BEMA Episode Link: 47: The Lord’s Mouthpiece
Episode Length: 19:39
Published Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2017 01:00:00 -0700
Session 2
About this episode:

Marty Solomon and Brent Billings examine the remaining books in Tanakh, most of which are prophets, attempting to understand prophetic history as a whole and the setting for each period of history.

The Lord’s Mouthpiece Presentation (PDF)

Discussion Video for BEMA 47

Out of Babylon by Walter Brueggemann

Transcript for BEMA 47

Notes

*Note: The following notes are handwritten by me, Adam, and I reserve the right to be wrong.

BEMA Episode 47: The Lord’s Mouthpiece - Study Notes

Title & Source Summary

This episode serves as a comprehensive introduction to the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible (TaNaKh). Marty and Brent transition from wisdom literature back into the biblical narrative, establishing a framework for understanding prophetic history. The episode reorients listeners’ understanding of what a prophet is, challenges common Western misconceptions about prophecy being primarily about future-telling, and organizes the prophets into five distinct historical periods: pre-Assyrian, Assyrian, Babylonian, exilic, and remnant.

Key Takeaways

  • Prophets were primarily God’s messengers bringing present-tense messages to their contemporary audiences, not fortune-tellers predicting distant futures
  • The prophetic books should be understood within their specific historical contexts and political realities (Assyrian conquest, Babylonian exile, Persian restoration)
  • The prophetic message consistently calls God’s people back to their original mission and reminds them of where they came from
  • Understanding whether a prophet spoke to the Northern Kingdom (Israel) or Southern Kingdom (Judah) is essential for proper interpretation
  • The Book of Isaiah likely contains multiple voices from different historical periods (four distinct periods according to Marty’s framework)
  • The underlying tension between Source A (obedience-focused) and Source B (mission-focused) narratives continues through the prophetic literature
  • Wisdom literature (Psalms, Proverbs) was written for communal, corporate worship and practice, not primarily for individual application

Main Concepts & Theories

The Nature of Biblical Prophecy

The Prophet as God’s Mouthpiece: In Hebrew thought, a prophet (navi) is fundamentally a messenger or spokesperson for God, not a mystical fortune-teller. The primary function of prophetic speech was to deliver God’s message to a present audience facing present circumstances. While prophetic utterances may have future implications or multiple layers of meaning, their immediate purpose was to address the current situation of God’s people.

Present Tense vs. Future Prediction: Western Christianity has often portrayed prophets as individuals who spoke in cryptic language about events hundreds or thousands of years in the future, leaving their original audiences confused and waiting for distant generations to “finally figure it out.” This fundamentally misunderstands the biblical role of the prophet. The prophetic message had immediate relevance and purpose for its original hearers. Future fulfillments or additional meanings are “icing on the awesome biblical cake,” not the primary purpose.

Message, Not Mystery: God sent prophets like Amos with specific messages for specific people in specific situations. Amos wasn’t delivering a coded message for 21st-century Christians; he was addressing 8th-century BCE Israelites about their covenant unfaithfulness, social injustice, and impending judgment through Assyrian conquest.

The Five Periods of Prophetic History

1. Pre-Assyrian Prophets (Before the Threat)

This earliest wave of prophets appeared before the northern superpower of Assyria began its conquest campaigns toward Israel and Judah. These prophets called God’s people to repentance before disaster struck:

  • To the Northern Kingdom (Israel): Hosea and Amos
  • To the Southern Kingdom (Judah): Micah and First Isaiah

The pre-Assyrian prophets addressed Israel when the kingdoms were divided, idolatry was rampant, social injustice was widespread, and the people had forgotten their foundational mission. These prophets served as early warning systems, calling the people back to covenant faithfulness.

2. Assyrian Prophets (During Conquest)

Once Assyria began its “long brutal process of conquest,” a new wave of prophetic voices emerged:

  • Speaking about Assyria/Nineveh: Jonah and Nahum (addressing God’s patience and forthcoming justice toward Israel’s enemies)
  • Warning Judah to Learn from Israel’s Fall: Zephaniah and Second Isaiah

After the Northern Kingdom fell to Assyria (722 BCE), prophets to Judah warned: “If you don’t right the ship, you’re going to end up in the same predicament.” The destruction of Israel served as an object lesson for Judah, which unfortunately went unheeded.

3. Babylonian Prophets (The New Threat)

After Assyria came the even greater threat of Babylon, which would ultimately destroy Jerusalem and the Temple, exiling Judah’s population:

  • Jeremiah
  • Lamentations
  • Habakkuk
  • Joel
  • Obadiah

These prophets spoke during “trying times” as Babylon swept through like “a locust plague” (Joel’s imagery). Their messages are characterized by poetic, hyperbolic language describing judgment and devastation. Joel’s locust plague serves as a metaphor for the Babylonian invasion—systematic, destructive, and seemingly unstoppable.

4. Exilic Prophets (In Captivity)

After the destruction of Jerusalem (586 BCE), the Jewish people sat in Babylonian exile, their Temple destroyed, their land lost, wondering if there was any hope:

  • Ezekiel
  • Daniel
  • Third Isaiah
  • Job (possibly rewritten during this period)

These prophets served different but complementary purposes:

  • They explained why the exile happened (helping people understand God’s justice)
  • They cast “apocalyptic visions of hope” for the future
  • They brought perspective to human suffering
  • Third Isaiah contains “some of the most beautiful poetry of the ancient world”

The exilic period produced literature focused on endurance, hope, and maintaining identity while living in a foreign land under foreign gods and foreign kings.

5. Remnant Prophets (Return and Rebuilding)

After Persia conquered Babylon, Cyrus the Great allowed the Jewish people to return home and rebuild (beginning around 538 BCE):

  • Ezra and Nehemiah (historical records of rebuilding)
  • Haggai (encouraging temple reconstruction)
  • Zechariah (casting vision for restoration)
  • Fourth Isaiah (messages of hope)
  • Malachi (addressing renewed covenant unfaithfulness)
  • Esther (representing those who stayed in Persia to influence from within)

This period presented new challenges: Do you return and rebuild? Do you stay in Persia and try to influence the empire? How do you reconstruct identity after exile? The remnant prophets addressed these questions, calling the people to “walk in the ways of God and recapture the mission of God in the world to remember where they came from.”

The Four Voices of Isaiah

The Book of Isaiah presents unique interpretive challenges because it addresses multiple historical periods spanning centuries. Rather than viewing Isaiah as a single prophet with extraordinarily detailed predictions of distant futures, most contemporary scholarship recognizes multiple voices or editorial layers within the book:

First Isaiah (Chapters 1-39): Pre-Assyrian period, addressing 8th-century BCE Judah before the fall of the Northern Kingdom

Second Isaiah (Chapters 40-55): Assyrian/early exilic period, addressing the reality of exile and offering hope

Third Isaiah (Chapters 56-66): Exilic period, containing profound poetry about suffering, hope, and restoration

Fourth Isaiah (portions distributed throughout): Remnant period, addressing post-exilic restoration

This framework isn’t about denying divine inspiration or biblical authority; it’s about recognizing that the prophetic tradition in Israel involved not just original prophets but also later communities who preserved, arranged, and sometimes expanded these messages for new contexts. The text as we have it is “God-breathed” in its final form, regardless of its compositional history.

Walter Brueggemann’s book “Out of Babylon” provides an accessible academic treatment of these different voices within Isaiah, though Marty recommends waiting to read it until after completing Session Two of the BEMA curriculum.

Source A vs. Source B Narrative Tension

The episode continues the earlier discussion of two perspectives found in Samuel/Kings (Source A) versus Chronicles (Source B):

Source A Perspective (Samuel/Kings): Focuses on Israel’s moral failures, obedience issues, and idolatry. This view emphasizes knowing and following the right moral code. History pivots on individual leaders’ good or bad decisions. The narrative is driven by questions of righteousness and unrighteousness.

Source B Perspective (Chronicles): Written with the benefit of hindsight, this perspective points to “the story behind the story”—the fundamental reason Israel collapsed wasn’t just individual moral failures but a collective “lust for empire” and “forgetfulness of God’s great project.” The people forgot where they came from, what the plot of the story was, and their mission in the world.

As the study moves into the prophets, this same tension will appear. The prophetic literature can be read as primarily about moral correction (Source A), but it can also be read as calling God’s people back to their foundational identity and mission (Source B). Both readings are inspired and correct; together they create a “larger, inspired, God-breathed story message.”

Communal vs. Individual Worldview

The episode opens with Brent’s realization about wisdom literature: he’d always read Psalms and Proverbs individualistically (“a Psalm for me to understand what I’m feeling,” “Proverbs for me to understand what to do”), but these texts were written for the entire assembly of Israel to practice together.

This represents the fundamental East vs. West worldview difference. Western readers default to individual application; ancient Near Eastern texts assume communal context. Making “Is this communal or individual?” one of your default interpretive questions fundamentally changes how you read Scripture.

This insight applies equally to the prophets: when Hosea speaks about Israel as God’s unfaithful wife, he’s not primarily giving marriage counseling for individuals—he’s describing the corporate identity and covenant relationship of the entire people.

Examples & Applications

Amos and Economic Justice

When Amos (a pre-Assyrian prophet to the Northern Kingdom) railed against Israel’s oppression of the poor, selling “the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 2:6), he wasn’t predicting events in the distant future. He was addressing the economic exploitation happening in 8th-century BCE Israel under Jeroboam II, when the nation was prosperous but unjust. His message: God cares more about justice than your religious festivals. This had immediate, present-tense relevance.

Joel and the Locust Plague

When Joel described a devastating locust plague sweeping through the land, he was using agricultural disaster as a metaphor for the Babylonian invasion. Ancient audiences would have understood this imagery viscerally—locusts were a terrifying reality that could destroy an entire harvest in days, leaving famine in their wake. Joel wasn’t writing an agricultural report; he was describing military conquest in terms his audience would feel emotionally and physically.

Jonah and God’s Concern for Enemies

The book of Jonah (an Assyrian-period prophet) addresses God’s patience and justice toward Nineveh, the capital of Assyria—Israel’s mortal enemy. The book challenges nationalistic assumptions: Does God care only about Israel, or does His concern extend even to Israel’s oppressors? For a Jewish audience that had suffered under Assyrian brutality, this was a radical, uncomfortable message about the scope of God’s mercy and the nature of His mission in the world.

Ezekiel’s Vision by the River Chebar

When Ezekiel received his wild, apocalyptic vision of God’s throne-chariot while sitting by the River Chebar in Babylon (Ezekiel 1), he was addressing a fundamental theological crisis: Can we encounter God outside the Promised Land? Is God confined to the Temple in Jerusalem? For exiles questioning whether their faith could survive displacement, Ezekiel’s vision provided hope: God’s presence is mobile and can meet His people even in a foreign land.

Haggai and Rebuilding Priorities

When the remnant returned to Jerusalem under Persian permission, they faced overwhelming challenges: destroyed infrastructure, hostile neighbors, economic hardship. Haggai’s message rebuked them for prioritizing their own comfortable homes while God’s Temple lay in ruins: “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” (Haggai 1:4). This wasn’t abstract theology; it was addressing the concrete, present-tense question of what rebuilding priorities should look like.

Esther and Diaspora Influence

The book of Esther represents a different perspective on post-exilic life: not everyone returned to Jerusalem. Some Jews chose to remain in Persian territory and seek to influence the empire from within. Esther’s story validated this choice, showing how God could work through His people even when they lived dispersed among the nations rather than gathered in the homeland. This addressed real strategic and theological questions facing the Jewish community in the 5th century BCE.

Potential Areas for Further Exploration

  1. Prophetic Call Narratives: How do different prophets describe their calling experiences (Isaiah’s temple vision, Jeremiah’s “before you were born” calling, Ezekiel’s scroll-eating, Amos’s “I was no prophet” disclaimer)? What do these varied accounts reveal about prophetic authority and authenticity?

  2. Social Justice in the Prophets: Systematically examine what the prophets say about economic justice, treatment of widows and orphans, honest business practices, and the relationship between worship and ethics. How does this challenge or inform contemporary faith practice?

  3. Symbolic Actions and Street Theater: Many prophets performed dramatic symbolic acts (Hosea marrying an unfaithful woman, Isaiah walking naked, Jeremiah buying a field during siege, Ezekiel lying on his side for months). What was the cultural function of these performances? How did symbolic action communicate differently than mere words?

  4. The “Day of the Lord” Theology: This phrase appears throughout prophetic literature with varying meanings. Trace its development from Amos (who reversed expectations about it) through the exilic and post-exilic prophets. How does this concept relate to apocalyptic literature?

  5. Women in Prophetic Literature: Examine female prophets mentioned in Scripture (Miriam, Deborah, Huldah) and the use of feminine imagery for Israel and Jerusalem. How does gender imagery function in prophetic metaphor? What are the implications and potential problems?

  6. Redaction and Canonical Shaping: If books like Isaiah contain multiple voices from different periods, how were they compiled? Who made decisions about what to include? What does the final canonical form add that individual voices alone might not communicate?

  7. Prophetic Critique of Temple and Sacrifice: Many prophets harshly criticized Israel’s temple worship and sacrificial system (see Amos 5:21-24, Isaiah 1:11-17, Micah 6:6-8). Were they rejecting the entire system or critiquing its misuse? How does this relate to Jesus’s later temple critiques?

  8. Mesopotamian and Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy: How did Israelite prophecy compare to prophetic practices in surrounding cultures (Mari prophets, Assyrian prophecy, Egyptian oracles)? What was distinctive about Hebrew prophecy?

  9. Reading Prophets Christologically: While Marty emphasizes the present-tense message to original audiences, Christian tradition has long read prophetic texts as pointing to Christ (suffering servant in Isaiah 53, virgin birth in Isaiah 7:14, Bethlehem in Micah 5:2). How do we hold both the historical meaning and the Christian interpretive tradition together responsibly?

  10. The Remnant Theology: The concept of a faithful remnant appears throughout prophetic literature. Trace this theme from pre-exilic warnings through the actual remnant that returned. How does this shape expectations about the size and nature of God’s faithful community?

  11. Apocalyptic Literature: Books like Daniel and portions of Ezekiel use highly symbolic, visionary language (beasts, numbers, cosmic battles). What historical circumstances give rise to apocalyptic literature? How should it be interpreted differently from other prophetic genres?

  12. Post-Exilic Disillusionment: The reality of return didn’t match the glowing promises of restoration in Isaiah and Ezekiel. The second temple was inferior to Solomon’s, foreign powers still ruled, the glory didn’t return as expected. How did prophets like Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi address this disappointment?

Comprehension Questions

  1. Define a biblical prophet according to the Hebrew understanding presented in this episode. How does this definition differ from the common Western Christian conception of prophecy, and why does this distinction matter for interpreting prophetic books?

  2. Marty organizes the prophets into five distinct historical periods. Name these five periods and identify at least one prophet associated with each. Why is understanding these historical contexts essential for proper interpretation?

  3. Explain the concept of multiple “voices” within the Book of Isaiah. What historical and literary evidence suggests the book contains material from different time periods? How does recognizing these different voices change how we read Isaiah?

  4. Describe the difference between the “Source A” (Samuel/Kings) and “Source B” (Chronicles) narratives introduced in earlier episodes. How does this tension between obedience-focused and mission-focused perspectives continue into the prophetic literature?

  5. Brent realizes at the beginning of the episode that he’d always read wisdom literature (Psalms, Proverbs) individualistically rather than communally. Explain this distinction and its significance. How might this same communal vs. individual framework apply to reading the prophets?

Brief Summary

Episode 47 transitions from wisdom literature back into the biblical narrative by introducing the prophetic books. The central reorientation is understanding that prophets were primarily God’s messengers delivering present-tense messages to contemporary audiences, not mystical fortune-tellers predicting distant futures. While prophetic texts may have multiple layers of meaning and future applications, their primary purpose was addressing specific historical situations.

The episode organizes prophetic history into five periods: (1) pre-Assyrian prophets warning of coming judgment, (2) Assyrian-period prophets addressing the northern conquest and warning Judah, (3) Babylonian prophets describing the devastation sweeping toward and through Judah, (4) exilic prophets bringing perspective and hope during captivity, and (5) remnant prophets addressing the challenges of return and rebuilding. Each period presents unique circumstances requiring specific messages from God through His prophets.

A significant insight is recognizing multiple voices within the Book of Isaiah, corresponding to different historical periods from pre-Assyrian times through post-exilic restoration. This doesn’t diminish biblical inspiration but recognizes how prophetic tradition developed and was preserved across centuries.

Throughout the prophets, the same tension between Source A (obedience-focused) and Source B (mission-focused) narratives continues. The prophets can be read as moral correctors calling Israel to obedience, but they can also be read as calling God’s people back to their foundational identity and mission—to remember where they came from and what God’s project in the world actually is.

The episode concludes by encouraging listeners to “listen for the underlying message” in the prophets, preparing to examine each prophetic book individually in upcoming episodes while keeping this larger historical and theological framework in mind.

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