Spong: Evolving the Prophet...
Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2008 10:50 am
Just what makes a Prophet? Is answered below. Also contains the story of David and Bathsheba--light-bulb moment: Was her name simply literary artistry? Back to this article. If the personal qualities of an ancient Prophet were as Spong suggests, it doesn't seem as if they are a requirement of a present day Prophet, who is not "outside of the Priesthood," as in ancient days.
An interesting read. Enjoy and comment...
The Origins of the Bible, Part X
The Rise of the Prophetic Movement: Nathan – Prophecy's Father
The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures are not religious versions of Drew Pearson or Jeane Dixon. They do not predict future events. Prophets are those who are in touch with values, truth, perhaps we could call it God, and who thus see the issues of life more deeply than other people see them. Perhaps they are the ones who, by standing on the shoulders of others, can perceive future trends and speak to them before others see them developing.
We have known artists to whom prescience has been attributed. A well known Spanish painter, for example, painted a scene several years before the Spanish Civil War that portrayed his country torn apart in a violent struggle. The Bible might well have called him prophetic. He saw what there was to be seen, but not everyone was able to see it. The power of the prophets was also derived not from the established structures of the social order, but from the prophet's vision. They were always outside the lives of either political or ecclesiastical authority. As such, they were what King Ahab called the prophet Elijah, "Troublers of Israel." The established priesthood always resented the prophets for they were not ordained or trained. They were free spirits who somehow spoke with an authority that established figures wished they possessed. The ability to speak to authority in a way that demanded the authority's attention was the signal mark of the prophetic spirit.
None of this, however, answers the question of just why it was that the role of the prophet was able to rise in Israel to such heights that the religion of Israel was said to rest with equal weight on the law (the Torah) and the prophets. It all began, I believe, in a charismatic confrontation between Israel's most powerful king and a man armed only with a sense of God's righteousness. That story is told in the Second Book of Samuel and it remains powerful today.
King David lived in the biggest and tallest house in the city of Jerusalem, which meant that when he was out on his roof top he could look at the roof tops of all of Jerusalem's citizens. One afternoon when he was doing just that, he spied a beautiful woman taking a bath in what she assumed was the privacy of her own roof top. The king was smitten with her charms and at once sent a messenger to her with an invitation to visit the palace to have a tryst with her king. The woman came. Perhaps in the power equations of that world she had no choice, perhaps she wanted to come, the text doesn't tell us and so we will never know. The two of them, nonetheless, became lovers at least for this brief time. When the lovemaking was over, the woman, whose name was Bathsheba, returned to her home. I suspect this was neither the first nor the last such affair that King David had had and so he did not think much about it once the rendezvous had ended. So it was that that weeks passed and memories faded until they were newly called to mind by a message arriving at the palace directed to the king's eyes alone. The message read: "King David, I need for you to know that I am expecting your child." It was signed, Bathsheba.
When David read it, he responded in a typically male, evasive way. "You are a married woman," he said. That is the first time that we learn from the biblical source that this tryst was an adulterous relationship that the king had had with a married woman. "Why do you assume that I am the father of this baby?" To which Bathsheba responded immediately, "I am indeed a married woman, but my husband Uriah is a solder in the king's army. He has been fighting the king's wars under Joab, the king's military leader, and thus he has not been home for months. There is no doubt, O King, that you are this baby's father."
Still unwilling to accept responsibility, the king decided on an alternative course of action. It was plan B. He would grant Uriah a furlough so that Uriah could then come home, enjoy the privilege of his wife's bed and then, in this pre-DNA testing world, they could say this baby came early. It would not be the first time that tactic had been employed. So this permission for leave was conveyed by a royal messenger to the field and a very surprised Uriah found himself being granted an unprecedented furlough. What King David did not anticipate, however, was that Uriah had the make up of the "original boy scout." He was a soldier first, drunk with the camaraderie of warfare. "It would not be fair or appropriate for me to enjoy the comforts of my home and my wife while my buddies are bleeding and dying on the battlefield from which I have somehow been removed. Therefore, in solidarity with them," he concluded, "I will not enter my home on this leave." Very ostentatiously Uriah set up a pup tent on the walk beside his home and spent his entire leave there. On viewing this, David, feeling trapped, said: "What a turkey" and began to develop Plan C.
Once again a sealed royal order was conveyed to Joab, the commanding officer, this time by the hand of Uriah himself. In this letter David commanded Joab to organize his army into a flying wedge and hurl it at the gates of his enemy's capital city. Uriah was to be placed at the front tip of the flying wedge, where his death was all but inevitable. It was done. Uriah was struck down and killed. Joab then notified the king that his problem was now solved. King David sent for Bathsheba and she became a member, perhaps the dominant member, of his harem. Finally King David felt that his problem was solved.
This outrageous kingly behavior, however, did not escape the notice of a highly respected holy man whose name was Nathan. He decided that he must confront the king about the king's action. The reputation of Nathan was such that the king, unsuspecting of what was to come, granted him the audience that he requested. It must have been a strange confrontation. Here was King David in his royal chambers surrounded by all the wealth, power and opulence of royalty. Standing before him was Nathan, armed only with a sense of righteousness that is contained in what he believed was the moral law of God and the universe. When the two of them were alone Nathan said to the king that an episode of gross injustice in the king's realm had occurred and that Nathan felt compelled to bring it to the king's attention. The king encouraged Nathan to speak on. Nathan did so in terms of a parable.
A certain poor man, he told the king, had a single ewe lamb that was treated as a pet in his family. This lamb was fed from the family's table, slept in the family's home and shared in the family's love. Another man who lived nearby, Nathan continued, was very wealthy and owned great flocks of sheep. One day this rich man had a distinguished visitor that he was required by the mores of his culture to honor by entertaining him at a banquet. Instead of taking a lamb from his own flocks, however, he went to the house of his poor neighbor, took his only ewe lamb, slaughtered, dressed and roasted it and set it before his guest. The rich man and his guest dined sumptuously while the poor man and his family were grief stricken. Nathan let the pathos hang as he finished his story. David, upon hearing this tale, was filled with anger and declared: "The man who has done this thing must surely die."
Then in one of the Bible's most dramatic moments Nathan fixed his eyes on the king and said: "Thou art the man!" The king, thought to be all powerful, had been called to answer for his deeds. No one is above the law of God, he learned. That was a lesson rare in the ancient world, indeed it was a message unique to the people of Israel. David might have been divinely chosen to be king, as the biblical story suggests, but the King of Israel still lived under the authority of the law of God and must answer for his behavior.
David, to his great credit, did not banish Nathan from his presence, but heard the voice of God through the words of Nathan and publicly repented. He sought to do acts of restitution. When the child of this adulterous liaison died shortly after his birth, David and the biblical writers interpreted this death as divine punishment. Perhaps in a further act of trying to make things right, David lifted Bathsheba out of his harem and into the public role as his queen. Their second child was born a while later. His name was Solomon and he was to be the successor to David's throne and to solidify the royal line of David that was destined to last, at least the Southern Kingdom, for over 400 years until it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.
For Nathan's act of courage to be included in the Jewish Scriptures meant that this episode had entered the annals of Jewish memory. By becoming part of the sacred text of the Jewish people, it was destined to be read in worship settings over the centuries and in time to become identified as a mark of Judaism. In retrospect, Nathan was called a prophet and because of that the prophet's role in Jewish life was established. It was the duty of the prophets to speak for God in the citadels of power, to claim for God's law a place of absolute influence and to assert that there is no one in the land who is not subject to the law of God. Monarchy was not absolute in Israel from that moment on.
Nathan originated the prophetic role in Israel. He established Israel as the one nation where no one's power would be above the power of the law. This was the reality that made the Jewish nation different from all the other nations of the ancient world. Certainly it was this nation alone that was destined to produce the prophetic tradition that would become so strong that it was not "the law and the Temple" but "the law and the prophets," that would characterize this people. We will look at a number of the prophetic voices as this series on the origins of the Bible continues.
John Shelby Spong
Well??? Roger
An interesting read. Enjoy and comment...
The Origins of the Bible, Part X
The Rise of the Prophetic Movement: Nathan – Prophecy's Father
The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures are not religious versions of Drew Pearson or Jeane Dixon. They do not predict future events. Prophets are those who are in touch with values, truth, perhaps we could call it God, and who thus see the issues of life more deeply than other people see them. Perhaps they are the ones who, by standing on the shoulders of others, can perceive future trends and speak to them before others see them developing.
We have known artists to whom prescience has been attributed. A well known Spanish painter, for example, painted a scene several years before the Spanish Civil War that portrayed his country torn apart in a violent struggle. The Bible might well have called him prophetic. He saw what there was to be seen, but not everyone was able to see it. The power of the prophets was also derived not from the established structures of the social order, but from the prophet's vision. They were always outside the lives of either political or ecclesiastical authority. As such, they were what King Ahab called the prophet Elijah, "Troublers of Israel." The established priesthood always resented the prophets for they were not ordained or trained. They were free spirits who somehow spoke with an authority that established figures wished they possessed. The ability to speak to authority in a way that demanded the authority's attention was the signal mark of the prophetic spirit.
None of this, however, answers the question of just why it was that the role of the prophet was able to rise in Israel to such heights that the religion of Israel was said to rest with equal weight on the law (the Torah) and the prophets. It all began, I believe, in a charismatic confrontation between Israel's most powerful king and a man armed only with a sense of God's righteousness. That story is told in the Second Book of Samuel and it remains powerful today.
King David lived in the biggest and tallest house in the city of Jerusalem, which meant that when he was out on his roof top he could look at the roof tops of all of Jerusalem's citizens. One afternoon when he was doing just that, he spied a beautiful woman taking a bath in what she assumed was the privacy of her own roof top. The king was smitten with her charms and at once sent a messenger to her with an invitation to visit the palace to have a tryst with her king. The woman came. Perhaps in the power equations of that world she had no choice, perhaps she wanted to come, the text doesn't tell us and so we will never know. The two of them, nonetheless, became lovers at least for this brief time. When the lovemaking was over, the woman, whose name was Bathsheba, returned to her home. I suspect this was neither the first nor the last such affair that King David had had and so he did not think much about it once the rendezvous had ended. So it was that that weeks passed and memories faded until they were newly called to mind by a message arriving at the palace directed to the king's eyes alone. The message read: "King David, I need for you to know that I am expecting your child." It was signed, Bathsheba.
When David read it, he responded in a typically male, evasive way. "You are a married woman," he said. That is the first time that we learn from the biblical source that this tryst was an adulterous relationship that the king had had with a married woman. "Why do you assume that I am the father of this baby?" To which Bathsheba responded immediately, "I am indeed a married woman, but my husband Uriah is a solder in the king's army. He has been fighting the king's wars under Joab, the king's military leader, and thus he has not been home for months. There is no doubt, O King, that you are this baby's father."
Still unwilling to accept responsibility, the king decided on an alternative course of action. It was plan B. He would grant Uriah a furlough so that Uriah could then come home, enjoy the privilege of his wife's bed and then, in this pre-DNA testing world, they could say this baby came early. It would not be the first time that tactic had been employed. So this permission for leave was conveyed by a royal messenger to the field and a very surprised Uriah found himself being granted an unprecedented furlough. What King David did not anticipate, however, was that Uriah had the make up of the "original boy scout." He was a soldier first, drunk with the camaraderie of warfare. "It would not be fair or appropriate for me to enjoy the comforts of my home and my wife while my buddies are bleeding and dying on the battlefield from which I have somehow been removed. Therefore, in solidarity with them," he concluded, "I will not enter my home on this leave." Very ostentatiously Uriah set up a pup tent on the walk beside his home and spent his entire leave there. On viewing this, David, feeling trapped, said: "What a turkey" and began to develop Plan C.
Once again a sealed royal order was conveyed to Joab, the commanding officer, this time by the hand of Uriah himself. In this letter David commanded Joab to organize his army into a flying wedge and hurl it at the gates of his enemy's capital city. Uriah was to be placed at the front tip of the flying wedge, where his death was all but inevitable. It was done. Uriah was struck down and killed. Joab then notified the king that his problem was now solved. King David sent for Bathsheba and she became a member, perhaps the dominant member, of his harem. Finally King David felt that his problem was solved.
This outrageous kingly behavior, however, did not escape the notice of a highly respected holy man whose name was Nathan. He decided that he must confront the king about the king's action. The reputation of Nathan was such that the king, unsuspecting of what was to come, granted him the audience that he requested. It must have been a strange confrontation. Here was King David in his royal chambers surrounded by all the wealth, power and opulence of royalty. Standing before him was Nathan, armed only with a sense of righteousness that is contained in what he believed was the moral law of God and the universe. When the two of them were alone Nathan said to the king that an episode of gross injustice in the king's realm had occurred and that Nathan felt compelled to bring it to the king's attention. The king encouraged Nathan to speak on. Nathan did so in terms of a parable.
A certain poor man, he told the king, had a single ewe lamb that was treated as a pet in his family. This lamb was fed from the family's table, slept in the family's home and shared in the family's love. Another man who lived nearby, Nathan continued, was very wealthy and owned great flocks of sheep. One day this rich man had a distinguished visitor that he was required by the mores of his culture to honor by entertaining him at a banquet. Instead of taking a lamb from his own flocks, however, he went to the house of his poor neighbor, took his only ewe lamb, slaughtered, dressed and roasted it and set it before his guest. The rich man and his guest dined sumptuously while the poor man and his family were grief stricken. Nathan let the pathos hang as he finished his story. David, upon hearing this tale, was filled with anger and declared: "The man who has done this thing must surely die."
Then in one of the Bible's most dramatic moments Nathan fixed his eyes on the king and said: "Thou art the man!" The king, thought to be all powerful, had been called to answer for his deeds. No one is above the law of God, he learned. That was a lesson rare in the ancient world, indeed it was a message unique to the people of Israel. David might have been divinely chosen to be king, as the biblical story suggests, but the King of Israel still lived under the authority of the law of God and must answer for his behavior.
David, to his great credit, did not banish Nathan from his presence, but heard the voice of God through the words of Nathan and publicly repented. He sought to do acts of restitution. When the child of this adulterous liaison died shortly after his birth, David and the biblical writers interpreted this death as divine punishment. Perhaps in a further act of trying to make things right, David lifted Bathsheba out of his harem and into the public role as his queen. Their second child was born a while later. His name was Solomon and he was to be the successor to David's throne and to solidify the royal line of David that was destined to last, at least the Southern Kingdom, for over 400 years until it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.
For Nathan's act of courage to be included in the Jewish Scriptures meant that this episode had entered the annals of Jewish memory. By becoming part of the sacred text of the Jewish people, it was destined to be read in worship settings over the centuries and in time to become identified as a mark of Judaism. In retrospect, Nathan was called a prophet and because of that the prophet's role in Jewish life was established. It was the duty of the prophets to speak for God in the citadels of power, to claim for God's law a place of absolute influence and to assert that there is no one in the land who is not subject to the law of God. Monarchy was not absolute in Israel from that moment on.
Nathan originated the prophetic role in Israel. He established Israel as the one nation where no one's power would be above the power of the law. This was the reality that made the Jewish nation different from all the other nations of the ancient world. Certainly it was this nation alone that was destined to produce the prophetic tradition that would become so strong that it was not "the law and the Temple" but "the law and the prophets," that would characterize this people. We will look at a number of the prophetic voices as this series on the origins of the Bible continues.
John Shelby Spong
Well??? Roger