THE LOST WORLD OF THE PROPHETS:
Old Testament Prophecy & Apocalyptic
Literature in Ancient Context
By John H. Walton
IVP Academic. 183 pages. £13.99
ISBN 978 1 514 004 890
Reading and preaching the Old Testament prophets can be one of the most challenging aspects of Bible reading. The world of the prophets seems to be a million miles away from our culture. Any help that is available is most welcome.
John Walton has gained a reputation for serving up the fruit of truckloads of Biblical scholarship with crisp succinctness and a lightness of touch. He does so again here.
He suggests 16 propositions for reading the Old Testament prophets. These are organised in five sections: Ancient Near East; Institution; Literature; Methodological Issues; and Apocalyptic.
The driving question for the author is: ‘How do the books of the prophets function as meaningful Scripture today?’
Walton questions the use of the Old Testament prophets as either primarily predictors of the future or an apologetic happy hunting ground for detecting predictions fulfilled in Christ. Rather, he suggests that readers should learn to track the Biblical author’s cultural setting and theological purpose in prophesying. In asking the question ‘What does the prophet try to say and do in his own day?’ we are more likely to grasp what he might be saying to our day. This point is outlined in Proposition 12, ‘The New Testament Use of Old Testament Prophecy’ and its focus on fulfilment, not message. In this section Walton has an illuminating excursus on how interpreters have determined an Old Testament text as Messianic. The watchword is that interpreters are to read the text carefully and not claim more than is warranted. This note of careful reading is particularly evident in the three propositions on Apocalyptic literature, where Walton warns of the limitations of all eschatological systems.
The book concludes with a section called ‘A Reading Strategy’; this underlines the restrained approach to the reading of Old Testament prophecy that is so helpfully advocated in this book. Following John Barton, Walton suggests that the aim of reading the sweep of Old Testament prophecy is to get to know what God is achieving in the world so that we can more effectively live for His ultimate purpose.
