Of all the failures of teaching by fundamentalist preachers, perhaps the most striking is when a congregation is encouraged to believe that the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is an example of biblical prophecy.  There are two massive misunderstandings at work in such teaching.  One is to perpetuate the belief that the word ‘prophecy’ in the Bible is all about the future and being able to foretell it.  The second misunderstanding is to believe that the Jews themselves believed the book of Daniel to be a prophet.

To take the second point first.  The Old Testament in its Hebrew version is divided into three sections – the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.  The book of Daniel is firmly placed in the third section – the Writings.  In ancient times it was understood to be a mysterious collection of oracles and stories with little relation to the classical prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah.  Modern scholars agree that the book was written in around 160 BC at the time of the Maccabean revolt against the Syrian kings.  The story of this revolt is set out in the Books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha.  More serious than an ignorance of what the Jews themselves thought about Daniel is a refusal to engage with what the Old Testament understood as the nature of prophecy.  When we actually read the early prophets, writing in period from 725 – 530 BC, we find a genre of literature that is quite distinctive in type.  What it does not possess in general is an obsession about the remote future.  Whatever the use of the prophets made by Matthew in his gospel, the prophets were far more interested in what was going on in their present as well as a concern for the immediate future.

How can we typify the extensive writings of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah etc?  These writings are not easy and relatively few Christians are familiar with more than selected passages which appear of relevance to sermons heard in church.  Thus we have all heard countless times the passage about a young woman bearing a child, which is read at Christmas, but we know little about the original context of the utterance.  I find that the best and simplest way to describe prophecy is to say that it is a perspective on the events of the time in the context of an understanding of the will and mind of God.  When we use the word prophecy today in relation to the Church, we also understand it like this.  We expect that Church to interpret what is going in our society and political life and offer a critique and perspective that comes out of faith and spiritual reflection.  This is what the classical prophets in the Old Testament were about.  For many people the social comments of the prophet Amos about the behaviour of the rich in Israel towards the poor are some of the most powerful verses in the Bible.  ‘Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land  … buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.’  Amos 8.4ff.  The whole of the book of Amos is unremitting in its condemnation of an unjust society as demonstrated by the people of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the years leading up to the Assyrian invasion in 721 BC.  Amos as well as the other prophets were talking about the future but it was a future firmly rooted in the present.  Israel and Judah were both failing to live according the laws of their God.  Because of this failure the message delivered was much of the time pessimistic – society as they knew it was to be utterly destroyed.  While hope was not entirely absent (2 Isaiah), more typical is an unrelenting announcing of doom and destruction.

When we grasp that the prophets were about announcing the consequences of injustice, idolatry and greed to their own contemporaries, we begin to get a glimpse of how incredible the achievement of these individuals was.  They had stumbled across an understanding of what we today would call ‘ethics’, the secret of good behaviour grounded and rooted in their faith in Yahweh their God.  The earlier followers had been given the Ten Commandments but these rules did not reach deep into a person’s conscience but rather represent a rule for a relatively ordered society.  The prophets began to articulate something new, a way of behaviour which drew people to reflect in their personal behaviour something of the holiness of the God they sought to worship.

The ethical genius, if we can call it that, of the classical Old Testament prophets helps us to understand more clearly that Daniel is not to be counted among them.  The book is a tale of the events of the exile, told 400 years later by an author who was keen to bolster up flagging morale in the midst of a terrifying war.  It attempts to indicate that history is in the hands of God by pretending to give an accurate foretelling of the future.  No prophet from the previous period had ever attempted to set out the future history of the world in this way.  The fact that the book of Daniel does indulge in this kind of writing has meant, tragically, that many Christian apologists have assumed that all the prophets think in this way.  There are no grounds for such an assumption.  But wait, I hear someone say, does not the evangelist Matthew also see the prophets foretelling the future in his gospel?  It is true that we do of course read in Matthew’s gospel several times the phrase ‘in order that the prophet ….. might be fulfilled’.  It is thus apparent that Matthew was following a particular tradition within early Christianity that wanted to find Christ in particular passages of the Old Testament.  But just because there was this tradition does not make it wrong for us to study the Old Testament prophets in their original historical and social context.  This combining of historical and literary scholarship when applied to the prophets has given to them an amazing vitality to modern students and readers.  The prophets are seen to be what they are – living breathing witnesses of a powerful transforming religious tradition, one which is of tremendous relevance and applicability today.

The prophets, the central swathe of the Old Testament, are read by scholars and all who study them properly as revealing a genius for religious experience as well as ethical thinking.  Let us celebrate them in this way and learn from them.  It may be that the message of Jesus should also be heard today through the prism of his readiness to be a continuity of Old Testament prophecy.  Perhaps if we have the eyes to see, we will find that he does not just fulfil the Law but he is also a living embodiment of the will of God first revealed in the writing of the classical prophets of the Old Testament.