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used to believe, that the whole thirty-nine chapters and every verse in them are all Isaiah's?

The reasons, unfortunately, are too numerous and too complicated for me to set them forth here and now. This much only

let me say.

The thirty-nine chapters clearly consist of certain minor collections or groups, which groups bear again within themselves the traces of aggregation. i-xii is one such group or collection, xiii-xxiii is a second, xxiv-xxxv is a third, while xxxvi-xxxix constitutes a sort of separate historical appendix.

These groups have each of them a history and growth of their

own.

Isaiah himself did not, so far as we can gather, prepare and issue a complete collection of his own prophecies. He was more a speaker than a writer. But separate prophecies (remember that this word is not equivalent to predictions) were written down by him or at his dictation on separate scrolls, and there were also, as it would seem, small collections, which are alluded to in his own writings. For example, our present chapters xxviii-xxxi, apart from later additions, probably formed one such booklet, while chapters vi-viii may have formed another.

The various papyrus scrolls and broadsheets were doubtless treasured up by Isaiah's disciples, who themselves may have begun to piece them together into further collections. Probably these various collections by no means all tallied with each other; there may have been overlapping and interchange of order, so that one collection contained, e. g., prophecies A, B, C, D, while another may have contained C, A, E, D, F. This process went on; copyist succeeded to copyist, and doubtless the original text got often changed and corrupted.

Then came the great break and ruin of the exile. When the Jews returned, they gradually began to collect together and to edit the fragments of ancient prophecy which were still preserved and still intelligible. For by this time we may readily suppose that many of the pre-exilic scrolls had been lost, and many others had become defaced or injured and therefore unintelligible.

For many reasons it became a custom to add or to prefix anonymous prophecies of post-exilic date to scrolls of pre-exilic material. Thus the collection xxiv-xxxv in the 'Book of Isaiah' opens with four chapters (xxiv-xxvii), which are a separate and very late post-exilic prophecy,' and it ends with two chapters (xxxiv-xxxv) which are the same. On the other hand, the intervening chapters (xxviii-xxxiii) do undoubtedly contain important fragments of the true Isaiah.

Now that the historical and critical eyes of scholars are thoroughly opened and trained, it is quite easy to see or to show that wholes, such as chapters xxiv-xxvii, or xxxiv-xxxv, are not Isaiah's. They are now seen to be unlike him in style and subject-matter, in thought and point of view, in environment and circumstance. They reflect and they assume a different and far later age.

It was and it is more difficult to see or to be made to see the editorial work in groups wherein are contained passages which Isaiah wrote and which certainly reflect his own age. Here opinions still differ, and will probably for long continue to differ. I allude to editorial work in chapters i-xii, in xiii-xxii and in xxviii-xxxiii. Be it noted that in these groups too there may be, in the second group there undoubtedly are, passages which have an independent origin, but which, though not originally written for the place they now occupy, were inserted, to give them a safe refuge and an honourable position, in an Isaianic collection. Such once independent passages, e. g., chapter xiv, quoted in Part I, p. 478, are, as I said before, more easy to detect and recognize than the editorial work and additions properly so called.

Let me state here in numerical form how much of the true Isaiah the distinguished German commentator, Professor Duhm, supposes still to exist in the groups i-xii, xiii–xxiii, and xxviiixxxiii. Chapters i-xii contain 252 verses. Of these Professor Duhm thinks 181 are Isaiah's, while 71 are editorial or insertions. Chapters xiii-xxiii contain 171 verses, of which he thinks that only 46 are Isaiah's, while 125 were either originally independent prophecies or are editorial assertions. Chapters xxviii-xxxiii contain 139 verses, of which 84 are considered Isaiah's, and 55 editorial. Professor Cheyne's allowances to Isaiah, especially in section three, are rather less liberal than Professor Duhm's.

§ 3. Tests by which to distinguish the work of Isaiah from later additions. On what grounds are the editorial accretions distinguished from Isaiah's own work? I must repeat that the full arguments and the complete list of reasons cannot here be given, but I may briefly indicate the following:

(1) Sudden change of style. The sudden substitution of prose for rhythm, and for good rhythm a very broken and halting one. Halting and feeble utterance following on or interrupting passages of power and elegance. Isaiah was a splendid stylist.

(2) Late words and expressions.

(3) Repetitions of certain catch-words or phrases, such as in that day,' characteristic of the post-exilic period and writers.

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(4) Sudden change of point of view or religious ideas, more especially a change from known pre-exilic to known post-exilic points of view or ideas.

(5) Sudden interruption of the sequence of thought.

(6) Sudden addition to a prophecy of judgement upon Israel of a judgement upon the 'nations.' The older prophets, as Jeremiah said (Part I, p. 424), prophesied mainly of war and of evil and of pestilence'; they were commissioned to threaten national ruin for national sin. The post-exilic writers, on the other hand, were constantly hoping for and speaking of the day when the tables would be turned, and when Israel would triumph over all its foes. The day of Jehovah' to Amos was the day of Israel's fall; 'that day' to the post-exilic writers is the day of Israel's triumph.

§ 4. Contents of the present chapter and its arrangement.—In the extracts from 'Isaiah' which are now to follow, dots will not generally mean, as in the translation of the Book of Job, that a line has been omitted because the Hebrew is untranslatable. They will mean that a part of a particular prophecy has probably been lost; that what we have is incomplete.

The present chapter will contain an English translation of Isaiah i-xii. Only in two cases have I ventured on a small transposition. Place and extent of these can be seen from the index. With these two exceptions the twelve chapters are printed exactly as we now find them. The supposed editorial additions are immediately made clear by rectangular brackets.

§ 5. Character and object of the post-exilic additions.-Two words more. Let it not be supposed that these editorial additions were written to deceive. In no wise would such an idea be true. The post-exilic Jews had no 'historic sense.' It was utterly indifferent to them what Isaiah meant to the men of Isaiah's generation; they only cared for what his words meant, or could be made to mean, to themselves. They believed that Isaiah's words had been written for them at least as much as for the past, and they saw no harm in adding to them, or in filling them out with, words which to their minds were in the very spirit of Isaiah himself. As God spoke through Isaiah, so the editors believed he spoke through them. Nor were they entirely mistaken; for though, upon the whole, their additions are less religiously and spiritually valuable than Isaiah's own words, still these additions are not only often interesting, but sometimes great and noble. They often express hopes and aspirations which in a purified and universalized form still appeal to us to-day. Although, therefore, we ourselves should not edit ancient records

in such a manner, we must certainly acquit the editors of 'Isaiah' of any conscious or intentional breach of faith.

A second word as to form. In those passages from the prophetical literature which are here printed in lines, the English does not invariably follow the metrical divisions of the Hebrew. The printing in lines means that the Hebrew is rhythmical, and the printing in prose means that in the Hebrew the rhythm is either poor or broken or absent, but each distinct division of Hebrew rhythm is not always represented in the English by a separate line. Sometimes it has seemed better to include two such divisions in one English line. Moreover, the indented lines are not always strictly justified by the Hebrew. Occasionally they are only to be justified by the eye and the better appearance which they give to the printed page. Often they do not represent (as in strictness perhaps they should) the second division of a Hebrew rhythmical unit, and sometimes they do not even clearly mark a parallelism in the thought. That parallelism may either be wholly wanting, or it may be contained in the second division of a Hebrew rhythmical unit, which in the English is now and then printed as a single line.

§ 6. The great arraignment.'-Of the minor collections which together constitute chapters i-xii of the Book of Isaiah, chapter i seems to form a whole by itself. Yet it was scarcely written at a single time. The short passage, 'Come now, and let us' down to the Lord hath spoken it,' is metrically different from what precedes, and the connexion is not particularly good. The passage, How is she become a traitress' down to 'the faithful city,' is composed in a peculiar metre and stands off from the rest. The concluding passage, 'For ye shall be ashamed' down to 'none shall quench them,' seems to be a fragment of a prophecy against tree worship, connected by an editorial link of two verses with all which precedes it. That 'all' seems, as Professor Cheyne says, to reproduce, or be a summary of, prophecies delivered by Isaiah during the invasions of Sennacherib but before the blockade of Jerusalem. The date would be 701 B.C. We have here a noble epitome of the prophetic teaching. Form and substance are alike superb. As to the attack on tree worship, seeing that 'tree worship specially prevailed in North Palestine, we may reasonably place the fragment before the fall of Samaria in 722' (Cheyne).

[The vision of Isaiah the son of Amos, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.] Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth,

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For the Lord speaketh :

Sons I have brought up and exalted,

But they have rebelled against me.

The ox knoweth its owner,

And the ass its master's crib:
But Israel doth not know,
My people doth not consider.
Ah, sinful nation,

A people laden with iniquity,
A seed of evildoers,

Sons that do corruptly: They have forsaken the Lord,

They have reviled the Holy One of Israel.. Whereon will ye still be stricken,

Continuing your revolt?

The whole head is sick,

And the whole heart faint.

From the sole of the foot even unto the head

There is no soundness;

Wounds and bruises and putrifying sores:

They have not been pressed out, neither bound up,

Neither mollified with oil.

Your country is desolate,

Your cities are burned with fire:

Your land-before your face

Strangers devour it.

And the daughter of Zion is left

As a booth in a vineyard,

As a lodge in a garden of cucumbers,

As a fort that is besieged.

Except the Lord of hosts

Had left unto us a remnant, We should almost be as Sodom, And be like unto Gomorrah.

Hear the word of the Lord,

Ye rulers of Sodom;

Give ear unto the teaching of our God,

Ye people of Gomorrah.

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? Saith the Lord:

I am full of the burnt offerings of rams,