Isaiah 48:16-19

4. TWO INSERTIONS

Isaiah 48:16-19

Isaiah 48:20-21 connect naturally with Isaiah 48:14-15. For Isaiah 48:14 foretells the victory of Cyrus over Babylon; Isaiah 48:20 summons Israel to flee out of vanquished Babylon as a prison opened by Cyrus. Isaiah 48:16, however, contains a personal remark of the Prophet; and though Isaiah 48:17-19 are a revealed word of God (com. כֹּה אָמַר י׳ Isaiah 48:17), they are yet of so general a nature, that they would be perfectly in place, indeed, after Isaiah 48:21, as expressive of a regret that Israel did not follow the direct way to salvation, but had made necessary the detour through the Exile; but coming between Isaiah 48:15; Isaiah 48:20, they can only be regarded as a break of the connection. How Isaiah 48:16-19 came where they are will hardly be made out by any one. Their proper place would be between Isaiah 48:21-22. Perhaps they first stood in the margin (occasioned by the personal nature of Isaiah 48:16 and the retrospective nature of Isaiah 48:17-19 in the midst of the current of prospective prophecy), and then they were, through misunderstanding, inserted before instead of after Isaiah 48:21. [The Author’s difficulty as to the order of the verses will not be felt by many, any more than they are, e.g., by Lowth, Maurer, Barnes, J. A. Alex., who comment right on without being aware of anything to stumble at. Yet J. A. A. pauses to say, that the objection as presented by others is entirely unfounded; vide. his comm. on Isaiah 48:18. Those that fail to see the difficulty with the Author, will equally discard the caption he adopts, by which he stamps these verses 16–19 as interpolations.—Tr.).

a) FIRST INSERTION

Isaiah 48:16

A personal remark of the Prophet

16          Come ye near unto me, hear ye this;

I have not spoken in secret from the beginning;From the time that it was, there am I:

And now the Lord God, 9and his Spirit, hath sent me.

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

These words are enigmatical, and I despair of explaining them in a convincing way. I do not believe that “come ye near unto me, hear ye this” are in parallelism with “all ye assemble yourselves and hear” Isaiah 48:14, and that therefore they are to be construed also as words of Jehovah. [“As certainly now as הִקָבְצוּ Isaiah 48:14 is the word of Jehovah, so certain is it that קִרְבוּ אֵלַי is the same. He summons to Himself the members of His nation, that they may hear still further His own testimony concerning Himself.” Delitzsch]. For, as has been shown, the initial words of Isaiah 48:14 are references to something said before. But Isaiah 48:16 begins a thought of another sort. It makes on me the impression of a separate remark, which the Prophet had directed to a narrower circle of immediate hearers, such as, say, the narrower circle of his disciples may have been (comp. on Isaiah 8:16 sqq.). Some might be surprised regarding the prophecies beginning with chap. 40, that the Prophet foretells so positively a Babylonian Exile, and the deliverance by a prince by the name of Cyrus. The Prophet explains this Isaiah 48:16. By “come ye near unto me” he intimates that he would make a particularly confidential communication. It consists in the statement that he must not be supposed to have known of these things already, say from the beginning of (מֵרֹאשׁ) his prophetic activity, and to have announced or may-be made a written record of them, as esoteric secrets, only in the narrowest circle. Rather he did not himself know of these things from the beginning. Only מעת היותה, “from the time that it was,” was he there. That is, only since these things “were created” (נִבְרְאוּ Isaiah 48:7) in the sense that we have explained Isaiah 48:7, did he become familiar with them and they stand visible before his prophetic eye. היותה seems to me to remind one of אָמַר וַיְהִי and of הַדָּבָר הָיָה. The Prophet regards as created, as come to pass, what has been announced to him. Hence he says here, he for his person was present, as an inward, spiritual witness and spectator, when these things, in a prophetic sense, came to pass. But now the LORD Jehovah (see List) has sent him, i.e., has sent him with the commission of announcing, and His Spirit. Therefore he distinguishes between the moment of prophetic seeing and that of prophetic announcement. I cannot construe רוּחוֹ as accusative. For then he would make himself like the Spirit, or put himself on a level with the Spirit. He can only make the Spirit equal with the Lord. But he distinguishes the Lord and His Spirit, by recognizing the first as the one from whom the Spirit proceeds (1 Kings 22:22) or is sent.

This is an attempt at exposition, which however I by no means set forth as an assured assertion. As I cannot hold it to be satisfying, I cannot pretend to have solved the enigma by it. For a Prophet to interrupt his official prophecy by a private remark is, of course, against the rule. Still it is not unexampled. I regard Jeremiah 31:26 as such, where see my comment. In Jeremiah, the occasion of that personal remark was the circumstance, that that moment of awaking out of sleep was for him the brightest point in all his trying prophetic career. For Isaiah the occasion was, that he regarded it as necessary to give his immediate hearers an explanation why he now announced things the like of which no one had ever before heard from him. It might seem as if hitherto he had preserved silence about what he had long known. But he says: The new thing that ye have heard, I myself did not know earlier. It has only now come to pass (in a prophetic sense), and only after it came to pass did I receive commission to reveal it. Of course, this exposition is only possible if the Prophet that speaks is Isaiah himself, and if Isaiah here for once speaks out of the historical moment in which he prophesied. But does not the whole weight of his discoures rest on this, that he is even prophesying, i.e., announcing future things, not present or past? If so, then he must be conscious of the interval between prophecy and fulfilment. He must know that what is prophesied lies far, far before him, too far for any human eye to recognize what lies beyond that interval. Hence I cannot agree with Delitsch in considering that the Prophet lives only in the Exile with his spirit. This were only possible did he forget that he prophesied.

[The comment of Delitzsch directly following his words quoted above is: “From the beginning He has not spoken in secret (see Isaiah 45:19); but from the time that all which now lies before their eyes—namely, the victorious career of Cyrus—has unfolded itself, He has been there, or has been by (שָׁם, ‘there,’ as in Proverbs 8:27), to regulate, what was coming to pass, and to cause it to result in the redemption of Israel. ‘I was there’ affirms, that, at the time when the revolution caused by Cyrus was preparing in the distance, He caused it to be publicly foretold, and thereby proclaimed Himself the present Author and Lord of what was then occurring. Up to this point Jehovah is speaking; but who is it that now proceeds to say, ‘And now’—namely, now that the redemption of Israel is about to appear (ועֲתָּה being here, as in many other instances, e.g., Isaiah 33:10, the turning-point of salvation)—‘now hath the Lord Jehovah seat me and His Spirit.’ The majority of the commentators assume that the Prophet comes forward here in his own person, behind Him whom he has introduced, and interrupts Him. But since the Prophet has not spoken in his own person before, whereas, on the other hand, these words are followed in Isaiah 49:1 sqq. by an address concerning himself from that Servant of Jehovah who announces Himself as the restorer of Israel and light of the Gentiles, and who cannot therefore be Israel as a nation or the Author of these prophecies, nothing is more natural than to suppose that the words, ‘And now hath the Lord,’ etc., form a prelude to the words of the One unequalled Servant of Jehovah concerning Himself which occur in 49. The surprisingly mysterious way in which the words of Jehovah suddenly pass into those of His messenger, which is only comparable to Zechariah 2:12 sqq.; Zechariah 4:9 (where the speaker is also not the prophet, but a divine messenger exalted above him), can only be explained in this manner. And in no other way can we explain the ועתה, which means, that after Jehovah has prepared the way for the redemption of Israel by the raising up of Cyrus, in accordance with prophecy, and by his success in arms, He has sent him, the speaker in this case, to carry out, in a mediatorial capacity, the redemption thus proposed, and that not by force of arms, but in the power of the Spirit of God (Isaiah 42:1; comp. Zechariah 4:6). Consequently the Spirit is not spoken of here as joining in the sending (as Umbreit and Stier suppose, after Jerome and the Targum; the LXX is indefinite, καὶ τὸ πνεῦμα αὐτοῦ); nor do we ever find the Spirit mentioned in such co-ordination as this (see, on the other hand, Zechariah 7:12, per spiritum suum). The meaning is, that it is also sent, i.e., sent in and with the Servant of Jehovah, who is speaking here.” Del. on Isa., vol. II. p. 252 sq. Clark’sFor. Theol. Lib.

We may anticipate here the comment on Isaiah 48:17-19 for the purpose of saying, in support of the above exposition of Delitzsch, that our Isaiah 48:16-19 seem to be the scripture (ἡ γραφή) referred to in John 7:37-39. In our text, the messenger and the Spirit sent with or after him (Isaiah 48:16) are presented as the source of the blessings conditionally guaranteed in Isaiah 48:17-19. The emphatic way in which the mention of the Spirit is introduced (Isaiah 48:16), and the mention of “teaching,” “hearkening to commandments,” “peace” and “righteousness” (Isaiah 48:17-18), make it plain that the agent of the blessings described (Isaiah 48:18-19) must be the Spirit; not, however, excluding the priority of the Redeemer who is the speaker. The blessing described is the blessing of Abraham, as our Author shows below; and (against Del. who translates “grains of sand”) we may, with our Author, translate מֵעוֹת = “viscera, bowels” (Barnes and J. A. Alex. do the same). Of course we must understand the blessing of numerous offspring in a spiritual sense, such as the Spirit will generate, i.e., a spiritual Israel. Our Author has shown this in cognate passages, e.g., see under Isaiah 44:3-5. Moreover the very parallelisms of Isaiah 48:18, “peace as the river,” “righteousness as the waves,” show this. In John 7:38 the Lord Jesus says: “He that believes on Me, as the Scripture said: rivers of living water shall flow from his bowels (ἐκ τῆς κοιλίας αὐτοῦ).” This is an allusion and interpretation, rather than a quotation. It combines the spiritual figures of Isaiah 48:18 with the figure of offspring in Isaiah 48:19, where the LXX. has: καὶ τὰ ἔκγονα τῆς κοιλίας σου. By saying this, our Lord claims that He is the source of the Abrahamic blessing, and reproduces in Himself the speaker of our text. To relieve the obscurity of the allusion the Evangelist adds his comment (John 7:39): “But this He spake of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.” By this John completes the allusion to our text, referring to the Spirit which our Isaiah 48:16 represents as sent with the messenger—but after; “and His Spirit (וְרוּחוֹ),” curiously subjoined grammatically, seeming to express an after-thought, but really expressing an after-act. The day of Pentecost witnessed this sending, and the promised effect of it in the multiplication of off-spring to those that believed on Christ, in the vast increase of the spiritual Israel, rivers of living waters, righteousness like waves, and seed like the offspring of the sea.

The view here given of the correlation of our text and John 7:37-39, if correct, is invaluable as aid in understanding the former, confirming the exposition of Delitzsch. At the same time it identifies the reference of ἡ γραφή in John 7:38, which, so far as we know, has never been satisfactorily done by any commentator, and at the same time must imperatively control the interpretation put upon “rivers of living water.” Tr.]

Footnotes:

[9]hath sent me and his Spirit.