Note 175 — Chapter VII · THE ECSTATIC DANCE

In speaking of the exercises of the early prophetical bands Robertson Smith says that “they were sometimes gone through in sacred processions, sometimes at a fixed place, as at the Naioth at Ramah, which ought probably to be rendered ‘dwellings’—a sort of coenobium. They were accompanied by music of a somewhat noisy character, in which the hand-drum and the pipe played a part, as was otherwise the case in festal processions to the sanctuary (2 Sam. vi. 5; Isa. xxx. 29). Thus the religious exercises of the prophets seem to be a development in a peculiar direction of the ordinary forms of Hebrew worship at the time, and the fact that the ‘prophesying’ was contagious establishes its analogy to other contagious forms of religious excitement” (The Prophets of Israel, p. 392 [1897]). See further, Gressmann, Palestinas Erdgeruch in der Israelitischen Religion, pp. 34 ff. (1909).