VI. ISAIAH CONTEMPORARY WITH UZZIAH, JOTHAM, AHAZ AND HEZEKIAH

But it is not by single and separate coincidences only, that the authority of these prophecies is upheld: there are some coincidences of a more comprehensive and general kind, that argue the same truth. Thus, the scenes amongst which Isaiah seems to write, indicate the commonwealth of Israel to be yet standing. He remonstrates, in the name of God, with the people for a hypocritical observance of the Fast-days (ch. 58:3); for exacting usurious profits nevertheless; for prolonging unlawfully the years of bondage (v. 6); for profaning the Sabbaths (v. 13); for confounding all distinction between clean and unclean meats (ch. 65:4; 66:17). He makes perpetual allusions, too, to the existence of false prophets in Jerusalem, as though this class of persons was very common whilst Isaiah was writing; the most likely persons in the world to be engendered by troubled times. And above all, he reviles the people for their gross and universal idolatry; a sin, which in all its aspects, is pursued from the fortieth chapter to the last with a ceaseless, inextinguishable, unmitigated storm of mockery, contempt, and scorn. With what position of the prophet can these, and many similar allusions, be reconciled, but with that of a man dwelling in Judea before the captivity, during a period, which, as historically described in the latter chapters of the Books of Kings and Chronicles, presents the express counterpart of those references in the prophet? Hezekiah and Josiah, the two redeeming princes of that time, serving, as breakers, to make manifest the fury with which the tide of abominations of every kind was running. I say, to what other period, and to what other position of the writer, does the internal evidence of Isaiah point? indirectly, indeed, but not on that account, in a manner the less conclusive. Had he taken up his parable during the Babylonish bondage, would there not have been frequent and inadvertent allusions to the circumstances of Babylon? Could his style have escaped the contagious influence of the scenes around him? even as the case actually is with Daniel, whose dwelling was at Babylon. Yet in Isaiah there are no allusions of this nature. It is of Jerusalem, and not of Babylon, that his roll savours throughout; of the land of Israel, and not of Chaldea. Moreover, it is of Jerusalem before the captivity; for after that trying furnace through which the Jewish nation was condemned to pass, it was disinfected of idolatry. Nay, a horror of idolatry succeeded, great as had been the propensity to it aforetime; the whole nation baring their necks to the sword, rather than admit within their walls even a Roman Eagle: whilst the ritual observances of the law, so far from falling into desuetude and contempt, were now kept with even a superstitious scrupulosity.

I think, then, that the several undesigned coincidences between passages in Isaiah, and others in the Books of Kings and Chronicles, which have been now adduced, are enough to prove that the prophet was contemporary with Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, and saw his vision in their days, even as its title declares. The mere introduction of the names of these princes into the pages of Isaiah, is not the argument on which I rely. It might be said, however improbably, that an author of a date much lower, might have admitted these names, and fragments of history connected with them, into his rhapsody, in order to give it a colouring of fact; but it is the indirect coincidences between the prophet and the history, which verifies the date of the former—allusions, mere allusions, to obscure servants of these sovereigns (known to be such); to a marriage of the day; to the stopping of a well; to the foolish exhibition of a treasure—allusions, indeed, in some cases so indistinct, that the full drift of the prophet would have escaped us, but for the historian. Such an argument ought to satisfy us that Isaiah was as surely alive, and dead, long before the Babylonish captivity, which he so accurately foretold, even to the deliverance from it—a still further reach into futurity—as that Ahaz and Hezekiah lived and died long before it; an argument, therefore, which justifies the Jews in their enrolment of his name amongst the most distinguished of the prophets, though they had no other ground for so doing than their knowledge of his exact prediction of the events of those days; and which must leave us without excuse in our incredulity, born as we are after the advent of that Messiah which forms so principal a subject of Isaiah’s writings besides; and whose character and Gospel we have found to correspond in so remarkable a manner to the description of both which they contain. For it is not the least singular or the least satisfactory feature in the writings of Isaiah that they should thus relate to two distinct periods, separated by a wide interval of time, and be found to be so exact in both; that they should have first taken for their field the events preceding and accompanying the captivity, foretelling them so faithfully as to convince the Jew that he was one of the greatest of his prophets: that some hundreds of years should then be allowed to elapse, of which they are silent; and that then they should break out again on the subject of a second and altogether different series of incidents, so deeply interesting to the Christian, and be found by him, in his turn, to be so wonderfully true to them—so wonderfully true to them, that he cannot but be surprised that the Jew, whose acceptance of the prophet was even already secured by the previous stage of his prophecy, of which we have been now examining the evidence, should still be unable to see in him the prophet of Jesus Christ of Nazareth too.