Moses and Abraham spoke with God as with a neighbour, face to face, or as the Bible says, mouth to mouth, W. says. They spoke using everyday speech, with an intimate simplicity that was lost to their successors. And their dialogues with God were written down and shared, and brought together a people who, though prone to apostasy and never yet a nation of prophets, were only at one remove from their Lord.
But everything changes with the later prophets. Is it that God can no longer get through, or no longer speaks clearly? Or does the fault lie with the listeners, who are no longer able to hear God's call? Either way, when God's voice does break through, it is presented (Isaiah) as 'so powerful that the very door posts move', or, with Amos 'a roaring like that of a lion', or with Jeremiah, 'his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones'.
And God makes a new demand: that the prophet emblematise the message they were charged to deliver. Thus, when God asks Isaiah to deliver the message, 'the soil speedeth, the prey hasteth', to the king of Israel, warning him not to enter into alliance with Assyria against common enemies, it is not enough for the prophet to write down his message and disseminate it. Isaiah fathers a child whom he names 'The Soil Speedeth, The Prey Hasteth' (just as he had fathered two children before with equally significant names: 'A Remnant will Return' and 'God is With Us').
Likewise, to send a message to the king of Assyria parade his prisoners naked and barefoot, to shame Egypt, God asks Isaiah to wander naked and barefoot for three years. And to send a message that Israel will not put its neck under the yoke of Babylon, he has Jeremiah 'make wooden yokes and put them on thy neck'; and when a false prophet breaks them, to replace them with yokes of iron …
What does this mean?, W. says. The old intimacy with God is lost. The dreams of the prophets, like their actions, call for the work of interpretation, the attempt to discern meaning in signs and allegories. A work that must also be applied to the lives of the prophets themselves, who have become living signs, witnesses to what it is not enough simply to proclaim.
And of what of his horror of the equivalent of contemporary apostasy, and the falling away from the Mosaic tradition?, W. wonders. What of his horror of climactic collapse and financial collapse, of the contemporary end of times? I am his sign, sent to him by God, W. has often been convinced of that. I am the horror he has to share with the world.
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