In a biblical context, a prophet (Hebrew navi) is a messenger or spokesperson for God.1 The word “prophet” is derived from the Greek prophetes, which also means an “interpreter” or “spokesperson,” typically someone who can read omens or who has received a divine communication (e.g., Teiresias in the plays of Sophocles). In simplest terms, then, a prophet is not someone who speaks in his or her own voice, but someone who has taken on the task of transmitting the voice of God. Much of the Bible consists of just such transmissions. As the biblical scholar James Kugel points out, the phrase “Thus says the LORD” occurs in the Bible more than three hundred times.2
Still there is more to prophecy than simply carrying a message from A to B. According to Abraham Joshua Heschel, a prophet is also a poet, preacher, patriot, statesman, social critic, and moralist.3 Beyond that, prophets are people in their own right, which is to say individuals from a particular background, facing concrete questions such as when to go to war, how to respond to political and economic changes, what to say to priests, and whether judges and merchants are treating people fairly.
Today, many of us have trouble understanding prophecy because we live in a scientific culture far removed from the culture of our ancient ancestors. When we want to know about the weather, the outbreak of a dangerous epidemic, or the necessary preparations for war, we consult specialists with technical training. No such option was available to our ancestors. Nor was there a word in biblical Hebrew that corresponded to our word “nature” in the sense of a system of causes and effects that can be studied by the hypothetical/deductive method.
As a result, when the ancients needed advice, they looked to people who could relate God’s intentions. If God wanted it to rain, they believed it would rain; if God wanted the Israelites to be victorious in battle, they would be victorious. Conversely, if God did not want the Israelites to be victorious, no amount of planning or exertion would help them.
A key question for the ancients was how to identify a prophet. In Jewish tradition, Moses was (and is) considered the supreme prophet. It was Moses who served as the spokesperson, to whom God revealed the divine name, all the legislation of the Torah, the route of the Exodus, where and how to seek water in the desert, whom to attack, and, in a general way, whether the Israelites had remained faithful to the promises they made when they accepted the covenant.
Deuteronomy 18:15 tells us that God will raise up a prophet like Moses after the people enter the Promised Land (“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your own people, like myself; him you shall heed”). But how will such a person be identified? Recall that, at the burning bush (Exod. 4), Moses worries that the people will not believe he has been sent by God. The answer, given in Deuteronomy, is that if a purported prophet speaks in the name of God and the prediction does not come to pass, then the person is a false prophet and should not be heeded. Deuteronomy 13 gives one qualification, however: If a purported prophet asks the people to follow strange gods, then even if the predictions come true, the person is a false prophet.
Unfortunately, these criteria still made it difficult for people to determine who was a true prophet and who was a pretender. Military powers rise and fall. Plagues can strike at any time. Floods and earthquakes take their toll as well. How long were the people to wait to decide if someone who predicted hardship, defeat, or disaster was telling the truth? Given sufficient time, almost any reasonable prediction would likely come true. As it is often said, even a broken clock is right twice every twenty-four hours.
The prophet Amos predicted the fall of the Northern Kingdom (Israel), which did indeed fall, but several decades later. At one point (8:8), he said the earth will shake. We know that his prophecy began some two years before an earthquake (1:1), but since he mentioned a variety of natural disasters, it is unclear whether “the earth will shake” referred to a specific event or was a general way of predicting misfortune. Nor is it clear how long this would go on or exactly how much damage it would cause.
In a passage from Isaiah (7:14–17) made famous by Christians, the prophet offered as a sign of his legitimacy the prediction that a young woman with child would give birth to a son named Immanuel and that by the time the child could distinguish between good and bad, the two foreign kings plotting against King Ahaz would have fallen and people would be eating curds and honey.4 But, again, the details are unclear. Was Isaiah talking about a son born to Ahaz or to someone else? What exactly was the sign by which the people would know the child could distinguish between good and bad, and exactly when would it be fulfilled? We are not told. In another passage, Isaiah (31:5) predicted that Jerusalem would never fall. Although it did survive the siege of Sennacherib in 701 BCE, it fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE.
To make the problem more difficult, Deuteronomy 18:9–14 warns that when the Israelites enter the Promised Land, they are not to pay attention to any augur, soothsayer, diviner, sorcerer, necromancer, one who casts spells, or one who consults with ghosts or spirits. These people, too, predict the future, and may get things right once in a while. Granted, they should be ignored if they ask people to follow strange gods, but what if they do not? What if they simply say they have the ability to see things other people cannot? How is one to tell which type of messenger is permitted and which forbidden?
Every age produces its share of dissident voices. Looking beyond the prophets, those voices include Socrates, Jesus, Yoḥanan ben Zakkai, Maimonides, Joan of Arc, Galileo, Spinoza, Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. It is easy for us to take these people seriously, because history has accorded them a privileged position. But it was not easy for their contemporaries to do so when they were alive. The same is true of the prophets. What criteria could one use to decide that Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah were legitimate, and their adversaries not?
The problem of how to identify a true prophet was complicated by the fact that biblical prophets came in all shapes and sizes. According to a talmudic passage (Megillah 14a), there were forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses in ancient Israel. In view of the importance of prophetic experience for Jewish self-understanding, medieval philosophers tried to devise a comprehensive theory encapsulating what prophecy consists of. Maimonides (1138–1204 CE) argued that the only way a person could get close enough to God to hear the divine voice was to develop her intellect to its fullest potential.5 His reasoning was straightforward: A fool should never be trusted as a messenger of God. The only person we should trust is a person who understands what God is and the kinds of things God wants.
According to Maimonides, what distinguishes a normal person of learning, say a scientist or philosopher, from a prophet is that, in addition to having a perfected intellect, the prophet also has a lively or perfected imagination. That is why, unlike scientists or philosophers, prophets are able to use parables, metaphors, and vivid language to express themselves. One could give a reasoned argument on the virtues of peace and the horrors of war, but it would not have the same impact as the words of Isaiah 2:4: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares / And their spears into pruning hooks.” With this sort of example in mind, Maimonides goes on to say that the prophets’ imaginations are so powerful that, instead of thinking only in abstract terms, they actually hear voices and see visions.
The obvious objection to this is that many of us hear voices at times or see visions in dreams, but that hardly makes us prophets. In response, Maimonides would say that the dreams or visions we have are disjointed and often incoherent. One night, we are running from terror; the next, we are sitting on top of the world. Rarely do our dreams have moral or religious significance. Rarer still is our ability to express them in poetic form using sophisticated literary techniques. For the prophets, it is otherwise. The voices or visions they experience contain messages of lasting importance, and the language in which their messages are expressed rivals that of the greatest poets of all time.
To Maimonides, the lively imagination that served as a prerequisite for prophecy was a natural gift; if a person did not have one, there was nothing she could do to get it. When it comes to perfecting the intellect, however, Maimonides thought that only a person who lived a moral life and exercised a high degree of self-control could devote the time and energy needed to master whole bodies of knowledge. Again his reasoning was straightforward: Why would God reveal something to a thug or a libertine?
It is clear, however, that Maimonides’ theory runs into problems. If prophecy involves perfection of the intellect, we would expect it to be widespread among the educated elite; but experience indicates that this is not so. Nor is it true that every person who became a prophet is a moral exemplar. Although no evidence suggests that Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant, had low moral standards, neither is there evidence that she was an intellectual giant—and yet, God sends an angel to address her at Genesis 21:17–18. From what we can tell, Balaam, a sorcerer hired to curse the Jewish people, did have low moral standards, but God addresses him several times at Numbers 22–24. By contrast, Joseph was a person of high moral standards who carried out the will of God, yet he never hears God’s voice. As Rabbi Barry Schwartz points out, there are also biblical figures who, though not prophets in their own right, possess prophet-like qualities: the seer (roeh), visionary (khozeh), and man of God (ish-Elohim).6 Still others, like Joseph, are people of high moral standards and therefore heroes in the prophetic mold, for example, Caleb, Hannah, and Ruth.
Even if we stick to people designated as prophets, it is difficult to construct a single theory accounting for all of them. Some prophets (e.g., Nathan) served by royal appointment, while others took money for their services.7 By the time of Samuel, there were prophetic guilds or schools where people may have received something in the way of formal training.8 King Ahab had four hundred prophets advise him when to go to war—almost as large a group as the U.S. House of Representatives. Not surprisingly, they spoke in one voice and told him exactly what he wanted to hear (1 Kings 22). A lone dissenter, the prophet Micaiah, mocks the unanimity of the others and correctly predicts disaster for Ahab.
Though some prophets probably received training, Amos, the first of the prophets who wrote down their messages and personal histories in literary form, did not. During his confrontation with the High Priest he declares: “I am not a prophet, and I am not a prophet’s disciple [son of a prophet]” (7:14). This may be taken to mean that he was not a member of a guild and did not have any official status. As he relays in the next sentence, he is a cattle breeder and a tender of sycamore figs. In all likelihood, he was not poor; his facility with language suggests that he must have been educated. Perhaps he ran something like the ancient equivalent of a farm or ranch. But neither was he a professional when it came to religious matters.
Looking at the rest of the Bible, we also learn of prophetic trances or frenzies whose states were so powerful that the people who witnessed them could easily be drawn in. To take a noteworthy example, Saul becomes possessed by such a frenzy and, in one instance, is so taken with it that he lies naked all day and all night (1 Sam. 10:10, 19:18–24). 1 Samuel 10:5 tells us that such states were brought on by musical instruments, which could indicate that rhythmic dancing was also part of the experience.9 Some scholars speculate that the priestess at Delphi, who served as a prophetess for the ancient Greeks, went into a trance by breathing intoxicating vapors.10 Even in the case of Abraham (Gen. 15:12), the Torah says that a deep sleep and “a great dark dread descended upon him” before God spoke.
Although we may question Maimonides’ attempt to subsume all prophetic experiences under one theory, he is right to point out that nothing like a trance or state of intoxication applies to Moses. At Numbers 12:6–8, God explains why Moses’ prophecy is unique: “When a prophet of the LORD arises among you, I make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream. Not so with My servant Moses; he is trusted throughout My household. With him I speak mouth to mouth, plainly not in riddles.” This means that Moses achieved a degree of clarity and specificity that the other prophets lacked. There is no mention here of ecstasy or possession. As far as we can tell, Moses is wide awake and in full possession of his faculties every time God speaks to him. In some passages, he is even willing to question God.
The record is equally mixed when it comes to miracles. The Bible tells us that both Elijah and Elisha performed miracles, including raising people from the dead (1 Kings 17–24; 2 Kings 4: 18–37). But there is nothing comparable in the literary prophets that are discussed in this book. As the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman points out, Elijah is the last person in the Bible to produce a large-scale public miracle of the sort produced by Moses.11 That is not to say that there are no miracles after Elijah, but that they are either private (e.g., Jonah’s captivity in the belly of the fish) or comparatively small (e.g., Isaiah’s causing a sundial to move ten steps backward).
We saw that if a prophet means someone addressed by God, then Hagar and Balaam qualify as prophets, though neither was an Israelite. Although Maimonides recognizes the possibility of gentile prophets, not every Jewish thinker would agree.12 His predecessor Judah Halevi (1075–1141) restricted prophecy to Jews, even to Jews residing in the Land of Israel.13
It is noteworthy that in the midst of a male-dominated culture, the Bible mentions four female prophets: Miriam (Exod. 15:20), Deborah (Judg. 4:4), Huldah (2 Kings 22:14–20 and 2 Chron. 34:22–28), and Noadiah (Neh. 6:14). Although none of the literary prophets whose works are preserved were women, the prophetic status of Miriam and the others does not seem to have caused a problem among their contemporaries. No one said that Deborah could not be a prophet because she was a woman.
From a sociological perspective, the word of God came to Moses when he was an adult criminal living in exile, to Jeremiah when he was probably a teenager. Hagar was a servant. We saw that Amos was a breeder of cattle; on the other hand, Ezekiel was a priest, and Isaiah (or the first prophet to go under that name) may have been a priest as well.14 Little is known about Hosea. Although most kings inherited their positions as a result of birth, the political theorist Michael Walzer points out that none of the literary prophets did; instead of being born into their roles, they were called by God.15 Not only were they called, to continue with Walzer’s insight, they do not get to name their successors.16
In view of the diversity of prophets, it is difficult to decide who is a true prophet on external factors alone. Some of the people mentioned above, for example, Ahab’s four-hundred-member prophetic consortium, had to have been fakes; they reinforced the king’s own beliefs and their prediction turned out to be false. The same may have been true of those who demanded money for their services, a group for whom Micah (3:5–11) had nothing but contempt. Ultimately, it all depends on whom God picks to carry the message. In many cases, that person may not be the one we would expect God to choose, but that likely says more about us than it does about God.
As we saw, one simple answer to the question of how to identify a true prophet is to assess the accuracy of the purported prophet’s predictions. As we use the word today, a prophet is usually someone who can tell us what the future has in store before anyone else. Many biblical prophets were consulted in order to get specific information about politics, weather conditions, or the outcome of battles. Some were even thought to be able to locate lost articles.
Yet when it comes to the great prophets who make up the subject matter of this book, the question of prediction is complicated. First, some background. Although biblical Hebrew had no word corresponding to “nature” as we understand it, the ancient Greeks did—physis. In fact, science as we know it was largely a Greek discovery. Once someone understands how nature operates and assumes that it is everywhere and always the same, it becomes possible to make predictions. Given the molecular structure of water, one can predict when it will freeze. Given the mass of the moon, one can predict how strong its gravitational pull will be. Given the mass and chemical make-up of the sun, one can predict that it in a billion years or so, it will become so hot that life on earth will cease.
It is often said that the origin of our concept of natural necessity derives from the Greek concept of Fate (Moira). According to mythology, the Fates determined the length and outcome of a person’s life so that no one—not even the gods—could interfere. Thus Oedipus is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. In the Iliad (16:419–61), when it is time for the Trojan warrior Sarpedon to die, Zeus asks whether he should intervene but is told that if he does, chaos will result. Even though Zeus is the most powerful god on Mount Olympus, he can only sit back and watch. Our concept of nature took shape from this idea of an underlying necessity that governs the world order. Rather than look to the gods as an explanation for why it rained, early Greek thinkers came up with a different explanation: Changes in weather are the result of condensation and rarefaction.
The prophets did not see things this way. Their predictions of impending doom were not like a scientist’s prediction of what will happen to the sun in a billion years. For the prophets, the order of the world is moral, not mechanical.17 The mountains will shake and the rivers run dry unless the people change their ways and return to God. Thus Jonah warns the people of Nineveh that their city is about to be destroyed; but the people repent, God undergoes a change of mind, and the city is saved. While in some places, for example, Isaiah 6:10 and Ezekiel 2:7, God, having suffered countless acts of rebellion, becomes so angry that the prophet is instructed to speak even though the people will not listen, these passages can be viewed as limiting cases rather than direct counterexamples. In other words, God may be saying that the people have made the wrong choice so many times in the past that it is all but hopeless to expect them to make the right choice in the present. In short, the people’s recalcitrance is the problem, not an unbreakable necessity imposed from above.
We can therefore agree with Heschel when he says that the prominent theme of the prophets is exhortation, not simple prediction.18 According to Kugel, the change in emphasis from exhortation to prediction began in the Second Temple period, in large part because predictions were allowed to range over a much longer period.19 But as the length of the period expanded, it became increasingly difficult to know how a prediction could be disconfirmed, since all one had to say is, “Give it more time.” The prophets aimed to paint a bleak picture of the future so the people would take note of what they were doing in the present. But, again, how long were they supposed to wait to verify their prognostications? Such considerations led the biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann to conclude that the agreement between prophecy and historical reality “does not extend to details.”20
This brings us back to our central question: How do we know when someone is actually speaking for God? A partial answer may be found at Jeremiah 28:1–17, when an argument breaks out between two prophets, Jeremiah and Hananiah. The former predicts doom, the latter good fortune. Both spoke in the Temple and began their prophecies with the words, “Thus says the LORD.” Which one should the people follow? Jeremiah responds that, given the many predictions of war, disaster, and pestilence that preceded him, it is more likely that he, rather than his opponent, is telling the truth.21 He goes on to say that we should be skeptical of prophets who predict good fortune, and believe them only if what they say actually comes to pass. As it happens, Jeremiah was right: Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians eight years later.22 But how could the people have known this at the time?
In an earlier passage (23:9–40), Jeremiah gives the gist of an answer. Pay no heed to a prophet whose words do not exhort the people to turn from evil and pursue goodness. The problem with predictions of good fortune is they run the risk of moral complacency. It is all too easy to think: things are going to turn out well, so there is no need to alter my behavior. While true prophets also hold out messages of consolation, they do so in the belief that injustice will be eradicated and eventually the people will return to God. Despite passage after passage predicting doom, Jeremiah himself foresees a time when God will make a new covenant with the people: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God” (31:31–34).
Putting all this together, we arrive at the conclusion that it is not so much the prophets’ ability to predict the future that establishes their credentials as the moral fiber of their message. They refuse to believe that God is satisfied with the behavior they see around them—whether in Israel or the other nations of the earth. The idea of a God willing to look the other way as the poor are trampled on, judges bought off, and merchants cheat their customers is abhorrent. The same is true of a God who sees injustice but can be appeased by sacrificing animals or burning incense.
A good example of this point can be found in the memorable words of Zechariah (4:6): “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit—said the LORD of Hosts.” Whatever history tells us about the use of raw power to decide international disputes, the prophet is telling us: This is not the right way to do it. Might does not make right, and if God stands for anything, it is for what is right.
Often the prophets’ words are scathing. Hosea accused the people of whoring (4:10–12). Isaiah accused the people, including priests and (false) prophets, of drunkenness (28:1–8). Jeremiah was told that God is so angry with the people, he should not intercede on their behalf (7:16). To be sure, no one likes to be dressed down in public, especially by a person claiming to speak for God. Nonetheless, even these words of the prophets represent attempts to appeal to our conscience, what Jeremiah called “the law inscribed on our hearts” (31:33). The prophets are relying on our sense that no matter how hard their words are to hear, we know they are right: the poor are not treated properly, the courts are not completely impartial, dishonest practices in the marketplace are all too common. This cannot be what God wants, and if the will of God eventually prevails, then someday justice will be done.
In one sense this is a prediction, but unlike a scientific prediction, which assumes an orderly connection between the present and future, this one assumes that if the people heed the message, the future will be radically different from the present: behavior as it is now will be transformed into behavior as it ought to be. It follows that rather than looking to external factors such as age, social status, or professional training, rather than keeping close tabs on whether a prediction has come true, the only hope for identifying a true prophet is to consider the moral truth of the message. If we follow Maimonides, we also would have to look for a lively imagination and a memorable facility with words. But the communication of moral truth is the primary factor.
Needless to say, assessing moral truth is not always easy to do. Even to begin, one must ask what morality requires. But difficult as the process is, there is no real alternative. Following Jeremiah, a person who assures us that we are doing the right thing and there is nothing to worry about in the days ahead, a person who lures us into a feeling of complacency, cannot be a prophet.
In putting a complicated subject like prophecy under the microscope, it often happens that we answer one question only to raise another. If prophets are to be identified primarily by the moral truth of their message, why do we generally not refer to people as prophets today? Why aren’t people like Thoreau, Gandhi, King, or Heschel—who marched with King and took on the task of shocking modern Jews out of their supposed state of complacency—considered prophets?
The traditional Jewish position, as articulated by the Rabbis, is that the age of prophecy came to an end with Malachi (500–450 BCE), roughly three hundred years after it began.23 This position seems to be confirmed by the prophet Zachariah (13:2–4), who predicts that in anger, God will rid the land of prophets. Along these lines, 1 Maccabees (9:27) relates that at the time of the Second Temple: “There was great distress in Israel, such as had not been seen since the time that prophets ceased to appear among them.” One Rabbinic source (Bava Batra 12b) maintains that since the destruction of the Second Temple, prophecy was taken from the prophets and given over to children and fools.
Why would a movement that produced some of the most creative and far-reaching literature the world has ever known suddenly die out? Was God displeased with Israel? The prophets often picture God as exasperated with the people and ready to take drastic measures against them. Having revealed God’s will at Sinai, and sent the likes of Moses, Joshua, Deborah, Samuel, David, Solomon, Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to offer guidance, God cannot understand why the people still do not heed the right message. As the author of 2 Chronicles (36:15–16) put it: “The LORD God of their fathers had sent word to them through His messengers daily without fail, for He had pity on His people and His dwelling-place. But they mocked the messengers of God and disdained His prophets until the wrath of the LORD against His people grew beyond remedy.”24
Did God really become dissatisfied with the Jewish people? Heschel opposed this view, arguing that medieval figures, including Maimonides, received mystical or esoteric knowledge that they understood as given to them by God.25 In other words, Heschel thought the idea that there was a cutoff when God suddenly decided not to address people anymore makes no sense. He is right to the degree that throughout Jewish history, the word “prophet” has been used to cover a variety of people and religious experiences. The broader issue here is whether it makes sense to draw a line between the great prophets of old, such as Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and people of learning and inspiration who came after them.
It is noteworthy that in Maimonides’ masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed, he twice denies that he is the beneficiary of prophetic insight, while in the Mishneh Torah, his great compendium of Jewish law, he says that anyone who supports an interpretation of Jewish law by saying that God spoke to him should be put to death.26 Though he allows that there may be prophets at a future date, he argues that their role is restricted to issues like when to go to war or where to build a well.
Beyond these admissions, there is the vast difference between the climate in which the prophets composed their writings and that in which Maimonides composed his. While it is unclear how much of the Torah and the other biblical books the prophets had access to, the prophets were able to proclaim “Thus says the LORD” because they lived in a period in which the record of what God said was still fresh and open to new additions.27 Looking at the Torah, we find that in the book of Genesis, God or one of the angels speaks to people all the time. By the time we get to the book of Exodus, dialogues between heaven and earth take up much of the narrative. We saw that in Numbers (12:6–8) God makes a distinction between Moses and the other prophets, saying that the latter encounter God in dreams or visions rather than face to face. The last time that the divine cloud or glory (kavod) of God appears in the Bible is at the dedication of Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 8:11). We also saw that according to Friedman, there is a cessation of public miracles after Elijah and Elisha.28 All of this is of a piece with his claim that as we move through the Bible, God becomes ever more distant. By the time we get to the book of Esther, God does not appear at all.
In a famous passage from the Talmud (Bava Metzi’a 59b), God enters into a legal dispute between two famous rabbis but is told that, on the basis of Deuteronomy 30:11, which says that the Torah is not in heaven, the divine voice has no standing in court. If God has no standing in court, then neither does a prophet who speaks in the name of God—hence Maimonides’ view that anyone who violates this rule should be put to death. As previously mentioned, Maimonides saw the role of future prophets as limited to issues such as when to go to war or where to build a well. Clearly, modern military science and geology have made such assistance unnecessary.
One way to approach the question of why prophecy ceased is to recognize that as the Jewish religion developed, more and more texts joined the canon of what counted as sacred literature. Tradition holds that 613 individual commandments were given in the Torah. Commentary on how those commandments were to be understood and applied began soon thereafter. Before long, there was commentary on the commentary, and commentary on the commentary on the commentary. Maimonides was as much a part of this tradition as anyone else. So in his day was Heschel. As layer after layer of commentary built up, it was inevitable that the prophet would give way to the exegete. And although the exegete may have been inspired, his claim was not that he had been given the word of God but that he could decipher the will of God on the basis of a close reading of what had already been recorded.29
As a result, most people today would be skeptical of someone who claimed to hear God’s voice directly. If we hear God, we tend to believe it is through the medium of the written word rather than the spoken word. It is no accident, then, that the phrase “Thus says the LORD” is no longer in use even by moderns with profound spiritual convictions. Rather than messengers in the biblical sense of the term, we have preachers, witnesses, spokespeople, or moral teachers.
Clearly there is a measure of overlap. It does not take much imagination to picture one of the prophets sitting at a racially segregated lunch counter in Alabama or engaging in a nonviolent protest against involvement in a foreign war. Still, overlap is not the same as identity. In our day and age, important dissident voices are more likely to quote the Bible than to think of themselves as standing on equal footing with its most famous authors.
In the end, we might do well to stick to the division Hillel made between prophets and the children of prophets. Let us therefore say that by holding people to high moral standards and calling attention to injustice, the “children of prophets,” people like Thoreau, Gandhi, and Heschel who exhibited a similar cast of mind, played a role in their societies similar to the role the prophets played in ancient times.
Even if we accept the view that prophecy came to an end in the ancient world, there may still be a need to infuse the religion of today with a greater sense of spontaneity. The biblical canon was closed a long time ago. The prayers have become standardized. For traditional Jews, they are said three times a day, seven days a week. While the familiarity of the prayers may provide a degree of comfort or a sense of belonging, their constant repetition can impair the practice of saying them with any degree of feeling, or with what the Rabbis called kavanah (intention).
Considerations like these motivated the twentieth-century thinker Martin Buber’s study of prophecy, first published in English in 1949. As he put it: “Centralization and codification, undertaken in the interests of religion, are a danger to the core of religion, unless there is the strongest life of faith, embodied in the whole of existence of the community, and not relaxing in its renewing activity.”30
What is that faith? For Buber it meant being open to the experience of wonder, which is to say “an event which cannot be grasped except as an act of God.”31 This is not the distant God loved by philosophers, but an active God who enters into human history and seeks to facilitate a dialogue with human beings. The writings of the prophets are a record of that dialogue. Although they articulated eternal truths, Buber was at pains to show that rather than teach theological lessons as we might understand them, the prophets responded to God by putting specific choices before the people.32 Still today, he believed, we, the Jewish nation, can continue doing what we have been doing, or we can undergo a change of heart and strike out in a new direction—one that puts aside the allures of politics and economics and allows us to see our task as becoming a holy nation dedicated to serving God.
A choice is a call to action. Rather than repeat established formulas or theological dogmas, Buber envisioned a renewal of the spirit that motivated the prophets to trust God and called the people to account for themselves. In one place, he went so far as to say that God does not attach decisive importance to the things normally grouped under the term “religion.”33 As he saw it, pagan gods were dependent on things like houses, altars, and sacrificial worship because these things were tangible symbols of their importance. While the God of Israel might have asked our ancestors for similar things, from Buber’s perspective, God does not really need them. Instead of “religion,” what God wants is “the makers of decision vindicating their right to those thirsting for justice, the strong having pity on the weak.”34 In short, by reading the prophets we learn that the need to rethink our values and rededicate ourselves to the things in life that really matter is as pressing for us as it was for people in ancient times.
The prophets speak to us from a distant age. Beyond the question of textuality, there is the ever-present question of science. People who predict plagues, droughts, or military uprisings now have to answer to specialists in command of large bodies of empirical evidence. Again, within this framework, “Thus says the LORD” will not get one very far.
Still, we do the prophets an injustice if we fail to recognize the lasting validity of their messages. When they insist on justice, express compassion for the poor, or tell us that we have it within our power to put our past mistakes behind us and set out on a new course, I would argue that they do speak for God. Their messages were as authentic then as they are now. That is why it is important that we study them closely and ask ourselves what these messages are trying to say. In my opinion, we can do this by examining the principles that lie behind the messages they received, not by claiming to be recipients of new ones.