Prophecy_Barton

The Babylonian Exile of the 6th century b.c.e. caused a sharp break in many of the traditions and institutions of ancient Israel. Its effect on the character of prophecy, however, was less marked than its social and political consequences; and there is a clear line of continuity linking Amos and Isaiah of Jerusalem with Ezekiel, Deutero-Isaiah, and Zechariah. Nevertheless, in time prophecy did gradually evolve into something very different from what had been known in preexilic Israel; and by the NT period the designation “prophet” applied to people in whom few of the characteristic features of the preexilic prophets are discernible. This change in turn had an effect on the way people in the Greco-Roman period perceived the preexilic prophets. At some point in the postexilic age, the idea began to develop that prophecy in the strict sense of the word had ceased from Israel, though certain groups, notably the Qumran community and the early Christians, held that it had recently revived. The interpretation of postexilic prophecy has many disputed areas, and in general it has not received as much scholarly attention as its preexilic counterpart. We shall examine five questions: the message of the postexilic prophets, their role and status in the community, the nature of prophetic experience after the Exile, the forms of prophetic literature, and the editing of prophetic books.

1. From Doom to Hope. The most obvious shift in the message of the prophets which begins with the Exile is the gradual loss of the sense that God was about to bring disaster on Israel and Judah. Scholars continue to disagree about the extent to which the preexilic prophets had seen hope beyond judgment, or had even thought that the judgment they predicted could be averted; but whether or not the preexilic message of judgment was total, there can be no doubt that it was an important part of the prophets’ teaching. Amos had said “The end has come upon my people Israel” (Amos 8:2); Hosea, “Compassion is hid from my eyes” (Hos 13:14); Isaiah, “His anger is not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still” (Isa 9:12, 17, 21). In Jeremiah, and in the early oracles of Ezekiel, we hear the same message of impending doom, foretelling the disaster of the Exile. But once the Babylonian invasion had happened and all false hopes of averting it had come to nothing, prophets began to look beyond disaster to more favorable divine purposes for Israel, “plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer 29:11). This is already clear in some of the oracles collected in Jeremiah 30–33 (although many scholars believe these to be additions to the words of Jeremiah, they cannot be much later than the work of the prophet himself), in Ezekiel 36–39 and the early postexilic appendix to Ezekiel (Ezekiel 40–48), and above all in the oracles of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55).

But exilic and postexilic prophecy of blessing is continuous with the preexilic judgment prophecy that it gradually displaced; it does not represent the triumph of the facile, optimistic prophets condemned by Jeremiah, who said “Peace, peace” when there was no peace (Jer 6:14). The stories of Jeremiah’s activities during the early years of the exile of Jehoiachin make it clear that Yahweh has not in any sense changed his mind about the fate of Judah; no speedy return of the exiles or simple restoration of the preexilic kingdom is to be looked for. In Jeremiah 28 we read how Jeremiah disputed with a prophet, Hananiah, who had said “Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house” (28:3). Jeremiah rejected such optimism as a failure to see that the Babylonian conquest was not a temporary setback, but part of a consistent divine plan, and that far worse was to come before there could be any thought of a change in Judah’s fortunes. As late as Deutero-Isaiah, who prophesied just before the return of the first people back to the land of Israel, there is no suggestion that the disaster of Exile had been against the will of Yahweh, or that the better times which were now coming marked a change of heart by Yahweh or invalidated the judgment prophecy that had gone before. On the contrary, the Exile was a vindication of the prophets who had predicted doom: “Your first fathers sinned, and your mediators transgressed against me; therefore I profaned the princes of the sanctuary, I delivered Jacob to utter destruction and Israel to reviling” (Isa 43:27–28). The possibility of a better future results from the fact that Yahweh has now exacted the punishment which earlier prophets had correctly maintained that he would insist on. There is thus, in postexilic prophecy, a strong sense of identity with the teaching of previous prophets.

Nevertheless, the belief that Yahweh’s judgment had now been fully exacted and so had come to an end did gradually change the prophetic message into something substantially different from what it had been before. Already in Deutero-Isaiah we find the idea that the punishment imposed on Judah was measured and could in principle be paid in full, so that a time would come (and had now come, according to the prophet) when the nation would owe Yahweh no more suffering by way of payment: “her time of service is ended . . . for she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins” (Isa 40:2). This could easily [Vol. 5, Page 490] [Vol. 5, Page 490] lead to a belief that the Babylonians, Yahweh’s instruments of punishment, had afflicted the Israelites more than they deserved and so stood under imminent judgment themselves. Such seems to be the perception both of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 46–47) and of the early postexilic prophet Zechariah (see Zech 1:15: “while I was angry but a little they furthered the disaster”).

Soon the notion took root that Yahweh had vented his full anger on his people in the past, in the Exile which was now over, and that there was no danger that he would ever have cause to do so again. After the Exile, oracles predicting judgment on Israel still appear fitfully, in Haggai’s warnings that sin leads to drought and famine (Hag 1:6–11), in Malachi’s insistence that blemished offerings lead to divine displeasure (Mal 1:6–2:9), or in Trito-Isaiah’s condemnation of social injustices and pagan practices which lead God to blight social relations and bring national calamity (Isaiah 59). But increasingly divine judgment was thought to fall selectively on those elements in Israel which continued to deserve it, and the overwhelming sense of impending national calamity which had been so marked a feature in the preexilic prophets was lost. Eventually even the theme of selective judgment died away, and the role of the prophets came to be understood as one of comfort and consolation for Israel, and of judgment only on her enemies.

2. Calls to Repentance. The question of whether the preexilic prophets preached “repentance” (i.e., a change in social and political attitudes and actions) is a vexed one, and the answer to it affects our assessment of how far the postexilic prophetic message is novel. There is no doubt that Jeremiah urged his contemporaries to “repent,” that is, to alter their attitude toward the Babylonian threat by capitulating rather than resisting, and that he urged them to reform the religious customs of the day—to move away from the syncretistic practices that had replaced a purer Yahwism. It is clear, however, that he did not expect such repentance to lead to a simple change in Yahweh’s plans for Israel. There was no question of averting the disaster of the Exile, whatever the people did; and the course of action he most urgently wished the leaders of Judah to adopt was to come to terms with this reality, not to resist it. Their “repentance” would thus consist more in recognizing the justice and inevitability of the Babylonian invasion and victory, and in adjusting to the new state of affairs this would imply, than in reforming the national life so as to persuade Yahweh to alter the course of international events—the time when that might have been possible was already past. Similarly, after the major deportations of 597 and 586 his advice to the exiles (according to the account in Jeremiah 29) is to settle down and come to terms with the reality of life in the land of Exile and not to act as if it were merely a temporary aberration in Yahweh’s designs for his people.

Jeremiah’s calls to repent are thus in practice calls to embrace realism and to abandon false hopes. Much the same may be said of the early oracles of Ezekiel, whose aim seems to have been chiefly to dissuade his contemporaries in Exile from believing that there would be a speedy restoration, and to accept that they were responsible for the fate that had befallen them and for the disasters which were still in store for the city of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 18). In this early exilic period attention shifts from the earlier prophetic concern with social justice and religious purity to the question of how the community will react to the conditions of life under Babylonian domination. Calls to reform the national life, even if these had once been typical of prophets, cease to be appropriate, in view of the total lack of self-determination possible for a nation in Exile or living in the ruins of its land.

In the period of postexilic reconstruction, however, prophets appear much more as teachers whose role is to induce a change of heart and of conduct in the community now striving to repair its national and social life. Haggai in particular quite clearly sees his task as being to persuade the people to make an effort to rebuild the temple (1:4, 9), while Zechariah seems to combine a similar concern for restoring the nation’s cultic life with an interest in questions of social justice that reminds us of Amos or Isaiah (see, for example, Zech 8:16–17). It is possible, of course, that passages of moral exhortation in the postexilic prophets owe something to the work of editors, but these passages are in keeping with the much more positive and constructive role of these later prophets as compared with the doom-laden words of their preexilic predecessors.

By NT times it was widely held that all the prophets had been essentially moral teachers, whose function had been to exhort rather than to foretell disaster. This idea seems to owe much to the early years after the Exile, when prophets such as Haggai and Zechariah had directed their efforts to improving the moral condition of the nation, at a time when it was no longer believed that national disaster was impending. Whereas preexilic prophets had been concerned to discern God’s hand in contemporary international affairs, and to show Israel the signs of the times, postexilic prophets became directly involved in social and political questions, as respected, official teachers of morality. The tenor of the preexilic prophets’ message (continued by Jeremiah and Ezekiel) is that the people should accept the justice of Yahweh’s impending punishment for their sins; that of the postexilic prophets is that Yahweh seeks moral reformation and renewal, and will reward them with his favor.

3. The Prophets and the Cult. Anyone who comes to the postexilic prophets after reading their preexilic predecessors is immediately struck by how differently they react to the place of the cult in Israel’s national life. Amos had condemned the religion of the sanctuaries (4:4–5; 5:4–5), and Jeremiah had dismissed the temple as a false focus of security for the nation (7:1–4). But Haggai and Zechariah regard rebuilding the temple as crucial to national reconstruction (Hag 1:4; Zech 4:8–10); the appendix to Ezekiel places cultic institutions at the center of national life (Ezekiel 40–44); Malachi rebukes the priests for neglecting the detail of ritual ordinances (Mal 1:6–10); and in the work of the Chronicler prophets are consistently represented as concerned with the cultic life of the nation (cf. 2 Chr 13:8–11; 15:1–7). The reason for this may be that there had been a change in the prophetic message—perhaps a necessary change in view of the different conditions of life for the postexilic Jewish community, deprived of its political institutions and obliged to embrace distinctive ritual and cultic ordinances as an alternative focus for national life. Alternatively, it may simply [Vol. 5, Page 491] [Vol. 5, Page 491] mean that the postexilic prophets who are represented in the OT happen to be those who came from a cultic milieu, though in this respect they were not necessarily typical of postexilic prophecy in general. (This point will be discussed again below in relation to the question of the role of the prophet in postexilic society.) Only in Trito-Isaiah (Isa 66:1) do we find hints that not all postexilic prophets were enthusiastic supporters of the renewed temple cult.

Connections between prophets and cult may be reflected not only in the content of the prophetic message but also in the form of prophetic books, for it is after the Exile that these begin to show influence from literary forms whose natural home is public worship. Deutero-Isaiah makes extensive use of hymns, royal oracles probably taken from coronation or enthronement rituals, and cultic exhortations; indeed, it has sometimes been suggested that the whole collection is liturgical in origin, or at least that the prophet was a temple singer or poet by profession. If we follow the division of prophetic collections into diwan (collected oracles) and liturgy types (as proposed by Engnell 1969), it is noteworthy that the postexilic period contributes by far the most examples of the liturgy type to the prophetic corpus of the OT. Postexilic prophecy almost wholly lacks the antipathy to national cultic life which is so marked a feature of the teaching of Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah. Perhaps this is because the cult had ceased to be a cause for complacent self-satisfaction, preventing the people from hearing the prophetic warning that sacrifices would not save a nation steeped in social injustice. Instead it had become the essential rallying point for renewal and reconstruction.

4. Oracles about Foreign Nations. Israelite prophets had probably uttered oracles about foreign nations from the earliest times, since prophets seem to have been retained by kings to foretell the downfall of their enemies—and perhaps to help bring it about, through what we might call magic. Amos (in chaps. 1–2) seems to presuppose that his audience was familiar with the custom of uttering oracles predicting the fall of Israel’s enemies. However, one of the most radical changes effected by the preexilic classical prophets was to replace such prophecies, which foretold disaster for the nation’s enemies, with condemnation of Israel itself. Thus by the time of Jeremiah, there was a strong tradition among the prophets of seeing Israel itself as the enemy whom Yahweh had cursed. But in either case, down to the early exilic period prophets evince little interest in the fate of foreign nations except as this bears on the fate of Israel. Other nations may be doomed because they are Israel’s enemies, or they may be Yahweh’s instruments to punish his sinful people. Sometimes both themes may appear: Isaiah 10 contains a number of oracles in which the eventual downfall of the Assyrians is prophesied after they have carried out their commission to punish Israel.

From Jeremiah onward, however, the interest of Israel’s prophets widens to include the fate of foreign nations as a theme in its own right. In Ezekiel, Deutero-Isaiah, Haggai, and Zechariah the downfall of Babylon is the prelude to the eventual restoration of Israel to its land; and the old tradition of cursing the enemies of Israel reemerges in the form of oracles against Babylon: Isaiah 46–47 is the most extended example. The Babylonians are denounced for their arrogance (cf. Isaiah 10 on the Assyrians), and their speedy collapse is promised by Yahweh. Probably from the same period are the oracles in Jeremiah 50–51 against Babylon. The logical implication of this is that Yahweh has appointed the Persian king, Cyrus, as his agent of judgment on Babylon and hence of salvation for the Jews, and this results in one of the earliest examples of an oracle’s promising divine blessing to a foreign king (Isa 45:1–7). Here Cyrus is actually described as Yahweh’s “anointed one”—a title previously used only for the Davidic king. The generally favorable view of the Persians continues to be characteristic of postexilic prophecy, which contains no explicitly anti-Persian oracles.

But alongside the specific oracles of doom on Babylon and of blessing on Persia, the prophetic tradition from Deutero-Isaiah onward comes to contain vaguer oracles about “the nations,” in which virulently xenophobic sentiments alternate with an attitude which seems incipiently universalistic. Most of the prophetic books now contain a cycle of “oracles against the nations,” in which (sometimes named, sometimes anonymous) nations are threatened with Yahweh’s wrath. These oracles are notoriously difficult to date, but must in most cases derive from the Persian or Hellenistic age. At the same time, many prophetic books include oracles foretelling the “gathering in” of the nations to Jerusalem, and seem to envisage a future in which the barriers between Jew and gentile will break down and all mankind will come to acknowledge Yahweh as the one God. There is dispute about whether this is how we should understand passages in Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah which say that Yahweh will become known to the nations. They may rather be a promise that the nations (who have derided fallen Israel) will come to acknowledge the reality of Yahweh’s power when he punishes them and restores his own people. But in Zechariah and Trito-Isaiah there can be little doubt that foreigners are regarded positively (cf. Zech 8:20–23; Isa 56:3–8), while Malachi seems to contrast the worship offered by gentiles favorably with the blemished offerings of Israelite priests (Mal 1:11–14). The book of Jonah—a legend about a prophet rather than a collection of prophetic oracles—seems designed to teach a similar message, perhaps in reaction against the exclusivism of some Judaism of the Second Temple period. Isaiah 19 concludes with five oracles of a strikingly universalistic tone, including the remarkable prophecy, “In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage’” (Isa 19:24–25).

First, sometimes this is a convenient way of expressing the idea that the time scale of prophetic predictions became longer after the Exile. Instead of foretelling the immediate consequences of national sin, prophets now came to be interested in a longer sweep of history; and, in particular, they started to think that God has a detailed plan for the history of all the nations which he was working out in a more or less predetermined manner. The [Vol. 5, Page 492] [Vol. 5, Page 492] preexilic prophets give the impression that Yahweh reacts sharply and immediately to human conduct, but not that he has a grand design coming to fruition in preplanned stages. But already in Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah, and to an increasing extent in the thought of Trito-Isaiah, Zechariah, and the forerunners of apocalyptic—such as the authors of Isaiah 24–27 or Zechariah 9–14—history seems to form an orderly progression, with human volition playing a role clearly subordinate to the divine plan. When the prophets after the Exile are said to have “an eschatology,” this is the aspect of their message that is often being referred to. Of course they also had an interest in what the immediate future held for Israel, but (as noted in the preceding section) the scope of their concern was perceptibly wider. It should be noted, however, that it is not until a few of the apocalyptic works of the NT period that the events foretold can be called “eschatological” in the full technical sense the term has in traditional Christian theology, where it implies an end to the whole world order and also refers to the fate of the individual after death.

Second, “eschatology” may also be used (as it frequently is by NT scholars) to point not so much to the long-term plan found in the thinking of postexilic prophecy as to the transcendent character of the divine action in history. This is another aspect of the tendency to determinism just noted: the prophets stress that what happens in human history is divine action, the coming to fruition of a divine purpose, accomplished through more than human means. God breaks into the progression of human history and takes control of it in a direct and uncompromising way, leaving little to human agents. This is certainly the impression created, for example, by Zechariah 14, where God stands in person on the Mount of Olives and causes it to be split in two, or in Isaiah 34, where he himself wields the sword that first destroys the heavenly hosts and then descends in judgment on Edom. The expectation of God’s personal, decisive intervention in human history seems to be a feature of prophecy as it develops toward what we call apocalyptic. There are few parallels to this way of thinking in the preexilic prophets, for whom divine involvement in human affairs is more often expressed through the mediation of human agency.

Third, some scholars hold that the failure of prophetic predictions to materialize led to their being projected into the remote (“eschatological”) future as a way of retaining their authority, when a simpler reaction would have been simply to conclude that they had been proved wrong. On this view, the postexilic prophets themselves did not hold any longer-term view of history than their predecessors; it was their disciples who, faced with the apparent failure of the prophets’ predictions, reworked their oracles so as to make them refer to the very remote future. Thus they made it impossible that the prophecies would ever be falsified by events. On this interpretation, “eschatology” is thus not a development within the prophetic tradition, but an interpretative category applied to prophetic oracles by those who edited and reused them in later generations.

We noted above that alongside collections of oracles, the postexilic prophetic books also contain many works which are closer to the “liturgy” type. This observation, combined with the evidence of the books of Chronicles, where “prophets” often appear in a liturgical role, may suggest that there was a significant shift after the Exile toward a closer alignment of the prophetic tradition with the institutions of the cult. Haggai and Zechariah might already be examples of this, with their concern for the reestablishment of temple worship among the returned exiles. Even Ezekiel, during the exilic period itself, shows many more points of contact with priestly circles than is the case with the preexilic prophets: the sins listed in chap. 18, for example, include a number of “cultic” offenses such as we do not find in Amos or Isaiah. Even if Ezekiel 40–48 is a postexilic addition, the perception of Ezekiel as a prophet deeply concerned with the ordering of worship may well be the reason why it was to his oracles that this appendix was added.

Late 19th-century scholarship was inclined to regard almost all postexilic prophecy as the product of cultic circles. This was thought to mark a decline in the institution of prophecy, from the high ethical concerns of the 8th and 7th centuries into an incipient “legalism” and obsession with ritual matters. On this view, prophecy in the sense the term has when applied to Amos, Hosea, or Isaiah more or less ceased to exist after the Exile; the term “prophet” (nābı̂˒) came to be used as the title of one among the many different types of temple officials. Other terms certainly underwent similar shifts—“Levite,” for example, ceased to mean any sort of priest and became the name for a temple singer.

In recent years, however, a more nuanced interpretation of these postexilic developments has been proposed by Hanson (1975), building on the work of Plöger (1968). Hanson argues that there are two distinct strands within postexilic prophetic writings. The first is indeed a drift toward the institutionalization of prophets as temple officials, whose function was to produce liturgical texts. Their “oracles” consisted only of exhortations to keep the Torah and be regular in worship, or of promises that God would bless the cultic community around the temple. Hanson sees this trend as beginning with Ezekiel, continuing in Haggai and Zechariah, and passing on into the Chronicler’s understanding of prophets.

But in tension with this shift toward the cult, there was also a second, minority tradition which kept alive “authentic” prophecy, the inheritance of Amos and Isaiah. This prophetic movement had as its task to protest against the increasingly static and complacent institutions of Second Temple Judaism. Its best representative is Trito-Isaiah (Isaiah 56–66). Trito-Isaiah’s opposition to rebuilding the temple (66:1) stands in continuity with the preexilic prophetic protest against the centrality of the temple, expressed most clearly by Jeremiah (see, for example, Jer 7:4, “Do not trust in these deceptive words: This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord”). According to Hanson, prophets such as Trito-Isaiah were not officials appointed by the Second Temple state but outsiders, just as the great preexilic prophets had been, denouncing the society of their day and attacking its cultic life as an empty show. This Isaiah 58 attacks solemn fasts in terms very similar to those used by the preexilic prophets to condemn feasts. The message here is that Yahweh hates fasting unaccompanied by social justice, and (by [Vol. 5, Page 493] [Vol. 5, Page 493] implication) will punish those who use such pentitential practices as a cover for an unreformed life. It contrasts with Zechariah’s cheerful optimism that fasts will cease merely because (in the newly restored and forgiven Jerusalem, which is to enjoy God’s blessing) they will no longer be appropriate (Zech 8:18–19). Trito-Isaiah is full of sharp condemnations of the corruption of cultic life (56:9–12; 57:1–13; 59:1–8; 65:1–12). It is hard to see him (or them, if the work is a collection of oracles by many hands) as any kind of temple official paid to maintain the institutional stability of the restored nation.

Hanson suggests that it is in this prophetic protest movement that the roots of apocalyptic are to be found, and that Trito-Isaiah represents “the dawn of apocalyptic.” The insights of this movement continue in the works commonly called “proto-apocalyptic”—Isaiah 24–27, Joel, and Zechariah 9-14. Thus the “liturgy” type of prophecy by no means succeeded in completely displacing the old independent prophetic spirit, which continued to exist and to resist the tendency toward “establishment” attitudes in the Second Temple period. These independent prophets believed that Yahweh’s hands were not tied by the institutional structures that had been established. Yahweh was still free to intervene dramatically in human affairs and, if he saw the need, to punish Israel as of old. To use the terms proposed by Plöger (1968), the postexilic theocracy succeeded in taming most prophets and reducing them to mere state officials—not unlike the “institutional prophets” whom Elijah, Micah, and Jeremiah had opposed; but there remained a loyal band of prophets who insisted that Yahweh’s word to Israel included an eschatology—a message of doom on a disobedient people.

Hanson’s theories have been widely accepted in OT scholarship, with the result that the picture of prophecy in postexilic times has become more subtle than it was at the end of the last century. There is no single model that will account for the role and function of “prophets” in the Second Temple period, as though all prophets were the same. Rather, we seem to have at least two radically different types. Some have asked whether there is really such a sharp distinction to be drawn between, for example, Trito-Isaiah and Zechariah; for Zechariah seems also to envisage the need for moral (not merely cultic) reform—Zech 7:1-7 criticizes fasting in much the same terms as Isaiah 58. Conversely, Isaiah 56–66 contain some oracles that seem perfectly well-disposed toward the restoration of Jerusalem and its cultus (the whole of Isaiah 60–62 belongs to this tradition). It has also been noted that the apocalyptic movement is by no means homogeneous and that not all apocalypses can be regarded as anti-“theocratic”; some indeed are entirely noneschatological. However, Hanson’s work has been important in establishing that something akin to the preexilic tradition of noninstitutional, independent prophets did continue after the Exile. We should not be misled by the fact that many of those responsible for our finished OT tried to erase the traces of this movement by preserving rather few of its works, and by hijacking the term “prophet” for use as a technical term in describing the personnel of the temple. Enough remains in the OT to show that there were prophets who had no official role even after the Exile, and that these persisted in denouncing the hierarchy of temple and nation when they saw fit.

The question of prophetic experience is an obscure one in every period of OT history. In the postexilic age the most noticeable development is a greater emphasis on the spirit of God as the motive force behind prophetic utterance. Ezekiel speaks of the spirit of Yahweh transporting him from place to place, and this seems intended to imply an “out-of-the-body” experience or perhaps even literal levitation (at one point he is picked up by a lock of his hair: see 3:12; 8:3; 11:1, 24). Trito-Isaiah contains a famous reference to the spirit of Yahweh as the inspiration behind his prophecy (Isa 61:1); and throughout Haggai and Zechariah there are repeated references to the spirit (Hag 1:14; 2:5; Zech 4:6; 7:12), though some scholars think that these are additions by the editors of the books, for whom it was important to stress the activity of the spirit in the restored community. Joel 3:1–2—Eng 2:28–29 explicitly refers to the gift of prophecy as resulting from the pouring out of God’s spirit, predicting that a time will come when this gift will be extended to all humankind.

As is well known, references to the spirit are very rare in the preexilic prophets, so that we have clear evidence here of a shift in understanding of the prophetic experience. It is not clear, however, whether this reflects any change in the experiences prophets actually had—whether, for example, the postexilic experience was more dramatic, or “ecstatic,” or was in some sense a return to the uncontrolled, frenzied activity of the preclassical prophets whom we meet in the books of Samuel and Kings and upon whom the spirit of Yahweh “came mightily” (cf. 1 Sam 10:10), driving them to act in uncontrollable, dervishlike frenzy. While this is possible, it may be simply that the post-exilic community spoke more of the spirit as the motive force behind prophecy as a way of emphasizing its divine origin, without meaning to imply that the psychological experience involved had changed significantly from preexilic times. It may be better to ask why the great classical preexilic prophets seem to avoid reference to the spirit of Yahweh, when both their predecessors and their successors seem to take it for granted that this is the best language to use in explanation of prophetic gifts.

A more significant shift may lie behind the greatly increased interest in visions and dreams in postexilic prophetic books. The passage from Joel just cited glosses the extension of prophetic gifts to all by saying, “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” If it is right to see significance in the insistence by preexilic prophets on hearing the word of Yahweh rather than on seeing visions or dreams, this change may well indicate an important new departure. Jeremiah once explicitly distinguishes true prophecy from seeing visions: “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord” (Jer 23:28). This appears to imply that true revelations from Yahweh do not come in visions or dreams, though it is not clear what experience is concretely implied by “him who has my word.” Does this refer to “audition,” a supernatural but literal hearing of voices, or to some more subtle inner conviction that Yahweh has spoken in the heart? In any case, preexilic prophets are not uniformly opposed to [Vol. 5, Page 494] [Vol. 5, Page 494] visions: both Amos (7:1, 4, 7; 8:1; 9:1) and Isaiah (6:1) report visions which enshrine the word Yahweh is speaking to his people, and they show no embarrassment about this mode of revelation—unless these reports are the work of postexilic redactors.

At all events postexilic prophets and the collectors of the oracles seem to have regarded visions as the normal method by which God communicates with his messengers; and sometimes the visions in question are detailed and full of symbolism, a kind of pageant played out in front of the prophet’s eyes, each incident within which has allegorical significance (see, for example, the vision reports in Zechariah 1–6). Amos’ visions already contain a symbolic component. In that a commonplace object (a basket of summer fruit, a plumb line) is given a deeper meaning, often through wordplay (cf. also Jer 1:11–12). But in the postexilic period the visions become lengthier, and sometimes a whole drama is acted out in symbolic form, requiring interpretation (often by an angel) before its significance can be grasped by the prophet and communicated to his hearers. The earliest example of this is Ezekiel’s vision of the coming fall of Jerusalem, recorded in Ezekiel 9. In later apocalyptic works such visions become deliberately obscure and riddling, so that it is quite impossible to understand them without the appended explanation. Such is the case, for instance, with the visions of Daniel, or (outside the Bible) of Enoch in the various books attributed to him.

A question which this often raises in the minds of students of apocalyptic, but one which is equally useful in studying the prophets, is whether in some cases the vision is not a “genuine” vision at all, but a literary convention deliberately and consciously adopted by the prophet. If so, then the “prophet” or apocalyptist is to be seen more as a writer than as a speaker. This question arises already with Ezekiel and Zechariah, for their allegorical visions seem to lack the immediacy and directness of the brief vision reports in Amos or Isaiah. There is no reason to rule out the possibility that some postexilic prophecy may have been communicated in writing, by the production of fly sheets which could be passed around among a literate religious group, rather than by the kind of public declamation that we associate with prophets like Isaiah or Jeremiah. In the case of apocalyptic works, it is virtually certain that this is how the works were appropriated by their intended audience. Of course the suggestion that some prophecy may have been literary from the beginning does not in itself detract from its inspiration; but it does imply that the prophet was a learned writer rather than a simple and perhaps illiterate spokesman for Yahweh. Since Hebrew culture seems to have lacked any conventional ways of describing literary inspiration, it may have seemed natural to account for such prophecies by attributing them to an origin in dreams and visions which had afterward to be written down—by contrast with the directness of the “word” of Yahweh which passed immediately through the prophet’s mouth as he spoke to the people.

The postexilic period witnessed a breaking down of some of the distinctive forms of prophetic utterance. Oracles beginning “Thus says the Lord” or ending “oracle of Yahweh” continue to appear, but are less characteristic than they were in the books of the preexilic prophets. Sometimes these formulas seem to be scattered almost at random as a guarantee of prophetic authenticity, and have lost their original character of marking the beginnings and ends of distinct oracles. This is particularly marked in Haggai and Zechariah, where the phrase “says the Lord of hosts” appears more or less as a refrain (e.g., Hag 2:4–9; Zech 1:2–6, 14–17). Furthermore, what is introduced by such formulas is often not what we would recognize as an “oracle” in earlier prophetic writings. In Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah many of the oracles use liturgical forms, and this is part of a general drift toward the use of cultic forms by the prophets (as discussed above).

On the other hand, the postexilic prophets do not seem to follow their preexilic predecessors in using forms borrowed from other spheres of Israel’s life with deliberately ironic or sarcastic effect. There is nothing like Amos’ parodying of priestly tôrôt (e.g., 4:4–5) or his use of lament forms to suggest that Israel is already spiritually dead (e.g., 5:2). One has the impression that the forms of prophetic oracles are not taken directly from this or that everyday use, but are imitated from what is by now perceived to be “normal” prophetic style, without any awareness that originally each prophetic oracle had a distinct origin. It is as though postexilic prophets are producing imitations or pastiches of the existing prophetic collections, and whereas these are often jumbled because of the vagaries of transmission and editing, the imitations are jumbled because postexilic writers felt that this is how a prophetic book should look.

At the same time, some forms that scarcely occur at all in the preexilic prophets now come into prominence, notably the allegory, and the extended vision report (with its interpretation by an interpreting angel), which eventually becomes the form known as the apocalypse. There is also a profusion of oracles beginning “in that day” or “in the end of the days,” which perhaps reflect the increasingly eschatological interest of these prophets. In general the developments are all consistent with the suggestion made in the preceding section, that prophecy gradually turned from a spoken into a written phenomenon, so that the forms used came increasingly to reflect leisurely literary composition rather than the needs of oral delivery, memorability, and immediate impact.

This leads naturally into the next question: the editing of the prophetic books. A marked feature of the postexilic age is the growth of official or semiofficial versions of older writings, which gradually moved in the direction of becoming “Holy Scripture.” Just as the Persian period saw the codification of the pentateuchal books to form the Torah, so at about the same time collections of prophetic oracles began to take on the character of sacred writings. At first perhaps these were revered by particular groups, but in due course they became part of the shared heritage of all Jews.

It is usually thought that the Exile itself provided the initial impetus toward the collection and codification of prophetic writings. For one thing, the event itself had vindicated the predictions of the preexilic prophets and so [Vol. 5, Page 495] [Vol. 5, Page 495] turned them from objects of scorn into venerable figures whom God himself had shown to be in the right; for another, the separation of so many Jews from their homeland made the preservation of the national literature imperative if Jewish culture and religion were to survive.

The process by which the prophetic books were compiled was almost infinitely complex, but it involved at least three separate elements. First, the authentic utterances of the prophets were arranged in order, sometimes chronologically (so far as the editors could guess at what this might be), sometimes thematically or on a catchword principle. Secondly, narratives about the prophet, which might or might not be of any historical value, were added. In the case of some prophets, such as Amos, very little such material was available, but with others, notably Jeremiah, it was very extensive. And thirdly, further oracles which had no original connection with the prophet in question were appended or worked into the earlier collection, until the ordinary reader could no longer discern the difference. With a book such as Isaiah this third stage probably contributed the greater part of the book. Indeed, from chap. 40 onward we have at least two collections which had probably existed in a semifinished form under who knows what name before they were added to Isaiah 1–39. Whether the editors intended to assert that the prophet named in the book’s superscription had in fact delivered all these oracles himself remains wholly uncertain. Later generations certainly took this to be implied. Some of the additional oracles may very well be genuinely prophetic, in the sense that they were originally delivered by people who would have claimed for themselves the same kind of inspiration as those in whose names the present books appear. But others may have always been essentially the work of scribes, composing what they took to be plausible “prophetic” utterances in an endeavor to update or revise existing oracles. And it seems clear that the same sort of process operated with all the prophetic books; the words of late postexilic prophets, once uttered and remembered, became subject to just the same procedures of redaction, addition, and embellishment that had by then already produced something like the present form of older books, such as Amos or Hosea. Only the beginnings of a distinct “canon” of Scripture eventually set limits to this kind of editorial work, and ensured that from then on comment and interpretation would have to take the form of acknowledged commentary rather than changes to the text of the prophetic books themselves.

How far the work of editors should itself be regarded as “prophetic” is largely a matter of our definitions. No doubt there were some for whom the work of interpretation entailed in the work of editing constituted a sharing in the inspiration of the prophet himself. Some people may have believed that Isaiah or Jeremiah himself continued to speak through the disciples who revised and collected his oracles—much as in later times the disciples of rabbis would give their own teaching but claim (and believe) that it was given “in the name” of their teacher, and of his teacher, and of the whole line of teachers in whose succession they stood.

Matters are complicated further when one remembers that, by the NT period, it was widely believed that the gift of authentic prophecy had died out in Israel—though its restoration, promised (it was felt) in Joel 3—Eng chap. 2, was eagerly hoped for. This belief could make claims to have received a direct divine revelation automatically suspect. The strange prediction in Zech 13:2–6, which regards “prophets,” like idols and “unclean spirits,” as a blight which Yahweh will remove from the land, may belong to a movement of thought in which any claim to be a prophet branded the claimant as an impostor. In such circumstances anyone who believed that God had spoken to him was obliged to dress his message up as the utterance of some ancient prophets, speaking in the time before “the spirit departed from Israel,” as the Talmud expresses it. This is undoubtedly part of the reason for the pseudonymity of apocalyptic works; and it no doubt also explains some of the more improbable additions to the prophetic books, such as those which imply that Isaiah addressed the problems of the Babylonian or Persian periods, or that Zechariah was interested in the Greeks. There is, however, little evidence that prophecy did in fact die out, if by “prophecy” we mean the phenomenon of inspiration such as existed in the 8th century. Indeed, theories such as those of Hanson (discussed above) have made it seem probable that the postexilic age saw just as active a prophetic movement as the preexilic. But the forms of expression did change significantly, and postexilic prophets often expressed their oracles as additions to existing collections, or even as whole new works falsely attributed to figures from the past, rather than speaking in their own persons as earlier prophets had done.

John Barton Reader in Biblical Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, England

Freedman, David Noel: The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. New York : Doubleday, 1996, c1992, S. 5:489