Note 1 — ISAIAH. (continued 6)

I agree with Vitringa, Dreschler, and others in regarding verse 16 as the prophet’s own prayer to Jehovah. We “bind”—tie together—what we wish to keep from getting separated and lost; we “seal” what is to be kept secret, and only opened by a person duly qualified. And so the prophet here prayed that Jehovah would take his testimony with regard to the future, and his intimation, which was designed to prepare for the future that testimony and thorah which the greatest mass, in their hardness, did not understand, and in their self-hardening despised, and lay them up well secured and well preserved, as if by bond and seal, in the hearts of those who receive the prophet’s words with loving obedience. For it would be all over with Israel unless a community of believers should be preserved, and all over with the community if the word of God, which was the ground of their life, should be allowed to slip out of their hearts.—Delitzsch.