21

The End of Prophecy

We now are in a position to take a long view of prophecy. I have discussed how my psychedelic drug research with DMT led me to the Hebrew Bible’s notion of this paradigmatic Western spiritual experience, reviewed salient features of the Hebrew Bible’s structure and contents relevant to prophecy, and characterized prophecy’s features and compared them side by side with those of the DMT effect. This comparison demonstrated that the two states display striking perceptual, emotional, cognitive, and other phenomenological similarities. It also revealed that the prophetic message, especially in the case of the canonical prophets, is much more abundant, sophisticated, and highly articulated than that of the DMT experience. While the messages of the non-canonical prophetic figures are quantitatively more modest than those of the canonical prophets, they nevertheless contain more truth value and impact than the information acquired by the DMT subjects.

I have reviewed the medieval Jewish philosophers’ metaphysical models for how prophecy works and attempted to relate them to the DMT state. Joining the two seemingly disparate phenomena of prophecy and the DMT experience using the bridge of medieval Jewish metaphysics has been one of the primary goals of my theoneurology model. The essential feature of this model is that it proposes that God communicates with humans through the agency of the mind-brain complex. DMT may be a critical component in this exchange.

Now that we have learned what prophecy is and how it may come about, what do the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish tradition say about its presence in our times? As usual, we find opposing views. One opinion is that prophecy has simply continued in much the same form as it did during the biblical era. Moses predicts: A prophet from your midst, from your brethren, like me, shall YHVH, your God, establish for you—to him shall you listen (Deut. 18:15).

On the other hand, prophecy may “end.” This end may occur in one of two ways. The more sanguine alternative is that in the distant future everyone will prophesy. Thus, prophecy as a unique phenomenon, different from normal consciousness, will cease to exist. This is one of the features of the “next world” that I previously discussed. As God tells the prophet: My spirit which is upon you and My words that I have placed in your mouth will not be withdrawn from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your offspring, nor from the mouth of your offspring’s offspring . . . from now until forever (Isa. 59:21).

The other “end” of prophecy is a true cessation. No one receives and communicates God’s message anymore. The psalmist states: Our signs we have not seen, there is no longer a prophet, and none among us knows how long (Ps. 74:9). Similarly, Ezekiel foretells: They shall seek vision from a prophet, but teaching shall be lost from the priest, and counsel from the elders (Ezek. 7:26).

One qualifier of this rabbinic proposition modifies the end of prophecy by limiting it to a particular type. The Second Temple prophets refer to the “earlier prophets” as distinct from themselves. Zechariah states: They did not hearken to the teachings and the words that YHVH of Hosts had sent through His spirit by the earlier prophets (Zech. 7:12). However, all the canonical prophets speak in God’s name and teach essentially the same message. While the form of the message varies across time, place, and personalities, this is the case throughout the entire biblical record. Perhaps these later prophets are alluding to the end of a specific type of a general phenomenon; for example, preaching to Israel’s kings.

However, rabbinic authorities who inherited the mantle of Jewish leadership around the beginning of the common era were more consistent in pronouncing prophecy’s actual end. They taught that this happened during the early Second Temple period, in the fifth century BCE. The earliest stratum of rabbinic teachings exists in the Talmud, so let’s look at a few representative Talmudic statements that make this assertion. Because traditional Judaism is essentially rabbinic, and rabbinic Judaism is essentially Talmudic, we will see how the rabbis laid the groundwork for the two-thousand-year-old Jewish tradition that prophecy has disappeared.

The Talmud states that after the destruction of the First Temple, “only children and fools prophesy” (Bava batra 12b), and “the wise are superior to the prophets” (Bava batra 12a). The Second Temple lacked, among other things, “the spirit of prophecy” and the Urim and Thummim prophetic tools (Yoma 21b). Legal acumen now trumped prophecy; for example, determining correct property boundaries without reference to previous rabbinic rulings is “nothing but prophecy” (Bava batra 12a). And in the spirit of historic revisionism, the Talmud interprets certain biblical references to prophets as “really” referring to legal scholars (Shabbat 119b).

How could prophecy have ended? Did it cease to exist because of some biological change in humans? Or were there perturbations in the theological-metaphysical realms? Did the authorities simply legislate away prophecy? Or did it never end?

METAPHYSICS AND THEOLOGY

An End to Prophecy

The medieval Jewish philosophers propose several reasons why prophecy ended, none of which stand up to biblical scrutiny. For example, Judah Halevi, who wrote when no significant Jewish population inhabited Israel, believes that prophecy can exist only in Israel because its geology and geography possess unique metaphysical properties. Without Jews living in Israel, prophecy could not occur, but once they return in the future, prophecy will also. However, the Hebrew Bible refutes Halevi’s assertion that prophecy can take place only in Israel. Ezekiel and Daniel prophesied in Babylonia and Jonah did so in Assyria.

Maimonides posits that prophecy requires an optimal constitution and training, and God’s will. He suggests that prophecy ended because of the sorrow of the exile, with depression making prophecy less likely because of its negative effects on the imagination. The Hebrew Bible contradicts this assertion: Jeremiah prophesied for decades in a state of near-continuous despondency. Thus, one needs to discard both these explanations—the presence of despondency and residing outside of Israel—for why prophecy “ended.”

As a way out of these and other contradictions, the medieval Jewish philosophers offer a solution to the problem of prophecy’s end, if indeed there was one, by placing much greater emphasis on God as the ultimate arbiter of the phenomenon. This is a difficult solution for the Aristotelian Maimonides, who while wearing his scientist-philosopher’s hat, notes that God does not stint, saying, “God will never withhold from any creature that which it deserves,”1 and “The laws of nature demand that everyone should be a prophet” when the proper conditions are met.2 At the same time, as a Jewish rabbi and community leader, Maimonides cannot go against centuries of rabbinic tradition regarding the end of prophecy. Thus, he proposes that the absence of prophecy in his day is supernatural; one cannot explain it scientifically. It is a miracle: the “miracle of withholding.” Despite the laws of nature, one can be qualified and yet not attain prophecy if God so decides.

Spinoza and the End of Prophecy

Spinoza’s analysis of prophecy turns on his defining it as any apprehension of the truth through the intellect. Therefore, anyone who attains a truthful certainty about anything experiences a measure of prophecy. Because, according to Spinoza, the Hebrew prophets were wrong about so many natural and theological laws, he writes that they possessed a lower degree of prophecy than many of us. Thus, we can’t really say that Spinoza confirmed or denied that prophecy ended because of his unique definition. Prophecy as he defines it has always existed. However, prophecy as those who believe in the literal truth of the Hebrew Bible define it, never existed, at least qua prophecy.

Nevertheless, Spinoza did effectuate an end to prophecy in a very real sense. He struck a mortal blow against it as a legitimate area of rational investigation.3 Because biblical prophecy isn’t really “prophetic,” scientific inquiry into its nature is akin to studying a mirage. In the case of a mirage, we can study heat, radiation, light, and even people’s sense that they are perceiving water, but there is no water. Similarly, for Spinoza, there is no prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. It is also a phantom. The study of “real” prophecy as he defines it is epistemology, the science of how we know things. And if the Hebrew Bible contains any miraculous revelation, such as the Golden Rule, its miraculous nature precludes its being an object of rational analysis. For Spinoza, how revelation works is fundamentally unknowable.

Spinoza’s treatment of biblical prophecy resulted in the Hebrew Bible becoming a book like any other book. We may understand it within its historical context as a text solely human in origin and not as a product of revelation. One gains insights into psychology, archaeology, literature, and so on by studying the text, but it is not a record of real prophecy, just as a mirage is not the perception of real water.

Spinoza also drove a stake into the heart of any attempt to reconcile science with prophetic experience. Because the Hebrew Bible contains little if anything prophetic, the text instead became poetic, social, political, anthropological, and psychopathological. No longer was it respectable to consider prophecy—as had the medievalists before him—as a system of intellects, agents, spheres, God, and human mental faculties. Studying prophecy’s shadows and reflections replaced inquiry into its essence.

Metaphysical approaches to the text gave way to modern bible studies, secular Western philosophy, and ultimately psychology. Psychiatry is still working within this paradigm. We see this in Freud’s writings about religion being a pathological product of unconscious mental processes,4 as well as in the more recent phenomenon of neurotheology. In this contemporary, if more benign, iteration of Freud’s reductionism, neurotheology teaches that religious experience similarly “serves a function,” but now it has become an adaptive brain state rather than a way to sublimate unconscious incestuous and murderous impulses. Spiritual experience enhances our physiological, emotional, and social lives. It is good for us, rather than being how God communicates with us in order to draw us nearer to Him. Those interested in studying prophecy from the top down now were seen as reactionaries, saddled by irrational tradition, faith, or even obscurantism. They were not welcome at the table of high-level scientific or philosophic debate. Any attempt to bring a theocentric metaphysics of prophecy back within the purview of contemporary philosophic and scientific discourse had become pseudoscience.

BIOLOGY

Julian Jaynes in his book on the “bicameral mind” suggests how the experience of hearing a spoken voice arose and fell in the course of human evolution.5 For millennia, those existing in small tribal groups perceived an “outside” voice advising, admonishing, and otherwise guiding individuals who faced various decision points. The spoken voice served as the prototype of self-consciousness and introspection. Jaynes theorizes that this voice was the subjective experience of communication between the brain’s right and left cerebral hemispheres.

He proposes that several thousand years ago, certain geo-cultural forces exerted selective pressure on the brain in such a manner as to gradually eliminate this phenomenon. The combined effects of volcanism-induced mass migrations and the establishment of large city-states influenced the evolution of brain structures mediating this exchange between its two hemispheres. A new “unified” consciousness emerged that was more adaptable to the increasingly complex physical and social environments. Jaynes considers the prophets as the last exemplars of “bicamerality,” a trait that finally died out with them and whose remnants we observe in those experiencing hallucinatory psychoses. He presents literary and archaeological evidence supporting his views, but the physical anthropological data, evidence of structural brain changes in physical remains of ancient humans, are lacking.

My own contribution to possible biological bases of the “end” of prophecy invokes endogenous psychedelics. If these compounds mediate elements of the prophetic state, decreased activity of this system would result in the disappearance of those experiences. This diminished activity might relate to the synthesis or breakdown of, sensitivity to, or relative proportions of different psychoactive molecules. However, as in Jaynes’s case, I know of no data either supporting or refuting this hypothesis.

HISTORY AND POLITICS

The most cogent arguments I have found for the rabbinic declaration that prophecy ended are political ones.6 That is, it didn’t end, but it was expedient to say that it had. Prophecy “ended” because the authorities told us so, and we believed them.

Various explanations exist for the rabbis’ pronouncing the death of prophecy. A likely reason pertains to the birth and early growth of Christianity, which temporally and geographically coincides with their edict. The earliest Christians, many of whom were Jews, attempted to convert other Jews to this new religion by claiming that Jesus was a Jewish prophet, if not the promised messiah. By retrospectively proclaiming that prophecy had ended several centuries before Jesus, the rabbis implied that he possessed no prophetic stature.

We can see how the rabbis’ response to Christianity affected their attitude toward prophecy when examining their postbiblical writings. There are six times the number of references to the canonical prophetic books in the New Testament compared with the contemporaneous rabbinic Mishnah.*1247 Both of these works were competing for legitimacy among the same groups, and the quantity of Christian references to prophecy indicates how important it was in supporting Christian contentions of the messianic status of Jesus. To counter these claims on the part of Christianity, the rabbis responded by extirpating prophecy from their competing version of normative Judaism. The rabbis delegitimized contemporary prophecy and prophetic authority in an attempt to delegitimize Christianity’s authority.

Prophecy rails against the corruption of those in power. Perhaps the rabbis wanted prophecy to end in order to maintain the precarious safety of the Jews living within Roman-occupied Judea. They marginalized anyone who claimed prophetic rank as the basis for criticizing the occupying government. This function overlapped with that of refuting anyone’s claim to being the messiah, one of whose roles is to redeem the Jewish people from subjugation by other nations. The rabbis had exercised this function throughout the years of the Roman occupation beginning in the first century BCE, not only during the early years of Christianity. If the Jewish religious establishment labeled as imposters those whom the masses considered messianic prophets, the authorities might be more tolerant of eccentrics making overblown claims than they would be of revolutionaries. In fact, the rabbis could claim a greater love for their co-religionists than that of the prophets or so-called messiahs, for the latter two sets of individuals consistently questioned whether the Jews deserved to survive because of their continual transgressions against God’s word.

In a related manner, the rabbis may have taught that prophecy ended because it had never been effective and the people no longer needed it. The prophets had not prevented the Jews’ exiles to Babylonia and Assyria centuries before, and their continued destabilizing presence would only lead to their destruction again, this time by the Romans. In addition, the kings of the independent nations of Israel and Judea had disappeared. Therefore, the most important and influential audience to whom the prophets preached no longer existed. The prophets’ time had passed.

The rabbis also used the canonization of scripture to promulgate the notion that prophecy was no more. By closing off the Hebrew Bible, a prophetic text, to any additional books, they implied that no contemporary individual’s utterances qualified as prophetic and therefore worthy of inclusion in the canon. Canonization also suggested that people no longer needed prophecy to know God’s word because of its ready availability in an authorized text. If the “new Israel,” the nascent Christian religion, could not tack on their “prophetic” narratives to a sealed canon, they had no claim to prophetic authority, at least not within the Jewish stream.

DID PROPHECY REALLY END?

Contrary to their general declaration, the early rabbis conceded that prophecy continued in their time. They referred to people in Israel who are “if not prophets, then the sons of prophets” (Pesachim 66b). If one awakens from a dream and a verse of scripture “falls into one’s mouth,” this is a “small prophecy” (Berachot 55b). Some sages sought answers in dreams or nighttime visions to questions they could not solve in normal waking consciousness, and considered these answers prophetic (Bava metzia 107b). Rabbinic lore is replete with references to the bat kol, the “daughter” or “echo” of a “voice.” This auditory phenomenon transmits God’s word to its recipients, usually one or several rabbis involved in solving a moral, exegetical, or legal dilemma (Yoma 9b). Halevi, among the medieval Jewish philosophers, states that the Talmudic sages composed “with God’s help.”8

All of these examples lead to the conclusion that the “end of prophecy” points to the end of a particular type that belonged to a group of prophets whose ranks included Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The rabbis seem to have legislated the end of canonical prophecy, but they tacitly accepted the continuing existence of the non-canonical type among their ranks.

PROPHECY AFTER THE PROPHETS

During the late Second Temple period and afterward, those outside the institution of the rabbinate continued to claim prophetic stature, and the Jewish population of Judea regarded them in that light. As Rebecca Gray, author of Prophetic Figures in the Late Second Temple Jewish Palestine, notes: “People said and did in Josephus’*125 time very much the same sort of things classical prophets said and did.”9 In addition, “prophetic” books continued to appear; in particular, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Both are collections of works by Jews and early non-Jewish Christians, who for the sake of authoritativeness, attributed them to ancient biblical personalities, such as Moses and the twelve sons of Jacob.10 Some of these works found their way into the New Testament, but the redactors of the Hebrew Bible did not include them. The content and style of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are similar, and are replete with typical prophetic features, describing an “almost psychedelic world.”11

Certain rabbis who lived after the Talmudic and Second Temple eras also attained a prophetic reputation.12 Even our medieval Jewish philosophers admitted to their own prophetic or prophecy-like experiences. In his commentary to the verse, Rashi tells us how he arrived at his interpretation of Exodus 28:4: “I don’t know but my heart tells me.” And Maimonides notes how he attained to a certain insight: “These ideas presented themselves like a prophetic revelation.”13 We most often associate post-Maimonidean spiritual practices and states with the thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.14 Soon thereafter, the highly visionary kabbalistic school of Isaac Luria rose up in Ottoman Palestine in the sixteenth century.15 The eighteenth century founder of the Hassidic movement, the Baal Shem Tov, recounted numerous prophetic experiences quite similar to those we find in the Hebrew Bible.16

SUMMARY

From a naturalistic point of view, concluding that prophecy ended—or survives only as an impulse for good, beauty, or knowledge17—is not tenable. I see no reason to assert that the biological and metaphysical mechanisms we’ve discussed, excluding the miraculous withholding of prophecy, no longer operate much as they always have. Perhaps, then, it is more accurate to frame the discussion by saying that while canonical prophecy ended millennia ago, non-canonical prophecy has continued, albeit standing much more at the periphery of normative Judaism than it did in the distant past.

If, on the other hand, one wishes to believe that no manner of prophecy exists any longer because God has decided to withhold it, there is nothing preventing us from doing everything possible to bring about its renewal. On the contrary, we read repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible that following God’s guidelines will result in humanity’s redemption, one of whose features is widespread prophecy. By thoroughly understanding prophecy’s nature and mechanisms, we may use that knowledge to make ourselves more qualified for prophecy if and when the time comes that God chooses to grant it again.