Saint Isaiah

Isaiah was still young when he began to prophesy, and he did so for a very long time. He himself teaches us that he announced the oracles of Jehovah during the reigns of four kings of Judah: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, which spans a period of more than one hundred years. But we believe, with Saint Jerome, that he only began to prophesy in the twenty-fifth year of the reign of Uzziah, nearly eight hundred years before Jesus Christ.

It was in the very year of the death of this prince that our holy Prophet had the heavenly vision of the divine Majesty on the throne of glory, of which he has left us the description in these terms: "I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up; his robe filled the vast enclosure of the temple. The dense ranks of the Seraphim formed like an impenetrable hedge around this throne; they each had six wings: two with which they veiled their faces, two with which they covered their feet, and two others which served them to fly in the immensity of the temple. Their melodious voices blended into sublime chords, and I distinguished these words: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord, the God of hosts: the earth is all filled with his glory. Suddenly the door of the celestial edifice was shaken by the resounding of these formidable voices and its enclosure filled with smoke. I then said: Woe to me who have kept silent, because my lips are impure, and I dwell in the midst of a people who also have defiled lips. At the same time, one

of the Seraphim flew toward me, carrying a burning coal that he had taken from the altar; having applied it to my mouth, he said to me: This coal has touched your lips, your iniquity shall be taken away and you shall be purified of your sin. I then heard the Lord who said: Whom shall I send to carry my word to my people? I answered: Here am I, send me. And the Lord: Go, and say to this people: Hear my voice and do not understand it, see what I show you, and do not discern it. Blind its heart, make its ears deaf, lest they hear, close its eyes for fear that they see: then it will be converted and I will heal it."

As the Lord had predicted to him when entrusting him with his mission, Isaiah, during the course of his preaching, had much to suffer from the Jews to whom his reproaches were odious. He himself complains in several places of the little success of his instructions and the little zeal his listeners showed in responding to them. But what consoled him in the midst of his afflictions was that, having God as his judge, he hoped that He would take into account his good will and his labor.

Towards the end of the reign of Jotham or the first year of that of Ahaz his son, Isaiah predicted not only the ruin of the kingdom of Israel, which was to happen twenty-one years later, but also the annihilation of the name of Ephraim, which was its principal tribe, and was to perish in such a way that it would cease to be counted among the ranks of the peoples. The Prophet clearly marked the term of sixty-five years for the fulfillment of this prediction, and it has been noted that at the end of this time the king of Assyria sent foreigners into the land of Samaria to form another people under other laws.

At the time Isaiah made this prediction, the city of Jerus alem was Jérusalem Holy city where the Cross was lost and subsequently recovered. besieged by Rezin, king of Syria, and by Pekah, king of Israel. Ahaz, who had only recently ascended the throne of Judah, remained locked in his capital, trembling with the apprehension of being taken with the city, and perishing there or being led away captive. The Lord then told Isaiah to go and meet this prince with his son Shear-Jashub, and to command him to remain in peace without fearing anything and without being troubled "before these two tails of smoking firebrands of fury," Rezin and Pekah. These kings, in fact, having been unable to take Jerusalem, were obliged to withdraw soon after: this was, however, only a delay of the punishment prepared for the impiety of the king of Judah.

Two or three years passed: the armies of the Syrians and the Israelites resumed their hostilities on the lands of the kingdom of Judah, and the Lord wished to speak again to King Ahaz through the ministry of the prophet Isaiah. The latter, addressing the prince to whom Jehovah had sent him: "Ask of your God," he said to him, "that He may show you a sign, either from the depths of the earth or from the highest heaven." — "I will not ask for a sign," replied Ahaz, "and I will not tempt the Lord." And Isaiah: "Adonai Himself will give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son: she shall call Him E mmanuel, Emmanuel Prophetic name of the Messiah meaning 'God with us'. that is to say, God with us. A shoot shall come forth from the stump of Jesse, and a flower shall spring from his root. And the spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon him; justice shall be the belt of his loins, and faith his baldric. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down beside the kid; the lion and the sheep shall dwell together, and a little child shall lead them." These words, Jews and Christians understand as referring to the Messiah: history and the world are there to show us their fulfillment. The formidable nations figured in Scripture by wild beasts, the

Goth, the Vandal, the Hun, the Cimbrian, the Teuton, we see them as they enter the holy mountain, into the Church of Christ, shed their natural ferocity, ally themselves imperceptibly with the more civilized populations of Gaul, Italy, Sicily, and finally form but one Christendom whose supreme law will be, no longer the force of the sword, but the knowledge of God spread over all the earth.

Isaiah then predicted the total destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Syria by the kings of Assyria, declaring that the Assyrians would be exterminated in their turn. Soon after, he announced the misfortunes that were to overwhelm the Philistines, then the Moabites. Under the reign of Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, he predicted the ruin of the kingdom of Judah, of the city of Jerusalem, and the captivity of the people by the Babylonians; then the desolation of Babylon by the Medes and Persians, and the deliverance of the Jews who were to rise from their oppression after the ruin of the Babylonian kingdom. He then prophesied against Arabia and Edom, which were to be punished in their turn. Finally, in the year that the general of Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, went to attack the cities of the Philistines, God had Isaiah announce the desolation of Egypt, which was to be the result of the war that this king was about to bring into those regions. The event confirmed the prediction.

Isaiah was still prophesying during the time of Hezekiah. This prince having fallen dangerously ill, the Prophet went to find him to announce to him, on behalf of God, that he would not recover; but the Lord, touched by the tears and prayers of the holy king, sent his Prophet back to him to announce that he would be healed, and, to give him assurance of this, He made the shadow of the sun move back ten degrees on the sundial of Ahaz. This pri nce had Manassès King of Judah, son of Hezekiah, responsible for the martyrdom of Isaiah. great veneration for Isaiah; but Manasseh, his son and successor, far from inheriting his sentiments, was offended by the reproaches that the servant of God addressed to him regarding his impieties, and, to get rid of an importunate censor whom he hated, he had him cut in two through the middle of the body with a wooden saw. This is at least an ancient tradition among the Jews, supported by the testimony of several Fathers of the Church, that Isaiah was put to death by the torture of the saw, towards the beginning of the reign of Manasseh, king of Judah (around 715 BC). Saint Justin Martyr accused the Jews of having removed from the text of Scripture this circumstance of Isaiah's death, which did so little honor to their fathers. Moreover, what is said in Saint Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews is applied to this Prophet: "Some of them were sawn asunder."

Isaiah is represented: 1° at the moment of his heavenly vision, when a seraph, as we have said, touches his lips to purify them with a coal taken from the fire of the altar; 2° showing the tree of Jesse, to prophesy the Incarnation; 3° with a sundial on which he makes the shadow move back ten degrees to guarantee to the sick King Hezekiah the promise he made to him that he would return to health; 4° holding an open book in his left hand which he points to with his right, and on which the word Maria is read, in allusion to the prophecy: "A virgin shall conceive"; 5° unrolling with both hands his scroll which contains his prominent prophecies; 6° having at his side a large wooden saw, the instrument of his martyrdom; 7° buried in a pit, near an oak tree.

[APPENDIX: CULT AND RELICS. — WRITINGS.]

The constant tradition of the Jews and Christians, affirms Dom Calmet, is that the body of Isaiah was buried near Jerusalem, under the fuller's oak, near the fountain of Siloam, from where it was transferred to Paneas or Caesarea Philippi, near the sources of the Jordan, in the basilica of Saint Lawrence, and from there to Constantinople, under the reign of T Constantinople City where the saint exercised his ministry and patriarchate. heodosius the Younger, in the year 442 of Jesus Christ. According to Mgr Mialin, between the upper pool and the lower pool of Siloam is a small mound which serves as a place of prayer for Muslims; a forked tree, which is in the middle, marks for the faithful the place where the most illustrious of the Prophets was martyred.

Isaiah is the most eloquent of the Prophets, and with David, the most sublime of the poets who have ever appeared. A contemporary of Homer, who possesses all the purity of the Greek language, Isaiah has all that of the Hebrew language, united with an energy of thought and a magnificence of language that are incomparable. Saint Jerome says that his writings contain everything that is in the Scriptures, and that one finds there all the knowledge of which the human mind is capable: natural philosophy, morality, and theology.

The title that we rea d at the head of t prophéties d’Isaïe Biblical book containing the oracles of the prophet. he prophecies of Isaiah clearly proves that he only wrote them at the end of his life, or at least that he only placed this title there after the work was completed; for, when he began to prophesy under the reign of Uzziah, he undoubtedly did not know that he would still be doing so more than fifty years later, under the reign of Hezekiah. He appears entirely occupied with predicting the calling of the Gentiles and the advent of Jesus Christ, the establishment and the glory of His Church; it is to this that all his prophecies must be referred, and without this, it is almost impossible to understand them. Those contained in the first twelve chapters are from the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, and Ahaz, and concern what happened in their time; the other fifty-four are from the reign of Hezekiah.

Besides the Prophecies that we have, Isaiah had written a Collection of the acts of King Uzziah, as we learn from the second book of Chronicles, chapter XXIV; but this work is lost. There have also been attributed to him a work entitled: the Ascension of Isaiah, and another under this title: the Vision of Isaiah; but all scholars place them among the apocrypha.

Among the literary works written on Isaiah, one may cite the Commentaries of Saint Hippolytus, Eusebius of Caesarea, Saint Basil the Great, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Jerome, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret, Procopius of Gaza, Thierry, monk of Saint-Mathias in Trier, and Saint Bruno of Segni; the sermons of Saint Augustine and of Alcedius, Abbot of Rindval; and the homilies of Saint John Chrysostom.

We have used, to compose this biography, the General History of Sacred and Ecclesiastical Authors, by Dom Calmet; the Biographical Dictionary by Abbé Migne; the Lives of the Saints, by Abbé Embrbacher; the Holy Places, by Mgr Mialin; the History of the Saints of the Old Testament, by Sailliet; and the Bible under the Bible, by Abbé Galnet. Bar-le-Duc, Louis Guérin, 2 vol., 1871.