Around the seer there gathered bands of disciples, closely resembling the dervishes of to-day. They, too, received a part of the prophetic spirit, and at times, under the influence of strong emotions, passed, as it were, out of the body into an ecstatic state. Like the modern dervishes, however, they were completely under the control of the seer. At a word from him their ecstasy would cease, and they would once more become ordinary citizens of the world. But the spirit that moved in them was easily communicated to religious or excitable natures. The messengers sent by Saul to arrest David at Ramah were themselves arrested by the spirit of prophecy which permeated the home of Samuel, and when Saul himself followed in his wrath, he, too, was suddenly overcome by the same divine influence. ‘The spirit of God was upon him also; and he went on and prophesied, until he came to Naioth (the convent) in Ramah. And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that night.’ But this ecstatic excitement was not of the essence of Hebrew prophecy, and the latter soon divested itself of it. The dervish element, indeed, remained almost to the last; Elijah is a proof of it, and even Hosea and Isaiah still recur at times to symbolic action. But it became subordinate and purely symbolical, while the seer himself became a prophet. The conception that gathered round him was no longer that of a seer of visions, a revealer of the future, but of an interpreter of the will of God to man. Prediction there might be in his prophecies; but it was accidental only, and dependent on conditions which were clearly expressed. If the people repented of their sins, God’s anger would be turned away from them; if, on the contrary, they persisted in their evil ways, disaster and destruction would fall upon them. The message of Yahveh was conditional; it did not contain the revelation of an inevitable future.