Deuteronomic History and the Prophets 2
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Abstract
Propagandists
About the time of Cyrus the Persian, some kings had realized that the prophecies of these men could be used as propaganda, demoralizing enemy countries and arousing patriotic fervour, as the case might be. It was a powerful psychological weapon. There is evidence of the Persians using this method in Babylon and in Anatolia. If biblicists suppressed their kneebending inclinations in favour of looking at the Jewish scriptures as historians, they would find the scriptures were excellent historical evidence that the Persians did the same in Yehud. So, prophets became under the Persians, if not before, a propaganda machine. Baruch Halpern sees the prophets as essentially agents of a totalitarian state agenda (J S Cooper and G M Schwartz (eds), The Study of the Ancient Near East in the Twenty-First Century ). If there is any distinction between prophecy and divination, it is only that prophecy assumed this propaganda role, and thus became less mechanical and more attuned to the political needs of the hour.
Prophets were the spokespeople of different “political parties,” one of which would have favoured the foreigners. The Jewish scriptures could not be clearer that the party of those loyal to the practice of worshipping Baal, had their own prophets, and so did worshippers of Asherah, the goddess (1 Kg 18:19). The scriptures are clear that there were schools of prophets which disagreed, but the impression clerics give is that they were like the Greek schools of philosophy or the medieval schools of theology.
The record left to future generations is that of the victors, so we have a record of the Persian salvation prophets, those who presented the conquerors as saviours. In the mythical histories of the Jews, the prophets often predict disaster and it comes about, surely proof that the accounts were not written by genuine contemporaries. The kings of Israel, and sometimes Judah, and even the people are often denigrated by the prophets, yet there they are—recorded! If Jews wrote these accounts they did it under Persian hegemony to suit the wishes of their masters. They had only one treaty, called a covenant, with their Persian suzerains, and other alliances and coalitions were forbidden. Oracles against foreign nations were warnings not to think of making them.
The success of the prophets plainly gave them authority, as the scriptures expressly say. It was authority that came from them being on the right side. But the writers who came to write their exploits, or if not them, later elaborators, wanted to show that they always had authority. Hermann Gunkel showed that the original prophecies of the recorded prophets became literature in a complex process. They introduced “call” narratives, and “disputes” among prophets to show they spoke truly.
No one suggests that the prophets did not have opponents but the truth will have been suppressed and lost, and the “disputes” added as fiction. They could be set convincingly in period because pre-Persian societies had their prophets, and to show the propagandist prophets in a suitable historical situation was no difficult task. It suited the Deuteronomic message that their reception was mixed to allow their “apostate” opponents to be highlighted. The original propagandists voiced their view against the other parties, and at some personal risk. Their messages in support of a foreign power were not necessarily well received, not least by the local authorities, so there was a basis in fact for stories of prophetic conflict, and they were retrojected mutatis mutandis to past times and places. Conflicts like that of Micaiah and the 400 (1 Kg 22) show the righteous prophet standing up against the odds, an illustrative myth set in the past, but meant to justify the Persian officials called prophets.
It is often poetic, but oracles in many societies from the Delphic Oracles through the Sybilline ones to Nostradamus are often poetry, however crude. Many scriptural prophetic works were refined by skilled poets, and Ezekiel might have been completely rewritten or composed anew to replace a lost original. In the literary process, especially when the original purpose was forgotten or had to be hidden, contradictions amerged making prophecy often seem incoherent or abstract, though it is plain enough that the central purpose remains Deuteronomistic.
The role of prophets in the history of appointing and deposing kings can hardly have been that of real prophets who were at the mercy of kings. Amos calls Jeroboam II to order, to Amaziah’s horror. Nathan condemns David. Elijah condemned Ahab. Jeremiah condemned Jehoiakim. It is mythology again aimed at puffing the Persian officials. The astrological prophets of Babylon had a precarious existence, depending upon the patronage of the king, who often neglected to reward them, as we know from plaintive letters found on cuneiform tablets. They were also liable to suffer the ultimate penalty if their prophecy was wrong. The scriptures say the same was true of biblical prophets. Jeremiah was threatened and Uriah killed.
The Persian prophets might sometimes have had the power to act directly for the Shahanshah himself, above the head of the local satrap or governor. They were men to be listened to—Hearken to me! P D Miller comments that “such political matters were always ultimately theological,” and vice versa, and that is because the tenor of Deuteronomy echoes throughout.
The Persians were careful to tell the people who the right prophets were (Dt 18:20,22). The prophets of the Persian party could make promises that they knew the Persian chancellery could bring about. Others were false prophets and their fate was death. They were, of course, those who prophesied against Persian rule. Prophets therefore would be careful to prophesy what the Persians wanted.
Popular prophecy, according to J S Holliday Jr, is not attested anywhere else except in Assyria, but the Persians inherited and applied more effectively what they had learnt from being neighbours of the Assyrians for centuries. Persian archives have been thoroughly destroyed by the Greeks and the Moslems, leaving us with astonishingly little knowledge of the first great world empire, whereas Assyrian records were preserved on clay tablets beneath the desert sands. This is why biblicists have been able to ignore Persia in exploring biblical origins, even though it is plain that Judaism began with the Persians, the only people at that time with an ethical, monotheistic and eschatological religion.
Concerns of the Prophets
Patrick D Miller, Jr in Old Testament Interpretation, summarises the topics addressed by the prophets as:
- tyranny
- injustice and social oppression
- military conquest
- people directionless in starting a new life
- people lamenting their exile
- political alliances
- apostasy.
There could be hardly a better summary of the concerns that faced the Persian colonists deported from their homes into an alien and hostile environment by their conquerors. They show the propaganda concerns of the prophets, and fit the concept that they were propagandists for a foreign power. Cyrus the Persian used such propaganda, as is an unarguable fact, and we can be sure that, even before the conquest, spokespeople for his pro-Persian parties would have railed against the injustice, oppression and tyranny of native rulers, depicting the conquerors as saviours, and would have recommended the political alliances that favoured the invaders and denigrated others.
They would have painted the foreign take-over as a necessary act ordained by a just god who would favour those who supported Him and punish enemies and apostates, so the best way to avoid hardship, injury and death was to support the just god and His cause. When deportees were moved in as rulers of the new colony, their problems of estrangement alienation and dispiritedness also were addressed. They were faced with the task of building a new life and society in the face of hostility from the local population, while lamenting their exile from their homeland, and their confusion in an unfamiliar place. All of this then is evident in the scriptures, even though the circumstances are sometimes altered into a mythical past, or the exile is rendered ambigously. Understanding this is the key to understanding “prophecy” in the bible, even though the prophetic works themselves have been substantially altered in later times when Persian requirements no longer pertained.
Messengers of God
The Hebrew word used for prophet, still used in the Arabic, is “nabi,” a word that it is impossible not to associate with the god, Nebo, the Babylonian equivalent of the Greek god Hermes (Mercury), the messenger of the gods. Prophets are precisely that—messengers of God.
The prophetic oracle is a message… from the divine assembly where the decrees of God are set forth and transmitted as a divine proclamation or message by the prophetic herald: “Thus said the Lord.”P D Miller Jr
The prophet came to speak… as an emissary of the heavenly assembly to the covenant people who were in league with the deity Yehouah.P D Miller Jr
Or, to be less mythological, as an emissary from of the Persian court to the vassal people whose universal god, Yehouah, acknowledged the Persian king as his agent on earth. This heavenly assembly appears in these monotheistic religions unequivocally (1 Kg 22:17-23; Isa 6; Jer 23:16-22), and prophets would describe a sight of it as proof of their authenticity. The executive assembly was in reality the Persian court, but the theory of the universal god of heaven was that the earth reflected what went on in heaven, and so the Persians actually presented their own court as the heavenly one. The Persian king was God’s khalif on earth, so what came from God came from the Shahanshah. The Persian kings never claimed to be gods themselves, but effectively they were God! Heaven spoke through the prophet but the rules that emerged were those of the Persian king.
Yes, there were prophets in the ancient near east before the Persian period but mainly they were court officials engaged as advisors to the king, as the scriptures show. The popular prophets, who were really propagandists might have appeared in the Assyrian period, but most of the biblical narratives about them were mythical anachronistic retrogressions of the Persian prophets, whose task was to urge obedience to the regulations of the universal god—in practice the laws of the Medes and Persians.
Scholars accept, in Miller’s words, “the prophetic insistence on justice and righteousness was rooted in the covenant traditions of Yehouahism.” What they are incapable of understanding is that gods are inventions of the human imagination and are incapable of forming covenant relationships with anybody. Covenants and treaties are made between people! Even though the mythical history of the bible is less credible than Santa Claus, they believe it as true and fail to see the real history in it. The covenant relationhip the scriptures speak of was with Persia in the fifth century not a transcendental being at the time of Noah, Abraham, Moses or anyone else. That is the mythological basis used to justify the covenant with the masters of the Jews, the Persians.
-->
Moses and Exodus
