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The first eight verses of this chapter are like the sudden opening of a window. The hall behind you resounds with the clamour of fierce contentions; the window before you frames in the prospect of a fair country, all bathed in rosy light, a land of corn and wine and oil, a land of plenty and peace. Isaiah is not the only politician who has found relief from the anxieties of a stormy time in a Utopia of his own imagining. The air was full of the noise of change, the Reformation was in full career on the Continent, and the ground-swell of the great movement already trembling on the shores of England, when Sir Thomas More wrote his description of the ideal state. When, as they think, everything is going wrong, men often have brightest visions of what the world would be if everything were going right. Isaiah's Utopia has three grand characteristics:

1. The triumph of righteousness in government. His programme for the ruling power is this: "A king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment."

2. The new state shall be broad-based, not upon the people's will, but upon the people's character. Men shall not be, as they have been, weak and unstable, and ungenerous; but, rock-like and river-like, they shall be strong and bountiful.

3. The ideal Israel, themselves judged justly, shall be just judges of others. They shall be able to discriminate character, and to recognise and honour the truly good. "The quack and the dupe," says Carlyle, "are upper and under side of the same substance." So, in the kingdom of the future, "the vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful." There will be no quacks, because there will be no dupes. Those who are liberal themselves are not likely to err in what constitutes liberality in others.

(W. B. Dalby.)

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KJV: Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment.

WEB: Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in justice.