Orthodoxy and the Prophetic Word: A Study in the Relationship between Jeremiah and Deuteronomy

Abstract

If many aspects of prophecy in Ancient Israel cannot be understood except against the background of parallel phenomena in the world of the Ancient Near East and beyond 1), so within Israel as recent research has increasingly emphasized prophecy is but one strand, albeit a very important strand, in the total religious life of the community. Much attention has therefore been given to the prophets in relationship, for example, to the cult, to the Psalms, to tradition and to the wisdom literature 2). The purpose of this paper is to explore another avenue in the same general area. Can we analyse the relationship between the prophetic message and what was generally accepted as orthodox religious tradition? A deceptively simple answer to this question has had wide currency.What we have described as 'orthodox religious tradition' was in fact a crude mixture of animism, polytheism and amoral Canaanite religious customs and beliefs. The turning point came with the prophets of the 8th century B. C. who first insisted that Yahweh was not merely the god of Israel but the moral sovereign of the entire universe. It was the prophets from Amos onwards who created and defended Hebrew orthodoxy mid a sea of near paganism 3). This is a dangerous oversimplification of the history of the religion