Consider the Prophets
“Go to the beginning of your Bible,”
My Sunday school teacher instructed the group of us sitting before her. I flipped the pages obediently back to Genesis 1. “Now write the word ‘dear’ and then your name right above the first verse.” I found a pencil, scribbled “Dear Emily” in the margin above those resounding words, “In the beginning...”
“Now flip to the very last verse of the Bible”—we all did so—“and write ‘Love, God’ right below it.”
I penciled that in, too. Now Revelation 22:21 had a post-script: “‘The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.’ Love, God.”
“The Bible is God’s love letter to you,” my teacher said. “This will help you remember that.”
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What a strange love letter it is.
I found myself thinking this at twelve years old, with my freshly penciled reminders of God’s care for me. The Bible is such a strange love letter, filled with words of hope and peace and life, but also with unthinkable violence and unhappy endings.
These parts of the Bible I wished to avoid made some other metaphors for it sound a bit silly—troubling, even. Somewhere in my years of small group and Sunday school, I heard the hoping-to-be-helpful initialism “B.I.B.L.E.”: “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” The Bible was not only a love letter to us—it was also an instruction manual. I had to wonder, which parts were the instructions? Surely not everything in the Bible—the wars, the murders—meant we should “go and do likewise”?
In thinking back through those years, as I bounced from a Baptist church to a non-denom to a speaking-in-tongues Sunday night youth group, I can’t recall many folks talking about the Bible as a book. We seemed eager to call it anything else: from a letter to an instruction book to a sword. But the Bible as a book? A literary work? That didn’t seem right.
I still believe the Bible is not an ordinary book. As someone with a high view of Scripture, I’d even call it inspired. But I believe something else now, something that makes these inspired pages even more vibrant: that there is something vital about thinking of the Bible as a work of literature, and approaching it as one cracks open some wondrous surprises.
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When we wander through bookstores or libraries, picking up those literary works with covers that catch our eye, we consider so many questions in our minds, all founded upon the concept of genre: Who wrote it? Who did they write it for—children, adults, horror or romance fans?
When did they write it? What’s it about?
When we sit down with the Bible, we find its opening pages contain a creation story of epic proportions—but then there come genealogies, and long lists of laws, and poetry, and historical accounts that may or may not match up with archaeological evidence, and stories of a carpenter named Jesus.
The Bible is a book, and it is filled with books of all kinds, and each begs to be read in a different way. Each deserves those old, familiar questions: Who wrote it? Who did they write it for? When did they write it? What’s it all about?
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Consider the prophets—those wild, ancient folks who ate scrolls and walked naked through cities and saw visions of dry bones rising to life. The prophetic books often make for troubling reading, and it’s tempting to skip the doom and gloom and head straight to Isaiah’s songs of the suffering servant, with Handel’s Messiah running through our heads.
If we sit with the prophets, though, we notice a couple things.
We might notice all the poetry, for one. Oracles of doom, messages of hope: so often, they are laid out on the page in lyrical lines. But why poetry? Why not straightforward proclamations of pending judgment, of future hope?
Hebrew scholar Murray H. Lichtenstein writes on the abundance of poetry in the prophetic corpus, noting how prophecy “relies on poetry’s unique ways of achieving immediate, intimate rapport. What is the ultimate concern of the prophet, if not the empathetic dialogue between God and Israel[?]” Indeed, poetry has a power unlike any other genre: a power to abruptly strike the heart, to break open new meanings of the words and ideas we thought we knew. Think back to Isaiah’s servant songs, or to Hosea’s metaphors of God as a husband and parent. What power does the poetry give them that no other kind of writing would?
Photograph by Elle Storset
The prophets are poets, yes, but we can also never forget that they are survivors of war. They are exiles and outcasts. They are traumatized, having witnessed chaos, destruction, and death: both in God-given visions and in their burning Promised Land. The horrors the prophets endured could shake even the most stable of faiths, and much of the prophets’ words are attempts at crafting some sort of story behind what has happened, and offering some sort of hope for the future. In You Are My People: An Introduction to Prophetic Literature, Louis Stulman and Hyun Chul Paul Kim write on this particular kind of literary genre: “The prophetic literature...is more than war literature; it survives as a meaning-making map of hope for ‘casualties’ of war and exile. In this capacity it looks the politics of violence in the eye without flinching and refuses to let death and destruction have the final say.”
The prophetic passages of hope—Ezekiel’s vision of a new temple, or Isaiah’s visions of lions and lambs living peaceably together—are radical, indeed, considering their backdrop and context. The passages of doom and violence—Jeremiah’s messages of destruction for Israel’s neighbors, or Hosea’s troubling, abusive marriage metaphors—should still cause us to pause, for we should never become too comfortable explaining away doom and violence. But may we remember the times in which these prophets lived: times of upheaval, upended worlds. May we remember the human impulse to try and find sense in senseless bloodshed—and may we remember that prophetic literature is perhaps not an instruction manual.
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We read the familiar lines in the opening chapter of Matthew’s gospel: “‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’”
God is with us. What a comfort that is. But what a strange, miraculous comfort, as well. Emmanuel, that second member of the Trinity, was born of a woman as one of us. Philosopher David L. Clough captures the disorienting nature of this concept so well: “God became a Jew rather than a Gentile, a man rather than a woman, an inhabitant of Palestine rather than one of South America, a creature alive in the first century AD rather than the twenty-first, a human being rather than a dog.” God chose to reach down to humanity in the particular first-century person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Why should it be any surprise that God humbles Himself to work within our own human genres and styles and forms?
It still surprises us, though. We want to explain away the difficult bits or discard them entirely, forgetting why they were written and who they were written for. We want to take the great diversity of biblical genres and flatten them into “a love letter to us” or “rules to live by.
In her book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, the late Rachel Held Evans expressed her own awe at what the Bible really is: a book unlike any other, but a book, nonetheless. “Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved,” she wrote. “It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.”
This is a God who is “with us” in the most concrete details of our existence.
How wondrous and wonderful it is that the God who transcends time works within our own time-rooted categories and canvases, letting us know how much we are loved.
By Emily Lund
Graduate Student & Freelance Writer
Emily Lund’s work has been published in Image Journal & Christianity Today.
Photography by Elle Suko