Let us realise how far this has brought us. When we stood with Isaiah in Jerusalem, our western horizon lay across the middle of Asia Minor in the longitude of Cyprus.[51] It now rests upon the Ægean; we are almost within sight of Europe. Straight from Babylon to Sardis runs a road, with a regular service of couriers. The court of Sardis holds domestic and political intercourse with the courts of Babylon and Ecbatana; but the court of Sardis also lords it over the Asiatic Greeks, worships at Greek shrines, will shortly be visited by Solon and strike an alliance with Sparta. In the time of the Jewish exile there were without doubt many Greeks in Babylon; men may have spoken there with Daniel, who had spoken at Sardis with Solon.
This extended horizon makes clear to us what our prophet has in his view, when in this forty-first chapter he summons _Isles_ to the bar of Jehovah: _Be silent before me, O Isles, and let Peoples renew their strength_,--a vision and appeal which frequently recur in our prophecy. _Listen, O Isles, and hearken, O Peoples from afar_ (xlix. 1); _Isles shall wait for His law_ (xlii. 4); _Let them give glory to Jehovah, and publish His praise in the Isles_ (xlii. 12); _Unto me Isles shall hope_ (li. 5); _Surely Isles shall wait for me, ships of Tarshish first_.[52] The name is generally taken by scholars--according to the derivation in the note below--to have originally meant _habitable land_, and so _land_ as opposed to water. In some passages of the Old Testament it is undoubtedly used to describe a land either washed, or surrounded, by the sea.[53]
But by our prophet's use of the word it is not necessarily _maritime provinces_ that are meant. He makes _isles_ parallel to the well-known terms _nations_, _peoples_, _Gentiles_, and in one passage he opposes it, as dry soil, to water.[54] Hence many translators take it in its original sense of _countries_ or _lands_. This bare rendering, however, does not do justice to the sense of _remoteness_, which the prophet generally attaches to the word, nor to his occasional association of it with visions of the sea. Indeed, as one reads most of his uses of it, one is quite sure that the island-meaning of the word lingers on in his imagination; and that the feeling possesses him, which has haunted the poetry of all ages, to describe as _coasts_ or _isles_ any land or lighting-place of thought which is far and dim and vague; which floats across the horizon, or emerges from the distance, as strips and promontories of land rise from the sea to him who has reached some new point of view. I have therefore decided to keep the rendering familiar to the English reader, _isles_, though, perhaps, _coasts_ would be better. If, as is probable, our prophet's thoughts are always towards the new lands of the west as he uses the word, it is doubly suitable; those countries were both maritime and remote; they rose both from the distance and from the sea.