Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [97]
• A “Book of the Law,” thought to be Deuteronomy, is found in the Jerusalem Temple. Hebrew prophets Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, and Jeremiah are active.
612 Fall of Assyrian capital of Nineveh to the Chaldeans (“Neo-Babylonians”). The Assyrian empire disappears soon after.
609 Judah’s King Josiah slain by Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II.
605 Egypt’s Necho is defeated by the Chaldean who begins a forty-three-year reign as Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar II.
• The Persian religious leader Zoroaster (Zarathustra) founds a faith that will dominate Persian thought for centuries.
597 Nebuchadnezzar II conquers Jerusalem; Judah’s King Jehoiachan is deported to Babylon, now a magnificent city of public buildings faced with blue, yellow, and white enameled tiles, broad avenues, canals, and winding streets. It is the site of the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, exotic shrubs and flowers irrigated by water pumped from the Euphrates.
587 Fall of Jerusalem; destruction of the Great Temple and beginning of fifty-year Exile in Babylon. During the Babylonian Captivity, many of the orally transmitted books of Hebrew scripture are first written down.
EIGHT MEN OUT
THE PRE-EXILE PROPHETS
* Why are the Children of Israel the “Chosen People”?
* What is the difference between a “virgin” and a “young woman”?
* Who is the “suffering servant”?
* What is a jeremiad?
If you were drawing up a guest list for a party, you might want to leave the prophets off. While David and Solomon deserve the title of ancient Israel’s “party animals,” the prophets were the “party poopers.” Represented by the fifteen individual books, the Hebrew prophets ringingly denounced evil, corruption, and immorality as they saw it. As noted earlier, the term “prophet” is a loose one. While the earliest sense of the word was “seer,” these men (Deborah in Judges was a prophetess, but very few other women are given the title) were far more than simple fortune-tellers or diviners. Their role might more accurately be defined as human messengers of God; occasionally they were reluctant witnesses, as in the case of Jonah in particular.
Although primarily targeting the people of Israel and Judah, the prophets also took aim at neighboring societies, and their words can still ring uncomfortably true in discussing sin, corruption, and human fallibility. These books offer few biographical details about these men, and in many cases, portions of their books were composed long after the individual prophets lived. For the most part uncompromisingly harsh, and often vividly poetic, the body of literature left by the prophets is unique among the world’s religions.
The prophetic books also mark a departure point for Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In the Hebrew scriptures, the three “major” and twelve “minor” prophets follow the “historical books” of Joshua through Kings, all under the heading of “Prophets” (Nevi’im). The Christian Old Testament continues a “historical” progression in which Kings is followed by Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, and the prophets are placed much later.
To maintain a narrative continuity tracing the history of ancient Israel, this survey of the prophets breaks them into two groups; the first group covers the eight prophets who preceded the fall of Jerusalem and the Exile. The prophets of the Exile and Post-Exile periods are covered in a later chapter.
The three longest prophetic books, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, have traditionally been labeled the “Major Prophets.” The other twelve books are called the “Minor Prophets,” but the characterization does not reflect their relative importance. The “minor” prophets are not less significant, but the books are much shorter in length. However, calling them the “Shorter Prophets” might have made them sound like a Hebrew version of the Seven Dwarfs.
THE PRE-EXILE PROPHETS
PROPHET
DATE (BCE)/Place
Amos
c. 760-750; Israel under Jeroboam II
Hosea
c. 745; Israel under Jeroboam II
Isaiah