Remark. In this insistance upon the kernel of the law the prophets are agreed. Duhm in his Theologie der Propheten, Bonn 1875, does not recognize this unity, since be assigns to the prophets different degrees of freedom and legality. In his opinion the spiritually free and moral tendency rises until Jeremiah and Deutero-Isaiah, the legally external finds its depth in Ezekiel and Malachi, where even the air of Judaism and the Talmud is perceptible. The fundamental error of Duhm consists in his laying such emphasis on religion as an inner life, that he regards all external forms which are necessary for its expression as a deterioration into formalism. But religion and sacred rites are indissolubly correlated. Even the religion of the individual cannot dispense with forms, for instance prayer when it leaves the sphere of secret and merely internal meditation. Much less can the religion of a community be maintained without such forms. It is not without sacred rites in any nation either in the Old Testament or the New, either in this world or the next. The legal forms in which the Tora comprehends the religion of Israel were indeed burdensome fetters, but yet they were wise means of education, and, as the history shows, were not incompatible with a true, profoundly hearty, and free religious spirit.
§ 9.
The Prophets as the Conscience of the State.
The prophets have rightly been called the conscience of the Israelitish state; for as the conscience in man is related to the law written in his heart (Rom. II, 15) so prophecy in Israel is related to the Sinaitic Tora kept by the priests. It is like the conscience a knowledge, which continually attests itself in the form of impulse, of judgment, and of feeling, a knowledge namely about that which God, who has revealed himself in history, wills or does not will. Its proper prophetic character follows from its admonitory and denunciatory nature.
Remark. It appears from passages like Hos. IV, 6; VIII, 1; Amos II, 4 and also Is. I, 11—14, where an existing code concerning festivals and offerings is presupposed, that a codex of the Mosaic laws was already in existence in the time of the prophets of the eighth century. With the latter passage we may compare Hos. VIII, 12, which should be translated: "Were I to write for him myriads of my law, they would be regarded as strange", that is a still more extensive Tora would have had the same fate as the existing one. Smend in his dissertation in the Studien und Kritiken, Gotha 1876, p. 599 etc. (Ueber die von den Propheten des 8. Jahrhunderts vorausgesetzte Entwickelungsstufe der israelitischen Religion), actually translates the passage: "I wrote for him myriads of my law". These words of Hosea certainly indicate, as even Schrader acknowledges, the existence of a divinely obligatory law in the form of a codex, not to mention such testimonies in the psalms as we find in Ps. XIX, which is by David, and in Ps. LXI, 6 and LXXVIII, 5 by Asaph.
