_Thy lovingkindness is better than life!_--is the secret of it all. There is that which excites a deeper hunger in the soul than the hunger for life, and for the food and money that give life. This spiritual poverty is most richly bred in physical penury, it is strong enough to displace what feeds it. The physical poverty of Israel which had awakened these other hungers of the soul--hunger for forgiveness, hunger for justice, hunger for God--was absorbed by them; and when Israel came out of exile, _to be poor_ meant, not so much to be indigent in this world's substance as to feel the need of pardon, the absence of righteousness, the want of God.
It is at this time, as we have seen, that Isa. xxiv.-xxvii. was written; and it is in the temper of this time that the three Hebrew words for "poor" and "needy" are used in chaps. xxv. and xxvi. The returned exiles were still politically dependent and abjectly poor. Their discipline therefore continued, and did not allow them to forget their new lessons. In fact, they developed the results of these further, till in this prophecy we find no fewer than five different aspects of spiritual poverty.
1. We have already seen how strong the sense of sin is in chap. xxiv. This POVERTY of PEACE is not so fully expressed in the following chapters, and indeed seems crowded out by the sense of the _iniquity of the inhabitants of the earth_ and the desire for their judgement (xxvi. 21).
2. The feeling of the POVERTY of JUSTICE is very strong in this prophecy. But it is to be satisfied; in part it has been satisfied (xxv. 1-4). _A strong city_, probably Babylon, has fallen. _Moab shall be trodden down in his place, even as straw is trodden down in the water of the dunghill._ The complete judgement is to come when the Lord shall destroy the two _Leviathans_ and the great _Dragon of the west_ (xxvii. 1). It is followed by the restoration of Israel to the state in which Isaiah (chap. v. 1) sang so sweetly of her. _A pleasant vineyard, sing ye of her. I, Jehovah, her Keeper, moment by moment do I water her; lest any make a raid upon her, night and day will I keep her._ The Hebrew text then reads, _Fury is not in Me_; but probably the Septuagint version has preserved the original meaning: _I have no walls_. If this be correct, then Jehovah is describing the present state of Jerusalem, the fulfilment of Isaiah's threat, chap. v. 6: _Walls I have not; let there but be briers and thorns before me! With war will I stride against them; I will burn them together._ But then there breaks the softer alternative of the reconciliation of Judah's enemies: _Or else let him seize hold of My strength; let him make peace with Me--peace let him make with Me_. In such a peace Israel shall spread, and his fulness become the riches of the Gentiles. _In that by-and-bye Jacob shall take root, Israel blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit._
Perhaps the wildest cries that rose from Israel's famine of justice were those which found expression in chap. xxxiv. This chapter is so largely a repetition of feelings we have already met with elsewhere in the Book of Isaiah, that it is necessary now only to mention its original features. The subject is, as in chap. xiii., the Lord's judgement upon all the nations; and as chap. xiii. singled out Babylon for special doom, so chap. xxxiv. singles out Edom. The reason of this distinction will be very plain to the reader of the Old Testament. From the day the twins struggled in their mother Rebekah's womb, Israel and Edom were either at open war or burned towards each other with a hate, which was the more intense for wanting opportunities of gratification. It is an Eastern edition of the worst chapters in the history of England and Ireland. No bloodier massacres stained Jewish hands than those which attended their invasions of Edom, and Jewish psalms of vengeance are never more flagrant than when they touch the name of the children of Esau. The only gentle utterance of the Old Testament upon Israel's hereditary foe is a comfortless enigma. Isaiah's _Oracle for Dumah_ (xxii. 11 f.), shows that even that large-hearted prophet, in face of his people's age-long resentment at Edom's total want of appreciation of Israel's spiritual superiority, could offer Edom, though for the moment submissive and inquiring, nothing but a sad, ambiguous answer. Edom and Israel, each after his fashion, exulted in the other's misfortunes: Israel by bitter satire when Edom's impregnable mountain-range was treacherously seized and overrun by his allies (Obadiah 4-9); Edom, with the harassing, pillaging habits of a highland tribe, hanging on to the skirts of Judah's great enemies, and cutting off Jewish fugitives, or selling them into slavery, or malignantly completing the ruin of Jerusalem's walls after her overthrow by the Chaldeans (Obadiah 10-14; Ezek. xxxv. 10-15; Ps. cxxxi. 7). In _the quarrel of Zion_ with the nations of the world Edom had taken the wrong side,--his profane, earthy nature incapable of understanding his brother's spiritual claims, and therefore envious of him, with the brutal malice of ignorance, and spitefully glad to assist in disappointing such claims. This is what we must remember when we read the indignant verses of chap. xxxiv. Israel, conscious of his spiritual calling in the world, felt bitter resentment that his own brother should be so vulgarly hostile to his attempts to carry it out. It is not our wish to defend the temper of Israel towards Edom. The silence of Christ before the Edomite Herod and his men of war has taught the spiritual servants of God what is their proper attitude towards the malignant and obscene treatment of their claims by vulgar men. But at least let us remember that chap. xxxiv., for all its fierceness, is inspired by Israel's conviction of a spiritual destiny and service for God, and by the natural resentment that his own kith and kin should be doing their best to render these futile. That a famine of bread makes its victims delirious does not tempt us to doubt the genuineness of their need and suffering. As little ought we to doubt or to ignore the reality or the purity of those spiritual convictions, the prolonged starvation of which bred in Israel such feverish hate against his twin-brother Esau. Chap. xxxiv., with all its proud prophecy of judgement, is, therefore, also a symptom of that aspect of Israel's poverty of heart, which we have called a hunger for the Divine justice.