Prophets in Israel: Stating a problem The Writing Prophets have, in Christian circles, traditionally been painted in a fairly romantic light as the giants of faith. A comparison between the superscriptions of the prophetic books and the historical literature of the Old Testament as well between the Jewish, Samaritan and Christian traditions’ views of the prophets raises several questions regarding the ‘office’ of the prophets, their social role and the notion of the church’s ‘prophetic’ calling. In the light of these questions the article calls for a fresh historical look at the Writing Prophets and identifies a few problem areas that may warrant further investigation.

The prophets have often been represented as innovators, as those who created the monotheistic faith of Israel. There is no doubt that they were creative personalities and that they were gifted with revelatory insights which gave them a deeper insight into the nature and purpose of Israel's God. The coming together of creative imagination and divinely inspired insight gave to their message a challenge and hope which provided a new kairos in the movement of God's dialogue with his people. Yet their message and insight were never severed from the past of their people. The traditions of God's dealings with the fathers, of the deliverance from Egypt and of the settlement in Canaan provided the receptive background in their consciousness as they encountered Yahweh in the events of their own times. They inherited a historic past which had been enshrined in the religious life of their day, expressed in their credos and acted out in their rituals. They were persons who looked back and who were better able to understand Yahweh's revelation to them because of their religious heritage.

Profete in Israel: ’n Probleemstelling

The Theology of the Prophets

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The prophets: are we heading for a paradigm switch?

The problem of prophetic consciousness is still receiving much attention from interpreters of the prophetic tradition. John Skinner's earlier and still valuable work (Skinner: 1922)-Carroll's criticisms notwithstandingattempted to come at the problem from a biographical point of view. The "historical Jeremiah" was sought in the pages of the book that bore his name, and the religious experience of this prophet was outlined in considerable detail. There was, it seems, an unspoken assumption of Skinneis work, namely that the religious experience of the prophet offered an analogy for modem religious experience. But exactly how this analogy worked, or indeed, why it should work, was never explained. Abraham Heschel's fresh study of the prophets (Heschel: 1960) offered what was essentially a similar approach. In this book Heschel expounded his theory of "prophetic pathos" as the clue to understanding the prophetic consciousness. In so doing Heschel claimed to be moving away from the sterile analytical literary studies which had dominated scholarship to that point on the one hand, and the attempt to reduce prophetic phenomena to the category of ecstasy on the other. Heschel instead offered a new language. Prophets, it was argued, "felt the mood of God"; God in turn "suffeIed through the prophets." The approach was distinguished from those earlier scholars who sought to locate any hint of ecstatic behavior in the prophets of the Bible. In effect Heschel's approach, while fresh, and written with such enviable skill with the English language, is essentially a biographical approach. The difference is that Heschel offers another metaphor to explain prophetic consciousness. The metaphor is inadequate mainly because it is left unexplained, and bears the burden of too many unexamined presuppositions. It comes no more nearer the understanding of the prophetic consciousness than does von Rad's contemporary study (von Rad: 1962) which, on the subject of prophetic consciousness, is overladen with many modern, occidental assumptions. It also has some distinctively Barthian theological overtones. For von Rad the prophets are individuals, addressed in a new and unique way by God. The prophet received the word of God in a decisive moment of national and personal history, and was thereby compelled to utter what he has heard. The precise mechanics are not explained, nor is there an attempt to establish criteria for differentiating between the various expressions used in the prophets. That the prophets heard actual words in their commissioning is stated axiomatically, but never explained, and if, as von Rad insists, the records of the calls of prophets were primarily for the purpose of communicating the experience to others, how are the others to understand if, as von Rad also insists, the calling of prophets was unique? The use of metaphor must be seen in these records. This is not the place to launch into an extensive discussion of the nature and purpose of metaphor, but some basics ought to be rehearsed. Metaphor is, according to Femandez, ". . . one of the few devices we have for leaping beyond the essential privacy of the experiential process" (Femandez: 1971). The function of metaphor is to communicate-to inform, to express, to declare, to direct and to persuade-by linking domains, the obscure with the familiar. The prophets explain the profundity of their religious experience and sense of compulsion to preach in the terms of everyday communicationbetween human beings. In seeking to understand this we are welladvised to pay close attention to the social and cultural environment in which this is done, rather than assume that either the language of daily communication means the same in modem westem society as it did in ancient oriental society (von Rad), or that the interior language

Profete in Israel: ’n Probleemstelling

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The Theology of the Prophets

References

The prophets: are we heading for a paradigm switch?

The Search For Prophetic Consciousness: Comments on Method

The Theology of the Prophets