ABSTRACT
There are many open scholarly questions about 'prophecy' in the Hebrew Bible. The origin and the earlier biblical sense of the noun are far from clear. This chapter focuses on the books of Kings and Jeremiah, and does so for two main reasons. It is in these two books that most biblical instances of noun and verb forms from are to be found. In the Latter Prophets, apart from Jeremiah, the usage of the noun and verb associated with can be readily presented: outside Ezekiel the evidence is relatively meagre, but in that book it is reasonably homogeneous. The situation in Jeremiah is very much more complex. The Jeremiah tradition is available to us in substantially different forms: the longer Hebrew book and the shorter Greek one. Although the data are differently evaluated in terms of authenticity and authorship, many scholars operate with a distinction between prose and poetry in the text of Jeremiah.
