The Book of Coicsis
4
through purely
man
that
should
human processes. Surely God has willed know more and ever more of Him and His
way; the knowledge which these prophets, as sons of Israel, God must have allowed, and even caused, them to discover, as He allowed and caused no men and no people Aye, this knowledge surely could not iiave before them. been only discovered by these prophets equally it must have been revealed to them by God. This is Revelation.
proclaimed,
Actually, however, Revelation
is
hardly a third source of
knowledge of God, but merely the same two sources viewed from the reverse side, in their divine, rather than in their human, aspect. It says not only that the Jew's knowledge of God came through the religious experiences and discoveries of individuals, particularly certain jjeculiarly fitted individuals, and through the religious experiences and discoveries of the entire people in all the stages and through the
all
Jew's
the fortunes of
that this fore,
its
history, but also that
knowledge come
really afTtirms
in this
manner.
God
has willed
Revelation, there-
only that the tw^o sources of the Jew's
knowledge of God have a divine, as well as a human, origin and cause. But in this sense Revelation means far more than as it is usually interpreted. True Revelation in Israel was through more than the prophets alone or rather, they were merely the agents or mouthpieces of Revelation, and Revelation itself was greater and grander far than just these prophets themselves and their inspired words. The prophets were primarily the children of their own times, spurred to activity not only by the conviction that God had literally called them, but also by the realization of the moral and spiritual evils and needs of their own days. They, above all others, saw God's hand constantly present in Israel's history, and read His divine purpose and guidance in all the events thereof. They realized that God was revealing His will, not only through them to Israel, but also, and to a far
