Eight Lectures
by W. Robertson Smith, LL.D.
Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black, 1882
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Table of Contents:
• Preface
• Lecture 1: Israel and Jehovah
• Lecture 2: Jehovah and the Gods of the Nations
• Lecture 3: Amos and the House of Jehu
• Lecture 4: Hosea and the Fall of Ephraim
• Lecture 5: The Kingdom of Judah and the Beginnings of Isaiah's Work
• Lecture 6: The Earlier Prophecies of Isaiah
• Lecture 7: Isaiah and Micah in the Reign of Hezekiah
• Lecture 8: The Deliverance from Assyria
• Notes and Illustrations
• Index
The Lectures contained in this volume were delivered last winter to large popular audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow, at the invitation of an influential committee of gentlemen interested in the progress of Biblical study.
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The practical point in all controversy as to the distinctive character of the revelation of God to Israel regards the place of Scripture as the permanent rule of faith and the sufficient and unfailing guide in all our religious life. When we say that God dealt with Israel in the way of special revelation, and crowned His dealings by personally manifesting all His grace and truth in Christ Jesus the incarnate Word, we mean that the Bible contains within itself a perfect picture of God's gracious relations with man, and that we have no need to go outside of the Bible history to learn anything of God and His saving will towards us, — that the whole growth of the true religion up to its perfect fulness is set before us in the record of God's dealings with Israel culminating in the manifestation of Jesus Christ.
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[I]t is plain that a personal knowledge of God and His will — and without personal knowledge there can be no true religion — involves a personal dealing of God with men. Such personal dealing again necessarily implies a special dealing with chosen individuals. To say that God speaks to all men alike, and gives the same communication directly to all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion to mysticism.
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[I]f revelation were not to be altogether futile it was necessary that each new communication of God should build on those which had gone before, and therefore that it should be made within that society which had already appropriated the sum of previous revelations....there must have been a society of men possessed of the whole series of divine teachings in a consecutive and adequate form. And under the conditions of ancient life this society could not be other than a nation....There is nothing unreasonable, therefore, in the idea that the true religion was originally developed in national form within the people of Israel; nay, this limitation corresponds to the historical conditions of the problem....The coming of Christ coincided under divine providence with the breaking down of national barriers and the establishment of a cosmopolitan system of politics and culture under the first Roman emperors, and so Christianity was able to leave the narrow field of Old Testament development and become a religion not for one nation but for all mankind....It will not be denied that the knowledge of God reached by Gentile nations was fragmentary and imperfect, that there was no solid and continuous progress in spiritual things under any heathen system, but that the noblest religions outside of Christianity gradually decayed and lost whatever moral power they once possessed....the religion of the Bible can be shown to have run a different course... in it truth once attained was never lost and never thrust aside so as to lose its influence ...in spite of all impediments the knowledge of God given to Israel moved steadily forward till at last it emancipated itself from national restrictions, and, without changing its consistency or denying its former history, merged in the perfect religion of Christ, which still satisfies the deepest spiritual needs of mankind ... the essential advantage claimed by the religion of the Bible does not lie in details, but in the consistent unity of scheme that runs through its whole historical development, and gives to each part of the development a share in the unique character that belongs to it as a whole....
There is an external evidence of the truth of the Biblical revelation which lies behind the question of the supernatural as it is usually stated, an evidence which lies, not in the miraculous circumstances of this or that particular act of revelation, but in the intrinsic character of the scheme of revelation as a whole. It is a general law of human history that truth is consistent, progressive, and imperishable, while every falsehood is self-contradictory, and ultimately falls to pieces. A religion which has endured every possible trial, which has outlived every vicissitude of human fortunes, and has never failed to reassert its power unbroken in the collapse of its old environments, which has pursued a consistent and victorious course through the lapse of eventful centuries, declares itself by irresistible evidence to be a thing of reality and power. If the religion of Israel and of Christ answers these tests, the miraculous circumstances of its promulgation need not be used as the first proof of its truth, but must rather be regarded as the inseparable accompaniments of a revelation which bears the historical stamp of reality....
In the long struggle with the empires of the East the Word of Jehovah was tried as gold in the furnace, and its behaviour under this crucial test is the best demonstration of its incorruptible purity and enduring worth....
We have already had occasion to note that the conception of a personal revelation of God to man, which underlies the scheme of Biblical religion in both Testaments, implies that God approaches man in the first instance in the way of special dealing with chosen individuals. According to the Old Testament prophets, the circle chosen for this purpose is the nation of Israel, the only nation, as Amos expresses it, among all the families of the earth which Jehovah knows in a personal way (Amos iii. 2). To the prophets, then, the nation of Israel is the community of the true religion. But it is important to observe how this is put. Amos does not say that Israel knows Jehovah, but that Jehovah knows or personally recognises Israel, and no other nation. The same idea is expressed by Hosea in figures drawn from domestic life. Israel is Jehovah's spouse (chaps, i. to iii.), or His son (chap. xi. 1). Thus the basis of the prophetic religion is the conception of a unique relation between Jehovah and Israel, not, be it observed, individual Israelites, but Israel as a national unity. The whole Old Testament religion deals with the relations between two parties — Jehovah on the one hand, and the nation of Israel on the other. Simple as this conception is, it requires an effort of attention to fix it in our minds. We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit, — in which we have to deal, not with the faith and obedience of individual persons, but with the faith and obedience of a nation as expressed in the functions of national life.
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It is only on the march and in time of war that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organisation, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial, and means "God (El) fighteth," and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwe Cebaoth, the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realised; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace, and the sanctuary of Jehovah, where Moses and the priests, his successors, gave forth the sacred oracle, was the final seat of judgment in all cases too hard for the ordinary heads of the Hebrew clans.
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It was the faith of Jehovah that united the Hebrews to final victory, and Jehovah who crowned His gift of the goodly land of Canaan by bestowing on Israel a king to reign in His name, and make it at length a real nation instead of a loose federation of tribes. And so the religion of Jehovah was not only a necessary part of the state, but the chief cornerstone of the political edifice. To Jehovah Israel owed, not only the blessings of life, but national existence and all the principles of social order; and through His priests, His prophets, but above all His anointed king. He was the source of all authority, and the fountain of all law and judgment in the land.
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[T]he official prophets, connected with the sanctuary, were, according to the testimony of Jeremiah and Micah, often not distinguishable from sorcerers.
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Another seat of the influence of the movement was the prophetic guilds. Elijah himself, so far as we can judge, had little to do with these guilds; but his successor Elisha, who had the chief share in giving political effect to his ideas, found his closest followers among the "sons of the prophets." The idea of ''schools of the prophets," which we generally connect with this Biblical phrase, is a pure invention of commentators. According to all the laws of Semitic speech the sons of the prophets were not disciples of a school, but members of a guild or corporation, [17] living together in the neighbourhood of ancient sanctuaries, such as Gilgal and Bethel, and in all likelihood closely connected with the priests, as was certainly the case in Judah down to the extinction of the state (Jer. xxix. 26, cf. XX. 1, 2; Lam. ii. 20, etc.).
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We have already seen that the revolution inaugurated by Elijah and Elisha appealed to the conservatism of the nation. It was followed therefore by no attempt to remodel the traditional forms of Jehovah worship, which continued essentially as they had been since the time of the Judges. The golden calves remained undisturbed, though they were plainly out of place in the worship of a Deity who had so markedly separated himself from the gods of the nations; and with them there remained also many other religious institutions and symbols — such as the Ashera or sacred pole at Samaria (A.V. "grove," 2 Kings xiii. 6) — which were common to Israel with the Canaanites, and in their influence on the popular imagination could only tend to efface true conceptions of the God of Elijah, and drag Him down again to the level of a heathen deity. Yet the sanctuaries which contained so many elements unfavourable to a spiritual faith were still the indispensable centres of national religion. True religion can never be the affair of the individual alone. A right religious relation to God must include a relation to our fellow-men in God, and solitary acts of devotion can never satisfy the wants of healthy spiritual life, which calls for a visible expression of the fact that we worship God together in the common faith which binds us into a religious community. The necessity for acts of public and united worship is instinctively felt wherever religion has a social influence, and in Israel it was felt the more strongly because Jehovah was primarily the God and King of the nation, who had to do with the individual Israelite only in virtue of his place in the commonwealth. It was in the ordering of national affairs, the sanctioning of social duties, that Jehovah made Himself directly present to His people, and so their recognition of His Godhead necessarily took a public form, when they rejoiced before Him at His sanctuary. The Israelite could not in general have the same personal sense of Jehovah's presence in his closet as when he "appeared before Him" or "saw His face" at the trysting-place where He met with His people as a king meets with his subjects, receiving from them the expression of their homage in the usual Oriental form of a gift (Exod. xxiii. 15, 17), and answering their devotion by words of blessing or judgment conveyed through the priest (Deut. x. 8; xxxiii. 8, 10). It was at the altar that Jehovah came to His people and blessed them (Exod. xx. 24), and acts of worship at a distance from the sanctuary assumed the exceptional character of vows, and were directed towards the sanctuary (1 Kings viii.), where in due time they should be supplemented by the payment of thank-offerings. How absolutely access to the sanctuary was conceived as the indispensable basis of all religion appears from the conception that Jehovah cannot be worshipped in foreign lands (1 Sam. xxvi. 19); that these lands are themselves unclean (Amos vii. 17); and that the captives in Assyria and Egypt, who cannot offer drink offerings and sacrifices to Jehovah, are like men who eat the unclean bread of mourners "because their food for their life is not brought into the house of Jehovah" (Hosea ix. 4). So too when Hosea describes the coming days of exile, when the children of Israel shall remain for many days without king or captain, without sacrifice or macceba (the sacred stone which marked the ancient sanctuaries), without ephod (plated image), or teraphim (household images), he represents this condition as a temporary separation of Jehovah's spouse from all the privileges of wedlock. [6]
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Under the kingship the judicial functions of the priests were necessarily brought into connection with the office of the sovereign, who was Jehovah's representative in matters of judgment, as well as in other affairs of state (2 Sam. viii. 15; xiv. 17; 1 Kings iii. 28). The priests became, in a sense, officers of the Court, and the chief priest of a royal sanctuary, such as Amaziah at Bethel (Amos vii. 10, 13), was one of the great officials of state. (Compare 2 Sam. viii. 17 seq., where the king's priests already appear in the list of grandees.) Thus the priesthood were naturally associated in feelings and interests with the corrupt tyrannical aristocracy, and were as notorious as the lords temporal for neglect of law and justice. The strangest scenes of lawlessness were seen in the sanctuaries — revels where the fines paid to the priestly judges were spent in wine-drinking, ministers of the altars stretched for these carousals on garments taken in pledge in defiance of sacred law (Amos ii. 8; comp. Exod. xxii. 26 seq.). Hosea accuses the priests of Shechem of highway robbery and murder (Hosea vi. 9, Heb); the sanctuary of Gilead was polluted with blood, and the prophet explains the general dissolution of moral order, the reign of lawlessness in all parts of the land, by the fact that the priests, whose business it was to maintain the knowledge of Jehovah and His laws, had forgotten this holy trust (Hosea iv.).
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y simply concentrating our attention on undeniable historical facts, and giving them their due weight, we have been able to form a consistent account of the progress of the religion of Jehovah from Moses to Elijah.
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It is important to indicate these deductions in a general way, but for our present purpose it is unnecessary to follow them out in detail, because, speaking broadly, they affect the interpretation rather than the substance of the history. In the time of Amos and Hosea the truest hearts and best thinkers of Israel did not yet interpret Jehovah's dealings with His people in the light of the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws; they did not judge of Israel's obedience by the principle of the one sanctuary or the standard of the Aaronic ritual; but they had heard the story of Jehovah's dealings with their fathers, and many of them, perhaps, had read it in books, great part of which is actually incorporated in our present Bible. Take, for example, the history of the Northern Kingdom as it is given in the Kings. No attentive reader, even of the English Bible, can fail to see that the substance of the narrative, all that gives it vividness and colour, belongs to a quite different species of literature from the brief chronological epitomes and theological comments of the Judaean editor. The story of Elijah and Elisha clearly took shape in the Northern Kingdom; it is told by a narrator who is full of personal interest in the affairs of Ephraim, and has no idea of criticising Elijah's work, as the Judaean editor criticises the whole history of the North, by constant reference to the schismatic character of the northern sanctuaries. Moreover, the narrative has a distinctly popular character; it reads like a story told by word of mouth, full of the dramatic touches and vivid presentations of detail which characterise all Semitic history that closely follows oral narration. The king of Israel of whom we read in 2 Kings viii. 4 was, we may be sure, not the only man who talked with Gehazi, saying, "Tell me, I pray thee, all the great things that Elisha hath done." By many repetitions the history of the prophets took a fixed shape long before it was committed to writing, and the written record preserves all the essential features of the narratives that passed from mouth to mouth, and were handed down orally from father to child. The same thing may be said of the earlier history, which in all its main parts is evidently the transcript of a vivid oral tradition. The story of the patriarchs, of Moses, of the Judges, of Saul, and of David is still recorded to us as it lived in the mouths of the people, and formed the most powerful agency of religious education. Even the English reader who is unable to follow the nicer operations of criticism may by attentive reading satisfy himself that all the Old Testament stories which have been our delight from childhood for their dramatic pictorial simplicity belong to a different stratum of thought and feeling from the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws. They were the spiritual food of a people for whom these laws did not yet exist, but who listened at every sanctuary to Jehovah's great and loving deeds, which had consecrated these holy places from the days of the patriarchs downwards. Beersheba, Bethel, Shechem, Gilgal, and the rest, had each its own chain of sacred story, and wherever the Israelites were gathered together men might be heard "rehearsing the righteous deeds of Jehovah, the righteous deeds of His rule in Israel " (Judges v. 11).
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In the Blessing of Moses the religion of Israel is described in a tone of joyous and hopeful trust — the glory of Jehovah when He shined forth from Paran and came to Kadesh full of love for His people, the gift of the law through Moses as a possession for the congregation of Jacob, the final establishment of the state when there was a king in Jeshurun uniting the branches of the people, and knitting the tribes of Israel together (ver. 5). The priesthood is still revered as the arbiter of impartial divine justice. The tribes are not all prosperous alike; Simeon has already disappeared from the roll, and Reuben seems threatened with extinction; but the princely house of Joseph is strong and victorious, and round the thousands of Manasseh and the myriads of Ephraim the other tribes still rally strong in Jehovah's favour. "There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rides on the heavens for thy help, and in His loftiness on the skies. The God of old is thy refuge and the outspreading of the everlasting arms; He drives out the enemy before thee, and saith, Destroy. Then Israel dwells secure; the fountain of Jacob flows unmixed in a land of corn and wine, where the heavens drop down dew. Happy art thou, Israel; who is like unto thee, a people victorious in Jehovah, whose help is the shield, whose pride is the sword, and thy foes feign before thee, and thou marchest over their high places."
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"Ye cannot serve Jehovah, for He will not forgive your sins; if ye forsake Him and serve foreign gods, then He will turn and do you hurt, and consume you after He hath done you good."
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[A] preacher in the modern sense, whose words are addressed to the heart of the individual, and who can discharge his function wherever he can find an audience willing to hear a gospel that speaks to the poor as well as to the great.
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Amos had many things to say to the nation and its rulers, but they all issued in the announcement of swift impending judgment. The sum of his prophecy was a death-wail over the house of Israel: "The virgin of Israel is fallen, she cannot rise again: She is cast down upon her land, there is none to raise her up. (V. 2.) " This judgment is the work of Jehovah, and its cause is Israel's sin. ''You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities." In the characteristic manner of Eastern symbolism, Amos expressed these thoughts in a figure. He saw Jehovah standing over a wall with a plumb-line in His hand. Jehovah is a builder, the fate of nations is His work, and, like a good builder, He works by rule and measure. And now the great builder speaks, saying, "Behold I set the plumb-line — the rule of divine righteousness — in the midst of Israel; I will not pass them by any more; and the high places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword."
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We have seen from the words he addressed to Amaziah that Amos looked for the fall of Israel before its enemies within his own generation; in the figure of the roar of the lion, which is silent till it makes its spring, he seems to imply that the destroying power was already in motion. What this power was Amos expresses with the precision of a man who is not dealing with vague threats of judgment, but has the destroyer clearly before his eyes. "Behold, I raise up against you a nation, house of Israel, and they shall crush you from the frontier of Hamath" on the north "to the brook of the Arabah," or brook of willows, a stream flowing into the Dead Sea, which separated Jeroboam's tributary Moab from the Edomites (vi. 14; comp. Isa. XV. 7). The seat of the invader is beyond Damascus, and thither Israel shall be carried captive (v. 27). It is plain, therefore, that Amos has Assyria in his mind, though he never mentions the name. It is no unknown danger that he foresees; Assyria was fully within the range of his political horizon; it was the power that had shattered Damascus by successive campaigns following at intervals since the days of Jehu, of which there is still some record on the monuments, one of them being dated B.C. 773, not long before the time when, so far as we can gather from the defective chronology of 2 Kings, Amos may be supposed to have preached at Bethel. When the power of Damascus was broken, there was no barrier between Assyria and the nations of Palestine; in fact, the breathing space that made it possible for Jeroboam II. to restore the old borders of his kingdom was only granted because the Assyrians were occupied for a time in other directions, and apparently passed through a period of intestine disturbance which terminated with the accession of Tiglath Pileser II. (B.C. 745). The danger, therefore, was visible to the most ordinary political insight, and what requires explanation is not so much that Amos was aware of it as that the rulers and people of Israel were so utterly blind to the impending doom. The explanation, however, is very clearly given by Amos himself. The source of the judicial blindness of his nation was want of knowledge of the true character of Jehovah, encouraging a false estimate of their own might. The old martial spirit of Israel had not died, and it had not lost its connection with religious faith and the inspiriting words of the prophets of the old school. Elisha was remembered as the best strength of the nation in the Syrian wars — ''the chariots and horsemen of Israel" (2 Kings xiii. 14). The deliverance from Damascus was "Jehovah's victory" (Ibid. ver. 17), and more recently the subjugation of Moab had been undertaken in accordance with the prophecy of Jonah. Never had Jehovah been more visibly on the side of His people. His worship was carried on with assiduous alacrity by a grateful nation. Sacrifices, tithes, thank-offerings, spontaneous oblations, streamed into the sanctuaries (Amos iv. 4 seq.). There was no question as to the stability of the newly-won prosperity, or the military power of the state (vi. 13). Israel was once more the nation victorious in Jehovah, whose help was the shield, whose pride was the sword (Deut. xxxiii. 29). Everything indeed was not yet accomplished, but the day of Jehovah's crowning victory was doubtless near at hand, and nothing remained but to pray for its speedy coining (Amos V. 18). [15]
We see, then, that it was not political blindness or religious indifference, but a profound and fanatical faith, that made Israel insensible to the danger so plainly looming on the horizon. Their trust in Jehovah's omnipotence was absolute, and absolute in a sense determined by the work of Elijah. There was no longer any disposition to dally with foreign gods. There was none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rode on the heavens for His people's help. That that help could be refused, that the day of Jehovah could be darkness and not light, as Amos preached, that the distant thunder-roll of the advance of Assyria was the voice of an angry God drawing nigh to judge His people, were to them impossibilities.
Amos took a juster view of the political situation, because he had other thoughts of the purpose and character of Jehovah. In spite of their lofty conceptions of the majesty and victorious sovereignty of Jehovah, the mass of the people still thought of Him as exclusively concerned with the affairs of Israel. Jehovah had no other business on earth than to watch over His own nation. In giving victory and prosperity to Israel He was upholding His own interests, which ultimately centred in the maintenance of His dignity as a potentate feared by foreigners and holding splendid court at the sanctuaries where He received Israel's homage. This seems to us an extraordinary limitation of view on the part of men who recognised Jehovah as the Creator. But, in fact, heathen nations like the Assyrians and Phoenicians had also developed a doctrine of creation without ceasing to believe in strictly national deities. Jehovah, it must be remembered, was not first the Creator and then the God of Israel. His relation to Israel was the historical foundation of the religion of the Hebrews, and continued to be the central idea in all practical developments of their faith. To Amos, on the other hand, the doctrine of creation is full of practical meaning. "He that formed the mountains and created the wind, that declareth unto man what is His thought, that maketh the morning darkness and treadeth on the high places of the earth, Jehovah, the God of hosts is His name" (iv. 13). This supreme God cannot be thought of as having no interest or purpose beyond Israel. It was He that brought Israel out of Egypt, but it was He too who brought the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir (ix. 7). Every movement of history is Jehovah's work; it is not Asshur but Jehovah who has created the Assyrian empire, and He has a purpose of His own in raising up its vast overwhelming strength and suspending it as a threat of imminent destruction over Israel and the surrounding nations. To Amos, therefore, the question is not what Jehovah as King of Israel will do for His people against the Assyrian, but what the Sovereign of the World designs to effect by the terrible instrument which He has created. The answer to this question is the "secret of Jehovah," known only to Himself and His prophet; and the key to the secret is Jehovah's righteousness, and the sins, not of Israel alone, but of the whole circle of nations from Damascus to Philistia.
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The fundamental law of Jehovah's special relations to Israel as they bear on the approach of the Assyrian is expressed in a verse which I have already cited. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities" (iii. 2). To know a man is to admit him to your acquaintance and converse. Jehovah has known Israel inasmuch as He has had personal dealings with it. The proof of this is not simply that Jehovah brought up His people from Egypt and gave them the land of Canaan (ii. 9, 10), for it was Jehovah who brought up the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir (ix. 7) although they knew it not. But with Israel Jehovah held personal converse. "I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your young men for Nazarites" (ii. 11). "The Lord Jehovah will not do anything without revealing His secret to His servants the prophets" (iii. 7). This is the real distinction between Israel and the nations — that in all that Jehovah did for His people in time past, in all that He is purposing against them now, He has been to them not an unknown power working by hidden laws, but a God who declares Himself to them personally, as a man does to a friend. And so the sin of Israel is not merely that it has broken through laws of right and wrong patent to all mankind, but that it has refused to listen to these laws as they were personally explained to it by the Judge Himself. They gave the Nazarites wine to drink, and commanded the prophets not to prophesy (ii. 12).
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"If ye be willing to obey, ye shall eat the fruit of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall he devoured with the sword: for the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken it."
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As yet, however, there was no movement of true repentance. There was indeed a great external display of eagerness for Jehovah's help: solemn assemblies were convened in the courts of the temple, the blood of sacrifices flowed in streams, the altars groaned under the fat of fed beasts, and the blood-stained hands of Jerusalem's guilty rulers were stretched forth to the sanctuary with many prayers. Against these outward signs of devotion, accompanied by no thought of obedience and amendment, Isaiah thundered forth the words of his first chapter. Jehovah's soul hates the vain religion of empty formalism.
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And the God who had wrought such great things for His people was not the Jehovah of the corrupt popular worship, for He had refused to hear the prayers of the adversaries of the prophet, but the God of Isaiah, whose name or manifestation the prophet had seen afar off drawing near in burning wrath and thick rising smoke, his lips full of angry foam and his tongue like a devouring fire, and his breath like an overflowing torrent reaching even to the neck, to sift the nations in the sieve of destruction, to bridle the jaws of peoples, and turn them aside from their course. The eyes of the prophet had seen the salvation for which he had been waiting through so many weary years; the demonstration of Jehovah's kingship was the public victory of Isaiah's faith, and the word of spiritual prophecy, which from the days of Amos downward had been no more than the ineffective protest of a small minority, had now vindicated its claim to be taken by king and people as an authoritative exposition of the character and will of the God of Israel.
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The record of the prophet's work closes with the triumphant strains of the thirty-third chapter, written perhaps before the catastrophe of Sennacherib, but after the result was already a prophetic certainty, because Judah had at length bent its heart to obedience to Jehovah's word. In this most beautiful of all Isaiah's discourses the long conflict of Israel's sin with Jehovah's righteousness is left behind; peace, forgiveness, and holy joy breathe in every verse, and the dark colours of present and past distress serve only as a foil to the assured felicity that is ready to dawn on Jehovah's land. ''Ha, thou that spoilest and thou wast not spoiled, that robbest and they robbed not thee; when thou makest an end of spoiling thou shalt be spoiled; when thou ceasest to rob they shall rob thee. Jehovah, be gracious, unto us; we have waited for Thee.
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There were worldly interests involved in the policy of religious centralisation which claimed to represent the spiritual aspirations of the prophets; and the priests of Jerusalem, whose revenues and influence were directly concerned, were at no time the most unselfish of reformers....
Thus we see, in the second place, that behind the legal aspect of the movement of reformation, as it is expressed in the Deuteronomic code, there lay a larger principle, which no legal system could exhaust, and which never found full embodiment till the religion of the Old Testament passed into the religion of Christ. The failure of Hezekiah's attempt to give a political expression to the teaching of Isaiah must have thrown back the men who had received the chief share of the prophet's spirit upon those unchanging elements of religion which are independent of all political ordinances. The religious life of Judah was not wholly absorbed in the contest about visible institutions, the battle between the one and the many sanctuaries. The organised prophetic party of Isaiah, which still found its supporters in the priesthood as it had done in the first days of that prophet's ministry, may soon have begun to degenerate into that empty formalism which took for its watchword "the Temple of Jehovah," against which Jeremiah preached as Isaiah had preached against the formalism of his day (Jer. x. 4). In Jeremiah's day the doctrine of the inviolability of Zion became in fact the very axiom of mere political Jehovah-worship. That has always been the law of the history of religion.
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"[B]ar naggare is not the son of a carpenter, but a carpenter as member of the incorporation." The current notion that the prophets were not a guild is derived from too exclusive attention to the prophets of the school that arose with Amos and expressly disclaimed connection with the established guilds. In Jerusalem, as we see from Jeremiah, the prophets were under a certain official control on the part of the priests.
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[b]In the first chapters of the book of Hosea the faithlessness of Israel to Jehovah, the long-suffering of God, the moral discipline of sorrow and tribulation by which He will yet bring back His erring people, and betroth it to Himself for ever in righteousness, truth, and love, are depicted under the figure of the relation of a husband to his erring spouse. This parable was not invented by Hosea; it is drawn, as we are expressly told, from his own life. The Divine Word first became audible in the prophet's breast when he was guided by a mysterious providence to espouse Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, who proved an unfaithful wife and became the mother of children born in infidelity (i. 2, 3). The details of this painful story are very lightly touched; they are never alluded to in that part of the book which has the character of public preaching — in chapter i. the prophet speaks of himself in the third person; and as Hosea gave names to the children of Gomer, names of symbolic form, to each of which is attached a brief prophetic lesson (i. 4, 5; 6, Y; 8 seq.).), it is plain that he concealed the shame of their mother and acknowledged her children as his own, burying his bitter sorrow in his own heart. But this long-suffering tenderness was of no avail. In chapter iii. we learn that Gomer at length left her husband, and fell, under circumstances of which Hosea spares the recital, into a state of misery, from which the prophet, still following her with compassionate affection, had to buy her back at the price of a slave. He could not restore her to her old place in his house and to the rights of a faithful spouse; but he brought her home and watched over her for many days, secluding her from temptation, with a loyalty which showed that his heart was still true to her.
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In some quarters a great deal too much stress has been laid upon the prophetic vision as a distinctive note of supernatural revelation. People speak as if the divine authority of the prophetic word were somehow dependent on, or confirmed by, the fact that the prophets enjoyed visions. That, however, is not the doctrine of the Bible. In the New Testament Paul lays down the principle that in true prophecy self-consciousness and self-command are never lost — the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets (1 Cor. xiv. 32). In like manner the prophets of the Old Testament never appeared before their auditors in a state of ecstasy, being thus clearly marked off from heathen soothsayers, who were held to be under the influence of the godhead just in proportion as they lost intelligent self-control. And, as the true prophets never seek in heathen fashion to authenticate their divine commission by showing themselves in a state of visionary ecstasy, so also they do not record their visions as a proof that they are inspired. They knew very well that vision and ecstasy were common in heathenism, and therefore could prove no commission from Jehovah (Jer. xxiii.); and so, as we have seen, Isaiah did not even publish his inaugural vision at the time, but reserved it till his ministry had been public for years. Moreover, the Hebrews were aware that the vision, in which spiritual truth is clothed in forms derived from the sphere of the outer senses, is not the highest method of revelation. In the twelfth chapter of Numbers, which belongs to the part of the Pentateuch composed before the rise of written prophecy, Moses, who received his revelation in plain words not involved in symbolic imagery, is placed above those prophets to whom Jehovah speaks in vision or in dream. This view is entirely conformed to the conclusions of scientific psychology. Dream and vision are nothing more than a peculiar kind of thought, in which the senses of the thinker are more or less completely shut to the outer world, so that his imagination moves more freely than in ordinary waking moments among the pictures of sensible things stored up in the memory. Thus, on the one hand, the images of fancy seem to stand out more brightly, because they are not contrasted with the sharper pictures of sense-perception, while, on the other hand, the power of the will to conduct thought in a predetermined direction is suspended, or so far subdued that the play of sensuous fancy produces new combinations, which appear to rise up of themselves before the mind like the images of real things before the physical senses. The ultimate elements of such a vision can include nothing absolutely new; the conceptions of which it is built up are exclusively such as are supplied by previous waking experience, the whole novelty lying in their combination. So far, therefore, as its structure is concerned, there is no essential difference between a vision and a parable or other creation of poetic fancy; and this is as strictly true for the visions of the prophets as for those of other men, so that it is often difficult to say whether any particular allegory set forth by a prophet is visionary or not — that is to say, we often cannot tell whether the prophet is devising an instructive figure by a deliberate act of thought, or whether the figure rose, as it were, of itself before his mind in a moment of deep abstraction, when his thoughts seemed to take their own course without a conscious effort of will.
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In primitive religious thought, the idea of godhead is specially connected with that of fresh unfading life, and the impurity or unholiness which must be kept aloof from the sanctuary is associated with physical corruption and death. Fire and water, the pure and life-like elements, man's chief aids in combating physical corruption, are the main agents in ceremonies of ritual sanctification (Num. xxxi. 23; this passage belongs to the later legislation, but the antiquity of the principle appears from Josh. vi. 19, 24). But fire is a more searching principle than water. Fiery brightness is of old the highest symbol of Jehovah's holiness, and purification by fire the most perfect image of the total destruction of impurity. To Isaiah, of course, the fire of Jehovah's holiness is a mere symbol. That which cannot endure the fire, which is burned up and consumed before it, is moral impurity. "Who among us shall dwell with devouring fire, who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He that walketh in righteousness and speaketh uprightly, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood [consenting to bloodshed], and shutteth his eyes from beholding [delighting in] evil; he shall dwell on high; his place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks, his bread shall be given him, his water shall be sure" (xxxiii. 14 seq.). That which can endure the fire is that which is fit to enter into communion with Jehovah's holiness, and nothing which cannot stand this test can abide in His sanctuary of Israel. Thus the fire which touches Isaiah's lips and consecrates him to prophetic communion with God has its counterpart in the fiery judgment through which impure Israel must pass till only the holy seed, the vital and indestructible elements of right national Life, remain. As silver is purified by repeated smeltings, so the land of Judah must pass, not once, but again and again through the fire. "Though but a tenth remain in it, it must pass again through the fire" (vi. 13), till all that remain in Zion are holy, "even every one that is ordained to life in Jerusalem, when Jehovah shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and purged the bloodshed of Jerusalem by the blast of judgment, and the blast of burning" (iv. 4 seq.)...
And yet Isaiah knows from the first that this consuming judgment at the hand of the Assyrians moves in the right line of Jehovah's purpose of holiness. The axe is laid at the root of the tree, and the present state, corrupt beyond the reach of partial remedies, must be hewn to the ground. But the true life of Israel cannot perish. "Like the terebinth and the oak, whose stock remains when they are hewn down," and sends forth new saplings, so "the holy seed" remains as a living stock, and a new and better Israel shall spring from the ruin of the ancient state.
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And now this whole fabric of sin and self-delusion must perish in a moment utterly, like chaff and stubble at the touch of fire (v. 24). "Sheol [the under world] hath enlarged its maw and opened its mouth without measure, and her glory and her multitude and her pomp and the joyous ones of Zion shall descend into it. And the mean man shall be brought down, and the mighty man shall be humbled, and the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled. And Jehovah of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and the Holy God shall be sanctified in righteousness". .. And now "He lifts up a standard to far nations and hisses to them from the ends of the earth, and behold they come with speed swiftly. None is weary, and none stumbleth among them; they slumber not nor sleep; the girdle of their loins is not loosed, nor the latchet of their shoe broken. Their arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs are like the flint, and their chariot wheels like the whirlwind. Their roar is like the lioness, they roar like young lions, moaning and seizing the prey and carrying it off safe, and none can deliver." The roar of the lion marks the moment of his spring, the sullen moaning that follows shows that the prey is secured. Judah lies prostrate in the grasp of the Assyrian, and over all the land no sound is heard but the deep growl of brutal ferocity as he crouches over the helpless victim. "In that day he shall moan over Judah like the moaning of the sea, when the mariner looks for land, but lo, darkness hems him in, and light is turned to darkness by the clouds".
This picture of judgment, you observe, has all the precision due to the fact that Isaiah is not describing an unknown danger, but one very real and imminent — the same danger which Amos had seen so clearly a generation before. The intervention of Assyria in the affairs of the Palestinian states could not in the nature of things involve anything less than a complete dissolution of the old balance of power, and of the whole political system. There was nothing in the circle of the nations round about Judah which could offer successful resistance to the well-directed force of a great and disciplined martial power, and the smallest acquaintance with the politics of Assyria was sufficient to prove that the absorption of the Mediterranean seaboard by that empire was only a question of time, and could in no case be very remote. The politicians of Judah were blinded to this truth by their characteristic Semitic vanity, by the truly Oriental indolence which refuse to look beyond the moment, but above all by a false religious confidence. The kind of Jehovah worship which had not learned to separate the God of Israel from idols, which left men to seek help from the work of their own hands, was only possible to those who knew as little about the world as about God. A just estimate even of the natural factors of the world's history would have shown them that the Assyrian was stronger than the idols, though it needed a prophet's faith to perceive that there was a God in Israel to whose commands Assyria itself was constrained to yield unconscious obedience. But, in truth, the leaders of Judah dared not face the realities of a situation which broke through all their established ideas, which offered no prospect but despair. Isaiah had courage to see and proclaim the truth, because he was assured that amidst the crash of nations, Jehovah's throne stood unmoved, and He was exalted when all was abased....
Jehovah's righteousness is nothing else than kingly righteousness in the ordinary sense of the word, and its sphere is the sphere of His literal sovereignty — that is, the land of Israel. Jehovah's great work of judgment by the hand of the Assyrians has for its object precisely the same things as a good and strong human judge aims at — not the transformation of the hearts of men, but the removal of injustice in the state, the punishment of offenders, the re-establishment of law and order, and the ultimate felicity of an obedient nation. It is such an ideal as would be actually realised if the judges and counsellors of the nation again were what they ought to be in a land whose king is the Holy One of Israel.
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All that remain in Zion shall be holy, for the filth of the daughters of Zion and the blood-guiltiness of Jerusalem have been purged away by the fiery blast of judgment.
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The principle of the monarchy was plunder.
-- The Prophets of Israel and Their Place in History To the Close of the Eighth Century, B.C., by W. Robertson Smith, L.L.D.