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Theology of the Prophetic Books: The Death and Resurrection of Israel
Donald Gowan offers a unified reading of the prophetic books, showing that each has a distinctive contribution to make to a central theme. These books--Isaiah through Malachi--respond to three key moments in Israel's the end of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE, the end of the Southern Kingdom in 587 BCE, and the beginning of the restoration from the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE. Gowan traces the theme of death and resurrection throughout these accounts, finding a symbolic message of particular significance to Christian interpreters of the Bible.
264 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1998
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February 23, 2025
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February 4, 2026
Ever since New Year’s on January 1, 2026, a darkness and gloom have settled everywhere across the globe such as the world has not seen for almost three thousand years. Those who are familiar with the Old Testament can discern in the actions of the leaders of the American federal government a depravity equal to that of the worst of the kings in ancient Israel. Read 1 Kings 21:1-26, for instance. What is now taking place in Minnesota eerily recalls the story of king Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard and, although we have no photographs from that distant period, it is not far-fetched to imagine that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s facial features bear a marked resemblance to those of the evil queen Jezebel.
Now, let us pose an elementary question: how do we know that the prevalent wickedness is wrong, in the first place? We who are partisans of the liberal world order which has guarded the peace for seventy-five years inherit our notions of justice and right behavior from two strands of antiquity, the Graeco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian. Certainly, a Greek theoretician like Thucydides, Aristotle or Plato would have no difficulty with identifying the nature of and censuring the practice of tyranny. If that were all, the Republicans could well be condemned for a want of measure in the pursuit of eudaimonia, or for an entire forgetfulness of what genuine excellence of character consists in. But the troubling problem of their perfidy goes far deeper than merely this. For, in their wanton greed and raging lust for power they violate the core values of our civilization which ultimately derive from scripture and imply a solicitude for the lot of the common man alien to the thought-world of the Greek citizen or Roman patrician.
The revelation to Moses made known the God of Israel who, unlike the pagan divinities is ‘compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love’ (Psalm 103:8). These qualities are exemplified in the conduct expected of us, as taught in the Torah from the Ten Commandments (which almost certainly go back to Moses himself) to the rest of the Pentateuch. Salvation history, however, differs from pagan mythology in that it reflects not mankind’s self-initiated and obscure search for the meaning of existence but an ongoing process of divine pedagogy. Thus, revelation could not be complete upon the writing down of the Mosaic Law. Rather, in due time God sent the prophets to continue the work began by Moses. To them we owe our knowledge of what social justice, and therefore holiness demand.
This preamble brings us to the subject of the present work under review, Donald E. Gowan’s Theology of the Prophetic Books: The Death & Resurrection of Israel (Westminster Press, 1998). Here, with a fine and masterly command of modern biblical scholarship Gowan undertakes to explicate a distinctive view of what prophecy is all about. Ever since the Enlightenment, it has been popular to cast the Hebrew prophets as highly original personalities. This they without doubt were. But, for Gowan, thus to circumscribe their significance would be limiting and cause one, in the end, to miss what God intends to teach mankind through their mission. He offers instead what he describes as a ‘theological reading’ of the prophetic literature. NB, Gowan is primarily concerned with the writing prophets from the eighth century onwards. Some kind of prophecy, of course, had always been an integral part of the religion of the Hebrews, from the exceptional case of Moses during the fourteenth century to the prophetic guilds active during the period of the judges up to the tenth century (an institution known as nabism). For a good treatment of these earlier forms and for a discussion of what is novel and distinctive about the writing prophets, let us refer the reader to Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, Vol. I (Westminster Press, 1957), our review here.
A handful of quotations to indicate, however sketchily, the outlines of Gowan’s theme already telegraphed in the subtitle to the book:
With the rise of the great empire builders in the Middle East—Assyria, followed by Babylon and Persia—God determined to do a new thing, in effect to start over. The little kingdoms of Israel and Judah would lose their political existence forever, but out of the death of Judah, God would raise up a new people, who would understand about God what most of their pre-exilic ancestors had never been able to comprehend, and who would commit themselves to obeying his will to an extent their ancestors had never done. The first step in making that happen was to raise up a series of prophets, messengers of God, whose responsibility was straightforward. They were no reformers; it was too late for that. They were to announce what was about to happen, to insist that it would not happen because God could not protect them from their enemies, but that God intended to use the disaster for his own purposes. They were also preachers of the law; the standards of behavior which, if obeyed, would produce a community of peace and harmony in which all would benefit. [p. 10]
Jeremiah lived through the second moment that brought forth the work of the canonical prophets—the fall of Jerusalem. His book and that of his younger contemporary Ezekiel point forward to the third moment—the achievement of God’s aim in all of this, the creation of a new people via the experience of the exile. [p. 98]
There was a community of sorts at Tel-abid, with a prophet living in their midst. But what future did they have? Was there any likelihood that they could achieve and maintain an identity that could preserve the uniqueness of the Yahwistic faith under these conditions? How could one expect it, when even in their homeland—where tradition, culture, language, government and custom were unified in telling them who they were—the essence of Yahwism remained constantly in jeopardy, and as practiced it was a mishmash of elements drawn from several religions? Now they lived in an alien culture that denied the truth of their ancestral faith. Any judgment of their future based on purely human factors would have to expect them to assimilate to the predominant culture within a few years, leaving nothing but a few vague recollections of Yahweh and Israel. The Yahwistic faith did survive, however, and it did more than just survive. It is the book of Ezekiel that reveals to us the severity of the crisis, and it must have been the prophet’s own work that laid some of the foundations for a new ‘house of Israel’. He responded to a faith built on sand, to unbelief and to despair, and at significant points in the book the challenges he faced are revealed by quotations of what the people were saying. Those ‘proverbs’ serve very well to introduce much of the theology of Ezekiel. [p. 123]
For the returnees, then, Second Isaiah’s message could be affirmed as having partly come true, but at the same time it raised serious questions. Was this, in fact, really the fulfillment of what the prophet had promised, or was this return a meaningless event? At any rate, Ezekiel’s concept of the restoration as a resurrection of deceased Israel was certainly not the obvious way to think of what had happened so far. The beauty and power of the poetry of Second Isaiah thus mask a troublesome ambiguity. He proclaimed the truth about who God really is, and what God is really like, and the believing communities have agreed, since then, that he was right. But this prophet no more knew exactly what the future will be like than any other human (inspired or not), and the enthusiastic poetry depicting a glorious future meant that Second Isaiah could not be the end of prophecy. God’s work with and for his people in this new era was not as clear as it needed to be, and it is hard to say what their future might have been without the work of the post-exilic prophets of the sixth and fifth centuries. [p. 162]
As to ‘all peoples’, Third Isaiah partly follows the rather negative view of the nations found in Second Isaiah, but departs from it in several places to advocate an openness toward membership in the faithful community surpassing even that noted in Zechariah 2:15; 8:20-23; 14:16-19. As in chs. 40-55, it is expected that foreigners will become subservient to Israel, enriching Zion by their labors (Isaiah 60:10-12, 14; 61:5). This prophet’s intention to define the people of God according to their faithfulness, rather than ancestry, leads to the conclusion that the barriers to membership found elsewhere in the Old Testament need not apply (contrast Deuteronomy 23:1-8; Ezekiel 44:4-16). This is a remarkable move away from the national/ethnic understanding of religion that prevailed in the ancient world, but it is a logical conclusion to draw from the explicit monotheism of Second Isaiah. [p. 173]
Third Isaiah is evidence for the major religious issue that faced the restored community in Judah—putting into practice the insights into the true character of Yahwism that had been gained in exile. Religion as practiced in Judah still preserved the syncretism of the pre-exilic period, and that was not eliminated during the early years of the restoration. The role of the prophet, with respect to the abuses that prevailed—cultic and social—was different from before. The restoration prophets did not see their situation as hopeless. They were convinced this was the beginning of the new era of God’s favor. They believed the radical changes in history brought about by the Persians were signs that God was at work to bring the world into harmony with his will. [pp. 176-177]
To conclude the review, let us jump to the present day. In the twenty-first century we have reached nadir: it is no longer quite appropriate to speak of a decline of the West (Ostwald Spengler: Untergang des Abendlandes). To confer a sense of the magnitude of the swerve the arc of civilization has adopted since the turn of the twentieth century, a quote from the notably keen analysis of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt:
The tragedy of our time has been that only the emergence of crimes unknown in quality and proportion and not foreseen by the Ten Commandments made us realize that what the mob had known since the beginning of the century: that not only this or that form of government has become antiquated or that certain values and traditions need to be reconsidered, but that the whole of nearly three thousand years of Western civilization, as we have known it in a comparatively uninterrupted stream of tradition, has broken down; the whole structure of Western culture with all its implied beliefs, traditions, standards of judgment, has come toppling down over our heads. [p. 625 in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); see our review here]
Implicit in Hannah Arendt’s blanket resignation in this passage must be the observation that—what could not possibly have escaped her notice—British prime minister Winston Churchill and American president Harry S. Truman were never prosecuted for their monumental war crimes during World War II. Although there must have been many millions of airmen and support personnel implicated in the Allies’ strategic bombing campaign, it is not known that a single conscientious objector refused to obey orders to firebomb German and Japanese cities. Even less could one have grounds to expect that any of the police officers currently serving in Immigration and Customs Enforcement or in the Customs and Border Patrol will listen to the voice of conscience pleading with him to remember his humanity. So much for America’s being a ‘Christian nation’! Seldom has this recensionist ever had occasion literally to fear for another’s eternal salvation.
However disturbing current events may be—and they are exceptionally disturbing, withal—one will not be perturbed to the point of desperation if he heed this crucial point: the political freedom and liberal democracy we Americans long enjoyed but lately have lost are good things, for sure, but salvation history does not in any way depend on them. Four thousand years ago, God called Abraham, who was living in the city of Ur in upper Mesopotamia among the Chaldaeans. The very concept of liberty was altogether unheard of in near Eastern civilization of Abraham’s day (see, for example, Marc van de Mieroop’s excellent A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2003), our review here). Nor had anything changed in this respect half a millennium later with Moses under the despotic Pharaoh. Also surprisingly in Israel and Judah after king David. In the course of the five hundred years following the inception of the Davidic dynasty, there arose but two good kings, Hezekiah (716-687 BC) and Josiah (640-609 BC).
Here is the lesson to which we must direct our attention, if anyone be left today who still cares about justice and rule of law. The prophet Elijah, at a dismal pass when all the king’s men—the aristocratic elite, the army, the royal priesthood—had abandoned the Covenant to which they were bound by a solemn obligation to the God of Israel no less thoroughly than modern-day American religious conservatives have wrecked the Constitution and, what is incalculably worse, forsaken Christ (or where exactly in the gospels does Jesus say that one should steal from the poor in order to give to the rich; that falsehood, deception, lying and intellectual dishonesty are the way to knowledge and power; that one should not love one’s enemy but persecute him; that police shootings and war crimes are acceptable, even to be encouraged and celebrated; that those who hunger and thirst for injustice will find their fill; etc. etc.?), cries out in a key passage:
When Ahab told Jezebel everything that Elijah had done, and how he had put all the prophets [of Baal, see 1 Kings 18:20-40] to the sword, Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, ‘May the gods bring unnameable ills on me and worse ills too, if by this time tomorrow I have not made your life like one of theirs!’ He was afraid and fled for his life. He came to Beersheba, a town of Judah, where he left his servant. He himself went on into the desert, a day’s journey, and sitting under a furze bush wished he were dead. ‘YHWH’, he said, ‘I have had enough. Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors’. Then he lay down and went to sleep. Then all of a sudden an angel touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat’. He looked around, and there at his head was a scone baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again. But the angel of YHWH came back a second time and touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat, or the journey will be too long for you’. So he got up and ate and drank, and strengthened by that food he walked for forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, God’s mountain. There he went into a cave and spent the night there. Then the word of YHWH came to him saying, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He replied, ‘I am full of jealous zeal for YHWH Sabaoth, because the Israelites have abandoned your covenant, have torn down your altars and put your prophets to the sword. I am the only one left, and now they want to kill me’ (1 Kings 19:1-10).
For, strange as it may appear to a worldly wisdom founded upon the imperative to secure material abundance and political control, this divine strength through human weakness is how providence elects to operate! Elijah thereupon receives the theophany and commission of 1 Kings 19:11-18. We cannot know God’s mysterious purpose that is working itself out in our own dark times, but a few of us also may hope to be numbered among a remnant to be spared, as were the ‘seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bent before Baal, all the mouths that have not kissed him’ (1 Kings 19:18).
To the overwhelming majority of American religious conservatives who have been lured into the unprincipled denial of everything for which, supposedly, they once stood by the thrilling prospect of exercising unparalleled world domination at the head of a right-wing authoritarian dictatorship we say, however: your idol is none other than Mammon, cf. Matthew 6:24, ‘No man can serve two masters: either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money’.
Against these sorry apostates, let us recommend the Old-Testament prophetic ideal of social justice and conformity to the commandments, as recapitulated so admirably in the present work by Donald E. Gowan. Hannah Arendt above, however astute a witness she may be to the great evil attendant on the collapse of Western civilization begun in her lifetime and now consummated in ours, allows herself to fall into an alarmist note in that, as a Jewish atheist, she lacks a dependable trust in God’s enigmatic salvific design. But anyone who knows God knows better. As the inestimable German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) memorably puts it in his poem, Patmos:
Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch.
In one of those ironies of history, the papacy has been entrusted to its first American occupant, Pope Leo XIV, even as the rampaging Americans president Donald J. Trump and vice-president J.D. Vance vow themselves to destroy the stable and prosperous world order so patiently and meticulously built up by previous generations. Pope Leo XIV grew up in Chicago long enough ago not to have been corrupted by the fanatical turn the Republican Party has taken in the past two decades. Let us hope he will right the ship of the Church after the severe battering it has endured at the hands of its powerful conservative wing in America. For, as Larry Siedentop shows in his magisterial Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2014, reviewed by us here), the long-term historical record reveals a preponderant tendency towards an increasingly liberal arrangement of political affairs, under the solicitous tutelage of the Latin church. Just as Israelite religion eventually recovered from the unmitigated disaster of the Babylonian Exile and issued in the two branches of theological tradition we know today as Christianity and rabbinical Judaism, then, perhaps in the course of time (to be measured in centuries) a sensible and just ethic of government under law rather than the rule of men may finally be restored.
Now, let us pose an elementary question: how do we know that the prevalent wickedness is wrong, in the first place? We who are partisans of the liberal world order which has guarded the peace for seventy-five years inherit our notions of justice and right behavior from two strands of antiquity, the Graeco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian. Certainly, a Greek theoretician like Thucydides, Aristotle or Plato would have no difficulty with identifying the nature of and censuring the practice of tyranny. If that were all, the Republicans could well be condemned for a want of measure in the pursuit of eudaimonia, or for an entire forgetfulness of what genuine excellence of character consists in. But the troubling problem of their perfidy goes far deeper than merely this. For, in their wanton greed and raging lust for power they violate the core values of our civilization which ultimately derive from scripture and imply a solicitude for the lot of the common man alien to the thought-world of the Greek citizen or Roman patrician.
The revelation to Moses made known the God of Israel who, unlike the pagan divinities is ‘compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love’ (Psalm 103:8). These qualities are exemplified in the conduct expected of us, as taught in the Torah from the Ten Commandments (which almost certainly go back to Moses himself) to the rest of the Pentateuch. Salvation history, however, differs from pagan mythology in that it reflects not mankind’s self-initiated and obscure search for the meaning of existence but an ongoing process of divine pedagogy. Thus, revelation could not be complete upon the writing down of the Mosaic Law. Rather, in due time God sent the prophets to continue the work began by Moses. To them we owe our knowledge of what social justice, and therefore holiness demand.
This preamble brings us to the subject of the present work under review, Donald E. Gowan’s Theology of the Prophetic Books: The Death & Resurrection of Israel (Westminster Press, 1998). Here, with a fine and masterly command of modern biblical scholarship Gowan undertakes to explicate a distinctive view of what prophecy is all about. Ever since the Enlightenment, it has been popular to cast the Hebrew prophets as highly original personalities. This they without doubt were. But, for Gowan, thus to circumscribe their significance would be limiting and cause one, in the end, to miss what God intends to teach mankind through their mission. He offers instead what he describes as a ‘theological reading’ of the prophetic literature. NB, Gowan is primarily concerned with the writing prophets from the eighth century onwards. Some kind of prophecy, of course, had always been an integral part of the religion of the Hebrews, from the exceptional case of Moses during the fourteenth century to the prophetic guilds active during the period of the judges up to the tenth century (an institution known as nabism). For a good treatment of these earlier forms and for a discussion of what is novel and distinctive about the writing prophets, let us refer the reader to Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, Vol. I (Westminster Press, 1957), our review here.
A handful of quotations to indicate, however sketchily, the outlines of Gowan’s theme already telegraphed in the subtitle to the book:
With the rise of the great empire builders in the Middle East—Assyria, followed by Babylon and Persia—God determined to do a new thing, in effect to start over. The little kingdoms of Israel and Judah would lose their political existence forever, but out of the death of Judah, God would raise up a new people, who would understand about God what most of their pre-exilic ancestors had never been able to comprehend, and who would commit themselves to obeying his will to an extent their ancestors had never done. The first step in making that happen was to raise up a series of prophets, messengers of God, whose responsibility was straightforward. They were no reformers; it was too late for that. They were to announce what was about to happen, to insist that it would not happen because God could not protect them from their enemies, but that God intended to use the disaster for his own purposes. They were also preachers of the law; the standards of behavior which, if obeyed, would produce a community of peace and harmony in which all would benefit. [p. 10]
Jeremiah lived through the second moment that brought forth the work of the canonical prophets—the fall of Jerusalem. His book and that of his younger contemporary Ezekiel point forward to the third moment—the achievement of God’s aim in all of this, the creation of a new people via the experience of the exile. [p. 98]
There was a community of sorts at Tel-abid, with a prophet living in their midst. But what future did they have? Was there any likelihood that they could achieve and maintain an identity that could preserve the uniqueness of the Yahwistic faith under these conditions? How could one expect it, when even in their homeland—where tradition, culture, language, government and custom were unified in telling them who they were—the essence of Yahwism remained constantly in jeopardy, and as practiced it was a mishmash of elements drawn from several religions? Now they lived in an alien culture that denied the truth of their ancestral faith. Any judgment of their future based on purely human factors would have to expect them to assimilate to the predominant culture within a few years, leaving nothing but a few vague recollections of Yahweh and Israel. The Yahwistic faith did survive, however, and it did more than just survive. It is the book of Ezekiel that reveals to us the severity of the crisis, and it must have been the prophet’s own work that laid some of the foundations for a new ‘house of Israel’. He responded to a faith built on sand, to unbelief and to despair, and at significant points in the book the challenges he faced are revealed by quotations of what the people were saying. Those ‘proverbs’ serve very well to introduce much of the theology of Ezekiel. [p. 123]
For the returnees, then, Second Isaiah’s message could be affirmed as having partly come true, but at the same time it raised serious questions. Was this, in fact, really the fulfillment of what the prophet had promised, or was this return a meaningless event? At any rate, Ezekiel’s concept of the restoration as a resurrection of deceased Israel was certainly not the obvious way to think of what had happened so far. The beauty and power of the poetry of Second Isaiah thus mask a troublesome ambiguity. He proclaimed the truth about who God really is, and what God is really like, and the believing communities have agreed, since then, that he was right. But this prophet no more knew exactly what the future will be like than any other human (inspired or not), and the enthusiastic poetry depicting a glorious future meant that Second Isaiah could not be the end of prophecy. God’s work with and for his people in this new era was not as clear as it needed to be, and it is hard to say what their future might have been without the work of the post-exilic prophets of the sixth and fifth centuries. [p. 162]
As to ‘all peoples’, Third Isaiah partly follows the rather negative view of the nations found in Second Isaiah, but departs from it in several places to advocate an openness toward membership in the faithful community surpassing even that noted in Zechariah 2:15; 8:20-23; 14:16-19. As in chs. 40-55, it is expected that foreigners will become subservient to Israel, enriching Zion by their labors (Isaiah 60:10-12, 14; 61:5). This prophet’s intention to define the people of God according to their faithfulness, rather than ancestry, leads to the conclusion that the barriers to membership found elsewhere in the Old Testament need not apply (contrast Deuteronomy 23:1-8; Ezekiel 44:4-16). This is a remarkable move away from the national/ethnic understanding of religion that prevailed in the ancient world, but it is a logical conclusion to draw from the explicit monotheism of Second Isaiah. [p. 173]
Third Isaiah is evidence for the major religious issue that faced the restored community in Judah—putting into practice the insights into the true character of Yahwism that had been gained in exile. Religion as practiced in Judah still preserved the syncretism of the pre-exilic period, and that was not eliminated during the early years of the restoration. The role of the prophet, with respect to the abuses that prevailed—cultic and social—was different from before. The restoration prophets did not see their situation as hopeless. They were convinced this was the beginning of the new era of God’s favor. They believed the radical changes in history brought about by the Persians were signs that God was at work to bring the world into harmony with his will. [pp. 176-177]
To conclude the review, let us jump to the present day. In the twenty-first century we have reached nadir: it is no longer quite appropriate to speak of a decline of the West (Ostwald Spengler: Untergang des Abendlandes). To confer a sense of the magnitude of the swerve the arc of civilization has adopted since the turn of the twentieth century, a quote from the notably keen analysis of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt:
The tragedy of our time has been that only the emergence of crimes unknown in quality and proportion and not foreseen by the Ten Commandments made us realize that what the mob had known since the beginning of the century: that not only this or that form of government has become antiquated or that certain values and traditions need to be reconsidered, but that the whole of nearly three thousand years of Western civilization, as we have known it in a comparatively uninterrupted stream of tradition, has broken down; the whole structure of Western culture with all its implied beliefs, traditions, standards of judgment, has come toppling down over our heads. [p. 625 in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); see our review here]
Implicit in Hannah Arendt’s blanket resignation in this passage must be the observation that—what could not possibly have escaped her notice—British prime minister Winston Churchill and American president Harry S. Truman were never prosecuted for their monumental war crimes during World War II. Although there must have been many millions of airmen and support personnel implicated in the Allies’ strategic bombing campaign, it is not known that a single conscientious objector refused to obey orders to firebomb German and Japanese cities. Even less could one have grounds to expect that any of the police officers currently serving in Immigration and Customs Enforcement or in the Customs and Border Patrol will listen to the voice of conscience pleading with him to remember his humanity. So much for America’s being a ‘Christian nation’! Seldom has this recensionist ever had occasion literally to fear for another’s eternal salvation.
However disturbing current events may be—and they are exceptionally disturbing, withal—one will not be perturbed to the point of desperation if he heed this crucial point: the political freedom and liberal democracy we Americans long enjoyed but lately have lost are good things, for sure, but salvation history does not in any way depend on them. Four thousand years ago, God called Abraham, who was living in the city of Ur in upper Mesopotamia among the Chaldaeans. The very concept of liberty was altogether unheard of in near Eastern civilization of Abraham’s day (see, for example, Marc van de Mieroop’s excellent A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2003), our review here). Nor had anything changed in this respect half a millennium later with Moses under the despotic Pharaoh. Also surprisingly in Israel and Judah after king David. In the course of the five hundred years following the inception of the Davidic dynasty, there arose but two good kings, Hezekiah (716-687 BC) and Josiah (640-609 BC).
Here is the lesson to which we must direct our attention, if anyone be left today who still cares about justice and rule of law. The prophet Elijah, at a dismal pass when all the king’s men—the aristocratic elite, the army, the royal priesthood—had abandoned the Covenant to which they were bound by a solemn obligation to the God of Israel no less thoroughly than modern-day American religious conservatives have wrecked the Constitution and, what is incalculably worse, forsaken Christ (or where exactly in the gospels does Jesus say that one should steal from the poor in order to give to the rich; that falsehood, deception, lying and intellectual dishonesty are the way to knowledge and power; that one should not love one’s enemy but persecute him; that police shootings and war crimes are acceptable, even to be encouraged and celebrated; that those who hunger and thirst for injustice will find their fill; etc. etc.?), cries out in a key passage:
When Ahab told Jezebel everything that Elijah had done, and how he had put all the prophets [of Baal, see 1 Kings 18:20-40] to the sword, Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, ‘May the gods bring unnameable ills on me and worse ills too, if by this time tomorrow I have not made your life like one of theirs!’ He was afraid and fled for his life. He came to Beersheba, a town of Judah, where he left his servant. He himself went on into the desert, a day’s journey, and sitting under a furze bush wished he were dead. ‘YHWH’, he said, ‘I have had enough. Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors’. Then he lay down and went to sleep. Then all of a sudden an angel touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat’. He looked around, and there at his head was a scone baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again. But the angel of YHWH came back a second time and touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat, or the journey will be too long for you’. So he got up and ate and drank, and strengthened by that food he walked for forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, God’s mountain. There he went into a cave and spent the night there. Then the word of YHWH came to him saying, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He replied, ‘I am full of jealous zeal for YHWH Sabaoth, because the Israelites have abandoned your covenant, have torn down your altars and put your prophets to the sword. I am the only one left, and now they want to kill me’ (1 Kings 19:1-10).
For, strange as it may appear to a worldly wisdom founded upon the imperative to secure material abundance and political control, this divine strength through human weakness is how providence elects to operate! Elijah thereupon receives the theophany and commission of 1 Kings 19:11-18. We cannot know God’s mysterious purpose that is working itself out in our own dark times, but a few of us also may hope to be numbered among a remnant to be spared, as were the ‘seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bent before Baal, all the mouths that have not kissed him’ (1 Kings 19:18).
To the overwhelming majority of American religious conservatives who have been lured into the unprincipled denial of everything for which, supposedly, they once stood by the thrilling prospect of exercising unparalleled world domination at the head of a right-wing authoritarian dictatorship we say, however: your idol is none other than Mammon, cf. Matthew 6:24, ‘No man can serve two masters: either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money’.
Against these sorry apostates, let us recommend the Old-Testament prophetic ideal of social justice and conformity to the commandments, as recapitulated so admirably in the present work by Donald E. Gowan. Hannah Arendt above, however astute a witness she may be to the great evil attendant on the collapse of Western civilization begun in her lifetime and now consummated in ours, allows herself to fall into an alarmist note in that, as a Jewish atheist, she lacks a dependable trust in God’s enigmatic salvific design. But anyone who knows God knows better. As the inestimable German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) memorably puts it in his poem, Patmos:
Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch.
In one of those ironies of history, the papacy has been entrusted to its first American occupant, Pope Leo XIV, even as the rampaging Americans president Donald J. Trump and vice-president J.D. Vance vow themselves to destroy the stable and prosperous world order so patiently and meticulously built up by previous generations. Pope Leo XIV grew up in Chicago long enough ago not to have been corrupted by the fanatical turn the Republican Party has taken in the past two decades. Let us hope he will right the ship of the Church after the severe battering it has endured at the hands of its powerful conservative wing in America. For, as Larry Siedentop shows in his magisterial Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2014, reviewed by us here), the long-term historical record reveals a preponderant tendency towards an increasingly liberal arrangement of political affairs, under the solicitous tutelage of the Latin church. Just as Israelite religion eventually recovered from the unmitigated disaster of the Babylonian Exile and issued in the two branches of theological tradition we know today as Christianity and rabbinical Judaism, then, perhaps in the course of time (to be measured in centuries) a sensible and just ethic of government under law rather than the rule of men may finally be restored.
July 23, 2018
Gowan presents almost a mini-commentary on the Prophetic books in the Old Testament. Chapter 5 is the value of reading this book. What he presents isn't difficult to pick up based on the title and issues he raises in his introduction.
May 29, 2008
Gowan's work expands upon the seminal work of Abraham Heschel in describing Israel of the 8th - 6th century BC in the reading of the major and minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible, and theologically explores the death of Israel - warned about by the early prophets, described by Isaiah and Jeremiah, as well as its purification and resurrection as found in Isaiah 40-66, Joel, Malachi, and Zechariah, among others. This book is a wonderful counterpart to reading Brueggeman's 2 volume set on Isaiah (Westminster Bible Companion).
August 15, 2012
Great commentary over the prophetic books. I really liked how it pulls you into the story of the prophets rather than looking at the prophets outside of time.
December 20, 2012
Gowan's method is peculiar, reading the Hebrew Bible through the eyes of the Christian Scriptures. I think the method is fairly problematic.
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