Posts
In this post, I have two items:
1. On pages 242-243 of Ancient Israel, Niels Peter Lemche talks about prophecy in the ancient Near East. The eighteenth century Mari texts from upper Mesopotamia refer to prophecy:
"These texts consist mostly of letters in which a provincial governor reports to the king in Maria that one or another temple prophet has made a proclamation containing an instruction to the king from the god of the temple in question. Such messages varied widely in content: they sometimes concern political matters and direct the king to go to war or to make peace; or, they might have a religious content and so entail that the king is to build a temple, or, alternatively, that he is not to do so...Another common feature of these reports of prophetic activity is the consequences of this activity: the prophet in question was detained either directly or else indirectly, that is, they took from him things which could serve to identify him and serve as control instances." The aim here, according to Lemche, was so that the authorities could eliminate the prophets whose "predictions proved to be false." Lemche says that this was what Ahab was doing to Micaiah: detaining him to execute him if his prophecy turned out to be incorrect.
Lemche talks about another prophet in the eleventh century---either in history or in romance. Wen-Amon, an Egyptian trade representative, "was rejected in Byblos [in Phoenicia] by a local king", but a Byblian prophet exhorts the king to trust Wen-Amon, saying that he was "sent by the god Amon".
Lemche's point is that prophecy was not a "specifically Israelite phenomenon", but I'm curious as to the differences between Israelite and other ancient Near Eastern prophecy, if there indeed are significant differences.
2. On page 139 of A History of Prophecy in Israel, Joseph Blenkinsopp talks about the absence of any reference to the Josianic reform in the Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah praises Josiah in Jeremiah 22:15-16, but in a manner that is "quite general and retrospective." Jeremiah 11:1-17 promotes the covenant, and some think that this refers to the Josianic reform, but Blenkinsopp says that this is from the Deuteronomist---perhaps because the Deuteronomist was concerned about the lack of support for Josiah in the Book of Jeremiah, which he considered odd, since Jeremiah lived in that time. On pages 268-269, Blenkinsopp refers to the language that is typically Deuteronomistic: "to command the covenant," "the iron furnace" (of slavery in Egypt), "fulfill the oath which I swore to your fathers," "walk in the stubbornness of his [evil] heart," bring upon them [you] the words of this covenant."
