THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
translates the dark sayings of God as uttered in the events of history, so the people gathered by the prophet's word and unified by it is the indestructible Zion, the enduring remainder of Israel which makes the prophet's teachings the ground of its inner life. The prophet is the medium of this new life. His conduct in life, his hope in sorrow, are the prefigurement and pledge of that which is destined for the community.
Such a person does Isaiah appear in the testimony, direct and indirect, which his book carries. Outside of the reports of his life already considered, it may be gathered that he was
6. Isaiah's Life and
Character a c^zen °f Jerusalem; that he had several children, one of whom, a son, must have been born in Jotham's reign (vii. 3), and another during the Syrian-Ephraimitic war (viii. 1 sqq.); that he regarded wife, children, and the events of family life as living pictures and true signs of the prophecies he uttered; that he looked back upon the hour of consecration pictured in chap. vi. as pivotal, and as conditioning his inner life (viii. 11 sqq.). Since his care and hopes were so different from those which public life offered, he deemed it his duty to implant in continuing security in the heart of a receptive circle, for use in the future, the divine knowledge which had come to him.
In chap, vii., in the midst of the Syrian-Ephraimitic crisis, Isaiah sought in vain to direct the policy of the Davidic house away from dependence upon Assyria to trust in Yahweh, and in chap. viii. testified that the waters of Shiloah were sufficient to withstand the turbulence of Rezin and Pekah, and they did not need the addition of the flood of Assyrian might, which would overflow the land it was designed to protect. Later Isaiah again sought to stem the course of public events among his people by glowing predictions of positive success. Such a case is presented in the reign of Hezekiah when the foe was drawn away from Jerusalem and the danger to the city was averted by the catastrophe which befell the enemy.
II. The Book of Isaiah. — 1. Its Place in the Canon : In the Hebrew Bible Isaiah stands first in the division of the so-called later prophets and precedes Jeremiah and Ezekiel evidently upon the ground of priority in history, but in the Septuagint it is preceded by the book of the Minor Prophets (cf. Jerome, Ad Paulinum, Prologus galeatus). The Hebrew order is confirmed by the treatment in Ecclus. xlviii. 22-xlix. 10. The Talmudic tract Baba bathra (col. xiv., col. 2) makes Jeremiah follow Kings and puts Isaiah between Ezekiel and the Twelve according to the principle which arranges books approximately in order of length. Reasons for this difference in order are variously given: Vitringa thought that the placing of Jeremiah first was due to the tradition that Jeremiah had composed the Books of Kings; Lightfoot alleged apologetic interests which used the order in which Jeremiah stood first to show that Matt, xxvii. 9 was not in error, since the whole of the prophetic canon might then be called after the name of the first book; still others thought it might be due to the fact that after Jeremiah and Ezekiel had taken form, Isaiah had been changed or that it had taken form only
Condition.
in the time of Cyrus. But these methods of reasoning are not conclusive.
2. The Text : The variety of contents and style, the idealistic character of the oracles and the originality of thought have from earliest *• Its times made this book difficult to understand. Much read and often edited, it could not maintain its original form, and it became the object of an exegesis which sought to come to an understanding with the traditional text as an inviolable and sacred thing. The condition of the text in chaps, xl.-lxvi. may be seen in Klostermann's commentary (Munich, 1893) of chaps, xxxvi.-xxxix. in the same author's commentary on the parallel section in Kings (Munich, 1887) and in TSK, 1884. And revision of the whole text of chaps, i.-xxxv. is required before exegesis can be securely founded, an especially difficult task, for which the test of meter and artistic form, so often suggested, is of very little value. Indeed, changes of form by the prophet or his disciples are not excluded from consideration; for example, in the great picture of the judgment under the figure of an earthquake in xxiv., at verse 7 there is the beginning of an alphabetical elegy in six-lined strophes, the first two strophes of which are present and complete, while of the third only the first half is given. Similarly in xxiii. 16 only the beginning of a known song is cited, and this may explain the break at the end of xxiv. 12.
Not to be disregarded are the paraphrases of Jonathan, the fragments of Aquilas, Theodotion, and Symmachus as they have come ' ^S^ down with the marginal notes of the of Errors Hexapla and from the notes of Jerome. These will at times serve to indicate the introduction of errors in later times. Thus, Jonathan indicates in viii. 14 the loss of " for you " after " he shall be," a conclusion supported not only by the Vulgate, but by the second person in the Septuagint. Doubled readings or translations in these texts are often a guide to the original text, since they point to a misreading or a misunderstanding of a reading to which such misunderstanding is a direct guide, as in xxxiii. 7, where " their valiant ones " was read by the translators in a double sense as the object of fear and as the subject, which led to further changes in the text of the verse. The Septuagint shows a similar doubled reading in ii. 16b through a mistake of the eye involving further changes in the text. Sometimes a doubled reading is merely a mistake in copying produced by itacism, as in viii. 23, codex 304. But a critical text of the Septuagint will show that sometimes the translator in deciphering his Hebrew exemplar has in a surprising manner gone wrong through too great confidence in his apprehension of the context. Such a case is presented in viii. 7-8. Examinations of the Septuagint make it perfectly clear that its present text is the result of a long period of correction of a text which sought to give the sense of the prophetical deliverances without having a sure insight into the meaning and the form of the original. But the early text together with the corrections themselves and the differences between them often put the