The Bible: Relevance of the Prophets

Many of the Old Testament prophets must have seemed odd indeed. Jeremiah, by his own admission, had a tremor "like a drunken man" (Jeremiah 23: 9), and Isaiah "walked naked and barefoot three years" (Isaiah 20: 3). Many of their Jewish contemporaries were skeptical of the prophets—and some people are skeptical still. Literary critics may see Isaiah as nothing more than a wild Hebrew bard, and psychoanalysts may explain the posturings and mutters of Hosea as the upshot of repressed sexual feelings.

In a new book, one of the world's most illustrious Jewish...

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