J.J. Blunt's Undesigned Scriptural Coincidences
AN ARGUMENT FOR THE VERACITY OF THE HOLY BIBLE
Introduction
Part One:
The Books of Moses
Part Two:
The Historical Scriptures
Part Three:
The Prophetical Scripture
Part Four:
The Gospels and Acts
Appendix:
The Gospels, Acts
and Josephus

V. HEPHZI-BAH AND BEULAH

In the sixty-second chapter of this same prophet Isaiah; reference is made to the future restoration of the Jewish Church; in the first sense, perhaps, and as a frame-work of more, its restoration from Babylon; in a second, its eventual restoration to Christ, and the coming in of the Jew and Gentile together. “Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken,”—so Isaiah here expresses himself concerning Jerusalem,—“neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate; but thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married.” (v. 4.)

The figure here employed is that of a marriage: there is to be a marriage between God and his Church: that divorce from God, which the sins of Jerusalem had effected, was to be done away, and the nuptial bond be renewed. Jerusalem was to be no longer as a widow, Forsaken and Desolate, but to be as a bride, and to be called Hephzi-bah, i.e., “in her is my delight,” and “Beulah,” i.e., married. The verse immediately following the one I have produced, still continues the same figure: “For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry (or again live with) thee; and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee” (ver. 5). Now it is impossible to read the prophets with the least attention, and not discover that the incidents upon which they raise their oracular superstructure are in general real matters of fact which have fallen in their way. When they soar even into their sublimest flights, they often take their spring from some solid and substantial footing. Our Lord was acting quite in the spirit of the older prophets when He advanced from his observations on the temple before him, and the desolation it was soon to suffer, to the final consummation of all things, and the breaking up of the universal visible world; and the commentary of those who would endeavour to construe the whole by a reference to the destruction of Jerusalem only is not imbued with the spirit of the prophets of ancient times.

From the passage before us, then, it should seem that some nuptial ceremony was the accident of the day which gave the prophet an opportunity of uttering his parable concerning the future fortune of Jerusalem. Can we trace any such event in the history of those days, likely from its importance to arrest public attention, and thus to furnish Isaiah with this figure? I do not say positively that we can; nevertheless the name of Hephzi-bah, which he assigns to this his new Jerusalem, may throw some light upon our inquiry; for in the twenty-first chapter of the second Book of Kings I read that “Manasseh” (the son of Hezekiah) “was twelve years old when he began to reign, and reigned fifty and five years in Jerusalem, and his mother’s name was Hephzi-bah.” [2 Kings 21:1.] It is not improbable, therefore, that the royal nuptials of Hezekiah occurred about the time of this prophecy; and that Isaiah, after the manner of the prophets in general, availed himself of the passing event, and of the name of the bride, as a vehicle for the tidings which he had to communicate. This, too, may seem the more likely, because this prophecy of Isaiah does not appear to have been spoken at an early period of his mission, but subsequently to the sickness and recovery of Hezekiah (if the prophecies at least are arranged at all in the order in which they were delivered); neither is it probable that the marriage of Hezekiah was contracted till after that same sickness and recovery, seeing that his son and successor was but twelve years old at his father’s death, which happened, we know, fifteen years after his illness.