those who came after him were prophets only in name.  Ezekiel had swallowed a book (iii. 1-3), and gave it out again.  He also, like Zechariah, calls the pre-exilic prophets the old prophets, conscious that he himself belongs to the epigoni:  he meditates on their words like Daniel and comments on them in his own prophecy (xxxviii. 17, xxxix. 8).  The writer of Isaiah xl. seq. might with much more reason be called a prophet, but he does not claim to be one; his anonymity, which is evidently intentional, leaves no doubt as to this.  He is, in fact, more of a theologian:  he is principally occupied in reflecting on the results of the foregoing development, of which prophecy had been the leaven; these are fixed possessions now secured; he is gathering in the harvest.  As for the prophets after the exile, we have already seen how Zechariah speaks of the old prophets as a series which is closed, in which he and those like him are not to be reckoned.  In the writing of an anonymous contemporary which is appended to his book we find the following notable expression:  “In that (hoped-for) day, saith Jehovah, I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, that they be no more remembered, and also I will cause to cease the prophets and the unclean spirit; and if a man will yet prophesy, his parents shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live, for thou speakest lies in the name of Jehovah, and his parents shall thrust him through when he prophesieth” (xiii. 2-3).

X.II.2.  Deuteronomy was the programme of a reform, not of a restoration.  It took for granted the existence of the cultus, and only corrected it in certain general respects.  But the temple was now destroyed and the worship interrupted, and the practice of past times had to be written down if it was not to be lost.  Thus it came about that in the exile the conduct of worship became the subject of the Torah, and in this process reformation was naturally aimed at as well as restoration.  We have seen II.II.1.) that Ezekiel was the first to take this step which the circumstances of the time indicated.  In the last part of his work he made the first attempt to record the ritual which had been customary in the temple of Jerusalem.  Other priests attached themselves to him (Leviticus xvii.-xxvi.), and thus there grew up in the exile from among the members of this profession a kind of school of people who reduced to writing and to a system what they had formerly practiced in the way of their calling.  After the temple was restored this theoretical zeal still continued to work, and the ritual when renewed was still further developed by the action and reaction on each other of theory and practice:  the priests who had stayed in Babylon took as great a part, from a distance, in the sacred services, as their brothers at Jerusalem who had actually to conduct them.  The latter indeed lived in adverse circumstances and do not appear to have conformed with great strictness or accuracy to the observances which