Jesus the Seer: The Progress of Prophecy

By Ben Witherington III

Scholars recognize that prophetic traditions, expressions, and experiences stand at the heart of most religions in the ancient Mediterranean world. This is no less true for the world of Judaism and Jesus. Ben Witherington III offers an extensive, cross-cultural survey of the broader expressions of prophecy in its ancient Mediterranean context, beginning with Mari, moving to biblical figures not often regarded as prophets‒‒Balaam, Deborah, Moses, and Aaron‒‒and to the apocalyptic seer in postexilic prophecy, showing that no single pattern describes all prophetic figures. The consequence is that different aspects of Jesus’s activity touch upon prophetic predecessors: his miracles, on Elijah and Elisha; his self-understanding as the Son of Man, on Daniel and 1 Enoch; his warnings of woe and judgment, on the “writing prophets” in Judean tradition; and his messianic entry into Jerusalem, on Zechariah 9. Witherington also surveys the phenomenon of apocalyptic prophecy in early Christianity, including Paul, Revelation, the Didache, Hermas, and the Montanist movement. Jesus the Seer is a worthy complement to Witherington’s other volume on Jesus, Jesus the Sage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781451489507

Ben Witherington III

Ben Witherington III is professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world and has written over forty books, including The Brother of Jesus (co-author), The Jesus Quest, and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. Witherington has been interviewed on NBC Dateline, CBS 48 Hours, FOX News, top NPR programs, and major print media including the Associated Press and the New York Times. He was featured with N.T. Wright on the recent BBC Easter special entitled, The Story of Jesus. Ben lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Book preview

Jesus the Seer

THE ORACLE

Call them forth,

Call them forth,

From the passive past.

The soothsayers and truth sayers

The yea sayers and nay sayers

The foretellers and forthtellers,

Scanning the skies,

Hoping for the horizon,

Acting out the plan

Signing forth the ban

Boon or bane

Commendation or condemnation

Blessing or curse,

Let them wrap their mantles

’Round their hoary heads

And cry: Thus saith the Lord

Once more

9-13-97

BW III

JESUS THE SEER

The Progress of Prophecy

Copyright © 2014 Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Visit http://www.augsburgfortress.org/copyrights/ or write to Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440.

Cover image © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

Cover design: Tory Herman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Print ISBN: 978-1-4514-8887-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-4514-8950-7

Table of Contents

Preface to the Fortress Press Edition

A Preview of Coming Attractions

Abbreviations

Introduction: Through the Eyes of the Seer

1. The Beginning of the Word

2. Keepers of the Flame: The Early Israelite Prophetic Experience

3. Courting the Prophets: Prophets and the Early Monarchy

4. Prophets of Holy Writ: From Amos to the Exile

5. Exilic Dreams of Grandeur

6. Vital Visions or the Dying of the Light?

7. Apocalypse—Then

8. Jesus the Seer

9. Prophets, Seers, and Dreamers at the Dawn of the Christian Era

10. Profile of a Prophet and His Movement: Jesus and His Followers in the Greco-Roman World

11. From the Seer to the Shepherd: Apocalyptic at the End of the New Testament Era

12. From Mari to Montanus

13. The Progress of Prophecy: Conclusions

Bibliography

Index of Modern Authors

Index of Ancient Sources

Preface to the Fortress Press Edition

WHEN Jesus the seer first came out in 1999, it was intended as a companion volume to Jesus the sage, done with Fortress Press (2000). Unfortunately, I had lost both my editors at Fortress, and both Fortress Press and I were going through transitions of various sorts. Long story short, the book was published by another publisher (Hendrickson), and when they sold numerous volumes over to Baker Books, the rights reverted to them. I am very grateful to my friends at Baker that they have given me back the rights to this volume, which has served and continues to serve as a textbook on prophecy in the Bible and on the historical Jesus and his earliest disciples in particular. I am equally grateful to my friends at Fortress, especially to Will Bergkamp and Pamela Johnson, for their eagerness to publish this volume once more, this time as the proper companion volume to Jesus the sage it was originally intended to be.

While much New Testament water has certainly gone under the bridge since 1999, somewhat strangely, very little of it has to do with nt prophecy in general or the historical Jesus in particular. This may be attributed in part to the gradual fading away of the Third Quest for the historical Jesus (only a few major volumes are still being produced out of that initial surge in emphasis; notably, John Meier’s series on A Marginal Jew is still producing fresh material), and in part from the turning of the discipline of nt studies to many other subjects.

Yes, there have been a few studies of note in the past fifteen years on the historical Jesus. Besides those of Meier, I am thinking of the volume of collected essays edited by A.-J. Levine and others, titled The historical Jesus in Context (Princeton University Press, 2006), to which I contributed a discussion of Isaiah 53, as well as Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus exist? (HarperOne, 2012), which rebuts the arguments of those who would wish to claim there was no historical Jesus. Equally important is the new edition of The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (ed. J. B. Green, et al.: InterVarsity Press, 2013), which gives all sorts of updated bibliography and discussion of relevant topics that overlap with this study’s focus. I would be remiss if I did not mention the remarkable conference at Lateran University and the Vatican, sponsored by the Pope Benedict XVI Foundation and held in October 2013, which produced numerous good papers on the historical Jesus from a wide variety of Jesus scholars. These papers, including my paper Jesus the Sage and his Provocative Parables, have just been published in two volumes, under the title The Gospels: history and Christology. The search of Joseph ratzinger—Benedict XVI (ed. B. Estrada et al.; Vatican Press, 2013). The conference was prompted by Pope Benedict’s three remarkable books on the historical Jesus, which were written at a more popular level but which nonetheless prompted some excellent discussion about the historical Jesus.

It is interesting, however, that in terms of fresh stand-alone monographs on prophecy and Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, basically what we find is a rehash of the older arguments by Albert Schweitzer that repeat Schweitzer’s major mistake—that is, assuming that Jesus engaged in date-setting in regard to his return and/or the end of all things, based chiefly on a misreading of Mark 13 (see, for example, the studies by Bart Ehrman and by Dale Allison on Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet).¹ It seems that even with the Third Quest waning, the ghost of Schweitzer’s Jesus has still not been entirely exorcised.

What has not been attempted since 1999, so far as I can tell, is what I sought to do with the volume Jesus the seer: namely, study Jesus and early Christianity in the context of the long practice and history of prophecy in the Ancient Near East, in the Old Testament, in the Greco-Roman world, and in early Christianity, and see how the prophetic traditions and practice developed over time. Thus the modus operandi in Jesus the seer is the same as what I pursued in Jesus the sage, and it still provides a useful widerand longer-angle lens from which to evaluate Jesus as a visionary prophet and his followers, such as John of Patmos, who continued to practice prophecy in that manner.

I have not sought to update the discussions of these various chapters in this volume with more recent references, since this is a reprint rather than a whole new edition, but there is still more than enough material in this volume to prompt more good discussion on the subject and to tease minds into active thought about Jesus and prophecy, which was the intent in the first place. I look forward to the response to this renewed stimulus.

Epiphany 2014

---

1 B. Ehrman, Jesus. Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and D. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).

A Preview of Coming Attractions

THE STUDY OF PROPHECY, whether ancient Near Eastern, Hebrew, early Christian, or Greco-Roman, has taken many twists and turns in the twentieth century. Occasionally, scholarship on prophecy has been refreshed and refined by new, unexpected discoveries from such places as Mari, Deir Alla, where a tablet referring to Balaam of Beor was found, or Qumran, in the salt flats along the Dead Sea. Yet despite all this stimulus, no one to my knowledge has ever attempted a broad, cross-cultural and diachronic study of the bearing of the prophetic phenomenon on the biblical data. No one has looked at the whole to see what trends and developments took place over the course of time or what the whole might tell us about the parts.

This judgment stands in spite of the fact that a considerable amount of attention has been paid to the historical relationship of apocalyptic literature to prophetic literature. Yet even this helpful body of scholarly work has not led to an adequate analysis of the broader sweep of the social and historical phenomenon of prophecy in the eastern Mediterranean. To the contrary, the study of prophecy has become an increasingly specialized and text-oriented matter. James Ward says with reason about the study of ot prophecy, Today the emphasis is upon the [prophetic] books themselves, and the complex literary traditions that produced them ¹ rather than on the prophets, their experience, or their original oracles. This is a 180-degrees reversal of the trend in the early part of this century when there was so much emphasis on prophets as unique individuals with intriguing religious experiences. ² Increasing doubts about the historical substance and character of the biblical prophetic books is in part responsible for this shift. Psychological maximalism has been replaced by historical minimalism.

Yet, while attention to tradition history and to the redaction of prophetic books is an important task, it need not eclipse other lines of approach to the phenomenon of ancient prophecy—and for good reason. Consider the remarks of R. P. Gordon:

While the phenomenon of the disappearing prophet has become a feature (indeed function) of some modern approaches to Israelite prophecy, at the same time the profile of Syro-Mesopotamian prophecy has become increasingly clear, and there are now definite cognates for the basic Hebrew word for prophet. Against this background . . . though eighth century prophets like Amos and Hosea may not have been much interested in the title prophet (. . . not surprisingly when the title was used for non-Israelite prophets), they nevertheless saw themselves functioning as such. No single aspect of Israelite prophecy marks it out as distinct from its near eastern equivalents; its obvious distinctiveness derives from Israel’s unique perception of God. ³

For some time I have been working on a broad study of the social phenomenon of prophecy in the ancient Mediterranean world, realizing full well that in some respects it is an impossible task. No one can be the master of this enormous corpus of material, and so at various points I have had to simply accept that I have to stand on the shoulders of the experts in this material and rely on their critical judgments. This means that this study must be seen for what it is—a first attempt to come to grips with this vast subject, not a definitive treatment of it.

Nevertheless, having immersed myself in the scope and breadth of this material, a great deal of light has been shed for me on issues that have vexed my particular field of expertise—nt studies. For example, I have pondered why it is that such a large proportion of the Hebrew Scriptures involves prophetic books, while the nt, unless one counts the apocalyptic revelation that concludes that corpus, contains no books which could be called prophetic as a whole or even any that in the main involve collections of oracles. I believe there are also many clues about Hebrew prophecy as part of the larger ANE phenomenon, including such sites as Mari and elsewhere, which attest to a family resemblance.

While there was a range of things that prophets might do and say in the ancient world, nonetheless their activity, the form of their discourse, and the social purposes and effects of this discourse were similar in all these Mediterranean cultures, so much so that a person traveling from, say, Rome to the extremes of the eastern end of the Empire in the first century ad could speak about prophets and prophecy and expect most audiences essentially to understand. Similarly, during the time of Jeremiah one could travel from Babylon to Jerusalem and expect the social phenomenon of prophecy to be in many, though not all, ways the same in a variety of these ANE cultures. The story of Jonah, like the story of Balaam, encourages us to look at prophecy as a cross-cultural phenomenon, with influence moving in various directions and development happening through the course of time.

I have discovered in my odyssey through the prophetic material that a great deal of loose talk has been allowed to pass for critical thinking about the nature of prophets and their utterances. For example, in my discipline, but also in ot studies, prophecy is often regarded as synonymous with preaching or with the creative handling and interpreting of earlier sacred texts. Part of this lack of clarity may be put down to confusion on the difference between prophetic utterances and the literary residue of such utterances, namely, books of prophetic material, collected and edited by scribes over the course of time. I have found it important in this study to distinguish the prophetic experience, the prophetic expression, the prophetic tradition, and prophetic corpus, all of which are part of the social phenomenon that falls under the heading of prophecy.

I have been struck repeatedly by how across a variety of cultural lines and over the course of an enormous amount of time Jews, pagans, and Christians in the eastern end of the Mediterranean crescent all seem to have had reasonably clear and similar ideas about what constituted a prophet and prophecy. To share a few of the conclusions of this study in advance, a prophet was an oracle, a mouthpiece for some divine being, and as such he or she did not speak for himor herself but for another. A prophet might also be many other things (teacher, priest, sage), but the role of prophet could be distinguished from these other roles and functions. Prophecy, whether from Mari or Jerusalem or Delphi or Rome, was spoken in known languages, usually in poetic form, and so it was an intelligible, even if often puzzling, kind of discourse. It might involve spontaneous utterances or a reading of various omens or signs, but in either case it was not a matter of deciphering ancient texts, which was the tasks of scribes, sages, and exegetes. Furthermore, people consulted a prophet to obtain a late word from a deity about pressing or impending matters. In sociological terms the prophet must be seen as a mediatorial figure; this, therefore, makes the prophet significant but also subject to being pushed to the margins of society if the divine words involve curse rather than blessing, judgment rather than redemption. At least in the setting of Israel and early Christianity, the prophet also deliberately stands at the boundary of the community—the boundary between God and the community as well as the boundary between the community and those outside it. It is the task of the prophet to call God’s people to account and to reinforce the prescribed boundaries of the community while reestablishing or reinforcing the divine-human relationship.

This takes us to another factor which has too often been underplayed in the scholarly discourse (perhaps in order to avoid the embarrassment of having to say that a particular favorite prophet was wrong). I am referring to the fact that prophecy was more often than not predictive in character, though most often its subject matter dealt with something thought to be on the near horizon, not something decades much less centuries in the future. And even when the more remote future was the subject of prophecy, the subject was raised because it was thought to have a rather direct bearing on the present. In short, ancient prophets were not armchair speculators about remote subjects. (Nostradamus, if even he were such a speculator, would not have felt comfortable in this company.)

Let me be clear from the outset that I am not just saying that a broad crosscultural study of the social phenomenon of prophecy is illuminating. This is true and is part of the focus of this study, but one could certainly do a broad study that was simply synchronic in nature (e.g., prophecy in the eighth century bc in the ANE including Israel). I intend in this study to also pursue particular prophetic trajectories through time, which also affords a tremendously illuminating way of examining the material. The basic arrangement of this book is diachronic.

Perhaps a small sample of the value of a diachronic study of prophecy is in order at this juncture, as a partial justification for that dimension of this work. Our earliest relevant text, Isa 24:21–22, reads: On that day the Lord will punish the host of heaven and on earth the kings of earth. They will be gathered together like prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a prison, and after many days they will be punished. Although the identity of the host of heaven is not explicit, the contrast between them and the kings of the earth makes it likely that rebellious powers in heaven are in view (cf. Deut 32:8; Dan 10:13). There may also be something to the suggestion that these powers in heaven are seen as the ones controlling the rebellious kings and their nations. ⁴ What is crucial to note about this passage is the stress that these powers are put in something like an extraterrestrial prison or holding cell until the time comes for them to be punished.

The second passage from closer to the time of, if not during, the early stages of the nt era is 1 en. 10:4–6. Here the picture of the two-stage defeat of these powers (or at least one of them) is clarified and particularized: "the Lord said to Raphael, ‘Bind Azaz’el ⁵ hand and foot, throw him into the darkness!’ And he made a hole in the desert which was in Duda’el and cast him there; he threw on top of him rugged sharp rocks. And he covered his face in order that he might not see the light; and in order that he might be sent into the great fire on the day of judgment." ⁶ Our next port of call is several nt texts, the earliest being Jude. For convenience we will present these three texts in parallel columns to facilitate the comparison.

JUDE (v. 6)

And the angels who did not keep their own position, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains in deepest darkness for the judgment of the great Day.

2 PETER (2:4)

For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell [Tartaros] and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment.

1 PETER (3:19–20)

he [Christ] went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah.

Obviously, the first two of these texts are more similar to one another than the third is to either one. R. Bauckham has demonstrated a likely literary link between Jude and 2 Peter, as the passages above show. ⁷ The first two of these texts are not obviously of christological import, though if the reference to Christ as Lord in Jude 4 prepares for v. 5, where the Lord is the one who saved the people from Egypt and then kept the angels in chains, then we have a comment on Christ’s preexistence and his roles in Israel’s history, drawing on Wisdom ideas not unlike what we find in 1 Cor 10:4 (cf.Wis. of Sol. 11:4). The author of 2 Peter, however, sees God and not Christ as the one who chained the disobedient angels; this comports with the font of this tradition in Isaiah.

All these nt texts refer to Gen 6:1–4, where God was so outraged by what the angels (sons of God) did with the daughters of humanity that God brought a flood upon the earth. This Genesis context is more obvious in the 1 Pet 3 use of this material, and it is in 1 Pet 3 that we find something with christological importance. Here Christ (v. 18 makes clear this is who it is) goes and preaches to these angels in prison. Though the 1 Pet 3 text has been the basis of the creedal statement he descended into hell and various second chance theologies, it is doubtful this text has anything at all to do with such notions. Nothing is said about Christ’s descent anywhere. We are simply told that after Christ died and was made alive in the Spirit he went and preached or made a proclamation to these spirits or angels. There may be a trace of this whole theological development in the hymn fragment in 1 Tim 3:16, where we hear that Christ was vindicated in spirit. This remark is immediately followed by seen by angels. Commentators have always thought this remark was out of place. If it referred to Christ’s entry into heaven it would be better placed just before or after the last line of the hymn, which reads taken up in glory. This reference to being seen by angels, however, may not be out of place at all if it is about Christ’s visit to Tartaros. It is also not impossible that Eph 4:8 is of relevance here as well, for there it is said of Christ, quoting Ps 68:18 with alterations, When he ascended on high, he led (or made) captivity itself captive.

To understand this material some knowledge of Jewish angelology and demonology is necessary. For our purposes it is necessary only to say that the powers and principalities and indeed Satan himself were believed to inhabit the realm between heaven and earth. This is one reason why the planets were sometimes assumed to be heavenly beings or angels (the heavenly host), and it is also why Satan is called in the nt the ruler of the power of the air (Eph 2:2).

It would appear then that 1 Pet 3, far from being about a descent to humans, is about Christ’s ascent to the angels on his way to heaven, at which point he proclaimed his victory over such powers and thereby made their captivity all the more permanent and their doom sure. This material then would provide us with another strand of evidence of the development of cosmic Christology or Christus Victor (over the powers), and it would show this is not simply a Pauline development. It would also provide another piece of evidence for the phenomenon whereby actions predicated of God in earlier Jewish traditions are now predicated of Christ in the nt. ⁸

There is actually a remarkable coherence between these five texts with signs of development in enoch in the naming of the demon in view, and in the nt in naming of the prison itself, and finally in the focus in 1 Pet 3 on the role of Christ in relationship to these beings. Yet without hearing the echoes of or allusions to the earlier prophetic texts, it is understandable how especially the text in 1 Pet 3 has been so often misread. Longitudinal studies in the trajectory of the prophetic tradition offers many such revelations. ⁹ What we intend to do in the main in the following study, however, is to examine larger issues concerning the nature of prophecy and the development of prophetic traditions, especially paying attention to the cross-cultural nature of the prophetic phenomenon. As we shall see, this sheds much light on the latest canonical stages of the prophetic and apocalyptic traditions and leads to some surprising conclusions.

The turn of our own era is, in various regards, an obvious time to turn once again and examine the ancient prophetic phenomenon. As I write, we have seen for several years running a wide and wild variety of end-of-the-world religious cults from North America to Switzerland and beyond, often unfortunately ending in tragedy. The fascination with prophecy, or what passes for it, remains strong even two thousand years after the time of Jesus. It is my hope that the following study may not merely further the study of ancient prophecy, but also further the discussion of whether prophecy is still a viable form of human discourse. If it accomplishes these aims I will be content.

EASTER 1999

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1 J. Ward, The Eclipse of the Prophet in Contemporary Prophetic Studies, usQr 42 (1988): 97–103, here 102.

2 See the older classic study by J. Skinner, Prophecy and religion: studies in the Life of Jeremiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).

3 R. P. Gordon, Where Have All the Prophets Gone? BBr 5 (1995): 67–86, here 67.

4 See now the discussion of R. Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead: studies on Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 49–80.

5 Clearly a demonic figure; see, e.g., D. P. Wright, Azazel, in ABD I, 536–37.

6 One should compare this text to 1 en. 10:12; 18:14–19; 21:6–10; 90:23–27; Jub. 5:6–10; 10:5–9.

7 See R. J. Bauckham, Jude and 2 Peter (Waco: Word, 1983).

8 For a compelling study of the material in the Petrine texts which leaves little doubt that the subject is angelic beings, not human beings, who are in this dark prison and that the land of the dead or hell is not meant, see W. J. Dalton, Christ’s Proclamation to the spirits: A study of 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965).

9 Another example of this sort of approach on a larger scale but dealing with one particular tradition is found in J. T. Greene, Balaam and his Interpreters: A hermeneutical history of the Balaam traditions (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).

Abbreviations

AB Anchor Bible

ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary. Ed. D. N. Freeman. 6 vols. New York, 1992

ALBO Analecta lovaniensia biblica et orientalia

ANet Ancient Near eastern texts relating to the Old testament. Ed. J. B. Pritchard. 3d ed. Princeton, 1969

ArAB Ancient records of Assyria and Babylonia. Ed. Daniel David Luckenbill. 2 vols. Chicago, 926–1927

ARM Archives royales de Mari

Auss Andrews university seminary studies

BAsOr Bulletin of the Americans schools of Oriental research BBr Bulletin for Biblical research

BETL Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium

Bib Biblica

BJrL Bulletin of the John rylands Library

Br Biblical research

CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly

Colloq Colloquium

DJG Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. Ed. J. B. Green and S. McKnight. Downers Grove, 1992

DLNt Dictionary of the Later New testament and Its Developments. Ed. R. P. Martin and P. H. Davids. Downers Grove, 1997

DPL Dictionary of Paul and his Letters. Ed. G. F. Hawthorne and R. P.Martin. Downers Grove, 1993

etL ephemerides theologicae lovanienses

expt expository times

FGh Die Fragmente der griechischen historiker. Ed. F. Jacoby. Leiden, 1954–1964

hr history of religions

huCA hebrew union College Annual

IDB The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Ed. G. Buttrick. 4 vols. Nashville, 1962

IDBsup Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: supplementary Volume. Ed. K. Crim. Nashville, 1976

Int Interpretation

JAOs Journal of the American Oriental society

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

JBr Journal of Bible and religion

Jets Journal of the evangelical Theological society JNes Journal of Near eastern studies

JsOt Journal for the study of the Old testament Jss Journal of semitic studies

JtC Journal for Theology and Church

Jts Journal of Theological studies

Nedtt Nederlands theologisch tijdschrift

NewDocs New Documents Illustrating early Christianity. Ed. G. H. R. Horsley and S. Llewelyn. North Ryde, N.S.W., 1981–

Novt Novum testamentum

Nts New testament studies

OtP Old testament Pseudepigrapha. Ed. J. H. Charlesworth. 2 vols. New York, 1983

PGM Papyri graecae magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri. Ed. K. Preisendanz. Berlin, 1928

resQ restoration Quarterly

revexp review and expositor

rtr reformed Theological review

SAA State Archives of Assyria

secCent second Century

sIG sylloge inscriptorium graecarum. Ed.W. Dittenberger

stTh studia theologica

Them Themelios

ts Theological studies

tynBul tyndale Bulletin

tZ Theologische Zeitschrift

usQr union seminary Quarterly review

VC Vigiliae christianae

Vt Vetus testamentum

WUNT Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament

ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

ZtK Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche

Dead Sea Scrolls

CD Damascus Document

1QapGen Genesis Apocryphon

1QH hodayot (Thanksgiving hymns)

1QM War scroll

1QpHab Pesher on habakkuk

1QS Manual of Discipline (rule of the Community)

4QTestim testimonia

11QMelch Melchizedek

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha

Ascen. Isa. Ascension of Isaiah

2 Bar. 2 Baruch

1 en. 1 enoch (ethiopian Apocalypse)

Jub. Jubilees

Odes sol. Odes of solomon

Pss. sol. Psalms of solomon

sib. Or. sibylline Oracles

t. Ash. testament of Asher

t. Benj. testament of Benjamin

t. Dan. testament of Daniel

t. Jud. testament of Judah

t. Levi testament of Levi

t.Mos. testament of Moses

Mishnah, Talmud, and Related Literature

b. tractates of the Babylonian Talmud

m. tractates of the Mishnah

Ber. Berakot

Meg. Megillah

sanh. sanhedrin

sotah sotah

Other Rabbinic Works

s. ‘Olam rab. seder ‘Olam rabbah

Apostolic Fathers

1 Clem. 1 Clement

Herm. Mand. Shepherd of Hermas,Mandate

Herm. sim. Shepherd of Hermas, similitude

Herm. Vis. Shepherd of Hermas, Vision

Ign. Phld. Ignatius, to the Philadelphians

Ign. rom. Ignatius, to the romans

Ign. trall. Ignatius, to the trallians

New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

Gos. Thom. Gospel of Thomas

Other Ancient Writings

Artemidorus Daldianus

Onir. Onirocritica

Cicero

Div. De divinatione

Constantine

Or. sanct. Oratio ad sanctos

Epiphanius

Pan. Panarion (Adversus haereses)

Eusebius

hist. eccl. historia ecclesiastica

Praep. ev. Praeparatio evangelica

Herodotus

hist. historiae

Hesiod

Op. Opera et dies

Hippolytus

Antichr. De antichristo

Iamblichus

Myst. De mysteriis

Josephus

Ag. Ap. Against Apion

Ant. Jewish Antiquities

War Jewish War

Justin

Dial. Dialogue with trypho

Juvenal

sat. satirae

Pausanias

Desc. Descriptions of Greece

Philo

Contempl. De vita contemplativa

her. Quis rerum divinarum heres sit

Migr. De migratione Abrahami

Introduction

Through the Eyes of the Seer

THE STUDY OF PROPHECY HAS PROVED to be a growth industry in the last twenty-five years. This has been fueled partly by the discoveries at Mari and elsewhere, but it has also been precipitated by the growing interest in things visionary throughout Western culture in the last several decades. In a world that has a global economy and a global communications system, it is hardly surprising that there has been some impetus to take a more global or cross-cultural approach to prophecy. Now more than ever, it is possible to compare and contrast the prophetic experience, the prophetic expression, the prophetic tradition across various cultural boundaries. Yet some cross-cultural studies, because they have been too broad, or involved comparing widely divergent cultures and their prophetic components, have shed only a little light on biblical prophecy in its various forms. ¹

This book will seek to study prophecy with something of a cross-cultural approach but within limited geographical and chronological parameters. The geographical parameters are basically the eastern end of the Mediterranean crescent and the nearby Middle Eastern regions (e.g., Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt), and the chronological parameters are about 1600 BC to approximately AD 300, or a little less than two thousand years. This sort of approach produces far more useful results than studies that wander further afield for parallels, precisely because all of these Near Eastern cultures shared similar views and attitudes about a host of subjects, including prophecy and divination. This study, then, is not limited just to an examination of biblical prophecy, though that is where the major focus lies; rather, it seeks to set biblical prophecy in a somewhat wider context, attempting to see what light the larger social context may shed on the biblical phenomena.

As a prelude to the diachronic study and survey of prophecy, it will be worthwhile to take the time to interact with an important recent study that takes a cross-cultural and social approach to prophecy; through dialoguing with this study, we will be able to set out and introduce to the reader some of the problems and promise of such an approach to prophecy and, hopefully, be guided away from the pitfalls of such an approach. The study in question is L. L. Grabbe’s highly regarded work, Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages. ²

Grabbe begins his study by surveying the most relevant biblical texts that reveal something about the nature of prophets and diviners and their arts. One tendency of Grabbe’s work throughout is his suspicion of those who would try to separate Hebrew prophets from other ancient Near East prophets as if they were somehow distinctive, and his even greater suspicion of the use of labels of true and false prophets within the biblical corpus itself. Thus, for instance, he takes the story found in 1 Kgs 22:1–28 somewhat at face value. Ahab had four hundred court prophets whom he consulted. Their leader, Zedekiah, prophesied in the name of Yahweh, and made a prophetic sign using iron horns to make clear what Yahweh was saying to Ahab—namely, that he would have a great victory. Grabbe’s opinion about labels is represented in the case of Micaiah, who was brought forward and predicted defeat. To account for the former prophecies, Micaiah reveals a session of the heavenly court in which Yahweh asks how Ahab might be deceived, and in due course a lying spirit volunteers to enter the court prophets. Grabbe concludes, All the prophets speak in the name of Yhwh; this includes the four hundred court prophets. Therefore, the conflict is between two sets of prophets of Yhwh. ³ Grabbe is obviously skeptical about the use of any sort of ideological criteria to discern the difference between a true and a false prophet.

Yet, even laying ideology aside, it can not be the case that both Micaiah and the court prophets were doing equally good jobs of discerning the divine will in this matter, for clearly the court prophets proved to be wrong, and Micaiah to be right. The historical and archaeological evidence should not be ignored. It is possible to argue in the abstract that both groups of prophets could be wrong about a particular matter (e.g., if Ahab never fought an enemy at all, both these prophecies could be incorrect), but if indeed there was a battle, they could not both be right. This brings up a crucial point. However difficult it may prove to be to assess the matter, there must be some criteria by which one discerns the difference between true and false prophets, or real and non-prophets, or else one is failing to think either historically or critically about the prophetic material. All claims to be a true prophet are not equally valid. Charlatans were just as much a regular social type as true prophets in antiquity.

What this story does reveal, however, is that one can not divide true from false prophets purely on the basis of who claims to speak for Yahweh. Other criteria, including historical criteria, must be applied. The conclusion the author of the material in Kings would seem to urge is that even if one was disposed to see the court prophets as, in general, true prophets of Yahweh, in this particular matter they had been misled by a lying spirit. This brings up a further issue we will need to address—true prophets can, on occasion, speak beyond or against what God wishes them to say, and on the other hand, nonbiblical figures such as Balaam can offer true prophecy. It is not at all easy to distinguish between a true and a false prophet, and perhaps the distinguishing should actually be done at the level of prophecies rather than the prophets themselves.

More helpful is Grabbe’s treatment of the Jonah stories. As Grabbe suggests, Jonah is too often ignored when the discussion turns to Hebrew prophecy, and certainly one of the major points this present book is seeking to make is that the prophecy a Hebrew prophet uttered could be conditional in nature. Furthermore, to a certain degree, a Hebrew prophet could resist God’s call to make an unpopular prophecy. On the former score, if the audience repented in the face of the oracle, then God would perhaps withhold the judgment threatened. ⁴ Of course, this makes it even more difficult to discern true from false prophecy, especially when we have, in most cases, a very piecemeal knowledge of what happened after a certain prophecy was uttered. Historical evidence and literary evidence must be allowed to interact before one can make pronouncements about prophecy failing. ⁵

Grabbe offers a brief definition of a prophet. A prophet is a person who speaks in the name of a god (usually Yahweh) and claims to pass on a revelation from that god. Divine revelation is a sine qua non of prophecy. ⁶ On this showing, the literary creation of quasi-prophetic works involving ex eventu prophecy should probably not be seen as prophecy at all, for such efforts may well involve neither oracular prophets nor divine revelations. This point is worth pondering further, especially when the discussion turns to apocalyptic material later in this study. On the whole, I must agree with Grabbe in his definition, and thus one must, at some point, broach the subject of non-prophetic developments based on, or prompted by, the prophetic corpus.

This leads to a brief discussion of the matter of literary prophecies, and a good point to start such a discussion is Grabbe’s assessment of Akkadian literary prophecies. These prophecies generally take the form of chronicling a succession of unnamed kings and evaluating them as good or bad on the basis of what happened to the nation during their rule. There are some striking parallels with later Jewish apocalyptic, not the least in the use of ex eventu prophecy. There is, in addition, the description of present troubles that are said to be followed by some sort of idyllic future, often seen in terms of the coming of an ideal king (Marduk, Sulgi, Uruk). About these literary, ex eventu prophecies, Grabbe concludes, There is no reason to think the literary prophecies arose from the pronouncements of a seer or ecstatic figure. Quite so, and Grabbe goes on to suggest that the distinction between literary predictive texts and real prophecy is a helpful one. I agree, and it suggests that literary predictions of the ex eventu sort should probably be seen as scribal rather than prophetic creations. ⁷ This, of course, raises the issue of how much of OT prophecy is in fact a literary creation, rather than a transcript of oracles. This issue will have to be faced again as this study proceeds.

Grabbe weighs in against the frequently offered characterization of prophets as social reformers and critics. This view has also led to the assumption that they are the forefathers of those who preach the social gospel. In this view, the prophets were largely forthtellers rather than foretellers. Grabbe admits that figures such as Amos do indeed offer social criticism, but in fact Amos’s criticisms do not always seem terribly specific.

Prophets do, from time to time, speak in a generic way about the evils of societies—crime, immorality, idolatry, the problem of evil neighboring kingdoms or nations, and the like. But as Grabbe points out, social criticism is a staple item in Wisdom literature as well. There is nothing distinctively prophetic about such remarks, and one might also add that there is, to some degree, this kind of social criticism in non-Israelite prophecy as well. It does not set Hebrew prophecy apart from its ancient Near East prophetic surroundings, unless in the degree that self-criticism comes to the fore in Israelite prophecy. ⁸ Grabbe is also correct that both biblical and nonbiblical prophecies are filled with predictions about the future. One can not dismiss this as uncharacteristic of Hebrew prophets. The designation ‘social critics’ applies only to some of the prophets and then only in a general way to a few of their prophecies, while ‘social reformer’ seems hardly appropriate to any of them ⁹ unless one widens the discussion to figures such as Elijah and Elisha—which will be done in this study. It will be seen that the more social-reforming sort of prophet tended to be those remembered as men of deeds, including the performance of miracles, rather than men who offered many oracles.

Although Grabbe is clearly a critical scholar, he is very leery of those who confidently think they can distinguish original oracular material from later literary expansion in the prophetic corpus. For example, he notes that the oracles against foreign nations have often been taken as secondary because it was cult prophets who offered such oracles and the Hebrew prophets we are dealing with are thought not to have been cult prophets. As Grabbe points out, this begs a whole host of questions, for clearly there were figures, such as Samuel or Jeremiah or Ezekiel, who have cultic associations or roots. When one deconstructs such criteria as are often used (e.g., certain major themes characterize a genuine oracle—woe rather than salvation oracles, for example), one is left with the rather remarkable conclusion that

if, on the other hand, most of a book is now credited to the prophet in question— Amos, for example—such passages as messages of salvation, oracles against foreign nations, detailed forecasts about the future, predictions of a new age with millennial conditions all become part of the message of the classical prophet. The differences between the pre-classical seer, the classical prophet, the post-exilic prophet, and the apocalyptic visionary dwindle at most to matters of degree rather than kind. ¹⁰

This is a startling conclusion, and this author is inclined to think Grabbe is right. The distinctions between the classical prophets and the later prophets, including the seers, appears to have been overdrawn, based on formal and content criteria that are dubious at best. A more holistic approach is in order when dealing with the prophetic corpus, and this study will try the experiment of being more inclusive in the analysis of the prophetic material of the various prophets and seeing what follows from such an approach.

Another subject on which Grabbe defies some common wisdom is the issue of ecstasy or trance and Israelite prophecy. Grabbe is right that, on a purely historical basis, one can not say it was only the prophets of Baal or non-Israelites prophets who experienced ecstasy or a trance state. Yet it is also true that only a distinct minority of texts in the Hebrew Scriptures suggest that biblical prophets experienced such a condition (cf. 1 Sam 10:10–11; 19:20–24; 1 Kgs 18:26–29; Ezek 1).

Much of the time, we have no idea how the prophet received the divine message.... The message could have come through a trance state or it could have been a conscious composition. It could have come spontaneously or it could be the result of specific inquiry. In many cases, a variety of modes is possible, and we can only speculate on how it was received. Thus, it would be wrong to ascribe all prophetic oracles to ecstatic experiences; equally, we have no right to deny such experiences categorically to Israelite prophets. ¹¹

The attempt, on the one hand, to make the classical prophets fit the mold of modern rationalistic preachers will not do, but on the other hand, it is also true that the phenomenological study of trance states and ecstasy makes it evident that they can vary from heavy to light, involving more or less loss of contact with the outer world. It would appear that Israelite prophets experienced the same range of experiences found in prophets in other, nearby cultures; more important, ecstasy certainly cannot by itself help to distinguish true from false prophecy.

Grabbe rightly emphasizes that prophecy in Israel, as in the other ancient Near Eastern cultures, was not a gender-specific matter. There were certainly prophetesses in Israel, although they made up a minority of the prophetic guild. Huldah is surely one of the more notable prophetesses (2 Kgs 22:14–20). Notice that Huldah is consulted by King Josiah. Huldah responds to the inquiry by delivering an oracle of disaster, telling the king that God would judge Israel’s disobedience. One may also point to the prophetess Noadiah, who opposed Nehemiah, or to Miriam (Exod 15:20), or to Deborah (Judg 4:4). From what little is known, the only difference from the male prophets seems to be their sex. The behavior and messages of the prophetesses show no significant differences from those found among male prophets. . . . No special bias against female prophets is indicated in any of the passages where they are mentioned. This suggests that the proportion of male and female prophets in the text probably represents social reality. ¹² Here it is important to note that Israel was not unusual either for the presence of prophetesses or for the roles they played in society; this shall become evident in the first chapter of this study.

The next minefield in the discussion of prophecy is the matter of divination. On first blush, one might think that divination was completely condemned in Israel (Isa 8:19; 44:25; Jer 14:14; 27:9–10; 29:8–9; Ezek 12:21–24). But what, then, is one to make of the sacred dice or lots, the consultation of Urim and Thummim for either yes or no answers (1 Sam 23:8–13; cf. Exod 28; 39)? It would appear that, as with the case of prophecy, there was bad consultation or divination for answers, and good consultation or divination. Or is it that the lots were tolerated in Israel but the prophets, as part of their critique of the cultus and the priestly apparatus, anathematized this way of controlling prophecy? Should one see in Israel an evolving critique of earlier means of getting answers from God?

It is difficult to know how to evaluate the data, but this matter needs to be revisited, not least because it even crops up in the NT in Acts 1. There would seem, however, to be this difference between genuine prophecy and divination: the latter is a human attempt to obtain an answer from God, presumably at a time when there is no spontaneous revelation from the deity about the matter. In other words, in Israel at least, it seems to serve in lieu of spontaneous prophecy. It also potentially involves an element of human manipulation. ¹³ As such, it would seem to be subject to more human abuse and charlatanism.

It is time now to turn briefly to the issue of dreams and the receiving of revelations in dreams. On the one hand, dreams seem to be treated rather negatively in Jer 23:27–32 and 29:8; on the other hand, Daniel and Zechariah treat the matter rather differently, as does the book of Acts in the NT. It is perhaps possible to make a distinction between message dreams and symbolic dreams, the latter of which require more interpretation. ¹⁴ The evidence is such that one must say that this was a widely known means of receiving revelation throughout the entire period this book will be discussing. ¹⁵ We have clear evidence from as early as the Mari materials of revelations received in dreams (ANET 623). It is perhaps possible to group visions together with dreams—the former being a sort of day dream, the latter received in the night.

There is also the issue of whether a vision or dream will be made public or whether it is intended as a private revelation to the recipient. Oracles, by nature, are public in character, even if there is only an audience of one. In any event, one finds as early as 1 Sam 28:6 the suggestion that dreams and prophecy are equally means of discovering God’s will, a phenomenon one also finds as late as the book of Acts, where both dreams and oracles regularly are portrayed as means of divine communication. There is clearly no blanket condemnation of dreams in the biblical or extrabiblical material relevant to this study, nor is there always a clear distinction between dreams and visions, any more than there is a clear distinction between seers and prophets in this material.

In many, if not most, respects, from a sociological point of view, it would appear that prophecy in Israel or in the Christian communities of the first century and later bore many similarities to the phenomenon found in the larger environment. One does see in the biblical tradition the shunning of certain practices, such as necromancy or witchcraft, but on the other hand, not all forms of divination would seem to have been ruled out. The question then becomes whether one places the emphasis on the similarities with the extrabiblical prophetic material or on the differences. Grabbe clearly does the former. Perhaps the current study will be able to assess the continuities and discontinuities without minimizing either. Prophecy is far too important a clue to the nature, especially the religious nature, of these ancient societies to be handled in overly simplified fashion. The reader, then, must be patient as this study allows the material to have its own say, without trying to impose a schema on the varied materials. If the reader has been exposed to new and fresh lines of thought about this venerable and variegated material, this author will be content. Clearly, this material holds an important key to understanding the biblical world. It will, then, be worth a detailed examination, to which this study now turns.

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1 Here a study such as T. Overholt’s Channels of Prophecy: The Social Dynamics of Prophetic Activity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989) comes to mind; among other things, it compares the prophecy of American Indians to that of the Hebrew prophets. This is not to say that there are not some parallels, but they are insufficient to produce any significant light on biblical prophecy.

2 L. L. Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio-historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel (Valley Forge, Penn.: Trinity, 1995).

3 Ibid., 72.

4 Ibid., 79–80.

5 This is one of the major failings of R. P. Carroll’s otherwise interesting study, When Prophecy Failed: Cognitive Dissonance in the Prophetic Traditions of the Old Testament (New York: Seabury, 1979). Carroll’s particular concern is with some of the literary prophets and their predictions about the future, but he fails to deal seriously with the issue of whether some of these prophecies were intended to be conditional in nature from the outset.

6 Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, 83. Compare this definition with what is said by Grabbe on p. 107: The prophet is a mediator who claims to receive messages directly from a divinity, by various means, and communicates these messages to recipients.

7 Ibid., 94.

8 Ibid., 103.

9 Ibid., 104.

10 Ibid., 106–7.

11 Ibid., 111.

12 Ibid., 115.

13 See ibid., 136–38.

14 See ibid., 146.

15 On the NT period, see pp. 340–43 below.

CHAPTER 1

The Beginning of the Word

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD . . ." It is a familiar and seemingly simple assertion; consequently, its profundity in a largely oral cultural environment can be overlooked. In an ancient culture the living word, the living voice, always had a certain precedence over a written word. ¹ And of all the voices of antiquity, none had more power or authority than those who could speak for God or, in a pagan culture, for the gods. Indeed, those who could proffer a late word from God might well be the most important members of an ancient society.

Surprisingly, a study of prophecy in antiquity reveals that almost all ancient cultures had those who exercised roles one would call prophetic. Prophecy did not begin with the period of the Israelite monarchy, nor did it end when that monarchy was eclipsed, for even in Israel forms of prophecy carried on beyond that period of time. Nor were the prophets of Israel, any more than the NT prophets, operating in a cultural vacuum. A Balaam or a Jonah or a Paul could step over cultural boundaries and still be recognized as a sort of prophetic figure, because the social functions and roles, and to a degree even the forms and contents of the messages of prophets, were the same throughout antiquity at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Whether one is talking about the period of the Babylonian Empire or the Roman Empire, certain traits marked out prophetic figures such that they could be recognized throughout the region as spokesmen or spokeswomen for the divine. These individuals could cross cultural and ethnic boundaries and still function. Indeed, prophecy was such a cross-cultural phenomenon that Babylonian kings could have Jewish prophets serving in their court, and Roman emperors might well listen to the word of an eastern and Jewish prophet before making a major decision. If one wants to understand biblical prophecy, one must be prepared to fish with a large net.

Though some cross-cultural and diachronic studies of prophecy have been undertaken in the past for at least part of the source material, it appears that no studies really take into consideration ancient Near Eastern, OT, NT, and GrecoRoman prophecy at one time. Some of the cross-cultural studies, undertaken largely by sociologists or those using sociological paradigms, ² tend to roam too far afield and end up comparing phenomena that are too dissimilar culturally and temporally (e.g., comparing Melanesian cargo cults or Native American tribes with Israelite prophets!) to really shed much light on the ancient Mediterranean phenomenon of prophecy. Other studies analyze ancient prophecy exclusively in theological terms, with the result that cross-cultural factors and examples that could illuminate the subject are omitted.

The present study assumes that proximity in time and culture is important if we are to have enough data and cultural overlap to make sense of our subject matter. Of necessity, we must draw some temporal as well as geographical parameters for our study. The temporal parameters will be from approximately the Middle Bronze Age until the end of the third century AD, or from about the time of the Mari texts until the end of the Montanist movement. This, of course, means that this investigation will not be dealing directly with the real beginnings of prophetic phenomena in the ancient Near East, and only in a cursory way with the time when the ancestors of Israel—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—were thought to have lived (the Middle Bronze Period). Almost certainly, numerous prophets existed prior to the Mari prophets; furthermore, various biblical writers saw figures such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in a prophetic light. The problem is that one does not possess oracles from these biblical figures, much less prophetic books, and there is only precious little other evidence that they were intermediaries for a group of people. ³ There are, of course, narratives about them, but most of these do not suggest prophetic activity on their part. Even in the case of Joseph, the having and interpreting of dreams, while a regular prophetic phenomenon, do not lead to an oracular function. Joseph could be seen as a diviner of dreams. A similar problem exists with some of the narratives about Moses, but more will be said about him, as he does fall within the parameters of this study and manifests enough prophetic traits to make a discussion worthwhile. Yet such a study must be undertaken carefully, with a full recognition of the historical problems and of later editing, for even the most optimistic of scholarly surveys of the early history of Israelite prophets begins not with Moses but with Saul and Samuel. ⁴ This study must begin with the remarkable findings at Mari. ⁵ One of the major purposes of this chapter is to make clear both the value and the urgency of taking a cross-cultural approach to the analysis of biblical prophecy. Before doing so, however, it is important to make certain critical distinctions.

First, there is a marked difference between a mediator or an intermediary and a prophet. There are times and places at which a prophet is simply a mouthpiece for the deity and in fact does not intercede with the deity on anyone’s behalf. The communication flows in one direction and is not prompted by any attempts at consultation by a human party. On the other hand, there are obviously also times when a prophet does beseech the deity or inquire of the deity on behalf of some human person or group. What needs to be emphasized about the latter is that this may be a role that a prophet plays but it is not specifically a prophetic role. Priests or kings or sages might also play such a role for a person or group of persons. Petitionary prayer or discourse is not a distinctively prophetic function. It is for this reason that I am is somewhat leery of calling a prophet an intermediary, for this term in English suggests an ambassador who exercises shuttle diplomacy between two parties. True, some central or institutional prophets did tend to function this way a good deal of the time, perhaps especially if there were no priests to approach or petition the deity. This, however, does not adequately describe the actual distinctive social function of prophets and prophetesses—namely, to speak oracles, a late word from God, to a person or group. Whether one is talking about the Mari prophets, or Israelite prophets, or the later Christian prophets, their chief and distinctive task was to speak for, or even as the instrument of, the deity.

Second, one must distinguish carefully between the prophetic experience, the prophetic expression, the prophetic tradition, and the prophetic corpus. Obviously, when one is talking about ancient prophets, there is no direct access to any of the first three of these items but only to the literary residue, whether in the form of the tablets at Mari, the Israelite prophetic books, the quotations of oracles in the NT, or the records of the pronouncements at Delphi. It is important to keep this point squarely in view because sometimes confusion has been created by treating these items together.

For example, only a few direct transcripts of prophetic experience have survived, although later reflections on what happened do exist. A good example of this phenomenon occurs in the book of Revelation. John of Patmos relates things he saw and heard, however, not as a transcript of an experience but, rather, as a form of exhortation and consolation to a remote group of Christian disciples. In other words, the literary residue is not a transcript but, rather, a later reflection on, and presentation of, the content of an earlier experience. What is also intriguing about this particular case is that apparently the prophetic oral expression and the period of transmission of tradition stages are skipped altogether. This material was not delivered orally by the prophet to anyone, for he was marooned—indeed, probably exiled—at the penal colony on Patmos. Rather, he put the material into an epistolary framework and sent it off as a circular letter to some churches in western Asia Minor with which he was associated. In other cases there may have been an initial proclamation followed by a long period of oral transmission of specific prophetic traditions before they became part of a prophetic corpus.

We must be sensitive to what is actually being dealt with when we approach the final form of the prophetic materials. Whether creative later editing and expansions on prophetic tradition can be called prophecy is debatable. For example, some of the creative exegesis of prophetic texts at Qumran does not necessarily qualify as prophecy itself but, rather, as attempts to contemporize, or apply former prophecies to a later audience. It is more a matter of hermeneutics than of new revelation from God, more a matter of creative reinterpretation or relecture than of inspiration. Prophets also should not be confused with their scribes or recorders, when they had them. Baruch was not Jeremiah. At its core, prophecy is a living word from the deity, and a prophet delivers that message. Figure 1-1 perhaps will illustrate some of the complexities of this matter. ⁶

First, note in this schematic the difference between the solid line and the dashed lines. The revelation from God to the prophet is the fundamental and invariable component of the social situation. This may be the only component if the revelation is simply to and about the prophet himself (or herself)—for example, when God first calls the prophet or when he instructs him about something he must do. The dashed lines indicate other frequent components, especially the delivering of a