Commentaria in Isaiam
6. FOR THOU HAST CAST OFF THY PEOPLE, THE HOUSE OF JACOB.—Vatablus renders, but thou hast cast off; but ki signifies for, not but. You will ask, for what reason is it “for”? Some answer: for the cause of the succession and overthrow of Jerusalem, of which he treated at the end of the preceding chapter; for to that this pertains. But this is too remote and hard: for there follows, chapter 3, verse 4: “The word of the Lord, etc.” I say, therefore, the sense is, as if to say: Let no one wonder that I Isaias, or the Gentiles, who before knew not God, exhort the Jews, to whom alone God was known, to the knowledge of the true light, namely Christ, saying: “O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord,” because thou, O Lord, hast cast off thy people, that is, hast now begun to cast off, and wilt plainly cast off in the time of the Babylonian captivity, and altogether in the time of Christ: for Isaias here returns to his own times, and as usual addresses his people. He adds the cause, namely the multitude of sins, namely augury, obscenity, avarice, pride, idolatry. So Forerius. Whence follows, FOR THEY ARE FILLED AS IN TIMES PAST,—as if to say: As the ancestors and parents of the Jews, so also these their descendants are filled with riches, and consequently with the sins which riches are wont to bring, namely idols, as the Chaldee renders (for these are the old and ancient sins of the Jews; as is plain from the golden calf, which they adored at Sinai), and with auguries, as the Septuagint render, and the other things which follow. So St. Jerome and others, and it is plain from what follows. For “as in times past” the Hebrew is mikkedem, that is, from the East, say Lyranus and Vatablus, as if to say: They are filled more with diviners and augurs: for the Orientals were given to augury. Whence the diviner Balaam is said to have dwelt in the parts of the East, Numbers 23. But with our Interpreter agree the Septuagint and the Chaldee, who render mikkedem, as from the beginning. For kedem signifies former, beginning; and because the East is such, hence it also signifies the East.
AND HAVE HAD SOOTHSAYERS LIKE THE PHILISTINES.—Augury is divination made from the chattering or gesture of birds; for augury is so called as if avigerium: thence augury is extended to signify any magic and divination, indeed also conjecture; whence Cicero says, Philippic 12: “O my auguries of things to come, always in vain, yet most true,” that is, conjectures.
“And they have cleaved to strange children.” First, as if to say: they have joined themselves to foreign nations in the worship of idols. So some explain it. But this is more obscure and remote, especially since the Prophet soon after clearly accuses them of idolatry, at verse 8.
Second, and better: Cyril, with the Septuagint, takes this of the marriages which the Jews had contracted with foreigners against the law of Exodus 34:16, and from which they had begotten children half Jewish and half Gentile. These children were “strange,” that is, of foreign blood, because their mothers were foreigners, and yet the Jews clung to them as their own offspring.
Third, in the proper and genuine sense, Jerome, Haymo, and St. Thomas, or rather Thomas Anglicus, think that the Jews are here reproved for the abominable vice of pederasty, or sodomy with boys. This sin the Jews learned from the neighbouring Gentiles, and it so took hold among them that they bought foreign slaves for the purpose, as Haymo says, and this is what the word “strange” signifies. Augustus Caesar, Hadrian, Trajan and others were pederasts. Hear St. Jerome here: “So much did the Greeks and Romans once labour under this vice that the most illustrious of the philosophers among the Greeks kept boys publicly as concubines; and Hadrian, learned in the arts of philosophy, consecrated Antinous as a god (as Jupiter did his Ganymede), and a temple to him and a city of Egypt (Antinopolis) and a new religion arose. Among the harlots also, in the brothels, boys stood publicly exposed to lust, until under the Emperor Constantine, by the Gospel of Christ, the infidelity and the baseness of all the nations was blotted out.”
This explanation is proved first, because we often read in Scripture of the prostitution of youths among the Jews, and of effeminate men, for whom lodgings were built not only in the city but near the temple by the impious high priest Menelaus, so that they turned the very temple, as it were, into a brothel, as appears from 2 Machabees 4:9 and 19. Second, because for this reason, in chapter 1, verse 10, he called them princes of Sodom and people of Gomorrha. Third, because the Hebrew reads, “they have been cemented together,” and Symmachus renders it, “they have clapped hands with strange boys.”
7. “AND THE LAND IS FILLED WITH SILVER AND GOLD.” The first sin of the Jews, for which they were cast off by God, was divination; the second, pederasty; the third is this, namely avarice and the insatiable desire of having, which sets no end or limit to riches, but the more it has, the more it strives to have and to heap up.
Note in the moral sense: he does not say, The heart is filled, but, The land is filled with gold; for it can happen that the land is filled with gold, but the heart of the miser can never be filled with it. Not without cause did Plato and Archytas of Tarentum compare the soul of a covetous man to a pierced vessel, because of its insatiable and boundless abyss of craving. The whole world does not fill the heart of man. As a symbol of this, the world has a round shape, the heart a pyramidal one; and a spherical figure cannot fit a pyramid. We shall be satisfied when we enjoy God in glory. “I shall be satisfied,” says the prophet in Psalm 16, “when thy glory shall appear.” Since, then, slight and perishing riches do not fill the soul but rather provoke and inflame it, why do you desire them so greatly? Why do you seek treasures on earth, when you have your portion in heaven? Christ’s poor perish of hunger and nakedness, and you hide in your chest the money by which they could have lived. Do you not understand that you have shut up in your chest the life of the poor? Why do I say shut up? Rather, buried. What is the miser’s chest but a sepulchre, where the life of the poor is buried? Why do you bury their life, indeed your own, and yourself? Your treasury is the tomb of your very self. For where the poor man is, there is your treasure, and there is your heart also. I do not say this, but Christ does, Matthew 6:21. So Hector Pintus. The Apostle said truly that avarice is the service of idols, and covetousness the root of all evils.
“Horses in abundance” (that is, very many; it is a hyperbole) “and numberless chariots.” The fourth sin is pride. For God had forbidden the kings of the Jews, and much more the people, in Deuteronomy 17:16 and 18, to multiply horses and chariots for themselves, both lest they be proud of them for display, and lest they place in them, rather than in God, their hope of victory in time of war. So St. Jerome, Basil, and others. See what was said on Deuteronomy 17 and Exodus 13. Forerius and Sanchez explain it otherwise: as if God said, I gave the Jews abundance of gold, silver and horses; why then do they flee to idols, and seek these things from them, and even turn them to the idols’ use, making idols of the gold I gave them? “And the land is full of idols.” The fifth sin of the Jews is idolatry.
9. “And the mean man (the common man) hath bowed himself down (to idols), and the great man hath been humbled,” that is, the chief man and prince; as if to say, Nobles and people alike worship idols, humbling themselves before them. This looks to the times not of Christ but of Isaias. For the Prophet flies from one subject to another, and mingles both, as in Canon 4. St. Jerome notes that the Jews after their return from Babylon never, and consequently not in the time of Christ, worshipped idols of their own accord and by common consent, and Tobias foretold it in the last chapter, verse 8; that it really came to pass is attested by the Jerusalem Talmud in Galatinus, book 4, chapter 22, and by Rabbi Samuel of Morocco, a Jew turned Christian, in his book On the Coming of the Messias, chapter 1, who concludes from it that not idolatry, as of old, but the killing of Christ is the cause of the ruin and desolation which the Jews suffer everywhere to this day. Calvin twists this against the veneration of holy images. For he thinks that every sign of reverence paid to works of hands, that is, to statues and images, is here condemned. But the impostor errs and deceives. For only idols are condemned here, not images: because the gods of the Gentiles are not images but idols made by their hands. For he says, “The land is full of idols.” Idols are works of men’s hands, not only materially but formally; for they received from men not only the carving or painting of the matter, but the form, that is, the name and divinity of God, though of themselves and in truth they are nothing, as the Apostle says, 1 Corinthians 8:4.
To bow down to these, that is, to adore them with the worship of latria, is unlawful.
“Therefore forgive them not.” The prophet Isaias says this out of zeal, as if to say: Destroy, O Lord, such wicked men, such cursed idolaters. Again, “forgive” stands for “wilt forgive”