question to that already…)?
1) More pointedly: what is a prophet? “one who speaks in the name
of, or at the behest of, God, to exhort, warn, or occasionally to provide
hope in time of trouble” (AB 433)
2) Hence, prophetic literature is literature written by or about
prophets, in which the prophets seeks to convey on the behest or in the
name of God.
3) The messages were usually directed to the people of Israel, but
not always—see the book of Jonah.
4) Many times the speech of the prophet—“thus says the Lord”—is
understood to quite literally be the words of God, spoken through the
individual prophet
5) Sometimes the writings are about prophets (the stories about
Elijah and Elisha that we read earlier during the Narrative portion of this
study, or Baruch, Jeremiahs personal secretary and biographer) and
sometimes the prophet himself writes the literature, such as in the case
of Ezekiel (with a third-party sounding prologue).
6) There were prophets in other surrounding religions, but one of
the unique characteristics of Israel’s prophets is that their literary
production—they got it down on paper!
7) The word prophets come from a Greek word that means,
primarily, “to foresee.” Though the prophets often did foretell the future,
this title is misleading because the prophets did a lot more than tell the
people of Israel what was going to happen to them in the future. They
were not in business of providing of horoscopes for the people of Judah
and Israel.
8) 4 titles for prophets exists for Israel’s prophets
a. seer—earliest title and eventually became subsumed under title
of “prophet” (1 Sam. 9.9); one receives and reports visions
b. diviner—associated with the prophet Samuel, able to
communicate with the world of the sacred in order to discover information
that will be useful to those who consult with him (1Sam. 9)
c. man of God—especially prominent in the stories of Elijah and
Elisha in 2 Kings; these people posses the power of the holy and are
dangerous and powerful, and due respect
d. prophet—most common title; someone called to a certain task
9) All these different types of prophets share one common
characteristic—they are intermediaries between human and divine
worlds (Petersen 5). They are boundary figures, with feet in both worlds,
bridging the gap between the worlds.
10) Prophets usually experience a calling to the profession, and
they are often divine intermediaries against their own personal wishes.
Read the following call stories: Jeremiah 1:1-10 & Ezekiel 3:4-15.
11) A key phrase: “the word of the Lord came to________”
When Did The Prophets Do Their Stuff?
1) Interestingly, prophets have not always been around in the
history of Israel
2) Remember Job and God’s last direct words to the people of
Israel? The prophets begin to be the spokesperson for God starting at
the time when Israel chooses to have a human king rather than a divine
king. Prophets begin to appear during the time Israel adopted
statehood. The work of the prophets seemed to have generally ceased
soon after Judah (Israel fell earlier)—around1000-400 BCE
3) Usually, the prophets are divide into two categories, based on the
amount of written material they left behind: The Major Prophets (Isaiah,
Jeremiah, & Ezekiel) and The Minor Prophets (the rest)
4) For our purposes, we’re going to divide them into the Pre-Exile
Prophets and Post-Exile Prophets. The Exile: the deportation of Judah’s
best and brightest to the city of Babylon after the conquest of Jerusalem
in 597 & 587 BCE.
5) The Pre-Exile Prophets:
Prophet Date/Place
Amos 760-750: Israel under Jeroboam II
Hosea 745; Israel under Jeroboam II
Isaiah 742-701; Judah under Uzziah, Jothan, Ahaz, & Hezekiah
Micah 750; Judah under Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah
Nahum 625-610; Judah under Josiah
Zephaniah c. 621; Judah under Josiah
Habakkuk 615-598; Judah?
Jeremiah 627-587; Judah to fall of Jerusalem
6) The pre-exile prophets were concerned with the corrupt and
unfaithful practices of Israel and Judah (mostly Judah—Southern
Kingdom—because the kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 722 BCE).
Read Lamentations 5
7) The Post-Exile Prophets:
Prophet Date/Place
Ezekiel c.597-563; Babylonian Exile
Haggai c.520: Jerusalem in post-Exilic period
Zechariah c.520-518; Jerusalem in post-Exilic period
Malachi c.460-450; Jerusalem after Temple in Jerusalem is
rebuilt
Obadiah c.460-400
Joel c.350
Jonah Lived in c.750; book written in c.350
Daniel Events take place during Exile, but written c.165-164
8) The prophets of the Post-Exile period focused on more hopeful
themes for the people of Israel, a future where God would rule the world
justly, sometimes hinting at a Messiah who would bring about this
restoration of Israel’s former glory.
9) An interesting feature of the later prophets is how the hand of
God moves beyond the people of Israel and God’s work becomes more
“international”—see Jonah and Nineveh and Obadiah
What Did the Prophet’s Actually Do—And What Is The Pay Like?
1) They spoke against the unfaithfulness of the people of Israel:
Hosea 3
2) They spoke words of warning and judgment to the people: Nahum
3:1-6
3) They spoke words of warning to other nations: Obadiah 8-14,
Jonah
4) They had visions of God—Ezekiel 1:4-14,God’s throne room
5) They were sometimes persecuted: Jeremiah 26
The Problem With Isaiah…Or Is It?
1) Traditionally, this book was understood as one book written by
one author, written sometime between 740-732 BCE
2) Most recent scholarship states that the book is actually the work
of at least three different authors and that editors continued to shape the
materials and writers continued to write in Isaiah’s name, speaking to
their own specific historical situation
a. Chapters 1-4—4th century BCE—the people are back in
Jerusalem after Babylonian Exile
b. Chapter 5-12—from 740-732 BCE, oldest part of the book where
warnings about the coming Assyrians abound
c. Chapters 13-27—The threat of Assyria invading Judah until about
538 BCE, when Babylon falls to Assyria, written over 200 years
d. Chapter 28-39—dealing with the situation of Hezekiah’s revolt
against Assyrians in 705-701 BCE
e. Chapters 40-55—written a decade before the fall of Babylon in
538 BCE
f. Chapters 56-66—probably written after Jews return back from
Babylonian Exile
3) Some conservative scholars over the years have rejected this
because it seems to attack the unity of the book, and the historical
existence of one Isaiah who wrote the whole book)
