Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament · Isaiah Capítulo 57

From fear of man, Israel, and still more Judah, had given up the fear of Jehovah. “And of whom hast thou been afraid, and ( whom) didst thou fear, that thou becamest a liar, and didst not continue mindful of me, and didst not take it to heart?” It was of men - only mortal men, with no real power (Isaiah 51:12) - that Israel was so needlessly afraid, that it resorted to lies and treachery to Jehovah ( kı̄ , ut , an interrogative sentence, as in 2 Samuel 7:18; Psalms 8:5): purchasing the favour of man out of the fear of man, and throwing itself into the arms of false tutelar deities, it banished Jehovah its true shelter out of its memory, and did not take it to heart, viz., the sinfulness of such infidelity, and the eventful consequences by which it was punished (compare Isaiah 47:7 and Isaiah 42:25).

With Isaiah 57:11 the reproaches are addressed to the present. The treachery of Israel had been severely punished in the catastrophe of which the captivity was the result, but without effecting any improvement. The great mass of the people were as forgetful of God as ever, and would not be led to repentance by the long-suffering of God, which had hitherto spared them from other well-merited punishments. “Am I not silent, and that for a long time, whereas thou wast not afraid of me?” A comparison with Isaiah 42:14 will show that the prophecy returns here to its ordinary style. The lxx and Jerome render the passage as if the reading were מעלם (viz., עיני = παρορῶν , quasi non videns ), and this is the reading which Lowth adopts. We may see from this, that the original text had a defective ומעלם , which was intended, however, to be read וּמעלם . The prophet applies the term ‛ōlâm (see Isaiah 42:14) to the captivity, which had already lasted a long time - a time of divine silence: the silence of His help so fas as the servants of Jehovah were concerned, but the silence of His wrath as to the great mass of the people.

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The promise is now followed by a appeal to make ready the way which the redeemed people have to take. “And He saith, Heap up, heap up, prepare a way, take away every obstruction from the way of my people.” This is the very same appeal which occurs once in all three books of these prophecies (Isaiah 40:3-4; Isaiah 57:14; Isaiah 62:10). The subject of the verb ( ' âmar ) is not Jehovah; but the prophet intentionally leaves it obscure, as in Isaiah 40:3, Isaiah 40:6 (cf., Isaiah 26:2). It is a heavenly cry; and the crier is not to be more precisely named.

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The primary ground for this voice being heard at all is, that the Holy One is also the Merciful One, and not only has a manifestation of glory on high, but also a manifestation of grace below. “For thus saith the high and lofty One, the eternally dwelling One, He whose name is Holy One; I dwell on high and in the holy place, and with the contrite one and him that is of a humbled spirit, to revive the spirit of humbled ones, and to revive the heart of contrite ones.” He inflicts punishment in His wrath; but to those who suffer themselves to be urged thereby to repentance and the desire for salvation, He is most inwardly and most effectually near with His grace. For the heaven of heavens is not too great for Him, and a human heart is not too small for Him to dwell in. And He who dwells upon cherubim, and among the praises of seraphim, does not scorn to dwell among the sighs of a poor human soul. He is called râm (high), as being high and exalted in Himself; נשּׂא (the lofty One), as towering above all besides; and עד שׁכן . This does not mean the dweller in eternity, which is a thought quite outside the biblical range of ideas; but, since עד stands to שׁכן not in an objective, but in an attributive or adverbial relation (Psalms 45:7, cf., Proverbs 1:33), and שׁכן , as opposed to being violently wrested from the ordinary sphere of life and work (cf., Psalms 16:9; 102:29), denotes a continuing life, a life having its root in itself, עד שׁכן must mean the eternally (= לעד ) dwelling One, i.e., He whose life lasts for ever and is always the same. He is also called qâdōsh , as One who is absolutely pure and good, separated from all the uncleanness and imperfection by which creatures are characterized. This is not to be rendered sanctum nomen ejus , but sanctus ; this name is the facit of His revelation of Himself in the history of salvation, which is accomplished in love and wrath, grace and judgment. This God inhabits m ârōm v e qâdōsh , the height and the Holy Place (accusatives of the object, like m ârōm in Isaiah 33:5, and m e rōmı̄m in Isaiah 33:16), both together being equivalent to φῶς ἀπρόσιτον (1 Timothy 6:16), since qâdōsh (neuter, as in Psalms 46:5; Psalms 65:5) answers to φῶς , and m ârōm to ἀπρόσιτον . But He also dwells with ( את as in Leviticus 16:16) the crushed and lowly of spirit. To these He is most intimately near, and that for a salutary and gracious purpose, namely “to revive ... .” ההיה e and היּה always signify either to keep that which is living alive, or to restore to life that which is dead. The spirit is the seat of pride and humility, the heart the seat of all feeling of joy and sorrow; we have therefore spiritum humilium and cor contritorum . The selfish egotism which repentance breaks has its root in the heart; and the self-consciousness, from whose false elevation repentance brings down, has its seat in the spirit ( Psychol. p. 199).

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The compassion, by virtue of which God has His abode and His work of grace in the spirit and heart of the penitent, is founded in that free anticipating love which called man and his self-conscious spirit-soul into being at the first. “For I do not contend for ever, and I am not angry for ever: for the spirit would pine away before me, and the souls of men which I have created.” The early translators (lxx, Syr., Jer., possibly also the Targum) give to יעטף the meaning egredietur , which certainly cannot be established. And so also does Stier, so far as the thought is concerned, when he adopts the rendering, “A spirit from me will cover over, and breath of life will I make;” and so Hahn, “When the spirit pines away before me, I create breath in abundance.” But in both cases the writer would at any rate have used the perf. consec. ועשׂיתי , and the last clause of the v. has not the syntactic form of an apodosis. The rendering given above is the only one that is unassailable both grammatically and in fact. כּי introduces the reason for the self-limitation of the divine wrath, just as in Psalms 78:38-39 (cf., Psalms 103:14): if God should put no restraint upon His wrath, the consequence would be the entire destruction of human life, which was His creative work at first. The verb עטף , from its primary meaning to bend round ( Comm. on Job, at Job 23:9), has sometimes the transitive meaning to cover, and sometimes the meaning to wrap one's self round, i.e., to become faint or weak (compare עטוּף , fainted away, Lamentations 2:19; and התעטּף in Psalms 142:4, which is applied to the spirit, like the kal here). מלּפני is equivalent to “in consequence of the wrath proceeding from me.” נשׁמות (a plural only met with here) signifies, according to the fixed usage of the Old Testament (Isaiah 2:22; Isaiah 42:5), the souls of men, the origin of which is described as a creation in the attributive clause (with an emphatic אני ), just as in Jeremiah 38:16 (cf., Zechariah 12:1). Whether the accents are intended to take עשׂיתי אני in this attributive sense or not, cannot be decided from the tiphchah attached to ונשׁמות . The prophet, who refers to the flood in other passages also (e.g., Isaiah 54:9), had probably in his mind the promise given after the flood, according to which God would not make the existing and inherited moral depravity an occasion for utterly destroying the human race.

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