We have now read the Book of Isaiah and Jeremiah. However, we have not taken time to ask what is a prophet? What traditions do these books take for granted in their presentations? Some scholars argue that there was a strong connection between the office of the prophet and the office of the king. They welded a bond of competing offices for the leadership of the community. For these scholars the institution of prophecy begins with Samuel and ends with Haggai. However, I think this is too limited a view of the phenomenon we call prophecy.

Prophecy is an expression of mantic wisdom, that is to say it is a special kind of knowledge one receives from religious experience broadly speaking. This understanding is largely formed out of my own form critical training that accented the oral aspect of prophecy. However, new research on literacy may lead us to re-think the institution of prophecy. If literacy is s early as some scholars such a Rollston, Schniedewind and Carr suggest then the distance between prophecy and apocalypticism may not be as large as we thought. For instance Carr argues that we have created a false dichotomy between written and oral. The literary structures of the so-called writing prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the editorial finger prints on the Book of the Twelve may indicate a poet/scribe who stands behind today’s prophetic books.