THE OFFICE OF THE PROPHET IN OLD TESTAMENT TIMES

S. HERBERT BESS
Professor of Old Testament
Grace Theological Seminary

When one undertakes to make a comprehensive study of the men in the o. T. who bore the
name "prophet," and-of the activities of those who are said to prophesy, he is confronted with a
bewi Idering and perplexing variety. He need not be very astute to observe that there is a marked
difference between Saul, who stripped off his clothes and prophesied, lying naked all day and all
night (I Sam. 19:24), and Isaiah or Amos, whose thunderous "thus saith the Lord" exposed the mor-
al corruption of the nation. Modern s.tudents of the O.T. seek to categorize the various kinds of
prophets by coining such terms as "frenzied" or "ecstatic" prophets, "canonical" or "writing"
prophets, "cultic" prophets, "false" or "professional" prophets, the "prophetic guild,1I and the
like. But the Bible itself uses the term IIprophetll to refer to all of these, and others.

In an effort to find a common definition which will embrace all the phenomena, etymology
has been often resorted to, but according to my understanding, without positive results. The verb
to prophesy, nibbe' or hithnabbe' is used preponderantly to signify the preaching of the message of
God. An example of the usage is found in Amos 7:14 ff, which reads: "I was no prophet, neither
was I a prophet's son; but I was a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore-trees: and Jehovah took
me from following the flock, and Jehovah said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel. II
While I have not analyzed every usage of the verb in the Old Testament, it surely must be safe to
say that in the great majority of cases the word means to declare God's message. However, there
are unquestionably a few places in the Bible where the word is used to mean "to behave in an un-
controlled manner." The verb is used of Saul when he lost his self control and hurled a javelin at
David (I Sam. 18: 10), or when he stripped off his clothes and rolled about on the ground. It is
also used of the prophets of Baal on Carmel when they danced about and cut themselves with knives
(I Kings 18:28,29). But the usage of the verb does not establish the meaning of the noun IIpro-
phet," because the verb was derived from the noun, and simply means to "play the prophet. II It
may well be that the "ecstatic" connotation of this verb is quite secondary, and is due to the fact
that ~ prophets were of the frenzied type.

The primary meaning of the word prophet sti II needs to be considered. Some have tried to
connect it with the verb nabal , which means to bubble forth. This view is technically unsound,
and has nothing to commend it except that it tries to establish a basis for the idea that ecstasy is
fundamental to all prophecy. Of this I will speak later.
Professor Albright (with more plausibility) has connected the noun prophet to the Akkadian
verb.o..gQy" which means to call, to announce. He takes it in the passive sense as one who is
called (by God). Others take it in the active sense, as an announcer, a proclaimer of a message.
The etymological argument, however, it quite inconclusive, and we have no certainty as to the
primary meaning of the root.

This article was read before the National Feliowshipof Brethren Ministers, Winona Lake, Indiana,
August 18, 1959.
7
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What cannot be established by etymology may often be established by function, and to this
purpose I direct your attention to Exodus 7: 1, which reads: "And Jehovah said unto Moses, See,
I have made thee as God to Pharoah; and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet." Compare this
with the parallel passage in Exodus 4: 15, 16 which reads: "And thou shalt speak unto him, and
put the words in his mouth: and I will be with thy mouth, and with his mouth, and will teach you
what ye shall do. And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people; and it shall come to pass, that
he shall be to thee a mouth, and thou shalt be to him as God." In the second passage the word
prophet is not used, but the same relationships appear to be in mind. These verses show that the
prophet's function was as a spokesman for another. He delivered a message which had previously
been given to him. In general terms, a prophet was considered to be a spokesman for God.

II.

In the light of the above definition, we are often perplexed by the very abnormal behavior of
some who are said to be prophets. Note has already been taken of the strange actions of Saul;
but his age seems to have witnessed quite a bit of this kind of thing. I Samuel 10:5 H. relates the
incident of a band of prophets coming down from a high place with the accompaniment of musical
instruments, and prophesying. It is difficult to see how prophesying in this context could be
preaching. Probably the act of prophesying here took the form of singing, or of giving what ap-
peared to be uncontrolled utterances of an ecstatic nature. Perhaps the music in some way induced'
the utterances, for we observe that Elisha also employed the minstrel in preparing to prophesy
(II Kings 3:15).

Another incident is instructive in this regard. We read in I Samuel 19:18 H. that David fled
from Saul and took refuge with Samuel, who had also with him a band of prophets who were pro-
phesying. When Saul on three occasions sent messengers there to take David, the messengers were
overcome by the Spirit of God and also prophesied. This can scarcely mean that the messengers
preached, but that they were compelled to act in some strange way that prevented them from going
about their intended business. Saul, therefore, set out to accomplish the task himself, but like-
wise was overcome by the Spirit of God and prophesied, stripping off his clothes and lying naked.
Thus we see that to prophesy sometimes indicated very abnormal behavior; and whi Ie this was true
more commonly in the earlier history of Israel, it was likewise known in later times. Jeremiah
29:26 refers to every man who is mad and acts as a prophet. Acting as a prophet and being mad
are here practically equated. The context shows that Jeremiah is very much included in this re-
ference, so that some people of his day, at least, regarded him as a mad man. It may be noted
that several of the so-called writing prophets at times engaged in what was regarded as abnormal
behavior, but this obviously was not the essence of their prophesying. Their prophesying had to
do with proclaiming God's message, and their strange acts were subservient to this purpose. We
may conclude then, that when the verb to prophesy is used to indicate strange behavior, this idea
is secondary to the primary connatation of speaking in the name of the Lord.

III.

Many scholars have spoken of the prophets as having received their messages in ecstasy.
Gunkel said: liThe fundamental experience of all types of prophecy is ecstasy, II and similarly
Jacobi said: "Ecstasy is the essence of prophecy. II They seem to mean that every prophetic oracle
arose out of an ecstatic experience; that the prophets were transposed into some sortof trance, in
which they received their revelations.
 THE OFFICE OF THE PROPHET IN OLD TESTAMENT TIMES 9

This seems to me to go far beyond the evidence. Those . who present this view ofte n refer to
the experience of Balaam, who says of himself in Numbers 24:3 ff. "Balaam the son of Beor saith,
and the man whose eye is opened saith, He saith who heareth the words of God, Who seeth the
vision of the Almighty, Falling down and having his ,eyes open: ----." The words IIfalling down
and having his eyes open" are taken to signify a trance-like experience. But we must remember
that Bal'aam is consistently presented in the Old Testament as a pagan soothsayer, who was intent
on getting the kind of oracle from God that he was being paid to obtain. Three times he set up
the circumstances and went through the ritual that was supposed to obtain the required result, but
each time he failed in his purposes because God was concerned to show that divination would not
work against Israel. If this so-called prophet experienced a suspension of his personality in re-
ceiving the divine message, it might well be because he was out of harmony with that message,
and God overwhelmed him in order to present it. It does not follow that other prophets who knew
God better and were more conformed to His wi II shou Id experi ence such a suspensi on of persona Ii ty.

Indeed the true prophets knew the experience of being possessed by God so as to declare the
word of God. Micah declared in 3:8: liAs for me, I am full of power by the Spirit of Jehovah,
and of judgment, and of might, to declare unto Jacob his transgression, and to Israel his sin."
But if the prophet became the mouthpiece of Jehovah and the medium of divine revelation, he did
not cease to be himself, and his message came through the organ of his personality. The personal-
ityof all the canonical prophets is reflected in their prophecies. It is clear then that our doctrine
of verbal inspiration cannot be described as any "mechanical dlctation" theory,. and those who
have so described it have grotesquely distorted it. The prophets had possession of their faculties;
they had real interests; their minds functioned; and they were men of deep-convictions. While
they declared the Word of God, they were more than mere passive mediums of his message. The
above is true even of Ezekiel, who did, more than some other prophets, receive revelations by
visions.
IV.

In more recent years there has been an emphasis upon the relation of the prophet to the rei ig-
ious ritual of the nation. The older liberal approach was to pit the prophet against the priest, and
to interpret such passages as Isaiah 1:10ff., Amos 5:21 f., Hosea 6:6, Micah6:6ff., Jeremiah
7:21, and others, as if the prophet was disposed to abolish the sacrificial system. This viewpoint,
spawned by the developmental theory of Israelite religion commonly associated with Wellhausen,
practically made out that the prophets a"nd the priests were exponents of two different religions.
Now there is a complete reversal, and the trend is to indicate a close association of the prophet
to what they term the cultus, and they sometimes refer to cultic prophets. For instance, it is
pointed out that the prophet Samuel often is seen as officiating in religious ritual in the offering
of sacrifi ces at various centers, and that he was related to the servi ce of the temple and of the
priest Eli from childhood. Elijah applied the term.nahl (prophet) to himself, and yet the episode
for which he is best remembered, the contest on Carmel, displays him performing the functions of
a priest, as well as prophet. As for the writing prophets, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah are
all said to be members of priestly families, and it is noted that Isaiah received his call to the pro-
phetic office while in the temple. However, these incontestable facts are given a new twist and
pushed beyond the limits of the evidence. The Norwegian scholar, Nowinckel, regards bath Jer-
emiah and Isaiah as temple personnel; and in the same vein Pedersen remarked that the prophets
constituted a stable part of the temple staff. The effect of this has been to make out both the
prophet and the priest as functionaries in the religious ritual.
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An interesting application of this new viewpoint has been given to the interpretation of the
Psalms. The radical notion that the Psalter was the IIhymnbook of the second temple ll has been
dropped, and instead, they regard the writers of the Psalms to have been these so-called cultic
prophets. This means that the various Psalms each have some ritualistic background, perhaps oc-
casioned by the events of the religious calendar. The prophet is then believed to have given
poetic expression to the pious responses of the people during these religious occasions. Thus the
Psalms are songs of the prophets designed to make the ritual acts meaningful.

Perhaps some good things can be said for this methodology. At least it has stopped the late-
dating of the Psalms, and the relegating of manY'of them to the Maccabean age. One practition-
er of this method states that he knows of only one post-exilic Psalm, the 137th. But obviously the
reoction to Wellhausenism has caused the pendulum to swing too far to the opposite extreme, and
the result has been another distortion. Who can s}'IY1pathetically read the words of Isaiah in 1:11
ff. -- IIWhat unto me is the multitude of your sacrifi ces? saith Jehovah: I have had enough of
the burnt-offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks,
or of iambs, or of he-goatsll--who can read these words and then believe that Isaiah was a cultic
offi cial who parti cipated in these very ceremonies?

v.
The step having been taken to make the prophet a temple functionary, the comparative relig-
ionists have gone one step further and sought to illustrate his role in Israel by comparing him with
the functionaries of Babylonian ritual. The Swedish scholar Haldar noted that a certain Babylon-
ian official was called.D!S!b.b.!.L. This word derived from the verb meaning lito rave II , evidently
signifying that his behavior was ecstatic. Haldar thus equated the.!!l9..bh.Y. priest of Babylonia with
the prophet of Israel who many had presumed received his oracles in ecstasy.

The prophet in Israel is sometimes called a ~, a seer. To him Haldar compared the Baby-
lonian official called baru, which also derives from the verb to see. But the Babylonian baru was
a seer in a different sense, since we know the technique by which he got his visions. He was one
who saw by divination. There were different means by which he practiced divination: there was
the observance of oil and water in a divining cup; or the omen might be received by observing the
entrails and markings of the liver of a sacrificed sheep; or he watched the flight of birds or the
movements of heavenly bodies, and such like.

The comparison of the Hebrew prophets with Babylonian diviners and ravers is a very extreme
position, which doubtless is repulsive to us who accept the Biblical position that the prophets of
the Old Testament proclaimed an objective revelation which was communicated to them by the
living God. The comparison, however, does serve one useful function. It shows us to what depths
some self-styled prophets in Israel had sunk, for we know that some of them indeed had odopted
the methods of the pagan diviners. Micah declared that lithe seers shall be put to shame and the
diviners confounded ll (3:7), and in 3:11 he denounced the prophets that divine for money. Indeed
the Biblical evidence shows that the false prophets were often quite assimilated to the pagan re-
ligion of Israel's neighbors. And recently from the ruins of ancient Hazor has come eloquent
testimony to the fact that divination of the Babylonian-type was known in Palestine, for excava-
tors recently unearthed a clay model of a sheep's liver, fashioned to initiate the novice into the
art of divining. (See the photograph in The Biblical Archaeologist of Feb., 1959.)
 THE OFFICE OF THE PROPHET IN OLD TESTAMENT TIMES 11

VI.

These above-mentioned false prophets are frequently mentioned by the great writing prophets.
Isaiah complained that the pr.ophet reeled with strong drink and was swallowed up with wine (28:7).
Jeremiah declared that they commit adultery and walk in lies (23: 14). He further declared that
these prophets were professionals who really had no commission: "I sent not these prophets, yet
they ran: I spake not unto them, yet they prophesied" (23:21). He maintained that they authored
their own messages: "I have heard what the propliets have said, that prophesy lies in my name,
saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that
prophesy lies, even the deceit of their own heart? II (23:25,26). In addition to all of this, Jeremiah
,charges -the false prophets with stealing one another's oracles. In 23:30 he says: "Therefore, be-
hold, I am against the prophets, saith Jehovah, that steal my words everyone from his neighbor?"
Professor Rowley says of them: "Instead of knowing the direct constraint of the Spirit of God, they
were looking around for their oracles. They were the mere members of a profession, not men of
vocation." For a modern applicatioh, we have not only the lying prophets who substitute their
own wishful thinking for the message of God, but also we have even in our fundamentalist circles
mere lookers for sermons, who do not know the compulsion of God's Spirit in their preaching.

We can even sample what the various writing prophets have to say about these false prophets.
Ezekiel devotes his entire thirteenth chapter to denouncing them, and Micah remarks that the or-
acles that they delivered were conditioned by the fee they received: "Thus saith Jehovah con-
cerni ng the prophets that make my peopl e to err; that bi te wi th thei r teeth, and cry, Peace; and
whoso putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him" (3:5).

VII.

The strange thing about this matter is that the false and the true prophets are referred to with
the same word,.w;aW.' (prophet). This raises the question as to how the true prophet of Israel was to
be distinguished from the false. Externally, the distinctions between the two are not very much in
evidence. Doubtless they dressed very much the same. And surely it must have appeared that their
actions were very much the same. And since the false prophets are denounced for deceiving the
people, it must have been that distinctions were not always easy, and they could not be based on
externals.

One point of distinction among the true prophets must have been that sense of compulsion to
prophesy. The record of Jeremiah's call in his first chapter shows his feeling of necessity to pro-
claim the message, a necessity which he could not side-step. But throughouthis book there recurs
this feeling of constraint. In 20:7,8, he complains that his message has made him a laughing
stock and in verse 9 he would resolve to be silent, but he cries: "If I say, I wi II not make mention
of him, nor speak any more in his name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up
in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I cannot contain. 1I

The oth;r~reat prophets also were conscious of this compelling call to prophesy, often against
their own desires. Moses would have liked to escape the obligation but could not. Isaiah's vision
in the temple compelled him to answer the call of who wi II go, and to say, .. Here am I, send me."
Amos, Hosea, and others experienced a definite call which obligated them to speak out for God,
and which gave a ring of convi ction to what they had to say.
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However, the great distinction between the messages of the true prophets and those of the
false was not in the manner of its delivery, but in the content of the message itself. The false pro-
phets were the yes-men of their times, currying favor with the political figures of the day and
giving the messages that would justify the actions of those politicians. They were motivated by a
policy of self-seeking, and were too shallow in their perception of God to know His mind on a
given matter.

The true prophets, however, were moved by conviction, and preached on the basis of their
knowledge of what God was and what He had said. These men had experience with God in their
own lives, and their messages were in accord with what they knew God to be--in accord with what
God had revealed Himself to be. Amos and Isaiah and Micah and others were compelled to pro-
claim the judgment of God upon unrepentant Israel because they had come to know God as the
Holy One, and any other message would have been inconsistent with the known character of God.
Hosea on the other hand appealed for his nation to give a proper response to the love of God be-
cause he himself had experienced a realization of that love in his own life. To say this is not to
fall into the error of making the prophet himself the source of his own message, but only to empha-
size once again that God spoke through the personality of His prophet, and conditioned the pro-
phet by experience for the message he was to give. The false prophets on the other hand could
prophesy peace and prosperity to a nation that teetered on the brink of moral collapse and of pol-
i ti ca I di si ntegrati on, because they had no persona I know Iedge of God.
VII.

Finally, I will include just a word about the common conception of prophecy, which has to
do with the foretelling of the future. Certainly the prophet did predict the future, as we all are
aware. Furthermore, Isaiah made the aoility to predict correctly the future a polemic against
heatheni sm: II Let them bri ng them forth, and shew us what sha II happen--or declare us th i ngs to
come. Declare the things that are to come hereafter •... " (lsa. 41:22,23. See also 45:21 and
46:9,10.) But prediction was not the larger part of prophecy; it was as much the prophet's respon-
sibility to interpret correctly the past and the present. An indication of this is given in the ar-
rangement of the books according to the Hebrew Bible. What we commonly call the historical
books are gathered together in the Hebrew Bible under the term lithe Former Prophets. II They are
included among the prophets because they give God's interpretation of the nation's past.

Thus we have come full cycle back to the point of our beginning. The office of the prophet
in the Old Testament was that of an announcer, a proclaimer of a message which he had received
from God, regardless of whether that message concerned the past, the present, or the future.

B BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. J. Young, My Servants the Prophets