A Chorus of Prophetic Voices: Introducing the Prophetic Literature of Ancient Israel

By Mark McEntire

While there are many textbooks about the prophetic literature, most have taken either a historical or literary approach to studying the prophets. A Chorus of Prophetic Voices, by contrast, draws on both historical and literary approaches by paying careful attention to the prophets as narrative characters. It considers each unique prophetic voice in the canon, in its fully developed literary form, while also listening to what these voices say together about a particular experience in Israel's story. It presents these four scrollsâ€"Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelveâ€"as works produced in the aftermath of destruction, works that employ prophetic characters, and as the words uttered during the crises. The prophetic literature became for Israel, living in a context of dispersion and imperial domination, a portable and adaptable resource at once both challenging and comforting. This book provides the fullest picture available for introducing students to the prophetic literature by valuing the role of the original prophetic characters, the finished state of the books that bear their names, the separate historical crises in the life of Israel they address, and the “chorus of prophetic voices†one hears when reading them as part of a coherent literary corpus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Aug 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781611646078

Mark McEntire

Mark McEntire is Professor of Biblical Studies at Belmont University in Nashville. He is the author of several important books on the Hebrew Bible, including Portraits of a Mature God: Choices in Old Testament Theologyand A Chorus of Prophetic Voices: Introducing the Prophetic Literature of Ancient Israel.

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A_Chorus_of_Prophetic_VoicesA_Chorus_of_Prophetic_Voices

For Paul,

companion longer than life

A_Chorus_of_Prophetic_Voices

© 2015 Mark McEntire

First edition

Published by Westminster John Knox Press

Louisville, Kentucky

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Unless otherwise indicated, 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 used by permission—some places adapted by the use of YHWH for the Lord. Quotations marked AT are the author’s translation.

Book design by Sharon Adams

Cover design by Lisa Buckley Design

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McEntire, Mark Harold, 1960–

A chorus of prophetic voices: introducing the prophetic literature of ancient Israel

/ Mark McEntire. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-664-23998-5 (alk. paper)

1. Bible. Prophets—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS1505.52.M43 2015

224′.061—dc23

2014049529

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Contents (Condensed)

List of Tables

List of Discussion Boxes

Preface

Acknowledgments

1.Defining Prophetic Literature

2.The Scroll of Isaiah:

Introduction and Response to the Assyrian Crisis

3.The Scroll of the Twelve:

Introduction and Response to the Assyrian Crisis

4.The Scroll of Isaiah Continued:

Response to the Babylonian Crisis

5.The Scroll of Jeremiah:

Introduction and Response to the Babylonian Crisis

6.The Scroll of Ezekiel:

Introduction and Response to the Babylonian Crisis

7.The Scroll of the Twelve Continued:

Response to the Babylonian Crisis

8.The Scroll of Isaiah Continued Again:

Response to the Restoration Crisis

9.The Scroll of Jeremiah Continued:

Response to the Restoration Crisis

10.The Scroll of Ezekiel Continued:

Response to the Restoration Crisis

11.The Scroll of the Twelve Continued Again:

Response to the Restoration Crisis

12.Hearing the Scrolls Together

Notes

Index of Scripture

Index of Modern Authors

Index of Subjects

Contents (Full)

List of Tables

List of Discussion Boxes

Preface

Acknowledgments

1.Defining Prophetic Literature

Approaches to Introducing the Prophetic Literature

The Literary and Canonical Shape of the Israelite Prophetic Literature

The Historical Framework Presumed by the Prophets

The Prophets as Figures in Ancient Israel

The Prophets as Characters in the Prophetic Literature

The Plan of This Book

2.The Scroll of Isaiah: Introduction and Response to the Assyrian Crisis

The Structure of the Book

The Settings of the Book

The Role of the Prophet within the Book

The Proclamation of Isaiah concerning the Assyrian Period

Isaiah Interrupted

3.The Scroll of the Twelve: Introduction and Response to the Assyrian Crisis

The Structure of the Book

The Settings of the Book

The Role of the Prophets within the Book

The Proclamation of the Twelve concerning the Assyrian Period

The Twelve Interrupted

4.The Scroll of Isaiah Continued: Response to the Babylonian Crisis

The Proclamation of Isaiah concerning the Babylonian Period

Isaiah Interrupted Again

5.The Scroll of Jeremiah: Introduction and Response to the Babylonian Crisis

The Structure of the Book

The Settings of the Book

The Role of the Prophet within the Book

The Proclamation of Jeremiah concerning the Babylonian Period

Jeremiah Interrupted

6.The Scroll of Ezekiel: Introduction and Response to the Babylonian Crisis

The Structure of the Book

The Settings of the Book

The Role of the Prophet within the Book

The Proclamation of Ezekiel concerning the Babylonian Period

Ezekiel Interrupted

7.The Scroll of the Twelve Continued: Response to the Babylonian Crisis

The Proclamation of the Twelve concerning the Babylonian Period

The Book of the Twelve Interrupted Again

8.The Scroll of Isaiah Continued Again: Response to the Restoration Crisis

The Proclamation of Isaiah concerning the Restoration Period

Retrospective on the Book of Isaiah

9.The Scroll of Jeremiah Continued: Response to the Restoration Crisis

The Proclamation of Jeremiah concerning the Restoration Period

Retrospective on the Book of Jeremiah

10.The Scroll of Ezekiel Continued: Response to the Restoration Crisis

The Proclamation of Ezekiel concerning the Restoration Period

Retrospective on the Book of Ezekiel

11.The Scroll of the Twelve Continued Again: Response to the Restoration Crisis

The Proclamation of the Book of the Twelve concerning the Restoration Period

Retrospective on the Book of the Twelve

12.Hearing the Scrolls Together

The Prophetic Literature and the Assyrian Period

The Prophetic Literature and the Babylonian Period

The Prophetic Literature and the Persian/Restoration Period

The Continuing Lives of the Prophets of Israel

The Prophetic Literature in the Modern World

Notes

Index of Scripture

Index of Modern Authors

Index of Subjects

Tables

1.1Major Events of the Assyrian Crisis

1.2Major Events of the Babylonian Crisis

1.3Major Events of the Restoration Crisis

1.4Five Prophets of Prophetic Literature Elsewhere in the Old Testament

2.1Major Components of the Scroll of Isaiah

2.2Chapter Outline of the Book of Isaiah

2.3Place Names and Their Distribution in Isaiah

2.4Proper Nouns in Isaiah 7

2.5Oracles against the Nations in Isaiah

3.1Lengths of the Prophetic Scrolls in Verses

3.2Sequence of Parts in the Book of the Twelve

3.3The Day of YHWH in the Book of the Twelve

3.4Oracles against the Nations in the Book of the Twelve

3.5Major Divisions of Hosea

3.6Major Sections of Amos

4.1Portions of Isaiah Addressing the Babylonian Crisis

4.2The Servant Poems, Their Speakers, Their Central Ideas

5.1Major Components of the Book of Jeremiah

5.2Repeated Uses of Elements of 1:10 in the Rest of Jeremiah

5.3Events of the Babylonian Crisis Significant for Jeremiah

5.4The Confessions of Jeremiah and Their Primary Ideas

5.5The Hardships of Jeremiah

5.6Oracles against the Nations in Jeremiah

6.1Significant Events for Ezekiel in the Babylonian Period

6.2Chronological Notations in Ezekiel

6.3The word of YHWH came to me ... in the Book of Ezekiel

6.4The Oracles against Foreign Nations in Ezekiel

7.1References to Babylon in the Book of the Twelve

8.1Former Things and New Thing(s) in Isaiah

8.2Servants of YHWH in Isaiah

9.1Appearances of Baruch, son of Neriah

10.1The word of YHWH came to me ... in Ezekiel

11.1An Outline of the Book of Haggai

11.2The Visions of Zechariah 1–8

11.3Disputation Sayings in Malachi

Discussion Boxes

1.1The Experience of Exile

2.1Disability in the Prophetic Literature

2.2The Use of Isaiah 6:9–10 in the Christian Gospels

2.3Children in the Old Testament

2.4Isaiah 7:14 and the Sign of Immanuel in Christian Tradition

3.1The Marriage Metaphor in Prophetic Literature

3.2Meteorology in the Old Testament

3.3Masculinity and Male Protection

4.1Isaiah 14:12–21 and the Fall of Satan

4.2The Use of the Servant Poems in the New Testament

4.3The Cyrus Cylinder

4.4Misreading Prophetic Texts

5.1Relationship between Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations

5.2God and Sexual Assault

6.1Prophecy and Mental Illness

6.2Means of Divination in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy

6.3The Meaning of Seeing the Nakedness in the Old Testament

7.1Africa in the Old Testament

8.1Anti-Semitism and Christian Interpretation of the Prophetic Literature

9.1Postcolonialism and Prophetic Literature

9.2Baruch, son of Neriah, and the Baruch Literature

10.1Myth and the Prophetic Literature

11.1Apocalyptic in the Prophetic Literature

12.1Female Prophets in the Old Testament

12.2Messianism and the Prophetic Literature

Preface

Several excellent introductions to the prophetic literature of Israel are currently available, so it is fair to ask why one more is necessary. A Chorus of Prophetic Voices attempts to distinguish itself by giving careful attention to four aspects of the prophetic literature that are crucial to understanding it.

1. Moment. The origins of the prophetic literature lie in a traumatizing set of events in the story of ancient Israel. Over a period of about three centuries, the tiny nations called Israel and Judah were crushed by the ambitions and movements of empires to their east and west. Even when they were able to make an attempt at recovery, it was a halting process, still subject to imperial power. The challenge of how to think about their identity in relation to their God under these circumstances was the force that drove the development of these traditions.

2. Character. The prophets who generated these traditions are present in the scrolls as literary characters, but in very different ways. Isaiah is a cool, detached royal adviser who vanishes from major portions of the book. Jeremiah is an agonizing figure, whose life is intertwined with the book named for him in the most intimate ways. Ezekiel is a strange visionary and street performer who rarely interacts with any other human being. Christian tradition has typically treated the twelve smaller books from Hosea to Malachi as individual pieces, but this book will examine them collectively as components of a prophetic scroll called the Book of the Twelve. The twelve characters who combine to make the Book of the Twelve are often entirely invisible, yet include Hosea, whose family is an embodiment of Israel’s relationship to YHWH; and Jonah, whose strange exploits make him a favorite of children’s stories.

3. Voice. The final literary shapes of the four great prophetic scrolls produce a voice for each that is distinct from the prophetic character for which it is named. These are all composite texts that grew and developed as artistic works of literature far beyond the lives of those individuals. Learning to attend to these literary voices will involve examination of each entire scroll from start to finish.

4. Canon. At some point these four traditions began interacting with each other, and eventually they became part of the canonical collection of prophetic literature. The scrolls are often speaking about the same events and asking similar questions, so it is also necessary to hear them together, as a chorus of four distinct voices.

Neglect of any of these four aspects will produce an incomplete picture of this part of the Bible. The primary strength of introductions produced in the second half of the twentieth century, with history as their driving force, was the way they attended to the first two aspects, moment and character. As the focus of Old Testament studies shifted over the last two decades to literary issues and a concentration on the final form of the text, the aspect of voice became the primary target of introductions to the prophetic literature. A new focal point led to productive new ways of asking what large, complex works of literature like the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah are about. The cost of the determination to give attention to the unique literary voice of each prophetic scroll, however, was to frequently isolate each voice from the others, so that canon received inadequate attention. A Chorus of Prophetic Voices offers a remedy for that isolation. The book requires a unique design to help readers encounter the prophetic scrolls as distinct voices, but performing together. Such a task requires careful movement back and forth among the various scrolls, learning to hear each one individually, then hearing each scroll along with the others.

Each of the four prophetic scrolls receives a careful introduction as a unified work of literature that speaks in a characteristic way. These discussions will be in chapters 2 (Isaiah), 3 (the Twelve), 5 (Jeremiah), and 6 (Ezekiel). A significant element in each case will be an examination of how the prophet(s) performs as a literary character in the finished book. Along with presentations of Isaiah and the Book of the Twelve as finished scrolls, chapters 2 and 3 will also examine how these bodies of tradition respond to the Assyrian crisis of the eighth century in ancient Israel. Readers will then be able to consider together parts of Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Micah, which address similar issues at the same point in the story of Israel.

The Babylonian crisis in ancient Israel receives attention in all four of the great prophetic scrolls. After a reminder of the nature of the scroll of Isaiah, developed in chapter 2, chapter 4 presents this scroll’s response to the Babylonian threat, invasion, destruction, and captivity. The opening of the discussion of the Babylonian period provides the occasion to bring the voices of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, both of which begin in the Babylonian period, into the discussion. Chapters 5 and 6 develop full portraits of these two scrolls, including the role of the prophets they are named for as characters within them. Chapters 5 and 6 combine Jeremiah and Ezekiel’s responses to the Babylonian crisis with Isaiah’s response. The discussion of the Babylonian period will end by bringing the voice of the Book of the Twelve into the conversation. Chapter 7 will remind the reader of the distinct nature of this scroll, then examine the components specific to this part of Israel’s story. By the end of chapter 7, all four scrolls will have spoken about the pivotal events of the early sixth century BCE.

After introducing all four of the prophetic scrolls, A Chorus of Prophetic Voices enters the discussion of the prophetic response to the Judean restoration, so each chapter from 8 to 11 will open by retuning the ear of the reader to these four voices, then examining each scroll in turn as it addresses the struggle of Judah’s restoration in the Persian period. Each of these chapters will close with an attempt to understand how the forces involved in the rebuilding task shaped the final form of each particular scroll.

Chapter 12 completes the book’s effort to present these four scrolls as works finished in the aftermath of the destruction of Israel, scrolls that employ prophetic characters and the words they uttered during the crises that led up to the destruction. Such a conclusion pushes back against the dominant, entrenched assumption, particularly within Christian reading contexts, that the prophetic tradition reached its pinnacle in preexilic Israel, then declined into nonexistence during the Second Temple period. The perspective of the prophetic literature presented here leads to a contrary conclusion. The prophetic literature is the climax of a process that produced these four scrolls for Israel, a people living in a context of dispersion and imperial domination. Prophecy did not cease or disappear, but it became textualized and thereby served as a portable and adaptable resource that provided both challenge and comfort in any context, even our own.

Acknowledgments

I wrote the bulk of this book during a sabbatical leave in the fall of 2013, so I need to thank Belmont University for granting the leave and my colleagues in the College of Theology and Christian Ministry for taking up the extra workload in my absence. For many years I have taught a course on the prophetic literature at Belmont for which this book is designed as a textbook. Thank you to all my students through the years, particularly the group in the spring 2014 semester who used a draft form of the book and provided helpful feedback. I completed most of the work in the Divinity Library at Vanderbilt University, so I wish to thank the staff of both the library and the Divinity School for the assistance those resources provided. Finally, the editorial staff at Westminster John Knox Press has been kind and generous in their assistance throughout the process, and I am grateful to all of them, particularly Bob Ratcliff.

1

Defining Prophetic Literature

Introducing the prophetic literature of the Old Testament should be a daunting task because it is a daunting collection. Its size, variety, and complexity have challenged every interpreter who has sought to make a coherent statement about this set of ancient scrolls that includes Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve. The century of the historical-critical method’s dominance provided a fertile environment for introductions to the prophetic literature that attached the prophetic characters and various portions of their books to specific periods in Israel’s history. The great accomplishment of these efforts was the grounding of the Israelite prophets in the earthly world of politics, economics, war, and suffering. Materializing the prophets was an effective antidote to the church’s long-held tendency to spiritualize the words of the prophets and read them as a disparate collection of esoteric predictions of the distant future. To understand how this introduction operates and why it is organized in a particular way, it is necessary to review the story of the writing of introductions to the prophetic literature at the time of this focus on history, and follow the story to the present moment in the context of biblical studies.

APPROACHES TO INTRODUCING THE PROPHETIC LITERATURE

Two classic formulations of the historical approach serve to illustrate both its strengths and limitations. In 1967 the portions of Gerhard von Rad’s Old Testament Theology that addressed the Israelite prophets, primarily those in part 2 of volume 2, were excerpted and developed into an introduction to the prophetic literature.¹ The English translation of this work was published under the title The Message of the Prophets and became a standard textbook on the subject for about a quarter century. After treating some introductory issues, the first prophet that von Rad’s work directly discussed was Amos, because he seems to have been the earliest, chronologically. The power of von Rad’s method is still evident in this discussion as it places this ambiguous prophetic figure within a moment of the development of Israel’s traditions when they needed radical critique, and the voice of Amos explodes in this context.² Von Rad moved on to treat the other prophets that he placed in the same historical period—Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah. Another example of the historical/chronological approach is the first volume of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s classic work The Prophets: An Introduction, which begins with an introductory discussion of the nature of prophets and follows with individual chapters on Amos, Hosea, Isaiah 1–39, and Micah, before moving on to Jeremiah.³ Heschel did not treat all of the prophetic literature in this volume, but the parts he did examine are organized according to a historical scheme similar to the one used by von Rad.

Both of the major limitations of this approach to the prophetic literature arise from a division of the texts that departs from the form in which they are currently found in the canons of Judaism and Christianity. First, von Rad and Heschel separated a book like Amos from its place within the Book of the Twelve, between Joel and Obadiah, and they divided Isaiah into the three portions that had become standard by that time, stemming from the classic work of scholars like Bernhard Duhm and Karl Elliger.⁴ Hence the literary character of the final forms of the scrolls, and the relationship between the final forms and the individual texts of which they are composed, received little attention, if any. Both introductions had great difficulty in formulating any response to a question like What is the book of Isaiah about? The second limitation of a historical/chronological approach is the elevation of the prophetic figures themselves as the originators of the traditions, at the expense of those who composed the final forms, which were often works of artistic genius. Studies like von Rad’s followed the efforts of form criticism to get back to the original settings of the small units of prophetic speech, which were always understood to be the oral utterances of the named prophets. The placing of the prophets along a strict historical trajectory that ended in their supposed disappearance inevitably created a sense of decline in the quality of their collective work. In the historical-critical era the idea of decline was part of the scheme of Julius Wellhausen and other prominent scholars who saw a general decline in ancient Israelite religion, from the pristine morality of the eighth-century prophets to the stunted legalism of Second Temple Judaism. When they ignored the nature of the great prophetic scrolls as finished literary works, they missed the process of development of a great literary-theological tradition and saw only decline.⁵

At times von Rad tried to push back against the portrait of decline in his discussion of the prophets of the Persian period, but seemed to give up the point even as he started:

There can, of course, be no question of comparing messages of such matchless depth and range as those of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deutero-Isaiah, each of whom represents a whole world of prophecy and theology, with those of Trito-Isaiah, Joel, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. None the less we ought to be more chary of such summary judgments as men of the Silver Age.⁶

By contrast, an approach that begins with the final forms of the scrolls as literary works, recognizing that the last stage of their production is the one most responsible for how we view the whole, is more likely to see the prophetic tradition moving on an upward trajectory throughout these centuries, reaching the pinnacle of its power and creativity in the Persian period. Those whom the form critics judged to be of lesser ability were actually the ones who provided the view of their predecessors that makes them appear to be so powerful and profound. What von Rad identified so well as a world of prophecy and theology was the literary accomplishment of the end of the process.

A crucial shift in the reading of the prophetic literature took place in 1978, when Walter Brueggemann published The Prophetic Imagination. This groundbreaking book did not fit the format of an introduction to the prophetic literature, but it provided a new hermeneutical lens through which to read this literature. Brueggemann only began to apply this lens to a few prophetic texts in the book, but he and others have continued to use the approach much more broadly since then. In Brueggemann’s words, The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.⁷ His understanding contends that the prophets were not just part of their own historical worlds, but also participated in an imaginative world that their own work helped to construct within the literature that presented them as characters.

Nevertheless, Brueggemann’s work should not be mistaken for an older view that the prophets were lone, detached, religious geniuses. Such an assumption had been present in the work of Walter Eichrodt, who understood the prophets as persons who were freed from all ties of class or professional self-consciousness and capable of moving through life in majestic solitude.⁸ The imaginative work of the prophets in Brueggemann’s understanding was deeply communal. This is why his continuing work throughout the remainder of the twentieth century could exist alongside and in important communication with the burgeoning sociological approaches championed by Norman Gottwald and Robert Wilson, which looked more broadly at human cultures and asked questions about the roles that prophets play within communities.⁹

Edgar Conrad’s Reading Isaiah, published in 1991, provides a superb example of how the ground was shifting beneath the study of the prophetic literature at the end of the twentieth century. Conrad’s work was a bold attempt to read the final form of the massive collection called Isaiah as a coherent literary work. He identified and called into question the assumptions behind historical-critical interpretive strategies, most significantly their tendency to place greater importance on materials that could be connected more directly to the great figures for whom the books were named, who had often been viewed through a Romantic lens.¹⁰ Instead, Conrad’s approach focused on the effects of reading Isaiah in finished form,¹¹ but this is by no means an ahistorical reading of the text. Reading Isaiah very much depends on understanding the interactions between Israel and the other nations of that time, particularly Assyria and Babylon. The primary limitation of this work, however, is its examination of the book of Isaiah in relative isolation from the other components of the prophetic literature, particularly the Book of the Twelve, which address the same span of Israel’s story.

Another important step in this direction took place in 2002, when David L. Petersen published The Prophetic Literature: An Introduction. To my knowledge, this was the first full, book-length introduction to the prophets that devoted a separate chapter to each scroll. Petersen’s introductory chapter gives some attention to common features of the prophetic scrolls, and there are occasional references to how they might speak together, but for the most part the proclamation of each book is treated independently.¹² In Petersen’s presentation the prophetic literature consists of four highly developed scrolls, each with its own powerful, literary voice, but they rarely get the opportunity to interact. Nevertheless, for an introductory textbook, this work brought the results of two decades of scholarship that had been shifting the emphasis away from a primarily historical approach that tended to fragment the prophetic scrolls, and toward one that could engage large, finished literary complexes.

Christopher Seitz’s 2007 work Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Toward a New Introduction to the Prophets seems to have been, in part, an attempt to address this transition. But the book’s preoccupation with defining a type of interpretation it calls figural, and with connecting the prophetic literature in a very specific and immediate way to the New Testament, often gets in the way of understanding this literature on its own terms.¹³ Nevertheless, Seitz identified the most significant problem for the production of new introductions to the prophetic literature. The field was moving beyond the dichotomous choices of either a synchronic or diachronic presentation.¹⁴ These two words are often used to describe two broad categories of approaches to biblical texts, depending on whether they examine how the biblical text developed through time (diachronic) or what they looked like at one particular time, the end of their development (synchronic). Future work would demand attention to both the complex compositional process of the prophetic scrolls that was taking place as the events they addressed were happening, and the overtly literary nature of the final forms as we now find them. My response to this problem has given rise to the unusual organization of this book, as explained in the preface (above) and the section The Plan of the Book, at the end of this chapter.

Another important innovation in introducing the prophetic literature appeared in 2010 with You Are My People: An Introduction to Prophetic Literature, by Louis Stulman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim. Along with a treatment focused on the final forms of the prophetic scrolls, Stulman and Kim chose a specific hermeneutical lens through which to look at all of the prophetic literature, calling the entire corpus meaning-making literature for communities under siege.¹⁵ This particular reading focus depends on an understanding of the final forms as works of literature because, as written artifacts, their meanings had changed drastically from the meaning of the oral presentations by the prophetic figures of the past, speeches still embedded within them:

Prophecy as oral communication is raw, iconoclastic, immediate, and exacting. It seeks to bring about fundamental changes in social arrangements, often before the collapse of long-standing and cherished structures—political, religious, economic, and symbolic. Prophecy as written communication attends to survivors. It takes shape during and after the frightful events; all the while it engages in artful reinterpretation and reenactment.¹⁶

A hermeneutical shift like this one allowed Stulman and Kim to hear and present the voices of the prophetic books, rather than trying to use the prophetic books to travel back and hear the voice of the authentic prophets. The scrolls contain oracles that predict future disaster, but the final forms are not predictions of disaster. Rather, they are responses to the disasters after they have happened, as the survivors struggled to find ways to reassemble and continue their lives as individuals and communities.

Reading in this way also began to lead Stulman and Kim away from the emphasis on the prophetic characters as unique and startling figures (without denying that these qualities did indeed define them). Instead, their focus on literary works drew attention to common patterns in the prophetic scrolls and how they might be speaking together, an idea that appears most clearly in their discussion of Ezekiel within the prophetic corpus. While much of the discussion in this section of their book focuses on the strangeness of the Ezekiel character and his differences from prophetic characters like Isaiah and Jeremiah, the examination of the macrostructure of the book of Ezekiel led Stulman and Kim back to the conclusion that Ezekiel follow[s] the prophetic proclivity to punctuate disaster with salvation and judgment with hope. This structure supports the contention that the prophetic corpus in its present form is far from a montage of discrete voices.¹⁷ The common shape of the prophetic scrolls will be illustrated in more detail below, but at this stage it is important to emphasize, with Stulman and Kim, that while these traditions have very different starting points, and earlier approaches to the prophetic literature did excellent work in demonstrating those, they had a common end point and participated in a common task. Akin to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Twelve, Ezekiel is beset by an empire’s designs toward world domination. It deals with the harsh realities of hegemony and the resulting collapse of long-standing national arrangements.... In this manner Ezekiel joins the prophetic chorus as disaster literature and survival literature.¹⁸

Conrad has recently developed a rationale and methodological approach for specific intertextual readings of some pairs or small groups of prophetic books. For example, only Amos and Jeremiah begin with superscriptions using the phrase The words of Jeremiah/Amos, and are the two prophetic books that most clearly announce the end of a nation.¹⁹ Conrad argues that the superscriptions are compositional cues to a model reader, directing linked readings of the prophetic books in their canonical form.²⁰ Isaiah, Obadiah, and Nahum are the three books described as a vision in their opening superscription, which directs readers to consider these books in light of each other.²¹ While Conrad’s sense of intertextual readings based on cues in the superscriptions that open the books is very specific, such an approach can easily participate in a larger sense of reading the prophetic scrolls together.

The trajectory above traces significant shifts in the study of the prophetic literature over the past century. It began with a focus on the prophets as historical figures proclaiming a moral decline in ancient Israelite society. The rending of the prophetic literature to produce historical data for a reconstruction of ancient Israelite religion gave way to an emphasis on the scrolls as unified works of literature that constructed imaginative worlds of their own, in which readers could explore their experience. The recent advent of trauma studies has reemphasized the historical events to which the prophetic literature responds, yet it has raised new questions about the effects of those events on the audiences of the texts. Because these posttrauma audiences could have been listening to some combination of the four prophetic scrolls, it has become necessary to learn to listen to them together, even as we distinguish their individual voices.

This introduction to the prophetic literature will explore the idea of the prophetic scrolls within the canon functioning together as a chorus more thoroughly than other introductory textbooks have.²² While the scrolls begin at different times and in different places, they all end in a similar place—trying to make sense of life in