y carried away into exile,
and makes them declare both the justice of the divine punishment, and
their confidence in the divine mercy. In the answer of the Lord also,
ver. 11, the city is supposed to be destroyed; for He promises that her
walls shall be rebuilt.--The anticipation of the Future prevails
throughout the whole prophecy of Obadiah also. The song of Habakkuk in
chap. iii. takes its stand in the midst of the anticipated misery. In
the announcement of the invasion of the Chaldeans in chap. i. 6 ff.,
the Future presents itself in the form of the Present. Here, as in the
case of Obadiah, _Hitzig_ and others, overlooking and misunderstanding
this prophetic peculiarity, and considering the _ideal_, to be the
_real_ Present, have been led to fix the age of the Prophet in a manner
notoriously erroneous.--Jeremiah, in chap. iii. 22, 25, [Pg 174]
introduces as speaking the Israel of the Future. In chap. xxx. and
xxxi., he anticipates the future carrying away of Judah. Even in the
Psalms we perceive a faint trace of this prophetic peculiarity. On Ps.
xciii. 1: "The Lord reigneth, He hath clothed himself with majesty,"
&c., we remarked: "The Preterites are to be explained from the
circumstance that the Singer as a _seer_ has the Future before his
eyes. He _beholds_ rejoicingly how the Lord enters upon His Kingdom,
puts on the garment of majesty, and girds himself with the sword of
strength in the face of the proud world." A similar anticipation of
redemption, even before the catastrophe has taken place, we meet with
in Ps. xciv. 1. The situation in the whole Psalm, yea in the whole
cycle to which it belongs, the lyrical echo of the second part of
Isaiah, is not a _real_, but an _ideal_ one. This cycle bears witness
that the singers and seers of Israel were living in the Future, in a
manner which it would be so much the greater folly to measure by our
rule as, for the people of the Old Covenant, the Future had a
significance altogether different from that which it has for the people
of the New Covenant. That which is common to all the Psalms, from
xciii. onward, is the confident expectation of a glorious manifestation
of the Lord, which the Psalmist, following the example of the prophets,
beholds as present. A counterpart is the cycle Ps. cxxxviii.-cxlv., in
which David, stirred up by the promise in 2 Sam. vii., accompanies his
house throughout history.

Several interpreters cannot altogether resist the force of these fac