Charles Ellicott Commentary Isaiah 6

In the year that king Uzziah died. —Probably before his death. If it had been after his death, the first year of king Jotham would have been the more natural formula. The chapter gives us the narrative of the solemn call of Isaiah to the office of a prophet. It does not follow that it was written at that time. We may even believe that, if the prophet were the editor of his own discourses, he may have designedly placed the narrative in this position so that people might see what he himself saw: that all that was found in the preceding chapters was merely the development of what he had then heard, and yet, at the same time, a representation of the evils which made the judgments he was commissioned to declare necessary. On the relation of the call to the prophet’s previous life, see Introduction.

The date is obviously given as important, and we are led to connect it with the crisis in the prophet’s life of which it tells. He had lived through the last twenty years or so of Uzziah’s reign. There was the appearance of outward material prosperity. There was also the reality of much inward corruption. The king who had profaned the holiness of the Temple had either just died or was dragging out the dregs of his leprous life in seclusion (2 Chronicles 26:21). The question, "What was to be the future of his people?" must have been much in the prophet’s thoughts. The earthquake that had terrified Jerusalem had left on his mind a vague sense of impending judgment. It is significant that Isaiah’s first work as a writer was to write the history of Uzziah’s reign (2 Chronicles 26:22). (See Introduction.)

I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne. —Isaiah had found himself in the court of the Temple, probably in that of the priests. He had seen the incense-clouds rising from the censer of the priest, and had heard the hymns and hallelujahs of the Levites.

Suddenly he passes—as St. Paul afterwards did under the influence of similar surroundings (Acts 22:17)—into a state of ecstatic trance. Then, as though the veil of the Temple was withdrawn, he saw the vision of the glory of the Lord, just as Moses (Exodus 24:10) and Micaiah of old had seen it (1 Kings 22:19), and as in more recent times it had appeared to Amos (Amos 9:1). The King of kings was seated on His throne, and on the right hand and on the left were the angel-armies of the host of heaven, chanting their hymns of praise.

His train filled the temple. —The word for “temple” is that which expresses its character as the palace of the great King (Psalms 29:9; Habakkuk 2:20). The “train” corresponds to the skirts of the glory of the Lord, who clothes Himself with light as with a garment (Exodus 33:22–23). It is noticeable:

1. That the versions (Septuagint, Targum, Vulgate) suppress the train, apparently as being too anthropomorphic, and
2. That to the mind of St. John this was a vision of the glory of the Christ (John 12:41).

Above it stood the seraphims... — It is noticeable that this is the only passage in which the seraphim are mentioned as part of the host of heaven. In Numbers 21:6, the word (whose primary meaning is the burning ones) occurs, denoting the fiery serpents that attacked the people in the wilderness. Probably the brazen serpent that Hezekiah afterwards destroyed (2 Kings 18:4) had preserved the name and its significance as denoting the instruments of the fiery judgments of Jehovah.

Here, however, there is no trace of the serpent form, nor again, as far as the description goes, of the animal forms of the cherubim of Ezekiel 1:5-11, and of the “living creatures” of Revelation 4:7-8.

The “burning ones” are in the likeness of men, with the addition of the six wings. The patristic and medieval distinction between the seraphim that excel in love, and the cherubim that excel in knowledge, apparently rests on the etymology of the former word.

The “living creatures” of Revelation 4:7-8 seem to unite the forms of the cherubim of Ezekiel with the six wings of the seraphim of this passage. Symbolically, the seraphim would seem to be like transfigured cherubim, representing the flaming fire of the lightning, as the latter did the storm-winds and other elemental forces of nature (Psalms 104:4).

Each one had six wings. — The thought seems to be that the human form was clothed, as it were, with six wings. One pair of wings covered the face as a sign of adoring homage (Ezekiel 1:11); a second, the feet, including the whole lower part of the human form; while with the third, they hovered as in the firmament of heaven above the skirts of the glory of the Divine Throne. It is noticeable that the monuments of Persepolis represent the Amshashpands (or ministers of God) as having six wings, two of which cover the feet.

And one cried to another. —So in Psalm 29:9, which, describing a thunderstorm, favors the suggestion that the lightnings were thought of as the symbols of the fiery seraphim, we read, in his temple does every one say, Glory. The threefold repetition, familiar as the Trisagion of the Church’s worship, and reproduced in Revelation 4:8 (where Lord God Almighty appears as the equivalent of Jehovah Sabaoth), may represent either the mode of utterance, first antiphonal, and then in full chorus, or the Hebrew idiom of the emphasis of a threefold iteration, as in Jeremiah 7:4; Jeremiah 22:29.

Viewed from the standpoint of a later revelation, devout thinkers have naturally seen in it an allusive reference to the glory of Jehovah as seen alike in the past, the present, and the future, which seems the leading idea in Revelation 4:8, or even a faint foreshadowing of the Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead. Historically, we cannot separate it from the name of the Holy One of Israel, which, with the Lord of hosts, was afterwards so prominent in Isaiah’s teaching.

The posts of the door. —Better, the foundations of the threshold. The words seem to point to the prophet’s position as in front of the Holy of holies.

The house was filled with smoke. —The vision had its prototype in the smoke as of a furnace on Sinai (Exodus 19:18), in the glory-cloud of 1 Kings 8:10, and possibly in its lurid fire-lit darkness represented the wrath of Jehovah, as the clear brightness of the throne did His love. So in Revelation 15:8, the smoke from the glory of God precedes the outpouring of the seven vials of wrath.

The parallelism of the clouds of incense-smoke as the symbol of adoring prayer (Revelation 5:8; Revelation 8:4) suggests an alternative interpretation as possible; but in that case, mention would probably have been made of the censers from which it rose. The incense-clouds of the Temple may, in either case, have been the starting-point of the mystic vision.

Then said I, Woe is me. — The cry of the prophet expresses the normal result of man’s consciousness of contact with God. So Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God (Exodus 3:6). So Job abhorred himself and repented in dust and ashes (Job 42:6). So Peter fell down at his Lord’s feet, and cried, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord (Luke 5:8). Man at such a time feels his nothingness in the presence of the Eternal, his guilt in the presence of the All-holy. No man can see God and live. (Compare also to 1 Samuel 6:20).

I am a man of unclean lips. — The prophet’s words present at once a parallel and a contrast to those of Moses in Exodus 4:10. The Lawgiver feels only, or chiefly, his lack of the gift of utterance which was needed for his work. With Isaiah the dominant thought is that his lips have been defiled by past sins of speech. How can he join in the praises of the seraphim with those lips from which have so often come bitter and hasty words, formal and ceremonial prayers? (James 3:9).

His lips are unclean like those of one stricken, as Uzziah had been, by leprosy (Leviticus 13:45). He finds no comfort in the thought that others are as bad as he is, that he dwells in the midst of a people of unclean lips. Were it otherwise, there might be some hope that influence from without might work his purification. As it is, he and his people seem certain to sink into the abyss. To have seen the King, the Lord of hosts, was in such a case simply overwhelming (Exodus 33:20).