Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/841

Rh PROPHET 817 for the southern kingdom, where, down to the last days of Hebrew independence, the official prophets of Jerusalem were connected with the temple and were under the authority of the chief priest (Jer. xxix. 26). Since the absorption of the aborigines in Israel Canaanite ideas had exercised great influence over the sanctuaries so much so that the reforming prophets of the 8th century regarded the national religion as having become wholly heathenish ; and this influence the ordinary prophets, whom a man like Micah regards as mere diviners, had certainly not escaped. They too were, at the beginning of the Assyrian period, not much more different from prophets of Baal than the priests were from priests of Baal. Their God had another name, but it was almost forgotten that He had a different character. The rise and progress of the new school of prophecy, beginning with Amos and continued in the succession of canonical prophets, which broke through this religious stagnation, has already been discussed in the article ISRAEL (vol. xiii. p. 410 sq.) ; for from Amos and still more from Isaiah downwards the prophets and their work make up the chief interest of Hebrew history. From this time, moreover, the prophets appear as authors ; and their books, preserved in the Old Testament, form the subject of special articles (AMOS, HOSE A, &amp;lt;fcc.). A few observa tions of a general character will therefore suffice in this place. Amos disclaimed all connexion with the mere profes sional prophets, and in this he was followed by his suc cessors. Formerly the prophets of Jehovah had been all on the same side ; their opponents were the prophets of Baal. But henceforth there were two parties among the prophets of Jehovah themselves, the new prophets accus ing the old of imposture and disloyalty to Jehovah, and these retaliating with a charge of disloyalty to Israel. We have learned to call the prophets of the new school &quot; true &quot; prophets and their adversaries &quot; false &quot; ; and this is perfectly just if we take the appellations to mean that the true prophets maintained a higher and therefore a truer view of Jehovah s character, purpose, and relation to His people. But the false prophets were by no means mere common impostors ; they were the accredited expon ents of the common orthodoxy of their day and even of a somewhat progressive orthodoxy, for the prophets who opposed Jeremiah took their stand on the ground of Josiah s reformation, and plainly regarded, themselves as conservators of the prophetic traditions of Isaiah, whose doctrine of the inviolability of Jehovah s seat on Zion was the starting point of their opposition to Jeremiah s pre dictions of captivity. No doubt there were many con scious hypocrites and impostors among the professional prophets, as there always will be among the professional representatives of a religious standpoint which is intrin sically untenable, and yet has on its side the prestige of tradition and popular acceptance. But on the whole the false prophets deserve that name, not for their conscious impostures, but because they were content to handle religious formulas which they had learned by rote as if they were intuitive principles, the fruit of direct spiritual experience, to enforce a conventional morality, shutting their eyes to glaring national sins, after the manner of professional orthodoxy, and in brief to treat the religious status quo as if it could be accepted without question as fully embodying the unchanging principles of all religion. 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 Jehovah. Amos and his successors accepted the old ideal of pro phecy if they disowned the class which pretended to em body it. &quot; The Lord Jehovah will do nothing, but He rc- vealeth His secret to His servants the prophets.&quot; &quot; By a prophet Jehovah brought Israel out of Egypt, and by a prophet &quot; in each successive age Israel had been watched over and preserved. But in point of fact the function of the new prophecy was not to preserve but to destroy Israel, if Israel still meant the actual Hebrew nation with its traditional national life. Till Amos prophecy was optimist even Elijah, if he denounced the destruction of a dynasty and the annihilation of all who had bowed the knee to Baal, never doubted of the future of the nation when only the faithful remained ; but the new prophecy is pessimist it knows that Israel is rotten to the core, and that the whole fabric of society must be dissolved before reconstruction is possible. And this it knows, not by a mere ethical judgment on the visible state of society, but because it has read Jehovah s secret written in the signs of the times and knows that He has condemned His people. To the mass these signs are unintelligible, be cause they deem it impossible that Jehovah 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 Assy^n 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 canonic? I prophets as simple preachers of righteousness ; their pre dictions of woe, we are told, are conditional, and tell what Israel must suffer if it does not repent. 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 Jehovah and His purpose. That cannot be frustrated, and, as it includes the choice of Israt I 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 resur rection of Israel is the goal of the prophets hope (Hos. vi. 1 sq.). This of course is only the broadest possible statement of a position which undergoes many modifications in the hands of individual seers, but on the whole governs all prophecy from Amos to Jeremiah. The position has, AVC see, two sides : on the one side the prophets are heralds of an inexorable judgment based on the demands of abso lute righteousness ; on the other they represent an assured conviction of Jehovah s invincible and gracious love. The current theological formula for this two-sided position is that the prophets are at once preachers of the law and forerunners of the gospel ; and, as it is generally assumed that they found the law already written, their originality and real importance is made to lie wholly in their evan gelical function. But in reality, as has been shown in ISRAEL and PENTATEUCH, the prophets are older than the law, and the part of their work which was really epoch- making far Israel is just the part which is usually passed over as unimportant. By emphasizing the purely moral character of Jehovah s demands from Israel, by teaching that the mere payment of service and worship at Jehovah s shrines did not entitle Israel s sins to be treated one whit more lightly than the sins of other nations, and by en forcing these doctrines through the conception that the approach of the all-destroying empire before which Israel must fall equall} with all its neighbours was the proof of Jehovah s impartial righteousness, they gave for the first XIX. 103