Publisher's Synopsis
From the AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
NO BRANCH of science, in the last generation, has undergone such a profound revolution as that of Old Testament research. In place of the traditional representation of the religious history of Israel has been substituted a rigorous historical mode of view, which discovers in the process in question an organic development, and assigns to each event its logical position in the whole, by reference to which all the facts are severally comprehended and explained. At first, even professional scholars received this organic view of the Old Testament with repugnance and distrust; for it was no light task to abandon a position that for two thousand years had been regarded as the absolute truth. But by that power of conviction which always inheres in what is intrinsically correct, it gradually increased its dominance over men's minds, and has, particularly since the brilliant and fascinating exposition of Wellhausen's History of Israel of the year 1878, been borne onwards in an irresistible and uninterrupted career of triumph.
For no part of the Old Testament literature has this change of view been more significant and momentous than for the prophets, whose real significance could only now be understood and properly valued. Whilst according to the traditional view the prophets merely deepened and broadened in single points the religion of Moses, which he was supposed to have promulgated as a complete and finished system, it now appeared that the prophets had completely revolutionized the religion of Israel, that it was wholly through them that the national religion founded by Moses be- came a religion of the world, and that it was they who prepared and fitted the religion of Israel to become the parent of Christianity....
