“And the word of the Lord came to…”
I was chatting with my daughter about Bible translations, and in the course of the conversation she mentioned something that I hadn’t been aware of (she took an OT Hebrew class in college). There’s a phrase that opens many of the OT prophets: “The word of the Lord came to…” Pretty much all of the common English translations use some variation of these words. But the thing is, that’s not what the Hebrew words really say. The literal translation is something more like this: “The word of the Lord was, (or happened) to…” To my mind, that has a very different meaning — it carries the sense of the prophet not just hearing or seeing but actually experiencing with his entire being the words that God has given him to say. No wonder Jeremiah said:
But if I say, “I will not mention him
or speak any more in his name,”
his word is in my heart like a fire,
a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
indeed, I cannot.
In fact, it’s pretty clear that many (most?) of the OT prophets didn’t really have much choice in the matter — a number of them didn’t want to be prophets. Moses and Jeremiah come immediately to mind, and Amos refused to let people identify him as a prophet. But God placed His word in or on them, and that was the end of the discussion. Now, I’m pretty sure that our experience of prophesying or otherwise sharing God’s word during our gatherings is not necessarily going to mirror the experience of Jeremiah or any other OT prophet. I know that this isn’t my experience on the occasions when I share or (rarely) prophesy. Maybe this kind of stuff happens only to people who wrote the books of the Bible…