There were some, however, who did not take so complacent a view of the times, upright and God-fearing men, who were moved to indignation by the wrongs of the oppressed and the decadence of morals, and believed that God must be as indignant as they were at such doings. This was the beginning of a new chapter in prophecy. The judicial murder of Naboth had prompted Elijah to predict the ruin of the house of Omri; the prophets of the eighth century foretell the fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah for the sins of their people. Looking backward, the historian sees Assyria, which had been stayed for half a century, about to begin again its triumphant westward progress, before which the petty kingdoms of western Syria must succumb. To the prophets the Assyrian is the rod of God's anger for the destruction of the guilty nations.

Prophecy is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the religion of Israel. Among some peoples, as in Egypt and India, the priesthood was most influential in the progress of religious thought; in Greece it was the poets and philosophers; in Israel the prophets. A succession of men of widely diverse genius, station, and circumstance, through a period of two centuries or more, transformed a national religion not externally different from that of their neighbours into a unique ethical monotheism. Some of these prophets committed their oracles to writing, the words of others were collected and preserved by their disciples, and thus a new and distinctive kind of literature arose.

The first prophet of this new type whose utterances are preserved in the Old Testament is Amos, and he, as if conscious of the difference, disclaims the very name of prophet. He is a plain herdsman, who, as he tended his flocks in the wilderness of Judah, heard the call of God to announce the coming judgment. In the astonished ears of the throng of worshippers gathered at the royal sanctuary in Bethel on some high festival he declared that a great catastrophe was about to befall Israel. The Assyrian armies will overrun the land from one end to the other; its defences will fall

before them, its palaces will be sacked, its temples desecrated. The city that set a thousand men in the field will see but a hundred return; the death-wail will resound in every street and lane, in every field and vineyard. The pitiful remnant of the people will be carried captive to the distant east. The prophet chants a dirge over the dead nation:

"The virgin of Israel is fallen, she shall never rise again;

She lies prostrate upon her land, there is none to raise her up."

The cause of this irrevocable doom is the violence and oppression, the fraud and corruption, that may be seen on every hand. The rich and the great use their power and wealth to rob their neighbours under the forms of law or in cynical defiance of law. The poor are their defenceless prey, whom they sell into slavery for a debt as small as the price of a pair of shoes.

Their religion is abhorrent to Amos' soul. Men think by hecatombs to buy the favour of God and bribe him to condone the outrages which they perpetrate upon their fellow men! What God requires is not worship, but justice, uprightness, and kindness. "I hate, I spurn your feasts; I take no pleasure in your great assemblies. Yea, if you offer me your burnt offerings and oblations, I will not accept them, and your sacrifices of fat cattle I will not look at. Away from me with the uproar of your hymns, and the music of your lyres let me not hear. But let justice flow like water, and right like an unfailing stream."

The will of God for righteousness, as Amos understands it, is written in the intelligence and conscience of all rightthinking men. He calls the very Philistines to see with horror and indignation the wrongs which are done in Israel. And since there is for all men but one natural and universal standard of right, Jehovah avenges transgressions of it not only in Israel but among other nations. The book of Amos begins with a series of oracles proclaiming the doom of sev

eral neighbouring peoples by name, and the ground of the judgment is in each case their ruthless trampling on the rights of man-the atrocities of war, the enslaving of the conquered, the violation of the tomb. The moral conception of God's character is the first step in the path which led the Jews to monotheism.

When fifteen or twenty years later Isaiah appeared as a prophet in Jerusalem it was with the same message and in the same tone. He condemns social conditions in Judah as sweepingly and scathingly as Amos in Israel, and as unqualifiedly predicts the approaching ruin of the kingdom. The worship in the temple in Jerusalem is as odious to God as that which Amos denounced at Bethel.

What do I care for your many sacrifices, says Jehovah. I am sated with burnt offerings of rams and the fat of stall-fed beasts; the blood of bulls and lambs and he-goats I have no pleasure in. . . . Your newmoons and your annual feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me that I am weary of bearing. When you spread out your hands I will shut my eyes not to see you; yea, when you multiply prayers I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood! Wash you, make you clean, take your evil doings out of my sight; leave off doing evil, learn to do well; strive after justice, punish the oppressor, do justice to the orphan, defend the cause of the widow.

We have here a fundamental doctrine of prophecy: the will of God is wholly moral. Worship for its own sake he cares nothing about, but he cares everything for justice, fairness, and goodness among men. The nation in which these do not prevail he will destroy. Hecatombs and panegyrics cannot bring him to wink at wrong and oppression; nor will he be softened by distressful prayers in the day of calamity. Nothing will avail but a thorough amendment of the relations of individuals and social classes.1

With this Isaiah joins a thought of God which had not previously been uttered with the same intensity and itera

1 See Amos 5, 21-24 Isaiah 1, 10-17; Micah 6, 6-8; Jer. 7 (especially verses 21-23).

tion-God's immeasurable might and his lofty majesty. Everything on earth that lifts itself on high before him shall be abased; the towering mountains and the impregnable fortresses, the arrogance of men in their pride of power all shall be laid low in the dust. The vain selfexaltation of the creature is an affront to the majesty of God. The greatness of God must fill man with the consciousness of his own littleness, his power with the sense of impotence. But while it dissipates vain self-confidence and reliance on the arm of flesh, it is the ground of a surer confidence. God rules among the nations, he makes them and breaks them; they execute his will while they think they are doing their own. Faith in him is the only stronghold: "If you will not have faith, surely you shall not be established." These, also, are ideas which enter into the Jewish conception of God and the substance of the Jewish religion.

Isaiah was a prominent figure in Jerusalem for forty years or more, and gave counsel-not always accepted-to kings. He witnessed the fulfilment of his own predictions as well as those of Amos and Hosea in the fall of the kingdom of Israel in 721, and saw Judah twenty years later brought to the verge of ruin by Sennacherib. His contemporary, Micah, a native of a town on the edge of the Judæan lowland, denounces with the utmost vehemence the wrongs which the country suffered at the hands of the unscrupulous plutocrats of the capital, and predicts that Jerusalem shall be ploughed as a field, and the temple be like a lonely chapel in the thick of the forest.

The fourth of the great prophets of the eighth century, Hosea, was, unlike those whom we have hitherto considered, a native of the northern kingdom. He began to prophesy in the latter years of Jeroboam II, and in the disorders and anarchy which followed Jeroboam's death he saw the beginning of that precipitous decline which within a generation brought Israel to its end. Since there is no allusion in the book to the invasion by Tiglath-Pileser in 734, it is probable that the prophet died before that date. Hosea paints his

time in the darkest colours: all classes of the community are alike corrupt-king, nobles, priests, prophets, and people. The cause of this universal moral corruption he finds in religious defection. In Canaan Israel had adopted the religion of Canaan, with all its Baals and its idolatrous and licentious worship. He compares this apostasy from the pure religion of Jehovah to the unfaithfulness of a wife who leaves the husband of her youth to run after other loves. The sin of Israel is, therefore, worse than a transgression of God's righteous will, it is a wrong against his love. By its very nature it makes the continuance of the union impossible; Jehovah will drive Israel out of his house (the land of Canaan). But God's love is not extinguished even by Israel's unfaithfulness. He will, as it were, lead Israel back into the wilderness again, away from all her Canaanitish seducers, that there, alone with him, she may return to the love of her espousals in that golden age of Moses. Then, restored to the favour of God, Israel shall enter upon a better and lasting future.1

In Amos the dominant idea of God is his inexorable righteousness; in Hosea it is his inextinguishable love. All that Amos' God demands of men is justice and fairness and goodness to their fellows-a purely ethical definition of religion. The moral demands of religion in Hosea are not a whit less stringent, but he finds the source and spring of all morality in love to God. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself" is the formulation of Hosea's idea of true religion.

The predictions of the fall of the kingdom of Israel which the contemporaries of Amos and Hosea received with incredulity were soon and signally fulfilled. In 734 TiglathPileser conquered the country, annexed Galilee and Gilead to his new province of Damascus, and set a king of his own choice on the throne in Samaria to rule over the remnant of the kingdom. Ten years later a revolt brought the Assyrian armies again upon the field. In 721 Samaria fell before See Hosea 2, 16 f.