What are the Prophets Doing in your Bible?
How their discerning imaginations bring criticism and consolation from the edges of their communities.
I’m pausing the REstory series briefly — today’s post is a teaser for another upcoming series on What To Do With The Bible? We will continue the REstory series next week :)
What comes to mind when you hear the word “prophet”? For many people it may conjure up an image of someone unpleasant or weird predicting the future. Turning to the Biblical prophets may feel strange and unfamiliar (“Wait, who was Zephaniah?”). Maybe some who’ve tried reading through the Bible in a year had good intentions, but then they ran out of steam before they got to the prophets (whose messages seem bizarre and extreme anyway). Maybe you picture in your mind someone with a wild appearance giving angry sermons out in the desert.
But what exactly are the prophets doing in your Bible? How do they fit in the overall story? What is going on in the section of scripture leading into the centuries of “silence” before Jesus’s arrival on the scene?1
Prophets: the People behind the Poetry
A really common idea is that prophets bring messages from God about the future and predict Jesus’s arrival, but those limited assumptions are actually too small. Instead, the Hebrew prophets are more like Israel and Judah’s “covenant lawyers,” and they are profoundly important for us today. They are usually paying the closest attention to the people’s life with God, and they are testifying to how the people have abandoned their covenant and gone down the wrong road of self-destruction.
In Abraham Joshua Heschel’s profound work The Prophets, he describes how the auditory and vocal range of a prophet reaches beyond the normal. They can hear “the silent sigh” of God, and although they are human, the prophet “employs notes one octave too high for our ears,” and becomes an “assaulter of the mind” because “often his words begin to burn where conscience ends.” The prophets are artists in agony, performing provocative stunts and writing protest poetry that describes in painstaking detail how the Beloved people’s accumulated idolatry, immorality, indifference, and injustices are breaking God’s heart.
Heschel reminds us that “the pages of the prophetic writings are filled with echoes of divine love and disappointment, mercy and indignation,” because “the God of Israel is never impersonal.” The prophets are participating in the passion of God. Their sympathy is excruciating, because “the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos.”2
The prophets share that heavy burden of God’s grief as they warn the people about the destructive consequences that await them at the end of their current trajectory. They can act as a hearing aid for us to more clearly appreciate what God cares about and how to get more in tune with that. They point to the past and call attention to what may happen in the future if nothing changes. Naming the future consequences is where the “future predictors” idea comes from, but that misses the larger point. Instead, the urgency of the prophets’ message is more like a warning or invitation to regret and remorse, and to repent and return. When prophets name consequences, I think for the most part they want to be proven wrong — they want the people to repent so that those consequences won’t come true.3
Their task is excruciating — the prophets are stretched as they mediate between God and people. Their messages were sometimes addressed to regular people, but often their strong language was aimed at kings and those in power around them, which made their calling pretty dangerous. Walter Brueggemann describes how prophets are calling out to people whose imaginations were captive to the empire, urging them to reject the “royal consciousness” of kings. Kings (and king-like figures) maintain the status quo built on systemic exploitation, and the first season of waking up to this truth is always lament:
“If we are to understand prophetic criticism, we must see that its characteristic idiom is anguish and not anger… the real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right…”
The king-types are invested in keeping people’s imaginations drowsy with mimed charm, but when the poetry of the prophets hits the ears of those who are starting to wake up to what they didn’t see before, they may find themselves in a season of deep sadness, yearning for action and change. These listeners can find themselves in a “contest of the imaginations that admits no easy resolution but that puts the hearer in crisis between a failed imagination and a new inexplicable imagination.”4
Although I am summarizing who the prophets are, they were definitely not all the same. Some preached in Israel, some in Judah, some to outside nations. Some performed provocative stunts to get people’s attention, some wrote texts, some were written about by others. Wilda Gafney does an excellent and thorough job describing that although most people think of men as prophets, women prophets served Israel as well, most notably Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah.5
Prophets were usually “insiders” who dealt with social rejection because of their vocation; they spoke truth to power from the edges of inside their own community. But we shouldn’t see the prophets as agents of “cancel-culture,” practicing moral grandstanding. They both grieve with God’s grief, and they urgently point to the path of repentance that is also the path of liberation. And they’re usually unsuccessful.6
Prophets: Their Witness in the Canon
While I admit that the prophets are not easy to listen to, I definitely do not want a Bible without the prophets in it. I want the testimonies of the prophets ringing in my ears anywhere I live, but especially at the heart of empire, I want the voices of the prophets in my head — we need them.
I’ve sometimes heard an oversimplified (and antisemitic) approach to Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) texts taught as a foil to Jesus, implying “that’s what those legalistic Jews did back then, and that’s why we need Jesus (to bring grace).” But the first testament is so much more than Jesus’s backstory and predictions, and this is especially true for the prophets. They were important in their time, and they are indispensable today. We need to hear from the prophets here and now — they are paying the most attention and telling the most truth. Prophets refused all forms of flattery and charm as they spoke truth to the powerful on behalf of the powerless. They connected the dots of the people’s cumulative thousands of selfish choices, and because they could see the whole of where it was heading, they were desperately trying to get the people’s attention to warn them.
However, despite their desperate messages, the prophets also describe the tiniest thread of hope, naming the ways that God promises to heal and rescue the people from the consequences of their own destruction. AND since the prophets prove to be the most honest about what’s wrong, the hope that the prophets describe is the “real-est” possible hope. While this thread is thin and easy to miss, it has the strength of deep roots that will someday bloom again. This hint of hope is profoundly sturdy and will connect us and hold us together through drought and dismay to peace on the other side.
We are invited to get to know each individual prophet, how they wrestled with their calling and context, and how their witness engages in dialogue with other voices — they sometimes disagree and contradict each other!7 But I think we also need to pay attention to their inclusion in the canon. Scribes and priests before, during, and after the exile were choosing, editing, and curating the texts that would eventually be included and assembled together and passed on to future generations. The prophets contain some of the harshest examples of community self-critique in the whole canon; they could have been left out or whitewashed or smoothed over, but instead they are included.
The inclusion of their collective witness can serve as a kind of communal confession within the canon, refusing to hide the failure of their leaders (both political and popular) and instead testifying to their own self-destruction:
Look how we ruined this.
Remember what we did.
Never stop rehearsing the testimony about how we lost the storyline with God.
It takes tremendous courage for each generation not only to honestly rehearse their own failings but also to profoundly persist in taking responsibility for the failings of their ancestors, trusting that the God of Israel was big enough to handle all of it.
Jesus is called a prophet in Luke 4 and Luke 7, and he modeled both criticism and compassion like they did. He criticized the status quo that keeps the oppressed under the boot of the system. Any criticism that leads to ideas about different kingdoms threatens to bring a “radical dismantling” for those who benefit from the current arrangement. Jesus also offered compassion like a prophet, showing us a God who sees the hurt and pain caused by the systems of the powerful, and even dies in solidarity with humanity.8
This compassion reignites our imagination for serving the God the prophets tell us about. When we submit to the testimony of the prophets, the blast disrupts our own complicity in the “royal consciousness” that would keep us drowsy. Since “empires live by numbness,” we are invited to shake off the charm of kings; then we can begin to imagine different realities and live creatively into a world that needs to wake up.
In the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox canons, the Prophets can be found at the end of the “Old Testament.” However, in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, the prophets are found in the large section in the middle called Nevi’im, meaning prophets. This section consists of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the “Book of the Twelve” minor prophets.
See Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Prophets, 11-12, 29, 31.
Obadiah, Jonah, and Nahum are some exceptions.
See Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination, 81, 11, 77, 130. Every leader should read this book with introspection and vulnerability. Any preacher, elder, professor, director, dean, president, manager, parent, executive, boss (etc) should always read the prophets as if they are the king in that scenario.
See Ellen Davis' Biblical Prophecy: Perspectives for Christian Theology, Discipleship, and Ministry in the Interpretation series. She notes on p.5 that Huldah can be viewed as one of the few successful prophets in the Bible. The character of Jonah is portrayed as successful, but the book of Jonah should probably be seen as an intentional caricature of an ironic antitype (and not portraying a historical event); see Davis, 45-53.
For example, the books of Nahum and Jonah contradict each other. Reading each one in conversation with the other’s testimony is a provocative experience.
Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, 84-88.