Voices of the One God.

The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are, by Norman Podhoretz (Free Press, 390 pp., $30)

'Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanu-el." The time is the late 8th century b.c., and the speaker is Isaiah the prophet; he is telling Ahaz, the king of Judah, about a sign of hope that will soon be manifested in his war-threatened kingdom. This, at least, was how the verse was understood for the centuries before the birth of Jesus; but since the advent of Christianity, exegetes eager to find confirmation of the story of Jesus' virgin birth have read "virgin" for "young woman." Surely, they say, the Church -- as the inheritor and thus the new "copyright holder" of the Hebrew Scriptures -- has the right to amend the traditional understanding in the light of the new, greater truth.

"They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." This passage appears in both the prophecy of Isaiah and the book of Isaiah's contemporary, the prophet Micah. Its actual author and date are unknown, but its context in the Scripture is clear: It refers to a future situation of peace and prosperity, which will obtain after Israel has defeated its enemies and won a global victory for its God. This, at least, is how the passage was understood until the emergence of liberal agnosticism -- which saw in this prophecy the outline of a peaceful and just human society that can be brought about by human hands. Surely, they say, liberalism -- as the inheritor of the Hebrew ethical system -- is right to build its institutions according to this prophetic blueprint, and equally right to discard anything in the blueprint that smacks of theology or tribalism.

To the Christians in the first example and the secularists in the second, Norman Podhoretz says: Not so fast. The prophets have their own message, which deserves to be heard and understood in its own integrity before being appropriated in the service of other agendas, no matter how apparently noble. Podhoretz is famous as a combative political essayist, but in this excellent new book he leaves his habitual arena for the dramatically different world of impartial religious scholarship -- and ends up making a very strong contribution to public understanding of the Hebrew prophets. They were, he concludes, not chiefly interested in predicting Christianity, or in propagandizing for secular social justice; they were, rather, engaged in a very this- worldly struggle against the particular challenges of idolatry in their own time and place.

Podhoretz's training as a literary critic is evident in the seriousness and sensitivity with which he examines the Biblical texts. His response to those who see the "Immanu-el" passage (Isaiah 7:14) as a prophecy of the virgin birth is a case in point. He notes that the Hebrew uses the word ha-almah, "young woman."

The problem is that the word for virgin in Hebrew is b'tulah, and since that very word appears twice within the first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah (and twice more in Chapters 40-66), it seems highly unlikely that the author or editor of 7:14, whoever he may have been, would not have used it here if what he had wanted to say was "virgin."

Similarly, in arguing against the secular messianists who seek to build the peaceable kingdom without reference to God, Podhoretz pays close attention to the Scriptural contexts from which their favorite passages have been ripped. The swords being beaten into plowshares, the lions lying down with lambs, and so on all coexist with the harshest of rebukes to idolaters and the bloodiest analyses of real-life power politics. The same chapter of Micah that tells us about the nations never learning war again (4:3) also proclaims, a few lines farther down, that God "will make your horn iron and your hoofs bronze; you shall beat in pieces many peoples, and shall devote their gain to the Lord, their wealth to the Lord of the whole earth" (4:13).

Combining the two passages -- as Micah or his editors actually did, by putting them so close together in the first place -- we see a prophetic vision of a world at peace because bloody war has been fought and won on behalf of the Lord. It is a vision of peace through strength, one Podhoretz goes so far as to call a "pax Israelitica."

Podhoretz's thesis is not, it is clear, designed to be palatable to universalists of various stripes. He writes that the message of the prophets has not been appropriately "transcended" and universalized in the religious sphere by the Christians, nor in the geopolitical sphere by the secularists; it has, rather, been misunderstood and mangled in both cases. But it would be wrong to view this important work as primarily a polemic against these adversaries. In the case of the Christians, Podhoretz explicitly disavows any intention of "engaging in a dispute with anyone who believes that Jesus was the Messiah":

As a Jew, I am by definition not among [the Christian believers], but the last thing in the world I want to do is challenge [their] faith. What I do feel it necessary to challenge, however, is the idea held by many pious Christians throughout the past two millennia that the Book of Isaiah foretells the coming of their faith.

As for today's liberal secularists, he reserves his strictures against them for his final chapter, to which I will return momentarily.

What this book is, above all, is a call for honesty -- and modesty. Podhoretz's foremost concern is that the prophets be allowed to speak in their own voices; this is therefore a scholar's work, an attempt to understand the prophets as they understood themselves.

And in this task, Podhoretz succeeds admirably. The bulk of the book is a reading of the Hebrew Bible as the chronicle of a highly unusual struggle within a people, the Israelites, who have somehow, mysteriously, been chosen by God. This people bears a specific message -- a code of both ethics and ritual -- that has the stamp of the divine upon it, and that is copiously authenticated by the various wonders performed by its Author. And yet: No sooner has this people witnessed its liberation -- by God -- from an enslaving power than it suddenly decides to attribute the glory of this miraculous act to the statue of a calf. This will become the pattern for Israel throughout its canonical history: It will reject, again and again, the one true God for various pagan idols. And, again and again, the chief force calling the people of Israel back to the true God will be the navi or prophet.

The prophets -- from Abraham, Aaron, and Elijah, through Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, down to the post-exilic Malachi and Second Zechariah -- have been animated by the single key goal of waging war on the idolatry rampant among the Israelites. They viewed themselves as fighters for an ancient and particular faith that happens to have been revealed by God.

Podhoretz makes a convincing case, based on many hundreds of Biblical citations -- so many, indeed, that the book has a value entirely independent from its thesis: It can stand as a balanced, intelligent, and excitingly written history of ancient Israel. Adding to the story's immediacy, source notes -- including Scriptural chapter-and-verse numbers -- are relegated to the book's back pages. This makes a greater difference than one might expect, because it underscores the fact that the prophets did not think of themselves as writing a canonical Scripture; what they were doing was defending their ancient faith in a very specific religio-political situation. It is only because they did so with great power and eloquence that their words later became Scripture.

Podhoretz's subtitle promises to tell us not just who the prophets were but also "what they are." And that brings us to the book's last chapter, which tries to discover the meaning of the prophets' message for contemporary society. Podhoretz has set himself an unenviable task here, because he has just spent a few hundred pages arguing that others have obscured the truth about the prophets in order to further their own agendas; if he were to reveal, in his final chapter, that the Hebrew prophets were actually American neoconservatives avant la lettre, he would run the risk of being attacked for doing precisely the same thing.

It comes as quite a relief, therefore, when the final chapter turns out to be an exhortation to moral engagement, accompanied by a warning against the temptation to self-righteousness that is inherent in moral passion. It is here that Podhoretz takes on, mildly but firmly, the contemporary utopians whose "tumultuous moral and political ambitions . . . wipe out all doubt about their own virtue and about the wickedness of any who might be misled by 'moral realism' into entertaining so much as a smidgen of skepticism."

Skepticism as the proper attitude toward ambitious schemes: This is a very Burkean concept. No less Burkean is Podhoretz's observation that "in moral idealism . . . there is little if any tolerance for human weakness." Both of these observations betoken the true modesty of the genuine monotheist, who recognizes that, in God, there is an authority beyond himself. But this modesty has two sides. In addition to the first -- an unwillingness to judge harshly the failings of others -- there is a willingness to stand up for divine truth, as one understands it, at the risk of being defeated and humiliated.

And even at the risk of being wrong: Podhoretz details with bracing honesty the predictions of the prophets that did not come true. This is in fact one of the most eloquent arguments for the overall veracity of the Bible: If the Bible were a purely human invention, wouldn't its editors have been smart enough to correct its failed prophecies, to delete its self-contradictions? (Similarly, if the Bible were just a pro-Israelite geopolitical tract, wouldn't the editors have left out the mountains of detail about Israel's sins and crimes?)

But the prophets -- many of whom were understandably reluctant -- knew that their mission was not in the service of their own egos. They were not standing athwart their time because they themselves were superior to its shortcomings; they did so, rather, because God was superior to those shortcomings, and He told them what to say. In the recent controversy about the U.S. intelligence failures concerning 9/11, it has been observed that some agencies have the self-protective rule, "We may not always be right, but we are never wrong." The prophet is not allowed this mantle of self-protection; his ego must be sacrificed.

Podhoretz locates today's central idolatry in the worship of self, and the consequent social antinomianism. But even here a genuine prophet's modesty is visible. Podhoretz is speaking as a monotheist, one who emerges from a particular tradition, but he does not require that one accept his religious premises:

We need not believe in heaven and hell -- or even, if it comes to that, in God, let alone the God of the Hebrew Bible -- in order to accept that our lives are governed by laws whose "terms" we all know in our "inmost hearts"; that people who obey those laws will be blessed; and that people who disobey them will be cursed. . . . One can serve God without being aware that He exists; one can even do so (if, as with the ancient empires, it suits His plan) through wickedness. And if one can all unawares serve God through wickedness, how much more so can one serve Him through virtue -- even while denying Him?

Podhoretz acknowledges that his views on these matters are "heterodox." But there is a truth at the heart of them that the canonical prophets would have acknowledged: that there is a "still, small voice" in the human soul. Is this voice a divine mandate, or is it the natural law of the philosophers? These questions will be asked until the end of time. In the meantime, let us ask -- as Norman Podhoretz has done in this marvelous book -- what that voice has said, and continues to say.