attempted this, have involved themselves in inextricable perplexity and in perpetual contradiction with each other. The most forced interpretations are resorted to, to find historical allusions where none are apparent, or to bring into some order events thrown together in wonderful confusion; and, after all, there are some verses in which the idea of any reference to particular events has to be given up. Thus the Targum refers ver. 3-5 to the descent upon Sinai; ver. 6 to the flood and the dispersion which took place at the tower of Babel; ver. 7 to the deliverance from Chushan-rishathaim by Othniel and from the Midianites by Gideon; ver. 9 to the bringing of water from the rock; ver. 10 again to the revelation on Sinai; ver. 11, with great apparent reason, and yet, when the context is considered, most unreasonably, to the standing still of the sun and moon in the time of Joshua; ver. 14, 15 to the passage of Israel through the Red Sea; ver. 8, 12, 13 are understood generally without reference to any particular events. Rosenmüller refers the whole to the Exodus from Egypt, except ver. 7, 11, in which he follows the Targum. Hesselberg finds in ver. 8 the drowning of the Egyptians; ver. 9, 10, Noah's flood; ver. 11, the stoppage of the sun by Joshua. Burk finds in ver. 3-7 a cycle of events from the time of Moses to the Judges; in ver. 8-15, another cycle from Moses to the kings; ver. 14 he refers to the slaying of Goliath. Roos finds one regular chronological succession from first to last; in ver. 10 he explains the mountains to be kingdoms, and the overflowing of the water to be Israel's entrance into Canaan. We may say of the interpreters who hold this view generally, what Delitzsch says in one place of Cocceius, they shake their kaleidoscope and then see whatever they choose. The view finds its best refutation in the miserable success of its advocates in every attempt to carry it consistently out.

Pressed by the difficulties which beset this scheme, Ewald has undertaken to refer the whole to one single event-the revelation of God at the Red Sea. He disposes the whole thus: ver. 3-5, God commences his advance; ver. 6-8, moves north-westwardly to the Red Sea; ver. 9-12, the phenomena before the deliverance; ver. 13-15, the destruction of Pharaoh and his host. But the advance from Sinai presupposes the giving of the law; many things in the description have to be explained as extravagant hyperbole unworthy of the prophet; and the chief fact, which ought to be made most prominent, the passage of Israel and the drowning of Pharaoh, -is scarcely more than hinted at.

If this passage, then, is to be understood historically, it can only be in one way, and that is, by assuming it to be a condensation into one single picture of whatever God has done

for Israel in the past. Traits are borrowed from the more prominent individual events here and there, and then combined in one complex representation; all interval of time and chronological succession is lost sight of, and the whole of the wonders are embraced in a single spectacle as one great wonder ;-just as in Ps. xviii. David throws together all the particular dangers and deliverances of his past life under the idea of one grand peril and one miraculous rescue. The prophet will then be considered as standing and looking back upon the past. All the mighty deeds which God had wrought, present themselves before him in one united prospect. He sees nothing for itself, but as it stands connected with the entire series of which it forms a part. He describes nothing individually, but gives us the combined effect of the whole seen at once. His language now and then takes its form or its colouring from this or that particular event, which is prominently before his eye, but it is with no intention of describing any individual event precisely; his thoughts are not occupied about any one.* This would be, in fact, just such a view of the past as the prophets are accustomed to take of the distant future, and finds in that perhaps its best exemplification. If this passage were to be understood as descriptive of the past, this mode of viewing it would be recommended both by its own structure and by the analogy of other similar passages.

There are reasons, however, which constrain us to decide against the historical and in favour of the prophetic sense. And first and mainly, the tense of the opening verb. This cannot be rendered "God came," English version, but "shall come," or in the sense of an action beginning in the present and continued in the future "is coming." This is the usual prophetic phrase for a future divine intervention. That this is followed in the description by preterities used interchangeably with futures will not surprise any one who is acquainted with the idiomatic use of the Hebrew tenses. This constant interchange is usual in graphic description of what is taking place before the eyes, or of what whether past or future is conceived of with the vividness of an event now in progress, and it makes advancing stages of the action with a peculiar liveliness of manner, which is incapable of being adequately transferred to any occidental language. It is in such cases, however, the first verb that governs the whole, and characterises the entire description as belonging to the region whether of the past or of the future. The prophetic view also agrees better with the structure of the entire chapter. These verses

* "Poetæ nihil est diuturnum. Complecti amant et tanquam semel factum unum sub adspectum ponere poetæ multorum annorum res gestas, præsertim dudum præteritas."-Maurer.

historically understood can only be recollections on which the prophet dwells to assure himself of an answer to his prayer. (Ver. 2.) But then it is disproportionately long, compared with both the other portions of the chapter; and the subordinate is not only in contrariety to the laws of taste, but to the natural utterance of feeling, erected into the most prominent. On the other hand, if it be prophetic, it is itself the answer to the prayer which precedes and the ground of the triumphant joy which follows. There are expressions, too, in the course of it, which a closer inspection would show to be more easily intelligible on the prophetic view, if they would in the other case be intelligible at all. To these grounds may be added, that the prophet, even where he had plainly in his eye events in the past, and actually adopts from earlier sacred writers their language describing them, invariably and with evident design avoids every expression which would be individual in its character and applicable only to the event in the past.

He finds in the past the type of the future; and borrows from the ancient works of God, and from the descriptions of them contained in the earlier Scriptures, the strokes and the colouring for his picture of a corresponding future. He presents us with the picture of a grand descent to judgment, which should combine in itself all that was fearfully majestic and all that was gracious in every previous revelation of God for judgment and for mercy,-a deliverance the antitype of that from Egypt, which should yet so far outshine as positively to eclipse it. (Jer. xvi. 14.) It is in consequence of this reproduction of the past in the future that we find in the Revelation those who have gotten the victory over the great enemy standing beside the sea of glass with harps in their hands, and singing the song of Moses the servant of God; it is Exod. xv. over again on a grander scale. It is for this same reason that in the chapter before us the Lord is represented as coming from the scene of his ancient wonders. He commences his majestic march from Teman and from Paran, and in his progress fills the nations that line the shore of the Red Sea with dismay. Possibly too, our author adds, there is a deeper reason for it than this, that in prophetic view the region between Palestine and Egypt shall actually be the scene of a grand final overthrow of nations, which here in conformity with the customary mode of prophetic representation appears as coincident with the overthrow of the Chaldeans.

God will have mercy upon Israel, and that by coming in judgment on their foes. This judgment shall first touch the Chaldeans, and there can be no doubt that in the prophet's own mind they are the immediate object of this judicial theophany; nor that by the wicked (ver. 13), the king of Babylon

is primarily meant, and by the invading troops (ver. 16), his armies. But this special judgment expands itself before the eye of the prophet into a universal judgment. The march of God is not as we should expect, if to punish the Chaldees was its exclusive object in the direction of Babylon; but it is located in the district between Egypt and Idumea, whence it spreads its effects over the whole earth with its inhabitants. The Chaldee empire, as that from which immediate danger was apprehended, certainly stands in the foreground; yet not as the Chaldee empire, but as the world's empire absolutely, which must be cast down that Israel may be redeemed. And it is for this reason that the picture lacks all traits which would have individual or exclusive reference to the Chaldeans. The kingdom of this world, in its ever-enduring hostility to the kingdom of God, has, since the fall of the Babylonish empire, changed its name and the form of its manifestation, but not its essence nor its spirit. Its fall has been gradually preparing in a number of catastrophes, which stand in the relation of prodromi to the acme, and at the final consummation it will be fully accomplished. This ultimate overthrow the prophet here depicts, by giving to the special judgment upon the Chaldees the intensity of a universal judgment upon all nations, and combining into the focus of one grand world-embracing catastrophe the rays of past and future preliminary judgments. His view is, on the one hand, limited, in that he has the Babylonish empire before him without being able to distinguish those that lie behind it in their succession; on the other, it is so extended that by the aid of inspiration he can see in the fall of Babylon the fall of the empire of evil, and from the proximate can look to the remotest future. This gives the prophecy an import for all times.

In consequence of this intermingling of what is in actual fact sundered by long intervals of time, that which in an exclusive description of the judgment on the Chaldees would be purely emblematic, obtains in the light of subsequent prophets and of the book of Revelation a deep actuality of meaning. The judgment on the Chaldee, the fall of his royal house, has taken place, but not amid the convulsions of nature which are here described. These are by a kind of prolepsis woven into the representation of special judgment, inasmuch as it is preliminary; it is as it were the prelude to a final catastrophe, which shall ensue amidst such commotions of heaven and earth. All that in special judgments can be understood only, at least chiefly, as emblematical of events, partly political, partly such as take place in the invisible and spiritual world, shall, in the final consummation, be outwardly and literally realised to the full extent of its meaning. The entire history of the world is

prognostic of its end; all individual judgments are links in that chain of development which reaches to the final judgment; they all prefigure what shall in the final catastrophe display itself when the outward shall be in perfect correspondence with the inward, and the material with the spiritual, both in intensity and extent. And herein lies the justification of the prophet, when, combining as he does the impending special judgment in one with the final judgment, or it may be in his own mind actually identifying them, he describes the former in such terms as, if we undertake to sunder what the prophet has blended, are applicable to the special judgment only in an emblematic sense, but belong to the final judgment in its strictest and most literal signification.

*

The same characteristic we find in all the prophets. Isaiah, chap. xiii., denounces the judgment upon Babylon; but this extends itself, in ver. 9, &c., to a day of judgment, which shall embrace the earth and all the sinners that are upon it. The figures there as here are not barely allegorical emblems, still less, which would be unworthy of the prophet, hyperbole or fancy; but they in the most literal manner mean, what according to the strict import of the words they denote; for in the vision he sees close behind the judgment upon Babylon, and coalescing with it the final judgment upon the world itself. This incorporating of features from the universal into particu lar judgments sometimes finds place even in cases where, except in such sudden glimpses, the latter are exclusively described. See for a remarkable instance of this kind, Joel ii. 10, 11, where, in a description of a devastation by locusts, language is used which recurs (iii. 15, 16) in the judgment of all na

tions.

The judgment announced in chap. i. as about to burst upon Judah, had led the prophet to pray (iii. 2), that God would repeat on their behalf some such marvellous deliverance as he had wrought of old. And now (ver. 3), in answer to his prayer, God comes to free his people and to punish their foes. The figure of the rising sun lies at the bottom of the majestic description which follows. The divine glory breaks in over Teman and Paran, the region of ancient wonders, not as though the divine advance began at the first of these points and proceeded thence to the other, but the entire horizon which they bound is illuminated at the same instant, and God comes from both at once. And now, as "Selah" intimates, the singers pause,

The two leading peculiarities of prophetic representation are thus admirably stated by Crusius in his Hypomnemeta, "Res quas prophetæ prædicunt, plerumque sistuntur complexe, ita ut in universo suo ambitu summatim, spectentur, vel zarà vò ¿reríah. e. secundum id quod res erit ubi ad fastigium suum pertigerit, non item adduntur partes singulæ, nec successiva graduum consecutio, aut periodorum temporis distinctio, etiam ubi de remotis vel per tempora longe dissita divisis dicitur."

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