The Prophets as Statesmen and Preachers (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Prophets as Statesmen and Preachers Lesson I - / - "..'.:, INTRODUCTION I. General Classification Of Prophets A reference in the book of Jeremiah distinguishes three classes of teachers in ancient Israel, the priests, the Israel's wise, and the prophets. Each of these Teachers contributed its portion to the thirty-nine books that compose our Old Testament. The conduct of formal worship, with the development and preservation of the many laws and customs controlling it, was the chief task of the priests. Even when they wrote their nation's history, their dominant purpose was evidently to emphasize its ritual aspects. The wise occupied themselves largely with observations upon the conduct of practical life and with problems concerning the divine government or the value of human life. Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes illustrate the various tendencies of their thought. It was through the prophets, chiefly, that the nature of God and his moral and spiritual demands were revealed. They developed the ethical and spiritual religion of Israel. In English, the words prophet and prophesy are used ordinarily in the meaning foreteller and foretell; but the Title Hebrew words that they represent in the Prophet Old Testament were not necessarily used in any such limited sense, and did not have such meaning in their .origin. Abimelech was told that Abraham was s. prophet whose prayer would be effective; here the word seems to mean one who enjoyed a peculiarly close t relation with God. Indeed, the terms man of God and prophet are often used interchangeably. Still, this does not give us in full the Old Testament idea of the prophet, nor the exact root meaning of the word. When Moses objected that Pharaoh would not hearken to him, he was told that Aaron should be his prophet and sh...