(v, 10-15). All this betokens in the prophet a large spiritual presage, an intuition of coming inner values, which transcends his power to describe. God's Plea for Plain Religion The thought of the elaborate usages of idolatry which "in that day are doomed to pass suggests by contrast the plainness and reasonableness of the religion that Jehovah requires from his people. This is not put as a requirement, however, but as a plea; it is "Jehovah's controversy with his people” (vi, 2), appealing to their simple sense of the way in which he has led them. The case of Balak and Balaam (Num. xxii-xxiv) is cited, apparently because of the lavish offerings made and wealth poured out in a heathen effort to buy a favorable response from Jehovah. In Micah's view, as in his contemporary Isaiah's (cf. Isa. i, 10-17), no such labored service is needed or fitting, though it reach the extreme of sacrifice (vi, 7). Then follows the celebrated utterance which is universally deemed the sanest and most reasonable definition of religion that the Old Testament or indeed any literature affords: "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (vi, 8). It is the country prophet's remedy for a time that, with its tendencies to the spirit of greed, had grown top-heavy with its luxurious cultus (cf. Amos iv, 4, 5; Isa. i, 11). This plea for plain religion is not made in invective as is Isaiah's. In a spirit of tolerance, rather, it recognizes in the people a sincere craving for the favor of God and a disposition to make the greatest sacrifices therefor. But these are the religiously inclined; and not all are so, perhaps indeed only a remnant. The plea has also a voice, however, for "the city," for the classes engaged in trade and traffic and husbandry, the classes whose mercenary spirit is getting the upper hand. If they will let their sound intuition1 speak, they too will see that a conduct that observes justice and mercy and humility has its vital claim upon them, a claim which their dishonest tricks of trade, derived from their more worldly brethren of the northern kingdom, have outraged. No peace of life, no real prosperity, no esteem and honor among the nations, can come of such practices; they are utterly inconsistent with God's requirement. Such seems to be the purport and connection of the passage (vi, 9-16). It is addressed to those whose favorite literature is not prophecy nor poetry but Wisdom.2 Emerging from the As Micah contemplates the spirit of his time, the sense of his loneliness therein, and of the falseness and rottenness of the social structure, comes upon him with overwhelming force; it is as if he were living Moral Chaos in a moral chaos, wherein all kindly human relations were reversed and a man's enemies were the men of his own house. It is the pessimistic stage in his book of prophecy, from which his faith must make escape if he would keep sight of Jehovah's purpose at all (vii, 1–6). ९९ Accordingly, in the last chapter of his book (vii, 7-20) the spirit of the prophet, by a magnificent resilience, emerges from the doubts and perplexities into which the evils of the time have temporarily plunged him. Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy," he exclaims; 'when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, Jehovah will be a light unto me" (vii, 8). We have noted his personified symbol the daughter of Zion," whose mission it was to bring forth the kingly spirit of redemption and to "arise and thresh" (iv, 10, 13); we have to note here another personification, his enemy, "her who said unto me, Where is Jehovah thy God?" (vii, 10), a mocking spirit which he has encountered, which is destined to shame and extinction. It is "a day for building thy walls," the constructive day succeeding to this 1 So I interpret the word translated "wisdom,” vi, 9. disintegration. He depicts it in much the same terms as does Isaiah the large and liberal time when peoples shall come to Israel from the great realms of the earth (vii, 12; cf. Isa. xix, 23, 24), and in Jehovah's light submit themselves to his fear (vii, 17; cf. Isa. xi, 12; xlix, 18; lx). Thus by his faith in that contrasted destiny to which in the beginning he has called his people, Micah pushes his prophecy to the outer limit of the prophetic range, and proves himself a worthy sharer with Isaiah in discovering and interpreting the inner signs of his day. In the sound spiritual insight of the twin prophets of Judah prophecy is responding nobly to its time of stress. III Isaiah of Jerusalem. Coming now to the sublimest of the prophets and one of the most vital literary forces of all time, we have from the outset to reckon, in the Book of Isaiah, with a divided authorship. Of the sixty-six chapters making up the book, the last twenty-seven (chapters xl-lxvi) belong to a period about one hundred and sixty years later than the period with which chapters i to xxxix deal, and is accordingly distinguished in modern scholarship as the Second Isaiah or Deutero-Isaiah. This fact of divided authorship, which may be taken as an assured result of criticism, is determined by internal evidence, and naturally gives rise to much study of the relation of the two parts of the book to each other, if indeed there is a connection more than accidental. In the view which we shall here follow, and which is derived from the like internal evidence, the authorship may better be called composite than divided. In other words, the Second Isaiah, in our view, is an organic sequel and supplement to the First; as if a later prophet, musing in the same vein, had taken up the theme where the earlier one had laid it down, and rounded it out to a finish. And so the two parts, while set in a different scene and subtending two widely sundered epochs of time, are in reality one book, with one homogeneous scheme of thought, and with a clear coördination and consecution of elements. To the just articulation of this organic scheme the work of Isaiah of Jerusalem is as essential, and as lucidly contributive, as is that of his supplementer, the seer of the Exile. What makes the Book of Isaiah as a whole so sublime is the fact that by its coördinated parts it covers the whole The Vision range of the prophetic period. Beginning some and the Word years before the fall of the northern kingdom, weathering a vital crisis in Judah, and culminating as the Chaldean exile is felt to be near its end, it groups its main subject matter round two historical focal points: the Assyrian invasions, culminating with that of Sennacherib in 701 B.C.; and the campaigns of Cyrus, bringing near the fall of Babylon in 538 B.C. and the prospective release of the Jewish people from exile. Between these points there lies, with its generous horizons of educative time and experience, wellnigh the whole landscape of literary prophecy. To traverse this in spiritual realization requires more than a sage's or statesman's genius: it calls for a divinely touched sense of the mind and purpose of God. Such a sense this Book of Isaiah evinces beyond any other Scripture book. It is a blend of apocalyptic and historically conditioned prevision. Both these qualities seem recognized in the titles appended to the body of the prophecy. In chapter i, I, it is called a Vision: "the vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz," a designation which we find in only two other prophetic books, Obadiah and Nahum. What this term distinctively means, in Isaiah's case, will come up for consideration later.1 The opening chapter, giving the ground and design underlying this Vision, is a fitting introduction to the whole book, though it may have contemplated only the time of Isaiah of Jerusalem. It lays a foundation on which ages of prophecy can build. 1 Under the heading, "Isaiah's Vision of Destiny," pp. 189 ff. After this initial chapter, however, a new start is made, under a title which names the prophecy a Word: "the word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw (ii, 1). It seems thus to draw in the matter of the book from the apocalyptic to the local and historic; like the vision title but in a more restricted sense it purports to be "concerning Judah and Jerusalem." This title, unlike Micah's, seems to ignore the northern kingdom (his was "concerning Samaria and Jerusalem," Mic. i, 1); but in the prophecy itself some of the most notable oracles are connected with the fortunes and character of that people (see Isa. ix, 8-x, 4; xvii, 1-11; xxviii, 1-6). Mainly, however, the prophet is called to be the spokesman of Jehovah for the capital and its grave needs in this time of stress. It is with this Isaiah of Jerusalem, Isaiah the son of Amoz, and his "word," that the present section is concerned. What Micah sees from the country and from the point of view of the common man, the man on the under side, The Situation Isaiah sees from his station among the aristoin Jerusalem cratic classes in Jerusalem: a people materialized by luxury and heartless greed (v, 8–12; 18–23), eager for foreign customs and fads (ii, 6–9), mixing their formal worship with iniquity (i, 10-14), and obtuse to spiritual things (vi, 9, 10). In dealing with this situation he sets over against it, as does Micah, the contrasted destiny of the latter days (ii, 2-4); but he applies its lessons in inverse order. Micah works up to it from the deplorable conditions of the day (Mic. i-iii); Isaiah, taking it as a literary point of departure, works downward and outward from it to the details of the utter contrast that he feels around him, the thankless conditions with which his prophetic labors must deal (ii-v). Employing for this mostly the impassioned rhythm of public discourse, he sums up the situation with a song (v, I-7); in which he depicts a well-located vineyard, which was provided with every care and cultivation for producing choice |