In ancient Judea, Jeremiah and Isaiah advised kings and priests and watched the great armies of the ancient Near East sweep across the desert, threatening and overtaking their tiny country with its burgeoning faith. Across centuries a new view emerged based on their words: Might does not make right; we are all the children of one God. Both the beautiful words of Isaiah and the frightening words of Jeremiah helped form our contemporary ideas of justice, ethics, and faith. Richard Rubenstein shows us the evolution of our own moral codes and how they transformed the god of the Israelites from a local deity into Adonai, the universal sovereign who requires ethical behavior and demands the pursuit of justice for all people.A work of historical and religious insight, Thus Saith the Lord will inspire readers to reexamine their beliefs and hear anew the words of these religious revolutionaries.

Chapter iIf YHVH is God, Follow Him!Elijah, I Kings 18:21The two kings sat side by side on a raised platform overlooking a large open square just outside the gates of Samaria. Both wore their robes of office. Ahab of Israel rested lightly on his ivory-inlaid throne with an ease born of long experience, like an expert cavalryman sitting his horse. Immediately to his right sat his guest, King Jehosophat of Judah, occupying a throne only slightly less ornate than his own. A large crowd of townspeople and farmers ringed the square, many holding up their children or craning on tiptoe for a better look at the two monarchs. But the kings attention was focused intently on the scene now being played out for their benefit in the open space before the platform. The name of the placethe Threshing Floorreflected its main function in the life of Israels capital. Each year, after the harvests of wheat and barley were brought in, oxen and mules were led round and round the flat, hard-packed surface to trample the stalks of grain or cut them up with threshing plows.1 At such times, the air would be full of chaff, thrown into the wind by farmers wielding winnowing forks, while the precious grain fell safely to earth. Today, however, the atmosphere was suffused not with dust and straw or the braying of barnyard animals, but with discordant human noise. The square, swept clean of farm debris, was full of prophets, hundreds of them, some dancing ecstatically or chanting with eyes closed, others gesturing wildly and crying aloud in voices that might or might not have been their own. Those who had never witnessed the neviim prophesying en masse might have found the spectacle frightening or absurda strange drama performed by demented actors, each enacting a role known only to himself.2 To the royal onlookers, however, the apparent chaos in the square made perfect sense. They had summoned the prophets to Samaria to help them decide an issue of great public importance. Should Israel and Judah go to war with the kingdom of Syria?3 Or should the Hebrew-speaking nations keep the peace? On Ahabs part, this was not a neutral inquiry. For months he had been preparing to attack the powerful Damascus-based regime that was Israels chief competitor for supremacy in the region. His immediate aim was to recapture Ramoth-gilead, a strategic city formerly occupied by King Solomon in the days of the United Monarchy, but now under the control of the Syrians and their formidable ruler, King ben-Hadad II. Israel and Judah, long at loggerheads, were at last allies, thanks to a diplomatic marriage uniting the two kings families. Ahab had therefore invited Jehosophat to furnish a certain number of horses and soldiers for the campaign, and the Judean king had agreedbut on one condition. Ahab must first ask his prophets whether or not YHVHthe God worshipped by both monarchsapproved of the proposed war.4 Even without this prompting, the king might well have summoned the neviim to Samaria

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Excerpted from Thus Saith the Lord: The Revolutionary Moral Vision of Isaiah and Jeremiah by Richard E. Rubenstein
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