William Robertson Smith, Owen Charles Whitehouse, Adolf von Harnack, and Arthur Cushman McGiffert

“ Throughout the great age of prophecy the most obvious formal character that distinguished it was that the prophet did not speak in his own name but in the name of Yahweh. But the claim to speak in the name of God is one which has often been made—and made sincerely—by others than the prophets of Israel, and which is susceptible of a great variety of meanings, according to the idea of God and His relation to man which is presupposed. Every early religion seeks to realize such an intercourse with the object of worship as shall be two-sided ”

“ It is impossible to read the books of the older prophets, and especially of their protagonist Amos, without seeing that the new thing which they are compelled to speak is not Yahweh's grace but His inexorable and righteous wrath. That that wrath must be followed by fresh mercies is not in itself a new thought, but only the necessary expression of the inherited conviction that Yahweh whom they preach as the judge of all the earth, is nevertheless, as past history has proved, the God who has chosen Israel as His people. ”

“ To know that God is with him is enough though all else fail him. Now as soon as the relation of God to a single soul has thus been set free from all earthly conditions the work of prophecy is really complete, for what God has done for one soul He can do for all, but only by speaking to each believer as directly as He does to Jeremiah. Henceforth revelation is not a word to the nation spoken through an individual, but a word spoken to one which is equally valid for every one who receives it with like faith. ”

“ Elisha still stands firmly planted on the old national conception of the religion of Yahweh; his ideals are such as do not lie beyond the range of practical politics. In doing battle against the Tyrian Baal he is content with a reformation for which the whole nation can be heartily won, because it makes no radical change in their inherited faith and practices of worship. And in stimulating resistance to Syria he is still the prophet of the old “God of the hosts of Israel”—a God who works deliverance by the thews and sinews of His earthly warriors. ”

“ And so too it is not through the material organization of the Judaean kingdom that Isaiah looks for deliverance from Assyria. He sees with absolute clearness the powerlessness of the little realm against that great empire: the Assyrian must fall, and fall before Jerusalem, that Yahweh alone may appear to all the earth as the one true God, while all the idols appear as vain to help their worshippers. These conceptions break through the old particularistic idea of Yahweh and His religion at every point. ”

“ The worship of the local sanctuaries did nothing to promote the sense of the religious unity of Israel; Yahweh in the age of the judges ran no small risk of being divided into a number of local Baals, givers of natural good things each to his own locality. The struggle for freedom called forth a deeper sense of the unity of the people of the one Yahweh, and in so doing raised religion to a loftier plane; for a faith which unites a nation is necessarily a higher moral force than one which only unites a township or a clan. ”

“ He is a man of God, like Moses and Samuel, a man admitted to a strange and awful intimacy with the Most High, and like them he combines functions which in later times were distributed between prophet and priest. The fundamental idea that Yahweh guides His people by the word of revelation is older than the separation of special classes of theocratic organs; Moses, indeed, is not only prophet and priest, but judge and ruler. ”

“ Still indeed the New-Testament idea of a purely spiritual kingdom of God, in this world but not of it, is beyond the prophet's horizon, and he can think of no other vindication of the divine purpose than that the true Israel shall be gathered again from its dispersion. ”

“ Zion is now not the centre of a mere national cult, but the centre of all true religion for the whole world; and more than once the prophet indicates not obscurely that the necessary issue of the great conflict between Yahweh and the gods of the heathen must be the conversion of all nations, the disappearance of every other religion before the faith of the God of Israel. ”

“ Thus, for the first time in the world's history, the ultimate problem of faith is based on the relation of God to the individual believer; and this problem Jeremiah is compelled to face mainly in relation to his own personality, to assure himself that his own faith is a true possession and lifts him above all the calamities that assail him, in spite of the hopeless ruin of his nation. The struggle is a sore one ”

“ The seer, in the sense in which all antiquity believed in seers, is simply a man who sees what others cannot see, no matter whether the thing seen be of public or of mere private interest; but the prophet is an organ of Yahweh's kingship over His people—he sees and tells so much of the secret purpose of Yahweh as is needful for His people to know. We have already seen how Amos and Hosea put this (supra, p. 2011) , and it does not appear that they were introducing a conception of prophecy formally novel—the new thing was their conception of Yahweh's purpose. ”

“ The popular faith was full of heathenish superstition strangely blended with the higher ideas which were the inheritance left to Israel by men like Moses and Elijah; but the common prophets accepted all alike, and combined heathen arts of divination and practices of mere physical enthusiasm with a not altogether insincere pretension that through their professional oracles the ideal was being maintained of a continuous divine guidance of the people of Yahweh. ”

“ But to an institution like prophecy national recognition, royal favour and fixed organization are dangerous gifts. It has always been the evil fate of the Hebrews to destroy their own highest ideals by attempting to translate them into set forms, and the ideal of a prophetic guidance of the nation of Yahweh could not have been more effectually neutralized than by committing its realization to the kind of state Church of professional prophets, “eating bread” by their trade (Amos vii. 12) , [8] which claimed to inherit the traditions of Elijah and Elisha. ”

“ The theodicea of the prophets is national; they see Yahweh's righteousness working itself out with unmistakable clearness in the present, and know that all that He brings upon Israel is manifestly just; but from the days of Jeremiah [13] the fortunes of Israel as a nation are no longer the one thing which religion has to explain; the greater question arises of a theory of the divine purpose which shall justify the ways of God with individual men or with His “righteous servant”—that is, with the ideal community of true faith as distinct from the natural Israel. ”

“ In this as in all other matters of transcendental truth “wisdom is justified of her children”; the conclusive vindication of the prophets as true messengers of God is that their work forms an integral part in the progress of spiritual religion, and there are many things in their teaching the profundity and importance of which are much clearer to us than they could possibly have been to their contemporaries, because they are mere flashes of spiritual insight lighting up for a moment some corner of a region on which the steady sun of the gospel had not yet risen. ”

“ The revelation thus looked for may be found in natural omens, in the priestly lot or some similar sacral oracle, or, finally, in the words of a seer who is held to be in closer contact with the deity than common men. Broadly speaking these methods of revelation are found in all ancient religions, but no other religion presents anything precisely analogous to prophecy. It is true that the prophets absorbed the old seers, and that the Israelites, as we see in the case of the asses of Kish, went to their seers on the same kind of occasions as sent heathen nations to seers or diviners. ”

“ To the mass these signs are unintelligible, because they deem it impossible that Yahweh should utterly cast off His chosen nation; but to those who know His absolute righteousness, and confront it with the people's sin, the impending approach of the Assyrian can have only one meaning and can point to only one issue, viz. the total ruin of the nation which has denied its divine head. It is sometimes proposed to view the canonical prophets as simple preachers of righteousness; their predictions of woe, we are told, are conditional, and tell what Israel must suffer if it does not repent. ”

“ But we know that there were nebhīīm among the Canaanites; the “prophets” of Baal appear in the history of Elijah as men who sought to attract their god by wild orgiastic rites. In fact the presence of an orgiastic character is as marked a feature in Canaanite religion as the absence of it is in the oldest religion of Israel; but the new Hebrew enthusiasts had at least an external resemblance to the devotees of the Canaanite sanctuaries and this would be enough to determine the choice of a name which in the first instance seems hardly to have been a name of honour. ”

“ But this is an incomplete view; the peculiarity of their position is that they know that Israel as it exists is beyond repentance. Only, while they are hopeless about their nation they have absolute faith in Yahweh and His purpose. That cannot be frustrated, and, as it includes the choice of Israel as His people, it is certain that, though the present commonwealth must perish, a new and better Israel will rise from its grave. Not the reformation but the resurrection of Israel is the goal of the prophets' hope (Hos. vi. 1 seq.) ”

“ The prophetic teaching had indeed produced a profound effect; to the party of reaction, as the persecution under Manasseh shows, it seemed to threaten to subvert all society; and we can still measure the range and depth of its influence in the literary remains of the period from Isaiah to the captivity, which include Micah vi. 1-8, and that noble essay to build a complete national code on the principle of love to God, righteousness, and humanity—the legislation of Deuteronomy. ”

“ The Hebrew prophet stands alone among divinely appointed and inspired men of any religion, though analogies in other religions present themselves. Ethical and religious teachers arose among other nations of antiquity whose precepts may well be compared with those of Hebrew prophecy. ”

“ But these teachers did not succeed in accomplishing a task parallel to what the Hebrew prophets achieved, namely, the complete renewal and elevation of the Hebrew religion from a local and national into a universal and ethical religion. Yet instructive parallels may be found in ancient literatures. Thus the Vedic hymns are reputed to have no human authors. The names attached to them are those of the seers who “saw” them, to whom they were revealed. They are therefore merely the channels through which the divine word is communicated to man (Professor Rapson) . ”

“ The word is true because it is worthy of the true God. When Deut. xviii. 21, 22 seeks the legal criterion of true prophecy in the fulfilment of prediction, the writer is no doubt guided by the remembrance of the remarkable confirmation which the doctrines of spiritual prophecy had received in history then recent, but his criterion would have appeared inadequate to the prophets themselves, and indeed this passage is one of the most striking proofs that to formulate the principles of prophetic religion in a legal code was an impossible task. ”

“ No doubt there were many conscious hypocrites and impostors among the professional prophets, as there always will be among the professional representatives of a religious standpoint which is intrinsically untenable, and yet has on its side the prestige of tradition and popular acceptance. ”

“ That the national or tribal god is the creator is an idea often found in very low religions. To us God's sovereignty over nature often seems the hardest thing to conceive; but to primitive peoples who know nothing of laws of nature, His moral sovereignty is a much more difficult conception. In the older literature of the Hebrews, the nearest approach to the thought of Amos and Hosea is not Gen. ”

“ It was the duty of the prophets to follow in all respects the example of the Lord (ἔχειν τοὺς τρόπους τοῦ Κυρίου) , and to put in practice what they preached. But an ascetic life was expected of them only when, like the apostles, they went about as missionaries, in which case the rules in Matt. x. applied to them. Whenever, on the contrary, they settled in a place they had a claim to a liberal maintenance at the hands of the congregation. The author of the Διδαχὴ even compares them to the High Priests of the Old Testament, and considers them entitled to the first fruits of the Levitical law. ”

“ The Prophets of the Old Testament.—The author of 1 Sam. ix. 9 tells us that “beforetime in Israel, when a man went to The Seer. inquire of God, thus he spake, Come and let us go to the seer; for he that is now called a prophet (nābhīa) was before time called a seer.” This remark is probably a later gloss. Samuel was a “seer” (ver. 11) , or, as he is also called (ver. 6 seq.) , a “man of God,” that is one who stood in closer relations to God than ordinary men ”

“ This probably facilitated the adoption of the term by the Hellenists of Alexandria, for, when Philo distinguishes the prophet from the spurious diviner by saying that the latter applies his own inferences to omens and the like while the true prophet, rapt in ecstasy, speaks nothing of his own, but simply repeats what is given to him by a revelation in which his reason has no part (ed. Mangey, ii. 321 seq., 343; cf. i. 510 seq.) , he follows the prevalent notion of the later Jews, at least in so far as he makes the function of the prophet that of purely mechanical reproduction ”