The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. 1
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Title: The Expositor's Bible: The Book of the Twelve Prophets, Vol. 1
Author: George Adam Smith
Editor: Sir W. Robertson Nicoll
Release date: September 29, 2013 [eBook #43847]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE: THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE PROPHETS, VOL. 1 ***
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE. Edited by Rev.
W. R. NICOLL, D.D., Editor of _London Expositor_.
1ST SERIES IN 6 VOLS.
=MACLAREN, Rev. Alex.=--COLOSSIANS--PHILEMON.
=DODS, Rev. Marcus.=--GENESIS.
=CHADWICK, Rev. Dean.=--ST. MARK.
=BLAIKIE, Rev. W. G.=--SAMUEL, 2 VOLS.
=EDWARDS, Rev. T. C.=--HEBREWS.
2D SERIES IN 6 VOLS.
=SMITH, Rev. G. A.=--ISAIAH, VOL. I.
=ALEXANDER, Bishop.=--EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN.
=PLUMMER, Rev. A.=--PASTORAL EPISTLES.
=FINDLAY, Rev. G. G.=--GALATIANS.
=MILLIGAN, Rev. W.=--REVELATION.
=DODS, Rev. Marcus.=--1ST CORINTHIANS.
3D SERIES IN 6 VOLS.
=SMITH, Rev. G. A.=--ISAIAH, VOL. II.
=GIBSON, Rev. J. M.=--ST. MATTHEW.
=WATSON, Rev. R. A.=--JUDGES--RUTH.
=BALL, Rev. C. J.=--JEREMIAH. CHAP. I-XX.
=CHADWICK, Rev. Dean.=--EXODUS.
=BURTON, Rev. H.=--ST. LUKE.
4TH SERIES IN 6 VOLS.
=KELLOGG, Rev. S. H.=--LEVITICUS.
=STOKES, Rev. G. T.=--ACTS, VOL. I.
=HORTON, Rev. R. F.=--PROVERBS.
=DODS, Rev. Marcus.=--GOSPEL ST. JOHN, VOL. I.
=PLUMMER, Rev. A.=--JAMES--JUDE.
=COX, Rev. S.=--ECCLESIASTES.
5TH SERIES IN 6 VOLS.
=DENNEY, Rev. J.=--THESSALONIANS.
=WATSON, Rev. R. A.=--JOB.
=MACLAREN, Rev. A.=--PSALMS, VOL. I.
=STOKES, Rev. G. T.=--ACTS, VOL. II.
=DODS, Rev. Marcus.=--GOSPEL ST. JOHN, VOL. II.
=FINDLAY, Rev. C. G.=--EPHESIANS.
6TH SERIES IN 6 VOLS.
=RAINY, Rev. R.=--PHILIPPIANS.
=FARRAR, Archdeacon F. W.=--1ST KINGS.
=BLAIKIE, Rev. W. G.=--JOSHUA.
=MACLAREN, Rev. A.=--PSALMS, VOL. II.
=LUMBY, Rev, J. R.=--EPISTLES OF ST. PETER.
=ADENEY, Rev. W. F.=--EZRA--NEHEMIAH--ESTHER.
7TH SERIES IN 6 VOLS.
=MOULE, Rev. H. C. G.=--ROMANS.
=FARRAR, Archdeacon F. W.=--2D KINGS.
=BENNETT, Rev. W. H.=--1ST AND 2D CHRONICLES.
=MACLAREN, Rev. A.=--PSALMS, VOL. III.
=DENNEY, Rev. James.=--2D CORINTHIANS.
=WATSON Rev. R. A.=--NUMBERS.
8TH AND FINAL SERIES IN 7 VOLS.
=FARRAR, Archdeacon F. W.=--DANIEL.
=SKINNER, Rev. John.=--EZEKIEL.
=BENNETT, Rev. W. H.=--JEREMIAH.
=HARPER, Rev. Prof.=--DEUTERONOMY.
=ADENEY, Rev. W. F.=--SOLOMON AND LAMENTATIONS.
=SMITH, Rev. G. A.=--THE MINOR PROPHETS, 2 VOLS.
About 400 pages in each Volume. Price for either series, six volumes
$6.06. (Orders for 2 or more series at same rate will be sent by
Express. prepaid.) (Separate vols. $1.50 postpaid. Descriptive
circular sent on application.)
THE BOOK
OF
THE TWELVE PROPHETS
COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR
BY
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS
FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW
_IN TWO VOLUMES_
VOL. I.--AMOS, HOSEA AND MICAH
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND A SKETCH OF PROPHECY
IN EARLY ISRAEL_
NEW YORK
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON
3 and 5 West Eighteenth Street
London: Hodder and Stoughton
1906
TO
HENRY DRUMMOND
PREFACE
The Prophets, to whom this and a following volume are dedicated,
have, to our loss, been haunted for centuries by a peddling and an
ambiguous title. Their Twelve Books are in size smaller than those
of the great Three which precede them, and doubtless none of their
chapters soar so high as the brilliant summits to which we are swept
by Isaiah and the Prophet of the Exile. But in every other respect
they are undeserving of the niggardly name of "Minor." Two of them,
Amos and Hosea, were the first of all prophecy--rising cliff-like,
with a sheer and magnificent originality, to a height and a mass
sufficient to set after them the trend and slope of the whole
prophetic range. The Twelve together cover the extent of that range,
and illustrate the development of prophecy at almost every stage from
the eighth century to the fourth. Yet even more than in the case of
Isaiah or Jeremiah, the Church has been content to use a passage
here and a passage there, leaving the rest of the books to absolute
neglect or the almost equal oblivion of routine-reading. Among the
causes of this disuse have been the more than usually corrupt state
of the text; the consequent disorder and in parts unintelligibleness
of all the versions; the ignorance of the various historical
circumstances out of which the books arose; the absence of successful
efforts to determine the periods and strophes, the dramatic dialogues
(with the names of the speakers), the lyric effusions and the
passages of argument, of all of which the books are composed.
The following exposition is an attempt to assist the bettering of all
this. As the Twelve Prophets illustrate among them the whole history
of written prophecy, I have thought it useful to prefix a historical
sketch of the Prophet in early Israel, or as far as the appearance of
Amos. The Twelve are then taken in chronological order. Under each
of them a chapter is given of historical and critical introduction
to his book; then some account of the prophet himself as a man and a
seer; then a complete translation of the various prophecies handed
down under his name, with textual footnotes, and an exposition and
application to the present day in harmony with the aim of the series
to which these volumes belong; finally, a discussion of the main
doctrines the prophet has taught, if it has not been found possible
to deal with these in the course of the exposition.
* * * * *
An exact critical study of the Twelve Prophets is rendered necessary
by the state of the entire text. The present volume is based on a
thorough examination of this in the light of the ancient versions and
of modern criticism. The emendations which I have proposed are few
and insignificant, but I have examined and discussed in footnotes all
that have been suggested, and in many cases my translation will be
found to differ widely from that of the Revised Version. To questions
of integrity and authenticity more space is devoted than may seem to
many to be necessary. But it is certain that the criticism of the
prophetic books has now entered on a period of the same analysis
and discrimination which is almost exhausted in the case of the
Pentateuch. Some hints were given of this in a previous volume on
Isaiah, chapters xl.-lxvi., which are evidently a composite work.
Among the books now before us, the same fact has long been clear
in the case of Obadiah and Zechariah, and also since Ewald's time
with regard to Micah. But Duhm's _Theology of the Prophets_, which
appeared in 1875, suggested interpolations in Amos. Wellhausen (in
1873) and Stade (from 1883 onwards) carried the discussion further
both on those, and others, of the Twelve; while a recent work by
Andrée on Haggai proves that many similar questions may still be
raised and have to be debated. The general fact must be admitted
that hardly one book has escaped later additions--additions of an
entirely justifiable nature, which supplement the point of view of
a single prophet with the richer experience or the riper hopes of a
later day, and thus afford to ourselves a more catholic presentment
of the doctrines of prophecy and the Divine purposes for mankind.
This general fact, I say, must be admitted. But the questions of
detail are still in process of solution. It is obvious that settled
results can be reached (as to some extent they have been already
reached in the criticism of the Pentateuch) only after years of
research and debate by all schools of critics. Meantime it is the
duty of each of us to offer his own conclusions, with regard to every
separate passage, on the understanding that, however final they may
at present seem to him, the end is not yet. In previous criticism
the defects, of which work in the same field has made me aware, are
four: 1. A too rigid belief in the exact parallelism and symmetry of
the prophetic style, which I feel has led, for instance, Wellhausen,
to whom we otherwise owe so much on the Twelve Prophets, into many
unnecessary emendations of the text, or, where some amendment is
necessary, to absolutely unprovable changes. 2. In passages between
which no connection exists, the forgetfulness of the principle
that this fact may often be explained as justly by the hypothesis
of the omission of some words, as by the favourite theory of the
later intrusion of portions of the extant text. 3. Forgetfulness of
the possibility, which in some cases amounts almost to certainty,
of the incorporation, among the authentic words of a prophet, of
passages of earlier as well as of later date. And, 4. depreciation
of the spiritual insight and foresight of pre-exilic writers. These,
I am persuaded, are defects in previous criticism of the prophets.
Probably my own criticism will reveal many more. In the beginnings
of such analysis as we are engaged on, we must be prepared for
not a little arbitrariness and want of proportion; these are often
necessary for insight and fresh points of view, but they are as
easily eliminated by the progress of discussion.
* * * * *
All criticism, however, is preliminary to the real work which the
immortal prophets demand from scholars and preachers in our age. In
a review of a previous volume, I was blamed for applying a prophecy
of Isaiah to a problem of our own day. This was called "prostituting
prophecy." _The_ prostitution of the prophets is their confinement to
academic uses. One cannot conceive an ending, at once more pathetic
and more ridiculous, to those great streams of living water, than to
allow them to run out in the sands of criticism and exegesis, however
golden these sands may be. The prophets spoke for a practical purpose;
they aimed at the hearts of men; and everything that scholarship can
do for their writings has surely for its final aim the illustration
of their witness to the ways of God with men, and its application to
living questions and duties and hopes. Besides, therefore, seeking to
tell the story of that wonderful stage in the history of the human
spirit--surely next in wonder to the story of Christ Himself--I have
not feared at every suitable point to apply its truths to our lives
to-day. The civilisation in which prophecy flourished was in its
essentials marvellously like our own. To mark only one point, the rise
of prophecy in Israel came fast upon the passage of the nation from an
agricultural to a commercial basis of society, and upon the appearance
of the very thing which gives its name to civilisation--city-life,
with its unchanging sins, problems and ideals.
A recent Dutch critic, whose exact scholarship is known to all
readers of Stade's _Journal of Old Testament Science_, has said of
Amos and Hosea: "These prophecies have a word of God, as for all
times, so also especially for our own. Before all it is relevant to
'the social question' of our day, to the relation of religion and
morality.... Often it has been hard for me to refrain from expressly
pointing out the agreement between Then and To-day."[1] This
feeling will be shared by all students of prophecy whose minds and
consciences are quick; and I welcome the liberal plan of the series
in which this volume appears, because, while giving room for the
adequate discussion of critical and historical questions, its chief
design is to show the eternal validity of the Books of the Bible as
the Word of God, and their meaning for ourselves to-day.
* * * * *
Previous works on the Minor Prophets are almost innumerable. Those
to which I owe most will be found indicated in the footnotes. The
translation has been executed upon the purpose, not to sacrifice the
literal meaning or exact emphasis of the original to the frequent
possibility of greater elegance. It reproduces every word, with
the occasional exception of a copula. With some hesitation I have
retained the traditional spelling of the Divine Name, Jehovah,
instead of the more correct Jahve or Yahweh; but where the rhythm
of certain familiar passages was disturbed by it, I have followed
the English versions and written Lord. The reader will keep in mind
that a line may be destroyed by substituting our pronunciation of
proper names for the more musical accents of the original. Thus,
for instance, we obliterate the music of "Isra'el" by making it two
syllables and putting the accent on the first: it has three syllables
with the accent on the last. We crush Yerushalayîḿ into Jerúsalem;
we shred off Asshûr into Assyria, and dub Miṣraîḿ Egypt. Hebrew has
too few of the combinations which sound most musical to our ears, to
afford the suppression of any one of them.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] J. J. P. Valeton, jun., _Amos en Hosea_, 1894: quoted by Budde in
the _Theologische Literaturzeitung_, September, 1894.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
PAGE
PREFACE vii
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1
_INTRODUCTION_
CHAP.
I. THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE 3
II. THE PROPHET IN EARLY ISRAEL 11
1. FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TILL SAMUEL.
2. FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA.
III. THE EIGHTH CENTURY IN ISRAEL 31
IV. THE INFLUENCE OF ASSYRIA UPON PROPHECY 44
_AMOS_
V. THE BOOK OF AMOS 61
VI. THE MAN AND THE PROPHET 73
1. THE MAN AND HIS DISCIPLINE
(i. 1; iii. 3-8; vii. 14, 15).
2. THE WORD AND ITS ORIGINS
(i. 2; iii. 3-8; and _passim_).
3. THE PROPHET AND HIS MINISTRY
(vii.; viii. 1-4).
VII. ATROCITIES AND ATROCITIES 121
AMOS i. 3-ii.
VIII. CIVILISATION AND JUDGMENT 141
AMOS iii.-iv. 3.
IX. THE FALSE PEACE OF RITUAL 156
AMOS iv. 4-vi.
1. FOR WORSHIP, CHASTISEMENT
(iv. 4-13).
2. FOR WORSHIP, JUSTICE (v.).
3. "AT EASE IN ZION" (vi.).
4. A FRAGMENT FROM THE PLAGUE
(vi. 9, 10).
X. DOOM OR DISCIPLINE? 181
AMOS viii. 4-ix.
1. EARTHQUAKE, ECLIPSE AND FAMINE
(viii. 4-14).
2. NEMESIS (ix. 1-6).
3. THE VOICES OF ANOTHER DAWN
(ix. 7-15).
XI. COMMON-SENSE AND THE REIGN OF LAW 196
AMOS iii. 3-8; iv. 6-13; v. 8, 9;
vi. 12; viii. 8; ix. 5, 6.
_HOSEA_
XII. THE BOOK OF HOSEA 211
XIII. THE PROBLEM THAT AMOS LEFT 227
XIV. THE STORY OF THE PRODIGAL WIFE 232
HOSEA i.-iii.
XV. THE THICK NIGHT OF ISRAEL 253
HOSEA iv.-xiv.
XVI. A PEOPLE IN DECAY: I. MORALLY 255
HOSEA iv.-vii. 7.
1. THE LORD'S QUARREL WITH ISRAEL
(iv.).
2. PRIESTS AND PRINCES FAIL
(v. 1-14).
3. REPENTANCE FAILS
(v. 15-vii. 2).
4. WICKEDNESS IN HIGH PLACES
(vii. 3-7).
XVII. A PEOPLE IN DECAY: II. POLITICALLY 269
HOSEA vii. 8-x.
1. THE CONFUSION OF THE NATION
(vii. 8-viii. 3).
2. ARTIFICIAL KINGS AND ARTIFICIAL
GODS (viii. 4-13).
3. THE EFFECTS OF EXILE
(ix. 1-9).
4. "THE CORRUPTION THAT IS THROUGH
LUST" (ix. 10-17).
5. ONCE MORE: PUPPET-KINGS AND
PUPPET-GODS (x.).
XVIII. THE FATHERHOOD AND HUMANITY OF GOD 290
HOSEA xi.
XIX. THE FINAL ARGUMENT 299
HOSEA xii.-xiv. 1.
1. THE PEOPLE AND THEIR FATHER
JACOB (xii.).
2. THE LAST JUDGMENT
(xiii.-xiv. 1).
XX. "I WILL BE AS THE DEW" 308
HOSEA xiv. 2-10.
XXI. THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 318
HOSEA _passim_.
XXII. REPENTANCE 333
HOSEA _passim_.
XXIII. THE SIN AGAINST LOVE 346
HOSEA i.-iii.; iv. 11 ff.;
ix. 10 ff.; xi. 8 f.
_MICAH_
XXIV. THE BOOK OF MICAH 357
XXV. MICAH THE MORASTHITE 375
MICAH i.
XXVI. THE PROPHET OF THE POOR 386
MICAH ii., iii.
XXVII. ON TIME'S HORIZON 400
MICAH iv. 1-7.
XXVIII. THE KING TO COME 408
MICAH iv. 8-v.
XXIX. THE REASONABLENESS OF TRUE RELIGION 419
MICAH vi. 1-8.
XXX. THE SIN OF THE SCANT MEASURE 426
MICAH vi. 9-vii. 6.
XXXI. OUR MOTHER OF SORROWS 435
MICAH vii. 7-20.
INDEX OF PASSAGES AND TEXTS 439
CHRONOLOGY OF THE DOUBLE KINGDOM OF ISRAEL, _c._ 940-639 B.C.
*** _c._ = _circa_: it refers only to the accession of the kings of
Judah and Israel; the years are exact so far as they concern the
Assyrian data. A date opposite the mere name of a king signifies the
year of his accession.
-------+-------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+-----------------------+-----
| JUDAH. | ISRAEL. | THE | SYRIA, ETC. | ASSYRIA. |
| | |PROPHETS.| | |
-------+-------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+-----------------------+-----
940_c._|Disruption of the Kingdom. | | | |
|Rehoboam. |Jeroboam I. | | | |
| |Establishment of | | | |
| | calf images in | | | |
| | N. Israel. | | | |
923_c._|Abijam. | | | | |
920_c._|Asa. | | | | |
918_c._| ... |Nadab. | | | |
915_c._| ... |Baasha. | | | |
891_c._| ... |Elah. | | | |
888_c._| ... |Zimri. Omri. | | | |
876_c._| ... |Ahab. |} | Revolt of Mesha of Moab: the | |
874_c._|Jehoshaphat. | ... |} Elijah.| Moabite Stone (_circa_ 860).| |
854 | ... |First contact of |} | Israel and Syria with | Assyria at the Battle | 854
| | |} | | of Ḳarḳar. |
853_c._| ... |Ahaziah. |}} | | |
852_c._| ... |Joram. | } | | |
.... | ... | Invades Moab w. | } | | |
| | Judah and Edom. | } | | |
850 | ... | ... | } ... | }Campaigns in all these 3 yrs| by Shalmaneser II. of |{850
849_c._|Jehoram. | ... | } ... | } Assyria against Dadidri or | Hadadezer of Damascus.|{849
846 | ... | ... | } ... | }Revolt of Edom from Judah | ... |{846
844_c._|Ahaziah. | | } | (2 Kings viii. 20 ff.). | |
842_c._|Athaliah. |Jehu. | }Elisha.| ... | Tribute from Jehu. | 842
... | ... | ... | } ... | War of Hazael with | Assyria. | ...
839 | ... | ... | } ... | War of Hazael with | Assyria. | 839
836_c._|Joash. | ... | } ... | }Hazael subdues Gilead (Amos | ... |{836
814_c._| ... |Jehoahaz. | } ... | } i. 3); attacks Gath, but is| ... |{814
| ... | ... | } ... | } bought off from Jerusalem. | |{
812 | ... | ... | } ... | ... | Ac. of Ramman-Nirari. | 812
806 | ... | ... | } ... | Arpad, campaign against, by | Assyria. | 806
803 | ... | ... | } ... | Damascus, under Meri, besieged and taken by Assyria. | 803
... | ... | ... | } ... | A year of pestilence. | ... | ...
798_c._| ... |Joash. | } | | |
797_c._|Amaziah. | | | | |
783_c._| ... |Jeroboam II. | ... | ... | Shalmaneser III. | 783
778_c._|Uzziah | | | | |
| (Azariah). | | | | |
775 | ... |}Jeroboam | ... | ... | Expedition to |
| |}re-conquers | | | Cedar Country. | 775
773 | ... |}Moab, Gilead, | ... | Damascus, campaign against, | by Assyria. | 773
772 | ... |}and part of | ... | Hadrach, campaign against, | by Assyria. | 772
765 | ... |}Aram. | ... | A pestilence. | Ac. of Assur-dan-il. | 765
| | | | Hadrach, campaign against, | by Assyria. |
763 |Total eclipse of the sun on June 15th | visible in Syria and at | Nineveh. | 763
759 | ... | ... | } ... | A pestilence in Western Asia.| ... | 759
755 | ... | ... | } ... | Hadrach suffers attack from | Assyria. | 755
754 | ... | ... | } Amos. | Arpad suffers attack from | Assyria. | 754
753 | ... | ... | } ... | ... | Ac. of Assur-Nirari. | 753
745 | ... | ... | } ... | ... | Accession of |
| | | } | | Tiglath-Pileser III. | 745
743 | ... |Zechariah, son of|} ... | } | | 743
| |Jeroboam (6 mo.).|} ... | } ... | |
| |Shallum (1 mo.). |} ... | } Arpad besieged, and after | two or three years |
| |Menahem. |} Hosea. | } | taken by Assyria. |
742 | ... | ... |} ... | } | | 742
741 | ... | ... |}} ... | } | | 741
740 |"The yr King | ... |}} | | |
736? |Uzziah died."| |}} | | |
|Jotham sole ruler. |}} | | |
738 | ... |Menahem is |}} | mentioned as tributary to | Assyria. | 738
737_c._| |Pekahiah. |}} | | |
736_c._|Ahaz. |Pekah, the | } | | |
| |Gileadite. | } | [(Isa. vii.).| |
735 |Ahaz is attacked both by Pekah | } | and by Rezin of Damascus | ... | 735
734 | ... |Captivity of Gil-| } | | etc., by Assyria |
| | ead, Galilee, | } | | (Isa. viii., ix.). | 734
733 | ... | ... | } ... |Damascus besieged and taken by| Assyria. | 733
732 |Ahaz pays homage | } | at Damascus to the King of | Assyria. | 732
731 | ... | ... | } ... | ... |Tiglath-Pileser becomes| 731
730_c._| ... |Hoshea. | } | | King of Babylon under|
| | | } | | the name of Pul. |
727_c._|Hezekiah. | ... | }Isaiah.| ... | Shalmaneser IV. | 727
725 | ... |Siege of Samaria | } | | begins. |
722 | ... |Fall of Samaria. | } ... | ... | Sargon takes Samaria. | 722
or 1 | | | } | | | or 1
720 | ... | ... |}} ... | Gaza overthrown by Sargon as he marches past Judah | 720
or 19 | | |}} | and defeats Egypt at Raphia. |or 19
715 | ... |Samaria peopled |}} | |by subjugated tribes | 715
| | |}} | | deported from Assyria.|
711 | ... | ... |}} ... | Ashdod taken by | Sargon. | 711
709 | ... | ... |}} ... | ... |Sargon takes Babylon | 709
| | |}} | | from Merodach-Baladan.|
705 | ... | ... |}} | ... | Death of Sargon. | 705
| | |}} | | Ac. of Sennacherib. |
704 | ... | ... |}} ... | ... War | with Merodach-Baladan.| 704
701 |Invasion of Judah |}} | and of all Syria | by Sennacherib. | 701
|Deliverance of Jerusalem. |}} | Siege of Ekron. Battle of | |
| | |} Micah. | Eltekeh. | |
695 |Manasseh. | ... |} | | |
_c._[2]| | | | | |
681 | ... | ... | ... | ... | Sennacherib murdered. | 681
| | | | | Asarhaddon succeeds. |
678 | ... | ... | ... | Phœnicia subdued by | Asarhaddon. | 678
676 |Manasseh |tributary to | | | Assyria. | 676
671 | ... | ... | ... | Tyre taken by | Asarhaddon on his | 671
| | | | march to Egypt, and conquest of Memphis. |
668 | ... | ... | ... | ... | Assurbanipal. | 668
666 |Manasseh |and the | | other Syrian kings | tributary to Assyria. | 666
641_c._|Amon. | ... | ... | Tyre assists | Assurbanipal against | 641
| | | | the Phœnician Arvad. | |
639_c._|Josiah. | | | | |
-------+-------------+-----------------+---------+------------------------------+-----------------------+-----
FOOTNOTE:
[2] This date is very uncertain. It may have been 690, or according
to some 685.
_INTRODUCTION_
Καὶ τῶν ιβ' προφητῶν τὰ ὀστᾶ
ἀναθάλοι ἐκ τοῦ τόπου αὐτῶν,
Παρεκάλεσαν δὲ τὸν Ἰακώβ
καὶ ἐλυτρώσαντο αὐτοὺς ἐυ πίστει ἐλπίδος.
_And of the Twelve Prophets may the bones_
_Flourish again from their place,_
_For they comforted Jacob_
_And redeemed them by the assurance of hope._
ECCLESIASTICUS xlix. 10.
CHAPTER I
_THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE_
In the order of our English Bible the Minor Prophets, as they are
usually called, form the last twelve books of the Old Testament.
They are immediately preceded by Daniel, and before him by the three
Major Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah (with Lamentations) and Ezekiel. Why
all sixteen were thus gathered at the end of the other sacred books,
we do not know. Perhaps, because it was held fitting that prophecy
should occupy the last outposts of the Old Testament towards the New.
In the Hebrew Bible, however, the order differs, and is much more
significant. The Prophets[3] form the second division of the
threefold Canon: Law, Prophets and Writings; and Daniel is not among
them. The Minor follow immediately after Ezekiel. Moreover, they are
not twelve books, but one. They are gathered under the common title
_Book of the Twelve_;[4] and although each of them has the usual
colophon detailing the number of its own verses, there is also
one colophon for all the twelve, placed at the end of Malachi and
reckoning the sum of their verses from the first of Hosea onwards.
This unity, which there is reason to suppose was given to them before
their reception into the Canon,[5] they have never since lost.
However much their place has changed in the order of the books of
the Old Testament, however much their own internal arrangement has
differed, the Twelve have always stood together. There has been every
temptation to scatter them because of their various dates. Yet they
never have been scattered; and in spite of the fact that they have
not preserved their common title in any Bible outside the Hebrew,
that title has lived on in literature and common talk. Thus the Greek
canon omits it; but Greek Jews and Christians always counted the
books as one volume,[6] calling them "The Twelve Prophets," or "The
Twelve-Prophet" Book.[7]. It was the Latins who designated them "The
Minor Prophets": "on account of their brevity as compared with those
who are called the Major because of their ampler volumes."[8] And
this name has passed into most modern languages,[9] including our
own. But surely it is better to revert to the original, canonical
and unambiguous title of "The Twelve."
The collection and arrangement of "The Twelve" are matters of
obscurity, from which, however, three or four facts emerge that are
tolerably certain. The inseparableness of the books is a proof of the
ancient date of their union. They must have been put together before
they were received into the Canon. The Canon of the Prophets--Joshua
to Second Kings and Isaiah to Malachi--was closed by 200 B.C. at
the latest, and perhaps as early as 250; but if we have (as seems
probable) portions of "The Twelve,"[10] which must be assigned to
a little later than 300, this may be held to prove that the whole
collection cannot have long preceded the fixing of the Canon of the
Prophets. On the other hand, the fact that these latest pieces have
not been placed under a title of their own, but are attached to the
Book of Zechariah, is pretty sufficient evidence that they were added
after the collection and fixture of twelve books--a round number
which there would be every disposition not to disturb. That would
give us for the date of the first edition (so to speak) of our Twelve
some year before 300; and for the date of the second edition some
year towards 250. This is a question, however, which may be reserved
for final decision after we have examined the date of the separate
books, and especially of Joel and the second half of Zechariah. That
there was a previous collection, as early as the Exile, of the books
written before then, may be regarded as more than probable. But we
have no means of fixing its exact limits. Why the Twelve were all
ultimately put together is reasonably suggested by Jewish writers.
They are small, and, as separate rolls, might have been lost.[11] It
is possible that the desire of the round number twelve is responsible
for the admission of Jonah, a book very different in form from all
the others; just as we have hinted that the fact of there being
already twelve may account for the attachment of the late fragments
to the Book of Zechariah. But all this is only to guess, where we
have no means of certain knowledge.
"The Book of the Twelve" has not always held the place which it now
occupies in the Hebrew Canon, at the end of the Prophets. The rabbis
taught that Hosea, but for the comparative smallness of his prophecy,
should have stood first of all the writing prophets, of whom they
regarded him as the oldest.[12] And doubtless it was for the same
chronological reasons, that early Christian catalogues of the
Scriptures, and various editions of the Septuagint, placed the whole
of "The Twelve" in front of Isaiah.[13]
The internal arrangement of "The Twelve" in our English Bible is the
same as that of the Hebrew Canon, and was probably determined by what
the compilers thought to be the respective ages of the books. Thus,
first we have six, all supposed to be of the earlier Assyrian period,
before 700--Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah; then three
from the late Assyrian and the Babylonian periods--Nahum, Habbakuk
and Zephaniah; and then three from the Persian period after the
Exile--Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. The Septuagint have altered the
order of the first six, arranging Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel and Obadiah
according to their size, and setting Jonah after them, probably because
of his different form. The remaining six are left as in the Hebrew.
Recent criticism, however, has made it clear that the Biblical order
of "The Twelve Prophets" is no more than a very rough approximation
to the order of their real dates; and, as it is obviously best for us
to follow in their historical succession prophecies, which illustrate
the whole history of prophecy from its rise with Amos to its fall
with Malachi and his successors, I propose to do this. Detailed
proofs of the separate dates must be left to each book. All that is
needful here is a general statement of the order.
Of the first six prophets the dates of Amos, Hosea, and Micah (but
of the latter's book in part only) are certain. The Jews have been
able to defend Hosea's priority only on fanciful grounds.[14] Whether
or not he quotes from Amos, his historical allusions are more
recent. With the exception of a few fragments incorporated by later
authors, the Book of Amos is thus the earliest example of prophetic
literature, and we take it first. The date we shall see is about 755.
Hosea begins five or ten years later, and Micah just before 722. The
three are in every respect--originality, comprehensiveness, influence
upon other prophets--the greatest of our Twelve, and will therefore
be treated with most detail, occupying the whole of the first volume.
The rest of the first six are Obadiah, Joel and Jonah. But the Book
of Obadiah, although it opens with an early oracle against Edom, is in
its present form from after the Exile. The Book of Joel is of uncertain
date, but, as we shall see, the great probability is that it is late;
and the Book of Jonah belongs to a form of literature so different from
the others that we may, most conveniently, treat of it last.
This leaves us to follow Micah, at the end of the eighth century,
with the group Zephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk from the second half
of the seventh century; and finally to take in their order the
post-exilic Haggai, Zechariah i.-ix., Malachi, and the other writings
which we feel obliged to place about or even after that date.
One other word is needful. This assignment of the various books to
different dates is not to be held as implying that the whole of a
book belongs to such a date or to the author whose name it bears. We
shall find that hands have been busy with the texts of the books long
after the authors of these must have passed away; that besides early
fragments incorporated by later writers, prophets of Israel's new dawn
mitigated the judgments and lightened the gloom of the watchmen of her
night; that here and there are passages which are evidently intrusions,
both because they interrupt the argument and because they reflect a
much later historical environment than their context. This, of course,
will require discussion in each case, and such discussion will be
given. The text will be subjected to an independent examination. Some
passages hitherto questioned we may find to be unjustly so; others
not hitherto questioned we may see reason to suspect. But in any case
we shall keep in mind, that the results of an independent inquiry are
uncertain; and that in this new criticism of the prophets, which is
comparatively recent, we cannot hope to arrive for some time at so
general a consensus, as is being rapidly reached in the far older and
more elaborated criticism of the Pentateuch.[15]
* * * * *
Such is the extent and order of the journey which lies before
us. If it is not to the very summits of Israel's outlook that we
climb--Isaiah, Jeremiah and the great Prophet of the Exile--we are
yet to traverse the range of prophecy from beginning to end. We
start with its first abrupt elevations in Amos. We are carried by
the side of Isaiah and Jeremiah, yet at a lower altitude, on to the
Exile. With the returned Israel we pursue an almost immediate rise to
vision, and then by Malachi and others are conveyed down dwindling
slopes to the very end. Beyond the land is flat. Though Psalms are
sung and brave deeds done, and faith is strong and bright, there is
no height of outlook; _there is no more any prophet_[16] in Israel.
But our "Twelve" do more than thus carry us from beginning to end of
the Prophetic Period. Of second rank as are most of the heights of
this mountain range, they yet bring forth and speed on their way not
a few of the streams of living water which have nourished later ages,
and are flowing to-day. Impetuous cataracts of righteousness--_let
it roll on like water, and justice as an everlasting stream_; the
irrepressible love of God to sinful men; the perseverance and
pursuits of His grace; His mercies that follow the exile and the
outcast; His truth that goes forth richly upon the heathen; the
hope of the Saviour of mankind; the outpouring of the Spirit;
counsels of patience; impulses of tenderness and of healing; melodies
innumerable,--all sprang from these lower hills of prophecy, and
sprang so strongly that the world hears and feels them still.
And from the heights of our present pilgrimage there are also clear
those great visions of the Stars and the Dawn, of the Sea and the
Storm, concerning which it is true, that as long as men live they
shall seek out the places whence they can be seen, and thank God for
His prophets.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Including, of course, the historical books, Joshua to 2 Kings,
which were known as "the Former Prophets"; while what we call the
prophets Isaiah to Malachi were known as "the Latter."
[4] עשר תרי ספר, the Aramaic form of the Hebrew עשר שנים, which appears
with the other in the colophon to the book. A later contraction is
תריסר. This is the form transliterated in Epiphanius: δαθαριασαρα.
[5] See Ryle, _Canon of the O.T._, p. 105.
[6] So Josephus, _Contra Apion_, i. 8 (_circa_ 90 A.D.), reckons the
prophetical books as thirteen, of which the Minor Prophets could only
have been counted as one--whatever the other twelve may have been.
Melito of Sardis (_c._ 170), quoted by Eusebius (_Hist. Eccl._, iv.
26), speaks of τῶν δώδεκα ἐν μονοβίβλῳ. To Origen (_c._ 250: apud
Ibid., vi. 25) they could only have been one out of the twenty-two he
gives for the O.T. Cf. Jerome (_Prolog. Galeatus_), "Liber duodecim
Prophetarum."
[7] Οἱ Δώδεκα Προφῆται: Jesus son of Sirach xlix. 10; Τὸ
δωδεκα-πρόφητον.
[8] Augustine, _De Civ. Dei_, xviii. 29: cf. Jerome, _Proem. in Esaiam_.
[9] The German usage generally preserves the numeral, "Die zwölf
kleinen Propheten."
[10] See Vol. II. on Zech. ix. ff.
[11] _Talmud_: Baba Bathra, 14_a_: cf. Rashi's Commentary.
[12] _Talmud_, _ibid._
[13] So the Codices Vaticanus and Alexandrinus, but not Cod. Sin. So
also Cyril of Jerusalem († 386), Athanasius (365), Gregory Naz. (†
390), and the spurious Canon of the Council of Laodicea (_c._ 400)
and Epiphanius (403). See Ryle, _Canon of the O.T._, 215 ff.
[14] By a forced interpretation of the phrase in chap. i. 2, _When the
Lord spake at the first by Hosea_ (R.V.), _Talmud_: Baba Bathra, 14_a_.
[15] For further considerations on this point see pp. 142, 194, 202
ff., 223 ff., 308, etc.
[16] Psalm lxxiv. 9.
CHAPTER II
_THE PROPHET IN EARLY ISRAEL_
Our "Twelve Prophets" will carry us, as we have seen, across the
whole extent of the Prophetical period--the period when prophecy
became literature, assuming the form and rising to the intensity of
an imperishable influence on the world. The earliest of the Twelve,
Amos and Hosea, were the inaugurators of this period. They were not
only the first (so far as we know) to commit prophecy to writing, but
we find in them the germs of all its subsequent development. Yet Amos
and Hosea were not unfathered. Behind them lay an older dispensation,
and their own was partly a product of this, and partly a revolt
against it. Amos says of himself: _The Lord hath spoken, who can but
prophesy?_--but again: _No prophet I, nor prophet's son_! Who were
those earlier prophets, whose office Amos assumed while repudiating
their spirit--whose name he abjured, yet could not escape from it? And,
while we are about the matter, what do we mean by "prophet" in general?
In vulgar use the name "prophet" has degenerated to the meaning of
"one who foretells the future." Of this meaning it is, perhaps, the
first duty of every student of prophecy earnestly and stubbornly
to rid himself. In its native Greek tongue "prophet" meant not
"one who speaks before," but "one who speaks for, or on behalf of,
another." At the Delphic oracle "The Prophētēs" was the title of
the official, who received the utterances of the frenzied Pythoness
and expounded them to the people;[17] but Plato says that this is a
misuse of the word, and that the true prophet is the inspired person
himself, he who is in communication with the Deity and who speaks
directly for the Deity.[18] So Tiresias, the seer, is called by
Pindar the "prophet" or "interpreter of Zeus,"[19] and Plato even
styles poets "the prophets of the Muses."[20] It is in this sense
that we must think of the "prophet" of the Old Testament. He is a
speaker for God. The sharer of God's counsels, as Amos calls him,
he becomes the bearer and preacher of God's Word. Prediction of the
future is only a part, and often a subordinate and accidental part,
of an office whose full function is to declare the character and the
will of God. But the prophet does this in no systematic or abstract
form. He brings his revelation point by point, and in connection
with some occasion in the history of his people, or some phase of
their character. He is not a philosopher nor a theologian with a
system of doctrine (at least before Ezekiel), but the messenger and
herald of God at some crisis in the life or conduct of His people.
His message is never out of touch with events. These form either
the subject-matter or the proof or the execution of every oracle he
utters. It is, therefore, God not merely as Truth, but far more as
Providence, whom the prophet reveals. And although that Providence
includes the full destiny of Israel and mankind, the prophet brings
the news of it, for the most part, piece by piece, with reference
to some present sin or duty, or some impending crisis or calamity.
Yet he does all this, not merely because the word needed for the
day has been committed to him by itself, and as if he were only its
mechanical vehicle; but because he has come under the overwhelming
conviction of God's presence and of His character, a conviction often
so strong that God's word breaks through him and God speaks in the
first person to the people.
1. FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TILL SAMUEL.
There was no ancient people but believed in the power of certain
personages to consult the Deity and to reveal His will. Every man could
sacrifice; but not every man could render in return the oracle of God.
This pertained to select individuals or orders. So the prophet seems
to have been an older specialist than the priest, though in every tribe
he frequently combined the latter's functions with his own.[21]
The matters on which ancient man consulted God were as wide as life.
But naturally at first, in a rude state of society and at a low stage
of mental development, it was in regard to the material defence
and necessities of life, the bare law and order, that men almost
exclusively sought the Divine will. And the whole history of prophecy
is just the effort to substitute for these elementary provisions a
more personal standard of the moral law, and more spiritual ideals of
the Divine Grace.
By the Semitic race--to which we may now confine ourselves, since
Israel belonged to it--Deity was worshipped, in the main, as the god
of a tribe. Every Semitic tribe had its own god; it would appear
that there was no god without a tribe:[22] the traces of belief in
a supreme and abstract Deity are few and ineffectual. The tribe
was the medium by which the god made himself known, and became an
effective power on earth: the god was the patron of the tribe, the
supreme magistrate and the leader in war. The piety he demanded was
little more than loyalty to ritual; the morality he enforced was
only a matter of police. He took no cognisance of the character or
inner thoughts of the individual. But the tribe believed him to
stand in very close connection with all the practical interests of
their common life. They asked of him the detection of criminals, the
discovery of lost property, the settlement of civil suits, sometimes
when the crops should be sown, and always when war should be waged
and by what tactics.
The means by which the prophet consulted the Deity on these subjects
were for the most part primitive and rude. They may be summed up
under two kinds: Visions either through falling into ecstasy or by
dreaming in sleep, and Signs or Omens. Both kinds are instanced in
Balaam.[23] Of the signs some were natural, like the whisper of
trees, the flight of birds, the passage of clouds, the movements of
stars. Others were artificial, like the casting or drawing of lots.
Others were between these, like the shape assumed by the entrails of
the sacrificed animals when thrown on the ground. Again, the prophet
was often obliged to do something wonderful in the people's sight,
in order to convince them of his authority. In Biblical language he
had to work a miracle or give a sign. One instance throws a flood of
light on this habitual expectancy of the Semitic mind. There was once
an Arab chief, who wished to consult a distant soothsayer as to the
guilt of a daughter. But before he would trust the seer to give him
the right answer to such a question, he made him discover a grain
of corn which he had concealed about his horse.[24] He required the
physical sign before he would accept the moral judgment.
Now, to us the crudeness of the means employed, the opportunities
of fraud, the inadequacy of the tests for spiritual ends, are very
obvious. But do not let us, therefore, miss the numerous moral
opportunities which lay before the prophet even at that early
stage of his evolution. He was trusted to speak in the name of
Deity. Through him men believed in God and in the possibility of a
revelation. They sought from him the discrimination of evil from
good. The highest possibilities of social ministry lay open to him:
the tribal existence often hung on his word for peace or war; he
was the mouth of justice, the rebuke of evil, the champion of the
wronged. Where such opportunities were present, can we imagine the
Spirit of God to have been absent--the Spirit Who seeks men more than
they seek Him, and as He condescends to use their poor language for
religion must also have stooped to the picture language, to the rude
instruments, symbols and sacraments, of their early faith?
In an office of such mingled possibilities everything depended--as
we shall find it depend to the very end of prophecy--on the moral
insight and character of the prophet himself, on his conception
of God and whether he was so true to this as to overcome his
professional temptations to fraud and avarice, malice towards
individuals, subservience to the powerful, or, worst snares of all,
the slothfulness and insincerity of routine. We see this moral issue
put very clearly in such a story as that of Balaam, or in such a
career as that of Mohammed.
So much for the Semitic soothsayer in general. Now let us turn to
Israel.
Among the Hebrews the _man of God_,[25] to use his widest designation,
is at first called _Seer_,[26] or _Gazer_,[27] the word which Balaam
uses of himself. In consulting the Divine will he employs the same
external means, he offers the people for their evidence the same signs,
as do the seers or soothsayers of other Semitic tribes. He gains
influence by the miracles, _the wonderful things_, which he does.[28]
Moses himself is represented after this fashion. He meets the magicians
of Egypt on their own level. His use of _rods_; the holding up of
his hands that Israel may prevail against Amaleq; Joshua's casting
of lots to discover a criminal; Samuel's dream in the sanctuary; his
discovery for a fee of the lost asses of Saul; David and the images
in his house, the ephod he consulted; the sign to go to battle _what
time thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry
trees_; Solomon's inducement of dreams by sleeping in the sanctuary at
Gibeah,--these are a few of the many proofs, that early prophecy in
Israel employed not only the methods but even much of the furniture of
the kindred Semitic religions. But then those tools and methods were at
the same time accompanied by the noble opportunities of the prophetic
office to which I have just alluded--opportunities of religious and
social ministry--and, still more, these opportunities were at the
disposal of moral influences which, it is a matter of history, were not
found in any other Semitic religion than Israel's. However you will
explain it, that Divine Spirit, which we have felt unable to conceive
as absent from any Semitic prophet who truly sought after God, that
Light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world, was present
to an unparalleled degree with the early prophets of Israel. He came to
individuals, and to the nation as a whole, in events and in influences
which may be summed up as the impression of the character of their
national God, Jehovah: to use Biblical language, as _Jehovah's spirit_
and _power_. It is true that in many ways the Jehovah of early Israel
reminds us of other Semitic deities. Like some of them He appears
with thunder and lightning; like all of them He is the God of one
tribe who are His peculiar people. He bears the same titles--Melek,
Adon, Baal (_King_, _Lord_, _Possessor_). He is propitiated by the
same offerings. To choose one striking instance, captives and spoil
of war are sacrificed to Him with the same relentlessness, and by a
process which has even the same names given to it, as in the votive
inscriptions of Israel's heathen neighbours.[29] Yet, notwithstanding
all these elements, the religion of Jehovah from the very first
evinced, by the confession of all critics, an ethical force shared by
no other Semitic creed. From the first there was in it the promise and
the potency of that sublime monotheism, which in the period of our
"Twelve" it afterwards reached.[30] Its earliest effects of course
were chiefly political: it welded the twelve tribes into the unity
of a nation; it preserved them as one amid the many temptations to
scatter along those divergent lines of culture and of faith, which the
geography of their country placed so attractively before them.[31] It
taught them to prefer religious loyalty to material advantage, and so
inspired them with high motives for self-sacrifice and every other
duty of patriotism. But it did even better than thus teach them to
bear one another's burdens. It inspired them to care for one another's
sins. The last chapters of the Book of Judges prove how strong a
national conscience there was in early Israel. Even then Israel was
a moral, as well as a political, unity. Gradually there grew up, but
still unwritten, a body of Torah, or revealed law, which, though its
framework was the common custom of the Semitic race, was inspired by
ideals of humanity and justice not elsewhere in that race discernible
by us.
When we analyse this ethical distinction of early Israel, this
indubitable progress which the nation were making while the rest
of their world was morally stagnant, we find it to be due to their
impressions of the character of their God. This character did not
affect them as Righteousness only. At first it was even a more
wonderful Grace. Jehovah had chosen them when they were no people,
had redeemed them from servitude, had brought them to their land; had
borne with their stubbornness, and had forgiven their infidelities.
Such a Character was partly manifest in the great events of
their history, and partly communicated itself to their finest
personalities--as the Spirit of God does communicate with the spirit
of man made in His image. Those personalities were the early prophets
from Moses to Samuel. They inspired the nation to believe in God's
purposes for itself; they rallied it to war for the common faith, and
war was then the pitch of self-sacrifice; they gave justice to it in
God's name, and rebuked its sinfulness without sparing. Criticism has
proved that we do not know nearly so much about those first prophets,
as perhaps we thought we did. But under their God they made Israel.
Out of their work grew the monotheism of their successors, whom we
are now to study, and later the Christianity of the New Testament.
For myself I cannot but believe, that in the influence of Jehovah
which Israel owned in those early times, there was the authentic
revelation of a real Being.
2. FROM SAMUEL TO ELISHA.
Of the oldest order of Hebrew prophecy, Samuel was the last
representative. Till his time, we are told, the prophet in Israel was
known as the Seer,[32] but now, with other tempers and other habits,
a new order appears, whose name--and that means to a certain extent
their spirit--is to displace the older name and the older spirit.
When Samuel anointed Saul he bade him, for a sign that he was chosen
of the Lord, go forth to meet _a company of prophets_--Nebi'îm, the
singular is Nabi'--coming down from the high place or sanctuary with
viols, drums and pipes, and _prophesying_. _There_, he added, _the
spirit of Jehovah shall come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with
them, and shalt be turned into another man_. So it happened; and the
people _said one to another, What is this that is come to the son of
Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?_[33] Another story, probably
from another source, tells us that later, when Saul sent troops
of messengers to the sanctuary at Ramah to take David, they saw
_the company of prophets prophesying and Samuel standing appointed
over them, and the spirit of God fell_ upon one after another of
the troops; as upon Saul himself when he followed them up. _And he
stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like
manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore
they say, Is Saul also among the prophets?_[34]
All this is very different from the habits of the Seer, who had
hitherto represented prophecy. He was solitary, but these went
about in bands. They were filled with an infectious enthusiasm, by
which they excited each other and all sensitive persons whom they
touched. They stirred up this enthusiasm by singing, playing upon
instruments, and dancing: its results were frenzy, the tearing of
their clothes, and prostration. The same phenomena have appeared
in every religion--in Paganism often, and several times within
Christianity. They may be watched to-day among the dervishes of
Islam, who by singing (as one has seen them in Cairo), by swaying
of their bodies, by repeating the Divine Name, and dwelling on the
love and ineffable power of God, work themselves into an excitement
which ends in prostration and often in insensibility.[35] The whole
process is due to an overpowering sense of the Deity--crude and
unintelligent if you will, but sincere and authentic--which seems
to haunt the early stages of all religions, and to linger to the
end with the stagnant and unprogressive. The appearance of this
prophecy in Israel has given rise to a controversy as to whether it
was purely a native product, or was induced by infection from the
Canaanite tribes around. Such questions are of little interest in
face of these facts: that the ecstasy sprang up in Israel at a time
when the spirit of the people was stirred against the Philistines,
and patriotism and religion were equally excited; that it is
represented as due to the Spirit of Jehovah; and that the last of
the old order of Jehovah's prophets recognised its harmony with his
own dispensation, presided over it, and gave Israel's first king
as one of his signs, that he should come under its power. These
things being so, it is surprising that a recent critic[36] should
have seen in the dancing prophets nothing but eccentrics into whose
company it was shame for so good a man as Saul to fall. He reaches
this conclusion only by supposing that the reflexive verb used for
their _prophesying_--_hithnabbē'_--had at this time that equivalence
to mere madness to which it was reduced by the excesses of later
generations of prophets. With Samuel we feel that the word had no
reproach: the Nebi'îm were recognised by him as standing in the
prophetical succession. They sprang up in sympathy with a national
movement. The king who joined himself to them was the same who
sternly banished from Israel all the baser forms of soothsaying and
traffic with the dead. But, indeed, we need no other proof than
this: the name Nebi'îm so establishes itself in the popular regard
that it displaces the older names of Seer and Gazer, and becomes the
classical term for the whole body of prophets from Moses to Malachi.
There was one very remarkable change effected by this new order of
prophets, probably the very greatest relief which prophecy experienced
in the course of its evolution. This was separation from the ritual
and from the implements of soothsaying. Samuel had been both priest
and prophet. But after him the names and the duties were specialised,
though the specialising was incomplete. While the new Nebi'îm remained
in connection with the ancient centres of religion, they do not appear
to have exercised any part of the ritual. The priests, on the other
hand, did not confine themselves to sacrifice and other forms of public
worship, but exercised many of the so-called prophetic functions. They
also, as Hosea tells us, were expected to give Tôrôth--revelations
of the Divine will on points of conduct and order. There remained
with them the ancient forms of oracle--the Ephod, or plated image,
the Teraphim, the lot, and the Urim and Thummim,[37] all of these
apparently still regarded as indispensable elements of religion.[38]
From such rude forms of ascertaining the Divine Will, prophecy in its
new order was absolutely free. And it was free of the ritual of the
sanctuaries. As has been justly remarked, the ritual of Israel always
remained a peril to the people, the peril of relapsing into Paganism.
Not only did it materialise faith and engross affections in the
worshipper which were meant for moral objects, but very many of its
forms were actually the same as those of the other Semitic religions,
and it tempted its devotees to the confusion of their God with the gods
of the heathen. Prophecy was now wholly independent of it, and we may
see in such independence the possibility of all the subsequent career
of prophecy along moral and spiritual lines. Amos absolutely condemns
the ritual, and Hosea brings the message from God, _I will have mercy
and not sacrifice_. This is the distinctive glory of prophecy in that
era in which we are to study it. But do not let us forget that it
became possible through the ecstatic Nebi'îm of Samuel's time, and
through their separation from the national ritual and the material
forms of soothsaying. It is the way of Providence to prepare for the
revelation of great moral truths, by the enfranchisement, sometimes
centuries before, of an order or a nation of men from political or
professional interests which would have rendered it impossible for
their descendants to appreciate those truths without prejudice or
compromise.
We may conceive then of these Nebi'îm, these prophets, as enthusiasts
for Jehovah and for Israel. For Jehovah--if to-day we see men cast
by the adoration of the despot-deity of Islam into transports so
excessive that they lose all consciousness of earthly things and fall
into a trance, can we not imagine a like effect produced on the same
sensitive natures of the East by the contemplation of such a God as
Jehovah, so mighty in earth and heaven, so faithful to His people, so
full of grace? Was not such an ecstasy of worship most likely to be
born of the individual's ardent devotion in the hour of the nation's
despair?[39] Of course there would be swept up by such a movement all
the more volatile and unbalanced minds of the day--as these always
have been swept up by any powerful religious excitement--but that is
not to discredit the sincerity of the main volume of the feeling nor
its authenticity as a work of the Spirit of God, as the impression of
the character and power of Jehovah.
But these ecstatics were also enthusiasts for Israel; and this saved
the movement from morbidness. They worshipped God neither out of
sheer physical sympathy with nature, like the Phœnician devotees of
Adonis or the Greek Bacchantes; nor out of terror at the approaching
end of all things, like some of the ecstatic sects of the Middle
Ages; nor out of a selfish passion for their own salvation, like so
many a modern Christian fanatic; but in sympathy with their nation's
aspirations for freedom and her whole political life. They were
enthusiasts for their people. The ecstatic prophet was not confined
to his body nor to nature for the impulses of Deity. Israel was his
body, his atmosphere, his universe. Through it all he felt the thrill
of Deity. Confine religion to the personal, it grows rancid, morbid.
Wed it to patriotism, it lives in the open air and its blood is pure.
So in days of national danger the Nebi'îm would be inspired like Saul
to battle for their country's freedom; in more settled times they
would be lifted to the responsibilities of educating the people,
counselling the governors, and preserving the national traditions.
This is what actually took place. After the critical period of Saul's
time has passed, the prophets still remain enthusiasts; but they are
enthusiasts for affairs. They counsel and they rebuke David.[40] They
warn Rehoboam, and they excite Northern Israel to revolt.[41] They
overthrow and they set up dynasties.[42] They offer the king advice
on campaigns.[43] Like Elijah, they take up against the throne the
cause of the oppressed;[44] like Elisha, they stand by the throne
its most trusted counsellors in peace and war.[45] That all this is
no new order of prophecy in Israel, but the developed form of the
ecstasy of Samuel's day, is plain from the continuance of the name
Nebi'îm and from these two facts besides: that the ecstasy survives
and that the prophets still live in communities. The greatest figures
of the period, Elijah and Elisha, have upon them _the hand of the
Lord_, as the influence is now called: Elijah when he runs before
Ahab's chariot across Esdraelon, Elisha when by music he induces
upon himself the prophetic mood.[46] Another ecstatic figure is
the prophet who was sent to anoint Jehu; he swept in and he swept
out again, and the soldiers called him _that mad fellow_.[47] But
the roving bands had settled down into more or less stationary
communities, who partly lived by agriculture and partly by the alms
of the people or the endowments of the crown.[48] Their centres were
either the centres of national worship, like Bethel and Gilgal, or
the centres of government, like Samaria, where the dynasty of Omri
supported prophets both of Baal and of Jehovah.[49] They were called
prophets, but also _sons of the prophets_, the latter name not
because their office was hereditary, but by the Oriental fashion of
designating every member of a guild as the son of the guild. In many
cases the son may have succeeded his father; but the ranks could be
recruited from outside, as we see in the case of the young farmer
Elisha, whom Elijah anointed at the plough. They probably all wore
the mantle which is distinctive of some of them, the mantle of hair,
or skin of a beast.[50]
The risks of degeneration, to which this order of prophecy was
liable, arose both from its ecstatic temper and from its connection
with public affairs.
Religious ecstasy is always dangerous to the moral and intellectual
interests of religion. The largest prophetic figures of the period,
though they feel the ecstasy, attain their greatness by rising
superior to it. Elijah's raptures are impressive; but nobler are
his defence of Naboth and his denunciation of Ahab. And so Elisha's
inducement of the prophetic mood by music is the least attractive
element in his career: his greatness lies in his combination of the
care of souls with political insight and vigilance for the national
interests. Doubtless there were many of the sons of the prophets
who with smaller abilities cultivated a religion as rational and
moral. But for the herd ecstasy would be everything. It was so
easily induced or imitated that much of it cannot have been genuine.
Even where the feeling was at first sincere we can understand how
readily it became morbid; how fatally it might fall into sympathy
with that drunkenness from wine and that sexual passion which Israel
saw already cultivated as worship by the surrounding Canaanites. We
must feel these dangers of ecstasy if we would understand why Amos
cut himself off from the Nebi'îm, and why Hosea laid such emphasis
on the moral and intellectual sides of religion: _My people perish
for lack of knowledge_. Hosea indeed considered the degeneracy of
ecstasy as a judgment: _the prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit
is mad--for the multitude of thine iniquity_.[51] A later age derided
the ecstatics, and took one of the forms of the verb _to prophesy_ as
equivalent to the verb _to be mad_.[52]
But temptations as gross beset the prophet from that which should have
been the discipline of his ecstasy--his connection with public affairs.
Only some prophets were brave rebukers of the king and the people.
The herd which fed at the royal table--four hundred under Ahab--were
flatterers, who could not tell the truth, who said Peace, peace, when
there was no peace. These were false prophets. Yet it is curious that
the very early narrative which describes them[53] does not impute
their falsehood to any base motives of their own, but to the direct
inspiration of God, who sent forth a lying spirit upon them. So great
was the reverence still for the _man of the spirit_! Rather than doubt
his inspiration, they held his very lies to be inspired. One does not
of course mean that these consenting prophets were conscious liars;
but that their dependence on the king, their servile habits of speech,
disabled them from seeing the truth. Subserviency to the powerful was
their great temptation. In the story of Balaam we see confessed the
base instinct that he who paid the prophet should have the word of the
prophet in his favour. In Israel prophecy went through exactly the same
struggle between the claims of its God and the claims of its patrons.
Nor were those patrons always the rich. The bulk of the prophets were
dependent on the charitable gifts of the common people, and in this we
may find reason for that subjection of so many of them to the vulgar
ideals of the national destiny, to signs of which we are pointed by
Amos. The priest at Bethel only reflects public opinion when he takes
for granted that the prophet is a thoroughly mercenary character:
_Seer, get thee gone to the land of Judah; eat there thy bread, and
play the prophet there!_[54] No wonder Amos separates himself from such
hireling craftsmen!
* * * * *
Such was the course of prophecy up to Elisha, and the borders of
the eighth century. We have seen how even for the ancient prophet,
mere soothsayer though we might regard him in respect of the rude
instruments of his office, there were present moral opportunities of
the highest kind, from which, if he only proved true to them, we cannot
conceive the Spirit of God to have been absent. In early Israel we are
sure that the Spirit did meet such strong and pure characters, from
Moses to Samuel, creating by their means the nation of Israel, welding
it to a unity, which was not only political but moral--and moral to a
degree not elsewhere realised in the Semitic world. We saw how a new
race of prophets arose under Samuel, separate from the older forms
of prophecy by lot and oracle, separate, too, from the ritual as a
whole; and therefore free for a moral and spiritual advance of which
the priesthood, still bound to images and the ancient rites, proved
themselves incapable. But this new order of prophecy, besides its moral
opportunities, had also its moral perils: its ecstasy was dangerous,
its connection with public affairs was dangerous too. Again, the test
was the personal character of the prophet himself. And so once more we
see raised above the herd great personalities, who carry forward the
work of their predecessors. The results are, besides the discipline
of the monarchy and the defence of justice and the poor, the firm
establishment of Jehovah as the one and only God of Israel, and the
impression on Israel both of His omnipotent guidance of them in the
past, and of a worldwide destiny, still vague but brilliant, which He
had prepared for them in the future.
This brings us to Elisha, and from Elisha there are but forty years
to Amos. During those forty years, however, there arose within Israel
a new civilisation; beyond her there opened up a new world; and with
Assyria there entered the resources of Providence, a new power. It
was these three facts--the New Civilisation, the New World and the
New Power--which made the difference between Elisha and Amos, and
raised prophecy from a national to a universal religion.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Herodotus, viii. 36, 37.
[18] _Timæus_, 71, 72. The whole passage is worth transcribing:--
"No man, when in his senses, attains prophetic truth and inspiration;
but when he receives the inspired word either his intelligence
is enthralled by sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or
possession. And he who would understand what he remembers to have
been said, whether in dream or when he was awake, by the prophetic
and enthusiastic nature, or what he has seen, must recover his
senses; and then he will be able to explain rationally what all such
words and apparitions mean, and what indications they afford, to this
man or that, of past, present, or future, good and evil. But, while
he continues demented, he cannot judge of the visions which he sees
or the words which he utters; the ancient saying is very true that
'only a man in his senses can act or judge about himself and his own
affairs.' And for this reason it is customary to appoint diviners or
interpreters as discerners of the oracles of the gods. Some persons
call them prophets; they do not know that they are only repeaters of
dark sayings and visions, and are not to be called prophets at all,
but only interpreters of prophecy."--Jowett's _Translation_.
[19] _Nik._, i. 91.
[20] _Phædrus_, 262 D.
[21] It is still a controversy whether the original meaning of the
Semitic root KHN is prophet, as in the Arabic KâHiN, or priest, as in
the Hebrew KôHeN.
[22] Cf. Jer. ii. 10: _For pass over to the isles of Chittim, and
see; and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently; and see if there
be such a thing. Hath a nation changed their gods?_ From the isles of
Chittim unto Kedar--the limits of the Semitic world.
[23] Numbers xxiv. 4, _falling but having his eyes open_. Ver. 1,
_enchantments_ ought to be _omens_.
[24] Instanced by Wellhausen, _Skizzen u. Vorarb._, No. v.
[25] אלהים איש
[26] רֹאֶה
[27] חזֶה
[28] Deut. xiii. 1 ff. admits that heathen seers were able to work
miracles and give signs, as well as the prophets of Jehovah.
[29] Cf. Mesha's account of himself and Chemosh on the Moabite Stone,
with the narrative of the taking of Ai in the Book of Joshua.
[30] Cf. Kuenen: _Gesammelte Alhandlungen_ (trans. by Budde), p. 461.
[31] So in Deborah's Song.
[32] 1 Sam. ix. 9.
[33] 1 Sam. x. 1-16, xi. 1-11, 15. Chap. x. 17-27, xi. 12-14, belong
to other and later documents. Cf. Robertson Smith, _Old Testament in
the Jewish Church_, 135 ff.
[34] 1 Sam. xix. 20-24.
[35] What seemed most to induce the frenzy of the dervishes whom I
watched was the fixing of their attention upon, the yearning of their
minds after, the love of God. "Ya habeebi!"--"O my beloved!"--they
cried.
[36] Cornill, in the first of his lectures on _Der Israelitische
Prophetismus_, one of the very best popular studies of prophecy, by a
master on the subject. See p. 73 _n_.
[37] It is now past doubt that these were two sacred stones used for
decision in the case of an alternative issue. This is plain from the
amended reading of Saul's prayer in 1 Sam. xiv. 41, 42 (after the
LXX.): _O Jehovah God of Israel, wherefore hast Thou not answered Thy
servant this day? If the iniquity be in me or in Jonathan my son, O
Jehovah God of Israel, give Urim: and if it be in Thy people Israel,
give, I pray Thee, Thummim._
[38] Hosea iii. 4. See next chapter, p. 38.
[39] Cf. Deut. xxviii. 34.
[40] 2 Sam. xii. 1 ff.
[41] 1 Kings xi. 29; xii. 22.
[42] 1 Kings xiv. 2, 7-11; xix. 15 f.; 2 Kings ix. 3 ff.
[43] 1 Kings xxii. 5 ff.; 2 Kings iii. 11 ff.
[44] 1 Kings xxi. 1 ff.
[45] 2 Kings vi.-viii., etc.
[46] 1 Kings xviii. 46; 2 Kings iii. 15.
[47] 3 Kings ix. 11. _Mad fellow_, not necessarily a term of reproach.
[48] 1 Kings xviii. 4, cf. 19; 2 Kings ii. 3, 5; iv. 38-44; v. 20
ff.; vi. 1 ff.; viii. 8 f., etc.
[49] 1 Kings xviii. 19; xxii. 6.
[50] So Elijah, 2 Kings i. 8: cf. John the Baptist, Matt. iii. 4.
[51] Hosea ix. 7.
[52] Jer. xxix. 26: _Every man that is mad, and worketh himself into
prophecy_ (מתנבא, the same form as is used without moral reproach in
1 Sam. x. 10 ff.).
[53] 1 Kings xxii.
[54] Amos vii. 12.
CHAPTER III
_THE EIGHTH CENTURY IN ISRAEL_
The long life of Elisha fell to its rest on the margin of the eighth
century.[55] He had seen much evil upon Israel. The people were smitten
in all their coasts. None of their territory across Jordan was left
to them; and not only Hazael and his Syrians, but bands of their own
former subjects, the Moabites, periodically raided Western Palestine,
up to the very gates of Samaria.[56] Such a state of affairs determined
the activity of the last of the older prophets. Elisha spent his life
in the duties of the national defence, and in keeping alive the spirit
of Israel against her foes. When he died they called him _Israel's
chariot and the horsemen thereof_,[57] so incessant had been both his
military vigilance[58] and his political insight.[59] But Elisha was
able to leave behind him the promise of a new day of victory.[60]
It was in the peace and liberty of this day that Israel rose a step
in civilisation; that prophecy, released from the defence, became
the criticism, of the national life; and that the people, no longer
absorbed in their own borders, looked out, and for the first time
realised the great world, of which they were only a part.
King Joash, whose arms the dying Elisha had blessed, won back in the
sixteen years of his reign (798-783) the cities which the Syrians
had taken from his father.[61] His successor, Jeroboam II., came in,
therefore, with a flowing tide. He was a strong man, and he took
advantage of it. During his long reign of about forty years (783-743)
he restored the border of Israel from the Pass of Hamath between the
Lebanons to the Dead Sea, and occupied at least part of the territory
of Damascus.[62] This means that the constant raids to which Israel
had been subjected now ceased, and that by the time of Amos, about
755, a generation was grown up who had not known defeat, and the most
of whom had perhaps no experience even of war.
Along the same length of years Uzziah (_circa_ 778-740) had dealt
similarly with Judah.[63] He had pushed south to the Red Sea, while
Jeroboam pushed north to Hamath; and while Jeroboam had taken the
Syrian towns he had crushed the Philistine. He had reorganised the
army, and invented new engines of siege for casting stones. On such
of his frontiers as were opposed to the desert he had built towers:
there is no better means of keeping the nomads in subjection.
All this meant such security across broad Israel as had not been
known since the glorious days of Solomon. Agriculture must everywhere
have revived: Uzziah, the Chronicler tells us, _loved husbandry_.
But we hear most of Trade and Building. With quarters in Damascus
and a port on the Red Sea, with allies in the Phœnician towns
and tributaries in the Philistine, with command of all the main
routes between Egypt and the North as between the Desert and the
Levant, Israel, during those forty years of Jeroboam and Uzziah,
must have become a busy and a wealthy commercial power. Hosea calls
the Northern Kingdom a very Canaan[64]--Canaanite being the Hebrew
term for trader--as we should say a very Jew; and Amos exposes all
the restlessness, the greed, and the indifference to the poor of
a community making haste to be rich. The first effect of this was
a large increase of the towns and of town-life. Every document of
the time--up to 720--speaks to us of its buildings.[65] In ordinary
building houses of ashlar seem to be novel enough to be mentioned.
Vast _palaces_--the name of them first heard of in Israel under Omri
and his Phœnician alliance, and then only as that of the king's
citadel[66]--are now built by wealthy grandees out of money extorted
from the poor; they can have risen only since the Syrian wars. There
are summer houses in addition to winter houses; and it is not only
the king, as in the days of Ahab, who furnishes his buildings with
ivory. When an earthquake comes and whole cities are overthrown,
the vigour and wealth of the people are such that they build more
strongly and lavishly than before.[67] With all this we have the
characteristic tempers and moods of city-life: the fickleness and
liability to panic which are possible only where men are gathered
in crowds; the luxury and false art which are engendered only by
artificial conditions of life; the deep poverty which in all cities,
from the beginning to the end of time, lurks by the side of the most
brilliant wealth, its dark and inevitable shadow.
In short, in the half-century between Elisha and Amos, Israel rose
from one to another of the great stages of culture. Till the eighth
century they had been but a kingdom of fighting husbandmen. Under
Jeroboam and Uzziah city-life was developed, and civilisation, in the
proper sense of the word, appeared. Only once before had Israel taken
so large a step: when they crossed Jordan, leaving the nomadic life for
the agricultural; and that had been momentous for their religion. They
came among new temptations: the use of wine, and the shrines of local
gods who were believed to have more influence on the fertility of the
land than Jehovah who had conquered it for His people. But now this
further step, from the agricultural stage to the mercantile and civil,
was equally fraught with danger. There was the closer intercourse with
foreign nations and their cults. There were all the temptations of
rapid wealth, all the dangers of an equally increasing poverty. The
growth of comfort among the rulers meant the growth of thoughtlessness.
Cruelty multiplied with refinement. The upper classes were lifted
away from feeling the real woes of the people. There was a well-fed
and sanguine patriotism, but at the expense of indifference to social
sin and want. Religious zeal and liberality increased, but they were
coupled with all the proud's misunderstanding of God: an optimist faith
without moral insight or sympathy.
It is all this which makes the prophets of the eighth century so
modern, while Elisha's life is still so ancient. With him we are back
in the times of our own border wars--of Wallace and Bruce, with their
struggles for the freedom of the soil. With Amos we stand among the
conditions of our own day. The City has arisen. For the development
of the highest form of prophecy, the universal and permanent form,
there was needed that marvellously unchanging mould of human life,
whose needs and sorrows, whose sins and problems, are to-day the same
as they were all those thousands of years ago.
With Civilisation came Literature. The long peace gave leisure for
writing; and the just pride of the people in boundaries broad as
Solomon's own, determined that this writing should take the form of
heroic history. In the parallel reigns of Jeroboam and Uzziah many
critics have placed the great epics of Israel: the earlier documents
of our Pentateuch which trace God's purposes to mankind by Israel,
from the creation of the world to the settlement of the Promised
Land; the histories which make up our Books of Judges, Samuel and
Kings. But whether all these were composed now or at an earlier date,
it is certain that the nation lived in the spirit of them, proud of
its past, aware of its vocation, and confident that its God, who had
created the world and so mightily led itself, would bring it from
victory by victory to a complete triumph over the heathen. Israel of
the eighth century were devoted to Jehovah; and although passion or
self-interest might lead individuals or even communities to worship
other gods, He had no possible rival upon the throne of the nation.
As they delighted to recount His deeds by their fathers, so they
thronged the scenes of these with sacrifice and festival. Bethel
and Beersheba, Dan and Gilgal, were the principal;[68] but Mizpeh,
the top of Tabor,[69] and Carmel,[70] perhaps Penuel,[71] were also
conspicuous among the countless _high places_[72] of the land. Of
those in Northern Israel Bethel was the chief. It enjoyed the proper
site for an ancient shrine, which was nearly always a market as
well--near a frontier and where many roads converged; where traders
from the East could meet half-way with traders from the West, the
wool-growers of Moab and the Judæan desert with the merchants of
Phœnicia and the Philistine coast. Here, on the spot on which the
father of the nation had seen heaven open,[73] a great temple was
now built, with a priesthood endowed and directed by the crown,[74]
but lavishly supported also by the tithes and free-will offerings
of the people.[75] _It is a sanctuary of the king and a house of
the kingdom._[76] Jeroboam had ordained Dan, at the other end of
the kingdom, to be the fellow of Bethel;[77] but Dan was far away
from the bulk of the people, and in the eighth century Bethel's real
rival was Gilgal.[78] Whether this was the Gilgal by Jericho, or the
other Gilgal on the Samarian hills near Shiloh, is uncertain. The
latter had been a sanctuary in Elijah's day, with a settlement of the
prophets; but the former must have proved the greater attraction to a
people so devoted to the sacred events of their past. Was it not the
first resting-place of the Ark after the passage of Jordan, the scene
of the reinstitution of circumcision, of the anointing of the first
king, of Judah's second submission to David?[79] As there were many
Gilgals in the land--literally _cromlechs_, ancient _stone-circles_
sacred to the Canaanites as well as to Israel--so there were many
Mizpehs, _Watchtowers_, _Seers' stations_: the one mentioned by Hosea
was probably in Gilead.[80] To the southern Beersheba, to which
Elijah had fled from Jezebel, pilgrimages were made by northern
Israelites traversing Judah. The sanctuary on Carmel was the ancient
altar of Jehovah which Elijah had rebuilt; but Carmel seems at
this time to have lain, as it did so often, in the power of the
Phœnicians, for it is imagined by the prophets only as a hiding-place
from the face of Jehovah.[81]
At all these sanctuaries it was Jehovah and no other who was
sought: _thy God, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of
Egypt_.[82] At Bethel and at Dan He was adored in the form of a calf;
probably at Gilgal also, for there is a strong tradition to that
effect;[83] and elsewhere men still consulted the other images which
had been used by Saul and by David, the Ephod and the Teraphim.[84]
With these there was the old Semitic symbol of the Maççebah, or
upright stone on which oil was poured.[85] All of them had been used
in the worship of Jehovah by the great examples and leaders of the
past; all of them had been spared by Elijah and Elisha: it was no
wonder that the common people of the eighth century felt them to be
indispensable elements of religion, the removal of which, like the
removal of the monarchy or of sacrifice itself, would mean utter
divorce from the nation's God.[86]
One great exception must be made. Compared with the sanctuaries we
have mentioned, Zion itself was very modern. But it contained the
main repository of Israel's religion, the Ark, and in connection with
the Ark the worship of Jehovah was not a worship of images. It is
significant that from this, the original sanctuary of Israel, with the
pure worship, the new prophecy derived its first inspiration. But to
that we shall return later with Amos.[87] Apart from the Ark, Jerusalem
was not free from images, nor even from the altars of foreign deities.
Where the externals of the ritual were thus so much the same as those
of the Canaanite cults, which were still practised in and around the
land, it is not surprising that the worship of Jehovah should be
further invaded by many pagan practices, nor that Jehovah Himself
should be regarded with imaginations steeped in pagan ideas of the
Godhead. That even the foulest tempers of the Canaanite ritual,
those inspired by wine and the sexual passion, were licensed in the
sanctuaries of Israel, both Amos and Hosea testify. But the worst
of the evil was wrought in the popular conception of God. Let us
remember again that Jehovah had no real rival at this time in the
devotion of His people, and that their faith was expressed both by
the legal forms of His religion and by a liberality which exceeded
these. The tithes were paid to Him, and paid, it would appear,
with more than legal frequency.[88] Sabbath and New Moon, as days
of worship and rest from business, were observed with a Pharisaic
scrupulousness for the letter if not for the spirit.[89] The
prescribed festivals were held, and thronged by zealous devotees who
rivalled each other in the amount of their free-will offerings.[90]
Pilgrimages were made to Bethel, to Gilgal, to far Beersheba, and the
very way to the latter appeared as sacred to the Israelite as the
way to Mecca does to a pious Moslem of to-day.[91] Yet, in spite
of all this devotion to their God, Israel had no true ideas of Him.
To quote Amos, they sought His sanctuaries, but Him they did not
seek; in the words of Hosea's frequent plaint, they _did not know
Him_. To the mass of the people, to their governors, their priests,
and the most of their prophets, Jehovah was but the characteristic
Semitic deity--patron of His people, and caring for them alone--who
had helped them in the past, and was bound to help them still--very
jealous as to the correctness of His ritual and the amount of His
sacrifices, but indifferent about real morality. Nay, there were
still darker streaks in their views of Him. A god, figured as an ox,
could not be adored by a cattle-breeding people without starting
in their minds thoughts too much akin to the foul tempers of the
Canaanite faiths. These things it is almost a shame to mention; but
without knowing that they fermented in the life of that generation,
we shall not appreciate the vehemence of Amos or of Hosea.
Such a religion had no discipline for the busy, mercenary life of
the day. Injustice and fraud were rife in the very precincts of the
sanctuary. Magistrates and priests alike were smitten with their
generation's love of money, and did everything for reward. Again
and again do the prophets speak of bribery. Judges took gifts and
perverted the cause of the poor; priests drank the mulcted wine,
and slept on the pledged garments of religious offenders. There
was no disinterested service of God or of the commonweal. Mammon
was supreme. The influence of the commercial character of the age
appears in another very remarkable result. An agricultural community
is always sensitive to the religion of nature. They are awed by
its chastisements--droughts, famines and earthquakes. They feel
its majestic order in the course of the seasons, the procession of
day and night, the march of the great stars all the host of the
Lord of hosts. But Amos seems to have had to break into passionate
reminders of Him that maketh Orion and the Pleiades, and turneth
the murk into morning.[92] Several physical calamities visited the
land. The locusts are bad in Palestine every sixth or seventh year:
one year before Amos began they had been very bad. There was a
monstrous drought, followed by a famine. There was a long-remembered
earthquake--_the earthquake in the days of Uzziah_. With Egypt so
near, the home of the plague, and with so much war afoot in Northern
Syria, there were probably more pestilences in Western Asia than
those recorded in 803, 765 and 759. There was a total eclipse of
the sun in 763. But of all these, except perhaps the pestilence, a
commercial people are independent as an agricultural are not. Israel
speedily recovered from them, without any moral improvement. Even
when the earthquake came _they said in pride and stoutness of heart,
The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones; the
sycamores are cut down, but we will change to cedars_.[93] It was
a marvellous generation--so joyous, so energetic, so patriotic, so
devout! But its strength was the strength of cruel wealth, its peace
the peace of an immoral religion.
I have said that the age is very modern, and we shall indeed go to
its prophets feeling that they speak to conditions of life extremely
like our own. But if we wish a still closer analogy from our history,
we must travel back to the fourteenth century in England--Langland's
and Wyclif's century, which, like this one in Israel, saw both the
first real attempts towards a national literature, and the first real
attempts towards a moral and religious reform. Then as in Israel a
long and victorious reign was drawing to a close, under the threat
of disaster when it should have passed. Then as in Israel there had
been droughts, earthquakes and pestilences with no moral results upon
the nation. Then also there was a city life developing at the expense
of country life. Then also the wealthy began to draw aloof from the
people. Then also there was a national religion, zealously cultivated
and endowed by the liberality of the people, but superstitious,
mercenary, and corrupted by sexual disorder. Then too there were many
pilgrimages to popular shrines, and the land was strewn with mendicant
priests and hireling preachers. And then too prophecy raised its voice,
for the first time fearless in England. As we study the verses of Amos
we shall find again and again the most exact parallels to them in the
verses of Langland's _Vision of Piers the Plowman_, which denounce the
same vices in Church and State, and enforce the same principles of
religion and morality.
* * * * *
It was when the reign of Jeroboam was at its height of assured
victory, when the nation's prosperity seemed impregnable after the
survival of those physical calamities, when the worship and the
commerce were in full course throughout the land, that the first of
the new prophets broke out against Israel in the name of Jehovah,
threatening judgment alike upon the new civilisation of which they
were so proud and the old religion in which they were so confident.
These prophets were inspired by feelings of the purest morality,
by the passionate conviction that God could no longer bear such
impurity and disorder. But, as we have seen, no prophet in Israel
ever worked on the basis of principles only. He came always in
alliance with events. These first appeared in the shape of the great
physical disasters. But a more powerful instrument of Providence, in
the service of judgment, was appearing on the horizon. This was the
Assyrian Empire. So vast was its influence on prophecy that we must
devote to it a separate chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[55] He died in 798 or 797.
[56] 2 Kings x. 32, xiii. 20, 22.
[57] 2 Kings xiii. 14.
[58] vi. 12 ff., etc.
[59] viii., etc.
[60] xiii. 17 ff.
[61] 2 Kings xiii. 22-25.
[62] xiv. 28, if not Damascus itself.
[63] 2 Kings xv.: cf. 2 Chron. xxvi.
[64] xii. 7 (Heb. ver. 8). Trans., _As for Canaan, the balances, etc._
[65] Amos, _passim_. Hosea viii. 14, etc.; Micah iii. 12; Isa. ix. 10.
[66] ארמון, a word not found in the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, or
Samuel, is used in 1 Kings xvi. 18, 2 Kings xv. 25, for a citadel
within the palace of the king. Similarly in Isa. xxv. 2; Pro. xviii.
19. But in Amos generally of any large or grand house. That the name
first appears in the time of Omri's alliance with Tyre, points to a
Phœnician origin. Probably from root ארם, _to be high_.
[67] Isa. ix. 10.
[68] 1 Kings xii. 25 ff., and Amos and Hosea _passim_.
[69] Hosea v. 1.
[70] 1 Kings xviii. 30 ff.
[71] 1 Kings xii. 25.
[72] Originally so called from their elevation (though oftener on the
flank than on the summit of a hill); but like the name High Street or
the Scottish High Kirk, the term came to be dissociated from physical
height and was applied to any sanctuary, even in a hollow, like so
many of the sacred wells.
[73] The sanctuary itself was probably on the present site of the Burj
Beitin (with the ruins of an early Christian Church), some few minutes
to the south-east of the present village of Beitin, which probably
represents the city of Bethel that was called Luz at the first.
[74] 1 Kings xii. 25 ff.; Amos vii.
[75] Amos iv. 4.
[76] Amos vii. 13.
[77] 1 Kings xii. 25 ff.
[78] Curiously enough conceived by many of the early Christian
Fathers as containing the second of the calves. Cyril, _Comm. in
Hoseam_, 5; Epiph., _De Vitis Proph._, 237; _Chron. Pasc._, 161.
[79] Josh. iv. 20 ff., v. 2 ff.; 1 Sam. xi. 14, 15, etc.; 2 Sam.
xix. 15, 40. This Gilgal by Jericho fell to N. Israel after the
Disruption; but there is nothing in Amos or Hosea to tell us,
whether it or the Gilgal near Shiloh, which seems to have absorbed
the sanctity of the latter, is the shrine which they couple with
Bethel--except that they never talk of "going up" to it. The passage
from Epiphanius in previous note speaks of the Gilgal with the calf
as the "Gilgal which is in Shiloh."
[80] Site uncertain. See _Hist. Geog._, pp. 579, 586.
[81] Amos ix. 3. But cf. i. 2.
[82] 2 Kings xii. 28.
[83] See above, p. 37, _n._ 1.
[84] The Ephod, _the plated thing_; presumably a wooden image covered
either with a skin of metal or a cloak of metal. The Teraphim were
images in human shape.
[85] The _menhir_ of modern Palestine--not a hewn pillar, but oblong
natural stone narrowing a little towards the top (cf. W. R. Smith,
_Religion of the Semites_, 183-188). From Hosea x. 1, 2, it would
appear that the maççeboth of the eighth century were artificial.
_They make good_ maççeboth (A.V. wrongly _images_).
[86] So indeed Hosea iii. 4 implies. The Asherah, the pole or
symbolic tree of Canaanite worship, does not appear to have been used
as a part of the ritual of Jehovah's worship. But, that there was
constantly a temptation so to use it, is clear from Deut. xvi. 21,
22. See Driver on that passage.
[87] See below, p. 99.
[88] Amos iv. 4 ff.
[89] Amos vii. 4: cf. 2 Kings v. 23.
[90] Amos iv. 4 f.
[91] See below, p. 185.
[92] But whether these be by Amos see Chap. XI.
[93] Isa ix. 10.
CHAPTER IV
_THE INFLUENCE OF ASSYRIA UPON PROPHECY_
By far the greatest event in the eighth century before Christ was the
appearance of Assyria in Palestine. To Israel since the Exodus and
Conquest, nothing had happened capable of so enormous an influence at
once upon their national fortunes and their religious development.
But while the Exodus and Conquest had advanced the political and
spiritual progress of Israel in equal proportion, the effect of the
Assyrian invasion was to divorce these two interests, and destroy the
state while it refined and confirmed the religion. After permitting
the Northern Kingdom to reach an extent and splendour unrivalled
since the days of Solomon, Assyria overthrew it in 721 and left all
Israel scarcely a third of their former magnitude. But while Assyria
proved so disastrous to the state, her influence upon the prophecy
of the period was little short of creative. Humanly speaking, this
highest stage of Israel's religion could not have been achieved by
the prophets except in alliance with the armies of that heathen
empire. Before then we turn to their pages it may be well for us
to make clear in what directions Assyria performed this spiritual
service for Israel. While pursuing this inquiry we may be able to
find answers to the scarcely less important questions: why the
prophets were at first doubtful of the part Assyria was destined to
play in the providence of the Almighty? and why, when the prophets
were at last convinced of the certainty of Israel's overthrow, the
statesmen of Israel and the bulk of the people still remained so
unconcerned about her coming, or so sanguine of their power to resist
her? This requires, to begin with, a summary of the details of the
Assyrian advance upon Palestine.
In the far past Palestine had often been the hunting-ground of the
Assyrian kings. But after 1100 B.C., and for nearly two centuries
and a half, her states were left to themselves. Then Assyria resumed
the task of breaking down that disbelief in her power with which
her long withdrawal seems to have inspired their politics. In 870
Assurnasirpal reached the Levant, and took tribute from Tyre and
Sidon. Omri was reigning in Samaria, and must have come into close
relations with the Assyrians, for during more than a century and a
half after his death they still called the land of Israel by his
name.[94] In 854 Salmanassar II. defeated at Karkar the combined
forces of Ahab and Benhadad. In 850, 849 and 846 he conducted
campaigns against Damascus. In 842 he received tribute from Jehu,[95]
and in 839 again fought Damascus under Hazael. After this there
passed a whole generation during which Assyria came no farther
south than Arpad, some sixty miles north of Damascus; and Hazael
employed the respite in those campaigns which proved so disastrous
for Israel, by robbing her of the provinces across Jordan, and
ravaging the country about Samaria.[96] In 803 Assyria returned, and
accomplished the siege and capture of Damascus. The first consequence
to Israel was that restoration of her hopes under Joash, at which
the aged Elisha was still spared to assist,[97] and which reached
its fulfilment in the recovery of all Eastern Palestine by Jeroboam
II.[98] Jeroboam's own relations to Assyria have not been recorded
either by the Bible or by the Assyrian monuments. It is hard to think
that he paid no tribute to the "king of kings." At all events it is
certain that, while Assyria again overthrew the Arameans of Damascus
in 773 and their neighbours of Hadrach in 772 and 765, Jeroboam
was himself invading Aramean land, and the Book of Kings even
attributes to him an extension of territory, or at least of political
influence, up to the northern mouth of the great pass between the
Lebanons.[99] For the next twenty years Assyria only once came as
far as Lebanon--to Hadrach in 759--and it may have been this long
quiescence which enabled the rulers and people of Israel to forget,
if indeed their religion and sanguine patriotism had ever allowed
them to realise, how much the conquests and splendour of Jeroboam's
reign were due, not to themselves, but to the heathen power which had
maimed their oppressors. Their dreams were brief. Before Jeroboam
himself was dead, a new king had usurped the Assyrian throne (745
B.C.) and inaugurated a more vigorous policy. Borrowing the name
of the ancient Tiglath-Pileser, he followed that conqueror's path
across the Euphrates. At first it seemed as if he was to suffer
check. His forces were engrossed by the siege of Arpad for three
years (_c._ 743), and this delay, along with that of two years more,
during which he had to return to the conquest of Babylon, may well
have given cause to the courts of Damascus and Samaria to believe
that the Assyrian power had not really revived. Combining, they
attacked Judah under Ahaz. But Ahaz appealed to Tiglath-Pileser, who
within a year (734-733) had overthrown Damascus and carried captive
the populations of Gilead and Galilee. There could now be no doubt
as to what the Assyrian power meant for the political fortunes of
Israel. Before this resistless and inexorable empire, the people of
Jehovah were as the most frail of their neighbours--sure of defeat,
and sure, too, of that terrible captivity in exile which formed the
novel policy of the invaders against the tribes who withstood them.
Israel dared to withstand. The vassal Hoshea, whom the Assyrians
had placed on the throne of Samaria in 730, kept back his tribute.
The people rallied to him; and for more than three years this
little tribe of highlanders resisted in their capital the Assyrian
siege. Then came the end. Samaria fell in 721, and Israel went into
captivity beyond the Euphrates.
In following the course of this long tragedy, a man's heart cannot
but feel that _all_ the splendour and the glory did not lie with the
prophets, in spite of their being the only actors in the drama who
perceived its moral issues and predicted its actual end. For who can
withhold admiration from those few tribesmen, who accepted no defeat
as final, but so long as they were left to their fatherland rallied
their ranks to its liberty and defied the huge empire. Nor was their
courage always as blind, as in the time of Isaiah Samaria's so fatally
became. For one cannot have failed to notice, how fitful and irregular
was Assyria's advance, at least up to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser;
nor how prolonged and doubtful were her sieges of some of the towns.
The Assyrians themselves do not always record spoil or tribute after
what they are pleased to call their victories over the cities of
Palestine. To the same campaign they had often to return for several
years in succession.[100] It took Tiglath-Pileser himself three years
to reduce Arpad; Salmanassar IV. besieged Samaria for three years, and
was slain before it yielded. These facts enable us to understand that,
apart from the moral reasons which the prophets urged for the certainty
of Israel's overthrow by Assyria, it was always within the range of
political possibility that Assyria would not come back, and that
while she was engaged with revolts of other portions of her huge and
disorganised empire, a combined revolution on the part of her Syrian
vassals would be successful. The prophets themselves felt the influence
of these chances. They were not always confident, as we shall see,
that Assyria was to be the means of Israel's overthrow. Amos, and in
his earlier years Isaiah, describe her with a caution and a vagueness
for which there is no other explanation than the political uncertainty
that again and again hung over the future of her advance upon Syria.
It, then, even in those high minds, to whom the moral issue was so
clear, the political form that issue should assume was yet temporarily
uncertain, what good reasons must the mere statesmen of Syria have
often felt for the proud security which filled the intervals between
the Assyrian invasions, or the sanguine hopes which inspired their
resistance to the latter.
We must not cast over the whole Assyrian advance the triumphant
air of the annals of such kings as Tiglath-Pileser or Sennacherib.
Campaigning in Palestine was a dangerous business even to the Romans;
and for the Assyrian armies there was always possible besides some
sudden recall by the rumour of a revolt in a distant province. Their
own annals supply us with good reasons for the sanguine resistance
offered to them by the tribes of Palestine. No defeat, of course, is
recorded; but the annals are full of delays and withdrawals. Then the
Plague would break out; we know how in the last year of the century
it turned Sennacherib, and saved Jerusalem.[101] In short, up almost
to the end the Syrian chiefs had some fair political reasons for
resistance to a power which had so often defeated them; while at the
very end, when no such reason remained and our political sympathy is
exhausted, we feel it replaced by an even warmer admiration for their
desperate defence. Mere mountain-cats of tribes as some of them were,
they held their poorly furnished rocks against one, two or three
years of cruel siege.
In Israel these political reasons for courage against Assyria were
enforced by the whole instincts of the popular religion. The century
had felt a new outburst of enthusiasm for Jehovah.[102] This was
consequent, not only upon the victories He had granted over Aram, but
upon the literature of the peace which followed those victories: the
collection of the stories of the ancient miracles of Jehovah in the
beginning of His people's history, and of the purpose He had even then
announced of bringing Israel to supreme rank in the world. Such a God,
so anciently manifested, so recently proved, could never surrender His
own nation to a mere Goî[103]--a heathen and a barbarian people. Add
this dogma of the popular religion of Israel to those substantial hopes
of Assyria's withdrawal from Palestine, and you see cause, intelligible
and adequate, for the complacency of Jeroboam and his people to the
fact that Assyria had at last, by the fall of Damascus, reached their
own borders, as well as for the courage with which Hoshea in 725 threw
off the Assyrian yoke, and, with a willing people, for three years
defended Samaria against the great king. Let us not think that the
opponents of the prophets were utter fools or mere puppets of fate.
They had reasons for their optimism; they fought for their hearths and
altars with a valour and a patience which proves that the nation as a
whole was not so corrupt, as we are sometimes, by the language of the
prophets, tempted to suppose.
But all this--the reasonableness of the hope of resisting Assyria,
the valour which so stubbornly fought her, the religious faith which
sanctioned both valour and hope--only the more vividly illustrates
the singular independence of the prophets, who took an opposite view,
who so consistently affirmed that Israel must fall, and so early
foretold that she should fall to Assyria.
The reason of this conviction of the prophets was, of course, their
fundamental faith in the righteousness of Jehovah. That was a belief
quite independent of the course of events. As a matter of history,
the ethical reasons for Israel's doom were manifest to the prophets
within Israel's own life, before the signs grew clear on the horizon
that the doomster was to be Assyria.[104] Nay, we may go further,
and say that it could not possibly have been otherwise. For except
the prophets had been previously furnished with the ethical reasons
for Assyria's resistless advance on Israel, to their sensitive minds
that advance must have been a hopeless and a paralysing problem.
But they nowhere treat it as a problem. By them Assyria is always
either welcomed as a proof or summoned as a means--the proof of their
conviction that Israel requires humbling, the means of carrying that
humbling into effect. The faith of the prophets is ready for Assyria
from the moment that she becomes ominous for Israel, and every
footfall of her armies on Jehovah's soil becomes the corroboration
of the purpose He has already declared to His servants in the terms
of their moral consciousness. The spiritual service which Assyria
rendered to Israel was therefore secondary to the prophets' native
convictions of the righteousness of God, and could not have been
performed without these. This will become even more clear if we look
for a little at the exact nature of that service.
In its broadest effects, the Assyrian invasion meant for Israel a very
considerable change in the intellectual outlook. Hitherto Israel's
world had virtually lain between the borders promised of old to
their ambition--_the river of Egypt,_[105] _and the great river, the
River Euphrates_. These had marked not merely the sphere of Israel's
politics, but the horizon within which Israel had been accustomed to
observe the action of their God and to prove His character, to feel
the problems of their religion rise and to grapple with them. But now
there burst from the outside of this little world that awful power,
sovereign and inexorable, which effaced all distinctions and treated
Israel in the same manner as her heathen neighbours. This was more
than a widening of the world: it was a change of the very poles. At
first sight it appeared merely to have increased the scale on which
history was conducted; it was really an alteration of the whole
character of history. Religion itself shrivelled up, before a force so
much vaster than anything it had yet encountered, and so contemptuous
of its claims. _What is Jehovah_, said the Assyrian in his laughter,
_more than the gods of Damascus, or of Hamath, or of the Philistines_?
In fact, for the mind of Israel, the crisis, though less in degree,
was in quality not unlike that produced in the religion of Europe by
the revelation of the Copernican astronomy. As the earth, previously
believed to be the centre of the universe, the stage on which the Son
of God had achieved God's eternal purposes to mankind, was discovered
to be but a satellite of one of innumerable suns, a mere ball swung
beside millions of others by a force which betrayed no sign of sympathy
with the great transactions which took place on it, and so faith in the
Divine worth of these was rudely shaken--so Israel, who had believed
themselves to be the peculiar people of the Creator, the solitary
agents of the God of Righteousness to all mankind,[106] and who now
felt themselves brought to an equality with other tribes by this sheer
force, which, brutally indifferent to spiritual distinctions, swayed
the fortunes of all alike, must have been tempted to unbelief in the
spiritual facts of their history, in the power of their God and the
destiny He had promised them. Nothing could have saved Israel, as
nothing could have saved Europe, but a conception of God which rose
to this new demand upon its powers--a faith which said, "Our God is
sufficient for this greater world and its forces that so dwarf our
own; the discovery of these only excites in us a more awful wonder
of His power." The prophets had such a conception of God. To them He
was absolute righteousness--righteousness wide as the widest world,
stronger than the strongest force. To the prophets, therefore, the rise
of Assyria only increased the possibilities of Providence. But it could
not have done this had Providence not already been invested in a God
capable by His character of rising to such possibilities.
Assyria, however, was not only Force: she was also the symbol of
a great Idea--the Idea of Unity. We have just ventured on one
historical analogy. We may try another and a more exact one. The
Empire of Rome, grasping the whole world in its power and reducing
all races of men to much the same level of political rights,
powerfully assisted Christian theology in the task of imposing upon
the human mind a clearer imagination of unity in the government of
the world and of spiritual equality among men of all nations. A
not dissimilar service to the faith of Israel was performed by the
Empire of Assyria. History, that hitherto had been but a series of
angry pools, became as the ocean swaying in tides to one almighty
impulse. It was far easier to imagine a sovereign Providence when
Assyria reduced history to a unity by overthrowing all the rulers
and all their gods, than when history was broken up into the
independent fortunes of many states, each with its own religion
divinely valid in its own territory. By shattering the tribes Assyria
shattered the tribal theory of religion, which we have seen to be
the characteristic Semitic theory--a god for every tribe, a tribe
for every god. The field was cleared of the many: there was room for
the One. That He appeared, not as the God of the conquering race,
but as the Deity of one of their many victims, was due to Jehovah's
righteousness. At this juncture, when the world was suggested to have
one throne and that throne was empty, there was a great chance, if we
may so put it, for a god with a character. And the only God in all
the Semitic world who had a character was Jehovah.
It is true that the Assyrian Empire was not constructive, like the
Roman, and, therefore, could not assist the prophets to the idea of a
Catholic Church. But there can be no doubt that it did assist them to
a feeling of the moral unity of mankind. A great historian has made
the just remark that, whatsoever widens the imagination, enabling it
to realise the actual experience of other men, is a powerful agent
of ethical advance.[107] Now Assyria widened the imagination and the
sympathy of Israel in precisely this way. Consider the universal Pity
of the Assyrian conquest: how state after state went down before it,
how all things mortal yielded and were swept away. The mutual hatreds
and ferocities of men could not persist before a common Fate, so
sublime, so tragic. And thus we understand how in Israel the old envies
and rancours of that border warfare with her foes which had filled the
last four centuries of her history is replaced by a new tenderness and
compassion towards the national efforts, the achievements and all the
busy life of the Gentile peoples. Isaiah is especially distinguished
by this in his treatment of Egypt and of Tyre; and even where he
and others do not, as in these cases, appreciate the sadness of the
destruction of so much brave beauty and serviceable wealth, their
tone in speaking of the fall of the Assyrian on their neighbours is
one of compassion and not of exultation.[108] As the rivalries and
hatreds of individual lives are stilled in the presence of a common
death, so even that factious, ferocious world of the Semites ceased
to _fret its anger and watch it for ever_ (to quote Amos' phrase) in
face of the universal Assyrian Fate. But in that Fate there was more
than Pity. On the data of the prophets Assyria was afflicting Israel
for moral reasons: it could not be for other reasons that she was
afflicting their neighbours. Israel and the heathen were suffering
for the same righteousness' sake. What could have better illustrated
the moral equality of all mankind! No doubt the prophets were already
theoretically convinced[109] of this--for the righteousness they
believed in was nothing if not universal. But it is one thing to hold
a belief on principle and another to have practical experience of
it in history. To a theory of the moral equality of mankind Assyria
enabled the prophets to add sympathy and conscience. We shall see all
this illustrated in the opening prophecies of Amos against the foreign
nations.
But Assyria did not help to develop monotheism in Israel only by
contributing to the doctrines of a moral Providence and of the
equality of all men beneath it. The influence must have extended
to Israel's conception of God in Nature. Here, of course, Israel
was already possessed of great beliefs. Jehovah had created man; He
had divided the Red Sea and Jordan. The desert, the storm, and the
seasons were all subject to Him. But at a time when the superstitious
mind of the people was still feeling after other Divine powers in
the earth, the waters and the air of Canaan, it was a very valuable
antidote to such dissipation of their faith to find one God swaying,
through Assyria, all families of mankind. The Divine unity to which
history was reduced must have reacted on Israel's views of Nature,
and made it easier to feel one God also there. Now, as a matter of
fact, the imagination of the unity of Nature, the belief in a reason
and method pervading all things, was very powerfully advanced in
Israel throughout the Assyrian period.
We may find an illustration of this in the greater, deeper meaning in
which the prophets use the old national name of Israel's God--Jehovah
Ṣeba'oth, _Jehovah of Hosts_. This title, which came into frequent
use under the early kings, when Israel's vocation was to win freedom
by war, meant then (as far as we can gather) only _Jehovah of the
armies of Israel_--the God of battles, the people's leader in
war,[110] whose home was Jerusalem, the people's capital, and His
sanctuary their battle emblem, the Ark. Now the prophets hear Jehovah
go forth (as Amos does) from the same place, but to them the Name has
a far deeper significance. They never define it, but they use it in
associations where _hosts_ must mean something different from the
armies of Israel. To Amos the hosts of Jehovah are not the armies
of Israel, but those of Assyria: they are also the nations whom He
marshals and marches across the earth, Philistines from Caphtor,
Aram from Qir, as well as Israel from Egypt. Nay, more; according to
those Doxologies which either Amos or a kindred spirit has added to
his lofty argument,[111] Jehovah sways and orders the powers of the
heavens: Orion and Pleiades, the clouds from the sea to the mountain
peaks where they break, day and night in constant procession. It is
in associations like these that the Name is used, either in its old
form or slightly changed as _Jehovah God of hosts_, or _the hosts_;
and we cannot but feel that the hosts of Jehovah are now looked upon
as all the influences of earth and heaven--human armies, stars and
powers of nature, which obey His word and work His will.
FOOTNOTES:
[94] "The house of Omri": so even in Sargon's time, 722-705.
[95] The Black Obelisk of Salmanassar in the British Museum, on which
the messengers of Jehu are portrayed.
[96] 2 Kings x. 32 f.; xiii. 3.
[97] 2 Kings xiii. 14 ff.
[98] The phrase in 2 Kings xiii. 5, _Jehovah gave Israel a saviour_,
is interpreted by certain scholars as if the saviour were Assyria. In
xiv. 27 he is plainly said to be Jeroboam.
[99] The entering in of Hamath (2 Kings xiv. 25).
[100] Salmanassar II. in 850, 849, 846 to war against Dad'idri of
Damascus, and in 842 and 839 against Hazael, his successor.
[101] See in this series _Isaiah_, Vol. I., pp. 359 ff.
[102] See above, pp. 35 ff.
[103] To use the term which Amos adopts with such ironical force: vi.
14.
[104] When we get down among the details we shall see clear evidence
for this fact, for instance, that Amos prophesied against Israel at
a time when he thought that the Lord's anger was to be exhausted
in purely natural chastisements of His people, and before it was
revealed to him that Assyria was required to follow up these
chastisements with a heavier blow. See Chap. VI., Section 2.
[105] That is, of course, not the Nile, but the great Wady, at present
known as the Wady el 'Arish, which divides Palestine from Egypt.
[106] So already in the JE narratives of the Pentateuch.
[107] Lecky: _History of European Morals_, I.
[108] The present writer has already pointed out this with regard to
Egypt and Phœnicia in _Isaiah_ (Expositor's Bible Series), I., Chaps.
XXII. and XXIII., and with regard to Philistia in _Hist. Geog._, p. 178.
[109] I put it this way only for the sake of making the logic
clear; for it is a mistake to say that the prophets at any time
held merely theoretic convictions. All their conviction was really
experimental--never held apart from some illustration or proof of
principle in actual history.
[110] צבאות יהוה: 1 Sam. i. 3; iv. 4; xvii. 45, where it is explained
by the parallel phrase _God of the armies of Israel_; 2 Sam. vi. 2,
where it is connected with Israel's battle emblem, the Ark (cf. Jer.
xxii. 18); and so throughout Samuel and Kings, and also Chronicles,
the Psalms, and most prophets. The plural צבאות is never used in the
Old Testament except of human hosts, and generally of the armies or
hosts of Israel. The theory therefore which sees the same meaning
in the Divine title is probably the correct one. It was first put
forward by Herder (_Geist der Eb. Poesie_, ii. 84, 85), and after
some neglect it has been revived by Kautzsch (_Z. A. T. W._, vi.
ff.) and Stade (_Gesch._, i. 437, _n._ 3). The alternatives are that
the hosts originally meant those of heaven, either the angels (so,
among others, Ewald, _Hist._, Eng. Ed., iii. 62) or the stars (so
Delitzsch, Kuenen, Baudissin, Cheyne, _Prophecies of Isaiah_, i.
11). In the former of these two there is some force; but the reason
given for the latter, that the name came to the front in Israel when
the people were being drawn into connection with star-worshipping
nations, especially Aram, seems to me baseless. Israel had not been
long in touch with Aram in Saul's time, yet even then the name is
accepted as if one of much earlier origin. A clear account of the
argument on the other side to that taken in this note will be found
in Smend, _Altiestamentliche Religionsgeschichte_, pp. 185 ff.
[111] See below, Chap. XI.
_AMOS_
"Towers in the distance, like an earth-born Atlas ... such a man in
such a historical position, standing on the confines of light and
darkness, like day on the misty mountain-tops."
CHAPTER V
_THE BOOK OF AMOS_
The genuineness of the bulk of the Book of Amos is not doubted by
any critic. The only passages suspected as interpolations are the
three references to Judah, the three famous outbreaks in praise of
the might of Jehovah the Creator, the final prospect of a hope that
does not gleam in any other part of the book, with a few clauses
alleged to reflect a stage of history later than that in which Amos
worked.[112] In all, these verses amount to only twenty-six or
twenty-seven out of one hundred and forty-six. Each of them can be
discussed separately as we reach it, and we may now pass to consider
the general course of the prophecy which is independent of them.
The Book of Amos consists of Three Groups of Oracles, under one
title, which is evidently meant to cover them all.
The title runs as follows:--
_Words of 'Amoṣ--who was of the herdsmen of Teḳôa'--which he saw
concerning Israel in the days of 'Uzziah king of Judah, and in
the days of Jarab'am son of Joash,_[113] _king of Israel: two
years before the earthquake._
The Three Sections, with their contents, are as follows:--
FIRST SECTION: CHAPS. I., II. THE HEATHEN'S
CRIMES AND ISRAEL'S.
A series of short oracles of the same form, directed impartially
against the political crimes of all the states of Palestine, and
culminating in a more detailed denunciation of the social evils
of Israel, whose doom is foretold, beneath the same flood of war
as shall overwhelm all her neighbours.
SECOND SECTION: CHAPS. III.-VI. ISRAEL'S
CRIMES AND DOOM.
A series of various oracles of denunciation, which have no further
logical connection than is supplied by a general sameness of
subject, and a perceptible increase of detail and articulateness
from beginning to end of the section. They are usually grouped
according to the recurrence of the formula _Hear this word_, which
stands at the head of our present chaps. iii., iv. and v.; and by
the two cries of _Woe_ at v. 18 and vi. 1. But even more obvious
than these commencements are the various climaxes to which they
lead up. These are all threats of judgment, and each is more
strenuous or explicit than the one that has preceded it. They
close with iii. 15, iv. 3, iv. 12, v. 17, v. 27 and vi. 14; and
according to them the oracles may be conveniently divided into six
groups.
1. III. 1-15. After the main theme of judgment is stated in 1, 2,
we have in 3-8 a parenthesis on the prophet's right to threaten
doom; after which 9-15, following directly on 2, emphasise the
social disorder, threaten the land with invasion, the people with
extinction and the overthrow of their civilisation.
2. IV. 1-3, beginning with the formula _Hear this word_, is
directed against women and describes the siege of the capital and
their captivity.
3. IV. 4-12, with no opening formula, contrasts the people's
vain propitiation of God by ritual with His treatment of them
by various physical chastisements--drought, blight and locusts,
pestilence, earthquake--and summons them to prepare for another,
unnamed, visitation. _Jehovah God of Hosts is His Name._
4. V. 1-17, beginning with the formula _Hear this word_, and
a dirge over a vision of the nation's defeat, attacks, like
the previous group, the lavish ritual, sets in contrast to it
Jehovah's demands for justice and civic purity; and, offering a
reprieve if Israel will repent, closes with the prospect of an
universal mourning (vv. 16, 17), which, though introduced by a
_therefore_, has no logical connection with what precedes it.
5. V. 18-26 is the first of the two groups that open with _Woe_.
Affirming that the eagerly expected _Day of Jehovah_ will be
darkness and disaster on disaster inevitable (18-20), it again
emphasises Jehovah's desire for righteousness rather than worship
(21-26), and closes with the threat of captivity beyond Damascus.
_Jehovah God of Hosts is His Name_, as at the close of 3.
6. VI. 1-14. The second _Woe_, on them _that are at ease in
Zion_ (1, 2): a satire on the luxuries of the rich and their
indifference to the national suffering (3-6): captivity must come,
with the desolation of the land (9, 10); and in a peroration the
prophet reiterates a general downfall of the nation because of its
perversity. _A Nation_--needless to name it!--will oppress Israel
from Hamath to the River of the Arabah.
THIRD SECTION: CHAPS. VII.-IX. VISIONS WITH
INTERLUDES.
The Visions betray traces of development; but they are
interrupted by a piece of narrative and addresses on the same
themes as chaps. iii.-vi. The FIRST TWO VISIONS (vii. 1-6) are
of disasters--locusts and drought--in the realm of nature;
they are averted by prayer from Amos. The THIRD (7-9) is in
the sphere, not of nature, but history: Jehovah standing with
a plumbline, as if to show the nation's fabric to be utterly
twisted, announces that it shall be overthrown, and that the
dynasty of Jeroboam must be put to the sword. Upon this mention
of the king, the first in the book, there starts the narrative
(10-17) of how Amaziah, priest at Bethel--obviously upon hearing
the prophet's threat--sent word to Jeroboam; and then (whether
before or after getting a reply) proceeded to silence Amos, who,
however, reiterates his prediction of doom, again described as
captivity in a foreign land, and adds a FOURTH VISION (viii.
1-3), of the Ḳaits or _Summer Fruit_, which suggests Ḳêts, or
_End_ of the Nation. Here it would seem Amos' discourses at
Bethel take end. Then comes viii. 4-6, another exposure of the
sins of the rich; followed by a triple pronouncement of doom
(7), again in the terms of physical calamities--earthquake (8),
eclipse (9, 10), and famine (11-14), in the last of which the
public worship is again attacked. A FIFTH VISION, of the Lord by
the Altar commanding to smite (ix. 1), is followed by a powerful
threat of the hopelessness of escape from God's punishment (ix.
1_b_-4); the third of the great apostrophes to the might of
Jehovah (5, 6); another statement of the equality in judgment
of Israel with other peoples, and of their utter destruction
(7-8_a_). Then (8_b_) we meet the first qualification of the
hitherto unrelieved sentence of death. Captivity is described,
not as doom, but as discipline (9): the sinners of the people,
scoffers at doom, shall die (10). And this seems to leave room
for two final oracles of restoration and glory, the only two in
the book, which are couched in the exact terms of the promises
of later prophecy (11-15) and are by many denied to Amos.
Such is the course of the prophesying of Amos. To have traced it must
have made clear to us the unity of his book,[114] as well as the
character of the period to which he belonged. But it also furnishes
us with a good deal of evidence towards the answer of such necessary
questions as these--whether we can fix an exact date for the whole
or any part, and whether we can trace any logical or historical
development through the chapters, either as these now stand, or in
some such re-arrangement as we saw to be necessary for the authentic
prophecies of Isaiah.
Let us take first the simplest of these tasks--to ascertain the
general period of the book. Twice--by the title and by the portion
of narrative[115]--we are pointed to the reign of Jeroboam II.,
_circa_ 783-743; other historical allusions suit the same years. The
principalities of Palestine are all standing, except Gath;[116] but the
great northern cloud which carries their doom has risen and is ready
to burst. Now Assyria, we have seen, had become fatal to Palestine
as early as 854. Infrequent invasions of Syria had followed, in one
of which, in 803, Rimmon Nirari III. had subjected Tyre and Sidon,
besieged Damascus, and received tribute from Israel. So far then as the
Assyrian data are concerned, the Book of Amos might have been written
early in the reign of Jeroboam. Even then was the storm lowering as he
describes it. Even then had the lightning broken over Damascus. There
are other symptoms, however, which demand a later date. They seem
to imply, not only Uzziah's overthrow of Gath,[117] and Jeroboam's
conquest of Moab[118] and of Aram,[119] but that establishment of
Israel's political influence from Lebanon to the Dead Sea, which must
have taken Jeroboam several years to accomplish. With this agree other
features of the prophecy--the sense of political security in Israel,
the large increase of wealth, the ample and luxurious buildings, the
gorgeous ritual, the easy ability to recover from physical calamities,
the consequent carelessness and pride of the upper classes. All these
things imply that the last Syrian invasions of Israel in the beginning
of the century were at least a generation behind the men into whose
careless faces the prophet hurled his words of doom. During this
interval Assyria had again advanced--in 775, in 773 and in 772.[120]
None of these expeditions, however, had come south of Damascus,
and this, their invariable arrest at some distance from the proper
territory of Israel, may have further flattered the people's sense
of security, though probably the truth was that Jeroboam, like some
of his predecessors, bought his peace by tribute to the emperor. In
765, when the Assyrians for the second time invaded Hadrach, in the
neighbourhood of Damascus, their records mention a pestilence, which,
both because their armies were then in Syria, and because the plague
generally spreads over the whole of Western Asia, may well have been
the pestilence mentioned by Amos. In 763 a total eclipse of the sun
took place, and is perhaps implied by the ninth verse of his eighth
chapter. If this double allusion to pestilence and eclipse be correct,
it brings the book down to the middle of the century and the latter
half of Jeroboam's long reign. In 755 the Assyrians came back to
Hadrach; in 754 to Arpad: with these exceptions Syria was untroubled by
them till after 745. It was probably these quiet years in which Amos
found Israel _at ease in Zion_.[121] If we went down further, within
the more forward policy of Tiglath-Pileser, who ascended the throne in
745 and besieged Arpad from 743 to 740, we should find an occasion for
the urgency with which Amos warns Israel that the invasion of her land
and the overthrow of the dynasty of Jeroboam will be immediate.[122]
But Amos might have spoken as urgently even before Tiglath-Pileser's
accession; and the probability that Hosea, who prophesied within
Jeroboam's reign, quotes from Amos seems to imply that the prophecies
of the latter had been current for some time.
Towards the middle of the eighth century--is, therefore, the most
definite date to which we are able to assign the Book of Amos. At so
great a distance the difference of a few unmarked years is invisible.
It is enough that we know the moral dates--the state of national
feeling, the personages alive, the great events which are behind the
prophet, and the still greater which are imminent. We can see that Amos
wrote in the political pride of the latter years of Jeroboam's reign,
after the pestilence and eclipse of the sixties, and before the advance
of Tiglath-Pileser in the last forties, of the eighth century.
A particular year is indeed offered by the title of the book, which,
if not by Amos himself, must be from only a few years later:[123]
_Words of Amos, which he saw in the days of Uzziah and of Jeroboam,
two years before the earthquake_. This was the great earthquake
of which other prophets speak as having happened in the days of
Uzziah.[124] But we do not know where to place the year of the
earthquake, and are as far as ever from a definite date.
The mention of the earthquake, however, introduces us to the answer
of another of our questions--whether, with all its unity, the Book
of Amos reveals any lines of progress, either of event or of idea,
either historical or logical.
Granting the truth of the title, that Amos had his prophetic eyes
opened two years before the earthquake, it will be a sign of
historical progress if we find in the book itself any allusions to
the earthquake. Now these are present. In the first division we find
none, unless the threat of God's visitation in the form of a shaking
of the land be considered as a tremor communicated to the prophet's
mind from the recent upheaval. But in the second division there is
an obvious reference: the last of the unavailing chastisements, with
which Jehovah has chastised His people, is described as a _great
overturning_.[125] And in the third division, in two passages, the
judgment, which Amos has already stated will fall in the form of an
invasion, is also figured in the terms of an earthquake. Nor does
this exhaust the tremors which that awful convulsion had started;
but throughout the second and third divisions there is a constant
sense of instability, of the liftableness and breakableness of the
very ground of life. Of course, as we shall see, this was due to the
prophet's knowledge of the moral explosiveness of society in Israel;
but he could hardly have described the results of that in the terms
he has used, unless himself and his hearers had recently felt the
ground quake under them, and seen whole cities topple over. If,
then, Amos began to prophesy two years before the earthquake, the
bulk of his book was spoken, or at least written down, after the
earthquake had left all Israel trembling.[126]
This proof of progress in the book is confirmed by another feature.
In the abstract given above it is easy to see that the judgments
of the Lord upon Israel were of a twofold character. Some were
physical--famine, drought, blight, locusts, earthquake; and some
were political--battle, defeat, invasion, captivity. Now it is
significant--and I do not think the point has been previously
remarked--that not only are the physical represented as happening
first, but that at one time the prophet seems to have understood
that no others would be needed, that indeed God did not reveal to
him the imminence of political disaster till He had exhausted the
discipline of physical calamities. For this we have double evidence.
In chapter iv. Amos reports that the Lord has sought to rouse Israel
out of the moral lethargy into which their religious services have
soothed them, by withholding bread and water; by blighting their
orchards; by a pestilence, a thoroughly Egyptian one; and by an
earthquake. But these having failed to produce repentance, God must
visit the people once more: how, the prophet does not say, leaving
the imminent terror unnamed, but we know that the Assyrian overthrow
is meant. Now precisely parallel to this is the course of the Visions
in chapter vii. The Lord caused Amos to see (whether in fancy or in
fact we need not now stop to consider) the plague of locusts. It was
so bad as to threaten Israel with destruction. But Amos interceded,
and God answered, _It shall not be_. Similarly with a plague of
drought. But then the Vision shifts from the realm of nature to that
of politics. The Lord sets the plumbline to the fabric of Israel's
life: this is found hopelessly bent and unstable. It must be pulled
down, and the pulling down shall be political: the family of Jeroboam
is to be slain, the people are to go into captivity. The next Vision,
therefore, is of the End--the Final Judgment of war and defeat, which
is followed only by Silence.
Thus, by a double proof, we see not only that the Divine method in that
age was to act first by physical chastisement, and only then by an
inevitable, ultimate doom of war and captivity; but that the experience
of Amos himself, his own intercourse with the Lord, passed through
these two stages. The significance of this for the picture of the
prophet's life we shall see in our next chapter. Here we are concerned
to ask whether it gives us any clue as to the extant arrangement of
his prophecies, or any justification for re-arranging them, as the
prophecies of Isaiah have to be re-arranged, according to the various
stages of historical development at which they were uttered.
We have just seen that the progress from the physical chastisements
to the political doom is reflected in both the last two sections of
the book. But the same gradual, cumulative method is attributed to the
Divine Providence by the First Section: _for three transgressions, yea,
for four, I will not turn it back_; and then follow the same disasters
of war and captivity as are threatened in Sections II. and III. But
each section does not only thus end similarly; each also begins with
the record of an immediate impression made on the prophet by Jehovah
(chaps. i. 2; iii. 3-8; vii. 1-9).
To sum up:--The Book of Amos consists of three sections,[127]
which seem to have received their present form towards the end of
Jeroboam's reign; and which, after emphasising their origin as
due to the immediate influence of Jehovah Himself on the prophet,
follow pretty much the same course of the Divine dealings with
that generation of Israel--a course which began with physical
chastisements, that failed to produce repentance, and ended with the
irrevocable threat of the Assyrian invasion. Each section, that is to
say, starts from the same point, follows much the same direction, and
arrives at exactly the same conclusion. Chronologically you cannot
put one of them before the other; but from each it is possible to
learn the stages of experience through which Amos himself passed--to
discover how God taught the prophet, not only by the original
intuitions from which all prophecy starts, but by the gradual events
of his day both at home and abroad.
This decides our plan for us. We shall first trace the life and
experience of Amos, as his book enables us to do; and then we shall
examine, in the order in which they lie, the three parallel forms in
which, when he was silenced at Bethel, he collected the fruits of
that experience, and gave them their final expression.
* * * * *
The style of the book is simple and terse. The fixity of the
prophet's aim--upon a few moral principles and the doom they
demand--keeps his sentences firm and sharp, and sends his paragraphs
rapidly to their climax. That he sees nature only under moral
light renders his poetry austere and occasionally savage. His
language is very pure. There is no ground for Jerome's charge that
he was "imperitus sermone": we shall have to notice only a few
irregularities in spelling, due perhaps to the dialect of the deserts
in which he passed his life.[128]
The text of the book is for the most part well-preserved; but there are
a number of evident corruptions. Of the Greek Version the same holds
good as we have said in more detail of the Greek of Hosea.[129] It is
sometimes correct where the Hebrew text is not, sometimes suggestive of
the emendations required, and sometimes hopelessly astray.
FOOTNOTES:
[112] The full list of suspected passages is this: (1) References
to Judah--ii. 4, 5; vi. 1, _in Zion_; ix. 11, 12. (2) The three
Outbreaks of Praise--iv. 13; v. 8, 9; ix. 5, 6. (3) The Final
Hope--ix. 8-15, including vv. 11, 12, already mentioned. (4) Clauses
alleged to reflect a later stage of history--i. 9-12; v. 1, 2, 15;
vi. 2, 14. (5) Suspected for incompatibility--viii. 11-13.
[113] So designated to distinguish him from the first Jeroboam, the
son of Nebat.
[114] Apart from the suspected parentheses already mentioned.
[115] Chap. vii.
[116] And, if vi. 2 be genuine, Hamath.
[117] 2 Chron. xxvi. 6. In the list of the Philistine cities, Amos
i. 6-8, Gath does not occur, and in harmony with this in vi. 2 it is
said to be overthrown; see pp. 173 f.
[118] 2 Kings. In Amos ii. 3 the ruler of Moab is called, not king, but
שׁופט, or regent, such as Jeroboam substituted for the king of Moab.
[119] According to Grätz's emendation of vi. 13: _we have taken
Lo-Debar and Karnaim_. Perhaps too in iii. 12, though the verse is
very obscure, some settlement of Israelites in Damascus is implied.
For Jeroboam's conquest of Aram (2 Kings xiv. 28), see p. 177.
[120] In 775 to Erini, "the country of the cedars"--that is, Mount
Amanus, near the Gulf of Antioch; in 773 to Damascus; in 772 to
Hadrach.
[121] vi. 1.
[122] vii. 9.
[123] Even König denies that the title is from Amos (_Einleitung_,
307); yet the ground on which he does so, the awkwardness of the
double relative, does not appear sufficient. One does not write a
title in the same style as an ordinary sentence.
[124] Zech. xiv. 5, and probably Isa. ix. 9, 10 (Eng.).
[125] iv. 11.
[126] Of course it is always possible to suspect--and let us by all
means exhaust the possibilities of suspicion--that the title has
been added by a scribe, who interpreted the forebodings of judgment
which Amos expresses in the terms of earthquake as if they were
the predictions of a real earthquake, and was anxious to show, by
inserting the title, how they were fulfilled in the great convulsion
of Uzziah's days. But to such a suspicion we have a complete answer.
No later scribe, who understood the book he was dealing with, would
have prefixed to it a title, with the motive just suspected, when
in chap. iv. he read that an earthquake had just taken place. The
very fact that such a title appears over a book, which speaks of the
earthquake as past, surely attests the _bona fides_ of the title.
With that mention in chap. iv. of the earthquake as past, none
would have ventured to say that Amos began to prophesy before the
earthquake unless they had known this to be the case.
[127] Except for the later additions, not by Amos, to be afterwards
noted.
[128] Cf. ii. 13; v. 11.; vi. 8, 10; vii. 9, 16; viii. 8 (?).
[129] See below, p. 221.
CHAPTER VI
_THE MAN AND THE PROPHET_
The Book of Amos opens one of the greatest stages in the religious
development of mankind. Its originality is due to a few simple ideas,
which it propels into religion with an almost unrelieved abruptness.
But, like all ideas which ever broke upon the world, these also have
flesh and blood behind them. Like every other Reformation, this one
in Israel began with the conscience and the protest of an individual.
Our review of the book has made this plain. We have found in it, not
only a personal adventure of a heroic kind, but a progressive series
of visions, with some other proofs of a development both of facts and
ideas. In short, behind the book there beats a life, and our first duty
is to attempt to trace its spiritual history. The attempt is worth the
greatest care. "Amos," says a very critical writer,[130] "is one of the
most wonderful appearances in the history of the human spirit."
1. THE MAN AND HIS DISCIPLINE.
AMOS i. 1; iii. 3-8; vii. 14, 15.
When charged at the crisis of his career with being but a
hireling-prophet, Amos disclaimed the official name and took his
stand upon his work as a man: _No prophet I, nor prophet's son, but
a herdsman and a dresser of sycomores. Jehovah took me from behind
the flock._[131] We shall enhance our appreciation of this manhood,
and of the new order of prophecy which it asserted, if we look for a
little at the soil on which it was so bravely nourished.
Six miles south from Bethlehem, as Bethlehem is six from Jerusalem,
there rises on the edge of the Judæan plateau, towards the desert, a
commanding hill, the ruins on which are still known by the name of
Teḳôa'.[132]
In the time of Amos Tekoa was a place without sanctity and almost
without tradition. The name suggests that the site may at first have
been that of a camp. Its fortification by Rehoboam, and the mission
of its wise woman to David, are its only previous appearances in
history. Nor had nature been less grudging to it than fame. The men
of Tekoa looked out upon a desolate and haggard world. South, west
and north the view is barred by a range of limestone hills, on one
of which directly north the grey towers of Jerusalem are hardly to
be discerned from the grey mountain lines. Eastward the prospect
is still more desolate, but it is open; the land slopes away for
nearly eighteen miles to a depth of four thousand feet. Of this
long descent, the first step, lying immediately below the hill of
Tekoa, is a shelf of stony moorland with the ruins of vineyards. It
is the lowest ledge of the settled life of Judæa. The eastern edge
drops suddenly by broken rocks to slopes spotted with bushes of
"retem," the broom of the desert, and with patches of poor wheat.
From the foot of the slopes the land rolls away in a maze of low
hills and shallow dales, that flush green in spring, but for the rest
of the year are brown with withered grass and scrub. This is the
_Wilderness_ or _Pastureland of Tekoa_,[133] across which by night
the wild beasts howl, and by day the blackened sites of deserted
camps, with the loose cairns that mark the nomads' graves, reveal a
human life almost as vagabond and nameless as that of the beasts.
Beyond the rolling land is Jeshimon, or Devastation--a chaos of
hills, none of whose ragged crests are tossed as high as the shelf
of Tekoa, while their flanks shudder down some further thousands of
feet, by crumbling precipices and corries choked with debris, to the
coast of the Dead Sea. The northern half of this is visible, bright
blue against the red wall of Moab, and the level top of the wall,
broken only by the valley of the Arnon, constitutes the horizon.
Except for the blue water--which shines in its gap between the torn
hills like a bit of sky through rifted clouds--it is a very dreary
world. Yet the sun breaks over it, perhaps all the more gloriously;
mists, rising from the sea simmering in its great vat, drape the
nakedness of the desert noon; and through the dry desert night the
planets ride with a majesty they cannot assume in our more troubled
atmospheres. It is also a very empty and a very silent world, yet
every stir of life upon it excites, therefore, the greater vigilance,
and man's faculties, relieved from the rush and confusion of events,
form the instinct of marking, and reflecting upon, every single
phenomenon. And it is a very savage world. Across it all, the towers
of Jerusalem give the only signal of the spirit, the one token that
man has a history.
Upon this unmitigated wilderness, where life is reduced to poverty and
danger; where nature starves the imagination, but excites the faculties
of perception and curiosity; with the mountain tops and the sunrise
in his face, but above all with Jerusalem so near,--Amos did the work
which made him a man, heard the voice of God calling him to be a
prophet, and gathered those symbols and figures in which his prophet's
message still reaches us with so fresh and so austere an air.
Amos was _among the shepherds of Tekoa_. The word for _shepherd_ is
unusual, and means the herdsman of a peculiar breed of desert sheep,
still under the same name prized in Arabia for the excellence of their
wool.[134] And he was _a dresser of sycomores_. The tree, which is
not our sycamore, is very easily grown in sandy soil with a little
water. It reaches a great height and mass of foliage. The fruit is
like a small fig, with a sweet but watery taste, and is eaten only by
the poor. Born not of the fresh twigs, but of the trunk and older
branches, the sluggish lumps are provoked to ripen by pinching or
bruising, which seems to be the literal meaning of the term that
Amos uses of himself--_a pincher of sycomores_.[135] The sycomore
does not grow at so high a level as Tekoa;[136] and this fact, taken
along with the limitation of the ministry of Amos to the Northern
Kingdom, has been held to prove that he was originally an Ephraimite,
a sycomore-dresser, who had migrated and settled down, as the peculiar
phrase of the title says, _among the shepherds of Tekoa_.[137] We shall
presently see, however, that his familiarity with life in Northern
Israel may easily have been won in other ways than through citizenship
in that kingdom; while the very general nature of the definition,
_among the shepherds of Tekoa_, does not oblige us to place either
him or his sycomores so high as the village itself. The most easterly
township of Judæa, Tekoa commanded the whole of the wilderness beyond,
to which indeed it gave its name, _the wilderness of Tekoa_. The
shepherds of Tekoa were therefore, in all probability, scattered across
the whole region down to the oases on the coast of the Dead Sea, which
have generally been owned by one or other of the settled communities in
the hill-country above, and may at that time have belonged to Tekoa,
just as in Crusading times they belonged to the monks of Hebron, or are
to-day cultivated by the Rushaideh Arabs, who pitch their camps not far
from Tekoa itself. As you will still find everywhere on the borders
of the Syrian desert shepherds nourishing a few fruit-trees round the
chief well of their pasture, in order to vary their milk diet, so in
some low oasis in the wilderness of Judæa Amos cultivated the poorest,
but the most easily grown of fruits, the sycomore.[138] All this
pushes Amos and his dwarf sheep deeper into the desert, and emphasises
what has been said above, and still remains to be illustrated, of the
desert's influence on his discipline as a man and on his speech as a
prophet. We ought to remember that in the same desert another prophet
was bred, who was also the pioneer of a new dispensation, and whose
ministry, both in its strength and its limitations, is much recalled by
the ministry of Amos. John the son of Zacharias _grew and waxed strong
in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his showing unto
Israel_.[139] Here, too, our Lord was _with the wild beasts_.[140] How
much Amos had been with them may be seen from many of his metaphors.
_The lion roareth, who shall not fear?... As when the shepherd rescueth
from the mouth of the lion two shin-bones or a bit of an ear.... It
shall be as when one is fleeing from a lion, and a bear cometh upon
him; and he entereth a house, and leaneth his hand on the wall, and a
serpent biteth him._
As a wool-grower, however, Amos must have had his yearly journeys
among the markets of the land; and to such were probably due his
opportunities of familiarity with Northern Israel, the originals of
his vivid pictures of her town-life, her commerce and the worship
at her great sanctuaries. One hour westward from Tekoa would bring
him to the high-road between Hebron and the North, with its troops
of pilgrims passing to Beersheba.[141] It was but half-an-hour more
to the watershed and an open view of the Philistine plain. Bethlehem
was only six, Jerusalem twelve miles from Tekoa. Ten miles farther,
across the border of Israel, lay Bethel with its temple, seven miles
farther Gilgal, and twenty miles farther still Samaria the capital,
in all but two days' journey from Tekoa. These had markets as well
as shrines;[142] their annual festivals would be also great fairs.
It is certain that Amos visited them; it is even possible that he
went to Damascus, in which the Israelites had at the time their own
quarters for trading. By road and market he would meet with men of
other lands. Phœnician pedlars, or Canaanites as they were called,
came up to buy the homespun for which the housewives of Israel were
famed[143]--hard-faced men who were also willing to purchase slaves,
and haunted even the battle-fields of their neighbours for this
sinister purpose. Men of Moab, at the time subject to Israel; Aramean
hostages; Philistines who held the export trade to Egypt,--these
Amos must have met and may have talked with; their dialects scarcely
differed from his own. It is no distant, desert echo of life which
we hear in his pages, but the thick and noisy rumour of caravan and
market-place: how the plague was marching up from Egypt;[144] ugly
stories of the Phœnician slave-trade;[145] rumours of the advance of
the awful Power, which men were hardly yet accustomed to name, but
which had already twice broken from the North upon Damascus. Or it
was the progress of some national mourning--how lamentation sprang
up in the capital, rolled along the highways, and was re-echoed
from the husbandmen and vinedressers on the hillsides.[146] Or, at
closer quarters, we see and hear the bustle of the great festivals
and fairs--the _solemn assemblies_, the reeking holocausts, the
_noise of songs and viols_;[147] the brutish religious zeal kindling
into drunkenness and lust on the very steps of the altar;[148] the
embezzlement of pledges by the priests, the covetous restlessness of
the traders, their false measures, their entanglement of the poor
in debt;[149] the careless luxury of the rich, their _banquets_,
_buckets of wine_, _ivory couches_, pretentious, preposterous
music.[150] These things are described as by an eyewitness. Amos
was not a citizen of the Northern Kingdom, to which he almost
exclusively refers; but it was because he went up and down in it,
using those eyes which the desert air had sharpened, that he so
thoroughly learned the wickedness of its people, the corruption of
Israel's life in every rank and class of society.[151]
But the convictions which he applied to this life Amos learned at
home. They came to him over the desert, and without further material
signal than was flashed to Tekoa from the towers of Jerusalem. This
is placed beyond doubt by the figures in which he describes his call
from Jehovah. Contrast his story, so far as he reveals it, with
that of another. Some twenty years later, Isaiah of Jerusalem saw
the Lord in the Temple, high and lifted up, and all the inaugural
vision of this greatest of the prophets was conceived in the figures
of the Temple--the altar, the smoke, the burning coals. But to his
predecessor _among the shepherds of Tekoa_, although revelation also
starts from Jerusalem, it reaches him, not in the sacraments of her
sanctuary, but across the bare pastures, and as it were in the roar
of a lion. _Jehovah from Zion roareth, and uttereth His voice from
Jerusalem._[152] We read of no formal process of consecration for
this first of the prophets. Through his clear desert air, the word
of God breaks upon him without medium or sacrament. And the native
vigilance of the man is startled, is convinced by it, beyond all
argument or question. _The lion hath roared, who shall not fear?
Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_
These words are taken from a passage in which Amos illustrates
prophecy from other instances of his shepherd life. We have seen
what a school of vigilance the desert is. Upon the bare surface all
that stirs is ominous. Every shadow, every noise--the shepherd must
know what is behind and be warned. Such a vigilance Amos would have
Israel apply to his own message, and to the events of their history.
Both of these he compares to certain facts of desert life, behind
which his shepherdly instincts have taught him to feel an ominous
cause. _Do two men walk together except they have trysted?_--except
they have made an appointment. Hardly in the desert, for there men
meet and take the same road by chance as seldom as ships at sea.
_Doth a lion roar in the jungle and have no prey, or a young lion
let out his voice in his den except he be taking something?_ The
hunting lion is silent till his quarry be in sight; when the lonely
shepherd hears the roar across the desert, he knows the lion leaps
upon his prey, and he shudders as Israel ought to do when they
hear God's voice by the prophet, for this also is never loosened
but for some grim fact, some leap of doom. Or _doth a little bird
fall on the snare earthwards and there be no noose upon her?_ The
reading may be doubtful, but the meaning is obvious: no one ever
saw a bird pulled roughly down to earth when it tried to fly away
without knowing there was the loop of a snare about her. Or _does the
snare itself rise up from the ground, except indeed it be capturing
something?_--except there be in the trap or net something to flutter,
struggle and so lift it up. Traps do not move without life in them.
Or _is the alarum trumpet_[153] _blown in a city_--for instance, in
high Tekoa up there, when some Arab raid sweeps from the desert on
to the fields--_and do the people not tremble?_ Or _shall calamity
happen in a city and Jehovah not have done it? Yea, the Lord Jehovah
doeth nothing but He has revealed His purpose to His servants the
prophets._ My voice of warning and these events of evil in your midst
have the same cause--Jehovah--behind them. _The lion hath roared, who
shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_[154]
We cannot miss the personal note which rings through this triumph
in the reality of things unseen. Not only does it proclaim a man of
sincerity and conviction: it is resonant with the discipline by which
that conviction was won--were won, too, the freedom from illusion and
the power of looking at facts in the face, which Amos alone of his
contemporaries possessed.
St. Bernard has described the first stage of the Vision of God as the
Vision Distributive, in which the eager mind distributes her attention
upon common things and common duties in themselves. It was in this
elementary school that the earliest of the new prophets passed his
apprenticeship and received his gifts. Others excel Amos in the powers
of the imagination and the intellect. But by the incorrupt habits of
his shepherd's life, by daily wakefulness to its alarms and daily
faithfulness to its opportunities, he was trained in that simple power
of appreciating facts and causes, which, applied to the great phenomena
of the spirit and of history, forms his distinction among his peers.
In this we find perhaps the reason why he records of himself no solemn
hour of cleansing and initiation. _Jehovah took me from following the
flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy unto My people Israel._
Amos was of them of whom it is written, "Blessed are those servants
whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching." Through all his
hard life, this shepherd had kept his mind open and his conscience
quick, so that when the word of God came to him he knew it, as fast
as he knew the roar of the lion across the moor. Certainly there is
no habit, which, so much as this of watching facts with a single eye
and a responsible mind, is indispensable alike in the humblest duties
and in the highest speculations of life. When Amos gives those naïve
illustrations of how real the voice of God is to him, we receive them
as the tokens of a man, honest and awake. Little wonder that he refuses
to be reckoned among the professional prophets of his day, who found
their inspiration in excitement and trance. Upon him the impulses of
the Deity come in no artificial and morbid ecstasy, removed as far as
possible from real life. They come upon him, as it were, in the open
air. They appeal to the senses of his healthy and expert manhood.
They convince him of their reality with the same force as do the most
startling events of his lonely shepherd watches. _The lion hath roared,
who shall not fear? Jehovah hath spoken, who can but prophesy?_
The influence of the same discipline is still visible when Amos
passes from the facts of his own consciousness to the facts of
his people's life. His day in Israel sweltered with optimism. The
glare of wealth, the fulsome love of country, the rank incense of
a religion that was without morality--these thickened all the air,
and neither the people nor their rulers had any vision. But Amos
carried with him his clear desert atmosphere and his desert eyes. He
saw the raw facts: the poverty, the cruel negligence of the rich,
the injustice of the rulers, the immorality of the priests. The
meaning of these things he questioned with as much persistence as he
questioned every suspicious sound or sight upon those pastures of
Tekoa. He had no illusions: he knew a mirage when he saw one. Neither
the military pride of the people, fostered by recent successes over
Syria, nor the dogmas of their religion, which asserted Jehovah's
swift triumph upon the heathen, could prevent him from knowing that
the immorality of Israel meant Israel's political downfall. He was
one of those recruits from common life, by whom religion and the
state have at all times been reformed. Springing from the laity and
very often from among the working classes, their freedom from dogmas
and routine, as well as from the compromising interests of wealth,
rank and party, renders them experts in life to a degree that almost
no professional priest, statesman or journalist, however honest or
sympathetic, can hope to rival. Into politics they bring facts, but
into religion they bring vision.
It is of the utmost significance that this reformer, this founder of
the highest order of prophecy in Israel, should not only thus begin
with facts, but to the very end be occupied with almost nothing
else, than the vision and record of them. In Amos there is but one
prospect of the Ideal. It does not break till the close of his
book, and then in such contrast to the plain and final indictments,
which constitute nearly all the rest of his prophesying, that many
have not unnaturally denied to him the verses which contain it.
Throughout the other chapters we have but the exposure of present
facts, material and moral, nor the sight of any future more distant
than to-morrow and the immediate consequences of to-day's deeds.
Let us mark this. The new prophecy which Amos started in Israel
reached Divine heights of hope, unfolded infinite powers of moral
and political regeneration--dared to blot out all the past, dared to
believe all things possible in the future. But it started from the
truth about the moral situation of the present. Its first prophet not
only denied every popular dogma and ideal, but appears not to have
substituted for them any others. He spent his gifts of vision on the
discovery and appreciation of facts. Now this is necessary, not only
in great reformations of religion, but at almost every stage in her
development. We are constantly disposed to abuse even the most just
and necessary of religious ideals as substitutes for experience or
as escapes from duty, and to boast about the future before we have
understood or mastered the present. Hence the need of realists like
Amos. Though they are destitute of dogma, of comfort, of hope, of the
ideal, let us not doubt that they also stand in the succession of the
prophets of the Lord.
Nay, this is a stage of prophecy on which may be fulfilled the prayer
of Moses: _Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets!_ To
see the truth and tell it, to be accurate and brave about the moral
facts of our day--to this extent the Vision and the Voice are possible
for every one of us. Never for us may the doors of heaven open, as they
did for him who stood on the threshold of the earthly temple, and he
saw the Lord enthroned, while the Seraphim of the Presence sang the
glory. Never for us may the skies fill with that tempest of life which
Ezekiel beheld from Shinar, and above it the sapphire throne, and on
the throne the likeness of a man, the likeness of the glory of the
Lord. Yet let us remember that to see facts as they are and to tell the
truth about them--this also is prophecy. We may inhabit a sphere which
does not prompt the imagination, but is as destitute of the historic
and traditional as was the wilderness of Tekoa. All the more may our
unglamoured eyes be true to the facts about us. Every common day leads
forth her duties as shining as every night leads forth her stars. The
deeds and the fortunes of men are in our sight, and spell, to all who
will honestly read, the very Word of the Lord. If only we be loyal,
then by him who made the rude sounds and sights of the desert his
sacraments, and whose vigilance of things seen and temporal became the
vision of things unseen and eternal, we also shall see God, and be sure
of His ways with men.
Before we pass from the desert discipline of the prophet, we
must notice one of its effects, which, while it greatly enhanced
the clearness of his vision, undoubtedly disabled Amos for the
highest prophetic rank. He who lives in the desert lives without
patriotism--detached and aloof. He may see the throng of men more
clearly than those who move among it. He cannot possibly so much feel
for them. Unlike Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Amos was not a citizen
of the kingdom against which he prophesied, and indeed no proper
citizen of any kingdom, but a nomad herdsman, hovering on the desert
borders of Judæa. He saw Israel from the outside. His message to her
is achieved with scarcely one sob in his voice. For the sake of the
poor and the oppressed among the people he is indignant. But with the
erring, staggering nation as a whole he has no real sympathy. His
pity for her is exhausted in one elegy and two brief intercessions;
hardly more than once does he even call her to repentance. His sense
of justice, in fact, had almost never to contend with his love. This
made Amos the better witness, but the worse prophet. He did not rise
so high as his great successors, because he did not so feel himself
one with the people whom he was forced to condemn, because he did
not bear their fate as his own nor travail for their new birth. "Ihm
fehlt die Liebe." Love is the element lacking in his prophecy; and
therefore the words are true of him, which were uttered of his great
follower across this same wilderness of Judæa, that mighty as were
his voice and his message to prepare the way of the Lord, yet _the
least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he_.
2. THE WORD AND ITS ORIGINS.
AMOS i. 2; iii. 3-8; and _passim_.
We have seen the preparation of the Man for the Word. We are now
to ask, Whence came the Word to the Man?--the Word that made him a
prophet. What were its sources and sanctions outside himself? These
involve other questions. How much of his message did Amos inherit
from the previous religion of his people? And how much did he teach
for the first time in Israel? And again, how much of this new element
did he owe to the great events of his day? And how much demands some
other source of inspiration?
To all these inquiries, outlines of the answers ought by this time to
have become visible. We have seen that the contents of the Book of
Amos consist almost entirely of two kinds: facts, actual or imminent,
in the history of his people; and certain moral principles of the
most elementary order. Amos appeals to no dogma nor form of law, nor
to any religious or national institution. Still more remarkably, he
does not rely upon miracle nor any so-called "supernatural sign."
To employ the terms of Mazzini's famous formula, Amos draws his
materials solely from "conscience and history." Within himself
he hears certain moral principles speak in the voice of God, and
certain events of his day he recognises as the judicial acts of God.
The principles condemn the living generation of Israel as morally
corrupt; the events threaten the people with political extinction.
From this agreement between inward conviction and outward event Amos
draws his full confidence as a prophet, and enforces on the people
his message of doom as God's own word.
The passage in which Amos most explicitly illustrates this harmony
between event and conviction is one whose metaphors we have already
quoted in proof of the desert's influence upon the prophet's
life. When Amos asks, _Can two walk together except they have
made an appointment?_ his figure is drawn, as we have seen, from
the wilderness in which two men will hardly meet except they have
arranged to do so; but the truth, he would illustrate by the figure,
is that two sets of phenomena which coincide must have sprung from
a common purpose. Their conjunction forbids mere chance. What kind
of phenomena he means, he lets us see in his next instance: _Doth
a lion roar in the jungle and have no prey? Doth a young lion let
forth his voice from his den except he be catching something?_ That
is, those ominous sounds never happen without some fell and terrible
deed happening along with them. Amos thus plainly hints that the
two phenomena on whose coincidence he insists are an utterance on
one side, and on the other side a deed fraught with destruction.
The reading of the next metaphor about the bird and the snare is
uncertain; at most what it means is that you never see signs of
distress or a vain struggle to escape without there being, though
out of sight, some real cause for them.[155] But from so general
a principle he returns in his fourth metaphor to the special
coincidence between utterance and deed. _Is the alarum-trumpet blown
in a city and do the people not tremble?_ Of course they do; they
know such sound is never made without the approach of calamity. But
who is the author of every calamity? God Himself: _Shall there be
evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?_ Very well then; we have
seen that common life has many instances in which, when an ominous
sound is heard, it is because it is closely linked with a fatal deed.
These happen together, not by mere chance, but because the one is the
expression, the warning or the explanation of the other. And we also
know that fatal deeds which happen to any community in Israel are
from Jehovah. He is behind them. But they, too, are accompanied by a
warning voice from the same source as themselves. This is the voice
which the prophet hears in his heart--the moral conviction which he
feels as the Word of God. _The Lord Jehovah doeth nothing but He
hath revealed His counsel to His servants the prophets._ Mark the
grammar: the revelation comes first to the prophet's heart; then he
sees and recognises the event, and is confident to give his message
about it. So Amos, repeating his metaphor, sums up his argument.
_The Lion hath roared, who shall not fear?_--certain that there is
more than sound to happen. _The Lord Jehovah hath spoken, who can
but prophesy?_--certain that what Jehovah has spoken to him inwardly
is likewise no mere sound, but that deeds of judgment are about to
happen, as the ominous voice requires they should.[156]
The prophet then is made sure of his message by the agreement between
the inward convictions of his soul and the outward events of the day.
When these walk together, it proves that they have come of a common
purpose. He who causes the events--it is Jehovah Himself, _for shall
there be evil in a city and Jehovah not have done it?_--must be
author also of the inner voice or conviction which agrees with them.
_Who_ then _can but prophesy?_ Observe again that no support is here
derived from miracle; nor is any claim made for the prophet on the
ground of his ability to foretell the event. It is the agreement of
the idea with the fact, their evident common origin in the purpose of
Jehovah, which makes a man sure that he has in him the Word of God.
Both are necessary, and together are enough. Are we then to leave
the origin of the Word in this coincidence of fact and thought--as
it were an electric flash produced by the contact of conviction with
event? Hardly: there are questions behind this coincidence. For
instance, as to how the two react on each other--the event provoking
the conviction, the conviction interpreting the event? The argument
of Amos seems to imply that the ethical principles are experienced by
the prophet prior to the events which justify them Is this so, or
was the shock of the events required to awaken the principles? And
if the principles were prior, whence did Amos derive them? These are
some questions that will lead us to the very origins of revelation.
The greatest of the events with which Amos and his contemporaries
dealt was the Assyrian invasion. In a previous chapter we have tried
to estimate the intellectual effects of Assyria on prophecy.[157]
Assyria widened the horizon of Israel, put the world to Hebrew
eyes into a new perspective, vastly increased the possibilities
of history and set to religion a novel order of problems. We can
trace the effects upon Israel's conceptions of God, of man and
even of nature.[158] Now it might be plausibly argued that the new
prophecy in Israel was first stirred and quickened by all this
mental shock and strain, and that even the loftier ethics of the
prophets were thus due to the advance of Assyria. For, as the most
vigilant watchmen of their day, the prophets observed the rise of
that empire, and felt its fatality for Israel. Turning then to
inquire the Divine reasons for such a destruction, they found these
in Israel's sinfulness, to the full extent of which their hearts
were at last awakened. According to such a theory the prophets were
politicians first and moralists afterwards: alarmists to begin with,
and preachers of repentance only second. Or--to recur to the language
employed above--the prophets' experience of the historical event
preceded their conviction of the moral principle which agreed with it.
In support of such a theory it is pointed out that after all the
most original element in the prophecy of the eighth century was the
announcement of Israel's fall and exile. The Righteousness of Jehovah
had often previously been enforced in Israel, but never had any voice
drawn from it this awful conclusion that the nation must perish. The
first in Israel to dare this was Amos, and surely what enabled him
to do so was the imminence of Assyria upon his people. Again, such a
theory might plausibly point to the opening verse of the Book of Amos,
with its unprefaced, unexplained pronouncement of doom upon Israel:--
_The Lord roareth from Zion,_
_And giveth voice from Jerusalem;_
_And the pastures of the shepherds mourn,_
_And the summit of Carmel is withered!_
Here, it might be averred, is the earliest prophet's earliest
utterance. Is it not audibly the voice of a man in a panic--such a
panic as, ever on the eve of historic convulsions, seizes the more
sensitive minds of a doomed people? The distant Assyrian thunder has
reached Amos, on his pastures, unprepared--unable to articulate its
exact meaning, and with only faith enough to hear in it the voice of
his God. He needs reflection to unfold its contents; and the process
of this reflection we find through the rest of his book. There he
details for us, with increasing clearness, both the ethical reasons
and the political results of that Assyrian terror, by which he was at
first so wildly shocked into prophecy.
But the panic-born are always the still-born; and it is simply
impossible that prophecy, in all her ethical and religious vigour, can
have been the daughter of so fatal a birth. If we look again at the
evidence which is quoted from Amos in favour of such a theory, we
shall see how fully it is contradicted by other features of his book.
To begin with, we are not certain that the terror of the opening verse
of Amos is the Assyrian terror. Even if it were, the opening of a book
does not necessarily represent the writer's earliest feelings. The rest
of the chapters contain visions and oracles which obviously date from
a time when Amos was not yet startled by Assyria, but believed that
the punishment which Israel required might be accomplished through a
series of physical calamities--locusts, drought and pestilence.[159]
Nay, it was not even these earlier judgments, preceding the Assyrian,
which stirred the word of God in the prophet. He introduces them with
a _now_ and a _therefore_. That is to say, he treats them only as the
consequence of certain facts, the conclusion of certain premises. These
facts and premises are moral--they are exclusively moral. They are the
sins of Israel's life, regarded without illusion and without pity. They
are certain simple convictions, which fill the prophet's heart, about
the impossibility of the survival of any state which is so perverse and
so corrupt.
This origin of prophecy in moral facts and moral intuitions, which are
in their beginning independent of political events, may be illustrated
by several other points. For instance, the sins which Amos marked in
Israel were such as required no "red dawn of judgment" to expose their
flagrance and fatality. The abuse of justice, the cruelty of the rich,
the shameless immorality of the priests, are not sins which we feel
only in the cool of the day, when God Himself draws near to judgment.
They are such things as make men shiver in the sunshine. And so the
Book of Amos, and not less that of Hosea, tremble with the feeling
that Israel's social corruption is great enough of itself, without
the aid of natural convulsions, to shake the very basis of national
life. _Shall not the land tremble for this_, Amos says after reciting
some sins, _and every one that dwelleth therein_?[160] Not drought nor
pestilence nor invasion is needed for Israel's doom, but the elemental
force of ruin which lies in the people's own wickedness. This is enough
to create gloom long before the political skies be overcast--or, as
Amos himself puts it, this is enough
_To cause the sun to go down at noon,_
_And to darken the earth in the clear day._[161]
And once more--in spite of Assyria the ruin may be averted, if only the
people will repent: _Seek good and not evil, and Jehovah of hosts will
be with you, as you say_.[162] Assyria, however threatening, becomes
irrelevant to Israel's future from the moment that Israel repents.
Such beliefs, then, are obviously not the results of experience, nor
of a keen observation of history. They are the primal convictions
of the heart, which are deeper than all experience, and themselves
contain the sources of historical foresight. With Amos it was not
the outward event which inspired the inward conviction, but the
conviction which anticipated and interpreted the event, though when
the event came there can be no doubt that it confirmed, deepened, and
articulated the conviction.[163]
But when we have thus tracked the stream of prophecy as far back as
these elementary convictions we have not reached the fountain-head.
Whence did Amos derive his simple and absolute ethics? Were they
original to him? Were they new in Israel? Such questions start an
argument which touches the very origins of revelation.
It is obvious that Amos not only takes for granted the laws of
righteousness which he enforces: he takes for granted also the
people's conscience of them. New, indeed, is the doom which sinful
Israel deserves, and original to himself is the proclamation of it;
but Amos appeals to the moral principles which justify the doom, as
if they were not new, and as if Israel ought always to have known
them. This attitude of the prophet to his principles has, in our
time, suffered a curious judgment. It has been called an anachronism.
So absolute a morality, some say, had never before been taught in
Israel; nor had righteousness been so exclusively emphasised as the
purpose of Jehovah. Amos and the other prophets of his century were
the virtual "creators of ethical monotheism": it could only be by
a prophetic licence or prophetic fiction that he appealed to his
people's conscience of the standards he promulgated, or condemned his
generation to death for not having lived up to them.
Let us see how far this criticism is supported by the facts.
To no sane observer can the religious history of Israel appear
as anything but a course of gradual development. Even in the
moral standards, in respect to which it is confessedly often most
difficult to prove growth, the signs of the nation's progress
are very manifest. Practices come to be forbidden in Israel and
tempers to be mitigated, which in earlier ages were sanctioned to
their extreme by the explicit decrees of religion. In the nation's
attitude to the outer world sympathies arise, along with ideals of
spiritual service, where previously only war and extermination had
been enforced in the name of the Deity. Now in such an evolution it
is equally indubitable that the longest and most rapid stage was the
prophecy of the eighth century. The prophets of that time condemn
acts which had been inspired by their immediate predecessors;[164]
they abjure, as impeding morality, a ceremonial which the spiritual
leaders of earlier generations had felt to be indispensable to
religion; and they unfold ideals of the nation's moral destiny, of
which older writings give us only the faintest hints. Yet, while the
fact of a religious evolution in Israel is thus certain, we must not
fall into the vulgar error which interprets evolution as if it were
mere addition, nor forget that even in the most creative periods
of religion nothing is brought forth which has not already been
promised, and, at some earlier stage, placed, so to speak, within
reach of the human mind. After all it is the mind which grows; the
moral ideals which become visible to its more matured vision are so
Divine that, when they present themselves, the mind cannot but think
they were always real and always imperative. If we remember these
commonplaces we shall do justice both to Amos and to his critics.
In the first place it is clear that most of the morality which Amos
enforced is of that fundamental order which can never have been
recognised as the discovery or invention of any prophet. Whatever
be their origin, the conscience of justice, the duty of kindness to
the poor, the horror of wanton cruelty towards one's enemies, which
form the chief principles of Amos, are discernible in man as far back
as history allows us to search for them. Should a generation have
lost them, they can be brought back to it, never with the thrill
of a new lesson, but only with the shame of an old and an abused
memory. To neither man nor people can the righteousness which Amos
preached appear as a discovery, but always as a recollection and a
remorse. And this is most emphatically true of the people of Moses
and of Samuel, of Nathan, of Elijah and of the Book of the Covenant.
Ethical elements had been characteristic of Israel's religion from
the very first. They were not due to a body of written law, but
rather to the character of Israel's God, appreciated by the nation
in all the great crises of their history.[165] Jehovah had won for
Israel freedom and unity. He had been a spirit of justice to their
lawgivers and magistrates.[166] He had raised up a succession of
consecrated personalities,[167] who by life and word had purified
the ideals of the whole people. The results had appeared in the
creation of a strong national conscience, which avenged with horror,
as _folly in Israel_, the wanton crimes of any person or section of
the commonwealth; in the gradual formation of a legal code, founded
indeed in the common custom of the Semites, but greatly more
moral than that; and even in the attainment of certain profoundly
ethical beliefs about God and His relations, beyond Israel, to all
mankind. Now, let us understand once for all, that in the ethics of
Amos there is nothing which is not rooted in one or other of these
achievements of the previous religion of his people. To this religion
Amos felt himself attached in the closest possible way. The word of
God comes to him across the desert, as we have seen, yet not out
of the air. From the first he hears it rise from that one monument
of his people's past which we have found visible on his physical
horizon[168]--_from Zion_, _from Jerusalem_,[169] from the city of
David, from the Ark, whose ministers were Moses and Samuel, from the
repository of the main tradition of Israel's religion.[170] Amos
felt himself in the sacred succession; and his feeling is confirmed
by the contents of his book. The details of that civic justice
which he demands from his generation are found in the Book of the
Covenant--the only one of Israel's great codes which appears by this
time to have been in existence;[171] or in those popular proverbs
which almost as certainly were found in early Israel.[172]
Nor does Amos go elsewhere for the religious sanctions of his
ethics. It is by the ancient mercies of God towards Israel that he
shames and convicts his generation--by the deeds of grace which made
them a nation, by the organs of doctrine and reproof which have
inspired them, unfailing from age to age. _I destroyed the Amorite
before them.... Yea, I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and
I led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the
Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your
young men for Nazirites. Was it not even thus, O ye children of
Israel? saith Jehovah._[173] We cannot even say that the belief which
Amos expresses in Jehovah as the supreme Providence of the world[174]
was a new thing in Israel, for a belief as universal inspires those
portions of the Book of Genesis which, like the Book of the Covenant,
were already extant.
We see, therefore, what right Amos had to present his ethical truths
to Israel, as if they were not new, but had been within reach of his
people from of old.
We could not, however, commit a greater mistake, than to confine the
inspiration of our prophet to the past, and interpret his doctrines as
mere inferences from the earlier religious ideas of Israel--inferences
forced by his own passionate logic, or more naturally ripened for him
by the progress of events. A recent writer has thus summarised the
work of the prophets of the eighth century: "In fact they laid hold
upon that bias towards the ethical, which dwelt in Jahwism from Moses
onwards, and they allowed it alone to have value as corresponding to
the true religion of Jehovah."[175] But this is too abstract to be an
adequate statement of the prophets' own consciousness. What overcame
Amos was a Personal Influence--the Impression of a Character; and it
was this not only as it was revealed in the past of his people. The God
who stands behind Amos is indeed the ancient Deity of Israel, and the
facts which prove Him God are those which made the nation--the Exodus,
the guidance through the wilderness, the overthrow of the Amorites,
the gift of the land. _Was it not even thus, O ye children of Israel?_
But what beats and burns through the pages of Amos is not the memory
of those wonderful works, so much as a fresh vision and understanding
of the Living God who worked them. Amos has himself met with Jehovah
on the conditions of his own time--on the moral situation provided
by the living generation of Israel. By an intercourse conducted, not
through the distant signals of the past, but here and now, through the
events of the prophet's own day, Amos has received an original and
overpowering conviction of his people's God as absolute righteousness.
What prophecy had hitherto felt in part, and applied to one or other
of the departments of Israel's life, Amos is the first to feel in its
fulness, and to every extreme of its consequences upon the worship,
the conduct and the fortunes of the nation. To him Jehovah not only
commands this and that righteous law, but Jehovah and righteousness are
absolutely identical. _Seek Jehovah and ye shall live ... seek good
and ye shall live._[176] The absoluteness with which Amos conceived
this principle, the courage with which he applied it, carry him along
those two great lines upon which we most clearly trace his originality
as a prophet. In the strength of this principle he does what is really
new in Israel: he discards the two elements which had hitherto existed
alongside the ethical, and had fettered and warped it.
Up till now the ethical spirit of the religion of Jehovah[177] had
to struggle with two beliefs which we can trace back to the Semitic
origins of the religion--the belief, namely, that, as the national God,
Jehovah would always defend their political interests, irrespective
of morality; and the belief that a ceremonial of rites and sacrifices
was indispensable to religion. These principles were mutual: as the
deity was bound to succour the people, so were the people bound to
supply the deity with gifts, and the more of these they brought the
more they made sure of his favours. Such views were not absolutely
devoid of moral benefit. In the formative period of the nation they had
contributed both discipline and hope. But of late they had between them
engrossed men's hearts, and crushed out of religion both conscience and
common-sense. By the first of them, the belief in Jehovah's predestined
protection of Israel, the people's eyes were so holden they could
not see how threatening were the times; by the other, the confidence
in ceremonial, conscience was dulled, and that immorality permitted
which they mingled so shamelessly with their religious zeal. Now the
conscience of Amos did not merely protest against the predominance of
the two, but was so exclusive, so spiritual, that it boldly banished
both from religion. Amos denied that Jehovah was bound to save His
people; he affirmed that ritual and sacrifice were no part of the
service He demands from men. This is the measure of originality in our
prophet. The two religious principles which were inherent in the very
fibre of Semitic religion, and which till now had gone unchallenged
in Israel, Amos cast forth from religion in the name of a pure and
absolute righteousness. On the one hand, Jehovah's peculiar connection
with Israel meant no more than jealousy for their holiness: _You only
have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore will I visit
upon you all your iniquities._[178] And, on the other hand, all their
ceremonial was abhorrent to Him: _I hate, I despise your festivals....
Though ye offer Me burnt offerings and your meal offerings, I will not
accept them.... Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; I will
not hear the music of thy viols. But let justice run down as waters,
and righteousness as a perennial stream._[179]
It has just been said that emphasis upon morality as the sum of
religion, to the exclusion of sacrifice, is the most original element
in the prophecies of Amos. He himself, however, does not regard
this as proclaimed for the first time in Israel, and the precedent
he quotes is so illustrative of the sources of his inspiration that
we do well to look at it for a little. In the verse next to the one
last quoted he reports these words of God: _Did ye offer unto Me
sacrifices and gifts in the wilderness, for forty years, O house of
Israel?_ An extraordinary challenge! From the present blind routine
of sacrifice Jehovah appeals to the beginning of His relations with
the nation: did they then perform such services to Him? Of course, a
negative answer is expected. No other agrees with the main contention
of the passage. In the wilderness Israel had not offered sacrifices
and gifts to Jehovah. Jeremiah quotes a still more explicit word of
Jehovah: _I spake not unto your fathers in the day that I brought
them out of the land of Egypt concerning burnt offerings and
sacrifices: but this thing I commanded them, saying, Obey My voice,
and I will be your God, and ye shall be My people._[180]
To these Divine statements we shall not be able to do justice if
we hold by the traditional view that the Levitical legislation was
proclaimed in the wilderness. Discount that legislation, and the
statements become clear. It is true, of course, that Israel must
have had a ritual of some kind from the first; and that both in the
wilderness and in Canaan their spiritual leaders must have performed
sacrifices as if these were acceptable to Jehovah. But even so the
Divine words which Amos and Jeremiah quote are historically correct;
for while the ethical contents of the religion of Jehovah were its
original and essential contents--_I commanded them, saying, Obey
My voice_--the ritual was but a modification of the ritual common
to all Semites; and ever since the occupation of the land, it had,
through the infection of the Canaanite rites on the high places,
grown more and more Pagan, both in its functions and in the ideas
which these were supposed to express.[181] Amos was right. Sacrifice
had never been the Divine, the revealed element in the religion of
Jehovah. Nevertheless, before Amos no prophet in Israel appears to
have said so. And what enabled this man in the eighth century to
offer testimony, so novel but so true, about the far-away beginnings
of his people's religion in the fourteenth, was pl
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