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THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL AND THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY TO THE CLOSE OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY, B.C.

LECTURE 6: THE EARLIER PROPHECIES OF ISAIAH.

We found in last Lecture that the arrangement of the extant collection of Isaiah's prophecies points to the conclusion that the prophet, at different times in his life, put forth several distinct volumes embodying the sum of certain parts of his oral teaching. In the case of Amos and Hosea it is not clear that anything of this kind took place, and as regards Amos we may take it as certain that his book was not written till his whole message to Israel had been delivered and rejected. Isaiah, on the other hand, used the publication of his past prophecies as an agency supplementing his continued oral work. He was not left to the same isolation as Amos and Hosea. At an early period of his ministry we find him surrounded by a circle of disciples, to whom it would appear that his written prophecies were in the first instance committed (viii. 16); and in this way he was able to influence a wider circle than he could have reached by mere oral preaching. The adoption of this method of teaching by books, and even, it would seem, by placards fixed in some public place (viii 1; xxx. 8) [1] implies the existence of a considerable reading public; and it may be noticed, as an interesting illustration of this fact, that the recently discovered inscription in the rock-cut tunnel of Siloam, probably dating from the lifetime of Isaiah, is no official record, but seems to have been carved by the workmen on their own account. Reading and writing must therefore have been pretty common accomplishments (comp. Isa. xxix. 11 seq.), and the well-timed publication of connected selections of prophecy, disseminated by the friends of Isaiah, had no doubt much to do with the solid and extensive influence which he gradually acquired. We must not suppose that Isaiah's publications were mere fly-sheets containing single oracles. Each of them was manifestly a well-planned digest of the substance of teaching which, in its first delivery, may have occupied several years; chaps, ii. - v., for example, with the connected passage ix. 8 to x. 4, cover all the prophet's teaching before the war of 734, and can hardly have been published till the outbreak of that war, to the first stage of which some of the allusions appear to point. The gravity of the crisis made it natural for Isaiah to make a special effort to lead his nation to form a just estimate of its religious significance, and this he could best do by recalling in summary form the substance of the lessons which year after year he had been laying before them. A book written in this way became something more than a series of skeleton sermons: it took the shape of a prophetic commentary on the political events, the social and religious phenomena, of a certain period of Judah's history, in which predictive announcements were mingled with historical retrospect. The peculiarities of Hebrew grammar and prophetic style often make it difficult to distinguish between narrative and prediction, and the difficulty is increased by the fact that predictions referring to the near future were sometimes fulfilled before they were set forth in a book. If the highest object of the prophet had been to show that he could foresee future events, he would no doubt have been careful to draw a sharp line between the predictive and retrospective parts of his writings; but in reality prediction was only one element in the work of explaining to the nation what Jehovah's present dealings meant, and how He desired them to be laid to heart. It would have been mere pedantry to sacrifice this object to that of recording each prediction exactly as it was first made. When historical events had thrown new light on any part of the prophet's argument, he used that new light in its proper place, and thus, on the whole, though many parts of Isa. ii.-v. are no doubt in the main a good deal older than the commencement of Ahaz's reign, we must take this section of Isaiah's prophecies as practically representing the stage, to which his prophetic argument had advanced, after a good many years of prophetic work, about the beginning of the war with Pekah and Rezin, or, which is the same thing, about the time of the accession of Ahaz.

The situation of the kingdom when this book appeared is clearly described by the prophet in his peroration, but to the English reader the sense of this passage is somewhat obscured not only by the transposition of ix. 8-x. 4 from its proper place, but by the inaccurate translation of many of the tenses as futures instead of perfects, so that the Authorised Version puts as prediction statements which are really descriptive of the present condition of affairs. To restore the order and the sense we must read ix. 8 seq. immediately after v. 25, so as to form a series of four strophes, describing in ascending series the evils that had already fallen on the Hebrews, and each closing with the words, "For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still." The final judgment therefore lies still in the future, the Assyrians are the instruments destined to accomplish it, and their approach is pictured in the predictive passage, v. 26-30, with which the book closes.

King Jotham, the last of a series of strong and generally successful princes, had died at a critical moment, when Pekah and Rezin were maturing their plans against his kingdom. The opposing parties in Northern Israel suspended their feuds to make common cause against Judah (ix. 21), and the proud inhabitants of Samaria hoped by this policy to more than restore the prestige forfeited in previous years of calamity (ix. 9, 10). At the same time the Syrians began to operate in the eastern dependencies of Judah, their aim being to possess themselves of the harbour of Elath on the Red Sea, while the Philistines attacked the Judaeans in the rear, and ravaged the fertile lowlands (ix. 12; 2 Kings xvi. 6). A heavy and sudden disaster had already fallen on the Judaean arms, a defeat in which head and tail, palm-branch and rush — that is, the highest officers and the common multitude of the host — had been mowed down in indiscriminate slaughter (ix. 14). [2] Ahaz was no fit leader in so critical a time; his character was petulant and childish, his policy was dictated in the harem (iii. 12). Nor was the internal order of the state calculated to inspire confidence. Wealth, indeed, had greatly accumulated in the preceding time of prosperity, but its distribution, as we saw in last Lecture, had been such that it weakened rather than added strength to the nation. The rich nobles were steeped in sensual luxury (v. 11 seq.), the Court was full of gallantry, and feminine extravagance and vanity gave the tone to aristocratic society (iii. 16 seq.,; comp. iii. 12, iv. 4), which, like the noblesse of France on the eve of the Revolution, was absorbed in gaiety and pleasure, while the masses were ground down by oppression, and the cry of their distress filled the land (iii. 15; v. 7). All social bonds were loosed in the universal reign of injustice, every man was for himself and no man for his brother (ix. 19 seq.). The subordination of classes was undermined (iii. 4, 5), things were tending to a pass when ere long none would be found willing to accept a post of authority, or to risk his own substance for the good of the state (iii. 6 seq.).  

"We must not suppose that to ordinary political observers at the time these internal wounds of the state appeared so aggravated and so patent as Isaiah represents them. The best Oriental administrations permit abuses which we would think intolerable, and in particular the wrongs and sufferings of the poor make little noise, and find no ready access to the supreme seat of government. The attention of the rulers was doubtless directed almost exclusively to the dangers that menaced from without; their schemes of deliverance took the shape of warlike preparations, or were already turned to the project of an alliance with Assyria. As yet they saw no cause for despondency; the accumulated resources of the nation were not exhausted, and the characteristic Hebrew obstinacy, which in later times more than once plunged the Jews into hopeless struggle with irresistible antagonists, was backed up by false religious confidence. The idols of which the land was full had not lost their reputation; Isaiah alone foresaw the approach of the hour of despair when these vain deliverers should be confronted with stern realities (x. 10, 11), when the nations and their gods, from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, should go down before the brute force of the Assyrian hosts, when men should cast their idols to the moles and to the bats, before the terror of Jehovah when He cometh to shake the earth (ii. 21). To the mass of Israel, the contrast which Isaiah draws between Jehovah and the idols did not exist; the idols themselves were associated with the sanctuaries of the national Deity, and men fancied, as the house of Ephraim fancied in the days of Amos, that Jehovah had no part in the calamities that befell His land; that though He was inactive for the moment, He must soon interpose, and could only interpose on behalf of Judah. But to Isaiah, these supposed tokens of Jehovah's temporary inactivity had quite an opposite sense: they proved that the King of Israel had risen for judgment, and would no longer pass by the sins of the state. "Jehovah setteth Himself to plead, and standeth up to judge His people; Jehovah will enter into judgment with the elders of His people, and the princes thereof, for ye have eaten up the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord Jehovah of hosts" (iii. 13 seq). "The vineyard of Jehovah of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant planting: and He looked for judgment, but behold bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold a cry " (v. 7). Once and again does Isaiah expose the strange delusion which could see no connection between the sins of the state and the threatening conjunction of foreign powers, the insensate conduct of the nobles who went on their course of lawlessness and riot without turning their eyes to the work of Jehovah or regarding the operation of His hands (v. 12). The whole perceptions of these men were radically perverted: they called evil good and good evil, they put darkness for light and light for darkness, bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (v. 20). Far from reading the lesson of Jehovah's displeasure, written so plainly on the page of contemporary events, they longed for His interposition as the cure for all their troubles. "Let Him make speed," they said, "and hasten His work that we may see it, and let the purpose of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh that we may know it." Thus, in their blindness to all moral distinctions and to all the signs of the times, they went on courting destruction, "drawing guilt upon themselves with the cords of their vain policy, and sin as it were with a cart rope." In their own conceit they were full of political wisdom (v. 21), but they had no eyes for the cardinal truth which Isaiah saw to outweigh every principle of earthly politics — that Jehovah was the one dispenser of good and evil to Israel, and that the law of His rule was the law of holiness and righteousness; "They had cast away the revelation of Jehovah of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel " (v. 24). And now this whole fabric of sin and self-delusion must perish in a moment utterly, like chaff and stubble at the touch of fire (v. 24). "Sheol [the under world] hath enlarged its maw and opened its mouth without measure, and her glory and her multitude and her pomp and the joyous ones of Zion shall descend into it. And the mean man shall be brought down, and the mighty man shall be humbled, and the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled. And Jehovah of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and the Holy God shall be sanctified in righteousness" (v. 14 seq.). Jehovah shall be exalted, for it is at His call that the messengers of destruction are hastening towards the doomed nation. Past and present warnings have been alike despised. What Israel has already suffered has brought no fruit of repentance, and Jehovah's wrath is still unappeased. And now "He lifts up a standard to far nations and hisses to them from the ends of the earth, and behold they come with speed swiftly. None is weary, and none stumbleth among them; they slumber not nor sleep; the girdle of their loins is not loosed, nor the latchet of their shoe broken. Their arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs are like the flint, and their chariot wheels like the whirlwind. Their roar is like the lioness, they roar like young lions, moaning and seizing the prey and carrying it off safe, and none can deliver." The roar of the lion marks the moment of his spring, the sullen moaning that follows shows that the prey is secured. Judah lies prostrate in the grasp of the Assyrian, and over all the land no sound is heard but the deep growl of brutal ferocity as he crouches over the helpless victim. "In that day he shall moan over Judah like the moaning of the sea, when the mariner looks for land, but lo, darkness hems him in, and light is turned to darkness by the clouds" (v. 26-30).

This picture of judgment, you observe, has all the precision due to the fact that Isaiah is not describing an unknown danger, but one very real and imminent — the same danger which Amos had seen so clearly a generation before. The intervention of Assyria in the affairs of the Palestinian states could not in the nature of things involve anything less than a complete dissolution of the old balance of power, and of the whole political system. There was nothing in the circle of the nations round about Judah which could offer successful resistance to the well-directed force of a great and disciplined martial power, and the smallest acquaintance with the politics of Assyria was sufficient to prove that the absorption of the Mediterranean seaboard by that empire was only a question of time, and could in no case be very remote. The politicians of Judah were blinded to this truth by their characteristic Semitic vanity, by the truly Oriental indolence which refuse to look beyond the moment, but above all by a false religious confidence. The kind of Jehovah worship which had not learned to separate the God of Israel from idols, which left men to seek help from the work of their own hands, was only possible to those who knew as little about the world as about God. A just estimate even of the natural factors of the world's history would have shown them that the Assyrian was stronger than the idols, though it needed a prophet's faith to perceive that there was a God in Israel to whose commands Assyria itself was constrained to yield unconscious obedience. But, in truth, the leaders of Judah dared not face the realities of a situation which broke through all their established ideas, which offered no prospect but despair. Isaiah had courage to see and proclaim the truth, because he was assured that amidst the crash of nations, Jehovah's throne stood unmoved, and He was exalted when all was abased.

The whole meaning of the impending crisis is summed up by the prophet in a sentence already quoted: "Jehovah of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and the Holy God shall be sanctified in righteousness." But to understand the scope of the judgment, the plan of the righteousness here spoken of, we must be on our guard against taking these terms in such a technical sense as they bear in modern theology. When Isaiah speaks of Jehovah's righteousness, he does so because he thinks of Jehovah as the King of Israel, discharging for His people, either directly or through His human vice-regent, all the ordinary functions of civil government. Jehovah's righteousness is nothing else than kingly righteousness in the ordinary sense of the word, and its sphere is the sphere of His literal sovereignty — that is, the land of Israel. Jehovah's great work of judgment by the hand of the Assyrians has for its object precisely the same things as a good and strong human judge aims at — not the transformation of the hearts of men, but the removal of injustice in the state, the punishment of offenders, the re-establishment of law and order, and the ultimate felicity of an obedient nation. "I will again bring my hand upon thee," says Jehovah, "smelting out thy dross as with lye, and taking away all thine alloy; and I will make thy judges to be again as aforetime, and thy counsellors as at the beginning; thereafter thou shalt be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city'' (i. 25, 26). No doubt when Isaiah limits the divine purpose to the restitution of Jerusalem as it had once been, we must remember that the days of David were idealised in the nation's memory. It is the virtues of ancient Jerusalem that are to be reproduced without its long-forgotten faults; but for all that it is plain that the ideal is simply a state perfectly well ordered — not a heavenly state, in which every individual is free from all sin in the New Testament sense of the word. It is such an ideal as would be actually realised if the judges and counsellors of the nation again were what they ought to be in a land whose king is the Holy One of Israel. [3]

The limitation of Isaiah's conception of the divine judgment leads us at once to observe the corresponding limitation in his use of the words sin, sinners, and the like. Sin, as we have seen in a former Lecture (p. 102 seq.), is to the Hebrew any action that puts a man in the wrong with one who has the power to make him rue it. Sin against Jehovah, therefore, is such conduct as He must take cognisance of in His quality of king and supreme judge in Israel, not sin in the New Testament sense, but on the one hand offences against social righteousness and equity, and on the other hand idolatry, which is the denial of Jehovah's true kingship. Hence the prophet has no doctrine of universal sinfulness. The Israelites are divided into two classes — the righteous, who have nothing to fear from Jehovah, and the wicked, whom His presence fills with terror (xxxiii 14). Weal to the righteous, who shall eat the fruit of their doings; woe to the wicked, because the deserving of his hands shall be rendered to him — is the law of Jehovah's justice (iii. 10, 11); and when it is executed in all its fulness the ideal of His sovereignty is fully realised. The redemption of Zion is conceived in the same plain sense: "Zion shall be redeemed by judgment, and those in her that return by righteousness'' (i. 27). The redemption is not the spiritual deliverance of the individual but the deliverance of the state, which can only be accomplished by purging out the sinners and their sin, and bringing back the remnant of the nation to obedience and right worship. If more than this were meant there would be no truth in Isaiah's representation of the fall of the might and independence of the state before Assyria as the means of redemption. But when we take the prophet's doctrine as he sets it forth himself, without complicating it by importing ideas from a later stage of revelation, the force of his argument at once becomes plain. The first condition of social reformation was the downfall of the corrupt rulers. While they held the reins there could be no hope of amendment, and in the approach of the Assyrians Isaiah sees the appointed means to level their pride and tyranny with the dust. And in like manner the first condition of true worship and homage to Jehovah was that men should recognise the nothingness of the idols, which the Assyrians in all their campaigns broke down or carried away captive.

Thus Isaiah looks forward without fear to the day when all the might of Judah shall be brought low, when great and fair houses shall be without inhabitant (v. 9), when wandering shepherds shall range at will over the rich corn-land and fertile vineyards of Judah (v. 17). He does so because Jehovah rules as Israel's king in the midst of judgment, and rules in grace for the remnant of Israel (iv. 2). In the day of utmost distress, when the land is shorn of all the artificial glories of man's making, "the spring of Jehovah [4] shall be the beauty and the wealth, the fruit of the land shall be the pride and the ornament of them that are escaped of Israel" (iv. 2). Once more, as in the old days, the Hebrews shall recognise the fruits of the land of Canaan, the simple blessings of agricultural life, as the best tokens of Jehovah's goodness, the best basis of a happy and God-fearing life, and shall cease to regret the lost splendours of the time when the land was full of silver and gold, of horses and chariots, and all the apparatus of human luxury and grandeur. All that remain in Zion shall be holy, for the filth of the daughters of Zion and the blood-guiltiness of Jerusalem have been purged away by the fiery blast of judgment.
 

Jehovah Himself shall overshadow His people, protecting them from all ill. His glory, manifested in smoke and cloud by day, in flaming fire by night, shall rest like a canopy over Mount Zion. He shall be their shadow by daytime from the heat, their hiding-place and cover from storm and from rain (iv. 3 seq.).

The picture of Israel's restoration, we observe, has none of that full precision of detail with which the prophet describes the present, or delineates the approaching judgment. The method of Jehovah's ideal government is as yet all vague; the grand but undefined image of overshadowing glory expresses no more than the constant presence and all-sufficient help of the King of Israel. And this is the law of all prophecy. It is a great fallacy to suppose that the seers of Israel looked into the far future with the same clear perception of detail which belongs to their contemplation of present events. The substance of Messianic prophecy is ideal, not literal; the business of the prophet is not to anticipate history, but to signalise the principles of divine grace which rule the future, because they are eternal as Jehovah's purpose. True faith asks nothing more than this: it is only unbelief that inquires after times and seasons, that claims to know not only what Jehovah's purpose is as it bears on the practical questions of the present, but how it will shape itself to needs and circumstances still remote. The law of prophetic revelation is that already laid down by Amos; the Lord Jehovah does nothing without revealing His secret to His servants the prophets. He deals with them as a prudent king does with a trusty counsellor. He never leaves them in the dark as to the scope and meaning of His present action, and He opens the future as far as is requisite to this end, but not further.

The vain confidence of the rulers of Judah described by Isaiah in his first prophetic book, was rudely shaken by the progress of the war with Pekah and Rezin. "It was told the house of David, saying, Syria is confederate [5] with Damascus. And the heart of the king and the hearts of his people were moved as the trees of the wood are moved by the wind " (vii. 2). The plan of the confederates was directed to the entire destruction of the Davidic dynasty, and a new king of Judah had already been selected in the person of a certain "son of Tabeel" (vii. 6). The allies obtained important successes, the Syrians in particular making themselves masters of the port of Elath. But an attempt to take Jerusalem failed, and though Ahaz was hard pressed on every side, his position could not be called desperate while he still held the strongest fortress of Palestine. On the part of the king and his princes, however, unreasoning confidence had given place to equally unreasoning panic. They saw only one way of escape, namely, to throw themselves on the protection of Assyria. They were well aware that the only conditions on which this protection would be vouchsafed were acceptance of the Assyrian suzerainty with the payment of a huge tribute, and an embassy was despatched laden with all the treasures of the palace and the temple, to announce that the king of Judah regarded himself as "the servant and the son" of Tiglath Pileser (2 Kings xvi. 7 seq.). The ambassadors had no difficulty in attaining their object, which perfectly fell in with the schemes of the Great King. The invincible army was set in motion, Damascus was taken and its inhabitants led captive, and Gilead and Galilee suffered the same fate. At Damascus Tiglath Pileser received the personal homage of Ahaz, whose frivolous character was so little capable of appreciating the dangers involved in his new obligations that he returned to Jerusalem with his head full of the artistic and religious curiosities he had seen on his journey. In a national crisis of the first magnitude he found no more pressing concern than the erection of a new altar in the temple on a pattern brought from Damascus (2 Kings xvi. 10 seq.). The sundial of Ahaz (2 Kings XX. 11), and an erection on the roof of the temple, with altars apparently designed for the worship of the host of heaven (2 Kings xxiii. 12), [6] were works equally characteristic of the trifling and superstitious virtuoso, who imagined that the introduction of a few foreign novelties gave lustre to a reign which had fooled away the independence of Judah, and sought a momentary deliverance by accepting a service the burden of which was fast becoming intolerable. The Assyrians had no regard to the welfare of their vassals. The principle of the monarchy was plunder; and Ahaz, whose treasures had been exhausted by his first tribute, was soon driven by the repeated demands of his masters to strip the temple even of its ancient bronze-work and other fixed ornaments (2 Kings xvi. 17 seq.). The incidental mention of this fact in a fragment of the history of the temple incorporated in the book of Kings is sufficient indication of the straits to which the Kingdom of Judah was reduced. The time was not far off when the rapacity of the Assyrian could no longer be satisfied, and his plundering hordes would be let loose upon the land.

At the moment when Ahaz and his panic-stricken counsellors were framing the desperate resolution of entrusting the state to the tender mercies of the Great King, Isaiah was the only man in Judah who retained his composure and his faith. He had long foreseen that judgment was inevitable, and he knew that the disasters of the Syro-Ephraitic war were only the prelude of a greater catastrophe in which the scourge of Assyria must fall on Judah and Ephraim alike. He had proclaimed these truths when no one else perceived the danger, and the publication of the first volume of his prophecies was almost coincident with the sudden collapse of national confidence. But to Isaiah the downfall of the sinners of Judah was not more certain than the indestructibility of the holy seed, the deliverance of those who were ordained to life in Jerusalem. In the moment of panic it was this side of prophetic truth that asserted its supremacy, and it did so in the form of absolute assurance that the scheme of Pekah and Rezin, which aimed at nothing less than the dissolution of the Judaean monarchy, could not succeed. "Take heed," he said to Ahaz, "and be still; fear not because of these two smoking ends of firebrands, in the hot rage of Rezin with Syria and the son of Eemaliah. Whereas they plot mischief against thee, saying, Let us go up against Judah, and strike terror into it, and conquer it for ourselves, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in it; thus saith the Lord Jehovah, It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin, and the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is the son of Remaliah. If ye will not believe, ye shall not be established" (vii. 4-9).

In translating this prophecy I follow the best recent commentators in rejecting as irrelevant the clause which in the Hebrew text stands at the end of verse 8, breaking the parallelism and weakening the force of the contemptuous allusion to Rezin and Pekah. The historical reference of the interpolated clause has become clear to us from the Assyrian monuments. When the Kingdom of Ephraim fell before Shalmaneser and Sargon, the Assyrians set up a vassal kingdom in Samaria (supra, p. 153), which is mentioned on the monuments for the last time a little less than sixty-five years after the date of Isaiah's prophecy to Ahaz. After that time we find the district of Samaria administered by an Assyrian prefect. It is plain that a reference to this change — which had no bearing on the fortunes of Judah or the history of Israel's religion — is quite out of place in the prophet's argument; it could afford no ground for his confidence, no consolation to Ahaz's fears. When Isaiah bids Ahaz consider that the whole strength of his enemies has no better front than the two half-consumed and smouldering firebrands, Pekah and Rezin, and then adds, "If ye will not have faith ye shall not be established," he plainly contrasts the mere human leaders of Ephraim and Damascus with the strength of Jehovah, the King of Israel. The same thought recurs at viii. 12, "Speak not of conspiracy [or formidable alliance] when this people speaks of conspiracy; and fear not what they fear, neither be ye afraid. Sanctify Jehovah of hosts, and let Him be your fear and let Him be your dread." The strength of Judah lies in its divine king, against whom man can do nothing; and lack of faith in Him can alone imperil the continuance of the state.

The delivery of this divine message to Ahaz marks an epoch in the work of Isaiah and in the history of Old Testament prophecy. In it Isaiah first appears as a practical statesman, no longer speaking of sin, judgment, and deliverance in broad general terms, but approaching the rulers of the state with a precise direction as to the course they should hold in a particular political juncture. The older prophets of Israel down to the time of Amos were habitually consulted on affairs of state. In all matters of difficult decision "the mouth of Jehovah" was appealed to; it was not doubted that He was with His people, that the cause of Jehovah was the cause of the nation, and that He was ever ready with prophetic counsel when man's wisdom failed. The influence of a great prophet like Elisha was therefore an influence directly political; in the period of the Syrian wars Elisha was the very soul of the struggle for independence. Jehovah and His people were still allied in a common cause, and the word of the prophet was accepted and obeyed accordingly. The doctrine of Amos and Hosea broke through the ancient faith in the unity of Jehovah's will with the immediate political interests of the nation. As the God of righteousness, they taught, Jehovah had nothing but chastisement to offer to an unrighteous nation; as a God of holy and jealous love He could not accord the privileges of a true spouse to a faithless people. The cause of Jehovah was for the present entirely divorced from the interests of Israel's political prosperity; the sinners of His people must be destroyed, or, on Hosea's view, Israel must pass through a moral resurrection before the union of the God with His nation could be restored and the felicity of the Hebrew state again become the central object of Jehovah's solicitude. The picture of a nation victorious and happy in Jehovah, which in the Blessing of Moses appears as realised, or at least in the course of realisation, in the events of present history, becomes to Amos and Hosea an ideal of the future, between which and the sin and misery of the present there yawns a great gulf, bridged over only by faith in the ultimate victory of righteousness and love. The breach between Jehovah and His people brings with it the suspension of prophetic guidance in the present difficulties of the state. The new prophecy has no counsel or comfort to offer to the corrupt rulers, whom Jehovah has not appointed and whose acts He does not recognise. When the people go with their flocks and herds to seek Jehovah they shall not find Him, He hath withdrawn Himself from them (Hosea v. 6). In the day of judgment "they shall wander from sea to sea, and run to and fro from north to south to seek the word of Jehovah, but they shall not find it" (Amos viii. 11 seq.). There were still prophets enough in Israel and in Judah who were ready with pretended divine counsel, but the prophets of the new spiritual school do not recognise them; they are not true prophets but diviners (Micah iii.). The disseverance of true prophecy from the political questions of the day is absolute; the faith that looks forward to a future redemption casts no light upon the affairs of the present; of them it can only be said that Jehovah has rejected His people (Isa. ii. 6), and that the cup of judgment must be filled up before brighter days dawn.

The position of Amos and Hosea is also the position of Isaiah in the prophecies that precede the campaign of Pekah and Rezin. Like his predecessors, he speaks both of mercy and of judgment; but the vision of judgment fills the immediate horizon, the picture of mercy lies all in the future, and its purely ideal outlines stand in the sharpest contrast with the historical realities of the present. The assurance of Israel's redemption rests on an act of pure faith; there is nothing to bear it out in Jehovah's present relations to His people. The work of mercy is not yet seen to be going on side by side with the work of judgment.

This complete dissociation of the two sides of Jehovah's dealings with Israel belongs, it is plain, to the fragmentary and imperfect character which in the Epistle to the Hebrews is attributed to all Old Testament prophecy. There is a want of unity in the prophetic argument. When we are told by Amos that the overthrow of the Hebrew state by the Assyrians has for its purpose the destruction of the sinners of Jehovah's people, in order that the righteous may remain and form a new and better Israel, we naturally ask how this separation of the righteous from the wicked can be effected in accordance with the ordinary laws of history. Or when Hosea predicts that the remnant of Israel scattered in Egypt and Assyria shall hear and answer the call of Jehovah in the day of restoration, the question forces itself upon us how that measure of the knowledge of Jehovah which the possibility of such a return implies can be kept alive in the midst of exile. To such questions Amos and Hosea supply no answer; they never tell us how the work of judgment is to be limited in order that the subsequent redemption may remain an historical possibility. And yet it is plain that there must be a continuity in Jehovah's work, and that in the midst of judgment the course of events must be so shaped as to give a basis and starting-point for the future work of grace. Provision must be made for the unbroken preservation of God's cause in Israel. The new Israel has its roots in the old; the new work of grace rests on the same principles with the great things which Jehovah did for His people in the past, and the work of judgment cannot sever this connection.

It is this principle which comes to the front in that second great group of Isaiah's prophecies to which chap. vi. serves as a preface, and which contains in chaps, vii.- ix. 7 the summary account of his teaching in the crisis of the Syro-Ephraitic war. The question which Isaiah proposes in vi. 11 is the key-note of this teaching. What are the limits prescribed to the impending judgment by the purpose that underlies it? The certainty of Jehovah's plan of grace involves the certainty that He will preserve to Judah in the coming disaster all that is necessary to make its realisation a practical possibility, and in this certainty the limits and measure of the judgment are prescribed. Hence the fundamental thesis expressed in vi. 13; the stock of the people of Jehovah is imperishable, the holy seed retains its vitality through all the work of judgment. In other words, the community of God's grace in Israel can never be extinguished. Within the corrupt mass of Judah there ever remains a seed of true life, a precious remnant, the preservation of which is certain.
 

Beyond this the prophet sets no limit to the severity of the troubles through which the land must pass. In the first years of Isaiah's ministry this principle seemed to slumber; it was not wholly forgotten, for in chap. iv. it is the remnant ordained to life in Jerusalem that appears as constituting the commonwealth of the redeemed in the final glory; but it is not brought into practical connection with the events of the present. But in the day of Judah's calamity, when kings and princes trembled for the endurance of the state, the doctrine of the remnant became immediately practical in the prophetic argument that, because the community of Jehovah is indestructible, the state of Judah and the kingdom of the house of David cannot he utterly overthrown. We shall best understand the bearings of this proposition, and the validity of the argument on which it rests, by comparing it with the prophecy of total captivity made by Jeremiah a century later. Both prophets start from the same inflexible conviction of the sovereignty of Jehovah's purpose; both are persuaded that the sphere of that purpose is the nation of Israel, and its goal the establishment in the land of Canaan of a nation conformed to Jehovah's holiness. But at this point the teaching of the two prophets diverges. Isaiah is convinced that the dissolution of the political existence of Judah is inconsistent with the accomplishment of the divine purpose. Jeremiah, on the other hand, regards the temporary suspension of the national existence in the land of Canaan as the necessary path to the future glory. According to Isaiah, the holy seed must remain rooted in Canaan, and must remain under the headship of the house of David. According to Jeremiah, Jerusalem and the cities of Judah shall be desolate, without inhabitant, and the kingdom of the house of David shall come to an end, not for ever, but till the day when Jehovah again gathers His captives. Each prophet was borne out by the events of the immediate future. Isaiah continued to affirm the inviolability of Jerusalem through all the dangers of the Assyrian invasion, and the event justified his confidence. Jeremiah foretold the captivity of Jerusalem, and Nebuchadnezzar accomplished his prediction. But we should do little justice to the sacred wisdom of the prophets if we regarded the fulfilment of their predictions as relieving us from all further inquiry into the reason why they took such widely divergent views of the method of Jehovah's sovereignty. When we look at Isaiah's prophecies more closely we see that in every one of them he directly connects the Assyrian judgment with the inbringing of the final glory. The maintenance of the continuity of Judah's political existence appears to him the necessary condition of the future redemption.  To Jeremiah this necessity no longer exists; to him it appears possible, while to Isaiah it seems impossible, that the religion of Jehovah can survive the fall of the state. This difference of view is not arbitrary, and is not to be referred to an unintelligible secret of divine providence; it rests on a difference in the religious condition of Israel at the times of the two prophets.

We have already seen, in speaking of the fall of Northern Israel (supra, p. 154), how the history of the Ten Tribes, after the fall of Samaria, proves that the religion of Jehovah, as it existed in Ephraim in the eighth century, was not able to survive in exile from the land of Canaan. The continued existence of a religion implies the maintenance of a religious community, united by acts of worship, and handing down the knowledge of God from father to son by inculcation not only of religious doctrine but of religious praxis. At the time when Samaria fell these conditions could not be fulfilled beyond the limits of the land of Canaan. Hosea expressly states that all religious observances were necessarily suspended in the exile of Israel. The feasts, the sacrifices, and all the other recognised elements of the worship of Jehovah demanded access to the sanctuary. When this was denied the whole life of the nation became unclean (Hosea ix. 3 sew.); and Israel was divorced from Jehovah (chap. iii.). The relapse of the Ten Tribes into heathenism was the inevitable consequence of their exile; nay, even the remnant that remained in Canaan was unable to maintain any consistent tradition of Jehovah worship in the dissolution of the independent monarchy, which had till then been universally regarded as the visible representation of Jehovah's sovereignty. The national religion of Judah was not more advanced than that of Ephraim. There, also, the ideas of the state and the religious community were inseparable; and, though isolated prophets could see that the elements of religion were independent of the traditional sanctuaries and their ritual, there was no community of men confirmed in these ideas, who could have held together in captivity, and nurtured their faith in Jehovah by spiritual exercises, unsupported by those visible ordinances which demanded regular access to the holy places of Canaan. In Judah as in Ephraim captivity and the dissolution of the state could have meant nothing else than relapse into heathenism, and the total obliteration of faith in Jehovah's kingship. In the time of Jeremiah all this was changed, and changed mainly by the work in which Isaiah was the chief instrument. The abolition of the provincial high places had taught religion to dispense with constant opportunity of access to the sanctuary; the formation of a consolidated prophetic party, which was the great work of Isaiah's life, provided a community of true faith able to hold together even in times of persecution, and conscious that its religion rested on a different basis from that of the idolatrous masses; and the accumulation of a sacred literature, of which only the first beginnings existed when Isaiah rose, kept the knowledge of Jehovah alive in the Exile, supplied materials for religious instruction, and permitted the development of the synagogue service, in which the captives found opportunity for those visible acts of united worship without which no religion can subsist.
 

Thus the faith of Jehovah survived the Exile, and was handed down from father to son in the Chaldaean dispersion in a way that would have been impossible in the Assyrian period; and so we see that Isaiah and Jeremiah measured the conditions, each of his own time, with equal accuracy, when the older prophet taught that the preservation of the community of Jehovah's religion involved the preservation of the Judaean state, and his successor looked forward to captivity as the only means of liberating the true faith from entanglement with a merely political Jehovah-worship.

I have asked you to consider the bearings of Isaiah's doctrine of the indestructibility of the Jewish state in the light of later history and prophecy, because in this way we not only see why the doctrine was true and necessary in the prophet's own time, but also learn that, as the divine purpose moved onwards, the community of grace came to exist under new conditions, which made the preservation of the kingdom of Judah no longer a matter of religious necessity, or, in other words, no longer a matter of faith. This, however, is a view of the case which goes beyond what was revealed to Isaiah. His faith in the preservation of Jerusalem and the Davidic kingdom amidst the troubles of the Syrian and Assyrian wars was not the special application of a general principle of religious truth, which he had grasped, and was able to express, in a form independent of the concrete circumstances of his age and nation. The prophets, as we have once and again had occasion to observe, saw only individual aspects and particular phases of divine truth; they apprehended the laws of Jehovah's dealings with men, not in their universal form, but in the particular shape applicable to present circumstances; and therefore they were altogether unconscious of the limitations of the principles of faith which they proclaimed. When we should say that, in order to preserve alive the knowledge and fear of the true God and maintain the continuity of Jehovah's purpose un earth, it was necessary that the kingdom of Judah should be saved through the Assyrian troubles, till the spiritual preaching of the prophets had formed a society within Israel in which true religion could be preserved even in exile, Isaiah says simply and without limitation that the sphere of Jehovah's purpose and the Kingdom of Judah are identical. Jehovah sits as King in Zion (viii. 18). His supreme purpose is to remodel the kingdom of Judah as a holy kingdom, and He will not suffer the hostile efforts of any nation to impede the development of this design. This view is altogether remote from the theory of the popular religion that the political interests of Israel and the interests of Jehovah's kingdom are always identical, that the mere fact that Jehovah is Israel's God secures His help in every emergency. On the contrary, all the evils that have befallen and are still to befall the state are Jehovah's work, but amidst these it remains true that Jehovah has a purpose of grace towards His nation, and that He will not suffer the enemies whose attacks He himself directs to do anything inconsistent with that purpose. And therefore the first duty of the rulers of Judah is to make no vain attempt to resist Jehovah's chastisement, but to submit to it with patience, and in the faith that He will bring the troubles of the nation to an end in His own way and in His own good time. The true policy of Judah is "to take heed and be quiet" (vii. 4). The safety of the kingdom depends on the maintenance of an attitude of faith: "If ye will not have faith, ye shall not endure''  (vii 9).

The chief practical object of Isaiah at this time was to prevent the scheme of alliance with Assyria. He saw plainly that Assyria was the real danger to all the Palestinian states; Damascus and Ephraim were mere smouldering firebrands. Confident upon grounds of faith that their immediate enterprise could not lead to the dissolution of the Judaean Kingdom, Isaiah also saw that Pekah and Rezin were not likely to trouble Judah in the future. It was indeed as clear as day that the Assyrians would not suffer extensive schemes of conquest to be carried on by their own rebellious vassals. If Ahaz had not called in the aid of Tiglath Pileser, his own interests would soon have compelled the Assyrian to strike at Damascus; and so, if the Judaean king had had faith to accept the prophet's assurance that the immediate danger could not prove fatal, he would have reaped all the advantages of the Assyrian alliance without finding himself in the perilous position of a vassal to the robber empire. As yet the schemes of Assyria hardly reached as far as Southern Palestine. Even Pekah was left upon his throne when Damascus was led captive, and so, if Isaiah had been followed, Judah would at all events have had twelve years of respite before she met Assyria face to face; and what might not have been accomplished in these years in a nation once more obedient to the prophetic word? The advice of Isaiah, therefore, displayed no less political sagacity than elevation of faith; but it could not approve itself to a king who had neither courage nor faith to accept the prophet's assurance that Jehovah would secure the defeat of Pekah and Rezin without the aid of the politicians of Judah. In vain did Isaiah seek to convey to the pusillanimous monarch some part of his own confidence by encouraging him to ask from Jehovah a sign or pledge of His help. Ahaz would ask nothing; he would not put Jehovah to the proof (vii. 12). The Assyrian alliance was finally determined on, and Judah was at once hopelessly involved in the toils of the empire of the Tigris.

Isaiah received the refusal of Ahaz as the loss of a great opportunity, a deliberate thwarting of Jehovah's counsel. The house of David, he says, are not content to try the patience of man by their silly obstinacy; they must, forsooth, try God's patience too. The phrase is characteristic of the intense realism with which he conceived the religious situation. Never for a moment doubting the final execution of Jehovah's purpose, he yet saw quite clearly that that purpose must be realised along the lines of the historical movement of the time, and that the conduct of Ahaz interposed a new difficulty, and must of necessity lead to new and perilous complications. The first result of the Assyrian intervention must be the fall of Pekah and Rezin, and this could not be delayed more than two or three years. Before a child born in the following spring was of age to say, "My father," and "My mother," or to distinguish good and evil (vii. 16; viii. 4), the land whose two kings had filled Ahaz with terror should be forsaken, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria should be taken away before the king of Assyria. And then Judah's turn must come." Jehovah shall bring upon thee and upon thy father's house such days as have not been since the time when Ephraim broke off from Judah" (vii. 17). For with the fall of Northern Israel, and the acceptance by Judah of the position of a vassal, the last barrier interposed between the empires of the Tigris and the Nile would have disappeared. A prolonged conflict must ensue between the two great powers, and their hosts shall swarm over the land of Judah like clouds of noxious insects (vii. 18 seq.), and lay the whole country utterly waste. The strongholds of Judah shall lie in ruins like the old hill-forts of the Amorites after the Hebrew conquest (xvii. 9). [7] Even the operations of agriculture shall become impossible: briers and thorns shall cover the whole face of the land, and the fair hillsides now crowned with terraced vineyards or blooming under careful tillage shall fall back into jungle, where sheep and oxen roam unchecked, where no human foot penetrates save that of the archer pursuing the gazelle or the mountain partridge. Bread shall be hardly known to the scanty remnant of the Judaeans (vii. 22), honey and sour milk shall be the chief articles of diet, and human life shall be reduced to its most primitive elements. [8]

Thus far Isaiah does no more than describe the natural consequences of Ahaz's foolish policy. His anticipations of evil show a clear appreciation of the dangers of the situation; but they are of the nature of a shrewd political forecast rather than of exceptional prediction, and as the future actually shaped itself his worst anticipations were not realised. The fall of Samaria did not come so soon as he expected (viii. 4), the conflict of Assyria and Egypt was deferred, and when it actually took place, thirty years later, the field of battle was in the extreme south of Palestine, and more in Philistine than in Judaean territory. The land suffered grievously from the armies which the Assyrian directed against Egypt, but the distress never reached the pitch which Isaiah feared. It is well to note these facts, for they show us that the prophetic predictions, even when they applied to the near future, were not always fulfilled in that literal way for which some theologians think it necessary to contend. And, as Isaiah did not lose his credit as a true prophet when it became plain that he had overstated the immediate danger, we are justified in believing that, in the age when prophecy was a living power, the hard-and-fast rule of literal interpretation which is the basis of so much modern speculation about the prophetic books was not recognised. It was understood that the prophets speak in broad poetically effective images, the essential justice of which is not affected by the consideration that they are not exactly reproduced in the future, so long as they embody true principles and indicate right points of view for the direction of conduct. In the case before us the practical object of Isaiah was to inspire new faith where all trust in the God of Israel seemed to be paralysed by terror. Ahaz had refused to put Jehovah to the proof; the oracles of the sanctuary and the vulgar herd of prophets were silent. Men knew no better counsel than to turn, as Saul had done in the moment of his despair, to the lowest forms of divination, to the peeping and muttering wizards, the ventriloquists who pretended to raise the shades of the dead that they, forsooth, might give help to the living. But to Isaiah it appeared that Jehovah had never been more clearly manifested as the living King of Israel. In the days of false prosperity it could be said with truth that He had cast off His people (ii. 6); then indeed there was no present token of the sovereignty of the holy God in a nation where everything that was inconsistent with His rule was suffered to run its course unchecked. But now the signs of Jehovah's presence and personal activity were plain. He had risen to shake the earth, and the lethargy that had so long covered the circle of Palestinian states was dispelled. On all sides the nations were astir, girding themselves for battle, knitting secret alliances, forging plans of defence against the approach of the Assyrian; and above all this turmoil Jehovah sat supreme. As the might of the heathen went down before the irresistible conqueror, as their plans were broken and their proud words of confidence brought to nought, each day made it more clear that there was no god but the God of Israel. The religions of the world were on their trial, and the verdict is pronounced by Isaiah in the words, "With us is God" (Isa. viii. 10).

What is the evidence on which Isaiah bases this verdict? We are all, I suppose, more or less accustomed to fancy that in Bible times the truths of religion were brought home to men's minds by evidence of a more tangible kind than in the present day. The ordinary method of dealing with the historical evidences of Christianity encourages the notion that the most serious difficulty of belief lies in the fact that we are separated by so many centuries from the time when God actually proved Himself a living God and the God of salvation; and we fancy that, if we had lived in the days of the prophets and seen with our own eyes the things that Jehovah wrought then, it would have been easy to believe, or rather impossible not to do so, because the supernatural in those days was as palpable to the senses as natural phenomena are now. An examination of the grounds which led Isaiah to declare that God was with Israel shows how erroneous this idea is. The events that gave him assurance of a present God were the same events that filled Ahaz with despair. It was indeed abundantly clear that the gods of the nations were naught, for none of them could save his worshippers from the Assyrian. But where was the proof that Israel was in a better case? The men of Judah might well say, as Gideon had said in the days of Midianite oppression, "If Jehovah be with us, why then is all this befallen us, and where be all His miracles which our fathers told us of, saying, Did not Jehovah bring us up from Egypt? but now Jehovah hath cast us off." To the spirit that will not believe except it see signs and wonders the natural inference from the Assyrian victory was that Asshur and not Jehovah was the God who ruled on earth. But to Isaiah divine rule means the rule of holiness. Judgment and mercy are equally valid proofs of the sovereignty of Jehovah in Israel. Where Amos had said, Jehovah knows Israel alone of all nations, therefore He punishes their sins, Isaiah inverts the argument and says, Because Jehovah punishes His people's sins there is verily a living God in Israel. Ahaz had refused to ask a pledge of Jehovah's interest in His people; but Jehovah Himself supplies that pledge in the swift approach of the calamity which Ahaz's rebellion entails.

The circumstance that Isa. vii, 14 seq. is applied in Mat. i. 23 to the birth of our Saviour has too often served to divert attention from the plain meaning of the sign or pledge which the prophet sets before the men of Judah. It is perfectly certain that the New Testament writers, in citing passages from the Old, do not always confine themselves to the original reference of the words they quote. The Old Testament Scriptures were an abiding possession of the Church. Their meaning was not held to have been exhausted in the events of past history; they all pointed to Christ, and every passage that could be brought into relation with the Gospel history might, it was felt, be legitimately adduced in that connection. The New Testament writers therefore do not help us to understand what a text of Isaiah meant to the prophet himself, or to those whom he personally addressed. They tell us only what it meant to the first generation of Christianity. The discussion of this secondary sense lies altogether beyond our present purpose. As historical students of prophecy, we have only to ask what the prophet designed to convey to his own contemporaries; and to them, it is clear, he offered a present token of Jehovah's presence, and of the truth of the prophetic word in its reference to current events. That token was not a miraculous conception. The word which the English version renders "virgin" means, strictly speaking, nothing else than a young woman of age to be a mother. On the person of the future mother Isaiah lays no stress; it does not appear that he pointed his hearers to any individual. He says only that a young woman who shall become a mother within a year may name her child "God with us." For, before the babe begins to develop into intelligent childhood, the lands of Pekah and Rezin shall be laid waste, and Judah as well as Israel shall be stripped of all its artificial wealth, and reduced to wild pasture ground, whose inhabitants feed on sour milk and honey. [9] In the collapse of all human resources, in the return of the nation to that elemental form of life in which the creations of human skill and industry no longer come between man and his Maker, it will become plain that there is a God in Israel. "In that day man shall look unto his Maker, and his eyes shall be turned to the Holy One of Israel. And they shall not look to the altars, the work of their hands, neither shall they turn to that which their own fingers have made, to the asherim and the sun-pillars" (xvii. 7, 8). To put the thought in modern language, the proof that God is with Israel, and with Israel alone, lies in this, that no other conception of godhead than that of the Holy God preached by Israel's prophets can justify itself as consistent with the course of the Assyrian calamity. The world is divided between two religions, the religion that worships things of man's making, and the religion of the Holy One of Israel. Judah is called to choose between these faiths, and its rulers have chosen the former. Their trust is in earthly things; — be these chariots and horses, strong cities and munitions of war, commercial wealth and agricultural prosperity, carnal alliances and schemes of human policy, or idols, altars, and sun-pillars, is alike to Isaiah's argument. When Jehovah rises in judgment all these vain helpers are swept away, and the Holy One of Israel alone remains. The plans of earthly policy which Ahaz and his counsellors had matured with so much care are likened by the prophet to the Adonis gardens [10] or pots of quickly withering flowers, which the ancients used to set at their doors or in the courts of temples: "Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore thou shalt plant Adonis gardens, and set them with strange slips. In the day that thou hedgest in thy plants, in the morning that thou makest thy seed to bud, the harvest is vanished in a day of grief and of hopeless sorrow" (xvii. 10 seq.).

Meantime, the duty of the prophet and his disciples is to hold themselves aloof from the rest of the nation, to take their stand on the sure word of revelation, and patiently await the issue. "Jehovah hath laid His strong hand on me, and taught me not to walk in the way of this people, saying, Speak not of confederacy where this people speaketh of confederacy, and fear not what they fear, neither be ye afraid. Sanctify Jehovah of hosts Himself, and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread. And He shall prove a sanctuary [asylum], but a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel, a gin and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem." "Bind up God's testimony, seal the revelation among my disciples. And I will wait for Jehovah that hideth His face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for Him" (viii. 11 seq). The circle that gathered round Isaiah and his household in these evil days, holding themselves apart from their countrymen, treasuring the word of revelation, and waiting for Jehovah, were indeed, as Isaiah describes them, "signs and tokens in Israel from Jehovah of hosts that dwelleth in Mount Zion." The formation of this little community was a new thing in the history of religion. Till then no one had dreamed of a fellowship of faith dissociated from all national forms, maintained without the exercise of ritual services, bound together by faith in the divine word alone. It was the birth of a new era in the Old Testament religion, for it was the birth of the conception of the Church, the first step in the emancipation of spiritual religion from the forms of political life, — a step not less significant that all its consequences were not seen till centuries had passed away. The community of true religion and the political community of Israel had never before been separated even in thought; now they stood side by side, conscious of their mutual antagonism, and never again fully to fall back into their old identity.

Isaiah, indeed, and the prophets who followed him were still far from seeing how deep was the breach between the physical Israel and the spiritual community of faith. To them the dissociation of these two qualities appeared to be merely temporary; they pictured the redemption of Israel as the vindication of the true remnant in a day of national repentance, when the state should accept the prophetic word as its divine rule. For the order of salvation is first light and then deliverance. In the depth of Israel's despair, when men walk in darkness, hardly bested and hungry, "they shall curse their king and their god, and look upward" (viii. 21). As their eyes turn to Him whom they cast off for the things they now curse as false helpers, the darkness is lifted from the land. "She who is in anguish shall not be in darkness." The work of redemption begins where the desolation of Israel by Assyria began, in the northern lands of Galilee by the shores of the Lake of Tiberias (ix. 1). But all Israel shares the great deliverance, in which the yoke of Assyria is broken, and Jehovah's zeal for His people manifested in a glorious reintegration of the Davidic kingdom. "The people that walk in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of deep shade, upon them hath the light shined. Thou hast made the gladness great. [11] Thou hast increased their joy; they joy before Thee according to the joy in harvest, as men are glad when they divide the spoil. For Thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, the rod of his back, the staff of his oppressor, as in the day of [battle with] Midian. For the greaves of the warrior that stampeth in the fray, and the garments rolled in blood, shall be cast into the fire as fuel for the flame. For to us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be on his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor — God, the mighty One — Everlasting Father — Prince of Peace, for the increase of the government, and for peace without end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom; to confirm it and to establish it in judgment and in righteousness, from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of Jehovah of hosts will perform this" (ix. 2-7).

In these words the picture of Israel's final glory assumes a much preciser form than in the earlier prophecy of chap. iv. There is still a large element of figure and symbol, so used as to show that the prophet does not possess a detailed revelation of the process of the work of salvation, but is guided, as was the case in the earlier predictions, by general principles of faith, too large to be immediately translated into the language of literality. But he has now gained a clearer view of the nature and limits of the work of judgment than was expressed in chaps, ii. and iii., and the new light shed on the present casts its rays into the future. The turning-point of Israel's history is the destruction of the power of the Assyrian oppressor, and with this deliverance the Messianic days begin. To Isaiah, therefore, the law of Jehovah's kingship is still the same as in ancient days. The new salvation is parallel to the great things which God did for His people in times of old, when the victories of Israel over such enemies as Midian were recognised as victories of Jehovah, and proved the chief means of confirming the national faith. But now the deliverance is no temporary victory over a mere Arab horde, but the final and complete discomfiture of the great power which represented all that man could do against the kingdom of Jehovah. The blood-stained relics of the struggle are cast into the fire. War has ceased for ever, and the reign of perpetual peace begins under a child of the seed of David, whose throne is established in righteousness and for evermore. In this last conception we meet for the first time with the idea of a personal Messiah. In chap. iv. it was Jehovah's glory, manifested in fire and cloud, that overshadowed and protected the ransomed nation. Now this image is translated into a new and more concrete form. The establishment and enlargement of the divine kingdom is committed to a human representative of Jehovah's sovereignty, and it is in a fresh scion of the house of David that Israel finds the embodiment of more than human wisdom, divine strength, and an everlasting reign of fatherly protection and peace. The further examination of these Messianic ideas must, however, be deferred till we can compare the prediction now before us with the later prophecies in which Isaiah recurs to the same subject.

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