the torah of moses: judaism in the bible 75
in history, but the fortunes of the great empires of Egypt, Assyria, Baby-
lon and Persia are of interest to the authors of the prophetic and
historical books of the Bible only in so far as they impact on Israel. It is
taken for granted that God will continue to communicate with his
people, in order to warn them of the consequences of transgressions,
although such messages are transmitted in less direct form than the
revelation on Mount Sinai when God spoke directly to Moses. The
assumed authority of the prophets presupposed that any individual
might be divinely inspired, whether by the spirit of the Lord impelling
to frenzied, ecstatic behaviour, or by the word of the Lord imparting a
message which its recipient felt impelled to speak, or by visions contain-
ing divine messages. The idea that all might have such prophetic gifts is
a feature of the eschaton, the end of time, in the imagination of one
biblical writer: ‘Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old
men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.’
In addition to such divinely inspired individuals, priests were believed
in early times to provide a direct link to God through the oracular Urim
and Tummim, probably small stones which were cast as lots to discover
the divine response to a direct question for which there could be an
answer either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, as when David asked the Lord about Saul:
‘David said, “O Lord, the God of Israel, your servant has heard that
Saul seeks to come to Keilah, to destroy the city on my account. And
now, will Saul come down as your servant has heard? O Lord, the God
of Israel, I beseech you, tell your servant.” The Lord said, “He will come
down.” ’ But such methods of discovering the divine will had fallen out
of use well before the end of the Second Temple. Josephus believed that
the oracular stones ‘ceased to shine two hundred years before I com-
posed this work, because of God’s displeasure at the transgression of the
laws’, although the Mishnah records a tradition that the Urim and Tum-
mim had ceased earlier, ‘at the death of the first prophets’.^8
The divine promise to Israel as reward for keeping the covenant with
God was the peace and prosperity of Israel and numerous descendants
in the land of Canaan far into the future. The biblical narrative of
repeated descent into sin followed by national tragedy at the hands of
outside powers is explained by the theological emphasis of the Bible on
this covenant relationship. Forged, it was believed, in the experience of
enslavement and liberation from Egypt, it was periodically honed by
exile and suffering. It was assumed that exile to Assyria and Babylon
was both a result of divine judgement and a recalling of Israel to
faithfulness.