Assyrian Statecraft and the Prophets of Israel

Abstract

The explosive emergence of the so-called “writing prophets” in the history of Israel is one of the great historical mysteries of Old Testament scholarship. The first, and in some ways one of the greatest of these figures, Amos of Tekoah, can hardly be dated much before 750 B.C., and the beginnings of the prophetic careers of Hosea ben Beeri, Isaiah of Jerusalem, and Micah of Moresheth all fall within the following decade and a half. From this time forward, with the single exception of the dark and bloody reign of Manasseh, there is a steady succession of prophetic literature, ending somewhere around the mid-fifth century B.C. Once initiated, this succession moves in what seems to the historian, operating with the full confidence of hindsight, to be an entirely logical and reasonably consistent fashion. Yet its origins are wholly obscure. Like Melchizedek, Amos seems to have been born without benefit of ancestors. (And it goes without saying that such an [apparently] “uncaused happening” in the historical sphere is as troubling to the modern historian as the thought of an ancestorless Jebusite king would be to the historian's colleague in the biology department.) But what sort of events would be deemed to constitute “sufficient historical causation” for the rise of the classical prophets of Israel?