Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  140. Shaughnessy, Before Confucius, 115. See Bernhard Karlgren’s translation of the “Shao gao” in his The Book of Documents, Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Bulletin 22 (Stockholm, 1950): 48-51.

  141. See especially Shaughnessy, “Western Zhou History,” 317, but also more generally 313-317 of that article; and Before Confucius, 101-164.

  142. Cho-yun Hsu and Katheryn M. Linduff, Western Chou Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 111. By “Jaspersian breakthrough” the authors mean the axial breakthrough, as the term “axial age” was first put into general use by Karl Jaspers in The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953 [1949]).

  143. Translation from Creel, Origins of Statecraft, 98. The words within the square brackets are Creel’s. Cf. Karlgren, The Book of Documents, 59.

  144. Translation from Creel, Origins of Statecraft, 99.

  145. Karlgren, The Book of Documents, 46.

  146. Book of Songs, trans. Waley, nos. 172, 146.

  147. Ibid., nos. 253, 256. Here “middle kingdom” does not yet mean China but the central Zhou domain.

  148. Ibid., nos. 113, 88.

  149. Ibid., nos. 288, 302.

  150. Ibid., nos. 204, 188.

  151. Ibid., nos. 209, 195.

  152. Ibid., nos. 194, 172.

  153. Ibid., nos. 193, 172.

  154. Analects 3:14. See TheAnalects of Confucius, trans. Arthur Waley (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), 97. Chinese words have been rendered here in Pinyin. For discussion of this system, see Chapter 8, note 1.

  155. When I said that China was the one case of unbroken continuity from the Neolithic to the present, I was only partly right. Japan also shows such continuity. I have, however, argued that although Japan moved from the Neolithic to the archaic, it never, to this day, has become an axial civilization. This may appear an odd assertion, as Japan has absorbed several major axial traditions: Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and the Western Enlightenment, including its successors such as Marxism. Thus, clearly, Japan is not preaxial, as all other archaic cases have been; yet, I would argue, it is non-axial, because it has used, with great brilliance and success, axial culture to defend its archaic presuppositions. I have made this argument elsewhere at length, so it does not require repetition here. See “Introduction: The Japanese Difference,” in Robert N. Bellah, Imagining japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1- 62. S. N. Eisenstadt has made a similar argument in his Japanese Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  156. Kramer (History Begins at Sumer, 123) sums it up with a laconic Sumerian proverb:

  157. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 164.

  158. Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” 147.

  159. We should not forget Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: Dover, 1957 [1927]), though some of the speculation reported there seems to me to have been stimulated by missionary interrogation and would not likely have been produced in precontact times.

  160. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 8.

  161. Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” 217.

  162. Mumford, Myth, 186.

  6. The Axial Age I

  1. An earlier version of the introduction to this chapter appeared as the essay “What Is Axial about the Axial Age,” Archives Europeennes de Sociologic 46, no. 1 (2005): 69-89, Cambridge University Press. Copyright © 2005 Archives Europeennes de Sociology. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

  2. Thorkild Jacobsen, “The Cosmos as a State,” in Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure ofAncient Man, ed. Henri Frankfort, Mrs. Henri Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1949 [1946]), 137-199.

  3. Marcel Gauchet, in The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1985]), makes the point that the emergence of the state focusing on a divine or quasi-divine king destabilizes the equilibrium of what he calls “primeval religion,” which he describes as both egalitarian and immobile. Though his notion of pre-state religion as “the reign of the absolute past” is hardly adequate, failing as it does to catch the openness and diversity of such religions, his emphasis on the emergence of the archaic state as the essential precondition for the axial age is surely correct. See esp. chaps. 1 and 2, and pp. 23-46.

  4. Christianity and Islam fall outside the axial age chronologically, but they are historically intelligible only as developments of Israel’s axial breakthrough.

  5. Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 164.

  6. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 8-9.

  7. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal ofHistory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953 [1949]), 1.

  8. Ibid., 4.

  9. Ibid., 6.

  10. Susan and Andrew Sherratt, in “The Growth of the Mediterranean Economy in the Early First Millennium BCE,” World Archaeology 24 (1993): 361-378, describe the remarkable economic growth of the first half of the first millennium in the Near East and the Mediterranean: “In 1000 BCE most of the Mediterranean was effectively prehistoric; by 500 BCE it formed a series of well differentiated zones within a world-system.” There was not only a significant growth of trade, but an increase in manufacturing, urbanization, and literacy throughout the Mediterranean basin. The Sherratts attribute the driving force of this change to Phoenicia, under Assyrian pressure, especially from the tenth through the eighth centuries. Only from the seventh century do the Greeks begin to rival the Phoenicians in trade and colonization. Similar developments, though perhaps a few centuries later, have been observed in northern India and northern China.

  11. “Neo-Assyrian” to distinguish it from the Old Assyrian state (ca. 1900-ca. 1830 BCE) and the Middle Assyrian state (ca. 1400-ca. 1050).

  12. See Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, chap. 6, “Iranians and Greeks,” 123-150, on the disappointing quality of the surviving Greek observations of the Persian Empire, as well as the severe limitations of all other forms of documentation.

  13. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 [1921-1922]), 441-442, 447.

  14. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 5 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956-1987).

  15. Eric Voegelin, The World of the Polis, vol. 2 of Order and History (1957), 19-23. In vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age (1974), 2-6, Voegelin abandons the idea that leaps in being can be located at any specific period in history, while admitting his earlier debt to Jaspers.

  16. S. N. Eisenstadt, “Introduction: The Axial Age Breakthroughs-Their Characteristics and Origins,” in The Origins and Diversity of the AxialAge, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 1. Eisenstadt recognizes the contributions of Jaspers and Voegelin, and also of the Daedalus conference on the axial age organized by Benjamin Schwartz and published as Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C., special issue, Daedalus 104, no. 2 (Spring 1975). In particular, Eisenstadt noted the emphasis on “the strain toward transcendence” in the axial age in Schwartz’s essay “The Age of Transcendence” in the Daedalus volume. See also S. N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2003), especially the essays in vol. 1, pt. 2, “Axial Civilizations.” The most recent collection of work on the axial age in which Eisenstadt has been engaged is Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Bjorn Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

  17. For doubts about China, see Mark Elvin, “Was There a Transcendental Breakthrough in China?” in Eisenstadt, Origins and Diversity, 325-359. Similar arguments have been made with respect to Greece.

  18. Johann Arnason, “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a
Debate,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, Axial Civilizations, 31-32. He refers to a passage in Jaspers, Origin and Goal, 2.

  19. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 214.

  20. Ibid., 269.

  21. Ibid., 272.

  22. Ibid., 312.

  23. Ibid., 273.

  24. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), xiii. I discovered the source of the James quotation in “Brute and Human Intelligence,” in William James, Writings, 1878-1899 (New York: Library of America, 1992 [1878]), 911.

  25. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, La mentalite primitive (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1922); translated into English as Primitive Mentality (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1923). A careful reading of Levy-Bruhl will disclose that he was not as ridiculous as he has been made out to be.

  26. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 339-340.

  27. Ibid., 341.

  28. Yehuda Elkana, “The Emergence of Second-Order Thinking in Classical Greece,” in Eisenstadt, Origins and Diversity, 40-64. Eisenstadt frequently uses the phrase “secondorder thinking” as a synonym for his term “reflexivity.”

  29. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, 9.

  30. Elkana, “Emergence,” 64.

  31. See David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, chap. 9, “Comparison of these Religions [polytheism and monotheism], with regard to Persecution and Toleration,” where Hume compares polytheistic toleration with monotheistic “zeal and rancour, the most furious and implacable of all human passions.” Hume on Religion, ed. Richard Wollheim (New York: Meridian, 1964 [1757]), 65.

  32. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 25. See also Erik Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999 [1995]).

  33. “The Great Hymn to the Aten,” Miriam Lichtheim, in Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2, The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 96-100.

  34. James P. Allen, “The Natural Philosophy of Akhenaten,” in Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, ed. W. K. Simpson, Yale Egyptological Studies 3 (1989): 89-101. See also Jan Assmann, “Akhanyati’s Theology of Light and Time,” Proceedings of the IsraelAcademy of Sciences and Humanities 7, no. 4 (1992): 143-175; and Assmann, The Mind ofEgypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003 [1996]), 214-228.

  35. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Religion in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem in the First Century B.C.,” in On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 76-77. How far back the handshake goes, we do not know, though Momigliano reports it for the Persians and the Celts as well as the Greeks and Romans.

  36. Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 53-54. He also argues, convincingly to me, that genuine learning requires the physical presence of teachers and students, so that “distance learning” is ersatz at best.

  37. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Age of the Computer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).

  38. Jerome Bruner, Acts ofMeaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 111.

  39. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982), 66-67. This is not the place to pursue the important issue of the relation between orality and literacy, but Walter Ong in several books besides the one cited has made important contributions, as have Eric Havelock and Jack Goody.

  40. Eric Weil, “What Is a Breakthrough in History?” Daedalus 104, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 21-36.

  41. Ibid., 26.

  42. Jaspers, Origin and Goal, 20.

  43. Weil, “What Is a Breakthrough,” 22.

  44. Niels Peter Lemche, in Prelude to Israel’s Past: Background and Beginnings of Israelite History and Identity (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1998), 222-225, considers possible dates and tends to believe, though there are valid arguments for a variety of dates, that the Persian or Hellenistic periods are the most likely.

  45. Moshe Weinfeld argues for a number of parallels between Greco-Roman migration/ foundation stories and Israelite ones. He cites, in particular, a number of structural parallels between the Aeneid and the Abraham stories in Genesis. He also calls attention to parallels with the Exodus/Moses narrative. See Weinfeld, The Promise of the Land: The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the Israelites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1-21.

  46. Mark S. Smith, The Memoirs of God: History, Memory, and the Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 24. Some have suggested that Exodus 15, Genesis 49, and Deuteronomy 33 may be premonarchical; others date them to the early monarchy.

  47. For a summary of these arguments, see Norman K. Gottwald, The Politics ofAncient Israel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 158-162.

  48. One might note that the pharaoh claims to have utterly destroyed the then victory inscriptions were famously exaggerated.

  49. Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel onAncient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 208-209.

  50. Alexander H. Joffe, “‘The Rise of Secondary States in the Iron Age Levant,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 45, no. 4 (2002): 437.

  51. Ibid., 440.

  52. On the Edomite origin of Yahweh and the close relation between early Israel and early Edom, see Smith, The Memoirs of God, 27, 153-154, 170-171.

  53. On the folk etymology of the name Israel as “God rules,” see Stephen A. Geller, Sacred Enigmas: Literary Religion in the Hebrew Bible (London: Routledge, 1996), 22. On Isra-el vs. Isra-yahu, see Smith, The Memoirs of God, 26.

  54. Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 254-255.

  55. See especially Frank M. Cross Jr., Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). See also Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  56. Rainer Albertz, A History oflsraelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, vol. 1, From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994 [1992]), 32.

  57. The evidence for a number of gods in early Israel is overwhelming. Ziony Zevit signals this new consensus in his use of the plural in the title of his book, The Religions ofAncient Israel: A Synthesis ofParallacticApproaches (London: Continuum, 2001). Mark S. Smith has meticulously examined the evidence in several books: The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990; 2nd ed., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002); The Origins of Biblical Monotheism; and The Memoirs of God. The use of the word “polytheism” is purely descriptive. The suffix -ism in this case does not refer to any theory nor, certainly, does it refer to any contrast with “monotheism.”

  58. Albertz, History of Israelite Religion, 1:32.

  59. Joffe, “Rise of Secondary States,” 425.

  60. Ibid., 445.

  61. See the discussion of Gideon and Abimelech in Gottwald, Politics of Ancient Israel, 42-43.

  62. Frank Cross, in his Canaanite Myth, writes, “The institution of prophecy appeared simultaneously with kingship in Israel and fell with kingship. This is no coincidence:… the charismatic principle of leadership which obtained in the era of the judges survived in its liveliest form in the office of the prophet” (223). Cross argues that Samuel was paradigmatic in that he designated the one chosen by Yahweh to be king; he judged the acts of the king and could take away the designation; and he could declare holy war (223-224).

  63. The term for prophet ca
me to be used for figures earlier than Samuel, above all for Moses, the superprophet, but that is a later development, probably late- or post monarchical. On Moses as superprophet, see Geller, Sacred Enigmas, 192.

  64. Even more strangely, it was God who incited David to make the census out of anger at Israel. 2 Samuel 24:1.

  65. Albertz, History oflsraelite Religion, 1:140-143. Mark Smith has discussed the possibility that the original God of the Exodus was El, not Yahweh. See his Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 146-148.

  66. “Divine sons” follows the Greek text. The Masoretic Hebrew text says “children of Israel,” but this is thought to be an alteration to avoid just the implications described below.

  67. On the transition from general Western Semitic ideas of the pantheon to that of early Israel, see the much richer and more detailed account in Smith, The Memoirs of God, 101- 119; and also Smith, Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 142ff.

  68. Mark Smith notes that history has seen a shift from “a world theology relating [Israel’s] god to the gods of other nations” to “a cosmic theology of a single deity,” to a common version of world theology today in which the world’s religions “pursue different paths toward reality and truth.” See his Memoirs of God, 171.

  69. For the process of convergence and differentiation, see Mark Smith, Early History of God, 7-9.

  70. Van der Toorn, Family Religion, 277-281.

  71. Steven W. Holloway, Assur Is King! Assur Is King! Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo Assyrian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 260.