(5) Testimony to Divine Mission of Other Prophets. Those prophets whose divine com mission had been sufficiently proved, bore testi mony to the divine mission of others. It has been observed above, that there was a certain gradation among the prophets; the principals of the colleges of prophets procured authority to the `sons' of prophets. Thus the deeds of Elijah and Elisha at the same time authenticated the hundreds of prophets whose superiors they were. Concerning the relation of the true prophets to each other, the passage 2 Kings ii :9 is remarka ble;Elisha says to Elijah, 'I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me.' Here Elisha, as the firstborn of Elijah in a spiritual sense, and standing to him in the same relation as Joshua to Moses, asks for a double portion of his spiritual inheritance, alluding to the law concerning the hereditary right of the lawfully begotten first born son (Deut. xxi:17). This case supposes that other prophets also of the kingdom of Israel took portions of the fullness of the spirit of Eli jah. It is plain, then, that only a few prophets stood in immediate communion with God, while that of the remaining was formed by medi ation. The latter were spiritually incorporated in the former, and on the ground of this relation, ac tions performed by Elisha, or through the instru mentality of one of his pupils, are at once ascribed to Elijah, c. g. the anointing of Hazael to be king over Syria (1 Kings xix:15; comp. 2 Kings viii: 13) ; the anointing of Jelin to be king over Israel (1 Kings xix:t6; comp. 2 Kings ix:1, sq.) ; the writing of the letter to Joram, etc. Thus in a certain sense it may be affirmed that Elijah was in his time the only prophet of the kingdom of Israel. Similarly of Moses it is recorded, dur ing his passage through the desert, that a portion of his spirit was conveyed to the seventy elders. The history of the Christian church itself offers analogies; e.g., look at the relation of the second class reformers to Luther and Calvin.
7. Promulgation of Prophetic Declarations. (1) Before the People. Usually the prophets promulgated their visions in public places before the congregated people. Still some portions of the prophetic books, as the entire second part of Isaiah and the description of the new temple (Ezek. xl-xlviii), probably were never communi cated orally. In other cases the prophetic ad dresses first delivered orally were next, when committed to writing, revised and improved.
(2) Written in Books. Especially the books of the lesser prophets consist, for the greater part, not of separate predictions, independent of each other, but form, as they now are, a whole, that is, give the quintessence of the prophetic la bors of their authors.
(3) Reference to Earlier Works. There is evidence to prove that the later prophets sedu lously read the writings of the earlier, and that a prophetic canon existed before the present was formed. The predictions of Jeremiah through
out rest on the writings of earlier prophets, as Kuper has established in his Ieremias librorum sacraria,' interpres atque vinde.r, Berlin, 1837. Zechariah explicitly alludes to writings of former prophets; 'to the words which the Lord has spoken to earlier prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and in prosperity' (Zech, i:4; vii :7, 12).
(4) Preservation of Books. In consequence of the prophets being considered as organs of God, much care was bestowed on the preservation of their publications. Ewald himself cannot re frain from observing (p. 56), 'We have in Jer. xxvi:1-19 a clear proof of the exact knowledge which the better classes of the people had of all that had, a hundred years before, happened to a prophet, of his words, misfortunes, and acci dents.' The collectors of the Canon arranged the proph ets chronologically, but considered the whole of the twelve lesser prophets as one work, which they placed after Jeremiah and Ezekiel, inasmuch as the three last lesser prophets lived later than they. Daniel was placed in the Hagiographa, be cause he had not filled the prophetic office. The collection of the lesser prophets themselves was again chronologically disposed; still Hosea is, on account of the extent of his work, allowed precedence of those lesser prophets, who, gen erally, were his contemporaries, and also before those who flourished at a somewhat earlier pe riod.
8. Literature. OE considerable eminence is the treatise by Ewald on prophecy, which pre cedes his work on the prophets, published in 1840 at auttgart. But to the important question whether the prophets enjoyed supernatural as sistance or not, an explicit answer will here be sought for in vain. His view of the subject is in the main that of the ationalists, though he en deavors to veil it : the Spirit of God influencing the prophets is in fact only their own mind worked up by circumstances; their enthusiasm and ecstasy are made to explain all. Sherlock, Discourses on the Use and Intent of Prophecy, 8vo, 1755; Hurd. Introd. to the Study of the Prophecies, etc., 8vo, 1772; Apthorp, Discourses on Prophecy, 2 vols. 8vo, 1786; Davidson, Dis courses on Prophecy (in which are considered it Structure, Use, and Inspiration), 8vo. 1824 : Smith. (J. Pye), Principles of Interpretation as Applied to the Prophecies of Holy Scripture, 8vo, 1829; Brooks, Elements of Propheticol Interpretation, 12M0, 1837; Horne, Introduction, vol. ii, p. 534; iv, p. 14o; Alexander, Connection of the Old and New Testaments, Lect. iv-vii, pp. 168-382, 8vo.
1841 ; F. D. Maurice, Prophets and Kings of the O. T., 1853; Taylor, The Spirit of Heb. Poetry, t862; Thomas Arnold, Arnold's ll'orks, i. 373 456; Stanley, Lectures on the Jewish Ch., t863; R. P. Smith, Messianic Interpretation, 1862. (See