Lecture 2: Prophets After the Pattern of Moses, and Isaiah 1:1: The Prince of the Prophets

The lecture, section by section

1. Three periods of prophets

   Following the survey chart in Walton, the Old Testament's prophets fall into three periods. Before the monarchy stand Moses and Deborah, with Abraham also called a prophet in Genesis, though as a recipient of revelation more than a proclaimer. The preclassical prophets begin with Samuel, who reestablished the word of the Lord throughout all Israel and anointed the first two kings, giving the kingship itself prophetic sanction; Gad, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, and Micaiah follow, ministering primarily to king and court with rebuke, blessing, and even military direction. The classical prophets are the writing prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, who still date their oracles by the kings but address every layer of society, kings, princes, priests, false prophets, and people, all of whom Jeremiah and Ezekiel indict together as rebels against the Lord.

2. The message in one scan

   Scanned whole, the latter prophets' message runs: rebuke of the current condition of society, rooted in the people's sin; beneath every named sin, the foundational sin of idolatry, the breaking of the first commandment from which every other violation of the decalogue flows; therefore not merely a warning but the certainty of destruction and exile; and yet, beyond the exile, the promise of eventual restoration, a future generation that repents and returns, with righteousness and justice spreading from Israel to all the nations of the earth.

3. Chosen, prepared, and called

   Moses supplies the pattern of a prophet's life in four movements. First, chosen and prepared: Exodus 2 shows God's providence ruling Moses' birth, protection, adoption, and Egyptian training, and Jeremiah 1 gives the pattern its ultimate wording, called while yet in his mother's womb. Second, specifically called and commissioned: forty years after his rejection, Moses meets Yahweh at the burning bush and is told exactly what his responsibilities are, and the first three latter prophets each record the same kind of call, Isaiah 6, Jeremiah 1, Ezekiel 1 through 3, with Amos 7 echoing it in the Twelve, so we assume it of them all.

4. A fire in the bones

   Third, the prophet is a spokesman under divine compulsion. Jeremiah 20 shows what the office cost: beaten, spat upon, a night in the stocks, and in the morning Jeremiah tells Yahweh he is through being a prophet. But the message burned in his bones like fire and he could not stop speaking, whatever the consequences. Every true prophet is that kind of man: God's message is in him, and it will come out.

5. To Israel, and to the nations

   Fourth, like Moses, who carried Yahweh's word both to Israel and to Pharaoh, each prophetic book turns at some point from Judah and Israel to address the Gentile nations. Only Jonah physically went to a foreign nation, but the oracles are there in every book, and they were needed: the prophets wrote near the end of their lives for future generations, which means for Israel in exile, scattered among those very nations from 722 and 587 BC onward. In exile God's people communicate the reality of God to Gentiles, as Daniel will show, and the books teach both that the nations stand under God's judgment and that they will ultimately partake of Israel's deliverance, for behind the prophets stands the Noahic covenant: God's final determination for the nations is not judgment but blessing, with a saved remnant from the nations as from Israel.

6. Who wrote the books

   Scholarly debate over authorship continues, and many evangelicals now settle for an anonymous later redactor shaping an Isaianic core. But the rest of Scripture reads the Torah as the book of Moses, and the New Testament says Isaiah says of texts drawn from every part of the book. Essex takes Scripture's own testimony at face value: what you read in Isaiah was spoken by Isaiah and written by Isaiah for future generations, the book produced by the prophet and directed by the Holy Spirit.

7. The Bible over the tablets

   Modern study of the prophets increasingly anchors itself in extra-biblical material, reading Israel's faith as a cultural response to Canaanite, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian religion. Essex reverses the flow: the Bible helps us understand the extra-biblical material more than the extra-biblical material helps us understand the Bible, for the Old Testament is the one God-breathed, inerrant word out of the ancient Near East. The parallels are real, but they descend from revelation rejected at Babel and truth suppressed as Romans 1 describes, counterfeited rather than the source. The working line inside evangelicalism, he warns, is exactly here: whether one's final authority is Scripture or the thinking of man.

8. What prophecy is for

   Pressed in questions about the nations named in prophecy, Essex answers that the prophets speak in the nomenclature of their own day, the named nations standing representatively, and God knows who belongs to every tribe and nation even when we cannot trace them. There is no hidden code that unlocks names and dates. Acts 1 gives the posture: it is not for you to know the times and the seasons; be about the task until he comes. Like New Testament prophecy, the prophets are given to lead God's people to godliness here and now in light of what is coming.

9. Isaiah, the prince of the prophets

   Isaiah is the prince of the prophets, the richest stylist in the Old Testament: some 2,186 different Hebrew word roots, slightly more than the entire book of Psalms with its many authors. Hebrew tradition made him a second cousin of Hezekiah, though nothing in the book says so; what the book does show is a close prophetic relationship with the king, without Isaiah being a court prophet on retainer. Next to the Torah, no Old Testament book shaped the New Testament more: 58 direct quotations, 41 passages cited, over a hundred allusions, with Isaiah 53 the most quoted chapter of all and Isaiah 6:9 and 10 cited five times to explain why the Lord spoke in parables.

10. The vision of Isaiah

    Isaiah 1:1 introduces the whole book: the vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. The name Isaiah means Yahweh is salvation, the burden of the entire prophecy. And the reader already knows the man: 2 Kings 19 introduced him as the prophet whose word about Assyria's siege came to pass, so his book opens pre-validated. The word vision matters most: a seer can be carried in vision to a place and time where he is not physically present, as Ezekiel is carried to Jerusalem in chapters 8 through 11 and to the future Jerusalem at his book's end. That is the answer to the oldest attack on Isaiah, that chapters 40 to 66 speak among Babylon's exiles long after his death: this is the vision of Isaiah.

11. Judah, Jerusalem, and Zion

    The prophecy's stated focus is Judah and Jerusalem, and above all Jerusalem, where Isaiah lived and ministered. As a poet, and he is a poet of David's rank, he heaps up synonyms, and chief among them is Zion, introduced in 2 Samuel 5:7 as the stronghold David captured, extended to the temple mount, and by extension to the whole city. Jerusalem present and Jerusalem future is the real focus of the book: what God will do to remake the old Jerusalem into a new one, with a new heavens and new earth in chapters 65 and 66, language Revelation 21 and 22 will take up.

12. Four kings, and the year Uzziah died

    The book carries only three chronological links, 6:1, 7:1, and 36:1, so the four kings of the superscription supply the frame, and 2 Kings 14 to 25 is the inspired background reading. Uzziah and Jotham were good kings who nevertheless left the high places standing; Ahaz was evil, walking in the ways of Israel's kings, passing his son through the fire, and, when Rezin of Syria and Pekah of Israel allied to force Judah into their anti-Assyrian coalition, buying Assyria's friendship instead, then copying the great altar he admired in conquered Damascus and desecrating the temple with it. Hezekiah is the best of the line: he removed the high places, broke the bronze serpent, and trusted Yahweh more than any king of Judah after David, which prepares you for Isaiah's great thrust, trust Yahweh rather than the nations. Even he stumbled, buying off Assyria and proudly showing Babylon's envoys his treasures, drawing Isaiah's word that Babylon would one day carry it all away.

13. When the book was written

    Isaiah records Sennacherib's assassination in the temple of his god, an event of 681 BC, so the prophet lived at least until then, into the reign of Manasseh. Yet 1:1 confines the vision to the days of the four named kings, ending with Hezekiah's death in 686 BC: revelation ceased, and the book was written afterward, in Manasseh's day. Manasseh was the worst king of all, the reason Kings gives for the judgment even Josiah could not turn back, and Jewish tradition, perhaps echoed in Hebrews 11's sawn in two, holds that he put Isaiah to death. The link into the book's second half is now visible: once Babylon is named as the coming instrument of exile in chapter 39, Isaiah speaks in vision to the Babylonian exiles as though standing among them.

1. Jeremiah tried to quit and could not, because the word was fire in his bones. What does that picture of compulsion say about the difference between a man who has a message and a man the message has, and where do you see that difference today?

2. Essex draws the line inside evangelicalism at final authority: Scripture, or the thinking of man. Where are you most tempted to let something outside the Bible sit in judgment over it, and how would you know if it had happened?

3. The prophets were written for exiles who would live among the nations and speak of God there. In what ways is that your situation, and what would it look like this week to carry the prophetic word into it?