The Significance of Biblical Prophecy for Our Time

Summary

THE prophets did not talk to scholars. They talked to the ordinary man; and when the old synagogue tradition prescribed weekly readings from the Prophets like those from the Law, it arranged that, just like the lessons from the Law, they should be read both in the original and in a vernacular translation, that is, presumably, for the benefit of the ordinary man.

Of course that was a dangerous practice. Bible reading in the vernacular always was dangerous. It gave people ‘ideas’. It sometimes made them disrespectful to the powers that be, and the powers that be did not like it. There is an episode in the history of the haftarah (as the weekly lesson from the Prophets read in the synagogue is called) which in this regard I find instructive. A noted rabbi is reported in the Mishnah to have laid it down that the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, beginning ‘Cause Jerusalem to know her abominations', is not to be used as a prophetic lesson. As the commentators explain (I should have thought superfluously), it is not to the credit of Jerusalem. You see the tendency, and it is the same everywhere and at all times. We must not be told about our misdeeds. It is bad for what is called, somewhat curiously, ’morale'.

I am glad to be able to say that in this particular instance the synagogue did not make that mistake. To its credit, the objection, although from a very famous rabbi, was overruled. The official decision is that the chapter in question may be used as a public lesson, and should be translated and read publicly in the vernacular.

This encourages me in my layman's view that the importance of the prophets, both for their generation and for us, is not that they speak ‘comfortable words’ (though they do that too at times), but that they dared to say things which are very uncomfortable indeed but which happen to be true. Their interest was not in morale (so-called) but in something very different: morals.