I. ISAIAH, AHAZ AND THE CONDUIT OF THE UPPER POOL

In the seventh chapter of Isaiah we read that Ahaz king of Judah was threatened with invasion by the confederate armies of Syria and Israel, and that Isaiah the prophet was commissioned by God to foretel to Ahaz the result of this invasion; and not only so, but the disastrous end of one of those kingdoms, if not both of them, after a period of threescore and five years. And the charge is thus given to Isaiah: “Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou and Shear-jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, in the highway of the fuller’s field” (v. 3). Here was to be the scene of the prophecy; and, accordingly, here it professes to have been actually spoken. To this point I would draw the attention of my readers, because the incidental mention of the place where it was to be delivered, furnishes us with the means of showing with great probability that a prophecy it was. For, why at the end of the conduit of the upper pool? No reason whatever is assigned, or even hinted for the choice of this particular spot, rather than the palace of Ahaz, or the city gate. But on turning to the thirty-second chapter of the second Book of Chronicles, in which are described the preparations made by king Hezekiah some thirty years afterwards against a similar invasion of Jerusalem by Sennacherib and the Assyrians, I find this to be amongst the number, that “he took counsel with his princes and his mighty men to stop the waters of the fountains which were without the city; and they did help him. So there was gathered much people who stopped all the fountains, and the brook that ran through the midst of the land, saying, Why should the kings of Assyria come, and find much water?” [2 Chron. 32:3–5.]

Here, then, in this passage of Hezekiah’s history, have we the key to the passage in the history of Ahaz, which is now engaging our inquiry, and in which the prophecy of Isaiah is involved. “Isaiah was to go forth to meet Ahaz, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool;” to go forth—the conduit of the upper pool, therefore, was without the walls, open to the use of the enemy. Ahaz, therefore, we may conjecture, was employed, as we know, though not from Isaiah, Hezekiah under similar circumstances afterwards was employed, with a number of his people in providing a defence for the city by stopping the fountains, of which the enemy might get possession. The place, therefore, was appropriate to the subject of the message with which Isaiah was charged, namely, that their labours were needless, for that God would take care of their city; and it was convenient for the publication of it, because the work interested and occupied both the sovereign and the people, and consequently a multitude were there gathered together ready to hear it. Now it appears to me, that this casual mention of Ahaz, being for some reason or other to be found by the prophet at the conduit of the upper pool, to which he was to go forth, without one word of note or explanation why he should be found there, or what was its exact site, or why it should be a fit place for delivering the message, coupled with the satisfactory cause for his being there, which most incidentally we are enabled of ourselves to supply from another quarter, does establish it as a fact, that Ahaz was occupied with concerting measures of defence for the city when Isaiah hailed him. But if so, Isaiah’s message must have necessarily been delivered when the invasion was only threatened, when there was yet time for making provision to meet it, and when the result of it, of which he speaks, must have been as yet in futurity; whilst events still beyond it, to which his words extend too, must have been in a futurity yet more distant; i.e. Isaiah must have been a prophet. Certainly it is a small matter of fact which lays the foundation for a great conclusion: but its seeming insignificance is just that which gives it extraordinary value for the purpose for which I use it; since it is impossible to believe that a forger of pretended prophecies, written after the event, would have hit upon such an expedient for stamping his imposture with a mark of truth, as to make the scene of this prediction a conduit outside the walls, without adding the most remote hint about the inference he meant to be drawn from it.