Chapter 47 Ruler of mankind - Yahweh

At first they waited longingly for something to happen suddenly, for the great Jeremiah's prophecies of the horrors of the last days were still ringing in their ears. But Jeremiah died, and no one has been able to fully replace him. In the preceding chapters we have briefly mentioned the nature of the Jewish prophets, who since time immemorial were the spiritual leaders of their people, and at certain times they were the embodiment of the national morality. However, as times changed, the Jews no longer had to rely on word of mouth for their religious instruction. They now had their own script, and their language had a formal grammar.

This kind of writing is very rough at the beginning, it has no vowels, and it leaves a lot of room for people's imagination when expressing meaning. The same is true for the rules that determine the syntactic structure of a sentence. There is no clear distinction between perfect and imperfect tenses. The same verb can express past perfect or future tense. We have to guess which from the interrelationships between sentences true meaning. Such a form of expression lends itself well to poetry, so they have many beautiful hymns.But the presentation is less successful when the writer has to deal with some specific thought or try to explain something from the past.

History told in this language cannot simply tell us where the prophecy ends or true history begins. Until the Jews learned from their neighbors the Aramaic script then in use, they were able to write a little better, still rough and imperfect, but enough to make the expressions quite good. This provided the conditions for new-minded prophets to influence their fellow Judahites, whether they lived in Egypt, Babylon, or the islands in the Aegean Sea.It also brings order to the old ambiguous liturgy; The law collection is the main classic of Judaism second only to the "Bible"-annotation.made possible the establishment of the vast system of legal codes and civil laws seen in the book; it also made the prophets really different from what they had been before, and they began to interpret the writings of their ancestors for a new generation of children, who from teaching by example became A philosopher who has been meditating in the pile of books all his life.Now we can still sometimes hear about prophets who travel among their compatriots and preach in popular languages, but as the number of schools for training prophets increases, the influence of the prophets who graduate from the schools is correspondingly weakening.

Yahweh is no longer Yahweh who blows over plain and hill like the wind. He becomes a whole set of precepts and rules.He no longer talks to people in person amid the deafening thunder over the desert, and his voice can only be heard in the quiet library from now on.The prophets became the priests of Judaism—the clergy who interpreted, elaborated, illustrated, and articulated God's will, and in the process gradually buried its essence day by day in ever-larger and larger academically Under the philosophical garbage heap of annotations and comments. This new change (like others of the same kind) did not happen overnight, and during the exile several figures rivaled the recognized spiritual leaders of the race's predecessors were produced.

Two of them stood out among them. One of them was Ezekiel. The other (unfortunately) we don't know his name.He was "the evangelist among the prophets".He spoke a completely new language, like none had been heard in Israel or Judah.You'll find his writings collected in the second half of the twenty-third book of the Old Testament, called the Book of Isaiah. The book has sixty-six chapters, the first thirty-nine of which are probably written by the prophet Isaiah.The prophet Isaiah lived during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Zedekiah, and foretold the fate of the two Jewish nations long before the days of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar.

The next twenty-seven chapters are obviously written by people who lived several centuries later, because different languages ​​and different styles are used. We are not surprised that these two completely different parts are put together without any explanation. The compilers of the Old Testament (as we have said repeatedly before) were not experts at writing books.They could glue together volumes, liked or not, wherever they were found, without a trace of what we moderns call "editing." The real author of the second part of Isaiah is thus submerged in the name of the prophet who wrote the first part, but that doesn't matter, because the "unknown poet" has won more than the lengthy genealogy in the Old Testament. Many of his contemporaries had a higher reputation.

His new and unique insight into the power and personality of Jehovah makes his writings extremely valuable.Yahweh, for him, was no longer the God of a small Semitic tribe, whose name was written high above the earth. He is the ruler of all mankind.