Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

the words which Jehovah thy God hath heard: wherefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant that is left" (xxxvii, 3, 4). It would seem from this that he shared in the prophet's idea of a new life to be born, a regenerate Israel, and that his sympathies were not with the dominant majority but with the remnant. But the nation, as such, had not yet reached that assured stage of spiritual development, that integrity of character and conscience, where it could afford to surrender. It was in truth too early for Judah to enter upon its distinctive mission in the world. A century of reprieve was needed for Israel's redeeming personality to be born and reach the vigor by which it could cope with exile and dispersion. The saving remnant must become a determining energy and redeeming element. So Hezekiah's prayer for deliverance was heard, and the prophet's intrepid faith was vindicated. The Assyrian peril was removed in a way that to Judah had all the effect of a miracle;1 and the prophet's prediction was: "The remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward. For out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant, and out of Mount Zion they that shall escape" (xxxvii, 31, 32). The prophecy of the First Isaiah, symbolized from his earliest activity in the name of his eldest son, still held good, and with it the idealized promise of One who was portrayed as Child, as Conqueror, and as the King of a regenerate and enlightened realm.

1 May not the passage in Second Isaiah (Isa. lxvi, 7-9) describing the new birth of a nation be a reminiscence of this wonderful deliverance and its effect, expressed in the same imagery?

CHAPTER V

AFTER THE REPRIEVE

[From 701 to 586 B.C.]

ITH the sudden release of Jerusalem and Judah from

WITH

the long-standing menace of Assyria, in 701 B.C., there came a corresponding revulsion. It was like opening the eyes of the nation to the true source and secret of their welfare; a visible proof that trust in Jehovah was not misplaced. For the first time since the cloud of invasion and tyranny had first appeared on the horizon, in the days of Amos and Hosea, the people of Jehovah could breathe freely. True, the revulsion caused by Sennacherib's retreat came to a people scarred and crippled. The northern kingdom had fallen, and exiles from it were scattered in the lands beyond the Euphrates (cf. 2 Kings xviii, 11). Judah had been ravaged with the loss of forty-six towns and over two hundred thousand inhabitants (cf. Isa. i, 7; vi, 11, 12; and the Taylor cylinder). The nation, when not intriguing with Egypt and Ethiopia against Assyria, had been obliged to buy off the invader by the payment of enormous tribute (cf. 2 Kings xviii, 14-16). But now, for a time at least, the cloud of anxiety and suspense was lifted. The people whose lands had been ravaged could sow their fields again and resume their peaceful occupations; it was the sign, Isaiah told them, that the long peril was over (xxxvii, 30). Men of thought and letters could now turn their attention to the deeper meanings that lay infolded in the nation's strange experience. The miraculous deliverance, with the spiritual emancipation it caused, was one of the cardinal

points of Israel's history; it opened a century's sound and healthy growth. "Israel," says Professor George Adam Smith, never wholly lost the grace of the baptism wherewith she was baptized in 701." 1

་་

The revulsion found the people's heart not wholly unprepared for its purposed avails. Isaiah had indeed worked at cross-purposes with a stupid and perverse An Enlarged Literary Con- aristocracy; but with the remnant whose spiritsciousness ual susceptibilities were awake he was in hearty fellowship and sympathy, and he had their faith and good will in return. It is of this element of the nation's life, indeed, that we are mainly to predicate the sound and healthy growth just mentioned. In his effort to create out of a degenerate nation a nation regenerate, it was with the remnant, the hidden repository of the nation's better self, that he must begin; and, as we have seen, he symbolized that beginning by the predicted birth of the Immanuel child.2 It was the birth of a forward-looking, resilient faith; and like an infant that faith must be nursed and tended until its assured life could induce in the nation at large a current of new energy and vision. Such was Isaiah's nobly conceived yet thankless task; whose effects could not well be seen until with the sudden release from the Assyrian peril an encouraging access of communal faith was precipitated, as it were, from solution. But while he was thus nursing to power the spiritual and prophetic sense in his people, another effect of the movement was making itself felt in the enlarged literary consciousness which, so far as we can trace, came in with the career of Isaiah and the reign of King Hezekiah; a consciousness which, touched with the prophetic spirit, wrought to revive and enrich the various lines of literary activity, poetic, didactic, and legislative.

1 Smith, "The Book of Isaiah" (in The Expositor's Bible), Vol. I, p. 365. 2 See above, p. 176.

It is the object of the present chapter to take note of this literary movement from the time of its great initiator Isaiah to the beginning of the Chaldean exile—a period of something over a century.

[ocr errors]

I. MEN OF INSIGHT AT WORK

The sad dearth of spiritual insight or what is called vision in the Jewish nation of the time calls forth bitter complaint alike from Micah (cf. Mic. iii, 5-7) ́and Isaiah. We have seen with what keenness the latter senses the contrasted density of his people's mind as soon as the live coal from the altar has touched his lips (vi, 10); it is the materialized national consciousness against which he has to struggle all his life. Later in his career he puts his complaint into somewhat more definite terms. "For Jehovah," he says, "hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes, the prophets; and your heads, the seers, hath he covered. And all vision is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, 'Read this, I pray thee'; and he saith, 'I cannot, for it is sealed': and the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, 'Read this, I pray thee'; and he saith, 'I am not learned"" (xxix, 10-12). Going on then to give the reason for this torpid state of things, he explains that their service of Jehovah is lip service with no heart in it, and that their fear of God is a theoretical fear, a commandment of men learned by rote (xxix, 13). When therefore the purpose of God comes to pass, there is no ability in the men of culture and intellect to understand and appropriate it.

A strong indictment this, and unless we allow for Isaiah's prophetic point of view and intensity of conviction rather more sweeping than the case warrants. The prophet had more supporters, perhaps, than he was aware of: men who

in their way felt the stirring of the times and if not by vision or by creating new ideas, yet by conserving the undying values of the old, contributed their quota to the volume of literary and spiritual activity. Let us take note of these, as evidences of their work come to light in the history and the literature.

I

Isaiah's Vision of Destiny. At the head of the list, however, must be placed the name of the prophet whose utterances are the soul of the whole movement. We have already considered Isaiah's "word" for his land and generation; but his book as a whole is called "the Vision," and rightly so, whether the name was given early or late. The work of Isaiah is referred to under that name as authority for "the rest of the acts of Hezekiah and his good deeds," in 2 Chron. xxxii, 32; but whether Second Isaiah was joined with the First when that book was written is uncertain. By Ecclesiasticus too, who attributes the whole book to Isaiah, he is called "great and faithful in his vision" (Ecclus. xlviii, 22). It is as a vision that the body of Isaianic prophecy is known and valued by later generations; or as Ecclesiasticus puts it, "he showed. the things that should be to the end of time, and the hidden things or ever they came" (Ecclus. xlviii, 22). As our next step in the study of Isaiah, therefore, let us here consider, as we have proposed,2 the vision element of his prophecy; the pervading trait, indeed, which from the beginning charged his words with power.

To get at the enlarged sense in which the term "vision" is here to be understood, we may glance at the two other prophetic books to which the title is given the books of Obadiah and Nahum. In still another book too, the Book of Habakkuk, though that title is not given at the beginning, 1 See above, pp. 167 ff. 2 See above, p. 168.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »