34 | SEPTEMBER 5 • 2024 

I

n Shoftim, Moses speaks about 
the great institutions of Judaism: 
courts, judges, officers, Kings, 
Priests, Levites and Prophets. In the 
case of the Prophet, Moses says in 
the name of God: “I 
will raise up a Prophet 
for them from among 
their own people, like 
yourself: I will put My 
words in his mouth, and 
he will speak to them all 
that I command him.
” 
Deut. 18:18
The phrase “a Prophet … like 
yourself” cannot be meant literally. 
In the quality and clarity of his 
communications with God, Moses was 
unique. He was unique in the miracles 
he performed. Most importantly, only 
he was authorized to proclaim Torah: 
he was Israel’s sole legislator. 
The King and Sanhedrin both had 
powers to make temporary enactments 
for the sake of social order. Prophets 
were given the authority to command 
specific, time-bound acts. But no one 
could add to or subtract from the 613 
commandments given by God through 
Moses.
This, therefore, is how Rambam 
explains our passage: “Why is it said in 
the Torah: ‘I will raise up a Prophet for 
them from among their own people, 
like yourself’ (Deut. 18:18)? He will 
come not to establish a religion, but 
to command them to keep the words 
of the Torah, warning the people not 

to transgress them, as the last among 
them said: ‘Remember the Torah of 
Moses My servant’” (Mal. 3:22). 
In other words, the Prophets 
who followed Moses, from Elijah to 
Malachi, were not revolutionaries. 
They did not intend to create 
something new but to restore 
something old. Their task was to recall 
people to the mission Moses taught 
them: to stay faithful to God, and to 
create a just and compassionate society.

WHAT HAPPENED TO 
PROPHECY?
Eventually, during or after the 
Second Temple period, most of these 
institutions came to an end. There 
were no Kings because Israel had no 
sovereignty. There were no Priests 
because it had no Temple. But there 
were also no Prophets. How important 
was this? And what happened to 
prophecy? 
The Talmud gives two radically 
opposite opinions. The first:
“Rabbi Yochanan said: From the 
day that the Temple was destroyed, 
prophecy was taken from the Prophets 
and given to fools and children.
” 
We can’t be sure what Rabbi 
Yochanan meant. He may have meant 
that children and fools sometimes see 
what others don’t (as Hans Christian 
Anderson illustrated in the famous 
story of The Emperor’s New Clothes). 
He may, though, have meant the 
opposite, that prophecy deteriorated 

during the late Second Temple period. 
There were many false prophets, 
soothsayers, doomsayers, mystics, 
announcers of the apocalypse and 
messianic movements, all confidently 
predicting the end of history and the 
birth of a new order of things. There 
were religious sectarians. There were 
Essenes expecting the arrival of the 
Teacher of Righteousness. There were 
rebels against Rome who believed 
that their military hero would bring 
freedom, even the messianic age. It 
was a fevered, destructive time, and 
Rabbi Yochanan may have wanted 
to discredit, as far as possible, any 
dependence on supposedly divine 
certainty about the future. Prophecy 
is the chattering of children or the 
rambling of fools. 
 However the Talmud also cites a 
quite different opinion:
“Rabbi Avdimi from Haifa says: 
From the day that the Temple was 
destroyed prophecy was taken from 
the Prophets and given to the Sages 
… Ameimar said: And a Sage is 
greater than a Prophet, as it is stated: 
‘
A Prophet has a heart of wisdom’ (Ps. 
90:12). Who is compared to whom? 
You must say that the lesser is 
compared to the greater. (Since a 
Prophet must have a heart of wisdom, 
the Sage, who is wisdom personified, 
must be greater still).
”
This is seriously interesting. 
The early Judges in Israel were 
Kohanim. When Moses blessed 

the people at the end of his life he 
said of the tribe of Levi, “They shall 
teach Your laws to Jacob and Your 
instructions to Israel” (Deut. 33:10). 
When Ezra taught Torah to the 
Israelites, he positioned Levites among 
the people to explain what was being 
said. All this suggests that when the 
Sages — teachers and masters of 
Jewish law — traced their intellectual-
spiritual lineage, they should have 
done so by seeing themselves as heirs 
of the Kohanim and Levi’im. But they 
did not do so. We see this from the 
famous Mishnah that opens Pirkei 
Avot:
“Moses received the Torah at Sinai 
and handed it onto Joshua, Joshua 
to the elders, and the elders to the 
Prophets, and the Prophets to the Men 
of the Great Assembly.
”

HEIRS TO THE PROPHETS
The Sages saw themselves as heirs to 
the Prophets. But in what sense? And 
how did they come to see themselves 
not just as heirs to, but as greater 
than the Prophets. What is more, the 
proof-text they cite means nothing of 
the kind. The verse in Psalm 90 says, 
“Teach us to number our days, that we 
may gain a heart of wisdom.
” The 
Talmud is playing on the fact that two 
quite different words sound alike. In 
other words, only by suspending our 
critical faculties is the proof-text a 
proof.
Something very strange is 
happening here. The Sages, who 
valued humility, who knew that 
prophecy had come to an end in the 
days of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi 
five centuries before the destruction of 
the Second Temple, who believed that 
the most one could hear from heaven 
was a bat kol, a distant echo, are here 
saying that not only are they Prophets, 
but they are superior to Prophets.
All this to teach us that the Sages 
took the ideals of the Prophets and 
turned them into practical programs. 
Here is one example. Remonstrating 
with the people, administering rebuke, 
was fundamental to the prophetic task. 
This is how Ezekiel understood the 
task:
“God said: ‘Son of man, I am 
sending you to the Israelites, to a 

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

 A Sage is 
 Greater than 
 a Prophet

