Word: prophetã
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...fiction is Milton Steinberg, formerly the rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City and a prolific author on Jewish thought. Much like its subject matter, the book is unusual. Though it was released to much fanfare this March, Steinberg died in 1950. “The Prophet??s Wife” is an unfinished manuscript, long preserved in boxes of papers and correspondence, and only now edited and presented to the public. The book has no ending, though not for lack of trying by numerous Jewish novelists—including Steinberg’s close...
...title is something of a misnomer in that it doesn’t reflect which character the book actually follows. Though Steinberg gives his due to Gomer, the wayward wife of Hosea, the book takes place within the mind of Hosea himself. “The Prophet??s Wife” thus follows the prophet from a contemplative childhood, through his apprenticeship as a scribe, and into his troubled marriage and adulthood. Ironically, and most unfortunately, due to the book’s arrested development, the story never does get to Hosea’s actual prophetic career...
...Driven Leaf”—in which he constructs a life for Elisha ben Abuyah, the Talmud’s own sage and heretic, out of short Talmudic stories about him and some healthy creative license—“The Prophet??s Wife” uses an intriguing traditional character as the starting point for a meditation on the religious experience. For the protagonist of “As a Driven Leaf,” the conundrum is whether faith is possible in a rational world. For Hosea in “The Prophet?...
...writer—uncomfortable with the idea of a too personal God and drawn to a materialistic understanding of human affairs—would tell it. Thus, even as Steinberg draws upon the Bible for his inspiration, he distances himself from it. Through this lens, “The Prophet??s Wife” is one theologian’s attempt at rational rapprochement with the Bible, and in this case, the idea of inspired prophecy. It is a move from the original prophetic intonation of “thus spake the Lord?...
...mode of writing helps explain the curious sight of many Jewish public and literary luminaries—Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick and Harold Kushner among them—all suddenly seizing the coattails of this rather obscure rabbi now six decades deceased, and adorning “The Prophet??s Wife” with glowing blurbs, introductions and even back-of-the-book commentaries. If there is a lesson beyond the theological to be derived from “The Prophet??s Wife,” it is that this is a genre worth reviving. Steinberg...