Seminal and beautiful, and also dense and difficult to get through. I learned so much about our Holy texts and am grateful for this reading, and I am also grateful to be done with it.

This book has a remarkable and life changing middle section. Heschel weaves the prophets words together to show they believed that God's ways are perfect and God's work is perfect. But that they never say God is perfect.

"The notion of God as a perfect being is not of Biblical extraction. It is the product not of prophetic religion but of Greek philosophy; a postulate of reason rather than a direct, compelling, initial answer of man to His reality. In the Decalogue, God does not speak of His being perfect but of His having made free men out of slaves. (Pg. 98)"

Heschel, via the prophets, paints a view of God who is active in and has concern for the world. God is emotional and responds to human actions. If we are to mirror God, we can't shrink from our emotions either.

Where this books starts to fall flat is that, after he makes his main point, Heschel proceeds to elaborate a bunch of possible objections and systematically refutes them. I understand the wish for intellectual rigor. But after a while it starts to seem like he's just arguing things no-one would actually quibble with instead of making substantive debate. Read this work, but maybe not all 600 pages.

Written in the 1950s, this book is dated (and considered somewhat of a classic), but still a decent introduction to the Old Testament prophets from a perspective that combines the academic and the devotional. I really liked some parts, while others felt more longwinded. Heschel focuses on the prophets as communicating God's pathos - the point of prophecy being that God feels for humanity and seeks to communicate to humanity. The book covers some of the important themes of prophecy, summarizes some of the main messages of some of the prophets, and contrasts the Hebrew prophet figure and prophetic experience to other spiritual figures and experiences through time and around the world. I thought that some of the contrasts Heschel drew were too stark, and I would have liked a more up to date book grounded in more recent historical and critical scholarship. Yet this is a book worth perusing for the gems that are there and for anyone seeking a basic overview of the Hebrew prophets.

I first read excerpts from "The Prophets" by Abraham J. Heschel in a class about the Hebrew Prophets in my Junior year at college. I appreciated it, and was fascinated by the points Heschel made, and the way in which he spoke about God and what it means to be a prophet of Israel. However, it was not until now, after I have finally had the chance to read this work in its entirety, that I realize exactly how important and beautiful of a work this is.

Abraham Heschel, a Hassidic Jew from Warsaw, Poland, published his dissertation, "The Prophetic Consciousness," which would later become the acclaimed book "The Prophets," while at the University of Berlin; this was also shortly after the rise of Hitler and Naziism to power in Germany. Soon after, Heschel fled to the United States, escaping from the clutches of the Nazi Regime; his mother and his three sisters who stayed behind in Poland were all killed by the Nazis, fueled by anti-Semitism. He spent the rest of his life in the U.S.A., teaching and writing; he was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement, marching alongside of the Reverend and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and also was outspokenly against the Vietnam War. This historical backdrop helps to inform our understanding of who Heschel as a person is, which aids in understanding who Heschel is as a writer, a theologian, and a biblical scholar.

"The Prophets" is one of the most fundamental works to spring up in the 20th century for biblical scholarship and the theology of the Hebrew Scriptures. It continues to bear witness and impact studies and lives today. In countless ways, Heschel shows how the prophets of Israel, unlike prophets elsewhere in antiquity and around the world, are not primarily concerned with their experiencing the divine, or of being possessed by God for their own sake; rather, the prophetic experience exists only because of the divine's concern for humanity and history. According to Heschel, God is attentive to and concerned with the plight of humanity; "it is God's concern for man that is at the root of the prophet's work to save the people" (618). God's pathos is the reason for the prophetic work. Because God is concerned about justice, about the oppression of the poor and the needy, about the events of history, and about His covenant with His people--it is for this reason that the prophets were sent to Israel. God's concern, pathos, and desire for justice is made evident in the spell-binding words and actions of the prophets of Israel.

While there is much more that can be said about this work, one will simply have to read it for one's self to fully unearth the treasures found therein.

The first volume of this work is phenomenal and must've been a bright light in the academic study of the prophetic books of the bible when it emerged in the 1960s. The second volume primarily deals with the history of the religion approaches to the prophets popular in that time and it primarily differentiates the prophets from the other soothsayers, possession by an entity or the inspiration of poetry.

I couldn’t decide between 4-5 stars. At times I found this a bit hard to follow, but I know how important this work is as a whole, a classic for sure.

ouch. I read the original thesis in German und ich habe mich bei gott noch nie in einer sprache so entmächtigt gefühlt die ich dachte sprechen zu können

Gg

This book is an absolutely incredible argument that the literary prophets' main agenda is God's pathos as a call for justice in humanity. In Heschel's meditative yet highly persuasive tone, he shows why the literary prophets are so relevant and what we should do about it. And of course, Heschel enacted the social justice the prophets called for throughout his own life.

However, I sometimes found his assumptions inconsistent with his arguments, and sometimes, inconsistent with the literary text. Also, I sometimes found his lengthy arguments against certain points of view to be overstated, although this might be a result of my place as a modern reader who is not directly engaged with Heschel's opponents. Even with my disagreements with the text, I will be referring to The Prophets as an integral part of my bookshelf, as a resource in counseling, Jewish education, and my own personal growth, for years to come.

This is not lightly to be entertained. The mode of reflection would be strange to someone unaccustomed to theology (a/o religion), but that is not a critique. It's thoughtful and a sensible attempt to explore the human dimension and individual qualities of prophets without attempting to rationalize them or reduce them to that dimension and those qualities. Requires simultaneous meditative and reflective effort.

3.5
Took me awhile to get through this and tbh skimmed the last chunk. First half is an insightful and impactful commentary, second half gets sluggish with academic arguments. First half is definitely worth a read and I’ll come back to it!

Studies the lives of the Prophets, the historical context their missions were set in, their work, and their psychological state. It gives a detailed treatment of the phenomenon of prophecy, and what it means.