And the earth is full of his praise. And his brightness is as the light; He hath rays coming forth from his hands; Before him goeth the pestilence, And fiery bolts go forth at his feet. He standeth and shaketh the earth; He beholdeth, and driveth asunder the nations; And the eternal mountains are scattered, The everlasting hills do bow; His ways are everlasting. I see the tents of Cushan in affliction; The curtains of the land of Midian do tremble." Then the antistrophe puts the question: Is it merely against inanimate nature that this power is being manifested? "Is the Lord displeased against the rivers? Is thine anger against the rivers, or thy wrath against the sea, Upon thy chariots of salvation? Thy bow is made quite bare, Sworn are the chastisements of thy word. Thou dost cleave the earth with rivers; The mountains see thee and are afraid; The tempest of waters passeth by; The deep uttereth his voice, And lifteth up his hands on high; The sun and moon stand still in their habitation At the light of thine arrows as they go, At the shining of thy glittering spear. Thou dost march through the land in indignation, Thou dost thresh the nations in anger." At length the epode may answer the question with the true meaning of the judgment that is descending. "Thou art come for the salvation of thy people, For the salvation of thine anointed: Thou dost smite off the head from the house of the wicked, Laying bare the foundation even unto the neck. Thou dost pierce with his own staves the head of his warriors: (They came as a whirlwind to scatter me, Their rejoicing was as to devour the poor secretly :) Thou didst tread the sea with thine horses, the surge of mighty water." The theophany is completed: there remains a postlude in which the seer trembles through terror into confidence. "I heard, and my belly trembled, My lips quivered at the voice; Rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in my place: That I should rest waiting for the day of trouble, When he that shall invade them in troops cometh up against the people. For though the fig tree shall not blossom, Neither shall fruit be in the vines; The labour of the olive shall fail, The flocks shall be cut off from the fold, I will joy in the God of my salvation. And he maketh my feet like hinds' feet, And will make me to walk upon mine high places." Simple as this prophecy is, it has exhibited all that is essential in rhapsodic literature: a problem of current history has been stated in the form of dramatic dialogue, solved in the mingled recitative and rhythm of the Doomform, and then the solution is realized in the full splendor of a lyric ode. Other examples of rhapsody are the following: Rhapsodies of Judgment, Isaiah 24-27; of Salvation, Isaiah 33; of the Drought, Jeremiah 14-15; of the Locust Plague, Joel; of the Judgment to come, Amos 1–9. Not only, however, is the prophetic content highly poetic, but the diction and structure show equally plainly the stamp of poetic genius. The number of words used by the prophets, not used in ordinary prose writings, is too large to be enumerated here. Harper in Appendix C to his "Prophetic Element in the Old Testament," has prepared a prophetic vocabulary containing the more important terms of the prophetic writings with their Greek and English equivalents.1 Under poetic structure, rhythm may be mentioned first, and by rhythm in Hebrew poetry, though often seen in the measured choice of words and thoughts, is meant especially rhythm of thought, that is, a parallelistic structure of sentences. The sentence is divided into two, sometimes three parts, each repeating the thought of the first clause in different words, thus presenting a symmetry of clauses in a verse, e. g., (Is. 14: 25) "I will break the Assyrian in my land, And upon my mountains tread him under foot; Another form of rhythm is the synthesis of thought and structure, i. e., stating a similar thought in similar words in different clauses of a verse, e. g., (Is. 11: 5). "And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, And faithfulness the girdle of his reins.” (Hos. 5:7) "Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, And leave off righteousness in the earth." Also three and four members to each verse, e. g. (Mic. 7:7) "Therefore will I look unto the Lord, Will I wait for the God of my salvation, My God will hear me." (Mic. 3:6) "Therefore night without vision shall be yours, And darkness yours without divining, And the sun shall go down upon the prophets, And dark shall be their day." 1 Cf. also Knobel, pp. 389 ff. 2 Cf. also Isaiah, 5: 21, 22; 11: 1, 4; 32: 16, 17; 33: 12-13; Hos. 5: 3. 12; 6:4; Joel 1: 2; 2: 6; Am. 5: 10, 20, 24; Nah. 1: 13; Hab. 1: 16; 2: 12; 3: 15, 18. Often, too, the refrain is used, either at the beginning or at the end of stanzas, just as in non-Biblical poetry, e. g., Is. 9: 7 to 10: 4, where each stanza closes with the lines: "For all this his anger is not turned away, But his hand is stretched out still." In Amos (Chaps. I and 2) each stanza opens with the same refrain, thus: "Thus saith Jahve: For three transgressions of -, yea, for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof." From what has been indicated above in this section, it must certainly be evident that, were it not for the fact that the Hebrew prophets more than the prophets of other peoples stand in European civilization as the inspired teachers of religion par excellence, they would be identified with poets of the highest classic order, and the psychology of prophecy would be very nearly, if not entirely, identical with the psychology of poetry. Nor is this a singular suggestion, for the Iliad and Odyssey, which to us stand only for examples of grand and beautiful epics, were to the Greeks just exactly what the prophetic writings are to us. Hence here again, in these related points, the psychology of the poet might well be eliminated from an investigation of the distinctive features of the psychology of prophecy. (D) PROPHET AND GENIUS It Prophet is one of the species of the genus genius. depends upon the people among whom the genius is born, also upon the circumstances and environment, as to whether the particular species shall be prophet, poet, statesman or soldier. "The hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest, or what you will, according to the kind of 66 world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man who could not be all sorts of men."1 From a psychological standpoint it is evident that the particular kind of man a genius shall be is very largely accidental. For there can be no a priori experience, the mental condition only can be a priori. In other words, there can be no concepts without percepts, and this, it must be emphasized, holds as true of the prophet or any other species of genius as of the ordinary mind. As little as the blind can conceive light, and the deaf sound, so little can a genius know a priori in what channels his energy shall be directed until, from contemporary life and experience, his concepts are shaped. 'By itself," says Schopenhauer, 2 genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny." Now while the Greek genius was shaped into sculptor or philosopher, the Roman genius into soldier and statesman, the Hebrew genius assumed the character and form of the prophet. As untrue, however, as it is to say that the Greeks are the only ones who produced sculptors and philosophers, and the Romans the only ones who produced soldiers, statesmen and law-givers, so little of truth holds the statement that the Hebrews were the only ones who produced prophets. The Greeks had prophets, the Romans had philosophers, and the Hebrews had both, only each nation's history was especially favorable for genius to assume the particular mould which we find predominating. There is no other explanation conceivable. If then we find every test of genius to apply to the prophet, it will be evident that the prophet and genius are very closely related, the prophet being a species of genius, Carlyle: "Heroes and Hero-Worship," Lect. III. |