In Roman law and in modern systems of law based on it, property is divided into “movables” and “immovables”; in English law, on the other hand, the division is into personal property, including chattels real, and real property (see Personal Property and Real Property). Theatrical usage has given a specific meaning to the word, that of any article used on the stage during the performance of a play.
PROPHET (προφήτης), a word taken from the vocabulary of ancient Greek religion,[1] which passed into the language of Christianity, and so into the modern tongues of Europe, because it was adopted by the Hellenistic Jews as the rendering of the Hebrew נָבִיא (nābhīa pl., nebhīīm). The word therefore as we use it is meant to convey an idea which belongs to Hebrew and not to Hellenic belief.
That the word nābhīa, “prophet,” originally signified one who speaks or announces the divine will, is rendered highly probable by a comparison of the Assyrian nabū, meaning (a) to “call” or “name,” (b) “announce” (see Delitzsch, Handwörterbuch sub voce). The Babylonian deity Nabū (in Old Testament Nebo) is a contraction from Na-bi-u, which thus corresponds closely with the Hebrew nābhīa and originally signified the speaker or proclaimer of destiny. He was represented as the writer of the tablets of destiny, and was therefore regarded as the interpreter of oracles (see Zimmern, K. A. T.3 pp. 400, 404). Accordingly this derivation is preferable to that suggested by earlier Semitists from Gesenius to (in recent times) Kautzsch (“Religion of Israel,” Hastings's Dict. Bible, extra vol., p. 652 footnote), and Cheyne (Ency. Bibl. col. 3853), which connects it with another verbal root naba, “bubble ” or “gush.” This Davidson (“Prophecy and Prophets,” Hastings's Dict. Bible, p. 108 footnote) rightly rejects. While he connects it with the Arabic root naba’a, “come into prominence” (conj. II. “announce,”) he ends by ascribing to it an ultimate Babylonian origin. Zimmern (K. A. T.3 p. 590) gives the name of a priest-official munambū (lit. “howler”), which is derived from a Piel of nabū, viz. nubbū ( = numbū), “bawl” or “howl.” A brief sketch will be given (1) of the history of Hebrew prophecy (in supplement to what has been already said in the article Hebrew Religion or is to be found in the articles devoted to individual prophets), and (2) of prophecy in the early Christian Church.
1. The Prophets of the Old Testament.—The author of 1 Sam. ix. 9 tells us that “beforetime in Israel, when a man went to The Seer. inquire of God, thus he spake, Come and let us go to the seer; for he that is now called a prophet (nābhīa) was before time called a seer.” This remark is probably a later gloss. Samuel was a “seer” (ver. 11), or, as he is also called (ver. 6 seq.), a “man of God,” that is one who stood in closer relations to God than ordinary men; “all that he said was sure to come to pass,” so that he could be consulted with advantage even in private matters like the loss of the asses of Kish. The narrative of 1 Sam. ix. belongs, as Budde has demonstrated, to the older stratum of the narrative (called J) which includes ix., x. 1-16, xi. 1-11, 15, xiii., xiv. 1-16 in which Samuel is a priest-seer of a provincial town, without the high functions of government as Shŏphēt. We must not suppose that the word “prophet” had merely become more common in his time and supplanted an older synonym. This is clearly shown a few verses farther down, where we see that there were already in Samuel's time people known as nebhīīm, but that they were not seers. The seer (rōeh) appears individually, and his function was probably not so much one of speech as of the routine of close observation of the entrails of slaughtered victims, like the Assyrian barū (see Priest). It is in this way that the function of the seer is closely connected (as in the case of Balaam) with sacrifices. With the prophets it is quite otherwise; they appear not individually but in bands; their prophesying is a united exercise accompanied by music, and seemingly dance-music; it is marked by strong excitement, which sometimes acts contagiously, and may be so powerful that he who is seized by it is unable to stand,[2] and, though this condition is regarded as produced by a divine afflatus, it is matter of ironical comment when a prominent man like Saul is found to be thus affected. Samuel in his later days appears presiding over the exercises of a group of nebhīīm at Ramah, where they seem to have had a sort of coenobium (Naioth), but he was not himself a nābhīa—that name is never applied to him except in 1 Sam. iii. 21, where it is plainly used in the later sense for the idea which in Samuel's own time was expressed by “seer.”
But again this special type of nebhīīm seems to have been a new thing in Israel in the days of Samuel. Seers there had The Dervish. been of old as in other primitive nations; of the two Hebrew words literally corresponding to our seer, rōeh and hōzeh, the second is found also in Arabic, and seems to belong to the primitive Semitic vocabulary.[3] But the enthusiastic bands of prophets are nowhere mentioned before the time of Samuel; and in the whole previous history the word prophet occurs very rarely, never in the very oldest narratives, and always in that sense which we know to be later than the age of Samuel, so that the use of the term is due to writers of the age of the kings, who spoke of ancient things in the language of their own day. The appearance of the nebhīīm in the time of Samuel was, it would seem, as is explained in the article Hebrew Religion, one manifestation of the deep pulse of suppressed indignant patriotism which began to beat in the hearts of the nation in the age of Philistine oppression, and this fact explains the influence of the movement on Saul and the interest taken in it by Samuel.
It was perhaps only in time of war, when Israel felt himself to be fighting the battles of Yahweh, that the Hebrew was stirred to the depths of his nature by emotions of a religious colour. Thus the deeper feelings of religion were embodied in warlike patriotism, and these feelings the Philistine oppression had raised to extreme tension among all who loved liberty, while yet the want of a captain to lead forth the armies of Yahweh against his foemen deprived them of their natural outlet.
In its external features the new phenomenon was exceedingly like what is still seen in the East in every zikr of dervishes—the enthusiasm of the prophets expressed itself in no artificial form, but in a way natural to the Oriental temperament. Processions with pipe and hand-drum, such as that described in 1 Sam. x., were indeed a customary part of ordinary religious feasts; but there they were an outlet for natural merriment, here they have changed their character to express an emotion more sombre and more intense, by which the prophets, and often mere chance spectators too, were so overpowered that they
- ↑ According to Plato (Timaeus, p. 72) the name προφήτης ought properly to be confined to the interpreters employed to put an intelligible sense on the dreams, visions, or enigmatic utterances of the frenzied μάντις. But in ordinary Greek usage the prophet of any god is in general any human instrument through whom the god declares himself; and the tendency was “to reserve the name for unconscious interpreters of the divine thought, and for the ministers of the oracles in general” (Bouché-Leclercq, Hist. de la divination, 1880, ii. 11). This probably facilitated the adoption of the term by the Hellenists of Alexandria, for, when Philo distinguishes the prophet from the spurious diviner by saying that the latter applies his own inferences to omens and the like while the true prophet, rapt in ecstasy, speaks nothing of his own, but simply repeats what is given to him by a revelation in which his reason has no part (ed. Mangey, ii. 321 seq., 343; cf. i. 510 seq.), he follows the prevalent notion of the later Jews, at least in so far as he makes the function of the prophet that of purely mechanical reproduction; cf. John xi. 51, and the whole view of revelation presupposed in the Apocalyptic literature. But in any case the Greek language hardly offered another word for an organ of revelation so colourless as προφήτης, while the condition of etymology among the ancients made it possible to interpret it as having a special reference to prediction (so Eusebius, Dem. Ev. v., deriving it from προφαίνω).
- ↑ 1 Sam. x. 5 seq., xix. 20 seq. In the latter passage read “they saw the fervour of the prophets as they prophesied, &c.” (see Hoffmann in Stade's Zeitschr. 1883, p. 89), after the Syriac.
- ↑ Hoffmann, ut supra, p. 92 seq. Rōeh, however, occurs very rarely in early, i.e. pre-exilian, Hebrew, viz. in 1 Sam. ix. 9, Isa. xxx. 10. We have several in the late literature of Chronicles. Accordingly we lack the materials for determining the distinction which probably existed between the rōeh, the ḥōzeh and the ḳōsēm. Cheyne, art. “Prophetic Literature” in Ency. Bib., col. 3858, appears to identify them.
