The Sabbatean Prophets

66 The Sabbatean Prophets
the Ark of the Lord. David’s wife, Michal, daughter of King Saul, who had
established ideas of appropriate royal behavior, found this conduct offensive.
She was particularly concerned with the fact that David disrobed, at
least partially, during the performance, an act imitated by Nathan. When
Michal reproached David, he answered: “Before the Lord who chose me
above thy father, and above all his house, to appoint me prince over the people
of the Lord, over Israel, before the Lord will I make merry” (II Samuel
6:21). Michal is ultimately punished for her criticism and David is vindicated.
The author of our account is clearly responding to those who found
Nathan’s behavior, or his message, inappropriate. The association with King
David, who was also messiah and father of the messianic line, can hardly be
accidental.
Benevolent possessions similar to Nathan’s were well known among Muslims
and Jews. In order to understand the cultural and religious implications
of Nathan’s possession that gave it such significance for the movement, it is
important to consider Nathan’s episode in relation to the sixteenth-century
maggidic experiences of Rabbi Joseph Karo—the most famous maggidevents
in Judaism. Few Jews could have failed to notice the similarities between
them.
R. Karo, who was born in Spain and left with the exiles as a child, lived
and studied in Nicopolis, Istanbul, and Edirne (Adrianople), settling finally
in Safed. There he wrote the Bet Yosef and Shulhan Arukh and was an active
member in the circle of mystics around Rabbis Moses Cordovero and Isaac
Luria. He experienced possessions by a maggid throughout a long period of
his life. 33 These possessions began on a Shavu’ot night, probably while R.
Karo was still in Greece, and one event is recorded in a very famous letter by
Rabbi Solomon Alkabetz:
Know that the saint [R. Karo] and I his and your humble servant, belonging
to our company, agreed to stay up all night in order to banish sleep from our
eyes on Shavuot. We succeeded, thank God, so that, as you will hear, we
ceased not from study for even a moment. This is the order I arranged for
that night. [R. Alkabetz describes the reading of portions from the Torah
and prophets.] All this we did in dread and awe, with quite unbelievable
melody and tunefulness. We studied the whole of the Order Zera’im in the
Mishnah and then we studied in the way of truth [the Kabbalah].
No sooner had we studied two tractates of the Mishnah than our Creator
smote us so that we heard a voice speaking out of the mouth of the saint,