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Excerpt from Books of the Old Testament in Colloquial Speech The prophets spoke under the stress of a peculiar condition of Degreesmind and body, which we commonly call the ecstasy. Their utterances were short, and seem usually, if not always, to have been poetic in form. These short speeches were not always written down immediately, and some ofthe prophets do not seem to have used the pen at all. Their message, they felt, was for their own time. But these messages were seen to have a per manent value, and were often kept isolated and separate. Then they would be copied and collected into smaller or larger groups, where the name of the prophet was known. To these would be added other isolated pieces which were anonymous. In the process many of them might undergo alteration. The language might be changed, so as to produce prose instead of poetry. Sometimes this was done by the prophet himself, but in the case of the earlier books it was clearly the work of the compilers of the small collections, or of someone even earlier than them. Sometimes the writing would be torn or badly copied, with the result that the compiler had only a fragment of the original oracle. Nevertheless he often put it in. The compiler arranged his material as seemed good to him, usually without regard to historical order, and seldom with any explicit reference to the occasion on which any oracle was delivered. Sometimes - as in the early chapters of the Book of Amos - the compiler shews a very high degree of literary and dramatic appreciation. There is reason to believe that he occasionally adopted a kind of for mula, and fitted the oracles of the prophet into it. Amos i. And ii. Are not the only examples of this tendency. Very often in placing his matter together, he was guided by no surer principle than the occurrence of similar language and thought in two oracles which may have been uttered at very different times and under very different circumstances. In particular, compilers were fond of grouping together oracles about foreign nations. In the Book of Amos, then, we have a collection of oracles of different dates and types, of which the great majority were probably uttered by Amos himself. The only indications we have as to the date and occasion of each are what we may gather from the oracle itself, and each must be treated separately, without reference to its neighbours. This necessarily makes thereading of the prophets a little difficult, but it is always possible to get their real message, in spite of the apparent scrappiness of the material. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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