His condemnations were aimed principally at the rich and powerful, and they expressed his rage against those who exploited and oppressed and ignored the weak, the poor, the ill, the imprisoned. He was a prophet of Israel who, like so many of the prophets of Israel before him, employed the ferocious imagery of a final divine reckoning for creation to denounce the injustices and follies of his age; and, as he was a first-century Jew, the language he used necessarily included much of the terrifying apocalyptic imagery and mythical topographies of Jewish intertestamental literature and early
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