The Prophets

by Heschel, Abraham Joshua

• ISBN13: 9780060936990
• ISBN10: 0060936991
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-12-30
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Abraham Heschel is a seminal name in religious studies and the author of Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man. When The Prophets was first published in 1962, it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of biblical scholarship. The Prophets provides a unique opportunity for readers of the Old Testament, both Christian and Jewish, to gain fresh and deep knowledge of Israel's prophetic movement. The author's profound understanding of the prophets also opens the door to new insight into the philosophy of religion.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition	xiii
Introduction	xxi
I
What Manner of Man Is the Prophet?	3	(29)
Sensitivity to evil
The importance of trivialities
Luminous and explosive
The highest good
One octave too high
An iconoclast
Austerity and compassion
Sweeping allegations
Few are guilty, all are responsible
The blast from heaven
The coalition of callousness and authority
Loncliness and misery
The people's tolerance
An assayer, messenger, witness
The primary content of experience
The prophet's response
Amos	32	(15)
Amos and his contemporaries
God and the nations
The anger of the Lord
A Redeemer pained by the people's failure
Iconoclasm
The Lord repented
An encounter will save
Hosea	47	(29)
Hosea and his times
Political promisuity
Tension between anger and compassion
Hosea sees a drama
Emotional solidarity
Longing for reunion
How to share disillustionment
Hosea's marriage
The marriage an act of sympathy
Death elohim
Isaiah: (Isa. 1--39)	76	(48)
Prosperity and power
Isaiah and the Northern Kingdom
Surrender to Assyria
A covenant with death
Jerusalem rejoices, Isaiah is distressed
If you will not believe, you will not abide
Against alliances
Assyria shall fall by a sword not of man
Sennacherib's invasion of Judah
Confusions
The anger of the Lord
Divine sorrow
There is sorrow in His anger
Sympathy for God
At one with His people
The vision of Isaiah
Uncanny indifference
My People go into exile for want of knowledge
A remnant will return
Zion
Micah	124	(6)
Jeremiah	130	(48)
Complacency and distress
The age of wrath
God's love of Israel
The inner tension
The sorrow and anguish of the Lord
Sympathy for God
Sympathy for Israel
The polarity within
The hypertrophy of sympathy
Prophecy not the only instrument
The collapse of Assyria
The emergence of the Babylonian empire
The fall of Jerusalem
Habakkuk	178	(6)
Second Isaiah	184	(18)
On the eve of red emption
My right is disregarded by God
Who taught Him the path of justice?
The suffering servant
In all their affliction, He was afflicted
Because I love you
The Lord's oath
A light to the nations
The word of our God will stand forever
History	202	(36)
The idolatry of might
There is no regard for man
For not by force shall man prevail
The pantheism of history
The unity of history
The human event as a divine experience
The contintingency of civilization
The polarity of history
Strange is His deed, alien is His work
Like a stranger in the land
A history of waiting for God
They shall not hurt or destroy
Blessed be My people Egypt
Chastisement	238	(11)
The futility of chastisement
The strange disparity
The failure of freedom
The suspension of freedom
No word is God's last word
Justice	249	(36)
Sacrifice
God is at stake
The a priori
Mishpat and tsedakah
Inspiration as a moral act
Perversion of justice
The sense of injustice
Nonspecialization of justice
The love of kindness
The inner man
An interpersonal relationship
A grammar of experience
As a mighty stream
Exaltation in justice
Autonomy of the moral law
The primacy of God's involvement in history
Intimate relatedness
II
The Theology of Pathos	285	(14)
Understanding of God
The God of pathos
Pathos and passion
Pathos and ethos
The transitive character of the divine pathos
Man's relevance to God
The God of pathos and the Wholly Other
The prophetic sense of life
Pathos and covenant
The meaning of pathos
Comparisons and Contrasts	299	(19)
The self-sufficiency of God
Tao, the Way
Pathos and karma
Pathos and Moira
Power and pathos
The ill will of the gods
The envy of the gods
The Philosophy of Pathos	318	(26)
The repudiation of the divine pathos
The indignity of passivity
The disparagement of emotion
Pathos and apathy
Apathy in the moral theory of the West
Reason and emotion
Emotion in the Bible
Anthropological significance
The ontological presupposition
The ontocentric predicament
The logical presupposition
Anthropopathy	344	(14)
Anthropopathy as a moral problem
The theological presupposition
The accommodation of words to higher meanings
The wisdom and the folly of anthropomorphism
The language of presence
My pathos is not your pathos
The Meaning and Mystery of Wrath	358	(25)
The embarrassment of anger
An aspect of the divine pathos
The evil of indifference
The contingency of anger
I will rejoice in doing them good
Anger lasts a moment
The secret of anger is care
Distasteful to God
Anger as suspended love
Anger and grandeur
In conclusion
Ira Dei	383	(10)
The God of wrath
The repudiation of Marcion
The survival of Marcionism
Demonic or dynamic
Religion of Sympathy	393	(21)
Theology and religion
The prophet as a homo sympathetikos
Sympathy and religious existence
The meaning of exhortation
Forms of prophetic sympathy
Spirit as pathos
Cosmic sympathy
Enthusiasm and sympathy
Pathos, passion, and sympathy
Imitation of God and sympathy
Prophecy and Ecstasy	414	(14)
The separation of the soul from the body
A divine scizure
A sacred madness
Ecstasy among the Semites
Ecstasy in Neoplatonism
A source of insight in Philo and Plotinus
The Theory of Ecstasy	428	(20)
In Hellenistic Judaism
In rabbinic literature
In the Church Fathers
In modern scholarship
An Examination of the Theory of Ecstasy	448	(20)
Tacit assumptions
Who is a prophet?
Frenzy
Merging with a god
Extinction of the person
The will to ecstasy
Deprecation of consciousness
Beyond communication
The privacy of mystical experience
Ecstasy is its own end
Heaven and the market place
Radical transcendence
The trans-subjective realness
Prophecy and Poetic Inspiration	468	(30)
Prophecy a form of poetry
Oversight or inattention
The disparagement of inspiration
The Bible as literature
Poetic and divine inspiration
Accounts of inspiration
Modern interpretations
Either-or
The elusiveness of the creative act
The neuter pronoun
Prophecy and Psychosis	498	(26)
Poetry and madness
The appreciation of madness
Genius and insanity
Prophecy and madness
Prophecy and neurosis
The hazards of psychoanalysis by distance
Pathological symptoms in the literary prophets
Relativity of behavior patterns
The etymology of nabi
Transcendance is its essence
The prophets are morally maladjusted
Limits of psychology
Explanations of Prophetic Inspiration	524	(21)
Out of his own heart
The spirit of the age
A literary device
A technique of persuasion
Confusion
``A very simple matter indeed''
The genius of the nation or the power of the subconscious
The genius of the nation or the power of the subconscious
The prophets were foreign agents
The prophets were patriots
Derogating the prophets
Event and Experience	545	(27)
The consciousness of inspiration
Content and form
Inspiration and event
An ecstasy of God
Being present
The event and its significance
Analysis of the event
Here am I, here am I, here am I...
Anthropotropism and theotropism
The form of prophetic experience
Prophets Throughout the World	572	(34)
The occurrence of prophetic personalities
Comparisons
Older views
The experience of mana and tabu
The art of divination
Prophecy and divination
Ecstatic diviners
Dreams
Socrates' Daimonion
The Code of Hammurabi
``Prophets'' in Egypt
Revelation and prophecy in India and China
The prophets of Mari
The biblical prophet a type suigeneris
Prophet, Priest, and King	606	(12)
The deification of kings
The separation of powers
King and priest
Prophet and king
The prophets and the nebiim
Conclusions	618	(9)
Involvement and concern
God in relationship
God as subjectivity
Transcendent anticipation
The dialectic of the divine
human encounter
Appendix: A Note on the Meaning of Pathos	627	(6)
Index of Passages	633	(24)
Index of Subjects and Names	657