THE BIBLE. 



299 



pleter history of written prophecy than of any 

 other part of Old Testament literature. We 

 have, on the one hand, a series of prophets — 

 Amos, Hosea, and the anonymous author of 

 Zechariah ix.-xi. — who preached in the northern 

 kingdom, but are not descendants of the school 

 of Elisha, which had so decayed under court fa- 

 vor from the dynasty of Jehu that Amos had to 

 be sent from the wilderness of Judah to take up 

 again the forgotten Word of the Lord. In Ju- 

 dah proper we have the great Assyrian prophets, 

 Isaiah, with his younger contemporary Micah, the 

 powerful supporters of the reformation of Heze- 

 kiah, laboring, one in the capital, the other in the 

 country district of the Philistine border. To the 

 Assyrian period belongs also Nahum, who wrote, 

 perhaps, in captivity, and foretold the fall of 

 Nineveh. Then comes Zephaniah, about the 

 time of the Scythian ravages, followed by the 

 prophets of the Chaldean period, first Ilabakkuk, 

 and then Jeremiah and Ezekiel, men of a heavier 

 spirit and less glowing poetic fire than Isaiah, no 

 longer upholding the courage of Judah in the 

 struggle with the empire of the East, but predict- 

 ing the utter dissolution of existing things, and 

 finding hope only in a new covenant — a new 

 theocracy. In the period of Exile more than one 

 anonymous prophet raised his voice ; for not only 

 the " Great Unnamed " of Isaiah xl.-lxvi., but the 

 authors of other Babylonian prophecies, are prob- 

 ably to be assigned to this time. In the new 

 hope of deliverance, the poetic genius, as well as 

 the spiritual insight of prophecy, awakes to fresh 

 life, and sets forth the mission of the new Israel 

 to carry the knowledge of the Lord to all nations. 

 But the spirit of the new Jerusalem had little in 

 common with these aspirations ; and in Haggai, 

 Zechariah, and Malachi, prophecy retains not 

 much of its old power, except an uncompromis- 

 ing moral earnestness. The noble poetry of the 

 old prophets, which even in the time of Eze- 

 kiel had begun to give way to plain prose, finds 

 no counterpart in these latest oracles ; and im- 

 aginative power is shown, where it still exists, in 

 the artificial structure of symbolic visions. No 

 important new ideas are set forth, and even the 

 tone of moral exhortation sometimes reminds us 

 more of the rabbinical maxims of the fathers in 

 the Mishna than of the prophetic teaching of the 

 eighth century. And, as if the spirit of prophecy 

 foresaw its own dissolution, Malachi looks not to 

 the continued succession of prophets, but to the 

 return of Elijah, as the necessary preparation 

 for the day of the Lord. In this sketch of the 

 prophetic writings we find no place for the book 



of Daniel, which, whether composed in the early 

 years of the Persian Empire, or, as modern critics 

 hold, at the time of the Maccabee wars, presents 

 so many points of diversity from ordinary prophe- 

 cy as to require entirely separate treatment. It 

 is in point of form the precursor of the apocalyp- 

 tic books of post-canonical Judaism, though in its 

 intrinsic qualities far superior to these, and akin 

 to the prophets proper. 



Further History of the Old Testament Canon 

 in the Jewish Church. — Under this head we con- 

 fine ourselves to points which lead up to the re- 

 ception of the Old Testament by Christendom. 

 These are mainly two: 1. The history of the 

 Hebrew text, which we now possess only in the 

 recension established by Jewish scribes at a time 

 later than the Christian era ; 2. The history of 

 those versions which arose among Jews, but have 

 influenced Christendom. 



The Text of the Old Testament. — Semitic alpha- 

 bets have no full provision for distinguishing vow- 

 els ; and the oldest writing, before orthography 

 became fixed, was negligent in the use evun of 

 such vowel-letters as exist. For a long time, 

 then, not only during the use of the old Phoeni- 

 cian character, but even after the more modern 

 square or Babylonian letters were adopted, the 

 written text of the Bible was consonantal only, 

 leaving a certain scope for variety of pronuncia- 

 tion and sense. But even the consonantal text 

 was not absolutely fixed. The loose state of the 

 laws of spelling, and the great similarity of sev- 

 eral letters, made errors of copying frequent. The 

 text of Micah, for example, is often unintelligible, 

 and many hopeless errors are older than the old- 

 est versions. But, up to the time of the Alex?n- 

 drian version, MSS. were in circulation which 

 differed not merely by greater or less accuracy 

 of transcription, but by presenting such differ- 

 ences of recension as could not arise by accident. 

 The Greek text of Jeremiah is vastly different 

 from that of the Hebrew Bible, and it is not cer- 

 tain that the latter is always best. In the books 

 of Samuel the Greek enables us to correct many 

 blunders of the Hebrew text, but shows at the 

 same time that copyists used great freedom with 

 details of the text. For the Pentateuch we have, 

 in the copies of the Samaritans, a third recen- 

 sion, often but not always closely allied to the 

 Greek. The three recensions show important 

 variations in the chronology of Genesis ; and it is 

 remarkable that the book of Jubilees, a Jewish 

 treatise, which cannot be much older than the 

 Christian era, perhaps not much older than the 

 destruction of the Jewish state, sometimes agrees 



