BOOKS.

THE SPEAKER'S COMMENTARY ; ISAIAH AND JERE MIAII.*

NELSON, in reporting the rout of a Neapolitan army, said, "They lost little honour in the battle, for though they lost all they had, that was very little." And the story recurs to us on reading the Commentary on Isaiah in this volume; for we might say that small as have been the merits of the previous volumes, the demerit of the first half of this one is greater than could have been expected even in the Speaker's Commentary. Whatever the promises in the original prospectus, every real student of the Bible knows that he need not look to that Commentary for any thoroughly honest criticism, such as is available in all good commentaries on the classical literatures. Orthodoxy, not truth, is, we might say avowedly,t the first object of the editors and contributors. In as far as orthodoxy coincides with truth, as it does in the main, these commentators uphold the truth with more or less, but generally considerable, learning and ability, though, being clergymen, it is mostly the homiletic side of the truth, with but indifferent appreciation of the great historical characteristics of Jehovah's chosen nation ; but wherever modern science has shown that the old orthodox notions and phrases are not true in their literal, and still popular, acceptation—as in reference to the Creation, the Deluge, the longevity of the Antediluvians, and many other unverified traditions—these orthodox errors are dressed up in language made to look as like as possible to that of honest criticism within the lines of modern thought and know- ledge, but really meaning nothing, after all. Henry VIII. com- plained to his Parliament of "the fathers and teachers of the spiritually, who were either too stiff in their old mumpsimus or too busy and curious in their new sumpsimus ;" and our "bishops and clergy of the Anglican Church" stand stiffly to

The Holy Bible, iv., with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary by Bishops and ether Clergy of Me Anglican Church. Edited by F. C. Cook, M.A., Canon of Exeter, &c. VoL V. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations. London : John Murray. 1875.

t We might say "avowedly," because when the Commentary was quoted in the House of Commons insalebste on Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister, Canon Cook wrote to the Time" I should not have felt justified in Interfering with the liberty of a contributor who has studied the subject re- sult on his personal authority, unless, indeed, the conclusion to Which he might be led were opposed to the law or doctrine of the Christian Church: How far this can be reconciled with the loth Article of the Church of England we will not decide, but it certainly makes orthodoxy, not truth, the final interpreter of Scripture.

the old mumpsimus, while at the same time they employ all their resources to enable them to utter it with a sound so like the new sumpsimus, that the ear shall not easily detect the trick. But the present Commentary on Isaiah is bad, even within the narrowest limits of orthodoxy. Even Mr. Birks's Commentary, which we once thought to have been rightly refused a place in this work, is so much better, that we cannot conceive why it should have been rejected in favour of such a substitute.

It would not have been unreasonable to expect that, in a com- mentary on the Bible, the writings of the prophet whose name stands first in the Canon, and is that of the greatest of the prophets, should be so explained as to throw light on the ques- tion what order of men the prophets were, and what part they took in the guidance of their nation and its rulers, while claiming to be sent by Jehovah himself, and by him "set over the nations, and over the kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, and to build, and to plant." It might have been expected that when the commentator had to deal with the actually recorded discourses of the greatest of these religious and political advisers of their sovereigns and their coun- trymen, delivered during fifty years most eventful in the history not only of his own nation but of the world, he would have shown in some clear and coherent manner how these discourses do illustrate and fill out with life and meaning the scanty and dry abstracts of the history which now alone remain to us, whether in the Hebrew or the Assyrian and Egyptian records.- It might have been expected that when the book under examina- tion presents a question of criticism—as to the authorship of cer- tain portions of it—which is far more interesting for its practical no less than its literary results than the like questions as to Homer and Plato, the reader should have had the whole case stated fully, and the arguments to which the critic was replying given fairly. That such things are possible, even to an orthodox commentator, we see in Dr. Payne Smith's Commentary on Jere- miah, which forms the latter half of this volume, and in which he does handle his subject with some tolerable interest in, and recognition of, that which is, in truth, the characteristic of Hebrew prophecy. But though Dr. Kay gives us some paragraphs in his Introduction which sound like "the new sumpsimus," yet, when we come to the Commentary itself, we find that if he has any conception at all of Isaiah as an actual man, and not merely as a vehicle for conveying religious instruction, it seems to be that he was—while possessing the power of making specific predictions which now take rank with miracles as evidences of the Christian Revelation—in other respects little better than a pious revivalist, " uttering the message of salvation in wondrous richness " to the people around him, and speaking in allegories the discovery of which by Dr. Kay we will not criticise further than by giving an example or two :—

4, These verses [16-24 of chap. iii., denouncing the fashions of the Jewish ladies] were, no doubt, applicable, in a literal sense, to the ladies of Jerusalem. The worldliness of the people was reflected in the luxury of the female; and the costly variety of their robes and ornaments, some of them, it would seem, imitated from the sacerdotal vestments, and others certainly borrowed from idolatry. But that a deeper mean- ing lay beneath the literal may be inferred from ther relation in which these verses stand to verses 25, 26. The sudden transition from the daughters of Zion' to Zion herself is very unnatural, unless we observe that, under the description of the female attire, there was an allegory aimed at the Levitical Church as a whole. The grounds for thinking this to be the case are very strong : 1. The phrase 'daughters of Zion' occurs only in iii. 16, 17, iv. 4, and Song of Solomon iii. 2, where the ' daughters of Zion ' -are invited to see the coronation of King Solomon," dm.

Again, chapter vii. 18 :— Who Assyrian armies [compared by Isaiah to bees] also were pro- vidential agents, employed to carry off from the hills of Canaan sweet honey, which should ' enlighten the eyes' (1 Sam. xiv. 29) of fainting humanity."

And again, in chap. sail. 15, where other commentators see the prophet's denunciation of the leader of the worldly party which had so long controlled Hezekiah, and his declaration that the crisis of its overthrow by the God-fearing men represented by Eliakim was at hand, Dr. Kay finds only an allegory :— " Whatever may have been the history of the actual Shebna and Eliakim of Hezekiah's time (of which we are ignorant), the names must here be looked upon as symbolising the two Dispensations."

This "allegorical view" of Shebna and Eliakim is proved by eight "observations," which we leave our readers to refer to or to imagine. We have said that this commentator has no sense of the historical importance of the times of Isaiah, but not to be unjust, we must give the following passage, only premising that two of the dates are impossible to be verified, and a third is at least very doubtful :—

" A few words may be added respecting the time at which this great prophet was raised up. The following facts show that it was a remark- able epoch, whether as regards Israel or the world at large. 1. The historical event which stands in the centre of the book—the destruction of Sennacherib's army—took place in 710 B.C. Now this year is exactly midway between Israel's complete occupation of Canaan (1445 B.C.) and John the Baptist's announcement that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand (A.D. 25). And again, if we bisect the interval between the first erection of the Tabernacle at Sinai (1490 B.C.) and the burning of the Temple in A.D. 70, which was the end of the Levitical dispensation, the middle point will fall in the same year. 2. This same year, 710, is also the starting-point of a great movement in the Gentile world. In that year, so far as can be ascertained," &o.

All—we believe we may now say all—philologists, English, French, Italian, German, are agreed that the Assyrian inscriptions can be deciphered, and that, in fact, their main contents are actually known ; but here we read :—

"Alter a minute examination of some of the works of the best Assyriologists (as M. Oppert, M. Menant, Mr. Norris, and Mr. Smith), the present writer is satisfied that the whole process of decipherment has not yet got beyond the tentative stage. In particular, as regards the names of Assyrian kings, they have not been, properly speaking, dis- covered in the inscriptions, but rather read into them. They were found, because it was assumed that they occurred there ; ,parce qu'on avait des raisons do croire qu'ils so rotrouvaient dans un groupe donne.' Results so obtained must undergo much patient verification, before they cease to be hypothetical. For the present, then (and probably for a long time to come), the decipherments cannot be held to furnish materials of authentic history."

It must have been a "minute" examination indeed on which this wise and modest judgment rests. We are re- minded of Dr. Schrader's observation, on this very point of the kings' names, that we must not complain if the layman shakes his head ; yet that if he would take the trouble to look a little deeper into the matter he might find that the Assyriologists know more than he supposes. And we are glad to say that Dr. Payne Smith, in his introduction to Jeremiah, shows that he can appreciate the value of the Inscriptions as " materials of authentic history," while we may add that they throw still more light on the history of Isaiah's times than on those of Jeremiah.

On the disputed question of the authorship of the latter and some of the earlier chapters of the book, Dr. Kay shows both Hebrew scholarship and literary ability in his examination of the

"literary evidence" in favour of the Isaian authorship. But he entirely overlooks all the real and weighty arguments for supposing those portions of the book to have been written by some other prophet in the time of the Captivity. As has been said more than once in the Spectator, the question is one of great obscurity and difficulty, so much is there to be said on both sides ; nor has it yet been thoroughly sifted out by the opposing critics. But no approach is made to such a settlement by those who are content, like the commentator before us, to state their own side, and mis- state, or leave unstated, and therefore unanswered, that of their opponents. It is not true that " undoubtedly the main reason [for questioning the authorship] was the a priori assump- tion " that " it is inconceivable that God should com- municate to man any foreknowledge or prevision of future events." The a priori assumption (if so it is to be called) -is, that with this one exception, all Hebrew prophecy, not excluding that of the books of Daniel and the Apocalypse, takes its standing-point in the prophet's own times, and rests its predictions of the future on that basis of the present ; and while this would be true no less of the later chapters of Isaiah than of all other prophecy, if those chapters were written at the time of the Captivity, it is necessary, in order to vindicate their

earlier date, to frame a special and exceptional hypothesis as to the nature of prophecy, which is applicable to them only,—the hypothesis, namely (in the words of the Dean of Westminster), of "the ecstatic transportation of the earlier prophet out of his own time into the middle of the next century." The question is not whether God could give, but whether the prophet Isaiah did possess this exceptional power ; and it can only be decided on the evidence, which, as we have said, is very conflicting, and not by abusing your opponents as " unbelievers," and calling their investigations "naturalistic."

It is with some hesitation that we have inflicted on our readers so long an account of a book to a large portion of which the epithet of "silly" is more suitable than any other. But it seems right to protest against such a Commentary being offered to the laity by " bishops and clergy of the Anglican Church," with the under- standing that they may expect it to be—in the words of the ori- ginal prospectus—" more complete and accurate than any now accessible to English readers." We venture to say that it is less explanatory, and altogether of less worth, than any other modern English commentary on Isaiah,—even if we limit ourselves to the strictly orthodox Henderson, Alexander, Birks, and the trans- lation of Delitzsch. •