ISAIAH xxvi. 14-19; xxv. 6-9.
Granted the pardon, the justice, the Temple and the God, which the returning exiles now enjoyed, the possession of these only makes more painful the shortness of life itself. This life is too shallow and too frail a vessel to hold peace and righteousness and worship and the love of God. St. Paul has said, _If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable_. What avails it to have been pardoned, to have regained the Holy Land and the face of God, if the dear dead are left behind in graves of exile, and all the living must soon pass into that captivity,[84] from which there is no return?
[84] Hezekiah's expression for death, xxxviii. 12.
It must have been thoughts like these, which led to the expression of one of the most abrupt and powerful of the few hopes of the resurrection which the Old Testament contains. This hope, which lightens chap. xxv. 7, 8, bursts through again--without logical connection with the context--in vv. 14-19 of chap. xxvi.
The English version makes ver. 14 to continue the reference to the lords, whom in ver. 13 Israel confesses to have served instead of Jehovah. "They are _dead; they shall not live_: they are _deceased; they shall not rise_." Our translators have thus intruded into their version the verb "they are," of which the original is without a trace. In the original, _dead_ and _deceased_ (literally _shades_) are themselves the subject of the sentence--a new subject and without logical connection with what has gone before. The literal translation of ver. 14 therefore runs: _Dead men do not live; shades do not rise: wherefore Thou visitest them and destroyest them, and perisheth all memory of them_. The prophet states a fact, and draws an inference. The fact is, that no one has ever returned from the dead; the inference, that it is God's own _visitation_ or _sentence_ which has gone forth upon them, and they have really ceased to exist. But how intolerable a thought is this in presence of the other fact that God has here on earth above gloriously enlarged and established His people (ver. 15). _Thou hast increased the nation, Jehovah; Thou hast increased the nation. Thou hast covered Thyself with glory; Thou hast expanded all the boundaries of the land._ To this follows a verse (16), the sense of which is obscure, but palpable. It "feels" to mean that the contrast which the prophet has just painted between the absolute perishing of the dead and the glory of the Church above ground is the cause of great despair and groaning: _O Jehovah, in The Trouble they supplicate Thee; they pour out incantations when Thy discipline is upon them_.[85] In face of _The_ Trouble and _The_ Discipline _par excellence_ of God, what else can man do but betake himself to God? God sent death; in death He is the only resource. Israel's feelings in presence of The Trouble are now expressed in ver. 17: _Like as a woman with child that draweth near the time of her delivery writheth and crieth out in her pangs, so have we been before Thee, O Jehovah_. Thy Church on earth is pregnant with a life, which death does not allow to come to the birth. _We have been with child; we have been in the pangs, as it were; we have brought forth wind; we make not the earth_, in spite of all we have really accomplished upon it in our return, our restoration and our enjoyment of Thy presence--_we make not the earth salvation, neither are the inhabitants of the world born_.[86]
[85] I think this must be the meaning of ver. 16, if we are to allow that it has any sympathy with vv. 14 and 15. Bredenkamp suggests that the persons meant are themselves the dead. Jehovah has glorified the Church on earth; but the dead below are still in trouble, and _pour out prayers_ (Virgil's "preces fundunt," _Æneid_, vi., 55), beneath this punishment which God causes to pass on all men (ver. 14). Bredenkamp bases this exegesis chiefly on the word for "prayer," which means _chirping_ or _whispering_, a kind of voice imputed to the shades by the Hebrews and other ancient peoples. But while this word does originally mean _whispering_, it is never in Scripture applied to the dead, but, on the other hand, is a frequent name for _divining_ or _incantation_. I therefore have felt compelled to understand it as used in this passage of the living, whose only resource in face of death--_Goa's discipline par excellence_--is to pour out incantations. If it be objected that the prophet would scarcely parallel the ordinary incantations on behalf of the dead with supplications to Jehovah, the answer is that he is talking poetically or popularly.