In his lifetime, the late Abraham Joshua Heschel was celebrated as a profound religious thinker, an eloquent writer on Hasidism, a modern prophet who led civil rights marches. All of these eclipsed his reputation as a first-rate scholar of Jewish thought; since his death his work has gradually emerged from behind his fame.

Central among his interests was the nature of the direct experience of God, either mystically or prophetically. While his work on the ancient Israelite prophets is well known, his studies of prophetic inspiration among Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages is not, in part because it exists in article form and in part because these articles were written in Hebrew.

The standard Jewish view is that prophecy ended with the ancient prophets, somewhere early in the Second Temple era. Heschel demonstrated that this view is not altogether accurate. Belief in the possibility of continued prophetic inspiration, and in its actual occurrence - appear throughout much of the medieval period, and even in modern times.