A History of Prophecy in Israel, Revised and Enlarged

By Joseph Blenkinsopp

This revised and enlarged edition of a classic in Old Testament scholarship reflects the most up-to-date research on the prophetic books and offers substantially expanded discussions of important new insight on Isaiah and the other prophets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 1996
• ISBN: 9781611642360

Joseph Blenkinsopp

Joseph Blenkinsopp is John A. O'Brien Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of Sage, Priest, Prophet: Religious and Intellectual Leadership in Ancient Israel and coauthor of Families in Ancient Israel.

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A HISTORY

OF PROPHECY

IN ISRAEL

A HISTORY

OF PROPHECY

IN ISRAEL

Revised and Enlarged

Joseph Blenkinsopp

© 1983, 1996 Joseph Blenkinsopp

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Westminster John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396.

Most scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. Some scripture quotations are the author’s own translations.

Book design by Jennifer K. Cox

Cover design by Kevin Darst

Cover illustration: The Prophet Isaiah by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome. Courtesy SuperStock.

Published by Westminster John Knox Press

Louisville, Kentucky

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39.48 standard.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blenkinsopp, Joseph, date.

A history of prophecy in Israel / Joseph Blenkinsopp

p.        cm.

Revised and enlarged.

ISBN: 978-0-664-25639-5 (alk. paper)

1. Prophets.   2. Bible. O.T.—Prophecies—History.   I. Title.

BS1198.B53   1996

224′.06—dc20

96-21402

In memory of my father and mother

Joseph William Blenkinsopp

and

Mary Lyons

CONTENTS

Preface to the Revised Edition

Abbreviations

Introduction

Notes

Index of Ancient Sources

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

That a second edition of A History of Prophecy in Israel can claim some plausible justification after being in print only twelve years is a tribute to the quantity and quality of commentary on and analysis of prophetic texts published during that time. While not much new data have come to light, conclusions that seemed to be in secure possession of the field have been challenged and new directions taken, several of them influenced by contemporary literary theory. While I have duly taken account of these recent developments, especially the current predilection for synchronistic readings of prophetic books (conspicuously Isaiah), none of this more recent writing has given me reason to abandon more traditional methods of redactional analysis. I continue to believe that synchrony and diachrony can and should coexist.

Anyone who reads historians working with data bearing on more recent topics—a medieval Cathar village or witchcraft in eighteenth-century Auvergne, reconstructed by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, for example, or apocalyptic movements of the Middle Ages, brought to life by Norman Cohn—could easily despair of writing a history of prophecy, or a history of anything else, in Iron Age Israel. The political and military vicissitudes to which that part of the world has always been subject, together with the Palestinian climate, have seen to it that practically no data of the kind available to these historians have survived from that time. I was aware of this twelve years ago, but the awareness has grown during the intervening period and will be apparent at several points in what follows. However, I persist in the view that it is possible, and therefore necessary, to make the best of what we have, to keep trying to elevate possibilities into serious probabilities, and to detect some glimmer of personalities, politics, and ideas of those times using the often uncooperative texts and artifacts at our disposal.

In addition to making changes of style and substance that seemed to be called for, rearranging the order of treatment here and there (especially with respect to Isaiah), and updating the bibliographies, I have eliminated whatever infelicities of expression, factual mistakes, or typographical errors I have noticed myself, as well as those brought to my attention by colleagues, students, and reviewers. My thanks to them, to my assistant, Shaun Longstreet, for valuable help with bibliographies, computer-related matters, and indexing, and to the staff of Westminster John Knox Press for their unfailing courtesy and cooperation.

South Bend, Indiana

December 1995

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Over the past two centuries or so the interpretation of prophetic texts has described an extremely broad arc. One has only to contrast millenarian and apocalyptic interpretations with the rabbinic view, which aimed at blunting the disruptive and destabilizing effect of prophecy, to see how different situations, with their own demands and constraints, produce different readings of prophetic texts. Modern critical scholarship, the course of which over the last century and a half is outlined briefly in chapter 1, broke decisively with traditional understandings of prophecy in Christianity and Judaism. Yet in spite of significant advances we are still some way from a consensus on several crucial issues, for example, the institutional and social connections and locations of different kinds of prophecy, the relation between prophetic experience and tradition, and the dating and editorial history of prophetic material. Also, only recently has the study of Israelite prophecy begun to free itself from theories of development inspired by philosophical or denominational perspectives that colored much of what was written on prophecy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The best way to get beyond this situation is to keep our attention fixed on the actual phenomenon of prophecy in Israel, which involves us in an attempt to make sense of its development over a long period, a millennium more or less, whole sections of which are poorly documented. It would be easier, and certainly safer for one’s reputation, to eschew the attempt at a comprehensive overview and to limit oneself to detailed work on specific texts and problems the results of which are much easier to assess. But from time to time anyone engaged in this study will feel the need to stand back and take stock, to regain perspective on the phenomenon of prophecy as a whole. This was the goal I had in mind in writing.

My justification for adding to the bibliographical mountain on prophecy is that one can find many thematic and theological studies of Israelite prophecy but few critical histories, and those that are available rarely attempt to cover the entire span of the biblical period. In most cases attention is concentrated almost exclusively on the period of classical prophecy, meaning the two centuries from Amos to the Isaiah of the Babylonian exile. Yet the earliest of these classical prophets, Amos and Hosea, refer to a prophetic tradition extending back over some three centuries, a tradition that had by their time reached a fairly mature stage of consolidation. To ignore or pass rapidly over this early stage puts us at risk of misunderstanding some crucial aspects of prophetic activity during the much better-known period of Assyrian and Babylonian hegemony (eighth to sixth century B.C.E.).

Even more problematic is the tendency for historical surveys of prophecy to either peter out or reach a grand finale with the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E. The effect, if not the intent, is to perpetuate the idea, widespread in the last century, that later developments, with their quite different forms of religious expression, represent a falling away from the high plateau of prophetic religion and a surrender to institutional paralysis. Bringing the history of prophecy to an end at the Babylonian exile also leads to neglect of the interesting transformations that prophecy underwent during the time of the Second Temple. This, after all, was the epoch that witnessed not only the rise and consolidation of Judaism in the Diaspora and the Judean homeland at the beginning of the period but also the emergence of Christianity with its own forms of prophetic activity at the end.

I have aimed therefore at a historical overview that treats with skepticism the distinctions between primitive and classical prophecy and assertions about the drying up of prophetic inspiration at the time of the Babylonian exile or shortly thereafter. It would have been appropriate, and was in fact originally intended, to take the survey down to the end of the Second Temple period. But considerations of space, as well as common sense (given the formidable problems involved), dictated otherwise, and that part of the task is left to others.¹

If a history of prophecy is not to be merely a series of sketches of individual prophetic figures, the lines of continuity throughout the history must be identified and followed up. In this respect our task would have been made much easier if prophets had explicitly acknowledged borrowings from their predecessors or contemporaries. Yet despite the fact that prophets never refer to one another by name, we can certainly speak of a prophetic tradition. Jeremiah’s complaint that his prophetic contemporaries were stealing sayings from one another (Jer. 23:30) may perhaps be interpreted in this sense, and we have just seen that Amos and Hosea align themselves with a tradition of prophetic protest already in place. Hosea appears to have been familiar with the public pronouncements of his near-contemporary Amos, and both announce the end of the special relationship between Israel and Israel’s God Yahweh. In an early stage of his career, Isaiah applied the message of Amos to his own contemporaries in the kingdom of Judah. Isaiah and Micah have much in common, Jeremiah’s debt to Hosea is easily verifiable, Ezekiel borrows from his older contemporary Jeremiah and composes a sermon using one of the visions of Amos as his text (Ezek. 7:1–27; cf. Amos 8:1–3), and so on.

In reading through the prophetic books, therefore, we experience a cumulative process of appropriation, assimilation, and adaptation that, as we move into the time of the Second Temple, shades off into an increasingly frequent recycling and reinterpreting of older prophetic material. This inner-biblical process provides a valuable indication of changes in the understanding of prophecy itself, and especially the shift from direct inspiration to the inspired interpretation of earlier prophecy. It leads, eventually, to the point where the prophetic books, having achieved canonical fixity, generate their own distinct commentaries.

We can therefore speak of a prophetic tradition, but we must add that this tradition follows different lines and involves different kinds of prophetic roles and personalities. We have to bear in mind that the sources at our disposal, almost exclusively biblical sources, have been selected, edited, and presented according to very definite criteria, quite apart from the question of how much prophetic material actually survived down to the time when the selecting, editing, and presenting was going on. It follows that those whom we refer to as the prophets formed only a small, and in some respects anomalous, minority of prophets in Israel at any given time. If by the religion of Israel we mean to refer to the beliefs and activities of the population as a whole, we would have to conclude that many of the prophets whose stories and sayings have survived were more often than not at odds with it. They played, in other words, a destabilizing rather than a validating role in the religious life of their contemporaries. But there were also prophets more closely tied to established institutions, especially the cult, and it is possible that their sayings, like those of similar figures elsewhere in the Near East, were preserved and transmitted by these institutions. These cultic prophets form a distinct class and have a fairly well-defined role, though we shall see that the task of deciding who belongs to this category is by no means simple.

Prophets, then, could play either a supportive or a destabilizing role, and they could operate either within recognized and approved institutions or outside of them. Another approach to multiple prophetic traditions that has been suggested is along geographical lines of demarcation. Some attention has been given in recent English-language scholarship (especially by A. W. Jenks and R. R. Wilson²) to Ephraimite or Northern prophecy as a special type preserving its own distinctive characteristics over several centuries. According to this view the line runs from the Elohist narrative strand in the Pentateuch, deemed to have originated in the kingdom of Samaria, through prophetic and Levitical groups that opposed the monarchy throughout the history of the same kingdom, then to Hosea, Jeremiah, and the Deuteronomic program as embodying elements of what might be called an Ephraimite prophetic theology. Judean prophecy, it is claimed, moved along a quite different trajectory. First attested during the reign of David in the persons of Gad and Nathan, it was taken up by Amos, Isaiah, and the other preexilic, exilic, and postexilic figures in Latter Prophets with the exception of Hosea and Jeremiah. The Ephraimite tradition, it is claimed, had its own characteristic speech forms, its own way of describing the process of prophetic mediation, and gave pride of place to Moses as the first and paradigmatic prophetic mediator.

While it is plausible to suggest that prophecy as an institution will reflect cultural conditions characteristic of different regions, the regional factor should not be overstated. Even if the elusive Elohist (E) constitutes an identifiable and independent source, which many scholars would no longer be prepared to grant, its northern provenance is simply assumed rather than demonstrated. It is worth noting, for example, that the three narratives presented as major evidence for an independent E source (Gen. 20:1–17; 21:8–21, 22–34) are all set in the Negev, and the Reuben-Midianite strand in the Joseph story, deemed to be Elohistic, also points toward the south rather than the north. Furthermore, the hypothesis of a prophetic-Levitical axis among the Joseph tribes (Ephraim, Manasseh) is also unsupported by evidence and clouded by anachronistic assumptions deriving from the author of 1 and 2 Chronicles. There are certainly links between the Ephraimite Hosea and Deuteronomy, but we must add that the social legislation of Deuteronomy owes nothing to Hosea and, as I will argue in due course, a great deal to Judean prophecy, especially Micah. This is not to deny the existence of distinctive Ephraimite prophetic features, but the distinctiveness should not be overstated.

At appropriate points in the historical overview I will suggest that the distinction between Jerusalemite and Judean, or metropolitan and provincial, prophecy may be noteworthy. Arguably the most angry, radical, and detailed critique of contemporary society, and especially of the state bureaucracy, is to be found in Micah, from the provincial center of Moresheth southwest of Jerusalem. It also will be proposed that Micah and his school represent the ethos and interests of the traditionalist social class known as the people of the land, and that their teaching notably influenced the social program set out in the Deuteronomic lawbook. Enough has been said, for the time being at any rate, to make the point that prophecy developed in different directions and with different emphases, drawing on religious traditions that were often radically reinterpreted in the process.³

Protest on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged, those least equipped to survive the transition from a traditional way of life based on the kinship network to a state system, is one of the most powerful strands in prophetic preaching. Beginning with Amos, it is taken up in different ways by Isaiah and Micah, developed further by the disciples or editors of the latter and also, to a lesser extent, by Zephaniah during the last century of Judean independence. It is not nearly so prominent in Hosea and Jeremiah, whose concerns focus more on syncretic cults and the foreign policy pursued by ruler and court. Linked with this critique of the encroaching state apparatus is the fundamental prophetic concern for community. On this point the difference between the optimistic and the critical prophet is that the latter, unlike the former, refuses to validate unconditionally the contemporary institutional form assumed by the community that calls itself Israel. When the critical prophet speaks of the remnant, he (less commonly she) implies that there will indeed be a future for that community even though the form it currently assumes—that is, an independent state system—will be swept away in the destructive flow of historical events. According to this predominantly Judean prophetic tradition, the fundamental reason for this state of affairs is disregard for justice and righteousness (Amos 5:7, 24; 6:12; Isa. 5:7; etc.). These twinned concepts (Hebrew mišpāṭ, ṣedaqâ) connote the maintenance of right order, of societal structures, and of judicial procedures respectful of the rights of all classes. The critical prophet is saying that a society that neglects that order, even one in which the practice of religion flourishes (cf. Amos 5:21–24; Isa. 1:12–17), does not deserve to survive.

While we hear nothing about a group of disciples that gathered around Amos, the victims of injustice on whose behalf he spoke would have been presumbably the most receptive to his message. That they are also described as righteous (Amos 2:6; 5:12; cf. Isa. 5:23) may perhaps be taken as a move toward the idea that the nucleus of the new or renewed community is to be found among those who adhere to the prophet’s teaching and who strive to embody the alternative vision proclaimed by the prophet in their lives. The question then arises, and is still relevant, whether that alternative vision can find embodiment at the center of society, even of the ecclesiastical community, or only at the periphery. Our study suggests that there is no clear-cut answer to this question. On the one hand, prophetic protest against injustice and exploitation was given official sanction and expression in a state document, Deuteronomy, and it continued thereafter as a powerful force for social renewal in mainline Judaism and Christianity. On the other hand, we have to reckon as early as the exilic period or shortly thereafter with the formation of prophetic groups around a charismatic figure—groups that betray some of the characteristics of the well-known sects of the Hasmonaean period. For this reason I take the passages referring to the Servant of Yahweh in the exilic Isaian material and to the servants of Yahweh in the last eleven chapters of Isaiah as marking an important stage in the historical development of prophecy.

A theological assessment of prophecy does not require us to follow the lead of those nineteenth-century pioneers who contrasted other forms of religious life unfavorably with it. Prophecy is only one of several such forms, and it seems that its fate is to be always necessary but never by itself sufficient. Concluding the survey with Jonah, which contains a shrewd theological critique of prophecy, is meant to suggest precisely that, and to recall the unsolved and perhaps insoluble problems endemic to prophecy we will be noting at different points throughout the history. On the other hand, no writings in the scriptures more than these confront the serious reader so directly with the need to question the perceptions, mundane and religious, that tend to control our lives.

To end this introduction on a practical note, it may be necessary to warn some readers that we will be engaged in a critical study, and in the critical study of prophecy there are very few assured results of modern scholarship. It follows, therefore, that few solutions to outstanding problems or interpretations of texts offered in this book will pass un-challenged. While obvious limitations of space have not permitted me to present adequately all alternatives worthy of serious attention, I have at least tried to acknowledge their existence while presenting my own views as clearly as possible. The bibliographies are intended to help the reader put the conclusions reached into the context of contemporary scholarly discussion where they belong. Here, too, choices had to be made, and it seemed to make sense to give preference, where possible, to recent studies available in English. (For works translated from foreign languages, the original date of publication is added in parentheses.) If, with their help, the reader will be in a position to draw his or her own conclusions, even if they differ from the ones proposed in the book, my purpose in writing it will have been achieved.

I

PROLEGOMENA: DEFINING THE OBJECT OF STUDY

1. SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF ISRAELITE PROPHECY

J. Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983; J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986; C. T. Begg, "The ‘Classical Prophets’ in Josephus’ Antiquities," Louvain Studies 13 (1988): 341–57; J. Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977; M. C. Brett, Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; H. von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972; B. S. Childs, The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature, Int 32 (1978): 46–55; Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979; G. W. Coats and B. O. Long, eds., Canon and Authority, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977; O. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, 562–71; D. N. Freedman, The Law and the Prophets, SVT 9 (1963): 250–65; Son of Man, Can These Bones Live? Int 29 (1975): 171–86; S. Z. Leiman ed., The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976; R. H. Pfeiffer, Canon of the Old Testament, IDB 1 (1962): 498–520; G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, 2:3–5, 388–409; R. Rendtorff, Canon and Theology, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993; A. C. Sundberg, Jr., The Old Testament of the Christian Church, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; G. M. Tucker, D. L. Petersen, R. R. Wilson, eds., Canon, Theology and Old Testament Interpretation, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988; J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994 [1883]; W. Zimmerli, The law and the Prophets, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965.

Apart from the biblical texts, the only direct reference to Israelite prophecy, and a very meager one at that, occurs on inscribed potsherds (ostraca) discovered during the excavation of Tell ed-Duweir (Lachish) in the 1930s. These were written during the Babylonian campaign that ended with the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. One of them (#3), a letter written by a certain Hoshaiah (Hosea), refers to an earlier letter containing a dire warning sent from one royal official to another by means of a prophet (nābî’), and another (#16) mentions a prophet, not necessarily the same one, the last part of whose name, unfortunately the only part extant, is identical with the last part of Jeremiah’s name (Yirmeyahu in Hebrew). Yet a third (#6) speaks of someone (there is a lacuna at this point) whose words are demoralizing people; some scholars supply the word prophet (nābî’) and refer it to Jeremiah since the same accusation, using the same idiom, is leveled against him during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem (Jer. 38:4). This is possible but uncertain; and all we are left with is confirmation of some degree of political involvement on the part of contemporary prophets like Jeremiah and others whose names are known to us from the book that bears his name (Jer. 26:20–23; 28:1–17; 29:21–23, 31).¹

These letters and lists were written on broken-off pieces of pottery, but texts of any length would have been written on papyrus, and the Palestinian weather with its rainy winters has seen to it that, so far, we have only one papyrus from the time of the kingdoms. The only other nonbiblical text dealing directly with our subject is an inscription written in ink on plaster discovered east of the Jordan at Deir ‘Alla in 1967, which speaks of Balaam the seer (cf. Numbers 22—24). But since Balaam is a foreign seer, we postpone comment on this text to the appropriate point in the following chapter. Postbiblical sources that retell the biblical story, conspicuously the Antiquities of Josephus, rarely if ever contain any independent historical information on the subject.

Comparativist approaches to Israelite prophecy have appealed to a variety of phenomena, social roles, and personalities in a wide range of cultures from the Nuer of southern Sudan to the Plains Indians.² Such comparative studies can lead to useful generalizations about religious intermediaries and stimulate new ways of thinking about familiar biblical figures, but the differences are often more in evidence than the similarities. They also raise the question to what extent ancient Israel is really comparable to traditional societies that have survived into the modern world. For these reasons, and the practical demands of space and time, we will confine ourselves—in the following section—to prophetic phenomena in societies in the ancient Near East and Levant.

This brings us to the biblical sources. For the reader of the Bible, prophecy connotes the fifteen books attributed to prophetic authors in the midsection of the Hebrew Bible. Yet these books by no means exhaust the phenomenon of prophecy in Israel. According to a rabbinic dictum (b. Meg. 14a) there were forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses in Israel, a conclusion no doubt based on a head count over the entire Hebrew Bible. None of the books accepted as canonical is ascribed to a prophet who lived before the eighth century B.C.E., yet the earliest of these canonical prophets, Amos and Hosea, knew of prophetic predecessors and stood quite consciously within a prophetic tradition (Amos 2:11–12; Hos. 6:5; 9:7–8; 12:10, 13). By the eighth century, in fact, Israelite prophecy had a history of some three centuries behind it.

It is also noteworthy that the canonical prophets refer often, and almost always disparagingly, to a class of people they themselves called prophets (nebî’îm), leaving us wondering whether they would have wished to be known by that title. One of them, Amos, appears to disavow it, though the passage in question has been interpreted otherwise (Amos 7:14). One explanation is that prophecy, in Israel as elsewhere, corresponded to an acknowledged institution and one that functioned within either royal court or temple. Hence the problem, which still awaits a satisfactory solution, of the relation of canonical prophets like Amos and Micah to Israelite institutions. We are reminded, at any rate, that the people we call the prophets formed only a small minority among prophets at any given time. Furthermore, the prophetic material in the Hebrew Bible has been chosen for inclusion and edited according to specific ideological criteria. The final editors were no more anxious to preserve sayings of those who did not meet these criteria, those they considered false prophets, than early ecclesiastical writers were to preserve the writings of those they considered heretics. This fairly obvious fact must be borne in mind by anyone using the Bible as a historical source for prophecy or anything else.

One of the most notable and, for some, disturbing tendencies in recent Old Testament scholarship is that of low or late dating of biblical texts. One aspect of this tendency relevant to the present study is the contention that the prophetic books are essentially or even entirely post-exilic compositions.³ Few critical scholars doubt that, in their final form, many of the prophetic books (e.g., Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah) date from the Persian period or later. Also, no one would underestimate the difficulty of identifying an early nucleus of material in the individual books. But the comparative material available, as exiguous as it is, gives at least initial credence to the existence of similar phenomena, and the production of similar texts, in Israel during the time of the kingdoms, even if the prophetic designation was added at a later time. An instructive parallel might be the passages in verse predicting disaster consequent on social injustice attributed to Solon. These come to us from authors (Demosthenes and Diodorus Siculus) later than the time of Solon (early sixth century B.C.E.). They may well have been edited and expanded, but as far as I know no one doubts Solon’s substantial authorship.⁴

Before looking more closely at the biblical sources for Israelite prophecy, a brief note on the formation of the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible may be useful. The first section of the tripartite Hebrew canon, the five-fifths of the law or Torah, contains a narrative of founding events from creation to the death of Moses together with a great deal of legal material. According to the traditional view, the Pentateuch was written by Moses and promulgated by Ezra and a learned body known in Jewish tradition as the Great Assembly. This entity was thought to be composed of Ezra himself, Nehemiah, the last three prophets (Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi) and other worthies, one hundred and twenty in all. The second section, Prophets (Nebi’im), takes in the historical books Joshua through Kings and the fifteen books ascribed to prophetic authors. These are known, respectively, as Former Prophets and Latter Prophets, a distinction unknown to Judaism of the biblical period. Latter Prophets includes the three lengthy scrolls of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel and a collection of twelve shorter books on a separate scroll of comparable length. The further distinction into Major and Minor is even later, indicates length rather than relative importance, and can be safely ignored. The third section, the Writings (Ketuvim), comprises all the remaining books in the Hebrew Bible, and an even greater number in the Old Greek translation known as the Septuagint (LXX).

Recent decades have witnessed a revival of interest in the canon, including the process leading to its final definition, the way it is structured, and the nature of the claims implied in the shaping of the tradition in its final stages of development (Blenkinsopp, Childs, Rendtorff). While there is much that is problematic about recent essays in canonical criticism, not least the impatience of some of its practitioners with historical-critical approaches to biblical texts, they have helped to show how the process leading to a canonical collection corresponds to a cumulative effort to give shape and significant form to a common tradition. But the process of forming such a tradition also involved reconciling, or simply juxtaposing, quite different and sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations and points of view. Critical attention to the formation of the tradition, therefore, has raised the issue of a plurality of interpretations and the need to resolve or mediate conflicting authority claims in the religious sphere. Given the peremptory and sharply divisive claims advanced by prophets, or by others on their behalf, prophecy was bound to play a decisive role in this ongoing process.

One of the principal stages in the emergence of a Torah canon was the promulgation of a lawbook allegedly found during repair work on the Jerusalem temple during the reign of Josiah (640–609 B.C.E. passim) as described in 2 Kings 22. Modern scholarship has concurred in identifying this book with Deuteronomy, though perhaps not exactly as we have it today. Deuteronomy for the first time uses the language of tôrâ in the sense of a comprehensive body of law and instruction. It presents itself as an official public document not to be tampered with (Deut. 4:2; 12:32) and represents the first attempt to impose an official state religion, an orthodoxy. About two centuries later the priest-scribe Ezra was sent on an official mission to the province of Judah, now under Iranian rule, by either Artaxerxes I, nicknamed Long Hand, or Artaxerxes II, nicknamed Memory Man, with the task of seeing that the law of the God of heaven was enforced among Jews in the Trans-Euphrates satrapy of the Persian empire (Ezra 7). While this law cannot simply be identified with our Pentateuch, it provides one of several indications that the Persian period was decisive for the formation of the legal traditions in their final written form.

Attempts to impose orthodoxies and enforce legislation are not, however, invariably successful. We should therefore not be surprised to find, in the Greco-Roman period, a variety of different approaches to the legal tradition, for example in Jubilees and the Temple Scroll. It was probably in the same period that the Pentateuch was divided into five books, the division being first explicitly attested in Josephus writing at the end of the first century C.E. (Five are the books of Moses, comprising the laws and the traditional history from the birth of man down to the death of the lawgiver, Against Apion 1:39.)

The phrase the Law and the Prophets, familiar to readers of the New Testament, first occurs in writings of the second century B.C.E. (Prologue to Sir.; 2 Macc. 15:9), but without the distinction between Former and Latter Prophets, that is, between historical books and prophetic books properly so called. Writing about 180 B.C.E., Jesus ben Sira traced the course of prophecy from Joshua, the successor of Moses in prophesying (Sir. 46:1), to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, again covering both historical and prophetic books without distinction. Thus the historical and prophetic books were always closely associated. The present consensus is that the historical books from Joshua to 2 Kings form a continuous history written according to the ideology of Deuteronomy, therefore known somewhat inelegantly as the Deuteronomistic History (hereafter Dtr). There is broad agreement that this history was composed toward the end of the monarchy and was revised and expanded during the exilic period, around the middle of the sixth century B.C.E. While it must have enjoyed great authority from the moment of its appearance on account of its connections with the Deuteronomic lawbook, it had to survive the challenge of later essays in historiography, including 1 and 2 Chronicles composed about two centuries later.

The rabbinic text dealing with the order and authorship of biblical books (b. B. Bat. 14b-15a) attributes the book of Joshua to Joshua; Judges, Ruth, and Samuel to Samuel; and Kings to Jeremiah. Thus the designation Former Prophets was due not to content but to the tradition of prophetic authorship. Josephus (Against Apion 1:37) also viewed the writing of sacred history as a prophetic prerogative, which had the advantage of advertising his own career as historian and his own claim to prophetic gifts providentially discovered or activated as he awaited capture and possible execution in the cave of Jotapata.⁵ More than four centuries earlier, the author of Chronicles named so many seers and prophets among his sources as to leave little doubt that even then the idea of the prophetic historian was well established. This transformation of the prophet into the historian is only one aspect of a gradual semantic expansion in the use of the term nābî’, to the point where practically any significant figure in the historical tradition (e.g., Abraham, Moses) could be described as prophetic (Barton).

Former Prophets (Dtr) traces the history of prophecy from Moses, prophet par excellence, to Joshua, who received a share in his charisma (Num. 27:18–23; Deut. 34:9), thence through a series of prophetic successors referred to as his (God’s) servants the prophets to the final disaster predicted by these servants as the consequence of neglecting the (Deuteronomic) law. The authors of Deuteronomy had their own theory about prophecy which dictated the role Dtr assigned to prophets throughout the history. In Deut. 18:15–19, the passage about the prophet like Moses, prophecy is, in effect, redefined as a way of continuing the work of Moses throughout history; it is therefore understood in terms of urging law observance and transmitting the same message to posterity. This redefined prophetic role will be detected in the historian’s comment on the conquest of Samaria by the Assyrians (722 B.C.E.):

Yahweh had warned Israel (and Judah) by means of every prophet and seer: turn from your evil ways and observe the commandments and statutes as found in all of the law which I prescribed for your forebears and which I also sent to you through my servants the prophets. (2 Kings 17:13)

The view is retrospective, and therefore hints that prophecy, or at least this kind of prophecy, is considered to