_All thy chiefs fled in heaps; Without bow they were taken: All thine that were found were taken in heaps; From far had they run. Wherefore I say, Look away from me; Let me make bitterness bitterer by weeping. Press not to comfort me For the ruin of the daughter of my people._
Urge not your mad holiday upon me! _For a day of discomfiture and of breaking and of perplexity hath the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, in the valley of vision, a breaking down of the wall and a crying to the mountain._ These few words of prose, which follow the pathetic elegy, have a finer pathos still. The cumulative force of the successive clauses is very impressive: _disappointment_ at the eleventh hour; the sense of a being _trampled_ and overborne by sheer brute force; the counsels, courage, hope and faith of fifty years crushed to blank _perplexity_, and all this from Himself--_the Lord, Jehovah of hosts_--in the very _valley of vision_, the home of prophecy; as if He had meant of purpose to destroy these long confidences of the past on the floor where they had been wrestled for and asserted, and not by the force of the foe, but by the folly of His own people, to make them ashamed. The last clause crashes out the effect of it all; every spiritual rampart and refuge torn down, there is nothing left but an appeal to the hills to fall and cover us--_a breaking down of the wall and a crying to the mountain_.
On the brink of the precipice, Isaiah draws back for a moment, to describe with some of his old fire the appearance of the besiegers (vv. 6-8_a_). And this suggests what kind of preparation Jerusalem had made for her foe--every kind, says Isaiah, but the supreme one. The arsenal, Solomon's _forest-house_, with its cedar pillars, had been looked to (ver. 8), the fortifications inspected and increased, and the suburban waters brought within them (vv. 9-11_a_). _But ye looked not unto Him that had done this_, who had brought this providence upon you; _neither had ye respect unto Him that fashioned it long ago_, whose own plan it had been. To your alliances and fortifications you fled in the hour of calamity, but not to Him in whose guidance the course of calamity lay. And therefore, when your engineering and diplomacy failed you, your religion vanished with them. _In that day did the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth; but, behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die._ It was the dropping of the mask. For half a century this people had worshipped God, but they had never trusted Him beyond the limits of their treaties and their bulwarks. And so when their allies were defeated, and their walls began to tremble, their religion, bound up with these things, collapsed also; they ceased even to be men, crying like beasts, _Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die_. For such a state of mind Isaiah will hold out no promise; it is the sin against the Holy Ghost, and for it there is no forgiveness. _And Jehovah of hosts revealed Himself in mine ears. Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts._
Back forty years the word had been, _Go and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again and be healed._ What happened now was only what was foretold then: _And if there be yet a tenth in it, it shall again be for consumption._ That radical revision of judgement was now being literally fulfilled, when Isaiah, sure at last of his remnant within the walls of Jerusalem, was forced for their sin to condemn even them to death.