SOURCE: Arkes, Hadley. “The Prophets Today.” New Criterion 21, no. 5 (January 2003): 62-7.

In the following review, Arkes examines Podhoretz's theological theories and beliefs in The Prophets, noting that Podhoretz presents the material with humility and respect.

Norman Podhoretz approaches the prophets of the Hebrew Bible with all the care that scholarship can bring to the project [in The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are]. But his purpose in the end is to administer a jolt—to bring out the challenge that classical prophecy would pose against the orthodoxies of our own day. Those new orthodoxies have commanded their deepest allegiance among the political class that rules now in the academy and the media, in the schools of law and the courts. That the outlook of this class has come to be seen as so intertwined with “modernity” is not to establish the futility of classical prophecy or the...