600 A.D., and his testimony on our present subject is only of use to show the continuity of opinion down to so late a date.

Ὁμοῦ δὲ τῶν βασιλέων τὰς πράξεις καὶ τὰ τέλη, Εσδρας ὁ σοφὸς, ἐν τῇ ἐπανόδῳ γενόμενος τοῦ λαοῦ, τῇ ἀπὸ τῆς αἰχμαλω σίας, ἀποπνημονεύσας ἅπασαν τὴν βίβλον τῶν Βασιλέων τῶν τε εὐσε βῶς βιωσάντων τάς πράξεις· μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα ἐπιγνοὺς τίνα ἐστι παραλειφθέντα αὐτῳ ἐν τῇ Βασιλειῶν βίβλῳ, ἰδίᾳ ταῦτα πάλιν ἀνενέγκας ἐξέθετο, ἐπείπερ ἡ προτέρα βίβλος ἡ ἐκδοθεῖσα παρὰ πολλῶν ἐξήλειπτο· ἣν τινα βίβλον ἐν δυσὶ τόμοις ἐγγραφεῖσαν Ἰουδαῖοι μὲν “ Λόγοι Λόγοι ἡμερῶν,” ή δε Εκκλησία “ Παρα λειπομένων βίβλον” ἐπέγραψεν. — JOSEPHI HYPOMNESTICON, ii, 131, in FABRICII Cod. Pseud. V. T., ii, 274.

At the same time the acts of the kings and their deaths, Esdras the wise living amid the return of the people from Babylon, writing from memory all the book of kings and the acts of those who lived religiously; and after this, noticing what things had been omitted by him in the book of the kings' acts, he again put forth and published these separately, since the former book put forth by him had been obliterated from many ; which book, written in two volumes, the Jews entitled the “Words of Days," but the Church Book of Paraleipomena (things omitted).

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE PROPHETS.

AN important testimony to the recent formation of the Jewish canon is thought by some writers to be found in the discrepancies which they say exist between the teaching of the earlier prophets and the Mosaic law, as we now have it in the Pentateuch and elsewhere. These writers assert that the enactments of that law are more in harmony with the fierce spirit of the Jewish sacerdotalism after the re-establishment of their nation than with the character of their great lawgiver, who could not have maintained his influence over the multitude that escaped from Egypt, unless he had acquired a hold on their affections by his humanity as well as on their obedience by his power.

We are not able, it is true, to trace this class of evidence from the beginning; for the earliest prophets seem to have written nothing. In their time, no doubt, the living speech. and action were more ready and useful whilst literature was not sufficiently advanced. The whole of the Old Testament, except the strictly historical portions of it, betrays a strong

cast of poetry, and that is always found in the early state of all nations, especially in the East, where every product of the mind presents itself not only in a poetical, but in a dramatic form. Now the Jews were not less barbarous than the other nations by which they were surrounded, nor do they appear to have been less bigoted on that account in the worship of the true God, or more advanced in the observance of those humane laws and customs, which, not religion, but social culture can create. It is certain that there were prophets from the commencement of the Hebrew commonwealth, and fragments of their oracles appear throughout the early course of Jewish history, from Joshua to Joel; of which we probably have an instance in Judges, ii, 1, where an angel of Jehovah is said to have appeared and spoken to the people. The angel or messenger was probably a prophet, and in the same book (vi, 8) a similar messenger sent by God is denominated a prophet and not an angel.

Recurring then to our argument, we may observe some striking peculiarities in the form which all the prophetical books now bear. They are seventeen in number, and the authorship of the first five is ascribed to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, who are called the Major or Greater Prophets; whilst the twelve other books appear under the names of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, who are termed the Minor Prophets, not from any inferiority of style, but from the smaller quantity which has been handed down to us of their writings. The dates at which these prophets are supposed to have lived, have been already given. in Chapter II of this volume, and at least five of them wrote either during the last years of the Captivity, or after the captives had returned to their own land.

An interesting subject of inquiry here arises. What was the essential difference between the priests and the prophets, and what were the duties of each class? It is the opinion of an able German critic, De Wette, that the teaching of the prophets was mostly spiritual, and that, holding no official position among the people like that of the priests, they were reverenced for such qualities as each of them exhibited in his own person, writings or prophecies, whilst the priests held a prominent official rank, which entitled them, as

ministering according to the outward forms of the Temple service, to the reverence of the people, irrespective of any personal merit whatever. Thus, whilst the priests remained attached to the symbols of the faith, and retained or introduced all those ancient restrictions and narrow views which we still observe, the prophets broke through the symbolical forms, or rose to the spiritual conception of them, and served the cause of truth by proclaiming the Word of God, very much in the same way as Jesus of Nazareth did more than five hundred years afterwards. Indeed it has been suggested by Dr Donaldson and others, that, as the Jews have certainly tampered with their sacred books at various times, the "Law," which we now read, did not contain, in the times of the early prophets, many of the severe clauses and ceremonial requirements which appear in it since the Christian

era.

It was the office of the prophets to purify and extend the influence of religion and morality: and they were moreover political teachers, natural philosophers, and workers of miracles. Their action on the public was kept up by religion, poetry, and music; all of which held an important place in their schools, and some of them, especially Samuel, seem to have united in their own persons, if not the names, yet all the functions, of prophet, priest, and king. Nor does this threefold character of Samuel, and perhaps of others, tend to weaken the theory which I am here endeavouring to point out, that the office of priest would tend towards exclusiveness and even bigotry, whilst the prophets would rather enlarge the bounds and spiritualize the duties of religious freedom. For whilst Samuel hewed Agag in pieces in vindication of the commands which emanated from religion, he accompanied the act with that noble maxim which accompanies the greatest freedom, "To obey is better than sacrifice and to hearken than the fat of rams!" It was difficult for Samuel to disconnect his various responsibilities. It was casier for the writer of the Fifteenth Psalm to proclaim the grand sentiments which it contains:

Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. He that back biteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.

Hosea also doubtless had good grounds for writing as we read in vi, 6:

I desired mercy and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

In like manner Micah (vi, 8) asks a most important and pertinent question :

What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

What says the greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, on this subject? In the very first chapter of his prophecies we read:

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs or of he-goats... Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. ..Wash make you, clean; put away the evil of your doings you from before my eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.

....

These words might have proceeded out of the mouth of Jesus of Nazareth himself, nor can we doubt that the Laws of the Israelites, coming originally from Moses, have found true and faithful exponents in the prophets, who, at a time when sacerdotalism was beginning to exert its sway over the mind, uttered without fear the noble sentiments which we have here recited.

Now in what form do the writings of these prophets appear to us at present? Not apparently as separate and independent editions of each, like the works of authors, both ancient and modern, given to the world without any relation to one another, but as a collection made by some one who had got together all the remains of each which he could find, and who sends them forth to the public in one volume, with the names of the various authors attached wherever any of the writings could be ascribed with certainty or probability to each. Moreover, the explanations which are found at the beginning of almost all the prophets look very much as if they were prefixed by some compiler as introductions to the

several portions cf the work. Thus the prophecies of Isaiah begin as follows:

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

The introduction to the prophesies of Jeremiah is of the same kind:

The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin: to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. It came also in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, unto the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah the son of Josiah king of Judah, unto the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the fifth month.

The attempt to fix the exact date is here evident but it can hardly be thought that prophets, who had to deal with such important political matters, or whose minds were inspired with such divine truths as were Isaiah and Jeremiah, would show much care to introduce their prophesies with such exact chronological minuteness.

The Books of Ezekiel and Daniel have no similar prefaces but these again occur at the beginning of all the minor prophets. Thus we have:

:

The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea-The word of the Lord that came to Joel-The words of Amos-The vision of Obadiah -Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah-The word of the Lord that came to Micah-The burden of Nineveh: the book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite-The burden which Habakkuk the prophet did see- -The word of the Lord which came unto Zephaniah. -In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, in the first day of the month, came the word of the Lord by Haggai-In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the Lord unto Zechariah-The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi.

The only explanation which I can give of this remarkable identity of language by which these prophecies are prefaced, is that they were gathered from separate documents or traditions, and arranged by the zeal of those who, wishing to re-establish the existence of their nation, wished also to recover and re-establish at the same time its literature and its religion.