The Prophets Are Overrated Social Change Agents and Underrated Poets

The prophets don't teach us how to create political change. They teach us something else.

The biblical prophets are often cited as examples of how to battle injustice. But judged by the change they created in their lifetimes, the prophets were failures. They weren’t good coalition builders or community organizers.

Who were the prophets?

Within the collection of books we call the Bible, there are fifteen books, each one named for a prophet.¹ Prophets were one part of the leadership triad of ancient Israel. The other leaders were kings (political) and priests (ritual).

Prophets provided a check and balance on the political and ritual institutions and their leaders. They criticized kings and priests. And they criticized the people for falling short of their obligations to take care of those who needed help. The prophets Micah (active 740-698 BCE) and Jeremiah (active 626-570 BCE) were imprisoned for their efforts.

The prophets articulated visions of a better future. But when they saw how far people were from living up to their ideal visions, they often spoke in angry and accusatory tones. This didn’t win them many friends.

If you want to create a better future, alienating the people you want to change is a sure-fire road to failure. The prophets were regularly ignored.

The exception

An exception to this rule is the Prophet Jonah. Jonah was an Israelite, but he had the good fortune to prophesy to the Assyrians in the ancient city of Nineveh. Unlike the Israelites, the Assyrians did exactly what the prophet told them to do.

Jonah’s experience, contrasted with the experience of the other prophets, is the likely origin of the saying “You can’t be a prophet in your own country.”

Ignored in their lifetimes, but still influential

A legacy we’ve inherited from the prophets is the idea that things can, and should, improve. There’s no guarantee this will happen. The prophets insisted that the ability to create a better future is in our hands.

If this point seems obvious to you, you’ve been influenced by the prophets. Alternative views—e.g. that the future can’t be changed or is determined by battles among the gods—were popular in ancient times. The belief that we can’t make a difference no matter what we do, is still alive today. It may even be gaining steam.

So far, I’ve said that the prophets weren’t good coalition builders or community organizers. I’ve also said they failed to achieve the changes they sought and were regularly ignored. But if they were such failures in these arenas, how did they manage to transmit the belief that we can create positive social change; a belief that has been influential for over 2500 years?

Poetry

The prophets were great poets. And poetry has power.

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

וְיִגַּ֥ל כַּמַּ֖יִם מִשְׁפָּ֑ט וּצְדָקָ֖ה כְּנַ֥חַל אֵיתָֽן

—Amos 5:24

Martin Luther King Jr. quoted this verse from the prophet Amos in his “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s an excellent example of prophetic language. All the elements we’ll see in this verse from Amos are used again and again in the poetry of the prophets.

The Amos verse imagines justice and righteousness flowing so freely that we are swept up in their powerful current. The idea and imagery are enough to make the verse memorable, but let’s take a closer look.

In the original Hebrew, the verse is six words—half the number of words used in the English translation. The word for roll down starts the sentence. The Hebrew word suggests a wave, and waves roll.

The last word of the sentence is mighty, with the words justice and righteousness appearing next to one another in the middle. The structure is a, b, c, c, b, a.

This structure creates the shape of a wave with the crest of the wave coming on the words justice and righteousness.

And now, look at the wave form above and listen to how the words sound in the original Hebrew. Notice that the first Hebrew word ends with “l” and the last word ends with “n.” These are soft sounds, as the wave is at its lowest points. The Hebrew words for justice and righteousness end with “t” and “ka,” creating a strong percussive quality at the top of the wave. The syncopated rhythm of the words creates a sense of movement, bringing to life the imagery of rushing waters.

The economy of language (six words), the wave structure, and the sounds of the words themselves, combine with the idea and imagery to create a power and force that can’t be fully captured in translation.

Yet even in translation, and more than 2500 years after it was composed, the verse still has the power to inspire. The sound of Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful voice bringing fresh life to these words is imprinted in my mind.

The prophets were fearless when it came to criticizing those who stood in the way of justice. Unfortunately, this fearlessness didn’t make them successful. In their own lifetimes, the biblical prophets didn’t achieve their political aims. But the prophets were great poets.

Like a mighty stream flowing to us from the past, their poetry continues to inspire.

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Worth Reading

I just finished reading “An Unfinished Love Story” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It gave me new insights into the political battles of the 1960s. Because we’re still fighting many of those battles today, it gave me insights into our own time as well.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a presidential historian who worked for Lyndon Johnson. Her husband, Richard Goodwin, was a speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy. “An Unfinished Love Story” draws from their personal experiences to create an unusual mix of memoir and history.

Book Writing News

My first attempt at a draft of my book on forgiveness helped me understand what I wanted to share. For my second attempt, I’m using what I learned to organize the material.

Religion, psychology, and philosophy have all tackled the topic of forgiveness. Your understanding of forgiveness has been shaped by the teachings from these disciplines. I need to make material from these very different fields of study accessible to the general reader. Religion and philosophy in particular aren’t known for their accessibility.

The payoff for the reader will be an improvement in dealing with anger, grudge, resentment, guilt, shame, and regret. It’s a big payoff, but to get there the book needs to be fun to read and easy to understand.

I’m working on it…

1. The fifteen prophetic books are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. There are a few prophets mentioned in other biblical books, but the discussion in this post refers to these fifteen prophets.