Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts:

The whole earth is full of his glory.

And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.

Then said I, 'Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.' Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a hot stone in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, 'Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.'

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' Then said I, 'Here am I; send me.' And he said, 'Go, and tell this people, Hear and hear again, but understand not;

And see and see again, but perceive not.

Make the heart of this people fat,

And make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes;

Lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears,
And their heart should understand, and they be healed.'
Then said I, 'Lord, how long?' And he answered,
'Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant,

And the houses without man, and the land be left desolate, And the Lord have removed men far away,

And the deserted region be large in the midst of the land. And if there still be in it a tenth,

It must again be burnt;

Like the terebinth and the oak,

Of which at the felling a stock remaineth,

[A holy seed is the stock thereof.']

§ 15. Isaiah and Ahaz.- The next section contains the famous scene between Isaiah and Ahaz, already quoted and very briefly explained in Part I, p. 375. The glosses there omitted are here inserted in brackets. For further explanations the reader should refer to Part I.

And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up toward Jerusalem to storm it, but were not

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able to storm it. And it was told the house of David, saying, Syria hath alighted upon Ephraim. And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.

Then said the Lord unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shear-jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, on the highway by the fuller's field; and say unto him, Take heed, and be quiet; fear not, neither be fainthearted for these two tails of smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria, and of the son of Remaliah. Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah, have taken evil counsel against thee, saying, Let us go up against Judah, and distress it, and let us make a breach therein for us, and set a king in the midst of it, even the son of Tabeal: thus saith the Lord God, It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin; [and within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broken, that it be not a people ;] and the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remaliah's son.... If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established.

And he spake again unto Ahaz, saying, 'Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God, going deep unto Sheol or high unto heaven.' But Ahaz said, 'I will not ask, neither will I put the Lord to the proof.' And he said, 'Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it too little for you to weary men, that ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign, Behold, the young woman shall bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (God is with us). [Curdled milk and honey shall he eat, when he shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.] For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land before whose two kings thou tremblest shall be deserted.'

'Ask thee a sign.' Among the many explanations of this famous passage I select that of Professor Cheyne as being one of the least unlikely. 'Isaiah may have heard, or divined, that Ahaz (736-728 B. C.) is on the point of inviting the aid of Assyria. He makes one more desperate effort to stimulate Ahaz to that great spiritual effort already called faith. If he cannot believe Isaiah without some extraordinary sign as a confirmation of the

prophet's word, then (Isaiah makes this strange condescension) let him choose his own sign. Isaiah adds, going deep to Sheol or high to heaven (so literally), to give Ahaz the utmost range of choice. Ahaz refuses the offer. He does not doubt the wonderworking capacity of Isaiah, but he knows that the prophet demands, not only a change of policy, but a change of life. The sign' chosen by Isaiah is not in order to persuade Ahaz, but to save the honour of God's prophet. It is not therefore such a startling one as if it had been selected by the king. It consists simply in the name which mothers will before long, by a kind of inspiration, give to their newly born babes. Immanuel, or some similar name expressing the deliverership of Jehovah, shall become the common name of the children of that generation. Nothing is said of the diet of the children who are referred to.' The words in brackets are a very misleading gloss. Before such children have learned to distinguish between what is wholesome and harmful, especially in foods,' the deliverance, already apparent in its beginnings when the children were born and named, shall then have been fully accomplished. Ahaz, as we know from the Book of Kings, did not trust to Isaiah. He became the vassal of Assyria. Thus the prophecies in these sections were not literally fulfilled. Damascus was taken by the Assyrians in 732, Samaria not till 722. Isaiah seems to have anticipated a speedier ruin. Compare in § 16 the passage about the child called 'Swift of spoil, Hasty of prey.' The Assyrian invasion of Judah was fulfilled in the reign of Hezekiah.

§ 16. The coming invasion of Judah.-Now follows a passage containing Isaianic fragments of the opposite kind to what has gone before. There Ahaz was comforted; here an invasion of the Assyrians into Judah is threatened. An editorial verse links the two passages together, and most of the latter portion of this fragment seems in style unlike and unworthy of Isaiah.

[The Lord shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people, and upon thy father's house, days such as have not been since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah.] And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall hiss for the fly [that is in the uttermost part of the canals of Egypt], and for the bee [that is in the land of Assyria], and they shall come, and shall settle all of them in the valleys of the steep hills, and in the holes of the rocks, and upon all the thorn-bushes, and upon all the pastures. In the same day shall the Lord shave with the razor hired beyond the river [by the king of

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Assyria] the head and the hair of the feet: and it shall even sweep away the beard. [And it shall come to pass in that day, that a man shall nourish a young cow and two sheep; and it shall come to pass, for the abundance of milk that they shall give he shall eat curdled milk: for curdled milk and honey shall every one eat that is left in the land. And it shall come to pass in that day, that every place where there used to be a thousand vines at a thousand silverlings shall be all briars and thorns. With arrows and with bows only shall men come thither; because all the land shall become briars and thorns. And as for all the hills that were hoed with the mattock, none shall come thither for fear of the briars and thorns; but they shall be for the sending forth of oxen and for the treading of sheep.]

In the following section Isaiah is commissioned to repeat to the people the prediction of the overthrow of Ephraim and Syria by the Assyrians. On this there follows a prophecy of the invasion of Judah by the same people, but the concluding section implies that this invasion shall not be wholly successful. The date is the same as before, about 734 B. C.

And the Lord said unto me, Take thee a great tablet, and write in it with common characters, Swift of spoil, Hasty of prey. And take faithful witnesses to record, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah.

And the prophetess bare a son. Then said the Lord to me, Call his name Swift of spoil, Hasty of prey. For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father and my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria.

The Lord spake also unto me again, saying,

Forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly,

And despond because of Rezin and Remaliah's son; Now therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth up upon them the waters of the river, strong and many, [even the king of Assyria, and all his glory]:

And it shall rise up over all its channels,

And flow over all its banks:

And it shall sweep on into Judah; it shall overflow and pass over, reaching even to the neck . .

And his outstretched wings shall fill the breadth of the land. [For God is with us.]

Rage, O ye peoples, and be dismayed;
Give ear, all ye of far countries:
Gird yourselves, and be dismayed;

Gird yourselves, and be dismayed.

Purpose a plan, and it shall come to nought;

Speak the word, and it shall not stand. [For God is with us.]

'The waters of Shiloah.' This refers to the well which flowed into the Pool of Siloam, cf. Part I, p. 388. The water which, even before Hezekiah's excavations, trickled ('flowed softly') into a pool, symbolizes God who works in silent and continual power. The waters of the river,' i.e. the Euphrates symbolizing Assyria. 'It shall rise,' i. e. the Euphrates. His wings': a sudden change of metaphor. There is a gap in the prophecy. Whose wings are these? The wings of a protector or an enemy?

In the following passage, relating to the same period, the 'conspiracy' is the Syro-Ephraimitish alliance. If the Lord were truly feared,' this alliance would prove to Judah no danger. The second paragraph seems to be an epilogue to all that has gone before from the first meeting with Ahaz. The people as a whole is spiritually deaf and blind. Isaiah will leave his message among his disciples and trust in God. 'We have here perhaps,' says Dr. Skinner, the earliest anticipation of what became afterwards a fixed element of Isaiah's prophecy-the inviolability of Jerusalem, the earthly seat of Jehovah's throne.' That doctrine became in later days an evil; compare the words of Jeremiah in Part I, p. 407.

For the Lord spake thus to me while the Hand grasped me, and he warned me that I should not walk in the way of this people, saying, Call ye not conspiracy all that this people calleth conspiracy; neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid. The Lord of hosts, him shall ye count holy, and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread. But he shall be for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel, for a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken.

I will bind up the testimony, and seal the instruction