Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Why We Have No Record of Elijah's Prophecies

  

Hosea, like Amos, lived in the eighth century BCE in the north. Archaeological findings tell us that this was the first period in which literacy started to spread among the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom. This is the reason why the prophecies of Elijah, who lived one hundred years earlier, were not recorded: there was no literate public to read them! (Israel Knohl, The Messiah Confrontation: Pharisees Versus Sadducees and the Death of Jesus [trans. David Maisel; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2022], 26, emphasis in bold added)