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

The prophets themselves believed that their calling, to which we shall now turn, confronted them with a range of tasks and duties. We may, indeed, quite properly speak of the prophetic 'office' consisting on the one hand of binding commitments and on the other of liberties and powers. Of course, since this is a very general term, it will have to be more precisely defined as we proceed, for we cannot presume that each and every prophet held an identical view of it. There were very many shades of difference indeed, of which only a few can be noticed in what follows. Not only did the prophets' own conception of their office clearly change, it was also possible for a prophet even to come into conflict With his office: a further cause of conflict might be where the prophet's definition of his office differed from the ideas of others. For example, in the case of Isaiah, the idea of his office which he himself held was not at all the same as the one which forms the background of the stories told about him in chs. 36—39. The latter version is determined by the narrator's own idea of it. In principle, behind every prophetic tradition and behind even the most insignificant mention, lies a well-defined idea of what constitutes a prophet and his office. If scholarship had a still keener awareness than it has of these questions, its eyes would be much more open to the enormous variety in the idea of what a prophet was.