place of the people of divine revelation. Abraham first exercised this prophetic office (Gen. XX, 7, compare XVIII, 19). The prophetic blessings of Isaac and Jacob show that like him they possessed the prophetic gift and calling. Hence the patriarchal family which makes its pilgrimages from place to place is called a race of kings and prophets (Ps. CV, 15).

Remark. Whoever has received the knowledge of God's decree and will, and makes it known to another, stands to that other in the relation of a prophet. Such was the relation of Abraham to his family, and of Aaron to Israel and Pharaoh (Ex. VII, 1—2; IV, 15-16) according to which Moses as Elohim is related to Aaron as prophet, or God's organ, for the prophet according to Jer. XV, 19, is God's mouth. The case however is different with the priest (75). The patriarchs maintained the family worship, and brought the family offerings, but no one was called priest (1), like Melchizedek, for is the name of a class, while from the outset indicates only a calling and endowment.

$ 6.

Special Calling of the Prophet.

In a wider sense indeed a prophet is one, who receives and records divine relations, like David and Daniel (Acts II, 30; Matt. XXIV, 15) and like John in the New Testament Apocalypse, but in the proper sense neither a seer (1 Sam. IX, 9), nor a beholder () as such is called a prophet, but only one, who, through proclamation of that which he has seen, works upon the life of the people, and the congregation. The calling of a prophet is that of a preacher or pastor, with reference to the congregation as a whole and its individual members, but is distinct from our modern ideas with reference to the calling as thus explained, in his drawing directly from divine revelation.

Remark. The signification of as indicating a class, which the word received at a later period, is indicated in the confession of Amos (VII, 14). He is a prophet, for be has been called by God to the public office of preaching, and yet he is not a prophet, in the sense of having received an education at one of the Ephraimitic schools, where young men were prepared for the prophetic office as a profession.

CHAPTER II.

Sphere and Position of the Prophets.

$ 7.

Difference between the Prophetic and Priestly Office.

The prophetic office of instruction is essentially different from that of the priestly (Mal. II, 7) which was confined to the teaching of the laws of the Tora, and to their casuistical application to ritualistic and legal questions (Lev. X, 11; Deut. XXXIII, 9. 10; XXIV, 8; Hag. II, 11; Ezek. XLIV, 23. 24), according to which we must presuppose that codex and tradition had been perpetuated within the priesthood. This supposition is confirmed by Deut. XVII, 19, compare XXXI, 9. When therefore we see priests appear as prophets, like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the two Zechariahs, or even Levites, like Hanan (Jer. XXXV, 4), and probably Habakkuk it is quite likely that their priestly and Levitical training afforded a fitting reason for the divine call, but the prophetic office in every age was radically distinguished from the priestly.

Remark. Preaching never had a place in temple worship, in which only certain passages from the Scriptures were occasionally read. Not until after the Babylonian exile was it introduced as a part of the divine service in the synagogues. Compare Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, Berlin 1832.

$ 8.

The Prophets as Guardians of the Spirit of the Law.

While the calling of the priest seeks to realize the letter of the law, that of the prophet endeavours to realize its spirit. The prophets in general demand obedience to God's will as revealed in his laws, and are fond of emphasizing the pre-Mosaic and decalogic command respecting the observance of the Sabbath, but Malachi's censure with reference to the malobservance of the sacrificial Tora (I, 10 etc.) stands absolutely alone. In every case the exhortations of the prophets do not refer to the externals, but to the substance of the law. They are zealous against the heartless and spiritless opus operatum of dead works. With biting sarcasm they depreciate ceremonial sacrifice and fasting (Hosea VI, 6; Jer. VII, 21-23; Joel II, 13; Is. LVIII). In brief the priest is the guardian of the external letter of the law, and the prophet of its internal, spiritual fulfilment.

Remark. In this insistance upon the kernel of the law the prophets are agreed. Duhm in his Theologie der Propheten, Bonn 1875, does not recognize this unity, since be assigns to the prophets different degrees of freedom and legality. In his opinion the spiritually free and moral tendency rises until Jeremiah and Deutero-Isaiah, the legally external finds its depth in Ezekiel and Malachi, where even the air of Judaism and the Talmud is perceptible. The fundamental error of Duhm consists in his laying such emphasis on religion as an inner life, that he regards all external forms which are necessary for its expression as a deterioration into formalism. But religion and sacred rites are indissolubly correlated. Even the religion of the individual cannot dispense with forms, for instance prayer when it leaves the sphere of secret and merely internal meditation. Much less can the religion of a community be maintained without such forms. It is not without sacred rites in any nation either in the Old Testament or the New, either in this world or the next. The legal forms in which the Tora comprehends the religion of Israel were indeed burdensome fetters, but yet they were wise means of education, and, as the history shows, were not incompatible with a true, profoundly hearty, and free religious spirit.

$ 9.

The Prophets as the Conscience of the State.

The prophets have rightly been called the conscience of the Israelitish state; for as the conscience in man is related to the law written in his heart (Rom. II, 15) so prophecy in Israel is related to the Sinaitic Tora kept by the priests. It is like the conscience a knowledge, which continually attests itself in the form of impulse, of judgment, and of feeling, a knowledge namely about that which God, who has revealed himself in history, wills or does not will. Its proper prophetic character follows from its admonitory and denunciatory nature.

Remark. It appears from passages like Hos. IV, 6; VIII, 1; Amos II, 4 and also Is. I, 11-14, where an existing code concerning festivals and offerings is presupposed, that a codex of the Mosaic laws was already in existence in the time of the prophets of the eighth century. With the latter passage we may compare Hos. VIII, 12, which should be translated: "Were I to write for him myriads of my law, they would be regarded as strange", that is a still more extensive Tora would have had the same fate as the existing one. Smend in his dissertation in the Studien und Kritiken, Gotha 1876, p. 599 etc. (Ueber die von den Propheten des 8. Jahrhunderts vorausgesetzte Entwickelungsstufe der israelitischen Religion), actually translates the passage: "I wrote for him myriads of my law". These words of Hosea certainly indicate, as even Schrader acknowledges, the existence of a divinely obligatory law in the form of a codex, not to mention such testimonies in the psalms as we find in Ps. XIX, which is by David, and in Ps. LXI, 6 and LXXVIII, 5 by Asaph.

S 10.

The Ethical Aim of Prophecy.

The prophet is not as such a proclaimer of future events. The prophetic preaching always has a moral end in view, and even its proclamation of the future serves this end. The disclosures respecting future events are determined and measured by the moral requirements of the present. Although all prophecy has been occasioned by the historic circumstances of the time in which it was uttered, nevertheless it does not surrender the progress of revelation to planless chance; for as God in the history of the world makes all the activity of human freedom a cooperative factor in the fulfilment of his decree, so in the history of revelation he causes the different phases of the times to become impulses of his revelation, which seeks step by step to reach its New Testament goal.

Remark. The gradual enrichment of the believing consciousness, brought about by the prophets, the deepening and purification of religion itself is effected through the looking out into future. The essential salvation, the full reality of the divine decree lay in the realm of the future. The prophecy was therefore for the present a religious and ethical lever, not a satisfaction of the intellectual desire for knowledge, but a practical longing for salvation.

S II.

The Prophets as retrospective Seers.

"The Lord Jehovah does not perform anything", says Amos (III, 7, compare Gen. XVIII, 17; Ps. XXV, 14) "unless he has revealed his secret to his servants the prophets". This insight into the grounds and the ends of his government which God grants the prophets extends from the present not only to the future, but also to the past; for in order to understand the present, one must not only know the future with which it is pregnant, but also the past from which the present has sprung. Therefore many prophets from the time of Samuel, Nathan, and Gad (1 Chron. XXIX, 29) were historians of their time. Therefore the Tora, which is regarded in Ezra IX, 11 as a prophetic work, begins with the primitive history of the human race and the historical antecedents of Israel. And hence the Pentateuchal narrative proceeds as a historical work, which relates the history of Israel further until the Babylonian Exile ( ), and which is more or less characterized by its

more ,(נְבִיאִים רִאשׁנִים)

placing its historical materials under the ethical and prophetic standpoint of Deuteronomy, and in interweaving and enclosing them with Deuteronomic reflections.

Remark. The name prophetae priores has, in our opinion, arisen from the presupposition, that the authors of our books were prophets. Anger however holds a different opinion. He says that works receive this designation which have prophetic sayings, whether they are communicated in historical connections (prophetae priores), or are gathered together in special prophetic writings (probhetae posteriores). But we may urge against this theory, that, if it were true, then (1) also Chronicles and Daniel must stand among the former prophets, and since they do not, that it would be necessary to assume, that the division of the prophets () was already closed, when these writings were added; (2) that the composition of those historical books by the prophets, not to speak of their work in the final redaction, is confirmed through their manner of writing history, which is sharply distinguished from the annalistic and priestly style of the Chronicler. (3) We urge further, that the prophets really occupied themselves with historical composition. Isaiah for example was according to 2 Chr. XXVI, 22 the author of a complete history of the reign of Uzziah.

S 12.

Close connection of Historiography and Prophecy.

The historical activity of the prophets was as such a literary one. It even began with Samuel Nathan and Gad. Citations by the Chronicler, like 2 Chr. IX, 29; XII, 15; XIII, 22 show that the prophets combined their prophecies with their representations of the history of the times. From this literature of prophetic history, of which we have an example in the book of Joshua, the literature of the properly prophetic books first gradually received an independent form. But this was never brought to an entire separation of the historical from the prophetic portions, as appears, for example, in the historical intermediate portions of the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and in the historical bisection of the book of Joel II, 18. 19a.

Remark. The transition of the literature of the prophetic historical writing into that of the prophetic collection is imperceptible. The period of the world-empires was decidedly favorable to the origin of the latter. At that time when Israel was violently drawn upon the theatre of the great world-historical conflicts the horizon of prophecy was wider, and its themes more comprehensive; the oral prophetic preaching therefore subsequently became fixed in writings, even without such a specially direct divine command as Is. XXX, 8, as a memorial of divine intimations for all peoples and times.