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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > February 2003

Jews and Christians

Seeing the prophets differently

By Rolf Rendtorff

Christians typically view the Old Testament prophets as individualists, as religious geniuses and defiant rebels, driven by their own personal experiences with God, answering to no one, and obedient only to their own inner voice. In Jewish tradition, however, the prophets are enforcers of God’s law—or torah—on earth. The difference is so striking, one might wonder whether Jews and Christians are even reading the same books. But the content of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible is more or less the same as in the Christian Old Testament. So what accounts for this disparity? Why do Jews and […]

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Footnotes

1.

See James Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” BR 14:03.

2.

See Joseph Blenkinsopp, “The Documentary Hypothesis in Trouble,” BR 01:04; and P. Kyle McCarter, “A New Challenge to the Documentary Hypothesis,” BR 04:02.)

3.

See Victor Hurowitz, “P—Understanding the Priestly Source,” BR 12:03.

4.

See Martin A. Cohen, “The Prophets as Revolutionaries: A Sociopolitical Analysis,” BAR 05:03; and Margaret Parker, “Exploring Four Persistent Prophetic Images,” BR 06:05.

Endnotes

1.

Reported in Harvard Divinity School Bulletin (Summer/Fall 2001), p. 5.

2.

Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), p. 25.

3.

Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 168.

4.

Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 3–4.

5.

Rainer Albertz, The History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1994).

6.

See Frank Crüsemann,The Torah (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), one of the most important books in Old Testament theology in the last decade.