ABSTRACT
According to a saying in the Babylonian Talmud (final redaction undertaken from late fifth century C.E.), ‘forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses have prophesied to the Israelites’ – a figure no doubt derived from a reading of the entire Hebrew Bible.1 Postexilic Judaism appears to have regarded these canonical prophets as custodians and explicators of the Law. This Law, known in Hebrew as Torah (a word that came to embody the whole corpus of the Pentateuch), was believed to have been given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai and was held to contain everything necessary for the future lives of the children of Israel. As the divine word of God the Torah was absolute and the prophets could neither add to nor remove anything from the Law. At most the prophetic message, whether oral, textual or visual, could render explicit what had only been implicit in the revelation of God upon Mount Sinai. This view was clearly stated in the opening paragraph of the Mishnaic treatise Pirke Abot:
Moses received Torah from Sinai and delivered it to Joshua; then Joshua delivered it to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets delivered it to the men of the Great Assembly.2
