In a previous post I began talking about the distinctive views of the book of Ecclesiastes, one of the real gems of the Hebrew Bible, a book that refuses to accept easy answers or blithe truisms about life, but faces reality head on.   No matter what we do or how we try to explain it away, life is short.  Very very short.  The author of course had no conception of what we know now about time in relation to lifespan.  What would he say if he knew that the world (what we would call the universe — something about which also he had no knowledge) was not a few thousand years old but 13.8 billion? My guess is that he would say the same thing he already does, but possibly with a few more exclamation points.   Given how incredibly brief our life is, even if we live to “old” age — what’s the point of it?  Is there a point?   I think there is.  And I find not just value but also hope in his [...]

Let me repeat what I said at the outset of this thread in order to explain where it's going now. A couple of weeks ago I decided I wanted to give a couple of posts on the differences between the understandings  of “salvation” in Jesus and Paul; then I realized to explain either one I would have to go over the basic ideas of Jewish apocalypticism; then it occurred to me that it would be useful to address the historical roots and development of apocalypticism; then I realized I couldn’t really do that without talking about the classical prophets of the Old Testament (Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.).  But then it occurred to me that to do that I’d have to explain what “prophecy” even was in the OT, before the classical prophets. I've seen this as an important discussion, since most Christian readers assume that the prophets of the Bible were mainly interested in predicting the coming of Jesus, or at least the coming of some kind of messiah who would save the people by suffering [...]

I've been talking about the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and giving some background on one of the earliest in particular, Isaiah of Jerusalem.  Here I'd like to summarize what he teaches to help provide an idea of the sorts of things Israelite prophets were saying.  A you'll see, Isaiah is deeply involved with political and military issues connected with his nation. The following brief exposition comes from my textbook The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ****************************** The message of Isaiah, in essence, is that the people of Judah (the southern kingdom) have strayed from God; this is most evident in the social injustice that pervades society, but it is the leaders of the people who are principally at fault. These problems cannot be fixed simply by attending to proper religious rituals. The nation will be punished by God at the hands of the Assyrians. Right off the bat Isaiah laments how the people of Israel (meaning, in this case, Judah) have fallen away from God. God had raised them as his own children, [...]

Divisions of the Book of Isaiah Before using the book of Isaiah to explain the kinds of things the Hebrew prophets generally proclaimed, I need to say something about the peculiarity of this long, 66-chapter writing in particular. A number of the books of the Bible appear to have been edited by later redactors -- for example, by someone who added a  conclusion in light of the new situation in which he was living.  In the case of Isaiah, however, we are dealing with a situation that is far, far more extreme. For well over a century scholars have recognized that major portions of the book do not actually derive from Isaiah of Jerusalem. The evidence is that a number of passages do not fit into Isaiah’s own historical context.   Evidence of Multiple Authors Most of the first 39 chapters of Isaiah clearly date to the ministry of Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century b.c.e. This is obviously true of the very end of the section, written when Hezekiah was king of Judah [...]

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 [...]

In my previous post I began to explain who the prophets of Scripture are, what they stand for, and what their message is.  In my experience, most people -- even most Bible readers -- don't actually know.  The general idea appears to be that prophets were all about predicting the coming of Jesus and the end of the world.  Nope.  Just read them and see. Here I can give some broad historical information about the prophets to get the ball rolling.  I am taking this discussion from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed.  (Oxford University Press), slightly edited.   The Narrative Prophets: Elijah and Elisha The earliest major prophets of the Old Testament (after Moses) show up in the narratives of the collection of books scholars call the Deuteronomistic History  (the historical books that come right after the Pentateuch: Joshua through 2 Kings which tell about the establishment and early centuries of the nation of Israel).  These  prophets are not known to have left anything in writing (in contrast to [...]