Educational reform is closely related to what we call today open access and freedom of information. In envisioning a more sustainable form of political community, the Biblical authors perceived the dangers of allowing certain institutions and sectors of society to restrict access to knowledge and information by exercising a monopoly over knowledge in one realm. An institution or group in society accumulated a disproportionate amount of power. And this imbalance posed a direct threat to the efforts of the bible, biblical authors to foster broad participation in the collective life of the community. To quote the prophet Hosea, my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Now through out the ages states have often sought to monopolize certain forms of knowledge. This is called, in Latin, Arcana imperii, or state secrets. Since the work of the German Philosopher Max Scheler, this phenomenon has been studied under the German term Herrschaftswissen. Herrschaftswissen designates in its narrowest sense, a knowledge that those in positions of power confine to themselves and that serves their political agendas. In its broadest meaning, it denotes a knowledge advantage, which is used to secure a position in society. The term recognizes the scarcity and precious value of knowledge, and the resulting advantage for those who possess it. This category is espe, of Heischasbeisein, is especially well suited to the study of ancient Israel and it's neighbors. For ancient Middle Eastern states the effort to establish a knowledge monopoly, monopoly of, over all kinds of knowledge, divine knowledge and normal knowledge, had to come to terms with the power of profits and diviners. By virtue of their direct access to the world of the gods, prophets and diviners possessed inside knowledge that was vital to their societies future. And with it they could challenge decisions of the palace or the legitimacy of a reign. For this reason, rulers spared no effort in their attempt to control the activities of prophets and diviners. How then do we account for the distinctive character of biblical, biblical prophetic writings? In three closely related respects, these writings stand out sharply against the back drop, of what we see from the Imperial Centers of Mesopotamia. So first the Biblical Corpus has been transmitted to us from generations to generation. In contrast, we would not know about the ancient or Eastern texts, prophetic texts, and texts of divination, if it were not for the work of archeologists to recover these texts from the ground in which they laid buried for thousands of years. Second, the context in which the Biblical Corpus of prophetic writings survived is much different from the ancient Middle Eastern texts. The Biblical Corpus consists of literary writings. The individual oracles are not simply linked together in a collection as we find, for example in the collections from Ashurbanipal Library. Instead they have been intricately woven into sophisticated works of literature. Books designed to be read by and to larger communities. Their addressee's are first and foremost not the palace but the people. Isaiah thus speaks in the name of Israels God to my people who dwell in Zion or Jerusalem. The books of Isiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, devote a lot of attention to the person and the fate of individual prophets. Oracles are situated into larger narratives that span the lives of these prophets. Thus the book of Jeremiah begins with Israel's God commissioning Jeremiah, the prophet, and then proceeds to show how the oracles that Jeremiah is called to pronounce bring great suffering in his own life. And, we have extensive third person accounts, narratives, in which Jeremiah has, you know, has to undergo trials and tribulations. He battles and competes with other prophets in Jerusalem. And in the end, he's imprisoned. And all these scenes of him being brought to trial, thrown in a pit, and later forced into exile in Egypt really show his life in the most intricate detail. His story of affliction runs parallel to the fate of Jewish population. The fate of the prophet in these poignant accounts is thus profoundly connected to the fate of the people as a whole. In the ancient or Eastern text, we don't witness this intimate bond between prophet and people. Indeed we can't even classify these texts as literature. They are instead collections of oracles arranged in the sequences without any interest in the experience of the prophets or diviners who deliver them. These oracles. And many of the prophesies that we know about are not written down, but are reported about from others who hear the prophesies. The collections of oracles themselves are not intended to be read by a larger community. To the contrary, they are what we called arcana imperious, state secrets, and they were safeguarded under lock and key, in royal, in a royal library off limits to anyone beyond the king and a small, select group of officials and scholars who had sworn allegiance to the king. In contrast to the Biblical writings, they were not collected and expanded into larger literary works to be studied by the people of Assyria, or the people of Babylon, or Maria, or Egypt, or what have you. Third, the larger message of the corpus of biblical prophets differs sharply from the kinds of texts we've, un, unearthed in archaeological excavations. Many biblical texts presented deep antagonism between kings and prophets. Think of the scene of the prophet Natan, Nathan, who boldly points an indicting finger at King David, and after his affair with Bathsheba, and after his assassination of her husband, Uriah, he appears before the throne and says attah iysh, you are the guilty one. And prophetic writings themselves, Israel's God pronounces his decision to bring an end to the entire political order to destroy the societies of Israel and Judah, and to exile his own people from their land. Now although some prophecies in the ancient near East, ancient near East tried the king and encourage him to pay more attention to the word of the deity or to, to attend to problems that he neglected. Nowhere do we find the kinds of messages of unconditional judgement that purveyed the biblical prophetic writings. In what follows, I'm going to look at these three factors. And, consider what we need to know, in order to account for the distinctive character of these writings. In the final video segments, before the interviews, with Professor Tamara Cohen Ezcanazi word and Professor Sweeney, I will tr, brief you in the cases of priestly knowledge, as well as wisdom collections. But first, prophetic writings.
