The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  How often did she flatter me, calling me a holy man, praising my self-restraint with deceitful words in the presence of her husband, but wishing only to trap me when we were alone! In public, she would praise me as showing self-restraint, but in secret she would say to me: “Don’t worry about my husband—he is already convinced of your self-restraint! Even if someone were to tell him about [the two of] us, he wouldn’t believe it.” Amidst all these things I lay down on the ground in sackcloth and I beseeched God, so that the Lord might save me from the Egyptian woman.

  When she in no way succeeded, she again came to me under the pretext of [wanting] instruction, “to learn the word of God.” And she said to me: “If you want me to abandon the idols [that I worship,] then sleep with me, and I will persuade the Egyptian [Potiphar] to give up idols, [so that] we both will walk in the law of your Lord.” And I said to her, “The Lord does not accept any who [would] worship Him in impurity, nor is He pleased by those who commit adultery.” At this she remained silent, wishing [only] to carry her desires to their conclusion. For my part, I increased my fasting and prayer, so that the Lord would save me from her.

  Here, it would seem, it is Joseph who is close to being a cliché: pious in the extreme, he is beyond all temptation. She, on the other hand, is realistic even in her desperation. Her attempts to seduce Joseph know no bounds, and they go on for pages and pages. She threatens to kill her husband so that she can marry Joseph legally, then tries to work some sorcery by tampering with Joseph’s food; after this, she resorts to a little piety of her own, promising to convert to the religion of Israel if only Joseph will submit. This is followed by a period of piteous weeping and groaning, leading eventually to her threatened suicide—all to no avail.

  But realizing that the Spirit of Beliar was tormenting her, I prayed to the Lord [on her behalf. Then] I said to her, “Why are you so disturbed and upset? [Are you] blinded by sins? Remember that if you kill yourself, Setho, your husband’s concubine—your rival!—will beat your children and destroy your memorial from the earth.”38 Then she said to me: “So you do love me! It is enough for me [to know] that you care about my life and my children’s. I can still expect that my desire [for you] will be fulfilled.”

  The account of her tormented, unrequited love goes on, as mentioned, for pages and pages—even after, in keeping with the biblical account, she finally accuses Joseph of attempted rape and has him imprisoned. But this, according to the author of the Testaments, was just another stratagem, since Joseph’s imprisonment would give her unobstructed access to him in his cell:39

  How often, despite her being ill [i.e., lovesick], did she used to come down to [my cell] at midnight to hear my voice as I prayed! But whenever I heard her groan, I would stay still. For when I was in her house, she used to bare her arms and breasts and legs to get me to lie with her—and she was very beautiful, splendidly adorned in order to seduce me—but the Lord saved me from her exertions.

  Such novelization of various schematic biblical figures may simply represent the adoption of the conventions of Greek romances and other genres by later Jewish writers. But the broader question that this raises is: Why? It is easy to imagine a pious critic in antiquity rebuking the author of the Testaments or anyone else who sought to Hellenize biblical narratives:40 “How dare you act as if this biblical tale was anything remotely resembling a Greek novella? It is sacred Scripture, as far from such literature as Jerusalem is from Athens.” If such reproaches were made, however, they apparently did not stop the author of the Testaments from doing what he did. Nor did they impede the Jew who recast Joseph’s encounter with his future bride Aseneth in the Hellenistic novella Joseph and Aseneth, nor the writer who sought to explore Eve’s inner motives in the Garden of Eden in the Life of Adam and Eve. So perhaps all of these were a reflection of some great sea change, something like a new understanding of the human being as having “inner depths” that had previously gone unrecognized.

  Or perhaps not. In fact, as I have been suggesting, everything surveyed in the present chapter may rightly be explained on other, more limited grounds. The rejection of vicarious and transgenerational punishment may have been no more than a reflection of a very local shift in human judicial norms. Jeremiah’s laments—in fact, Jeremiah’s generally painful depiction of himself as a struggling, vulnerable prophet—seems to have been altogether sui generis, not comparable to the presentation of any other prophet, earlier or later. Job and Koheleth are both protestors against the standards of conventional wisdom—this may be part of the reason for their authors’ very human portrayal of both. And as just suggested, the “novelization” of biblical figures, especially women, in Second Temple times may simply be evidence of one relatively small change in the “representation of reality in Western literature” (as Eric Auerbach subtitled his famous work, Mimesis). Perhaps more damning than any of these arguments is the ineluctable fact that they are all based on texts, things that were written down and copied and recast and recopied. We don’t really know much about scribal culture before the Babylonian exile (and not all that much about what followed the return from exile), nor is it easy to guess why many of these texts were written down in the first place. As a general principle, it is probably safe to say that most of them were written down for one purpose and ended up being preserved in the Bible for quite another.

  And yet, surveying what seem to be some of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible and comparing them to others that are clearly later, a real difference is evident. Most of the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis, along with those of Deborah or Gideon or Samson or the concubine at Gibeah (all in the book of Judges), seem to exist in a different world of assumptions from that underlying the portrayal of the various ideas and figures surveyed in the present chapter. Was this a strictly literary change, or is it attesting to something far broader if harder to pin down, a different sense of what it means to be a person, indeed, that elusive item, the individual?

  15

  Humans in Search

  PSALMS THAT ESTABLISH CONTACT; DIVINE REMOTENESS AND THE HEAVENLY TEMPLE; RETROFITTED WITH VIRTUE; THE SONG OF SONGS AND THE YEARNING FOR GOD

  The Second Temple period’s greater focus on a single human life (as suggested by various texts mentioned in the last chapter) was accompanied by another change. A number of texts from this period seem to highlight God’s remoteness. Now, instead of God intervening in human affairs by stepping across the dividing line that separated ordinary from extraordinary reality, it was human beings who were suddenly “in search of God,” a God who was frequently depicted as remote and out of reach. Were these two phenomena related?

  Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have divided the book of Psalms into various subcategories. Apart from the psalms of petition examined above, there are psalms of praise (in general) and psalms of thanksgiving (for a specific act of intervention, or thanksgiving offered time and again at various festivals or other ritual occasions). In addition, there are “enthronement psalms,” proclaiming God as king at one or another hypothetical celebration, psalms recited by or on behalf of individuals upon payment of a vow or in search of divine approval, plus “Zion hymns,” pilgrimage psalms or “psalms of ascents,” and so forth. Almost all of these psalms have a presumed place in which they were sung or recited: the Israelite temple(s) as well as, at least for a time, “high places” or other sacred sites.

  Placeless, Occasionless Psalms

  But then, toward the end of the biblical period, come a number of psalms that are apparently placeless and occasionless, psalms that seem neither to be asking for something specific nor offering heartfelt thanks for a particular act of divine intervention, nor praising God in connection with some festival or rite.1 They offer no particular reason for being recited. They also consistently speak in the first person singular, “I,” “me,” or “my soul” (nafshi). Attaching a date to a particular psalm has always been a somewhat risky business; many scholars are content to label psalms as pre-exilic or
post-exilic and leave it at that. (Sometimes a historic reference will support a more specific dating. Psalm 137 begins, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept,” an obvious reference to the Babylonian exile, hence its dating as “exilic or early post-exilic.”) But these placeless and occasionless psalms are often dated late not because of some historical reference, but because of the specific words they use, words that seem not to have existed in earlier Hebrew texts (in some cases because they were borrowed from Aramaic in post-exilic times), or lexical items that seem to have taken on a different meaning in later times, or formulations that seem to have been gradually modified over time. A good example is Psalm 145:

  A [psalm of] praise, of David *

  I will exalt You, O God and King, and bless Your name forever and ever.

  Let me bless You every day, and praise Your name forever and ever.

  Great is the LORD, and much to be praised; His greatness is unfathomable.

  For ages and ages Your deeds will be hymned, and Your mighty acts recounted.

  I will speak of the splendor of Your glorious majesty and of Your wondrous acts.

  Let the might of Your fearsome deeds be told, and let me recount Your greatness.

  Let the fame of Your beneficence be told, and Your righteousness be sung.

  The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in kindness.

  The LORD is good to everyone, and His mercy extends over all the living.

  Let all whom You made give You thanks, O LORD, and let Your faithful ones bless You.

  They will speak of Your glorious kingship and tell of Your powers,

  Making known to all people Your mighty deeds, and the glorious splendor of Your kingship.

  Your kingship is an everlasting kingship, and Your dominion will last for all generations.

  The LORD upholds all who stumble, and makes all who are bent stand straight.

  The eyes of all look to You in hope, and You give them their food in its time,

  Opening Your hand and feeding every living thing its needs.

  The LORD is just in all His ways, and kindly in all that He does.

  The LORD is close to all who cry out to Him, to all who cry out to Him faithfully.

  He fulfills the desire of all who worship Him; He hears their plea and saves them.

  The LORD watches over all who love Him, but all the wicked He will destroy.

  Let my mouth speak the praise of the LORD, and all flesh bless His holy name forever and ever.

  The linguistic arguments suggesting a late dating for this psalm are many.2 While most of the indications of lateness would pass the nonspecialist by, such lexical items as the word translated “hymned” in verse 4, the references to God’s “kingship” in verses 11 through 13, the particular formulations “everlasting” (literally, “in all ages”) and “for all generations” (more literally, “in each and every generation”) in verse 13, and the word for “stand straight” in verse 14 (apparently an Aramaism) all suggest a rather late date of composition.3

  But what is particularly interesting about this psalm is precisely its placeless and occasionless quality. There is no mention of a temple or other holy spot where the psalm is to be recited; there are no other people in the background. In fact, the psalmist seems altogether alone: for the most part it is just God and “I.” As for its being occasioned by some specific thing that happened or some particular celebration, the psalmist rules this out from the start: “Let me bless You every day,” the second line says. In fact, if this psalm has an overall theme or subject (not all psalms do), it would seem to be the act of praising God itself. This is what the psalmist talks about in each of the first seven verses, and then returns to this subject again in verses 10–12 and yet again in verse 21. Between these verses, the psalmist seems to be taking his own advice, repeatedly praising God’s goodness and mercy. Note also that the psalmist doesn’t seem to be expecting any kind of answer. In fact, despite God’s being repeatedly addressed as “You,” He seems quite distant in this psalm. His greatness is “unfathomable.” His “kingship”—no matter how His control of things may be obscured from time to time—will always exist: “Your dominion will last for all generations.”4

  Considering all this, praising God seems to be not only the subject, but the psalmist’s whole reason (one might even say, his pretext) for opening his mouth in the first place. “Praising You,” he says, “is what I wish to do now—after all, doing so altogether befits Your greatness, and it is what everyone else does, or at least should do [vv. 1–7]. So I will recite these verses, which have conveniently been composed in alphabetical order, in fact I wish to do so every day, as a gesture of devotion and piety.”5

  Psalm 145 is not quite unique in its offering of placeless and occasionless praise to God, though it is certainly a relatively rare sort of psalm.6 But one might include under the same rubric another alphabetical psalm with signs of lateness, Psalm 34, which begins,

  Let me bless the LORD at any time, let praise of Him be forever in my mouth.

  Let my soul glorify the LORD, so that the lowly may hear and be glad.

  Exalt the LORD and with me, let us praise His name together. (34:1–3)

  Here again is the theme of perpetual praise (“at any time,” which can also mean “at all times”).

  Another example—if anything, more obviously placeless and occasionless—has already been discussed: Psalm 119. The mere recitation of this huge, 176-verse litany must have been thought to be a kind of offering, and it has the same solitary feel as Psalm 145: the psalmist is alone, endlessly reiterating in different combinations his praise of God (here along with his requests for enlightenment, understanding, and secret knowledge from the Torah).* What is striking in both psalms is the writers’ evident taking the initiative, seeking out God at no special time or place and with no special need or request, offering praise along some pretty standard lines, as if merely repeating these things constituted a readily available reason for addressing Him. A dotted line connects these three psalms to a few others in the book of Psalms (certainly 103, 104, 139, 146, and perhaps some others) that are also placeless and occasionless (and apparently late),7 and thence to the Thanksgiving Hymns from the Dead Sea Scrolls, with their repeated offerings of thanks that also sound like pretexts—for having been saved from apparently typological enemies, or for God’s having “revealed the ways of truth and the works of evil” (col 5:20), “placed me by the source of streams in a dry land” (col 16:5), and repeatedly for “not rejecting me,” “purifying me,” “having made known to me the secret counsel of truth,” and the like.

  It is difficult not to contrast all this with relations between man and God in an earlier day, when He was said to buttonhole Moses or Jeremiah or Jonah. Then it was indeed “God in search of man,” a God who calls out from the middle of a burning bush, or who picks up Ezekiel from over here and drops him down over there. But after a while, all this stopped happening, and I believe that this is what those placeless, occasionless psalms are all about. The balance had somehow shifted; now it was the human who was searching, reaching out to a remote and hard-to-imagine deity through prayers of praise.

  Heavenly Travelers

  This new phenomenon, people being “in search of God,” is manifest most strikingly in those human beings who actually ascended into heaven in order to stand before God’s heavenly throne. Of course, from time immemorial, people had imagined what it would be like to ascend to heaven and look around. The earliest written account of such an ascent goes back to ancient Sumer, in the late third or early second millennium BCE, and peoples in the ancient Near East and elsewhere continued to explore the possibilities of this genre in the centuries that followed. It should be mentioned that heaven in those days didn’t mean the limitless reaches of outer space, as it does today. Rather, it was the “upper shelf,” that sky-blue expanse just above the lowest clouds and a little higher than the highest mountain peak. If one could only get up there, one c
ould commune directly with the gods or the angels and find out what they were planning, or gain some other form of hidden knowledge, or request a special favor, or stay there permanently and become immortal.8

  Yet it is striking that the Hebrew Bible itself contains only one heavenly ascent,9 the famous account of how a chariot of fire came sweeping down and picked up the prophet Elijah:

  Now when the LORD was about to carry Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha [his prophet-apprentice] were on their way from Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here; the LORD is sending me to Bethel.” But Elisha said, “As the LORD lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” So they went down to Bethel. The company of prophets who were in Bethel came out to Elisha and said to him, “Do you know that today the LORD is taking your master away from you?” And he said, “Yes, I know; keep silent.” . . .

  They were walking and talking as they went, when a chariot of fire and fiery horses separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha kept watching and cried out, “Father, O father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” (2 Kgs 2:1–12)

  In its larger context, this account seems designed to assert that Elisha was indeed a fit successor to Elijah, and almost his prophetic equal. (In the continuation of this passage, Elisha quite literally picks up Elijah’s prophetic mantle, a symbol of his succession.) But as for Elijah, his ascent into heaven puts the final seal of divine approval on his life’s work. This prophet and miracle worker did not die like an ordinary human being, this text says; he ascended bodily into the upper realms on a chariot of fire.