3. What the prophet says about what is present to him (namely, about that which appears to him in the form of the present time), is correctly and minutely detailed ; and what he describes as future, are ideal and animated hopes which far exceed ter rene reality. IIence our opponents attempt to prove that the present time in those portions which they reject, is not ideal but real ; and that the author was actually an eye-witness of the exile, be. cause, they say, if the prophet merely placed him self in the period of the exile, then this present time would be ideal, and in that case there could be no difference between this ideally present time and the more distant future. But we question this fact most decidedly. The descriptions of the per son of Messiah in the second part of Isaiah are far more circumstantial than the descriptions of the person of Cyrus. Of Cyrus these prophecies fur nish a very incomplete description. Whoever does not fill up from history what is wanting, obtains a very imperfect idea of Cyrus. But there is suffi cient information to show the relation between his tory and prophecy ; and nothing more was required than that the essence of prophecy should be clear. The form might remain obscure until it was cleared up by its historical fulfilment. The Messiah, on the contrary, is accurately depicted, especially in ch. liii., so that there is scarcely wanting any essen tial trait. It is quite natural that there should be greater cleamess and definiteness here, because the anti-type of redemption stands in a far nearer rela tion to the ideal than is the case with Cyrus, so that form and essence less diverge.
The assertion that the animated hopes, ex pressed in the second part of Isaiah, had been very imperfectly fulfilled, proceeds from the erroneous supposition that these hopes were to be entirely fulfilled in the times immediately following the exile. But if we must grant that these prophecies refer both to the delivekance from captivity, and to the time of the Messiah in its whole extent, from the lowliness of Christ to the glorious completion of his kingdom, then the fulfilment is clearly placed before our eyes ; and we may expect that whatever is yet unfulfilled, due time, find its accom plishment. In this hope we are supported by the N. T., and still more by the nature of the matter in question. If the prophecies of Isaiah were nothing but arbitrary predictions on his own exter nal authority, without any internal warrant, one might speak here of an evasion of the difficulty ; but as the matter stands, this objection proves only that those who make it are incapable of compre hending the idea which pervades the whole repre sentation. Tbe entire salvation which the Lord has destined to his people has been placed before the spiritual eye of the prophet. His prediction is not entirely fulfilled in history, so that we could say we have now done with it, but every isolated fulfilment is again a prediction de facto, supporting our hope of the final accomplishment of the whole word of prophecy.
4. Our opponents think that they have proved that a portion of Isaiah is not genuine, if they can show that there occur a few Aramaic words and forms of speech, which they endeavour to explain from the style prevalent in a period later than Isaiah.
That this argument is very feeble even our oppo nents have granted in instances where it can be adduced with by far greater stringency than in the questioned portions of Isaiah. This appears espe cially from the example of the Song of Solomon, in which there occur a considerable number of Aramaic words and expressions, said to belong to the later Hebrew style. Berth°1dt, Umbreit, and others, base upon this their argument, that the Song of Solomon was written after the Babylonian exile. They even maintain that it could not have
been written before that period. On the contrary, the two most recent commentators, Ewald and Doepke, say most decidedly that the Song of Solo mon, in spite of its Aramaisms, was written in the days of Solomon.
Hirzel, in his work De Chaldaismi gine, Lcipsic 183o, has contributed considerably to the formation of a correct estimate of this argu ment. He has proved that in all the books of the O. T., even in the most ancient, there occur a few Chaldaisms. This may be explained by the fact that the patriarchs were surrounded by a popu lation whose language was Chaldee. Such Chal daisms are especially found in poetical language in which unusual expressions are preferred. Conse quently, not a few isolated ChaldaisnA, but only their decided prevalence, or a Chaldee tincture of the whole style, can prove that a book has been written after the exile. Nobody can assert that this is the case in those portions of Isaiah whose authenticity has been questioned. Even our oppo nents grant that the Chaldaisms in this portion are not numerous. After what have erroneously been called Chaldaisms are subtracted, we are led to a striking result, namely, that the unquestionable Ch al daisms are more numerous in the portions of Isaiah of which the genuineness is granted, than in the portions which have been called spurious. Ifirzel, an entirely unsuspected witness, mentions in his work De Chaldaisnzo, p. 9, that there are found only four real Chaldaisms in the whole of Isaiah ; and that these all occur in the portions which are declared genuine ; namely in vii. (where, how ever, if the grammatical form is rightly understood, we need not admit a Chaldaism) ; xxix. ; xviii.
7 ; XX1. 12.
5. The circumstance that the diction in the attacked portions of Isaiah belongs to the first, and not to the second period of the Hebrew language, must render us strongly inclined to admit their authenticity. It has been said that these portions were written during, and even after, the Baby lonian exile, when the ancient Hebrew language fell into disuse, and the vanquished people began to adopt the language of their conquerors, and that thus many Chaldaisms penetrated into the works of authors who wrote in ancient Hebrew. Since this is not the case in the attacked portions of Isaiah, granting the assertions of our opponents to be correct, we should be compelled to suppose that their author or authors had intentionally ab stained from the language of their times, and pur posely imitated the purer diction of former ages. That this is not quite impossible we learn from the prophecies of Haggai, Malachi, and especially from those of .Zechariah, which are nearly as free from Chaldaisms as the writings before the exile. But it is improbable, in this case, because the pseudo Isaiah is stated to have been in per,ition very different from that of the prophets just mentioned, who belonged to the newly returned colony. The pseudo-Isaiah has been placed in a position similar to that of the strongly Chaldaizing Ezekiel and Daniel ; and even more unfavourably for the attainment of purity of diction, because lie had not, like these prophets, spent his youth in Pales tine, but is said to have grown up in a country in which the Arami-ean language was spoken ; conse quently, it would have been more difficult for him to write pure Hebrew than for Ezekiel and Daniel. In addition to this it ought to be mentioned that an artificial abstinence from the language of their times occurs only in those prophets who entirely lean upon an earlier prophetic literature ; but that union of purity in diction with independence, which is manifest in the attacked portions of Isaiah, is nowhere else to be founcl.