felt to be linked to the original named prophet. The weakness in the idea of a prophetic school is its extremely hypothetical character. Apart from the one verse in Isaiah already mentioned (8:16), the prophets never refer to their ‘disciples’. Furthermore, it is difficult to imagine what kind of social reality ‘schools’ of the disciples of the prophets could have had in Israel and Judah. How and where might their members have lived? Were they in effect ‘prophets’ themselves, or ‘laymen’? Did they