The tephiUdh now returns to the retrospective glance already cast in vers. 8, 9 into that night of affliction, which preceded the redemption that had come. Vers. 16-18. "Jehovah, in trouble they missed Thee, poured out light supplication when Thy chastisement came upon them. As a woman with child, who draws near to her delivery, writhes and cries out in her pangs, so were we in Thy sight, 0 Jehovah. We went with child, we torithed; it was as if we brought forth wind. We brought no deliverance to the land, and the inhabitants of the world did not come to the light." The substantive circumstantial clause in the parallel line, Su? *nWDj castigatione tua eos affligente (? as in ver. 9), corresponds to "1JQ; and B*n? pp¥, a preterite (pre == pXJ, Job xxviii. 2, xxix. 6, to be poured out and melt away) with Nun paragogic (which is only met with again in Deut. viii. 3, 16, the yekoshun in Isa. xxix. 21 being, according to the syntax, the future of hash), answers to pdkad, which is used here as in ch. xxxiv. 16, 1 Sam. xx. 6, xxv. 15, in the sense of lustrando desiderare. Lachash is a quiet, whispering prayer (like the whispering of forms of incantation in ch. iii. 3); sorrow renders speechless in the long run; and a consciousness of sin crushes so completely, that a man does not dare to address God aloud (ch. xxix. 4). Pregnancy and pangs are symbols of a state of expectation strained to the utmost, the object of which appears all the closer the more the pains increase. Often, says the perfected church, as it looks back upon its past history, often did we regard the coming of salvation as certain; but again and again wrere our hopes deceived. The first i£3 is equivalent to 3, " as a woman with child," etc. (see at ch. viii. 23); the second is equivalent to 1^3, " as it were, we brought forth wind." This is not an inverted expression, signifying we brought forth as it were wind; but i£3 governs the wThole sentence in the sense of " (it was) as if." The issue of all their painful toil was like the result of a false pregnancy (empneumatosis), el delivery of wind. This state of things also proceeded from Jehovah, as the expression "before Thee" implies. It was a consequence of the sins of Israel, and of a continued want of true susceptibility to the blessings of salvation. Side by side with their disappointed hope, ver. 18 places the ineffectual character of their own efforts. Israel's own doings, — no, they could never make the land into nfcB* (i.e.
bring it into a state of complete salvation); and (so might the final clause be understood) they waited in vain for the judgment of Jehovah upon the sinful world that was at enmity against them, or they made ineffectual efforts to overcome it. This explanation is favoured by the fact, that throughout the whole of this cycle of prophecies yoshbe tebel does not mean the inhabitants of the holy land, but of the globe at large in the sense of "the world" (ver. 21, ch. xxiv. 5, 6). Again, the relation of v%\ to the r%n in ver. 19, and the figure previously employed of the pains of child-birth, speak most strongly in favour of the conclusion, that ndphal is here used for the falling of the fruit of the womb (cf. Wisd. vii. 3, II. xix. 110, KaTairecrelv and ireaelv). And yoshbe tebel (the inhabitants of the world) fits in with this sense (viz. that the expected increase of the population never came), from the fact that in this instance the reference is not to the inhabitants of the earth; but the words signify inhabitants generally, or, as we should say, young, new-born " mortals." The punishment of the land under the weight of the empire still continued, and a new generation did not come to the light of day to populate the desolate land (cf. Psychol, p. 414).
But now all this had taken place. Instead of singing what has occurred, the tephillah places itself in the midst of the occurrence itself. Ver. 19. " Thy dead will live, my corpses rise again. Awake and rejoice, ye that lie in the dust! For thy dew is dew of the lights, and the earth will bring shades to the day? The prophet speaks thus out of the heart of the church of the last times. In consequence of the long-continued sufferings and chastisements, it has been melted down to a very small remnant; and many of those whom it could once truly reckon as its own, are now lying as corpses in the dust of the grave. The church, filled with hope which will not be put to shame, now calls to itself, " Thy dead will live " (THO W, reviviscent, as in DVftDn n*nn? the resurrection of the dead), and consoles itself with the working of divine grace and power, which is even now setting itself in motion: " my corpses will rise again " (pDj^ ^72}^ nebelah: a word without a plural, but frequently used in a plural sense, as in ch. v. 25, and therefore connected with pEpI, equivalent to njippn • here before a light suffix, with the e~ retained, which is lost in other cases). It also cries out, in full assurance of the purpose of God, the believing word of command over the burial-ground of the dead, "Wake up and rejoice, ye that sleep in the dust," and then justifies to itself this believing word of command by looking up to Jehovah and confessing, " Thy dew is dew born out of (supernatural) lights," as the dew of nature is born out of the womb of the morning dawn (Ps. ex. 3). Others render it "dew upon herbs," taking nrrix as equivalent to rripV, as in 2 Kings iv. 39. We take it as from niitf (Ps. exxxix. 12), in the sense of D^nn lis. The plural implies that there is a perfect fulness of the lights of life in God (" the Father of lights," Jas. i. 17). Out of these there is born the gentle dew, which gives new life to the bones that have been sown in the ground (Ps. cxli. 7), — a figure full of mystery, which is quite needlessly wiped away by Hofmann's explanation, viz. that it is equivalent to ial horothy " dew of thorough saturating." Luther, who renders it, " Thy dew is a dew of the green field," stands alone among the earlier translators. The Targum, Syriac, Vulgate, and Saad. all render it, "Thy dew is light dew;" and with the uniform connection in which the Scriptures place \r flight) and chayyim (life), this rendering is natural enough. We now translate still further, " and the earth (yadretz, as in ch. lxv. 17, Prov. xxv. 3, whereas p.ao is almost always in the construct state) will bring shades to the day" (hippil, as a causative of ndphal, ver. 18), i.e. bring forth again the dead that have sunken into it (like Luther's rendering, " and the land will cast out the dead" — the rendering of our English version also; Tr.). The dew from the glory of God falls like a heavenly seed into the bosom of the earth; and in consequence of this, the earth gives out from itself the shades which have hitherto been held fast beneath the ground, so that they appear alive again on the surface of the earth. Those who understand ver. 18 as relating to the earnestly descried overthrow of the lords of the world, interpret this passage accordingly, as meaning either, " and thou castest down shades to the earth" (pN, ace. loci, = pK-nj;, ver. 5, pi6, ch. xxv. 12), or, "and the earth causeth shades to fall," i.e. to fall into itself. This is Kosenmuller's explanation (terra per prosopopoeiam, ut supra xxiv. 20, inducta, deturbare in or cum sistitur impios, eo ipso manes eos reddens). But although rephaim, when so interpreted, agrees with ver.
14, where this name is given to the oppressors of the people of God, it would be out of place here, where it would necessarily mean, " those who are just becoming shades." But, what is of greater importance still, if this concluding clause is understood as applying to the overthrow of the oppressors, it does not give any natural sequence to the words, " dew of the lights is thy dew;" whereas, according to our interpretation, it seals the faith, hope, and prayer of the church for what is to follow. When compared with the New Testament Apocalypse, it is "the first resurrection" which is here predicted by Isaiah. The confessors of Jehovah are awakened in their graves to form one glorious church with those who are still in the body. In the case of Ezekiel also (Ez. xxxvii. 1-14), the resurrection of the dead which he beholds is something more than a figurative representation of the people that were buried in captivity. The church of the period of glory on this side is a church of those who have been miraculously saved and wakened up from the dead. Their persecutors lie at their feet beneath the ground.
The judgment upon them is not mentioned, indeed, till after the completion of the church through those of its members that have died, although it must have actually preceded the latter. Thus the standpoint of the prophecy is incessantly oscillating backwards and forwards in these four chapters (xxiv.-xxvii.). This explains the exhortation in the next verses, and the reason assigned. Vers. 20, 21. (i Go in, my people, into thy chambers, and shut the door behind thee; hide thyself a little moment, till the judgment of wrath passes by. For, behold, Jehovah goeth out from His place to visit the iniquity of the inhabitants of the earth upon them; and the earth discloses the blood that it has sucked up, and no more covers her slain." The shir is now at an end. The prophet speaks once more as a prophet. Whilst the judgment of wrath (zdam) is going forth, and until it shall have passed by (on the fut. exact., see ch. x. 12, iv. 4; and on the fact itself, acharith hazzdam, Dan. viii. 19), the people of God are to continue in the solitude of prayer (Matt. vi. 6, cf. Ps. xxvii. 5, xxxi. 21). They can do so, for the judgment by which they get rid of their foes is the act of Jehovah alone; and they are to do so because only he who is hidden in God by prayer can escape the wrath. The judgment only lasts a little while (ch. x. 24, 25, liv. 7, 8, cf. Ps. xxx. 6),
I short time which is shortened for the elect's sake. Instead of the dual 1W* (as the house-door is called, though not the chamber-door), the word is pointed ^JOT (from n^n = rfaj)} just as the prophet intentionally chooses the feminine ^n instead of IDTI. The nation is thought of as feminine in this particular instance (cf. ch. liv. 7, 8); because Jehovah, its avenger and protector, is acting on its behalf, whilst in a purely passive attitude it hides itself in Him. Just as Noah, behind whom Jehovah shut the door of the ark, was hidden in the ark whilst the water-floods of the judgment poured down without, so should the church be shut off from the world without in its life of prayer, because a judgment of Jehovah was at hand. " He goeth out of His place " (verbatim the same as in Mic. i. 3), i.e. not out of His own divine life, as it restc within Himself, but out of the sphere of the manifested glory in which He presents Himself to the spirits. He goeth forth thence equipped for judgment, to visit the iniquity of the inhabitant of the earth upon him (the singular used collectively), and more especially their blood-guiltiness. The prohibition of murder was given to the sons of Noah, and therefore was one of the stipulations of "the covenant of old" (ch. xxiv. 5). The earth supplies two witnesses: (1) the innocent blood which has been violently shed (on ddmim, see ch. i. 15), which she has had to suck up, and which is now exposed, and cries for vengeance; and (2) the persons themselves who have been murdered in their innocence, and who are slumbering within her. Streams of blood come to light and bear testimony, and martyrs arise to bear witness against their murderers.
Upon whom the judgment of Jehovah particularly falls, is described in figurative and enigmatical words in ch. xxvii. 1: " In that day will Jehovah visit with His sword, with the hard, and the great, and the strong, leviathan the fleet serpent, and leviathan the twisted serpent, and slay the dragon in the sea'' No doubt the three animals are emblems of three imperial powers. The assertion that there are no more three animals than there are three swords, is a mistake. If the preposition were repeated in the case of the swords, as it is in the case of the animals, we should have to understand the passage as referring to three swords as well as three animals. But this is not the case. We have therefore to inquire what the three world-powers are; and this question is quite a justifiable one: for we have no reason to rest satisfied with the opinion held by Drechsler, that the three emblems are symbols of ungodly powers in general, of every kind and every sphere, unless the question itself is absolutely unanswerable. Now the tannin (the stretched-out aquatic animal) is the standing emblem of Egypt (ch. li. 9; Ps. lxxiv. 13; Ezek. xxix. 3, xxxii. 2). And as the Euphrates-land and Asshur are mentioned in vers. 12, 13 in connection with Egypt, it is immediately probable that the other two animals signify the kingdom of the Tigris, i.e. Assyria, with its capital Nineveh which stood on the Tigris, and the kingdom of the Euphrates, i.e. Chaldea, with its capital Babylon which stood upon the Euphrates. Moreover, the application of the same epithet Leviathan to both the kingdoms, with simply a difference in the attributes, is suggestive of two kingdoms that were related to each other. We must not be misled by the fact that ndchdsh bdriacli is a constellation in Job xxvi. 13; we have no bammarom (on high) here, as in ch. xxiv. 21, and therefore are evidently still upon the surface of the globe. The epithet employed was primarily suggested by the situation of the two cities. Nineveh was on the Tigris, which was called ChiddeJcel,1 on account of the swiftness of its course and its terrible rapids; hence Asshur is compared to a serpent moving along in a rapid, impetuous, long, extended course (bdriach, as in ch. xliii. 14, is equivalent to barriach^ a noun of the same form as VpV9 and a different word from beriach, a bolt, ch. xv. 5). Babylon, on the other hand, is compared to a twisted serpent, i.e. to one twisting about in serpentine curves, because it was situated on the very winding Euphrates, the windings of which are especially labyrinthine in the immediate vicinity of Babylon. The river did indeed flow straight away at one time, but by artificial cuttings it was made so serpentine that it passed the same place, viz. Arderikka, no less than three times; and according to the
1 In point of fact, not only does jtf signify both an arrow and the Tigris, according to the Neo-Persian lexicons, but the old explanation ''Tigris, swift as a dart, since the Medes call the Tigris toxeuma" (the shot or shot arrow; Eustath. on Dion Perieg. v. 984), is confirmed by the Zendic tighri, which has been proved to be used in the sense of arrow or shot (Yesht 8, 6, yatha tigliris mainyavaqao), i.e. like a heavenly arrow.
declaration of Herodotus in his own time, when any one sailed down the river, he had to pass it three times in three days (Ritter, x. p. 8). The real meaning of the emblem, however, is no more exhausted by this allusion to the geographical situation,, than it was in the case of " the desert of the sea" (ch. xxi. 1). The attribute of winding is also a symbol of the longer duration of one empire than of the other, and of the more numerous complications into which Israel would be drawn by it. The world-power on the Tigris fires with rapidity upon Israel, so that the fate of Israel is very quickly decided. But the worldpower on the Euphrates advances by many windings, and encircles its prey in many folds. And these windings are all the more numerous, because in the prophet's view Babylon is the final form assumed by the empire of the world, and therefore Israel remains encircled by this serpent until the last days. The judgment upon Asshur, Babylon, and Egypt, is the judgment upon the world-powers universally.
D. The fourth echo: The fruit-bearing vineyard under the protection of Jehovah. — Chap, xxvii. 2-6.
The prophecy here passes for the fourth time into the tone of a song. The church recognises itself in the judgments upon the world, as Jehovah's well-protected and beloved vineyard. Vers. 2-5. " In that day
Instead of introducing the song with, " In that day shall this song be sung/' or some such introduction, the prophecy passes at once into the song. It consists in a descending scale of strophes, consisting of one of five lines (vers. 2, 3), one of four lines (ver. 4), and one of three lines (ver. 5). The thema is placed at the beginning, in the absolute case: cerem chemer. This may signify a vineyard of fiery or good wine (compare cerem zaith in Judg. xv. 5); bat it is possible that the reading should be cerem chemed, as in ch. xxxii. 12, as the LXX., Targum, and most modern commentators assume.? nay signifies, according to Num. xxi. 17, Ps. cxlvii. 7 (cf. Ex. xxxii. 18, Ps. lxxxviii. 1), to strike up a song with reference to anything, — an onomatopoetic word (different from ruy, to begin, literally to meet, see p. 156). Cerem (the vineyard) is a feminine here, like "W3, the well, in the song of the -well in Num. xxi. 17, 18, and just as Israel, of which the vineyard here is a symbol (ch. iii. 14, v. 1 sqq.), is sometimes regarded as masculine, and at other times as feminine (ch. xxvi. 20). Jehovah Himself is introduced as speaking. He is the keeper of the vineyard, who waters it every moment when there is any necessity (lirgaim, like labbekdrim in ch. xxxiii. 2, every morning), and watches it by night as well as by day, that nothing- may visit it. ^ ^i?? (to visit upon) is used in other cases to signify the infliction of punishment; here it denotes visitation by some kind of misfortune. Because it was the church purified through afflictions, the feelings of Jehovah towards it were pure love, without any admixture of the burning of anger (chemdh). This is reserved for all who dare to do injury to this vineyard. Jehovah challenges these, and says, Who is there, then, that gives me thorns, thistles! (*33W = 7 }FP, as in Jer. ix. 1, cf. Josh, xv. 19.) The asyndeton, instead of IWJ "i"1*?^, which is customary elsewhere, corresponds to the excitement of the exalted defender. If He had thorns, thistles before Him, He would briak forth upon them in war, i.e. make war upon them (bah, neuter, upon such a mass of bush), and set it all on fire (TT'Vn = JVarn). The arrangement of the strophes requires that we should connect nonten with '"Wax (var. n^ff**), though this is at variance with the accents. We may see very clearly, even by the choice of the expression ba?nmilchd?ndh, that thorns and thistles are a figurative representation of the enemies of the church (2 Sam. xxiii. 6, 7). And in this sense the song concludes in ver. 5: only by yielding themselves to mercy will they find mercy. iN with a voluntative following, " unless," as in Lev. xxvi. 4L « Take hold of:" hechezik b\ as in 1 Kings i. 50, of Adonijali, who lays hold of the horns of the altar. " Make 'peace with:" 'dsdh shdlom f, as in Josh. ix. 15. The song closes here. What the church here utters, is the consciousness of the gracious protection of its God, as confirmed in her by the most recent events.
The prophet now adds to the song of the vineyard, by way of explanation,— Ver. 6. " In future will Jacob strike roots, Israel blossom and bud, and fill the surface of the globe with fruits." We may see from D^an (ace. temp, as in Eccles. ii. 16, equivalent in meaning to "Behold, the days come," Jer. vii. 32, etc.), that the true language of prophecy commences again here. For the active ***?£*, compare Jer. xix. 4, Ezek. viii. 17, etc. The prophet here says, in a figure, just the same as the apostle in Rom. xi. 12, viz. that Israel, when restored once more to favour as a nation, will become "the riches of the Gentiles."
The prophet does not return even now to his own actual times; but, with the certainty that Israel will not be exalted until it has been deeply humbled on account of its sins, he places himself in the midst of this state of punishment. And there, in the face of the glorious future which awaited Israel, the fact shines out brightly before his eyes, that the punishment which God inflicts upon Israel is a very different thing from that inflicted upon the world. Vers. 7, 8. " Hath He smitten it like the smiting of its smiter, or is it slain like the slaying of those slain by Him? Thou punishedst it with measures, when thou didst thrust it away, sifting with violent breath in the day of the east wind." " Its smiter" (maccehu) is the imperial power by which Israel had been attacked (ch. x. 20); and " those slain by Him" (W3) are the slain of the empire who had fallen under the strokes of Jehovah. The former smote unmercifully, and its slain ones now lay without hope (ch. xxvi. 14). Jehovah smites differently, and it is very different with the church, which has succumbed in the persons of its righteous members. For the double play upon words, see ch. xxiv. 1G, xxii. 18, x. 16. When Jehovah put Israel away (as if by means of a " bill of divorcement," ch. 1. 1), He strove against it (ch. xlix. 25), i.e. punished it, "in measure," i.e. determining the measure very exactly, that it might not exceed the enduring power of Israel, nor endanger the existence of Israel as a nation (cf. bemishpdt in Jer. x. 24, xxx. 11, xlvi. 28). On the other hand, Hitzig, Ewald, and Knobel read HNpKpa, from a word KDKD,1 related to R^T, or even KBKB, " when thou didst disturb (or drive forth);" but the traditional text does not indicate any various reading with n mappic, and the ancient versions and expositors all take the word as a reduplication of rwp, which stands here as the third of an ephah to denote a moderately large measure. The clause hdgdli berucho is probably regarded as an elliptical relative clause, in which case the transition to the third person can be best explained: " thou, who siftedst with violent breath." Hdgdli, which only occurs again in Prov. xxv. 4, signifies to separate, e.g. the dross from silver (ch. i. 25). Jehovah sifted Israel (compare the figure of the threshing-floor in ch. xxi. 10), at the time when, by suspending captivity over it, He blew as violently upon it as if the east wind had raged (yid. Job, ii. 77). But He only sifted, He did not destroy.
He was angry, but not without love; He punished, but only to be able to pardon again. Ver. 9. u Therefore will the guilt of Jacob be purged thus; and this is all the fruit of the removal of his sin: when He maketh all altar-stones like chalkstones that are broken in pieces, Astarte images and sun-pillars do not rise up again." With the word " therefore " (Idcen) a conclusion is drawn from the expression " by measure." God punished Israel " by measure; " His punishment is a way to salvation: therefore it ceases as soon as its purpose is secured; and so would it cease now, if Israel would thoroughly renounce its sin, and, above all, the sin of all sins, namely idolatry. " Thus" (by this) refers to the tato which follows; " by this," namely the breaking to pieces of the altars and images of the moon goddess; or possibly, to speak more correctly, the goddess of the morning-star, and those of the sun-god as well (see ch.
1 Bbttcher refers to a Talrmidic word, JODH (to remove), but this is to be pronounced fcODn ( ==. JTDH), and is, moreover, very uncertain.
xvii. 8). By the fact that Israel put away the fundamental cause of all mischief, viz. idolatry, the guilt for which it had yet to make atonement would be covered, made good, or wiped away (on cuppar, see at ch. xxii. 14). The parenthesis (cf. ch. xxvi. 11/;) affirms that this very consequence would be all the fruit (cdl-peri) desired by Jehovah of the removal of the sin of Israel, which the chastisement was intended to effect.
The prophet said this from out of the midst of the state of punishment, and was therefore able still further to confirm the fact, that the punishment would cease with the sin, by the punishment which followed the sin. Vers. 10, 11. " For the strong city is solitary, a dwelling given up and forsaken like the steppe: there calves feed, and there they lie down, and eat off its branches. When its branches become withered, they are broken: women come, make fires with them; for it is not a people of intelligence: therefore its Creator has no pity upon it, and its Former does not pardon it" The nation without any intelligence (ch. i. 3), of which Jehovah was the Creator and Former (ch. xxii. 11), is Israel; and therefore the fortress that has been destroyed is the city of Jerusalem. The standpoint of the prophet must therefore be beyond the destruction of Jerusalem, and in the midst of the captivity. If this appears strange for Isaiah, nearly every separate word in these two verses rises up as a witness that it is Isaiah, and no other, who is speaking here (compare, as more general proofs, ch. xxxii. 13, 14, and v. 17; and as more specific exemplifications, ch. xvi. 2, 9, xi. 7, etc.). The suffix in "her branches" refers to the city, whose ruins were overgrown with bushes. Synonymous with E^yp, branches (always written with dagesh in distinction from Bspyp, clefts, ch. ii. 21), is kdtzir, cuttings, equivalent to shoots that can be easily cut off. It was a mistake on the part of the early translators to take kdtzir in the sense of "harvest" (Vulg., Symm., Saad., though not the LXX. or Luther). As kdtzir is*a collective term here, signifying the whole mass of branches, the predicate can be written in the plural, tisshdbarndh, which is not to be explained as a singular form, as in ch. xxviii. 3. nrriN, in the neuter sense, points back to this: women light it fWn, as in Mai. i. 10), i.e. make with it a lighting flame (nix) and a warming fire (tin, ch. xliv. 16). So desolate does Jerusalem lie, that in the very spot which once swarmed with men a calf now quietly eats the green foliage of the bushes that grow between the ruins; and in the place whence hostile armies had formerly been compelled to withdraw without accomplishing their purpose, women now come and supply themselves with wood without the slightest opposition.
But when Israel repents, the mercy of Jehovah will change all this. Vers. 12, 13. " And it will come to pass on that day, Jehovah will appoint a beating of corn from the water-flood of the Euphrates to the brook of Egypt, and ye will be gathered together one by one, 0 sons of Israel. And it will come to pass in that day, a great trumpet will be blown, and the lost ones in the land of Asshur come, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and cast themselves down before Jehovah on the holy mountain in Jerusalem." I regard every exposition of ver. 12 which supposes it to refer to the return of the captives as altogether false. The Euphrates and the brook of Egypt, i.e. the Wady el-Arish, were the north-eastern and south-western boundaries of the land of Israel, according to the original promise (Gen. xv. 18; 1 Kings viii. 65), and it is not stated that Jehovah will beat on the outside of these boundaries, but within them. Hence Gesenius is upon a more correct track, when he explains it as meaning that u the kingdom will be peopled again in its greatest promised extent, and that as rapidly and numerously as if men had fallen like olives from the trees." No doubt the word dhdbat is applied to the beating down of olives in Deut. xxiv. 20; but this figure is inapplicable here, as olives must already exist before they can be knocked down, whereas the land of Israel is to be thought of as desolate. What one expects is, that Jehovah will cause the dead to live within the whole of the broad expanse of the promised land (according to the promise in ch. xxvi. 19, 21). And the figure answers this expectation most clearly and most gloriously. Chdbat was the word commonly applied to the knocking out of fruits with husks, which wer.e too tender and valuable to be threshed. Such fruits, as the prophet himself affirms in ch. xxviii. 27, were knocked out carefully with a stick, and would have been injured by the violence of ordinary threshing. And the great field of dead that stretched from the Euphrates to the Rhinokoloura,1 re- gambled B floor covered over with such tender, costly fruit. There true braelites and apostate Israelites lay mixed together. Bat Jehovah would separate them. He would institute a beating, bo that the true members of the church would come to the light of day, being separated from the false like grains sifted from their husks. "Thy dead will live;" it is to this that the prophet returns. And this view is supported by the choice of the word shibboleth, which combines in itself the meanings of "flood" (Ps. lxix. '3, 16) and ".ear" (sc. of corn). This word gives a fine dilogy (compare the dilogy in ch. xix. 18 and Hab. ii. 7). From the " ear" of the Euphrates down to the Peninsula of Sinai, Jehovah would knock — a great heap of ears, the grains of which were to be gathered together " one by one," i.e. singly (in the most careful manner possible; Greek, /carets, tea® eva). To this risen church there would be added the still living diaspora, gathered together by the signal of God (compare ch. xviii. 3, xi. 12). Asshur and Egypt are named as lands of banishment. They represent all the lands of exile, as in ch. xix. 23-25 (compare ch. xi. 11). The two names are emblematical, and therefore not to be used as proofs that the prophecy is within the range of Isaiah's horizon. Nor is there any necessity for this. It is just as certain that the cycle of prophecy in ch. xxiv.-xxvii. belongs to Isaiah, and not to any other prophet, as it is that there are not two men to be foiind in the world with faces exactly alike.
HESE chapters carry us to the earliest years of Hezekiah' s reign, probably to the second and third; as Samaria has not yet been destroyed. They run parallel to the book of Micah, which also takes its start from the destruction of Samaria, and are as faithful a mirror of the condition of the people under Hezekiah, as ch. vii.-xii. were of their condition under Ahaz. The time of Ahaz was characterized by a spiritless submission to the Assyrian yoke; that of Hezekiah by a casual striving after liberty. The people tried to throw off the yoke of Assyria; not with confidence in Jehovah, however, but in reliance upon the help of Egypt. This Egypticizing policy is traced step by step by Isaiah, in ch. xxviii.-xxxii. The gradual rise of these addresses may be seen from the fact, that they follow the gradual growth of the alliance with Egypt through all its stages, until it is fully concluded. By the side of this casual ground of trust, which Jehovah will sweep away, the prophet exhibits the precious corner-stone in Zion as the true, firm ground of confidence. We might therefore call these chapters (xxviii.-xxxiii.) " the book of the precious corner-stone," just as we called ch. vii.-xii. " the book of Immanuel." But the prophecy in ch. xxviii. 16 does not determine and mould the whole of this section, in the same manner in which the other section is moulded and governed by the prophecy of the Son of the Virgin. We therefore prefer to call this cycle of prophecy " the book of woes;" for censure and threatening are uttered here in repeated utterances of " woe" not against Israel only, but more especially against Judah and Jerusalem, until at last, in ch. xxxiii., the " hoi concerning Jerusalem" is changed into a " hoi concerning Asshur." All the independent and self-contained addresses in this cycle of prophecy commence with hoi (" woe:" ch. xxviii., xxix., xxx., xxxi.-xxxii., xxxiii.). The section which does not begin with hoi (viz. ch. xxxii. 9-20) is the last and dependent part of the long address commencing with ch. xxxi. 1. On the other hand, ch. xxix. 15-24 also commences with hoi, though it does not form a distinct address in itself, since ch. xxix. forms a complete whole. The subdivisions of the sections, therefore, have not a uniform commencement throughout; but the separate and independent addresses all commence with hoi. The climax of these prophecies of woe is ch. xxx. Up to this point the exclamation of woe gradually ascends, but in ch. xxxi.-xxxii. it begins to fall; and in ch. xxxiii. (which contains an epilogue that was only added in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah's reign) it has changed into the very opposite. The prophet begins with hoi, but it is a woe concerning the devastator. This utmost woe, however, was not fulfilled at the point of time when the fulfilment of a the utmost" predicted in ch. xxviii.— xxxii. was apparently close at hand; but Jerusalem, though threatened with destruction, was miraculously saved. Yet the prophet had not merely to look on, as Jonah had. He himself predicted this change in the purpose of God, inasmuch as the direction of the " woe" in his mouth is altered, like that of the wrath of God, which turns from Jerusalem to Asshur, and destroys it.
THE FIRST WOE. — JUDGMENT UPON SAMARIA AND JERUSALEM, AND CONSOLATION FOR BOTH. — CHAP. XXVIII.
Isaiah, like Micah, commences with the fall of the proud and intoxicated Samaria. Ver. 1. " Woe to the proud crown of the drunken of Ephraim, and to the fading flower of its splendid ornament, which is upon the head of the luxuriant valley of those slain with wine'y The allusion is to Samaria, which is called (1) " the pride-crown of the drunken of Ephraim," i.e. the crown of which the intoxicated and blinded Ephraimites were proud (ch. xxix. 9, xix. 14), and (2) "the fading flower" (on the expression itself, compare ch. i. 30, xl. 7, 8) " of the ornament of his splendour," i.e. the flower now fading, which had once been the ornament with which they made a show. This flower stood " upon the head of the valley of fatnesses of those slain with wine" (cf. ch. xvi. 8), i.e. of the valley so exuberant with fruitfulness, belonging to the Ephraimites, who were thoroughly enslaved by wine. Samaria stood upon a beautiful swelling hill, which commanded the whole country round in a most regal way (Amos iv. 1, vi. 1), in the centre of a large basin, of about two hours' journey in diameter, shut in by a gigantic circle of still loftier mountains (Amos iii. 9). The situation was commanding; the hill terraced up to the very top; and the surrounding country splendid and fruitful (Hitter, Erdkunde, xvi. 660, 661). The expression used by the prophet is intentionally bombastic. He heaps genitives upon genitives, as in ch. x. 12, xxi. 17. The words are linked together in pairs. Sh'mdnlm (fatnesses) has the absolute form, although it is annexed to the following word, the logical relation overruling the syntactical usage (compare ch. xxxii. 13, 1 Chron. ix. 13). The sesquipedalia verba are intended to produce the impression of excessive worldly luxuriance and pleasure, upon which the woe is pronounced. The epithet nobhel (fading: possibly a genitive, as in ver. 4), which is introduced here into the midst of this picture of splendour, indicates that all this splendour is not only destined to fade, but is beginning to fade already.
In the next three verses the hoi is expanded. Vers. 2-4. " Behold, the Lord holds a strong and mighty thing like a hailstorm, a pestilent tempest; like a storm of mighty overflowing waters, He casts down to the earth with almighty hand. With feet they tread down the proud crown of the drunken of Ephraim. And it happens to the fading flower of its splendid ornament, which is upon the head of the luxuriant valley, as to an early fig before it is harvest, which whoever sees it looks at, and it is no sooner in his hand than he swallows it." " A strong and mighty thing:" p?$ Pjn we have rendered in the neuter (with the
LXX. and Targum) rather than in the masculine, as Luther does, although the strong and mighty thing which the Lord holds in readiness is no doubt the Assyrian. He is simply the medium of punishment in the hand of the Lord, which is called ydd absolutely, because it is absolute in power, — as it were, the hand of all hands. This hand hurls Samaria to the ground (on the expression itself, compare ch. xxv. 12, xxvi. 5), so that they tread the proud crown to pieces with their feet (terdmasndh, the more pathetic plural form, instead of the singular terdmes; Ges. § 47, Anm. 3, and Caspari on Obad. 13). The noun saar, which is used elsewhere in the sense of shuddering, signifies here, like 'TJVP, an awful tempest; and when connected with 3Dp, a tempest accompanied with a pestilential blast, spreading miasma. Such destructive power is held by the absolute hand. It is soon all over then with the splendid flower that has already begun to fade (??J rfipV, like fBjjn V3 in ch. xxii. 24). It happens to it as to a bikkurdh (according to the Masora, written with mappik here, as distinguished from Hos. ix. 10, equivalent to kebhikkurdthdh; see Job xi. 9, " like an early fig of this valley;" according to others, it is simply euphonic). The gathering of figs takes place about August. Now, if any one sees a fig as early as June, he fixes his eyes upon it, and hardly touches it with his hand before he swallows it, and that without waiting to masticate it long. Like such a dainty bit will the luxuriant Samaria vanish. The fact that Shalmanassar, or his successor Sargon, did not conquer Samaria till after the lapse of three years (2 Kings xviii. 10), does not detract from the truth of the prophecy; it is enough that both the thirst of the conqueror and the utter destruction of Samaria answered to it.
The threat is now followed by a promise. This is essentially the same in character as ch. iv. 2-6. The place of the false glory thus overthrown is now filled by a glory that is divine and true. Vers. 5, 6. " In that day will Jehovah of hosts be the adorning crown and the splendid diadem to the remnant of His people; and the spirit of justice to them that sit on the judgment-seat, and heroic strength to them that drive back war at the gate.v " The remnant of His people" (">NSp with a fixed kametz, as in ch. xxi. 17) is not Judah, as distinguished from Ephraim that had utterly perished; but Judah and the remaining portion of Ephraim, as distinguished from the portion which had perished. After the perishable thing in which they gloried had been swept away, the eternal person of Jehovah Himself would be the ornament and pride of His people. He, the Lord of the seven spirits (ch. xi. 2), would be to this remnant of His people the spirit of right and heroic strength. There would be an end to unjust judging and powerless submission. The judges are called " those who sit * al-hammishpdt" in the sense of " on the seat of judgment" (Ps. ix. 5, cxxii. 5); the warriors are called " those who press back milchdmdh shd'rdh" (war at the gate), i.e. either war that has reached their own gate (ch. xxii. 7), or war which they drive back as far as the gate of the enemy (2 Sam. xi. 23; 1 Mace. v. 22). The promise in this last passage corresponds to Mic. v. 4, 5. The athnach in ver. 6 ought to stand at hammishpdt; the second clause of the verse may be completed from the first, "T^aipl being equivalent to fTOU nr6l, and *3*6ttD to WVnb. We might regard 2 Chron. xxx. as a fulfilment of what is predicted in ver. 6, if the feast of passover there described really fell in the age succeeding the fall of Samaria; for this feast of passover did furnish a representation and awaken a consciousness of that national unity which had been interrupted from the time of Rehoboam. But if we read the account in the Chronicles with unprejudiced minds, it is impossible to shut our eyes to the fact that this feast of passover took place in the second month of the first year of Hezekiah's reign, and therefore not after the depopulation of the northern kingdom by Shalmanassar, but after the previous and partial depopulation by Tiglathpileser (see vol. i. p. 52). In fact, the fulfilment cannot be looked for at all in the space between the sixth and fourteenth years of Hezekiah, since the condition of Judah during that time does not answer at all to the promises given above. The prophet here foretells what might be hoped for, when Asshur had not only humbled Ephraim, but Judah also. The address consists of two connected halves, the promising beginnings of which point to one and the same future, and lay hold of one another.
With the words, " and they also," the prophet commences the second half of the address, and passes from Ephraim to Judah. Vers. 7, 8. " And they also reel with wine, and are giddy with meth; priest and prophet reel with meth, are swallowed up by wine: they are giddy with meth, reel when seeing visions, stagger when pronouncing judgment. For all tables are full of filthy vomit, without any more place" The Judseans are not less overcome with wine than the Ephraimites, and especially the rulers of Judah. In wicked violation of the law of God, which prohibited the priests from drinking strong drink when performing priestly service, and that on pain of death (Lev. x. 9, cf. Ezek. xliv. 21), they were intoxicated even in the midst of their prophetic visions (fifrpn, literally " the thing seeing," then the act of seeing; equivalent to lfcnj like nth in ver. 15 = nWJj Olshausen, § 176, c), and when passing judicial sentences. In the same way Micah also charges the prophets and priests with being drunkards (Mic. iii. 1 sqq., cf. ii. 11). Isaiah's indignation is manifested in the fact, that in the words which he uses he imitates the staggering and stumbling of the topers; like the well-known passage, Sta pes sta mi pes stas pes ne labere mi pes. Observe, for example, the threefold repetition of shdgu — tdghu, shdgu — tdghu, shdgu — pdqu. The hereditary priests and the four prophets represent the whole of the official personages. The preterites imply that drunkenness had become the fixed habit of the holders of these offices. The preposition 3 indicates the cause (" through," as in 2 Sam. xiii. 28 and Esther i. 10), and min the effect proceeding from the cause (in consequence of wine). In ver. £ we can hear them vomit. We have the same combination of the p and ¥ in the verb kotzen, Gothic kozan. All the tables of the carousal are full, without there being any further room (cf. ch. v. 8); everything swims with vomit. The prophet paints from nature, here without idealizing. He receives their conduct as it were in a mirror, and then in the severest tones holds up this mirror before them, adults though they were.
Vers. 9, 10. " Whom then would he teach knowledge? And to whom make preaching intelligible? To those weaned from the milk? To those removed from the breast? For precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, a little here, a little there!" They sneer at the prophet, that intolerable moralist. They are of age, and free; and he does not need to bring knowledge to them (daath as in ch. xi. 9), or make them understand the proclamation. They know of old to what he would lead.
Are they little children that have just been weaned (on the constructive^ see ch. ix. 2, v. 11, xxx. 18; Ges. § 114, 1), and who must let themselves be tutored? For the things he preaches are nothing but endless petty teazings. The short words (todv, as in IIos. v. 11), together with the diminutive TJt (equivalent to the Arabic sugayyir, mean, from sagir, small), are intended to throw ridicule upon the smallness and vexatious character of the prophet's interminable and uninterrupted eludings, as *> (= *?V, ht; comp. h *|DJ, ch. xxvi. 15) implies that they are; just as the philosophers in Acts xvii. 18 call Paul a <T7r€p/j,o\6>yo<;, a collector of seeds, i.e. a dealer in trifles. And in the repetition of the short words we may hear the heavy babbling language of the drunken scoffers.
The prophet takes the ki (" for ") out of their mouths, and carries it on in his own way. It was quite right that their ungodliness should show itself in such a way as this, for it would meet with an appropriate punishment. Vers. 11-13. u For through men stammering in speech, and through a strange tongue, will He speak to this people. He who said to them, There is rest, give rest to weary ones, and there is refreshing! But they would not hear. Therefore the word of Jehovah becomes to them precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, a little here, a little there, that they may go and stumble backwards, and be wrecked to pieces, and be snared and taken" Jehovah would speak to the scoffing people of stammering tongue a language of the same kind, since He would speak to them by a people that stammered in their estimation, i.e. who talked as barbarians (cf. /3ap/3apL%ecv and balbutire; see ch. xxxiii. 19, compared with Deut. xxviii. 49). The Assyrian Semitic had the same sound in the ear of an Israelite, as Low Saxon (a provincial dialect) in the ear of an educated German; in addition to which, it was plentifully mixed up with Iranian, and possibly also with Tatar elements. This people would practically interpret the will of Jehovah in its own patois to the despisers of the prophet. Jehovah had directed them, through His prophets, after the judgments which they had experienced with sufficient severity (ch. i. 5 sqq.), into the true way to rest and refreshing (Jer. vi. 16), and had exhorted them to give rest to the nation, which had suffered so much under Ahaz through the calamities of war (2 Chron. xxviii.), and not to drag it into another war by goading it on to rise against Assyria, or impose a new burden in addition to the tribute to Assyria by purchasing the help of Egypt. But they would not hearken («««-=««, ch. xxx. 15, 16;' Ges. § 23, 3, Anm. 3). Their policy was a very different one from being still, or believing and waiting. And therefore the word of Jehovah, which they regarded as an endless series of trivial commands, would be turned in their case into an endless series of painful sufferings. To those who thought themselves so free, and lived so free, it would become a stone on which they would go to pieces, a net in which they would be snared, a trap in which they would be caught (compare ch. viii. 14, 15).
The prophet now directly attacks the great men of Jerusalem, and holds up a Messianic prophecy before their eyes, which turns its dark side to them, as ch. vii. did to Ahaz. Vers. 14-17. u Therefore hear the word of Jehovah, ye scornful lords, rulers of this people tuhich is in Jerusalem! For ye say. We have made a covenant with death, and with Hades have we come to an agreement. The swelling scourge, when it cometh hither, will do us no harm; for we have made a lie our shelter, and in deceit have we hidden ourselves. Therefore thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Behold, I am He who hath laid in Zion a stone, a stone of trial, a precious corner-stone of well-founded founding; whoever believes will not have to move. And I make justice the line, and righteousness the level; and hail sweeps away the refuge of lies, and the hiding-place is washed away by waters" With lakhen (therefore) the announcement of punishment is once more suspended; and in ver. 16 it is resumed again, the exposition of the sin being inserted between, before the punishment is declared. Their sin is latson, and this free-thinking scorn rests upon a proud and insolent self-confidence, which imagines that there is no necessity to fear death and hell; and this self-confidence has for its secret reserve the alliance to be secretly entered into with Egypt against Assyria. What the prophet makes them say here, they do not indeed say exactly in this form; but this is the essential substance of the carnally devised thoughts and words of the rulers of the people of Jerusalem, as manifest to the Searcher of hearts. Jerusalem, the city of Jehovah, and such princes as these, who either proudly ignore Jehovah, or throw Him off as useless, what a contrast! Chteek, and chdzidh in ver. 18, signify an agreement, either U ■ decision or completion (from the radical meaning of the verb chdzdh; see vol. i. p. 71), or as a choice, bnteplacitum (like the Arabic ray), or as a record, i.e. the means of selecting (like the talmudic chdzlth, a countersign, a ra'aydh, sl proof or argument: Luzzatto). In shot slwteph (" the swelling scourge," cheikib D*0), the comparison of Asshur to a flood (vers. 2, 8, 7), and the comparison of it to a whip or scourge, are mixed together; and this is all the more allowable, because a whip, when smacked, really does move in waving lines (compare Jer. viii. 6, where shdtaph is applied to the galoping of a war-horse). The chethib "Uy in ver. 15 (for which the keri reads 133£, according to ver. 19) is to be read TO (granting that it shall have passed, or that it passes); and there is no necessity for any emendation. The Egyptian alliance for which they are suing, when designated according to its true ethical nature, is sheqer (lie) and kdzdbh (falsehood); compare 2 Kings xvii. 4 (where we ought perhaps to read sheqer for qesher, according to the LXX.), and more especially Ezek. xvii. 15 sqq., from which it is obvious that the true prophets regarded self-willed rebellion even against heathen rule as a reprehensible breach of faith. The Idkhen (therefore), which is resumed in ver. 16, is apparently followed as strangely as in ch. vii. 14, by a promise instead of a threat. But this is only apparently the case. It is unquestionably a promise; but as the last clause, " he that believeth will not flee," i.e. will stand firm, clearly indicates, it is a promise for believers alone. For those to whom the prophet is speaking here the promise is a threat, a savour of death unto death. Just as on a former occasion, when Ahaz refused to ask for a sign, the prophet announced to him a sign of Jehovah's own selection; so here Jehovah opposes to the false ground of confidence on which the leaders relied, the foundation stone laid in Zion, which would bear the believing in immoveable safety, but on which the unbelieving would be broken to pieces (Matt. xxi. 44). This stone is called 'ebhen bochan, a stone of proving, i.e. a proved and self-proving stone. Then follow other epithets in a series commencing anew with pinnath = 'ebhen pinnath (compare Ps. cxviii. 22): angulus h. e. lapis angularis pretiositatis fundationis fundatce. It is a corner-stone, valuable in itself (on yiqrath^ compare 1 Kings v. 31), and affording the strongest foundation and inviolable security to all that is built upon it (musdd a substantive in form like musdr, and mussdd a hophal participle in the form of those of the verba contracta pe yod). This stone was not the Davidic sovereignty, but the true seed of David which appeared in Jesus (Rom. ix. 33; 1 Pet. ii. 6, 7). The figure of a stone is not opposed to the personal reference, since the prophet in ch. viii. 14 speaks even of Jehovah Himself under the figure of a stone. The majestically unique description renders it quite impossible that Hezekiah can be intended. Micah, whose book forms the side piece of this cycle of prophecy, also predicted, under similar historical circumstances, the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem Ephratah (Mic. v. 1). What Micah expresses in the words, " His goings forth are from of old," is indicated here in the preterite yissad connected with hirtfni (the construction is similar to that in Obad. 2, Ezek. xxv. 7; compare ver. 2 above, and Jer. xlix. 15, xxiii. 19). It denotes that which has been determined by Jehovah, and therefore is as good as accomplished. What is historically realized has had an eternal existence, and indeed an ideal pre-existence even in the heart of history itself (ch. xxii. 11, xxv. 1, xxxvii. 26). Ever since there had been a Davidic government at all, this stone had lain in Zion. The Davidic monarchy not only had in this its culminating point, but the ground of its continuance also. It was not only the Omega, but also the Alpha. Whatever escaped from wrath, even under the Old Testament, stood upon this stone. This (as the prophet predicts in B*W i6 pp^n: B*nj the fut. hal) would be the stronghold of faith in the midst of the approaching Assyrian calamities (cf. ch. vii. 9); and faith would be the condition of life (Hab. ii. 4). But against unbelievers Jehovah would proceed according to His punitive justice. He would make this (justice and righteousness, mishpdt and ts'ddqdh) a norm, i.e. a line and level. A different turn, however, is given to qdvy with a play upon vers. 10, 11. What Jehovah is about to do is depicted as a building which He is carrying out, and which He will carry out, so far as the despisers are concerned, on no other plan than that of strict retribution. His punitive justice comes like a hailstorm and like a flood (cf. ver. 2, ch. x. 22). The hail smites the refuge of lies of the great men of Jerusalem, and clears it away (njr, hence V;, a shovel); and the flood buries their hiding-place in the waters, and carries it away (the accentuation.should be "trip tifchah, DVD mercha).
And the whip which Jehovah swings will not be satisfied with one stroke, but will rain strokes. Vers. 18, 19. "And your covenant with death is struck out, and your agreement with Hades will not stand; the swelling scourge, when it comes, ye will become a thing trodden down to it. As often as it passes it takes you: for every morning it passes, by day and by night; and it is nothing but shuddering to hear such preaching. For the bed is too short to stretch in, and the covering too tight when a man wraps himself in zV." Although b'rith is feminine, the predicate to it is placed before it in the masculine form (Ges. § 144). The covenant is thought of as a document; for khuppar (for which Hupfeld would read thuphar; Ps. ii. 197) signifies here obliterari (just as the kal is used in Gen. vi. 14 in the sense of oblinere; or in Prov. xxx. 20, the Targum, and the Syriac, in the sense of abstergere; and in the Talmud frequently in the sense of wiping off = qinnedch, or wiping out = mdchaq, — which meanings all go back, along with the meaning negare, to the primary meaning, tegere, obducere). The covenant will be " struck out," as you strike out a wrong word, by crossing it over with ink and rendering it illegible. They fancy that they have fortified themselves against death and Hades; but Jehovah gives to both of these unlimited power over them. When the swelling scourge shall come, they will become to it as mirmds, i.e. they will be overwhelmed by it, and their corpses become like dirt of the streets (ch. x. 6, v. 5); Drv^rn has the mercha upon the penult., according to the older editions and the smaller Masora on Lev. viii. 26, the tone being drawn back on account of the following &. The strokes of the scourge come incessantly, and every stroke sweeps them, i.e. many of them, away. *8? (from % construct *j», sufficiency, abundance) followed by the infinitive, quotiescunque irruet; laqach, auferre, as in Jer. xv. 15, and in the idiom laqach nephesh. These scourgings without end — what a painful lecture Jehovah is reading them! This is the thought expressed in the concluding words: for the meaning cannot be, that "even (raq as in Ps. xxxii. 6) the report (of such a fate) is alarming," as Grotius and others explain it; or the report is nothing but alarming, as Gussetius and others interpret it, since in that case njnw ybB (cf. ch. xxiii. 5) would have been quite sufficient, instead of njttE^ \*2n. There is no doubt that the expression points back to the scornful question addressed by the debauchees to the prophet in ver. 9, "To whom will he make preaching intelligible?" i.e. to whom will he preach the word of God in an intelligible manner? (as if they did not possess bindh without this; TOEB^ clkot], as in ch. liii. 1.) As ver. 11 affirmed that Jehovah would take up the word against them, the drunken stammerers, through a stammering people; so here the scourging without end is called the shemudh, or sermon, which Jehovah preaches to them. At the same time, the word habhln is not causative here, as in ver. 9, viz. " to give to understand," but signifies simply " to understand," or have an inward perception. To receive into one's comprehension such a sermon as that which was now being delivered to them, was raq-zeva ah, nothing but shaking or shuddering (raq as in Gen. vi. 5); JW (from which comes W?? or by transposition nW) is applied to inward shaking as well as to outward tossing to and fro. Jerome renders it " tantummodo sola vexatio intellectum dabit auditui" and Luther follows him thus: " but the vexation teaches to take heed to the word," as if the reading were P^n. The alarming character of the lecture is depicted in ver. 20, in a figure which was probably proverbial. The situation into which they are brought is like a bed too short for a man to stretch himself in (min as in 2 Kings vi. 1), and like a covering which, according to the measure of the man who covers himself up in it (or perhaps still better in a temporal sense, " when a man covers or wraps himself up in it," cf. ch. xviii. 4), is too narrow or too tight. So would it be in their case with the Egyptian treaty, in which they fancied that there were rest and safety for them. They would have to acknowledge its insufficiency. They had made themselves a bed, and procured bed-clothes; but how mistaken they had been in the measure, how miserably and ridiculously they had miscalculated!
It would be with them as it was with the Philistines when David turned their army into water at Baal-Perazim (2 Sam. v. 20; 1 Chron. xiv. 11), or when on another occasion he drove them before him from Gibeon to Gezer (1 Chron. xiv. 13 sqq.). Ver. 21. " For Jehovah will rise up as in the mountain of Ptfiunm, and be wroth as in the valley at Gibeon to work His work: astonishing is His work; and to act His act: strange is His act" The Targum wrongly supposes the first historical reminiscence to refer to the earthquake in the time of Uzziah, and the second to Joshua's victory over the Amorites. The allusion really is to the two shameful defeats which David inflicted upon the Philistines. There was a very good reason why victories over the Philistines especially should serve as similes. The same fate awaited the Philistines at the hands of the Assyrians, as predicted by the prophet in ch. xiv. 28 sqq. (cf. ch. xx.). And the strangeness and verity of Jehovah's work were just this, that it would fare no better with the magnates of Judah at the hand of Asshur, than it had with the Philistines at the hand of David on both those occasions. The very same thing would now happen to the people of the house of David as formerly to its foes. Jehovah would have to act in opposition to His gracious purpose. He would have to act towards His own people as He once acted towards their foes. This was the most paradoxical thing of all that they would have to experience.
But the possibility of repentance was still open to them, and at least a modification of what had been threatened was attainable. Ver. 22. "And now drive ye not mockeries, lest your fetters be strengthened; for I have heard from the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, a judgment of destruction, and an irrevocable one, upon the whole earth." It is assumed that they are already in fetters, namely, the fetters of Asshur (Nah. i. 13). Out of these fetters they wanted to escape by a breach of faith, and with the help of Egypt without Jehovah, and consequently they mocked at the warnings of the prophet. He therefore appeals to them at any rate to stop their mocking, lest they should fall out of the bondage in which they now were, into one that would bind them still more closely, and lest the judgment should become even more severe than it would otherwise be. For it was coming without fail. It might be modified, and with thorough repentance they might even escape; but that it would come, and that upon the whole earth, had been revealed to the prophet by Jehovah of hosts. This was the slfmudh which the prophet had heard from Jehovah, and which he gave them to hear and understand, though hitherto he had only been scoffed at by their wine-bibbing tongues.
The address of the prophet is here apparently closed. But an essential ingredient is still wanting to the second half, to make it correspond to the first. There is still wanting the fringe of promise coinciding with vers. 5, 6. The prophet has not only to alarm the scoffers, that if possible he may pluck some of them out of the fire through fear (Judg. v. 23); he has also to comfort believers, who yield themselves as disciples to him and to the word of God (ch. viii. 16). He does this here in a very peculiar manner. He has several times assumed the tone of the mashal, more especially in ch. xxvi.; but here the consolation is dressed up in a longer parabolical address, which sets forth in figures drawn from husbandry the disciplinary and saving wisdom of God. Isaiah here proves himself a master of the mashal. In the usual tone of a mashal song, he first of all claims the attention of his audience as a teacher of wisdom. Ver. 23. " Lend me your ear, and hear my voice; attend, and hear my address! " Attention is all the more needful, that the prophet leaves his hearers to interpret and apply the parable themselves. The work of a husbandman is very manifold, as he tills, sows, and plants his field. Vers. 24-26. " Does the ploughman plough continually to sow f to furrow and to harrow his land? Is it not so: when he levels the surface thereof he scatters black poppy seed, and strews cummin, and puts in wheat in rows, and barley in the appointed piece, and spelt on its border? And He has instructed him how to act rightly: his God teaches it him." The ploughing (chdrash) which opens the soil, i.e. turns it up in furrows, and the harrowing (sidded) which breaks the clods, take place to prepare for the sowing, and therefore not interminably, but only so long as is necessary to prepare the soil to receive the seed. When the seed-furrows have been drawn in the levelled surface of the ground (shivvdh), then the sowing and planting begin; and this also takes place in various ways, according to the different kinds of fruit. Qetsach is the black poppy (nigella sativa, Arab, habbe soda, so called from its black seeds), belonging to the ranunculacese. Kammon was the cummin (cuminum cyminum) with larger aromatic seeds, Ar. kammwi, neither of them our common carraway (Kiimmel, carum). The wheat he sows carefully in rows (sOrdh, ordo; ad ordinem, as it is transluted by Jerome), i.e. he does not scatter it about carelessly, like the other two, but lays the grains carefully in the furrows, because otherwise when they sprang up they would get massed together, and choke one another. Nismdn, like sordh, is an ace. loci: the barley is sown in a piece of the field specially marked off for it, or specially furnished with signs (simdnlm); and kussemeth, the spelt (£aa, also mentioned by Homer, Od. iv. 604, between wheat and barley), along the edge of it, so that spelt forms the rim of the barley field. It is by a divine instinct that the husbandman acts in this manner; for God, who established agriculture at the creation (i.e. Jehovah, not Osiris), has also given men understanding. This is the meaning of vyissero lammishpdt: and (as we may see from all this) He (his God: the subject is given afterwards in the second clause) has led him (Prov. xxxi. 1) to the right (this is the rendering adopted by Kimchi, whilst other commentators have been misled by Jer. xxx. 11, and last of all Malbim Luzzatto, " Cosi Dio con giustizia corregge;" he would have done better, however, to say, con moderazione).
Again, the labour of the husbandman is just as manifold after the reaping has been done. Vers. 27-29. " For the black poppy is not threshed with a threshing sledge, nor is a cart wheel rolled over cummin; but black poppy is knocked out with a stick, and cummin with a staff. Is bread corn crushed? No; he does not go on threshing it for ever, and drive the wheel of his cart and Ids horses over it: he does not crush it. This also, it goeth forth from Jehovah of hosts: He gives wonderful intelligence, high understanding." Ki (for) introduces another proof that the husbandman is instructed by God, from what he still further does. He does not use the threshing machine (chdruts, syn. morag, Ar. naureg, noreg), or the threshing cart (dgdldh: see Winer's ReaUWorterbuch, art. Dreschen), which would entirely destroy the more tender kinds of fruit, but knocks them out with a staff (baculo excutit: see at ch. xxvii. 12). The sentence lechem yuddq is to be accentuated as an interrogative: Is bread corn crushed? Oh no, he does not crush it. This would be the case if he were to cause the wheel (i.e. the wheels, gilgal, constr. to galgal) of the threshing cart with the horses harnessed in front to rattle over it with all their might (hdmam, to set in noisy violent motion). Lecliem, like the Greek sites, is corn from which bread is made (ch. xxx. 23; Ps. civ. 14). tsnis is metaplastic (as if from KHN) for enn (see Ewald, § 312, b). Instead of y&7$\ the pointing ought to be VBhsn (from BH3 with kametz before the tone = Arab, faras, as distinguished from BHS with a fixed kametz, equivalent to f arras, a rider): u his horses," here the threshing horses, which were preferred to asses and oxen. Even in this treatment of the fruit when reaped, there is an evidence of the wonderful intelligence (*y?n, as written N7Sn) and exalted understanding (on fiHytf), from V^J, see at Job xxvi. 3) imparted by God. The expression is one of such grandeur, that we perceive at once that the prophet has in his mind the wisdom of God in a higher sphere. The wise, divinely inspired course adopted by the husbandman in the treatment of the field and fruit, is a type of the wise course adopted by the divine Teacher Himself in the treatment of His nation. Israel is Jehovah's field. The punishments and chastisements of Jehovah are the ploughshare and harrow, with which He forcibly breaks up, turns over, and furrows this field. But this does not last for ever. When the field has been thus loosened, smoothed, and rendered fertile once more, the painful process of ploughing is followed by a beneficent sowing and planting in a multiform and wisely ordered fulness of grace. Again, Israel is Jehovah's child of the threshing-floor (see ch. xxi. 10). He threshes it; but He does not thresh it only: He also knocks; and when He threshes, He does not continue threshing for ever, i.e. as Caspari has well explained it, " He does not punish all the members of the nation with the same severity; and those whom He punishes with greater severity than others He does not punish incessantly, but as soon as His end is attained, and the husks of sin are separated from those that have been punished, the punishment ceases, and only the worst in the nation, who are nothing but husks, and the husks on the nation itself, are swept away by the punishments" (compare ch. i. 25, xxix. 20, 21). This is the solemn lesson and affectionate consolation hidden behind the veil of the parable. Jehovah punishes, but it is in order that He may be able to bless. He sifts, but He does not destroy. He does not thresh His own people, but He knocks them; and even when He threshes, they may console themselves in the face of the approaching period of judgment, that they are never crushed or injured.
The prophecy here passes from the fall of Samaria, the crown of flowers (ch. xxviii. 1-4), to its formal parallel. Jerusalem takes its place by the side of Samaria, the crown of flowers, under the emblem of a hearth of God. 'Artel might, indeed, mean a lion of God. It occurs in this sense as the name of certain Moabitish heroes (2 Sam. xxiii. 20; 1 Chron. xi. 22), and Isaiah himself used the shorter form i>N"]N for the heroes of Judah (ch. xxxiii. 7). But as?&?"]$ (God's hearth, interchanged with?£"£?, God's height) is the name given in Ezek. xliii. 15, 16, to the altar of burnt-offering in the new temple, and as Isaiah could not say anything more characteristic of Jerusalem, than that Jehovah had a fire and hearth there (ch. xxxi. 9); and, moreover, as Jerusalem the city and community within the city would have been compared to a lioness rather than a lion, we take /N^N in the sense of ara Dei (from iTjtf, to burn). The prophet commences in his own peculiar way with a grand summary introduction, which passes in a few gigantic strides over the whole course from threatening to promise. Ver. 1. " Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the castle where David pitched his tent! Add year to year, let the feasts revolve: then I distress Ariel, and there is groaning and moaning; and so she proves herself to me as Ariel." By the fact that Bavid fixed his headquarters in Jerusalem, and then brought the sacred ark thither, Jerusalem became a hearth of God. Within a single year, after only one more round of feasts (to be interpreted according to ch. xxxii. 10, and probably spoken at the passover), Jehovah would make Jerusalem a besieged city, full of sighs (yahatslqothi, perf. cons., with the tone upon the ultimate); but " she becomes to me like an Ariel," i.e., being qualified through me, she will prove herself a hearth of God, by consuming the foes like a furnace, or by their meeting with their destruction at Jerusalem, like wood piled up on the altar and then consumed in flame. The prophecy has thus passed over the whole ground in a few majestic words. It now starts from the very beginning again, and first of all expands the hoi. Vers. 3 and 4. " And I encamp in a circle round about thee, and surround thee with watch-posts, and erect tortoises against thee. And when brought down thou wilt speak from out of the ground, and thy speaking will sound low out of the dust; and thy voice cometh up like that of a demon from the ground, and thy speaking will whisper out of the dust." It would have to go so far with Ariel first of all, that it would be besieged by a hostile force, and would lie upon the ground in the greatest extremity, and then would whisper with a ghostlike softness, like a dying man, or like a spirit without flesh and bones. Kaddur signifies sphcera, orbis, as in ch. xxii. 18 and in the Talmud (from kddar = kdthar; cf. Jcudur in the name Nabu-kudur-ussur, Nebo protect the crown, Kihapiv), and is used here poetically for Mp. Jerome renders it quasi sphceram (from dilr, orbis). 2VD (from y*3, 3^) might signify " firmly planted " (Luzzatto, immobilmente; compare shuth, ch. xxii. 7); but according to the parallel it signifies a military post, like 3jW, 2*5p. Metsuroth (from mdtsor, Deut. xx. 20) are instruments of siege, the nature of which can only be determined conjecturally. On 'obh, see ch. viii. 19;* there is no necessity to take it as standing for baal yobh.
Thus far does the unfolding of the hoi reach. Now follows an unfolding of the words of promise, which stand Tat the end of ver. 1: " And it proves itself to me as Ariel." Vers. 5—8. " And the multitude of thy foes will become like finely powdered dust, and the multitude of the tyrants like chaff flying away; and it will take place suddenly, very suddenly. From Jehovah of hosts there comes a visitation icith crash of thunder and earthquake and great noise, whirlwind and tempest, and the blazing up of devouring fire. And the multitude of all the nations that gather together against Ariel, and all those who storm and distress Ariel and her stronghold, will be like a vision of the night in a
1 The Jakkubh mentioned there is equivalent to anbub, Arab, a knot on a reed stalk, then that part of such a reed which comes between two knots, then the reed stalk itself; root 33, to rise up, swell, or become convex without and concave within (Fl.). It is possible that it would be better to trace ''obh back to this radical and primary meaning of what is hollow (and therefore has a dull sound), whether used in the sense of a leather-bag, or applied to a spirit of incantation, and the possessor of such a spirit.
dream. And it is just as a hungry man dreams, and beliold he eats; and when he wakes up his soul is empty: and just as a thirsty man dreams, and behold he drinks; and when he loakes up, behold, he is faint, and his soul is parched with thirst: so will it be to the multitude of the nations which gather together against the mountain of Zion." The hostile army, described four times as hdmOn, a groaning multitude, is utterly annihilated through the terrible co-operation of the forces of nature which are let loose upon them (ch. xxx. 30, cf. ch. xvii. 13). "There comes a visitation:" tippdqe'd might refer to Jerusalem in the sense of "it will be visited" in mercy, viz. by Jehovah acting thus upon its enemies. But it is better to take it in a neuter sense: " punishment is inflicted." The simile of the dream is applied in two different ways: (1.) Ver. 7. They will dissolve into nothing, as if they had only the same apparent existence as a vision in a dream. (2.) Ver. 8. Their plan for taking Jerusalem will be put to shame, and as utterly brought to nought as the eating or drinking of a dreamer, which turns out to be a delusion as soon as he awakes. Just as the prophet emphatically combines two substantives from the same verbal root in ver. 1, and two adverbs from the same verb in ver. 5; so does he place NJ? and naj together in ver. 7, the former with t$ relating to the crowding of an army for the purpose of a siege, the latter with an objective suffix (compare Ps. liii. 6) to the attack made by a crowded army. The mHsoddh of Ariel (i.e. the watch-tower, specula, from tsud, to spy l) is the mountain of Zion mentioned afterwards in ver. 8. ">^3, as if; comp. Zech. x. 6, Job x. 19. byitt rtarn without KVJ; the personal pronoun is frequently omitted, not only in the leading participial clause, as in this instance (compare ch. xxvi. 3, xl. 19; Ps. xxii. 29; Job xxv. 2; and Kohler on Zech. ix. 12), but also with a minor participial clause, as in Ps. vii. 10, lv. 20, and Hab. ii. 10. The hungering and thirsting of the waking man are attributed to his nephesh (soul: cf. ch. xxxii. 6, v. 14; Prov. vi. 30), just because the soul is the cause of the physical life, and without it the action of the senses would be followed by no sensation or experience whatever. The hungry stomach is simply the object of feeling,
1 In Arabic, also, masdd signifies a lofty hill or mountain -top, from a secondary form of tsud; and massara, to lay the foundations of a fortified city Or mdtsor, Ps. xxxi. 22), from tsur.
and everything sensitive in the bodily organism is merely the medium of sensation or feeling; that which really feels is the soul. The soul no sooner passes out of the dreaming state into a waking condition, than it feels that its desires are as unsatisfied as ever. Just like such a dream will the army of the enemy, and that victory of which it is so certain before the battle is fought, fade away into nothing.
This enigma of the future the prophet holds out before the eyes of his contemporaries. The prophet received it by revelation of Jehovah; and without the illumination of Jehovah it could not possibly be understood. The deep degradation of Ariel, the wonderful deliverance, the sudden elevation from the abyss to this lofty height, — all this was a matter of faith. But this faith was just what the nation wanted, and therefore the understanding depending upon it was wanting also. The shemiidh was there, but the blndh was absent; and all nyii^ pnn was wrecked on the obtuseness of the mass. The prophet, therefore, who had received the unhappy calling to harden his people, could not help exclaiming (ver. 9a), " Stop, and stare; blind your selves, and grow blind!" nDnftnn^ to show one's self delaying (from nnD? according to Luzzatto the reflective of rJEiiDfy an emphatic form which is never met with), is connected with the synonymous verb fiDfl, to be stiff with astonishment; but to W&, to be plastered up, i.e. incapable of seeing (cf. ch. vi. 10), there is attached the hithpalpel of the same verb, signifying "to place one's self in such circumstances," se oblinere (differently, however, in Ps. cxix. 16, 47, compare ch. xi. 8, se permulcere). They could not understand the word of God, but they were confused, and their eyes were, so to speak, festered up: therefore this self-induced condition would become to them a God-appointed punishment. The imperatives are judicial words of command.
This growth of the self-hardening into a judicial sentence of obduracy, is proclaimed still more fully by the prophet. Vers. 95-12. " They are drunken, and not with wine; they reel, and not with meth. \For Jehovah hath poured upon you a spirit of deep sleep, and bound up your eyes; the prophets and your heads, the seers, lie has veiled^ And the revelation of all this will be to you like words of a sealed writing, which they give to him who understands writing, saying, Pray, read this; but he tai/8, I cannot, it is scaled. And they give the writing to one who d I understand writing, saying, Pray, read this; but he says, I do not understand writing'' They were drunken and stupid; not, however, merely because they gave themselves up to sensual intoxication (£, dependent upon rot£ ebrii vino), but because Jehovah had given them up to spiritual confusion and self-destruction. All the punishments of God are inflicted through the medium of His no less world-destroying than world-sustaining Spirit, which, although not willing what is evil, does make the evil called into existence by the creature the means of punishing evil. Tardemdh is used here to signify the powerless, passive state of utter spiritual insensibility. This judgment had fallen upon the nation in all its members, even upon the eyes and heads of the nation, i.e. the prophets. Even they whose duty it was to see to the good of the nation, and lead it, were blind leaders of the blind; their eyes were fast shut (EOT, the intensive form of the kal, ch. xxxiii. 15; Aram. E2ty; Talmud also \W: to shut the eyes, or press them close), and over their heads a cover was drawn, as over sleepers in the night. Since the time of Koppe and Eichhorn it has become a usual thing to regard DWaarrntf and DWin as a gloss, and indeed as a false one (compare ch. ix. 13, 14); but the reason assigned — namely, that Isaiah's polemics are directed not against the prophets, but against the stupid staring people — is utterly groundless (compare ch. xxviii. 7, and the polemics of his contemporary Micah, e.g. ch. iii. 5-8). Moreover, the author of a gloss would have been more likely to interpret BWfcO by D'n&n or E^lPl! (compare Job ix. 24). And vers. 11 and 12 are also opposed to this assumption of a gloss. For by those who understood what was written (sepher), it is evident that the prophets and rulers of the nation are intended; and by those who did not understand it, the great mass of the people. To both of them, " the vision of all," i.e. of all and everything that God had shown to His true prophets, was by the judgment of God completely sealed. Some of them might have an outward knowledge; but the inward understanding of the revelation was sealed to them. Some had not even this, but stared at the word of the prophet, just as a man who cannot read stares at what is written. The chethib has IBDn; the keri "ISD, though without any ground, since the article is merely generic. Instead of nrttt fcnp, we should write nr W"*op in both cases, as certain codices and old editions do.
This stupefaction was the self-inflicted punishment of the dead works with which the people mocked God and deceived themselves. Vers. 13, 14. " The Lord hath spoken: Because this people approaches me with its mouthy and honours me with its lips, and keeps its heart far from me, and its reverence of me has become a commandment learned from men: therefore, behold, I will proceed wondrously with this people, wondrously and marvellously strange; and the wisdom of its wise men is lost, and the understanding of its intelligent men becomes invisible" Ever since the time of Asaph (Ps. 1., cf. Ixxviii. 36, 37), the lamentation and condemnation of hypocritical ceremonial worship, without living faith or any striving after holiness, had been a leading theme of prophecy. Even in Isaiah's introductory address (ch. i.) this complaint was uttered quite in the tone of that of Asaph. In the time of Hezekiah it was peculiarly called for, just as it was afterwards in that of Josiah (as the book of Jeremiah shows). The people had been obliged to consent to the abolition of the public worship of idols, but their worship of Jehovah was hypocrisy. Sometimes it was conscious hypocrisy, arising from the fear of man and favour of man; sometimes unconscious, inasmuch as without any inward conversion, but simply with work-righteousness, the people contented themselves with, and even prided themselves upon, an outward fulfilment of the law (Mic. vi. 6-8, iii. 11). Instead of VV (LXX., Vulg., Syr., Matt. xv. 8, Mark vii. 6), we also meet with the reading £>2?, u because this people harasses itself as with tributary service;" but the antithesis to richaq (LXX. iroppco awe^ei) favours the former reading niggash, accedit; and b'phlv (with its mouth) must be connected with this, though in opposition to the accents. This self-alienation and self-blinding, Jehovah would punish with a wondrously paradoxical judgment, namely, the judgment of a hardening, which would so completely empty and confuse, that even the appearance of wisdom and unity, which the leaders of Israel still had, would completely disappear. *?0V (as in ch. xxxviii. 5) is not the third person fut. hiphil here (so that it could be rendered, according to ch. xxviii. 16, "Behold, I am he who;" or more strictly still, " Behold me, who;" which, however, would give a prominence to the subject that would be out of place here), but the part kal for ^pr. That the language really allowed of such a lengthening of the primary form qatXl into qatil, and especially in the case of Tor, is evident from Eccles. i. 18 (see at Ps. xvi. 5). In Kj« «!*n, *Ab (cf. Lam. i. 9) alternates with the gerundive (see at ch. xxii. 17): the fifth example in this one address of the emphatic juxtaposition of words having a similar sound and the same derivation (yid. vers. 1, 5, 7, 9).
Their hypocrisy, which was about to be so wonderfully punished according to the universal law (Ps. xviii. 26, 27), manifested itself in their self-willed and secret behaviour, which would not inquire for Jehovah, nor suffer itself to be chastened by His word. Vers. 15, 16. " Woe unto them that hide plans deep from Jehovah, and their doing occurs in a dark place, and they say, Who saw us then, and who knew about us f Oh for your perversity! It is to be regarded as potters' clay; that a work could say to its maker, He has not made me; and an image to its sculptor, He does not understand it /" Just as Ahaz had carefully kept his appeal to Asshur for help secret from the prophet; so did they try, as far as possible, to hide from the prophet the plan for an alliance with Egypt. ">^P? is a syncopated hiphil for TJPIpnK as in ch. i. 12, iii. 8, xxiii. 11. P'DVn adds the adverbial notion, according to our mode of expression (comp. Joel ii. 20, and the opposite thought in Joel ii. 26; Ges. § 142). To hide from Jehovah is equivalent to hiding from the prophet of Jehovah, that they might not have to listen to reproof from the word of Jehovah. We may see from ch. viii. 12 how suspiciously they watched the prophet in such circumstances as these. But Jehovah saw them in their secrecy, and the prophet saw through the whole in the light of Jehovah. DD3Sn is an exclamation, like ^V??^ in Jer. xlix. 16. They are perverse, or Qim) "is it not so?" They think they can dispense with Jehovah, and yet they are His creatures; they attribute cleverness to themselves, and practically disown Jehovah, as if the pot should say to the potter who has turned it, He does not understand it.
But the prophet's God, whose omniscience, creative glory, and perfect wisdom they so basely mistook and ignored, would very shortly turn the present state of the world upside down, and make Himself a congregation out of the poor and wretched, whilst He would entirely destroy this proud ungodly nation. Vers. 17-21. "Is it not yet a very little, and Lebanon is turned into a fruitful field, and the fruitful field esteemed as a forest? And in that day the deaf hear scripture words, and the eyes of the blind will see out of obscurity and out of darkness. And the joy of the humble increases in Jehovah, and the poor among men will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. For tyrants are gone, and it is over with scoffers; and all who think evil are rooted out, who condemn a man for a word, and lay snares for him that is free-spoken in the gate, and overthroio the righteous through shameful UesT The circumstances themselves, as well as the sentence passed, will experience a change, in complete contrast with the present state of things. This is what is affirmed in ver. 17; probably a proverb transposed into a more literary style. What is now forest becomes ennobled into garden ground; and what is garden ground becomes in general estimation a forest (?Oi3p, "W v, although we should rather expect?, just as in ch. xxxii. 15). These emblems are explained in vers. 18 sqq. The people that are now blind and deaf, so far as the word of Jehovah is concerned, are changed into a people with open ears and seeing eyes. Scripture words, like those which the prophet now holds before the people so unsuccessfully, are heard by those who have been deaf. The unfettered sight of those who have been blind pierces through the hitherto surrounding darkness. The heirs of the new future thus transformed are the 'dndvlm (" meek") and the ' \bhyonim ("poor"). 0*JK (the antithesis of O^JK, e.g. ver. 13) heightens the representation of lowliness; the combination is a superlative one, as in {MSn *Tyv, Jer. xlix. 20, and jxvn ":y in Zech. xi. 7 (cf. DVn piB in ch. xxxv. 9): needy men who present a glaring contrast to, and stand out from, the general body of men. Such men will obtain ever increasing joy in Jehovah (ydsaph as in ch. xxxvii. 31). Such a people of God would take the place of the oppressors (cf. ch. xxviii. 12) and scoffers (cf. ch. xxviii. 14, 22), and those who thought evil (shdqad, invigilare, sedulo agere), i.e. the wretched planners, who made a Ntth of every one who did not enter into their plans {i.e. who called him a chote; cf. Deut. xxiv. 4, Eccles. v. 5), and went to law with the man who openly opposed them in the gate (Amos v. 10; y'qoshun, possibly the perf. kal, cf. Jer. 1. 24;
According to the syntax, however, it is the fut. leal of qush = >W<: see at cli. xxvi. 16; Ges. § 44, Anm. 4), and thrust away the righteous, i.e. forced him away from his just rights (cli. x. 2), by tohu, i.e. accusations and pretences of the utmost worthlessness; for these would all have been swept away. This is the true explanation of the last clause, as given in the Targum, and not "into the desert and desolation," as Knobel and Luzzatto suppose; for with Isaiah tohu is the synonym for all such words as signify nothingness, groundlessness, and fraud. The prophet no doubt had in his mind, at the time that he uttered these words, the conduct of the people towards himself and his fellow-prophets, and such as were like-minded with them. The charge brought against him of being a conspirator, or a traitor to his country, was a tohu of this kind. All these conspirators and persecutors Jehovah would clear entirely away.
Everything that was incorrigible would be given up to destruction; and therefore the people of God, when it came out of the judgment, would have nothing of the same kind to look for again. Vers. 22-24. " Therefore thus saith Jehovah of the house of Jacob, He who redeemed Abraham: Jacob shall not henceforth be ashamed, nor shall his face turn pale any more. For when he, when his children see the work of my hands in the midst of him, they will sanctify my name, and sanctify the Holy One of Jacob, and shudder before the God of Israel. And those who were of an erring spirit discern understanding, and murmurers accept instruction." With 7K (for which Luzzatto, following Lowth, reads?K, " the God of the house of Jacob") the theme is introduced to which the following utterance refers. The end of Israel will correspond to the holy root of its origin. Just as Abraham was separated from the human race that was sunk in heathenism, to become the ancestor of a nation of Jehovah, so would a remnant be separated from the great mass of Israel that was sunk in apostasy from Jehovah; and this remnant would be the foundation of a holy community well pleasing to God. And this would never be confounded or become pale with shame again (on bosh, see at ch. i. 29; chdvar is a poetical Aramaism); for both sins and sinners that called forth the punishments of God, which had pat them to shame, would have been swept away (cf. Zeph. iii. 11). In the presence of this decisive work of punishment (ma&seh as in ch. xxviii. 21, x. 12, v. 12, 19), which Jehovah would perform in the heart of Israel, Israel itself would undergo a thorough change. V*VP is in apposition to the subject in ^H?, " when he, namely his children" (comp. Job xxix. 3); and the expression "his children" is intentionally chosen instead of "his sons" (bdnlm), to indicate that there would be a new generation, which would become, in the face of the judicial self-manifestation of Jehovah, a holy church, sanctifying Him, the Holy One of Israel. Yaqdishu is continued in v'hiqdishu: the prophet intentionally repeats this most significant word, and heerits is the parallel word to it, as in ch. viii. 12, 13. The new church would indeed not be a sinless one, or thoroughly perfect; but, according to ver. 24, the previous self-hardening in error would have been exchanged for a willing and living appropriation of right understanding, and the former murmuring resistance to the admonitions of Jehovah would have given place to a joyful and receptive thirst for instruction. There is the same interchange of Jacob and Israel here which we so frequently meet with in ch. xl. sqq. And, in fact, throughout this undisputedly genuine prophecy of Isaiah, we can detect the language of ch. xl.-lxvi. Through the whole of the first part, indeed, we may trace the gradual development of the thoughts and forms which predominate there.
The plan which, according to ch. xxix. 15, was already projected and prepared in the deepest secrecy, is now much further advanced. The negotiations by means of ambassadors have already been commenced; but the prophet condemns what he can no longer prevent. Vers. 1-5. " Woe to the stubborn children, saith Jehovah, to drive plans, and not by my impulse, and to plait alliance, and not according to my Spirit, to heap sin upon sin: that go away to travel down to Egypt, without having ashed my mouth, to fly to Pharaotis shelter, and to conceal themselves under the shadow of Egypt. And Pharaoh's shelter becomes a shame to them, and the concealment under the shadow of Egypt a disgrace. For Judalis princes have appeared fa Zoo*) and his ambassadors arrive in Hanes. They will all have to be ashamed of a people useless to them, that brings no help and no use, but shame, and also reproach." Sor'rim is followed by infinitives with Lamed (cf. ch. v. 22, iii. 8): who are bent upon it in their obstinacy. Massekhdh designates the alliance as a plait (massekheth). According to Cappellus and others, it designates it as formed with a libation {airovhrj, from airevZeaOai); but the former is certainly the more correct view, inasmuch as massekhdh (from ndsakh, fundere) signifies a cast, and hence it is more natural here to take ndsakh as equivalent to sdkhakh, plectere (Jerome: ordiremini telam). The context leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the adverbial expressions *?*?"*& and WTWJ, viz. without its having proceeded from me, and without my Spirit being there. " Sin upon sin:" inasmuch as they carry out further and further to perfect realization the thought which was already a sinful one in itself. The prophet now follows for himself the ambassadors, who are already on the road to the country of the Nile valley. He sees them arrive in Zoan, and watches them as they proceed thence into Hanes. He foresees and foretells what a disgraceful opening of their eyes will attend the reward of this untheocratical beginning. On Id'oz b\ see at ch. x. 31: roz is the infinitive constr. of *uz; ma oz, on the contrary, is a derivative of 'dzaz, to be strong. The suffixes of FJJP (his princes) and V3S7D (his ambassadors) are supposed by Hitzig, Ewald, and Knobel, who take a different view of what is said, to refer to the princes and ambassadors of Pharaoh. But this is by no means warranted on the ground that the prophet cannot so immediately transfer to Zoan and Hanes the ambassadors of Judah, who were still on their journey according to ver. 2. The prophet's vision overleaps the existing stage of the desire for this alliance; he sees the great men of his nation already suing for the favour of Egypt, first of all in Zoan, and then still further in Hanes, and at once foretells the shameful termination of this self-desecration of the people of Jehovah. The LXX. give for VP£ Djn, fidvnv KoiriaaovGiv, i.e. W?) D|n, and Knobel approves this reading; but it is a misunderstanding, which only happens to have fallen out a little better this time than the rendering o>? Aavih given for W3 in ch. xxix. 3. If chinndm had been the original reading, it would hardly have entered any one's mind to change it into chdnes. The latter was the name of a city on an island of the Nile in Central Egypt, the later Heracleopolis (Eg. Hues; Ehnes), the Anysis of Herodotus (ii. 137). On Zoan, see at ch. xix. 11. At that time the Tanitic dynasty was reigning, the dynasty preceding the Ethiopian. Tanis and Anysis were the two capitals. B*K3il (= B^hj a metaplastic Jdphil of WT = t$3? a different word from B^iJ) is incorrectly pointed for B^WIJ, like Hjfe^n (keri) for rub^Ni in Josh. xxi. 10. fc*N3n signifies elsewhere, " to make stinking" (to calumniate, Prov. xiii. 5), or " to come into ill odour" (1 Sam. xxvii. 12); here, however, it means to be put to shame (B>«3 = 6^3).
The prophet's address is hardly commenced, however, when a heading is introduced of the very same kind as we have already met with several times in the cycle of prophecies against the heathen nations. Gesenius, Hitzig, Umbreit, and Knobel, rid themselves of it by pronouncing it a gloss founded upon a misunderstanding. But nothing is more genuine in the whole book of Isaiah than the words massa bahamoth negebh. The heading is emblematical, like the four headings in ch. xxi., xxii. And the massa! embraces vers. 6, 7. Then follows the command to write it on a table by itself. The heading is an integral part of the smaller whole. Isaiah breaks off his address to communicate an oracle relating to the Egyptian treaty, which Jehovah has specially commanded him to hand down to posterity. The same interruption would take place if we expunged the heading; for in any case it was vers. 6, 7 that he was to write upon a table. This is not an address to the people, but the preliminary text, the application of which is determined afterwards. The prophet communicates in the form of a citation what has been revealed to him by God, and then states what God has commanded him to do with it. We therefore enclose vers. 6, 7 in inverted commas as a quotation, and render the short passage, which is written in the tone of ch. xxi., as follows: Vers. 6, 7. " Oracle concerning the wateroxen of the south: Through a land of distress and confinement, whence the lioness and lion, adders and flying dragons; they carry their possessions on the shoulders of asses' foals, and their treasures on the humps of camels, to a nation that profits nothing. And Egypt, worthlessly and hollowly will they help; therefore
/ call this Egypt, Great-mouth that sits still'" The "waterox of the south" is the Nile-horse; and this is the emblem of Egypt, the land of the south (in Daniel and Zechariah Babylonia is " the land of the north"). Bahamdth is the construct of b'henwth (Job xl.), which is a Hebraized form of an Egyptian word, p-ehe-mau (though the word itself has not yet been met with), i.e. the ox of the water, or possibly p-ehe-mau-t (with the feminine article at the close, though in hesmut, another name for a female animal, mut = t. mau signifies " the mother:" see at Job xl. 15). The animal referred to is the hippopotamus, which is called bomarino in Italian, Arab, the Nile-horse or water-pig. The emblem of Egypt in other passages of the Old Testament is tannin, the water-snake, or leviathan, the crocodile. In Ps. lxviii. 31 this is called chayyath qdneh, "the beast of the reed," though Hengstenberg supposes that the Nile-horse is intended there. This cannot be maintained, however; but in the passage before us this emblem is chosen, just because the fat, swine-like, fleshy colossus, whose belly nearly touches the ground as it walks, is a fitting image of Egypt, a land so boastful and so eager to make itself thick and broad, and yet so slow to exert itself in the interest of others, and so unwilling to move from the spot. This is also implied in the name rahabh-hem-shdbheth. Rahab is a name applied to Egypt in other passages also (ch. li. 9; Ps. Ixxxvii. 4, lxxxix. 11), and that in the senses attested by the LXX. at Job xxvi. 12 (cf. ix. 13), viz. ktjtoS) a sea-monster, monstrum marinum. Here the name has the meaning common in other passages, viz. violence, domineering pride, boasting (ahatyveia, as one translator renders it). DH is a term of comparison, as in Gen. xiv. 2, 3, etc.; the plural refers to the people called rahabh. Hence the meaning is either, " The bragging people, they are sit-still;" or, "Boasthouse, they are idlers." To this deceitful land the ambassadors of Judah were going with rich resources (chdydllm, opes) on the shoulder of asses' foals, and on the hump (dabbesheth, from ddbhash, according to Luzzatto related to gdbhash, to be hilly) of camels, without shrinking from the difficulties and dangers of the road through the desert, where lions and snakes spring out now here and now there (DHD, neuter, as in Zeph. ii. 7, comp. ch. xxxviii. 16; see also Deut. viii. 15, Num. xxi. 6). Through this very desert, through which God had led their fathers when
He redeemed them out of the bondage of Egypt, they were now marching to purchase the friendship of Egypt, though really, whatever might be the pretext which they offered, it was only to deceive themselves; for the vainglorious land would never keep the promises that it made.
So runs the divine oracle to which the following command refers. Ver. 8. " Now go, write it on a table with them, and note it in a booh, and let it stand there for future days, for ever, to eternity" The suffixes of kothbdh (write it) and chuqqdh (note it) refer in a neuter sense to vers. 6, 7; and the expression " go " is simply a general summons to proceed to the matter (cf. ch. xxii. 15). Sepher could be used interchangeably with ludch, because a single leaf, the contents of which w^ere concluded, was called sepher (Ex. xvii. 14). Isaiah was to write the oracle upon a table, a separate leaf of durable material; and that " with them," i.e. so that his countrymen might have it before their eyes (compare ch. viii. 1, Hab. ii. 2). It was to be a memorial for posterity. The reading *w (Sept., Targ., Syr.) for lyj is appropriate, though quite unnecessary. The three indications of time form a climax: for futurity, for the most remote future, for the future without end.
It was necessary that the worthlessness of the help of Egypt should be placed in this way before the eyes of the people. Vers. 9-11. u For it is a refractory people, lying children, children who do not like to hear the instruction of Jehovah, who say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things! Speak flatteries to us! Get out of the way, turn aside from the path, remove from our face the Holy One of Israel." On the expression 'am merl (a people of stubbornness), see at ch. iii. 8. The vowel-pointing of D*Bfa3 follows the same rule as that of &??-• The prophet traces back their words to an unvarnished expression of their true meaning, just as he does in ch. xxviii. 15. They forbid the prophets of Jehovah to prophesy, more especially nekhochoth, straight or true things (things not agreeable to their own wishes), but would rather hear chdldqoth, i.e. smooth, insinuating, and flattering things, and even mahdthalloth (from hdthal, Talm. tal, ludere), i.e. illusions or deceits. Their desire was to be entertained and lauded, not repelled and instructed. The prophets are to adopt another course (*JO only occurs here, and that twice, instead of the more usual?0—|B, after the form £», \!$), and not trouble them any more with the Holy One of Israel, whom they (at least Isaiah, who is most fond of calling Jehova'h by this name) have always in their mouths.