The beasts have not yet come; they are yet to come. We can here think of nothing else than the invasion of the Chaldeans, which the Prophet, stepping back to the stand-point of his time, beholds here as future; whilst, in what precedes, from his ideal stand-point, which he had taken in the Babylonish exile, he had, for the most part, considered it as past.--In chap. lvi. 10-12, we meet with corrupted rulers of the people, who are indolent, when everything depends upon warding off the danger, greedy, luxurious, gormandizing upon what they have stolen. The people are not under foreign dominion, but have rulers of their own, who tyrannize over, and impoverish them; comp. Is. chap. v.; Micah, chap. iii.--In chap. lvii. 1, it is said: "The righteous perisheth and no man layeth it to heart, and the men of kindness are taken away, no one considering that, on account of the evil, the righteous is taken away." The Prophet mentions it as a sign of the people's hardening that, in the death of the righteous men who were truly bearing on their hearts the welfare of the whole, they did not recognize a harbinger of severe divine judgments, from which, according to a divine merciful decree, these righteous were to be preserved by an early death. "On account of the evil," _i.e._, in order to withdraw them from the judgments, which were to be inflicted upon the ungodly people, comp. Gen. xv. 15; 2 Kings xxii. 20; Is. xxxix. 8. The evil, _i.e._ according to 2 Kings xxii. 20, the Chaldean catastrophe, appears here as still future. In chap. lvii. 2: "They enter in peace, they rest in their beds who have walked before themselves in uprightness," the "peace" forms the contrast to the awful condition of suffering which the survivors have to encounter.--In chap. lvii. 9, it is said: "And thou lookest on the king anointed with oil, and increasest thy perfumes, and sendest thy messengers far off, sendest them down into hell." The apostacy from the Lord their God is manifested not only in idolatry, but also in their not leaving untried any means to [Pg 178] procure for themselves human helpers, in their courting human aid. The personification of Israel as a woman, which took place in the preceding verses, is here continued. She leaves no means untried to heighten her charms; she makes every effort to please the mighty kings. The king is an ideal person comprehending a real plurality within himself A parallel passage, in which the seeking for help among foreign nations is represented under the same image, is Ezek. xvi. 26 ff., comp. Hos. xii. 2 (1). It occurs also in immediate connexion with seeking help from the idols, in chap. xxx. 1 ff. The verb שור means always "to see," "to look at;" and this signification is, here too, quite appropriate: Israel is _coquetting_ with her lover, the king. The reproach which the Prophet here raises against the people has no meaning at all in the time of the exile, when the national independence was gone. We find ourselves all