The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  The grieving of Israel—perhaps self-pity and surely complaint but never resignation—is the beginning of criticism. It is made clear that things are not as they should be, not as they were promised, and not as they must be and will be. Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge. That cry which begins history is acknowledged by Yahweh as history gathers power:

  I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians. (Exod 3:7-8)

  And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you. (3:9-10)

  That cry which is the primal criticism is articulated again in Exod 8:12. Moses and Aaron now know that serious intervention and intercession must be made to Yahweh the God of freedom and not to the no-gods of Egypt. In 5:8 and 15 there is still a cry to Pharaoh, still a looking to the empire for help and relief: “Therefore they cry, ‘Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.’ . . . Then the foremen of the people of Israel came and cried to Pharaoh. . . .”

  By the middle of the plague cycle Israel has disengaged from the empire, cries no more to it, expects nothing of it, acknowledges it in no way, knows it cannot keep its promises, and knows that nothing is either owed it or expected of it. That is the ultimate criticism which leads to dismantling.

  In the narrative, criticism moves and builds. The grieving cry learns to turn away from false listeners and turn toward the one who can help. Prophetic criticism, as Dorothee Soelle has suggested,[13] consists in mobilizing people to their real restless grief and in nurturing them away from cry-hearers who are inept at listening and indifferent in response. Surely history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place.

  Curiously, the criticism of cry is intensified as the narrative develops. In the report of Exod 11:6 and 12:30 the mighty empire cries out:

  And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt as there has never been, nor ever shall be again. (11:6)

  And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where one was not dead. (12:30)

  Both times the cry concerns the killing of the firstborn, even the firstborn of Pharaoh who was born to rule. That is highly ironic, for now the self-sufficient and impervious regime is reduced to the role of a helpless suppliant. The cry of Israel becomes an empowering cry; the cry of Egypt is one of dismantling helplessness. But it is too late. History has begun, and the initiative has been taken by the new God for the new community. The empire is left to grieve over its days of not caring and its gods of order and its politics of injustice, which are all now ended. Criticism has reached its goal.

  Prophetic Energizing

  The alternative consciousness wrought by Moses also provides a model for energizing. Moses and this narrative create the sense of new realities that can be trusted and relied upon just when the old realities had left us hopeless. It is the task of the prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more visible ones of the old order. Energizing is closely linked to hope. We are energized not by that which we already possess but by that which is promised and about to be given. It is the tendency of liberals to rail and polemicize, but in the lack of faith or bad faith of so many it is not believed that something is about to be given. Egypt was without energy precisely because it did not believe anything was promised and about to be given. Egypt, like every imperial and eternal now, believed everything was already given, contained, and possessed. If there is any point at which most of us are manifestly co-opted, it is in this way. We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns.

  It is precisely the prophet who speaks against such managed data and who can energize toward futures that are genuinely new and not derived. I suggest three energizing dimensions to this narrative that are important for prophetic imagination.

  First, energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness.[14] That darkness, which is frightening in its authority, appears here in the hardness of heart. That motif pervades this strange text. At every turn, it is affirmed not that Pharaoh’s heart is hard, but that Yahweh hardens it. It is Yahweh’s peculiar way of bringing the empire to an end. It is Yahweh’s odd way to present the possibility of historical freedom. There is more here than can be understood, but whatever else it means it begins in the conviction that God works on both sides of the street. The despairing ones do not see how a newness can come, how evil can be overcome, or how futures can arise from the totalitarian present. This awesome programmatic statement affirms that something is “on the move” in the darkness that even the lord of the darkness does not discern. It is strange that neither Egypt nor Israel understands the movement in the darkness! Israel is no more privy to God’s freedom than Egypt is. And when Israel yearns to know too much about that freedom, Israel easily plays the role of Egypt. In any case, this narrative knows that the darkness may be trusted to him as it surely cannot be trusted to Pharaoh. That is energizing because the alternative community dares to affirm how it will turn out. It knows what Pharaoh does not know. It knows, but it does not understand. It knows because it has submitted, and that submission began when the cry was cried toward the free one. There is new energy in finding one who can be trusted with the darkness and who can be trusted to be more powerful than the one who ostensibly rules the light.

  Second, in Exod 11:7 there is a wondrous statement of a new reality that surely must energize: “But against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, not a dog shall growl; that you may know that the LORD makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel.” In our scholarly ways we may miss the power here. It is too terrible to be contained in a “doctrine of election.” It occurs not in a doctrine but in a narrative and an unproven memory that we must let stand in all its audacity. It is not reflective theology but news just for this moment and just for this community. The God who will decide is not the comfortable god of the empire, so fat and well fed as to be neutral and inattentive. Rather, it is the God who is alert to the realities, who does not flinch from taking sides, who sits in the divine council on the edge of his seat and is attentive to his special interests. It is the way of the unifying gods of the empire not to take sides and, by being tolerant, to cast eternal votes for the way things are.

  We may pause here to note the kind of theological reflection in which this primal prophetic narrative engages. There is not much here for the reasoned voices. No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity. It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied to see only a piece of it all and to speak out of that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it.[15] Empires prefer reasoned voices who see it all, who understand both sides, and who regard polemics as unworthy of God and divisive of the public good. But what an energizing statement! In his passion and energy, Moses takes sides with losers and powerless marginal people; he has not yet grown cynical with the “double speak” of imperial talk and so dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking. The affirmation whispered in the barracks is that Moses is “up front” about his commitments, and Pharaoh is not going to like it.

  Seen at a distance, this bald statement is high theology. It is the gospel; God is for us. In an empire no god
is for anyone. They are old gods who don’t care anymore and have tried everything once and have a committee studying all the other issues. For Moses and Israel, energizing comes not out of sociological strategy or hunches about social dynamic, but out of the freedom of God. And so the urging I make to those who would be prophets is that we not neglect to do our work about who God is and that we know our discernment of God is at the breaking points in human community.

  Third, the great Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1-18) and Song of Miriam (Exod 15:21) are the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated songs in Israel. The last energizing reality is a doxology in which the singers focus on this free one and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom. In his recent typology, David Noel Freedman places this song at the head of the period of militant Mosaic Yahwism.[16] By a study of divine names, he observes the repeated use of the name, the very name of freedom Egypt couldn’t tolerate and slaves couldn’t anticipate. The speaking of the name already provides a place in which an alternative community can live. So prophets might reflect on the name of God, on what his name is, on what it means, on where it can be spoken, and by whom it might be spoken. There is something direct and primitive about the name in these most primal songs of faith and freedom. Egypt is inclined to hedge the name with adjectives and all manner of qualifiers, but the community of justice practicing the freedom of God cannot wait for all that.

  It is of course the case that Moses dominates the tradition and surely has crowded Miriam out of the picture. It is likely that the Song of Moses in Exod 15:1 quotes the Song of Miriam, so that she has priority in the tradition. In the final form of the text it may be that masculine power has crowded out her earlier prominence. In recent time there has been an important scholarly effort to recover Miriam’s prominence, suggesting that originally she was an important figure in emerging Israel.[17]

  Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham Heschel has seen most wondrously how doxology is the last full act of human freedom and justice.[18] The prophetic community might ponder what the preconditions of doxology are and what happens when doxologies that address this one are replaced by television jingles that find us singing consumerism ideology to ourselves and to each other. In that world there may be no prophet and surely no freedom. In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and the people know no justice or compassion.

  The energy of Moses’ doxology includes:

  The speaking of a new name that redefines all social perception.

  A review of an unlikely history of inversion in which imperial reality is nullified. (Obviously that is not the kind of history taught in the royal court school.)

  An asking for the enactment of freedom in dance, freedom in free bodies that Pharaoh could no longer dominate (15:20). (We may ponder the loss of freedom for our bodies and about the ideological dimensions of the current wrath about human sexuality.)

  A culmination in enthronement, the assertion of the one reality Egypt could not permit or tolerate: “The LORD will reign for ever and ever” (15:18). (We must learn that such doxologies are always polemical; the unstated counter-theme, only whispered, is always “and not Pharaoh.”)

  It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible.[19]

  It is worth asking how the language of doxology can be practiced in the empire. Only where there is doxology is there any emergence of compassion, for doxology cuts through the ideology that pretends to be a given. Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transfigure fear into energy.

  I shall not now explore further the second and third Mosaic memories of sojourn and Sinai, although that is worth doing. The wilderness theme asks about immobilizing satiation; the Sinai theme speaks of God’s freedom for the neighbor. Taken altogether, the Mosaic tradition affirms three things:

  The alternative life is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community.

  This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality.

  This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire.

  * * *

  To be sure, the prophet lives in tension with the tradition. While the prophet is indeed shaped by the tradition, breaking free from the tradition to assert the new freedom of God is also characteristic of the prophet. Compare Walther Zimmerli, “Prophetic Proclamation and Reinterpretation,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. Douglas A. Knight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 69–100. More broadly, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins, Studies of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity 3 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1977), has explored the authority found in the ongoing tension between prophet and tradition. ↵

  Formally this argument is informed by the sociology of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966); Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967); Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967). But our concern is with the substance of prophetic ministry and not simply with formal understandings. In terms of substance, the issue has been well put by Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976). ↵

  The data on prophetic ecstasy has been summarized by Johannes Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973; original publication, 1962). Compare V. Epstein, “Was Saul Also Among the Prophets?” ZAW 81 (1969): 287–304; Robert R. Wilson, “Prophecy and Ecstasy: A Reexamination,” JBL 98 (1979): 321–37, reprinted in Community, Identity, and Ideology: Social Science Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. C. E. Carter and C. L. Meyers (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1996), 404–22. Note should be made of Thomas Overholt’s comparative work, Channels of Prophecy: The Social Dynamics of Prophetic Activity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). On Mari and comparative materials on institutional prophecy, see F. Ellenmeier, Prophetie in Mari und Israel (Herzberg: E. Jungfer, 1968); John H. Hayes, “Prophetism at Mari and Old Testament Parallels,” ATR 49 (1967) 397–409; Herbert B. Huffmon, “Prophecy in the Mari Letters,” BA 31 (1968) 101–24, and his summary articles: “Prophecy in the Ancient Near East,” in IDBS (1976) 697–700, and “Prophecy (Ancient Near East),” in ABD (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 5:477–82; Abraham Malamat, “A Forerunner of Biblical Prophecy: The Mari Documents,” in Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, ed. P. D. Miller Jr. et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 33–52; idem, “Prophecy at Mari,” in The Place Is Too Small for Us: The Israelite Prophets in Recent Scholarship, ed. R. P. Gordon, SBTS 5 (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 50–73. On Neo-Assyrian prophecy, see Martti Nissinen, References to Prophecy in Neo-Assyrian Sources, SAAS 7 (Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1998); Simo Parpola, Assyrian Prophecies, SAA 9 (Helsinki: Helsinki Univ. Press, 1997). ↵

  R. E. Clements, Prophecy and Tradition: Growing Points in Theology (Atlanta: John Knox, 1975); R. E. Clements, Prophecy and Covenant, SBT 1/43 (Naperville, Ill.: Allenson, 1965). This judgment, I am aware, is against the current tendency of scholarship. Thus, for example, Ronald
Clements in his more recent Prophecy and Tradition has drawn back somewhat from his earlier position in Covenant and Prophecy. There is currently the reassertion of a kind of neo-Wellhausian perspective, and that may be an important corrective to the synthesis of Gerhard von Rad. Nonetheless, I would urge that we are on sound ground if we take as our beginning point Moses as the paradigmatic prophet who sought to evoke in Israel an alternative consciousness. ↵

  George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), chaps. 7–8; Norman K. Gottwald, “Domain Assumptions and Societal Models in the Study of Pre-Monarchic Israel,” in Congress Volume: Edinburgh 1974, VTS 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 89–100, reprinted in Gottwald, The Hebrew Bible in Its Social World and in Ours, Semeia Studies (Atlanta: Scholars, 1993), 5–15; idem, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1979). ↵

  See the collection of essays in The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics, ed. Norman K. Gottwald and Richard A. Horsley, rev. ed., Bible and Liberation Series (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993). ↵

  This point has been most forcefully made by M. Douglas Meeks, God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). ↵

  The theme of God’s freedom is primary in the whole program of Karl Barth. Zimmerli has brought that emphasis to fresh expression: “Prophetic proclamation thus shatters and transforms tradition in order to announce the approach of the Living One” (“Prophetic Proclamation,”100). It is the work of liberation theologians to articulate the societal implications of this theological confession. Compare, e.g., Erhard S. Gerstenberger, “Der Befreiende Gott: Zum Standort lateinamerikanischer Theologie,” in Problems in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Rolf Knierim, ed. H. T. C. Sun et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 145–66; José Porfirio Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, trans. J. Eagleson (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1974). ↵