Commentaria in Isaiam
BUT ISRAEL HATH NOT KNOWN ME.—So also the Septuagint. But the Hebrew omits the pronoun me, and then the pathos is more apt and vehement: for “his owner and his master’s crib” is to be repeated from the preceding antithesis, “him”; for the ox knew him: but Israel knew him not, as if to say: Israel, in such stupor, has not known its God and Lord, who feeds it in Chanaan as in a rich crib, whereas the ox and ass even there acknowledge their master feeding them.
AND MY PEOPLE HATH NOT UNDERSTOOD,—namely my language and voice, as if to say: The ox and the ass understand the voice of their master, and by it turn every way at their master’s nod; but Israel has not understood me feeding, calling, commanding, threatening, beseeching, as though I were a barbarian to it, or importunate and a tyrant, as though I spoke to it in Japanese or Turkish or Tartar.
4. WOE TO THE SINFUL NATION, A PEOPLE LADEN WITH INIQUITY, A WICKED SEED, UNGRACIOUS CHILDREN.—Here the Prophet is in the third tone of preaching. For “woe” the Hebrew is hoi, which Vatablus renders “alas”: for it is, he says, the voice of one pitying and lamenting another’s misery and calamity. But others generally better render hoi as “woe”: for here it is the speech of God threatening and indignant. “Woe” signifies threats, a decree and sentence, both of temporal desolation and of eternal damnation, says St. Gregory, homily 9 on Ezechiel. Israel is called here, first, “laden with iniquity,” that is, weighed down by the weight and multitude of crimes, and bent over as if to the ground. Second, “a wicked seed,” because the Jews degenerated from the grace of God, by which they had been made his children, and turned the perversity of their will as it were into nature, says St. Augustine, book 7 Against the Adversary of the Law and the Prophets, chapter 22. Here is a climax or gradation: for the speech gradually grows and becomes graver and more vehement. For there are here five degrees of impiety and of the impious. The first, when it is said: “Woe to the sinful nation,” that is, to one wandering from the law of God; for this is the Hebrew chote. The second, when he says, “a people laden with iniquity,” who have now become hardened to crimes, and are pressed down to the very ground by their weight. The third, when he says, “a wicked seed,” as if to say: Of the worst parents are the worst children, who have as it were drawn in and inherited idolatry and malice from their parents and from their very race and nature, and have changed it as it were into their own disposition and nature. The fourth, when he says, “ungracious children,” who have added to the sins of their parents more atrocious crimes, and think and plot nothing but crimes and wickedness. Hence Vatablus renders, most abandoned children; the Hebrew is banim maschitim, that is, children cut off, as if to say: They are like a tree cut down, which cannot revive and sprout again; it is all over with them, no hope of fruit is left in them. Second, and more genuinely, maschitim, being the active participle in hiphil, you may render, destroyers, devastators, corrupters, as if to say: These corrupt, lay waste and ruin themselves and others and all things. So Vatablus. The fifth may be where he adds: “They have forsaken the Lord, they have blasphemed the Holy One of Israel, they are gone away backwards,” as if to say: Our Jews, forsaking, blaspheming and cursing the Lord, and in his presence, to his greatest injury and insult, turning their backs on him, have devoted themselves to idols.
THEY HAVE BLASPHEMED THE HOLY ONE OF ISRAEL.—In Hebrew it is naatsu, that is, they have cast away, despised, provoked. But the highest contempt of God is blasphemy. Again, their idolatry is blasphemy, both real and verbal. For idolaters, by the very fact that they worship idols in place of God, blaspheme God in fact, and by words and hymns celebrating idols and spurning God, blaspheme him verbally. Isaias speaks primarily to the Jews of his own time; St. Basil, however, Jerome and Cyril refer this to the Jews at the time of Christ: for their genius, as followers of their fathers, was the same, and the Holy Spirit foresaw and foretold it here through Isaias: for these properly blasphemed Christ, calling him a wine-drinker, a demoniac, and one who cast out devils in the name of Beelzebub.
THE HOLY ONE OF ISRAEL.—There is emphasis, as if to say: they blasphemed God, who is the Holy of holies, holiness itself, to be adored, supremely revered and glorified, especially by Israel, as the people whom he chose for himself as his own and holy people, and to whom he delivered his holy law, holy faith, holy victims and ceremonies. “Israel” here is in the genitive case: “the Holy One of Israel” is therefore the God of Israel, whose holiness the impious profaned and polluted. For blasphemy directly violates the holiness of God: hence it is the supreme sin.
5. FOR WHAT SHALL I STRIKE YOU ANY MORE, YOU THAT INCREASE TRANSGRESSION?—There is here a threefold sense, and each is suitable. First, “for what,” that is, to what purpose, why, shall I strike you, since you are obstinate in evil, so that I do not hope for your amendment? So Vatablus.
Second, “for what,” that is, in what member, in what part of the body? as if you said: I find no member left in your body in which there is room for a new stroke. For all is one wound, one bruise and swelling, as follows. So St. Jerome and Nazianzen, oration On the Plague of Hail. So says Ovid, book 4, On the Pontus:
What avails it to plunge steel into limbs already dead? In me a new wound has no place now.
Third, “for what,” that is, with what stroke shall I strike you? So St. Jerome, as if to say: In vain shall I strike you henceforth: for I have sent upon you every kind of stroke, and spent them in vain, and you have become no better: I have afflicted you with famine, war, plague, servitude, and have as it were emptied my whole armory against you: I have nothing further with which to strike you: it remains therefore that I forsake you and cast you wholly from me. So Cyril. This forsaking and casting away is the gravest stroke of God, of which Psalm 80, 13: “So I let them go according to the desires of their heart: they shall walk in their own inventions”; and Ezechiel 16, 42: “My jealousy shall be taken away from thee,” and God delivered them up to the desires of their heart.
THE WHOLE HEAD IS SICK, AND THE WHOLE HEART IS SAD. 6. FROM THE SOLE OF THE FOOT UNTO THE TOP OF THE HEAD THERE IS NO SOUNDNESS IN IT.—Behold here is the effect of falling away from God, or of that which he said: “They are gone away backwards.” For God is the strength, health and joy of the soul and of the commonwealth. If therefore thou fallest away from God, thou wilt become sick and sad. Hear St. Cyprian, or rather Origen (as Pamelius gathers from the style and other things), in the book On the Singularity of Clerics: “As,” he says, “a small drop of water poured into much wine wholly fails of itself and takes on the color and taste of the wine; as glowing iron is stripped of its former and proper form, and made most like fire; as air filled with a sunbeam is transformed into the same brightness of light; as a mirror directly lit by the sun’s rays receives in itself the likeness of the sun, and you would think it another sun: so also the Saints in their inmost parts are wholly penetrated by the charity of God, and thus made deiform are transformed into the likeness of God.” Mystically on these words of Isaias Richard of St. Victor wrote a treatise On the State of the Interior Man.
Note: Isaias here speaks not so much of the diseases, wounds and strokes of the body as of the soul, namely of vices and sins: for he passes from the effect to the cause, namely from the stroke to the fault, as if to say: Your whole body is wounded by my strokes; because the same body is wholly infected and sick with fault and sins.