must remain inviolable; it can never be delivered into the hands of the Assyrian. Thus, with Isaiah in the days of Sennacherib's invasion, the prophetic word became again, as it had been in the days of the Syrian wars, “the chariots and horsemen of Israel,” the stay and strength of all patriotic hope.
Yet even at this crisis the resemblance between Isaiah and Elisha, between the new prophecy and the old, is more apparent than real. Elisha still stands firmly planted on the old national conception of the religion of Yahweh; his ideals are such as do not lie beyond the range of practical politics. In doing battle against the Tyrian Baal he is content with a reformation for which the whole nation can be heartily won, because it makes no radical change in their inherited faith and practices of worship. And in stimulating resistance to Syria he is still the prophet of the old “God of the hosts of Israel”—a God who works deliverance by the thews and sinews of His earthly warriors. But Isaiah's ideal of religion was one for which he himself demands as a preliminary condition an outpouring of Yahweh's spirit on king (Isa. xi. 2) and people (Isa. xxxii. 15), working an entire moral regeneration. And so too it is not through the material organization of the Judaean kingdom that Isaiah looks for deliverance from Assyria. He sees with absolute clearness the powerlessness of the little realm against that great empire: the Assyrian must fall, and fall before Jerusalem, that Yahweh alone may appear to all the earth as the one true God, while all the idols appear as vain to help their worshippers. These conceptions break through the old particularistic idea of Yahweh and His religion at every point. Zion is now not the centre of a mere national cult, but the centre of all true religion for the whole world; and more than once the prophet indicates not obscurely that the necessary issue of the great conflict between Yahweh and the gods of the heathen must be the conversion of all nations, the disappearance of every other religion before the faith of the God of Israel. The pre-exilian origin of Isa. ii. 2-4 which announces that all foreign nations shall stream towards the exalted mountain of Yahweh's temple is maintained by Duhm but is denied by many recent critics including Cornill. But this all-conquering religion is not the popular Yahweh worship; why then can the prophet still hold that the one true God is yet the God of Israel, and that the vindication of His Godhead involves the preservation of Israel? Not because His providence is confined to Israel—it embraces all nations; not because He shows any favouritism to Israel—He judges all nations by the same strict rule. If Israel alone among nations can meet the Assyrian with the boast “with us is God,” the reason is that in Zion the true God is known[1]—not indeed to the mass, but to the prophet, and that the “holy seed”[2]or “remnant” (contained in the name Sheār yāshūbh) which forms the salt of the nation. The interpretation which Isaiah puts on this fact depends on the circumstance that at that date religion had never been conceived as a relation between God and individuals, or as a relation between God and a purely spiritual society, but always as a relation between a deity and some natural social group—a stock, a tribe, a nation. It was therefore only as the God of Israel that the true God could be known within Israel; and so on the one hand the little society of faith—which had not in reality the least tinge of political coherence—is thought of as yet forming the true kernel of the nation qua nation, while on the other hand the state of Judah profits by the prophetic religion inasmuch as the nation must be saved from destruction in order that the prophetic faith—which is still bound up with the idea of the nation—may not be dissolved. This connexion of ideas was not of course explicitly before the prophet's mind, for the distinctive features of a national religion could not be formulated so long as no other kind of religion had ever been heard of. When we put down in black and white the explicit details of what is involved in Isaiah's conclusion of faith we see that it has no absolute validity. True religion can exist without having a particular nation as its subject as soon as the idea of a spiritual community of faith has been realized. But till this was realized Isaiah was right in teaching that the law of continuity demanded that the nation within which Yahweh had made Himself known to His spiritual prophets must be maintained as a nation for the sake of the glory of God and the preservation of the “remnant.”
The withdrawal of Sennacherib's army, in which the doctrine of the inviolability of Zion received the most striking practical confirmation, was welcomed by Isaiah and his disciples as an earnest of the speedy in bringing of the new spiritual era. But these hopes were not fulfilled. The prophetic teaching had indeed produced a profound effect; to the party of reaction, as the persecution under Manasseh shows, it seemed to threaten to subvert all society; and we can still measure the range and depth of its influence in the literary remains of the period from Isaiah to the captivity, which include Micah vi. 1-8, and that noble essay to build a complete national code on the principle of love to God, righteousness, and humanity—the legislation of Deuteronomy. Nay more, the reception of the book of Deuteronomy by king and people in the eighteenth year of Josiah shows what a hold the prophetic teaching had on the popular conscience. It was no small triumph that there was even a passing attempt to introduce such a code as the law of the land. But it was one thing to touch the conscience of the nation and another to change its heart and renew its whole life. That no code could do, and, as every practical government must adapt itself to actualities and not to a purely ideal standard, it must have appeared at once that the attempt to govern by prophetic ideas was only sewing a new piece on an old garment. The immediate result of Josiah's reformation was the complete dissolution of anything that could be called a political party of prophetic ideas; the priests and the ordinary prophets were satisfied with what had been accomplished; the old abuses began again, but the nation had received a reformed constitution and there was nothing more to be said.
Thus it was that, though beyond question there had been a real advance in the average ethical and spiritual ideas of the people since the time of Isaiah, Jeremiah found himself more isolated than Isaiah had ever been. Even in that earliest part of his book which is mainly a recapitulation of his experiences and work in the reign of Josiah, his tone is one of absolute hopelessness as to the future of the nation. But we should quite misunderstand this pessimism if we held it to mean that Jeremiah saw no signs of private morality and individual spiritual convictions among his people. To him as a prophet the question was whether Israel as a nation could be saved. In Isaiah's days the answer had been affirmative; there appeared to be at least a potentiality of national regeneration in the holy seed when once it should be cleansed from the chaff by a work of judgment. But, now a century of respite had been granted, the Chaldaeans were at the gates, and there was no sign of valid national repentance. The harvest was past, the season of ripe fruits was over, and still Israel was not saved (Jer. viii. 20). The time of respite had been wasted, all attempts at national reformation had failed; how should Yahweh spare a nation which had shown no tokens of fitness to discharge the vocation of Yahweh's people? The question was not whether there was still a faithful remnant, but whether that remnant was able 'to save the state as a state, and this Jeremiah was forced to deny. Nay, every attempt at genuine amendment was frustrated by the dead weight of a powerful opposition, and when the first captivity came it was precisely the best elements of Judah that went into captivity and were scattered among the nations (xxiv. 5, xxiii. 2 seq.). And so the prophet was compelled to teach that the immediate future of Israel was a blank, that the state as a state was doomed. He did not even dare to intercede for such a nation (vii. 16); though Moses and Samuel stood pleading for it before Yahweh, He could not but cast it out of His sight (xv. 1). It was the death-struggle of the idea of a national religion (vi. 8);
- ↑ We should be apt to say “the true idea of God,” but that is a way of putting it which does not correspond with prophetic thought. To the prophets knowledge of God is concrete knowledge of the divine character as shown in acts—knowledge of a person, not of an idea.
- ↑ The last clause of Isa. vi. 13, “a holy seed is its stock,” is rejected by many critics (Duhm, Cheyne, Marti and others) as a later insertion. It is omitted in the Septuagint.
