A very simple answer is purposely obscured by connecting some things with it which have a remote bearing on the subject, and others which have no connection with it at all. "Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good," is an obscure allusion to the age of the child: and his name shall be called Immanuel, is of no significance, for he might as well be called by any other name. When we first read the passage, we see nothing distinct: all is in a kind of penumbra; but after looking for a short time, as in a curiously shaded picture, an image, an idea, shows or appears on the ground-work, well marked and defined.
The explanation we have given of the passage from Isaiah is justified and made apparent by the language used in the first, second, and third verses of the eighth chapter of this prophet. It seems the Lord wished to prove to Ahaz, by actual demonstration, that what he promised should be fulfilled to the letter. The prophet says, he took with him two faithful witnesses and went in to the prophetess (who was the virgin) and she conceived and bare a son. Then when the son was born, the Lord said to the prophet, that before the child could pronounce the name of father or mother, "the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria." Tiglath Pileser, king of the Assyrians, did come to the aid of Ahaz, and made war on the Syrians—laid their country waste—took Damascus, and slew Rezin. He afflicted the land of Israel, and carried the people away captives. (Josephus, Antiq., book ix. chap. 12, sec. 3.) All this too within the time promised Ahaz, according to Isaiah.
The mystical language used by Isaiah in the fourteenth verse of the seventh chapter, which has been the cause of so much speculation and false interpretation, springs from the poetic element of the Hebrew mind. Had Isaiah lived in our day, his sublime genius would have produced a Paradise Lost; but in his own country, and in his own times, his imagination dwelt upon ideas and thoughts which had their root in the hearts of the Jewish people. The Hebrew poets found subjects within the history of their own nation best suited to arouse their genius, and move the hearts of the people. The sorrows and afflictions brought on the nation by her enemies, and her final deliverance by the hand of the Lord, are favorite themes, and inspire her poets with thoughts full of tenderness, and with denunciations which are sublime and often terrific. The harp of Zion in the hands of the daughters of Judah, as they weep by the waters of Babylon, gives forth no sounds but those of sorrow; but the genius of her prophets, inspired by a consciousness that a time of deliverance will come, deals out thunderbolts on the heads of their oppressors.
What are called the prophecies of Isaiah are nothing more, many of them, than so many epic poems, like the Iliad of Homer, to celebrate scenes and real occurrences in Jewish history. The war upon Ahaz, king of Judah, by Rezin and Pekah, kings of Israel and Syria, took place during the life of Isaiah: and the poet undertakes to commemorate the history of the times, in the form of a Jewish epic. He speaks of the past, and not of things to come. The Jews were taught to believe that their nation was the favorite people of God, and from the time of Moses to the last of her prophets, her poets did not hesitate to introduce the Lord, and cause him to take part in a Jewish epic, any more than Homer hesitated to introduce Jupiter and all the heathen gods into the story of the Iliad. The meeting of the Lord and Ahaz at the "end of conduit of the upper field," and what afterwards takes place, is the poetic license of the poet, as he undertakes to narrate a portion of the history of his own time.
CHAPTER XXI.
Bethlehem the birthplace of Christ, as foretold by the
prophets.—Cyrus, the deliverer and ruler referred to by
Micah the prophet.—The Lamentations of Jeremiah spoken of
by Matthew (Chap. ii. 18), refers to the Jews, and not to
the massacre of the infants by Herod.
When Herod inquired of the wise men where Christ should be born, they said unto him, "In Bethlehem of Judea: for thus it is written by the prophet, And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel." (Matt. ii. 5, 6.)
The passage is taken from the prophet Micah, who was a cotemporary with Jeremiah, and prophesied under the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. He lived during the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the great enemy of the Jewish nation, and witnessed a large share of the miseries he inflicted upon that people. We would infer from the first verse of the fifth chapter, that his book was written at a time when the armies of the king of Babylon were encamped around the walls of Jerusalem.
"Now gather thyself in troops, O daughter of troops: he hath laid siege against us; they shall smite the judge of Israel with a rod upon the cheek." Looking forward to the time when the Jewish people will be delivered from the power of Nebuchadnezzar and the Assyrian nation, and of their conquest by some other power, the prophet, aroused by a prophetic spirit, announces that the time is coming when Israel shall again be free: "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet opt of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. Therefore will he give them up, until the time that she which travaileth hath brought forth: then the remnant of his brethren shall return unto the children of Israel. And he shall stand and feed in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God; and they shall abide; for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth." (Micah v. 2, 3, 4.)