Dean Plumptre has plausibly suggested, that these verses may represent the programme which Isaiah set before his pupil Hezekiah on his accession to the charge of a nation, whom his weak predecessor had suffered to lapse into such abuse of justice and laxity of morals.[33] The acts of government described are all of a punitive and repressive character. The hero speaks only to make the land tremble: _And He shall smite the land[34] with the rod of His mouth_ [what need, after the whispering, indecisive Ahaz!], _and with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked_. [33] Dean Plumptre notes the identity of the ethical terminology of this passage with that of the book of Proverbs, and conjectures that the additions to the original nucleus, chaps. x.-xxiv., and therefore the whole form, of the book of Proverbs, may be due to the editorship of Isaiah, and perhaps was the manual of ethics, on which he sought to mould the character of Hezekiah (_Expositor_, series ii., v., p. 213). [34] Perhaps for _land--'arets_--we ought, with Lagarde, to read _tyrant--'arits_. This, though a fuller and more ethical picture of the Messiah than even the ninth chapter, is evidently wanting in many of the traits of a perfect man. Isaiah has to grow in his conception of his Hero, and will grow as the years go on, in tenderness. His thirty-second chapter is a much richer, a more gracious and humane picture of the Messiah. There the Victor of the ninth and righteous Judge of the eleventh chapters is represented as _a Man_, who shall not only punish but protect, and not only reign but inspire, who shall be life as well as victory and justice to His people--_an hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land_.