Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible

Honestly, if someone in your town did the things that I just described above... you'd think they need help, serious help.

I wanted to kick off this topic this way to really shake us out of our modern assumptions about what prophecy is, given the baggage that word carries, like the weird flyer about the end times I just got in my mailbox last week.

And even if what I've just described are all stories that the authors understood as things that didn't really happen, but stories, it still says a lot about the society who would write them.

I want to get back to our strange characters.

But first, Joel, I want to ask a question that astute listeners of our show will already know to expect.

Is prophecy something that is unique to ancient Israelite society and the Hebrew Bible? Or were there other societies in the ancient world that had their own prophets?

What a leading question that was.

So we think prophecy and we think of biblical prophets, and there's something unique about the relationship between God and these individuals.

And that may be true, but they wouldn't have thought that back then, which is to say, as your question so subtly suggested, Prophecy was a well-known ancient world phenomenon.

And you don't need me to tell you that as long as, you know, you have some vague notion.

And we've talked about this, like the Greek mythology kids, like we all know prophecy, right? We know seers and oracles and all of those kinds of, you know, ways of transmitting hidden messages that no one else has access to that come from deities somehow, one way or the other, or at least from some kind of knowledge of what is to come

or not,

or not knowledge, right? So what we see in Greece and what we see in Israel in various ways is replicated across the ancient Mediterranean world.

We have prophetic texts from Mesopotamia.

And they all, you know, in combination help us get a sense of really just how very broad a phenomenon prophecy really was.

And if we think of prophecy as this one thing, even in the Bible, then I think we're missing all kinds of interesting features of it.

Right.

I started out introducing some of the more famous prophets in the Hebrew Bible, the one that, if you're using a Jewish Bible, are actually in the section that are labeled prophets, along with actually what most Christians who are using a Christian Bible will consider to be the histories.

Those are also confusingly called the former prophets, the books of Joshua through Kings.

But we have actually met one prophet in our episodes already.

That was Samuel.

And what he was doing- You spent

two prophets.

What about Moses? Oh, yeah.

I suppose Moses counts, too.