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189 CHAPTER FOUR The Place of Skepticism in Determining the Divinely Willed Order of the World The need for inspired knowledge was felt not only among the Judahite deportees but also among the Mesopotamians with whom they were resettled and among the more distant peoples of Presocratic Greece. The vulnerability of mortals along with their limited knowledge of reality leads them to seek guidance about their place in the larger world within which they sojourn. The kind of knowledge needed is one that will reduce anxiety about what the future holds in store. Prophets, sages, and diviners from each of these three cultures responded to this need and offered their form of divinely legitimated knowledge to their audiences. But not all the practitioners of these crafts of divine communication were regarded as authentic. Skepticism toward claims of having a divine message was a practice evident not only in the tradition of ancient Israel but also in those of ancient Mesopotamia and Presocratic Greece. This chapter examines the conflictual context in which divine communications were reported and received by Ezekiel’s exilic audience, by Neo-Assyrian audiences, and Presocratic Greek audiences. The presuppositions of those who hear prophetic messages are crucial to the way they interpret them. Such prerational factors are, this study contends, fundamental to the functioning of a coherent vision for the community. So the debates about the truth of such messages and the means by which such messages are received and formulated are essential to the veracity of the community’s way of life. Skepticism is essential to the discernment of truth, but it can only function positively when a person is aware of the limits that humans face in their efforts to create order in the world. If 190 SPIrIT AND rEASON such limits are not acknowledged, then the order given in the world will be overlooked in favor of an order that the human perceiver fabricates. This chapter is divided into six sections. The first section addresses the issue of how the absolute pronouncements of an Israelite prophet provoke not only an acceptance or rejection of the message but also reflection on its content. This conflict in interpretation took the form of public disputations as well as individual questioning. Analogous responses from Neo-Assyrian and Homeric prophecy are examined. The second section highlights the importance of the proper starting point of an inquiry for the capacity to apprehend truth. Authentic prophecy gives a hearer a new standing place for perceiving the world. The shamanlike journeys of Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Parmenides will be compared to Ezekiel’s prophetic communication. The third section examines how the debate over the search for truth is essential to the proper apprehension of divinely revealed truth communicated by prophets, diviners, and thinkers. Parmenides claimed that truth properly apprehended is unchanging, but Heraclitus countered that such truth can only be intuited in the midst of conflict and change. The fourth section examines further how conflict within the thought of prophets, diviners, exorcists, thinkers, physicians and statesmen is indispensable for the discernment of truth and the right ordering of a community. The fifth section addresses the question whether there is an objective order to nature that operates independently from the intervention of a sovereign deity. Ezekiel emphasizes God’s direct intervention to connect cause with effect, but the Mesopotamian “Advice to a Prince” indicates that the law of talion was regarded as a ruling force even when the gods were not summoned to enforce it. In Presocratic Greece, the just order ruling within the fabric of the polis had a necessary character like the order of nature. Finally, the sixth section addresses the practice of magic, which aimed to manipulate the order of nature and society through its rituals and formulas. The binding rituals condemned by Yhwh in Ezekiel 13:1723 have analogues in the Mesopotamian rituals against which exorcists battled with their rituals such as the Maqlû. From Presocratic Greece, binding rituals have been preserved in the form of lead curse tablets. Also the Hippocratic doctors tried to heal by manipulating nature, but they distinguished their approach from that of the exorcists. With what might be called a more holistic approach, Empedocles tried to understand nature rationally but also tried to manipulate it with exorcisms. Human Conflict over Prophetic Messages: A Catalyst to Thought and Reflection Ezekiel’s prophecy of doom for Judah and Jerusalem (12:19-20) was met with skepticism and denial by both the Jerusalemites and the exiles. The Judahites...

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