ISAIAH lvi. 9-lix.
It was inevitable, as soon as their city was again fairly in sight, that there should re-awaken in the exiles the civic conscience; that recollections of those besetting sins of their public life, for which their city and their independence were destroyed, should throng back upon them; that in prospect of their again becoming responsible for the discharge of justice and other political duties, they should be reminded by the prophet of their national faults in these respects, and of God's eternal laws concerning them. If we keep this in mind, we shall understand the presence in "Second Isaiah" of the group of prophecies at which we have now arrived, ch. lvi. 9-lix. Hitherto our prophet, in marked contrast to Isaiah himself, has said almost nothing of the social righteousness of his people. Israel's righteousness, as we saw in our fourteenth chapter, has had the very different meaning for our prophet of her pardon and restoration to her rights. But in ch. lvi. 9-lix. we shall find the blame of civic wrong, and of other kinds of sin of which Israel could only have been guilty in her own land; we shall listen to exhortations to social justice and mercy like those we heard from Isaiah to his generation. Yet these are mingled with voices, and concluded with promises, which speak of the Return as imminent. Undoubtedly exilic elements reveal themselves. And the total impression is that some prophet of the late Exile, and probably the one, whom we have been following, collected these reminiscences of his people's sin in the days of their freedom, in order to remind them, before they went back again to political responsibility, why it was they were punished and how apt they were to go astray. Believing this to be the true solution of a somewhat difficult problem, we have ventured to gather this mixed group of prophecies under the title of the Rekindling of the Civic Conscience. They fall into three groups: first, ch. lvi. 9-lvii.; second, ch. lviii.; third, ch. lix. We shall see that, while there is no reason to doubt the exilic origin of the whole of the second, the first and third of these are mainly occupied with the description of a state of things that prevailed only before the Exile, but they contain also exilic observations and conclusions.
I. A CONSCIENCE BUT NO GOD (ch. lvi. 9-lvii.).
This is one of the sections which almost decisively place the literary unity of "Second Isaiah" past possibility of belief. If ch. lvi. 1-8 flushes with the dawn of restoration, ch. lvi. 9-lvii. is very dark with the coming of the night, which preceded that dawn. Almost none dispute, that the greater part of this prophecy must have been composed before the people left Palestine for exile. The state of Israel, which it pictures, recalls the descriptions of Hosea, and of the eleventh chapter of Zechariah. God's flock are still in charge of their own shepherds (lvi. 9-12),--a description inapplicable to Israel in exile. The shepherds are sleepy, greedy, sensual, drunkards,--victims to the curse, against which Amos and Isaiah hurled their strongest woes. That sots like them should be spared while the righteous die unnoticed deaths (lvii. 1) can only be explained by the approaching judgement. _No man considereth that the righteous is taken away from the Evil. The Evil_ cannot mean, as some have thought, persecution,--for while the righteous are to escape it and enter into peace, the wicked are spared for it. It must be a Divine judgement,--the Exile. But _he entereth peace, they rest in their beds, each one that hath walked straight before him_,--for the righteous there is the peace of death and the undisturbed tomb of his fathers. What an enviable fate when emigration, and dispersion through foreign lands, are the prospect of the nation! Israel shall find her pious dead when she returns! The verse recalls that summons in Isa. xxvi., in which we heard the Mother Nation calling upon the dead she had left in Palestine to rise and increase her returned numbers.