THE last twenty-seven chapters form a prophecy, whose coherence of structure and unity of authorship are generally admitted even by those who deny that it was written by Isaiah. The point of time and situation from which the prophet here speaks is for the most part that of the captivity in Babylon (compare, e.g., 64 : 10, 11). But this is adopted on a principle which appears to characterize “vision”—viz., that the prophet sees the future as if present. This second part falls into three sections, each, as it happens, consisting of nine chapters; the two first end with the refrain, “There is no peace, saith Jehovah (or ‘my God’), to the wicked;” and the third with the same thought amplified. The first section (chaps. 40–48) has for its main topic the comforting assurance of the deliverance from Babylon by Cyrus, who is even named twice (41 : 2, 3, 25 ; 44 : 28 ; 45 : 1–4, 13 ; 46 : 11 ; 48 : 14, 15). It is characteristic of sacred prophecy in general that the “vision” of a great deliverance leads the seer to glance at the great deliverance to come through Jesus Christ. This principle of association prevails in the second part taken as a whole; but in the first section, taken apart, it appears as yet imperfectly. The second section (chaps. 49–57) is distinguished from the first by several features. The person of Cyrus, as well as his name and the specification of Babylon, disappear altogether. Return from exile is indeed repeatedly spoken of and at length (49 : 9–26 ; 51 : 9–52 : 12 ; 55 : 12, 13 ; 57 : 14); but in such general terms as admit of being applied to the spiritual and Messianic, as well as to the literal restoration. In the third section (chaps. 58–66), as Cyrus nowhere appears, so neither does “Jehovah’s servant” occur so frequently to view as in the second. The only delineation of the latter is in chap. 61 : 1–3 and in chap. 63 : 1–6, 9. He no longer appears as suffering, but only as saving and avenging Zion. The section is mainly occupied with various practical exhortations founded upon the views of the future already set forth. Dic. B.

In these later prophecies, the continuity of subject is remarkable, there being one main course of thought throughout the entire portion. Its central points are, God, the strength and comfort of His people, infinitely surpassing the gods of the heathen in both prescience and power; His people of the Jews, the faithful few among the many faithless, with their Messiah; all in some general respects servants of Jehovah, and the Messiah specially and permanently so; their work, trials and successes; the Gospel age, its nature, its mission, its triumphs, the calling of the Gentiles and the victories of truth in all the earth; the rejection of the unbelieving Jews and their exemplary doom. H. C.

The form in which the prophecy begins has been determined by its intimate connection with the threatening in the thirty-ninth chapter. To assure the Israel of God, or true Church, that the national judgments which had been denounced should not destroy it, is the prophet’s purpose in the fortieth chapter, and is executed by exhibiting Jehovah’s power, and willingness, and fixed determination to protect and save His own elect. In the forty-first, His power and omniscience are contrasted with the impotence of idols, and illustrated by an individual example. In the forty-second, the person of the great Deliverer is introduced, the nature of His influence described, the relation of His people to Himself defined, and their mission or vocation as enlighteners of the world explained. The forty-third completes this exposition by exhibiting the true design of Israel’s election as a people, its entire independence of all merit in themselves, and sole dependence on the sovereign will of God. In the forty-fourth the argument against idolatry is amplified and urged, and the Divine sufficiency and faithfulness exemplified by a historical allusion to the exodus from Egypt, and a prophetic one to the deliverance from Babylon, in which last Cyrus is expressly named. The last part of this chapter should have been connected with the first part of the forty-fifth, in which the name of Cyrus is repeated, and his conquests represented as an effect of God’s omnipotence, and the prediction as a proof of His omniscience, both which attributes are then again contrasted with the impotence and senselessness of idols. The same comparison is still continued in the forty-sixth, with special reference to the false gods of Babylon, as utterly unable to deliver either their worshippers or themselves. In the forty-seventh the description is extended to the Babylonian government, as wholly powerless in opposition to Jehovah’s interference for the emancipation of His people. The forty-eighth contains the winding up of this great argument from Cyrus and the fall of Babylon, as a conviction and rebuke to the unbelieving Jews themselves. The fact that Babylon is expressly mentioned only in these chapters is a strong confirmation of our previous conclusion that it is not the main subject of the prophecy. By a natural transition he reverts in the forty-ninth to the true Israel, and shows the groundlessness of their misgivings, by disclosing God’s design respecting them, and showing the certainty of its fulfilment notwithstanding all discouraging appearances. The difference in the character and fate of the two Israels is still more exactly defined in the fiftieth chapter. In the fifty-first the true relation of the chosen people both to God and to the Gentiles is illustrated by historical examples—the calling of Abram and the exodus from Egypt, and the same power pledged for the safety of Israel in time to come. In the last part of this chapter and the first of the fifty-second, which cohere in the most intimate manner, the gracious purposes of God are represented as fulfilled already, and described in the most animating terms. This view of the future condition of the Church could not be separated long from that of Him by whom it was to be effected; and accordingly the last part of this chapter, forming one unbroken context with the fifty-third, exhibits Him anew, no longer as a teacher, but as the great sacrifice for sin. No sooner is this great work finished than the best days of the Church begin, the loss of national distinction being really a prelude to her glorious emancipation. The promise of this great change in the fifty-fourth chapter is followed in the fifty-fifth by a gracious invitation to the whole world to partake of it. The fifty-sixth continues the same subject, by predicting the entire abrogation of all local, personal and national distinctions. Having dwelt so long upon the prospects of the spiritual Israel or true Church, the prophet, in the last part of the fifty-sixth and the first part of the fifty-seventh, looks back at the carnal Israel, as it was in the days of its idolatrous apostasy, and closes with a threatening which insensibly melts into a promise of salvation to the true Israel. The fifty-eighth again presents the carnal Israel, not as idolaters, but as hypocrites, and points out the true mean between the rejection of appointed rites and the abuse of them. The fifty-ninth explains Jehovah’s dealings with the nation of the Jews, and shows that their rejection was the fruit of their own doings, as the salvation of the saved was that of God’s omnipotent compassions. In the sixtieth he turns once more to the true Israel, and begins a series of magnificent descriptions of the new dispensation as a whole, contrasted with the imperfections and restrictions of the old. The prominent figures of the picture in this chapter are immense increase by the accession of the Gentiles, and internal purity and peace. The prominent figure in the sixty-first is that of the Messiah as the agent in this great work of spiritual emancipation. In the sixty-second it is that of Zion, or the Church herself, in the most intimate union with Jehovah and the full fruition of His favor. But this anticipation is inseparably blended with that of vengeance on the enemies of God, which is accordingly presented in the sublime vision of the sixty-third chapter, followed by an appeal to God’s former dealings with His people, as a proof that their rejection was their own fault, and that He will still protect the true believers. These are represented in the sixty-fourth as humbly confessing their own sins and suing for the favor of Jehovah. In the sixty-fifth he solemnly announces the adoption of the Gentiles and the rejection of the carnal Israel because of their iniquities, among which idolatry is once more rendered prominent. He then contrasts the doom of the apostate Israel with the glorious destiny awaiting the true Israel. And this comparison is still continued in the sixty-sixth chapter, where the prophet, after ranging through so wide a field of vision, seems at last to fix his own eye and his reader’s on the dividing line or turning point between the old and new economy, and winds up the whole drama with a vivid exhibition of the nations gathered to Jerusalem for worship, while the children of the kingdom—i.e., Israel according to the flesh, are cast forth into outer darkness, where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched. Upon this awful spectacle the curtain falls, and we are left to find relief from its impressions in the merciful disclosures of a later and more cheering revelation. J. A. Alexander.

Isaiah, in the close of the previous part of the prophecies (39:7), had distinctly announced that the nation should be carried to Babylon. He saw that this was inevitable, and that the crimes of the monarch and of the nation were such as would certainly hasten this result. He had retired from the public functions of the prophetic office, and given himself up to the contemplation of happier and purer times. He therefore devoted himself to the task of furnishing consolation for the pious portion of the nation, and especially of recording prophetic descriptions which should comfort the Jews when they should be held in their long captivity in Babylon. We have seen (notes on chaps. 13 and 14) that Isaiah had before this laid the foundation for these consolations by the assurance that Babylon and its mighty power should be entirely destroyed, and, of course, that the Jewish people could not be held always in bondage there. In this part of the prophecy (chaps. 40-66) his object is to give more full and specific consolations. He therefore places himself in vision in the midst of the future scenes which he describes, and states distinctly and fully the grounds of consolation. These topics of consolation would arise from two sources—both of which he presents at great length and with great beauty. The first is, that the nation should be delivered from its long and painful captivity. This was the primary thing to be done, and this was needful in order to furnish to them consolation. He places himself in that future time. He sees his own nation borne to a distant land, according to his own predictions; sees them sighing in their hard bondage; sees the city and the Temple where they once worshipped the God of their fathers laid in ruins, and all their pleasant things laid waste (64:11); and the people dispirited and sad in their long and painful captivity. He predicts the close of that captivity, and speaks of it as present to his view. He consoles the people by the assurance that it was coming to an end; names the monarch—Cyrus—by whom their oppressors were to be punished, and by whom they were to be restored to their own land; and describes in the most beautiful and glowing imagery their certain return. The second source of consolation is that which relates to the coming of a far more important deliverer than Cyrus, and to a far more important deliverance than that from the captivity at Babylon. By the laws of prophetic suggestion, and in accordance with the usual manner of Isaiah, his mind is carried forward to much more momentous events. His thoughts glide easily to the Messiah; and any event which bears a resemblance to His coming suggests His work, His character and the benefit of His advent, and the descriptions of the prophet insensibly change from the immediate subject under contemplation to the far more important events connected with His work. This was the common rule by which the mind of Isaiah acted; and it is no wonder, therefore, that an event so strikingly resembling the deliverance of man from the bondage of sin by the Messiah as was the deliverance from the captivity of Babylon should have been suggested by that, and that his thoughts should pass rapidly from one to the other, and the one be forgotten in the other. The eye of the prophet, therefore, glances rapidly from the object more immediately in view in the future, to the object more remote; and he regards the deliverance from the Babylonish captivity as introductory to a far more important deliverance. In the contemplation of that more distant event, therefore, he becomes wholly absorbed; and from this he derives his main topics of consolation. He sees the future coming of the Messiah; he sees his forerunner; he sees the author of redemption in various scenes—now as a sufferer, humble, poor and persecuted; and now the more distant glories of the Messiah’s kingdom rises to view. He sees Him raised up from the dead; he sees His empire extend and spread among the Gentiles; he sees kings and princes from all lands coming to lay their offerings at His feet; he sees the distant tribes of men come bending before Him, and His religion of peace and joy diffusing its blessings around the world. In the contemplation of these future glories, he desires to furnish consolation for his afflicted countrymen in Babylon, and at the same time a demonstration of the truth of the oracles of God, and of the certain prevalence of the true religion, which should impart happiness and peace in all future times. Isaiah was now an old man, and his style and manner of thinking and of utterance would be naturally mellowed by age. His object, also, was not reproof so much as consolation; it was not, as formerly, to denounce judgment, to rebuke kings and nobles for their crimes, and to rouse the nation to a sense of its danger; it was to furnish topics of support to those who were groaning in captivity far from the Temple of their God and from the sepulchres of their fathers. The language of the second part is more gentle and flowing, more tender and mild. There is exquisite beauty and finish, and occasionally there are bursts of the highest sublimity; but there is not the compression of thought and the struggling for utterance, which there is often in the former part. There, the prophetic impulse is often like waters pent up between projecting rocks and hills, and where it struggles and bursts forth impetuously and irresistibly; in this portion of the prophecy it is like the placid stream—the full-flowing, majestic river—calm, pure, deep and sublime. There are, indeed, characteristics of the same style, and of the same author, but it is in different circumstances, and with a different object in view. The portion which follows (chaps. 40-66) is a single prophecy, apparently uttered at one time, and relating to one subject, and having one great design. The former part of his prophecies consists of a number of independent and separate predictions, some of them very brief, and having no immediate connection with each other. Here all is connected; and the same design is kept steadily and constantly in view. His beautiful descriptions roll on, to use one of his own images, “like a river,” or like the “waves of the sea,” and there is an inimitable beauty and majesty in his sentiments and in his style. Almost everything which occurs in the prophecy relates to that which was to be fulfilled long after the time of Isaiah. Occasionally there is a hint, or glance, or slight allusion to the prevalence of idolatry in his own time; but there is no express mention of the events which were then occurring. He does not mention his own circumstances; he does not allude to the name of the monarch who lived when he wrote. He seems to have forgotten the present, and to live and act in the scenes of the distant future. He therefore speaks as if he were in the midst of them; he speaks as one living among the exiled Jews in Babylon when their long captivity was about to come to an end; he exhorts, rebukes, administers comforts, as if they were present to his mind, and as if he were directly addressing them. He speaks of the life, sufferings and death of the Messiah also, as if passing before his mind, or as events which he saw, and seeks personal consolation and support amid the prevailing crimes and calamities of his own times, in the contemplation of future scenes. Barnes.

These chapters have formed a part of the collection of Isaiah’s prophecies as far back as the history of the canon can be traced, without the slightest vestige of a different tradition among Jews or Christians as to the author. The tone and spirit of these chapters are precisely such as might have been expected from the circumstances under which they are alleged to have been written, and their variations from the earlier chapters such as must have been expected from the change in the circumstances themselves. A cursory inspection of these later prophecies is enough to satisfy the reader that he has before him neither a concatenated argument nor a mass of fragments, but a continuous discourse in which the same great topics are continually following each other, somewhat modified in form and combination, but essentially the same from the beginning to the end. If these twenty-seven chapters are confessedly the work of one man and indeed a continuous discourse on one great subject, and if a perfectly uniform tradition has attached them to the writings of Isaiah, it remains to be considered whether we have any reason to deny or even to dispute the fact so solemnly attested. All the presumptions are in favor of its truth. For two thousand years, at least, the book was universally regarded as Isaiah’s, and no other name has ever been connected with it even by mistake or accident. It is just such a book as the necessities of that age might have been expected to call forth. Its genuineness, therefore, as a writing of Isaiah, is not a fact requiring demonstration by detailed and special proof, but one attested both by its external history and its internal structure, unless positive reasons can be given for rejecting a conclusion which appears not only obvious, but unavoidable. A.

The prophecies of Isaiah (chaps. 40-46), which follow the historical episode have been received as genuine, and one main part of Isaiah’s writings, by the common faith of Jews and Christians for more than two thousand years. During the last century, however, a school of critics arose in Germany, who ascribe them to one or more unknown writers near the close of the Captivity. So Koppe, Eichhorn, Döderlein, Justi, Paulus, Bauer, Bertholdt, De Wette, Gramberg, Vatke, Rosenmüller, Gesenius, Hitzig, Maurer, Knobel, Ewald, Hendewerk and Umbreit, and others. In some circles the modern theory has even been turned into an axiom, and a test of critical learning. Their authenticity, however, has been upheld in Germany by many able writers; as Hensler, Piper, Beckhaus, Jahn, Dereser, Greve, Möller, Kleinert, Schleier, Hengstenberg, Hävernick and Keil.

More recently Stier has vindicated and expounded these chapters in his “Esaias, nicht Pseudo-Esaias,” a learned work of a thousand pages. Drechsler, also, in his commentary on the earlier visions, Hahn and Delitzsch in their continuation, and the last in his own complete and able commentary, share the same view, and maintain strongly the organic unity of the whole work. Birks.

Attacks have been made by German critics upon the integrity of the whole book, different critics pronouncing different portions of the first part spurious, and many concurring to reject the second part altogether (the last twenty-seven chapters). Defenders of the integrity of the book have not, however, been wanting—e.g., Jahn, Hengstenberg, Möller, Kleinert, Havernick, Stier, Keil, Delitzsch (in Fbn.), etc. The circumstance mainly urged by those who gain-say Isaiah’s authorship of this second part is the unquestionable fact that the author takes his standpoint at the close of the Babylonish captivity, as if that were his present, and from thence looks forward into his subsequent future. Other grounds which are alleged are confessedly secondary and external, and are really of no great weight. The most important of these is founded upon the difference of style. On the other hand, for the authenticity of the second part the following reasons may be advanced. (a) Externally. The unanimous testimony of Jewish and Christian tradition (cf. Ecclus. 48:24); the use apparently made of the second part in Jer. 10:1-16, verse 25; 25:31; 50, 51; in Ezek. 23:40, 41 and Zeph. 2:15; 3:10; the decree of Cyrus in Ezra 1:2-4, which plainly is founded on Isa. 44:28; 45:1, 13; and the evidence of the N. T. quotations (Matt. 3:3; Luke 4:17; Acts 8:28; Rom. 10:16, 20). (b) Internally. The unity of design which connects these last twenty-seven chapters with the preceding; the oneness of diction which pervades the whole book; the peculiar elevation and grandeur of style which characterize the second part as well as the first; the absence of any other name than Isaiah’s claiming the authorship; the claims which the writer makes to the foreknowledge of the deliverance by Cyrus, which claims, on the opposing view, must be fraudulent; lastly, the Messianic predictions which mark its inspiration, and remove the chief ground of objection against its having been written by Isaiah. Ewald thus characterizes Isaiah: “Just as the subject requires, he has readily at command every several kind of style and every several change of delineation; and it is precisely this that, in point of language, establishes his greatness, as well as in general forms one of his most towering points of excellence. His only fundamental peculiarity is the lofty, majestic calmness of his style. His discourse varies into every complexion; it is tender and stern, dictating and threatening, mourning and again exulting in Divine joy, mocking and earnest; but ever at the right time it returns to its original elevation and repose, and never loses the clear ground-color of its Divine seriousness.” In point of style we can find no difficulty in recognizing in the second part the presence of the same plastic genius as we discover in the first. And, altogether, the aesthetic criticism of all the different parts of the book brings us to the conclusion that the whole of the book originated in one mind, and that mind one of the most sublime and variously gifted instruments which the Spirit of God has ever employed to pour forth its voice upon the world. Dic. B.

The book in its present form can be traced to the time of Ezra, or nearly, and from that time until what from its recency may be called the other day, its Isaianic authorship has been regarded as an established fact. The Hebrew nation, which guarded its Scriptures with an almost superstitious jealousy, ascribed the Book to Isaiah. Our Lord and His apostles never expressed a doubt, and spoke of the prophet Isaiah as the author of passages which they quoted from the second as well as the first part of the book. This historic evidence is corroborated by many considerations which confirm it. He is a bold man who in these circumstances can say that the generation which stood nearest to the origin of the book was mistaken as to its authorship, and that all the generations which followed failed to discover reasons, external or internal, for doubting the belief which had been entertained from the beginning, that Isaiah was the author of the whole book. Kennedy.

The last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah form a continuous literary work. This work may perhaps be best described as a didactic poem, a series of sermons in rhythm, full of feeling and poetic fire, though lacking the progressive action which would be essential in an epic or in a drama. The regular rhythm of the poem is stately, occasionally relieved by the insertion of brief lyric pieces, with an entirely different movement. (See, for example, Isa. 42:10-12.) The poem has three main divisions, each of them containing three subdivisions, each of which consists of three parts. These twenty-seven parts are quite commonly called cantos, in the lack of a better term, by the scholars who have written on the Book of Isaiah. The twenty-seven cantos differ somewhat in their limits from the twenty-seven chapters, as the latter are now divided.

Many hold that the poem was written from the point of view of Israel in Babylon, just at the beginning of the conquests of Cyrus. Some of these hold that this point of view was adopted predictively, by inspiration, and others, that the book was written in the time of Cyrus. I cannot accept this opinion. Some parts of the work certainly refer to the period in question—Isa. 44:24-28, and the opening verses of the next chapter, for example. But this is only an occasional mode of representation; the usual mode contemplates Israel as a political power, residing in Jerusalem and the cities of Judah.

These twenty-seven cantos are very much more used in the New Testament than is any other continuous portion of the Old Testament of equal length. Some other sections, the middle chapters of Genesis, for example, or a selected tract of the Psalms, might rival it in the number of citations, but the citations from these chapters of Isaiah are longer and fuller, and the imagery of Isaiah is carried over into the New Testament, to an extent altogether without parallel in these other writings. The name of Isaiah, as a concordance shows, is ten times mentioned in the New Testament, in connection with these twenty-seven chapters; in six of these instances, the words cited are attributed, verbally at least, to the person Isaiah; and in the other four, to the Book of Isaiah. There is no historical testimony, either in the Bible or out of it, to the existence of any great prophet named Isaiah, except the one who lived in the days of Hezekiah. The evidence in the case seems to me to preponderate immensely in favor of the conclusion that the twenty-seven cantos are the literary work of the Isaiah who lived in Hezekiah’s time. W. J. Beecher. (See Vol. VII., p. 475.)

The earliest hint of any new discovery is commonly ascribed to Koppe, who in a note upon his German edition of Bishop Lowth’s work suggests that the fiftieth chapter may have been written by Ezekiel or some other Jew in exile. A similar opinion was expressed about the same time by Döderlein and Eichhorn with respect to the entire latter part of Isaiah. The same hypothesis was then carried out in detail by Justi, and adopted by Bauer, Paulus, Bertholdt and Augusti; so that not long after the beginning of this century it was established as the current doctrine of the German schools. This revolution of opinion, though ostensibly the pure result of critical analysis, was closely connected with the growing unbelief in inspiration, and the consequent necessity of explaining away whatever appeared either to demonstrate or involve it. It must also be noted, as a circumstance of great importance in the history of this controversy, that the young theologians of Germany for fifty years were almost as uniformly taught and as constantly accustomed to assume the certainty of this first principle as their fathers had been to assume the contrary. This fact will enable us to estimate at something like their real value the pretensions to superior candor and impartiality advanced by the neological interpreters, and more especially by some of recent date, who are in truth as strongly biased by the prejudice of education as their immediate predecessors by the love of novelty and passion for discovery.

All that need be added in relation to the arguments against the genuineness of these chapters drawn from their matter or contents, is the general observation that their soundness may be brought to the test by inquiring whether they do not either take for granted something as belonging to the prophecy which is not found there by a simple and natural interpretation, or proceed upon some general false principle, such as the denial of prophetic inspiration as impossible. If either of these flaws is fatal to the argument affected by it, how much more must it be vitiated by the coexistence of the two, which is the case in many minor arguments of this class, and emphatically true of that main argument to which they are auxiliary—viz., that Isaiah cannot be the writer of these chapters on account of their minute and constant reference to the Babylonian exile. The alleged fact and the inference are equally unfounded.

The other main objection to the genuineness of these prophecies is founded not upon their matter, but their manner, or in other words, their diction, phraseology and style, which are said to be entirely unlike those of Isaiah. The rejection of these chapters was not forced upon the critics by a palpable diversity of style and diction, but such diversities were hunted up, laboriously and gradually brought to light, in order to justify the previous rejection. By parity of reasoning it may be foreseen that whoever cannot be convinced of the reality of inspiration will consider these detailed proofs of later date conclusive; while the reader who knows better, or at least has no misgivings upon that point, will as certainly pronounce them “trifles light as air.” If we gain nothing more by this investigation, it is at least satisfactory to know that all depends upon a foregone conclusion, and that as to faith in such things no less than in higher matters, he that hath receiveth, and from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.

The objection drawn from indefinite diversities of tone and manner, such as a more flowing style and frequent repetitions, is so far from having any force, that the absence of these differences would in the circumstances of the case be well adapted to excite suspicion. In other words, Isaiah writing at a later period of life, and when withdrawn from active labor, with his view directed not to the present or a proximate futurity, but one more distant, and composing not a series of detached discourses, but a continuous, unbroken prophecy, not only may but must have differed from his former self as much as these two parts of the collection differ from each other. This antecedent probability is strengthened by the fact that similar causes have produced a still greater difference in some of the most celebrated writers, ancient and modern, who exhibit vastly more unlikeness to themselves in different parts of their acknowledged writings than the most microscopic criticism has been able to detect between the tone or manner of Isaiah’s earlier and later prophecies. J. A. Alexander.

And now we come to Isaiah’s final prophecy, published by him some years afterward, probably toward the end of the lives of both Hezekiah and himself. In it, leaving the temporal fortunes of Judah far behind, he soars onward and upward to Christ and His kingdom. The criticism of these twenty-seven chapters has been the crux and opprobrium of modern scholarship. It started with the fullest belief in the unity of this wonderful work, a unity evident to the judgment of every attentive reader; but with equal confidence asserted that it was written by some second Isaiah at the close of the Babylonian captivity, when the growing power of Cyrus justified the use of his name in chap. 45 as the probable conqueror of Babylon. But a close comparison between the words and phrases used in the first thirty-nine and the last twenty-seven chapters showed a very extraordinary amount of resemblance. The language of the two portions is even in minute particulars the same; so, too, are the ideas. If this second part described Judea as desolate, such was the most common picture in the first; if it represented Zion as a wilderness, and God’s holy and beautiful house as burned with fire (64:10, 11), though within a few verses it speaks of city and Temple as if still standing (66:6), as just before it had described the watchman standing upon the walls of Jerusalem, so had the prophet started with a quotation from Micah, part of which was that Jerusalem was to become heaps of ruins, and the Temple site a desolate mountain-top. But in fact all is ideal, and the desolation of the city and the burning of the Temple refer rather to the times of the Romans, when the lineal Israel was removed that the spiritual Israel might take its place, than to the capture of the city by Nebuchadnezzar.

In fact, in reading it through as modern critics have done to discover by internal evidence proofs of the period when it was written, only two certain facts appear—the first, the mention of Cyrus; the second that the prophecy was written in Judea, and that the people at the time when it was written were given to Moloch worship. This second fact is proved by chap. 57:5.6. The Jews are there represented as sacrificing their children to Moloch in dried-up water-courses, the beds of what in the rainy season were rushing streams; for such is the meaning of the word there rendered “valleys.” Now there were no such valleys in Babylonia, and no stones worn smooth by torrents, such as are common in Palestine; for the whole region is alluvial, and watered by canals from the Euphrates. Nor is there the slightest proof, but the contrary, that the horrible fanaticism which drove the people to sacrifice their offspring to Moloch in the days of Hezekiah and his successors ever existed among the exiles at Babylon.

Criticism has therefore changed its front, and instead of two portions of Isaiah, one a collection of the most remarkable predictions of his younger days, the other the calm outpouring of his later years, written at a time when he had retired from active life, and was bowed down beneath the load of nearly eighty winters, it now dismembers all Isaiah, and distributes his mangled limbs among a host of prophets known and unknown, extending from Isaiah down to Maccabean times. Manasseh did but saw him asunder, and this was the sole feat attempted by modern critics at first. Having found this simple process impossible, they now hack him into small pieces. R. P. Smith.

The objections against the critical hypothesis may be all reduced to this, that the oblivion of the author’s name and history is more inexplicable, not to say incredible, than anything about the other doctrine can be to a believer in prophetic inspiration. This is a difficulty which no ingenuity has ever yet been able to surmount. That a writer confessedly of the highest genius, living at one of the most critical junctures in the history of Israel, when the word of God began to be precious and prophetic inspiration rare, should have produced such a series of prophecies as this, with such effects upon the exiles and even upon Cyrus as tradition ascribes to them, and then have left them to the admiration of all future ages, without so much as a trace of his own personality about them, is a phenomenon of literary history compared with which the mystery of Junius is as nothing. It would be so even if we had no remains of the same period to compare with these; but how immensely is the improbability enhanced by the fact that the other prophets of the Exile, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Haggai, Zechariah, are not only well known and easily identified, but minutely accurate in the chronological specifications of their prophecies, a feature absolutely wanting in these chapters, though alleged to be the work of a contemporary writer. It is in vain to say, with Ewald, that the suppression of the author’s name and the oblivion of his person may be accounted for by the peculiar circumstances of the times, when the other writings of those times still extant not only fail to prove what is alleged, but prove the very opposite.

Even this, however, though sufficiently incredible, is still not all we are required to believe; for we must also grant that these anonymous though admirable writings were attached to those of a prophet who flourished in the preceding century, and with whose productions they are said to have scarcely anything in common, and that this mysterious combination took place so early as to lie beyond the oldest tradition of the Hebrew canon, and was so blindly acquiesced in from the first that not the faintest intimation of another author or another origin was ever heard of for two thousand years, when the Higher Criticism first discovered that the prophecies in question were the work of many authors, and then (no less infallibly) that they were really the work of only one, but (still infallibly) that this one could not be Isaiah!

To this intrinsic want of credibility now add, as positive considerations, the ancient and uniform tradition of the Jews; the testimony of the general title, which must be regarded as inclusive of these chapters, in the absence of all countervailing evidence; the influence exerted by these prophecies, according to Josephus, on Cyrus and the Restoration, implying their antiquity and previous notoriety; the recognition of the whole book as Isaiah’s by the Son of Sirach (48:22-25); and the indiscriminate citation of its different parts in the New Testament.

Again, to these external testimonies may be added, as internal proofs, the writer’s constant representation of himself as living before some of the events which he describes, and as knowing them by inspiration; his repeated claim to have predicted Cyrus and the Restoration long before the first appearances of those events; the obvious allusions to Jerusalem and Judah as the writer’s home, to the Temple and the ritual as still subsisting, and to idolatry as practised by the people, which the Higher Critics can evade only by asserting that the Jews did not cease to be idolaters in Babylon; the historical allusions to the state of the world with which the writer was familiar, precisely similar to those in the genuine Isaiah; the very structure of the prophecies relating to the Exile, clear enough to be distinctly verified, and yet not so minute as a contemporary writer must have made them; and lastly, the identity of Messiah here described with the Messiah of the undisputed prophecies.

If the Higher Critics can find nothing in the arguments alleged against them to make inspiration and prophetic foresight credible, they have certainly done still less to drive us from our position, that Isaiah’s having written this book is unspeakably more probable than any other supposition. A.

With regard to Isaiah’s authorship there was for nearly eighteen hundred years only one opinion in the Christian Church and the Jewish nation. It was not until men had ceased to believe in Christ that they began to question the latter prophecy of Isaiah. The Buxtorfs, the Carpzovs, Glassius, Gussetius, Cocceius, Venema, Vitringa, Schultens, Danz, the Michaelis, acquiesced in the judgment of antiquity. Even Paulus says that the diction is as pure as in the other parts of Isaiah. Eichhorn adduced no instances of later language. Bertholdt confesses that there are no traces of later usage. The first, and the great objection still, is that Cyrus is mentioned by name. When men came to teach, either that God could not know beforehand the name of one of His creatures, or if He could He could not or would not communicate it before the existence of that creature, they necessarily thought that the prediction concerning the conque, or of Babylon must have been written after his appearance. The denial of the genuineness came first, the criticism came after, similar to that famous course of law, which first condemned and executed, and afterward proceeded to trial. Yet the process has led to beneficial results. The Rationalist dogmatic criticism has been subjected to a thorough examination by Hengstenberg, Havernik, Kleinert, Drechsler, Keil and many others. The objections have been fairly met, and the claims of Isaiah to the latter chapters vindicated on various grounds; as, for example, the plain references to those chapters in the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Jeremiah; the circumstances of the times described, so exactly agreeing to the days of Isaiah and not to the close of the Exile; the historical relations; the similarity of style and manner and the peculiarities of diction; the entire tone and coloring, not to mention other evidences external and internal. Indeed, Ewald and Bleck have made a fatal rent in the adverse criticism by confessing that the passage chaps. 56:9-57:11 was written before the Exile. “This passage,” they say, “may be received with the highest probability as a prophetic oracle uttered before the Exile perhaps by Isaiah himself, certainly when the Jewish nation still existed, as it is only on this supposition that the contents and composition can be understood.” . . . It is a singular coincidence that those portions of the Old Testament which are most essential to New Testament theology, as the Pentateuch, Daniel and the latter part of Isaiah, are just those parts which Rationalist criticism has selected as the favorite fields on which to display its skill. Those Messianic predictions which it can explain with plausibility as expressing Jewish hopes of earthly grandeur and prosperity, and incompatible with the teaching of Christ, it pronounces genuine. The prophecies which represent the Son of man as a heavenly judge coming in the clouds of heaven (Dan. 7); the Messiah as cut off (Dan. 9); Sion’s King as meek and lowly and riding upon an ass (Zech. 9); the good shepherd sold for thirty pieces of silver (Zech. 11); pierced by the inhabitants of Jerusalem (Zech. 12:10); despised and rejected of men, cut off out of the land of the living, one upon whom the Lord hath laid the iniquities of us all (Isa. 53), are just the predictions which it pronounces to be ungenuine. All this is in direct opposition to the teaching of the New Testament, which especially ascribes the whole prophecy of Isaiah to him as the writer, and cites as being fulfilled in our Lord, His sufferings and His salvation. McCaul.

We are asked to believe “that a writer of transcendent genius admitted by all competent judges to surpass even the greatest writers among the Hebrews, with the exception alone, if exception it be, of Isaiah, grew up among the exiles in Babylon and attracted to himself, as he must have done, by this remarkable prediction (chaps. 44-66) the attention of all his contemporaries and yet afterward dropped so entirely into oblivion that his very name and memory perished. Yet this is but part of the wonder. We are called upon, in addition, to believe that in the midst of a people banished from their native land and compelled to adopt the dialectic peculiarities of the language of their foreign oppressors—which so mingled with, and finally superseded their own, that their original tongue was all but forgotten (Neh. 8:7, 8)—a poet was born and brought up who yet attained to such purity of diction and command of the ancient Hebrew as has never been surpassed, if even equalled!” Forbes.

There is no ground for attributing these prophecies to two authors. It is the same Isaiah, the same ambassador from God, now hoary and tremulous, yet not soured in temper nor sickened by a life-long ministration among a gainsaying people, but benign and hopeful as always, who sees in the age to come the wide world “blossoming as the rose.” On every page there is the same protest for truth, justice and mercy, between man and man; there is the same message of wrath for the oppressor and the cruel, and the same righteous care for the widow, the fatherless, the bondsman, the stranger. On every page there are the same elements of what we acknowledge to be a true theology. Isaac Taylor.

The spirit and moral portraiture are identical in both parts of Isaiah. It is full, as no other book of the Old Testament is, of the magnificence of our human hopes, and of the strange and inconceivable ways in which they were to be secured and fulfilled; and it is unrolled before us like the march of some profound and overpowering musical composition, full of all changeful and unexpected movements, strains of sadness and awe interwoven with thrilling joy and piercing tenderness, appeals the most pathetic with bursts of wrath and terror, but all resulting in a whole of incomparable grandeur. But we may also see in it the mirror of the mind of him who was charged with this wonderful disclosure of the counsels and purposes of God. In this awful volume, in which thought and imagination were allowed to master “the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be,” in which he has embodied all that most concerns mankind for the present and the future, and in which the tremendous severity of judgment mingles so strangely with a gracious and inexpressible sweetness which even still takes us by surprise—through all these public and divinely inspired utterances we may trace, with a fulness and richness and depth unequalled in the Old Testament, the personal lineaments of one who not only by faith and self-discipline, but by thought and knowledge, had become fitted to be a saint of the company of that Redeemer, whose person, whose coming, whose life of suffering and glory he was given to foretell, and in whose perfection man was to be made perfect. Church.

Affirmatively, my reasons for holding and maintaining that one and the same Isaiah wrote both the earlier and later prophecies of this book are: 1. The internal evidence lying in the book itself. The author’s cast of mind, his poetic conceptions, his wonderfully bold, glowing, yet chastened imagination, his manner of predicting future events, his style of poetry and his style as a writer—all combine to identify him as the author of the entire book—of the later as well as the earlier portions. As the world never produced but one Homer and but one Milton, so it never produced but one Isaiah. That two men should appear in history of such transcendent and peculiar genius, towering so high in their line above all other authors, yet so like each other that the great mass of readers see no distinction, and naturally account them the same man, is simply incredible. Even the fact of real prophecy is not more decisively supernatural. For, let it be considered, men of such surpassing genius are always original; are truly Divine creations. No second Isaiah could possibly be a copy of the first—could never be brought out by any supposable amount of effort at imitation. The witness borne by the unsophisticated common sense of the masses is triumphantly decisive. Not one reader in a thousand, in passing from the former portion to the latter, would suspect that he was passing from one author to another. And this may be asserted of the Hebrew reader as well as of the English. In fact the main criteria of authorship are those great salient points of an author’s mind which determine his cast of thought and consequently of expression and style, and which are patent to readers of average sagacity. The fact, therefore, that the masses who have read this book have seen no reason to question that one Isaiah wrote the whole, becomes a valid proof that he did. Again, of the fifteen other Hebrew prophets whose writings have come down to us, not one bears a hundredth part so much resemblance to Isaiah as the author of the later prophecies in this book bears to the author of the earlier. That is, the same Isaiah who wrote the entire book has idiosyncrasies of character and of style which no other Hebrew prophet shares with him—to which no other even approximates. Again, as already suggested, if it were a fact that some pseudo-Isaiah, living during the Exile, wrote the latter portion, then the similarity between him and the real Isaiah in respect to cast of mind, style of thought and expression would be a greater miracle than prophetic vision itself. Hence, those critics who espouse this doctrine of a second Isaiah, for the sake of avoiding the admission of supernatural agency in prophecy, have another case of supernatural phenomena to dispose of not a whit less stubborn than that of prophetic vision. In regard to the peculiar and salient points of Isaiah’s style, it is scarcely possible by any analysis of particulars to give the reader any stronger impression of the unity of the book than a careful perusal will make on any appreciative mind; yet the following specifications may aid the honest inquirer. Note his boldness in the use of the figure which rhetoricians call “apostrophe”—e.g., invoking “the heavens and the earth.” “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth,” etc. (1:2 and 34:1). In the later prophecies, “Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth,” etc. (41:1; 45:8 and 49:13). Note also one peculiar manner of predicting future events, not by simply affirming that they will be indicatively, but by commanding that they be done, or that the party in question do them imperatively. Of this sort, in the earlier prophecies, see chaps. 10:30; 13:2; 14:29, 31; 21:2, 5; 23:1, 2, etc. In the later prophecies, compare chaps. 44:27; 47:1, 2, 5; 49:9; 51:9; 52:1, 2 and 60:1. This list might be much increased. Again, observe how naturally his strong emotions seek utterance in song. On great occasions of joy, in view of inspiring truths, he calls for songs of praise, and sometimes gives the very words of the song to be sung. In the earlier prophecies, see chaps. 12:1-6; 25:9 and 26:1-4. In the later, chaps. 42:10-12; 44:23; 48:20; 49:13 and 52:9. And finally, as an instance of somewhat minute figures, take his allusions to the potter and his clay; in the former part, chap. 29:16, and in the latter, chaps. 45:9 and 64:8. Hence, the internal evidence becomes an argument for the unity of this book which cannot be gainsayed. Even the German critics (e.g., Ewald), who insist most strenuously that not Isaiah, but some “great unknown” wrote the last twenty-seven chapters, yet ascribe to him essentially the same qualities of mind and of style as to the true Isaiah in the first portion. This frank but inevitable admission is really the strongest internal evidence that the book all comes from one Isaiah.

The actual differences of thought and of style are easily accounted for. In this latter portion Isaiah has passed on beyond the scenes of the life of Ahaz and beyond the thrilling events of the reign and personal life of Hezekiah. His external surroundings are therefore very much changed. Enjoying a serene old age, he lives far onward in the better days of Zion. But the man remains the same. The author, the poet, the prophet, the Christian—all are still the same. His conceptions of the Messiah and of the wide extent of His peaceful reign are the same. Lapse of years, the influence of age and the great change in his circumstances, account amply for all the real changes in his style. Hence the inference comes with resistless force that the same Isaiah wrote both portions.

2. The testimony of Jewish authority is unwavering. The compilers of these writings, living far back toward those times, have given us the whole book as the prophecies of one and the same Isaiah. No counter voice has ever been heard from the Jewish fathers—e.g., from those who translated the Septuagint, or those who brought out the Chaldee Paraphrasts, or who have in any way expressed the opinions of the ancient Jews respecting the authorship of this book. In any similar written productions, such testimony would be accounted decisive.

The legitimate force of this argument will be seen yet more clearly by supposing the theory of two Isaiahs to be true. Let it then be supposed that about the time of the Restoration, a second Isaiah lived and wrote the last twenty-seven chapters of what comes to us as the book of the prophet Isaiah. This supposition may seem to be easily made; but it creates a demand for an answer to such questions as the following: Who was this Isaiah No. 2? What was his name? How came he to be a “great unknown?” Was he a Jew, living among the Jews of the Exile? So the supposition must assume; but why has he no place and no record in Jewish history? How does it happen that his writings exhibit no traces of Chaldean figures and symbols, such as abound in Ezekiel and Daniel? How could such a man, so great, of qualities so commanding, of influence necessarily so pervading, live and die without making even a ripple on the surface of Jewish history? A contemporary almost necessarily of Ezekiel, certainly of Daniel, at a time when Jewish prophets were rare, were much sought for, and certain to come to the surface of society and of history, too; how can the theory be accounted for, that one of the greatest of all Jewish prophets lived and died unknown to history? But even this is not all. How came his writings to appear in the accepted sacred canon without his name? How came they to be appended to the prophecies of the great Isaiah with no note or hint of their being written by a different author, living one hundred and seventy years later? Who perpetrated this fraud upon the Jewish canon; this fraud upon the Jewish nation and upon the whole religious world? Was this done by Ezra and his associates? Living so near this time, almost within this very age, they could not have done it ignorantly. They must have known all the facts of the case. Did they perpetrate this literary fraud upon the true Isaiah? Were they inspired to do this? Can any of the German critics assign any plausible reason for such a fraud on the Church universal and on mankind? Have they thought of attempting an answer to these and similar questions? Should they not be aware that the Christian feeling, not to say the common sense of men, will and ought to demand a fair answer to all these questions and to many more of the same sort?

3. The authority of the New Testament is most abundant, and with all who accept the testimony of Christ and of His apostles, is perfectly decisive. Thus, Matthew (3:3) quotes from Isa. 40:3-5, affirming, “This is what was spoken of by the prophet Esaias.” Again (12:17-21), he quotes from Isa. 42:1-4, here also endorsing Isaiah as the author of this chapter. “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet.” John (12:38) ascribes to Isaiah the words found (Isa. 53:1), just as in the next three verses he credits Isaiah with another passage found (Isa. 6:9, 10). In his view, Isaiah wrote chap. 53 as truly as chap. 6—i.e., the latter portion of this book as really as the former. Philip (Acts 8:27-35) met the Ethiopian eunuch reading Isaiah the prophet, and found the passage to be this very fifty-third chapter. Paul (Rom 10:16) ascribes the first verse of this chapter to Isaiah, and in Rom. 10:20, 21 ascribes to him also the first two verses of chap. 65. And, finally, our Lord

Himself (Luke 4 : 17-19) read in the synagogue service from the Book of Isaiah, the passage standing (Isa. 61 : 1, 2). Did Jesus Christ and His inspired apostles know whereof they affirmed, or were they mistaken in attributing these chapters to Isaiah? Do the critics in question know more and better on this point than they? Is it even supposable that inspired men endorsed these as the words of Isaiah without being aware of their mistake; or that, knowing the universal mistake of the Jews in this particular, they did not regard it as sufficiently important to be exposed and rectified? Those who shall carefully and truly weigh all this testimony in support of the genuineness of Isa., chaps. 40-66, will conclude that it cannot be ruled out or overbalanced by the naked assumption that the Infinite God could not, or, being able, would not inspire the real Isaiah to write what now stands in these last twenty-seven chapters. For the controversy comes in the end to this very question: Is prophecy from God? Those who admit this will have no question as to the genuineness of the entire Book of Isaiah. Those who deny real inspiration have a stubborn witness to dispose of in this ancient document bearing the name of the Book of Isaiah the prophet. Fair criticism has never impeached the unity of this book, and has never set aside or rebutted its testimony to the fact of real prophetic inspiration—and never can. The testimonies here adduced from the New Testament show conclusively that, up to that period, no thought of a second Isaiah had yet entered the minds of men. In fact this notion was never broached until a century ago, in 1779-80, by the German critic Koppe, H. C.

These chapters do indeed make mention of the Babylonish exile, the capture of Babylon by Cyrus, and the release of the Jews from captivity. But this does not disprove the authorship of Isaiah, except on the assumption that prophetic foresight of specific events is impossible. And it is to be observed:

1. That the author of these chapters nowhere connects himself, in any way, with the Exile, by any mention of localities, incidents, or circumstances belonging to it, as is done, for example, by Ezekiel.

2. While specific mention is made of Babylon, Cyrus and the restoration of the Jews, no such particulars are given as might be expected from one living in the midst of the scenes referred to. The language employed is mostly figurative and general, such as is suggestive of a prophet surveying a future period of calamity and trial, rather than one who is depicting what he has witnessed and experienced.

3. In repeated passages the state of things implied is that which existed before the Exile. Thus the Temple and its services (Isa. 43 : 22-24 ; 65 : 11 ; 66 : 1-3, 6, 20) ; the people seeking alliance with foreign monarchs (Isa. 57 : 9, 11) ; the threatened punishment not yet inflicted (Isa. 56 : 9-57 : 2).

4. Frequent rebukes of idolatry, and passages in which its folly and absurdity are shown. And this in forms which prevailed before the Exile, as the Moloch abomination in the valley of Hinnom (Isa. 57 : 5-7), or rites derived from Egypt rather than Babylon (Isa. 65 : 3, 4 ; 66 : 17).

5. Numerous passages in which the deity of Jehovah is proved, as opposed to idols, who can predict nothing and accomplish nothing, whereas Jehovah both predicted Cyrus long before and raised him up for the deliverance of His people (Isa. 41 : 1, 21-29 ; 42 : 9 ; 43 : 9-12 ; 45 : 3, 4).

It is alleged that these events were too remote to be of any present interest to the people in Isaiah’s time; but they did not know, and there is no evidence that he knew, that any long interval would elapse before their occurrence. At the outset of his ministry he had predicted the desolation of the land and the exile of the people (Isa. 6 : 11, 12), to be accomplished by a powerful and distant nation (Isa. 5 : 26 sqq.), which, at a later time, he declared would be Babylon (Isa. 39 : 5-7), as did also his contemporary, Micah (Mic. 3 : 12 ; 4 : 10). It was promised that this should not take place in Hezekiah’s days (Isa. 39 : 8), whose life was to be prolonged fifteen years (Isa. 38 : 5) ; but no assurance had been given beyond that time.

It is alleged that the people are throughout these chapters uniformly represented as actually in exile. But this is a mistake. The prophet here transports himself in thought—as the prophets often do—into the midst of the scenes which he foretells; but his actual present prior to the Exile shines through in numerous passages, as has already been shown. In Isa. 45 : 4-13 he looks forward to the capture of Babylon as future; in Isa. 46 : 1, 2, he looks back upon it as past; in Isa. 51 : 3 (Rev. Ver.) the desolations of Zion are already repaired; in Isa. 53 the humiliation and vicarious death of the Messiah are described as having already taken place. The prophet thus takes his stand successively at different points in the future, showing that these represent not his real, but his ideal, present.

It is said that there are many words and phrases in these chapters which are not found in the acknowledged writings of Isaiah, and vice versa. But Dr. Stanley Leathes has shown (“The Witness of the Old Testament to Christ,” Boyle Lectures for 1868, pp. 282, 283, quoted by Dr. Edersheim in his “Prophecy and History in Relation to the Messiah,” pp. 283, 284) that there is ten times the reason, on the ground of diversity of diction, for assuming a deutero-Milton or Tennyson as for imagining a deutero-Isaiah. W. H. Green.

Internal Evidence from the Imagery.

In the books of the Old Testament the scenery of Palestine is reflected as the mountain which towers above the valley and the cloud that crowns the peak are mirrored in the lake which lies below. If internal evidence be proof at all there is proof abundant that the Pentateuch and all the chapters of Isaiah were written amid the hills of Palestine, in sight of its rocky ridges, with orchard of olive and grove of palm in full view. Interior.

With the exception of a very few detached passages, the most conspicuous of these passages being the prophecy concerning Cyrus (chaps. 44, 45), the Book of Isaiah throughout assumes that the Jews were living in their own country when it was written. All the coloring is thoroughly pre-exilic. W. J. Beecher.

The latter half of the Book of Isaiah, whose authorship is in question, is a composition abounding in metaphors, imagery, and allusions to natural scenery; and these must have been determined by the physical features of the country in which it had its birth. If not written, as it purports to be, by Isaiah, the alternate theory is that it was written by some one, at the close of the Exile, living in Babylon. No two countries could be much more dissimilar in physical features than Palestine and Babylon; the one a land of rugged, often barren mountains, with little green valleys winding among them, with narrow plains and vine-clad slopes, and cattle upon a thousand hills; the other a flat, irrigated plain, so level that the monarch must build lofty artificial structures to simulate and suggest the mountains for his mountain-bred queen. We have before us, then, a sufficiently practicable problem. Given a certain piece of composition to determine by the figures and illustrations whether it was written in the mountains of Judea or the level stretches of Babylon. We may begin the examination of the document, then, with the understanding that, if written in Babylon, it could not differ very radically in imagery and symbolism from the ordinary native literature, and must be conditioned by the physical features of the landscape and life in Babylon.

When we open the book what do we find? Almost the first utterance strikes us like a blast from the mountains and rocky steeps of the wilderness of Judea: “The voice of one that crieth, Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of Jehovah, make level in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low: and the uneven shall be made level, and the rough places a plain: and the glory of Jehovah shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together” (40 : 3 ff.). From that right on through to the end there is hardly a chapter that does not have the odor of the hills, the hot breath of the wilderness, or the roar of the waves beating on the rocky coast of Palestine. Scattered all through the twenty-seven chapters into which this writing is divided are more than twenty direct allusions to mountains and mountain scenery, not counting half a dozen other places where the terms mountain, rock, etc., are used as appellations without necessarily implying acquaintance with mountain scenery. All these passages refer to the mountains as objects so vividly familiar to the hearers that their scenery and even unstriking details could be used for symbols and illustrations of religious truths. Besides these allusions to mountains, there are about sixty other explicit allusions to natural scenery and outdoor life, all of which are perfectly applicable to Palestine, most of them far more so than to Babylon, and many would not fit the Babylonian life scenery and outlook at all.

So also we may class, perhaps, the many references to the sea and to the islands. Of course the Chaldeans had more or less to do with ships and seagoing, as indeed is implied in 43 : 14: “I will bring down all of them as fugitives, even the Chaldeans, in the ships of their rejoicing.” But to the peasants in the city and plains of Babylon the sea was something remote and mysterious, the symbol of the unknown. To the dwellers in Palestine the sea was near and present, washing all along their borders and visible even from the high lands of the interior. The sight of the tossing waters and the roar of the waves rolling in among the rocks of the coast were facts in their experience. And so in this writing we find the sea always conceived of as something whose phenomena were familiar to the hearers. There is another object that is referred to as remote and more or less mysterious—viz., “the isles of the sea.” Apparently these were the islands in the Mediterranean, if, as commonly supposed, Tarshish be some Mediterranean point.

Another group of passages refers to the scenes and life of the wilderness. To the Babylonian the wilderness was a place remote, unknown, suggesting only fear and mystery. To the Jew it was something near and familiar, part of his own land, where he led his own flocks and herds to graze. Rough, parched, and barren he knew it to be, but he also knew its little green valleys and springs among the rocks, or the grass springing up for a little while after the rains, when the mountain torrents poured down their floods, gradually drying up again as the heat of summer advanced. To him the wilderness was not the symbol of remoteness and mystery, but only of barrenness and distress, and that not universal, but relieved in many places by little valleys of rest and greenness, and by occasional floods bringing fertility and happiness. It is just this latter conception of the springs and fertilizing floods in the wilderness that is most made use of by our author. (See 41:17, 18; 42:15; 43:11, 19, 20; 44:3; 49:10; 50:2; 63:13; 58:11, and many others.)

Another group of passages of considerable significance refers to rain, snow, etc. In Palestine rain was all important to the farmer, as absolutely necessary for his crops, while in Babylon, where irrigation was chiefly depended on, the rain was not so considered. So in Babylonian literature we find clouds and rain more commonly associated with the idea of storms, whirlwinds and destruction. In our writing, however, we find rain referred to only as a fertilizing agent. (See 44:14; 55:10, etc.)

Another significant class of passages is those that relate to the preparation of a road for the coming of Jehovah. We can infer much as to the character of the country upon which the eyes of the audience daily rested, by noting the kind of preparation which the speaker conceives as being made for the coming of the Exalted One. The passage at the very beginning of the document sets it forth at some length.

“Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of the Lord; make level in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the uneven shall be made level, and the rough places a plain” (40:3, 4).

Both mountains and hills are specified, indicating that it was more than a merely undulating or broken country. The image presented is either the bold one of the mountains being levelled down and the valleys filled up so as to make the whole country a plain, or possibly only what was familiar as seen in all the great public roads through the country; deep cuts through the mountains, and the road built up across the valleys, so as to be made as level and easy as possible, while instead of the crooked footpaths, winding zigzag over the hills, is substituted the one broad “smooth” and comparatively “straight” public highway, if that is the translation we are to give the text. (See 49:11; 57:14; 62:10, etc.)

But strong as is the evidence of the foregoing passages, we have not yet considered the strongest, most numerous, and most decisive passages of all—those that refer directly and explicitly to the mountains and mountain life and scenery. Here it seems to me the evidence is conclusive. All their moods and pledges are referred to, and referred to merely incidentally, without explanation or comment, and especially the little inconspicuous scenes and homely events, which have much greater significance because they would be the most unlikely to be referred to either by or to persons who knew the mountains only at second hand. What, for instance, could be more homely and yet more suggestive than the picture in chap. 63:14: “As the cattle that go down into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord caused them to rest.” These allusions are scattered all through this writing from beginning to end. In its very first chapter we have: “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain” (40:9). And in the next to the last chapter: “Which have burned incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed Me upon the hills” (65:7). And there is hardly a chapter between but has some similar allusion.

One of the most striking expressions in the book is that found in chap. 49:13 and elsewhere: “Sing, O ye heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into singing, O mountains.” This would be a most improbable creation of the imagination of one living in a level country. But the mountaineer, wishing for some object to personify to take up his song, finds the heavens, the earth and the mountains the most prominent objects before his own and his hearers’ sight.

In many other passages also we find the mountains referred to in a way and in connections in which a dweller in a level country would be very unlikely to conceive of them, no matter how well informed he was about their appearance and characteristics, especially since his hearers would see no force or aptness in the figures used. Thus, chap. 49 : 11 : “I will make all My mountains a way.” Why use the mountains for that purpose, except that the mountains made up a very large proportion of the landscape known to both speaker and hearers? Thus, too, chap. 40 : 12 : “Who hath weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?” As designed to portray boundless power, it is just the figure that would be most impressive in Judea. But many other figures could be found to convey these ideas more vividly to the dweller in a level land.

Such are some of the more obvious allusions to natural scenery in this document. Is it possible that they could have come from a native of such a country as we know the flat plains of Babylon to have been? A Jewish writer in Babylon, at the close of the Exile, could not differ materially in his imagery from the ordinary writers of the country; but we have found this writing filled with allusions to scenes not found in Babylon at all, but common in Palestine. Of the allusions to mountain scenery some single ones are of such a character as to be alone almost conclusive; their frequency shows how vivid such scenes were to the author’s mind. Especially when we consider how this whole composition is saturated with allusions to the scenery of Palestine, and contains not a single reference to the characteristic scenery of Babylon the conclusion seems irresistible that Babylon could not have been the birthplace of the document. D. A. Murray.

Diction and Style.

The difference of style in these chapters, on which great stress has been laid by some modern critics to prove their later authorship, is not explained in the least by referring them to an unknown writer near the close of the Exile. They are unlike all the known writings of that period. On the other hand, the difference is just what we might expect, if they were written by Isaiah during those later days of “truth and peace” (39 : 8). For here, in agreement with that temporary and merciful change, the details of the earlier prophecies, the stern rebukes with which they begin, their woes and burdens, blossom out into rich and beautiful promise. New subjects demand some new words and phrases. A denial of the genuineness on this ground must be simply puerile, unless the contrast were extreme. It would require us to infer that hardly one book of considerable size is throughout from the same author. But most of the alleged contrasts, when examined, prove erroneous and illusive; while the resemblances, which attest the common origin of both parts, are many and important, and cannot be referred to chance alone. Birks.

The true argument from diction is complex and delicate. Each author’s vocabulary is an element in that indescribable whole which we call style, and which several hundred writers since Buffon have called “the man himself.” If Isaiah wrote both the chief sections of the book that goes by his name, then there will be a multitude of philological filaments binding together these two halves, which will not connect the disputed portions with any other writing or group of writings. If such traces are absent, the unity of Isaiah is scientifically disproved. Accordingly I prepared a Hebrew index to chaps. 40-66, giving in extenso the entire Isaian use of each word. The occurrences elsewhere being grouped roughly by classes, I determined the extent of the difference between the vocabulary of the earlier and the later prophets, taken as a whole. The vocabulary of Isaiah B proved to resemble closely that of the prophets before the Exile, to resemble Isaiah A most closely of all, and to incline less toward that of the exilic and post-exilic prophets, with no solitary exception even when each arbitrary division, according to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, was taken by itself. Minute examination of the separate words, beginning with the rarest, tended constantly to the same result, some of the individual cases being very striking; and then an elaborate comparison was instituted between Isaiah B and the only undisputed prophet of the Exile, Ezekiel, from whom he was found to differ (while agreeing with Isaiah A) in his total environment, that is, in words pertaining to organic and inorganic nature, and to all manner of human relations; and especially in the names for God. This material was published in four numbers of the Bibliotheca Sacra, 1881-82. The argument has been sometimes misconceived, for its value evidently depends upon the accumulated mass of its particulars. It is not a chain which must fall if a single link be broken; it resembles rather a multitude of pillars, all supporting a common conclusion. W. H. Cobb.

[Some detailed points from Mr. Cobb’s summary of his papers in the Bibliotheca Sacra are here subjoined. B.]

By a series of careful enumerations, there was ascertained the whole number of words in the Hebrew vocabulary, then the number in each main division of Isaiah, in the entire book, in the earlier prophets, the later prophets, and the prophets as a whole; also the commonest and the rarest words in the so-called later Isaiah, with a few other particulars. It was thence proved that the vocabulary of Isaiah B presents striking affinities with that of the earlier prophets (especially Isaiah A) and striking diversities from that of the later prophets. This appeared both from the number of coincident words and from their character. For instance, while eight hundred and forty-eight of B’s words are found in A, only seven hundred and thirty-five occur in the exile-prophet, Ezekiel, though his prophecy is about twice as long as A’s. Again, there are eight words found in both parts of Isaiah and nowhere else, but only one word peculiar to Isaiah B and the period of the Exile. The books of the Old Testament I arranged in groups, according to two systems of classification, and the vocabulary of Isaiah B (excepting proper names, and words so common as to be indecisive) was taken up word by word, the number of occurrences of each word in all the classes was recorded, and the occurrences in Isaiah were cited by chapter and verse. From this “Hebrew Index” tables were deduced, proceeding from the more rare to the more frequent words, and showing by each particular grouping that the language of B belongs in the class which includes A, and can readily be excluded from Ezekiel’s class.

A concluding article is given in the Bibliotheca Sacra for July, 1882, carrying out with great care an examination of the local color of Isaiah B as compared with that of Isaiah A, on the one hand, and the late prophets, on the other. It will be seen that this argument advances a stage from the mere grouping of words to the comparison of ideas. Beginning with inorganic nature, I have gone through the vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms, noting agreements and disagreements, and finding that, whoever wrote the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, it cannot be fairly denied that his environment was very like that of the genuine Isaiah, and very unlike the scenery of Babylon. The evidence examined next, that drawn from the names of God, does not lose its force when stated in brief. It appears from induction (as might have been judged a priori) that most of the earlier prophets use these Divine titles with great freedom, while in later times there seemed to be a special sacredness attached to two or three names, which caused a loss of spontaneity. Thus Ezekiel almost always employs “Jehovah” or “Adonai Jehovah.” But both parts of Isaiah blend with these a rich variety of other terms in such a way as to be characteristic of the earlier prophets and to reveal also a minute and evidently undesigned correspondence of part with part. The particular terms they employ have sometimes a special weight in the argument. Thus “the Holy One of Israel,” occurring fourteen times in each part, is found nowhere else among the prophets, except twice in the last chapters of Jeremiah, which seem to presuppose Isaiah’s predictions against Babylon. Again, the Divine title “King,” the idea at the root of the theocracy, is frequently met with both in writers before and after the Exile; its absence from the undisputed prophecies of that period is certainly a natural circumstance; yet it is found in both parts of Isaiah. Equally natural is the fact that the writers of the Exile abstain from that title of God so common among the prophets—“Jehovah Sabaoth.” The victorious leader of Israel’s “hosts,” the God of her “armies,” was not likely to be invoked by that name when those forces were defeated and humbled. Yet “Jehovah Sabaoth” occurs six times in Isaiah B, as well as often in Isaiah A. W. H. Cobb.

No Proper Marks of a Distinct Work near the Close of the Captivity. 1. The prophet is wanting and cannot be found. 2. The title and name are also wanting. The Old Testament contains sixteen books of prophecy from as many different authors. But in every case, without exception, the name of the prophet meets us at the opening of his work. Had these chapters proceeded, then, from some prophet near the close of the Exile, his name, without doubt, would have stood at their opening. This results not only from these sixteen precedents, but even from the laws of common sense. No king would commit a royal message, claiming the obedience of his subjects, to nameless hands, or to parties left without any proof or sign of their royal commission. How much less could these noblest prophecies form a solitary exception to this universal rule!

3. The date and place are wanting, as well as the prophet himself, and his name. All the four leading prophets and seven of the other twelve have dates given, besides their name, to fix their historical standpoint. Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, in whom alone this is wanting, are assigned to persons historically defined; and besides, their writings are together less than one half the length of these later prophecies. 4. The prophetic call and commission is wanting. This marks all the other leading books of prophecy. It occupies the sixth chapter of

Isaiah, the first of Jeremiah, the first and second both of Ezekiel and Daniel, the first of Hosea, several verses of Amos, one half of Jonah, and is present both in Haggai and Zechariah.

5. Contemporary persons and names are also wanting. These form one striking feature of all the more important books of prophecy, whereby their intimate connection with the actual course of God’s providence and of the sacred history is maintained. Seventeen persons are thus named in Isaiah, fifty in Jeremiah, eight or ten in Ezekiel, besides definite groups, like the elders and the sun-worshippers; about the same number in Daniel, and thirty in the books of the minor prophets. But in these later prophecies, written, by the hypothesis, in stirring times, and at a most critical season of Israel’s history, not a single personal or historical name, except that of Cyrus only, can be found.

6. The prophetic structure, also, is wholly absent. The early prophecies of Isaiah, and every other book from Jeremiah to Malachi, have one common feature. They begin with history or prophetic warning, and then pass on to the utterance of bright hopes and gracious promises. There is one slight exception, because Haggai and Zechariah prophesied together, and Haggai’s earlier voice, mainly of rebuke and warning, was continued at once, by his brother prophet, in words of comfort and promise. In every other case this order is observed, and thus forms a kind of law in every complete prophetic message. The warnings of the law constantly prepare the way for the hopes of the Gospel. This rule is fully observed on the usual view of these chapters, that they are later portions of Isaiah’s own work. But the moment they are referred to a different and unknown author, it is contradicted and reversed. This message, unlike the voice of every known prophet, would then hurry at once, without a word of caution or rebuke, into utterances of fullest and brightest promise.

7. The strong assertions of Divine foreknowledge in reference to the victories of Cyrus are a further disproof of the later date. This appeal is made strongly and repeatedly (Isa. 41:23, 25, 26; 42:9; 43:9; 44:25, 26; 45:3, 4; 46:10, 11). The transfer of these predictions to the days of Cyrus himself robs them of all their force, and contradicts their plain meaning. It degrades a series of striking prophecies into falsehoods, the work of some reckless and unscrupulous forger, who habitually takes the holy name of God in vain, to disguise his forgeries. Thus every feature of name, title, structure and internal contents, which would naturally belong to a prophetic writing near the close of the Exile, so far as these can be inferred by strict induction from existing prophecies, is wholly wanting in these later visions of Isaiah.

FURTHER, 1. The two portions of the book have also a close and intimate relation to the history which is interposed between them. The main subject of the first part is the progress and triumphs of the Assyrian power, which was to reach even to the neck, and cover the whole land; but then to dash itself vainly against the rock of God’s covenant and the bulwarks of Zion. These warnings begin chap. 5, and reach their climax in chap. 33, when the last invasion seems to have been actually begun. The history (chaps. 36, 37) first recounts this very crisis and Sennacherib’s overthrow. Next, in the narrative (chap. 38), of Hezekiah’s sickness and recovery, and the reversed decline of the shadow in the dial of Ahaz, it marks the transition to a gracious though short reprieve in the decline of the kingdom. This episode of history closes, in chap. 39, with a clear announcement of the coming captivity of Babylon. The earlier prophecies all converge on the first of these three events, and the later ones all diverge from the last. They assume the fulfilment of this predicted captivity, and open out the fulness of those hopes of Israel which lay beyond it. The middle event, which parts the reign of Hezekiah into a morning of cloud and tempest, and an eventide of peace and truth, is also represented by the plain contrast of warning and promise in the two main portions of the book which precede and follow.

2. These two portions correspond also with the position and character of Isaiah, the chief of the prophets, and with the moral object of the prophetic word, as the Divine bridge between the law of Moses and the Gospel of Christ. In the usual chronology, the year of Hezekiah’s recovery is just midway between the song and death of Moses, the last year of Israel in the wilderness, and the preaching of the Baptist, the first dawn of the Gospel. Now the earlier prophecies answer to the warnings of the law, to which they allude in their first sentence (Isa. 1:2; De. 32:1); while it is from the later that Isaiah has received his title of the evangelical prophet, because they contain such clear and full anticipations of the Gospel. And this relation is still more complete. For while the first portion begins with a direct reference to the warnings in the song of Moses, which it proclaims as fulfilled, the second portion opens with a direct prophecy of the Baptist, the forerunner of our Lord. Thus the two parts link themselves, in their opening sentences, with the latest warnings of the law and the earliest notes of Gospel promise.

3. These later prophecies, also, on close examination, will be found to have their text in chap. 35, the close of the earlier ones, which they amplify and unfold. [Expanded in thirty particulars, p. 336, etc.] Birks.

Summary of Argument, pp. 411-415.

There is just the same reason for referring the earlier as the later prophecies to some later prophet than Isaiah. The whole argument then is nugatory, and the sameness of the proportions of the three classes in the two divisions is a fresh, indirect and collateral proof of their common authorship. Both in the earlier and later prophecies there are four or five chapters where the prophetic present seems to be in the time of Isaiah himself, but more expressly so in the later than in the earlier; in each there are four or five chapters when the prophet seems rather translated from his own actual place two or three centuries into the times of Cyrus, though more explicitly and clearly in the later than in the earlier prophecies. Thus the last pretext for the dual hypothesis on close examination disappears and yields a fresh argument in proof of its falsehood; those are thus left, I think, without the least excuse who venture to contradict the testimony of our Lord Himself in the very opening of His grand commission of mercy, and the consenting testimony of nearly all the inspired writers of the New Testament. Birks.

New Testament Statements.

John the Baptist said: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias.” The Baptist thus bore witness to a double truth; that he was truly fulfilling an office assigned to him in God’s message by Isaiah (40: 3); and that the office thus divinely given him was to go before the face of the Lord, the good Shepherd of Israel, who was now at hand. If these words were not Isaiah’s, and do not really refer to the Baptist, then he must have borne witness to a double falsehood in those very words, in which our Lord solemnly declares that “He bare witness to the truth.”

Luke, in his Gospel, thus records the opening of our Lord’s ministry in the synagogue at

Nazareth. “And there was given him the book of the prophet Esaias, and he found the place where it is written: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,” etc. (Isa. 61: 1-3). “And he closed the book and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say, This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.” Here the evangelist himself plainly affirms that chap. 61 is part of the work of Isaiah. But our blessed Lord evidently, by His conduct, affirms the same. The whole roll was given to Him as “the book of Isaiah the prophet.” As such He receives it. He then turns to a part, according to modern sceptics wholly spurious, and chooses its words as a sacred and solemn witness to His Divine mission. He claims to be received and honored as God’s messenger, nay, as the long-expected Messiah, because His work was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy. If the words were not those of Isaiah, but of some unknown party in the days of Cyrus, whose horizon was bounded by his own days, and could not possibly reach forward through five centuries to come, what conclusion must follow?

John thus describes our Lord’s rejection by the Jewish rulers. “But though He had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on Him: That the saying of Esaias the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed our report? . . . Therefore they could not believe, because that Esaias said again, He hath blinded their eyes, etc. These things said Esaias, when he saw His glory, and spake of Him” (John 12: 37-41). The beloved disciple, the great prophet of the New Testament, here testifies that the early and the later prophecies of this book belong equally to Isaiah. In one of the two passages cited he received his first commission, and in the other he reached its crowning honor. In one he saw the glory of Christ, and in the other he spake of His sufferings with clearest voice. But the testimony of the apostle goes farther, since he assures us that the central fact of our Lord’s ministry was a direct fulfilment of Isaiah’s warning message.

Our Lord’s own testimony, at the very close of His ministry, is, if possible, even still more striking: “For I say unto you, that this which is written must yet be fulfilled in Me, And he was numbered among the transgressors; for the things concerning Me have an end.” The exact force of the words is rather, “For even the things which concern Me have their fulfilment.”

The Gospel of Christ was to have its first entrance to a distant nation through the Ethiopian eunuch; and Philip, the evangelist, for this great end, receives a miraculous commission. “The angel of the Lord spake unto him, Arise, and go toward the south,” etc. He finds the eunuch reading “Esaias the prophet.” “Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot. And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esaias.” If these verses, which the eunuch was reading, are not Isaiah’s, and do not really predict the sufferings of the Lord Jesus, but are a doubtful guess at the sufferings of Israel or of the prophets by a nameless writer in the days of Cyrus, or the history of “some other man,” what conclusion will follow? The eunuch would have been deceived, and taught a double falsehood, and this would then have been the first step in the conversion of Ethiopia to the Christian faith.

Paul, in his Epistle to Rome, the Gentile metropolis, has for one main object to prove the Divine call of the Gentiles, that doctrinal and historical foundation of the Church of Christ. He uses for this end five main scriptural arguments. The first is taken from these later prophecies, without naming their author (Rom. 10 : 15). The next is from these same prophecies, ascribing them expressly to Isa. 10 : 16. His third proof is that the Jews had a prediction of this fact in the law of Moses itself (10 : 19). His fourth is that Isaiah had announced it still more plainly; and his fifth and last, that Isaiah, once more, had placed it side by side with a warning of Jewish unbelief (Rom. 10 : 20, 21; Isa. 65 : 1, 2). Thus, in this main argument of the apostle of the Gentiles, to confirm a great doctrine of Christianity, the chief warrant for his own manifold labors, three proofs out of five directly involve the genuineness of these later prophecies as Isaiah’s own, while a fourth rests on their character as inspired messages of God. The theory which ascribes them to some unknown hand in the days of Cyrus turns his whole reasoning into mischievous errors and worthless fallacies. And thus, before the spuriousness of these chapters can be received, the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles, Matthew, Luke, John, Philip the evangelist, Paul must be condemned together. Birks.

Alleged Objections.

The chief reasons, which have been alleged to justify a desertion of the constant faith of the Church of Christ, and of the direct testimony of our Lord and His apostles, have been summed up as follows in a recent English work.

“It is a first principle that the historical horizon of a prophet belongs to his own time. He takes his stand in his own generation, and looks onward from it. His starting-point lies in the circumstances of the age he lives in. This analogy is violated by such as attribute these chapters to Isaiah, since their visible horizon is the time of the Exile.” This first principle is a plain self-contradiction. A standpoint and an horizon, the centre and the circumference of a landscape, are not the same. The true first principle is that “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,” and could therefore announce whatever the Spirit of God, who sees the end from the beginning, was pleased to reveal. It is another first principle, clearly laid down in these same chapters, that He “declareth the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things not yet done” (46 : 10). The objection, so far as it implies a truth, yields a direct proof of the genuineness. The starting-point of a prophet, though not his horizon or limit of view, is in the circumstances of his own age. So the starting-point of this book, if all be genuine, is in its first chapters, and these abound in references to Isaiah’s time. But these later visions, if spurious, have their starting-point in chap. 40, where no single person, place, or circumstance of the Exile is introduced. They would thus float in the air with no historical starting-point whatever.

2. “Isaiah could not have taken such a bound as to predict a far distant personal Messiah, consistently with the analogy of prophecy. Such leaps into the future are unknown.” Our Lord said to the Jews—“Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad,” and “Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me.” Yet Abraham lived twelve centuries, and Moses seven centuries, before Isaiah. The assertion, then, flatly contradicts Him whose name is the Truth. The exact reverse is really true, that “all the prophets bear witness” of Messiah (Acts 10 : 43), and that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev. 19 : 10).

3. “The prophet indicates very clearly his own position, historically and geographically, in chap. 52 : 4, 5. Whether these be referred to place, Babylon, or mean ‘in the present case,’ he alludes to the Chaldean Exile as then present.” This remark combines four errors. First, the date of these later prophecies can never be fixed by one text midway in their course, where the Lord Himself, not the prophet, is plainly the speaker. Next, this chapter has plainly no fixed standpoint, but a varying horizon. For in the second verse Zion is described as still captive, and in verse 9 has been comforted and redeemed. Thirdly, we have a clear indication that prophetic or ideal, not actual time, is expressed, by the remark which follows: “Therefore they shall know in that day that I am He that doth speak,” etc. The time of the fulfilment is there contrasted with that of the prophecy. Lastly, a reference to the Babylonish Exile, except allusively, or as an earnest, seems disproved by the context, which points us to a time when Jerusalem shall be no more defiled by the presence of the unclean. This may apply to the future close of the times of the Gentiles, but was not true of the Return from Babylon.

4. “It is implied, in various places, that Jerusalem and the cities of Judah are depopulated and decayed, but that they shall be rebuilt (44:26-28; 51:3; 52:9; 58:12; 62:4; 64:10, 11; 44:28; 58:12; 61:4).” All these passages imply and require some previous mention of the desolation, either in the form of historical statement or direct prophecy. If the chapters are from Isaiah, this condition is amply satisfied by eight or ten clear predictions of this great change (1:24-26; 3:25, 26; 6:11, 12; 7:23-25; 14:3, 4; 17:9-11; 24:12; 27:10; 32:13, 14). But if spurious, or from an unknown writer at the close of the Exile, this essential condition wholly fails to be satisfied. This “Unknown” would rush at once into bright predictions of Israel’s Return, before one word was given to throw light on his own circumstances, or to affirm the present state of exile. Thus it comes to pass that one critic of the negative school places him in Palestine, another in Egypt, a third in Babylon; some just after the fall of the Temple, others just before the Return. The objection is really fatal to the theory it is brought to confirm.

5. “The people are described as robbed, spoiled and imprisoned, whose time of deliverance is nigh” (42:22-24). This text, also, is a strong disproof of the view it is said to confirm. For the appeal is there openly made: “Who among you will give ear to this? who will hearken and hear for the time to come?” The message of calamity is thus given to the people beforehand, that, when it is fully arrived, they may lay it to heart. From this it follows, by natural inference, that the prophecy dates before the Exile.

6. “The writer shows a minute acquaintance with the relations of the Oriental world in his day. The Chaldean empire is depicted in the height of its splendor, but its fall is near. He refers to intestine wars (49:26), Evil-Merodach murdered by Neriglissar, etc. Cyrus is named, and his conquests referred to; and his designs against Egypt, which Cambyses carried out; and the Persians rewarded by the gift of Egypt, Ethiopia and Meroe. Such specific details could only proceed from one living near the end of the Exile, when Babylon’s fall was at hand.” This objection consists of five elements. First, that the Spirit of God could not know, and therefore could not reveal, the state of the eastern world so long beforehand as two centuries. Secondly, that the predictions of Cyrus and his conquests, made here the ground of a solemn appeal to all the heathen on the vanity of their idols in the presence of an All-wise God, who sees the end from the beginning, were profane forgeries after the events, which were foretold in pretence only. Thirdly, that the appeal concerning the oppression of Babylon and its fall, “I have even from the beginning declared it to thee, before it came to pass,” means really that a forger described it after all Asia had beheld it. Fourthly, that the threatening, “I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh,” means that Evil-Merodach had been murdered fifteen or twenty years before the words were written. Lastly, that chap. 43:3, “I gave Egypt for thy ransom, Ethiopia and Seba for thee,” describes the conquest of Egypt by Cambyses, and still was written by a forger, whose horizon was the Exile, fifteen or twenty years before the expedition occurred!

7. “Exhortations to the exiles, encouraging them to return, are an anomaly in one like Isaiah, living in the Assyrian period, when the Exile was unknown, and not predicted by any prophet, Amos, Hosea, Micah and Nahum. Our prophets takes his stand in the Exile, and does not predict its desolation and misery.” The Exile could not be unknown to “the Lord God of the holy prophets,” who sees the end from the beginning. It had been announced by Moses long before, and in Isaiah’s own time by Amos (5:27), and even Babylon as the scene of exile by Micah (4:10). “Our prophet” also has predicted its misery and desolation eight or ten times. Israel, too, were one people, and the exile of Ephraim had already come. For a false Isaiah to urge the exiles to return, without one single hint, date, person, or place, by which we might learn who were the persons addressed, and their actual condition, would be most unnatural. On the other hand, what can be more simple and natural than for a prophet, who has ten times foretold the calamity, in a later and still fuller message to proclaim the deliverance?

8. “The writer often appeals to old announcements as in course of fulfilment (42 : 9 ; 43 : 9 ; 41 : 22 ; 48 : 3).” Such an objection is startling and prodigious, since these four texts supply one of the plainest disproofs of the sceptical theory. For in chap. 41 : 22, 23, 25, a coming of Cyrus, still future, is declared to be such a proof of God’s foreknowledge, that by means of it all idols and their worshippers will be confounded and brought to shame. In chap. 43 : 9, also, the declaration of former things—viz., the return of Israel’s captives, is again made the reason of a public challenge to the nations and their idols, “Who among them can declare this?” In chap. 48 : 3-8, the clearness of these very predictions is explained by their moral design, to bow the stubborn hearts of the Jews into submission and reverence. “Because I knew that thou art obstinate . . . I have even from the beginning declared it to thee ; before it came to pass, I showed it thee.” To adduce these very texts as so many proofs that the predictions they contain followed the events, is no common form of scepticism, and seems to call for wonder and sorrow, rather than formal refutation.

9. “The people seem to be without the external ordinances of worship, for the sacrifices and services of the Temple are never referred to. They only keep fast days and Sabbaths.” To such an objection quotation is the best reply. “But thou hast been weary of me, O Israel. Thou hast not brought me the small cattle of thy burnt offerings, . . . neither hast thou filled me with the fat of thy sacrifices” (43 : 23, 24) ; “He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man ; he that sacrificeth a lamb, as if he cut off a dog’s neck ; he that offereth an oblation, as if he offered swine’s blood” (66 : 3). If all texts alike are to be expounded of actual, not prophetic time, these speak as plainly of an actual Temple, and of sacrifices either neglected or perverted, as others do of a temple in ruins. But if once we admit the use of prophetic time, the whole argument vanishes away.

10. “The writer describes the theocracy of the future in splendid poetry, but without a visible king. But Isaiah always associates a king with the flourishing theocracy (9 : 6 ; 11 : 1 ; 32 : 1).” This objection implies and requires some entire contrast between these three earlier, and the later predictions of Messiah. But, on the contrary, the allusions to the earlier in the later are clear and full. Thus

“the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him” (11 : 2) has its exact counterpart in the words of chap. 42 : 1, “I have put my Spirit upon him,” and in the words of Messiah Himself (61 : 1), “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me.” The next words, “a branch shall grow up out of his roots,” are re-echoed in the description (53 : 2), “For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and a root out of a dry ground.” Also Messiah is described in the later visions, first, as an object of worship to kings and princes (49 : 7) ; next, as God reigning (52 : 7) ; thirdly, as inheriting the strong for his portion (53 : 12) ; fourthly, as the leader and commander, in whom the sure promises to David are fulfilled (55 : 3, 4) ; and lastly, as the Divine Bridegroom and Redeemer of Israel (59 : 20 ; 61 : 10 ; 62 : 5). The only difference is that the later messages reveal more clearly, not royalty alone, but the sufferings of Christ, and His Divine glory.

11. “Favorite topics of the unknown prophet do not appear in Isaiah, his delineation of the servant of God and vicarious suffering. Idols are combatted with arguments ; and a defence of Jehovah as the only true God is conducted ; and a proof of it founded on His declaring beforehand things future, as a fact which shows the heathen gods to be nothing, because it is beyond their power.” The first part of this objection is that the Messiah is described under new titles of honor. It assumes that a prophet must go on repeating the same phrases to the end, and may not, without pain of losing his identity, reveal in new forms or under varied titles “the unsearchable riches of Christ.” The next part of it makes an admission fatal to the sceptical theory. It is owned that chap. 53 predicts vicarious sufferings, which can only be those of Messiah. If so, the whole is inspired prophecy, and reaches onward to a future, which was still distant even in the days of Cyrus. Thus the attempt to find a mark of contrast between Isaiah and the “unknown prophet” defeats itself. For if the writer, whoever he were, could predict the vicarious sufferings of Christ five centuries before they occurred, the whole basis of the sceptical hypothesis is overthrown. The last remark is still more adverse to the theory it is intended to sustain. For the argument by which, in these later chapters, idols are denounced and condemned is the clear proof of God’s foreknowledge which He has here given, in announcing the fall of Babylon, the conquests of Cyrus, and the return of the Jewish exiles, at a time when these events could not have been foreseen by merely human wisdom. It follows plainly that these messages could not have been written at the close of the Exile, when those facts were patent to the whole world, unless we suppose this “unknown prophet” to have been just as foolish, blind and senseless as the idols he so sternly condemns. Is it not strange that a critic of eminence should attempt to prove the spuriousness of these later chapters by features which are consistent, logical and impressive, if referred to Isaiah himself, but which, when ascribed to some unknown writer or pseudo-prophet at the close of the Exile, become nothing better than one tissue of impudent and ridiculous folly?

12. “The tone is tenderer and more uniformly evangelical than that of Isaiah, and the ideal hopes and pretendings of the theocracy take a higher, wider and purer range. Political relations enter into them far less than into Isaiah’s. The Gentile nations are little regarded; and their destruction is not dwelt upon with fierce rejoicings over it. Accordingly the heart of the Christian more nearly sympathizes with the poetic strains in which the unknown seer expatiates on the trials and hopes of Zion, and the promises of Divine aid to her, than it does with the sublimest descriptions of Isaiah.” These words are an example of the bold manner in which critics who have ceased to be disciples bring the words of God to the bar of their own tastes and careless errors. First, the objection is fatally adverse to the theory it is meant to support. Every prophetic message, by a constant and unvaried law, deals more on bright hopes toward its close. Its Sinai comes before its Olivet. This is doubly natural in the case of Isaiah. His earlier prophecies were uttered in times of deep anxiety, in the midst of political storms and the ravages of the Assyrian spoiler. But he survived till the brief reprieve of judgment after the fall of Sennacherib, and the days of “peace and truth” (39:8), when the storm of the terrible had passed away. Again, for an Old Testament prophet to begin his message abruptly with simple promises, before a single word of caution, reproof and remonstrance has prepared the way, contradicts every known precedent. It sets aside a truth which lies deeper than those precedents and occasions them, a settled law of Divine revelation, expressly taught us by Isaiah himself in his earlier prophecies. The Great Husbandman always convicts of sin before He convinces of righteousness, and ploughs and harrows the ground with warnings and judgments before He casts in the incorruptible seed of the promresses of the Gospel. The other remark is untrue, as well as irreverent. For the Gentiles are as prominent in the later as in the earlier prophecies. They are the subject, first, of solemn reproof and warning (chaps. 40, 41), then of repeated promises (chaps. 49, 52:15; 55:4), then have solemn judgments denounced against them (59:19; 63:1-6), and then are addressed in words of rich promise once more (66:12, 19). The “fierce rejoicing” in the destruction of the Gentile oppressors (Isa. 14:3-27) is not one whit more severe than the woes pronounced by our Lord on the Pharisees in Matt. 23, or than the counterpart in the New Testament denunciation of the fall of Babylon (Rev. 18). And there is nothing, even in the later prophecies, which has gathered round it deeper Christian sympathy, love and joy than Isa. 9:6, 7, the keynote of every Christmas celebration, and the promises (25:6-9; 26:1-4), and the outburst of prophetic gladness which closes the whole series in the thirty-fifth chapter.

13. “Jeremiah, a much later prophet, suffered ill-treatment and persecution for predicting a captivity, and none believed him. Had these prophecies been current in the name of a prophet so celebrated as Isaiah, Jeremiah would doubtless have appealed to them. Such a predecessor he could hardly have overlooked, especially as his defenders appealed to an independent prophecy of Micah’s (Mic. 3:12; Jer. 26:17, 18). The discourses before us therefore did not exist in Jeremiah’s day, and are not Isaiah’s” (Dav. Int. iii., p. 40). Now it is true that an appeal was made by some of Jeremiah’s friends to the prophecy of Micah, and the conduct of Hezekiah and the people of his days, to repel the malice of those who sought to put him to death in these earnest words—“Did Hezekiah and all Judah put him at all to death? did he not fear the Lord, and besought the Lord, and the Lord repented him of the evil which he had pronounced against them? Thus might we procure great evil against our souls.” From this incident it is inferred that the later prophecies were not then in existence, or else an appeal would have been made to them also in defence of Jeremiah. A very strange argument! For if it has any force, it would prove the non-existence of the earlier prophecies, admitted to be Isaiah’s, and not of the later, whose authenticity is denied. For in Isa. 3:25, 26; 6:9-12; 27:9-11; 32:11-14; 39:5-7, we have repeated predictions of the desolation of the land and exile of the people, and in the last a distinct announcement of the deportation to Babylon. On the other hand, the later prophecies predict only comfort and delivery to Zion, and judgments on Babylon and the Chaldeans.

On whatever side we pursue the inquiry, if only it be thorough and complete, the external and internal evidence, each of them full, various and decisive, conspires to prove the genuineness and real Isaian authorship of these later prophecies. The repeated testimony of the apostles and of the Lord of glory Himself, in the opening of His great mission at Nazareth, ought to settle the question, and dispel every doubt, among all who call themselves His disciples. But it is well to see that the internal evidence keeps pace with the external, and confirms the unity of the whole Book by an amount of proof which becomes clearer, deeper and fuller the further the inquiry is pursued. The adverse opinion does not rest, as sometimes alleged, on superior accuracy of Hebrew scholarship, but on the concurrence, in a small number of celebrated critics, of great technical knowledge of Hebrew grammar, with an entire lack of the logical instinct, and of all insight into the real harmonies and relations of the work they undertake to dissect. Their skill and learning reach only to the husk and mere exterior of the prophecies, while they seem wholly blind as to the substance of the whole. The result is what has been fitly called “the theory of despair.” The book, in their hands, becomes a mere cento from various writers, all unknown but one, of dates ranging through three centuries, and thrown together without order, method or unity of any kind.

The denial of Isaiah’s authorship is not at all confined to the later prophecies (chaps. 40-66). It includes further all these passages: chaps. 2: 1-4; (12: 1-6, Ewald); 13, 14: 1-23; 15, 16, 21: 1-10, 11-15; 23, 24, 27, 34, 35, 36-39, that is, eighteen chapters or parts of chapters out of thirty-nine. Thus out of sixty-six chapters there are only twenty-two, or just one third, of which the entire authorship is conceded to Isaiah. Two thirds are held to be spurious, and falsely ascribed to him. Out of 1304 verses, those of which the genuineness is allowed are only 524, or exactly two parts in five. The rest are assigned to four or five pseudo-Isaiahs, whose names, character and residence are wholly unknown.

It is needless to waste words on the comparisons in these criticisms between the style of the true Isaiah and the alleged defects of his various counterfeits. To those who are convinced, both on external and internal grounds, that all are his alike, they are wearisome and trifling. To those who believe that they are all messages of truth and wisdom from the living God to sinful men, it is hard to say whether the eulogies or the censures with which they alternate are the more repulsive and painful. But there is one remark forcibly suggested by the whole drift and character of the negative criticism. Starting from the principle that real prophetic foresight is impossible, or has never been vouchsafed at all, unless shrewd guesses at what is likely to happen within a year or two is to be dignified with that name, the whole Book of Isaiah becomes a riddle, incapable of any key, and baffles all the efforts of mere learning, however great, to account for the phenomena. The parts have to be shifted up and down, to meet the exigencies of a false theory, till confusion becomes worse confounded, and every fresh critic, working on this unbelieving assumption, makes a fresh guess, and introduces some new complication. The conclusion finally reached is that the book is “an aggregate of unauthentic pieces accumulating by degrees to its present extent. That he spent the eve of his life in committing them to writing or arranging them after they were written is highly improbable, else he would not have left them without any observable plan. No organic unity can be pointed out in them. No principle of arrangement appears.” Surely we have here one illustration of the prophet’s own words, in describing the unhappy state of those who have light, and will not use it. “We grope for the wall like the blind, and grope as if we had no eyes; we stumble at noon-day as in the night.” The real structure is beautifully simple, and the harmony of method and outline complete. The chapters of history which separate the two portions distinguish them, as the New Testament is distinguished from the Old, but only so as to reveal more plainly, to thoughtful minds, the deep unity of the whole message. As the law prepares for the Gospel, the burdens and woes prepare the way for rich comfort and abundant promise. All the tones of threatening converge, in the first part, on the Assyrian desolation and defiance (chaps. 36, 37), and all the messages of hope and promise diverge from chap. 39 and its warning of the Captivity in Babylon. The solemn voice at the opening, “Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth! I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me,” finds its gracious reversal in the later voice of mercy, “Comfort ye, comfort ye, My people, saith your God.”

Thus the whole book is a miniature Bible, where the law is unfolded in the earlier, and the Gospel largely and brightly anticipated in the later prophecies, while the grand crisis of Zion’s travail and deliverance lies between them, and unites them into one complete message of mingled warning, hope and Divine consolation. Birks.

The extended citations upon this vital question of the unity of Isaiah have been selected from the highest sources, that the intelligent

reader may apprehend the main points in refutation of the modern doctrine of a dual or multiple authorship. We further commend the treatment of the question by Dr. J. Addison Alexander (Later Prophecies, pp. xi.-xl.); Canon Rawlinson (Pulpit Com., pp. xxii.-xxvii.); W. Kay (Bible, or Speaker’s Com., pp. 7-18); Nägelsbach (Lange, pp. 13-25); Auberlen (Div. Rev., pp. 82-86); Hengstenberg (Kitto’s Bib. Dictionary); Oehler (O. T. Theology); Barth (Chron. Com.), and Kennedy (Unity of Isaiah). B.

40:1, 2 COMFORT ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; that she hath received of the LORD’s hand double for all her sins. 3 The voice of one that crieth, Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of the LORD, make 4 straight in the desert a high way for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough 5 places plain: and the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: 6 for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it. The voice of one saying, Cry. And one said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the 7 field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the breath of the LORD bloweth upon 8 it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. 9 O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain; O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; 10 say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God! Behold, the Lord God will come as a mighty one, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his recom- 11 pence before him. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd, he shall gather the lambs in his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that give suck. 12 Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in 13 scales, and the hills in a balance? Who hath directed the spirit of the LORD, or being his 14 counsellor hath taught him? With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him, and taught him in the path of judgement, and taught him knowledge, and shewed to him the 15 way of understanding? Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as 16 the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing. And 17 Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. All the nations are as nothing before him; they are counted to him less than nothing, and van- 18, 19 ity. To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? The graven image, a workman melted it, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and cast- 20 eth for it silver chains. He that is too impoverished for such an oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a cunning workman to set up a graven image, that shall 21 not be moved. Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the 22 beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth 23 out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: that bringeth

24 princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity. Yea, they have not been planted; yea, they have not been sown; yea, their stock hath not taken root in the earth: moreover he bloweth upon them, and they wither, and the whirlwind taketh them away as 25 stubble. To whom then will ye liken me, that I should be equal to him? saith the Holy 26 One. Lift up your eyes on high, and see who hath created these, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by name; by the greatness of his might, and for that he is strong in power, not one is lacking.

27. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the LORD, and my

28 judgement is passed away from my God? Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard? the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is

29 weary; there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to

30 him that hath no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary,

31 and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.

Chap. 40. The earlier prophecies have closed with the message, “Say to them of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not! behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God, He will come and save you.” These later visions open here with a prediction of the fulfilment of this Divine command. Their first chapter is a voice of comfort to the fearful-hearted, because the Lord is at hand, as the Good Shepherd, to save and bless His people. The threatenings of the law are replaced by the promises of the Gospel. The key-note of all these later prophecies is Divine consolation to the mourners in Zion. Birks.

The great and joyful thought, central in this chapter, is that God is coming in some signal manifestations of power and grace and in fulfilment of promise. For this let His people be comforted (verses 1, 2); let His way be prepared (verses 3-5); for however frail all men and all human things are, God’s word is sure and abiding (verses 6-8). Let evangelists proclaim to all the cities of Judah that God is coming (verse 9); with great strength (verse 10); and yet with no less wonderful tenderness and compassion (verse 11). None so great as He (verse 12), nor any so wise as to have taught Him (verses 13, 14); for all the nations even are as nothing before Him and all the world could not make an adequate sacrifice (verses 15-17). Shall God be compared to a graven image, curiously wrought with human skill, by human fingers (verses 18-20)? He who made the world, who spread out the heavens, who shapes the destinies of nations—is not He the mighty God, able to fulfil every word of His promise (verses 21-26)? Why then should His people think He has forgotten either them, or His cause on earth? For He is never weary or faint, but on the contrary always has strength and succor to give to the needy (verses 27-31). H. C.

Jerusalem is regarded as in ruins (cf. chap. 44:26-28; 51:3; 52:9; 58:12); the land is waste and desolate (63:18); the city and the Temple are destroyed (64:9-11). Their deliverance is about to take place and their captivity about to end, and the people about to be restored to their own land (chaps. 44:28; 58:12; 60:10; 65:9). In this situation, the prophet is directed to address words of consolation to the oppressed and long-captive Jews, and to assure them that their captivity is about to close. Jerusalem—now in ruins—was to be assured that the end of her desolation was near, for that an ample punishment had been taken for all her sins.

The prophet next represents the deliverance which would be accomplished under an image taken from the march of earthly kings (verses 3-8). The voice of a herald is heard in the wilderness making proclamation, that every obstacle should be removed, that Jehovah might return to Zion conducting His people. As He had conducted them from the land of Egypt, so He was about to conduct them from Babylon, and to appear again in Jerusalem and in the Temple. Between Babylon and Jerusalem there was an immense tract of country which was a pathless desert. Through this land the people would naturally be conducted; and the voice of the herald is heard demanding that a highway should be made—in the manner of a herald who preceded an army, and who required valleys to be filled, and roads to be constructed, over which the monarch and his army might pass with ease and safety. It is to be observed that the main thing here is not that the people should return, and a way for them be made, but that Jehovah was about to return to Jerusalem, and that the pathway should be made for Him. He was to be their leader and guide, and this was the principal source of comfort in their return; the principal event which was to give joy—that the glory of Jehovah was again about to be seen in Zion that had been so long desolate. In this the Holy Spirit, who directed and inspired the prophet, purposely suggests language that would be applicable to a far more important event, when the herald of the Messiah should announce His coming. The main thing which the voice was to cry is represented in verses 6–8. That was, that Jehovah was faithful to His promises, and that His predictions would be certainly fulfilled. Everything else would fade away—the grass would wither, the flower would fail, and the people would die—but the word of Jehovah would be unfailing, and this would be manifest alike in the release of the people from Babylon, and in the coming of the Messiah.

The messenger that brought these glad tidings to Zion, or Jerusalem, is exhorted to announce the happy news to the remaining cities of Judah—to go to an eminence—to lift up the voice—and to announce that their God had come (verse 9).

In verses 10, 11 the assurance is given that their God would come. He would come “with a strong hand”—almighty, and able to save; He would come able to reward His people; He would come as a tender and gentle shepherd, regarding especially the weak and feeble of His people—language alike applicable to God who should conduct the people from exile to their own land, and to the Messiah—though more strikingly and completely fulfilled in the latter.

The mention of the omnipotence of Jehovah, who was about to conduct His people to their own land, and to come Himself to Zion, leads the prophet into a most sublime description and His power, majesty and glory, the object of which seems to be to induce them to put entire confidence in Him (verses 12–17). This omnipotence, majesty and glory is set forth in most elevated and glowing language. God measures the waters in the hollow of His hand; He measures the heavens with a span; He measures the dust of the earth, and weighs the mountains (verse 12). None has counselled or can counsel Him—His understanding is superior to that of all creatures (verses 13, 14). The nations before Him are as a drop of a bucket, and as the small dust of the balance, and as nothing (verses 15, 17). All the vast forests of Lebanon and all the beasts that roam there would not be sufficient to constitute a burnt offering that should be a proper expression of His majesty and glory (verse 16).

From this statement of the majesty and glory of God, the prophet infers the folly of idolatry, and shows the absurdity of attempting to form an image or likeness of God, and the certainty that all who trusted in idols should be destroyed as the stubble is swept away by the whirlwind (verses 18–25).

And another inference of the prophet, and the main one which he designed to draw, is, that the people should put confidence in God (verses 26–31). They should trust Him who had such power; they should believe that He was able to save them; they should wait on Him who alone could renew their strength (verses 26–31). The entire scope and design of the chapter, therefore, is to induce them to put their reliance in God, who was about to come to vindicate His people, and who would assuredly accomplish all His predictions and promises. Barnes.

1–10. How majestically this great half of the Book of Isaiah opens with these mysterious voices! Other prophecies are wont to begin with symbolic visions, but here the ear takes the place of the eye; and instead of forms and flashing lights, which need to be translated, the prophet hears words, the impressiveness of which is heightened by the absence of any designation of the speakers. This much is clear, that the first words are God’s, addressed to the prophets. They are the key-note of the whole. Israel is comforted in the assurance that her trial is ended and her sin purged. Then there is silence, broken by a voice to which no personality is attached, the herald and forerunner of the coming King and God. When the echoes of it have died away, another is heard, commanding yet another unnamed to “cry,” and in response to the latter’s asking what is to be the burden of His message, bidding him peal out the frailty of man and the eternal vigor of the word of the Lord, which assures its own fulfilment. Then comes a longer pause. The way has been prepared, the coming God has come; He has set up His throne in the restored Jerusalem, and His glory is seen upon her. So there rings out from unnamed lips the stirring command to the city, thus visited by the indwelling God, to proclaim the glad tidings with a voice, the strength of which shall correspond to their gladness and certainty.

1. God speaks and bids His servants speak. That is a wonderfully tender word with which the silence and sadness of exile are broken.

The inmost meaning of God’s voice is ever comfort. What a world of yearning love there is, too, in the two little words “my” and “your”! The exiles are still His; He who has hidden His face from them so long is still theirs. And what was true of them is true of us; for sin may separate us from God, but it does not separate Him from us, and He still seeks to make us recognize the imperishable bond, which itself is the ground of both our comfort and of His will that we should be comforted. A. M.

2. This exhortation affords a key to the whole prophecy, as being consolatory in its tone and purpose. Jerusalem is here put for the Church or chosen people, whose metropolis it was, and for whose sake the place itself was precious in the sight of God. A.

As the very first words go deep into the meaning of all God’s voices, and unveil the permanence of His relation of love even to sinful and punished men, so the next disclose the tender manner of His approach to us, and prescribe the tone for all His true servants, “Speak ye to the heart of Jerusalem,” with loving words, which may win her love; for is she not the bride of Jehovah, fallen though she be? And is not humanity the beloved of Jesus, in whom God’s heart is unveiled that our hearts may be won? How shall human voices be softened to tenderness worthy of the message which they carry? Only by dwelling near enough to Him to catch the echoes and copy the modulations of His voice, as some birds are taught sweeter notes than their own. The prophet’s charge is laid upon all who would speak of Christ to men. Speak to the heart, not to the head, not to the conscience only. God beseeches in the person of His “ambassadors.” The substance of the message may well find its way to the heart; for it is the assurance that the long, hard service of the appointed term of exile is past, that the sin which brought it about is forgiven, and, more wonderful and gracious still, that God’s mercy reckons that the ills which followed on faithlessness have more than expiated it. We need not seek for any other explanation of these startling words than the exuberance of the Divine pity, which “doth not willingly afflict.” The Divine voice bids His prophets proclaim that Jehovah comes to set us all free, to end the weary bondage, and to exact no more punishment for sins. A. M.

That her warfare is accomplished. Her period of toilsome trial and suffering, here compared to a protracted term of military service, is at length over. This looks forward to the end of the distresses and sorrows of the people of God, and may be regarded as having special reference to the termination of that great calamity, which was then impending and was predicted in the immediately preceding chapter (Isa. 39:6). This must come, but it shall not last forever; it shall have an end, which is already fixed. This clause may be regarded as expanded in chaps. 40-48, which deals largely with the overthrow of Babylon and the deliverance of Judah. “That she hath received of Jehovah’s hand double for all her sins.” “Double” is not here to be understood numerically, but as meaning “largely” or “abundantly.” The reference is not to ample punishment, as Jer. 16:18; 17:18, but rich and exuberant blessings, as Isa. 61:7; Zech. 9:12. This looks forward to the time when God’s overflowing grace shall more than have made up to her all that she had endured and deserved. “For all her sins” would be more exactly rendered “in all her sins;” that is, in the midst of them, or in spite of them. This corresponds to the glowing picture presented of the future of Zion in chaps. 58-66 (see particularly chap. 60), which the Lord shall bring to pass, not according to her desert, but according to His own rich mercy and grace. W. H. G.

3. The call is to prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness of human sin, by raising up the cast-down by reason of transgressions or sorrows, to subdue lofty thoughts and self-sufficiency, by humble self-abnegation, to make the “crooked things” or the “rugged things” straight or smooth, and the rough ground where heights were tumbled on heights a deep valley, by forsaking evil. The moral preparation, not the physical, is meant. A. M.—Babylon is not named nor the Exile, nor the restoration to Palestine. On the other hand, the New Testament refers this passage directly and explicitly to the preaching of John the Baptist, as the great work which was to prepare the way for the Messiah. Remarkably the three earlier Gospel historians, Matthew, Mark and Luke, have but one voice to this point, and that is entirely explicit. H. C.

Prepare ye the way. As every Eastern traveller has learned, roads, in our sense of the term, are unknown. The feet of camels and horses are the only road-makers in the East; and generation after generation walks round the same boulder, makes a circuit round the same hollow, no man ever dreaming of cutting, levelling, banking up or draining a road, although the remains of the paved and levelled highways of those master engineers, the Romans, may be seen at every turn. But let a sultan or a shah propose a royal progress, and then all is changed. Pioneers are hurriedly sent forward along the whole route; the neighboring population is at once impressed, and compelled to work without pay, the stones are gathered out, the dry watercourses are filled in, the rocks are scarped, the sides of the hills are cut, and the track levelled and guarded. No obstacle delays the monarch’s advance. I myself have seen exactly this preparation made, and the road cut and levelled from Jaffa to Jerusalem, to receive the visit of the Prince Imperial of Austria. But it lasts not long. The first rain washes all this loose earth away, and the old rocks and watercourses reappear. Tristram.

This is the very labor by which we are required to prepare His way. This is the very work which His Church must do. She must cast up the highway for the progress of the Gospel by her own efforts, self-denial and prayer. She has no questions to ask but what is the will of the Lord; that being known, to be deterred by difficulties is to renounce her faith, and to withhold her sacrifices is to be unworthy of the office to which her Lord has commissioned her. Thornwell.

The prophet looked beyond the redemption of Israel from captivity to the redemption of the nations from the God of this world, from the powers of darkness, through the coming of Christ. What might seem impossible to short-lived men and to human agencies, that wither like the grass, was made sure by the enduring word of the Lord; and centuries later, when Jerusalem had forever lost her independent nationality, and was held as a vassal of Rome, the voice of John the Baptist was heard in the wilderness of Judea, crying, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord;” and her King came, whose triumph, begun in suffering, is going on to possess the earth till “all flesh shall see it together.” J. P. T.

5. The simple meaning is, that when the way should be prepared, the glory of God would be universally displayed; a promise too extensive to be fully verified in that event or period of history. A.—This “revealing of the glory of the Lord” is that which was made by the incarnation, the earthly life, the Divine teachings and the vicarious death of the Son of God. For this is distinctively and superlatively the great revealing of God’s glory to men—far more signal and complete than any other, and therefore, with high probability, this is the manifestation of God which is primarily in view here. The teachings of the New Testament on this point are exceedingly full and explicit. Remarkably all its leading writers concur in describing the incarnation of Jesus as being “God manifested in the flesh,” and as a revealing of the glory of God.

6-8. The point made in these three verses is that God’s word of promise is sure of accomplishment. Men may fail, but God never. The generations of men pass away; there are no passing generations in the eternal life of God. Men may prove untrue, and for this reason their words may fail; but God is forever truthful, and therefore both fully disposed and richly able to make good every word He hath spoken. 1 Pet. 1:24, 25 quotes portions of the passage before us, and adds, “And this is the word which by the Gospel is preached unto you;” that is, he takes this “word” in its broad sense, comprehending those great spiritual truths, fundamental to salvation, which the Spirit employs in regeneration. He manifestly contemplates the truths, not as promises, but as facts. The prophet thinks of them as promise. Thus those very Gospel truths which were facts to Peter were promise to Isaiah. They dawned on the race first in the light and form of promise. In the personal advent of the Messiah they were fulfilled, and then became realized facts; the Gospel word preached everywhere. Peter and Isaiah, therefore, think of the same “word of the Lord,” and since we know that Peter’s word is the Gospel, we infer with certainty that Isaiah’s word also refers to the great truths of the Gospel. H. C.

Amid all the changes on earth, all the revolutions of empires, all the passing away of kingdoms, God is the same, and His promises are unfailing. We see the grass wither at the return of autumn or in the drought; we see the flower of the field lose its beauty and decay; we see man confident in his strength, rejoicing in his vigor and his health, cut down in an instant; we see cities fall, and kingdoms lose their power and vanish from among nations, but the word of God is the same. He changes not. He presides in all these revolutions; sits calm and unmoved amid all these changes; and carries forward His great designs. Not one of His promises shall fail; and at the end of all the changes which human things shall undergo, Jehovah, the God of His people, will be the same; and they will be enabled to say that all His promises have been fulfilled. Barnes.

The repetition of the theme of man’s frailty gives emphasis to the contrast of the unchangeable stability of God’s word. Everything lovely, bright and vigorous in humanity wilts and dies. One thing alone remains fresh from age to age—the uttered will of Jehovah. His breath kills and makes alive. It withers the creatural, and it speaks the undying word. This message is to follow those others which tell of God’s merciful promises, that trembling hearts may not falter when they see all created stays sharing the common lot, but may rest assured that God’s promises are as good as God’s facts, and so may hope when all things visible would preach despair. It was given to hearten confidence in the prophecy of a future revelation of the glory of God. It remains with us to hearten confidence in a past revelation, which will stand unshaken, whatever forces war against it. Its foes and its friends are alike short-lived as the summer’s grass. The defences of the one and the attacks of the other are being antiquated while being spoken; but the bare word of God, the record of the incarnate word, who is the true revelation of the glory of God, will stand forever, “And this is the word which by the Gospel is preached to you.” A. M.

7. S.** The flower fades and falls off the plant, but it does not altogether vanish. Some part of it, larger or smaller according to the species, remains behind to form the nucleus of the fruit. In every case the lower portion of the central and most important part of the blossom is left, and it is out of it that the fruit is formed. The fruit, in the language of the botanist, is only the enlarged and matured pistil. Yes, the flower as a flower fades, but there is a something in it, and developed by it, which abides. The ripe fruit has the beauty of the blossom, but it has a great deal more. And so is it with these fleeting lives of ours. The kingdom of heaven is within every true human life. The permanent derives something of its grace and value from that which is transient. It takes unto itself and perpetuates all that was good and true and useful in the fading flower. The flower fades, but the glory of it lives—that word of God, of which it was the inspired but silent teacher, abideth an incorruptible seed in the soul that received it and turned it into fruit. All the circumstances of our natural life will soon fade away and disappear. But the moral discipline which they afforded us, the virtues and the graces which they helped to produce and develop, will survive as a part of our being here and hereafter. Macmillan.

Since John wrote in his cell at Patmos, and Paul preached in his own hired house at Rome, the world has been turned upside down; all old things have passed away; all things on earth have changed but one. Rivalling in fixedness, and more than rivalling in brightness, the stars that saw our world born and shall see it die, that rejoiced in its birth and shall be mourners at its burial, the word of our God stands forever. Time, that weakens all things else, has but strengthened the impregnable position of the believer’s faith, and hope, and confidence. And as, year by year, the tree adds another ring to its circumference, every age has added the testimony of its events to this great truth, “The grass withereth, and the flower fadeth, but the word of the Lord shall endure forever.” Guthrie.—The word of Jehovah takes its character from Him. It is immutable, it is enduring. Nothing prevails against it. Satan has attempted its perversion. He assailed it in the garden when the first Adam was tempted successfully; he assailed it in the wilderness when the last Adam was tempted unsuccessfully; but it was stronger than he. Man has assailed it in his unbelief, levelling at it the shafts of ridicule, or smiting it with the sword of an unbelieving criticism, or burning it in the flames of a malignant hostility, yet it has continued unharmed, living and mighty as ever. And so it shall continue everlastingly. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away.” Over it, as over Him, years have no power. N. W. Wells.

The word is its own best evidence. It will correct all the misrepresentation of its foes and supplement the inadequate defences of its friends. Amid all the changes of attacks that have their day and cease to be, amid all the changes of our representations of its endless fulness, it will live. Schools of thought that assail and defend it pass, but it abides. Of both enemy and friend it is true, “The grass withereth, and the flower thereof passeth away.” How antique and ineffectual the pages of the past generations of either are compared with the ever-fresh youth of the Bible, which, like the angels, is the youngest and is the oldest of books. The world can never lose it; and notwithstanding all assaults, we may rest upon His assurance, whose command is prophecy, when He says, “Write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come forever and ever.” A. M.

Over the whole realm of knowledge the Scripture lifts its sceptre, and the star of our Lord is as truly the guiding light of science as of faith. The truths of men are to be encompassed, they are to be illumined by the truth in Scripture, and from it they are to learn what, without it, they cannot know. For there are truths that science sublimely believes; “it labors in their light and journeys in their hope,” but it cannot prove them; it is ever drawing nearer to them, but it cannot teach them; these truths the Bible makes certain. The Bible is to be harmonized with itself alone; that is, so far as possible, its truth is to be seen in its unity. Vainly into comparison with it is brought anything else, for it is written “God hath magnified His word above all His name.” The Bible has outlasted forms of society, systems of science. It will outlive them all. Thousands of years are gone since it was written “the grass withereth, and the flower fadeth, but the word of God shall stand forever.” Its everlasting truth is of another duration than pertains to the material worlds whose years are numbered. F. W. Upham.

The singleness of truth constitutes the basis of its exclusiveness. It claims for itself, exclusively and without rival, the faith and obedience of mankind; a claim that is exclusive because it is just, and that could not be consistent without requiring thus the rejection of all error. These exclusive claims are often misrepresented as involving the most odious intolerance and illiberality. But in truth there is no more a possibility of the existence of several true religions than there is of the existence of more than one God. From the one Jehovah there can emanate but the one truth—developed, indeed, in different degrees at different ages, in Judaism the bud, in Christianity the expanded flower—but essentially, and in all ages, the one unchanged and unchangeable religion, revealing for man the sinner salvation, through an atonement and mediator of Divine appointment. Wm. R. Williams.

The Gospel has been tried by the young and the old, the wise and the weak, the cultured and the untaught, by men and women under every variety of climate and civilization, in every stage of guilt and innocence, and all have found it better than it promised to be, and its Lord more fully accredited to be the Christ of God. This testimony is every day repeated in myriads of prayers that go up before God. It is warbled and sung in the praises of throngs of men, in the sacredness of solitude and under the inspiration of worship. It is attested by the peace of God, that is written on the brows of myriads of life-long sufferers, and by the unutterable joy which has looked forth from the eyes of multitudes as they have wrestled with death. The disciples of Christ are divided on many points, but on one point their testimony is united, that He has proved Himself to be nearer and better than they could have expected with the measure of faith and love which they have given Him. N. Porter.

There is no book so real as the Bible, a book of realities grand, glorious, palpable, terrible. Its God is a real, living God. Its law is a reality. Its spiritual world is a reality. Its threatenings against evil-doers are realities; its promises and hopes are realities; its salvation is a reality; its life and death, its resurrection and judgment, its heaven and hell are realities. And these realities have an object. The Bible aims throughout to make men better. Perfection of character is its aim; and the revelation of God in His holiness and His mercy, in His law and His redemption is its means. The Bible is a sublime symphony framed about the theme of man’s reconciliation with God. The theme runs through different keys and various movements, but the listening ear catches it again and again; it emerges from the chaos of the fall in the song of Moses, the servant of God; the harps of David and Isaiah give it a distincter and sublimer utterance; the angels breaking the silence of the midnight air chant it over Bethlehem; it rises more clear and waxes more loud in the doxologies of Paul and the choruses of John until it rolls through the arches of heaven in one magnificent choral of earth and sky, the song of Moses and the Lamb. J. P. T.

9. Zion or Jerusalem herself is represented as the bearer of good tidings to the towns of Judah. This construction is recommended by the beautiful personification, which it introduces, of the holy city as the seat of the true religion and the centre of the Church. The office here ascribed to it is the same that is recognized in chap. 2:3: “The law shall go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Not only in the restoration from captivity or in the personal advent of the Saviour, but in every instance of the Lord’s return to His forsaken people, it is the duty of the Church to communicate as well as to receive the joyful tidings. A.—In the nature of the case God must first give the Gospel to Zion, and then require her to publish it. First, angels brought the glad news from heaven; then Jesus and His disciples took it up to publish, first in order to all the cities of Judah, and then, by His Divine behest, over all the world, to every creature. A grand, magnificent summons is this to preach the glad tidings of the Divine Saviour come at last! The ages had been waiting in anxious expectation and long-deferred hope; now let the daughters of Zion themselves become evangelists, and ascending the highest hill-tops of the land lift up their voice with strength and proclaim, “Behold your God!” H. C.

9,10. The prophecy refers to the Church. It sets forth her highest office as being the proclamation of her indwelling King. The possession of Christ makes the Church the evangelist for the world; for it gives the capacity and the impulse as well as the obligation. Every Christian has this command binding on him by the fact of his having Christ. The command sets forth the bold clearness which should mark the herald’s call, “Lift up thy voice with strength.” Bated breath is no fit vehicle for God’s Gospel. There are too many of God’s heralds who are always apologizing for their message, and seeking to reconcile it with popular opinions. We are all apt to speak truth less confidently because it is denied; but, while it is needful to speak with all gentleness and in meekness to them that oppose, it is cowardly, as well as impolitic, to let one tremor be heard in our tones, though a world should deny our message. The command tells the substance of the Church’s message. Its heart is the proclamation of the manifested God. To gaze on Jesus is to behold God. That God is made known in the twin glories of power and gentleness. He comes as a strong one. His dominion rests on His own power, and on no human allies. His reign is retributive, and that not merely as penally recompensing evil, but as rewarding the faith and hope of those who waited for Him. The paradox of the Gospel, which points to a poor, weak man, dying in the dark, on a cross, and says, “Behold the great power of God!” is anticipated in this prophecy. The triumphant paradox of the apostle is shadowed here: “We preach Christ crucified, the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” A. M.

11. This is the earliest distinct application of this figure of the shepherd to the Messiah. It stands here in its blended beauty and strength, exceedingly rich in its points of analogy and tenderly precious in its great moral lessons. To the Jews, familiar with all the details and therefore comprehending perfectly the significance of shepherd life, this comparison must have been intensely rich and expressive. Then our Lord appropriates to Himself this beautifully descriptive figure, saying with special reference to these prophecies, “I am the good shepherd;” not merely, I am a shepherd, and not merely, I am the shepherd; but yet more specifically, “I am the good shepherd;” the same whose good qualities were so fully presented by Isaiah. H. C.—And what can fill us with a loftier inspiration or lift us into a more sublime and blessed confidence than this, the fact that Christ, the Eternal Shepherd, has a personal recognition of us, leading us on, by name, and calling us to follow. No matter whether He calls us into ways of gain or of suffering, of honor or of scorn; it is all one, with such a leader before us. Nay, if we go down to sound the depths of sorrow, and ennoble the pains of sacrifice, what are these but a more inspiring and more Godlike call, since He is now our leader even here. Bushnell.

No description could more beautifully describe the character of the Redeemer. In the New Testament He is often described as a shepherd, tender and kind, and regarding the welfare of all His flock, and as ready to give His life for them (John 10: 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15; Heb. 13: 20; 1 Pet. 2: 25; 5: 4). We are here strikingly reminded that He has a special solicitude for the feeble and infirm, and that they will be the objects of His tender care; and that He feels a particular interest in the young. He knows their feebleness; He is acquainted with their temptations; He sees the importance of their being trained up with care; and He looks with deep interest, therefore, on all the efforts made to guard them from the ways of sin, and to train them up for His service. Barnes.

12. The sudden transition is most heart-stirring and impressive. How great! how wise! how thoughtful and constant in love is the Lord, the Good Shepherd, who is to come! The message opens with a charge to comfort, and ends with a promise of strength restored and comfort attained. Birks.

This sublimely grand portrayal of God as Almighty and All-wise continues nearly to the close of this chapter, and then comes to its point of practical application in the great truth, Almighty to give strength and succor to His people, and therefore a legitimate object of supreme trust. The questions in this passage, “Who hath measured,” etc., carry their own answer with resistless force, None but God! What conceptions are these of the vastness of His power and of the infinite ease with which He controls the material universe! H. C.

Some astronomers have computed that there are no less than 75,000,000 of suns in this universe. The fixed stars are all suns, having, like our sun, numerous planets revolving round them. The solar system, or that to which we belong, has about thirty planets, primary and secondary, belonging to it. The circular field of space which it occupies is in diameter 3,600,000,000 of miles; and that which it controls much greater. That sun which is nearest neighbor to ours is called Sirius, distant from our sun about 22,000,000,000 of miles. Now, if all the fixed stars are as distant from each other as Sirius is from our sun; if the solar system be the average magnitude of all the systems of the 75,000,000 of suns, what imagination can grasp the immensity of creation? Every sun of the 75,000,000 controls a field of space about 10,000,000,000 of miles in diameter. Who can survey a plantation containing 75,000,000 of circular fields, each 10,000,000,000 of miles? Such, however, is one of the plantations of Him who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out heaven with a span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance; Him who, sitting upon the orbit of the earth, stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in. Anon.

It has been proved by Professor Faraday that it requires more electricity to decompose a drop of water than to charge a thundercloud. What a revelation of power we have here! In every drop of water there is a constant striving of the elements to escape; they are exerting a force to break the bonds that unite them, which can be measured only by the power of concentrated thunderbolts, and yet this immense force is kept in check by a force of equal power, and so exactly balanced that not the slightest disturbance can occur. When, now, I reflect that this chemical force has produced a result which all human strength, aided by the appliances of modern art, has been unable to effect—that in every particle of water the force is still acting, so that every rain-drop which falls animates the river or swells the ocean, is a silent monitor of human weakness, I am overwhelmed by that mystery in nature, which here as elsewhere ever points upward to the Infinite, and thus silently teaches that the mighty influence which binds the atoms of the rain-drop is merely the manifestation of His ceaseless power who holdeth “the waters in the hollow of His hand.” Cooke.

12,13. Both these verses are designed alike to set forth His supremacy and independence, by describing Him as measuring and regulating all things, while Himself incapable either of measurement or regulation. A.

15. Here is still another view of the greatness of God. The prophet first compared Him with the universe of matter, in which the ocean waters are to Him only a handful; next with the universe of created mind, challenging the whole of it to produce a thought new to God, or a suggestion that could add to His wisdom; and next, he measures God (so to speak) against the nations of men. They are to Him only as the drop hanging from the bucket—a mere drop of water; or as the small dust whose weight on the scales is inappreciable. H. C.

16. “And Lebanon is not enough for burning, and its beasts are not enough for a sacrifice.” The supremacy and majesty of God are now presented by expressions borrowed from the Mosaic ritual. He is not only independent of the power, but also of the good-will of His creatures. This general allusion to oblation, as an act of homage or of friendship, suits the connection better than a specific reference to expiation. The insufficiency of these offerings is set forth not in a formal proposition, but by means of a striking individualization. For general terms He substitutes one striking instance, and asserts of that what might be asserted of the rest. If Lebanon could not suffice, what could? The imagery here used is justly described by Umbreit as magnificent: nature the temple; Lebanon the altar; its lordly woods the pile; its countless beasts the sacrifice.

18. “And (now) to whom will ye liken God, and what likeness will ye compare to Him?” The inevitable logical conclusion from the previous considerations is that God is one and that there is no other. From this, the prophet now proceeds to argue, that it is folly to compare God even with the most exalted creature, how much more with lifeless matter.

19. The verse contains a direct answer to the question in the one before it. What have you to set over against such a God? The image which an ordinary workman manufactures. This construction enables us to account for the position of the image at the beginning of the sentence, and for its having the definite article. A.

22-31. The true use of nature is to teach us to observe God in His works, and so to help our faith in the higher sphere of spiritual religion. But men pervert nature, on the one hand, to the displacement of God, by substituting its forces for His power, its laws for His Spirit; and on the other, to the degrading and caricaturing of the divinity through material objects of worship. The prophet, having exhibited, even to the verge of ridicule, the folly and worthlessness of idolatry, and the emptiness and vanity of worldly rank and power, would have us regard the earth in the firmness of its foundations and the breadth of its circuit, the heavens in their widespread glory, the stars in their ordered beauty and majesty, as evidences of the inapproachable unity, power and dominion of God. But this everlasting Creator and Lord, whose nature no image could represent, whose understanding no philosophy could measure, will reveal Himself to the consciousness of those who humbly wait upon His pleasure, and will communicate to them of His wisdom and strength. The highest power of man exhausts itself by its own exertion; the freshest vigor, after a little, grows weary and faint, and must be renewed by rest. But the strength that the Lord imparts to the trusting soul never exhausts itself, nor tires him who exerts it. It is perpetually self-renewing. And he who by faith so uses this Divine power as to overcome the downward tendency of sense and sin will gain such freedom and vigor, that, as the eagle mounts to the sun, he will rise to the Source of all light and love. J. P. T.

23,24. These verses add still another point in this magnificent comparison of the Omnipotent God with His various works. He has been compared with the material universe; with all nations; with graven images; with all the inhabitants of the earth; and now with their princes and judges. How easily can He reduce them to nothing; break down their power; lay their glory in the dust! Yea, ere they are planted and sown and ere they have taken firm root He only blows upon them, and they wither away.

25. Where we might expect some of those names of God which signify omnipotence, or perhaps power in combination with wisdom and majesty, these points being made specially prominent in this passage (verses 12-26), we really have neither of these, but this only—"the Holy One." H. C.

26. As a general reviews a numerous army, so “He bringeth out their host;” and by number, so that each one in their vast array is separately known. He discerns the character and the place of every star, and the part it has to fulfil in His vast scheme of creation. Night after night each one keeps its place, for thousands of years, and performs its own circuit in the heavens. The constancy of the laws of nature illustrates and confirms, but can never set aside, the dominion of God.

27. This wonderful greatness of the Most

High, revealed in His works, is now applied to strengthen and comfort His fearful-hearted people. However dark the clouds around them, one glimpse of His majesty, when joined with His promises, ought to banish all their fears. The repetition implies the frequency of their complaints, and the question itself, their folly. The birth-name, Jacob, and the covenant-name, Israel, are a secret appeal to the love of the Creator and the grace of the Redeemer. Birks.

28. The God whom the Bible discloses and the moral system which it reveals lose nothing when compared with the extent of nature or with the simplicity and majesty of her laws; they seem rather worthy to be enthroned upon and to preside over such an amazing domain. M. H.

28-31. This Almighty Lord, incapable of weariness Himself, is also the stay of His wearied people. All besides, however strong they may appear, are liable to exhaustion and decay. But the weakest, who resort to Him who is the Fountain of life, shall receive new life and vigor from His Divine fulness; shall run swiftly onward in their journey as pilgrims to a better land, and mount upward, in holy aspirations, toward heaven. The poor in spirit will be satisfied forever from the fulness of God. Birks.—Feeble are we? Yes, without God we are nothing. But what, by faith, every man may be God requires him to be. This is the only Christian idea of duty. Measure obligation by inherent ability! No, Christian obligation has a very different measure. It is measured by the power that God will give us, measured by the gifts and possible increments of faith. That only is Christian faith that lives in the power of faith; in that does its works, makes its sacrifices, sustains its hopes and measures its holy obligations. Almost everything a Christian is to do for his times and the sphere in which he lives transcends his ability, and the very greatness and joy of his experience consists in the fact that he is exalted above himself, and made a partaker in his works of a Divine power, as in his character of the Divine nature. He is a man who lives in God and by God is girded to his duties and his triumphs—God in nature, God in the Gospel, God in the Spirit, God in the plenitude of His promises. Bushnell.

30,31. The best of human vigor will tire—that of young men in their prime, such as are chosen for war (the sense of the Hebrew), will by no means endure unremitted tension. But they that wait upon God, not here in the sense of service, but of trustful faith, shall grow stronger. Through grace, in response to such faith, the Christian life goes on from strength to strength, from victory to other victories evermore yet greater, rising triumphant over successive temptations, and at last coming off more than conqueror through Him that hath loved and therefore never fails to help. The promise has ever been true. It has been found in the experience of thousands and tens of thousands, that by waiting on the Lord the heart has been invigorated; the faith has been confirmed; and the affections have been raised above the world. Strength has been given to bear trial without murmuring; to engage in arduous duty without fainting, and to pursue the perilous and toilsome journey of life without exhaustion. Barnes.

Here, on the one hand, is the boundless ocean of the Divine strength, unfathomable in its depth, full after all draughts, tideless and calm, in all its movement never troubled, in all its repose never stagnating; and on the other side is the empty aridity of our poor, weak natures. Faith opens these to the influx of that great sea, and “according to our faith,” in the exact measure of our receptivity, does it enter our hearts. In itself the gift is boundless. It has no limit except the infinite fulness of the power which worketh in us. But in reference to our possession it is bounded by our capacity, and though that capacity enlarges by the very fact of being filled, and so every moment becomes greater through fruition, yet at each moment it is the measure of our possession, and our faith is the measure of our capacity. Our power is God’s power in us, and our faith is the power with which we grasp God’s power and make it ours. So then, in regard to God, our faith is the condition of our being strengthened with might by His Spirit. A. M.

There is only one pledge for the permanence of any good thing that is in you—viz., that you bring it to God, and that you reserve it for God with that higher consecration which He only can give it—not now any more a virtue of this world, but a grace of the kingdom of heaven; and that you bring it to Him again and again, for indeed all your fresh springs must be in Him; and they that wait on Him, they, and they only, renew their strength, run and are not weary, walk and are not faint; they, and they only, bring forth fruit in old age to show that the Lord is upright, and that there is no unrighteousness in Him. Trench.

Devotion is not the end of Christian life; we wait upon God that we may renew our strength for noble service. In our eagerness to press within the temple to look upon the face of God we must not pass unheeding by the suffering ones who lie with appealing glance and voice outside the temple-gate. Visions of God which lead to no active service will soon die out. J. R. M.

Thus closes this wonderfully rich and beautiful chapter. Accepting it as revealing primarily and directly the opening scenes and the distinctive glories of the Gospel age, resting (so to speak) upon the assumed restoration from Babylon as the underlying conception in some of its figures, the whole becomes intensely graphic and luxuriantly rich in its revelations. The soul of the Gospel is the soul and the life of this chapter. Its great central truth is, The Son of God becoming manifest in human flesh—the Redeemer and the saving strength of His trusting people. H. C.