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What do the Hebrew prophets have to say to us in these days of noisy and fascinatingly unpredictable politics? The 8th-century BCE religious geniuses whom we know as Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah had a brand in common, a phrase that would fit on a bumper sticker: mishpat u-tzedeqah, “justice and righteousness.”

Singly, these are cardinal virtues: “justice,” doing what’s fair, and “righteousness,” doing what’s right. Occasionally they could clash, as the early-bird workers in Jesus’ parable about the vineyard would tell you (Matthew 20:1-16). Though each word has its own depths, what is most interesting is their conjunction:

• Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream (Amos 5:24).
• Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness (Isaiah 1:27). Hosea and Micah add a dose of love (hesed) to their phrases:
• Hold fast to love and justice (Hosea 12:6).
• Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before your God (Micah 6:8).

The political platform of these Classical Hebrew prophets emphasized the conjunction – “justice and righteousness,” a phrase that means “care for the poor,” as Israeli biblical scholar Moshe Weinfeld argues. For the prophets, the truest measure of societal health was, as their inspired heir put it in Matthew 25:45, the way it treated “the least of these,” the widow, the stranger, the orphan, the prisoner, the disabled. In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the prophet registered “the secret obscenity of sheer unfairness, the unnoticed malignancy of established patterns of indifference. … The prophet’s ear perceive[d] the silent sigh.

 The name of Jesus is so powerful that ignorance of it is robbing many of God’s blessings and fulfillment in life. The enemy will do anything to keep man in the dark so that he can continue to oppress him. The truth is that the power in the name of Jesus brings deliverance from all oppression of the devil and delivers dominion to mankind. 

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