Let Us Go to the Seer!

Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”) has long been regarded as fundamentally different from the divinatory methods of ancient pagans: while the pagans sought out and solicited messages from the gods, the Hebrew prophets received revelation spontaneously, at the initiative of Israel’s deity. The trouble with this dichotomy between solicited and spontaneous revelation is that it overlooks or misreads a number of ancient sources, and it obscures the similarities between Hebrew and other s