Synopsis
A radical reinterpretation of the biblical prophets by one of America's most provocative critics reveals the eternal beauty of their language and the enduring resonance of their message.
Long before Norman Podhoretz became one of the intellectual leaders of American neoconservatism, he was a student of Hebrew literature and a passionate reader of the prophets of the Old Testament. Returning to them after fifty years, he has produced something remarkable: an entirely new perspective on some of the world's best-known works.
Or, rather, three new perspectives. The first is a fascinating account of the golden age of biblical prophecy, from the eighth to the fifth century B.C.E., and its roots in earlier ages of the ancient Israelite saga. Thus, like large parts of the Bible itself, "The Prophets" is a history of the Near East from the point of view of a single nation, covering not only what is known about the prophets themselves -- including Elijah, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel -- but also the stories of King David, King Saul, and how the ancient Israelites were affected by the great Near Eastern empires that surrounded them. Layered into this work of history is a piece of extraordinary literary criticism. Podhoretz's very close reading of the verse and imagery used by the biblical prophets restores them to the top reaches of the poetic pantheon, for these books contain, unequivocally, some of the greatest poetry ever written.
The historical chronicle and the literary criticism will transport readers to a time that is both exotic and familiar and, like any fine work of history or literature, will evoke a distinct and original world. But the third perspective of "The Prophets" is that of moral philosophy, and it serves to bring the prophets' message into the twenty-first century. For to Norman Podhoretz, the real relevance of the prophets today is more than the excitement of their history or the beauty of their poetry: it is their message. Podhoretz sees, in the words of the biblical prophets, a war being waged, a war against the sin of revering anything made by the hands of man -- in short, idolatry. In their relentless battle against idolatry, Podhoretz finds the prophets' most meaningful and enduring message: a stern warning against the all-consuming worship of self that is at least as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was three thousand years ago.
"The Prophets" will earn the respect of biblical scholars and the fascinated attention of general readers; its observations will be equally valued by believers and nonbelievers, by anyone with spiritual yearnings. Learned, provocative, and beautifully written, "The Prophets" is a deeply felt, deeply satisfying work that is at once history, literary criticism, and moral philosophy -- a tour de force.
Extrait
Introduction: The Biblical Context
Roughly 2,750 years ago -- around the time Homer was probably singing and/or writing the Iliad and the Odyssey in far-off Greece -- a man named Amos, who described himself in the Bible as "...an herdsman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit..." left the village near Jerusalem where he lived and traveled up to Samaria in the northern part of the Land of Israel. Immediately he erupted like a volcano, denouncing its people in the name of God for their sins and calling upon them to repent.
Thus did the first of the so-called classical prophets suddenly and mysteriously stride onto the historical scene, to be followed by, among many others, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Micah. They were some of the greatest men ever to walk the earth, and most of them, like Homer himself, were also, and not so incidentally, among the greatest poets who ever lived. Then, three centuries after Amos started this astonishing parade (and just when Socrates and Plato were active in Athens), it ground to a halt as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun.
In the pages that follow I propose to tell the story of these blazing human giants. Without quixotically attempting to dispel the entire mystery of the phenomenon they represented, I will try to shed a bit of light on it by examining their roots in the history of ancient Israel as recounted so fascinatingly and with such incomparable artistry in the Bible; by looking at how they reacted to the conditions surrounding them at home, as well as to the bloody conflicts impinging upon their people from abroad; and by speculating on how and why they faded away when they did.
In telling this story, I will also try to correct certain stubborn misconceptions about the classical prophets. A trivial example is the popular notion that these turbulent and troublesome and tormented figures were saintly old characters with long beards wandering about in loin cloths and issuing otherworldly moral pronouncements in abstractly universal terms. Yet few of them were what nowadays passes for saintly; and far from dealing in abstractions floating above the concrete details of daily life, all of them were always plunging down and dirty into the world around them.
For their story is, at bottom, the story of a war -- among the most consequential in all of human history, and to my mind one of the most exciting. These men were the heroes of that war, but in waging it, the lethal instruments they wielded were not swords or lances. No, their weapons were words: words that in their own way could bring death as surely as swords and lances, but that could also do something beyond the power of swords and lances, which was to bring life and balm and healing, often to the wounds they themselves had made. I will be quoting many of those words, whose incandescent beauty and awful power ultimately vanquished an enemy as insidious and seductive as he was cruel and evil: the enemy they knew as idolatry. Yet I will conclude by arguing that this enemy keeps coming back under different names and in mutated forms that are not always easy to recognize as his. And I will ask, finally, whether the weapons that defeated him over two thousand years ago, and that are ready to hand in the Bible, may still be sharp enough to cut him down again today.
The Bible: it is probably the most widely circulated book in the history of the world (or at least the Western world). Once upon a time it was so constantly and intensively read that it often blotted out all other books, provoking the great Victorian literary and social critic Matthew Arnold to protest in exasperation that "No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible." Well, that may have been so in 1869, and even into more recent times. But no longer. As I have discovered from innumerable conversations, most people nowadays have only the most general acquaintance with the Bible. Unless they happen to be students or regular devotional readers, they are usually familiar only with some of the more famous stories the Bible tells. Turning Matthew Arnold upside down, one could say that even people who know everything else, do not know their Bible.
Indeed, I have also learned from those innumerable conversations that many such people do not even know what the Bible contains. They vaguely remember that it is divided into two major sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament, and perhaps they recall that in some English translations there is also a section called the Apocrypha. But few are able to remember the names of more than a small number of the books in either of the two Testaments, and fewer still have more than the vaguest notion of what the Apocrypha is.
I have also run into Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, who are unaware, or have forgotten, that the original language of the Old Testament is Hebrew and that the New Testament was first written in Greek hundreds of years later. On the other hand, in my experience, virtually all Jews, no matter how secularized, know that the New Testament is not part of their Bible (or, to be more precise, the Bible of their forebears, for whom there was nothing old about the "Old Testament" except its age, and nothing in the "New Testament" that was true). Conversely, almost all Christians, even if they too are "lapsed," know that both Testaments are sacred to Christianity. Still, it can come as a surprise even to religious Christians that the Protestant and Catholic versions of the Bible are not precisely the same.
There has, then, been a general loss of intimate familiarity with the Bible throughout our culture. And yet, a Gallup survey taken in the year 2000 reported that more than eight out of ten Americans believed the Bible still spoke to us today and could even solve "most or all" of life's problems. At the same time, they admitted to finding the Bible as a whole "confusing" and often hard to understand.
This is not in the least surprising. In addition to containing many difficult passages, the Bible is not a book as that word is customarily used: it is, as the author of a popular work on it has correctly remarked, "a library" that took many centuries to compile and that features everything from "poetry, genealogy, prophecy, legal codes, parables, proverbs, theology, and history." From which it follows that "You can't read one portion the same as another," and most people who try to read it that way invariably run into trouble.
So far as strictly Orthodox Jews are concerned, God is the author of the Hebrew Bible, which He revealed to Moses at Mt. Sinai. Among fundamentalist Protestants, similarly, the Bible, from beginning to end, is the "inerrant" word of God. Gone are the days when vast numbers of American Protestants were in this camp. And yet, again according to Gallup, as late as about fifty years ago, two-thirds of the American people described themselves as fundamentalists, and even as of the year 2000, a full one-third of American adults still did.
But if strict fundamentalism suffered heavy losses during the past half-century, those who held on to the looser idea that everything in the Bible was in some undefined sense written under divine "inspiration and authority" remained steady at 80 percent. Eighty percent! This statistic is hard to reconcile with the results of my own highly informal and unscientific survey showing a dismal lack of knowledge of the Bible. But perhaps Gallup and I are both right -- perhaps one can believe that the Bible is divinely inspired and still hardly bother to read it.
Probably the major cause of the drop in strict fundamentalism is the corrosive effect of the sciences -- from cosmology to biology -- on a literal understanding of the biblical text, beginning with "In the beginning": its very first words, which introduce an account of the creation of the world. But another major cause, coming from a very different direction, is the influence of the hordes of highly learned scholars (some of them pious Christians and Jews themselves) who, since the mid-nineteenth century, have steadily been undermining the assumptions of the strict fundamentalists. These scholars have asked, and labored mightily to answer, questions -- especially about the Old Testament -- that to some fundamentalists border on, if they do not actually cross over into, sheer blasphemy. Such as:
When was this or that book of the Bible originally written? Or was it first transmitted by word of mouth and then inscribed on parchment or stone tablets? If so, over how long a period did this process occur and how many authors were involved? When and by whom was the text as we now have it finally edited and established as "canonical" or authoritative? Is this text closer to the lost original than others that still exist, either in fragments on scraps of papyrus (like the Dead Sea Scrolls), or (like the Greek Septuagint) full translations into other languages from versions that have also been lost?
I would suppose that, unlike the strict fundamentalists, few members of Gallup's 80 percent would have any serious problems with the view that those who wrote and/or edited the books of the Bible were fallible human beings. Nor would they likely resist accepting that errors could easily have crept into the texts of these books through centuries of copying (as well as through translations containing errors of their own). Nor, finally, would they feel obliged to doubt that these errors -- or some of them, anyway -- can be corrected on the basis of philological, archaeological, and historical data deriving both from the Bible itself and from sources outside it.
It is on the basis of those assumptions about the part of the Bible that to Christians is the "Old Testament" and to Jews like myself simply the Bible, or the Hebrew Bible, that I have undertaken to tell the story of prophecy in ancient Israel. Though a Jew (with -- as will become evident -- rather idiosyncratic religious beliefs), I am addressing myself here as far as possible to everyone. "Everyone" embraces Jewish and Christian believers who may or may not be as soaked in the Bible as they (and particularly the Protestants among them) would have been in the not so distant past; non-believers to whom the Bible is one of the greatest treasures of world literature we possess and who take a keen interest in it as such; and even (I would hope) other non-believers who have hardly, if ever, encountered the Bible before.
Yet because the level of biblical literacy among us is no longer what it was in the past, it might be helpful if, before delving into the prophets themselves, I were to get some background information out of the way that might otherwise clog up the narrative and analysis to follow. Let me start, then, with a number of basic facts that are necessary for avoiding possible confusions and gratuitously distracting considerations up ahead.
For openers, since this is the story of prophecy in ancient Israel, I concern myself almost entirely with the Hebrew Bible, concentrating most heavily on one section of it, and rarely venturing into the New Testament except when I think it sheds light on a point I am working to clarify.
The (relatively) modern term in Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible is TaNaKh, an acronym composed of the titles of the three sections into which it is divided. The first, Torah (literally, "instruction" or "law"), is made up of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; together these are called in English the First Five Books of Moses, or the Pentateuch (a Latinized Greek word that can be translated as "a volume of five books"). The second of the three sections is N'vi-im (or the Prophets -- about whose contents more in a moment). The third is K'tuvim (Writings, or Hagiographa -- another Latinized Greek word, this one meaning "sacred writings"), consisting of Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, First Chronicles, and Second Chronicles.
But a complication arises from the title of the second section, which is that N'vi-im has two subsections of its own: the Former Prophets and the Latter Prophets. In the Former Prophets are the Books of Joshua, Judges, First Samuel, Second Samuel, First Kings, and Second Kings. To complicate matters even further, these six books are not collections of prophecies. Rather, they constitute an account of the history of the people of Israel from the invasion and conquest of the Promised Land (then Canaan, later Palestine) in about 1250 B.C.E. up to the expulsion of most of their descendants to Babylon nearly seven hundred years later. Prophets abound throughout this history, some of whom, like Samuel and Elijah, are among the most noteworthy. When they appear, however, it is as characters whose doings are recounted and a number of whose sayings are quoted; they are not the authors (or the putative authors) of the books themselves. The two volumes bearing the name of Samuel, for instance, do not claim to have been written by him (and, in fact, he dies before the second even begins).
It is very different with the Latter Prophets, on whom I concentrate after surveying all the named prophets in the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets. With the exception of Jonah, the books of the Latter Prophets are all attributed in the introductory "superscriptions" to the men whose names are attached to them. Furthermore -- and again with the exception of Jonah -- these books are not stories about those men, but almost entirely collections of the prophecies they delivered (or supposedly delivered), interspersed here and there with narrative bridges.
Thus the Book of Isaiah begins: "The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah." From there, with no further ado, we are launched directly into the first of his prophetic utterances ("Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the LORD hath spoken...").
This is why the Latter Prophets came to be dubbed the "writing" prophets, though most modern scholars (not all) agree that they themselves went around pronouncing "oracles" and preaching sermons that were transcribed by others. Nowadays, therefore, the standard term is the "canonical" prophets, or (in my own preferred designation) the "classical" prophets.
There are fifteen such books in the Hebrew Bible, and they in turn are divided into two sections, major and minor. The "major" prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the other twelve (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi) are "minor." Theoretically, the word minor signifies not lesser moral or religious or literary stature but only lesser length. In practice, however, among the "minor" prophets only three (Amos, Hosea, and Micah) have over the centuries come to rank in importance, both intrinsic and in terms of influence, with their three "major" counterparts.
But we are not yet free of the complications in this picture. Modern scholars have demonstrated -- if not without much debate among themselves as to crucial elements and details -- that more than one hand is at work in every one of the fifteen Latter Prophets. To cite the least controversial case, the last twenty-six of the sixty-six chapters of the Book of Isaiah are without a doubt about events that took place about 150 years after those of the first thirty-nine. To strict fundamentalists, there is nothing strange about this: Isaiah, being a prophet, simply foresaw the future. But predicting the specifics of the future was something the classical prophets rarely did. In fact -...
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