The Twelve Prophets Volume I
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Preface
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THE Prophets, to whom this and a following Part are dedicated, have,
to our loss, been haunted for centuries by a peddling and ambiguous
title. Their Twelve Books are in size smaller than those of the
great Three which precede them, and doubtless none of their chapters
soar so high as the brilliant summits to which we are swept by
Isaiah and the Prophet of the Exile. But in every other respect they
are undeserving of the niggardly name of "Minor." Two of them, Amos
and Hosea, were the first of all prophecy-rising cliff-like, with a
sheer and magnificent originality, to a height and a mass sufficient
to set after them the trend and slope of the whole prophetic range.
The Twelve together cover the extent of that range, and illustrate
the development of prophecy at almost every stage from the eighth
century to the fourth. Yet even more than in the case of Isaiah or
Jeremiah, the Church has been content to use a passage here and a
passage there, leaving the rest of the books to absolute neglect or
the almost equal oblivion of routine-reading. Among the causes of
this disuse have been the more than usually corrupt state of the
text; the consequent disorder and in parts unintelligibleness of all
the versions; the ignorance of the various historical circumstances
out of which the books arose; the absence of successful efforts to
determine the periods and strophes, the dramatic dialogues (with the
names of the speakers), the lyric effusions and the passages of
argument, of all of which the books are composed.
The following exposition is an attempt to assist the bettering of
all this. As the Twelve Prophets illustrate among them the whole
history of written prophecy, I have thought it useful to prefix a
historical sketch of the Prophet in early Israel, or as far as the
appearance of Amos. The Twelve are then taken in chronological
order. Under each of them a chapter is given of historical and
critical introduction to his book; then some account of the prophet
himself as a man and a seer; then a complete translation of the
various prophecies handed down under his name, with textual
footnotes, and an exposition and application to the present day in
harmony with the aim of the series to which these volumes belong:
finally, a discussion of the main doctrines the prophet has taught,
if it has not been found possible to deal with these in the course
of the exposition.
An exact critical study of the Twelve Prophets is rendered necessary
by the state of the entire text. The present work is based on a
thorough examination of this in the light of the ancient versions
and of modern criticism. The emendations which I have proposed are
few and insignificant, but I have examined and discussed in
footnotes all that have been suggested, and in many cases my
translation will be found to differ widely from that of the Revised
Version. To questions of integrity and authenticity more space is
devoted than may seem to many to be necessary. But it is certain
that the criticism of the prophetic books has now entered on a
period of the same analysis and discrimination which is almost
exhausted in the case of the Pentateuch. Some hints were given of
this in a previous book on Isaiah, chapters 40-66, which are
evidently a composite work. Among the books now before us, the same
fact has long been clear in the case of Obadiah and Zechariah, and
also since Ewald’s time with regard to Micah. But Duhm’s "Theology
of the Prophets," which appeared in 1875, suggested interpolations
in Amos. Wellhausen (in 1873) and Stade (from 1883 onwards) carried
the discussion further both on those, and others, of the Twelve;
while a recent work by Andree on Haggai proves that many similar
questions may still be raised and have to be debated. The general
fact must be admitted that hardly one book has escaped later
additions-additions of an entirely justifiable nature, which
supplement the point of view of a single prophet with the richer
experience or the riper hopes of a later day, and thus afford to
ourselves a more catholic presentment of the doctrines of prophecy
and the Divine purposes for mankind. This general fact, I say, must
be admitted. But the questions of detail are still in process of
solution. It is obvious that settled results can be reached (as to
some extent they have been already reached in the criticism of the
Pentateuch) only after years of research and debate by all schools
of critics. Meantime it is the duty of each of us to offer his own
conclusions, with regard to every separate passage, on the
understanding that, however final they may at present seem to him,
the end is not yet. In previous criticism the defects, of which work
in the same field has made me aware, are four:
1. A too rigid belief in the exact parallelism and symmetry of the
prophetic style, which I feel has led, for instance, Wellhausen, to
whom we otherwise owe so much on the Twelve Prophets, into many
unnecessary emendations of the text, or, where some amendment is
necessary, to absolutely unprovable changes.
2. In passages between which no connection exists, the forgetfulness
of the principle that this fact may often be explained as justly by
the hypothesis of the omission of some words, as by the favorite
theory of the later intrusion of portions of the extant text.
3. Forgetfulness of the possibility, which in some cases amounts
almost to certainty, of the incorporation, among the authentic words
of a prophet, of passages of earlier as well as of later date. And,
4. depreciation of the spiritual insight and foresight of pre-exilic
writers. These, I am persuaded, are defects in previous criticism of
the prophets. Probably my own criticism will reveal many more. In
the beginnings of such analysis as we are engaged on, we must be
prepared for not a little arbitrariness and want of proportion;
these are often necessary for insight and fresh points of view, but
they are as easily eliminated by the progress of discussion.
All criticism, however, is preliminary to the real work which the
immortal prophets demand from scholars and preachers in our age. In
a review of a previous volume, I was blamed for applying a prophecy
of Isaiah to a problem of our own day. This was called "prostituting
prophecy." The prostitution of the prophets is their confinement to
academic uses. One cannot conceive an ending, at once more pathetic
and more ridiculous, to those great streams of living water, than to
allow them to run out in the sands of criticism and exegesis,
however golden these sands may be. The prophets spoke for a
practical purpose; they aimed at the hearts of men; and everything
that scholarship can do for their writings has surely for its final
aim the illustration of their witness to the ways of God with men,
and its application to living questions and duties and hopes.
Besides, therefore, seeking to tell the story of that wonderful
stage in the history of the human spirit-surely next in wonder to
the story of Christ Himself-I have not feared at every suitable
point to apply its truths to our lives today. The civilization in
which prophecy flourished was in its essentials marvelously like our
own. To mark only one point, the rise of prophecy in Israel came
fast upon the passage of the nation from an agricultural to a
commercial basis of society, and upon the appearance of the very
thing which gives its name to civilization -city-life, with its
unchanging sins, problems, and ideals.
A recent Dutch critic, whose exact scholarship is known to all
readers of Stade’s "Journal of Old Testament Science," has said of
Amos and Hosea:
"These prophecies have a word of God, as for all times, so also
especially for our own. Before all it is relevant to ‘the social
question’ of our day, to the relation of religion and morality.
Often it has been hard for me to refrain from expressly pointing out
the agreement between Then and Today."
This feeling will be shared by all students of prophecy whose minds
and consciences are quick; and I welcome the liberal plata of the
series in which this book appears, because, while giving room for
the adequate discussion of critical and historical questions, its
chief design is to show the eternal validity of the Books of the
Bible as the Word of God, and their meaning for ourselves today.
Previous works on the Minor Prophets are almost innumerable. Those
to which I owe most will be found indicated in the footnotes. The
translation has been executed upon the purpose, not to sacrifice the
literal meaning or exact emphasis of the original to the frequent
possibility of greater elegance. It reproduces every word, with the
occasional exception of a copula. With some hesitation I have
retained the traditional spelling of the Divine Name, Jehovah,
instead of the more correct Jahve or Yahweh; but where the rhythm of
certain familiar passages was disturbed by it, I have followed the
English versions and written LORD. The reader will keep in mind that
a line may be destroyed by substituting our pronunciation of proper
names for the more musical accents of the original. Thus, for
instance, we obliterate the music of "Isra’el" by making it two
syllables and putting the accent on the first: it has three
syllables with the accent on the last. We crush Yerushalayîm into
Jerusalem; we shred off Asshûr into Assyria, and dub Misraîm Egypt.
Hebrew has too few of the combinations which sound most musical to
our ears to afford the suppression of any one of them. |
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