^«Y OF pmsc^ I., i «> u ( i. THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL BY THE SAME AUTHOR. The Rise of the People of Israel. A brief, popular essay in Epitomes of Three Sciences, also con- taining Prof. H. Oldenberg's * ' Study of Sanskrit " and Prof. J. Jastrow's "Aspects of Modern Psychology." Pages, 140. Cloth, 50 cents. This volume will be sent to purchasers of the "Prophets," if ordered di- rect from the publishers, for 25 cents. THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. 324 dearborn ST., CHICAGO. jp^£ L "5 9 1922 PROPHETS OF ISRAEL POPULAR SKETCHES FROM OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY BY y CARL HEINRICH CORNILL DOCTOR OF THEOLOGY AND PROFESSOR OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KÖNIGSBERG TRANSLATED BY SUTTON F. CORKRAN SECOND EDITION CHICAGO THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY (LONDON: 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET ST., E. C.) 1897 Copyright by The Open Court Publishing Co. Chicago, III., 1895, AUTHOR'S PREFACE. NO BRANCH of science, in the last generation, has undergone such a profound revolution as that of Old Testament research. In place of the traditional representation of the rehgious history of Israel has been substituted a rigorous historical mode of view, which discovers in the process in question an organic development, and assigns to each event its logical po- sition in the whole, by reference to which all the facts are severally comprehended and explained. At first, even professional scholars received this organic view of the Old Testament with repugnance and distrust ; for it was no light task to abandon a position that for two thousand years had been regarded as the absolute truth. But by that power of conviction which always inheres in what is intrinsically correct, it gradually in- creased its dominance over men's minds, and has, par- ticularly since the brilliant and fascinating exposition of Wellhausen's History of Israel of the year 1878, been borne onwards in an irresistible and uninterrupted career of triumph. For no part of the Old Testament hterature has this change of view been more significant and momen- tous than for the prophets, whose real significance vi THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. could only now be understood and properly valued. Whilst according to the traditional view the prophets merely deepened and broadened in single points the religion of Moses, which he was supposed to have promulgated as a complete and finished system, it now appeared that the prophets had completely revolution- ised the religion of Israel, that it was wholly through them that the national religion founded by Moses be- came a religion of the world, and that it was they who prepared and fitted the religion of Israel to become the parent of Christianity. Truths of such importance, and so recently ac- quired, concerning things which affect every man's dearest interests, should not be restricted to a small band of scholars, as if constituting an esoteric doc- trine ; but every educated man and woman has a right to hear and to know about them. This is the purpose which this little book is designed to serve. It presup- poses no special knowledge, but seeks simply to give a popular presentation of its subject-matter. It ex- plains first the nature and import of Israelitic prophecy: indicating what in Israel's own view a prophet was ; how prophecy is to be explained, and what position it occupies in the history of the rehgion of Israel ; what its presuppositions are, and in what manner, thus, it sheds light on the period preceding it. To this is added an attempt at a historical valuation of Elijah, who occupies in so far a place apart as we possess nothing written from him. Next, the productions of the prophetic Hterature of Israel which have been pre- served are examined in the chronological order estab- lished by Old Testament inquiry as the result of pro- found and laborious research. The historical conditions and the contemporary environment of the various PREFACE. vii prophets are portrayed, their significance, their pe- cuhar original achievements briefly characterised, and finally the attempt made to assign and establish for each prophet in the developmental process of the reli- gion of Israel his logical and organic position — in what respect his influence was promotive, and in what re- spect reactionary; so that the little book may be viewed as a brief sketch, giving only the salient and important outlines, of the religious history of Israel from Moses down to the time of the Maccabees. The book grew out of a course of lectures which I was invited to deliver at the Freie Deutsche Hochstift in my native city of Frankfort-on-the-Main, at the re- quest of its indefatigable director, Prof. V. Valentin. I accepted this invitation with pleasure and gratefully seized the opportunity of presenting to cultured lay- men some portrayal of this grandest event in the his- tory of religion before Christ. The idea of making a book out of my unpretentious sketch, (it does not claim to be more, and the professional scholar will recog- nise in it at once Wellhausen, Kuenen, Duhm, Stade, Smend, and others,) never occurred to me, and I was at first firm in my refusal to publish it. But the so- licitations became finally so pressing and kind that I found it impossible not to accede to them, and over- came my hesitation. It is my hope that the printed book will have as good results as the spoken word, and accomplish its purpose of affording to persons who are deprived of access to the latest works of Old Tes- tament science, some insight into its results and into the spirit and purpose of its inquiries. In the passages which I have literally cited from the prophetic books I have, of course, complied with the requirements of textual criticism, and I hope that my readers will not vüi THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. take it amiss if they are frequently found to depart from the traditional text.^ May, then, my unassuming pages contribute their mite towards promoting the general understanding of Israelitic prophecy, and winning for it that love and admiration which cannot fail to follow on its being understood. C. H. CORNILL. Königsberg, February, 1894. lln the English translation of the Bible passages the Old or the Revised Version has been used except where the text demanded the rendering of Pro- fessor Cornill.— 7Va«j. PUBLISHERS' PREFACE. " Search the Scriptures." — SL John, V., 3g, THE Bible is unqualifiedly that collection of books in the literature of mankind which has exercised the most potent influence over the civilisation of the world. Yet it is little read, and where it is read it is much misunderstood. The pious exalt it as the word of God, and believe in its very letter, as best they can ; while infidels point out its incongruities and pillory its monstrosities. Need we add that only the mistaken pretensions of the former justify the caustic sarcasm of the latter? If we read the Bible, not with an open mind, but devoutly, with a complete submission of judgment, we are as apt to distort its meaning, and render our- selves unfit to comprehend its purport, as is the icon- oclast, who goes over its pages with no other intention than to seek out absurdities. There is, however, another attitude which we can take towards the Bible. It is that of a reader impar- tial in investigation and eager to learn. He who studies the Bible, not as a partisan, but as a scholar, in the same spirit that the historian studies Greek and Roman literature, finds the Biblical books 3t THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL, invaluable, for they are the precious documents of the religious evolution of mankind. Such men as Goethe, Humboldt, and Huxley, the great pagans of modern times, had only words of praise for the Bible ; they found in it an inexhaustible source of wisdom and poetry. The work of earnest study, comparison, and inves- tigation has been undertaken by a number of intrepid scholars, who have devoted their lives to the interpre- tation of the Scriptures. The foundation w^as laid by what is commonly called ''text-critique," or **the Lower Criticism,'' which implies a collation of the va- rious manuscripts, a restoration of doubtful readings, and the determination of exact definitions of words or phrases. This done, ''the Higher Criticism" can at- tack the more important problems of the origin of a book, its place in history, its significance, and the pur- pose which the author had in view in writing it. It is a matter of course that the methods of the Higher Criticism alone enable us to understand and appreciate the Bible. Nevertheless earnest believers are full of anxiety on account of the negative results of scientific Bible-research, which, in their opinion, threat- ens to destroy Christianity, and appears to leave noth- ing tangible to believe in or to hope for. The Higher Criticism appears alarming to the old orthodoxy, for nothing seems left which can be relied upon. Orthodoxy means "right doctrine," and it is but natural to think that if the old conception of orthodoxy has become untenable, scepticism will prevail, and that we must be satisfied with the resigned position of agnosticism, proclaiming that nothing can be known for certain. But because the old conception of ortho- doxy fails, there is no reason to say that orthodoxy PREFACE. xi itself, in the original and proper sense of the term, is a vain hope. Bear in mind that the endeavor to estab- lish an unquestionable orthodoxy on the solid founda- tion of evidence is founded in the very nature of science. The negations of the Biblical criticism are only a preliminary work, which prepares the way for positive issues. Scepticism may be a phase through which we have to pass, but it is not the end. The final result will be the recognition of a new and a higher ortho- doxy — the orthodoxy of provable truth, which discards the belief in the letter, but preserves the spirit, and stands in every respect as high above the old ortho- doxy as astronomy ranks above astrology. Prof. Carl Heinrich Cornill is an orthodox Chris- tian. He holds the chair of Old Testament history in the venerable University of Königsberg. But, being a Christian and at the same time a scientific man, he has devoted his life to the investigation of the religious evolution of the Israelitic and Christian faiths. Thus he serves both Christ and Science. Is not this position inconsistent? Does it not in- volve that a critic serves two masters? Let us see. What shall a Christian scholar do if the injunc- tions of Christ come into conflict with science? First he may doubt the exactness of the scientific argument, and keep his judgment suspended until better evidence is forthcoming. But suppose the evidence comes and the conflict still remains? Exactly in anticipation of such possibilities the opinion is often set up that it is wrong for a Christian to subject the documents of his faith to a scientific critique, and he is requested to ac- cept them blindly without inquiry. We venture to differ, and would say, as it is a man's duty to investigate nature and to invent machinery for xii THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. the sake of his bodily prosperity, so it is the more his duty to inquire into the central problem of life, which is religion, so that he may the better learn to take care of his soul. Investigation is a religious duty. In this sense Christ says : *' Search the Scriptures ; for in them ye think ye have eternal life; and they are they which testify of me." Christ himself requests us to search, and should the results of our search really come into conflict with Christ's injunctions, must we not assume that there is something wrong either in our science or in our concep- tion of Christ? Instead of giving up all investigation for this reason, we must, on the contrary, continue to search until we find both Christ and Science in perfect agreement. But there is danger in superficiality ! Some take a few apparently obvious but one-sided observations as the final verdict of science, while others worship a Christ who is merely a pagan idol that has received a Christian finish. Science is often regarded as a human invention in which sense it is considered as profane and contrasted to the truth of God. But is Science really a human invention? Can man fashion Science as he pleases? Is it an expression of his subjectivism? Can its propo- sitions be suited to our likes and dislikes? Certainly not ! On the contrary. Science is a revelation of truth, and its nature is stern and unalterable objectivity. Science is superhuman, and scientific truth partakes of that eternity which is predicated of God ; for, in- deed the truth is of God. If Science is truly Science, it is God's revelation, and he who is afraid of a conflict between Religion and Science, must be on his guard lest his Religion, though dear to him, be a mere su- PREFACE. xiii perstition. A Religion that comes into conflict with Science is doomed, be it ever so pleasing to the human heart. Religion must always remain in accord with Science, for Science is not profane ; Science is holy. If God ever spoke to man, Science is the fiery bush. Science is a religious revelation. Professor Cornill, in speaking of the scientist's free- dom of investigation, says : *'Am I not speaking in behalf of the most bound- less and devotionless subjectivism? Indeed not. I demand complete freedom only for scientific criticism, and that carries within itself its own corrective. Sci- ence is a sovereign power, which proceeds in accord- ance with rules of its own, yet is unconditionally bound to law : without law, without discipliiie, no true science is conceivable. But to that which has been acquired through strict and methodical scientific research, we are bound to bow unconditionally, be it welcome to us or not ; confidently trusting that, like every good gift, so also science is not a work of the Devil, but comes from God." We seek for catholicity in Religion, and lo, v/e have it in Science, for we may define Science as that upon which all those who thoroughly understand a problem must finally agree. Science digs down to the bed-rock of truth and if anything can reveal to us the bed-rock of ages upon which our religious faith rests, it is Sci- ence. We do not mean to say that Science is sufficient, but we do say that Science is indispensable. Mere intellectual comprehension, it is true, has no saving power ; it is without avail if the emotional side of man's soul remains neglected, for the heart is after all the mainspring of our actions. But the heart, if xiv THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. not illumined by the head, is like a man groping in the dark. Disregard of Science leads men astray, and we do not hesitate to brand a contempt of Science as a religious fault, as a sin. It is not based upon strength of faith, but indicates a lack of Faith, and, indeed, it is the expression of the highest impertinence and arro- gance a man is capable of, that of raising his opinion, his private belief of what the Truth ought to be, against actual Truth, the Truth as it is revealed to the world. Genuine Religion will always encourage Science. We must investigate and acquire knowledge, we must exercise critique, and we must respect the authority of scientific demonstration. But our knowledge must become conviction, and conviction, if it becomes the motive power of a moral life, is called Faith. There is no merit in belief. A blind acceptance of religious traditions is not recommendable ; but Faith, that is, a living conviction well founded upon a basis which we know to be the Truth, is the ultimate aim of Religion. Paul Carus, Manager of The Open Court Publishing Co. P. S. — As it was impossible to send proofs of this book to Mr. Sutton F. Corkran, who lives in Europe, Mr. Thomas J. McCormack has carefully revised the translation and collated the manuscript with the ori- ginal, and he is responsible for its final form. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE The Meaning of Prophecy . . . . . . . i The Religion of Moses ....... i6 The Early Prophets. — Elijah. — Elisha . . . .27 Amos 37 Hosea . 47 Isaiah. — Micah ........ 57 The Reaction Against the Prophets. — Micah (Chaps. 6-7). — Zephaniah. — Nahum. — Habakkuk . . . .71 Deuteronomy . . ...... 80 Jeremiah .......... 91 The Babylonian Exile 108 Ezekiel 115 The Literary Achievements of the Exile . . . . 125 Deutero-Isaiah .131 The Return from the Captivity. — Haggai. — Zechariah . 145 Ezra and Nehemiah. — Malachi 155 The Later Prophets. — Joel. — Obadiah. — Isaiah (Chaps. 24- 27). — Zechariah (Chaps. 9-14) 164 Jonah and Daniel.— The Maccabees. — Conclusion . , 170 THE MEANING OF PROPHECY. THERE is none of us but knows of the existence of the prophets of the Old Testament, having learnt in the Sabbath-school the outlandish names of those sixteen men, and on account of their very un- wontedness perhaps retained them in the memory. Possibly, also, some one or other of the so-called apophthegms from their writings have remained famil- iar to us. But here our acquaintance ceases. Who those men were, what they aspired for and did, what they were for their time, and what they still are for us, the average educated person of to-day may have some dim inkling, but in no wise a correct or clear idea. Nor is this to be wondered at. Neither can any one be blamed for it. If, in general, the books of the Old Testament are not easily understood by the laity, this is especially true as regards the prophetic books. They are in the veriest sense ' ' books with seven seals. " Does not Isaiah himself in a very remarkable passage com- pare prophecy to a sealed book, of which the mere perusal does not suffice. Not that the prophets wrote 2 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. in an especially obscure or abstruse style. The diffi- culty of understanding them is not of the kind that confronts us when reading Dante's Divina Comedia, or the second part of Faust, though such instances do oc- cur in the prophetic literature, as, for example, in the visions of the book of Zechariah. No, the interpreta- tion of the mere words of the prophetic writings is mostly simple ; but in perusing them the reader has a two-fold sensation : either what is said appears to him as self-evident, as being nothing wonderful or impor- tant, or it is quite unintelligible to him, because he does not know what the prophet is striving after, what he alludes to, nor what are the circumstances and sit- uations he may be considering. Both these impres- sions are justified and well-founded. The Israelitish prophecy is a distinctly historical event, and for understanding it a thorough and precise knowledge of the religious and profane history of the Jews is absolutely necessary : a thorough and precise knowledge of the religious history, so as to enable us to judge what that which appears to us self-evident meant in the mouth and at the time of the man who first spoke it ; and a precise and thorough knowledge of the profane history of the Israelites, so as to under- stand the relations under which and in which the prophets acted, and towards which their efforts were directed. It is no easy matter to obtain such a thor- ough and complete command of the religious and sec- ular history of the Israelites. This goal is to be reached THE MEANING OF PROPHECY. 3 only by much labor and on circuitous paths, for the Is- raelitish narrative, as it lies before us in the books of the Old Testament, gives a thoroughly one-sided and in many respects incorrect picture of the profane his- tory, and on the other hand an absolutely false repre- sentation of the religious history of the people, and has thus made the discovery of the truth v^ell-nigh im- possible. At the time when the historical books of the Old Testament were put into the final form in which they now lie before us, during and after the Babylonian exile, the past was no longer understood. Men were ashamed of it. They could not understand that in the days of old all had been so completely different, and therefore did all in their power to erase and blot out in their accounts of the past whatever at this later date might be a cause of offence. In the same manner the Arabs, after their conver- sion to Islam, purposely obliterated all traces of the era of ''folly," as they term the pre-Islamitic period of their existence, so that it gives one the greatest difficulty to get in any wise a clear picture of the early Arabic paganism. The history of the German nation has also an analogous spectacle to show in the blind and ill-advised zeal of the Christian converts who sys- tematically destroyed the old pagan literature, which a man like Charles the Great had gathered together with such love and appreciation. This, luckily, the men to whom we owe the compilation and final redac- 4 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. tion of the ancient Israelitish literature did not do ; they were satisfied with emendations and corrections, and left enough standing to afford, at least to the trained eye of the modern critic, a sufficient ground- work for unravelling the truth. The newest phase of Old Testament investigation has succeeded in raising this veil, now more than two thousand years old, and through an act similar to that of Copernicus, by which, so to speak, the narrative was turned upside down, has brought out the real historical truth. I can assert without any personal presumption, as I am only a worker and not a discoverer in this par- ticular field, that a thorough comprehension of the Is- raelitish prophecy has only been possible within the last twenty-five years, as it is only since this date that the true course and the real development of the Is- raelitish religious history has been ascertained, and because also the discovery and deciphering of the cune- iform inscriptions have given us a more thorough un- derstanding of the secular history of ancient Israel. I may hope, therefore, in the remarks which are to follow and to which I now ask your attention, to be able to offer something new to such of my hearers as have not followed the latest developments of Old Tes- tament research. But before we enter upon our study of the Israe- litish prophecy, we must first answer the question, */ the innermost and purest feeling of his heart have been only self-deception? At one time she loved him. And Hosea feels himself responsible for her who was his wife. Was it not possible to wake the better self of the woman again ? When the smothering ashes had been cleared away, could not the spark, which he can- not consider to have died out, spring up into a bright and pure flame? That was possible only through self- denying and tender-hearted love. Such love could not fail, in the end, to evoke a genuine response. He must try again this faithless woman, must have her near him. He takes her back into his house. He cannot reinstate her at once into the position and rights of a wife ; she must first pass through a severe and hard period of probation ; but if she goes through this probation, if she yields to the severe yet mild dis- cipline of the husband who still loves her, then he will wed her afresh in love and trust, and nothing again shall rend asunder this new covenant. Hosea recognises in this relation of his wife an image of the relation of God to Israel. God has chosen the poor, despised Israelites, the slaves of the Egyp- tians, to be His people ; has allied Himself with them in love and faith, showered His blessings upon the na- tion, miraculously guided it, and finally made it great and mighty. And all these mercies are requited by Israel with the blackest ingratitude ; its service of God is, in the eyes of the prophet, a worship of Baal, a mockery of the holy God, whom it knows not, and of 50 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. whom it does not want to know ; and therefore He must give it over to perdition. But for God this judgment is no personal object. He wishes thereby to lead these foolish and blinded hearts to reflexion and to self-knowl- edge. When they learn to pray in distress, when they humbly turn again to God with the open confession of their sins, then will He turn to them again, then will He accept into grace those fallen away, then will they be His people, who are now not His people, and He will be their God. Right and justice, grace and pity, love and faith, will He bring to them as the blessings and gifts of the new covenant, and they will acknowl- edge Him and become His willing and obedient chil- dren. He will be to Israel as the dew, and Israel shall grow as the lily and blossom out as the olive-tree, and stand there in the glory and scent of Lebanon. God is love. Hosea recognised this, because he bore love in his heart, because it was alive in him ; love which is long-suffering and kind, which seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, the love which never faileth. When we consider that all this was absolutely new, that those thoughts in which humanity has been educated and which have consoled it for nearly three thousand years, were first spoken by Hosea, we must reckon him among the greatest religious geniuses which the world has ever produced. Among the prophets of Israel, Jeremiah alone can bear comparison with him, and HOSEA. 51 even here we feel inclined to value Hosea higher, as the forerunner and pioneer. Why is it that Hosea is so often misconceived in this, his great importance? He has not rendered it easy for us to do him justice, for his book is unusually obscure and difficult. It is in a way more than any other book individual and subjective. What Hosea gives us are really monologues, the ebullitions of a deeply moved heart, torn by grief, in all its varying moods and sentiments. Like the fantasies of one delirious, the images and thoughts push and pursue one another. But it is exactly this subjectivity and this individual- ity which gives to the Book of Hosea its special charm and irresistible efficacy. He is the master of heart-born chords, which for power and fervor are possessed by no other prophet. Let me quote, in Hosea's own words, an especially characteristic passage, a master- piece of his book. *' When Israel was a child, I loved him and called - him as my son out of Egypt. But the more I called " the more they went from me ; they sacrificed unto ~ Baalim and burned incense to graven images. I taught " Ephraim also to walk, taking him in my arms. But- they knew not that I meant good with them. I drew, them with cords of a man, with bands of love ; and I was to them as they that take off the yoke on their jaws, and I laid meat unto them. Yet they will return into the land of Egypt, and Asshur be their king. Of me they will know nothing. So shall the sword abide 52 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. in their cities, destroy their towers, and devour their strongholds. My people are bent to backsliding from me ; when called on from on high, none looketh up- wards. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? How shall I deliver thee, Israel? Shall I make thee as Ad- mah? Shall I set thee as Zeboim ? My heart is turned within me, my compassion is cramped together. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger. I will not return to destroy thee Ephraim, for I am God and not man ; the Holy One in the midst of thee. I cannot ^come to destroy." Thus is love, grace, mercy, ever the last word : for - God is love. Thus religion becomes an act of love. God calls for love, not sacrifice, knowledge of God, not burnt offerings ; and acquires thus a power of in- timacy that till then was unknown. That dear, com- forting phrase, ''the Lord thy God," which places every individual man in a personal relation of love with God, was coined by Hosea, and is first found in -^ his book Even the requirement of being born again, - of having to become completely new, in order to be ^ really a child of God, can be found in Hosea. He is the first who demands that God shall not be worshipped by images, and pours out his bitterest scorn on the '' calves " of Dan and Bethel, as he dares to name the old, venerated bull-symbols. In fact, he demands a rigorous separation of the worship of God from the worship of nature. Everything that is contradictory to the real holy and spiritual nature of God is paganism HOSEA. 53 and must be done away with, were it ten times a ven- erable and traditional custom. That this man, so apparently a man of emotion, governed entirely by his moods, and driven helplessly hither and thither by them, should have possessed a formal theological system, which has exercised an im- measurable influence on future generations, is a phe- nomenon of no slight significance. To prove this state- ment would require too much time and the discussion of details. But it is not too much to say that the en- tire faith and theology of later Israel grew out of Hosea, that all its characteristic views and ideas are to be first found in his book. Hosea was a native of the northern part of the na- tion, its last and noblest offshoot. He wrote his book between 738 and 735 B. C, about twenty-five years after the appearance of Amos. We already know from the short accounts in the Book of Kings that this was a period of anarchy and dissolution \ Hosea's book transplants us to this time, and allows us to see in the mirror of the prophet's woe-torn heart the whole life of this period. It is a horrible panorama that unfolds itself before our eyes. One king murders the other ; God gives him in his wrath and takes him away in his displeas- ure ; for none can help, but all are torn away and driven about by the whirlpool of events, as a log upon the waters. So hopeless are matters that the prophet can pray, God should give to Ephraim a miscarrying 54 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. womb and dry breasts, so that fresh offerings of calam- ity and misery should not be born. In such a state of affairs the thought strikes the prophet, that the whole state and political life is an evil, an opposition to God, a rebellion against Him who is the only Lord and King of Israel, and who will have men entirely for himself. In the hoped-for future time of bliss, when all things are such as God wishes them, there will be no king and no princes, no politics, no alliances, no horses and chariots, no war and no victory. What is usually known as the theocracy of the Old Testament, was created by Hosea, as the direct outcome of those dis- tressful days. As a man of sorrows, he was naturally not spared a personal martyrdom. He fulfils his mission in the midst of ridicule and contumely, amidst enmity and danger to his life. He occasionally gives us a sketch of this in his book : '' The days of visitation are come, the days of recompense are come : Israel shall know it!" And the people shout back mockingly : <'The prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad." Hosea takes up their words and answers : ''Verily I am mad, but on account of the multitude of thine iniquity and the multitude of the persecution." ''The snares of the fowler threaten destruction to the prophet in all his ways ; even in the house of his God have they dug a deep pit for him." We know not if Hosea survived the overthrow of Israel. His grave, still regarded as a sanctuary, is HOSEA. 55 shown in Eastern Jordan, on the top of Mount Hosea, Dschebel Oscha, about three miles north of es-Salt, from where we can obtain one of the most beautiful views of Palestine. ISAIAH. TN THE year 722 B. C. Israel disappears, and Judah -■- succeeds as its heir. From the time of Hosea prophecy has its existence wholly on the soil of Judah. At the head of these Judaic prophets stands Isaiah, who began his work shortly after the completion of the Book of Hosea. He is distinguished from both his predecessors by his personality and whole style of ac- tion. Whilst Amos only rages and punishes, Hosea only weeps and hopes, Isaiah is a thoroughly practical and positive character, who feels the necessity of in- fluencing personally the destinies of his people. Evi- dently belonging to the highest classes — Jewish tradi- tion makes him a priest of the King's house — he pos- sessed and made use of his power and influence. Seated at the tiller, he guides by the divine compass the little ship of his fatherland through the rocks and breakers of a wild and stormy period. It was the most critical period of the whole history of Judah. The question was. To be or not to be? If Judah weathered this crisis and held out for over a century, it is essentially due to the endeavors of the ISAIAH. 57 prophet Isaiah who knew how to make clear to his contemporaries the wondrous plan of God. In Isaiah we find for the first time a clearly grasped concep- tion of universal history. Nothing takes place on earth but it is directed by a supramundane holy will, and has as its ulterior object the honor of God. God is all, man is nothing — thus perhaps the theology of Isaiah could be most tersely and clearly stated. God is supramundane, the all-powerful, who fills heaven and earth, the Holy One of Israel, as Isaiah loves to call Him, who proves His sanctity by His justice. Man is in His hand as clay in the hand of the potter. Even the powerful Assyrians are but the rod of His wrath, whom He at once destroys on their presuming to become more than a mere tool in the hands of God. Pride, therefore, is the special sin of man, as where he arrogates to himself the honor and glory which belong to God alone. In one of his earliest prophecies Isaiah bursts forth like a thunderstorm over everything great and lofty that men possess and men produce. All this will be mercilessly levelled to the ground — "the lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, and the Lord alone shall be ex- alted in that day.'* On the other hand, the true virtue of man is loyal confidence in God and submission to his will. **In quietness and rest shall ye be saved; in submission and confidence shall be your strength," so does he preach to his people. 58 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. This guidance of the history of the world by a supra- mundane holy will, as the fulfilment of its own honor, is what Isaiah repeatedly terms ''the work of God." It is true, this work is singular, this plan is wondrous, but man must accept it and submit to it. Their blind- ness to it, their wilfully closing their eyes against it, is the severest reproof which the prophet brings against his people. But let us follow up his work in its single stages and see if we can understand it. At the opening of Isaiah's theology we find the thought, ''A remnant shall return." Thus had he named his eldest son, just as Hosea had given signifi- cant names to his children, and made them in a cer- tain sense living witnesses of his prophetic preaching. Like Amos, Isaiah considers the judgment as unavoid- able, but like Hosea he sees in the judgment not the end but the beginning of the true salvation. Yet in the manner in which he thinks out the realisation of this salvation, Isaiah goes his own way. He cannot think of his people as only a rabble of godless evil-doers ; there must be some among them susceptible of good, and whom one can imagine as worthy of becoming cit- izens of the future kingdom of God, and those are the ''remnant." This remnant is the " holy seed " from which the future Israel shall burst forth under God's care. Thus Isaiah sees the object of the judgment to be, the rooting out of the godless and the sinners, so that this noble remnant, which is left over, shall con- tinue alone in the field and develop free and unhin- tSAtAH. 59 dered. And this future kingdom of God Isaiah can only picture to himself under a mundane form. This is his principal contrast to Hosea, the opposition of the Judaean to the Israelite. In Judah, where the supremacy of the House of David had never been seriously opposed, a benign stability had prevailed in all affairs and a doctrine of legitimacy had been established, owing to a lack of which Israel was incessantly disturbed and hurried on from revolution to revolution, from anarchy to anarchy. These inestimable mundane blessings the prophet is anxious shall not be wanting in the future kingdom of God. We find in his work a very remarkable passage in which he places a religious valuation on patriotism, and acknowledges it to be both a gift and the working of the spirit of God for men to fight valiantly for their country and to repel the enemy from its imperilled bor- ders. The future kingdom of God shall also have its judges and officials, and above all, at its head an earthly king of the House of David. But this earthly king will rule over a kingdom of peace and justice. Then will all the harnesses of the proud warriors, and the blood- stained cloaks of the soldiers be consumed as fuel of the fire. And in their place the government will be on the shoulders of a child, who shall be called ''Won- derful Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." Of the increase of peace there will be no end, and the throne of David will be established on judgment and justice for ever and ever. 6o THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. And again most beautifully in another passage, which I cannot refrain from quoting in its own words : *'And there shall come forth a sprig out of the stem of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots ; and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord ; the delight of whose life shall be the fear of the Lord. And he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears. But with righteousness shall he judge the poor and re- prove with equity for the oppressed of the earth ; and he shall smite the tyrant with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together ; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed ; their young ones shall lie down together ; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain ; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the wa- ters cover the sea." How, now, shall this last design of the divine govern- ment of the world be fulfilled? The mission of Isaiah ISAIAH, 6i begins apparently with a shrill dissonance. As he receives the call and consecration to the office of prophet in the year of the death of Uzziah, 736 B.C., God speaks to him: *'Go and tell this people, Hear 3^e indeed but understand not ; and see ye indeed but perceive not ! Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes ; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and un- derstand with their heart, and convert, and be healed." These words sound terrible, I might almost say godless, but they contain nevertheless a deep truth. Isaiah has clearly recognised that man can and dare not be indifferent to the good. Either he bows to the good and it becomes a blessing to him, or he hardens his heart against it, and it becomes to him a double curse. The nation as a whole is neither ripe nor ready for the future kingdom of God. And since the judg- ment is the necessary transition to salvation, since the quicker the judgment comes, the quicker salvation can be effected, therefore it is to the interest both of God and Israel if the sins of the latter shall speedily reach a point where judgment must ensue. Uzziah was a vigorous ruler, whose reign of fifty- two years was a period of power and splendor for Ju- dah. This, however, was entirely changed when in the year 735 B. C. his grandson Ahaz ascended the throne. This young monarch was a perfect type of the Oriental despot, capricious, extravagant, profli- gate, cruel, acknowledging only his own will as the 62 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. highest law. In his reign just such conditions pre- vailed in the kingdom as are described in Israel b}'' Amos and Hosea. Outside troubles were soon to be added to this inner dissolution. Whilst the great As- syrian conqueror Tiglath-Pileser already hovered over their heads like a lowering thundercloud, the small kingdoms had in their confusion nothing better to do than to fall to blows with one another. Rezin of Da- mascus and Pekah of Israel took advantage of Ahaz's weak and unpopular government and allied themselves in an attack on Judah, which they drove to such sore straits that even a siege of Jerusalem seemed imminent. Ahaz helped himself out of this dilemma by taking a desperate step. He placed himself and his kingdom voluntarily under the protection of Assyria as the price of being rescued by the Assyrians from his enemies. Isaiah evidently knew of these machinations. One day as Ahaz was inspecting the works for the defence and fortification of Jerusalem, he publicly stepped in front of the king and implored him to rely on his good cause, and to have confidence in God, who would surely help him. As Ahaz hesitates, Isaiah sa37^s to him : ''Ask thee a sign from the Lord thy God, ask it either in the depth or in the height above." Tremen- dous words, a belief in God of such intensity as to appear to us men of modern times fanatical. We can hardly take umbrage, therefore, at the remark of one of the most brilliant modern interpreters of Isaiah, that the prophet had every reason for being grateful to Ahaz ISAIAH. 63 for his unbelief, in that he did not take him at his word and ask for the sign. And now with flaming eyes Isaiah discloses to him his shortsightedness. The means will indeed help, but at a high cost, for the decisive strug- gle between Assyria and Egypt will then have to be fought out on the soil of Judah, and thereby the coun- try will be shaved with the razor that has been hired, namely, by them beyond the river Euphrates, and con- verted into a desert and a wilderness. After that Isaiah has made Ahaz and his son respon- sible for all the consequences by their want of trust in God, and, knowing full well that all public labor would now be in vain, he temporarily abandons the scene, and begins a more silent task. He sets to work to form and educate the remnant which shall be left and on which depends the hope of Israel. He gathers about him a band of kindred hearts, whom he names disciples of God, "to bind up the testimony and to seal the law " for him and them. *'I am thy son and thy slave. Come up and save me from the King of Damascus and from the King of Israel, "was the fatal message sent by Ahaz to Tiglath'- Pileser, who did not wait to be twice summoned, but came at once. Israel was conquered in 734, King Pe- kah executed, and two-thirds of the country annexed. In 732, after three years' hard fighting, Damascus also succumbed to the Assyrian arms. King Rezin was executed and his land converted into an Assyrian province. 64 THE PROPHETS OP ISRAEL, One may think of Ahaz as one likes. But political foresight he certainly possessed, as the issue proved. By his remaining loyal and unwavering in his unsought submission to Assyria, he brought it about that whilst one after another of the neighboring kingdoms sank, whilst war and uproar, murder and plunder raged about him, Judah remained quiet, a peaceful island on a storm-tossed sea. Ahaz died in the year 715 B.C., and was succeeded by his son Hezekiah. Hezekiah was of a weak and wavering character. Under him the national party, which, with the assistance of Egypt, wished to shake off the Assyrian yoke, obtained the supremacy. Here, again, was work for Isaiah. At that time Assyria un- der Sargon, one of the most powerful of warrior-kings, and, what we must also not overlook, one of the noblest and most sympathetic of all the Assyrian rulers, was celebrating her greatest triumphs, winning her most brilliant victories, and achieving her most marvellous successes. According to Isaiah, that could only have been accomplished through God, or suffered by Him ; and therefore he drew the conclusion, that in conform- ity with God's plan the Assyrian's role was not yet ex- hausted, that God still had need of him and had yet greater things in store for him. To rise against the Assyrian was rebellion against the will of God, and so Isaiah did all in his power to keep Judah quiet and guard it against foolish enterprises. When in the year 711 B.C. the excitement was at ISAIAH. 65 its highest, and men were on the verge of yielding to the siren voice of Egypt, Isaiah appeared publicly in the despicable garb of a prisoner of war, as a sign that the prisoners of Egypt and Ethiopia would be led away captives in this apparel by the Assyrians. But to forestall the thought that the overpowering advance of the Assyrian Empire was after all a serious danger to Judah, which prudence and self-preservation bade the nation unconditionally to guard against, Isaiah at this critical period establishes a dogma, which was to be of the uttermost importance for all future ages — the dogma of the inviolability of Mount Zion. There God has His dwellmg on earth, His habitation ; whosoever touched this, touched the personal property of God. And such an attack God could not permit ; even the mighty Assyrian would dash himself to pieces against the hill of Zion, if in his impious presumption he dared to stretch out his hand against it. Isaiah really suc- ceeded in subduing the excitement. Jerusalem re- mained quiet and no further steps were taken. In the year 705 Sargon died, probably murdered by his son and successor Sennacherib. Everywhere did men rejoice, that the rod of the oppressor was broken, and they now prepared themselves with all their might to shake off the yoke. Isaiah remained firm in his warnings to undertake nothing and to leave everything in the hands of God. This was not cowardice. On the contrary, it was a sublime consciousness of strength, the sentiment of 66 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL, being in God's hand, of being safe and protected by Him. This is proved by a very characteristic passage, which is one of the most powerful in all Isaiah. An embassy had come from Ethiopia to Jerusalem to so- licit an alliance against Assyria ; Isaiah says : ''Return to your country. All ye inhabitants of the world and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains, and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye. For so the Lord said unto me, I will take my rest, and I will consider in my dwelling- place like a clear heat upon herbs and like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest. For afore the harvest when the bud is perfect and the sour grape is ripening in the flower, he shall both cut off the sprigs with pruning hooks, and take away and cut down the branches. They shall be left together with the fowls of the moun- tains, and to the beasts of the earth ; and the fowls shall summer upon them, and all the beasts of the earth shall winter upon them." Then will the Ethio- pians also bow down to the God, who is enthroned on Zion. Here God plays with the Assyrian as a wild beast with his prey. He lets him have his own way, appears even to encourage him ; but at the right moment He has only to strike out to stretch him lifeless on the ground. This time, however, Isaiah was unable to stem the rising current of enthusiastic patriotism. In spite of his ef orts an alliance with Ethiopia and Egypt was ISAIAH. 67 concluded, and Hezekiah together with all the small rulers of the neighboring lands, openly rebelled against the mighty Assyrian monarch. Isaiah's position at this period is very curious, and apparently a very contradictory one. Nowhere does he oppose his people with greater harshness, never did he utter bitterer truths, or hurl more terrible threats against them ; yet despite all he remains unmoved in his assurance that God will save Jerusalem, and not suffer it to fall into the hands of the heathen. And wonderful to say, his prediction is fulfilled ! In the year 701 Sennacherib approached with a mighty army. Egypt and Ethiopia were beaten, and Judaea horribly desolated. The Assyrians robbed and plundered forty-six cities, and drove 200, 150 men out of this small land of not over 1500 miles square into cap- tivity. But the waves actually broke against the walls of Jerusalem. The Assyrians withdrew without hav- ing accomplished their object. In the direst moment of trouble God triumphed over them and protected his city. The fate to which twenty-one years previously Israel and Samaria had succumbed, did not befall Judah and Jerusalem. We can well imagine how the wonderful fulfilment of his prophecy must have increased the authority of the prophet. God Himself had imprinted the seal of His approval on the words of Isaiah. And this man, ever restlessly active for the welfare of his people, at once turned his success to practical profit. The Book 68 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. of Kings tells us that Hezekiah reformed the worship of the nation and abolished the worst idolatrous prac- tices in the temple at Jerusalem. We must surely imagine Isaiah as the motive power in this reform, and as the date of its carrying out we should most nat- urally select the time succeeding the wonderful pre- servation of Jerusalem. Thus with Isaiah prophecy had become a power which exerted a decisive influence over the destinies of the people, and brought it safely and surely to blessing and to salvation. We know nothing of the last days of Isaiah. The legend that he suffered martyrdom at an advanced age, is wholly unfounded, and in itself highly improbable. With Isaiah sank into the grave the greatest classic of Israel. Never did the speech of Canaan pour forth with more brilliant splendor and triumphant beauty than from his lips. He has a strength and power of language, a majesty and sublimity of expression, an inexhaustible richness of fitting and stirring imagery, that overwhelms the reader, nay, fairly bewilders him. This and the circumstance that too little is known of his predecessors, is probably the reason why Isaiah is often overrated. He was certainly one of the great- est men of Israel. But the ideas at the basis of his prophecies are already found in Amos and Hosea. What he added of his own was a two-edged sword. A hundred years later Jeremiah had to wage a life and death struggle against them ; for wrongly extended and ISAIAH. 69 exaggerated, those very ideas ultimately brought about the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah. In religious depth and fervor Isaiah is far surpassed by Hosea. We do not find in the titanic pathos of Isaiah the touching, heart-born tones that sob out and caress us in the Book of Hosea. His historical and religious importance lies in something quite different, namely, in that he saved Judah, and in doing so saved religion. The Israelites, who were carried away into Assyr- ian captivity in 722, are untraceably lost. They were absorbed by their conquerors. Had the same fate be- fallen Judah and Jerusalem, they too would have dis- appeared. That their ruin was delayed a century and time gained in which religion could firmly establish itself and strike deep roots, so as to survive the over- throw of Judah and Jerusalem, was Isaiah^s work and merit. In conclusion I should like to make some brief mention of a contemporary of Isaiah who forms an ex- ceedingly curious contrast to him — Micah the Moras- thite. In him Amos lives again. Like Amos, a dweller in the country, and a man of the people, his straight- forward and lively sense of justice suffered itself to be neither silenced nor repressed. A moral indignation, truly awe-inspiring, overpowers him at all he sees and experiences. Especially the sins of the nobility of Jeru- salem, those unscrupulous bloodsuckers and despoilers of the people, who stopped at naught if they had but 70 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. the power, are so atrocious that they can only be atoned for by the destruction of Jerusalem. Therefore he calls to them : ''Hear this ye heads of the house of Jacob and princes of the house of Israel that abhor judgment and pervert all equity. Who build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money — and yet do they lean upon God and say, Is not God among us? none evil can come upon us. Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field and Jerusalem shall be- come heaps, and the mountain of the temple as the high places of the forest. " A strange contrast between the two contempora- ries. One cannot help thinking that Micali is in direct controversy with Isaiah. History has proved both to be right. At first Isaiah was victorious. But one hun- dred and fifteen years after Jerusalem was rescued from the hands of Sennacherib, the prophecy of Micah was fulfilled. Jerusalem became a heap of ruins, the tem- ple a smoking pile, and the people were led away into far captivity. THE REACTION AGAINST THE PROPHETS. IT WAS Hosea who first perceived that the tradi- tional system of worship, which in his eyes was ar- rant paganism, constituted the real cancer that was eating the life of Israel. Isaiah shared his view, and, being of a practical nature, acted upon it. The prophecy of Israel openly and hostilely attacks the religion of the people and endeavors to mould it ac- cording to the prophetic ideal. That was no easy task and had, in the nature of the case, to meet with bitter and fanatical opposition. We men of modern times can scarcely appreciate what religion means to a primitive people, how it governs and enters into all their relations and becomes the pulse and motive power of their whole life. On the other hand, the power of custom in religion cannot be too highly rated. Tradition is considered sacred because it is tradition. The heart clings to it. The solemn mo- ments of life are inseparably bound up with it, and every alteration of it appears as blasphemy, as an in- sult to God. 72 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. And now let us consider the feelings of the people of Judah towards the reforms proposed and inaugur- ated by Isaiah. The ancient and honored relics, which could be traced back to the Patriarchs and to Moses, before which David had knelt, which from time immemorial had been to every Israelite the most sacred and beloved objects on earth, should now of a sudden, to quote Isaiah, be considered as filth to be cast to moles and bats, because a few fanatics in Jerusalem did not find them to their taste ! Now in- deed, if the new God whom the prophets preached (for thus he must have appeared to the people) had only been more powerful than the older, whom their fathers had worshipped, if things had only gone on better — well and good. But there was no trace of this. So long as we were confined solely to the Old Tes- tament for our knowledge of Jewish history, it was supposed naturally enough that with the futile attack on Jerusalem in the year 701 the Assyrian domination in Judah was broken for all time, and that Judah had again become free. But that is not the case. As a matter of fact the Assyrian power only attained to the zenith of its glory under the two successors of Sen- nacherib, Esarhaddon and Asurbanipal. It is true that Sennacherib did not again enter Palestine, as he had enough to do in the neighborhood of his own capital, and it may be that for a short time a certain respite was gained. But Israel remained as before THE REACTION' AGAINST THE PROPHETS. 73 an Assyrian province, and Judah as before the vassal of the Assyrian monarch, having yearly to send a trib- ute to Nineveh. In fact, the Assyrian rule became more and more oppressive. Esarhaddon had laid the keystone in the Assyrian domination of the world by his conquest of Egypt. Thrice in rapid succession had the Assyrian army forced its way to Thebes, and Assyrian viceroys governed Egypt as an Assyrian province. Asurbanipal had also fought in Egypt, in Arabia, and Syria, and we can easily understand that in all these attacks Judasa, the natural sallying-port from Asia into Africa, and the natural point of union between Syria and Egypt, was sucked into the raging whirlpool and suffered severely. Such a state of affairs was not calculated to recom- mend the reform of the prophets. On the contrary, the religious sentiment of the people could not but see in it all a punishment inflicted by the national Deity for the neglect of his wonted service. The popular religion understood the great danger that threatened it. The prophecies had smitten it with a deadly stroke, but it was nevertheless not inclined to give up the struggle without a blow. It accepted the chal- lenge and soon wrested a victory from the reformers. It is true, so long as Hezekiah lived, submission was imperative. For the reform had become a law of the kingdom, enacted by him, and was in a certain measure his personal creation. He died in the year 686, leav- ing the kingdom to Manasseh, his son, a child twelve 74 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. years old. How it came to pass, will forever remain an enigma, owing to the utter lack of records ; but the fact remains certain that under Manasseh a ter- rible and bloody reaction set in against the prophets. This is the period of which Jeremiah says that the sacred sword devoured the prophets like a raging lion, when all Jerusalem was full of innocent blood from one end to the other. All that Hezekiah had destroyed was restored. No memories of the hated innovations were suffered to remain. A further step was taken. Genuine paganism now made its entry into Judaea and Jerusalem. The over- powering strength of the Assyrians must have made a deep impression on their contemporaries. Were not the gods of Assyria more mighty than the gods of the nations subjugated by it ? And so we find under Man- asseh the Assyrio-Babylonian worship of the stars intro- duced into Judaea, and solemn festivals held in honor of it in the temple at Jerusalem. Even foreign habits and customs were adopted. The healthful simplicity of the fathers was discarded to exchange therefor the dangerous blessings of an overrefined and vitiated civilisation. This also had its effect on the worship of God. The ritual became more and more gaudy and elaborate. Incense, of which ancient Israel knew nothing, appears from this time as an essential con- stituent of the service, and even that most terrible of religious aberrations, the sacrificing of children, fully calculated to excite with gruesome and voluptuous tit- THE REACTION AGAIMST THE PROPHETS. 75 illation the unstrung nerves of an overwrought civili- sation, became the fashion. King Manasseh himself made his firstborn son pass through the fire, and everywhere in Jerusalem did the altars of Moloch send up their smoke, whilst a bloody persecution was instituted against the prophets and all their party. These events made on the minds of the devout men in Israel an indelible impression, and the pro- phecies of Isaiah as to the indestructibility of Zion and of the House of David, were forgotten in their terror. It became the settled conviction of the best spirits that God could never forgive all this, but that, owing to the sins of Manasseh, the destruction both of Judah and Jerusalem was inevitable. It is a memorable fact that during this whole period, almost, prophecy remained dumb in Israel. We can only point to one brief fragment with anything like assurance, and that is now read as Chapter 6 and the beginning of Chapter 7 of the book of Micah. This fragment is one of the most beautiful that we possess, and still resounds, borne on Palestrina's magic notes, as an improperia, on every Good Friday in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. God pleads with Israel : **0, my people, what have I done unto thee ? And wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me." And as now the people bow themselves down be- fore God in answer to His divine accusations, and are anxious to give up everything, even the first-born, for their transgressions, then speaks the prophet : 76 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. ''He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?'* This fragment is important, as testifying how dur- ing this time of heavy affliction and persecution, piety deepened and became more spiritual ; how it retired within itself and saw itself in an ever truer and clearer light, finally to come forth purified and strengthened. Prophecy was again aroused from its slumbers by the trumpet notes of the world's history. In 650 the Assyrian empire was, if anything, greater and mightier than ever. But now destiny knocked at its gates. From the coasts of the Black Sea a storm broke forth over Asia, such as man had never before witnessed. Wild tribes of horsemen, after the manner of the later Huns and Mongolians, overran for more than twenty years all Asia on their fast horses, which seemed never to tire, spreading everywhere desolation and terror. Egypt had torn itself away from the rule of the Assyrians, and a new and terrible enemy in the Medes who were now consolidating their forces in the rear of Nineveh appeared. The Assyrian world- edifice cracked in all its joints, and grave revolutions were imminent. At once prophecy is at hand with the small but exceedingly valuable book of Zephaniah. The thunder of the last judgment rolls in Zephaniah's powerful words, whose dithyrambic lilt and wondrous music no translation can render. The Dies irce^ dies THE REACTION AGAINST THE PROPHETS. 77 illa^ which the Roman Church and the whole musical world now sings as a requiem, is taken word for word from Zephaniah. <'The great day of the Lord is near, it is near and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the Lord ; the mighty man shall cry there bitterly. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness. A day of the trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities and against the high towers. And I will bring distress upon men, that they shall walk like blind men because they have sinned against the Lord ; and their blood shall be poured out as dust, and their marrow as the dung. Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the Lord's wrath ; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy : for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land." The cause of this terrible judgment is the sins of Manasseh, which Zephaniah describes with drastic vividness at the beginning of his book. Only the righteous and the meek of the earth shall escape, who will form at the end of time a people pleasing unto God. In the time of Nahum events had progressed still further. His book has for its sole subject the impend- ing destruction of Nineveh. It was probably written in the year 625, as the Medes under king Phraortes 78 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. made their first attack on Nineveh, but did not ac- complish their aim. The merited judgment shall now fall upon the Assyrian nation for all the oppressions and persecutions which it has brought upon the world, and especially on the land and people of God. In a religious and prophetic sense the contents of the book are not important, but its aesthetic and poetical value is on that account the higher, the language full of power and strength, and possessing a pathos and fervor which only true passion can inspire. It is in a certain measure the cry of distress and revenge from all the nations oppressed and downtrodden by that detestable people, which is here re-echoed to us with irresistible power from the Book of Nahum. The Book of Habakkuk also belongs to this series. The destruction of Nineveh is its subject. But in Habakkuk's Book the Chaldeans appear as the future instruments of the divine wrath. Habakkuk is a mas- ter of eloquence and imagery. His description of the Assyrian as the robber who opens his jaws like hell, and is as insatiable as death, who devoureth all people, and swalloweth down all nations, is among the most magnificent productions of Hebrew litera- ture. *'He treateth men as the fishes of the sea, as creeping things that have no ruler over them. He fishes up all of them with the angle, he catches them in his net, and gathers them in his drag; therefore does he rejoice and is glad. Therefore he THE REACTION AGAINST THE PROPHETS. 79 sacrifices unto his net, and burns incense unto his drag, because by them is his portion plenteous and his meat fat. Shall he then ever draw his sword, and not spare continually to slay the nations ? " In Habakkuk the ethical and religious element is duly treated. Pride causes the fall of the Assyrian, the hybris in the sense of Greek tragedy, for, as Habakkuk sharply and clearly expresses it, he makes <*his strength his God." Might for the Assyrian ex- ceeds right. Because he has the might, he oppresses and enslaves nations which have done him no harm. The universal moral law demands his destruction. * * * But now we must retrace our steps for a time. As Zephaniah, Nahum, and Habakkuk form an inti- mately connected group, it appeared expedient to treat them together. But Jeremiah appeared before Nahum, and between Nahum and Habakkuk an event happened which ranks among the most important and momentous in the history of mankind. DEUTERONOMY. UNDER King Manasseh the ancient popular religion had won a complete and bloody victory over the prophets. But, like all spiritual powers, prophecj^ could only gain by being combated and persecuted. The blood of its martyrs had not flowed in vain, and new life was soon to spring from it. In 641 B. C, King Manasseh died and was suc- ceeded by Amon, his son. During the latter's life, things continued as they were. In the second year of his reign, however, Amon was murdered in his own house by his servants. The Book of Kings recounts this event, but tells us nothing of the accompanying circumstances, and nothing at all of the cause of the conspiracy. The book, continuing, says, that the peo- ple slew the conspirators and placed Josiah, the son of the murdered king, a boy of eight, on the throne. If ever we had just ground for complaint, it exists here. We know really nothing of this extraordinarily important century, except a few scattered facts. The great main-springs of its action are entirely hidden DEUTERONOMY. 8i from us, and the results only are known. From a youth of Josiah's age naturally nothing was to be expected. The government was in the hands of corrupt courtiers, the people as described by Zephaniah worshipped both the God of Israel and Baal, Moloch and the hosts of heaven, that is the stars, clad themselves after strange fashions, and filled the house of the Lord with vio- lence and deceit, — who were settled on their lees and who spake in their hearts, ' ' The Lord does no good, neither evil ! " But the times were such as to rouse even these careless spirits. Men were gradually*coming to see the gravity of the situation, and slowly but surely an inner change seems to have been wrought in the hearts of the people. The prophetic party, which had ap- parently not been persecuted for some time, must have kept up secretly a continuous and successful agitation. The priests in the temple of Jerusalem must have been won over to it, or at least influenced by it, and espe- cially must its aspirations have found access to the heart of the young king, who, from all we know of him, was a thoroughly good and noble character. The time now appeared ripe for a bold stroke.' When, in the eighteenth year of Josiah, 621 B.C., Shaphan the scribe paid an official visit to the temple of Jerusalem, the priest Hilkiah handed to him a book of laws which had been found there. Shaphan took the book and immediately brought it to the King, be- fore whom he read it. 82 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. The impression which the book made on the King must have been tremendous. He rent his garments, and sent at once a deputation to Huldah, the proph- etess, who was the wife of one of his privy officers and evidently held in high esteem. Huldah declared in favor of the book, and the King now went energetically to work. The entire people were convened in the temple at Jerusalem, and the King entered with them into a covenant. Both parties mutually and solemnly pledged themselves to acknowledge this book as the fundamen- tal law of the kingdom, and to observe its commands. Upon the basis of it, a thorough reorganisation was effected and the celebrated reform of worship carried out, of which we read in the Book of Kings. The events of the year 621 at Jerusalem were ap- parently of no great moment. But their consequences have been simply immeasurable. By them Israel, nay, the whole world, has been directed into new courses. We are to-day still under the influence of beliefs which were then promulgated for the first time, under the sway of forces which then first came into life. It is imperative, therefore, to enter into this matter more minutely, as the entire later development of prophecy is quite unintelligible unless we have a clear concep- tion of it. Our first question must be : What is this book of laws of Josiah, which was discovered in the year 621? The youthful De Wette, in his thesis for a professor- ship at Jena in the year 1805, clearly proved that this DEUTERONOMY. 83 book of laws was essentially the fifth book of Moses, known as Deuteronomy. The book is clearly and dis- tinctly marked off from the rest of the Pentateuch and its legislation, whilst the reforms of worship intro- duced by Josiah correspond exactly to what it called for. The proofs adduced by De Wette have been gen- erally accepted, and his view has become a common possession of Old Testament research, having afforded us our first purchase, so to speak, for a true under- standing of the religious history of Israel. The conceptions and aims of Deuteronomy are thoroughly prophetic. It seeks to realise the hoped for Kingdom of God as promised by the prophets. Israel is to become a holy people, governed by the will of God; and this holiness is to be manifested through worship and justice, so that man shall serve God righteously and judge his fellow-men uprightly. The first point is the more important with Deuteronomy ; its chief attention is devoted to the cultus, and here it broke awaj^, in all fundamental points, from the ideas of ancient Israel and turned the development of things into entirely new courses. The fundamental problem of religion is the relation between God and the world. Ancient Israel had seen both in one \ all things worldly appeared to it divine ; in everything appertaining to the world it found the expressions and revelations of God. The entire na- tional life was governed and ruled by religion ; in all places and all things God was to his people a living 84 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. and real presence. The result of this naturally was the secularisation of God, which the prophets felt to be an exceedingly grave danger. The right solution of the problem would have been that given by Jesus, who openly recognised the divinisation of the world as the rightful task of religion — to fill and sanctify the world with the spirit of God, and thus to make it a place and a field for God's work, a Kingdom of God, and a tem- ple of the Holy Spirit. Deuteronomy pursues a differ- ent course; it dissolves the bond between God and the world, tears them asunder, and ends by depriving the world entirely of its divinity. On the one hand, a world without a God ; on the other, a God without a world. Nevertheless, this last was more the result than the in- tention of Deuteronomy. At least, wherever it con- sciously carries out this view it is justified, especially when it requires that God shall not be worshipped through symbols or images, and that every figurative representation of the Godhead, or its simulation by certain venerated forms of nature, must be destroyed root and branch. We have here merely the outcome of the prophetic apprehension that God is a spirit, and therefore must be worshipped as a spirit. But Deu- teronomy makes additional requirements. Obviously in consequence of the dogma of Isaiah respecting the central importance of Mount Zion as the dwelling- place of God on earth, Deuteronomy insists that God can only be worshipped at Jerusalem ; only there should acts of adoration be permitted, and all other sanctua- DE UTER ONOMY. 85 ries and places of worship outside of Jerusalem should be destroyed. The idea that the centralisation of worship in a single place rendered it easier of supervision and en- sured the preservation of its purity may have contrib- uted to the adoption of this last measure ; and it must certainly be admitted that the local sanctuaries in smaller towns were really breeding-places of flagrant abuses. But the consequences of the measure were simply incalculable. It was virtually tantamount to a suppression of religion in the whole country outside of Jerusalem. Up to this time, every town and village had had its sanctuary, and access to God was an easy matter for every Israelite. When his heart moved him either to give expression to his thanks, or to seek consolation in his sorrow, he had only to go to his place of worship. Every difficult question of law was laid before God ; that is, argued in the sanctuary and decided by a solemn oath of purification. And to one and all these sanctuaries granted the right of refuge. Here was the fugitive safe from his pursuer, and he could only be removed from the sanctuary and delivered up provided he were a convicted felon. Moreover, in the old days of Israel all these sanctuaries were oracles, where at any time men could ask advice or aid in difficult or dangerous matters. And many things which have for us a purely secular character, were to the ancient Is- raelites acts of divine service. Every animal slaugh- 86 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. tered was a sacrifice ; every indulgence in meat, a sacrificial feast. All this ceased with the legislation of Deuteron- omy. The Israelite was now compelled to carry on his daily life without God, and thus accustomed him- self to consider life as something apart from religion, and in no wise connected with God. Religion was re- duced to the three great feasts, which Deuteronomy likewise fundamentally reconstituted. In ancient Israel the three great feasts were thanks- giving festivals. At the feast of the unleavened bread the first fruits of the fields, of the barley harvest, were offered up to God. The Feast of Weeks, or Pente- cost, was the regular harvest feast, when the wheat was garnered, and the Feast of Tabernacles was the autumn festival, the feast of the ingathering of the wine and the fruit. This natural foundation of the three great festivals, which brought them into organic relation with each individual and his personal life, and in fact formed for him the real crises of his life, was now de- stroyed, and an ecclesiastical or ecclesiastico-histor- ical basis given to them. The feast of unleavened bread took place in remembrance of the flight out of Egypt ; the Feast of Weeks later in remembrance of the giving of the law on Sinai, the Feast of Tabernacles in remembrance of the journey through the desert, when Israel dwelt in tents. A difference thus was created spontaneously between holy events and secular events, week days and festivals. Routine every-day life was DEUTERONOMY. 87 secularised, while religion was made into an institution, ordinance, work, and achievement apart by itself. A further outcome of Deuteronomy was, that a dis- tinct and rigorously exclusive priesthood now appears as the sole lawful ministers and stewards of the cultus, and it was enacted that all its members should be de- scended from the tribe of Levi. In olden times the father of the family offered up the sacrifices for himself and household ; he was the priest of his house. To be sure, larger sanctuaries and professional priests were already in existence, but the people were not re- stricted to them. Every house was still a temple of God, and every head of a family a priest of the Most High. Deuteronomy did away with all this, and so first created the distinction between clergy and laity. Man, as such, has nothing to do directly with God, but only a privileged class of men possess this pre- rogative and right. In this way Deuteronomy also radically transformed the priesthood. In ancient Israel the priest was pri- marily the minister of the divine oracle, the interpreter and expositor of the Divine Will. Deuteronomy did away with oracular predictions as heathenish, and con- verted the priest into a sacrificer and expounder of the law. The character of the sacrifice also was completely altered. The Israelite now only offered up sacrifices at the three great yearly festivals, when he was com- pelled to be in Jerusalem. He could hardly be ex- pected to undertake a journey to Jerusalem merely for 88 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. the sake of making a thanksgiving offering. There was, however, a species of sacrifice which allowed of no delay, — the sacrifice of sin and atonement. Here, in restoring man's broken relations with God, no time could be lost. Accordingly, the sin and atonement offerings now assume increasing dominance ; the whole cultus becomes more and more an institution for the propitiation of sins, and the priest, the intermediator who negotiates the forgiveness. Still another consequence flowed from the ideas of Deuteronomy — the opposition of Church and State. This also Deuteronomy created. If the whole of hu- man life has in itself something profane, and the reli- gious life is restricted to a definite caste, man is, so to speak, torn into two halves, each of which lives its own life. In ancient Israel man saw a divine dispen- sation in the public and national life ; love of country was a religious duty. The king was the chief high priest of the people; all State acts were sanctified through religion, and when men fought for home and country, they fought for God ''the fight of God." But now all that was changed. The State as such had nothing more to do with the religious life, and we even see the beginnings in Deuteronomy of that develop- ment which subsequently set the Church over the State and regarded the latter merely as the handmaid of the former. Civil State life became a matter of ecclesias- tical cult. This, in a sense, was providential. By the separation of religion from the State, the religion of DEUTERONOMY. 89 Israel was enabled to survive the destruction of the Jewish State which followed thirty-live years later. But its ultimate consequences were direful beyond measure. Nor was this all that Deuteronomy did. It substi- tuted for the living revelation of God in the human heart and in history, the dead letter. For the first time a book was made the foundation of religion, reli- gion a statute, a law. He who followed what was writ- ten in this book was religious, and he alone. We see, thus, how an indubitable deepening of the religious spirit is followed by a fixed externalism, and how the prophetic assumptions led to thoroughly un- prophetic conclusions. Deuteronomy is an attempt to realise the prophetic ideas by external means. This naturally brought in its train the externalisation of those ideas. In Deuteronomy prophecy gained a de- cided victory over the national religion, but it was largely a Pyrrhic victory. Prophecy abdicated in favor of priesthood. It is worthy of note that Deuteronomy makes provision for the event of a prophet appearing who might teach doctrines not written in this holy book, of which the priests are the natural guardians and interpreters. As in earlier times the monarchy and prophecy were the two dominant powers, so now priesthood and the law ruled supreme. But Deuteronomy was productive of still other re- sults. The opposition of secular and sacred, of laity and clergy, of State and Church, the conception of a 90 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. holy writ and of a divine inspiration, can be traced back in its last roots to the Deuteronomy of the year 621, together with the whole history of revealed religion down to the present time, including not only Judaism but Christianity and Islam, who have simply borrowed these ideas from Judaism. By whom this book, which is perhaps the most sig- nificant and most momentous that was ever written, was composed, we do not know. It represents a com- promise between prophecy and priesthood, and might therefore have been compiled by the priests of Jerusa- lem, as indeed it was a priest who delivered it to the king, and the priests who derived all the benefits from it. It may be regarded as pretty certain that it took its origin in this period. Josiah regarded the demands of this book with rev- erent awe. We are not told whether his reforms were opposed by the people, although he carried them out with great severity and harshness. The final estab- lishment of regularity must have been looked upon as a blessing, and the more so as Deuteronomy lays par- ticular stress on civil justice, establishing in this do- main also stability and order. Moreover, Josiah was a man who by his personal qualities was fitted to ren- der acceptable the oppressive features of the work, and to win for it able partisans. JEREMIAH. PROPHECY did not experience at once the disas- trous consequences of the priestly reforms of 621, but displayed at this period its noblest offshoot in Jere- miah. It is impossible to suppose that Jeremiah had anything to do with either the composition or intro- duction of Deuteronomy. The rather elaborate account given of the proceedings of this period in the Book of Kings makes no mention of him, and the mental rela- tionship which some have claimed to exist between Jeremiah and Deuteronomy is based on passages of this book which did not belong to the law-code of 621, but are later than Jeremiah, and the direct outcome of his influence. As the Kingdom of Israel on its downfall bore in Hosea its noblest prophetic fruit, so in the time imme- diately preceding the destruction of Judah we find the sublime figure of Jeremiah. Mentally, also, these two men were closely related. Sentiment is the predomi- nant characteristic of each. Both have the same ten- der and sympathetic heart ; both have the same elegiac 92 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. bent of mind ; both were pre-eminently devout men. The reHgious element preponderates entirely over the ethical. It can be proved that Jeremiah was power- fully influenced by Hosea, and that he looked upon him as his prototype. We are better informed concerning the life and for- tunes of Jeremiah than of any other prophet. He re- ceived his call to the prophetic office in the thirteenth year of Josiah's reign, namely, in 627. He must have been at the time very young, as he hesitated to obey the divine order on the ground of his youth. We are referred, therefore, to the later years of the reign of King Manasseh, as the period of the prophet's birth. Jeremiah was not a native of Jerusalem ; his home was Anathoth, a small village near Jerusalem. He came of a priestly family, and we get the impression that he did not live in poor circumstances. Solomon had ban- ished to his estate in Anathoth, Abiathar, the high- priest of David, and the last remaining heir of the old priesthood of Shiloh. The conjecture is not rash, perhaps, that Jeremiah was a descendant of this fam- ily, which could cherish and preserve the proudest and dearest recollections of Israel as its family traditions. The family was descended from Moses. Abiathar had been closely attached to David's person and throne; he had given the religious sanction to all David's mighty deeds, and it was he who helped to found Je- rusalem as also to be the first to worship there the God of Israel. How vividly such traditions are wont to JEREMIAH. 93 be fostered in fallen families is well known. Further than that, Jeremiah shows himself to be thoroughly ac- quainted with the past history of Israel. Moses and Samuel, Amos and Hosea, — such were the men with whom and in whom he lived. No other prophet is so steeped in the ancient literature and history of Israel. Everything that was noble and worthy in Israel was known and familiar to him. We see in this the fruits of a careful education, and can readily imagine how the priestly father or pious mother filled the impressionable heart of the child with what was most sacred to them. Jeremiah himself mentions his debt to his parents, where God says to him in the vision: '* Before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified and ordained thee a prophet." Which means: A person born of such parents must of necessity be consecrated to God. And still another circumstance is of utmost impor- tance. Jeremiah is the scion of a martyred church. He was born at a time when Manasseh persecuted the prophets with fire and sword, and raged against their whole party. Persecution, however, only serves to fan religion into a more intense flame. With what fervor do men then pray ; with what strength do they believe and confide, wait and hope. Under such circumstances was Jeremiah born. Under such impressions he grew up. Truly, he was a predestined personality. In Jeremiah prophecy appears in a totally distinc- tive character, noticeable even in his first calling in the year 627. God says to Jeremiah: '^See I have 94 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. this day set thee over the nations and over the king- doms, to root out and to pull down, to build and to plant." So thoroughly does the prophet feel himself one with Him who sent him, and conceive his own per- sonality absorbed in God ! Likewise, in one of the grandest passages of his book it is he who causes all the nations to drink of the wine-cup of God's fury. And thus the whole life of the prophet is bound up in his calling. He must even deny himself the joys of matrimony and of home. Solitary and forlorn he must wander through life, belonging only to God and to his vocation. It is my duty to state, so as not to draw on myself the charge of false embellishment, that this conscious- ness of absolute union with God often assumes in Jere- miah a form which has for us something offensive in it. His enemies are also God's enemies, and this other- wise tender and gentle man calls down upon them the heaviest curses: <*Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of throtthng." But he is conscious himself that this is something in- congruous. In one of his most remarkable passages, where he has broken out into the direst imprecations and cursed himself and the day of his birth, God an- swers him : ''If thou becomest again mine, thou may- est again be my servant, and if thou freest thy better self from the vile, then shalt thou still be as my mouth." Jeremiah did indeed free his better self from the JEREMIAH. 95 vile, and such passing outbreaks only make him dearer to us and render him more human, as showing us what this man inwardly suffered, how he struggled, and un- der what afflictions his prophecy arose. The sorrow he bears is twofold : personal, in that he preaches to deaf ears and only reaps hate in return for his love ; and general, as a member of his people. For as the prophet knows himself to be in his vocation one with God, so does he know himself as a man to be one with his people, whose grief he bears with a double bur- den, whose destiny is like to break his heart. *'My bowels, my bowels, I am pained to my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war." Thus he exclaims in one place, and in another we read : ''O that my head were waters, and my eyes a foun- tain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people ! " Out of this peculiar and twofold position of the prophet between God and his people Jeremiah drew the practical inference that he was the chosen advo- cate and intercessor of the nation with God ; in his ardent prayers he fairly battles with God for the sal- vation of his people. This is a totally new feature. The relation of the former prophets to their contem- poraries was that of mere preachers of punishment and repentance. Jeremiah, however, in spite of their 96 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. unworthiness, holds his fellow-countrymen lovingly in his heart and endeavors to arrest the arm of God, already uplifted to deal on them the destructive blow. God at last must all but rebuff his unwearying and im- petuous prophet. The prophetic preaching of Jeremiah naturally often rests on that of his predecessors, out of which it organically grew. But it is curious to see, and this is noticeable even in the smallest details, how everything is spiritualised and deepened in Jeremiah, and in a certain measure transposed to a higher key. Often it is a mere descriptive word, or characteristic expres- sion, which makes old thoughts appear new, and stamps them as the mental property of Jeremiah. I must forego the proof of this in detail, and limit my- self in this brief sketch to what is specifically new in Jeremiah, and to what constitutes his substantial im- portance and position in the history of Israelitic proph- ecy and religion. Now, the specifically new in Jeremiah touches di- rectly the kernel and substance of religion. Jeremiah was the first to set religion consciously free from all extraneous and material elements, and to establish it on a purely spiritual basis. God himself will destroy His temple in Jerusalem, and at the time of the final salvation, it shall not be built up again, and the Holi- est of Holies, the ark of the covenant, will not be missed, and none new made. What God requires of man is something different : man shall break up his JEREMIAH. 97 fallow ground and not sow among thorns ; he shall circumcise his heart. God considers only the purity of the heart, its prevalent disposition; it is he who ''tries the heart and the reins" — an expression origin- ally coined by Jeremiah, and which we meet with in his book for the first time. Truth and obedience are good in themselves, as denoting a moral disposition. There was a sect, the Rechabites, who abstained from drinking wine. Jeremiah knew well that the Kingdom of God was not eating and drinking, and that the goodness and worth of man in God's sight did not depend on whether he drank wine or not. Neverthe- less, he praises these Rechabites, and holds them up to the people as an example of piety and faith. Jere- miah indeed goes further than this. He is the first to affirm in clear and plain words, that the gods of the heathen are not real beings, but merely imaginative creations in the minds of their worshippers. Yet he holds up to his people the heathen who serve their false and meaningless religion with genuine faith and sincere devotion, as models and examples which put them to shame. They are really more pleasing to God than a people who have the true God, but are unmindful and forgetful of Him. And this is a sin for which there is no excuse, for the knowledge of God is inborn in man. As the bird of passage knoweth the time of his depar- ture and the object of his wandering, so is the longing for God born in man ; he has only to follow after that yearning of his heart as the animal after its instinct, 98 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. and this craving must lead him to God. And this will also be in the final time when God concludes a new covenant with Israel : then has every man the law of God written in his heart ; he has only to consult his heart and to follow after its directions. Now, if reli- gion, or, as Jeremiah calls it, the knowledge of God, is born in man, then there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, and this grand thought Jeremiah first recognised : " O Lord, . . . the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth and shall say, Our fathers have inherited only lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit. Can a man make gods unto him- self, that are not gods? " And when the Gentiles then learn from converted Israel to worship the true God, as they themselves taught Israel to offer sacrifices to idols, then they, too, will enter into the future king- dom of God. The ideality and universality of religion — these are the two new grand apprehensions which Jeremiah has given to the world. Every man as such is born a child of God. He does not become such through the forms of any definite religion, or outward organisation, but he becomes such in his heart, through circumci- sion of the heart and of the ears. A pure heart and a pure mind are all that God requires of man, let his piety choose what form it will, so long as it is genuine. Thus we have in Jeremiah the purest and highest con- summation of the prophecy of Israel and of the reli- JEREMIAH. 99 gion of the Old Testament. After him One only could come, who was greater than he. But we must now pass on to a consideration of the life and fortunes of Jeremiah, for in them are reflected the fortunes of his people and age. In the early days of his vocation as a prophet, Jere- miah seems to have worked very quietly. For the first five years, during the occurrence of the extremely im- portant events enacted at Jerusalem in connexion with Deuteronomy, nobody took the slightest notice of him. Perhaps he was still living in his native village of Anathoth. We know from his own accounts that he labored there, as also that he was the object of a ran- corous persecution, which aimed at his life. It is pos- sible that it was this that induced him to settle in Je- rusalem. Of his work during the reign of Josiah we know nothing definite. Only one short speech of the col- lection in his book is expressly ascribed to this time. In fact, we are told nothing of Josiah himself, after the famous reform, except the manner of his death. The second half of his reign must have been on the whole happy and propitious for Judah. The Scythian storm had raged across it without causing much se- vere damage. The power of Assyria was smitten and had entirely disappeared in the outlying regions. Jo- siah could rule over Israel as if it were his own land, and in a measure restore the kingdom of David. But events pursued their uninterruptible course. loo THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. In the year 608 Nineveh was surrounded by the allied Medes and Chaldeans, and its fall was only a question of time. The Egyptian Pharaoh Necho held this to be a fitting opportunity to secure for himself his por- tion of the heritage of Assyria. He set forth with a huge army from the Nile, to occupy on behalf of the Egyptian kingdom the whole country up to the Euphrates. What moved Josiah to oppose him we do not know. A disastrous engagement took place at Megiddo, where Josiah was completely defeated and mortally wounded. This was for the religious party in Israel a terrible blow. Josiah, the first king pleas- ing to God, had met a dreadful end. He had served God faithfully and honestly, and now God had aban- doned him. Could not some mistake have been made as to God's power, or as to His justice? And indeed after this event a change does really seem to have taken place in the religious views. Jehoiakim, Josiah's eldest son, who nov/ ruled as an Egyptian vassal, was not a man after the heart of the prophet ; in him Manasseh lived anew. He also per- secuted the prophets. He ordered one of them named Urijah to be executed, and Jeremiah himself was in constant danger of losing his life. Whether the re- form of the cultus ordered by Josiah was revoked, we do not know ; in any event Jekoiakim took no interest in it, and in no wise supported it. Under him the temporal arm of the church was not available. And now, just at the beginning of his reign, Jeremiah ap- JEREMTAH. loi pears with the awful prophecy, at that time doubly monstrous and blasphemous, that temple and city would both be destroyed if a radical improvement and thorough conversion did not take place. Violent scenes arose in the temple; the death of the obnoxious prophet was clamorously called for. He was saved only with difficulty, and it seems was forbidden to enter the tem- ple and to preach there. In the year 606 Nineveh fell after a three years' siege, and thus disappeared the kingdom and nation of the Assyrians from the face of the earth. The Medes and Chaldeans divided the spoils among them. Now, however, they had another task on their hands. A third competitor was to be driven out of the field. Pharaoh Necho had actually occupied the whole coun- try up to the Euphrates. Accordingly, in 605, a year after the fall of Nineveh, the Babylonian Nebuchad- nezzar marched against him. The battle took place at Carchemish and Necho was totally defeated. The Egyptian hosts rolled back in wild flight to their homes and the whole country as far as the confines of Egypt fell into Nebuchadnezzar^s hands. In this critical year, 605, Jeremiah received God's command to write down in a book all the words which he had hitherto spoken, and at the end of the book we find the vision of the cup of wrath, which the prophet was to cause all nations and peoples to drink, for now through the Chaldeans God's judgment is fulfilled over the whole earth. Jehoiakim felt the seriousness of 102 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. the situation. A general fast was ordered, and seizing the occasion Jeremiah caused his young friend and pupil Baruch to read his book of prophecies aloud in the temple. The King heard of it, ordered the book to be read to him, had it cut into pieces and cast into the fire. He ordered the arrest of Jeremiah and Ba- ruch, but they managed to keep out of the way. Thus Jehoiakim was converted from an Assyrian into a Babylonian vassal ; and Jeremiah incessantly urged upon him the necessity of bending his neck to the yoke of the King of Babel. For Nebuchadnezzar was the servant, the chosen weapon of God, appointed by Him to rule over the earth. Natural prudence and insight alone would have recommended this policy as the only right and possible one ; for by it relative quiet and peace were assured to the nation. But Jehoiakim did not think so. He arose against the King of Babel, and a storm now brewed around Jerusalem. Jehoiakim himself did not survive the catastrophe, but his son Jehoiachin was compelled to surrender unconditionally to the Babylonians. Nebuchadnezzar led the king captive to Babylon, where he was kept in close bond- age, together with ten thousand of his people, the entire aristocracy of birth and intellect ; nothing re- mained but the lower classes. He set the third son of Josiah, Zedekiah, as vassal king over this decimated and enfeebled people. All this happened in the year 597. Better days now began for Jeremiah. Zedekiah JEREMIAH. 103 resembled his father Josiah ; he evidently held the prophet in high esteem, and seemed not indisposed to be guided by him. But he had to reckon here with the wishes of the people and with public opinion, and they tended the other way. The sadder the situation and the more dangerous the circumstances became, the higher flared the fanaticism, which was fanned into a flame by other prophets. Here we encounter those biassed and undiscriminating disciples of Isaiah, who, with their boasts of the indestructibility of Jeru- salem and the temple, were never weary of assuring the people of divine protection, and of urging them to shake off the detested yoke of the Gentiles. In the fourth year of the reign of Zedekiah a pow- erful and widespread agitation seems to have broken out. Ambassadors from all the smaller nations and peoples round about gathered in Jerusalem to plan some scheme of concerted action against Nebuchad- nezzar. Jeremiah appears in their midst with a yoke around his neck. It is the will of God that all the na- tions should bow their necks beneath the yoke of Neb- uchadnezzar, lest a heavier judgment should fall upon them. One of the false prophets, Hananiah, took the yoke from off the neck of Jeremiah and broke it, say- ing : '' Even so will the Lord break the yoke of Nebu- chadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all the nations within the space of two full years." Then said Jeremiah to him: '*Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but in their stead shall come yokes of iron." 104 '^HE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. It was predicted Hananiah should die in that year, for having prophesied falsely in the name of God. And Hananiah died in the seventh month. Finally, noth- ing definite came of the deliberations, and the nations remained quiet. But even the exiles in Babylon, who were also greatly excited and stirred up by false proph- ets, had to be warned by Jeremiah to peace and resig- nation in the will of God. He did this in a letter, which must have been written at the same time with the events above-mentioned. Of the next five years we know nothing. But ad- versity takes rapid strides, and now the destiny of Jerusalem was about to be fulfilled. Confiding in the help of Eg3^pt, Zedekiah rebelled against his suzerain and for a second time the Babylonian armies marched against Jerusalem. Zedekiah sent to consult the prophet as to the future. Jeremiah remained firm in his opinion — subjection to the King of Babylon. Who- soever shall go forth against the Chaldeans shall not escape out of their hands, and whosoever shall re- main in the city shall die through the sword, hunger, and pestilence, but the city shall be consumed with fire. The people did not listen to him ; passion had blinded and rendered them foolish. The siege began. The Egyptians, however, kept their promise. Egyp- tian troops poured in, and Nebuchadnezzar raised the siege. The joy in Jerusalem knew no bounds. But un- fortunately these days of rejoicing and confidence were JEREMIAH, 105 darkened by a disgraceful breach of faith. The neces- sities of the siege had suggested the revival of an an- cient custom, by which the Hebrew slaves were set free after six years' service. To obtain warriors willing to fight during the siege, the Hebrew slaves had been solemnly liberated, but now that all danger was over, they were compelled to return to servitude. The en- raged prophet hurled his most terrible words at the heads of this faithless and perjured people, but in so doing he made enemies among the ruling classes, who, as he was about to set forth to his birthplace Anathoth, caused him to be arrested, on the pretence that he in- tended to go over to the Chaldeans; he was beaten and put into prison. But his prophecy was right. The Chaldeans returned, and the siege began anew. That was for Jeremiah a time of alHiction. Hated, ill-treated, persecuted by all as a betrayer of his country, he passed several weeks and months of unutterable misery. To the energetic mediation of King Zedekiah he owed his life. We can now understand, perhaps, the moods which caused him to curse his birth and to murmur against God, who had only suffered him to be born for misery and wretchedness, hatred and enmity. But soon the fate of Jerusalem was fulfilled. After being defended with the wild courage of despair, it was finally captured on the ninth of July, 586. This time Nebuchadnezzar showed no mercy. Zedekiah had his eyes put out and was carried in chains to Baby- io6 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. Ion, after all his children had been murdered in his sight. The city and temple were plundered, burnt with fire, and utterly destroyed, and almost the entire population carried away captive into Babylon. Only a few of the poor of the land were left behind for vine- dressers and for husbandmen. As Babylonian viceroy over this miserable remnant, with a residence in Miz- pah, was appointed Gedaliah, a grandson of Shaphan, the scribe who had delivered Deuteronomy to King Josiah. Jeremiah, who had survived all the terrors and suf- ferings of the siege and capture, and whom the Chal- deans had left in Judah, remained with Gedaliah, whose father, Ahikam had been a warm friend and supporter of the prophet. And now that his prophecies soared to their sublimest heights and he had just pre- dicted on the ruins of Jerusalem and of the temple, God's everlasting covenant of grace with Israel, he would, perhaps, have still enjoyed a successful activ- ity, had not a band of fanatics with a prince of the royal blood at their head, treacherously attacked and slain Gedaliah and such Chaldeans as were with him. Jeremiah still counselled quiet. Nebuchadnezzar would not visit the crime of a few on the whole nation. But the people would not trust him ; they arose and went into Egypt and forced the aged prophet to ac- company them. In Egypt the prophet closed a life full of suffering. Bitter contentions arose with his countrymen. Jere- JEREMIAH. 107 miah still fearlessly discharged his office as incarnate conscience of his people, and was, according to a Jew- ish tradition, stoned to death by an infuriated mob. Thus, breathed out his great soul Jeremiah, solitary and alone on Egyptian soil under the blows of his own people, for whom during his whole lifetime he had striven and suffered, and from whom, for all his love and faith, he had but reaped hatred and persecution. Truly he drank the cup of suffering to its dregs. But undismayed and dauntless, he fell in his harness, a true soldier of the truth. He had become as an iron wall, and as pillars of brass against the whole land. They had struggled against him, but not overcome him. He fell as a hero, as a conqueror ; he could die for the truth, he could not abjure it. Jerusalem destroyed, its greatest son buried in the sands of Egypt, the people dragged as captives into Babylon — what was now to become of Israel? Here was the opportunity for Deuteronomy to prove itself true, and it did prove so. It saved Israel and religion. And to this end prophecy also helped much. If the songs of the Lord were silent in a strange land, and Israel weeping hung her harps on the willows by the waters of Babylon — yet prophecy was not silent. It found during the exile in Babylon two of its truest and spiritually most powerful exponents. THE BABYLONIAN EXILE. 'T^HE Assyrians wejre the first people to make use of ^ the exile as a means of pacifying rebellious tribes. Whenever they chanced to come upon an especially hardy nationality, which offered determined opposi- tion in its struggle for existence and was not willing to be swept away without resistance by the advancing avalanche, the entire nation was expelled from its land and dragged into the heart of the Assyrian empire, either directly into Assyria itself, or into regions which had been denationalised for generations and already been made Assyrian, whilst the depopulated country itself was filled with Assyrian colonists. The Assyrians had already noticed that the strong roots of the power of an individual as well as of a nation lie in its native soil. Home and country mutually determine each other and form an inseparable union. In those days they did so more than now, for then religion also was an integral part of the nation, and religion, too, was indissolubly associated with the soil. A nation's coun- try was the home and dwelling-place of its national THE BAB YL ONI AN EXILE. 1 09 Deity ; to be torn away from one's native soil was equi- valent to being torn away from Him, and thus was de- stroyed the strongest bond and the deepest source of nationality. The object of the transportation was attained. Such members of the ten tribes of Israel as were carried away in the year 722 have disappeared without a trace, and if that branch of the Semites commonly known as the Aramaic has never exhibited a distinct ethnographical type in history, the fact may be ascribed to the five hundred years' dominion of the Assyrians in those regions, who from the earliest times systemati- cally eradicated the national features of conquered countries. In their national sentiments Irael did not differ from the other nations of antiquity. Every country except Palestine was unclean, and to hold there the service of God was impossible. For a man like the prophet Hosea, who did not suffer himself to be gov- erned by prejudices, or allow his better judgment to be impaired, it was quite a matter of course that as soon as the people left the soil of Palestine, all service of God should cease of itself, and this for him is one of the deepest terrors of the threatened exile. He said : ''They shall not dwell in the Lord's land, but Ephraim shall return to Egypt and eat unclean things in Assyria. They shall not pour out wine-offerings to the Lord, neither shall they prepare burnt-offerings for Him ; their bread shall be unto them as the bread of no THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. mourners ; all that eat thereof shall be polluted : for their bread shall be for their appetite ; it shall not come into the house of the Lord. What will ye do in the solemn day and in the day of the feast of the Lord?" Such also was the thought one hundred and fifty years later, when Judah was carried into exile. The Babylonian government would have had no objection to the exiles building for themselves the altars and temples of their God in Mesopotamia — but it never entered the heads of the Jews to build a temple to God on the Euphrates, after that His own house on Mount Zion had been destroyed. Even the most religious man would have seen in this an insult, a mockery of the God of Israel : better not sacrifice at all than unclean things on unclean ground. And this condition of things was to last a long time. Jeremiah had distinctly named seventy years as the period during which God would grant dominion to the Chaldeans, and had re- peatedly and urgently warned the exiles to make ar- rangements for a long sojourn in the strange land. How, now, did Israel pass this period of probation ? The consequences of the Babylonian exile have been momentous in every way; the exile in Babylon quite transformed Israel and its religion ; it created what is known in religious history as Judaism, in con- tradistinction to Israelitism. To have been the first to clearly recognise that the Judaism of post-exilic times, although the organic outcome of the Israelitism of the THE BAB YL ON IAN EXILE, 1 1 1 exilic period, was yet something totally new and spe- cifically different from it, is the great and imperishable service of De Wette, who was indeed the first to gain any understanding at all of the religious history of the Old Testament in its real significance and tendencies. That the exile into Babylon exercised this stupendous transformative influence, was the natural result of the circumstances and of the logic of facts. A later writer of the Old Testament, whose name and period are unknown to us, he who gave to the Book of Amos the conciliatory conclusion already men- tioned, compares the Babylonian captivity to a sieve, in which the house of Israel is sifted, through which all the chaff and dust passes, but not the least grain falls to the earth. This comparison is excellent and char- acterises the situation with a distinctness and sharpness that could not be improved upon. The Babylonian exile did indeed bring about a sepa- ration of the religious from the irreligious section of the people, of the followers of the prophetic religion from the followers of the ancient popular religion. In the fall of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the prophetic religion won a complete victory over the old religion of the people, and the latter lost every possibility of further existence. The ancient Deity of the nation vanished in the smoke sent up by the conflagration of the temple of Solomon. He was vanquished and destroyed by the gods of Ne- buchadnezzar. His want of power had been plainly 1 1 2 THE PR OPHE TS OF I SR A EL. proved by the destruction of His people and of His house, and He himself lay buried beneath their ruins. The moral influence of the Babylonian captivity and its attendant features must also be taken into ac- count. Bowed down by the dread blows of fate, all confidence lost in themselves and their God, the Jews came, a despised and oppressed remnant, to Babylon, which was at that time in the zenith of its power and magnificence. What an overwhelming effect must the undreamt-of grandeur of their new surroundings have made upon them ! Their once so loved and admired Jerusalem, how poor it must have appeared to them when compared with the metropolis of Babylon with its gigantic buildings, its art, its luxury ! The temple of Solomon, at one time their pride and glory, was it not but a miserable village-church when likened to the wondrous edifice raised to the worship of the Baby- lonian God ! As the great unknown writer towards the end of the captivity expresses it, Israel was here but a worm and Jacob a maggot. How irresistible the temptation must have been : "Away with the old trash, let us bow down and acknowledge this new and powerful deity ! " Moreover, it was a decided personal advantage for a Jew to renounce his nationality and to become a Babylonian. We have in the literary productions of the time woful complaints concerning the brutal mock- ery and heartless derision to which the poor Jews were subjected in exile, nay more, they were subject to ill- THE BAB YL ON IAN EXILE. 1 1 3 treatment and personal violence. An extraordinary strength of character was necessary to remain stead- fast and true ; only really earnest and convinced reli- gious natures could resist such temptations. And thus the natural consequences of the conditions were that the half-hearted and lukewarm, the weak and those wanting in character, the worldly-minded, who thought only of personal advantage and honor, broke away, and that a refining process took place within Israel which left nothing remaining but the sacred remnant hoped for by Isaiah. Even on this remnant, which was really composed of the best and the noblest ele- ments of the people, the Babylonian captivity had a profound effect. The religion of Israel, in fact, was destined to undergo a deep change. Deuteronomy had already effected a separation be- tween the State and the Church, between the national and the religious life. Of course, at the outset the re- form had to reckon with these as concrete powers and weighty factors, but it is evident they stood in its way and formed serious obstacles to the realisation of its final aims, which were of a purely ecclesiastical char- acter. But now destiny had removed these hindrances. The State was destroyed, the national life extirpated, nothing but the ecclesiastical element remained. The hard logic of facts itself had drawn the conclusions of Deuteronomy, and afforded them the freest play for their growth and operation. Judah as a nation was destroyed by the Babylonian captivity as completely as 114 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. Israel was by the Assyrian, but it was transformed into Judaism. The State became a Church ; a nation was converted into a congregation. And this Judah, which had now become Judaism, had a world-wide mission to fulfil which was without parallel. The fu- ture and entire further development of religion de- pended upon it. The first person who clearly recognised the situa- tion of the Jews in the Babylonian captivity and sought to adapt the exiles to the change of conditions was Ezekiel, the son of Buzi. The significance and in- fluence of this man cannot be rated too highly. He took the initiative step in the entire development which followed, and gave to it its theological foundations. Ezekiel may be justly styled a theologian ; he is the first dogmatist of the Old Testament. EZEKIEL. T^ZEKIEL, was the son of a priest of the temple of ^-^ Jerusalem, and had been carried off to Babylon with the first captives, under Jehoiachin, in the year 597. Five years later, 592, he appeared as prophet. His work lasted for twenty-two years, but we know nothing of its details. He was at first a mere herald of the judg- ment ; the approaching complete destruction of Jeru- salem was his only theme. But his companions in misery refused to listen to him. National fanaticism, blind confidence in God, who in the end must perforce aid both His people and His temple, had seized pos- session of their hearts. Derided and maligned, the prophet was forced to be silent, till the fulfilment of his threat by the destruction of Jerusalem loosed the seal from his mouth and from the ears and hearts of his people. The Book of Ezekiel is the most voluminous of all the prophetic literature, and it is not easy to give in a few brief strokes a sketch of the man and of his impor- tance, but I will try to emphasise at least the main points. 1 1 6 THE PR OPHE TS OF I SR A EL . Personality is the characteristic of Ezekiel. Eze- kiel was a man of a thoroughly practical nature with a wonderfully sharp perception of the problems and needs of his age ; he understood how to read the signs of the times and to deduce the right lessons from them. In this respect he bears a most wonderful resemblance to Isaiah, with whom he has also a marked relationship of character. The key-note in the character of both is the immeasurable distance between God and man. In the image of God the predominant and decisive feature is His sanctity and majesty, His absolutely supramundane elevation in ethical and metaphysical matters, the consequence being that humility is the cardinal virtue of man. When confronting his God, Ezekiel feels himself to be only the '^son of man." When thought worthy of a divine revelation, he falls on his face to the ground, and it is God who raises him up and sets him on his feet. He has, in common with Isaiah, the same terrible moral earnestness, a certain vein of severity and harshness, which does not suffer the tenderer tones of the heart to come into full play. One of the most learned theologians of the present day has compared this prophet to Gregory VII. and Calvin, in both of whom personal amiability and sym- pathy are wanting, but who excite our unbounded ad- miration as men and characters by the iron consistency of their thought and the hard energy of their actions. There is much that is true and befitting in this com- EZEKIEL. 117 parison. Ezekiel — if I may be allowed the expres- sion — is pre-eminently churchman and organiser ; as such, the greatest that Israel ever had. He has left, in this respect, the imprint of his mind on all future ages, and marked out for them the path of develop- ment. As Isaiah transformed into practice the ideas of Amos and Hosea, so Ezekiel is thoroughly dependent on his great predecessor Jeremiah. He drew the con- clusions from the religious subjectivism and individ- ualism of Jeremiah, and bestowed upon them the cor- rective which they urgently needed. I will now endeavor to group together and to char- acterise the leading thoughts of Ezekiel in their most important aspects. The first thing Ezekiel is called upon to do is to vindicate God, even as against his most pious contemporaries. *'The way of the Lord is the wrong way," was a remark that Ezekiel must have repeatedly heard. And such views were not urged without a certain amount of justification. Were the people and the period just previous to the destruction of Jerusalem so especially wicked and godless? Had not King Josiah done everything to fulfil the demands of God? Yet this righteous king was made to suffer a horrible death, and misfortune on misfortune was heaped upon Judah. The proverb arose: "Our fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." This conception appears in a still more drastic form in lr8 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. a remarkable passage of the Book of Jeremiah, where the answer is hurled at the head of the prophet, who is warning and exhorting his people: ''When our fathers worshipped Baal and the stars, things went well with us, but since Josiah served the Lord only, things have gone ill." In opposition to such views, Ezekiel had now to bring forward proof that the judg- ment was deserved and unavoidable. To this end, he passes in review the entire past of the people, and comes to the conclusion that it had been one long chain of direst ingratitude and shocking sin. Jerusalem is much worse than Samaria, has acted more sinfully than the Gentiles ; even Sodom is justi- fied by the iniquity of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is as a rusty pot, whose filthiness cannot be removed by being burnt out, but which must be thrown into the furnace, so that its metal may be purged and rendered fit for a new cast. This appears heartless and is at times stated by Ezekiel with offensive severity. But to break up the new land required by Hosea and Jeremiah, the thorns and weeds must first be pitilessly dug out, and the earth upturned to its very depths by the plough- shares. Nothing else is Ezekiel's intention. By this painful process the ground is simply to be loosened for the new seed, for God takes no pleasure in the death of a sinner, but wishes rather that he be con- verted and live. And this conversion is quite pos- sible ; for the relation of God to man adjusts itself EZEKIEL. 119 according to the relation of man to God. Now, here is the point where Ezekiel's creative genius is dis- played. If religious personality be the true subject of religion, the inestimable value of every individual hu- man soul follows directly from this fact. Here it is that the lever must be applied, and in Ezekiel thus prophecy is transformed into the pastoral care of souls. The idea of pastoral care, and the recognition of it as a duty, is first found in Ezekiel. Even the Messiah does not appear to him in the pomp of a royal ruler, but as the good shepherd, who seeks him that is lost, goes after him that has strayed, binds up the wounded, and visits the sick and afflicted. Ezekiel considers this pastoral and educating office to be his vocation as prophet, and has conceived it with the sacred earnest- ness peculiar to himself : he feels himself to be per- sonally responsible for the soul of every one of his fellow-countrymen : ** If the wicked man sin, and thou givest him not warning, to save his life, the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul." With these words God makes Ezekiel a prophet, or, as he has vividly expressed it, a ** watchman over the house of Israel." Such was the practical conclusion which Ezekiel drew from Jeremiah's religious conceptions, and by which he introduced into the religio-historical devel- 120 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. opment of the world an entirely new force of imperish- able importance and of incalculable consequences. I spoke above, however, of a complement, of a corrective of the work of Jeremiah by Ezekiel, and this brings us to the point where Ezekiel exercised a powerful influence on the period which followed. Jeremiah with his religious subjectivism and individ- ualism had spoken the final and conclusive word on the relation of the individual to God. But beyond in- dividualism Jeremiah did not go. The conception of fellowship was altogether wanting in his views. He did not notice that great things on earth are only pro- duced by union. Ezekiel, on the other hand, regarded it as" the aim and task of his prophetic and pastoral mission to educate individuals not only to be religious, but also to be members of a community, which as such could not be subjectively determined only, but needed besides, definite objective rules and principles. The problem was, to preserve Israel in Babylon, to prevent the nation from being absorbed by the Gentiles. To this end Ezekiel insists that his people shall absolutely eschew the worship of the idols of their conquerors. He also discovers a means of directly worshipping God. Temple and sacrifices were wanting in the strange land, but they had the Sabbath, which apper- tained to no particular place nor land, which they could observe in Babylon just as well and in the same way as in Palestine. And so Ezekiel made the Sab- bath the fundamental institution of Judaism, or, as he EZB KIEL. 121 himself expresses it, ''a sign between God and Israel, by which they shall know that it is God who sanctifies them." On every seventh day Israel shall feel itself to be the holy people of God. Also in its mode of life Israel must prove itself a pure and holy people. Ezekiel warns his people against the sins of unchastity with greater emphasis than any of his predecessors. If the sanctification of wedded life and the purity of the family has ranked at all times as the costliest ornament and noblest treasure of the Jewish race, it is a possession, in which we cannot fail to recognise, more than any other, the seal which Ezekiel lastingly imprinted upon it. And moreover, Ezekiel urges and inculcates afresh the necessity of love towards brethren and neighbors. Every Israelite shall recognise in every other a brother and treat him with brotherly love, that the little band of dispersed and scattered exiles may be held together in ideal unity by this spiritual bond. If Ezekiel could only succeed in making of every individual a sanctified per- sonality, who at the same time felt himself to be a member of a community and was steeped with the conviction that he could find true salvation only in this community, then would there be some hope of obtaining citizens worthy of the Kingdom of God, which was sure to come. Ezekiel has given us a description of this future Kingdom of God, which ranks among the most remark- able creations of his book. It is the famous vision of 122 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. the new Jerusalem, which forms the conclusion of the Book of Ezekiel. Here he essentially follows Deute- ronomy. The service and worship of God are marked out most exactly, and the temple becomes, not only spiritually, but also materially, the centre of the whole nation and its life. The priests and Levites receive a definite portion of land as the material foundation of their existence. Most noteworthy of all, however, is the future pic- ture of the State in the vision of Ezekiel. In earlier speeches Ezekiel had expressed the hope that the fu- ture king would come of the house of David, though the king he pictures exhibits quite peculiar ecclesias- tical characteristics. Now, however, there is no fur- ther mention of a king ; he is merely called the prince. And what is his position? In the new Jerusalem crime is unknown, as God bestows on all a new heart and a new mind, and turns them into a people who walk in the way of his commandments, observe his laws, and act accordingly. The administration of justice, then, is no longer needed, and so one of the most important moral functions of the government dispensed with. Should, however, a crime or transgression actually occur, it must be atoned for by an ecclesiastical pen- ance. Nor has the State need to provide for the ex- ternal welfare of the people, for God gives all things bounteously now and no one is in want. Neither are measures for the external security of the country re- quired, for this is a kingdom of everlasting peace. EZEKIEL. 123 where war is no longer possible. Should a heathen nation dare to disturb this peace and stretch forth its hand against the Kingdom of God, God himself will interfere and in the fire of His wrath destroy the offen- der, so that Israel will only need to bury the corpses, and to burn with fire the weapons of the enemy, as described by Ezekiel in his wondrous vision of Gog, chief of the land of Magog. In such conditions no function is left for the prince but that of representative of his people, and patron of the church. He has to look after the temple, and sup- ply the materials of worship, for which purpose he can only collect from the people gifts of such things as are needful for the sacrifice : sheep, goats, bullocks, oxen, corn, wine, oil. All taxes are exclusively church taxes. The prince receives, so as not to oppress his people, nor exact unlawful tribute from them, a rich demesne of land, which he tills like every other Israelite. Also each individual tribe receives its determinate portion of the sacred land. We have here for the first time in perfect distinct- ness the conception of a Kingdom of God, or, as we might also say, of an ecclesiastical State. The State is completely absorbed in the Church. Such is Eze- kiel's new Jerusalem, and its name is ** Here is God." These ideas were feasible as long as the Baby- lonians, the Persians, and the Greeks deprived the Jews of all secular and governmental functions and discharged them themselves. Theocracy as a fact, for 124 '^H^ PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. such we are wont to call this conception after a word coined by Josephus, — theocracy as a fact, realised in this world, needed as its complement and as its pre- supposition the conquest and government of the Jews by a foreign power. So soon, however, as Judah was enabled and obliged to form a national and political State, this contradiction asserted itself, and the tragical conflict arose which five hundred years later brought about the destruction of the State of the Maccabees.^ ^Professor Cornill has devoted much time and labor to the prophet Ezek- iel, the results of which were published in his works, Der Prophet Ezechiel ge- schildert, Heidelberg, 1882; Das Buch des Propheten Ezechiel herausgegeben, Leipsic, 1886. We regret to add that these books have not as yet been trans- lated.— /'«^/wÄ^r, THE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE EXILE. TN THE generation succeeding Ezekiel no prophet ^ appeared in Babylon. Literary work followed other paths and other aims. The task which now de- volved on the nation was the inventorying of the spir- itual property of Israel ; possibly the people also began at this time the collecting of the prophetic writ- ings ; at any rate they busied themselves extensively with the historical literature of the past. The great philosopher Spinoza had observed that the historical books of the Old Testament, as now known to us, form a connected historical whole, nar- rating the history of the people of Israel from the crea- tion of the world to the destruction of Jerusalem, and marshalling all materials under causal points of view of a distinctively religious character. This biassed but magnificent account of the past life of the chosen peo- ple was undertaken during the Babylonian exile, as we can discover from indubitable literary evidence. At the time in question all the outward and speci- 126 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL, fically psychological conditions existed which favored such a bent of the mind. The destruction of State and nationality awakened a new interest in the past. As in the time of Germany's profoundest national dis- grace, under the compulsory dominion of Napoleon, the love of the nation's all but forgotten past was re- aroused to life, and people buried themselves with lov- ing discernment in the rich depths of German min- strelsy, beginning once more to understand the German art of bygone days ; as the Germans recalled to mind the names of Henry the Fowler, Frederick Barbarossa, Walther von der Vogelweide, and Albrecht Dürer : so, during the captivity in Bab34on, the Jews lost them- selves in the stories of Moses and David, Samuel and Elijah. They sought to lift themselves, by a study of their ancient greatness and by memories of the past, to a plane where they could withstand the present, and strengthen themselves for the future. In thus contemplating the past, however, it was necessary to explain above all how the dread present had come to pass. For those exiled compilers and expounders of the ancient historical traditions of Is- rael, as for Ezekiel, the problem of all problems was the vindication of God, that is, a theodicy. And this theodicy, as in the case of Ezekiel, was conducted to show that all must have happened exactly as it did. All the evil which befell Israel is a punishment for sins and especially for the worship of idols. The sins of Jeroboam, who exhibited two golden calves at Dan LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE EXILE. 127 and Bethel, hastened the destruction of Israel, and the sins of Manasseh, who had offered sacrifices in the temple of Jerusalem to Baal and to the stars, could only be atoned for by the destruction of Judah, de- spite the radical conversion and reforms of his grand- son Josiah. Thus arose this prophetic exposition of the history of Israel, which converts the historian into a prophet with his eyes turned to the past. But this historical writing has not only a theoreti- cal side, looking back to the past, but also an emi- nently practical side, looking forward to the future. The Jews have a firm hope in the restoration of the nation, for which they possessed an infallible guaran- tee in the prophetical promise. Ever since Hosea the prophets had distinctly announced the judgment, but only seen in the judgment the necessary transition to the final salvation. On this latter they counted, and prepared themselves for its arrival. And this prophetic history of the past shall be both a warning and a guid- ance for the future. The new Israel risen again from the tomb of captivity shall avoid the sins and errors of the old Israel, which caused her destruction. We have thus in the historical work of the exile a sort of applied prophecy, whose influence and efficacy were perhaps even greater than that of prophecy itself. We see thus that the exiles lived in constant hope. Nor had they long to wait for its fulfilment. Seventy years was the time fixed by Jeremiah as the period of the Chaldean rule. But forty-eight years after the 128 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. destruction of Jerusalem the kingdom of Babylon had ceased to exist, and, in the year following, the new king granted to the exiles the long-wished-for permis- sion to return to the land of their fathers. The Baby- lonian kingdom rested wholly on the person of its founder, and only survived his death twenty-three years. Nebuchadnezzar is styled by modern historians, not unjustly, "the great." He is the most towering personality in the whole history of the ancient Orient, and a new era begins with him. The greatness of the man consists in the manner in which he conceived his vocation as monarch. Nebuchadnezzar was a war- rior as great as any that had previously existed. He had gained victories and made conquests equal to those of the mightiest rulers before him. But he never mentions a word of his brilliant achievements in any of the numerous inscriptions we have of him. We know of his deeds only through the accounts given by those whom he conquered, and from strangers who admired him. He himself tells us only of buildings and works of peace, which he completed with the help of the gods, whom he worshipped with genuine rev- erence. The gods bestowed on him sovereignty, that he might become the benefactor of his people and subjects. He rebuilt destroyed cities, restored ruined temples, laid out canals and ponds, regulated the course of rivers, and established harbors, so as to open safe ways and new roads for commerce and trafHc. We see in this a clear conception of the moral LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE EXILE. 129 duties of the State, where its primary object is to be- come a power for civilisation. Forty-three years were allotted to Nebuchadnez- zar, in which he reigned to the welfare of humanity. He died in the year 561. Destiny denied to him a befitting successor. His son, Evil Merodach, was murdered two years after, for his atrocities and disso- luteness, by his brother-in-law, Nergalsharezer, who must have been a descendant of the older line of Baby- lonian kings. At his death four years later, Nergal- sharezer was able to bequeath the empire intact to his son Labasi-marduk. But as this king, according to the Babylonian historian Berosus, exhibited a thor- oughly bad character, he was slain by his courtiers after nine months of sovereignty, and Nabu-nahid ascended the throne, 555 B. C, as the last of the Babylonian kings. Nabu-nahid, or Nabonidus, ap- pears to have been a personally mild and just ruler, with literary and antiquarian tastes, to which we owe much that is important. But a storm lowered over his head, which was soon to destroy with the rapidity of lightning both himself and his kingdom. Cyrus, the Median viceroy of that primitive and robust nation of hunters and horsemen, the Persians, had shaken off the Median yoke. In the year 550 he had conquered and taken prisoner Astyages, the last Median king, and captured his capital Ecbatana. Four years later, Lydia, the powerful neighboring empire of Cyrus, succumbed to his resistless courage and energy. I30 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. And now the destruction, or at least the conquest, of the Babylonian empire was but a question of time. A mighty seething was taking place among the Jewish exiles. Anxiously and full of confidence they awaited the saviour and avenger who would destroy Babylon and again restore Jerusalem. And in this period of the gathering storm, the stillness before the tempest, prophecy again lifted up its voice in one of its noblest and grandest representatives, the great Unknown, who wrote the concluding portions of the Book of Isaiah, and who is therefore called the Second, or Deutero- Isaiah. DEUTERO-ISAIAH. TT IS now generally admitted, and may be regarded ■^ as one of the best established results of Old Testa- ment research, that the portion of our present Book of Isaiah, which embraces Chapters 40 to 66, did not ema- nate from the prophet Isaiah known to us, but is the work of an unknown prophet of the period towards the end of the Babylonian captivity. In many respects this Second or Deutero-Isaiah must be accounted the most brilliant jewel of prophetic literature. In him are gathered together as in a focus all the great and noble meditations of the prophecy which preceded him, and he reflects them with the most gorgeous refraction, and with the most beauteous play of light and color. In style he is a genius of the first rank, a master of language, and a proficient in diction equalled by few. One feels almost tempted to call him the greatest among the prophets, were it not that we find in him the most distinct traces that the Israelitish prophecy had reached once for all its culminating point in Jeremiah, and that we are now starting on the 132 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. downward slope. These traces, it is true, are scat- tered and sporadic in Deutero-Isaiah, but they are the more striking in connexion with a mind of such pre- eminence. Prophecy has now a drop of foreign blood in its veins, which the first Isaiah or Jeremiah would have repudiated with indignation. The influence and views of Deuteronomy, which first disintegrated and then completely stifled prophecy, now begin to make themselves felt. The fundamental theme and the burden of his mes- sage is told by Deutero-Isaiah in the first words of his book, which also form the beginning of Handel's Mes- siah, and are well-known to every lover of music in the wondrously solemn strains of the master : '< Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her day of trial is accomplished and that her iniquity is pardoned ; for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins." In the wilderness the way shall be prepared for God and his people returning to their home : *' Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low ; and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain. For now the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." And all these wonders shall be fulfilled, for no DEÜTERO-ISAIAH. 133 power in man can hinder God's work, because his promise remains eternally. ''All flesh is grass, and all the splendor thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth : because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand forever." And now Jerusalem lying in its ruins is addressed, and the joyful message shouted to the other Jewish towns that were demolished : ''O Zion that bringeth good tidings, get thee up into a high mountain. O Jerusalem that bringeth good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength ; lift it up, be not afraid ; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God ! Behold the Lord God will come with strong hand and his arm shall rule free in his omnipotence : behold his reward is with him, and his recompense be- fore him. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd ; he shall gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young." What fills the prophet with this hope, that which has given him the assurance that now the salvation promised by God is about to be accomplished, are the victories and deeds of Cyrus, by which the king had proved himself to be the chosen weapon, the executor of the divine judgment on Babylon. ''Who hath raised up the man from the east, in whose footsteps victory follows, hath given the nations 134 "^HE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. before him, and made him rule over kings? hath given them as dust to his sword, and as the driven stubble to his bow? He pursueth them, and passeth on safely, even by ways that his feet have never trodden.'* ''I have raised up him from the north and he shall come : from the rising of the sun shall he call upon my name, and he shall come upon princes as upon mortar, and as the potter treadeth clay." "I have raised him up for victory and I will make straight all his ways ; he shall build my city again, and he shall let my exiles go free." *' I shall call a ravenous bird from the east, and the man that executeth my counsel from a far country ; yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass ; I have purposed it, I will also do it." God loves him, and has chosen him to perform his pleasure on Babylon and execute his judgment on the Chaldeans. **I, even I, have spoken ; yea, I have called him, I have brought him hither, and his way shall be pros- perous." Cyrus is even called directly by name, so that there may not be the slightest doubt as to the upshot of the matter : *' I am the Lord that saith of Cyrus : He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure, even say- ing to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built, and to the tem- ple, thy foundation shall be laid again.'* '' Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, DEUTERO-ISAIAH. 135 whose right hand I have strengthened, to subdue na- tions before him ; and the doors shall open before him, and the gates shall not be shut. I myself will go be- fore thee and make the rugged places plain ; I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron ; and I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by name, am the God of Israel." Here the prophet calls the Persian conqueror by the most honorable names, '' Shepherd," even '' anointed of God," and here must be considered the curious fact, that he nov/here speaks of a future Messiah of the house of David, but that he is always concerned sim- ply with God on the one hand, and with Israel and Jerusalem on the other. This seems to have met with lively opposition from his first hearers. They cannot bring themselves to find in a Gentile the executor of that, which according to general expectation the ideal Son of David should accomplish ; and thus Deutero- Isaiah in a very remarkable passage chides their ques- tionings and anxieties, which is tantamount to a criti- cism of the plan of God, who has decided upon this Persian king as his shepherd and as his anointed. And that leads us to a cardinal feature in Deutero-Isaiah, — namely, the stress he lays on the omnipotence of God, and which the prophet never wearies of repeating in ever newer and loftier variations : ''Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of 136 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? " '' Behold the nations before him are as a drop of a bucket and are counted as the small dust of a balance : behold he weigheth the isles as dust. And Lebanon is not sufficient for wood to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. All nations before him are as nothing : and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity." *' It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers ; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spread- eth them out like a tent to dwell in." *< Lift up your eyes to heaven. Who hath created this? He that bringeth out their host by number and calleth them all by names ; for that he is strong in power, not one faileth. " This omnipotent God of Israel is the only God in Heaven and on earth, everlasting, eternal, the first and the last, and beside Him there is no God. Deutero- Isaiah lays special emphasis on this point. No one has held up to scorn more bitterly than he the idols of the heathen, and proved their emptiness and impo- tence. *'The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth thereon silver chains. He that is too impoverished DEUTERO-ISAIAH. 137 for such an outlay chooseth a tree that will not rot ; and seeketh unto him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image, that shall not rock." ^^They helped every one his neighbour and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage. So the workman encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the hammer him that smiteth the an- vil, saying of the soldering, It is good : and he fasten- eth it with nails, that it should not be moved." *' They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith, and he maketh it a god : they fall down, yea, they worship it. They bear him upon the shoulder, they carry him, and set him in his place and he standeth ; from his place shall he not remove : yea, one shall cry unto him, yet he cannot answer, nor save him out of his trouble. '* And, again, in the principal passage : ''Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is profitable for nothing? Behold all his fellows shall be ashamed, for the workmen they are men. The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals and fashioneth with hammers, and worketh it with the strength of his arms ; he groweth hungry and his strength faileth : he drinketh no water and is faint. The carpenter stretcheth out his rule, he marketh it out with a line, he fitteth it with planes, and he mark- eth it out with the compass, and shapeth it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man, to dwell in a house. He heweth him down cedars and 138 7'HE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. taketh the holm-tree and the oak which he strengthen- eth for himself among the trees of the forest ; he planteth a fir-tree and the rain doth nourish it, that it shall be for a man to burn. And he taketh thereof and warmeth himself ; yea, he kindleth it and maketh bread ; yea, he maketh a god and worshippeth it ; he maketh it a graven image and falleth down thereto. He burneth part thereof in the fire ; with part thereof he eateth flesh ; he roasteth roast and is satisfied ; yea, he warm- eth himself and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have felt the fire : And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image : he falleth down unto it and wor- shippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me ; for thou art my god. . . . And none considereth in his heart, neither is there knowledge nor under- standing to say, I have burned part of it in the fire ; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof ; I have roasted flesh and eaten it : and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? shall I fall down to the stock of a tree? " And the exclusive divinity of this God of Israel is now proved by Deutero-Isaiah most characteristically from the prophecy : he is the only One who has pre- viously foretold the future : '*Thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel, and his redeemer, the Lord of hosts. I am the first and I am the last ', and beside me there is no God. Who is as I? Let him stand forth and say it and declare it, and set it opposite to me. And the things that are com- DEUTERO-ISAIAH. 139 ing, and that shall come to pass, let them declare. Fear ye not, neither be afraid : have I not declared unto thee of old, and shewed it? ye even are my wit- nesses, whether there be a God, whether there be a rock beside me?" This God of prophecy, whose predictions never fail, had long foretold that Babylon must fall, and He, the Almighty, before whom the people are as nothing, He will now carry out His plan, through Cyrus, His shepherd and His anointed. The impending destruc- tion of the Babylonian tyrant, of his kingdom, and of his city, is described in the most vivid colors of hatred and scorn. And then shall take place the re- turn of Israel to the land of its fathers. God himself heads the procession and makes in the wilderness a safe way through shady trees and rippling fountains, that they may build at last the new Jerusalem, whose splendor the prophet depicts in the most gorgeous colors. *'For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. O thou af- flicted, tossed with tempests, and not comforted, be- hold I will set thy stones in fair colors and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy pin- nacles of rubies, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy border of precious stones. And all who build thee shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the 140 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. peace of thy children. In righteousness shalt thou be established ; thou shalt be far from oppression for thou shalt not fear, and from terror for it shall not come near thee. If bands gather together against thee, it shall not be from me : and whosoever shall gather to- gether against thee shall fall because of thee." '< I will make thy officers peace, and thine exactors righteous- ness . . . and thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise. The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee ; but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. . . . Thy people also shall be all righteous ; they shall inherit the land forever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified." Brilliant as all this is, however, it is in a manner only a secondary achievement of Deutero-Isaiah. His special and fundamental conception is different, and infinitely more profound than this. He adopted the idea, first clearly conceived by the original Isaiah, of a world's history, but widened it and deepened it by combination with one of Jeremiah's thoughts. Accord- ing to Jeremiah, all men and all nations are destined and called upon to turn to God and become His chil- dren. Deutero-Isaiah sees in this the final aim of the history of the world, towards which its entire develop- ment and guidance strives. *' My house shall be called a house of prayer unto all nations." Now, this gives to him an entirely new foundation DEUTERO-ISAIAH. 141 for his contemplation of Israel. Israel alone knows and possesses the true God. Only through Israel can the other nations learn to know Him, and thus Israel becomes the servant and messenger of God, the laborer and herald of God to man. Israel is to mankind what the prophet is to Israel. God is the God of the whole earth, and Israel His prophet for the whole earth. Thus may we sum up most succinctly the theology of Deutero-Isaiah. He says : *4. 6. Old Testament, Spinoza on, 125. Omri, the dynasty of, 33. Oracle, ancient Israelitic, its func- tions, 25, 87; abolished by Deuter- onomy, 85, Paganism, in Israel and Judah, 38, 52, 74-75. Palestine, 16, 26, 30. Palestrina, his musical setting of the verses of Micah, 75. Pantheon, of the heathen Semites, 21. Passover, feast of, 23, 26. Pastoral care of souls, 119 et seq. Patriarchs, 72. Pekah, king of Israel, attacks Ahaz of Judah, 62; conquered and exe- cuted by Tiglath-Pileser, 63. Pentateuch, its analysis by De Wette, 83 ; juridical parts of the first books of, written by the post-exilic Baby- lonian Jews, 159. Pentecost, the feast of, 86. Pergamon, the kingdom of, 175. Persecution, only intensifies religious zeal, 93. Persians, under Cyrus, 129 ; their re- ligion, 145 ; overthrow Babylon, 144, 156, and succor the Jews, 147 ; sub- due Egypt, 149; consolidated by Darius, 150-154; their empire de- stroyed by Alexander the Great, 165. Pharaoh, Egyptian king, 10. Pharisaism, Judaism transformed into, 176. Philistines, 43, 44. Phoenician prophets, 12. Phraortes, king of the Medes, lays siege to Nineveh, 77. Pindar, 11. Plat, I will requite thee in this, 32. Ploughshares, turned into swords, 165. Polytheism, 24. Potter, as the, treadeth clay, 134= Pouring out of the spirit, 165. Praise, shall call thy gates, 140. Prayer, my house a house of, 140. Precious from the vile, freeing the, 94. 171- Prepare ye in the wilderness a way, 132. Priesthood, old Israelitic concep- tion of, modified by Deuteronomy, 87 et seq.; all its members de- scended from the tribe of Levi, 87 ; gradually takes the place of proph- ecy, 90; its transformation in the post-exilic period, 149; its post- exilic backsliding from God, 156. Priestly code, of the post-exilic Bab- ylonian Jews, also called the fun- damental writing of the Penta- teuch, 159-160. Prince of the New Jerusalem, in Eze- kiel, 122-124. Prophecy, compared to a sealed book, 1; pre-requisites of a knowledge of, 2; meaning of the term, 3-15; originally a foreign element in the Israelitic religion, 14 ; its activity always coincident with historical catastrophes, 34-35; the rise of written, 37 et seq.; its practical in- fluence in Isaiah, 68 ; attacks the religion of the people, 71 ; how in- fluenced by Deuteronomy, 82 et seq.; abdicates in favor of the priesthood, 89-go; Jeremiah's con- ception of, 93-94, 95; reaches its highest consummation in Jeremiah, 98; wins a triumph over the popu- lar religion in the Babylonian exile, III ; applied in the historical liter- ature of Israel, 127; its character, etc., in the period after the exile, 149 et seq.; change of its style, in Zechariah, becoming literary in form, 152; lowest degradation and caricature of, in Zechariah, Chap- ters 9-14, 167-169; flares upward victorious for the last time in Jonah and Daniel, 169, 170, 177; Israel's costliest and noblest bequest to the world, 173, 179 ; superior to any other intellectual production of INDEX. 191 mankind, 178 ; its relation to Chris- tianity, 178; its tremendous signifi- cance to the world, 178 ; called Mary the mother of Christianity, 178; God's noblest gift of grace, 178. Prophet, originally not a foreteller of the future, 5 et seq.; etymologi- cal analysis of the Hebrew word, 8-13 ; the primitive Canaanite type, 13 et seq.; the storm-petrels of the world's history, 35; the true char- acter of the Israelitic prophet, 35 at seq.; Israel God's prophet to the whole earth, 141 et seq., 162. wpo(l>r]TTjq, Greek for prophet, mean- ing of, 5, II. Prophetic exposition of the history of Israel in the Babylonian exile, 126-128. Prophets, general ignorance of their significance, 1-2; the schools of, 14 et seq., 28 ; the reaction against, under Manasseh, 71-79; their per- secution infuses in them new life, 80; their influence with Josiah, 81 ; their altered relation to God after the exile, 152 ; the distinctive note of all their religious activity, 154 ; post-exilic reaction against their predictions, 155-156. Pruning-hooks, turned into spears, 165. Psaltery, tablet, etc., prophets with a, 12. Ptolemies, the Egyptian, support the Jews, 175. Pyrrhic victory of prophecy, 89. Quietness, in, shall ye be saved, 57. Ramah, place of worship, 26. Razor, that is hired, shaved with, 63. Rechabites, abstainers from wine, Jeremiah's approval of, 97. Reed, a bruised, shall he not break, 142. Reform, of Ezra and Nehemiah, 160 et seq.; of Josiah, 83, 90, 127. Reins, God tries the heart and the, an expression coined by Jeremiah, 97- Religion, Israel's first impulses al- ways spring from, 27; as defined by Amos, 42; by Hosea, 52; saved by Isaiah, 69 ; its power among primitive peoples, 71, 108-109; its fundamental problem, the relation of God and the world, 83; Deuter- onomy's conception of, 83-84, 89; Jeremiah's conception of, 96-99; Jesus's conception of, 84; reduced by Deuteronomy to three great feasts, 86-87 ; reaches its highest Old Testament consummation in Jeremiah, 98-99 ; Ezekiel's viewof, 119; made a matter of a book by Deuteronomy, 152; its neglect after the exile, 157; universal, the idea of, first clearly conceived by Isra- elitic prophecy, 45, 178. Remembrance-book, God's, 158. Remnant, Isaiah's, 58, 63; sifted out in the Babylonian captivity, 113. Rend, the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, Behold I will, 28. Resurrection of the dead, first taught as a postulate of faith in Isaiah, Chapters 24-27, 166-167; becomes a dogma in Daniel, 174. Revealed religion, conception of, in- troduced by Deuteronomy, 90. Revelry, at the ancient Israelitic fes- tivals, 28 et seq. Rezin, last king of Damascus, con- quered and executed by Tiglath- Pileser, 62, 63. Righteousness, in, shalt thou be es- tablished, 140; also 144, 166. Robber, Assyrian compared to, 78. Rock, beside Me, Is there a, 139. Sabbath, known to the old Babylon- ians, 26; made a fundamental in- stitution of Judaism by Ezekiel, 120-121. Sacrifices, in ancient Israel, 37 et seq.; the ancient Israelitic concep- tion of, 85-86; revolutionised by Deuteronomy, 87-88, 192 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. Salvation, by works, 159 ; thy walls, called, 140. Samaria, 30, 39, 44, 118. Samuel, not a prophet but a seer, 12; his character and historical import, 27-28 ; the mother of, at the festival of Shiloh, 38, 126. Sanctuaries, the ancient local, 85. Sanskrit, 9. Sargon, Assyrian king, 64. Saul, among the prophets, 12-13; his character misjudged, 28, 29. Scales, weigh the mountains in, 136. Scythians, devastate Asia, 76, 99. Sealed book, prophecy a, i. Seamen, heathen, their behavior con- trasted with that of Jonah's, 171. Seed, holy, of Isaiah, 58. Seer, for prophet, 12. Seleucidae, conquer Egypt and at- tempt to Hellenise the Jews, 176; repulsed by the Maccabees, 176-177. Semites, their religion, 7; their lan- guage, 5 et seq. Sennacherib, Assyrian king, 66; at- tacks Judah and besieges Jerusa- lem, 62, 72. Seraiah, the last priest of the old temple of Jerusalem, 148. Seraphs, original meaning of, 21. Servant, Israel, my, 141-142. Shake the heaven and the earth, 151. Shaphan, Josiah's scribe, delivers Deuteronomy to the king, 81. Sheep, like, for the slaughter, 94. Shepherd, the Messiah compared to a good, by Ezekiel, 119; of God, Cyrus called the, 135. Sheshbazzar, Persian commissary, heads the return of the Jews, 147. Shiloh, place of worship, 26, 38. Sichem, place of worship, 26; Sieve, Babylonian captivity com- pared to a. III. Sign, from God, Ahaz challenged by Isaiah to ask for a, 62; between God and Israel, i2i. Signet, make Zerubbabel, as a, 151. Sin, the propitiation of, as viewed by Deuteronomy, 88. Sinai, its connexion with Moses and the religion of Israel, 18-21 ; pen- insula of, 21. Sins, Israel knew only sins, no crimes, 25 ; of Israel, the prophets' constant reference to, 164. Sisera, the stars fight, 27. Sistine Chapel, 75. Slave, I am thy son and, 63. Slaves, Hebrew, set free to save Je- rusalem, but afterwards basely forced into new servitude, 105. Slow of speech and tongue, 10. Smith, makes idols, 137. Sodom, justified, 118. Solomon, his worship of idols, 23, 30; his despotic government, 23 ; inter- pretation of his supposed idolatry, 30; opens Israel to the world, 30. Son of Man, expression used by Eze- kiel, 116; designation of the Messi- anic ruler as the, in Daniel, 174. Souls, Ezekiel's pastoral care of, 119 et seq. Sour grapes, our fathers have eaten, etc., 117. Spinoza, his view of the historical books of the Old Testament, 125. Spirit, of wisdom and understanding, 60 ; the pouring out of the, 165. Stars, Assyrian worship of, in Judaea, 74, 81, 118, 127; fight for Israel, 27. State and Church, opposition of, cre- ated by Deuteronomy, 88-89, 114. State, ecclesiastical, Ezekiel's ideal of, 122-124. Strength, his God, 79. Stubble, as driven, to his bow, 134. Sycomore-fruit, gatherer of, 14, 41. Symbols, in Zechariah's visions, 152. Synagogue, excludes Daniel from the prophetic writings, 174. Syncretism, religious, 31. Syria, invaded by the Assyrians, 73; under Antiochus IV., 176. Syrians, Have I not brought up the, from Kir, 43. Tabernacles, feast of, 26, 86. Tarshish (Tartessus), Jonah flees to, 171, 172. Tatnai, Persian satrap, 154. INDEX. 193 Tears, that my eyes were a fountain of, 95- Teeth, prophets that bite with their, 35 ; children's on edge, 117. Teiresias, soothsayer, 5. Tekoa, Amos's home, 40, Temple, the new, begun and com- pleted, 151, 154 ; feeling of the Jews towards, 155. Testify against me, 75. Testimony, bind up the, 63. Theocracy, so-called, of the Old Tes- tament, originates with Hosea, 54; its realisation possible only under foreign rule, 123-124. Theodicy, or vindication of God, the Jews' need of, in the exile, 126. See also Ezekiel. Theology of history, Deutero-Isaiah's, 143- Tiglath-Pileser, Assyrian king, the suzerain of Ahaz, conquers Damas- cus and Israel, 62-63. Trumpet, Shall a, be blown ? 35. Tyre, 30. Unchastity, religious, 23-24. Unclean things in Assyria, eat, 109. Universal, history, Isaiah's concep- tion of, 57-58; religion, the idea of, first clearly conceived by Israelitic prophecy, 45, 178. Urijah, prophet, executed by Jehoia- kim, 100. Uzziah, king, 61. Vile, freeing of the precious from, 94. 171. Vineyard of Naboth, 31 et seq. Virgin, of Israel, is fallen, 40. Visions, of Zechariah, 152-153. Walther von der Vogelweide, 126, Watchman, over the house of Israel, Ezekiel's definition of a prophet, 119; also 35. Waters, O that my head were, 95. Wearied, ye have, the Lord, 157, Weeks, feast of, 26, 86. Whale, Jonah's, 170. Wickedness, wicked man, etc., 32, "9. 157. 158, 166. Wine and strong drink, I will, proph- esy of, 35. Wine-drinking, Jeremiah on, 97. Works, salvation by, in later Juda- ism, origin and meaning, 159. Worm, Jacob as a, 112, 141. Wormwood, justice turned to, 44. Worship, paganism in, causes the decay of Israel, 71 ; the reforms of, by Hezekiah, 68 ; how viewed by the Jews, 72 ; by Josiah, 82, 83, 90 ; centralised by Deuteronomy in Je- rusalem, 84-88. Wrath, O day of, 76-77; cup of, 94, loi. Writ, holy, idea of, introduced by Deuteronomy, 90. Yahveh, original Hebrew pronuncia- tion of Jehovah, 17 ; the name in- troduced by Moses, 18-19; etymo- logical meaning, 19-21 ; originally a tempest-god worshipped on Mt. Sinai, 20-21 ; worshipped under the image of a bull, 37, 52; His ex- clusiveness and intimate relation to Israel, 25, 31; prophets of, 30. Yokes of wood, thou hast broken, etc., 103. Zarephath, the widow of, succored by Elijah, 31. Zebaoth, the Lord of Hosts, a name coined by Amos, 46. Zeboim, Shall I set thee as, 52. Zechariah, prophet, 152-153 ; vision of, 2. Zechariah, Chapters 9-14, dates from the third century, shows the lowest degradation of the prophetic litera- ture of Israel, 167-169. Zedekiah, king of Judah, seated on the throne by Nebuchadnezzar, 1-2; his revolt against Nebuchadnezzar, 103-104 ; taken captive and led to Babylon in chains, 105-106. Zephaniah, prophet, 76 et seq.; his description of Josiah's corrupt court, 81. 194 THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL. 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