(8) Is 9'6 and 111-°.—The same difficulty arises, of course, in estimating the two great, undoubtedly Messianic prophecies, Is 9! and 111 [the secondary character of 11°" is now pretty generally acknow- ledged]. It is no objection to Isaiah’s authorship that in 9! the circumstances of the Exile appear to be presupposed, and that in 111 the stock of David seems to be reduced toa mere stump. For it lay quite within the range of true Jahweh prophetism that Isaiah should be transported by the spirit of God into these very future conditions—a result which would not at all impair his connexion with the present. Again, as regards the further features of the prediction of 91", namely, the hope of a brilliant victory, whereby Jahweh breaks the yoke of the enemy (v.°), the burning of all instruments of war (v.4), the righteous and peaceful rule of the descendant of David (for such is certainly intended) over the kingdom of David restored to its old ex- tent,—all these are expectations which an Isaiah may quite well have cherished. Nor is any stumbling- block occasioned by the names by which God (v.5) calls the Messiah, provided one does not render 22 5x ‘hero God,’ but finds in it an epithet=‘ god of a hero,’ i.c. ‘Godlike hero’: an absolute predication of Godhead, even in the case of the Messiah, would be inconceivable in the OT.+ But it is an undeniable difficulty that
* Two periods (the first from 736-724) are assumed by Guthe (Das Zukunftsbild des Jesaja, Leipzig, 1885); a ‘threefold
icture of the future’ by Giesebrecht (Beitrdge zur Jesaja-
vitik, Gottingen, 1890, p. 70 ff.); a fourfold one by Meinhold (Studien zur israel. Religtonsgeschichte : i. ‘Der heilige Rest,’ Bonn, 1903). 4
+ Rabbinical exegesis, as is well known, gets over the diffi- culty by taking the first three (or at least two) titles as sub- jects, Divine names in apposition with the ‘He’ of ‘and He calls,’ so that only the last title (or at most the last two) belongs to the Messiah.
696 RELIGION OF ISRAEL
RELIGION OF ISRAEL
the announcement of the Messiah is conveyed by such enigmatic expressions as ‘a child’ or ‘a son’ without any more specific explanation—a manner of procedure which indeed reminds us of the pur- posely obscure manner of speech of the later pro- pheecy, which is already on the point of passing into apocalyptic. Thesame cannot be said of 11. The fresh shoot from the stump of Jesse could not be misunderstood by any one, and as little could this be the case with the beautiful description of the righteous sway that he is to exercise in virtue of his extraordinary endowment with the spirit of Jahweh, with its many-sided influences. The whole prediction is indeed dominated by religious points of view, but the ideal picture of the the- ocracy is yet far from that of a priestly State under the dominion of a written law. On the contrary, the expectation in question moves quite within the sphere of ideas that strike us as per- fectly natural to a prophet of the 8th cent., look- ing to the historical experiences of the past and to the conditions of his own time. Even the appended description (v.*") of the paradisaic peace that reigns among wild animals could be pronounced Utopian and derived from the later apocalyptic only if in v.® the animals had attributed to them a share in the universal knowledge of God which marks the Messianic age. If this latter piece of (certainly unjustified) exegesis be rejected, all that remains is a highly poetical carrying out of the true Pro- phetical notion that even the external course of nature and the changes it undergoes stand in the closest connexion with the fortunes of the people of God, whether their fall or their rising again. In view of all this, it is quite intelligible that even so radical a critic as Duhm holds to the authen- ticity of 9'° and 11?°; and we should readily sub- scribe unreservedly to this view, if the question were first answered how such express and strong expectations of a personal Messiah could possibly find no echo in the later oracles of Isaiah.
(y) Mic 5'"-.—New difficulties are raised by the Messianic prophecy of Mic 5, These do not lie in the seemingly magical prediction that Bethle- hem is to be the place from which the Messiah is to come forth. For (as in Is 112) all that is meant by this is plainly nothing more than that the Davidie dynasty must first be reduced to the pre- Davidie conditions before the Messiah can make His appearance. Again, the reference to the remote antiquity * from which the origin of the Messiah dates, would tell against Micah’s author- ship only if the allusion were to the time when David first came upon the scene and not rather to the primeval resolution of Jahweh to send the Messiah. But our difficulties do begin with v.%. Are we to hold that Micah, with an eye upon the prophecy (which he interpreted in a Messianic sense) of his contemporary Isaiah (Is 714), used the peculiarly veiled expression ‘till the time when one who is to bear shall have brought forth’? When the hope is expressed of the return of the residue of his countrymen along with the Israelites (v.*»), is not the return of a portion already pre- supposed (and thus not predicted)? And does not the announcement that the Messiah shall be great ‘even to the ends of the earth’ already recall the late theologumenon of the world-empire of Israel under the Messiah? All these are questions which still wait for a satisfying answer. But the main difficulty here, again, is that so sharply defined a Messianic expectation should apparently have passed again into oblivion both with Micah him- self and with the prophets who succeeded him.