THE SHEPHERD-KING 369
The words are addressed to Jerusalem, the counterpart of Sarah, in her barrenness at first and her fruitfulness afterwards. She is barren now not, indeed, because she had never borne children, but because in her captivity and exile she had been robbed of her children, and as a holy city had all this time given birth to none. But she is to awake and sing, because the children that shall gather around her after her long period of desolateness would be more than when in the time before her calamity came upon / her she had as a married wife yea, so great will be the e increase of Zion s future population, that, instead of bewail- i] ing her lonely and desolate condition, she shall even hear s her children say "in her own ears" that the place is too v strait, and the call to the surrounding nations : " Give place (literally, give way, or fall back ), that I may be able to settle down."
I have elsewhere pointed out l that the land which God by oath and covenant promised to the fathers is about fifty times as large as the part which hitherto the Jews actually possessed, and that it is only pitiable ignorance which made the superficial Voltaire utter the blasphemy that the God of the Jews must have been a little God, because He gave His people a land no larger than Wales, and called it " a good land and a large " (Ex. iii. 8). Surely a land which includes within its boundaries an area at least one-third more than the whole of France may with right be called " a large land " ; but it is possible that even the larger land, with its desert parts transformed into fruitful fields, will not suffice to hold the whole of blessed Israel in the millennial period, so great and rapid will be the increase of the saved remnant.
In the iith verse God s wonderful works on behalf of His people in the past are again alluded to as the basis and illustration of what He will do for them in the yet greater deliverance of the future. When He brought them out of Egypt, He went before them in the pillar of cloud ; and when pursued by Pharaoh and his host, and there
1 See The Jewish Problem. 24
