Chapter IX

CHAPTER IX.

PROPHECY IN THE BABYLONIAN EXILE.

§ 39. The Messiah in Ezekiel.

TN the midst of Jeremiah's activity occurred the deportation of Jehoiachin which followed the battle at Carchemish (606 B.C.). Among the ten thousand who shared the fate of the king was also Ezekiel, son of Buzi the priest, who, after he had settled in Tel-Abib, on the Babylonian Chaboras, in the fifth year of the deportation, was called as prophet. When he became prophet, he was not false to the priesthood, whose calling had to do with the handling of the legal torah. In this respect he stands in sharp contrast with Jeremiah, who, although he was also a jn3 (priest), yet had no warm interest in the ceremonial law. There is no book of any other prophet which is so pictorial as that of Ezekiel. Heavenly and earthly things transform themselves for him into plastic pictures, which he describes even to the minutest details, with which this is connected, that the co-operation of the fancy and of the understanding in the act of prophesying is especially influential with him. The manner of his call is at once characteristic. The fact that it is God who rules the world in judicial omnipotence, that names Ezekiel as the prophet of the judgment upon Jerusalem, is established by a vision of unparalleled grandeur. While Isaiah, caught up to heaven, is called by the One enthroned there, who is surrounded by the seraphim, in Ezekiel it is the One inhabiting the universe, riding upon the chariot, the royal waggon borne by the cherubim and ofannim, who sweeps down to the one who is to be called. And while in Isaiah the One enthroned is indeed visible, but covered by a long garment, in Ezekiel the heavenly charioteer appears in unveiled human form, which shines from the loins and upwards like chasmal (amber), and downwards like fire. John the evangelist is so bold as to say that Isaiah beheld the doxa of the future Christ (xii. 41). If, as is presupposed in this passage, Yahweh, who granted that His prophet should behold Him in human form, is identical with the human [elements] which appeared in Christ, the Johannean eiSe rrjv Boljav avrov is still more true of Ezekiel than of Isaiah, for the One who is enthroned permits himself to be seen as a real man (D"]N '"IN"!!??, Ezek. i. 26). But these are lights which fall only upon those preprophetic visions for him who has recognised the incarnation as the end of the ways of God. We turn to another significant picture composed by Ezekiel, which is properly Messianic, and does not first appear from a Christian standpoint in a Christological light. We mean the prophecy concerning the grape vine and the sprout of the cedar in chap, xvii., which, in so far as it has an apocalyptic character, is received into the composition of the picture of the future as already past events—the removal of Jehoiachin and the appointment of Mattaniah-Zedekiah, perhaps also Zedekiah's connection with Egypt. The opening of this view into the future falls, according to viii. 1 (according to the date of the second book, viii.-xix.), in the sixth year of the deportation, hence in the second year of the activity of -the prophet. The grape vine, which, planted by the Babylonian eagle, perishes because of its treacherous inclination to the Egyptian eagle, is Zedekiah, and the tender sprout of the Davidic cedar, which, planted by Yahweh on Zion, grows to a cedar overtopping and overshadowing the nations, is the Messiah. The unnoticeable, humble beginning of the Messianic kingdom, which is indicated in the *H of xvii. 22b reminds us in fact and in form of Isa. xi. 1, liii. 2; and the growth of the tender sprout to a glorious cedar, ver. 23, is re-echoed in the parable of the Lord concerning the grain of mustard seed (Matt. xiiL 31 f.); also the word of the Lord (Matt, xxiii. 12): "He who exalteth himself shall be abased," etc., refers to Ezek. xvii. 24 as the moral of the allegory.

This principle of the moral world also finds expression in the threatening prediction against Zedekiah in chap. xxi., according to the date of the third book (xx.-xxiii.), from the seventh year after the deportation, and hence only a few years before the fall of Jerusalem. In xxi. 23-27 the prophet describes how the king of Babylon stands at the parting of two ways, one of which leads to Eabbath Amnion, the other to Jerusalem, the treacherous (cf. xvii. 5) and yet secure city, as it thinks, on account of its oath of vassalage. "And thou"—with these words, xx. 30-32, the prophet turns himself to Zedekiah—" pierced through [fulfilled through the putting out of his eyes, Jer. xxxix. 7], blasphemer, prince of Israel, whose day has come at the time of the guilt of the end [that is, which demands the final judgment]; thus saith the Almighty, Yahweh: The mitre shall be removed [naavisn, the head-band which designated the high priest], and the crown shall be taken away [""JByri, the designation of honour of the king]; it shall not remain: the lowly shall be exalted, and the high shall be brought low (cf. xvii. 24). Overthrow, overthrow, overthrow I bring upon them [upon mitre and crown, high priesthood and kingdom]; also they [this twofold dignity in its degenerate representatives] shall be destroyed [rpn N5 like Isa. xv. 6; Job vi. 21], until he comes to whom the government [032*13?, _as i_n Hos. v. 1] belongs, and I give it to him." Whether that which precedes these closing words is interpreted as we or as others interpret it, it is more than probable that the prophet, by vnrw DS^sn 6 N3njf, alludes to 1J> r6s> '3 (Gen. xlix. 10), since he explains it in entirely the same way as Onkelos and the second Jerusalem Targum, Nnota K'n Fi^Yi Nwd iy. We are not thereby compelled to regard this as the original meaning of nbe > (Shiloh); but there are three conclusions we can draw from this old interpretation of Ezekiel of this word in Jacob's blessing of Judah: (1) that the prophet regards it as a Messianic prophecy; (2) that he did not have n^e > according to the Massoretic writing, but r6e > without yodh in his text; and (3) that, even at a very ancient period, rbv was understood in the sense of tfW, equivalent to iW, is cujus est (scil. regnum), as a designation of the Messiah.

In the predictions against the nations (xxv.-xxxii.), which can be inserted between the beginning and end of the fourth book (xxiv., xxxiii. 1-20) as a fifth, a promise which maybe compared with Isa. xix. 23 ff. is wanting; but this deficit is covered through the conclusion of chap. xvi. — the terrible picture of the moral condition of Jerusalem in comparison with that of her sisters, Sodom and Gomorrah. This conclusion agrees essentially with the conclusion of Paul's outline of the history of redemption (Eoni. xL 32 ff.): the end of human history is this, that the compassion of God, surpassing the greatness of the sin, raises all, Sodom, Samaria, and even Judah, from the pit—a time of universal grace which rescues all that is to be rescued, even that which has fallen into Hades. While Jerusalem lies in the death struggle, dumbness is inflicted upon Ezekiel (xxiv. 25 ff.).

The discourses of the sixth book (xxxiii. 21-xxxix.) begin, as the later information reaches the prophet at Tel-Abib, that the sufferings of Jerusalem have ended, and now the string of his tongue is loosed. The second of these addresses (Ezek. xxxiv.) is directed against the self-seeking, unscrupulous shepherds: Yahweh Himself will take His own herd (xxxiv. 23 f.): "And I will appoint over them a shepherd (inK njft), and he shall feed them; my servant David, he shall feed them, and he shall be their shepherd. I, Yahweh, will be their God, and my servant David prince (K^) in their midst: I, Yahweh, have spoken it." This promise is repeated (xxxvii. 236, 24): "I will purify them, and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. And my servant David is king ) over them, and they all [Israel of both kingdoms] have one shepherd, and they shall walk in my laws, and my statutes shall they observe and execute."

Hitzig thinks that Ezekiel has the awakening of David from the dead in prospect; but the meaning of the promise is nothing else than Hos. iii. 5 ; Jer. xxx. 9. A king is intended who is David's antitype, and this king is not one who, like others, transmits his throne, for God gives His people in him "in? ⁿ}h> one instead of many, and hence probably one for ever.

§ 40. The Prince in Ezekiel's Future State.

One for ever? The case would be different if the prince (^tPJ), whom Ezekiel embodies with his ecclesiastical and political ideal of the future, were to be identified with the "King David" of the promise; for this prince has children and successors—he is nothing less than an absolute personality. This torah

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of the future does not recognise a high priest. But this prince, far from taking the place of the pontifex, is rather a layman. His relation to the priesthood and sanctuary is sharply denned ; his chief pre-eminence consists only in his being able to hold sacrificial meals in the hall of the east door,—the east door itself, through which the doxa of Yahweh entered the temple, remains closed. The sacrificial duties of the prince are exactly indicated, and such dynastic excesses as have occurred before are prevented through exact regulations regarding the prince's possession. The son of the prince, who is designated as his successor, is also universal heir. The domain is so great that the prince can also remember his other sons with gifts, but he is not allowed to give to others besides his own lawful heirs of his landed property. Even such presents as he makes to his servants return in the year of jubilee to the Crown. Only those are persuaded that this prince is the Messiah who begin with the irpwrov Tp-evSo? that the future temple of Ezekiel is an allegory of the New Testament Church. This prince has nothing whatever in common with the Messiah; it is not demanded or expressly presupposed that he belongs to the house of David. If he were the Messiah, then there would be no Messiah at all—that is, no final ideal king of absolute significance, and with a calling reaching beyond the national limitations to mankind. But he recognises indeed the lofty form of the second David, also his last prophetic word (Ezek. xxix. 21), from the twenty-seventh year of the deportation, the sixteenth after the destruction of Jerusalem: " On that day I will cause a horn to bud for the house of Israel" —probably has in view the King Messiah (Ps. cxxxii. 17, cf. Luke i. 69). How does it come about now that, in the outline of the existence of the congregation of Israel in the final period, which is clothed in vision, that noble form has disappeared from his horizon? It has come about because the Messiah is more than a temporal reigning prince, because the princely dignity in the future State is too small for Him. It is significant that the prophet, while he sketches the picture of the future State, leaves the Messiah out of account. When the Jewish people again becomes an independent State, as is expected by all the prophets, it must also have a king, must have princes. But that the Messiah shall be this king is not only an impossible representation for the New Testament consciousness, but also, as here appears in Ezekiel, for the Old Testament. For this reason there is in the prophetic view of the future an unremoved antinomy which is most striking in Ezekiel, because he paints everything to the smallest details. Tor also in Isaiah (vii.-xi.) the question is raised, Is the second David a king who first arises, and dies and makes room for another? We must answer this question in the negative; and if, therefore, a Jewish State in the future should have a king who traced his ancestry back to David, he would not be the Messiah, he has more divine than earthly greatness, he is a personality of religious, and not merely of political significance. The exaltation of his person and of his calling resists his introduction into an ideal State which is purely natural, although it may belong to the final period, like Ezekiel's republic. There is in no prophet anything which can be compared with these chapters (Ezek. xl.—xlviii). Ezekiel is the only prophet who knows that he is not only called by God to be prophet, but also at the same time as reformer. We must know the history of worship, and the history of the state of the Jewish people more exactly, in order everywhere to discern against what evil conditions which had found place his reform was directed. At times he says himself expressly, as in chap. xliv., when he limits the service of the sanctuary to the priests of Zadok, and the Levites who are subordinated to them, with the exclusion of uncircumcised Israelites, and (xlv. 8) after the unchangeable measurement of the land of the prince, he continues: "My princes shall no longer oppress the people." Whether the new legislation is intended for the time of the return from the exile, or for the final period, we should not ask at alL

As the development of the last things was contemporaneous for the primitive Church with the destruction of Jerusalem on account of the peculiar eschatological addresses of the Lord, so the final period is joined for all prophets with the gathering of Israel from all lands among which they had been scattered. In chap. xxxvii. Ezekiel prophesies the bringing again from the exile under the image of a resurrection; and in chaps. xxxviii., xxxix., the last attack

of the heathen world, under the leadership of Gog from the land of Magog, against the entire house of Israel, which has returned to its native land. The new torah is designed for this Israel at the end of the exile. Without denying the authority of the old legislation for the present,—which, as Ezekiel wrote, had certainly been codified in the Jehovistic book of history and of law, if not in the Priests' Code, — he promulgated a new code, in case that the Israel of both kingdoms, ashamed of its former offences (Ezek. xliii. 10 f.), should return from banishment. In the year 536 B.C. and afterwards, only a small portion of the people had returned, who rightly did not regard the torah of Ezekiel as having binding force, since the realization of its conditions were wanting, and this realization, notwithstanding all deviations, was preceded by the foundation of the new covenant upon the basis of the torah which was built upon the Sinaitic legal covenant, which excludes every repristination of the shadow of works; for Christ is the end of the law. But, nevertheless, no interpreter can say how much of the ideal of Ezekiel will be realized when the icaipoi idv&v (Luke xxi. 24) are passed, and Israel shall be restored to his new land, full of blessing and prosperity.

§ 41. The Metamorphosis of the Messianic Ideal in Isa. xl.-lxvi.

We now turn from Ezekiel, the prophetic reformer of the character of the congregation, to the author of the thrice nine addresses on the exiles (Isa. xl.-xlviii., xlix.-lvii., lviii.-lxvi.), who has a higher significance as reformer, since he is the reformer of the Messianic ideal. If Isaiah, who was called in the year of Uzziah's death, were the author of these addresses, the Babylonian exile would not be his actual, but his ideal present. In fact, there are weighty grounds for Isaiah's authorship, which at least two of the later [critics], Klostermann and Bredenkamp, have allowed to influence them; the former helping himself through the supposition that an heir of the Isaianic spirit freely reproduced posthumous prophecies of the master, which had to do with the Babylonian exile;¹ the latter believing that from the time of that exile the protoIsaianic elements, which belong at the beginning of the web of these Deutero-Isaianic prophecies, may be still recognised here and there. Leaving these hypotheses aside, we hold that without a doubt Isaiah participated essentially in this book of consolation for the exiles. The author, although not an immediate pupil of Isaiah, is yet a prophet of his school: he is by birth equal with the master in spirit and gifts. Not without the influence of an advance and change in the age, he even surpasses him, and shows his reciprocal relation to the Book of Jeremiah, since in many places he reproduces Jeremianic thoughts with bold independence in a higher tone, and with an Isaianic stamp. In many respects we might sooner hold that Jeremiah

¹ Zeitschrift fiir die gesammte lutherische Theologie und Kirche, Leipzig 1876, pp. 1-60.

is the one who reproduced [the passage in question]; but the weighty grounds for Isaiah's priority are cast aside by two preponderating reasons: (1) that if we hold that Isaiah is the author of xl.-lxvi. we must maintain a phenomenon which otherwise is without a parallel in the prophetic literature, for otherwise it is everywhere peculiar to prophecy that it goes out from the present, and does not transport itself to the future, without returning to the ground of its own contemporary history; but Isaiah would live and act here in the exile, and address the exiles through twenty-seven chapters, without coming back from his ideal to his actual present. (2) The pedagogical progress in the recognition and progress of salvation, divinely ordered, demands the origin of these addresses under the impulses given by the exile. Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel would represent an incomprehensible retrogression if the author of Isa. xl.-lxvi. were not younger than Jeremiah, younger even than Ezekiel, and did nbt have the last third of the exile as his historical station. It is indeed all the more incomprehensible that this great prophet should have become an anonymous for the congregation who returned to the Holy Land, of whom he was a contemporary, and that his forgotten name was covered with that of Isaiah; but we must accept these and other incomprehensible things in order to escape that which was most incomprehensible of all, that it is one and the same prophet to whom we are indebted for the image of the second David in Isa. viL-xi., and the image of the servant of Yahweh in xl.—lvi Isaiah, who was called in the year of the death of Uzziah, although he was not the creator, was nevertheless the developer of the idea of the Messiah; the image of King Messiah, previously only a shadowy outline, becomes in chaps. vii.-xi. a picture in rich colours with three panels. In chaps. xl.-lxvi., on the contrary, nothing is said concerning a Messiah a son of David. It is the people to whom Yahweh offers an everlasting covenant, since He actualizes the inviolable promises which were made to David. Only Yahweh is called everywhere King of Israel (xliv. 6, xliii. 15). The idea of King Messiah disappears in the idea of the Messianic people. Israel is designed to be, as the introduction to the Sinaitic legislation says, a ro^pn D^n3 (Ex. xix. 6). Deutero-Isaiah reaches back to this idea of Israel as the people of mediation. Certainly this is connected with the loss which the Davidic kingdom suffered after Zedekiah. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who experienced the catastrophe either wholly or partially, and had a fresh recollection of it, vie with each other in promises of another David; but it was given to the second Isaiah, who was born in the exile, to look through the redemptive historical mission of Israel, from the removal of his people into the heathen world in new great connections, from which he receives back the idea of the Messiah transfigured and enriched, and so to lead the Messianic proclamation into a new path, within which it moves among the post-exilic prophets, including David. The ecce-Aomo-characteristic and the work of the Messiah are hereafter received into the image of the Messiah. The idea of the servant of Yahweh is bridge and ladder to these new means of knowledge.

§ 42. The Servant of Yahweh in Deutero-Isaiah.

Israel is the servant of Yahweh — Israel as the people whom the call of Abraham had in view, as the people called to the service of Yahweh, and for the advancement of the work which has for its object the salvation of the human race (xli. 8). But the mass is unequal to this ideal of a people serving the highest ends of God; it is untrue towards Yahweh, and incapable of Israel's mediating mission, blind with seeing eyes, and deaf with hearing ears (xliii. 8), so that the prophet has to complain (xlii. 19): "Who is blind, if not my servant, and deaf as my messenger, whom I send?" Nevertheless there are such who not only belong externally to the people of redemptive history, but also really serve the God of salvation in reverence and confession, in spite of the hostility which meets them. Such significant words as xliv. 2 refer to them: "Fear not, my servant Jacob, and Jeshurun, whom I have chosen." Their spiritual character is indicated (li. 7): "Hearken to me, who know righteousness, oh people, in whose heart is my law." But in this inner circle the conception of the ^p] 12$ does not remain; it is still further contracted to an individual centre, to one who is called ^B*. (xlix. 3), because he is Israel in highest potency, the perfect reality of that which Israel is to be, and the transcendent realization of that which he is to accomplish. The calling of this servant of God, in which the idea of Israel as the servant of God culminates, is addressed first to his own people (xlii 6, xlix. 8): "I make thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the heathen;" it is therefore not a collective identical with the mass of the people, with the kernel of the people. The description of him and his utterances is so individual that the personification of a plurality is excluded. We are prevented from thinking of the prophet, the author of these addresses, because this servant of Yahweh (xlii. 1) is introduced by God Himself, and is passed before us in an objective way: "Behold, my servant, whom I have chosen, my elect, with whom my soul is pleased—I have put my Spirit upon him." The prophet hears this iv •Kvevnan: that which is described is an ideal form of the future. Now, when this second, this Babylonian Isaiah appears, Cyrus has already begun his victorious course; his casting down of idolatrous peoples makes way for the work of the servant of Yahweh, whose victorious power is the word of the Spirit. His entrance upon his ministry belongs to the rriBnn, which Yahweh announces through the prophets (xlii. 9). The transition to this view of the servant of Yahweh as present is formed by xlviii. 16, where the future One, as with a sudden IBoii tfica>, breaks through the secret of his parousia and appears

upon the theatre of the present: "And now the Almighty Yahweh hath sent me and His Spirit." Prom chap. xlviii. 16 the prophet not only hears words of God from and to His servant, but the servant himself takes up the word, xlix. 1 ff. He it is in whom Yahweh came to His people without finding a hearing (L 2); and he, His servant, also himself complains (1. 4—9) that he came to his own, and his own received him not. It is only questionable who is the one in Ixi. 1 ff.—whether the servant of Yahweh or the prophet—who rejoices over his calling to preach the gospel as especially glorious. The decision is here and elsewhere difficult, because that the address of the servant of Yahweh loses itself unobserved in the address of Yahweh or in the address of the prophet, but yet only in the objective address of the prophet, whose " I" only once evidently appears in the refrain of the second paragraph (lvii. 21). In every place where the servant of Yahweh appears speaking in immediate self-representation in the field of vision of the prophet, the appearance of the future One is not long maintained on this its greatest height—even in lxi. 4—9 prophecy and the address of Yahweh are introduced in the midst of the address of the one who is rejoicing there.

§ 43. The Mediator of Salvation as Prophet, Priest, and King in one Person.

All forms of the previous representation of redemption removed from their isolation are united in the person of the nirr "ny (servant of Yahweh), the prophet like Moses, the King Messiah, the priest after the order of Melchizedek. Isaiah demands (xii. 4) the preaching of the great deeds of Yahweh in the world of nations. In Deutero - Isaiah we see the execution of this demand brought about through the servant of Yahweh, who does not rest nor repose until he has secured the recognition of the religion of the God of revelation in the heathen world. The servant of Yahweh is therefore a prophet, and more than Jonah, whose unique mission only belongs to the shadow, which the one who is in the process of coming casts before himself; his apostleship comprises the entire race. He is also a king who, removed from his humiliation, shall shine in a so transcendent royal glory, that the kings of the earth shall cast themselves at his feet in mute astonishment (xlix. 7, lii. 15).

He is also a priest; he exercises a priestly expiation after he has offered his own life as that is, as a propitiatory sacrifice, which atones and makes amends for the sins of his people. Thus we read in the great prophecy of the passion (lii. 13-liii.), which makes such an impression of a definite person, and not of a personified plurality, that Ewald and others think that the prophet has here embodied an ancient martyr-picture into the connection of his address concerning the doings and sufferings of the true Israel. But the servant of Yahweh suffers, indeed freely, not only as a noble man can take all kinds of sufferings upon himself, in order to ward them off from others, or also that in this way, through the transference of sufferings, welfare may arise for others; but the servant of Yahweh, the guiltless pne, loads himself with the guilt of his people in order to make it possible for God without injury to His holiness to suffer grace instead of justice to visit the sinner. Since as an antitype of the sacrificial animal he takes upon himself the sins of his people, he thus executes God's decree; it pleased God to crush him, He purposely allowed him to sink in the deepest woe (liii. 10), for his purpose was directed to the fruit of his suffering; He permitted the guilt of us all to storm upon him, and hence His wrath to go over him, in order to make in him, His beloved, a justified and sanctified congregation of His people. No man, according to Ps. xlix. 8 f., can give for another a 133 (ransom) in order to release him from death; in case a man like Moses (Ex. xxxii. 32) or Paul (Eom. ix. 3) should offer himself as willing to suffer vicariously the death deserved by the sinner, God would not accept this offer,—only the absolutely guiltless holy servant of God is capable of bringing an offering which covers sin and breaks its power, since in the offering of himself God's own decree of love is executed as a morally effective deed of love. If we consider who speaks of himself in chap. liii. as " we" and." us," this also decides that the servant of Yahweh cannot be the congregation of confessors and martyrs in the exile. It is indeed the Israel of the final period, who in chap. liii. penitently confesses its sin against the servant of God; and this servant, whose innocent shed blood rested hitherto as a national guilt upon the one making confession, is to be considered a collective? But even the one who is unwilling to recognise the Lamb of God, who bears the sins of the world, in this chapter written as it were under the cross upon Golgotha, even such an one must admit that the Deutero-Isaianic prophecy concerning the servant of God is the workshop in which the New Testament ideal of the Messiah comes to realization—the model for a new, more spiritual image of the Messiah, which unites all inalienable elements of the former in itself. In the mirror of this prophecy the Messiah beheld Himself. It became His guiding star upon the way of His calling, and He became its fulfilment.

§ 44. The Great Finale, Isa. xxiv.-xxvii.

The Deutero - Isaianic prediction concerning the servant of Yahweh appears to be the ne plus ultra of New Testament knowledge in the Old Testament; but in many respects it is surpassed through the cycle of prophecies, Isa. xxiv.-xxvii., which, according to the present arrangement of the Book of Isaiah, form the finale to the oracles concerning the nations (xiii.— xxiii.). This finale is one of the greatest achievements of Old Testament prophecy. The language, accumulating paronomasia on paronomasia, is here address and music at the same time, and the form which the prophecy takes is at the same time epic and lyric; the prophet prophesies mostly in songs taken from the heart of the redeemed congregation. And this imitative musical sound, this hymnological character, is only the incomparable form of an incomparable train of thought. We place this finale after DeuteroIsaiah, because the state of knowledge which is represented therein goes far beyond the Assyrian Isaiah, far beyond Jeremiah and Ezekiel, partially also beyond II. Isaiah. When the prophet (xxvii. 12 f.) represents the diaspora of Israel as returning from Egypt, there seems to be mirrored in it the form of the time of Isaiah, in which Egypt and Asshur were the two great powers (xi. 11). But what is then the Vih nnp (xxiv. 10, cf. xxv. 2, xxvi. 5 f.), whose fall is the middle point of the judgment against the world which is hostile to God, and the turningpoint in the redemption of Israel and of the nations? It appears to be Babylon, but it is not the Babylon which was conquered by Cyrus. All which apparently pertains to the history of the times in these chapters xxiv.-xxvii. is emblematical, and merely supplies the colours to the eschatological pictures. The catastrophe of the metropolis of the world appears in connection with the judgment and destruction of the • world, and with the destruction of the world (xxiv. 19 f.), and with the judgment of the world the prophet beholds the judgment upon the demoniacal powers which are active in the world's history (xxiv. 21-23). The redemption of Israel does not merely consist in an outward restoration, but in an internal

renewal (xxvi. 1—4). And the conversion of the heathen is symbolized as a participation in a feast (xxv. 6): "And Yahweh the Lord prepares for all peoples upon this mountain (that is, Zion as the centre of God's redemption) a feast of fat food, a feast of wine on the lees (that is, which has lain a long while and is thoroughly fermented), of fat food, rich in marrow, of wine on the lees thoroughly strained," and as an unveiling (xxv. 7): "And He removes upon this mountain [that is, Zion as the central place of the accomplishment] the veil which veiled all peoples, and the covering which rested on all nations." But still more than this. In the new Jerusalem Deutero-Isaiah compares the duration of the life of man with the high age which a tree reaches. He who dies when he is a hundred years old will be considered as dying in his youth (lxv. 20-22). In spite, therefore, of the long duration of life, death still reigns; but the author of the finale prophesies (xxv. 8): "He swallows up ($^3, of absorption, equivalent to annihilation) death for ever, and the Almighty Yahweh wipes the tears from every face, and the disgrace of His people he removes from the entire earth: for Yahweh hath spoken it." And yet more than that. While the oppressors of Israel must be destroyed, without rising to life, the field of corpses of the people of God will become through heavenly dew a resurrection field: the congregation of those who survive the time of judgment will be supplemented through those who are raised from the dead (xxvi. 14-19): "My dead shall live again, my corpses shall arise; wake up and rejoice, ye who lie in the dust! For the dew of the heavenly bodies is thy dew, and the earth shall bring forth shades." It is the entire New Testament Apocalypse which we have here before us in mice, only that, as also in 1 Cor. xv., the discourse is exclusively concerning the resurrection to life, and is also limited to the narrow frame of the trpmrrj dvdaraaK (Eev. xx. 5 f.). In general that which is magnificent in these chapters (xxiv.—xxvii.) is that the redemption is conceived of as radical, spiritual for mankind. So that the end of the history of redemption is bound together with the beginning, which is written upon the first pages of Genesis.

Who this great prophet was, whether DeuteroIsaiah or another, and when he wrote, whether in the exile or later, can never be satisfactorily explained. That which is relatively most probable is the unity of the great anonymous of chaps. xl.—lxvi. with the great anonymous of chaps. xxiv.—xxvii. With this view we have arranged the concluding portion after II. Isaiah of the time of the exile, the end of which we now pass over.