The Prophets

According to popular definition, prophets accurately predict the future. In Jewish tradition, as Abraham Joshua Heschel explains in The Prophets, they earn the title by witnessing the world around them with outstanding passion. Prophets are those whose "life & soul are at stake" in what they say about "the mystery of [God's] relation to man." They're "some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived." Yet they're also "the men whose image is our refuge in distress & whose voice & vision sustain our faith." This book, a classic text on the subject, contains sophisticated, straightforward discussions of each of the Hebrew prophets, the primary themes of their preaching & comparisons of Israel's prophets to those of other religions'. Throughout, he avoids the two great temptations in any discussion of prophesy: overstating the supernatural quality of a prophet's epiphany ("A prophet is a person, not a microphone") & reducing prophesy to a merely human phenomenon. Instead, he describes the prophet's peculiar status as God's spokesman in a way that does justice to its complexity: "He speaks from the perspective of God as perceived from the perspective of his own situation."--Michael Joseph Gross (edited)