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Part Two · Chapter Forty-Four — The Modes of Speech Heard in Prophecy
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Prophecy occurs only in a vision or a dream, as we have explained many times — we will not always repeat this. Let us now state: when a prophet prophesies, he may see an allegory as we have explained many times; or he may see God, exalted be He, speaking to him in the prophetic vision, as Isaiah said: 'And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: Whom shall I send and who will go for us?' (Isa. 6:8). He may hear an angel speaking to him while also seeing him — this is very frequent — as in: 'And the angel of God said to me' etc. (Gen. 31:11); 'And it said to me, Do you not know what these are?' (Zech. 4:5); 'And the angel who spoke with me answered' etc. (Zech. 4:5); 'And I heard one holy one speaking' (Dan. 8:13) — this is more than can be counted. The prophet may also see a human figure speaking to him, as is said of Ezekiel: 'And behold, a man whose appearance was like the appearance of bronze' etc. (Ezek. 40:3), 'and the man spoke to me: Son of man' etc. (ibid. 40:4) — after the passage began with 'the hand of the Lord was upon me' (ibid. 40:1). And the prophet may see no figure at all but only hear speech in the prophetic vision calling to him — as Daniel says 'And I heard the voice of a man between the banks of Ulai' (Dan. 8:16); as Eliphaz says 'stillness — and I heard a voice' (Job 4:16); and also Ezekiel: 'And I heard one speaking to me' (Ezek. 1:28). For the thing perceived by Ezekiel in the prophetic vision was not the one who spoke to him; rather, at the conclusion of that strange and extraordinary event which he explicitly described as having perceived, he begins the prophetic content and its form by saying: 'And I heard one speaking to me.'
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After these preliminary remarks — which the texts themselves confirm — I now say: the speech that the prophet hears in the prophetic vision may also seem to him to be of extreme intensity, just as a person may dream that he heard a tremendous thunder, or saw an earthquake, or a lightning bolt — such things are also very frequently dreamed.
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And the speech heard in the prophetic vision may also sound like ordinary, familiar speech — nothing about it unusual at all. This is clear from the story of the prophet Samuel: when God, exalted be He, called him in a prophetic state, he thought the priest Eli was summoning him, time after time, three times. Then the text explained the cause of this, saying that what led to it and his thinking it was Eli was that he had not yet learned that God's speech to the prophets takes this form, and that this secret had not yet been revealed to him. So it explains: 'And Samuel had not yet known the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him' (1 Sam. 3:7) — meaning that he had not known, nor had it been revealed to him, that this is how the word of the Lord sounds. The phrase 'had not yet known the Lord' may also mean that he had not yet received any prophecy — for of one who does prophesy it is said 'In a vision I make myself known to him' (Num. 12:6); and so the meaning of the verse is: Samuel had not yet prophesied before that, and had not known either that this is the form of prophecy. Note this.