Biggerstaff, Michael
Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
This dissertation assesses biblical prophets' claims to possess access to suprahuman knowledge. A common modern scholarly construct of biblical prophecy holds that prophets were primarily social critics who denounced social injustice and exhorted repentance. The problem with that construct is not that it acknowledges prophets as decrying social ills and admonishing repentance, but that the construct marginalizes prophets' alleged suprahuman knowledge to the function of social criticism. A close analysis of the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, as provided herein, reveals that the modern construct has inverted the primary focus of the ancient texts. Rather than present the prophets as primarily social critics who denounce social injustice and exhort repentance, the biblical authors principally emphasized the prophets as suprahuman knowledge specialists who occasionally decried social ills and preached repentance. The introductory chapter demonstrates the prevalence of the modern scholarly construct by citing numerous statements by scholars who explicitly marginalize biblical claims that prophets possessed access to suprahuman knowledge in favor of interpreting prophets as social critics denouncing social ills and exhorting repentance. Chapter two provides a history of scholarship from the Dead Sea Scrolls through the twentieth century that establishes the origin of the modern construct as a product of the nineteenth century. Prior to the nineteenth century, exegetes never understood prophetic claims of suprahuman knowledge as subordinate to issues of social justice and repentance. In chapter three, I expose how biblical prophetic texts only occasionally depicted the prophets as social critics. Even in cases where the prophets were portrayed as decrying social injustice or exhorting repentance, the authors paired those statements with claims of prophets announcing information beyond normal human ken. Whereas relatively few prophetic texts paint the prophets as...Committee: Samuel Meier (Advisor); Daniel Frank (Committee Member); Michael Swartz (Committee Member)
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