then shall the land rest and pay her sabbaths.  As long as it lieth desolate it shall make up the celebration of the sabbaths which it did not celebrate as long as you dwelt in it.  And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the land of their enemies, and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them, and they shall flee as fleeing from a sword, and they shall fall when none pursueth.  And they shall fall one upon another as it were before a sword when none pursueth, and there shall be no stopping in the flight before your enemies.  And ye shall lose yourselves among the peoples, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.  And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’ lands, and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away.  And they shall confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers in regard to their unfaithfulness which they committed against me, and that because they have walked contrary to me, I also walk contrary to them, and bring them into the land of their enemies.  Then their uncircumcised heart is humbled, and then they pay their penalty, and I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham, and I remember the land.  The land also, left by them, pays its sabbaths, while she lieth without inhabitant and waste, and they themselves pay the penalty of their iniquity because, even because, they despised my judgments, and their soul abhorred my statutes.  And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies, I have not rejected them, neither have I abhorred them to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them:  for I am Jehovah their God.  And I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the peoples, that I might be their God:  I am Jehovah” (xxvi. 27-45).

These words undoubtedly cannot have been written before the Babylonian exile.  It is said that the Assyrian exile will explain the passage:  but where is there any similarity between the oration before us and the old genuine Isaiah?  In Ezekiel’s day such thoughts, feelings, and expressions as we have here can be shown to have prevailed:  but it would be difficult to show that the fall of Samaria gave rise to such depression at Jerusalem:  and Leviticus xxvi. was not written outside Jerusalem, for it presupposes unity of worship.  The Jews are addressed here, as in Deuteronomy xxix., xxx., and they had no such lively feeling of solidarity with the deported Israelites as to think of them in connection with such threats.  I even think it certain that the writer lived either towards the end of the Babylonian exile or after it, since at the close of the oration he turns his eyes to the restoration.  In such prophets as Jeremiah and Ezekiel there is a meaning in such forecasting of the joyful future but here it contradicts both the historical position