Summary: Bible - Major Prophets

The GIST

Major Prophets, from the Bible, is the name Christians give to five books of the Old Testament: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel. The word "major" is about size and not rank. These books are simply much longer than the twelve short prophetic books that the Hebrew Bible gathers into a single book, and tradition credits them to four men, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, with Lamentations attributed to Jeremiah.

Together they tell the most painful chapter of ancient Israel's story and refuse to let it be the last one. They run from the days of the kings of Judah, through the siege and fall of Jerusalem, into the long captivity in Babylon. The prophets explain the catastrophe as the consequence of idolatry and injustice, mourn it without holding anything back, and then, again and again, promise that God will gather, heal and restore. Judgment and comfort stand side by side on almost every page.

What It Says

Isaiah: judgment, and then comfort

Isaiah, the son of Amoz, sees his vision "concerning Judah and Jerusalem" during the reigns of four kings of Judah: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. The book opens like a court case. God has raised children and they have rebelled; even an ox knows its owner, but Israel does not know its God. A little later the prophet sings of a vineyard planted on a fruitful hill with the choicest vine, fenced, cleared of stones and given a tower and a winepress, that produced only wild grapes. His anger is aimed at specific wrongs: rulers who write unjust decrees, turn the needy away from justice and make widows and the fatherless their prey.

In the year King Uzziah dies, Isaiah sees the Lord on a throne, high and lifted up, attended by six-winged seraphim who call to one another, "Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory." That sense of God's holiness drives everything that follows. There are oracles, each announced as a "burden," against Babylon, Moab, Damascus, Egypt and Tyre. There are warnings to Judah not to run to Egypt for help. And there is a stretch of plain narrative, in which Sennacherib, king of Assyria, takes the fortified cities of Judah and sends a great army to Jerusalem, and King Hezekiah tears his clothes, puts on sackcloth and sends his officials to Isaiah.

Hope keeps breaking through. All nations will one day stream to the mountain of the Lord's house. "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light." A branch will grow from the stem of Jesse, and the spirit of wisdom and understanding will rest on him. Then, at chapter 40, the tone changes entirely: "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God." From here the book speaks to a people who need rescue. God tells them not to fear, because he has redeemed them and called them by name. He names Cyrus as his anointed, the one before whom gates will open. The idols of Babylon bow down and go into captivity. And a mysterious servant appears, gentle enough that he will not break a bruised reed, and later described as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." The closing chapters invite everyone who thirsts to come and buy without money, announce good tidings to the meek and liberty to the captives, and end with a God whose throne is heaven and who looks to the one who is poor and of a contrite spirit.

Jeremiah: the prophet who wept

Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, comes from a family of priests in Anathoth. The word of the Lord reaches him in the thirteenth year of King Josiah and keeps coming through the reigns of Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, right up to the day Jerusalem is carried away captive. His message is hard and it does not change: Judah has abandoned the God she followed so devotedly in her youth, and disaster is coming from the north.

He delivers it in public. Standing in the gate of the temple, he tells the worshippers to amend their ways and not to trust in the slogan "The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD," as if the building could protect them. He also acts his message out. He hides a linen girdle in a hole in the rock beside the Euphrates. He watches a potter rework a spoiled vessel into another one. He wears bonds and yokes on his neck.

The cost to him is plain. A priest named Pashur strikes him and puts him in the stocks. A rival prophet, Hananiah, announces that God has broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. King Zedekiah shuts him in the court of the prison for saying the city will fall. And Jeremiah does not hide what it does to him: "Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!"

Yet the same book holds some of the warmest promises in Scripture. Jeremiah writes a letter to the exiles already in Babylon. God says he will bring his people back to the land he gave their fathers, and tells them, "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." Here too is the promise of a new covenant, written on the heart. The scribe Baruch takes the prophet's words down in a book. Then the end arrives as foretold: Nebuchadnezzar besieges Jerusalem in the ninth year of Zedekiah, and in the eleventh year the city is broken open. The last chapters follow the survivors, the murder of the governor Gedaliah and the remnant in Egypt. Oracles against the nations come next, Babylon above all, and a final chapter returns to Zedekiah's reign and his rebellion against Babylon.

Lamentations: grief in five poems

Lamentations is what the fall of Jerusalem felt like. "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!" it begins, and the city is pictured as a widow weeping in the night with no one to comfort her. The poems do not look away from anything: the starving children, the slain in the streets, the sanctuary entered by enemies, the sense that "The LORD was as an enemy." They are also confession. "The LORD is righteous; for I have rebelled against his commandment."

At the centre, a single voice, "the man that hath seen affliction," reaches the bottom and finds something to stand on: "It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not." And then: "They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness." The book does not end in triumph. Its final prayer asks, "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old," and the last line still speaks of being rejected.

Ezekiel: visions by the river

Ezekiel is a priest among the captives by the river Chebar in the land of the Chaldeans when the heavens open and he sees visions of God. A voice addresses him as "Son of man" and sends him to a rebellious nation. He is given a scroll to eat, and it tastes as sweet as honey.

Like Jeremiah, he preaches with his body. He draws Jerusalem on a tile and lays siege to it. He shaves his head and beard and divides the hair into thirds, to be burned, struck with a knife and scattered to the wind. In vision he is taken to the temple and watches God's glory depart from it. He packs his belongings and leaves in full view, like someone going into captivity. He attacks prophets who speak out of their own hearts, and he rejects the proverb that "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge": each person answers for his own life.

After oracles against the Ammonites, Tyre and Pharaoh of Egypt, the book turns toward renewal. Ezekiel is pictured as a watchman, responsible for sounding the warning, and he condemns shepherds who feed themselves and not the flock. God promises a new heart and a new spirit. In the valley of dry bones he asks, "Son of man, can these bones live?" and promises to put breath into them. The final chapters, dated to the twenty-fifth year of the captivity, are a long, carefully measured vision of a new temple. The glory of the God of Israel returns from the east, water flows out from under the threshold, and the land is shared among the tribes.

Daniel: faithful in a foreign court

Daniel begins with a siege of Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim, after which Nebuchadnezzar has young men of Israel brought to be trained for his palace. Four are named: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, the last three renamed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Daniel resolves not to defile himself with the king's food and wine, asks for ten days on pulse and water, and the four come out looking healthier than the rest.

The stories that follow are among the best known in the Bible. The king demands that his wise men tell him both his dream and its meaning, on pain of death, and Daniel steps forward. A golden image sixty cubits high is set up, and everyone is ordered to bow at the sound of the music or be thrown into a burning fiery furnace. At Belshazzar's feast, with the temple vessels on the table, the fingers of a hand write on the wall. Under Darius, jealous officials get a law passed forbidding prayer to anyone but the king for thirty days, and Daniel goes home and, with his windows open toward Jerusalem, prays three times a day as before, knowing the penalty is the den of lions.

The second half is vision: four great beasts rising from the sea, the Ancient of days on a throne of fire, "one like the Son of man" coming with the clouds of heaven, a ram and a goat, and the seventy weeks. It ends with a promise that many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, and that "they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament."

Why It Matters

These books give the Bible its explanation of the exile and its way through it. Four convictions run through all five. The God of Isaiah's throne vision will not shrug at idols or at the robbing of the poor. His anger has a purpose, which is to turn a people around. No empire, whether Assyria, Babylon or Persia, is outside his hand, even while his people are its captives. And ruin never gets the final word: after every warning comes a promise of return and new life.

Traditions arrange them differently. The grouping itself belongs to the Christian Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible has no such section and places Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel among the Prophets (the Nevi'im) and Lamentations and Daniel among the Writings (the Ketuvim). The Catholic Bible adds the Book of Baruch, named for Jeremiah's scribe, with the Letter of Jeremiah as its sixth chapter; most Protestant Bibles keep to the five. Christians have long read Isaiah's suffering servant and Daniel's Son of Man as pointing to Jesus.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who wants to understand the Bible's great arc from judgment to hope, or who has heard of the fiery furnace, the dry bones and the handwriting on the wall and wants to meet them in context. Readers living through loss will find in Lamentations and Jeremiah an honesty about grief that is rare anywhere, and readers who love poetry will find in Isaiah some of the most beautiful lines ever written.