The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 2 (of 2)Smith, George Adam
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 2 (of 2)
Smith, George Adam
Bible. Isaiah -- Commentaries
2. What we have seen to be true of the local colour of our prophecy,
holds good also of its style and language. There is nothing in
either of these to commit us to an Isaian authorship, or to make an
exilic date improbable; on the contrary, the language and style,
while containing no stronger nor more frequent resemblances to the
language and style of Isaiah than may be accounted for by the natural
influence of so great a prophet upon his successors, are signalised by
differences from his undisputed oracles, too constant, too subtle, and
sometimes too sharp, to make it at all probable that the whole book
came from the same man. On this point it is enough to refer our readers
to the recent exhaustive and very able reviews of the evidence by Canon
Cheyne in the second volume of his Commentary, and by Canon Driver in
the last chapter of _Isaiah: His Life and Times_, and to quote the
following words of so great an authority as Professor A. B. Davidson.
After remarking on the difference in vocabulary of the two parts of
the Book of Isaiah, he adds that it is not so much words in themselves
as the peculiar uses and combinations of them, and especially "the
peculiar articulation of sentences and the movement of the whole
discourse, by which an impression is produced so unlike the impression
produced by the earlier parts of the book."[8]
3. It is the same with the thought and doctrine of our prophecy.
In this there is nothing to make the Isaian authorship probable,
or an exilic date impossible. But, on the contrary, whether we
regard the needs of the people or the analogies of the development
of their religion, we find that, while everything suits the Exile,
nearly everything is foreign both to the subjects and to the methods
of Isaiah. We shall observe the items of this as we go along, but
one of them may be mentioned here (it will afterwards require a
chapter to itself), our prophet's use of the terms _righteous_ and
_righteousness_. No one, who has carefully studied the meaning which
these terms bear in the authentic oracles of Isaiah, and the use to
which they are put in the prophecies under discussion, can fail to
find in the difference a striking corroboration of our argument--that
the latter were composed by a different mind than Isaiah's, speaking
to a different generation.[9]
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