Unit 13 · Law, Covenant and the Prophetic Voice

Exodus 19 begins with a date. In the third month after leaving Egypt, the Torah says, the people camp in the wilderness in front of a mountain. The book calls it Sinai; in Deuteronomy the same mountain is usually called Horeb. Moses goes up, and the text reports God’s message to the people below. It is short, and it is built like an offer with a condition.

The offer runs like this. God reminds the people what has already happened: "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians." Then comes the condition, "if ye will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant." Then the promise: they will be God’s own treasure among all peoples, "a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:4–6, JPS 1917). A covenant, brit in Hebrew, is a binding bond between two parties with duties on each side.

The people answer as one: "All that the LORD hath spoken we will do" (Exodus 19:8). Only after that answer does the text describe the thunder, the cloud and the ten sayings. Rashi, the eleventh-century French commentator, reads "kingdom of priests" as meaning princes or nobles, a people set apart for service. Modern literary readers notice the order of the scene: memory of a rescue, then a condition, then a promise, then consent. That order will matter in the next lesson.

In the 1950s the American scholar George Mendenhall noticed something about the Sinai chapters. Treaties from the Hittite empire, in what is now Turkey, dating from about 1400 to 1200 BCE, follow a set pattern. A great king makes a pact with a smaller king who becomes his vassal, his loyal dependent. The treaty opens by naming the great king. It recalls what he has done for the vassal. It lists the vassal’s duties. It calls witnesses, orders the text to be kept and read aloud, and ends with blessings for loyalty and curses for betrayal.

Set Exodus 19–24 beside that list and the fit is striking. "I am the LORD thy God" names the greater party. "Who brought thee out of the land of Egypt" recalls the favor already done. The ten sayings and the laws that follow are the duties. In Exodus 24 the text is written down, read aloud, and the people answer. Deuteronomy, which retells the covenant, adds long blessings and curses in chapters 27 and 28. Scholars call this the suzerainty treaty form, from a French word for an overlord.

Not everyone agrees on the details. Some scholars think the closest parallels are later Assyrian treaties from the 600s BCE, which would point to a later date for parts of Deuteronomy. Others caution that a shared form does not tell you where a text came from. What most readers accept is the main point: the Torah presents law not as a king’s decree but as the terms of a relationship. Jewish tradition had long said something similar in its own words. The midrash pictures God offering the Torah to other nations first, and Israel accepting it, a story of consent rather than force.

Before the sayings, the Torah sets the stage with care. The people wash their clothes and prepare for three days. A boundary is drawn around the mountain, and no one may cross it. On the third day, the text reports thunder and lightning, a thick cloud, a loud horn blast, smoke and fire. The mountain shakes. "And all the people that were in the camp trembled" (Exodus 19:16). The scene is built to convey the weight of what follows.

After the sayings, the people react. In the JPS 1917 numbering, Exodus 20:15 says the people "saw the thunderings" and stood far off. They ask Moses to speak with them instead, "but let not God speak with us, lest we die" (Exodus 20:16). Moses agrees. From here on, most of the Torah’s laws come through Moses rather than directly to the crowd. The rabbis noticed this. One tradition in the Talmud (Makkot 24a) says the people heard the first two sayings directly and the rest through Moses, because those two are phrased in the first person.

Readers also notice the odd phrase "saw the thunderings." Rashi takes it literally as a miracle: they saw what is normally only heard. Ibn Ezra, a twelfth-century Spanish commentator, reads it as ordinary language, since Hebrew often uses one sense-word for another. Two commentators, one verse, two methods: one presses the strange wording, the other explains it as idiom. Both are honored in Jewish study, and comparing them is part of how the Torah is read.

English speakers say "the Ten Commandments," but the Torah’s own phrase is aseret hadevarim, "the ten words" (Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 4:13). Rabbinic Hebrew calls them Aseret HaDibrot, the ten sayings or utterances. The difference matters. The first saying in Jewish counting, "I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:2, JPS 1917), commands nothing. It is a statement of who is speaking and what has already been done. Calling it a "word" fits it better than calling it a command.

The sayings appear twice. Exodus 20 gives them at Sinai. Deuteronomy 5 has Moses repeat them forty years later. The two versions are nearly identical, but not quite. The Shabbat saying in Exodus begins "Remember" (zakhor) and gives creation as the reason: God rested on the seventh day. In Deuteronomy it begins "Observe" (shamor) and gives Egypt as the reason: you were slaves, so let your servants rest too. The Talmud (Shevuot 20b) says "Remember" and "Observe" were spoken in a single utterance, a way of saying both are equally the word of God.

Jewish practice keeps both. The Friday night hymn Lekha Dodi opens with the line "Observe and Remember in a single utterance." In synagogue, when the ten sayings are read from the Torah, many congregations stand. But the rabbis also resisted giving the ten a special status above the rest of the Torah. The Talmud (Berakhot 12a) reports that the daily recitation of the ten sayings was stopped so that no one could claim that only these ten were given at Sinai.

Everyone agrees the text of Exodus 20:2–14 (JPS numbering) contains ten sayings, because Exodus 34:28 says so. But the verses do not come numbered. Where one saying ends and the next begins is a matter of tradition, and three main systems exist. Each covers exactly the same words; they simply cut them at different places.

In the Jewish count, the first saying is "I am the LORD thy God." The second joins "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" with the ban on graven images. The rest follow in order, and the tenth is the ban on coveting. The Catholic and Lutheran count goes back to Augustine (354–430 CE). It treats "I am the LORD" as an introduction. It joins "no other gods" and "no images" as the first. Then it splits coveting into two: the ninth covers a neighbor’s house or wife, the tenth the rest. Most Protestants and Orthodox Christians use a third count, which matches the ancient Jewish writers Philo and Josephus. There "no other gods" is the first, "no images" the second, and coveting a single tenth.

This is why a Catholic student and a Baptist student may both say "the fifth commandment" and mean different things: for one it is "Honor thy father and thy mother," for the other "Thou shalt not murder." No system changes the content. What differs is how each tradition hears the opening. Jewish tradition puts the relationship first: before any command, the speaker names who is speaking and what has been done.

Jewish tradition often pictures the sayings on two tablets, five and five. The first five in the Jewish count concern the relationship with God, and they include honoring parents. The second five concern the neighbor: murder, adultery, theft, false witness and coveting. The Mekhilta, an early rabbinic commentary on Exodus, pairs them across the tablets. It matches "I am the LORD" with "Thou shalt not murder," since a human being is made in the divine image. The pairing is a reading, not a fact about the stone. But it shows how the rabbis heard the two halves as one.

The Hebrew of the sixth saying is lo tirtzach. The King James Version (1611) translates it "Thou shalt not kill," and JPS 1917 does the same. Many later translations, including NJPS (1985), prefer "You shall not murder," because the Hebrew verb is generally used for unlawful killing and not for war or the death penalty, both of which the Torah elsewhere permits. The choice of word carries a reading with it. A class can compare the two translations and ask what each one lets the verse say.

The Shabbat saying is the longest of the ten. It names everyone who rests: you, your children, your servants, your animals and the stranger within your gates (Exodus 20:10). No other ancient law code known to scholars orders a weekly rest for servants and animals. Jewish families keep Shabbat from Friday sunset to Saturday night with candles, a meal, prayer and a break from work. For observant Jews it is the most frequent of all the commandments, arriving every seven days. The Torah presents it here as a reminder of creation; in Deuteronomy, as a reminder of freedom.

In December 1901 a French team digging at Susa, in southwestern Iran, uncovered a pillar of black stone taller than a person. At the top, a carving shows a king standing before a seated god. Below run column after column of cuneiform writing: a prologue, some 282 laws, and an epilogue with blessings and curses. The king is Hammurabi of Babylon, who ruled about 1792 to 1750 BCE. An Elamite conqueror had hauled the stone to Susa centuries later as loot. It now stands in the Louvre, and it is the most complete ancient law collection known.

Hammurabi’s is not the oldest. Laws of Ur-Nammu from about 2100 BCE, written in Sumerian, and laws from the city of Eshnunna, from about 1770 BCE, survive in part. Later Middle Assyrian and Hittite laws also exist. Scholars debate whether these were codes that courts actually consulted or monuments meant to show the king as a just ruler. Either way, they show the kinds of cases that ancient Near Eastern societies argued about: injury, theft, marriage, slaves, wages, loans and animals.

The University of Chicago has a long connection to this world. Its Oriental Institute, now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, spent ninety years on one project. From 1921 to 2011 it produced the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. That is the standard dictionary of Akkadian, the language in which Hammurabi’s laws were written. Much of what any reader can say about those laws in English passes through work done in Hyde Park.

Why does this matter for reading Exodus? Because Exodus 21–23, the section scholars call the Covenant Code, treats many of the same cases in a similar style: "if a man does X, then Y." Nobody claims the Torah copied Hammurabi. The likeliest view is that both draw on a shared legal culture of the region, and the interesting question is where the Torah goes its own way. Jewish tradition, reading the same laws as Torah given at Sinai, asks a different question: what each law teaches and how it is to be practiced.

Exodus 21:28–32 sets out the case in steps. If an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox is stoned and its flesh is not eaten. The owner is clear. But suppose the ox was known to gore, the owner was warned, and he did not keep it in. Then the ox is stoned and the owner too is liable to death. A ransom may be set for him instead, and then he pays what is laid on him. If the victim is a slave, the owner pays thirty shekels of silver to the slave’s master, and the ox is stoned. The next verses handle an ox that gores another ox.

Hammurabi’s laws 250–252 cover the same ground. If an ox gores a man on the street and kills him, there is no claim. But suppose the ox was known to gore, the owner was told by the authorities, and he did not blunt its horns or tie it up. Then if the ox kills a free man, the owner pays half a mina of silver. If it kills a slave, he pays a third of a mina. The structure is the same. First an accident with no fault. Then an owner who ignored a warning. Then a lower payment for a slave.

The differences are the point. Hammurabi never touches the ox; the whole matter is money. Exodus stones the ox in every case where a human dies, and forbids eating the meat, which suggests the animal has done something more than cause a loss. And for the negligent owner, Exodus raises the stakes to his own life, with ransom as an option, while Hammurabi sets a fixed sum. The Mishnah and Talmud (tractate Bava Kamma) later build a whole system on these verses: a tam, an ox with no record, whose owner pays half damages, and a mu'ad, a warned ox, whose owner pays in full.

The most quoted line in the Covenant Code is Exodus 21:23–25: "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." Scholars call this lex talionis, Latin for the law of retaliation in kind. It appears again in Leviticus 24:19–20 and Deuteronomy 19:21. In Exodus it comes at the end of a case about two men fighting and hurting a pregnant woman, and it reads like a general principle attached to a specific case.

Hammurabi has the same principle in laws 196–200: if a free man destroys the eye of another free man, his eye is destroyed; if he breaks a bone, his bone is broken; a tooth for a tooth. But Hammurabi’s version depends on rank. If the victim is a commoner, the offender pays one mina of silver; if a slave, half the slave’s value. Talion applies only between equals. The Torah’s version names no ranks, and the verse right after it frees a slave whose master destroys his eye or tooth (Exodus 21:26–27).

Rabbinic tradition reads "eye for eye" as payment, not mutilation. The Mishnah (Bava Kamma 8:1) lists five kinds of compensation an injurer owes: the injury, the pain, the medical costs, lost work and the shame. The Talmud (Bava Kamma 83b–84a) argues at length that the verse must mean money. Two eyes are never exactly equal, and a blind man could not be blinded in return. Was the verse ever applied literally in ancient Israel? Historians cannot settle that. Both the plain wording and the rabbinic reading are part of the Torah’s history, and a student should be able to state both.

Ancient law collections often say a king protects the weak; Hammurabi’s prologue claims he did so. What is unusual in Exodus is the reason given and the people addressed. The command is not to a king but to every Israelite, and the reason is memory: "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:20 in the JPS numbering; 22:21 in most Christian Bibles). The Hebrew word is ger, a resident foreigner living among the people without land or clan of their own.

The verses that follow protect the widow and the orphan. They warn that if these cry out, God will hear, just as God heard the cry of Israel in Egypt (Exodus 22:21–23). Then come laws on lending. No interest may be taken from the poor. A cloak taken as a pledge must be returned before sunset, because "it is his only covering" (22:25–26). Exodus 23:9 repeats the stranger law and adds a phrase: "ye know the heart of a stranger." The Talmud (Bava Metzia 59b) notes that the Torah warns about wronging the stranger in dozens of places, more than almost any other command.

Jewish tradition made these laws a theme of the whole Torah. The Passover Haggadah and many modern Jewish social-justice organizations quote "you were strangers in the land of Egypt" as the reason to welcome immigrants and refugees. In Chicago, Jewish agencies, including the local HIAS office, have resettled refugees through the twentieth century, and they cite these verses. Whether one reads the verses as divine command or as ancient ethics, the argument they make is the same: law that flows from memory.

Exodus 24 closes the block that began in Exodus 19. Moses builds an altar and twelve pillars, one for each tribe. Young men offer sacrifices. Moses takes half the blood and puts it in basins and dashes half on the altar. Then he reads "the book of the covenant" aloud, and the people answer: "All that the LORD hath spoken will we do, and obey" (Exodus 24:7, JPS 1917). Moses sprinkles the rest of the blood on the people and says, "Behold the blood of the covenant." Then Moses, Aaron, Aaron’s sons and seventy elders go up, see a vision of God, "and did eat and drink" (24:11).

The Hebrew of the people’s answer is na'aseh v'nishma, literally "we will do and we will hear." The order caught the rabbis’ attention: doing before hearing, action before full understanding. The Talmud (Shabbat 88a) tells that when Israel put "do" before "hear," a heavenly voice praised them for knowing a secret that the angels know. In Jewish thought the phrase became a motto for the idea that practice comes first and understanding grows from it.

For historians, the chapter shows the treaty pattern coming to its end. There is a written text, a public reading, the parties’ consent, and a ceremony that binds them. Blood rites sealing a pact are known from elsewhere in the ancient world. A shared meal is a common way to close an agreement. A literary reader notices something else. The same people who trembled at the thunder in Exodus 19 now eat and drink in God’s presence. That movement from fear to fellowship frames the laws in between.

The Torah lists Shavuot among the three pilgrimage festivals, with Passover and Sukkot. Exodus 23:16 calls it the feast of harvest; Leviticus 23:15–16 says to count seven weeks from the day after Passover and keep the fiftieth day; Deuteronomy 16:10 names it the feast of weeks, which is what Shavuot means. In the Torah itself the holiday is about the wheat harvest and the first fruits. It says nothing about Sinai.

The connection came from reading. Exodus 19:1 places the arrival at Sinai in the third month, which is roughly when the fiftieth day falls. The rabbis of the Talmud (Shabbat 86b) worked out from the verses that the Torah was given on the sixth of Sivan, the date of Shavuot. The festival prayers call it zeman matan Torateinu, "the time of the giving of our Torah." This is a rabbinic teaching about the calendar. Historians can only say the link is ancient and firmly established by the Talmudic period.

Jewish communities keep Shavuot with practices that grew from this reading. Many stay up all night studying Torah, a custom called tikkun leil Shavuot that spread from sixteenth-century Safed. The ten sayings are read from the Torah in synagogue, and the congregation usually stands. The book of Ruth, a harvest story about a stranger who joins Israel, is read as well. Dairy foods are traditional, with many explanations offered. In Chicago, synagogues across the city and suburbs hold late-night study sessions, some running until dawn, drawing students, teachers and families to read the very chapters this unit studies.

The book of Amos opens with a date and an address. Amos was "among the herdmen of Tekoa," and he spoke "concerning Israel" in the days of King Uzziah of Judah and King Jeroboam of Israel, "two years before the earthquake" (Amos 1:1). Scholars place this around 760 to 750 BCE. Tekoa lies south of Jerusalem in Judah. Israel, the northern kingdom, was a separate state with its own king and its own shrines, the chief one at Bethel. Amos crossed a border to deliver his message.

Amos 7:10–17 tells what happened. Amaziah, priest of Bethel, reported to King Jeroboam that Amos was conspiring against him. He told Amos to flee to Judah and earn his bread there. Amos replied that he was no prophet and no prophet’s son but a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees. The LORD took him from following the flock and said, "Go, prophesy unto My people Israel" (7:15). The exchange is one of the few places where a prophetic book shows the prophet being answered back.

Readers have drawn different things from this. Historians note that Amaziah treats Amos as a professional prophet, one who earns a living by prophesying, and Amos rejects the label. There were such prophets, and the books sometimes attack them. Rabbinic tradition lists Amos among the twelve minor prophets. "Minor" means short, not unimportant. His book is read as the haftarah on several Shabbatot. Literary readers notice that Amos speaks in the language of the countryside: locusts, plumb lines, baskets of summer fruit, a lion roaring.

Amos 5 is the center of the book. It opens as a funeral song, a lament over Israel as if the nation were already dead. It calls the people to seek God and live, and then, in verses 21–24, it turns on the worship at the shrines. The speaker is God: "I hate, I despise your feasts." Burnt offerings and meal offerings will not be accepted. The songs and the music of the harp are to be taken away. And then: "But let justice well up as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream" (5:24, JPS 1917).

The two Hebrew words matter. Mishpat, justice, is what happens in a court: a fair judgment, especially for the poor. Tzedakah, righteousness, is doing right by others; in later Hebrew it came to mean charity. The prophets pair the words often. Amos has already listed what he means: selling the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes (2:6), trampling the poor and taking their grain (5:11), taking bribes and turning aside the needy at the gate (5:12). The passage is not against worship as such. It is against worship offered by people who do these things.

Later readers have heard it in different ways. Rabbinic tradition kept the sacrifices and the festivals. It read the passage as a demand that ritual and ethics go together, not as a rejection of ritual. Some Christian readers in the past used it to argue that God had rejected Jewish ritual altogether. Jewish commentators reject that reading, and most modern scholars regard it as a misreading of a prophet who was addressing his own people. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the verse in his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, in a slightly different translation. It is carved on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

Amos 1–2 is built as a trap. The prophet announces judgment on Israel’s neighbors one by one: Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab. Each begins with the same formula, "For three transgressions, yea, for four," and each names a cruelty done in war. A northern audience would cheer. Then the formula turns on Judah, and then on Israel itself, and the charges are not about war but about the poor and the courts. The listeners are caught by the pattern.

Near the end of the book comes a verse that has startled readers for a long time. "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto Me, O children of Israel? saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and Aram from Kir?" (Amos 9:7, JPS 1917). The Exodus, the founding story of Israel, is set beside the migrations of two of Israel’s old enemies, and God claims all three.

What Amos means by this is debated. Some read it as saying that Israel’s chosenness is not a privilege that protects it from judgment; Amos 3:2 says the same, that because God knew Israel alone, God will punish it for its wrongs. Others read it as a wider claim that the God of Israel acts in every nation’s history. Jewish tradition holds both: the covenant is with Israel, and God is the God of all. A class can compare Amos 9:7 with Exodus 19:5, "for all the earth is Mine," and ask how the two fit together.

Hosea prophesied in the northern kingdom in the decades before it fell to Assyria in 722 BCE. His book opens with a command that has troubled readers ever since. The LORD tells him to take "a wife of harlotry" and children of harlotry, "for the land doth commit great harlotry, departing from the LORD" (Hosea 1:2, JPS 1917). He marries Gomer. Their three children receive names that are messages: Jezreel, after a valley of bloodshed; Lo-ruhamah, "not pitied"; and Lo-ammi, "not My people."

The marriage is a parable, a story that stands for something else. Israel is the wife who has gone after other lovers, the Canaanite gods, and credited them with her grain, wine and oil. Hosea 2 is a long speech of anger and then of longing. God will strip her of the gifts, and then lead her into the wilderness and "speak to her heart" (2:16). The chapter ends with a betrothal: "I will betroth thee unto Me for ever" (2:21). Hosea 3 has the prophet buy back his wife. Whether the story happened, or is only a parable, the rabbis themselves debated; the Talmud (Pesachim 87a) tells it as an event and adds a dialogue in which God teaches Hosea, through his own marriage, not to give up on Israel.

Modern readers, including many Jewish and Christian scholars, have raised hard questions about the image. A husband who punishes and then reclaims his wife is a troubling picture of love. The text uses a woman’s body to figure a nation’s sin. Others answer that the parable’s point is the opposite of what it seems: the bond survives betrayal and ends in a renewed covenant. Observant Jews recite Hosea 2:21–22 every weekday morning while winding the strap of the tefillin around the finger, like a ring. The words are "And I will betroth thee unto Me for ever."

Hosea 6 opens with the people saying, "Come, and let us return unto the LORD." They expect quick healing. God’s reply is that their goodness is like a morning cloud that vanishes. Then comes the verse that would travel far: "For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings" (Hosea 6:6, JPS 1917). The Hebrew word JPS renders "mercy" is chesed. It has no single English equivalent: loyal love, kindness that keeps faith, the steady goodness owed within a covenant.

Like Amos, Hosea is not abolishing sacrifice. The phrase "rather than" in the second half shows a comparison. Hebrew often says "X and not Y" to mean "X more than Y." But the verse became a foundation stone after the year 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and sacrifice ended. An early rabbinic text, Avot de-Rabbi Natan (chapter 4), tells of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai walking past the ruins with a student. The student grieved that the place of atonement was gone. The rabbi answered that they had another atonement as good as it, acts of chesed, and he quoted Hosea 6:6.

The verse is also quoted twice in the Gospel of Matthew (9:13; 12:7), where Jesus cites it against critics. That shared use is a good case for comparing readers. In Matthew the verse supports a dispute inside first-century Judaism about Sabbath rules and table fellowship; in Avot de-Rabbi Natan it answers a catastrophe. Neither reading owns the verse. A student should be able to say what Hosea 6:6 says in its own context and how each later reader put it to work.

Micah came from Moresheth, a town in the Judean lowlands, and prophesied in the late 700s BCE, in the same years as Isaiah in Jerusalem. Micah 6 is staged as a lawsuit. God calls the mountains as witnesses and asks the people what wrong has been done to them, recalling the Exodus and the wilderness. Then a speaker, standing for the people, asks what could possibly be enough: burnt offerings, calves, thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil, even a firstborn child (6:6–7). The list climbs to horror and stops.

The answer is short. "It hath been told thee, O man, what is good, and what the LORD doth require of thee: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah 6:8, JPS 1917). Three verbs, and the word "only." "Mercy" here is again chesed. "Walk humbly" translates a rare Hebrew word, hatznea, which some render "modestly" or "carefully." The verse does not name a single ritual. It also does not forbid one.

Jewish tradition gave the verse a special place. The Talmud (Makkot 23b–24a) tells that Moses received 613 commandments, David reduced them to eleven, Isaiah to six, and Micah to three, quoting this verse. Rabbi Simlai’s teaching is not that the other commandments are canceled; it is that Micah states the principle beneath them. The verse is read as the haftarah for the Torah portion Balak, and it appears on synagogue walls and in the mission statements of Jewish agencies. King quoted it too. It is one of the shortest summaries of the prophetic demand, and one of the most quoted.

Isaiah son of Amoz prophesied in Jerusalem from about 740 to 700 BCE, through the years when Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom and besieged Judah. His book is the longest of the prophets, sixty-six chapters, and it opens with a chapter that works as an overture. Heaven and earth are called to hear. Israel is a child who has rebelled, a body covered in wounds, a country burned by invaders, with Jerusalem left "as a booth in a vineyard" (1:8).

Then comes the attack on worship, in words close to Amos and Hosea. God is full of burnt offerings and has no delight in the blood of bulls. New moons and Sabbaths, the sacred gatherings, are called a burden. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear; your hands are full of blood" (1:15, JPS 1917). The remedy follows at once: wash, cease to do evil, "learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow" (1:17).

In the synagogue, Isaiah 1 is read as the haftarah on the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av, the summer fast that mourns the destruction of both Temples. That Shabbat is named Shabbat Chazon, "the Sabbath of the vision," from the chapter’s first word. The choice places the prophet’s warning right before the day of mourning, as if to say that the destruction the prophets warned of has a cause. Then, the week after the fast, the reading turns to comfort, as the next lessons show.

Isaiah 58 comes from the later part of the book, which most scholars date after the Babylonian exile. It addresses a community that fasts and complains that God has not noticed. The answer is sharp. On the day of your fast you pursue your business and press your workers. You fast to quarrel and to strike with the fist. Is that the fast God has chosen, a day for bowing the head like a bulrush? Then the chapter defines the fast God wants. Loose the bonds of wickedness. Let the oppressed go free. Share bread with the hungry. Bring the homeless poor into your house. Clothe the naked. Do not hide from your own kin (58:6–7).

Then the promise: your light will break forth like the dawn, and when you call, the LORD will answer, "Here I am" (58:8–9). The chapter ends with the Sabbath: call it a delight, and you will delight in the LORD (58:13–14). The chapter is not against fasting or Sabbath. It insists that the fast and the Sabbath include the hungry and the worker.

The rabbis chose this chapter as the haftarah for the morning of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is the one fast day in the Torah itself (Leviticus 16:29; 23:27) and the holiest day of the Jewish year. Congregations have fasted since the previous sunset. Now they hear a prophet ask whether their fast is the kind God wants. Many synagogues pair the day with food drives for local pantries. The practice grew in the twentieth century and is common in Chicago-area congregations. The passage is a case of a tradition reading its own harshest critic aloud on its most solemn day.

Something changes at Isaiah 40. The Assyrians are gone; the enemy is Babylon; Jerusalem is in ruins and the people are in exile. A voice says, "Comfort ye, comfort ye My people, saith your God" (40:1, JPS 1917). Jerusalem’s term of service is over. A highway is to be made in the desert, and the glory of the LORD will be revealed. Chapters 40 to 55 speak of a return from Babylon and even name the Persian king Cyrus (44:28; 45:1), who in 539 BCE conquered Babylon and allowed exiles to go home.

Because of this, most scholars since the 1700s have held that chapters 40–66 were written later. They credit one or more prophets in the exile and after, sometimes called Second and Third Isaiah, whose words were joined to the book of Isaiah of Jerusalem. Traditional Jewish and Christian readers held that Isaiah foresaw the exile, and many still do. Interestingly, the medieval commentator Ibn Ezra hints at a later author in his note on Isaiah 40:1, though he says it guardedly. The question of authorship is a live one. A class can hold both positions in view.

In the synagogue, Isaiah 40:1–26 is read on the Shabbat after Tisha B’Av, called Shabbat Nachamu, "the Sabbath of Comfort," from its first word. It begins the seven haftarot of consolation, seven weeks of readings from Isaiah 40 onward that lead up to Rosh Hashanah. The calendar tells a story: three weeks of warning before the fast, then seven weeks of comfort after it. The same book that provided the harshest reading of the year provides the gentlest. Christians know the chapter too; its opening is the first words sung in Handel’s Messiah (1741).

The prophets do not only accuse. Nearly every one of them ends an oracle with a door left open. Hosea’s last chapter begins, "Return, O Israel, unto the LORD thy God" (14:2 in JPS numbering; 14:1 in most Christian Bibles), and promises that God will heal their backsliding and love them freely. Amos says, "Seek ye Me, and live" (5:4). Isaiah 55:7 calls the wicked to forsake his way and return, "for He will abundantly pardon." The Hebrew verb is shuv, to turn or return, and the noun is teshuvah.

Rabbinic tradition made teshuvah the center of the ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe. The Shabbat between them is called Shabbat Shuvah after the first word of its haftarah, Hosea 14. Maimonides, the twelfth-century philosopher and legal authority, defined teshuvah in his Laws of Repentance (2:2). The sinner abandons the sin, removes it from his thoughts, resolves in his heart never to do it again, and regrets the past. He adds a test. Full teshuvah is proven when the same temptation returns and the person passes it by.

Two things stand out. First, the prophets address the nation, and the rabbis address each person; teshuvah moves from the public square to the individual heart without leaving the square. Second, teshuvah is not only sorrow. Maimonides also requires that wrongs against other people be put right with the person wronged; Yom Kippur atones for sins against God, the Mishnah says (Yoma 8:9), but not for sins against a fellow human until that person is appeased. The prophetic demand for justice and the personal work of repentance meet in that rule.

Jonah is the shortest story among the prophets and the strangest. God sends the prophet to Nineveh, capital of Assyria, the empire that destroyed the northern kingdom, to announce its doom. Jonah runs the other way, to the sea, and is thrown overboard and swallowed by a great fish. Returned to land, he walks into Nineveh and delivers a message of five Hebrew words: in forty days the city will be overturned. The whole city, from the king down to the cattle, fasts and puts on sackcloth. God relents. And Jonah is furious.

The last chapter is a dialogue. Jonah sits outside the city, and God makes a plant grow to shade him, then sends a worm to kill it. Jonah grieves for the plant. God asks: you cared about a plant you did not grow, that came up in a night and died in a night; should I not care about Nineveh, a great city with more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and much cattle? (4:10–11, paraphrased from JPS 1917). The book ends there, on a question with no answer written.

The rabbis chose Jonah as the haftarah for the afternoon of Yom Kippur, the last reading before the fast ends. The Mishnah (Ta’anit 2:1) had already made the point: on a public fast day, the elder says to the people that of Nineveh it is not written that God saw their sackcloth and fasting, but that God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way. Nineveh, the enemy, becomes the model of teshuvah. And the prophet, who wanted judgment, is the one still learning at the end. Readers argue about what Jonah is: a satire on prophets, a lesson on mercy to enemies, a story about the limits of prophecy. The book seems built to leave the argument open.

The prophets are not only read once a year. The siddur, the Jewish prayer book, is threaded with their lines. Isaiah 6:3, "Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts," is the heart of the Kedushah in every morning service. Hosea’s betrothal verses are said with the tefillin. Micah 7:18–20, "Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth the iniquity," is recited at Tashlich on Rosh Hashanah beside a stream. Every Shabbat brings a haftarah. A Jew who prays regularly hears the prophets more often than almost any other part of the Tanakh outside the Torah.

In the twentieth century the prophets became a language of action. Abraham Joshua Heschel was a rabbi and scholar who escaped Nazi Europe and taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He published The Prophets in 1962, arguing that the prophets’ anger was God’s own concern for the poor. In March 1965 he marched beside Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma toward Montgomery. He later wrote that he felt his legs were praying. King, a Baptist minister, quoted Amos 5:24 in the "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 and again in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. He drew on Isaiah and Micah throughout his sermons.

Chicago has its own chapter of this story. In 1966 King moved into an apartment on the West Side to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement for open housing, and rabbis and Jewish congregations marched with him. Jewish social-justice organizations in the city today, from congregational committees to community-wide agencies, cite Amos, Isaiah and Micah in their statements of purpose. Not every Jewish reader agrees on what the prophets require in politics; Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and secular Jews draw different conclusions from the same verses. What they share is the text, and the belief that reading it is not finished until something is done.