the prophecy of moses in medieval jewish philosophy 117

The Prophecy of Moses in Medieval Jewish Philosophy

Howard Kreisel

The Middle Ages witnessed the renewal of the philosophic interpretation

of Scripture among the Jews, first in the Arabic speaking world and later
in Christian lands.1 The biblical figure of Moses in particular raised a myr-
iad of issues with which the medieval Jewish philosophers were forced to
confront in the process of developing their thought. Insofar as much of
their philosophy was exegetical in character, they were faced with the prob-
lem of explaining the verses in the Pentateuch dealing with the life of
Moses, and more importantly, the special qualities of his prophecy: “If there
be a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known in a vision and
speak to him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so for he is the trusted
one in all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, manifestly and not
by riddles, and the similitude of God does he behold” (Num. 12:6-8); “There
did not arise since in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face
to face” (Deut. 34:10). Above all there was a need to clarify the nature of the
public revelation to all of Israel at Sinai in which Moses served as God’s
intermediary as well as the unique private revelation to Moses at Sinai in
which God informs him: “Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand
upon a rock. And it shall come to pass, while my Glory passes by, and I will
put you in a cleft of the rock and cover you with my Hand while I pass by.
And I will take away my Hand, and you will see my Back, but my Face shall
not be seen” (Exod. 33:21-23). Rabbinic statements regarding Moses’ proph-
ecy in contrast to the prophecy of others also required interpretation, state-
ments such as: “All prophets looked through a non-transparent crystal.
Moses our Master looked through a transparent crystal” (B.T. Yebamot 49b).
No less noteworthy was the pronouncement that apparently accorded

1 For a survey of this topic see my “Philosophical Interpretations of the Bible,” in Cam-
bridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century, ed.
Steven Nadler and Tamar Rudavsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 88-120.
The most outstanding examples of Jewish philosophical exegesis in Classical Antiquity
belong to Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE). Philo’s exegesis, however, does not
appear to have exerted much influence, if any, on subsequent Jewish exegesis in Late
Antiquity.
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superiority to one of the gentile prophets over Moses: “And there arose not
a prophet since in Israel like Moses (Deut. 34:10)—in Israel there has not
arisen, but in the nations of the world there has arisen; that prophet was
Balaam.”2
The religious-intellectual contexts in which the medieval Jewish phi-
losophers developed their thought brought in its wake a number of addi-
tional factors that markedly influenced their treatments of Moses. One is
the polemical aspect. The prophecy of Moses is integrally connected with
the revelation of the divine law. Insofar as both Christianity and Islam
challenged the continued binding nature of the Law of Moses, though not
its divine origin, the Jewish thinkers tended to underscore the unique na-
ture of Mosaic prophecy in order to defend the view of the enduring au-
thority of his Law. They were able to draw upon biblical verses and
rabbinic statements in support of this view, though some of the statements,
such as the one referring to Balaam, posed a challenge in one regard. The
other significant pole around which treatments of Mosaic prophecy re-
volved was the Greek philosophic one. The nature of prophetic revelation,
the qualities a person was required to possess in order to attain prophecy,
and the purpose of law as perceived by the Arabic philosophers who ad-
opted and developed the Greek philosophic tradition left a strong impres-
sion on how Jewish philosophers regarded Moses, the master of the
prophets. Perhaps the most important issue confronting the Jewish think-
ers was whether one should understand Mosaic prophecy in light of the
workings of the natural order as understood by the philosophic tradition,
or alternately, as the product of God’s immediate involvement in history
that defies any naturalistic interpretation. Moreover, to the degree that
Mosaic prophecy was treated as a natural phenomenon, it provided the
interpreter with an opportunity to indicate his view regarding the absolute
limits of human apprehension.3

Saadia Gaon

For the most prominent of the Jewish theologians of the tenth century,
Rabbi Saadia Gaon, all prophets are chosen directly by God, who is also the

2 Sifre on Deuteronomy, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Jersey City, N.J.: Ktav Publishing Inc.,
1969), 340.
3 Most of my discussion of these issues in the present study is based on my detailed
treatment of the topic in Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).