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15 Introduction to Prophecy Primary Reading: 1 Kings 17 through 2 Kings 9. Difficulties in Studying Prophecy By “prophecy” I mean the “transmission of allegedly divine messages by a human intermediary to a third party.”1 As a literary genre, prophecy is extremely difficult to read and to understand. Prophets are quite alien to contemporary culture. When we see someone dressed oddly in public, proclaiming that the end of the world is near, we typically keep our distance—or perhaps listen but laugh. Most people in our society no longer share the view that God communicates messages to us through certain individuals. Indeed, many of us think that anyone who believes that they have received such a divine message is delusional and requires psychiatric treatment. Ancient Israelites had a fundamentally different view of the world and how God is manifest in it; the historical-critical method helps us to recover their worldview. Let me highlight some of the differences between the contemporary and biblical worlds by recasting biblical passages in today’s idiom. First, imagine that you are hiring someone to fill a position, and the first stage is for candidates to send in a promotional video. In scene two of one individual’s video—let’s call him Elisha—he is walking along when a few kids run up and to the side of the road and mock him. He curses them; they promptly drop dead. Then Elisha goes on his merry way. A simple question: would you call this person in for an interview? You might hesitate, to say the least. Yet the Bible relates a similar event about the prophet Elisha—and that passage is intended to reflect positively on him: 137 (2 Kings 2:23) From there he went up to Bethel. As he was going up the road, some little boys came out of the town and jeered at him, saying, “Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!” (24) He turned around and looked at them and cursed them in the name of the LORD. Thereupon, two she-bears came out of the woods and mangled forty-two of the children . (25) He went on from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria. Now, let’s imagine a second scenario. One day you happen to be in New York City, in a house of worship, and the preacher gets up and says: Thus said the LORD: / For three transgressions of the residents of Manhattan, / For four, I will not revoke it: / Because they shop in expensive shops and neglect the poor, / Eat in five-star restaurants while others starve. / I will send down fire upon Fifth Avenue, / A conflagration on 57th St. / And it shall devour the fancy penthouses, / Destroy the mansions. / And the people of “the city” shall be exiled to California— said the LORD. You might wonder how it is that this preacher presumes to speak for God. You might also be puzzled about why the preacher suddenly decided to speak in poetry rather than prose. Yet this imagined sermon is a paraphrase of one of the prophet Amos’ oracles against the nations—oracles that grabbed his audience’s attention—such as: (1:3) Thus said the LORD: For three transgressions of Damascus, / For four, I will not revoke it: / Because they threshed Gilead / With threshing boards of iron. (4) I will send down fire upon the palace of Hazael, / And it shall devour the fortresses of Ben-hadad. (5) I will break the gate bars of Damascus, / And wipe out the inhabitants from the Vale of Aven / And the sceptered ruler of Beth-eden; And the people of Aram shall be exiled to Kir—said the LORD. Finally, imagine that you are traveling on a public bus. In the seat right behind you, two people are conversing. You overhear one of them telling the other about a recent incident: (Zech. 5:9) I looked up again and saw two women come soaring with the wind in their wings—they had wings like those of a stork—and carry off the tub between earth and sky. (10) “Where are they taking the tub?” I asked the angel who talked with me. (11) And he answered, “To build a shrine for it in the land of Shinar; a stand shall be erected for it, and it shall be set down there upon the stand.” 138 How to Read the Bible [3.144.48.135] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16:09...

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