mickw

I just finished a couple of the works of Joseph Wheless on this site.

When he is speaking of OT prophets, he says, in essence, that prophesy is synonymous with rant.

He talks about some prophets being referred to as "meshuggah", ie crazy or mad.

Is his equating prophesying with ranting correct, and/or does anyone have a source for the original Hebrew word?

Thank you.

spin

Wheless may be referring to a statement like that in Jer 29:26, where we find m$g(, "mad". The writer is being ironic, since it comes out of a prophetic work and since the Jeremiah message is presented as so unpalatable to the relevant audience that he is supposed to have been considered mad.

The original notion of "prophet" (nby)) had no notion of prediction of the future.


spin

mickw

Thanks. He was pointing out how they ran around naked or with skins ala John the Baptist. . .I took him to mean they were not holy or wise sages in the traditional sense, but more like a fakir, dervish, etc.

In other words, kind of screwy.

spin

He's working on the theory that we can take the texts on face value in these instances.

I fear that the quasi-naked semi-savage is a literary trope -- what one would expect to be found in the literature -- and that most prophecy was written around the Jerusalem temple.


spin

mickw

Why would the author be disparaging, though? Aren't the writings meant to be believed?

spin

What are you referring to with "disparaging"?


spin

mickw

I guess I thought that's what you meant. . .that the author was portraying them as not wrapped too tight.

spin

I find that much found in the prophets is literary, rewriting earlier works, earlier ideas, using conventions. These things are not what you'd expect from a real wild man. There may have been a real Isaiah somewhere in the literary trasition that bears his name, but I wouldn't know how to find it. We are dealing with texts writtenover a long time, if their contents are at all relevant. Isaiah ostensibly goes from before 700 BCE and the time of Hezekiah down at least to 539 BCE and the presence of Cyrus of Persia -- though in fact it may easily have been written much later with different contexts to explain the different phases of the text. The book of Isaiah was written in a literary context, probably within a current over generations. One cannot imagine a single real wild man behind it.

I guess the wild man trope allows the writer to say things more easily through the voice of such a person as would have no constraints -- a bit like a fool in Shakespearean times, who can get away with saying wise things because he is afterall a fool. (Perhaps there was an early tradition in which the prophet had a performative role like the fool, but we only have literary evidence.)


spin

mickw

Interesting. Grazie.

Ben C Smith

The classical Hebrew prophets (those whose written works we have preserved in holy scripture) seem to me to be, as Spin noted, literary folk, not wild dervishes.

However, the origins of Hebrew prophecy may well have been a bit wilder. Saul strips off his clothes in 1 Samuel 19.23-24 while under a spirit of prophecy, and Elisha once requires music to be played in 2 Kings 3.15 before he can prophesy, as if he is trying to go into an ecstasy.

According to some, the root word of prophet or prophesy originally meant to froth or boil, perhaps implying a prophetic frenzy of some kind. (I myself do not know if this is true or not; the Hebrew word is naba'.)

Ben.