Manasseh succeeded Hezekiah about 687 (some competent chronologists would make it an earlier date). A fair impression of his reign, although only an impression, is returned in IL Kings 21 and IL Chronicles 33. He is bitterly condemned by DH. He was surely repudiated in prophetic-Yahwistic circles, and it may be that Yahwism during his reign was virtually forced to go underground. An extrabiblical tradition reports Isaiah's death under Manasseh's persecution.

His was a long reign, lasting until 642, when his son Amon succeeded to the throne. He appears as an Assyrian vassal in the annals of Esarhaddon (681-669) and Asshurbanapal (669- 633?). The Chronicler reports an act of rebellion, or suspected rebellion; but if true, his relationship to Assyria as a subject king in good standing was quickly restored. As the King's account also reports of his grandfather Ahaz (in II 16:3), Manasseh reverted to child sacrifice (II 21:6); and, also like Ahaz, he introduced, no doubt under the guise of what continued to pass for Yahweh worship and the Yahweh cult, extraneous practices denoting Judah's subservience to Assyria.

Amon 's reign - indeed his life - was brief (642-640: he was killed at 24). DH formally condemns him, but it is interesting and perhaps significant that his assassination was avenged by "the people of the land," i.e., the most influential citizens,² and his son Josiah put on the throne at the age of eight to succeed him. During the years of Josiah's reign (640-609) Assyria was dying and Josiah was able to effect a drastic religious transformation because Judah gained again, and for the last time, a period of political independence.

Unless these two chapters are a hoax, they are historically two of the most important in the Old Testament. Here is recorded the most extensive, thorough-going reform in the whole history of the Israelite kingdoms, a reform based upon a book of law found - or appearing, or now for the first time seriously heeded - in the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign (probably 621). Reform is already under way: Josiah has already set in motion the complete redecoration and restoration of the "house of Yahweh," the Temple in Jerusalem. Manasseh bad apparently permitted its shameful deterioration. The priest Hilkiah reports the finding of "the book of the law in the house of Yahweh" (II 22:8). Josiah's secretary, Shaphan, reads the book to the king, who is profoundly moved by the disparity between present practice and the book's, admonition (22:11-13). The prophetess Huldah is consulted. She is apparently a professional prophet in her own right commanding vast respect in Judah, although we hear of her nowhere else. She returns the Yahweh Word validating the book, confirming Josiah's concern. She indicts and passes judgment upon Judah, but for Josiah she speaks gentle words of Yahweh's acceptance

(22:14-20).

Nothing daunted, Josiah sets about implementing the law-book. He calls a popular assembly at the temple; gives the books a public reading; elicits the assembly's acceptance of "the words of this covenant" in the old covenant-making tradition (e.g., Josh. 24); and at once proceeds with appropriate reforms (see 23:4 ff.), including the excision from the whole temple cultus of objects and personnel alien, or deemed to be alien, to traditional Yahwism. Cult prostitution, scattered idolatrous sanctuaries, the practice of child sacrifice, and all objects and manifestations of astral worship (ancient Babylonian in origin, taken over by Assyria) are abolished. The passover is re-established, not afresh, but in a form deemed to adhere for the first time in centuries to ancient rite (23:21 f.; observe that the Chronicler, II 35, greatly expands and elaborates the account of this passover celebration).

DH gives expression to unprecedented gratification in Josiah:

Before him there was no king like him, who turned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might (cf. Deut. 6:5), according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him. (2 Kings 23:25)

Josiah's death at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco is recorded (2 Kings 23:28-30); but the details are decidedly not clear, and the Chronicler's account of the same tragic episode (II 35:20 ff.) compounds the confusion. It is only clear that Josiah loses his life, still a relatively young man, at Megiddo. Egypt is allied in a hopeless cause with Assyria against the Medes and Babylonians. Perhaps the Kings and Chronicles accounts are both satisfied on the assumption that Josiah, forced into the battle by Egypt, loses his life in the fighting (Chronicles) and so, in a manner of speaking, at Neco's hand (Kings).

For well over a century and a half this identification has been widely, and we think, rightly accepted. The basis of Josiah's reform, centering the cult practice of Yahwism exclusively in Jerusalem, purifying and simplifying Yahweh's worship, and rearticulating the "law of Moses," was the original unit of the present book of Deuteronomy, that is, chapters 12-26 (perhaps also including chapter 28), or even the larger block, chapters 5-26. This prevailing view has had its able opponents. A handful of scholars have argued that Deuteronomy was not in existence in Josiah's day and that Josiah's reform program was shaped by the J legislation in Exodus 12 and 32-34; or a brief collection of Jeremiah's oracles; or the Holiness Code of Leviticus 17-26 (conventionally dated in the sixth century, of course); or, if any part of Deuteronomy, then chapters 5-11 only.

Others have seen in Deuteronomy 12-26 (and 28) a very early North-Israelite work - late tenth or early ninth century. Centralization of worship was out of the question at that time, and they rid Deuteronomy of any such program by ruling the passage 12:1-7 to be a later intrusion; and by reading 12:14 (RSV: "at the place which Yahweh will choose in one of your tribes, there you shall offer . . . ) "in any place which Yahweh shall choose in any one of your tribes." The original and early Deuteronomy argued, they say, only for centralization by tribes and could not, therefore, have been the basis of Josiah's reform.

The ease for identification nevertheless remains convincing. As many as twenty-six specific parallels between Deuteronomy and 2 Kings 22-23 have been cited; and it is difficult indeed to believe that the Kings account of Josiah's reform is an invention of DH. From a literary point of view, Deuteronomy shows dependence on JE, but no rapport with P. To narrow the span of years of Deuteronomy's possible origin, the eighth-century prophets betray no knowledge of it whatsoever; while late seventh- and sixth-century prophets (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, II Isaiah, Haggai, and Zechariah) all show at least some indirect acquaintance with it. Style and vocabulary accord well with what we know of late eighth- and earlier seventh-century Hebrew.³

To many careful readers of Deuteronomy, the theological tone necessarily presupposes the preaching of the eighth-century prophets.⁴ The strong theological ethic enunciated in Deuteronomy has a kind of post-Amos, post-Isaiah appeal. The central body, chapters 12-26, 28, gives in a considerably expanded and often significantly modified form virtually the full contents of the Covenant Code (E? Ex. 20:18-23:19; see above Chapter 3). There is, of course, new material in Deuteronomy, regulations specifically pertinent to the life of Judah in the years of Assyria's ascendancy around 725-625 B.C. Concern with the sociopolitical implications of war is marked both in the main body of Deuteronomy (20:1-20; 21:1-14; 23:10-14; 24:5; 25:17-19) and in the long introduction (see, e.g., 7:16-26 and 9:1-6)) Some of this material no doubt originated centuries before, but in this century of Assyrian domination it is revived by Deuteronomy. A sense of crisis and urgency pervades the material. The tone of Deuteronomy is far less legal than hortatory: it is all cast now in the form of Moses' personal words to his own people in direct address, and the note of pleading (characterized in the phrase, "Hear, O Israel!" 5:1; 6:3 f.; 9:1; 20:3; cf. 12:28; 13:11 f.) is implicit throughout. It is Old Testament law, of course; but the content of the law provides, as it were, the text for the sermon. This is Old Testament law, not so much formally codified as preached, and preached with passion and conviction).⁶

Deuteronomy has been called a derailment of prophetism. Far from resulting in a new response of the people to the living word of Yahweh . . . the prophetic effort (Deuteronomy) derailed into a constitution for the Kingdom of Judah which pretended to emanate from the "historical" Moses. The past that was meant to be revitalized in a continuous present now became really a dead past; and the living word to which the heart was supposed to respond became the body of the law to which the conduct could conform).⁷

Deuteronomy was produced - like the Yahwist's work from a wide range of sources and including some very old materials - out of prophetic Yahwism in the century preceding Josiah.⁸Deuteronomy was probably already in process during the reign of Hezekiah (about 715-687) and influenced his reforms (2 Kings 18:3 ff.). The work which was ultimately to issue in the law-book of Josiah's reform went underground during the reigns of Manasseh (c. 687-642) and Amon (642-640) and was "found" in the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign when a Yahwist king was ready to institute a Yahwistic reform and a Yahwistic program.

It did become a derailment of prophetism. Prophetism in a package cannot remain prophetic. And yet, the same commentator who so eloquently describes the derailment also declares:

With all its dubious aspects admitted, Deuteronomy is still a remarkable recovery of Yahwist order, when held against the practice of Judah under Manasseh; and when held against the alternative of a complete destruction of Yahwist order through the Exile and the dispersion of the upper class, it has proved to be its salvation in the form of the Jewish postexilic community).⁹

Deuteronomy looks like this:

1-11 a. 1-4. A summary of the history recounted in Exodus and Numbers. b. 5-11. A forceful call to obedience, with repeated reference to the era of Israel's wilderness days.

12-26, 28 The main, and probably original, section: laws old and new, prophetically apprehended, compiled, and edited; suggesting a product not of altar or bench, but of the pulpit.

27, 29-31 A collection of heterogeneous character, relatively late.

32 The so-called "Song of Moses" (vv. 1-43), unmistakably a product of prophetic circles; a poetic, lyrical expression out of classical prophetism, interpreting the history of Israel in terms of the theology of Yahwism (cf. Pss. 78, 105, 106).

33 The so-called "Blessing of Moses," one of the Old Testament's older long poems, probably premonarchic in origin, but showing signs of editing certainly in the tenth century and perhaps as late as the eighth century; preserving, in the form of individual blessings, characteristics of the tribes constituting the people Israel (and therefore to be compared closely with Gen. 49).

In three regards the law which Deuteronomy pleads (rather than strictly legislates) may be seen to express the prophetic temper which produced it. As compared with similar regulations of the Covenant Code, Deuteronomy (1) further tempers justice in behalf of the offender of any sort and any class; (2) takes a markedly more merciful, sympathetic view of the weak member of society by providing a sort of legal compensation for those who are victimized by social inequity or who suffer from the brutality and deprivation of the accidental in life; and (3) presupposes throughout a theological perspective indebted to classical Israelite prophetism and dependent upon its prior emergence.

In reading in Deuteronomy, one can have no better introduction than is contained in 4:31-39 and the moving Shema' Yisrael, "Hear, O Israel," of 6:4-13 (a recitation in constant use in Judaism from Deuteronomy's day to the present). One will not miss the distinctive genius of the preaching: all that is urged is itself sustained by the sense of the merciful Yahweh who himself took a victimized nation from among the nations of the world and gave to it full life and enduring meaning. All that is urged is then caught up in the words, "You will love Yahweh your God with all your heart!" It is all said, in a different way, in 9:6; and more fully in summary, in 10:12-22. With this done, and knowing the theme, read at random in the introduction (chs. 1-11); read aloud, and you will be preaching in ancient Israel. But see that, like the prophets, you also stand as the recipient of the word that is spoken.

You will want to see for yourself the difference between Deuteronomy and the Covenant Code where both address the same problem. See, for example, Deuteronomy 15:12-18 and then Exodus 21:2-11. The law sets the Hebrew slave free after six years of servitude and legally determines related questions (Ex. 21:2 ff.); Deuteronomy restates the law but makes it subservient to the prophetic-theological ethic - when the slave goes free "you shall furnish him liberally . . . remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and Yahweh your God redeemed you . . . it shall not seem hard to you, when you let him go free" (Deut. 15:14 ff.).

The peculiar character of Deuteronomy and its post-Amos-Isaiah status is equally revealed in regulations that are new, at least in the sense that they do not appear in the Covenant Code. By all means read:-

24:14 f. On the rights of hired servants.

23:15 f. On the sheltering of a runaway slave.

25:13-16 On weights and measures (cf. Amos 8:5!).

24:16 On the confinement of guilt to the guilty individual (and for an illustration of the application of the law, see 2 Kings 14:1-6).

22:6-7 On birds - "you shall not take the mother with the young .

25:4 On oxen - let him eat of the grain that he treads as he works!

22:8 On a railing round the roof.

23:12-14 And even on defecation; for the sake of cleanliness, of course, but - this is Deuteronomy - be clean because Yahweh walks in the midst of your camp!

An important clement in the difference between the codes of Exodus and Deuteronomy is the emergence between them of classical prophetism; Leviticus 19, in the still later Holiness Code, reflects the further development of prophetism's theological ethic. One looks in vain in Deuteronomy for the statement of the equality of the stranger and the homeborn (Lev. 19:34). The nationalism mainly apparent in Deuteronomy's acute martial sensitivity speaks in discrimination against the stranger even in worship (alas, contemporary worship practices remain by and large in this sense deuteronomic), and to the bastard child, then - as down to our own time - there is harshness (23:3 ff. and 23:2, respectively). Inconsistencies of a theological-humanitarian kind are not uncommon: see, for example, 23:3 (Ammonites and Moabites forbidden Yahweh's presence) and 24:17 in implicit contradiction (the sojourner's justice is in no way to he perverted); or again, the contradiction between 12:29 f., 20: 16-18, and 7:3 on the one hand (all of which, in the category of Holy War, insist that there be no kind of intercourse between Israelite and non-Israelite), and 21:10-14 on the other hand (which not only permits intermarriage, but remarkably honors the rights of the non-Israelite wife). And sometimes, we suspect, what is represented as of nobler stuff is in reality hard, shrewd, brutal, and deeply selfish, as in 20:10-20.

Let the three underlying qualities long ago pointed up in Deuteronomy continue to testify to the fact that, package though it be, it is a prophetic package. First, Deuteronomy insists on the unity of God. Yahweh is one - and this is so emphatic (whether explicit or implicit) that it indirectly affirms that he is alone. Indeed, Deuteronomy 6:4 can sustain four translations, all different, but unified in meaning:¹⁰

Yahweh our God is one Yahweh (RSV text)

Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one

Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one ) - (RSV margin)

Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone

The second of these qualities, narrow in itself perhaps, nevertheless grasps after what has been in Western religions a prominent and persistent hope - unity of sanctuary. In Deuteronomy it is conceived as a physical, geographical unity; but the symbol of such unity is still the yearning dream of the New Testament centuries later, a dream carried through from the old covenant to the new (see John 10:16 and 17:20). And in our own time modern Judaism with its exciting focus on the new Israel, Roman Catholicism, and world Protestantism with its increasing sense of unity - all know now in one form or another the worthy vision of a symbolic unity of sanctuary.

The third underlying principle or fundamental quality of Deuteronomy has been called "social morality and wholehearted worship." This is nothing other than what we have been calling the theological ethic. For all its limitations, Deuteronomy speaks for prophetic Yahwism when it pleads, as consistently it means to do, for righteousness and justice that issue from love of God involving all that one is - heart, soul and might!

Asshurbanapal was the last strong Assyrian king. After his death in 633 or 632, Assyria's collapse was swift and sure. Babylon had its independence by 625. The Medes from the mountains of Iran pushed westward unhindered into Assyria's central domain. And out of the steppes of Russia marauding bands, probably Scythian, poured over the outlying reaches of the empire in the same decade of the 620's. The capital city of Nineveh fell in 612 to a coalition of forces involving all three of these peoples; and in 610 Assyria lost its last real battle. It was, then, no mere coincidence that Josiah expressed himself so freely in the year 621 with his deuteronomic reform program: Assyria, liege lord of the vassal, Judah, was as good as dead!

With unrestrained gratification and unabashed glee, this resident of the town of Elkosh somewhere in southern Judah verbally celebrates Assyria's dying. He composes, apparently shortly before the fact in 612 B.C., a brilliant ode on the destruction of Nineveh.

Nineveh is like a pool whose waters run away.

"Halt! Halt!" they cry;

...................................

All who look on you will shrink from you and say,

"Wasted is Nineveh; who will bemoan her?"

...................................

There is no assuaging your hurt, your wound is grievous.

All who hear the news of you clap their hands over you.

For upon whom has not come your unceasing evil? (2:8; 3:7,19)

The physical text of Nahum has suffered as much abuse in transmission as any prophetic writing, as witness the excessive number of footnotes in the RSV translation. Chapter 1 may contain fragments of a prophetic oracle originally of a piece with chapters 2-3; but these nahumesque lines, which appear only after verse 11 or 12 have been incorporated by an editor in what was intended to be au acrostic poem, a kind of alphabetical psalm. However, only fifteen lines remain of an original twenty-two, presumably one each for the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

How is Nahum to be evaluated? What is his relationship to prophetism? Some interpret him as a cult prophet, a professional member of the Temple staff, whereas others exclude him altogether from the company of the prophets. Admittedly, we have very little to go on; but tradition, never glibly to be set aside, ranks him with the prophets and his language is unmistakably prophetic in character:

Behold, I am against you, says Yahweh of hosts, and I will burn your chariots in smoke . . . and the voice of your messengers shall no more be heard.

Behold, I am against you, says Yahweh of hosts, and I will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will let nations look on your nakedness and kingdoms on your shame. (2:13; 3:5)

Furthermore, Nahum speaks not merely for Judah but for humanity: Assyria's death means longed-for peace and self-respect for all the small peoples of the world. How wrong he was in this; but how prophetically right in his participation in this event not merely as an Israelite, but as a member of the international community.

The central emphases of classical prophetism are lacking - the passionate address to the contemporary life of the covenant nation; the cry for justice and righteousness in the theological ethic; and the consuming concern for ultimate meaning in the events of history. But we could hardly expect to find them in such a narrowly focused subject.

For the rest, we affirm enthusiastically the judgment which ranks this brief utterance in its sheer power and skill of articulation with the best of the age of classical Hebrew - a piece toward the end of that epoch to be classed with David's Lament (2 Sam. 1) in the middle of it and the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5) from the years of its beginning.

Zeph. 1-3

In the eruptive decade of the 620's - about ten years before Nahum - the prophet Zephaniah speaks out in accents strongly reminiscent of Amos and Isaiah. His place in the succession of classical prophets is unquestioned. In one or all of the several fierce new powers unleashed on dying Assyria he sees the Day of Yahweh near and hastening fast;

A day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry (1:14 f.)¹¹

The catastrophe of this Day of Yahweh is of such magnitude as to engulf all men (1: 18b, if original); but with the particularity characteristic of classical prophetism, the Day is the day of Judah's judgment, fall, and destruction. In 1:7-9 a grim metaphor is used. On the Day of Yahweh, Yahweh himself makes a sacrifice - and Judah is the sacrificial victim! Yahweh's guests, Israel's enemies, will consume the victim. Judah's official and ruling classes are especially singled out, a fact the more remarkable since Zephaniah is probably himself of royal descent. His genealogy (1:1) is the longest recorded of any prophet, reaching back four generations, apparently in order to name the great-great-grandfather, Hezekiah (king, c. 715- 687).

At the end of chapter 1 (verse 18b, which may be secondary), Judah's fate is merged with the fate of the world. Chapter 2 opens with the prophetic plea that the covenant people of Judah-Israel turn back to Yahweh in righteousness and humility, so that "perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the wrath of Yahweh." And then, in order, Philistia (four of the five major Philistine cities are named), Moab and Ammon, and Ethiopia are all denounced in bitterest terms, capped with this superbly articulated description of desolate Nineveh:

Herds shall lie down in the midst of her,
the vulture and the hedgehog shall lodge in her capitals;
the owl shall hoot in the window, the raven croak on the threshold;

This is the exultant city that dwelt secure! that said to herself,
"I am and there is none else!"
What a desolation she has become, a lair for wild beasts.
Everyone who passes by her hisses and shakes his fist. (2:14-15)

We are again confronted by the problem of originality and authenticity. We noted in the book of Isaiah a miscellaneous collection of oracles against foreign nations in chapters 13-23. The books of Jeremiah (46-51) and Ezekiel (25-32) embrace similar collections. On a much smaller scale, Zephaniah 2 incorporates oracles of this same sort which must be later than the prophet himself. When Judah finally fell, her neighbors Ammon and Moab incurred the enduring hatred of all the surviving inhabitants by further humiliating the shattered people with acts of plunder and cries of derision. The oracle of 2:8-11 probably originates in those dark days, several decades after Zephaniah.

A disciple of Isaiah?

The more extreme critics have left nothing to the prophet in chapter 3; or, still with a large question mark, only verses 1-7. A more conservative judgment accepts the finely wrought indictment of Jerusalem (vv. 1-7; cf. Isa. 1:21-23); admits, at least in the present form of verses 14-20, evidence of firsthand knowledge of events in the next century; but holds the middle section, verses 8-13, so strongly in the tradition of Isaiah, as very possibly or even probably the utterance of the seventh-century prophet.

If Isaiah 9:2-7 and/or 11:1-9 are oracles of Isaiah of Jerusalem in the eighth century, then it is Isaiah who first among the prophets speaks out in strong eschatological language. What do we mean by eschatology?

Eschatology . . . while sometimes signifying (in the Old Testament) the abandonment of any hope for justice in this world, is essentially an expression of the sense of injustice in the world as it is, and tile conviction that God is good and his justice must somewhere and somehow ultimately triumph.12

If we speak more narrowly of covenant eschatology, we mean the description of covenant fulfillment beyond the present or impending apparent frustration of covenant purpose and covenant ends. Quite apart from the specific question of the authenticity of Isaiah 9 and 11, Isaiah certainly envisaged destruction and beyond destruction, productive, fulfilling survival: "a remnant will return." It is then certainly not impossible that Isaiah could have elaborated his own eschatology in one or both of these passages.

Isaiah speaks of his disciples (Hebrew, limmudim, 8:16). The so-called Second Isaiah (whose oracles appear mainly in chapters 40-55, but perhaps also in 34-35 and here or there in 56-66) almost two centuries later probably means to identify himself as among those disciples when he calls himself one of the limmudim (RSV, "those who are taught" Isa. 50:4, twice; and see below, Chapter 10). We have already suggested that Micah, if not in the circle of Isaiah's continuing discipleship, was apparently influenced by Isaianic prophetism. Zephaniah, who may borrow directly or indirectly from Amos, shows such strong affinity with Isaianic motifs as to raise the question of his possible connection with circles of Isaianic prophetism.

In any case, there is the strong possibility that the eschatological note is authentic, The skill, power, vigor of the prophetic utterance; the deftness in the use of metaphor; the brilliance of the whole prophetic production - all this is eminently worthy of the lsaianic tradition. More specifically. Isaianic influence asserts itself in the admonition to be silent before Yahweh (1:7); the enumeration of the symbols of human pride like "the fortified cities" and "the lofty battlements" (1:16); the emphasis on humility (2:3); the very language in which the prophet's anti-Assyrianism is couched (2:13-15; cf. Isa. 10); the indictment of Jerusalem, as already noted; the eschatology implicit in Yahweh's plea, "Wait for me!" (3:8; cf. Isa. 8:17; 30:15); and perhaps most compellingly,

On that day. .
. . .I will remove from your midst your proudly exultant ones, and you shall no longer be haughty in my holy mountain.
For I will leave in the midst of you a people humble and lowly.
They shall seek refuge in the name of Yahweh,
For they shall pasture and lie down, and none shall make them afraid. (3:11-13)

This is the distinguished seventh-century prophet Zephaniah, who pictured Yahweh as a kind of sinister Diogenes, holding aloft a lamp and searching out in Jerusalem all who, like coagulated wine, have "thickened on their lees," lost all their covenant sensibilities, and whose attitude toward Yahweh is the ultimate denial of prophetic Yahwism "Yahweh will not do good, nor will he do ill" (1:12). Yahweh may be, but he does not do; his life is utterly unrelated to the living of our days; he is absent from our history.

This invokes the judgment, the "return to Egypt." Out of the second Egypt the purposes for which Yahweh chose Israel shall be fulfilled. In the traditional medieval representation of Zephaniah, the prophet himself holds the lamp and sheds the light; and so in fact he does.

Hab. 1-3

We have here only the scantiest direct information about the prophet himself. There is no authentic extrabiblical tradition about him; and the Old Testament gives us only the single line in the book which bears his name, "The oracle of God which Habakkuk the prophet saw" (1:1).

We cannot even fix his dates precisely. He speaks out in the face of Babylon's fresh aggression (Chaldeans, 1:6), probably in the decade of the 610's, perhaps closer to 600. Jerusalem was to suffer heavy deportation under Neo-Babylonian conquest in 597 and, ten years later, destruction by the same armies. He raises the problem we have come to identify by the term theodicy (Greek: theos, God; plus dike, right, justice). Theodicy presupposes the prophetic proposition that God rules in history and, of course, that God is just. What then of patent historical injustice? How injustice?

Specifically, Habakkuk proceeds as follows:

1:2-4 Forthright and bitter complaint over the wicked character of presiding power.

1:5-11 Yahweh's unapologetic response, not only not answering the prophet's lament but for the moment apparently confirming its validity. Chaldean power - magnificently described - is the power of "guilty men, whose own might is their God!"

1:12-17 The resumption of the prophet's complaint. He knows that Yahweh has "ordained them as a judgment," but what of Yahweh's judgment against them, when they go on "mercilessly slaving nations for ever!"?

2:1-3 The prophet now stations himself ( on the tower ) to await "the vision," the divine answer to his anguished problem. The vision is delayed, but the Word of Yahweh assures its coming and demands that it be written "plain upon tablets," so that even a jogging runner may be able to read it. The vision - as we read Habakkuk - is recorded in the "prayer of Habakkuk" in chapter 3,¹³which, in the original arrangement of the text, may have immediately followed 2:1-3.

2:4-5 Any translation of the first two lines of verse 5 will represent some conjecture, since the Hebrew text is obscure. This little unit is in the form of a rnashal, i.e., a proverb or parable, designed to bridge the gap between the expectant prophet, waiting for his vision, and the five woes pronounced in the next section. Verse 4 nevertheless states the theme of Habakkuk and verse 5 is an appropriate prelude to the woes.

2:6-19 The five woes are invoked against Babylon, by the victimized nations. In this perspective, Babylon is, in the family of nations, (1) the despot, (2) the megalomaniac, (3) perpetrator of violence, (4) vicious tormentor, and (5) in Israel's book the worst offense, idolater, worshiper of inanimate wood and stone! This last, but perhaps also all of these indictments, invokes the familiar lines,

But Yahweh is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.

And one is reminded again of the great Isaiah (cf. Isa. 2:17; 7:9b; 8:16; 30:15).

3:1-19 This is set now, like a psalm, with directions for its (cultic) performance. Conventional liberal criticism has deemed the "prayer" of Habakkuk to be a later, and unauthentic, addition, We prefer the judgment of those who read here the report of the promised vision, which, in its use of brilliant images, reminds us of Judges 5 and Deuteronomy 33.

We hold to the substantial unity of the little book. Habakkuk may well have been a cultic prophet, professionally attached to the Jerusalem Temple as a member of the Temple staff. The forms of prophetic utterance which he employs are disciplined forms, by his time conventionalized in the institution of prophetism. We sense in Habakkuk the meeting of the free-ranging prophetic articulation and the best of the long-disciplined liturgical expression in Temple cultus:

O Yahweh, I heard the report of you, and your work, O Yahweh, do I fear¹⁴

In the midst of the years renew it; in the midst of the years make it known; in wrath remember mercy. (3:2)

This is one of the great, timeless prayers of the Old Testament, created out of a prophetic faith confronted by an uncertain present and an immediate catastrophic future.

The theme of Habakkuk is faith, and faith is not espoused as an answer to the problem of theodicy. The prophet is content to live with the problem in the conviction that faith can sustain any and all seeming denials of the reign of God and the justice of God (3:17-18). The stated proposition that "the righteous shall live by his faith" (2:4b) no doubt came to mean in subsequent Judaism that the religious Jew justifies himself and fulfills his covenant responsibility by his faithfulness - to the formal prescriptions of Torah, the whole law and instruction of "Moses." Yet even here, even in the circles of much maligned (unjustly) postexilic legalistic Judaism (fifth and following centuries B.C.), if this kind of faithfulness in carrying out the (religious) law is what justifies and even defines "the righteous," it must be remembered that this was the best, and perhaps the only, way in which the prophetic Yahweh faith could now come to expression. And for the prophet Habakkuk, as always for prophetic Judaism and prophetic Christianity, the phrase carries the primary meaning - the biblical-theological theme - that the quality of righteousness is not first an item of performance but of faith; that the only righteous life is lived in faith, which alone is able to sustain life. The Yahwist knew this in the tenth century and affirmed it then (Gen. 15:6). It was Isaiah's fundamental affirmation (7:9). Indeed, the key word in both of these is "believe," from the same Hebrew root as Habakkuk's "faith." Paul, on behalf of the covenant community of the New Testament, is not wrong when he quotes and interprets Habakkuk as he does (Gal. 3:11 and Rom. 1:17; cf. Hebrews 10:38); nor was Martin Luther guilty of any textual distortion when he took this declaration, originally out of classical prophetism, as the primary point of cohesion for the Protestant Reformation.

In ancient Israel's most dismal, hopeless hours, prophetism continued to speak with honesty, realistically acknowledging the anguish of Israel's existence and the fearful perplexities therein for the prophet; and yet at the same time it joyfully affirmed Yahweh's reign and the ultimate success of his Word. "The wicked surround the righteous and justice goes forth perverted!" (1:4). This is, says the prophet; I see it, I live with it, and I vigorously and even violently protest it. Nevertheless, and even though it continue and be intensified, "I will rejoice in Yahweh, I will joy in the God of my salvation!" (3:18). This is the righteousness which lives only in faith.

1. The following passages are appropriate to the present discussion: 2 Kings 21; II Chron. 33; 2 Kings 22-23; II Chron. 35; Deut. 1-8, 10, 12, 17, 20, 22-25, 27-33.

2. Cf. G. von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy, in the series Studies in Biblical Theology, London, 1953, p. 63: "We may take it as certain that the term means the free, property-owning, full citizens of Judah."

3. For an excellent summary of the major interpretations of Deuteronomy, see the symposium, "The Problem of Deuteronomy," Journal of Biblical Literature, LXVII (1928), 305 ff.

4. But see von Rad, op. cit., especially pp. 60ff. "The prophetic in Deuteronomy is merely a form of expression, and a means of making the book's claim to be Mosaic real" (p. 69). For a view of Deuteronomy differing in some important respects from that taken here, see also his Theologie des Alten Testaments, Munich, 1957, vol. 1, pp. 218 ff.

5. See von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy, op. cit., pp. 50ff. Cf. F. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, Baton Rouge, 1956, pp. 375 f.

6. Cf. von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy, op. cit., especially pp. 15f.

7. Voegelin, op. cit., p. 429.

8. See also von Rad, Studies in Deuteronomy, op. cit., pp. 66 ff.

9. Voegelin, op. cit., p. 377.

10. On Exodus 20:306, see above, Chapter 3, and B. D. Napier, Exodus, in the series The Layman's Bible Commentary, Richmond, 1961.

11. Cf. Amos 5:18-20.

12. M. Burrows, An Outline of Biblical Theology, Philadelphia, 1946, p. 286. (Italics mine.)

13. See A. Weiser, Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 2nd ed., Gottingen, 1949. I am indebted to Weiser's analysis of Habakkuk.

14. Fear in the sense of acknowledge, affirm, respect.

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. (Jer. 1:5]

The Time and The Book

The prophetic career of Jeremiah begins during the reign of Josiah (640-609), in the thirteenth year of that reign (1:2), and so in the turbulent decade of the 620's (or possibly, changing "thirteen" to "twenty-three" in 1:2, in the decade of the 610's).¹⁶The bulk of material in the book of Jeremiah relates to the years after the accession of Jehoiakim in 609; and we know that Jeremiah was still an active prophet long after Jerusalem's fall to Babylon in 587. His was a long career.

Three kinds of material relating to Jeremiah and his times dominate the hook: (1) prophetic oracles deemed in their freshness and vitality to be authentic, in the sense in which we have used this word before; (2) historical-biographical narratives, conservatively attributed (and rightly, we think) in first origin to Baruch, the prophet's personal scribe (36:4 ff.); (3) oracles related in essence to (1) but obviously edited by Deuteronomists.

The contents of Jeremiah can be described as follows:

1 The prophet's introduction and call.

2-25 Oracles for the most part; and for the most part against Judah and Jerusalem. Here the reader confronts the problem of Jeremiah; the arrangement of the material is not consistently chronological and it is sometimes impossible to discover any sense or scheme behind the present arrangement. That the physical text of Jeremiah has suffered uncommon problems in transmission is apparent from a comparison of the Hebrew and Greek (Septuagint) forms of the text. Appreciable sections of the Hebrew are missing altogether in the Greek (about twelve percent, in bulk of words); and the block of oracles against foreign nations (chs. 46-51) are placed in the Septuagint after 25:13, and in completely different order. On the other hand, this section does exhibit this much order: chapters 1-6 reflect Josiah's reign; 7-20 contain oracles for the most part from the reign of Jehoiakim (609-598); and 21-25 are largely later.

26-36 The dominant first-person, oracular, forms of the preceding section give way now to narration of episodes. Jeremiah's scribe, Baruch, is probably responsible for the basic structure of chapters 26-45. Chapters 7 and 26 offer instructive comparison. The first is preserved no doubt from Jeremiah's dictation, and reports what was spoken; the other, dealing with the same episode, is concerned much more with the circumstances of Jeremiah's Temple speech. The time sequence in 26-29 is chronological, moving from Jehoiakim's reign (26) to Zedekiah's (598-587); and chapter 29 is a letter to Babylonian exiles deported from Judah by Nebuchadnezzar in 597. Chapters 30-31 constitute the most important collection of prophetic promises of restoration; 32 contains Jeremiah's emphatic confirmation of this promise in his purchase of land; 33 reiterates, in different form, the essential message of ultimate hope; 34 dates from Jerusalem's final siege which ended in the city's destruction in 587; 35 leaps back to the days of Jehoiakim and lauds the faithfulness of the Rechabites, a sect in Judah preserving the forms of wilderness existence; and 36 gives us the Old Testament's only description of the origin of a scroll, also in Jehoiakim's reign.

37-45 Here is recounted Jeremiah's experiences during Babylon's three-year siege of Jerusalem, which ended in the city's fall and destruction in 587. This takes, for the most part, the character of an intimately informed report from Baruch, who describes in detail the suffering and fate of his master through these days of catastrophe. Baruch remained to the end the faithful scribe and disciple; and this section appropriately concludes with a notice (ch. 45) reflecting Jeremiah's appreciation of Baruch.¹⁷

46-51 This is a collection of oracles against foreign nations (cf. Isa. 13-23 and Ezek. 25-32) almost certainly compiled after Jeremiah's day. Some of these oracles may originate in prophetic circles quite independent of Jeremiah; but others - for example, the oracle against Egypt (46: 2-28) and those oracles directed against Moab, Ammon, Edom (48:1- 49:27), and Elam (49:34-39) - may well be fashioned in present form from authentic oracles of Jeremiah.

52 An appended historical narrative, largely paralleled in 2 Kings 24:18-25: 1-21,27-30.

The Prophetic Quality

The best introduction to Jeremiah is Jeremiah. The following selection of brief readings from the book of Jeremiah represent some of the important forms, moods, and emphases, and the passionate self-involvement of the prophetism of Jeremiah. Read these, if possible aloud, without concern for critical questions of precise date and specific background. We know the broad character of Jeremiah's time: that is enough.

Yahweh to Jeremiah:

Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note!

Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth, that I may pardon her.

........................

Jeremiah:

You have smitten them, but they felt no anguish you have consumed them, but they refused to take correction.

They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to repent.

Then I said, "These are only the poor, they have no sense; for they do not know the way of Yahweh, the law of their God.

I will go to the great, and will speak to them: for they know the way of Yahweh, the law of their God."

But they all alike had broken the yoke. they had burst the bonds. (5:1-5)

Yahweh:

For from the least to the greatest of them, every one is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, every one deals falsely.

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, "Peace, peace!" when there is no peace! (6:13-14)

Behold, you trust in lying [RSV, deceptive] words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, "We are delivered!. . .Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eves? (7:8-11)

Therefore I still contend with you, . . . and with your children's children I will contend.

.........................

Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods?

But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit!

Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, . . . for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves broken cisterns, that can hold no water. (2:9-13)

Have I been a wilderness to Israel, or a land of thick darkness?

Why then do my people say, "We are free, we will come no more to you"?

Can a maiden forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire?

Yet my people have forgotten me days without number. (2:31-32)

In anguish, now, Jeremiah cries out, seeing only destruction:

My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me.

Hark, the cry of the daughter of my people, from the length and breadth of the land:

"Is Yahweh not in Zion?

Is her King not in her?

...........................

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!"

For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded,

I mourn, and dismay has taken hold on me.

Is there no balm in Gilead?

Is there no physician there?

Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored?

Othat my head were waters, and my eves a fountain of tears,

That I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! (8: 18-9: 1)

Finally, again the Yahweh-Words looking beyond the catastrophe:

Return, O faithless children, says Yahweh; for I am your master;

I will take you, one from a city, and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion.

And I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding. (3: 14-15)

. . .I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying "Know Yahweh," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (31:31-34)

A Prophet Among Prophets

Jeremiah's call took him to the capital city of Judah from his native town of Anathoth, set in the rugged, barren hills a few miles north of Jerusalem. He was the son of a priest in Anathoth (1:1) who may well have found himself without employment when Josiah's deuteronomic reform (in 621) centralized all of Judah's worship in the Jerusalem Temple.

Jeremiah, with Zephaniah, stands next in the succession of great classical prophets after the giants of the preceding (ninth and eighth) centuries. Some brief words of comparison may be instructive. Jeremiah was both like and unlike Elijah. He seems, like Elijah, almost to have cherished his stark singularity, his aloneness, his separateness. And yet, in one of a number of paradoxical qualities in his personality, Jeremiah was more passionately gregarious than any prophet before him. It was one of the major frustrations of his life that the city of Jerusalem, the largest city by far in Judah, was never able to satisfy his love of people and his intense desire to be warmly accepted, to be loved. To the end, Jeremiah resented bitterly his own alienation within the city. To the end he was baffled and outraged by the city's life and manner and disposition.

He was both like and unlike Amos. The strident prophetic note of denunciation and doom is familiar in both prophets. But while in Amos this note is struck with a force and persistence at best, for the most part, only implicitly relieved, it is sounded by Jeremiah consistently with compassion and personal anguish. For it is a part of the distinctive character of Jeremiah that he always sees himself in dual focus. He is the whip of God, called to wield the Yahweh-Word which must first be a seemingly merciless lash. At the same time, the prophet sees himself standing under the abuse of the very weapon he wields, in full identification with those whom he is called to scourge with the Word of Yahweh. It is another paradox in Jeremiah that this prophet who defined (with his younger contemporary, Ezekiel) a new covenant between Yahweh and the individual (Jer. 31:31 ff., cf. Ezek. 11:19-20 and ch. 37) hears in himself the strongest convictions of the solidarity of human life, the inescapable involvement of the life of the one in the life of the many, and the essentially corporate nature both of virtue and of sin. More closely than of any other man in the Old Testament - and quite without sacrilege - the words of the Servant Poem (in Isa. 53:4-5) may be applied to Jeremiah: "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows . . . . he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities."

Jeremiah is also both like and unlike Isaiah. Each is called out of a quiet and relatively secure existence into the unpopular role of spokesman for an angry God, for a Yahweh determined now to act in judgment. Both are initiated into prophetic careers by indescribably moving Yahweh, which both nevertheless attempt to describe. But while Isaiah enters this service as a kind of involuntary volunteer, Jeremiah sees himself from the beginning a conscript, captive to a Word he would, if only he could, defy and ignore (see 20:7 ff.). And the glory and grandeur of Isaiah's vision (Isa. 6) is in stark contrast to Jeremiah's consummate simplicity and his profound and bitterly protesting humility (see especially 1:4-10, 17-19). But here, too, Israelite prophetism attains one of its highest peaks; for here there is no intermediary agency. In this one man, Jeremiah, this lonely prophet, this exquisitely sensitive, turbulently loving man - here, in this person, God and man meet! It is a meeting specifically direct and intensely personal - but at once involving all of human history, all of human existence. It is a relationship in which human and divine emotion are merged and in such a phenomenal union as ultimately to defy separation. In this person, classical prophetism comes as close to incarnation as it is to come.

Jeremiah in History

Four events loom especially large in this epoch. (1) The call of Jeremiah sometime during the middle years of the decade of the 620's is coincident with the collapse of Assyrian power from assertive forces both within and without the empire. Jeremiah, through whom the Word of Judah's destruction has been spoken, sees one of these powers as the instrument of judgment (1:13 ff.). (2) A few years after his call, the prophet watches the process of Josiah's reforms. It is impossible now to recover his initial attitude. It is clear that he was later disillusioned. It is, on the other hand, not an unreasonable assumption that in its early enthusiastic introduction, he encouraged the reform. Long after Josiah's death, he held Josiah in high regard (22: 15b,16); and if 11: 1-8 refers to Josiah's reformation, there is no question about it: "Cursed be the man who does not heed the words of this covenant. . . hear the words of this covenant and do them" Perhaps 8:8 is a considerably later reflection of the prophet on the same deuteronomic law: "How can you say, 'we are wise, and the law of Yahweh is with us'? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie." Or are both of these references to other covenants, other laws? It is in any case clear that Jeremiah lived to see the collapse of Josiah's reformation. (3) There is no report of any response from Jeremiah to the fall of Nineveh in 612; and (4) only the briefest passing word on Josiah's death (22:10).

Josiah is immediately succeeded by Jehoahaz, a younger son of Josiah, apparently the popular choice. He dares to defy Egypt and is deposed by Pharaoh Neco in favor of his older brother, Jehoiakim. Jeremiah apparently held Jehoahaz in respect and even affection, and laments his tragic fate of permanent exile (22: 10-12; see also 2 Kings 23:30 ff.). One attempt on Jeremiah's life - there may have been several - occurs now at Anathoth (11:18-23), which gives rise to the same complaint in Jeremiah that is voiced about the same time by Habakkuk (12:1-6; cf. Hab. 1:2-4). Yahweh's answer to Jeremiah (12:5) is, in poetic effect, You haven't seen anything yet!

Some of the greatest prophetic utterances of Jeremiah originate in this period: the parable of the potter, chapter 18; the Temple discourse, 7:18:3,26, with its expression of Jeremiah's characteristic tension between the Word of destruction and his own pleading word of mercy, 7:16 ff. (cf. 18:20 and 14:11); Jeremiah's profound grief, 8:4-9:1; his affinity with Hosea, 13:16 27 but in many other passages as well; the certainty of destruction, 14:10-18; the quality of the "Confession" in 15:10-18 (as also elsewhere) that brings Jeremiah closer to us than any other figure in the Old Testament; the symbolic act again, chapter 19 - only Ezekiel among the prophets performs more such acts than Jeremiah; the bitterest of his confessions, 20:7-18, matched in the Old Testament only in Job (cf. Job 3); his association with Baruch in the remarkable narrative of chapter 36, "in the fourth year of Jehoiakim"; and his devastating words on Jehoiakim, 22: 13-19, bitter testimony to what was in Jeremiah's eyes the miserable rule of a miserable king.

Jehoiakim dies (or is assassinated) while Jerusalem is under siege by Babylon in 598. His eighteen-year-old son, Jehoiachin succeeds him and "reigns" for three months in the besieged city until he is forced to surrender. Jehoiachin gives himself up and the city is spared destruction for another decade; but the young king spends the next thirty-seven years in Babylonian prison until he is finally released in 561 (see Jer. 22:24-30, and 2 Kings 25:27-30). His weakling uncle, Zedekiah, presides over the last years of ancient Israelite Jerusalem. Jeremiah writes movingly to the company exiled with Jehoiachin to Babylon (ch. 29). It is still early in Zedekiah's reign when Jeremiah has his violent encounter with the prophet Hananiah (ch. 28). During the final three years of Zedekiah's reign, Jerusalem remains under Babylonian siege and Jeremiah remains the outspoken prophet of the impending tragedy as Yahweh's act of judgment. It is not strange that in a city straining every faculty toward the very faint hope of survival, such a line as Jeremiah's would be regarded not merely with distaste, but as defeatist if not downright seditious. Even when the siege is briefly lifted, while Babylonian forces frightened Egypt home again, Jeremiah declares once more Yahweh's totally negative Word - the Chaldeans will return, take this city, and burn it with fire (see 37:4-10). We cannot wonder, then, that Jeremiah is beaten and imprisoned (37:11-21). We wonder only that he survived at all - indirect tribute to the place of prophetism in ancient Israel, despite the individual unpopularity of most of the prophets. Earlier, in Jehoiakim's reign, Jeremiah's life was spared only, apparently, on the precedent of the prophet Micah, who had not been put to death by Hezekiah when he had, like Jeremiah, predicted the destruction of the city (ch. 26, the parallel and sequel to the Temple discourse of ch. 7). Zedekiah remains eager to know the Yahweh Word to Jeremiah (37:17 and 38:14), but lacks the courage to support the prophet (38:4-5), swears Jeremiah to secrecy about their conversations (38:24), and ultimately rejects the counsel of submission to Babylon which Jeremiah gives him (38:17-20).

Jerusalem continues to resist until the wall is breached. Three years was a long siege and the long-frustrated, now victorious armies of Babylon take bitter vengeance (39:1-2; 4-10 is an abbreviation of 52:4-16 and a repeat of 2 Kings 25:1-12). Jeremiah is set free under exceedingly liberal terms: in Babylon's eyes he had been, in effect, a collaborator (40: 1-6). Those not taken captive - the poorest elements of Judah - set up a community at Mizpeh, a few miles north of the ruined Jerusalem, under the administration of Gedaliah, the appointive governor of Judah. Gedaliah is assassinated by a violently nationalist group under one Ishmael, whose bloody coup at Mizpeh is, however, quickly ended (ch. 41). The survivors at Mizpeh resolve to take up voluntary exile in Egypt and hope to have an affirmative word from Jeremiah, whose counsel they seek. Their piety is prodigious: "Whether it is good or evil, we will obey the voice of Yahweh. . . ." (42:6). The Word comes ( at the end of ten days"!) - "Remain in this land" (42:10). But this is another instance where confirmation, not counsel, is sought. Jeremiah is again called a liar for representing the unpopular word as the Yahweh Word (43:2); and the whole Mizpeh community under Johanan and "all the insolent men" go into Egypt, taking Jeremiah and Baruch with them (43:4-7).

And old Jeremiah? A tradition, unconfirmed and unconfirmable, reports that they stoned him to death there. It is certain that he found himself still proclaiming essentially the same word of violence and destruction which it had been his to speak from the beginning of his career, still no doubt to his own anguish. The last words we hear from him are like the first (see 43:8-11 and 44:26-30). The judgment, even on these survivors, is only suspended. "I am watching over them for evil and not for good; all the men of Judah who are in the land of Egypt shall be consumed by the sword and by famine, until there is an end of them!" (45:27)

Jeremiah: Prophet and Covenant

Since the days of Tiglath-pileser and Isaiah, Southern Israel, the little kingdom of Judah, had lived with and under prophetic Yahwisrn's persistent proclamation of death. Jerusalem surrendered to Babylon in 597, already a doomed state. In 587 the city was destroyed after a three-year siege by the forces of Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonian king. In both debacles, and indeed again in 582, Babylon, following Assyrian practice, forcibly deported large numbers from the best elements of the surviving populations. A people whose faith attributed their very peoplehood to the gracious, purposive power of their God, Yahweh, now suffered, no doubt with bitter incredulity, the destruction of this wonderfully created people of Israel; and, according to the same Yahweh-faith, the end was effected as the beginning, by Yahweh and the power of his Word. Out of Egypt into this land: out of chaos into meaning - but now back to Egypt, as it were, consigned again to the chaotic and the meaningless.

Prophetism never deemed this to be the end. Judgment is bitter, but its function is the restitution of productive order, its aim always positive (see below, Chapter 10). We left Jeremiah in the preceding discussion breathing fire on the beaten survivors of 587. But we know the other side of this astonishing man's prophetism. Exile would be long. It is twice stated in Jeremiah as seventy years (25:11 and 29:10). It was something less than this for the first returnees (c. 538), but approximately this length of time from 587 to the reconstruction of the Temple in the years c520-515. Is "seventy" Jeremiah's round number, the maximum allotment of time to any man, to encourage the exiles to unpack their bags and prepare to live and die in the "city where I have sent you into exile" (see again his letter to the exiles of 597, ch. 29)? Or is this number editorial, deeming "exile" to end with the reconstituted Temple? For Jeremiah, in any case, exile would be long; but it would also be terminal and all Israel would participate in the restoration (see especially now ch. 31). We have already marked Jeremiah's concrete demonstration of the certainty of restoration: in the final year of the fatal siege,

I bought the field at Anathoth from Hanamel my cousin. . .and 1 gave the deed of purchase to Baruch. . . . in the presence of all the Jews who were sitting in the court of the guard. And I charged Baruch in their presence, saying. . .thus says Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel; Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land! (32:9-15)

As has been most aptly remarked, Jeremiah's action here "smacks of the same paradox as if a contemporary should forecast nuclear warfare and then proceed to buy a choice piece of real estate on Manhattan";²yet even more - as if he did this with the sirens already warning of the fatal attack!

All of the major emphases of classical prophetism are present in Jeremiah. But, as with every great prophet, there is that which is distinctive and even unique. In Jeremiah the impact of the person of the prophet is quite without parallel. Nowhere else do we encounter the depth and intimacy and force of Jeremiah's own self-disclosure; in no other Old Testament figure do we face so vividly, so realistically, this kind of personal anguish in unceasing tension with profoundly saintly faith. We are talking about hope in Jeremiah. One of the great paradoxes of the Judeo-Christian faith is for the first time made explicitly articulate in Jeremiah. It appears again in the Bible most notably in the New Testament in Jesus of Nazareth. In the "knowledge" of God's effective, meaningful involvement in the very substance of human history, Jeremiah and Jesus regard as indivisible, as faces of the same coin, God's love and wrath, God's grace and judgment. And they understand that redemption, whether historical or suprahistorical, involves inseparably both peace and anguish. Jeremiah and Jesus affirm essentially the same paradox as regards prophet and people of the old covenant or the new: he that would save his life must lose it. The finding lies always beyond, and only beyond, the losing. Peace is always beyond, and only beyond, anguish.

One will not want to miss the old prophetic emphasis, here renewed, confirmed, strengthened - the power and entity of the Word for Jeremiah (1:3,9,10,12,18,19; cf. again Isa. 55:10 f.); the remarkably, forthright declaration on the subject of slaves and human liberty (34:12 ff.); or the typically Jeremianic analysis of the character of false prophetism (23:23-32; cf. Isa. 30:9-11); or this word on the nature of biblical faith:

Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom let not the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this - that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practice kindness (hesed) justice, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, says the Lord. (9:23 f.)

But it must be finally the new covenant which stands as the last word. Again in the Judeo-Christian faith, this is the first expression of the indomitable hope which, in any ultimate analysis, is the saving source of the strength both of Judaism and Christianity:

Behold, the days are coming, says Yahweh, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers. . . .which they broke. . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (see 31:31-24)

Obad. Vv. 1-21

There is no bitterness like that between relatives. Patriarchal tradition preserves the fact of the close relationship between Israel (Jacob) and Edom (Esau): Jacob and Esau are twins (Gen. 25:24-26). But in the day of Israel's final ignominy, in the collapse and destruction of Jerusalem in 587, Edom gave brotherly help - to the enemy! This littlest of prophetic "books" eloquently records the bitterness against Edom in surviving circles of prophetism.

For the violence done to your brother Jacob, shame shall cover you,

....................... on the day that strangers carried off his [Jacob/Israel's] wealth and the foreigners entered his gates and cast lots for Jerusalem, you were like one of them. (vv. 10-11)

The name Obadiah ( Servant-of-Yahweh ) may be a later attachment to the oracles in honor to the memory of Ahab's major-domo back in the ninth century (1 Kings 18:3 ff.); or it is possibly the real name of a sixth-century prophet on whose lips originated substantially what we have in verses 2-14. Verses 15-21 obviously reflect a different situation. Esau Edom still figures, but now the fate of all of Israel's enemies is contrasted with the ultimate glory of Israel. It has been common to attribute the second section to another source; but it may be that it should be assigned only to another mood and time in the life of the same prophet.

In the final arrangement of the canon, Obadiah follows Amos perhaps for two reasons. In Amos 9:12 the day is envisaged when Edom will be possessed by Israel. More importantly, we suspect, Obadiah takes up again (as Zephaniah did earlier) Amos' theme of the Day of Yahweh (v. 15).

It is interesting to note that one in the collection of oracles against the nations in Jeremiah is probably dependent upon Obadiah: there are a number of parallels between Jeremiah 49:7-22 and Obadiah verses 1-9. One often has reason to suspect that the remarkable emotional vitality and equilibrium of Israelite Yahwism and subsequent Judaism is in part due to the verbal discharge of all widely suffered frustrations, antagonisms, aggressions. Israel suffered intensely as a people, and, judged by any commonly employed criteria, she suffered her most exquisite abuse arbitrarily and unjustly. But she never suffered mutely! And she was able to produce as a part of her phenomenal literature the skillfully articulated expression of the nature and the subjects of her wrath and her ire, her suffering and her anguish. Both Obadiah and Lamentations (as well as numbers of Psalms) are in liturgical form. See, for example, the refrain running through Obadiah verses 12-14. With some persistent regularity this people was able thus to discharge the otherwise debilitating poison of profound feelings of injury and of impotence in the face of shameless abuse and aggression.

It would be wrong, we think, to dismiss Obadiah's sentiment as unqualified human hatred. Even this little piece comes appropriately into the canon of the prophets since "it is not fanatic nationalistic hate but rather the notion of an appropriately compensating divine justice that shapes the proclamation of Obadiah."³

(Lam. 1-5)

The study of meter in Hebrew poetry had its beginnings in these five poems. The first four are acrostic (like Nahum 1, Ps. 119, Prov. 31); that is, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet are employed in succession, one at the beginning of each verse. The English versification in chapter 3 accords three verses to each letter. The fifth poem has twenty-two lines but does not follow the acrostic scheme.

The prevailing demands of this exacting form impose some restrictions on the free delivery of emotion. Nevertheless, taken together these dirges illuminate with brightness and a sense of reality the anguished reactions to 587 and its aftermath among Judah's survivors. All five poems are to be dated in the sixth century. Some expert readers have claimed to find internal evidence that chapters 2 and 4 stand closest to 587 (on the strength, chiefly, of an "eyewitness" quality allegedly not present in the others); that chapters 1 and 5 are a little later; and that chapter 3 is the latest of the five. Other equally expert readers admit of some unevenness from poem to poem, but cite comparable inconsistencies within the individual laments and a certain possibly calculated coordination in the present arrangement of the five poems. These readers conclude that while the issue of unity may remain in doubt, there is insufficient evidence to justify the firm assertion of a plurality of sources. In any case, the five poems represent the same epoch, the same experience, the same point of view.

Interpreting a tragedy

The book of Lamentations was written, not simply to memorialize the tragic destruction of Jerusalem, but to interpret the meaning of God's rigorous treatment of his people, to the end that they would learn the lessons of the past and retain their faith in him in the face of overwhelming disaster. There is deep sorrow over the past and some complaint, but there is also radiant hope for the future, particularly in ch. 3.⁴

This is an important observation. The tone of the dirge is seldom relieved; but here and there explicitly, and much more pervasively implicitly, Lamentations affirms Yahweh's continuing purpose in history and his reign over the world of nations. This is briefly illustrated in the fourth poem when Lamentations picks up the theme of Obadiah (the first line is surely ironic):

Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom,
................... but to you also the cup shall pass; you shall become drunk and strip yourself bare.
The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter of Zion, is accomplished, he will keep you in exile no longer;
But your iniquity, O daughter of Edom, he will punish, he will uncover your sins. (4:21-22)

There is no substance whatsoever to the tradition attributing Lamentations to Jeremiah; but in such lines as this we understand why the identification was made and we strongly suspect dependence, conscious or unconscious, on Jeremiah's language:

My eyes are spent with weeping; my soul is in tumult; my heart is poured out in grief because of the destruction of the daughter of my people. (2:11)⁵

And in the mood of Jeremiah's confessions, but with the "I" changed to "we":

You have wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us, slaying without pity; you have wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through.

You have made us offscouring and refuse among the peoples.

All our enemies rail against us; panic and pitfalls have come upon us, devastation and destruction; (3:43-47)⁶

To bring Jeremiah to mind is to bring hope to mind. In the passage - it stands solidly in the very center of Lamentations - where the note of hope is sounded most powerfully even Isaiah is recalled, if not to the author, then certainly to the reader:

"Yahweh is my portion," says my soul,

"therefore I will hope in him."

Yahweh is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of Yahweh. (3:24-26)⁷

And at this climax, Lamentations embraces words that have continued to bring incalculable solace to persons in all branches of biblical faith in all time:

Yahweh will not cast off for ever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love (hesed); for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men. (3:31-33)

The mood of the dirge returns. This is a bitter existence and the lament proudly rejects any stance of unrealistic piety. The concluding lines constitute as vigorous a protest against Yahweh's conduct of history as any in the Old Testament - but the power is the power of faith:

But you, O Yahweh, reign for ever; your throne endures to all generations.

Why do you forget us for ever, why do you so long forsake us?

Restore us to yourself, O Yahweh, that we may be restored!

Renew our days as of old!

Or have you utterly rejected us?

Are you exceedingly angry with us? (5:19-22)

Lamentations - and the Old Testament people's epoch of supreme despair - leave us here.

What Manner of Man?

Like Jeremiah, Ezekiel⁸ is of a priestly family; but more, is himself a priest (1:3), probably attached to the Jerusalem Temple staff before the city's fall. He is among those deported in 597 (1:1; 33:21; 40:1), and he then lives at Tel-abib on the canal Chebar (3:15 and 1:1), which leaves the Euphrates north of Babylon and returns again near the mouth of the river. He occupies his own house (3:24; 8:1) with his wife who dies very suddenly in the course of his exile (24:15-18). Even apart from his prophetic role, he appears to have been a person of uncommon stature among the exiles (8:1; 14:1). "The thirtieth year" of 1:1 is a standing puzzle - the thirtieth year of what or whom? But the vision which inaugurated his career as a prophet is unambiguously dated in "the fifth year of exile of King Jehoiachin," hence, in 593-592. Although he addresses himself repeatedly to Judah and Jerusalem,⁹ his actual residence is exclusively Babylon where he remains the active prophet-priest for at least twenty years. His latest dated oracle ( the twenty-seventh year," in 29:17) is from the year 571 or 570.

Interpreters of Ezekiel have assessed him very differently. At least one book which purports to deal with the most significant aspects of the Old Testament omits altogether any discussion of Ezekiel except brief mention in a footnote or two.¹⁰ Two summary statements by knowledgeable commentators illustrate the two extremes in the evaluation of Ezekiel:

Ezekiel is the first fanatic in the Bible. He is completely dominated by an uncompromising zeal for Jehovah's [Yahweh's] cause and the vindication of his name. He is filled with holy fury against Jerusalem's profanation of Jehovah's earthly abode and for its other insults on the deity. Although he is not devoid of human feelings - twice he cries out in anguish at the thought of the coming destruction, interceding for his people (9:1; 11-13) - he never yielded to them: he was a stern zealot with a forehead hard as a diamond (3:9). . . . Like most fanatics, Ezekiel was dogmatic. Unflinching zeal and doctrinal assurance, often inseparable, tend to produce what Edmund Burke called "a black and savage atrocity of mind," of which there are traces in our prophet, and utter intolerance, deaf to the voice of wisdom and common sense."

It is hard to believe that the following paragraph addresses the same subject:

He is a man of rich and versatile mind, thoroughly alive to the problems and perplexities of the people he addresses, and well qualified, by discipline alike of head and heart, to bring to bear upon their situation words full of insight and consolation, of warning and of hope. . . . Further, he is sensitive to every current of life about him, he knows its every whisper. So far are his words from being abstract or theological discussions that they are frequently a direct reply to popular murmurs or challenges which he quotes. . . . No prophet ever took himself or his call more seriously. From the beginning to the end he devoted to his ministry all his powers of mind, heart and imagination.¹²

But it is significant that these same two commentators agree precisely in one particular. Writes the first: "Ezekiel wrote a book destined to exercise an incalculable influence on the history of his people and indirectly on Western nations." The second: "No influence was more potent than his in the shaping of that Judaism which has lived on unshaken through the centuries."¹³

The Book

We would not now say so confidently that Ezekiel wrote the book, although most of its content is probably authentic - the accurate representation of at least the prophet's verbal record and report.

In gravest doubt are:

25-32 This is the block of oracles against foreign nations, the like of which we have already encountered in Isaiah (13-23) and Jeremiah (46-51). As also there, a few oracles originating with the prophet have provided the nucleus for the editorially expanded section.

40-48 The section deals in elaborate detail with all that has to do with Judah in the ideal age to come, the Messianic age; with its architecture, ritual, religious personnel, feasts and festivals, and finally even the physical features and properties of the land itself. There can be no doubt that this is, in its present form, the work of editors subsequent to the time of Ezekiel; but it is very possible that this is an editorial expansion and elaboration of an Ezekielian original, produced in the same priestly tradition responsible for the final form of the Tetrateuch.¹⁴

For the rest, we shall assume that we have to do with material substantially from the thoughts and visions and experiences of the prophet Ezekiel. This does not exclude the minor editorial work of later scribes. It is probable, for example, that the now enigmatic "Gog" of chapters 38-39 was originally Babylon, or some recognizable representation of that power, and that at a good many points the text of Ezekiel has suffered both accidental and well-intentioned alteration. Over-all, the Hebrew text comes down to us in as poor condition as Samuel and Psalms. We are nevertheless confident that it is by and large the prophet himself who is returned to us in these sections:

1-24 This deals with or is related to the imminent destruction of Jerusalem. It comes out of the years between Ezekiel's call in 593 or 592, and the fateful year 587. The prophetic message, whether by word or vision or symbolic action, is of violence and destruction, doom, and Jerusalem's sure end.

33-35 This is not properly a major division in and of itself; but we list it so because it marks rather clearly a historical transition, and bears affinity both with what precedes and what follows. In chapter 33, the prophet receives news of Jerusalem's fall. But the tone of the chapter continues harsh. In chapter 34 the shepherds of Israel receive a brilliant and finally moving indictment. Chapter 35, which purposes to make the turn to gentleness and hope, is an extended oracle against Edom (so also, as we have seen, Obad. and Lam. 4:21-22).

Prophet of Hope (36-39)

In chapter 36 hope is made articulate and restoration is assured:

But you, O mountains of Israel, shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people Israel; for they will soon come home. For behold, I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown; and I will multiply men upon you, the whole house of Israel, all of it; the cities shall be inhabited and the waste places rebuilt. . . . then you will know that I am Yahweh (see 36:8-16). Chapter 37 follows with the vision of the nation's resurrection and the restoration of life and vitality to Israel's vast valley of bones, long still and dry:

Yahweh said to me, 'Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the Word of Yahweh. . .Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am Yahweh!" (37:4-6)

And the prophet's sure hope of Israel's re-creation, of her restoration again to life and meaning, is climaxed in the stirring description of the overthrow of Gog - Babylon no doubt for Ezekiel, but certainly in subsequent centuries again and again the oppressor, the most conspicuous contemporary source of injustice and brutality and all human anguish, whose overthrow must precede the reign of God in history, the establishment of his just rule among men.

Ezekiel's Prophetism

There exists obviously a vast disparity between our ways and those of the ancient East, our thoughts and their thoughts, our disposition and psyche and theirs. Standards of judgment and norms of behavior are conspicuously and often radically removed from one another. If any biblical character were placed unchanged in our culture, he would certainly appear to be an odd ball, a ready candidate for the psychiatrist's couch, or perhaps, if the transported were a Hosea or a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel, the institutional strait-jacket. In an environment which, relatively speaking, rigorously inhibits virtually all the phenomena attendant upon the exercise of the prophetic role, not only an Ezekiel, but probably even an Amos or an Isaiah, would appear to be mad. Certainly by our psychological standards Ezekiel's frequent symbolic actions, his strange visions, his trances, and his clairvoyance all consign him to one of our categories of emotional illness. Obviously, this is an illegitimate judgment. In an age which had its own madmen, the prophets were listened to if often detested, were respected if deplored, and were immortalized in subsequent generations. This judgment no doubt is also subjective, but it is on every count a more dependable judgment than that which exercises exclusively alien criteria.

The opening vision of Ezekiel

The opening vision of Ezekiel, his call-vision, is a weird report (ch. I), if only superficially regarded. But one clue is the recognition that the prophet attempts to describe what he himself knows to be indescribable. In the constant reiteration of such phrases as "the likeness of," "the appearance of," "as it were," and the variety of similes introduced by "like," the prophet is insisting that he knows full well that this is a vision only, that this kind of ultimate reality cannot be apprehended in substance, but only - and only in part - in meaning. The vision of the creatures with their wheels (1: 15-21) verges on the grotesque. Yet what is conveyed to the prophet, and what he would in turn convey, is clear - the mobility and universality of the spirit of Yahweh. The four creatures move in every direction propelled by seeing wheels. This is, of course, not substance and concrete form: this is only how it seemed, this is what it was "like," this was the "appearance" of the reality. And it is a reality about Yahweh of particular pertinence at that time: the Temple of Yahweh lies in ruins and we are removed, we exiles, from Yahweh's land; but not from Yahweh!

Isaiah and Jeremiah, and now Ezekiel, all record their most revealing single "essays" in their call-accounts. Ezekiel's vision of Yahweh is the most sensitive and sophisticated of the three, and it is the more striking and moving for its humility. He does not claim to have laid eyes on Yahweh or even Yahweh's throne. The description of the vision is repeatedly punctuated with qualifying clauses (vv. 26-28a) and is climaxed with the vision of deity that is nevertheless four times removed: Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of Yahweh.

He is overcome by what he sees. (It is utterly gratuitous to deduce from the words "I fell upon my face" and the prophet's occasional trances that Ezekiel was a cataleptic.) The call moves now to the prophet's charge, and the Word which first comes to him is emphatic and explicit - "Son of man, stand upon your feet and I will speak with you!" (2:1). And in what follows we hear in eloquent refrain the characteristic theme of classical prophetism: you shall speak to this people the Word of Yahweh "whether they hear or refuse to hear!" (see 2:5,7; 3:11,27).

We have seen the use of symbol in name and act in previous prophets; but more than any of these, Ezekiel is given to the dramatic portrayal of the Word's message. Before the actual destruction of Jerusalem he shuts himself in to symbolize the siege (3:24-27) and plays in miniature scale the game of siege, as would a child (4:1-3,7), rationing out to himself publicly his own food and water supply (4:9-17).

Further graphic symbolisms are performed. Ezekiel cuts off his hair and divides it into equal thirds; one part he burns, another he assaults with a sword, and the third he scatters to the winds.

A third part of you [in Jerusalem] shall die of pestilence and be consumed with famine in the midst of you; a third part shall fall by the sword round about you; and a third part I will scatter to all the winds. (5:12)

Later (ch. 12) he carries his belongings out of his house through a hole in the wall; and in the same chapter, driving home the same point, he eats and drinks publicly, quaking all the while. Like the prophetic understanding of the Word, the symbolic act is also deemed to be efficacious, involving the instrument of the message (the prophet) as a participant in the execution of the dramatized event. Ezekiel's seeming callousness is psychologically understandable. It is no less a reaction to anguish than Jeremiah's tears and confessions - the anguish of participating in the "execution" of Israel-Judah (see further below, ch. 10).

Another quality of Ezekiel's prophetism is illustrated in chapter 8. Here the prophet inveighs against pagan forms of worship practiced in Jerusalem - another characteristic expression of classical prophetism. But Ezekiel gives to his condemnation a new dimension of psychological depth which renders his prophecy at once more primitive and more modern than comparable words from his predecessors. To begin with, he sees the abominable forms of worship in a vision, 8: 3b; and in verse 7, still in vision, he is brought to the door of the Temple.

Ezekiel often speaks from a position midway between fact and allegory, between actual visual perception and vision-imagination. He is psychologically able to move back and forth between the two easily and sometimes without distinction. It is apparent that the prophet's own mind makes a facile transition from sensory perception to psychic perception, that is, from what is seen and heard with eye and ear to what is, no less realistically for him, internally perceived and psychically apprehended. So, too, in his observation of others, he moves with equal facility from acute observation of the outward man to an even more acute and penetrating observation of the hidden realms of thought and imagination.

In verse 7a Ezekiel and Yahweh stand at the door of the outer court of the Temple. The door was always open, the outer court of the Temple always accessible to all. If Ezekiel goes through the open door into the court he will see what the patrons of the court expect him and all others to see - their pretensions, the facade of cleanness and decency, the guise of conformity and respectability. Ezekiel chooses another way, to enter not only the court of the Temple but its very occupants:

When I looked, behold, there was a hole in the wall. Then Yahweh said to me, "Son of man, dig in the wall;" and when I dug in the wall, lo, there was a door. And he said to me, "Go in, and see the vile abomination that they are committing here." So I went in and saw; and there, portrayed upon the wall round about, were all kinds of creeping things, and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel. (8:7-10)

And who are the occupants of the Temple court? None other than the seventy elders of Israel, in the outward act of utmost piety: "each had a censer in his hand, and the smoke of the cloud of incense went up" (v. 11). The prophet, we repeat, moves easily back and forth between the two realms of perception. But Yahweh now asks,

"Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, every man in his chambers of imagery (RSV, room of pictures)? For [here] they say, 'Yahweh does not see us; Yahweh has forsaken the land.'" (8:12)

This kind of sensitivity and insight is not matched anywhere else in prophetism.

The characteristic themes of classical prophetism are all here, but, as with every prophet in this succession, they are qualified by the particular strength and temper of the person of the prophet. Chapter 16 reminds us of Hosea, but the language is even stronger (probably offensive to the prudish) and the allegory has its own originality. Chapter 22 takes up the now familiar theological ethic. But this is the prophet Ezekiel who is more prophet-priest than Jeremiah. The old cultus of the Temple and the whole external institution of Yahwism which earlier prophets condemned for its enthusiastic but hollow support is now for the exiles beyond reach, and in Jerusalem itself about to be extinguished. In the full reconstitution of Yahwism, Ezekiel wants the formal ritual performance inseparably linked to the covenant-righteousness which appears with such signal force in earlier prophets (who, we think, would have concurred now, in Ezekiel's time). See how Ezekiel brings ritual and righteousness together especially in 22:6-12.

Ezekiel's Faith

All of this discussion is simply to cite some of the qualities of Ezekiel's prophetism in the pre-587 epoch of his career. We have already noted that the prophet's dominant note of doom changes dramatically to one of hope and resurrection with word of the disaster. However, the strongest and most persistent single criticism of Ezekiel from modern commentators is precisely here in the charge that the proclamation of redemption betrays no more of human compassion and gentleness than his treatment of the theme of destruction.

Thus says Yahweh God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act [in redemption], but for the sake of my holy name. . .I will vindicate the holiness of my great name. . . which you have profaned. . . . that the nations may know that I am Yahweh. (see 36:22 ff.)

Now certainly the quality of compassion does not dominate the personality of Ezekiel as it does Jeremiah. But it would be instructive to ask why Ezekiel (with the second Isaiah; cf. Isa. 48:1-11) stresses the point of Yahweh's acting in his own behalf. He does so because he fears with good reason that with the promise of restoration, the narrow, short-sighted, vicious pride of covenant Israel will return in full measure. He does so because he knows all too well the popular tendency to make Yahweh the junior party to the covenant, dependent for his glory and perhaps even his very being upon Israel. Ezekiel knows that Israel was created for Yahweh's purposes, and is now brought under sentence of death to make possible the reconstitution and re-creation of a new Israel made fit by the very judgment for Yahweh's original purpose - to bless the families of the earth and that the nations may know Yahweh.

And the alleged hard-heartedness of the word even of resurrection is denied by what Ezekiel says:

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. . . I will put my spirit within you. . . . You shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (see 36:25 ff.)

Although Ezekiel stresses Yahweh's self-sufficiency, he is not a prototype of the extreme Barthian, the proponent of a theology in which man's role in redemption is reduced to a cipher. Man has a position of critical significance in the fulfillment of Yahweh's historical purpose. Nowhere is this brought out more emphatically than in the vision of the valley of dry bones (ch. 37). Yahweh's purposes require a redeemed community which knows itself to be constituted by the resurrecting spirit of God. Here is Yahweh's Word to an Israel dead and buried:

Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you home into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am Yahweh when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land; then you shall know that I, Yahweh, have spoken, and I have done it! (37:11-14)

Judah and Israel, South and North, are reunited in this vision of resurrection (as also in Jer. 31):

My servant David shall be king over them;, and they shall have all one shepherd. . . . I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant. . . then the nations will know that I Yahweh sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary is in the midst of them for evermore. (see 37:24 ff.)

We encounter in Ezekiel two very important items of prophetism already met in Jeremiah. The new covenant (Jer. 31:31-34), while not thus specifically indicated, is a repeated explicit and implicit theme in Ezekiel. It is envisaged in what we have just quoted from chapter 37; and, in terms especially reminiscent of Jeremiah, the substance of the new covenant is stated in 11:19-20. And we find in Ezekiel, as in Jeremiah, what has been called perhaps inadvisedly a "doctrine of individualism" The two prophets quote, in order to refute it, the same proverb: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge" (Jer. 31:29; Ezek. 18:2). In these critical years before Jerusalem's final destruction, the proverb is much in vogue: we are not responsible for this debacle, people are saving, but the generations that preceded us. We are suffering for the sins and stupidities of those who went before us. And the inference in all of this, of course, is that we are innocent and God is unjust! Now it is important to insist that neither Jeremiah nor Ezekiel means in refuting the proverb to propound a "doctrine of individualism" which would deny communal responsibility and the inescapable corporateness of human existence. Nothing that either prophet says can be legitimately interpreted as advocating religious individualism. These two prophets are the most community-conscious, Israel-conscious, corporate-conscious of the prophets, and so it is impossible that either would deny the covenant solidarity of Israel. But they are faced with a rampant, diabolical conceit, a self-righteousness which absolutely blocks any reconciliation with Yahweh; and both prophets are sufficient realists to know that no generation may with impunity declare itself guiltless. The popular proverb - which is in certain lights profoundly true - is in this crisis and in its present interpretation refuted. "Each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge" (Jer. 31:30). "Behold, all souls are mine [says Yahweh]; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine [soul here in the sense of entity or being - the total person]: the soul that sins shall die" (Ezek. 18:4).

There can be no mistake about the prophetic intent: the popular proverb is denied in its pointed use as a declaration of the innocence and the consequent unjust suffering of the prophets' own generation (see also Ezek. 12:6 and 14: 12-23).

Finally, do not overlook in Ezekiel the superb description of the city of Tyre as a majestic ship (ch. 27, especially vv. 1-11,26-32); or what is surely one of the Old Testament's most sensitive creations, the oracle against the shepherds in chapter 34; or in chapter 47, the moving description of the stream flowing from the Temple, increasing in breadth and volume and majesty as it flows, bringing life, healing, and fruitfulness all along its redemptive course.

And do observe in Ezekiel that (1) Yahweh's ways, if sometimes unfathomable, are deemed to be just and right; (2) history, even in its anguish, is interpreted in terms of Yahweh's concerned, purposeful impingement upon it; (3) Yahweh's ultimate purpose is confidently assumed to be redemptive - to recreate by resurrection a people who will be his people and (certainly implicitly) will yet fulfill themselves as his people; and (4) the bold faith that despite any appearances to the contrary, the Word of Yahweh is accomplishing itself and cannot in any future be thwarted.

1. Cf. Pss. 89, 137.

2. N. H. Gottwald, A Light to the Nations, New York, 1959, p. 370.

3. A. Weiser, Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 2nd ed., Gottingen, 1949, p. 186.

4. T. J. Meek, "Lamentations Introduction," The Interpreter's Bible. Nashville, 1956, vol. VI, pp. 5 f.

5. Cf. 3:48-49 and Jer. 8:18 ff.

6. Cf Jer. 20:7 ff.

7. Cf. Isa. 8:17; 30:15.

8. See especially Ezek. 1-4, 8-9, 16, 18, 22, 27, 33-39, 47.

9. A fact which has led a few interpreters of Ezekiel to conclude that the Babylonian setting is a later fiction, and that Ezekiel in fact fulfilled his career in Jerusalem.

10. See W. A. L. Elmsie, How Came Our Faith, New York, 1949, pp. 37, 191 n., and passing reference to Ezekiel on p. 99.

11. R. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament, New York, 1958, p. 543.

12. J. E. McFayden, "Ezekiel," Peake's Commentary on the Bible, London 1937, pp. 501, 503.

13. Pfeiffer, op. cit., p. 565; McFayden, op. cit., p. 503. Perhaps the best study of Ezekiel is W. Zimmerli, Erkenntnis Gottes nach dem Buche Ezekiel, Zurich, 1954.

14. Cf., for example, Weiser, op. cit., p. 170.

There are elements in classical prophetism which are distinctly new. There is the new that is external: a new situation which emerges out of pragmatic history, out of the actual course of real events and which could not have been anticipated. It is a new epoch, which develops out of the wide range of possibilities determined by the past. And in eighth-century Israel it was a new epoch charged with tragedy.

There are, of course also the new internal elements, but the internal is inseparable from the external. The classical prophets now see Israel's historical existence, first brought into being out of Egypt, turning back again into that same essential abyss, chaos, and unendurable meaninglessness. For the prophets from Moses to Elijah and Elisha, Egypt lay in the past, however wide of Yahweh's mark Israel's performance might be. But now, Egypt, or what Egypt represented, lay in the future as well. Out of the Egyptian existence of formlessness and void Yahweh had created for Israel a life relatively formed and ordered; certainly in the popular mind this definition of existence continued to be valid and to provide meaning enough for historical consciousness, however strong the opposing judgment from core Yahwism, from prophetic Yahwism.

Here, of course, in Israel's core of Yahweh loyalists, the meaning of the present was not so superficially determined. The present was appraised and its meaning apprehended in terms of Yahweh's participation in Israel's past; and his ultimate purpose in the future. But until the eighth century the future could be seen in continuum with the present, holding in prospect essentially more of the same, or even, in the prophetic view, the restoration of Yahweh's lost order. Now prophetism envisages discontinuity between the present and the future, the catastrophic imposition from without of disorder and chaos, the abrupt and violent termination of Israel past and present.

The new aspects of external history and the related internal prophetic mind were initially produced in the middle of the eighth century simply by the aggressive ambition of Assyria backed, for the first time in several centuries, with the leadership and power to implement ambition. Tiglath-pileser III assumed the throne of Assyria in 745 B.C., "the first of an uninterrupted series of great soldiers on the throne of Assyria, who quickly brought the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the zenith of its power and created an empire in the ancient Orient which for the first time united almost the whole of the ancient Orient under Assyrian rule."¹Indeed, within a single decade of the accession of Tiglath-pileser all of the oriental world that he wanted was clearly either in fact or potentially his. By 721, when the Northern kingdom of Israel fell to Assyria, any hopes of political existence independent of Assyria entertained by smaller neighboring states were simply fatuous. From Tiglath-pileser's days (745-727), through the successive reigns of Shalmaneser V (727-722), Sargon II (to 705), Sennacherib (to 681), and Essarhaddon (to 669), Assyria's position of world domination was beyond serious challenge.

The succeeding reign of Asshurbanipal (669-632), unlike his predecessors a patron of the arts rather than of war, was the beginning of the undoing of Assyrian world rule. Assyria slowly succumbed to the vicious powers of the Chaldeans of Babylon, the Medes of the mountains of Iran, and the bands of Umman-manda (apparently Scythians) from the steppes of Russia; and the long death-agony of Assyria was finally ended in decisive battles of 612 and 610 B.C. But unhappily, Assyria's collapse provided only a brief respite for the barely surviving Israelite kingdom of Judah. For now Assyria's position in the world was appropriated by Neo-Babylonian power. The political center of the ancient Middle East was moved from Nineveh to Babylon. The sentence of political death was imposed on Judah in the first quarter of the sixth century. The cycle was complete. Israel became once more void and without form. She was once more swallowed up in the chaos of captivity. From uncreation to creation, she was now relegated again to the uncreated. The symbolic word of the eighth-century prophet Hosea (11:5) was fulfilled: "They shall return to the land of Egypt!"

Classical prophetism rises, then, first in the consciousness that Israel now stands between Egypts, that what she was she will be again. Heretofore in Israelite Yahwism the meaning of the present was taken primarily from the understanding and interpretation of the past (see Deut. 6:20 ff.; cf. 26:5-9). So it is in the old cultic credos:

We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt; and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand . . . that he might bring us in and give us the land which he swore to give to our fathers.

This confession of faith addresses the future, if at all, only implicitly, for the future is of a piece with the present. "Now" embraces tomorrow and tomorrow.² The appropriate response to the confessional knowledge of meaning in history is, of course, faithful participation in the Yahweh cultus. Such is the sense of Deuteronomy 6:24 (cf. 26:10, the similar conclusion of a variant of the same basic cultic confession):

And Yahweh commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear Yahweh our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as at this day.

Yahwism before the eighth century understood the past and the present chiefly in terms of Yahweh's positive action on behalf of Israel. If the future is addressed, it is in the confident expectation that it will be in predictable conformity with the past. One sees this in the preclassical prophets. Elijah, for example, believes this, even though he knows full well that Israel's unfaith has already reduced to disorder the order which Yahweh purposed in Israel. But the classical prophets, from Amos on, are forced to reinterpret the meaning of the present not only in terms of a heightened sense of Israel's failure to maintain Yahweh's true order in the present, but also in overwhelming awareness of an immediate future charged with tragedy. This imminent tragedy is deemed to be no less Yahweh's doing than the great formative event of redemption from Egypt, or political self-fulfillment under the David-Zion covenant. For the classical prophet the old two-member scheme, "out of Egypt, into this land," has become a three-member scheme - "out of Egypt, into this land, back to Egypt again."

Yahweh who redeemed the nation for his own purposes now finds those purposes thwarted by the unfaith and unrighteousness of Israel. Therefore, he will now commit the nation to its preredeerned status of chaos for the same essential purposes. Why? What lies beyond the second Egypt? Is there, in other words, a fourth member to be added to the three-member scheme. Above all, how does all this qualify the nature of existence under Yahweh in the present time?

These questions and their answers are the essence of classical prophetism. They are the context of Israelite prophetism in the eighth to the sixth centuries.3

The literary-critical problems are few and small. The book is substantially a unit. Some of the woes pronounced upon small neighboring states in chapters 1-2 have commonly been regarded as secondary, particularly the condemnation of Judah, 2:4-5. The superbly articulated doxologies of 4:13, 5:8-10, and 9:5-6 may be later editorial insertions. The ending of Amos, from 9: 8b, has often been regarded as an appendix on the grounds that it represents too radical a change of mood to be a part of the original unit. Now these may be good guesses, but it is important to recognize that this remains a guessing game. We do not even know how the writing first came into existence - whether by the prophet's own hand (unlikely) or at his dictation (possible); or, with greater possibility, from a circle of prophets-disciples among whom the words of Amos were first "recorded" in memory.

The contents of Amos may be surveyed in this fashion:

1-2 A series of oracular indictments (of Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab, Judah, and Israel) climaxed in the final oracle against Israel.

3-6 The condition of Israel's present unsatisfying, rebellious existence.

7 The three visions of locust, fire, and plumbline.

8-9 The vision of summer fruit; the pronouncement of Israel's final and irremediable doom; and (whether secondary or not) the proclamation of hope in Israel's future beyond the catastrophe of historical judgment.

One may interpret the astonishing phenomenon of classical Israelite prophetism in two ways. It emerges among the ancient Israelites, one may insist, as a kind of mechanical achievement wrought by the accidents of history. It is, as such, a product of Interaction between history and human genius. Now, it is a perennial problem in the life of faith that this remains a possible and credible explanation.

The prophets themselves would, of course, resoundingly repudiate this interpretation of prophetism. They would insist, as the Bible insists, as the life of faith continues to insist, that this epoch in Israelite history witnessed an intense series of divine-human encounters, initiated by God himself and effected by his Word. In this view the phrase, the Word of Yahweh, represents no courteous condescension to religion or piety, no innocent lie thoroughly conventionalized to mean in fact the word of man. It means the Word of God, initiated by God, irresistibly breaking into the life and work of men from Moses' time on and with peculiar, sustained potency in the classical prophets. In all of these we cannot fail to note - whatever else is the work of the Word - the sharp, specific references to the throbbing life of contemporary human history.

If King Ahab, more than a century earlier, had characterized Elijah in the phrase, "You troubler of Israel" (1 Kings 18:17), how much more fervently might Jeroboam II have thrown that epithet at Amos. Amos not only condemned the prostitution of Yahwism in Israel and unethical behavior in the king. He heartily damned the whole fabric of society; he repudiated with violence and contempt all of Israel's life and thought and practice, including even its worship of Yahweh (e.g., 5:21-23).

Although a native of the Southern kingdom from the little village of Tekoa, about seven miles southeast of Bethlehem, his one recorded public appearance was at Bethel, the official Southern sanctuary of the Northern kingdom. In appreciation of his efforts here, the local authorities cordially expelled him, with the firm invitation for the future to do his preaching at home - or anywhere but Bethel. "It is," said Amaziah, the presiding priest of Bethel, "the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom" (7:13). Amos' only trouble - it is always the prophets' trouble - was his insistence that sanctuary, temple, and kingdom all are Yahweh's!

It would appear from this same exchange between Amaziah and Amos that the term prophet still commonly denoted a certain official status, or some professional affiliation with organized prophetism. We observe that thus far in Old Testament history, professional prophetism has been both of Yahweh and Baal. The professional prophetism of Yahweh appears neutral in quality as associated with Saul, "good" as associated with Obadiah (1 Kings 18:13; cf. 19:14) and Elisha, and on the whole "had" as associated with Ahab's court as we see the court prophets contrasted with one of their number, Micaiah (2 Kings 22).

Amos denies unequivocally any professional status (7:14): "I am not a prophet, and I am not a son of a prophet" (that is, I belong to no guild, no band, no association of prophets). It is, of course, possible to translate "was" rather than "am." The verb "to be" is commonly supplied in translation since it does not appear in Hebrew. Grammatically the imperfect may even be "equally possible" as some have insisted.⁴But in context it does not appear to be natural. Amos is denying, not necessarily in heat and certainly not necessarily in repudiation of the institution of prophetism, that he does not himself represent what Amaziah has just imputed to him. He has had no contact with the professional, associated prophets: "Yahweh took me from following the flock, and Yahweh said to me, 'Go, prophesy to my people Israel!'" (7:15). His action here at Bethel is inspired by this personal confrontation with Yahweh, not by any group apprehension. Not that institutional prophetism may not and does not have this valid, authentic apprehension; nor that Amos is unwilling to be cast in a prophetic role (3:3-8 indicates the contrary!), but simply and exclusively that neither the group phenomenon nor any other official connection happens to be his origin, as charged by Amaziah. Something new comes into the term prophet with Amos. Even Elijah is recognized from the beginning as fulfilling the role of prophet, man of God. Amos is freshly created and validated a prophet only and directly by the Word.

He speaks in passionate and apparently unrelieved condemnation. He excoriates the social structure and practice of the entire nation, in which increasingly during the reign of Jeroboam II wealth was extorted from the poor, in which deceit and dishonesty were the rule; in which great masses of the poor, the dispossessed, the powerless were crushed under the weight of an easy discrimination, a rank and complacent injustice.

He damns the religious structure in which the fervent hymns of praise and the devout symbols of dedication were matched by a fervent immorality and a devout pursuit of vanity; in which Yahwism was enthusiastically endorsed at the sanctuaries but - as Amos saw the Yahweh faith - blatantly violated in business, domestic, and personal relationships. Yahweh was acknowledged with the lips, but denied in the total performance of Israel's life.

We first learn from Amos of the popularly expected Day of Yahweh. Nothing more brilliantly illustrates the polar disparity between prophetic and popular expectations for the future. Amos declares Israel's certain doom. The jig is up. Time and Yahweh's patience have run out. What Israel calls and anticipates as the Day of Yahweh is imminent, but let no one be so foolish as to long for the Day's coming. It will be darkness and not light. It will be gloom, with no brightness at all (5:18-20).

Israel has brought upon herself the sentence of death which Amos proclaims with bitter fury and passion. He is at pains to let Israel know the magnitude of her rejection of role as Yahweh's people. We read, then, with wonder and appreciation. Here is an incomparably intimate, partisan interpretation of the life of a little Near Eastern state in the second quarter of the eighth century, the words of Amos, who was among the shepherds of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel. . . (1:1)

The Positive in Amos

It would be woefully wrong to interpret Amos as an exponent of moral law. Israel's doom is for Amos no mechanical, impersonal, and automatically invoked judgment. For Amos, as for all prophetism, justice and righteousness (5:24) are not abstractions or in any sense absolutes. They have no independent meaning. These are terms which have meaning only in specific, familiar relationships, and the particular meaning is determined by the particular relationship. When Amos cries, "Let justice roll along [RSV, roll down] like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream!" (5:24), he means specifically justice and righteousness in the Yahweh-Israel relationship, the justice and righteousness in human relationships which honor Yahweh, by which the life of Yahweh's people is fulfilled, and in adherence to which Yahweh's purposes in Israel may be consummated. Morality and ethics subsist only in theology. Justice and righteousness in prophetism are derivatives of faith. Israel's violation is not of principles but of persons, and ultimately the person of Yahweh. The judgment is not a result of the automatic action of some mechanism built into the moral structure of things, but comes directly and personally from Yahweh himself, whose life and power are thus apprehended primarily in history.

Now, if this is true, it is also wrong to read Amos as a prophet of unqualified, unrelieved negation. Contingency and hope are here. The fierce indictment and the proclamation of cataclysmic judgment are predicated on Israel's persistent repudiation of Yahweh, and are implicitly contingent upon her refusal to turn back again. But Amos knows Yahweh's love and patience (see 4:6-11, with the essentially tender refrain, "Yet you did not return to me"; but especially 7:2,5); and when he speaks the apparently immutable sentence of death upon Israel (4:12; 7:9; 9: l-8a) it is surely motivated (as the articulation of despair is of necessity always motivated) by hope, indomitable hope, that the pronouncement of judgment will effect decisive change in the conditions which invoked the judgment.

The quality of contingency in prophetism is more marked in other prophets, but it is implicit in Amos; and no prophet, not even Amos, can be interpreted as holding Yahweh's judgment upon Israel as the last word. The ending of the book of Amos may be secondary (although this proposition is by no means unassailable), but it remains in a profound sense authentic. The man Amos, the prophet Amos, could not have spoken with such passion on behalf of Yahweh except in the faith that the very historical judgment which he proclaimed was itself ultimately positive and redemptive in divine purpose. If Amos had deemed Israel's sentence of execution to be the end, he would never have spoken at all!

Hosea: The Time and the Book

Hosea's role of prophet is played out some ten to twenty-five years after Amos. From a number of allusions in the text of Hosea, it appears rather certain that the prophet's career began after the reign of Jeroboam 11(786-746) and probably after 740 (despite the reference to Jeroboam in 1:1). Since there is no mention of the fall of Damascus to Assyria in 732, it is possible that his active career ended prior to that date. It is certain that it did not extend beyond the fall of Samaria in 721.

The last generation of the Northern kingdom, to which Hosea belonged, was a period of hectic, brutal confusion. Jeroboam II's reign may have been superficially brilliant but it apparently lacked any fundamental, enduring strength. His son, Zechariah, after a very brief reign (746-745), was assassinated by Shallum, who was himself rather promptly dispatched by Menahem. Menahem (745-738) bought an uneasy security from Assyria in the last year of his reign with the payment of a handsome tribute to Tiglath-pileser, whose annals declare:

As for Menahem I overwhelmed him like a snowstorm and he. . . fled like a bird, alone, and bowed to my feet [?]. I returned him to his place and imposed tribute upon him, to wit: gold, silver, linen garments with multicolored trimmings, . . . great . . . I received from him. Israel [the text reads literally, "Omri-Land," testifying to the power of that reign a century and a half earlier]. . . all its inhabitants and their possessions I led to Assyria. They overthrew their king Pekah and I placed Hoshea as king over them.⁵

Menahem's son, Pekahiah, not mentioned in the Assyrian record, reigned for a couple of years (738-732), to meet a violent end at another assassin's hands, Pekah, who led an anti-Assyrian party in Israel. Pekah (737-732) was rejected by his own people following a pathetic attempt to stop a westward Assyrian advance, and was murdered by Hoshea (2 Kings 15:30), who reigned as a vassal of Assyria. Hoshea (732-724) subsequently revolted and was executed by the Assyrian monarch, Shalmaneser V (727-722). Samaria was besieged for three years, and fell to Shalmaneser's successor, Sargon II, in 721.

The Hebrew text of Hosea is as difficult and confused as the epoch in which it originated. One hesitates to propose anything as definite as an "outline." The present structure does appear to fall into the two divisions:

1-3 The theme, throughout apparent, is Hosea's anguished relationship to Gomer and the tightly analogous relationship of Yahweh and Israel.

4-14 There is nothing here to give form or provide unity. The character of the section is, however, typically prophetic: the broad range of the types of prophetic utterance is embraced, from indictment and judgment to some of the most tender expressions of the compassion in which Yahweh holds Israel.

The more severe textual critics have reduced Hosea largely to a name under which a broad assortment of prophetic oracles from widely varied sources and times has been collected. Preponderant critical opinion has been much more conservative and withholds from Hosea (or the immediate Hosea-circle of prophetism) chiefly two kinds of material (and not all examples of these two kinds): (1) the utterance which favorably contrasts Judah with condemned Israel (e.g., 1:7), and (2) the prediction of an unqualified bright future, usually falling at the end of an oracle of doom. For the rest, the substantial eighth-century figure of the prophet Hosea is directly or indirectly responsible. This is for the most part "the Word of Yahweh that came to Hosea the son of Beeri" (1:1) in the years shortly before the fall of Samaria and the extinction of the political entity of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

The Major Problems of Hosea 1-3

Two problems promise to remain problems and may well be ultimately insoluble. One is the relationship between chapters 1 and 3. The other, not unrelated, has to do with the interpretation of the personality of Hosea.

According to chapter 1, in which Hosea appears in the third person, the prophet is commanded by Yahweh to marry a prostitute and to accept offspring of this union whose paternal status must in fact remain in doubt. This Hosea does; and to the three children now born to Gomer he gives symbolic names, making them living oracles of indictment in the community:

Jezreel - for yet a little while, and I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel (1:4; cf. 2 Kings 9-10)

Lo'-Ruhamah ( Not Pitied ) - for I will no more have pity on the house of Israel, to forgive them at all. (1:6)

Lo'-'Ammi ( Not My People ) - for you are not my people and I am not your God

(1:9, with the Septuagint and the RSV.) Chapter 3 is a narrative in the first person: the prophet is himself the narrator. The Yahweh Word to the prophet is essentially the same: "Go again [a great deal hangs on this word: is it original or secondary?]; love a woman who is beloved of a paramour [anyone who loves or is loved illicitly] and is an adulteress - even as Yahweh loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins [denoting idolatrous rites] ."

The first problem, then, concerns the relationship between the two accounts. There are three possible answers:

1. Since chapter 1 is an account in the third person, and chapter 3 in the first person, the two accounts are parallel - descriptions in different terms of the same thing. The word "again" in 3:1 is an editorial insertion.

2. Chapter 3 preserves Hosea's own view of the matter preceding the actual marriage which is narrated in chapter 1.

3. Chapter 3 is a sequel to chapter 1. It is the same woman in both chapters. After the birth of the children in chapter 1, Gomer leaves Hosea; and he, later, buys her back, he redeems her from the life of prostitution to which she has returned.

The second problem arises out of the repeated statement that Hosea knowingly married a prostitute (1:2 and 3:1). For one whose moral constitution was as acutely sensitive as Hosea's, no undertaking could be more bitter. If in fact, then, Hosea married Gomer in the full knowledge of her previous professional standing either as an independent prostitute or as a sacred prostitute attached to one of the still-flourishing fertility cults (see for example Hosea 4:14), several interpretations are proposed:

1. Some, intrigued with the (dubious) game of fitting ancient figures into compartments of modern psychoanalysis, would see Hosea's act as symptomatic of a profound sickness. Hosea is a masochist: he takes upon himself the fullest possible measure of abuse in committing himself to sexual partnership with a confirmed whore.

This is masochism in its original sense. The term has come into common use for that personality sickness in which one derives perverted pleasure from the endurance of pain. The term originally derives, however, from the title of an Austrian Novel, Masoch, written in the nineteenth century by von Sacher, and describing in detail the case of one whose abnormal sexual appetite and passion find satisfaction in exquisite abuse by his partner.

It is unnecessary to say that this view of a severely psychotic prophet has little to recommend it.

2. Others give a high religious interpretation to the reported fact of Hosea's foreknowledge of Gomer's unchaste status. This act - of all acts most repugnant to him - is one of supreme surrender to divine will. In this view, Hosea conforms to the not uncommon figure in the history of religions of the flagellant who, as a (perverted) act of service to or contrition before the deity, heaps abuse upon himself. But this strictly "hair-shirt" explanation of Hosea is only a variant of, and no more satisfying than, the interpretation of masochism.

3. The simplest view - on the assumption still that Hosea did know the qualities of Gomer before their marriage - is that he loved her; that he believed this marriage to be according to the Word of Yahweh; and that he hoped, at least, that his love, like Yahweh's love for Israel, would ultimately bring a satisfying response and a fulfilled relationship.

It may be, of course, in spite of the statement of 1:2 ( Yahweh said to Hosea, 'Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry' ), that Hosea did not in fact knowingly marry a prostitute. Someone has suggested that the implication of "And the Lord said to Hosea" is simply that looking back on his life, Hosea realized that God had enabled him to turn his sorrow to the service of truth, and therefore he could feel that the good hand of God had been with him from the start, despite the personal tragedy for Gomer and for him.⁶

On any view of either problem, the central facts are unaltered. Whatever the relationship between chapters 1 and 3, and whatever the interpretation of Hosea's personality, the prophet was in marriage covenant with an unfaithful woman; and in his own anguish and love for his wife, he believed Yahweh had revealed the nature of the relationship between Yahweh and unfaithful Israel, the specific character of the divine compassion, and the precise quality of Israel's violation of covenant.

Hosea-Gomer: Yahweh-Israel

Is it possible that Hosea is fictional allegory? This suggestion has appeared with some persistence in modern interpretations of the book. It seems unlikely on a number of counts, and especially in view of the authentic appeal and the emotional intensity of the central analogy that as Gomer is to Hosea, so Israel is to Yahweh. In 2:2-7, for example, it is improbable, to say the least, that we are reading a theoretical, fictionalized allegory. In this brief section, and in others, the mingled fury, anguish, love, and hope tend to confirm the dual historical, existential reference - Israel and Gomer. In prophetic faith, this is revelation, this is Yahweh's self-disclosure, with double intensity. He makes himself known in the most intimate and bitter relationship of Hosea's private life, in the prophet's personal history; and Hosea, recipient of the Word of Yahweh, is called to be the interpreter of that segment of history in which he is himself the center. His own agony is the key to the meaning of that history.

The intensity of the castigation in 2: 2-5a (cf. 9:10-17) is derived from the same dual historical reference. So, too, is derived the pathos in the portrayal of a lack of knowledge in 2: 5b and 8. >From the same double reference comes the tender hope of a voluntary return in 2:7.

As Gomer is to Hosea, so Israel is to Yahweh. The wife is unfaithful. The husband's love is rejected. The marriage covenant is shattered. The most common Hebrew term for the sex act in marriage is the verb "to know." The phrase occurs again and again in the Old Testament: "and so-and-so knew his wife, and she conceived and bore . . ." The book of Hosea repeatedly sets the appropriate Yahweh-Israel relationship in terms of "knowledge" or "knowing" and of course this conveys implicitly far more than the narrow analogue of contractual obligation. The knowledge of Yahweh embraces also the cognizance that in Israel and Israel's world there is no other; that in her history and the broad history which she shares, Yahweh rules (see 13:4 f.). But in the context of Hosea we cannot escape the inference of the intimate and the particular. The lament that there is no knowledge of God in the land (4:1,6) and the plea for the restoration of that knowledge (6:6; cf. 2:20; 6:3; 8:2) imply so strong a relationship between Israel and Yahweh that the profound effect of its violation can be conveyed only by comparing it to the violation of the marital relationship when a wife wantonly offers a husband's sexual prerogatives to other men (10:11). Incidentally, in all of this Hosea merits a standing ovation for his unqualified assertion of a single standard in sex morality (4:14).

As Hosea is to Gomer, so Yahweh is to Israel. "How can I give you up, O Ephraim!" cries Yahweh (11:8), whose love and compassion are made known in one who has himself cried, night after lonely night, "How can I give you up, O Gomer!" Hosea knows that the unfaithfulness of the covenant partner invokes wrath, discipline, judgment; and that as Gomer must suffer, so also must Israel (see, e.g., 2:10-14; 4:9-10; 7:11-13; 9: 3,10-17; 11:5; 13:16). But Hosea also knows that unfaithfulness, even at its most lewd and shameless, does not stop the flow of love or assuage the anguish of woefully injured affection. His hopes and purposes for his life with Gomer, as Yahweh's with Israel, cannot be permanently frustrated. Compassion is of stronger, more enduring stuff than wrath. Discipline becomes only the necessity by which the relationship may be restored and redeemed.

These comments touch but lightly on this rich product of classical prophetism. Read Hosea again - and again. The theme of impending catastrophe is sounded no less forthrightly than in Amos. But the dominant theme is Yahweh's compassion for Israel and Yahweh's unimpedable purpose to produce out of Israel his own people in a fulfilled covenant relationship.

In that day, says Yahweh.
I will sow him [i.e., Jezreel: this is a play on the name] for myself in the land.
And I will have pity on Not-Pitied
And I will say to Not-My-People, "You are my people!"
And he shall say, "You are my God." (2:21-23)

Tiglath-pileser (745-727) first consolidated his eastern territories before turning west; but in 738 Rezin of Damascus and Menahem of Israel render the tribute of vassals, and other small western states capitulate. Pekah in Samaria and Rezin later conspire to throw off the Assyrian yoke, but needing the support of Judah, and finding Ahaz (735-715?) unwilling to join, they lay siege to Jerusalem in the hope of deposing Ahaz. In extreme straits, Ahaz reverts to the crude rite, persistently condemned in prophetic Yahwism, of child sacrifice, and offers up his own son as a burnt offering (1 Kings 16:3). He also appeals to Tiglath-pileser, against Isaiah's advice (2 Kings 16:7; Isa. 7) which was certainly prudentially given: since the Assyrian king would not in any case tolerate for long such independent and insurrectionist action on the part of vassals, Ahaz obligated himself unnecessarily.

In 734, then, the Assyrians campaign in the west with bitter vengeance. Damascus and Northern Israel are mercilessly plundered and for the first time Assyria invokes in this area the policy of deportation, the removal to other parts of the empire of appreciable numbers of the population and particularly the real or potential leaders around whom subsequent rebellion might form. Judah is not molested at this time, but she remains in diminished circumstances from the occupation of Rezin's and Pekah's armies. And Ahaz the king is summoned peremptorily to Damascus where, in partial token of his subservience to Assyria, he arranges for the erection of an altar in the Temple in Jerusalem copied from an imported Assyrian altar in Damascus. This we suspect underlies the account of 2 Kings 16:10 ff. Ahaz hardly went to such pains and expense in the midst of his humiliation simply to satisfy his aesthetic delight in some Syrian altar he chanced to see in Damascus! Commonly in the ancient East political dependence required formal recognition of the victor's gods, a fact explaining in part the common prophetic protest against any and all kinds of "alliances" with superior powers.

By 732 Tiglath-pileser had efficiently organized and consolidated his western territories north of Samaria into Assyrian provinces. It is important to remember that Hoshea of Samaria (732-724) owed his throne to Tiglath-pileser, a fact which made his subsequent rebellion all the more odious to Assyria. Early in the reign of Shalmaneser of Assyria (727-722) Hoshea begins a series of politically unfaithful flirtations with Egypt. 2 Kings 17:4 puts it succinctly: "Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea." The prophet Hosea speaks of the ultimate folly of this kind of action when he characterized the pro-Egypt party as silly doves without sense, calling to Egypt, going to Assyria (Hosea 7:11, cf. 8:9). King Hoshea in Samaria openly declares his intentions to divorce Assyria in 724 (2 Kings 17:4). Assyrian forces are able to imprison Hoshea; but probably to their surprise and dismay, Samaria does not surrender and Assyria is put to the effort of a three-year siege before the capital and kingdom of North Israel falls in 722-21, never again to be so reconstituted. Sargon II (722-705) had succeeded Shalmaneser before the fall of Samaria. In Sargon's own annals, the conquest is claimed several times. And again, Assyria follows its policy of shifting the best classes of populations, deporting thousands of Israelites eastward, and importing thousands from Aramaic-speaking countries, who in time lose their identity among the inhabitants of Palestine. The subsequent attitude of the Judean Jew toward the Samaritan (cf. in the New Testament John 4) draws from the memory of this fusion of population elements. The immediate problems of the North are described in 2 Kings 17:29 ff.

The history of surviving Judah is resumed in 2 Kings 18. Hezekiah (715-687?) had come to the throne in Jerusalem a few years after Samaria's fall (perhaps a few years before; his dates present particularly difficult problems). He defies Assyria in two ways: he institutes elaborate religious reforms, always in the ancient East a gesture of independence; and even more brazenly, he undertakes extensive defense measures. The outer fortifications of Jerusalem are strengthened, an act of military strategy against which the prophet Isaiah speaks a devastating theological word: it is right and good that this be done, he says in effect to the king, but you and your action are condemned in this kingdom of Yahweh unless it be done for Yahweh's sake and to his honor and glory (see Isa. 22:8b-11). The same critical prophetic word appears in the same passage applied to Hezekiah's attention to the acute problem of the city's water supply in time of siege. The Gihon spring, outside the city wall - ancient Jerusalem's only unfailing source of water - is made inaccessible to attackers, and its waters channeled through a tunnel cut through the rock, into the city, for a distance of about 1700 feet. The spring, the tunnel, and the terminal pool of Siloam are still in use today. In the tunnel's construction, workmen began at opposite ends.

At the point of meeting someone inscribed a brief account of this remarkable feat of ancient engineering in the limestone wall - soft when first exposed to air. It is one of our oldest and best Hebrew inscriptions, even though the first half is unfortunately missing:

[. . . when] (the tunnel) was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through: - While . . . (were) still. . .axe(s), each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be cut through, [there was heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellow, for there was an overlap in the rock on the right [and on the left]. And when the tunnel was driven through, the quarrymen hewed (the rock), each man toward his fellow, axe against axe; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1200 cubits, and the height of the rock above the head(s) of the quarrymen was 100 cubits.⁸

It is remarkable that Hezekiah got by for so long a time without a spanking from Assyria. In 711 he is party to a rebellious coalition of western states inspired by Egypt or Babylon, or both; yet he appears to escape the punishment which they receive. But in 701 Sennacherib (705-681) moves in to pour the wrath of Assyria on all the small western states, as well as Egypt. Jerusalem, besieged by Assyria, escapes destruction. Why and how? Why was the siege lifted?

2 Kings 18-19 lists three reasons:

1. Hezekiah's payment of tribute (18:14-16), a prodigious sum then - the equivalent of at least ten to fifteen million dollars. Assyrian records indicate a more critical tribute including some of Hezekiah's daughters, his "concubines, male and female musicians."⁹

2. Urgent military business elsewhere - rumor of trouble (19:7).

3. Plague (the angel of Yahweh, 19:35).

Some believe that three separate, conflicting accounts of the same episode are combined in the present Kings narrative - Tribute, 18:14-16; Rumor, 18: l7-19:9a; and Plague, 19:9b-35. Not uncommonly this kind of explanation has been offered: