The darkness deepened across Israel. The Assyrian had come. The northern floods kept surging among the little States of Palestine, and none knew what might be left standing. We can well understand Isaiah pausing, as he did, in face of such rapid and incontrollable movements. When Tiglath-pileser swept over the plain of Esdraelon, casting down the king of Samaria and the Philistine cities, and then swept back again, carrying off upon his ebb the populations east of the Jordan, it looked very like as if both the houses of Israel should fall. In their panic, the people betook themselves to morbid forms of religion; and at first Isaiah was obliged to quench the hope and pity he had betrayed for them in indignation at the utter contrariety of their religious practices to the word of God. There can be no Divine grace for the people as long as they _seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto the wizards that chirp and that mutter_. For such a disposition the prophet has nothing but scorn, _Should not a people seek unto their God? On behalf of the living should they seek unto the dead?_ They must come back to the prophet's own word before hope may dawn. _To the revelation and the testimony! If they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them._ The night, however, grew too awful for scorn. There had been no part of the land so given to the idolatrous practices, which the prophet scathed, as _the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, by the sea beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles_. But all the horrors of captivity had now fallen upon it, and it had received at the Lord's hand double for all its sins. The night had been torn enough by lightning; was there no dawn? The darkness of these provinces fills the prophet's silenced thoughts. He sees a people _hardly bestead and hungry, fretting themselves, cursing their king_, who had betrayed them, _and their God_, who had abandoned them, _turning their faces upwards_ to heaven and _downwards_ to the sacred soil from which they were being dragged, _but, behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and into thick darkness they are driven away_. It is a murky picture, yet through the smoke of it we are able to discern a weird procession of Israelites departing into captivity. We date it, therefore, about 732 B.C., the night of Israel's first great captivity. The shock and the pity of this rouse the prophet's great heart. He cannot continue to say that there is no morning for those benighted provinces. He will venture a great hope for their people.