The Prophets

Who They Were, What They Are

Norman Podhoretz

• Editorial: Free Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780743238601
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Teologia ebraica

A radical reinterpretation of the biblical prophets by one of America's most provocative critics reveals the eternal beauty of their language and the enduring resonance of their message. Long before Norman Podhoretz became one of the intellectual leaders of American neoconservatism, he was a student of Hebrew literature and a passionate reader of the prophets of the Old Testament. Returning to them after fifty years, he has produced something remarkable: an entirely new perspective on some of the world's best-known works.Or, rather, three new perspectives. The first is a fascinating account of the golden age of biblical prophecy, from the eighth to the fifth century B.C.E., and its roots in earlier ages of the ancient Israelite saga. Thus, like large parts of the Bible itself, The Prophets is a history of the Near East from the point of view of a single nation, covering not only what is known about the prophets themselves -- including Elijah, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel -- but also the stories of King David, King Saul, and how the ancient Israelites were affected by the great Near Eastern empires that surrounded them. Layered into this work of history is a piece of extraordinary literary criticism. Podhoretz's very close reading of the verse and imagery used by the biblical prophets restores them to the top reaches of the poetic pantheon, for these books contain, unequivocally, some of the greatest poetry ever written.The historical chronicle and the literary criticism will transport readers to a time that is both exotic and familiar and, like any fine work of history or literature, will evoke a distinct and original world. But the third perspective of The Prophets is that of moral philosophy, and it serves to bring the prophets' message into the twenty-first century. For to Norman Podhoretz, the real relevance of the prophets today is more than the excitement of their history or the beauty of their poetry: it is their message. Podhoretz sees, in the words of the biblical prophets, a war being waged, a war against the sin of revering anything made by the hands of man -- in short, idolatry. In their relentless battle against idolatry, Podhoretz finds the prophets' most meaningful and enduring message: a stern warning against the all-consuming worship of self that is at least as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was three thousand years ago. The Prophets will earn the respect of biblical scholars and the fascinated attention of general readers; its observations will be equally valued by believers and nonbelievers, by anyone with spiritual yearnings. Learned, provocative, and beautifully written, The Prophets is a deeply felt, deeply satisfying work that is at once history, literary criticism, and moral philosophy -- a tour de force.

PART ONE

Clouds of Ancestral Glory

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE BEGINNING

IN SPEAKING OF classical prophecy as a mysterious phenomenon at both ends of its three-hundred-year course, I also suggested that Amos and those who followed in his footsteps neither materialized out of nowhere nor eventually vanished into thin air. But we cannot appreciate the force of that suggestion without first sketching the ancient Israelite matrix out of which the classical prophets arose and back into which their words were eventually reabsorbed. When we arrive at the end of the story, I will take a stab at explaining why no such words were heard again after they had been shattering the air for three hundred years. But for now, there is the question of the original emergence of the classical prophets.

In grappling with that question, one scholar, Shalom M. Paul, reaches all the way forward to early nineteenth-century England for a line in William Wordsworth’s great poem,“Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Adapting this line to Amos, Paul describes him as “trailing clouds of ancestral glory.” The allusion is to all those earlier prophets who did not leave books of their own behind them but of whom we read in the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets.

If the current scholarly consensus is right, the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets did not exist in written form when Amos showed up in about 750 B.C.E. But it seems reasonable to some scholars—and to me as well—that the history those books recount, and the stories they tell about the central figures in that history, were in wide circulation long before being pulled together, written down, and edited. It is not even impossible that some or much of this material may already have been committed to writing by the middle of the eighth century B.C.E. But the main point is that the classical prophets of that century knew from whence, from whom, and from what they had stemmed.

In later generations, the rabbis of the Talmud would speculate that not even all the prophets in the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets added together made up anywhere near the sum total of such spokesmen sent by God to reprove and instruct and comfort the children of Israel. According to one talmudic estimate, they amounted to “double the number of the children of Israel” who were led by Moses out of Egyptian slavery. But as a less fanciful talmudic count has it, only fifty-five prophets, including seven females, are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, apart from the fifteen whose names are attached to books of their own. Still, whatever the number of predecessors he may have had, a very old tradition stood behind Amos of which he must have been aware.

How old? Well, we meet the word navi (the most common of the four Hebrew terms for prophet^I) for the first time in Genesis, the very first book of the Hebrew Bible, when the pagan king Abimelech is told by God in a dream that the patriarch Abraham “is a prophet, and he shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live . . . .”

The context here is that on entering Abimelech’s domain, Abraham has passed off his wife Sarah as his sister, having successfully pulled the same trick once before (when his name was Abram and hers Sarai) on Pharaoh in Egypt. In both cases, he does this because he fears, not without cause, that these monarchs will kill him in order to add so beautiful a woman to their own harems. God is thus warning Abimelech not to have sexual relations with Sarah, as Pharaoh— the text is silent on the matter—may have done (and which may be why he is then, like another Pharaoh in the future who will at first refuse to free his Hebrew slaves, hit “. . . with great plagues . . .”).

In the next generation, poor Abimelech is put through the same paces by Abraham’s son Isaac with his wife Rebekah. These three episodes, however, may constitute one of the numerous instances in the Hebrew Bible where different (and even conflicting) versions of the same story are told. Presumably the reason was that by the time such tales were written down, the editors or redactors did not dare to change or omit anything that had already become well-known, or sanctified, through oral transmission. (If so, this would lend additional credence to the supposition that Amos was conscious of the “clouds of ancestral glory” he himself was trailing.)

But where Abraham is concerned, the story—like many others we will pass along our way—also illustrates the Bible’s amazing refusal to conceal the human weaknesses of even its most revered figures. (After Pharaoh takes Sarah into his “house,” Abraham is rewarded with great riches, and shows no compunction about accepting them.) The prophets, I have said, were not saints as we understand the term, and that very much includes the first of them.

Some scholars, reasoning from the lack of evidence outside the Bible, and their own predispositions, hold that there never was such a person as Abraham, and that the name stands for a clan, perhaps legendary, into which later ideas and beliefs were retrojected. Other equally reputable scholars disagree, seeing nothing in the Bible itself, or in materials from other sources, that is necessarily inconsistent with the historicity of Abraham. If we cast our lot, as I do, with the theory that Abraham actually existed, we can reasonably guess that he was born in Mesopotamia around the year 2000 B.C.E., and that he grew up to become a wealthy semi-nomadic tent dweller. In that era, his family would, like everyone else in the world, have been idol worshipers. This is not mentioned in Genesis, but very likely only because it is taken for granted there.^II

Then one day, with no warning or preparation, Abraham (still called Abram) hears the voice of God commanding him to “. . . Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee . . . .” This command is accompanied not by any promulgation of a new law, or of a new faith, but only by a promise: “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee . . . . And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”

God reiterates this promise again and again to Abraham, but such direct communication from Him, while a necessary condition for being designated in the Hebrew Bible as a prophet, is evidently not sufficient. Before Abraham there was his own remote ancestor Noah, to whom God also spoke and who “. . . found grace in the eyes of the LORD . . .” as “. . . a just man and perfect in his generations . . . .” Noah was accordingly spared from the universal destruction of the flood God had decided to bring upon the earth in order to wash away the wickedness that had spoiled His original creation, and thereby also to give it a new beginning. Yet Noah was never referred to as a prophet. More remarkably, neither will the title be given to Abraham’s son Isaac or his grandson Jacob, even though they, along with him, will be reckoned among the three patriarchs of the special people that God has promised will develop out of their descendants.

Then there is the almost equally curious, and very significant, case of Joseph, one of Jacob’s twelve sons. After being sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, who envy his status as the favorite of their father, Joseph gradually rises to great heights there by predicting the future through the interpretation of dreams and through practicing divination. Yet he is never deemed a prophet, either.

Here, then, is an early indication that, so far as the Hebrew Bible is concerned, prophecy does not mean the ability to foresee the future.^III Just the opposite: though Joseph is not condemned or even criticized for it in Genesis, divination will be forbidden to the children of Israel in the third book of the Pentateuch, Leviticus.^IV

---

WHAT IS IT, then, that makes Abraham, and not any of the other patriarchs or their immediate descendants, a prophet? On the basis of the verse in which his being a prophet is associated with the ability to save Abimelech’s life through prayer, the suggestion has been advanced by Shalom Paul and other authorities that the key element is this power to intercede with God for others. Other authorities, notably Francis L. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, writing in collaboration, disagree:

A prophet may [intercede], because the situation makes such action possible, that is, he is in the presence of the divine king. That . . . , however, is not formally part of the status of prophet; it does not belong officially to the job description.

But in my view, the main factor in “the job description” is that Abraham alone plays the double role—involving a positive as well as a negative aspect—that all prophets will play throughout the history of Israel.

The positive side of this coin is the capacity to understand, and to make others understand, the revolutionary and previously unimaginable idea that there is only one God, not many gods; that He is invisible; that He alone created the heavens and the earth and all they contain or embrace; and that, for reasons He does not disclose, He has chosen to make the seed of Abraham (or the children of Israel, after the new name that will later be given to his grandson Jacob), the instrument through which His law and His commandments will be revealed first to them and then in due course to all other peoples as well.

With Abraham, we are still some seven hundred years away from the detailed contents of that revelation, which will take place through Moses on Mount Sinai. Meanwhile, however, Abraham “. . . believe[s] in the LORD . . .” and commits himself to “. . . command his children and his household after him . . . that they shall keep the way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment . . . .”

No further definition is given of what justice means, or how Abraham can keep the way of God before its twists and turns have been disclosed. But as Andersen and Freedman comment about the oracles the classical prophets will deliver in the far future against the pagan nations:

[These nations] are not to be blamed for failing to worship and serve Yahweh, whom they do not know as God. Hence they are not condemned [as Israel is] for apostasy, because never having known him they have not been guilty of abandoning him.

In spite of this, Andersen and Freedman go on, the crimes with which the pagan nations are charged “would be regarded as reprehensible behavior on anyone’s part, anywhere, anytime. There seem to be underlying principles of justice and equity that are equally applicable to all.”

In this illuminating perspective, what will be assumed by the classical prophets is “a kind of ‘natural law,’ ” and I would suggest that some such assumption is also at work in connection with Abraham’s commitment. Otherwise on what basis would Abraham argue and bargain with God, as he does (simultaneously appealing to “a kind of ‘natural law’ ” and foreshadowing prophets of the classical era like Jeremiah) when He proposes to wipe the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah off the face of the earth: “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? . . . Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

We are entitled to conclude from all this—so it seems to me—that Abraham grasps the essence of the revolutionary idea of the one true and invisible God, which is why he ratifies his acceptance of it both for himself and his descendants through a “covenant” written by circumcision into the very organ of male generation.

In entering into this covenant with God, however, Abraham necessarily also takes upon himself the obverse or the negative aspect of the prophetic privilege and burden. He, the offspring of idolators, repudiates them so as to inaugurate a war against the religious ideas by which they and all other men have thus far always lived: that there are many gods; that images of wood, and silver, and gold can be fashioned of them; and that these images can then be worshiped and served. “Abominations”—as the Hebrew Bible never tires of characterizing them—are encouraged through this worship, and they must ultimately be extirpated, first among Abraham’s own “. . . children and his household after him . . .” and the great people who will spring from his loins, and then among “. . . all families of the earth . . . .”

I should note that scholars exist who perceive no clear sign of the war against idolatry in the narratives about Abraham. Some even contend that Abraham brought the familial god with him when he left home, that this god was then identified with a local (Canaanite) deity, and that only after the time of Moses was it merged conceptually into the God of Israel. Yet surely the commission to set himself against the family god is inherent in God’s command to Abraham that he go forth from the land of his birth and set out on a journey to a new place—or, as it might be phrased in a more modern idiom, a new world.

Then there is the story of the binding of Isaac, one of the greatest masterpieces of minimalist narrative art in the history of literature—an example par excellence of how much and how wide a range of emotion the Hebrew Bible can pack into just a few short verses, where what is omitted miraculously becomes as expressive as what is included. This story has frequently been interpreted as proof that the practice of child sacrifice associated with idolatry was not precluded at an early stage in the development of the Hebrew Bible’s conception of God. But I would argue, paradoxical as the idea may seem at first sight, that the story should be understood as the first major shot ever fired in the war against idolatry.

Consider: when God commands him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac as a “. . .burnt offering . . . ,” Abraham, without a murmur of protest or a plea for mercy, immediately prepares to do so; only at the very last moment, when an angel stays his hand, is he prevented from consummating this dreadful act. Why does Abraham, who does not hesitate to argue with God over Sodom and Gomorrah, fail to argue with Him over his own beloved son?

One reason may be that child sacrifice is so common in the world around him that he sees nothing extraordinary about the command. As we have been taught by scholars like Jon D. Levenson, there is no need to assume that pagans who engaged in this practice loved their sons any less than Abraham loved Isaac. On the contrary: it is more likely that in appeasing or beseeching favor from the gods represented by their idols, they were sacrificing what was most preci...