The prophecies of Isaiah Author:Joseph Addison Alexander Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: v with which some writers speak of this magnificent passage as plainly belonging to a later age. A similar remark may he applied to Knobel's repetition of Vi... more »tringa's indiscreet suggestion as.to the popular belief of the Hebrews respecting the heavens and the heavenly bodies. It would be no less rational to argue from the foregoing verse, that they believed in streams of blood so vast as to dissolve whole mountains. If the terms of that verse are poetical hyperboles, on what ground is this to be explained as a lesson in natural philosophy ? Another notion of Vitringa's, equally unfounded, although not adopted by the modern Germans, is that the terms of this verse plainly shew that the prediction has respect to some great body politic or organised society, the sun being the emblem of the civil power, the moon of the ecclesiastical, and the stars of distinguished men in Church and State. The context clearly shews that the terms used are not symbolical but poetical, and that here, as in chap. xiii. 10, the idea which they are all intended to convey is that of revolution, of sudden, total, and appalling change. The imagery of the passage has been partially adopted in Matt. xxiv. 29, and Eev. vi. 13, neither of which, however, is to be regarded either as a repetition or an explanation of the one before us. 5. There is no need of giving '3 the sense of yea (Angustí), or of explaining it asa mere connective particle (Knobel), since it may be construed, in its proper sense, either with' ver. 8 (Hitzig), or with the whole of the preceding description. All this shall certainly take place, for my sword (the speaker being God himself) is steeped (saturated, soaked) in heaven. Most versions, ancient and modern, take the verb here in the same sense of being drunk or intoxicated, either wi...« less