Chapter 7 Summary

Prophesy combines preaching, politics and poetry; in this book, it will be examined as the self-characterization of God in a non-narrative form. Most often the prophets speak God's words rather than their own or "the Word," quasi-personified. The various prophetic messages frequently contradict each other and commentators get around this by dealing with each prophet as an autonomous author, which contradicts the basic premise that all of the messages in the Tanakh come from the One God. The contradictions reveal God as a character in distress. Without the prophets, God would have no outlet for his ongoing thoughts; he and they intimately shape one another. The threats and predictions are all memoirs written and read after-the-fact. The predictions and threats show God struggling to mine his history with Israel for some way to keep his and its life going, some way to draw...