the prophet implore them: "This is the rest, give ye rest to him that is weary;" they did not listen to him, and now Jahveh turns their own gibes against them: "Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little,"--"that they may go and fall backward, and be broken and snared and taken." There was to be no hope of safety for Jerusalem unless it gave up all dependence on human counsels, and trusted solely to God for protection.* * Isa. xxviii. Giesebrecht has given it as his opinion that only verses 1-6, 23-29 of the prophecy were delivered at this epoch: the remainder he believes to have been written during Sennacherib's campaign against Judah, and suggests that the prophet added on his previous oracle to them, thus diverting it from its original application. Others, such as Stade and Wellhausen, regard the opening verses as embodying a mere rhetorical figure. Jerusalem, they say, appeared to the prophet as though changed into Samaria, and it is this transformed city which he calls "the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim." Samaria was doomed; this was the general belief, and men went about repeating it after Isaiah, each in his own words; every one feared lest the disaster should spread to Judah also, and that Jahveh, having once determined to have done with the northern kingdom, would turn His wrath against that of the south as well. Micah the Morashtite, a prophet born among the ranks of the middle class, went up and down the land proclaiming misery to be the common lot of the two sister nations sprung from the loins of Jacob, as a punishment for their common errors and weaknesses. "The Lord cometh forth out of His place, and will come and tread upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains shall be molten under Him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire, as waters that are poured down a steep place. For the transgression of Jacob is all this, and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not Samaria? and what are the high places of Judah? are they not Jerusalem?" The doom pronounced against Samaria was already being carried out, and soon the hapless city was to be no more than "an heap of the field, and as the plantings of a vineyard; and I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley," saith the Lord, "and I will discover the foundations thereof. And all her graven images shall be beaten to pieces, and all her hires shall be burned with fire, and all her idols will I lay desolate; for of the hire of an harlot hath she gathered them, and into the hire of an harlot shall they return." Yet, even while mourning over Samaria, the prophet cannot refrain from thinking of his own people, for the terrible blow which had fallen on Israel "is come even unto Judah; it reacheth unto the gate of my people, even to Jerusalem." Doubtless