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).
Marx’s programmatic statement from “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” is: “Thus the criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics,” quoted from Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), 13.
James Plastaras, The God of Exodus: The Theology of the Exodus Narratives (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1966), chap. 3.
On the meaning of the term “primal scream,” see Arthur Janos, The Primal Scream (New York: Putnam, 1970). Dorothee Soelle has shown how expressed complaint is the beginning of liberation; see Suffering, trans. E. R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).
Erhard Gerstenberger, “Der klagende Mensch: Anmerkungen zu den Klagegattungen in Israel,” in Probleme biblischer Theologie: Gerhard von Rad zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. H. W. Wolff (Munich: Kaiser, 1971), 64–72. See also his important distinction between complaint and lament in “Jeremiah’s Complaints,” JBL 82 (1963): 407 n.55; his more recent Psalms: Part 1 with an Introduction to Cultic Poetry, FOTL 14 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988).
Soelle writes that the movement from helplessness to power is accomplished through public expressions of lament, complaint, and protest (Suffering, 73). In describing the powerlessness that comes with failed speech, Graham Greene contrasts those who lack speech: “Most of his middle-class patients were as accustomed to spend at least ten minutes explaining a simple attack of flu. It was only in the barrio of the poor that he ever encountered suffering in silence, suffering which had no vocabulary to explain a degree of pain, its position or its nature”; The Honorary Consul (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 66.
Hall effectively explores the theme of darkness as the arena of suffering, death, and liberty. He concludes his study: “The people of the cross, who name the darkness, can summon no absolute light, no unsullied vision, whether of God or of man. It becomes for them, as for all who in the past have been grasped by his logic of the cross, a matter of faith” (Lighten Our Darkness, 225).
Characteristically the prophets do partisan theology “from below” while the royal consciousness always wants to state it “from above.” See Robert McAfee Brown, “The View from Below,” A.D. 6 (September 1977): 28–31. In that connection, the Detroit Conference on “Theology in the Americas” expressed a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” a posture linked to theology from below. This phrase is identified with Paul Ricoeur, but especially in biblical studies with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983; 10th anniversary ed. 1994).
David Noel Freedman, “Pottery, Poetry, and Prophecy: An Essay on Biblical Poetry,” JBL 96 (1977): 5–26; idem, “Divine Names and Titles in Early Hebrew Poetry,” in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, ed. F. M. Cross et al. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 55–107. These two studies are reprinted in Freedman’s Pottery, Poetry, and Prophecy: Studies in Early Hebrew Poetry (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1980), 1–22 and 77–129.
On that scholarly recovery, see, for example, Phyllis Trible, “Bringing Miriam Out of the Shadows,” Bible Review 5/1 (February 1989): 13–25.
Abraham Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1965), chap. 6 and passim.
On the fundamental importance of the universe of discourse for the possibility of faith, see especially Rubem A. Alves, Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
Chapter 2
John Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity, Prentice-Hall Studies in Religion Series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975).
Robert W. Friedrichs has shrewdly described the interests of sociologists and the influence of interests on scholarship in A Sociology of Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1970). For the paradigm we will seek to develop here, the connections are worth noting. Thus the paradigms of system and conflict, which Friedrichs uses for soc
iology, may have correlations with the royal and Mosaic traditions of Israel.
This particular judgment was made in a lecture given in St. Louis in 1976, but his general argument moves in this direction as well. That theological urging is not unrelated to his understanding of tribe and city. Compare Mendenhall, “Social Organization in Early Israel,” in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, ed. F. M. Cross et al. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 132–51.
The term hapiru in various forms and with various linguistic cognates appears in the Ancient Near East in the second millennium to refer to stateless people who live at the edges of society, threaten society, and are in turn threatened by it. It is widely thought that the biblical term Hebrew is linked to the term; if so, then the early references to what became Israel are linked to a border social movement of marginal, precarious peoples. Recent scholarship has indicated that the term is not ethnic but is sociological and refers to those at the edge of economic and political viability in many states in the region. The theme of Hebrew-hapiru figures prominently in the influential sociological interpretation of Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 b.c. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1979).
See George E. Mendenhall, “The Monarchy,” Interp 29 (1975) 155–70; Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), 237–41. He refers to David’s court as “rustic,” a term usually assigned only to Saul. Note James Flanagan’s important work, David’s Social Drama: A Hologram of Israel’s Early Iron Age, JSOTSup 73; SWBA 7 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988).
Walter Brueggemann, “The Social Significance of Solomon as Patron of Wisdom,” in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. J. G. Gammie and L. G. Perdue (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 117–32.
The evidence is summarized by Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000–586 b.c.e. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 368–402; Gösta W. Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine, ed. D. Edelman (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 455–542; William G. Dever, “Archaeology of the ‘Age of Solomon’: A Case Study in Archaeology and Historiography,” in The Age of Solomon: Scholarship at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. L. K. Handy, Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 11 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 217–51.
Mendenhall, “The Monarchy,” 160.
Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 148–56. The phenomenon hypothesized by von Rad, sharply disputed by other scholars, can be read negatively as well as positively. James L. Crenshaw disputes the entire hypothesis of a Solomonic Enlightenment, whether it be viewed positively or negatively (“Introduction,” in Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom, Library of Biblical Studies [New York: Ktav, 1976], 16–20).
See Walter Brueggemann, In Man We Trust: The Neglected Side of Biblical Faith (Richmond: John Knox, 1972). I believe that my interpretation in that work is essentially correct, but that it should be emphasized or read with positive interpretations surely reflects the milieu of the book, namely the theological climate of the late 1960s.
See the sensitive expression of distinction by Stefan Heym, The King David Report (New York: Putnam, 1972), 237.
See Walter Brueggemann, “Presence of God, Cultic,” in IDBS, 630–33; idem, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 576–704, and Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology, Religious Perspectives (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
Jürgen Moltmann has seen most clearly that the loss of passion is not only a psychological factor but a predictable ingredient in social oppression; see The Experiment Hope, ed. and trans. M. Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), chap. 6; more extensively, idem, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Thus Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg sees a direct link to the Genesis materials: “The book of Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) was written by the author with Genesis 1–4 in front of him; Qoheleth’s conceptuality is formed on the basis of creation history” (Der Prediger, KAT 17 [Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1963], 230). Hertzberg can persuasively hypothesize that the literature is a reflection of Genesis 1–4, including the J (Yahwist) material, likely a Solomonic piece. The irony of linking this literature at least indirectly with the Solomonic situation is strengthened by the analysis of Ecclesiastes by James G. Williams, “What Does It Profit a Man?” in Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom, ed. J. L. Crenshaw (New York: Ktav, 1976), 375–89. Williams himself has no interest in that question, but the circumstance he posits for the literature is suggestive.
Compare Bernhard W. Anderson, Creation Versus Chaos: The Reinterpretation of Mythical Symbolism in the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987; reprinted with a new foreword).
The relation between these two strands of tradition and these two perceptions of reality is a question fundamental to current Old Testament studies. While the tradition itself argues for continuity, the scholarship reflected here not only distinguishes between them but sees deep conflict between them. Such a way of putting the question enhances the figure of Josiah, in which the two are briefly held together.
See Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. E. R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); Moltmann, The Experiment Hope; Elie Wiesel in various works such as A Beggar in Jerusalem (New York: Schocken, 1997); Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
I have used the paradigm in a quite concrete way in “A Biblical Perspective on Hunger,” ChrCent 94 (1977), 1136–41.
The phrase is from Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), chap. 3.
Chapter 3
Rubem A. Alves has said this most eloquently in Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). The practice of imagination is a subversive activity not because it yields concrete acts of defiance (which it may), but because it keeps the present provisional and refuses to absolutize it. The practice of a historical imagination maintains the possibility of a future that is not continuous from the present. It is the intent of every totalitarian regime to force the future to be only an unquestioned continuation of the present.
As indicated in chapter 2, reference to Ecclesiastes here means no questioning of the conventional Hellenistic dating but only the observance that the cynicism of that period found a correlate in the cynicism of the Solomonic environment. Socially, the two periods are to be contrasted for Israel; but in terms of the human spirit, the two seem to come to the same sorry situation.
R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), chap. 1. His programmatic statement is: “If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive” (12). The contrast between experience and behavior illuminates the recent statement of Martin Marty, A Nation of Behavers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976). It is the argument of this chapter that Israel’s prophets must deal with this alienation between experience and behavior, that royal Israel was now only capable of behavior.
Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson have explored the failure of symbols for death and the destructiveness of death when it lacks adequate symbolization; Living and Dying (New York: Praeger, 1974). Thus they speak of “psychic numbing” and a “symbolic gap” (137). They conclude that “the whole age in which we live is one of vast numbing and desensitization” caused by the technologies of death. Compare Lifton, Death in Life:Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967), 474, “Technology Leads to Disconnected Death”; idem, History and Human Survival: Essays on the Young and Old, Survivors and the Dead, Peace and War, and on Contemporary Psychohistory (New York: Random House, 1970), 175, in which Lifton speaks of death
without symbols as “severance of the sense of connection.” The prophet’s stance over against the king nurtures adequate symbolization and therefore insists upon connectedness.
Effective symbols are those that have grown out of the history of the community. Thus we are speaking not of universal myths but of symbolization appropriate to a peculiar history. In Israel we may then refer to the memories of incongruity that serve Israel through the prophecy of Jeremiah. See the provocative statement of Peter R. Ackroyd, “Continuity and Discontinuity: Rehabilitation and Authentication,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. D. A. Knight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 215–34. There is a danger in symbols that provide continuity, for they may lessen the reality of the discontinuity; but Ackroyd has stated for Israel that which Lifton sees in terms of our own culture.
The anguish and passion that make such speech authoritative cannot be in terms of comprehensive myths but must be out of the experience of the community. Thus the study of the language of metaphor and parable is to let Israel experience its own experience, as Laing has seen. On the concreteness of language, see Sallie McFague TeSelle, Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge, 1988; reprint ed.); William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994). It is the task of the prophet to energize the metaphors resulting from historical experience.
The Prophetic Imagination Page 19