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THE DATE OF Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24
THE problem of the date of Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 is this: In a book called by the name of the prophet Isaiah, who flourished between 740 and 700 B.C., the last twenty-seven chapters deal with the captivity suffered by the Jews in Babylonia from 598 to 538, and more particularly with the advent, about 550, of Cyrus, whom they name. Are we to take for granted that Isaiah himself prophetically wrote these chapters, or must we assign them to a nameless author or authors of the period of which they treat?
Till the end of the last century it was the almost universally accepted tradition, and even still is an opinion retained by many, that Isaiah was carried forward by the Spirit, out of his own age to the standpoint of one hundred and fifty years later; that he was inspired to utter the warning and comfort required by a generation so very different from his own, and was even enabled to hail by name their redeemer, Cyrus. This theory, involving as it does a phenomenon without parallel in the history of Holy Scripture, is based on these two grounds: first, that the chapters in question form a considerable part-nearly nine-twentieths-of the Book of Isaiah; and second, that portions of them are quoted in the New Testament by the prophet’s name. The theory is also supported by arguments drawn from resemblances of style and vocabulary between these twenty-seven chapters and the undisputed oracles of Isaiah but, as the opponents of the Isaian authorship also appeal to vocabulary and style, it will be better to leave this kind of evidence aside for the present, and to discuss the problem upon other and less ambiguous grounds.
The first argument, then, for the Isaian authorship of chapters 40-66 is that they form part of a book called by Isaiah’s name. But, to be worth anything, this argument must rest on the following facts: that everything in a book called by a prophet’s name is necessarily by that prophet, and that the compilers of the book intended to hand it down as altogether from his pen. Now there is no evidence for either of these conclusions. On the contrary, there is considerable testimony in the opposite direction. The Book of Isaiah is not one continuous prophecy. It consists of a number of separate orations, with a few intervening pieces of narrative. Some of these orations claim to be Isaiah’s own: they possess such titles as "The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz." But such titles describe only the individual prophecies they head, and other portions of the book, upon other subjects and in very different styles, do not possess titles at all. It seems to me that those who maintain the Isaian authorship of the whole book have the responsibility cast upon them of explaining why some chapters in it should be distinctly said to be by Isaiah, while others should not be so entitled. Surely this difference affords us sufficient ground for understanding that the whole book is not necessarily by Isaiah, nor intentionally handed down by its compilers as the work of that prophet.
Now, when we come to chapters 40-66, we find that, occurring in a book which we have just seen no reason for supposing to be in every part of it by Isaiah, these chapters nowhere claim to be his. They are separated from that portion of the book, in which his undisputed oracles are placed, by a historical narrative of considerable length. And there is not anywhere upon them nor in them a title nor other statement that they are by the prophet, nor any allusion which could give the faintest support to the opinion, that they offer themselves to posterity as dating from his time. It is safe to say, that, if they had come to us by themselves, no one would have dreamt for an instant of ascribing them to Isaiah; for the alleged resemblances, which their language and style bear to his language and style, are far more than overborne by the undoubted differences, and have never been employed, even by the defenders of the Isaian authorship, except in additional and confessedly slight support of their main argument, viz., that the chapters must be Isaiah’s because they are included in a book called by his name.
Let us understand, therefore, at this very outset, that in discussing the question of the authorship of "Second Isaiah," we are not discussing a question upon which the text itself makes any statement, or into which the credibility of the text enters. No claim is made by the Book of Isaiah itself for the Isaian authorship of chapters 40-66.
A second fact in Scripture, which seems at first sight to make strongly for the unity of the Book of Isaiah, is that in the New Testament, portions of the disputed chapters are quoted by Isaiah’s name, just as are portions of his admitted prophecies. These citations are nine in number. {Mat_3:3, Mat_8:17, Mat_12:17, Luk_3:4, Luk_4:17, Joh_1:23, Joh_12:38, Act_8:28, Rom_10:16-20} None is by our Lord Himself. They occur in the Gospels, Acts, and Paul. Now if any of these quotations were given in answer to the question, Did Isaiah write chapters 40-66 of the book called by his name? or if the use of his name along with them were involved in the arguments which they are borrowed to illustrate as, for instance, is the case with David’s name in the quotation made by our Lord from Psa_110:1-7, then those who deny the unity of the Book of Isaiah would be face to face with a very serious problem indeed. But in none of the nine cases is the authorship of the Book of Isaiah in question. In none of the nine cases is there anything in the argument, for the purpose of which the quotation has been made, that depends on the quoted words being by Isaiah. For the purposes for which the Evangelists and Paul borrow the texts, these might as well be unnamed, or attributed to any other canonical writer. Nothing in them requires us to suppose that Isaiah’s name is mentioned with them for any other end than that of reference, viz., to point out that they lie in the part of prophecy usually known by his name. But if there is nothing in these citations to prove that Isaiah’s name is being used for any other purpose than that of reference, then it is plain-and this is all that we ask assent to at the present time-that they do not offer the authority of Scripture as a bar to our examining the evidence of the chapters in question.
It is hardly necessary to add that neither is there any other question of doctrine in our way. There is none about the nature of prophecy, for, to take an example, chapter 53, as a prophecy of Jesus Christ, is surely as great a marvel if yon date it from the Exile as if you date it from the age of Isaiah. And, in particular, let us understand that no question need be started about the ability of God’s Spirit to inspire a prophet to mention Cyrus by name one hundred and fifty years before Cyrus appeared. The question is not, Could a prophet have been so inspired?-to which question, were it put, our answer might only be, God is great!-but the question is, Was our prophet so inspired? does he himself offer evidence of the fact? Or, on the contrary, in naming Cyrus does he give himself out as a contemporary of Cyrus, who already saw the great Persian above the horizon? To this question only the writings under discussion can give us an answer. Let us see what they have to say.
Apart from the question of the date, no chapters in the Bible are interpreted with such complete unanimity as Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22. They plainly set forth certain things as having already taken place-the Exile and Captivity, the ruin of Jerusalem, and the devastation of the Holy Land. Israel is addressed as having exhausted the time of her penalty, and is proclaimed to be ready for deliverance. Some of the people are comforted as being in despair because redemption does not draw near; others are exhorted to leave the city of their bondage, as if they were growing too familiar with its idolatrous life. Cyrus is named as their deliverer, and is pointed out as already called upon his career, and as blessed with success by Jehovah. It is also promised that he will immediately add Babylon to his conquests, and so set God’s people free.
Now all this is not predicted, as if from the standpoint of a previous century. It is nowhere said-as we should expect it to be said, if the prophecy had been uttered by Isaiah-that Assyria, the dominant world-power of Isaiah’s day, was to disappear and Babylon to take her place; that then the Babylonians should lead the Jews into an exile which they had escaped at the hands of Assyria; and that after nearly seventy years of suffering God would raise up Cyrus as a deliverer.
There is none of this prediction, which we might fairly have expected had the prophecy been Isaiah’s; because, however far Isaiah carries us into the future, he never fails to start from the circumstances of his own day. Still more significant, however-there is not even the kind of prediction that we find in Jeremiah’s prophecies of the Exile, with which indeed it is most instructive to compare Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 Jeremiah also spoke of exile and deliverance, but it was always with the grammar of the future. He fairly and openly predicted both; and, let us especially remember, he did so with a meagreness of description, a reserve and reticence about details, which are simply unintelligible if Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 was written before his day, and by so well-known a prophet as Isaiah.
No: in the statements which our chapters make concerning the Exile and the condition of Israel under it, there is no prediction, not the slightest trace of that grammar of the future in which Jeremiah’s prophecies are constantly uttered. But there is a direct appeal to the conscience of a people already long under the discipline of God; their circumstance of exile is taken for granted; there is a most vivid and delicate appreciation of their present fears and doubts, and to these the deliverer Cyrus is not only named, but introduced as an actual and notorious personage already upon the midway of his irresistible career.
These facts are more broadly based than just at first sight appears. You cannot turn their flank by the argument that Hebrew prophets were in the habit of employing in their predictions what is called "the prophetic perfect"-that is, that in the ardour of their conviction that certain things would take place they talked of these, as the flexibility of the Hebrew tenses allowed them to do, in the past or perfect as if the things had actually taken place. No such argument is possible in the case of the introduction of Cyrus. For it is not only that the prophesy, with what might be the mere ardour of vision, represents the Persian as already above the horizon and upon the flowing tide of victory; but that, in the course of a sober argument for the unique divinity of the God of Israel, which takes place throughout chapters 41-48, Cyrus, alive and irresistible, already accredited by success, and with Babylonia at his feet, is pointed out as the unmistakable proof that former prophecies for a deliverance for Israel are at last coming to pass. Cyrus, in short, is not presented as a prediction, but as the proof that a prediction is being fulfilled. Unless he had already appeared in flesh and blood, and was on the point of striking at Babylon, with all the prestige of unbroken victory, a great part of Isa_41:1-29 - Isa_48:1-22 would be utterly unintelligible.
This argument is so conclusive for the date of Second Isaiah, that it may be well to state it a little more in detail, even at the risk of anticipating some of the exposition of the text.
Among the Jews at the close of the Exile there appear to have been two classes. One class was hopeless of deliverance, and to their hearts is addressed such a prophecy as chapter 40: "Comfort ye, comfort ye, My people." But there was another class, of opposite temperament, who had only too strong opinions on the subject of deliverance. In bondage to the letter of Scripture and to the great precedents of their history, these Jews appear to have insisted that the Deliverer to come must be a Jew, and a descendant of David. And the bent of much of the prophet’s urgency in chapter 45 is to persuade those pedants, that the Gentile Cyrus, who had appeared to be not only the biggest man of his age, but the very likely means of Israel’s redemption, was of Jehovah’s own creation and calling. Does not such an argument necessarily imply that Cyrus was already present, an object of doubt and debate to earnest minds in Israel? Or are we to suppose that all this doubt and debate were foreseen, rehearsed, and answered one hundred and fifty years before the time by so famous a prophet as Isaiah, and that, in spite of his prediction and answer, the doubt and debate nevertheless took place in the minds of the very Israelites, who were most earnest students of ancient prophecy? The thing has only to be stated to be felt to be impossible.
But besides the pedants in Israel, there is apparent through these prophecies another body of men, against whom also Jehovah claims the actual Cyrus for His own. They are the priests and worshippers of the heathen idols. It is well known that the advent of Cyrus cast the Gentile religions of the time and their counsellors into confusion. The wisest priests were perplexed; the oracles of Greece and Asia Minor either were dumb when consulted about the Persian, or gave more than usually ambiguous answers. Over against this perplexity and despair of the heathen religions, our prophet confidently claims Cyrus for Jehovah’s own. In a debate in chapter 41, in which he seeks to establish Jehovah’s righteousness-that is, Jehovah’s faithfulness to His word, and power to carry out His predictions - the prophet speaks of ancient prophecies which have come from Jehovah, and points to Cyrus as their fulfilment. It does not matter to us in the meantime what those prophecies were. They may have been certain of Jeremiah’s predictions; we may be sure that they cannot have contained anything so definite as Cyrus’ name, or such a proof of Divine foresight must certainly have formed part of the prophet’s plea. It is enough that they could be quoted; our business is rather with the evidence which the prophet offers of their fulfilment. That evidence is Cyrus. Would it have been possible to refer the heathen to Cyrus as proof that those ancient prophecies were being fulfilled, unless Cyrus had been visible to the heathen, -unless the heathen had been beginning already to feel this Persian "from the sunrise" in all his weight of war? It is no esoteric doctrine which the prophet is unfolding to initiated Israelites about Cyrus. He is making an appeal to men of the world to face facts. Could he possibly have made such an appeal unless the facts had been there, unless Cyrus had been within the ken of "the natural man"? Unless Cyrus and his conquests were already historically present, the argument in 41-48 is unintelligible.
If this evidence for the exilic date of Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22 -for all these chapters hang together-required any additional support, it would find it in the fact that the prophet does not wholly treat of what is past and over, but makes some predictions as well. Cyrus is on the way of triumph, but Babylon has still to fall by his hand. Babylon has still to fall, before the exiles can go free. Now, if our prophet were predicting from the standpoint of one hundred and forty years before, why did he make this sharp distinction between two events which appeared so closely together? If he had both the advent of Cyrus and the fall of Babylon in his long perspective, why did he not use "the prophetic perfect" for both? That he speaks of the first as past and of the second as still to come, would most surely, if there had been no tradition the other way, have been accepted by all as sufficient evidence, that the advent of Cyrus was behind him and the fall of Babylon still in front of him, when he wrote these chapters.
Thus the earlier part, at least, of Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 -that is, chapters 40-48-compels us to date it between 555, Cyrus’s advent, and 538, Babylon’s fall. But some think that we may still further narrow the limits. In Isa_41:25, Cyrus, whose own kingdom lay east of Babylonia, is described as invading Babylonia from the north. This, it has been thought, must refer to his union with the Medes in 549, and his threatened descent upon Mesopotamia from their quarter of the prophet’s horizon. If it be so, the possible years of our prophecy are reduced to eleven, 549-538. But even if we take the wider and more certain limit, 555 to 538, we may well say that there are very few chapters in the whole of the Old Testament whose date can be fixed so precisely as the date of chapters 40-48.
If what has been unfolded in the preceding paragraphs is recognised as the statement of the chapters themselves, it will be felt that further evidence of an exilic date is scarcely needed. And those, who are acquainted with the controversy upon the evidence furnished by the style and language of the prophecies, will admit how far short in decisiveness it falls of the arguments offered above. But we may fairly ask whether there is anything opposed to the conclusion we have reached, either, first, in the local colour of the prophecies: or, second, in their language; or, third, in their thought - anything which shows that they are more likely to have been Isaiah’s than of exilic origin.
1. It has often been urged against the exilic date of these prophecies, that they wear so very little local colour, and one of the greatest of critics, Ewald, has felt himself, therefore, permitted to place their home, not in Babylonia, but in Egypt, while he maintains the exilic date. But, as we shall see in surveying the condition of the exiles, it was natural for the best among them, their psalmists and prophets, to have no eyes for the colours of Babylon. They lived inwardly; they were much more the inhabitants of their own broken hearts than of that gorgeous foreign land; when their thoughts rose out of themselves it was to seek immediately the far-away Zion. How little local colour is there in the writings of Ezekiel! Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 has even more to show; for indeed the absence of local colour from our prophecy has been greatly exaggerated. We shall find as we follow the exposition, break after break of Babylonian light and shadow falling across our path, -the temples, the idol-manufactories, the processions of images, the diviners and astrologers, the gods and altars especially cultivated by the characteristic mercantile spirit of the place; the shipping of that mart of nations, the crowds of her merchants; the glitter of many waters, and even that intolerable glare, which so frequently curses the skies of Mesopotamia. {Isa_49:10} The prophet speaks of the hills of his native land with just the same longing, that Ezekiel and a probable psalmist of the Exile {Psa_121:1-8} betray, -the homesickness of a highland-born man whose prison is on a flat, monotonous plain. The beasts he mentions have for the most part been recognised as familiar in Babylonia; and while the same cannot be said of the trees and plants he names, it has been observed that the passages, into which he brings them, are passages where his thoughts are fixed on the restoration to Palestine. Besides these, there are many delicate symptoms of the presence, before the prophet, of a people in a foreign land, engaged in commerce, but without political responsibilities, each of which, taken by itself, may be insufficient to convince, but the reiterated expression of which has even betrayed commentators, who lived too early for the theory of a second Isaiah, into the involuntary admission of an exilic authorship. It will perhaps startle some to hear John Calvin quoted on behalf of the exilic date of these prophecies. But let us read and consider this statement of his: "Some regard must be had to the time when this prophecy was uttered; for since the rank of the kingdom had been obliterated, and the name of the royal family had become mean and contemptible, during the captivity in Babylon, it might seem as if through the ruin of that family the truth of God had fallen into decay; and therefore he bids them contemplate by faith the throne of David, which had been cast down."
2. What we have seen to be true of the local colour of our prophecy holds good also of its style and language. There is nothing in either of these to commit us to an Isaiah authorship, or to make an exilic date improbable; on the contrary, the language and style, while containing no stronger nor more frequent resemblances to the language and style of Isaiah than may be accounted for by the natural influence of so great a prophet upon his successors, are signalised by differences from his undisputed oracles, too constant, too subtle, and sometimes too sharp, to make it at all probable that the whole book came from the same man. On this point it is enough to refer our readers to the recent exhaustive and very able reviews of the evidence by Canon Cheyne in the second volume of his Commentary, and by Canon Driver in the last chapter of "Isaiah: His Life and Times," and to quote the following words of so great an authority as Professor A. B. Davidson. After remarking on the difference in vocabulary of the two parts of the Book of Isaiah, he adds that it is not so much words in themselves as the peculiar uses and combinations of them, and especially "the peculiar articulation of sentences and the movement of the whole discourse, by which an impression is produced so unlike the impression produced by the earlier parts of the book."
3. It is the same with the thought and doctrine of our prophecy. In this there is nothing to make the Isaian authorship probable, or an exilic date impossible. But, on the contrary, whether we regard the needs of the people or the analogies of the development of their religion, we find that, while everything suits the Exile, nearly everything is foreign both to the subjects and to the methods of Isaiah. We shall observe the items of this as we go along, but one of them may be mentioned here (it will afterwards require a chapter to itself), our prophet’s use of the terms righteous and righteousness. No one, who has carefully studied the meaning which these terms bear in the authentic oracles of Isaiah, and the use to which they are put in the prophecies under discussion, can fail to find in the difference a striking corroboration of our argument-that the latter were composed by a different mind than Isaiah’s, speaking to a different generation.
To sum up this whole argument. We have seen that there is no evidence in the Book of Isaiah to prove that it was all by himself, but much testimony which points to a plurality of authors; that chapters 40-66 nowhere assert themselves to be by Isaiah; and that there is no other well-grounded claim of Scripture or doctrine on behalf of his authorship. We have then shown that chapters 40-48 do not only present the Exile as if nearly finished and Cyrus as if already come, while the fall of Babylon is still future; but that it is essential to one of their main arguments that Cyrus should be standing before Israel and the world, as a successful warrior, on his way to attack Babylon. That led us to date these chapters between 555 and 538. Turning then to other evidence, -the local colour they show, their language and style, and their theology, -we have found nothing which conflicts with that date, but, on the contrary, a very great deal, which much more agrees with it than with the date, or with the authorship, of Isaiah.
It will be observed, however, that the question has been limited to the earlier chapters of the twenty-seven under discussion, viz., to 40-48 Does the same conclusion hold good of 49 to 66? This can be properly discovered only as we closely follow their exposition; it is enough in the meantime to have got firm footing on the Exile. We can feel our way bit by bit from this standpoint onwards. Let us now merely anticipate the main features of the rest of the prophecy.
A new section has been marked by many as beginning with chapter 49. This is because chapter 48, concludes with a refrain: "There is no peace, saith Jehovah, to the wicked," which occurs again at the end of chapter 57, and because with chapter 48. Babylon and Cyrus drop out of sight. But the circumstances are still those of exile, and, as Professor Davidson remarks, chapter 49 is parallel in thought to chapter 42, and also takes for granted the restoration of Israel in chapter 48, proceeding naturally from that to the statement of Israel’s world-mission. Apart from the alternation of passages dealing with the Servant of the Lord, and passages whose subject is Zion - an alternation which begins pretty early in the prophecy, and has suggested to some its composition out of two different writings-the first real break in the sequence occurs at Isa_52:13, where the prophecy of the sin-bearing Servant is introduced. By most critics this is held to be an insertion, for Isa_54:1 follows naturally upon Isa_52:12, though it is undeniable that there is also some association between Isa_52:13 - Isa_53:1-12, and chapter 54. In chapters 54-55, we are evidently still in exile. It is in commenting on a verse of these chapters that Calvin makes the admission of exilic origin which has been quoted above.
A number of short prophecies now follow, till the end of chapter 59 is reached. These, as we shall see, make it extremely difficult to believe in the original unity of "Second Isaiah." Some of them, it is true, lie in evident circumstance of exile; but others are undoubtedly of earlier date, reflecting the scenery of Palestine, and the habits of the people in their political independence, with Jehovah’s judgment-cloud still unburst, but lowering. Such is Isa_56:9 - Isa_57:1-21, which regards the Exile as still to come, quotes the natural features of Palestine, and charges the Jews with unbelieving diplomacy-a charge not possible against them when they were in captivity. But others of these short prophecies are, in the opinion of some critics, post-exilic. Cheyne assigns chapter 56 to after the Return, when the temple was standing, and the duty of holding fasts and sabbaths could be enforced, as it was enforced by Nehemiah. I shall give, when we reach the passage, my reasons for doubting his conclusion. The chapter seems to me as likely to have been written upon the eve of the Return as after the Return had taken place.
Chapter 57, the eighteenth of our twenty-seven chapters, closes with the same refrain as chapter 48, the ninth of the series: "There is no peace, saith Jehovah, to the wicked." Chapter 58, has, therefore, been regarded, as beginning the third great division of the prophecy. But here again, while there is certainly an advance in the treatment of the subject, and the prophet talks less of the redemption of the Jews and more of the glory of the restoration of Zion, the point of transition is very difficult to mark. Some critics regard chapter 58, as post-exilic; but when we come to it we shall find a number of reasons for supposing it to belong, just as much as Ezekiel, to the Exile. Chapter 59 is perhaps the most difficult portion of all, because it makes the Jews responsible for civic justice in a way they could ‘hardly be conceived to be in exile, and yet speaks, in the language of other portions of "Second Isaiah," of a deliverance that cannot well be other than the deliverance from exile. We shall find in this chapter likely marks of the fusion of two distinct addresses, making the conclusion probable that it is Israel’s earlier conscience which we catch here, following her into the days of exile, and reciting her former guilt just before pardon is assured. Chapters 60, 61, and 62 are certainly exilic. The inimitable prophecy, Isa_63:1-6, complete within itself, and unique in its beauty, is either a promise given just before the deliverance from a long captivity of Israel under heathen nations (Isa_63:4), or an exultant song of triumph immediately after such a deliverance has taken place. Isa_63:7 - Isa_64:1-12 implies a ruined temple (Isa_63:10), but bears no traces of the writer being in exile. It has been assigned to the period of the first attempts to rebuild Jerusalem after the Return. Chapter 65 has been assigned to the same date, and its local colour interpreted as that of Palestine. But we shall find the colour to be just as probably that of Babylon, and again I do not see any certain proofs of a post-exilic date. Chapter 66, however, betrays more evidence of being written after the Return. It divides into two parts. In Isa_66:1-4 the temple is still unbuilt, but the building would seem to be already begun. In Isa_66:5-24, the arrival of the Jews in Palestine, the resumption of the life of the sacred community, and the disappointments of the returned at the first meagre results, seem to be implied. And the music of the book dies out in tones of warning, that sin still hinders the Lord’s work with His people.
This rapid survey has made two things sufficiently clear. First, that while the bulk of chapters 40-66 was composed in Babylonia during the Exile of the Jews, there are considerable portions which date from before the Exile, and betray a Palestinian origin; and one or two smaller pieces that seem-rather less evidently, however-to take for granted the Return from the Exile. But, secondly, all these pieces, which it seems necessary to assign to different epochs and authors, have been arranged so as to exhibit a certain order and progress-an order, more or less observed, of date, and a progress very apparent (as we shall see in the course of exposition) of thought and of clearness in definition. The largest portion, of whose unity we are assured and whose date we can fix, is found at the beginning. Chapters 40-48 are certainly by one hand, and may be dated, as we have seen, between 555 and 538-the period of Cyrus’ approach to take Babylon. There the interest in Cyrus ceases, and the thought of the redemption from Babylon is mainly replaced by that of the subsequent Return. Along with these lines, we shall discover a development in the prophecy’s great doctrine of the Servant of Jehovah. But even this dies away, as if the experience of suffering and discipline were being replaced by that of return and restoration; and it is Zion in her glory, and the spiritual mission of the people, and the vengeance of the Lord, and the building of the temple, and a number of practical details in the life and worship of the restored community, which fill up the remainder of the book, along with a few echoes from pre-exilic times. Can we escape feeling in all this a definite design and arrangement, which fails to be absolutely perfect, probably, from the nature of the materials at the arranger’s disposal?
We are, therefore, justified in coming to the provisional conclusion, that Second Isaiah is not a unity, in so far as it consists of a number of pieces by different men, whom God raised up at various times before, during, and after the Exile, to comfort and exhort amid the shifting circumstance and tempers of His people; but that it is a unity, in so far as these pieces have been gathered together by an editor very soon after the Return from the Exile, in an order as regular both in point of time and subject as the somewhat mixed material would permit. It is in this sense that throughout this volume we shall talk of "our prophet," or "the prophet"; up to chapter 49, at least, we shall feel that the expression is literally true; after that it is rather an editorial than an original unity which is apparent. In this question of unity the dramatic style of the prophecy forms, no doubt, the greatest difficulty. Who shall dare to determine of the many soliloquies, apostrophes, lyrics, and other pieces that are here gathered, often in want of any connection save that of dramatic grouping and a certain sympathy of temper, whether they are by the same author or have been collected from several origins? We must be content to leave the matter uncertain. One great reason, which we have not yet quoted, for supposing that the whole prophecy is not by one man, is that if it had been his name would certainly have come down with it. Do not let it be thought that such a conclusion, as we have been led to, is merely a dogma of modern criticism. Here, if anywhere, the critic is but the patient student of Scripture, searching for the testimony of the sacred text about itself, and formulating that. If it be found that such a testimony conflicts with ecclesiastical tradition, however ancient and universal, so much the worse for tradition. In Protestant circles, at least, we have no choice. Litera Scripta manet. When we know that the only evidence for the Isaiah authorship of chapters 40-66 is tradition, supported by an unthinking interpretation of New Testament citations, while the whole testimony of these Scriptures themselves denies them to be Isaiah’s, we cannot help making our choice, and accepting the testimony of Scripture. Do we find them any the less wonderful or Divine? Do they comfort less? Do they speak with less power to conscience? Do they testify with more uncertain voice to our Lord and Saviour? It will be the task of the following pages to show that, interpreted in connection with the history out of which they themselves say that God’s Spirit drew them, these twenty-seven chapters become only more prophetic of Christ, and more comforting and instructive to men, than they were before.
But the remarkable fact is that anciently tradition itself appears to have agreed with the results of modern scholarship. The original place of the Book of Isaiah in the Jewish canon seems to have been after both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, a fact which goes to prove that it did not reach completion till a later date than the works of these two prophets of the Exile.
If now it be asked, Why should a series of prophecies written in the Exile be attached to the authentic works of Isaiah? that is a fair question, and one which the supporters of the exilic authorship have the duty laid upon them of endeavouring to answer. Fortunately they are not under the necessity of falling back, for want of other reasons, on the supposition that this attachment was due to the error of some scribe, or to the custom which ancient writers practised of filling up any part of a volume, that remained blank when one book is finished, with the writing of any other that would fit the place. The first of these reasons is too accidental, the second too artificial, in face of the undoubted sympathy which exists among all parts of the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah himself plainly prophesied of an exile longer than his own generation experienced, and prophesied of a return from it (chapter 11). We saw no reason to dispute his claims to the predictions about Babylon in chapters 21 and 39 Isaiah’s, too, more than any other prophet’s, were those great and final hopes of the Old Testament - the survival of Israel and the gathering of the Gentiles to the worship of Jehovah at Jerusalem. But it is for the express purpose of emphasising the immediate fulfilment of such ancient predictions, that Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 were published. Although our prophet has "new things to publish," his first business is to show that the "former things have come to pass," especially the Exile, the survival of a Remnant, the sending of a Deliverer, the doom of Babylon. What more natural than to attach to his utterances those prophecies, of which the events he pointed to were the vindication and fulfilment? The attachment was the more easy to arrange that the authentic prophecies had not passed from Isaiah’s hand in a fixed form. They do not bear those marks of their author’s own editing, which are borne by the prophecies both of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. It is impossible to be dogmatic on the point. But these facts-that our chapters are concerned, as no other Scriptures are, with the fulfilment of previous prophecies; that it is the prophecies of Isaiah which are the original and fullest prediction of the events they are busy with; and that the form, in which Isaiah’s prophecies are handed down, did not preclude additions of this kind to them-contribute very evident reasons why Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24, though written in the Exile, should be attached to Isa_1:1-31; Isa_2:1-22; Isa_3:1-26; Isa_4:1-6; Isa_5:1-30; Isa_6:1-13; Isa_7:1-25; Isa_8:1-22; Isa_9:1-21; Isa_10:1-34; Isa_11:1-16; Isa_12:1-6; Isa_13:1-22; Isa_14:1-32; Isa_15:1-9; Isa_16:1-14; Isa_17:1-14; Isa_18:1-7; Isa_19:1-25; Isa_20:1-6; Isa_21:1-17; Isa_22:1-25; Isa_23:1-18; Isa_24:1-23; Isa_25:1-12; Isa_26:1-21; Isa_27:1-13; Isa_28:1-29; Isa_29:1-24; Isa_30:1-33; Isa_31:1-9; Isa_32:1-20; Isa_33:1-24; Isa_34:1-17; Isa_35:1-10; Isa_36:1-22; Isa_37:1-38; Isa_38:1-22; Isa_39:1-8.
Thus we present a theory of the exilic authorship of Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 within itself complete and consistent, suited to all parts of the evidence, and not opposed by the authority of any part of Scripture. In consequence of its conclusion, our duty, before proceeding to the exposition of the chapters, is twofold: first, to connect the time of Isaiah with the period of the Captivity, and then to sketch the condition of Israel in Exile. This we shall undertake in the next three chapters.
Readers may wish to have a reference to other passages of this part, in which the questions of the date, authorship and structure of Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24, are discussed. See: Introduction to Book III; opening paragraphs of chapter 18, and of chapter 19, etc.
FROM ISAIAH TO THE FALL OF JERUSALEM
701-587 B.C.
AT first sight, the circumstances of Judah in the last ten years of the seventh century present a strong resemblance to her fortunes in the last ten years of the eighth. The empire of the world, to which she belongs, is again divided between Egypt and a Mesopotamian power. Syria is again the field of their doubtful battle, and the question, to which of the two shall homage be paid, still forms the politics of all her states. Judah still vacillates, intrigues, and draws down on herself the wrath of the North by her treaties with Egypt. Again there is a great prophet and statesman, whose concern is righteousness, who exposes both the immorality of his people and the folly of their policies, and who summons the "evil from the North" as God’s scourge upon Israel: Isaiah has been succeeded by Jeremiah. And, as if to complete the analogy, the nation has once more passed through a puritan reformation. Josiah has, even more thoroughly than Hezekiah, effected the disestablishment of idols.
Beneath this circumstantial resemblance, however, there is one fundamental difference. The strength of Isaiah’s preaching was bent, especially during the closing years of the century, to establish the inviolableness of Jerusalem. Against the threats of the Assyrian siege, and in spite of his own more formidable conscience of his people’s corruption, Isaiah persisted that Zion should not be taken, and that the people, though cut down to their roots, should remain planted in the land, -the stock of an imperial nation in the latter days. This prophecy was vindicated by the marvellous relief of Jerusalem on the apparent eve of her capture in 701. But its echoes had not yet died away, when Jeremiah to his generation delivered the very opposite message. Round him the popular prophets babbled by rote Isaiah’s ancient assurances about Zion. Their soft, monotonous repetitions lapped pleasantly upon the immovable self-confidence of the people. But Jeremiah called down the storm. Even while prosperity seemed to give him the lie, he predicted the speedy ruin of Temple and City, and summoned Judah’s enemies against her in the name of the God on whose former word she relied for peace. The contrast between the two great prophets grows most dramatic in their conduct during the respective sieges, of which each was the central figure. Isaiah, alone steadfast in a city of despair, defying the taunts of the heathen, rekindling within the dispirited defenders, whom the enemy sought to bribe to desertion, the passions of patriotism and religion, proclaiming always, as with the voice of a trumpet, that Zion must stand inviolate; Jeremiah, on the contrary, declaring the futility of resistance, counselling each citizen to save his own life from the ruin of the state, in treaty with the enemy, and even arrested as a deserter, -these two contrasting figures and attitudes gather up the difference which the century had wrought in the fortunes of the City of God. And so, while in 701 Jerusalem triumphed in the Lord by the sudden raising of the Assyrian siege, three years after the next century was out she twice succumbed to the Assyrian’s successor, and nine years later was totally destroyed.
What is the reason of this difference which a century sufficed to work? Why was the sacredness of Judah’s shrine not as much an article of Jeremiah’s as of Isaiah’s creed, -as much an element of Divine providence in 600 as in 700 B.C.? This is not a very hard question to answer, if we keep in our regard two things, -firstly, the moral condition of the people, and, secondly, the necessities of the spiritual religion, which was identified for the time with their fortunes.
The Israel which was delivered into captivity at the word of Jeremiah was a people at once more hardened and more exhausted than the Israel, which, in spite of its sin, Isaiah’s efforts had succeeded in preserving upon its own land. A century had come and gone of further grace and opportunity, but the grace had been resisted, the opportunity abused, and the people stood more guilty and more wilful than ever before God. Even clearer, however, than the deserts of the people was the need of their religion. That local and temporary victory-after all, only the relief of a mountain fortress and a tribal shrine-with which Isaiah had identified the will and honour of Almighty God, could not be the climax of the history of a spiritual religion. It was impossible for monotheism to rest on so narrow and material a security as that. The faith, which was to overcome the world, could not be satisfied with a merely national triumph. This time must arrive-were it only by the ordinary progress of the years and unhastened by human guilt-for faith and piety to be weaned from the forms of an earthly temple, however sacred: for the individual-after all, the real unit of religion-to be rendered independent of the community and cast upon his God alone; and for this people, to whom the oracles of the living God had been entrusted, to be led out from the selfish pride of guarding these for their own honour-to be led out, were it through the breaches of their hitherto inviolate walls, and amid the smoke of all that was most sacred to them, so that in level contact with mankind they might learn to communicate their glorious trust. Therefore, while the Exile was undoubtedly the penance, which an often-spared but ever more obdurate people had to pay for their accumulated sins, it was also for the meek and the pure-hearted in Israel a step upwards even from the faith and the results of Isaiah-perhaps the most effectual step which Israel’s religion ever took. Schultz has finely said: "The proper tragedy of history-doom required by long-gathering guilt, and launched upon a generation which for itself is really turning towards good-is most strikingly consummated in the Exile." Yes: but this is only half the truth. The accomplishment of the moral tragedy is really but one incident in a religious epic-the development of a spiritual faith. Long-delaying Nemesis overtakes at last the sinners, but the shock of the blows, which beat the guilty nation into captivity, releases their religion from its material bonds. Israel on the way to Exile is on the way to become Israel after the Spirit.
With these principles to guide us, let us now, for a little, thread our way through the crowded details of the decline and fall of the Jewish state.
Isaiah’s own age had foreboded the necessity of exile for Judah. There was the great precedent of Samaria, and Judah’s sin was not less than her sister’s. When the authorities at Jerusalem wished to put Jeremiah to death for the heresy of predicting the ruin of the sacred city, it was pointed out in his defence that a similar prediction had been made by Micah, the contemporary of Isaiah. And how much had happened since then! The triumph of Jehovah in 701, the stronger faith and purer practice, which had followed as long as Hezekiah reigned, gave way to an idolatrous reaction under his successor Manasseh. This reaction, while it increased the guilt of the people, by no means diminished their religious fear. They carried into it the conscience of their former puritanism-diseased, we might say delirious, but not dead. Men felt their sin and feared Heaven’s wrath, and rushed headlong into the gross and fanatic exercises of idolatry, in order to wipe away the one and avert the other. It availed nothing. After an absence of thirty years the Assyrian arms returned in full strength, and Manasseh himself was carried captive across the Euphrates. But penitence revived, and for a time it appeared as if it were to be at last valid for salvation. Israel made huge strides towards their ideal life of a good conscience and outward prosperity. Josiah, the pious, came to the throne. The Book of the Law was discovered in 621, and king and people rallied to its summons with the utmost loyalty. All the nation "stood to the covenant." The single sanctuary was vindicated, the high places destroyed, the land purged of idols. There were no great military triumphs but Assyria, so long the accepted scourge of God, gave signs of breaking up; and we can feel the vigour and self-confidence, induced by years of prosperity, in Josiah’s ambition to extend his borders, and especially in his daring assault upon Necho of Egypt at Megiddo, when Necho passed north to the invasion of Assyria. Altogether, it was a people that imagined itself righteous, and counted upon a righteous God. In such days who could dream of exile?
But in 608 the ideal was shivered. Israel was threshed at Megiddo, and Josiah, the king after God’s own heart, was slain on the field. And then happened what happened at other times in Israel’s history when disillusion of this kind came down. The nation fell asunder into the elements of which it was ever so strange a composition. The masses, whose conscience did not rise beyond the mere performance of the Law, nor their view of God higher than that of a patron of the state, bound by His covenant to reward with material success the loyalty of His clients, were disappointed with the results of their service and of His providence. Being a new generation from Manasseh’s time, they thought to give the strange gods another turn. The idols were brought back, and after the discredit which righteousness received at Megiddo, it would appear that social injustice and crime of many kinds dared to be very bold. Jehoahaz, who reigned for three months after Josiah, and Jehoiakim, who succeeded him, were idolaters, The loftier few, like Jeremiah, had never been deceived by the people’s outward allegiance to the Temple or the Law, nor considered it valid either to atone for the past or now to fulfil the holy demands of Jehovah; and were confirmed by the disaster at Megiddo, and the consequent reaction to idolatry, in the stern and hopeless views of the people which they had always entertained. They kept reiterating a speedy captivity. Between these parties stood the formal successors of earlier prophets, so much the slaves of tradition that they had neither conscience for their people’s sins nor understanding of the world around them, but could only affirm in the strength of ancient oracles that Zion should not be destroyed. Strange is it to see how this party, building upon the promises of Jehovah through a prophet like Isaiah, should be taken advantage of by the idolaters, but scouted by Jehovah’s own servants. Thus they mingle and conflict. Who indeed can distinguish all the elements of so ancient and so rich a life, as they chase, overtake, and wrestle with each other, hurrying down the rapids to the final cataract? Let us leave them for a moment, while we mark the catastrophe itself. They will be more easily distinguished in the calm below.
It was from the North that Jeremiah summoned the vengeance of God upon Judah. In his earlier threats he might have meant the Scythians; but by 605, when Nebuchadrezzar, Nabopolassar of Babylon’s son, the rising general of the age, defeated Pharaoh at Carchemish, all men accepted Jeremiah’s nomination for this successor of Assyria in the lordship of Western Asia. From Carchemish Nebuchadrezzar overran Syria. Jehoiakim paid tribute to him, and Judah at last felt the grip of the hand that was to drag her into exile. Jehoiakim attempted to throw it off in 602; but, after harassing him for four years by means of some allies, Nebuchadrezzar took his capital, executed him, suffered Jehoiachin, his successor, to reign only three months, took Jerusalem a second time, and carried off to Babylon the first great portion of the people. This was in 598, only ten years from the death of Josiah, and twenty-one from the discovery of the Book of the Law.
The exact numbers of this first captivity of the Jews it is impossible to determine. The annalist sets the soldiers at seven thousand, the smiths and craftsmen at one thousand; so that, making allowance for other classes whom he mentions, the grown men must alone have been over ten thousand; but how many women went, and how many children-the most important factor for the period of the Exile with which we have to deal-it is impossible to estimate. The total number of persons can scarcely have been less than twenty-five thousand. More important, however, than their number was the quality of these exiles, and this we can easily appreciate. The royal family and the court were taken, a large number of influential persons, "the mighty men of the land," or what must have been nearly all the fighting men, with the necessary artificers; priests also went, Ezekiel among them, and probably representatives of other classes not mentioned by the annalist. That this was the virtue and flower of the nation is proved by a double witness. Not only did the citizens, for the remaining ten years of Jerusalem’s life, look to these exiles for her deliverance, but Jeremiah himself counted them the sound half of Israel-"a basket of good figs," as he expressed it, beside "a basket of bad ones." They were at least under discipline, but the remnant of Jerusalem persisted in the wilfulness of the past.
For although Jeremiah remained in the city, and the house of David and a considerable population, and although Jeremiah himself held a higher position in public esteem since the vindication of his word by the events of 598, yet he could not be blind to the unchanged character of the people, and the thorough doom which their last respite had only more evidently proved to be inevitable. Gangs of false prophets, both at home and among the exiles, might predict a speedy return. All the Jewish ability of intrigue, with the lavish promises of Egypt and frequent embassies from other nations, might work for the overthrow of Babylon. But Jeremiah and Ezekiel knew better. Across the distance which now separated them they chanted, as it were in antiphon, the alternate strophes of Judah’s dirge. Jeremiah bade the exiles not to remember Zion, but "let them settle down," he said, "into the life of the land they are in, building houses, planting gardens, and begetting children, and ‘seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto Jehovah for it, for in the peace thereof ye shall have peace’-the Exile shall last seventy years." And as Jeremiah in Zion blessed Babylon, so Ezekiel in Babylon cursed Zion, thundering back that Jerusalem must be utterly wasted through siege and famine, pestilence and captivity. There is no rush of hope through Ezekiel. His expectations are all distant. He lives either in memory or in cold fancy. His pictures of restoration are too elaborate to mean speedy fulfilment. They are the work of a man with time on his hands; one does not build so colossally for tomorrow. Thus reinforced from abroad, Jeremiah proclaimed Nebuchadrezzar as "the servant of Jehovah," and summoned him to work Jehovah’s doom upon the city. The predicted blockade came in the ninth year of Zedekiah. The false hopes which still sustained the people, their trust in Egypt, the arrival of an Egyptian army in result of their intrigue, as well as all their piteous bravery, only afforded time for the fulfilment of the terrible details of their penalty. For nearly eighteen months the siege closed in-months of famine and pestilence, of faction and quarrel and falling away to the enemy. Then Jerusalem broke up. The besiegers gained the northern suburb and stormed the middle gate. Zedekiah and the army burst their lines only to be captured on an aimless flight at Jericho. A few weeks more, and a forlorn defence by civilians of the interior parts of the city was at last overwhelmed. The exasperated besiegers gave her up to fire-"the house of Jehovah, the king’s house, and every great house"-and tore to the stones the stout walls that resisted the conflagration. As the city was levelled, so the citizens were dispersed. A great number-and among them the king’s family-were put to death. The king himself was blinded, and, along with a host of his subjects, impossible for us to estimate, and with all the temple furniture, was carried to Babylon. A few peasants were left to cultivate the land; a few superior personages-perhaps such as, with Jeremiah, had favoured the Babylonians, and Jeremiah was among them-were left at Mizpah under a Jewish viceroy. It was a poor apparition of a state; but, as if the very ghost of Israel must be chased from the land, even this small community was broken up, and almost every one of its members fled to Egypt. The Exile was complete.
WHAT ISRAEL TOOK INTO EXILE
BEFORE we follow the captives along the roads that lead to exile, we may take account of the spiritual goods which they carried with them, and were to realise in their retirement. Never in all history did paupers of this world go forth more richly laden with the treasures of heaven.
1. First of all, we must emphasise and define their monotheism. We must emphasise it as against those who would fain persuade us that Israel’s monotheism was for the most part the product of the Exile; we must analyse its contents and define its limits among the people, if we would appreciate the extent to which it spread and the peculiar temper which it assumed, as set forth in the prophecy we are about to study.
Idolatry was by no means dead in Israel at the fall of Jerusalem. On the contrary, during the last years which the nation spent within those sacred walls, that had been so miraculously preserved in the sight of the world by Jehovah, idolatry increased, and to the end remained as determined and fanatic as the people’s defence of Jehovah’s own temple. The Jews who fled to Egypt applied themselves to the worship of the Queen of Heaven, in spite of all the remonstrances of Jeremiah; and him they carried with them, not because they listened to him as the prophet of the One True God, but superstitiously, as if he were a pledge of the favour of one of the many gods, whom they were anxious to propitiate. And the earliest effort, upon which we shall have to follow our own prophet, is the effort to crush the worship of images among the Babylonian exiles. Yet when Israel returned from Babylon the people were wholly monotheist; when Jerusalem was rebuilt no idol came back to her.
That this great change was mainly the result of the residence in Babylon and of truths learned there, must be denied by all who remember the creed and doctrine about God, which in their literature the people carried with them into exile. The law was already written, and the whole nation had sworn to it: "Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our God; Jehovah is One, and thou shalt worship Jehovah thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength." These words, it is true, may be so strictly interpreted as to mean no more than that there was one God for Israel: other gods might exist, but Jehovah was Sole Deity for His people. It is maintained that such a view receives some support from the custom of prophets, who, while they affirmed Jehovah’s supremacy, talked of other gods as if they were real existences. But argument from this habit of the prophets is precarious: such a mode of speech may have been a mere accommodation to a popular point of view. And, surely, we have only to recall what Isaiah and Jeremiah had uttered concerning Jehovah’s Godhead, to be persuaded that Israel’s monotheism, before the beginning of the Exile, was a far more broad and spiritual faith than the mere belief that Jehovah was the Sovereign Deity of the nation, or the satisfaction of the desires of Jewish hearts alone. Righteousness was not coincident with Israel’s life and interest; righteousness was universally supreme, and it was in righteousness that Isaiah saw J
GOD: AN ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY
Isa_41:1-29
HAVING revealed Himself to His own people in chapter 40, Jehovah now turns in chapter 41 to the heathen, but, naturally, with a very different kind of address. Displaying His power to His people in certain sacraments, both of nature and history, He had urged them to "wait upon Him" alone for the salvation, of which there were as yet no signs in the times. But with the heathen it is evidently to these signs of the times, that He can best appeal. Contemporary history, facts open to every man’s memory and reason, is the common ground on which Jehovah and the other gods can meet. Chapter 41 is, therefore, the natural complement to chapter 40. In chapter 40 we have the element in revelation that precedes history: in chapter 12 we have history itself explained as a part of revelation.
Chapter 41 is loosely cast in the same form of a Trial-at-Law which we found in chapter 1 To use a Scotticism, which exactly translates the Hebrew of Isa_41:1, Jehovah goes "to the law" with the idols. His summons to the Trial is given in Isa_41:1; the ground of the Trial is advanced in Isa_41:2-7. Then comes a digression, Isa_41:8-20, in which the Lord turns from controversy with the heathen to comfort His people. In Isa_41:21-29 Jehovah’s plea is resumed, and in the silence of the defendants-a silence, which, as we shall presently see by calling in the witness of a Greek historian, was actual fact-the argument is summed up and the verdict given for the sole divinity of Israel’s God.
The main interest of the Trial lies, of course, in its appeal to contemporary history, and to the central figure Cyrus, although it is to be noted that the prophet as yet refrains from mentioning the hero by name. This appeal to contemporary history lays upon us the duty of briefly indicating, how the course of that history was tending outside Babylon, -outside Babylon, as yet, but fraught with fate both to Babylon and to her captives.
Nebuchadrezzar, although he had virtually succeeded to the throne of the Assyrian, had not been able to repeat from Babylon that almost universal empire, which his predecessors had swayed from Nineveh. Egypt, it is true, was again as thoroughly driven from Asia as in the time of Sargon: to the south the Babylonian supremacy was as unquestioned as ever the Assyrian had been. But to the north Nebuchadrezzar met with an almost equal rival, who had helped him in the overthrow of Nineveh, and had fallen heir to the Assyrian supremacy in that quarter. This was Kastarit or Kyaxares, an Aryan, one of the pioneers of that Aryan invasion from the East, which, though still tardy and sparse, was to be the leading force in Western Asia for the next century. This Kyaxares had united under his control a number of Median tribes, a people of Turanian stock. With these, when Nineveh fell, he established to the north of Nebuchadrezzar’s power the empire of Media, with its western boundary at the river Halys, in Asia Minor, and its capital at Ecbatana under Mount Elwand. It is said that the river Indus formed his frontier to the east. West of the Halys, the Mede’s progress was stopped by the Lydian Empire, under King Alyattis, whose capital was Sardis, and whose other border was practically the coast of the AEgean. In 585, or two years after the destruction of Jerusalem, Alyattis and Kyaxares met in battle on the Halys. But the terrors of an eclipse took the heart to fight out of both their armies, and, Nebuchadrezzar intervening, the three monarchs struck a treaty among themselves, and strengthened it by intermarriage. Western Asia now virtually consisted of the confederate powers, Babylonia, Media, and Lydia.
Let us realise how far this has brought us. When we stood with Isaiah in Jerusalem, our western horizon lay across the middle of Asia Minor in the longitude of Cyprus. It now rests upon the Aegean; we are almost within sight of Europe. Straight from Babylon to Sardis runs a road, with a regular service of couriers. The court of Sardis holds domestic and political intercourse with the courts of Babylon and Ecbatana; but the court of Sardis also lords it over the Asiatic Greeks, worships at Greek shrines, will shortly be visited by Solon and strike an alliance with Sparta. In the time of the Jewish exile there were without doubt many Greeks in Babylon; men may have spoken there with Daniel, who had spoken at Sardis with Solon.
This extended horizon makes clear to us what our prophet has in his view, when in this forty-first chapter he summons "Isles" to the bar of Jehovah: "Be silent before me, O Isles, and let Peoples renew their strength,"-a vision and appeal which frequently recur in our prophecy. "Listen, O Isles, and hearken, O Peoples from afar"; {Isa_49:1} "Isles shall wait for His law"; {Isa_42:4} "Let them give glory to Jehovah, and publish His praise in the Isles"; {Isa_42:12} "Unto me Isles shall hope"; {Isa_51:5} "Surely Isles shall wait for me, ships of Tarshish first." The name is generally taken by scholars-according to the derivation in the note below-to have originally meant "habitable land," and so "land" as opposed to water. In some passages of the Old Testament it is undoubtedly used to describe a land either washed, or surrounded, by the sea.
But by our prophet’s use of the word it is not necessarily "maritime provinces" that are meant. He makes isles parallel to the well-known terms "nations, peoples, Gentiles," and in one passage he opposes it, as dry soil, to water. Hence many translators take it in its original sense of "countries or lands." This bare rendering, however, does not do justice to the sense of "remoteness," which the prophet generally attaches to the word, nor to his occasional association of it with visions of the sea. Indeed, as one reads most of his uses of it, one is quite sure that the island-meaning of the word lingers on in his imagination; and that the feeling possesses him, which has haunted the poetry of all ages, to describe as "coasts" or "isles" any land or lighting-place of thought which is far and dim and vague; which floats across the horizon, or emerges from the distance, as strips and promontories of land rise from the sea to him who has reached some new point of view. I have therefore decided to keep the rendering familiar to the English reader, "isles," though, perhaps, "coasts" would be better. If, as is probable, our prophet’s thoughts are always towards the new lands of the west as he uses the word, it is doubly suitable; those countries were both maritime and remote; they rose both from the distance and from the sea.
"The sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o’erlace the sea
And laugh their pride, where the light wave lisps, ‘Greece.’"
But if Babylonia lay thus open to Lydia, and through Lydia to the "isles" and "coasts" of Greece, it was different with her northern frontier. What strikes us here is the immense series of fortifications, which Nebuchadrezzar, in spite of his alliance with Astyages, cast up between his country and Media. Where the Tigris and Euphrates most nearly approach one another, about seventy miles to the north of Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar connected their waters by four canals above which he built a strong bulwark, called by the Greeks the Median wall. This may have been over sixty miles long; Xenophon tells us it was twenty feet broad by one hundred high. At Sippara this line of defence was completed by the creation of a great bason of water to flood the rivers and canals on the approach of an enemy, and of a large fortress to protect the bason. Alas for the vanity of human purposes! It is said to have been this very bason which caused the easy fall of Babylon. By turning the Euphrates into it, the enemy entered the capital through the emptied river-bed.
The triple alliance-Lydia, Media, Babylonia-stood firm after its founders passed away. In 555, Croesus and Astyages, who had succeeded their fathers at Sardis and Ecbatana respectively, and Nabunahid, who had usurped the throne at Babylon, were still at peace, and contented with the partition of 585. But outside them and to the east, in a narrow nook of land at the head of the Persian Gulf, the man was already crowned, who was destined to bring Western Asia again under one sceptre. This was Kurush or Cyrus II of Anzan, but known to history as Cyrus the Great or Cyrus the Persian. Cyrus was a prince of the Akhaemenian house of Persia, and therefore, like the Mede, an Aryan. but independent of his Persian cousins, and ruling in his own right the little kingdom of Anzan or Anshan, which, with its capital of Susan, lay on the rivers Choaspes and Eulaeus, between the head of the Persian Gulf and the Zagros Mountains.
Cyrus the Great is one of those mortals whom the muse of history, as if despairing to do justice to him by herself, has called in her sisters to aid her in describing to posterity. Early legend and later and more elaborate romance; the schoolmaster, the historian, the tragedian, and the prophet, all vie in presenting to us this hero "le plus sympathique de l’antiquite"-this king on whom we see so deeply stamped the double signature of God, character and success. We shall afterwards have a better opportunity to speak of his character. Here we are only concerned to trace his rapid path of conquest.
He sprang, then, from Anshan, the immediate neighbour of Babylonia to the east. This is the direction indicated in the second verse of this forty-first chapter (Isa_41:2): "Who hath raised up one from the east?" But the twenty-fifth verse veers round with him to the north (Isa_41:25): "I have raised up one from the north, and he is come." This was actually the curve, from east to north, which his career almost immediately took.
For in 549 Astyages, king of Media, attacked Cyrus, king of Anshan; which means that Cyrus was already a considerable and an aggressive prince. Probably he had united by this time the two domains of his house, Persia and Anshan, under his own sceptre, and secured as his lieutenant Hystaspes, his cousin, the lineal king of Persia. The Mede, looking south and east from Ecbatana, saw a solid front opposed to him, and resolved to crush it before it grew more formidable. But the Aryans among the Medes, dissatisfied with so indolent a leader as Astyages, revolted to Cyrus, and so the latter, with characteristic good fortune, easily became lord of Media. A lenient lord he made. He spared Astyages, and ranked the Aryan Medes second only to the Persians. But it took him till 546 to complete his conquest. When he had done so he stood master of Asia from the Halys to perhaps as far east as the Indus. He replaced the Medes in the threefold power of Western Asia, and thus looked down on Babylon, as verse 25 says, "from the north". {Isa_41:25}
In 545, Cyrus advanced upon Babylonia, and struck at the northern line of fortifications at Sippara. He was opposed by an army under Belshazzar, Bel-sharuzzur, the son of Nabunahid, and probably by his mother’s side grandson of Nebuchadrezzar. Army or fortifications seem to have been too much for Cyrus, and there is no further mention of his name in the Babylonian annals till the year 538. It has been suggested that Cyrus was aware of the discontent of the people with their ruler Nabunahid, and, with that genius which distinguished his whole career for availing himself of the internal politics of his foes, he may have been content to wait till the Babylonian dissatisfaction had grown riper, perhaps in the meantime fostering it by his own emissaries.
In any case, the attention of Cyrus was now urgently demanded on the western boundary of his empire, where Lydia was preparing to invade him. Croesus, king of Lydia, fresh from the subjection of the Ionian Greeks, and possessing an army and a treasure second to none in the world, had lately asked of Solon, whether he was not the most fortunate of men; and Solon had answered, to count no man happy till his death, The applicability of this advice to himself Croesus must have felt with a start, when, almost immediately after it, the news came that his brother-in-law Astyages had fallen before an unknown power, which was moving up rapidly from the east, and already touched the Lydian frontier at the Halys. Croesus was thrown into alarm. He eagerly desired to know Heaven’s will about this Persian and himself, who now stood face to face. But, in that heathen world, with its thousand shrines to different gods, who knew the will of Heaven? In a fashion only possible to the richest man in the world, Croesus resolved to discover, by sending a test-question, on a matter of fact within his own knowledge, to every oracle of repute: to the oracles of the Greeks at Miletus, Delphi, Able; to that of Trophonius; to the sanctuary of Amphiaraus at Thebes; to Dodona; and even to the far-off temple of Ammon in Libya. The oracles of Delphi and Amphiaraus alone sent an answer which in the least suggested the truth. "To the gods of Delphi and Amphiaraus, Croesus, therefore, offered great sacrifices, -three thousand victims of every kind; and on a great pile of wood he burned couches plated with gold and silver, golden goblets, purple robes and garments, in the hope that he would thereby gain the favour of the god yet more And as the sacrifice left behind an enormous mass of molten gold, Croesus caused bricks to be made, six palms in length, three in breadth and one in depth; in all there were 117 bricks. In addition there was a golden lion which weighed ten talents. When these were finished, Croesus sent them to Delphi; and he added two very large mixing bowls, one of gold, weighing eight talents and a half and twelve minae, and one of silver (the work of Theodorus of Samos, as the Delphians say, and I believe it, for it is the work of no ordinary artificer), four silver jars, and two vessels for holy water, one of gold, the other of silver, circular casts of silver, a golden statue of a woman three cubits high, and the necklace and girdles of his queen." We can understand, that for all this Croesus got the best advice consistent with the ignorance and caution of the priests whom he consulted. The oracles told him that if he went against Cyrus he would destroy a great empire; but he forgot to ask, whether it was his own or his rival’s. When he inquired a second time, if his reign should be long, they replied: "When a mule became king of the Medes," then he might fly from his throne; but again he forgot to consider that there might be mules among men as among beasts. At the same time, the oracles tempered their ambiguous prophecies with some advice of undoubted sense, for when he asked them who were the most powerful among the Greeks, they replied the Spartans, and to Sparta he sent messengers with presents to conclude an alliance. "The Lacedaemonians were filled with joy; they knew the oracle which had been given Croesus, and made him a friend and ally, as they had previously received many kindnesses at his hands."
This glimpse into the preparations of Croesus, whose embassies compassed the whole civilised world, and whose wealth got him all that politics or religion could, enables us to realise the political and religious excitement into which Cyprus’ advent threw that generation. The oracles in doubt and ambiguous; the priests, the idol-manufacturers, and the crowd of artisans, who worked in every city at the furniture of the temple, in a state of unexampled activity, with bustle perhaps most like the bustle of our government dockyards on the eve of war: hammering new idols together, preparing costly oblations, overhauling the whole religious "ordnance," that the gods might be propitiated and the stars secured to fight in their courses against the Persian; rival politicians practising conciliation, and bolstering up one another with costly presents to stand against this strange and fatal force, which indifferently threatened them all. What a commentary Herodotus’ story furnishes upon the verses of this chapter, in which Jehovah contrasts the idols with Himself. It may actually have been Croesus and the Greeks whom the prophet had in his mind when he wrote Isa_41:5-7 : "The isles have seen, and they fear; the ends of the earth tremble: they draw near and they come. They help every man his neighbour, and to his brother each sayeth, Be strong. So carver encourageth smelter, smoother with hammer, smiter on anvil; one saith of soldering, It is good: and he fasteneth it with nails lest it totter. "The irony is severe, but true to the facts as Herodotus relates them. The statesmen hoped to keep back Cyrus by sending sobbing messages to one another, Be of good courage; the priests "by making a particularly good and strong set of gods."
While the imbecility of the idolatries was thus manifest, and the great religious centres of heathendom were reduced to utter doubt that veiled itself in ambiguity and waited to see how things would issue, there was one religion in the world, whose oracles gave no uncertain sound, whose God stepped boldly forth to claim Cyrus for His own. In the dust of Babylonia lay the scattered members of a nation captive and exiled, a people civilly dead and religiously degraded; yet it was the faith of this worm of a people which welcomed and understood Cyrus, it was the God of this people who claimed to be his author. The forty-first chapter looks dreary and ancient to the uninstructed eye, but let our imagination realise all these things: the ambiguous priests, oracles that would not speak out, religions that had no articulate counsel nor comfort in face of the conqueror who was crushing up the world before him, but only sobs, solder, and nails; and our heart will leap as we hear how God forces them all into judgment before Him, and makes His plea as loud and clear as mortal ear may hear. Clatter of idols, and murmur of muffled oracles, filling all the world; and then, hark how the voice of Jehovah crashes His oracle across it all!
"Keep silence towards Me, O Isles, and let the peoples renew their strength: let them approach; then let them speak: to the Law let us come."
"Who hath stirred up from the sunrise Righteousness, calleth it to his foot? He giveth to his face peoples, and kings He makes him to trample; giveth them as dust to his sword, as driven stubble to his bow. He pursues them, and passes to peace a road that he comes not with his feet. Who has wrought it and done it? Summoner of generations from the source, I Jehovah the First, and with the Last; I am He."
Croesus would have got a clear answer here, but it is probable that he had never heard of the Hebrews or of their God.
After this follows the satiric picture of the heathen world, which has already been quoted. And then, after an interval during which Jehovah turns to His own people (Isa_41:8-20), -for whatever be His business or His controversy, the Lord is mindful of His own, -He directs His speech specially against the third class of the leaders of heathendom. He has laughed the foolish statesmen and image-makers out of court (Isa_41:5-7); He now challenges, in Isa_41:21, the oracles and their priests.
We have seen what these were, which this vast heathen world-heathen but human, convinced as we are that at the back of the world’s life there are a secret, a counsel, and a governor, and anxious as we are to find them - had to resort to. Timid waiters upon time, whom not even the lavish wealth of a Croesus could tempt from their ambiguity; prophets speechless in face of history; oracles of meaning as dark and shifty as their steamy caves at Delphi, of tune as variable as the whispering oak of Dodona; wily-tongued Greeks, masters of ambiguous phrase, at Miletus, Able, and Thebes; Egyptian mystics in the far-off temple of "Lybic Hammon,"-these are what the prophet sees standing at the bar of history, where God is Challenger.
"Bring here your case, saith Jehovah; apply your strong grounds, saith the King of Jacob. Let them bring out and declare unto us what things are going to happen; the first things announce what they are, that we may set our heart on them, and know the issue of them; or the things that are coming, let us hear them. Announce the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods. Yea, do good or do evil, that we may stare and see it together. Lo! ye are nothing, and your work is of nought; an abomination is he who chooseth you."
Which great challenge just means, Come and be tested by facts. Here is history needing an explanation, and running no one knows whither. Prove your divinity by interpreting or guiding it. Cease your ambiguities, and give us something we can set our minds to work upon. Or do something, effect something in history, be it good or be it evil, -only let it be patent to our senses. For the test of godhead is not ingenuity or mysteriousness, but plain deeds, which the senses can perceive, and plain words, which the reason and conscience can judge. The insistence upon the senses and mental faculties of man is remarkable: "Make us hear them, that we may know, stare, see all together, set our mind to them."
But as we have learned from Herodotus, there was nobody in the world to answer such a challenge. Therefore Jehovah Himself answers it. He gives His explanation of history, and claims its events for His doing.
"I have stirred up from the north, and he. hath come; from the rising of the sun one who calleth upon My Name: and he shall trample satraps like mortar, and as the potter treadeth out clay."
"Who hath announced on-ahead that we may know, and beforehand that we may say, ‘Right!’ Yea, there is none that announced, yea, there is none that published, yea, there is none that heareth your words. But a prediction" (or predicter, literally a thing or man on-ahead-r’ishon corresponding to the me-r’osh of Isa_41:26) "a prediction to Zion, ‘Behold, behold them,’ and to Jerusalem a herald of good news-I am giving." The language here comes forth in jerks, and is very difficult to render. "But I look and there is no man even among these, and no counsellor, that I might ask them and they return word. Lo, all of them vanity! and nothingness their works; wind and waste their molten images."
Let us look a little more closely at the power of Prediction, on which Jehovah maintains His unique and sovereign Deity against the idols.
Jehovah challenges the idols to face present events, and to give a clear, unambiguous forecast of their issue. It is a debatable question, whether He does not also ask them to produce previous predictions of events happening at the time at which He speaks. This latter demand is one that He makes in subsequent chapters; it is part of His prophet’s argument in chapters 45-46, that Jehovah intimated the advent of Cyrus by His servants in Israel long before the present time. Whether He makes this same demand for previous predictions in chapter 41 depends on how we render a clause of Isa_41:22, "declare ye the former things." Some scholars take former things in the sense, in which it is used later on in this prophecy, of previous predictions. This is very doubtful. I have explained in a note, why I think them wrong; but even if they are right, and Jehovah be really asking the idols to produce former predictions of Cyrus’ career, the demand is so cursory, it proves so small an item in His plea, and we shall afterwards find so many clearer statements of it, that we do better to ignore it now and confine ourselves to emphasising the other challenge, about which there is no doubt, -the challenge to take present events and predict their issue. Croesus had asked the oracles for a forecast of the future. This is exactly what Jehovah demands in Isa_41:22, "declare unto us what things are going to happen"; in Isa_41:23, "declare the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods"; in Isa_41:26 (spoken from the standpoint of the subsequent fulfilment of the prediction), who declared it on-ahead that we may know, and beforehand that we may now say, "‘Right!’ Yea, there is none that declared, yea, there is none that published, yea, there is none that heareth your words. But a prediction unto Zion, ‘Behold, behold them,’ and to Jerusalem a herald of good news-I give." I give is emphatically placed at the end, -"I Jehovah alone, through My prophets in Israel, give such a prediction and publisher of good news."
We scarcely require to remind ourselves, that this great challenge and plea are not mere rhetoric or idle boasting. Every word in them we have seen to be true to fact. The heathen religions were, as they are here represented, helpless before Cyrus, and dumb about the issue of the great movements which the Persian had started. On the other hand, Jehovah had uttered to His people all the meaning of the new stir and turmoil in history. We have heard Him do so in chapter 40. There He "gives a herald of good news to Jerusalem,"-tells them of their approaching deliverance, explains His redemptive purposes, proclaims a gospel. In addition, He has in this chapter accepted Cyrus for His own creation and as part of His purpose, and has promised him victory.
The God of Israel, then, is God, because He alone by His prophets claims facts as they stand for His own deeds, and announces what shall become of them.
Do not let us, however, fall into the easy but vulgar error of supposing, that Jehovah claims to be God simply because He can predict. It is indeed prediction, which He demands from the heathen: for prediction is a minimum of godhead, and in asking it He condescends to the heathen’s own ideas of what a god should be able to do. When Croesus, the heathen who of all that time spent most upon religion, sought to decide which of the gods was worthiest to be consulted about the future and propitiated in face of Cyrus, what test did be apply to them? As we have seen, he tested them by their ability to predict a matter of fact: the god who told him what he, Croesus, should be doing on a certain day was to be his god. It is evident, that, to Croesus, divinity meant to be able to divine. But the God, who reveals Himself to Israel, is infinitely greater than this. He is not merely a Being with a far sight into the future; He is not only Omniscience. In the chapter preceding this one His power of prediction is not once expressed; it is lost in the two glories by which alone the prophet seeks to commend His Godhead to Israel, -the glory of His power and the glory of His faithfulness. Jehovah is Omnipotence, Creator of heaven and earth; He leads forth the stars by "the greatness of His might"; Supreme Director of history, it is He "who bringeth princes to nothing." But Jehovah is also unfailing character: "the word of the Lord standeth for ever"; it is foolishness to say of Him that He has forgotten His people, or that "their right has passed" from Him; He disappoints none who wait upon Him. Such is the God, who steps down from chapter 40 into the controversy with the heathen in chapter 41. If in the latter He chiefly makes His claim to godhead to rest upon specimens of prediction, it is simply, as we have said, that He may meet the gods of the heathen before a bar and upon a principle, which their worshippers recognise as practical and decisive. What were single predictions, here and there, upon the infinite volume of His working, who by His power could gather all things to serve His own purpose, and in His faithfulness remained true to that purpose from everlasting to everlasting! The unity of history under One Will-this is a far more adequate idea of godhead than the mere power to foretell single events in history. And it is even to this truth that Jehovah seeks to raise the unaccustomed thoughts of the heathen. Past the rude wonder, which is all that fulfilled predictions of fact can excite, He lifts their religious sense to Himself and His purpose, as the one secret and motive of all history. He not only claims Cyrus and Cyrus’ career as His own work, but He speaks of Himself as "summoner of the generations from aforehand; I Jehovah, the First, and with the Last; I am He," It is a consummate expression of godhead, which lifts us far above the thought of Him as a mere divining power.
Now, it is well for us-were it only for the great historic interest of the thing, though it will also further our argument-to take record here that, although this conception of the unity of life under One Purpose and Will was still utterly foreign, and perhaps even unintelligible, to the heathen world, which the prophecy has in view, the first serious attempt in that world to reach such a conception was contemporary with the forty-first chapter of Isaiah. It is as miners feel, when tunnelling from opposite sides of a mountain, they begin to hear the noise of each other’s picks through the dwindling rock. We, who have come down the history of Israel towards the great consummation of religion in Christianity, may here cease for a moment our labours, to listen to the faint sound from the other side of the wall, still separating Israel from Greece, of a witness to God and an argument against idolatry similar to those with which we have been working. Who is not moved by learning, that, in the very years when Jewish prophecy reached its most perfect statement of monotheism, pouring its scorn upon the idols and their worshippers, and in the very Isles on which its hopes and influence were set, the first Greek should be already singing, who used his song to satirise the mythologies of his people, and to celebrate the unity of God? Among the Ionians, whom Cyrus’ invasion of Lydia and of the Aegean coast in 544 drove across the seas, was Xenophanes of Colophon. After some wanderings he settled at Elea in South Italy, and became the founder of the Eleatic school, the first philosophic attempt of the Greek mind to grasp the unity of Being. How far Xenophanes himself succeeded in this attempt is a matter of controversy. The few fragments of his poetry which are extant do not reveal him as a philosophical monotheist, so much as a prophet of "One greatest God." His language (like that of the earlier Hebrew prophets in praising Jehovah) apparently implies the real existence of lesser divinities:-
"One God, ‘mongst both gods and men He is greatest
Neither in shape is He like unto mortals nor thought."
Xenophanes scorns the anthropomorphism of his countrymen, and the lawless deeds which their poets had attributed to the gods:-
"Mortals think the gods can be born, have their feelings, voice, and form; but, could horses or oxen draw like men, they too would make their gods after their own image."
"All things did Homer and Hesiod lay on the gods,
Such as with mortals are full of blame and disgrace,
To steal and debauch and outwit one another."
Our prophet, to whose eyes Gentile religiousness was wholly of the gross Croesus kind, little suspected that he had an ally, with such kindred tempers of faith and scorn, among the very peoples to whom he yearns to convey his truth. But ages after, when Israel and Greece had both issued into Christianity, the service of Xenophanes to the common truth was recounted by two Church writers-by Clement of Alexandria in his "Stromata," and by Eusebius the historian in his "Praeparatio Evangelica."
We find, then, that monotheism had reached its most absolute expression in Israel in the same decade in which the first efforts towards the conception of the unity of Being were just starting in Greece. But there is something more to be stated. In spite of the splendid progress, which it pursued from such beginnings, Greek philosophy never reached the height on which, with Second Isaiah, Hebrew prophecy already rests; and the reason has to do with two points on which we are now engaged, -the omnipotence and the righteousness of God.
Professor Pfleiderer remarks: "Even in the idealistic philosophy of the Greeks matter remains, however sublimated, an irrational something, with which the Divine power can never come to terms. It was only in the consciousness, which the prophets of Israel had of God, that the thought of the Divine omnipotence fully prevailed." We cannot overvalue such high and impartial testimony to the uniqueness of the Hebrew doctrine of God, but it needs to be supplemented. To the prophets’ sense of the Divine onmipotence, we must add their unrivalled consciousness of the Divine character. To them Jehovah is not only the Holy, the incomparable God, almighty and sublime. He is also the true, consistent God. He has a great purpose, which He has revealed of old to His people, and to which he remains forever faithful. To express this the Hebrews had one word, -the word we translate righteous. We should often miss our prophet’s meaning, if by righteousness we understood some of the qualities to which the term is often applied by us: if, for instance, we used it in the general sense of morality, or if we gave it the technical meaning, which it bears in Christian theology, of justification from guilt. We shall afterwards devote a chapter to the exposition of its meaning in Second Isaiah, but let us here look at its use in chapter 41. In Isa_41:26, it is applied to the person whose prediction turns out to be correct: men are to say of him "right" or "righteous." Here it is evident that the Hebrew-ssaddiq-is used in its simplest meaning, like the Latin rectus, and our "right" of what has been shown to be in accordance with truth or fact. In Isa_41:2, again, though the syntax is obscure, it seems to have the general sense of "good faith with the ability to ensure success." Righteousness is here associated with Cyrus, because he has not been called for nothing but in good faith for a purpose which will be carried through. Jehovah’s righteousness, then, will be His trueness, His good faith, His consistency; and indeed this is the sense which it must evidently bear in Isa_41:10. Take it with the context: "But thou, Israel, My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, seed of Abraham who loved Me, whom I took hold of from the ends of the earth and its corners, I called thee and said unto thee, Thou art My servant. I have chosen thee, and will not cast thee away. Fear not, for I am with thee. Look not round in despair, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of My righteousness." Here righteousness evidently means that Jehovah will act in good faith to the people He has called, that He will act consistently with His anciently revealed purpose towards them. Hitherto Israel has had nothing but the memory that God called them, and the conscience that He chose them. Now Jehovah will vindicate this conscience in outward fact. He will carry through His calling of His people, and perform His promise. How He will do this, He proceeds to relate. Israel’s enemies shall become as nothing (Isa_41:11-12). Israel himself, though a poor worm of a people, shall be changed to the utmost conceivable opposite of a worm-even "a sharp threshing instrument having teeth"-a people who shall leave their mark on the world. They shall overcome all difficulties and "rejoice in Jehovah." Their redemption shall be accomplished in a series of evident facts. "The poor and the needy are seeking water, and there is none, their tongue faileth for thirst; I, Jehovah, will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them." And this shall be done on such a scale, that all the world will wonder and be convinced, Isa_41:18-19 : "I will open on the bare heights rivers, and in the midst of the plains fountains. I will make the desert a pool of water, and the dry ground water-springs. I will plant in the wilderness cedars and acacias and myrtles and olive-trees; I will plant in the desert pines, planes and sherbins together." Do not let us spoil the meaning of this passage by taking these verses literally, or even as illustrative of the kind of restoration which Israel was to enjoy. This vast figure of a well-watered and planted desert the prophet uses rather to illustrate the scale on which the Restoration will take place: its evident extent and splendour. "That they may see and know and consider and understand together, that Jehovah hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it." The whole passage, then, tells us what God means by His righteousness. It is His fidelity to His calling of Israel, and to His purpose with His people. It is the quality by which He cannot forsake His own, but carries through and completes His promises to them; by which He vindicates and justifies, in facts so large that they are evident to all mankind, His ancient word by His prophets.
This lengthened exposition will not have been in vain, if it has made clear to us, that Hebrew monotheism owed its unique quality to the emphasis, which the prophets laid upon the two truths of the Power and the Character of God. There was One Supreme Being infinite in might, and with one purpose running down the ages, which He had plainly revealed, and to which He remained constant. The people, who knew this, did not need to wait for the fulfilment of certain test-predictions before trusting Him as the One God. Test-predictions and their fulfilment might be needful for the heathen, from whose minds the idea of One Supreme Being with such a character had vanished; the heathen might need to be convinced by instances of Jehovah’s omniscience, for omniscience was the most Divine attribute of which they had conceived. But Israel’s faith rested upon glories in the Divine nature of which omniscience was the mere consequence. Israel knew God was Almighty and All-true, and that was enough.
In Isa_41:25 a phrase is used of Cyrus which is very obscure, and to which, considering its vagueness even upon the most definite construction, far too much importance has been attached. The meaning of the words, the tenses, the syntax-perhaps even the original text itself-of this verse are uncertain. The English revisers give, I have raised up one from the north and he is come; from the rising of the sun one that calleth upon My Name. This is probably the true syntax. But in what tense is the verb to call, and what does calling upon My name mean? In the Old Testament the phrase is used in two senses, -to invoke or adore, and to proclaim or celebrate the name of a person. As long as scholars understood that Cyrus was a monotheist, there was a temptation to choose the former of these meanings, and to find in the verse Jehovah’s claim upon the Persian. as a worshipper of Himself, the One True God. But this interpretation received a shock from the discovery of a proclamation of Cyrus after his entry into Babylon, in which he invokes the names of Babylonian deities, and calls himself their "servant." Of course his doing so in the year 538 does not necessarily discredit a description of him as a monotheist eight years before.-Between 598 and 546-the probable date of chapter 41-a prophet might in all good faith have hailed as a worshipper of Jehovah a Persian who still stood in the rising of the sun, -who had net yet issued from the east and its radiant repute of a religion purer than the Babylonian; although eight years afterwards, from motives of policy, the same king acknowledged the gods of his new subjects. This may be; but there is a more natural way out of the difficulty. Is it fair to lay upon the expression, calleth on My name, so precise a meaning as that of a strict monotheism? Some have turned to the other use of the verb, and, taking it in the future tense, have translated, who shall proclaim or celebrate My name, - which Cyrus surely did, when, in the name of Jehovah, he drew up the edict for the return of the Jews to Palestine. {Ezr_1:2; 2Ch_36:22-23} But do we need to put even this amount of meaning upon the phrase? In itself it is vague, but it also stands parallel to another vague phrase: I have raised up one from the north, and he is come; from the sunrising one who calleth on My name. Taken in apposition to the phrase he is come, calleth on My name may mean no more than that, answering to the instigation of Jehovah and owning His impulse, Cyrus by his career proclaimed or celebrated Jehovah’s name. In any case, we have said enough to show that, in our comparative ignorance of what Cyrus’ faith was, and in face of the elastic use of the phrase to call on the name of, it is quite unwarrantable, to maintain that the prophet must have meant a strict monotheist, and therefore absurd to draw the inference that the prophet was incorrect. A way has been attempted out of the difficulty by slightly altering the text, and so obtaining the version, I have raised up one from the north and he is come: from the sunrise I call him by name. This is a change which is in harmony with Isa_45:3-4, but has otherwise no evidence in its favour.
THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ISRAEL AND THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD
Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24
IN the chapters which we have been studying we have found some difficulty with one of our prophet’s keynotes-"right" or "righteousness." In the chapters to come we shall find this difficulty increase, unless we take some trouble now to define how much the word denotes in Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24. There is no part of Scripture, in which the term "righteousness" suffers so many developments of meaning. To leave these vague, as readers usually do, or to fasten upon one and all the technical meaning of righteousness in Christian theology, is not only to obscure the historical reference and moral force of single passages, -it is to miss one of the main arguments of the prophecy. We have read enough to see that "righteousness" was the great question of the Exile. But what was brought into question was not only the righteousness of the people, but the righteousness of their God. In Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 righteousness is more often claimed as a Divine attribute, than enforced as a human duty or ideal.
Ssedheq, the Hebrew root for righteousness, had, like the Latin "rectus," in its earliest and now almost forgotten uses, a physical meaning. This may have been either "straightness," or more probably "soundness,"-the state in which a thing is "all right." "Paths of righteousness," in Psa_23:1-6 and Isa_40:4, are not necessarily straight paths, but rather sure, genuine, safe paths. Like all physical metaphors, like our own words "straight" and "right," the applicability of the term to moral conduct was exceedingly elastic. It has been attempted to gather most of its meaning under the definition of "conformity to norm"; and so many are the instances in which the word has a forensic force, as of "vindication" or "justification," that some have claimed this for its original, or, at least, its governing sense. But it is improbable that either of these definitions conveys the simplest or most general sense of the word. Even if "conformity" or "justification" were ever the prevailing sense of ssedheq, there are a number of instances in which its meaning far overflows the limits of such definitions. Every one can see how a word, which may generally be used to express an abstract idea, like "conformity," or a formal relation towards a law or person, like "justification," might come to be applied to the actual virtues, which realise that idea or lift a character into that relation. Thus righteousness might mean justice, or truth, or almsgiving, or religious obedience, -to each of which, in fact, the Hebrew word was at various times specially applied. Or righteousness might mean virtue in general, virtue apart from all consideration of law or duty whatsoever. In the prophet Amos, for instance, "righteousness" is applied to a goodness so natural and spontaneous that no one could think of it for a moment as conformity to norm or fulfilment of law.
In short, it is impossible to give a definition of the Hebrew word, which our version renders as "righteousness," less wide than our English word "right." "Righteousness" is "right" in all its senses, -natural, legal, personal, religious. It is to be all right, to be right-hearted, to be consistent, to be thorough; but also to be in the right, to be justified, to be vindicated; and, in particular, it may mean to be humane (as with Amos), to be just (as with Isaiah), to be correct or true to fact (as sometimes with our own prophet), to fulfil the ordinances of religion, and especially the command about almsgiving (as with the later Jews).
Let us now keep in mind that righteousness could express a relation, or a general quality of character, or some particular virtue. For we shall find traces of all these meanings in our prophet’s application of the term to Israel and to God.
One of the simplest forms of the use of "righteousness" in the Old Testament is when it is employed in the case of ordinary quarrels between two persons; in which for one of them "to be righteous" means "to be right" or "in the right." {Gen_38:26; Cf. 2Sa_15:4} Now to the Hebrew all life and religion was based upon covenants between two, -between man and man and between man and God. Righteousness meant fidelity to the terms of those covenants. The positive contents of the word in any single instance of its use would, therefore, depend on the faithfulness and delicacy of conscience by which those terms were interpreted. In early Israel this conscience was not so keen as it afterwards came to be, and accordingly Israel’s sense of their righteousness towards God was, to begin with, a comparatively shallow one. When a Psalmist asseverates his righteousness and pleads it as the ground for God rewarding him, it is plain that he is able with sincerity to make a claim, so repellent to a Christian’s feeling, just because he has not anything like a Christian’s conscience of what God demands from man. As Calvin says on Psa_18:20 "David here represents God as the President of an athletic contest, who had chosen him as one of His champions, and David knows that so long as he keeps to the rules of the contest, so long will God defend him." It is evident that in such an assertion righteousness cannot mean perfect innocence, but simply the good conscience of a man, who, with simple ideas of what is demanded from him, feels that on the whole "he has" (slightly to paraphrase Calvin) "played fair."
Two things, almost simultaneously, shook Israel out of this primitive and naive self-righteousness. History went against them, and the prophets quickened their conscience. The effect of the former of these two causes will be clear to us, if we recollect the judicial element in the Hebrew righteousness, -that it often meant not so much to be right, as to be vindicated or declared right. History, to Israel, was God’s supreme tribunal. It was the faith of the people, expressed over and over again in the Old Testament, that the godly man is vindicated or justified by his prosperity: "the way of the ungodly shall perish." And Israel felt themselves to be in the right, just as. David, in Psa_18:1-50, felt himself, because God had accredited them with success and victory. But when the decision of history went against the nation, when they were threatened with expulsion from their land and with extinction as a people, that just meant that the Supreme Judge of men was giving His sentence against them. Israel had broken the terms of the Covenant. They had lost their right; they were no longer "righteous." The keener conscience, developed by prophecy, swiftly explained this sentence of history. This declaration, that the people were unrighteous, was due, the prophet said, to the people’s sins. Isaiah not only exclaimed, "Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire"; he added, in equal indictment, "How is the faithful city become a harlot! it was full of justice, righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers: thy princes are rebellious, they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come before them." To Isaiah and the earlier prophets Israel was unrighteous because it was so immoral. With their strong social conscience, righteousness meant to these prophets the practice of civic virtues, -truth-telling, honesty between citizens, tenderness to the poor, inflexible justice in high places.
Here then we have two possible meanings for Israel’s righteousness in the prophetic writings, allied and necessary to one another, yet logically distinct, -the one a becoming righteous through the exercise of virtue, the other a being shown to be righteous by the voice of history. In the one case righteousness is the practical result of the working of the Spirit of God; in the other it is vindication, or justification, by the Providence of God. Isaiah and the earlier prophets, while the sentence of history was still not executed and might through the mercy of God be revoked, incline to employ righteousness predominantly in the former sense. But it will be understood how, after the Exile, it was the latter, which became the prevailing determination of the word. By that great disaster God finally uttered the clear sentence, of which previous history had been but the foreboding. Israel in exile was fully declared to be in the wrong-to be unrighteous. As a church, she lay under the ban; as a nation, she was discredited before the nations of the world. And her one longing, hope, and effort during the weary years of Captivity was to have her right vindicated again, was to be restored to right relations to God and to the world, under the Covenant.
This is the predominant meaning of the term, as applied to Israel, in Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24. Israel’s unrighteousness is her state of discredit and disgrace under the hands of God; her righteousness, which she hopes for, is her restoral to her station and destiny as the elect people. To our Christian habit of thinking, it is very natural to read the frequent and splendid phrases in which "righteousness" is attributed or promised to the people of God in this evangelical prophecy, as if righteousness were that inward assurance and justification from an evil conscience, which, as we are taught by the New Testament, is provided for us through the death of Christ, and inwardly sealed to us by the Holy Ghost, irrespective of the course of our outward fortune. But if we read that meaning into "righteousness" in Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24, we shall simply not understand some of the grandest passages of the prophecy. We must clearly keep in view, that while the prophet ceaselessly emphasises the pardon of God "spoken home to the heart" of the people as the first step towards their restoral, he does not apply the term righteousness to this inward justification, but to the outward vindication and accrediting of Israel by God before the whole world, in their redemption from Captivity, and their reinstatement as His people. This is very clear from the way in which "righteousness" is coupled with "salvation" by the prophet, as {Isa_62:1} "I will not rest till her righteousness go forth as brightness, and her salvation as a lamp that burneth." Or again from the way in which righteousness and glory are put in parallel: {Isa_62:2} "And the nations shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory." Or again in the way that "righteousness" and "renown" are identified: {Isa_61:11} "The Lord Jehovah will cause righteousness and renown to spring forth before all the nations." In each of these promises the idea of an external and manifest splendour is evident; not the inward peace of justification felt only by the conscience to which it has been granted, but the outward historical victory appreciable by the gross sense of the heathen. Of course the outward implies the inward, -this historical triumph is the crown of a religious process, the result of forgiveness and a long purification, -but while in the New Testament it is these which would be most readily called a people’s righteousness, it is the former (what the New Testament would rather call "the crown of life"), which has appropriated the name in Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24. The same is manifest from another text: {Isa_48:18} "O that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments; then had thy peace been as the River, and thy righteousness like the waves of the sea." Here "righteousness is not only not applied to inward morality, but set over against this as its external reward,"-the health and splendour which a good conscience produces. It is in the same external sense that the prophet talks of the "robe of righteousness" with its bridal splendour, and compares it to the appearance of "Spring." {Isa_61:10-11}
For this kind of righteousness, this vindication by God before the world, Israel waited throughout the Exile. God addresses them as "they that pursue righteousness, that seek Jehovah." {Isa_51:1} And it is a closely allied meaning, though perhaps with a more inward application, when the people are represented as praying God to give them "ordinances of righteousness," {Isa_58:2} -that is, to prescribe such a ritual as will expiate their guilt and bring them into a right relation with Him. They sought in vain. The great lesson of the Exile was that not by works and performances, but through simply waiting upon the Lord, their righteousness should shine forth. Even this outward kind of justification was to be by faith.
The other meaning of righteousness, however, -the sense of social and civic morality, which was its usual sense with the earlier prophets, -is not altogether excluded from the use of the word in Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 Here are some commands and reproaches which seem to imply it. "Keep judgment, and do righteousness,"-where, from what follows, righteousness evidently means observing the Sabbath and doing no evil. {Isa_56:1} "And justice is fallen away backward, and righteousness standeth afar off, for truth is fallen in the street, and steadfastness cannot enter." {Isa_59:14} These must be terms for human virtues, for shortly afterwards it is said: "Jehovah was displeased because there was no justice." Again, "They seek Me as a nation that did righteousness"; {Isa_58:2} "Hearken unto Me, ye that know righteousness, a people-My law is in their hearts"; {Isa_51:7} "Thou meetest him that worketh righteousness"; {Isa_64:5} "No one sues in righteousness, and none goeth to law in truth." {Isa_59:4} In all these passages "righteousness" means something that man can know and do, his conscience and his duty, and is rightly to be distinguished from those others, in which "righteousness" is equivalent to the salvation, the glory, the peace, which only God’s power can bring. If the passages that employ "righteousness" in the sense of moral or religious observance really date from the Exile, then the interesting fact is assured to us that the Jews enjoyed some degree of social independence and responsibility during their Captivity. But it is a very striking fact that these passages all belong to chapters, the exilic origin of which is questioned even by critics, who assign the rest of Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 to the Exile. Yet, even if these passages have all to be assigned to the Exile, how few they are in number! How they contrast with the frequency, with which, in the earlier part of this book, -in the orations addressed by Isaiah to his own times, when Israel was still an independent state, -"righteousness" is reiterated as the daily, practical duty of men, as justice, truthfulness, and charity between man and man! The extreme rarity of such inculcations in Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 warns us that we must not expect to find here the same practical and political interest which formed so much of the charm and the force of Isa_1:1-31 - Isa_39:1-8. The nation has now no politics, almost no social morals. Israel are not citizens working out their own salvation in the market, the camp, and the senate; but captives waiting a deliverance in God’s time, which no act of theirs can hasten. It is not in the street that the interest of Second Isaiah lies: it is on the horizon. Hence the vague feeling of a distant splendour, which as the reader passes from Isa_39:1-8 to Isa_40:1-31, replaces in his mind the stir of living in a busy crowd, the close and throbbing sense of the civic conscience, the voice of statesmen, the clash of the weapons of war. There is no opportunity for individuals to reveal themselves. It is a nation waiting, indistinguishable in shadow, whose outlines only we see. It is no longer the thrilling practical cry, which sends men into the arenas of social life with every sinew in them strung: "Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow." It is rather the cry of one who still waits for his working day to dawn: "I will lift up mine eyes to the hills; from whence cometh my help?" Righteousness is not the near and daily duty, it is the far-off peace and splendour of skies, that have scarce begun to redden to the day.
But there was another Person, whose righteousness was in question during the Exile, and who Himself argues for it throughout our prophecy. Perhaps the most peculiar feature of the theology of Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 is its argument for "the righteousness of Jehovah."
Some critics maintain that righteousness, when applied to Jehovah, bears always a technical reference to His covenant with Israel. This is scarcely correct. Jehovah’s dealings with Israel were no doubt the chief of His dealings, and it is these, which He mainly quotes to illustrate His righteousness; but we have already studied passages, which prove to us that Jehovah's righteousness was an absolute quality of His Godhead, shown to others besides Israel, and in loyalty to obligations different from the terms of His covenant with Israel. In Isa_41:1-29 Jehovah calls upon the heathen to match their righteousness with His; righteousness was therefore a quality that might have been attributed to them as well as to Himself. Again, in Isa_45:19 "I, Jehovah, speak righteousness, I declare things that are right,"-righteousness evidently bears a general sense, and not one of exclusive application to God’s dealing with Israel. It is the same in the passage about Cyrus: {Isa_45:13} "I have raised him up in righteousness, I will make straight all his ways." Though Cyrus was called in connection with God’s purpose towards Israel, it is not that purpose which makes his calling righteous, but the fact that God means to carry him through, or, as the parallel verse says, "to make straight all his ways." These instances are sufficient to prove that the righteousness, which God attributes to His words, to His actions, and to Himself, is a general quality not confined to His dealings with Israel under the covenant, -though, of course, most clearly illustrated by these.
If now we enquire, what this absolute quality of Jehovah’s Deity really means, we may conveniently begin with His application of it to His Word. In Isa_41:1-29 He summons the other religions to exhibit predictions that are true to fact. "Who hath declared it on-ahead that we may know, or from aforetime that we may say, He is ssaddiq." Here ssaddiq simply means "right, correct," true to fact. It is much the same meaning in Isa_43:9, where the verb is used of heathen predicters, "that they may be shown to be right," or "correct" (English version, "justified"). But when, in Isa_46:1-13, the word is applied by Jehovah to His own speech, it has a meaning of far richer contents, than mere correctness, and proves to us that after all the Hebrew ssedheq was almost as versatile as the English "right." The following passage shows us that the righteousness of Jehovah’s speech is its clearness, straightforwardness, and practical effectiveness: "Not in secret have I spoken, in a place of the land of darkness,"-this has been supposed to refer to the remote or subterranean localities in which heathen oracles mysteriously entrenched themselves, -"I have not said to the seed of Jacob, In Chaos seek Me. I am Jehovah, a Speaker of righteousness, a Publisher of straight things. Be gathered and come, draw near together, O remnants of the nations. They know not that carry the log of their image, and pray to a god who does not save. Publish and bring near, yea, let them take counsel together. Who caused this to be heard of old? long since hath published it? Is it not I, Jehovah, and there is none else God beside Me; a God righteous and a Saviour, there is none except Me. Turn unto Me and be saved, all ends of Earth, for I am God, and there is none else. By Myself have I sworn, gone forth from My mouth hath righteousness: a word and it shall not turn; for to Me shall bow every knee, shall swear every tongue. Truly in Jehovah, shall they say of Me, are righteousnesses and strength. To Him shall it come, and shamed shall be all that are incensed against Him. In Jehovah shall be righteous and renowned all the seed of Israel." {Isa_45:19-25}
In this very suggestive passage "righteousness" means far more than simple correctness of prediction. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish how much it means, so quickly do its varying echoes throng upon our ear, from the new associations in which it is spoken. A word such as "righteousness" is like the sensitive tones of the human voice. Spoken in a desert, the voice is itself and nothing more; but utter it where the landscape is crowded with novel obstacles, and the original note is almost lost amid the echoes it startles. So with the "righteousness of Jehovah"; among the new associations in which the prophet affirms it, it starts novel repetitions of itself. Against the ambiguity of the oracles, it is echoed back as "clearness, straightforwardness, good faith"; {Isa_40:19} against their opportunism and want of foresight, it is described as equivalent to the capacity for arranging things beforehand and predicting what must come to pass, therefore as "purposefulness"; while against their futility, it is plainly "effectiveness and power to prevail." {Isa_40:23} It is the quality in God, which divides His Godhead with His power, something intellectual as well as moral, the possession of a reasonable purpose as well as fidelity towards it.
This intellectual sense of righteousness, as reasonableness or purposefulness, is clearly illustrated by the way in which the prophet appeals, in order to enforce it, to Jehovah’s creation of the world. "Thus saith Jehovah, Creator of the heavens-He is the God-Former of the Earth and her Maker, He founded her; not Chaos did He create her, to be dwelt in did He form her." {Isa_45:18} The word "Chaos" here is the same as is used in opposition to "righteousness" in the following verse. The sentence plainly illustrates the truth, that whatever God does, He does not so as to issue in confusion, but with a reasonable purpose and for a practical end. We have here the repetition of that deep, strong note, which Isaiah himself so often sounded to the comfort of men in perplexity or despair, that God is at least reasonable, not working for nothing, nor beginning only to leave off, nor creating in order to destroy. The same God, says our prophet, who formed the earth in order to see it inhabited, must surely be believed to be consistent enough to carry to the end also His spiritual work among men. Our prophet’s idea of God’s righteousness, therefore, includes the idea of reasonableness; implies rational as well as moral consistency, practical sense as well as good faith; the conscience of a reasonable plan, and, perhaps also, the power to carry it through.
To know that this great and varied meaning belongs to "righteousness" gives us new insight into those passages, which find in it all the motive and efficiency of the Divine action: "It pleased Jehovah for His righteousness"; {Isa_42:21} "His righteousness, it upheld Him; and He put on righteousness as a breastplate." {Isa_59:16-17}
With such a righteousness did Jehovah deal with Israel. To her despair that He has forgotten her. He recounts the historical events by which He has made her His own, and affirms that He will carry them on; and you feel the expression both of fidelity and of the consciousness of ability to fulfil, in the words, "I will uphold thee with the right hand of My righteousness." "Right hand"-there is more than the touch of fidelity in this; there is the grasp of power. Again, to the Israel who was conscious of being His Servant, God says, "I, Jehovah, have called thee in righteousness"; and, taken with the context, the word plainly means good faith and intention to sustain and carry to success.
It was easy to transfer the name "righteousness" from the character of God’s action to its results, but always, of course, in the vindication of His purpose and word. Therefore, just as the salvation of Israel, which was the chief result of the Divine purpose, is called Israel’s righteousness, so it is also called "Jehovah’s righteousness." Thus, in Isa_46:13 "I bring near My righteousness"; and in Isa_51:5 "My righteousness is near, My salvation is gone forth"; Isa_40:6 "My salvation shall be forever, and My righteousness shall not be abolished." It seems to be in the same sense, of finished and visible results, that the skies are called upon "to pour down righteousness," and "the earth to open that they may be fruitful in salvation, and let her cause righteousness to spring up together" (Isa_45:8; cf. Isa_61:10 "My Lord Jehovah will cause righteousness to spring forth").
One passage is of great interest, because in it "righteousness" is used to play upon itself, in its two meanings of human duty and Divine effect- Isa_56:1, "Observe judgment"-probably religious ordinances-"and do righteousness; for My salvation is near to come, and My righteousness to be revealed."
To complete our study of "righteousness" it is necessary to touch still upon one point. In Isa_40:1-31; Isa_41:1-29; Isa_42:1-25; Isa_43:1-28; Isa_44:1-28; Isa_45:1-25; Isa_46:1-13; Isa_47:1-15; Isa_48:1-22; Isa_49:1-26; Isa_50:1-11; Isa_51:1-23; Isa_52:1-15; Isa_53:1-12; Isa_54:1-17; Isa_55:1-13; Isa_56:1-12; Isa_57:1-21; Isa_58:1-14; Isa_59:1-21; Isa_60:1-22; Isa_61:1-11; Isa_62:1-12; Isa_63:1-19; Isa_64:1-12; Isa_65:1-25; Isa_66:1-24 both the masculine and feminine forms of the Hebrew word for righteousness are used, and it has been averred that they are used with a difference. This opinion is entirely dispelled by a collation of the passages. I give the particulars in a note, from which it will be seen that both forms are indifferently employed for each of the many shades of meaning which "righteousness" bears in our prophecies.
That the masculine and feminine forms sometimes occur, with the same or with different meanings, in the same verse, or in the next verse to one another, proves that the selection of them respectively cannot be due to any difference in the authorship of our prophecy. So that we are reduced to say that nothing accounts for their use, except, it might be, the exigencies of the metre. But who is able to prove this?