The Prophets Who They Were; What They Are by Norman Podhoretz Free Press, 400 pp., $30 ONE FALL DAY, while I was in San Francisco, a friend took me to his favorite spot of pilgrimage–the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. The design is impressive. A narrow path leads past a wall filled with quotations from the writings of Dr. King, while the visitor hears the crushing sound of water cascading to the ground on the other side of the path. As we walked, I read the various quotations from King. Many sound contemporary, concerned with social justice, the over-reliance on technology and science, and so forth. And yet, as my secular friend’s enthusiasm soared, mine flagged. The Reverend King had the impact he did partly because of his theological convictions. Yet this monument depicted his achievements in secular tones. Even this was not without irony. Many times I had to ask my friend to repeat what he was saying. The crashing thunder of the waterfall was so loud that it was difficult to hear. But behind that sound, I could sense the legacy of the prophet Amos and one of King’s favorite lines: “Let justice roll like the waters, and righteousness like an unfailing stream.” Though this biblical text, inscribed on the monument, informed the design of the waterfall, no citation of the prophet’s name or King’s biblical inspiration was to be found. Liberal secularism had risen up and erased the sense of religious truth. It may be a similar experience that prompted Norman Podhoretz to write “The Prophets: Who They Were; What They Are.” In this powerful rereading of Israel’s prophetic legacy, Podhoretz attempts to set the record straight about Israel’s prophets. Liberals have long claimed that they alone bear the mantle of these courageous warriors from the biblical past; Podhoretz will have none of it. The prophets, in his reading, are not to be reduced to a “liberalogical” construal. Rather, they are to be understood as highly committed religious persons who were “fighting with all their might against idolatry in order to keep their people faithful to God because they believed with all their hearts and all their souls that He had, out of an inscrutable love, chosen the children of Israel as the instrument through which His Law would be revealed and ultimately accepted by every other people as well.” Podhoretz’s corrective is useful, precisely because the religious sense has been lost on an entire generation of Bible readers. For those reared in the wake of the cultural turbulence of the late 1960s, the writings of the prophets are best known as a weapon brandished by various activists seeking to overturn assorted injustices. Common to most of these usages is the absence of any consideration of the particular religious framework from which the prophets sprang. Consider the harshly critical words of Amos directed to the northern Kingdom of Israel in the mid-eighth century B.C.: Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes; That pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and turn aside the way of the meek: and a man and his father will go in unto the same maid, to profane my holy name; And they lay themselves down upon clothes laid to pledge by every altar, and they drink the wine of the condemned in the house of their god. This ringing piece of social criticism does not spring fully formed from the tip of Amos’ caustic pen. Rather, as Podhoretz illustrates, much of it is drawn from the specific covenantal norms of Mosaic law. Moreover, besides striking parallelism between the demands of the Law and the words of the prophet, the diatribe weaves together the ritual and moral violations of the chosen people. If there is some fundamental difference between ritual and morality, the prophet does not seem to know it. Without the religious tenor, there is no prophetic critique of social injustice. THIS POINT, which might seem rather obvious, has not always been granted. Some commentators have taken notice that this diatribe against Israel (Amos 2:6-16) has been set up by a list of condemnations of Israel’s neighbors (some six different nations are condemned for various crimes in the first chapter). This inclusion of non-Israelites among those who stand under the righteous judgment of God shows, in the words of one such interpreter, “the ethical and theological impartiality of the prophetic word in Amos.” But Podhoretz recognizes that this softhearted turn to a more universalist reading is, in truth, soft-headed. He rebuts the claim decisively: “What the prophet is implying when he starts with the non-Israelites before turning to his own people is that, bad as the surrounding nations are, the children of Israel–both North and South–are worse precisely because they were chosen by Him to obey His law and His commandments and have failed to do so.” One of the benefits of having an intelligent lay reader like Podhoretz write an introduction to the Israelite prophets is that one does not get bogged down in the often-insufferable and often-insoluble questions that are the staple of biblical scholars. Podhoretz has read widely and intelligently in this genre, having begun his study while an undergraduate at Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary some decades ago. His translation of this enormous body of scholarly literature into more everyday language is, on the whole, dependable. One significant omission, though, is a systematic consideration of the prophet as intercessor. The prophet not only delivered harsh messages to Israel but was also required to voice misgivings about some of the judgments of the Holy One of Israel! In “Love and Joy,” Yochanan Muffs of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America has written most engagingly and profoundly on this often neglected part of the prophet’s job description. It seems that God demanded that the prophet stand toe to toe against him to argue that Israel be shown mercy. It was in the interplay between prophet and Deity that the true depth of the nature of God was given expression. Podhoretz’s occasional discussions of why Christological readings of the prophets fail are also problematic. Such Christian readings turn, he asserts, on whether texts such as Isaiah’s “a virgin shall conceive” are to be understood as literal predictions of Jesus Christ. Podhoretz rightly notes that it is very difficult to square such a claim with modern Hebrew lexicography, in which “virgin” is more aptly rendered, “a young, marriageable girl.” Yet few commentators would claim that a Christian reading of Isaiah stands or falls on the translation of this verse. (The interested reader might look at Christopher Seitz’s outstanding essay, “Isaiah in New Testament, Lectionary, Pulpit,” in “Word Without End,” for an alternative view.) MORE OF A PROBLEM is Podhoretz’s move to equate the prophetic attack on idolatry with the contemporary antinomianism that is so much the rage among the Western academic elite. Although I agree with most of Podhoretz’s assessment of the moral and cultural devastation wrought by these antinomian trends, his move to align the perpetrators of deconstruction and other forms of moral nihilism with the paganizing opponents of Israel’s God tends toward the simplistic and the misleading. He quotes Jon Levenson’s warning that “using the Hebrew Bible as a source for learning about paganism is like trying to learn about Judaism from the New Testament, where the parent religion is comparably misrepresented by polemical zeal.” But this does not prevent Podhoretz from doing exactly this just eight pages later. His description of Canaanite paganism (which in its sanctioning of sexual promiscuity and disregard for the well-being of its children shows considerable overlap with contemporary antinomianism) is no truer to Canaanite religion than is the Gospel writers’ account of the Pharisees to Jewish thought in the first century A.D. His diatribe against modern nihilistic
trends is instructive in its own right, but Podhoretz doesn’t quite find an adequate interpretive foundation to root it in the legacy of the biblical prophets. Nonetheless, “The Prophets” is an elegant and well-written survey of Israel’s prophetic heritage. The reader can find a myriad of recent books on the prophets that have emerged from the desks of biblical scholars, but few of them will have the sort of passionate, contemporary engagement that marks Norman Podhoretz’s work. Gary A. Anderson is professor of Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School.
