The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  For some scholars, these bare facts have suggested that adherence to divine law did not play a particularly important role in Israel’s religion, at least not at first. There may be good arguments to explain the relative absence of reference to God’s covenant and its laws in early prophetic writings (save for one apparent, though sometimes contested, reference to the Decalogue in Hos 4:2), as well as the more generalized absence of reference to divine laws, such as in the narrative instances cited above.17 Still, looking at the larger picture it is clear that adherence to God’s laws only gradually became a central feature of Israel’s religion. But with time, observing those laws did indeed come to be (to the extent that our biblical texts can be said to reflect the lived reality of at least part of the population) a crucial element in Israelite piety. This, then, is another important transformation, and one with great ramifications for our understanding of the divine-human encounter.18

  One interesting manifestation of this change is described in the biblical book of 2 Kings, where the high priest Hilkiah is said to have discovered a previously unknown scroll of laws in the Jerusalem Temple. After the contents of the scroll are read to King Josiah, he immediately tears his clothes (a sign of great distress) and says to the High Priest:

  “Go inquire of the LORD on my behalf, and on behalf of the people, and on behalf of all of Judah, concerning the words of this scroll that has been found. For great indeed must be the wrath of the LORD that has been kindled against us, because our fathers did not obey the words of this scroll to do all that has been prescribed for us.” (2 Kgs 22:13)

  The scroll is described as one of legal instruction (torah), which modern scholars have identified as (roughly) the central legal core of the book of Deuteronomy. Thus Josiah, according to this account, understood at once that his people’s failure to adhere to this legal code may have already spelled disaster for “all of Judah” and its people. In other words, failure to adhere to a written text may on its own condemn a people to destruction, even if its contents had been quite unknown.

  But this incident goes on to represent a certain hesitation on the king’s part. Should he rely solely on the words of this newly discovered (and presumably divinely given) text, or should he recruit an authoritative human to validate its message? Josiah chooses the latter. He orders Hilkiah to “inquire of the LORD on my behalf,” and the priest forthwith goes and consults the prophetess Huldah, who confirms this grim diagnosis (2 Kgs 22:15–17). What clearer symbolic representation could there be of this intermediate state, whereby a sacred text must vie with the mantic revelation of a prophetess?

  Not long after this incident, the prophet Jeremiah is represented19 as reproving his countrymen for their disregard of various biblical prohibitions, ending with at least five of the Ten Commandments:

  If you put your ways and your deeds aright, if you judge disputes fairly between one man and another [Exod 23:1–3; cf. Lev 19:15, Deut 16:18–19]; if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow [Exod 22:20–23, 23:6–9, etc.], nor shed innocent blood [Exod 21:12 etc.] in this place; if you do not go after other gods to your own harm [Exod 22:19, 22:13, etc.], then I will [continue to] dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave to your forefathers forever . . . But will you steal and murder and commit adultery and swear false oaths and sacrifice incense to Ba‘al and follow other gods whom you did not know? (Jer 7:6–8)

  Here, clearly, the provisions set forth in the Ten Commandments are now the index of the people’s loyalty to God. These ten laws themselves were altogether simple and straightforward—hardly the stuff of profound contemplation—nor did keeping them, on the face of things, require constant vigilance or effort.20 Moreover, as we have just seen, the Bible never mentions Gideon or Deborah or Samson or David or any other early Israelite leader doing something (or not doing something) because of some divine law. But surely Moses did not need to stay on Mount Sinai for “forty days and forty nights” (Exod 24:18) in order to memorize ten simple commandments. In the book of Exodus, the Ten Commandments are followed by a multitude of others statutes (Exodus chapters 21–23) governing such criminal offenses as assault and battery, theft, kidnapping, rape, and so forth; acts of negligence that carry legal liability (your ox gores my slave); commercial transactions of various sorts (I hire you to take care of my ox when I’m out of town); gap loans to poor farmers and the permissible forms of collateral that can be demanded of them; the prohibition of anything smacking of the worship of other gods; laws of the Sabbath and various festivals; dietary restrictions; and much more. These are presented in the text as further stipulations binding God to Israel, since the ceremony (actually, two ceremonies) that sealed God’s covenant is narrated in Exodus 24:1–9, after all these other laws have been mentioned.

  Even this, however, did not mark the end of lawgiving presented in the Torah. The rest of the book of Exodus and the three books that follow (Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) are in fact full of further laws: rules governing the construction of the desert tabernacle and the offering of sacrifices inside it; priestly purification, and other things connected to the sanctuary; miscellaneous laws concerning, for example, a husband who suspects his wife of unfaithfulness but has no proof; a child who refuses to obey his parents; the proper way to besiege a city; a man who divorces his wife but then wants to take her back; and many, many more. It is because of this profusion of laws that the Pentateuch as a whole came to be known in Hebrew as the Torah (in this word’s sense of “law” or “legal procedure”), and similarly as the nomos (law) in Greek.21

  Apart from such specific laws, there came the frequent theme of Deuteronomy (but found elsewhere as well) that serving God—which is to say, both worshiping Him and showing Him one’s devotion—was accomplished not only through the sort of sacrificial offerings found throughout the ancient Near East, but through keeping God’s “laws/statutes/commandments (Deut 4:40, 45; 5:10, 26; 6:17; 8:11; 11:13; 13:5, 19; 26:17, 18; 27:10; 28:1, 15, 45; 30:10, 16, etc.). Here, then, is a striking transformation of the connection between the people of Israel and their God, one that would be repeatedly ratcheted upward until, toward the end of the Second Temple period, God’s aspect as divine lawgiver would be unsurpassed. In His Torah He had given Israel 613 commandments to live by, day after day.22 Thus was born something theretofore quite unheard of, a religion that consisted of keeping divine laws.

  In sum: Go back far enough in biblical history and divine laws seem to play a minor part at best. Indeed, the altogether static nature of a written legal code must seem somewhat at odds with the God of Old, who generally acted or reacted spontaneously and by His own judgments. But God’s role as divine lawgiver became increasingly important as time went on, until—as we shall see—in late- and post-biblical times, divinely given law became a, perhaps the, meeting-place of God and humans. Saying this, however, still leaves open the larger question. Had something changed in people’s minds—specifically, in the way they conceived of themselves and of the way their minds worked—that caused them now to seek out God’s laws and keep them as a religious act? What was happening to Israel and its God?

  11

  The Emergence of the Biblical Soul

  ANCIENT EXPRESSIONS FOR ONESELF; A GROWING INTERIORITY; BODILY RESURRECTION AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL

  The biblical “soul” was not originally thought to be immortal; in fact, the whole idea that human beings have some sort of sacred or holy entity inside them did not exist in early biblical times. But the soul as we conceive of it did eventually come into existence, and how this transformation came about is an important part of the history that we are tracing.

  The biblical book of Proverbs is one of the least favorites of ordinary readers. To put the matter bluntly, Proverbs can be pretty monotonous: verse after verse tells you how much better the “righteous” are than the “wicked”: that the righteous tread the strait and narrow, control their appetites, avoid the company of loose women, save their money for a rainy day, and so fort
h, while the “wicked” always do quite the opposite. In spite of the way the book hammers away at these basic themes, a careful look at specific verses sometimes reveals something quite striking.1 Here, for example, is what one verse has to say about the overall subject of the present study:

  A person’s soul is the lamp of the LORD, who searches out all the innermost chambers. (Prov 20:27)

  At first glance, this looks like the old theme of the semipermeable mind, whose innermost chambers are accessible to an inquisitive God. But in this verse, God does not just enter as we have seen Him do so often in previous chapters, when He appeared (apparently in some kind of waking dream) to Abraham or Moses, or put His words in the mouth of Amos or Jeremiah, or in general was held to “inspect the kidneys and heart” (that is, the innermost thoughts) of people. Here, suddenly, God seems to have an ally on the inside: the person’s own soul.

  This point was put forward in rather pungent form by an ancient Jewish commentator, Rabbi Aḥa (fourth century CE). He cited this verse to suggest that the human soul is actually a kind of secret agent, a mole planted by God inside all human beings. The soul’s job is to report to God (who is apparently at some remove) on everything that a person does or thinks:

  “A person’s soul is the lamp of the LORD, who searches out all the innermost chambers”: Just as kings have their secret agents* who report to the king on each and every thing, so does the Holy One have secret agents who report on everything that a person does in secret . . . The matter may be compared to a man who married the daughter of a king. The man gets up early each morning to greet the king, and the king says, “You did such-and-such a thing in your house [yesterday], then you got angry and you beat your slave . . .” and so on for each and every thing that occurred. The man leaves and says to the people of the palace, “Which of you told the king that I did such-and-so? How does he know?” They reply to him, “Don’t be foolish! You’re married to his daughter and you want to know how he finds out? His own daughter tells him!” So likewise, a person can do whatever he wants, but his soul reports everything back to God.2

  The soul, in other words, is like God’s own “daughter”: she dwells inside a human body, but she reports regularly to her divine “father.” Or, to put this in somewhat more schematic terms: God, who is on the outside, has something that is related or connected to Him on the inside, namely, “a person’s soul.” But wasn’t it always that way?

  Before getting to an answer, it will be worthwhile to review in brief something basic that was seen in the preceding chapters. Over a period of centuries, the basic model of God’s interaction with human beings came to be reconceived. After a time, He no longer stepped across the curtain separating ordinary from extraordinary reality. Now He was not seen at all—at first because any sort of visual sighting was held to be lethal, and later because it was difficult to conceive of. God’s voice was still heard, but He Himself was an increasingly immense being, filling the heavens; and then finally (moving ahead to post-biblical times), He was just axiomatically everywhere all at once. This of course clashed with the old idea of the sanctuary (a notion amply demonstrated in ancient Mesopotamian religion as well), according to which wherever else He was, God was physically present in his earthly “house,” that is, His temple. But this ancient notion as well came to be reconfigured in Israel; perched like a divine hologram above the outstretched wings of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies, God was virtually bodiless, issuing orders (like “Let there be light”) that were mysteriously carried out.3

  If conceiving of such a God’s being was difficult, His continued ability to penetrate the minds of humans ought to have been, if anything, somewhat easier to account for. He was incorporeal and omnipresent;4 what could stand in the way of His penetrating a person’s mind, or being there already? Yet precisely for this reason, Proverbs 20:27 is interesting. It suggests that God does not manage this search unaided: there is something inside the human being that plays an active role in this process, the person’s own self or soul.

  Three Hebrew Words

  Most people nowadays, if they think about the soul at all, think of it as a kind of spiritual entity, the body’s opposite and complement. Souls are often deemed to be immortal, as opposed to bodies, which perish and disintegrate. But this was not the soul as it was conceived throughout much of the biblical period. In fact, asking what the soul was in biblical times is really putting the question backwards. What should really be asked is the meaning—and the history—of three different words in Hebrew, each of which ended up being translated as “soul” in most Bibles. What exactly did these words designate at first, and how did their meaning change?

  The word for soul used in Proverbs 20:27 is neshamah. It is clearly related to the verbal root meaning “to breathe,” so much so that most modern Bibles translate it here and there as “breathing” or “breath.” Thus, for example, neshamah in Genesis 2:7 is usually rendered as the “breath” or “life-breath” that God breathes into the lifeless body of Adam—essentially an act of divine mouth-to-mouth respiration.5 (Interestingly, “breath” or “breathing” is connected to different words for soul or spirit in various Indo-European languages: Latin spiritus, Greek psuchē [often spelled in English as “psyche”], German Geist [and English “ghost”], Slavic dusha, Sanskrit atmān, and so forth.) Neshamah is not an especially common biblical term—it is the least common of the three terms translated as “soul.” When it does not actually mean breath itself, it is usually a kind of shorthand for “all things that breathe,” that is, all living things (e.g., Ps 150:6). In fact, its use in Proverbs 20:27 is rather unique—here, “soul” is actually a good translation—and its use in this verse is therefore potentially significant: it says that there is something inside people (permanently, not the breath that comes and goes) whose role it is to light the path for God as He inspects “all the innermost chambers.” It is also noteworthy that this verse marks the only appearance of neshamah in the whole book of Proverbs. While the word does appear in other books, making for a total of 24 uses of the word in all, this is still a relatively small number; it pales before the most common word translated as soul in the Hebrew Bible, nefesh.

  Nefesh appears some 753 times in the Hebrew Bible, making it one of the most common nouns in the language as a whole. The trouble is, nefesh means quite a few things besides soul. Like its cognates in other Semitic languages, it can sometimes mean “neck” or “throat.”6 Thus, when the psalmist says that “the water has reached my nefesh” (Ps 69:2), he means it has risen up to his neck and he is about to drown. The Israelites, grown tired of subsisting on manna in the wilderness, say to Moses, “Our nefesh is sick of eating this second-rate food” (Num 21:5); in this and other usages, nefesh seems to mean something like “throat,” or perhaps “appetite.” More commonly, nefesh designates the human being as a whole, a person—rather like soul in English in such expressions as “some poor soul is likely to touch that wire,” or “a town of some 100,000 souls.” Along with this, however, nefesh is occasionally used for any animate being (nefesh ḥayyah), such as the fish in the sea or the birds in the sky, indeed, “cattle and creeping things and wild animals of all kinds” (Gen 1:20, 21, 24, etc.). Probably the word’s most common meaning is something like “self,” especially “myself” (nafshi). Most of the time, nafshi does not seem to refer to anything especially holy or spiritual. “My soul” is just “me.”

  The third Hebrew word that is often translated as “soul” is ruaḥ, and its root meaning is very much like those of nefesh and neshamah: “wind,” “breath,” hence “inclination,” “disposition,” “spirit,” and yet more. It often designates a temporary state, a mood (sometimes in combination with another word, “bitter of spirit,” “lowly of spirit,” “shortness of spirit” [= impatience], and so forth). But as with nefesh and neshamah, if one examines the use of ruaḥ without assuming beforehand that our concept of soul must have existed somewhere in biblical Hebrew, then there is little reason to consider “
soul” as one of its meanings. In truth, there are very few biblical verses in which any of these three terms must be translated as “soul” in the sense that this word has now, something spiritual that all people “have” and that constitutes their immaterial essence.7

  The conclusion to which this leads is, at least at first, somewhat shocking. It is not, as some have argued, that biblical souls were simply conceived to be different from ancient Greek souls or more modern souls. Rather, for much of the biblical period, there simply were no souls. People were people. They had breath that came into their lungs and went out again, and so long as this happened they were alive; it is this that neshamah mostly refers to. Similarly, when ancient Israelites talked about their nefesh or their ruaḥ, for the most part they meant nothing like “soul” in our sense; they mostly meant “me.” People in biblical times certainly had minds (usually referred to in Hebrew as a person’s “heart,” since this was presumed to be the physical place of understanding),8 and they seem to have had, as all people have, a sense of self, albeit one that was rather different from ours today. But it is only relatively late in the biblical period that people began to believe that they had something inside of them or attached to them that was their immaterial, spiritual essence. Thereafter, when readers encountered the words neshamah, nefesh, and ruaḥ in various biblical verses, they naturally understood them to be referring to this spiritual essence—and soon enough, to be referring to a person’s immortal soul. Suddenly, the Bible was full of souls. But such readings are, for the most part, a later imposition.9