How to Read the Bible 5 min read Lesson 7 of 12

Most of prophecy is not prediction, and what the prophets were doing, and to whom

Reading a Prophet

Ask most people what a prophet does and they will say he foretells the future. Open Amos, Micah or Jeremiah and you will find a man shouting at his own country about its own present: its courts, its markets, its worship, its poor. The future comes into it. It is not what most of the pages are about.

Lesson 7 of 12 · Reading a prophet

A prophet was sent to his own nation to speak about its own present, and most of what he said was indictment and summons: this is what you are doing, this is what God requires, turn. Where a prophet does speak of the future, the first meaning is the one his hearers could have understood, and the further meanings the New Testament finds are read through that one, not instead of it. And a prophecy about a nation carries a condition inside it, stated by the prophets themselves: what is announced can be turned aside by the people it is announced to. Read a prophet for his own day first, and his day will tell you what his words are for in yours.

To whom a prophet spoke

The prophetic books say at the top who spoke, and when, and to whom, and the answer is never the distant future. Amos was a herdsman from the south sent north to Israel, and when the priest at Bethel told him to go home and prophesy there, he answered with his address.

and Yahweh took me from following the flock, and Yahweh said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ — Amos 7:15 · WEB

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Go, prophesy to my people Israel. The books open the same way, one after another, dated by the kings they spoke under.

“The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” Isaiah 1:1 · WEB
Dated by four kings of Judah, and addressed to Judah and Jerusalem.
“Yahweh’s word that came to Hosea the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.” Hosea 1:1 · WEB
Dated by five kings, four of them Judah’s and one Israel’s, and addressed to the north.
“Yahweh’s word that came to Micah of Morasheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem.” Micah 1:1 · WEB
Three kings, and two capitals named as the subject.

A book that begins with a list of reigns is telling you where to stand while reading it. Stand there, in Jerusalem or Samaria under those kings, and the prophet is a man in the street of your own city, saying what is wrong with it.

What a prophet mostly did

Read the whole of Amos, nine chapters, and count the verses about the future. Then count the verses about weights and measures, about bribes, about the poor sold for a pair of sandals, about worship God says he cannot stand. The second count wins by a distance.

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I can’t stand your solemn assemblies. — Amos 5:21 · WEB

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I hate, I despise your feasts. That is a prophet, and so is Micah’s question about what God actually wants from a worshiper, with its answer in three clauses that have nothing to do with the future.

He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does Yahweh require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? — Micah 6:8 · WEB

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Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly. The prophets are the Bible’s sustained argument that worship and justice cannot be separated, made to people who were separating them. The argument is the point. The predictions are the sanction behind it.

נָבִיא nâbîyʼ H5030

from נָבָא; a prophet or (generally) inspired man; prophecy, that prophesy, prophet.

The Hebrew word for prophet has nothing to do with time. Its root is disputed, but the oldest usage is about being called and made to speak: one who has been summoned and now announces. Aaron is called Moses’ prophet in Exodus 7:1 because he speaks Moses’ words to Pharaoh, and there is no future in that sentence at all. A prophet is a spokesman before he is a seer.

When a prophet does predict

The prophets do foretell, and the way the New Testament reads their predictions is worth learning, because it is not the way they are often read now. Jeremiah told the exiles in Babylon exactly how long they would be there.

“For Yahweh says, “After seventy years are accomplished for Babylon, I will visit you and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.” Jeremiah 29:10 · WEB
Seventy years, said to people who would count them.
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Isaiah 7:14 · WEB
A sign given to King Ahaz, in his own crisis, with a child in his own generation.
““Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall give birth to a son. They shall call his name Immanuel,” which is, being interpreted, “God with us.”” Matthew 1:23 · WEB
The same verse, read of Jesus seven centuries later.

Jeremiah’s seventy years is a plain prediction with a date, and Daniel later sat counting them. Isaiah’s sign is harder and more instructive. It was given to a frightened king as a sign for his own day: before a child then to be born could tell good from evil, the kings Ahaz feared would be gone. That is what Ahaz could understand, and it happened. Matthew reads the same verse of the birth of Jesus, and the church has read it so ever since.

How those two readings relate is honestly contested. Some hold that the verse had one meaning and it was Matthew’s; some that it had one meaning and it was Ahaz’s, and Matthew made a preacher’s use of it; most that a sign given to Ahaz was also, in a way its first hearers could not see, a pattern that Jesus filled. What is not contested is the order. Matthew knew Ahaz’s story and read through it, and so should a reader who wants to know what Matthew was doing. A prediction read without its first fulfilment is a sentence without its subject.

The condition inside a prophecy

The prophets say something about their own predictions that readers of prophecy often forget: a word about a nation is conditional on the nation. Jeremiah states it as a rule.

At the instant I speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to break down and to destroy it, if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do to them. — Jeremiah 18:7–8 · WEB

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At one moment I speak concerning a nation, to pluck it up; and if that nation turns, I relent. Then the book of Jonah shows the rule working. The prophet announces forty days to Nineveh with no condition attached, the city repents, and God does not do what Jonah said he would.

God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. God relented of the disaster which he said he would do to them, and he didn’t do it. — Jonah 3:10 · WEB

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Jonah is furious, and the book ends with God explaining to him why he should not be. So a prophecy of judgment is not a timetable. It is a summons with a consequence attached, and its whole purpose is to be turned aside. A reader who takes such a prophecy as a fixed prediction has misread its kind, and the prophet who spoke it would say so.

How to read a prophet

Find the date at the top and stand in it. Ask what the prophet is accusing his people of, since that is most of the book. Ask what he is summoning them to. Only then ask what he foretells, and of any prediction ask first what it meant to the people in front of him, and then what the New Testament made of it, in that order. The present will not go away when you do this. It will arrive, because the sins of Samaria have not gone out of fashion.