The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  The word of the LORD came to me: “What do you see, Jeremiah?” and I said, “I see an almond branch (shaqed).” And the LORD said to me, “You have seen right, since I will make sure (shoqed) to carry out My word.” (Jer 1:11–12)42

  Then the word of the LORD came to me a second time: “What do you see?” And I said, “I see a bubbling pot tipped away from the north.” And the LORD said to me: “The evil will pour out from the north against all the land’s inhabitants.” (Jer 1:13–14)

  And the LORD said to me, “What do you see, Jeremiah?” And I said, “Figs. The good figs are very good, but the bad figs are so bad that they cannot be eaten.” And the word of the LORD came to me: “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Just as with these good figs, I will single out favorably the exiles of Judah whom I have sent off from this place to the land of the Chaldeans, and I will look after them . . . But as for those bad figs, so bad that they cannot be eaten, thus says the LORD: so will I treat King Zedekiah of Judah and his officials and the remnant of Jerusalem that is left in this land, along with those who are living in the land of Egypt, and I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth . . .” (Jer 24:3–9)

  These instances are particularly interesting because the question that God asks, “What do you see?,” seems to presume that the prophet is having some sort of vision, one that will then serve as an opening to God’s spoken message, like the word shaqed or the image of the good and bad figs.43 Incidentally, Jeremiah was not the first to be asked this sort of question, nor the first to get this sort of answer:

  This is what He showed me: He was standing on a wall [built] plumb, and He had a plumb line in His hand. And the LORD said to me, “What do you see, Amos?” And I said, “A plumb line.” And my Lord said, “I hereby set a plumb line in the midst of My people Israel—I am through with pardoning them.” (Amos 7:7–8)

  This is what my Lord GOD showed me: There was a basket of summer fruit (qayiṣ).44 He said, “What do you see, Amos?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” And the LORD said: “The end (qeṣ) is coming to My people Israel; I will not pardon them again.” (Amos 8:1–2)

  What is striking about the things that prophets “see” is that their visions function in a way that is not very different from the visions of Hagar, Abraham, Jacob, and the others discussed above. As in those cases, so here too, what the person’s eyes seem to be capturing is not normal seeing—it is that other kind of seeing, what was called earlier an “enabling vision,” which then led to God speaking. His speech, while not actually auditory, turns out to be true; in the case of the prophets, God gives the prophet a message that He wishes to transmit to someone else.

  In fact, such enabling visions are not an infrequent opening for the verbal message received by the prophet. Here, for example, is the prophet Isaiah’s famous vision of God in His heavenly temple:

  In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw my Master sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were perched above Him, and each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.”

  The doorposts shook at the sound of the one who called, and the temple filled up with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is erased.” Then I heard the voice of my Master saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” And I said, “Here I am. Send me.” (Isa 6:1–8)

  This too is a vision; the passage certainly does not say that Isaiah has been physically transported to heaven to see God enthroned there.45 Rather, what he sees has the same sort of enabling function glimpsed earlier. The vision transforms Isaiah into a worthy carrier of God’s words and so leads into the auditory message, the divine speech that follows:46

  Then He said, “Go and say to this people:

  ‘Listen, but don’t comprehend; stare, but don’t understand;

  Make the minds of this people dull, their ears undiscerning, and their eyes unable to see,

  Lest with eyes that can see and ears that can hear, their minds may indeed comprehend,

  and then they may turn and be healed.’”

  And I said, “Until when, my Master?” And He said: “Until towns are laid waste, with no one inside, houses empty of people, and farmland left to lie fallow.

  For the LORD will banish the people, and much land will be forfeit and lost.” (Isa 6:9–12)

  Similar enabling visions characterize the accounts of numerous prophets, right down to Zechariah, arguably the last of the canonical prophets (see Zech chapters 1–6).

  One striking aspect of the divine question “What are you seeing?” deserves mention here. The fact that God is said to ask this question in the first place is significant, since it seems to presume that the prophet is indeed seeing something, and seeing not in the ordinary way, but in a prophetic vision. It is certainly remarkable that this sort of seeing functions in a way quite comparable to the visual hallucinations that preceded God’s words in the stories of Hagar, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, and the others. In other words, for all their differences, those Genesis narratives and these prophetic ones share the same basic scenario: first the person sees, or thinks he sees, something or someone, and this ultimately leads to direct address from God; then the thing seen—three strangers, a burning bush, or a basket of summer fruit—fades away; it was just a means to opening a channel of direct address from God. Of course, the fact of this shared scenario proves nothing in itself, but the common elements are nonetheless striking for their being unnecessary. There was no apparent need for a visual hallucination to precede God’s words to any of His prophets, nor, for that matter, was there any need for the visionary encounters that Israel’s ancient ancestors experienced just before God spoke to them. And yet, this seems to have been a common scenario for both groups. In this sense, Abraham might truly be said to be a prophet, as he was at one point (Gen 20:7); his visions, like those of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and later prophets, led into a verbal message sent from God.

  The Unanswerable Question

  What, in the end, do we really know about biblical prophets? They say they hear voices, and in the light of recent research, this claim seems altogether plausible: a lot of people do, even today. Of course, this does not mean that the voice they hear is of divine origin, and the very fact that diagnosed schizophrenics also claim to be in touch with God hardly strengthens the case.*47 On the other hand, anthropologists report the existence of prophets and other sorts of intermediaries in a wide variety of societies; the very fact of their existence—and particularly in view of similar figures documented in Mesopotamian societies preceding or contemporary to biblical Israel—suggests that their existence in ancient Israel was unremarkable.

  At the same time, we have seen that reported visions or voice hearing alone are apparently not enough to make someone a prophet. A lot depends on the preconceptions of the voice hearer’s own society; prophecy seems to flourish where it is part of the cultural landscape, and the prophet’s own self-understanding depends in large measure on his ongoing relationship with his society. Does this mean that Jeremiah and the others were playing on their countrymen’s predispositions in order to present themselves as communicating with higher powers? Such a conclusion is not to be ruled out. But this hardly eliminates the opposite supposition. Perhaps it was his society’s own assumptions—about the reality of prophecy itself, and along with this, the very sense of self that Jeremiah and his fellow citizens shared—that enabled him to hear a voice to which, in other circumstances, his ears might have been altogether deaf.


  The biblicist Johannes Lindblom was cited earlier in connection with what he called a prophet’s “revelatory state of mind,” and his words are perhaps worth repeating in the present context:

  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.48

  This certainly sounds like Jeremiah—and not him alone. It may not have been his hearing of an actual voice, nor yet society’s willingness to accept someone in the prepared niche of “prophet,” that made Jeremiah a prophet. These were certainly necessary, but along with them came the particular sense of self described by Lindblom’s “revelatory state of mind.”

  Ultimately, the answer to the question about biblical prophecy—was there any reality to it all?—depends on whether the questioner attributes any reality to an external God who can nonetheless enter a prophet’s mind. Certainly if this is an illusion, then so is the basic premise of prophecy, and everything collapses. And the fact that some of the voice hearers mentioned above were indeed schizophrenics or sufferers of other mental disorders might indeed support such a conclusion—although there are also those sane voice hearers, who, we have seen, actually constitute a significant part (10 percent? 15 percent?) of even modern, Western populations. But perhaps, in considering what has been seen above, one might frame the question a bit differently. After all, whether sane or otherwise, voice hearing is something that happens in the brain: someone standing next to a voice hearer hears nothing, so we are not talking about a voice traveling on sound waves into the voice hearer’s ear. Rather, whatever is happening in the brain is being construed by the brain as a voice—indeed, a voice speaking words. So the question is really: Is it construed out of nothing, or out of something?

  Seeing Colors

  Perhaps an analogy from a quite different area of neuroscience might frame the question with a bit more sophistication. According to the way we normally conceive of seeing, our eyes capture a picture of whatever is going on outside and then send that picture on to the inside, the brain, where it can be used. The crossing from outside to inside ought therefore to take place at the obvious border-point, the eyes themselves. But this is not at all how we really see: here, as elsewhere, the line separating outside from inside is a lot fuzzier than our own, modern self-image would have it.

  To begin with, there’s a lot of the outside that is truly “out there” but which we don’t see at all, simply because it is beyond the normal range of human perception. The reason is that our eyes come equipped with receptors capable of processing only part of the larger electromagnetic spectrum. (Other species can “see” things we can’t; for example, bees can detect some ultraviolet light, which helps them to locate nectar in flowers.) When we see, our eyes pick up only the light waves that they are designed to pick up—from sunlight or some other, artificial source, like a light bulb—as those waves are reflected off the objects around us. The different ranges of wavelengths are ultimately processed as colors: this is how our brains sort them out into usable information. But the colors aren’t really “out there”; a brain is required to convert those different wavelengths into different colors.

  Various species, including human beings, have evolved brains with this capacity, because it turns out to be a good way of making sense of those perceived wavelengths, using them to create a picture of the outside. Imagine if, instead of being processed as colors, the reflected light off of each object we perceive was represented by a little flashing sign that displayed the object’s wavelength: we would see nothing but various shades of gray along with a lot of twinkling numbers telling us the wavelengths of what we were seeing. Surely, this would not be a very useful way of identifying the ear and part of the neck of a tiger otherwise hidden by some tall grass next to that tree! Colors allow us, quickly and effortlessly, to use information supplied by different wavelengths of light in order to sort out and identify everything in our visible range, an obvious help in every aspect of daily life. But those colors are generated inside, and they represent only one possible way of sorting out the reflected light. (Nowadays, we can program a computer to sort out wavelengths differently, so that, for example, what our eyes perceive as two indistinguishably close shades of black can be converted into, say, red and blue.)

  How, then, does seeing happen? In the human retina, two kinds of photoreceptor cells, called rods and cones, react to the different wavelengths: the rods are especially active in low light, since they are far more sensitive to light overall than the cones; but it is the cones that are responsible for color perception. (There are actually three different types of cone cells in our retinas, each sensitive to a different range of wavelengths that are ultimately processed into what we see as colors—but as already implied, this happens at the end of a long series of steps.) The light’s data thus pass from the eyes themselves to the optic nerve, and from there to the optic chiasm, at the base of the hypothalamus; there the information from both eyes is combined and eventually passed on to something else called the LGN (lateral geniculate nucleus), which in humans is a six-layered sensory relay nucleus that further processes and sorts the information until it is forwarded to the visual cortex, way at the back of the brain above the cerebellum. The visual cortex is actually the largest system in our brain and the one responsible for ultimately making sense of all the input deriving from the previous stages. In this sense, what we think we see is really a projection of what’s going on deep inside the visual cortex onto something we like to think of as the outside. But what, more generally, truly is “out there”—and how different is it from what we perceive “in here”? Here is a matter of great theological import. The world is full of reflected light, but what turns it all into a lush, multicolored image?

  8

  The Book of Psalms and Speaking to God

  PSALMS, THEN AND NOW; GOD “JUST BEYOND THE CURTAIN” AND THE PRESUMPTION OF DIVINE PROXIMITY; NEUROSCIENCE AND THE QUESTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  This chapter may seem to reverse our subject, since it deals not with “God speaks to man,” but with “Man speaks (or, rather, prays) to God,” principally, but not exclusively, in the book of Psalms. But approaching the encounter between God and human beings from the opposite side will reveal something crucial (and usually overlooked) about the whole subject.

  The book of Psalms has always been a favorite part of the Hebrew Bible. Of course the Pentateuch (Torah) was, for various reasons, read and studied from ancient times: it became, as we shall see, the focus of Judaism and, though to a lesser extent, of early Christianity as well. But the book of Psalms was turned to less in study than in loving devotion.1 Traditionally attributed to the authorship of King David, the Psalms put into words what any worshiper might wish to say—to cry out for God’s help; to express the cautious hope, but sometimes also the despair, that followed; to give thanks for all of God’s blessings; most of all, perhaps, simply to address God in the Bible’s own words, letting the Psalms’ “I” become one’s own—these are the things that have always made the book of Psalms a uniquely loved part of the Bible.

  The Psalms of King David

  As with many other parts of the Bible, modern biblical scholarship has changed perceptions about the Psalms.2 Compositions that were, until the late nineteenth century, regarded as the “occasional [that is, inspired by a particular event or occasion], personal lyrics of King David” have come to be thought of by scholars as neither occasional, nor personal, nor the lyrics of King David. Instead, careful study has revealed that the Psalms were written by different hands over the course of many centuries. (To mention only the most obvious case of a relatively late psalm, the opening words of Ps 137, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down an
d wept,” clearly refer to the Babylonian exile, which took place some four centuries after the time of King David.) Moreover, while most of the Psalms were composed, or at least have reached us, in the “Jerusalem dialect” used in the Southern Kingdom (Judah), others are written in a different dialect, apparently native to the Northern Kingdom (Israel); some of these psalms also mention various sites located in the North.3 This has led scholars to suppose that these psalms might have been associated with sanctuaries or “high places” at various Northern locales, perhaps brought to Jerusalem by priests fleeing the Assyrian conquest of the North in the eighth century.4

  Then how did the tradition of Davidic authorship get started? About half of the canonical psalms in Hebrew have headings that refer to David, such as mizmor ledavid, a phrase usually translated as “a psalm of David.”5 This might seem (and after a while did seem) to attribute the psalm’s authorship to David. But scholars know that this phrase could equally well mean “a psalm about David,” “a psalm belonging to David,” “a psalm belonging to the Davidic king [that is, one of David’s dynastic descendants],” or—perhaps most likely—“a psalm belonging to the Davidic kings’ collection of psalms.” In short, the old idea of David as the author of the whole book of Psalms is no longer accepted by most modern scholars.