] is the common Future, and
to [Hebrew: vatnh] the [Hebrew: h] _optativum_ is added; and hence, we
cannot by any means translate and explain it by: _I gave_.--In chap.
lvi. 9, it is said: "All ye beasts of the field come ye to devour all
the beasts in the forest." This utterance stands in connection with the
[Hebrew: lnqbciv], at the close of the preceding verse. The gathering
of Israel by God the good Shepherd, promised there, must be preceded by
the scattering, by being given up to the world's power--mercy, by
judgment. By the wild beasts are to be understood the Gentiles who
shall be sent by God upon [Pg 177] His people for punishment. This
mission they must first fulfil before they can, according to ver. 8, be
added to, and gathered along with, the gathered ones of Israel. By the
"beasts in the forest," brutalized, degraded, and secularized Israel is
to be understood, comp. Jer. xii. 7-12; Ezek. xxxiv. 5; and my
Commentary on Rev. ii. 1.

The beasts have not yet come; they are yet to come. We can here think
of nothing else than the invasion of the Chaldeans, which the Prophet,
stepping back to the stand-point of his time, beholds here as future;
whilst, in what precedes, from his ideal stand-point, which he had
taken in the Babylonish exile, he had, for the most part, considered it
as past.--In chap. lvi. 10-12, we meet with corrupted rulers of the
people, who are indolent, when everything depends upon warding off the
danger, greedy, luxurious, gormandizing upon what they have stolen. The
people are not under foreign dominion, but have rulers of their own,
who tyrannize over, and impoverish them; comp. Is. chap. v.; Micah,
chap. iii.--In chap. lvii. 1, it is said: "The righteous perisheth and
no man layeth it to heart, and the men of kindness are taken away, no
one considering that, on account of the evil, the righteous is taken
away." The Prophet mentions it as a sign of the people's hardening
that, in the death of the righteous men who were truly bearing on their
hearts the welfare of the whole, they did not recognize a harbinger of
severe divine judgments, from which, according to a divine merciful
decree, these righteous were to be preserved by an early death. "On
account of the evil," _i.e._, in order to withdraw them from the
judgments, which were to be inflicted upon the ungodly people, comp.
Gen. xv. 15; 2 Kings xxii. 20; Is. xxxix. 8. The evil, _i.e._ according
to 2 Kings xxii. 20, the Chaldean catastrophe,