Revelation – Mattan Torah

Benjamin D. Sommer

Revelation is a central concept in Judaism, referring broadly to the communication of God’s will. This article addresses Jewish thinking about how God communicates God’s will to the Jewish people and to humanity more generally. It identifies main themes and debates that recur in Judaism, from the biblical era (including traditions that underlie and precede the final form of biblical books) through Rabbinic and medieval traditions and into the modern and contemporary eras. It acknowledges not only the variety of ways Jewish thinkers have perceived the mechanics of revelation but also the ways in which these approaches recognize that different sacred texts (the Pentateuch, other parts of the Bible, Rabbinic texts, post-Rabbinic texts) have been revealed (or influenced by revelational processes) in different ways. Some sacred texts in Judaism are the product of sages’ interpretation of older revealed texts, and the interpretive activities of the sages can be considered part of the revelatory process, which entails both divine and human roles. The article further asks whether Judaism acknowledges a universal revelation based on reason or nature and accessible to all humanity in addition to, and underlying, a particular revelation to Israel. The article ends by examining two feminist approaches to revelation along with the challenges and new models these approaches open up.

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Revelation Mattan torah Interpretation Lawgiving Written Torah Oral Torah Prophecy Natural law Natural theology Verbal revelation Participatory revelation Mosaic revelation

1 Defining the term

1.1 Keith Ward

We can follow the Anglican comparative theologian Keith Ward in preliminarily defining revelation as ‘a communication of information by God or by a suprahuman spiritual source’ (Ward 1994: 15). More specifically, for a theistic religion such as Judaism, Ward suggests that revelation ‘occurs when God directly intends someone to know something beyond normal human capacity, and brings it about that they do know it, and they know that God has so intentionally caused it’ (1994: 16). This definition does not fit all theistic conceptions of revelation, as we will see in section 5 below, but it works well for most Jewish thinkers from the Bible to the present.

1.2 Mattan torah

Biblical and Rabbinic texts have no precise equivalent for our English term ‘revelation’. (The modern Hebrew term hitgallut in the sense of ‘divine revelation’ first appears in the late eighteenth century, as noted by Hebrew Academy [n.d.] and Ben-Yehudah and Tur-Sinai 1908–1959: 1221 [vol. 3]; the first citation of the term in the sense of ‘divine revelation’ in the latter source is from Qedushas Levi by Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev, first published in 1798.) The closest analogy in traditional Rabbinic sources is the phrase mattan torah, as the philosopher Hermann Cohen (1995: 83) notes. This phrase, variously rendered ‘giving of torah’ or ‘lawgiving’, establishes that for Judaism revelation conveys prescriptive teachings about human behaviour rather than just information about the nature of God or the cosmos. To understand what mattan torah entails, then, one must first understand the term torah. What is it that God gives? If, following Ward, we understand revelation to entail God’s intention that the nation Israel should know something, then, according to Jewish tradition, what sort of information does God intend Israel to know?

1.2.1 The Hebrew noun torah

The noun torah is used in multiple ways in Jewish culture. It refers to a particular book and also to a body of teachings that goes beyond that book. ‘Torah’ (especially, ‘the Torah’) can refer to the first section of the Jewish Bible, which is the Five Books of Moses or Pentateuch. But torah also refers all Jewish learning throughout the generations, whether written down or not. Thus when Pirqei Avot, the Mishnah’s tractate on fundamental principles, begins with the words, ‘Moses received Torah from Sinai’, it refers to Jewish religious teachings generally, including but hardly limited to the Pentateuch. In the Bible, the term torah can refer to a specific text or scroll – sometimes the Pentateuch (e.g. Ezra 7:10; Neh 8:1–3; 2 Chr 30:16; 35:26), and in other cases specifically the Book of Deuteronomy (Josh 8:30–32; 2 Kgs 14:6). But the basic meaning of the noun torah is ‘guidance, pointing in some direction, teaching’ (Prov 1:8; 3:1; 13:14). The noun is derived from the verb horah, which means ‘point, show’ (Gen 46:28; Exod 15:25; Prov 6:13) and ‘teach, give directions’ (Exod 4:12, 35:34; Deut 33:10; Isa 28:26). From the basic meaning ‘guidance’, the noun further developed its most common sense in biblical Hebrew, ‘law’, which is to say, ‘mandatory guidance’, ‘guidance that is commanded’ (Lev 6:2; Num 19:2; Deut 33:4; Josh 1:7). The noun torah in this sense can refer to ritual law (Lev 6:2; 7:1) or civil, criminal, and ethical laws (Amos 2:4–7). It often appears parallel to words for ‘commandment’, ‘statute’, ‘rule’, and ‘covenant’ (Exod 18:20; Ps 19:8–10; 89:31–32; 2 Chr 14:3). The word also means ‘legal ruling’, ‘an answer that an authoritative source gives to a legal enquiry’, a sense similar to the postbiblical Hebrew-Aramaic term pesaq (Hag 2:11–13; Isa 2:3; cf. the verb horah in this sense in Deut 17:10–11). But torah as guidance, whether in the sense of a written text or an oral declamation, is not limited to legal directives. It can also refer to an instructive narrative or a motivational speech that is worth memorizing, pondering, repeating, and studying (Josh 1:7–9; Ps 78:1–5; Isa 8:16; Deut 1:5). In one case it refers to a narrative parents tell children in order to justify a ritual practice (Exod 13:5–10).

It follows that the denotation of the term mattan torah is broader than a purely legislative act. It encompasses storytelling that provides direction, wisdom that one memorizes and mulls over, and orations that encourage observance of the laws bestowed. By giving torah, God acts not only like a legal authority (e.g. the priests and scribes of Jer 8:8–9; 18:18; Ezek 7:26; cf. Isa. 8:16) but also like a parent (Prov 1:8; cf. Ps 78:1–5) and like a national leader encouraging the citizenry to act the right way (Deut 33:10). Mattan torah encompasses both law and narrative, both Halakhah and aggadah; it orients its recipient in the realms of behaviour as well as thought. Revelation in Judaism inexorably entails command, but, following David Weiss Halivni (1986), we should recognize that revelation in Judaism situates command within a discourse that motivates one to observe the law and that provides context for understanding how to apply it. Revelation includes not only law but justification for the law.

2 Gradations of revelation: different types of torah

2.1 Written Torah or the Bible: the Pentateuch and the Nakh (Prophets and Writings)

According to Jewish tradition, mattan torah in the biblical period resulted in the twenty-four books of the Jewish biblical canon. But these books – and the revelations that produced them – differ in status. The first section of the canon, consisting of the Five Books of Moses or Pentateuch, is by far the most important in Judaism: it is the most sacred, the most authoritative, and the most familiar to Jews. The remaining books are traditionally divided into two groups, the Nevi’im or Prophets and the Ketuvim or Writings. On a practical level, however, it would be more accurate to say that the Jewish Bible has two parts: first and foremost, there is the Pentateuch; also, there is the rest of the Bible, sometimes referred to as the Nakh (an acronym created from the first letters of Nevi’im and Ketuvim). Only the Pentateuch is chanted in its entirety in the course of synagogue worship; a mere fraction of the remaining material is chanted in the synagogue. Jewish schools tend to give much more attention to the Pentateuch than they give to the Nakh. While Jewish beliefs flow from and to some degree claim to be based on the whole Bible, Jewish law – the core of Jewish practice and identity – claims to be based on the Pentateuch alone. The revelations to Moses that produced the Pentateuch are viewed in Jewish tradition as having been more direct, more reliable, and more consequential than subsequent revelations to motley prophets who produced the other books of the Bible. The revelation of the Pentateuch at Sinai, moreover, was an event of lawgiving, but according to traditional Jewish sources, the revelations to prophets after the Mosaic era did not disclose new laws; rather, they provide encouragement, warning, and clarifications about the importance of observing the law. (For the view that the purpose of the Prophets and Writings is to exhort Israel to observe the Torah’s laws but not to legislate, see, e.g., the commentary of Nissim Gerondi [the Ran] to b. Ned. 22b, as well as the Ahavat Eitan of Abraham of Minsk on b. Ber. 5a in the Ein Ya‘akov, who maintains that the role of the Prophets and Writings is to elucidate the Pentateuch, just as the Gemara elucidates the Mishnah. On the prophetic canon as supplementing and commenting on the Pentateuch in the view of both Rabbinic Judaism and at least some of the scribes in the Second-Temple period, see Blenkinsopp 1977: 116–120.)

2.1.1 Mosaic revelation versus prophetic revelation

Biblical, Rabbinic, and medieval texts distinguish between God’s communications with Moses and God’s communications with all other prophets. In Num 12:6–8, God states:

If your prophet is a prophet from Yhwh, it is through a mirror that I make Myself known to him; I speak to him through a dream. Not so My servant Moses! He is trusted throughout My household. I speak to him directly, clearly and not in riddles. He gazes on the form of Yhwh. (All translations from Hebrew are the author’s.)

This passage teaches that God appeared to Moses ‘clearly’ or in ‘a direct vision’ (mar’eh), but to other prophets God appears as though ‘in a mirror’ (mar’ah). Here we need to recall that mirrors in the ancient world were not like our own. Generally small and handheld, they were made of copper, and they had uneven surfaces rather than the perfectly smooth surfaces our mirrors have. As a result, the image one saw in a mirror was tiny, reddish, and blurry. Moses saw God; other prophets saw a poor reflection. What non-Mosaic prophets learn from God is like a dream or a riddle, both of which are in need of interpretation. But God speaks to Moses ‘directly’ – literally, ‘mouth to mouth’. Rabbinic literature also notes this distinction, though describing the matter somewhat differently. See, for example, a midrash in Wayyiqra Rabbah 1:14 (for another version of this teaching, see b. Yevam. 49b):

How did Moses differ from all the prophets? Rabbi Judah son of Rabbi Ille‘ai and the Sages expressed their opinions. Rabbi Judah said: All the prophets saw through nine aspaqlariyot [...] but Moses saw through one aspaqlariyah, as it is written, ‘Clearly and not in riddles’ (Num 12:8). The Sages said: All the prophets saw through a dirty aspaqlariyah, [...] but Moses saw through a polished aspaqlariyah.

An aspaqlariyah refers either to a mirror or to a pane of glass. In either case, in ancient times the image one saw through it was distorted; a pane of glass in the rabbis’ world was bumpier and less pellucid than a modern window. God’s revelation to Moses, then, was much clearer than revelations to all other prophets – though for this midrash, in contrast to Numbers 11, even Moses saw God indirectly. In the Middle Ages, Maimonides speaks of multiple levels of prophecy, the highest of which only Moses attained. In Part II, chapter 39 of The Guide to the Perplexed, he argues that Moses was the greatest of all prophets (Maimonides 1963: 378–381; 2024: 301–303). In Part II, chapters 41–42 he describes four types of prophetic revelation: (1) an angel speaks to the prophet within a dream or vision; (2) an angel speaks to the prophet; (3) the prophet experiences a dream or a vision; (4) God speaks to the prophet without an angel, a dream, or a vision (Maimonides 1963: 385–390; 2024: 308–312). Moses alone experienced the fourth. In Part II, chapter 45, Maimonides describes eleven degrees of prophecy, the first two of which were a sort of semi-prophecy or stepping stones to prophecy (Maimonides 1963: 395–403; 2024: 315–320). He maintains that God communicated with judges and kings at the level of semi-prophecy, and he notes the various prophets in the Bible who experienced higher or lower degrees. Some experienced more than one type; thus God communicated with Abraham both at the semi-prophetic level and through the three highest degrees of prophecy at different times. But Moses, uniquely, went beyond these eleven levels.

Some Rabbinic and medieval authorities explain that God communicated to non-Mosaic prophets in nonverbal or semiverbal form; these prophets interpreted and paraphrased those communications in order to pass them on the human audiences. Moses, however, transmitted specific words that came from God. Abraham Joshua Heschel (2005: 478–501 [1965: 264–298 [vol. 2]]; 2021: 679–714), Menachem Mendel Kasher (1927–1995: 328–379 [vol. 19]), Moshe Greenberg (1995: 405–420), and Alan Cooper (1990: 26–44) point out that sages from the Talmudic era (R. Isaac in b. Sanh. 89a) and the Middle Ages (Isaac Abarbanel, Menachem Meiri, Joseph Albo, Profiat Duran, Rashi) already affirm the existence of what Greenberg (1995: 405) calls ‘the human factor in biblical prophecy’. Thus prophets typically introduced their proclamations with the words, ‘Thus says Yhwh’. Several of these authors maintain that the word ‘thus’ (Heb. koh) denotes not exact quotation but an attempt to convey in their own words the main purport of divine communications. Moses, on the other hand, received precise linguistic communications from God, though at times (especially in Deuteronomy) he, too, interpreted or extended God’s messages before passing them on (Heschel 1962: 502–536). Thus Moses achieved the exalted status of a stenographer taking dictation from the Master of the Universe, while all other prophets were mere translators.

Several classical Jewish texts and thinkers maintain that there are differing degrees of prophetic revelation: biblical prophets had greater or lesser levels of access to God (with Moses having attained the highest level of access), and several other biblical characteres experienced near-prophetic communcations. The concept of multiple degrees of prophecy is implied in some biblical and Rabbinic texts, and it appears explicitly in the work of medieval and early modern authorities such as Maimonides, Menachem Ha-Meiri, Moshe Chaim Luzzato, and the chassidic master Tzadok Ha-Kohen (A. Sommer 2025: passim).

2.2 Oral Torah (Rabbinic literature and later traditions)

There are two Torahs according to the classical rabbis of the Talmudic era (hereafter: ‘the Rabbis’): Written Torah and Oral Torah. Both stem from God’s revelation to Israel at Sinai. The Written Torah consists not only of the Pentateuch but also the Prophets and Writings; in other words, ‘Written Torah’ is another term for ‘the Bible’. The Oral Torah consists of the classical works of Rabbinic literature composed in the first millennium CE: the Mishnah, the Talmuds, and midrashic and aggadic literature. Further, the term Oral Torah is often used to include post-Talmudic texts and teachings up to the present. In this expansive sense, the Oral Torah includes many teachings not relegated to writing; a sermon delivered in a synagogue last Saturday and classes taught in a Jewish school earlier today can also fall under the rubric of Oral Torah. (On the inclusion of Prophets and Writing within ‘Written Torah’, see the sources collected in Heschel 2005: 370–371 [1965: 73–74 [vol. 2]; 2021: 485–486] and Silman 1999: 32–33, and see further 1908–1959: 7704b [vol. 16]. On Oral Torah as a product of revelation at Sinai, see Rosenthal 1993: 448–489; Schäfer 1978: 153–197.)

While Rabbinic texts agree that Oral Torah stems from the revelation at Sinai, they conceptualize the relation between Oral Torah and revelation in more than one way. According to some texts (especially from later strata of the Babylonian Talmud), Moses received the entire the Oral Torah at Sinai – including all of Rabbinic literature and even what keen-witted students of the Torah would one day expound in the presence their teachers (see, e.g., y. Pe’ah 2:6, 4a; y. Ḥag. 1:8, 2d; b. Meg. 19b; Shemot Rabbah Ki Tissa 47:1; Wayyiqra Rabbah 22:1; Qohelet Rabbah 1:29, 5:6). Other Rabbinic texts make less comprehensive claims. Some passages claim that laws found in Rabbinic literature come from God, without insisting that all their details were revealed to Moses; rather, post-Sinaitic sages elaborated and added to these laws (see Sifra Shemini 1:9 on Lev 10:11; Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishmael Vayyisa‘ section 1 on Exod 15:26; Sifre Devarim section 48 and section 351). Some Rabbinic texts make clear that some aspects of Oral Torah were unknown to Moses and arose only after his day, even though some such later teachings were rhetorically linked to Moses (see, for example, the story told by Rav in b. Menah. 29b; Yannai’s teaching and its explanation in y. Sanh. 4:2, 6a, Seder Eliahu Zuṭa section 2, Bemidbar Rabbah Ḥuqqat section 4). Thus particular elements of Oral Torah were revealed to Moses at Sinai, but many others were not, and usually we are not in a position to know which ones are which.

Much that is found in Oral Torah results from the learned work of commentary and legislation performed by sages over generations. The Oral Torah, then, is partly human and partly divine in origin. Some medieval thinkers, such as Yom Tov Ishbili (the Ritba) and Nissim Gerondi (the Ran), regard the Oral Torah’s multiplicity of opinion resulting from this mixing of human and divine elements as ennobling because it gives space for human creativity. This perspective is embraced by several twentieth-century thinkers (Yitzchok Hutner, Abraham Isaac Kook, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Tamar Ross, Louis Jacobs). Other medieval Jewish thinkers, including Maimonides, regard the human dimensions of Oral Torah and the resultant multiplicity of views as the tragic result of human forgetfulness: because parts of the divine message revealed at Sinai as the Oral Torah were forgotten over the generations (especially before Oral Torah was written down in the Rabbinic era), the Rabbis had to reconstruct what was lost, resulting in the debates so characteristic of Rabbinic literature. Whether the human creativity evident in Rabbinic literature’s multiplicity of viewpoints is to be praised or mourned, most authorities agree that Oral Torah has a mixed character, because it is derived from both earthly and heavenly sources. What makes the notion of Oral Torah distinctive in the history of religions is precisely its combination of divine and human provenance. (Note ‘distinctive’, not unique: one may compare the Rabbinic doctrine of two Torahs with the notions of shruti and smriti texts in Hinduism, for example.) Oral Torah is the Gilgamesh or Akhilleus of religious literature: part human and part divine, it is a literature at once sacred and fallible. That its wording originates with human sages does not detract from its authority, but this fact allows for a more nuanced or flexible notion of authority.

It follows that revelation of Oral Torah and even (as we saw in the discussion of the human factor in prophecy in section 2.1.1) of the Prophets and Writings is not simply a top-down process. Human interpretation and supplementation play a crucial role in revelation. Rather than being a solely divine activity, revelation of Oral Torah and the Nakh (the Prophets and the Writings) involves human participation.

3 Verbal versus nonverbal revelation

We noted above (section 1.2) that understanding mattan torah requires us to investigate the varied uses of the term torah in Jewish culture. To comprehend mattan torah, we also need to explore the first term: mattan. According to classical Jewish texts, what does does it mean to say that God ‘gives’ the Torah?

3.1 Stenographic theories of revelation

The distinction between revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai and all other prophetic revelations entails two types of revelation that we may term stenographic and participatory. Moses alone consistently and directly experiences the former, in which God speaks to Moses in human language. The Pentateuch repeatedly states, ‘God spoke to Moses, saying’. In each of these statements, God communicates the actual words that follow in the form they appear in the biblical text. All the specific content of the texts that record these words comes to the earth from the divine realm, just as a novel comes to you, via a publisher, from the novelist’s study or writing desk. The view that revelation to Moses at Sinai was stenographic in nature appears in many sources.

3.1.1 Deuteronomy and the E source in Exodus

The description of the lawgiving at Sinai in Deuteronomy 4 and 5 insists on a stenographic approach to revelation. As Sommer (2015a: 64–68) argues, these chapters use several rhetorical techniques to assert that God spoke the Decalogue to Moses and the whole nation Israel in verbal form. Deuteronomy emphasizes that the whole nation heard the whole text of the Decalogue directly from God – and thus experienced direct verbal revelation – when they stood at the foot of Mount Horeb. (‘Horeb’ is the term that both Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch’s E source in Exodus use where other Pentateuchal texts speak of Sinai.) The people found the experience of listening to the divine voice terrifying, and they asked Moses to act as intermediary from that time forth (Deut 5:23–26). Moses then received additional laws from God, which he passed on to the nation forty years later in lengthy discourses in Deuteronomy 12–26. Because the people had heard God speaking at Horeb, they understood that God literally conveyed these additional laws to Moses word-for-word. It is possible to read the account of the lawgiving in Exodus 19–24; similarly, as Baruch Schwartz (1997: 26–27) has explained, God used a ‘voice’ (qol) to enunciate the Decalogue to Moses, and God forced the whole people assembled at the foot of the mountain to overhear this communication in its entirety. The frightened people begged Moses to act as intermediary from that time forth (Exod 20:18–22). Subsequently God spoke the words found in the legal passage in Exodus 21–23 to Moses. When Moses then informed the people that God had ‘said’ or ‘spoken’ certain words, the people, having heard God’s voicing speaking actual words in the Decalogue, could understand that Moses was telling them the truth. The narrative from Exodus that I summarize here stems entirely from the Pentateuch’s E source. Thus for E as for Deuteronomy, a major concern of the lawgiving narrative is to establish Moses’ prophetic and legislative authority.

3.1.2 The classical rabbis and the Rabbinic liturgy

The stenographic theory of revelation to Moses also appears among the Rabbis in the Talmuds and the midrashim, as Heschel (2005: 321–657, esp. 552–609, [1965: passim, esp. 220–263, 360–380 [vol. 2]; 2021: 633–678, 775–796]) shows in his classic study of Rabbinic theologies of revelation. Indeed, midrashic interpretation of the Bible is based on the assumption that the Bible’s words come from heaven, so that they are supercharged with meaning in a way that regular human speech cannot be. The goal of midrashic interpretation, Sommer (2012: 64–79) argues, is to unpack this overabundance of meaning. Significantly, the stenographic theory of mattan torah seems to be articulated in the one work of Rabbinic culture that distills the core ideas of Rabbinic Judaism, the siddur or prayer book. In one oft-repeated benediction, the siddur has worshippers affirm that God ‘gave us His Torah’ and that God is ‘the giver of Torah’. In another liturgical affirmation, the siddur has the congregation point at the Torah scroll while affirming, ‘This is the Torah that Moses set before the children of Israel by the command of God through Moses’, or more literally, ‘This is the Torah that Moses set before the children of Israel by the mouth of God in Moses’ hand’. The somatic phrasing of this affirmation (God’s mouth, Moses’ hand) may highlight that God spoke the text found on the scroll, and Moses wrote them down word-for-word.

3.1.3 Maimonides’ Eighth Principle as typically understood

The stenographic theory is also associated with Maimonides, especially with the eighth of his Thirteen Principles of Judaism, which he sets forth in his commentary to the tenth chapter of tractate Sanhedrin in the Mishnah. There he uses the simile of a stenographer to describe Moses’ work in writing down the Torah that God dictated to him. This simile is often taken to mean that Maimonides regards belief in the stenographic theory of revelation as a fundamental imperative of Judaism. We will see in section 3.2.3 below that this is not the only, or even most plausible, reading of Maimonides’ careful phrasing in the Eighth Principle. But this reading is a common one, in part because the Thirteen Principles are most widely known not from Maimonides’ detailed presentation in his Mishnah commentary but from two brief summaries that appear Jewish liturgy: the Ani Ma’amin appended to some versions of the Morning Service and the Yigdal poem that begins or ends various services. These provide one-line summaries of each principle that lack the subtleties a careful reading of Maimonides’ original yields. This simple reading of the Eighth Principle gains support from a statement in Maimonides’ legal code (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, 3:8) condemning as a heretic anyone who holds that ‘the Torah is not from God, even a single verse, even a single word’.

3.2 Participatory theories of revelation

3.2.1 Participatory revelation in modern Jewish thought

Several modern Jewish theologians have offered alternative understandings of Mosaic revelation that retain Judaism’s emphasis on revelation as conveying normative teachings about behaviour while jettisoning the idea that the entire Pentateuch consists of divine words that came from heaven to earth. For these thinkers, the Jewish people took part (and still take part) in the process of revelation. Revelation of the Pentateuch, then, was not stenographic but participatory. The participatory approach to revelation takes varied forms. Hermann Cohen (1995: 71–84) idealizes the Sinai event. For him, the Sinai narrative symbolically represents a moral argument concerning the relationship between God and humanity. Mattan torah at Sinai was not an event that took place in historical time at a particular hilltop. Rather, it is a mythical archetype. For Cohen, mattan torah symbolizes not simply the giving of this or that specific law but the ethical correlation between human rationality and the divine.

Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Louis Jacobs take participatory theology in a different direction. (Their classic discussions of revelation are found in Rosenzweig 2005, esp. Part Two, Book Two; Rosenzweig 1965: 72–92, 109–124; Heschel 1955; Heschel 1996: 12–17, 127–145, 185–190; Heschel 2005, esp. chs 17–41 [1965 [vol. 2] and 1990; 2021: Books Two and Three]; Jacobs 1965: 57–92; Jacobs 1973: 199–260; Jacobs 1999: passim, esp. 106–131. For overviews and analysis, see Amir 2004: 129–196; Even-Chen 1999: 49–123, 154–179; Held 2013: 94–134; Samuelson 2002: 63–90.) For these three thinkers (and especially for Heschel), Sinai was a historical event that took place in time, even though, as a divine act, it also occurs eternally or outside time. According to these thinkers, God conveyed a message that resulted in a sense of commandedness within the nation Israel, but this message was not necessarily conveyed through language. Rosenzweig makes clear that the commanding revelation was entirely supralingual. According to Rosenzweig, the core command (German, Gebot) at Sinai was to love God. But the law (Gesetz) is a human response to God’s command. The Bible is not a transcript of the revelatory event; it is an interpretation of the event. Rosenzweig (1984: 761) refers to the Bible as being ‘human throughout’, even though he asserts that it is possible, if only for a moment, to sense ‘the divine in what is humanly written’. (The crucial sentence from which I quote here is missing from the English translation in Buber and Rosenzweig 1994: 59.) Though a divine command underlies the text, the specific words and laws in the Pentateuch and Rabbinic literature are human interpretations of the command God issues to Israel at Sinai. Quoting Exod 19:23 and 20:1, Rosenzweig (1965: 118) writes: ‘The primary content of revelation is revelation itself. “He came down” – this already concludes the revelation; “He spoke” is the beginning of interpretation, and certainly “I am”.’ Heschel is more ambivalent, at times seeming to allow the possibility that some of the Bible’s actual words may have come from God. For Heschel,

[t]here is in the Bible [...] not only God’s disclosure but man’s insight [...]. As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash [...]. There is a partnership of God and Israel in regard to both the world and the Torah: He created the earth and we till the soil; He gave us the text and we refine and complete it. (Heschel 1955: 26, 185, 274)

For Jacobs, Rabbinic Judaism transforms humanly-authored commandments, practices, and institutions into divinely-commanded ones, so that the Torah and Jewish tradition can be viewed as simultaneously human in origin and divine in authority (Jacobs 1999: 116, 131; cf. the dictum in Jacobs 1964: 300–301: ‘The question of whether the Torah is God’s gift to Israel or Israel’s gift to God is seen to be irrelevant, for on a profounder view of what is involved in Revelation the two are seen to be the same many-splendored thing’). These thinkers imply that, beginning at the moment they stood at Sinai, Moses and the people Israel have translated a non-specific but real divine command into words and norms. Israel’s acceptance of Torah is as much a part of revelation as God’s bequeathing. There can be no giving without receiving, and in the process of receiving Israel affects the gift. By making it their own, they inevitably alter it.

For all these thinkers, that process did not only occur in Moses’ day; it continues throughout Jewish history. Revelation, Rosenzweig insists, always happens ‘today’. In the section of The Star of Redemption entitled ‘The Present’, Rosenzweig (2005: 191) speaks of the ‘great today’ in which command occurs. Heschel, too, speaks of the need for commitment to happen in a moment that is always present; this is true of commitments humans have to other humans, and no less so for one’s acceptance of commitments to God:

Revelation lasts a moment, acceptance continues [...] Sinai is both an event that happened once and for all, and an event that happens all the time. What God does, happens both in time and in eternity. Seen from our vantage point, it happened once; seen from His vantage point, it happens all the time [...] the day of giving the Torah can never become past; that day is this day, every day. (Heschel 1955: 213–215)

Israel comes to new but legitimate understandings of God’s will over time; though God gave Torah in the past, Israel continues to receive it, and to perfect its reception.

3.2.2 Torah as translation

For the participatory theology of revelation, revelation may have been non-linguistic, but it was not devoid of content. Although no words travelled from heaven to earth in this event, God did communicate ideas or cognitions at Sinai. Propositional or cognitive content need not be verbalized out loud or in writing; we humans frequently convey messages through gestures, looks, or sounds that are not words. Between parents and children, among siblings and friends, and between lovers one person may use a glance or a slight movement of the head to convey a message nonverbally. Not infrequently, that message is, ‘I want you to do something’, and within the context of the relationship, it is often clear what that something is. There are also cases in which the person sending the nonverbal directive intends something non-specific, and what that something turns out to be is the choice of the recipient of the message. It is the recipient’s ability to invent an appropriate something that makes that person’s execution of the command poignant as an act of love. For the participatory theology, the message conveyed at Sinai is precisely this sort of communication. The nonverbal act of communication at Sinai conveyed content, which can be translated into linguistic form as, ‘there is a God who commands us’. It is possible that this content was limited to conveying God’s desire that Israel express obedience, and that the specifics through which the obedience is expressed were intended to be constructed by Israel. At Sinai, then, God conveyed two propositions nonverbally. If we translate these two propositions into language, we can render them as follows:

(1) I am God,
Yhwh, Your God,
who saves,
who saves you,
who took you out of slavery in Egypt.

(2) I want you to love,
to love Me,
to show your love for Me,
to show your covenant-loyalty to Me,
by obeying My command,
by obeying the commandments
by observing Halakhah.

Precisely where in these two statements the human act of interpretation and paraphrasing begins to move beyond the divine message can never be known. A core difference between traditional Judaism and Christianity is how we answer that question, especially in relation to the second proposition.

3.2.3 Moses as translator – a demotion?

This participatory view of revelation narrows the distance between Moses and other prophets. We saw above (section 2.1.1) that for some Jewish thinkers Moses differed from other prophets because he received a direct verbal revelation from God that he passed on to Israel word-for-word, whereas all other prophets passed on divine communications in their own words. If (as Heschel teaches) the Bible is a midrash, and if (per Rosenzweig) even the text of the Decalogue in Exodus 20 is an interpretation, then it seems that Moses, too, was an interpreter or a translator. His reliability in this role may be greater than all other prophets, but the participatory approach seems to introduce a quantitative distinction between Moses and the other prophets where most premodern thinkers posited a qualitative one. In this sense, the participatory theory does seem, at least to some degree, to demote Moses to a rank similar to other prophets, and Written Torah to the status of Oral Torah.

3.2.4 Participatory theology in the Bible: the E and P sources

This participatory theology may strike one as thoroughly modern. Sommer (2015a: 27–60) argues, however, that intimations of this approach are found in the Bible itself, especially in the Elohistic (E) account of lawgiving in Exodus and in the Priestly (P) account of lawgiving in Leviticus and Numbers.

A series of ambiguities in the E narrative in Exodus 19–20 lead the reader to wonder: did the whole nation Israel hear commandments being proclaimed by God? Or did they receive all the laws that resulted from the theophany, including the Decalogue, through Moses’ mediation? By raising this question, the E narrator forces us to reflect on the question of the laws’ origins. For example, E reports that the people heard God speaking to Moses using a qol in Exod 19:19, but it is impossible to decide whether the Hebrew term here refers to God’s voice or to thunder that accompanied the theophany. One’s understanding of revelation changes drastically depending on which reading we adopt. If qol is a voice, the Israelites heard God providing specific information to Moses. If it means thunder, then what occurred at Sinai was an overwhelming experience, but not necessarily one in which Israelites or Moses acquired distinct teachings in verbal form from God. The stenographic theory of revelation emerges from the former translation, and participatory theories from the latter. Other ambiguities in these chapters focus on whether the people heard the Decalogue’s words from God or only when Moses recited them to the people. If the people heard a divine voice speaking Hebrew words distinctly, then God conveyed these commandments directly to the whole nation. If they heard them only through Mosaic mediation, then it is possible that Moses interpreted God’s thundering command, translating it into specific commandments. E does not allow the reader to decide between the two readings, constantly providing details that might support the one or the other. By allowing for the participatory reading, E suggests – but does not insist – that God’s speaking is not like a human’s speaking. If we read other instances of divine speech in the Pentateuch through the lens of E’s lawgiving narrative, then the meaning of the verb in the phrase ‘God spoke’ may differ from the meaning it carries when its subject is human. Thus E endorses the divinely derived authority of its own laws even as it forces us to wonder whether their specifics are of earthly or heavenly origin.

P endorses the participatory theory in a more straightforward manner, as Sommer (2023: 270–282) argues. For P, lawgiving commences only in Lev 1:1. All legislative communications from God go through Moses, Aaron, or Aaron’s son Eleazar; these communications never go to the whole nation. In Num 7:89, P describes the way that God communicates to Moses whenever God issues commands. An unusual Hebrew verbal form used in this verse suggests that what transpires between God and Moses is an extraordinary form of communication, possibly reciprocal or dialogical in nature (rather than entirely top-down) and probably ongoing (rather than punctual). P further relates five narratives (Lev 24:10–23; Num 9:1–14; 15:32–36; 27:1–11; 36:1–9) in which Israelites pose questions that Moses brings to God. In three of them (Num 9, 27, and 36) the people imply that they are dissatisfied with an existing law and hint at the answer they are hoping God will provide. Immediately thereafter, God announces God’s agreement with the people’s suggestions. In these five cases of mattan torah, God gives law in response to the people’s questions; in three of them, God ratifies a law some Israelites had in effect already drafted. Revelation in these cases is nearly as bottom-up as it is top-down.

3.2.5 Participatory theology in Rabbinic and medieval literature

It is not only in the Bible that one finds intimations of a participatory theology of revelation. Much of Heschel’s masterwork, Heavenly Torah (2005), is devoted to limning two approaches to understanding revelation in Rabbinic literature and medieval Jewish thought. One approach, equivalent to what we have called the stenographic theory, views the whole Torah as having come to earth from heaven. The words of the Pentateuch and perhaps even the specifics of the Oral Law are divine in origin, not human. This approach focus on God’s contribution to Torah while minimizing the human component (Heschel 2005: chs 17, 20, 21, and 31 [1965 and 2021: Book 2: chs 1, 4, 5, 15]). The other, participatory, approach distinguishes between the Torah known in this world and a Torah that exists beyond this world, a perfect heavenly Torah that exists only in the mind of God. The earthly Torah (both Written and Oral) reflects the heavenly Torah or strives to imitate it; we might even say that the earthly Torah is an incarnation of a heavenly prototype. This second approach acknowledges, indeed celebrates, substantial human contributions to the earthly Torah (Heschel 2005: chs 22, 27, 28, 32, and 34 [1965: Book 2, chs 6, 12, 13, 16 and Book 3, ch. 2; 2021: Book 2, chs 6, 12, 13, 16 and Book 3, chs 4 and 5]).

Heschel shows how these approaches interact in complex ways in Rabbinic literature (where he associates the former with the school of Rabbi Akiva and the latter with the school of Rabbi Yishmael), in medieval philosophy, in Kabbalah, and in Hasidic literature. He also introduces the useful question, ‘Is the prophet a partner or a vessel?’ (Heschel 2005: 478 [1965: 264 [vol. 2]]; 2021: 679). The view that the prophet is a vessel, simply passing on what God gave but not contributing to it, became the most well-known view in Rabbinic culture; one can rightly call it the standard theology. But Heavenly Torah argues that a more ‘interpretive and moderate’ approach in which prophets are partners with God is also found among the Rabbis. (The Hebrew original that I render ‘interpretive and moderate’ is parshanit umetunah; see Heschel 1965: ii [vol. 2]; Heschel 2021: 408. In Heavenly Torah, Tucker translates these terms more freely, writing that this approach ‘is moderate and has give’ [Heschel 2005: 321].)

Yochanan Silman (1999) agrees with Heschel that Rabbinic and medieval Jewish sources evince a wider variety of approaches to mattan torah than has been recognized. He describes three approaches in these sources. One regards Torah as a perfect entity vouchsafed to Moses and Israel that should never be changed. Israel’s role is to observe and preserve Torah meticulously. A second approach views Torah as always in process, on the way to becoming more and more perfect. This understanding encourages human creativity; Israel’s sages make a positive contribution to the evolution of Torah. An intermediate position regards the Torah in heaven as absolute and perfect, while its apprehension by human beings is always in the process of becoming more perfect. For both the second and third approaches, the lawgiving at Sinai did not end at Sinai; it continues as sages interpret Torah so that Israel’s understanding comes closer to God’s intentions. These approaches, then, are significant precursors to modern ideas of revelation as a process extending over time associated with Heschel and Jacobs.

3.2.6 Maimonides redux

We saw above (section 3.1.3) that Maimonides’ Eighth Principle is often taken to be the classical expression of the stenographic approach; but this understanding of Maimonides’ view may be based more on the brief liturgical summaries than on a careful reading of the Eighth Principle as it appears in Maimonides’ Mishnah commentary. To be sure, this principle states that ‘[i]n handing down the Torah, Moses was like a scribe writing from dictation the whole of it’ (translation from Abelson 1906: 54). This simile seems to endorse the stenographic theory. But Maimonides includes this line only after he avers that ‘the whole of the Torah came unto him from before God in a manner which is metaphorically called “speaking”; but the real nature of that communication is unknown to everybody except to Moses’. This sentence undercuts the image of the stenographer that appears in the very next sentence. Maimonides makes clear that the image is not literally true; it is, he states, a rhetorical figure (Arabic majaz, from a noun that literally means ‘passageway’; Abelson renders the term with the adverb ‘metaphorically’). We describe revelation using the word ‘speaking’ (Arabic kalām), but this ‘speaking’, Maimonides explicitly tells us, was not actual speaking at all. Since there was no actual speaking, then there was no actual dictation.

In his discussions of revelation in The Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides goes much further. He points out in I:65 that the Hebrew verbs usually rendered ‘speak’ and ‘say’ can refer not only to making the sound of words with one’s mouth but also to abstract, nonphysical processes of thinking and of intending. He then states categorically that in all cases in which God is the subject of those verbs, they refer to thinking or intending, never to communication by means of words, whether orally or in writing. If this is the case, then what does it mean to say that God ‘spoke’ to Moses and that God ‘commanded’ Israel through Moses? Maimonides’ surprising answer to these questions is elucidated by Alvin Reines (1969–1970), Kalman Bland (1982), Lawrence Kaplan (1990), and Micah Goodman (2010). These scholars demonstrate that Maimonides viewed the verbal content of the Pentateuch to be the work of Moses, not of God. They further show that when composing the laws, Moses was not acting as a prophet. Rather, he was writing as a great intellect and a lawgiver with an unparalleled understanding of nature. None of this implies that the Torah is not of divine origin, since Moses composed the law based on his unique apprehension of the world and of humanity that resulted from the divine overflow of knowledge that Moses, alone among humanity, was graced to receive. The Torah’s laws are influenced by revelation, but the Torah is not itself a revealed work, at least not in anything resembling the stenographic sense. It contains Moses’ near-perfect response to the task to which God set him. Maimonides champions a participatory theory of revelation, even if his phrasing in Mishneh Torah and the commentary on the Mishnah produces the impression, at least for someone reading quickly, that he subscribes to the stenographic theory.

3.2.7 Other participatory thinkers

Similar views are hidden in plain sight in the work of other medieval authorities. In a series of articles, Eran Viezel (2009; 2010; 2012; 2013a; 2013b) has argued that several biblical commentators, especially ibn Ezra and Rashbam, regard the wording of the Pentateuch as a mixture of divine and human elements that include not only God’s words but also – and more frequently – Moses’ words. While Rashbam and ibn Ezra agree with Deuteronomy that the whole nation heard the whole Decalogue, Viezel shows that both regard the Decalogue as the only case of pure divine speech in the Bible. They view the wording of most of the rest of the Pentateuch as the work of Moses, not God. Viezel further maintains that what I call the stenographic theory is less common among the Talmudic Rabbis than is generally assumed; it became the standard in Jewish thought only starting in the thirteenth century CE. Talmudic texts are not especially concerned with technicalities of how God’s revelation was reduced to the written form. Viezel points to the paucity of texts within the Rabbinic corpus that actually claim that God dictated the Pentateuch to Moses word for word – though, to be sure, the stenographic theory is articulated by some authorities in the Talmudic era (see, for example, the view of Resh Lakish [y. Shekalim 49d, 6:1]).

What emerges from Viezel’s work is substantial openness among classical Jewish authorities to acknowledging human contributions to biblical texts. Yoshi Fargeon (2019: 1–145) has taken this project even further, assembling dozens of Rabbinic sources from antiquity through modernity that evince a surprising variety of views of the origins of the Torah and of other biblical books. (Fargeon also assembles a similar collection of sources that are surprisingly open to studying other issues that modern biblical critics address; see Fargeon 2019: 146–190.) Norman Solomon (2012) analyses views of revelation in Jewish sources from antiquity through the present, similarly uncovering a range of views even before the advent of modernity. (For the argument that what I call the participatory view of revelation is far more loyal to the traditions of medieval Jewish philosophy than most scholars have realized, see also Samuelson 2002: chs 2 and 7, especially 173–175. For the claim that Heschel’s philosophy of revelation has deep roots in classical Rabbinic literature, see Perlman 1989: 119–133; Even-Chen 1999: 160–179.)

Several modern thinkers have developed what might be described as syntheses of the stenographic and participatory theories, according to which the possibility of human composition of texts is acknowledged even as their fully divine authority is affirmed. Thus Jerome Yehuda Gellman (2016: 149–165, esp. 151–152) argues that the composition of biblical texts by human beings may have been guided by God in a manner that combined divinely mandated limits as well as human freedom. Samuel Lebens (2020: 177–232, esp. 177–178) maintains that divine approval granted to these texts after their composition, as well as to the history of their interpretation in postbiblical Judaism, renders them divinely authoritative even in the event that they were humanly written.

3.3 The importance of the debate between stenographic and participatory models for Jewish law and practice

The debate between the stenographic and participatory models for understanding lawgiving at Sinai has weighty consequences for Jewish religious practice. For Jews who subscribe to the stenographic theory, Jewish law is based on the actual words of God found in the Pentateuch. For Jews who champion a participatory theory, especially in its robust modern forms, the biblical texts are largely or entirely products of human beings who respond to the revelation at Sinai. The extent to which religious authorities feel free to alter laws based on revelation at Sinai is likely to be limited if they believe those laws are rooted in a legislation whose wording came down from heaven. But for someone who believes that human interpreters of the Sinai event wrote all the laws found in the Pentateuch in an attempt to translate God’s nonverbal command into human language, the authority behind the Halakhic system remains divine, but the specifics of any given law are human – and perhaps even fallible. In that case, the possibility that contemporary Jews have a right to alter or correct some aspects of Jewish law becomes much more palatable. If a particular law does not accurately reflect the will of a God who is merciful and just, or if a particular law primarily reflects human cultural norms of the era in which that it was enacted, then revising that particular law need not be an act of sacrilege or hubris.

4 Revelation after the Bible

Traditional Jewish sources regard the biblical period as an era of revelations that produced both Written and Oral Torah, though Oral Torah was written down much later. But does divine revelation continue after the biblical period? Does it continue to influence the development of Oral Torah? Various answers to these questions appear in Jewish tradition.

4.1 Prophecy ceased

According to a widespread view among Jews in antiquity and the Middle Ages, divine revelation ceased at the end of the biblical era (Sommer 1996). After the last prophets – Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi – died, God no longer communicated information to the nation Israel through specific individuals charged with proclaiming that information. Multiple Rabbinic sources assert that the prophetic spirit ceased functioning in the early or middle part of the Second Temple era (b. Sanh. 11a; b. Yoma 9b; b. Sotah 48b; y. Sotah 9:13; t. Sotah 13:3; Song of Songs Rabbah 8:11; Seder ‘Olam Rabbah 86b; see also the assertion that the prophetic spirit was one of five things known in the First Temple but lacking in the Second in b. Yoma 2lb; y. Ta‘an. 2:1; y. Mak. 2:6 [2:7 in some editions]; Song of Songs Rabbah 8:10 [8:11 in some editions]; Yalqut Shimoni to Hag 1:8).

Non-Rabbinic sources from the late Second-Temple era and the period shortly thereafter also express the view that prophecy was a thing of the past (1 Macc 4:44–46; 9:27; 2 Apoc Bar 85:1–3). However, Rabbinic and non-Rabbinic texts maintain that prophecy would return at the eschaton, along with the arrival of the Messiah. (In Rabbinic literature, see Tanḥuma Beha‘lotka 6, end; Num. Rabbah 15:10; b. Sanh. 93a–b. In the Qumran scrolls, see 1QS 9:11. In the Apocrypha, see 1 Macc 4:46; 14:41.) Consequently, Jewish groups who believe the eschaton is imminent often claim that prophecy has returned. Josephus describes figures whom some Jews regarded as prophets in the time immediately preceding the great revolt in 66–70 CE; their followers believed that the eschaton had arrived and thus that prophecy had been restored (see Jewish War 2, sections 261–263; 6, sections 288–309). Similarly, Jews who saw Jesus as the Messiah (or even as the forerunner of the Messiah) held that prophecy had reappeared in the person of John the Baptist or Jesus himself. Followers of the seventeenth-century messianic pretender Shabbetai Zvi believed that Zvi and his associate Nathan of Gaza enjoyed the prophetic spirit. Some late twentieth-century Lubavitch Hasidic Jews contended that their leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, had proclaimed a prophecy stating that ‘the time of redemption has arrived, and Moshiach is on his way’ (see the full-page advertisement from an organization calling itself ‘The International Campaign to Bring Moshiach’ in New York Times, 29 August 1993). All these Jews, ancient, medieval, and modern, adhered to Rabbinic doctrine regarding prophecy: since they thought that the Messiah’s arrival was imminent, they believed prophecy had returned.

4.2 Prophecy continued, in different or lesser forms

Many traditional Rabbinic Jews have believed that in the time between the biblical era and the eschaton God uses attenuated forms of communication. Rabbinic texts (e.g. b. Sanh. 11a; b. Yoma 9a) speak of a rare phenomenon, the bat qol (‘echo’, ‘daughter of a voice’) that was, in the words of Song of Songs Rabbah 8:11 [8:13 in some editions], a ‘vestige’ (sarid) of prophecy. The messages imparted by the bat qol had no legal authority and hardly dealt with issues of import in the manner of biblical prophets, but they were regarded as heavenly in origin. More recently, ultra-Orthodox Jews of the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries claim that a small number of contemporary rabbis are endowed with what they call daas Torah (in Sephardic Hebrew, da‘at Torah), an ability to ascertain the divine will in regard to many non-Halakhic issues, such as theology, politics, and lifestyle. They regard daas Torah as a form of revelation that is inferior to prophecy but is explicitly, if distantly, related to it. As various scholars have shown (e.g. Brown 2005; Kaplan 1992; Katz 1997), the question of whether to accept this doctrine marks a core dividing line between centrist Orthodox thinkers, who tend to reject this modern conception of religious authority, and ultra-Orthodox thinkers, who embrace it enthusiastically while denying its modernity.

According to medieval mystics, especially in the school of the thirteenth-century sage Abraham Abulafia, various ecstatic and scholarly practices could achieve what they termed prophecy. Their use of this term, however, does not involve revelation in the sense we are using it here, because the prophetic experience of these kabbalistic mystics diverged in fundamental ways from revelatory prophecy of the biblical (and messianic) eras. In most cases, these figures concentrated on their own experience of union with God, not on an office as messenger conveying information from God to the Jewish people. Consequently, mystics of this school explicitly distinguished between their ritually-based attempts to achieve this state and biblical prophecy, which came to a prophet unbidden. However, the line dividing kabbalistic prophecy from revelatory prophecy is permeable; the author of the Shulḥan Arukh, Rabbi Yosef Qaro, was visited by a heavenly voice that not only allowed him to experience mystical closeness with the heavenly realm but on occasion imparted correct rulings in disputed areas of Jewish law.

4.3 Interpretation as a substitute for revelation

Lesser forms of prophecy are not the most important substitutes for full-fledged prophecy in postbiblical Judaism. Already in the biblical period and increasingly thereafter, intensive study of revealed texts began to take the place of revelation. The beginnings of this process can be found in the Bible, as Michael Fishbane (1985) shows. Exilic and early post-exilic prophets such as Deutero-Isaiah, Haggai, and Zechariah wrote prophetic oracles that carefully rework vocabulary and motifs found in earlier prophets. Understanding the divine will by studying older texts, sometimes with aid from heavenly figures, became more intense later in the Second-Temple period as claims to prophecy ceased. In Daniel 9, Daniel meditates on the words of the prophet Jeremiah and prays that he might understand them, whereupon the angel Gabriel appears to explain the older works to him. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, the pesher literature lays out the meaning of biblical texts for the present. The pesher that elucidates the Book of Habakkuk makes clear that its author was inspired (1Qp Hab 7:2–4, 49; cf. 2:1–10), but he did not compose his own prophecies; he limited himself to commenting on already existing texts. By the time of the Rabbis, even this more limited claim to inspired interpretation had faded. Most of the Rabbis refrained from suggesting that their interpretations were inspired. Indeed, the fact that they engage in debate regarding correct understandings of biblical verses shows that they saw their readings as fallible, and this fallibility demonstrates that the readings were human in origin. But the Rabbis did not regard reliance on the interpretation of older prophecies rather than new prophetic revelations as a tragic necessity. A widely cited passage from b. B. Bat. 12a teaches:

Rabbi Avdimi from Haifa said: ‘Ever since the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken from the prophets and given to the sages’. Does that mean a sage would not be suitable prophet? What he really said was: ‘Even though it was taken from the prophets, it was not taken from the sages’. Ameimar said: ‘And a sage is preferable to a prophet, as it is said: “And a prophet – [he has] a heart of wisdom” (Ps 90:12). Who is compared to whom? What is small is compared to what is great.’ [Since the verse describes prophets by attributing sagacity to them, it follows that sages are greater than prophets.]

Even when the gates of prophecy are closed, the gates of interpretation remain open, allowing divine communications from past to shed light on the concerns of the present. God’s communications to Moses and the prophets of the biblical era are supercharged with meaning, and the sages use their exegetical skills to find a lesson revealed long ago but relevant to their own day. In this sense, revelation continues to produce new meanings. Most Rabbinic and medieval sources regard these new meanings as resulting from the intellectual achievements of scholars who study older revealed texts. But Heschel (2005: 658–700 [1990: 23–81]; 2021: 980–1007, 1047–1084) and Silman (1999: 89–149) note that at least some authorities are sympathetic to the possibility that an unceasing divine presence inspires and informs the work of human sages who interpret and supplement older texts. Authorities of this type view ‘the difference between revelation and interpretation as a matter of degree, but not a difference in kind’, as Tamar Ross (2005: 202) points out, because ‘the meaning of Torah [...] is eked out in the interpretive enterprise of the scholars’. For this school of thought, she notes, the sages’ interpretive enterprise can be seen as part of the process of revelation, because ‘the spirit of God hovers over the bet midrash (the study hall)’.

If God gave teachings in the past some of whose relevance becomes clear much later, then from a human point of view, one can say that God continues to give Torah in the present. Indeed, a liturgical benediction recited daily before the Morning Service and also before the formal lectionary reading of the Pentateuch in synagogue states, ‘God gave His Torah’, before proceeding with the summation, God ‘gives the Torah’. Both statements are true: God continues to give the Torah as long as Israel continues to receive it and interpret it. (On this interpretation of the present and past tense verbs in the liturgical passage, see Horowitz 1648: 25a–b, Toledot Adam, Beit Hokhmah telita’ah.) The event at Sinai, as Rosenzweig and Heschel stress (section 3.2.1 above), takes place today.

5 Revelation through nature and reason in Judaism

One might argue that God communicates truths to humanity not only by granting specific individuals or groups prophetic experiences but also through the natural world God created or the rationality God bequeaths to all human beings. Observing creation or utilizing reason might allow a person to understand God’s nature or even God’s will. The possibility of such revelation is a concern of natural theology. Alister McGrath, in his article Natural Theology in the Christianity section of this encyclopaedia, proposes several definitions of natural theology, two of which are especially relevant for our discussion of revelation in Judaism:

Natural theology is working out what can be known of God from a close study of the ‘Book of Nature’, which may be supplemented by a reading of the ‘Book of Scripture’.

Natural theology is the enterprise of using purely human intellectual resources – such as reason and other natural perceptual faculties such as intuition and imagination – to demonstrate the rationality of belief in God independently of divine revelation. (McGrath 2022)

These definitions regard natural theology as the result of a revelation that God inscribed into creation or into human nature in the form of rationality. Unlike the revelation of Torah at Sinai and its unfolding over the generations, this revelation is universal, not particular. Several scholars argue that Judaism recognizes the possibility that God makes theological or ethical truths accessible to all humanity through the natural world or through reason, separately from the particular revelation of Torah to Israel at Sinai. (Such a universal revelation fits Ward’s preliminary definition of revelation cited above in section 1.1, but it is less clear that it fits his more specific definition of revelation in theistic religions.)

5.1 Biblical antecedents

As McGrath points out, parts of the Hebrew scriptures suggest that real and useful knowledge about God’s intentions for the world can be gained by observing creation or the natural world (see Natural Theology, section 3). Especially in wisdom texts (Job, Proverbs, and certain psalms, esp. 19, 104, and 119), biblical authors describe aspects of creation that testify to the world’s order and structure and to God’s concern for God’s creatures. James Barr (1993), John Barton (1998: 31–44, 48–50), John Collins (2005: 91–126), and David Novak (1998) argue that certain biblical texts evince a natural theology, especially in the second of McGrath’s definitions quoted above. Many biblical texts assume that universally valid moral laws exist and that all humans can know them without recourse to Sinaitic revelation. This is especially the case in the narratives of Genesis and Exodus and in the prophetic oracles to the nations (e.g. Amos 1–2). Without a universally known moral law, God could not have held the generation of the Flood, sinners at Sodom and Gomorrah, Pharaoh, or the Arameans, Philistines, and Canaanites whom Amos mentions responsible for their misdeeds. Thus many biblical texts presuppose the existence of a revelation communicated to human beings through humanity’s very existence as rational beings created in God’s image (Gen 1:26–27).

Attention to the ways creation and reason form a conceptual foundation for the law given at Sinai is characteristic of Hellenistic Judaism of the late Second-Temple period. Consequently, many of the texts marshalled by Barr, Barton, and Collins lie outside the Jewish biblical canon; they discuss ancient Jewish texts preserved in the Apocrypha, and also the New Testament. This affinity for natural theology is also prominent in the thought of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, for whom, Hindy Najman (1999) points out, the written Mosaic law was a perfect copy of the unwritten law of nature. For Philo, the law of nature authorizes and justifies Mosaic law.

Some biblical texts that evince a natural theology also circumscribe it. Sommer (2015b) argues that Psalm 19 compares the knowledge of God that comes from creation with the knowledge that comes from Torah. The first part of the psalm celebrates a universal natural law available to all humanity. The second part, however, asserts that the law made known through Torah and covenant supplements that knowledge in significant ways. The ordered nature of the created world allows all humanity to know about God’s attributes, but Torah allows Israel to know God’s will and to enter into a personal relationship with God. A similar idea may appear in the Book of Job, which contains moving descriptions of nature as reflecting God’s glory and as teaching us about divine justice. But Matitiahu Tsevat (1980: 1–38) and Moshe Greenberg (1995: 327–357) have argued that God’s words to Job from the whirlwind establish that what happens in nature does not always reflect or reinforce justice. This direct prophetic revelation to Job implies a limit to how much humanity can know, at least about morality, from observing nature. Thus the Book of Job, like Psalm 19, engages in a discourse of revelation through nature but also restricts the scope of that discourse, because God’s manifestation to Job demonstrates that there exist ‘reasonless phenomena in nature’ (Greenberg 1995: 329).

5.2 Medieval Jewish thinkers

A universal revelation that fosters the development of natural theology in McGrath’s first definition quoted above – that is, the notion that creation is worthy of our religious attention because it teaches truths about the Creator – appears in a great deal of medieval Jewish writing, especially in the Sephardic orbit. This idea plays a major role, for example, in the poetry and commentary of Abraham ibn Ezra, as Israel Levin explains (2011: 208–209). Similarly, this idea is central to Solomon ibn Gabirol’s masterwork, the long philosophical poem, Keter Malkhut (ibn Gabirol 2003).

A universal revelation that fosters natural theology in McGrath’s second definition above – that is, a revelation inscribed into the human mind in the form of reason – is also central to several medieval Jewish thinkers. To be sure, few Jewish thinkers use the term ‘natural theology’ or ‘natural law’, though Novak (1998: 124–125) points out that the medieval theologian Joseph Albo does in fact speak of dat tiv‘it (natural law) and that earlier Jewish thinkers spoke of mitzvot sikhliyot (rational commandments). Novak (1998: passim) argues that a belief in a universal ethical law based not upon Sinaitic revelation but on reason is central to the work of medieval philosophers such as Saadia Gaon and Maimonides and also to the kabbalistically inclined commentator Nachmanides. All these thinkers devote a great deal of time to investigating ta‘amei hamitzvot – the meaning or purpose of the commandments revealed at Sinai and expounded (and expanded) in Rabbinic tradition. This attempt to understand ta’amei hamitzvot rests upon rational and thus universal justifications that come from outside the covenantal system. These justifications are not dependent on the lawgiving at Sinai itself. Thus, for Novak, Sinaitic lawgiving by itself is insufficient; the commandments are given meaning only in light of a more universal reason to which the Jews, like all humans, have access. Further, the Rabbis believe that certain moral and even theological norms apply to all humanity, even though God did not grant all nations prophets to whom God revealed the divine will. The existence of these norms show that all humanity has access to important aspects of God’s will without prophetic revelation. The Rabbinic concept of the seven Noahide laws that God imposes on all humanity is, Novak maintains (1998: 191), ‘an authentically Jewish way to engage in thinking natural law’. (For a lengthy treatment of Novak’s work as a natural law theologian, see Milevsky 2022.)

We saw above (section 5.1) Hindy Najman’s assertion that for Philo, the Mosaic law was a perfect copy of the law of nature. Goodman (2010: 181–182) shows that Maimonides independently put forth a similar idea in the Guide: Moses composed the law on the basis of his intensive study of nature. Thus for Maimonides, as for Philo, a universal natural law attests to the rationality and utility of the particular law Moses instituted.

6 Feminist approaches to revelation

In recent decades, feminist theologians have interrogated revelation in Judaism in original and pressing ways, attending to issues heretofore overlooked.

6.1 Judith Plaskow: the Jew revelation ignored

Judith Plaskow’s book, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990), argues that Judaism has long treated Jewish women simultaneously as insiders and outsiders. Especially in the book’s second chapter, ‘Torah: Reshaping Jewish Memory’, Plaskow focuses on the problematic ways traditional Jewish notions of revelation exclude women. Having noted that ‘entry into the covenant at Sinai is the root experience of Judaism, the central event that established the Jewish people’ (1990: 25), Plaskow points out that the narrative in Exodus 19–20 consistently describes God as addressing Israelite men but not Israelite women – most vividly in Exod 19:15, but not only there. Consequently, the Torah that results from revelation as remembered by Israel treats women as Other, only partially Israelite. The invisibility of women at Sinai resulted in the marginalization of women in Jewish ritual and from Jewish community through the ages. Consequently, Plaskow argues that contemporary Jews need to reshape the memory of Sinai in radical ways so as to render women as women present in Jewish religious life. As she notes, traditional midrash already reshaped Jewish memories of Sinai in the Rabbinic era, so that in some ways Plaskow’s project moves along a familiar and indeed hallowed path; it need not be seen as deviant or irreverent. But Plaskow argues that this reshaping, influenced by late twentieth-century feminism, needs to deconstruct the theological hierarchies and the Halakhic norms established by revelation as traditionally understood. In this light, her proposals have a self-consciously dissident character. Indeed, she questions (1990: 73) whether feminism is compatible with law at all – a question of enormous consequence in light of traditional Judaism’s definition of revelation as mattan torah (see section 1.2). Plaskow sensibly decides to leave this question open, because the process of re-remembering lawgiving and hence reconstituting the law in light of feminist critiques was only beginning as she wrote this book.

6.2 Tamar Ross: cumulative revelation

In Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (2005; especially ch. 10: ‘The Word of God Contextualized: Successive Hearing and the Decree of History’), Tamar Ross explores the imbrication of revelation, interpretation, tradition, and innovation in Jewish thought in order to propose ways in which feminism can enrich traditional Judaism. She observes (2005: 184–186) that feminism poses a challenge to the divinity of God’s word by highlighting the way Torah is vulnerable to the distortions of patriarchy. But Ross argues that a religiously authentic, divinely intended form of evolution occurs as successive generations hear God’s voice from Sinai in new ways. When new interpretations are accepted by the community of believers, the very fact that this community accepts them – whatever their source in the wider culture – demonstrates that the new interpretation comes from God. Thus for Ross, following Abraham Isaac Kook, revelation occurs through history and the history of interpretation. Contemporary feminism helps us to understand the limitations of patriarchal religion and thus to arrive at a deeper and more accurate perception of God. As such an understanding gains acceptance in traditional communities, new, non-patriarchal interpretations of Judaism expand Judaism in a way intended by God. Consequently, for Ross, feminism itself has revelatory status.

Ross further claims (2005: 200) that what I have called the participatory stream in Jewish thought found in certain aggadic texts of the Talmudic era, in kabbalistic literature, and in Hasidism is more feminine in nature precisely because of this stream’s embrace of fluidity. These more feminine texts reject binary thinking as they blur boundaries between the divine word and the human interpreter. Ross’ approach resembles that of Heschel, Jacobs, and Silman, and she mines many of the same Rabbinic and medieval texts that they analysed. However, she highlights what she calls a ‘cumulative revelation’ rather than a merely progressive or continuous one. ‘Even when the faith community absorbs new understandings’, she writes (2005: 207), ‘such understandings never displace the original heritage’. Of course, Heschel, Jacobs, and Silman hardly advocate discarding older sacred texts, but Ross puts particular emphasis on the ways that the divinely guided evolution of Judaism conserves as much as it reforms. And yet in other ways, Ross is more radical than Heschel. Influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgentsein’s insight that language serves distinct purposes in distinct contexts, she maintains (2005: 194–195) that theological language, unlike historical language, makes no empirical claims about actual events, so that there is no reason to insist that a Sinai event ever happened in history. In this respect, she departs from Heschel’s traditionalism, idealizing Sinai in a manner close to the Reform Jewish theologian Hermann Cohen (see above, section 3.2.1).

7 Conclusion

Revelation at Sinai is, as Plaskow describes it (above, section 6.1), ‘the root experience of Judaism, the central event that established the Jewish people’ – or, as Heschel and Rosenzweig might say, the root experience that establishes the Jewish people in every generation. For this reason, our topic looms large not only in Jewish theology but in any discussion of Jewish self-definition and Jewish practice. The ways one views pressing normative controversies among modern Jews – the role of women in Jewish ritual, their place in public prayer, their freedom to remarry and to have children if their husband refuses to grant a Halakhic divorce, the status of gay and lesbian Jews, and the legitimacy of intermarriage – follow from the ways one understands revelation. Attitudes towards modifications in Jewish law are largely epiphenomena of the theories of lawgiving we have discussed. To the extent that Jews become more aware of their own (often implicit and unexamined) attitudes to revelation, the real nature of their debates with other Jews will come to be revealed.

Attributions

Copyright Benjamin D. Sommer (CC BY-NC)

Bibliography

  • Further reading

    • Fargeon, Yoshi. 2019. ‘Annotated Anthology – “Wisdom and Knowledge Will Be Given to You”’, in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible. Edited by Yehudah Brandes, Tovah Ganzel, and Chayuta Deutsch. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 1–190.
    • Heschel, Abraham J. 1955. God in Search of Man. A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux.
    • Heschel, Abraham J. 2005. Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations. Edited and translated by Gordon Tucker and Leonard Levin. New York: Continuum.
    • Jacobs, Louis. 1973. A Jewish Theology. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.
    • Jacobs, Louis. 1999. Beyond Reasonable Doubt. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.
    • Novak, David. 1998. Natural Law in Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Plaskow, Judith. 1990. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
    • Rosenzweig, Franz. 1965. On Jewish Learning. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books.
    • Rosenzweig, F. 2005. The Star of Redemption. Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
    • Ross, Tamar. 2005. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Waltham: Brandeis University Press.
    • Samuelson, Norbert M. 2002. Revelation and the God of Israel. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    • Silman, Yochanan. 1999. The Voice Heard at Sinai: Once or Ongoing? Jerusalem: Magnes. (Hebrew)
    • Solomon, Norman. 2012. Torah from Heaven: The Reconstruction of Faith. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.
    • Sommer, Benjamin. 2015a. Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
    • Ward, Keith. 1994. Religion and Revelation: A Theology of Revelation in the World’s Religions. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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