School of Suspicion

Tag: Prophets and Seers

Those who see what is coming and are believed or ignored: Tiresias, Cassandra, Jonah, Noah, Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, and the oracle Rebekah receives before her sons are born.

  • Noah — Prophet and Builder

    Noah — Prophet and Builder

    Lamech named his son for rest. Noah built a chest sealed with the letters of atonement, fed every creature in it for a year, sent out the dove, and woke from his wine to curse a grandson. Read beside the giants of 1 Enoch, the birds of Gilgamesh, Peter’s eight souls, the dove at the…

  • Cadmus — The Dragon’s Teeth

    Cadmus — The Dragon’s Teeth

    Cadmus kills the guardian of the spring, sows its teeth, and founds Thebes with the survivors. Read once as courage and reparation, once as a foreign settlement told from the side that won.

  • Jonah — Rebirth in the Heart of Darkness

    Jonah — Rebirth in the Heart of Darkness

    The prophet who drew Israel’s border is sent to save the city that will erase it. The whole book of Jonah with its Hebrew: four descents, a fish on an errand, five words that come true twice and a question he never answers, beside Jesus asleep in the storm, Caiaphas, the sign of Jonah, Inanna’s…

  • The Serpent Slayers

    The Serpent Slayers

    Genesis 3:15 is usually called the first messianic prophecy, and the reading is old and serious. God turns to the serpent, promises lasting hostility between its offspring and the woman’s, and says that one will be struck on the head and the other on the heel. Christian tradition has read that as the announcement of…

  • Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation

    Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation

    Apollo forces Creusa in a cave under the Acropolis, has their son raised in his temple at Delphi and hands him to her husband as the husband’s own. Euripides’ Ion beside Joseph and the supposed father of Luke’s genealogy, the boy Jesus in his Father’s house, Rebekah and Jacob, and the question Athens put to…