How Prophecy Became Literature

Prophecy—the transmission of divine messages to human recipients—is essentially an oral phenomenon. However, all knowledge of ancient prophecy is based on written sources. The Hebrew Bible forms a special case, since it includes the only extant collection of prophetic books, a genre otherwise unknown in the ancient Near East. The article investigates the process of the literarization of prophecy, proceeding from the late sociohistorical context of the biblical prophetic literature towards its hypothetical beginnings. It is argued that the literarization of prophecy required the support of the literate circles of any given community in both pre‐ and post‐exilic times.