What Did the OT Writers Know?

In the comments to my post, Mediating Between Dispensational and Covenant Theologies, Don Johnson brought up the issue of Kaiser's position on what the OT writers (particularly the prophets) understood as they wrote. I thoroughly agree with Don that "this conception of what the OT writers knew (and when did they know it) is an important part of understanding the whole."

Kaiser addressed this issue when interviewed by Andy Cheung. He made the point that he believes that the OT writers had an "adequate" understanding of what they were writing. "Adequate" doesn't imply that the writers had a full understanding of all of the details (especially concerning eschatology), but rather that they knew what was essential. This is key to the view of progressive revelation and to Kaiser's argument and methodology in both Toward and Old Testament Theology (1978) and The Promise-Plan of God (2008). It is also key to Eugene Merrill's argument and methodology in Everlasting Dominion (2006).

What follows are a few excerpts from the three aforementioned books that address (and hopefully) clarify this issue.

Eugene Merrill –

[T]he true prophet was a vehicle of divine revelation, one who declared not his own word but also that of God. (Everlasting Dominion, p. 92)

In line with our frequently reiterated method, we shall attempt to blend both a canonical and a chronological approach in an attempt to be sensitive to the impetus lying behind the present (Hebrew) canonical order as well as to the principle of progressive revelation of which, one would think, the prophets themselves were consciously aware.#[see Kaiser, Toward an Old Testament Theology, p. 11] That is, later prophets were in possession of the works of their predecessors and used them, even if not explicitly, as a matrix within which they formulated their own contributions to the emerging collection of inspired works. (Everlasting Dominion, p. 492, emphasis mine)

Walter Kaiser –

Even more crucial, can it be shown form the claims of the original participants in the events and thoughts of these OT texts that they were conscious of a continuing stream of events, meanings, and ideas which preceded them and that they felt themselves obligated to acknowledge some type of permanent, normative demands laid on their beliefs and actions?

There is an inner center or plan to which each writer consciously contributed.(Toward an Old Testament Theology, p. 11, emphasis mine)

The accumulation of the total message was never far from most of the writers’ minds as they chose the words or connected their experiences with what had been their religious and revelational heritage up to that point in time. Notice, this is not the usual Analogy of Faith procedure in which the NT or later theology is allowed to set the pace for earlier passages. On the contrary, it is what we will call the Analogy of Antecedent Scripture where chronologically antecedent canonical theology must be checked to see whether it informed the theology under investigation. (Toward an Old Testament Theology, p. 16, emphasis mine)

Thus the prophetic promise was not a group of scattered predictions that only later made sense after Christ appeared and others had reinterpreted many of the old prophetic words. If the prophets merely had been prognosticating or foretelling the future, then the focus of their message would have fallen only on two things: (1) the word spoken before the event, and (2) the final fulfilling event itself. While this view of prophecy may be proper and legitimate in itself, at least according to some students of prophecy, it fails to capture precisely that aspect that had captivated the hearts and minds of the Old Testament writers and saints the most.

The prophets’ messages were not heterogeneous and disconnected predictions, randomly announced throughout an otherwise dull drone of chastisements. Nor was prediction even the main feature of prophecy. Rather, the prophets were proclaimers of righteousness, preaching both law and promise, grace and judgment, to motivate the people to repentance and a life of obedience in the will and plan of God. Their predictions were often given as incentives to their contemporaries for holy living in that day, seeing that the future belonged to their God and to his righteous reign.

More was to be found in these predictions, of course, than novel glimpses of the future scattered as bits of candy to whet the appetite of a sensate or occult mentality that hungered to be the first to know what would be in tomorrow’s headlines in the newspapers. Instead of any such whimsical purpose as this, the prophets often deliberately cast their words about the future in the phraseology and conceptual patterns of past prophecies. There was a deliberate borrowing and supplementing from the previous words of the Abrahamic-Davidic promise. Hence, for them, the future was part of God’s single, cumulative, ongoing promise from the past as well as a pointer to the future. (The Promise-Plan of God, pp. 152-53; compare with Toward an Old Testament Theology, pp. 183-84, emphasis mine)

What Did the OT Writers Know?