Prophecy

Jeremiah urges Judah to submit to Babylon while Hananiah claims that Babylon will soon fall. Both use the same prophetic tropes to convince their listeners. Maimonides reads this story as a blueprint for distinguishing true prophets from false ones.

The use of the unusual verb מִדַּבֵּר, middabber in Numbers 7:89 suggests that YHWH does not speak to Moses in the literal and simple sense.

Ahab’s 400 court prophets all assure him that he will defeat Aram, but the prophet Micaiah tells him that these prophets are being enticed by a lying spirit, sent by YHWH himself, for the purpose of destroying Ahab. If Ahab had been willing to face his own position vis-a-vis God honestly, he would have known who was telling the truth.

Deuteronomy promises the Israelites that God will continue sending prophets “like Moses.” But if the Torah’s legislation cannot be adjusted, what is the role of later prophets? And how can all the changes to Torah law made by the rabbis be justified?

During the Babylonian siege, while Jeremiah was in King Zedekiah’s prison, he redeems his cousin'’s land, upon YHWH’s instruction. The incarcerated prophet thus symbolically enacts the future restoration for the people who will soon be exiled from their land.

Ancient Near Eastern cultic rituals located the presence of gods and divine messages in nature.

Even those who categorically deny that God has form, is composed of matter, is visible, or is subject to the constraints of time and place, cannot seem to relinquish the notion that God speaks precisely as described in the Bible.

Deuteronomy introduces the possibility of future Moses-like prophets who will continue to instruct the Israelites how to follow YHWH’s commandments. At the same time, it makes the existence of such a prophet virtually impossible.

The Torah is silent about the nature of Joseph’s dreams: What do they mean?  Do they come from God? This ambiguity is part of the literary artistry of the story, which relates Joseph’s “coming of age” as a prophet.

Deuteronomy 13 discusses the case of a false prophet who does not have a message from God, but advocates worshiping other gods. Oddly enough, the false prophet can successfully perform miracles, or is able to predict the future.  How is this possible?

A Devar Torah inaugurating Project TABS / TheTorah.com

Moses' control over prophecy is successfully challenged.

What we know about where he lived, the language he spoke, and the gods he worshiped.

An Exploration of the Views of Sa’adia Gaon, Judah Halevi, Ibn Ezra, and Maimonides

The Sinai theophany is virtually absent from the Bible outside of the Torah and the very late book of Nehemiah. This absence reflects an alternative tradition that sees Israel’s laws as deriving from multiple small revelations from prophets throughout history. 

The biblical portrait of Miriam can leave the feminist reader with a lingering bitterness but a literary rereading helps highlight her prophetic leadership role.

In a polemical response to Christian and Jewish allegorical interpretation of the Torah’s laws, Bekhor Shor writes that just as God speaks to Moses “clearly and without riddles” (Num 12:8), so too the Torah is clear and means what it says, and should not be interpreted allegorically.

In the Prophets, Israelite leaders such as Joshua, Saul, David, and Ahab use divination to help them make decisions, just as their ancient Near Eastern counterparts did. The Torah sidesteps the divinatory character of these objects and practices, and instead, emphasizes their ritual and religious character.

A Pagan “Prophet Like Moses”