The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  Against this background, the passages from the Psalms cited above take on a greater significance. They present a vivid picture of human beings who pray to God in the hope, one might even say in the expectation, that their words are not uttered in vain: somehow, God will, or at least may, hear them. As the Joseph story and these P passages demonstrate, a belief in the efficacy of prayer is not a necessary element in a theistic religion; one can certainly believe in God without imagining that He attends to, or even hears, people’s prayers. And yet people do believe this, not only in the book of Psalms, but in later Judaism and Christianity and Islam—in fact, as scholars have documented, people in the most disparate parts of the globe are known to pray to various deities, not only in ancient times, but in all periods up to and including the present day.23 This may seem an obvious point about human behavior, but in the long view, it is nonetheless striking.

  The Great King

  If this first point seems obvious, the second is even more so—but still worth stating. The basic situation in these psalms of request is always the same: a meek and humble supplicant24 calls out to God, who has all the power. He is the great king,25 and this very idea deserves a further word of explanation. Nowadays we tend to think of the conditions in which we live as ever-changing, the product of interacting forces that operate on both the personal and worldwide stage. With regard to the latter, for example, those shifting forces (the world economy, the alignment of various military powers, the existence of persistent “trouble spots,” and so forth) are conceived to combine—sometimes quite irrationally—to bring about war or peace, prosperity or famine, a brilliant future or an outlook of the darkest gloom. In the ancient Near East, things were simpler; everything that happened was deemed to be generated from the top down, starting with God/the gods who, like an earthly king, sat enthroned at the very apex of the power pyramid and controlled all that happened below.26

  In the book of Psalms, God is thus explicitly the King, ruler of the world (see in particular Pss 29, 47, 93–99, 145). He is addressed as “O King!” (20:10, 98:6, 145:1), “my King” (5:3, 44:5, 68:25, 74:12, 84:4), and “our King” (47:7, 89:19) and is also explicitly referred to as the “eternal King” (10:16, 29:10, cf. 145:13, 146:10), “King of the earth” (47:3, 8), “the glorious King” (24:7, 8, 9, 10), and so forth, before whom earthly kings tremble in fear and acknowledge as their master (102:16, 138:4, 148:11). One adjective closely associated with this picture is the word “great.” God is frequently praised with the Hebrew term gadol (Pss 47:3, 48:2, 76:2, 77:14, 86:10, 95:3, 96:4, 99:2–3, 135:5, 138:5, 145:3, 147:5), which, like its common English equivalent, can mean great in degree or quality (that is, important, outstanding, and the like) or simply big, great in size or reach or power:

  Great is the LORD, and much to be praised; His greatness is beyond measure. (Ps 145:3)

  It is probably impossible to sort out which of these meanings is intended in this or most of the Psalms’ assertions that God is gadol, since they are all closely connected, but together with “king,” “great” suggests suggests the gap that separates the little supplicant from the divine addressee.

  Yet, despite the overwhelming power of the divine king, the supplicants in these psalms are not overwhelmed, and this very fact seems to belong to the theme of the “cry of the victim” examined above. In other circumstances, he or she might be a polite, reserved human being, but coming before God in the psalms of request, the supplicant is axiomatically desperate. People who are starving or fleeing an assailant are never polite. They need help right away. So too—whatever the particulars of the individual speaker’s needs—the psalmist is never bashful about addressing God in the imperative and demanding relief, sometimes implying along the way that He is actually a rather sluggish deity:

  Rise up, LORD! Lift up Your hand! Don’t forget the downtrodden!

  How can the wicked man scorn God, supposing that You won’t react?

  But You have seen! You’ve observed the trouble, the grief;

  You have the power to help the helpless; surely You should aid an orphan. (Ps 10:12–14)

  How long, O LORD? Or will You just forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?

  How long will I ache in my soul and keep suffering in my heart all day?

  How long will my enemy be exalted over me? (Ps 13:2–3)

  I am crying out to You, LORD. O my Rock, don’t keep silent toward me, because if You hold back from me, I’ll be as good as dead. (Ps 28:1–2)

  How long, my Lord, will You just look on? Save me from their ravages, [save] my life from those lions!

  Don’t let my lying enemies rejoice over my fate. [Don’t let] those who have no reason to hate me wink their eye . . .

  You have seen, O LORD, don’t sit still; my Lord, do not stay far from me! Wake up! Get up and take my side, my God and Master of my case. (Ps 35:17–23)

  Sound Times Distance

  In addition to the role of the victim’s cry and the theme of God’s kingship and greatness throughout the Bible, a third aspect of biblical prayers is to be mentioned here. While many of the psalms of request seem to have been specifically crafted for recitation in a temple or sanctuary, God’s earthly home, other passages seem to suggest that human cries for help can be uttered from anywhere; they will reach God no matter what. Clearly, this undercuts the very idea of physically going to a special sanctuary to seek help. A few biblical texts thus seem to suggest a compromise solution: while presence in God’s own sanctuary is indeed the ideal place from which to pray for God’s help, prayers from elsewhere will somehow reach the sanctuary and be heard by God Himself:27

  In my distress I cry out to the LORD, appealing to my God;

  In His temple He hears my voice, my cry to Him reaches His ears. (Ps 18:7)

  In fact, prayers are sometimes said to travel great distances. God promises to hear the prayers of Israel’s scattered exiles coming to him “from there,” faraway Babylon or other places of their exile (Deut 4:29). Jonah is said to have cried out to God from the belly of a “great fish,” and his prayer seems to have reached Him (Jonah 2:2, 11). The account of Solomon’s inauguration of the Jerusalem temple is quite explicit about the temple’s role: God is in any case in heaven, but the temple will act as a kind of launching pad from which people’s words may ascend to God’s attention (1 Kings 8:32, 34, 42–43, etc.).* Strikingly, however, Solomon’s speech also asserts that merely praying in the direction of the temple will have the same effect as being inside it:

  [Solomon says:] May Your eyes be open day and night toward this house, the place of which You said, “My name shall be there,” so that You may heed the prayer that Your servant prays toward this place. Then, when You hear the supplications of Your servant, or of Your people Israel as they pray toward this place, heed [them] in Your heavenly dwelling-place; heed and forgive . . .

  Any prayer or supplication that is from any individual or from all Your people Israel, each of whom knows his own afflictions, when they stretch out their hands toward this house, then hear in Your heavenly dwelling-place . . .

  Or if a foreigner, who is not of Your people Israel, comes from a distant land . . . and prays toward this house, then may You hear in heaven, Your dwelling-place, and do according to all that the foreigner cries out to You . . .

  If Your people go out to battle against their enemy, wherever You may send them, and they pray to the LORD via the city that You have chosen and the house that I have built for Your name, then may You hear in heaven their prayer and their plea, and take up their cause. (1 Kings 8:29–30, 38–39, 41–43, 44–45)

  In this view of things, geography didn’t count for much: prayers will axiomatically be heard from wherever they are uttered, and distance was no barrier. In later times Daniel, a resident of Babylon, “had had windows made in his upper chamber facing toward Jerusalem, and three times a day he knelt down, prayed, and made confession to his God” (Dan 6:11).

  A related belief is attested in the sto
ry of Hannah (1 Sam 1). Hannah is, to her great distress, childless, and on one occasion she goes to the great temple at Shiloh to seek God’s help:

  The priest Eli was sitting on a seat near the doorpost of the temple of the LORD. In the bitterness of her heart, she prayed to the LORD and wept. She made a vow and said: “O LORD of Hosts, if You take note of Your maidservant’s distress, and if You keep me in mind and do not neglect Your maidservant and grant Your maidservant a male offspring, I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life; and no razor shall ever touch his head.”* Now as she was speaking her prayer before the LORD, Eli was watching her mouth. Hannah was praying in her heart [i.e., silently]; her lips were moving, but her voice could not be heard, so Eli thought she was drunk. Eli said to her: “How long are you going to keep up this drunkenness? Cut out the boozing!” But Hannah answered: “Oh no, sir, I am a woman of saddened spirit. I have drunk no wine or strong drink, but I have been pouring out my heart to the LORD. Don’t take your maidservant for an ill-behaved woman! I have been praying this long because of my great distress.” Eli answered her: “Then go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of Him.” (1 Sam 1:9–17)

  If Eli couldn’t hear her, how did Hannah ever expect God to hear her? But she did. Somehow, even though no sound was coming out of her mouth, she apparently believed that God would hear her vow and, she hoped, act accordingly. (Which He did; “at the turn of the year she bore a son,” 1 Sam 1:20.) This too seemed to defy the laws of physics, just as much as Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish, or any prayer uttered at some distance from God’s presumed locale, a temple or other sacred spot.

  Many other things could be said about the Psalms, or about biblical prayers in general, but the foregoing three points have been chosen for what they imply for the overall theme of this book. We have already seen a great deal of evidence indicating that people in biblical times believed the mind to be semipermeable, capable of being infiltrated from the outside. This is attested not only in the biblical narratives examined earlier, but it is the very premise on which all of Israel’s prophetic corpus stands. The semipermeable mind is prominent in the Psalms as well; in a telling phrase, God is repeatedly said to penetrate people’s “kidneys and heart” (Pss 7:10, 26:2, 139:13; also Jer 11:20, 17:10, 20:12), entering these messy internal organs28 where thoughts were believed to dwell and reading—as if from a book—all of people’s hidden ideas and intentions. God just enters and looks around:

  You have examined my heart, visited [me] at night;

  You have tested me and found no wickedness; my mouth has not transgressed. (Ps 17:3)

  Examine me, O LORD, and test me; try my kidneys and my heart. (26:2)

  Indeed God is so close that inside and outside are sometimes fused:

  Let me bless the LORD who has given me counsel; my kidneys have been instructing me at night.

  I keep the LORD before me at all times, just at my right hand, so I will not stumble. (Ps 16:7–8)

  (Who’s giving this person advice, an external God or an internal organ?)

  Such is God’s passage into a person’s semipermeable mind. But the flip side of all this is prayer, when a person’s words, devised on the inside, in the human mind, leave his or her lips in order to reach—somehow—God on the outside. As we have seen, those words were indeed believed to make their way to God; in fact, it was the cry of the victim that in some sense made the world work, causing God to notice and take up the cause of justice and right. Now, the God who did so was also, we have seen, a mighty King, who presumably ranged over all of heaven and earth:

  He mounted on a cherub and flew off, gliding on the wings of the wind. (Ps 18:11)

  He makes the clouds His chariot, He goes about on the wings of the wind. (Ps 104:3)

  Yet somehow, no matter where His travels might take Him, God is also right there, just on the other side of the curtain that separates ordinary from extraordinary reality, allowing Him to hear the sometimes geographically distant cry of the victim or even to hear an inaudible, silent prayer like Hannah’s. The doctrine of divine omnipresence was still centuries away and was in fact implicitly denied in many biblical texts,29 yet something akin to omnipresence seems to be implied in God’s ability to hear and answer prayers uttered from anywhere, no matter where He is. In fact, this seems implied as well in the impatient, recurrent question seen above, “How long, O LORD?”; the psalmist seems to be saying, “I know You’ve heard me, so when will You answer?”

  Perhaps the most striking thing suggested by all this is the extent to which the Psalms’ depiction of God seems to conform to the general contours of the great Outside as described in an earlier chapter. God is huge and powerful, but also all-enfolding and, hence, just a whisper away. Somehow, people in biblical times seem to have just assumed that God, on the other side of that curtain, could hear their prayers, no matter where they were. All this again suggests a sense of self quite different from our own—a self that could not only be permeated by a great, external God, but whose thoughts and prayers could float outward and reach a God who was somehow never far, His domain beginning precisely where the humans’ left off.

  One might thus say that, in this and in other ways, the psalmists’ underlying assumptions constitute a kind of biblical translation of a basic way of perceiving that had started many, many millennia earlier, a rephrasing of that fundamental reality in the particular terms of the religion of Israel. That other, primeval sense of reality and this later, more specific version of it found in these psalms present the same basic outline, which is ultimately a way of fitting into the world: the little human (more specifically in the Psalms, the little supplicant) faced with a huge enfolding Outside (in the Psalms, the mighty King) who overshadows everything and has all the power: sometimes kind and sometimes cruel (in the Psalms, sometimes heeding one’s request, but at other times oddly inattentive or sluggish), the Outside is so close as to move in and out of the little human (in the Psalms as elsewhere, penetrating a person’s insides, but also, able to pick up the supplicant’s request no matter where or how uttered).30

  Mysterians

  Thinking about the very idea of prayer—and how, as was just suggested, its roots may go back to earlier centuries of human consciousness—ultimately leads us to the most basic question of all that scholars in various disciplines ask about the sense of self (whether the ancient or modern one): Where does the picture of ourselves that we carry around in our heads come from? Is our “I”—the “I” that, among other things, prays to God—something that really exists? Of course it does! we think. But neuroscientists who study the matter are not so sure.

  All human minds, despite their differences, do seem to share certain things. We all have a sense that we are alive; in fact (as mentioned previously), we all feel that we continue to be the same person over time.31 What is more, we do not identify ourselves as being our brains or our bodies; somehow we think of ourselves as the owners of those brains and bodies—our “I” seems to be some sort of being distinct from these body parts. But is there any physical evidence of its existence? Or is it just what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle derisively called the “ghost in the machine”? The neuroscientist Patricia Churchland has posed the problem in these terms:

  I think I am something, yet my self is not anything that I can actually observe—at least not in the way I can observe pains or fatigue or my hands or my heart. So if my self is not something I can observe, what is it? If the “self” is a mental construction—a mode of thinking about my experiences—what are the properties of this construction, and where does this construction come from?32

  This is the great problem of thinking about the self and its peculiar way of perceiving things. Neuroscientists have studied individual brain functions and know how many of them work: over recent decades they have mapped different areas of the brain and identified their functions with sometimes surprising precision.33 But putting this information together has not led to t
he discovery of anything resembling the human sense of self; what scholars have investigated about the brain’s functioning can be fully described without recourse to its postulated owner, the person himself/herself. In short, science doesn’t need any “I.” But apparently we do.

  Philosophers have long debated this conundrum, known as the “mind-body” problem, and its ramifications sharply divide today’s researchers. Some hold that our “I” will eventually be explained, located somewhere in the brain’s own complicated, overlapping circuitry, while others hold that our mind is necessarily an ultimately unknowable entity.34 Why is this important to our present subject? We have seen that the basic premise of the book of Psalms is that God is “out there” and, among other things, hears the desperate cries of human beings. It is certainly possible that this is a piece of mental baggage left over from the great Outside and the dawn of human consciousness. But how are we to judge it when we know so little about the other half of this interaction, the “I” who is asking this question? This “I’s” very existence may itself be the product of a slowly evolved combination of different systems of neurons and synapses, systems that came together to create the illusory world that is human consciousness—an entity no less potentially mythical than the Supreme Being, but one that has persisted simply because it has served to keep us going as a species.35