CHAPTER IX.

ISAIAH XIII., XIV.—GENUINENESS OF the prophECIES ON BABYLON.-SCEPTICAL CRITICISM-ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS-NOT POSITIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE. -ORTHODOX CRITICISM.-RESULTS OF THE CONTROVERSY.-TRADITIONAL COMMENTS CONFOUNDED WITH THE TEXT.-HEBREW HISTORICAL NOTICES OF BABYLON-ASSYRIAN NOTICES.-BABYLON SACKED IN ISAIAH'S TIME BY PERSIANS, AND PERHAPS BY MEDES.-BABYLON A DIAGRAM OR IDEOGRAPH. -ARGUMENTS FROM STYLE.-SUSPENSE BETTER TRAN HASTY DECISION.FINAL OVERTHROW OF THE EMPIRE OF FORCE.

THE burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amos did see.'-Many of the most learned of the modern commentators maintain that this Title must be pronounced to be spurious, and the prophecy at the head of which it stands, as well as several others in the book, and especially chapters xl. to lxvi., to have been written towards the end of the great Babylonish Captivity. The question is not one of Hebrew scholarship, for the authenticity of these chapters is maintained by scholars not incompetent opponents to those by whom it is denied. Nor is it altogether a question of religious belief, though it has been a good deal confused and complicated by the assertion that it The belief that the book forms a part of the revelation of God to man has indeed avowedly guided the arguments of those critics who maintain its authenticity as the work of Isaiah; but the more thoughtful of them admit that the two conclusions do not stand or fall together, while there has been no deeper or more religious appreciation of the nature of prophecy than that of some of the critics who continue to assert the late authorship of the portions of the book now under consideration. The question is, in truth, mainly one of critical method; and its solution, or such an approach to it as the existing evidence may finally make possible, can only be obtained

is so.

GENUINENESS OF CERTAIN PROPHECIES.

155

by a more strict, and so to speak scientific, regard to induction and verification of the facts and inferences than has been hitherto shown on either side. It may not always be possible in historical criticism to separate fact from theory so completely as in physical inquiry; but the distinction is not the less real; and there is much of the criticism upon the writings of Isaiah which bears the same relation to a really historical investigation as ingenious speculations on the origin of the world and its inhabitants do to the observations and inductions by which the foundations of the physical sciences have been slowly but surely laid. Still there is also much on both sides which is really sound, and the controversy has already been fruitful, and promises to be more so. This will be apparent from a sketch of its history.

The insight-political and religious-of Milton and Grotius enabled them to anticipate the principles and method required for the thorough understanding of Hebrew prophecy; but this insight was imperfectly shared even by the great Vitringa, who may be taken as the type of the best commentators on Isaiah up to the latter years of the eighteenth century. These commentators never seem to have distinctly asked themselves what manner of man Isaiah actually was, and what his actual relations to other men in his own times, or in those which have followed. Not that they denied, or altogether failed to recognize, that Isaiah was a real man, patriot, and politician; but the experience of their own Christian faith had convinced them that they had another and deeper interest in the words of Isaiah than in those of any patriot or politician, ancient or modern; they accepted the common explanation of this experience—' that Isaiah was inspired, and his prophecies a part of the revelation of God to man;' and then they adopted, and employed all their learning and ingenuity to maintain, the notion-in former times floating vaguely on the surface of a deeper and truer belief, but now reduced to a coherent system-that not only was 'all Scripture given by inspiration,' but that (contrary to the constant declaration of Scripture itself) inspiration was confined to the writers of Scripture, and consisted not in

156

THE NEW CRITICISM,

the perpetual presence and indwelling of God's spirit in men, but mainly and eminently, though not entirely, in special arbitrary and miraculous communications from God through the prophet or apostle, who was himself little more than a mechanical instrument for the purpose. And, therefore, while they give a predominance to the religious and Christian interest of Isaiah's prophecies, to which it can only be objected that it is shown apart from their national and human interest, instead of in the entire union in which the two stand together in the prophecies themselves, we find them maintaining that these prophecies are full of miraculous predictions of future events, which could only have been made known to the prophet because God had seen fit to suspend or supersede the laws of nature and the human mind for the occasion.

The publication of Bishop Lowth's work on Isaiah in 1786, gave a new interest and a new direction to the study of the subject. While Lowth accepted the ordinary orthodox views of prophecy, it was his main object to exhibit Isaiah as a poet not inferior to the great classical models, and to remove the obstacles to his being duly appreciated as such, partly by literary illustrations, and partly by a new translation in which many real errors or obscurities of the authorized version were avoided, while the whole was made to assume a form more in accordance with classical, or supposed classical, canons. The last point he endeavoured to attain by a free use of conjectural emendations his own, and those of ancient versions or modern scholars-of the text, in places of which it was not then seen that they were already in harmony with the canons of Hebrew, and often even of English, taste, and could only be injured by being altered. And though these particular conjectures were soon set aside by Hebrew scholars, as wanting alike in authority and probability, yet the spirit of them, as well as of the criticism they were intended to support, appeared in new forms. Lowth had employed himself in making it clear that Isaiah was a real poet certain of his German contemporaries and successors proposed to prove by Lowth's methods that he was a real patriot, politician, and man of flesh and blood, like

ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS.

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Socrates, or Cicero, or the men of the eighteenth century itself. Destructive analysis and hypothetical reconstruction were the critical methods of the age, and the commentators on Isaiah employed them as their contemporaries were employing them upon the classical authors. The destructive criticism did much service by the sceptical questioning and skilful anatomy with which it refuted many figments of the commentators and swept away much accumulated rubbish; but when the combined efforts of this criticism during forty years had reduced the unquestioned portions of the writings of Isaiah to five chapters and six verses of a sixth,* it had plainly gone too far, and its results were

'Si enim ea perlegeris quæ Koppius, Doederlinius, Eichornius, Paulus, Rosenmüllerus, Bertholdus, Gesenius, alii, de authentia oraculorum Esaia doceant, invenies perpauca oracula intacta restare: scilicet ea quæ legentur c. i. 3-9, xvii. xx. xxviii. xxxi. xxxiii.' J. U. Möller, De Authentia Oraculorum Esaia. Havniæ, 1825. Dr. Alexander, in the introduction to his Commentary, gives the following account of some of the different contentions as to what should be received as the genuine writings of Isaiah:⚫ Chapter vii. 1-16 is regarded by Gesenius as probably not the composition of Isaiah, who is mentioned in the third person. This opinion is refuted by Hitzig, and repudiated by the later writers. Koppe's idea that the twelfth chapter is a hymn of later date, after being rejected by Gesenius and revived by Ewald has again been set aside by Umbreit. The genuineness of chapters xiii. xiv. 1-23 is more unanimously called in question on account of its resemblance to chapters xl.-lxvi. which this whole class of critics set aside as spurious. Chapters xv. and xvi. are ascribed by Koppe and Bertholdt to Jeremiah; by Ewald and Umbreit to an unknown prophet older than Isaiah ; by Hitzig, Maurer, and Knobel to Jonah; by Hendewerk to Isaiah himself. Eichorn rejects the nineteenth chapter; Gesenius calls in question the genuineness of vv. 18-20; Koppe denies that of vv. 18-25; Hitzig regards vv. 16-25 as a fabrication of the Jewish priest Onias; while Rosenmüller, Hendewerk, Ewald, and Umbreit, vindicate the whole as a genuine production of Isaiah. The first ten verses of the twenty-first chapter are rejected on the ground of their resemblance to the thirteenth and fourteenth. Ewald ascribes both to a single author; Hitzig denies that they can be from the same hand. Ewald makes the prophecy in chapter xxi. the earlier; Hitzig proves it to be later. Koppe, Paulus, Eichorn, and Rosenmüller, look upon it as a vaticinium ex eventu; Gesenius, Ewald, and the other later writers as a real prophecy. The twenty-third chapter is ascribed by Movers to Jeremiah; by Eichorn and Rosenmüller to an unknown writer later than Isaiah; by Gesenius and De Wette to Isaiah himself; by Ewald to a younger contemporary and disciple of the prophet. The continuous prophecy contained in chapters xxiv.-xxvii. Knobel shows to have been written in Palestine about the beginning of the Babylonish exile; Gesenius in Babylon, towards the end of the captivity, and by the author of chapters xl.—lxvi.; Ümbreit at the same time but by a different author; Gramberg after the return from exile; Ewald just before the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses; Vatke in the period of the Maccabees; Hitzig in Assyria just before the fall of Nineveh; while Rosenmüller, in the last edition of his Scholia, ascribes it to Isaiah himself. Chapters xxvii.-xxxiii. are supposed by Koppe to contain many distinct prophecies of different authors, and by Hitzig several successive compositions of one and the same author; while most other writers consider them as forming a continuous whole. This is regarded by Gesenius and Hitzig,

158 THE NEW AND THE OLD METHODS,

like those astronomical investigations in which it was at last found that the observers had been measuring only the errors of their instruments.* Nor were the earlier attempts at reconstruction of the text more satisfactory, while the critic's conception of prophecy as a phenomenon of the human mind was limited by analogies and illustrations from the intellectual experiences of the eighteenth century, which we now know to have been quite inadequate, and to have excluded from observation other experiences, deeper but not less real or less human than those were. These new critics of the eighteenth century were, in spite of their desire to be positive, too frequently carried away by theories to which they required the facts to conform, or else if they were quite intractable they rejected them even though with no better reason than that they had a 'critical feeling' that they were not genuine. Their orthodox opponents-though in many respects not less addicted to narrow theories had this great advantage, that they were impelled by their religious feeling to maintain the authenticity of the book, and therefore to insist upon taking all the facts, and not merely such a selection from them as would fit a pre-conceived theory; while they were obliged to employ all their resources of learning and argument to meet the reasoning by which those facts were brought into question. As the controversy went on, which it did with great activity, the results became apparent in a gradual and important modification and enlargement of view on both sides: and the investigations and arguments of such writers as Gesenius, Hitzig, and Ewald, on the one hand, and Möller, Hengstenberg, Hävernick, and Alexander, on the other, seemed when I published the first edition of this book in 1853-to justify my expectation that we were approaching the final settlement of the question. But since then there has been a pause, if not a re

notwithstanding the objections of previous critics, as a genuine production of Isaiah; but Ewald doubts whether it may not be the work of a disciple. Most of the writers of this school join chapters xxxiv. and xxxv. together, as an unbroken text, but Hitzig no less confidently puts them asunder. Rosenmüller, De Wette, and others, set these chapters down as evidently written by the author of chapters xl.-lxvi.; while Ewald on the other hand maintained that their identity is disproved by a difference of style and diction.'

Herschel's Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, p. 278, ed. 1830.