Prolegomena to the History of Israel

by Julius Wellhausen

In later times also, when priests and prophets drew off and separated from each other, they yet remained connected, both in the kingdom of Israel (Host iv. 5) and in Judah. In the latter this was very markedly the case (2Kings xxiii. 2; Jeremiah xxvi. 7 seq., v. 31; Deuteronomy xviii. 1-8, 9-22; Zechariah vii. 3). What connected them with each other was the revelation of Jehovah which went on and was kept alive in both of them. It is Jehovah from whom the torah of the priest and the word of the prophet proceeds: He is the true DIRECTOR, as Isaiah calls Him in the passage xxx. 20 seq., where, speaking of the Messianic time, he says to the people, "Then thy director (MWRYK) is no more concealed, but thine eyes see thy director, and thine ears hear the words of One calling behind thee; this is the way, walk ye in it; when ye are turning to the right hand or to the left." TORAH and WORD are cognate notions, and capable of being interchanged (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 9; Isaiah i. 10, ii. 3, v. 24, viii. 16, 20). This explains how both priests and prophets claimed Moses for their order: he was not regarded as the founder of the cultus.

The difference, in the period when it had fully developed itself, may be said to be this: the Torah of the priests was like a spring which runs always, that of the prophets like a spring which is intermittent, but when it does break forth, flows with all the greater force. The priests take precedence of the prophets when both are named together; they obviously consolidated themselves earlier and more strongly. The order, and the tradition which propagates itself within the order, are essential to them: they observe and keep the torah (Deuteronomy xxxiii. 9). For this reason, that they take their stand so entirely on the tradition, and depend on it, their claim to have Moses for their father, the beginner and founder of their tradition, is in itself the better founded of the two. /l/

— Footnote 1 It is also more firmly rooted in history; for if Moses did anything at all, he certainly founded the sanctuary at Kadesh and the torah there, which the priests of the ark carried on after him, thus continuing the thread of the history of Israel, which was taken up again in power by the monarchy. The prophets only appeared among the Hebrews from the time of Samuel onwards, but the seers were older than Moses, and can scarcely have had such a close connection with his tradition as the priests at the sanctuary of the ark of Jehovah. — Footnote

In the ordinary parlance of the Hebrews torah always meant first, and chiefly the Priestly Torah. The prophets have notoriously no father (1Samuel x. 12), their importance rests on the individuals; it is characteristic that only names and sketches of their lives have reached us. They do indeed, following the tendency of the times, draw together in corporations; but in doing so they really renounce their own distinctive characteristics: the representative men are always single, resting on nothing outside themselves. We have thus on the one side the tradition of a class, which suffices for the occasions of ordinary life, and on the other the inspiration of awakened individuals, stirred up by occasions which are more than ordinary. After the spirit of the oldest men of God, Moses at the head of them, had been in a fashion laid to sleep in institutions, it sought and found in the prophets a new opening; the old fire burst out like a volcano through the strata which once, too, rose fluid from the deep, but now were fixed and dead.

The element in which the prophets live is the storm of the world's history, which sweeps away human institutions; in which the rubbish of past generations with the houses built on it begins to shake, and that foundation alone remains firm, which needs no support but itself. When the earth trembles and seems to be passing away, then they triumph because Jehovah alone is exalted. They do not preach on set texts; they speak out of the spirit which judges all things and itself is judged of no man. Where do they ever lean on any other authority than the truth of what they say; where do they rest on any other foundation than their own certainty? It belongs to the notion of prophecy of true revelation, that Jehovah, overlooking all the media of ordinances and institutions, communicates Himself to the INDIVIDUAL, the called one, in whom that mysterious and irreducible rapport in which the deity stands with man clothes itself with energy. Apart from the prophet, in abstracto, there is no revelation; it lives in his divine-human ego. This gives rise to a synthesis of apparent contradictions: the subjective in the highest sense, which is exalted above all ordinances, is the truly objective, the divine. This it proves itself to be by the consent of the conscience of all, on which the prophets count, just as Jesus does in the Gospel of John, in spite of all their polemic against the traditional religion. They are not saying anything new: they are only proclaiming old truth. While acting in the most creative way they feel entirely passive: the homo tantum et audacia which may with perfect justice be applied to such men as Elijah, Amos, and Isaiah, is with them equivalent to deus tantum et servitus. But their creed is not to be found in any book. It is barbarism, in dealing with such a phenomenon, to distort its physiognomy by introducing the law.

X.I.3. It is a vain imagination to suppose that the prophets expounded and applied the law. Malachi (circa 450 B.C.) says, it is true, iv. 4, "Remember ye the torah of Moses my servant;" but where shall we look for any second expression of this nature? Much more correctly than modern scholars did these men judge, who at the close of the preexilic history looked back on the forces which had moulded it, both the divine and those opposed to God. In their eyes the prophets are not the expounders of Moses, but his continuators and equals; the word of God in their mouth is not less weighty than in the mouth of Moses; they, as well as he, are organs of the spirit of Jehovah by which He is present in Israel. The immediate revelation to the people, we read in Deuteronomy xviii., ceased with the ten commandments: from that point onwards Jehovah uses the prophets as His mouth: "A prophet like unto thee," He says to Moses, "will I raise up to them from among their brethren, and will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him; and whosoever shall not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him."

We find it the same in Jeremiah; the voice of the prophets, always sounding when there is need for it, occupies the place which, according to the prevailing view, should have been filled by the law: this living command of Jehovah is all he knows of, and not any testament given once for all.

"This only I commanded your fathers when I brought them up out of Egypt: Obey my voice, and walk ye in all the ways that I will command you. Since the day that your fathers came forth out of Egypt, I have sent unto you all my servants the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them; but ye would not hear."

And even after the exile we meet in Zechariah (520 B.C.) the following view of the significance of the prophets: "Thus spake Jehovah of hosts [to the fathers before the exile], Speak true judgment, and show mercy and compassions every man to his brother, and oppress not the widow nor the fatherless, the stranger nor the poor: and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in his heart. But they refused to hearken, and shrugged the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear. Yea, they made their hearts as a flint, lest they should hear the Torah and the words which Jehovah Sebaoth hath sent by His Spirit through the old prophets: therefore came a great wrath from Jehovah Sebaoth. And as He cried and they would not hear, so now shall they cry and I will not hear, and I will blow them away among the peoples…. Thus saith Jehovah Sebaoth [after the exile to the present generation], As I thought to punish you without pity because your fathers provoked me to anger, so again have I thought in these days to do well to the house of Judah: fear ye not. These are the things that ye shall do: Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates; and let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour, and love no false oath, for all these are things which I hate, saith Jehovah" (Zechariah vii. 9-11, viii. 14-16).

The contents of the Torah, on obedience to which the theocracy is here based, are very suggestive, as also its derivation from the "old" prophets. Even Ezra can say (ix. 10, 11):