The world knows but little of its greatest men. It sees from afar the candle burning in the garret of the thinker, and wists not that it will throw its beams right down the ages. The man who lives in the realm of thought, instead of the realm of action, is generally overlooked while he lives. It is only when his thought has become translated into deeds, perhaps centuries after he is buried, that the world cares to ask who the thinker was, and eagerly snatches at every detail of his personal history. Is there a more pathetic scene in all the biographies of great souls than that of the poet Burns dying neglected by the patrons of his happier days, and yet, with the hopefulness which made his genius so winsome, saying to his weeping wife, “Dinna greet for me; I shall be thought far more of a hundred years hence than I am now”? Of Shakespeare, “the myriad-minded man,” we have only a few scraps of history, which may or may not be true. Of Dante we know but little, and of Homer still less. The same is true of Isaiah, the sweetest and most impassioned of all the Hebrew poets. For, in spite of the influence he exercised upon his contemporaries, our knowledge of Isaiah's life is derived for the most part from his own works. It is true that he comes before us in the Second Book of Kings as the counsellor to whom the Jewish monarch and his ministers betook themselves in their hour of need, as the prophet who was empowered to promise them a speedy deliverance, as the healer who restored Hezekiah to life when all earthly hope of recovery seemed gone, and finally as the stern reprover of the monarch's pride and worldliness. But the passages in which Isaiah is thus brought before us are found also in the book that bears his name; the only additional information we receive is the record in the Second Book of Chronicles (2Ch_32:32) that “the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and his goodness, behold, they are written in the vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz.”
A silhouetted form stands before us whose face is hid, whose expression is veiled, whose very attitude is but dimly recognized. Contrast the portraits of an Abraham, an Isaac, a Jacob, a Joseph, with the portraits of an Amos, an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, an Ezekiel, and you will see the full force of the difference. The former are almost modern in the interest they awaken; the latter seem far away. The former are men; the latter are shadows. The former suggest the living world; the latter come like voices from the dead.
How are we to account for this? Is it accident? No, it is too methodical for that; a thing which pervades one class exclusively cannot be accidental. Is it ignorance on the part of the delineator? No; why should the artist know less of Isaiah than of Abraham? Isaiah belonged to an age when knowledge was more easily transmitted than it was in the days of Abraham. Is it the uneventfulness of a prophet's life in comparison with a ruler's life? No, for the facts we wish to learn are just the common uneventful facts that environ men of every day-the place of birth, the home circle, the training influences, the worldly circumstances, the struggles for survival, the loves and hates and hopes and fears that compose the lights and shadows of human life. This is what we want to know; this is what is not revealed.
Is there any explanation which can be suggested for this biographical reticence? I think there is. I believe it originates in the notion that a man's religious message has more power when separated from his personal circumstances. This is not a feeling peculiar to the Jew. It lies at the root of clerical celibacy; it forms the basis of religious asceticism. There has ever been a widespread impression that familiarity with the teacher of sacred things weakens the force of his message. How often you and I are disappointed when we have realized our wish to meet some distinguished educator of the race. We have figured to ourselves the joy of that meeting-how our hearts will burn, how our souls will be enlightened. And we have found the man a very ordinary individual, with the average amount of human frailties and perhaps more than the average amount of human foibles. The man who habitually lives on the mountains is apt to find himself not at home on the plains. He often shows to less advantage in commonplace things than the essentially commonplace man. The Jew felt this and sought to obviate it. He withdrew the everyday life of his prophets from common observation. He placed his Isaiah in the mist. He shrouded his form and features. He hid his environment. He concealed his domestic altar. He threw a veil over his circle and his circumstances. He allowed only his voice to be revealed. He would not let us look, but he bade us listen. He sent a cloud to the eye, but he lifted a curtain from the ear.1 [Note: G. Matheson, The Representative Men of the Bible, ii. 266.]
1. Isaiah's Name and Family.-His name appears not to have been an uncommon one in Israel, and although to the prophet himself it had a symbolic significance as embodying a cardinal principle of his ministry, it throws no light on the circumstances of his birth or the religious disposition of his parents. Of his father Amoz nothing is known. The fancied resemblance of his name to that of the prophet Amos does not exist in the original, and the notion that the younger prophet was the son of the older was only the speculation of some Greek, ignorant of Hebrew orthography. Jewish tradition, perhaps to account for Isaiah's great influence at court, makes his father Amoz a brother of king Amaziah, and the prophet therefore a first cousin of Hezekiah. From the fact, however, that he was intimately acquainted with the ways of the court and had at all times ready access to the presence of the king, as well as from a certain aristocratic loftiness of thought which appears in his writings, we may probably conclude that at least he belonged to a good family and had enjoyed all the advantages of education and social intercourse that were open to the son of a prominent citizen of Jerusalem.
Isaiah's own name signifies “The salvation of the Lord.” It was thus, as he himself tells us, that he was a “sign and wonder in Israel from the Lord of hosts,” like his children, whose names were equally ever-present witnesses of the prophecies he had uttered. The constant burden of his preaching had been that though the heathen should rage for a while against Judah, though the tree of the chosen people should be felled to the root, God would yet have mercy upon it; the root should again put forth its shoots, “a remnant” should return and behold the “salvation of the Lord.” His own name was as surely a token of forgiveness to repentant Judah as was the name of his son Shear-jashub, “a remnant shall return.”
Shear-jashub was perhaps the eldest of his children. He was, at all events, old enough to accompany his father when he went out of the city to meet Ahaz, who was examining “the conduit of the upper pool” at the beginning of the Syro-Ephraimitic war. At a later date was born Maher-shalal-hash-baz, “spoil swiftly, rob quickly.” These were the words Isaiah had been ordered to write on a “large slab,” with “the graving-tool of the people,” so that all might see and read, and then to give them as a name to the child that was born to him shortly afterwards. The name, like the inscription, was to be a sign that “before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria.”
The wife of Isaiah is termed “the prophetess.” From this we must infer that she also, like her husband, was endowed with the gift of prophecy. The usage of Hebrew would not allow us to interpret the title as we might perhaps in English, where it could signify simply a prophet's wife.
2. His City and Circumstances.-Isaiah was probably a native of Jerusalem, where all his prophecies were apparently given, and seems to have resided in the lower city, which lay to the north of the upper city or Zion as it is now, although incorrectly, called. His ministry dates from 740 b.c., the year of king Uzziah's death,-his call being connected with a glorious vision of Jehovah (Isa_6:1-13),-and lasted at least to 701 b.c., the year of Sennacherib's attack on Jerusalem. Two very important chronological epochs have their beginning in his time: the Roman, 753 b.c. being the traditional year of the founding of Rome, and the Babylonian, the era of Nabonassar having begun in 747 b.c.
(1) The City.-Jerusalem was the hallowed yet comparatively squalid capital of the petty principality of Judah. It was the crown and heart of Jewish life, political and religious. Solomon's temple stood on Zion's ridge. Jehovah of Hosts had there His seat. In the eye of an Israelite it was “beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.” In the eye of her citizens it was the impregnable and inviolable fortress and sanctuary of God. To citizen Isaiah it was the apex of the world. All else might perish, but, as the symbol and seat of the one true faith, Jerusalem must stand. Passionate patriotism and the enthusiasm of religion had girded the city of David with a sanctity unique, and gilded it with a glory imperishable.
The nearest neighbours to the little kingdom were the independent cities of the Philistines to the south-west, and the little principalities of Edom and Moab to the east, while to the north lay the sister but usually unfriendly State of North Israel or Ephraim, with its independent prince reigning in Samaria.
The great Assyrian Empire, with its colossal capital Nineveh and its subordinate but refractory province of Babylonia, held sway over all the East. Over it reigned in Oriental magnificence “the king of kings,” in whose eyes the kinglets of Jerusalem and Samaria were as grasshoppers. He numbered his hosts by myriads; his chariots and horsemen covered the land like locusts-their onrush was like an overflowing ocean. In the lifetime of Isaiah this terrific and irresistible force was no less than four times let loose upon the land of Jehovah, and each of these incursions gives occasion to the prophet to utter in powerful prophecy the “word of the Lord concerning Judah and Jerusalem.” The terror of this Behemoth of the East hung over Israel and Judah like a perpetual nightmare, paralysing their energies and warping their policy. The winged man-headed bull of Asshur, symbol of intellect, strength, and swiftness, was the veritable ogre of the Jews. They lived in constant dread of falling any day into its merciless clutches as a helpless lamb into a lion's jaws, and to understand Isaiah one must realize this ever-impending danger.
Occupying the other pole of Isaiah's little world was the empire of the Pharaohs, whose dynasties ran back to primeval time, and whose power, though little exerted beyond the Nile boundaries, was so old and consolidated that it was acknowledged without challenge as a mighty unknown quantity. In the Jewish mind the wholesome fear of Egypt could not fail to be accentuated by the recollection that the fathers of their nation had been brick-making bond-slaves there for generations. And though their prophets called the old empire facetiously “Rahab” the Braggart, the Crocodile, the fear that their nationality might one day, and could any day, be crunched between her cruel jaws was never absent as an impending possibility. One element of weakness within her own borders, the semi-barbarous and restless Soudanese or Ethiopians, combined with the balancing power of Assyria to put off the evil day. The main road, moreover, between Nineveh and the Nile lay along the Mediterranean shore and through the Pass of Esdraelon-a geographical fact which doubtless contributed largely to prolong the security of Jerusalem and Judah.
(2) The Circumstances.-Isaiah's boyhood was during a happy period of Judah's history, when the energetic and enterprising Uzziah was on the throne of Judah. This king, crowned when but a youth, enabled his people to recover speedily from the depression to which the stubborn conceit of his father Amaziah had reduced them. With skill and judgment he developed Judah's natural resources, strengthened her defences, and opened many avenues of wealth. He compelled the petty nations round about to resume their old relation as tributaries. He even won back the port of Elath, on the eastern arm of the Red Sea, secured a navy of “ships of Tarshish,” and resumed the traffic with South Arabia which Solomon had fostered. He thus made his little kingdom secure, powerful, and prosperous, and gave his people renewed confidence in themselves and in their future. Judah, under King Uzziah, became a fair counterpart of Israel under King Jeroboam ii, whose reign was practically contemporaneous. No wonder that the soul of the young Judæan prophet was stirred by the sight of evils similar to those which had kindled the prophetic ardour of Amos-a thoughtless greed for wealth, a consequent abuse of power and opportunity, a forgetfulness of moral standards, all combined with a scrupulousness for religious forms and with a pretence of loyalty to Jehovah-and that his study of the utterances of Amos and Hosea to the northern people prepared him for a prompt consecration of himself as God's spokesman to the people of Judah.
Over the door of the new church [at Finnieston, Glasgow] are carved the three Hebrew words translated in our Bible, “He that winneth souls is wise.” They were put there as an indication of the object of the church's existence, and also in the hope that some Jews passing by might see them, and come in to worship the God of Abraham. Dr. Bonar preached from these words on the day on which the church was opened, explaining that “winning” was the word used to describe a hunter stalking game, and reminding “soul-winners” that their work must be done in a wise way. “How carefully David prepared to meet Goliath! He chose five smooth stones out of the brook. He did not assume that one would be lying to his hand when he needed it. Never go to the Lord's work with meagre preparation.”1 [Note: Reminiscences of Andrew A. Bonar, 41.]
