First Things: Where Are the Prophets?

By Peter Leithart
Wednesday, April 2, 2008

The question of my title is not a lament. My question is not, Why are there no more prophets? I have something more literal in mind: Where do we find prophets, and, specifically, where do we find them in the Bible? What is their physical and social location?

To judge by popular American perceptions, prophets are easy to recognize. Check the wilderness and woods, because prophets always stand outside, protesting the system. Look for the shaggy, crazed, wild-eyed guy, the one wearing a hair shirt instead of an Armani suit. Listen for the one who speaks in shrieks and whose personal habits embarrass polite society. Anger is the prophet’s characteristic emotion, and the jeremiad his characteristic genre. The prophet is more at home in the angular world of Flannery O’Connor than in the elegance of John Updike. It’s this image of the prophetic outsider that has inspired radicals from the Romantic period on to dress themselves in the mantle of the prophet. the rest image