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§ 7. A song of a vineyard.—A brief and obscure song now follows. The text is very doubtful. The vineyard is of course Israel; the briars are its enemies. We may profitably compare and contrast the vineyard song of Isaiah.

In that day (shall they say): Pleasant vineyard! sing ye unto it. I the Lord am its keeper; every moment I water it, that its leaf fail not (?); night and day I keep it, wrath have I none.

O that I might meet briars and thorns! With war would I march against them (?), I would burn them together. Else must he take hold of my protection, make peace with me (?).

[In days to come Jacob shall take root; Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.]

§ 8. The desolation of Jerusalem.-Now comes a passage which may possibly belong to the main prophecy, but may also be a further, though not a lyrical interpolation. It is not clearly connected with what preceded. The text has suffered a good deal, and the whole passage is obscure. Some untranslatable or meaningless words I have indicated by dots.

Hath he smitten him as he smiteth those that smote him? Hath he been slain according to the slaughter of those that slew him? . . . Therefore on this condition let the iniquity of Israel be expiated, and let this be the fruit of the removal of his sins: that he make all altar-stones as chalkstones that are beaten in sunder; the Asherim and sun-pillars shall not remain standing.

For the defenced city is solitary, an habitation deserted and forsaken like a wilderness: there shall the calf feed, For it is a people of no understanding; therefore he that made them can not have mercy on them, and he that formed them can shew them no favour.

...

The section, as Dr. Skinner says, 'seems to be a summons to national repentance and reformation.' God has treated Israel more tenderly than he has treated or will treat Israel's oppressors. Therefore Israel may expect complete forgiveness and renewed prosperity when by a resolute effort it erases 'all monuments and relics of idolatry in the land.' Let that be the condition and result of sin's forgiveness. A mention of Asherim and pillars and altar-stones

in this post-exilic passage is rather surprising, but there is other evidence to show that even at a late period there were still some idolatrous remnants or superstitious excrescences and recrudescences existing among the community. The city is Jerusalem: her condition is the same as was described above in the first paragraph. The last words seem to mean that deliverance, redemption and the advent of the Golden Age are compulsorily delayed through the folly and impenitence of the people.

§ 9. The last ingathering.-A final short description of the Judgement on its redemptive side for Israel concludes the prophecy. It joins on very well with paragraph six.

And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord will thresh out ears of wheat from the River unto the Brook of Egypt, and ye shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel. And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great trumpet shall be blown, and the lost in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, shall come and shall worship the Lord on the holy mountain at Jerusalem.

The River is the Euphrates: the Brook is now known as the Wadi el Arish. What lies between constitutes 'the ideal territory of Israel. The meaning is that within this territory Jehovah will carefully separate the corn from the chaff and straw-the true Israelites from heathens and apostates. The last sentence describes, under another figure, the ingathering of those who were exiled beyond these limits' (Skinner).

As regards the general date for the entire group of prophecy and songs, it is enough to mention here the hypothesis of Professor Cheyne, who assigns it to the era of Alexander the Great, or more precisely to 332 B.C. The desolations and disasters will then allude to the misfortunes (not yet after some fifteen or twenty years fully repaired) which Jerusalem and Judah and Syria underwent in the reign of Artaxerxes Ochus, of which I have often spoken before. The growing weakness and dissolution of the Persian Empire between Ochus and Alexander would probably only have increased the daring of local oppressors. The premature songs of triumph referred to in chapter xxiv. 16' (the sixth paragraph of the first section) 'are supposed to have been called. forth by rumours of the expedition of Alexander the Great, whilst the interspersed lyrical passages celebrate the Jewish deliverance achieved by the Macedonian victories. Perhaps the least convincing part of the hypothesis is the identification of the conquered city (in the first paragraph of sections 2 and 5) with Tyre or Gaza

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destroyed by Alexander; but, in spite of that, Cheyne's view is probably the one which best harmonizes the varied indications of the prophecy' (Skinner).

With all their nationalist limitations, these four chapters are a striking production: the Book of Isaiah would be the poorer if they were not there. Our hope of immortality is not founded on any allusion or statement in any particular book: it is grounded and founded on our faith in God, and all which that faith implies. The idea of a heavenly or supernatural dew-a 'dew of lights,' in accordance with the customary association of 'light' and 'life'—which, falling upon the tombs of the dead, makes them awake and arise in fresh and fairer bodily form upon a glorified earth, has passed away for ever. Nevertheless we are grateful to those among our Hebrew forefathers who first conceived and expressed the larger hope; even if his form or fashion of the hope was other than ours, we are grateful to the man who wrote those simple and beautiful words:

He destroyeth death for ever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces.

CHAPTER VI

THE BOOK OF JOEL

§ 1. The age and character of the Book of Joel.-The book of Joel, which is to form the contents of the present short chapter, was at one time regarded as the earliest of the written prophets, but is now almost universally held to be post-exilic. Its precise date is uncertain; but happily the knowledge of the date would add little to our understanding of the prophecy. Whether it was written about 400 B. C., as seems most probable, or whether it was somewhat earlier or somewhat later, makes no difference to its readers of to-day.

Of Joel as a person we know nothing whatever. His book seems to be intact and uninterpolated. Its occasion was the incursion of an enormous army of locusts into Judah. With the locusts or after them there came also a terrible drought. Joel thought he saw in these locusts and in the ravage and ruin they wrought the first signs of the coming of the Lord's day-the day of judgement. This day is for him, as for other post-exilic writers, primarily a day of judgement upon the nations around, the enemies and oppressors of the Jews. Joel is in this respect no better and no worse than the majority of his contemporaries and successors, to whom national hatreds had, alas! become part and parcel of religious faith. But with this fierce attitude to the 'nations,' Joel also combines something of the earlier and preexilic manner. He believes that the locusts, God's army, will return again a second time in even greater numbers and strength, but he urges the Jews to avert the anger of God by true repentance. Thus the present condition of the people did not deserve the glories of the Golden Age even as compared with the lower religious and moral standard of the nations. Before that age could arrive, the Jews must either be sifted by the judgement or truly repent. Rend your heart, and not your garments,' says Joel in words well worthy of Amos and Jeremiah.

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To the prophet's inward vision his call to repentance seems successful. He therefore foretells that God will remove the scourge and confine the judgement to Judah's enemies. Judah shall be blessed materially as well as spiritually, while its enemies will be destroyed.

§ 2. The idea of the judgement and its value to-day.-Joel's conception of the judgement has no value for us to-day. His fundamental presupposition that the destruction of the nations is a proof of divine justice seems to us merely one more mournful instance of how national pride and national hatreds can obscure even a good man's notion of goodness and of God. Professor Driver is perfectly right when he says that 'the contrast between Israel and the nations' is only fruitful for us to-day, if we regard it as 'typical of the great contrast between good and evil, between truth and falsehood.' Joel could only think of that great and constant contrast in this limited and erroneous form. Moreover, as we have so frequently had occasion to observe, God's punishments are not for ever, for they are, ex hypothesi, punishments inflicted by goodness; they are not sent by God for his own sake or for the sake of Israel, but for the sake of the punished; they are not done on the principle of tit for tat; they are disciplinal. At the same time Professor Driver is scarcely less right when he says that Joel, in striking imagery, sets forth some of the eternal principles of divine righteousness and human duty, and draws pictures of the ideal blessedness, spiritual and material, which, if man would but adequately respond, God would confer upon the human race.' Let us therefore read his book attentively, and seek to get out of it all the profit we can.

§ 3. The invasion of the locusts.-The first section depicts poetically the actual ravages of the locusts which have already taken place. It would seem from the many reports of travellers both from the east and the west that the picture is hardly, if at all, exaggerated: so terrible is the plague. In this very year the harvests of the Jewish colonists in Argentina have almost wholly been destroyed by an overwhelming swarm of irresistible locusts (1896-97).

The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel. Hear this, ye old men,

And give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land.

Hath this been in your days,

Or in the days of

your fathers?