1. _Rosenmüller_ expressed his adherence to the Messianic explanation, but supposed that the Prophet was of opinion that the Messiah would be born in his time. Even _Bruno Bauer_ (_Critik der Synopt._ i. S. 19) could not resist the impression that Immanuel could be none other than the Messiah. But he, too, is of opinion that Isaiah expected a Messiah, who was to be born at once, and to become the "deliverer from the collision of that time." This view has been expanded especially by _Ewald_. "False," so he says, "is every interpretation which does not see that the Prophet is here speaking of the Messiah to be born, and hence of Him to whom the land really belongs, and in thinking of whom the Prophet's heart beats with joyful hope, chap. viii. 8, ix. 5, 6 (6, 7)." But not being able to realize that which can be seen only by faith--a territory, in general, very inaccessible to modern exposition of Scripture--he, in ver. 14, puts in the _real_ Present instead of the _ideal_, and thinks that the Prophet imagined that the conception and birth of the Messiah would take place at once. By עלמה he understands, like ourselves, a virgin; but such an one as is so at the present moment only, but will soon afterwards cease to be so;--and in supposing this, he overlooks the fact that the virgin is introduced as being already with child, and that her bearing appears as present. In ver. 15, the time when the boy knows &c., is, according to him, the maturer juvenile age from ten to twenty years. It is during this that the devastation of the land by the Assyrians is to take place, of which [Pg 60] the Prophet treats more in detail afterwards in ver. 17 ff. But opposed to this view is the circumstance that, even before the boy enters upon this maturer age (ver. 16), hence in a few years after this, the allied Damascus and Ephraim shall be desolated; so little are these two kings able to conquer Jerusalem, and so certain is it that a divine deliverance is in store for this country in the immediate future. And, in every point of view, this explanation shows itself to be untenable. The supposition that a _real_ Present is spoken of in ver. 14 saddles upon the Prophet an absurd hallucination; and nothing analogous to it can be referred to in the whole of the Old Testament. According to statements of the Prophet in other passages, he sees yet many things intervening between the Messianic time and his own; according to chap. vi. 11-13, not only the entire carrying away of the whole people, (and he cannot well consider the Assyrians as the instruments of it, were it only for this reason, that he is always consistent in the announcement that they should not succeed in the capture of Jerusalem), but also a later second divine judgment. According to chap. xi., the Messiah is to grow up as a twig from the stem of Jesse completely cut down. This supposition of His appearance, the complete decay of the Davidic dynasty, did not in any way exist in the time of the Prophet.