It was inevitable, as soon as their city was again fairly in sight, that there should re-awaken in the exiles the civic conscience; that recollections of those besetting sins of their public life, for which their city and their independence were destroyed, should throng back upon them; that in prospect of their again becoming responsible for the discharge of justice and other political duties, they should be reminded by the prophet of their national faults in these respects, and of God's eternal laws concerning them. If we keep this in mind, we shall understand the presence in "Second Isaiah" of the group of prophecies at which we have now arrived, ch. lvi. 9-lix. Hitherto our prophet, in marked contrast to Isaiah himself, has said almost nothing of the social righteousness of his people. Israel's righteousness, as we saw in our fourteenth chapter, has had the very different meaning for our prophet of her pardon and restoration to her rights. But in ch. lvi. 9-lix. we shall find the blame of civic wrong, and of other kinds of sin of which Israel could only have been guilty in her own land; we shall listen to exhortations to social justice and mercy like those we heard from Isaiah to his generation. Yet these are mingled withvoices, and concluded with promises, which speak of the Return as imminent. Undoubtedly exilic elements reveal themselves. And the total impression is that some prophet of the late Exile, and probably the one, whom we have been following, collected these reminiscences of his people's sin in the days of their freedom, in order to remind them, before they went back again to political responsibility, why it was they were punished and how apt they were to go astray. Believing this to be the true solution of a somewhat difficult problem, we have ventured to gather this mixed group of prophecies under the title of the Rekindling of the Civic Conscience. They fall into three groups: first, ch. lvi. 9-lvii.; second, ch. lviii.; third, ch. lix. We shall see that, while there is no reason to doubt the exilic origin of the whole of the second, the first and third of these are mainly occupied with the description of a state of things that prevailed only before the Exile, but they contain also exilic observations and conclusions.
I.A Conscience but no God(ch. lvi. 9-lvii.).
This is one of the sections which almost decisively place the literary unity of "Second Isaiah" past possibility of belief. If ch. lvi. 1-8 flushes with the dawn of restoration, ch. lvi. 9-lvii. is very dark with the coming of the night, which preceded that dawn. Almost none dispute, that the greater part of this prophecy must have been composed before the people left Palestine for exile. The state of Israel, which it pictures, recalls the descriptions of Hosea, and of the eleventh chapter of Zechariah. God's flock are still in charge of their own shepherds (lvi. 9-12),—a description inapplicable to Israel in exile. The shepherdsare sleepy, greedy, sensual, drunkards,—victims to the curse, against which Amos and Isaiah hurled their strongest woes. That sots like them should be spared while the righteous die unnoticed deaths (lvii. 1) can only be explained by the approaching judgement.No man considereth that the righteous is taken away from the Evil. The Evilcannot mean, as some have thought, persecution,—for while the righteous are to escape it and enter into peace, the wicked are spared for it. It must be a Divine judgement,—the Exile. Buthe entereth peace, they rest in their beds, each one that hath walked straight before him,—for the righteous there is the peace of death and the undisturbed tomb of his fathers. What an enviable fate when emigration, and dispersion through foreign lands, are the prospect of the nation! Israel shall find her pious dead when she returns! The verse recalls that summons in Isa. xxvi., in which we heard the Mother Nation calling upon the dead she had left in Palestine to rise and increase her returned numbers.
Then the prophet indicts the nation for a religious and political unfaithfulness, which we know was their besetting sin in the days before they left the Holy Land. The scenery, in whose natural objects he describes them seeking their worship, is the scenery of Palestine, not of Mesopotamia,—terebinthsandwâdies, andclefts of the rocks, andsmooth stones of the wâdies. The unchaste and bloody sacrifices with which he charges them bear the appearance more of Canaanite than of Babylonian idolatry. The humiliating political suits which they paid—thou wentest to the king with ointment, and didst increase thy perfumes, and didst send thine ambassadors afar off, and didst debase thyself even unto Sheol(ver. 9)—could not be attributed to acaptive people, but were the sort of degrading diplomacy that Israel learned from Ahaz. While the painful pursuit of strength (ver. 10), the shabby political cowardice (ver. 11), the fanatic sacrifice of manhood's purity and childhood's life (ver. 5), and especially the evil conscience which drove their blind hearts through such pain and passion in a sincere quest for righteousness (ver. 12), betray the age of idolatrous reaction from the great Puritan victory of 701,—a generation exaggerating all the old falsehood and fear, against which Isaiah had inveighed, with the new conscience of sin which his preaching had created.[258]The dark streak of blood and lust that runs through the condemned idolatry, and the stern conscience which only deepens its darkness, are sufficient reasons for dating the prophecy after 700. The very phrases of Isaiah, which it contains, have tempted some to attribute it to himself. But it certainly does not date from such troubles as brought his old age to the grave. The evil, which it portends, is, as we have seen, no persecution of the righteous, but a Divine judgement upon the whole nation,—presumably the Exile. We may date it, therefore, some time after Isaiah's death, but certainly—and this is the important point—before the Exile. This, then, is an unmistakably pre-exilic constituent of "Second Isaiah."
Another feature corroborates this prophecy's original independence of its context. Its style is immediately and extremely rugged. The reader of the original feels the difference at once. It is the difference between travel on the level roads of Mesopotamia, with their unchanging horizons, and the jolting carriage of thestony paths of Higher Palestine, with their glimpses rapidly shifting from gorge to peak. But the remarkable thing is that the usual style of "Second Isaiah" is resumed before the end of the prophecy. One cannot always be sure of the exact verse at which such a literary change takes place. In this case some feel it as soon as the middle of ver. 11, with the words,Have not I held My peace even of long time, and thou fearest Me not?[259]It is surely more sensible, however, after ver. 14, in which we are arrested in any case by an alteration of standpoint. In ver. 14 we are on in the Exile again—before ver. 14 I cannot recognise any exilic symptom—and the way of return is before us.And one said,—it is the repetition to the letter of the strange anonymous voice of ch. xl. 6,—and one said, Cast ye up, Cast ye up, open up, or sweep open, a way, lift the stumbling block from the way of My people. And now the rhythm has certainly returned to the prevailing style of "Second Isaiah," and the temper is again that of promise and comfort.
These sudden shiftings of circumstance and of prospect are enough to show the thoughtful reader of Scripture how hard is the problem of the unity of "Second Isaiah." On which we make here no further remark, but pass at once to the more congenial task of studying the great prophecy, vv. 14-21, which rises one and simple from these fragments as does some homogeneous rock from the confusingdébrisof several geological epochs.
For let the date and original purpose of the fragments we have considered be what they may, this prophecy has been placed as their conclusion with at least some rational, not to say spiritual, intention. As it suddenly issues here, it gathers up, in the usual habit of Scripture, God's moral indictment of an evil generation, by a great manifesto of the Divine nature, and a sharp distinction of the characters and fate of men. Now, of what kind is the generation, to whose indictment this prophecy comes as a conclusion? It is a generation which has lost its God, but kept its conscience. This sums up the national character which is sketched in vv. 3-13. These Israelites had lost Jehovah and His pure law. But the religion into which they fell back was not, therefore, easy or cold. On the contrary, it was very intense and very stern. The people put energy in it, and passion, and sacrifice that went to cruel lengths. Belief, too, in its practical results kept the people from fainting under the weariness in which its fanaticism reacted.In the length of thy way thou wast wearied, yet thou didst not say, It is hopeless; life for thy hand—that is, real, practical strength—didst thou find: wherefore thou didst not break down. And they practised their painful and passionate idolatry with a real conscience. They were seeking to work out righteousness for themselves (ver. 12 should be rendered:I will expose your righteousness, the caricature of righteousness which you attempt). The most worldly statesman among them had his sincere ideal for Israel, and intended to enable her, in the possession of her land and holy mountain, to fulfil her destiny (ver. 13). The most gross idolater had a hunger and thirst after righteousness, and burnt his children or sacrificed his purityto satisfy the vague promptings of his unenlightened conscience.
It was indeed a generation which had kept its conscience, but lost its God; and what we have in vv. 15 to 21 is just the lost and forgotten God speaking of His Nature and His Will. They have been worshipping idols, creatures of their own fears and cruel passions. But He is thehigh and lofty one—two of the simplest adjectives in the language, yet sufficient to lift Him they describe above the distorting mists of human imagination. They thought of the Deity as sheer wrath and force, scarcely to be appeased by men even through the most bloody rites and passionate self-sacrifice. But He says,The high and the holy I dwell in, yet with him also that is contrite and humble of spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. The rest of the chapter is to the darkened consciences a plain statement of the moral character of God's working. God always punishes sin, and yet the sinner is not abandoned. Though he go in his own way, Godwatches his ways in order to heal him. I create the fruit of the lips, that is,thanksgivings: Peace, peace, to him that is far off and him that is near, saith Jehovah, and I will heal him. But, as in ch. xlviii. and ch. l., a warning comes last, and behind the clear, forward picture of the comforted and restored of Jehovah we see the weird background of gloomy, restless wickedness.
II.Social Service and the Sabbath(ch. lviii.).
Several critics (including Professor Cheyne) regard ch. lviii. as post-exilic, because of its declarations against formal fasting and the neglect of social charity,which are akin to those of post-exilic prophets like Zechariah and Joel, and seem to imply that the people addressed are again independent and responsible for the conduct of their social duties. The question largely turns on the amount of social responsibility we conceive the Jews to have had during the Exile. Now we have seen that many of them enjoyed considerable freedom: they had their houses and households; they had their slaves; they traded and were possessed of wealth. They were, therefore, in a position to be chargeable with the duties to which ch. lviii. calls them. The addresses of Ezekiel to his fellow-exiles have many features in common with ch. lviii., although they do not mention fasting; and fasting itself was a characteristic habit of the exiles, in regard to which it is quite likely they should err just as is described in ch. lviii. Moreover, there is a resemblance between this chapter's comments upon the people's enquiries of God (ver. 2) and Ezekiel's reply when certain of the elders of Israel came to enquire of Jehovah.[260]And again vv. 11 and 12 of ch. lviii. are evidently addressed to people in prospect of return to their own land and restoration of their city. We accordingly date ch. lviii. from the Exile. But we see no reason to put it as early as Ewald does, who assigns it to a younger contemporary of Ezekiel. There is no linguistic evidence that it is an insertion, or from another hand than that of our prophet. Surely there were room and occasion for it in those years which followed the actual deliverance of the Jews by Cyrus, but preceded the restoration of Jerusalem,—those years in which there were no longer political problemsin the way of the people's return for our prophet to discuss, and therefore their moral defects were all the more thrust upon his attention; and especially, when in the near prospect of their political independence, their social sins roused his apprehensions.
Those, who have never heard an angry Oriental speak, have no idea of what power of denunciation lies in the human throat. In the East, where a dry climate and large leisure bestow upon the voice a depth and suppleness prevented by our vulgar haste of life and teasing weather, men have elaborated their throat-letters to a number unknown in any Western alphabet; and upon the lowest notes they have put an edge, that comes up shrill and keen through the roar of the upper gutturals, till you feel their wrath cut as well as sweep you before it. In the Oriental throat, speech goes down deep enough to echo all the breadth of the inner man; while the possibility of expressing within so supple an organ nearly every tone of scorn or surprise preserves anger from that suspicion of spite or of exhaustion, which is conveyed by too liberal a use of the nasal or palatal letters. Hence in the Hebrew languageto call with the throatmeans to call with vehemence, but with self-command; with passion, yet as a man; using every figure of satire, but earnestly; neither forgetting wrath for mere art's sake, nor allowing wrath to escape the grip of the stronger muscles of the voice. It isto lift the voice like a trumpet,—an instrument, which, with whatever variety of music its upper notes may indulge our ears, never suffers its main tone of authority to drop, never slacks its imperative appeal to the wills of the hearers.
This is the style of the chapter before us, which opens with the words,Call with the throat, spare not, lift upthy voice like a trumpet. Perhaps no subject more readily provokes to satire and sneers than the subject of the chapter,—the union of formal religion and unlovely life. And yet in the chapter there is not a sneer from first to last. The speaker suppresses the temptation to use his nasal tones, and utters, not as the satirist, but as the prophet. For his purpose is not to sport with his people's hypocrisy, but to sweep them out of it. Before he has done, his urgent speech, that has not lingered to sneer nor exhausted itself in screaming, passes forth to spend its unchecked impetus upon final promise and gospel. It is a wise lesson from a master preacher, and half of the fruitlessness of modern preaching is due to the neglect of it. The pulpit tempts men to be either too bold or too timid about sin; either to whisper or to scold; to euphemise or to exaggerate; to be conventional or hysterical. But two things are necessary,—the facts must be stated, and the whole manhood of the preacher, and not only his scorn or only his anger or only an official temper, brought to bear upon them.Call with the throat, spare not, like a trumpet lift up thy voice, and publish to My people their transgression, and to the house of Jacob their sin.
The subject of the chapter is the habits of a religious people,—the earnestness and regularity of their religious performance contrasted with the neglect of their social relations. The second verse, "the descriptions in which are evidently drawn from life,"[261]tells us thatthe people sought God daily, and had a zeal to know His ways, as a nation that had done righteousness,—fulfilled the legal worship,—and had not forsaken the law[262]of their God: they ask of Me laws[262]of righteousness,—that is, a legalworship, the performance of which might make them righteous,—and in drawing near to God they take delight. They had, in fact, a great greed for ordinances and functions,[263]—for the revival of such forms as they had been accustomed to of old. Like some poor prostrate rose, whose tendrils miss the props by which they were wont to rise to the sun, the religious conscience and affections of Israel, violently torn from their immemorial supports, lay limp and windswept on a bare land, and longed for God to raise some substitute for those altars of Zion by which, in the dear days of old, they had lifted themselves to the light of His face. In the absence of anything better, they turned to the chill and shadowed forms of the fasts they had instituted.[264]But they did not thereby reach the face of God.Wherefore have we fasted, say they,and Thou hast not seen? we have humbled our souls, and Thou takest no notice?The answer comes swiftly: Because your fasting is a mere form!Lo, in the very day of your fast ye find a business to do, and all your workmen you overtask.So formal is your fasting that your ordinary eager, selfish, cruel life goes on beside it just the same. Nay, it is worse than usual, for your worthless, wearisome fast but puts a sharper edge upon your temper:Lo, for strife and contention ye fast, to smile with the fist of tyranny. And it has no religious value:Ye fast notlikeasyou are fastingto-day so as to make your voice heard on high.Is such the fast that I choose,—a day for a man to afflict himself? Is it to droop his head like a rush, and grovel on sackcloth and ashes? Is it this thou wilt call a fastand a day acceptable to Jehovah?One of the great surprises of the human heart is, that self-denial does not win merit or peace. But assuredly it does not, if love be not with it. Though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Self-denial without love is self-indulgence.Is not this the fast that I choose? to loosen the bonds of tyranny, to shatter the joints of the yoke, to let the crushed go free, and that ye burst every yoke. Is it not to break to the hungry thy bread, and that thou bring home wandering poor?[265]when thou seest one naked that thou cover him, and that from thine own flesh thou hide not thyself? Then shall break forth like the morning thy light, and thy health[266]shall immediately spring. Yea, go before thee shall thy righteousness, the glory of Jehovah shall sweep thee on, literally,gather thee up. Then thou shalt call, and Jehovah shall answer; thou shalt cry, and He shall say, Here am I. If thou shalt put from thy midst the yoke, and the putting forth of the finger, and the speaking of naughtiness—three degrees of the subtlety of selfishness, which when forced back from violent oppression will retreat to scorn and from open scorn to backbiting,—and if thou draw out to the hungry thy soul,—tear out what is dear to thee in order to fill his need, the strongest expression for self-denial which the Old Testament contains,—and satisfy the soul that is afflicted, then shall uprise in the darkness thy light, and thy gloomshall be as the noonday. And guide thee shall Jehovah continually, and satisfy thy soul in droughts, and thy limbs make lissom; and thou shalt be like a garden well-watered,[267]and like a spring of water whose waters fail not. And they that are of thee shall build the ancient ruins; the foundations of generation upon generation thou shalt raise up, and they shall be calling thee Repairer-of-the-Breach, Restorer-of-Paths-for-habitation.[268]Thus theirrighteousnessin the sense of external vindication and stability, which so prevails with our prophet, shall be due to theirrighteousnessin that inward moral sense in which Amos and Isaiah use the word. And so concludes a passage, which fills the earliest, if not the highest, place in the glorious succession of Scriptures of Practical Love, to which belong the Sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, the Twenty-fifth of Matthew and the Thirteenth of First Corinthians. Its lesson is,—to go back to the figure of the draggled rose,—that no mere forms of religion, however divinely prescribed or conscientiously observed, can of themselves lift the distraught and trailing affections of man to the light and peace of Heaven; but that our fellow-men, if we cling to them with love and with arms of help, are ever the strongest props by which we may rise to God; that character grows rich and life joyful, not by the performance of ordinances with the cold conscience of duty, but by acts of service with the warm heart of love.
And yet such a prophecy concludes with an exhortation to the observance of one religious form, and places the keeping of the Sabbath on a level with the practice of love.If thou turn from the Sabbath thy foot, fromdoing thine own business on My holy day;[269]and callest theSabbath Pleasure,—the word is a strong one,Delight, Delicacy, Luxury,—Holy of Jehovah, Honourable; and dost honour it so as not to do thine own ways, or find thine own business, or keep making talk: then thou shalt find thy pleasure, orthy delight, in Jehovah,—note the parallel of pleasure in the Sabbath and pleasure in Jehovah,—and He shall cause thee to ride on the high places of the land, and make thee to feed upon the portion of Jacob thy father: yea, the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken.
Our prophet, then, while exalting the practical Service of Man at the expense of certain religious forms, equally exalts the observance of Sabbath; his scorn for their formalism changes when he comes to it into a strenuous enthusiasm of defence. This remarkable fact, which is strictly analogous to the appearance of the Fourth Commandment in a code otherwise consisting of purely moral and religious laws, is easily explained. Observe that our prophet bases his plea for Sabbath-keeping, and his assurance that it must lead to prosperity, not on its physical, moral or social benefits, but simply upon its acknowledgment of God. Not only is the Sabbath to be honoured because it is theHoly of JehovahandHonourable, butmaking it one's pleasureis equivalent tofinding one's pleasure in Him. The parallel between these two phrases in ver. 13 and ver. 14 is evident, and means really this: Inasmuch as ye do it unto the Sabbath, ye do it unto Me. The prophet, then, enforces the Sabbath simply on account of its religious and Godward aspect. Now, let us remember the truth, which he so often enforces, that the Service of Man, however ardently and widely pursued, can never lead or sum up our duty; that the Service of God has, logically and practically, a prior claim, for without it the Service of Man must suffer both inobligation and in resource. God must be our first resort—must have our first homage, affection and obedience. But this cannot well take place without some amount of definite and regular and frequent devotion to Him. In the most spiritual religion there is an irreducible minimum of formal observance. Now, in that wholesale destruction of religious forms, which took place at the overthrow of Jerusalem,[270]there was only one institution, which was not necessarily involved. The Sabbath did not fall with the Temple and the Altar: the Sabbath was independent of all locality; the Sabbath was possible even in exile. It was the one solemn, public and frequently regular form in which the nation could turn to God, glorify Him and enjoy Him. Perhaps, too, through the Babylonian fashion of solemnising the seventh day, our prophet realised again the primitive institution of the Sabbath, and was reminded that, since seven days is a regular part of the natural year, the Sabbath is, so to speak, sanctioned by the statutes of Creation.
An institution, which is so primitive, which is so independent of locality, which forms so natural a part of the course of time, but which, above all, has twice—in the Jewish Exile and in the passage of Judaism to Christianity—survived the abrogation and disappearance of all other forms of the religion with which it was connected, and has twice been affirmed by prophecy or practice to be an essential part of spiritual religion and the equal of social morality,—has amply proved its Divine origin and its indispensableness to man.
III.Social Crimes(ch. lix.).
Ch. lix. is, at first sight, the most difficult of all of "Second Isaiah" to assign to a date.[271]For it evidently contains both pre-exilic and exilic elements. On the one hand, its charges of guilt imply that the people addressed by it are responsible for civic justice to a degree, which could hardly be imputed to the Jews in Babylon. We saw that the Jews in the Exile had an amount of social freedom and domestic responsibility which amply accounts for the kind of sins they are charged with in ch. lviii. But ver. 14 of ch. lix. reproaches them with the collapse of justice in the very seat and public office of justice, of which it was not possible they could have been guilty except in their own land and in the days of their independence. On the other hand, the promises of deliverance in ch. lix. read very much as if they were exilic.Judgementandrighteousnessare employed in ver. 9 in their exilic sense,[272]and God is pictured exactly as we have seen Him in other chapters of our prophet.
Are we then left with a mystery? On the contrary, the solution is clear. Israel is followed into exile by her old conscience. The charges of Isaiah and Ezekiel against Jerusalem, while Jerusalem was still a "civitas," ring in her memory. She repeats the very words. With truth she says that her present state, so vividlydescribed in vv. 9-11, is due to sins of old, of which, though perhaps she can no longer commit them, she still feels the guilt. Conscience always crowds the years together; there is no difference of time in the eyes of God the Judge. And it was natural, as we have said already, that the nation should remember her besetting sins at this time; that her civic conscience should awake again, just as she was again about to become a civitas.[273][274]
The whole of this chapter is simply the expansion and enforcement of the first two verses, that keep clanging like the clangour of a great, high bell:Behold, Jehovah's hand is not shortened that it cannot save, neither is His ear heavy that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have been separators between you and your God, and yoursins have hiddenHisface from you, that He will not hear.There is but one thing that comes between the human heart and the Real Presence and Infinite Power of God; and that one thing is Sin. The chapter labours to show how real God is. Its opening verses talk ofHis Hand,His Ear,His Face. And the closing verses paint Him with the passions and the armour of a man,—a Hero in such solitude and with such forward force, that no imagination can fail to see the Vivid, Lonely Figure.And He saw that there was no man, and He wondered that there was none to interpose; therefore His own right arm brought salvation unto Him, and His righteousness it upheld Him. And He put on righteousness like a breastplate and salvation for an helmet upon His head; and He put on garments of vengeance for clothing, and wrapped Himself in zeal like a robe.Do not let us suppose this is mere poetry. Conceive what inspires it,—the great truth that in the Infinite there is a heart to throb for men and a will to strike for them. This is what the writer desires to proclaim, and what we believe the Spirit of God moved his poor human lips to give their own shape to,—the simple truth that there is One, however hidden He may be to men's eyes, who feels for men, who feels hotly for men, and whose will is quick and urgent to save them. Such an One tells His people, that the only thing which prevents them from knowing how real His heart and will are—the only thing which prevents them from seeing His work in their midst—is their sin.
The roll of sins to which the prophet attributes the delay of the people's deliverance is an awful one; and the man who reads it with conscience asleep might conclude that it was meant only for a period of extraordinary violence and bloodshed. Yet the chapter implies thatsociety exists, and that at least the forms of civilisation are in force. Men sue one another before the usual courts. But nonesueth in righteousness or goeth to the law in truth. They trust in vanity and speak lies.All these charges might be true of a society as outwardly respectable as our own. Nor is the charge of bloodshed to be taken literally. The Old Testament has so great a regard for the spiritual nature of man, that to deny the individual his rights or to take away the peace of God from his heart, it calls the shedding of innocent blood. Isaiah reminds us of many kinds of this moral murder when he says,your hands are full of blood: seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Ezekiel reminds us of others when he tells how God spake to him, that if hewarn not the wicked, and the same wicked shall die in his iniquity, his blood will I require at thy hand. And again a Psalm reminds us of the timewhen the Lord maketh inquisition for blood, He forgetteth not the cry of the poor.[275]This is what the Bible calls murder and lays its burning words upon,—not such acts of bloody violence as now and then make all humanity thrill to discover that in the heart of civilisation there exist men with the passions of the ape and the tiger, but such oppression of the poor, such cowardice to rebuke evil, such negligence to restore the falling, such abuse of the characters of the young and innocent, such fraud and oppression of the weak, as often exist under the most respectable life, and employ the weapons of a Christian civilisation in order to fulfil themselves. We have need to take the bold, violent standards of the prophets and lay them to our own lives,—the prophets that call the man who sells hishonesty for gain,a harlot, and hold himblood-guiltywho has wronged, tempted or neglected his brother. Do not let us suppose that these crimson verses of the Bible may be passed over by us as not applicable to ourselves. They do not refer to murderers or maniacs: they refer to social crimes, to which we all are in perpetual temptation, and of which we all are more or less guilty,—the neglect of the weak, the exploitation of the poor for our own profit, the soiling of children's minds, the multiplying of temptation in the way of God's little ones, the malice that leads us to blast another's character, or to impute to his action evil motives for which we have absolutely no grounds save the envy and sordidness of our own hearts. Do not let us fail to read all such verses in the clear light which John the Apostle throws on them when he says:He that loveth not abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.
The deliverance from Babylon has long been certain, since ch. xlviii.; all doubts in the way of Return have been removed, ch. xlix.-lii. 12; the means for the spiritual Restoration of the people have been sufficiently found, ch. liii. and preceding chapters on the Servant; Zion has been hailed from afar, ch. liv.; last calls to leave Babylon have been uttered, ch. lv.; last councils and comforts, lvi. 1-8; and the civic conscience has been rekindled, ch. lvi. 9-lix. There remains now only to take possession of the City herself; to rehearse the vocation of the restored people; and to realise all the hopes, fears, hindrances and practical problems of the future. These duties occupy the rest of our prophecy, chs. lx.-lxvi.
Ch. lx. is a prophecy as complete in itself as ch. liv. The City, which in liv. was hailed and comforted from afar, is in ch. lx. bidden rise and enjoy the glory that has at last reached her. Her splendours, hinted at in ch. liv., are seen in full and evident display. In chs. lxi.-lxii. her prophet, her genius and representative, rehearses to her his duties, and sets forth her place among the peoples. And in ch. lxiii. 1-7 we have another of those theophanies or appearances of the—SoleDivine Author of His people's salvation, which, abrupt and separate as if to heighten the sense of the solitariness of their subject—occur at intervals throughout our prophecy,—for instance, in ch. xlii., vv. 10-17, and in ch. lix. 16-19. These three sections, ch. lx., chs. lxi.-lxii. and ch. lxiii. 1-7, we will take together in this chapter of our volume.
I.Arise, Shine(ch. lx.)
The Sixtieth chapter of Isaiah is the spiritual counterpart of a typical Eastern day, with the dust laid and the darts taken out of the sunbeams,—a typical Eastern day in the sudden splendour of its dawn, the completeness and apparent permanence of its noon, the spaciousness it reveals on sea and land, and the barbaric profusion of life, which its strong light is sufficient to flood with glory.
Under such a day we see Jerusalem. In the first five verses of the chapter, she is addressed, as in ch. liv., as a crushed and desolate woman. But her lonely night is over, and from some prophet at the head of her returning children the cry peals,Arise, shine, for come hath thy light, and the glory of Jehovah hath risen upon thee. In the East the sun does not rise; the word is weak for an arrival almost too sudden for twilight. In the East the sun leaps above the horizon. You do not feel that he is coming, but that he is come. This first verse is suggested by the swiftness with which he bursts upon an Eastern city, and the shrouded form does not, as in our twilight, slowly unwrap itself, butshinesat once, all plates and points of glory. Then the figure yields: for Jerusalem is not merely one radiant point in a world equally lighted by the sun, butis herself Jehovah's unique luminary.For behold the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the peoples, but upon thee shall Jehovah arise, and His glory upon thee shall be seen. And nations shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.In the next two verses it is again a woman who is addressed.Lift upthine eyesround about and see, all of them have gathered, have come to thee: thy sons from afar are coming, and thy daughters are carried in the arms.[276]Then follows the fairest verse in the chapter.Then thou shalt see and be radiant, and thy heart shall throb and grow large; for there shall be turned upon thee the sea's flood-tide, and the wealth of the nations shall come to thee.The word which the Authorised English version translatedshall flow together, and our Revised Versionlightened, means both of these. It is liquid light,—light that ripples and sparkles and runs across the face; as it best appears in that beautiful passage of the thirty-fourth Psalm,they looked to Him and their faces were lightened. Here it suggests the light which a face catches from sparkling water. The prophet's figure has changed. The stately mother of her people stands not among the ruins of her city, but upon some great beach, with the sea in front,—the sea that casts up all heaven's light upon her face and drifts all earth's wealth to her feet, and her eyes are upon the horizon with the hope of her who watches for the return of children.
The next verses are simply the expansion of these two clauses,—about the sea's flood and the wealth of the Nations. Vv. 6-9 look first landward and then seaward, as from Jerusalem's own wonderful positionon the high ridge between Asia and the sea: between the gates of the East and the gates of the West. On the one side, the city's horizon is the range of Moab and Edom, that barrier, in Jewish imagination, of the hidden and golden East across which pour the caravans here pictured.Profusion of camels shall cover thee, young camels of Midian and Ephah; all of them from Sheba shall come: gold and frankincense shall they bring, and the praises of Jehovah shall they publish. All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered to thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister to thee: they shall come up with acceptance on Mine altar, and the house of My glory will I glorify.These were just what surged over Jordan from the far countries beyond, of which the Jews knew little more than the names here given,—tawny droves of camels upon the greenness of Palestine like a spate of the desert from which they poured; rivers of sheep brimming up the narrow drove-roads to Jerusalem:—conceive it all under that blazing Eastern sun. But then turning to Judah's other horizon, marked by the yellow fringe of sand and the blue haze of the sea beyond, the prophet cries for Jehovah:Who are these like a cloud that fly, and like doves to their windows? Surely towards Me the Isles[277]are stretching, and ships of Tarshish in the van, to bring thy sons from afar, their silver and their gold with them, to the Name of Jehovah of Hosts and to the Holy of Israel, for He hath glorified thee.The poetry of the Old Testament has been said to be deficient in its treatment of the sea; and certainly it dwells more frequently, as was natural for the imagination of an inland and a highland people to do, upon the hills. But in what literature will you find passagesof equal length more suggestive of the sea than those short pieces in which the Hebrew prophet sought to render the futile rage of the world, as it dashed on the steadfast will of God, by the roar and crash of the ocean on the beach;[278]or painted a nation's prosperity as the waves of a summer sea;[279]or described the long coastlands as stretching out to God, and the white-sailed ships coming up the horizon like doves to their windows!
The rest of the chapter, from ver. 10 onwards, is occupied with the rebuilding and adornment of Jerusalem, and with the establishment of the people in righteousness and peace. There is a very obvious mingling of the material and the moral. The Gentiles are to become subject to the Jew, but it is to be a voluntary submission before the evidence of Jerusalem's spiritual superiority. Nothing is said of a Messiah or a King. Jerusalem is to be a commonwealth; and, while hermagistracy shall be Peace and her overseers Righteousness, God Himself, in evident presence, is to be her light and glory. Thus the chapter ends with God and the People, and nothing else. God for an everlasting light around, and the people in their land, righteous, secure and growing very large.The least shall become a thousand, and the smallest a strong nation: I Jehovah will hasten it in its time.
This chapter has been put through many interpretations to many practical uses:—to describe the ingathering of the Gentiles to the Church (in the Christian year it is the Lesson for Epiphany), to prove the doctrine that the Church should live by the endowment of thekingdoms of this world, and to enforce the duty of costliness and magnificence in the public worship of God.The glory of the Lebanon shall come unto thee, fir-tree, plane-tree and sherbin together, to beautify the place of My sanctuary, and I will make the place of My feet glorious.
The last of these duties we may extend and qualify. If the coming in of the Gentiles is here represented as bringing wealth to the Church, we cannot help remembering that the going out to the Gentiles, in order to bring them in, means for us the spending of our wealth on things other than the adornment of temples; and that, besides the heathen, there are poor and suffering ones for whom God asks men's gold, as He asked it in olden days for the temple, that He may be glorified. Take that last phrase:—And—with all that material wealth which has flowed in from Lebanon, from Midian, from Sheba—I will make the place of My feet glorious. When this singular name was first uttered it was limited to the dwelling-place of the Ark and Presence of God, visible only on Mount Zion. But when God became man, and did indeed tread with human feet this world of ours, what were then theplaces of His feet? Sometimes, it is true, the Temple, but only sometimes; far more often where the sick lay, and the bereaved were weeping,—the pool of Bethesda, the death-room of Jairus' daughter, the way to the centurion's sick servant, the city gateways where the beggars stood, the lanes where the village folk had gathered, against His coming, their deaf and dumb, their palsied and lunatic. These werethe places of His feet, who Himself bare our sicknesses and carried our infirmities; and these are what He would seek our wealth to make glorious. They say that the reverence of men buildsnow no cathedrals as of old; nay, but the love of man, that Christ taught, builds far more of those refuges and houses of healing, scatters far more widely those medicines for the body, those instruments of teaching, those means of grace, in which God is as much glorified as in Jewish Temple or Christian Cathedral.
Nevertheless He, who setthe place of His feet, which He would have us to glorify, among the poor and the sick, was He, who also did not for Himself refuse that alabaster box and that precious ointment, which might have been sold for much and given to the poor. The worship of God, if we read Scripture aright, ought to be more than merely grave and comely. There should be heartiness and lavishness about it,—profusion and brilliance. Not of material gifts alone or chiefly, gold incense or rare wood, but of human faculties, graces and feeling; of joy and music and the sense of beauty. Take this chapter. It is wonderful, not so much for the material wealth which it devotes to the service of God's house, and which is all that many eyes ever see in it, as for the glorious imagination and heart for the beautiful, the joy in light and space and splendour, the poetry and the music, which use those material things simply as the light uses the wick, or as music uses the lyre, to express and reveal itself. What a call this chapter is to let out the natural wonder and poetry of the heart, its feeling and music and exultation,—all that is within us, as the Psalmist says,—in the Service of God. Why do we not do so? The answer is very simple. Because, unlike this prophet, we do not realise how present and full our salvation is; because, unlike him, we do not realise thatour light has come, and so we will notarise and shine.
II.The Gospel(chs. lxi.-lxii.)
The speaker in ch. lxi. is not introduced by name. Therefore he may be the Prophet himself, or he may be the Servant. The present expositor, while feeling that the evidence is not conclusive against either of these, and that the uncertainty is as great as in ch. xlviii. 16,[280]inclines to think that there is, on the whole, less objection to its being the prophet who speaks than to its being the Servant. See the appended note. But it is not a very important question, which is intended, for the Servant was representative ofprophecy; and if it be the prophet who speaks here, he also speaks with the conscience of the whole function and aim of the prophetic order. That Jesus Christ fulfilled this programme does not decide the question one way or the other; for a prophet so representative was as much the antetype and foreshadowing of Christ as the Servant himself was. On the whole, then, we must be content to feel about this passage, what we must have already felt about many others in our prophecy, that the writer is more anxious to place before us the whole range and ideal of the prophetic gift than to make clear in whom this ideal is realised; and for the rest Jesus of Nazareth so plainly fulfilled it, that it becomes, indeed, a very minor question to ask whom the writer may have intended as its first application.
If ch. lx. showed us the external glory of God's people, ch. lxi. opens with the programme of their inner mission. There we had the building and adornment of the Temple, thatJehovah might glorify His people: here we have the binding of broken hearts and the beautifying of soiled lives, thatJehovah may be glorified. But this inner mission also issues in external splendour, in a righteousness, which is like the adornment of a bride and like the beauty of spring.
The commission of the prophet is mainly to duties we have already studied in preceding passages, both on himself and on the Servant. It will be enough to point out its special characteristics.The Spirit of my Lord Jehovah is upon me, for that Jehovah hath anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim to the captive liberty, and to the prisoners open ways;[281]to proclaim anacceptable year for Jehovah, and a day of vengeance for our God; to comfort all that mourn; to offer to the mourners of Zion, to give unto them a crest[282]for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the mantle of praise for the spirit of dimness;[283]so that men may call them Oaks-of-Righteousness, the planting of Jehovah, that He may break into glory.
There are heard here all the keynotes of our prophet, and clear, too, is that usual and favourite direction of his thoughts from the inner and spiritual influences to the outward splendour and evidence, the passage from the comfort and healing of the heart to the rich garment, the renown, and his own dearest vision of great forest trees,—in short, Jehovah Himself breaking into glory. But one point needs special attention.
The prophet begins his commission by these words,to bring good tidings to the afflicted, and again says,to proclaim to the captive.The afflicted, orthe poor, as it is mostly rendered, is the classical name for God's people in Exile. We have sufficiently moved among this people to know for what reason thebringing of good tidingsshould here be reckoned as the first and most indispensable service that prophecy could render them. Why, in the life of every nation, there are hours, when the factors of destiny, that loom largest at other times, are dwarfed and dwindle before the momentousness of a piece of news,—hours, when the nation's attitude in a great moral issue, or her whole freedom and destiny, are determined by telegrams from the seat of war. The simultaneous news of Grant's capture of Vicksburg and Meade's defeat of Lee, news that finally turned English opinion, so long shamefully debating and wavering, tothe side of God and the slave; the telegrams from the army, for which silent crowds waited in the Berlin squares through the autumn nights of 1870, conscious that the unity and birthright of Germany hung upon the tidings,—are instances of the vital and paramount influence in a nation's history of a piece of news. The force of a great debate in Parliament, the expression of public opinion through all its organs, the voice of a people in a general election, things in their time as ominous as the Fates, all yield at certain supreme moments to the meaning of a simple message from Providence. Now it was fornewsfrom God that Israel waited in Exile; for good tidings and the proclamation of fact. They had with them a Divine Law, but no mere exposition of it could satisfy men who were captives and waited for the command of their freedom. They had with them Psalms, but no beauty of music could console them:How should we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?They had Prophecy, with its assurance of the love and the power of their God; and much as there was in it to help them to patience and to hope, general statements were not enough for them. They needed the testimony of a fact. Freedom and Restoration had been promised them: they waited for the proclamation that it was coming, for the good news that it had arrived. Now our prophecy is mainly this proclamation and good news of fact. The prophet uses before all other words two,—to call or proclaim, kara, and to tell good tidings, bisser. We found them in his opening chapter: we find them again here when he sums up his mission. A third goes along with them,to comfort, naham, but it is the accompaniment, and they are the burden, of his prophecy.
Butgood tidingsand theproclamationmeant somuch more than the mere political deliverance of Israel—meant the fact of their pardon, the tale of their God's love, of His provision for them, and of His wonderful passion and triumph of salvation on their behalf—that it is no wonder that these two words came to be ever afterwards the classical terms for all speech and prophecy from God to man. We actually owe the Greek words of the New Testament forgospelandpreachingto this time of Israel's history. The Greek term, from which we haveevangel,evangelistandevangelise, originally meant good news, but was first employed in a religious sense in the Greek translation of our prophecy. And our word "preach" is the heir, though not the lineal descendant, through the Latinprædicareand the Greek κηρυσσειν, of the word, which is translated in ch. lx. of our prophet toproclaim, but in ch. xl. tocallorcry. It is to the Exile that we trace the establishment among God's people of regular preaching side by side with sacramental and liturgical worship; for it was in the Exile that the Synagogue arose, whose pulpit was to become as much the centre of Israel's life as was the altar of the Temple. And it was from the pulpit of a synagogue centuries after, when the preaching had become dry exposition or hard lawgiving, that Jesus re-read our prophecy and affirmed again thegood newsof God.
What is true of nations is true of individuals. We indeed support our life by principles; we develop it by argument;—we cannot lay too heavy stress upon philosophy and law. But there is something of far greater concern than either argument or the abstract principles from which it is developed; something that our reason cannot find of itself, that our conscience but increases our longing for. It is, whether certain thingsare facts or not; whether, for instance, the Supreme Power of the Universe is on the side of the individual combatant for righteousness; whether God is love; whether Sin has been forgiven; whether Sin and Death have ever been conquered; whether the summer has come in which humanity may put forth their shoots conscious that all the influence of heaven is on their side, or whether, there being no heavenly favours, man must train his virtue and coax his happiness to ripen behind shelters and in conservatories of his own construction. Now Christ comes to us with the good news of God that it is so. The supreme force in the Universe is on man's side, and for man has won victory and achieved freedom. God has proclaimed pardon. A Saviour has overcome sin and death. We are free to break from evil. The struggle after holiness is not the struggle of a weakly plant in an alien soil and beneath a wintry sky, counting only upon the precarious aids of human cultivation; but summer has come, the acceptable year of the Lord has begun, and all the favour of the Almighty is on His people's side. These are thegood tidingsandproclamationof God, and to every man who believes them they must make an incalculable difference in life.
As we have said, the prophet passes in the rest of this prophecy from the spiritual influences of his mission to its outward effects. The people's righteousness is described in the external fashion, which we have already studied in Chapter Fourteen; Zion's espousals to Jehovah are celebrated, but into that we have also gone thoroughly (pp.398ff.); the restoration of prophecy in Jerusalem is described (lxii. 6-9), as in ch. lii. 8; and another call is given to depart from Babylon and every foreign city and come to Zion. This call coming now,so long after the last, and when we might think that the prophet had wholly left Babylon behind, need not surprise us. For even though some Jews had actually arrived at Zion, which is not certain, others were hanging back in Babylon; and, indeed, such a call as this might fitly be renewed for the next century or two: so many of God's people continued to forget that their citizenship was in Zion.
III.The Divine Saviour(ch. lxiii. 1-7).
Once again the prophet turns to hail, in his periodic transport, the Solitary Divine Hero and Saviour of His people.
That the writer of this piece is the main author of "Second Isaiah" is probable, both because it is the custom of the latter to describe at intervals the passion and effort of Israel's Mighty One, and because several of his well-known phrases meet us in this piece. Thespeaker in righteousness mighty to saverecalls ch. xlv. 19-24; andthe day of vengeance and year of my redeemedrecalls ch. lxi. 2; andI looked, and there was no helper, and I gazed, and there was none to uphold, recalls lix. 16. The prophet is looking out from Jerusalem towards Edom,—a direction in which the watchmen upon Zion had often in her history looked for the return of her armies from the punishment of Israel's congenital and perpetual foe. The prophet, however, sees the prospect filled up, not by the flashing van of a great army, but by a solitary figure, without ally, without chariot, without weapons,swaying on in the wealth of his strength. The keynote of the piece is the loneliness of this Hero. A figure is used, which, where battle would only have suggested complexity, enthrals us with the spectacle ofsolitary effort,—the figure of trampling through some vast winefat alone. The Avenging Saviour of Israel has a fierce joy in being alone: it is his new nerve to effort and victory,—therefore mine own right arm, it brought salvation to me. We see One great form in the strength of one great emotion.My fury, it upheld me.
The interpretation of this chapter by Christians has been very varied, and often very perverse. To use the words of Calvin, "Violenter torserunt hoc caput Christiani." But, as he sees very rightly, it is not the Messiah nor the Servant of Jehovah, who is here pictured, but Jehovah Himself. This Solitary is the Divine Saviour of Israel, as in ch. xlii. 7 f. and in ch. lix. 16 f. In Chapter Eight of this volume we spoke so fully of the Passion of God, that we may now refer to that chapter for the essential truth which underlies our prophet's anthropomorphism, and claims our worship where a short sight might only turn the heart away in scorn at the savage and blood-stained surface. One or two other points, however, demand our attention before we give the translation.
Why does the prophet look in the direction of Edom for the return of his God? Partly, it is to be presumed, because Edom was as good a representative as he could choose of the enemies of Israel other than Babylon.[284]But also partly, perhaps, because of the names which match the red colours of his piece,—the wine and the blood. Edom meansred, and Bossrah is assonant to Bôsser, avinedresser.[285]Fitter backgroundand scenery the prophet, therefore, could not have for his drama of Divine Vengeance. But we must take care, as Dillmann properly remarks, not to imagine that any definite, historical invasion of Edom by Israel, or other chastening instrument of Jehovah, is here intended. It is a vision which the prophet sees of Jehovah Himself: it illustrates the passion, the agony, the unshared and unaided effort which the Divine Saviour passes through for His people.
Further, it is only necessary to point out, that the term in ver. 1 given assplendidby the Authorised Version, which I have renderedsweeping, is literallyswelling, and is, perhaps, best rendered bysailing onorswinging on. The other verb which the Revised Version rendersmarchingmeansswaying, or moving the head or body from one side to another, in the pride and fulness of strength. In ver. 2like a wine-treaderis literallylike him that treadeth in the pressing-house—Geth (the first syllable of Gethsemane, the oil-press). But ור ה in ver. 3 is thepressing-trough.