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

LECTURE 8: THE DELIVERANCE FROM ASSYRIA [1]

Between the Syro-Ephraitic war and the accession of Sennacherib to the throne of Nineveh the power of Assyria had been steadily on the increase. The energy and talent of Sargon, devoted to the consolidation rather than the unlimited extension of his empire, effectually put down every movement of independence on the part of subjects and tributaries, and even the united realm of Egypt and Ethiopia no longer ventured to measure its strength with his. The nations groaned under a tyranny that knew no pity, but they had learned by repeated experience that revolt was hopeless while the reins of empire were held by so firm a hand. At length, in the year 705, Sargon died, and the crown passed to his son, Sennacherib. A thrill of joy ran through the nations at the fall of the great oppressor (Isa. xiv, 29). In a few months Babylon was in full revolt, the Assyrian vassal king was overthrown, Merodach Baladan — either the old adversary of Sargon, or a son of the same name — assumed the sovereignty, and for two years (704-3), according to the canon of Ptolemy, the Assyrian kingship in Chaldaea was interrupted. The rebel king sought alliances far and wide; the monuments tell us that he found support in Elam (the region to the east of the lower Tigris, now part of Khuzistan), among the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, and among the Arab tribes, and that two campaigns were occupied in reducing the revolt in these districts. But the plan of Merodach Baladan had not been limited to Chaldaea and the neighbouring regions. The far West was equally impatient of Assyrian rule with the eastern provinces, and the first hope of the Babylonian leader was to raise the whole empire in simultaneous insurrection from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. It is to this date that we must refer his embassy to Hezekiah spoken of in 2 Kings xx. (Isa. xxxix), for which the sickness of the king of Judah can have been no more than the formal pretext, since we are told that Hezekiah "hearkened to the ambassadors," and displayed before them the resources of his kingdom. Such a reception given to a declared rebel against Assyria could have but one meaning. It meant that the king of Judah was more than half inclined to join the revolt. Merodach Baladan, in fact, had not misjudged the feelings of the Palestinian nations. The Philistine states especially, the old hotbed of revolt, were in a ferment of exultation at the news of Sargon's death, and already committed to war, and the contagion of their enthusiasm had reached Judah. Hezekiah, however, does not seem to have engaged himself to immediate action. He was not disposed to advance without the aid of Egypt, and the diplomacy of the Pharaohs moved slowly. But while the king hesitated, Isaiah had at once taken up his position. At the first news of the attitude of the Philistines he had sounded a note of warning in the brief prophecy preserved in xiv. 29- 32. "Rejoice not, all Philistia, that the rod that smote thee is broken; for from the root of the serpent shall come forth a basilisk, and its fruit shall be a flying dragon." Sennacherib, that is to say, will prove an enemy still more dangerous than his father. The cities of Philistia are doomed, "for a smoke cometh out of the north" — the cloud that marks the approach of the Assyrian host — '' and there is no straggler in his bands." But if Judah hold the safe course, and eschew all connection with foreign schemes of liberation, the destruction shall not be suffered to affect Hezekiah, or disturb the peace of the poorest in his land (xiv. 30). What answer then should be made to the ambassadors of the nation which solicits the Judaean alliance? "That Jehovah hath founded Zion, and in it His afflicted people shall find shelter." [2] Thirty years had passed since Isaiah first struck this very note of warning and of hope in his famous interview with Ahaz, at a time when the leaders of Judah were as eager to commit themselves to the Assyrian tutelage as they now were impatient to throw it off. The new generation which had grown up in the interval, and now held the reins of the state, had seen greater changes take place in their own lifetime than had passed before all the generations of their fathers from the time of Solomon downwards. Judah was like a ship that had lost its rudder, drifting at the mercy of shifting winds. Every ancient principle of national policy had disappeared or been reversed. No one knew whither the state was tending, or what results might flow from the new alliance with Philistia and Egypt, so contrary to all the traditions of past history, which the king and his counsellors were disposed to welcome as offering at least a hope of momentary relief from a bondage that had become intolerable. During these thirty years Isaiah alone had remained ever constant to himself, alike free from panic and flattering self-delusion, unshaken by the successes of Assyria, assured that no political combination which lay within the horizon of Judaean statesmanship could stem the tide of conquest, but not less assured that Jehovah's kingdom stood immovable, the one sure rock in the midst of the surging waters. An attitude so imposing in its calm and steadfast faith, and justified by so many proofs of true insight and sound political judgment, could not fail to secure for Isaiah a deep and growing influence. He no longer, as in the days of Ahaz, confronted the king as a mere isolated individual, whose counsels could be contemptuously brushed aside. The prophetic word had become a power in Jerusalem, and though the "scornful men," who despised Jehovah's word and trusted in oppression and crooked ways (xxx. 9-12), were still predominant in the counsels of state, they were afraid openly to challenge the opposition of Isaiah until the nation was too deeply committed to draw back. Their plans of revolt were matured in all secrecy; they hid their counsel deep from Jehovah and kept their actions in the dark — so Isaiah complains — saying, Who seeth us and who knoweth us? (xxix. 15). The prolonged wars of Sennacherib in the east gave them time to ripen their plans in private negotiation with Egypt. An embassy was sent to Zoan with a train of camels and asses bearing a rich treasure as the best argument to secure the assistance of Pharaoh (xxx. 1-6). The delay which attended these negotiations was in itself sufficient to ruin the prospects of the conspirators, for it gave Sennacherib time to crush the Babylonians and their allies in detail, before the flame of war broke out in the west. Even the common political judgment must justify Isaiah when he pointed out that the strength of the Assyrian was in no sense broken by the death of Sargon, and that the inertness of the Egyptians gave no promise of effectual help (xxx. 7). When Sennacherib had secured his eastern provinces, and at last moved westward (701 B.C.), the allies had effected as good as nothing. No Egyptian army was yet in the field. The Philistines had risen in conjunction with Hezekiah, and King Padi of Ekron, the vassal of Sennacherib, had been laid in chains in Jerusalem; the Phoenician cities were also in revolt, but no scheme of joint action was prepared, and the Great King advanced victoriously along the Mediterranean coast. The first blow fell upon Tyre, Zidon, and the minor Phoenician ports, and, when they were reduced, the Samaritans, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and even a part of the Philistines, hastened to bring gifts and do homage to the conqueror. Still continuing his march along the coast, Sennacherib successively reduced Ashkelon and the other maritime cities of Philistia; and, having thus thrown his force between the Palestinian rebels and their tardy allies of Egypt, he was able to turn his arms inland against Ekron and Judaea without fear of their forces effecting a junction with Tirhakah. Tirhakah, in fact, had already begun to move, and sent an army to the relief of Ekron, but it was defeated at Eltekeh, [3] and compelled to retire without effecting its purpose. From this moment the fall of Ekron was assured, and the Judaeans, who had been the soul of the revolt in Southern Palestine, bad no human hope of deliverance from the Great King. The crisis had arrived which Isaiah had so long foreseen; the last act of the Divine judgment had opened, and all eyes could now see the madness of a policy which had sought help and counsel from man and not from God.

During the three years of suspense that intervened between the embassy of Merodach Baladan to Hezekiah and the defeat of the forces of Egypt and Ethiopia at Eltekeh, Isaiah had never wavered in his judgment on the insensate folly of the rulers of Judah. "When the secret of the negotiations with Egypt, so long hid with care from Jehovah and His prophet, was at length divulged, and the whole nation was carried away by a tide of patriotic enthusiasm, his indignation found utterance in burning words. The political folly of the scheme was palpable; the enthusiasm with which it was greeted was mere intoxication (xxix. 9). Yet it was not for miscalculating the relative strength and readiness of Egypt and Assyria that Isaiah blamed his countrymen, but for entering at all into a calculation which left Jehovah out of the reckoning. "Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help, and stay on horses and trust in chariots because they are many, and on horsemen because they are a great host; but they look not to the Holy One of Israel, neither do they consult Jehovah. Yet He is wise, and bringeth evil, and will not call back His words, but will rise against the house of evildoers and the help of them that work iniquity. The Egyptians are men and not God, and their horses flesh and not spirit: Jehovah stretcheth forth His hand, and the helper stumbleth, and he that is holpen falls, yea, all of them shall fail together " (xxxi. 1 seq). Their plans had left out of account the one factor that really makes history, the supreme purpose and will of the Holy One of Israel. A judicial blindness seemed to cover the eyes of Judah. Jehovah had poured upon them a spirit of deep sleep; His revelation had become a sealed and illegible book to the nation which called itself Jehovah's people, but refused to hear His counsel (xxix. 10 seq.). He had long since set before His people the path of true deliverance. "Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, By returning and rest ye shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength: but ye would not." The rest and quietness which Isaiah prescribes are not the rest of indolence; he calls on Israel to abjure the vain bustle of foreign politics and put their trust in Jehovah; but faith in Jehovah brings its own obligations, — conformity to Jehovah's law, the establishment of religion as a practical power in daily life, and not as a mere precept of men learned by rote. To think that the divine wrath expressed in the continuance of Assyrian oppression can be escaped where these conditions are ignored is to reduce Jehovah to the level of man; it is not against Assyria but against Jehovah Himself that the plans of Judah are directed. "Out of your perversity," he cries; "shall the potter be esteemed as the clay, that the thing made should say of him that made it, He made me not? or the thing framed of him that framed it. He hath no understanding?" (xxix. 16). Not by such vain rebellion against the Maker of Israel can peace and help be found. Jehovah's salvation must be sought in His own way, and when it comes it shall sweep away not only the foreign tyrant, but the idolatry and traditional formalism of the masses, the oppressive and untruthful rule of the godless nobles (xxxi. 7; xxxii. 1 seq.).

To a superficial view the teaching of Isaiah in this juncture may seem to present the aspect of political fatalism. The apparent patriotism of his opponents enlists a ready sympathy, and the prophet's declaration that it was vain to attempt anything against the Assyrian till Jehovah Himself rose to bring deliverance is very apt to be confounded with, the vulgar type of Oriental indolence, which, identifies submission to the divine will with a neglect of the natural means to a desired end, leaving the means and the end alike to the sovereignty of fate. Such a view altogether mistakes the true point of Isaiah's argument. He does not refuse the use of means, but condemns the choice of means that are necessarily inadequate because they ignore the conditions of Jehovah's sovereignty. If the plans of Hezekiah and his princes had succeeded, they would still have contributed nothing to the true deliverance of Judah. To be freed from Assyria only that the rulers of the land might continue their oppressions uncontrolled, that religion might go on in its old round of formal observances which had no influence on conduct, that the credit of the idols might be re-established, and the true word of Jehovah still treated with contumely, would have been no benefit to the land. Isaiah was not the enemy of patriotic effort, but only of the spurious patriotism that identifies national prosperity with the undisturbed persistence of cherished abuses; he did not value political freedom less than his countrymen did, but he valued it only when it meant freedom from internal disorders as well as from foreign domination, the substitution for Assyrian bondage of the effective sovereignty of Jehovah's holiness.

And so the criticism which Isaiah directed against the policy of Egyptian alliance was not merely negative. As a true prophet he could not preach the vanity of mere human helpers without at the same time unfolding the all-sufficiency of the divine Saviour. The crisis which the folly of the rulers had brought upon the nation had to Isaiah a meaning of mercy as well as of judgment, for mercy and judgment meet in those supreme moments of history when the wisdom of the wise and the understanding of the prudent are confounded before Jehovah's counsel, when the arm of flesh is broken, and the might of Jehovah stands revealed to every eye. The impending destruction of the human helpers of Judah, the confusion that awaits those who put their trust in idols and in that religion learned by rote (xxix. 13) of which the idols were a part (xxxi. 7), the disasters which are prepared for the armies of Hezekiah (xxx. 17), the overthrow of citadel and fortress, and the desolation of the fruitful land (xxxii. 9 seq.), are so many steps towards the great turning-point of Israel's history, when all the delusive things of earth that blind men's eyes to spiritual realities are swept away, and Jehovah alone remains as the supreme reality and the one help of His people. "In that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book [of revelation, xxix. 11], and the eyes of the blind shall see out of darkness and out of obscurity. And the afflicted ones shall renew their joy in Jehovah, and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. For the tyrant is brought to nought, and the scorner is consumed, and all that watched for iniquity are cut off, that make men to sin by their words, and lay a snare for him that judgeth in the gate, and undo him that is in the right by empty guiles." Jehovah's deliverance, you observe, is not limited to the overthrow of the Assyrian; its goal is the establishment of His revelation as the law of Israel, and especially as a law that restores justice in the land and enables the poor and oppressed to rejoice in their divine King. "Therefore, thus saith Jehovah, who redeemed Abraham, unto the house of Jacob, Jacob shall not now be ashamed, neither shall his face now wax pale; for when his children see it, even the work of My hands in the midst of him, they shall sanctify My name and sanctify the Holy One of Jacob, and shall fear the God of Israel, And they that erred in spirit shall come to understanding, and they that murmured shall learn instruction " (xxix. 18-24).

Thus the words of stern rebuke which Isaiah continued to direct against the princes and their carnal policy (chaps, xxix.-xxxii.) are mingled with pictures of salvation, in which the main ideas are those already developed in earlier prophecies, but set forth with a depth of sympathy and tender feeling to which none of the earlier prophecies attain. The prophet's fire had not been quenched, but his spirit was chastened and his faith mellowed by the experience of forty years spent in waiting for the salvation which Judah's unbelief had so long deferred. One can see that the old man had begun to live much in the future, that he was glad to look beyond the present, and delight himself in the images of peace and holiness that lay on the other side of the last and crowning trouble which the nation had so wantonly drawn upon itself. Jehovah is ready with grace and help at the first voice of repentant supplication. "He waiteth long that He may be gracious unto you; He lifteth Himself on high that He may have compassion upon you, for Jehovah is the God of judgment; blessed are all they that wait for Him. Nay! weep no more, people of Zion, that dwellest in Jerusalem; He will surely be gracious to thee at the voice of thy cry, even as He heareth it He will answer thee. And when the Lord giveth you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy Revealer be hidden any more, but thine eyes shall see thy Revealer; and thine ears shall hear a word behind thee saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand or to the left. Then ye shall defile the silver plating of your graven images, and the golden overlaying of your molten images; thou shalt cast them away as a foul thing; thou shalt say to it, Get thee hence. Thus He shall give the rain of thy seed that thou sowest the ground withal, and bread of the increase of the earth, and it shall be rich and full; in that day shall the cattle feed in large pastures. . . . Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, in the day that Jehovah bindeth up the hurt of His people and healeth the stroke of their wound" (xxx. 18, seq.). In these pictures of assured prosperity in a nation that has cast aside its idols to seek deliverance and continual guidance from the true Teacher. Isaiah dwells again and again, and with a fulness which we are apt to think disproportionate, on images of fertility and natural abundance, of plenty and contentment for man and beast, when streams flow on every mountain (xxx. 25), when Lebanon is changed to a fruitful field, and the fruitful field of to-day shall be esteemed as a forest (xxix. 17). There is true poetical pathos in these images of rural peace and felicity, drawn by an old man whose life had been spent in the turmoil of the capital, in the midst of the creations of earthly pride, where the works of man's hands disguised the simple tokens of Jehovah's goodness. But the emphasis which Isaiah lays on the gifts of natural fertility has more than a poetic motive. From the days of his earliest prophecies he had pointed to the "spring of Jehovah," the God-given fruits of the earth, as the true glory of the remnant of Israel, — the best of blessings, because they come straight from heaven, and are the true basis of a peaceful and God-fearing life (chap. iv.). And so he draws once more the old contrast between the immediate prospect of a land desolated by invading hosts, when the pleasant fields and the fruitful vineyards lie waste, when the gladsome houses of the joyous cities of Judah are covered with thorns and briers, when the citadel is forsaken and the turmoil of the city changed to silence, when ruined fortress and tower are the haunt of the wild asses, a pasture for flocks, and the days of Israel's restoration, "when the spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness shall be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest." To Isaiah the fertility of the land is a spiritual blessing, the token of acceptance with Jehovah, the seal of the return of the nation to the paths of righteousness and true obedience. The desert is transformed to fertility, for judgment dwells in it, and righteousness abides in the fruitful field. "And the effect of righteousness shall be peace, and the reward of righteousness quietness and security for ever. And My people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation and in sure dwellings and in quiet resting-places." "Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters, sending forth the feet of the ox and the ass" to tread in the seed. Blessed is Israel, when the turmoil of the present has passed away for ever, and all corners of the land are again the scene of the yearly routine of simple husbandry (xxxii. 12, seq.).

There is a tinge of weariness, an earnest longing after rest, in these idyllic pictures, but Isaiah did not suffer them to withdraw his attention from the pressing questions of the present. Step by step he watched the progress of events. While all around him were still steeped in careless security, while the feasts still ran their round, and more than one year passed by and brought no tidings of the approach of Sennacherib, he continued to send forth words of warning. Jehovah Himself is preparing the onslaught. He will camp against Zion round about, and build siege-works and forts against the city of David, and the deliverance shall not come till Jerusalem is humbled to the dust, and her plaintive cry seems to rise from the depths of the earth like the voice of a ghost. But in the last extremity her help is sure, and her adversaries vanish as chaff before the wind. "She shall be visited of Jehovah of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire. And the multitude of all the nations that fight against Ariel — the hearth of God — even all that fight against her and her munition, and they that distress her, shall be as a dream, a vision of the night" (xxix. 1 seq). Thus assured of the limits of the appointed judgment, Isaiah follows with calmness the gradual evolution of Jehovah's purpose. The Assyrian is drawing nigh to discharge his last commission, to complete the work of judgment, and then to disappear for ever. The greatness of the crisis and the lofty eminence of faith from which Isaiah looks down upon it declare themselves in an expansion of the prophetic horizon. The impending decision is not merely the turning-point of Israel's history, it is the crisis of the history of the world; the future not of Judah alone, but of all the nations, from Tarshish in the Mediterranean West, and Meroe in the distant South, to the far Eastern lands of Elam, hangs upon the approaching conflict. On every side the nations are mustering to battle; Assyria, on its part, is gathering the peoples of the East (xvii. 12; xxii. 6; xxix. 7); on the Nile swift messengers are hurrying to and fro betwixt Ethiopia and Egypt (xviii. 2); and the centre of all this turmoil is Jehovah's mountain land of Judah. For Jehovah hath sworn that in His land the Assyrian shall be broken, and on His mountains He will tread him under foot. "This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth, and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all nations" (xiv. 24-27). And so the prophet calls upon all the inhabitants of the world to watch for the decisive moment, the signal of Jehovah's visible intervention, when the ensign is lifted up on the mountains, and the trumpet blast proclaims the great catastrophe. Meanwhile Jehovah in His heavenly dwelling-place looks down at ease upon the gradual ripening of His purpose, as the skies seem lazily to watch the ripening grapes on a clear bright day in the hot autumn. "For before the vintage, when the blossom is over and the flower gives place to the ripening grape, He shall cut off the sprigs with pruning-hooks, and the branches shall He hew away," Thus surely and without interruption shall the Assyrian mature his plans of universal conquest, till Jehovah Himself strikes in, and the invincible armies of Nineveh are left together to the fowls of the mountains and to the beasts of the earth; and the vultures shall summer upon their carcasses, and all the beasts of the earth shall winter upon them. Then shall Mount Zion, the place of the name of Jehovah of hosts, be known to all the ends of the earth, and from far Ethiopia tribute and homage shall flow to Jehovah's shrine (xviii. 4-7).

Thus, while Isaiah does not cease to concentrate his chief attention on Israel, or to regard the restoration and true redemption of the ancient people of Jehovah as the central feature of the Divine purpose, the largeness of the historical issues involved in the downfall of the supreme world-power carries the prophetic vision far beyond the narrow limits of Judah, and in the destruction of the Assyrian tyrant the King of Israel declares Himself Lord of all the earth. And so when Babylon had fallen (xxiii. 13), and Sennacherib at length began his destroying march upon the western provinces, Isaiah followed his progress with absorbing and almost sympathetic interest. First he announces the speedy discomfiture of the Arab tribes; within a short year all the glory of Kedar shall be consumed, and the remnant of the bowmen of the desert shall be few (xxi. 13 seq.). And next, as we know was the actual course of events, the stroke shall fall on the proud city of Tyre, the mart of nations, whose merchants are princes, and her traffickers the honourable of the earth; for Jehovah of hosts hath purposed to stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honourable of the earth (chap, xxiii.). And still the career of the destroyer has not reached its end: "Behold Jehovah rideth upon a swift cloud, and cometh unto Egypt, and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at His presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst thereof." The strength of Pharaoh is brought to nought, and the wisdom of his counsellors is changed to folly; the land is divided against itself and passes under the hand of a cruel Lord — the merciless king of Assyria (chap. xix.). It is Jehovah Himself that leads the armies of Nineveh in this career of universal conquest, paralysing the arms of their enemies; all the nations must be abased before Him, the strength of the world must be laid low, that His majesty may be exalted and every land do homage to Him. The crowning decision has assumed proportions so vast that its issue can be nothing less than the subjugation of the inhabited world to Jehovah's throne. For the desolation of the kingdoms is no longer, as it had appeared to earlier prophecy, a mere work of judgment on a godless world. To them as well as to Judah, if not in so exalted a sense, the judgment is the prelude to a great conversion. Tyre shall be forgotten for seventy years — the period, as the prophet explains it, of a single reign — and then Jehovah shall visit her in mercy, and she shall return to her merchandise and her gains, no longer to heap up treasure in the temple of Melkarth, but to consecrate her wealth to Jehovah, and supply abundance of food and princely clothing to the people of Israel that dwell in His presence.

We see from this detail that Isaiah still pictures the conversion of the nations under the limitations prescribed by the national idea of religion, which the Old Testament never wholly laid aside, which could not indeed be superseded in an age to which all cosmopolitan ideas were utterly foreign. But, while Isaiah was unable to conceive of the conversion of foreign nations to Jehovah in any other form than that of homage done to the Divine King that reigned on Zion, and tribute paid to His courts we should greatly err if we imagined that this conception sprang, as has sometimes been supposed, from mere national vanity. The subjection of the nations to Jehovah's throne, and the share which they thus obtain in the blessings of peace and good governance that are ministered by His sovereign word of revelation (ii. 2 seq.) is no grievous bondage, but their best privilege and happiness, their redemption from the cruel yoke which pressed so heavily on all the earth. This appears most clearly in the prophecy of the conversion of Egypt in chap. xix. On no land do the evils of a selfish and oppressive government weigh so grievously as on the valley of the Nile, where the very conditions of life and the maintenance of the fertility of the soil depend on a continual attention to the canals and other public works, the condition of which has, in all ages, been the best criterion of a strong and considerate administration. [4] This characteristic feature of the economy of the nation does not escape Isaiah, for the lofty spirituality of his aims is always combined with a penetrating insight into actual historical conditions. Under the cruel king whose advent dissolves the government of the Pharaohs, and sets free the intestine jealousies of the Egyptian nomes, the prophet describes the canals as dried up, and all the industries that depended on them as paralysed. Then the Egyptians shall cry unto Jehovah because of their oppressors, and He shall send them a saviour and a prince, and He shall deliver them. "And Jehovah shall be known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall know Jehovah on that day, and shall do worship with sacrifice and oblation, and shall vow vows to Jehovah, and perform them." Then all the lands of the known world from Egypt to Assyria shall serve the God of Jacob, "Israel shall be the third with Egypt and Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom Jehovah of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance." Never had the faith of prophet soared so high, or approached so near to the conception of a universal religion, set free from every trammel of national individuality. For now the history of the world had narrowed itself to a single issue; the fate of all nations turned on the decisive contest between the Assyrian and the God of Zion; and it was plain that Jehovah's kingship in Israel was naught unless it could approve itself by arguments that spoke to all the earth. [5]

If the vindication of the divine mission of the prophets of Israel must be sought in the precision of detail with which they related beforehand the course of coming events, the hopes which Isaiah continued to preach during the victorious advance of Sennacherib must be reckoned as vain imaginations. The great decision which shall call back the earth to the service of the true God is still an object of faith, and not an accomplished reality. The Assyrians passed away, and new powers rose upon the ruins of their greatness to repeat in other forms the battle of earthly empire against the Kingdom of God. As Babylonia and Persia, Greece and Rome, successively rose and fell, the sphere of the great movements of history continually enlarged, till at length a new world went forth from the dissolution of ancient society, the centre of human history was shifted to lands unknown to the Hebrews, and its fortunes were committed to nations still unborn when Isaiah preached. Not only have Isaiah's predictions received no literal fulfilment, but it is impossible that the evolution of the divine purpose can ever again be narrowed within the limits of the petty world of which Judah was the centre and Egypt and Assyria the extremes. Fanciful theorists who use the Old Testament as a book of curious mysteries, and profane its grandeur by adapting it to their idle visions at the sacrifice of every law of sound hermeneutics and sober historical judgment, may still dream of future political conjunctions which shall restore to Palestine the position of central importance which it once held as the meeting-place of the lands of ancient civilisation; but no sane thinker can seriously imagine for a moment that Tyre will again become the emporium of the world's commerce or Jerusalem the seat of universal sovereignty. The forms in which Isaiah enshrined his spiritual hopes are broken, and cannot be restored; they belong to an epoch of history that can never return, and the same line of argument which leads us reverently to admire the divine wisdom that chose the mountains of Palestine as the cradle of true religion at a time when Palestine was, in a very real sense, the physical centre of those movements of history from which the modern world has grown, refutes the idea that the Kingdom of the living God can again in any special sense be identified with the nation of the Jews and the land of Canaan. These indeed are considerations which have long been obvious to all but a few fantastic Millenarians, whose visions deserve no elaborate refutation. But even serious students of Scripture do not always clearly realise the full import of the failure of the literalistic view of prophecy; and the doctrine of literal fulfilment, rejected in principle, is still apt to exercise a fatal influence on the details of prophetic exegesis. If we repudiate the dream of an earthly Millennium, with Jerusalem and a Jewish restoration as its centre, we have no right to reserve for literal fulfilment such details of the prophecies as seem more capable of being reconciled with the actual march of history, or to rest the proof of the prophets' inspiration on the literal realisation of isolated parts of their pictures of the future, while it is yet certain that as a whole these pictures can never be translated into actuality — nay, that there is boundless variety and discrepancy of detail between the pictures contained in the various prophetic books, or even between those drawn by the same prophet at different periods of his career.

The perception of these difficulties, which can escape no thoughtful reader of the prophecies, has therefore long formed the chief support of the figurative or allegorical school of exegesis, which, not only in the Old Catholic and Mediaeval Churches, but in modern Protestantism, may claim to be viewed as the official type of prophetic exegesis. It is plain, however, that this method of exegesis labours under precisely the same difficulties when applied to prophecy with those which have caused its general abandonment as regards other parts of Scripture. The general law of allegorical interpretation, as developed in the ancient Church, is that everything which in its literal sense seems impossible, untrue, or unworthy of God must be rescued from this condemnation by the hypothesis of a hidden sense, which was the real meaning of the inspiring Spirit, and even of the prophet himself, except in so far as he was a mere unintelligent machine in the hand of the revealer. Now, it is certainly true, as we saw in a former Lecture (supra, p. 221 seq.), that all early thought about abstract and transcendental ideas is largely carried out by the aid of figure and analogy, and that general truths are apprehended and expressed in particular and even accidental forms. But this is something very different from the doctrine of a spiritual sense in the traditional meaning of the word. It means that the early thinker has apprehended only germs of universal truth, that he expresses these as clearly as he can, and that the figurative or imperfect form of his utterance corresponds to a real limitation of vision. That is not the principle of current allegorical exegesis, which holds rather that the obscurity of form is intentional, at least on the part of the revealing Spirit, and so that the true meaning of each prophecy is the maximum of New Testament truth that can be taken out of it by any use of allegory which the Christian reader can devise. Such a method of exegesis is purely arbitrary; it enables each man to prove his own dogmas at will from the Old Testament, and leaves us altogether uncertain what the prophets themselves believed, and what work they wrought for God in their own age. All this uncertainty disappears when we read the words of the prophets in their natural sense. The teaching of Isaiah, the greater part of which has now fallen under our survey, is the very reverse of unintelligible, if we consent to understand it by the plain rules of ordinary human speech, and in connection with the life of his own age. We do not need to carry with us to the study of the prophet any formulated principles of prophetic interpretation; the true meaning of his words unfolds itself clearly enough as soon as we realise the historical surroundings of his ministry, and the principles of spiritual faith, or, in other words, the conception of Jehovah and the laws of His working, which dominated all Isaiah's life. The kingship of Jehovah, the holy majesty of the one true God, the eternal validity of His law of righteousness, the certainty that His cause on earth is imperishable and must triumph over all the wrath of man, that His word of grace cannot be without avail, and that the community of His grace is the one thing on earth that cannot be brought to nought, — these are the spiritual certainties the possession of which constituted Isaiah a true prophet. Everything else in his teaching is nothing more than an attempt to give these principles concrete shape and tangible form in relation to the problems of his own day. The practical lessons which he drew from them for the conduct of Israel were in all respects absolutely justified. At every point his insight into the actual position of affairs, his judgment on the sin of Judah and the right path of amendment, his perception of the true sources of danger and the true way of deliverance, had that certainty and clear decisiveness which belong only to a vision purged from the delusions of sense by communion with things eternal and invisible. But when he embodied his faith and hope in concrete pictures of the future, these pictures were, from the necessity of the case, not literal forecasts of history, but poetic and ideal constructions. Their very object was to gather up the laws of God's working into a single dramatic action, — to present in one image, and within the limited scene of action that lay before the Hebrews, the operation of those divine forces of which Isaiah had only apprehended the simplest elements, and which since his day have expanded themselves, in new and more complex workings, through all the widening cycles of history. In such dramatic pictures it is only artistic or poetical truth that can be looked for. The insight of the prophet, like that of the unprophetic dramatist, vindicates itself in the delineation of true motives, — in the representation of the actual forces that rule the evolution of human affairs, — not in the exact reproduction of any one stage of past or future history. Actual history, as we know, is far too complex a thing to make it possible to isolate any one part of its action and delineate it literally in perfectly dramatic form; and just as every drama of human life maintains its ideal truth and perfection, as an exhibition of historical motives, only by abstracting from many things that the literal historian must take account of, so the drama of divine salvation, as it is set forth by the prophets, gives a just and comprehensive image of God's working only by gathering into one focus what is actually spread over the course of long ages, and picturing the realisation of the divine plan as completed in relation to a single historical crisis.

The supreme art with which the great prophets of Israel apply these laws of poetic or ideal truth to the dramatic representation of the divine motives that govern the history of Israel was no doubt in great measure the unconscious and childlike art of an age in which all lofty thought was still essentially poetical, and the reason was not yet divorced from the imagination. And yet I think it is plain from the very freedom with which Isaiah recasts the details of his predictions from time to time, — adapting them to new circumstances, introducing fresh historical or poetic motives, and cancelling obsolete features in his older imagery, — that he himself drew a clear distinction between mere accidental and dramatic details, which he knew might be modified or wholly superseded by the march of history, and the unchanging principles of faith, which he received as a direct revelation of Jehovah Himself, and knew to be eternal and invariable truth. Jehovah and Jehovah's purpose were absolute and immutable. Through all the variations of history He was the true asylum of His people, and in Him the victory of faith over the world was assured. The proof that this faith was true and all-sufficient was not dependent on the completeness or finality of the divine manifestation that vindicated it in any one crisis of history. Isaiah's faith was already victorious over the world, and had proved itself a source of invincible steadfastness, of peace and joy which the world could not take away, when it raised him high above the terrors and miseries of the present, and filled his mouth with triumphant praises of Jehovah's salvation in the depth of Judah's anguish and abasement. There was no self-delusion in the confidence with which he proclaimed Jehovah's victory amidst the crash of the Palestinian cities and the advance of Sennacherib from conquest to conquest. For, though the victory of divine righteousness came not at once in that complete and final form which Isaiah pictured, it was none the less a real victory. "When the storm rolled away, the word of Jehovah and the community of the faith of Jehovah still remained established on Mount Zion, a pledge of better things to come, a living proof that Jehovah's kingdom ruleth over all, and that though His grace tarry long it can never come to nought, and must yet go forth triumphant to all the ends of the earth.

When we learn to seek the true significance of the work of the prophets, not in the variable details of their predictions, but in the principles of faith which are common to all spiritual religion, and differ from the faith of the New Testament only as the unexpanded germ differs from the fall growth, we see also that the complete proof of their divine mission can only be found in the efficacy of their work towards the maintenance and progressive growth of the community of spiritual faith. It is the mark of God's word that it does not return to Him void, that in every generation it is not only true but fruitful, that by its instrumentality things spiritual and eternal become a power on earth, and an efficient factor in human history. Thus we have seen how the ministry of Elijah was taken up and continued by Amos, how the word of Amos and Hosea, despised and rejected by the men of Ephraim, yet formed the basis of the teaching of the Judaean prophets, Isaiah and Micah. But it was the special privilege of Isaiah that, unlike his immediate predecessors, he was permitted to enter in no small degree into the fruit of his own labours, and that the patient endurance of forty years was at last crowned by his personal participation in a victory of faith which produced wide and lasting effects on the subsequent course of Old Testament history.

As soon as he had secured his position on the coast, Sennacherib felt himself free to direct part of his forces against King Hezekiah. [6] One by one the fortresses of Judah yielded to the foe (2 Kings xviii. 13). Sennacherib claims on his monuments to have taken forty-six strong cities and 200,000 captives. "Your country," says Isaiah, [7] "is desolate, your cities burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as in the overthrow of Sodom. And the daughter of Zion is left as a hut in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city'' (Isa. i. 7). As yet, however, there was no movement of true repentance. There was indeed a great external display of eagerness for Jehovah's help: solemn assemblies were convened in the courts of the temple, the blood of sacrifices flowed in streams, the altars groaned under the fat of fed beasts, and the blood-stained hands of Jerusalem's guilty rulers were stretched forth to the sanctuary with many prayers (i. 11 seq.). Against these outward signs of devotion, accompanied by no thought of obedience and amendment, Isaiah thundered forth the words of his first chapter. Jehovah's soul hates the vain religion of empty formalism. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; turn away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; follow judgment, correct the oppressor, give justice to the fatherless, plead for the widow." Even now it is not too late to repent. "If ye be willing to obey, ye shall eat the fruit of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall he devoured with the sword: for the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken it." Always practical and direct in his admonitions, Isaiah concentrates his indignation on the guilty rulers, and announces their speedy fall as the first step to restoration (i. 23 seq.); one in especial, the vizier Shebna, he singles out by name, and declares that he shall be hurled from his post and dragged captive to a distant land (xxii. 15 seq.). For the moment these denunciations had no recognised effect; but already Isaiah felt himself master of the situation, and so sure was he that the march of events would set his party at the helm of the state that he even proceeded to nominate "Jehovah's servant," Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, as the successor of the wicked minister (xxii. 20 seq.). Meantime a strong Assyrian column advanced against the capital, and the affrighted inhabitants found the city in no fit state of defence. Some hasty preparations were made, which are graphically described in Isaiah xxii. The armoury was examined, the walls of the city of David were found to be full of breaches, and houses were pulled down that the material for needful repairs might be quickly available, and a store of water was accumulated in a new reservoir between the two walls at the lowest part of the town. But no confidence was felt in these provisions; there was no calm and deliberate courage to abide the issue. Many of the nobles fled from the danger (xxii. 3), and those who remained knew no better counsel than to drown their cares in wine, and spend in riot the few days of respite that remained to them. "Jehovah of hosts called to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: and behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Nevertheless, it would appear from the monuments of Sennacherib that Hezekiah resolved to stand the siege; and it was not till the operations of the assailants had made some progress that he made his submission as recorded in 2 Kings xviii. 14. All his treasures were surrendered to the Assyrian, the captive Padi of Ekron was delivered up, and large portions of Judaean territory were detached and given over to Philistine princes of the Assyrian party; but Hezekiah was left upon his throne; perhaps, indeed, Sennacherib thought this the safest course to adopt, as it is very clear from the whole tenor of Isaiah's prophecies that Hezekiah was not a man of much personal strength of character, and had during the previous years been little more than a passive instrument in the hand of Shebna and the other princes. No doubt, provision was made for a change of administration, and the party of war was effectually superseded; for a little later we actually find Eliakim in place of Shebna in the possession of the dignity for which Isaiah had marked him out (2 Kings xviii. 37).

Notwithstanding the hard conditions laid upon Hezekiah, these changes were, in a certain sense, of good omen for the future of the state. The party which had so long resisted all internal reformation had been hurled from power, the delusive visions of a brilliant foreign policy were dissipated, and the influence of the prophetic party, which took for its maxim the reform of religion, the abolition of idolatry, and the administration of equal justice to rich and poor, was greater than at any previous moment. But, on the other hand, the land was exhausted by the disastrous progress of the war, and by the enormous sacrifices which had been demanded as the price of peace. The Assyrian yoke pressed more heavily than ever upon Judah; and, though the nation was at length convinced that Isaiah's words were not to be despised, the course of events which had justified his foresight was by no means calculated to inspire that buoyancy and confidence of faith which were necessary to unite all classes in a vigorous and successful effort to reorganise the shattered life of the nation on higher principles than had been followed in time past. True religion cannot live without the experience of grace, and as yet Jehovah had shown all the severity of His judgment, but little or nothing of His forgiving love. This onesidedness, if I may so call it, of the historical demonstration of His effective sovereignty in Israel was fraught with special danger in a community like that of Judah. Where religion was so intimately bound up with the idea of nationality, the depression of all the energies of national life, involved in the abject humiliation of the land before the Assyrian, could not fail to prove a great stumbling-block to living faith; and to this must be added the marked tendency to a brooding melancholy which characterises the Hebrew race, and in later ages of oppression exercised a stifling influence on the religion of the Jews, changing its joy to gloom, and transforming the gracious Jehovah of the prophets into the pedantic taskmaster of Rabbinical theology. When we remember what Judaism became under the Persian and Western Empires, or what strange developments of cruel superstition and gloomy fanaticism displayed themselves a generation after Isaiah, in the reign of King Manasseh, we can form some conjecture as to the dangers which true religion would have run if Sennacherib had retired victorious, and Judah had been left to groan under a chastisement more grievous than had ever before fallen on its sins. But the divine wisdom decreed better things for Jehovah's land.

The submission of Hezekiah and the fall of Ekron had not completed Sennacherib's task. Some strong places on the Philistine frontier of Judah, such as Lachish and Libnah, still held out, and Tirhakah was not disabled by the defeat of the army he had sent to the relief of Ekron. On the contrary, Sennacherib now learned that the king of Ethiopia was marching against him in person (2 Kings xix. 9), and that the most serious part of the campaign was yet to come. Under these circumstances he began to feel that he had committed a grave strategical error in allowing Hezekiah to retain possession of the strongest fortress in the land. It cost the treacherous Assyrian no difficulty to devise a pretext for cancelling the newly-ratified engagement; and, while the siege of Lachish occupied the main army, a great officer was sent to Jerusalem to charge Hezekiah with complicity with Tirhakah, and to demand the surrender of the city. The troops that accompanied Rabshakeh were not sufficient to enforce submission; the Assyrians supposed that intimidation and big words would be sufficient to overawe the weak king of Judah. But Hezekiah was now in very different hands from those which had conducted his previous conduct. At this critical moment Isaiah was the real leader of Judah, and the confidence of Zion was no longer set on man but on God. At length the prophet knew that the turning-point had come, the false helpers had perished, and Jehovah was near to deliver His people, "Be not afraid," he said to Hezekiah, "of the words that thou hast heard, wherewith the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed Me. Behold, I will send a blast against him, and he shall hear a rumour and return to his own land, and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land." Against such confidence the menaces of Rabshakeh were of no avail. The populace, which he hoped to enlist on his side, stood firm by Hezekiah and Isaiah, and he returned to his master without accomplishing anything. [8]

Hezekiah's refusal was of course equivalent to a renewed declaration of war. But Sennacherib's hands were too full in the quarter where he awaited the advance of Tirhakah to allow him at once to detach a force sufficient for the reduction of a great city like Jerusalem. Again he had recourse to menaces, and again Isaiah responded in tones of confident assurance and scornful indignation against the presumption that dared to challenge Jehovah's might. "The virgin the daughter of Zion hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee. Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? and against whom hast thou exalted thy voice, and lifted up thine eyes on high? even against the Holy One of Israel." The Assyrian boasts that his own power has subdued the nations, "Nay," says Isaiah, "hast thou not heard that it was I that ordained it from afar, and that of old I formed it? now have I brought it to pass, that thou shouldest lay waste fenced cities into ruinous heaps. Therefore their inhabitants were of small power, they were dismayed and confounded: they were as the grass of the field or the green herb, like grass on the housetops and blasted corn. Thy rising up and thy sitting down are before Me; [9] I know thy going out and thy coming in, and thy rage against Me. Because thy rage against Me and thy tumult is come up unto Mine ears, I will put My hook in thy nose, and My bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way in which thou earnest. . . . And the remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward: for out of Jerusalem shall go forth, a remnant, and they that are escaped out of Mount Zion: the zeal of Jehovah of hosts shall do this" (2 Kings xix. 21 seq.; Isa. XXX vii.). Isaiah's confidence was not misplaced. A great and sudden calamity overwhelmed the army of Sennacherib (2 Kings xix. 35), and he was compelled to return to his own land, leaving Jerusalem unmolested. [10] Of the details of the catastrophe, which the Bible narrative is content to characterise as the act of God, the Assyrian monuments contain no record, because the issue of the campaign gave them nothing to boast of; but an Egyptian account preserved by Herodotus (ii. 141), though full of fabulous circumstances, shows that in Egypt as well as in Judaea it was recognised as a direct intervention of divine power. The disaster did not break the power of the Great King, who continued to reign for twenty years, and waged many other victorious wars. But none the less it must have been a very grave blow, the effects of which were felt throughout the empire, and permanently modified the imperial policy; for in the following year Chaldaea was again in revolt, and to the end of his reign Sennacherib never renewed his attack on Judah.

The retreat of the Assyrian was welcomed at Jerusalem with an outburst of triumphant joy, the expression of which may be sought with great probability in more than one of the hymns of the Psalter, especially in Psalm xlvi. The deliverance was Jehovah's work. He had returned to His people as in the days of old, and the burden of Judah's song of thanksgiving was, "Jehovah of hosts is with us, the God of Israel is our high tower.'' And the God who had wrought such great things for His people was not the Jehovah of the corrupt popular worship, for He had refused to hear the prayers of the adversaries of the prophet, but the God of Isaiah, whose name or manifestation the prophet had seen afar off drawing near in burning wrath and thick rising smoke, his lips full of angry foam and his tongue like a devouring fire, and his breath like an overflowing torrent reaching even to the neck, to sift the nations in the sieve of destruction, to bridle the jaws of peoples, and turn them aside from their course (xxx. 27 seq.). The eyes of the prophet had seen the salvation for which he had been waiting through so many weary years; the demonstration of Jehovah's kingship was the public victory of Isaiah's faith, and the word of spiritual prophecy, which from the days of Amos downward had been no more than the ineffective protest of a small minority, had now vindicated its claim to be taken by king and people as an authoritative exposition of the character and will of the God of Israel.

The acknowledged victory of Isaiah's doctrine contained an immediate summons to a practical work of reformation, and prescribed the rules to be followed in the reconstitution of the shattered fabric of the state, which was the first concern of the government when the invader evacuated the land. It would be of the highest interest to know in full detail how Hezekiah addressed himself to this task, and how Isaiah employed his well-won influence in the direction of the work. Unfortunately the history of the kings of Judah is almost wholly silent as to the last years of Hezekiah, and we have no prophecy of Isaiah which serves to fill up the blank. The record of the prophet's work closes with the triumphant strains of the thirty-third chapter, written perhaps before the catastrophe of Sennacherib, but after the result was already a prophetic certainty, because Judah had at length bent its heart to obedience to Jehovah's word. In this most beautiful of all Isaiah's discourses the long conflict of Israel's sin with Jehovah's righteousness is left behind; peace, forgiveness, and holy joy breathe in every verse, and the dark colours of present and past distress serve only as a foil to the assured felicity that is ready to dawn on Jehovah's land. ''Ha, thou that spoilest and thou wast not spoiled, that robbest and they robbed not thee; when thou makest an end of spoiling thou shalt be spoiled; when thou ceasest to rob they shall rob thee. Jehovah, be gracious, unto us; we have waited for Thee: be Thou our arm every morning, our victory also in the time of trouble. At the noise of the tumult the peoples fled; at the lifting up of Thyself the nations are scattered. . . . Jehovah is exalted; for He dwelleth on high: He hath filled Zion with judgment and righteousness. Then shall there be stability of thy seasons, plenitude of victory, wisdom, and knowledge: the fear of Jehovah shall be thy treasure. . . . Hear, ye that are afar off, what I have done; and, ye that are near, acknowledge my might. The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the godless men. Who among us shall dwell with devouring fire? who shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walketh in righteousness and speaketh upright things; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood and shutteth his eyes from looking on evil; he shall dwell on high: his place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks: his bread shall be given him; his water shall be sure. Thine eyes shall behold the King in His beauty: they shall see a land that reaches far. Thy heart shall muse on the past terror; where is he that inscribed and weighed the tribute? where is he that counted the towers? . . . Look upon Zion, the city of our solemn feasts: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a peaceful habitation, a tent that shall never be removed. . . . For there shall Jehovah sit in glory for us; but the place of broad rivers and streams — that is, the place of the overflowing empires of the Tigris and the Nile— no galley with oars shall go therein, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby. For Jehovah is our Judge, Jehovah is our Lawgiver, Jehovah is our King; He will save us. . . . And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick: the people that dwell therein are forgiven their iniquity."

And so Jehovah's word to Isaiah ends, as it had begun, with the forgiveness of sins. "Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged" (vi. 7). "The people that dwell therein are forgiven their iniquity." The goal of prophetic religion is reached when Israel, as a nation, is brought nigh to God in the same assurance of forgiveness, the same freedom of access to His supreme holiness, the same joyful obedience to His moral kingship, that made Isaiah a true prophet, and sustained his courage and his faith through the long years of Israel's rebellion and chastisement.

The culminating points of the world's history are not always those which are inscribed in boldest characters in the common records of mankind. The greatest event of all history, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, has scarcely left a trace in the chronicles of the Roman empire, and in like manner only a faint and distorted echo of the retreat of Sennacherib is heard beyond the narrow field of Judaean literature. The mere political historian of antiquity might almost refuse a place in his pages to a reverse which barely produced a momentary interruption in the victorious progress of the Assyrian monarchy. And yet the event, so inconsiderable in its outward consequences, has had more influence on the life of subsequent generations than all the conquests of Assyrian kings; for it assured the permanent vitality of that religion which was the cradle of Christianity. When Sennacherib's messenger approached the walls of Jerusalem with the summons of surrender, the fate of the new world, which lay in germ in Isaiah's teaching, seemed to tremble in the balance. "The children were come to the birth, and there was not strength to bring forth " (Isa. xxxvii. 3). Jehovah supplied the lacking strength, and the new community of prophetic faith came forth from the birth-throes of Zion (comp. Micah v. 3). But very soon it became manifest that this new born community of grace, the holy remnant, the fresh offshoot of the decaying stock of Israelm was not identical with the political state of Judah. Isaiah himself was far from suspecting this truth. All his prophecies are shaped by the assumption that in the future, as in the past, the people of Jehovah and the subjects of the Davidic monarchy must continue to be interchangeable ideas. The vindication of Jehovah's sovereignty was in his mind inseparable from such a national conversion as should stamp the impress of Jehovah's holiness on all the institutions of national life. This point of view is as plainly dominant in his latest prophecy as in his earliest discourses. The rulers of Zion, who dwell in the full blaze of Jehovah's consuming holiness, must be men whose hands are clear of bribes, who refuse to hear suggestions of crime, or to open their eyes to plans of iniquity. The salvation of God's people is manifested in the stability of national welfare, the regular succession of the natural seasons and unbroken victory going side by side with wisdom and knowledge and the fear of Jehovah. Hence the prophetic ideal of a redeemed nation contained, as has been already indicated, the outlines of a scheme for the reorganisation of national life, but of a scheme which, even at the outset, was found to be encompassed with imsurmountable practical difficulties. A radical renovation of society cannot be effected through the organs of national action, for a nation has no personal identity or invariable fixity of purpose; and the momentary impression of the great deliverance, when, for an instant, all Israel seemed to bend as one man before Jehovah's will, could not secure a permanent and unfailing concentration of every class, in its own place in society, towards the realisation of the prophetic ideal. The effective regeneration of society, as the gospel teaches us, must necessarily begin with the individual heart, and the true analogy of the workings of the kingdom of God is not found in the forms of earthly government, but in the hidden operations of a pervading leaven. Such a leaven did indeed exist in Isaiah's day, but it was not co-extensive with the nation of Judah; it consisted of the comparatively few whose adherence to spiritual religion was an affair of settled conviction, and not a passing impulse determined by one of those rare junctures when the power of spiritual things shows itself for an instant with all the palpable reality of a phenomenon of sense. It is not the law of divine providence that such visible manifestations of the hand of God, vouchsafed as they are only in supreme crises, should continue permanently, and supersede the exercise of the faith that endures as seeing that which is invisible; and nothing short of a continued miracle could have held the nation as a nation in that frame of repentance and new obedience which seemed to be universal in the first burst of exultation at Jehovah's victory.

The reforms which Hezekiah was able to introduce touched only the surface of national life; a radical amendment of social life, even as regarded the administration of equal and impartial justice, and the establishment of kindlier relations between the rich and poor, — points which Isaiah had always emphasised as fundamental, — lay altogether beyond their scope. In this respect the utmost that was accomplished was a temporary mitigation of crying abuses. It was less difficult to work a change in those parts of the visible ordinances of religion which were plainly inconsistent with prophetic teaching. The abolition of idolatry, or at least of its more public and flagrant manifestations, was undoubtedly attempted; indeed we might be led to infer from the prominence assigned to Hezekiah's religious reforms in the history of Kings that some movement in this direction may have been made in the earlier part of his reign. But it is quite clear from the prophecies of Isaiah that Hezekiah was wholly in the hands of the adversaries of the prophetic party till the last period of the Assyrian war; not till after his first surrender and the discomfiture of the politicians of whom Shebna was the leader could it be said of Hezekiah, in the language of 2 Kings xviii, 5, 6, that he trusted in Jehovah and clave to Him. Even in the discourses of the reign of Sennacherib Isaiah speaks of the abolition of the idols as a thing still in the future (xxx. 22; xxxi. 7), so that any earlier work of reformation, such as may possibly have been suggested by the lesson of Samaria's fall, as it was enforced by the contemporary prophecies of Isaiah and Micah, can at best have been only imperfect and transitory. The character which Hezekiah bears in history and the reforms connected with his name really refer to the years that followed the victory of Isaiah.

Isaiah had never ceased to declare that the rejection of the idols must be one of the first-fruits of Judah's repentance, but he did not attempt to indicate a scheme of reformed worship to take their place. The idols shall be cast away when the eyes of the nation are turned to the Holy One of Israel, and His voice is heard behind them to guide all their goings. To Isaiah, in truth, ritual worship had very little significance. He certainly did not distinctly look forward to its complete abolition, for he speaks of the Egyptians as serving Jehovah by sacrifice, and even of altar and macceba,  such as characterised the common provincial shrines of Judah, erected within Egypt in token of homage to Jehovah (xix. 19, 21). And in like manner the solemn feasts at Jerusalem — from which a figure is derived in XXX. 29 — are assumed to continue in the days of Israel's redemption (xxxiii. 20). But, on the other hand, he not only represents the sacrifice of guilty hands as unacceptable to Jehovah (chap, i.), but there is never the slightest indication that repentance and obedience require to be embodied in acts of ritual worship in order to find acceptance with God. There is not a line in all the prophecies that have come before us which gives the slightest weight to priesthood or sacrifice. Nay, in xvii. 8 the altars as well as the asherim and the sun-pillars appear as things of man's making that come between Israel and its God. It is not the temple that is the glory of the new Jerusalem and the seat of Jehovah's presence; the true meaning of Jehovah's residence on Zion lies in the fact that the capital is the centre of His effectual kingship in Judah; and even the name of the "hearth of God," which Isaiah bestows on the holy city, and not on the sanctuary alone, has rather reference to the consuming fire of the divine holiness than to altar or sacrificial flame. If Jerusalem appears to Isaiah as the centre of that sanctity which belongs to all Jehovah's "holy mountain land," and as the point of assembly where His people meet before Him, the meaning of this conception is that in Jerusalem Jehovah holds His kingly court, and that from Zion His prophetic word goes forth to guide His subjects. Thus, while Isaiah insists on the removal from religion of things that hide the true character of Jehovah, he has no positive views as to the institution of a reformed worship: the positive task on which he always lays stress is the purification of the organs of judgment and administration, so that the leaders of the state may be able to dwell safely in the consuming fire of Jehovah's holiness.

Isaiah had looked for the spontaneous repudiation of the idols in an impulse of national repentance which needed no official decree to guide it; the reforms of Hezekiah were the act of the government in a nation not wholly converted to Jehovah; and, in the absence of that pure spontaneity which the prophets regard as the true spring of right religion they must have been directed to an external aim, the establishment of a fixed type of official worship. The attempt was confronted from the first by a formidable difficulty: the idols, the sun-pillars, the asherim, the sacred trees, and all the other pagan or half-pagan symbols, so plainly inconsistent with the prophetic faith, were of the very substance of Israel's worship in the popular sanctuaries. So much was this the case that Isaiah, as we have just seen, was practically indifferent to all forms of cultus: the social exercises of his faith as described in Isa. viii. 16 seq. were altogether of another kind, anticipating the worship of the New Testament Church. Hezekiah could not propose to himself, and Isaiah had never formally contemplated, the entire abolition of the traditional ritual; and yet it was scarcely possible to introduce any effective reform without a great limitation, an almost radical subversion, of the ancient shrines. But at this point the zeal of Hezekiah was powerfully aided, and the plan of reformation practically determined, by the fact that almost every considerable provincial town of Judah had been ruined by the armies of Sennacherib. The local Baalim of the high places had been of no avail to save their worshippers; their shrines were burned or laid waste, and in many cases, no doubt, in accordance with the common practice of the Assyrians, the idols had been carried away to grace the triumph of Sennacherib. This destruction of the strongholds and sanctuaries of the land corresponded in the most marked way with the predictions of Micah, the influence of which on the conduct of Hezekiah is expressly attested in the book of Jeremiah. Micah, it is true, had not exempted the fortress and sanctuary of Zion from the universal destruction; his picture of the future left no room for any vestige of the ancient ritual; to him the Zion of the latter days is a religious centre, not as a place of worship, but as the seat of Jehovah's throne and of a revelation of law and judgment. But for the mass of the people the temple of Zion had received a new importance in connection with the effectual proof of the inviolability of Jehovah's holy mountain. They were unable to separate the idea of holiness from its traditional association with observances of ritual service, and the natural or even inevitable interpretation of the lesson written on the blackened ruins of the provincial holy places was that the "mountain of the house" was the true sanctuary of Judah's worship. [11] Thus the scheme of Hezekiah necessarily assumed, with more or less explicitness, the form of a superseding of the provincial shrines and the centralisation of worship in the temple of Jerusalem, purged from heathenish corruptions. At first this change would not appear very startling or difficult to carry out, for Sennacherib had left the provinces a desert (Isa. i. 7; xxxiii. 8, 9), and his monuments aver that 200,000 of their inhabitants were carried off as slaves. Judah and Jerusalem were for the moment almost identical ideas, and the sphere of Hezekiah's reforms was perhaps confined to the immediate vicinity of the capital. Even here there was one strange omission in his work. The shrines of foreign deities which had stood around Jerusalem since the days of Solomon were for some reason left untouched — probably because of privileges of worship that could not be refused to the Phoenicians and other aliens, who occupied in the capital a quarter or suburb called the Maktesh (Zeph. i. 11); and in the sequel these shrines exercised more influence on Judaean religion than they had ever done before. [12]

Thus the visible impulse of the great victory of Isaiah's faith appeared to have exhausted itself in a scheme of external reform which fell far short of giving full expression to the spirituality of prophetic teaching, and, carried out as it was by the authority of the government rather than by the spontaneous impulse of the whole nation, was sure to lead to the reaction that always follows on the enforcement by external authority of principles not thoroughly understood or sympathised with. As the nation fell back into the grooves of its old existence, ancient customs began to reassert their sway. The worship which the prophets condemned and which Hezekiah had proscribed was too deeply interwoven with all parts of life to be uprooted by royal decree, and the old prejudice of the country folk against the capital, so clearly apparent in Micah, must have co-operated with superstition to bring about the strong revulsion against the new reforms which took place under Hezekiah's son, Manasseh. A bloody struggle ensued between the conservative party and the followers of the prophets, and the new king was on the side of the reaction. Perhaps in this struggle the motives of the unpopular faction were less pure, as their aims were certainly less ideal, than Isaiah's. There were worldly interests involved in the policy of religious centralisation which claimed to represent the spiritual aspirations of the prophets; and the priests of Jerusalem, whose revenues and influence were directly concerned, were at no time the most unselfish of reformers. Thus we can well suppose that the religious war which ensued had on both sides a demoralising tendency; a contest as to forms of worship and ecclesiastico-political organisation is seldom for the advantage of spiritual faith. No great prophet arose as the champion of Hezekiah's reforms; and the one voice of lofty faith which speaks to us from these disastrous days, in the last two chapters of the book of Micah, [13] is the voice of a man who belongs to neither of the contending factions, and feels himself alone in Judah, as Isaiah had never been, in a society where all moral corruption is rampant, where justice, honesty, and truth are unknown, where the good man is perished out of the earth, and there is none upright among men, where the son dishonoureth his father, and the daughter riseth up against her mother, where the nearest friend cannot be trusted, where a man dare not speak freely even to the wife of his bosom. And yet in a certain sense religious earnestness was deeper than before. The reaction had brought back all the old corruptions, but not the old lightness of heart with which Israel rejoiced before its God in every holy place. The terrible experiences of the Assyrian wars had left behind them a residuum of gloomy apprehension. If Jehovah's deliverance was forgotten by the men who no longer clave to the faith of Isaiah, the terrors of his wrath, as they had been experienced in the ravages of Sennacherib and perhaps in subsequent calamities — for in Manasseh's time the Assyrians again became lords of the land — still weighed upon the nation, and gave a sombre tinge to all religion. In this respect Judah did not stand alone. To all the Palestinian nations the Assyrian crisis had made careless confidence in the help of their national deities a thing impossible. As life was embittered by foreign bondage, the darker aspects of heathenism became dominant. The wrath of the gods seemed more real than their favour; atoning ordinances were multiplied, human sacrifices became more frequent, the terror which hung over all the nations that groaned under the Assyrian yoke found habitual expression in the ordinances of worship; and it was this aspect of heathenism that came to the front in Manasseh's imitations of foreign religion.

Thus once more, and within a few years of Isaiah's great victory, the national ideal of Jehovah worship had broken down, and the old controversy of Jehovah with His people was renewed, but with other and deeper issues, in the development of which a new race of prophets was to take part. So far as appeared on the surface of Judaean society the results of the Assyrian judgment and the prophetic preaching that interpreted it had been purely negative. The old joyous religion of Israel had broken down, but the faith of Isaiah had not taken its place. The glad confidence in Jehovah, making it an easy thing to obey His precepts and a privilege to be called by His name, which Isaiah had continually set forth as the right disposition of true religion, was lost in gloomy superstition. The grace of Jehovah, so often manifested in the past history of Israel, was forgotten (Micah vi. 4 seq.), and His name had become a name of terror, not of hope. This was the true secret of Manasseh's polytheism. He sought other gods, not because Jehovah was powerless, but because he despaired of securing His help (comp. Jer. xliv. 18; Ezek. viii. 12). But beneath all this it is not difficult to see that a real advance had been made, and that the basis was laid for a new development of spiritual truth which should carry the religion of Israel another stage towards its goal in the religion of Christ.

The failure of Hezekiah's plans of reformation involved more than a merely negative result. And it did so in two ways. In the first place, it became manifest that to purge the religion of Judah from heathenish elements it was necessary that the whole notion of sacrificial worship should undergo a radical change. The code of Deuteronomy, which must be regarded as in great measure a product of reflection on the failure of Hezekiah's measures, starts from the observation that it is impossible to get rid of Canaanite elements of worship until sacrifice and ritual observances are confined to one sanctuary, and that this again is impossible till the old principle is given up that all food, and especially every animal slain for a feast, is unclean unless presented at the altar. By dissociating the ideas of slaughter and sacrifice, which till then had been absolutely indistinguishable and expressed by a single word, the law of Deuteronomy revolutionised the religion of daily life, and practically limited the sphere of ritual worship to the pilgrimage feasts and other occasions of special importance. This principle found no complete access to the mass of the people so long as the Kingdom of Judah stood; but it put in a tangible and easy shape at least one aspect of the prophetic teaching that the religion of ordinary life does not consist in ritual, but in love to God and obedience to Him, and so prepared many in Israel to maintain their faith in Jehovah in the approaching dissolution of national existence, when ritual service was not merely restricted in scope but altogether suspended. From one point of view the law of the single sanctuary seems a poor outcome for the great work of Isaiah, and yet when it was construed in the way set forth in Deuteronomy it implied a real step towards the spiritualisation of all the service of God, and the emancipation of religion from its connection with the land and holy places of Canaan (supra, p. 262). That the movement which finds expression in Deuteronomy became strong enough under Josiah to lead to a second and more effective suppression of the high places was not in itself a matter of great importance, for the new reformation was not more permanent in genuine results of a visible character than that of Hezekiah; but the spiritual power that lay behind the political action of Josiah is not to be measured by visible and immediate results. The book of Deuteronomy could not have touched the conscience of the nation even in a momentary and superficial way unless there had been many in Judah who sympathised with the spirit of that prophetic teaching to which the new code strove to give expression under forms which were indeed, as the sequel proved, too strait for its spiritual substance. The introduction now prefixed to the Deuteronomic code shows clearly that it was by spiritual motives, derived from the prophetic teaching, that the new system of ordinances was commended to Israel; the great limitation of visible acts of worship presented itself to thoughtful minds not as a narrowing of the sphere of religion but as a sublimation of its contents. Jehovah requires nothing of His people but "to fear Jehovah thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love and serve Him with all thy heart and all thy soul" (Deut. X. 12).

Thus we see, in the second place, that behind the legal aspect of the movement of reformation, as it is expressed in the Deuteronomic code, there lay a larger principle, which no legal system could exhaust, and which never found full embodiment till the religion of the Old Testament passed into the religion of Christ. The failure of Hezekiah's attempt to give a political expression to the teaching of Isaiah must have thrown back the men who had received the chief share of the prophet's spirit upon those unchanging elements of religion which are independent of all political ordinances. The religious life of Judah was not wholly absorbed in the contest about visible institutions, the battle between the one and the many sanctuaries. The organised prophetic party of Isaiah, which still found its supporters in the priesthood as it had done in the first days of that prophet's ministry, may soon have begun to degenerate into that empty formalism which took for its watchword "the Temple of Jehovah," against which Jeremiah preached as Isaiah had preached against the formalism of his day (Jer. x. 4). In Jeremiah's day the doctrine of the inviolability of Zion became in fact the very axiom of mere political Jehovah-worship. That has always been the law of the history of religion. What in one generation is a living truth of faith becomes in later generations a mere dead formula, part of the religion learned by rote with which living faith has to do battle upon new issues. But even in the darkest hours of Israel's history the true faith of Jehovah was never left without witness, and the men to whom Isaiah's teaching was more than a formula, the community of those that waited for Jehovah in a higher sense than the mass even of the so-called party of pure worship, withdrew more and more from all the forms of political religion to nourish their religious life in exercises purely spiritual, and to embody their hope of Jehovah's salvation in thoughts that stretched far beyond the limits of the old dispensation to days when Jehovah's precepts should be written on every heart (Jer, xxxi.). And in this new development of prophetic thought, of which Jeremiah is the great representative, standing to the second stage of the history of prophecy in much the same relation as Amos and Hosea stood to the first, the deeper, though misdirected, sense of guilt so characteristic of the gloomy days of Judah's decadence became an important element. The sense of sin was not extenuated, but it was interpreted aright and conquered by a new and profounder conception of redeeming grace, in which the idea of the spiritual as distinguished from the natural Israel, the servant of Jehovah, whose sufferings are the path of salvation, takes the place of the older and more mechanical notion of judgment on the wicked and salvation to the righteous (Isa. xl. seq.).

But to develop these and all the other ideas that come before us in the great prophecies of the Chaldaean period, to trace the course of the new religious issues that shaped themselves in the decline and fall of the Judaean Kingdom, and finally in exile and restoration, would be a task as large as that which we have already accomplished, and must be reserved for a future opportunity. Meantime, the record of the first period of prophetic religion may fitly close with the words in which the solitary voice crying out of the darkness of Manasseh's reign sets forth the sum of all preceding prophetic teaching, and gathers up the whole revealed will of Jehovah in answer to the false zeal of the immoral bigotry of the age.

''O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherewith have I wearied thee? testify against Me. For I brought thee up out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed thee out of the house of bondage, and I sent before thee Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. . . . Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old? Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, man, what is good, and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do judgment, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah vi. 2 seq.).

It is no mere religion of legal obedience that these words proclaim. Jehovah requires of man not only to do but to love, mercy. A heart that delights in acts of piety and loving-kindness, the humility that walks in lowly communion with God, — these are the things in which Jehovah takes pleasure, and this is the teaching of the law and the prophets, on which our Lord Himself has set His seal (Matt. xxii. 37 seq.).

Thus in the deepest darkness of that age of declension which sealed the fate of ancient Israel, when the true prophet could no longer see any other end to the degenerate nation than a consuming judgment that should leave the land of Canaan a desolation and its inhabitants a hissing and a reproach among the nations (Mic, vi. 16), the voice of spiritual faith rises high above all the limits of the dispensation that was to pass away, and sets forth the sum of true religion in words that can never die. The state of Israel perished; the kingdom of Judah and all the hopes that had been built upon it crumbled to the dust; but the word of the God of Israel endureth for ever.  

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