God’s perfection is not only a problem in talking about God. It can also be an obstacle to the possibility of God’s talking to us. How, then, could Maimonides determine that prophecy is one of the basic principles of faith? In the Mishneh Torah, the Rambam declares, “Among the foundations of religion, one must know that God speaks to people in prophecy” (Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah, 7:1). The Rambam’s understanding of prophecy bridges God’s unchanging nature and the idea that certain people can receive prophecy.
The Rambam considered our preconceptions to be the greatest obstacle to intellectual development. We maintain our belief in the ideas that are familiar to us. In general, the longer we hold an opinion, the greater our sense of certainty about it. We reflexively suspect new ideas. The psychological price of abandoning an old opinion and adopting a new one is often too high. The Guide for the Perplexed challenges us and seeks to free us from familiar thoughts that imprison us.
Maimonides begins his discussion of prophecy by describing the traditional view or preconceived notion: most people believe that prophecy is an act of God in which God reveals Himself to a particular person and transmits an important message. Prophecy is commonly thought of as a miraculous break in the natural order of things. The person who has a prophetic experience is, in that moment, lifted above the laws of nature. He or she bursts the bounds of normal existence and attains a kind of superhuman consciousness.1 According to the Rambam:
The first opinion—that of the multitude of those among the Pagans . . . and also believed by some of the common people professing our Law—is that God, may He be exalted, chooses whom He wishes from among men, turns him into a prophet, and sends him with a mission. According to them, it makes no difference whether this individual is a man of knowledge or ignorant, aged or young. The view of the ignorant masses . . . and also of some of our simple co-religionists, is that God selects anyone He pleases, speaks to him through prophecy and entrusts him with a mission. It makes no difference, in their view, whether the person is learned or stupid, young or old. (Guide, 2:32)
As the antithesis of this view, Maimonides presents the Aristotelian position:
The second opinion is that of the philosophers. It affirms that prophecy is a certain perfection in the nature of man. This perfection is not achieved in any individual from among men except after a training that makes that which exists in the potentiality in the species pass into actuality, provided an obstacle due to temperament or some external cause does not hinder this, as is the case with regard to every perfection whose existence is possible in a certain species. For the existence of that perfection in its extreme and ultimate form in every individual of that species is not possible. It must, however, necessarily exist in at least one particular individual; if, in order to be achieved this perfection requires something that actualizes it, then that something must necessarily exist. According to this opinion, it is not possible that an ignoramus should turn into a prophet; nor can a man not be a prophet on a certain evening and be a prophet on the following morning, as if he had made some sudden find. Things are rather as follows: When, in the case of a superior individual who is perfect with respect to his rational and moral faculties, his imaginative faculty is in the most perfect state, and when he has prepared in the way that you will hear, he will necessarily become a prophet, because that is a perfection that belongs to us by nature. According to this opinion, it is impossible that a person should be fit for prophecy and prepared for it, but not become a prophet, except to the extent that an individual having a healthy temperament should be nourished with excellent food, without sound blood and similar things being generated from that food. (Guide, 2:32)
Prophecy, according to this Aristotelian view, is a product of fully realized human perfection. Just as someone who develops his body to the utmost will become a model of physical fitness, so too, one who does the same for his spirit will be a prophet. This is the opposite of the traditional notion. The Rambam is saying that prophecy is a human spiritual achievement rather than an act of God.
One of Aristotle’s great contributions to human thought was to articulate a new kind of “lack.” Apart from “absolute lack,” there is also a “lack of potential.” Saying that a kitten is not a pine tree is different from saying that a kitten is not a cat. A kitten will never become a pine tree. That is not part of the kitten’s potential. But the kitten is growing toward becoming a cat. The goal of its life, so to speak, is to overcome the lack that is inherent in mere potentiality and to actualize the full “catness” of its existence.
All of nature tends to move from potentiality to actualization, or, to put it in another way, from absence to reality. The movement toward full actualization is not a matter of choice. That is how nature works, with one exception: man. Human beings, according to Maimonides, are the only creatures that can choose to remain less than they can be.2 A person can elect not to realize his potential and not to actualize his full human capacities. Unlike all other beings, man may remain a mere man-in-potential. The prophet, however, chooses to become a full human being and succeeds in doing so. His life’s journey brings the potential intellect and humanity within him to full realization.
According to Maimonides, a person who does not actualize his intellect may have the external form of a human being but cannot be described as fully human. Extraordinarily, Maimonides calls such a person an animal, or creature.
You know that whoever is not endowed with this form, whose signification we have explained, is not a man but an animal, having the shape and configuration of a man. (Guide, 1:7)
It would appear that the prophet is not only no “superman” but is also one of the few people who can properly be called human.
This view resolves our opening difficulty. There is no contradiction between the notion of a static God and the dynamic occurrence of prophecy. God neither changes in the course of prophecy nor initiates the prophetic encounter. The change occurs only within human consciousness. According to this understanding of prophecy, God does not reveal Himself to humanity. Rather, humanity reveals God.
In addition to preserving the static conception of God, this understanding of prophecy is also compatible with a stable natural world. According to Aristotle, the natural system is eternal and constant; the laws that govern it are unchanging. The “ignorant” view of prophecy as a miracle that overturns the laws of nature threatens this harmonious picture. Seeing prophecy as a human achievement is congenial with the Aristotelian vision of nature. Prophecy is not some exceptional break with natural laws but an effect of powers that are inherent in nature itself.
After having outlined the Aristotelian view, Maimonides explains his own position.
The third approach is the opinion of our law and the foundation of our doctrine. It is identical with the philosophic opinion except in one thing. For we believe that it may happen that one who is fit for prophecy and prepared for it should not become a prophet, namely on account of the divine will. To my mind, this is like all of the miracles, and takes the same course as they. For it is a natural thing that everyone who according to his natural disposition is fit for prophecy and who has been trained in his education and study should become a prophet. He who is prevented from it is like him who has been prevented, like Jeroboam, from moving his hand, or like the King of Arram’s army going to seek out Elisha, from seeing. (Guide, 2:32)
The Torah, according to Maimonides, is consistent with the Aristotelian features of prophecy, except for one difference: a person may prepare himself for prophecy yet not merit it. Not everyone who has the potential for prophecy will receive it from God. Prophecy remains miraculous.
At first glance, it might seem that this change undermines the naturalness of prophecy as presented in the Aristotelian approach. In the Aristotelian view, the natural aspect of prophecy also reflects its necessity. It is impossible for a person who is prepared for prophecy not to achieve it. According to Aristotle, prophecy, like all natural phenomena, is bound by laws of causality. Training for prophecy is the cause, and the occurrence of prophecy is the necessary effect. In “the Torah’s opinion,” God breaks into this closed causal system, negates the natural necessity of prophecy, and blocks someone who is properly prepared from attaining prophetic experience.
Maimonides agrees with Aristotle’s view of prophecy as a non-miraculous, natural process. One who is appropriately prepared should, in the natural way of things, achieve prophecy. Rather, it is the prevention of prophecy that is the miraculous occurrence here. This is not, in principle, different from other miracles; it is “according to the way of all miracles” (Guide, 2:32). Just as God can take away a person’s ability to see, so too He can remove the ability to prophesy. The prevention of prophecy belongs to the phenomenon of miracles and is not conceptually connected to the phenomenon of prophecy. As far as the definition of prophecy goes, there is actually no difference between the Torah’s view and Aristotle’s: prophecy is a natural event and a human achievement.
The space that Maimonides allows for divine involvement leaves God outside the concept of prophecy but within the prophetic event, since God can block it from taking place.3 Maimonides enlists scriptural support:
Similarly, it may be said, as we shall explain, that in the passage, Yea her prophets find no vision from the Lord (Lam. 2:9), this was the case because they were in exile. However, we shall find many texts, some of them scriptural and some of them dicta of the Sages, all of which maintain this fundamental principle that God turns whom He wills, whenever He wills it into a prophet—but only someone perfect and superior to the utmost degree. (Guide, 2:32)
This is a powerful scriptural argument. “Yea her prophets find no vision from the Lord” implies that even those people who were fit for prophecy (i.e., “prophets”) “received no vision from God.” The human effort that should have called forth prophecy was answered with divine refusal.
Maimonides deploys this verse in another place as well. The mainstream Jewish doctrine is that prophecy ceased at the close of the biblical period. The question then arises: if God does not initiate prophecy, as Maimonides claims, why were there no more prophets after that point? One reason he gives for the cessation of prophecy does not rely on the extent of God’s involvement: the climate of exile hindered the full actualization of human reason. Maimonides relies on the very same verse that we have just seen:
This is indubitably the essential and proximate cause of the fact that prophecy was taken away during the time of the exile. For what languor or sadness can befall a man in any state that would be stronger than that due to his being a thrall slave in bondage to the ignorant who commit great sins and in whom the privation of true reason is united to the perfection of the lust of the beasts . . . and so it says, her kings and princes are among the nations; there is no Torah, and her prophets find no vision from the Lord. (Guide, 2:36)
Since the kings and princes were among the nations, the prophets could find no vision. From this reading of the verse it appears that there is a causal relationship between exile and the cessation of prophecy. In this case, “her prophets find no vision from the Lord” serves as a proof for God’s non-involvement in the cessation of prophecy. However, Maimonides read the same passage as supporting the idea of God’s involvement in blocking the prophetic process. The same verse that is a justification for God’s miraculous role in prophecy in one place is also an argument for the absolute naturalness of prophecy somewhere else.
This is an example of an intentional contradiction in the Guide. In the introduction to the Guide, the Rambam lists seven contradictions that one may find in writings the world over. The seventh is the contradiction intended to conceal certain ideas. Maimonides did not want all of his readers to understand the most complex and mysterious of his teachings. He acknowledged that he sometimes made contradictory points in order to keep his true opinion from the general public. Most Rambam scholars agree that when there is a contradiction between a conventional and a radical view, the latter is the Rambam’s true opinion. This type of intentional contradiction for the sake of the concealment of esoteric ideas is known by Maimonidean scholars as a “contradiction of the seventh kind.”
Some interpreters offer the following resolution: when he lays out the different possibilities about prophecy, Maimonides, by leaving room for God’s involvement in the prophetic event, presents his own position as differing somewhat from the Aristotelian view. Thus he reassures his common audience. However, a few chapters later, Maimonides “winks” at the sophisticated reader and communicates a more subtle message, namely, that his real opinion is identical to Aristotle’s, not just on the nature of prophecy, but also regarding its absence even where the preconditions have been met.
Let us now try and understand the specific characteristics that a would-be prophet must have.
This is emphatically not something that every person can attain. No one can reach it without arriving at perfection in the theoretical sciences and improving his moral qualities until they are as refined as they can possibly be; in addition, he must be naturally endowed with the most perfect imaginative faculty possible. (Guide, 2:36)
The personality of a prophet must combine three very different kinds of perfection: moral, intellectual and imaginative.
Moral Perfection: A moral person is not just someone who does good things, but also, and primarily, someone who has good qualities. Maimonides locates morality in the personality, which is the source of deeds, and not just in the actions themselves. He follows the Aristotelian conception that measures the moral quality of personal characteristics according to their degree of balance: “Good qualities are attributes of the soul that attain to a mean in between two bad characteristics, one of them being an excess and the other being a lack. One should aim for actions that are in the middle between these extremes.”4
The “middle way” of Maimonides and Aristotle is frequently misunderstood. Balanced personal qualities do not always result in balanced actions. Well-balanced attributes lead to actions that are appropriate to one’s objectives.5 For example, responding to a minor irritant such as a fly in a manner that is halfway between anger and apathy is not following the middle path, because generally the proper way to react to a fly is with relative indifference. Similarly, the appropriate response to a grave injustice is not at the mean between anger and apathy; one should respond with righteous indignation. Balance means correct emotional calibration.
Through extensive training, people can reshape their personalities. Someone who attains moral perfection will have brought his personality into proper balance, meaning that one is able to maintain harmonious interactions with one’s surroundings. This may be the greatest achievement of a person’s life.
Imaginative Perfection: The imaginative faculty has two functions. First, it represents to us sensory impressions even when they are absent. “The imaginative faculty is a power that recalls our sense impressions after they have faded from the sensory organs that perceived them.”6 Second, it enables us to make new, complex images out of those impressions: “He may combine a bit of this with a bit of that, or separate one thing from another, and so the imaginative faculty can make compounds out of different perceptions, and create things that were never perceived by the senses.”7 A person may imagine an iron boat because he once saw one. He can imagine a bird because he has often seen such a creature. The imagination can render both of these images and connect them in order to create in one’s mind the image of something that he never saw: “for example, a person may imagine an iron boat that flies in the air.”8
The limit of the imaginative faculty depends on the hardwiring of the brain.9 One has little ability to improve his imaginative capacity if it is innately limited. Some may achieve intellectual and moral perfection yet fail to attain prophecy because they do not possess a perfected imagination. Such people face a natural impediment to prophecy.10
The quality of the imaginative faculty varies from person to person. These differences consist in two features:
1. Imaginative Power: For most people, the objects of sense perception that are reconstructed in imagination seem faded in comparison with the sense perceptions themselves. When I imagine my desk, its colors and sense of presence are relatively weak compared to when I see it directly. However, there are some people who imagine objects in a way that is no less vivid and immediate than their sensory perception of the things themselves. For them, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between reality and imagination.
2. The capacity to create new constellations of images out of sense impressions differs from person to person. There are people who are unable to imagine anything very different from what they know. Others can burst through the bounds of experience and create worlds that don’t exist. Imaginative perfection consists in the ability to re-create sense impressions that are as powerful as the original perceptions and to form them into new and extraordinary imaginary creations.
Intellectual Perfection: Reason is the ability to think about reality and to explain it in terms of its component parts. We seek the truth and desire deep knowledge of reality. Intellectual perfection means knowing truth for the sake of truth: “The point of truth is simply to know it as the truth.”11 Maimonides calls the person who attains intellectual perfection a philosopher.
A prophet has balanced moral qualities, a powerful imagination, and intellectual perfection. The prophet is a blend of saint, artist, and philosopher. A person who brings all of the rich resources of his humanity to full realization may become a prophet.
How does the prophetic personality give birth to prophecy? How does this synthesis of moral, intellectual, and imaginative perfection produce revelation?
Know that the true reality of prophecy consists in its overflowing12 from God, may He be cherished and honored, through the intermediation of the Active Intellect toward the rational faculty in the first place and thereafter toward the imaginative faculty. This is the highest degree for man, and the ultimate term of perfection that can exist for his species; and this state is the ultimate term of perfection for the imaginative faculty. (Guide, 2:36)
Prophecy is an event that changes the normal relationship between imagination and intellect. Imagination, according to Maimonides, ordinarily is a threat to reason. It causes intellect to deviate from its course and to blur its goals. Reason, therefore, usually tries to free itself from the influence of imagination. In prophecy, however, instead of overcoming the imagination, reason must engage it in order to reach a spiritual breakthrough.
When intellectual attainments flood the imagination, a person is able to express intellectual concepts in imaginative language. When this happens, one can reflect visually upon his knowledge. The imagination represents theoretical knowledge as a powerful spectacle. The prophet is a philosopher who can visualize his philosophy as if it were a movie. This is also connected to Maimonides’s psychology of dreams:
If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord do make myself known unto him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream (Num. 12:6). Thus He, may He be exalted, has informed us of the true reality and essence of prophecy and has let us know that it is a perfection that comes in a dream or a vision. The word mareh, vision, derives from the word ra’oh, to see, This signifies that the imaginative faculty achieves so great a perfection of action, that it sees the thing as if it were outside, and that the thing whose origin is due to it appears to have come to it by way of external sensation. In these two groups, I mean vision and dream, all the degrees of prophecy are included, as shall be explained. It is known that a matter that occupies a man greatly—he being bent on it and desirous of it—while he is awake and while his senses function, is the one with regard to which the imaginative faculty acts when he is asleep, when receiving an overflow of the intellect corresponding to its disposition. It would be superfluous to quote examples of this and to expatiate on it, as this is a manifest matter that everyone knows. It is similar to the apprehension of the senses with regard to which no one whose natural disposition is healthy disagrees. (Guide, 2:36)
Dreams reflect our emotional autobiographies. We do not dream about the events of the day but about what caused an emotional reaction during that day. Someone who was angry will symbolically manifest anger in his dream. When a person is focused on his desires during the day, the desires will find expression in what he sees during sleep. This is why a philosopher who is intellectually perfect but ethically flawed does not achieve prophecy:
For most of the thoughts of those who are outstanding among the men of knowledge are preoccupied with pleasures of this sense (the sense of touch) and are desirous of it. And then they wonder how it is that they do not become prophets if prophecy is something natural. (Guide, 2:36)
This phenomenon is not confined to dreaming. When a person is morally refined, his emotional energy is not dissipated in trivialities but rather is focused on unraveling the secrets of creation. A well-balanced character is not drawn to anger, envy, or lust; when he thinks about metaphysics, all of his emotional energy is devoted to the subject. The person whose emotions are riveted by “The Works of Creation”13 and “The Works of the Chariot”14 will see in his imagination (which represents the objects of desire) the secrets of physics and metaphysics.
Now there is no doubt that whenever, in an individual of this description, his imaginative faculty, which is as perfect as possible, acts and receives from the intellect an overflow corresponding to his speculative perfection, this individual will only apprehend divine and most extraordinary matters, will see only God and his angels, and will be aware and achieve knowledge of matters that constitute true opinions and general rules for the welfare of human beings in their relations to one another. (Guide, 2:36)
The prophetic scene unfolds in the prophet’s inner world. When Isaiah saw God seated on a throne, and when Ezekiel beheld the divine chariot, these visions were not external. Maimonides was not the first to make this assertion. There is a tradition in Judaism that locates such visions in the soul of the seer. The mystical world that coexists with the Rabbinic-talmudic universe is replete with accounts of ascents by mystics to the upper worlds. In these visions, they visit exalted, heavenly chambers, and their desire is to see the face of God. The descriptions of these celestial journeys are highly detailed and were collected in the hechalot literature—a genre of esoteric texts related to visions of ascents into heavenly palaces. Several hundred years later, Rabbi Hai Gaon was asked about the secret of these visions:
When one wishes to behold the chariot, or to glimpse the chambers of the heavenly angels, there are ways to do so: he should fast for a number of days, place his head between his knees, and whisper many songs and praises. Thus he will gaze upon the seven chambers as if he is entering them one by one and look at what is in each. There are two tractates that the teachers of the Mishnah taught about this matter, Hechalot Rabbati and Hechalot Zutri, and this is public and well known.15
These sages would curl up into the mystical, fetal position, repeat names of God, enter into a deep trance, and embark on a journey to the heavenly chambers. According to Rabbi Hai Gaon, this flight to the upper worlds was a journey within the soul. That is where revelation happened. While Maimonides did not invent this idea, he did give it a psychological explanation. Visions take place in the consciousness of the prophet because the imagination of the morally perfect is liberated from the snares of lust and therefore free to represent metaphysical truths in a powerful, symbolic form.
In this light, one may discern a fourth ingredient in Maimonides’s revolutionary account of prophecy. We have already seen that the Rambam understood prophecy as natural, not miraculous; it is a human achievement, not a divine initiative; and the prophet is a superlative human being, but not more than that. In addition, prophecy takes place within the prophet and not outside. Since prophecy is a symbolic representation of an intellectual phenomenon, once it has happened, a person reverts to the rational mode to decode the prophetic symbols. The intellect is garbed in imaginative form and then must itself interpret the prophecy. Prophecy enables reason to be self-reflective. The prophet activates his intellect through the mediation of imagination in order to understand his own thoughts anew.
This idea of prophecy as an internal phenomenon may seem to undermine the objective nature of the prophetic experience. If it is a human achievement that takes place within the individual, in what sense is prophecy divine revelation? Doesn’t giving psychological explanations of prophetic process also imply its secularization?
The truth that reveals itself to the prophet is, according to Maimonides, absolutely objective and represents an external reality. The symbols that imagination creates for the prophet are conceived deep within him, but when he reflects upon and deciphers them he grasps a signified world that touches on the foundations of existence. Maimonides’s prophetic conception of dreams stands in contrast to Freudian dream theory.
Freud viewed dreams as a secret, symbolic script that we must decode and interpret. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote that, while the ancient world saw a dream as a letter received from the gods, he believed that a dream was a kind of letter, not from the gods but from a no less mysterious place: the unconscious. The dream is a symbolic communication from the unconscious to the conscious mind, a precious gateway to self-knowledge. The central role of dreams, according to Freud, is wish fulfillment. If we are able to interpret our dreams, we will thereby come to understand our deepest desires.
For both Maimonides and Freud, dreams are in a language of images that requires rational interpretation. In the Freudian dream, however, the knowledge that interpretation affords is limited to that of the dreamer’s mind. The Maimonidean prophetic dream, on the other hand, bestows knowledge whose significance is far more profound. Prophecy is a moment when a person breaks through the boundaries of self.
The experience of prophecy is a symbolic representation of an objective truth. In general, however, scriptural accounts of prophecy set forth the truth without describing the accompanying drama. Many prophetic passages are monologues in which a prophet conveys ideas that are derived from an intellectual interpretation given by the prophet to images that he saw in his mind. Generally, the Bible does not disclose the whole creative process with readers—just the results. But sometimes the interpretation of the vision and also the vision itself are described: “and so too with other prophets; there are those who tell us the parable and its meaning, while others just tell us the meaning” (MT, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah, 3:7).
In some instances the Bible conveys the symbolic vision of the prophecy but not its interpretation: “And sometimes they speak just the parable, but not its solution, as in, for example, some of the words of Ezekiel and Zechariah—and in all of them they prophesy in riddles” (MT, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah, 3:7).
In Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot, the reader is exposed to the prophet’s inner world. We glimpse the products of Ezekiel’s powerful imagination and contemplate their tumultuous symbols, but without explanation. The reader is expected to figure out what the vision means. In this sense, prophetic passages of the third kind make the reader a participant in the prophetic process. The final step, in which the prophet returns to rational consciousness and interprets the vision, is left to the reader. Here, the Bible is not merely presenting prophecy but also inviting us to take part in it.
Prophecy may also involve the capacity to discern the future:
So too, the faculty of divination exists in all people . . . but in virtue of the strength of this divination the mind goes over all the premises and draws from them conclusions in the shortest time, so that it is thought to happen in no time at all. In virtue of this faculty, certain people give warnings concerning great future events. (Guide, 2:38)
The power of divination seems a paranormal intuition. The prophet is able to predict future events in a way that is so quick that the rational mind does not appear to be involved in the process at all. But this is an illusion.16 According to Maimonides, the prophet’s power of divination allows him to reflect very rapidly on the continuum of past and present events and thereby draw conclusions about what will happen in the future. This is actually an ordinary intellectual operation.17 The faculty of divination simply accelerates the work of processing data and drawing inferences.18
Maimonides’s explanation of prophecy offers a new understanding of a number of scriptural passages. The Torah tells us that Abraham, who was sitting at the entrance to his tent, ran toward three men who were approaching and, without knowing that they were angels, extended extraordinary hospitality. According to Maimonides, the story never actually happened but rather was all a prophetic vision that took place in Abraham’s mind.
And the Lord appeared to him by the tents of Mamre . . . and he raised his eyes and saw and behold three men were standing facing him” (Gen. 18:1–2). For after he had first propounded the proposition that God appeared to him, he began to explain what the form of this proposition was; and he said that at first he saw three men and ran; whereupon they spoke and were spoken to. He who propounded this allegorical explanation says of Abraham’s utterance: And he said: My Lord, if I have now found favor in your sight, pass not away, I pray you from your servant (Gen. 18:3) that it too is a description of what he said to one of them in a vision of prophecy, he says in fact He said it to the greatest among them. Understand this story, for it is one of the secrets.” (Guide, 2:42)
These biblical descriptions enable us to behold, as it were, Abraham’s inner visions. Maimonides claims that Jacob’s struggle with an angel and the talking donkey in the story of Bilaam (Num. 22:22–35) also happened only in visions. The category of prophetic vision may be widened to include many other biblical episodes. The scholar Avraham Nouriel maintains, that according to Maimonides, even the binding of Isaac only took place in a prophetic vision.19 Abraham did not rise early in the morning, or physically saddle his ass, or journey for three days, or actually offer his son on an altar. It all happened in a vision. This approach empties biblical narratives of historical significance. The prophetic vision is a continuous, symbolic, multivalent phenomenon that transforms biblical narrative from history into literature, from something that really happened into a parable.
Maimonides determines that although many of the biblical stories did not actually take place in reality, they are still true—because the lessons that emerge from their parables are true. If an event is historical, then it is something that happened in the past; if it is a parable, then it is a story that also “happens” in the present and the future. Turning story into allegory by placing it in the category of prophetic vision strengthens its meaning and transforms it from an isolated event into a universal truth.
God’s revelation to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai significantly challenges Maimonides’s theory of prophecy. If prophecy requires preparation and training, how could a slave-people suddenly achieve prophecy in the middle of the desert? If prophecy is attainable only by a few extraordinary individuals, how could it be reached by the entirety of the Jewish people, so many of whom belonged to the “ignorant masses”?
Maimonides relies on the Rabbinic midrashim (narrative forms of Rabbinic commentary on the Bible) that distinguish between the first two commandments, which were heard by the whole people, and those that followed, which Moses alone received. The difference, according to Maimonides, is that anyone can fully grasp the first two commandments, which express God’s existence and unity, by means of an entirely rational proof. Not so, however, with the latter commandments:
The sages have a dictum formulated in several passages of the midrashim and also in the Talmud. This is their dictum: they heard I and thou shalt not from the mouth of the Mighty One. They mean that these words reached them just as they reached Moses our Master and that it was not Moses who communicated them to them. For these two principles, I mean the existence of the deity and His being one are knowable by human speculation alone. Now with regard to anything that can be known by demonstration, the status of the prophet and anyone else who knows it are equal; there is no superiority of one over the other. Thus these two principles are not known through prophecy alone. The text of the Torah says: unto you it was shown (Deut. 4:35). As for the other commandments, they belong to the class of generally accepted opinions and those adopted in virtue of tradition, not to the class of intellecta. (Guide, 2:33)
The Jewish people, according to Maimonides, experienced a moment of philosophical illumination, but not prophecy. The revelation at Sinai proved God’s existence, incorporeality, and unity. Maimonides believed that such proofs, although complex, were accessible to the masses. He even presented one such proof, as we saw above, in the first chapter of the Mishneh Torah, when he determined that knowledge of God was incumbent on the whole Jewish people. Maimonides’s understanding of the Sinai moment reflects his trust in the potential for democratizing philosophy, even as he rules out the possibility of democratizing prophecy.
Our description of prophecy applies to all Jewish prophets except Moses. His prophecy was qualitatively different:
The proof from the Torah as to his prophecy being qualitatively different from that of all who came before him is constituted by his saying: And I appeared to Abraham . . . but my name, the Lord, I made not known to them (Ex. 6:3). Thus it informs us that his apprehension was not like that of the patriarchs, but greater—nor, all the more, like those who came before. As for the difference between his prophecy and that of all those who came after, it is stated by way of communicating information in the dictum: And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face (Deut. 34:10). Thus it has been made clear that his apprehension is different from all those who came before him in Israel, which is a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, and in whose midst is the Lord—and all the more so from the apprehension of all those who came in other religions communities. (Guide, 2:35)
Moses was unique, says the Rambam. In part 2, chapter 35 of the Guide, Maimonides declares that the term “prophecy,” applied both to Moses and to other prophets, is “amphibolous,” that is, equivocal. An amphibolous word is one “in which two or more essential meanings have, for whatever reason, been joined together and neither predominates” (Milot Ha-higayon, 13:57).
With amphibolous words, the similarity between the different meanings is coincidental rather than essential. The prophecy of Moses is of a different order than that of other prophets. His prophecy, and only his, had legislative force. Even the prophetical levels of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did not confer upon them this power. People followed them because of the power of their personalities, not because the people were commanded to do so. Maimonides distinguishes Moses from the other prophets and thereby reinforces Moses’s authority. Maimonides’s conception allows anyone—at least anyone whose imaginative faculty is not congenitally limited—to train, to prepare, and to reach the level of prophecy. However, if Moses’s prophecy could be replicated in anyone, then a subsequent prophet claiming to have attained the same level could abrogate, amend, or supplement Torah law. Therefore, it was important for Maimonides to characterize Moses’s prophecy as unique and not reproducible.
Some contemporary scholars claim that the Rambam’s view is a necessary opinion, meaning that, in order to preserve the authority of halakhah, it is important that people accept the uniqueness of Moses’s prophecy. But, they argue, Maimonides’s real opinion was that the terms he ascribed to other prophets apply equally to Moses. Maybe Moses’s prophecy was of a higher order than that of other prophets, but it was still the same sort of prophetic experience.
In chapter 2 of the Guide, Maimonides differentiates between divine law and human law. One of the ways to distinguish between the two is to look at who gave them:
It also remains for you to know if he who lays claim to such guidance is a perfect man to whom a prophetic vision of that guidance has been vouchsafed, or whether he is an individual who lays claim to these dicta, having plagiarized them. The way of putting this to the test is to consider the perfection of that individual, carefully to examine his actions, and to study his way of life. The strongest of the indications that you should pay attention to this guidance is constituted by his renunciation of and contempt for the bodily pleasures, for this is the first of the degrees of people of science and, all the more so, of the prophets. (Guide, 2:40)
Since prophecy is an expression of human perfection, one may determine the authenticity of a particular prophetic message by examining the personality of the prophet. If he is indeed perfect, then it is possible that he has attained genuine prophetic experience. However, the paragraph quoted above is not describing ordinary prophecy; it refers to prophecy that creates law. Now, we saw earlier that Maimonides attributes this kind of prophecy to Moses alone. Since he previously stated that anyone who is not Moses and claims to have received a law-giving prophecy is a false prophet, it would appear that this passage undermines the idea of the uniqueness of Moses, because it grants that any prophet may be a source of legislation. Is this a contradiction of the seventh kind, that is, an intentional contradiction for the sake of the concealment of esoteric ideas?
That would not be the only contradiction. In part 2, chapter 35 of the Guide, part of the introduction to his teaching on prophecy, Maimonides writes that since his doctrine of prophecy does not apply to Moses, he will not mention him in the ensuing chapters: “And I will not relate to Moses’s prophecy with a single word in these chapters, neither explicitly, nor in hints.” Notwithstanding this emphatic declaration, Maimonides does mention Moses again—many times. He even illustrates parts of his theory using the example of Moses’s prophecy. For example, he asserts that a sad person cannot have a prophetic experience, citing Moses as proof. Moses was so aggrieved by the sin of the spies that he did not prophesy for another forty years:
Prophetic revelation did not come to Moses, peace be on him, after the disastrous incident of the spies, until the whole generation of the desert perished, in the way that revelation used to come before, because, seeing the enormity of their crime, he suffered greatly because of the matter. (Guide, 2:36)
The dissonance between Maimonides’s professed intention not to mention Moses and what he actually writes reflects essential tensions in his teaching. Maimonides’s theory of prophecy is based on the idea that the imagination of the morally perfect person represents what is in his intellect. This theory does not apply to Moses, because his prophecy is supposed not to involve imagination at all (Guide, 2:45). Nevertheless, Maimonides illustrates the imaginative variety of prophecy precisely through the example of Moses. These contradictions may be added to others that Rambam commentators have found in his treatment of Moses’s prophecy.20 Closing the gap between Moses’s prophecy and that of others has far-reaching implications.
Even if we emphasize Maimonides’s straightforward writing and leave aside radical commentaries and contradictions of the seventh kind, we are left with a highly unusual approach to Moses’s prophecy. According to Maimonides, the uniqueness of Moses’s prophecy was that he connected directly to the cosmic intellect, without the intermediation of imagination. This was the greatest cognitive achievement in human history.21 No one will ever reach such heights again.
Whether we stress the radical or traditional interpretation of his teaching, Maimonides’s approach to this issue is a revolutionary departure in the history of Jewish thought. The Torah, in his view, is an intellectual achievement. Jewish rationalists prior to Maimonides, such as Saadia Gaon and Bachya Ibn Pakuda, labored to demonstrate the alignment of reason and Torah. Saadia, for example, gave rational proofs for the existence of God, the creation of the world, the existence of divine providence, a system of reward and punishment, and even for the revival of the dead. He sought to rationally prove the content of Jewish faith out of a deep conviction that the truth as conceived by reason must be the same truth that is revealed by the Torah. In his view, reason and Torah are two authentic ways of accessing truth and therefore cannot contradict one another. The task of the religious philosopher, then, is to harmonize them.
Maimonides, by contrast, does not try to make reason and Torah compatible. For him, there is no need to harmonize revelation and reason, because revelation reveals reason. One does not have to reconcile the two intermediaries between us and truth, because they are really one. According to Saadia Gaon, Torah exists in harmony with reason; according to Maimonides, Torah is the revelation of reason.
Maimonides recasts our conceptions of prophecy, the prophetic event, and the image of the prophet. He bridges the gap between a perfect, unchanging God and the ideas of revelation and prophecy. Maimonides opens up new perspectives on the Bible and on the Law, and in the process he creates a new image of a hero.
The Bible: Many of the biblical stories could be considered prophetic visions. Maimonides and those who continued his approach erode the image of the Bible as a historical book and treat its stories as parables that express Jewish prophecy. This has important implications for modern readers who are troubled by questions about the historical truth of Scripture.
The Law: The prophecy that expressed biblical legislation was not a disruption of reason; rather, it was reason’s perfect expression: the Law is the product of intellect. One implication of this view is that all of the commandments may be explained rationally.
The Hero: Maimonides’s God is perfect, pure, and unchanging, beyond space and time. In the prophetic process, the only thing that changes is the prophet’s consciousness. The prophet is elevated above his physical needs and desires, connects himself to the cosmic intellect, and reveals metaphysical truths. Because of God’s unchanging nature, alteration and initiative are transferred into the human realm. A new kind of religious hero appears: the perfect man, whose discoveries constitute revelation. An even more extraordinary expression of how divine perfection expands the human role may be found in Maimonides’s teachings about providence, to which we now turn.