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

This passage, which comes from the latter period of Isaiah's life, makes the transition of prophecy from oral proclamation to its reduction to writing, that is to say, to the second, the literary, form of its existence, still clearer. Here the prophet is no ambassador. He is not to go out, but is to 'go into' his house, and he is not to speak, but to write 'for a time to come'. The situation is clearly the same as that in Isa. 8.16ff. The message has been delivered. Once again a phase of the prophet's work has come to an end, and once again it has resulted in failure. Isaiah had not succeeded in kindling faith; his hearers were far too preoccupied with political projects to listen. Indeed, things were even worse. They 'would not' do so, and deliberately decided against Yahweh and his pleading. And this time there are no comfortable words about a small group of disciples. The atmosphere is much more laden with rejection than it was on the other occasion. A far deeper darkness enfolds the prophet. In one respect the passage goes much further than Isa. 8, for it shows the decision against Yahweh and his pleading as one which has already been taken. This is important for the message of Isaiah, or this is one of the very few places where the prophet himself recapitulates the essential content of that message in one or two words and summarizes the ideas. His wish had been to move people to turn to Yahweh, and to seek security in his protection, and to find confidence and ‘calm’. As it was, since they have rejected it all, it will be their lot to lose all stability, as Isaiah so magnificently depicts it in the picture of a wall suddenly bulging out and collapsing.

‘Why does the prophet write down his message as а ‘testament’, as it is generally called? How far it is intended for ‘а time to come’? What he thought of initially was certainly the fulfilment of his threat. Those who came after him would be able to see in retrospect that his prophetic word had been no empty one. It may also well be that, as he made the record, his thoughts ranged considerably wider than the immediate fulfilment. His own generation was written off — ‘suddenly, in an instant’, ruin would overtake it. Yet, even if the fate he foretold for it actually came to pass, this was after all only one part of his prophetic message. The promise of blessing it contained, its invitation to seek security in the protection of Yahweh, also remained valid. Though one generation turns а deaf еаг to it, it does not fail. Yahweh does not abandon his purposes: the only difference is that these now reach forward to a more distant future in the nation’s history, and for this reason the message required to be written down.

What gives the passage its great interest is that it shows how in certain circumstances the prophet broke the connection between his words and their original hearers and, without the slightest alteration, carried the message over to apply to hearers and readers of a more distant future. At the time when Isaiah wrote down his preaching, possibly after 701, history had certainly overtaken some of his prophecies. Looked at from the point of view of their obvious and immediate fulfilment, they had apparently failed. This was not, however, a reason for regarding them as things of the past, for they retained their significance for more than merely the time to which they were addressed initially. Nor was it any more a reason for altering their content or recasting them to suit their new recipients. The same thing had happened with Hosea.

When it was originally delivered, his whole message was directed to the then northern kingdom. But sometime later very slight editing — the insertion of the name ‘Judah’ at several places — gave it a new address, to the southern kingdom. It was never presumed that the prophet’s oracles were addressed to one set of people and one only, and were thereafter to be wrapped up in their rolls and deposited among the records. There must have been people who never forgot that а prophet’s teaching always remained relevant for a coming day and generation, and who themselves played their part in making it appear relevant — in many cases their work can be clearly seen in the various secondary additions which they made. A clearer instance than most, showing what took place during the process of transmission, is the relationship of Trito-Isaiah to Deutero-Isaiah. The former’s dependence upon the latter is so striking that it has been correctly assumed that their relationship was one of master and pupil. But the situation in which the younger man voiced the elder’s words was very different from that in which they had first been coined; and, consequently, the master’s sayings were radically modified. In the first phase of his activity Jeremiah, too, is a disciple — of Hosea. Again, scholars long ago marked off a large section of prose passages in his book whose diction and theological ideas approximate very closely to the tradition associated with Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomists. Obviously, we have here а characteristic reshaping by а second hand of material belonging to Jeremiah, though we do not, of course, know who was responsible for it or why he acted as he did.

Baruch’s long, detailed account of how Jeremiah’s preaching was set down in writing, and of the several readings of the roll, parallels the two passages from Isaiah discussed above to the extent that it describes the transition from oral preaching to written word. But it goes much further in that it tells of the strange fate which overtook the book. Like Isaiah, Jeremiah derived the order to make a written record from Yahweh’s express command: what, however, is significant is the purpose of this undertaking as revealed in the account (Jer. 36). It was a final attempt to move Israel to repentance, and so to make it possible for Yahweh to forgive her. But this is only the introduction to the account of the book’s fate once it had been produced. Baruch shows great artistry as he leads up to the climax. He tells how the roll was read three times. The first occasion is fairly lightly touched on. This was a public reading during а fast before Yahweh in 605. The second reading, held in the secretary of state’s office in the presence of the chief state officials, is given a fuller description. The audience then was alarmed at what they heard; they cross-examined Baruch, and the roll itself was put into ‘official safe-custody’. While there was marked goodwill towards Baruch personally, the matter itself had to be reported to the king. What a consummate artist Baruch is as he thus prepares the way for the climax of his story! What is the king’s attitude going to be? For his decision will determine whether the whole people — not just he himself — are to stand or fall. Now the story gives а detailed account. The king is in the winter-house, sitting beside the brazier, with his ministers around him. Yet in the end it is not he who is the centre of interest, but the roll itself, ‘which he cuts up and throws piece by piece into the fire. Thereupon Jeremiah dictates his preaching to Baruch anew, and makes the second roll more comprehensive still than the first.

The story is unique in the Old Testament, since its subject is neither а person, nor an act of Yahweh’s providence or appointment, but a book. But the book’s fortunes epitomize the fortunes of the message it contained. Once more the motif is that of the great failure, which Jeremiah plays with his own particular variations. We might therefore almost speak of а ‘passion’ undergone by the book as well as by its author. At one point, however, the parallel with Jeremiah’s own via dolorosa breaks down. The scroll is torn and burnt, but it is renewed. Yahweh’s word does not allow itself to be brought to naught.

These three passages show, of course, only the first step in the formation of tradition, that from oral proclamation to written record, a step sometimes taken by the prophets themselves. This was, however, a long way from the final stage in the process of making а permanent record of а prophet’s message; instead, it ought to be called only its beginning. As we have already seen, a prophet’s preaching was not restricted to its original audience. As Israel journeyed through time, the message accompanied her, even if the historical circumstances to which it had originally been spoken had changed in the interval. The basic conviction underlying the process of tradition was that, once a prophet’s word had been uttered, it could never in any circumstances become void. The time when, and the way by which, it reached fulfilment were Yahweh’s concern; man’s part was to see that the word was handed on. And we must notice particularly that even the prophecies which had plainly found their historical goal, and had thus clearly been fulfilled, were retained as prophecies which concerned Israel and could always have fresh meaning extracted from them.

A particularly revealing instance of this centuries-long incessant process of continual reinterpretation of tradition is furnished by the so-called Nathan prophecy (II Sam. 7). Verses 11 and 16 show what is perhaps the oldest strand, a prophecy aimed directly at David himself. Compared with it, the ideas expressed in vv. 12a, 14-16 are later — the advance in point of time comes out in the interest shown in ‘the son after you, who shall come forth from your body’, when David ‘will have lain down with his fathers’; the point is now Yahweh's relationship to David’s descendants. Then, considerably later, the Deuteronomistic theology of history connected this whole prophecy with Solomon’s building of the temple (v. 13), while later still Deutero-Isaiah severed the tie with the house of David and applied the saying to Israel as a whole (Isa. 55.3f.). Even after this, the old reference of the promise to the seed of David himself is not wide enough for the Chronicler: he speaks of ‘the seed which shall come forth from thy sons’, and thus adds a further stage in the prophecy’s scope (I Chron. 17.11). In this way an oracle first spoken in the long distant past continued to have a present message considerably later than the exile.

The way in which tradition mounts and grows can be closely followed in the prophetic writings. Exegesis must be less ready than at present to look on this infusion of new blood into the prophetic tradition as ‘spurious’ or an unhappy distortion of the original. The process is in reality a sign of the living force with which the old message was handed on and adapted to new situations. Adaptation was in some cases effected by adding threats against foreign nations which had meantime come within е orbit of Israel’s history. Thus, for example, the very old prophecy of Balaam was finally even made to refer to the Greeks (Num. 24.24). In Isaiah 23 a few later additions made an earlier oracle against Sidon refer to Tyre. To the Messianic prophecy of Isa. 11.1ff. was added in а later day v.10, and it was applied to the Gentile world, and was taken up by Paul in this reinterpreted form (Rom. 15.12). In just the same way the Messianic prophecy in Amos passed over into the New Testament in its less restricted LXX version (Acts 15.16f.: ‘Adam’; Amos 9.12: ‘Edom’). In Isa. 9.11, Isaiah spoke of Aram and the Philistines; the LXX applies the saying to Syria and the Greeks.

When, however, in the course of adaptation of this kind an old oracle is converted into its opposite — when, for instance, an oracle of judgment is made into one of salvation — doubts begin to arise, at least for the modern reader. Isaiah proclaimed ‘woe’ to the Egyptians, ‘the nation tall and smooth, feared near and far’, and threatened them with destruction (Isa. 18.1-6). But as it now stands, the oracle goes on to prophesy that ‘at that time’ gifts will be brought to Yahweh from ‘the people tall and smooth, feared near and far’ (v. 7). Yet even such а conversion of an older message of judgment into one of salvation is not the plagiarism, on principle illegitimate, of а later writer who is himself devoid of inspiration. There is in the Isaiah text a genuine sense of continuity, and a genuine belief that authority has been given to reinterpret an earlier oracle, even if in opposite terms, because of the very different historical situation. The very fact that oracles are so often inverted in this way compels us to regard it as а perfectly normal and theologically legitimate procedure. For example, in the composite passage Isaiah 22.15-25 three stages of growth stand out in clear relief. In the first section, vv. 15-18, the wrath of Yahweh and of the prophet himself were poured out on Shebna, one of the chief officials of Judah. He shall not some day be laid to rest in his newly hewn tomb. Yahweh will toss his mummified corpse into a foreign land as if it were a ball. This is the end of the oracle spoken by Isaiah himself, but it continues:

 

‘I will thrust you from your office and cast you down from your station.

This will come to pass on the day when I call Eliakim the son of Hilkiah my servant.

I will clothe him with your robe,

and bind your girdle on him, and commit your authority to his hand,

that he may be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah.

And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David;

when he opens, none shall shut, and when he shuts, none shall open.

 I will fasten him like а peg in а sure place,

and he will become а throne of honour to his father’s house’ (Isa. 22.19-23).