every bit as cruel and inhospitable as the desert sun. Indeed, when the prophets turn to the symbolism of the desert, there is an unmistakable tone of suffering and dereliction in their appeals. While the mystics are fond of desert language for its apophatic significance, their theologies often remain confined within an intellectual paradigm about the possibilities and limits of human ideas. With the prophet, on the contrary, the desert is a perfect mirror of the desolation and destitution felt by hungry wanderers and oppressed slaves, by exiles and aliens. Different from mystical exegesis, the language of the prophet is much more tormented, frightening, existential. It captures the coarseness of human history.
Desert imagery in the prophets is, in short, a dark summary of human history. The desert signifies dispossession in history and location, the forced slavery of entire communities, the yoke and cruelty of war, the loss of house and homeland, the hunger and misery of exiles and refugees. The desert is the homeland of the homeless, the region of wanderers and pilgrims. And the desert is, as Juan Rulfo knew so well, our own century, an age that bears a striking resemblance to the town of Comala in Rulfo’s surrealistic masterpiece Pedro Páramo (indeed, in Spanish páramo means a wasteland or barren plain, which makes his novel speech from the void, speech that rises from the barren soil like a scorpion).33
To take one example of the desertlike spirituality of the prophets, consider Jeremiah. His speech is like an uncontrollable fire—his metaphor—because it bears witness to the ashes of history, to burned communities and cities, to the desolation left in the wake of war, captivity, and exile. Like so many prophets, Jeremiah is the anguished chronicler of the heavy hand of history, of the welts and bruises left on the souls of the poor and innocent. He lets loose his words to wreak havoc among the untroubled and complacent consciences of the people. His words are wild and agonizing, full of complaints and protests, sad moans and laments—and full of tears:
O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people.
(Jeremiah 9:1)
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.
(Jeremiah 31:15)
Indeed, in Jeremiah and other biblical texts, tears are the most obvious sign of the devastating reach of exile. They are the most visible indication that there is something terribly wrong. The evidence is in their eyes, eyes that suffer blindness for being flooded with tears. When distinguishing the poet from the philosopher, Federico García Lorca captured beautifully the principal meaning of the prophet: “And I tell us that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.”34 The prophets are poets of this kind, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to death than to philosophy. Their proclamations are evocative of imploration and blindness rather than vision, apocalypse instead of enlightenment. If one understands anything about the Bible, it should be how much the prayers of the Bible are bathed in mourning and lamentations, dirges and cries. Derrida picks up on this theme:
By praying on the verge of tears, the sacred allegory does something. It makes something happen or come, makes something come to the eyes, makes something well up in them, by producing an event. It is performative, something vision alone would be incapable of if it gave rise only to representational reporting, to perspicacity, to theory or to theater, if it were not already potentially apocalypse, already potent with apocalypse. . . . To have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or gaze. . . . Contrary to what one believes one knows, the best point of view is a source-point and a watering hole, a waterpoint—which thus comes down to tears.35
The biblical prophets do not give us theory or systems, they do not look or gaze—they implore. Their bodies and spirits are embodied apocalypses, they put on the garments and sackcloth of mourning, they become walking dramas of Israel’s impending doom. Their words are mournful revelations that announce the death of the old before the new can be envisaged. Jeremiah will literally put on the oxen’s yoke to forewarn the Israelites of the Babylonian might. Isaiah will strip his body naked and wander the desert for three years to call attention to the fate of the nations at the hands of the Assyrians (Isaiah 20). Ezekiel is commanded to prepare an exile’s bag and to cover his eyes to characterize the impending days of darkness that will fall hard on this nation of wayfarers. In each case, the prophets become one-man shows in a peripatetic theater that has the dispossessions of history as its main act (Ezekiel 12). With feverish histrionics, they cry out, denounce, censure, bewail, bemoan. And above all, they shed tears of blood for the omens of death they notice everywhere.
The prophets are, in fact, obsessed with death, and they succor death as if it was their own beloved who has died, marching arm in arm with him, bemoaning his death, grieving and wailing, singing the blues. Some tremble to name the ghastly specter of death for fear of reprisal or curse, but the prophets are not reserved in this regard. Because they announce the end of all that presumes to be inviolable and unending, death is always a key theme in the prophets, if not their most beloved companion, their most steadfast love, as Octavio Paz once wrote about Mexicans.36 The funeral they enact is for Israel, of course, or the Temple, or for the dead consciences of the people. Whatever the case, there is no doubt that their pronouncements are peopled by the ghosts of the dead.
And for the prophets, this familiarity with death is impossible to disentangle from their experience of exile. Exile is a break and disruption with death-like features, a wound that can be fatal. As an omen of death, exile takes and strips away all that is dear and life-giving; it peels away our soul, leaving us denuded and bare. It can be catastrophic, this much is clear in the Hebrew Bible:
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro,
I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land
was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins.
(Jeremiah 4:23–26)
In fact, most of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible prophesy and describe the great catastrophes that befell the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The prophets are chroniclers of these violent episodes in Israel’s history. As speaker’s of God’s word, they call out and denounce the bloody machinations of world powers: the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Persians, Syrians, and Romans. And closer to home, they see with great clarity and honesty their own nation’s sins and injustices. They are harshest and most unforgiving when it comes to Israel’s own ethical-political offenses. They jolt the memory of the people when they are likely to forget that that they, too, were once strangers in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:19). They excoriate the guilty for “crushing the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:7), for turning away widows and orphans, for not welcoming the strangers of the land. And they are hostile to practices
