Israel obtained a reconciliation with God by bringing the prescribed offerings, and entered into fellowship with the Lord by means of the priests whom He had sanctified. But this was only in a way which merely typified the true reconciliation, and which could not produce that real fellowship of life which is attained through the Spirit of God, but could only beget a longing for it. If the legal institution of the Old Testament was to become the right παιδαγωγὸς εἰς Xploτóv, prophecy must supervene upon the law; not only as the promise of divine grace and of future redemption, but also as a typical realizing of the promised gracious fellowship of the Lord with His people.

Prophecy opened a way for that which was an impossibility to the law; namely, for renewing the hearts of the people, for kindling and inflaming the love of God with all their heart and all their powers. In so far as the Spirit of the Lord came upon the prophets, not merely illuminating their knowledge, but also hallowing their lives, so that a man with the Spirit of the Lord upon him became another man (1 Sam. x. 6; Isa. vi. 7); so far did prophecy represent a union of the divine and the human,—an actual spiritual living fellowship with God, which not only pointed forward to the perfecting of the divine kingdom, in which the will of God is written on the hearts of men with living touches, and the Spirit of God dwells in the heart, but also offered already a real pledge of its being one day actually accomplished. And if in the priesthood the reconciliation between God and His people proceeds more directly from the latter [?], since the people appear before Jehovah in their priests chosen by God, and if the dedication to the Lord demanded by the theocratic covenant is consummated in the sacrificial service by the priests by means of atonement for their sins; then, on the other hand, in the prophetic office God consummates the reconciliation with the people through His Spirit, who opens up the eternal fundamental principles of the law, judges the present at every moment in accordance with these, and points forward and works towards the perfecting of the theocracy (1).

(1) Comp. the remarks, short but to the point, upon the reference of prophecy to the law, and the consequent position of the prophetic office in the theocracy, by Oehler in Tholuck, litt. Anzeiger, 1846, No. 32. The view of Knobel, der Prophetism. i. p. 14 f., rests upon a total

mistake as to both the priesthood and the prophetic office: "The priests represent the theocracy according to the purely external exhibition of it, and they are administrators of the theocratic forms. The inspired prophets, on the contrary, represent the theocracy according to its spirit and essence. The prophets and the priests stand to each other in the relation of the internal and the external, the essence and the form."

The prophets do not at all stand above the law, in the sense of the law ceasing to be the absolute binding will of God, in any of its parts whatsoever. Yet they do open up a higher spiritual conception of the law, in which obedience to His word appears as the true sacrifice well pleasing to God (1 Sam. xv. 22); and they prepare the way for the time when the whole people should be consecrated by the Spirit of God to be organs of the divine will (Joel iii. 1 ff.; Jer. xxxi. 33 f.; Isa. liv. 13; Ezek. xxxvi. 26 f.). [Yet the opposition of the law and the prophets must be taken as comparative rather than absolute, since the law really rested on the promises to the fathers; and Moses was himself a prophet, with much that is prophetical in his writings, especially in Deuteronomy; and the texts now quoted are related to a most important passage in the history of the wandering, Num. xi., especially vers. 25-29.]—In this sense the prophets are interpreters, through whom God speaks to His people, revealing to them His will and His decrees; and not only unfolds the spirit of the law, but also announces beforehand His way of salvation and the future development of His kingdom.

The official name of the prophets is ", "speaker," utterer of divine revelation (2); whereas the other appellations, , "beholder," and, "seer," are derived from the internal, spiritual intuition, as the medium through which the divine revelation was imparted to them (3).

(2) We arrive at this proper and original meaning of the word by means of Ex. vii. 1, where Aaron is called the Nabi of Moses— that is, the speaker for Moses, who was not mighty in discourse, as he is called the "mouth" of Moses, his organ of utterance, in iv. 16. Etymologically, too, this meaning is perfectly correct; comp. Häv. pp. 6, 7, and Ewald, die Propheten, i. p. 6.-The prophet is therefore called "the messenger of Jehovah," Hag. i. 13; also, "the

man of the Spirit," that is, impelled by the Spirit of God, Hos. ix. 7; or "man of God," Judg. xiii. 6, 8, 1 Sam. ii. 27, ix. 6, 10, 1 Kings xiii. 11 ff., and often, especially in the histories, like Moses in Deut. xxxiii. 1, Josh. xiv. 6, on the basis of Deut. xviii. 15, 18, xxxiv. 10. Universally the prophet comes forward in the name of Jehovah his word is "the word of Jehovah" (Deut. xviii. 18; Hos. i. 1; Joel i. 1, etc., hence the frequent in D and is in the prophecies); and his disposal of events is precisely identical with God's, Jer. i. 10, Zech. xi. 4 ff. He is "the servant of Jehovah,” Amos iii. 7, 2 Kings xvii. 13, Jer. vii. 25, and often; just as Moses was, Deut. xxxiv. 5, Josh. i. 1, 2, 13, 15, and often (comp. my Comm. on Joshua, p. 4). The priest is only "the minister of Jehovah," Num. xviii. 2, and often.-An erroneous etymological explanation of Nabi is "one on whom it has spouted or burst forth, a man laid hold of by the Spirit of God:" so Redslob, der Begriff des Nabi, Leipzig 1839, p. 3 ff.; [Köster, according to Bleek ;] De Wette, Einl. § 202; Knobel, Prophetismus, i. p. 137 ff. [Bleek, pp. 412-13, agrees with Keil,

,Also .עָשִׁיר צָעִיר נָגִיד referring to the parallel intransitive meaning of

pp. 413-14, he notices its application to Abraham and the patriarchs, Gen. xx. 7, Ps. cv. 15; and Philo's view, that the prophet was God's Epμnveús, of which he quite approves, as of the Septuagint's porns ὑποφήτης = ἐξηγητής.]

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(3) From 1 Sam. ix. 9, "He that is now called Nabi was beforetime called Roeh," it does not follow that "after Samuel's time common soothsaying was restrained by the prophetic office" (De Wette); but only that before Samuel's time, when prophecy was rare (1 Sam. iii. 1), the name which designated prophecy according to its true signification, for the theocracy had receded into the background in the consciousness of the people. [Bleek, p. 416, thinks that before Samuel's time the prophets were few, and did not come much forward to guide the people; that the name Roeh better suited their contemplative life than Nabi, "one who uttered," would have done. He also observes that Hozeh occurs only in Chronicles, except in 2 Sam. xxiv. 11, where it is applied to Gad, as it also is in 1 Chron. xxix. 29, where at the same time Samuel is called a Roeh, and Nathan a Nubî, probably because the chronicler found these persons so designated in the works which he cites.]

It results evidently from what has been said, that Old Testament prophecy can neither be identified nor placed on the same level with the system of oracles among the rest of the nations of antiquity. Prophecy is a gift of divine grace, by which the Old Testament legal

institution was conducted forward to its divinely appointed goal, and a preparation was made for restoring the fellowship of man with God which had been lost by sin. On the contrary, the divination or soothsaying of the heathen was not indeed originally a mere means of satisfying human curiosity, but proceeded from the belief that human life in all its relations was the object of a divine providence; yet, since it did not enjoy the light of divine revelation, it sought to satisfy that innate necessity of the human spirit, a knowledge of its fellowship with the Godhead, and a maintenance of continuous living intercourse with Him, by a way of its own, by means of presentiments and interpretations of signs (4).

(4) Oehler, ib. pp. 255-6: "Divination has ransacked heaven and earth, in order to find signs of the will which disposes of the destiny of man; it has descended into the depths of the human breast to gain acquaintance with the living God; and yet it was unable to find that knowledge of the counsel of God with which Old Testament prophecy was familiar."

This is the essential distinction between prophecy and divination (DPP, Num. xxii. 7), that prophecy rests upon divine inspiration, but divination upon mere presentiment of the human spirit, or imaginary loftier inspiration, or artificially-begotten enthusiasm: hence the prophet speaks only the words of Jehovah, the words which the Lord puts into his mouth, Deut. xviii. 18, [which even Balaam proclaimed to be his rule, however much falsehood may have been intermingled with his claims to be a prophet of Jehovah, Num. xxii. 8, 18, 19, 38, xxiii. 12, xxiv. 13]; while the soothsayers and the false prophets, on the contrary, speak out of their own hearts, Jer. xiv. 14, xxiii. 16, Ezek. xiii. 2 ff. It is, however, entirely mistaken by Ewald, who designates prophecy the original common good of all nations of superior antiquity; and he admits of no difference between the prophetic order in the Bible and the system of divination and soothsaying of the heathen, except this, that the former was refined to the purest form and conception by the pure spiritual religion of the old covenant, whereas the latter became degenerate by exaggeration, self-deception,

and other abuses.

Upon the subject of the historical development of the prophetic order, and its relation to the kingly office, comp. Häv. p. 13 ff., and the supplementary remarks of Oehler, ib. p. 254.

§ 62. Nature of Prophecy in reference to Subject-matter and Form.

Prophecy does not spring from any natural parts whatsoever, or from any powers of the human spirit: its origin lies in a supernatural working (belonging to the kingdom of grace) of the Spirit of God upon the spirit of man, by which the prophets were furnished for being heralds to publish divine discourses, for being organs of the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. i. 21). But the divine decree and will, or the word of God, which they had to utter, was communicated to them through the medium of internal intuition of spiritual vision, as

For the Spirit of God, which came upon them, elevated their spiritual being (knowledge, thinking, and feeling) into a higher sphere, a world of spirit exalted above the limits of the natural life of the spirit; and in this they perceived the voice of God, and cast glances into the future development of the kingdom of God, which were neither products of human thought and reflection upon divine revelation already given, nor mere presentiments or creations of a quick-sighted imagination, but contained objective divine truth. Yet we are not to think of the reception of this revelation, or the prophetic ecstasy, as a suppression of the intellectual consciousness by a violent working of the Divine Spirit, putting an end to the prophet's spiritual activity, and making his soul a purely passive vessel for the impressions and communications of the Spirit of God. Instead of this, it was an elevation of the human spirit to a degree of spiritual intuition such as lies quite beyond the limits of its natural ability; in which all the spiritual powers and capacities implanted in human nature were exalted, glorified, and enlightened, and furnished with supernatural powers from the Divine Spirit, for perceiving and uttering the divine revelations (1).

(1) The subjective nature of prophecy, as distinguished from divination, is thus determined by the Fathers, and by the older theologians that the soothsayer found himself in an ecstatic state, his self-consciousness being suppressed; on the contrary, that the prophet spoke with a sober spirit, with clear and collected consciousness: Jerome, præf. in Jes.: "Neque vero, ut Montanus cum insanis feminis somniat, prophetæ in ecstasi loquuti sunt, ut nescirent quid loquerentur, et, cum alios erudirent, ipsi ignorarent quid dicerent." Procem. Nahum: "Non loquitur propheta év éxoτáσe, ut Montanus