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FOOTNOTES:
[1] See p. 343.
[2] At least those to whom the first twenty-three verses were addressed. There is distinct blame of worshipping in the groves of Asherah in the appended oracle (vv. 24-31), which is proof that this oracle was given at an earlier period than the rest of the chapter—a fair instance of the very great difficulty we have in determining the dates of the various prophecies of Isaiah.
[3] Les Misérables: "a Tempest in a Brain."
[4] Ewald happily suggests that verse 17 has dropped out of, and should be restored to, its proper position at the end of the first "woe," where it contributes to the development of the meaning far more than from where it stands in the text.
[5] Read past tenses, as in the margin of Revised Version, for all the future tenses, or better, the historical present, down to the end of the chapter.
[6] It is part of the argument for connecting ix. 8 with v. 25 that this phrase would be very natural after the earthquake described in v. 25.
[7] King Lear, act iv., sc. 2.
[8] Ulrici: Shakespeare's Dramatic Art.
[9] A Browning's "Christmas Eve."
[10] Even Calvin, though in order to prove that Isaiah had been prophesying for some time before his inaugural vision, says that his commission implies some years' actual experience of the obstinacy of the people.
[11] The Pul of 2 Kings xv. 19 and the Tiglath-pileser of 2 Kings xvi. are the same.
[12] Isa. vii. 12.
[13] There is a play upon words here, which may be reproduced in English by the help of a North-England term: If ye have not faith, ye cannot have staith.
[14] Page 96.
[15] Physics and Politics (International Scientific Series), pp. 75 ff. One of the finest modern illustrations of the connection between faith and common-sense is found in the Letters of General Gordon to His Sister. Gordon's coolness in face of the slave trade, the just survey he makes of it, and the sensible advice which he gives about meeting it stand well in contrast to the haste and rash proposals of philanthropists at home, and are evidently due to his conviction that the slave trade, like everything else in the world, is in the hands of God, and so may be calmly studied and wisely checkmated. Gordon's letters make very clear how much of his shrewdness in dealing with men was due to the same source. It is instructive to observe throughout, how his complete resignation to the will of God and his perfect obedience delivered him from prejudices and partialities, from distractions and desires, that make sober judgement impossible in other men.
[16] 1 Sam. xii. 17.
[17] 1 Kings xiii. 3.
[18] Chap. xxxviii.
[19] Ewald.
[20] Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 275.
[21] English Version, "law," but not the law of Moses. Isaiah refers to the word that has come by himself.
[22] The Messiah, or Anointed, is used in the Old Testament of many agents of God: high-priest (Lev. iv. 3); ministers of the Word (Ps. cv. 15); Cyrus (Isa. xlv. 1); but mostly of God's king, actual (1 Sam. xxiv. 7), or expected (Dan. ix. 25). So it became in Jewish theology the technical term for the coming King and the Captain of salvation.
[23] I regret very much that in previous editions I should have erroneously imputed this opinion to Dr. Hermann Schultz—through a mistranslation of his words on pp. 726, 727 of his A. T. Theologie.
[24] Prophets of Israel, p. 306.
[25] See further on this passage pp. 180-183. As is there pointed out, while these passages on the Messiah are indeed infrequent and unconnected, there is a very evident progress through them of Isaiah's conception of his Hero's character.
[26] Stanton: The Jewish and Christian Messiah.
[27] Delitzsch, who fancies that the fall of Samaria is a completed affair only in the vision of the prophet, not in reality.
[28] 2 Kings xvii. 5.
[29] Ewald. The original runs thus: "Ki tsav la-tsav, tsav la-tsav qav la-qav, qav la-qav; z'eir sham z'eir sham."
[30] Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Letter cxxxvi.
[31] It will be noticed that in the above version a different reading is adopted from the meaningless clause at the end of verse 27 in the English version, out of which a proper heading for the subsequent itinerary has been obtained by Robertson Smith (Journal of Philology, 1884, p. 62).
[32] The authenticity of this hymn has been called in question.
[33] Dean Plumptre notes the identity of the ethical terminology of this passage with that of the book of Proverbs, and conjectures that the additions to the original nucleus, chaps. x.-xxiv., and therefore the whole form, of the book of Proverbs, may be due to the editorship of Isaiah, and perhaps was the manual of ethics, on which he sought to mould the character of Hezekiah (Expositor, series ii., v., p. 213).
[34] Perhaps for land—'arets—we ought, with Lagarde, to read tyrant—'arits.
[35] Didron, Christian Iconography, Engl. trans., i., 432.
[36] Didron, Christian Iconography, Engl. trans., i., 426.
[37] See Didron for numerous interesting instances of this.
[38] Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, pp. 20, 21.
[39] Galton, quoted by Darwin.
[40] Isa. lxiii. 13, 14; Hos. xi. 4.
[41] Records of the Past, vii., 40.
[42] Cheyne.
[43] W. R. Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 282.
[44] Cheyne.
[45] Browning's Christmas Eve.
[46] Chap. viii. 1 (p. 119).
[47] So Dr. B. Davis, quoted by Cheyne.
[48] So Bredenkamp in his recent commentary on Isaiah.
[49] Cf. further with this passage F. J. Church, Trial and Death of Socrates, Introd. xli. ff.
[50] Cf. with the fifth and sixth verses of chap. xxxii. the forcible passage in the introduction to Carlyle's Cromwell's Letters, beginning, "Sure enough, in the Heroic Century, as in the Unheroic, knaves and cowards ... were not wanting. But the question always remains, Did they lie chained?" etc.
[51] Cf. Newman, Oxford University Sermons, xv.
[52] Our translation, though picturesque, is misleading. The voice does not inquire, "What of the night?" i.e., whether it be fair or foul weather, but "How much of the night is passed?" literally "What from off the night?" This brings out a pathos that our English version has disguised. Edom feels that her night is lasting terribly long.
[53] It is confusing to find this date attached to Sennacherib's invasion of 701, unless, with one or two critics, we place Hezekiah's accession in 715. But Hezekiah acceded in 728 or 727, and 701 would therefore be his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year. Mr. Cheyne, who takes 727 as the year of Hezekiah's accession, gets out of the difficulty by reading "Sargon" for "Sennacherib" in this verse and in 2 Kings xiii., and thus secures another reference to that invasion of Judah, which he supposes to have taken place under Sargon between 712 and 710. By the change of a letter some would read twenty-fourth for fourteenth. But in any case this date is confusing.
[54] Records of the Past, i. 33 ff. vii.; Schrader's Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament (Whitehouse's translation).
[55] Records of the Past, i. 38; vii. 62.
[56] Ibid., i., 40; Schrader, i., 286.
[57] Chap. i. 7-9.
[58] See p. 238.
[59] Isa. xxxvi. 3.
[60] Schrader, Cuneiform Inscriptions, O.T., i., p. 286.
[61] 2 Kings xviii. 13-16. Here closes a paragraph. Ver. 17 begins to describe what Sennacherib did, in spite of Hezekiah's submission. He had withdrawn the army that had invested Jerusalem, for Hezekiah purchased its withdrawal by the tribute he sent. But Sennacherib, in spite of this, sent another corps of war against Jerusalem, which second attack is described in ver. 17 and onwards.
[62] Didron Christian Iconography, fig. 52.
[63] Chap. xxxvii.
[64] Chaps. iv. 4; xxx. 33.
[65] Cf. Browning's La Saisiaz.
[66] A still more striking analogy may be found in the case of Napoleon I. when in the East in 1799. He had just achieved a small victory which partly masked the previous failure of his campaign, when "Sir Sydney Smith now contrived that he should receive a packet of journals, by which he was informed of all that had passed recently in Europe and the disasters that France had suffered. His resolution was immediately taken. On August 22nd he wrote to Kleber announcing that he transferred to him the command of the expedition, and that he himself would return to Europe.... After carefully spreading false accounts of his intentions, he set sail on the night of the same day" (Professor Seeley, article "Napoleon" in the Ency. Brit.).
[67] The statement of the Egyptian legend, that it was from a point in the neighbourhood of Pelusium that Sennacherib's army commenced its retreat, is not contradicted by anything in the Jewish records, which leave the locality of the disaster very vague, but, on the contrary, receives some support from what Isaiah expresses as at least the intention of Sennacherib (chap. xxxvii. 25).
[68] Gibbon, Decline and Fall, xliii.
[69] Arnold, Lectures on Modern History, 177, quoted by Stanley.
[70] Gibbon, xlii.; lix.
[71] Heb. xi.
[72] Isa. xxxviii., xxxix., has evidently been abridged from 2 Kings xx. and in some points has to be corrected by the latter. Chap. xxxviii. 21, 22, of course, must be brought forward before ver. 7.
[73] Doughty's Arabia Deserta: Travels in Northern Arabia, 1876-1878.
[74] By Professor Fiske.
[75] "Those principles of natural philosophy which smothered the religions of the East with their rank and injurious growth are almost entirely absent from the religion of the Hebrews. Here the motive-power of development is to be found in ethical ideas, which, though not indeed alien to the life of other nations, were not the source from which their religious notions were derived."—(Lotze's Microcosmos, Eng. Transl., il., 466.)
[76] P. 447 ff.
[77] It is, however, only just to add that, as Mr. Sayce has pointed out in the Hibbert Lectures for 1887 (p. 365), the claims of Babylonian kings and heroes for a seat on the mountain of the gods were not always mere arrogance, but the first efforts of the Babylonian mind to emancipate itself from the gloomy conceptions of Hades and provide a worthy immortality for virtue. Still most of the kings who pray for an entrance among the gods do so on the plea that they have been successful tyrants—a considerable difference from such an assurance as that of the sixteenth Psalm.
[78] The popular Semitic conception of Hades contained within it neither grades of condition, according to the merits of men, nor any trace of an infernal torment in aggravation of the unsubstantial state to which all are equally reduced. This statement is true of the Old Testament till at least the Book of Daniel. Sheol is lit by no lurid fires, such as made the later Christian hell intolerable to the lost. That life is unsubstantial; that darkness and dust abound; above all, that God is not there, and that it is impossible to praise Him, is all the punishment which is given in Sheol. Extraordinary vice is punished above ground, in the name and family of the sinner. Sheol, with its monotony, is for average men; but extraordinary piety can break away from it (Ps. xvi.).
[79] Readers will remember a parallel to this ode in Carlyle's famous chapter on Louis the Unforgotten. No modern has rivalled Carlyle in his inheritance of this satire, except it be he whom Carlyle called "that Jew blackguard Heine."
[80] vv. 14-16, which are very perplexing. In 14 a company is introduced to us very vaguely as those or yonder ones, who are represented as seeing the bright side of the convulsion which is the subject of the chapter. They cry aloud from the sea; that is, from the west of the prophet. He is therefore in the east, and in captivity, in the centre of the convulsion. The problem is to find any actual historical situation, in which part of Israel was in the east in captivity, and part in the west free and full of reasons for praising God for the calamity, out of which their brethren saw no escape for themselves.
[81] The mention of Moab (xxv. 10, 11) is also consistent with a pre-exilic date, but does not necessarily imply it.
[82] E.g., xxv. 6-8, 10, 11; xxvii. 10, 11, 9, 12, 13.
[83] Even at the risk of incurring Canon Cheyne's charge of "ineradicable error," I feel I must keep to the older view of chap. xxxv. which makes it refer to the return from exile. No doubt the chapter covers more than the mere return, and includes "the glorious condition of Israel after the return;" but vv. 4 and 10 are undoubtedly addressed to Jews still in exile and undelivered.
[84] Hezekiah's expression for death, xxxviii. 12.
[85] I think this must be the meaning of ver. 16, if we are to allow that it has any sympathy with vv. 14 and 15. Bredenkamp suggests that the persons meant are themselves the dead. Jehovah has glorified the Church on earth; but the dead below are still in trouble, and pour out prayers (Virgil's "preces fundunt," Æneid, vi., 55), beneath this punishment which God causes to pass on all men (ver. 14). Bredenkamp bases this exegesis chiefly on the word for "prayer," which means chirping or whispering, a kind of voice imputed to the shades by the Hebrews and other ancient peoples. But while this word does originally mean whispering, it is never in Scripture applied to the dead, but, on the other hand, is a frequent name for divining or incantation. I therefore have felt compelled to understand it as used in this passage of the living, whose only resource in face of death—Goa's discipline par excellence—is to pour out incantations. If it be objected that the prophet would scarcely parallel the ordinary incantations on behalf of the dead with supplications to Jehovah, the answer is that he is talking poetically or popularly.
[86] English version, fallen; i.e., like our expression for the birth of animals, dropped.
[87] Technical Hebrew word for the inhabitants of the underworld—the shades.
[88] Extracted from the Assyrian Descent of Istar to Hades (Dr. Jeremias' German translation, p. 11, and Records of the Past, i., 145).
[89] Cf. James i. 17.
Transcriber's note:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been preserved except in obvious cases of typographical error.
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