The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  From the standpoint of the present study, these lines may be the most significant ones in all of the Thanksgiving Hymns. The speaker is saying that it is his soul, “the ruaḥ that You have put inside me,” that enables him to know God. Here, as with classical prophecy, God “open[s] up knowledge” in a person—but not by penetrating his insides. The capacity to know God is, as it were, already in him, thanks to the soul that God has inserted into him (apparently from birth).28 All he has to do is to “listen faithfully to Your wondrous counsel” emerging from this holy ruaḥ, because the soul is God’s hidden source of understanding (“hidden” probably in the sense that the soul has no observable, physical being) and the “wellspring of Your strength.”

  The Inward Gaze

  Anyone who has studied the history of ideas knows that human thought does not stop on a dime. Old ways of conceiving of things coexist with new ones, sometimes in open rivalry, but just as often in a forced harmony that is adopted despite its obvious internal contradictions. In chapter 3 we saw that two rival explanations for the origin of human evil coexisted in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and other texts. The “demonic possession” model was still strong in late- and post-biblical times: the wicked spirits unleashed by the Archfiend in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs give ample evidence of the ongoing ability of these outside forces to penetrate a person’s insides. But along with this there existed the “interior struggle” model, whereby two warring forces—the good and the bad—are part of the person’s insides, each struggling to take control of the person’s life. As Jacob’s son Asher explains in the “Testament of Asher,” “There are two ways, of good and of evil, and along with them two impulses within our breasts that differentiate them” (1:5). In other words, the soul is divided: there is a good part and a bad part, and the two are at war with each other. Similarly, the Psalms of Solomon (first century BCE) affirmed:

  Our deeds are [done] by choice and [are] in the power of our souls. Doing right or wrong is the work of our own hands, and in Your righteousness You survey the sons of men. (9:4)

  It may not be obvious at first, but a dotted line connects this other view of human sinfulness to the verse with which we started, “A person’s soul is the lamp of the LORD . . .” In that verse, the neshamah is a divine agent, something inside a person that acts on God’s behalf; similarly, in the “interior struggle” model of the cause of human sinfulness, there is something inside a person that struggles against sin, seeking to overcome the person’s inclination to do the wrong thing. Indeed, what was most interesting was how these two different models seem to overlap in the Testaments and other texts, the interior struggle sometimes being attributed to an earlier invasion of a person’s insides by a demonic spirit. This is a good example of the “forced harmony” of two opposing conceptions mentioned above.

  In view of subsequent history, however, it is clear that by late- and post-biblical times, the “inner struggle” view was on its way to victory.29 And this reflects the new reality of the soul. In a sense, the great Outside had now established a permanent presence on the inside. Such was not the case in the representations of Abraham or Moses or Gideon: God was external and crossed over for a time, then went back behind the curtain. Nor was it the case with the “spiritual projectile,” whether dispatched by God or by Satan. But now, a new interiority had taken over. A person’s nefesh or ruaḥ, which used to be another way of referring to himself or herself, had become a foreign implant—inside, but belonging to God.

  Greek Souls

  In trying to understand what brought about this change, some scholars have pointed to the infiltration of Greek philosophical notions of the human soul into the land of Judea, particularly after Alexander’s conquest of the area in the late fourth century BCE. Perhaps it was the entry of Greek ideas of the soul at this time that began to penetrate Jewish (and later, Christian) understandings of the Hebrew nefesh or ruaḥ. But the Greek soul was, no less than the Jewish one, a protean entity: what the human psuchē* really was, where it was, and what happened to it when its owner stopped breathing were questions that had received a variety of answers in Greece by the time the last verses of the Hebrew Bible were being written (second century BCE).

  For some time, the Greek psuchē was, a bit like the Hebrew nefesh, ruaḥ, or the lifebreath neshamah, terms that designated a person’s self or inner feelings, sometimes specified as a kind of animating force; it is not far from other Greek terms, such Homer’s thumos (spirit, strong feeling, strength, desire, inclination) or noos (mind, thought).30 Moreover, as with a ruaḥ or neshamah, having a psuchē was a necessity of life; it was, for example, what a person risked losing in battle, life itself. As a consequence, empsuchos (having a psuchē) came to be a synonym for “alive.” While lacking any precise or commonly agreed-upon definition, the psuchē appears to have been conceived for some time as part of, or connected to, a person’s physical existence. Thus, one scholar has observed:

  In fifth century Attic writers, as in their Ionian predecessors . . . the psyche is imagined as dwelling somewhere in the depths of the organism, and out of these depths it can speak to its owner with a voice of its own. In most of these respects it is again a successor of the Homeric thumos. Whether it be true or not that on the lips of an ordinary Athenian the word psyche had or might have a faint flavor of the uncanny, what it did not have was . . . any suggestion of metaphysical status. The “soul” was no reluctant prisoner of the body: it was the life or spirit of the body, and perfectly at home there.31

  Meanwhile, however, the psuchē was sometimes distinguished from the physical body, so that eventually the two were often spoken of as opposite entities. It is difficult to fix when exactly this opposition began to emerge in Greek thought, but it may be attested as early as the sixth century.32

  This opposition of soul and body achieved its classical expression in one of Plato’s best known dialogues, Phaedo or “On the Soul,” which centers on the death of Socrates. In this dialogue, Socrates unfolds his various arguments for the immortality of the soul, and the fundamental dualism of Socrates’s argument—soul versus body, immortal versus mortal, spiritual versus physical—went on to influence Greek and Roman thinkers and their later Christian and Muslim inheritors.33

  Did these themes, and in particular that of the separation of body and soul, find their way from Greece into Jewish writings as well, or were they already there? This is a somewhat more complicated issue.34 Some relatively early biblical texts have been cited to support the idea that ancient Israel always had its own notion of the soul’s independence from the body,35 indeed, its immortality. It used to be thought, for example, that Abigail (Nabal’s wife in 1 Sam 25) was referring to such immortality when she said to David:

  If someone should set out after you and try to kill you [literally, “seek your nefesh”], then may my lord’s nefesh be bound up in the bundle of life thanks to the LORD your God, and let Him sling away the lives of your enemies in the pocket of His slingshot. (1 Sam 25:29)

  But most scholars now agree that what Abigail was wishing David, albeit in rather elegant language, was that he go on being “bound up in the bundle of life,”* that is, continue living, while God took care of his enemies. Wishing someone an immortal soul was not only unlikely in the context of David’s life and times, but it’s also not exactly the kind of wish that a fighter like David would have wanted to get before going into battle. “May you remain alive” is more likely what Abigail meant.

  On the other hand, the inward-looking biblical psalms examined above probably preceded Alexander’s conquest by at least a century or two (nor did Greek philosophical influence instantly follow Alexander’s conquest). Their outlook seems to be homegrown. The author of the book of Ecclesiastes, which some scholars date to the Persian period (meaning that it preceded Alexander’s conquest by at least several decades),36 seems to be aware of the claim that souls somehow survive death, though he himself is not particularly convinced:

 
For the fate of people and the fate of an animal—they have the same fate! The way the latter dies, so does the former—they all have the same breath (ruaḥ), so a person is no different from an animal; all of them amount to nothing. Everyone goes to the same place: everyone came from the dust and everyone goes back to the dust. So who can really know** that the ruaḥ of humans goes up on high while the ruaḥ of an animal goes down to beneath the earth? (Eccles 3:19–21)

  Later, however, in his poetic description of the last day of a person’s life, he says something rather different. This is the time, he says,

  when a person goes off to his eternal home, and the mourners make their rounds in the square . . . and the dust returns to the earth as it was and the ruaḥ returns to God who gave it. (Eccles 12:5, 7)

  Given such evidence, it seems unwise to chalk up the Jewish focus on the human soul to Greek influence alone. Perhaps the change in the understanding of nefesh or ruaḥ was something that evolved in parallel to the Greek soul; it may also have been affected by the somewhat earlier influence of Persian demonology, or by some combination of Greek and Persian notions.37 In addition, it may have had something to do with the interest in determinism attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and earlier texts.38

  But whatever the cause, the new interest in what makes people sin—attested in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and other late- and post-biblical writings—may have been, at least in part, a reflection of what had been happening on the Outside. The supreme God of monotheism, soon to be the omnipresent God, was different from the old deity who was just waiting in the wings, who could enter into our minds or our lives at will, in the enchanted world where strange things just sometimes happened. Now He was more like the God of the Joseph story, where there were rules that governed reality (even, as we have seen, rules that governed what God did or did not do). This God was, for all His grandeur, remote; Joseph doesn’t pray to Him, nor does God noticeably intervene as the events of Joseph’s life unfold. He is on the Outside, but having planned everything in advance, He need not play any active role in the story’s unfolding. This may tell us something basic about the changing sense of self over the long haul.

  After Joseph explains the meaning of Pharaoh’s dreams, the Egyptian king decides to put him in charge of the royal court:

  Pharaoh said to his courtiers: “Could we ever find someone like this, a man who has the spirit of God inside him?” Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Since God has informed you of all this, there is no one as discerning and wise as you.” (Gen 41:38–39)

  Here, the divine has, as it were, moved inside: the “spirit of God” directs Joseph’s actions from within, and it is this that makes him the perfect job applicant for head of the royal court: he is ipso facto “discerning and wise.”

  Not too long after this began the soul’s internal battle with its own evil side, as here in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs:

  If the soul chooses the good, everything it does will be [done] in righteousness, and [even] if it sins, it will repent right away. For when a person’s thoughts are set on righteous things and he rejects wickedness, he immediately overthrows what is evil and uproots the sin. But if [the person’s soul] opts for the [evil] impulse, then its every action will be in wickedness, and, having driven away the good, [it] will take hold of the bad; it will [eventually] be ruled by Beliar (Satan). (T. Ash. 1:4–8)

  More important even than this internal struggle, however, was the fact that the reality of God, which had always been “out there,” was now explicitly connected to something deep in here. Whoever looked into his own soul—perhaps in the silence of a dark night, when everyone else was asleep—would find spread out in front of him a stark world of black and white, good and evil, and certain fateful choices which, once made, could never be retracted.

  So you, my children, do not become like those two-sided people, [people] of both goodness and wickedness; but cling solely to goodness, because that is where God resides and what men yearn for. Flee from wickedness, doing away with the [evil] impulse by your good deeds; for two-sided people serve not God, but [only] their own desires—in order to please Beliar and people like themselves . . .

  For, people’s righteousness is shown by their end, whether they meet up with the angels of the Lord or of Satan. For when a troubled soul leaves [its body], it is tortured by the [same] evil Spirit it [once] served in its lusts and bad deeds. But if it leaves in a state of ease, it meets up [after death] with the angel of peace, who will summon it [back] to life. (T. Ash. 3:1–2; 6:4–6)

  A Chorus of Voices

  The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is apparently a composite text, its beginnings going back to the first or second centuries BCE, but then supplemented by two or three later editors, the last of whom was clearly a Christian whose interpolations thus cannot be earlier than the late first century CE.39 In this respect, the Testaments cannot help us to compose a chronology of the soul’s development in late biblical times. But other texts can.

  The oldest parts of 1 Enoch go back to at least the late third century BCE. Here it is clearly stated that souls survive the death of their bodies. Thus:

  And now look: the spirits of the souls of the men who have died are making suit, and their groan has come up to the gates of heaven. (1 En 9:10)

  There I saw the spirit (ruaḥ) of a dead man making complaint, his lamentation [reaching] up to heaven . . . Then I asked [the angel] Raphael: . . . “This spirit who is making suit—who does it belong to, such that his lamentation is going up and making suit unto Heaven?” And he answered me and said, “This is the spirit that came forth from Abel, whom his brother Cain murdered. And Abel will make accusation against him until his posterity perishes from the face of the earth and his posterity is obliterated from the posterity of men.” (22:5–7)

  So is it as well in a first-century text called the Testament of Abraham. In a touching scene at the end of his life, Abraham has an extended conversation with personified Death, who has come to take his soul away.

  Abraham said to Death: “Leave me alone for a little while, so that I can rest on my bed, since my heart feels very weak. For from the time I first saw you with my own eyes, my strength has given way. All the limbs of my body seem to be like a lead weight, and my breathing is quite labored. So leave for a little while; as I said, I cannot stand to see your form.” His son Isaac then came and fell upon his breast, weeping, and his wife Sarah came in as well and embraced his feet, wailing bitterly . . . and Abraham reached the brink of death. Now Death said to Abraham, “Come and kiss my right hand, and may cheerfulness and life and strength come [back] to you.” But Death was deceiving Abraham: when he kissed his hand, his soul immediately stuck to Death’s hand. And immediately the archangel Michael stood beside him with multitudes of angels, and they bore his precious soul in their hands . . . And they buried him in the Promised Land by the oak of Mamre, while the angels escorted his precious soul and ascended to heaven singing the thrice-holy hymn [Isa 6:3] to God. (T. Abr. 20:4–12)

  Here, clearly, Abraham’s soul separates from his body immediately after death: his body is buried in the land of Canaan, while his soul is carried up to heaven.

  The Wisdom of Solomon is another first-century Jewish composition (now included among the biblical Apocrypha in Christian Bibles, sometimes referred to simply as “[the Book of] Wisdom”). Written from the start in Greek, it may have been composed for the Jewish community in the Greek-speaking city of Alexandria (Egypt). It says that the souls of the righteous, despite any suffering they may appear to have undergone in their final hours, are headed toward an immortal afterlife:

  But the souls of the righteous are in God’s hand, and torment shall in no way touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they may seem to have died, and their departure [from life] may look like ill-treatment, as if their leaving us marks their downfall; yet [in truth] they are at peace. For even if in the sight of others they may seem to have been punished,* immortality is what they await; a
nd following this slight bit of disciplining, they will be richly rewarded, since God, having now tested them, will have found them worthy of Himself. (Wis. 3:1–5)

  A somewhat different scenario calls for the dead to be in a state of suspension until, after a time, they are resurrected.40 The book of Daniel thus foretells:

  And at that time, the great angel Michael will arise, standing over your people’s children—and it will be a time of trouble, such as has never come about since the nation has been until then. At that time, your people will be saved—each one who is found written in the book. And many of those who are sleeping in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life, and some to shame and eternal contempt. But the knowing ones will shine as bright as the brightness of the firmament and like the stars forever and ever. (Dan 12:1–3)

  A number of other texts further specify that there exists a kind of storehouse (“treasury”)41 that souls enter after death, presumably waiting there for their bodies to be resurrected so that they can return to their previous owners:

  [An angel says to Ezra:] Did not the souls of the righteous in their treasuries ask about these matters, saying, “How long are we to remain here? And when will we harvest our reward?”