Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus 36

Since we have turned to the subject of the prophets, what follows will not be useless for the Jews, who believe the prophets spoke by the divine Spirit — and it will also serve the well-disposed among the Greeks. We will tell them that they must accept that the Jews had prophets too, if the Jews were indeed to remain bound together in the law given them, to believe in the Creator just as they had received him, and to have no opening to revolt into the polytheism of the nations. We will establish this necessity as follows. 'The nations,' as it is written even in the law of the Jews themselves, 'will listen to diviners and soothsayers'; but to that people it was said: 'The Lord your God has not given you such things' (Deuteronomy 18:14). And this is added to it: 'The Lord your God will raise up a prophet for you from among your brothers' (Deuteronomy 18:15). Now if the nations resort to divination — whether by omens, or by watching birds, or by reading entrails, or through ventriloquists, or through those who promise sacrificial rites, or through Chaldean astrologers — all of which were forbidden to the Jews — then, if the Jews had possessed no consolation of foreknowledge, they would have been driven by the same human craving to know the future. They would have despised their own heritage as having nothing divine in it; they would not have followed Moses as a prophet, nor recorded their words, but would have deserted to the divinations and oracles of the nations, or even tried to set up something similar among themselves. Therefore it is not absurd that the prophets among them spoke beforehand for the consolation of those who long for such knowledge — so that even Samuel prophesied about lost donkeys, and the prophet recorded in the third book of Kings spoke about the illness of a royal child (2 Kings 1:2–3). How else would the Jewish elders, who represent the law, have rebuked anyone who wanted to seek divination from idols? Just as Elijah is found rebuking Ahaziah and saying: 'Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going to inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron?' (2 Kings 1:3).