Inspired Prophets and Lying Spirits

Today in my class on the Bible, we started the subject of “the Prophets.” Although we had already covered the “former prophets” aka the Deuteronomistic History, this was our first direct look at the phenomenon of prophecy. Since the student who presented addressed the subject of “false prophets” I shared with the class the story in 1 Kings 22.

For those who may not be familiar with it, the story features a prophet who predicts both that the king will have success in a battle and then that he will meet his death, and then follows with a story about Yahweh looking for ideas from the heavenly council on how to entice king Ahab to his death. Various suggestions are made, but the “winning idea” is to inspire the prophets to tell Ahab he will have victory when that isn’t in fact true. This suggestion gets Yahweh’s approval, and this suggests that on the one hand the prophets in question were thought to genuinely be inspired, and yet they were simultaneously thought to not be accurately predicting the future.

There are lots of interesting and intriguing elements in this story. One that is particularly striking is that the story seems to completely undermine the standard presented in Deuteronomy that a true prophet can be identified in terms of what he or she predicts coming true. I’m used to finding divergent views in the Bible, but it is interesting that the Deuteronomistic History itself includes a story that seems to undercut Deuteronomy’s own criteria at this point.