đź“™ [EN] 2. Pre-reading2: Gerhard von Rad "The Message of the Prophets"
1. The first stage was undoubtedly that stories were told about the prophets, and in this respect the stories about Elisha give the impression of coming from a distant past. On the other hand, the very considerations just noticed should warn us against allowing these popular miracle stories to lead us into forming too naїve a picture of this prophet as he really was. He gave formal lectures to disciples (II kings 4: 38; 6.1). If we had a collection of his lectures or his sayings, our picture of him might well be different. The same would be true of Elijah.
By the time of Amos, however, people had learned to take a Prophet`s words by themselves and to write them down. This meant that the center of gravity in the prophetic tradition now moved from the story told about the prophet to the collection and transmission of his sayings. This development did not, however, lead to disappearance of the custom of telling stories about the prophets, or indeed, to any decline in such a practice. This literary category still remained influential, for when she came to a more spiritual understanding of Prophecy, Israel never went so far, in the interest of reducing the prophetic message to its ideal truths, as to sever it from its original roots in concrete events. On the contrary, she never ceased to see each of the prophets in his own historical situation, either as one who initiated historical movements or as one who was crushed to powder in the conflicts of History. The largest number of stories about a prophet is to be found in the book of Jeremiah, which is comparatively late. When we come to it, we shall have to consider the importance of these as a supplement to Jeremiah's own oracles.
In reading the prophets today we must, of course, realize that what chiefly interests us, biographical detail, imports into these stories viewpoint which is foreign to them themselves. Even the idea of "prophetic personalities" which so readily comes to our minds is very far from being what the sources themselves offer us. In all probability, the writers were much less concerned then we imagine to portray a prophet as a "personality", that is to say, as a unique human being who possessed special qualities of mind and Spirit.
The same is true of interest in biographical detail. We can even feel that the sources are opposed to any attempt to write "lives" of the prophets. Had the writer of Amos 7.1off. had any intention of giving information about Amos`s own life, he would never have ended his account as he does, and have failed to inform the reader whether or not the prophet complied with the deportation order. If the store is to be read as a fragment taken from a biography, they only possible verdict on such an ending is "unsatisfactory". Amos is here only described from the point of view of his being a prophet, that is to say, as the holder of an office, and because of this the writer had no interest beyond describing the clash between the bearer of a charisma and the high priest, and recording the oracle of doom to which this gave rise.
The stories about Elijah, Elisha, and Isaiah also provide examples both of a similar lack of interest in biographical detail and of a concentration upon how a prophet acted in virtue of his calling. A change comes about with Jeremiah. Jeremiah the man and his Via Dolorosa are now really described for their own sake. This, however, is closely connected with the fact that with Jeremiah prophecy entered upon a critical phase of its existence, and that a new concept of a prophet was beginning to appear. Probably the first to realize that suffering was to be regarded as an integral part of prophet`s service was Baruch. There was more to being a prophet than mare speaking. Baruch saw a completely new aspect of the office. Not only the prophet`s lips but also his whole being were absorbed in the service of Prophecy.
Consequently, when the prophet`s life entered the vale of deep suffering and abandonment by God, this became a unique kind of witness-bearing. Yet even this does not mean that in narrative portions of Jeremiah the account of the prophet`s life is given for its own sake. It is given because in his case his life had been absorbed into his vocation as a prophet, and made and integral part of the vocation itself. But, as I have already stressed, this insight was only reached after some time and must therefore be dealt with at a later stage.
Prophecy ultimately employed the 'messenger formula' as the most direct means of expressing its function. But since from its very first appearance in Israel there were more kinds of prophecy than one, it is practically impossible to point to any single basic 'form' of prophetic speech and to identify it, from the point of view of form criticism, as prophecy's original starting-point' Yet, even though the 'messenger formula' cannot be taken as this, it should be considered first, since it persists as a constant factor in all OT prophecy from Elisha to Malachi, and is, too, the most consistently used of all the many different prophetic literary categories.
As everyone knows, it was a common custom in the ancient world for a messenger with some announcement to make to discharge his errand when he came into the recipient's presence, by speaking in the first person, the form in which the message had been given to himself; that is to say, he completely submerged his own ego and spoke as if he were his master himself speaking to the other. Examples of this entirely secular use of the 'messenger formula' introduced by the words 'thus says so and so' are still to be found within the Old Testament itself.   This is the form which the prophets used more frequently than any other to deliver their messages, and the fact is important for the understanding of their own conception of their role. They saw themselves as ambassadors, as the messengers of Yahweh.
As a rule, however, the prophets prefaced this messenger formula with another form of words whose purpose was to draw the recipient's attention to the message and which, indeed, gave the first precise designation of those for whom it was intended. In the case of a divine threat, what was prefixed was a 'diatribe', in the case of a promise, an 'exhortation'. These two, the messenger formula and the prefaced clause, must both be present before we have the literary category 'prophetic oracle'. To understand the category, we must remember that down to the time of Jeremiah, with whom there is a change, the prophets always made a clear distinction between the messenger formula and the diatribe or exhortation which introduced it. The former alone was the direct word of God: the other was a human word whose purpose was to lead up to and prepare the way for God's word and give it its reference. The divine word was, of course, primary in point of time: this was what came to the prophet in a moment of inspiration, to be passed on to those whom it concerned. This the prophet did by prefixing to it a diatribe which identified the people addressed. What makes the inner connection between diatribe and threat is the characteristic 'therefore', justifying the latter and leading on to the words 'Thus hath Yahweh spoken'.
But the messenger formula, frequent though it is, is still only one among many forms used by the prophets in their preaching' In fact, they showed no hesitation in availing themselves of all manner of forms in which to clothe their message. None, secular and sacred alike, was safe from appropriation as a vessel for the discharge of his task by one prophet or another. What these men wanted to do, of course, was to attract attention: indeed sometimes, as when, for example, they laid violent hands on some timehallowed sacral form of expression, their express intention was to shock their audience. Thus their utterances can be couched as a priestly direction concerning sacrifice (Isa. 1.16f.; Amos 5.21ff.), as a cultic hymn, or as a pronouncement in a court of law.   DeuteroIsaiah took the priestly oracle of salvation and reshaped it into something more sweeping and made it the 'form' of his preaching. His well-known phrases, 'Fear not, I have chosen you, redeemed you, I call you by name, you are mine' (Isa. 41.10ff.; 43.1f.; 44.1f.; etc.) are modelled on the liturgical language used by the priest in the cult in response to an individual prayer of lamentation (Isa. 41.10ff.; 43.1f.; 44.1f.; etc.). In other cases the message was clothed in the form used by the teachers of wisdom (Isa. 28.23ff.; Amos 3-3ff.), or of a popular song (Isa. 5.1ff.). The best example of the changes which these literary categories underwent at the hands of the prophets, who sometimes even expanded them into really grotesque shapes, is the dirge: the later prophets actually parodied it.   Exegesis has therefore to be particularly careful here, because a great deal depends on correct determination of 'form', and in particular on the correct delimitation of the beginning and end of the unit under discussion. To add a verse from the unit which follows, or to omit one which properly belongs to the close of an oracle, can alter the whole meaning.
The form in which a particular message is cast is also important in a still stricter sense of the word 'form', for a 'form' is never just something external, concerned with literary style alone; in the last resort, form cannot be separated from content. What determined the choice of the form was primarily the subject-matter of the message. But the content of the prophetic preaching could not possibly be housed in any traditional form — not even a specifically prophetic — for it completely transcended the whole of Israel's previous knowledge of Yahweh. The very nature of the subjectmatter itself demanded nothing short of a bold method of expression — it was always, so to speak, ad hoc improvization — simply because the prophets' message thrust out at every side beyond each and all of Israel's sacral institutions, the cult, law, and the monarchy. In the same way, the very nature of prophecy also demanded the right to make use of what were entirely secular forms with exactly the same freedom as with religious ones, as if there were no difference at all between them, for ultimately prophecy moved In a direction which transcended the old distinctions : when it prophesied judgment, it also announced the end of the established sacral order, and when it foretold salvation, it spoke increasingly of a state of affairs in which all life would be ordered, determined, and sustained by Yahweh. This would, of course, result in the removal of the old distinction between sacral and secular.