📙 [EN] 2. Pre-reading2: Gerhard von Rad "The Message of the Prophets"

About  a century after Elijah, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah appeared on the scene. If the source material for them is compared with that available for their predecessors, we finde that in the eighth century a new factor has emerged. The narrative form of report, which is only kind of source we have for Elijah and Elisha, markedly diminishes, and its place is taken by collections of disconnected sayings, speeches, poems. This difference in the way in which the account of the prophets` activity has been handed on forces us to give some consideration to the literary „form“ in which the memory of their work and preaching has ultimately come down to us, for upon this largely depends the theological evaluation of later ages. 

Like the historical tradition, the prophetic corpus lies before us in what are, to some extent, very shapeless collections of traditional material, arranged with almost no regard for content or chronological order, and apparently quite unawear of the laws with which we are familiar in the development of European literature.

Ezekiel is the first to give us the benefit of an arrangement according to a chronology based on the time at which the oracles were delivered. Nevertheless, within this vast body of material a differentiation, at once simple and at the same time of great theological importance, is immediately forced upon the reader`s notice. This is the distinction between passages in poetry and passages in prose. While there are exceptions, the prophets` own way of speaking is, as a rule, in poetry: that is to say, it is speech characterized by rhythm and parallelism.

In contrast, passages in which they are not themselves speakers but are the subjects of report, are in prose. There are thus two ways in which the prophets made their contribution to the literature of the Old Testament, or at at any rate to the traditions contained in it; on the one hand there are narratives or collections of narratives which tell of what they did, and on the other oracles or collections of oracles which they themselves delivered.

Accordingly there are two reasons why they attracted the attention both of their own contemporaries and of those who came after them. One was the content of their preaching; the other was there circumstances of their appearance, the conflicts in which they were involved, the Miracles they performed, and their particular encounters with particular people. In cases where both what a prophet himself said and what was reported about him are preserved, it is obviously not always possible to harmonize the accounts, for the point of view of a narrator who sees the prophet involved in them tensions and dramas of public life may be different from that of a group of disciples whose sole interest was to record in correct form oracles whose historical context has been forgotten. This explains, for example, the marked dissimilarity between the picture of isaiah given in the stories told about him (Isa. 36- 39) and that conveyed by his own oracles.

The former is much closer to the popular estimate of him, and scarcely any indication of the enormous intellectual sweep of his preaching as reflected in the oracles. It must also be self-evident that of these two forms of prophetic literature, that of the report is the earlier. Time, some degree of familiarity with the phenomenon of Prophecy itself, and some education into a more spiritual outlook were all needed before it became possible to collect only the prophets` bare words, and to view them in detachment from their historical context, and evaluate them on their own intrinsic merits.