SIR EDWARD STRACHEY ON JEWISH 1TISTORY AND
roLrncs.*
[SECOND NOTICE.]
AVE have said that Sir Edward Strachey's conception of the prophetic character seems to us unsatisfactory, and especially so in his partial identification of that faculty for vision which is (to use a photographic term) a sensitive surface for receiving on itself the clear impression of divine and human character, with that " imaginative " and " creative " power of the orator and the poet by the help of which alone, no doubt, the prophet wields his most intense and widest influence over human society, but which would not constitute him a prophet at all without the humbler receptive faculty. Isaiah himself, indeed, was at once a great seer and a great poet,—perhaps the greatest of all poets, —but the two characters are very different in kind and not necessarily united, and it is not uncommon to find them separated both in Hebrew and other literatures. Samuel, for instance, appears to have been a great prophet in the sense of having shown very keen discernment of the moral purposes of God, and of what was good and what was evil in the strangely mingled heart of man but there is little or no trace in him of the imaginative and poetical faculties which were combined with this same insight in the mind of Isaiah ; and the same must be said of Socrates, unless we credit him with the imaginative power of Plato's probably more than half-misleading picture of him ; on the other hand, it would be very difficult to find in a great many really magnificent orators and poets any trace of this delicate impressibility to the moral purposes of God and the moral character of man. Samuel's vision, -while still a child, of the end awaiting Eli's sons has all the external marks at least of genuineness ; and the promptin,gs of "the demon" of Socrates have precisely the same character of extreme modesty in the occasions of them, and matter-of-factness in the modes. In Isaiah, no doubt, such visions were combined with the most won- derful faculty of imaginative exposition, but it seems to us a mis- take, and to lead to further mistakes, to treat the foundation of his prophetic power as dependent on that sublime imagination which we, at least, regard only as the instrument whereby he popu- larised and impressed on the Jewish world the spiritual impres- sions he had received.
However, this idea of Sir Edward Strachey's that prophecy should in some way be connected with the imaginative gifts of modern men of genius seems to us to have led to two slight * Jewish History and Polities in the Times of Sargon awl Bennacheribr an Inquiry into the Historical Meaning and Purpose of the Prophecies of Isaiah. By Sir E. Strachey, Bart. Second Edition, revised, with Additions. London: W. labister and Co. misconstructions of the book with which he was dealing,—one an effort to explain away that for which no analogy can be found in the historical intuitions of men like Luther or Burke ; and the other, an effort to compensate this attenuation of the super- natural predictions of Isaiah by assigning even more mysterious and hidden meaning than is reasonable to Isaiah's language, in cases where his prophecies admit of being characterised as a moral commentary of the same kind, though of a much higher than the same grade, as that of reformers like Luther or Burke. In speaking, however, of this apparent exaggeration of the eloquent mystery of Isaiah's prophecies by our author, we are not, of course, referring to his view of Isaiah's delineations of the perfect king and the perfect servant of God. Though we believe, with Sir Edward Strachey, that these were suggested to Isaiah by hopes proper to his own day and generation, and that, at all events during the earlier part of his life, he quite expected them to be fulfilled in his own life-time, we also agree with him that they arose out of a real divine inspiration, which rendered them infinitely more applicable to Christ than they ever could. have been to the best of mere human kings or servants of God. The vision of the King who was to "reign in righteousness,' and "rule in judgment," to beji hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place or ti e shadow of a great rock in a weary land,"—of him who was to be called "Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace," was not and could not have been realised in Hezekiah, though it may probably have been from the hopes for Hezekiah that Isaiah's vision took its origin. In relation to these visions our author is obviously right in assuming that inspiration overleapt the bounds of what was then possible, and delineated him in whom "the thoughts of many hearts" were to be revealed, rather than any Jewish prince ; and Sir Edward Strachey's commentary on these pro- phecies is both wise and eloquent. But what we do refer to is Sir Edward Strachey's attempt to magnify the imaginative marvels of the mere accidents of Isaiah's language, while rather explain- ing away, as it seems to us, the true gift of more than ordinary human foresight which he hot only claimed, but probably had. It seems clear, indeed, that Isaiah sometimes prophesied what did not happen; in the case of Hezekia,h's illness, he himself within a few' days withdrew his prophecy of Hezekiah's death, and substituted a prophecy of the prolongation of his life for fifteen years. There is no adequate evidence, again, that the prophecy of the laying-waste of Moab, in the fifteenth chapter, was fulfilled, though Sir Edward Strachey thinks that Sennacherib's mention of a king of Moab as repairing to him (Sennacherib) in the neighbourhood of Tyre during his third campaign, to pay tribute, may imply a conquest of Moab by Assyria in the interval. Again, it is pretty certain that Isaiah's prophecy that "Egypt should serve Jehovah with Assyria" (chapter xix., v. 23) was never fulfilled in any sense which the words would convey to ordinary people, though there appears to be a trace of a treaty of peace between Egypt and Assyria (p. 213). But while we quite admit that if ever some of Isaiah's prophecies were fulfilled at all, the record of their fulfilment has perished, so that we cannot verify his power of prediction in relation to them, there still seem to be cases of real and important predictions so clear as not to admit of being explained away, either as due to the shrewd prognostic of a keen politician, or as due to that insight into the moral laws of the universe which properly belongs to the nature of a prophet. The first of such predictions is the assertion that before a child as yet unborn should be of the age of reason, "the land whose two kings thou feared shall be desolate," i.e., Syria and Samaria. Surely, neither Luther, nor Burke, nor Niebuhr, nor any other imaginative statesman, would have pre- dicted the result of a great war with confidence like that. The prophecy is the more remarkable because it is formally wit- nessed by two witnesses (chapter viii. 2), and on the child's - birth it is recast in the form that before the infant shall have knowledge to say, My father and my mother,' "the riches' of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria." That seems to us the kind of specific prediction which no man without something of the faculty of what is called second-sight could venture upon, and there is no doubt that it was fulfilled within three years. But Sir E. Strachey seems to us to make rather light of this prediction, while he com- pensates for doing so by making a great deal too much of one of the misinterpreted words which it contains. Everyone knows that the verse "a virgin shall conceive" has been regarded as an ex- press prediction of the supernatural birth of Christ. There is no justification for such a view. In the first place, the damse is to conceive and bear a son before the lands of Samaria and Syria are to be wasted. In the next, the Hebrew word used means, as Sir E. Strachey admits, damsel,' and not 'virgin' at all, and probably refers to Isaiah's wife. In the third place, there is no conceivable word which could apply to Christ, except the name Immanuel to be given to the child,— (to whom apparently it was either not actually given, or given only as a secondary name); and the name was intended only as a sign that God was visiting his people in giving them the sign, not specially that he was in the child in question. Yet Sir Edward Strachey remarks :— "If then we find these to be sufficient grounds for thinking that Isaiah, an actual practical politician of the day in which he lived, could have now thought and spoken of the old promise of the Messiah as the true sign of God's deliverance of the land from its invaders, then we may not unreasonably return to the belief that such was his meaning. We do not escape all difficulty; but I think we have the difficulty of completely comprehending the life of prophecy, instead of that of being satisfied with its caput mortuum And if so, we may be content to say that in the vehemence of inspira- tion,Isaiah exclaims, 'Jehovah himself gives you for a sign the Mother and the Child,' and then returning to the scene before him, fuses into one image the birth of the Immanuel and that of his own child, and declares in direct reference to the latter, that before he has learnt to distinguish good from evil (come to years of discretion, as we say), he shall be sharing the general prosperity—the old Proverbial blessing—of his native land, which before then shall have seen the land of her present invaders—spoken of as one, because its kings were confederate—itself laid waste, after having first lost both those kings."
That seems to us making an eloquent mystery where there is no opening for one, solely because later generations have connected the passage, by a double blunder of mistranslation and historical confusion, with an event with which it had no connection at all. Yet while Sir E. Strachey makes so much of a word, he makes little of the remarkable prediction so curiously verified within three years of the prophecy :—
" In about three years from this time, Tiglath-Pileser overthrew the kingdom of Syria, killed Rezin, carried away the Damascenes and Syrians into Assyria and Media ; took several cities in the north of Israel and carried away the people of that part of the kingdom ; and Pekah's own assassination by Hoshea followed this devastation of his country."
Again, we believe that in the case of the sudden destruction of Sennacherib's army, another Isaihan prediction of the same kind, unquestionably fulfilled, is to be found. Would Carlyle or any great historian or statesman have ever dreamt of delivering so precise a prophecy as to the French Army of 1870? We cannot doubt that in these, and probably in other cases, Isaiah showed not only that vision of divine purpose proper to the prophet, but the power of second-sight, as the Highlanders call it, peculiar to particular kinds of receptive constitutions, and much more common in some races than in others. Whether to call the gift miraculous or not, we hardly know, and do not much care. If any of Isaiah's prophecies failed, as there seems some reason to believe, and if many of them were never verified for our benefit, even if verified at all, it is clear they cannot have been miracles intended to convince us at least, of the divine inspiration of the prophet. But that they were due to a special gift of a kind closely related with the receptive character of the true prophet, it is difficult to doubt. Sir Edward Strachey seems to us to ignore this, while he descants somewhat too much on the unconscious depth of meaning in very plain words. For example, in discussing Isaiah's vision (chapter vi.), he says :—
" It has been, and is still discussed, whether, in the words Who will go for us?' as in the like use of the plural pronoun in other places in the Old Testament, there is a reference to the Trinity ; or whether the phrase is 'merely the plural of majesty,' or some other idiom. There is something opposed to all our present habits of thought and criticism in the notion that a word of this kind can be made to prove a dogma ; yet to the mind which recognises a deeper meaning in words than the merely grammatical, the latter explanation will seem a very poor sub- stitute for the old dogmatic interpretation. It would be better to ask what is the origin of the 'plural of majesty.' Majesty or greaterness, is the attribute of the personal head of a body, not that of a solitary indi- viduaL / is the word of mere will, good or evil ; we, that of counsel, fellowship, and co-operation ; and the plural of the latter expresses .a higher unity than the singular of the former. There is a higher unity in the marriage of man and wife than in the single half .existence of either separately, and in the Godhead which is the object of the Christian's faith than in the solitary Being whom the Mahometan or other. Theist worships. The first cause,' says Aristotle, 'is the last in discovery when it is at last revealed, we can look back and trace its work- ings in forms where it could not have been recognised at the time, and thus we, by the fullness of the light of the Gospel, can see in the lan- guage which combines the plural Elohim with the singular Jehovah, the preludings of that revelation of the Trinity in Unity which the spirit of man was not yet educated to receive in its spiritual meaning, and the formal announcement of which could therefore have only con- firmed and perpetuated his natural proneness to polytheism."
Now, that surely is very fanciful The "plural of majesty" may very likely arise in the condescending assumption that what the King wishes, all around him wish too, and. in that politeness of true power which prefers to appear to share its privilege with those who only echo its will. At all events, it can never be wise to strain in any way the scope of a prophet's words, in order to make them seem to convey anything different in kind to their readers now, from what they conveyed to the minds of those who first spoke and heard them. If Isaiah only meant to say, "A damsel shall conceive, and bear a son," the fact that he used by accident, if he did use, a word that would bear the meaning of "a virgin," can hardly by any possibility have been divinely pre- destined in order to become a source of wonderful coincidence to us ; or else the interpretation of prophecy would mean finding new drifts in the speech of past times which were not and could not have been embodied in it by the speakers. Again, if Isaiah put "the plural of majesty" into the mouth of God, without any dream of the doctrine of the different divine persons, to indulge in any feeling of awe or reverence at his thus adapting his language to a creed of which he had never heard, is like indulging the same emotion over Goethe's dying cry for "more light,"—as if the natural complaint of failing eyesight in any way implied the spiritual craving for larger knowledge.
We hold, then, that this most valuable book, full as it is of painstaking research and of admirable historical judgment, ha.a just this defect,—that it betrays an almost unreasonable dislike to attribute to Isaiah a gift corresponding to what is called second- sight, which we believe, nevertheless, that, in common with many others of the prophets, and with various natures of the same sensitive and receptive cast in all ages, he really had, (though we quite admit that this gift is not the supernatural sign with which modern orthodoxy identifies it, else we should not have been so often left to guess doubtfully whether or not the prediction were actually fulfilled); and again, that it endeavours to make up for explaining away the marvel in such predictions by finding, now and again, too much mysterious and hidden meaning in phrases the only importance of which is due to modern blunders, and not to ancient inspiration. With this general exception, we may say that we have read no book for many years, on a Scrip- ture subject, so full of historical learning, moral insight, con- scientious judgment, and manly good-sense.
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