Isaiah 14:21

slaughter a place of slaughter (R.V. marg.).

that they do not rise … land R.V. that they rise not up, and possess the earth.

full the face of the worldwith cities This could hardly be reckoned a crime, for it would be undoing the wrong that their father had wrought (Isaiah 14:17). Some render "enemies" or gain that sense by an emendation. Others change the word -ârîm(cities) into -iyyîm(ruined heaps). The easiest correction is simply to omit the word, the sense being complete without it.

The elegy ends here. The passage just considered (Isaiah 14:9) bears a close resemblance to Ezekiel's dirge over the fall of Pharaoh and his host (Ezekiel 32:19 ff.). Many questions of great interest and importance are suggested by both. The most important is how far such representations are to be taken as expressing the fixed belief of the writers or their age with regard to the state after death. Their affinities with Babylonian speculation on that subject, taken in connexion with the fact that such elaborate descriptions of the underworld do not occur before the Exile, may indicate that the imagination of the writers had been influenced by their contact with the religion of their conquerors. In that case it may be reasonable to suppose that they freely availed themselves of the material thus laid to their hand merely as poetic imagery, without meaning to attribute strict objective reality to all the conceptions. At the same time there was a common basis of belief underlying the Hebrew and Babylonian ideas regarding the future state, and all that is essential to the understanding of this passage was probably familiar to the minds of the Israelites before the Exile. In the conception as here presented the following points are to be noted. (1) Sheol, which is figured as a vast subterranean region, is the common gathering-place of all the dead. They exist there as shades, rěphâ"îm(Isaiah 14:9), a word which is usually explained to mean "feeble ones," weak, pithless adumbrations of the living form. These are represented as capable of being roused to a transient interest in human affairs by the arrival amongst them of so distinguished a personage as the king of Babylon; but their ordinary condition is one of utter inactivity, a sort of conscious death rather than life. It is true that the writer speaks only of kings and potentates, and throws little light on the state of the common man after death. Still the Old Testament as a whole knows nothing of separate spheres of existence for the righteous and for the wicked, and that idea is certainly not to be imported into the present passage. (2) We seem to find a clear trace of the antique notion that the lot of the shade in Sheol depends on the fate of the body on earth. The kings who have received due interment sit each on his throne retaining the semblance of their former greatness, while he who was "cast forth away from his sepulchre" is relegated to the "recesses of the pit." This, however, is connected with the conviction that the fate of the body is not accidental; a dishonoured death expresses the final judgment of God on a career of exceptional wickedness. And it is this judgment of God, executed on earth, which is regarded as reflected and perpetuated in the condition of the disembodied spirit. (3) In this way the idea of retribution is extended to the other world. There is indeed an essential difference between the application of the principle here given and that to which a fuller revelation has led us. As we have seen, the retribution here spoken of is only the counterpart of a retribution already manifest on earth, whereas we have learned to look to the future life to redress the inequalities of the present, and to bring about a perfect correspondence between character and destiny, never realised in this world.