Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible

4. The Irony of Prophetic Performance

The phenomenon of biblical prophecy may be interpreted as inherently ironic even apart from particular ironies that are wielded by prophets as weapons in their rhetorical arsenals. Prophets are represented in the Hebrew Bible as speaking divinely authorized, powerfully performative words. The biblical prophet “double-voices” God. In doing so, he represents a perspective that he can never fully understand and that he may, at least in theory, misrepresent. Prophetic speech and prophetic sign acts are mimetic, and accurate mimesis of divine revelation is essential to the truth of the biblical prophetic message. The prophet reiterates what God has already said or enacts with his body and with props (a basket of figs, a tattered loincloth) something that God has already revealed. Translation is a life-or-death matter here: the authenticity of prophecy depends entirely on the reliability of the prophet’s translation rather than on the prophet’s originality. Yet there is a fundamental and inescapable discontinuity about the performance of prophecy. “Thus says the Lord,” pronounces someone who is not, in fact, the Lord. Intermediation unavoidably destabilizes the subject, both the divine subject who must speak through another and the prophet who must speak words not 4 The Irony of Prophetic Performance 126 Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible his own. Further complicating matters for the interpreter, divine and human utterances are mixed together, sometimes without clear markers of the identity of the speaker, in the written prophetic books. It can be challenging for the reader to determine in some turbulent oracles whether the one lamenting is Jeremiah or God, whether an outraged reaction to the people’s faithlessness is Ezekiel’s or God’s. Prophetic speaking on behalf of the deity creates a conflictual site of theopolitical discourse within Israelite culture. The presence of the formula , “Thus says the Lord,” at the beginning of some oracles may be read as implicitly problematizing the claim to divine authority of any oracle that does not bear those words. Even more alarming, that formula, “Thus says the Lord,” can come from the mouth of a false prophet (as Hananiah in Jer 28:2). This throws the notion of human mediation of divine speech into a potentially irresolvable storm of indeterminacy, clearly a concern for biblical tradition, as Deuteronomy 18:15–22 shows. The prophets themselves knew how essential it was to understand the difference between God’s word and human words. Their God thunders, “For it is God that I am, and no human; the Holy One in your midst” (Hos 11:9), and, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways” (Isa 55:8). Yet prophetic intermediation troubles this binary even as it attempts valiantly to reinforce it. If this is indeed the voice of the “Holy One in your midst,” it would be death to ignore it. But if this is a false word, an incomplete or deceptive or misguided word, one would transgress against God himself by heeding it as if it had been God’s own utterance. The anxiety about false prophecy visible in Deuteronomy 13 and 18 and in the drama of Jeremiah 28 is contending with the need for divinely inspired language over against the impossibility of speaking for God. Because the divine word can easily be commodified for human agendas, the problem of ascertaining which intermediary words were authentic is an urgent matter for Israelite communities and their leaders. Divine and human words in ancient Hebrew prophecy blend into a fluid, composite discourse, the authority of which is paradoxically both enhanced and threatened by the changeability of the speaker. Prophecy in its very utterance becomes an ironically changed word, elusive and “other” than either its human speaker or its divine source. Prophecies are given voice through the idiosyncrasies and flaws of the human prophet rather than spoken direct from the mouth of the One who is beyond all language.1 Not surprisingly , the act of contesting prophetic authority is characterized by the prophets themselves as stubborn sinfulness. The Jeremiah traditions, in particular, are acutely aware of challenges to Jeremiah’s authority and, in response, rain down God’s punishment for Israel’s generations-long failure to heed the prophets. Thus the discourse of biblical prophecy relies The Irony of Prophetic Performance 127 on the implied hostile audience and the notion of the unheard word. Intermediation may be represented in certain political contexts as a route...