6 - Angelic Contemplation in the Sar Torah and the Prognostic Turn

Summary

This final chapter extends the argument in chapter five by investing the “Prince of Torah” section in the earliest Jewish mystical corpus known as the Hekhalot literature. It reads through the extended narrative of this text through the genre of a historiola, demonstrating that the rhetoric through which it separates between a “human, earthly” Torah and a “divine Torah” resonates with the manner in which Neoplatonists, Manichaeans, and “Jewish Christians” distinguished between “mere prognosis” and “divine prognosis” in chapter five. Not only does this text present the reader with a way of elevating his own learning faculties to be more like the angels, but Torah itself is conceptualized as something that is “instantly knowable” in a moment of divine comprehension.