238 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



diffused. Long before this time, therefore, there must 

 have been in Israel all the conditions of literary activity, 

 and sufficient motives to induce the prophets to write 

 their oracles at large. Accordingly, Joel iii. 5 appears to 

 contain a quotation from an earlier prophet. Similarly 

 Isaiah ii. 2, 4, and Micah iv. i, 4, quote the same passage 

 from a predecessor, who may perhaps have been Joel 

 himself. But whatever relics of early written prophecies 

 may thus have been preserved, prophetic authorship in 

 a strict sense begins for us in the book of Joel. 



(For further information on the literary activity of 

 Prophets, see Ewald, Pro. i. 47.) 



3. Authorship o/Isa. xiii. 2-xiv. 23. Prophecy of the 

 Fall of Babel (1871). 



v. i. What weight belongs to this title must appear 

 below. Meantime, I quote only Delitzsch : &quot;If this 

 burden of Babel lay before us entirely by itself, and 

 without Isaiah s name attached to it, we would never 

 venture to ascribe it to that prophet. . . . Here, at a 

 time when the Assyrian empire was still standing, the fall 

 of the Chaldean is without any connecting link foretold.&quot; 



4. Date of Zech. ix.-xi. (March 1871). 



Besides Hosea and Amos we possess in the judgment 

 of most critics an important prophecy referring to the 

 decay of the N. Kingdom in Zech. ix.-xi. 



Doubts whether Zechariah is the real author of these 

 chapters began very early. In 1653 Mede concluded 

 from Mt. xxvii. 9, that Jeremiah is the true author of the 

 whole section Zech. ix.-xiv. It was an Englishman also, 

 Newcome, 1785, who first separated ix.-xi. from xii.-xiv., 

 and placed the composition of the former chapters before 

 the fall of the kingdom of Ephraim. Of late this view 

 has been supported by the whole strength of the critical 

 school, and though opposed by Hengstenberg, Havernick, 



