For the third year running, the chairs Assyriology and Hebrew Bible
and its Context at the College de France (Paris) have come together to
discuss questions of prophecy from a variety of different angles and
perspectives. The Mari tablets, the oldest Semitic corpus of prophetic
writings that has been passed down to us directly, give us valuable
insight into the role and nature of prophetism and divination in the
second millennium BCE. An edition of new texts, prepared by the team of
Mari epigraphers, bears witness to the impressive variety of prophetic
figures. Above all other things, these texts demonstrate that a prophet
can be an anonymous personality acting as an intermediary of a divine
voice that makes itself heard unexpectedly and on specific occasions,
and that divination, most often manifesting itself in dreams, may be
difficult to disseminate.
The nature of biblical prophetism, on the other hand, appears to be
rather different. Around the first millennium BCE, the prophets of
ancient Israel founded their own schools. Put down in writing and
transmitted from generation to generation, the teachings of the first
prophets were believed to convey a timeless message, adaptable to any
given socio-political context. Gradually, with more copies being
produced, these writings were given new interpretations and amended with
additional oracles. The texts as we know them today thus constitute an
impressive collection of puzzles whose reconstruction poses a number of
methodological problems. Biblical prophets can be understood as being
ancient figures of Hebrew prophetism or representatives of literary
traditions that were developed much later, leading us to the texts of
Qumran and to Flavius Josephus. The investigation on prophecy is
complemented by interpretations of prophetism deriving from the Greek
tradition and from Islamic culture.
The contributors in this volume aim to shed new light on various
different aspects of prophetism and define the socio-historical context
not only of prophetic phenomena as such, but also of the texts
documenting them.
