BOOKS.
MR. CHEY.NE'S BOOK OF ISAIAH.*
THE character of Messrs. Macmillan, as publishers of books of more than ordinary merit, gave us expectations when we saw this volume announced by them, which we are obliged to confess have not been realized. Mr. Cheyne is a Hebrew scholar of reputation, and we do not question that the writing of every part of his work has been, as he tells us in the preface, accompanied by independ- ent researches ; but we prefer hia philology to his exegesis, and could wish that he had given us an enlarged and completed examination of the whole text of Isaiah, on the plan of his "Notes and Criticisms" on that text, published two years since, and left to others the historical and theological investigation of the sub- ject-matter of the prophet's writings. For though our author does not, in his earlier work, abstain from the latter kind of criti- cism, he distinguishes between the two, so that his readers may take the one and leave the other ; whereas in the later work, which we have now before us, he gives us little more than the results at which he has arrived from the combination of the two processes. And these results are not satisfactory, not what we really want, if English criticism is to carry inquiry beyond the point to which German learning has brought it, or in directions in which the Germans give no adequate help. For Mr. Cheyne, though no doubt in intention an independent critic and com- mentator, is in fact over-mastered by his German authorities, and especially by the great German scholar and critic, Ewald. His " chronological arrangement " of the prophecies of Isaiah is, with some unimportant exceptions, the arrangement of Ewald ; and we need not tell the student how large a part of the interpretation of the whole book must be affected by the acceptance of that arrangement as though it were historical. If he does accept it as historical, and reads the text in its light, a whole series of facts will present themselves as belonging to the times at which the several prophecies are thus supposed to have been uttered, and the text becomes the prophets' elucidation of those facts for the practical edification of their hearers. But if he holds .as we do, that any such chronological arrangement is for the most part merely fanciful, he will believe that its accompany- ing assumption of historical facts is fanciful too, and he will— with a humbler estimate of the limits of possible knowledge in the matter—examine the text by a different method of investigation, -and with the certainty of different results. The commentator, be he even so great as Ewald himself, who begins by recon- structing his text on the basis of a chronology restored by himself, has departed from the first principles of sound criti- cism, and inevitably gives not only fanciful but actually erroneous interpretations of his text. This chronological arrangement forms, in fact, the greater part of the commentary before us. The treat- ment of details is too slight and occasional to be of much value to the student, and we find nothing to supply its place in the introduc- tory sections, whether relating to the whole book or to particular prophecies. What is wanted at the present stage which the enormous mass of literature upon Isaiah has reached is a really thoughtful English commentary, including an English investigation and judg- ment upon all the vexed questions of authorship of certain por- tions of the book. A reproduction of German investigations, or, still less valuable, of German conclusions on these points, whether orthodox or rationalist, is not wanted ; and least of all do we need a reproduction, or copy, of Ewald's work in English. Let us not be thought to under-rate Ewald. We heartily adopt the words of Mr. Cheyne's preface, that " Ewald's work on the Prophets is certainly the most important contribution ever made to the study of this subject ;" but Ewald has a weak as well as a strong side, -and unfortunately Mr. Cheyne has followed him in his weakness, and not where he is strong. What Bunsen has said of "the Protestant Critical school in Germany," that " what they know how to handle best is thought, the ideal part of history, what is farthest from their grasp is reality," — this is pre-eminently true of Ewald, as even his own countrymen admit. Ewald is 4‘ of imagination all compact," and when he is handling such a subject as the nature of Prophecy, we feel that he is really penetrating into, and discovering to us, the human and divine springs of that bygone form of Hebrew life and action. His genius enables him to body forth the forms of things unknown any longer to us as actual existences, but which, when so bodied forth, we can see and feel must have once had such an actual existence, • The Book of Isaiah Chronologically Arranged: an Amended Version, with Historical and Criti:al Introductions and Explanatory Yates. By T. K. Cheyne, M.A., Fellow of Eanlot College, Oxford. London: Macmillan and Co. 1870.
and can understand how they must have been true and reasonable forms of our common humanity. But Ewald is not less practised in giving a local habitation and a name to " airy nothings," when he passes from philosophical to historical and critical inquiries. Here, too, as in his profound scholarship, his discoveries are often alike real and important ; but they are, on the other hand, often only "airy nothings," with no reality.
And while the volume before us gives us but too much of the fanciful criticism of Ewald, as of other German commentators, it omits, to a strange extent, to make available to the English reader the really valuable part of their investigations, philoso- phical or historical. Nothing can be more jejune than Mr. Cheyne's introductory sections on the prophetic career and writings of Isaiah. Nor does he give us any new light on the point on which, more than on any other, new light is wanted, —that of the disputed authorship of certain portions of the Book of Isaiah. For though Ewald pronounces this question to be so completely settled by all competent critics as to need no farther consideration, not only is the Isaian authorship of the whole book maintained against Ewald and those who think with him on this point, by many of the most recent German critics,—and this not altogether on what their opponents would hold to be supersti- tious and uncritical grounds,—but the question has especial need to be thoroughly reinvestigated and discussed by English minds. The Germans give us precious stones, and pretty glass beads, which seem to them of equal value ; and it is we who must judge for ourselves which are, and which are not, worth having. But then it must be our judgment, arrived at by English methods of examining and weighing evidence ; and not the adoption of the judgment of German authorities on either side. Without making too much of the reductio ad absurdum. which, put- ting together the conclusions of all the critics as to the spurious- ness of various portions of Isaiah, leaves us only five chapters and six verses (chaps. i.,3-9, xvii., xx., xxxiii., xxxi., xxxiii.) as genuine, we may say that the whole of this so-called Higher Criticism, in the forms in which it has hitherto been reproduced by English commentators and critics, as to the non-genuineness of certain portions of the Book of Isaiah, is questionable, and most of it clearly untenable, if tried by such tests as we should apply to the like criticism upon any other book. But the Bible has been set up to be worshipped, not to be read and understood ; and certain of the conclusions of its uncritical believers have in the course of many ages become so inveterate, that they have in the oddest way retained their hold on the minds of those who have abandoned the belief itself out of which they have grown. Thus, in times wanting either in historical feeling or critical faculty, but full of religious earnest- ness, the belief grew up that the Hebrew prophets habitually uttered miraculoua predictions in the fulfilment of which was the evidence that they were teachers sent by God. And now that a nobler as well as truer conception of the character of the prophets and the nature of prophecy has been formed, at once more reli- gious, more philosophical, and more in accordance with history, it is yet constantly assumed that Uwe miraculous predictions are in the books in which men have so long declared that they found them. It is assumed that they are there, but the explana- tion is that they were uttered after or contemporaneously with the events, and not by the prophets to whom they are attributed. The previous question, whether the miraculous predictions exist at all, whether there is any sufficient reason for calling them miraculous, even if they were uttered by those to whom they have been hitherto attributed, is never asked. The rationalist commentator, no less than the orthodox, is but too often content with the position which the natural philosopher accepted before the days of Bacon, in which the facts are assumed on popular report without actual observation, and then ingenious and elaborate explanations of them developed by the logic of the philosopher. Take, for instance, the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Isaiah. The old commentators found in this prophecy a miraculous prediction by Isaiah of the taking of Babylon by Cyrus, nearly two hundred years before the event ; and the modern critics of whom we speak at once accept one-half of this conclusion, namely, that the text contains an historically accurate and detailed description of that event, though they proceed to draw the inference—not that it is miraculous, but—that it was written by a contemporary, and not by Isaiah. Thus, Mr. Cheyne merely observes that " the date of the prophecy [in question] is determined by its contents, which relate to the march of Cyrus against Babylon," while he drops out of the text without notice the words, "The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see," which are certainly a part of the text, and of its most ancient versions, as they have come down to us, and
which it is surely beyond the right of critical philology thus summarily to deal with. Conjectural emendations should be at least stated as such. But why, we ask, do the commentators agree in thus assuming that the text contains this historical description of the times of Cyrus? Is the exposition of Grotius, who saw in this and the like prophecies denunciations of the Babylonish Empire of Isaiah's own time, not worth looking at and considering ? We cannot see why this view of Grotius, if worked out by the modern methods of accurate criticism which scholars employ with Latin and Greek books, and with the aid of the new light afforded by the cuneiform inscriptions, should not be found adequate to meet the difficulties of the case, both as to the -chapters before us, and also as to all the rest of the disputed prophecies. The Dean of Westminster, in his Lectures on the Jewish Church (2nd series, p. 480), thinks the argument of a writer whom he there quotes " very strong for supposing that by the ' King' in Isaiah xiv. 4 is meant the King of Assyria," that is, Sennacherib : we have not space to reproduce that argument at length ; but if it is worth so much, it is worthy of consideration whether it may not be carried farther. It is premature to pro- nounce a final judgment on a matter which has not yet been fully argued out by opposing advocates, but that the question of the genuineness of the prophecies of Isaiah does need to be investigated far more thoroughly than it has yet been we cannot doubt. And unsatisfactory as the orthodox theory of miraculous prediction is, whether we look at it from the side of reason or from that of fact —the fact that so many of the predictions are either vague or unfulfilled—we confess that in the hands of such men as Vitringa, Alexander, or Delitzsch, it seems a less unreal and unsubstantial theory than that of the pseudo-Isaiah, the Great Unnamed, or " the five unknown prophets in Babylon," on whom we come—not with- out a shudder at such ghastly apparitions—in Mr. Cheyne's volume, and of whom those who will may there read, and may learn, if they can, to believe in their flesh-and-blood existence, nay, even to perceive how " the manner in which they unfold their common message is marked by a striking individuality." To us they are inexpressibly unreal and dreary ; we still hold to the grand old Isaiah of our fathers, though his features may have been made a little indistinct in the lapse of ages, and by an appreciation not -always as critical as hearty.
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