Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/845

Rh 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. A less complete but yet most powerful vindication of the spiritual prophets was furnished by the course and event of Israel s history. After the captivity it was no longer a question that the prophetic conception of Jehovah was the only possible one. Thenceforth the religion of Jehovah and the religion of the prophets are synonymous ; no other reading of Israel s past was possible, and in fact the whole history of the Hebrews in Canaan, as it was finally shaped in the exile, is written from this point of view, and has come down to us, along with the remains of actual prophetic books, under the collective title of &quot; The Prophets.&quot; To some extent this historical vindication of the pro phetic insight went on during the activity of the prophets themselves. From the time of Amos downwards the pro phets spoke mainly at great historical crises, when events were moving fast and a few years were often sufficient to show that they were right and their opponents wrong in their reading of the signs of the times. And here the controversy did not turn on the exact fulfilment of de tailed predictions ; detailed prediction occupies a very secondary place in the writings of the prophets ; or rather indeed what seem to be predictions in detail are usually only free poetical illustrations of historical principles which neither received nor demanded exact fulfilment. Isaiah, for example, in the time of Ahaz sketches the fatal results of Assyrian intervention, and pictures the sufferings of Judah when it should become the battlefield of the rival empires of the Tigris and the Nile, in a way that was by no means realized in detail ; but this does not affect the fact that he alone in Judah had correctly appreciated the historical situation, and that he did so not because he was a better statesman than his opponents, but because he had a different conception of the religious significance of the crisis. All through the prophetic period it was plain that the true prophets differed from the mere pro fessional prophets and statesmen in their view of the political duties and prospects of the nation because they had a different idea, or, as they themselves would have said, a truer knowledge, of God, and so the prophets and their successors notably Isa. xl.-lxvi. look on the event of Israel s history, not so much as proving that Isaiah or Jeremiah was a true prophet, but as proving that the Jehovah of the prophets is the true God, whose word cannot return to Him void, but must surely accomplish that which He pleaseth (Isa. Iv. 11). The prophets themselves required no historical verifica tion of their word to assure them that it was indeed the word of God, nor do they for a moment admit that their contemporaries are entitled to treat its authority as un proved till such verification is offered. The word of God carries its own evidence with it in its searching force and fire : &quot; Is not my word like as a fire, saith Jehovah, and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces ? &quot; (Jer. xxiii. 29). To the prophet himself it comes with imperi ous force : it constrains him to speak (Amos iii. 8), seizes him with a strong hand (Isa. viii. 11), burns like a fire within his bones till it finds utterance (Jer. xx. 9) ; and it is this force of moral conviction which ought also to com mend it to the conscience of his hearers. 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 821 then recent, but his criterion would have appeared inade quate 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. The mass of the nation, of course, was always much more struck by the &quot; signs &quot; and predictions of the pro phets than by their spiritual ideas ; we see how the idea of supernatural insight and power in everyday matters dominates the popular conception of Elijah and Elisha in the books of Kings. At a very early date the great pro phets became a kind of saints or welis, and the respect paid to the tombs of the prophets, which ultimately took in almost every particular the place of the old local shrines (Mat. xxiii. 29; Jerome, Epit. Pcmlee, 13; see OBADIAH), can be traced back to the time before the exile. 1 After the extinction of the prophetic voice, an ever-increasing weight was not unnaturally laid on the predictive element in their writings. Their creative religious ideas had become the common property of religious-minded Jews, at least in the somewhat im perfect shape in which they were embodied in the law, and their work on this side was carried on by the great religious poets. But the restored community which was still making a sort of faint attempt to be a religious nation as well as a church felt very pain fully the want of a direct message from God in critical times such as the prophets of old had been wont to bring. And in this need men began to look at the prophetic books, mainly in the hope that there might be found in them predictions which still awaited ful filment, and might be taken as referring to the latter days of Persian or Greek oppression. By ignoring the free poetical form of pro phecy, and still more by ignoring the fact that the prophetic pictures of the ideal future of Israel could not be literally fulfilled after the fall of the ancient state had entirely changed the sphere in which the problems of true religion had to be worked out, it was possible to find a great mass of unfulfilled prophecy which might form the basis of eschatological constructions. To use this material for the purpose in hand it was necessary to symbolize what was literal and to literalize what was figurative, to harmonize and to rearrange, above all to introduce some sort of prophetical chrono logy of future events. Hut all this was quite in the vein of later Judaism, and so at length the unfulfilled predictions of the prophets served as the raw material for the elaborate eschatology of the apoca lypses. See APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE and MESSIAH. In spite of superficial resemblances, mainly due to the unavoidable influence of current exegetical methods, the New-Testament conception of prophecy as fulfilled in Christ is fundamentally different from the Jewish apocalyptic view of unfulfilled prophecy. Not external details but the spiritual ideas of the prophets find their fulfilment in the new dispensation, and they do so under forms entirely diverse from those of the old national kingdom of Jehovah. iiuiesLuni, views TO vv usius, us rrvpneiis et j^/o/ fttttu. ine glowing BCU: the insufficiency of fhis treatment towards the close of the period of dogmatism showed itself in various ways. On the one hand we have the revival of apoca lyptic exegesis by Cocceius and his school, which has continued to Influence certain circles down to the present day, and has led to the most varied attempts to find in prophecy a history, wiitten before the event, of all the chief vicissitudes of the Christian church down to the end of the world. On the other hand Lowth s Lectures on Hebrew Poetry, and the same author s Commentary on Isaiah (1778), show the beginnings of a tendency to look mainly at the aesthetic aspects of the prophetical books, and to view the prophets as enlightened religious poets. This tendency culminates in Kichhorn, Die Hebraisrhen Propheten, 1810. Neither of these methods could do much for the historical understanding of th&amp;lt; pheno mena of prophecy as a whole, and the more liberal students of the Old 1. stament were long blinded by the moralizing unhisiorical rationalism which succeeded the old orthodoxy, the first requisite of real progress, after dogmatic prejudices had been broken through, was to get a living conception of the history in which the prophets moved ; and this again called for a revision of all traditional notions as to the age of the various parts of Hebrew literature criticism of the sources of the history, among which the prophetical books themselves take the first place. In recent times therefore advance in the understanding of the prophets lias moved on pari passu with the higher criticism, especially the criticism of the Pentateuch, and with the general study of Hebrew history ; and most works on the subject prior to Ewald must be regarded as quite antiquated except for the light they cast on detailed points of exegeMs. On the prophets and their woiks in general the best book is still Ewald s Propheten des Alien Bundes (1st eci. 1840-41, 2d ed. 1867-fi8, Eng. tr. 1876-77). The subject is treated in all works on Old Testament introduction (among which Kuenen s Onderzoek. vol. ii., claims the first place), and on Old Testament theology (see especially Vatke, Religion des A. T.. 1835). On the theology of the prophets there is a separate work by Duhm, lionn, 1875, and Knobel s Praphetigmus der Hebraer, 1837, is a separate introduction to the prophetical books. Kuenen s Prophets and Prophecy in Israel 1 See 2 Kings xxiii. 21, and also Deut. xxxiv. 6. So too all the old national heroes and heroines ultimately became prophets ; in the case of Deborah there is even a fusion in local tradition between an old heroine and an historical suer.