[52] Our translation, though picturesque, is misleading. The voice does not inquire, "What of the night?" _i.e._, whether it be fair or foul weather, but "How much of the night is passed?" literally "What from off the night?" This brings out a pathos that our English version has disguised. Edom feels that her night is lasting terribly long.
11. xxi. 13-17. ORACLE FOR ARABIA. From Edom the prophet passes to their neighbours the Dedanites, travelling merchants. And as he saw night upon Edom, so, by a play upon words, he speaks of evening upon Arabia: _in the forest, in Arabia_, or with the same consonants, _in the evening_. In the time of the insecurity of the Assyrian invasion the travelling merchants have to go aside from their great trading roads _in the evening to lodge in the thickets_. There they entertain fugitives, or (for the sense is not quite clear) are themselves as fugitives entertained. It is a picture of the _grievousness of war_, which was now upon the world, flowing down even those distant, desert roads. But things have not yet reached the worst. The fugitives are but the heralds of armies, that _within a year_ shall waste the _children of Kedar_, for Jehovah, the God of Israel, hath spoken it. So did the prophet of little Jerusalem take possession of even the far deserts in the name of his nation's God.
12. xxiii. ORACLE FOR TYRE. Elegy over its fall, probably as Sennacherib came south upon it in 703 or 702. To be further considered by us (pp. 288 ff.).
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These then are Isaiah's oracles for the Nations, who tremble, intrigue and go down before the might of Assyria.
We have promised to gather the circumstances and meaning of these prophecies round three representative texts. These are--
1. _Ah! the booming of the peoples, the multitudes, like the booming of the seas they boom; and the rushing of the nations, like the rushing of mighty waters they rush; nations, like the rushing of many waters they rush. But He rebuketh it, and it fleeth afar off, and is chased like the chaff on the mountains before the wind and like whirling dust before the whirlwind_ (xvii. 12, 13).
2. _What then shall one answer the messengers of a nation? That Jehovah hath founded Zion, and in her shall find refuge the afflicted of His people_ (xiv. 32).
3. _In that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts hath blessed them, saying, Blessed be My people Egypt, and the work of My hands Assyria, and Mine inheritance Israel_ (xix. 24, 25).
1. The first of these texts shows all the prophet's prospect filled with storm, the second of them the solitary rock and lighthouse in the midst of the storm: Zion, his own watchtower and his people's refuge; while the third of them, looking far into the future, tells us, as it were, of the firm continent which shall rise out of the waters--Israel no longer a solitary lighthouse, _but in that day shall Israel be a third to Egypt and to Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth_. These three texts give us a summary of the meaning of all Isaiah's obscure prophecies to the foreign nations--a stormy ocean, a solitary rock in the midst of it, and the new continent that shall rise out of the waters about the rock.
The restlessness of Western Asia beneath the Assyrian rule (from 719, when Sargon's victory at Rafia extended that rule to the borders of Egypt) found vent, as we saw (p. 198), in two great Explosions, for both of which the mine was laid by Egyptian intrigue. The first Explosion happened in 711, and was confined to Ashdod. The second took place on Sargon's death in 705, and was universal. Till Sennacherib marched south on Palestine in 701, there were all over Western Asia hurryings to and fro, consultations and intrigues, embassies and engineerings from Babylon to Meroe in far Ethiopia, and from the tents of Kedar to the cities of the Philistines. For these Jerusalem the one inviolate capital from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt, was the natural centre. And the one far-seeing, steady-hearted man in Jerusalem was Isaiah. We have already seen that there was enough within the city to occupy Isaiah's attention, especially from 705 onward; but for Isaiah the walls of Jerusalem, dear as they were and thronged with duty, neither limited his sympathies nor marked the scope of the gospel he had to preach. Jerusalem is simply his watchtower. His field--and this is the peculiar glory of the prophet's later life--his field is the world.