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Ancient Near East Monographs #4
Constructs of Prophecy in the Former and Latter Prophets and Other Texts
Proceedings of meetings of the Prophetic Texts and Their Ancient Contexts Group of the Society of Biblical Literature held in 2007 in Washington, D.C. and in 2008 in Boston, Mass.
247 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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• Introduction by Grabbe
o Book emerges from SBL’s Prophetic Texts and their Ancient Contexts Group
o When the steering committee chose the themes of the Former and the Latter Prophets for two separate sessions, the main reason was to see how different sections of the Bible may have differed in how prophecy was constructed. But it was recognized that the different types of biblical literature and the different approaches to them were not exhausted by drawing on these two main prophetic sections of the biblical text. Hence, essays on Daniel, Chronicles, and the Qur’an were also accepted for the volume to give this additional perspective.
o By “constructs of prophecy” is meant potentially two separate issues.
1. the way that the various biblical books construct prophecy
2. the way in which modern scholars go about constructing prophecy in ancient Israel
o Themes and topics
Prophets and Books
• We tend to think of prophecy as an oral phenomenon, but most of what we know about prophets is related to the written word: much of our knowledge is from prophetic books, including the record of possible prophetic words themselves; communication in writing rather than orally is a feature of many prophetic pronouncements
• A continuing issue of discussion is how the prophetic books originated. Was a collection of originally oral sayings collected as the core, which was later developed and expanded to give the final prophetic book? Did these books begin with a very small amount of text initially but with a later increase as other material was added over time? Do these books begin with prophetic words or with non-prophetic writing (such as cultic proclamation)—the core of prophetic books might not have been oral prophecy or collection of such prophets but another sort of writing *****
• BEENTJES draws attention to the fact that Chronicles associates prophets with archives and documents in a number of passages
Prophets and Cult
• Generally positive relationship
Prophets, Divination, and Apocalyptic
• In my opinion, prophecy can be classified as a form of divination.4 Many would no doubt disagree, but the main function of divination is to ascertain the will of God/the gods. This might well be information on future events but may rather be finding the basis for making a decision or determining the right direction among several alternatives. The subject is complicated, but many prophets induce a “prophetic ecstasy” by various means, such as singing and music, dance, drugs, physical stress or trauma. The prophetic figure might well respond to requests for information from “clients.” Again, there has been a tendency in Old Testament scholarship to disassociate the “classical” prophets from trance or ecstasy, but there is no good reason to do so.5 Some recents studies bear this out. DEF PROPHET***
The Prophetic Persona
• Yet Weber recognized the importance of the personal call for all prophets, which some have denied.11 He had further emphasized the importance of charisma as an essential feature of prophetic individuals. This of course tied in with his wider perspective on charisma in relation to individuals in positions of authority and leadership.12 COOK treated the subject of prophetic charisma in the context of feminist recuperative scholars. In this case, the expression of prophetic charisma as “emotive preaching” was seen as a particularly useful model for this section of scholarship. That preaching could come by various media, including literary compositions.1
• Another possible persona is the prophet as agent provocateur (FROLOV). By this is meant that the prophet says things that cause Israel to sin or omits to mention things that might deter them from sinning. For example, in 1 Sam 4 the prophet Samuel encourages the people to fight the Philistines for the first time in a long time. The implication is that there was a divine promise of victory. In actual fact, God was planning to use this occasion to punish Eli’s sons, but Israel had to be defeated to bring this about. The prophet had, in effect, misled the people
• Constructs of Prophets and Prophecy in the book of Chronicles by Beenjes
o Within the Hebrew Bible, the book of Chronicles in many respects is a kind of a “lonely planet,” since the book has many peculiarities that are found nowhere else in the Old Testament. Reading the book of Chronicles, one undoubtedly will be surprised that classical prophets such as Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are hardly mentioned, if at all. Instead, the Chronicler presents prophets and inspired messengers who in the rest of the Bible are completely unknown and are often introduced and typified in a special way. In this contribution we will specifically investigate in what manner prophets, prophecy, and prophetical activities are presented in this document that most probably originates from the Persian period. The outcome of this investigation will be that the book of Chronicles has a specific theological view of prophets, prophecy, and inspired messengers. THESIS
o William Schniedewind has convincingly demonstrated that, as far as the book of Chronicles is concerned, one has to differentiate between speeches by speakers with prophetic titles (אישׁ־האלהים ,חזה ,ראה ,נביא) and speeches by speakers without prophetic titles, but being introduced by “possession formulas” (“the spirit of God was upon ...”, “the spirit enveloped ...”)
o it therefore can hardly be an accident that precisely in the final chapter of the book, the Chronicler mentions both “messengers” and “prophets”
o Whereas in the book of Kings the narratives on Ahijah, Elijah, Elisha, and others commonly included miraculous elements and were concerned with efficacy of the prophetic pronouncements, in the book of Chronicles the ministry of the prophets is nowhere described in terms of ecstasy, miracles, or political dimensions.
The obvious reason for this is that the prophetic narratives in Samuel- Kings mostly concern the northern kingdom ... Since the Chronicler wrote a history of the southern kingdom, there was little for the Chronicler to borrow.
o Chronicler repeatedly plays down narratives in which prophets are central characters
o In the book of Chronicles, the noun “prophet” is found at least seven times in connection with a document that is attributed to a specific prophet
o In the Chronicler’s presentation, these prophets do not act as messengers, but rather hold the position of keepers of the royal archives; they are characterized as responsible for the records of a specific king.
o The majority of the prophets and inspired messengers we met in the book of Chronicles have been “invented” by the Chronicler and should therefore be characterized as “literary personages” rather than historical persons.
o Consequently, the speeches delivered by these literary personages are the most appropriate place to look for the Chronicler’s own theological convictions and accents. One will hardly wonder that it is just these prophetic addresses where fundamental theological notions of 1–2 Chronicles are to be found.
o As far as so-called “classical prophets” are met in the Chronicler’s text, they do not act as inspired messengers, but rather hold the position of keepers of the royal archives, being responsible for the records of a king’s reign.
• Some Precedents for the Religion of the Book: Josiah’s Book and Ancient Revelatory Literature by Ben-Doc
o The Josiah Narrative, one of the most often discussed passages of the Bible, refuses to let go of the scholarly imagination.
o This paper will focus attention on the relevance of the Josiah narrative for the crystallization of what is now called “the Religion of the Book
o I will summarize the argument by the late Moshe Weinfeld, a radical proponent of the view that Josiah initiated a new religion of the Book:5 a) Josiah’s reform brought about a new religious situation in which prayers and Torah readings (2 Kgs 23:1–2, 21–23), being purely textual rituals, were no longer related to Temple and Sacrifice, but rather existed as an essential religious element by themselves; b) The acts of Josiah “began the process of the canonization of Scripture, a concept which penetrated also Christianity and Islam.”
o By the end of the seventh century BCE, says van der Toorn, the book was considered the ultimate source of authority. Furthermore, one particular book, i.e., Deuteronomy, was considered already then to be revealed knowledge (Deut 4:44, 29:28). Deuteronomy thus combines two key concepts of the later monotheistic religions which are intensively explored in van der Toorn’s book: Writtenness and Revelation.
o Indeed, the Josiah narrative uses the same building blocks that were used to construct a canonical awareness within ancient Israel and outside it in Late Antiquity: the concepts of Prophecy, Law, and the Divine authority of the written word.
o Taking a serious look at these extra-biblical precedents, we should consider the possibility that Josiah’s book was a transition point rather than a revolution. In the words of the medievalist Carolyn Bynum, we may wish “to stress connections and transitions rather than borders, boundaries and breaks.”
o The way out from the vicious circle is to acknowledge that the book find story did exist in a pre-Deuteronomistic account of Josiah’s reign, but not as the Book of Law. In that original account, the book was conceived as part of the oracular process in the royal court. Davies is right that the story—as it is now—urges the reader to identify the book with Deuteronomy, but this was not necessarily the intention of the original story.
o in priestly literature the word tôrāh denotes a short instruction which relates to the ritual realm—sacrifices, purity, leprosy, etc. This kind of instruction, always supplied by priests, was committed to writing in a series of short scrolls, and is presently collected into one priestly continuum in the Pentateuch. Side by side with the above connotations, the prophetic literature retained yet another meaning for tôrāh, which is closer to the cognate Akkadian term têrtu(m). In Akkadian (especially in Mari and in Neo-Assyrian but also in the Neo-Babylonian inscriptions of Nabunaid) this term means “oracle, decision,” as well as “the instruction of the liver by extispicy,” and thus remains part and parcel of the semantic field of divination and oracular instruction.
The book of Deuteronomy, when referring to itself as tôrāh, amalgamates several of the meanings adduced above, on its way to a radical change of the concept of writing and revelation in ancient Israel.
o Some scholars view the book-find of Josiah as a sign for a new tendency in Judahite religion which sought to replace the temple with the book
o In light of the above deliberations, however, I suggest that the book find of Josiah may be interpreted differently. A book find was a perfectly acceptable phenomenon, maybe even a prestigious way for discovering the divine decree, in Judah as in a variety of other ancient cultures in pre-Deuteronomistic times.
Hittite extant source wherein The king then sought to reenact this ritual, supporting his intention by double-checking the word of the written tablets by a second query to the oracle ** DOUBLE CHECKING ORACLES
o It is significant that a close parallel to the book-find of Josiah arises from the second millennium BCE Hittite culture rather than from the contemporary activity of prophets and diviners in the Neo-Assyrian court. Josiah’s book find can now be more confidently understood on a pre-Deuteronomic background.
o According to Nissinen, the basic format for a prophetic report was the disposable u’iltu.36 Several such reports were subsequently collected into a standard archival tablet in order to enhance their preservation and circulation. I suggest that a similar distinction might be useful with regard to Josiah’s book. While this book first appeared in history as a rather short divine instruction, meant to support the reforming intentions of the king, it was later represented by Deuteronomistic authors as a long and comprehensive book, to be archived and preserved in the temple. The initial document may have contained very small parts of Deuteronomy—possibly only chapters twelve through sixteen and twenty-eight37—but the composition gradually accrued to include more text in a longer form
o PROTO CANONIZATION
o The evidence collected here would suggest that the conceptions of Torah in both biblical and post-biblical religion may find some precedents in non-Israelite sources of prophetic and divinatory literature. Judaic religion during the monarchy was not a religion of the book. Under the Davidic dynasty, the Judahite state was a monarchy based on a divinely-supported royal family, which in turn relied on a divinatory-prophetic establishment. This ancient divinatory milieu gave rise to some early connections between writing and revelation even before the creation of a full-fledged reflection on writtenness. Later on, when this kind of reflection did come to exist in Judah, and as Jewish literati became acquainted with the Mesopotamian scholarly establishment, the older stories were refashioned to fit this new agenda. The story on the book find of Josiah came into existence as part of the early tendency, while it was still tightly close to the divinatory process pursued in the royal court. With the strengthening of the Deuteronomistic ideology, this story became the hinge on which to suspend a reformulated conception of the book. THESIS
• The Weberian Construct of Prophecy and Womanist and Feminist Recuperative Criticism by STEVE(?) Cook
o Prophets are theologians, social critics, intercessors, future tellers, priests, and intermediaries of divine information, among others. As good as biblical scholarship has been in bringing to light multiple ways by which to understand the idea of “prophet,” it has often not proceeded with clear articulations about the significance of its work, or, simply put, what interests its constructions of “prophet” serve
o The scholars who have spoken most clearly about their intentions in the context of the study of prophecy are womanists and feminists. Feminists and womanists highlight that the category of “prophet” presented in the biblical text includes women (starting with those named as such in the Bible), excavate women’s contributions to biblical prophetic texts (especially of “writing prophets”), critique prophetic language that perpetuates harmful social relations (Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel), and contribute to understanding the language, theology, history, and biblical representations of women prophets and prophecy in general.
o Weberian Construct of Prophecy and Feminist recuperative criticism
Per Weber: a prophet performs the role by virtue of charisma, preaches, and advances the renewal or establishment of a religion. A prophet is not established in the role by virtue of institutional standing, lineage, tradition, or the like; a prophet is not a ritual functionary; a prophet is not a “priest.”
Weber’s construction of prophecy has much that is widely appealing. By virtue of the mechanism by which one becomes a prophet (charisma) and by virtue of their importance (they stand at the very heart of a religion’s formation and continuance), anyone has the potential to create and sustain a social force (religion) deemed positive by many.
While neither Lee, Walker, nor Stanton were “heirs” to Weber, just as Wellhausen was not, all of them operated with expectations of “prophet” that he helped to imprint further in people’s minds
Concurrent ideas do not mean that they should be attributed to Weber though****????
o Issues for consideration
For generations of (male) scholars, prophets were men.
In part, the real-world gains that can be and have been made by womanist and feminist recuperative scholars comes from advancing “prophet” as a role that is freely open, especially significant, and analogous to modern professions, especially preachers. If recuperative readers were to promote the participation of women in religious leadership by drawing upon prophets in ancient Near Eastern contexts—who as a “profession” were often secondary to extispicy experts for providing monarchs with divine 22 information—recuperative hermeneutics might not have the same impact
For discussion of prophets vis-à-vis extispicy experts and the relevance for studying biblical prophets, see: Jack M. Sasson, “About ‘Mari and the Bible,’” RA 92 (1998): 118–19.
INTERESTING ANE PRIMACY OF EXTISPICY OVER PROPHECY
In thinking about the costs of painting prophets in ways that resemble Weber’s prophets, we should consider the prejudices that Weber’s “prophets are not equal to priests” dynamic can harbor and promote.
• 1 Sam 1-8 The Prophet As Agent Provocateur by Frolov
o It is only in the book of Samuel and in association with its title character that the root נבא goes into sustained use (eventually to be employed more than four hundred times in the Hebrew Bible) and certain related terms begin to show up, such as ראה “seer” (1 Sam 9:9) and חזון “vision” (1 Sam 3:1).
o Two major stages in the literary unfolding of the biblical concept of prophecy can be consequently singled out: first, Deut 18 with its concise “prophetic statute” and second, the opening chapters of 1 Samuel where the first biblical character emerges who not only walks and talks like a prophet but also is consistently characterized as such.
o Samuel’s first prophetic experience is recounted by 1 Sam 3. This well- known narrative, where YHWH speaks to Samuel at night while the latter lodges in the inner sanctum of the temple, where the ark is also housed, is unique in at least two respects.
1. First, the message that Samuel receives from the deity (vv. 11–14) is entirely redundant; it does not go even a small step beyond what the audience and Samuel’s mentor, Eli, already know from 2:27–36: that Eli’s priestly house is doomed to destruction because of the blasphemies of his sons. Of course, for Samuel himself it is definitely news, but that does not matter because he is not asked to do anything, not even to make the revelation public.
2. At the outset, the theophany it recounts is strictly auditory: the deity repeatedly calls Samuel by name, and the boy repeatedly runs to Eli, thinking that the master is calling him (vv. 4–8a). Only on the third try does Eli realize that his apprentice is being addressed by God and suggest an appropriate response (v. 8b–9). In the next verse, the format of the theophany dramatically changes: by “coming and standing erect,” YHWH apparently adds a visual component to it (v. 10a). Remarkably,
o Book emerges from SBL’s Prophetic Texts and their Ancient Contexts Group
o When the steering committee chose the themes of the Former and the Latter Prophets for two separate sessions, the main reason was to see how different sections of the Bible may have differed in how prophecy was constructed. But it was recognized that the different types of biblical literature and the different approaches to them were not exhausted by drawing on these two main prophetic sections of the biblical text. Hence, essays on Daniel, Chronicles, and the Qur’an were also accepted for the volume to give this additional perspective.
o By “constructs of prophecy” is meant potentially two separate issues.
1. the way that the various biblical books construct prophecy
2. the way in which modern scholars go about constructing prophecy in ancient Israel
o Themes and topics
Prophets and Books
• We tend to think of prophecy as an oral phenomenon, but most of what we know about prophets is related to the written word: much of our knowledge is from prophetic books, including the record of possible prophetic words themselves; communication in writing rather than orally is a feature of many prophetic pronouncements
• A continuing issue of discussion is how the prophetic books originated. Was a collection of originally oral sayings collected as the core, which was later developed and expanded to give the final prophetic book? Did these books begin with a very small amount of text initially but with a later increase as other material was added over time? Do these books begin with prophetic words or with non-prophetic writing (such as cultic proclamation)—the core of prophetic books might not have been oral prophecy or collection of such prophets but another sort of writing *****
• BEENTJES draws attention to the fact that Chronicles associates prophets with archives and documents in a number of passages
Prophets and Cult
• Generally positive relationship
Prophets, Divination, and Apocalyptic
• In my opinion, prophecy can be classified as a form of divination.4 Many would no doubt disagree, but the main function of divination is to ascertain the will of God/the gods. This might well be information on future events but may rather be finding the basis for making a decision or determining the right direction among several alternatives. The subject is complicated, but many prophets induce a “prophetic ecstasy” by various means, such as singing and music, dance, drugs, physical stress or trauma. The prophetic figure might well respond to requests for information from “clients.” Again, there has been a tendency in Old Testament scholarship to disassociate the “classical” prophets from trance or ecstasy, but there is no good reason to do so.5 Some recents studies bear this out. DEF PROPHET***
The Prophetic Persona
• Yet Weber recognized the importance of the personal call for all prophets, which some have denied.11 He had further emphasized the importance of charisma as an essential feature of prophetic individuals. This of course tied in with his wider perspective on charisma in relation to individuals in positions of authority and leadership.12 COOK treated the subject of prophetic charisma in the context of feminist recuperative scholars. In this case, the expression of prophetic charisma as “emotive preaching” was seen as a particularly useful model for this section of scholarship. That preaching could come by various media, including literary compositions.1
• Another possible persona is the prophet as agent provocateur (FROLOV). By this is meant that the prophet says things that cause Israel to sin or omits to mention things that might deter them from sinning. For example, in 1 Sam 4 the prophet Samuel encourages the people to fight the Philistines for the first time in a long time. The implication is that there was a divine promise of victory. In actual fact, God was planning to use this occasion to punish Eli’s sons, but Israel had to be defeated to bring this about. The prophet had, in effect, misled the people
• Constructs of Prophets and Prophecy in the book of Chronicles by Beenjes
o Within the Hebrew Bible, the book of Chronicles in many respects is a kind of a “lonely planet,” since the book has many peculiarities that are found nowhere else in the Old Testament. Reading the book of Chronicles, one undoubtedly will be surprised that classical prophets such as Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are hardly mentioned, if at all. Instead, the Chronicler presents prophets and inspired messengers who in the rest of the Bible are completely unknown and are often introduced and typified in a special way. In this contribution we will specifically investigate in what manner prophets, prophecy, and prophetical activities are presented in this document that most probably originates from the Persian period. The outcome of this investigation will be that the book of Chronicles has a specific theological view of prophets, prophecy, and inspired messengers. THESIS
o William Schniedewind has convincingly demonstrated that, as far as the book of Chronicles is concerned, one has to differentiate between speeches by speakers with prophetic titles (אישׁ־האלהים ,חזה ,ראה ,נביא) and speeches by speakers without prophetic titles, but being introduced by “possession formulas” (“the spirit of God was upon ...”, “the spirit enveloped ...”)
o it therefore can hardly be an accident that precisely in the final chapter of the book, the Chronicler mentions both “messengers” and “prophets”
o Whereas in the book of Kings the narratives on Ahijah, Elijah, Elisha, and others commonly included miraculous elements and were concerned with efficacy of the prophetic pronouncements, in the book of Chronicles the ministry of the prophets is nowhere described in terms of ecstasy, miracles, or political dimensions.
The obvious reason for this is that the prophetic narratives in Samuel- Kings mostly concern the northern kingdom ... Since the Chronicler wrote a history of the southern kingdom, there was little for the Chronicler to borrow.
o Chronicler repeatedly plays down narratives in which prophets are central characters
o In the book of Chronicles, the noun “prophet” is found at least seven times in connection with a document that is attributed to a specific prophet
o In the Chronicler’s presentation, these prophets do not act as messengers, but rather hold the position of keepers of the royal archives; they are characterized as responsible for the records of a specific king.
o The majority of the prophets and inspired messengers we met in the book of Chronicles have been “invented” by the Chronicler and should therefore be characterized as “literary personages” rather than historical persons.
o Consequently, the speeches delivered by these literary personages are the most appropriate place to look for the Chronicler’s own theological convictions and accents. One will hardly wonder that it is just these prophetic addresses where fundamental theological notions of 1–2 Chronicles are to be found.
o As far as so-called “classical prophets” are met in the Chronicler’s text, they do not act as inspired messengers, but rather hold the position of keepers of the royal archives, being responsible for the records of a king’s reign.
• Some Precedents for the Religion of the Book: Josiah’s Book and Ancient Revelatory Literature by Ben-Doc
o The Josiah Narrative, one of the most often discussed passages of the Bible, refuses to let go of the scholarly imagination.
o This paper will focus attention on the relevance of the Josiah narrative for the crystallization of what is now called “the Religion of the Book
o I will summarize the argument by the late Moshe Weinfeld, a radical proponent of the view that Josiah initiated a new religion of the Book:5 a) Josiah’s reform brought about a new religious situation in which prayers and Torah readings (2 Kgs 23:1–2, 21–23), being purely textual rituals, were no longer related to Temple and Sacrifice, but rather existed as an essential religious element by themselves; b) The acts of Josiah “began the process of the canonization of Scripture, a concept which penetrated also Christianity and Islam.”
o By the end of the seventh century BCE, says van der Toorn, the book was considered the ultimate source of authority. Furthermore, one particular book, i.e., Deuteronomy, was considered already then to be revealed knowledge (Deut 4:44, 29:28). Deuteronomy thus combines two key concepts of the later monotheistic religions which are intensively explored in van der Toorn’s book: Writtenness and Revelation.
o Indeed, the Josiah narrative uses the same building blocks that were used to construct a canonical awareness within ancient Israel and outside it in Late Antiquity: the concepts of Prophecy, Law, and the Divine authority of the written word.
o Taking a serious look at these extra-biblical precedents, we should consider the possibility that Josiah’s book was a transition point rather than a revolution. In the words of the medievalist Carolyn Bynum, we may wish “to stress connections and transitions rather than borders, boundaries and breaks.”
o The way out from the vicious circle is to acknowledge that the book find story did exist in a pre-Deuteronomistic account of Josiah’s reign, but not as the Book of Law. In that original account, the book was conceived as part of the oracular process in the royal court. Davies is right that the story—as it is now—urges the reader to identify the book with Deuteronomy, but this was not necessarily the intention of the original story.
o in priestly literature the word tôrāh denotes a short instruction which relates to the ritual realm—sacrifices, purity, leprosy, etc. This kind of instruction, always supplied by priests, was committed to writing in a series of short scrolls, and is presently collected into one priestly continuum in the Pentateuch. Side by side with the above connotations, the prophetic literature retained yet another meaning for tôrāh, which is closer to the cognate Akkadian term têrtu(m). In Akkadian (especially in Mari and in Neo-Assyrian but also in the Neo-Babylonian inscriptions of Nabunaid) this term means “oracle, decision,” as well as “the instruction of the liver by extispicy,” and thus remains part and parcel of the semantic field of divination and oracular instruction.
The book of Deuteronomy, when referring to itself as tôrāh, amalgamates several of the meanings adduced above, on its way to a radical change of the concept of writing and revelation in ancient Israel.
o Some scholars view the book-find of Josiah as a sign for a new tendency in Judahite religion which sought to replace the temple with the book
o In light of the above deliberations, however, I suggest that the book find of Josiah may be interpreted differently. A book find was a perfectly acceptable phenomenon, maybe even a prestigious way for discovering the divine decree, in Judah as in a variety of other ancient cultures in pre-Deuteronomistic times.
Hittite extant source wherein The king then sought to reenact this ritual, supporting his intention by double-checking the word of the written tablets by a second query to the oracle ** DOUBLE CHECKING ORACLES
o It is significant that a close parallel to the book-find of Josiah arises from the second millennium BCE Hittite culture rather than from the contemporary activity of prophets and diviners in the Neo-Assyrian court. Josiah’s book find can now be more confidently understood on a pre-Deuteronomic background.
o According to Nissinen, the basic format for a prophetic report was the disposable u’iltu.36 Several such reports were subsequently collected into a standard archival tablet in order to enhance their preservation and circulation. I suggest that a similar distinction might be useful with regard to Josiah’s book. While this book first appeared in history as a rather short divine instruction, meant to support the reforming intentions of the king, it was later represented by Deuteronomistic authors as a long and comprehensive book, to be archived and preserved in the temple. The initial document may have contained very small parts of Deuteronomy—possibly only chapters twelve through sixteen and twenty-eight37—but the composition gradually accrued to include more text in a longer form
o PROTO CANONIZATION
o The evidence collected here would suggest that the conceptions of Torah in both biblical and post-biblical religion may find some precedents in non-Israelite sources of prophetic and divinatory literature. Judaic religion during the monarchy was not a religion of the book. Under the Davidic dynasty, the Judahite state was a monarchy based on a divinely-supported royal family, which in turn relied on a divinatory-prophetic establishment. This ancient divinatory milieu gave rise to some early connections between writing and revelation even before the creation of a full-fledged reflection on writtenness. Later on, when this kind of reflection did come to exist in Judah, and as Jewish literati became acquainted with the Mesopotamian scholarly establishment, the older stories were refashioned to fit this new agenda. The story on the book find of Josiah came into existence as part of the early tendency, while it was still tightly close to the divinatory process pursued in the royal court. With the strengthening of the Deuteronomistic ideology, this story became the hinge on which to suspend a reformulated conception of the book. THESIS
• The Weberian Construct of Prophecy and Womanist and Feminist Recuperative Criticism by STEVE(?) Cook
o Prophets are theologians, social critics, intercessors, future tellers, priests, and intermediaries of divine information, among others. As good as biblical scholarship has been in bringing to light multiple ways by which to understand the idea of “prophet,” it has often not proceeded with clear articulations about the significance of its work, or, simply put, what interests its constructions of “prophet” serve
o The scholars who have spoken most clearly about their intentions in the context of the study of prophecy are womanists and feminists. Feminists and womanists highlight that the category of “prophet” presented in the biblical text includes women (starting with those named as such in the Bible), excavate women’s contributions to biblical prophetic texts (especially of “writing prophets”), critique prophetic language that perpetuates harmful social relations (Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel), and contribute to understanding the language, theology, history, and biblical representations of women prophets and prophecy in general.
o Weberian Construct of Prophecy and Feminist recuperative criticism
Per Weber: a prophet performs the role by virtue of charisma, preaches, and advances the renewal or establishment of a religion. A prophet is not established in the role by virtue of institutional standing, lineage, tradition, or the like; a prophet is not a ritual functionary; a prophet is not a “priest.”
Weber’s construction of prophecy has much that is widely appealing. By virtue of the mechanism by which one becomes a prophet (charisma) and by virtue of their importance (they stand at the very heart of a religion’s formation and continuance), anyone has the potential to create and sustain a social force (religion) deemed positive by many.
While neither Lee, Walker, nor Stanton were “heirs” to Weber, just as Wellhausen was not, all of them operated with expectations of “prophet” that he helped to imprint further in people’s minds
Concurrent ideas do not mean that they should be attributed to Weber though****????
o Issues for consideration
For generations of (male) scholars, prophets were men.
In part, the real-world gains that can be and have been made by womanist and feminist recuperative scholars comes from advancing “prophet” as a role that is freely open, especially significant, and analogous to modern professions, especially preachers. If recuperative readers were to promote the participation of women in religious leadership by drawing upon prophets in ancient Near Eastern contexts—who as a “profession” were often secondary to extispicy experts for providing monarchs with divine 22 information—recuperative hermeneutics might not have the same impact
For discussion of prophets vis-à-vis extispicy experts and the relevance for studying biblical prophets, see: Jack M. Sasson, “About ‘Mari and the Bible,’” RA 92 (1998): 118–19.
INTERESTING ANE PRIMACY OF EXTISPICY OVER PROPHECY
In thinking about the costs of painting prophets in ways that resemble Weber’s prophets, we should consider the prejudices that Weber’s “prophets are not equal to priests” dynamic can harbor and promote.
• 1 Sam 1-8 The Prophet As Agent Provocateur by Frolov
o It is only in the book of Samuel and in association with its title character that the root נבא goes into sustained use (eventually to be employed more than four hundred times in the Hebrew Bible) and certain related terms begin to show up, such as ראה “seer” (1 Sam 9:9) and חזון “vision” (1 Sam 3:1).
o Two major stages in the literary unfolding of the biblical concept of prophecy can be consequently singled out: first, Deut 18 with its concise “prophetic statute” and second, the opening chapters of 1 Samuel where the first biblical character emerges who not only walks and talks like a prophet but also is consistently characterized as such.
o Samuel’s first prophetic experience is recounted by 1 Sam 3. This well- known narrative, where YHWH speaks to Samuel at night while the latter lodges in the inner sanctum of the temple, where the ark is also housed, is unique in at least two respects.
1. First, the message that Samuel receives from the deity (vv. 11–14) is entirely redundant; it does not go even a small step beyond what the audience and Samuel’s mentor, Eli, already know from 2:27–36: that Eli’s priestly house is doomed to destruction because of the blasphemies of his sons. Of course, for Samuel himself it is definitely news, but that does not matter because he is not asked to do anything, not even to make the revelation public.
2. At the outset, the theophany it recounts is strictly auditory: the deity repeatedly calls Samuel by name, and the boy repeatedly runs to Eli, thinking that the master is calling him (vv. 4–8a). Only on the third try does Eli realize that his apprentice is being addressed by God and suggest an appropriate response (v. 8b–9). In the next verse, the format of the theophany dramatically changes: by “coming and standing erect,” YHWH apparently adds a visual component to it (v. 10a). Remarkably,
November 4, 2014
A great collection of essays on the prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible and related topics--you should definitely work through this text, its well worth your time.
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