| Summary: | Prophets living at the time when literacy expanded in Juda (whose writings are kept under the names of Proto-Isaiah and Jeremy) had to deal with writing as a new kind of transmission of knowledge, accomplishment of power, and self-affirmation of authority. This new technique, which they did not themselves master, soon began to compete with their own tools based on orality and spectacular living metaphors. A few passages belonging to these two biblical collections bear testimony of a conflict between the two systems. Two of these passages are presented here:1. Isaiah’s Mirror (Isaiah 8:1-4) In which the prophet Isaiah tries to divert, exploit and take over techniques of writing, in order to use them in a classical, metaphorical and symbolical prophetic way, but ignoring in doing so the specificities of literacy.2. Jeremy’s burnt scroll (Jeremy 36 passim) In which the king decides of a conflict between the authority of the King’s Law and the authority of the Prophet’s Verb, by putting to fire the scroll on which Jeremy’s prophecies were written, as and when they were read before him. And in which one can observe that writing down prophecy did not cancel its essentially oral character.
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