‘Isaiah's Call to England': Doubts about Prophecy in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Prophetic thought in nineteenth-century Britain has often been presented as divided between those mostly evangelical constituencies who ‘believed' in its literal fulfilment in the past, present or future and those who ‘doubted' such interpretations. This essay seeks to question that division by tracking the uses of one set of prophetic passages, those concerning the ‘Ships of Tarshish’ mentioned in Isaiah 60: 9 and elsewhere. It examines their appropriation from the late eighteenth century onwards by those seeking prophetic-providential justification for the British maritime empire. Next it shows how such such ideas fuelled missionary expansion in the years after 1815, suggesting that by mid-century that there was a growing spectrum of ways in which such passages were used by religious commentators. The final section shows how biblical critics seeking to bolster the integrity of the Bible as a text reconstructed the geographical and economic settings for these passages, establishing their historical veracity as they did so but in the process undermining their supernaturally predictive status. Thus one way of bolstering ‘faith’ – the study of prophetic fulfilments – was rendered doubtful by another. By the end of our period Tyre and Tarshish retained much of their homiletic punch as metaphors for the sin brought by trade and luxury, but those who saw them as literal proxies for Britain were in the minority.