From prophetic words to prophetic literature: Challenging Paradigms that control our Academic thought on Jeremiah and Ezekiel

The prolific study of prophets and prophetic literature has produced several influential scholarly paradigms over the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries. This article calls attention to two of the paradigms that have shaped our scholarly mind-sets - literary criticism and redaction criticism - and asks what stands behind the different treatments of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the prophets and their books, in these strands of biblical scholarship. The discussion raises challenges to these paradigms concerning three topics: prophets as personae (historical or literary), prophetic activity within the societies of Israel and Judah, and the literary evolution of prophetic literature.