The understanding of Hebrew prophecy has made great advances in modern biblical scholarship. To be sure, such is the diversity and complexity both of prophetic texts within the Hebrew canon and of contemporary methods of interpretation that many unresolved—perhaps irresolvable—issues remain. Yet recent hermeneutical debate, like the philological and historical work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, can offer fresh lenses through which to read the text, in ways that at least sometimes may help make progress beyond seeming impasses. My purpose in this paper is to focus on one particular prophetic narrative, one which is often used as a case study: the story of Micaiah ben Imlah in 1 Kgs 22:1–38. I hope it may illustrate something of the kind of fresh understanding of a difficult prophetic text which is achievable.

For a long time, Lucien Febvre was obsessed by an arduous problem in cultural history: how could some brilliant intellectuals of the Renaissance have believed in witches? Influenced by the parallel that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl drew between child and primitive mentalities,Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalidad primitiva (Madrid: Akal, 1982). The original French edition was published in 1922. the French historian proposed an answer: in early modern times many beliefs could be upheld because a real Sense-of-the-Impossible did not exist. Febvre declared: “men in 1541 never said impossible.”Lucien Febvre, El problema de la incredulidad en el siglo XVI: La religión de Rabelais (México: Uthea, 1959) 382. Six years later he returned to the same issue, explicitly stating the dilemma in the title of an almost forgotten paper, “Sorcellerie, sottise ou révolution mentale?” How could Jean Bodin reconcile the publication of his Six Books of the Commonwealth with the ridiculous witchcraft stories included in his Dèmonomanie des Sorciers? In Febvre's view, Bodin could believe in the sabbat because until the middle of the seventeenth century there was no real Sense-of-the-Impossible in Western culture.Lucien Febvre, “Sorcellerie, sottise ou révolution mentale?” Annales 3 (1948) 15. See also Alexandre Koyré's 1949 article, “La aportación científica del Renacimiento,” reprinted in Estudios de historia del pensamiento científico (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1988) 43.

And never be joyful, save when you look in love upon your brother.

—a probably authentic saying of Jesus recorded in the now lost Gospel of the Hebrews

On the east wall of the south balcony in the St. Thomas Church of Leipzig, one of the principal churches where J. S. Bach worked as musical director from 1723 to 1750, there hangs in memory of one Bartholomæus Helmut a large, anonymous sixteenth-century painting now known by the title Gesetz und Gnade (“law and grace”) or Gesetz und Evangelium (“law and gospel”).A badly mangled reproduction, with many important elements cut off from all four edges, can be found in Herbert Stiehl, “Das Innere der Thomaskirche zur Amtszeit Johann Sebastian Bachs,” Beiträge zur Bachforschung 3 (1984) 91; a serviceable one in Ernst-Heinz Lemper, Die Thomaskirche zu Leipzig: Die Kirche Johann Sebastian Bachs als Denkmal deutscher Baukunst (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1954) 213; and a good one in Landesamt f¨r Denkmalpflege Sachsen, ed., Die Bau-und Kunstdenkmäler von Sachsen: Stadt Leipzig, Die Sakralbauten (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1995) 1.280. The picture presents a powerful series of theologically conventional contrasts of type with antitype. At the far left Moses is shown on his knees at the edge of a precipice receiving stone tablets—the law—from a pair of hands sticking out of a cloud; at the far right, in a roughly parallel position, Mary, with wavy blonde hair, is shown receiving a cross-bearing baby Jesus—the gospel—from a fully visible God. At the left, further below, humanity's Fall is depicted: Adam and Eve break God's law by eating of the forbidden fruit (from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), and are shown thus bringing death into the world; at the right, divine redemption is depicted: Jesus, with heavenly rays beaming from his head, suffers on the cross (a sort of tree), and is shown conquering death. Likewise at the left is found the bronze serpent amid exodus encampments of the Hebrew people in the wilderness;See Num 21:4–9; cf. 2 Kgs 18:4. at the right is a large church of Christian worship amid the established city of God, the New Jerusalem.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) is often cited as the outstanding figure of modern Orthodox Judaism in the twentieth century.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the British Association of Jewish Studies Conference, University of Southampton, England, in July 2002. Born into one of the most famous rabbinic families of nineteenth-century Lithuanian Jewry, Soloveitchik held unimpeachable “Orthodox” credentials, and as head of the Talmud faculty at New York's Yeshiva University, he spent his active working life as a teacher of Talmud. With his deep roots in the world of the Lithuanian yeshivah (Talmudic academy), Soloveitchik was an exemplar of the sophisticated “Brisker” method of Talmudic study that had reached its apotheosis in the hands of his grandfather, the great R. Chaim Brisker (1853–1918). This “Brisker” method,So called after the town of Brest-Litovsk (Brisk), where R. Chaim settled after his time as the rosh (head) of the Volozhin Yeshivah. with its emphasis on conceptual precision and abstract analysis, was characterized by the value it placed on the intellectual pursuit of Talmud study “for its own sake.”For further discussion of the Brisker method, see Norman Solomon, The Analytic Movement: Hayyim Soloveitchik and his Circle (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1993); Marc B. Shapiro, “The Brisker Method Reconsidered,” Tradition 31, no. 3 (1997), 78–102; and Moshe Soloveitchik, “‘What’ Hath Brisk Wrought: The Brisker Derekh Revisited,” The Torah u-Madda Journal 9 (2000)1–18. Significantly, though, the intellectual pursuits that Soloveitchik valued expanded his intellectual horizons far beyond traditional Talmudic fare. Thus, in a famously pioneering break with family tradition, at the age of twenty-two he went to study at the University of Berlin where he would receive a doctorate in philosophy, concentrating on the epistemology and ontology of the Neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen.

Arnold, Matthieu, and Rolf Decot, eds. Frömmigkeit und Spiritualität: Auswirkung der Reformation im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 54. Mainz, Germany: Philipp von Zabern, 2002. 184 pp. € 29,80 hb.