The Wilderness

The Wilderness is an in-depth study of the haftarah.

The haftarah is a section of Holy Scripture taken from the Prophets or Writings of the Hebrew Bible that is read after the weekly alongside the Torah. The specified section always has some connection to the theme of the Torah portion of the week and the time and season of year.

The reading of the haftarah began during the Greek oppression of the Jewish people in the period before the Maccabbean revolt. During this time public Torah readings were outlawed. The sages of the time instituted the reading of a section of the Prophets and Writings in place of the Torah to remind the people of the themes, motifs, and message of the weekly Torah portions that they could no longer read.

Most of the haftarah readings come from the books of the prophets and the prophets would often come out of the wilderness, enter the wilderness, or make use of wilderness metaphors. With this in mind, we see in the biblical prophets that God meets us in the difficult seasons of our lives. People like Hagar, Moses, David, the people of Israel, John the Baptist, and Jesus Himself each spent prophetic time in the wilderness. Their experiences and encounters with God in the wilderness teach us how to trust God when life gets hard. It is in the wilderness where we find refuge and revelation; provision and providence. In the wilderness we learn that we serve a God who sees us, hears our cries for help, and provides for our needs in the wildernesses of our own life. It is out of the wilderness comes our Messiah.