After reviewing intertestamental literature (e.g., 1 Enoch 14:8-25; 24; 25; 39:3-8; 48; 82:1-3; 91:1-4; Song of Sabbath Sacrifice) on pp. 123-47 of her book, The Mystic Heart of Judaism, Miriam Bokser Caravella offers this postscript on God speaking authoritatively to people after Malachi as well as later Jewish understandings thereof within mysticism:
By looking at some of these documents written in priestly circles in the last few centuries before the Common Era, we have seen that although the sages had declared that prophecy had ended with the prophet Malachi in the fifth century, there is enough evidence to show that it continued. Indeed, it would appear that to the people living at Qumran, the concept of an “end to prophecy” was alien or irrelevant at best.
Historically, the idea that there would be no more prophecy, no more direct communion between the divine and the humanity, seems to have arisen from a struggle between those who sought to establish the authority of human interpretation of past revelation as presented in texts and those for whom revelation was a continuing process.
There were however, some differences between the prophetic experiences of the classical prophets and those of the last few centuries BCE—the exilic and post-exilic periods. As we have seen, in these later periods, prophecy was focused on the material future—on a hope for a messiah who would end the suffering of exile and subjugation, as well as who would bring spiritual liberation.
Another significant difference is that in the later prophecies, the identities of the mystics is kept hidden by their anonymity. They were no longer linked with a particular “named” individual and his unique personality, like Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, or Zechariah, but rather with someone from a lineage or school—like Third Isaiah or Malachi (whose name simply means “my messenger”)—or with a great biblical figure of the past, under whose name the work was written, like Enoch, Ezra, or the scribe Baruch. Another change is that now the prophecies are intended only for a select few—the “wise,” the elect, the qualified. The mystic experience has become esoteric, secret no longer for public consumption.
And because the prophetic teaching were no longer recognized as a valid form of communion with God, it is probable that people began to lose the capacity to understand or accept them. The scholar Elliot Wolfson comments that the vision of the enthroned from of God, recounted first in 1 Enoch and later in other texts, created a dilemma for traditional heirs to the faith. From the time of Moses, who sensed that he could not see “the face of God” and live, it was considered beyond human capacity to see God in his glory. Yet some of the prophets as well as these later anonymous mystics did have such visions. Thus there was a “clash between the vision of the enthroned form . . . and the overwhelming sense that such a vision is impossible.”
The mystic experience threatened the very assumptions of the religion concerning the accessibility of God, and – by extension – the possibility of unio mystica (mystic union). These experiences were considered dangerous, likely to confuse the ordinary person. Those who engaged in the practices that led to such experiences felt that only their small coterie of fellow-mystics and disciples were ready for them. So the mystics knew that they had to keep their experiences secret and teach them only to their select disciples.
In later times, however, there were numerous philosophers and religious luminaries who attested to the continuance of prophecy as the means for the divine to enter and guide people’s lives. Moses Maimonides, the highly venerated twelfth-century philosopher, wrote that the level of prophecy could be achieved by anyone at any period, not only the biblical prophets. He believed it described a state of consciousness that could be attained through inner, mystic experience. He wrote explicitly of the limitations of intellect and of the potential for superior spiritual knowledge through prophecy, which he described as “the vital energizing condition that established the channel linking man with God.” Maimonides aw a link between the level of prophecy of the Bible and the spiritual state that can be achieved by people at all times through mystic practice. “In the thought of Maimonides, prophecy ceased to be a singular phenomenon of God’s revelation vouchsafed to chosen individuals, and became instead an episode in a larger category of man’s encounter of the divine; it became a phase of mystical experience.
It is true that in the later period, the intense, raw relationship with God which the classical prophets had enjoyed and which prompted them to minister to their flocks with such dedication and selflessness, was mostly portrayed as a relationship with the divine realm through a hierarchy of angels and other intermediate forms. The earlier prophets received God’s word in a revelation direct from God himself, not through intermediaries, and they transmitted that “word” boldly and publicly.
Maimonides tended to evaluate the level of prophecy of the earlier and later prophets according to how they received their message; whether directly, through an angel, in a night vision, in the daytime, while asleep, while conscious and so forth. There were some teachers, however, at different periods, who understood the phenomenon of encounters and revelation through angels as metaphorical a literary device used by these later prophets in a world culturally very different from that of the classical prophets, to convey the concept of a graduated revelation or series of revelations. The philosopher Philo of Alexandria in the first century wrote that angels were not “beings” but rather devices or metaphors to express the extension of God’s power to humanity. Even Saadia Gaon, the tenth-century philosopher and grammarian, referred to the divine power, the “glory of God” which reveals itself to man, as an angel. Similarly, in later periods, the kabbalist mystics expressed the nature of revelation and the creative activity of God through the symbol of the sefirot (gradations of the divine power), which were sometimes also called angels. So the differences may be attributed to historical and cultural conditions, or to differences in the symbolism and language being used to express the awesome, supernatural phenomenon the mystics were experiencing. (Miriam Bokser Caravella, The Mystic Heart of Judaism [Science of the Soul Research Centre, 2011], 148-50)
