Voices of God

Readers of the prophets – those brave or foolish enough to tackle these most challenging of the biblical books – tend to believe that these men of the ancient Mideast speak authoritatively for God. After all, they tell us that they do. Despite their many differences, the 15 writing prophets of the Hebrew Bible (Christians count 16, including Daniel in the ranks) all claim to be speaking on behalf of a God who has given them messages – primarily of warning – to deliver to humanity.

But why do we accept the authority of these men? After all, if we encountered men or women today who spoke or wrote the way the prophets do, we would be most likely to write them off as crazy, delusional, or at the very least obsessed with their religion to the exclusion of common sense, good manners and social skills.

We would likely react in a way similar to the priest Amaziah, who essentially told Amos to shut up and go home. Amaziah is portrayed as a villain by Amos, but when you stop and think about it, his behavior was pretty rational when confronted with a man who was running around screaming that the king would be assassinated, and the citizenry of Israel sent into exile. We don’t have much patience with people who claim to be receiving messages directly from God.

We know very little about the men who wrote the 15 prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible – basically whatever these authors chose to tell us, supplemented by a few little snippets in the books of Kings. And yet we not only accept that they were authentically speaking for God, but, in the case of Christians, that their words predicted the coming of Christ.

The late scholar David J.A. Clines, in his essay “Metacommentating Amos,” states the problem this way:

“Somehow we need to distance ourselves from the prophetic voice, and recognize that the prophet’s is only one voice in his community. The prophet, and the text, have a corner to fight, a position to uphold, and we for our part need to identify that position, and to relativize it, not so as to discard it but only so as to give it its proper due.”

As Clines points out, the supposedly villainous Amaziah was a respected priest. He and Amos shared a faith in Yahweh: “He worshipped the same God as Amos, and he and Amos believed in almost all the same things.” Indeed, it seems plausible that Amaziah was trying to protect Amos from the wrath of King Jeroboam II.

Amos, Prophet. Public domain image

Although Judaism, Christianity and – to a lesser extent – Islam have hung on the words of the prophets for millennia, it really is not clear who wrote those words. Many scholars suspect that multiple authors and numerous redactors contributed to each and every book of prophecy, even the very short ones. These authors and editors were crafting narratives about a society about which we have very little evidence outside of the Bible. This makes critical analysis extremely difficult, which is the point of Clines’s essay. (The essay appears in a collection called, Of Prophets’ Visions and the Wisdom of Sages, which Clines co-edited. The essay and the book are worth checking out for anyone serious about studying the Bible).

I feel about the books of the prophets much the same as I feel about the Bible as a whole. Although scholarship and speculation about the creative process that shaped it is very interesting, whave we have in front of us is an extraordinary work of art. Complex, sophisticated, deep in meaning, the Bible can certainly stand up to the belief that it was divinely inspired. How else could this kind of greatness emerge?

But the greatness is artistic, not historical or factual. The books of the prophets contain some of the most beautiful poetry ever written. These words inspire and transform us in the way that only great art can. In the end, it doesn’t matter that it is unlikely that Jonah lived in the belly of a fish for three days, or that Obadiah believed that God was coming to punish and shame the people of Edom for collaborating with a foreign power in their assault on Israel. (Scholars can’t agree on which foreign power Obadiah was writing about, or much of anything else about Obadiah, whose book is the shortest in the Hebrew Bible.)

The Prophet Obadiah.Orthodox Church in America

We assume the authority of these books because they are great literary achievements, just as we may talk about Amy Dorrit or Raskolnikov as if their stories are true. They are imbued with the truth of genius.

Who Is a God Like You?

Reading the book of the prophet Micah is a bit of a roller-coaster ride. It alternates graphic doomsaying with utopian visions not just for the Hebrews but for the entire world. At least three such reversals take place within its seven short chapters, announced by the classic prophet’s call to “hear” or “listen”; not unexpectedly, this has given rise to thousands of years of speculation over whether Micah is the work of multiple authors, as well as how many, and when they may have written the various documents redacted into the book we read today.

Jan van Eyck: The Prophet Micah, Ghent altar

Micah is revered among Christians primarily for the opening of chapter 5, which has been interpreted as predicting the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. That’s arguable – the passage can be read in other ways – and also one of the least interesting things about Micah, in my opinion.

In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Micah sits between Jonah and Nahum. It shares some common ground with both. All three books focus on Israel and Judah’s antagonistic relations with their neighbor Assyria, whose capital Nineveh is used as a synecdoche for that country and its people. Jonah is called to preach repentance to the Ninevites; Nahum portrays their total destruction. Micah addresses the threat that Assyria poses to the cities and towns of the two kingdoms, predicting that they will wreak destruction that will drive the Hebrews to repent their evil ways and ultimately lead to an earthly utopia.

Like Jonah, Micah takes a globalist view of God’s justice. While Micah is a much more traditional book of prophecy than is Jonah – unlike Jonah, Micah speaks to the Hebrew people about their behavior and their need to repent – he is clear that God’s love and mercy extend to all the peoples of the world. However, Micah makes clear that the Hebrews hold fate in their hands.

Micah’s book begins with a frightening set of images of God coming down to Earth to trample the entire planet because of the sins of Israel and Judah (similar imagery is used by Nahum). “Listen, all you peoples, earth and its fullness,” Micah begins. He goes on:

“For the Lord is about to come out from his place.
And go down and tread on earth’s high places,
And the mountains shall melt beneath Him and the valleys split open, 

Like wax before the fire, like water pouring down a slope.” (1:3-4)

Universal destruction so far. But then there’s a twist:

“For Jacob’s trespass all this has happened 

And for the house of Israel’s offenses.” (1:5)

Already in 700 BCE, Jews were being blamed for all the troubles of the world. Some things never change.

Following this global cataclysm, Micah gets specific: Samaria will become “a ruined heap in the field.” Further, the threat will reach as far as Jerusalem’s gates, clearly a threat of an advancing army – the Assyrians – reducing Samaria to rubble and threatening, the Judean capitol in the south.

As Micha’s first prophecy proceeds, it becomes clear that the sins of the Israelites are to a large degree about corruption within their governmental and religious institutions. Judges demand bribes, preachers and prophets demand payment and offer lies in return, the rich and powerful rob the poor. Widows and their fatherless children are thrown out of their homes. Although “whore’s pay,” money spent on cultic prostitutes who then use it to purchase idols and other riches for their altars, is mentioned, Micah is not primarily about faith in the one God of the Hebrews. It is about how we behave toward each other in society and around the world.

Later on, Micah makes clear what would constitute behavior acceptable to God:

“It was told to you, man, 
What is good And what the Lord demands of you – 
Only doing justice and loving kindness 
And walking humbly with your God.” (6:8)

That last clause is interesting. “Your God.” Does that imply that your god might not be my god? It’s hard to say what the implication is at this point in Micah, but a few chapters earlier, presenting a utopian vision of a world at peace, he makes it clear that achieving this paradisiacal state does not demand that everyone adhere to the same religion:

“For all the peoples shall walk 

Each in the name of his god 
But we shall walk in the name of the Lord our God forevermore.” (4:5)

The future world at peace envisioned by Micah is duplicated almost exactly in Isaiah chapter 2. The two prophets (assuming 1st Isaiah here – Isaiah appears to have been written by at least three distinct authors) were contemporaries, and may have known each other or certainly of each other, so their content-sharing is not a complete surprise. We don’t have a clue who borrowed from whom. But Isaiah does not repeat the “Each in the name of his god” clause.

Micah and Isaiah position Jerusalem, site of God’s restored temple, as the center of this peaceful world, and as a place where God will be “arbiter to vast nations from far away.” (4:3) But while Isaiah seems to assume that the entire world will follow the Hebrew God, Micah does not require faithfulness to Yahweh of anyone but the Hebrews. Just as God in Jonah did not require conversion of either the sailors or the Ninevites, God in Micah does not mandate the conversion of anyone outside the Hebrew community. He just wants the pervasive maltreatment He observes to stop.

What kind of a god is Yahweh, who does not demand fealty to Himself, but instead demands that we recognize all of his human creation as worthy of decency and respect? One who places love and forgiveness above power and vengeance, it seems. The question arises both in the meaning of Micah’s name, “Who is like God?”, and explicitly in the final chapter of his prophetic book:

“Who is a God like You dismissing crime 
And forgiving trespass for the remnant of His estate?” 
He does not cling forever to His wrath, 
For He desires kindness.” (7:18)

Like Jonah, Micah seems taken aback by God’s determination to forgive, but unlike the other prophet, Micah is not angered by God’s graciousness. Micah sees tolerance and acceptance as key features of the universal utopia he envisions. It may take destruction and repentence to get there, but it awaits us as, in essence, its own reward. Would that today's children of Abraham recall what Micah knew.

The Questions of Jonah

The Book of Jonah stands out as an oddity even within a work as teeming with oddities as the Bible. Consisting of a mere four chapters – a trifle, in terms of the Bible – Jonah is by far the best known of the books of the Prophets despite the fact that it is completely unlike any of the Bible’s other prophetic books.

For one thing, it contains almost no prophecy. Although it is nestled among the 12 short works known as the “Minor Prophets,” Jonah is uniquely a plot-driven narrative mostly remembered for the episode in which the protagonist is swallowed by an enormous fish. The only words of God shared by Jonah are, “Forty days more, and Nineveh is overthrown.”

That statement represents another oddity: Jonah delivers his prophecy not to the people of Israel or Judah, but to their sworn and feared enemy, the Assyrians, conquerors of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Nineveh was the Assyrian capitol. Jonah is the only biblical prophecy delivered to a non-Jewish audience. Other prophets wrote of the fate of the Hebrews’ non-Jewish neighbors -- the book of Nahum, indeed, prophesies the destruction of Nineveh – but the pagans are not the audience for those words

We are not told what language Jonah was speaking when he uttered those scant prophetic words while making his way through the streets of Nineveh. He is a self-described Hebrew, commanded by God to deliver his prophecy to the great city’s residents. But whatever language he spoke, The Ninevens must have understood him, because he was remarkably effective. Unlike the stubborn and recalcitrant Jews who received the other prophecies, the people of Nineveh immediately donned sackcloth and repented their evil ways. When their king decided to hop on the bandwagon, he added the city’s animals to the penitents required to put on sackcloth. Seeing their repentence from unnamed “evil,” God abandons his plan to destroy Nineveh and saves the heathens. Notably, their salvation does not involve religious conversion, simply their repentance.

Similarly, in the first chapter of Jonah, the episode detailing the storm at sea, God saves the ship full of religiously diverse – and presumably polyglot – sailors who reluctantly follow Jonah’s instructions and throw him overboard as appeasement of the God that Jonah had tried to flee. When the storm immediately stops, the sailors pray and make sacrifices to the Hebrew God, but there is no suggestion that they have converted.

One of the key messages of Jonah may be, indeed, that belief in the god of the Hebrews is not a requirement for God’s mercy, but abstaining from evil is.

Those casually acquainted with the story of Jonah often think of it as a tale for children, the story of a man who disobeyed God, was swallowed by a fish in whose belly he spent three days and three nights, repented and was saved. But that is a seriously understated depiction of this book. Jonah may be brief, but it is far from simple or straightforward.

Jan Brueghel the Elder: Jonah Leaving the Whale 

Jonah is by convention divided into four chapters that play out as follows:

• God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh to deliver a prophecy, which at this point is not defined. Jonah, in fear of confronting that city’s populace, instead decides to flee from God, traveling to the port of Joppa (Jaffa) and purchasing a fare on a ship bound for the distant city of Tarshish. When the ship sets sail, a fierce storm develops. The crew prays to their various gods for salvation, to no avail. Jonah, who has gone down into the vessel to sleep, is confronted by the ship’s captain who asks him about his god. Jonah acknowledges that he is a Hebrew and, evidently having previously told the sailors he was fleeing from God, says that in order to save themselves they must throw him overboard. Although the sailors are reluctant to do so, they eventually see that as their only option and cast Jonah into the sea, which immediately calms, leading to the sailors’ prayers and sacrifices.

• God instructs a gigantic fish to swallow Jonah, who then spends three days and nights in its belly. While in there, he recites a prayer, a psalm about salvation and deliverance. Hearing this, God instructs the fish to “vomit” Jonah out onto shore.

• God again commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh and deliver his prophecy, which this time Jonah does, inspiring the city’s population – and eventually their king and their animals – to don sackcloth, fast, and repent. Hearing their repentance, God changes his mind about destroying the city.

• Jonah is incensed by God’s change of mind, and goes east of the city to sit and sulk. He builds a small shelter. God causes a shade tree to grow to protect him from the sun, but after the first night, God sends a worm to destroy the tree and a wind to make conditions unbearable for Jonah. God confronts Jonah about why he is angry, to which Jonah responded that the reason he ran away in the first place was that he knew that God was compassionate and was likely to save the Ninevens. He tells God he wants to die. The story ends with a questioning retort from God to Jonah: “You – you had pity over the qiqayon (tree), for which you did not toil and which you did not grow, which overnight came and overnight was gone. And I, shall I not have pity for Nineveh the great city, in which there are many more thousand human beings who do not know between their right hand and their left, and many beasts?”

That final question, which gets no answer, is a radical one in biblical terms, making it clear that despite the fact that God is worshipped by the Hebrews, he is God of the entire world, and sees care for all of humanity as his obligation. This from the God who so often in the Bible has protected the Israelites from their enemies, dispatching Egyptians, Phoenicians, and assorted pagans.

Although the residents of Nineveh are said to have been condemned for their evil ways and are saved by repentence, it is never made clear what evil they have perpetrated to deserve the destruction God has proposed. Whatever the moral of this story is, it does not have to do with specific, named acts. Instead, it suggests that we know evil when we see it; it doesn’t have to be spelled out to us.

One thing that is clear is that Jonah’s God likes to be recognized and communicated with. The sailors in Chapter 1 do it and the storm is quelled; the Ninevites in Chapter 3 do it and their city is spared from destruction; and Jonah does it in his psalm in Chapter 2, after which God engineers his release from the belly of the beast. It has been widely noted that neither the sailors nor the citizens of Nineveh are said to convert to Judaism; however, they recognize the Hebrew god as a powerful agent whose wishes need to be obeyed.

So, what is the Book of Jonah, exactly? That’s a question that continues to stump both scholars and the faithful. As the Yale Anchor Bible series volume on Jonah puts it:

“The question of the genre of the book of Jonah is a thorny one. It has been described as history, satire, parody, allegory, midrash, parable, biography, prophetic narrative, novella, tragedy, myth, and folklore, among others. Almost as common as the assigning of Jonah to a specific literary genre is the insistence that the book defies genre categories … The matter is further complicated by the fact that many of the genres that appear in discussion are foreign to the ancient biblical world.”

If Jonah is satire, or parody of the other writing prophets, how did his jab at them end up in the Bible? Well, the Bible is an anthology – even an anthology of anthologies when you consider how many of its books appear to have had multiple authors whose work was stitched together by editors who have come to be known as redactors. Like many anthologies, its point of view is not consistent. The so-called Wisdom Books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are similarly off-the-main-stream message.

It’s very hard to know when the books of the Hebrew Bible were written much less accepted into the canon. Guesses about Jonah’s authorship and era are all over the board. The prophet is mentioned in 2 Kings as having lived during the reign of Jeroboam II in the northern kingdom, a 41-year span lasting from approximately 790 to 750 BCE. But his association in Kings with reestablishment of an eastern border bears no relation to the Book of Jonah.

The Anchor Bible commentary posits that the book we read today as Jonah is a blending of at least three distinct components:

• A straightforward original story in which God commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh to deliver his prophecy and Jonah obeys – in other words, the opening of chapter 1, followed immediately by chapter 3.

• An interpolated story about Jonah’s attempt to flee from God by boarding a ship to Tarshish, the storm at sea and the swallowing by the fish – most of chapters 1 and 2

• The psalm in chapter 2, which virtually everyone agrees was an independent, pre-existing work absorbed into Jonah’s story.

If this theory is correct, each of these pieces likely was written at a different time, and their redaction into one narrative may have occurred quite late in the compositional stream of the Hebrew Bible. That would make sense if Jonah is indeed a satirical commentary on other prophetic works (Nahum and Joel are likely candidates). The author(s) of the fish story and God’s final interaction with Jonah in Chapter 4 may well have had a more universalist view than the often fiercely national pre-exilic prophets.

Remember, too, that the Priestly writer (P) credited with the first, universalist creation story in Genesis 1 is believed to have lived long after the Yahwist writer (J) who composed the domestically scaled creation story in Genesis 2. Adam and Eve can be seen as the beginning of the story of the Jewish people; the Priestly creation story covers all of us.

But is that all that we are seeing at play here? I think there is more, and that something more may be more subversive expected in a book of the Bible. Let’s take another look at the sailors, the citizens of Nineveh and Jonah. What do they have in common? It’s clear that they all changed their behavior to attain God’s mercy. They prayed, they fasted, they repented their past behaviors. But did they really change?

As mentioned before, there is no suggestion that either the sailors or the Ninevites converted to the worship of the Hebrew God. Jonah seems to fully accept God’s rule in the Chapter 2 psalm, but since he appears to be reciting a pre-existing prayer, is that really evidence that the man who tried to escape and hide from God has truly changed? Chapter 4 tells us that the answer is a resounding no. It reveals Jonah as headstrong and petulant, incensed that God showed mercy on the people of Nineveh. Moreover, it reveals that this mercy is just what Jonah expected and was rebelling against when he decided to run away. In his eyes, he has been proven right. It seems Jonah has learned little, despite his time in the belly of the fish.

Antonius Wierix: Jonah Under the Gourd

No wonder the book ends with that challenging question from God. How can Jonah, it asks, waste his sympathies on a triviality – a tree that provided temporary shade – while criticizing God for saving an entire population of his creatures? Have the Hebrews, including their prophets, learned nothing from their experiences, the loss of their kingdoms and the destruction of their temple? Why are they wasting their time mourning over trivialities? Staying alive is relatively easy, the stories show. Pray, fast, repent, repeat.

But if that doesn’t translate into care for all of God’s creation – including our perceived enemies – we’ve missed the point.