John H. Walton. The Lost World of the Prophets: Old Testament Prophecy and Apocalyptic Literature in Ancient Context

This book is one of seven thus far published in John Walton’s Lost World series, which covers topics such as the flood, the conquest, and so on. Like the others, Walton has structured this book into chapters that each defend a proposition, which doubles as the chapter title. (Since the table of contents is readily accessible online, I will not take up space in this essay rehearsing the propositions here.) Despite the wording of the book title, Walton has little to say about the world of the prophets itself; only 19 out of 173 pages discuss ancient Near East culture and society. Instead, the main focus of the book is contemporary interpretation. Walton says as much in the introduction. His aim is to “guard against misunderstanding” and “misuse” of the prophetical books in the church today (p. 1).To do that, Walton seeks “God’s authoritative message,” which he locates “in the communication as it was understood by the human instruments (speakers or writers) and their audience(s)” (pp. 1–2; cf. 8–9). Thus, for Walton, the meaning and therefore the authority of Scripture is conscribed strictly within the ancient human mind(s?). This view has some serious hermeneutical and theological knock-on effects, some of which I highlight below. Walton shoehorns this interpretive approach into the ambiguity of prepositions with his well-known aphorism “The Bible is written for us but not to us,” where by us he seems to mean any non-ancient (Christian?) reader (p. 2).Walton is burdened with concern that the church has often read the prophets for eschatology and apologetics. To do so is “a serious error” in Walton’s view, since such things are matters of fulfillment, and to focus on such things instead of the ancient message of the text “in context” is to “miss out on God’s message for us” (p. 3). Walton believes this focus on fulfillment is problematic and arises because “people believe that prophets tell the future and that in the prophecies God has embedded significance beyond the understanding of the prophet and his audience” (p. 3). Walton evidently wishes to persuade his readers that there is no such significance in biblical prophecy, and in this quest he sets his hermeneutical sails against the headwinds of millennia of broad consensus within both Christianity and Judaism, which according to him have actually been mistaken all along.There are some aspects of this book that are helpful and unproblematic. Walton appropriately encourages interpreting Scripture in light of what we know about the ancient cultural context in which it was written. He also rightly recognizes how prophecy in Israel was predicated upon the covenants between the nation and Yhwh, and that this feature is basically absent from the activity of (pseudo)prophets in other ancient Near Eastern societies. He fairly notes how prophecy in Israel was not uniform in the concerns, rationales, goals, and literary conventions that were involved over the course of the centuries but rather developed. And Walton properly cautions against attempts to derive a highly detailed eschatological timeline of events from the prophetical corpus.In connection with the last point, throughout the book Walton takes occasional swipes at classical dispensationalism. It is that interpretive framework that he seems to have in mind when he speaks of hermeneutical “abuse” of the prophets (p. 109). Walton, who was on faculty at Moody Bible Institute for two decades, notes in passing that he was also raised in a premillennial dispensationalist context (p. 199). I am Reformed and Presbyterian, and therefore I have no objections to critiquing dispensationalism. But it seems that much of how the book is framed emerges from Walton’s close familiarity with the dispensationalist hermeneutic that he now rejects, which at times can leave the reader feeling like a guest at a dinner party where the hosts have descended into a thinly veiled marital argument.Within the realm of accessible Old Testament scholarship, Walton’s reputation ranks among well-known names like Tremper Longman and Bruce Waltke. For that reason, many lay readers who come across this book will no doubt assume that Walton’s views are standard among believing scholars and therefore trustworthy for evangelical Christians broadly writ. I must therefore use this occasion to register my strong dissent from much of what Walton says about the prophets and how to interpret Scripture. There is too little space even in a critical review essay to interact with everything, so I will focus only upon the most glaring problems.The first problem is Walton’s dichotomy between what he calls message versus fulfillment, as outlined in chapters 10 and 12. “Message” he defines as the “word from God that the prophet intended to deliver to his immediate audience” (p. 89). Setting aside the odd presence of “intended” in that sentence, Walton regards only the message, so understood, as authoritative. “Fulfillment,” on the other hand, is “the unfolding of events that brings additional meaning” to the message (p. 90). On this model, fulfillment does not render greater clarity for the meaning already present in prophetic texts. Rather, Walton’s fulfillment meaning is novel. It was not there to begin with, and therefore it is not authoritative, unless it is extrapolated in writing by another inspired author, such as a New Testament author, in which case that writing becomes its own authoritative message (see pp. 6, 90).According to Walton, when a New Testament author works with a prophetic text, these two parts of Scripture have two different messages that should be kept separate. This separation is necessary because, in Walton’s view, New Testament authors did not attend to the historical context of Old Testament prophecy, and in fact were not actually interpreting any given Old Testament text when they quoted them. Instead, they were “adapting and repackaging” or redirecting prophecy (pp. 58, 91, 100). As a result, these two messages—the prophetic text and its New Testament citation—share no organic unity or redemptive-historical coherence. “Each carries its own authority” in a sort of “bifurcated” way, we are told (pp. 93, 99). Perhaps one authority is for Israel, the other for the Church? Old habits die hard.This dichotomizing hermeneutic leaves in question whether and how Walton could affirm divine authorship of Scripture as a whole, prophecy or not. He does devote a single paragraph to explaining that he upholds “a ‘Christotelic’ perspective” on Scripture. But Walton’s description of this perspective is oblique at best. He says it means that he “can view prophecy in terms of how it leads to God’s plans and purposes being realized in Christ” (p. 100). On this definition, notice that prophecy itself as written in Scripture is not actually Christotelic but is only indirectly conducive to Jesus in a secondary or even tertiary fashion, and only because we choose to view it that way. It’s a perspective; it’s what we infer, not what the author implies, whether human or divine. “Old Testament texts invite Christotelic repackaging,” he says (p. 101, emphasis original). For Walton, then, Christ might be the telos of Old Testament prophecy but only after it is redirected toward a new meaning. This is presumably why only inspired authors can discern it “with the confidence of reliable results” (p. 111). The best anyone else can do is to manipulate Old Testament prophecy to insert Christ into the metaphorical package, since he is not already there, and hope we are not wrong (see example and warning on p. 150). But even if we somehow get lucky and are correct, our interpretation still has no authority because we are not inspired.On that note, however, Walton’s message-fulfillment dichotomy leaves one wondering why exactly the novel, “repackaged” meaning generated by New Testament authors should bear any authority. Early in the book, Walton states that “ethical reading respects the author’s intentions” (p. 4, emphasis added). And yet, he also claims that writers like Peter and Paul “were not trying to understand the authoritative intentions of the Old Testament” (p. 101, emphasis added). If that is the case, why should we attribute any authority to New Testament authors? If we apply Walton’s own rubric, they were being unethical in how they read Old Testament texts. He attempts to resolve this problem as follows: “People who are inspired do not need a consistent methodology. Inspiration validates when hermeneutics cannot do so” (p. 111). But this move only creates a much more serious problem, one with heterodox implications for theology proper. For if God was involved in the writing of Scripture, then, according to Walton’s logic, God himself acted unethically when he inspired disrespect on the part of New Testament writers for the intentions of Old Testament writers. Such a conclusion must be rejected, along with its premises. Unfortunately, Walton’s discussion of inspiration only raises further doubt, as discussed below.A second serious problem in this volume is Walton’s ambiguity about inspiration. On the one hand, as noted above, he affirms that biblical authors were inspired and regards this as the criterion for the authority of their writing. (I have more to add on “authority” below.) On the other hand, however, it is unclear whether and how Walton distinguishes between prophecy and inspiration. The confusion is mostly concentrated in chapter 6, entitled “Prophecy Takes a Variety of Different Shapes After the Old Testament.” On this topic, Walton wants to integrate into his work the results of scholarship from the wider academy, including Hindy Najman and John Barton among others. I share that desire in a general way. But research undertaken within the biblical studies academy at large disregards or denies the nature of Scripture as divinely inspired, thereby qualifying its usefulness for Christian scholars.The thrust of this chapter is to consider “the continuing social role of prophecy” in the historical period between Old and New Testament writings (i.e., Second Temple Judaism; p. 58). During this time, “the institution of prophecy did not disappear,” says Walton, although “we have no collections of oracles from prophets of this period” (p. 60). This is correct as far as it goes. Not all prophecy that truly came from God through inspired intermediaries was written down (see, e.g., 1 Sam. 10:10–11). Walton also notes that not all true prophecy that was written down became canonical Scripture (p. 62). Again, this is correct (see, e.g., 2 Chron 9:29).Where things get muddled is in a list of those “who are called prophets,” presented on p. 63. Here we find the usual suspects: Samuel, Elijah, Deborah, Habakkuk, and so on. But in this same list we also find items like “Book of Enoch,” “Qumran Teacher of Righteousness” (listed on the same line as John the Baptist), and “those who wrote the pesher literature in Qumran,” among others. Walton’s point here appears to be that the conceptualization of prophetic identity and textual production changed over time. Fine. But he concludes this list (and the chapter) by saying that “Each offers its own vantage point on divinely inspired insight” (p. 63). At best, this sentence is unclear. Is the “divinely inspired insight” mentioned here Scripture itself? The closest antecedent to the pronoun “each” is the word “definitions” in the preceding sentence, which appears to refer to the bullet points in the list. So, it could be instead that the “divinely inspired insight” refers to the message conveyed by items in the list. On that reading, Walton’s list on p. 63 puts prophets like Samuel in the same category of legitimacy as everything and everyone else in the list. One might hope for a clearer statement that, say, the pesherists or the Teacher of Righteousness were not themselves inspired. Tangentially, but equally important, one might also expect that the output of divine inspiration would be described as something more than mere “insight.”Lest readers think I am being uncharitable, I would point to footnote 15 on p. 63. There Walton suggests that it is “possible” in his view that 1 Pet 1:10–12 refers not to “the classical prophets,” like Isaiah or Jeremiah, but rather to those who lived in the historical period between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, “such as those who wrote the pesher literature in Qumran.” As a refresher, 1 Pet 1:10–12 speaks about “the prophets” inquiring into the time and circumstances of the messiah, with the Spirit of Christ in them revealing God’s plan. Maybe Walton does regard the pesherists as divinely inspired after all. I am not sure how to understand this footnote without concluding that he believes it is at least possible that they were. Although earlier in the chapter Walton says, “we have no collections of oracles from prophets of this period” (p. 60), we do have pesher scrolls like 1QpHab. Is there any qualitative difference between ancient pesher and canonical Scripture? How would we know? Walton is content to leave such matters ambiguous.A third problem in Walton’s book appears in chapter 3, which is entitled “A Prophet Is a Spokesperson for God, Not a Predictor of the Future.” This chapter is difficult to follow. There is no argument that I can discern to defend the proposition. But the dual outcomes here seem to be: (1) to obscure the idea of prediction and (2) to imply that most prophecy had little long-term relevance or informational detail.As for the first, Walton says that it is a “serious mistake” to think about prophecy as prediction (p. 35). For something to be prediction, he explains, the person giving it must be uninvolved in planning or in event causation, and therefore not know at all what will happen. It would not be prediction, for example, if I proclaimed that I shall walk through a doorway directly in front of me, and then did so. That is simply stating a plan and carrying it out. So, because “God is always involved in causation,” prophets are not predicting anything (p. 35). In essence, then, Walton is making a fairly straightforward philosophical point, if by “prediction” one strictly means guessing. Prophets did not guess because God does not guess.But the way Walton approaches this semantic quibble with “prediction” is puzzling and, at points, contradictory. At the outset, he expresses concern that “many Bible readers” think prophets “foretell what is to come, predicting the shape of future events” (p. 34). Here, foretelling and prediction are conflated, making it sound like Walton is about to say that prophets did not talk about the future at all, guessing or otherwise. But just a few lines later, we read that “prophecy does not just deal with the future” (p. 34, emphasis mine). Now it sounds as if he is saying that prophets do talk about the future, plus more too. Yet then at the bottom of the same page, Walton says that prophets “were engaged not in telling the future but in revealing God’s plans” (emphasis mine). Which is it? Why can’t a prophet reveal God’s plans while telling the future? Walton ignores the false dichotomy and leaves this obvious question unanswered.Things get more confusing from there. Walton then mentions a 2017 speech given by Anthony Fauci on the probability of a pandemic in the near future. According to Walton, we “cannot rule out the possibility that he was inadvertently serving as a mouthpiece for God,” yet also this speech was not “technically prophetic” (p. 37). Setting that juxtaposition aside, somehow Walton’s point here is that Fauci was merely using data and reason to forecast a likely outcome, and that is also not what the prophets did. The prophets spoke “in the Spirit” to deliver “a word from God” (pp. 38, 39). (Later, however, Walton does suggest contemporary “projections” of climate change are the “closest comparison” to some prophecy and implies that such “warnings” may sometimes be considered a message from God; pp. 169, 171).After this bumpy start, Walton begins the main discussion in the chapter, in which he assumes and implies—but does not state or argue—that prophecy by definition had little long-term relevance or informational detail. He begins by stating that prophecy does not include “random factoids about the future.” Rather, prophecy must “logically connect to the covenant and to historical circumstances,” even when there are “oddly specific declarations” (p. 39). At first this sounds like Walton is saying that specific, future-oriented declarations must somehow be relevant, even if we do not know exactly how. But what he actually means is that, when prophecy includes such detailed declarations, they are probably not original because, in Walton’s view, informational specifics about the future are rarely logically connected to the covenant or to the circumstances of the prophet or his audience. Unfortunately, Walton does not explain the criteria by which such specificity about the future can be classified as odd or not odd. But he does give examples that showcase his assumptions. For Walton, the detail of being in in 1 is simply too detailed to be It is and and (p. 39). Walton in a approach to the of in Isaiah To give such a detail so in is to Walton, who would regard such a as a mere (p. this chapter, Walton seems to stating what he and He says or implies in different that prophets did sometimes talk about the future (pp. 38, But he also says the (p. 34). He says that “God have detailed about the future (p. But then when that in the text, Walton doubt on its not on the of any textual but simply because he has to his and it This approach is rather given that Walton on and as to against to authority” in interpretation (pp. 6, will by a and telling in the It is Although Walton often about “authority” in to Scripture, as I have discussed he does not explain what that But given the that Walton what he calls the message of Scripture, where he it cannot mean is therefore to find that Walton does not believe that the Bible should our our view of or that it a of for or or even that theology is possible (p. At best, he says, Scripture may for such although for Walton they are merely (p. For who it is to that John Walton has such might even say of Scripture. a few in a he the and of the across the not to Christian and the of all of which for him are evidently or this view, one is wondering what exactly is over in Scripture that is us” after prophetic of the Bible is both and Christian would from more to understand To many the ancient historical circumstances and theological of this part of Scripture are a world of given the I cannot how Walton’s book will Christian readers it