what does the Lord require of youbut to do justice,
to value covenant loyalty,
and to live humbly with your God (6:6–8).
Here we learn what we must do to stand before God. The religious life is not manifested primarily by participation in the cult, even when it includes extraordinary acts of ritual devotion. The religious life consists of daily living. It is by dealing justly with our neighbors, showing loyalty to the covenant with God, and recognizing God’s power and glory by a humble demeanor that we are accepted before Yahve.
The prophets distinguished themselves by their engagement with history. In fact, starting with the first one, Amos (circa 750 B.C.E.), they discovered that a person’s life does not acquire meaning by being tied to ceremonial rites that are repeated in annual, monthly or weekly cycles. Life acquires meaning as it forges a future, and God is the One who is actively leading His people toward the future. In this way God makes history and human beings occupy it.
The prophets of Israel have the honor of having been the first philosophers of history, the first to break the circularity of traditional societies that identify themselves with a golden past that every succeeding generation is bound to preserve. Amos proclaimed for the first time a “Day of the Lord” (5:18–20). This future day is determinative of the quality of all human life. It is the day of judgment of the nation, the day of the divine verdict on the history of nations.
For the prophets the central idea is the covenant that ties the people to God. The covenant, obviously, is a historical reality. It was established at the Exodus, the clearest manifestation of God’s action to forge a people with a historic mission. With the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., the future of the nation as a viable community was severely tested. As a consequence, the prophets of this period, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, gave to the covenant a more individualistic application.
For the prophets, Yahve is the God of the future. God’s promises are an invitation to the future. The prophets struggled to prove that Yahve is not only stronger than the other gods, but in fact that Yahve is the only God since the other gods are idols and idols are nothing (Is. 40:19–20; 41:6–7). Isaiah considers that the final proof for his argument is that Yahve of Israel, the creator who is constantly creating both in the cosmos and in history, is the only God who holds the future and, therefore, the only One capable of predicting it (Is. 41:21–24). Being loyal to the covenant opens the future to the people.
The prophets see two very important things in creation: 1) creation identifies the God with whom they are bound by a covenant, and 2) creation is part of the historical reality in which they live, not just an event of a remote past. In the same way in which Yahve is tied to His people by a covenant, God is also tied to creation. The faithfulness with which God creates each new day is the guarantee of his faithfulness to God’s people.
For the prophets, nature and history are not two discrete universes with characteristics particular to each, as they are for modern academics. Classical Hebrew did not have words for nature, society, history, or universe. These words name abstract concepts that were unknown to them. The prophets did not distinguish between nature and history. The realm in which Yahve acts is one. Yahve’s faithfulness is one and the same in all God’s activity.
Jeremiah said it well. He announced that Yahve intended to establish a new covenant which would not be like the covenant made with the fathers. They had broken that covenant and consequently were being taken into exile in Babylon. Jeremiah says, “Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar, . . . If this fixed order departs from before me, says the Lord, then shall the descendants of Israel cease from being a nation before me for ever” (Jer. 31:35–36).
According to this declaration, the permanency of Israel as a nation is guaranteed by the permanency of the solar system. History and nature are one and the same realm in which the sovereignty and the fidelity of Yahve are evident. Jeremiah comforted the people of Israel facing exile with the promise of a new covenant. Addressing the power of Yahve, Isaiah asks, “Was it not thou who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon? Was it not thou who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep; who made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to pass over?” (Is. 51:9–10). On the basis of Yahve’s performance at creation and the exodus, Isaiah predicts the people’s joyful return from exile.
Here creation is described as the cut that severed Rahab into two hemispheres, the thrust that pierced the dragon to death. Both references recall theogonic narratives of neighboring nations. These monsters represented the chaos that needed to be mastered in order to install cosmos. The reference to the crossing of the sea during the exodus also assumes cosmic proportions when the Red Sea becomes “the waters of the great deep”. Again we notice that the act that brings the cosmos to existence (cutting Rahab) and the act that brings to existence Israel (cutting the sea) are considered in parallel by the prophet since the Red Sea is part of the waters of chaos on which the earth is founded. Both acts provide the means for identifying Yahve. Isaiah continues asking, “Have you forgotten the Lord, your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth?” (51:13). God is the God of history who is “ Maker” both of God’s people and of the heavens and the earth. For Isaiah the union of cosmos and history includes the history of all nations (40:21–23).
While it is true that creation is something God did “in days of old, the generations of long ago” (51:9), creation was not accomplished then. The One who cut Rahab and pierced the dragon then is also the One who creates each passing moment. If night follows day and dawn puts an end to night is because Yahve is actively creating. Yahve is the God who created, formed and made (Is. 43:7), but also the one who now and in the future redeems (Is. 43:1–7). Creation is not a fait accompli. It is a creatio continua. To put it in contemporary American terms, creation is not a “mission accomplished.” Amos puts this notion on relief: “He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out upon the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name” (5:8; compare 4:13). The succession of days and nights and the rising and lowering of the tides are to be seen together with the placing of the Pleiades and Orion in the cosmos.
For the prophets cosmos and history are one, but it does not follow on this account that the prophets were interested in the “how” of creation. In fact, as we already saw, when they refer to how it happened they relapse to the mythological language of the cosmogonies known to them. Instead of making reference to a creation week they parade Rahab, Leviathan, the dragon of the sea, and the waters of the deep.
For us the language of mathematics has become the best vehicle to convey our understanding of creation, and with mathematics we are creating (or discovering?) a universe best understood cybernetically. The prophets were the precursors in the transposition of the description of the universe from mythological narratives to the historical existence of Israel. This was a most significant discursive shift. The prophets, as said above, were the discoverers of history as a purposeful divine activity, and they attached creation to it. This transposition of references to creation that ties it to historical events in the life of the people was the first step in the secularization of nature, even if what the prophets considered history is not what we today call history. They were the ones who took away the gods from nature and thereby began the process of secularization. By insisting that human beings must become responsible for their future, the prophets broke the ties that had bound humans to the cycles of nature. As a result, creation became the guarantee of God’s faithfulness. Creation became a servant to history.
One of the forms used in the prophetic oracles is what scholars called the “divine lawsuit” (in Hebrew, RIB). In these oracles Yahve announces that
