Once meanings are not necessarily in the mind, once we can fall under the spell [and] enter the zone of exogenous meaning, then we think of this meaning as including us, or perhaps penetrating us . . . This porousness is most clearly in evidence in the fear of possession. Demons can take us over. And indeed, five centuries ago, many of the more spectacular manifestations of mental illness, what we would classify as psychotic behavior, were laid at the door of possession . . .
Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded self—I want to say “buffered” self—and the “porous” self of the earlier enchanted world . . . For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from, everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them . . . This is not to say that the buffered understanding necessitates your taking this stance. It is just that it allows it as a possibility, whereas the porous one does not. By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions [is] outside the “mind”; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense.43
Homer and Abraham
Similar observations have been made about ancient Greek ideas of the mind or soul, bringing us considerably closer in space and time to biblical Israel. A little more than half a century ago, the German classicist Bruno Snell published a study entitled The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. In it, Snell sought to trace the emergence of what we might call the modern “sense of self” by examining different stages of ancient Greek writing. Examining the very earliest stage—represented by the poetry of Homer and other ancient texts—Snell argued that we are still in the world of outside causes, gods and goddesses who intervene in human thought. A later writer, he said, might speak of Achilles or some other hero arriving at an assessment and plan of action on his own:
Homer, however, could not do without the deity. We might substitute a decision on the part of Achilles, his own reflection and his own incentive. But Homer’s man does not yet regard himself as the source of his own decisions . . . When the Homeric hero, after duly weighing his alternatives, comes to a final conclusion, he nonetheless feels that his course has been shaped by the gods. Even nowadays, when we try to recapture the past, we may lose sight of our own share in an event in which we were once implicated and ask ourselves: how did this plan, or that thought, ever come to me? If we take this notion, that a thought “came” to us, and give it a religious twist, we come fairly close to the Homeric attitude . . . Homer lacks a knowledge of the spontaneity of the human mind; he does not realize that decisions of the will, or any impulses or emotions, have their origin in man himself.44
This view of things is rather similar to that underlying the “malign spirits” explanation found in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (and in the religions that preceded it, in both ancient Israel and Greece). Things come from the outside. This includes, prominently, words that come from the outside. The “invocation of the muse” may have become a mere convention in later times, but in ancient Greece it was dead serious. You, mere human, weren’t going to get anywhere in your epic poem on your own; what you needed was nothing less than divine dictation, so “Sing, O Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles . . .” (Iliad 1:1) was the request with which you had to begin. And such outside help was called for not just at the start of the poem, but at crucial points thereafter:
Tell me now, Muses who dwell on Olympus—
Since you, as divine, are present and know
All things (while we have just hearsay, knowing
Nothing firsthand)—Then who were the chieftains
Who led the Danaans? Their numbers myself
I could never relate, not if I had
Ten tongues and ten mouths, a voice never ceasing
And a heart made of bronze; unless you Muses,
Heavenly daughters of shield-wielding Zeus,
Should name for me all who came to Ilios. (Iliad 2:484–488)
True knowledge belonged to the gods, who could choose to impart it to humans, or choose not to.45 This was true of all sorts of knowledge, not only poetry but history and philosophy and mathematics and yet other things. Humans could, of course, speculate about such matters on their own, but they could never know for sure if they were right. Snell quotes Xenophanes (late fifth–early fourth centuries BCE):
Accordingly, there has not been a man, nor will there ever be, who knows for certain what I am saying about the gods, or for that matter in regard to all things, for even if one happens to say what is for the most part true, still he would not know, since [the expression] “it seems” has been established with regard to all things. (frag 34)
Similarly, Alcmaeon of Croton (fifth century): “Concerning things unseen the gods have certainty, whereas to us as men conjecture [alone is possible].” One can sense the frustration that stands behind these assertions. We can know for sure only that which has been revealed by the gods.
A later echo of this same mentality is found in hymns included among the Dead Sea Scrolls:
What can I say unless You open my mouth? And what can I reply, unless You give me insight? . . . Without You, nothing can be done, and nothing can be known without You willing it. (1QHa Thanksgiving Hymns col 18:9–11)
You prepared in the wisdom of Your mind the course [of things] before they existed, and everything is in accordance with Your will, and nothing can be done without You. These things I know through Your knowledge, since You opened my ears to [i.e., gave me to understand] wondrous mysteries . . . What can I speak that is not known [i.e., by You], or say that has not been told [by You]? Everything has been engraved before You with the memory’s stylus for all the periods of eternity and uncounted times . . . (1QHa Thanksgiving Hymns col 9:21–26)
What Snell says about Homer brings to mind a number of passages from the Bible that seem to share the Homeric view. Take, for example, the previously mentioned departure of Israel’s ancestor Abraham from his native land (Gen 11:34[some Bibles, 11:31]–12:6). According to the biblical account, Abraham first traveled from Ur northward to the city of Haran, and then continued on to Canaan. What caused Abraham to go that long way, leaving behind all but his immediate family, braving the hazards of travel in the ancient world to settle as a stranger in a place unknown? Simple: God told him to do it. “And the LORD said to Abram, ‘Depart from your homeland, and your clan, and your kin, to the land that I will show you’” (Gen 12:1).
Here we seem to be in the land of Snell’s Homer. Abraham doesn’t decide to do what he is about to do; he is ordered to do so by God—for no apparent reason. Indeed, the very wording of this command is clearly intended to tell us how little Abraham’s rational mind could have had to do with this turn of events: God tells him to leave everything familiar, including all those in his native land who might defend him in a dispute or take his side in actual combat, in order to go to some place that God does not even choose to name, “to the land that I will show you.” Commanded, Abraham obeys. (Just as, later in his biography, he will bow to God’s horrific order that he offer his beloved son Isaac as a human sacrifice on an altar “on one of the mountains that I will show you”—another destination undefined!)
At the same time, it seems to me that Snell may have overstated things a bit in the passage cited earlier, at least if his analysis is to be applied to Abraham. The biblical Abraham is not consistently an automaton. One could not say of the Genesis narrative (as Snell says of Homeric narrative) that it demonstrates no awareness “that decisions of the will, or any impulses or emotions, have their origin in man himself”—far from it! Elsewhere in Genesis, Abraham thinks for himself, weighs alternatives, and takes the initiative on his own: he decides to go to war, to divide the land of Canaan with his nephew Lot, to deceive the Egyptians (“Say you’re my sister,” he tells his wife Sa
rah), to bargain with the Hittites for a burial plot—God has no role in any of these events. In fact, Homer’s heroes are not automatons either (as Snell certainly knew). Surely it is not their every thought that just “comes to them.” Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, and the rest likewise make plans, trick people, and exhibit all the mental capacities that we ourselves have. Rather, what might be more truly said is that sometimes in the Bible, as in the Iliad and the Odyssey, an ordinary, otherwise rational person hears a divine voice telling him or her what to do. But a lot hangs on that “sometimes.” Clearly there was a time when such things happened, and just as clearly there came a moment when such a way of conceiving of human beings seemed somehow wrong, old-fashioned, and was eventually dropped.
When was that moment? No doubt it arose at different times in different places, and certainly not at a snap of history’s fingers. But in the Greek-Jewish orbit, if one takes the evidence of the Testaments and contemporaneous texts as an indication, there seems to have been a period of coexistence of two different “senses of self,” the one still quite open to external intruders, the other moving closer to our modern, Western selves, which for the most part deny the very possibility of such intrusion.46
The Testaments were begun roughly two centuries before the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius undertook to write the Jewish Antiquities, retelling his people’s history to a Greek-speaking audience, including the narrative of Abraham’s departure from Ur seen above. In recounting this departure, Josephus repeats what the biblical text had said, that Abraham left Ur “after God had ordered him to proceed to Canaan.” But then, Josephus seeks to connect Abraham’s departure to another cause entirely: his being the first monotheist.47 The fact that Abraham believed in one God alone, Josephus explains, came to upset some of his non-monotheistic neighbors in Ur:
It was in fact owing to these opinions that the Chaldeans [inhabitants of Ur] and the other peoples of Mesopotamia rose up against him, and he, thinking fit to change his dwelling-place, at the will and with the aid of God, settled in the land of Canaan. (Ant. 1:157)
Here is a marvelous bit of hedging on Josephus’s part. As we have seen, the biblical text, which Josephus certainly knew by heart, clearly has God command Abraham: “Depart from your homeland . . .” But Josephus feels impelled to turn this into Abraham’s decision: “thinking fit to change his dwelling-place . . .” That’s why Abraham left: he had an internally generated idea: “The Chaldeans are angry at me—I better get out of here.” And yet Josephus knows full well that the biblical account attributes Abraham’s departure from Ur to God, “Depart from your homeland,” so he adds, as if an afterthought, the words “at the will and with the aid of God.” Of course, this falls far short of what Josephus had said earlier, that God had “ordered” Abraham to leave; here, in fact, Abraham is not even being directly addressed by God.48
In short, it seems that texts like this one by Josephus, or the earlier Qumran documents and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, bear witness to a true hesitation or even confusion, one that may well tell us a great deal about the evolving “sense of self” in that period. Of course, one can always say that such hesitation is merely conventional, the result of conflicting Persian- and Greek-inspired ideas. But what I have tried to suggest is that the conflict goes much deeper, to the very “sense of self” that these various authors carried about in their own heads. To put this question directly: Isn’t it possible that the Abraham of Genesis was a little more like the Dinka than we usually think? And, centuries later, weren’t the authors of Jubilees, the Testaments, and the Qumran “Plea for Deliverance” still holding on to a sense of self entirely different from our own?
I have intended these first three chapters to introduce the basic theme and scope of this book, namely, the human encounter with the divine as reflected in different writings during and just after the biblical period. In all, this study is intended to cover some ten centuries of human history in one part of the globe, and even if an ancient psalmist could write that “a thousand years are like yesterday in Your sight” (Ps 90:3), for this book’s subject those centuries are hugely important, bearing witness to a fundamental change that can tell us much about the reality of God, both then and now. In the chapters that follow I intend to explore a number of specific aspects of this change, starting with the earliest evidence of religious beliefs and going on to such specifics as ancient priests and prophets, the biblical soul (and how it changed), ancient and not-so-ancient prayers, and ending in the period just preceding the dawn of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.
PART II
Divine Encounters
In the ancient Near East, people were said to have actually encountered God/the gods. Biblical narratives as well as external evidence leave little doubt that this is how people understood things. But what lay behind such a construal, and was it really true? These questions are not easily answered; they bring us to the heart of our inquiry.
4
Adam and Eve and the Undifferentiated Outside
HUMANITY’S ANCESTORS; HOMO RELIGIOSUS; A SENSE OF SMALLNESS; THE ENCHANTED WORLD
Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden with more than a new set of clothes. They carried along with them an understanding of the world, which they later passed on to their descendants, the human race.
Scholars are divided about the story of Adam and Eve. Although it begins by telling about humanity’s earliest origins, some argue that its real focus is not on the creation itself, but on a moment that comes much later in human development, the time when people first learn the secrets of agriculture. Human beings are not born farmers; somehow they have to figure out that if you take some vegetable seeds or grains of wheat and stick them into the ground—a seemingly wasteful and senseless act—in a few months the seeds will have sprouted into edible plants, repaying your investment a hundredfold. This is a lesson that has to be discovered and passed on. Scholars nowadays believe that agriculture sprang up more or less simultaneously in three or four different locations around the globe (including the Middle East), starting around twelve thousand years ago.
Before that time, one might indeed say that human beings lived like Adam and Eve; they inhabited a marvelous garden (or jungle), where all the food they consumed grew on trees or sprang up unbidden from the ground. An anthropologist, however, might characterize the same state somewhat differently. Preagricultural societies were often harsh; in some, people had to forage daily for their food, and the threat of starvation was an everyday concern. In any event, Adam and Eve lived for a time in their Garden—we are not told how long; when God said to Adam that “you may eat from all the trees in the Garden” (except, of course, for the forbidden one), He was describing what was the ordinary way of life followed by early humans for countless millennia. Adam and Eve had no clothes; the pair walked around in the Garden naked “and were not ashamed,” just as our ancestors did, and some peoples still do today.
At a certain point, however, Eve encountered a talking snake. Later interpreters of the biblical story saw this snake as a figure of Satan,1 but there was nothing corresponding to Satan at the time of this story’s composition—and nothing in the story to suggest it. Actually, snakes in the ancient Near East were sometimes associated with wisdom,2 and this seems more to the point here: as it says in Genesis, “Now the serpent was cleverer than any other animal that the Lord God had made.” This snake encouraged Eve to eat from the forbidden tree that imparted knowledge, and she and Adam did so. Their disobedience was promptly punished: “By the sweat of your brow,” God tells Adam, “you shall eat your food”—in other words, Adam’s newly acquired wisdom resulted in his becoming . . . a farmer. It was not a painless transition: from that point on, Adam and his descendants would have to toil long hours in seedtime and harvest time, but the rewards were great. Humanity now gained a measure of control over its food supply and could settle down, no longer needing to wander about in search of its next meal.
At roughly the same time that huma
ns first understood the secret of agriculture, another, related insight emerged. Women’s bellies, it now appeared, do not swell up and deliver babies at random, but as a result of a different sort of planting that took place nine months earlier. Here was a theory that at first must have seemed as unlikely as the idea of agriculture; eventually, however, experimentation demonstrated its truth, and life was changed forever. Now children were understood to have two parents, and sometimes a whole new social organization resulted. As the biblical account notes, henceforth the man would “cling to his wife and they shall be one flesh” (Gen 2:24); moreover, just as Adam was condemned to toil by the sweat of his brow for food, so Eve was told that “in pain you will bring forth children,” the one painful harvest corresponding to the other.
Scholars doubt that this biblical story could be based on any collective, historical memory of the transition to agriculture. Rather, it seems to be more like a nostalgic reconstruction, perhaps reflecting reported encounters with still-existing, preagricultural societies. This notwithstanding, considering a few specific details in the biblical story—and taking them seriously—may help us to enter more fully into an early sense of self.
Life in the Garden
To begin with, it is most significant that God in this story exists inside the Garden. Adam and Eve “heard the sound of the LORD God walking about in the Garden at the breezy time of day” (Gen 3:8). He is not the remote, heavenly God of later times, nor a deity who inhabits a special temple or shrine reserved for Him, along with a specially trained cadre of priests who serve Him in a state of ritual purity. He is not even the God of Old as depicted in other Genesis stories, the God who is generally just elsewhere and only on occasion crosses over into the world of human beings. He never enters in this story because He is always already there, strolling about in the same garden inhabited by the naked human beings whom He has made. Their very nakedness ought to have been, as in other circumstances, quite incompatible with God’s presence3—and this detail in the story certainly shocked ancient Israelites.4 So what is this picture of divine and human cohabitation seeking to tell us?
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