The mantic and mythic imagination in the Book of the Twelve

I’ve got my paper accepted to the Society of Biblical Literature’s national meeting in Boston in November! Yippee! Its been ages since I went, and I really enjoyed Boston last time. Here is the abstract for my paper. It will be in one of the two the Book of the Twelve prophets (i.e., “minor prophets”) sections.

The mantic and mythic imagination in the Book of the Twelve.

James Linville (University of Lethbridge)

According to a number of scholars the scribes who produced the prophetic corpus understood themselves as embarking on a quasi-prophetic or mantic quest for divine knowledge. This paper builds on these insights and combines them with a perception of the prophetic corpus as a part of a larger national mythology granting reason and meaning to the past. Moreover, it views the Twelve as a complex symbolic universe in which the historically contingent is revealed as instantiating eternal and paradigmatic truths. This discovery of the timeless within history is what bridges the gap between the eponymous prophet and the scribe, and makes the prophetic text eternally relevant and revelatory for the initiated interpreter.

By looking at Hosea, Zechariah, and Malachi in relative detail, I demonstrate how the Twelve opens and closes on depictions of heavenly and earthly relationship as a relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. This is expressed in the marriage imagery as well as other features. Moreover, the obvious cultic interests of these books suggest a textual, symbolic ritual of transformation and purification embodied in the idea of the “Day of the Lord”, rendering the experience of the writer and even the reader with this symbolic universe not so much as a voyeuristic encounter with the divine, but an active participant in the revelation of it.

Viewing the Book of the Twelve in this way provides a plausible scenario for explaining the desire to produce a tightly interrelated anthology of prophetic documents. Moreover, it can impact how scholars view ancient Judaism’s return to older mythological themes of cosmology, heavenly rebellion and combat, themes that are expressed in a number of apocalyptic texts of the late second temple period.

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