  Halevi's task at this juncture is not only to explain how God could have entered into contact with mere flesh and blood to provide instruction about what is pleasing and displeasing to him, but also to explain how only Israel could have received this instruction. His strategy for explaining both successfully is to build upon the king's skepticism regarding claims of direct divine-human contact in order to strengthen his case by raising such contacts to a higher level. Accordingly, the sage calls the king's attention to the familiar hierarchical structure of the empirical world, namely, the ascending orders of living beings that can be perceived by the senses—plants, animals, and human beings endowed with intellect. He also wins the king's basic assent to his classification of each order (amr) or level (rutbah) by reference to the various abilities and/or activities that distinguish the creatures that belong to it. When the king is then asked what level might be above the intellectual order, which distinguishes human beings as rational animals from all other animals by virtue of their concern with improving character traits, the household, and the city through man-made laws and political institutions, he maintains that there is none higher than that of great savants. To this, the sage counters that they, too, belong to the intellectual order, since they differ from other human beings only in degree, not in kind. So he asks about what appears to be yet another hypothetical case: If he were to find someone with an utterly extraordinary capacity for surviving amidst life-threatening circumstances as well as amazing self-mastery and knowledge of hidden things pertaining to both the past and the future, would this not represent an essentially different level? The king responds that it amounts to even more than that; it would be the divine level characteristic of God's own kingdom, if it exists. In addition, the person described would come under the dominion of the divine order (al-amr al-ilahi). After the king's qualified revision of the hierarchy's true extent, it remains only for the sage to explain that what he described were, in fact, the attributes of the undisputed prophet through whom multitudes of Israelites became aware of God's attachment to them and also of the fact that God governs them in accordance with both his will and their own obedience and disobedience, as recorded in the Bible's historical and genealogical narratives. (K 1: 31–43)