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40. The fact that human interpreters felt free to modify the meaning of a scriptural verse might seem to contradict the equation of Scripture with God’s presence, but it is well to remember what Scripture had become. Its actual words were (or were becoming) unchangeable. “Interpreters” of an earlier day could simply tamper with the text itself, inserting words, sentences, or even whole chapters on their own initiative. Now it was necessary to claim that the interpreter’s changed meanings were in fact the text’s original meanings—and to justify these new meanings by hanging them on some clever hook from within the Bible’s own words.
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17. PERSONAL RELIGION
1. Indeed, the prominence of the individual seems to arrive more or less simultaneously in Deuteronomy and the book of Ezekiel; see B. Levinson (2010), 64–67, 72–74, 79–81.
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2. See the recent survey of such questions in H. MacKay (2001), 11–20.
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3. Ravid (2000).
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4. Too many to list here; see the pioneering work of Schiffman (1975), 77–133.
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5. These words, spoken by Isaac to Jacob and Esau, might therefore appear to be restricted to these two siblings; but the plural “be loving of your brothers” along with the phrases “as a man loves himself” and “loving each other as themselves,” identify this passage as an allusion to Lev 19:18.
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6. At Qumran as elsewhere, Lev 19:18 was read in the light of the preceding prohibition of Lev 19:17, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart.” Further: Kugel (1987).
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7. These two are now widely recognized as a merism, the naming of two extremes so as to include everything inside them, just as “night and day” means “all the time.” See Honeyman (1952).
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8. Some Jews (notably some Karaites, who flourished in medieval and early modern times; apparently the Samaritans as well, and probably some Jews in more ancient days) thus maintained that this commandment does not involve actually tying anything to one’s arm or head. Rather, exponents of this position argue, its aim is to instruct Jews to hold the Torah’s words dear, binding them close, as it were, to one’s head and heart. And the exponents do have a point. One of the four verses, Deut 11:18, says more specifically: “You shall put these words of Mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall tie them for a sign upon your arm, and they shall be as ṭoṭafot between your eyes.” The second part of the sentence seems to be a metaphorical reiteration of the first part: “Don’t ever let these words of Mine be far from you! Tie them to yourself, keep them forever close!” Such a reading is supported by other verses in the Bible. Prov 6:20–21 says, “My son, keep your father’s commandment and do not neglect your mother’s teachings; tie them upon your heart forever and bind them around your neck.” This certainly does not seem to be a reference to tefillin; is it not simply the case that the parents’ teachings are to be cherished and held close, and for that reason are compared to some sort of ornament worn close to the body? The lovesick maiden of the Song of Songs similarly says to her beloved, “Set me as a signet upon your hand, as a signet on your arm” (8:6), once again in the sense of, “Don’t forget me, not for one minute!” Once again, an external ornament is invoked to signify metaphorical closeness. Another passage in Proverbs reads: “My son, do not forget my teaching, and may your heart keep my commandments . . . bind them around your neck, write them on the writing tablet of your heart” (3:1–3). Just as there does not seem to be any physical writing tablet on a person’s heart, so the previous “bind them around your neck” ought likewise to be seen as figurative speech, a metaphor for keeping the parent’s words constantly in mind. So, all in all, it might seem that the whole idea of binding the tefillin to one’s arm and head is a kind of literalization, turning an originally metaphorical commandment into a physical act. These have been studied recently in Cohn (1998), 55–87. The earliest material evidence of tefillin is found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and was first discussed by Haberman (1954), cf. Yadin (1969). The Qumran tefillin arguably go back to the second century. In all, remnants of approximately forty-five separate parchment slips traced to Qumran have been identified as belonging to tefillin or mezuzot, as well as around twenty-five tefillin boxes (battim); see the discussion and sources cited in Cohn (1998), 55–79. The literary evidence for tefillin is somewhat ambiguous: see the Septuagint translation of Exod 13; Letter of Aristeas 157–158; Philo, SpecLeg 137–42; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 4:213. Cohn expresses doubt that these literary sources refer to physical tefillin, but the issue remains controversial. Philo’s understanding of this commandment as referring to tefillin is maintained in N. G. Cohen (1995), 144–55. On who actually wore tefillin: S. Stern (1994); S. J. D. Cohen (1999), 106–24.
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9. See above, note 7.
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10. See further Kugel (2008a).
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11. Usually translated as “every deed,” but ma‘aseh also means “person” or “offspring,” especially in late- (and post-) biblical Hebrew, e.g., Prov 31:31 (surely this ideal wife is not being praised by inanimate objects, but by her sons “at the gates,” that is, the most honored place in the town).
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12. Note that some writings seem to suggest that martyrs in particular will merit resurrection, perhaps because their lives were cut short. Such was the case with one martyr’s death as recounted in 2 Maccabees: “A certain Razis, one of the elders of Jerusalem, was denounced to Nicanor as a man who loved his compatriots and was very well thought of and for his goodwill was called father of the Jews. Being surrounded, Razis fell upon his own sword, preferring to die nobly rather than to fall into the hands of sinners and suffer outrages unworthy of his noble birth. But in the heat of the struggle he did not hit exactly, and the crowd was now rushing in through the doors. He courageously ran up on the wall, and bravely threw himself down into the crowd. But as they quickly drew back, a space opened and he fell in the middle of the empty space. Still alive and aflame with anger, he rose, and though his blood gushed forth and his wounds were severe he ran through the crowd; and standing upon a steep rock, with his blood now completely drained from him, he tore out his entrails, took them in both hands, and hurled them at the crowd, calling upon the Lord of life and spirit to give them back to him again. Such was the manner of his death”: (2 Macc 14:37–46). Similarly: “With these words the mother of the seven [future martyrs] exhorted each of them and persuaded them to die rather than transgress the commandment of God, and they knew full well themselves that those who die for the sake of God live unto God, as do Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the patriarchs” (4 Macc 16:25).
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13. Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezek 37:1–10) certainly suggested such a thing was possible, though some people objected; see below.
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14. Such was certainly the understanding of God/the gods in an earlier day. Henri Frankfort put it well: “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”: Frankfort (1948), p. 3; cf. Th. Jacobsen (1976), 78–91. The idea that God/the gods were divine rulers sometimes led to the depiction of the earthly king as a priest-like figure: for Assyria and the national deity Aššur, see recently Pongratz-Leisten (2015) and Karlsson (2016), esp. 93–103; Brettler (1989).
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15. This is of course related to the broader theme of apocalyptic eschatology, but to do more than merely evoke this subject in the present context would lead us far astray. Among numerous studies, see the excellent overview and history of scholarship by Knibb (1992); in addition, the numerous studies by John Collins, including Collins (1979), (1991), and (1995).
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16. And even before that, the ruler of His land
. This theme is connected to that of the divine council; see Kugel (2003), 122–24, 235–36, and (2007a), 545–46, and sources cited there.
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17. Again, Brettler (1989). As for the apologetic motif of God’s everlasting kingship in Dan 3:33, etc., note also Tobit 13:1: “Blessed be the living God, whose kingdom is for all ages” (text following 4Q200 6:5). Here we are back at the longue durée of Jubilees.
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18. The same assertion appears in Aramaic in Dan 3:33 and cf. 4:31. Note that malkhut came to be favored in late biblical Hebrew over the related terms mamlakhah and melukhah used in standard biblical Hebrew. Of the ninety-one occurrences of the word malkhut in the Hebrew Bible, all but five appear in late biblical texts. In general, the nominalizing suffix -ut, while present in many Semitic languages in different periods, became increasingly common in late biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew; see Kutscher (1982), 81, 84, and Rabin (1991), 11.
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19. This subject has been researched by numerous scholars, among them Hengel (1977), R. Brown (1994) and (1998), J. P. Meier (2009); note also Joseph Fitzmyer (2007), who takes up, among other thngs, Israel Knohl’s controversial thesis: Knohl (2000).
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20. A number of rabbinic texts also use the phrase to refer to the somewhat exceptional revelation of God in physical form: “Your children, O Lord, beheld Your kingship on the shores of the Red Sea . . .” based on the midash in Mekhilta deR. Ishmael zeh eli.
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21. Mishnah Berakhot 2:2. On the version “accept the kingship of God” (and not “the yoke of God’s kingship”), see Frankel (2014).
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22. The views attributed to Jesus in the Gospels have been much discussed: see in particular the parables in Matt 13:24–50; 18:23–25; 20:1–16; 22:1–14; 25:1–13; Mark 4:26–34. In some of these as well as elsewhere, God’s kingship is asserted to be already here, although Matt 5:10 remains somewhat ambiguous: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”; cf. Matt 12:28. Elsewhere, however, the revelation of God’s kingship is still an event in the future; Matt 8:11–12, Luke 13:28–29; Mark 9:1 (= Matt 16:28, Luke 9:27).
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23. Similarly, a number of Dead Sea Scrolls texts assert that God’s kingdom is in heaven, only visible, apparently, to those who ascend on high: 4Q286 Blessings, frag 7 col 1:6; 4Q287 Blessings frag 2:11; 4Q299 Mysteries frag 9:3; 4Q400 ShirShabba 1:3; 2:4, etc.
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24. Even if some rabbinic sages urged people not to be like servants who serve their master on condition of being rewarded (m. Abot 1:3), the expectation of individual reward and punishment was a fundamental of rabbinic theology. Further: Urbach (1975), 402–4, 436–44.
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18. SOME CONCLUSIONS
1. Starting with terrace farming, iron farming tools, and a more effective waterproof plaster to line cisterns; see Kugel (2007a), 383–84.
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2. That is, its situation at the crossroads of three continents, combined with its relatively small population (due to the paucity of natural sources of drinking water), leaving it open to relatively easy conquest by its strong and irrigation-rich neighbors.
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3. In Israel’s case, the rise and fall of successive empires, bringing about the region’s exposure to new ideas in cycles of conquest or domination by Hittites, Egyptians, Aegeans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks.
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4. Most conspicuously, the reversion of David’s united monarchy into the divided polities of Israel and Judah, followed by the Babylonian exile and the post-exilic priestly state of Judah.
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5. The late-biblical soul might be one example.
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6. The German (later Swiss) philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) argued that the period from the eighth to the third centuries BCE was a pivotal one in human history, a time in which great thinkers somehow appeared more or less simultaneously in different places across the globe and in relatively short order changed the whole nature of human thought: Confucius and Lao-tzu in China, Gautama Buddha in India, Zarathustra in Persia, Homer and the early philosophers in Greece, as well as Israel’s great prophets from the eighth to the sixth centuries. Jaspers called this period the Axial Age, and while his characterization of it, along with his inclusion of six rather different centuries (just look at the biblical evidence!) as constituting a single period, has not gone unopposed by other thinkers, his idea has continued to inspire studies in disparate domains. See the survey by Eisenstadt (1986), also Assmann (2014). It must be noted that, from the standpoint of the present study, the very period Jaspers identified in ancient Israel is hardly altogether “axial,” since—to the extent that we can even attach approximate dates to biblical texts that were constantly revised and re-edited—the Axial Age ends up including both the old, pre-axial sort of thinking Jaspers describes alongside the very different outlook that gradually replaced it.
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7. Here I am referring to the explanation offered by Julian Jaynes (1920–1997), for many years a professor of psychology at Princeton University; unlike Jaspers, Jaynes had a definite theory as to what brought about the great shift he charted in the history of human thought, presented in Jaynes (1976). Jaynes’s evidence of such a change in ancient thought comes primarily from Homer’s Iliad. Like Bruno Snell before him (see above, chapter 1), Jaynes was struck by the absence of words describing consciousness or ordinary mental acts in Homer’s Greek: “There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad. I am saying ‘in general’ because I shall mention some exceptions later. And in general therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts . . . There is also no concept of will or word for it, the concept developing curiously late in Greek thought.” “The characters of the Iliad,” Jaynes observed, “do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like”: Jaynes (1976), 69–70, 72.
Note that this claim is sometimes made of biblical Hebrew as well. The misuse of such lexical arguments—as in, for example, Boman (1970)—was properly criticized by James Barr; see Barr (1961) and other works, but his critique has had a chilling effect on the broader examination of biblical representations (or lack thereof) of thinking in general, and in particular of the “inner depths” (discussed in chapters 11 and 14). See recently D. Lambert (2016b); also Carasik (2006).
Jaynes’s observations about Homer open the way to his overall thesis, namely, that human brains in ancient times functioned quite differently from our brains nowadays. His argument is, above all, physiological. Human brains consist of left and right hemispheres; most of the brain’s important functions are represented, at least in part, in both hemispheres, so that “if one side is injured, the other side can compensate.” The exception is our capacity for speech, which in most brains is located exclusively on the left side, in Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. This is particularly surprising since, in physiological terms, “the neurological structure necessary for language exists in the right hemisphere as well as the left . . . In a child, a major lesion of Wernicke’s area on the left hemisphere, or of the underlying thalamus which connects it to the brainstem, produces transfer of the whole speech mechanism to the right hemisphere” (pp. 102–3).
Jaynes therefore sought to argue that the now-dormant right hemispheric area corresponding to Wernicke’s area in the left was, in ancient times, altogether active. “The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.” That is, for centuries the right hemisphere was abuzz with orders emanating from various deities, until its speech center eventually shut down, leaving only the human speech emanating from the left hemisphere. Such was the beginning of modern human consciousness.
This bold hypothesis has naturally been met by a number of obvious questions. What initiated the change described by Jaynes, and what caused human brains in various locations all across the globe to undergo it more or less simultaneously, all of them losing their right hemisphere’s capacity for speech? And how could such a fundamental change take place in what amounts to an evolutionary nanosecond: this right-brain speech center was still active in the time of Homer (or, in biblical terms, the time of the eighth-century prophet Amos) but then came to be utterly shut down only a few centuries later (in biblical terms, in the time of the fourth- or third-century author of Ecclesiastes). Note that Jaynes specifically contrasts Amos and Ecclesiastes in this connection, p. 296.
Moreover, in many societies nowadays (as we have seen), prophet-like figures continue to receive messages from the gods; were they exempted from this otherwise widespread change in brain function, and is this exemption attested as well in other aspects of their ordinary mental life? In this connection, scholars have also been disturbed by the general absence of reference in Jaynes’s book to the work of anthropologists and ethnographers focusing on civilizations far distant from those of both ancient Greece and modern Europe and America. Even if one narrows the focus to theistic religions alone, God/the gods manifest themselves in different ways among different peoples—and divine speech or visual hallucinations are apparently not a sine qua non. Finally, any student of non-Western religions knows that the gods are usually part of an entire ecosystem of thought; presumed divine speech may have been the Prime Mover in the creation of such systems, but this remains to be proven. Considered together, these arguments have caused some scholars to back off from Jaynes’s neurologically based approach. But even if his theory has thus far failed to win the day, we are still left with his opening set of observations, paralleled by those of Bruno Snell discussed earlier, as well as by those of Jaspers and other thinkers (though not quite lining up chronologically with them). Despite their differences, such scholars agree that some sort of fundamental change did occur within a few centuries somewhere in the first millennium BCE—as indeed the various biblical texts surveyed herein also seem to indicate. But how is this change to be understood?
The Great Shift Page 56