THE DIVINE TEACHER

Behold, the name of the Lord cometh from far

349

Burning with his anger and with thick uplifting of smoke: His lips are full of indignation,

And his tongue as a devouring fire,

And his breath as an overflowing stream,

That reacheth even unto the neck

To sift nations in the sieve of ruin,

And as a bridle that causeth to err (?) in the jaws of peoples.

Ye shall have a song,

As in a night when a feast is hallowed;

And gladness of heart like his who marcheth with a flute
That he may come up to the mountain of the Lord, to the
Rock of Israel.

And the Lord shall cause his glorious voice to be heard,
And shall shew the lighting down of his arm,

With furious anger and with the flame of a devouring fire,
With a blast and rain storm and hailstones.

Through the voice of the Lord shall the Assyrian be panicstricken,

And every stroke of the staff shall be his chastisement; To the sound of tabrets and harps and with battles of shaking he shall fight them. (?)

For a pyre of burning is already laid out;
Deep and broad is it prepared;

The pile thereof is fire and much wood;

The breath of the Lord like a stream of brimstone doth kindle it.

§ 12. Threat and promise strangely blended.-The twelfth (or, according to Professor Duhm's divisions, the fourteenth) section of our group embraces the thirty-first chapter. It was certainly not written by Isaiah from end to end. It opens with a familiar attack upon the policy of the Egyptian alliance; then suddenly we get a prediction of the destruction of the Assyrians. Part is poetic and rhythmic; part conventional and prosaic. A grand Homeric simile of the lion roaring over his prey seems to halt in its application. It is not clear whether it is used to portray the divine warrior fighting for or against Jerusalem. Immediately following it is a second simile, which hangs together still more clumsily. Either its beginning or its end must belong to another than to the artist-prophet Isaiah. Professor Cheyne and Professor Duhm disagree as to the interpolations.

Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help;

And rely on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many;

And in horsemen because they are very strong;

But they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the Lord.

Yet he too is wise, and bringeth evil (?), and hath not recalled his words,

And he will arise against the house of the evil-doers, and against the help of them that do iniquity.

And the Egyptians are men, and not God,

And their horses flesh, and not spirit. And the Lord shall stretch out his hand,

And the helper shall stumble, and the holpen shall fall.

For thus hath the Lord spoken unto me: As the lion growleth, and the young lion over his prey, against whom the full band of shepherds hath been called out-he is not terrified by their cry, nor dismayed at their shouting-so shall the Lord of hosts come down to fight against mount Zion and against its hill. As flying birds,

[so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it, and passing over (?) he will rescue it.]

[Turn ye unto him from whom ye have deeply revolted, O children of Israel. For in that day every man shall cast away his nonentities of silver and his nonentities of gold, which your own hands have made unto you for a sin.]

[And Assyria shall fall by the sword of one that is no man, and the sword of one that is no mortal shall devour him. And he shall flee from the sword, and his young men shall become tributary, and he shall pass by his rock through terror (?), and his captains shall be frighted away from the flag. Such is the oracle of the Lord, who hath a fire in Zion and an oven in Jerusalem.]

'So shall the Lord of hosts come down,' &c. The coming down is not a good parallel to the growling. Hence Professor Duhm thinks the true Isaianic conclusion to the simile had become illegible, and in its place the editor supplied one of his own. But in that case we have to suppose that he uses the Hebrew preposition 'al to mean 'upon' (i.e. in defence of), whereas its usual meaning would be against.

FLESH AND SPIRIT

351

'As birds flying,' &c. The helpless birds that hover, albeit protectingly, over their nests is a very inappropriate figure for the omnipotent deliverer. Hence Professor Duhm supposes that the true Isaianic figure was lost, and that the words 'as birds flying' belong to the editor; Professor Cheyne, on the other hand, supposes that the words 'as flying birds' are Isaiah's, and were originally followed by some such phrase as 'so shall the inhabitants of Zion flutter in terror.' This continuation had become illegible when the prophecy was edited after the exile,' and the editor supplies one of his own. To decide between these two authorities is difficult, but to believe that the verse as it stands is all Isaiah's is hardly easier.

From Turn ye' to the end of the section the brackets are put according to Professor Cheyne, who, with probably exaggerated scepticism, does not allow to Isaiah any (extant) prophecy of Assyria's destruction dating from the reign of Sennacherib, with the exception of one short fragment.

The most permanently important passage in the section is: For the Egyptians are men, and not God, and their horses flesh, and not spirit.' Duhm and, following him, Dr. Skinner are, I think, right in taking this utterance to imply Isaiah's conviction that all that was spiritual in the world was summed up in, or was the outflow and purpose of, the Holy One of Israel, the one existing God. That men could not stand against God, or flesh against spirit, Isaiah's contemporaries did not need to be taught; what separated him from his hearers was the conviction that there is but one Divine Person and one spiritual power in the universe, viz. Jehovah and his moral government as revealed in the consciousness of the prophet' (Skinner).

§ 13. Impenitent Jerusalem.—I interrupt the present sequence of these prophecies to insert here one or two fragments of Isaiah's oratory which were delivered or written during the Assyrian invasion. They now constitute the first fourteen verses of the twenty-second chapter. Too striking and sublime to be omitted from our selections, they are yet full of difficulties into which I cannot fully enter here.

The first and main difficulty is to what point or points of time during the Assyrian invasion these verses should rightly be assigned. A second difficulty is whether we have here two separate prophecies or only one.

The Biblical and Assyrian accounts of Sennacherib's invasion (compare Part I, pp. 378-384) lead us to believe that Jerusalem was blockaded for a time by a detachment of the Assyrian army, and that Hezekiah then submitted to the first demands of Sennacherib.

This escape from danger seems to have incited the populace of the capital to scenes of mirth and dissipation. Instead of humble and sincere gratitude to God, there was thoughtless festivity. So Isaiah in the rejoicings of the populace reads the evidence of their hopeless impenitence and insensibility, and he concludes his discourse by expressing the conviction that at last they have sinned beyond the possibility of pardon' (Skinner). We shall see, however, that many verses of this short discourse' cannot easily be explained on these lines.

What aileth thee, then, that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops, thou that art full of uproar, tumultuous city, jubilant town?

The citizens have gone up on the flat roofs to watch some spectacle, to make merry and keep holiday. Are they gazing on the retiring Assyrians? In sudden and lurid contrast to this crowd of light-hearted revellers, the prophet places a vision of the dread doom which, at that time, le foresaw and predicted for unrepentant Judah.

Thy slain are not slain by the sword, nor dead in battle. All thy chieftains have fled, thy mighty ones are taken captive; they fled afar. Therefore, I say, Look away from I will weep bitterly; press not to comfort me, because of the destruction of the daughter of my people.

me;

For a day of tumult and trampling and confusion hath the Lord of hosts: in the valley of vision they are battering down the wall, and the battle cry riseth up the mountain!

At this point Professor Cheyne thinks the first fragment ceases. The next verse he regards as belonging to a fresh prophecy of the same period, of which the beginning is lost. He thinks it refers to the past, not to the future. But this is doubtful.

And Elam hath raised the quiver on chariots of horses, and Kir hath uncovered the shield. And thy choicest valleys are full of chariots and horses; they are set in array against the gate!...

Elam and Kir are serving as Assyrian mercenaries. Now once again there seems to be a gap or break in the text.

And he exposed the covering of Judah (?). And ye looked [on that day] at the armour of the forest house, and ye

UNTIMELY MIRTH

353

examined the breaches of the city of David, for they were many, [and ye collected the waters of the lower pool, and ye numbered the houses of Jerusalem, and ye brake down the houses to fortify the wall, and ye made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool], but ye looked not to him who hath done It, and him who hath fashioned It from long ago ye did not regard.

Here we seemingly have still to do with a retrospect and not with prediction. When the Assyrians drew near Jerusalem and a siege was imminent, the citizens paid attention to the material defence of the town, but morally, religiously, spiritually, there was no heed or amendment. Of God who had prepared this danger and brought it about they thought but little, and that little was not to his liking. By 'It' Isaiah means all that was then happening. God is the true maker of history. The coming of the Assyrians is his work. Dr. Skinner says: The sin of the rulers of Jerusalem is that same indifference to the work of Jehovah with which the prophet had charged them many years before. Το Isaiah, history is the evolution of a consistent, pre-determined plan of Jehovah; to the men of his day it was merely a confused struggle between opposing forces. Their failure to discern the hand of God in the events which had befallen them was the crowning proof of their spiritual insensibility; their ill-timed frivolity on this occasion seemed to the prophet to seal their fate.'

Now we come to the culmination of the prophecy. But the difficulties do not cease. Is the prophet alluding (1) to the time when the Assyrians were approaching, and is he blaming the people for drowning their fears in forced revelry and unseemly banquets, or (2) is he alluding to the period when the blockade was (at least temporarily) withdrawn (as it would seem he does at the opening of the section), or lastly, (3) may we, with Professor Cheyne, combine both periods and say that 'Isaiah here describes a state of things which began in the past, but reaches into the present' God called the citizens to repent, and still calls them, but they rushed and rush still to mere revelry and debauch. It is very difficult to decide.

And [on that day] the Lord God of hosts called to weeping and to lamentation, to baldness and to girding with sackcloth: but, behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh, and drinking wine! and drink, for to-morrow we shall die.'

Eat