God's Problem by Bart D. Ehrman Read Free Book Online

to change their ways in order to stand in God’s good favor (see, e.g., 1 Samuel 9; 2 Samuel 12). Other prophets—these are the ones who are more familiar to us today—were writing prophets, spokespersons for God whose (oral) proclamations were also written down, on the ancient equivalent of paper. The writings of some of the ancient Israelite prophets later became part of the Bible. In English translations of the Bible they are divided into the “major” prophets, the well-known figures of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the “minor” prophets. This differentiation is not made to suggest that some prophets are more important than others but rather to indicate which writings are longer (“major”) than others (“minor”). The twelve minor prophets are somewhat less well known, but many of them deliver powerful messages: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habbakuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
    What ties all these prophets together is that they were delivering God’s message, speaking God’s word, as they understood it, to God’s people. They saw themselves, and (some) others saw them, as the mouthpieces of God. In particular, they were delivering God’s message to people in concrete situations, telling them what, in God’s view, they were doing wrong, what they needed to do right, howthey needed to change, and what would happen if they refused. This matter of “what would happen if they refused” is the full extent of the “predictions” made by the prophets. They were not speaking about what would happen in the long term, thousands of years after their own day. They were speaking to living people of their own time and telling them what God wanted them to do and what he would do to them if they failed to obey.
    As a rule, the prophets believed there were dire consequences for not following their instructions, given by God. For them God was sovereign over his people and was bound and determined to see that they behaved properly. If they did not, he would punish them—as he had punished them before. He would cause drought, famine, economic hardship, political setbacks, and military defeat. Most of all, military defeat. The God who destroyed the Egyptian armies when he delivered his people out of slavery would destroy them if they did not behave as his people. For the prophets, then, the setbacks the people experienced, many of the hardships they endured, many of the miseries they suffered, came directly from God, as a punishment for their sins and in an effort to get them to reform. (As we will see later, the prophets also thought that human beings themselves were often to blame for the suffering of others, as the rich and powerful, for example, oppressed the poor and powerless: it was precisely for such sins that God had determined to punish the nation.)
    Most of the writing prophets were producing their work around the time of the two great disasters experienced by ancient Israel: the destruction of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE and the destruction of the south by the Babylonians in the sixth. To explore further the specific burdens of these authors, here I will simply highlight the message of several of them. Those I have chosen are representative of the views found in the others, but they present their messages of sin and punishment in particularly graphic and memorable terms. 15
     
    Amos of Tekoa
     
    One of the clearest portrayals of the “prophetic view” of the relationship of sin and suffering comes in one of the gems of the Hebrew Bible, the book of Amos. 16 We learn little about the man Amos himself from the book, and he is not mentioned in any other book of the Bible. What he tells us is that he was from the southern part of the land—that is, from the country of Judah—from the small village of Tekoa in the hills south of Jerusalem (1:1). He twice mentions that he was a shepherd (1:1; 7:14) and a farmer—one who tended