I The Broad Historical Situation. It was just when the great military empire of Assyria began to move in its career of world conquest that the literary prophets, who were men of larger than local caliber, began their work with the Hebrew people. That work was addressed first to home interests; but it always had a world background, in the implicit consciousness that Jehovah, as God of heaven and earth, was shaping the mysterious events of history to His purpose. The broad situation of things, and Israel's relation thereto, comes progressively into view, as the prophetic era advances. Up to the eighth century before Christ the ancient civilizations, which were of Semitic stock and centered in the Mesopotamian plains and uplands, could hardly be called empires, in the sense of united and organized governments. The political genius was not their gift. They were loose agglomerations of tribes, held together only by military force and despotism; tribes with discordant passions and interests, each petty province or city with its local god, and each larger state having a pantheon of jealous and quarreling deities. In all their strifes with each other the powers and fortunes of the gods were involved with those of the people, sharing with them in victory or defeat. Deities were honored or despised according to their prowess in wars or raids, and according to their caprice in sending or withholding fruitful seasons. Such was the prevailing religious consciousness of those times. Of these ancient civilizations Chaldea, with its capital at Babylon, was the oldest and most highly cultured; a kind of recognized arbitress of the thought and learning of the eastern world.1 At the opening of our era, however, Assyria, farther up the great rivers, which was a daughter state of 1 This seems to be implied in Isaiah's oracle against Babylon; see especially Isa. xiv, 4 ("exactress," margin); and xiv, 12-14. Chaldea and a worshiper of the same deities, was in the ascendant; being strongest and most aggressive in military conquest. Its capital was at Nineveh. It has been described as the most brutal empire which was ever suffered to roll its force across the world." 1 It was with this arrogant military empire, from about 745 B.C., when Tiglath Pileser IV began to reign, that the little states around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, Israel among them, had to reckon; the Assyrian hosts. coming, in successive raids of conquest, devastating, ravaging, extorting tribute, or deporting whole communities and peoples, until, outside of Egypt, the Assyrian empire was virtually master of the ancient world. It was not a power to civilize, but to subjugate, and to enrich itself with booty and slaves. All this looks, from one point of view, like a meaningless chaos of brute force and heartless greed. Such perhaps was Its Developed its only conscious motive. Not so, however, did Meaning the prophets regard it; nor can we so interpret it, in the broader historical light which later ages shed upon it. It was rather the beginning of a vast world movement toward unity, toward concentrated and organized power, and so toward such stable and homogeneous government as could be the field for a progressive and enlightened civilization. As such it was as truly Jehovah's work as was his local preparation in Israel. He had a purpose for civilization as well as for religion; and as this was by degrees disclosed the prophets realized increasingly that he was rising as in wrath to "do his work, his strange work, and bring to pass his act, his strange act" (Isa. xxviii, 21). The vigorous but ferocious empire of Assyria had its day; and was followed in course of time by the more humane and cultured empire of Chaldea; and this in turn, under the conquests of Cyrus, by the more austere sway of Medo-Persia. 1 G. A. Smith, "Book of the Twelve Prophets," Vol. II, p. 91. Under this latter régime the Aryan race, with its genius for civilization, took the helm of world-empire from the Semitic hands hitherto in control; the same imperial dominance that through the Greeks and Romans, also of Aryan stock, and their modern successors, has continued to this day the chief civilizing power of the world. It was just during this colossal shift of empire from Semitic to Aryan hands that the Hebrew era of literary The Hebrew prophecy lasted, and that the people of Israel Contribution underwent their strange fortune of exile, dispersion, and return. Their destiny was to be not that of a victorious but of a tributary and subject people; to be absorbed, like other peoples, in the huge melting-pot of tribes and cults. Not like other peoples, however, were they to lose their identity, or the sacred religious trust which they had inherited from their fathers. From a very early period of their history they had possessed the oracle pronounced upon them by Balaam (Num. xxiii, 9): Lo, it is a people that dwelleth alone, And shall not be reckoned among the nations; and whatever vicissitudes of worldly lot they passed through, though it were the extreme of oppression and dispersion, that distinctiveness and independence of character must remain intact. It was to promote this to define and purge and purify it—that the great prophets began, as it were instinctively, to work, as soon as the peril of invasion began to be foreseen. It was their way of making their people ready for their fate; fortifying them not by walls and ramparts but by character. And when the stress came, a sterling character, an enlightened conscience, was their contribution to the welter of the times. II Rising to the Occasion. As the nation thus approaches the crisis of its destiny, it is well to note how the literary method of the great prophets conforms to the large situation. Prophecy, as a type of literary utterance, has a style of its own, quite different from that of the historians and sages, and eminently adapted to its sublime object and mission. NOTE. The Prophetic Style. Professor Gardiner, in "The Bible as English Literature,” p. 209, thus describes it: "Of all the writings in the [English] Bible these oracles of the prophets are the most foreign and the least like anything that we have in modern literature: as they appear here they belong to a vanished past. Men are still born who have glimpses of the everlasting verities to communicate to other men; but they deliver them in forms wholly different. The prophet of the Old Testament was at once preacher and statesman, seer of visions and guide in the affairs of the nation, reformer of religion, moralist, and poet. The prophecies contain deliverances on all subjects, from new revelations of the nature of Jehovah to the practical questions of tithes or the keeping of the Sabbath. Yet through them all..., the normal form is poetical, and they all show the parallelism of the Hebrew poetry." As regards its form, the prophetic style has the rhythmical swing of impassioned address. Its verse structure, if such we may call it, is not so lyrical as that of the Psalms; not so condensed in phrasing as that of the Proverbs and Job. It bears much the same relation to the more metrical types of poetry that dramatic blank verse like Shakespeare's bears to lyric and heroic verse like Wordsworth's or Pope's. Some analogy to it is furnished by the rhythmical and yet not measured roll of high oratory, like Webster's or Burke's. In other words, it is the style naturally evolved in a nation gifted with the poetry of passion, when a speaker conscious that he is dealing with the most momentous issues of life puts into his utterance (essentially oral) the whole energy of his emotion, his imagination, and his idealized thinking. Identification with Jeho vah's Mind It is its transcendent point of view, and scale of treatment, the high issues with which it deals, and the imagery and atmosphere thus occasioned, which make the prophetic style sound so foreign to modern ears. The prophets themselves maintain that they are bringing to men the actual words of Deity. "Thus saith Jehovah" is the distinctive prophetic formula. They are not without a sense of what this means for scope, dignity, sublimity, and power of language. They must indeed put their thoughts in "matter-moulded forms of speech"; but they are consciously expressing God's thought and presuming to make Him speak in character. It is a felt interfusion of divine and human mind; and therefore subject, style, and point of view must be befitting to so high a source and copartnership. To work in the feeling that they were responsible spokesmen of the Being who formeth the mountains, and createth the winds, must have been, however we view the result, the most tremendous literary enterprise ever undertaken by man. And the thought of Jehovah, dealing with earthly and human affairs as their Creator and Controller sees them, must needs be strange unless the writer and reader can in a degree raise themselves to the same point of view. Attitude toward Natural Forces The habitually recognized sphere of Jehovah's will and work is not limited in time and space. This presupposition of the literary prophets becomes increasingly clear to them as their work goes on. Jehovah's word is brought indeed to a particular chosen nation, and is adapted to a particular situation; but its field of operation is the whole unbounded world of nature and man. This seems to be recognized in the constantly used term "Jehovah of Hosts," the prophetic title ascribed to God, 1 Amos iv, 13. |