The Great Shift
Page 51
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37. This is not to say that the three omni’s were an entirely Greek import; clearly, the groundwork for each of these had been laid even before Alexander’s conquest of the ancient Near East. But the sweeping assertion of these three terms as definitional bears an altogether Hellenic character; note briefly Winston (1981), 335 n. 57.
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38. Philo, The Confusion of Tongues, 136–37.
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39. Philo, The Sacrifices of Abel and Cain, 67–68. Note that the same dissonance is found in the Hebrew, and inspired the brief comment in Mekhilta deR. Ishmael par. Vayyissa’ (Horowitz-Rabin ed. 175): “Behold, I will stand before you there . . .”: God said to him [Moses], “Wherever you find the footprint of man, there I will be [standing] before you.” A remarkable point of resemblance, pointed out by D. Winston (1981), 348 n. 201.
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40. See Kugel (1998a), 127–28.
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41. I have tried to avoid referring to either divine “immanence” or “transcendence” in this book because neither term, despite their distinguished pedigrees, quite captures what I am trying to say here and elsewhere—in part because the terms themselves carry a significance heavily freighted with later theological preconceptions. The anthropologist Alfred Gell once wrote about Polynesian cosmology as follows: “The idea of an immanent rather than transcendent divinity was, I think, the source of certain cosmological anxieties that played an enormous part in Polynesian life. For us, the immanent deus sive natura of Spinoza represents an optimistic rather than pessimistic deism, a blessed relief from the angry and punishing Almighty God of traditional Christianity, set apart from His creation and judging it harshly. But that is because the idea of an immanent God was never really naturalized in Christian Europe, however much eighteenth-century intellectuals may have hankered after one. In Polynesia the situation was the precise opposite: the immanence of the Gods was the source of continuous anxiety (the proverbial hedonism of the South Sea islanders was founded on a sense of acute and abiding hysteria), and the rapidity and enthusiasm with which the Polynesians accomplished their conversion to Christianity stemmed from their untold relief upon discovering that God was, after all, transcendent, not part of this world . . . Most important, Polynesian ritual operated in precisely the inverse sense to Christian communion, i.e., the intention was to cause the divinity to leave (some part of) the world, rather than to induce the divinity to enter (some part of) it”: Gell (1995), 290–305.
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42. See chap. 5, note 14.
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10. A SACRED AGREEMENT AT SINAI
1. It is probably impossible to determine the very oldest biblical text that refers to God as a king, but among the oldest, Exod 15:18 or Deut 33:5 might be reasonable candidates. On God’s kingship in the Psalms, Brettler (1989), esp. 2–26. As we have seen, this is hardly the only representation of God in early biblical times. Indeed, the Divine Warrior does not necessarily contradict the Divine King—the two coexist in Exod 15 (15:3 and 18 respectively); Ps 68 seems to embody the progression from victorious warrior (8–24) to exalted king (25–36). The former is certainly the controlling image of the ancient hymn of Habakkuk 3. Beyond these biblical examples is the broad spectrum of connections between gods and kingship among Israel’s neighbors. Note also Henri Frankfort’s observation: “The ancient Near East considered kingship the very basis of civilization. Only savages could live without a king. Security, peace, and justice could not prevail without a ruler to champion them. If ever a political institution functioned with the assent of the governed, it was the monarchy which built the pyramids with forced labor and drained the Assyrian peasantry by ceaseless wars”: Frankfort (1948), 3.
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2. See Roth (1997).
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3. Noth (1967), 14.
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4. The scholarly writings on this passage are understandably vast. See among many the classic studies Zenger (1977); Toeg (1977); Dozeman (1989); B. Schwartz (1996).
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5. See Greenberg (1950); and further Reiner (1984), 244, in particular entry 3 “treasured possession of Divine Name3”; Alalakh’s goddess adopted the king as her sikiltu; see also Weinfeld (1970), 195, n. 103, and Weinfeld (1972), 226, n. 22, and recently Bloch (2013).
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6. These were discussed by Korošec (1931), building on the two-volume study by Friedrich (1926–30). Akkadian treaties had been published somewhat earlier in Weidner (1923).
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7. See on this Altman (2004). Note that the historical prologue is typical of the second-millennium treaties but virtually absent from the first-millennium Assyrian vassal treaties to which the Hittite treaties have been compared.
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8. Cited in Beckman (1999), 60–61.
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9. Ibid., 65, slightly reworded for clarity.
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10. In later, Assyrian suzerain treaties, the vassal is required to “love” the suzerain; on this language, see Moran (1963).
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11. Early examples include Mendenhall (1955), Beyerlin (1965), Zimmerli (1965). Their arguments were challenged early on, in particular by Perlitt (1969). The virtual absence of any reference to a great covenant between God and Israel from the eighth-century prophets would suggest that the concept was unknown until relatively late. The Assyrian vassal treaties of the eighth and ninth centuries BCE bring us closer to ancient Israel, but those treaties have a far simpler form, one that might be found in almost any age or location. See McCarthy (1978); Clements (1975). For a recent review of the question see Weeks (2004), 5–12.
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12. As almost always, scholars are confronted by the problem discussed earlier as “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”; again, see Weeks (2004), 5–12.
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13. A number of recently discovered inscriptions (some mentioned in chapter 5) seem to connect Israel’s God with various sites to the south of ancient Canaan. He is thus recorded as “YHWH of Teman” (the “southland,” here, probably, Edom) on a clay water jar discovered at Kuntillat Ajrud, in the eastern part of the Sinai desert not far from the current Israeli-Egyptian border. Final publication of the excavation was reported in Meshel (2012).The writing has been dated to the eighth century BCE. Another inscription at the same site likewise reads “YHWH of Teman.” Two Nubian temple inscriptions from the second half of the second millennium refer to nomads in the region of Seir (again, to Israel’s south) as the “Shashu (š3śu, that is, Bedouins) of YHWH.” These inscriptions are particularly important because, apart from them, there is little evidence that this particular God was known elsewhere. As Pharaoh says after Moses first mentions God’s name to him: “Who is this YHWH, that I should obey Him and let Israel go? I never heard of YHWH” (Exod 5:2). The recent discovery of these southern inscriptions has revived interest in the nineteenth-century “Midianite (or Kenite) Hypothesis,” which held that Israel’s God was originally located far to the south of ancient Canaan. For a brief review of the arguments: Kugel (2007a), 63–66.
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14. The divine stipulation that in accepting God’s covenant Israel would become a “nation of priests” deserves mention here. Surely this phrase did not mean that everyone would henceforth be a priest, barging into sanctuaries at will and offering their own sacrifices. Nor did it likely mean that the king at any time would have to come from priestly stock; the notion that the high priest was also ex officio a kind of king only appeared much, much later, at the end of the second century BCE. Besides, the whole idea of this passage and God’s subsequent issuing of the Ten Commandments is that He will be the people’s king and the people will be his faithful subjects. Rather, this passage seems to be saying that by taking on the obligations of God’s covenant—the Ten Commandments and, eventually, the other laws that follow in the Torah—the people would somehow be like priests in a temple or other sanct
uary, those who are allowed to come close to the deity. Note the wording “you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests.” The phrase “to Me” seems to imply some sort of qualification: you will be priests as far as I am concerned—not the kind of priests who officiate in a temple, but somehow the equivalent, a whole kingdom of people who are closely connected to Me. Scholars are divided as to when this passage was written, and this is, as almost always, an important matter. F. M. Cross called Exod 19:3–6 the “archaic, poetic (liturgical) prologue” of this section, citing Moran (1962); see Cross (1973), 84n. But early or late, this passage’s suggestion that by “keeping My covenant” Israel will become God’s “treasured people”—this was a theme with enormous ramifications for the later development of Israel’s religion, as we shall see.
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15. Much later, toward the end of the biblical period, such omissions bothered the author of the book of Jubilees, and he consciously set out to correct them—but there is scant evidence that such things bothered anyone before his time. Kugel (2007a), 41–42, 58, 65–66, 69–70, etc.
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16. To be sure, the “period of the Judges” is a later construct: it means “the time before there was an established sequence of kings,” a period which actually stretched back from Saul and David to time immemorial. Cf. H. Frankfort cited above, note 1.
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17. Evocation of a binding, legal connection between God and Israel may, in a way, have seemed to undercut the living prophet’s own authority: why should he need to evoke an ancient covenant or its stipulations when he himself has, as it were, the last word? So, for example, when the daughters of Zelophehad tell Moses that the existing laws of inheritance treat them unfairly, Moses, as a prophet, could “bring their case before the LORD” and have the law changed (Num 27:1–11). At the same time, any society needs established rules and norms of behavior, and the existence of sophisticated legal codes in the ancient Near East that predate Israel’s own existence by a wide margin suggests that such rules—indeed, many of the same rules that are found in Mesopotamian law codes—must have been promulgated in Israel from an early period. With regard to the Ten Commandments in particular, however, it may well be that they started off not as the stipulations of a great divine-human covenant, but (as Cross has suggested) as a set of simple rules agreed upon by the inhabitants of various separate highland sites at the very dawn of Israel’s history—the sort of rules that would allow these isolated settlements to intermarry and cooperate in other minimal ways while maintaining their fierce independence; see below, note 20. Only later were these rules recast as a great covenant. In addition, scholars have recently emphasized that laws in the ancient Near East had more of an exemplary than a strictly prescriptive character: the biblical and ancient Near Eastern lists of laws were more in the nature of “legal treatises” rather than actual law codes in our sense. Individual laws were thus examples to be elaborated on, or departed from, by actual judges—and the laws themselves were often left uncited in narrative. This certainly seems to be the case with the famous judgment of Solomon (1 Kgs 3:16–27): underlying his apparently irrational proposal to cut the baby in half is the unstated legal principle that disputed property whose true ownership cannot be proven is to be divided by the disputants (cf. M. Baba Meṣi’a 1:1). But with time, citing the authority of the law came to be more frequent. See Jackson (2000), 287–97.
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18. Could the Torah’s laws be described as another form of encounter between God and Israel? At first the answer might seem to be a straightforward No. Once a set of laws has been promulgated and accepted, there is no implied encounter between the lawgiver and the people; he or she is basically out of the picture. But such a notion fails to take into account the ramifications of a divinely given set of laws. In an entirely human legal system, disobeying the law is a crime. In biblical law, by contrast, disobeying the law is a sin. Of course, if applied to Israelite law in its early stages, such a distinction would probably have seemed entirely theoretical: a thief is a thief, and whether his crime is committed against the deity or against the crown probably made little difference to him or to his judges in ancient times. But eventually, as we shall see, obeying God’s laws came to be conceived as a kind of encounter, that is, a way of coming close to God. In this respect, the whole career of divine law is an important part of the fundamental change which lies at the heart of this book. Note in this connection Nickelsburg (2001), 1 Enoch 1: “[In the Enochic corpus,] sin is a violation of the divine King’s sovereignty through the worship of other divine beings, a transgression of the divinely created cosmic order, or disobedience of the laws that regulate the human conduct toward God and one’s fellow human beings . . . The Enochic corpus explains the origins and presence of sin and evil on earth in two ways: (1) sin and evil are the function of a primordial heavenly revolt whose results continue to victimize the human race; (2) responsibility for sin and evil lies with the human beings who transgress God’s law” (p. 46). By the same token, obeying the law in a human legal system is usually just a matter of staying out of trouble, or at best good citizenship. By contrast, consciously carrying out a law given by God is (or can be construed as) a way of doing His bidding, following His instructions and so acting as His faithful subject. Either way, the laws of the Pentateuch implied an automatic and ongoing connection between God and the human beings charged with obeying them. Beyond this, however, is the more specific matter of enforcement. Some transgressions listed in the Torah could be found out and punished by human courts, but others could not. Who is going to enforce a commandment such as “You shall not hate your brother in your heart” (Lev 19:17)? The phrase “in your heart” means secretly, holding the hatred inside without telling anyone: see Kugel (1987). If so, then the very existence of this law implies that some non-human—God or one of His angels—must somehow always be watching in order to properly reward or punish those who keep or violate it. The same applies to “And you shall love your neighbor like yourself” (Lev 19:18) and many other biblical statutes. Indeed, a number of infractions are specifically punishable by extirpation, a punishment that presumably could be carried out only by God. See Milgrom (1990), 405–8.
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19. An important proviso, since this and much of the book is attributed by scholars to later hands: a relatively early Deuteronomic compilation, followed by further additions (including a putative Deutero-Deuteronomic editing). See chapter 7, note 21.
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20. Some scholars have suggested that the Ten Commandments actually began not as part of a great covenant between God and Israel, but as a code of conduct agreed upon by the inhabitants of various separate, hilltop settlements that constituted the first “Israelite” populations in Canaan. This code of conduct was only subsequently adopted (and revised) to fill an entirely different purpose, to be the covenant stipulations of an agreement binding Israel’s tribes with the God YHWH. See further Cross (1998), 33, and Kugel (2007a), 721 n. 5.
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21. Neither of these terms means, strictly speaking, a legal code alone; see Urbach (1987), 286–95. Moreover, what the term torah designated in post-exilic is a moving target; see Achenbach (2007), Kugel (1986b).
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22. Interpreters concluded that He had given Israel no fewer than 613 different commandments in the Torah, though they differed on exactly which commandments to include in this total. For the biblical source of this exact number: Kugel (1998a), 637–38, 677.
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11. THE EMERGENCE OF THE BIBLICAL SOUL
1. See in this connection: Clifford (2004); M. Fox (1999); see also “Solomon’s Riddles,” in Kugel (1999), 160–80. For the explicit connection of mashal (“proverb”) with ḥidah (“riddle”), see Ezek 17:2, Hab 2:6, Ps 49:5, 78:2; Prov 1:6. Many previous writers have sought to catalogue the different forms and functions of biblical proverbs, inter alia: von Rad (1972) 25–40; Scott, (1971), 59–71.
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; 2. See Ulmer (2009), 102–3.
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3. To repeat: “The notion of such a cherub (apparently a kind of gryphon) throne is found in texts of different dates, but the priestly picture in Exodus 25 does not describe a throne (pace Haran, 1978:251, 254). There is no seat, no armrests, no footstool; the creatures do not stand side-by-side, but face each other . . . There is no way this can be envisioned as a throne.” Propp (2006), 390.
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4. This might mean (and sometimes did) that an omnipresent deity is by definition everywhere including every person’s insides; some early postbiblical texts suggest, however, that “omnipresent” meant spread out all over the outside world. An omnipresent God was, at least for a time, all around, but this “everywhere” did not necessarily include a person’s insides. (For examples, see below). In fact, this may be what the words of Prov 20:27 are trying to explain.
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5. See also such uses as Isa 2:22 “breath” and Ps 150:6 “everyone that breathes” in the NRSV and NJPS translations of neshamah.
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6. This understanding was first put forward by Dürr (1925) in the wake of earlier research by P. Dhorme (1920), esp. 482–83.
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7. I should make it clear that I do not take this and other expressions as indicating that ancient Semites and other peoples had no notion of a unitary mind or of the individual as such, nor that ancient Israelite thinking was itself fundamentally different from ours (as argued by, for example, Boman [1970]) nor yet that ancient minds were structurally different from ours, as argued by Jaynes (1976), discussed below (chap. 18, note 7). Di Vito (1999) similarly asserts that “in the OT [i.e., Hebrew Bible], human faculties and bodily organs enjoy a measure of independence that is simply difficult to grasp today,” illustrating this phenomenon with an array of biblical examples (p. 227) and concluding: “In short, the biblical character presents itself to us more as parts than as a whole” (pp. 227–28). Michael Carasik is perhaps the most recent scholar to debunk such notions: Carasik (2006), 2–9.