A glance at the present state of the disputed question will prepare us to go into the merits of it.

The great majority of American Christians have taken little interest until recently in the theories of so-called historical criticism. Thus it has come to pass in the case before us that at least nine-tenths of our intelligent church members assume without question that the whole book of Isaiah came from the pen of the son of Amoz ; while most of those who comprise the remaining tenth regard doubt upon this point as merely one of the vagaries of German neology. On the other hand, in Germany itself, few respectable scholars remain who have not yielded more or less to the prevailing tendency to cut the book into sections varying in date and authorship.

Ewald, in his great work on the prophets, imputes to those who deny the Babylonian authorship of the last twenty-seven chapters, “motives altogether reprehensible.” So Weber, as quoted by Delitzsch, regards the traditional view as manifesting “a devilish self-hardening against the scientific conscience.” Despite the grim humor of this last expression it was doubtless written mainly in earnest. Delitzsch himself, with more caution than candor, allows his arguments for tlie integrity of Isaiah to stand, in the successive editions of his commentary, though one need look no further than the articles lately published in this journal to find him quoting from the “Babylonian Isaiah.” Much more conservative is Nägelsbach, author of the commentary in the Lange series ; yet even he admits several interpolations. One is hardly surprised that Kuenen, in searching out a reliable basis for his “History of Israel” should profess to “know for certain” that the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah belong to the second half of the 6th century B. C. Yet there are signs that this firm foundation is yielding, by concessions from within, as well as attacks from without. The most recent, perhaps the most important, commentary comes from England; that of Rev. T. K. Cheyne (2nd ed. 1882), whose work is highly commended by Robertson Smith. A previous volume of his, “The Book of Isaiah Chronologically Considered” appeared in 1871. At that time Mr. Cheyne went all lengths with Ewald; at present, he gives up important ground, so far as concerns the local origin of the prophecies of Isaiah. About three-fourths of the book he now believes to have been written in Palestine. But far from maintaining the unity of Isaiah, he tends in the contrary direction, holding that the sixty-six chapters consist of more than a dozen fragments, written by perhaps ten different authors, at periods varying from the middle of the eighth to the middle of the fifth century. Not more than twenty- seven chapters, he thinks, can be ascribed to Isaiah with much probability. Here is confusion worse confounded. The sober student is fair to ask on what grounds these astonishing dissections are made. The frank answer of many Continental critics would be: “There is no such thing as predictive prophecy ; since the so-called Isaiah foretells deliverance under Cyrus from the Babylonian captivity, he must have lived about the time of Cyrus.”

This position has been fearlessly avowed by Gresenius, Knobel, Ilitzig, Ewald, Wellhausen, and others. The majority of students in this country will deem it an unwarranted theological prejudice, and simply oppose to it the authority of our Master and Lord (e. g. in Luke xxiv. 27). To do Mr. Cheyne justice he does not hold, in this respect, with the destructive school. When we inquire for the further reasons of the view we are examining, they reduce themselves to alleged incompatibilities, in point of style and diction, between the sections of the. prophecy. Questions of style are exceedingly complex, involving so much of the personal element as to be practically indeterminate. The argument from diction, however, deserves a more important place in this controversy than has usually been assigned to it. Defenders of the unity of Isaiah have aimed to show that the formidable lists of peculiarities in phraseology brought forward on the other side are not sufficient to prove diversity of authorship. For the most part, they have not been bold enough to assume that if Isaiah wrote the book as a whole there must be a multitude of unconscious threads of coincidence in point of language binding the entire work together, and to stake their case upon observed facts of this nature. Dr. Nägelsbach, however, has given at the close of his commentary a laborious collection of materials embracing the entire vocabulary of the suspected portions, with their occurrences in the undisputed chapters also, but he gives no summary of results. He expresses his belief, it is true, that the unity of authorship is thereby confirmed ; still, he speaks so hesitatingly as not to carry conviction. The value of the list, moreover, is seriously lessened by the many errors running through it, so that an entire revision would be necessary to make it trustworthy. My own work in this department was begun and completed in total ignorance of Nägelsbach’s researches. Referring for details to the Bibliotheca Sacra for April and October 1881, and for January 1882, I will simply indicate the plan pursued. By a series of careful enumerations, there was ascertained the whole number of words in the Hebrew vocabulary’, then the number in each main division of Isaiah, in the entire book, in the earlier prophets, the later prophets, and the prophets as a whole; also the commonest and the rarest words in the so called later Isaiah, with a few other particulars. It was thence proved that the vocabulary of Isaiah B presents striking affinities with that of the earlier prophets (especially Isaiah A) and striking diversities from that of the later prophets. This appeared both from the number of coincident words and from their character. For instance, while 848 of B’s words are found in A, only 735 occur m the exile-prophet Ezekiel, though his prophecy is about twice as long as A’s. Again, there are eight words found in both parts of Isaiah and nowhere else, but only one word peculiar to Isaiah B and the period of the exile. The books of the Old Testament I arranged in groups according to two systems of classification, and the vocabulary of Israeli B (excepting proper names, and words so common as to be indecisive) was taken up word by word, the number of occurrences of each word in all the classes was recorded, and the occurrences in Isaiah were cited by chapter and verse. From this “Hebrew Index” tables were deduced, proceeding from the more rare to the more frequent words, and showing by each particular grouping that the language of B belongs in the class which includes A and can readily be excluded from Ezekiel's class.

A concluding article is given in the Bibliotheca Sacra for July 1882, carrying out with great detail an examination of the local color of Isaiah B as compared with that of Isaiah A on the one hand and the late prophets on the other. It will be seen that this argument advances a stage from the mere grouping of words to the comparison of ideas. Beginning with inorganic nature, I have gone through the vegetable, animal and human kingdoms, noting agreements and disagreements, and finding that, whoever wrote the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, it cannot be fairly denied that his environment was very like that of the genuine Isaiah and very unlike the scenery of Babylon. As it would be manifestly improper to judge a house from a brick, I will give no illustrations from this portion of the article. But the evidence examined next, that drawn from the names of God, does not lose its force when stated in brief. It appears from induction (as might have been judged a priori) that most of the earlier prophets use these divine titles with great freedom, while in later times there seemed to be a special sacredness attached to two or three names, which caused a loss of spontaneity. Thus Ezekiel almost always employs “Jehovah” or “Adonai Jehovah.” But both parts of Isaiah blend with these a rich variety of ether terms in such a way as to be characteristic of the earlier projects and to several also a minute and evidently undesigned correspondence of part with part. The particular terms they employ have sometimes a special weight in the argument. Thus “the Holy One of Israel,” occurring 14 times in each part, is found nowhere else among the prophets, except twice in the last chapters of Jeremiah, which seem to presuppose Isaiah’s predictions against Babylon. Again, the Divine title “King,” the idea at the root of the theocracy, is frequently met with both in writers before and after the exile; its absence from the undisputed prophecies of that period is certainly a natural circumstance ; yet it is found in both parts of Isaiah. Equally natural is the fact that the writers of the exile abstain from that title of God so common among the prophets—“Jehovah Sabaoth.” The victorious leader of Israel’s “hosts,” the God of her “armies” was not likely to be invoked by that name when those forces were defeated and humbled. Yet “Jehovah Sabaoth” occurs six times in Isaiah B, as well as often in Isaiah A.

I close with a specimen or two of the inferences which may be drawn from the rare words common to both parts. There are two Hebrew nouns from the root “to be white,” meaning white linen. חוׄר and חוּר. These same forms are also found from an entirely different root, “to hollow out,” and mean a hole. Isaiah A uses חוׄר for white linen, and חוּר for hole; the later writers reverse this. Isaiah B uses but one of these words, חוּר, but uses it in the sense of hole, thus differing from the later writers and agreeing with Isaiah A. In fact, this is one of the eight words occurring only in the two parts of Isaiah. Another interesting case is פּוּרָה a wine-press, which occurs once in B and once in Haggai, nowhere else. A wine-press has two receptacles, one for treading the grapes, the other for receiving the juice. Isaiah B uses פּוּרָה of the former, Haggai of the latter. But as פּוּרָה comes from the verb “to bruise,” it must have meant originally the upper part of the winepress, which would place B among the older writers. So יֶקֶב means the upper receptacle in Isaiah A, the lower in Jeremiah.

The advantages of the line of argument I have pursued is that it is independent of doctrinal assumptions either Christian or anti-Christian. The facts pertaining to the language of our present book of Isaiah seem to indicate clearly that the sixty-six chapters are rightly ascribed to a single age and a single author.