OUTLINE
Introduction
Hebrew prophet
Alternate titles:
Ezechiel, Ye?ezqel, Ezekiel
Ezekiel, also spelled Ezechiel, Hebrew Ye?ezqel, (flourished 6th century BC), prophet-priest of ancient Israel and the subject and in part, the author of an Old Testament book that bears his name.
Flourished: c.600 BCE - c.550 BCE
Notable Works:
• The Book of Ezekiel
Scripture - religious literature
Key People:
St. Paul the Apostle St. Peter the Apostle Muhammad Isaiah Jeremiah
• Characteristics
• Scriptures in non-Western religions
• Scriptures in Western religions
• Other religious or devotional literature
• Article History
Introduction
In Jerusalem, there were reports of violence and destruction; his later statements addressed the hopes of the Israelites exiled in Babylon. The faith of Ezekiel in the ultimate establishment of a new covenant between God and the people of Israel has had a profound influence on the postexilic reconstruction and reorganization of Judaism.
Ezekiel's ministry was conducted in Jerusalem and Babylon during the first three decades of the 6th century BC. For Ezekiel and his people, these years were bitter ones because the remnant of the Israelite domain, the tiny state of Judah, was eliminated by the rising Babylonian empire under Nebuchadrezzar (reigned 605–562 BC). Jerusalem surrendered in 597 BC. Israelite resistance was nevertheless renewed, and in 587–586, the city was destroyed after a lengthy siege. In both debacles, and indeed again in 582, large numbers from the best elements of the surviving population were forcibly deported to Babylonia.
Before the first surrender of Jerusalem, Ezekiel was a functioning priest probably attached to the Jerusalem Temple staff. He was, among his fellow exiles, a person of uncommon stature. He was among those deported in 597 to Babylonia, located at Tel-Abib on the Kebar canal (near Nippur). Ezekiel's religious call came in July 592 when he had a vision of the "throne-chariot" of God. He subsequently prophesied until 585 and was not heard of again until 572. His latest datable utterance can be dated about 570 BC, 22 years after his first.
These two periods of prophesying, separated by 13 years, represent various emphases in Ezekiel's message. His earlier oracles to the Jews in Palestine were pronouncements of God's judgment on a sinful nation for its apostasy. Pagan rites abounded in the courts of the Temple. Ezekiel said that Judah was guiltier than Israel had been and that Jerusalem would fall to Nebuchadrezzar, and its inhabitants would be killed or exiled. According to him, Judah trusted in foreign gods and alliances, and Jerusalem was a city full of injustice.
After the fall of Jerusalem and his period of silence, Ezekiel now addressed himself more pointedly to the exiles. He sought to direct their hopes for the restoration of their nation. His theme changed from the harsh judgment of God to the promise of the future. Ezekiel prophesied that the exiles from Judah and Israel would return to Palestine, leaving none in the dispersion. In the impending new age, a new covenant would be made with the restored house of Israel, to whom God would give a new spirit and a new heart. The restoration would be an act of divine grace for the sake of God's name. Ezekiel's prophecies conclude with a vision of a restored Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple's form of worship would be reestablished in Israel, and each of the ancient tribes would receive appropriate allotments of land. In contrast to those hoping for national restoration under a Davidic king, Ezekiel envisioned a *theocratic community revolving around the Temple and its cult as the connection ( of the restored Jewish state).
*theocratic (Theocracy) is a form of government in which one or more deities of some type are recognized as the supreme ruling authority, giving divine guidance to human intermediaries who manage the day-to-day affairs of the government.
More than any of the classical biblical prophets, Ezekiel was given to symbolic actions, strange visions, and even trances (although it is entirely complementary to deduce from these, and from his words "I fell upon my face" [1:28], that he was cataleptic - comatose). He eats a scroll on which words of prophecy are written to symbolize his appropriation (seizure) of the message (3:1–3). He lies down to symbolize Israel's punishment (4:4ff). He is struck dumb on one occasion for an unspecified length of time (3:26). As other prophets have done before him, he sees the God-to-People relationship as corresponding to a husband to an unfaithful wife. He, therefore, understands the collapse of the life of Judah as a judgment for actual infidelity.
Scripture, also called sacred scripture, is the revered text, or Holy Writ, of the world's religions. Scriptures comprise a large part of the literature of the world. They vary significantly in form, volume, age, and degree of sacredness, but their common attribute is that their words are regarded by the devout as sacred. Sacred words differ from ordinary words. They are believed either to possess and convey spiritual and magical powers or to be the means through which a divine being or other sacred reality is revealed in phrases and sentences full of power and truth.
Characteristics
Most sacred scriptures were originally oral (spoken) and were passed down through memorization from generation to generation until they were finally committed to writing. A few are still preserved orally, such as the hymns of Native Americans. Many bear the unmistakable marks of their oral origin and can best be understood when recited aloud; in fact, it is still held by many Hindus and Buddhists that their scriptures lack when read silently. The meaning and significance they have when recited aloud is vastly improved, for the human voice is believed to add to the recited texts dimensions of truth and power not readily grasped by the solitary reader.
Not all scriptures, however, were originally oral, nor were they in all parts directly effectual in rituals that sought the granting of magical and spiritual powers. The more significant part of recorded scripture has either a narrative or an expository character. The types of sacred and semisacred texts are, in fact, many and varied. Besides magical characters (ancient Germanic alphabet characters – signs, symbols, cryptograms, incantations, and spells) from primitive and ancient sources, they include hymns, prayers, chants, myths, stories about gods and heroes, epics, fables, sacred laws, directions for the conduct of rituals, the original teachings of prominent religious figures, expositions of these teachings, moral anecdotes, dialogues of seers and sages, and philosophical discussions. Scriptures include every form of literature capable of expressing religious feelings or convictions.
Types of sacred literature vary in authority and degree of sacredness. The centrally essential and most holy of the sacred texts have in many instances been gathered into canons (standard works of the faith), which, after being determined either by general agreement or by official religious bodies, become fixed—i.e., limited to particular works that are viewed as fully convincing and genuinely beyond all further change or alteration.
The works not admitted to the canons (semisacred or semi canonical character) may still be valuable supplementary texts.
Scriptures in non-Western religions
A striking instance of making a distinction between canonical and semi canonical scriptures occurs in Hinduism. The Hindu sacred literature is voluminous and varied; it contains ancient elements and every type of religious literature that has been listed, except historical details on the lives of the seers and sages who produced it. Its earliest portions, namely the four ancient Vedas (hymns), seem to have been provided by Indo-European families in northwestern India in the 2nd millennium BCE. These and the supplements to them were composed after 1000 BCE—the Brahmanas (commentaries and instruction in ritual), the Aranyakas (forest books of ascetics), and the Upanishads (philosophical treatises - Sanskrit texts of Hindu philosophy which supplied the basis of later Hindu philosophy)—are considered more sacred than any later writings. They are collectively referred to as Shruti ("Heard"; i.e., communicated by Revelation), whereas the later writings are labeled Smriti ("Remembered"; i.e., recollected and reinterpreted at some distance in time from the original revelations). The former are canonical and completed, not to be added to nor altered, but the latter are semi canonical and semisacred.
Buddhist sacred literature recollects Gautama Buddha's life and teaching in the 6th century BCE and first appeared in the language called Pali, allied to the Magadhi that he spoke. As time passed and his movement spread beyond India, Buddhism adopted the Indian classical language widely used in ancient Asia. A distinction arose between the Theravada ("Way of the Elders"), preserved in Pali and regarded as canonical. The vast number of works written in Sanskrit within the more widely dispersed Buddhism is called by its adherents Mahayana ("Greater Vehicle"). The Mahayana works were later translated and further expanded in Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese.
Buddha
In the sense of Holy Writ, whether the primary texts of native Chinese religion should be called sacred is open to question. Neither classical Daoism nor Confucianism can be said to have been based on Revelation; the texts of these faiths were initially viewed as human wisdom, books written by humans for humans. However, they acquired authority, actually a canonical status that caused them to be regarded with profound reverence and thus, in effect, as sacred. This certainly was true of the revered Daoist book, the Daodejing ("Classic of the Way of Power"), the Wujing ("Five Classics"), and the Sishu ("Four Books") of Confucianism.
Scriptures in Western religions
The most precisely fixed canons are those that official religious bodies have defined. The Jewish canon, known to Christians as the Old Testament, was fixed by a synod of rabbis held at Yavneh, Palestine, about 90 CE. The excluded semisacred books were labeled by Christians the Apocrypha (Greek: "Hidden Away"). Roman Catholicism later included them in its canon. Jesus, the founder of Christianity, left nothing in writing. However, he so inspired his followers that they preserved his sayings and biographical details about him orally until they were written down in the four Gospels. To these were added the letters of St. Paul and others and the Book of Revelation to John, forming a sacred canon called the New Testament, which was ecclesiastically sanctioned by the end of the 4th century. There was also a New Testament Apocrypha, but it did not achieve canonical status because of numerous spurious (bogus) details.
Jesus
Jesus enthroned as Lord of All (Pantocrator - meaning "Almighty, All-Powerful,").
Where no religious body has provided sanction or authorization, scriptures have had to stand on their authority. Muslims believe that the Qur?an does this effortlessly. The Qur?an, their only sacred canon or standard of faith, authenticates itself, they believe, by its internal self-evidencing power, for it is composed of the very words of God communicated to Muhammad and recited by him without addition or subtraction. This faith of Muslims in the Qur?an is similar to that of fundamentalist Christians who believe that the Bible, as God's word, is verbally inspired from beginning to end.
Qur?an
Qur?an with illuminated manuscript pages featuring ink, gold, and lapis, is late 18th–early 19th century.
Other religious or devotional literature
A large body of literature possesses more of the aura of true scripture than the works just noted. They are interpretations about divine truth and divine commands, or stories that illustrate how exalted or lowly have acted (with or without awareness) in response to a divine stimulus. They are, in effect, supportive of true scripture.
An outstanding instance is the Talmud, a compilation of Law, lore, and commentary that, to many Jews, has very nearly the authority of the Mosaic Torah (the Law, or the Pentateuch). Indeed, in the postbiblical rabbinical writings, it was generally considered a second Torah, complementing the Written Law of Moses. The Christian church provides another instance. Its major creeds have been regarded at one time or another as infallible statements to depart from, which would be heresy. This is particularly true of the Apostles' Creed and the three "ecumenical creeds" of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon. Roman Catholics add to these the papal decrees summarizing in credal form the conclusions of the councils of the Roman Catholic Church concerning the sacraments, transubstantiation (the changing of the substance of the bread and wine in the mass into the body and blood of Christ), confession, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, papal infallibility, and the Assumption of the body and soul of the Virgin Mary to heaven. More or less binding for Protestants are their distinctive statements of faith: the Augsburg Confession of 1530 (Lutheran), the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 (Reformed), the Westminster Confession of 1646 and Shorter Westminster Catechism of 1647 (Presbyterian), and others.
During the last seven centuries in the West, some religious writings have attained a semisacred, if not entirely sacred, status: Imitatio Christi of Thomas à Kempis (1379/80–1471); John Bunyan's (1628–88) The Pilgrim's Progress; Mary Baker Eddy's (1821–1910) Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures; and the reputed discovery of Joseph Smith (1805–44), the Book of Mormon.
Types of prophecy
Types of prophecy can be classified based on inspiration, behavior, and office. Divinatory prophets include seers, oracle givers, soothsayers, and diviners, all of whom predict the future or tell the divine will in oracular statements using instruments, dreams, telepathy, clairvoyance, or visions received in the frenzied state of ecstasy. However, predictions and foretellings may also result from inspiration or common sense by the intelligent observation of situations and events, albeit (although) interpreted from a religious point of view.
The cult prophet or priest-prophet is of broad importance to the religious community. Under the mandate of the cult, the priest-prophet (who may be an ordinary priest) is part of the priestly staff of a sanctuary, and he must pronounce the divine oracular word at the appropriate point in a liturgy. As such, he is an "institutional" prophet. The difference between a cult prophet and a prophet in the classical sense is that the latter has always experienced a divine call, whereas the cult prophet, pronouncing the word of the deity under cultic mandate, repeats his messages at a particular moment in the ritual. However, because of the timeless character of cultic activity, his message is regarded as new every time he prophesies.
Missionary (or apostolic) prophets maintain that the religious truth revealed to them is unique to themselves alone. Such prophets acquire a following of disciples who accept that their teachings reveal the true religion. The result of that kind of prophetic action may lead to a new religion, as in the cases of Zarathustra, Jesus, and Muhammad. The founders of many modern religious sects also should be included in this type.
Another type of prophet is of the reformative or revolutionary kind (looking to the past and the future), closely related to the restorative or purificatory (having the effect of purifying or cleaning or looking to the past as the ideal) type. The best examples are the classical prophets from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), e.g., (for example) Amos and Jeremiah. Many of those so-called literary prophets were working to reform the religion of Yahweh, attempting to free it from its Canaanite heritage and accretions (masses). In the Arab world, Muhammad is included in this category. The social sympathy found among such prophets is rooted in their religious conscience. Therefore, what may have been preached as religious reform often took on the form of social reform. This kind of prophecy is also found in India and Africa. In modern times, prophets have arisen to restore or purify the old tribal religious forms and the customs and laws that had their sources in the older precolonial religious life. Many of those movements became revolutionary by logic and social and political pressure (see eschatology).
According to scholars, though there may be several categories of prophecy, no sharp line of demarcation differentiates among these different types. Any prophet may be predictive (analytical), missionary, ecstatic (elated), and reformative.
The chief priest of Jerusalem was the supervisor of both priests and prophets, and those prophets had rooms in the Temple buildings. In pre-Exilic Israel (before 587/586 BCE), prophetic guilds were a social group as crucial as the priests. Isaiah includes the navi? and the qosem ("diviner," "soothsayer") among the leaders of Israelite society. Divination in the pre-Exilic period was not considered foreign to the Israelite religion.
In reconstructing the history of Israelite prophecy, the prophets Samuel, Gad, Nathan, and Elijah (11th–9th century BCE) have been viewed as representing a transitional stage from the so-called vulgar prophetism to the literary prophetism, which some scholars believed represented a more ethical and therefore a "higher" form of prophecy. The literary prophets also have been viewed as being antagonistic toward the cults. However, modern scholars recognized that such an analysis oversimplified an intricate problem. It is impossible to prove that the nevi?im did not emphasize ethics simply because few of their utterances are recorded. None of the so-called "transitional" prophets was a reformer or was said to have inspired reforms. Samuel was a prophet and a priest, seer, and ruler ("judge") who lived at a sanctuary that was the location of a prophetic guild and was the leader of that navi? guild. In the cases of Nathan and Gad, there are no indications that they represented some new development in prophecy. However, Nathan's association with the priest Zadok has led some scholars to suspect that Nathan was a Jebusite (an inhabitant of the Canaanite city of Jebus).
Elijah was a "prophet father" (or prophet master) and a prophet priest. Much of his prophetic career was directed against the Tyrian Baal cult, which had become popular in the northern kingdom (Israel) during King Ahab's reign (mid-9th century BCE) and his Tyrian queen, Jezebel. Elijah's struggle against that cult indicated a religiopolitical awareness, on his part, of the danger to Yahweh worship in Israel—namely, that Baal of Tyre might replace Yahweh as the primary God of Israel.
The emergence of classical prophecy in Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom) begins with Amos and Hosea (8th century BCE). What is new in classical prophecy is its hostile attitude toward Canaanite influences in religion and culture, combined with an old nationalistic conception of Yahweh and his people. The reaction of those classical prophets against Canaanite influences in the worship of Yahweh is a means by which scholars distinguish Israel's classical prophets from other prophetic movements of their time. Essentially, the classical prophets wanted a renovation of the Yahweh cult, freeing it from all taint of worship of Baal and Asherah (Baal's female counterpart). Though not all aspects of the Baal-Asherah cult were wholly eradicated, ideas and rituals from that cult were rethought, evaluated, and purified according to those prophets' concept of true Yahwism.
Included in such ideas was the view that Yahweh was a jealous God who, according to psalms, Yahweh had chosen Israel to be his people and did not wish to share his people with any other god. When the prophets condemned cultic phenomena, such condemnation reflected a rejection of certain kinds of cult and sacrifice—namely, those sacrifices and festivals directed not exclusively to Yahweh but rather to other gods. The prophets likewise rejected liturgies incorrectly performed. The classical prophets did not reject all cults, per se (as such); instead, they wanted a cultus (a cult, esp. a religious cult) ritually correct, dedicated solely to Yahweh, and productive (creative) of ethical conduct. Another vital concept accepted by the classical prophets was Yahweh's choice of Zion (Jerusalem) as his cult site. Thus, every cult site of the northern kingdom of Israel and all the sanctuaries and bamot ("high places") were roundly condemned, whether in Israel or Judah.
Amos, whose oracles against the northern kingdom of Israel have been misunderstood as reflecting a negative attitude toward cultus per se, did not consider the royal cult of the northern kingdom at Bethel to be a legitimate Yahweh cult. Instead, Amos considered the Bethel cult Canaanite, like the prophet Hosea after him.
Prophets of the ancient Middle East generally interjected their opinions and advice into the political arena of their countries. However, the classical Hebrew prophets were perhaps more advanced than other prophetic movements. They interpreted the will of God within the context of their particular interpretation of Israel's history and, based on that interpretation, often arrived at a word of judgment. Critical to that interpretation of history was the view that Yahweh's acts on behalf of his chosen people Israel was an apostate people—having rejected a faith once confessed—from the very earliest times, and the view that had been their worship of other gods. In that situation, the prophets preached doom and judgment and even the destruction of Israel. The source of prophetic insight into those matters is the cultic background of liturgical judgment and salvation, wherein Yahweh judged and destroyed his enemies and created the "ideal" future. What is unexpected is that the prophets would go so far as to include Israel itself among Yahweh's enemies, thus using those ideas against their people. Usually, however, the prophets allowed some basis for hope in that a remnant would be left.
The future of that remnant (Israel) lay in the reign of an ideal king (as described in Isaiah), indicating that the prophets were not anti royalists. Though they could and did oppose individual kings, the prophets could not make a separation between Yahweh and the reign of his chosen king or dynasty. Their messianic ideology, referring to the Messiah, or anointed one, is based on old royal ideology. The ideal king is not an eschatological (relating to death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and humankind) figure (one who appears at the end of history). In that respect, the prophets were nationalistic. They believed that the ideal kingdom would be in the promised land, and its center would be Jerusalem.
With the Exile of the Judaeans to Babylon of 586 BCE, prophecy entered a new era. The prophecies of what is called Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–45), for instance, were aimed at preserving Yahwism in Babylonia. His future vision went beyond the pre-exilic concept and extended the concept into a paradisaical future wherein Yahweh's new creation would be a new Israel. That tone of optimism is continued in the prophetic activity (late 6th century BCE) of Haggai and Zechariah, prophets who announced that Yahweh would restore the kingdom and the messianic vision would come to pass. A prerequisite to that messianic age was rebuilding the Temple (which was viewed as heaven on earth). When, however, the Temple had been rebuilt and long years had passed with neither the kingdom being restored nor the messianic age initiated, Israelite prophecy declined.
There is a tendency in prophetic preaching to spiritualize those aspects of religion that remain unfulfilled; therein lie the roots of eschatology, which is concerned with the last times, and apocalyptic literature, which describes the intervention of God in history to the accompaniment of dramatic, cataclysmic events. Since the predictions of the classical prophets were not fulfilled in a messianic age within history, those visions were translated into a historical apocalypse, such as the Book of Daniel. Why prophecy died out in Israel is difficult to determine, but Zechariah offers as good an answer as any in saying that the prophets "in those days" told lies. Prophets did appear, but after Malachi, none gained the status of the classical prophets. Another reason may be found in Ezra's reform of the cult in the 5th century BCE. Yahwism was so firmly established that there was no longer any need for the old polemics (arguments) against the Canaanite religion.
