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[First posted in 2013. In the Christian Bible, the 12 prophets in the “Old” Testament are counted individually as separate “books” and that is why the Christian OT has 39 books total.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, also known as the TNK —acronym for: Torah (5 books attributed to Moses), Neviim (the Prophets), and the Ketuviim (the Writings)—-the 12 prophets are considered as one book in the TNK which has a total of 24 books and as such, this one article deals with all 12.
Again, the source of ALL our literary approaches to TNK books is our MUST READ/MUST OWN: The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Alter and Kermode. Remember that this is NOT a religionist approach, but an objective one that simply examines the literary merits of TNK books so surprise yourself by reading these series of articles and learn just as much if not more from the book’s superb literary critics. Lengthy as these articles are, you might be discouraged to read all the way to the end but — trust me — it is worth the read even if sometimes the commentator seems to be talking way above our heads; after all how many readers have had an education in literature as an art form and how many are even aware that prophetic writings in the Hebrew Scriptures used literary conventions? Fret not, as a psalmist reminds us; you will still learn a lot! Besides, all 12 are discussed not only singly or individually, but as collectively and comparatively as well, with their peculiar and individual prophetic voice and message. Additionally, if you look up all the words this critic uses which we, the average reader, might not normally use or even have in our vocabulary, you will learn so much more than just how to read the 12 prophets.
Comfort, comfort; and patience, patience!
Reformatting and highlights added. Enjoy!—Admin1]
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The Twelve Prophets
Herbert Marks
The Book of the Twelve Prophets,
- the most heterogeneous of the twenty-four that make up the traditional Hebrew canon,
- is a prophetic anthology,
- containing writings composed over a period of almost five hundred years.
As such, it presents problems and opportunities for reading similar in many ways to those posed by the Bible as a whole. Not only the individual books, but informal sections within the same book, adjacent verses, and even words within a single verse are the work of various hands, reflecting—-
- different historical contexts,
- different rhetorical conventions,
- different or flatly incompatible ideological perspectives.
Such a text challenges our common habit of construing meaning with reference to the intentions of an imagined author. Interpreters generally resort to one of several fictions to replace this missing figure of the author,
- including the supreme fiction of a divine intentionality or spirit, embracing incompatibles and transmuting the accidents of juxtaposition into a unique plenum.
- Weaker alternatives include the attempt to focus on a particular stage of the text’s history:
- perhaps to isolate an “original” core in each book going back to the prophet himself; or,
- since this involves the loss of much material, to posit instead a final editor of great perceptiveness and subtlety, responsible for the extant form of the text, whose vagaries may thus be recovered as meaningful.
- Perhaps the fullest reading is the one—
- that alternates between these latter extremes,
- compassing the contraries of voice and text—
- though recognizing at the same time that there are more than two stages,
- the “final” one no less elusive than its predecessors.
The earliest mention of “the twelve prophets” occurs in the deutero-canonical Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, written early in the second century B.C.E.
(The common designation “minor prophets,” referring to the relative brevity of the individual books, not to their importance, probably derives from Augustine,City of God 18.29.)
The collection is thought to have assumed its unitary form sometime in the century before. The compilers of the Hebrew text apparently aimed for a chronological arrangement.
- The first six—Hosea, Joel, Amos, Jonah, Obadiah, and Micah—belong, or were thought to belong, to the eight century, a period which saw a resurgence of Assyrian power and the fall of the Northern Kingdom.
- The critically dubious placement of Obadiah and Joel, which lack historical superscriptions, may be based on verbal association (Hosea 14:1 followed by Joel 2:12, Joel 3:16 by Amos 1:2, Amos 9:12 and Obad. 19).
- In the case of Jonah, the most anomalous member of the collection, the placement accords with the chronological setting of 2 Kings 14:25, the verse that gave the book its protagonist.
(In the Septuagint, the order within the chronological division is by length: Hosea to Obadiah, with Jonah last, where it stands as a sort of commentary on the entire collection.)
- The next three books—Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah—belong to the years of Assyrian decline at the end of the seventh century B.C.E. Again, verbal association probably affected the order within the chronological division (Hab. 2:20 and Zeph. 1:7, with Nahum placed first because of the subtler connection of 1:2-3 with the final verses of Micah).
- The last three books—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—all belong to the beginning of the Persian period (late sixth and early fifth centuries), which saw the rebuilding of the Temple and the consolidation of Israel’s cultic and legal traditions under the control of the priesthood.
Because the biblical writings at the time of their final compilation were already approaching the status of Scripture, the two distinct principles of literary organization—
- representation or mimetic verisimilitude in the effort to recreate a historical schema,
- and formalization in the reliance on verbal ties—
—-did not appear incompatible.
Both the text and its ostensible subject matter were God’s davar, his “work” or “word.”
It is a striking fact that, with the exception of the pseudonymous Jonah, none of the Twelve is mentioned anywhere in the Book of Kings, which covers the same period as the pre-Exilic prophets (although the mysterious “man of God” from Judah who prophesies against Jeroboam in 1 Kings 13 has been compared to Amos of Tekoa).
This raises questions about the motives for the collection, which in other respects shows signs of Deuteronomic shaping.
Perhaps the editors intended it as a supplement to the history books. Yet the final count of twelve prophets seems less a reflection of the material available than a deliberately imposed convention, designed to enforce a radical kind of closure.
- The book of Jonah, a didactic or satirical narrative rather than a collection of prophetic savings, fits awkwardly with the rest of the Twelve (see the following essay by James A. Ackerman);
- and there is some question whether Malachi, which begins with the same distinctive phrase—“oracle of the word of YHWH”—found elsewhere only in the two anonymous collections belatedly added to the book of Zechariah (see Zech. 9:1; 12:1), was not broken off from them to make a separate unit.
In the Hebrew arrangement—-
- witnessed by Sirach
- the Twelve come immediately after the three “major” prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.
- The pattern of three plus twelveBy accommodating the prophetic corpus to such type, the editors were in effect assimilating prophecy to a canonical rule, solidly rooted in communal tradition.
- recalls the three patriarchs and the twelve sons of Jacob—
- one of the basic paradigms of Israelite historiography,
- repeated again among the apostles of Jesus and among the twelve “tribes” at Qumran with their council of twelve laymen and three priests.
- (A similar imposition is probably responsible for the final shape of the book of Psalms, whose five sections correspond to the “five fifths of the law,” as the Pentateuch is called.)
- From this perspective, “The Book of the Twelve” may well be—-
- an anti-prophetic document,
- restricting prophecy to a limited number of sources,
- whose authority depends on established precedent.
In a famous passage, Amos likens the call to prophesy to an irresistible and unsolicited natural force: “The lion hath roared, who will not fear? / the Lord God hath spoken, who can but prophesy?” (3:8); and in the account of the debate at Bethel with the priest Amaziah, the prophet appears as an ordinary herdsman, compelled against his will to leave his flock and declare God’s judgment (7:10-17). The elaboration of a fixed canon of prophetic writings forecloses, even as it enshrines, this charismatic tradition, in which the vested authority of an Amaziah could be set at nought. Yet its internal discrepancies and the power of its discordant voices have continued to inspire successive waves of reform—political, religious, and literary.
Text and Voice
Compilation is, of course, only the final stage in the complex compositional process by which the prophetic books as we know them evolved.
- Amos and those who came after him are called the “writing prophets”
- to distinguish them from others such as Nathan and Elijah whose acts are recounted in the Deuteronomic History,
- but it is likely that the majority of them delivered oral speeches,
- which often went through several stages of transmission before being written down.
Scholars sometimes postulate a series of hypothetical layers,
- beginning with the actual words of the prophet,
- for the most part short sayings or oracles
- prompted by a particular historical situation
- and addressed to a particular audience.
Such sayings conform to one of a limited number of formal models, similar in many respects to literary genres, although, as with more familiar genres, the boundaries between them are by no means clear. Preserved by his followers, the words of the prophet would eventually have been combined into small collections, supplemented in a few cases by short biographical narratives, such as the account of Amos’s conflict with Amaziah (Amos 7:10-17) or the third-person account of Hosea’s marriage (Hosea 1). At a later stage, the collections would have been brought together into something like the current books, often with the addition of framing material, which, like the revisions and interpolations at each step in the process, reflected the new perspective of the editors.
The relevance of this general scheme varies from book to book.
- Nahum, Habakkuk, Zechariah, Malachi, and Joel were probably written compositions from the outset.
- Even with books that did evolve in the manner just described, critical reconstruction requires a verse-by-verse analysis, often based on a circular series of inferences. Yet a few characteristic patterns are still apparent.
- The most obvious reflect the change in perspective that followed the collapse of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. In the face of these catastrophes and the ensuing harshness of exile, the old prophetic burden of condemnation and warning gave way to new tasks of encouragement.
- Concurrently, the emphasis on specific transgressions and actual historical circumstance receded in favor of a freer orientation toward an unspecified future resonant with eschatological overtones.
- In the case of Amos 9:11-15, for example, we may infer that stylistically distinctive expressions of hope or comfort were simply appended to the end of an extant collection, thereby transforming the prophecies of judgment—now fulfilled—into a provisional movement in the drama of eternal deliverance.
- This revisionary tendency was confirmed by Jewish tradition, which, as the early reference in Sirach suggests, remembered the Twelve principally as agents of comfort:
May the bones of the twelve prophets
revive from the place where they lie,
for they comforted the people of Jacob
and delivered them with confident hope. (49:10)
The Book of Micah has perhaps the most extensive redactional history among the Twelve, and it will be instructive to consider both its final form and the hypothetical stages in its composition.
- The superscription permits us to identify Micah as a contemporary of Isaiah,
- likewise active in the kingdom of Judah before and after the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E.
- The invectives and threats in the first three chapters are, except for minor expansions, generally accepted as “genuine” sayings of the prophet,
- who shows a particular sympathy for the poor of the land,
- referred to as “my people” (2:4, 8, 9; 3:2, 3),
- and a corresponding hostility to the institutions of power centralized in the capital.
- Corruption and injustice among the princes, landlords, priests, and guild prophets have provoked YHWH’s judgment of doom against Jerusalem, which Micah here proclaims in defiance of the complacent Temple theology (3:9-12).
A similar ethical perspective seems to motivate the covenant lawsuit in 6:1-5 (cf. Hosea 4:1) and the oracles immediately following, including the repudiation of ritual sacrifice in favor of the personal virtues of justice, kindness, and “humility” (6:6-8; cf. Amos 5:21-24, Hosea 6:6). By contrast, the pseudonymous prophecies of redemption from exile, of Jerusalem’s future glory and hegemony over the nations, and of a Davidic ruler who will shepherd his people “as in the days of old” (chaps. 4-5 and 7) clearly reflect a post-Exilic setting (note the explicit reference to Babylon in 4:10).
From these antithetical traditions the redactors have created three literary units, each introduced by an injunction to “hear” (1:2, 3:1, 6:1), in which oracles of judgment are followed by oracles of salvation. As in Isaiah 2-12, which shows a similar pattern, the transitions are abrupt. For example, Micah’s oracle against Jerusalem, which ends by reducing the Temple mountain to a wooded height, is followed immediately by the prophecy of Zion’s exaltation when the Temple mountain “shall be established in the top of the mountains…and people shall flow unto it” (4:1). (The same oracle of eschatological triumph appears in Isa. 2:2-4, which, alongside the many thematic and stylistic features shared by the two collections, points to a common history of redaction.)
Theologically, the unmotivated reversals suggest the absolute freedom of YHWH. At the same time, they seem to reflect the psychological paradox of power in vulnerability, or of anxiety generating strength, of which the “confessions” of Jeremiah and certain psalms of lament are the most prominent Hebrew models, analogous to the infernal descents of epic and the passions of classical tragedy and the New Testament.
The confessional paradigm is most evident in chapter 7, which reproduces the disjunctive logic of the previous sections in a quasi-liturgical setting. As with so many prophetic passages, how we read the chapter depends in the first instance on where we locate the original units and thus, by inference, the marks of literary elaboration.
- Were verses 8-20 (or some part of them) once a separate liturgy in which sequentially responsive expressions of human trust and divine promise, of petition and praise, were arranged for choral recitation?
- Or were the “responses” composed, or collected and ordered, by the same anonymous hand that published them as Micah’s?
- How are they related to the hymnal introit (1:2-4) which now opens the entire book?
- Can we assume the unity of even the opening lament (7:1-6), with its bitter, and perhaps incongruous, outburst of imperatives (7:5) reminiscent of Jeremiah 9:4?
- What, in either case, is the relation of its first-person speaker to the feminine “I” of the ensuing confession (7:8-10), whose references to sin and judgmental recall the divine lawsuit that opens the larger redactional section (6:2), and whose gender (apparent in Hebrew from the feminine possessive in the quoted taunt at 7:10) suggests a collective personification (compare the personified city of 6:9)?
- Finally, what are the relations between both these figures and the “I” of the pivotal verse that links them—perhaps a redactional hinge, mediating the transition from judgment to salvation with a declaration of patience and faith: “But as for me, I will look unto the Lord; / I will wait for the God of my salvation: / my God will hear me” (7:7 [AR])?
- The text as we have it resists univocal answers; nor need we suppose that its indeterminacies were foreign to the sensibility of the redactors. At the least, the allusiveness with which “wait” (‘ohilah) at the midpoint of the passage gestures toward the anxious “writhing” (huli) of the daughter of Zion (4:10), while the verb translated “I will look” (‘atsapeh) picks up the stem elsewhere associated with the prophetic “watchman” (7:4), suggests a deliberate convergence of desperation and confidence, of individual and communal identity.
As the example of Micah illustrates, redactional “order” in the Prophets is not always perspicuous.
- The received texts are cluttered and chaotic,
- and the signs of literary shaping have studiously to be recovered from under a welter of vestiges and interpolations.
- Even where deliberate patterns may be confidently traced, they frequently overlie one another, like the superimposed figures of paleolithic cave art—the successive tradents, authors, and editors having valued polyphony and suggestive density more than formal decorum.
- The persistence of discordant features that resist assimilation may result in part from—But regardless of its cause, it contributes largely to the aesthetic impact of the collections, which in the self-occlusion of their rough formal structures, as in the sheer abundance of their “difficult ornament,” are the reflection or perhaps the model of Israel’s image of the divine.
- the peculiar status of the Israelite literature as evolving Scripture,
- a repository of collective traditions that could more safely be expanded or rearranged than canceled.
Although it was shaped in different circles and attained its approximate form earlier than Micah, the Book of Hosea also comprises three smaller collections, each of which tempers inexorable judgment with a final promise of forgiveness.
- The main collection in chapters 4-11, framed by call and messenger formulate (4:1, 11:11),
- is composed of short, mostly isolated oracles, which Lowth compared to “the scattered leaves of the Sibyl” (Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, lect. 21).
- They seem to proceed from accusation to threat to promise,
- though there is also evidence of chronological grouping,
- and local organization is frequently determined by theme or catchword (see especially 4:4-5:7, where the various sayings all denounce religious syncretism under the figure of “whoredom”).
- Throughout, there is a unifying concern with fidelity (hesed) to the Covenant,
- equated with “knowledge of God” (4:1).
- Religious abuses, ranging from—
- violation of covenant law (4:2 may represent an early form of the Decalogue)
- to idolatry (8:5)
- and participation in the Canaanite fertility rites (4:13-14),
- have led YHWH to reject his people:
- they shall be “swallowed up” among the nations (8:8),
- “smitten” and “dried up” (9:16),
- their king “utterly … cut off” (10:15);
- in short, “they shall return to Egypt” (8:13; 9:3, 6).
The later sayings especially are dense with allusions to Israel’s history,
- presented both to accuse and
- to remind the audience of the special legacy they are in danger of forgetting.
This historical bond is the basis for the moving depiction of YHWH has a troubled father unable to forget his wayward son, which has been placed near the end of the collection, where it prepares for the final promise of restoration at 11:11:
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them, the further they went from me;
they sacrificed to the Baals and burned incense to graven images.
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
taking them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I cared for them. (11:1-3 [AR])
In the lines that follow, the conjunction of judgment and promise has been enlarged by the successive arrangement of disparate oracles into a dramatization of divine pathos, in which the rhetorical turns reflect the turning against themselves of YHWH’s wrath and compassion: “my heart turns against me [‘alay], / my repentings are kindled together” (11:8 [AR]). Such conjunctions defy the pressure of events, enacting a deep though often inaccessible human reality, here troped as the freedom of radical otherness: “for I am God, and not man; / the Holy One in the midst of thee” (11:9).
The last three chapters repeat the general movement of the main collection, beginning with illustrations of Jacob/Israel’s legendary “deceit” (11:12; see also Gen. 27:35, 29:25) and ending with a series of salvation oracles that expand on the reciprocal relationship between Israel’s “return” and YHWH’s “turning.” Return is also the burden of the composite narrative of Hosea’s marriage in chapters 1-3, which in its present form serves as an introduction and hermeneutical guide to the collected oracles. This is one of the most heavily interpreted sections of the prophetic literature, although much of the discussion has centered on moral or supposedly biographical questions:
- Are the women in chapters 1 and 3 the same?
- Are all three children in fact Hosea’s?
- Is Gomer a common prostitute,
- and, if so, how could God have commanded his prophet to marry her?
- Concern over Hosea’s moral purity is equally evident in the many allegorical interpretations, which date back to the Targums, and in the rationalizations of Origen and Maimonides, who treated the passage as a prophetic vision.
Somewhat more to our purpose are the modern debates over the relation between the biographical memoir in chapter 1 and the first-person narrative in chapter 3. The most reasonable solution—and the most exegetically productive—is to treat the two as originally independent versions of the same tradition of the adverb “again” in 3:1 (“Go again”) so as to create a story of alienation and reconciliation against which Hosea’s own prophecies to Israel must now be read. (In the received text this pattern is partly obscured by subsequent expansions, identifiably addressed to Judean and post-Exilic audiences and more eschatological in tone; examples include 1:7, 1:10-2:1, and 3:4-5.)
The emphasis in the first chapter, taken by itself, is not really on marriage or harlotry, but on the naming of the three children, a typical form of symbolic action (see Isa. 7-8). The sequence is cumulative and leads to cancellation of the covenantal bond based on YHWH’s self-revelation at Sinai: “for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God” (1:9, literally, “I am not your I am,” a punning allusion to the divine name; cf. Exod. 3:14). The pairing of the two accounts, however, puts the focus on the marriage, and specifically on the wife’s “whoredoms,” a loose figure for Israel’s infidelities, very probably based on Hosea’s own trope in the main collection, which develops the sacred marriage of Canaanite ritual into a figure for religious apostasy.
Accordingly, the redeemed “adulteress” of 3:1 is identified with Gomer, but in place of the history of estrangement needed to motivate the reconciliation, the editors have inserted a collection of oracles (chap. 2) depicting Israel’s religious apostasy under the erotic figure of the faithless woman. A close reading of this apparently homogeneous material reveals several traditionary strands and a good deal of editorial stitching, but the clearest break is at 2:14, where accusation and threat suddenly give way to promises of comfort:
Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak comfortably unto her …
and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth. (2:14-15)
The transition, willful despite its conjunction, simulates the unconditioned generosity of YHWH—conveyed in the surrounding narrative through the actions of his prophet—and thus dictates our reading of the marriage story as a parable of divine forgiveness. In this reciprocal glossing of symbolic action and prophetic discourse it is impossible to say which takes precedence, just as it is impossible to say whether the three-chapter unit, which could conceivably have circulated on its own, would have provided the model for the arrangement of the main collection or have been elaborated in its wake. Moreover, its double plot, for all its persuasiveness, does not annul the severity of the original traditions, still discernible beneath the redactional arrangement, but rather leaves their ultimate authority in suspense.
The powerful short Book of Nahum, which Lowth judged “without equal in boldness, ardour, and sublimity,” provides
- a different model of the way redactional mediation can loosen a prophetic message from its original historical context.
- The core of the book, chapter 2, is a poetic tableau describing in vivid language the destruction of Nineveh, last capital of the Assyrian Empire. The dramatic details—chariots, torches, plunder, treaty curses.
- but appreciated by the Deuteronomic editor, who in the superscription introduces the book generically as a “vision.”
- The description culminates in a magnificent cadence in which the repetition of “all” enforces the note of finality, and the conversion of splendor to ruin is represented not in itself, but more powerfully by its effect on those who suffer it:
She is empty, and void, and waste [buqah umebuqah umebulaqah]:
and the heart melteth, and the knees smite together,
and much pain is in all loins,
and the faces of them all gather blackness. (2:10)
An ironic coda (2:11-12) generalizes the action, moving from description to the emblematic association of Assyria with the lion, while the ubi sunt motif converts lament to taunt in accordance with a pattern characteristic of Hebrew victory odes (cf. the Song of Deborah, Judges 5:28-30).
Chapter 3, though not integral with the preceding vision of the sack, continues it, beginning with a conventional woe oracle addressed to the “bloody city” Nineveh but modulating immediately into another cinematic montage of battle scenes. The juxtaposition of moral category and visual image works like a medieval emblem, the final “heaps of corpses” standing as a translation of, and judgment on, the rapacity that here seems to be its cause, while “none end of … corpses” (3:3) likewise comments upon “none end of … store” (2:9) in the previous section. The subsequent series of variations includes an ironic recollection of mighty Thebes, destroyed fifty years earlier by Assyria with a ruthlessness now transferred back upon Nineveh.
It has been suggested that the original Nahum was a cult prophet attached to the Jerusalem Temple and that the linked poems in chapters 2 and 3 are extensions of the nationalistic genre of oracles against foreign nations. Similar material is common throughout the prophetic writings and forms a distinct section of the books of Nahum’s contemporaries Jeremiah (46-51) and Zephaniah (2:4-3:8). In the latter, these oracles are the central section in a tripartite structure that moves from threats against Judah (1:2-2:3) to promises of salvation (3:9-20).
The same dialectical arrangement is found in the Greek text of Jeremiah and may have helped shape the convention of the apocalyptic battle that ushers in the millennium in such late writings as Zechariah 14, Joel 3, and Revelation 20. It is a powerful schema which gives narrative organization to Israel’s inherently ambivalent relation to YHWH, a God “merciful and gracious … and [who] will by no means clear the guilty” (Exod. 34:6-7). In psychological terms, it projects guilt and consequently the feared judgment onto the nations before introjecting the desired presence, now relieved of its threat.
We see this structure most clearly in the Book of Zephaniah, where the imminent “day of YHWH” is conceived, following Amos 5:18-20, as a “day of wrath” on which Judah will be judged and the whole earth “devoured [te’akhel] by the fire of his jealousy” (Zeph. 1:18).
At the end of the central section of oracles against the nations, ending with Assyria, the same phrase recurs (3:8); but now the judgment has been displaced onto the foreign nations who are the object of the preceding oracles. The ensuing gospel of redemption then concludes with a literal image of internalization in which YHWH the “devourer” assumes a place “in the midst” of Israel (3:15, 17).
This internalization is reciprocal, for YHWH promises to “gather [in]” the afflicted (3:18), a figure related to the remnant motif which runs through the book (2:3, 7, 9; 3:12) in keeping with the example of Zephaniah’s Jerusalemite predecessor Isaiah. Like the recurrence of the key word “devour” (‘kl), the distribution of the verb “gather” reinforces the three-part movement of the book.
The Hebrew stem ‘sf has two nearly antithetical senses, on the one hand “ingathering,” on the other “removal” or “destruction,” and the prophet’s message, like the fate of Judah, is suspended between them. The promises of salvation culminate in the “ingathering” in 3:18 (a conclusion enlarged in the brief post-Exilic coda); but this is only the merciful counterpart of the threatened decreation with which the opening doom on Judah began:
“I will utterly destroy [‘asof ‘asef] all things from the face of the earth, says the Lord. I will destroy [‘asef] man and beast; I will destroy [‘asef] the birds of the air” (1:2-3 [AR]).
The Effectiveness of the wordplay is of course just as great whether we derive the irregular forms in 1:2-3 from ‘sf, “gather,” or take them as homonymous forms of the stem suf, “cease.” If the latter, we gain an added dimension of verbal play, in which historical and etymological alternatives are both resolved in favor of “ingathering” rather than “cessation.” Between the two terms, the threatening sense is again projected onto the nations, which YHWH determines to “gather” for destruction (3:8) as part of the definitive “devouring” that terminates the book’s middle movement.
The destruction of Assyria in Nahum corresponds to this second movement taken in isolation from the theological context, the condemnation and remission of Israel’s sin, which gives the nation oracles their meaning in the other pre-Exilic prophets. Readers who value the austere emphasis on cultic purity and social justice in Amos, Hosea, and Micah have thus tended to depreciate a prophet who seems to content to glorify vengeance. Yet it is precisely here that we must distinguish between the early strata of the book and the final setting; for in the edited collection, the reader comes to Nahum’s vision of martial triumph by way of an independent hymnic composition—
- celebrating God’s supernatural power and
- presenting his ultimate control of historical ends
- as an aspect of his primal authority over all creation.
He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry,
and drieth up all the rivers …
The mountains quake at him,
and the hills melt,
and the earth is burned at his presence,
yea, the world, and all that dwell therein. (1:4-5)
In this context the destruction of Nineveh is no longer an aggressive vindication of Jewish nationalism but, more generally, an illustration of God’s universal government. As in Obadiah, a specific prophecy may now be read either with reference to its historical setting or within a revisionary frame that tends toward eschatology.
The hymn proper is an acrostic covering the first half of the Hebrew alphabet and ends at 1:8, but the short oracles that follow, adjoined to the hymn by the repetition of kalah, “utter end” (1:8-9), and punctuated with the definitive phrase lo ‘od, “no more” (1:12, 14, 15; see also 2:13), reinforce the eschatological orientation. The two locutions are conjoined in the final verse of chapter 1, which occupies an ambiguous position between the hymnic material and the anti-Assyrian poems which it may be read as introducing:
Behold upon the mountains the feet of him
that bringeth good tidings,
that publisheth peace!
O Judah, keep my solemn feasts,
perform thy vows:
for the wicked shall no more pass through thee;
he is utterly cut off. (1:15)
The opening verset is a direct echo of Isaiah 52:7 (cf. 40:9), and thus an indication that the final form of the book (as of Micah) may have been shaped by the same late-Exilic circles responsible for the transmission of the Isaianic material. There are good grounds for supposing that these editors may have been moved by an incipient sense of a biblical canon, that they tried to free the extant traditions and writings from their historical anchors, to open them to continual reinterpretation within a dialectical context created by the aggregate of Israel’s literary heritage. Here the echo both invites assimilation to the cosmic theology of Deutero-Isaiah and invokes by association the characteristic emphasis on salvation. Taken in isolation, the messenger’s proclamation is related to the command in the same verse to keep the feasts. But within the larger context of the book, the tidings appear to refer to the visionary poems that follow. In this way the vindictive account of Assyria’s destruction is redefined as a consequence or aspect of the promise of eschatological peace. In light of the echo, the very name of the prophet comes to recall the message of comfort—nahamu nahamu ‘ami, “Comfort, comfort, my people”—with which Deutero-Isaiah begins (40:1).
Redactional use of an independent hymn is also discernible in Amos and in the final chapter of Habakkuk. In Amos, three “strophes” of what may originally have been a single composition celebrating YHWH’s power over creation in implicit refutation of the claims of Canaanite deities (hence the refrain “YHWH is his name”) are introduced into the collection at moments of exceptional severity, as though to solemnize the words of divine judgment (4:13, 5:8-9, 9:5-6).
In Habakkuk, as in Nahum, the hymn helps to relocate the contingent or historical action at the core of the book. Against the turmoil and uncertainty of human affairs—the world of existential immediacy which is the traditional scene of prophecy—the compilers set the elemental features of the phenomenal world (light and darkness; earth, sea, and sky) in their timeless sublimity.
The two orders so juxtaposed have almost nothing in common except the dominion of YHWH, personified in the hymns where the approach is descriptive, and represented in the oracular forms by the dynamic force of the word, a dramatic figure for the grammatical modes of command, dread, and desire, as for the principle of causal succession. It is for the reader to specify more precisely the relation between cosmology and history, and thereby to define the nature of their common term. But since no simple formula (inside-outside, above-below, whole-part, cause-effect) can explain the relation, one is thrown back on the human motives generally associated with the different genres, alternating between the willful impulses of desire and fear expressed in the oracles and the contemplative impulse to praise, accept, and endorse magnified in the hymn.
In Nahum this absolute order is encountered at the beginning of the book. It provides a theocentric perspective from which to interpret the historical action that follows, approaching the contingent by way of the absolute.
In Habakkuk, which has a more complex structure and compositional history, the pattern is reversed.
The first section (1:2-2:5) has been organized as a dialogue in which YHWH answers the prophet’s complaints about the fate of the righteous. A series of woe oracles against an unnamed enemy (2:6-20) is then followed by the hymn in chapter 3. Further seams are evident in each of the three sections, and the scattered historical allusions are inconsistent, making dating extremely difficult.
In its attempt to reconcile the facts of suffering and injustice with the idea of divine governance, the book reflects the tradition of Israelite Wisdom literature (cf. Ps. 73), while in overall structure it resembles certain psalms of lament, beginning with petition and ending with hymnic celebration. The parallel with Psalms 74 and 77 is particularly close, the hymnic conclusion to the latter echoing almost word for word in Habakkuk 3:10-11.
The opening dialogue is itself a liturgical form, rooted in the responsorial patterns of Temple worship—a mode which Deutero-Isaiah develops most fully. By lending a new animation to the prophetic voice, it focuses attention on the person of the prophet. In Habakkuk, however, its suggestiveness depends largely on the dramatic inconsistencies which result from the composite structure. Scholars have tried to construct a unified scenario for the section, but it is precisely the disjunctions—the fact that prophetic complaint and divine response appear to be at cross-purposes—that account for its resonance.
Habakkuk’s initial complaint concerns YHWH’s silence before the demise of justice:
O Lord, how long shall I cry,
and thou wilt not hear?
or cry out to thee of violence,
and thou wilt not save? …
So the law fades,
and judgment slackens;
for the wicked surround the righteous;
so judgment goes forth perverted. (1:2, 4 [AR])
The violence here is evidently internal, a continuation of the abuses attacked by the classical prophets.
YHWH’s response, however,—-
- announces an imminent military invasion,
- a violence of a different order,
- which, although it does not dull the issue of theodicy,
- shifts it into the international arena: “lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, / that bitter and hasty nation” (1:6).
- The response is equally surprising from a formal perspective, for by generic convention the prophet’s petition ought to have been followed by a divine word of comfort.
Habakkuk’s second complaint (1:12-2:1) renews the emphasis on social justice, but the appeal is now set within the larger context of national defeat, which the prophet first accepts as a chastisement (1:12) and then decries (vv. 15-17).
The final response reconciles without resolving the disparate perspectives by reorienting the prophet toward a future event of indeterminate content which the righteous must faithfully attend:
And the Lord answered me and said.
Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables,
that he may run that readeth it.
For the vision is yet for an appointed time,
but at the end it shall speak, and not lie:
though it tarry, wait for it;
because it will surely come. (2:2-3)
For all its surprising shifts and sublimations, the dialogue manages to generate a logic of its own, or to goad us into constructing one. It is a logic that in fact points toward the hymn of chapter 3—a redactional appropriation of a bolder sort—which extends and completes the responsorial pattern, but in at least two different ways.
On the one hand, the description of YHWH the divine warrior
driving forth from Mount Paran
functions like the theophanies in the Psalms
or the appeal to the splendor of creation at the conclusion of Job.
It commands assent beyond the logic of theodicy by convincing us, rhapsodically rather than discursively, that the power of YHWH is incommensurate with human notions of purpose and, by extension, with human notions of justice.
It thus fills the place of the withheld vision which the prophet was commanded to write (2:2-3).
On the other hand, the conclusion of Habakkuk’s second complaint has left us in anticipation not only of God’s answer but also of the prophet’s subsequent reaction:
I will stand upon my watch,
and set me upon the tower,
and I will watch to see what he will say unto me,
and what I shall answer when I am reproved. (2:1)
From this second perspective, the hymn expresses the personal reconciliation of the prophet. The succession of complaints has established a pattern of prophetic answering which the hymn now forgoes. Like Job’s final speech, it marks Habakkuk’s acceptance of the divine “reproof” and so follows movingly on the injunction to “keep silence” before YHWH enthroned in his Temple, which concludes the intervening woe oracles (2:20; cf. Zech. 1:7).
This second function of the hymn is underlined by the expressions (3:2, 16-19) which link it to the watchtower speech (2:1) and, via the key word “hear,” to the prophet’s opening lament:
O Lord, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid. (3:2)
When I heard, my belly trembled;
my lips quivered at the voice …
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord.
I will joy in the God of my salvation. (3:16, 18)
Together with 1:2 and 2:1, these verses constitute the autobiographical frame within which the original traditions have been assembled. The choice of such a structure suggests again that for the final editors the troubled status of prophecy itself was an urgent issue. The concern is evident already in the several sections.
The command to “write the vision” (2:2) echoes the similar command in Isaiah 30:8, where the issue is precisely the indifference of the people to the prophetic word.
Likewise, the parallel between “law” (torah) and “judgment” (mishpat) in the first complaint (1:4) suggests that judgment may refer as much to a languishing genre of prophetic speech as to social justice. Hence the “judgment” of the lawless Chaldeans which “goes forth from themselves” (1:7 [AT]) becomes not only a corrective but also an ironic replacement for the “judgment” that “doth never go forth” from the beleaguered prophet in Judah(1:4). The word used in that context is not “prophet” but tsadiq, “righteous one,” and it is difficult to hear the famous verse at the end of the dialogue, directing the “righteous” to “live by faith” (‘emunah, 2:4), without recalling those in Judah who would not “believe” (1:5, same stem), though YHWH, or his prophet, spoke the word.
The autobiographical frame dramatizes this predicament by attaching it to the personal experience of a typical figure. As the divine warrior is finally a personification of divinity, so the watchman on the tower is finally a personification of prophecy, erected more likely than not in the face of rising skepticism and disaffection with the tenets of prophetic religion.
Psalm 74, which also moves from petition to celebration, fixes at its nadir on the cessation of prophecy: “there is no more any prophet: / neither is there among us any that knoweth how long” (74:9).
One might say that the Book of Habakkuk, which is structured according to a liturgical form, supports the traditional view of the prophet as messenger against such despair. It does so in part through its formal indeterminacies, which allow the concluding hymn to be read simultaneously as God’s response or the prophet’s. On a smaller scale, the pivotal image of Habakkuk looking forth from his watchtower to catch both YHWH’s word and his own response conflates the two voices dramatized in the dialogue. The final phrase—literally, “what I shall answer concerning my reproof [‘al-tokhahti]”—is ambiguous: does “reproof” refer to the prophet’s challenge to YHWH or to YHWH’s challenge to the prophet? In the context of the book as a whole, the ambiguity marks a fusion and so reaffirms the place of the prophet as the divine spokesman.
When the aging Goethe began the West-Oestlicher Divan, his commemorative journey back to the sources of lyric, he envisaged a return to “the air of the patriarchs,” to a primordial world in which “the word carried such weight because it was spoken word.” As we have seen, the prophetic collections are far from being the loose diwan form to which they are sometimes compared, yet—-
in our preoccupation with their specifically literary features
we tend to overlook the more difficult questions of representation and inflection,
which in prophecy as in lyric are figurations of voice.
Ezekiel consumes a written scroll as a sign of his prophetic vocation; but —-
the pre-Exilic prophets, who to the best of our knowledge
indeed delivered their sayings orally,
depend for their power on fictions of presence,
on effects of invocation and evocation,
which strain against all forms of literary fixation.
A full description of these effects might begin with the combination of rhetorical mobility and thematic restraint: the exuberant crowding of violent and often incongruous figures, reminiscent of the boldness of popular speech, and the narrow repertoire of themes and referents (YHWH, Israel), which sustain such ceaseless variety. More subtle perhaps are the agitated shifts of grammatical markers, especially tenses and pronouns, which project the ambiguities of the divine messenger form into the domain of syntax; and the marked insistence on patterns of causal motivation, the incessant “therefore,” which becomes, paradoxically, a figure for the unentailed power of YHWH (and hence of prophetic speech). Each of these effects is animated by a strong antithetical impulse, and scholars have dedicated entire monographs to its ethical corollary, the “prophetic no.” The characteristic will to negation was already was already obvious to the disciples of Amos, who epitomized it in the argument or motto to his collected sayings—
The Lord roars from Zion,
and utters his voice from Jerusalem;
the pastures of the shepherds mourn,
and the top of Carmel withers (Amos 1:2 [AR])
—where the prophet’s own figure for the irrepressibility of prophetic voice (the lion’s roar, 3:8) is wedded to natural figures of ruin and desolation.
Amos’s voice, supreme among the Twelve, is “the voice of honest indignation,” identified by Blake as the genius of prophecy, and his magnificent rhetoric is consistently, even monotonously, antithetical.
The first section of the book (chaps. 1-2) shows his deployment of the well-attested prophetic genre of oracles against the nations. The standard messenger form, “thus saith the Lord,” introduces the specific accusations, and these are followed in turn by an announcement of judgment.
The denunciation of Israel’s enemies was a standard task of official prophecy. Amos, however, turns it to his own purpose. At an earlier stage, the section probably comprised five oracles (compare the five visions in chap. 7-9 and the five forms of self-indulgence castigated in the woe sayings of chap. 6).
Damascus, Gaza, Ammon, and Moab were all long-standing enemies; but Amos goes on, extending the list to Israel itself:
Thus saith the Lord;
For three transgressions of Israel,
and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof;
because they sold the righteous for silver,
and the poor for a pair of shoes. (2:6)
The traditional terms by which YHWH’s messenger assured his people of their God’s special protection are here used to declare that no special bond exists. Israel is similar to the other objects of YHWH’s wrath, only more culpable.
The Wisdom formula “three transgressions and four” suggests a pattern of cumulation and surfeit in accordance with which Israel, in the larger scheme of the whole oration, is the supernumerary term. Thus the cited atrocities of the nations—including the ripping up of pregnant women by the Ammonites and the desecrations of the Moabites—are only preliminaries to the more severe transgressions against social justice perpetrated in Israel.
To group Israel with the nations is to negate the whole history of salvation and thereby to upset the foundations of communal identity. The same disavowal determines the reinterpretation of the Exodus which is placed toward the end of the book, just before the eschatological coda. That YHWH led Israel “out of the land of Egypt” is the basis of the earliest credos, providing the frame within which even the Law is promulgated (Exod. 20:2).
Amos dismisses it:
Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me,
O children of Israel? saith the Lord.
Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt?
and the Philistines from Caphtor,
and the Syrians from Kir? (9:7)
Amos’s campaign against inequity, his zealous pursuit of social justice, thus leads to a paradoxical repudiation of the covenant relation itself, which in Israelite traditional determines the very possibility of justice.
It is difficult to comprehend this ecstatic fury of the negative.
- Where does the energy for the prophet’s wrath come from?
- How and why does he persist against all odds in rejecting accommodation?
To speak of the social context of prophecy, of scholars or support groups, only evades the central question of a poetic power which in its hallucinatory intensity recalls the megalomania, the magic words and obsessional ideas, of the paranoiac. Like paranoid delusions, prophetic zeal may be a function of repression, or, more precisely, of the failures of repression, which allow the will to break through in disguised forms and to elaborate, in place of the forbidden world, its own structures of psychological and social affliction. The aggression at the root of all poetic enthusiasm has been recognized since Longinus, the first literary critic to mention the Bible, but it burns hottest in the prophets, who, themselves afflicted, inflict their word on everything about them. Indignation includes but is not limited to social criticism.
The poetic ire of Amos extends to poetry itself, consumed with other expressions of human capability, in a universal leveling:
I hate, I despise your feast days,
and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.
Though ye offer me burnt offerings
and your meat offerings, I will not accept them:
neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.
Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs;
for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.
But let judgment run down as waters,
and righteousness as a mighty stream. (5:21-24)
Beyond the aptness of water as a figure for leveling, righteousness in Amos is catastrophic. “Judgment” (mishpat) is translated “justice” in all the modern versions, and the parallel references to those who convert justice and righteousness to wormwood (5:7, 6:12) seem to confirm this social emphasis. But the Hebrew sustains the fuller range of meanings preserved in the King James Version, where “judgment,” like its older synonym “doom,” may suggest condemnation or even calamitous visitation (see also Hosea 5:1, 11; 10:4; Isa. 4:4, 26:9). The association of justice and cataclysm, reinforced by the metaphorical depiction of Israel’s fate in the rise and fall of the Nile (8:8) and by allusions to the Flood in two of the three late hymnic passages scattered through the final redaction (5:8, 9:6), resembles the antithetical treatment of the “day of YHWH” in the preceding verses. Again, the word is directed with an almost vindictive ferocity against the structure of communal defense and presumption, which by Amos’s time had modified the old tradition of the divine warrior into a vision of eschatological victory:
Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it? (5:18-20)
Such reversals, which cut the prophet’s polemic off from its institutional foundations, amount to an anticreation, more radical for being less systematic than the deliberate cancellation of the priestly ordering found, for example, in Jeremiah 4:23-26. Anticosmic gestures are a basic strategy of much Western literature, but the force of Amos’s negations is foreign to literature, where aggression is typically converted into contemptus mundi, iconoclastic quest, or the rage for aesthetic order, while its object is subsumed into some ulterior reality—often a book, a similitude or “mesocosm” which preserves the world it would resolve.
This sublimation is thematized in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Spenser’s Mutabilite Cantos, in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, but it is implicit to one degree or another in every poetic or fictive work, beginning with the elegiac eighth book of the Odyssey, where we first feel the loss of the heroic present, its liminal vulnerability, by way of its immortalization in the song of the rhapsode Demodocus.
In the later prophetic writings, we are given something similar.
- A book,
- or its visionary prototype,
- usually an apocalypse or dream text,
- subsumes the perceptual reality negated by the prophetic word.
- By contrast, the oral rhetoric of early prophecy refuses to convert its passion, whether for an artifice of eternity or for a seat in the apocalyptic theater.
- The negations of Amos make their own amends.
Vision and Revision
Among the techniques productive of “grandeur, magnificence and urgency,” one of the most notable, according to Longinus, is phantasia or visualization, “the situation in which enthusiasm and emotion make the speaker see what he is saying and bring it visually before his audience” (On the Sublime, 15).
Hosea describes God as multiplying visions when he speaks to the prophets (12:10), and word and vision are frequently grouped together in the Deuteronomic superscriptions: “the word which Amos [Isaiah, Micah, Habakkuk] saw.” We have seen the use Nahum makes of phantasia in his vision of the destruction of Nineveh.
In later Hebrew prophecy, the extended vision or apocalypse becomes a distinct literary genre with its own special conventions.
The most developed instance of it among the Twelve occurs in Zechariah, often called the most obscure of the prophetic books.
- From the point of view of its composition history,
- Zechariah is really several books,
- but our chief concern here is with the late sixth-century prophet
- represented in chapters 1-8,
- who, together with his contemporary Haggai,
- actively promoted the reconstruction of the Temple under Zerubbabel (see Ezra 5:1-2, 6:14).
Support for the Temple project was by no means universal in Judah, despite the Persian policy of encouraging the restoration of local forms of worship throughout the empire. From what we can gather, control of the YHWH cult following the return from exile had come increasingly under the domination of a single class of priests who traced their authority through Zadok from Aaron. Consequently, the disfranchised, including many of the Levites and Temple prophets, opposed the Zadokite program with eschatological fervor, expressing their hostility to institutionalized religion through the antithetical and visionary rhetoric of classical prophecy (see, for example, Isa. 66:1-4).
The “night visions” of Zechariah, in their final form as an integrated sequence, are designed on the contrary to lend divine legitimation to the Temple program of the Zadokites. At least some of the eight visions must originally have served a different function.
- The vision of the divine horsemen (1:8-17) presumes that Jerusalem and the cities of Judah are still suffering the afflictions of the conquest.
- Likewise, the vision of the four horns (1:18-21) seems to be an allegorical judgment against Babylonia,
- and the vision of the man with the measuring line (2:1-5) a possible warning against fortifying Jerusalem for revolt.
- By contrast, the visions of the flying scroll (5:1-4)
- and of the woman in the ephah (5:5-11) appear to address conditions after the return, when reclamation of property rights and exclusion of the gerim, or foreign colonists, were crucial issues (see Ezra 4:1-5).
- The flying scroll is particularly striking: on the one hand it is a figure, derived from Ezekiel, for the word of God incarnate in the scroll of the Law; yet its vast dimensions are those of the vestibule of the Temple of Solomon (1 Kings 6:3; see also Ezek. 40:14), the implication being that the two dispensations, word and Temple, are coextensive.
In Zechariah as it now stands, these visions have all been assigned the same date:
- shortly after the laying of the Temple foundation in the second year of Darius (520-19),
- the same year in which Haggai was exhorting Zerubbabel to get on with the work of building (Zech. 1:7, Hag. 1:2-4).
It seems likely that they were first arranged in a group of seven, symmetrically distributed about the central figure of the menorah, whose seven lamps, interpreted as “the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth” (4:10), represent God’s presence enshrined in the Temple.
From this center the divine power radiates out through Jerusalem and Israel (the visions of the horns and the ephah) and on to the ends of the earth, patrolled by the two tetrads of horsemen in the first and last visions.
The vision of the filthy garments in chapter 3, which is formally distinct and upsets the symmetry, may represent a subsequent and more directly polemical response to the accusations of the antihieratic party, here identified with Satan, who is rebuked for challenging the high priest Joshua.
Several short passages, such as the word to Zerubbabel focusing on YHWH’s “spirit” (4:6-10) and the eschatologically oriented prophecy of YHWH’s glory “tabernacling” (shkn) in the midst of Zion (2:8-12; cf. Ezek. 37:27, 43:9), also seem to be expansions on the basic composition, which is traditionary rather than charismatic in emphasis.
The Book of Zechariah marks an important step toward the full-fledged apocalyptic prophesy of Daniel, Second Esdras, and the Book of Revelation. These works were the models for the view of prophecy as “visionary thereafter” which dominated the thinking of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, influencing the conception of the prophetic vocation shared by Dante and Milton. There is a certain logic, even an inevitability, in the way the symbolic vision emerges as the final stage in prophecy’s historical development. Given the highly imagistic texture of the pre-Exilic oracles, apocalyptic might even be considered the generic expression of a visual pressure latent already in classical prophecy, where the dominant tropes (prosopopoeia, apostrophe) work to personify the abstract and to make the absent present.
Hosea, for example, represents YHWH in dizzying succession as—
- husband,
- lion,
- healer,
- bird-catcher,
- father,
- leopard,
- she-bear,
- cypress,
- and even pus and rot;
—and his figurations of Israel are still more visual and prolific. Moreover, prophetic forms probably evolved in part from the practice and rhetoric of divination, including of course the interpretation of dreams, common in Israel as throughout the ancient Near East.
The affinities with divination are particularly evident in the visual puns and associative techniques deployed by Amos in one of the earliest examples of the genre subsequently developed by Zechariah. Amos’s five visions compose a carefully graduated series.
- In the first two (7:1-3, 4-6), the prophet recognizes figures of imminent destruction (locusts and fire), which he succeeds in deflecting by a moving appeal to YHWH’s mercy.
- In the next pair (7:7-9, 8:1-3), interrogation replaces intuitive understanding as he is forced to acknowledge the inevitability of YHWH’s judgment in the appearance of the plumb line and the summer fruit.Interpretation of the fourth depends on a rebus, the “basket of summer fruit” (qayits) suggesting by paronomasia the “end” (qets) of Israel.
- (The shrewd placement of the encounter with Amaziah between visions three and four both provides a fuller context for Amaziah’s hostility and hints at Amos’s ultimate vindication.)
A similar instance of audiovisual play occurs in Jeremiah 1:11-12, where the prophet is shown a rod of almond (shaqed) to signify that YHWH is watching (shoqed) over his word. In both examples the prophetic word must be inferred from its revelatory image, and in Amos the vision even terminates in a repudiation of speech: “corpses scattered everywhere; be silent [has]” (8:3 [AT]).
- The final vision (9:1-4), following a series of oracles which enlarge on the theme of judgment, concludes the series by showing how the announced end will come, beginning with the destruction of the sanctuary and extending outward. In five structurally parallel verses the prophet reproduces the fivefold pattern of the larger sequence, the formal reiteration intensifying the sense of finality. Each line depicts a different attempt at evasion. The first four (hell, heaven, mountain, and sea) are again composed into pairs, while the isolated fifth (political captivity) reconfirms the historicity of the threat, and hence the reality and immediacy of the vision.
Prophecy is thus, from the very beginning, a matter of visual no less than aural hallucination—or at least its rhetorical simulation.
According to Maimonides, for whom all prophetic revelation was a form of imaginative vision akin to dreaming,
- the superior imagination, when not receiving and imitating things perceived by the senses,
- can receive and imitate the intellectually mediated “overflow” of the divine presence (The Guide of the Perplexed, 2.36).
A modern writer might be more inclined to substitute “the unconscious” for “the divine,” but the functional observation still holds.
From a Freudian perspective prophecy could be described as “archaic” or “regressive”—a displacement of thought by hallucination along a metaphorical chain which begins with sensations and proceeds via mnemic images through words to verbal complexes or thought. If mnemic images are more primitive than words, we can understand the tendency of the prophets, oriented ethically as well as psychologically toward the primordial, to displace or confuse word with vision.
Thus, in the first vision of Zechariah, seeing and showing are interwoven with speaking and answering in what seems, semantic flexibility notwithstanding, like a deliberate synesthesia: the “vision” being prompted by an initiatory “word of YHWH” and having at its center a dialogue and a command to “cry out” (Zech. 1:7-15).
For the most part, the visions in Amos depend on the prophet’s direct apprehension of verbal and visual associations.
In Zechariah, by contrast, we see the emergence of a new intermediary figure, the interpreter angel, influenced perhaps by the heavenly messenger that guided Ezekiel (Ezek. 8:2, 40:3).
It is he who now exercises the traditional prophetic prerogatives of intercession and proclamation (Zech. 1:12, 14-15).
The change signals a shift in emphasis from the direct transmission of YHWH’s word to greater reliance on the revelations of the past, which, with the acceleration of scribal activity, are beginning to acquire authoritative status.
Henceforth, the word of YHWH will be increasingly mediated by a textual tradition until, in the stories of Joseph and Daniel, interpretative skill is itself represented as charismatic.
Even from the beginning, however, vision and revision were inseparably fused, not only in the prophet’s tendency to exploit historical ideals against contemporary norms, but also in their adaptation of specific tropes and forms.
Amos refers repeatedly to his prophetic forerunners, as do Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, who moreover echo either Amos or one another with impunity.
Jeremiah, whose early sayings are strongly indebted to Hosea’s, even has YHWH complain about the prophets who steal divine words “every one from his neighbour” (23:30).
The revisionary impulse extended to legal and narrative traditions as well.
Thus Hosea’s interpretation of the Jacob saga as a parable of rebellion and reconciliation reads like an aggadic transformation of the Genesis story (or of the underlying traditions):
The Lord hath a controversy with Judah [originally “Israel”?],
and will punish Jacob according to his ways …
He took his brother by the heel in the womb [cf. Gen. 25:26],
and in his strength he strove with God [cf. Gen. 32:22-32]:
Yea, he strove with the angel, and prevailed [c. Gen. 32:28]:
he wept, and made supplication unto him …
So thou, by the help of thy God, return [cf. Gen. 28:15, 21];
hold fast to loyalty and justice,
and wait on thy God continually. (Hosea 12:2-6 [AR])
Here Hosea’s concern with the possibility of forgiveness has converted the wily patriarch into a type of the wayward son of chapter 11, an example to the rebellious nation of the efficacy of reform.
A more narrowly verbal appropriation is evident in the hymnic conclusion to Micah, where the key words are all borrowed from the traditional list of divine attributes, which YHWH proclaims to Moses before his renewal of the Sinai Covenant.
Since much of the final section of Micah is cast as a covenant lawsuit, the echoes are particularly appropriate:
The Lord, the Lord, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, pardoning iniquity andtransgression and sin … (Exod. 34:6-7 [AR])
Who is a God like thee, that pardoneth iniquity
and passeth by transgression …?
he retaineth not his anger for ever,
because he delighted in mercy.
He will again have compassion upon us …
Thou wilt cast all our sins
into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:18-19 [AR])
The same formula undergoes a somewhat more complex transformation, with the emphasis turned from forgiveness to vengeance, in the brief segment that interrupts the acrostic hymn at the very beginning of Nahum (1:2b-3a).
In late interpolations such as these, and in writings of the post-Exilic prophets, we can see the revisionary gestures becoming more deliberate, the network of echo and allusion increasingly dense. Such persistent reference to earlier text is an active part of the circular process of canon formation. Sources, elevated by virtue of being cited or echoed, lend back their growing authority to the writings that appear to sustain their tradition.
The obsession with a textual heritage which animated the founders of Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the era thus has its origins in the later layers of the Bible itself.
When Haggai (who alludes to Amos and Jeremiah as well as to the Holiness Code) is directed to “ask … the priests concerning the law” (2:11), the word torah probably signifies a mere point of “instruction,” but both the juxtaposition of accepted formulas, presumed binding, in the passage that follows (2:11-14) and the style of reasoning from them to a current moral exigency anticipate the methods of rabbinic exegesis.
For Zechariah, likewise, the authority of the scriptural word outlives the cry of its occasion, as is evident from the editorial introduction, in which YHWH speaks with the voice of the Deuteronomists: “Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live for ever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers …?” (1:5-6 [AR]).
Such long-suffering words help to generate the visions themselves;
- for the prophecies of the seventy years’ captivity (Zech. 1:12; see Jer, 25:11, 29:10),
- of the avenging smith (Zech. 1:20; see Isa. 54:16),
- of the man with the measuring line (Zech. 2:1; see Ezek. 40:3),
- and the righteous Branch (Zech. 3:8, 6:12; see Jer. 23:5, 33:15)
- all have their source in “the former prophets” (Zech. 1:4; 7:7, 12),
- revised by the deferred action of an “interpreter angel.”
In contrast to Haggai and Zechariah, who combine messianic rhetoric with a dedication to the Temple cult, the author of Malachi uses intertextual echoes to sharpen his protest against current abuses.
Malachi 1:6-2:9, the second and longest of the book’s six disputations, is a virulent attack on the Zadokite priesthood, who in elevating themselves above the other Levites “have corrupted the covenant of Levi” (2:8).
On the surface, the passage is a critique of ritual misfeasance, but its denunciations are sharpened by a pattern of ironic references to the words of the Priestly blessing (Num. 6:23-27), whose authority, according to how one interprets the echoes, is either mocked or directed against its own custodians.
- The priests, solemnly bound to “put [YHWH’s] name upon the children of Israel” (Num. 6:27), have come to “despise [his] name” (Mal. 1:6),
- and consequently their “blessings” have been “cursed” (2:2).
- YHWH’s protection or “keeping” (Num. 6:24) has become the priests’ failure to “keep” his ways (Mal. 2:9);
- the “shining” (from ‘or) of the divine countenance (Num. 6:25) has become their vain “kindling” (same stem) on the sacrificial altar (Mal. 1:10).
- Polluted offerings have so vitiated their rote appeals for “grace” (Num. 6:25, Mal. 1:9)instead he will cover their “countenances” with dung (Mal. 2:3 [AT]),
- that YHWH will no longer “lift up his countenance” upon them (Num. 6:26, Mal. 1:9);
- for they have corrupted the covenant of “peace” (Num. 6:26, Mal. 2:5)
- and have been partial in administering the Law (literally, “lifted their countenances against the torah”; Mal. 2:9).
The allusive texture is probably densest in the late Book of Joel, sometimes called the “learned prophet,” who, though sedulous in his recreation of the old oral forms, must have composed his prophecies in writing toward the close of the Persian period (early fourth century B.C.E.). Like the authors of the two pseudonymous collections sometimes known as “Second Zechariah” (Zech. 9-14), Joel appeals to textual traditions in support of an eschatological vision which will supersede the theocratic reliance on ritual and law.
His picture of the end time, later adopted by the author of Acts for Peter’s speech at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-21), includes a radical democratization of spiritual authority:
And it shall come to pass afterward,
that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh;
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams,
your young men shall see visions. (Joel 2:28)
Yet this very passage is itself heavily indebted to at least two literary models:
- Ezekiel’s prediction of the outpouring of spirit upon the house of Israel (Ezek. 39:29),
- which also underlies the transition from the previous oracle (cf. Joel 2:27 and Ezek. 39:28),
- and Moses’ defense of unauthorized prophecy in the Wilderness camp (Num. 11:29)—
- a paradoxically mediated projection of unmediated experience.
As in the Book of Obadiah, Joel’s vision of the coming day of YHWH supervenes on a historical event.
- The disastrous plague of locusts, described in chapter 1,
- gives way in chapter 2 to a vision of divine hosts leaping upon the mountaintops and darkening the heavens as they gather to execute the word of judgment.
- Following a call to “return to YHWH with all your heart” (2:12 [AT])—based not, as for the Deuteronomists, on a devotion to torah, but rather on a full acceptance of the prophetic threat, such that YHWH himself will “return and repent” (2:14; cf. Amos 4:6-11; Hosea 3:5, 14:1; Mal. 3:7; Jonah 3:9-10)—
- the second half of the book announces a new season of plenty before depicting, in what may be a secondary expansion, the final day when YHWH will judge the nations in the valley of Jehoshaphat (“YHWH judges”) and at last “utter his voice from Jerusalem” (3:16) as Amos 1:2 had promised.
- Every episode in this sequence is so rich in prophetic echoes that it would take an extensive commentary even to begin to unravel them.
- Worth noting, however, for its theoretical interest is the way Joel presents the words of an earlier prophet as divine speech (2:32b, quoting Obad. 17a), while at the same time taking liberties with established texts, as in his inversion of the beautiful oracle of peace found in Micah and Isaiah—“Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears” (Joel 3:10; see Micah 4:3, Isa. 2:4)—or of the Isaianic prophecy of a wilderness transformed into Eden (Joel 2:3; see Isa. 51:3).
The danger of such bold revisionism is the growing burden it places on those who would extend the chain of supersessions.
Amos, the earliest of the writing prophets, already expressed an impatience with prophetic forms, and it was perhaps inevitable that the prophetic corpus would ultimately include, together with its diatribes against priestly abuses, the anticipation of a day in which prophecy itself would cease:
And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the Lord … And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision. (Zech.13:3-4)
By the time this was written, the evolving canon of prophetic writings had long begun to displace direct revelation as an imaginative force within Israelite culture.
The wonder is that the theocratic circle,
- having established the Torah as a bulwark against charismatic religion,
- failed to suppress the emerging collections.
- The antagonism is especially evident in the coda to the Pentateuch,
- which chooses oddly to stress the uniqueness of Moses,
- “whom the Lord knew face to face: (Deut. 34:10),
- thereby putting the revelation at Sinai and the Deuteronomic law beyond the reach of prophetic supersession.
The conclusion to the Book of the Twelve seems in many ways to be a deliberate counterpart to this passage in Deuteronomy. As such, it testifies again to the wisdom of the final compilers, who recognized that the future of the collection required not the suppression of divergent ideas but their juxtaposition under the most extreme reciprocal pressure.
The new coda begins with an exhortation to preserve the authoritative body of scribal traditions: “the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel” (Mal. 4:4). But this injunction is then balanced by a final glance toward the eschatological future, of which the prophets rather than the scribes were the appointed wards.
In Malachi 3:1, YHWH has already announced the coming of a divine messenger who will purify the priesthood: “Behold, I will send my messenger [mal’akhi]”—a revisionary conflation of the Deuteronomic “prophet like [Moses]” (Deut. 18:18) with the divine messenger mentioned first in the Covenant Code (Exod. 23:20) and again in the anti-Aaronic context of the Golden Calf episode (Exod. 32:34).
In the coda, this figure is identified with Elijah, the archetypal prophet, who, like Moses, heard the divine voice at Sinai (see 1 Kings 19):
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. (Mal. 4:5-6)
The late version of this passage in Sirach speaks of Elijah’s coming “to turn the heart of the father to the son, / and to restore the tribes of Jacob” (48:10), and it is tempting to carry the parallel back and to see in Malachi too an allusion to the twelve tribes, of which the Twelve Prophets may have been a reflection.
Of course, in the order most frequently attested, these verses conclude not only the Book of the Twelve but the prophetic corpus as a whole. From this perspective, both the prophecy of the eschatological forerunner and the closing threat take on ulterior meanings—the “curse” in particular reflecting the long succession of failures, which—-
- from the Garden of Eden
- through the Wilderness wanderings,
- and again, for the Deuteronomists, from the conquest of the Land
- through the defeat of Judah,
—-had characterized sacred history.
Later generations were sensitive to the implications of such a perspective.
[Note from Admin1—- this last paragraph connects the last book of the Christian OT to the opening gospels of the NT; please note that the Hebrew Scriptures end NOT with Malachi but with Chronicles and there is good reason for that which we won’t elaborate on here; it is explained in other posts. We include this concluding paragraph only because it is part of the commentary and since the author has based his critique on the Christian Bible and not on the Hebrew Scriptures, this is the logical connection he makes. Sinai 6000 does not agree with this final paragraph and all other comments that make such connections to the NT.]
For most English readers, the last verse of Malachi is followed directly by the “good news” of the Gospels. In this proclamation of the word made flesh, the New Testament represents the abrogation of the open-ended or endlessly self-perpetuating revisions of prophetic literature. It propounds its central presence once and for all. Likewise, Jewish Bibles regularly repeat the promise of Elijah’s coming in small print following the final verse, thus ending the collection on a hopeful note and converting the anxiety of succession into a figure of eternal return or of timeless expectation. Sheltering in the comfort of these traditional responses, the solitary reader may occasionally look beyond to the prophets’ more ominous alternative.