. . . beginning about this time,
we begin to hear increasingly frequent allusions to earlier prophets and their
sayings. At his trial for sedition in 609 Jeremiah was saved by timely appeal
to the eighth-century prophet, Micah of Moresheth (Jer. 26:17-19; Mic. 3:12).
This incident, by the way, provides one of the firmest pieces of evidence for
the expansion of prophetic books in the direction of eschatology and the
millenarian expectation. For if Micah's prediction of the destruction of
Jerusalem were to have any force when quoted at the trial it could not have
been followed then, as it is now, by the prospect of a glorious future. About
half a century later the exilic Isaiah ascribed great importance to the
fulfillment of predictions by his prophetic predecessors. Shortly after the
return, Haggai berated his contemporaries in language borrowed from Amos. He
also made use of Jeremiah's metaphor of the king as Yahweh's signet ring (2:23,
cf. Jer. 22:24), while Zechariah used the other Jeremian figure of the Branch
(3:8; 6:12, cf. Jer. 23:5; 33:15). The prediction of seventy years' exile in
Jeremiah (25:11; 29:10) is also taken up by Zechariah (1:12; 7:5) and perhaps
also in Haggai's reference to the right time ('et) for rebuilding the
temple (1:2). With this process of appropriation and reinterpretation a
decisive step has been taken to- wards the "recycling" of prophetic
texts in apocalyptic writings of the Greco-Syrian and Greco-Roman periods. (Joseph
Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins
[University of Notre Dame Center for the Study of Judaism and Christianity
in Antiquity 3; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006], 102)
