storm, as a tempest of mighty waters overflowing, shall be cast down to the earth with violence.  The crown of the pride of the drunkards of Ephraim shall be trodden underfoot, and the fading flower of his glorious beauty, which is on the head of the fat valley, shall be as the first ripe fig before the summer; which when he that looketh upon it seeth, while it is yet in his hand he eateth it up.”  While the cruel fate of the perverse city was being thus accomplished, Jahveh Sabaoth was to be a crown of glory to those of His children who remained faithful to Him; but Judah, far from submitting itself to His laws, betrayed Him even as Israel had done.  Its prophets and priests were likewise distraught with drunkenness; they staggered under the effects of their potations, and turned to scorn the true prophet sent to proclaim to them the will of Jehovah.  “Whom,” they stammered between their hiccups—­“whom will He teach knowledge? and whom will He make to understand the message? them that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts?  For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little!” And sure enough it was by the mouth of a stammering people, by the lips of the Assyrians, that Jahveh was to speak to them.  In vain did the prophet implore them:  “This is the rest, give ye rest to him that is weary;” they did not listen to him, and now Jahveh turns their own gibes against them:  “Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little,”—­“that they may go and fall backward, and be broken and snared and taken.”  There was to be no hope of safety for Jerusalem unless it gave up all dependence on human counsels, and trusted solely to God for protection.*

* Isa. xxviii.  Giesebrecht has given it as his opinion that only verses 1-6, 23-29 of the prophecy were delivered at this epoch:  the remainder he believes to have been written during Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah, and suggests that the prophet added on his previous oracle to them, thus diverting it from its original application.  Others, such as Stade and Wellhausen, regard the opening verses as embodying a mere rhetorical figure.  Jerusalem, they say, appeared to the prophet as though changed into Samaria, and it is this transformed city which he calls “the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim.”

Samaria was doomed; this was the general belief, and men went about repeating it after Isaiah, each in his own words; every one feared lest the disaster should spread to Judah also, and that Jahveh, having once determined to have done with the northern kingdom, would turn His wrath against that of the south as well.  Micah the Morashtite, a prophet born among the ranks of the middle class, went up and down the land proclaiming misery to be the common lot of the two sister nations sprung from the loins of Jacob, as a punishment for their common errors and weaknesses.