Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/398

382 ISAIAH was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth " 1 Silver tones of which the ear is never weary ; honied rhetoric, which thrills, like a subtle odour, even those who have lost the key to its meaning. It should be remembered, however, that these delightful passages are mostly confined to that part of chaps, xl.-xlvi. which has, on the whole, a literary and sesthetic unity. Among the passages which we have indicated as of doubtful age and origin there are but two which are generally remembered. One of these has apparently been adopted and restricted by the great prophet of chap. xl.-xlviii., and is therefore not abso lutely an exception. The other has commended itself not so much to the affections as to the imagination of later readers (we refer to the wonderfully picturesque vision in Ixiii. 1-6). V. From a religious point of view there is a wide differ ence, not only between the acknowledged and (taking them altogether) the disputed prophecies of the book of Isaiah, but also between those of the latter which occur in chaps. i.-xxxix., on the one hand, and the greater and more striking part of chaps, xl.-lxvi., on the other. We may say, upon the whole, with Dr Duhm, that Isaiah represents a synthesis of Amos and . Hosea, though not without important additions of his own. Isaiah s "place in the affections of all succeeding generations is due to the fact chat he was, perhaps, the first to preach in distinct terms the doctrines of a personal Messiah and of the spiritual brotherhood of all nations. He foresaw that, in the awful day of Jehovah which former prophets had announced, few even of the chosen people should pass the ordeal, and so deep was his conviction of this that he expressed it in the name of one of his sons, Shear Yashub, a remnant shall return. But he was too bold, as St Paul says, to terminate his speculations at so early a point. By com bining the doctrine of the few that should be saved with that of the necessary triumph of Jehovah s kingdom, he was prepared to receive a new and grand revelation. He saw in prophetic vision an exalted personage ascending the throne of David, who should attract the whole world into voluntary submission to his rule And thus to the twofold elementary doctrine of the sole divinity of Jehovah and the awful strictness of the impending judgment a fellow-truth was added, viz., that of the personal Messiah, which developed finally into the crowning doctrine of the spiritual equality of all nations " (Cheyne, The Book of Isaiah Chronologically Arranged, Introduction, p. xi.). This very conception, which is, as it were, the blossom of the revelations of the acknowledged portions of Isaiah, is conspicuously wanting in the disputed prophecies ; or rather, this particular form of the conception has disap peared. Not the ideal king of Israel, but a figure vari ously described, and susceptible (as experience proves) of different explanations, is the centre of the longest and grandest of this cognate group. Who is the " Servant of Jehovah " ? Certainly not, in the proper sense of the word, the Messiah ; certainly not, in all the extant descrip tions, an individual. Both these explanations must from the very first be excluded as absolutely opposed to a philo logical exegesis. The following are, in brief, the leading opinions which have been held: (1) Hitzig s, that the Jewish people in exile is referred to, as distinguished from the heathen ; (2) that of Paulus and Maurer, that the Ser vant is the pious portion of the people; (3) that of Gesenius, that the prophetic order is intended ; (4) that of Hofmann, combining (2) and (3), that it means Israel, the prophetic people, suffering on behalf of the heathen world; (4) that of Oehler and Delitzsch, that " the conception of the Servant of Jehovah is, as it were, n, pyramid, of which the base is the people of Israel as a whole, the central part Israel according to the Spirit, and the summit the person of the mediator of salvation who arises out of Israel." [Delitszch, however, who now traces this historical person, the Christ of the gospels, in the strongly individualizing portrait in chap, liii., formerly considered the subject of that chapter to be the spiritual Israel ; see his article in Zeitschrift fur lutherische Theologie, 1850, pp. 29-42.] This last theory has been advocated on partly new grounds by the writer of this article in his work called The Pro phecies of Isaiah, ii. 194-200, where it is further admitted that though the Servant of Jehovah, even in the most individualizing passages, is not properly speaking the Messiah, yet there are features in the description borrowed from the earlier portraits of the Messianic king, features which, regarded strictly, may be inconsistent, but which serve to keep up the historical continuity of the announce ment of salvation. " It was natural and necessary that the die from which the coins with a royal stamp had proceeded should be broken, the royalistic form of the Messianic conception having become antiquated with the hopeless downfall of the kingdom of Judah ; but equally so that fragments of the die should be gathered up and fused with other elements into a new whole." Among the other characteristic religious peculiarities of the disputed as opposed to the acknowledged prophecies are (1) the emphasis laid on the uniqueness, eternity, creatorship, and predictive power of Jehovah (xl. 18, 25, xli. 4, xliv. 6, xlviii. 12, xlv. 5, 6, 18, 22, xlvi. 9, xlii. 5, xlv. 18, xli. 26, xliii. 9, xliv. 7, xlv. 21, xlviii. 14); (2) the ironical descriptions of idolatry (Isaiah in the acknow ledged prophecies only refers incidentally to idolatry), xl. 19, 20, xli. 7, xliv. 9-17, xlvi. 6 ; (3) the personality of the Spirit of Jehovah (mentioned no less than seven times, see especially xl. 3, xlviii. 16, Ixiii. 10, 14) ; (4) the influ ence of the angelic powers (xxiv. 21) ; (5) the resurrection of the body (xxvi. 19) ; (6) the everlasting punishment of the wicked (IxvL 24); (6) vicarious atonement (chap. liii.). It is unnecessary to do more than chronicle the singular attempts of the Jewish scholar, Dr Kohut, in the Z. D. M. G. for 1876 to prove a Zoroastrian influence on chaps, xl.-lxvi. Were this proved, of course the date of these chapters would be determined. But the baselessness of this hypothesis has been shown by M. de Harlez in the Revue dcs questions historiques, and by Dr Matthes in the Theologisch Tijdschrift, There is, however, an equally striking difference among the disputed prophecies themselves, and one of no small moment as a subsidiary indication of their origin. We have already spoken of the difference of tone between parts of the latter half of the book ; and, when we compare the disputed prophecies of the former half with the Prophecy of Israel s Restoration, how inferior (with all reverence be it said) do they appear ! Truly " in many parts and many manners did God speak " in this composite book of Isaiah ! To the Prophecy of Restoration we may fitly apply the words, too gracious and too subtly chosen to be translated, of M. Renan, " ce second Isa ie, dont lame lumineuse semble commeimpre gne e, six cent ans d avance, de toutes les rose es, de tous les parfums de 1 avenir " (L Antcchrist, p. 464) ; though, indeed, the common verdict of sympathetic readers sums up the sentence in a single phrase "the Evangelical Prophet." The freedom and the inexhaustiblencss of the undeserved grace of God is a subject to which this gifted son constantly returns with "a monotony which is never monotonous." 1 The defect of the disputed prophecies in the former part of the book (a defect, as long as we regard them in isolation, and 1 The Rev. G. G. Bradley, Master of University College, Oxford, iii an academical sermon on the Book of Isaiah, preached February 18, 1875.