Chapter 14. 

Haggai.  

Post-exilic Prophecy.

        Jewish tradition confined recorded post-exilic prophecy to the contents of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, and this is the view adopted by us. Modern scholarship for the most part would add “Trito-Isaiah,” Isa. 24-27, Joel and the moral tale of Jonah, as well as considerable additions in other pro­phets. Even were we to accept this, it would not materially alter our picture of post-exilic prophecy.

        It seems to be clear that prophecy died out very largely because prophets were not really wanted. In Zech. 13:2-6 we have the last miserable end of the professional prophets. Nehemiah was troubled by them (Neh. 6:10-14), but it is striking that he reveals no sense of loss at the lack of genuine prophets. We can discover at least four reasons for the rapidly diminishing regard for the prophet.

        1. The religious Jew, apart from an exceptional crisis that might occur once in a life-time, had outgrown the need for some almost mechanical means for the discovery of God’s will, whether through the priest with Urim and Thummim or the prophet through his dreams or clairvoyance. He had in large measure learnt that we can know God’s will npw through His self-revelation in the past. This was intensified by the post-exilic community’s being a religious rather than a national community, as was the case before the exile. This was emphasized by the failure to obtain national independence until 142 B.C. The Jew who was not interested in his religion normally just did not return from Babylonia.

        2. The returning exiles contained an altogether dis­proportionate number of priests, Levites and ecclesiastical persons, a total of nearly 5,700 out of 42,360 (Ezra 2), a pro­portion of about 1 in 7 and 1/2. Ezra is not so explicit about the numbers that returned with him, but we may be fairly sure that they were not strikingly dissimilar. The priest always tended to be suspicious of the prophet and to think himself his superior. It is therefore typical that when doubts arose as to the eligibility of some of the priests that had returned, the Tirshatha deferred the matter until “there stood up a priest with Urim and with Thummim” (Ezra 2:62f). There is no suggestion that a prophetic opinion, if offered, would have been acceptable. Quite consistently with this whole attitude we find that Zechariah was a priest, and Haggai and Malachi probably came from ecclesiastical circles. It is true that in I Mace. 4:46; 14:41 we have certain matters kept for pro­phetic decision in the future, but the context creates the im­pression that the prophet was not expected until Mal. 4:5 was fulfilled. That the priest can be called the angel of Jehovah in Mal. 2:7 (the English misleadingly, though ac­curately, for angel=messenger, renders “the messenger of the Lord”) shows how the priesthood was now exalted.

        3. Ezra and to a less extent Nehemiah stamped on the post-exilic community the awareness that they were a people under the divine law; at the same time the story clearly sug­gests that Ezra was no innovator; he was merely giving ex­pression to a principle already generally accepted. His under­lying assumption, one that was bound to lead in due time to Pharisaism and Rabbinic Judaism, was that in the Law as interpreted by the prophets of the past all that man needed to know of God had been given. All that was needed was a mind filled with wisdom derived from the fear of the Lord. In such a society a prophet was an anachronism.

        4. Even if conditions had not been unpropitious for the prophets, it is likely that they would gradually have faded out, for their main work was done. God had said all through them in sundry ways and divers manners that could be said. Now the community had to learn and absorb what had been given them in the Law and the Prophets, that they might be pre­pared for Him who was the fulfilment of both the Law and the Prophets. Modern scholarship has done much to fill the gap between the Testaments, but the gap has its place in our Bibles; it was a time not of revelation but of learning and discipline.