Saturday, December 31, 2022

Ronald E. Clements on the Use of Amos 8:2 in Ezekiel 7:1-4

  

In Ezek 7:1-4 we find a prophetic pronouncement given by Ezekiel upon them that “the end” is about to come upon Israel, which harks back to the prophecy of “the end” in Amos 8:2. Thus a prophecy which originally applied to the downfall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel has been carried forward into a larger situation and made applicable to the threatened fall of the surviving kingdom of Judah more than a century later. By such a development the earlier prophecy of Amos is certainly affected, in its written form, since this too acquired new meaning in relation to the new context. The theme of the end and destruction of Israel, which is to be found extensively throughout the pre-exilic prophets in the very center of their preaching, becomes supremely related to the debacle of 587 B.C., with its fateful consequences for Israel-Judah. That a very extended sequence of disasters and political misfortunes led up to this tragic climax provides one clue to the way in which the various prophetic messages have been coordinated so that they point to a unified message. The message is the destruction of Israel, although the separate pronouncements and warrings given by the prophets refer more directly to specific situations and dangers in which first Israel and then Judah were threatened. In this way the individual threats became a part of a greater threat—the threat of all Israel’s destruction. It is this larger threat which properly deserves the description eschatological, if that term is to be employed at all in relation to pre-exilic prophecy. Events which historically spanned a long period from the mid-eighth century to the first quarter of the sixth century B.C., have been linked together and viewed connectedly as an expression of divine judgment upon Israel. In this process the formation of written collections of prophecies has contributed to such a connected pattern of interpretation. (Ronald E. Clements, “Patterns in the Prophetic Canon,” in Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, ed. George W. Coats and Burke O. Long [Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress Press, 1977], 46-47)

 

Further Reading:


Biblical Prophets Changing their Words and the Words of Previous Prophets