My heart is crushed within me,
All my bones are trembling;
I have become like a drunken man,
Like one overcome by wine
Because of the LORD and His holy word.
—Jeremiah 23:9
It should be clear by now that being a prophet is no fun. In most cases, one has to carry an unpopular message to the people and face the usual scorn and humiliation that goes with it. Nobody wants to hear that unless drastic changes are made in the social order and the religious commitment of the people, God will execute judgment on the kingdom. On top of that, in the ancient and medieval worlds, as in much of the modern world, free speech was not guaranteed. Accusing priests and official prophets of misconduct would create powerful enemies, while predicting the defeat or downfall of the king could be viewed as treason.
Of all the prophets, Jeremiah is the most explicit about the difficulty of carrying an unpopular message to a hostile audience. He tells us in the opening verses that during his ministry—which began in the days of King Josiah (around 627 BCE) and continued for more than forty years through the reigns of Jehoiakim and Zedekiah—the people of his hometown of Anathoth plotted against him (11:21–23). A priest named Pashhur had him beaten and put in the stocks, with his ankles and wrists locked up overnight (20:1–3). When Jeremiah opposes a Judean alliance with Egypt and urges surrender to the Babylonians instead, he is sent to prison (37:21). Eventually a group of priests and official prophets charge that his message of surrender is sowing discontent among the soldiers and, with Zedekiah’s approval, lower him into a cistern, where he goes without water and almost dies.
Fortunately, Zedekiah undergoes a change of heart and sends people to rescue him (38:1–28). After his release, Zedekiah has a private conversation with Jeremiah and warns him not to reveal its contents. Although Jeremiah never discloses the exchange, he is nonetheless sent back to prison, where he remained until Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Following the destruction of Jerusalem, Jeremiah went into exile in Egypt. We do not know the circumstances of his death.
The people’s animosity toward Jeremiah is especially strong because he goes much farther than the prophets before him. Whereas Isaiah said that God would never abandon Jerusalem, the site of the Holy Temple, Jeremiah insists that the Temple will fall if the people continue their evil ways. In one place, he reports God as saying: “Shall I not bring retribution / On a nation such as this?” (5:9). He even warns the people not to take refuge in the Temple when the day of retribution arrives (7:4).
Still, it would be wrong to think of Jeremiah as all doom and gloom, because he does offer words of consolation. For example, at 24:4–7, he promises that those who return from the exile will find favor if they turn back to God with all their heart. As we saw, he also envisions a time when God will make a new covenant with Israel and remember the people’s sins no more.1 But, of course, the new covenant is in the future—a hallmark of the Messianic Age, when Israel will finally come to its senses.
Meanwhile, the day-to-day situation Jeremiah witnessed was bleak. Jehoiakim used forced labor to build a luxurious palace at a time when fraud and violence ruled the day. The familiar pleas to care for the widow and the orphan were ignored. Murder and theft went on unchecked. Offerings were made to strange gods. Although he was mocked every place he went, Jeremiah tells us that he cannot keep silent. God’s words burn in him like a fire so that he cannot hold them in (20:9).
The details of Jeremiah’s life raise important questions. How could an all-powerful God, a God who parted the Red Sea and destroyed the mightiest army on earth, allow the Temple, the seat of divine authority, to be destroyed by a pagan nation, in this case a nation that worships Marduk? Or, on a more personal level: How could an all-powerful God allow a chosen servant to be treated in such a disrespectful manner? I will address both of these questions, the second one before the first. But before I do, I want to turn back and examine the prophet par excellence—Moses, who also led a difficult and tumultuous life.
When God first calls to Moses at Exodus 3, the Israelites are enslaved to a brutal dictator who has ordered all Israelite male children to be thrown into the Nile. Under the circumstances, we would expect Moses to be eager to serve God and liberate his people. But the ensuing dialogue shows that Moses is anything but. Time and again he raises objections to God’s plan for action: “Who am I that I should go before Pharaoh?” “Who shall I say has sent me?” “What if the Israelites will not listen to me?” “I am slow of speech.” By Exodus 3:13, he pleads with God to choose someone else. Tired of hearing excuses, God becomes angry with Moses.
Why is Moses so reluctant?2 One way to answer this question is to recall a passage from Plato’s Republic, where the characters agree that the best people to rule a state are those who are least eager to do so.3 After viewing civil disorder for much of his life, Plato thought that those who are eager to rule often put their own interests above those of the state. In other words, they want to rule so they can cash in on the benefits that come with high office. By contrast, those who are not eager to rule are more likely to put the interests of the state first, because they have no desire for wealth or power. In a biblical context, we can broaden this insight to say that a reluctant leader would not be inclined to put her own interests ahead of God’s for the simple reason that, aside from God’s exhortation, she would never accept the job. Measured by this standard, Moses is the ultimate servant. Rather than bask in the limelight of being the one to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, he is cautious. At Numbers 12:3, the Torah calls attention to his humility. In the end, his decision to assume the mantle of leadership rests on his readiness to carry out the will of God and nothing else.
As we have seen, carrying out the will of God is not for the faint of heart. No sooner do the people celebrate their release from slavery than they begin to complain of hunger, thirst, and the hardships of the desert. Although God provides them with manna, that is not enough. They want the lavish meals they think they enjoyed in Egypt (Num. 11:4–5). Later, at Numbers 14, they beg to be taken back to Egypt, indicating that, despite all Moses has done for them, they prefer to be slaves to Pharaoh. In addition to disloyalty, Moses must deal with the apostasy of the Golden Calf, challenges to his authority from Aaron and Miriam, and the outbreak of civil war.
Nor is that all. As difficult as it is to please the people, it sometimes proves just as difficult to please God. Twice (Exod. 32 and Num. 14) God becomes angry with the people and threatens to destroy them. Each time Moses must placate God and ask God to reconsider the decision. Heschel is therefore right to say that the prophet often finds himself in a lonely position: When he is with the people, he pleads for God; when he is with God, he pleads for the people.4 In this way, the prophet occupies a no-man’s-land between heaven and earth. Wherever things go wrong, he is the one who has to set them right.
We know that at the end of his life, Moses is not allowed to enter the Promised Land. It would be one thing if God were to console him by revealing a vision of the next generation of Israelites living happily in the land and taking full advantage of the milk and honey it has to offer. Though Moses himself could not participate, he could die a happy man, knowing that his labors in the desert had not been in vain. Instead, at Deuteronomy 31, God predicts that the next generation will repeat all of its parents’ mistakes. For all of Moses’ efforts, then, God and the people will remain at odds with one another.
With the possible exception of the “Song at the Sea” at Exodus 15, when the Israelites are rescued from Pharaoh’s army, it is hard to find a point in the story of the Exodus when Moses experiences anything in the way of happiness. And even that moment is short-lived; the people begin to complain a few lines later. Rather than happiness, what appears to keep Moses going is an unshakeable sense of duty to carry out God’s will no matter what the obstacles. As we have seen, his understanding of that duty drives him to even call God to account.
In many ways, Moses sets the tone for Jeremiah. Although there is no burning bush in Jeremiah’s call, as Buber says, it descends into the human situation unexpected and unwilled, free and fresh like lightning.5
Before I created you in the womb, I selected you;
Before you were born, I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet concerning the nations. (1:5)
Rather than accept the call without thinking, Jeremiah protests that he is too young and not a good enough speaker to take on such a role.
Again, God is not swayed by excuses. Jeremiah is the one to carry God’s word, and that is that:
So you, gird up your loins,
Arise and speak to them
All that I command you.
Do not break down before them,
Lest I break you before them.
I make you this day
A fortified city,
And an iron pillar,
And bronze walls
Against the whole land—
Against Judah’s kings and officers,
And against its priests and citizens.
They will attack you,
But they shall not overcome you;
For I am with you—declares the LORD—to save you. (1:17–19)
The rhetoric of this passage suggests that Jeremiah is about to go to war with the powers that be, both secular and religious. Like Moses, he will occupy the no-man’s-land between heaven and earth, pleading for mercy with one and for a moral awakening with the other. In the words of Buber, he is the messenger of God and intercessor in one.6
Also like Moses, he is not afraid to hold God to account. At 12:1, he raises the classic formulation of the problem of evil:
You will win, O LORD, if I make claim against You,
Yet I shall present charges against You:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
And yet, for all his honesty in the face of God, Jeremiah responds with an unshakeable sense of duty:
You enticed me, O LORD, and I was enticed;
You overpowered me and You prevailed.
I have become a constant laughingstock,
Everyone jeers at me. . . .
But [God’s word] was like a raging fire in my heart,
Shut up in my bones;
I could not hold it in, I was helpless. (20:7–9)
The emotional intensity of this passage is impossible to miss. The difference between Jeremiah and Moses is that while Moses is silent about his inner turmoil, Jeremiah is explicit about his.
To understand this turmoil, we must not forget that while Jeremiah is disgusted by what he sees the people doing, they are nonetheless his people—and, just as important, God’s people too. In anguish, he reports God as saying:
I have abandoned My House,
I have deserted My possession,
I have given over My dearly beloved
Into the hands of her enemies. (12:7)
As the servant of God, Jeremiah feels the same anguish over the fate of his countrymen:
Oh, my suffering, my suffering!
How I writhe!
Oh, the walls of my heart! (4:19)
The Hebrew is more explicit, for it has Jeremiah saying that he can feel the anguish deep in his bowels.
The same sentiment is expressed when disaster strikes:
My heart is sick within me. . . .
Because my people is shattered I am shattered;
I am dejected, seized by desolation.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Can no physician be found?
Why has healing not yet
Come to my poor people?
Oh, that my head were water,
My eyes a fount of tears!
Then would I weep day and night
For the slain of my poor people. (8:18–23)
So troubling is Jeremiah’s predicament that at 20:14, he curses the day of his birth and asks why he has had to see so much misery and spend his days in shame.
The simple answer is that he lived through the fall of Jerusalem and, like Cassandra of Greek mythology, was ignored by those he sought to warn. As he tells us, the people have eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear (5:21). Why is this? Christian commentators see in Jeremiah evidence of the sickness of the human heart and thus the doctrine of original sin, which holds that depravity is inherent in the human condition.7 At 5:23 and again at 17:9, Jeremiah says that the human heart is stubborn and rebellious, weak and deceitful. It is no accident that Kant, a Pietist Christian, argued more than two thousand years later that human behavior is affected by a perversity of the heart that runs so deep, it cannot be eradicated.8 He meant that even when we think we are acting in a moral fashion, an element of selfishness is always corrupting our motivation. But Jeremiah himself never asserted anything that radical. The human heart may be stubborn and rebellious at times, but to him it was not sinful at its core because there is always hope that one day human beings will renounce sin and return to God.
Let us return to the question of why God would allow a chosen servant to suffer such humiliation. In time, another prophet, Second Isaiah, suggests an answer: Contrary to what we might think, it is the one who suffers most, who is shunned and despised, who is the true servant of God.
Who can believe what we have heard?
Upon whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
For he has grown, by His favor, like a tree crown,
Like a tree trunk out of arid ground.
He had no form or beauty, that we should look at him:
No charm, that we should find him pleasing.
He was despised, shunned by men,
A man of suffering, familiar with disease.
As one who hid his face from us,
He was despised, we held him of no account. (Isa. 53:1–3)
The meaning of the passage has long been disputed: Jews see it as a reference to Israel’s place among the nations, while Christians see it as foretelling the coming of Jesus.9 In either case, we must ask why suffering should confer legitimacy.
We can begin to answer this by considering the opposite: someone who has never suffered in any appreciable way. Imagine someone on whom fortune seems to have smiled from the moment of her birth. Her family loved her. She has always been popular. She received a quality education and went on to a wonderful job. She has an adoring husband and equally adoring children. She has never experienced rejection either in her personal or business life. As a result, she has always maintained a confident and cheerful disposition. Recognizing this, her colleagues and community have honored her with a variety of awards.
Although it is tempting to think that God must look favorably on such a person, the relevant question is, would she would be a legitimate spokesperson for God, especially during a time of crisis? Has someone who has never dealt with misfortune earned the right to speak about the meaning of life? For my part, the answer is no. Human beings are inherently vulnerable. A person who has never dealt with a broken heart, never had to endure intense pain, or never walked the streets wondering how she would support her family has not experienced enough of life to be able to talk about it with any degree of understanding. Moreover, a person who has never had to deal with misfortune has never had to call on the moral strength needed to overcome it. As is discussed in chapter 8, this is the point Satan makes at the beginning of Job. How can we trust the moral fiber of someone whose life has been a cakewalk?
The obvious answer is that we cannot. Qualities like faith, courage, love, or commitment to an ideal have to be tested to be real. Abraham was tested, repeatedly. So was Moses. It is for this reason that suffering can be ennobling, that we can admire those who are beset with pain, written off, or cast aside, but remain true to their calling. As committed an atheist as Bertrand Russell saw in the endurance of intense pain “a sacredness and an overpowering awe.”10
We should keep in mind, however, that some of those who suffer feel the agony of others’ misfortunes. Concerned parents may suffer at the sight of their child in pain. Morally sensitive people may be dismayed by the sight of a homeless person on a bitterly cold day. Along these lines, Kant argued that we should not avoid places like hospitals or debtors’ prisons where the poor suffer, because we have a moral duty to cultivate the compassionate side of our nature.11
On this point, Cohen goes further than Kant, arguing that for the prophets, the fundamental problem of human life is not death but poverty. For Cohen, poverty is the chief way human vulnerability expresses itself—or, as he put it, the poor person typifies humanity in general.12 Broadly speaking, the main purpose of the prophets’ teaching is to highlight the importance of compassion. Compassion, Cohen says, more than anything else, enables us to establish a bond with our fellow human beings. It is when I take pity on another person that the person becomes more than just another face in the crowd but a friend or fellow (German, mitmensch), by which he means a person whose welfare is tied up with my own.13 To this Cohen would add that if, as the prophets insist, there is a divine command to help those at the bottom of the social scale, then by establishing a bond of fellowship with them, I become a worthy human being in my own right.14 In the immortal words of Hillel: If I am only for myself, what am I?
It is here above all else that Jeremiah excels. It is not just his own misfortune he is bemoaning but, more importantly, the plight of the widows, orphans, and oppressed laborers whose cause he has taken up. Their suffering is his suffering. In Buber’s words: “His ‘I’ is so deeply set in the ‘I’ of the people that his life cannot be regarded as that of an individual.”15 Moreover, this type of suffering—not only with but on behalf of other people—is tinged with outrage, and therefore provides a springboard for corrective action. So even though Jeremiah’s writings reveal a tortured soul overcome by the sight of poverty and injustice, we can also see them as ennobling. As troubled as he is, we can admire Jeremiah as a human being considerably more than we can a person who goes through life without a care in the world.
There is another reason why God allows Jeremiah to undergo such turmoil—and it has to do with the fact that God undergoes turmoil as well. The book of Deuteronomy tells us that God chose Israel out of love (3:7, 7:8) and wants to be loved in return (6:5). But as we have seen throughout this study, God is spurned at nearly every turn. Divine commandments are broken. The witnesses to God’s great name are ostracized. Worship falls into the hands of false prophets and hypocritical priests. God’s hope that Israel will become a light unto the other nations now seems futile. In this light, perhaps it is not surprising that God allows a chosen servant to be humiliated—because when the people turn their backs on God, there is a sense in which God is humiliated as well. If Jeremiah is outraged by what he sees, so is God. If Jeremiah is torn between his feelings for his people and his disgust at what they have become, God is as well.
It could be said, therefore, that Jeremiah’s turmoil is symbolic of God’s turmoil. If so, he would not have been the first prophet to serve God in this way. Recall how Hosea’s torment over an unfaithful wife was symbolic of God’s torment over an unfaithful Israel. In either case, a servant who lived a comfortable and successful life during a period of moral and spiritual crisis would have been totally out of place.
As for why an all-powerful God would allow the Temple to be destroyed, the prophetic answer is that, despite repeated warnings about provoking God, the people are no longer worthy of it. By the same token, if Israel were loyal to God, then there is no way that a pagan nation could defeat it. But, in Jeremiah’s opinion, this has not happened. We must be careful, then, not to view this—or any other conflict—as a victory for Israel’s opponent. It is not that God has decided that the Babylonians are now the chosen people. Rather, it is that Israel has failed God and deserves what it gets.
I will take up this issue again when I discuss Ezekiel. At this point, it is noteworthy that Persia conquered Babylonia, and Cyrus of Persia allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild what the Babylonians had destroyed. But, as indicated earlier, the Romans destroyed the rebuilt Temple in 70 CE. Although both cases of destruction are seen as national tragedies, Hosea may have spoken for all the prophets when he said, more than 150 years before the Babylonian invasion: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, / the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”16
Putting all this together, we arrive at the conclusion that people like Moses or Jeremiah do not live their lives the way most of us do. For most of us, the pursuit of happiness is the predominant factor in decision making. What college will provide the best opportunity to land a good job? What job will provide the best opportunity for advancement? When is the best time to have children, if one is going to have them at all?
As prevalent as it is, this way of thinking is exactly what the prophets reject. For them, there is only one path to take: carry the word of God to the people no matter the consequences. Even though God tells Jeremiah, “You shall say all these things to them, but they will not listen to you; you shall call to them, but they will not respond to you” (7:27), Jeremiah still chooses the life of a dissident. Once God’s words come to him like a raging fire in his heart, he is incapable of doing otherwise.
This does not mean that all dissidents are prophets—far from it. Rather, it means that people like Jeremiah who feel a burning desire to serve God are not motivated by the things that most of us hold dear. Wealth, popularity, and social position mean nothing to them. If anything, they are suspicious of them. They are willing to suffer any amount of external (as well as internal) abuse if that is what it takes to serve God. Put otherwise, service to God is self-justifying: to be called by God is reason enough to act. Once the call comes, nothing else matters.
Nevertheless, we must steer clear of hasty generalizations. Although Jeremiah went to war with the powers that be, not all biblical prophets did. Moses had a difficult time leading an unruly people through the desert, but there was never any serious question that he was in charge. Those who challenged his authority, including Aaron and Miriam, paid a price. David was victorious in battle and reigned as king. Solomon reigned as king and amassed legendary wealth. Although these people faced obstacles and sometimes came up short, it would be hard to describe them as dissidents.
If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that the circumstances of people’s lives are not always a reliable guide to whether their claim to speak for God is authentic. Some prophets occupy the top of the social ladder, some the bottom. Some lead schools, while others act alone. Some come from priestly families, while others are of common birth. From what we can tell, God selects messengers from a variety of backgrounds. This means we have no choice but to look beyond their social status to the content of their message. Someone who turns a blind eye to injustice, who takes a casual attitude to idolatry, or who modifies his principles to placate existing centers of power cannot speak for God.
The problem is that while these criteria allow us to tell who does not speak for God, they do not necessarily allow us to tell who does. In the Torah, a pillar of cloud descended on the Tent of Meeting when Moses and God communicated, leaving no doubt as to the legitimacy of Moses’ prophecy. But nothing like this validated the prophets who make up the subject matter of this book. In their case, the people were faced with a choice and, in most cases, chose incorrectly. The people were willing to live with bribes, false weights and measures, and letting widows and orphans fend for themselves. They sought mechanical ways to curry favor with fortune, such as turning to idols or sacrificing animals. When someone stood up to say all of this is wrong, they spurned both the message and the messenger.
While we may never have a simple formula for identifying true prophets, the history of prophecy leaves us with the question of whether we have become so set in our ways, so comfortable with the powers that be, that we too have turned our backs on people who speak the truth—and thus on God as well.