*********************************** 1 It is also more firmly rooted in history; for if Moses did anything at all, he certainly founded the sanctuary at Kadesh and the torah there, which the priests of the ark carried on after him, thus continuing the thread of the history of Israel, which was taken up again in power by the monarchy.  The prophets only appeared among the Hebrews from the time of Samuel onwards, but the seers were older than Moses, and can scarcely have had such a close connection with his tradition as the priests at the sanctuary of the ark of Jehovah. **********************************

In the ordinary parlance of the Hebrews torah always meant first, and chiefly the Priestly Torah.  The prophets have notoriously no father (1Samuel x. 12), their importance rests on the individuals; it is characteristic that only names and sketches of their lives have reached us.  They do indeed, following the tendency of the times, draw together in corporations; but in doing so they really renounce their own distinctive characteristics:  the representative men are always single, resting on nothing outside themselves.  We have thus on the one side the tradition of a class, which suffices for the occasions of ordinary life, and on the other the inspiration of awakened individuals, stirred up by occasions which are more than ordinary.  After the spirit of the oldest men of God, Moses at the head of them, had been in a fashion laid to sleep in institutions, it sought and found in the prophets a new opening; the old fire burst out like a volcano through the strata which once, too, rose fluid from the deep, but now were fixed and dead.

The element in which the prophets live is the storm of the world’s history, which sweeps away human institutions; in which the rubbish of past generations with the houses built on it begins to shake, and that foundation alone remains firm, which needs no support but itself.  When the earth trembles and seems to be passing away, then they triumph because Jehovah alone is exalted.  They do not preach on set texts; they speak out of the spirit which judges all things and itself is judged of no man.  Where do they ever lean on any other authority than the truth of what they say; where do they rest on any other foundation than their own certainty?  It belongs to the notion of prophecy of true revelation, that Jehovah, overlooking all the media of ordinances and institutions, communicates Himself to the INDIVIDUAL, the called one, in whom that mysterious and irreducible rapport in which the deity stands with man clothes itself with energy.  Apart from the prophet, in abstracto, there is no revelation; it lives in his divine-human ego.  This gives rise to a synthesis of apparent contradictions:  the subjective in the highest sense, which is exalted above all ordinances, is the truly objective, the divine.  This it proves itself to be by the consent of the conscience of all, on which the prophets count, just as Jesus