The Prophets

This chapter explores some of the challenges for future scholarship on the Latter Prophets. It highlights the difficulty of bridging the methodological gap that sometimes exists between different scholarly approaches, for example between evangelical and secular research methods or between synchronic and diachronic reading strategies; yet it also draws attention to existing scholarly collaborations across this divide. The chapter further points out some issues that scholars face who are involved in the ideological study of the prophets (such as feminist scholarship). The chapter also surveys some of the recent changes in the understanding of prophecy as a phenomenon and of prophetic texts as a scribal endeavor. Is the prophet a visionary, a scribe, a redactor, a literary persona? Who created the prophetic texts and what purposes did those texts fulfill in ancient Israelite society? Finally, the chapter calls for more studies on the reception of prophetic texts.