Interpreting the Prophetic Books: An Exegetical Handbook (Handbooks for Old Testament Exegesis | HOTE)
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Preaching from a prophetic text can be daunting because it can be difficult to place these prophecies in their proper historical setting. The prophets used different literary genres and they often wrote using metaphorical poetry that is unfamiliar to the modern reader. This handbook offers an organized method of approaching a prophecy and preparing a persuasive, biblically based sermon that will draw modern application from the theological principle embedded in the prophetic text.
Top Highlights
“In synonymous parallelism the second line is supporting and clarifying what the first line says. Both lines used the same grammatical verb forms (first person singular in the future tense), and both mentioned two nouns after the verb.” (Page 47)
“Archaeologists have found two main groups of ancient Near Eastern prophetic texts outside of Israel, the Mari prophecies (eighteenth century BC) and Neo-Assyrian prophecies (seventh century BC).” (Page 95)
“One of the main characteristics of Hebrew poetry was its tendency to repeat in the second line, corresponding ideas or grammatical characteristics that appeared in the first line of the couplet.” (Page 46)
“More recent studies of poetic parallelism by James Kugel and Robert Alter emphasized that Hebrew parallelism did not just repeat the same idea in the second line, but it added something beyond the meaning of the first line.38 The content of the second line often focused attention on an aspect of the first line to bring greater intensification of the idea.” (Pages 49–50)
“Apocalyptic visions had the same two fold construction of (a) a vision, and (b) the divine interpretation (often through an interpreting angel), but the apocalyptic visions described distant cataclysmic events in the future that included more obscure symbolism.” (Page 45)
