Were the Prophets Poets?
The similarity between ancient Greek bards and Israelite prophets has thus suggested to some scholars that the men and women whom ancient Israelites called prophets were basically the same sort of figures whom other nations called poets.5 This is a comparison worth taking seriously. After all, poets in classical Greece and Rome claimed to have been inspired (quite literally): a god or divine muse breathed something into their minds, and out came a poem. And it was not just poets who believed this. In Plato’s Ion, Socrates presents his own idea of inspiration:
All good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired or possessed . . . For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no more in him. When he has not attained to this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles . . . And therefore, God takes away the minds of the poets and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.6
Any Israelite in biblical times would probably have had no difficulty in concluding that what this Greek philosopher is talking about is indeed the figure that “we” call a nabi (prophet) or ḥozeh (visionary) or ish ha-Elohim (“man of God”). Socrates continues with a concrete example:
Tynnichus the Chalcidian affords a striking instance of what I am saying: he wrote nothing that anyone would care to remember but the famous paean that is in everyone’s mouth, one of the finest poems ever written, simply an invention of the Muses, as he himself says. For in this way the God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only intermediaries of the gods by whom they were severally possessed.7
All this may help us imagine the reality of biblical prophecy. Perhaps the prophets were indeed very much like poets in our own day. Prophets started out, as best we know, without any formal initiation or anyone having appointed them—other than God.8 Poets, too, generally start writing without any formal approval or confirmation (“nothing to authenticate the mission imposed,” wrote Basil Bunting). And just as modern poets often say that the beginning of a poem, or a whole poem, just “came to them,” so the prophet’s words were placed by God “in their mouth,” that is, ready to be spoken, or sometimes simply “were found” (Jer 15:16), apparently without effort. Perhaps because many prophets had a gift for speaking in verse—and a gift for speaking in general—people were fascinated and gathered to hear them, just as they might for a poet; some people even bothered to commit the prophets’ memorable sayings to writing. The Bible also reports that prophets, like ancient poets, sometimes used musical instruments, “lyres, timbrels, flutes and harps,” to accompany their prophesying (1 Sam 10:5), rather like ancient Greek bards. Elisha, when asked to prophesy, called for a musician: “And as the musician played, the hand of the LORD came upon him and he said, ‘Thus says the LORD . . .’” (2 Kings 3:15–16). Moreover, a passage in the book of Ezekiel presents God as telling the prophet not to be disturbed by the fact that some of his listeners seem to regard him as a kind of entertainer:
[God said to Ezekiel:] “As for you, son of man, your countrymen talk together about you by the walls and in the doorways of their houses; they say to one another, ‘Let’s go hear what word is coming forth from the LORD.’ So they go to you like an audience, and they sit in front of you, My people do, and they listen to what you have to say—but they won’t do what you tell them. Lust is what’s on their lips, and getting money is in their hearts. As far as you are concerned, you are to them like a love song sung with a beautiful voice and musical accompaniment; they hear what you say to do, but they do not do it. Yet when this thing comes—and come it will—then they will know that a prophet has been among them.” (Ezek 33:30–33)
Of course, there are also significant differences between biblical prophets and inspired Greek poets. To begin with, prophets are not generally praised for the beauty of their words;9 in fact, they are not much praised at all. Rather, they are usually presented as merely repeating what God has told them to say,10 starting off with the stock messenger formula, “Thus says the LORD” (this was in fact an aspect of prophecy proudly stressed in later times).11 Commissioned by God to pass along a specific communication from Him concerning matters at hand, they prophesied about such things as Israel’s affairs of state; Israel’s neighbors, particularly in time of crisis; the king and the royal court, or other individual Israelites; and the people as a whole. In this sense, biblical prophets could be described as political figures, functioning somewhat differently from most classical poets.12 They also advised (and often rebuked) the king or prominent members of society. They cursed Israel’s enemies (their curses were deemed to be effective, backed with divine power), and not infrequently also excoriated the people of Israel and their leaders on God’s behalf. Some performed symbolic acts in addition to speaking (1 Kings 11:29–31, 22:11; Ezek 37:16; Hos 1:1–8), something not attested in classical poets.13 Indeed, some prophets are said to have performed miracles.14 Considered together, these various manifestations of prophetic activity in the Bible seem to put it somewhat outside of what we normally associate with ancient poets.15 Yet these must be balanced against the other, rather compelling, similarities of poets and prophets. Perhaps it would be best to say that biblical prophets represent a special kind of poet-like figure, with their own way of functioning and their own special role in society. Beyond saying this, generalizations will not be particularly useful; it might be better to examine two rather different prophets from Israel’s history.
Balaam’s Couplets
The story of the pagan prophet Balaam is told in the book of Numbers.16 Balaam’s particular specialty was cursing people. (In biblical times, curses were believed capable of hurting people, even causing their death; some prophets were prodigious cursers.)17 As such, Balaam was hired by the king of Moab to curse the Israelites, whom the king feared might be planning to encroach on his territory. Balaam traveled all the way from northern Syria to Moab to do the job, but God ultimately frustrated his plans. Every time Balaam tried to curse the Israelites, all that would come out of his mouth were blessings.
[After Balaam arrived in Moab,] God came to Balaam, and Balaam said to Him, “I have arranged the seven altars [as You demanded], and I have placed a bull and a ram on each altar.” Then the LORD put a word in Balaam’s mouth, and He said, “Go back to Balak [the Moabite king], and speak to him thus.” So he returned to Balak, who was standing beside his burnt-offerings with all the officials of Moab. Then he spoke his couplets, saying:
“From Aram Balak brought me here, called me forth from the eastern mountains:
‘Come, curse this Jacob for me; Come, damn the people of Israel!’
Can I damn those whom God has not, or doom those not doomed by the LORD?
From the tops of these crags I can see them, I glimpse them beneath these hills:
a people who’ll live on its own, not reckoned as part of another.
Who can count Jacob’s descendants, or number Israel’s seed?
Let me die a righteous man’s death, so my offspring will end up like them.” (Num 23:4–10)
The passage begins by saying that God put a word in Balaam’s mouth, an utterly straightforward attribution of Balaam’s words to God. Indeed, by Balaam’s own account, God was forcing him to say what he didn’t want to say: he wanted to curse Israel and get his promised fee.18 But the phrase used just before Balaam begins his speech, “Then he spoke his couplets,” is more equivocal. The word “couplets” is my attempt to render the Hebrew mashal, which means something like “poetic speech,” since such speech consisted of passages of successive two-part
lines, like Balaam’s above. Poetic couplets were often (though not always) used by prophets, but they were also employed by ordinary people with a gift for rhetoric, people who made no claim to divine inspiration. In fact, the book of Job uses the same phrase used here, “Then he spoke his couplets,” to introduce Job’s altogether human complaints (27:1, 29:1).
So: were Balaam’s couplets an exact quote of God’s words to him, or were they his own rewording of the general message that God had just “put in Balaam’s mouth,” making him a bit more like a poet? A passage later on in the story suggests that at some point, the prophet was indeed free to formulate his words on his own. After two attempts at cursing the Israelites,
Balaam saw that it pleased the LORD to bless Israel, so he stopped going time and again after divine oracles and set his gaze toward the wilderness. Lifting up his eyes, he saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe; the spirit of God came upon him, and he spoke his couplets and said . . . (Num 24:1–3)
Here, unlike the previous times, Balaam doesn’t have to go off in search of a direct oracle from God—apparently, he has gotten the general idea and he can now go it on his own. (True, the passage says that “the spirit of God came upon him,” but this assertion may be added to make clear that the poetic message that he is about to proclaim, even if it is not the result of a divine oracle, nevertheless has divine approval.)
What happens after this only strengthens the idea. The Moabite king, frustrated by Balaam’s inability to curse the Israelites, informs him that his promised fee will not be paid; he is to return home without an honorarium. Then Balaam—without any mention of God dictating his words—announces that he has foreseen Moab’s destruction:
The words of Balaam, son of Beor; the words of a man whose eye sees true;
the words of one who hears God speak and knows the Most High’s mind,
who sees what God Almighty sees, bowing low but with open eyes:
I glimpse it, but it is not yet; I behold what is not close;
A star rising up from Jacob, from Israel comes forth a king,
crushing the Moabites’ skulls, smashing the heads of the Sethites;
Edom falls into his hands, Seir becomes his possession, and Israel is triumphant. (Num 24:15–19)
One might thus conclude, at least on the basis of this one case, that prophets sometimes were thought to have had a good bit of latitude. They couldn’t change the overall message (despite his trying, Balaam could not curse Israel), but perhaps when prophets said, “Thus said the LORD,” they did not mean that He spoke these very words. On the other hand, this may be too rational a view of prophecy. Perhaps “Thus said the LORD” meant precisely that.
Jeremiah of Anathoth
Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah, was a relatively late biblical prophet. He was born in the town of Anathoth, about three miles northeast of Jerusalem, sometime toward the end of the first half of the seventh century BCE. He apparently began his life of prophecy at a relatively early age and lived through good times and bad, the former associated with the heyday of King Josiah’s thirty-year reign (640–609 BCE), which then quickly degenerated into the political and strategic blunders of Josiah’s successors, ultimately leading to the fall of the Kingdom of Judah to the Babylonians in the early sixth century BCE. The first phase of this national catastrophe—of which Jeremiah warned unrelentingly—climaxed in 597 BCE, with the Babylonian conquest of Judah and the deportation of much of its aristocracy to exile in Babylon. This was certainly bad enough, but a bungled attempt at revolt in Judah led to renewed suffering: a prolonged siege of Jerusalem ended in 587 BCE with the destruction of the city and the desecration of the holiest spot on earth, the Jerusalem temple, God’s earthly residence. Jeremiah himself sought refuge in Egypt, where he apparently died.
Jeremiah came toward the end of a long line of prophets. There were his immediate predecessors, the famous prophetic figures of the eighth and seventh centuries: Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, followed by Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Before these “writing prophets”—so called because actual collections of their words are included in the Bible—were earlier prophets such as Elijah and Elisha, whose messages and miraculous deeds are recounted in 1 and 2 Kings, but whose words were never gathered into collections. Still earlier were the prophet-like figures mentioned in texts from ancient Mesopotamia, the āpilu/āpiltu (male/female “spokesperson” for the deity),19 muḫḫû/muḫḫûtu (“ecstatic”)—both known to us from Akkadian texts of the eighteenth century BCE—as well as raggimu/raggimtu (“proclaimer”) and others found in later writings from the Neo-Assyrian period.20 All this is to say that, long before Jeremiah’s time, the existence of prophets and the phenomenon of prophecy were simply a fact of life, apparently taken for granted by ordinary Israelites.
The book of Jeremiah21 begins with the prophet recounting how—apparently as a young man, perhaps only a teenager—he discovered that he was born to be a prophet:
The word of the LORD came to me, saying: “I knew you even before I formed you in the womb, and before you came out, I had already set you apart: I appointed you to be a prophet regarding the nations.” I said, “Oh no! Sir, LORD, I can’t make speeches—I’m just a boy.” But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, ‘I’m just a boy.’ You will go to whomever I send you and say whatever I tell you to say. And do not worry about them, because I will be there to save you—declares the LORD.”
Then the LORD put out His hand and touched me on the mouth, and the LORD said to me, “Now I have put My word in your mouth. As of today I am commissioning you to speak concerning the nations and the kingdoms—the uprooting and pulling down, the destruction and devastation, the rebuilding and the replanting.” (Jer 1:4–10)
So later on, when Jeremiah repeatedly stood in front of his townsmen and said, “This is what God told me to say,” he was—if this account is true—simply fulfilling a role that God had assigned him from birth (or, as a matter of fact, “even before I formed you in the womb”). But in saying the sort of things that he said, was Jeremiah literally transmitting God’s own words? Had God, to borrow Socrates’s description, “taken away the prophet’s mind” and replaced it with His own? As noted, prophets often ended up criticizing the reigning king of Israel, and one such passage in the book of Jeremiah poses the question of “Is God speaking?” rather clearly. Here, Jeremiah is denouncing King Jehoiakim for his corrupt ways:
A man builds his house through injustice, unfairness from bottom to top,
He makes someone work for no wages, or hires but then doesn’t pay;
“I’ll build me a palace,” he says, “equipped with the finest of rooms,
windows and panels of cedar, and painted inside with vermilion”—
Do you think that’s what makes someone kingly, a house with the best cedar panels?
Wasn’t your father content to eat and drink without frills,
While acting with justice and fairness—wasn’t that what seemed to him good?
He gave the poor man his due; for him that was true satisfaction.
Isn’t that what it means to obey22 Me?—so says the LORD.
But your eyes look only for profit, your heart’s always out for more gain,
Shedding the innocents’ blood, oppressing and crushing at will.
Therefore, thus says the L ORD concerning Jehoiakim son of Josiah, king of Judah:
No one will go around mourning, crying “Ah my brother! My sister!”
No one will go around mourning, “Your majesty! Oh my lord!”
You’ll be buried like a dead donkey, dragged and dumped outside the gates of Jerusalem. (Jer 22:13–19)
This brief passage puts the problem squarely, since scholars disagree on which parts of it are being claimed to be God’s own words to Jeremiah. Perhaps the whole passage, with its ringing indictment of a corrupt king, is being presented here as God’s actual words; or perhaps only the words following Therefore, thus says the LORD are said to have come from God, announcing God’s verdict
after Jeremiah had presented the indictment on his own. Or perhaps this passage is implying that none of these words actually flew into the brain of the prophet; all that Jeremiah* may have gotten was some sort of indication of what to say, which he assumed to have come from God—a flash of insight that he then elaborated on his own, rather like an inspired poet in modern times. The question is important not only in regard to the prophet-as-poet, but more significantly, in our overall effort to understand just how far the ancient sense of self, with its semipermeable mind, could go.
Hearing Voices
Psychologists and other researchers know that some people still hear voices. The voice that they hear, according to some subjects interviewed, can be clearly male or female, although for others it can be without gender. Sometimes the voice is recognized as belonging to a person the hearer knows—a friend or relative (alive or dead), but other voice hearers report that the voice seems to come from an anonymous, disembodied speaker.23 In any case, hearing voices is often symptomatic of some deep mental disturbance: psychotic disorders of various sorts, including schizophrenia, are often associated with hearing voices, as are dissociative identity disorder and related problems. Most dramatically, hearing voices is sometimes connected to the crimes committed by serial killers, who report that they were “instructed” by a voice to seek out their victims. Perhaps the most famous such instance was that of the “Son of Sam” murders of the 1970s in New York City, whose perpetrator claimed to have been told to kill by a demon who had taken possession of his neighbor’s (Sam’s) dog. (The killer, David Berkowitz, later retracted his story, claiming it was a hoax.) Other, recent voice-hearing murderers may be less well known but no less deadly (Herbert Mullin, Priscilla Joyce Ford, James Huberty, Joseph Hunter Parker, and many more). Beyond these are just ordinary voice hearers, thousands of patients diagnosed with symptoms of psychosis who need a daily cocktail of antipsychotic, antidepressant, and antianxiety medications to silence the sounds in their heads.
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