Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/839

Rh PROPHET 815 he who is seized by it is unable to stand, 1 and, though this condition is regarded as produced by a divine afflatus, it is matter of ironical comment when a prominent man like Saul is found to be thus affected. Samuel in his later days appears presiding over the exercises of a group of nebiim at Raman, where they seem to have had a sort of coenobium (Naioth), but he was not himself a ndbi that name is never applied to him except in 1 Sam. iii. 21, where it is plainly used in the later sense for the idea which in Samuel s own time was expressed by &quot;seer.&quot; 2 But again the nebiim seem to have been a new thing in Israel in the days of Samuel. Seers there had been of old as in other primitive nations; of the two Hebrew words literally corresponding to our seer, roeh and huzeh, the second is found also in Arabic, and seems to belong to the primitive Semitic vocabulary. 3 But the enthusiastic bands of prophets are nowhere mentioned before the time of Samuel; and in the whole previous history the word prophet occurs very rarely, never in the very oldest nar ratives, and always in that sense which we know to be later than the age of Samuel, so that the use of the term is due to writers of the age of the kings, who spoke of ancient things in the language of their own day. The appearance of the nebiim in the time of Samuel was, it would seem, as has been explained in the article ISRAEL, one manifestation of the deep pulse of suppressed indignant patriotism which began to beat in the hearts of the nation in the age of Philistine oppression, and this fact explains the influence of the movement on Saul and the interest taken in it by Samuel. The ordinary life of ancient Israel gave little room for high-strung religious feeling, and the common acts of worship coincided with the annual harvest and vintage feasts or similar occasions of natural gladness, with which no strain of abnormal enthusiasm could well be combined. It was perhaps only in time of war, when he felt himself to be fighting the battles of Jehovah, that the Hebrew was stirred to the depths of his nature by emotions of a religious colour. Thus the deeper feelings of religion were embodied in warlike patriotism, and these feelings the Philistine oppression had raised to extreme tension among all who loved liberty, while yet the want of a captain to lead forth the armies of Jehovah against his foemen deprived them of their natural outlet. It was this tense suppressed excitement, to which the ordinary acts of worship gave no expression, which found vent in the enthusiastic services of the companies of prophets. In its external features the new phenomenon was exceedingly like what is still seen in the East in every zikr of dervishes the enthusiasm of the prophets expressed itself in no artificial form, but in a way natural to the Oriental temperament. Processions with pipe and hand-drum, such as that described in 1 Sam. x., ware indeed a customary part of ordinary religious feasts ; but there they were an outlet for natural merriment, here they have changed their character to express an emotion more sombre and more intense, by which the prophets, and often mere chance spectators too, were so overpowered that they seemed to lose their old personality and to be swayed by a super natural influence. More than this hardly lies in the expression &quot; a divine spirit &quot; (DTl^K nil), which is used not only of the prophetic afflatus but of the evil frenzy that afflicted Saul s later days. The Hebrews had a less narrow conception of the spiritual than we are apt to read into their records. 1 1 Sam. x. 5 sq., xix. 20 sq. In the latter passage read &quot; they saw the fervour of the prophets as they prophesied, &c. &quot; (see Hoff mann in Stade s Zeitschr., 1883, p. 89), after the Syriac. 2 On grounds of text-criticism indeed both this passage and 1 Sam. xxviii. , where at ver. 6 prophets appear as revealers (seers), are held to be no part of the old stock of the history of Samuel. 3 Hoffmann, ut supra, p. 92 sq. To give a name to this new phemonenon the Israelites, it would seem, had to borrow a word from their Canaanite neighbours. At all events the word ndbt is neither part of the old Semitic vocabulary (in Arabic it is a late loan word), nor has it any etymology in Hebrew, the cognate words &quot; to prophesy &quot; and the like being derived from the noun in its technical sense. But we know that there were nebiim among the Canaanites ; the &quot;prophets&quot; 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 Cauaanite sanctuaries, and this would be enough to deter mine the choice of a name which in the first instance seems hardly to have been a name of honour. 4 In admit ting that the name was borrowed, we are not by any means shut up to suppose that the Hebrew nebiim simply copied their Canaanite neighbours. The phenomenon is perfectly intelligible without any such hypothesis. A wave of in tense religious feeling passes over the land and finds its expression, according to the ordinary law of Oriental life, in the formation of a sort of enthusiastic religious order. The Nazarites and the Rechabites are parallel phenomena, though of vastly inferior historical importance. The peculiar methods of the prophetic exercises de scribed in 1 Samuel were of little consequence for the future development of prophecy. The heat of a first en thusiasm necessarily cooled when the political conditions that produced it passed away ; and, if the prophetic asso ciations had done no more than organize a new form of spiritual excitement, they would have only added one to the many mechanical types of hysterical religion which are found all over the East. Their real importance was that they embodied an intenser vein of feeling than was ex pressed in the ordinary feasts and sacrifices, and that the greater intensity was not artificial, but due to a revival of national sentiment. The worship of the local sanctu aries did nothing to promote the sense of the religious unity of Israel ; Jehovah 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 Jehovah, 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. The local worships, which subsisted unchanged during the greater part of the Hebrew kingship, gave no expression to this rise in the religious consciousness of the nation ; on the contrary we see from the prophetic books of the 8th century that they lagged more and more behind the pro gress of religious thought. But the prophetic societies were in their origin one symptom of that upheaval of national life of which the institution of the human sove reign reigning under the divine King was the chief fruit ; they preserved the traditions of that great movement ; they were, in however imperfect a way, an organ of national religious feeling, and could move forward with the movement of national life. And so, though we cannot follow the steps of the process, we are not surprised to 4 If this account of the origin of the nebitm is correct (comp. Kueneu, Prophets, Eng. tr., p. 554 sq.), the etymological sense of the word tf QJ is comparatively unimportant. The root seems to mean &quot;to start up,&quot; &quot;to rise into prominence,&quot; and so &quot;to become audible&quot;; but the range of possible explanations of the noun which remains open is too great to give value to any conjecture. The leading views are collected in several of the books cited at the close of this article, and a fresh and interesting investigation is given in G. Hoffmann s article quoted above.