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AT ONE WITH THE INVISIBLE

THE MYSTICISM OF THE HEBREW
PROPHETS

FRANK CHAMBERLIN PORTER

The Old Testament Prophets have been understood by Christian people generally as foretellers of Jesus Christ and of various details of his earthly life, death and resurrection. This use and understanding of them has caused neglect of their message for their own age and people, of their close relation to the events and conditions of their time, and of their real significance as discovering, or one may say, creative, minds in the history of the religious progress and achievement of mankind. It has also prevented the effort to understand the inner experiences of the prophets; since if the prophets really wrote of a person or of events centuries in the future, it could only be assumed that they themselves did not know the real meaning of their writing, but were passive human instruments through whom God spoke and wrote. This way of regarding them may, no doubt, at first seem to exalt and honor them, forbidding their classification with other men. The idea that we can understand the human nature of their experience is excluded by the theory; still more absolutely forbidden is all thought of our learning from their example the real nature of religion, and following them in their inner life with God. In this sense we are not and cannot be prophets. This conception of prophecy was, in fact, a Christian inheritance from Jewish and more especially from Hellenistic Jewish interpretations.

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The theory of the passiveness of the prophets as the voice or the pen of the Spirit of God was, in fact, more Greek than Hebrew.

Two movements of thought in modern times have changed all this and made such an understanding of the prophets unnatural to us: first, the historical method and spirit of research; and then, more recently, the psychological analysis of religious experience.

Historical science has changed the prophets from what Coleridge called "Super-human Ventriloquists" to most living personalities, who have a greatness of their own, and each his own quality of greatness, and who stand almost highest among the path-makers in the history of the religious and ethical advance of man. It has had this effect by concentrating our attention first upon the work of the prophets in and for their own times; and yet their abiding significance and the permanent factors in their teaching have come into clearer light by this emphasis on their relation to these long past situations and events.

The comparative study of religions, the last path of historical study to be opened up, tends still further to lessen the isolation and peculiarity of the religion of Israel. It is true that the prophets remain the fact most without parallel in other religions. But comparative studies have tended toward denying uniqueness where it seemed greatest, in ecstasy and vision and in prediction, and bringing uniqueness to light in what seems to us natural, the ethical interpretation of the character and demands of God. It is also true that the significance of the prophets as those who really opened the path toward Christ and Christianity is increased, not lessened, by an historical interpretation which gives them a real place and a great part in the developing life of the human spirit. We now see that the prophets actually achieved, all together, yet each in lines of his own, the truths about God and the experiences of the life of man

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with God and toward man which were brought to their unity and culmination in the teachings and life of Christ. Historical studies have thus re-discovered the prophets, released them from the obscurity and isolation in which the old theory necessarily held them, and revealed them as great struggling and achieving human beings.

But now comes a new method of scientific study that claims its rights in the sphere of religion, past as well as present; and it is not at first so evident that this also will prove a gain, rather than a loss, to religious faith and life. Psychology undertakes to explain the nature of the religious experiences of great as well as average people; and there are many who fear that its tendency is toward reducing the great to the level of the lowly, if not reducing religious experience in general to inward processes which do not require the assumption of the reality of another world than the natural, or another person than the human. Our present study of the mysticism of the prophets must take its start from the findings of history, but must then attempt to understand the nature of their inner life and their special experience of God in the spirit of this newer science.

Prophecy in Israel is of three kinds, or presents three distinct aspects, which are also three successive stages of development, though there is over-lapping and some movement back and forth between them.

Prophets first meet us as bands of dancing dervishes, inducing ecstatic conditions by music and dancing, and creating a contagious atmosphere of excitement, which draws such outsiders as Saul under its spell (I Sam. 10: 5-13, 19: 2024). Their emotions very likely found expression in unintelligible outcries of the sort that Paul describes in I Corinthians 12 and 14 as "speaking with tongues." We get the impression that the ecstatic condition itself was the thing cultivated and valued. The revelation was the fact that men could thus become possessed by a divine spirit. Their

appearance and actions were evidence of the reality of the unseen world. The loud cries and dances and knife-cuttings ascribed in I Kings 18 to the prophets of Baal are of the same sort; and it is not unlikely that the “nebiim" came into Israel from the Canaanitish religion. They are distinguished from the seers, whom we infer unveiled future or hidden things through a magic science or art, by the use of some ritual, by the observation of the starry heavens, or by some other means. The prophets became recognized and honored in Israel, but all sorts of magic and divination were denounced by the prophets themselves and prohibited by the law. They were no doubt thought to involve the recognition of other divine powers besides Yahweh. The nebiim seem never to have used physical means, but to have depended upon the ecstatic frenzy which they cultivated, and to have acted and spoken as impelled by this sacred madness. Their utterances did not remain always unintelligible. Balaam is a type of the prophet whose inspiration is of the ecstatic type (Num. 24:2-4, 15), a heathen prophet, who utters against his will oracles dictated by Israel's God, and containing the praises of Israel and promises of its coming greatness. He is a passive instrument through which God announces his great historic plan. The four hundred prophets who advised Ahab to engage in the battle in which he fell (I Kings 22), and the prediction by Hananiah of an early return within two years of the exiles of 597 B. C. (Jeremiah 28), indicate that the majority of the prophets were patriots in their inspiration, and were inclined to foretell what the king and the people desired. Ahab's prophets were really inspired by Yahweh, but were inspired to prophesy falsely; a secret which only one prophet, Micaiah, knew.

He was an early forerunner of the second and greatest class of Israel's prophets, whom it is the special task of this discussion to understand. Their message contradicted the popular desires, and was opposed by the great majority of

prophets, as well as by the priests and kings, but was vindicated by the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 B. C., and of Judah and Jerusalem in 586 B. C. Their message and the nature of their inspiration stand in striking contrast to those who preceded them; but we shall do better to return to them after looking briefly at their successors, with whom their contrast is almost as striking.

The third sort of prophecy belongs after the Exile and comes out in its true character only in the apocalypses; but the transition to them is made through Ezekiel, Zechariah, Joel, and other late parts of the prophetic canon. The first apocalypse in the full sense, and the only one in the canon, is Daniel. Others follow during a period of two centuries or more, from Daniel's time, that of the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus IV (about 165 B. C.), to the fall of Jerusalem (70 A. D.) and the final end of the Jewish state (135 A. D.). Here we have writers who are writers only, not speakers nor actors, not at all in the public eye, their personalities wholly concealed behind the assumed names of ancient men of God. This third stage and type of prophecy in Israel has something in common with the first; for the apocalyptists also value and cultivate ecstatic experiences, though rather as a condition of vision than as a physical excitement which has its value in itself. Vision is the uniform method in which apocalyptic revelations are given. The method corresponds to the contents, for the apocalypse is a revelation" of mysteries of the unseen world and of the future. The language in which such themes are treated is almost of necessity that of mysterious imagery. The pseudepigraphic form is usual in all apocalyptic writing.

In regard to the nature of the experiences that underlie such writings there can hardly be much more doubt or difficulty than in the case of the frenzied ecstasies of the earlier period. We have no need to assume any but physiological and psychic causes of the transports of the early prophets,

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