The Prophets

According to popular definition, prophets accurately predict the future. In Jewish tradition, as Abraham Joshua Heschel explains in The Prophets , they earn the title by witnessing the world around them with outstanding passion. Prophets are those whose “life & soul are at stake” in what they say about “the mystery of [God’s] relation to man.” They’re “some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived.” Yet they’re also “the men whose image is our refuge in distress & whose voice & vision sustain our faith.” This book, a classic text on the subject, contains sophisticated, straightforward discussions of each of the Hebrew prophets, the primary themes of their preaching & comparisons of Israel’s prophets to those of other religions’. Throughout, he avoids the two great temptations in any discussion of overstating the supernatural quality of a prophet’s epiphany (“A prophet is a person, not a microphone”) & reducing prophesy to a merely human phenomenon. Instead, he describes the prophet’s peculiar status as God’s spokesman in a way that does justice to its “He speaks from the perspective of God as perceived from the perspective of his own situation.”–Michael Joseph Gross (edited)