A PROPHET IS A MOVING TARGET.
A PROPHET IS A MOVING TARGET.
Prophets and Prophecy are a moving target in the Bible. This simply means that what we mean by prophet and prophecy shifts over time. Since the Bible is a composite text, that is, it draws together different sources from different authors in discrete times and political settings, many terms and concepts change over time. The term ,נבא navi, refers to the practitioner of divining through prophecy in the Bible. We saw in the blog post “Prophets and Prophecy 01” that prophecy is understandable as a form of ancient Near Eastern divination. Well, how one divined, or decoded the secret messages from the gods slowly evolved over time in antiquity. There are roughly three stages of what we mean by prophet and prophecy in the Bible. They are not fixed, they overlap, and sometimes we have both cases going on at once. But in general, we have what I like to call the lone ranger prophet, the institutional guild prophet, and then literary prophecy.
THE LONE RANGER PROPHET.
The earliest layer of prophet stories emphasize charisma; Moses, Joshua, the Judges, and Kings like Saul, have the same charismatic “spirit of YHWH” that later marks נבים alone. are all political rulers in some capacity who display the charismatic רוח יהוה “spirit of Yahweh” which later marks prophets alone. The primary function of the earliest prophets seems to be mediation of the divine will with respect to holy war, including at times, leading the charge into battle.
The best mature development of the loner prophet is the Elijah and Elisha cycles. They work alone, perform miracles that leave poser prophets stunned, and most importantly speak truth to immense power, like King Ahab for instance. Nathan, Micaiah, and other lone ranger prophets in the Hebrew Bible are cut from this cloth. These Deuteronomist portrayals carry the weight of the Axial Age where a great human moral internalizing in China, India, the near East and Greece finds its voice in the prophets…if you’re down to clown. :D This internal moralizing of humanity guides prophetic critiques of political rulers for justice and social responsibility. Lone ranger prophets ride into town, walk straight into the throne room, and say the absolute last thing the king wants to hear.
Lone ranger prophets are solitary, wander from village to village, and are the most comfortable with traditional divining and honestly, magic. Magic is one of the phenomena which emerges consistently in lone ranger prophet types. The stories of Elijah and Elisha, for example, are shot through with larger ancient culture of magic. Scholars are not always sure what to make of the varied vocabulary for types of magic. For instance, in Deuteronomy 18:10 we are confronted with a list of about nine or ten terms in the Bible which denote different kinds of magic specialists. What we do know is that magic specialists were ubiquitous in the ancient world and they were paid for their services. Many texts surrounding the discussion of prophets and prophecy has a larger context of magic. We might say lone ranger prophets wheel and deal in wonder working miracles and bending, natural world, and finding divine messages in what should be otherwise mundane.
The dependency upon magic specialists stems from an entire belief systems of deities, divine monsters, and spirits which know significant information about human fate, future events, and the like. So we have rope casters, snake handlers, witch consultants, just to name a few good ones, and these specialists were used to find out information which matters to people. Lone ranger prophets are situated both inside and outside of the magic culture. They are inside in that prophets are involved with the larger conceptualization of divine beings and magic. And they are outside in that they are on their own plane in the Bible. While a prophet may be able to perform these kinds of magic, their calling card seems to be some kind of direct line to God. God speaks to, envisions, visits them in some way and gives them information which matters and instructions on how and when to deliver the message.
THE GUILD PROPHET.
Prophecy secondarily evolves into a separate profession which functions alongside monarchic authority. We might say the monarchy absorbs the business of prophecy, specifically prophecy is extremely destabilizing to political institutions. Think about it, if the King on earth under the auspices of the king of Heaven says one thing, and the prophet of God says another…who do you believe? Whose advice do you go with. And the thing behind the whole thing… who is more powerful, the king or the man of God? For this reason, kings start to hire them. Kings began to employ prophets— tons of them.
This is the case in layer of biblical prophetic stories found in I Samuel through II Kings where rulers of cities and the King employ guild prophets. A guild is a professional group, like metal workers, or scribes, or…prophets. And so we have a pretty tight job description for the kinds of prophets that start working for the monarchs. This is the case throughout the Near East, where ancient kings began to absorb diviners and employ them for their political ambitions. As we might guess, the goal of a prophet for the king was to be…for the king. Guild prophets were most often sycophants who told kings what they wished to hear. This is the case whereby King Ahab and Jezebel employ hundreds of Baal prophets and a few less for Asherah. Guild prophets are portrayed in the Bible as distinct from and often in tension with itinerant wilderness, or lone ranger, prophets found in the northern Elijah and Elisha cycles.
A positive example of a institutionalized guild prophet would be the narrative character of Isaiah, working for king Hezekiah. This is a positive example of the guild prophet. Isaiah and Hezekiah have a healthy working relationship whereby the king consults the prophet to understand the will of Yahweh. The prophet faithfully receives and decodes the message for Hezekiah. While the artifacts are still being authenticated, Eilit Mazar found this very year the royal bullae seals of Isaiah the prophet and Hezekiah the king less than three feet apart in a Jerusalem excavation. These seals not only legitimize Hezekiah and Isaiah as verifiable people, they corroborate institutionalized guild prophecy, whereby a prophet works for hire in a kingly court. We have lots of ancient Near Eastern textual evidence for this, but this is archaeological evidence targeted specifically at the biblical tradition.
THE WRITING PROPHET.
The critique of political power towards achieving justice and an idealized egalitarian society continues into this third and final evolutionary stage of ancient Israelite prophecy. The final stage is prophetic writing; a metamorphosis into a scribal genre of writing by priestly literati. Prophetic writing is exemplified best by the high brow writing in much of the Book of the Twelve and the writing prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. Writing prophecy is an art, a cadre of sages to belong to, an insider discussion, and in some respects, the game of imbuing former texts with new meaning. Prophetic literature is high register of poetry composed for a close eye and a careful ear. Texts like the Book of the Twelve seem to be written for sound as much as for sight, making lexical choices at times to accomplish consonant and vowel repetition.
The writing prophets adhere to genre constraints and draw upon an established repertoire of imagery. Scribal production and reading was the pastime and profession of the scribal class so that later prophecy is poetry composed for a close eye and a careful ear. By generalizing prophetic utterances, only keeping the basic setting of “the late northern Israelite period or its counterpart in Hezekianic Judah or the late Judahite monarchic period,” prophetic literary works become a template for reinterpretation and re-contextualization for centuries to come.
The very nature of prophetic literature evades precise dating and historical contextualization— scribes are stripping the literature of specifics on purpose. Prophetic writing is intended to be read and reread, appreciated and appropriated. For example, In the case of Habakkuk 1, the scribe uses a portion of poetry about the specific events of Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign and siege of Jerusalem around 586 B.C.E., but he makes use of the material in such a way that readers can apply the finished text to a myriad of similar circumstances. In this way, prophetic literature moves from specific to general over time and often particulars are a mirage in terms of the text’s historical context being recovered.
It is not possible to know when much of the prophetic materials were composed and how they were transmitted in similar prophetic literature prior to being used by the particular scribe who penned the specific scroll. What we can demonstrate within literary prophecy texts is that they adhere to genre constraints, that they draw upon an established repertoire of imagery, and that their production and reading was the pastime and profession of the literati.
OKAY I’M GONNA HIT THE HYPERDRIVE BUTTON NOW TEXT AND ROCKERS…
We can observe a great deal of tension between cult specialists and institutionalized guilds in many discrete narratives about prophets, which gives us a larger picture of the socio-political aspects of Israelite religion. Some texts support “true prophets” over and against large guilds of prophets for hire. In 1 Kings 18:20-46, Elijah is depicted as a vehicle for bringing Israel back to their true allegiance to God, while the 400 Baal prophets are antagonists who act collectively for a false god and have no underlying power or authority.
In similar support of the lone ranger prophet, 2 Kings 2 demonstrates in artful prose the transition from one true prophet to the next (Elijah to Elisha). At the same time, as Elijah and his protege travel to three different towns they meet three different guilds of prophets, one for each town. These prophets seem to have much less power. They have some notion that God is going to take up Elijah, but besides that fact, they seem to be waiting to see who the next “super-prophet” of God will be. In this latter text, then, we have guilds and then highly powered itinerant prophets who are above and beyond the local guilds.
And there are a handful of stories where the prophet confronts a problem, does a miracle, and everything comes out well. In the beginning of 2 Kings 4:1-7, Elisha helps the wife of a prophetic guild member with a miracle of continuous oil in order to sell it and pay off her debts. Her problem is solved, and the prophet is working to help the family member of the religious guild. We are all on the same team in this story.
On the other hand, individual specialists with independent revelations are extremely destabilizing to institutions of religious guilds. And so we are not surprised to see several stories which are subtly skeptical about peripatetic prophets who answer only to God. For instance, 2 Kings 4:8-37 is contiguous with the 4:1-7 narrative we just considered, and yet here the prophet is not infallible and his knowledge is only partial to the detriment of a second woman in need. After repaying a religious patron with the miraculous birth of a child, the child dies and the prophet saves the boy’s life by the skin of his teeth after a few attempts.
Still other texts, like 1 Kings 13, are less subtle. Here we have two legitimate prophets, with true revelations from God, and yet both prophets are completely unreliable. One authentic prophet botches up God’s instruction while the other acts deceptively for little apparent reason. What is accomplished by narratives such as these, is a concession that prophecy and magic is possible (adhering to cultural values and belief) while at the same time undermining the trustworthiness of the prophet.
A final example of calling prophecy into question within stories about prophecy is found in two texts which share several motival elements, Isaiah 6 and 1 Kings 22. In both texts we find a type scene where a prophet is called into the court or throne room of God (the location is vague), and God says he will place deception within in the prophets so that humans will respond with unintentional disobedience causing divine punishment. Here we find no question as to whether prophets exist or receive messages from God for human agents, but rather, the reader must ask whether or not a prophet can be trusted by virtue of God’s motives. Tricky huh?
MOSES STRIKES THE RIGHT BALANCE…AND OCCASIONALLY A ROCK. GET IT?
The full weight of the discussion surrounding the definition and reliability of prophets surrounds the character of Moses. In Moses, we find the paradigmatic prophet of the literary guilds. He does not act charismatically and he is largely demythologized compared to the Elijah and Elisha cycles. While he works stock miracles, Moses dominantly operates a a civil servant between God and the people, and even negotiates with God in times where the people are being too burdensome. Moses, on the whole, is palatable because he simply serves the people under God. He does not come up with new visions or revelations which change the trajectory of God’s will. This is because the literary scribes get to tell his story.
There is also the undertone in a handful of Moses passages that there is nothing particularly special about prophets as individuals. These are statements against what Boyer calls individual cult specialists, where the person is believed to possess some internal or inherent skill or ability in order to carry out supernatural mediation. Moses’ character is the opposite. For instance, in Numbers 11 we enter a complaint scene motif where Moses asks to share the burden of leadership. In the text God permits that his spirit be placed upon seventy elders who will help Moses in his commission. At the climax of the narrative Moses remarks that it would be great if God’s spirit would spread to everyone so that everyone could be a prophet! This calls into question the idea that the prophet contains some quality or gift for prophecy. The subtextual statement of Numbers 11 is that anyone is capable of being a prophet. Even you. Yes you, Karen.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE COWBOYS GONE?
In ancient Israelite religion, the primary reason for the end of charismatic prophets and the slow transfer to literary art is the reality of the exile. When the northern and southern kingdoms were brought under foreign rule, Israelite prophets no longer had the ear of the monarch. Confrontation necessarily ceased, and only the stories lived on over time. Prophecy writing is a step away from directly expressing the tension between diviner and monarchic power and, as we discussed, it is open to continual interpretation. Prophetic literature is a distinct phenomenon, and becomes a scribal guild craft in Israel. But this is what replaces prophecy.
For a comparative example, ancient Greece witnessed a similar shift in its seers. Seers also made a transition towards formulaic oral performance which was much less threatening to political power. But the larger decline of the seer came from the advent of the famed democracy of Greece. National decisions were not made less and less through diviners, but through political process. Divination through oracles became an enterprise for individual consultation at designated sacred places (i.e. Delphi).
TAKEAWAYS FOR MODERNS.
THE PROPHETS HAVE A CLEAR CONTEXT. It is important to situate prophets and prophecy in the ancient and social world from which they functioned. Prophetic stories or narratives make the most sense when we understand the necessary tension between kings and diviners. Magic and politics do not mix, and when they do, we get politics. Think on that one my friends.
UNDERSTAND PROPHETIC GENRE. We can interpret prophetic literature best when we understand its genre, the art of interpretation, and the scribe at play with artful writing and re-writing. Using a study Bible with cross-references will allow you to see how different one liners, tropes, or key phrases are picked up and used by different writing prophets. For instance, the concept of the day of the Lord is all over the place, or the idea of God allowing foreign superpowers to use a dragnet to capture his own rebellions people like fish, is a stock image. There is a cache of imagery and ideas that these writers all know and employ. Just as stock stories get picked up and used by different authors, like striking a rock for water, different poetic imagery gets used across time and author.
STAGES OF PROPHECY ARE KEYS FOR MEANING. We can also understand passages better when we ask what stage or stages of prophecy we are dealing with. A great starting point is simply to ask whether we have a lone ranger prophet or one who is working for the king. The follow up question is the most important one— am I reading an author who is pro-prophet or prophet-skeptical. The Bible is complex and stories about prophets float between these two points. A careful reader sees and gains the most. Fist bump.
HAVE FUN WITH STORIES ABOUT PROPHETS. They are highly meaningful and theologically dense at times. The authors are trying to tell us many things about God, what it is to be human, and how we might understand what God desires for his people Israel in specific situations. But these stories are also great literature. They are sometimes meant to be funny. Sometimes they are meant to push on what you might expect and come in the side door. So enjoy the prophets of Israel.