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THE Prophets, to whom this and a following Part are dedicated, have, to our loss, been haunted for centuries by a peddling and ambiguous title. Their Twelve Books are in size smaller than those of the great Three which precede them, and doubtless none of their chapters soar so high as the brilliant summits to which we are swept by Isaiah and the Prophet of the Exile. But in every other respect they are undeserving of the niggardly name of "Minor." Two of them, Amos and Hosea, were the first of all prophecy-rising cliff-like, with a sheer and magnificent originality, to a height and a mass sufficient to set after them the trend and slope of the whole prophetic range. The Twelve together cover the extent of that range, and illustrate the development of prophecy at almost every stage from the eighth century to the fourth. Yet even more than in the case of Isaiah or Jeremiah, the Church has been content to use a passage here and a passage there, leaving the rest of the books to absolute neglect or the almost equal oblivion of routine-reading. Among the causes of this disuse have been the more than usually corrupt state of the text; the consequent disorder and in parts unintelligibleness of all the versions; the ignorance of the various historical circumstances out of which the books arose; the absence of successful efforts to determine the periods and strophes, the dramatic dialogues (with the names of the speakers), the lyric effusions and the passages of argument, of all of which the books are composed.
The following exposition is an attempt to assist the bettering of all this. As the Twelve Prophets illustrate among them the whole history of written prophecy, I have thought it useful to prefix a historical sketch of the Prophet in early Israel, or as far as the appearance of Amos. The Twelve are then taken in chronological order. Under each of them a chapter is given of historical and critical introduction to his book; then some account of the prophet himself as a man and a seer; then a complete translation of the various prophecies handed down under his name, with textual footnotes, and an exposition and application to the present day in harmony with the aim of the series to which these volumes belong: finally, a discussion of the main doctrines the prophet has taught, if it has not been found possible to deal with these in the course of the exposition.
An exact critical study of the Twelve Prophets is rendered necessary by the state of the entire text. The present work is based on a thorough examination of this in the light of the ancient versions and of modern criticism. The emendations which I have proposed are few and insignificant, but I have examined and discussed in footnotes all that have been suggested, and in many cases my translation will be found to differ widely from that of the Revised Version. To questions of integrity and authenticity more space is devoted than may seem to many to be necessary. But it is certain that the criticism of the prophetic books has now entered on a period of the same analysis and discrimination which is almost exhausted in the case of the Pentateuch. Some hints were given of this in a previous book on Isaiah, chapters 40-66, which are evidently a composite work. Among the books now before us, the same fact has long been clear in the case of Obadiah and Zechariah, and also since Ewald’s time with regard to Micah. But Duhm’s "Theology of the Prophets," which appeared in 1875, suggested interpolations in Amos. Wellhausen (in 1873) and Stade (from 1883 onwards) carried the discussion further both on those, and others, of the Twelve; while a recent work by Andree on Haggai proves that many similar questions may still be raised and have to be debated. The general fact must be admitted that hardly one book has escaped later additions-additions of an entirely justifiable nature, which supplement the point of view of a single prophet with the richer experience or the riper hopes of a later day, and thus afford to ourselves a more catholic presentment of the doctrines of prophecy and the Divine purposes for mankind. This general fact, I say, must be admitted. But the questions of detail are still in process of solution. It is obvious that settled results can be reached (as to some extent they have been already reached in the criticism of the Pentateuch) only after years of research and debate by all schools of critics. Meantime it is the duty of each of us to offer his own conclusions, with regard to every separate passage, on the understanding that, however final they may at present seem to him, the end is not yet. In previous criticism the defects, of which work in the same field has made me aware, are four:
1. A too rigid belief in the exact parallelism and symmetry of the prophetic style, which I feel has led, for instance, Wellhausen, to whom we otherwise owe so much on the Twelve Prophets, into many unnecessary emendations of the text, or, where some amendment is necessary, to absolutely unprovable changes.
2. In passages between which no connection exists, the forgetfulness of the principle that this fact may often be explained as justly by the hypothesis of the omission of some words, as by the favorite theory of the later intrusion of portions of the extant text.
3. Forgetfulness of the possibility, which in some cases amounts almost to certainty, of the incorporation, among the authentic words of a prophet, of passages of earlier as well as of later date. And,
4. depreciation of the spiritual insight and foresight of pre-exilic writers. These, I am persuaded, are defects in previous criticism of the prophets. Probably my own criticism will reveal many more. In the beginnings of such analysis as we are engaged on, we must be prepared for not a little arbitrariness and want of proportion; these are often necessary for insight and fresh points of view, but they are as easily eliminated by the progress of discussion.
All criticism, however, is preliminary to the real work which the immortal prophets demand from scholars and preachers in our age. In a review of a previous volume, I was blamed for applying a prophecy of Isaiah to a problem of our own day. This was called "prostituting prophecy." The prostitution of the prophets is their confinement to academic uses. One cannot conceive an ending, at once more pathetic and more ridiculous, to those great streams of living water, than to allow them to run out in the sands of criticism and exegesis, however golden these sands may be. The prophets spoke for a practical purpose; they aimed at the hearts of men; and everything that scholarship can do for their writings has surely for its final aim the illustration of their witness to the ways of God with men, and its application to living questions and duties and hopes. Besides, therefore, seeking to tell the story of that wonderful stage in the history of the human spirit-surely next in wonder to the story of Christ Himself-I have not feared at every suitable point to apply its truths to our lives today. The civilization in which prophecy flourished was in its essentials marvelously like our own. To mark only one point, the rise of prophecy in Israel came fast upon the passage of the nation from an agricultural to a commercial basis of society, and upon the appearance of the very thing which gives its name to civilization -city-life, with its unchanging sins, problems, and ideals.
A recent Dutch critic, whose exact scholarship is known to all readers of Stade’s "Journal of Old Testament Science," has said of Amos and Hosea:
"These prophecies have a word of God, as for all times, so also especially for our own. Before all it is relevant to ‘the social question’ of our day, to the relation of religion and morality. Often it has been hard for me to refrain from expressly pointing out the agreement between Then and Today."
This feeling will be shared by all students of prophecy whose minds and consciences are quick; and I welcome the liberal plata of the series in which this book appears, because, while giving room for the adequate discussion of critical and historical questions, its chief design is to show the eternal validity of the Books of the Bible as the Word of God, and their meaning for ourselves today.
Previous works on the Minor Prophets are almost innumerable. Those to which I owe most will be found indicated in the footnotes. The translation has been executed upon the purpose, not to sacrifice the literal meaning or exact emphasis of the original to the frequent possibility of greater elegance. It reproduces every word, with the occasional exception of a copula. With some hesitation I have retained the traditional spelling of the Divine Name, Jehovah, instead of the more correct Jahve or Yahweh; but where the rhythm of certain familiar passages was disturbed by it, I have followed the English versions and written LORD. The reader will keep in mind that a line may be destroyed by substituting our pronunciation of proper names for the more musical accents of the original. Thus, for instance, we obliterate the music of "Israel" by making it two syllables and putting the accent on the first: it has three syllables with the accent on the last. We crush Yerushalayîm into Jerusalem; we shred off Asshûr into Assyria, and dub Misraîm Egypt. Hebrew has too few of the combinations which sound most musical to our ears to afford the suppression of any one of them.
IN the order of our English Bible the Minor Prophets, as they are usually called, form the last twelve books of the Old Testament. They are immediately preceded by Daniel, and before him by the three Major Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah (with Lamentations), and Ezekiel. Why all sixteen were thus gathered at the end of the other sacred books we do not know. Perhaps, because it was held fitting that prophecy should occupy the last outposts of the Old Testament towards the New.
In the Hebrew Bible, however, the order differs, and is much more significant. The Prophets form the second division of the threefold Canon: Law, Prophets, and Writings; and Daniel is not among them. The Minor follow immediately after Ezekiel. Moreover, they are not twelve books, but one. They are gathered under the common title "Book of the Twelve"; and although each of them has the usual colophon detailing the number of its own verses, there is also one colophon for all the twelve, placed at the end of Malachi and reckoning the sum of their verses from the first of Hosea onwards. This unity, which there is reason to suppose was given to them before their reception into the Canon, they have never since lost. However much their place has changed in the order of the books of the Old Testament, however much their own internal arrangement has differed, the Twelve have always stood together. There has been every temptation to scatter them because of their various dates. Yet they never have been scattered; and in spite of the fact that they have not preserved their common title in any Bible outside the Hebrew, that title has lived on in literature and common talk. Thus the Greek Canon omits it; but Greek Jews and Christians always counted the books as one volume, calling, them "The Twelve Prophets," or "The Twelve-Prophet Book." It was the Latins who designated them "The Minor Prophets": "on account of their brevity as compared with those who are called the Major because of their ampler volumes." And this name has passed into most modern languages, including our own. But surely it is better to revert to the original, canonical and unambiguous title of "The Twelve."
The collection and arrangement of "The Twelve" are matters of obscurity, from which, however, three or four facts emerge that are tolerably certain. The inseparableness of the books is a proof of the ancient date of their union. They must have been put together before they were received into the Canon. The Canon of the Prophets-Joshua to Second Kings and Isaiah to Malachi-was closed by 200 B.C. at the latest, and perhaps as early as 250; but if we have (as seems probable) portions of "The Twelve," which must be assigned to a little later than 300, this may be held to prove that the whole collection cannot have long preceded the fixing of the Canon of the Prophets. On the other hand, the fact that these latest pieces have not been placed under a title of their own, but are attached to the Book of Zechariah, is pretty sufficient evidence that they were added after the collection and fixture of twelve books-a round number which there would be every disposition not to disturb. That would give us for the date of the first edition (so to speak) of our Twelve some year before 300; and for the date of the second edition some year towards 250. This is a question, however, which may be reserved for final decision after we have examined the date of the separate books, and especially of Joel and the second half of Zechariah. That there was a previous collection, as early as the Exile, of the books written before then, may be regarded as more than probable. But we have no means of fixing its exact limits. Why the Twelve were all ultimately, put together is reasonably suggested by Jewish writers. They are small, and, as separate rolls, might have been lost. It is possible that the desire of the round number twelve is responsible for the admission of Jonah, a book very different in form from all the others; just as we have hinted that the fact of there being already twelve may account for the attachment of the late fragments to the Book of Zechariah. But all this is only to guess, where we have no means of certain knowledge.
"The Book of the Twelve" has not always held the place which it now occupies in the Hebrew Canon, at the end of the Prophets. The rabbis taught that Hosea, but for the comparative smallness of his prophecy, should have stood first of all the writing prophets, of whom they regarded him as the oldest. And doubtless it was for the same chronological reasons’ that early Christian catalogues of the Scriptures and various editions of the Septuagint placed the whole of "The Twelve" in front of Isaiah.
The internal arrangement of "The Twelve" in our English Bible is the same as that of the Hebrew Canon, and was probably determined by what the compilers thought to be the respective ages of the books. Thus, first we have six, all supposed to be of the earlier Assyrian period, before 700-Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah; then three from the late Assyrian and the Babylonian periods-Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah; and then three from the Persian period after the Exile-Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The Septuagint have altered the order of the first six, arranging Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, and Obadiah according to their size, and setting Jonah after them, probably because of his different form. The remaining six are left as in the Hebrew.
Recent criticism, however, has made it clear that the Biblical order of "The Twelve Prophets" is no more than a very rough approximation to the order of their real dates; and, as it is obviously best for us to follow in their historical succession prophecies which illustrate the whole history of prophecy from its rise with Amos to its fall with Malachi and his successors, I propose to do this. Detailed proofs of the separate dates must be left to each book. All that is needful here is a general statement of the order.
Of the first six prophets the dates of Amos, Hosea, and Micah (but of the latter’s book in part only) are certain. The Jews have been able to defend Hosea’s priority only on fanciful grounds. Whether or not he quotes from Amos, his historical allusions are more recent. With the exception of a few fragments incorporated by later authors, the Book of Amos is thus the earliest example of prophetic literature, and we take it first. The date we shall see is about 755. Hosea begins five or ten years later, and Micah just before 722. The three are in every respect-originality, comprehensiveness, influence upon other prophets-the greatest of our Twelve, and will therefore be treated with most detail, occupying the whole of the first volume.
The rest of the first six are Obadiah, Joel, and Jonah. But the Book of Obadiah, although it opens with an early oracle against Edom, is in its present form from after the Exile. The Book of Joel is of uncertain date, but, as we shall see, the great probability is that it is late; and the Book of Jonah belongs to a form of literature so different from the others that we may, most conveniently, treat of it last.
This leaves us to follow Micah, at the end of the eighth century, with the group Zephaniah, Nahum, and Habakkuk from the second half of the seventh century; and finally to take in their order the post-exilic Haggai, Zec_1:1-21; Zec_2:1-13; Zec_3:1-10; Zec_4:1-14; Zec_5:1-11; Zec_6:1-15; Zec_7:1-14; Zec_8:1-23; Zec_9:1-17., Malachi, and the other writings which we feel obliged to place about or even after that date.
One other word is needful. This assignment of the various books to different dates is not to be held as implying that the whole of a book belongs to such a date or to the author whose name it bears. We shall find that hands have been busy with the texts of the books long after the authors of these must have passed away; that besides early fragments incorporated by later writers, prophets of Israel’s new dawn mitigated the judgments and enlightened the gloom of the watchmen of her night; that here and there are passages which are evidently intrusions, both because they interrupt the argument and because they reflect a much later historical environment than their context. This, of course, will require discussion in each case, and such discussion will be given. The text will be subjected to an independent examination. Some passages hitherto questioned we may find to be unjustly so; others not hitherto questioned we may see reason to suspect. But in any case we shall keep in mind that the results of an independent inquiry are uncertain; and that in this new criticism of the prophets, which is comparatively recent, we cannot hope to arrive for some time at so general a consensus as is being rapidly reached in the far older and more elaborated criticism of the Pentateuch.
Such is the extent and order of the journey which lies before us. If it is not to the very summits of Israel’s outlook that we climb-Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the great Prophet of the Exile-we are yet to traverse the range of prophecy from beginning to end. We start with its first abrupt elevations in Amos. We are carried by the side of Isaiah and Jeremiah, yet at a lower altitude, on to the Exile. With the returned Israel we pursue an almost immediate rise to vision, and then by Malachi and others are conveyed down dwindling slopes to the very end. Beyond the land is flat. Though Psalms are sung and brave deeds done, and faith is strong and bright, there is no height of outlook; "there is no more any prophet" {Psa_74:9} in Israel.
But our "Twelve" do more than thus carry us from beginning to end of the Prophetic Period. Of second rank as are most of the heights of this mountain range, they yet bring forth and speed on their way not a few of the streams of living water which have nourished later ages and are flowing today. Impetuous cataracts of righteousness-"let it roll on like water, and justice as an everlasting stream"; the irrepressible love of God to sinful men; the perseverance and pursuits of His grace; His mercies that follow the exile and the outcast His truth that goes forth richly upon the heathen; the ‘hope of the Savior of mankind the outpouring of the Spirit; counsels of patience; impulses of tenderness and of healing melodies innumerable, -all sprang from these lower hills of prophecy, and sprang so strongly that the world hears and feels them still,
And from the heights of our present pilgrimage there are also clear those great visions of the Stars and the Dawn, of the Sea and the Storm, concerning which it is true that as long as men live they shall seek out the places whence they can be seen, and thank God for His prophets.
Our "Twelve Prophets" will carry us, as we have seen, across the whole extent of the Prophetical period-the period when prophecy became literature, assuming the form and rising to the ‘intensity of an imperishable influence on the world. The earliest of the Twelve, Amos and Hosea, were the inaugurators of this period. They were not only the first (so far as we know) to commit prophecy to writing, but we find in them the germs of all its subsequent development. Yet Amos and Hosea were not unfathered. Behind them lay an older dispensation, and their own was partly a product of this, and partly a revolt against it. Amos says of himself: "The Lord hath spoken, who can but prophesy?"-but again: "No prophet I, nor prophet’s son!" Who were those earlier prophets whose office Amos assumed while repudiating their spirit-whose name he abjured, yet could not escape from it? And, while we are about the matter, what do we mean by "prophet" in general? In vulgar use the name "prophet" has degenerated to the meaning of "one who foretells the future." Of this meaning it is, perhaps, the first duty of every student of prophecy earnestly and stubbornly to rid himself. In its native Greek tongue "prophet" meant not "one who speaks before," but "one who speaks for, or on behalf of, another." At the Delphic oracle "The Prophet’s" was the title of the official who received the utterances of the frenzied Pythoness and expounded them to the people; but Plato says that this is a misuse of the word, and that the true prophet is the inspired person himself, he who is in communication with the Deity and who speaks directly for the Deity. So Tiresias, the seer, is called by Pindar the "prophet" or "interpreter of Zeus," and Plato even styles poets "the prophets of the Muses." It is in this sense that we must think of the "Prophet" of the Old Testament. He is a speaker for God. The sharer of God’s counsels, as Amos calls him, he becomes the bearer and preacher of God’s Word. Prediction of the future is only a part, and often a subordinate and accidental part, of an office whose full function is to declare the character and the will of God. But the prophet does this in no systematic or abstract form. He brings his revelation point by point, and in connection with some occasion in the history of his people, or some phase of their character. He is not a philosopher nor a theologian with a system of doctrine (at least before Ezekiel), but the messenger and herald of God at some crisis in the life or conduct of His people. His message is never out of touch with events. These form either the subject matter or the proof or the execution of every oracle he utters. It is, therefore, God not merely as Truth, but far more as Providence, whom the prophet reveals. And although that Providence includes the full destiny of Israel and mankind, the prophet brings the news of it, for the most part, piece by piece, with reference to some present sin or duty, or some impending crisis or calamity. Yet he does all this, not merely because the word needed for the day has been committed to him by itself, and as if he were only its mechanical vehicle; but because he has come under the overwhelming conviction of God’s presence and of His character, a conviction often so strong that God’s word breaks through him and God speaks in the first person to the people.
There was no ancient people but believed in the power of certain personages to consult the Deity and to reveal His will. Every man could sacrifice; but not every man could render in return the oracle of God. This pertained to select individuals or orders. So the prophet seems to have been an older specialist than the priest, though in every tribe he frequently combined the latter’s functions with his own.
The matters on which ancient man consulted God were as wide as life. But naturally at first, in a rude state of society and at a low stage of mental development, it was in regard to the material defense and necessities of life, the bare law and order, that men almost exclusively sought the Divine will. And the whole history of prophecy is just the effort to substitute for these elementary provisions a more personal standard of the moral law, and more spiritual ideals of the Divine grace.
By the Semitic race-to which we may now confine ourselves, since Israel belonged to it-Deity was worshipped, in the main, as the god of a tribe. Every Semitic tribe had its own god; it would appear that there was no god without a tribe: the traces of belief in a supreme and abstract Deity are few and ineffectual. The tribe was the medium by which the god made himself known, and became an effective power on earth: the god was the patron of the tribe, the supreme magistrate and the leader in war. The piety he demanded was little more than loyalty to ritual; the morality he enforced was only a matter of police. He took no cognizance of the character or inner thoughts of the individual. But the tribe believed him to stand in very close connection with all the practical interests of their common life. They asked of him the detection of criminals, the discovery of lost property, the settlement of civil suits, sometimes when the crops should be sown, and always when war should be waged and by what tactics.
The means by which the prophet consulted the Deity on these subjects were for the most part primitive and rude. They may be summed up under two kinds: Visions either through falling into ecstasy or by dreaming in sleep, and Signs or Omens. Both kinds are instanced in Balaam. Of the signs some were natural, like the whisper of trees, the flight of birds, the passage of clouds, the movement of stars. Others were artificial, like the casting or drawing of lots. Others were between these, like the shape assumed by the entrails of the sacrificed animals when thrown on the ground. Again, the prophet was often obliged to do something wonderful in the people’s sight in order to convince-them of his authority. In Biblical language he had to work a miracle or give a sign. One instance throws a flood of light on this habitual expectancy of the Semitic mind. There was once an Arab chief who wished to consult a distant soothsayer as to the guilt of a daughter. But before he would trust the seer to give him the right answer to such a question he made him discover a grain of corn which he had concealed about his horse. He required the physical sign before he would accept the moral judgment.
Now, to us, the crudeness of the means employed, the opportunities of fraud, the inadequacy of the tests for spiritual ends, are very obvious. But do not let us, therefore, miss the numerous moral opportunities which lay before the prophet even at that early stage of his evolution. He was trusted to speak in the name of Deity. Through him men believed in God and in the possibility of a revelation. They sought from him the discrimination of evil from good. The highest possibilities of social ministry lay open to him: the tribal existence often hung on his word for peace or war; he was the mouth of justice, the rebuke of evil, the champion of the wronged. Where such opportunities were present, can we imagine the Spirit of God to have been absent-the Spirit Who seeks men more than they seek Him, and, as He condescends to use their poor language for religion, must also have stooped to the picture language, to the rude instruments, symbols and sacraments, of their early faith?
In an office of such mingled possibilities everything depended-as we shall find it depend to the very end of prophecy-on the moral insight and character of the prophet himself, on his conception of God and whether he was so true to this as to overcome his professional temptations to fraud and avarice, malice, towards individuals, subservience to the powerful, or, worst snares of all, the slothfulness and insincerity of routine. We see this moral issue put very clearly in such a story as that of Balaam, or in such a career as that of Mohammed.
So much for the Semitic soothsayer in general. Now let us turn to Israel.
Among the Hebrews the "man of God," to use his widest designation, is at first called "Seer," or "Gazer," the word which Balaam uses of himself. In consulting the Divine will he employs the same external means, he offers the people for their evidence the same signs, as do the seers or soothsayers of other Semitic tribes. He gains influence by the miracles, "the wonderful things," which he does. Moses himself is represented after this fashion. He meets the magicians of Egypt on their own level. His use of "rods"; the holding up of his hands that Israel may prevail against Amaleq: Joshua’s casting of tots to discover a criminal; Samuel’s dream in the sanctuary; his discovery for a fee of the lost asses of Saul; David and the images in his house, the ephod he consulted; the sign to go to battle "what time thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees"; Solomon’s inducement of dreams by sleeping in the sanctuary at Gibeah, -these are a few of the many proofs that early prophecy in Israel employed not only the methods but even much of the furniture of the kindred Semitic religions. But then those tools and methods were at the same time accompanied by the noble opportunities of the prophetic office to which I have just alluded-opportunities of religious and social ministry-and still more, these opportunities were at the disposal of moral influences which, it is a matter of history, were not found in any other Semitic religion than Israel’s; However you will explain it, that Divine Spirit, which’ we have felt unable to conceive as absent from any Semitic prophet who truly sought after God, that Light which light, eth every man who cometh into the world, was present to an unparalleled degree with the early prophets of Israel. He came to individuals, and. to the nation as a whole, in events and in influences which may be summed up as the impression of the character of their national God, Jehovah: to use Biblical language, as "Jehovah’s spirit" and "power." It is true that in many ways the Jehovah of early Israel reminds us of other Semitic deities. Like some of them He appears with thunder and lightning; like all of them He is the God of one tribe who are His peculiar people. He bears the same titles!-Melek, Adon, Baal ("King," "Lord," "Possessor"). He is propitiated by the same offerings. To choose one striking instance, captives and spoil of war are sacrificed to Him with the same relentlessness, and by a process which has even the same names given to it, as in the votive inscriptions of Israel’s heathen neighbors. Yet, notwithstanding all these elements, the religion of Jehovah from the very first evinced, by the confession of all critics, an ethical force shared by no other Semitic creed. From the first there was in it the promise and the potency of that sublime monotheism, which in the period of our "Twelve" it afterwards reached. Its earliest effects of course were chiefly political: it welded the twelve tribes into the unity of a nation; it preserved them as one amid the many temptations to scatter along those divergent lines of culture and of faith, which the geography of their country placed so attractively before them. It taught them to prefer religious loyalty to material advantage, and so inspired them with high motives for self-sacrifice and every other duty of patriotism. But it did even better than thus teach them to bear one another’s burdens. It inspired them to care for one another’s sins. The last chapters of the Book of Judges prove how strong a national conscience there was in early Israel. Even then Israel was a moral, as well as a political, unity. Gradually there grew up, but still unwritten, a body of Torah, or revealed law, which, though its framework was the common custom of the Semitic race, was inspired by ideals of humanity and justice not elsewhere in that race discernible by us.
When we analyze this ethical distinction of early Israel, this indubitable progress which the nation were making while the rest of their world was morally stagnant, we find it to be due to their impressions of the character of their God. This character did not affect them as Righteousness only. At first it was even a more wonderful Grace. Jehovah had chosen them when they were no people, had redeemed them from servitude, had brought them to their land; had borne with their stubbornness, and had forgiven their infidelities. Such a Character was partly manifest in the great events of their history, and partly communicated itself to their finest personalities-as the Spirit of God does communicate with the spirit of man made in His image. Those personalities were the early prophets from Moses to Samuel. They inspired the nation to believe in God’s purposes for itself; they rallied it to war for the common faith, and war was then the pitch of self-sacrifice; they gave justice to it in God’s name, and rebuked its sinfulness without sparing. Criticism has proved that we do not know nearly so much about those first prophets as perhaps we thought we did. But under their God they made Israel. Out of their work grew the monotheism of their successors, whom we are now to study, and later the Christianity of the New Testament. For myself I cannot but believe that in the influence of Jehovah which Israel owned in those early times there was the authentic revelation of a real Being.
Of the oldest order of Hebrew prophecy, Samuel was the last representative. Till his time, we are told, the prophet in Israel was known as the Seer, {1Sa_9:9} but now, with other tempers and other habits, a new order appears whose name-and that means to a certain extent their spirit-is to displace the older name and the older spirit.
When Samuel anointed Saul he bade him, for a sign that he was chosen of the Lord, go forth to meet "a company of prophets"-Nebi’im, the singular is Nabi’-coming down from the high place or sanctuary with viols, drums and pipes, and prophesying. "There," he added, "the spirit of Jehovah shall come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." So it happened; and the people "said one to another, What is this that is come to the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?" Another story, probably from another source, tells us that later, when Saul sent troops of messengers to the sanctuary at Ramah to take David, they saw the company of prophets prophesying and Samuel standing appointed over them, and the spirit of God fell upon one after another of the troops; as upon Saul himself when he followed them up. "And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore they say, Is Saul also among the prophets?" {1Sa_19:20-24}
All this is very different from the habits of the Seer, who had hitherto represented prophecy. He was solitary, but these went about in bands. They were filled with an infectious enthusiasm, by which they excited each other and all sensitive persons whom they touched. They stirred up this enthusiasm by singing, playing upon instruments, and dancing: its results were frenzy, the tearing of their clothes, and prostration. The same phenomena have appeared in every religion-in Paganism often, and several times within Christianity. They may be watched today among the dervishes of Islam, who by singing (as one has seen them in Cairo), by swaying of their bodies, by repeating the Divine Name, and dwelling on the love and. ineffable power of God, work themselves into an excitement which ends in prostration and often in insensibility. The whole process is due to an overpowering sense of the Deity-crude and unintelligent if you will, but sincere and authentic-which seems to haunt the early stages of all religions, and to linger to the end with the stagnant and unprogressive. The appearance of this prophecy in Israel has given rise to a controversy as to whether it was purely a native product, or was induced by infection from the Canaanite tribes around. Such questions are of little interest in face of these facts: that the ecstasy sprang up in Israel at a time when the spirit of the people was stirred against the Philistines, and patriotism and religion were equally excited; that it is represented as due to the Spirit of Jehovah; and that the last of the old order of Jehovah’s prophets recognized its harmony with his own dispensation, presided over it, and gave Israel’s first king as one of his signs, that he should come under its power. These things being so, it is surprising that a recent critic should have seen in the dancing prophets nothing but eccentrics into whose company it was shame for so good a man as Saul to fall. He reaches this conclusion only by supposing that the reflexive verb used for their "prophesying"-hithnabbe- had at this time that equivalence to mere madness to which it was reduced by the excesses of later generations of prophets. With Samuel we feel that the word had no reproach: the Nebi’im were recognized by him as standing in the prophetical succession. They sprang up in sympathy with a national movement. The king who joined himself to them was the same who sternly banished from Israel all the baser forms of soothsaying and traffic with the dead. But, indeed, we need no other proof than this: the name Nebi’im so establishes itself in the popular regard that it displaces the older names of Seer and Gazer, and becomes the classical term for the whole body of prophets from Moses to Malachi.
There was one very remarkable change effected by this new order of prophets, probably the very greatest relief which prophecy experienced in the course of its evolution. This was separation from the ritual and from the implements of soothsaying. Samuel had been both priest and prophet. But after him the names and the duties were specialized, though the specializing was incomplete. While the new Nebi’im remained in connection with the ancient centers of religion, they do not appear to have exercised any part of the ritual. The priests, on the other hand, did not confine themselves to sacrifice, and other forms of public worship, but exercised many of the so-called prophetic functions. They also, as Hosea tells us, were expected to give Toroth-revelations of the Divine will on points of conduct and order. There remained with them the ancient forms of oracle-the Ephod, or plated image, the Teraphim, the lot, and the Orim and Thummim, all of these apparently still regarded as indispensable elements of religion. From such rude forms of ascertaining the Divine Will, prophecy in its new order was absolutely free. And it was free of the ritual of the sanctuaries. As has been justly remarked, the ritual of Israel always remained a peril to the people, the peril of relapsing into Paganism. Not only did it materialize faith and engross affections in the worshipper which were meant for moral objects, but very many of its forms were actually the same as those of the other Semitic religions, and it tempted its devotees to the confusion of their God with the gods of the heathen. Prophecy was now wholly independent of it, and we may see in such independence the possibility of all the subsequent career of prophecy along moral and spiritual lines. Amos absolutely condemns the ritual, and Hosea brings the message from God, "I will have mercy and not sacrifice." This is the distinctive glory of prophecy in that era in which we are to study it. But do not let us forget that it became possible through the ecstatic Nebi’im of Samuel’s time, and through their separation from the national ritual and the material forms of soothsaying. It is the way of Providence to prepare for the revelation of great moral truths, by the enfranchisement, sometimes centuries before, of an order or a nation of men from political or professional interests which would have rendered it impossible for their descendants to appreciate those truths without prejudice or compromise.
We may conceive then of these Nebi’im, these prophets, as enthusiasts for Jehovah and for Israel. For Jehovah-if today we see men cast by the adoration of the despot-deity of Islam into transports so excessive that they lose all consciousness of earthly things and fall into a trance, can we not imagine a like effect produced on the same sensitive natures of the East by the contemplation of such a God as Jehovah, so mighty in earth and heaven, so faithful to His people, so full of grace? Was not such an ecstasy of worship most likely to be born of the individual’s ardent devotion in the hour of the nation’s despair? {Cf. Deu_28:34} Of course there would be swept up by such. a movement all the more volatile and unbalanced minds of the day-as these always have been swept up by any powerful religious excitement-but that is not to discredit the sincerity of the main volume of the feeling nor its authenticity as a work of the Spirit of God, as the impression of the character and power of Jehovah.
But these ecstatics were also enthusiasts for Israel; and this saved the movement from morbidness. They worshipped God neither out of sheer physical sympathy with nature, like the Phoenician devotees of Adonis or the Greek Bacchantes; nor out of terror at the approaching end of, all things, like some of the ecstatic sects of the Middle Ages; nor out of a selfish passion for their own salvation, like so many a modern Christian fanatic; but in sympathy with their nation’s aspirations for freedom and her whole political life. They were enthusiasts for their people. The ecstatic prophet was not confined to his body nor to nature for the impulses of Deity. Israel was, his body, his atmosphere, his universe. Through it all he felt the thrill of Deity. Confine religion to the personal, it grows rancid, morbid. Wed it to patriotism, it lives in the open air and its blood is pure. So in days of national danger the Nebi’im would be inspired like Saul to battle for their country’s freedom; in more settled times they would be lifted to the responsibilities of educating the people, counseling the governors, and preserving the national traditions. This is what actually took place. After the critical period of Saul’s time has passed, the prophets still remain enthusiasts; but they are enthusiasts for affairs. They counsel and they rebuke David. {2Sa_12:1 ff.} They warn Rehoboam, and they excite Northern Israel to revolt. {1Ki_11:29; 1Ki_12:22} They overthrow and they set up dynasties. {1Ki_14:2; 1Ki_7:11; 1Ki_19:15 ff} They offer the king advice on campaigns. {1Ki_22:5 2Ki_2:11 ff} Like Elijah, they take up against the throne the cause of the oppressed; {1Ki_21:1 ff} like Elisha, they stand by the throne its most trusted counselors in peace and war. {2Ki_6:1-8, etc.} That all this is no new order of prophecy in Israel, but the developed form of the ecstasy of Samuel’s day, is plain from the continuance of the name Nebi’im and from these two facts besides: that the ecstasy survives and that the prophets still live in communities. The greatest figures of the period, Elijah and Elisha, have upon them "the hand of the Lord," as the influence is now called: Elijah when he runs before Ahab’s chariot across Esdraelon, Elisha when by music he induces upon himself the prophetic mood. {2Ki_3:15} Another ecstatic figure is the prophet who was sent to anoint Jehu; he swept in and he swept out again, and the soldiers called him "that mad fellow."
But the roving bands had settled down into more or less stationary communities, who partly lived by agriculture and partly by the alms of the people or the endowments of the crown (1Ki_18:4; 1Ki_18:19; 2Ki_2:3, 2Ki_4:38-44; 2Ki_5:20 ff.; 2Ki_6:1 ff.; 2Ki_8:8 f., etc.). Their centers were either the centers of national worship, like Bethel and Gilgal, or the centers of government, like Samaria, where the dynasty of Omri supported prophets both of Baal and of Jehovah. {2Ki_18:19; 2Ki_22:6} They were called prophets, but also "sons of the prophets," the latter name not because their office was hereditary, but by the Oriental fashion of designating every member of a guild as the son of the guild. In many, cases the son may have succeeded his father; but the ranks could be recruited from outside, as we see in the case of-the young farmer Elisha, whom Elijah anointed at the plough. They probably all wore the mantle which is distinctive of some of them, the mantle of hair, or skin of a beast.
The risks of degeneration, to which this order of prophecy was liable, arose both from its ecstatic temper and from its connection with public affairs.
Religious ecstasy is always dangerous to the moral and intellectual interests of religion. The largest prophetic figures of the period, though they feel the ecstasy, attain their greatness by rising superior to it. Elijah’s raptures are impressive; but nobler are his defense of Naboth and his denunciation of Ahab. And so Elisha’s inducement of the prophetic mood by music is the least attractive element in his career: his greatness lies in his combination of the care of souls with political insight and vigilance for the national interests. Doubtless there were many of the sons of the prophets who with smaller abilities cultivated a religion as rational and moral. But for the herd ecstasy would be everything. It was so easily induced or imitated that much of it cannot have been genuine. Even where the feeling was at first sincere we can understand how readily it became morbid; how fatally it might fall into sympathy with that drunkenness from wine and that sexual passion which Israel saw already cultivated as worship by the surrounding Canaanites. We must feel these dangers of ecstasy if we would understand why Amos cut himself off from the Nebi’im, and why Hosea laid such emphasis on the moral and intellectual sides of religion: "My people perish for lack of knowledge." Hosea indeed considered the degeneracy of ecstasy as a judgment:
"the prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad - for the multitude of thine iniquity." {Hos_9:7} A later age derided the ecstatics, and took one of the forms of the verb "to prophesy" as equivalent to the verb "to be mad."
But temptations as gross beset the prophet from that which should have been the discipline of his ecstasy-his connection with public affairs. Only some prophets were brave rebukers of the king and the people. The herd which fed at the royal table-four hundred under Ahab-were flatterers, who could not tell the truth, who said Peace, peace, when there was no peace. These were false prophets. Yet it is curious that the very early narrative which describes them {1Ki_22:1-53} does not impute their falsehood to any base motives of their own, but to the direct inspiration of God, who sent forth a lying spirit upon them. So great was the reverence still for the "man of the spirit"! Rather than doubt his inspiration, they held his very lies to be inspired. One does not of course mean that these consenting prophets were conscious liars; but that their dependence on the king, their servile habits of speech, disabled them from seeing the truth. Subserviency to the powerful was their great temptation. In the story of Balaam we see confessed the base instinct that he who paid the prophet should have the word of the prophet in his favor. In Israel prophecy went through exactly the same struggle between the claims of its God and the claims of its patrons. Nor were those patrons always the rich. The bulk of the prophets were dependent on the charitable gifts of the common people, and in this we may find reason for that subjection of so many of them to the vulgar ideals of the national destiny, to signs of which we are pointed by Amos. The priest at Bethel only reflects public opinion when he takes for granted that the prophet is a thoroughly mercenary character: "Seer, get thee gone to the land of Judah: eat there thy bread, and play the prophet there!" {Amo_7:12} No wonder Amos separates himself from such hireling craftsmen!
Such was the course of prophecy up to Elisha, and the borders of the eighth century. We have seen how even for the ancient prophet, mere soothsayer though we might regard him in respect of the rude instruments of his office, there were present moral opportunities of the highest kind, from which, if he only proved true to them, we cannot conceive the Spirit of God to have been absent. In early Israel we are sure that the Spirit did meet such strong and pure characters, from Moses to Samuel, creating by their means the nation of Israel, welding it to, a unity, which was not only political but moral-and moral to a degree not elsewhere realized in the Semitic world. We saw how a new race of prophets arose under Samuel, separate from the older forms of prophecy by lot and oracle, separate, too, from the ritual as a whole; and therefore free for a moral and spiritual advance of which the priesthood, still bound to images and the ancient rites, proved themselves incapable. But this new order of prophecy, besides its moral opportunities, had also its moral perils: its ecstasy was dangerous, its connection with public affairs was dangerous too. Again, the test was the personal character of the prophet himself. And so once more we see raised above the herd great personalities, who carry forward the work of their predecessors. The results are, besides the discipline of the monarchy and the defense of justice and the poor, the firm establishment of Jehovah as the one and only God of Israel, and the impression on Israel both of His omnipotent guidance of them in the past and of a worldwide destiny, still vague but brilliant, which He had prepared for them in the future.
This brings us to Elisha, and from Elisha there are but forty years to Amos. During those forty years, however, there arose within Israel a new civilization; beyond her there opened up a new world; and with Assyria there entered the resources of Providence, a new power. It was these three facts-the New Civilization, the New World, and the New Power-which made the difference between Elisha and Amos, and raised prophecy from a national to a universal religion.
THE long life of Elisha fell to its rest on the margin of the eighth century. He had seen much evil upon Israel. The people were smitten in all their coasts. None of their territory across Jordan was left to them; and not only Hazael and his Syrians, but bands of their own former subjects, the Moabites, periodically raided Western Palestine, up to the very gates of Samaria. {2Ki_10:32; 2Ki_13:20; 2Ki_13:22} Such a state of affairs determined the activity of the last of the older prophets. Elisha spent his life in the duties of the national defense, and in keeping alive the spirit of Israel against her foes. When he died they called him "Israel’s chariot and the horsemen thereof," {2Ki_13:14} so incessant had been both his military vigilance (2Ki_6:12 ff., etc.), and his political insight (2Ki_8:1-29, etc.). But Elisha was able to leave behind him the promise of a new day of victory (2Ki_13:17 ff.). It was in the peace and liberty of this day that Israel rose a step in civilization; that prophecy, released from the defense, became the criticism, of the national life; and that the people, no longer absorbed in their own borders, looked out, and for the first time realized the great world, of which they were only a part.
King Joash, whose arms the dying Elisha had blessed, won back in the sixteen years of his reign (798-783) the cities which the Syrians had taken from his father. {2Ki_13:23-25} His successor, Jeroboam II, came in, therefore, with a flowing tide. He was a strong man, and he took advantage of it. During his long reign of about forty years (783-743) he restored the border of Israel from the Pass of Hamath between the Lebanons to the Dead Sea, and occupied at least part of the territory of Damascus. This means that the constant raids to which Israel had been subjected now ceased, and that by the time of Amos, about 755, a generation was grown up who had not known defeat, and the most of whom had perhaps no experience even of war.
Along the same length of years Uzziah (circa 778-740) had dealt similarly with Judah. {2Ki_15:1-38; cf. 2Ch_26:1-23} He had pushed south to the Red Sea, while Jeroboam pushed north to Hamath: and while Jeroboam had taken the Syrian towns he had crushed the Philistine. He had reorganized the army, and invented new engines of siege for casting stones.
On such of his frontiers as were opposed to the desert he had built towers: there is no better means of keeping the nomads in subjection.
All this meant such security across broad Israel as had not been known since the glorious days of Solomon. Agriculture must everywhere have revived: Uzziah, the Chronicler tells us, "loved husbandry." But we hear most of Trade and Building. With quarters in Damascus and a port on the Red Sea, with allies in the Phoenician towns and tributaries in the Philistine, with command of all the main routes between Egypt and the North as between the Desert and the Levant, Israel, during those forty years of Jeroboam and Uzziah, must have become a busy and a wealthy commercial power. Hosea calls the Northern Kingdom a very Canaan-Canaanite being the Hebrew term for trader-as we should say a very Jew; and Amos exposes all the restlessness, the greed, and the indifference to the poor of a community making haste to be rich. The first effect of this was a large increase of the towns and of town-life. Every document of the time-up to 720-speaks to us of its buildings. In ordinary building houses of ashlar seem to be novel enough to be mentioned. Vast palaces- the name of them first heard of in Israel under Omri and his Phoenician alliance, and then only as that of the king’s citadel-are now built by wealthy grandees out of money extorted from the poor; they can have risen only since the Syrian wars. There are summer houses in addition to winter houses; and it is not only the king, as in the days of Ahab, who furnishes his buildings with ivory. When an earthquake comes and whole cities are overthrown, the vigor and wealth of the people are such that they build more strongly and lavishly than before. {Isa_9:10} With all this we have the characteristic tempers and moods of city-life: the fickleness and liability to panic which are possible only where men are gathered in crowds; the luxury and false art which are engendered only by artificial conditions of life; the deep poverty which in all cities, from the beginning to the end of time, lurks by the side of the most brilliant wealth, its dark and inevitable shadow.
In short, in the half-century between Elisha and Amos, Israel rose from one to another of the great stages of culture. Till the eighth century they had been but a kingdom of fighting husbandmen. Under Jeroboam and Uzziah city-life was developed, and civilization, in the proper sense of the word, appeared. Only once before had Israel taken so large a step: when they crossed Jordan, leaving the nomadic life for the agricultural; and that had been momentous for their religion. They came among new temptations: the use of wine, and the shrines of local gods who were believed to have more influence on the fertility of the land than Jehovah who had conquered it for His people. But now this further step, from the agricultural stage to the mercantile and civil, was equally fraught with danger. There was the closer intercourse with foreign nations and their cults. There were all the temptations of rapid wealth, all the dangers of an equally increasing poverty. The growth of comfort among the rulers meant the growth of thoughtlessness. Cruelty multiplied with refinement. The upper classes were lifted away from feeling the real woes of the people. There was a well-fed and sanguine patriotism, but at the expense of indifference to. social sin and want. Religious zeal and liberality increased, but they were coupled with all the proud’s misunderstanding of God: an optimist faith without moral insight or sympathy.
It is all this which makes the prophets of the eighth century so modern, while Elisha’s life is still so ancient. With him we are back in the times of our own border wars-of Wallace and Bruce, with their struggles for the freedom of the soil. With Amos we stand among the conditions of our own day. The City has arisen. For the development of the highest form of prophecy, the universal and permanent form, there was needed that marvelously unchanging mold of human life, whose needs and sorrows, whose sins and problems, are today the same as they were all those thousands of years ago.
With Civilization came Literature. The long peace gave leisure for writing; and the just pride of the people in boundaries broad as Solomon’s own, determined that this writing should take the form of heroic history. In the parallel reigns of Jeroboam and Uzziah many critics have placed the great epics of Israel: the earlier documents of our Pentateuch which trace God’s purposes to mankind by Israel, from the creation of the world to the settlement of the Promised Land; the histories which make up our Books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings. But whether all these were composed now or at an earlier date, it is certain that the nation lived in the spirit of them, proud of its past, aware of its vocation, and confident that its God, who had created the world and so mightily led itself, would bring it from victory by victory to a complete triumph over the heathen. Israel of the eighth century were devoted to Jehovah: and although passion or self-interest might lead individuals or even communities to worship other gods, He had no possible rival upon the throne of the nation.
As they delighted to recount His deeds by their fathers, so they thronged the scenes of these with sacrifice and festival. Bethel and Beersheba, Dan and Gilgal, were the principal; but Mizpeh, the top of Tabor, {Hos_5:1} and Carmel, {1Ki_18:30} perhaps Penuel, {1Ki_12:25} were also conspicuous among the countless "high places" of the land. Of those in Northern Israel Bethel was the chief. It enjoyed the proper site for an ancient shrine, which was nearly always a market as well-near a frontier and where many roads converged; where traders from the East could meet halfway with traders from the West, the wool-growers of Moab and the Judaean desert with the merchants of Phoenicia and the Philistine coast. Here, on the spot on which the father of the nation had seen heaven open, a great temple was now built, with a priesthood endowed and directed by the crown, {1Ki_12:25; Amo_7:1-17} but lavishly supported also by the tithes and free-will offerings of the people. {Amo_4:4} "It is a sanctuary of the king and a house of the kingdom." {Amo_7:13} Jeroboam had ordained Dan, at the other end of the kingdom, to be the fellow of Bethel; {1Ki_12:25} but Dan was far away from the bulk of the people, and in the eighth century Bethel’s real rival was Gilgal. Whether this was the Gilgal by Jericho, or the other Gilgal on the Samarian hills near Shiloh, is uncertain. The latter had been a sanctuary in Elijah’s day, with a settlement of the prophets; but the former must have proved the greater attraction to a people so devoted to the sacred events of their past. Was it not the first resting-place of the Ark after the passage of Jordan, the scene of the reinstitution of circumcision, of the anointing of the first king, of Judah’s second submission to David? As there were many Gilgals in the land-literally "crom-lechs," ancient "stone-circles" sacred to the Canaanites as well as to Israel-so there were many Mizpehs, "Watch-towers," "Seers’ stations": the one mentioned by Hosea was probably in Gilead. To the southern Beersheba, to which Elijah had fled from Jezebel, pilgrimages were made by northern Israelites traversing Judah. The sanctuary on Carmel was the ancient altar of Jehovah which Elijah had rebuilt; but Carmel seems at this time to have lain, as it did so often, in the power of the Phoenicians, for it is imagined by the prophets only as a hiding-place from the face of Jehovah. {Amo_9:13}
At all these sanctuaries it was Jehovah and no other who was sought: "thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." {1Ki_12:28} At Bethel and at Dan He was adored in the form of a calf; probably at Gilgal also, for there is a strong tradition to that effect; and elsewhere men still consulted the other images which had been used by Saul and by David, the Ephod and the Teraphim. With these there was the old Semitic symbol of the Maccebah, or upright stone on which oil was poured. All of them had been used in the worship of Jehovah by the great examples and leaders of the past; all of them had been spared by Elijah and Etisha: it was no wonder that the common people of the eighth century felt them to be indispensable elements of religion, the removal of which, like the removal of the monarchy or of sacrifice itself, would mean utter divorce from the nation’s God.
One great exception must be made. Compared with the sanctuaries we have mentioned, Zion itself was very modern. But it contained the main repository of Israel’s religion, the Ark, and in connection with the Ark the worship of Jehovah was not a worship of images. It is significant that from this, the original sanctuary of Israel, with the pure worship, the new prophecy derived its first inspiration. But to that we shall return later with Amos. Apart from the Ark, Jerusalem was not free from images, nor even from the altars of foreign deities.
Where the externals of the ritual were thus so much the same as those of the Canaanite cults, which were still practiced in and around the land, it is not surprising that the worship of Jehovah should be further invaded by many pagan practices, nor that Jehovah Himself should be regarded with imaginations steeped in pagan ideas of the Godhead. That even the foulest tempers of the Canaanite ritual, those inspired by wine and the sexual passion, were licensed in the sanctuaries of Is