early as David's time they had become the historians and chroniclers of the court. Unlike the priesthood, the prophetic office was open to all; it depended neither upon birth nor station; even education and training in the prophetic schools was no certain stepping-stone to it. No doubt there were vast numbers of men who were prophets simply by education. Four hundred such were found in Samaria, even after Jezebel's persecution, and prophesied in the name of Jehovah before Ahab and Jehoshaphat (1 Kings xxii. 6). Even these belonged to no special caste, but were recruited from all ranks alike; but above these, from time to time, there stood forth men instinct with Divine power-few in number, but vast in might and dignity; men who spake for God, and who were felt to be invested with superhuman awfulness.

It was in the northern kingdom that prophecy first rose to this colossal grandeur. The Mosaic institutions had fallen there into decay. Jeroboam had engrafted upon them the worship of the sun, as symbolised by the Egyptian bull Apis; Ahab and Jezebel tried to crush them, and set up instead the worship also of the sun, as represented by the Sidonian Baal. Were the powers of the state to be permitted thus to overthrow Jehovah's worship? No! God always grants his people a choice. The acceptance or rejection of his worship must be done by them, not for them; and the prophets were his appeal to the national conscience. Elijah and Elisha stepped forth, therefore, in proportions as vast as the evil with which they had to struggle. But in vain. They delayed Israel's fall; wrought a reformation among large masses of the people; saved multitudes of souls; but idolatry gradually prevailed, and Israel was carried away into a captivity which to this day has been followed by no restoration.

In Judæa the prophets never attained to so grand an elevation as in Israel. They always wrought within a narrower circle, and more as a literary than as a popular power. In the books of Chronicles we find the names of a large number who compiled histories of the kings who reigned at Jerusalem; and while writing does not appear to have been an art much practised in Israel-though we find it mentioned in the days of Ahab-it is reasonably certain that from the time of David there was a large literary class at Jerusalem. The historians mentioned in Chronicles were the successors of Dan and Gad, who kept the records of David's court. In the palmy days of the learned and versatile Solomon, the number of writers must have largely increased. Of this educated class, the priests and prophets formed the chief proportion; and the many Psalms written in these two reigns, and the perfection of style attained to in them, prove that the standard of literary excellence, even at this early period, was a very high one.

But after the days of Solomon literature for a while decayed. The rupture of the two kingdoms, the loss of national power and glory, the disastrous invasion of Shishak, and the tyrannical nature of Rehoboam's government, all conspired to lower the national tone, 27-VOL. II.

Still we

and turn its ability into inferior channels. find Shemaiah and Iddo writing books (2 Chron. xii. 15), but it was not till the time of Hezekiah that learning again attained to something like its ancient proportions, or indeed surpassed them.

During this intermediate time there was nothing to call forth great energy on the part of the prophets. The kings were in general good, if often feeble, men. The nation was slowly ripening for its high purpose, and the revolt of the ten tribes had removed the two dangers of a despotic court at home, and a military policy abroad. First under Jehoshaphat, and then under Uzziah and Jotham, Judæa enjoyed great prosperity; and though the sixteen years' reign of the foolish Ahaz brought with it a bitter reverse of fortune, yet it was not enough to undo the effects of the able government of the kings who had preceded him; and in Hezekiah's reign Jewish literature reached its Augustan age.

It was a reign of very chequered events in political matters. The dark cloud long gathering on the Tigris burst with tremendous force upon the mountains of Judæa. The great Assyrian warrior Sennacherib, the pictorial record of whose numberless conquests has been so strangely disentombed for us within the last few years, that we are as familiar with his features as with those of Napoleon or Wellington, laid his heavy hand upon Hezekiah's dominions; but after many a severe struggle, there were still tranquil years in store for Judæa and her king. And of this period many literary monuments remain. Many psalms, less vigorous and forcible, but more calmly beautiful, were written, inscribed to Asaph and others of the minstrels of the Temple. A supplementary collection of the psalms of David was made, of which Ps. lxxii. 20 is a record. Search was made for proverbs by Solomon (Prov. xxv. 1); Micah and other prophets flourished; but above all Isaiah wrote his matchless poetry.

Apparently he held a high rank in the city, for Hezekiah, when sending a deputation to him, chose his highest officers and the elders of the priests (2 Kings xix. 2). Many of the Rabbins assert that he was of royal lineage, and brother of King Amaziah; but of this there is no proof. Still more unfounded is the idea of Clement of Alexandria, that he was son of the prophet Amos; for his father's name is in the Hebrew quite different, though the same in Greek and English. Really we know nothing of his parentage, but his dwelling, we find, was not in the city of Zion, or in the Temple buildings, but in the lower town; for such in the Hebrew is the meaning of the words translated in our version, Afore Isaiah was gone out into the middle court” (2 Kings xx. 4). It is exceedingly probable that he was the head and chief of the prophetic order, holding in Jerusalem the same rank which Elisha had held in the prophetic schools in Israel. To such a position his great talents as well as his high gift of prophecy would justly entitle him. And these gifts seem to have developed themselves at an early age; for he was appointed to write the annals of the great King Uzziah when scarcely more than a boy (2 Chron. xxvi.

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22). For as his life was prolonged certainly till towards the close of the reign of King Hezekiah, whose death is separated from that of Uzziah by a period of no less than sixty years, at the utmost he could have been but a young man when appointed to this task, and yet already in the year in which King Uzziah died he had been called to the office of prophet by a vision of surpassing magnificence.

The Rabbins have indeed a tradition that he survived Hezekiah, and having provoked the anger of Manasseh by his opposition to his idolatries, was by his order enclosed in a hollow tree and sawn asunder. To this martyrdom of Isaiah the words in Heb. xi. 37 are often supposed to refer; but really there is no authority for this legend, and it is scarcely probable that Isaiah could have lived to so great an age. There is no difficulty, however, in supposing that Isaiah had but just arrived at manhood when he was appointed a prophet; for equally the call came to Jeremiah when still but a youth, or as less correctly rendered in our version, "a child" (Jer. i. 6). But no more glorious vision is recorded in the Bible than that by which he was inaugurated to his office. He saw in the Temple the Deity sitting enthroned among the seraphim, and adored with thrice repeated cries of "Holy is Jehovah of hosts!" Shrinking with natural timidity from so heavy a responsibility, he is nevertheless solemnly dedicated to Jehovah's service by his lips being touched with a live coal from the altar, while withal he is warned that his mission would be apparently in vain. In the very acme of Uzziah's prosperity the prophetic vision saw Judah wasted without inhabitant, the houses empty, the land desolate. Yet she could not perish. The Jew then as now bore a charmed existence. In Isaiah's days the great purpose for which God had formed the nation was still altogether unaccomplished: even now there is part of the work as yet not done (Rom. xi. 15). And so the call of Isaiah ended in the repetition of the old promise. The type of fallen Israel is the oak in winter, stripped of the luxuriance of its summer foliage, but not dead. Its substance is yet in it, and in due time it shall revive (Isa. vi. 13).

So wonderful a picture of life in death, representing so truly the intense vitality of the Jews under so long a series of national reverses, was a strange vision to greet the eye of the child-seer, called so young and with such high gifts to his office; and it was the more remarkable, as Isaiah was born and educated at a time of great and long-continued national prosperity. But he lived to see the beginning of those troubles which, coming from Nineveh and Babylon and Rome, have literally fulfilled the vision's boding words.

For a long time, as was naturally to be expected, the youthful prophet does not seem to have taken much part in national affairs. His earliest prophecy is that contained in chaps. ii., iii., iv., though we must not suppose that his writings give us the record of the whole activity of his life. Even of this, his first prophecy, the date is uncertain; but he describes the country as enjoying the utmost prosperity (ii. 7), while the long list of articles

of feminine adornment enumerated in chap. iii. shows how great was the luxury then prevalent, while the things themselves are as difficult to understand as would be a similar list of the toilet requisites of a West-end lady of the present day. But such luxury is just the theme which a youthful poet would lash with his satire, only Isaiah's indignation rises to nobler proportions than that of Juvenal, or of even those famous sermons of St. Chrysostom, launched against the foibles of the women of his days.

A far more interesting question is the relation of Isaiah to the prophet Micah; for the prediction begins with three verses quoted verbatim from Micah iv. 1-3, not omitting the "and" at the beginning (rendered in Micah, in our version, "but "). Now in Jer. xxvi. 18, we read that Micah uttered this prophecy in the days of Hezekiah, and that it made a very great impression upon both king and people. Thus there is no little difficulty in harmonising the matter; for we are distinctly told in Jeremiah that the prophecy is Micah's, and not Isaiah's. Next, the manner of quotation drives us to the same conclusion; while, nevertheless, the general date of these three chapters cannot well be later than the days of Jotham. My own opinion is that they were prefixed to this prophecy at the time when Isaiah wrote chap. i., and placed it as a sort of preface to a collection of his works, published probably about 710 B.C., and containing chaps. i.—xxxv., with an historical appendix consisting of four chapters more. The quotation hangs loosely upon Isaiah's prophecy, while it is the very centre and core of Micah's, as subsequently it gives the key-note to some of Isaiah's own writings, as, for instance, to chap. xxv. Nothing was more natural than that Isaiah, when editing, as we should say, a collection of his prophecies in Hezekiah's days, should prefix to them words with which all Jerusalem was then ringing, and should thus both himself solemnly reaffirm the appalling vision of Micah, and also add weight to his own warnings by quoting words so famous and so fear-inspiring.

Commentators constantly forget that the date of a prophecy as contained in the Scriptures is not merely that of the time at which the events referred to in it happened, but also that of the period when the author finally published it in a written form. Most prophecies were, I imagine, published immediately in some form or other; but when the author made a collection of such as had a lasting and permanent significancy, he would probably both omit what had served its purpose, and add, under the guidance of the Spirit, whatever would increase their usefulness. Such an addition seems to be this quotation from Micah prefixed to an older prophecy of Isaiah, at the time when the first chapter was written.

In that chapter we have first a general title to the works of Isaiah, in which they are called his Vision, with direct reference, doubtless, to the marvellous sight by which he was inaugurated to his office (chap. vi.). We have, further, the date given of Isaiah's labours, extending through the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz,

and Hezekiah. The last name fixes generally the date when the volume was put forth in its written form; it must have been at some time in Hezekiah's reign, and probably was about the middle of it, when Isaiah would be about sixty-five years of age. Its whole matter is prefatory, a sermon rather than a prediction, sharply rebuking princes and people for their sins, warning them that no amount of attendance upon Temple services, so magnificently restored by Hezekiah, would avail without personal repentance and holiness. But what decidedly fixes the date is the account of the Assyrian invasions. The whole country desolate, the fenced cities all captured, bands of marauders roving without check far and wide over the land, Zion alone unconquered, but even it shorn of its glory, and compared to a booth of boughs put up for the temporary lodging of the keepers of a melon garden. But all this is past: a remnant is left; the Temple once again resounds with the tramp of worshippers; sacrifices of fed beasts tell of the restoration of agriculture. There has been time to recover from the worst effects of the invasions of Sennacherib. Now as the historical appendix ends with the account of the embassy from Merodach-baladan, itself a proof of the falling power of Nineveh, and of Hezekiah's growing prosperity, and as this restoration of national weal is not obscurely indicated in chap. i., it is not without grounds that we consider that this portion of Isaiah's works was collected by the prophet himself, arranged in order, and published about three or four years after the destruction of the Assyrian host. Isaiah may well have given new force to his former predictions by putting at their head the startling words with which Micah had alarmed all Jerusalem; and returning power and prosperity may have made the warning more than ever necessary.

It was probably their similarity in subject to the preface in chap. i. that made Isaiah place the prophecy contained in chaps. ii., iii., iv., and that of the unfruitful vineyard (chap. v.), before the account of his inauguration to his office. Thus far all is general. It is the usual lesson of the preacher-and the prophets were Israel's preachers-Repent: for man is corrupt; but God merciful. But the vision of the Almighty on his throne ushers in one of the most remarkable of all Isaiah's predictions-that contained in chaps. vii., viii., and ix. 1-7; and the importance of this prophecy was apparently the reason why Isaiah placed in front of it his own solemn call.

Ahaz had probably been upon the throne of Judæa for two or three years when a powerful confederacy was formed against him by Pekah, king of Samaria, and Rezin, king of Damascus. And the league was at first only too successful. In one day there fell in battle 120,000 valiant warriors of Judah, and 200,000 women and children were taken prisoners (2 Chron. xxviii. 6, 8). No wonder that, as the confederate kings marched upon Jerusalem with the avowed intention of utterly destroying it, "the heart of the people was moved as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind." With some show, nevertheless, of courage, the young king took measures

for the coming siege, and while visiting the works on the north-eastern side of the city, by which Jerusalem was supplied with water, and where, too, an assault would probably be made upon the walls, the prophet went forth to meet him.

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His own

His son was specially ordered to go with him, and we may notice how the names of the prophet's family contain the substance of his predictions. name means the salvation of Jah," or Jehovah : Shear-jashub is "a remnant shall return." Chastisement there is to be, and national ruin, and dispersion, and captivity; but never a total destruction. The other son has a name of less significance, portending only the speedy fall and spoiling of Samaria. Accompanied then by his elder son, Isaiah meets the idolatrous king, assures him of deliverance, and offers him a sign in proof thereof. But Ahaz had cast off his allegiance to Jehovah, and with a certain show of consistency will accept no sign from a Deity whom he no longer serves.

But Judah is still Jehovah's people, and he grants them the sign rejected by the royal house. And here we must notice that the word "sign is our word "miracle." In St. John's Gospel the word rendered "miracle" in our version is constantly in the Greek "sign :" and thus what Isaiah offered was a miracle, that is, a sign of God's presence, not in the ordinary workings of nature, but in some special and supernatural way. Ahaz will have no miracle: Isaiah gives him the miracle of the virgin's child, the Immanuel. A mere ordinary event is not in Biblical language a sign.

Yet this sign has an ordinary side to it. As far as Ahaz and unbelievers generally were concerned, there was nothing more than a plain promise, though couched in an obscure form, that within about two years all danger from the confederacy would have passed away. Who or what was the almah, or virgin; who or what the child; and why the name God with us:" with all this Ahaz had nothing to do. It was one of the dark sayings which Hebrew seers loved so well. But that the two kings would in two years be swept away, of that the promise was clear.

There was the clear threatening, too, of long and desolating invasions. By the eating of curds and honey is signified the cessation of all the ordinary processes of agriculture. There is no cora, no vintage, no olives, but such produce only as grows of itself. On the sloping hill-sides, where there were wont to be vineyards with a thousand vines, each worth a piece of silver, the scanty population will come with bows and arrows to shoot the game which has found there an undisturbed covert, or to pasture the heifer, or two or three sheep, which are all they have managed to save from the invading foe (vii. 21—24).

In the main this picture is ideal. The land was not so wasted in the days of Ahaz, nor even when in the time of Hezekiah the heavier hand of Sennacherib lay upon the country. We must carry on our minds to the days when the Jews had gone into captivity at Babylon. Then agriculture did thus utterly cease, and the land enjoyed a sabbath-fallow for seventy years.

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. xlv., 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 Judæa 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 (chap. lxiv. 10, 11), though within a few verses it speaks of city and Temple as if still standing (lxvi. 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 Nebuchad

nezzar.

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 Judæa; and that the people at the time when it was written were given to Moloch worship. This second fact is proved by chap. lvii. 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 Maccabæan 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.

Into this criticism we decline to follow them; for it involves a detailed consideration of almost every

chapter; nor is there any agreement among the critics themselves, who, for reasons so shadowy often that it is scarcely possible to understand them, ascribe the same prophecy to men very unlike one another, and who lived at very different times. One thing, however, we may notice, that they restore much of these last twenty-seven chapters to Isaiah, or to a prophet who did not live later than Manasseh's days.1

Let me say, in conclusion, a few words upon the contents of these marvellous chapters themselves. They begin with Jehovah's controversy with idols. Now this was the great question in Hezekiah's days. The nation was making its choice whether it would serve a spiritual, unseen Deity, Jehovah, or the idols which appealed to their senses, and whose worship were impure orgies, which threw the cloak of religion over licentious pleasures. Vigorously Isaiah contrasts the powerlessness of idols, made, perhaps, out of the remnant of a log, of which the rest had been burnt as firewood, and which had to be carried on men's shoulders because they could not walk, and to be nailed in their place for fear they should fall; vigorously he contrasts these with the God who measures the waters in the hollow of his hand, and metes out heaven with the span, and comprehends the dust of the earth in a measure.

But Isaiah is not content with this. He appeals not only to God's works in Nature, but also to his foreknowledge (xli. 22, 23), and thus the specific prophecy of the fall of Babylon by the hand of Cyrus forms an integral part of the proof. If this appeal was made after the fact, the whole prophecy is a sham, and the claim that Jehovah frustrates the pretensions of diviners and of the wise men of the earth, while He con firms the words of his own messengers (xliv. 26) is manifestly dishonest, and to be rejected with scorn.

We find, however, from this time frequent allusions to Isaiah's arguments. Jeremiah, the least original of all the prophets, reproduces them in chap. x. They are reproduced also in Ps. cxv., where also, in ver. 17, there is an unmistakable allusion to Hezekiah's prayer, suggesting to us that the writer had both that prayer and the second part of Isaiah before him. And, in short, they were the strong armoury whence arguments against idolatry were drawn; and at Babylon they prevailed. There was henceforth no controversy among the Jews between Jehovah and idols: the nation utterly rejected them, and chose instead Pharisaism as its sin.

The twenty-seven chapters are divided into three portions of nine chapters each by a refrain occurring at the ends of chaps. xlviii. and lvii. In the second part Isaiah leaves behind the controversy with idols and all allusion to Babylon, and whereas before he had spoken of Israel as being Jehovah's servant, he now describes the person and offices and sufferings of Christ, to whom

1 For a more full discussion of this question, see my Bampton Lectures, Prophecy a Preparation for Christ, ed. sec., p. 294; and Professor Stanley Leathes' Witness of the Old Testament to Christ p. 254. Also my Messianic Interpretation of the Prophecies of Isaiah p. 90; for the Almah, ib. 301; and on the mention of Cyrus b name, ib. 101.