Even the dress of the prophet was subservient to his vocation. He wore a garment of hair-cloth or sackcloth (ch. xx. 2). This seems also to have been the costume of Elijah, according to 2 Kings i. 8 ; and it was the dress of John the Baptist. Hairy sackcloth is, in the Bible, the symbol of repentance (compare Is. xx. 1, 12, and Kings xxi. 27). This costume of the prophets was a serino prophetieus realis, a prophetic preaching by fact. The prophetic preacher comes forward in the form of personified repentance. What he does exhibits to the people what they should do. Be fore he has opened his lips his external appeamnce proclaims Ateravoare, repent.
11. On the Historical Works of Isaiah.—Besides the collection of prophecies which has been pre served to us, Isaiah also wrote two historical works. It was part of the vocation of the prophets to write the history of the kingdom of God, to exhibit in this history the workings of the law of retribution, and to exhort to the true worship of the Lord. History, as written by the prophets, is itself retro verted prophecy, and, as such, offers rich materials for prophecy strictly so-called. Since all the acts of God proceed from his essence, a complete un derstanding of the past implies also the future ; and, vice verni, a complete understanding of the future implies a knowledge of the past. Most of the historical books in the O. T. have been written by prophets. The collectors of the Canon placed most of these books under the head O'N'1), pro phets ; hence, it appears that, even when these his torical works were re-modelled by later editors, these editors were themselves prophets. The Chronicles are not placed among the Viti'11 : we may, therefore, conclude that they were not written by a prophet. But their author constantly indi cates that he composed his work. from abstracts taken verbatim from historical monographies written by the prophets ; consequently the books of Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, are the only histori cal books of the O. T. which did not originate from prophets.
The first historical work of Isaiah was a bio graphy of King Uzziah (comp. 2 Chron. xxvi. 22), Now the rest of the acts of Uzziah, first and last, did Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, write.' The second historical work of Isaiah was a bio graphy of King Hezekiah, which was subsequently inserted in the annals of Judah and Israel. These annals consisted of a series of prophetic mono graphies, which were received partly entire, partly in abstracts, and are the chief source from which the information contained in the Chronicles is de rived. In this work of Isaiah, although its con tents were chiefly historical, numerous prophecies were inserted. Hence it is called in 2 Chron. xxxii. 32, rm.?, nm, The Vision of Isaiah. In a similar manner the biography of Solomon by Ahijah is called in 2 Chron. ix. 29, the prophecy of Ahijah.' The two historical works of Isaiah were lost, together with the annals of Judah and Israel, into which they were embodied. Whatever these annals contained that was of importance for all a,,,ms, has been preserved to us by being re ceived into the historical books of the O. T., and the predictions of the most distinguished prophets have been formed into separate collections. After this was effected, less care was taken to preserve the more diffuse annals, which also comprehended many statements, of value only for particular times and places.
III. The intesral genuineness of the prophecies of Isaiah.—The Jewish synagogue, and the Christian church during all ages, have considered it as an undoubted fact that the prophecies which bear the name of Isaiah really originated from that prophet. Even Spinoza did not expressly assert in his Thu. talus Theologieo-Politieus (viii. 8), that the book oi Isaiah consisted of a collection originating from a variety of authors, although it is usually considered that he maintained this opinion. But in the last quarter of the r8th century this prevailing convic tion appeared to some divines to be inconvenient. In the theology of the natural man it passed as certain, that nature was complete in itself, and that prophecies, as well as miracles, never had occurred, and were even impossible. Whoever is spell bound within the limits of nature, and has never felt the influence of a supernatural principle upon his own heart, is incapable of understanding the supernatural in history, and feels a lively interest in setting it aside, not only on account of its appear ing to him to be strange and awful, but also be cause supernatural events are facts of accusation against the merely natural man. The assumption
of the impossibility of miracles necessarily de manded that the genuineness of the Pentateuch should be rejected ; and, in a similar manner, the assumption of the impossibility of prophecy de manded that a great portion of the prophecies of Isaiah should be rejected likewise. Here also the wish was father to the thought, and interest led to the decision of critical questions, the argurnents for which were subsequently discovered. All those who attack the integral genuineness of Isaiah agree in considering the book to be an anthology, or gleanings of prophecies, collected after the Baby lonian exile, although they differ in their opinions respecting the origin of this collection. Koppe gave gentle hints of this view, which was first ex plicitly supported by Eichhorn in his introduction. Eichhorn advances the hypothesis that a collection of lsaian prophecies (which might have been aug mented, even before the Babylonian exile, by seve ral not genuine additions) formed the basis of tbe present anthology, and that the collectors, after the Babylonian exile, considering that the scroll on which they were written did not form a volume proportionate to the size of the three other pro phetic scrolls, containing Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and the minor prophets, annexed to the Isaian collec tion all other oracles at hand whose authors were not known to the editors. In this supposition of the non-identity of date and authorship, most learned men, and lately also Hitzig and Ewald, followed Eichhom. Gesenius, on the contrary, maintained, in his introduction to Isaiah, that all the non-Isaian prophecies extant in that book originated from one author and were of the same date. Umbreit and Koster on the main point follow Gesenius, considering chapters xl. to lxvi. to be a continuous whole, written by a pseudo-Isaiah who lived about the termination of the Babylonian exile. In reference to other portions of the book of Isaiah, the genuineness of which has been ques tioned, Umbreit expresses himself doubtingly, and Koster assigns them to Isaiah. Gescnius declines to ansver the question, how it happened that these portions were ascribed to Isaiah, but Hitzig felt that an answer to it might be expected. He. ac cordingly attempts to explain why such additions were made to Isaiah and not to any of the other prophetical books, by the extmordinary veneration in which Isaiah was held. He says that the great authority of Isaiah occasioned important and dis tinguished prophecies to be placed in connection , with his name. But he himself soon after destroys the force of this assertion by observing, that the great authority of Isaiah was especially owing to those prophecies which were falsely ascribed to him. A considerable degree of suspicion must, however, attach to the boasted certainty of such critical investigations, if we notice how widely these learned men differ in defining what is of Isaian orig-,in and what is not, although they are all linked together by the same fundamental tendency and interest. There are very few portions in the whole collection whose genuineness has not been called in question by some one or other of the various im pugners. Almost every part has been attacked either by Dcederlein, or by Eichhorn (who, espe cially in a later work entitled Die Hebraischen Propheten, GOttingen 18'6 to 1819, goes farther than all the others), or by Justi (wlio, anion; the earlier adversaries of the integral genuineness of Isaiah, uses, in his Vermischte Schriften (vols. i. and ii.), the most comprehensive, and, apparently, the best grounded arguments), or by Paulus, Rosenmialler, Bauer, Bertholdt, De Wette, Gese nius, Hitzig, Ewald, Umbreit, or others. The only portions left to Isaiah are chap. i. 3-9, xvii., xx., xxviii., xxxi., and xxxiii. All the other chap ters are defended by some and rejected by others ; they are also referred to widely different dates. In the most modern criticism, however, we observe' an inclination again to extend the sphere of Isaian genuineness as much as the dogmatic principle and system of the critics will allow. Modern criticism is inclined to admit the genuineness of chaps. i. to X-Xiii., with the only exception of the two pro phecies against Babylon in chaps. xiii. and xiv., and in chap. xxi. r-ro. Chaps. xxviii.-xxxiii. are allowed to be Isaian by Ewald, Umbreit, and others.