word and, for that matter, in the situation of the Hebrew prophet,
whose voice is raised and whose freight of duty is indeed hard to carry.

In looking at the fusion of poetic with scriptural thinking in the
prophets and wisdom writers, I focus here on the details, on the quick
of the thinking, on their thematic concentrations, and on the posture
they assume to orient them in their utterance. I take the view that a
deep associability of theme and prophetic posture justifies lumping to-
gether under the name Isaiah the three prophets whom modern com-
mentators have long ascertained were active over a span of two centu-
ries or so. Even traditional ascriptions that have far less historical
justification -- like ascribing Ecclesiastes and Proverbs to a Solomon
who lived nearly a millennium before they were composed or calling
David the author of the Psalms -- still have some thematic relevance.
When we are dealing with cases like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, whose
prophecies might reasonably have been uttered within the lifetime of a
single prophet, the question is moot whether or not the person of that
name wrote every line in the book so ascribed. Even the ascription of
Lamentations to Jeremiah, which goes back to the Septuagint -- at least
as far back as the second century B.C.E. -- while not usually accepted as
fact, does have the justification of strong thematic and historical con-
gruence. I look, therefore, only incidentally at the layerings of literary
form and rhetorical purpose that modern commentators have discerned
in each of the poetic books of the Old Testament that I discuss.

Homer, Confucius, the poets of the Confucian anthology, and the
authors of the Zend Avesta and the Rig Veda are variously endowed
with an authority empowered by the instituted religious thinking of
their times, and all rest stably in the reassurances provided by their par-
ticular contexts. The Hebrew prophets, however, come forward and pre-
sent themselves as open to the momentary utterances of God. ² This God
is not primarily an image or a symbol; the Hebrew Yahweh is a force
manifesting himself in developing history. ³ In that dangerous situa-
tion, the prophet remains open directly to God and gets a continu-
ally renewed verbal authority and power from that flow. Since the
prophet is commenting on the constantly changing flow between God
and people, every utterance, while formed in reference to the basic val-
ues of righteousness and the law and in measured analogy to such de-
fining tribal experiences as the Exodus, takes on the nature of a prog-

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