Judaism
The Prophets 3
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
Third Isaiah
The existence of the temple is implied throughout Third Isaiah, especially 56:7, 62:9 (the temple courts), 66:6. Some colonists have arrived, others have still to do so (Isa 56:8, 60:4). The faithful are abused by the governors, and the poor by the rich (Isa 58-59). Jerusalem and its walls are in ruins (Isa 58:12, 60:10) but the temple is built (Isa 56:7), and the Jews are interested in proselytizing (Isa 56:3-5). People are impatient to start the new state, but a voice tells them “a nation cannot be brought forth in one moment” (Isa 66:7-9). Idolaters practise in typically Palestinian scenery (56:9-57), and apostate Jews are among them (Isa 66:24). Peace is promised, implying strife. It must be meant to be after the time when Ezra returned, and the temple state was set up for all the nations of Abarnahara.
The one theme that unites the Isaiah books above all is that of the covenant. Second and Third Isaiah are dealing with a covenant that the people had to accept to be saved, and it appears thus four times in Second Isaiah and five times in Third Isaiah. First Isaiah is based on the premise that the covenant has been broken, and in two of the four places it mentions the word “covenant”, it is a “covenant of death” that the people have entered, while, in the other two passages, it is a “broken covenant.” It is plain then that First Isaiah is really Last Isaiah, being a later and more refined composition by the Deuteronomic Historian and later editors, highlighting the fact that the people had quickly neglected their duty to obey the covenant, while the utterances of the historic Isaiahs of the time of the Persian colonization were left relatively untouched.
The covenant is, of course, the vassalage treaty that Persia imposed on the state of Yehud by Ezra. These prophets will have preceded Ezra but knew that any vassal state would have to obey such a treaty and that it would be presented as God’s not the king’s—but the king acted for God! In the Jewish scriptures, God is synonymous with the Persian Shahanshah. The people were meant to understand Persian law as God’s law.
Zion
Isaiah is fond of using the word, “harab”, using it twelve times of the 37 times it occurs in the scriptures. The verb “harab” originally meant “to be dry.” From this, it also came to mean “to be waste.” Especially in the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, the word “harab” denotes desolation and ruin. Horba is the noun meaning waste or desolate places (in Isaiah 48:21, “horba” means “deserts”) or ruins—Yehouah who will raise up the ruins of Jerusalem (44:26), their desolate places will one day be too limited for the increased population (49:19), Yehouah will comfort Zion’s waste places and transform them into an Eden (51:3), Jerusalem’s ruins will break forth into singing (52:9), as they will be rebuilt (58:12; 61:4).
Nehemiah (c 445 BC) learns that Jerusalem is still in ruins (Neh 2:3, 17), and Ezra thanks God for permitting the Jews to repair the temple’s ruins (Ezra 9:9). When the Jews’ dedication to rebuilding the temple flagged, Haggai rebuked them with a play on words, proclaiming that because Yehouah’s house had remained “desolate” (“hareb”, Hag 1:4,9) Yehouah would bring a “drought” (“horeb”, Hag 1:11) upon the land. Jeremiah 33:10 promises that in the desolate place “without man or inhabitant or beast” voices of gladness would be heard once more.
Now curiously, Horeb, meaning dryness, drought, heat, desolation, because it was desolate, is an alternative name for Mount Sinai, the mountain of God, appearing 17 times in the bible, no less than nine of them in Deuteronomy. In the hypothesis on these pages, Horeb was the original word used of the dry hilltop used as a High Place for worshipping Yehouah before the colonization. Horeb is Zion, which means the same. Zion means a dry and solitary but prominent place. These were the conditions described of the place where the temple was built. More happens at Horeb than we now know about (Deut 4:10; 9:8; 18:16). Moses struck the rock in Horeb (Ex 17:6), but not on Mount Sinai which the Israelites did not reach until later (Ex 19:1). The Israelites made a calf at Horeb (Ps 106:19). When Solomon installed the ark, it contained only the two tables of stone which Moses placed in it at Horeb (1 Kg 8:9; 2 Chr 5:10).
Horeb is Zion, and the priests changed Zion to Sinai when they invented the myth of the desert wanderings. Zion is never used by any biblical author in a book that uses Sinai. Sinai appears in Deuteronomy, but only once in the song of Moses which is plainly an addition by the priestly school that invented the myth of the Exodus. Horeb appears three times in Exodus (Ex 3:1; 17:6; 33:6), but otherwise Sinai is used (13 times), and Sinai is used exclusively in the priestly book, Leviticus.
In the myth of David, the king bought a threshing floor from the Jebusite Araunah (Ornan), at the highest elevation of the plateau. Threshing floors were often places of worship in the ancient near east, and were preferably dry places. Araunah’s threshing floor was plainly a High Place, an open air sanctuary. This is the place where David chose to put the Ark of the Covenant and his son, Solomon, built the temple, in the legend. The place was called Mount Zion, the home of Yehouah and therefore the mountain of God. L M Luker in Lutterworth’s Dictionary of the Bible, comments:
In a sense then, Yehouah moved his mountain abode from Sinai to Zion.
Sinai was never, in fact, anything other than a mythicized Mount Zion. It was a Canaanite High Place, then, early in the Persian period, a Persian style open air sanctuary, and finally Darius II built a treasury there in the form of a traditional enclosed temple in a fortified city. The priests writing the myth of Moses, under the sponsorship of the Egyptian Ptolemies, transposed Zion a millennium back in history to become Sinai where God appeared to Moses and gave him the law.
Jeremiah
Jeremiah is a confused book but has a consistent theme, that of decrying the people for being apostates and warning them to change their ways from worshipping Canaanite Gods. The book is set towards the end of the kingdom of Judah. Good king Hezekiah (714-686 BC) had been succeeded by bad king Manasseh (686-641 BC), Hezekiah’s son, who is supposed to have brought back the Canaanite deities outlawed getting on for a millennium before by Moses. Novelties were also imported from Assyria and Babylon allegedly to renovate the religion of Yehouah, which of course, existed then only as a Canaanite sect. Despite Manasseh’s apostasy, king Josiah (639-609 BC) followed on, but apparently God was not appeased by the good deeds of the good kings and destroyed Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians anyway.
For the first time, the scriptures acknowledge that Yehouah had a rival “queen of heaven” She was, in fact, his consort. It showed the myths of earlier reform related in the scriptures were not true and, on the ground, Judah was still Canaanite in religion. The myth makers simply highlighted the truth in between their myths of reform to make the Judahites seem like apostates. They kept abandoning the new Yehouah they were currently restoring—imposing in fact—and returning to the old idols.
Zephaniah and Jeremiah are painted as threatening, like Amos and Hosea, with punishment from the north, this time the Scythians, who did invade Palestine in 626 and got to Egypt, but they stuck to the shore line, and left Judah alone. Yehouah was showing he was ready to punish the Jews for the sins of Manasseh but gave them another chance to atone. A prophetic threat had almost come to pass, but in the myth God had been merciful. The myth showed it as a renewed interest in the reforming party which then gained the support of good king Josiah.
The Babylonians under Nebuchadrezzar, having crushed Assyria with their allies the Medes, routed the Egyptians near Carchemish (604 BC). In the myth, Jeremiah had the divine command to write down his life’s work. Judah was subjected as a vassal state (c 602), but after a while, Jehoiakim, an ally of the Egyptians who resented the northern suzerain, refused tribute. Nebuchadnezzar forced Jerusalem to yield in 597 BC, and important citizens were exiled, including Jechoniah ben Jehoiakim. Zedekiah was made puppet king. Ten years later, after some dissent, a rebellion was again raised with a promise of Egyptian help. The Egyptians distracted the Babylonian army into raising the seige, but Jeremiah is shown as still pessimistic. The Egyptians were repulsed and the siege resumed, and the city taken and reduced to ruins. Even more people were deported. The kingdom of Judah ended in 586 BC.
In 621, the eighteenth of Josiah, Deuteronomy was allegedly discovered. The name Josiah is really a variant of Joshua (“Yehouah Saves”) and he is supposed to have found a hidden book of the law, assumed to have been Deuteronomy, and put it into effect. Josiah is offered as a king who is a saviour, whence Josiah, but he was not a saviour because Jerusalem was soon ruined. He has the name because he was presented by the Persians as the one who discovered the law and first put it into effect. Ezra really introduced the law (Deuteronomy) based on Zoroastrian law and imperial needs, but to give it credibility, they used their ruse of telling the people that the law was their own law and had been implemented by Josiah 200 years before. Who could dispute it? The Persians were the real saviours, and Josiah is too fantastic to be credible. King at eight years old, he began reforming the religion at twelve! To believe the scriptures, from now on the cult was practised only in Jerusalem, but plainly it was not. This reform of Josiah’s was a retrogression of the Persian law and cultic restoration. Consequently, nothing still happened in real history in respect of any reformation of the Canaanite cults.
The Deuteronomic law was not merely a religious law, but a civil law too. Under this law, all native and foreign cults were suppressed in favour of that of Yehouah, and every shrine other than the temple closed. No such law could have been Canaanitish. It was a Persian law and so could not have been a law of Josiah 200 years before. That is propaganda to persuade the people to accept an unpopular law as their own. Biblicists say Deuteronomy had grown out of the prophetic spirit, but the prophetic spirit was invented to be the justification of Deuteronomy, not here in the time of Josiah, but when the Persians really introduced it 200 years later. Yehouah is the only God, whose service demands the whole heart and every energy. He has entered into a covenant—a treaty—with Israel, with moral and universal conditions. Yehouah asks nothing for Himself, but insists it is a duty that man should deal rightly with other men. His will is known and understood by all.
The commandments which I command thee are not unattainable for thee, neither are they far off, not in heaven so that one might say, Who can climb up into heaven and bring them down, and tell us them that we might do them! Not beyond the sea so that one might say, Who shall go over the sea, and fetch them, and tell us them that we might do them!—but the matter lies very near thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, so that thou canst do it.Deut 30:11-14
Jeremiah’s significance is in formulating the idea of a “New Covenant” (Jer 31:31-34). According to the later biblical myth, the original covenant was that of Moses in about 1300 BC, but Moses was really Ezra in about 400 BC, the law he presented being misunderstood as the law of Moses, from the failure of the Canaanite people to understand words they were unfamiliar with. The word for law (DT, “data”) and the name, Ahuramazda, meaning the “law of Ahuramazda” sounded to them like “Torah Moshe”, which they took to be “torah”, law, of Moses, and “torah” became the Hebrew word for law.
Jeremiah was depicted as a second Amos, but he was a professional prophet, who had taken an active part in the Persian introduction of Deuteronomy. Over a hundred years before he really lived, he was in the pseudepigraphic myth, exposing unlawful altars and stopping idol worship. Since the reform had happened under Josiah, according to the myth, why should it have continued to be necessary to stop these illegalities. After all, high places and pillars of wood and stone are not easily hidden. In Persian times, centralization of worship had still not occurred. Jeremiah claimed Judah was no better than Israel, and Jerusalem would be destroyed like Shiloh. Jeremiah called for a change of heart. He berated the people and was reproached and ridiculed for it. The ungrateful people reject him and he dies in Egypt.
So, Jeremiah was more than likely to have been a real prophet warning the Jews against supporting the Egyptians, but not at the time of Nebuchadrezzer, at a time over a hundred years later when the Persians were already in charge. The people have not accepted the reforms and he urges them to put the covenant in their hearts. He urges a personal commitment rather than formal sacerdotalism, putting him close to the later Hasidim or Essenes than to the temple priesthood. Whether this is the result of editing, it impossible to say. The scriptures did not seem able to distinguish the Persians from the earlier Babylonians, perhaps because both had their capital in Babylon when the scriptures were written, or perhaps edited later still. Egypt was the main problem of the Persians, and they were keen to influence the Judahites against them, their natural allies. The Jews had supported Egyptian rebels against Persia, and the Persians had punished them. The Persian punitive force that Jeremiah warned against was therefore cast back into the time of Nebuchadrezzer. Josiah was succeeded by Jehoiakim, in the myth a vassal of Egypt, who is shown as ignoring Deuteronomy.
The actual introduction of the law by the Persians was accompanied by the propaganda needed to persuade the people of it. This was the basis of the historical books of the bible, and the prophetic writings and schools. People were not literate, and had to have the law, and its justification read to them in the places of worship, but also they listened to the prophets who went around explaining it. Once it was accepted, the prophetic function ended leaving only the religious one, the exhortation in church which still remains with us. Prophecy was over.
Jeremiah must have been writing after the tribes of the Medes had been united as a nation, and he knew the king of the Medes had plotted against Babylon:
Make bright the arrows. Gather the shields. Yehouah hath raised up the spirit of the kings of the Medes, for his device is against Babylon, to destroy it, because it is the vengeance of Yehouah, the vengeance of his temple.Jeremiah 51:11
So, in fact, he must have been writing in the time of the Persians, after the fall of Babylon. The message of Jeremiah is that the people have not properly taken the religious and social changes to heart. They have adopted them superficially and insincerely. Yehud had therefore already been colonized but the changes were not being fully accepted. In Deuteronomy, the “extension of the frontier” is mentioned, an indication that the nation of priests would be influential, effectively be responsible not just for Judah but for the whole satrapy of Abarnahara. As priests in the temple state of Abarnahara, they would be the first among equals.
Ezekiel
Ezekiel is presented as a priest sent into exile before the destruction of Jerusalem. Ezekiel’s book seems to be a single work of a single author, but a closer look betrays some seams. Certainly Ezekiel has been meticulously edited to give it a complete and polished look, uncharacteristic of some of the other scriptural works.
Ezekiel is offered as the Jewish equivalent of Zoroaster, both having a startling vision of God to set them on the road to prophecy. The first half of the book contains warnings to Jerusalem then follows warnings to other nations and finally from chapters 33 to 48 are set out how the temple city of Jerusalem was intended to be, including detailed specifications for the architecture of the proposed temple.
Ezekiel 14:14 mentions Job and king David, so it must be later than these late constructs. Such a highly polished book is likely to be late and C C Torrey, judging from language and historical allusions, thought it was written about 230 BC. This is the time of the Egyptian Greek rulers, the Ptolemies, who began by being favourable to the Jerusalem cult. It is likely that in this period the priests developed the detail of the sacerdotal practice of the temple, and introduced more and more reasons for offering sacrifices to keep themselves in their comfortable work. Most of the Pentateuch will have been written at this time for the Ptolemies to keep in their new library at Alexandria.
The concerns of Ezekiel could have placed it at the time of the Persian colonists, but much of the detail shows the interests of later priests, those that devised the Priestly Codes. It might be that there is a prophet of the fifth century at the centre of Ezekiel, but he seems to be overlaid thickly with later material and plenty of polish! Thus the design of the temple in Ezekiel might have been overelaborated by the third century priests who saw it as an ideal or heavenly temple, but they might have had an original specification sent with the returners. The hold ups and delays, that Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai and Zechariah speak of, perhaps necessitated a more utilitarian design and the specification came to be seen as an ideal, then got even more idealized in the copying.
Ezekiel is written mainly in prose unlike the other major prophets. Perhaps for that reason, he does not use the word “Zion” for Jerusalem. Most of the poetic prophets and the Psalms use it considerably, though it hardly appears otherwise in the scriptures. Ezekiel, however, is also unusual compared with his supposed contemporary, Jeremiah, for example in not being interested in Jerusalem and Judah compared with Israel. Since the Persians were intent on setting up the temple state of Yehud, Ezekiel must have shown that in his work, but he uses “Israel” almost exclusively.
