The Maccabaean

WHEN the newly emancipated Jews of western Europe sought a religious sanction for their rejection of everything distinctive in Jewish ritual and observance, their cry was, "Let us return to prophetic Judaism and extricate ourselves from rabbinic provincialism and clannishness; let us cease to cherish the hope of a national redemption, and, in the broad spirit of prophecy, accept it as our mission to spread our beliefs among the people with whom we live." But if these reformers had only read, though even in a cursory manner, yet without partisan bias, those very prophets in whose doctrines they professed belief, they would needs have been impressed by the basic position that Jewish nationalism held in their religious concepts. The idea of the choice of Israel as a nation to fulfill a mission such as only a nation could conceivably fulfill is axiomatic in the doctrine of all the prophets. For this mission was essentially that expressed by the words of the Torah, "Ye shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation;" not, mark you, a church of priests and a holy communion, but a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Israel was to be not so much the disseminator of God's law as its custodian; his duty not so much to preach it as to obey it, to apply it to his social life, to be its very incarnation.

This ideal of the purpose of the Jews' national existence was, as we have said, common to all the prophets, was the heritage that each generation of them handed down to the succeeding until

*Read. before the B’nai U’Bnoth Zion of Newark.

prophecy, its work accomplished, ceased. But each generation added its share to this generous patrimony and it will be my task in this paper to trace some of the various phases in the prophetic conception of Israel's mission which were from time to time made prominent by the events of history or the personality of the individual prophet.

At just what period in the history of the Jews prophecy began it would be hard to tell, but we know that already in Samuel's time, about 1100 B. C. E., the schools of the prophets were a fixed institution in Israel, possessing certain definite traditions and doctrines which they transmitted to future generations of prophets. All the prophets believed themselves to be the oracles of God, the instruments by which He of the Ineffable Name kept reminding His people of their covenant with him; in short, they were throughout the leaders of that party which, true to Israel's history, championed the cause of the God who had led them through the wilderness, against the local deities of Canaan. For no sooner had the Jews been settled on their own land than a movement in the direction of assimilation began. The immoral cults of Baal and Astarte entered into competition with the pure worship of Jehovah, and the prophets, by identifying themselves with the latter, were protecting the true Jewish culture of their day from foreign invasion and corruption.

The desire of the people to imitate the surrounding nations also showed itself in their insistence on a king to rule over them, and Samuel, compelled to yield to public pressure, appoints Saul to reign over the people. It