Relevance of the Prophets

Many of the Old Testament prophets must have seemed odd indeed. Jeremiah, by his own admission, had a tremor "like a drunken man" (Jeremiah 23: 9), and Isaiah "walked naked and barefoot three years" (Isaiah 20: 3). Many of their Jewish contemporaries were skeptical of the prophets--and some people are skeptical still. Literary critics may see Isaiah as nothing more than a wild Hebrew bard, and psychoanalysts may explain the posturings and mutters of Hosea as the upshot of repressed sexual feelings.

In a new book, one of the world's most illustrious Jewish theologians puts the prophets back into place as the first men to speak some bedrock ideas of Western thought. Abraham Joshua Heschel, 56, professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, writes in The Prophets (Harper & Row; $6) that if those peculiar ancients claimed to speak for God himself, their message is indeed worthy of the Creator. For they preached the dignity of the world's poor and downtrodden, and warned unjust men that God himself cared about what happened on earth.

A Personal God. Modern man finds it hard to sympathize with the prophets, Heschel argues, largely because Biblical thinking is so alien to his own. Unlike the Greek philosophers, or even Judaeo-Christian theologians of later years, the prophets did not think of God as a first cause or prime mover but as a person; they were unconcerned with what God is, but cared only for what he does and says. Unlike the mystics, the prophets did not express the ineffable glory of God, but spoke of specific situations--the machinations of Jewish foreign policy, or the selling of debtors into slavery during the reign of King Jeroboam II (circa 786-746 B.C.). Isaiah, for example, declares that the Almighty will condemn a military alliance between Israel and Egypt:

Woe to the rebellions children, says

the Lord,

Who carry out a plan that is not from

Me,

Who turn an alliance not of My spirit,

Adding sin to sin;

Who set out to go down to Egypt,

Without asking for My counsel.

The prophets saw these incidents as symptoms; the disease was the corrupt state of Israel. Their cure was angry eloquence. "To us," Heschel writes, "a single act of injustice--cheating in business, exploitation of the poor--is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world."

The explanation of this supranatural fury, Heschel says, lies in the prophets' claim to be surrogates for God. In their writings, they expressed both their own anger and divine wrath as well; their mission was to make known this "divine pathos"--God's concern for the world--to men. "Prophecy," Heschel writes, "is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor. God is raging in the prophet's words." Their distinction "was to sense the human situation as a divine emergency."

Lesson for Today. Yet though the prophets have gone, still "the world is dark, and human agony is excruciating." Although Heschel does not expressly argue it in his book, he believes that man today is called upon to be prophetlike--last week in Chicago he was a mordant critic of religion's ineffectiveness in U.S. race questions (see below). Born in Warsaw, the descendant of a long line of Hasidic rabbis, Heschel earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin, but was expelled by the Nazis to Poland in 1938. He left for England six weeks before the outbreak of World War II, arrived in the U.S. in 1940, and has taught at Jewish Theological Seminary since 1945.

Heschel first turned to the study of the prophets as a university student, when he was repelled by the aridity of contemporary philosophy. He has since spent most of his energies defending "the intellectual relevance of the Bible." Heschel argues that the secular disciplines of philosophy or science are no help to man in solving the ultimate riddles of life. "Marx and Freud are interesting," he says, "but in extreme situations, such as in dealing with good and evil, do they lead anywhere? Science presupposes a certain aspect of being, but is it the ultimate?" Heschel answers no, and says that in the long run of time, "the prophet may be more relevant than the scientist."

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