You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
If a psychological or psychoanalytic study of the prophetic documents of the Old Testament is to be meaningful, one must understand the role of the prophets in the history of humanity. The following quotations from Isadore Epstein's Judaism—A Historical Presentation, will offer the reader a preliminary glimpse of this role:2
Basic to prophesy is the inseparableness of religion and morality. This conception signified a forward leap in the religious consciousness and moral conscience of mankind. …
The Hebrew prophets rose above the credulity which blindly accepted a direct correspondence between individual goodness and prosperity, and individual wickedness and misery. … It was not God, but the wealthy and the noble who crushed the weak and ground the face of the poor. It was they who … by doing so set themselves against the rule of God. …
The Hebrew prophets were not satisfied merely to denounce injustice and oppression. They set themselves the task of arousing among the people a feeling against social suffering—a feeling which was not to rest in knowledge, but to become full action. …
Chief among the fundamental moral principles of the prophets enunciated was righteousness. … The universal character of divine righteousness implied a uniform relation of God to man, and man to man. This turn inspired the idea of the unity of men, and any violation of that unity was an injury to divine righteousness. …
The prophets of Israel … rose above the boundaries of their own nation to a vision of a unified humanity, and made the conception of mankind a content of religion. … Thus the ‘Day of the Lord' becomes the symbol of Messianism with the rule of universal righteousness on earth … the key to this universal
Page 100conversion is the knowledge of the Lord. The knowledge of the Lord draws its universal significance from the fact that it is not theoretical. … It is a knowledge which, by experiencing the divine presence, enables man to be possessed of a real understanding of, and