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• Title: From Honor Challenge to False Prophecy: Rereading Jeremiah 28' S Story of Prophetic Conflict in Light of Social-Science Models (Essay)
• Author : Currents in Theology and Mission
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 289 KB

Description

The story of Jeremiah and Hananiah is perhaps the Bible's classic narrative about prophetic conflict. Unfortunately, many readers and interpreters overlook the details in the exchange between the central characters in the story and instead look to the end of the story to see what it says about the phenomenon of false prophecy in ancient Israel. This is understandable, especially when Jeremiah 28 is read, first of all, theologically and, secondly, canonically in light of such texts as Deuteronomy 18:18-22. These verses, situated as they are in Israel's ostensive early history, are ordinarily understood as the criteria for determining true or false prophecy. Thus, later interpreters will come to think of those intermediaries who do such things as speak in the name of other gods, or speak presumptuously a word that does not come from YHWH, or pronounce an oracle that does not come true, as false prophets. And false prophets shall die. However, what I propose here is that the details of the narrative in Jeremiah 28 suggest that what is at stake in the scenes between Hananiah and Jeremiah is not some abstract theological principle but honor; and that a particular social-science model provides a useful lens through which to reread this narrative of prophetic conflict, so that even before the passage of time validates Jeremiah's message, audiences come to see him as an honorable person in the community and a faithful spokesperson of YHWH. We are fundamentally social beings who live in a particular context, and our work of interpreting the Bible does not take place in a vacuum. It is also a fallacy to think that anyone is able to offer an entirely objective interpretation of a (biblical) text. Even practitioners of the historical-critical method do well to identify the various factors that comprise their social location (gender, race, ethnicity, religious commitment, age, education, class, cultural traditions, and the like) and to be self-aware of how these aspects of their being shape the way they read and understand the Bible. The social-scientific study of the Bible appeared as an important, complementary methodology in the later decades of the twentieth century. (2) Social-science critics are careful to recognize and admit chat differences exist between the interpreter's context (social location) and the context of the biblical text and its author. (3) As western readers and interpreters of the Bible in the twenty-first century, we live in asocial, political, religious, and cultural context significantly different from the world of the Bible. A principle goal of social-scientific criticism is to understand the text in terms of the social and cultural system in which it was written. As Elliott states, this method is intended "to yield an understanding of what authors said and meant within the contours of their own environment." (4) In order to find out what a text meant in its original context, we need to have some familiarity with the social and cultural world of the Bible. Learning about the values of honor and shame in the ancient world will better allow us to hear and understand a biblical text as its original audience would have experienced it in their particular context.

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