Professor Christine
Hayes: We were talking last
time about prophets of the
Assyrian crisis.
We've talked about two of the
northern prophets,
Amos and Hosea,
and we started talking about
Isaiah who was a southern
prophet, a prophet in Judah;
and we'll be talking now about
the second southern prophet of
the Assyrian crisis.
 
That is Micah, or Micah.
 
And he is said to come from the
town of Moreshet,
which is about 25 miles
southwest of Jerusalem.
So he's in Judah,
and he's the last of the
eighth-century prophets.
 
He's quite different from the
city-bred Isaiah.
He seems to have been a rural
prophet who spoke for the poor
farmers.
Now, he's prophesying in the
second part of the eighth
century, so 740 to about 700.
He's attacking the northern
kingdom, although he's a
southern prophet.
 
He attacks Israel for
idolatries and says that the
kingdom will surely fall because
of these.
So he also follows the other
prophets, as we've seen,
in condemning the people for
their moral failings.
The greedy landowners,
the dishonest merchants,
the aristocracy,
they're all targets of his
denunciations as are other
leaders: the priests,
the judges, royalty,
the royal house as well as
other false prophets.
 
But the greatest contrast
between Isaiah and Micah--if you
want to differentiate these two
southern prophets of the
Assyrian crisis in your
mind--the greatest contrast lies
in his view of the city as
inherently corrupt.
It's inherently sinful;
it's inherently doomed to
destruction.
Isaiah had preached the
inviolability of Zion and Micah
is sharply critical of the
Davidic dynasty.
He ridicules the idea of the
inviolability of Zion.
 
He ridicules the belief that
the presence of the sanctuary in
Jerusalem somehow protects the
city from harm.
He says, on the contrary,
that God will destroy his city
and his house if need be.
 
Micah 3:9-12:
Hear this,
you rulers of the House of
Jacob,
You chiefs of the House of
Israel,
Who detest justice
And make crooked all that is
straight,
Who build Zion with crime,
Jerusalem with iniquity!
 
Her rulers judge for gifts,
Her priests give rulings for a
fee,
And her prophets divine for pay;
Yet they rely upon the Lord,
saying,
"The Lord is in our midst;
No calamity shall overtake us."
Assuredly, because of you
Zion shall be plowed as a field,
And Jerusalem shall become
heaps of ruins,
And the Temple Mount
A shrine in the woods.
A stark contrast then between
Isaiah who trusts and has
confidence that God will never
allow His holy city to be
destroyed,
his sanctuary to be destroyed.
His presence in the midst of
the city is a guarantee that it
will survive.
And Micah says:
it's no guarantee of anything.
 
One of the most famous passages
in the Book of Micah is in
chapter 6--eight verses in
chapter 6--and this is a passage
that takes the form of a
covenant lawsuit,
which we've talked about
before, and the structure is as
follows (I've put it up on the
white board there):
The first two verses are the
issuing of the summons,
the summons to the case.
 
So the prophet here is acting
as God's attorney and he summons
the accused and he summons the
witnesses--those would be the
mountains,
who are to hear the case
against Israel,
God's case against Israel:
Hear what the Lord is
saying:
Come, present [My]
case before the mountains,
And let the hills hear you
pleading.
Hear, you mountains,
the case of the Lord--
You firm foundations of the
earth!
For the Lord has a case [=a
lawsuit]
against His people,
He has a suit against
Israel.
So those are the opening verses
and in verses 3 to 5 we then
move on to the plaintiff's
charge, God's charge or
accusation.
And this is given,
again, through the attorney.
He appeals to Israel's memory
of all of the events that have
manifested his great love for
her.
That begins with the exodus of
course and continues with the
entry into the Promised Land and
he says Israel seems to have
forgotten all of these deeds
that God has performed on her
behalf,
and the obligations that those
deeds obviously entail.
 
Israel's conduct in response to
this continuous benevolence on
God's part is appalling.
 
In verses 6 to 7 you have the
defendant's plea.
This is Israel speaking,
but Israel really,
of course, has no case to
plead.
And Israel knows that her only
choice is to try to effect
reconciliation but she doesn't
know where to begin.
Verses 6-7:
With what shall I
approach the Lord,
Do homage to God on high?
Shall I approach Him with burnt
offerings,
With calves a year old?
 
Would the Lord be pleased with
thousands of rams,
With myriads of streams of oil?
 
Shall I give my firstborn for
my transgression,
The fruit of my body for my
sins?
And the prophetic
attorney--because the prophet is
here acting as the attorney--in
verse 8, responds to this.
"He has told you,
O man, what is good,
And what the Lord requires of
you:
Only to do justice
And to love goodness,
And to walk humbly with your
God." [See note 1]
And the word that has been
translated here as goodness,
is this word hesed.
 
This is a word that we
discussed last week in relation
to Hosea, and it's a word that
seems to refer to that
covenantal loyalty,
the loyal love of covenantal
partners.
This is a classic passage that
really typifies the prophetic
emphasis on morality or the
primacy of morality in prophetic
thought.
The book of Micah itself
structurally alternates three
prophecies of doom with three
prophecies of restoration or
hope.
So it's doom,
restoration,
doom, restoration,
doom, restoration.
 
These last prophecies tell of
the glory of Zion to come in the
future.
These restoration passages may
seem a little out of keeping or
out of step with the scathing
denunciations or condemnations
of Judah in the other parts of
Micah's prophecy,
and so some scholars have
suggested that those restoration
passages and those references to
God's unconditional promise to
preserve the Davidic kingdom,
and the optimistic predictions
of universal peace--these must
be interpolations by a later
editor.
And it's true that certain
parts we see again in Isaiah.
But this is always a very
difficult case or issue,
because we know that the
prophetic writings do fluctuate
wildly between denunciation and
consolation.
So I think that a shift in
theme alone is not ever a
certain basis for assuming
interpolation--outright
contradiction perhaps--but a
shift in theme or tone is never
a solid basis for assuming
interpolation.
Anachronism is a very good
guide to interpolation.
So Micah explicitly refers to
the Babylonian exile,
of course, and that's going to
be in 586 and he's in the eighth
century.
He's also going to refer to the
rebuilding of the walls of
Jerusalem.
The walls of Jerusalem aren't
even destroyed until 586 for
anyone to even speak about
rebuilding them,
so those little units or
passages may of course represent
late editorial interpolations.
 
But in its present form--in
that nice structure of
alternation of denunciation,
restoration,
denunciation,
restoration,
a pattern that happens three
times--that structure,
is I think typical of the
common paradox that we find in
the prophetic writings where
they try to balance God's stern
judgment on the one hand,
his punishment,
with his merciful love and
salvation of his people.
A further paradox lies in the
very preservation of prophecies
like Micah's prophecy.
 
These prophecies were probably
preserved by priests in the
temple, even though priests were
very often among the targets of
the prophets in their
denunciations,
particularly Micah.
 
Alright, so we've talked about
the prophets who responded to
the Assyrian crisis towards the
end of the eighth century,
two in the north,
two in the south.
Jerusalem survived the siege of
701 when the Assyrians laid
siege in 701.
And that gave credence to the
royal ideology,
the idea that God was with
Zion,
was with Jerusalem,
and was with the House of David
and would preserve them,
but even so Judah moves into
the next century,
into the 600s in a considerably
weakened state after the siege.
And it's during that
century--the first half of the
next century--that Assyria
reached the zenith of its power.
In Judah, you have King
Manasseh reigning.
Now, King Manasseh reigned for
nearly 50 years.
We're not sure of exact dates,
but somewhere around the 690s
to the 640s, about 640:
50 years.
Now remarkably,
the Deuteronomistic historian
devotes only 18 verses to this
king who reigned for 50 years
and all of those verses are
entirely negative.
And that's in great contrast to
their treatment of his father,
Hezekiah, and his grandson who
follows him, Josiah.
Manasseh was apparently a loyal
vassal of Assyria,
and according to the biblical
writer he reversed the reforms
of his father Hezekiah who is
said by the writer to have
destroyed idolatry and so on.
 
But he is said to have reversed
that and to have adopted
Assyrian norms.
As we move through this century
and move towards the latter half
of this century,
Assyria, which has overextended
itself is beginning to decline
and some of the other states in
the Ancient Near East are able
to break away.
First Egypt breaks away;
Babylon breaks away.
 
Josiah comes to the throne in
Judah in 740.
He sees Assyria's weakness.
 
He decides to take advantage of
that and asserts Judean
independence,
carries out a series of
reforms--we've talked about
several times--in 622,
which include purging the cult
perhaps of Assyrian religious
influences, centralizing worship
of Yahweh only and in Jerusalem,
and so on.
So this centralization of the
cult served probably a political
agenda as well,
of asserting independence from
Assyria.
Assyria is continuing to
decline towards the end of this
century and in 612 the capital
Nineveh will fall.
The Babylonians manage to
conquer the Assyrians by
destroying Nineveh;
it's actually an alliance of
Medes and Babylonians.
 
So things are going quite well.
 
Josiah is king;
he's a favored king,
but just a few years later he
will die in a battle against the
Egyptians at Megiddo.
 
So a little bit of historical
background for you as we talk
about the next prophets.
 
Alright, so Josiah,
the king who's highly favored
will die in 609.
Now, Zephaniah was a Judean
prophet who prophesied during
the reign of King Josiah.
So we're going to be moving on
now to Zephaniah and Jeremiah,
as the prophets of the
Babylonian crisis--and we're
going to throw in a couple of
prophetic characters along the
way,
but they will be the two main
prophets of the Babylonian
crisis, obviously in the
south--all we have now is a
southern kingdom,
Judah--but I'll be picking up
on two other prophets in a
moment as well.
So he prophesied during the
time of King Josiah.
 
Some of his prophecies seem to
date to the time,
we think, before Josiah's
reforms in 622.
And those prophecies tend to be
very pessimistic and very grim.
Judah is condemned.
 
It's condemned for apostasy;
it's condemned for decadence,
all of the things that
flourished under King Manasseh.
God is wrathful and his wrath
is imminent.
There will be a universal
destruction according to
Zephaniah.
All life, animal and human,
will be exterminated.
 
So, as we saw in the book of
Amos this Day of Yahweh,
this Day of the Lord,
which has been so eagerly
awaited,
will not in fact be a day of
triumph, but a day of dark
destruction and despair.
Zephaniah 1:15-18,
That day shall be a day
of wrath,
A day of trouble and distress,
A day of calamity and
desolation,
A day of darkness and deep
gloom,
A day of densest clouds,
A day of horn blasts and
alarms--
Against the fortified towns
And the lofty corner towers.
 
I will bring distress on the
people
And they shall walk like blind
men,
Because they sinned against the
Lord;
Their blood shall be spilled
like dust,
And their fat like dung.
 
Moreover, their silver and gold
Shall not avail to save them.
On the day of the Lord's wrath,
In the fire of his passion,
The whole land shall be
consumed;
For He will make a terrible end
Of all who dwell in the
land.
You can see why people didn't
enjoy listening to these
prophets, but at the same time,
like the other prophets,
Zephaniah also offered hope.
There will be a humble remnant
which will seek refuge in God.
These Jewish exiles,
he says, will be delivered from
their oppressors and even
Gentiles will join in the
worship of God.
Zephaniah 3:11-13:
"In that day,
You will no longer be shamed
for all the deeds
By which you have defied me.
For then I will remove
The proud and exultant within
you,
And you will be haughty no more
On my sacred mount.
 
But I will leave within you
A poor, humble folk,
"--this idea of purging the
dross and leaving the pure
remnant--"And they shall find
refuge
In the name of the Lord.
 
The remnant of Israel
Shall do no wrong
And speak no falsehood;
A deceitful tongue
Shall not be in their mouths.
 
Only such as these shall graze
and lie down,
With none to trouble
them."
There will also be an
ingathering of any exiled.
Verse 20:
"At that time I will
gather you,
And at [that]
time I will bring you [home];
For I will make you renowned
and famous
Among all the peoples on earth,
When I restore your fortunes
Before their very eyes."
There's one passage in
particular that seems
extraordinarily joyous.
 
It seems to announce the
salvation as happening now,
as present and so a lot of
scholars think that this was
Zephaniah's reaction to Josiah
and Josiah's reform which seemed
to him to perhaps be the very
salvation for which the nation
was longing.
Chapter 3:14 and 15:
Shout for joy, Fair Zion,
Cry aloud, O Israel!
Rejoice and be glad with all
your heart,
Fair Jerusalem!
The Lord has annulled the
judgment against you,
He has swept away your foes.
Israel's Sovereign the Lord is
within you;
You need fear misfortune no
more.
So, this sounds very much like
a reaction to these reforms
initiated by Josiah.
 
This is hailed as the very
restoration of God's presence in
the community of Judah that was
desired.
The judgment has been annulled,
these terrible things I've been
prophesying will not happen.
 
Another short prophetic book we
should mention now is the Book
of Nahum.
It's very different from the
other prophetic books.
 
It doesn't really contain
prophecies and it doesn't really
upbraid the people for their
failings,
which are two things that most
of the other prophets do.
The Book of Nahum is a short
little book and it's really a
series of three poems and the
first one is an acrostic poem,
an alphabetical poem--each line
beginning with successive
letters of the Hebrew
alphabet--and these poems
rejoice over the fall of Nineveh
in 612,
the capital of the cruel
Assyrian empire.
The Assyrians were actually
quite widely hated in the
Ancient Near East.
 
They were noted for their
exceptional brutality,
their inhumanity,
particularly in their conquests
and empire building.
 
They deported populations
wholesale;
they were guilty of all sorts
of atrocities like mutilating
their captives;
they would butcher women and
children--all sorts of
horrendous deeds.
We have lots of testimony about
this, both in Assyrian sources
but other Ancient Near Eastern
sources, texts as well as
artwork.
So Nahum, in this poem,
is celebrating the avenging and
wrathful God who has finally
turned around to destroy this
terrible enemy of Israel and
indeed the world.
 
According to Nahum,
it's quite true that God had
used Assyria as his tool.
 
He had used Assyria to
discipline the kingdom of
Israel--they did destroy
Israel--and to discipline Judah
for Judah's sins.
 
But God is ultimately the
universal sovereign and so
Assyria's savagery--even if it
was part of God's disciplining
of his children is--Assyria's
savagery is itself something
that must be punished.
 
So for Nahum,
the fall of Nineveh is God's
vengeance upon Assyria for her
barbaric inhumanity.
The Book of Nahum has often
been praised for its very vivid
poetic style.
It describes these armed
legions that march against
Nineveh and plunder its
treasure,
and some of the most exciting
archaeology that's been going on
has been the digging up of
Nineveh.
I think the dig has obviously
stopped for reasons having to do
with the climate in that part of
the world,
but the findings of Nineveh and
the sacking of Nineveh--how
shallow pits were dug and
treasures thrown into them and
covered over by the gates of the
city as people were fleeing,
and many of these things-- when
you read the description of
Nineveh and look at some of the
archaeological data,
it's quite fascinating.
But Nahum looks forward to a
happy era of freedom for Judah
and he says in 2:15:
"For never again shall the
wicked come against you."
 
Well, this isn't true,
and in fact,
in a few years Josiah's going
to be killed.
Judah's going to be made
subject to Egypt and in fact
Babylon.
By 605 Babylon manages to
extract tribute from Judah as a
vassal.
So in a way,
we have here really a glaring
error and it's important to note
that this error in Nahum--it
wasn't updated,
it wasn't repaired in order to
protect his prophetic
reputation.
So we see this interesting
tension.
We sometimes see prophetic
books being edited,
revised, having interpolations
put into them,
partly out of this conviction
that their words must be
relevant and continue to have
some relevance;
and other times,
there seems to be good evidence
that prophetic oracles were
preserved rather faithfully.
But with the fall of Nineveh,
national confidence was
probably boosted and then things
quickly turned sour with the
death of Josiah in 609,
which was a terrible shock.
You have Judah lying trapped,
as it were, between two great
powers: Egypt in the southwest,
Babylon in the northeast.
And in 605, as I said,
Babylon managed to defeat Egypt
and reduce Judah to the status
of a tributary vassal under the
King Jehoiakim.
King Jehoiakim rebels and in
response, the Babylonians lay
siege to Jerusalem.
There will be two sieges of
Jerusalem by the Babylonians
just as we've had two sieges
earlier--two sieges:
one in 597,
one in 587, both under
Nebuchadnezzar.
He lays siege to Jerusalem in
597, and doesn't destroy
Jerusalem.
He kills the king,
takes the king's son into
captivity in Babylon and
installs a puppet king,
still under the assumption that
things could be kept under
control.
So the puppet King Zedekiah is
on the throne but he also
decides to rebel and assert
Judah's independence against the
Babylonians.
So Nebuchadnezzar returns,
and this is in 587.
And now the city is in fact
captured, the sanctuary is
completely destroyed,
and the bulk of the population
is exiled and this is what
brings to end nearly 400years of
an independent Hebrew nation.
 
The Book of Habakkuk was
written during this period,
so 600 to the
destruction--somewhere in those
years.
That's the period in which the
Babylonians attacked Jerusalem
twice.
Habakkuk is another unusual
prophetic book.
It doesn't contain prophecies,
so much as it contains
philosophical musings on God's
behavior.
And we're going to see this
increasing now as we move into
the next section of the Bible
when we complete the prophetic
section.
We'll be encountering writings
of very different genres and
some of them do contain these
philosophical musings on God's
conduct.
Habakkuk 1 and 2 are a kind of
poetic dialogue between the
prophet and Yahweh,
and the prophet complains
bitterly about God's inaction.
 
Verses 2 and 3 of the first
chapter:
How long,
O Lord, shall I cry out
And You not listen,
Shall I shout to you "Violence!"
And you not save?
 
Why do You make me see iniquity
[Why] do You look upon wrong?--
Raiding and violence are before
me,
Strife continues and contention
goes on.
And skipping down to verses 13
and 14,
You whose eyes are too
pure to look upon evil,
Who cannot countenance
wrongdoing,
Why do you countenance
treachery.
And stand by idle
While the one in the wrong
devours
The one in the right?
You have made mankind like the
fish of the sea,
Like creeping things that have
no ruler.
Well, God responds to these
charges by saying that the
Babylonians are the instruments
of his justice even though they
ascribe their might and their
success to their gods,
rather than to Yahweh.
 
Now, we've already seen in
other books the idea that a
conquering nation is serving as
the instrument of God's
punishment.
But Habakkuk is a little bit
unusual because he doesn't couch
this idea in the larger argument
that Judah deserves this
catastrophic punishment.
There's a great difference
between Habakkuk and the
Deuteronimistic historian,
for example,
because Habakkuk doesn't assert
that the people are suffering
for their sins.
Habakkuk is struggling with
what appears to him to be a
basic lack of justice.
The Deuteuronomistic historian
wants to assert God's justice,
and whatever suffering happens
is justifiable.
Habakkuk is resisting that idea
and we're going to see that
resistance really come to a
climax next week when we talk
about the Book of Job.
 
Habakkuk in 1:4 struggles with
this, "…decision fails / And
justice never emerges.
 
/ For the villain hedges in the
just man-- / Therefore judgment
emerges deformed."
 
It's not merely that the wicked
and the righteous suffer the
same fate, it's that the wicked
really seem to fare better than
the just and that reduces
humankind to the level of fish
and creeping things for whom
sheer power and not morality is
the principal consideration.
 
Now, having made this charge,
Habakkuk awaits God's answer.
In chapter 2:1-5 he says,
I will stand on my watch,
Take up my station at the post,
And wait to see what He will
say to me,
What He will reply to my
complaint.
The Lord answered me and said:
"Write the prophecy down,
Inscribe it clearly on tablets,
So that it can be read easily.
 
…the righteous man is
rewarded with life
For his fidelity.
 
How much less then shall the
defiant go unpunished,…
Not a terribly deep answer.
 
The righteous simply have to
have faith that justice will
prevail and this faith has to
sustain them through the trials
that challenge that very idea.
 
We'll see a deeper answer to
this same problem in the Book of
Job.
The third chapter then shifts
gears.
So much so that once again
scholars say it must be an
interpolation.
But again, I would warn that
dramatic shifts in tone and
theme are not that uncommon in
the prophetic books and we have
to be careful.
But in this third chapter,
God is described as a warrior
god.
He thunders from the east,
he hurls his spear,
he seeks vengeance on Israel's
oppressors.
It may be that this is some
editor's attempt to respond to
Habakkuk's skepticism that
Yahweh will bring justice--and
bring it soon-- that he's
waiting: how long?
why is this taking you so long?
 
Why are you not acting?
 
And this image of an avenging
warrior God answers Habakkuk's
opening question:
How long will God stand by and
watch while the Babylonians rape
and pillage?
But on the other hand,
it's possible that it's
Habakkuk himself and again the
book exhibits that same
paradoxical tension we've seen
through so many of the prophetic
books.
Specifically,
he holds out the paradoxical
view that God's justice is slow
in coming but the righteous must
have complete faith in its
ultimate execution.
 
But he's raised the issue of
theodicy, the problem of evil,
the problem of suffering.
 
Ultimately, he sees the
problem's resolution only in
some vision of the future--an
avenging God,
when justice will be done.
 
That is typical of some texts
that we will see later,
particularly apocalyptic
literature,
which is going to emphasize
patient waiting for an end time
when there will be a cataclysmic
final act that will bring
justice and judgment.
 
Now the prophet,
who lived at the time of the
final destruction of Judah,
saw the fall of Jerusalem at
the hands of the Babylonians in
587 was the prophet Jeremiah,
another long prophetic book.
 
So we have our three long
prophetic books,
Isaiah of the Assyrian crisis,
Jeremiah of the Babylonian
crisis,
and Ezekiel writing from exile
in Babylon.
Jeremiah was born of a priestly
family in a village near
Jerusalem, Anathoth,
and he began prophesying while
he was still a boy.
Now, he was a contemporary of
King Josiah and so he saw the
renaissance that briefly
occurred under his guidance:
the sweeping reform,
the eradication of Assyrian
influences that had been
welcomed by King Manasseh,
the renewal of the covenant,
all of these activities that
are so highly favored by the
biblical writer.
And when Josiah died,
Jeremiah also lamented his
passing, along with the rest of
the nation.
Jeremiah witnessed the final
destruction and the exile.
The Book of Jeremiah is a
collection of very different
types of material.
 
There's really no clear
organization,
there's no clear chronological
order, not the kind of thing you
can just sort of sit down and
read from beginning to end and
hope it'll make sense.
 
There are prophecies,
there are oracles and diatribes
against foreign nations,
there are stories,
biographical narratives,
there's some poetry,
and at the very end a little
brief historical appendix which
really resembles 2 Kings:
24 and 25.
So the literary history of the
book itself is also quite
complex because there's great
variation in our ancient
witnesses.
The Septuagint,
which is the Greek translation
of the Bible--third century BCE
Greek translation of the
Bible--its Jeremiah is much
shorter than the Hebrew version
of Jeremiah and it's arranged
differently;
internally, the arrangement is
different.
There are also significant
differences between the Hebrew
text that we have now and some
fragments of Jeremiah that have
been found among the Dead Sea
scrolls.
So this attests to the very
open-ended nature of written
compositions in antiquity.
We find three main types of
material, however,
in Jeremiah.
(1) The poetic oracles that
generally are attributed to
Jeremiah;
Then (2) biographical anecdotes
and narratives about him,
which are attributed to his
amanuensis and assistant whose
name I don't think I put up
here.
Baruch ben Neriah,
ben simply meaning son
of, so Baruch,
the son of Neriah,
whose name comes up quite a bit
in the Book of Jeremiah.
And he is a scribe who assists
Jeremiah, and it's thought that
perhaps the biographical
narrative sections were composed
by Baruch ben Neriah.
 
Then we also have (3) certain
editorial notes about Jeremiah
that are in the style of the
Deuteronomistic historian,
Deuteronomistic editor.
 
Jeremiah, in general,
seems to have very close
connections with the language
and the ideology of Deuteronomy.
So if we look quickly at the
structure of the book,
for the most part,
the first 25 chapters,
Jeremiah 1 through 25 contain
an introduction and an account
of Jeremiah's call,
but then also poetic oracles
with some biographical snippets
thrown in there as well.
Not snippets
narratives--biographical
narratives as well as poetic
oracles.
In 26to 29 we have stories of
his encounters--I should say
run-ins--with other prophets and
with authority figures of
various types.
Chapters 30 to 33 are oracles
of hope and consolation;
34 to 45 are more prose
stories, and these stories
center around and after the time
of the final destruction.
 
Then we have several chapters,
46 to 51 that contain oracles
against nations.
Some of these,
scholars think,
might be from other writers and
then again, as I say,
it concludes with this
historical appendix about the
fall of Jerusalem that's
extracted from 2 Kings.
 
Now, Jeremiah preached the
inevitable doom and destruction
of the nation because of its
violation of the covenant,
which was the very charter for
her existence,
and his descriptions were quite
vivid and quite terrifying.
He denounced Israel's leaders,
the professional prophets in
particular with whom he has many
encounters.
The professional prophets are
liars, he says,
because they prophesy peace.
 
He has some negative references
to priests as well,
but he's especially critical of
King Jehoiakim who's the son of
Josiah.
He can be compared to Micah
because he also attacked this
idea, this popular ideology of
the inviolability of Zion.
 
As long as injustice and
oppression are practiced in
Judah, the presence of the
temple is no guarantee of
anything.
Judah will suffer the fate that
she deserves for failure to
fulfill her covenantal
obligations.
So God tells Jeremiah to go
stand at the gate of the temple
and speak these words,
and this is a passage that's
often referred to as the "Temple
Sermon."
It's from chapter 7:
Thus said the Lord of
Hosts, the God of Israel:
Mend your ways and your
actions, and I will let you
dwell in this place.
 
Don't put your trust in
illusions and say,
"The Temple of the Lord,
the Temple of the Lord,
the Temple of the Lord are
these buildings."
No, if you really mend your
ways and your actions;
if you execute justice between
one man and another;
if you do not oppress the
stranger, the orphan,
and the widow…
You hear the language of
Deuteronomy right?
 
Those three are always together
in Deuteronomy,
drawing very heavily on the
same language.
If you do not oppress the
stranger, the orphan,
and the widow;
if you do not shed the blood of
the innocent in this place;
if you do not follow other
gods, to your own hurt --then
only will I let you dwell in
this place,
in the land that I gave to your
fathers for all time.
 
See, you are relying on
illusions that are to no avail.
Will you steal and murder and
commit adultery and swear
falsely,…
Again, allusion to the
Decalogue, right?
 
Those four terms in the
Decalogue.
Will you steal and murder
and commit adultery and swear
falsely, and sacrifice to Baal,
and follow other gods whom you
have not experienced,
and then come and stand before
Me in this house,
which bears My name and say,
"We are safe"?
[Safe]
to do all these abhorrent
things!
Do you consider this House,
which bears My name,
to be a den of thieves?
 
As for Me, I have been
watching--declares the
Lord.
So he attacked this doctrine of
the inviolability of Zion and
that would have been
iconoclastic to say the least.
 
But he pointed to history as
proof for his assertion.
He cites the example of Shiloh
as an example.
You remember during the period
of the Judges when the Ark of
the Covenant was peripatetic and
would stay at different places,
but for some time it came to
rest at Shiloh with the priest
Eli and his sons.
 
And in that time,
the Philistines managed to
destroy the sanctuary and
capture the Ark and carry it off
into Philistine territory.
 
So the presence of the Ark of
the Covenant is no guarantee of
anything, and the belief that
God would not allow his temple,
his city, his anointed ruler to
be destroyed,
Jeremiah says,
is a deception.
It's an illusion.
 
His political message resembles
very much the message of his
predecessors.
He says that the nation's
pathetic attempts to resist the
great powers and to enter into
alliances with the one against
the other--these were all
completely futile.
 
And to dramatically illustrate
the destruction and the slavery
that were inevitable,
he paraded around Jerusalem,
first in a wooden yoke and then
in an iron yoke.
He does this in chapters 27 and
28.
This is a symbol of the
slavery, the yoke of the master
that is to come.
In chapter 27:6 he claims that
God has power over all the Earth
and has given the Earth to
Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon,
God's servant.
As you can imagine,
referring to the destroyer of
the nation as God's servant
would have been shocking,
not to say dangerous.
 
You can imagine parallels in
our own time,
where people would see the God
most commonly understood to be
the God of most Americans being
the one who orchestrated attacks
against us.
It would have that same kind of
feel and power to people,
and in several passages
Jeremiah exhorts the king to
submit to the Babylonian forces.
This is acceptance of God's
will, the forces that are
surrounding Jerusalem.
 
To ensure the preservation of
his words, which were not
popular, Jeremiah had his
amanuensis Baruch write down
everything that God spoke to
him.
Chapter 36 gives us an insight
into this process.
It's kind of interesting
because Jeremiah's words are
transcribed.
God specifically tells Jeremiah
how to do this.
"Get a scroll," he says,
"and write upon it all the
words that I have spoken to
you--concerning Israel and Judah
and all the nations--from the
time I first spoke to you in the
days of Josiah to this time"
(36:2).
Now it's the time of
KingJehoiakim and then in verse
4 we read, "So Jeremiah called
Baruch son of Neriah;
and Baruch wrote down in the
scroll, at Jeremiah's dictation,
all the words which the Lord
had spoken to him."
 
Now, Jeremiah is in hiding at
this time because he's
politically very unpopular,
so he instructs Baruch to take
the scroll to the temple and to
stand there and to read it to
the people.
The king's officials are there.
They report to the king about
the subversive message which has
been delivered by Baruch.
 
So Baruch goes into hiding;
the scroll is torn into strips
and burned.
God orders Jeremiah to get
another scroll and repeat the
process, and he does.
Verse 32 of chapter 36,
"So Jeremiah got another scroll
and gave it to the scribe Baruch
son of Neriah.
And at Jeremiah's dictation,
he wrote in it the whole text
of the scroll that King
Jehoiakim of Judah had burned;
and more of the like was
added," – so,
and then some.
They came back with even more.
So it's possible--some scholars
suggest--that what was written,
would have been the contents of
chapters 1 to 25 which really
contains the oracular material,
the oracles.
But in any event,
this story gives us some
insight into the process of
prophecy.
It doesn't appear to have been
really off the cuff.
The compositions of the
prophets were literary
compositions that were committed
to memory;
they could then be dictated
again.
And on an archaeological note,
I should point out that one of
the most exciting finds,
I think, is a clay--in 1975
they found a clay bulla which is
like a clay imprint of Baruch
son of Neriah,
the scribe – that's what it
says on the clay imprint.
 
Another one was found in 1996.
 
It was said to be found in a
burnt house in Jerusalem,
which would have been around
the time of the destruction.
And it just showed up on the
antiquities market,
so some question whether it's
genuine or not.
The second one that was found
has a fingerprint on it and
people say, well,
that could be the fingerprint
of Baruch son of Neriah.
 
Anyway, this is the fun stuff
you get to do if you do
archaeology, but there are
plenty of people who think that
these probably are the seals of
the scribe Baruch son of Neriah,
that he would have used to
stamp anything that he would
have transcribed or written.
 
So Jeremiah was rejected;
he was despised;
he was persecuted by fellow
Judeans.
Naturally, they would have seen
him as a traitor.
He was flogged,
he was imprisoned.
Often in his life he was in
hiding, he was a very troubled
person and he lived in very
difficult times.
But we also get an insight into
his emotional state which we
don't from any of the other
prophets.
He suffered immensely;
he weeps over Jerusalem in
chapter 8 and 9.
We get a sense of the turmoil
that he suffers,
particularly because of a group
of passages that are referred to
as the Confessions of Jeremiah
and these are sort of scattered
throughout--some in chapters 11
and 12,
15,17, 18,20,
but these are passages that
reveal his inner state.
Some people question their
authenticity,
but in any event they paint a
very fascinating portrait of the
prophet.
He curses the day that he was
born;
he accuses God of deceiving
him, of enticing him to act as
God's messenger only to be met
with humiliation and shame,
but he can't hold it in.
God's words rage inside him and
he must prophesy.
It would be better had he not
been born at all than to suffer
this ceaseless pain.
 
Chapter 20:7-18,
just selections from there:
You enticed me,
O Lord, and I was enticed;
You overpowered me and You
prevailed.
I have become a constant
laughingstock,
Everyone jeers at me.
 
For every time I speak I must
cry out,
Must shout, "Lawlessness and
rapine!"
For the word of the Lord causes
me
Constant disgrace and contempt.
 
I thought, "I will not mention
Him,
No more will I speak in His
name"--
But [His Word]
was like a raging fire in my
heart,
Shut up in my bones;
I could not hold it in,
I was helpless.
I heard the whispers of the
crowd--
Terror all around:
"Inform!
Let us inform against him!"
 
…Accursed be the day
That I was born!
…Accursed be the man
Who brought my father the news
And said, "A boy / Is born to
you,"
And gave him such joy!
 
Let that man become like the
cities
Which the Lord overthrew
without relenting!
…Because he did not kill me
before birth
So that my mother might be my
grave,
And her womb big [with me]
for all time.
Why did I ever issue from the
womb,
To see misery and woe,
To spend all my days in
shame!
Nevertheless,
despite all of his very harsh
criticisms of the establishment
authorities,
the royal house and even
scribes, other prophets who are
labeled as liars by Jeremiah,
his words were preserved by
scribes, by the Deuteronomistic
editors.
Shortly after the fall of
Judah, Jeremiah was taken
forcibly to Egypt.
And he lived his final years
out in Egypt.
He didn't give up his job
though.
He kept denouncing people.
 
We have records of his
denouncing his fellow Judean
exiles down in Egypt for
worshipping the Queen of Heaven
and as before,
it seems very few heeded him
there.
But like the earlier prophets,
Jeremiah also balanced his
message with a message of
consolation,
and there are some very
interesting and unique features
of Jeremiah's message of
consolation.
These passages are found
particularly in chapters 30 to
33 where we have more hopeful
prophesies.
He envisages a restoration;
the exile will come to an end,
and in fact Jeremiah is the
first to actually set a time
limit to what we might refer to
as the dominion of the
idolaters;
the idolaters holding sway over
God's people,
and that time limit he says is
70 years.
Jeremiah writes a letter to the
first group of deportees,
so remember the first siege in
597?
You have the king killed,
his son and many people taken
into exile in Babylon.
 
Jeremiah, from Jerusalem,
writes a letter to that first
group of exiles and it's quite
remarkable,
it's found in chapter 29,
and it's quite remarkable for
its counsel, its advice to the
exiles to settle down in their
adopted home and just wait out
the time.
There is an appointed end.
 
He warns the people not to
listen to prophets who say you
will return shortly,
it's just a lie.
The Israelites have to serve
the king of Babylon and by doing
so they will live.
 
So in Jeremiah 29:4-7,
"Thus said the Lord of Hosts,
the God of Israel,
to the whole community which I
exiled from Jerusalem to
Babylon,"
--he's writing to the exiles:
Build houses and live in
them, plant gardens and eat
their fruit.
Take wives and beget sons and
daughters;
and take wives for your sons,
and give your daughters to
husbands, that they may bear
sons and daughters.
Multiply there, do not decrease.
 
And seek the welfare of the
city to which I have exiled
you..."
Instead of seek the welfare of
Jerusalem, seek the welfare of
the city to which I have exiled
you "and pray to the Lord in its
behalf;
for in its prosperity you shall
prosper.
In other words,
you're in for the long haul.
And you shouldn't be deceived
by the idle dreams or the false
prophets who tell you that
return is imminent.
God has other plans.
 
They are plans for welfare,
not for evil,
and they will give you a future
and a hope.
At the end of 70 years,
Jeremiah said,
there will be a great war of
all the nations and Judah and
Israel will be returned to their
land.
Zion, he declared,
would be acknowledged as the
Holy City and a new Davidic king
would reign.
A new covenant would be made
with Israel as well.
And this time,
Jeremiah says,
it's a covenant that will be
etched on the heart,
encoded as it were into human
nature.
Jeremiah 31:31-34:
See, a time is
coming--declares the Lord--when
I will make a new covenant with
the House of Israel and the
House of Judah.
It will not be like the
covenant I made with their
fathers, when I took them by the
hand to lead them out of the
land of Egypt,
a covenant which they broke,
so that I rejected
them--declares the Lord.
But such is the covenant I will
make with the House of Israel
after these days--declares the
Lord: I will put My Teaching
into their inmost being and
inscribe it upon their hearts.
Then I will be their God,
and they shall be My people.
No longer will they need to
teach one another and say to one
another, "Heed the Lord";
for all of them,
from the least of them to the
greatest, shall heed
Me--declares the Lord.
So this is a remarkable idea.
It seems to express some
dissatisfaction with the element
of free will,
which is otherwise so crucial
to the biblical notion of
covenant and morality:
the idea that humans freely
choose their actions.
After all, when you think about
some of the major themes set out
in the Hebrew Bible at the very
beginning in the opening
chapters,
this would seem to be a
cardinal principle:
choice.
But free choice does mean of
course that there will be bad
choices and there will be
disobedience and evil,
and people can get tired of
that and Jeremiah was.
So his utopian ideal is
inspiring, but it does eliminate
the element of free will.
 
It seems to describe a
situation in which humans are
almost hardwired to obey God's
covenant.
That's a tension that will also
be developed in some later
texts.
I just note it here.
In a very beautiful passage,
Jeremiah describes a future
restoration of the temple,
the bringing of offerings
again, the singing of psalms and
praise, and this is in contrast
to chapter 25.
There, in chapter 25,
he warned that God will banish
"the sound of mirth and
gladness,
the voice of bridegroom and
bride," leaving the land a
desolate ruin.
Now in his oracle of
consolation Jeremiah says,
Again there shall be
heard in this place… in the
towns of Judah and the streets
of Jerusalem that are desolate,
without man,
without inhabitants,
without beast--the sound of
mirth and gladness,
the voice of bridegroom and
bride, the voice of those who
cry, "Give thanks to the Lord of
Hosts,
for the Lord is good,
for His kindness is
everlasting!"
as they bring thanksgiving
offerings to the House of the
Lord.
For I will restore the fortunes
of the land as of old--said the
Lord [Jer 33:10-11].
So just to kind of summarize
these prophets leading up to the
time of the destruction (because
next time we'll be talking about
the exile and later the return):
The fall of Jerusalem shattered
the national and territorial
basis of Israel's culture and
religion.
The Babylonians had burned the
temple to the ground,
they carried away most of the
people to exile,
to live in exile in Babylon,
leaving behind mostly members
of the lower classes to eke out
a living as best they could.
And it was the completion of a
tragedy that had begun centuries
earlier and it was interpreted
as a fulfillment of the covenant
curses.
It was the end of the Davidic
monarchy, although the
Deuteronomistic historian does
close with this note,
that the son of Jehoiakim was
alive and living in Babylon,
kind of holding out hope that
the line hadn't actually been
killed out,
hadn't been completely wiped
out.
But the institution seemed to
have come to an end for now.
It was the end of the temple,
the end of the priesthood,
the end of Israel as a nation,
as an autonomous nation,
and so the Israelites were
confronted with a great test.
As I've stressed before,
one option would be to see in
these events a signal that
Yahweh had abandoned them to,
or had been defeated by,
the god of the Babylonians,
and Marduk would replace Yahweh
as the Israelites assimilated
themselves into their new home.
 
And certainly there were
Israelites who went this route,
but others who were firmly
rooted in exclusive Yahwism did
not,
and they're the ones who left
us their literature.
 
How could this faith survive
outside the framework of
Israelite national culture,
away from the temple and the
land, uprooted and scattered?
 
Could Israelite religion
survive without these national
foundations and institutions and
on foreign soil,
or would it go the way of other
national religions?
You hear the pain and the
despair that would have been
experienced at this time in the
words of the Psalmist,
Psalm 137 which is written at
this time:
By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung up our lyres,
for our captors asked us there
for songs
our tormentors,
for amusement,
"Sing us one of the songs of
Zion."
How can we sing a song of the
Lord
on alien soil?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither;
let my tongue stick to my palate
if I cease to think of you,
if I do not keep Jerusalem in
memory
even at my happiest hour.
It was the message of the
prophets that helped some
Israelites make sense of their
situation in a manner that kept
them distinct and invulnerable
to assimilation.
And this was probably the
reason for the preservation of
the prophetic writings,
even though they had often been
despised or unheeded in their
own lifetimes.
Yahweh hadn't been defeated,
they claimed.
The nation's calamities were
not disproof of His power and
covenant, they were proof of it.
 
The prophets had spoken truly
when they had said that
destruction would follow if the
people didn't turn from their
moral and religious violations
of God's law.
So that rather than undermining
faith in God,
the defeat and the exile when
interpreted in the prophetic
manner,
had the potential to convince
Jews of the need to show
absolute and undivided devotion
to God and His commandments,
so that paradoxically the
moment of greatest national
despair could be transformed by
the prophets into an occasion
for the renewal of religious
faith.
The great contribution of the
prophets was their emphasis on
God's desire for morality as
expressed in the ancient
covenant.
The great contribution of
Jeremiah was his insistence on
God's everlasting covenant with
his people,
even outside the land of Israel
and despite the loss of national
religious symbols--the temple,
the Holy City, the Davidic king.
And this insistence that the
faithful person's relationship
with God wasn't broken,
even in an idolatrous land,
when added to Jeremiah's notion
of a new covenant,
provided the exiles with the
ideas that would transform the
nation of Israel into the
religion of Judaism.
Next time we're going to turn
to two post-destruction prophets
who also helped the nation
formulate a viable response to
the tragedy that had befallen
them.
This is a point at which we can
begin to use words like
"Judaism."
 
