquisition for blood, He forgetteth not the cry
of the poor_.[275] This is what the Bible calls murder and lays its
burning words upon,--not such acts of bloody violence as now and then
make all humanity thrill to discover that in the heart of civilisation
there exist men with the passions of the ape and the tiger, but such
oppression of the poor, such cowardice to rebuke evil, such negligence
to restore the falling, such abuse of the characters of the young
and innocent, such fraud and oppression of the weak, as often exist
under the most respectable life, and employ the weapons of a Christian
civilisation in order to fulfil themselves. We have need to take
the bold, violent standards of the prophets and lay them to our own
lives,--the prophets that call the man who sells his honesty for gain,
_a harlot_, and hold him _blood-guilty_ who has wronged, tempted or
neglected his brother. Do not let us suppose that these crimson verses
of the Bible may be passed over by us as not applicable to ourselves.
They do not refer to murderers or maniacs: they refer to social crimes,
to which we all are in perpetual temptation, and of which we all are
more or less guilty,--the neglect of the weak, the exploitation of
the poor for our own profit, the soiling of children's minds, the
multiplying of temptation in the way of God's little ones, the malice
that leads us to blast another's character, or to impute to his action
evil motives for which we have absolutely no grounds save the envy
and sordidness of our own hearts. Do not let us fail to read all such
verses in the clear light which John the Apostle throws on them when
he says: _He that loveth not abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his
brother is a murderer._
FOOTNOTES:
[258] See vol. i., pp. 363, 364.
[259] So Ewald, Cheyne and Briggs. Ewald takes lvi. 9-lvii. 11_a_
as an interruption, borrowed from an earlier prophet in a time of
persecution, of the exilic prophecy, which goes on smoothly from lvi.
8 to lvii. 11_b_. We have seen that it is an error to suppose that
lvi. 9-lvii. rose from a time of persecution.
[260] Ezek. xxi.; _cf._ xxxiii. 30 f.
[261] Delitzsch.
[262] Mishpat and mishpatim, _cf._ p. 299.
[263] Such as is also expressed by exiles in Psalms xlii., xliii. and
lxiii., but there with what spiritual temper, here with what a hard
legal conception of righteousness.
[264] For these see p. 61.
[265] Literally, _the poor, the wandering_. It was a frequent
phrase in the Exile: Lam. iii. 19, _Remember mine affliction and my
homelessness_; i. 7, Jerusalem in the day _of her affliction and her
homelessness_. LXX. αστεγοι, roofless.
[266] Probably the fresh flesh which appears through a healing wound.
Made classical by Jeremiah, who uses it thrice of Israel,--in the
famous text, _Is there no balm_, etc., x. 22; and in xxx. 17; xxxiii. 6.
[267] Jer. xxxi. 12.
[268] _Cf._ Job xxiv. 13.
[269] _Cf._ Amos viii. 5.
[270] See pp. 43 f.
[271] Ewald conceives chs. lviii., lix. to be the work of a younger
contemporary of Ezekiel, to which the chief author of "Second Isaiah"
has added words of his own: lviii. 12, lix. 21. The latter is
evidently an insertion; _cf._ change of person and of number, etc.
Delitzsch puts the passage down to the last decade of the Captivity,
when for a little time Cyrus had turned away from Babylon, and the
Jews despaired of his coming to save them.
[272] See pp. 219 ff.
[273] Another slight trace reveals the conglomerate nature of the
chapter. If, as the earlier verses indicate, it was Israel that
sinned, then it is the rebellious in Israel who should be punished.
In ver. 18_a_, therefore, the _adversaries_ or _enemies_ ought to be
Israelites. But in 18_b_ the foreign _islands_ are included. The LXX.
has not this addition. Bredenkamp takes the words for an insertion.
Yet the consequences of Israel's sin, according to the chapter, are
not so much the punishment of the rebellious among the people as
the delay of the deliverance for the whole nation,--a deliverance
which Jehovah is represented as rising to accomplish, the moment the
people express the sense of their rebellion and are penitent. The
_adversaries_ and _enemies_ of ver. 18, therefore, are the oppressors
of Israel, the foreigners and heathen; and 18_b_ with its _islands_
comes in quite naturally.
[274] _Note on mishpat and Ssedhaqah in ch. lix._ This chapter is a
good one for studying the various meanings of mishpat. In ver. 4 the
verb shaphat is used in its simplest sense of going to law. In vv.
8 and 14 mishpat is a quality or duty of man. But in ver. 9 it is
rather what man expects from God, and what is far from man because of
his sins; it is _judgement_ on God's side, or God's saving ordinance.
In this sense it is probably to be taken in ver. 15,--Ssedhaqah
follows the same parallel. This goes to prove that we have two
distinct prophecies amalgamated, unless we believe that a play upon
the words is intended.
[275] Isa. i. 17; Ezek. ii. 18; Psalm ix. 12.
CHAPTER XXIV.
_SALVATION IN SIGHT._
ISAIAH lx.-lxiii. 7.
The deliverance from Babylon has long been certain, since ch.
xlviii.; all doubts in the way of Return have been removed, ch.
xlix.-lii. 12; the means for the spiritual Restoration of the people
have been sufficiently found, ch. liii. and preceding chapters on
the Servant; Zion has been hailed from afar, ch. liv.; last calls to
leave Babylon have been uttered, ch. lv.; last councils and comforts,
lvi. 1-8; and the civic conscience has been rekindled, ch. lvi.
9-lix. There remains now only to take possession of the City herself;
to rehearse the vocation of the restored people; and to realise all
the hopes, fears, hindrances and practical problems of the future.
These duties occupy the rest of our prophecy, chs. lx.-lxvi.
Ch. lx. is a prophecy as complete in itself as ch. liv. The
City, which in liv. was hailed and comforted from afar, is in
ch. lx. bidden rise and enjoy the glory that has at last reached
her. Her splendours, hinted at in ch. liv., are seen in full and
evident display. In chs. lxi.-lxii. her prophet, her genius and
representative, rehearses to her his duties, and sets forth her
place among the peoples. And in ch. lxiii. 1-7 we have another of
those theophanies or appearances of the--Sole Divine Author of His
people's salvation, which, abrupt and separate as if to heighten
the sense of the solitariness of their subject--occur at intervals
throughout our prophecy,--for instance, in ch. xlii., vv. 10-17, and
in ch. lix. 16-19. These three sections, ch. lx., chs. lxi.-lxii. and
ch. lxiii. 1-7, we will take together in this chapter of our volume.
I. ARISE, SHINE (ch. lx.)
The Sixtieth chapter of Isaiah is the spiritual counterpart of a
typical Eastern day, with the dust laid and the darts taken out of
the sunbeams,--a typical Eastern day in the sudden splendour of its
dawn, the completeness and apparent permanence of its noon, the
spaciousness it reveals on sea and land, and the barbaric profusion
of life, which its strong light is sufficient to flood with glory.
Under such a day we see Jerusalem. In the first five verses of the
chapter, she is addressed, as in ch. liv., as a crushed and desolate
woman. But her lonely night is over, and from some prophet at the
head of her returning children the cry peals, _Arise, shine, for
come hath thy light, and the glory of Jehovah hath risen upon thee_.
In the East the sun does not rise; the word is weak for an arrival
almost too sudden for twilight. In the East the sun leaps above the
horizon. You do not feel that he is coming, but that he is come. This
first verse is suggested by the swiftness with which he bursts upon
an Eastern city, and the shrouded form does not, as in our twilight,
slowly unwrap itself, but _shines_ at once, all plates and points
of glory. Then the figure yields: for Jerusalem is not merely one
radiant point in a world equally lighted by the sun, but is herself
Jehovah's unique luminary. _For behold the darkness shall cover the
earth, and gross darkness the peoples, but upon thee shall Jehovah
arise, and His glory upon thee shall be seen. And nations shall come
to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising._ In the next
two verses it is again a woman who is addressed. _Lift up_ thine
eyes _round about and see, all of them have gathered, have come to
thee: thy sons from afar are coming, and thy daughters are carried
in the arms._[276] Then follows the fairest verse in the chapter.
_Then thou shalt see and be radiant, and thy heart shall throb and
grow large; for there shall be turned upon thee the sea's flood-tide,
and the wealth of the nations shall come to thee._ The word which
the Authorised English version translated _shall flow together_, and
our Revised Version _lightened_, means both of these. It is liquid
light,--light that ripples and sparkles and runs across the face;
as it best appears in that beautiful passage of the thirty-fourth
Psalm, _they looked to Him and their faces were lightened_. Here it
suggests the light which a face catches from sparkling water. The
prophet's figure has changed. The stately mother of her people stands
not among the ruins of her city, but upon some great beach, with the
sea in front,--the sea that casts up all heaven's light upon her face
and drifts all earth's wealth to her feet, and her eyes are upon the
horizon with the hope of her who watches for the return of children.
The next verses are simply the expansion of these two clauses,--about
the sea's flood and the wealth of the Nations. Vv. 6-9 look first
landward and then seaward, as from Jerusalem's own wonderful
position on the high ridge between Asia and the sea: between the
gates of the East and the gates of the West. On the one side, the
city's horizon is the range of Moab and Edom, that barrier, in
Jewish imagination, of the hidden and golden East across which pour
the caravans here pictured. _Profusion of camels shall cover thee,
young camels of Midian and Ephah; all of them from Sheba shall come:
gold and frankincense shall they bring, and the praises of Jehovah
shall they publish. All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered to
thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister to thee: they shall come
up with acceptance on Mine altar, and the house of My glory will
I glorify._ These were just what surged over Jordan from the far
countries beyond, of which the Jews knew little more than the names
here given,--tawny droves of camels upon the greenness of Palestine
like a spate of the desert from which they poured; rivers of sheep
brimming up the narrow drove-roads to Jerusalem:--conceive it all
under that blazing Eastern sun. But then turning to Judah's other
horizon, marked by the yellow fringe of sand and the blue haze of
the sea beyond, the prophet cries for Jehovah: _Who are these like a
cloud that fly, and like doves to their windows? Surely towards Me
the Isles_[277] _are stretching, and ships of Tarshish in the van,
to bring thy sons from afar, their silver and their gold with them,
to the Name of Jehovah of Hosts and to the Holy of Israel, for He
hath glorified thee._ The poetry of the Old Testament has been said
to be deficient in its treatment of the sea; and certainly it dwells
more frequently, as was natural for the imagination of an inland and
a highland people to do, upon the hills. But in what literature will
you find passages of equal length more suggestive of the sea than
those short pieces in which the Hebrew prophet sought to render the
futile rage of the world, as it dashed on the steadfast will of God,
by the roar and crash of the ocean on the beach;[278] or painted a
nation's prosperity as the waves of a summer sea;[279] or described
the long coastlands as stretching out to God, and the white-sailed
ships coming up the horizon like doves to their windows!
The rest of the chapter, from ver. 10 onwards, is occupied with the
rebuilding and adornment of Jerusalem, and with the establishment of
the people in righteousness and peace. There is a very obvious mingling
of the material and the moral. The Gentiles are to become subject to
the Jew, but it is to be a voluntary submission before the evidence
of Jerusalem's spiritual superiority. Nothing is said of a Messiah or
a King. Jerusalem is to be a commonwealth; and, while her _magistracy
shall be Peace and her overseers Righteousness_, God Himself, in
evident presence, is to be her light and glory. Thus the chapter ends
with God and the People, and nothing else. God for an everlasting light
around, and the people in their land, righteous, secure and growing
very large. _The least shall become a thousand, and the smallest a
strong nation: I Jehovah will hasten it in its time._
This chapter has been put through many interpretations to many
practical uses:--to describe the ingathering of the Gentiles to the
Church (in the Christian year it is the Lesson for Epiphany), to
prove the doctrine that the Church should live by the endowment of
the kingdoms of this world, and to enforce the duty of costliness
and magnificence in the public worship of God. _The glory of the
Lebanon shall come unto thee, fir-tree, plane-tree and sherbin
together, to beautify the place of My sanctuary, and I will make the
place of My feet glorious._
The last of these duties we may extend and qualify. If the coming in
of the Gentiles is here represented as bringing wealth to the Church,
we cannot help remembering that the going out to the Gentiles, in
order to bring them in, means for us the spending of our wealth on
things other than the adornment of temples; and that, besides the
heathen, there are poor and suffering ones for whom God asks men's
gold, as He asked it in olden days for the temple, that He may be
glorified. Take that last phrase:--_And_--with all that material
wealth which has flowed in from Lebanon, from Midian, from Sheba--_I
will make the place of My feet glorious_. When this singular name
was first uttered it was limited to the dwelling-place of the Ark
and Presence of God, visible only on Mount Zion. But when God became
man, and did indeed tread with human feet this world of ours, what
were then the _places of His feet_? Sometimes, it is true, the
Temple, but only sometimes; far more often where the sick lay, and
the bereaved were weeping,--the pool of Bethesda, the death-room of
Jairus' daughter, the way to the centurion's sick servant, the city
gateways where the beggars stood, the lanes where the village folk
had gathered, against His coming, their deaf and dumb, their palsied
and lunatic. These were _the places of His feet, who Himself bare
our sicknesses and carried our infirmities_; and these are what He
would seek our wealth to make glorious. They say that the reverence
of men builds now no cathedrals as of old; nay, but the love of man,
that Christ taught, builds far more of those refuges and houses of
healing, scatters far more widely those medicines for the body, those
instruments of teaching, those means of grace, in which God is as
much glorified as in Jewish Temple or Christian Cathedral.
Nevertheless He, who set _the place of His feet_, which He would have
us to glorify, among the poor and the sick, was He, who also did not
for Himself refuse that alabaster box and that precious ointment,
which might have been sold for much and given to the poor. The
worship of God, if we read Scripture aright, ought to be more than
merely grave and comely. There should be heartiness and lavishness
about it,--profusion and brilliance. Not of material gifts alone or
chiefly, gold incense or rare wood, but of human faculties, graces
and feeling; of joy and music and the sense of beauty. Take this
chapter. It is wonderful, not so much for the material wealth which
it devotes to the service of God's house, and which is all that many
eyes ever see in it, as for the glorious imagination and heart for
the beautiful, the joy in light and space and splendour, the poetry
and the music, which use those material things simply as the light
uses the wick, or as music uses the lyre, to express and reveal
itself. What a call this chapter is to let out the natural wonder
and poetry of the heart, its feeling and music and exultation,--_all
that is within us_, as the Psalmist says,--in the Service of God.
Why do we not do so? The answer is very simple. Because, unlike this
prophet, we do not realise how present and full our salvation is;
because, unlike him, we do not realise that _our light has come_, and
so we will not _arise and shine_.
II. THE GOSPEL (chs. lxi.-lxii.)
The speaker in ch. lxi. is not introduced by name. Therefore he
may be the Prophet himself, or he may be the Servant. The present
expositor, while feeling that the evidence is not conclusive against
either of these, and that the uncertainty is as great as in ch.
xlviii. 16,[280] inclines to think that there is, on the whole, less
objection to its being the prophet who speaks than to its being
the Servant. See the appended note. But it is not a very important
question, which is intended, for the Servant was representative of
prophecy; and if it be the prophet who speaks here, he also speaks
with the conscience of the whole function and aim of the prophetic
order. That Jesus Christ fulfilled this programme does not decide
the question one way or the other; for a prophet so representative
was as much the antetype and foreshadowing of Christ as the Servant
himself was. On the whole, then, we must be content to feel about
this passage, what we must have already felt about many others in
our prophecy, that the writer is more anxious to place before us the
whole range and ideal of the prophetic gift than to make clear in
whom this ideal is realised; and for the rest Jesus of Nazareth so
plainly fulfilled it, that it becomes, indeed, a very minor question
to ask whom the writer may have intended as its first application.
If ch. lx. showed us the external glory of God's people, ch. lxi. opens
with the programme of their inner mission. There we had the building
and adornment of the Temple, that _Jehovah might glorify His people_:
here we have the binding of broken hearts and the beautifying of soiled
lives, that _Jehovah may be glorified_. But this inner mission also
issues in external splendour, in a righteousness, which is like the
adornment of a bride and like the beauty of spring.
The commission of the prophet is mainly to duties we have already
studied in preceding passages, both on himself and on the Servant.
It will be enough to point out its special characteristics. _The
Spirit of my Lord Jehovah is upon me, for that Jehovah hath anointed
me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; He hath sent me to bind
up the broken-hearted, to proclaim to the captive liberty, and to
the prisoners open ways;_[281] _to proclaim an acceptable year for
Jehovah, and a day of vengeance for our God; to comfort all that mourn;
to offer to the mourners of Zion, to give unto them a crest_[282] _for
ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the mantle of praise for the spirit
of dimness;_[283] _so that men may call them Oaks-of-Righteousness, the
planting of Jehovah, that He may break into glory._
There are heard here all the keynotes of our prophet, and clear,
too, is that usual and favourite direction of his thoughts from the
inner and spiritual influences to the outward splendour and evidence,
the passage from the comfort and healing of the heart to the rich
garment, the renown, and his own dearest vision of great forest
trees,--in short, Jehovah Himself breaking into glory. But one point
needs special attention.
The prophet begins his commission by these words, _to bring good
tidings to the afflicted_, and again says, _to proclaim to the
captive_. _The afflicted_, or _the poor_, as it is mostly rendered,
is the classical name for God's people in Exile. We have sufficiently
moved among this people to know for what reason the _bringing
of good tidings_ should here be reckoned as the first and most
indispensable service that prophecy could render them. Why, in the
life of every nation, there are hours, when the factors of destiny,
that loom largest at other times, are dwarfed and dwindle before
the momentousness of a piece of news,--hours, when the nation's
attitude in a great moral issue, or her whole freedom and destiny,
are determined by telegrams from the seat of war. The simultaneous
news of Grant's capture of Vicksburg and Meade's defeat of Lee, news
that finally turned English opinion, so long shamefully debating and
wavering, to the side of God and the slave; the telegrams from the
army, for which silent crowds waited in the Berlin squares through
the autumn nights of 1870, conscious that the unity and birthright
of Germany hung upon the tidings,--are instances of the vital and
paramount influence in a nation's history of a piece of news. The
force of a great debate in Parliament, the expression of public
opinion through all its organs, the voice of a people in a general
election, things in their time as ominous as the Fates, all yield
at certain supreme moments to the meaning of a simple message from
Providence. Now it was for _news_ from God that Israel waited in
Exile; for good tidings and the proclamation of fact. They had with
them a Divine Law, but no mere exposition of it could satisfy men who
were captives and waited for the command of their freedom. They had
with them Psalms, but no beauty of music could console them: _How
should we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?_ They had Prophecy,
with its assurance of the love and the power of their God; and much
as there was in it to help them to patience and to hope, general
statements were not enough for them. They needed the testimony of a
fact. Freedom and Restoration had been promised them: they waited
for the proclamation that it was coming, for the good news that it
had arrived. Now our prophecy is mainly this proclamation and good
news of fact. The prophet uses before all other words two,--to call
or proclaim, kara, and to tell good tidings, bisser. We found them
in his opening chapter: we find them again here when he sums up his
mission. A third goes along with them, _to comfort_, naham, but it is
the accompaniment, and they are the burden, of his prophecy.
But _good tidings_ and the _proclamation_ meant so much more than
the mere political deliverance of Israel--meant the fact of their
pardon, the tale of their God's love, of His provision for them,
and of His wonderful passion and triumph of salvation on their
behalf--that it is no wonder that these two words came to be ever
afterwards the classical terms for all speech and prophecy from God
to man. We actually owe the Greek words of the New Testament for
_gospel_ and _preaching_ to this time of Israel's history. The Greek
term, from which we have _evangel_, _evangelist_ and _evangelise_,
originally meant good news, but was first employed in a religious
sense in the Greek translation of our prophecy. And our word "preach"
is the heir, though not the lineal descendant, through the Latin
_prædicare_ and the Greek κηρυσσειν, of the word, which is translated
in ch. lx. of our prophet to _proclaim_, but in ch. xl. to _call_
or _cry_. It is to the Exile that we trace the establishment among
God's people of regular preaching side by side with sacramental and
liturgical worship; for it was in the Exile that the Synagogue arose,
whose pulpit was to become as much the centre of Israel's life as was
the altar of the Temple. And it was from the pulpit of a synagogue
centuries after, when the preaching had become dry exposition or hard
lawgiving, that Jesus re-read our prophecy and affirmed again the
_good news_ of God.
What is true of nations is true of individuals. We indeed support
our life by principles; we develop it by argument;--we cannot lay
too heavy stress upon philosophy and law. But there is something of
far greater concern than either argument or the abstract principles
from which it is developed; something that our reason cannot find of
itself, that our conscience but increases our longing for. It is,
whether certain things are facts or not; whether, for instance,
the Supreme Power of the Universe is on the side of the individual
combatant for righteousness; whether God is love; whether Sin has
been forgiven; whether Sin and Death have ever been conquered;
whether the summer has come in which humanity may put forth their
shoots conscious that all the influence of heaven is on their
side, or whether, there being no heavenly favours, man must train
his virtue and coax his happiness to ripen behind shelters and in
conservatories of his own construction. Now Christ comes to us with
the good news of God that it is so. The supreme force in the Universe
is on man's side, and for man has won victory and achieved freedom.
God has proclaimed pardon. A Saviour has overcome sin and death. We
are free to break from evil. The struggle after holiness is not the
struggle of a weakly plant in an alien soil and beneath a wintry
sky, counting only upon the precarious aids of human cultivation;
but summer has come, the acceptable year of the Lord has begun, and
all the favour of the Almighty is on His people's side. These are
the _good tidings_ and _proclamation_ of God, and to every man who
believes them they must make an incalculable difference in life.
As we have said, the prophet passes in the rest of this prophecy from
the spiritual influences of his mission to its outward effects. The
people's righteousness is described in the external fashion, which we
have already studied in Chapter Fourteen; Zion's espousals to Jehovah
are celebrated, but into that we have also gone thoroughly (pp. 398
ff.); the restoration of prophecy in Jerusalem is described (lxii.
6-9), as in ch. lii. 8; and another call is given to depart from
Babylon and every foreign city and come to Zion. This call coming
now, so long after the last, and when we might think that the prophet
had wholly left Babylon behind, need not surprise us. For even though
some Jews had actually arrived at Zion, which is not certain, others
were hanging back in Babylon; and, indeed, such a call as this might
fitly be renewed for the next century or two: so many of God's people
continued to forget that their citizenship was in Zion.
III. THE DIVINE SAVIOUR (ch. lxiii. 1-7).
Once again the prophet turns to hail, in his periodic transport, the
Solitary Divine Hero and Saviour of His people.
That the writer of this piece is the main author of "Second Isaiah"
is probable, both because it is the custom of the latter to describe
at intervals the passion and effort of Israel's Mighty One, and
because several of his well-known phrases meet us in this piece. The
_speaker in righteousness mighty to save_ recalls ch. xlv. 19-24;
and _the day of vengeance and year of my redeemed_ recalls ch. lxi.
2; and _I looked, and there was no helper, and I gazed, and there
was none to uphold_, recalls lix. 16. The prophet is looking out
from Jerusalem towards Edom,--a direction in which the watchmen upon
Zion had often in her history looked for the return of her armies
from the punishment of Israel's congenital and perpetual foe. The
prophet, however, sees the prospect filled up, not by the flashing
van of a great army, but by a solitary figure, without ally, without
chariot, without weapons, _swaying on in the wealth of his strength_.
The keynote of the piece is the loneliness of this Hero. A figure
is used, which, where battle would only have suggested complexity,
enthrals us with the spectacle of solitary effort,--the figure of
trampling through some vast winefat alone. The Avenging Saviour of
Israel has a fierce joy in being alone: it is his new nerve to effort
and victory,--_therefore mine own right arm, it brought salvation to
me_. We see One great form in the strength of one great emotion. _My
fury, it upheld me._
The interpretation of this chapter by Christians has been very
varied, and often very perverse. To use the words of Calvin,
"Violenter torserunt hoc caput Christiani." But, as he sees very
rightly, it is not the Messiah nor the Servant of Jehovah, who is
here pictured, but Jehovah Himself. This Solitary is the Divine
Saviour of Israel, as in ch. xlii. 7 f. and in ch. lix. 16 f. In
Chapter Eight of this volume we spoke so fully of the Passion of God,
that we may now refer to that chapter for the essential truth which
underlies our prophet's anthropomorphism, and claims our worship
where a short sight might only turn the heart away in scorn at the
savage and blood-stained surface. One or two other points, however,
demand our attention before we give the translation.
Why does the prophet look in the direction of Edom for the return of
his God? Partly, it is to be presumed, because Edom was as good a
representative as he could choose of the enemies of Israel other than
Babylon.[284] But also partly, perhaps, because of the names which
match the red colours of his piece,--the wine and the blood. Edom
means _red_, and Bossrah is assonant to Bôsser, a _vinedresser_.[285]
Fitter background and scenery the prophet, therefore, could not have
for his drama of Divine Vengeance. But we must take care, as Dillmann
properly remarks, not to imagine that any definite, historical invasion
of Edom by Israel, or other chastening instrument of Jehovah, is here
intended. It is a vision which the prophet sees of Jehovah Himself: it
illustrates the passion, the agony, the unshared and unaided effort
which the Divine Saviour passes through for His people.
Further, it is only necessary to point out, that the term in ver. 1
given as _splendid_ by the Authorised Version, which I have rendered
_sweeping_, is literally _swelling_, and is, perhaps, best rendered
by _sailing on_ or _swinging on_. The other verb which the Revised
Version renders _marching_ means _swaying_, or moving the head or
body from one side to another, in the pride and fulness of strength.
In ver. 2 _like a wine-treader_ is literally _like him that treadeth
in the pressing-house_--Geth (the first syllable of Gethsemane, the
oil-press). But ה ור in ver. 3 is the _pressing-trough_.
_Who is this coming from Edom,_
_Raw-red_ his _garments from Bossrah!_
_This sweeping on in his raiment,_
_Swaying in the wealth of his strength?_
_I that do speak in righteousness,_
_Mighty to save!_
_Wherefore is red on thy raiment,_
_And thy garments like to a wine-treader's?_
_A trough I have trodden alone,_
_Of the peoples no man was with me.
So I trod them down in my wrath,_
_And trampled them down in my fury;_
_Their life-blood sprinkled my garments,_
_And all my raiment I stained._
_For the day of revenge in my heart,_
_And the year of my redeemed has come._
_And I looked, and no helper;_
_I gazed, and none to uphold!_
_So my righteousness won me salvation;_
_And my fury, it hath upheld me._
_So I stamp on the peoples in my wrath,_
_And make them drunk with my fury,_
_And bring down to earth their life-blood._
FOOTNOTES:
[276] Literally, _on the side_ or _hip_, the Eastern method of
carrying children.
[277] Or _coasts_. See pp. 109 ff.
[278] Isa. xiv.; _Isaiah i.-xxxix._, pp. 281 ff.
[279] Isa. xlviii. 18.
[280] See p. 210, note. Some points of the speaker's description of
himself--for example, the gift of the Spirit and the anointing--suit
equally well any prophet, or the unique Servant. The lofty mission
and its great results are not too lofty or great for our prophet, for
Jeremiah received his office in terms as large. That the prophet has
not yet spoken at such length in his own person is no reason why he
should not do so now, especially as this is an occasion on which he
sums up and enforces the whole range of prophecy. It can, therefore,
very well be the prophet who speaks. On the other hand, to say with
Diestel that it cannot be the Servant because the personification of
the Servant ceases with ch. liii. is to beg the question. A stronger
argument against the case for the Servant is that the speaker does
not call himself by that name, as he does in other passages when he
is introduced; but this is not conclusive, for in l. 4-9 the Servant,
though he speaks, does not name himself. To these may be added this
(from Krüger), that the Servant's discourse never passes without
transition into that of God, as this speaker's in ver. 8, but the
prophet's discourse often so passes; and this, that בשׂר, קרא and
נחם are often used of the prophet, and not at all of the Servant.
These are all the points in the question, and it will be seen how
inconclusive they are. If any further proof of this were required,
it would be found in the fact that authorities are equally divided.
There hold for the Servant Calvin, Delitzsch, Cheyne (who previously
took the other view), Driver, Briggs, Nägelsbach and Orelli. But the
Targums, Ewald, Hitzig, Diestel, Dillmann, Bredenkamp and Krüger hold
by the prophet. Krüger's reasons, _Essai sur la Théologie d'Isaïe
xl.-lxvi._, p. 76, are specially worthy of attention.
[281] Literally, _opening_; but the word is always used of opening of
the eyes. Ewald renders _open air_, Dillmann _hellen Blick_.
[282] Any insignia or ornament for the head.
[283] The same word as in xlii. 3, _fading wick_.
[284] See _Isaiah i.-xxxix._, pp. 438-40.
[285] _Cf._ Krüger, _Essai sur la Théologie d'Isaïe xl.-lxvi._, pp.
154-55. Lagarde has proposed to read אָדָּםמְ, past participle, for
מֵאֱדֹם and מִבּצֵר for מִבָּצְרָה. _Who is this that cometh dyed
red, redder in his garments than a vinedresser?_
CHAPTER XXV.
_A LAST INTERCESSION AND THE JUDGEMENT._
ISAIAH lxiii. 7-lxvi.
We might well have thought, that with the section we have been
considering the prophecy of Israel's Redemption had reached its
summit and its end. The glory of Zion in sight, the full programme
of prophecy owned, the arrival of the Divine Saviour hailed in the
urgency of His feeling for His people, in the sufficiency of His
might to save them,--what more, we ask, can the prophecy have to give
us? Why does it not end upon these high notes? The answer is, the
salvation is indeed consummate, but the people are not ready for it.
On an earlier occasion, let us remember, when our prophet called the
nation to their Service of God, he called at first the whole nation,
but had then immediately to make a distinction. Seen in the light of
their destiny, the mass of Israel proved to be unworthy; tried by
its strain, part immediately fell away. But what happened upon that
call to Service happens again upon this disclosure of Salvation. The
prophet realises that it is only a part of Israel who are worthy of
it. He feels again the weight, which has been the hindrance of his
hope all through,--the weight of the mass of the nation, sunk in
idolatry and wickedness, incapable of appreciating the promises. He
will make one more effort to save them--to save them all. He does
this in an intercessory prayer, ch. lxiii. 7-lxiv., in which he
states the most hopeless aspects of his people's case, identifies
himself with their sin, and yet pleads by the ancient power of God
that _we all_ may be saved. He gets his answer in ch. lxv., in which
God sharply divides Israel into two classes, the faithful and the
idolaters, and affirms that, while the nation shall be saved for the
sake of the faithful remnant, Jehovah's faithful servants and the
unfaithful can never share the same experience or the same fate.
And then the book closes with a discourse in ch. lxvi., in which
this division between the two classes in Israel is pursued to a last
terrible emphasis and contrast upon the narrow stage of Jerusalem
itself. We are left, not with the realisation of the prophet's prayer
for the salvation of all the nations, but with a last judgement
separating its godly and ungodly portions.
Thus there are three connected divisions in lxiii. 7-lxvi. _First_,
the prophet's Intercessory Prayer, ch. lxiii. 7-lxiv.; _second_, the
Answer of Jehovah, ch. lxv.; and _third_, the Final Discourse and
Judgement, ch. lxvi.
I. THE PRAYER FOR THE WHOLE PEOPLE (ch. lxiii. 7-lxiv.).
There is a good deal of discussion as to both the date and the
authorship of this piece,--as to whether it comes from the early
or the late Exile, and as to whether it comes from our prophet or
from another. It must have been written after the destruction and
before the rebuilding of the Temple; this is put past all doubt by
these verses: _Thy holy people possessed it but a little while:
our adversaries have trodden down Thy sanctuary. Thy holy cities
are become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a
desolation. The house of our holiness and of our ornament, wherein
our fathers praised Thee, is become for a burning of fire, and all
our delights are for ruin._[286]
This language has been held to imply that the disaster to Jerusalem
was recent, as if the city's conflagration still flared on the
national imagination, which in later years of the Exile was impressed
rather by the long, cold ruins of the Holy Place, the haunt of wild
beasts. But not only is this point inconclusive, but the impression
that it leaves is entirely dispelled by other verses, which speak of
the Divine anger as having been of long continuance, and as if it
had only hardened the people in sin; compare ch. lxiii. 17 and lxiv.
6, 7. There is nothing in the prayer to show that the author lived
in exile, and accordingly the proposal has been made to date the
piece from among the first attempts at rebuilding after the Return.
To the present expositor this seems to be certainly wrong. The man
who wrote vv. 11-15 of ch. lxiii. had surely the Return still before
him; he would not have written in the way he has done of the Exodus
from Egypt unless he had been feeling the need of another exhibition
of Divine Power of the same kind. The prayer, therefore, must come
from pretty much the same date as the rest of our prophecy,--after
the Exile had long continued, but while the Return had not yet taken
place. Nor is there any reason against attributing it to the same
writer. It is true the style differs from the rest of his work, but
this may be accounted for, as in the case of ch. liii., by the
change of subject. Most critics, who hold that we still follow the
same author, take for granted that some time has elapsed since the
prophet's triumphant strains in chs. lx.-lxii. This is probable; but
there is nothing to make it certain. What is certain is the change of
mood and conscience. The prophet, who in ch. lx. had been caught away
into the glorious future of the people, is here as utterly absorbed
in their barren and doubtful present. Although the salvation is
certain, as he has seen it, the people are not ready. The fact he has
already felt so keenly about them,--see ch. xlii., vv. 24, 25,--that
their long discipline in exile has done the mass of them no good,
but evil, comes forcibly back upon him (ch. lxiv. 5_b_ ff.). _Thou
wast angry, and we sinned_ only the more: _in such a state we have
been long, and shall we be saved_! The banished people are thoroughly
unclean and rotten, fading as a leaf, the sport of the wind. But
the prophet identifies himself with them. He speaks of their sin as
_ours_, of their misery as _ours_. He takes of them the very saddest
view possible, he feels them all as sheer dead weight: _there is
none that calleth on Thy name, that stirreth himself up to take hold
on Thee: for Thou hast hid Thy face from us, and delivered us into
the power of our iniquities_. But the prophet thus loads himself
with the people in order to secure, if he can, their redemption as
a whole. Twice he says in the name of them all, _Doubtless Thou art
our Father_. His great heart will not have one of them left out; _we
all_, he says, _are the work of Thy hand, we all are Thy people_.
But this intention of the prayer will amply account for any change
of style we may perceive in the language. No one will deny that it
is quite possible for the same man now to fling himself forward
into the glorious vision of his people's future salvation, and
again to identify himself with the most hopeless aspects of their
present distress and sin; and no one will deny that the same man will
certainly write in two different styles with regard to each of these
different feelings. Besides which, we have seen in the passage the
recurrence of some of our prophecy's most characteristic thoughts. We
feel, therefore, no reason for counting the passage to be by another
hand than that which has mainly written "Second Isaiah." It may be
at once admitted that he has incorporated in it earlier phrases,
reminiscences and echoes of language about the fall of Jerusalem in
use when the Lamentations were written. But this was a natural thing
for him to do in a prayer, in which he represented the whole people
and took upon himself the full burden of their woes.
If such be the intention of chs. lxiii. 7-lxiv., then in them we have
one of the noblest passages of our prophet's great work. How like he
is to the Servant he pictured for us! How his great heart fulfils the
loftiest ideal of Service: not only to be the prophet and the judge
of his people, but to make himself one with them in all their sin and
sorrow, to carry them all in his heart. Truly, as his last words said
of the Servant, he himself _bears the sin of many, and interposes for
the transgressors_. Before we see the answer he gets, let us make clear
some obscure things and appreciate some beautiful ones in his prayer.
It opens with a recital of Jehovah's ancient lovingkindness and
mercies to Israel. This is what perhaps gives it connection with
the previous section. In ch. lxii. the prophet, though sure of the
coming glory, wrote before it had come, and _urged_ upon _the Lord's
remembrancers to keep no silence, and give Him no silence till He
establish and till He make Jerusalem a praise in the earth_. This
work of remembrancing, the prophet himself takes up in lxiii. 7:
_The lovingkindnesses of Jehovah I will record_, literally, _cause
to be remembered, the praises of Jehovah, according to all that
Jehovah hath bestowed upon us_. And then he beautifully puts all
the beginnings of God's dealings with His people in His trusting of
them: _For He said, Surely they are My people, children that will not
deal falsely; so He became their Saviour. In all their affliction
He was afflicted, the Angel of His Face saved them._ This must be
understood, not as an angel of the Presence, who went out from the
Presence to save the people, but, as it is in other Scriptures, God's
own Presence, God Himself; and so interpreted, the phrase falls into
line with the rest of the verse, which is one of the most vivid
expressions that the Bible contains of the personality of God.[287]
_In His love and in His pity He redeemed them, and bare them,
and carried them all the days of old._ Then he tells us how they
disappointed and betrayed this trust, ever since the Exodus, the days
of old. _But they rebelled and grieved the Spirit of His holiness:
therefore He was turned to be their enemy, He Himself fought against
them._ This refers to their history down to, and especially during,
the Exile: compare ch. xlii., vv. 24, 25. Then in their affliction
they _remembered the days of old_--the English version obscures the
sequence here by translating _he remembered_--and then follows the
glorious account of the Exodus. In ver. 13 the _wilderness_ is, of
course, _prairie_, flat _pasture-land_; they were led as smoothly
as _a horse in a meadow, that they stumbled not. As cattle that
come down into the valley_--cattle coming down from the hill sides
to pasture and rest on the green, watered plains--_the Spirit of
Jehovah caused them to rest: so didst Thou lead Thy people to make
Thyself a glorious name_. And then having offered such precedents,
the prophet's prayer breaks forth to a God, whom His people feel no
longer at their head, but far withdrawn into heaven: _Look down from
heaven, and behold from the habitation of Thy holiness and Thy glory:
where is Thy zeal and Thy mighty deeds? the surge of Thy bowels and
thy compassions are restrained towards me._ Then he pleads God's
fatherhood to the nation, and the rest of the prayer alternates
between the hopeless misery and undeserving sin of the people, and,
notwithstanding, the power of God to save as He did in times of
old; the willingness of God to meet with those who wait for Him and
remember Him; and, once more, His fatherhood, and His power over
them, as the power of the potter over the clay.
Two points stand out from the rest. The Divine Trust, from which all
God's dealing with His people is said to have started, and the Divine
Fatherhood, which the prophet pleads.
_He said, Surely they are My people, children that will not deal
falsely: so He was their Saviour._ The "surely" is not the fiat of
sovereignty or foreknowledge: it is the hope and confidence of love.
It did not prevail; it was disappointed.
This is, of course, a profound acknowledgment of man's free will.
It is implied that men's conduct must remain an uncertain thing,
and that in calling men God cannot adventure upon greater certainty
than is implied in the trust of affection. If one asks, What, then,
about God's foreknowledge, who alone knoweth the end of a thing from
the beginning, and His sovereign grace, who chooseth whom He will?
are you not logically bound to these?--then it can only be asked in
return, Is it not better to be without logic for a little, if at
the expense of it we obtain so true, so deep a glimpse into God's
heart as this simple verse affords us? Which is better for us to
know--that God is Wisdom which knows all, or Love that dares and
ventures all? Surely, that God is Love which dares and ventures all
with the worst, with the most hopeless of us. This is what makes this
single verse of Scripture more powerful to move the heart than all
creeds and catechisms. For where these speak of sovereign will, and
often mock our affections with the bare and heavy (if legitimate)
sceptre they sway, this calls forth our love, honour and obedience
by the heart it betrays in God. Of what unsuspicious trust, of what
chivalrous adventure of love, of what fatherly confidence, does it
speak! What a religion is this of ours in the power of which a man
may every morning rise and feel himself thrilled by the thought that
God trusts him enough to work with His will for the day; in the power
of which a man may look round and see the sordid, hopeless human life
about him glorified by the truth, that for the salvation of such
God did adventure Himself in a love that laid itself down in death.
The attraction and power of such a religion can never die. Requiring
no painful thought to argue it into reality, it leaps to light
before the natural affection of man's heart; it takes his instincts
immediately captive; it gives him a conscience, an honour and an
obligation. No wonder that our prophet, having such a belief, should
once more identify himself with the people, and adventure himself
with the weight of their sin before God.
The other point of the prayer is the Fatherhood of God, concerning
which all that is needful to say here is that the prophet, true to
the rest of Old Testament teaching on the subject, applies it only to
God's relation to the nation as a whole. In the Old Testament no one
is called the son of God except Israel as a people, or some individual
representative and head of Israel. And even of such the term was seldom
employed. This was not because the Hebrew was without temptation to
imagine his physical descent from the gods, for neighbouring nations
indulged in such dreams for themselves and their heroes; nor because
he was without appreciation of the intellectual kinship between the
human and the Divine, for he knew that in the beginning God had said,
_Let us make man in our own image._ But the same feeling prevailed with
him in regard to this idea, as we have seen prevailed in regard to the
kindred idea of God as the husband of His people.[288] The prophets
were anxious to emphasize that it was a moral relation,--a moral
relation, and one initiated from God's side by certain historical acts
of His free, selecting, redeeming and adopting love. Israel was not
God's son till God had evidently called and redeemed him. Look at how
our prophet uses the word Father, and to what he makes it equivalent.
The first time it is equivalent to Redeemer: _Thou, O Lord, art our
Father; our Redeemer from old is Thy name_ (lxiii. 16_b_). The second
time it is illustrated by the work of the potter: _But now, O Lord,
Thou art our Father; we are the clay, and Thou our potter; and we are
all the work of Thy hand_ (lxiv. 8). Could it be made plainer in what
sense the Bible defines this relation between God and man? It is not
a physical, nor is it an intellectual relation. The assurance and the
virtue of it do not come to men with their blood or with the birth of
their intellect, but in the course of moral experience, with the sense
that God claims them from sin and from the world for Himself; with the
gift of a calling and a destiny; with the formation of character, the
perfecting of obedience, the growth in His knowledge and His grace. And
because it is a moral relation time is needed to realise it, and only
after long patience and effort may it be unhesitatingly claimed. And
that is why Israel was so long in claiming it, and why the clearest,
most undoubting cries to God the Father, which rise from the Greek in
the earliest period of his history, reach our ears from Jewish lips
only near the end of their long progress, only (as we see from our
prayer) in a time of trial and affliction.
We have a New Testament echo of this Old Testament belief in the
Fatherhood of God, as a moral and not a national relation, in Paul's
writings, who in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (vi. 17, 18)
urges thus: _Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate,
saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive
you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be My sons and
daughters, saith the Lord Almighty_.
On these grounds, then,--that God in His great love had already
adventured Himself with this whole people, and already by historical
acts of election and redemption proved Himself the Father of the
nation as a whole,--does our prophet plead with Him to save them all
again. The answer to this pleading he gets in ch. lxv.
II. GOD'S ANSWER TO THE PROPHET'S INTERCESSION (ch. lxv.).
God's answer to his prophet's intercession is twofold. _First_, He
says that He has already all this time been trying them with love,
meeting them with salvation; but they have not turned to Him. The
prophet has asked, _Where is Thy zeal? the yearning of Thy bowels and
Thy compassions are restrained towards me. Thou hast hid Thy face
far from us. Wilt Thou refrain Thyself for these things, O Jehovah?
wilt Thou hold Thy peace and afflict us very sore._ And now, in the
beginning of ch. lxv., Jehovah answers, not with that confusion of
tenses and irrelevancy of words with which the English version makes
Him speak; but suitably, relevantly and convincingly. _I have been to
be inquired of those who asked not_ for _Me. I have been to be found
of them that sought Me not. I have been saying, I am here, I am here,
to a nation that did not call on My name. I have stretched out My
hands all the day to a people turning away, who walk in a way that is
not good, after their own thoughts; a people that have been provoking
Me to My face continually_,--and then He details their idolatry.
This, then, is the answer of the Lord to the prophet's appeal. "In
this I have not all power. It is wrong to talk of Me as the potter
and of man as the clay, as if all the active share in salvation
lay with Me. Man is free,--free to withhold himself from My urgent
affection; free to turn from My outstretched hands; free to choose
before Me the abomination of idolatry. And this the mass of Israel
have done, clinging, fanatical and self-satisfied, to their unclean
and morbid imaginations of the Divine, all the time that My great
prophecy by you has been appealing to them." This is a sufficient
answer to the prophet's prayer. Love is not omnipotent; if men
disregard so open an appeal of the Love of God, they are hopeless;
nothing else can save them. The sin against such love is like the sin
against the Holy Ghost, of which our Lord speaks so hopelessly. Even
God cannot help the despisers and abusers of Grace.
The rest of God's answer to His prophet's intercession emphasizes
that the nation shall be saved for the sake of a faithful remnant
in it (vv. 8-10). But the idolaters shall perish (vv. 11, 12). They
cannot possibly expect the same fare, the same experience, the same
fate, as God's faithful servants (vv. 13-15). But those who are true
and faithful Israelites, surviving and experiencing the promised
salvation, shall find that God is true, and shall acknowledge Him as
_the God of Amen, because the former troubles are forgotten_--those
felt so keenly in the prophet's prayer in ch. lxiv.--_and because
they are hid from Mine eyes_. The rest of the answer describes a
state of serenity and happiness wherein there shall be no premature
death, nor loss of property, nor vain labour, nor miscarriage, nor
disappointment of prayer nor delay in its answer, nor strife between
man and the beasts, nor any hurt or harm in Jehovah's Holy Mountain.
Truly a prospect worthy of being named as the prophet names it, _a
new heaven and a new earth_!
Ch. lxv. is thus closely connected, both by circumstance and logic,
with the long prayer which precedes it. The tendency of recent
criticism has been to deny this connection, especially on the line of
circumstance. Ch. lxv. does not, it is argued, reflect the Babylonish
captivity as ch. lxiii. 7-lxiv. so clearly does; but, on the
contrary, "while some passages presuppose the Exile as past, others
refer to circumstances characteristic of Jewish life in Canaan."[289]
But this view is only possible through straining some features of the
chapter adaptable either to Palestine or Babylon, and overlooking
others which are obviously Babylonian. _Sacrificing in gardens and
burning incense on tiles_ were practices pursued in Jerusalem before
the Exile, but the latter was introduced there from Babylon, and
the former was universal in heathendom. The practices in ver. 5 are
never attributed to the people before the Exile, were all possible in
Babylonia, and some we know to have been actual there.[290] The other
charge of idolatry in ver. 11 "suits Babylonia," Cheyne admits, "as
well as (probably) Palestine."[291] But what seems decisive for the
exilic origin of ch. lxv. is that the possession of Judah and Zion
by the seed of Jacob is still implied as future (ver. 9). Moreover
the holy land is alluded to by the name common among the exiles in
flat Mesopotamia, _My mountains_, and in contrast with the idolatry
of which the present generation is guilty the idolatry of their
fathers is characterised as having been _upon the mountains and upon
the hills_, and again the people is charged with _forgetting My holy
mountain_, a phrase reminiscent of Psalm cxxxvii., ver. 4, and more
appropriate to a time of exile, than when the people were gathered
about Zion. All these resemblances in circumstance corroborate the
strong logical connection which we have found between ch. lxiv. and
ch. lxv., and leave us no reason for taking the latter away from the
main author of "Second Isaiah," though he may have worked up into it
recollections and remains of an older time.
III. THE LAST JUDGEMENT (ch. lxvi.).
Whether with the final chapter of our prophecy we at last get
footing in the Holy Land is doubtful.[292] It was said on p. 20
that, "in vv. 1 to 4 of this chapter the Temple is still unbuilt,
but the building would seem to be already begun." This latter clause
should be modified to, "the building would seem to be in immediate
prospect." The rest of the chapter, vv. 6-24, has features that speak
more definitely for the period after the Return; but even they are
not conclusive, and their effect is counterbalanced by some other
verses. Ver. 6 may imply that the Temple is rebuilt, and ver. 20 that
the sacrifices are resumed; but, on the other hand, these verses may
be, like parts of ch. lx., statements of the prophet's vivid vision
of the future.[293] Vv. 7 and 8 seem to describe a repeopling of
Jerusalem that has already taken place; but ver. 9 says, that while
the _bringing to the birth_ has already happened, which is, as we
must suppose, the deliverance from Babylon,--or is it the actual
arrival at Jerusalem?--the _bringing forth from the womb_, that is,
the complete restoration of the people, has still to take place. Ver.
13 is certainly addressed to those who are not yet in Jerusalem.
These few points reveal how difficult, nay, how impossible, it is to
decide the question of date, as between the days immediately before
the Return and the days immediately after. To the present expositor
the balance of evidence seems to be with the later date. But the
difference is very small. We are at least sure--and it is really
all that we require to know--that the rebuilding of Jerusalem is
very near, nearer than it has been felt in any previous chapter. The
Temple is, so to speak, within sight, and the prophet is able to talk
of the regular round of sacrifices and sacred festivals almost as if
they had been resumed.
To the people, then, either in the near prospect of Return, or
immediately after some of them had arrived in Jerusalem, the prophet
addresses a number of oracles, in which he pursues the division,
that ch. lxv. had emphasized, between the two parties in Israel.
These oracles are so intricate, that we are compelled to take up
the chapter verse by verse. The first of them begins by correcting
certain false feelings in Israel, excited by former promises of the
rebuilding and the glory of the Temple. _Thus saith Jehovah, The
heavens are My throne, and earth is My footstool: what is this for a
house that ye will build_--or, _are building--Me, and what is this
for a place for My rest? Yea, all these things_--that is, all the
visible works of God in heaven and earth--_My hand hath made_, and
so _came to pass all these things, saith Jehovah. But unto this will
I look, unto the humble and contrite in spirit, and that trembleth
at My word._ These verses do not run counter to, or even go beyond,
anything that our prophet has already said. They do not condemn the
building of the Temple: this was not possible for a prophecy which
contains ch. lx. They condemn only the kind of temple which those
whom they address had in view,--a shrine to which the presence of
Jehovah was limited, and on the raising and maintenance of which
the religion and righteousness of the people should depend. While
the former Temple was standing, the mass of the people had thus
misconceived it, imagining that it was enough for national religion
to have such a structure standing and honoured in their midst. And
now, before it is built again, the exiles are cherishing about it the
same formal and materialistic thoughts. Therefore the prophet rebukes
them, as his predecessors had rebuked their fathers, and reminds them
of a truth he has already uttered, that though the Temple is raised,
according to God's own promise and direction, it will not be to its
structure, as they conceive of it, that He will have respect, but
to the existence among them of humble and sincere personal piety.
The Temple is to be raised: _the place of His feet God will make
glorious_, and men shall gather round it from the whole earth, for
instruction, for comfort and for rejoicing. But let them not think
it to be indispensable either to God or to man,--not to God, who
has heaven for His throne and earth for His footstool; nor to man,
for God looks direct to man, if only man be humble, penitent and
sensitive to His word. These verses, then, do not go beyond the Old
Testament limit; they leave the Temple standing, but they say so much
about God's other sanctuary man, that when His use for the Temple
shall be past, His servant Stephen[294] shall be able to employ these
words to prove why it should disappear.
The next verse is extremely difficult. Here it is literally: _A
slaughterer of the ox, a slayer of a man; a sacrificer of the lamb, a
breaker of a dog's neck; an offerer of meat-offering, swine's blood;
the maker of a memorial offering of incense, one that blesseth an
idol_, or _vanity_. Four legal sacrificial acts are here coupled
with four unlawful sacrifices to idols. Does this mean that in the
eye of God, impatient even of the ritual He has consecrated, when
performed by men who do not tremble at His word, each of these lawful
sacrifices is as worthless and odious as the idolatrous practice
associated with it,--the slaughter of the ox as the offering of a
human sacrifice, and so forth? Or does the verse mean that there
are persons in Israel who combine, like the Corinthians blamed by
Paul,[295] both the true and the idolatrous ritual, both the table of
the Lord and the table of devils? Our answer will depend on whether
we take the four parallels with ver. 2, which precedes them, or with
the rest of ver. 3, to which they belong, and ver. 4. If we take them
with ver. 2, then we must adopt the first, the alternative meaning;
if with ver. 4, then the second of these meanings is the right one.
Now there is no grammatical connection, nor any transparent logical
one, between vv. 2 and 3, but there is a grammatical connection
with the rest of ver. 3. Immediately after the pairs of lawful and
unlawful sacrificial acts, ver. 3 continues, _yea, they have chosen
their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations_.
That surely signifies that the unlawful sacrifices in ver. 3 are
things already committed and delighted in, and the meaning of
putting them in parallel to the lawful sacrifices of Jehovah's
religion is either that Israelites have committed them instead of
the lawful sacrifices, or along with these. In this case, vv. 3, 4
form a separate discourse by themselves, with no relation to the
equally distinct oracle in vv. 1 and 2. The subject of vv. 3 to 4
is, therefore, the idolatrous Israelites. They are delivered unto
Satan, their choice; they shall have no part in the coming Salvation.
In ver. 5 the faithful in Israel, who have obeyed God's word by the
prophet, are comforted under the mocking of their brethren, who shall
certainly be put to shame. Already the prophet hears the preparation
of the judgement against them (ver. 6). It comes forth from the city
where they had mockingly cried for God's glory to appear. The mocked
city avenges itself on them. _Hark, a roar from the City! Hark, from
the Temple! Hark, Jehovah accomplishing vengeance on His enemies!_
A new section begins with ver. 7, and celebrates to ver. 9 the
sudden re-population of the City by her children, either as already
a fact, or, more probably, as a near certainty. Then comes a call
to the children, restored, or about to be restored, to congratulate
their mother and to enjoy her. The prophet rewakens the figure,
that is ever nearest his heart, of motherhood,--children suckled,
borne and cradled in the lap of their mother fill all his view; nay,
finer still, the grown man coming back with wounds and weariness
upon him to be comforted of his mother. _As a man whom his mother
comforteth, so will I comfort you, and ye shall be comforted in
Jerusalem. And ye shall see, and rejoice shall your heart, and your
bones shall flourish like the tender grass._ But this great light
shines not to flood all Israel in one, but to cleave the nation
in two, like a sword of judgement. _The hand of Jehovah shall be
known towards His servants, but He will have indignation against
His enemies,_--enemies, that is, within Israel. Then comes the
fiery judgement, _For by fire will Jehovah plead, and by His sword
with all flesh; and the slain of Jehovah shall be many_. Why there
should be slain of Jehovah within Israel is then explained. Within
Israel there are idolaters: _they that consecrate themselves and
practise purification for the gardens, after one in the middle;_[296]
_eaters of swine's flesh, and the Abomination, and the Mouse. They
shall come to an end together, saith Jehovah, for I_ know, or will
punish,[297] _their works and their thoughts_. In this eighteenth
verse the punctuation is uncertain, and probably the text is corrupt.
The first part of the verse should evidently go, as above, with ver.
17. Then begins a new subject.
_It is coming to gather all the nations and the tongues, and they
shall come and shall see My glory; and I will set among them a
sign_,--a marvellous and mighty act, probably of judgement, for he
immediately speaks of their survivors,--_and I will send the escaped
of them to the nations Tarshish, Put_[298] _and Lud, drawers of the
bow, to Tubal and Javan_,--that is, to far Spain, and the distances
of Africa, towards the Black Sea and to Greece, a full round of
the compass,--_the isles far off that have not heard report of Me,
nor have seen My glory; and they shall recount My glory among the
nations. And they shall bring all your brethren from among all the
nations an offering to Jehovah, on horses and in chariots and in
litters, and on mules and on dromedaries, up on the Mount of My
Holiness, Jerusalem, saith Jehovah, just as when the children of
Israel bring the offering in a clean vessel to the house of Jehovah.
And also from them will I take to be priests, to be Levites, saith
Jehovah. For like as the new heavens and the new earth which I am
making shall be standing before Me, saith Jehovah, so shall stand
your seed and your name._ But again the prophecy swerves from
the universal hope into which we expect it to break, and gives us
instead a division and a judgement: the servants of Jehovah on
one side occupied in what the prophet regards as the ideal life,
regular worship--so little did he mean ver. 1 to be a condemnation
of the Temple and its ritual!--and on the other the rebels' unburied
carcases gnawed by the worm and by fire, an abomination to all. _And
it shall come to pass from new moon to new moon, and from sabbath to
sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before Me, saith Jehovah:
and they shall go out and look on the carcases of the men who have
rebelled against Me; for their worm dieth not, and their fire is not
quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh._
We have thus gone step by step through the chapter, because its
intricacies and sudden changes were not otherwise to be mastered.
What exactly it is composed of must, we fear, still remain a problem.
Who can tell whether its short, broken pieces are all originally from
our prophet's hand, or were gathered by him from others, or were the
fragments of his teaching which the reverent hands of disciples picked
carefully up that nothing might be lost? Sometimes we think it must
be this last alternative that happened; for it seems impossible that
pieces so strange to each other, so loosely connected, could have
flowed from one mind at one time. But then again we think otherwise,
when we see how the chapter as a whole continues the separation made
evident in ch. lxv., and runs it on to a last emphatic contrast.
* * * * *
So we are left by the prophecy,--not with the new heavens and the new
earth which it promised: not with the holy mountain on which none
shall hurt nor destroy, saith the Lord; not with a Jerusalem full of
glory and a people all holy, the centre of a gathered humanity,--but
with the city like to a judgement floor, and upon its narrow surface
a people divided between worship and a horrible woe.
O Jerusalem, City of the Lord, Mother eagerly desired of her
children, radiant light to them that sit in darkness and are far off,
home after exile, haven after storm,--expected as the Lord's garner,
thou art still to be only His threshing-floor, and heaven and hell
as of old shall, from new moon to new moon, through the revolving
years, lie side by side within thy narrow walls! For from the day
that Araunah the Jebusite threshed out his sheaves upon thy high
windswept rock, to the day when the Son of Man standing over against
thee divided in His last discourse the sheep from the goats, the wise
from the foolish, and the loving from the selfish, thou hast been
appointed of God for trial and separation and judgement.
It is a terrible ending to such a prophecy as ours. But is any
other possible? We ask how can this contiguity of heaven and hell
be within the Lord's own city, after all His yearning and jealousy
for her, after His fierce agony and strife with her enemies, after
so clear a revelation of Himself, so long a providence, so glorious
a deliverance? Yet, it is plain that nothing else can result, if
the men on whose ears the great prophecy had fallen, with all its
music and all its gospel, and who had been partakers of the Lord's
Deliverance, did yet continue to prefer their idols, their swine's
flesh, their mouse, their broth of abominable things, their sitting
in graves, to so evident a God and to so great a grace.
It is a terrible ending, but it is the same as upon the same floor
Christ set to His teaching,--the gospel net cast wide, but only to
draw in both good and bad upon a beach of judgement; the wedding
feast thrown open and men compelled to come in, but among them a
heart whom grace so great could not awe even to decency; Christ's
Gospel preached, His Example evident, and Himself owned as Lord, and
nevertheless some whom neither the hearing nor the seeing nor the
owning with their lips did lift to unselfishness or stir to pity.
Therefore He who had cried, _Come all unto Me_, was compelled to
close by saying to many, _Depart_.
It is a terrible ending, but one only too conceivable. For though
God is love, man is free,--free to turn from that love; free to be
as though he had never felt it; free to put away from himself the
highest, clearest, most urgent grace that God can show. But to do
this is the judgement.
_Lord, are there few that be saved?_ The Lord did not answer the
question but by bidding the questioner take heed to himself: _Strive
to enter in at the strait gate_.
* * * * *
Almighty and most merciful God, who hast sent this book to be the
revelation of Thy great love to man, and of Thy power and will to
save him, grant that our study of it may not have been in vain by the
callousness or carelessness of our hearts, but that by it we may be
confirmed in penitence, lifted to hope, made strong for service, and
above all filled with the true knowledge of Thee and of Thy Son Jesus
Christ. Amen.
FOOTNOTES:
[286] Ch. lxiii. 18 and lxiv. 10, 11. In the Hebrew ch. lxiv. begins
a verse later than it does in the English version.
[287] Semites had a horror of painting the Deity in any form. But
when God had to be imagined or described, they chose the form of a
man and attributed to Him human features. Chiefly they thought of His
face. To see His face, to come into the light of His countenance,
was the way their hearts expressed longing for the living God. Exod.
xxiii. 14; Psalm xxxi. 16, xxxiv. 16, lxxx. 7. But among the heathen
Semites God's face was separated from God Himself, and worshipped as
a separate god. In _heathen_ Semitic religions there are a number of
deities who are the faces of others. But the Hebrew writers, with
every temptation to do the same, maintained their monotheism, and
went no farther than to speak of the _angel of God's Face_. And in
all the beautiful narratives of Genesis, Exodus and Judges about the
glorious Presence that led Israel against their enemies, the angel
of God's face is an equivalent of God Himself. Jacob said, the _God
which hath fed me, and the angel which hath redeemed me, bless the
lads_. In Judges this angel's word is God's Word.
[288] See pp. 398 ff.
[289] Cheyne. Similarly Bredenkamp, who contends that the prophecy is
Isaianic, and to be dated from the time of Manasseh.
[290] _Cf._ Dillmann, _in loco_.
[291] Among Orientals the planets Jupiter and Venus were worshipped
as the Larger and the Lesser Luck. They were worshipped as Merodach
and Istar among the Babylonians. Merodach was worshipped for
prosperity (_cf._ Sayce, _Hibbert Lectures_, pp. 460, 476, 488). It
may be Merodach and Istar, to whom are here given the name Gad, or
Luck (_cf._ Genesis xxii. 11, and the name Baal Gad in the Lebanon
valley) and Meni, or Fate, Fortune (_cf._ Arabic al-manijjat,
fate; Wellhausen, _Skizzen_, iii., 22 ff., 189). There was in the
Babylonian Pantheon a "Manu the Great who presided over fate"
(Lenormant, _Chaldean Magic_, etc., p. 120). Instances of idolatrous
feasts will be found in Sayce, _op. cit._, p. 539; _cf._ 1 Cor. x.
21, _Ye cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table
of devils_. See what is said in p. 62 of this volume about the
connection of idolatry and commerce.
[292] Bleek (5th ed., pp. 287, 288) holds ch. lxvi. to be by a prophet
who lived in Palestine after the resumption of sacrificial worship (vv.
3, 6, 30), that is, upon the altar of burnt-offering which the Returned
had erected there, and at a time when the temple-building had begun.
Vatke also holds to a post-exilic date, _Einleitung in das A.T._, pp.
625, 630. Kuenen, too, makes the chapter post-exilic. Bredenkamp takes
vv. 1-6 for Palestinian, but pre-exilic, and ascribes them to Isaiah.
With ver. 1 he compares 1 Kings viii. 27; and as to ver. 6 he asks, How
could the unbelieving exiles be in the neighbourhood of the Temple and
hear Jehovah's voice in thunder from it? Vv. 7-14 he takes as exilic,
based on an Isaianic model.
[293] So Dillmann and Driver; Cheyne is doubtful.
[294] Acts vii. 49.
[295] 1 Cor. x.
[296] So, in literal translation of the text, _the One_ being a
master of ceremonies, who, standing in the middle, was imitated
by the worshippers (_cf._ Baudissin, _Studien zur Semitischen
Religions-geschichte_, i., p. 315, who combats Lagarde's and Selden's
view, that אהד, _one_, stands for the God Hadad). The Massoretes read
the feminine form of one, which might mean some goddess.
[297] _Know_, Pesh. and some editions of the LXX.; _punish_,
Delitzsch and Cheyne.
[298] The Hebrew text has Pul, the LXX. Put. Put and Lud occur
together, Ezek. xxvii. 10-xxx. 5. Put is Punt, the Egyptian name for
East Africa. Lud is not Lydia, but a North African nation. Jeremiah,
xlvi. 9, mentions, along with Cush, Put and the Ludim in the service
of Egypt, and the Ludim as famous with the bow.
INDEX TO CHAPS. XL.-LXVI.
_The Arabic numerals on the right-hand column refer to the pages, the
Roman to the chapters of the volume._
xl. 1-11 67, V.
xl. 12-31 VI.
xli.-xlv. 9
xli. VII.
xli. 2 164 f.
xli. 8-20 244 f., 256
xli. 25 12, 113, 130 f., 145
xli. 26 225
xlii. 1-7 261 f., XVIII.
xlii. 8-17 VIII.
xlii. 18 ff. 262 f.
xlii. 22 59
xlii.-xliii. XV.
xliii.-xlviii. IX.
xliii. 1-7 257
xliii. 3, 4 246
xliii. 8, 10 158 f., 263 f.
xliii. 14 147, 246
xliii. 16-19 158
xliii. 22-24 156
xliii. 25 157
xliv. 1 ff. 256
xliv. 7, 8 158
xliv. 9-20 153 f.
xliv. 21 256
xliv. 21, 22 157
xliv. 24-28 160, X.
xlv. 1-13 X.
xlv. 8 228
xlv. 13 224
xlv. 18 227
xlv. 19 159, 224
xlv. 19-25 225 f.
xlvi. XI.
xlvi. 11 168
xlvi. 13 228
xlvii. XII.
xlvii. 6 59
xlviii. XIII.
xlviii. 18 221
xlviii. 22 17
xlix. 1-9 240 f., 264 f., XIX., 381.
xlix. 9-26 XXI.
l. 1-3 XXI.
l. 4-11 XIX.
li.-lii. 12 XXI.
li. 5 228
lii. 7 50
lii. 13-liii. 18, 267, XX.
liv.-lvi. 8 XXII.
liv. 397
lv. 402
lvi. 1-8 406
lvi. 1 222, 229
lvi. 9-lix. 18 f., XXIII.
lvi. 9-lvii. 409
lviii. 61, 414
lviii. 2 222
lix. 423
lix. 4 222
lx.-lxiii. 7 19, XXIV.
lx. 429
lxi., lxii. 435
lxi. 10, 228
lxi. 11 220
lxiii. 2 220
lxiii. 1-6 441
lxiii. 7-lxvi. 19 f., XXV.
lxiii. 7-lxiv. 446
lxiv. 5 222
lxv. 455
lxvi. 458
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
(_The Arabic numerals refer to pages, the Roman to chapters._)
Anshan or Anzan, 112 f.
Babylon, 55 ff.;
capture of, 146 f., xii.;
compared with Rome,189, 199 f.;
meaning of its name, 191;
its pride, 191;
early history, 192 n.;
cruelty, 201;
yielding to Cyrus, 193;
religion, 193;
in the modern world, 200 ff.;
ruin, 199, 204;
call to leave, 211, 396.
Babylonia, described, 53;
history of, 107 ff., 146 f.
Baudissin, 463.
Belshazzar, 113.
Bredenkamp argues for "Isaianic" elements in Isa. xl.-lxvi., 24, 205,
211.
Briggs, Prof., theory of two different writings in Isa. xl.-lxvi., 18,
315, 336, cf. 234.
Calvin, testimony to exilic authorship of Isa. xl.-lxvi., 14 f.;
fair exegesis, 215;
Commentary, _Introduction_.
Captivity. _See_ Exile.
Chaldea. _See_ Babylon.
Astrology, 193, 198.
Cheyne, Prof., 19, 121, 211, 435.
Crœsus, 113;
and the oracles, 114;
defeated by Cyrus, 144 f.
Cyropædia, 164, 170.
Cyrus, alleged mention of his name by Isaiah, 7;
not monotheist, 40, 165, 179;
not a prediction but a fulfilment, 9, 11, 66, 111 ff.;
Jehovah's claim on, 130, 166, 144, 162 ff.;
capture of Babylon, 146, 178;
Greek presentation of, compared with Hebrew, 164 f., 169 ff.;
As Messiah: Hebrew objection to, 167 f., 175;
a fulfilment of prediction, 207 f.;
an elect instrument, not the Servant, 253.
Davidson, Prof. A. B., quoted, 15, 17, 306, 317.
_See also_ Introduction, 121.
Delitzsch, 121, 211, etc.
Dillmann, 435, etc.
Driver, Prof., _Isaiah: His Life and Times_, 14, 18, 121, 435, etc.
Ewald, 121, 269, 336, etc.
Exile, the Babylonian, reason of, 28 ff.;
What Israel took into Exile, iii.;
Israel in Exile, iv.;
the first deportation, number, and quality of exiles, 32 ff.;
second deportation, 35;
march to Babylon, 48 f.;
condition of the exiles, 55 ff.;
social condition of exiles, 57 ff.;
literary efforts, 59 f.;
religious life, 61;
commerce, 62;
spiritual experience, 63;
traces of exile in Jewish literature, 63;
condition of Israel at end of exile, 66.
Ezekiel, compared with Jeremiah, 34, 46;
picture of captivity, 59;
sin-bearer, 352;
and the Messiah, 404.
Face of God, 450 n.
Fasts in the exile, 61, 415.
Fatherhood of God, 453 ff.
Giesebrecht, 210.
God and history, 87 f., 100, 106 ff., 157 ff.
God and the idols, vi., ix. (especially 153).
God, His Omnipotence and Faithfulness, 121 ff., 390.
God the Saviour, 136;
Personality of, 148 f.;
Passion of God, viii.;
spirituality of Jewish conception, 137.
Gospel, or Good News. Meaning in the Exile, 437 f.;
development from then, 439 f.
Grace, proclamation of, characteristic of "Second Isaiah," 78 f.;
to fulfil service, 290.
Herodotus, quotation from, 114 f.
Hahn, 121.
Idolatry, 91, 94 ff., 116, 152 ff., 177 ff.
Incarnation, true O. T. prophecies of, 135 ff., 141.
Individualism, 41 ff.
Isaiah, the Prophet: his prophecies of exile, 23, 29 f.;
his connection with chs. xl.-lxvi., 23, 24;
are there fragments by him in ch. xl.-lxvi.? 24;
his use of the word Righteousness, 216, 218.
Isaiah, Book of: plurality of authors in, 4;
on its own testimony composite book, 4 f.
Isaiah xl.-lxvi.: their date, i.;
do not claim to be by Isaiah, 5;
New Testament quotations from, 6;
speak of exile and Cyrus as actual facts, 8, 9;
use Cyrus as a fulfilment of previous prophecies, 11, 12;
local colour, 13;
language and style, 15;
characteristic doctrine, 16;
unity, 18 f., 21,212, 222, 234, 314 f., 336 ff., 409, 441, 446;
Palestinian and pre-exilic elements, 18-20, 409 ff.;
post-exilic elements, 18, 414, 458, 465.
Isaiah xl.-lxvi.: the double problem of the prophecy, _Introduction_,
377, 378.
"Isles," or coast-lands, 109 ff.
Israel: sketch of history from Isaiah to exile, ii., iii., iv.;
uniqueness; reason of election by God, xv.;
missionary career, 44 f.;
prominence given to, 236;
elected for service, 237;
qualities of nation, 240 ff.;
Jesus a Jew, 249 f.
Jeremiah, his prediction of exile, 8, 27, 66, 79;
teaching on this contrasted with Isaiah's, 27;
Jeremiah's significance for "Second Isaiah," and foreshadowing of
the Servant of the Lord, as suffering for the people, 42, 275,
277;
and for God's Word, 330;
and as sin-bearer, 352, 358;
cf. also 326, 435 n.
Jerusalem or Zion, fall of, 30 ff.;
religious significance of its destruction, 43 ff.;
the exiles take the city's name to themselves, 47, 72;
personification of Israel under name of Zion, 382 ff.;
her restoration, 395, xxiv.;
the Bride of God, 397 ff.;
City of Judgement, 466.
Jesus Christ, and the Passion of God, viii.;
a Jew, 249;
His testimony as to His uniqueness, 283, 369 f.;
His example of service, 284, 285, 305 ff.;
called the Servant of the Lord in the _Acts_, 286;
so recognised by Peter and Paul, 287;
God's will first with Him, 298;
martyrs for the Word of God, 285, 331;
and the Fifty-third of Isaiah, 366 ff.;
as bringer of good news, 439.
John the Baptist and the Book of Isaiah, 282 f.
Josiah, King, 30.
Krüger, 435, 442.
Love of God, 76 f., viii., 399 f., 451 f.;
sin against it, 467.
Marriage, figure of religious marriage use among the Semites, 398 ff.;
purified and exalted in the Old Testament, 400;
a test of the uniqueness of Hebrew prophecy, 398 f., cf. 76 f.
Media, 107.
Mesopotamia, 51 ff.
Monotheism, 88;
and the imagination, 95 ff.;
of Israel defined, 36 ff., 129, 149 ff.
Nabunahid or Nabonidos, King of Babylon, 65, 113, 193.
Nebuchadrezzar, 32, 34, 54, 107.
New Testament quotations from Isaiah xl.-lxvi., p. 6 and references,
282, 284 f., xvii.
Persia, 111.
Pfleiderer, quoted, 127.
Positivism and the service of man, 294.
Prediction, Jehovah's claim to, 120 ff., 208;
the ri'shonoth, 206;
new things, 206.
Prophecy, in the Exile, its anonymousness, 61;
and appeal to former scriptures, 62;
precedes history as well as interprets it, 100;
uniqueness of Hebrew prophecy, 248, ff., xix., 321 ff.;
and martyrdom, 328.
Redemption of Israel. _Political_, fulfilled by Cyrus, 271;
_spiritual_, fulfilled by Servant, 271, 273.
Renan, "Natural Monotheism of the Semites," 149.
Return from exile, promise of, 46;
facts of, 57;
call to 211 ff., 396, 405, etc.
Revelation, conditions of, 73;
method of, 100 f., 148 f.
_See_ Prophecy.
Righteousness, 127 f., xiv.;
root and growth of word, 215 f.;
of Israel, 217;
of Jehovah, 224, cf. 365, 392, 410, 436 f.
Sabbath, 61, 422.
Sacramental character of prophecy, 89 f.
Sayce, 163, 165, 179, 457.
Sin, its effects, 387;
its punishment, 29, 465 ff.;
grounds of forgiveness, 79;
borne by God, viii., 183;
by Jeremiah and Ezekiel, 352;
by the Servant, xx.
Sinim, land of, 383.
Socialism and the service of man, xviii.
Suffering, vicarious, Jeremiah 422, 64;
of the Servant, 272 f., 331.
The Servant of Jehovah, God's commission of, 132 f.;
Christ's relation to, 142;
possibly speaker summing moral meaning of Exile, 210;
passages on, 233;
his character, 254;
as a nation, 236 ff., 256 f.;
as part of a nation, 257 ff.;
as realised by one man--prophet and martyr, 276;
a person, 276, etc.;
a personification, 266;
fulfilled by Christ, 267, 281 ff., 367;
an individual, objections answered to recognising this--
1st, 270,
2nd, 272,
3rd, 274;
cf. xx., 405.
The Servant's office, extended by Paul, 287 f.;
by Peter, 286 f.
The Servant's chief end, 317;
as prophet and martyr, 313 ff.;
as sin-bearer, xx.
Voice, the human, in Isaiah xl.-lxvi., 302, 416.
Wellhausen, 238, 269, 457 n.
Xenophanes, the Eleatic, contemporary of "Second Isaiah," 125.
Xenophon, portrait of Cyrus, 163 f.
HEBREW AND GREEK WORDS SPECIALLY TREATED.
אײם, 109
ארץ and הארץ, 262, 292, 298.
עם ריתב, 262.
בשר, 84, 85, 437 ff.
נם, 206.
על־לב דבר, 76.
משלם, 263.
משפט, 299.
ענו, 384.
נשא and מבל, 179 ff., 343, 352.
יהוה עבד, 255, xvi.
צדק and צדקה, xiv., 392.
צלח, 168.
קרא, 82.
בשם קרא, 130 f., 437 ff.
ראשנות and אחרית, 121, 206.
טראש, 117, 119.
δουλος and παις, 286 n.
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. Vol. I.
CHAPS. I.--XXXIX.
=Spectator.=--"This is a very attractive book. Mr. George Adam Smith
has evidently such a mastery of the scholarship of his subject that it
would be a sheer impertinence for most scholars, even though tolerable
Hebraists, to criticise his translations; and certainly it is not the
intention of the present reviewer to attempt anything of the kind, to
do which he is absolutely incompetent. All we desire is to let English
readers know how very lucid, impressive, and, indeed, how vivid a study
of Isaiah is within their reach--the fault of the book, if it has a
fault, being rather that it finds too many points of connection between
Isaiah and our modern world, than that it finds too few. In other
words, no one can say that the book is not full of life."
=Saturday Review.=--"He writes with great rhetorical power, and
brings out into vivid reality the historical position of his author."
=Record.=--"He is always reverent and thoroughly Christian in his
exposition. He gives us models of exposition. They are full of
matter, and show careful scholarship throughout. We can think of no
commentary on Isaiah from which the preacher will obtain scholarly
and trustworthy suggestions for his sermons so rapidly and so
pleasantly as from this."
=Prof. T. K. Cheyne in "Academy."=--"Here is a well-trained critical
scholar coming forward to help preachers and ordinary readers to a
truer comprehension of their Scriptures. In all essentials this new
expositor has succeeded. His work is in every sense mature, and shows
a thorough comprehension of the problem."
=British Weekly.=--"Isaiah is for the first time made perfectly
intelligible to the people; and not only is he made intelligible,
but he is reproduced and connected with so much of modern life as
virtually to give him a resurrection in all his original power....
Mr. Smith has at one stride taken his place at the head of living
expositors, and opened out a new line of work in which, perhaps, few
will be found able to follow him, but which will do more than many
arguments to reconcile a timorous and misguided public to scientific
scholarship and the newer criticism. This may seem extravagant
praise. We are quite confident that those who are most familiar with
the exposition will be the readiest to endorse it."
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"A delightful book, abounding in interesting matter."--_Liverpool
Mercury._
PROFESSOR W. G. ELMSLIE, D.D. MEMOIRS AND SERMONS. Memoir by W.
ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D. With Reminiscences by Professor
MARCUS DODS, D.D., Professor HENRY DRUMMOND, Rev. JOHN SMITH,
M.A., and Rev. JAMES STALKER, D.D. Third Edition. With
Portrait, crown 8vo, cloth, price 6_s._
"Elmslie was too remarkable a man to be left without a memoir. He
was too bright and genial a spirit to be buried in a ponderous
biographical sarcophagus. Dr. Robertson Nicoll may be heartily
congratulated on having produced a 'speaking portrait' of his
friend. The presentation of him is, indeed, dramatic, with its keen
strokes of characterisation, its rapid action, its bright succession
of scenes, and the success with which it enables the reader to
realise the man Elmslie, his achievements, his springs of action,
the atmosphere and sunshine of his life, his speech, and almost, it
seems, his play of feature."--_Scotsman._
IMAGO CHRISTI; The Examples of Jesus Christ. By the Rev. JAMES
STALKER, M.A., Author of the "Life of Jesus Christ," "The Life
of St. Paul," etc. Fifth Edition, completing 16,000. Crown 8vo,
cloth, price 5_s._
"Will sustain the author's already high reputation as a thinker and
literary artist. It is a volume alive with interest."--_Glasgow
Herald._
LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
SHEAVES OF MINISTRY: Sermons and Expositions. By JAMES MORISON,
D.D. 8vo, cloth, 10_s._ 6_d._
NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD. By Professor HENRY DRUMMOND,
F.R.S.E. Twenty-sixth Edition, completing One Hundred Thousand.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._
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and interesting books on the relations which exist between natural
science and spiritual life that has appeared."--_Literary Churchman._
"One of the most impressive and suggestive books on religion that we
have read for a long time."--_Spectator._
ROMANCE OF PSALTER AND HYMNAL: Authors and Composers. By the
Rev. R. E. WELSH, M.A., and F. G. EDWARDS, Author of "United
Praise." Crown 8vo, cloth, 5_s._
"A work of more than ordinary interest and ability."--_Morning Post._
"This handsome and interesting book."--_Methodist Recorder._
"Will charm those who take an interest in the hymnology of the
Christian Church."--_Bradford Observer._
LIGHT IN AFRICA. By the Rev. JAMES MACDONALD. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._
"One of the brightest and most readable books of its class produced
during recent years.... A book that has not a single dull or
superfluous page."--_Athenæum._
AN ITALIAN CAMPAIGN; or, The Evangelical Movement in Italy,
1845-1887. From the Letters of the late Rev. R. W. STEWART,
D.D., of Leghorn. By the Rev. J. WOOD BROWN, M.A., Gordon.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._
RESCUERS AND RESCUED: Experiences among our City Poor. By the Rev.
JAMES WELLS, M.A., Glasgow. Author of "Christ and the Heroes of
Heathendom," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth, price 3_s._ 6_d._
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though some of the sketches of Glasgow low life are almost painfully
realistic, they are not in any way sensational, and are saved from
being dull and depressing by the touches of genuine pathos and humour
which abound throughout."--_Glasgow Herald._
LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
_WORKS BY THE REV. PROFESSOR A. B. BRUCE, D.D._
1. THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS. 8vo, cloth, price 12_s._
"Dr. Bruce once more gives us a volume of great value. There is
no living Apologist in whose hands the Christian faith is so
safe."--_Presbyterian Messenger._
"It displays minute acquaintance with the modern literature of the
subject, and all forms of attack to which Christian belief in the
supernatural has been subjected. The defence is able all round; and
the closing chapters--in which the miracle implied in the character
of Jesus is dwelt on, and where the defence is for a moment changed
into attack--are full of spirit and fire."--_Methodist Recorder._
"A valuable apologetic work, which will be a useful weapon against
rationalism, and one which should be in the library of every
minister."--_Ecclesiastical Gazette._
2. THE CHIEF END OF REVELATION. Third Edition. In crown 8vo,
cloth, price 6_s._
3. THE PARABOLIC TEACHING OF CHRIST: A Systematic and Critical
Study of the Parables of our Lord. Second Edition. Crown 8vo,
cloth, price 12_s._
"Professor Bruce brings to his task the learning, and the liberal
and finely sympathetic spirit, which are the best gifts of an
expositor of Scripture. His treatment of his subject is vigorous and
original."--_Spectator._
4. THE GALILEAN GOSPEL. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, price
3_s._ 6_d._
"We heartily commend this little volume as giving an outline ably
drawn of the teachings of Christ."--_Spectator._
"The product of a rich, imaginative mind, marked by scholarly
analysis, subtle insight and the suggestiveness of an original and
unconventional thinker."--_Glasgow Herald._
* * * * *
THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD. Expository and Homiletic. By the Rev.
JOHN LAIDLAW, D.D., Professor of Theology, New College,
Edinburgh. Second Edition, with New Index. Crown 8vo, cloth,
7_s._ 6_d._
"Marked by the competent scholarship, the sound and cautious exegesis,
the homiletic tact, the mastery of lucid and, at times, beautiful style
which characterise his preaching."--_Theological Review._
UNTIL THE DAY BREAK, and Other Hymns and Poems Left Behind. By
HORATIUS BONAR, D.D. Crown 8vo, cloth, red edges, price 5_s._
"There is not one we could have spared; while there are several of
which it may safely be predicted that they will become universal
favourites."--_Christian Leader._
"All of them have merit as verses, and breathe a pure and sweet
spirit of Christian piety."--_Scotsman._
"A prettier gift book we could not recommend."--_Rock._
LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
_WORKS BY REV. PROF. MARCUS DODS, D.D._
1. THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS. Second Edition. Crown
8vo, cloth, price 7_s._ 6_d._
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intelligent interest in modern social problems."--_Guardian._
2. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo,
cloth, price 2_s._ 6_d._
"Each book is the subject of a separate chapter, the volume being
really a series of introductions to the several Gospels and Epistles.
The authenticity, authorship, history, object, and general character
of each are discussed with admirable condensation and lucidity, and
with ample critical knowledge."--_Scotsman._
3. THE BOOK OF GENESIS. Fourth Edition. 8vo, cloth, price 7_s._ 6_d._
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strong and unencumbered, and there is in the ripe result such a
perfect assimilation of varied erudition, that none but fellow
craftsmen will realise the amount of study, industry, and many-sided
ability that was requisite to produce it."--_Professor Elmslie, D.D._
4. THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. First Series. The Parables recorded
by St. Matthew. New Edition. Sixth Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth,
price 3_s._ 6_d._
"There is certainly no better volume on the subject in our
language."--_Glasgow Mail._
5. THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. Second Series. The Parables recorded
by St. Luke. New Edition. Sixth Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth,
price 3_s._ 6_d._
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6. ISAAC, JACOB, AND JOSEPH. Fifth Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth,
price 3_s._ 6_d._
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deals with the problems of human life and character, which these
biographies suggest, in a candid and manly fashion."--_Spectator._
7. THE PRAYER THAT TEACHES TO PRAY. Sixth Edition. Crown 8vo,
price 2_s._ 6_d._
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quiet personal use."--_Clergyman's Magazine._
8. ISRAEL'S IRON AGE. Sketches from the Period of the Judges.
Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo, price 3_s._ 6_d._
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strength."--_Nonconformist._
9. MOHAMMED, BUDDA, AND CHRIST. Fifth Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth,
price 3_s._ 6_d._
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to many others, of a new outburst of earnest religious thought and
sentiment."--_Spectator._
LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
JOHN G. PATON, Missionary to the New Hebrides. An Autobiography.
FIRST PART. Edited by his Brother, Rev. JAMES PATON, B.A.
Fifteenth Thousand. With Portrait. Crown 8vo, cloth, price 6_s._
JOHN G. PATON, Missionary to the New Hebrides. An Autobiography.
SECOND PART. Twelfth Thousand. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo,
cloth, price 6_s._
* * * * *
_WORKS BY THE REV. W. J. DAWSON._
I.
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD: A Young Man's Words to Young Men. By the
Rev. W. J. DAWSON, Glasgow, Author of "The Makers of Modern
English," etc. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, price 3_s._ 6_d._
"His discourses are rich in thought, are lighted up with a vivid
imagination, and glow with the fire of imagination. Young men will be
charmed with the book."--_North British Daily Mail._
II.
THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH. Crown 8vo, price 5_s._
"Mr. Dawson has evidently made a careful study of his subject, and
has read widely and with considerable range of sympathy. His work
contains a good deal of really useful and unpretending information,
likely to be of considerable service to the readers whose wellbeing
he has at heart; and with this is combined a sound and appreciative
judgment which ought not to be unnoticed."--_Guardian._
* * * * *
THE LIVING CHRIST AND THE FOUR GOSPELS. By R. W. DALE, LL.D. Crown
8vo, cloth, price 6_s._
"Characterised by Dr. Dale's usual breadth of view, strong common
sense, and clear, forcible style."--_Manchester Examiner._
"As a man of culture and eloquence he has put the case strongly
and well, and it will not be surprising if his book, which is not
written, he tells us, for Masters of Arts, but in the first instance
for members of his own congregation, and then for all ordinary
people who take an interest in such matters, should be the means of
convincing many that the assumptions sometimes made about late origin
of the Gospels, etc., are utterly unfounded."--_Scotsman._
"Dr. Dale has enriched theological literature with many volumes full
of the strenuous thinking of a man thoroughly alive with the life
of his time. He has given us one or two volumes which will be read
when the problems of this present time have been forgotten; but he
has given us nothing which is more likely to be helpful, both to his
own and to future generations, than 'The Living Christ and the Four
Gospels.'... Its publication is a most helpful sign of the times. It
will bring light to many who have been feeling their way. It will
encourage many to speak out. It will help to dissipate the mists
begotten by spurious Protestantism, and to show us where we are and
what the ground is that we stand upon. A more significant or a more
valuable book has not appeared for many a day."--_Professor Marcus
Dods, in the "British Weekly."_
LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation and spelling errors have been fixed throughout.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Expositor's Bible - The Book of Isaiah, Volume II" ***
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