The Prophetic Tradition: Is It Ours?
by Bennett Muraskin
Morris U. Schappes was the long time editor of Jewish Currents and an American Jewish historian. A progressive secular Jew from the old school of Jewish communists and socialists who came of age before World War Two, he once wrote about the prophetic tradition:
There are . . . two traditions in Jewish life and history. There is the tradition of the Hebrew prophets and the tradition of those who stoned the prophets . . . We progressive Jewish secularists lay claim to the Prophetic tradition of challenging tyranny, poverty, oppression and war. Secularism without social action . . . is too thin for survival. We see this social action as based on, its broadest terms, on the social program of the Prophets, whom we abandon at our peril.
Schappes’ views were and still are, in fact, shared by a wide variety of Jewish liberals and leftists, including the leadership of the Reform and Reconstructionist movements. Irving Howe, the Jewish socialist who edited Dissent magazine, was one of the few who struck a skeptical note when he wrote in his World of Our Fathers:
During the 1960s, some Jewish leftists tried to ground their politics in the “prophetic tradition” with the hope of thereby staking out a claim to Jewish legitimacy. These efforts ignored the complex diversity of Jewish history since the Diaspora, as indeed before then. With enough wrenching one could find “ancestors” in the Jewish past for almost any opinion.
Well, who was right?
The Prophets were definitely not revolutionaries. They did not seek to overturn the ruling class of their day, the monarchy or the priesthood. (The prophet Ezekiel was himself a priest.) They specialized in exhorting kings and priests and others among the Jewish elite to be “righteous,” but they were not community organizers. They did not preach among the poor or call for social protest. Were they at least reformers? Not that either, because reformers by nature appeal to the public for support to achieve change. The Prophets appealed only to the ruling and upper classes. As political philosopher Michael Walzer observes, “They are not agitators in the modern sense. They don’t aim to create a political or social movement; they make no effort to organize their audience.”
Unlike revolutionaries and reformers, the Prophets also lacked a coherent program for a better society. They condemned excessive concentration of wealth and the oppression of the poor, to be sure, but it was in the name of a mythical past where every man lived beneath his vine and fig tree as subsistence farmers or shepherds. Cities and the social and commercial activities that typically develop within urban centers were depicted as the source of corruption in the prophetic literature.
Prophetic thinking is not rational. Convinced that they were instruments of God’s will, the Prophets declaimed and proclaimed without explanation. They left no room for disagreement or debate. In most cases, it was strictly “my way or the highway.” Furthermore, the consequences for not following their edicts are a host of harsh collective punishments, including war, famine, devastation, death, and ultimately the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, foreign conquest, and exile.
The only exception I have found comes from Ezekiel 18, where God thoroughly explains why He no longer holds that sins of the father are to be visited upon the son.
In Jeremiah 44, the prophet confronts a community of Egyptian Jews with unorthodox religious beliefs involving the worship of a goddess. Despite Jeremiah’s dire threats of reprisal, this feisty group of Diaspora Jews stands its ground and sends him packing. Of course, this episode is presented to show Jeremiah’s worth as a prophet of God, but I am using it to shed light on those who defied him.
In the end, Jeremiah probably got what he deserved. He prophesized against what he considered pagan religious practices within the Kingdom of Judah. He was hated by the priests for this and punished and nearly killed by kings for predicting and then welcoming the Babylonian invasion, which destroyed the Temple and the city of Jerusalem and carried off thousands of Jews into exile. After the conquest, Jeremiah preached submission to Babylonian rule and actively collaborated with the occupying power. It is hardly surprising that he was reviled by the populace for his traitorous conduct.
At best, the Prophets should be recognized for “speaking truth to power.” But their “truth” is not primarily the message of social justice, but of religious conformity. The great majority of the prophetic writings are directed against the perceived threat of pagan religions or, in Biblical language, “worshipping other gods” and practicing “idolatry.” In other words, the Prophets railed against what today we would consider religious pluralism. Their call for social justice comes in a distant second.
Only for the prophet Amos is social justice a top priority. God orders him to leave his native land in the southern kingdom of Judah to spread the word in the northern Kingdom of Israel. Why Israelites would be receptive to an outsider who comes to castigate them is not explained. Be that as it may, it is from Amos that we derive the poetic phrase, “Let justice well up like water, righteousness like a mighty stream,” which was adopted by Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. Amos is also the only prophet who declares that Jews may not be any better than any other people in God’s eyes, and that He will punish Jews and non-Jews alike for their transgressions, including secular crimes such as wars of aggression. However, Amos does not hold out any hope that the Israelites will repent. Rather, he predicts that God will send a foreign nation to exact His judgment by destroying the kingdom of Israel. For this reason (not his attacks on social injustice), the Israelite high priest orders Amost to leave the country and return home. If that was the extent of his punishment, Amos got off easy. Nothing further is known of his fate.
There are not many cases in which the Prophets directly confront kings or priests over their abuse of power. The two best-known instances do not come from any of the Prophetic books, but are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. In 2 Samuel 11, Nathan reprimands King David for sending off Uriah the Hittite to be killed in battle so that he can take his wife Bathsheba. In 1 Kings 21, Elijah rebukes King Ahab for having a landowner killed so he can seize his property. These are indeed remarkable instances of speaking truth to power in a just cause. But Elijah, in particular, has a much darker side. He is responsible for the massacre of 450 priests of the god Baal (1 Kings 18:22-40) and 102 Moabite soldiers (2 Kings 1:10-14).
Isaiah may be the most appealing prophetic book, even if scholars tell us that it had two or three authors. Here is the oft-quoted chapter 58:
5 Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?
7 Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?
8 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward
9 Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
10 And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noonday:
11 And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.
12 And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.
13 If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable; and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words:
14 Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
Only in Isaiah do we hear of the great day when the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid; and the calf with the young lion (11:6). Isaiah 2:4 is also where swords are famously beat into plowshares so that “nation will not lift up sword against nation and never again will they learn war” (2:4.) The same message of universal, lasting peace is repeated in Micah 4:3. Micah is also the source of another lofty passage: “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy and walk humbly with your God” (6:8).
But what they don’t reveal in Hebrew or Jewish school is Joel 4:10, which celebrates war. Plowshares are beaten into swords so the weak will say “I am a mighty man.”
Isaiah is also capable of making blood curdling threats. Chapter 9:7-21 states:
The Lord has sent a message against Jacob;
it will fall on Israel.
9 All the people will know it—
Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria—
who say with pride
and arrogance of heart,
10 “The bricks have fallen down,
but we will rebuild with dressed stone;
the fig trees have been felled,
but we will replace them with cedars.”
11 But the Lord has strengthened Rezin’s foes against them
and has spurred their enemies on.
12 Arameans from the east and Philistines from the west
have devoured Israel with open mouth.Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.13 But the people have not returned to him who struck them,
nor have they sought the Lord Almighty.
14 So the Lord will cut off from Israel both head and tail,
both palm branch and reed in a single day;
15 the elders and dignitaries are the head,
the prophets who teach lies are the tail.
16 Those who guide this people mislead them,
and those who are guided are led astray.
17 Therefore the Lord will take no pleasure in the young men,
nor will he pity the fatherless and widows,
for everyone is ungodly and wicked,
every mouth speaks folly.Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.18 Surely wickedness burns like a fire;
it consumes briers and thorns,
it sets the forest thickets ablaze,
so that it rolls upward in a column of smoke.
19 By the wrath of the Lord Almighty
the land will be scorched
and the people will be fuel for the fire;
they will not spare one another.
20 On the right they will devour,
but still be hungry;
on the left they will eat,
but not be satisfied.
Each will feed on the flesh of their own offspring[b]:
21 Manasseh will feed on Ephraim, and Ephraim on Manasseh;
together they will turn against Judah.Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away,
his hand is still upraised.
The rhetoric is grand but the message is gruesome.
Prophets were not practical men, and Isaiah’s diplomatic skills left much to be desired. With Jerusalem besieged by Assyria, he counseled against seeking help from Egypt on the grounds that only God could save the day.
In fact most prophets were isolationists, fearing any foreign alliances or influences. As Israeli political philosopher Avishai Margalit has written, “The prophets . . . condemned Israel’s defense treaties with Egypt and Assyria, both superpowers at the time, by which the Jews . . . bought defense in return for accepting political subjugation and paying taxes. For the prophets, such treaties sinfully violated the true exclusivity of God, who must be the sole source of providing protection to Israel.”
Women do not fare well in the Jewish Bible, although there are exceptions like Deborah, Miriam, Esther, and Naomi. However none of them are in the Prophetic literature. When women are mentioned at all, it is metaphorically: To quote Avisahi Margalit again, “God the husband is betrayed by Israel, the adulterous wife, whose lover is a strange god.”
Many on the Jewish left never tire of invoking the Prophets as advocates for social justice, yet a careful analysis shows that the Prophets do not challenge the ruling elite. Their targets are those individuals within the elite for acting unjustly toward the poor. If only the rich and powerful would stop committing these evil deeds, all would be well. If not, the Prophets do not foresee social unrest or civil war, but divine wrath that will indiscriminately strike the entire society, including the oppressed. Micah declared in no uncertain terms that because of the sins of the high and mighty, “Zion shall be plowed as a field and Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins” (Micah 3:12). As Michael Walzer asserts, “[The Prophets] seem to accept . . . that Zion being plowed under and Jerusalem in ruins represent a just response to oppression and corruption.”
With this attitude, if any Prophets were stoned, it was likely the common people that were throwing the stones, but I cannot, in fact, find any such examples in the Jewish Bible. Schappes must have confused it with the New Testament, in which Jews are accused of stoning Jesus and certain Christian Prophets!
There are superior examples of “speaking truth to power” in the Bible. Abraham at Sodom challenges God not to “sweep away the innocent along with the guilty” (Gen. 18-23). Moses, after the Golden Calf incident, convinces God not to wipe out the entire Jewish people (Ex. 32:10-14). The Book of Job is essentially a searing indictment of God’s injustice. (Only one Prophetic book, Habakkuk, carries the same message. He is the only Prophet who questions God’s conduct and demands that He act justly, yet Habakkuk is never cited by progressive Jews.) These figures rise head and shoulders over the Prophets in “speaking truth to power” because they do so in defense of human dignity.
Bennett Muraskin is a contributing writer to Jewish Currents and the author of several foundational books for the secular Jewish community.
Dan Brook -
Another fascinating article!
The prophetic tradition is at least as much ours as anyone else’s. If nothing else, it is ours to interpret. Just because the orthodox say they’re orthodox, it doesn’t mean that they don’t interpret these writings as well; they simply interpret differently than we might.
For my purposes, even while taking into account what Muraskin nicely lays out about the prophets regarding social justice and challenging elite power, I will continue to interpret the prophetic tradition, from back then til now and beyond, as a universal call for (secular) social justice.
Bennett Muraskin -
I urge people to actually take the trouble to read the Prophets before they endorse them.
To me, they come off as religious fanatics.
Lawrence Bush -
Leonard Lehrman comments:
Bennett Muraskin’s musings are always interesting, but rarely comprehensive.
As I’ve written in the Forward, and elsewhere, the most important “prophetic imperative” I knew about was always “tikkun olam,” to leave the world a better place than one found it. (My Forward article, reprinted in The “New Music Connoisseur” and posted at http://www.newmusicon.org/v9n2/v92sacco.htm, was about what drove me to complete the unfinished works of one of America’s most important Jewish composers, Marc Blitzstein.)
When Martin Luther King, guided by Abraham Joshua Heschel, stopped emphasizing Jesus (the way Jesse Jackson, alas, never did) and instead built his rhetoric on Old Testament prophets, he reached out to a broader constituency that included and encouraged our fellow, active, progressive Jews.
When Elie Wiesel, not a progressive but to some a prophet, spoke truth to power, telling Reagan that Bitburg was “not your place,” he was acting in a noble tradition that, even if he had done nothing else, merited his winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
Morris Schappes was right about choosing to side with those opposed to stoning.
There are plenty of laws in the Torah that call for enforcement by threat of stoning, whether we read in the Hebrew scriptures of that punishment being administered or not. Jesus was a Jewish prophet who specifically stopped stoning. We can identify with him as Jews, without deifying him (as Christians do) or any other prophet. So I stand with Morris, as I think most Jewish Currents readers will, or should, not with the skeptical, often wise, but unfortunately also too often Red-baiting Irving Howe.
Leon Levitt -
Educational. But I will forget it all rapidly, no reflection on either the writer or the content but due to the age of the reader and an unwillingness to take biblical exegesis seriously.
Bennett Muraskin -
The concept of tikkun olam does not come from the Prophets.
We progressive secular Jews should distrust anyone who claims to be speaking on behalf of God, which is what the Prophets did.
Stoning was nothing compared to the what the Prophets said the entire Jewish people deserved for the sins of the elite: mass murder, devastation, exile etc.
Ralph Seliger -
My friend, Bennett, has again written a challenging piece containing a very large kernel of truth. But there’s a condemnatory tone here that reminds me of the fire & brimstone moralistic judgments of too many of the Hebrew Prophets.
I would shy away from judging all of them, and certainly wouldn’t want to evaluate them too harshly based upon modern-day understandings and values. Bennett is best here when he differentiates between individual Prophets. Some clearly come closer to our standards than others.
From my vantage point of taking Mordecai Kaplan very seriously, my understanding is that much of the Prophetic literature was a retrospective reading of events by authors who were trying to make sense in moral behavioral terms of the catastrophes that so often befell our Hebrew ancestors. And after the Hebrew kingdoms fell to foreign conquest, it was the latter Prophets (e.g., Ezekiel) who made it possible for many Hebrews to survive spiritually as Jews, by interpreting the destruction, exile and return of the inhabitants of Judah as part of God’s divine plan. This meant the true birth of monotheism, as enemy armies were now understood to be nothing more than agents of the one true God.
This was a mixed blessing, as on the one hand behavior had consequences and there were now moral guidelines affixed to religion, rather than a mere manifestation of arbitrary divine power. On the other hand, advocates of moral standards too often became moralistic and the conceptual demands of monotheism gave rise to intolerance of polytheism and paganism.
Still, the very idea of ethical and moral behavior embedded within religion was an advance. We need to be on guard against the intolerance that generally follows in its wake. Rigidly doctrinaire leftism has a trajectory toward intolerance that resembles the worst excesses of religion. It’s no wonder then that we speak of “sectarianism” in both realms.
Bennett Muraskin -
Ralph has a point, but it is not the same as mine. I am arguing against relying on the Prophets as the basis for our contemporary struggle for social injustice or other progressive political positions.
Arthur Waskow, for example, does it all the time. So does the non-Jewish Cornel West.
gerry kane -
Bennet, if you”re not relying the Prophets as the basis for our contemporary struggle for social justrice or other progressive political positions — what are you relying on that has a Jewish presence in the framing of your person or thought?
When I was a kid growing up in the shules my teachers always stressed the “goldene keyt”– the golden chain that linked one generation of Jews and their history to another. We both take from and add to that chain. The prophets with all their bombast, and yes, wisdom are part of what we take and use very subjectively to further the cause of justice in building a besere shenere velt; a better mor becautiful world. That cultural and historical DNA is what we have to use and add to if we are to remain Jews. For me that’s not a religious statement but a very secular, humanistic expression of the complex make- up we take into the world of achievement and struggle. Having access to the Goldene Keyt, being able to choose particular links in the chain that I thing are pertinent to me, today, strengthens my presentation when I say, “I am a secular JEW” and have the person or audience to which I say it understand what I mean and the footnotes to that statement which are available to anyone who wants to challenge me.
Bennett Muraskin -
In my article, I mentioned Nathan’s rebuke to David, Elijah’s rebuke to Ahab, Abraham insisting to God that innocent lives not be lost in Sodom, Moses (twice) talking God out of wiping out the Israelites, the Prophet Habukkuk and the entire Book of Job. And I wrote that I found some value in Amos.
Limiting myself to the Bible, I would add Samuel’s warning to the Jews not to adopt a monarchy, the Books of Ruth, Jonah, Song of Songs,
We do not need the mishegas fanaticism of the Prophets. Repent you sinners or die!
Carl Rosenberg -
I enjoyed reading Bennett’s article, as always, and admire his encyclopedic knowledge. I find the prophets very much a mixed bag. I agree with many of Bennett’s criticisms, but I can’t completely forget the positive aspects of some of the prophets (Amos and Isaiah)–aspects which Bennett does concede.
However, i was surprised by Bennett’s mention of Moses as a figure (whether historically real or not) standing head and shoulders above the prophets. Yes, the statement from Exodus which Bennett cites is admirable, but there are other completely indefensible actions and statements from Moses, such as Numbers, Chapter 31. Taken as a whole, Moses is just as problematic (to put it very mildy) as the prophets.
Adam Chalom -
Another provocative piece by Bennett Muraskin – always appreciated.
What Bennett often does is what we should all do – read the complete original sources (not just isolated verses), and let them say what it seems they are actually saying. Yes, they said some good things; they also said some objectionable things. We do not throw out the wisdom because it is with folly, but we do not celebrate the author as marvelous and a role model if a substantial part of his work is folly or even objectionable. And we should not forget that anyone claiming to hear voices today is called “meshugge”, not a prophet.
Let us find honest roots: admitting where we disagree with our past makes us trustworthy enough to celebrate where we do.
Rabbi Adam Chalom
International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism