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"Kings shall be thy nursing fathers . . . . . they shall not be ashamed that wait for Me"
(Isa. 49: 23).
The doubter says:
"Shall the prey be taken from the mighty?" (Isa. 49: 24),
and again the Lord assures the doubting soul by saying:
"Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away . . . . . I will save thy children"
(Isa. 49: 25).
Then for a third time the voice of doubt is heard, this time implied in the reference to
the bill of divorcement and the selling of children for debt:
"The form in which this challenge is put, assumes that the Israelites themselves had
been thinking of Jehovah's dismissal of Israel as an irrevocable divorce and a bankrupt
sale into slavery" (Geo. A. Smith).
Until the student of Isaiah is acquainted in some degree with the law of Moses, the
point of the reference to a bill of divorcement may be missed. In Deut. 24: 1-4, we
find the law concerning divorcement and read:
"When a man hath taken a wife . . . . . find no favour . . . . . then let him write her a bill
of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house . . . . . she may go
and be another man's wife. And if the latter husband hate her, and writer her a bill of
divorcement, and giveth it in her hand . . . . . her former husband, which sent her away,
may not take her again to be his wife . . . . .".
Here, as Geo. Adam Smith says, are the ideas of absoluteness, deliberateness and
finality; -- of absoluteness, for throughout the East, power of divorce rests entirely with
the husband; of deliberateness, for in order to prevent hasty divorce the Hebrew law
insisted that the husband must make a bill of writing of divorce instead of only speaking
dismissal; and of finality, for such a writing, in contrast to the spoken dismissal, set the
divorce beyond recall.
The second figure introduced by the doubting Israelites is that of the sale of children
by a father who put his children away, not as the husband put his wife away in his anger,
but in his necessity, selling them to pay his debts and because he was bankrupt.
Israel had indeed been put away, but the very essence of Isaiah's prophecy is that their
dismissal was not beyond recall, they shall yet be restored and comforted. Israel had
indeed been sold, but they had sold themselves!
"Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is
your mother put away" (Isa. 50: 1).
It is ever the same. Man, who is a responsible agent and suffers for his own actions,
flies from a guilty conscience to some fatalistic theory which he disguises under the high