The Prophets: Pt. 1 - Softcover

Heschel, Abraham Joshua

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061314218 ISBN 13: 9780061314216

Publisher: HarperPerennial, 1969

Synopsis

The Prophets is widely recognized as a masterpiece of biblical scholarship. Heschel attempts to understand the thoughts, feelings, and impressions of each of the prophets, presenting the reader with a sense of their very being. He effectively achieves a balance between the objective supernatural and the subjective human situation, and presents a unique discussion of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk and their particular challenges and journeys. In the second part of the book, Heschel addresses such subjects as pathos, wrath, sympathy, ecstacy, psychosis, and prophetic and poetic inspiration, and in so doing offers a new contribution to the philosophy of religion. The Prophets is both scholarly and devotional, an indispensable part of an in-depth understanding of the Hebrew Bible.

About this title

Review:

Abraham Heschel was an Orthodox Jewish scholar who was born in Warsaw and fled the Nazi regime, ending in the United States. "The Prophets" is an expanded English translation of his German doctoral thesis, first published in 1962. Both volumes are here conveniently reprinted in a single volume, marking the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

Heschel's approach to the prophets seeks to take account both of their divine inspiration and of the human personalities through which this came. He rejects any approach that stresses revelation to the exclusion of the human role or that views the prophets in purely human terms. The key to the prophets, for Heschel, is the divine pathos. Their writings reveal the passionate God, being 'filled with echoes of divine love and disappointment, mercy and indignation'. Much modern theology has moved away from the traditional doctrine that God is impassible, not subject to feelings or emotions. Heschel's work has been influential in that move, as for example on Jiirgen Moltmann's "The Crucified God."

In the first volume Heschel expounds the thought of a number of the prophets: Amos, Hosea, First and Second Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah and Habakkuk. The second volume focuses especially on the divine pathos. But doesn't 'anthropopathic language', speaking of God's feelings in human terms, prejudice the transcendence of God? There are two opposite errors to avoid. On the one hand we must not make God so 'Wholly Other' that he remains unknown. On the other hand we must not reduce him to human terms. The prophets used anthropomorphic and anthropopathic language of God, but did not imagine that this described him adequately. Adapting Isaiah 55:8, 'My pathos is not your pathos, neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and my pathos than your pathos.' The essential meaning of the divine pathos 'is not to be seen in its psychological denotation, as standin

About the Author:

Abraham J. Heschel (1907-1972), was perhaps the most significant Jewish theologian of the twentieth century. He was Professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) from 1946 until his death. In addition to The Prophets, his most influential works include "Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, God in Search of Man, Man's Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism, Who Is Man?, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence" and "The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man."

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperPerennial
• Publication date: 1969
• ISBN 10: 0061314218
• ISBN 13: 9780061314216
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250