Park false interpretations of the word of God by the interpreters of the divine word. This story upends the distinction between true and false prophecy—or correct and incorrect interpretation—as both the true and the false prophecy is said to emanate from God.5 The narrative also upends the distinction between true and false prophets. This blurring is especially evident in the Hebrew. Micaiah, in heaven, hears the Lord ask for a lying spirit to deceive the prophets of Ahab. The word that is translated as deceive (the piel stem of p-t-h) can also mean to entice, trick, seduce, or allure. Interestingly, this verb does not occur only in relation to false prophets or false prophecy. Rather, the same verb appears in Jeremiah when the prophet, lamenting his calling, asks why the Lord has deceived him in making him a prophet: “O Lord, you deceived me [piel of p-t-h], and I was deceived [Niphal of p-t-h]” (Jeremiah 20:7). The fact that this particular verb is used in conjunction with both the “false” prophets of Ahab as well as with Jeremiah, a true prophet of the Lord—the fact that both claim that their vocation as prophets or interpreters involves a sense of being seduced or perhaps deceived by God—shows that the distinction between true and false prophecy, as well as false and true prophets, is murky and unclear, even to the prophets themselves. Both types of prophets and both types of prophecy involve divine deception and lies. Hence, as I read it, this narrative, at its heart, is about the duplicity—the deceptiveness—of interpretation. It is about the difficulty of the interpreter in finding and ascertaining a true exegesis of the divine word. This story is self-referential: a biblical story about the difficulty of interpreting a biblical story. Moreover, the story is also about the deception of the interpreters who themselves remain unclear and doubtful as to the truthfulness of their own interpretation. Hence, this story, as I read it, is about the inability to know a true interpreter or interpretation from a false one.
Yet Another Story about False Prophecies and Interpretations
A
ccording to my reading, this story in 1 Kings raises suspicions about the very nature of the exegetical enterprise. This interpretation, in turn, cannot help but raise questions as to what I am doing when I interpret. Indeed, according to my interpretation, even my interpretation of the story in 1 Kings is suspect. So why have I interpreted the narrative in 1 Kings in the way that I have? Is there something of my own personal bias, leaning, or story that has inadvertently come into this interpretation? To further elucidate, a second, more personal story is needed. I am an Asian-American woman biblicist of the Old Testament. This is not the usual career path of someone like me. The story of how I became a biblical scholar begins a while back in North Korea before the civil war that separated the South from the North. The family narrative goes that my grandmother in Pyongyang went to a shaman to inquire about my great-grandfather—her father—who had failed to return from a journey. His family, not knowing whether he was dead or alive, sent my grandmother to inquire with a local cult figure as to his whereabouts. When my grandmother saw the shaman, she was told to mourn her father as he was 7