Lesson 8 | Prophecy & Directive Discourse
[1] A Prophetic Text Hierarchy
Back in Lesson 2, we introduced you to two types of clauses in a discourse block: mainline clauses, which provide the backbone of the block, and offline clauses, which support the mainline clauses in some way.
We also introduced you to the three genres that show their structure using these two types of clauses:
Genre
Mainline Verb Type
Narrative
sequential-imperfect
Prophetic Discourse
sequential-perfect
Directive Discourse
commands or a command + sequential-perfect
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Now that we’ve focused on narrative in Lessons 2 and 4, it is time to take a brief look at the remaining two genres, for making a text hierarchy will help you interpret both prophetic discourse and directive discourse correctly.
Understanding Prophetic Discourse
Duane Garrett and Jason DeRouchie explain that prophetic discourse...
...is made up of predictions and promises that propose, plan, or depict events or actions that will occur in future time.
—Duane A. Garrett and Jason S. DeRouchie, A Modern Grammar for Biblical Hebrew (B&H Academic, 2019), 294.
Making a Prophetic Text Hierarchy
Thus it makes sense that a discourse block often begins with an imperfect verb, or else “וְהָיָה, ‘and it shall come about.’”¹
The backbone of the discourse is made mostly of sequential-perfect verbs. As with narrative, offline clauses can be of different types, and can have several different functions. Therefore, the guidelines for finding, indenting, and labelling offline clauses remain the same as in narrative.
Let’s look at three verses from Isaiah 12 to see prophetic discourse in action.
This passage illustrates that, unlike in narrative, mainline verbs in prophetic discourse don’t move a narrative forward in time; they are related logically more than temporally.² For example, 3a doesn’t take place after 2d, but is a continuing explanation of what God is promising to do. So 4a, b, and c aren’t temporal events, happening one after the other, but three tightly-connected promises God is making.
Some of you may have noticed that, in the ESV, Isaiah 12:2-4 is laid out like poetry. It is, in fact, poetry, but the mainline clauses function the same here as they would if it were prose. Thus it would also be valuable to analyze this passage poetically—i.e. to divide up the text into lines and connect the lines into stanzas and larger blocks.