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.