Judaism
The Prophets 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, June 12, 2001
It is indeed characteristic of apocalyptic… to put an account of past history into the mouth of a pseudonymous author in the guise of prediction.J P M Sweet
Pseudepigraphs
Biblicists always have trouble in seeing through the internal chronology of the bible. They know full well that the Jews were particularly fond of writing pseudepigraphs, works that pretend to be by an authoritative writer. There is a whole faculty of biblicism devoted to studying pseudepigraphs, but too many biblical experts refuse to accept that the bible itself is full of them. They will accept the odd book, such as Daniel as being a pseudepigraph because it is so obvious it cannot be denied, but they will persist that other books of the prophets are all historical works, contemporary with the events they describe! The prophets are known entirely from the bible. They are not historical figures. Christian commentators will give convincing sounding lives and times of the prophets but they are paraphrases of the bible tied in with contemporary history also from the bible or from the supposed time of the events.
In a world that was happily polytheistic, biblicists believe it is credible that strange men should stand up and decry all the deities that people knew and loved, and mainly escape with their lives. Not only that, but their obviously unpalatable message that there was only one god—the prophets carried on with their ranting for several hundred years (c 800-c 500 BC) with no apparent effect—nevertheless, and inconsistently, was recorded in a time and place where writing was expensive and unusual so that it is now still readable in God’s Holy word. A miracle!
The core of the prophetic messages was in three parts—a rebuke, a call for repentance, and a threat. It was the threats that were supposedly prophetic, being the threat of conquest or exile—threats that were, remarkably enough, realised! They were realised, obviously enough, because the prophetic books were written after the events threatened had already occurred. They were written after the colonisation of Judah by the Persian colonists.
The Hebrew word for prophets is “nebiim”, singular, “nabi”, as plain as the nose on your face, a word derived from the name “Nabu” (Nebo, in the bible) of a Babylonian god—the one considered, like Mercury, to have been the messenger of the gods. A “nabi” in the Jewish scriptures is a man who brings a message from God. The message from God in the scriptures was the rebuke against idolatry—supposedly at a time when all religion consisted of worshipping idols or symbols—or apostasy, and the promised threat of retribution if the backsliding did not cease. To anyone rational, the nature of the rebuke and the realisation of prophesied threat ought to be proof enough that the books were not accounts of contemporary history, but were written when the rebuke meant something and the prophecy had already happened—after the “return” from Babylon.
The Persian religion was itself a singular religion in that it was the first to forbid representation of its transcendental God, Ahuramazda. The message of the prophets was the message of the Persian religion that could have meant nothing to the people of the Palestinian hills until Persians arrived to settle there after about 500 BC. The messages of the prophets also had a political function—the people of these tiny countries were warned not to support their powerful neighbours, Egypt and Babylonia, at a time when they were bound to be in the sphere of influence of one or the other. This additional message suited the Persian conquerors of these countries.
The significance of the prophets is immense in explaining the origins of Judaism. They were professional propagandists used by the Persians to predispose people towards their way of thinking, and it is known that Cyrus used such propagandists in preparing to attack a country. Propaganda was doubtless always their function. They were messengers all right but were messengers usually for the king or various parties acting in the country. They were the radio stations or news stands, or the equivalent of the medieval town cryer, but sponsored by different factions.
The majority of the prophets were not often revolutionaries. Prophets were the soap box orators of their time. They stood on market places or at cross roads haranguing the passing crowds with their assessment of the state of the nation. Mainly, they prophesied to suit the party in power. They, though, were hardly the ones to have left any impression. They supported the status quo at times when it was not in question. It was when the status quo was inept or corrupt, and the people suffered and were angry that the prophets were engaged by rival parties to the leaders, and even people from outside the country. Occasionally some will have been favouring foreign intervention. They were effectively agent provocateurs.
Prophets claimed to be speaking on behalf of God and they proclaimed ideas, defended them and fought for them like latter day politicians. In fact, they did not do this out of the love of God or from His instructions but, just as politicians do at election times—to influence the people. But ordinarily, their influence was less than that of the priests, who were servants of royalty at the chief sanctuaries, and attached to the established order.
To ordinary people, ritual seemed the essence of religion. Before the Persians, altars were everywhere, with sacred stones and trees—the latter either artificial (poles, Asheras) or natural (still growing)—beside them. Assistance in all occasions of life was what pre-Persian Judahites looked for from their gods, not “salvation”. The people served their gods, who, in turn, helped the people. The relation between the people and God was that of slave to lord. It did not depend on a legal covenant. A fertility religion’s chief seasons were the agricultural festivals—the passover, the feast of weeks, and the feast of the ingathering at the close of the year, and everyone was expected to attend. The mode of worship, as to place, time, matter, and form, was entirely Canaanite, as the prophet Hosea shows.
Christians, even clever ones, think that prophets could read the future. Many Christian scholars and commentators accept that they foresaw the fall of Jerusalem or Babylon or Tyre. Thus, they can tell us without a blush that Isaiah lived at the end of the eighth century and Daniel in the sixth century, even though they prophesied later events. It ought to be evident that Isaiah and Daniel either lived after their supposed prophecies occurred, or their prophecies, and probably they too, were projected into the past by later writers who knew what had happened.
The prophetic books are misplaced in our bibles, appearing at the back of the Old Testament, but they had been written when most other books including the Pentateuch were being written as is plain from prophetic references and allusions. Even within the books of prophets, they are not in their correct order. Except for the short works, the books of the prophets were obviously not written by a single author, despite absurd recent attempts by purblind Christian “scholars” to maintain the opposite, contrary to the obvious clues within the books themselves. The utterances of some prophets are broken and quite jumbled, whereas others are smooth and pretty complete. In Isaiah 15-16, the verses are jumbled, but in the main works of Isaiah they are smooth. They are collections of visions and utterances compiled and placed into an historical situation as a pseudepigraph.
Elijah and Elisha
Some prophets do not have their own books but appear in the “historical” section of the bible. Elijah and Elisha are the best known. They wrote nothing, but Amos a hundred years later in the biblical chronology was an author. Wellhausen thinks the only explanation is that Israel became literate in between. It could admit of the answer that these are later myths. Wellhausen judged that Elijah could not have been an invention, but he goes on to add that such a man as he was a prophecy of the future rather than an actual agent in shaping the present. And that is the point. He was invented for that purpose.
Really Elijah and Elisha are the two sides of the same coin. They appear in the Deuteronomic History as the prophets who oppose and defeat the worshippers of the Baals. Elijah, which means “My God is Yehouah”, stands for the struggle against the Canaanite gods, in which the prophet, as his name implies, is the determined assertion of the new god, Yehouah, defying the native religions. Elisha, which means “My God is Salvation”, is the prophet symbolising Yehouah’s victory over the Baals—Yehouah is asserted and the people saved by their allegiance to him. The Canaanite gods are in disarray, the objects only of apostasy. Again, the pair symbolize the El to Yehouah transition that occurred in the fifth century.
A Rofé has pointed out that the mini-fairy tales in the bible such as the miraculous deeds of Elijah and Elisha were originally simply folk tales and magical acts into which the name Yehouah was judiciously incorporated to turn them from magic to miracle. Similar stories are found in other traditions. In 2 Kings 8:1-6, a servant is telling wondrous tales like those about Elisha to the king. It is just like the Arabian Nights. In these ancient times devoid of TVs, DVDs and CDs, kings employed story tellers to keep them amused of an evening. They would have had a repertoire of stories about mythical heroes that they embellished in their own characteristic way. Some will have been meant to be edifying too, and some of the story tellers might have been considered as prophets, or at least “sons of prophets” when they told miraculous stories about the deeds of prophets.
One such story, the revival of the Shunammite woman’s son by Elisha (2 Kg 4:30-37) is essentially the same as Elijah’s revival of the Zeraphathite woman’s son (1 Kg 17:17-24), after the latter had been sustained by a magical cauldron tale in which a pitcher of meal and a jar of oil never emptied, though they were consumed (1 Kg 17:12-16). Stretching out over a sick person is a well-attested cure in Mesopotamia in these times.
The Jewish scriptures ought to be read in the awareness that they were written in the Persian (“post-exilic” age, as believers will have it) with the new conditions retrojected into history as a lesson to the people to be obedient. Their own history, as written by the Deuteronomic Historian, showed over and over again what happened when they did not. Then similarities can be found with the known structure of the later period and tested. Thus “sons of the prophets” begin to look like Hasidim or Essenes and their followers. They came together on prescribed occasions (2 Kg 4:23), and the prophets officiated (1 Sam 7:5-6; 9:12; 10:8; 13:10-11; 1 Kg 18:30-39). Zevit ( The Religions of Ancient Israel ) observes that the Essenes, according to Josephus, had a reputation as successful prophets, and had disciples. Elisha seems to have had communities at Carmel (2 Kg 4:25), Gilgal (2 Kg 4:38; 5:22; 6:1), and Dothan (2 Kg 6:13). Pharisee prophets seem to have plotted against Herod, Josephus tells us.
These and other prophets of the period behave in a manner situating them among the non-literary prophets of pre-exilic Israel.Z Zevit
The thesis could equally be that the biblical prophets are modelled on the prophets of post-Persian Hellenistic Judaea when the scriptures were worked into their present form. Moreover, they were similar in that they did not generally lead mass movements to institute the reforms they prophesied. They presented themselves as theoreticians not practical men. Essenes pretended to be docile pacifists but were preparing for a holy war. Many of the biblical prophets made booming pronouncements, but it was for others to respond to them. Prophets were a type of rabble rouser, calling the people to action. Of course, they did not always, or perhaps often, succeed. Like politicians they could get on a bandwagon, but often did not, and they remained unpopular and their messages rejected. Though they all claimed to speak for God, they could have contradictory messages through no fault of their own, or God’s. When a lying spirit entered them, an honest prophey could give a false oracle.
The prophets who were written into the prophetic books of the Jewish scriptures are supposed to have had singularly ethical messages, and believers think their concerns were social ones. Zevit points out that the number of passages in the whole prophetic corpus concerned with social affairs is small. Half the prophetic books address no particularly social concerns, and when they do, it is often railing against kings, authorities and the people, just as the Deuteronomic History is. The message is always that the people have let God down.
Amos
Amos means the “People’s Saviour”. The chronology of the Jewish scriptures put the prophet Amos in the time of king Jeroboam II. At Bethel, the greatest sanctuary in Israel, the prophet interrupted the joyous songs of the sacred banquet with the harsh note of the mourner’s wail. Amos of Tekoa, prophesying for Israel, curiously was a Judaean, a shepherd from the wilderness bordering on the Dead Sea.
The virgin of Israel is fallen, never more to rise, lies prostrate in her own land with no one to lift her up.
His message was doom and gloom, the imminent downfall of the kingdom rejoicing in the consciousness of power, and the deportation of the people to a far off northern land. He says the poor were suffering and oppressed, justice was defective, yet the times of Jeroboam II seem to have been reasonably prosperous. Amos was not bothered by that but by the Assyrians. A shepherd from the Dead Sea noticed what princes and their advisors, statesmen and diplomats failed to see. This is a romance written after the fact, and when these are found in ancient times, the scholars normally call them pseudepigraphs—false writings. Here in the Jewish scriptures they are never false writings but are always honest and remarkably accurate prophecies because they were sent by God.
As Wellhousen notes:
The common man was in no position truly to estimate the danger.
Amos was a common man, however uncommon a prophet he was made out to have been. The ruling classes saw no danger, but Amos did—the downfall of Israel was imminent. Moreover, it was not the Assyrian god, Ashur, who was engineering the disaster, it was Yehouah Himself! And at a time when Yehouah was no exclusive god to the Israelites. Yet, we are to believe that a nation’s own god would eliminate his own base—his own nation and country—and not only put himself out of work but also quite possibly end his existence! The whole point of tribal and national gods was to stand up for their people. Surely, it is as plain as the nose on your face that this has been written afterwards by the conqueror to scare the people into obedience to their God, a God who had sent a law to be obeyed! So far as we know the Assyrians had not done it, nor did they seem likely to have done, but the Persians were much like the Assyrians, and they could have done it! And what does Yehouah say to his people by way of explanation:
You only do I know, therefore do I visit upon you all your sins.
God is represented by the prophet as turning against His own people. It is the sort of behaviour that has impressed believers, but it is impossible behaviour for a god. Only an outsider could aver that a god would behave in this way! The people were acting wrongly and had to be punished. Only a critical observer could make such a judgement, and only a conquerer could impose it.
Amos calls Yehouah the God of Hosts—the God of Armies—not the God of Israel. Amos was the first new prophet. The Assyrians were the first imperialists, but they were soon followed by the Babylonians briefly, and then the Persians, whose own empire lasted only 200 years but left a permanent impression. They introduced the conception of the world, and refined the means of controlling a vast motley of different people. Petty nationalities were absorbed and their gods flung to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah 2:20).
Before any of this, the prophets of Israel alone are shown as anticipating the changes of history. They alone took on board the world in a universalism that destroyed the religions of the nations. They alone anticipated the outcome—everywhere the same goal, everywhere the same laws, everywhere the same God, the god of the world, Yehouah. Yehouah kills off his own people and is born again as the God of the Universe. The canonical prophets, beginning with Amos, were not patriotic, they prophesied not good but evil for their people (Jer 28:8). As God of righteousness, the law of the whole universe, Yehouah was God only in so far as right was recognised and followed. The new ethical element destroyed the national character of the old religion. The first step towards universalism had been taken. The prophets were the founders of “ethical monotheism”. But why? Then there was no reason for it, and especially in a minute country. The whole story is plainly not original history but later imperial mythologising.
Hosea
Hosea means “Salvation”. Hosea was set more against the cultus as Canaanite nature worship and idolatry than Amos was. Hosea accepted that Yehouah was the only true and helper god of the Canaanite kind, but Israel had to completely change to win Him and was not so doing. The aim of the prophet is to impose a change in the nature of worship. An overthrow of the state was needed for the transition. In Hosea’s prophecies the relation between Yehouah and Israel is dissoluble and on the point of being dissolved, but it must establish itself again.
The first actual collision between Israel and Assyria occurred in 734, and it was when Judah first emerged as an independent country. From the bible, historians think the small kingdom of Judah had stood in the background while Israel—Samaria—stood in the front. Judah is said to have been overshadowed in a relationship that was not voluntary, and in which Judah even rendered Israel military service. The kings of Judah are unknown in history until Assyrian times. Indeed, all that is known of it comes from the Jewish scriptures until some mentions are found in late Assyrian and Babylonian annals.
The early history of Judah is a continuation of the romance of David, David being the mythical founding hero of the country. Judah and life in it is depicted as idyllic compared with that of the drama of Israel, and the real reason is that it is a Jewish Arcadia. The rulers of Judah were shown as being especially interested in the temple at Jerusalem and its cult, but this is also likely to be mythical. The message of the Jewish scriptures is the constancy of Jewish dedication to Jerusalem and its temple, but the scriptures imply that the cult of Yehouah at Jerusalem was of the same kind as those at Bethel and Samaria—Canaanite—and no archaeology has shown otherwise. Samaria was the historical country, and Judah nothing but a runp of it, at best. The Persians actually created Judah.
Tiglath-pileser had apparently been waiting for an excuse to incorporate Samaria into empire, and, in 734 BC, set up his armies in Palestine. Samaria soon surrendered, paid a large tribute, and another Hosea was made puppet king. Hezekiah ben Ahaz was an historical king of Judah, his father, a contemporary of the puppet king Hosea of Samaria, was probably the first actual king of Judah. Ahaz, king of Judah, the Jewish scriptures say, was under the protection of the Assyrians when Resin, king of Damascus, and Pekah, king of Samaria, united against him. It looks as though the Assyrians had fomented trouble within Samaria and Judah under Ahaz had seceded.
At the death of Tiglath-pileser ten years later, Hosea of Samaria rebelled and the country was damaged by Shalmaneser and destroyed by Sargon (721 BC). Sargon deported the chief citizens to Calachene, Gozanitis, and Armenia. These were the legendary ten lost tribes of Israel. No biblical scholar ever considers why these ten tribes were exiled, and disappeared, but the tribes of Judah were exiled and returned more fanatical about Yehouah than they were beforehand. Deported people were deported for a political purpose and with a duty. It was to impose an alien culture on the place they were deported into. If they did not do so, they could not survive. They were told to restore the worship of a god—Sin perhaps—and had to do it. They could not therefore have been worshipping their own god at the same time. That would have invited retribution from the imperium. The ten tribes disappeared, and so did the Judahites. But, the Persians deported some other people into Judah as Jews to restore the worship of Yehouah. They had to do it, and did it so effectively that people still worship Yehouah to this day!
