ABSTRACT
Isaiah used the publication of his past prophecies as an agency supplementing his continued oral work. The vain confidence of the rulers of Judah described by Isaiah in his first prophetic book, was rudely shaken by the progress of the war with Pekah and Kezin. The limitation of Isaiah's conception of the divine judgment leads us at once to observe the corresponding limitation in his use of the words sin, sinners, and the like. At the moment when Ahaz and his panic-stricken counsellors were framing the desperate resolution of entrusting the state to the tender mercies of the Great King, Isaiah was the only man in Judah who retained his composure and his faith. He had long foreseen that judgment was inevitable, and he knew that the disasters of the Syro-Ephraitic war were only the prelude of a greater catastrophe in which the scourge of Assyria must fall on Judah and Ephraim alike.
