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The Hebrew Prophets and National Crises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2024

Extract

The subject of the Hebrew Prophets and National Crises is one that could hardly be exhausted in a book of slender bulk. I can, therefore, only sketch out some outline of this great and, at the present time, very important matter.

First of all, we have to consider the wonderful phenomenon of these Prophets. It is not just a natural thing. It has a supernatural element, made up of all that is natural. The supernatural is not built on the natural, but with it. To some, the prophecies, as recorded, would seem to be nothing more than a very fine forecast by one who paid attention to the laws of nature; just as you might account merely by chemical laws for the writing which a person makes on a page, but that would not account for everything, all the intellectual and spiritual values, contained in it.

Another unique element is that, in almost every page, there is a denunciation of the people that recorded those things. You have the phenomenon of a little people transmitting to posterity only one group of writings (I do not think we have any other Hebrew literature of the time of Isaias), and those writings a most appalling account of their own doings. Now that is a very strange phenomenon because, in point of fact, if you asked England to-night to set up a book in English about the size of the Bible, and to transmit it to posterity, what would they put in it?

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1940 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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