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35. The question of the antiquity of aniconism was raised by S. Mowinckel (1930); with regard to the explicit prohibition in the Decalogue, see Zimmerli (1930) and Dohmen (1985). Christoph Dohmen, like his predecessors, holds this commandment to be essentially Deuteronomic, although he finds an earlier allusion to such a prohibition in Exod 20:23. T. Mettinger (1995) rejects the antiquity of this verse on source-critical grounds (p. 138). Moreover, a late dating of this prohibition is at odds with the recent work of Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger; see further Kugel (2003), 217–34.
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36. The evidence for this assertion is reviewed in Kugel (2003), 217–19.
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37. Often cited in this connection is Pausanias, a Greek travel writer/geographer of the second century CE: “At a more remote period all the Greeks alike worshipped uncarved stones instead of images of the gods” (Description of Greece 7:22.4). Cf. Walter Burkert: “In many places the most important gods of the Mycenean period, Zeus and Poseidon, did without cult image and temple down into classical times; it is possible that Indo-Europeans used no images of the gods”: Burkert (1985), 88.
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38. See Gaifman (2008). This is particularly the case with the sacred stones called baetyli or betyls, as Gaifman shows.
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39. Ibid.
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40. The term comes from Mettinger (1995). On such empty-space aniconism in Israel, see also the two golden calves established at Bethel and Dan (1 Kings 12:28–30), which many scholars see as the equivalent of the empty space iconography of the outstretched wings of the cherubim in the Jerusalem temple. A Greek example of “empty-throne aniconism” is the double rock-cut seat of Zeus and Hekate at Chalke, on which again see Gaifman (2008).
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41. The notion of such a cherub (apparently a kind of gryphon) throne is found in texts of different dates, but the priestly picture in Exodus 25 “does not describe a throne [pace Haran (1985), 251, 254]. There is no seat, no armrests, no footstool; the creatures do not stand side-by-side, but face each other . . . There is no way this can be envisioned as a throne”: Propp (2006), 390. Similarly, Jacob Milgrom writes: “Indeed, that the cherubim are winged means that the divine seat is in reality a chariot: His dominion is the world, and only when He wishes to manifest Himself to Israel does He condense His presence upon the Ark-cherubim inside the Holy of Holies . . . He summons Moses to receive His commands (e.g., Exod 25:20, Lev 1:1). Another tradition informs us that even when Moses enters the Tent on his own initiative for oracular purposes, there is no guarantee that the Lord will answer him or even that He is there. Only the descent of the pillar of cloud at the entrance to the Tent indicates that the Lord is present and is ready for an audience (Exod 33:8–9)”: Milgrom (1990), 375.
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42. Sommer draws a sharp contrast between the views of E and P: “The tabernacle is described in P as the site of an unceasing and ever accessible theophany . . . The differences between E’s conception of the tent and P’s are readily evident. E’s ‘tent of meeting’ (ohel mo’ed ); E never calls it the ‘tabernacle’ or ‘tent of the pact’) was located outside the Israelites’ camp, indeed, at some distance from it . . . God did not dwell in E’s tent but popped in on appropriate occasions to reveal Himself to Moses or to other Israelites” (pp. 81–82). I believe this contrast is too sharp. If, indeed, P’s God is, as Sommer writes, a “non-fluid” and fully embodied God, it is hard to see how He could be located “permanently” in the tabernacle (p. 76), “dwelling there without interruption for centuries” (90). If His presence there was indeed “an unceasing and ever accessible theophany,” why don’t we hear of Him being endlessly encountered by humans? What would be the point of such a nonfluid, fully embodied deity just hanging around back there, behind a curtain and perched (somehow!) on the outspread wings of two cherubs? (See previous note.) Instead, P’s view seems to identify the holy of holies as God’s home base, where He indeed reveals Himself to humans on specific occasions, but He cannot be stuck there without interruption forever. Perhaps it would be more useful to say that P himself does not like to depict God as doing things, and sometimes even not as saying things; see Knohl (1995), 128–52. But even P does not maintain that his God is endlessly present in the sanctuary. He appears there (cf. Ps 94:1); where He is the rest of the time we don’t know.
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43. In saying this, I realize that in speaking of “the conception of things,” I am really referring only to what is presented in biblical texts, and even these, as scholars know well, do not speak with one voice: P’s conception of the sanctuary and its functions are at odds with those attributed to E (and J), P differs with H, and all these clash with D and the texts influenced by his/their school. These differences have been explored in some detail by, among others, Weinfeld (1992a), Knohl (1995), and Sommer (2009). I believe the intermittently appearing God is a notion that underlies all Pentateuchal sources although, in the case of P, the immanence of God’s presence is stressed (not surprisingly for a priestly source).
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44. An incident not usually associated with this theme is found in 1 Kgs 12:32–13:1–2. Jereboam, having established the priests who are to serve at the temple at Bethel, ascends the altar to offer a sacrifice. Suddenly, a “man of God” (a Northern expression meaning a prophet) cries out, “O altar, altar! Thus says the LORD . . .” But if God were present in this sanctuary, what need was there of a prophet to address the altar? Let God Himself shoot fire onto the altar, as in Lev 9:24. “O altar, altar!” means that the golden calf, meant as an empty-space icon, was unoccupied at the time.
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45. Apart from the visual appearances of God studied above, note that He appears visually in front of the whole people of Israel at Mount Sinai, albeit surrounded by a “thick cloud” (Exod 19:9); He also is said to have appeared to David (2 Chron 3:1), to Solomon at Gibeon (1 Kings 3:5), as well as to prophets like Isaiah (Isa 6:1), Jeremiah (Jer 31:2), Amos (Amos 9:1), and others. “The LORD appeared to Abram,” the book of Genesis reports in yet another place, “and he built an altar to the LORD who appeared to him” (Gen 12:7). “God Almighty appeared to me in Luz in the land of Canaan,” Jacob reports, “and He blessed me” (Gen 48:3). The psalmist says, “My soul thirsts for the living God, for the time when I may go and see God’s face” (Ps 42:2). When Moses expresses doubts about the Israelites’ willingness to follow him, he says, “They will not believe me or do what I say. Instead they will say, ‘The LORD did not appear to you.’ ” Later, Moses says, “You, O LORD, are in the midst of this people, and You are seen by them eye to eye . . . In a pillar of cloud You go before them by day, and in a pillar of fire by night” (Num 14:14). These are but a few more visual appearances.
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7. IMAGINING PROPHECY
1. Lawlor (2004).
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2. This is sometimes part of a related theme, that the prophets were essentially social reformers (in turn related to the “low Christology” theme of Jesus as a social reformer). This understanding of the social side of prophecy has a rich history, going back more than a century; see for example Stiblitz (1898); note the survey of Bruce Malchow (1996).
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3. Divine inspiration here (and perhaps in Hebrew Scripture as well) is tied to oral composition: the poet spontaneously re-creates his text with each recital. This was demonstrated in the researches of Milman Parry and set out by his student Albert Lord; see Lord (1990). Note also Nagy (1990a). Particularly helpful in our present context is Nagy’s brief survey of various Greek terms related to prophecy: see Nagy (1990b).
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4. Indeed, poetic inspiration has never really died, though it has changed. Reformulated as the Holy Spirit, the poetic muse was reborn (or still alive?) in Milton’s proem to Paradise Lost.
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, wh
ose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed. (1:1–8)
The muse who inspired “that shepherd,” Moses, to recount the fall of man in Gen 2–3 is, for Milton, none other than the Holy Spirit, as he goes on to relate:
And chiefly thou O spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou knowest; thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast abyss. (1:17–21)
For Milton, the visitations of his muse were apparently a reality: she would reportedly communicate with him at night, and he would wake up early the next morning, ready to dictate dozens of verses to his amanuensis. At the beginning of Book 9 of Paradise Lost, he promises to write something no less heroic than a classical Greek and Latin epic,
If answerable style I can obtaine
Of my Celestial Patroness, who deignes
Her nightly visitation unimplor’d,
And dictates to me slumb’ring, or inspires
Easie my unpremeditated Verse. (9:20–24)
How striking, then, is the reformulation of the muse’s invocation in the prologue of Wordsworth’s The Prelude two centuries later, her inspiration now reconceived as a “half-conscious” visitant blown into his room from the fields and originating, just perhaps, from something like heaven:
Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky. (1:1–4)
See further Rhu (1990). Among contemporary poets, the clearest example of an undisguisedly inspired poet might be James Merrill, who recounts at length the role of a kind of divination in his The Changing Light at Sandover. See Hammer (2015), 194–206 and passim.
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5. The idea that biblical prophets were “divine poets” had its own, interesting history even before Robert Lowth popularized this notion in the eighteenth century; see Kugel (1981) and Kugel (1990d), 1–25, esp. 21–23.
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6. On the relation of such theoretical statements to those of various poets, see Murray (1981).
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7. Plato, Ion (534), in Jowett (1931) vol. 1, 501–2; cf. Plato’s distinction between mantis, “seer,” and prophētēs, “declarer” in Timaeus 71e-72b. Here, Nagy argues, the mantis is “one who speaks from an altered mental state, let us call it inspiration, while the prophētēs does not”: see Nagy (1990b), esp. 61.
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8. A possible exception may be found in the reference to a “band of prophets,” in 1 Sam 10:10 and in its doublet in 1 Sam 19:20, but it is far from clear why this collective existed or what its function was. The similar term “sons of prophets” is, in the words of one scholar, “restricted to Ephraimite narratives describing prophetic activity in Israel during the reigns of Ahab, Azariah, and Joram (1 Kgs 20:35; 2 Kgs 2:3, 5, 7, 15; 4:1, 38; 5:22; 6:1, 9:1). The title thus seems to have been employed for a relatively brief period of time (ca. 869–842 BCE) and is particularly identified with the activities of Elisha”: R. R. Wilson (1980), 140–41. Apart from these, biblical prophets were all apparently loners.
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9. Exception made for Ezekiel’s admirers in the passage just cited.
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10. In ancient Greece, this function was closer to that of the theōros, a term that designated someone assigned to go to Delphi and consult the oracle there; he was a bit like a biblical prophet in that the oracle “confer[red] an inner vision upon the theōros, the one who consult[ed] him . . . To be a theōros, as Theognis declares, you may not change for your audience one iota of what the god had imparted to you, just as whoever consults an oracle must report to the community exactly what the priestess has said”: see Nagy (1990b), 62, 64.
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11. Note in this connection Philo’s description of the biblical prophet, based almost entirely on Plato’s description of the poet in Ion (cited above): “For a prophet, being a spokesman, has no utterance of his own, but all his utterance came from elsewhere, the echoes of Another’s voice . . . For when the light of God shines, the human light sets; when the divine light sets, the human light dawns and rises. This is what regularly befalls the fellowship of the prophets. The mind is evicted at the arrival of the divine Spirit, but when that departs the mind returns to its tenancy. Mortal and immortal may not share the same home”: Quis haeris 259, 263–65. For later Jewish understandings of the prophetic office: Cooper (1990).
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12. Though even this qualification must be further qualified, since ancient Greek and Latin lyrics did sometimes take on contemporary political figures or themes, though hardly in the manner of Israel’s prophets; much later, the hexametric Sibylline oracles present a true fusion of biblical and classical models. See Collins (1983).
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13. A few prophets also seem to have been ecstatics, falling into trances, unable to control their movements, gyrating, stripping off their clothes, and the like, acts somewhat paralleled by the poetic fury of ancient Greek poets or, later, the Sibyls. See on these Lindblom (1962), 47–65.
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14. Scholars have remarked on the prevalence of miracle stories with regard to northern prophets, Elijah and Elisha in particular; they can heal the sick (2 Kings 5:1–14), revive the dead (1 Kings 17:17–24; 2 Kings 4:17–37), or merely cause an ax head that had fallen into a river to float to the surface (2 Kings 6:6). On the overall differences between prophets in the North and in the South, see Wilson (1980), 135–296. Note also that some northern texts represent prophets as ecstatics, though this hardly distinguishes them from certain Greek poets and the Sibyls.
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15. Nor, it should be stressed, did all prophets answer to the same job description: prophecy in the north was different from prophecy in the south, and the institution itself clearly evolved over time. Among other studies: R. R. Wilson (1980).
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16. The eighth- or early-seventh-century Deir ‘Alla inscription, discovered in 1967, speaks of a “seer of the gods” named Balaam son of Be’or, suggesting that the real or fictional figure in the biblical account was known outside the biblical orbit. See Vuilleumier (1966); Hackett (1984), Hoftijzer and Van der Kooij (1991), Dijkstra (1995).
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17. On the prophetic “oracle against the nations” genre: Christensen (1975), 58–72; Clements (1975); Kugel (2007a), 626–28.
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18. Of course, this is the editorial frame of the Balaam periscope. For the historical background, see Kugel (2007a), 338–40.
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19. This is the translation suggested by Jonathan Stökl in his nuanced discussion of the term in Stökl (2012), 38–43; the book as a whole examines in detail the terminology applied to prophet-like figures in Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian inscriptions as well as in biblical texts.
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20. On these see Durand (1988), 386–96; Huffmon (2000), 47–70.
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21. I refer here to the book of Jeremiah because, in fact, we have no way of knowing what, if anything in that book (which itself exists in different recensions), might actually have been spoken by the prophet himself, if such a prophet existed. What we have at best is someone else’s accounts of this prophet’s words; as one scholar has noted, “a written prophecy is always a scribal work, and it is ultimately beyond our knowledge to determine to what extent the scribe would, or could, transmit the exact wording of the prophecy”: Nissinen (2004), p. 29. Scholars have long hypothesized that, following the putat
ive appearance of an early collection of Jeremianic sayings, a subsequent Deuteronomic revision of various parts of the book was made; some even now speak of a secondary revision thereof, that is, a “Deutero-Deuteronomic” editor putting his own spin on the book. See most recently Stipp (2016), Kratz (2016), along with the other contributions in Najman and Schmid (2016). My references elsewhere to Jeremiah the man should be understood in this light: they really refer to the Jeremiah presented in this biblical book. The paradox of this prophet was thus summed up nicely by the Assyriologist and biblicist Herbert Huffmon: “Jeremiah is the most accessible of the prophets; Jeremiah is the most hidden of the prophets”: Huffmon (1999), p. 261. Having stated this qualification, however, I should add that in the present context the matter of authorship (that is, our ability or inability to attribute this or that statement to the historical Jeremiah) is somewhat less crucial than it might be elsewhere. The important thing here is to examine carefully what the text says in order to understand what it can tell us about the very nature of prophecy as it was conceived at the end of the First Temple period (the early sixth century BCE), or not long thereafter. What did it mean then for a prophet to deliver a message that, he said, God had put in his mouth?
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22. I am guilty of free translations throughout this chapter, but “obey” here is not one of them; scholars have long recognized that da‘at is sometimes used in the sense of “be loyal to”: see Huffmon, (1966).
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23. On these and other findings see I. E. Sommer et al. (2010).
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