Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah Part 16

The vocation of a merchant differs from others in this, that there is no inherent nor instinctive obligation in it to ends higher than those of financial profit--emphasized in our days into the more dangerous constraint of _immediate_ financial profit. No profession is of course absolutely free from the risk of this servitude; but other professions offer escapes, or at least mitigations, which are not possible to nearly the same extent in trade. Artist, artisan, preacher and statesman have ideals which generally act contrary to the compulsion of profit and tend to create a n.o.bility of mind strong enough to defy it. They have given, so to speak, hostages to heaven--ideals of beauty, of accurate scholarship or of moral influence, which they dare not risk by abandoning themselves to the hunt for gain. But the calling of a merchant is not thus safeguarded. It does not afford those visions, those occasions of being caught away to the heavens, which are the inherent glories of other lives. The habits of trade make this the first thought--not what things of beauty are in themselves, not what men are as brothers, not what life is as G.o.d's discipline, but what things of beauty, and men and opportunities are worth to us--and in these times what they are _immediately_ worth--as measured by money. In such an absorption art, humanity, morals and religion become matters of growing indifference.

To this spirit, which treats all things and men, high or low, as matters simply of profit, Isaiah gives a very ugly name. We call it the mercenary or venal spirit. Isaiah says it is the spirit of _the harlot_.

The history of Phnicia justified his words. To-day we remember her by nothing that is great, by nothing that is original. She left no art nor literature, and her once brave and skilful populations degenerated till we know them only as the slave-dealers, panders and prost.i.tutes of the Roman empire. If we desire to find Phnicia's influence on the religion of the world, we have to seek for it among the most sensual of Greek myths and the abominable practices of Corinthian worship. With such terrible literalness was Isaiah's harlot-curse fulfilled.

What is true of Phnicia may become true of Britain, and what has been seen on the large scale of a nation is exemplified every day in individual lives. The man who is entirely eaten up with the zeal of gain is no better than what Isaiah called Tyre. He has prost.i.tuted himself to covetousness. If day and night our thoughts are of profit, and the habit, so easily engendered in these times, of asking only, "What can I make of this?" is allowed to grow upon us, it shall surely come to pa.s.s that we are found sacrificing, like the poor unfortunate, the most sacred of our endowments and affections for gain, demeaning our natures at the feet of the world for the sake of the world's gold. A woman sacrifices her purity for coin, and the world casts her out. But some who would not touch her have sacrificed honour and love and pity for the same base wage, and in G.o.d's sight are no better than she. Ah, how much need is there for these bold, brutal standards of the Hebrew prophet to correct our own social misappreciations!

Now for a very vain delusion upon this subject! It is often imagined in our day that if a man seek atonement for the venal spirit through the study of art, through the practice of philanthropy or through the cultivation of religion, he shall surely find it. This is false--plausible and often practised but utterly false. Unless a man see and reverence beauty in the very workshop and office of his business, unless he feel those whom he meets there, his employes and customers, as his brethren, unless he keep his business methods free from fraud, and honestly recognise his gains as a trust from the Lord, then no amount of devotion elsewhere to the fine arts, nor perseverance in philanthropy, nor fondness for the Church evinced by ever so large subscriptions, will deliver him from the devil of mercenariness. That is a plea of _alibi_ that shall not prevail on the judgement day. He is only living a double life, whereof his art, philanthropy or religion is the occasional and dilettante portion, with not nearly so much influence on his character as the other, his calling and business, in which he still sacrifices love to gain. His real world--the world in which G.o.d set him, to buy and sell indeed, but also to serve and glorify his G.o.d--he is treating only as a big warehouse and exchange. And so much is this the case at the present day, in spite of all the worship of art and religion which is fashionable in mercantile circles, that we do not go too far when we say that if Jesus were now to visit our large markets and manufactories, in which the close intercourse of numbers of human persons renders the opportunities of service and testimony to G.o.d so frequent, He would scourge men from them, as He scourged the traffickers of the Temple, for that they had forgotten that _here_ was their Father's house, where their brethren had to be owned and helped, and their Father's glory revealed to the world.

A nation with such a spirit was of course foredoomed to destruction.

Isaiah predicts the absolute disappearance of Tyre from the attention of the world. _Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years._ _Then_, like some poor unfortunate whose day of beauty is past, she shall in vain practise her old advertis.e.m.e.nts on men. _After the end of seventy years it shall be unto Tyre as in the song of the harlot: Take an harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many songs, that thou mayest be remembered._

But Commerce is essential to the world. Tyre must revive; and the prophet sees her revive as the minister of Religion, the purveyor of the food of the servants of the Lord, and of the accessories of their worship. It must be confessed, that we are not a little shocked when we find Isaiah continuing to apply to Commerce his metaphor of a harlot, even after Commerce has entered the service of the true religion. He speaks of her wages being devoted to Jehovah, just in the same manner as those of certain notorious women of heathen temples were devoted to the idol of the temple. This is even against the directions of the Mosaic law. Isaiah, however, was a poet; and in his flights we must not expect him to carry the whole Law on his back. He was a poet, and probably no a.n.a.logy would have more vividly appealed to his Oriental audience. It will be foolish to allow our natural prejudice against what we may feel to be the unhealthiness of the metaphor to blind us to the magnificence of the thought which he clothes in it.

All this is another proof of the sanity and far sight of our prophet.

Again we find that his conviction that judgement is coming does not render his spirit morbid, nor disturb his eye for things of beauty and profit in the world. Commerce, with all her faults, is essential, and must endure, nay shall prove in the days to come Religion's most profitable minister. The generosity and wisdom of this pa.s.sage are the more striking when we remember the extremity of unrelieved denunciation to which other great teachers of religion have allowed themselves to be hurled by their rage against the sins of trade. But Isaiah, in the largest sense of the expression, is a man of the world--a man of the world because G.o.d made the world and rules it. Yet even from his far sight was hidden the length to which in the last days Commerce would carry her services to man and G.o.d, proving as she has done, under the flag of another Phnicia, to all the extent of Isaiah's longing, one of Religion's most sincere and profitable handmaids.

BOOK IV.

_JERUSALEM AND SENNACHERIB_, 701 B.C.

ISAIAH:--

x.x.xvi. 1. Early in 701.

i. " "

xxii. " "

x.x.xiii. A little later.

x.x.xvi. 2-x.x.xvii. " "

_______

x.x.xviii.-x.x.xix. Date uncertain.

BOOK IV.

Into this fourth book we put all the rest of the prophecies of the Book of Isaiah, that have to do with the prophet's own time: chaps. i., xxii.

and x.x.xiii., with the narrative in x.x.xvi., x.x.xvii. All these refer to the only a.s.syrian invasion of Judah and siege of Jerusalem: that undertaken by Sennacherib in 701.

It is, however, right to remember once more, that many authorities maintain that there were two a.s.syrian invasions of Judah--one by Sargon in 711, the other by Sennacherib in 701--and that chaps. i. and xxii.

(as well as x. 5-34) belong to the former of these. The theory is ingenious and tempting; but, in the silence of the a.s.syrian annals about any invasion of Judah by Sargon, it is impossible to adopt it. And although chaps. i. and xxii. differ very greatly in tone from chap.

x.x.xiii., yet to account for the difference it is not necessary to suppose two different invasions, with a considerable period between them. Virtually, as will appear in the course of our exposition, Sennacherib's invasion of Judah was a double one.

1. The first time Sennacherib's army invaded Judah they took all the fenced cities, and probably invested Jerusalem, but withdrew on payment of tribute and the surrender of the _casus belli_, the a.s.syrian va.s.sal Padi, whom the Ekronites had deposed and given over to the keeping of Hezekiah. To this invasion refer Isa. i., xxii. and the first verse of x.x.xvi.: _Now it came to pa.s.s in the fourteenth[53] year of King Hezekiah that Sennacherib, King of a.s.syria, came up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took them._ This verse is the same as 2 Kings xviii. 13, to which, however, there is added in vv. 14-16 an account of the tribute sent by Hezekiah to Sennacherib at Lachish, that is not included in the narrative in Isaiah. Compare 2 Chron. x.x.xii. 1.

[53] It is confusing to find this date attached to Sennacherib's invasion of 701, unless, with one or two critics, we place Hezekiah's accession in 715. But Hezekiah acceded in 728 or 727, and 701 would therefore be his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year. Mr. Cheyne, who takes 727 as the year of Hezekiah's accession, gets out of the difficulty by reading "Sargon" for "Sennacherib" in this verse and in 2 Kings xiii., and thus secures another reference to that invasion of Judah, which he supposes to have taken place under Sargon between 712 and 710. By the change of a letter some would read _twenty-fourth_ for _fourteenth_. But in any case this date is confusing.

2. But scarcely had the tribute been paid when Sennacherib, himself advancing to meet Egypt, sent back upon Jerusalem a second army of investment, with which was the Rabshakeh; and this was the army that so mysteriously disappeared from the eyes of the besieged. To the treacherous return of the a.s.syrians and the sudden deliverance of Jerusalem from their grasp refer Isa. x.x.xiii., x.x.xvi. 2-x.x.xvii., with the fuller and evidently original narrative in 2 Kings xviii. 17-xix.

Compare 2 Chron. x.x.xii. 9-23.

To the history of this double attempt upon Jerusalem in 701--x.x.xvi. and x.x.xvii.--there has been appended in x.x.xviii. and x.x.xix. an account of Hezekiah's illness and of an emba.s.sy to him from Babylon. These events probably happened some years before Sennacherib's invasion. But it will be most convenient for us to take them in the order in which they stand in the canon. They will naturally lead us up to a question that it is necessary we should discuss before taking leave of Isaiah--whether this great prophet of the endurance of the kingdom of G.o.d upon earth had any gospel for the individual who dropped away from it into death.

CHAPTER XIX.

_AT THE LOWEST EBB._

ISAIAH i. and xxii. (701 B.C.).

In the drama of Isaiah's life we have now arrived at the final act--a short and sharp one of a few months. The time is 701 B.C., the fortieth year of Isaiah's ministry, and about the twenty-sixth of Hezekiah's reign. The background is the invasion of Palestine by Sennacherib. The stage itself is the city of Jerusalem. In the clear atmosphere before the bursting of the storm Isaiah has looked round the whole world--his world--uttering oracles on the nations from Tyre to Egypt and from Ethiopia to Babylon. But now the a.s.syrian storm has burst, and all except the immediate neighbourhood of the prophet is obscured. From Jerusalem Isaiah will not again lift his eyes.

The stage is thus narrow and the time short, but the action one of the most critical in the history of Israel, taking rank with the Exodus from Egypt and the Return from Babylon. To Isaiah himself it marks the summit of his career. For half a century Zion has been preparing for, forgetting and again preparing for, her first and final struggle with the a.s.syrian. Now she is to meet her foe, face to face across her own walls. For forty years Isaiah has predicted for the a.s.syrian an uninterrupted path of conquest to the very gates of Jerusalem, but certain check and confusion there. Sennacherib has overrun the world, and leaps upon Zion. The Jewish nation await their fate, Isaiah his vindication, and the credit of Israel's religion, one of the most extraordinary tests to which a spiritual faith was ever subjected.

In the end, by the mysterious disappearance of the a.s.syrian, Jerusalem was saved, the prophet was left with his remnant and the future still open for Israel. But at the beginning of the end such an issue was by no means probable. Jewish panic and profligacy almost prevented the Divine purpose, and Isaiah went near to breaking his heart over the city, for whose redemption he had travailed for a lifetime. He was as sure as ever that this redemption must come, but a collapse of the people's faith and patriotism at the eleventh hour made its coming seem worthless.

Jerusalem appeared bent on forestalling her deliverance by moral suicide. Despair, not of G.o.d but of the city, settled on Isaiah's heart; and in such a mood he wrote chap. xxii. We may ent.i.tle it therefore, though written at a time when the tide should have been running to the full, "At the Lowest Ebb."

We have thus stated at the outset the motive of this chapter, because it is one of the most unexpected and startling of all Isaiah's prophecies.

In it "we can discern precipices." Beneath our eyes, long lifted by the prophet to behold a future _stretching very far forth_, this chapter suddenly yawns, a pit of blackness. For utterness of despair and the absolute sentence which it pa.s.ses on the citizens of Zion we have had nothing like it from Isaiah since the evil days of Ahaz. The historical portions of the Bible which cover this period are not cleft by such a creva.s.se, and of course the official a.s.syrian annals, full as they are of the details of Sennacherib's campaign in Palestine, know nothing of the moral condition of Jerusalem.[54] Yet if we put the Hebrew and a.s.syrian narratives together, and compare them with chaps. i. and xxii.

of Isaiah, we may be sure that the following was something like the course of events which led down to this woeful depth in Judah's experience.

[54] _Records of the Past_, i. 33 ff. vii.; Schrader's _Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament_ (Whitehouse's translation).

In a Syrian campaign Sennacherib's path was plain--to begin with the Phnician cities, march quickly south by the level coastland, subduing the petty chieftains upon it, meet Egypt at its southern end, and then, when he had rid himself of his only formidable foe, turn to the more delicate task of warfare among the hills of Judah--a campaign which he could scarcely undertake with a hostile force like Egypt on his flank. This course, he tells us, he followed. "In my third campaign, to the land of Syria I went. Luliah (Elulaeus), King of Sidon--for the fearful splendour of my majesty overwhelmed him--fled to a distant spot in the midst of the sea. His land I entered." City after city fell to the invader. The princes of Aradus, Byblus and Ashdod, by the coast, and even Moab and Edom, far inland, sent him their submission. He attacked Ascalon, and captured its king. He went on, and took the Philistine cities of Beth-dagon, Joppa, Barka and Azor, all of them within forty miles of Jerusalem, and some even visible from her neighbourhood. South of this group, and a little over twenty-five miles from Jerusalem, lay Ekron; and here Sennacherib had so good a reason for anger, that the inhabitants, expecting no mercy at his hands, prepared a stubborn defence.

Ten years before this Sargon had set Padi, a va.s.sal of his own, as king over Ekron; but the Ekronites had risen against Padi, put him in chains, and sent him to their ally Hezekiah, who now held him in Jerusalem.

"These men," says Sennacherib, "were now terrified in their hearts; the shadows of death overwhelmed them."[55] Before Ekron was reduced, however, the Egyptian army arrived in Philistia, and Sennacherib had to abandon the siege for these arch-enemies. He defeated them in the neighbourhood, at Eltekeh, returned to Ekron, and completed its siege.

Then, while he himself advanced southwards in pursuit of the Egyptians, he detached a corps, which, marching eastwards through the mountain pa.s.ses, overran all Judah and threatened Jerusalem. "And Hezekiah, King of Judah, who had not bowed down at my feet, forty-six of his strong cities, his castles and the smaller towns in their neighbourhood beyond number, by casting down ramparts and by open attack, by battle--_zuk_, of the feet; _nisi_, hewing to pieces and casting down (?)--I besieged, I captured.... He himself, like a bird in a cage, inside Jerusalem, his royal city, I shut him up; siege-towers against him I constructed, for he had given command to renew the bulwarks of the great gate of his city."[56] But Sennacherib does not say that he took Jerusalem, and simply closes the narrative of his campaign with the account of large tribute which Hezekiah sent after him to Nineveh.

[55] _Records of the Past_, i. 38; vii. 62.

[56] _Ibid._, i., 40; Schrader, i., 286.

Here, then, we have material for a graphic picture of Jerusalem and her populace, when chaps. i. and xxii. were uttered by Isaiah.