of the second part
must here acknowledge that the Prophet takes his stand in an _ideal_
Present.--In chap. liii. the Prophet takes his stand between the
sufferings and the glorification of the Messiah. The sufferings appear
to him as past; the glorification he represents as future.

Hosea had, in chap. xiii., predicted to Israel great divine judgments,
the desolation of the country, and the carrying away of its inhabitants
by powerful enemies. This punishment and judgment appear in chap. xiv.
1 (xiii. 16) as still future; but in ver. 2 (1 ff.) he transfers
himself in spirit to the time when these judgments had already been
inflicted. He anticipates the Future as having already taken place, and
does not by any means exhort his _contemporaries_ to a sincere
repentance, but those upon whom the calamity had already been
inflicted: "O Israel, return unto the Lord thy God; for [Pg 173] thou
hast fallen by thine iniquity." This parallel passage shews especially,
with what right it has been asserted that the addresses to the people
pining away in exile "were out of place in the mouth of Isaiah, who, as
he lived 150 years before, could _prophesy_ only of the exiled"
(_Knobel_).--Micah says in chap. iv. 8 (compare vol. i., p. 449 ff.):
"And thou tower of the flock, hill of the daughter of Zion, unto thee
it will come, and to thee cometh the former dominion." If the Prophet,
a cotemporary of Isaiah, speaks here of a _former dominion_, and
announces that it shall again come back to the house of David, he
transfers himself from his time, in which the royal family of David
still existed and flourished, into that period of which he had just
before spoken, and during which the dominion of the Davidic dynasty was
to cease. In vers. 9, 10: "Now why dost thou raise a cry! Is there no
king in thee, or is thy counsellor gone? For pangs have seized thee as
a woman in travail," &c., mourning Zion, at the time of the carrying
away of her sons into captivity, stands before the eye of the Prophet,
and is addressed by him. (In commenting upon this passage, we pointed
already to Hosea xiii. 9-11 as an analogous instance of representing as
present the time of the calamity.) The moment of the carrying away into
exile forms to him the Present; the deliverance from it, the Future:
"There shalt thou be delivered, there the Lord thy God shall redeem
thee out of the hand of thine enemies." In chap. vii. 7, Micah
introduces, as speaking, the people alread