Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1882 edition. Excerpt: ... (xviii. 15-19). "A prophet from the midst of thee, from thy brethren like myself, shall the Lord thy God raise up unto thee," etc. It is most singularly introduced in connection with a prohibition of magic, to which, in fact, it holds a subordinate position. Moses is the speaker. He assumes as something well understood, that this prophet had been already provided for at the giving of the law in Sinai, although we have no other record of such a provision. He declares that when he comes he will be the mouth-piece of Jehovah to Israel, and that whoever refuses to hear him, it will be required of him. Nowhere is the personality of the great mediator of the Sinaitic covenant more distinctly impressed on an utterance of the Pentateuch. Now, let it be supposed that it was not he. Let us look for a moment at the hypothesis, that it is some unknown prophet or priest of many centuries later who is speaking here, as if he were Moses. What must have been the man's temerity to press his impersonation to the extent that he not only makes the suppositious law-giver say that the coming prophet will be like himself, but refer to an event in his own and their past history, concerning which the Pentateuch is silent, and the people of that later day were probably ignorant? How strange the working of his mind, especially if he were himself a prophet, that he should introduce in so dubious a connection, i.e., as subordinate to a law on magic, the matter of Hebrew prophecy, and the culmination of it too, an institution surpassed by no other in its grandeur and importance. It is not to be supposed that critics who reject the Mosaic authorship of these laws will, with Delitzsch and others, see in the present one a direct, not to say exclusive, prophetic...
