The Great Shift Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Timeline of Major Figures and Events

  Maps

  Foreword

  “A Thousand Ages in Thy Sight . . .”

  Seeing Biblically

  Joseph and His Brothers

  The Last Wills of Jacob’s Sons

  Divine Encounters

  Adam and Eve and the Undifferentiated Outside

  The Fog of Divine Beings

  Eternity in Ancient Temples

  Imagining Prophecy

  The Book of Psalms and Speaking to God

  Transformations

  To Monotheism . . . and Beyond

  A Sacred Agreement at Sinai

  The Emergence of the Biblical Soul

  Remembering God

  The End of Prophecy?

  In Search of God

  The Elusive Individual

  Humans in Search

  Outside the Temple

  Personal Religion

  Some Conclusions

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Subject Index

  Verses Cited

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2017 by James L. Kugel

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-52055-4

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover illustration: Abraham Receives the Three Angels, 1646 (oil on panel), Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1609–69)/Aurora Trust/Bridgeman Images

  Parchment image: mammuth/Getty Images

  eISBN 978-0-544-52057-8

  v1.0817

  Maps on pages x and xi are from How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now by James L. Kugel. Copyright © 2007 by James L. Kugel. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  To R., as always

  Timeline of Major Figures and Events

  ★ Israel’s Remote Ancestors

  Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and his wives

  (dates uncertain)

  Moses and the Exodus

  13th–12th centuries BCE*

  Joshua and the entrance into Canaan; Deborah, Samson, and the other Judges

  13th–11th centuries BCE

  ★ First Temple Period, ca. 1000 to 586 BCE

  Saul becomes king of Israel

  late 11th century BCE

  King David (founder of the United Monarchy)

  ruled ca. 1010–ca. 970 BCE

  King Solomon

  ruled United Monarchy ca. 970–ca. 930 BCE

  King Rehoboam succeeds Solomon; breakup of the United Monarchy

  late 10th century BCE

  ★ Separate kingdoms of Judah (in the south) and Israel (in the north)

  The prophets Elijah and Elisha

  9th century BCE

  The prophet Amos

  early to mid 8th century BCE

  Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah prophesy; Assyria threatening

  latter half of 8th century BCE

  Fall of Israel (Northern Kingdom) to Assyria

  722–721 BCE

  ★ Henceforth, Bible’s focus is on Judah (Southern Kingdom)

  Josiah becomes king of Judah

  641–640 BCE

  Jeremiah begins prophesying

  627–626 BCE

  King Josiah dies; Neo-Babylonian Empire begins actively threatening

  609 BCE

  Babylonians deport King Jehoiachin and many prominent Jerusalemites (including the prophet Ezekiel) to Babylon

  597 BCE

  Fall of Jerusalem to Babylonians; mass deportation of Judeans to Babylon; Jeremiah and Ezekiel major prophets

  587–586 BCE

  ★ Babylonian exile and aftermath

  After Cyrus’s Persian Empire takes over Babylon, exiled Judeans begin to return to their homeland

  late 6th century BCE

  ★ Second Temple period, ca. 530 BCE to 70 CE

  Persians rule province of Judah until decisive Battle of Issus, when Alexander the Great conquers entire region

  333 BCE

  Judah/Judea ruled by Egyptian Ptolemies

  from 323 BCE

  1 Enoch; Book of Jubilees

  late third, early second century BCE

  Syrian Seleucids take over Judea from Ptolemies

  198 BCE

  Book of Ben Sira written

  ca. 180 BCE

  Revolt of the Maccabees ousts Seleucids, leading to Jewish self-rule

  166–63 BCE

  Origins of Dead Sea Scrolls community

  second half of second century BCE

  Pompey conquers Jerusalem to start Roman rule

  63 BCE

  Jewish revolt against Romans ends in defeat

  66–70 CE

  The Ancient Near East

  Israel and Judah

  Foreword

  I have spent most of my adult life researching and teaching the Hebrew Bible. For more than twenty years I taught at Yale and Harvard Universities, and another ten years at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. It has been a real pleasure teaching the students in these places, but I’ve never lost sight of my main purpose in going into this field. I wanted, as much as possible, to get inside the biblical world and see what ancient Israelites saw, to enter their minds in order to understand what the Bible is really saying. Over the years, I’ve written books on various topics, but I’ve saved for this last one what seems to me the most important question of all:

  Modern scholars know that in biblical times, people did not “believe” in God in the way they do now. In truth, there is not a single verse in the Hebrew Bible that suggests that God’s existence was a matter of belief or faith, and it certainly was not the subject of debate or questioning. (True, biblical figures are sometimes said to believe in God in the sense that they put their trust or faith in God’s readiness to intervene on their behalf, believing that He will help them. But it was not God’s existence that was believed in; that was simply obvious.)1 Sometimes it is asserted that people back then simply assumed that God exists because they lacked today’s knowledge of science and so had to conclude that some sort of divine being was in charge of life on earth. But if biblical stories are any kind of guide, people in ancient times sometimes encountered God, or at least thought they did.2 Moreover, the whole way in which these encounters took place seems quite foreign to the experience of most of us today. My aim in the present study is to try to understand why this is so. The question I wish to answer, using all that we now know about biblical Israel and its neighbors, is: What was the actual, lived reality of God in biblical times, and why have most people lost it today?

  A word of caution to begin with: this book is not for everyone. Many of the things that modern scholars have discovered about the Bible go against the established religious doctrines of Judaism and Christianity. This can be quite disturbing for some readers. Even among university researchers, there are those who try to put their own spin on recent discoveries, consciously or otherwise seeking to salvage what they can of traditional teachings. On the other extreme, there are certainly some contemporary scholars who see their mission as debunking everything people used to believe about the Bible. My own program here is to avoid either approach. What I wis
h to do is to make use of everything modern scholars have discovered about the Bible and the ancient Near East (as well as a few other topics) and to try to use these insights, along with a little imagination, in order to enter the world of the Bible as fully and truly as possible, to see things as they were seen then.

  To do this, however, is to pursue a moving target, because even within the biblical period (roughly a thousand years long), things changed. If you go back far enough in biblical history, you find yourself in a very different world. How can someone make sense, realistic sense, of the things that people say and do in the Bible? One of the most common features in the writings of ancient Israel’s prophets and sages is the assertion that God speaks, indeed, speaks to them: “The word of the LORD came to me, saying . . .”; “Thus says the LORD . . .”; “And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying . . .” What did they mean by this—did a voice just pop into their heads? God does not seem to speak in this way to people today. True, some people seek divine guidance or advice in prayer or meditation, and an answer sometimes emerges in their minds. But this is rather different from divine speech in the Bible, where the people involved are not usually seeking to hear from God; often, in fact, they flee at the very prospect. When God addresses Moses out of the burning bush, “Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.” He tries to turn down the mission that God has reserved for him: “Please,” he begs, “send someone else.” Later, when God reveals Himself to the Israelites assembled at Mount Sinai, “all the people saw it and fell back and stood at a distance; ‘You be the one to speak to us,’ they said to Moses, ‘and we will obey, but do not let God speak to us, lest we die’” (Exod 20:15–16; some Bibles, 20:18–19). Prophets summoned by God similarly react by saying, “Please find someone else”: this is basically what Jeremiah says when God first calls him, and other prophets are likewise reluctant. In fact, the prophet Jonah didn’t say anything; when God called him, he hopped the next ship to faraway Tarshish, hoping God would simply forget about him.

  Moreover, what God has to say to these prophets, as well as to virtually all others, does not come in response to some request from the human beings involved. He* simply speaks to people unprompted, demanding that they do something or announce things to come. Amos describes transmitting God’s message as a kind of knee-jerk reaction: “If a lion roars, who isn’t afraid? And if God speaks, who doesn’t prophesy?” What could have been the lived reality behind such assertions?

  In fact, it is not just a matter of divine speech. Many biblical texts report that God actually appeared to people. Some modern theologians have sought to downplay these passages, since most people nowadays hold that God has no physical form, nothing that the eye can perceive. But that does not appear to have been the case with Abraham or Sarah or Jacob or Moses or Isaiah; all these, along with numerous other biblical figures, are said to have actually seen God, once or even several times. “The LORD appeared to him by the oak trees of Mamre,” the book of Genesis reports matter-of-factly about Abraham. Jacob tells his son Joseph, “God Almighty appeared to me at Luz, in the land of Canaan, and He blessed me.” “I saw the LORD standing next to the altar,” Amos recounts. “Woe is me, I am lost,” says Isaiah, “for my own eyes have beheld the King, the LORD of Hosts.” “In the thirtieth year, on the fifth day of the fourth month . . . the heavens opened and I saw the appearance of God,” Ezekiel says. Were they all lying? It seems to me more likely that these people (or more precisely, the people telling their stories) must have felt that they were telling the truth, at least in some sense; it was altogether plausible for a person to hear and see God in a way that is quite distant from us today. But to say this is virtually to admit that human beings today seem to have lost this vital capacity. Of course, one might just say, “Ancient people had a different understanding of reality,” and leave it at that. But this doesn’t really answer the question. Why do these biblical texts say what they say, and if there was any reality to them, why has it mostly disappeared?

  Finding an answer is no simple undertaking; it involves getting into the nitty-gritty of modern biblical scholarship and its investigation of various biblical narratives and prophecies, the songs and psalms of the Bible, its laws and its proverbs—as well as borrowing some insights from neuroscience and anthropology. Before we are done, we will have looked at much of the Hebrew Bible, because almost all of it has something to tell us about the great subject at the core of this book: the reality of God in ancient times—and in our own.

  A few technicalities before we begin:

  Most of the translations of biblical texts are my own, but I have drawn here and there on two excellent modern translations, the New Jewish Publication Society (NJPS) and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translations. For proper names from the Bible I have generally used the standard English forms rather than transcriptions of the Hebrew, thus: Jacob and not Ya‘akov, Jerusalem and not Yerushalayim. In transcribing Hebrew words, I have used the rough English equivalents rather than “scientific” transcription, thus: le-David rather than lĕdāwid. The only exception is that cleaning-your-glasses sound represented by the letter ḥ (with an underdot), as distinct from our ordinary h sound.

  The numbering of biblical verses poses a great problem, particularly in the book of Psalms. A surprising variety in the numbering of Psalms verses exists. Many modern translations do not include the various psalm headings in their numbering, so that a one-verse difference exists between such numberings and the traditional numbering of the Hebrew text. A similar gap appears here and there in other biblical books as well. After some deliberation I have decided to list the traditional Hebrew numbering alone in cases where there is only a one-verse difference, trusting that curious readers will easily be able to find the verse in question adjacent to the one listed in their own translations. In cases of more than a one-verse difference, I have listed the Hebrew numbering first, followed by “some Bibles, such-and-such.”

  PART I

  “A Thousand Ages in Thy Sight . . .”

  The Bible consists of texts composed at different times—by most accounts, over the course of nearly a thousand years. Within this period, people are sometimes said to meet God face-to-face. At other times God seems to be more remote and abstract; sometimes people don’t actually encounter God at all. Which picture is the right one?

  1

  Seeing Biblically

  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANGELS; HIDDEN BEHIND THE CURTAIN; WAKING DREAMS; A DIFFERENT KIND OF MIND

  The Bible sometimes seems to stress that when people encountered God, either directly or in the form of an angel, they “saw” in a special way, quite different from ordinary seeing. And yet what they saw was usually just another ordinary human being or some object from daily life.

  In the book of Genesis, Hagar is the maidservant of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. At a certain point she and Sarah have a falling out, and Sarah orders her to be banished—in fact, sent off into the bleak wilderness along with her young son Ishmael. This cruel decree is carried out, and poor Hagar wanders about with her son for a time. Eventually they run out of drinking water, and it seems they will both die of thirst. Hagar, despairing, leaves her son under one of the nearby bushes and sits down some distance away. “I don’t want to have to watch the boy die,” she says, and bursts into tears. But help is on the way:

  God heard the boy’s cry, and an angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid: God has heard the boy’s cry from where he is. Get up, pick up the boy and hold him tight in your arms, for I intend him to become a great nation.” And God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water, so she went and filled the water-skin with water and gave the boy to drink. (Gen 21:17–19)

  This is one of those passages that biblical scholars call a “name etiology”:1 Ishmael’s name means “God hears,” or “May God hear,” so the passage suggests—not once but twice—that Ishmael was so named because God heard Ishmael’s cry. Beyond this, there is
a larger, national issue lurking beneath the narrative. Ishmael’s descendants would indeed become a great nation, as later history was to show. This section of Genesis thus seeks to point out that, on the one hand, those Ishmaelites are actually the Israelites’ cousins, both peoples descended from Abraham; but on the other hand, it was equally important to assert that they were Israel’s inferiors, the descendants of a mere maidservant who had been unceremoniously booted out of Abraham’s camp.

  Two Kinds of Seeing

  For our subject, however, what is most important is the beginning of the last sentence, “God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water.” Why should the narrative have said that God opened her eyes? Minutes earlier, she seemed to be wandering around in the wasteland with nothing to drink. Now an angel calls to Hagar from heaven and tells her that everything will be all right and that, in fact, God has destined her son for greatness. Then God Himself opens her eyes and she suddenly sees a well that will save her life along with that of her son. Why didn’t she see it before? Nothing in the text implies that she then had to dig the well, or that God led her to some previously hidden opening in the ground. Apparently the well was in plain sight all along. In fact, the text had earlier mentioned that Hagar put her son “under one of the bushes” because she couldn’t stand to witness his death. But didn’t she know that bushes, especially bushes in the scorched wilderness, must have some source of water to survive, and that such a source must therefore be somewhere very close by? If so, why did God have to open her eyes? And by the way, were they really closed?