Thinking about the Prophets: A Philosopher Reads the Bible looks at the great literary prophets whose ministry ran from the eighth to the sixth centuries BCE: Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Isaiah, and Job. Their teachings occupy a pivotal position in the history of both Judaism and Christianity and constitute one of the great achievements of the human spirit.
Important as these messages are, however, they are not always easy to stomach, and in this day and age, they are often forgotten. Within the synagogue on Sabbath and festival days, discussions typically focus on the Torah portion. Short passages from the prophets are relegated to the haftarah and, in my experience, rarely discussed in detail, if discussed at all. Meanwhile, in churches, the prophets are read mainly as forerunners to Jesus. In short, the books of the prophets are rarely read in full.
For some modern readers, the message of the prophets is too controversial to put before a public audience. As the twentieth-century theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel remarked, they are some of the most disturbing people who ever lived. Many passages portend doom. Others are critical of existing religious practices. Thus Amos 5:21–22:
I loathe, I spurn your festivals,
I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies.
If you offer Me burnt offerings—or your meal offerings—
I will not accept them;
I will pay no heed
In a nutshell, Amos is telling us that the religion his contemporaries practiced was a sham.
Might God be just as disdainful of our festivals and assemblies today? The modern biblical scholar Marc Brettler asks how we would respond to someone who stood up in public and said:
Thus said the Lord. / For three transgressions of the residents of Manhattan. / For Four, I will not revoke it: / Because they shop in expensive shops and neglect the poor, / Eat in five-star restaurants while others starve. / I will send down fire upon Fifth Avenue, / A conflagration on 57th St. / And it shall devour the fancy penthouses, /Destroy the mansions. / And the people of “the city” shall be exiled to California—said the Lord.1
Seen in this light, Amos and the other prophets pose a serious threat to our current ways of doing things. Not surprisingly, today’s religious leaders typically water down the prophets’ messages, read them in a perfunctory manner, or do not read them at all. And yet, to Amos’s point, I argue in the pages that follow that neither he nor the rest of the prophets wanted the people to relinquish their festivals and assemblies altogether. Rather, they wanted people to ask whether their festivals and assemblies fulfill the purpose for which they were intended. Do they enhance moral or religious sensitivity? Do they help us to follow in the ways of God, which means (among other things) to insist on justice and protect the poor?
What is true of Amos is also true of those who followed in his footsteps: They challenged existing authority and established new ways of thinking. Hosea accused the people of breaking the promise they made to God. First Isaiah agreed with Amos that God despised the people’s festivals, and went on to tell a king facing invasion by a foreign power to trust in God rather than horses and chariots. Jeremiah mocked the secular and religious leadership of his day and warned the people that taking refuge in the Temple would not help them. His near contemporary Ezekiel said that in God’s eyes, the sins of Israel are even worse than those of its neighbors—so much so that when punishment is inflicted, parents will eat the flesh of their children and children will eat the flesh of their parents.
In my view, we do these people an injustice if we diminish the shock value of their messages. Broadly speaking, the prophets present us with a deep and abiding question: What does it mean to serve God? Is it enough to perform the required rituals, or must we ask what effect these rituals have on the people who perform them and the society of which they are a part?
To answer this question, we must ask how to balance a well-established religious tradition with the need to make changes or modifications. The rituals mandated by Jewish Law have stood the test of time and kept the people together despite two millennia without a homeland or a central place of worship. It would be foolish to drop them in favor of a trendy alternative. By the same token, it would be foolish to ignore the question of whether those in charge of existing institutions have drowned out dissident voices to the point where the institutions no longer fulfill their original purpose. Admittedly, change can be disruptive, both to the institution and to the lives of those who serve it. Nonetheless, successful institutions find a way to embrace change by taking criticism seriously and not just tolerating but finding a place for dissident voices.
Although the prophets maintained that they were taking Judaism back to its core values, and some of them came from established priestly families, it is undeniable that they served as divinely authorized whistle-blowers. Kings, priests, other prophets, judges, merchants—in short almost everyone in a position of authority—were targets for their criticism. How are we to consider these whistle-blowers in our own era? We can treat the prophets in a purely ceremonial fashion, admiring their rhetoric and assigning them space in a worship service. But if this is all we do, we sell them short. To take them seriously, we have to ask whether the religion we ourselves practice can answer the challenges they voiced. Do our prayers motivate us to stand up for the rights of the poor, the sick, and the abused? Are we serving God each and every day with purity of intention and action? Are we sincere when we ask God for forgiveness? These are just some of the questions the prophets force us to ask.
The standard Jewish position is that prophecy came to an end with the destruction of the Second Temple, if not some time before. Even if this is true, it does not follow that the voice of the prophets can no longer be heard. As I see it, Hillel was surely right when he said that if we are not prophets, then we are nonetheless children of prophets (Pesaḥim 66b). As children of prophets, we can do no better than to listen to the voice of our ancestors.
This book attempts to do right by the prophets by looking at their writings and asking how they influenced later thinkers. Despite the long years that separate us from them, their lessons are as telling for us as they were for our ancestors. Indeed, the timeless nature of their message is part of what justifies their claim to speak for God.
The chapters take up the prophets Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Second Isaiah, and Job in chronological order, set a historical context for their teachings, and examine their teachings in light of later thinkers and historical developments. Amos raises questions about the nature of moral reasoning, Hosea about the divine persona, First Isaiah about divine providence, Jeremiah about innocent suffering, Ezekiel about the power of repentance, and Second Isaiah about what it means to believe in a monotheistic conception of God. (For Job, keep reading.)
As in my previous book, Thinking about the Torah: A Philosopher Reads the Bible (JPS, 2016), I argue that to understand the full significance of prophetic literature, we have to move beyond the confines of the ancient Near East in which this literature is set and ask about the direction to which it is trying to point. Great ideas are not limited by time or place. Once they are put forward, they take on a life of their own. To look at that life and trace its progress is to read the prophets philosophically. That is why, unlike most people who write about the prophets, I bring in the medieval and modern philosophers Maimonides, Kant, Cohen, Buber, Levinas, Heschel, and Soloveitchik, all of whom read the prophets and had important things to say as a result. Having moved beyond the ancient Near East, we can ask what the prophets have to teach us today.2
It is worth noting that all of the prophetic writings appear in the second of the Hebrew Bible’s three sections (Torah, Prophets, and Writings) except Job, who is part of the third section. Unlike the books of the Prophets, which make reference to real people and historical events, the book of Job sets no historical context. In fact, it is not even clear that Job is an Israelite, because nothing is said about his lineage.3 I have included a chapter on him not only because he intercedes with God on behalf of other people—as the prophets did—but because his plight raises a question that runs through much of prophetic literature, especially Jeremiah: Why would God allow an innocent person to suffer?
I do not claim that this book will resolve every question it raises and thereby end the need for further discussion. On the contrary, this book is meant to stimulate further discussion by highlighting issues that are too important to ignore. If we pray, what are we praying for and why? If we espouse a commitment to monotheism, what exactly does this entail? If we practice the rituals and remain loyal to tradition, do we have a right to expect that God will reward us in kind? No author will ever have the last word on these kinds of questions. But that is no excuse for ignoring them. If we do, I contend, religious practice will become rote and hypocritical—everything the prophets objected to.