The bows of the mighty are broken, while the weak are girded with strength.
The formerly sated have hired themselves out for food, while those who were hungry are fat with spoil.
The barren woman has borne seven, but she who had many children is bereft.
The LORD kills and brings back to life; He sends down to Sheol and raises up.
The LORD makes poor and makes rich; He brings low, but He also exalts.
He raises up the poor from the dust; He lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.
For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s, and on them He has set the world. (1 Sam 2:1–8)
Even a casual inspection of the words reveals that they are not really appropriate to Hannah’s situation. Instead, this song appears to be a celebration of some sort of military triumph. What would Hannah be referring to in mentioning her “enemies” and her “victory”? And what might “the bows of the mighty are broken” refer to? Perhaps the verse that most betrays the inappropriateness of this song is the only one that actually does refer to childbirth: “The barren woman has borne seven, but she who had many children is bereft.” No doubt, this verse in particular suggested that the song in question might be Hannah’s hymn of thanksgiving; she was a barren woman. But in the preceding narrative, it is clear that she has thus far given birth to only one child, not seven! Was she exaggerating? Considered as a whole, this song’s real subject is not Hannah’s (or anyone else’s) giving birth, but God’s unpredictable behavior in granting victory, or whatever else He should want, to whomever He sees fit. “The LORD kills and brings back to life; He sends down to Sheol and raises up. The LORD makes poor and makes rich; He brings low, but He also exalts.”
Two possible explanations might account for the song’s place in the narrative. It might simply have been a well-known song; Hannah felt that the overall theme of God’s unpredictable power was altogether applicable to her situation, so she sang it—in which case it might well have been part of the original narrative. The other explanation, however, seems more likely in the light of other biblical passages: someone else, a later editor or copyist, inserted this song because it seemed improper for Hannah to have had her desperate prayer for children (1 Samuel 1) answered by God without her subsequently offering some words of thanks.
Such an explanation, while merely possible here, seems rather unassailable in other cases of songs in the midst of biblical narratives. For example, the book of Judges contains an account of the defeat of the foreign general Sisera and his subsequent murder at the hands of Jael (Judges 4). Following this, Deborah sings a long hymn of praise recounting the same events in poetic style. The problem is that the details in the song don’t match the ones in the prose account: Deborah comes from a different tribe, the participants in the battle against Sisera are not the same, and in the song Jael kills Sisera in a way that differs sharply from that in the prose account.20 If so, why was the song included at all? It seems that sometime after the prose account had been written, someone felt there was something missing: no one ever expressed thanks for God’s help in this striking victory. So, apparently, an anonymous editor dug up the poetic victory song (which has probably inspired the prose version in the first place)21 and stuck it in Deborah’s mouth: at least now, he thought, thanks would properly be expressed, and no one could accuse Deborah of “forgetting” God.
The same is true, some scholars hold, of a song attributed to Moses, the “Song of the Sea” in Exodus 15. According to the preceding narrative, the Red Sea split in two, allowing the Israelites safe passage from one side to the opposite bank, but when the Egyptians sought to pursue them, the waters of the sea came crashing back and drowned the Egyptian army. But if so, how did the Israelites, just now arriving on the opposite shore, already know the words of this song? Were they all simultaneously inspired to know the lyrics, or did they merely (as one ancient interpretation maintained) repeat each verse after Moses? This is not the major problem, however. Once again, the words of the song don’t seem truly to match the words of the prose narrative. In the latter, the sea splits in two for a time, allowing the Israelites to cross, and then returns to drown the Egyptians. But the song makes no mention of the sea splitting. Instead, what it describes seems to be more like a bad storm at sea, with huge waves crashing down: “At the blast of Your nostrils the waters piled up, the breakers stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.” The last phrase cannot refer to anything close to shore in biblical Hebrew; it means in the middle of the sea. The song adds that the Egyptians “sank into the billows like a stone,” “they sank like lead in the mighty waters.” But how could they sink at all if they were pursuing the Israelites in the space of dry land that had opened up and then were overcome by the returning waters: they couldn’t “sink”—their feet were already on the bottom!22 Still more problematic, the song ends by describing events which, according to the surrounding narrative, had not yet taken place:
In Your kindness You led the people whom You redeemed; You guided them by Your strength to Your holy abode.
When the peoples [of Canaan] heard, they trembled; fright seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed; trembling seized the leaders of Moab; all the inhabitants of Canaan melted away.
Terror and dread fell upon them; by the might of Your arm they turned still as a stone—
until Your people, O LORD, could go past them, until the people You created went past.
You brought them in and planted them at the mountain of Your land,
the place, O LORD, that You made Your abode,
the sanctuary, O Lord, that Your hands have established. (Exod 15:13–17)
None of these things had happened at the time of the crossing of the Red Sea; indeed, according to the biblical narrative, it would be nearly forty years before the Israelites would “go past” the Edomites and Moabites and enter the land of Canaan, and considerably longer before God’s “abode” or “sanctuary” would be permanently established in Canaan.
What, then, is this song doing in the book of Exodus? Scholars theorize that, as in the previous case, this song was inserted later on to fill a perceived gap: without it, there would be no thanksgiving hymn after this miraculous act of salvation—and that idea was, at a certain point in Israel’s history, suddenly unthinkable.23 So an already existing song was enlisted—in this case, probably a celebration of the events of the exodus connected to a particular local sanctuary, the one alluded to in the last verse above. Even though its words jangled somewhat with those of the prose account, the inserted song took care of the thanksgiving problem, and that was enough.
Scholars have identified other inserted songs of thanksgiving: David’s song in 2 Samuel 22 (which also appears in slightly different form as Psalm 18), Hezekiah’s song (apparently a psalm designed to be sung after recovery from illness) in Isaiah 38, and Asaph’s song in 1 Chronicles 16 (apparently a compound of Pss 105:1–15, 96:1–13, and Ps 106:47–48), and others.24 The reason for their insertion into the narrative is the same: at a certain point it seemed necessary that the biblical figures involved express their thanks—and so some preexisting material was enlisted to do the job. But why weren’t these songs of thanksgiving there from the start—why weren’t they expressly composed to fit precisely the events described in the surrounding prose? The answer appears to be that the convention of expressing thanks only became obligatory after the prose narratives were already in existence. It would seem that this convention emerged in response to the “forgetting” problem, a convention that was now an obligatory routine. An increasingly remote and distant God needed institutionalized thanks precisely because He was there, somewhere, but not obviously so. The days of His physically crossing over from behind the curtain were over.
Inserted Thank-Yous
Saying thank you to God gradually came to be thought of as an actual duty. A lat
er rabbinic text expresses some astonishment at the fact that this had not always been the case, even among Israel’s own ancestors:
From the time God created the world until Israel stood at the [Red] Sea, we find no one who uttered thanksgiving to God, save for the [people of] Israel [as a whole]. He created Adam, but he did not offer thanksgiving. He saved Abraham from the furnace and from the kings, but he did not offer thanksgiving. Similarly, [He saved] Isaac from the knife, but he did not offer thanksgiving. And similarly, He saved Jacob from the angel and from Esau and from the men of Shechem, yet he did not offer thanksgiving [etc.]. (Exodus Rabba 23:4)
The absence of grateful acknowledgment for such kindnesses clearly was no problem at the time these biblical narratives were written down—but why not? Oughtn’t Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to have uttered heartfelt words of thanksgiving on the occasions mentioned? But they didn’t. It was only toward the end of the biblical period that such thanks became a religious requirement.
Many people today “say grace”* before or after eating. This institution does go back to biblical times, but only late biblical times; there is no indication that it existed before the second or third century BCE. Thus, the book of Deuteronomy is lavish in its praise of the land of Canaan that the Israelites are about to enter:
The LORD your God is taking you into a goodly land, a land with flowing streams, springs and fountains gushing forth from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stinting, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are of iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. And you will eat and be satisfied and bless the LORD your God for the goodly land that He has given you. (Deut 8:7–10)
The last sentence seems to describe a spontaneous act: given such abundance, the Israelites will naturally bless God for having given them this land.25 (Note: what was given was the land, not a meal!) And actually, there is nothing resembling grace before or after meals in most of the Bible itself: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Abimelech, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, the Israelites in the wilderness, David, Solomon, Elijah and Elisha—all these and more are said to eat and drink, sometimes under miraculous circumstances, but there is no blessing before or after their meals.
With time, however, such a blessing before and/or after eating seems to have become obligatory—indeed, the last sentence of the above passage came to be the biblical warrant that such acts of blessing were a divine commandment. The Book of Jubilees (early second century BCE) may suggest as much:
Rebekah made fresh bread out of new wheat. She gave it to her son Jacob to bring to his father Abraham, some of the first fruits of the land, so that he would eat (it) and bless the Creator of everything before he died. Isaac, too, sent through Jacob [his] excellent peace offering [and wine to his father] Abraham for him to eat and drink. He ate and drank. Then he blessed the Most High God who created the heavens and the earth, who made all the fat things of the earth, and gave them to mankind to eat, drink, and bless their Creator. (Jub 22:4–6)26
The same act of offering thanks for food served is witnessed in the Dead Sea Scrolls,27 and in the New Testament,28 and rabbinic Judaism.29 Saying thank you was now a sacred obligation. In retrospect, the emergence of this formulaic, obligatory acknowledgment might be seen as a model of things to come.
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The End of Prophecy?
HOW PROPHECY’S CHARACTER CHANGED; PREDICTIONS OF A DISTANT DAY; ANGELIC INTERLOCUTORS; PROPHECY BECOMES SCRIPTURE
There were prophets in Israel, and then, according to various sources, there weren’t. Or were there? Prophet-like figures certainly did exist after the return from Babylonian exile; that is, in the late sixth century BCE . But they were different from their predecessors, and the differences can tell us much about our overall theme.
For some time, prophecy was an institution whose existence was simply taken for granted in ancient Israel. In the eighth century BCE, Amos and Isaiah presented themselves to people as spokesmen carrying a message from God, and as such they were apparently listened to (at least, this is what the books bearing their names report). Prophets sometimes recount how they happened to become prophets, but there was no apparent necessity for them to explain to their listeners what a prophet was; everyone already knew that. A century and a half later, some people found Jeremiah’s prophesying troubling or even seditious, to the point of threatening his life, but they do not seem to have questioned his standing as a legitimate spokesman of Israel’s God. On the contrary, if they hadn’t believed that his words were, in one way or another, divinely dictated or sanctioned, why would they care what he said, or even bother to listen to him?
No More Prophets
But later on, after the Judeans had started streaming back to their homeland following their exile in Babylon, prophecy’s status seems to have changed.1 Three more prophets of the Hebrew Bible—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—prophesied just after the return from exile, but after them . . . nothing. Indeed, the book of Zechariah itself reports that “prophet” had become something of a dirty word, referring in later times mostly to liars and charlatans:2
And it will be that in that time—so says the LORD of Hosts—that I will remove the names of idols from the land, so that they will no longer be mentioned; and along with this, I will rid the land of the prophets and the spirit of impurity, so that if a man should act as a prophet, his father and mother—his own parents!—will say to him, “You must die, since you have spoken falsehood in the name of the LORD.” And his parents, his father and mother, will put him to death even as he prophesies. Then the prophets will be put to shame because of the visions they have had in their prophesying, and no one will don the [prophet’s] hairy mantle to deceive. (Zech 13:2–4)
Still later writings seem to take it for granted that prophecy had ceased some time before. For example, the book of 1 Maccabees asserts that after the death of Judah the Maccabee,
There was great distress in Israel, such as had not existed since the time when prophets ceased to exist among them. (1 Macc 9:27)
Similarly:
[Azariah prayed:] “For we, O lord, have become fewer than any other nation, indeed, we have now become the lowliest in all the land because of our sins. In these days we have no ruler or prophet or leader, no burnt offering or sacrifice or oblation or incense, no place in which to sacrifice before You and find mercy.” (Prayer of Azariah 15)
Know, then, that in former times and in former generations our fathers had righteous helpers and holy prophets . . . and the Mighty One heard their prayer and forgave us. But now the righteous have been gathered in [i.e., have died] and the prophets have gone to sleep [i.e., have died]. We too have left our land and Zion has been taken away from us. Now we have nothing left except the Mighty One and His Torah. (2 Baruch 85:1–3)3
Somewhat later, it became rabbinic doctrine that prophecy had simply ceased to exist:
[In reference to Dan 8:21 and 11:3–4] Alexander the Macedonian [i.e., Alexander the Great] ruled for twelve years and then died. Until that time there were prophets who prophesied through the Holy Spirit; thereafter: “Incline your ear and attend to the words of sages.”* (Seder Olam 30)4
When Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the last prophets, died, the Holy Spirit [ruaḥ ha-Kodesh] ceased in Israel; nevertheless, people had recourse to a bat qol [a voice from heaven]. (Tosefta Soṭah 13:3, b. Yoma 9:2, etc.)5
Prophets Galore
Numerous post-exilic sources thus seemed to agree that prophecy had ended sometime following the return from Babylonian exile, either shortly thereafter or perhaps as late as the time of Alexander. Particularly in light of the absence of any canonical prophets after Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the cessation of prophecy must have seemed perfectly self-evident.
Eventually, however, the idea that prophecy had simply ceased was found to conflict with evidence from other sources.6 For example, the author of the
Wisdom of Solomon (first century BCE) had opined:
Although she [Wisdom] is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things.
In every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets. (Wis 7:27)
Likewise:
The holy word vouchsafes the gift of prophecy to any proper person. For a prophet, being a spokesman, declares nothing on his own, but all he speaks belongs to Another, a resonance from Someone Else. (Philo, Who Is the Heir? 259)
Even if some would-be prophets were denounced as false prophets, their very existence seemed nonetheless to attest to the continued claimants of the prophetic mantle:
But You, God, despise all the plans of Belial, and it is Your idea that will triumph, and Your heart’s plan will stand forever. But [the wicked] come to inquire of You out of the mouths of false prophets, from deluded simpletons. (1QHa Thanksgiving Hymns col 12:13–17)
Josephus, the first-century CE historian, reports extensively on the existence of various prophets in his own time.7 Prophecy now was frequently identified as the ability to foretell future events,* and Josephus devotes particular attention to John Hyrcanus, who ruled Judea as high priest in the first century BCE and whose predictive powers were apparently the stuff of legend.8 What is more, Josephus himself claimed to have prophetic powers, having received nighttime visions in which “God foretold to him of the impending disasters of the Jews, as well as the fates of the Roman kings” (Bellum judaicum 3:351).9 He also successfully predicted that the general who took him captive in the Great Revolt, Vespasian, would soon succeed Nero as the Roman emperor:
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