Isaiah 36

This creed of historic Christianity has known eighteen hundred years of battle; it has never known defeat. The Church of God, built on the incarnation and resurrection, and holding from her temple’s topmost spire the cross, has seen imperial dominions and hoary superstitions and theologies of error, and ten thousand airy speculations disappear, while she steadily expands her sheltering walls and shining gates to encompass all nations. J. H. Barrows.

THESE historical chapters, which conclude the earlier prophecies of Isaiah, are embodied in the history of Hezekiah’s reign, Vol. VII., pp. 343-371. B.

The next four chapters contain a historical appendix to the first part of Isaiah’s prophecies, relating chiefly to Sennacherib’s invasion and the slaughter of his host, to Hezekiah’s sickness and miraculous recovery, and to the friendly intercourse between him and the king of Babylon. The same narrative is found substantially in the Second Book of Kings (chaps. 18-20), and a different account of the same matters in the Second Book of Chronicles (chap. 32). It may safely be inferred, as a legitimate if not an unavoidable deduction, that these chapters form a continuous, unbroken narrative by one and the same writer; that this writer may as well have been Isaiah as any other person, if we regard internal evidence, and can have been no other, if we regard the immemorial tradition of the Hebrew canon; and that these four chapters, far from having been inserted here at random or through ignorance, are in their proper place, as a connecting link between the earlier and later prophecies, the threatening in chap. 39:6 being really the theme or text of the long prophetic discourse, with which the remainder of the book is occupied. A.