Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah Part 18

But if forgiveness mean all this, then the objections frequently brought against a conveyance of it so unconditioned as that of Isaiah fall to the ground. Forgiveness of such a kind cannot be either unjust or demoralising. On the contrary, we see Jerusalem permoralised by it. At first, it is true, the sense of weakness and fear abounds, as we learn from the narrative in chaps. x.x.xvi. and x.x.xvii. But where there was vanity, recklessness and despair, giving way to dissipation, there is now humility, discipline and a leaning upon G.o.d, that are led up to confidence and exultation. Jerusalem's experience is just another proof that any moral results are possible to so great a process as the return of G.o.d to the soul. Awful is the responsibility of them who receive such a Gift and such a Guest; but the sense of that awfulness is the atmosphere, in which obedience and holiness and the courage that is born of both love best to grow. One can understand men scoffing at messages of pardon so unconditioned as Isaiah's, who think they "mean no more than a clean slate." Taken in this sense, the gospel of forgiveness must prove a savour of death unto death. But just as Jerusalem interpreted the message of her pardon to mean that _G.o.d is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved_, and straightway obedience was in all her hearts, and courage upon all her walls, so neither to us can be futile the New Testament form of the same gospel, which makes our pardoned soul the friend of G.o.d, accepted in the Beloved, and our body His holy temple.

Upon one other point connected with the forgiveness of sins we get instruction from the experience of Jerusalem. A man has difficulty in squaring his sense of forgiveness with the return on the back of it of his old temptations and trials, with the hostility of fortune and with the inexorableness of nature. Grace has spoken to his heart, but Providence bears more hard upon him than ever. Pardon does not change the outside of life; it does not immediately modify the movements of history, or suspend the laws of nature. Although G.o.d has forgiven Jerusalem, a.s.syria comes back to besiege her. Although the penitent be truly reconciled to G.o.d, the const.i.tutional results of his fall remain: the frequency of temptation, the power of habit, the bias and facility downwards, the physical and social consequences. Pardon changes none of these things. It does not keep off the a.s.syrians.

But if pardon means the return of G.o.d to the soul, then in this we have the secret of the return of the foe. Men could not try nor develop a sense of the former except by their experience of the latter. We have seen why Isaiah must have welcomed the perfidious reappearance of the a.s.syrians after he had helped to buy them off. Nothing could better test the sincerity of Jerusalem's repentance, or rally her dissipated forces.

Had the a.s.syrians not returned, the Jews would have had no experimental proof of G.o.d's restored presence, and the great miracle would never have happened that rang through human history for evermore--a trumpet-call to faith in the G.o.d of Israel. And so still _the Lord scourgeth every son whom He receiveth_, because He would put our penitence to the test; because He would discipline our disorganised affections, and give conscience and will a chance of wiping out defeat by victory; because He would baptize us with the most powerful baptism possible--the sense of being trusted once more to face the enemy upon the fields of our disgrace.

That is why the a.s.syrians came back to Jerusalem, and that is why temptations and penalties still pursue the penitent and forgiven.

CHAPTER XXI.

_OUR G.o.d A CONSUMING FIRE._

ISAIAH x.x.xiii. (701 B.C.).

We have seen how the sense of forgiveness and the exultant confidence, which fill chap. x.x.xiii., were brought about within a few months after the sentence of death, that cast so deep a gloom on chap. xxii. We have expounded some of the contents of chap. x.x.xiii., but have not exhausted the chapter; and in particular we have not touched one of Isaiah's principles, which there finds perhaps its finest expression: the consuming righteousness of G.o.d.

There is no doubt that chap. x.x.xiii. refers to the sudden disappearance of the a.s.syrian from the walls of Jerusalem. It was written, part perhaps on the eve of that deliverance, part immediately after morning broke upon the vanished host. Before those verses which picture the disappearance of the investing army, we ought in strict chronological order to take the narrative in chaps. x.x.xvi. and x.x.xvii.--the return of the besiegers, the insolence of the Rabshakeh, the prostration of Hezekiah, Isaiah's solitary faith, and the sudden disappearance of the a.s.syrian. It will be more convenient, however, since we have already entered chap. x.x.xiii., to finish it, and then to take the narrative of the events which led up to it.

The opening verses of chap. x.x.xiii. fit the very moment of the crisis, as if Isaiah had flung them across the walls in the teeth of the Rabshakeh and the second emba.s.sy from Sennacherib, who had returned to demand the surrender of the city in spite of Hezekiah's tribute for her integrity: _Woe to thee, thou spoiler, and thou wast not spoiled, thou treacherous dealer, and they did not deal treacherously with thee_!

_When thou ceasest to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled; and when thou makest an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with thee._ Then follows the prayer, as already quoted, and the confidence in the security of Jerusalem (ver. 2). A new paragraph (vv. 7-12) describes Rabshakeh and his company demanding the surrender of the city; the disappointment of the amba.s.sadors who had been sent to treat with Sennacherib (ver. 7); the perfidy of the great king, who had broken the covenant they had made with him and swept his armies back upon Judah (ver. 8); the disheartening of the land under this new shock (ver. 9); and the resolution of the Lord now to rise and scatter the invaders: _Now will I arise, saith Jehovah; now will I lift up Myself; now will I be exalted_. _Ye shall conceive chaff; ye shall bring forth stubble; your breath is a fire, that shall devour you. And the peoples shall be as the burnings of lime, as thorns cut down that are burned in the fire_ (vv. 10-12).

After an application of this same fire of G.o.d's righteousness to the sinners _within_ Jerusalem, to which we shall presently return, the rest of the chapter pictures the stunned populace awaking to the fact that they are free. Is the a.s.syrian really gone, or do the Jews dream as they crowd the walls, and see no trace of him? Have they all vanished--the Rabshakeh, _by the conduit of the upper pool, with his loud voice_ and insults; the scribes to whom they handed the tribute, and who prolonged the agony by counting it under their eyes; the scouts and engineers insolently walking about Zion and mapping out her walls for the a.s.sault; the close investment of barbarian hordes, with their awesome speech and uncouth looks! _Where is he that counted? where is he that weighed the tribute? where is he that counted the towers? Thou shall not see the fierce people, a people of a deep speech that thou canst not perceive, of a strange tongue that thou canst not understand._ They have vanished.

Hezekiah may lift his head again. O people--sore at heart to see thy king in sackcloth and ashes[63] as the enemy devoured province after province of thy land and cooped thee up within the narrow walls, thou scarcely didst dare to peep across--take courage, the terror is gone! _A king in his beauty thine eyes shall see; they shall behold the land spreading very far forth_ (ver. 17). We had thought to die in the restlessness and horror of war, never again to know what stable life and regular wors.h.i.+p were, our Temple services interrupted, our home a battlefield. But _look upon Zion_; behold again _she is the city of our solemn diets; thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tent that shall not be removed, the stakes whereof shall never be plucked up, neither shall the cords thereof be broken. But there Jehovah_, whom we have known only for affliction, _shall be in majesty for us_. Other peoples have their natural defences, a.s.syria and Egypt their Euphrates and Nile; but G.o.d Himself shall be for us _a place of rivers, streams, broad on both hands, on which never a galley shall go, nor gallant s.h.i.+p shall pa.s.s upon it_. Without sign of battle, G.o.d shall be our refuge and our strength. It was that marvellous deliverance of Jerusalem by the hand of G.o.d, with no effort of human war, which caused Isaiah to invest with such majesty the meagre rock, its squalid surroundings and paltry defences. The insignificant and waterless city was glorious to the prophet because G.o.d was in her. One of the richest imaginations which patriot ever poured upon his fatherland was inspired by the simplest faith saint ever breathed. Isaiah strikes again the old keynote (chap.

viii.) about the waterlessness of Jerusalem. We have to keep in mind the Jews' complaints of this, in order to understand what the forty-sixth Psalm means when it says, _There is a river the streams whereof make glad the city of our G.o.d, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High_--or what Isaiah means when he says, _Glorious shall Jehovah be unto us, a place of broad rivers and streams_. Yea, he adds, Jehovah is everything to us: Jehovah is our Judge; Jehovah is our Lawgiver; Jehovah is our King: He will save us.

[63] Chap. x.x.xvii.

Such were the feelings aroused in Jerusalem by the sudden relief of the city. Some of the verses, which we have scarcely touched, we will now consider more fully as the expression of a doctrine which runs throughout Isaiah, and indeed is one of his two or three fundamental truths--that the righteousness of G.o.d is an all-pervading atmosphere, an atmosphere that wears and burns.

For forty years the prophet had been preaching to the Jews his gospel, _G.o.d-with-us_; but they never awakened to the reality of the Divine presence till they saw it in the dispersion of the a.s.syrian army. Then G.o.d became real to them (ver. 14). The justice of G.o.d, preached so long by Isaiah, had always seemed something abstract. Now they saw how concrete it was. It was not only a doctrine: it was a fact. It was a fact that was a fire. Isaiah had often called it a fire; they thought this was rhetoric. But now they saw the actual burning--_the peoples as the burning of lime, as thorns cut down that are burned in the fire_.

And when they felt the fire so near, each sinner of them awoke to the fact that he had something burnable in himself, something which could as little stand the fire as the a.s.syrians could. There was no difference in this fire outside and inside the walls. What it burned there it would burn here. Nay, was not Jerusalem the dwelling-place of G.o.d, and Ariel the very hearth and furnace of the fire which they saw consume the a.s.syrians? _Who_, they cried in their terror--_Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?_

We are familiar with Isaiah's fundamental G.o.d-with-us, and how it was spoken not for mercy only, but for judgement (chap. viii.). If _G.o.d-with-us_ meant love with us, salvation with us, it meant also holiness with us, judgement with us, the jealousy of G.o.d breathing upon what is impure, false and proud. Isaiah felt this so hotly, that his sense of it has broken out into some of the fieriest words in all prophecy. In his younger days he told the citizens not _to provoke the eyes of G.o.d's glory_, as if Heaven had fastened on their life two gleaming orbs, not only to pierce them with its vision, but to consume them with its wrath. Again, in the lowering cloud of calamity he had seen _lips of indignation, a tongue as a devouring fire_, and in the overflowing stream which finally issued from it the hot _breath of the Almighty_. These are unforgettable descriptions of the ceaseless activity of Divine righteousness in the life of man. They set our imaginations on fire with the prophet's burning belief in this. But they are excelled by another, more frequently used by Isaiah, wherein he likens the holiness of G.o.d to an universal and constant fire. To Isaiah life was so penetrated by the active justice of G.o.d, that he described it as bathed in fire, as blown through with fire. Righteousness was no mere doctrine to this prophet: it was the most real thing in history; it was the presence which pervaded and explained all phenomena. We shall understand the difference between Isaiah and his people if we have ever for our eyes' sake looked at a great conflagration through a coloured gla.s.s which allowed us to see the solid materials--stone, wood and iron--but prevented us from perceiving the flames and s.h.i.+mmering heat.

To look thus is to see pillars, lintels and cross-beams twist and fall, crumble and fade; but how inexplicable the process seems! Take away the gla.s.s, and everything is clear. The fiery element is filling all the interstices, that were blank to us before, and beating upon the solid material. The heat becomes visible, s.h.i.+mmering even where there is no flame. Just so had it been with the sinners in Judah these forty years.

Their society and politics, individual fortunes and careers, personal and national habits--the home, the Church, the State--common outlines and shapes of life--were patent to every eye, but no man could explain the constant decay and diminution, because all were looking at life through a gla.s.s darkly. Isaiah alone faced life with open vision, which filled up for him the interstices of experience and gave terrible explanation to fate. It was a vision that nearly scorched the eyes out of him. Life as he saw it was steeped in flame--the glowing righteousness of G.o.d. Jerusalem was full _of the spirit of justice, the spirit of burning. The light of Israel is for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame._ The a.s.syrian empire, that vast erection which the strong hands of kings had reared, was simply their pyre, made ready for the burning. _For a Topheth is prepared of old; yea, for the king it is made ready; He hath made it deep and large; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of Jehovah, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it._[64] So Isaiah saw life, and flashed it on his countrymen. At last the gla.s.s fell from their eyes also, and they cried aloud, _Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?_ Isaiah replied that there is one thing which can survive the universal flame, and that is character: _He that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of fraud, that shaketh his hands from the holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from the hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from looking on evil, he shall dwell on high: his place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks: his bread shall be given him: his water shall be sure._

[64] Chaps. iv. 4; x.x.x. 33.

Isaiah's Vision of Fire suggests two thoughts to us.

1. Have we done well to confine our horror of the consuming fires of righteousness to the next life? If we would but use the eyes which Scripture lends us, the rifts of prophetic vision and awakened conscience by which the fogs of this world and of our own hearts are rent, we should see fires as fierce, a consumption as pitiless, about us here as ever the conscience of a startled sinner fearfully looked for across the grave. Nay, have not the fires, with which the darkness of eternity has been made lurid, themselves been kindled at the burnings of this life? Is it not because men have felt how hot this world was being made for sin that they have had a _certain fearful expectation of judgement and the fierceness of fire_? We shudder at the horrible pictures of h.e.l.l which some older theologians and poets have painted for us; but it was not morbid fancy, nor the barbarism of their age nor their own heart's cruelty that inspired these men. It was their hot honour for the Divine holiness; it was their experience of how pitiless to sin Providence is already in this life; it was their own scorched senses and affections--brands, as many honest men among them felt themselves, plucked from the burning. Our G.o.d _is_ a consuming fire--here as well as yonder. h.e.l.l has borrowed her glare from the imagination of men aflame with the real fieriness of life, and may be--more truly than of old--pictured as the dead and hollow cinder left by those fires, of which, as every true man's conscience is aware, this life is full. It was not h.e.l.l that created conscience; it was conscience that created h.e.l.l, and conscience was fired by the vision which fired Isaiah--of all life aglow with the righteousness of G.o.d--_G.o.d with us_, as He was with Jerusalem, _a spirit of burning and a spirit of justice_.

This is the pantheism of conscience, and it stands to reason. G.o.d is the one power of life. What can exist beside Him except what is like Him?

Nothing--sooner or later nothing but what is like Him. The will that is as His will, the heart that is pure, the character that is transparent--only these dwell with the everlasting fire, and burning with G.o.d, as the bush which Moses saw, are nevertheless not consumed.

Let us lay it to heart--Isaiah has nothing to tell us about h.e.l.l-fire, but a great deal about the pitiless justice of G.o.d in this life.

2. The second thought suggested by Isaiah's Vision of Life is a comparison of it with the theory of life which is fas.h.i.+onable to-day.

Isaiah's figure for life was a burning. Ours is a battle, and at first sight ours looks the truer. Seen through a formula which has become everywhere fas.h.i.+onable, life is a fierce and fascinating warfare.

Civilised thought, when asked to describe any form of life or to account for a death or survival, most monotonously replies, "The struggle for existence." The sociologist has borrowed the phrase from the biologist, and it is on everybody's lips to describe their idea of human life. It is uttered by the historian when he would explain the disappearance of this national type, the prevalence of that one. The economist traces depression and failures, the fatal fevers of speculation, the cruelties and bad humours of commercial life, to the same source. A merchant with profits lessening and failure before him relieves his despair and apologizes to his pride with the words, "It is all due to compet.i.tion."

Even character and the spiritual graces are sometimes set down as results of the same material process. Some have sought to deduce from it all intelligence, others more audaciously all ethics; and it is certain that in the silence of men's hearts after a moral defeat there is no excuse more frequently offered to conscience by will than that the battle was too hot.

But fascinating as life is when seen through this formula, does not the formula act on our vision precisely as the gla.s.s we supposed, which when we look through it on a conflagration shows us the solid matter and the changes through which this pa.s.ses, but hides from us the real agent? One need not deny the reality of the struggle for existence, or that its results are enormous. We struggle with each other, and affect each other for good and for evil, sometimes past all calculation. But we do not fight in a vacuum. Let Isaiah's vision be the complement of our own feeling. We fight in an atmosphere that affects every one of us far more powerfully than the opposing wits or wills of our fellow-men. Around us and through us, within and without as we fight, is the all-pervading righteousness of G.o.d; and it is far oftener the effects of this which we see in the falls and the changes of life than the effects of our struggle with each other, enormous though these may be. On this point there is an exact parallel between our days and the days of Isaiah. Then the politicians of Judah, looking through their darkened gla.s.s at life, said, Life is simply a war in which the strongest prevail, a game which the most cunning win. So they made fast their alliances, and were ready to meet the a.s.syrian, or they fled in panic before him, according as Egypt or he seemed the stronger. Isaiah saw that with a.s.syrian and Jew another Power was present--the real reason of every change in politics, collapse or crash in either of the empires--the active righteousness of G.o.d. a.s.syrian and Jew had not only to contend with each other. They were at strife with Him. We now see plainly that Isaiah was right. Far more operative than the intrigues of politicians or the pride of a.s.syria, because it used these simply as its mines and its fuel, was the law of righteousness, the spiritual force which is as impalpable as the atmosphere, yet strong to burn and try as a furnace seven times heated.

And Isaiah is equally right for to-day. As we look at life through our fas.h.i.+onable formula it does seem a ma.s.s of struggle, in which we catch only now and then a glimpse of the decisions of righteousness, but the prevailing lawlessness of which we do not hesitate to make the reason of all that happens, and in particular the excuse of our own defeats. We are wrong. Righteousness is not an occasional spark; righteousness is the atmosphere. Though our dull eyes see it only now and then strike into flame in the battle of life, and take for granted that it is but the flash of meeting wits or of steel on steel, G.o.d's justice is everywhere, pervasive and pitiless, affecting the combatants far more than they have power to affect one another.

We shall best learn the truth of this in the way the sinners in Jerusalem learned it--each man first looking into himself. _Who among us shall dwell with the everlasting burnings?_ Can we attribute all our defeats to the opposition that was upon us at the moment they occurred?

When our temper failed, when our charity relaxed, when our resoluteness gave way, was it the hotness of debate, was it the pressure of the crowd, was it the sneer of the scorner, that was to blame? We all know that these were only the occasions of our defeats. Conscience tells us that the cause lay in a slothful or self-indulgent heart, which the corrosive atmosphere of Divine righteousness had been consuming, and which, sapped and hollow by its effect, gave way at every material shock.

With the knowledge that conscience gives us, let us now look at a kind of figure which must be within the horizon of all of us. Once it was the most commanding stature among its fellows, the straight back and broad brow of a king of men. But now what is the last sight of him that will remain with us, flung out there against the evening skies of his life? A bent back (we speak of character), a stooping face, the shrinking outlines of a man ready to collapse. It was not the struggle for existence that killed him, for he was born to prevail in it. It was the atmosphere that told on him. He carried in him that on which the atmosphere could not but tell. A low selfishness or pa.s.sion inhabited him, and became the predominant part of him, so that his outward life was only its sh.e.l.l; and when the fire of G.o.d at last pierced this, he was as thorns cut down, that are burned in the fire.

We can explain much with the outward eye, but the most of the explanation lies beyond. Where our knowledge of a man's life ends, the great meaning of it often only begins. All the vacancy beyond the outline we see is full of that meaning. G.o.d is there, and _G.o.d is a consuming fire_. Let us not seek to explain lives only by what we see of them, the visible strife of man with man and nature. It is the invisible that contains the secret of what is seen. We see the shoulders stoop, but not the burden upon them; the face darken, but look in vain for what casts the shadow; the light sparkle in the eye, but cannot tell what star of hope its glance has caught. And even so when we behold fortune and character go down in the warfare of this world, we ought to remember that it is not always the things we see that are to blame for the fall, but that awful flame which, unseen by common man, has been revealed to the prophets of G.o.d.

Righteousness and retribution, then, are an atmosphere--not lines or laws that we may happen to stumble upon, not explosives, that, being touched, burst out on us, but the atmosphere--always about us and always at work, invisible and yet more mighty than aught we see. _G.o.d, in whom we live and move and have our being, is a consuming fire._

CHAPTER XXII.

_THE RABSHAKEH; OR, LAST TEMPTATIONS OF FAITH._

ISAIAH x.x.xvi. (701 B.C.).

It remains for us now to follow in chaps. x.x.xvi., x.x.xvii., the historical narrative of the events, the moral results of which we have seen so vivid in chap. x.x.xiii.--the perfidious return of the a.s.syrians to Jerusalem after Hezekiah had bought them off and their final disappearance from the Holy Land.

This historical narrative has also its moral. It is not annals, but drama. The whole moral of Isaiah's prophesying is here flung into a duel between champions of the two tempers, which we have seen in perpetual conflict throughout his book. The two tempers are--on Isaiah's side an absolute and unselfish faith in G.o.d, Sovereign of the world and Saviour of His people; on the side of the a.s.syrians a bare, brutal confidence in themselves, in human cleverness and success, a vaunting contempt of righteousness and of pity. The main interest of Isaiah's book has consisted in the way these tempers oppose each other, and alternately influence the feeling of the Jewish community. That interest is now to culminate in the scene which brings near such thorough representatives of the two tempers as Isaiah and the Rabshakeh, with the crowd of wavering Jews between. Most strikingly, a.s.syria's last a.s.sault is not of force, but of speech, delivering upon faith the subtle arguments of the worldly temper; and as strikingly, while all official religion and power of State stand helpless against them, these arguments are met by the bare word of G.o.d. In this mere statement of the situation, however, we perceive that much more than the quarrel of a single generation is being decided. This scene is a parable of the everlasting struggle between faith and force, with doubt and despair between them. In the clever, self-confident, persuasive personage with two languages on his tongue and an army at his back; in the fluttered representatives of official religion who meet him and are afraid of the effect of his speech on the common people; in the ranks of dispirited men who hear the dialogue from the wall; in the sensitive king so aware of faith, and yet so helpless to bring faith forth to peace and triumph; and, in the background of the whole situation, the serene prophet of G.o.d, grasping only G.o.d's word, and by his own steadfastness carrying the city over the crisis and proving that faith indeed can be _the substance of things hoped for_--we have a phase of the struggle ordained unto every generation of men, and which is as fresh to-day as when Rabshakeh played the cynic and the scribes and elders filled the part of nervous defenders of the faith, under the walls of faith's fortress, two thousand five hundred years ago.

THE RABSHAKEH.

This word is a Hebrew transliteration of the a.s.syrian Rab-sak, _chief of the officers_. Though there is some doubt on the point, we may naturally presume from the duties he here discharges that the Rabshakeh was a civilian--probably the civil commissioner or political officer attached to the a.s.syrian army, which was commanded, according to 2 Kings xviii.

16, by the Tartan or commander-in-chief himself.

In all the Bible there is not a personage more clever than this Rabshakeh, nor more typical. He was an able deputy of the king who sent him, but he represented still more thoroughly the temper of the civilisation to which he belonged. There is no word of this man which is not characteristic. A clever, fluent diplomatist, with the traveller's knowledge of men and the conqueror's contempt for them, the Rabshakeh is the product of a victorious empire like the a.s.syrian, or, say, like the British. Our services sometimes turn out the like of him--a creature able to speak to natives in their own language, full and ready of information, mastering the surface of affairs at a glance, but always baffled by the deeper tides which sway nations; a deft player upon party interests and the superficial human pa.s.sions, but unfit to touch the deep springs of men's religion and patriotism. Let us speak, however, with respect of the Rabshakeh. From his rank (Sayce calls him the Vizier), as well as from the cleverness with which he explains what we know to have been the policy of Sennacherib towards the populations of Syria, he may well have been the inspiring mind at this time of the great a.s.syrian empire--Sennacherib's Bismarck.

The Rabshakeh had strutted down from the great centre of civilisation, with its temper upon him, and all its great resources at his back, confident to twist these poor provincial tribes round his little finger.

How petty he conceived them we infer from his never styling Hezekiah _the king_. This was to be an occasion for the Rabshakeh's own glorification. Jerusalem was to fall to his clever speeches. He had indeed the army behind him, but the work to be done was not the rough work of soldiers. All was to be managed by him, the civilian and orator.

This fellow, with his two languages and clever address, was to step out in front of the army and finish the whole business.

The Rabshakeh spoke extremely well. With his first words he touched the sore point of Judah's policy: her trust in Egypt. On this he spoke like a very Isaiah. But he showed a deeper knowledge of Judah's internal affairs, and a subtler deftness in using it, when he referred to the matter of the altars. Hezekiah had abolished the high places in all parts of the land, and gathered the people to the central sanctuary in Jerusalem. The a.s.syrian knew that a number of Jews must look upon this disestablishment of religion in the provinces as likely to incur Jehovah's displeasure and turn Him against them. Therefore he said, _But if thou say unto me, We trust in Jehovah our G.o.d, is not that He whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath taken away, and hath said to Judah and to Jerusalem, Ye shall wors.h.i.+p before this altar?_ And then, having shaken their religious confidence, he made sport of their military strength. And finally he boldly a.s.serted, _Jehovah said unto me, Go up against this land and destroy it_. All this shows a master in diplomacy, a most clever demagogue. The scribes and elders felt the edge, and begged him to sheathe it in a language unknown to the common people. But he, conscious of his power, spoke the more boldly, addressing himself directly to the poorer sort of the garrison, on whom the siege would press most heavily. His second speech to them is a good ill.u.s.tration of the policy pursued by a.s.syria at this time towards the cities of Palestine. We know from the annals of Sennacherib that his customary policy, to seduce the populations of a hostile State from allegiance to their rulers, had succeeded in other cases; and it was so plausibly uttered in this case, that it seemed likely to succeed again.

To the common soldiers on the walls, with the prospect of being reduced to the foul rations of a prolonged siege (ver. 12), Sennacherib's amba.s.sador offers rich and equal property and enjoyment. _Make a treaty with me, and come out to me, and eat every one of his vine and every one of his fig tree, and drink ye every one of the water of his cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of corn and grapes, a land of bread-corn and orchards. Every one_!--it is a most subtle a.s.sault upon the discipline, comrades.h.i.+p and patriotism of the common soldiers by the promises of a selfish, sensuous equality and individualism. But then the speaker's native cynicism gets the better of him--it is not possible for an a.s.syrian long to play the part of clemency--and, with a flash of scorn, he asks the sad men upon the walls whether they really believe that Jehovah can save them: _Hath any of the G.o.ds of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the King of a.s.syria, ... that Jehovah should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?_ All the range of their feelings does he thus run through, seeking with sharp words to snap each cord of faith in G.o.d, of honour to the king and love of country. Had the Jews heart to answer him, they might point out the inconsistency between his claim to have been sent by Jehovah and the contempt he now pours upon their G.o.d. But the inconsistency is characteristic. The a.s.syrian has some acquaintance with the Jewish faith; he makes use of its articles when they serve his purpose, but his ultimatum is to tear them to shreds in their believers' faces. He treats the Jews as men of culture still sometimes treat barbarians, first scornfully humouring their faith and then savagely trampling it under foot.