Commentaria in Isaiam
Third, St. Jerome, Haymo and Sanchez take the covenant which God made with the Jews, in which he promised to be their protector: this covenant God, because of the sins of the Jews, made void and broke, and “hath not regarded” the Jews “as men,” but as beasts, says St. Jerome, as those who, following not reason but appetite and concupiscence, transformed themselves as it were into brutes, and therefore he cast them away, and threw them to the Chaldeans to be slain: or, as Sanchez says, he reckoned them not men, but as vain stubble, which is driven by the wind; or as the potter’s earthen vessels, which are broken. This sense, like the second, is apt.
9. The land hath mourned and languished.—The ambassadors go on to weep and say that Judea mourns, that is, is squalid, deserted, barren.
Obsorduit (is become dull)—as if to say: The fields are silent, no voice of farmers, as being fugitives, is heard in them, and, as Cyril and Hugh say, the voices of singers and the praises of God in the temple are silent. The Roman text reads obsorduit, that is, is uncultivated, lies filled with briers, tares and filth. Hence our translator renders the Hebrew kamal, chapter 19, verse 6, “shall wither”; the Septuagint, the Chaldean and recent writers render, is cut off without any pity. What precisely the Hebrew kamal signifies is not agreed: for it is found only here and in chapter 19.
10. Now will I rise up, saith the Lord—when things are desperate I will show my faith and power, I will heal so great a disaster with a divine hand, and I will lay Sennacherib low. Note: So God is wont to suffer not only cities and kingdoms, but souls also, by temptation to be driven as it were to the extreme and to despair, and then he succors with mighty grace. Let us say, therefore, in temptation, with holy Job: “While I hope, I breathe; even if he should kill me, I will hope in him.”
11. You shall conceive heat.—God, rising as avenger for the Jews, here attacks the Assyrians.
Note: To conceive heat is to plot slaughters, plunderings, burnings, and everything hostile: the birth of this conception is the execution itself and the effect; as if to say: You have conceived in mind, O Assyrians, the destruction and burning of Jerusalem: but you shall bring forth stubble, that is, an empty and futile thing; your threatening and burning spirits will go off into wind, all your endeavors and efforts were in vain: it is a proverb.
Second, aptly, Forerius, Sanchez and Delrio, adage 1358, as if to say: The fire which you have conceived in mind, O Assyrians, will not so much inflame Jerusalem as yourselves: for you are the stubble worthy of and destined for the fire. In like manner he said, chapter 9, verse 18: “Wickedness is kindled as a fire, it shall devour the brier and the thorn.”
Here learn that the impious man brings forth for himself the evil he plans for another, and that an impious thought is like a fire that blows upon and burns the very man who thinks it. By a like proverb we say: “The smith is bound by the fetters he himself forged; and the thrush breeds evil for itself, because from its dung fowlers make the bird-lime with which they catch it.” Similar are: “To cherish a snake in the bosom, to rear the whelps of wolves”; and that of Ecclesiasticus 42:13: “From garments cometh a moth, and from a woman the iniquity of a man”; and that of Job 13:28: “Who am like rottenness to be consumed, and like a garment that is moth-eaten.” For as a garment breeds the moth that consumes it, so the mortal body breeds from itself putrid humors that corrupt it; for we carry death in our bowels. So anger destroys the angry man, while it makes him rush on swords and death: so lust drives the lustful, and every crime the criminal, to the burnings of Gehenna.
12. And the people shall be as ashes after a fire—as if to say: The Assyrians shall perish and be burned, like gathered thorns, so that by fire they are turned to ashes. Vatablus renders, and the peoples shall be as burnings of lime, that is, like stones that are burned that lime may be made.
The Hebrews relate that the Assyrians were burnt by an Angel with a hidden fire, for instance a pestilence, as Berosus relates in Josephus, book 10, chapter 2. And indeed Isaias hints at that when so often he threatens them with fire.
Thorns.—That is, they shall be as thorns. For the Hebrews often understand the marks of similitude, so, as, like.
13. Hear, you that are far off.—This is an exclamation, after so great a slaughter of the Assyrians, in which, turning aside to the Jews and other Gentiles, he warns them to fear God and the vengeance and fire of God, above all the eternal.
14. The sinners in Sion are afraid—as if to say: Some Jews, hypocrites and impious, were terrified seeing so great a slaughter of the Assyrians, and feared lest God would smite them also, as impious, with like fury: they would have wished, then, not to have God so near; to whom God replies that if they escape that temporal fire of God, they shall fall into the burnings of eternal Gehenna. So Adam and Forerius. Where morally note: He who wishes to dwell with God, let him know that he is a fire burning and consuming whatever in man is carnal and vicious; wherefore for him who will not endure this fire, eternal fire is prepared. The words seem to demand this sense; for he says: “They are afraid,” not slain or burned.
Second, however, St. Thomas, Hugh and Sanchez refer this to the Assyrians, who, terrified by God, were slain in Sion, that is, near Sion: the same are called hypocrites, that is, sinners. For every sinner wishes to seem good while he is bad, and is therefore a hypocrite. Again, hypocrites, says Sanchez, because when after vanquishing the Ethiopians they came up to Jerusalem and played the part of triumphers, yet this was feigned and put on. For they had nothing but an empty show of strength, and the vainest sounds of triumphers.
Which of you can dwell with devouring fire?—As in the public punishment of criminals the preacher who leads the culprit exhorts the people by the criminal’s punishment to avoid crimes, lest they fall into a like penalty, so God here from the slaughter and fire of the Assyrians warns all the impious, as if to say: You have beheld the temporal fire that in a moment slew the Assyrians: but be wise from this spectacle; for what befell the Assyrians, this, nay a far heavier, will befall all the impious after death: against them the wrath of God will rage with a fire not earthly but infernal; not temporal but eternal, so that they shall be ever tumbled in the eternal burnings of Gehenna, yet not reduced to ashes, as the Assyrians were, but always remaining alive and burning. So St. Jerome, Procopius and others.
Note: God is here called a fire devouring sins and sinners, because he is the cause of the fire of hell, which will burn the damned. Otherwise Vatablus, as the voice of the Jews, as if to say: Who will fight for us against this army of the Assyrians, which like fire devours and destroys all things, and which a fire precedes in place of a standard? For a fire in a brazier was carried before the camp and before the kings of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians, as Sanchez teaches from Xenophon, Curtius and Tertullian: but this army cannot be called everlasting burnings.
Which of you shall dwell with everlasting burnings?—What is this devouring fire? what are these everlasting burnings? Let the damned say, who experience them, who are in them. Say then, O Judas! O Caiphas! O Herod! O Pharao! O Caesar! what are thy everlasting burnings? what is thy wretched and penal eternity? “We are tormented with fire and sulphur, and the smoke of our torments ascendeth up for ever and ever.” O if God would grant us our one wish, namely that he should fill the whole universe, from the earth to the empyrean heaven in every direction, with the smallest sand (a single nut holds ten thousand grains of sand), and say to St. Michael to take away one grain every thousand years; and when in this way, through countless thousands, nay millions of years, he had removed all these grains and exhausted the whole globe, that then he should take away one degree of our punishment, nay the least bit of it: and again create another world as great, and again fill it with sand, and tell St. Michael to remove one grain every thousand years, and when he had removed this whole mass of sand of the whole world, then take off a second degree of our punishment: that he should create a third world; a fourth, a fifth, another and another, and do likewise; finally create as many worlds as there can be grains of sand in this world, and fill each one with as many grains up to the top; and when, by removing one grain every thousand years, he had exhausted all these heaps, all these worlds, then our eternity would end, our punishments cease, and, if he would not make us happy, at least not torment us, nay reduce us to nothing. If this were granted to us we should rejoice, we should exult, we should bear our cross willingly, we should suffer the burnings of Gehenna until all those sands were consumed. But we wish in vain. After all these mountains of sand, nay worlds, there is yet no end, yet no middle, yet no beginning of our eternity, of our burning. After all these thousands and millions of years, as great, as long, as entire, as infinite remains our eternity, to be paid for in perpetual fire.