The Prophets as Revolutionaries: A Sociopolitical Analysis

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Five Biblical prophets—Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah—scathingly attacked the sacrificial cult practiced in the shrines of ancient Israel and Judah.

These prophets all lived in that turbulent 150-year period that began with the death-pangs of the Kingdom of Israel in the late 8th century B.C. and ended with the Babylonian destruction of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C. They were all literary prophets—that is, they were fortunate enough to have had their messages recalled, transmitted, recorded, embellished and ultimately canonized into sacred writ—unlike, for example, the earlier Elijah who survives only in a record of deeds.

The messages of these first literary prophets were all suffused with a passionate dedication to the ethical foundations of life, and they all declaimed against the moral corrosion of the Hebrew society of their time. Although diversely formulated and illustrated, their messages are all pervasively dominated by the same theme: In Hosea it is hesed, with its multiple nuances of mercy, kindness, love, loyalty and reciprocity.¹ In Amos it is righteousness and justice.² In Micah it is justice, mercy and humility.³ And in Isaiah⁴ and Jeremiah⁵ it is goodness, justice and compassion.

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But in each case, the ethical pronouncement is accompanied by an attack on the cult and the details of its rituals. Because the cult served as the symbolic bridge between the Hebrews and their God, the common theme of these attacks on the cult reveals the fundamental burden of the prophetic message.

When Amos, in Yahweh’s name, exclaims:

“I hate, I despise your feasts,

And I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies;”⁶

when Hosea says:

“For I desire mercy and not sacrifice;”⁷

when Isaiah declares:

“Bring no more vain oblations:

It is an offering of abomination unto Me …

Your new moons and appointed seasons My soul hateth;

They are a burden unto Me;”⁸

when Jeremiah declaims:

“Your burnt offerings are not acceptable,

Nor your sacrifices pleasing to Me;”⁹

when Micah asks:

“Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,

With ten thousands of rivers of oil?”¹⁰

it is clear that the prophets were denouncing the pointlessness and hypocrisy of cultic solicitation of Yahweh’s favor on behalf of a morally corrupt society by men of authority and power who condoned and even contributed to its debauchery.

Clear as the prophetic message is, the sociopolitical cause is obscure. In sociopolitical terms what were these prophets trying to accomplish? The Biblical materials relating to this question are too scant to permit any definitive answer, but the question is of paramount importance to an understanding of the prophetic enterprise.

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Two principal answers have been given by scholars. One is that the prophets regarded the sacrificial cult as so inherently corrupt and superfluous that they desired nothing short of its abolition.¹¹ The other insists that the prophets’ quarrel was not with the cult as such, but with its corruption, and that the prophets’ aim was a reinvigoration of the sacrificial system emanating from a moral transformation of society.¹² Between these two answers are ranged a variety of hedges,¹³ including one which claims that the prophetic opposition to sacrifice stemmed from the infiltration into the Yahwistic cult of pagan practices which the prophets sought to destroy.¹⁴

Each of these positions rests precariously on three unstable premises. The premises are first, that the prophetic intent can be recovered from interpreting the prophets’ words; second, that the prophets’ value judgements are objectively accurate, and third, that the prophetic mission can be understood in the main as a religious endeavor.

This approach, seeking as it does to fathom the meaning of particular writers, implicitly contains a psychological probe. Such psychological scrutiny is difficult enough under the best of circumstances, when subjects are present and available. But it becomes utterly impossible for it to yield fruitful results with the Bible, where the subjects are separated from us by the chasm of the centuries and layers of editorial revision and addition.

A useful alternative approach, however, is to look at these prophets as types, as role-figures, rather than as isolated individuals. This typological analysis may be contrasted to the more traditional psychological analysis. In a typological analysis, what we do not know is reconstructed by extrapolation from the norm of parallel societal situations, with due consideration to the variables, rather than from a psychological analysis of one individual.¹⁵

Politically, the prophetic message is an anti-establishment message. Regardless of whether the aim of the prophets was reformation or abolition of the sacrificial cult, their indictments certainly challenged and threatened the institutions supporting the cult.¹⁶

Typologically, the prophetic message shares the contours of anti-establishment messages in general. Such messages are always position statements made to sharpen battle lines and galvanize support. They are regularly couched in simplistic generalities. One characteristic that such messages never possess is objectivity.

The cultic leadership threatened by the prophets could hardly have failed to take sharp issue with the prophetic contention that Yahweh desired the subordination of sacrifice or that He had an aversion to it. But, unfortunately, the response of the cult establishment has not survived. The cult leaders, we may be sure, indignantly denied the charge of rampant corruption. They categorically rejected the implication of their own involvement in unethical conduct or practice. On the contrary, they no doubt listed a respectable catalogue of their own contributions to the welfare of society. They doubtless credited themselves with unquestioned achievements, including such stability as did exist then and in the past. For the cult leadership, the source of any instability, malaise or corruption could be found in the preachings of opposition spokesmen, whom the cult leadership probably characterized as rabble-rousing demagogues!¹⁷

Above all, these establishment leaders assuredly reaffirmed the immemorial ethical concepts that underpinned Yahwism and its sacrificial cult, the very same concepts articulated by their prophetic opponents.

From all this flows a striking conclusion. The prophets’ insistence on Yahweh’s desire for goodness, justice, mercy, humility and hesed cannot mean that the sacrificial system as then practiced in Israel or Judah was empty of ethical values. Our typological analysis suggests that, for all its moral power, the prophetic message, even originally, exaggerated the ethical depravity of the opposition.

An understanding of prophetic rhetoric in this light makes it difficult to believe that the prophets were champions of the unalloyed good, locked in quasi-apocalyptic struggle with the grubby forces of irredeemable evil. Instead, this analysis places the prophets on a more recognizably human sociopolitical stage, and renders possible a new approach to the questions of what the rhetoric of the prophets really intended, what they were trying to achieve, and whom they were seeking to benefit.

Some modern commentators who have attempted a sociopolitical analysis of these prophets have offered a simplistic Marxist answer. They have asserted that these prophets were champions of the downtrodden poor, and, at least implicitly, that the culprits were the lyre-thrumming and summer-homing rich. The same limited evidence, however, can be used to support other hypotheses, among them that the prophets were anti-ecclesiastical, anti-monarchical, pre-monarchical conservatives, self-seeking opportunists, 015or any combination of these, and in each case they employed their prophetic rhetoric to win popular support for their sociopolitical agenda.

The Marxist class-struggle hypothesis is perhaps the most vulnerable of the alternatives, since social and political experience has repeatedly demonstrated that so-called upper and lower classes, however defined, almost never act as unified bodies, and that divisive issues regularly cut across class lines to embrace individuals who, judging from the rhetoric alone, are acting at variance with their material self-interest.

For example, there is every reason to suppose, on typological grounds, that large segments of the disadvantaged Israelite populace in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. remained loyal to the cult as the instrument of their hope, and recoiled angrily at all efforts 016to link its practitioners to their misfortune. By the same token, there is also every reason to suppose that messages such as those articulated by the prophets were supported by upper class elements, including some on the fringes of authority and power who wished thereby to enhance their political position. Indeed, the occasional suggestion that the prophets themselves may have been, broadly speaking, members of the cultic establishment, is consistent with this possibility. Jeremiah was a priest and, through Anathoth, connected to the Shilonites.¹⁸ Amos in all likelihood was not a humble shepherd and sycamore-dresser.¹⁹

In any event, the prophetic message was a potential benefit to segments of society which today we cannot identify with any certainty. Was this benefit simply a coincidence? Were the prophets incorruptible altruists incapable of making the compromises required to organize politically?²⁰ Were the prophets, as one scholar insists, merely announcing an ineluctable doom, without any program for political renewal?²¹ Or did their message reflect a following, or, at least, the quest for one?

Sociopolitical typologies militate against the theory that the prophets were loners. Without the megaphone of structure, even the most cogent voices are regularly muffled. When such loners can be heard, they are regarded by the establishment as mere nuisances and shunted off unheeded into expedient oblivion. Rarely do loners have an opportunity to deliver themselves of their ideas at official public gatherings such as those in which Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah and, also, almost certainly, Hosea and Micah participated.

The impact of the prophetic message, its pointed fullness and its obvious preservation by various successive groups until its eventual canonization suggest that even if the prophets began without supporting structures, it was not long before they possessed them.

This view is supported by the fact that in the case of Amos and Jeremiah, where evidence is available, the establishment reaction suggests a substantial following. Neither Amos nor Jeremiah was ignored by the establishments they confronted. Amos was ordered to leave Israel²² and Jeremiah was imprisoned.²³ Neither was put to death, although a similar message by Jeremiah’s contemporary, Uriah ben Shemaiah of Kirjath-Jearim, ultimately led to his execution at the hands of King Jehoiakim.²⁴ Usually, anti-establishment spokesmen can entertain hope of emerging with impunity from a high public forum only when their support or potential support is strong enough to threaten internecine struggle if they are martyred. Such was probably the case with the prophets we have been discussing.

The experiences of Jeremiah and Amos indicate that the prophetic message was regarded as an attack on the entire apparatus of state and not the cult alone. Jeremiah is frequently called a traitor,²⁵ while Amaziah accuses Amos of conspiring against the king “in the midst of the house of Israel”.²⁶ These prophets were more than religious leaders, as modern analysts often depict them. We must remember that the Temple of old was not a religious institution separable from the state, nor was it symbiotically bound to a secular government in a state-church relationship.²⁷ Among the Biblical Hebrews, Temple and government were merely different dimensions of a single organism of state, with the Temple serving as the major ceremonial center of the polity. Within the Temple, the cult was the quintessential sociopolitical symbol, the flag, so to speak, of the ideals and the hopes of the united society. It was also the chief ideologically supported instrument for the collection of taxes and the demonstration of emotional allegiance to the state. The prophets moved in this world of the Temple—or that of the latter-day church or synagogue whose confines are more strictly limited to the religious sphere.

If the prophets engaged in what we today would call political treason, as Jeremiah’s enemies believed and the priest Amaziah clearly charged in the case of Amos,²⁸ they were in fact revolutionaries. As such, they were interested not in the correction but in the overthrow of what they regarded to be a corrupt government. If they were revolutionaries, their indictment of the cult was not objective but symbolic; that is, what they said of the cult, they meant for the national government. Since their plan for the national government was its dissolution, their symbolic articulation of this goal could have called for nothing less than the dissolution of the cult.

All this accords entirely with the typologies of revolutionary behavior. Revolutionaries regularly preach the overthrow of what they regard to be the infamous structures of their enemies and their replacement by utopias. Such utopias are characterized by a refreshing egalitarianism. They possess either no structures at all, or, at least, ideal structures that cannot oppress.²⁹ Such utopias may be embryonically actualized only in the early flushes of 017revolutionary success. Before long, conventional institutions again appear and bearing noticeable similarities to, if not connections with, those they have replaced. Just as often, however, a revolutionary group is successfully absorbed by the establishment through compromise and accommodation, in which case little substantial change is seen.

The latter of these patterns is discernible in the case of the prophets. It is hardly fortuitous that no post-exilic prophet that we know of continued the pre-exilic prophets’ attack on the cult. To the contrary, prophets like Joel, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi were partisans of the Temple and hence the entire state apparatus. Does this signify that a corrupt pre-exilic cult, refined through the exile, was now insusceptible of blemish?³⁰ Or does it mean that the critical prophetic elements had now been successfully neutralized by incorporation into the establishment, and that the inevitable critique of the establishment, especially in troubled times, would have to come from other sources? The emergence of a new anti-establishment group in the troubled days of the Hasmoneans suggests that in fact the post-exilic prophets had been absorbed into the establishment which their predecessors had so violently attacked.³¹

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All of this reasoning is obviously highly speculative. Yet it is no more speculative than the conventional reconstructions of the prophetic attack on the cult.

The typological approach, bringing the prophetic experience into the framework of general sociopolitical behavior, has several advantages. It views the cult in the perspective of its own contemporary society. It allows us to understand the prophets on the basis of roles rather than the uniqueness of their calls or personalities. Finally, it bypasses the partisanship of the usual interpretations in which church and synagogue liberals seek to justify a diminution of ritual on the basis of a prophetic condemnation of the cult, while church and synagogue conservatives find in the prophetic message a reaffirmation of the cult through its purification.

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About the Prophet Drawings

The drawings of the prophets Amos, Hosea and Micah which accompany this article are by the Israeli artist Jossi Stern and appear in his just published work People of the Book: An Artistic Exploration of the Bible. The book is available for $14.95 from William Collins Publishers, Inc., 2080 West 117th Street; Cleveland, Ohio 44111.

Five Biblical prophets—Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah—scathingly attacked the sacrificial cult practiced in the shrines of ancient Israel and Judah. These prophets all lived in that turbulent 150-year period that began with the death-pangs of the Kingdom of Israel in the late 8th century B.C. and ended with the Babylonian destruction of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C. They were all literary prophets—that is, they were fortunate enough to have had their messages recalled, transmitted, recorded, embellished and ultimately canonized into sacred writ—unlike, for example, the earlier Elijah who survives only in a record of deeds. The […]