[16] לוא “priest,” לואת “priestess”; see Hommel, Süd-arabische Chrestomathie, p. 127; Ancient Hebrew Tradition, p. 278 foll.
[17] Moore regards this verse as belonging to the J or older document, op. cit. p. 367.
[18] Similarly in ancient Greece. See the instructive passage in Aristotle, Nic. Eth. viii. 9 (4, 5), on the relation of Greek sacrifices and festivals to κοινωνίαι and politics: αἱ γὰρ ἀρχαῖαι θυσίαι καὶ σύνοδοι φαίνονται γίγνεσθαι μετὰ τὰς τῶν καρπῶν συγκομιδὰς οἷον ἀπαρχαί; cf. Grote on Pan-Hellenic festivals, History of Greece, vol. iii., ch. 28.
[19] Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums (2nd ed.), p. 89.
[20] Though this be an interpolated gloss (Thenius, Budde), it states a significant truth as Kautzsch clearly shows, op. cit. p. 672. In Micah iii. 7 the ḥōzeh is mentioned in a sense analogous to the rō’ēh or “seer,” and coupled with the qōsēm or “soothsayer,” viz. as spurious; cf. Deut. xviii. 10.
[21] No better derivation is forthcoming of the word nabhi’, “prophet,” than that it is a Kāṭīl form of the root nābā = Assyr. nabū, “speak.”
[22] In Isa. iii. 2 the soothsayer is placed on a level with the judge, prophet and elder.
[23] Kautzsch, in his profoundly learned article on the “Religion of Israel,” to which frequent reference has been made, exhibits (pp. 669-671) an excess of scepticism, in our opinion, towards the views propounded by Gunkel in 1895 (Schöpfung und Chaos) respecting the intimate connexion between the early Hebrew cosmogonic ideas and those of Babylonia. Stade indeed (Z.A.T.W., 1903, pp. 176-178) maintained that the conception of Yahweh as creator of the world could not have arisen till after the middle of the 8th century as the result of prophetic teaching, and that it was not till the time of Ezekiel that Babylonian conceptions entered the world of Hebrew thought in any fulness. Such a theory appears to ignore the remarkable results of archaeology since 1887. At that time Stade’s position might have appeared reasonable. It was the conclusion to which Wellhausen’s brilliant literary analysis, when not supplemented by the discoveries at Tell el-Amarna and Tell el-Hesi, appeared to many scholars (by no means all) inevitably to conduct us. But the years 1887 to 1891 opened many eyes to the fact that the Hebrews lived their life on the great highways of intercourse between Egypt on the one hand, and Babylonia, Assyria and the N. Palestinian states on the other, and that they could scarcely have escaped the all-pervading Babylonian influences of 2000-1400 B.C. It is now becoming clearer every day, especially since the discovery of the laws of Khammurabi, that, if we are to think sanely about Hebrew history before as well as after the exile, we can only think of Israel as part of the great complex of Semitic and especially Canaanite humanity that lived its life in western Asia between 2000 and 600 B.C.; and that while the Hebrew race maintained by the aid of prophetism its own individual and exalted place, it was not less susceptible then, than it has been since, to the moulding influences of great adjacent civilizations and ideas. Cf. C. H. W. Johns in Interpreter, pp. 300-304 (in April 1906), on prophetism in Babylonia.
[24] There is some danger in too strictly construing the language of the prophets and also the psalmists. It is not to be supposed that either Amos or Isaiah would have countenanced the total suppression of all sacrificial observance. It was the existing ceremonial observance divorced from the ethical piety that they denounced. The speech of prophecy is poetical and rhetorical, not strictly defined and logical like that of a modern essayist. See Moore in Encyc. Bibl., “Sacrifice,” col. 4222.
[25] Viz. Budde in Die so-genannten Ebed-Jahweh Lieder u. die Bedeutung des Knechtes Jahwehs in Jes. xl.-lv. (Giessen, 1900); Karl Marti in his well-known commentary on Isaiah, and F. Giesebrecht, Der Knecht Jahwes des Deuterojesaja. The special servant-songs which Duhm asserts can be readily detached from the texture of the Deutero-Isaiah without disturbance to its integrity are Isa. xlii. 1-4, xlix. 1-6, l. 4-9, lii. 13-liii. 12.