20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Prophecy

Prophecy Peter S. Zaas J ewish theology cannot be said to share the preoccupation of contemporary biblical criticism with the Hebrew prophets. Nonetheless, a consideration of the prophetic phenomenon, of its message, and, indeed, of its decline from primary consideration in Jewish thought, can provide a useful perspective from which to view Jewish theology, especially in the connections it makes between morals and ethics, revelation and history. As far as Judaism is concerned, prophecy is a phenomenon with a distinct beginning and a distinct end. The prophets appear concurrently with the Sinai theophany as exemplars of the religious man seized by direct revelation of the divine word, and their disappearance is noted at the beginning of the Hasmonaean age in 164 B.C.E.: Moses is the first and greatest of the prophets, and the line comes to an abrupt end in the sixth century B.C.E. with the postexilic figures of Zechariah and Malachi. With the single exception of the predicted return of Elijah as the messianic herald, prophecy in Judaism is a phenomenon of the distant past. In this respect, Jewish theology is sharply to be distinguished from its Christian and Moslem relatives, 732 PROPHECY both of which depend heavily on prophetic revelations posterior to Hebrew prophecy, and both of which, at least in some manifestations, require that prophecy be a continuing process. For Judaism, prophecy's decline is as significant as its rise. Biblical criticism emphasizes the diversity of the Hebrew prophets. It yields no unified morphology of prophecy, no unified prophetic message or prophetic role. But Judaism has always tended to view the biblical prophets monolithically. Furthermore, each group of Jewish interpreters has viewed them as supporting its own enterprises. Thus the rabbis emphasized that the prophets were paragons of halakhic Judaism, laying no new revelation alongside the eternal law. They saw Moses as the "lord of the prophets" and the prophets as belonging to the direct line of tradition between the "elders" and the "men of the Great Synagogue" (M. Avot 1:1), neither adding nor subtracting anything from the law (BT Meg. 14a). By contrast, contemporary liberal Jewish theology sees the prophets in its own mirror, as champions of freedom from the domination of the priesthood. Historically, prophecy ceased in Judaism at the same moment that the oral Law gained ascendancy, during the Hasmonaean revolution (I Macc. 4:46). Jewish leadership after 70 C.E., regrouping to face the bleak prospect of a world without the Temple cultus, found little room for the charismatic figures who were now dearer to Christian than to Jewish life. The rabbinic antipathy toward a continuing prophetic institution must have been in part defensive. Religiously, this narrowing of the vector of revelation led to Judaism 's characteristic preoccupation with the halakhic text, a text that, by legal dictum, itself subsumed the old prophetic roles. But the rabbis were antipathetic only to new prophets, not to the old ones, whose poetic imagination supplied much of the substance of their liturgy. Jewish theologians of the pre-Enlightenment era were more interested in meta-prophetic questions than in the message of the Hebrew prophets. Their concerns focused on describing the mechanism of the prophetic revelation , on the qualifications of the men chosen for the prophetic role, and on the obvious conclusions to be drawn about the superiority of Israel from the phenomenon of prophecy itself. For Judah Halevi, for example, the very fact that the Scripture contains revealed prophecy demonstrates its divine origin, and does so irrespective of the precise content of that revelation. Modern Jewish theologians, far from emphasizing the commonality of the prophetiC experience, emphasize the phenomenon's otherness. Thus for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the most sublime modern interpreter of Hebrew prophecy, it is the direct prophetic experience of the "divine pathos" that is preeminent; the prophets embody the relationship between God and PROPHECY 733 Israel in a specialized way. Martin Buber similarly emphasizes the quality of immediacy in the prophetic faith. ~ecent biblical criticism has noted the extent to which the prophets are faithful supporters of the halakhah: they were in no way opposed to the law. Nonetheless, theology must continue to emphasize the prophetic contribution in the ethical sphere. It can be argued that ethics per se begins with the Hebrew prophets, whose insistence that a moral imperative follows directly from the sacred covenant commences a long and rich tradition within Judaism of defining morality...