THE PROPHETS

The Hebrew prophets, as Mr. Kraeling points out, Were considerably more than crystalgazers. They were controversial figures, thorns in the sides of their kings and their contemporaries, social reformers, and, in a special sense, embodiments of the aspirations of their time and their people. They were also men who lived and died in a process of historical continuity which, if they had never existed, would have been indescribably different from what it has been and is. The Prophets makes all these points clearly, interestingly, and precisely, by a series of brief but comprehensive sketches of each of them -- Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the so-called Deutero-Isaiah, and the Prophets of the Return (Haggai, Zechariah, ere). The author, for each figure, combines biographical information with-historical background and exegesis into a happily readable blend which Biblical students, both lay and clerical, as well as many general readers, will find edifying and and entertaining.