Exploring Four Persistent Prophetic Images

The writings of the Hebrew prophets are, for many people, the cornerstone of the Hebrew Bible. In some of the most vivid and beautiful language in all literature, the Hebrew prophets castigate the wrongdoer, denounce injustice, offer consolation to those in misery, call for repentance and righteousness, predict calamity and envision renewal and peace.

So powerful are the prophets as literary and historical figures, so majestic are their words, that we tend to think of them as a monolithic group. But it is important to remember that the prophets were active over a span of centuries in widely different locales, responding to very different national crises.