ourselves.

Ver. 2. "In that day the Sprout of the Lord becomes for beauty and glory, and the fruit of the land for exaltation and ornament, to the escaped of Israel."

Ver. 3. "And it shall come to pass, he that was left in Zion, and was spared in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, every one that is written to life in Jerusalem."

Ver. 4. "When the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall remove the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of right and the spirit of destruction."

Ver. 5. "And the Lord creates over the place of Mount Zion, and over her assemblies clouds by day and smoke, and the brightness of flaming fire by night, for above all glory is a covering."

Ver. 6. "And a tabernacle shall be for a shadow by day from the heat, and, for a refuge and covert from storm and from rain."

Ver. 2. "In that day" i.e., not by any means after the suffering, but in the midst of it, comp. chap. iii. 18; iv. 1, where, by the words "in that day," contemporaneousness is likewise expressed. Parallel is chap. ix. 1 (2),where the people that walketh in darkness seeth a great light. According to Micah v. 2 (3) also, the people are given up to the dominion of the world's powers until the time that she who is bearing has brought forth. Inasmuch as the Messianic proclamation bears the same general comprehensive character as the threatening of punishment, and includes in itself beginning and end, the suffering may partly also reach into the Messianic time. It dismisses from its discipline those who are delivered up to it, gradually only, after they have become ripe for a participation in the Messianic salvation.--There cannot be any doubt that, by the "Sprout of the Lord" the Messiah is designated,--an explanation which we meet with so early as in the Chaldee Paraphrast (בְּעדָּנָא הַהוּא יְהֵי מְשִׁיחָא דַיָי לְחֶדְוָה וְלִיקָר), from which even Kimchi did not venture to differ, which was in the Christian Church, too, the prevailing one, and which Rationalism was the first to give up. The Messiah is here quite in His proper place. The Prophet had, in chap. iii. 12-15, in a very special manner, derived the misery of the people from their bad rulers. What is now more rational, therefore, than that he should connect the salvation and prosperity likewise with the person of a Divine Ruler? comp. chap. i. 26. In the adjoining prophecies of Isaiah, especially in chaps. vii., ix., and xi., the person of the Messiah likewise forms the centre of the proclamation of salvation; so that, a priori, a mention of it must be expected here. To the same result we are led by the analogy of Micah; comp. Vol. i. p. 443-45, 449. Farther--The representation of the Messiah, under the image of a sprout or shoot, is very common in Scripture; comp. chap. xi. 1-10; liii. 2; Rev. v. 5. But of decisive weight are those passages in which precisely our word צמח occurs as a designation of the Messiah. The two passages, Jer. xxiii. 5: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, and I raise unto David a righteous Sprout;" and xxxiii. 15: "In those days, and at that time, shall I cause the Sprout of righteousness to grow up unto David," may at once and plainly be considered as an interpretation of the passage before us, and as a commentary upon it; and that so much the more that there, as well as here, all salvation is connected with this Sprout of Jehovah; comp. Jer. xxiii. 6: "In His days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely, and this is His name whereby he shall be called: The Lord our righteousness." The two other passages, Zech. iii. 8: "Behold, I bring my servant Zemach," and vi. 12: "Behold, a man whose name is Zemach" are of so much the greater consequence that in them Zemach (i.e., Sprout) occurs as a kind of nomen proprium, the sense of which is supposed as being known from former prophecies to which the Prophet all but expressly refers; or as Vitringa remarks on these passages: "That man who, in the oracles of the preceding Prophets (Is. and Jer.) bears the name of 'Sprout.'" Of no less consequence, finally, is the parallel passage, chap. xxviii. 5: "In that day shall the Lord of hosts be for a crown of glory, and for a diadem of beauty unto the residue of His people." The words צבי and תפארת there meet us again. The same is there ascribed to the Lord which is here attributed to the Sprout of the Lord. That can be readily accounted for, only if the Sprout of the Lord be the Messiah. For the Messiah appears everywhere as the channel through which the Lord imparts to His Church all the fulness of His blessings, as the Immanuel by whom the promise given at the very threshold of the Old Testament: "I dwell in the midst of them," is most perfectly realized. "This is the name whereby He shall be called: The Lord our righteousness," says Jeremiah, in the passage quoted.--The "Sprout of the Lord" may designate either him whom the Lord causes to sprout, or him who has sprouted forth from the Lord, i.e., the Son of God. Against the latter interpretation it is objected by Hoffmann (Weissagung und Erfüllung. Th. 1, S. 214): "צמח is an intransitive verb, so that צֶמַח may be as well connected with a noun which says, who causes to sprout forth, as with one which says, whence the thing sprouts forth. Now it is quite obvious that, in the passage before us, the former case applies, and not the latter, inasmuch as one cannot say that something, or even some one, sprouts forth from Jehovah; it is only with a thing, not with a person, that צמח can be connected." But it is impossible to admit that this objection is well founded. The person may very well be conceived of as the soil from which the sprout goes forth. Yet we must, indeed, acknowledge that the Messiah is nowhere called a Sprout of David. But what decides in favour of the first view are the parallel passages. In Jer. xxiii. 5, xxxiii. 15, the Lord raises up to David a righteous Sprout, and causes Him to grow up unto David. Hence here, too, the Sprout will in that sense only be the Lord's, that he does not sprout forth out of Him, but through Him. In Zech. iii. 8 the Lord brings his servant Zemach; in Ps. cxxxii. 17, it is said: "There I cause a horn to sprout to David," and already in the fundamental passage, 2 Sam. xxiii. 5, which contains the first germ of our passage, David says: "For all my salvation and all my pleasure should He not make it to sprout forth."--As the words "Sprout of the Lord" denote the heavenly origin of the Redeemer, so do the words פרי הארץ the earthly one, the soil from which the Lord causes the Saviour to sprout up. These words are, by Vitringa and others, translated: "the fruit of the earth," but the correct translation is "the fruit of the land." The passages, Num. xiii. 26: "And shewed them the fruit of the land;" and Deut. i. 25: "And they took in their hands of the fruit of the land, and brought it unto us, and brought us word again, and said, good is the land which the Lord our God doth give us,"--these two passages are, besides that under consideration, the only ones in which the phrase פרי הארץ occurs; and there is here, no doubt, an allusion to them. The excellent