The Prophets / Abraham J. Heschel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 1907-1972.

Series:

Perennial classic

Perennial classics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bible. Prophets--Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bible.

Bible. Prophets.

Prophets.

Physical Description:

xxix, 672 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.

Edition:

First Perennial classics edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : HarperCollins, 2001.

Summary:

Abraham Heschel is a seminal name in religious studies and the author of "Man Is Not Alone" and "God in Search of Man." When "The Prophets" was first published in 1962, it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of biblical scholarship."The Prophets" provides a unique opportunity for readers of the Old Testament, both Christian and Jewish, to gain fresh and deep knowledge of Israel's prophetic movement. The author's profound understanding of the prophets also opens the door to new insight into the philosophy of religion.

Contents:

1 What Manner of Man Is the Prophet? 3

Sensitivity to evil

The importance of trivialities

Luminous and explosive

The highest good

One octave too high

An iconoclast

Austerity and compassion

Sweeping allegations

Few are guilty, all are responsible

The blast from heaven

The coalition of callousness and authority

Loneliness and misery

The people's tolerance

An assayer, messenger, witness

The primary content of experience

The prophet's response

2 Amos 32

Amos and his contemporaries

God and the nations

The anger of the Lord

A Redeemer pained by the people's failure

Iconoclasm

The Lord repented

An encounter will save

3 Hosea 47

Hosea and his times

Political promiscuity

Tension between anger and compassion

Hosea sees a drama

Emotional solidarity

Longing for reunion

How to share disillusionment

Hosea's marriage

The marriage an act of sympathy

Daath clohim

4 Isaiah: (Isa. 1-39) 76

Prosperity and power

Isaiah and the Northern Kingdom

Surrender to Assyria

A covenant with death

Jerusalem rejoices, Isaiah is distressed

If you will not believe, you will not abide

Against alliances

Assyria shall fall by a sword not of man

Sennacherib's invasion of Judah

Confusions

Divine sorrow

There is sorrow in His anger

Sympathy for God

At one with His people

The vision of Isaiah

Uncanny indifference

My people go into exile for want of knowledge

A remnant will return

Zion

5 Micah 124

6 Jeremiah 130

Complacency and distress

The age of wrath

God's love of Israel

The inner tension

The sorrow and anguish of the Lord

Sympathy for Israel

The polarity within

The hypertrophy of sympathy

Prophecy not the only instrument

The collapse of Assyria

The emergence of the Babylonian empire

The fall of Jerusalem

7 Habakkuk 178

8 Second Isaiah 184

On the eve of redemption

My right is disregarded by God

Who taught Him the path of justice?

The suffering servant

In all their afflication, He was afflicted

Because I love you

The Lord's oath

A light to the nations

The word of our God will stand forever

9 History 202

The idolatry of might

There is no regard for man

For not by force shall man prevail

The pantheism of history

The unity of history

The human event as a divine experience

The contingency of civilization

The polarity of history

Strange is His deed, alien is His work

Like a stranger in the land

A history of waiting for God

They shall not hurt or destroy

Blessed be My people Egypt

10 Chastisement 238

The futility of chastisement

The strange disparity

The failure of freedom

The suspension of freedom

No word is God's last word

11 Justice 249

Sacrifice

God is at stake

The a priori

Mishpat and tsedakah

Inspiration as a moral act

Perversion of justice

The sense of injustice

Nonspecialization of justice

The love of kindness

The inner man

An interpersonal relationship

A grammar of experience

As a mighty stream

Exaltation in justice

Autonomy of the moral law

The primacy of God's involvement in history

Intimate relatedness

1 The Theology of Pathos 285

Understanding of God

The God of pathos

Pathos and passion

Pathos and ethos

The transitive character of the divine pathos

Man's relevance to God

The God of pathos and the Wholly Other

The prophetic sense of life

Pathos and covenant

The meaning of pathos

2 Comparisons and Contrasts 299

The self-sufficiency of God

Tao, the Way

Pathos and karma

Pathos and Moira

Power and pathos

The ill will of the gods

The envy of the gods

3 The Philosophy of Pathos 318

The repudiation of the divine pathos

The indignity of passivity

The disparagement of emotion

Pathos and apathy

Apathy in the moral theory of the West

Reason and emotion

Emotion in the Bible

Anthropological significance

The ontological presupposition

The ontocentric predicament

The logical presupposition

4 Anthropopathy 344

Anthropopathy as a moral problem

The theological presupposition

The accommodation of words to higher meanings

The wisdom and the folly of anthropomorphism

The language of presence

My pathos is not your pathos

5 The Meaning and Mystery of Wrath 358

The embarrassment of anger

An aspect of the divine pathos

The evil of indifference

The contingency of anger

I will rejoice in doing them good

Anger lasts a moment

The secret of anger is care

Distasteful to God

Anger as suspended love

Anger and grandeur

6 Ira Dei 383

The God of wrath

The repudiation of Marcion

The survival of Marcionism

Demonic or dynamic

7 Religion of Sympathy 393

Theology and religion

The prophet as a homo sympathetikos

Sympathy and religious existence

The meaning of exhortation

Forms of prophetic sympathy

Spirit as pathos

Cosmic sympathy

Enthusiasm and sympathy

Pathos, passion, and sympathy

Imitation of God and sympathy

8 Prophecy and Ecstasy 414

The separation of the soul from the body

A divine seizure

A sacred madness

Ecstasy among the Semites

Ecstasy in Neoplatonism

A source of insight in Philo and Plotinus

9 The Theory of Ecstasy 428

In Hellenistic Judaism

In rabbinic literature

In the Church Fathers

In modern scholarship

10 An Examination of the Theory of Ecstasy 448

Tacit assumptions

Who is a prophet?

Frenzy

Merging with a god

Extinction of the person

The will to ecstasy

Deprecation of consciousness

Beyond communication

The privacy of mystical experience

Ecstasy is its own end

Heaven and the market place

Radical transcendence

The trans-subjective realness

11 Prophecy and Poetic Inspiration 468

Prophecy a form of poetry

Oversight or inattention

The disparagement of inspiration

The Bible as literature

Poetic and divine inspiration

Accounts of inspiration

Modern interpretations

Either-or

The elusiveness of the creative act

The neuter pronoun

12 Prophecy and Psychosis 498

Poetry and madness

The appreciation of madness

Genius and insanity

Prophecy and madness

Prophecy and neurosis

The hazards of psychoanalysis by distance

Pathological symptoms in the literary prophets

Relativity of behavior patterns

The etymology of nabi

Transcendence is its essence

The prophets are morally maladjusted

Limits of psychology

13 Explanations of Prophetic Inspiration 524

Out of his own heart

The spirit of the age

A literary device

A technique of persuasion

Confusion

"A very simple matter indeed"

The genius of the nation or the power of the subconscious

The prophets were foreign agents

The prophets were patriots

Derogating the prophets

14 Event and Experience 545

The consciousness of inspiration

Content and form

Inspiration an event

An ecstasy of God

Being present

The event and its significance

Analysis of the event

Here am I, here am I ...

Anthropotropism and theotropism

The form of prophetic experience

15 Prophets Throughout the World 572

The occurrence of prophetic personalities

Comparisons

Older views

The experience of mana and tabu

The art of divination

Prophecy and divination

Ecstatic diviners

Dreams

Socrates' Daimonion

The Code of Hammurabi

"Prophets" in Egypt

Revelation and prophecy in India and China

The prophets of Mari

The biblical prophet a type sui generis

16 Prophet, Priest, and King 606

The deification of kings

The separation of powers

King and priest

Prophet and king

The prophets and the nebiim

Involvement and concern

God in relationship

God as subjectivity

Transcendent anticipation

The dialectic of the divine-human encounter

Appendix A Note on the Meaning of Pathos 627.

Notes:

Originally published: 1st ed. New York : Harper & Row, 1962.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

0060936991

OCLC:

46929118