Joseph thus stands in sharp contrast to earlier figures in Genesis—to Abraham, for example. Abraham is all about that revelatory state of mind. The first thing we know about him, reported in Genesis 12:1, is that God told him to leave his homeland: “The LORD said to Abraham, ‘Depart from your homeland, your kindred, and your father’s house, to go to the land that I will show you.’” This will obviously make for a momentous change in Abraham’s life, as this sentence itself makes clear: leaving his homeland meant severing the connection to his larger clan (here called his “kindred”; this subtribe constituted a person’s principal source of protection in the ancient world), as well as to his immediate family. Leaving them meant becoming a sojourner, an alien with no official status. Yet Abraham does not hesitate: he “went forth as the LORD had commanded him” (Gen 12:4). In fact, there is no mention of Abraham even considering the consequences, no indication that he thought anything on his own. He moves about like an automaton.
The same sort of automaton-like Abraham appears in what is a still more momentous act in his life, his willingness to offer his son Isaac as a human sacrifice to God:
After these things, God put Abraham to the test and said to him, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said: “Now take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go off to the land of Moriah: offer him up as a burnt offering there, on one of the mountains that I will show you.” Abraham got up early in the morning and saddled his donkey and took two of his servants with him along with his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering and set out for the place that God had mentioned. (Gen 22:1–3)
Once again, Abraham does not seem to have any sort of inner life—one might even say, any sort of mind at all. He is not, as a famous essay once described him, “fraught with background.”11 God speaks to him (how or under what circumstances is not explained: this is apparently unnecessary), and off he goes, prepared to sacrifice his beloved son.
What do we know of Abraham as a human being? He is not “wise” like Joseph, with all the character traits that go along with that quality—patient, modest, and the rest. Later tradition repeatedly described Abraham as “faithful” (ne’eman), that is, someone trusted by God,12 but he is never called even that in Genesis. The most that is said of him there is that he is “one who fears God”; that is, he was willing to kill his own son rather than face the consequences of disobedience. Much of the time, there does not seem to be a real “self” there; at least half his brain, it appears, is ruled by God.
This difference between the selves of Abraham and Joseph, I wish to suggest, is paralleled by the difference between the way God acts, or doesn’t, in their two sagas. Joseph, with his fairly modern self, knows of God only as the remote, long-range planner, a God whose universe runs on automatic pilot, obeying rules established long ago. Abraham’s God is altogether unpredictable, threatening at every turn to intervene, telling Abraham what to do, demanding, commanding, intruding at will. Both men of course believe that God is the great Unseen Causer, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter; but they differ as to how this causality is expressed. For Abraham, God’s control is immediate: just as Er and Onan could not simply die, but had to be “killed” by God, so nothing simply happens in Abraham’s universe, and there are no rules: a ninety-year-old woman can give birth to a baby; a son granted by God’s beneficence can be snatched away (or threatened to be) by God’s whim. For both Abraham and Joseph, the differing depictions of God and of self seem to correspond to each other, and, as we shall see, this equation continues on in other ways elsewhere in the Bible.
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The Last Wills of Jacob’s Sons
WHAT MAKES US SIN?; AN INNER STRUGGLE; AN ANCIENT SENSE OF SELF; ABRAHAM AND THE DINKA
The difference between the Joseph story and the other narratives of Genesis seems to have something to do with what modern-day researchers call the human “sense of self.” Tracing its development may prove crucial in understanding not only how we differ from biblical man, but how people of the modern West also differ from people elsewhere in the world.
A strange book appeared sometime around the start of the first century BCE. Nowadays it is not a part of anyone’s Bible, but for a time ancient Jews and Christians considered it altogether sacred. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is just what the title says, a set of twelve last will and testaments, allegedly composed by the twelve sons of the biblical Jacob (traditionally known as “the patriarchs”).* These are not last wills in our sense: they do not talk about distributing money or property to one’s heirs. Rather, they are “spiritual” testaments. In keeping with ancient custom, each patriarch here summons his children shortly before his death and transmits to them some of the lessons he has learned in his own life, along with some advice for their own future.
The book’s a fake, of course. These testaments weren’t really written by the biblical Reuben, Simeon, and Jacob’s other sons. Instead, an anonymous author apparently dreamed up the idea of having each of these biblical figures transmit his spiritual testament to his children. In this way, the real author could pass on his own beliefs about what is important in life; putting his beliefs in the mouths of Jacob’s sons would give his ideas an authority, and a cachet, that they certainly would not have had if the author had signed his own name to them.
Marauding Spirits
The reason this book is of interest here is that its author (or perhaps its authors, since this seems to be a composite work) could not resolve the issue answered in two different ways in the two previous chapters: Who’s in charge here? Are we the sole proprietors of our own brains, or are our minds penetrated from time to time by God or some other external power? More generally, as we shall see, this issue is connected to a subtler question: What exactly do we mean by “I”—and is this “I” the same concept that existed two or three thousand years ago?
For the author of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the question “Who’s in charge here?” presented itself most directly with a central concern of his book, the cause of human sinfulness. Most people, at least in some sense, want to do the right thing, and yet they often end up not doing it. What makes them go wrong? This was a pressing question in the first century BCE (as it is today), and to answer it, the Testaments and other, roughly contemporaneous writings propose two quite different alternatives.
The first answer is that of Outside Powers. We do wrong because something outside ourselves burrows into our minds and causes us to go astray. In these ancient texts, this outside force is typically identified as Satan or another evil angel* who dispatches his minions to attack human beings. These lesser demons are usually simply called “spirits” in Hebrew and Greek;** they quickly take over people’s minds and cause them to lose control. In fact, they’re a bit like bacteria: they can’t be seen, but somehow they get inside you, and once they do, you’re in trouble. (The customary way to counteract their power is to pray to God with special “apotropaic” prayers, designed to turn aside their evil powers; sometimes these prayers worked, but sometimes they didn’t.)1 In the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, each of these spirits is identified with a particular kind of sin: there is the Spirit of Licentiousness, the Spirit of Contentiousness, the Spirits of Arrogance, of Flattery, Injustice, and so forth. All of them are in the employ of the great Angel of Deceit,2 another name for Satan in use at the time.
In his testament, Simeon (one of Jacob’s twelve sons) confesses that he actually wanted to kill his brother Joseph, “because the Angel of Deceit had sent the Spirit of Jealousy to blind my mind, so that I would not treat him in brotherly fashion” (T. Sim. 2:7). Consequently, he warns his children:
Beware of the Spirits of Deceit and Jealousy, for Jealousy takes over a person’s whole mind and will not allow him to eat or drink or do anything good. Rather, it is always pushing him to kill the person of whom he is jealous. (T. Sim. 3:1–3)
Simeon’s brother Dan has a different besetting sin, anger. Accor
dingly, he warns his children:
For the Spirit of Anger traps [a person] in nets of deceit and blinds his natural eyes, and by lying makes his mind go dark, and [then] transmits to him his own way of seeing. And what does he [i.e., the Spirit of Anger] trap his eyes with? With hatred [in] the heart,3 so that he [the spirit] gives him his [the spirit’s] own heart against his brother, so that he [the person] will envy him [his brother]. [The Spirit of] Anger is evil, my children, for he becomes a soul to the soul. For he takes over the body of the angry person, then gains dominion over the soul, then grants to the body his own power, so that it will perform any transgression. (T. Dan 2:4–3:2)
This view of the cause of sin was hardly the invention of the Testaments’ author; it is found in many texts of the same period. For example, the author of the Book of Jubilees (early second century BCE), writes of Noah’s descendants:
Impure demons began to mislead Noah’s grandchildren, to make them act foolishly, and to destroy them. Then Noah’s sons came to their father Noah and told him about the demons who were misleading, blinding, and killing his grandchildren. He prayed before the Lord his God and said: “God of the spirits which are in all animate beings . . . may Your mercy be lifted over the children of Your children; and may the wicked spirits not rule them in order to destroy them from the earth. (Jub 10:1–3)4
Later, in recounting the story of Abraham, the author of Jubilees has Abraham pray using rather similar language:5
That night he prayed and said: My God, my God, God Most High, You alone are my God. You have created everything: Everything that was and has been is the product of Your hands. You and Your lordship I have chosen. Save me from the power of the evil spirits who rule the thoughts of people’s minds. May they not mislead me from following You, my God. Do establish me and my posterity forever. May we not go astray from now until eternity. (Jub 12:19–20)
The fierce monotheism professed by Abraham in this prayer does not stop him from worrying about the “power of the evil spirits who rule the thoughts of people’s minds.” He knows what they can do if left unchecked; they can even cause a person to fall away from God, “from following You.”6
A similar prayer was discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls* seventy years ago:
Forgive my sin, O Lord, and cleanse me of my iniquity. Favor me with the spirit of faithfulness and knowledge; let me not be caught in transgression. Do not let any satan** or impure spirit rule over me;7 let no pain or an evil inclination take over me/my bones. (11Q5 [11QPsa] col 19 “Plea for Deliverance” 14–16)8
Evil Comes from Within
The other explanation for human evil is quite the opposite of the Outside Powers answer, and it is basically what most people in the modern West believe. Evil comes from within us. More precisely, we are all given the capacity to choose what we do and to face the consequences. These two answers may be opposites, but, strange to tell, this second explanation for evil’s origin is also found within the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. For example, the “Testament of Asher” begins by asserting that “There are two ways, of good and of evil, and along with them two impulses within our breasts that differentiate them” (T. Ash. 1:5). What we do is thus the result of what we choose to do:
If the soul chooses the good, everything it does will be in righteousness, and [even] if it sins, it will repent right away . . . But if it opts for the [evil] impulse, then its every action will be in wickedness, and, having driven away the good, it will take hold of the bad. (T. Ash. 1:6–8)
In other words, it’s all up to the individual soul to set its own course.
This view seems to concur with a passage from the Book of Ben Sira, a second-century BCE Jewish text found in the Apocrypha section of many Christian Bibles (and known there as Ecclesiasticus, or Sirach):
God created mankind in the beginning, and gave him over to the power of his own disposition.
If you wish, you will keep a commandment, and faithfully do God’s will.
If you trust in Him, you too may live.
Fire and water are set before you; extend your hand to whichever you choose.
Life and death are before a person: whichever he chooses will be given to him. (Sir 15:14–17)9
Similarly, in the Psalms of Solomon, another apocryphal work from the same period:
Our deeds are [done] by choice and [are] in the power of our souls.
Doing right or wrong is the work of our own hands, and in Your righteousness You survey the sons of men. (Pss. Sol. 9:4)
Here, God is clearly a bystander; His “righteousness” is apparently mentioned because in the end God will judge the people for their actions, but their choices are their own.
“I Can’t Decide”
These two poles, the external and internal explanations for the source of human evil, seem clear enough.10 But as many scholars have noted, a number of authors (including some of those cited above) seem to hesitate between the two answers, sometimes even evoking both simultaneously, as if trying to settle somewhere in the middle. This may be the most interesting thing about the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and other compositions from the same period. It is as if their authors had both possibilities in front of them, but all they keep saying is: “I just can’t make up my mind!”
Take, for example, Moses’s opening prayer in the Book of Jubilees:
Then Moses fell prostrate and prayed and said: “Lord my God, do not allow your people and your heritage to go along in the error of their minds . . . Create for them a just spirit. May the spirit of Belial not rule over them so as to bring charges against them before You and to trap them away from every proper path so that they may be destroyed from your presence. They are your people and your heritage whom You have rescued from Egyptian control by your great power. Create for them a pure mind and a holy spirit. May they not be trapped in their sins from now to eternity.” (Jub 1:19–21)
We saw above that Jubilees elsewhere seems to endorse the “outside” source of human evil—and indeed, it does so here as well: don’t let Belial* rule over Israel, the author says—this is clearly the external understanding of evil’s origin. If Belial does take over, he goes on to say, the consequences will be dire: Belial will be able to bring charges against the people before God (since accusing people before God is the satanic task par excellence), leading to the severest punishment.11 But the author also asks God to prevent Israel from “go[ing] along in the error of their minds,” and this seems to be talking about something internal.12 The author also evokes a verse from the Psalms twice in this same passage, “Create for them a just spirit” and “Create for them a pure mind and a holy spirit” (for both, see Ps 51:12; some Bibles, 51:10). Here it is hard to know if this is to be accomplished externally or internally. That is, does God create a “just spirit” and a “pure mind” through an act of cleansing that presumably takes place entirely inside? Or is it more like (excuse the analogy!) changing a flat tire, where the old spirit is somehow exchanged for a brand-new spirit from the outside, which is attached in the discarded one’s place? It is not even clear that the author of Jubilees himself knew for sure.
Another example of hesitating between two explanations for human evil is in the already-cited “Plea for Deliverance” from the Dead Sea Scrolls:
Forgive my sin, O Lord, and cleanse me of my iniquity. Favor me with the spirit of faithfulness and knowledge; let me not be caught in transgression. Do not let any satan or impure spirit rule over me; let no pain or an evil inclination take over me/my bones. (11Q5 [11QPsa] col 19 “Plea for Deliverance” 14–16)13
Here again the author seems to have combined the external-source rhetoric (Do not let any satan or impure spirit rule over me) with the internal-source theme, “Cleanse me of my iniquity.” Even more striking is the juxtaposition of “Do not let any satan or impure spirit rule over me” with “let no pain or an evil inclination take over me/my bones.” Obviously, “any satan or impure spirit” is going to be invading the human being from the outside, w
hereas “evil inclination” (in Hebrew, yetzer [ha]-ra) was a kind of code word during this period for something inside, an internal urge that is part of every human’s makeup.14
I should add that the fact that Satan’s minions are sometimes called “spirits” only adds a further layer of ambiguity, since in both Hebrew and Greek this word can refer equally to an external spirit flying around and then entering the human mind, and to a person’s own, internal spirit, what might elsewhere be called his or her “soul” or “heart” or indeed whole being.15 In the Testaments and elsewhere, it is sometimes difficult to decide which sense is being evoked, the internal or external.16
The Semipermeable Mind
Despite the ambiguous evidence seen above, some students of these ancient Jewish and Christian texts have a tendency to dismiss the Outside Powers explanation as a mere metaphor. Everyone knows that there are no real evil spirits flying around out there, and even if there were, how could they get from the outside atmosphere to the inside of a human brain and take it over?
The Great Shift Page 6