[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).