But to say this is to ignore a whole area of research that is currently being pursued by scholars in a variety of other fields—neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists (though somewhat less by historians, especially historians of ancient times). The object of their research is sometimes referred to as the “sense of self.” Since this turns out to be a fairly important concept in this book, and one that is sometimes used in different ways, I ought to define what I mean by this term:17
sense of self: the mental picture that people have of what a person consists of and does, as distinct from everything that is not that person (namely, the rest of the world). Or, to put it slightly differently: the assumptions about what a person is that a defined group of people carry around in their heads.18
This mental picture of our selves can be extremely significant in the way our brains process visual or auditory stimuli in daily life. However, the interesting thing that scholars have observed is that this “sense of self” actually varies greatly from civilization to civilization. People construe their selves differently, depending on where and when they happen to live. The apparent reason for this variety is that there is no “default” position when it comes to our sense of self, nothing that all people are born with; moreover, unlike other phenomena, our picture of who “I” am and how my brain functions does not seem to be explained by anything we know about the physiology of the brain.19
Some characteristics of the human mind do seem to be universal and hence, apparently hardwired into our sense of self. (All human beings, for example, exhibit what is called “psychic continuity,” the feeling that we continue to be the same person minute after minute and year after year20—though it is not at all clear how we all come equipped with such a sense of things.) But there are other attributes of a given sense of self that are characteristic of only some human beings. What is more, when it comes to the self, it is far from clear if (and if so, where) there is a central, physical clearinghouse in the brain, a single spot where all the incoming sensory data and stored memories are synthesized into an ongoing picture experienced by that theoretical entity, “I myself.”21 The problem posed by this fact has been clearly stated by one writer:
When the self is considered from the standpoint of neuroscience, one primary concern is how awareness is integrated and organized into a coherent whole, since the whole is what is emphasized when we refer to “the self” or “the mind.” Here the emphasis is not upon any single, momentary act of perception or motor response, but rather upon the totality of the brain’s functions into unified experience and action. Indeed, one major reason why the self seems so difficult to explain on a purely neurobiological basis is that, while we experience a unified consciousness, there appears to be an essential difference between the unified mind and the divisible brain. We know the nervous system is composed of millions of neurons grouped into numerous larger structures [or “systems”]. The question is, how [do] all these physically connected but materially separable structures function as a seamless whole that we experience as our unified selves?22
The answer to this question is far from simple, but most scholars agree that our self is in any case some sort of mental construct, a way our brains make sense of the ever-changing flow of data inside us.23 What does this construct stipulate? When it comes down to details, our modern, Western “self” turns out to be only one sort of construct among many, and not, it turns out, a particularly popular one. In the words of another writer:
No scholar has yet written the definitive history of the modern self, but we know now that it does have a history—and a geography. Although all human beings construct a self, most people in the past were probably not individual selves in the modern Western sense, and people in some parts of the world probably are not now. That is, they do not experience themselves as clearly bounded, but rather as seamlessly embedding in their tribes and their ecosystems; they do not think of themselves as unique, but rather as more or less identical to others of their kind; and they do not think of themselves as neatly integrated, but rather as invaded by strange spirits and forces that may pull them in many different directions.24
The only problem with this excellent summary is the word “probably” used twice in the second sentence. Anthropologists and other scholars have shown for sure that people outside of the modern West (which is to say most of humanity even today) are not individuals in the modern Western sense, nor did any segment of humanity construct a self like ours until quite recently. As a pair of researchers recently wrote:
In the Western view, the individual is a separate, autonomous entity that comprises distinct attributes (e.g., abilities, traits, motives, and values), and it is these attributes that are assumed to cause behavior. Further, there is a belief in the inherent separateness of distinct individuals. People seek to maintain independence from others and to discover and express their unique configuration. A great deal of what is known [to Western scientists] about “human” nature is rooted in this model of the person. Yet a growing volume of research by psychological and cultural anthropologists indicates that over three quarters of the world—the part of the world typically considered non-Western—does not share this view of the person.25
This might then lead one to ask: if the world today offers evidence of widely varying “senses of self,” what sort of self was carried about in the brains of people in biblical times, or even the somewhat later writers cited earlier in this chapter? For example, possession by deities or spirits is a common occurrence in many non-Western societies, and one that is in some ways reminiscent of the understanding of sin as presented in parts of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and other, contemporaneous writers.26 The anthropologist Michael Lambek has studied extensively the phenomenon of spirit possession among inhabitants of the island of Mayotte (off Madagascar). There,
Spirits enter the bodies of human beings and rise to their heads, taking temporary control of all bodily and mental functions . . . Despite the fact that the body remains the same, it is now occupied by a different person.27
One particularly widespread form of possession in our own day is the cult of zar spirits, witnessed across a broad swath of territory including parts of the Middle East and East Africa, particularly the Horn of Africa. After a person has been possessed by a zar spirit,
everyone in the culture knows the procedure that follows. The patient will be interrogated in the house of the doctor. There the doctor will lure his own zar into possessing him in a trance, and through his intercession try to lure the unknown zar of the patient (his “horse”) into public possession. Then the spirit will be led to reveal his identity by means of adroit cajolery, promises, and threats. The demands of the zar will be negotiated through a lengthy process of financial dickering. Finally, the patient will be enrolled, for the rest of his life, in the “zar society” of fellow sufferers, renting, as it were, his temporary freedom from relapse through regular donations and by means of participation in the worship of the spirit.28
Zar possession is more common among women than among men—and among married women more than the unmarried.29 The spirit enters the woman’s body and, once admitted, takes over:
Zar spirits may be acquired or inherited, usually passing from mother to daughter or daughter-in-law, if there are no daughters. Everyone is potentially exposed to possession by a zar spirit. A state of possession is described as if the possessed is a horse and the zar is the rider . . . A zar may attack when someone is alone, especially at night, or perhaps standing under a large tree, or near a river, or in a cave, or when someone is playing an instrument or singing. Most of the conducive conditions are related to psychological pressures, and weak or melancholy people are most susceptible. Yet often those chosen have attractive qualities that provoke jealousy, as does a beautiful woman who is often praised for her beauty.30
In the light of such evidence, there does not seem to be any reason not to take quite literally the Outside Powers explanation o
f sin and evil as found in the Testaments and other writings of that period. Possession by malign spirits has been going on since time immemorial, and it continues to this day.31
A Different Sort of “I”
What does all this have to do with the Bible? Here one must proceed with caution, since little can be said for sure about the sense of self that characterized people in biblical times (all the more so because those “times” stretch out over nearly a millennium). Moreover, no matter which part of the Bible one is examining, there is no escaping the fact that biblical texts are not to be confused with biblical people. The former have been transmitted through the work of scribes and other figures; how they represent heroes and ancestors, kings and prophets and sages, may tell us little about what these various figures actually did, and perhaps even less—or nothing at all—about how they conceived of the functioning and limits of their own minds.
On the other hand, there is still less reason simply to assume that biblical man and modern man shared the same, or even a similar, sense of self. Too many of the above-cited neurological and anthropological studies suggest that this is not likely to be the case, and too many of the biblical texts themselves seem to back them up: these texts bear witness to a strange world, in which people’s minds were sometimes penetrated from the outside—a world that seemed to assume that God or spirits or demons could quite naturally infiltrate people’s brains, planting pictures in their minds or sticking words inside their mouths.
Many contemporary biblical scholars might react to such observations with a learned ho-hum: of course ancient Israelites believed such things. They also believed in magic; they thought that a person could be physically harmed if someone inscribed his name on an execration bowl or on a statue representing him and then smashed the bowl or statue to smithereens. (We know this because the smithereens, along with ancient documents explaining their function, are nowadays on display in numerous museums as well as a few private collections.) Ancient Israelites, along with other peoples around the globe, also believed in the efficacy of curses: speak these words over here and somehow they will fly through the air and attack someone over there, causing him or her to become sick or die. Demons? Some of the oldest texts we have from Mesopotamia are incantations or rituals aimed at protecting people from demons or the evil eye.32
Moving westward to the sphere of the otherwise philosophical Greeks or rational Romans, we find that a man could inscribe on a strip of lead the name of a young woman he was interested in—including in the inscription his request that she return his interest while throwing over her present suitor—and then drop this metal strip into a fountain, a bath, or a well; this, people apparently thought, actually worked. (You could also write the name of an enemy on a strip of lead and then drive a nail through it; deposit this in a public fountain or elsewhere and then sit back and wait for the victim to drop dead.)33 Indeed, people have always used similar sorts of inscriptions to heal or harm34—these practices continued to be used by Jews well into the Middle Ages and beyond; in fact, on to the present day.35 Throughout the ancient Near East, people knew that a great, heavenly god could somehow also inhabit a foot-and-a-half-high statue in a temple,36 or that the same god could simultaneously exist (that is, actually, physically, be located) in two or ten different temples on earth.37 The statue was, or was claimed to be, the god himself.
So: a different sense of self as well? Why not?
I am not sure, however, that such a reaction takes the full measure of what is meant by “sense of self” or how deep it goes. (In fact, it seems to me likely that all the aforementioned phenomena are somehow possible only if one has a sense of self very different from our own; if so, such a sense is not merely an additional oddity, but the essential base upon which all the other phenomena stand.) In any case, the fact that contemporary biblical scholars may be open to the idea of a different sense of self existing in biblical times does not necessarily affect how they—how we—read and understand actual passages from the Hebrew Bible. The fact is that we all are immersed in the Western and modern sense of self; as a result, we all tend to read the words of these ancient texts in a way that is probably quite different from that of their original audience. It is as if we are separated from the world of those words by a thick wall of Plexiglas that prevents us from ever truly crossing over and entering their world, even though we are staring right at it. So we read biblical accounts of people directly encountering God—the stories of Hagar, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, Moses, Gideon, and the other narratives seen in chapter 1—without ever truly being able to enter into their reality. (Again: I am not speaking about a real person named Hagar or Abraham, but of the world in which these narratives made sense.) The most we can say is that those sorts of things may have happened “back then,”38 or may seem to have happened back then, but whichever the case, they don’t happen anymore. Nor is this incomprehension limited to ancient biblical narratives. Indeed, its most important manifestation comes with the whole matter of biblical prophets, people who consistently report that God spoke to them one day and gave them a message to transmit to the people as a whole, or to the king, or to some foreign nation (see chapter 7). How is a modern person to relate to this claim? Or, moving toward the end of the biblical period, how are we to understand the explanation for sin’s origins in the passages seen in the Testaments and other texts, or even Philo of Alexandria’s views on angels or on prophecy?39
Godfrey Lienhardt, a student of the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the mid-twentieth century, at one point studied the Dinka, a people of southeastern Sudan. The Dinka, Lienhardt wrote, have a different sense of self from that familiar to us, one that, he somewhat mournfully concluded, “I can discuss only inadequately”:
The Dinka have no conception which at all closely corresponds to our popular, modern conception of the “mind” as mediating and, as it were, storing up the experiences of the self. There is, for them, no such interior entity to . . . stand between the experiencing self at any given moment and what is or has been an exterior influence upon the self.
(Here, I should note, the distinction between inside and outside seems to be as blurry among the Dinka as it sometimes appears to be in the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Testaments.)
Lienhardt continues:
So it seems that what we should call the memories of experiences, and regard therefore as in some way intrinsic and interior to the remembering person and modified in their effect upon him by their [very] interiority, appear to the Dinka as exteriorly acting upon him [and, therefore, potentially continuing to act upon him].
A man who had been imprisoned in Khartoum called one of his children “Khartoum” in memory of that place, but also to turn aside any possible harmful influence of that place upon him in later life . . . It is Khartoum which is regarded as an agent, the subject which acts, and not as with us the remembering mind which recalls a place. The man is the object acted upon.40
Summing up his own years of research on this “sense of self” in different cultures, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in a well-known essay:
The concept of person is, in fact, an excellent vehicle by means of which to examine this whole question of how to go about poking into another people’s turn of mind. In the first place, some sort of concept of this kind, [that is, a “sense of self”] . . . exists in recognizable form among all social groups. The notions of what persons are may be, from our point of view, sometimes more than a little odd. They may be conceived to dart about nervously at night shaped like fireflies. Essential elements of their psyches, like hatred, may be thought to be lodged in granular black bodies within their livers, discoverable upon autopsy. They may share their fates with Doppelgänger beasts, so that when the beast sickens or dies they sicken or die too. But at least some conception of what a human individual is, as opposed to a rock, an animal, a rainstorm, or a god, is, so far as I can see, universal.
Yet, at the same time, as these offhand examples suggest, the actual concept
ions involved vary from one group to the next, and often quite sharply. The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible [i.e., irrefutable—JK] it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. Rather than attempting to place the experience of others within the framework of such a conception, which is what the extolled “empathy” in fact usually comes down to, understanding them demands setting that conception aside and seeing their experiences within the framework of their own idea of what self-hood is. And for Java, Bali, and Morocco, at least, that idea differs markedly not only from our own but, no less dramatically and no less instructively, from one to the other.41
Actually, there is nothing particularly elusive about the idea that people outside of what has been called the “WEIRD* world” have a different sense of their own minds. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor—not a biblical scholar nor, for that matter, an anthropologist or neuroscientist—has written insightfully about two kinds of “self,” the premodern one, which he describes as “porous” (that is, semipermeable, open in some degree to the outside),42 and the modern, closed-off one, the “buffered” self. The old kind of mind was porous in the sense that it was open to external influences:
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