You Are My People: An Introduction to Prophetic Literature
You Are My People: An Introduction to Prophetic Literature
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781426719554 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 831 KB |
About the Author
Hyun Chul Paul Kim is Professor of Hebrew Bible Methodist Theological School in Ohio Delaware, Ohio.
Read an Excerpt
You Are My People
An Introduction to Prophetic Literature
By Louis Stulman, Hyun Chul Paul Kim
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2010 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-1955-4
CHAPTER 1
Reading the Prophets as Meaning-Making Literature for Communities Under Siege
Wartime prayers, wartime prayers in every language spoken, For every family scattered and broken
—Paul Simon
One of the sure results of twentieth-century Near Eastern scholarship is that prophecy is an oral phenomenon. Prophets in ancient Israel were primarily spokespersons and intermediaries, not writers; the essence of their enterprise was the spoken word, perhaps even the brief poetic utterance. At the same time, we have become increasingly aware of the difficulty in exhuming ancient prophets (or for that matter in locating contemporary ones!). As Martti Nissinen recently put it: "No videotapes or sound recordings are available to authenticate the oral messages of the prophets." Instead, we have access to this oral phenomenon only in written sources.
Although this observation may seem self-evident, it is neither incidental nor merely a matter of modus operandi. Contemporary studies of language have made us well aware that the transition from spoken to written prophecy involves more than a mimetic transposition. Writing does not preserve meaning with externalized precision; rather, it restructures and reconfigures thought. Robert P. Carroll noted: "When the spoken oracle becomes a written document, that is, transcribed from the sphere of uttered word to that of written documentation, changes and even transformations take place. The precise nature of such changes may be debatable, but that change does take place should not be a matter of dispute." Similarly, Ronald E. Clements observes that "written prophecy is necessarily different from oral prophecy precisely because it is written and is thereby made subject to the gains and losses that written fixation entails." The point is this: when the spoken word of the prophet is transcribed, some degree of "metamorphosis" occurs.
In the most modest of terms, written prophecy has fewer geographic and temporal limitations than its counterpart. Whereas oral prophecy functions within well-defined spatial and temporal categories, written prophecy moves about freely in diaspora, both figuratively and literally (for example, Jer 29:1-14). Accordingly, prophetic texts can do what prophets cannot; and they can go where prophets are forbidden. Scrolls have access to insolent kings who are intent on silencing disturbing prophets. And even though brazen acts of political force can destroy scrolls, others can be produced, demonstrating their resilient character. As Regina Schwartz states, despite royal disdain for the text, "the text persists." Walter Brueggemann suggests that "God will generate as many scrolls as necessary to override the king's [i.e., Jehoiakim's] zeal for autonomy." In spite of its liabilities, the scroll—as symbol, literary artifact, and potent presence—compensates for the vanquished prophet.
Written prophecy, however, is more than a liberated surrogate of the spoken word. Prophetic speech and prophetic writing represent two different though complementary enterprises. Prophecy as oral communication is raw, iconoclastic, immediate, and exacting. It seeks to bring about fundamental changes in social arrangements, often before the collapse of long-standing and cherished structures—political, religious, economic, and symbolic. Prophecy as written communication attends to the survivors. It takes shape during and after the frightful events; all the while it engages in artful reinterpretation and reenactment. This complex literary activity in ancient Israel—which no doubt involves a degree of "routinisation" (coined by Max Weber)—strives to find meaning and reform values during times of war and social dislocation. To be sure, the shift from orality to writing involves a realignment of intentionality, setting, and audience.
Written prophecy converts prewar oracles into postwar texts. It transforms prophets of doom into prophets of salvation. Written prophecy marches to the beat of "scroll time" rather than to the directives of ordinary (chronological) time. It is governed by a Sitz im Buch rather than a Sitz im Leben. And eventually written prophecy comes to enjoy an authoritative role that eclipses its oral counterpart, not only in the postbiblical world but also in the evolving biblical tradition itself. In some embryonic form the prophetic text wields the power to dismantle entrenched social and mythic structures. It serves as the basis to judge the legitimacy of oral prophecy. And it seeks to generate hope and a sense of identity in people whose world has collapsed, whose cherished forms of life have been confounded and whose conceptual universe has been shattered.
Building on these observations as well as on other recent developments in the interpretation of the Latter Prophets, we would suggest that written prophecy is survival literature for communities under siege and at risk of symbolic and cultural collapse. In large measure this literary artifact shows marked signs of liminality and danger because of hegemonic constraints; written prophecy is a rich and varied symbolic response to these devastating forces. More specifically, it functions as a meaning-making map intended to help war-torn communities and conquered societies endure decimating loss. While this symbolic map is diverse and wide-ranging, and at times even cacophonic, it is not formless. By being attentive to distinguishing characteristics and overarching structures, one can identify an anatomy of hope amid the literary chaos.
These wide-ranging claims are clearly predisposed—and probably doomed—to formalistic fallacies. Our only defense is that they are intended not to be definitive but only suggestive and, it is hoped, generative. In that spirit, we offer a series of brief statements on the character of written prophecy in the Bible.
The prophetic literature is survival literature for postwar communities living through monstrous events. Coarse language of violence together with penetrating images of cultural ruin run through the literary terrain. Shocking scenes of brutality give the corpus its erratic and discontinuous quality. Put concretely, written prophecy bears witness to unmanageable social and symbolic dissonance as a result of colonizing forces located on the Tigris and Euphrates. As Donald E. Gowan has said, the two focal points of the prophetic literature are the fall of Samaria in the eighth century (by the Assyrian military machine) and the collapse of Jerusalem in the sixth century (by the neo-Babylonian armies). We would suggest that community survival within the Persian Empire is also a focal concern of this literature. Primarily because of imperial constraints—imposed by Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia, and their designs toward absolute power—the prophetic corpus is a literary artifact of terror and vulnerability, a disturbing cultural expression of lament and chaos. Its multiple voices are often raw, unpredictable, and violent because savage forces perceived as both human and divine have devastated symbolic and social worlds.
From the testimony of survivors, both ancient and contemporary, we know that such wreckage not only causes physical and emotional havoc, but it also evokes probing questions about meaning: the meaning of atrocity; the meaning of moral chaos; the meaning of divine silence. The prophetic corpus, like many contemporary expressions of art that are informed by war atrocities, are penetrating responses to multifaceted configurations of evil, hegemony, and cosmic inertia. When detonated, these real and symbolic configurations explode into unthinkable violence and horror.
Bubbling beneath the surface of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve are marked signs of liminality, danger, and palpable disease. The ravages of war and forced deportation are never far from the purview of the Isaian tradition. The collapse of trusted belief systems and long-standing institutions gives Jeremiah its distinctive character. The loss of shrine and the resultant dislocation of God are central concerns in Ezekiel, and these concerns fuel the prophet's insistence that the refugee community should recognize the divine presence in a wide range of arenas of their marginal life (more than forty times, "that you shall know that I am YHWH"). The implied readers of the Twelve, who are also located at the edge of time, must manage their way through profound disorientation as a national narrative unravels. Amos addresses a state on the eve of destruction. Hosea's deathbed musings—for example, How did it all go so wrong? (9:15)—reveal late-stage communal trauma. Using the imagery of ravenous locusts, Joel warns of a dreadful military invasion. Zechariah 1–8 pulsates with the pain of demographic dislocation and pining for "the holy land" (Zech 2:12).
Accordingly, written prophecy is eschatological. It addresses communities in the throes of upheaval and disjunction, communities that are living with an acute sense of liminality. The breakdown of cherished social realities and understandings of life is apparent not only in the devastating events and oracles of doom but also in the language itself—language that pulsates with pain, staggers in darkness, and rages in raw emotion. Attempts by later interpretive communities to tone down this incendiary speech do little to mute its renderings of a God who implodes in anguish and lashes out in wrath.
Prophetic literature dares to address the realities of war in particular. It speaks of annihilated worlds and traumatized communities. While its constructions are certainly open to criticism—especially its tendency to scapegoat and trade in wholesale blame (see below)—this corpus refuses to close down the senses and banish memory. W. G. Sebald's thesis in his work On the Natural History of Destruction reminds us that postwar Germany did exactly that: it demonstrated well "people's ability to forget what they do not want to know ... and carry on as if nothing had happened." Written prophecy resists this propensity, at least for its implied audience. Admittedly, prophetic memory can be quite selective; it is capable of "disappearing acts," as in the case of the Judean community that remained "in the land" after the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian invasions. Nonetheless, a sustained determination to deal with paralyzing loss defines biblical prophecy.
This literary tradition not only gives speech to disaster; it also functions as a rich and complex response to massive disjunction. More specifically, it serves as a meaning-making map, a tapestry of hope, which strives to sustain those suffering a cascade of direct traumas such as military invasion, occupation, the loss of homeland and family, shaming, torture, forced displacement and resettlement, as well as secondary or historical trauma. And trauma, whether direct or secondary, diminishes agency, numbs the senses, and destroys one's sense of identity; it reduces the world to silence. In prophecy the voice returns!
Although prophetic constructions of meaning are elusive and unwieldy, they are not amorphous. Similar to biological survival, which depends on certain microorganisms as well as complex physical and chemical reactions, written prophecy enjoys its own anatomy of meaning. In the broadest of terms, this literature addresses the basic needs of survivors for hope, dignity, agency, acceptance, and forgiveness. It attempts to help displaced communities "make sense" of a world in which death and despair are more demonstrable than moral symmetry. As Gordon W. Allport notes in the foreword to Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in this suffering." It seems to us that written prophecy is in some measure an attempt to find meaning in events that defy ordinary categories, events that are beyond communal recognition. Put negatively, the "literarization" of prophecy is spurred by the collapse of coherent networks of meaning, including revered social structures, cultural identities, and theological maps. Put positively, written prophecy attends to the symbolic, psychological, and emotional effects of the wreckage and strives to help survivors cope with their dangerous place within the empire.
Attentive to the text itself and its distinguishing indices, patterns, and macrostructures, especially the overarching judgment-salvation schema, one can identify threads of this tapestry of hope, markers of this meaning-making map. Whichever metaphor one employs, the telos of written prophecy is communal survival.
Prophetic meaning-making grows within the tumultuous particularities of life. As superscriptions suggest from the outset, configurations of meaning in the prophetic corpus are neither abstractions nor unfettered imagination, but like the faith of Israel are shaped by memory and physicality. In other words, the divine message is rooted in particular moments in the communal life experience of Israel. To "genericize" the realities of community life, to deny its human face, to extricate it from the fissured world is to read against the grain of written prophecy.
Prophetic meaning-making is candid about the deep ruptures of life. It names and breaks a surplus of denials, and it exposes assumptions and values that would anesthetize the community to its true condition. Amos, for instance, announces that the end has come for Israel (8:2). Micah weeps over Judah's incurable wound (1:8-9). While addressing hybrid social realities, Ezekiel attempts to repair the huge breach in the theological world of the Babylonian exiles. Hosea insists that Israel's fascination with other deities will lead to imminent disaster. Jeremiah bears witness to the failure of both venerated institutions and understandings of reality associated with the dynasty and temple. Although certain voices eagerly proclaim, "Peace, peace" (Jer 6:14; 8:11; see also Mic 3:5), the prophetic chorus overwhelmingly contends that all is not well! Such engagement may appear to have little to do with hope. But recovery— communal and individual—begins by telling the truth. Indeed, facing life's particularities head-on and relinquishing false hopes and detrimental securities are the principal resources of "collective healing," a term used by psychiatrist and human rights advocate Jean-Marie Lemaire.
Prophetic meaning-making moves beyond candor to critique. As survival literature for war-torn communities, written prophecy not only discerns what others fail to see, it also renders incisive cultural and ethical commentary on existing structures and "first principles." In this capacity, it puts virtually every facet of national life under scrutiny and contends, in large measure, that cardinal infractions have been committed. As long recognized, the prophetic word uncovers the social and symbolic patterns that foster exploitation, injustice, idolatry, and other falsehoods, including unfounded assurances for the future.
Prophetic meaning-making destabilizes and deconstructs (as a starting point for reconstruction and realignment). Written prophecy not only exposes communal acts of injustice—which Abraham Heschel calls a "deathblow to existence, a threat to the world"—it also authorizes the dismantling of cultural arrangements and institutions, dogmas, and traditions that perpetuate such wrongdoing. It does so by deploying a rhetorical arsenal, including accusation, disputation, covenant lawsuit, Deuteronomistic alternative speech, sermon, prophetic story and symbolic action, liturgy, dirge, and of course indictment and judgment oracles. When written prophecy takes on perpetrators of injustice and the systems that support them, it vies for congruent ethical arrangements in the face of moral chaos. A corollary of this interpretive move is the capacity to make sense of the nonsense of radical suffering.
Prophetic meaning-making places disjunction and disaster within a context of meaning. In her study "Refugee Women's Psychological Response to Forced Migration," Elzbieta Gozdziak argues that viable explanations of suffering are crucial to individual and community survival. On some primal level, written prophecy functions as a complex theodicy, which is little more than an attempt to help survivors cope with massive devastation and imagine new life springing forth from the ruins of war and exile. To this end, the corpus garners a rich array of metaphorical constructions to harness symbolic, cultural, and emotional chaos. Ezekiel constructs a retributive and morally exacting universe in which disaster and dislocation neither impugn God's character (name) nor compromise God's power. Drawing in part on conventional wisdom norms, Amos argues for a meaningful correlation between Israel's conduct and its imminent demise. Informed by Deuteronomistic categories, the Jeremianic prose sermons articulate symmetrical moral arrangements, which attend to the construction of orderly Weltanschauung (comprehension of the world). Complex asymmetrical understandings of suffering in Second Isaiah serve to highlight ethical anomie (see, for example, the "Servant songs"; see also the so-called confessions in the book of Jeremiah).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from You Are My People by Louis Stulman, Hyun Chul Paul Kim. Copyright © 2010 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Abbreviations,
Introduction,
Chapter One: Reading the Prophets as Meaning-making Literature for Communities under Siege,
Part One: The Book of Isaiah,
Chapter Two: Isaiah as Messenger of Faith amid Doubt,
Chapter Three: Vision of Homecoming amid Diaspora,
Part Two: The Book of Jeremiah,
Chapter Four: Jeremiah as a Messenger of Hope in Crisis,
Chapter Five: Jeremiah as a Complex Response to Suffering,
Chapter Six: Conflicting Paths to Hope in Jeremiah,
Part Three: The Book of Ezekiel,
Chapter Seven: Ezekiel as Disaster Literature,
Chapter Eight: Ezekiel as Survival Literature,
Part Four: The Book of the Twelve,
Chapter Nine: An Anthology of Dispersion and Diagnosis (Hosea–Micah),
Chapter Ten: An Anthology of Debate and Rebuilding (Nahum–Malachi),
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index of Scripture References,