Chapter 33

spared in the divine judgments. They are to become wise by the sufferings of others. The Prophet takes his stand in a time when these judgments, which were to be inflicted by Cyrus, had already been completed. Even those who maintain the spuriousness of the second part must here acknowledge that the Prophet takes his stand in an _ideal_ Present.--In chap. liii. the Prophet takes his stand between the sufferings and the glorification of the Messiah. The sufferings appear to him as past; the glorification he represents as future.

Hosea had, in chap. xiii., predicted to Israel great divine judgments, the desolation of the country, and the carrying away of its inhabitants by powerful enemies. This punishment and judgment appear in chap. xiv. 1 (xiii. 16) as still future; but in ver. 2 (1 ff.) he transfers himself in spirit to the time when these judgments had already been inflicted. He anticipates the Future as having already taken place, and does not by any means exhort his _contemporaries_ to a sincere repentance, but those upon whom the calamity had already been inflicted: "O Israel, return unto the Lord thy God; for [Pg 173] thou hast fallen by thine iniquity." This parallel passage shews especially, with what right it has been asserted that the addresses to the people pining away in exile "were out of place in the mouth of Isaiah, who, as he lived 150 years before, could _prophesy_ only of the exiled" (_Knobel_).--Micah says in chap. iv. 8 (compare vol. i., p. 449 ff.): "And thou tower of the flock, hill of the daughter of Zion, unto thee it will come, and to thee cometh the former dominion." If the Prophet, a cotemporary of Isaiah, speaks here of a _former dominion_, and announces that it shall again come back to the house of David, he transfers himself from his time, in which the royal family of David still existed and flourished, into that period of which he had just before spoken, and during which the dominion of the Davidic dynasty was to cease. In vers. 9, 10: "Now why dost thou raise a cry! Is there no king in thee, or is thy counsellor gone? For pangs have seized thee as a woman in travail," &c., mourning Zion, at the time of the carrying away of her sons into captivity, stands before the eye of the Prophet, and is addressed by him. (In commenting upon this passage, we pointed already to Hosea xiii. 9-11 as an analogous instance of representing as present the time of the calamity.) The moment of the carrying away into exile forms to him the Present; the deliverance from it, the Future: "There shalt thou be delivered, there the Lord thy God shall redeem thee out of the hand of thine enemies." In chap. vii. 7, Micah introduces, as speaking, the people already carried away into exile, and makes them declare both the justice of the divine punishment, and their confidence in the divine mercy. In the answer of the Lord also, ver. 11, the city is supposed to be destroyed; for He promises that her walls shall be rebuilt.--The anticipation of the Future prevails throughout the whole prophecy of Obadiah also. The song of Habakkuk in chap. iii. takes its stand in the midst of the anticipated misery. In the announcement of the invasion of the Chaldeans in chap. i. 6 ff., the Future presents itself in the form of the Present. Here, as in the case of Obadiah, _Hitzig_ and others, overlooking and misunderstanding this prophetic peculiarity, and considering the _ideal_, to be the _real_ Present, have been led to fix the age of the Prophet in a manner notoriously erroneous.--Jeremiah, in chap. iii. 22, 25, [Pg 174] introduces as speaking the Israel of the Future. In chap. xxx. and xxxi., he anticipates the future carrying away of Judah. Even in the Psalms we perceive a faint trace of this prophetic peculiarity. On Ps.