"we have become insensitive to the radical and revolutionary social reality that emerged because of Moses"

 In Yisrael none like Moshe arose again - a prophet who perceived His vision clearly. G-d gave His people a Torah of truth, by means of His prophet, the most trusted of His household.

The Yigdal

I am tempted to leave out some of what Walter Brueggemann says in regard to the work of some well respected scholars and theologians because I suspect you, as I, have read little to nothing of their work.  That is always a problem for a non-specialist reading the work of a great scholar who is writing for a general audience as well as for other scholars.  But if you have the time and resources those citations will point to other things that you might read.  Like all such inevitably incompletely followed up citations, we take it on faith that the points made about them by a scholar we have every reason to trust will be accurate.   I know that we all do that all of the time but it's seldom confessed to.  I will say that every time I have looked up his citations,  Brueggemann's have been spot on to an extent I have seldom if ever found in secular scholarship so I will include those passages that contain that kind of citation.  Also note, when possible, I will give cited Bible texts from the 1917 Jewish Publications Society translation. 

As a beginning point in these considerations,  I propose that our understanding of prophecy comes out of the convenental tradition of Moses.  I do not minimize the important scholarly contributions concerning non-Israelite antecedents to prophecy in Israel.  These include (a) studies in Canaanite phenomenon of ecstasy, surely echoed in 1 Samuel 10 and 19; and more recently, (b) the evidence from Mari concerning institutional offices of prophecy, both in the cult and in the court.  Both these kinds of evidence illuminate practices and conventions to which Israel undoubtedly appealed in its much borrowing.  But the tradition itself is not ambiguous hen it comes to the dominating figure of Moses who provides our primary understandings.  That is to say,  the shaping of Israel took place from inside its own experience and confession of faith and not through external appropriation from somewhere else.  That urging is fundamental for its discussion for I am urging in parallel fashion that if the church is to be faithful it must be formed and ordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources external to its own life. This judgment, I am aware, is against the current tendency of scholarship.  Thus, for example,  Ronald Clements in his more recent Prophecy and Tradition has drawn back somewhat from his earlier position in Covenant and Prophesy.  There is currently a reassertion of a kind of neo-Wllhausian perspective, and that may be an important corrective to the synthesis of Gerhard von Rad.  Nonetheless,  I would urge that we are on sound ground if we take our own beginning point Moses as the paradigmatic prophet who sought to evoke in Israel analterntaive consciousness. 

The ministry of Moses, so George endenhall and Norman Gottwald have most recently urged, represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharaoh's Egypt.  the newness and radical innovativeness of Moses and Israel in this period can hardly be overstated.  Most of us are probably so used to these narratives that we have become insensitive to the radical and revolutionary social reality that emerged because of Moses.  It is clear that the emergence of Israel by the hand of Moses cannot be extrapolated from any earlier reality.  Obviously nothing like the Kenite hypothesis of the monotheism of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt will help us at all.  While there are some hints that the God of Israel is known tobe the God of the fathers (cf. Exod. 15:2)

2 The Lord is my strength and song,

And He is become my salvation;

This is my God, and I will glorify Him;

My father's God, and I will exalt Him.

Jewish Publication Society 1917

that evidence is at best obscure.  In any case, the overriding experience of Exodus is decisive and not some memory now only hinted at in the tradition.  However those antecedents are finally understood, the appearance of a new social reality is unprecedented.  Israel in the thirteenth century is indeed ex nihilo.  And that new social reality drives us to the category of revelation. Israel can only be understood in terms of the new call of God and his assertion of an alternative social reality.  Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political reality is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause.  Theological cause without social political reality is only of interest to professional religionists, and social political reality without theological cause need not concern us here.  But it is being driven by the one to the other that requires us to speak and to wonder about the call to the prophetic.  

In my search for how the American left has been so long in a wilderness, one largely of its own making, I have come to be quite convinced that "social political reality without theological cause" of exactly the kind which does concern Walter Brueggemann's examination and, in fact, the entire monotheistic tradition that flows out of the Mosaic Law, inevitably leads to the kind of ubiquitous gangster regimes that we struggle against today and always.  

The Jewish prophetic tradition is the constantly fallen away from, constantly renewed struggle for justice and a decent life in so far as it is humanly possible to know that and in each and every secular, non-theological, anti-theological attempt to make a new order that I have looked at, hard, I have seen that without that foundation in at least the aspiration of what is crudely considered "the supernatural" will inevitably devolve quickly into injustice from barely tolerable for a majority (often, as in America under the Constitution nowhere near tolerable for minorities) to the kind of scientific totalitarian regimes that arose in the 20th century.  It always bears pointing out that a good part of the American left has been as enthusiastic in supporting some of the worst of those murderous dictators, Leinin, Stalin, Mao, etc.as the worst of the American right has been enthusiastic for other such foreign dictators,  Hitler,Mussolini,various, especially, African and Latin American dictatorships as well as the American internal version of it in slavery,the Confederacy and Jim Crow, and the even wider enthusiasm for those who practiced genocide against the Native People to steal their lands.  That is the kind of thing I think you will always get under secular framing.    

That isn't to say that even with an official framing of theological foundation that the potential to backslide into a Pharaohnic kind of violent, extractive gangsterism isn't there, indeed, the Old Testament documents how very quickly that happened in Israel, the complex, deeply ambiguous claims of how it was founded as a nation in the conquest and obliteration of the native Canaanites and others, the violent cycles of the historical books, kings who, as was warned through Samuel, rode The People hard and did all kinds of injustices and violated The Law which led to disasters for the whole People.  But without the kind of ultra-radical view of life from the Law of Moses and in its most radical of all interpretations as in The Gospel, you start out with a guarantee that you're going to get the kind of injustice that Pharaoh symbolized and embodied.  

That it's hard to really do it doesn't change the fact that without trying, without feeling you had a powerful obligation to try to do it, you remain mired in the endless tyrannical habits of habitual and continual toil and competition against your fellow toilers lorded over by the habitual power holders and wealth extractors.  Americans have become used to that within my lifetime, secularized education (much of that taught by domesticated "religious"institutions of learning) has certainly not led us out of it but deeper into it.