Biblical prophets often preached through strange public performances rather than words
According to the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah buried a linen belt until it rotted, smashed a clay jar before the elders and wore a wooden yoke around his neck. Ezekiel lay on his side for 390 days. For these messengers, acting out a message could matter as much as speaking it.
The English word comes from Greek, joining pro, meaning before or toward, with a verb for telling; a prophet conveys messages from the divine and only sometimes predicts the future. It translated the Hebrew navi and parallels the Arabic nabi. The scholar W. F. Albright traced both to Akkadian nabû, meaning announcer or authorised person. One Jewish tradition links navi to a root suggesting hollowness, since receiving wisdom requires being open. An older Hebrew term, ro'eh, meant seer, which may record a shift from paid fortune-tellers to moral teachers.
Prophet-like figures appear across many faiths, from Mesopotamian religion to Buddhism, Manichaeism and Thelema. In Sumer, rulers titled ensi acted as representatives of a city's patron god. Zoroaster, founding his faith in Persia around the 6th century BCE, received revelations from the supreme god Ahura Mazda that became the Avesta, and his picture of a cosmic battle between good and evil shaped later religions.
The Hebrew Bible shows the role as gruelling. Isaiah reportedly walked stripped and barefoot for three years to foreshadow captivity. Jeremiah was beaten, locked in the stocks, jailed and thrown into a cistern for his warnings. Moses, regarded as Judaism's greatest prophet, once saw his spirit shared with seventy elders, who could prophesy only that one time. Not every prophet was an Israelite: the text includes the foreigner Balaam.
Jewish tradition counts differently. One claim holds there were 1,200,000 prophets, twice the number who left Egypt, while the Talmud names 48 men and seven women, including Sarah, Miriam and Esther, whose messages apply to all generations. It treats Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, active around the end of the Babylonian exile, as the last. Christianity describes prophets as inspired by the Holy Spirit, and a flower from southern Africa is nicknamed the weather prophet.
Source: Prophet
