to be so. It is hardly necessary to give references to the abundant evidence that the system of Leviticus agrees with the chronicler's formula, rather than with that of Deuteronomy. In a succeeding Article will be presented an exposition of Graf's comparison of the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws concerning sacerdotal income. As already stated, the present writer reserves entirely his own conclusions; holding that, thus far, only hypotheses are possible.

ARTICLE V.

THE INTEGRITY OF THE BOOK OF ISAIAH.

BY REV. WM. HENRY COBB, UXBRIDGE, MASS.

THE Bibliotheca Sacra for April and October 1881, and for January 1882, contained Articles aiming to show a linguistic correspondence between the main divisions of the Book commonly ascribed to Isaiah too minute and undesigned to be accounted for on the hypothesis of a diversity of authorship. Since those Articles were written, the thirteenth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica has appeared, with an Article on Isaiah from the pen of Rev. T. K. Cheyne, which may be regarded as giving the high-water mark of recent exegesis, as its author has written the latest, and in some respects the best, commentary on the prophecies of Isaiah. This commentary, especially its appended essays, should be read in connection with the Article in the Encyclopedia, as the latter is too brief to express justly the writer's cautious, reverent, and thoroughly Christian spirit. It is gratifying to find him treating the conservative view with far more respect than was evinced in his earlier work." It is well to remind a certain class of critics that such epithets as "blind conservatism," "hard-and-fast traditionalism," fail to meet the present conditions of the problem. Professor Plumptre, for example, who cannot be accused of an orthodox bias, declares: "My own conviction is, that the second part of Isaiah bears as distinct traces of coming from the author of the first as Paradise Regained does of coming from the author of Paradise 1 London: C. Kegan Paul and Co. 1880-1.

2 The Book of Isaiah chronologically arranged. London: Macmillan and Co. 1870. 8 Contemporary Review, Aug. 1881.

Lost." The British Quarterly Review for last October, in a favorable notice of Dr. Bruce's recent work, remarks: "He accepts the idea of a Deutero-Isaiah, which, on grounds of exact criticism, is, to say the least, a mere hypothesis, and, we think, a gratuitous one." Professor W. S. Tyler, whose accurate and fair-minded scholarship is as conspicuous as his conservatism, stated a few months since that he considered the argument for the unity of Isaiah to come as near a demonstration as is possible in an investigation of this kind.

Mr. Cheyne is far enough from agreeing with the writers just quoted, but his progress during ten years is worth noting. In 1870 he held that Isa. xl.-lxvi. is the work of a single author, who wrote at Babylon in the time of Cyrus; he noted with evident satisfaction that "the principal passage (Isa. lvi. 9-lvii. 11), which has been thought by some to imply the authorship of a resident in Palestine, is given up by Delitzsch as incapable of defense." He also claimed, at that time, that four other anonymous prophets of the exile have contributed to i.-xxxix. The vicarious fifty-third chapter was rationalized as follows: "The genius of Israel rises from the ashes of martyrdom to an undecaying supremacy, and the actual nation is so transformed in character as to correspond to its divine ideal" (pp. 176, 177). At present, Mr. Cheyne gives back to Isaiah the Babylonian prophecy in xxi. 1-10, because a lately-discovered cylinder shows this to refer to Sargon's conquest of Babylon. He has also entirely reconstructed his theory of xl.-lxvi., making only xl.-lii. 12 Babylonian; the rest he breaks up into nine different works, all of which were written in Palestine, some of them probably in the time of Manasseh, that is, close to Isaiah's date, some by one or more Jews left in Palestine during the exile, and some as late as the days of Nehemiah. Isa. liii. is assigned to the age of Manasseh, but was "probably based on an older work." At all events, he regards it as typical of the Christ who was to come.

These and similar changes of view are confessed with a frankness which almost disarms criticism; but it is pertinent to remark that Mr. Cheyne's assignment of so many disputed chapters to a Palestinian authorship rests not on the discovery of any cylinder or other antique, but upon the more careful study of the local allusions and historical references in the prophecy itself. He had denied these in his earlier work, but he now says (Vol. 1. p. 203): “Such references are really forthcoming as the elder traditionalists rightly

saw." The question of phraseology he examines in some detail (pp. 223, 224, 232-234), but speaks very disparagingly of this kind of argument (see p. 223), considering the evidence from style to be of much greater importance. It is chiefly the variety of style which leads him to dissect so mercilessly the latter part of Isaiah. But surely an author may vary his style to a great extent, without committing felo de se; no one has ever invented an instrument for defining the lawful limits of this power. Mr. Cheyne himself says (Vol. I. p. 169): "To me, indeed, it is tolerably clear that xliii. 1-xliv. 5 forms one section in itself, and xliv. 6-xlv. 25 another. But when I find Delitzsch connecting xliii. 1-13 with xlii., and Ewald not only accepting xliv. as an independent section, but even forming xliv. 1-9 into a single paragraph, I am obliged to distrust my own insight."

the description Passing on to "But what shall

Mr. Cheyne gives us in the Encyclopedia Britannica a much clearer and very amusing, because unconscious, instance of the difficulties of dealing with "style" (p. 379): "No doubt an author may change his style, writing in a different mood; we must, at all events, suppose that the author, whoever he may have been, was in a different tone of mind when he wrote so hardly, obscurely, and awkwardly as in liii." Again he mentions (p. 380) the "harsh, but strong style" of liii., which all will recognize as of the Servant of Jehovah in his vicarious suffering. the foot of page 381 we read (the italics are mine): we say what language is adequate to the divine beauty of such passages as Handel linked to music almost as divine: Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God;' 'He shall feed his flock like a shepherd;''He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth'? Silver tones of which the ear is never weary; honied rhetoric which thrills like a subtile odor even those who have lost the key to its meaning."

In view of this rhapsody, would it not be preferable to come back to the patient sifting of linguistic evidence, until we have laid a firmer foundation for the higher criticism?

In 1870 Mr. Cheyne states, as though there were no doubt in the matter: "With all his originality, our prophet [Isaiah A] was indebted for his most essential doctrine to Joel, Amos, and Hosea, his predecessors." In 1880 he says, on the other hand2: "I have no doubt that Joel belongs to post-exile times." I repeat, 1 Introduction, p. x. 2 Vol. ii. p. 219, note 1. VOL. XXXIX. No. 155.

66

I have no disposition to cavil at such changes of view when so openly avowed; but it is plain that a science with results so quickly shifting needs a broader base in the patient collation of those facts which lie open to the investigation of all. One who is obliged to confess repeatedly that "the complications of the problems of biblical criticism are only beginning to be adequately realized" ought not to waste his ammunition upon an ally like Mr. Urwick, whose Servant of Jehovah (pp. 29-50) contains extended specimens of the diction of Isaiah A and B. Had I seen this latter work before preparing my previous Articles, I should have recognized its helpfulness; it is due to myself to add that the results of the present Article were obtained before Mr. Urwick's book had come to my notice. Mr. Cheyne dismisses him as follows (Vol. 11. p. 223): "I am not a professor of philosophy, and cannot think that a valuable 'cumulative argument' is produced for the unity of Isaiah by count

which occur (how אור and אות, אביון and אבח ing up words like

could they help occurring?) in both parts of the book; and it is with real sorrow that I notice a 'tutor in Hebrew' priding himself on the discovery that ' and its participle or noun occurs fourteen times in the later portion and seven times in the earlier.'"

Again, Mr. Cheyne speaks far too slightingly of the argument from diction when he declares that "the peculiarities of phraseology [in xl.-lxvi.] can obviously be explained by the profound influence which so great a prophet as Isaiah must have exercised, and demonstrably did exercise, on his successors." Instead of a general statement of this nature, we ought to have a frank admission that the language of a writer is as important an element in determining his historical position as the coarser facts of scenery and allusion; an element so delicate that it should be examined with the greatest care, but capable of producing as high a degree of conviction as any other, when properly applied. No such rough-and-ready remark as that just quoted can sever the thousand philological tendrils which bind together the two parts of Isaiah.

Putting these aside for the present, I claim that the argument from incidental allusions is very much understated by the advocates of a double, or (as Mr. Cheyne would have it) a multiple authorship. According to their view Ezekiel was the great and only prophet in Chaldea during nearly the whole period of the Captivity; Isaiah B not having appeared till just before its close, and Daniel not till centuries later.

1 Encycl. Brit., xiii. 383.

It is admitted on all sides that Ezekiel exercised a powerful influence upon both generations of the exiles, and kept alive their hope of a return to Babylon. His prophecies must have been the one fresh, living book of that period, far more pondered than the writings of those earlier prophets, whose word was so much less adapted to their circumstances, and therefore so much less "the word of God to them." To quote the eloquent language of Dr. Stebbins1: "His vision of God's greatness with which he opens his prophecy; his denunciation of the nations which had been the most implacable foes of his people; his vision of the dry bones, and their restoration to life and activity; and above all, his glorious vision of the recovered land, and its division among the tribes; ..... all this would solace the heart of the sorrowing captive, and his soul would be all aflame with a desire to recover the sacred soil of the fathers, and make such sacrifices as were necessary to gratify it."

Whoever the prophet B may have been, on this theory he had grown up among the exiles; whether or not he had ever seen Jerusalem, the atmosphere he had breathed during the main part of his life was that of Babylonia. He must have eagerly devoured, and been, as it were, saturated with the prophecies of Ezekiel. If, then, Isaiah A could have made so deep an impression upon him as all grant that he did, could it have been otherwise with the influence of Ezekiel? If, again, the connection between A and B can be accounted for by the "profound influence which A must have exerted, and demonstrably did exert, upon his successors," how much profounder must have been A's influence upon Ezekiel than upon B; for Ezekiel was at least fifty years nearer the time of A, and he had been brought up in Judea before the Captivity. If, thirdly, the local allusions in Ezekiel leave no room for reasonable doubt that he wrote in Babylonia, although the formative period of his life was spent in Palestine, we should expect a fortiori to find such allusions even more numerous and clear in the case of the prophet B. While some purely abstract writer might use language free from any terrestrial costume, yet if local incidental references actually occur in B (and we shall find a multitude of them) then they must be allowed to speak honestly for themselves. On each of these three points we find precisely what we should not expect on the theory of the modern critics, and precisely what we should

1 Christian Register, Jan. 5, 1882.