[339] LXX. τοῖς προεστηκόσι: evidently in ignorance of the reading or the meaning.
[340] The burning of a body was regarded, as we have seen (Amos ii. 1), as a great sacrilege; and was practised, outside times of pestilence only in cases of great criminals: Lev. xx. 14; xxi. 9; Josh. vii. 25. Doughty (Arabia Deserta, 68) mentions a case in which, in Medina, a Persian pilgrim was burned to death by an angry crowd for defiling Mohammed's tomb.
[341] The Assyrian inscriptions record at least three—in 803, 765, 759.
[342] As in Psalm lxxviii. 50. הִסְגִּיר, to give up, is so seldom used absolutely (Deut. xxxii. 30 is poetry and elliptic) that we may well believe it was followed by words signifying to what the city was to be given up.
[344] See Chapter VI., Section [3].
[345] The phrase is uncertain.
[346] Wellhausen thinks that the prophet could not have put the parenthesis in the mouth of the traders, and therefore regards it as an intrusion or gloss. But this is hypercriticism. The last clause, however, may be a mere clerical repetition of ii. 6.
[347] Isa. lviii. See the exposition of the passage in the writer's Isaiah xl.-lxvi. (Expositor's Bible Series), pp. 417 ff.: "Our prophet, while exalting the practical service of man at the expense of certain religious forms, equally exalts the observance of the Sabbath; ... he places the keeping of the Sabbath on a level with the practice of love."
[348] She shall rise, etc.—The clause is almost the same as in ix. 5b, and the text differs from the LXX., which omits and heave. Is it an insertion?