Between Foreign Politics and Scribal Theology: Prophecy Concerning the Nations
Panel hosts: Dr. Helge Bezold, Dr. Meike J. Röhrig
Almost all prophetic books in the Old Testament contain texts that deal with the fate of peoples or nations other than Israel and Judah (“Oracles against the Nations”, OAN). Although the texts have attracted significant interest in recent scholarship, many questions still remain unanswered. Most importantly, it is unclear whether these prophetic texts bear any reference to concrete real-world interactions between Israel/Judah and the foreign peoples in question.
Two explanations are, often implicitly, underlying recent treatments of the OAN: First, that the prophecies arise from concrete political events regarding foreign affairs and that they were directed outwards (despite their readership being Israelite/Judahite). Second, that these texts were mainly theoretical in nature, serving internal—literary and theological—purposes. In the latter case, exegetical studies understand the OAN as "mirrors" for the fate of Israel: By considering the reasons for the (announced) destruction of a neighbouring nation, Israel/Judah is made aware of its own hubris and the reasons for its own downfall.
The Panel addresses the question of inward-oriented and outward-oriented tendencies in the OAN. What are examples of OAN that result from concrete incidents of interaction or “foreign politics”? What are examples of OAN that result from a theoretical, inward-oriented discourse in which foreign nations are used as a blue-print for statements about Israel/Judah? As it is to be expected that both tendencies can be verified in relevant texts (as can middle grounds), panelists will most importantly address the following questions: What are relevant indications to distinguish the two modes of interaction? How do these two categories relate to each other? Can they be explained in a scenario of religious-historical development?
A possible starting point for a nuanced approach of a hermeneutic of OAN is the investigation of similar phenomena in neighbouring cultures. Given the scarce literary evidence, any comparison should include not only prophetic, but also divinatory literature in the broader sense. Another starting point is the diachronic, literary-historical examination of certain Old Testament texts themselves to trace the development of ideas within the development of the prophetic books.
This open panel invites exegetes as well as scholars of neighbouring disciplines of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Egyptology, and Ancient Greece to examine relevant texts in light of the following questions: How specific and how generic are the statements that prophetic texts make about other peoples, their actions, and their attitudes? What is the relationship between ingroup- and outgroup-orientated approaches to the texts? What conclusions can be drawn about the contexts of origin of these texts? What transformations and shifts can be observed from a diachronic perspective?