page_title: Prophecy
section_title: Judaism
hierarchical_section_title: Prophecy / Judaism
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail from a 1878 oil painting.
context_page_description: A prophecy is a message that is claimed by a prophet to have been communicated to them by a deity. Such messages typically involve inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of divine will concerning the prophet's social world and events to come.
context_section_description: The Hebrew term for prophet, Navi, literally means "spokesperson"; he speaks to the people as a mouthpiece of their God, and to their god on behalf of the people. "The name prophet, from the Greek meaning "forespeaker" (πρὸ being used in the original local sense), is an equivalent of the Hebrew נבוא, which signifies properly a delegate or mouthpiece of another."
  According to Judaism, authentic Nevuah (Heb.: נבואה,  "Prophecy") got withdrawn from the world after the destruction of the first Jerusalem Temple. Malachi is acknowledged to have been the last authentic prophet if one accepts the opinion that Nechemyah died in Babylon before 9th Tevet 3448 (313 BCE).
  The Torah contains laws concerning the false prophet (Deuteronomy 13:2-6, 18:20-22). Prophets in Islam like Lot, for example, are false prophets according to Jewish standards.
  In the Torah, prophecy often consisted of a conditioned warning by their God of the consequences should the society, specific communities, or their leaders not adhere to Torah's instructions in the time contemporary with the prophet's life. Prophecies sometimes included conditioned promises of blessing for obeying their god, and returning to behaviors and laws as written in the Torah. Conditioned warning prophecies feature in all Jewish works of the Tanakh.
  Notably Maimonides, philosophically suggested there once were many levels of prophecy, from the highest such as those experienced by Moses, to the lowest where the individuals were able to apprehend the Divine Will, but not respond or even describe this experience to others, citing in example, Shem, Eber and most notably, Noah, who, in biblical narrative, does not issue prophetic declarations.
  Maimonides, in his philosophical work The Guide for the Perplexed, outlines twelve modes of prophecy from lesser to greater degree of clarity:
  Inspired actions
  Inspired words
  Allegorical dream revelations
  Auditory dream revelations
  Audiovisual dream revelations/human speaker
  Audiovisual dream revelations/angelic speaker
  Audiovisual dream revelations/Divine speaker
  Allegorical waking vision
  Auditory waking revelation
  Audiovisual waking revelation/human speaker
  Audiovisual waking revelation/angelic speaker
  Audiovisual waking revelation/Divine speaker (that refers implicitly to Moses)
  The Tanakh contains prophecies from various Hebrew prophets (55 in total) who communicated messages from God to the nation of Israel, and later the population of Judea and elsewhere. Experience of prophecy in the Torah and the rest of Tanakh was not restricted to Jews. Nor was the prophetic experience restricted to the Hebrew language.
caption: David and Saul, detail from an 1878 oil painting, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
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