231

ISAIAH.

The vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz, which he saw upon Judah and Jerusalem: [in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah.]

1. Hearken, Heavens, and give ear, Earth,' for the ETERNAL hath spoken: I nourished and brought up sons, and they rebelled against me.

2. Ox knoweth his owner, and ass the stall2 of his lord: Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.

Verse 1 may be punctuated with a larger pause at Earth: and the Eternal hath spoken, be taken as the Eternal has said, &c. &c.

2 Stall, or not less accurately, crib or manger. Lat. Præsepe.

Does the Title refer to all Isaiah's work? or to the first chapter only? or to the first large portion, closing with the twelfth chapter? Since there are many titles of portions, probably the first portion had its title: but this would end with the word Jerusalem; the subsequent names of the kings may have been added by an editor to describe the whole book, since nothing short of the whole extends over so many reigns. So I think the best judges; but from the number of opinions as to the arrangement of Isaiah, selection between them must be conjectural.

1-3. At the commencement of his work, or rather of the collection of his prophecies, which he may have himself arranged, Isaiah (whose name means, the salvation of Jehovah), calls on Heaven which is God's throne, and on Earth which is His footstool, to hear the cry of sorrow and remonstrance, which comes of reverence for God, and

3. Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evil-doers, sons that are corrupters; they have forsaken the ETERNAL, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel, they are estranged backwards.

4. Whereupon will ye be smitten again, when ye multiply revolt? the whole head is gone sick, and the whole heart faint;

3 The reader will notice a more complex rhythm than the simpler duality which we have elsewhere; the parallelism here proceeding by triplicates, or more loosely. Corrupters, or degenerate. Estranged, or retreated. Latin, abalienati sunt. The LXX. omit the clause, possibly finding it hard. Whereupon. Vulg. Super quo percutiam.

We

indignation at sin. Of the thoughts which break into such a cry, we hardly know how much is our own. feel them, but God awakens them; a consciousness of His awful majesty makes our minds give birth to them: so although the expression is the voice of man, the thought is the Word of God. So in reality, but a reality which should not conceal from us the dramatic imagination and anthropomorphic dress of the utterance, it is God who complains that the nations of the earth, the offspring of his creative thought, become rebellious children. Israel, invested by patriotic piety with the proud title of the firstborn of God, had become degenerate, and gone back into estrangement. Already the presentiment shews itself in the Prophet's mind, that the Eternal must punish, yet after punishment, restore a remnant, or create a better generation.

4-7. Strokes enough had fallen, to leave little room for striking. Though Jerusalem remained intact, the land was laid waste by invaders, whether we are to understand the allied troops of the Syrian Retzin and Samaritan Pekach at the end of Jotham's reign, and early under Ahaz; or whether some invasion of the Assyrians,

5. From the sole of the foot even to the head there is no sound part in it; there is wound and bruise and festering sore; they have not been closed, and not bound, and not softened with oil.

6. Your country is desolate, your cities burnt with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and its desolation is as the overthrow of strangers.5

7. And the daughter of Zion is left like a tent in a vineyard, like a lodge in a cucumber ground, like a besieged city; save that the ETERNAL of hosts had left us a remnant, within a little we had been as Sodom, and had been like unto Gomorrah.

5 And its desolation is. Or, And it is desolate, as in an overthrow by aliens. Vulg. Desolabitur, sicut in vastatione hostili. In this verse and the next, the Latin turns the past tenses into futures, desolabitur, derelinquetur; as does the Greek in the next; ¿ykaraλip0ýσetai. Wrongly, beyond doubt.

6 Within a little. These words belong by punctuation to what has gone before; but by the sense to what follows.

difficult now to define, had extended its effects into the territory of Judah. Though it is most natural to suppose exaggeration in the Chronicles account of 120,000 soldiers slain, and 200,000 captives (2 Chron. xxviii. 6), which is difficult to reconcile with 2 Kings xvi. 5, and with the promise in Isaiah vii. 6-8, there may easily have been disasters sad enough to awaken a consciencestricken people, and to set the prophet on the track of inquiry as to the meaning of Jehovah's judgments. When sin and suffering go together, the preacher connects them, although the philosopher may add a consideration of other causes. The overthrow of so many towns, leaving Jerusalem isolated like a shepherd's cottage in the mountains, reminds the Prophet of the destruction of the cities of the plain.

8. Hear the word of the ETERNAL, rulers of Sodom: give ear to the law of our God, people of Gomorrah.

9. Wherefore to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, saith the ETERNAL; I am satiated with burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and in the blood of bullocks and lambs and he-goats I have no delight.

10. When ye come to behold my face," who hath required this at your hand? ye shall not continue to tread my courts, to bring oblation of falsehood;

To behold my face; or, to appear before me. Probably here, as certainly in Psalm xlii. 2, the original writer spoke plainly of seeing God's face in worship, and this not in any gross sense, but in frank tenderness of faith; but the Hebrew editors, fearing the reproach of anthropomorphism, altered the verb see into the passive appear. The alteration is betrayed by the want of a preposition to the word face.

8. Having mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah in respect of their ruin, Isaiah is reminded of their wickedness, and with the vehemence of exhortation, adapts their name to Jerusalem. Such an adaptation is not to be interpreted rigidly here, any more than the same expressions should be, when applied to the British king Maelgwyn, by a monk assuming the name of Gildas.

9-11. As men are often struck with the hollowness of mere ritual under the gilded roof of some vaunted Cathedral, so the multitude of propitiations seems to the Prophet shocking. It is unjust to suppose that ancient sacrifice had no higher idea than that of feeding the Deity's appetite, or glutting his wrath; the better feeling of consecration, and of self-dedication by way of symbol, or contrition expressed by offering, entered into the rite from at least Abraham's time, probably before. Granting that coarser minds took a sensual view, such as the Apocryphal book Bel and the Dragon maliciously ascribes to the Babylonians, which is but analogous to the depra

11.

Incense, that is an abomination to me ; new moon and sabbath, calling convocation, is an iniquity I cannot endure, and the congregation on your new moons and your festivals my soul hateth; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing.

12.

And on your spreading forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when you multiply prayer, I am not listening; your hands are full of blood.

13. Wash, and make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do good; search out judgment, relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.

Incense that is, &c.; or, That, namely an offering of falsehood, is an incense of abomination to me,

9 Congregation; or, Day of restraint. Comp. Joel i. 13, and ii. 16.

vation among ourselves of the true doctrine of the Atonement-granting also that Priests, to whom victims were then, as tithes are now, a part of their subsistence, may have encouraged carnal views-yet the gifted spirits, the seers of God, must ever have turned things inward. To them, the sacrifices of God, of which those of Priests could only be signs, were ever the upright or contrite heart. But is the Prophet writing for his own day, or for ours? Incense, and Sabbath, and Convocation, a weary round of forms and processions, are they pleasanter to God now than of old? Isaiah spoke of his own time; but the spirit of his words applies to all time in which like occasion arises. What would he say of consecrating bells?

The eleventh verse may be differently punctuated, and has been made to express combination of religion and wickedness. I rather think, that idea begins with the following verse, but that formalism or pietism is the offence denounced in vv. 9, 10, 11.

12, 13. After striking at forms, the Prophet strikes