The prophets were charismatic figures, believed to be endowed with the Divine gift of receiving and imparting messages revealed to them by God. Prophecy is the delivery of these messages, not the ability to look into the future. The prophet was the intermediary between the Divine Will and the people. The concept was known to other peoples in the Ancient Near East so the ancient Israelites took seriously, for example, Balaam, the prophet-soothsayer sent by the king of Moab to curse them (Num. 22). The first person to be called a prophet in the Bible was Abraham (Gen. 21:7), while Moses was regarded as the greatest of the prophets (Deut. 34:10), a belief formulated by Maimonides in his Principles of Faith.
Once the prophet felt that he had been commanded by God to speak His word, he had to do so (Amos 3:8), having to convey the message whether or not the people wished to hear it (Ezek. 3:11). Some of the prophets were initially reluctant to serve, such as Moses, Jeremiah and Jonah; the last even tried to evade his mission. However, the prophet must obey and accept his role as the Divine mouthpiece, frequently beginning his message with the introduction, "Thus says the Lord." Once he prophesies, he is set apart from the other men and must bear the responsibility of being chosen. His message does not concern the being of God but the Divine plan for the world.
The second section of the Hebrew Bible is called Nevi'im---Prophets. It is divided into two sections. First come the "Former Prophets"---the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which are in fact historical works, but contain the stories of the early pre-classical prophets, notably, Nathan, Elijah and Elisha. The second group is the "Latter Prophets," containing the classical literary works. These consist of three major prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel) and the twelve Minor Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Mlcah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi). The difference between the "major" and "minor" prophets is the length of their books, not their relative importance.
The former books present mainly biographical details about the prophets, whereas the latter books give the contents of the prophecies. Common to both types is the title "prophet" and the Divine inspiration to deliver a message to the people of Israel in order to preserve their covenant with God.
The early prophets are sometimes called "seers." Some of them, especially Elijah and Elisha, were miracle-workers. In this early prophetic period (up to the eighth century BCE), there were groups or schools of prophets who would gather together and train themselves in the prophetic experience (I Sam. 10:5, 10). These preclassical prophets fearlessly rebuked the ruler, especially for moral wrongdoing such as adultery and murder in the case of David and Bathsheba (II Sam. 12) and unjust confiscation and murder in the case of Naboth's vineyard (I Kings 21).
The first of the literary prophets was Amos and the last, Malachi. Thus, the period of classical prophecy lasted for about 300 years (mid-eighth to mid-fifth centuries BCE) and spanned the crucial periods of the rise of three great empires, Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia, as well as pivotal events in the life of the nation---the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by Assyria (722 BCE), the destruction of the Southern Kingdom and the Temple by the Babylonians (586 BCE), the Babylonian Exile, and the early years of the Return to Zion with the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple.
The prophets came from many classes of society: aristocracy (Isaiah); priesthood (Jeremiah and Ezekiel); farmers (Amos), etc. They preached on the issues of the day and were fearless in the reproofs they administered to kings and priests, the rich and the powerful, the hostile masses. As a result, they were often persecuted and subjected to great hardships (e.g., Elijah, Jeremiah). However, they also inspired the rulers and sometimes guided them (e.g., Deborah, Samuel, Isaiah).
The prophets would often tell the people what would happen to them and the kingdom. This came out of their conviction that the people's sins would lead to national disaster. In giving this message of impending doom, the prophets believed they were conveying the warning of God. They also interpreted the major international events of their day in the light of their special outlook, seeing God as responsible for the fates of all peoples and for their interrelations.
A characteristic feature of the prophet's method was his employment of symbolic acts to make his message more vivid. Isaiah called his children Shear-Jashub and Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. The first means "A remnant shall return" and the second "The enemy shall speedily take away the spoil." He did this so that the people would have a constant, living reminder of their national fate as he saw it. Jeremiah bought up family property when the Babylonians were at the gates, to show his confidence in the return of the people to their ancestral land. Ezekiel engraved the names Ephraim and Judah on two separate sticks and held them together to symbolize his belief in the ultimate reunification of all the scattered tribes of Israel.
All the prophets accepted the Temple cult. Their criticisms were aimed at those who meticulously performed the ritual while being immoral in their everyday lives and disregarding the social and ethical demands of the Divine code. Indeed, they saw the essence of God's demands to lie in the moral and ethical rather than the cultic spheres. Ritual was not to be seen as a substitution for moral behavior but only as a reinforcement. This view inevitably led to tensions between Priests and prophets.
Prophetic teaching covers many aspects of the Jewish ethic. It contains a rebuke to the sinner as well as the message of God's love, a burning nationalism and also a universalism and messianism, the threat of punishment as well as the promise of redemption. Above all is an insistence on the centrality of the unity of the One God. In general, all the prophets preached against a background of Idolatry, pagan immorality, and social corruption. Therefore, while each prophet spoke in his own style and with his own emphases, to a significant extent the prophets displayed a marked unanimity in outlook.
The phenomenon of prophecy was a central theme of Jewish philosophy and several questions exercised the minds of Jewish thinkers, particularly in the Middle Ages. Who were these people called "prophets"? How did they experience the Word of God? Was the prophetic experience objectively real or only subjectively so?
Two schools of thought emerged regarding these questions. The first was the supernatural school, which saw prophecy as a miracle and the prophet as a person supernaturally chosen by God. The outstanding representative of this school is Judah Halevi, who insisted that all depends on God's choice. The intellectual qualifications of the prophet are not relevant to that Divine choice. Further, what a prophet sees in his vision or dream is objectively real, although only the prophet with his special gift of prophecy can see or hear it (Kuzari I, 11, 43, 79-98; II, 49; III, 23). Halevi further holds that only Israel as the people of the Torah have true prophets of God (I, 27, 95, 115), while only the Land of Israel can be the site of true prophecy (II, 10, 12, 14). The prophecies of Moses and Ezekiel are seen as true because they related to the Land of Israel.
The second school of thought stressed the natural aspects of the prophetic experience and held that not everyone can be a prophet or even be chosen by God to bear His message. The prophet is a person who is perfect in his mental, spiritual, moral, and even physical life. The phenomenon of prophecy is really an extension or overflowing of his qualities of perfection. The second school thus shifts the emphasis from God's choice and the supernatural to the quality of the man and his inherent psychological makeup.
Maimonides represents this second school. He devotes nearly a third of the second book of his Guide for the Perplexed to this subject. Essentially, he combines both schools of thought. He says that the prophet is chosen by God; but it is only the perfect man who will be chosen. God cannot choose one who is intellectually or morally inferior (Guide II, 32, 36; Yesodé ha-Torah VII, 5). Further, the prophet must have a perfectly developed imaginative faculty. According to Maimonides, the prophetic experience is not objectively real, but exists only for the prophet. It is only subjectively real and is experienced by his imaginative intelligence (Guide II ,41-42). The single exception to this is the prophecy of Moses. While other prophets saw God in a dream at night or in an ecstatic vision by day, Moses saw God "face to face," in a direct prophetic confrontation. Maimonides holds that there is a lesser degree of prophecy among all other prophets because they saw or heard what they saw or heard only in a dream or vision. Among non-Jews, Maimonides allows, there is also a degree of prophecy, but it is lower still.
Nearly all Jewish writers on the subject suppose that prophecy ceased with the closing of the Bible canon at the time of Ezra and the rabbis said that prophecy ended with Malachi.
