Were the prophets of the Bible holy men inspired by God? Then why did they insult and sometimes kill each other? Can you always trust what they say?
Many people believe that some have the ability to see into the future. ESP, clairvoyance, second sight, sixth sense, etc. I see this commercial on TV for a psychic organization. Hard to believe it is legal to fleece people in this way, harder still to believe that people will spend their hard-earned money for such nonsense. Ever notice that the list of richest people never contains any psychics? We have five obvious senses and when we examine the human body we find organs that handle those senses: eyes for sight, ears for hearing, etc. There is no organ for perceiving the future or anything else outside of one’s immediate vicinity. People think there is some disembodied soul floating around within us that could have ESP or some such ability but as a doctor I have never seen evidence of such a thing. We have a brain that processes all our outside output and our inner thoughts, but it is quite material and tangible. Have you ever wondered how it is that substances like alcohol and other drugs affect our personality and thinking? How could a soul be affected by something in the bloodstream? Likewise with a stroke that damages part of the brain. Or dementia. Or brain infection. Anytime you damage or suppress part of the brain, temporarily through things like drugs or permanently through disease, you see a loss of brain function. The “soul” does not remain whole and healthy. There is no mystical part of us that can perceive things beyond our senses. I know some (many?) will argue this point, but it is so. Which brings us to prophets.
People tend to think of a prophet as someone who looks into the future. It is actually one who speaks with the help of divine inspiration and thus a prophet in the Bible more likely to proclaim God’s view of the present situation than to make some prediction about the future. Since the prophet is supposedly speaking with divine help his (or her) words are thought of by believers as the words of God Himself. In the Old Testament there are books classified as by written by the Major Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel) and by the Minor Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi). Since many people believe the entire Bible to have been written by divine inspiration then all the authors of the books are in a sense prophets. And since prophets are speaking with God’s help everything they say must be true, right? Well, lets’ see what the Bible itself says about prophets.
In regard to those who claim to see the future or consort with spirits, this is what the Law of Moses says:
There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, a soothsayer, one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who consults the dead.
Deuteronomy 18:10, 11
Now Joseph, of technicolor dreamcoat fame (Genesis 37-50, one of the best stories in the Bible) made his name by interpreting dreams, Aaron used the magical Urim and Thummim stones in discerning God’s will (Exodus 28:30) and King David used an ephod (religious garment) to divine God’s will (1st Samuel 30:7), so apparently there was some wiggle room about this.[1]
Previously in post 16 I presented the idea that prophets may have been part of the arts community in Israel: the poets, musicians, dancers and writers. There are verses specifically tying music to prophesy:
Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took the timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dancing…
Exodus 15:20
“Afterward you will come to the hill of God where the Philistine garrison is; and it shall be as soon as you have come there to the city, that you will meet a group of prophets coming down from the high place with harp, tambourine, flute, and a lyrebefore them, and they will be prophesying…”
1st Samuel 10:5
Recall that when King Saul was depressed (or possessed) David would play the harp for him:
The next day an evil spirit from God came forcefully upon Saul. He was [prophesying] in his house, while David was playing the harp, as he usually did.
1st Samuel 18:10
I bracketed the word “prophesying” because some English translations change it to something like “raving” even though the word is usually translated “prophesying.” I suppose some translators can’t bring themselves to say “prophesying” because of the “evil spirit” but hey, it was from God! This may actually be a case in which the ramblings of a mentally unstable man were interpreted as demon possession, as happens with the man called Legion in Mark 5. Here is a verse that clearly ties music to prophesying:
Moreover, David and the commanders of the army set apart for the service some of the sons of Asaph and of Heman and of Jeduthun, who were to prophesy with lyres, harps and cymbals…
1st Chronicles 25:1
As you flip through the pages of the books of the prophets you will see that much of it, in some cases the entire book, is in the form of poetry. Some of it, like the Psalms, may have been set to music. Throughout the ages poets and musicians have often served as the conscience of their nation, speaking out or singing out about right and wrong, justice and injustice. This appears to have been the case as well with the Old Testament prophets as much of their poetry and song has to do with the ills of their society. Often they stood up against the corruption of their day in defense of the poor and the downtrodden. They used poetry and music to state their views. Even today we think of someone who is talented in music or other arts as being given a gift from God. I suspect that the people of ancient Israel also thought of their poets and musicians as being inspired by God. And when their pointed messages enhanced by the power of poetry and music pricked the conscience it was easy to think of those messages as coming right from God Himself. In post 16 I pointed out that ancient prophets used mind-altering substances to achieve religious experiences; need I point out that the artistic community is no stranger to the use of such substances to “expand” their minds and help their creative processes?
However, the prophets themselves often took issue with one another and did not necessarily think that they were all speaking (or singing) what was right. This is a very important point: if prophets can speak falsely then one has to be very careful about what one accepts as being truth. The fact that a “prophet” says something, well, to quote George Gershwin, “it ain’t necessarily so.”
The Law of Moses recognized that some prophets would try to mislead people:
If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a miraculous sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder of which he has spoken takes place, and he says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul.
Deuteronomy 13:1-3
Note that even if a miraculous sign accompanies the prophecy, you can’t trust it; God might just be trying to test you! This point seems to have eluded some of the authors of the New Testament including Paul who seem to believe that miracles lend credibility to a prophet’s message (e.g., Romans 15:19 and 1st Corinthians 2:4) and even Jesus is portrayed as claiming that his miracles were proof of what he said, as in John 10:38 and 14:11 (throughout the Gospel of John Jesus’ miracles are specifically referred to as “signs.”).
There are some stories in the Bible that seem to cast some doubt on the integrity of prophets. Consider the story told in 1st Kings 13. There two unnamed prophets, one from Judah and one from Israel (the kingdom having divided by this point). The one from Judah goes to Israel to pronounce judgment against their corrupt worship practices. God gives him specific instructions to then return straight home. However the prophet of Israel goes to him and lies, saying that God said he is to have dinner with him. The prophet of Judah does so, inciting God’s anger. So God has that prophet killed by a lion on the way home. Thus we see that one prophet is capable of telling a lie and the other is unable to discern it as a lie. And God kills him for believing what the other prophet said! This doesn’t say much for either the character of prophets or their psychic abilities.
In 1st Kings 20:35ff there is another unnamed prophet who wants to make a prophecy against the king while disguised as a wounded warrior. So he asks another prophet to strike him, to give him a realistic wound (I suppose). The other prophet refuses to strike his fellow prophet, so the first one curses him, and as in the previous story the disobedient prophet is killed by a lion. (Apparently making them drop dead isn’t good enough; God wants them painfully mauled by a lion!) The first prophet then finds another man who is willing to strike him. Isn’t this an odd story? A prophet is killed for refusing to strike a fellow prophet who wants to disguise himself in order to trick the king. Not exactly what I would think of as pious behavior. To make it worse, the prophet’s message is that the king himself will die because he did not kill a man God wanted dead. Why didn’t God Himself kill the man? He seems to have no problem killing other people. It’s a bloody and strange story, to be sure.
1st Kings has other interesting prophet stories. In chapter 22 the king is getting ready for battle and is getting uniformly positive predictions from his “prophets.” For some reason he is suspicious, so he seeks out another opinion from a prophet that usually speaks ill of him. Micaiah goes before the king and says, “Go up and succeed, and the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.” The king recognizes that the prophet is lying! He asks for the truth, and finally Micaiah prophesies failure for the king. Why did Micaiah lie? He tells this story:
“I saw the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left. The Lord said, ‘Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ And one said this while another said that. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord and said, ‘I will entice him.’ The Lord said to him, ‘How?’ And he said, ‘I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ Then He said, ‘You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.’ Now therefore, behold, the Lord has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the Lord has proclaimed disaster against you.”
So, Yahweh wanted to entice Ahab to go into a battle he would lose. God the All-knowing apparently needs some suggestions on how to do this, and one enterprising spirit volunteers, offering to be a deceiving spirit to cause the prophets to speak lies. Apparently Yahweh and His spirits don’t have the high regard for truth that we traditionally attribute to them. So, not only can God and His spirits lie, but the prophets are unable to know when they are being induced to tell lies. Hmmm. Does that tell us anything about the prophets who wrote the Bible? Did they know if what they were writing was true or not? Is it possible some of the things in the Bible were put there to test us? How are we to know?
We will continue in the next post, and look at some of the nasty things the prophets said about each other.
Thinking exercises:
1. Deuteronomy 13 says that God might test people with false signs and wonders. Is it possible that God is testing us with the Bible, which contains many stories that make God appear cruel, insensitive, unfair and narcissistic, to see if we really believe that God is like that? Wouldn’t it be embarrassing at the Judgment if God asked you, “How could you believe that about me?!”
2. Why do you think people are so fascinated by the occult, like psychics, astrology, etc.? Do we humans find it that hard to cope with reality on our own that we crave supernatural help?
3. People believe the prophets of their own religion but are dismissive of those in other religions. (Did Mohammed really receive the Qur’an from God with the help of an angel? Did Joseph Smith really translate the Book of Mormon from some golden plates with the help of an angel?) Do you use the same standards of judgment that you apply to other religions when reviewing the holy writings of your own religion? (See the next two posts for more on this…)
[1] Joseph Smith incorporated the idea of the magical Urim and Thummim stones into his story of translating the golden plates into what became the Book of Mormon.