[CHAP. I. AND II.]
The prophet begins with the words: "Hear, all ye people, hearken, O earth and the fulness thereof, and let the Lord God be witness against you, the Lord from His holy temple. For, behold, the Lord cometh forth out of His place, and cometh down, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains are melted under Him, and the valleys are cleft, as wax before the fire, as waters poured down a steep place. For the transgression of Jacob is all this, and for the sins of the house of Israel." Vers. 2-5.
This majestic exordium has been misunderstood in various ways: First, by those who, like Hitzig, would understand by the people, צמים in ver. 2, the tribes of Israel. We shall show, when commenting on Zech. xi. 10, that this is altogether inadmissible. But in the present case especially, this interpretation must be rejected; partly on account of the reference to the words of the elder Micah, and partly on account of the parallel terms, "O earth and the fulness thereof," which, according to the constant usus loquendi, lead us far beyond the narrow limits of Palestine. On the other hand, they who by the צמים rightly understand the nations of the whole earth, are mistaken in this, that they consider them as mere witnesses, whom the Lord calls up against His unthankful people, instead of considering them as the very same against whom the Lord bears witness; and that they come into consideration from this point of view, clearly appears from the words, "The Lord be witness against you." As regards צד with ב following, compare, e.g., Mal. iii. 5.—Another mistake is committed in the definition of the way and manner of the divine witness. The greater number of interpreters suppose it to be the subsequent admonitory, reproving, and threatening discourse of the prophet. Thus, e.g., Michaelis, who explains: "Do not despise and lightly esteem such a witness, who by me earnestly and publicly testifies to you His will." But in opposition to this view, it appears from ver. 3, that here, as well as in Mal. iii. 5, "And I will come near to you in judgment, and I am a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against those that swear to a lie," the witness is a real one,—that it consists in the actual attestation of the guilt by the punishment, viz., by the divine judgment described in vers. 3, 4. The words, "The Lord cometh forth out of His place, and cometh down," there correspond to, "From His holy temple,"—from which it is evident, at the same time, that by the temple, the heavenly temple must be understood.
We have thus, in vers. 2-4, before us the description of a sublime theophany, not for a partial judgment upon Judah, but for a judgment upon the whole world, the people of which are called upon to gather around their judge—whom the prophet beholds as already approaching, descending from His glorious habitation in heaven, accompanied by the insignia of His power, the precursors of the judgment—and silently to wait for His judicial and penal sentence.[1]
But how is it to be explained that with the words, "For the transgression of Jacob is all this," etc., there is a sudden transition to the judgments upon Israel, yea, that the prophet goes on as if Israel alone had been spoken of? Only from the relation in which these two judgments stand to one another. For they are perfectly one in substance. They are separated only by space, time, and unessential circumstances; so that we may say that the general judgment appears in every partial judgment upon Israel. In order to give expression to the thought, that it is the judge of the world who is to judge Israel, the prophets not unfrequently represent the Lord appearing to judge the whole world; and in Israel, the Microcosmos, it was indeed judged. We have a perfectly analogous case, e.g., in Is. chap. ii.-iv. It is only by means of a very forced explanation, that it can be denied that after the prophet has, by a few bold touches, from ii. 6-9, described the moral debasement of the Covenant-people, and marked out pride as its last source, the last judgment upon the whole earth forms the subject of discourse. In that judgment there will be a most clear revelation of the vanity of all which is created—a vanity which, in the present course of the world, is so frequently concealed—and that the Lord alone is exalted, and that those who now shut their eyes will then be compelled to acknowledge these truths. That Isaiah has this general judgment in view, is too clearly proved by the sublimity of the whole description, by the express mention of the whole earth, e.g., ii. 19, and by not limiting, in the individualized description in ver. 12 sqq., the high and lofty which is to be brought low to Judah alone, but by extending it to the whole world. But in iii. 1 ff. the prophet suddenly passes over to the typical, penal judgment upon Judah; and the כי, at the commencement, shows that he does not consider this subject as one altogether new, but as being substantially identical with the preceding subject. This reminds us forcibly of the mode in which, in the prophecies of our Lord, the references to the destruction of Jerusalem, and to the last judgment, are connected with one another. In the "burden of Babylon" in chap. xiii. likewise, the judgment of the Lord upon the whole earth is first described. Nor is it only on the territory of prophecy that this close connection of the general judgment with the inferior judgments upon the Covenant-people appears. In Ps. lxxxii. 8, e.g., after the unrighteousness prevailing among the Covenant-people has been described, the Lord is called upon to come to judge, not them alone, but the whole earth; compare my Commentary on Ps. vii. 8, lvi. 8, lix. 6.
The prophet thus passes over, in ver. 5, from the general manifestation of divine justice to its special manifestation among the Covenant-people, and mentions here, as the most prominent points upon which it will be inflicted, Samaria and Jerusalem, the two capitals, from which the apostasy from the Lord spread over the rest of the country. He mentions Samaria first, and then, in vers. 6, 7, he describes its destruction which was brought about by the Assyrians, before he makes mention of that of Jerusalem, because the apostasy took place first in Samaria, and hence the punishment also was hastened on. The latter circumstance, which is merely a consequence of the former, is in an one-sided manner made prominent by the greater number of interpreters, who therein follow the example of Jerome. It was at the same time, however, probably the intention of the prophet to be done with Samaria, in order that he might be at liberty to take up exclusively the case of Judah and Jerusalem—the main objects of his prophetic ministry.
He makes the transition to this in ver. 8, by means of the words: "On that account I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked; I will make a wailing like the jackals, and a mourning like the ostriches." "On that account"—i.e., on account of the judgment upon Judah, to be announced in the subsequent verses. It is commonly supposed that the prophet here speaks in his own person; thus, e.g., Rosenmüller: "The prophet mourns in a bitter lamentation for the number and magnitude of the calamities impending over the Israelitish people." But the correct view rather is, that the prophet, when, in his inward vision, he sees the divine judgments not remaining and stopping at Samaria, but poured out like a desolating torrent over Judah and Jerusalem, suddenly sinks his own consciousness in that of his suffering people. We have thus here before us an imperfect symbolical action, similar to that more finished one which occurs in Is. xx. 3, 4, and which can be explained only by a deeper insight into the nature of prophecy, according to which the dramatic character is inseparable from it. The transition from the mere description of what is present in the inward vision only, to the prophet's own action, is, according to this view, very easy. If we confine ourselves to the passage before us, the following arguments are in favour of our view. 1. The predicates שילל and ערום cannot be explained upon the supposition that the prophet describes only his own painful feelings on account of the condition of his people. Even if ערום stood alone, the explanation by "naked," in the sense of "deprived of the usual and decent dress, and, on the contrary, clothed in dirt and rags," would be destitute of all proof and authority. No instance whatsoever is found of the outward habit of a mourner being designated as nakedness. But it is still more arbitrary thus to deal with שילל, whether it be explained by "deprived of his mental faculties on account of the unbounded grief of his soul,"—as is done by several Jewish expositors (who, in the explanation of this passage, would have done much better, had they followed the Chaldee, in whom the correct view is found; only that he, giving up the figurative representation, substitutes the third person for the first, paraphrasing it thus: "On that account they shall wail and howl, they shall go stripped and naked," etc.),—or by "badly clothed," as is done by the greater number of Christian expositors. The signification "robbed," "plundered," is the only established one; compare שולל in Job xii. 17-19. The parallel passages, in which nakedness appears as the characteristic feature of the captives taken in war, show how little we are entitled to depart from the most obvious signification, in these two words. Thus we find immediately afterwards, in ver. 11: "Pass ye away, ye inhabitants of Saphir, having your shame naked;" on which Michaelis remarks: "With naked bodies, as is the case with those who are led into captivity after having been stripped of their clothes." Thus Is. xx. 3, 4: "And the Lord said. Like as My servant Isaiah walketh naked and barefoot three years, for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and Ethiopia, so shall the king of Assyria lead away the prisoners of Egypt, and the prisoners of Ethiopia, young men and old men, naked and barefoot;" compare Is. xlvii. 3.—2. The term התפלשתי, in ver. 10, is in favour of the supposition, that the prophet here appears as the representative of the future condition of his people. The Imperat. fem. התפלשי of the marginal reading is evidently, as is commonly the case, only the result of the embarrassment of the Mazorets. The reading of the text can be pointed as the first person of the Preterite only; for the view of Rosenmüller, who takes it as the second person of the Preterite, which here is to have an optative signification, is, grammatically, inadmissible. Rückert's explanation, "In the house of dust (zu Staubheim), I have strewed dust upon me," is quite correct. But if here we must suppose that the prophet suddenly passes over from the address to his unfortunate people, to himself as their representative, why should not this supposition be the natural one in ver. 8 also?
The correctness of the view which we have given is further strengthened, if we compare the similar lamentations of the prophets in other passages, in all of which the same results will be found. In Jer. xlviii. 31, e.g., "Therefore will I howl over Moab, and cry out over all Moab, over the men of Kir-heres shall he groan," the "he" in the last clause sufficiently shows how the "I" in the two preceding clauses, is to be understood,—especially if Is. xvi. 7, "Therefore Moab howleth over Moab," be compared. But if this interpretation be correct in Jeremiah, it must certainly be correct in Is. xv. 5 also: "My heart crieth out over Moab,"—a passage which Jeremiah had in view; and this so much the more, that in Is. xvi. 9-11—where a similar lamentation for Moab occurs: "Therefore do I bewail as for Jazer for the vine of Sibmah; I water thee with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh.... Therefore my bowels sound like a harp for Moab, mine inward parts for Kirhareseth"—it is quite unsuitable to think of a lamentation of the prophet, which is expressive of his own grief. This was seen by the Chaldee, who renders "my bowels" by "bowels of the Moabites,"—a view the correctness of which has been strikingly demonstrated by Vitringa: "Although," he says, "the emotion of compassion be by no means unsuitable in the prophet, yet no one will be readily convinced that the prophet was so much concerned for the vines of Sibmah and Jazer, and for the crops of the summer-fruits of a nation hostile and opposed to the people of God, that it should have been for him a cause for lamentation and wailing." In Is. xxi., in the prophecy against Babylon, and in the lamentation in vers. 3, 4, "Therefore are my loins filled with pain, pangs take hold upon me as the pangs of a woman that travaileth, etc., the night of my pleasure has been turned into terror," it is clearly shown in what sense such lamentations are to be understood. By "the night of pleasure," we can, especially by a comparison of Jeremiah, understand only the night of the capture of Babylon, in which the whole city was given up to drunkenness and riot. But it is impossible that the prophet should say that this night—the precursor of the long-desired day for Israel—had been turned for him into terror. Either the whole lamentation is without any meaning, or the prophet speaks in the name of Babylon, and that, not of the Babylon of the present, but of the Babylon of the future. This must be granted, even by those who assert that this portion was composed at a later period; so that, even from this quarter, the soundness of our view cannot be assailed.
In ver. 9, the prophet returns to quiet description, from the symbolical action to which he had been carried away by his emotions. The subject of this description he states in the words: "It cometh unto Judah; it cometh unto the gate of my people, unto Jerusalem." By individualizing, he endeavours to give a lively view of the thought, and to impress it. He begins with an allusion to the lamentation of David over Saul and Jonathan in 2 Sam. i. 17 ff., which is so much the more significant, that in this impending catastrophe, Israel also was to lose his king (compare iv. 9), and that in it David was to experience the fate of Saul. He then indicates the stations by which the hostile army advances towards Jerusalem, and describes how, from thence, it spreads over the whole country, even to its southern boundary, and carries away the inhabitants into exile. But, in doing so, he always chooses places, whose names might, in some way, be brought into connection with what they were now suffering; so that the whole passage forms a chain of paronomasias. These, however, are not by any means idle plays. They have, throughout, a practical design. The threatening is thereby to be, as it were, localized. The thought of a divine judgment could not but be called forth in every one who should think of one of the places mentioned. Jerusalem is first spoken of in ver. 9 as the centre of the life of Judah: "The gate of my people," etc., being tantamount to "the city or metropolis of it." Then, it appears a second time in ver. 12, in the middle between five Judean places preceding and five following it,—the number ten, which is the symbolical signification of completeness, indicating that the judgment is to be altogether comprehensive. The five places mentioned after Jerusalem are all of them situated to the south of it. That the five places, the mention of which precedes that of Jerusalem, are all to be sought to the north of it, and that, hence, the judgment advances from the north in geographical order, as is the case in Is. x. 28 ff. also, is evident from the fact that Beth-Leaphrah, which is identical with Ophrah, is situated in the territory of Benjamin, and that Beth-Haezel, which is identical with Azal in Zech. xiv. 5, was situated in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Hence, we cannot suppose that Zaanan here is identical with Zenan, which is situated in the south of Jerusalem, Josh. xv. 37, nor Saphir with Samir.
The question still arises, In what event did the threatening of punishment, contained in chap. i., find its fulfilment? Theodoret, Cyril, Tarnovius, Marckius, Jahn, and others, refer it to the Assyrian invasion. Jerome referred it to the Babylonish captivity: "The same sin," he says, "yea, the same punishment of sin which shall overturn Samaria, is to extend to Judah, yea, even unto the gates of my city of Jerusalem. For, as Samaria was overturned by the Assyrians, so Judah and Jerusalem shall be overturned by the Chaldeans." This opinion was adopted by Michaelis and others.