The God of Old
This God does not seem to have much in common with the God of later theologians. Here, God is not everywhere, omnipresent; as already mentioned, modern scholars know that throughout the Bible, God is conceived—even in an optical hallucination—as having some actual form, a body.13 In these narratives, God is just elsewhere, at least most of the time, hidden behind the curtain of ordinary reality and the usual way of seeing. Sometimes, however, He crosses that curtain to speak to human beings. When this happens, the people involved don’t actually see Him: what they see, or think they see, is an “angel/envoy” or a “man” (an apparition might be the best way to say it) who looks like an ordinary human being.14 They interact with this apparition for a time, sometimes a long time, and all the while they are in a kind of fog: they think they are seeing, but they are wrong.
Even when Moses and the leaders of Israel ascend Mount Sinai and are said to see God, it is striking that the narrative lowers its gaze just at the crucial moment:
Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel went up [Mount Sinai]. And they saw the God of Israel: under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. Yet He did not harm the leaders of the Israelites: they beheld God, and they ate and drank. (Exod 24:9–11)
They may actually have beheld God, their real partner in this covenant-sealing ceremony. But the narrative is at a loss to say anything about God’s appearance: all it can describe is what was underneath His feet.
The state of mind that people have in these divine encounters seems quite similar to that of someone having a dream. When the dreamer wakes up, he says things like, “In my dream I saw someone approaching me; he was wearing a gray sharkskin suit and a black hat. He started talking to me, and I recognized the voice, as if we knew each other, but then suddenly I noticed that he had a pearl-handled revolver in his right hand. There was a loud bang, so loud that I woke up.” Of course, the dreamer didn’t really see any of the things he mentioned. In fact, his eyes did not see a thing: they were closed tight throughout the dream.15 By the same token, that bang that he heard was an auditory illusion. In the biblical stories seen thus far, the people encountering God are not asleep, but they are in a fog, which is a lot like dreaming. As in a dream, the most illogical things seem to make sense to them, or else they are just ignored; it is only later that all or part of what was seen turns out to have been an illusion. But these are not useless illusions. They might be better described as a kind of theatrical setting that allows this auditory encounter with God to take place. Now, the voice of God might also be described as an illusion, a way for God to communicate with us through our sound software. But whatever the means, what God says, these texts are telling us, turns out to be true. Even in this, the similarity to dreams is striking. Consider, for example, Jacob’s actual dream at Bethel:
Jacob left Beer Sheba and went on toward Haran. He chanced upon a certain place and spent the night there, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in the place. And he dreamed there was a ladder stuck into the earth, whose top reached to heaven, and the angels of God were going up and down on it. The LORD stood over him and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you are lying I will give to you and your offspring; and your offspring will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east and the north and the south; and all the families of the earth will be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I will be with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it!” And he was afraid and he said, “How fearsome is this place! This is the very house of God and this is the gate of heaven.” (Gen 28:10–17)
What Jacob hears is the voice of God, and what the voice says is altogether true: God will grant the land to Jacob and his descendants will spread out in all directions. But what is the significance of the vision, the ladder and the angels? This was a question that fascinated ancient biblical interpreters,16 but in fact this visual part of Jacob’s dream seems altogether parallel to the manlike “angels” and other visual effects that make up the waking dreams seen already. In other words, there was no particular message in the ladder and the angels, other than to signify that this place, which Jacob had just happened upon, was by its very nature a sacred spot connecting earth to heaven and thus destined to be the site of an earthly sanctuary, as Jacob goes on to vow (verse 22).17
Surprised, but Not Flabbergasted
All these encounters follow a similar pattern, but sometimes one of the elements is omitted or modified. For example, the story of the prophet Samuel’s first encounter with God lacks any visual component. According to the narrative, Samuel had been given by his mother to serve Eli, a priest in the temple at Shiloh. Then, one night:
The lamp of God had not yet burnt out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was. Then the LORD called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!” and ran to Eli, and said, “Here I am. You called me?” But he said, “I did not call you; go back to bed.” So he went and lay down. The LORD called again, “Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am. You called me?” But he said, “I did not call, my son; go back to bed.” Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD; the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. Then the LORD called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am. You called me?” Then Eli understood that the LORD was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if He calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, LORD, for Your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the LORD came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for Your servant is listening.” Then the LORD said to Samuel, “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will set the ears of anyone who hears of it to tingling.” (1 Sam 3:3–11)
Samuel is a novice, never having been addressed by God before. All this back and forth between him and Eli seems thus designed to tell us that Samuel’s call to prophecy was no vague inner prompting, and certainly not a case of self-promotion. The voice that called him was so real that not once but three times Samuel mistook it for a perfectly human voice—in fact, that of his master. It is only on the fourth time that he is ready to hear God’s words. So this, in a way, is parallel to the angel stories we have seen; here as well, the hearer of God’s voice is also in a fog of sorts, but this time there is no accompanying vision.
The story of Samuel’s call embodies another strange aspect of these narratives. In almost all of them, the people encountering God at first suspect nothing. This is the moment of confusion. But after a while they do catch on, and then their reaction is almost as striking as the encounter itself: they are surprised, but not exactly bowled over. So Eli, after Samuel comes to him for the third time, “understands” that it’s God calling; in other words, he realizes that this was one of those manifestations of the divine that sometimes do occur. So he informs Samuel, who likewise seems to know about such things; summoned the next time, Samuel calmly replies, “Speak, for Your servant is listening.” In the same way, Moses, once he has understood that this vision of a burning bush was meant to bring him to where God was, calmly answers the voice from the bush: “God called to him from the middle of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ He answered, ‘Here I am.’” No “What—a talking bush?!” Apparently, Moses likewise knows that such things occur.
True, Moses goes on to manifest his fear at this encounter: “And Moses hid his face, since he was afraid to look at God” (Exod 3:6). The same is true of nearly all the other cases mentioned: Sarah (see Gen 18:15), Gideon, Manoah and his wife, and Jacob (twice! Gen 28:17, 32:31) are all apparently in fear of th
eir lives after having “seen” God, even if in this visionary mode. But this only reinforces the impression that, once the fog has lifted, they are no longer in unknown territory; encountering God is dangerous, and clearly, that is what has just happened. Here is one more example to add to the previous ones:
And it came to pass, when Joshua was in Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and saw, and behold! A man was standing across from him with his sword drawn in his hand. So Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you one of us or one of our enemies?” And he answered, “Neither. I am the chief of the LORD’s army; I have just arrived.” Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in prostration and said to him, “What does my lord wish to say to his servant?” And the chief of the LORD’s army said to Joshua, “Take your shoe from off your foot, for the place on which you are standing is holy”—and Joshua did so. (Josh 5:13–15)
Here in compact form are nearly all the elements previously seen: the emphatic phrasing indicating a vision (“he lifted up his eyes and saw, and behold!”), the initial moment of confusion (“Are you one of us or one of our enemies?”), and the curious reaction to this divine encounter (“Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in prostration and said to him, “What does my lord wish to say . . . ?”). Joshua, too, is surprised but not flabbergasted.
The Revelatory State of Mind
One might conclude that the resemblance of all these different accounts simply proves that later ones were based on the earlier accounts.18 And this is probably true, for at least some of these texts. After all, every literature has its conventions, and the recurrence of the same basic pattern in these divine encounters suggests the existence of some such literary tradition. Even slight deviations from the pattern, as in the example of Samuel, are altogether within the usual bounds of established literary conventions.
But conventions have to have a starting point as well as a reason for becoming conventional, and these are the matters of interest here. Was there something in this combination of elements—the illusory appearance, the fog, the divine words spoken, the relatively mild surprise—that seemed to ring true in the minds of ancient readers/listeners? An answer of sorts comes from an unexpected source, the writings of ancient Greece and Rome. The religions of Greco-Roman civilization were in many ways strikingly different from those of the ancient Near East in general19 and ancient Israel in particular. The Greeks had nothing corresponding to angels, for example; moreover, their myths are full of stories of gods who are frequently unfair and immoral, who feud with one another and sometimes take revenge on mortals, transforming themselves into animals or transforming humans into animals or plants.
It is all the more striking, therefore, that they sometimes describe divine encounters in a manner quite similar to the ones that we have seen. In Homer’s Iliad, for example, gods and goddesses sometimes come down to earth disguised as ordinary humans; the person they encounter fails to recognize them—very much as Abraham or Gideon failed to recognize their divine interlocutors:
Then the goddess [Aphrodite] spoke to her [Helen] in the likeness of an old woman, a wool-comber who used to card wool for her when she lived in Lacedaemon . . . “Come here,” [Aphrodite said]. “Alexander [i.e., Helen’s seducer, Paris] is calling you home. He’s in his room on his inlaid bed, gleaming in his beautiful attire. You wouldn’t think that he had just finished fighting an enemy! He looks as if he were going to a dance, or rather as if he had just finished dancing and sat down.”
So she spoke, and stirred Helen’s heart in her breast. But when she [Helen] caught a glimpse of the goddess’s beautiful neck, of her lovely breast and flashing eyes, she was shocked. Then she spoke to her, saying, “Strange goddess, why are you determined to fool me like this . . .” (Iliad 3:385–400)20
A similar instance occurs in Virgil’s Aeneid. Shipwrecked with his men on the Libyan shore, Aeneas is despairing of his fate when he suddenly encounters a young girl; at least that’s what he thinks. But it turns out—just as with Jacob’s wrestling partner, or the “man” who visits Manoah and his wife—that the human being is an illusion: in this case, the young girl turns out to be none other than his divine mother Venus. Of course, she does not look like Venus: “She had a girl’s face and clothes, and even carried the weapons of a girl from Sparta . . . Like a hunting-girl, she had a bow hanging handily from her shoulder, and she let her hair blow loose in the wind.” The disguise fools Aeneas, and he asks her to tell him where they have landed and what sort of a place it is. Her answer goes on for nearly a hundred lines; at the end, she tells Aeneas to take heart and go on his way:
She spoke, but as she turned away, a glint of rose shone forth from her neck and her heavenly hair exhaled its godly perfume. Her garment now flowed down to her very feet, and by her demeanor she was revealed to be a true goddess. Now he recognized his mother and pursued her with these words as she vanished: “Why do you cruelly delude your own son with disguises? Why not have our hands clasp each other and have our voices speak and reply in truth?” With such words he reproved her, then headed off toward the walls of the city. (Aeneid 1:402–10)
The resemblance of these passages to the earlier biblical ones is certainly remarkable. It is important to note, however, that while there were some contacts between biblical Israel and ancient Greece, there is little here to suggest any sort of direct literary borrowing. Rather, the common elements seen might point toward a different, and somewhat eerier, conclusion. Perhaps these literary resemblances reflect something deeper that ancient Greeks and ancient Israelites shared, an underlying set of assumptions about their own minds and how they interact with the divine. Both civilizations thus conceived of the possibility of encountering a deity in a way that is quite foreign to our own world of ideas and experience. For one reason or another, these encounters were held to start with something like a hallucination,21 a waking dream of an uncanny meeting with a stranger and a conversation that, on later reflection, sounded quite illogical at points; ultimately this was followed by the stunning, auditory revelation of the deity’s true identity and the true message that he/she had come down to transmit. In some of the texts that we possess, these elements may have already become conventional, but behind them may stand a once-common picture of the human mind and its encountering the divine that is altogether unfamiliar nowadays.
But if these things did, in some sense, “really happen” in the distant past, what was it that caused them to cease happening? Did God, or the gods, just lose interest in direct encounters with human beings? In his exhaustive catalogue of the phenomena of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Swedish biblicist Johannes Lindblom asked a similar question: What was it that allowed some ancient Israelites to become prophets, that is, spokesmen and intermediaries between God and humans? Although he described at length various biblical accounts of spiritual possession and trance-like states, he ultimately pointed to what he called the “revelatory state of mind” as crucial for Israel’s prophets, an openness to God addressing them directly:
Typical of the revelatory state of mind is the feeling of being under an influence external to the self, a divine power, the consciousness of hearing words and seeing visions which do not come from the self, but from the invisible divine world, into which, in the moment of revelation, an entrance has been granted. This feeling of being subject to an external influence is perhaps the most constant element in the revelatory state of mind.22
In other words, the prophet’s state of mind is such that he or she is open to a divine being or beings quite “external to the self,” who could somehow penetrate their brains and make them see and hear things that come from elsewhere. But this was hardly the only way that God was understood in biblical times. In other parts of the Bible, God is conceived in terms closer to our own: He controls everything that happens, but from a distance.
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Joseph and His Brothers
DIVINE CAUSALITY; THE OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS OF THE WORLD; WISDOM’S IDEOLOGY; SUPERSTITIOUS FOOLS
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p; The biblical story of Joseph and his brothers presents a picture of God’s way with the world that is strikingly different from that of the narratives examined in the previous chapter. Here God is a long-range planner who arranges everything in advance and then sits back to watch the events unfold. He scarcely intervenes in human affairs, if at all; He is generally remote from the events themselves.
In the world of the Bible, things do not just happen: God is the great Unseen Causer of everything that humans do not cause on their own. This was true throughout the biblical period and manifested itself in different ways1—including prominently the way in which people thought about the weather. From time immemorial, inhabitants of the land of Canaan had looked skyward (for a long while to the Canaanite storm god Haddad/Ba‘al, and later to the God of Israel) to “open the treasure-houses of the heavens” and bring down the precious raindrops needed for survival in that water-poor environment. The weather was so capricious there that it was sometimes obviously the product of divine manipulation. As God tells the prophet Amos, “I was the one who stopped the rain from falling three months before harvest-time. Or sometimes I would rain on one town, but on another I wouldn’t let it rain; or one field would get rain, but another field, where I didn’t make it rain, would just dry up” (Amos 4:7). The weather was thus not simply bad or good, and certainly not the simple product of high or low pressure areas moving about; neither did the rain come because of a cold front coming in from the north, although everyone knew that a north wind brings rain (Prov 25:23). But the ultimate cause of good or bad weather was God; in fact, unusual weather was often intended as a divine warning or divine punishment.
The Great Shift Page 3