In the present article no attempt will be made to follow those speculations about the nature of prophecy which belong to dogmatic theology rather than to history; but a brief sketch will be given (1) of the history of Hebrew prophecy (in supplement to ,what has been already said in the article Israel or is to be found in the articles devoted to individual prophets), and (2) of prophecy in the early Christian Church. To speak of more recent religious phenomena within Christendom which have claimed to be prophetic would carry us too far; for them the reader is referred to such articles as Montanism, Anabaptists. The conception of prophecy on which the Mohammedan religion is built has been sufficiently explained in the life of Mohammed; borrowed, somewhat unintelligently, from later Judaism, it is radically different from that of the Old Testament, and when narrowly looked at lends no countenance to the statement often made, and at first sight plausible, that prophecy is a phenomenon characteristic of Semitic religion in general.

1. The Prophets of the Old Testament.— The author of 1 Sam. ix. 9 tells us that “beforetime in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, thus he spake, Come and let us go to the seer; for he that is now called a prophet (nâbî) was beforetime called a seer.” This remark is introduced to explain how his contemporaries spoke of Samuel. He was a “seer” (ver. 11), or, as he is also called (ver. 6 sq.), a “man of God,” that is one who stood in closer relations to God than ordinary men; “all that he said was sure to come to pass,” so that he could be consulted with advantage even in private matters like the loss of the asses of Kish. The narrative of 1 Sam. ix. is so vivid and exact that not many generations of oral tradition can have separated the writer from the events he records; it shows us therefore, at least broadly, what the word prophet meant in the early times of the Hebrew kingdom, and it shows us that it had acquired that meaning after the age of Philistine oppression in which Samuel lived, and to which his younger contemporaries Saul and David put an end. That this is the sense of the author, and that we must not suppose that the word prophet had merely become more common in his time and supplanted an older synonym, appears beyond question a few verses further down, where we see that there were already in Samuel’s time people known as nebîîm, but that they were not seers. The seer, with his exceptional insight, is a man of prominent individuality and held in great respect: when Saul asks for the seer every one knows that there is only one person in the town whom he can mean. With the prophets it is quite otherwise; they appear not individually but in bands; their prophesying is a united exercise accompanied by music, and seemingly dance-music; it is marked by strong excitement, which sometimes acts contagiously, and may be so powerful that

he who is seized by it is unable to stand, 1 and, though this condition is regarded as produced by a divine afflatus, it is matter of ironical comment when a prominent man like Saul is found to be thus affected. Samuel in his later days appears presiding over the exercises of a group of nebîîm at Ramah, where they seem to have had a sort of coenobium (Naioth), bat he was not himself a nâbî — that name is never applied to him except in 1 Sam. iii. 21, where it is plainly used in the later sense for the idea which in Samuel’s own time was expressed by “seer.” 2

But again the nebîîm seem to have been a new thing in Israel in the days of Samuel. Seers there had been of old as in other primitive nations; of the two Hebrew words literally corresponding to our seer, rôeh and hôzeh, the second is found also in Arabic, and seems to belong to the primitive Semitic vocabulary. 3 But the enthusiastic bands of prophets are nowhere mentioned before the time of Samuel; and in the whole previous history the word prophet occurs very rarely, never in the very oldest narratives, and always in that sense which we know to be later than the age of Samuel, so that the use of the term is due to writers of the age of the kings, who spoke of ancient things in the language of their own day. The appearance of the nebîîm in the time of Samuel was, it would seem, as has been explained in the article Israel, one manifestation of the deep pulse of suppressed indignant patriotism which began to beat in the hearts of the nation in the age of Philistine oppression, and this fact explains the influence of the movement on Saul and the interest taken in it by Samuel. The ordinary life of ancient Israel gave little room for high-strung religious feeling, and the common acts of worship coincided with the annual harvest and vintage feasts or similar occasions of natural gladness, with which no strain of abnormal enthusiasm could well be combined. It was perhaps only in time of war, when he felt himself to be fighting the battles of Jehovah, that the Hebrew was stirred to the depths of his nature by emotions of a religious colour. Thus the deeper feelings of religion were embodied in warlike patriotism, and these feelings the Philistine oppression had raised to extreme tension among all who loved liberty, while yet the want of a captain to lead forth the armies of Jehovah against his foemen deprived them of their natural outlet. It was this tense suppressed excitement, to which the ordinary acts of worship gave no expression, which found vent in the enthusiastic services of the companies of prophets. In its external features the new phenomenon was exceedingly like what is still seen in the East in every zikr of dervishes—the enthusiasm of the prophets expressed itself in no artificial form, but in a way natural to the Oriental temperament. Processions with pipe and hand-drum, such as that described in 1 Sam. x., were indeed a customary part of ordinary religious feasts; but there they were an outlet for natural merriment, here they have changed their character to express an emotion more sombre and more intense, by which the prophets, and often mere chance spectators too, were so overpowered that they seemed to lose their old personality and to be swayed by a supernatural influence. More than this hardly lies in the expression “a divine spirit” (q*∏Sk mi), which is used not only of the prophetic afflatus but of the evil frenzy that afflicted Saul’s later days. The Hebrews had a less narrow conception of the spiritual than we are apt to read into their records.

To give a name to this new phemonenon the Israelites, it would seem, had to borrow a word from their Canaanite neighbours. At all events the word nâbî is neither part of the old Semitic vocabulary (in Arabic it is a late loan word), nor has it any etymology in Hebrew, the cognate words “to prophesy” and the like being derived from the noun in its technical sense. But we know that there were nebîîm among the Canaanites; the “prophets” of Baal appear in the history of Elijah as men who sought to attract their god by wild orgiastic rites. In fact the presence of an orgiastic character is as marked a feature in Canaanite religion as the absence of it is in the oldest religion of Israel; but the new Hebrew enthusiasts had at least an external resemblance to the devotees of the Canaanite sanctuaries, and this would be enough to determine the choice of a name which in the first instance seems hardly to have been a name of honour. 4 In admitting that the name was borrowed, we are not by any means shut up to suppose that the Hebrew nebîîm simply copied their Canaanite neighbours. The phenomenon is perfectly intelligible without any such hypothesis. A wave of intense religious feeling passes over the land and finds its expression, according to the ordinary law of Oriental life, in the formation of a sort of enthusiastic religious order. The Nazarites and the Rechabites are parallel phenomena, though of vastly inferior historical importance.

The peculiar methods of the prophetic exercises described in 1 Samuel were of little consequence for the future development of prophecy. The heat of a first enthusiasm necessarily cooled when the political conditions that produced it passed away; and, if the prophetic associations had done no more than organize a new form of spiritual excitement, they would have only added one to the many mechanical types of hysterical religion which are found all over the East. Their real importance was that they embodied an intenser vein of feeling than was expressed in the ordinary feasts and sacrifices, and that the greater intensity was not artificial, but due to a revival of national sentiment. The worship of the local sanctuaries did nothing to promote the sense of the religious unity of Israel; Jehovah in the age of the Judges ran no small risk of being divided into a number of local Baals, givers of natural good things each to his own locality. The struggle for freedom called forth a deeper sense of the unity of the people of the one Jehovah, and in so doing raised religion to a loftier plane; for a faith which unites a nation is necessarily a higher moral force than one which only unites a township or a clan. The local worships, which subsisted unchanged during the greater part of the Hebrew kingship, gave no expression to this rise in the religious consciousness of the nation; on the contrary we see from the prophetic books of the 8th century that they lagged more and more behind the progress of religious thought. But the prophetic societies were in their origin one symptom of that upheaval of national life of which the institution of the human sovereign reigning under the divine King was the chief fruit; they preserved the traditions of that great movement; they were, in however imperfect a way, an organ of national religious feeling, and could move forward with the movement of national life. And so, though we cannot follow the steps of the process, we are not surprised to 1 1 Sam. x. 5 sq., xix. 20 sq. In the latter passage read “they saw the fervour of the prophets as they prophesied, &c.” (see Hoffmann in Stade’s Zeitschr., 1883, p. 89), after the Syriac.

2 On grounds of text-criticism indeed both this passage and 1 Sam. xxviii., where at ver. 6 prophets appear as revealers (seers), are held to be no part of the old stock of the history of Samuel.

3 Hoffmann, ut supra, p. 92 sq. 4 If this account of the origin of the nebîîm is correct (comp. Kuenen, Prophets, Eng. tr., p. 554 sq.), the etymological sense of the word K'3J is comparatively unimportant. The root seems to mean “to start up,” “torise into prominence,” and so “to become audible”; but the range of possible explanations of the noun which remains open is too great to give value to any conjecture. The leading views are collected in several of the books cited at the close of this article, and a fresh and interesting investigation is given in G. Hoffmann’s article quoted above.

learn that they soon had an established footing in Israel, and that the prophets came to be recognized as a standing sacred element in society. What was their precise place in Hebrew life we hardly know, but they formed at least a religious class which in all its traditions represented the new national and not the old communal and particularistic life. One characteristic point which appears very early is that they felt themselves called upon to vindicate the laws of divine righteousness in national matters, and especially in the conduct of the kings, who were not answerable to human authority. The cases of Nathan and David in the matter of Uriah, of Elijah and Ahab after the judicial murder of Naboth, will occur to every one, and from the Hebrew standpoint the action of Gad in the matter of the census taken by David belongs to the same category. Such interventions with an Eastern king demanded great moral courage, for, though to some extent protected by their sacred character, the persons of the prophets were by no means legally inviolable (1 Kings xix. 2; xxii. 27; 2 Kings vi. 31). Another point of the first importance in the development of the class was the absorption into it of the old seers, which, as we have already seen, must have occurred comparatively early. The great prophecy of Nathan (2 Sam. vii.) is of too disputed a date to be cited in evidence, but already in David’s time we find that Gad the nâbî is also the king’s seer (2 Sam. xxiv. 11; comp. 1 Sam. xxii. 5), and by and by it comes to be clearly understood that the prophets are the appointed organ of Jehovah’s communications with His people or His king. The rise of this function of the prophets is plainly parallel with the change which took place under the kings in the position of the priestly oracle; the Torah of the priests now dealt rather with permanent sacred ordinances than with the giving of new divine counsel for special occasions. Jehovah’s ever-present kingship in Israel, which was the chief religious idea brought into prominence by the national revival, demanded a more continuous manifestation of His revealing spirit than was given either by the priestly lot or by the rise of occasional seers; and where could -this be sought except among the prophets? It does not of course follow that every one who had shared in the divine afflatus of prophetic enthusiasm gave forth oracles; but the prophets as a class stood nearer than other men to the mysterious workings of Jehovah, and it was in their circle that revelation seemed to have its natural home. A most instructive passage in this respect is 1 Kings xxii., where we find some four hundred prophets gathered together round the king, and where it is clear that Jehoshaphat was equally convinced, on the one hand that the word of Jehovah could be found among the prophets, and on the other that it was very probable that some or even the mass of them might be no better than liars. And here it is to be observed that Micaiah, who proved the true prophet, does not accuse the others of conscious imposture; he admits that they speak under the influence of a spirit proceeding from Jehovah, but it is a lying spirit sent to deceive. The sublime and solitary figure of Elijah, whom we are apt to take as the typical figure of a prophet in the old kingdom, has little in common with the picture even of the true prophet which we derive from 1 Kings xxii.; and when his history is carefully and critically read it is found to give no reason to think that he stood in any close relation to the prophetic societies of his time. He is a man of God like Moses and Samuel, a man admitted to a strange and awful intimacy with the Most High, and like them he combines functions which in later times were distributed between prophet and priest. The fundamental idea that Jehovah guides His people by the word of revelation is older than the separation of special classes of theocratic organs; Moses indeed is not only prophet and priest but judge and ruler. But as the history goes on the prophet stands out more and more as the typical organ of revelation, the type of the man who is Jehovah’s intimate, sharing His secrets (Amos ii. 7; Jer. xxiii. 22), and ministering to Israel the gracious guidance which distinguishes it from all other nations (Amos ii. 11; Hosea xii. 10, 13), and also the sentences of awful judgment by which Jehovah rebukes rebellion (Hos. vi. 5). The full development of this view seems to lie between the time of Elijah and that of Amos and Hosea,—under the dynasty of Jehu, when prophecy, as represented by Elisha and Jonah, stood in the fullest harmony with the patriotic eSorts of the age. This growth in the conception of the prophetic function is reflected in parts of the Pentateuch which may be dated with probability as belonging to the period just named; the name of nâbî is extended to the patriarchs as Jehovah’s intimates (Gen. xx. 7), and Moses begins to be chiefly looked at as the greatest of prophets (Num. xi. xii.; Deut, xxxiv. 10), while Aaron and Miriam are also placed in the same class (Exod. xv. 20; Num. xii.) because they too are among the divinely favoured leaders of Israel (comp. Micah vi. 4)..

Elisha,' the successor of Elijah, stood in much closer relations to the prophetic societies than his great master had done. As a man of practical aims he required a circle through which to work, and he found this among the prophets, or, as they are now called, the sons of the prophets. According to Semitic idiom “sons of the prophets” most naturally means “members of a prophetic corporation,” which may imply that under the headship of Elisha and the favour of the dynasty of Jehu, which owed much to Elisha and his party, the prophetic societies took a more regular form than before. The accounts we have certainly point in this direction, and it is characteristic that in 2 Kings iv. 42 first fruits are paid to Elisha. But to an institution like prophecy national recognition, royal favour, and fixed organization are dangerous gifts. It has always been the evil fate of the Hebrews to destroy their own highest ideals by attempting to translate them into set forms, and the ideal of a prophetic guidance of the nation of Jehovah could not have been more effectually neutralized than by committing its realization to the kind of state church of professional prophets, “eating bread” by their trade (Amos vii. 12), which claimed to inherit the traditions of Elijah and Elisha. The sons of the prophets appear to have been grouped round the leading sanctuaries, Gilgal, Bethel, and the like (comp. Hos. ix. 8), and to have stood in pretty close relation to the priesthood (Hos. iv. 5), though this comes out more clearly

for the southern kingdom, where, down to the last days of Hebrew independence, the official prophets of Jerusalem were connected with the temple and...