The Plausibility of the Prophetic History

Israelite History and Idolatry

The plausibility of the prophetic history recorded in the Old Testament, in which Israel repeatedly turned to worship foreign gods in spite of the many miracles God performed for them, has often been called into question by skeptics.

Let’s begin with the golden calf incident recorded in Exodus 32. God has just rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt with many mighty miracles, and has brought Israel to Mount Sinai to make a covenant with them. While Moses is on the mountain conversing with God, the people grow impatient and make a golden calf to worship, bringing God’s anger upon them. How does it make any sense that the Israelites could reject the God who just miraculously rescued them from slavery in favor of another god?

Well, that would not make any sense, but if we examine this story more closely, we will see that that was not actually what happened. What happened was that the people asked Aaron to “make us gods who shall go before us” (v. 1). So, Aaron made a golden calf and “and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD”” (vv. 4-5). So, the Israelites were not completely rejecting the LORD. They were still worshiping the LORD, but they also desired a visible idol to worship, which was either regarded as another god alongside the LORD, or as an idol of the LORD Himself. After living a long time in Egypt, the Israelites would have been accustomed to thinking in polytheistic terms and familiar with worshiping idols. Although the Israelites knew that the LORD was real and had miraculously rescued them from Egypt, they allowed polytheism and idolatry to corrupt their worship of Him.

Throughout the prophetic history recorded in the Old Testament, this problem of polytheism and idolatry resurfaces again and again. Repeatedly, the Israelites turn to worship foreign gods and idols, in spite of the LORD’s prophets warning them not to. Often, Israel shifted back and forth from faithfulness to unfaithfulness to the LORD, depending on the religious leadership and policies of the king. Skeptics have argued that it makes no sense that the Israelites would have so easily embraced foreign gods if there really was good evidence that the LORD was the real, true God, and that He was the one who had rescued them from Egypt and established them as a nation in Palestine.

We must remember, though, that the Israelites were living in an ancient Near Eastern context in which polytheism was everywhere. Each nation had its national god/gods, cities had their own local gods, and families had their own household gods. Even if a nation did not worship the gods of another nation, they did not deny that those gods existed. It would have been very easy for Israelites to be influenced by this polytheistic thinking, which was all around them. 

So, even though the Israelites had good evidence that the LORD was real, there was a constant temptation for them to also worship other gods as well, hoping to gain additional benefits from them. Although the Israelites knew that the LORD had rescued them from Egypt and given them the Promised Land, there was the temptation to wonder if the gods of powerful nations and empires around them might be more powerful even than the LORD. It is not that the Israelites lacked good reasons for believing that the LORD was real, it is that they had a hard time fully embracing the radically countercultural idea taught in the Torah that they should worship the LORD and the LORD alone. Not until the Babylonian exile was the remaining remnant of Israel able to do this.

The Book of Jonah

If there is any part of the Old Testament prophetic history which has been called into question most often, it is the book of Jonah.^[1]I should mention that some Christian interpreters have regarded the book of Jonah as a parable rather than as a historical account. However, due to its similarity to the prophetic narratives of 1 and … Continue reading Numerous objections have been raised to the plausibility of this story.

First, how does it make any sense that Jonah would have tried to run from God if he believed God was the creator of everything (1:8-10)? This indeed does not make much logical sense. However, as the ending of the book eventually shows, Jonah is acting out of emotion (his hatred of the Ninevites) rather than acting based on logic. It is also possible that, although Jonah speaks of “the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land,” this was just a stock Israelite confession of faith, the implications of which he had not fully thought out yet.

Second, isn’t the idea of Jonah being swallowed by a big fish and then being spat up onto dry land ridiculous and superstitious? Actually, it is quite possible for a whale to swallow a person whole. Under natural conditions, it would not be possible for a person to survive for long in a whale’s stomach. However, if God is omnipotent, then there is no reason He could not have miraculously protected Jonah from harm inside the whale and then miraculously caused the whale to spit Jonah out towards dry land. 

Third, how does it make any sense that the Ninevites would repent at the preaching of a prophet of the God of Israel? Actually, this makes perfect sense. The ancient Ninevites were thoroughgoing polytheists. They did not at all call into question the existence of the gods of other nations, even if they did not worship them themselves. If the prophet of a foreign god traveled a long distance just to warn them that this god was angry with them, it is perfectly plausible that they would have taken this seriously and decided to play it safe and try to appease this god’s potential wrath. 

Of course, there is no historical evidence that the Ninevites ever converted to worshiping the God of Israel. But the book of Jonah never claims that they did. It just says that the Ninevites repented of their wicked ways for a time, causing God to relent from the disaster He had said He would bring on Nineveh.

But why would God relent from punishing the Ninevites, if they made no lasting conversion? This is exactly the question that Jonah asks. This is why, at the end of the book, he is angry with God. Jonah knows that the repentance of the Ninevites is temporary and relatively superficial. He knows that the Ninevites do not deserve mercy, so he is angry at God for giving it to them. God’s answer, which closes the book, is simply that He has compassion on His creation (4:10-11). The main purpose of the book of Jonah is to tell us that that is the kind of God the LORD is.

But doesn’t the fact that God did not destroy Nineveh mean that Jonah’s prophecy, “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown” (3:4), was a false prophecy? This objection is based on a false understanding of the nature of prophecy. The purpose of prophecy is not to predict the future; it is to give a message from God to a contemporary audience. When prophecy does speak of the future, what it says will happen is often conditional, based upon the response of the audience. In the book of Jeremiah, God declares, “If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it” (Jer 18:7-10). Jonah’s prophecy, then, was not a failed prophecy. It was a genuine message from God which fulfilled its intended purpose of influencing the Ninevites to repent, and so it was a true, successful, prophecy.