Commentaria in Isaiam
9. UNLESS THE LORD OF HOSTS HAD LEFT US SEED, WE HAD BEEN AS SODOM.—In Hebrew it is, unless the Lord sabaoth, that is, of armies: sabaoth is a name, or rather an epithet, of God; signifying God’s power furnished with the greatest, readiest and most invincible forces of armies, heavenly and earthly, namely of Angels, stars, lightnings, hailstorms, thunders, bears, lions, wasps, and of all creatures, which no one can resist, as if to say: Why then do you, O Jews, dare to resist the God of sabaoth? Anna, the mother of Samuel, is read to have been the first to name and invoke the God of sabaoth, 1 Kings 1. See what is said on Exodus 6, 3, about the ten names of God.
Note: For seed the Hebrew is sarid, that is, remnant, a few survivors, as if to say: Unless God from that common and universal hostile devastation had preserved a few, as the remnants and seed of the race (as Noe was the seed of the human race), and made them survivors, we Jews should all have been utterly destroyed like Sodom: for the impiety of Jerusalem was so great, equal to that of Sodom, that Josephus, book 5 of the Jewish War, chapter 13, says: “I think that if the Romans had delayed to come against the guilty, the city would have been swallowed up by a chasm of the earth, or perished by a flood, or suffered the thunderbolts and fires of Sodom: for it bore a much more impious progeny than that which Sodom had brought forth.” Literally Isaias speaks both of those few Jews who survived the Babylonian captivity, and returned to Jerusalem with Zorobabel and Jesus the son of Josedec; and of the yet fewer who survived the Roman disaster under Titus. The Jews, therefore, because they sinned equally, indeed more than the Sodomites, were also punished more than they: for this is what Jeremias says, Lamentations 4, 6: “The iniquity (that is, the punishment of iniquity) of the daughter of my people is made greater than the sin (that is, the punishment of the sin) of Sodom.” This sense answers to the Hebrew sarid, and is the plainest and simplest, and therefore genuine. Sanchez explains it a little differently, as if to say: For the sake of a few just men, as Osee, Amos, Joel, Jonas, Micheas, who were the true seed of God, that is, holy men, God did not utterly destroy the city and nation of the Jews: as he would not have destroyed Sodom, if ten just men had been found in it.
Allegorically, the Apostle, Romans 9, 29, transfers this to Christ, as if to say: Unless God had chosen and reserved from the Jews a small remnant, namely the Blessed Virgin, the Apostles, and a few others believing in Christ, all Israel would have been rejected for unbelief, and would have perished like Sodom and Gomorrha. So St. Jerome, Cyril, Rupert and Haymo. To this come Origen and Oecumenius on Romans 9, who take by “seed” Christ, or the doctrine of Christ. So also St. Basil and Hugh explain, as if to say: Unless God had decreed from the Jews his seed, that is, Christ to be born, and therefore had preserved in this destruction some Jews from whom he should be born, all would have been destroyed. To Christ, therefore, the Jews owe it that they were not utterly cut off. So of Fabius Maximus Ovid said, book 1 On the Pontus, elegy 2:
That you might be born, though three hundred fell, one day did not carry off all the Fabii; as if to say: In so great a slaughter of the Fabii made by Hannibal, God preserved one, from whom Fabius Maximus, the pillar of the Republic, should be born.
Wherefore St. Chrysostom, homily 5 On Penance, skilfully teaches that God not rarely bears even with great sinners on account of the holy offspring whom he foresees or predestines to be born of them. “Terah,” he says, “the father of Abraham, was both a worshipper and maker of idols, yet did not pay the penalty of impiety; and rightly. For if God had cut off the root, whence would so great fruits of faith (Abraham) have sprung? Who is more wicked than Esau? But if he had been cut off, the world would have lost the greatest fruit of justice; and what sort, hear. Esau begot Raguel, Raguel Zara, Zara Job. You see how great a flower of patience would have withered, if God, forestalling, had exacted the penalty from the root. He also used this providence toward the Egyptians, beyond belief blasphemous: for he waited until there should be monasteries there in which those might flourish who imitate the angelic life. But human laws also keep a pregnant mother, though a sinner, unharmed until the birth, lest they destroy an innocent fetus. Finally, if God had been swift to punishment, the Church would not have possessed Paul: he deferred therefore the blasphemer, to show in him as penitent the longsuffering of God; and how many offspring did Paul beget to God?” This and more Chrysostom.
Tropologically, let the penitent soul say this of itself: Unless the Lord in my heart had left the seed of good inspiration, fear, compunction and penance, I should have perished like Sodom: “The mercies of the Lord, that we are not consumed: the mercies of the Lord I will sing for ever.” This St. Mary of Egypt felt, this she said.
10. HEAR THE WORD OF THE LORD, YE PRINCES OF SODOM: GIVE EAR TO THE LAW OF OUR GOD, YE PEOPLE OF GOMORRHA.—Note: The Jews are here called “people of Gomorrha”: as the “princes of Sodom,” formerly Abrahamites and Jacobites, now Gomorrhites. He alludes to Deuteronomy 32, 32: “Their vine is of the vineyard of Sodom, and of the suburbs of Gomorrha: their grape is the grape of gall, and their cluster most bitter.” So Ezechiel says, chapter 16, verse 3: “Thy father was an Amorrhite, and thy mother a Cethite,” and Daniel to the incestuous old man, chapter 13, verse 56: “Thou seed of Chanaan, and not of Juda.”
With the same freedom Pope Agapetus, sent by Theodatus king of the Goths to the Emperor Justinian, when, peace having been made between them, he was pressed by Justinian, even with added threats, to confirm the Eutychian heresy, replied:
“I desired to come to Justinian, a most Christian prince, but I have found a Diocletian,”
a most bitter enemy of the Christians; Cedrenus and others are witness. The same was afterward said to the same Justinian by Pope Vigilius. So St. Hilary calls the Emperor Constantius, persecuting Christians, “a tyrant and enemy of Christ”; Lucifer of Cagliari calls the same “Judas the betrayer” and “the worm of Arius”; St. Athanasius calls the same “Antiochus, Herod,” indeed “Antichrist.” So to the Emperor Leo the Isaurian, who was the first Iconoclast, St. Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople, said to his face: “Thou art Antichrist,” as his Acts have it, and from them Baronius.
11. TO WHAT PURPOSE (do you offer) ME THE MULTITUDE OF YOUR VICTIMS? I AM FULL.—Here he refutes the empty and harmful confidence of the Jews in their victims. “I am full,” that is, satisfied with your victims. These, so often repeated, cause me nausea: because although in themselves good, and commanded by me, yet because they are offered by you they displease me. First, because you offer them with an unclean heart and full of sins. “For your hands are full of blood,” as follows: for “the victims of the wicked are abominable to the Lord: the vows of the just are acceptable,” Proverbs 15, 8. Second, because you place all holiness in those external sacrifices, and neglect the internal, which is the true; indeed you think it is permitted you with impunity to plunder, to get drunk, to fornicate, etc., because you think to expiate your sins with your victims; for this is what Jeremias reproaches them with, chapter 7, 4: “Trust not in lying words, saying: The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. To steal, to kill, to commit adultery, to swear falsely, to offer sacrifice to Baalim; and you have said: We are delivered, because (that is, although) we have done all these abominations.” Wherein you err most gravely. For God is not fed by your external sacrifices, but by internal ones, and therefore through the external, as through an image and shadow only, he wills to rouse you to the internal, namely to acts of religion, piety, love, obedience to the divine law, in which he himself delights. You therefore, ambitiously clinging to sacrifices and your empty shadows, and offering these alone to God, do just as if one inviting friends to a dinner set before them, hungry, hares and meats not real but painted and shadowed: in which manner Lampridius teaches that Heliogabalus mocked his guests; Suetonius teaches the same of Caligula, chapter 36. So Irenaeus, book 4, chapter 31, Theodoret, book On Sacrifices, before the middle, St. Chrysostom on this place, tome 1, Haymo, Thomas, Hugh, Adam, Forerius, and clearly St. Jerome expound this place. “Victims,” he says, “were not principally sought by God, but that they might not be offered to idols, and that by carnal victims, as by a type and image, we might pass to spiritual sacrifices.” The “princes of Sodom” are called the princes of the Jews, both those who lived in the time of Isaias, and, as Basil and Jerome say, those at the time of Christ, namely Annas, Caiphas, the Scribes, the Pharisees, and the magistrates themselves: and this, first, because the sins of Sodom were “pride, fullness of bread and abundance, and the idleness of her and of her daughters: and they did not put forth their hand to the needy and the poor,” as Ezechiel 16, 49 says; for from this they plunged into all crimes, and became the worst. The same were the sins of the Jews. Second, because the Jews themselves were liable to the abominable vice of sodomy, as is plain from chapter 26. So Cyril. Third, because in their crimes they were as shameless and impudent as the Sodomites; for this is what is said in chapter 3, verse 9: “They have proclaimed their sin as Sodom.” Fourth, because, as in Sodom few just men were found, namely Lot with his own, so also in Judea, says Cyril. Fifth, because Sodom, in Hebrew, says Basil, signifies declination, Gomorrha rebellion: and these princes with the people of the Jews were transgressors and rebels against God. See Canon 22.