years after the death of David, and then not in prophetic allusion to the Messiah, but in honor of Simon the Maccabee. The fifty-first psalm, so universally attributed to the penitent David, was, says Robertson Smith, "obviously composed during the destruction of the temple"—most critics think it much later. The first book or collection of psalms (containing the so-called Davidic) seems to have been made in the days of Nehemiah and Ezra; the second and third (containing the Korahites and Asaphites) are much later, as a collection. The fourth and fifth books run down to the Maccabean period, to which many of them (44, 74, 79, 83, etc.) belong.
One of the most important sections—perhaps the most important section—of the Old Testament, in the eyes of the Christian world, has been the collection of prophetical books. The existence of definite prophecies has always been relied upon as one of the most cogent demonstrations of the divinity of Christ, and it was thought that nothing could be clearer than the Messianic predictions of the four major and twelve minor prophets. The notion of prediction has been always regarded as the essential characteristic of the prophet, and it was held that the Messianic revelation, which began vaguely in Genesis, reached an unmistakeable degree of clearness and definition in Isaiah and Daniel. At the present day, however, the orthodox notion of a prophet has undergone a complete metamorphosis. "The predictive element," says Robertson Smith, "received undue prominence, and withdrew attention from the influence of the prophets on the religious life of their time." We are told that they were the "leaders of a great development," that their principal concern was with the present, not with the future; and hence that "there is no reason to think that a prophet ever received a revelation which was not spoken directly and pointedly to his own time." The truth is, of course, that the higher criticism has completely revolutionized the traditional conception of the prophets, and theologians are adapting their tenets to the irresistible conclusions of the critics. All competent orthodox critics now admit that each of the so-called Messianic predictions finds a sufficient explanation in the political circumstances of the period at which it was written. They leave a margin, of course, for their Christian readers to indulge in thoughts
