The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  [Later, Ezra asks:] If I have found favor in Your sight, O Lord, show this as well to Your servant: after death, as soon as each of us yields up his soul, will we be kept in a state of rest until such time as You will renew creation, or will we be tormented at once?” . . . [God’s answer:] “Concerning death, the teaching is: When the decisive decree has gone forth from Most High that a man shall die, as the soul leaves the body to return again to Him who gave it, first of all it adores the glory of the Most High. But if it is one of those who have shown scorn and have not kept the ways of the Most High, and who have ‘despised his law’ [Num 15:31], and hated those who fear God, such souls will not enter into treasuries, but they will immediately wander about in torments. (4 Ezra 4:35, 7:75–80)

  The post-biblical soul was sometimes depicted not only as separate from the rest of the human being, but not even belonging to its human host. Rather, it was conceived of as dwelling in its temporary, fleshly home, a little divine oasis amidst the human body. Since, according to Genesis 2:7, God breathed His ruaḥ into Adam’s nostrils, so it must happen to all subsequent human beings:

  And I, Your servant, know, by the spirit that You placed in me [ ],

  that all Your works are righteous and Your word will not depart.

  And all Your ages are appointed [ord]ered in all their details.

  (1QH a Thanksgiving Hymns col 5:35–37)

  And what God breathes in at the beginning of a person’s life, He logically must take back at the end. Religious Jews recite this brief prayer upon awakening:

  My God, the soul (neshamah) that You have put inside me is pure. You created it, shaped it, and breathed it into me, and You are preserving it within me, and You will take it from me and return it to me in the Age to Come. So long as the soul is within me, I will thank You, O my Lord God and God of my fathers, Master of all beings, lord of all souls. Blessed are You, Lord, who restores souls to dead corpses.

  Truth or Fiction?

  Was this new kind of soul a discovery or an invention? This is ultimately the question raised by this chapter.

  It was suggested above that the gradual emergence of the soul came about more or less in tandem with the gradual abstraction and re-understanding of God: He no longer stood just over there, behind the curtain separating ordinary from extraordinary reality. Now, He was the God, the only one, and of necessity, He became a huge, cosmic deity, looking down from the heights of heaven, until finally, He was simply everywhere all at once, like the air we breathe. But “everywhere” is a kind of nowhere, abstract and therefore remote; God needed to be sought out. Late at night, one could turn to this soul and feel what was truly real, in an entirely different register—not the variegated, inviting world of the sun, but the stark moonscape of the soul, where what is ultimate is also proximate, and the things of this world dissolve into a wholly different kind of being.

  Was this merely self-delusion? A theme throughout this book has been that the “self” is itself a construct, and one whose nature (either utterly overshadowed, or semipermeable, or the battleground between good and evil, or a little door inside leading Outward) had been, from the very beginning, closely linked to the way human beings construed their encounter with the undifferentiated Outside. Western philosophy gradually abandoned the ethereal word “soul” in favor of “mind” or “self”; but today, thanks not only to neuroscience but to contemporary philosophy as well, the self is in trouble. “Its demise was gradual, but by the end of the twentieth century the unified self had died the death if not of a thousand qualifications, then of a thousand hyphenations.”42 In its place has come . . . well, nothing in particular. Our notions of ownership of, and identification with, a self are now widely considered the product of human evolution, created to serve the overall goal of survival. But whatever the self’s lack of physiological reality may prove, our sense of self is certainly real; as one contemporary writer has comfortingly observed, “To have a sense of X doesn’t necessarily entail that X exists.”43

  This brings us back to the particular construction of self which, as we have seen, began to emerge in later biblical times. Its stark inner landscape, a place of heightened reality, opened the way to God. It was thus a kind of ever-present, vital possibility: a little bit of enabling legislation. And surely it had cognates elsewhere in the world: Hinduism, Buddhism, are altogether focused on the inward gaze, their spiritual exercises (prominently meditation) aimed at its cultivation. But Judaism, and later Christianity, never went far in that direction. In both religions, the ultimate reality still lies outside the human being: God stands apart and away, as if to say that, in the end, man is not the whole point, but that the inward turn ultimately leads outward, to a divine reality beyond oneself.

  This notwithstanding, the emergence of the late- and post-biblical soul marks a change of supreme importance, reflecting nothing less than a new way in which humans began to conceive of themselves. Did this new soul merely reflect a broader, emerging sense of self in Israel—or did it actually help bring it about? And if the latter is the case, wasn’t the emergence of a new sense of self fundamentally tied to a new way of conceiving of God?

  12

  Remembering God

  MOSES STRIKES THE ROCK; THANKING THE GODS IN ANCIENT INSCRIPTIONS; THANKSGIVING BECOMES OBLIGATORY

  People had gradually come to think of their insides differently. Now there was something “in here” that approximated the later Jewish and Christian concepts of the soul. Yet despite this internal presence, people still suffered from an ancient problem, perhaps more than ever before: they often failed to see God’s hand in the events of this world. He did things, sometimes intervening in human affairs in the most obvious manner. But people still (indeed, proverbially) forgot.

  The Bible recounts that, toward the end of their forty years of wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites ran out of water. They complained bitterly to their leaders, Moses and Aaron: “Why did you take us out of Egypt only to have us die here of thirst?” Thereupon, God instructed Moses to pick up his staff and go with Aaron to a certain rock. “Speak to the rock,” God tells them, “so that it gives forth water, and there will be enough to drink for all the Israelites and their flocks.” The two then proceed to carry out this instruction:

  Moses took the staff from before the LORD as He had commanded him. Then Moses and Aaron gathered the people in front of the rock, and he said to them: “Hear me now, you rebellious ones: can we get water for you from out of this rock?” Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff, and abundant water flowed from the rock, so that the congregation and their flocks could drink. Then the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Since you did not show your trust in Me, sanctifying Me in the Israelites’ sight, you will not lead this congregation to the land that I am giving them.” (Num 20:9–12)

  Moses’s Mistake

  That last sentence comes as a shock. Didn’t Moses and Aaron do exactly as they were told? Then why should they now be prevented from finishing their mission of leading the Israelites into the Promised Land?

  This passage has posed something of a challenge to biblical interpreters in every period.1 Some have suggested that Moses had erred in striking the rock. After all, God had told Moses to speak to the rock, but He didn’t say anything about Moses hitting it with his staff—so he was punished. But this explanation seems unlikely on two counts. First, this wasn’t the first time that Moses was told to produce water from a rock. The same thing had happened years earlier, at the very start of the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness.2 On that occasion, too, there was not enough water for the people to drink; then as well, the people quarreled with Moses, and God instructed Moses to go to a certain rock with his staff.

  [God said:] “I will be present there, next to the rock at Horeb, and you will strike the rock with your staff and water will come out of it for the people to drink.” And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel. (Exod 17:6)

  Here there was apparently n
o problem with striking the rock: it gave up its water and God said nothing to Moses in the way of a reproach. So if there was no problem the first time, what was wrong the second time?

  Those who blame Moses for striking the rock instead of talking to it have another problem as well. In the incident with which we began, no less than in the one just cited, God orders Moses to take his staff. What would be the point of such an order if all that Moses had to do was speak to the rock? What is more, the Hebrew word for “speak” (here dibbartem) seems to be connected to the same root that appears elsewhere as a verb meaning “strike” or “smash.” True, in the latter sense it is usually in the hiph’il (“causative”) form, but some scholars have suggested that dibbartem here may simply be an alternative to that form with the same meaning—that is, “strike.” After all, what sense does it make for Moses to speak to a rock? At least hitting it is an action that might conceivably open some crevice through which water could then flow, perhaps from an underground stream beneath it. What would talking accomplish?

  Considering such evidence, other commentators have ventured that Moses’s big mistake was striking the rock twice. After all, God had said nothing about striking it two times; if Moses had deviated from his instructions even in this one detail, wouldn’t that be enough to merit punishment? But this, too, seems unlikely. God’s instructions did not specify that Moses strike the rock any specific number of times; He certainly didn’t say “once and no more.” Even if Moses had struck it ten or twenty times, could that really be construed as disobeying God’s order?

  Actually, I have never understood why this passage should seem so mysterious to commentators. The Bible states the reason for Moses’s and Aaron’s subsequent punishment quite clearly: “Since you did not show your trust in Me,3 sanctifying Me in the Israelites’ sight, you will not lead this congregation to the land that I am giving them.” What does this mean in context? It means that Moses should never have said what he said to the people: “Hear me now, you rebellious ones: can we get water for you from out of this rock?” The problem was the “can we get water.” Through this little slip of the tongue, it seemed as if Moses and Aaron were actually taking credit for a miracle that God was about to perform and thereby not “sanctifying Me in the Israelites’ sight.”

  The slip is somewhat understandable. After all, faced with the same situation some years earlier, Moses had been ordered by God to strike the rock and everything turned out fine. Moses was silent that first time; perhaps it was hard for him to believe that striking a rock would produce anything. But now, God gives Moses what looks like the same order, and Moses—having no reason to fear that the outcome will be any different this time—confidently uses the occasion to reprove the Israelites for their lack of faith: “Hear me now, you rebellious ones: can we get water for you from out of this rock?” Some Bible translations render God’s subsequent rebuke of Moses as: “Since you did not trust in Me” or “Because you did not trust Me enough,” but neither of these makes sense. Moses had plenty of trust that everything would turn out well; that’s why he could give his swaggering challenge to the people, “Hear me now, you rebellious ones: can we get water for you from out of this rock?” Rather, it was precisely his overconfidence that led him to omit a crucial step, namely, his failure to declare publicly his reliance on God and thereby “sanctifying Me in the Israelites’ sight.”

  In a word: Moses’s mistake was forgetting God. And this, it turns out, was not an uncommon problem in the ancient Near East. People—including kings and other leaders—sometimes failed to give the gods proper credit for their beneficial interventions into the affairs of mankind.

  Royal Braggadocio

  Ancient Near Eastern kings were not famous for their self-effacing modesty. It was not uncommon for monarchs to commission monumental statues of themselves, sometimes accompanied by inscriptions detailing their glorious personal histories as well as their tremendous acts of beneficence to their own people and humanity in general. Generations of schoolchildren have memorized Shelley’s famous sonnet “Ozymandias,” in which a long-dead king boasts, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Shelley’s poem was inspired by a real inscription of Ramesses II of Egypt (then only recently published) which reads in part, “King of Kings am I, Osymandias [Ramesses’s other, regnal name]. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him [try to] surpass even one of my works!” Surely here is no wavering or hovering: Ramesses II is virtually an all-powerful god himself.

  The genre of the self-glorifying inscription was carried to especially great heights by various kings in Phoenicia and Asia Minor, whose inscriptional autobiographies have been rightly characterized by one scholar as “royal braggadocio.”4 Some of them are, indeed, little more than “How great am I!”

  I am Kilamuwa, the son of Hayya. [King] Gabar reigned over Ya’diya, but he d[id] nothing.

  Then there was Bamah, but he did nothing.

  Then there was my father Hayya, but he did nothing.

  Then there was my brother Sha’il, but he did nothing.

  But I, Kilamuwa, the son of Tm-5—what I did the ones who preceded [me] did not do.

  My father’s kingdom was in the midst of mighty kings, and all of them stretched forth their hands to consume [it].

  And I [too] was in the hands of the kings—[but] like a fire! burning the[ir] beards and burning their hands . . .

  I Kilamuwa, son of Hayya, sat on the throne of my father.

  In the presence of the earlier kings, the mškbm had whined like dogs.

  But I—to them I was a father and to them I was a mother and to them I was a brother.

  Someone who had never even seen the face of a sheep, I would make him the owner of a flock;

  someone who had never seen the face of an ox, I made him the owner of a herd, and the owner of silver and the owner of gold;

  and someone who had never seen [even ordinary] linen in his youth, in my day he was covered in byssus.

  I held the mškbm by the hand; I made their attitude [toward me] like the attitude of a fatherless child toward its mother.6

  Apparently, it just didn’t occur to King Kilamuwa (ninth century BCE, Anatolia) to share his glory with anyone else (at least not here); after all, propaganda—boasting, “royal braggadocio”—was what these inscriptions were all about.

  And yet, even amidst this lavish self-praise, other kings did take the trouble to remember their divine sponsor(s). Here, for example, is the Karatepe Inscription from what is now southern Turkey, in which the eighth-century BCE king Azitawada sets out his accomplishments:

  I am Azitawada, the blessed one of Ba‘al, the servant of Ba‘al, who was placed in authority by Awrikku, the king of the Danunites. Ba‘al made me a father and a mother to the Danunites. I gave life to the Danunites. I expanded the territory of the Adana Valley from east to west. In my days, the Danunites had everything pleasant, abundance and pleasure. And I filled the arsenals of Pa’ar, and I acquired horse after horse and shield after shield and army after army—thanks to Ba‘al and the [other] gods, I shattered the rebellious ones.

  The language is strikingly similar to the previous inscription—like Kilamuwa, Azitawada was “a father and a mother” to his people and the source of economic prosperity. But unlike the former, Azitawada starts off by identifying himself as Ba‘al’s servant and acknowledges the help of Ba‘al and other deities. Indeed, a few lines further down, he announces:

  And I have built this city and named it Azitawadiya, for Ba‘al and Reshef of the stags had dispatched me to build it. And I built it thanks to Ba‘al and thanks to Reshef of the stags, with abundance and pleasantness and good living and peace of mind.

  Azitawada actually claims to have been sent by Ba‘al and Reshef to build the city that he inaugurated. And this sort of piety, even in the midst of self-promotion (after all, in the same breath he names the new city after himself!), seems rather more typical.

  Why sh
ould this have been? If the whole point of these inscriptions was to catalogue the king’s great accomplishments, why bring the gods into it? Kilamuwa certainly felt no necessity to do so. Perhaps, in the case of Azitawada, it was merely a formulaic gesture, like the clergyman’s invocation at the start of some public event in which there will be no further need to refer to the deity. But I think not. Azitawada says that Ba‘al and Reshef actually sent him, commissioned him, to build the new city; at some level, I think he must have believed this to be true. (And, on the other hand, he certainly doesn’t seem to think of himself as a mere pawn: these are his mighty deeds as well as those of his divine patrons.)

  Another inscription, that of Zakir, king of Hamath and Luash, goes a bit further, attributing nearly all his success to divine help. “I was oppressed,” he begins, “but Ba‘al Shameyn (“the Lord of Heaven”) delivered me and stood by me, and Ba‘al Shameyn made me king in Hadarik.” He continues:

  Now Bar Hadad, the son of Hazael, king of Aram, united se[ven]teen kings against me . . . And all these kings set up a circumvallation* against Hadari[k], and they erected a wall higher than the wall of Hadarik, and they dug a moat deeper than [its] moa[t]. But I lifted up my hands to Ba‘al Shameyn, and Ba‘al Shameyn answered me. [And] Ba‘al Shameyn spoke to me through seers and messengers. [And] Ba‘al Shameyn [said to me:] Do not fear, for I have made [you] king, [and I] shall stand by you, and I shall deliver you from all [these kings who] have rammed a circumvallation against you.” Thus spoke to me [Ba‘al Shameyn and he drove away?] all those kings . . .