BOOKS.

MR. CHEYNE ON ISAIA11.—VOL. H.*

MR. CIIEYNII has now completed his learned and valuable Com- mentary on Isaiah, of the first volume of which we gave some .account in the Spectator of May rsth in last year. The first half of this volume completes the commentary, of which it is

hardly necessary to say that it everywhere shows the same sound and careful learning, and the same religious appreciation of the prophet's meaning, as the former volume always exhibits.

The other half of the volume consists of a series of essays, several of which are more or less connected—and indirectly, where not directly—with the problem of the authorship of the disputed prophecies of Isaiah. Mr. Cheyne does not overlook or underrate the grave difficulties of the problem, in itself, or in its bearings upon the interpretation of the text. He declines Partisanship either with the critics who dogmatically portion out the prophecies among different authors of different periods, or with those who no less peremptorily maintain that the whole is from the hand of the one Isaiah, the son of Amoz.

Nor has he any sympathy with those light-hearted readers—we can

hardly say students—of the text who hold that the question is unimportant, since the book is equally. instructive either way. But we fear that those to whom the problem is one of the greatest literary and theological interest will be disappointed, as we confess ourselves to be, with Mr. Cheyne's own contribu- tion to the investigation. We admire and respect the modesty 'with which he habitually shrinks from dogmatic assertion, 'whatever be the point before him. Yet his Hebrew scholarship, his lifelong study of his subject, his acquaintance with all that

has been, and that is now being said upon it by Euro- pean as well as English students, and, not least, his in- telligent inconsistency in not clinging to old opinions merely because he had once hold them,—all these qualifications for his making some important addition to fruitful discussion of the subject, compel us to wish that he had not shown such extreme caution and reticence as he has done in dealing with it. Mr. Cheyne tells us in the preface to this second volume that " the author would fain bespeak for the series of essays -which it contains a specially patient and candid perusal." And he goes on to say,—

" On the critical bearing of his exegetical results he has also afforded such information as was consistent with the limits originally marked out. He would gladly have had no limits to regard, gladly have ,communicated his present solution (which is not of yesterday) of the .complicated oritical problem, but he has been held back, as has been explained elsewhere, by a wish to promote disinterested exegesis (the only safe basis of criticism), and by a conviction that the problem of Isaiah can only be definitively solved in connection with those of the prophetic literature as a whole. Ho hopes, nevertheless, that in more than one of the essays he has made some real, however small, contri- butions to that new theory, which must, when thoroughly matured, take the place of both the prevalent views of tho origin of Isaiah, end which, being just to all the facts revealed by an honest exegesis, cannot be inconsistent with a scientific orthodox theology. A. single eye is what the author most desires for himself and his readers ; it is * The ProphocieR of hoiah. A New Translation, with Conunontlry and Appendices. By the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, M.A. Vol. II. London ; C. Kegan Paul and Co.

the talisman which opens that enchanted chamber over which are written the words 'Be not too beide,' (Mary Queen, iii., 12). The glamour under which antiquity has so long slept is yielding in every direction, nor can Biblical antiquity remain entirely sealed to philo- logical research, warmed by religious sympathy."

We have, to the best of our ability, given these words, and the essays to which they refer, " a patient told. candid perusal," arid that, as far as the principal passages are concerned, more than once ; yet we honestly doubt whether we so understand them, and can consequently so speak of them, as to do justice

to Mr. Cheyne's meaning. If our author has in his own mind reached a solution of the problem, as seems to be implied by the words, " solution which is not of yesterday," his readers., who come to him as learners, not as teachers, may surely say that it is not a sufficient reasou for holding back the full explanation, that he wishes them to study and decide the matter for themselves, which seems the alternative suggested. It is true that he is no real student who merely adopts the ready- made conclusions of his teacher ; but the very meaning and use of a teacher is that he can and does make clear and easy the successive steps by which the conclusions are to be reached, by stating from the first what those conclusions are. "Exegesis" is, no doubt, in one sense, "the only safe basis of criticism;" but it is not less true that intelligent exegesis is impossible, except in the light which "criticism" throws upon it. Neither, in fact, is possible or conceivable without the other. The succes- sive words and sentences of a book, and above all of an ancient book, have their proper verbal and grammatical meaning ; but these must instantly suggest the occasion and the subject of which the author treats, or they will remain not only without meaning, but often without any certainty as to their mere gram- matical sense. Criticism cannot always restore with certainty the details of a past time ; but—as Niebuhr wrote to the young student of history—it must aim at reproducing such a know- ledge of the time as would have been possessed by a man in the following generation, when the exact details lnol been forgotten.

No one can read the Book of Isaiah intelligently without a working hypothesis as to the authorship, though he must be always verifying that hypothesis by the facts as they succes- sively present themselves, and be always ready to modify or change it, if the facts so require. The question is one of degree: wo think Mr. Cheyue goes too far when he says,—" Parts there may be of the exegesis which remain vague and. obscure, till we know the circumstances under which a prophecy was written, but these, in the case of Isaiah, form but a small proportion of the whole. There is no absolute necessity for an honest exegete, to give any detailed treatment to the higher critical problems."

But if we regret, or even complain, that Mr. Clique has not told us his whole mind on this subject of the authorship of the Book of Isaiah, we are not the less sensible that he has made a contribution to the investigation which, coming from a man of his great learning, and intimate knowledge both of the text and of the whole literature relating to it, is of real value. For while, in stating with complete fairness and impartiality the principal arguments for and agaiust the authorship of one Isaiah, he repeatedly declines to pronounce a conclusion of his own, still we think we have not so far misunderstood his reti- cence as to be wrong in saying that he suggests that the solution of the problem is to be found in a middle course between the two sides, anti not by the simple adopting of one or the other. He suggests that it is possible—and we suppose him to meats that it is probable—that the book as we now have it has been revised and re-edited, and adapted to the times and circum- stances of the Exile, though originally coming,. to some con- siderable extent at least, from Isaiah as its author. He says :—

"Complication, and not simplicity, is the note of the questions and of the answers which constitute Old-Testament criticism. It: is be- coming more and more certain that the present form, especially cf the prophetic Scriptures, is due to a literary class (the smenJuleids

Soforim, Scribes,' or ' Scripturists whose principal function was collecting and supplementing the scattered records of prophetic reve- lation They wrote, they recast, they edited to Ewald that we owe the first rough sketch of their pro- ceedings - But though Ewald has been the first or one of the

first in the field, he has left much land still to be occupied. First of all, he has taken no account of the possibility that the author of chaps. xl.-lxvi. riot only put old ideas and phrases into a new setting, but also incorporated the substance of connected discourses of that great prophet, of whose style we are so often reminded in these chap- ters,--1 sahib. This is a possibility which it is impossible to raise to a certainty, or even to such an approximate certainty as we are so often fain to be content with in literary criticism. For if the work of Isaiah has been utilised, it has been so skilfully fused in the mind and.

imagination of the later prophet, that a discrimination between the old and the new is scarcely feasible. Bat the view is quite in harmony with what we know of the Soforim."

There is probably suspension of judgment, as well as reticence, in this and like passages of Mr. Cheyne's book. We are anxious not to extract from them a meaning beyond what he intends them to bear, nor do we suppose that he is prepared. to go so far as some other recent commentators have done, in the direc- tion of vindicating the whole Book of Isaiah as substantially the work of the one prophet, the son of Amos, while holding that his writings have been very considerably recast, in order to adapt them for manuals of instruction and devotion of later times. But, convinced as we are that it is in this direction that the solution of the problem is to be found, we welcome every aid which is offered by so learned and thoughtful a critic, and one who combines the old Christian faith as to inspiration with our modern, rational, understanding and recognition that the Hebrew prophets were real men, living and speaking within the limits of a human existence common to them with ourselves. And we trust that he will not forget the promise he makes his readers when, saying that his present treatment of his subject is "incomplete and fragmentary," he adds, "it only supple- ments, and will at the right time be supplemented."

Meanwhile, it is no small gain that so learned an authority as Mr. Cheyne, and one .who, if he has any leaning, leans to what is commonly called the rationalist side, should distinctly recognise the fact—not new to the readers of the Spectator— that there is another solution of the problem "which must, when thoroughly matured, take the place of both the prevalent views." Those views—the rationalist, oddly enough, no less than the orthodox—have assumed such an absolute verbal accuracy of the text, that the cue question to be solved has really, if not always avowedly, been,—Whether Isaiah could and did miraculously predict the name of Cyrus :—for in the one case, he could and did write every word of the disputed prophecies; in tlic other, he could not, and did not, write anything that referred, or seemed to refer, to the Exile. But when once it is granted that the existing text has been revised and re-edited by later hands, and adapted for purposes of practical instruction and edification to later times,—a revision perhaps almost to be compared with that of the English Prayer-book in its relation with the original breviaries and "uses,"—let this be granted, and the critical investigation takes an entirely new form. The question now is, not whether Isaiah could predict the name of Cyrus, contrary to all analogy, whether psychological or theological (for there is no theological probability or fitness in a miracle for such is purpose, seeing that the greatest of all names was never predicted), but whether the prophet could, in accordance with such analogies, so throw himself in imagina- tion into times and circumstances which we do know that both he and his contemporaries were always anticipating, as to be able to utter some main part of the prophecies as to which the authorship is disputed. Isaiah and his contemporaries had seen Samaria taken and the Ten Tribes carried into exile in Babylon, and they repeatedly warned the people of Judah that a like fate awaited them ; whilst they also promised a restoration, and a subsequent reign of righteousness and prosperity. These warnings are given in every variety of form in the undisputed pro- phecies of Isaiah, and in one of them (chap. xxxfi., 13-19) Jerusa- lem and the Temple hill (Ophel) are pictured as in ruins; while Micah (chap. iii. 12, iv. 10), even more explicitly says that "Zion shall be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem become ruins, stud the temple-bill as the forest-heights," and that "the daughter of ,Zion shall go forth to Babylon, and there Jehovah shall redeem her from the hand of her enemies," The Exile and the Restoration were habitually anticipated, by those who had eyes to see, in the days of Isaiah ; but could Isaiah him-

self, the greatest of all the seers, throw himself more completely than any other prophet before or after him into those times, and picture them almost—for it is only almost—as though he were actually living in them P If we grant that the passages in which Cyrus is named or described are interpolated ; that possibly "Babylon " has been substituted for " Nineveh " in chapters xiii., xiv., and xxi. (though the Cuneiform Inscriptions make the necessity for this more doubtful than it had previously seemed); and that there has been in other places a fresh colour- ing given by minute changes made during or after the Exile itself ;—if we grant this, is it not conceivable that Isaiah was, in the main, the original author of the disputed prophecies P Ewald, while heartily recognising that God spake by the prophets, has shown that Hebrew prophecy was a real, though, now no longer existing, form and expression of the human, imagination and intellect, and one which can be understood and judged of by the ordinary laws of psychology. But though we can never go back to a less intelligible and intelligent appre- ciation than his of what prophecy was, there is no reason why. we should not make a farther and more complete development and application of his principles to the facts than be himself did. His intuitive inductions have the truth of genius, but his deductions from them are not always verified, or capable of verification, by the facts. We still need to have this subject of the authorship of Isaiah treated by an hypothesis which ox-- plains all the facts, and which can be verified by them all,—a double process of exegesis and criticism, as Mr. Cheyne would say, both parts of which must he carried on at once.

We take this opportunity of expressing our regret that in our review of Mr. Cheyne's first volume, we erroneously said that he had not referred to Mr. George Smith's Assyrian, Eponym Canon. There are several references to that work in. the notes.