If Judah and Jerusalem had listened to the messages of Isaiah,[559] they might have been saved the humiliating affliction which seemed to have plunged the brief sun of their prosperity into seas of blood. He had warned them incessantly and in vain. He had foretold their present desolation, in which Zion should be like a woman seated on the ground, wailing in her despair. He had taught them that formalism was no religion, and that external rites did not win Jehovah's approval. He had told them how foolish it was to put trust in the shadow of Egypt, and had not shrunk from revealing the fearful consequences which should follow the setting up of their own false wisdom against the wisdom of Jehovah. Yet, intermingled with pictures of suffering, and threats of a harvestless year, designed to punish the vanity and display of their women, and the intimation--never actually fulfilled--that even the palace and Temple should become "the joy of wild asses, a pasture of flocks," he constantly implies that the disaster would be followed by a mysterious, divine, complete deliverance, and ultimately by a Messianic reign of joy and peace. Night is at hand, he said, and darkness; but after the darkness will come a brighter dawn. FOOTNOTES: [535] One legend of his birth resembles the finding of Moses in the bulrushes. [536] Schrader, _K. A. T._, pp. 272-274; _Records of the Past_, vii. 28. [537] Smith, _Eponym Canon_, p. 130. [538] See Prof. Smith, _Isaiah_, p. 198. [539] _Records of the Past_, vii. 40. Sargon's words are, "The people of Philistia, Judah, Edom, and Moab were speaking treason. The people and their evil chiefs, to fight against me, unto _Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, a monarch who could not save them_, their presents carried, and besought his alliance" (G. Smith, _Assyrian Discoveries_, 290). [540] On the monuments called _Turtanu_, "Holder of power." See Schrader in Riehm, _s.v._ [541] Raphia, or Ropeh, is on the borders of the desert. Asia beat Africa in every encounter--at Raphia, at Altaqu, at Carchemish. The impression of the seal of Shabak, attached to his capitulations with Sargon, was found at Nineveh by Sir A. H. Layard, and is now in the British Museum. Shabak died in 712. His son Shabatoh succeeded him in Egypt, and his nephew(?) Tirhakah in Ethiopia. Sabaco's name assumes many forms (LXX., Σηγώρ; Herod., ii. 137; Σαβακώς; Vulg., _Sua_). The Egyptians called him Shaba(ka). [542] Isa. xx. 1-6. [543] Lenormant, _Les Premières Civilisations_, ii. 203; _Records of the Past_, vii. 41-46. [544] Isa. xxi. 6, A.V., "Watch in the watch-tower." Hitzig, Cheyne, "They spread the carpets." Much in this short oracle (xxi. 1-10) is obscure. Isaiah seems, in denouncing the fate of Babylon, to mourn for the ruin of the smaller states of which it was the prelude (G. Smith, _Soc. of Bibl. Arch._, ii. 320 Kleinert, _Stud. u. Krit._, 1877 W. R. Smith in _Enc. Brit._, _s.v._ "Isaiah").