Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
How Can We Understand the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible? Isaiah as a Case Study
I have started to discuss the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, in large part to correct widespread misunderstandings of what they were doing and what their books were about, and in part to emphasize just how interesting and important they are. These are Israelite teachers who believe that God was delivering a message through them to the crises they were facing in their time. To understand their message, we have to know what the particular crises were – there were many different ones confronted by different prophets, and each had a message to deliver in the face of the one he was addressing. Even so, there is a broad consistency among the messages you will find in the prophets – though it is not at all what most people tend to think. These prophets were not anticipating a messiah to come hundreds of years later or a cataclysmic end of the world to come thousands of years later. They were talking about their own situations and what God wanted to be done – and what [...]