The Great Shift
Page 68
Ecclesiastes:
1:2–11, 275
1:12, 274
1:12–15, 276–77
1:14, 194 n
2:1, 276–77
2:4–11, 276–77
2:11, 194 n
2:12, 277
2:13, 277
2:15, 277
2:17, 194 n
2:26, 194 n
3: 1–11, 278
3:19–21, 203
4:1–2, 277
7:26, 277
8:8, 194 n
9:9, 277
10:20, 24
12:5, 203
12:7, 203
12:9–10, 277
12:13–14, 328
Esther:
9:6, 266
9:7–10, 266
9:15, 266
9:16, 266
Daniel:
1–6, 394 n40
1:2:4a, 394 n40
2:4b–7:28, 394 n40
2:19, 34
2:20–22, 32, 254 n
2:21–22, 199
2:28, 245
2:31–35, 245
2:39–40, 245
3:33, 408 nn17–18
4:31, 408 n18
5, 254
6:11, 144, 304
7–12, 394 n40
7:3–7, 245
7:11–14, 400 n9
7:13–14, 246
7:13–17, 239
7:17, 246
8–12, 394 n40
8:3, 348 n2
8:15, 236 n
8:15–17, 239
8:16, 162
8:21, 232
9:2, 252
9:20–24, 252
9:21–24, 31
9:24, 252
10:5, 348 n2
10:13, 349 n11
10:21, 349 n11
11:3–4, 232
12:1, 162
12:1–3, 207
12:2–3, 329, 330
Ezra:
5–6, 393 n23
8:16, 391 n3
Nehemiah:
5:7, 275
8:1–3, 311
8:7, 312, 391 n3
8:8, 312
8:9, 391 n3
9:17, 397 n12
9:31, 397 n12
1 Chronicles:
2:7, 397 n5
6, 404 n15
13:6, 104
13:9–12, 91
15:2–7, 406 n36
16, 227, 404 n15
21:1, 270 n
21:16, 348 n2
2 Chronicles:
3:1, 368 n45
15:2–7, 406 n36
16:9, 161, 172
18:20–22, 193
19:6, 406 n36
30:6–9, 406 n36
30:9, 397 n12
32:7–8, 406 n36
New Testament
Matthew:
3:2, 331
5:10, 409 n22
6:10, 335
8:11–12, 409 n22
10:16, 356 n2
11:10, 393 n13
12:28, 409 n22
13:24–50, 409 n22
14:5, 393 n13
16:28, 335, 409 n22
17:14, 393 n13
18:23–25, 409 n22
20:1–16, 409 n22
22:1–14, 409 n22
25:1–13, 409 n22
Mark:
1:14, 331
4:26–34, 409 n22
9:1, 335, 409 n22
Luke:
1:41–42, 393 n13
1:67, 393 n13
2:26–32, 393 n13
2:36, 393 n13
7:26–28, 393 n13
9:27, 335, 409 n22
10:25–29, 326
13:28–29, 409 n22
17:20–21, 336
24:44, 405 n33
24:51, 295
John:
1:1–14, 381 n19
6:23, 392 n28
Acts:
1:9, 295
2:29–30, 242
11:27, 393 n13
13:1–2, 393 n13
15:32, 393 n13
17:30–32, 330
21:9, 393 n13
21:10–12, 393 n13
27:35, 392 n28
Romans:
12:12, 388 n17
14:6, 392 n28
1 Corinthians:
10:30, 392 n28
2 Corinthians:
11:30–12:7, 295
Ephesians:
2:20, 393 n13
3:5, 393 n13
4:11, 393 n13
1 Thessalonians:
5:17, 388 n17, 400 n5
1 Timothy:
4:3–5, 392 n28
Hebrews:
9:19–22, 308
10:4, 308
11:5, 291
James:
4:10, 222
4:13–15, 222
5:10, 393 n13
1 Peter:
1:10, 393 n13
Revelation:
1:1, 238
4:1, 295
21:1, 250
21:1–4, 250
22:6–9, 238
About the Author
JAMES L. KUGEL is the Starr Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University. His many books include The Bible As It Was, winner of the Grawemeyer Award in religion, and How to Read the Bible, given the National Jewish Book Award for the best book of 2007. He lives in Jerusalem, and in 2016 he received the Rothschild Prize, Israel’s highest award, in Jewish studies.
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Footnotes
* BCE stands for “before the Common Era,” that is, BC
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* Throughout this book, I have referred to God using the pronouns “He,” “Him,” “His,” etc., since for the most part God was represented as a specifically male deity in biblical times. By the same token, the capital letter H is intended to convey the respect for the various forms of divine reference current in the Hebrew Bible itself.
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* A similar switch back to regular sight is specially marked in Gen 22:13, “And Abraham lifted up his eyes and he saw and behold! a ram caught in a thicket by its horns.” This was a real ram, the one that Abraham goes on to sacrifice. But before that, apparently, his eyes were working in the “vision” mode. It is noteworthy, however, that the specially marked act of seeing usually introduces the vision rather than following it; see below.
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* The Hebrew word elohim can mean either God or “the gods.”
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** Through most of the biblical period, there was no reason not to believe that God did not have some sort of physical form, and in this account, that physical form was in a specific place, on or near “the mountain of God/the gods.”
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* See Ruth 2:4. Note that our word “goodbye” is somewhat similar; it comes from the contracted phrase “God be with you,” used as a pious farewell in Middle English.
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* A special sort of devotee to God (cf. Numbers ch. 6).
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* There was some dispute in Second Temple times about the length of a jubilee; because of the apparent disagreement of this verse with the mention of the “fiftieth year” in Lev 25:10, some held that a jubilee lasts 50 years.
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* The Greek word “patriarch” (πατριάρχης) originally referred to the founder or father of a nation; since each of Jacob’s sons was considered to be the founder of a different tribe, they were collectively known as “the patriarchs.”
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* The word “satan” was originally a common noun in Hebrew meaning “accuser” or “adversary.” Later, angels with various names—Mastema, Sammael, Gadreel, Satanel, Belial, etc.—came to be considered the chief wicked angel. Even
tually, “Satan” came to be a proper noun, referring to the embodiment and sponsor of all evil.
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** Greek is mentioned because many first-century Jewish texts originally written in Hebrew have survived only in Greek translation, while other texts from this period were originally composed in Greek by their Jewish authors.
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* A collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts discovered on the shores of the Dead Sea, starting in 1947. Most of the texts are dated to the end of the biblical period; that is, to the third, second, and first centuries BCE.
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** The word “satan” here is not our Satan, but a general term for an evil spirit.
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* Or Beliar, yet another name for Satan or a similar demonic power.
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* I am not sure of the origin of this acronym (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) for our own societies, nor do these traits characterize all of the countries involved; on its own, however, this name does have one thing in its favor, the suggestion that, in the broad perspective of three or four millennia of human history, as well as in comparison to the great bulk of the world’s population today, the way in which we denizens of the modern West view ourselves and the outside world must appear rather unique and, on reflection, altogether strange.
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* A relatively new term designating creatures that paleoanthropologists now agree were either humans themselves or in the line of human ancestors.
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* This is the modern spelling of Neanderthal, whose name derives from the Neander Valley (German: Tal, “valley,” used to be spelled Thal) near Düsseldorf, Germany, where parts of an ancient human skeleton were excavated in 1856.
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* The biblical text literally says “the tree of knowing good and bad,” but good and bad here is what is called a merism, namely, mentioning two extremes in order to include everything in between, such as “night and day” (meaning “all the time”), “high and low” (everywhere), “man and beast” (all creatures), and so on.
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* Traditionally spelled with its consonants only, as the precise vowel sounds connecting them have been lost since biblical times. In most Bibles, this name is rendered “the LORD.”
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* An analogy with language might make the point more clearly. Linguists have studied the speech of contemporary civilizations that are, in some respects, rather similar to that of our Stone Age ancestors, yet their languages are every bit as sophisticated and complicated as English or Japanese. As Steven Pinker has noted: “The universality of complex language is a discovery that fills linguists with awe . . . There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language” (The Language Instinct, New York: Harper Collins, 2000, p. 14). Nor, one might add, is there a contemporary Stone Age religion.
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* Deafness from birth had no remedy; the deaf could not be taught to speak or understand as nowadays.
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* Asherah was a goddess, the concubine of the Sumerian god Anu and, in Canaan, that of the supreme deity El. The form Asherot is, like Be‘alim, plural.
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* Asherah was the name of both a goddess and a sacred grove; probably the latter is intended. See also the brief discussion in Kugel (2003), 232–34.
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* An extinct language of Mesopotamia, now used as a general name for various dialects of ancient Babylonian and Assyrian.
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* An Arab people from northern Arabia and the inland Levant; remains of Nabatean settlements have been found at Petra (in modern Jordan), Avdat and Halutzah (in the Negev region of southern Israel), and elsewhere.
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* See chapter 3.
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* I should stress throughout that I am not talking about the historical person named Jeremiah, if such a person ever existed, but about the prophet Jeremiah as presented in a biblical book by that name—an important distinction. See also note 12 of this chapter.
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* Jeremiah and his fellow prophets were probably not schizophrenics, although they did do some pretty strange things. On God’s instructions Hosea married a prostitute (Hos 1:2), then named their daughter “Unloved” (“for I will no longer love the house of Israel”), while the son born after her was called “Not My People,” in keeping with God’s condemnation, “for you are not My people”) (Hos 1:6–8). Somewhat more dramatically, on God’s instructions Isaiah took off his clothes and sandals and walked around naked for the next three years (Isa 20:2–3); his contemporary, the prophet Micah, similarly stripped himself naked for an undisclosed period (Mic 1:8). God told Ezekiel to eat a scroll made out of parchment (Ezek 3:1–3), lie on his left side for 390 days, followed by 40 days on his right side (Ezek 4:5–6), shave his hair and beard (5:1–4) and perform all manner of other symbolic acts.
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* The numbering of verses in the Psalms sometimes differs among different translations; here, for example, the traditional Hebrew numbering (5:8) appears in the widely used New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) as 5:7: the reason is that the NRSV regularly does not count a psalm’s heading as a separate verse. (Another modern translation, the New English Bible, omits the psalm headings altogether!) Throughout I have followed the traditional Hebrew numbering of verses. Note also that the numbering of the psalms themselves in the Old Greek Psalter (and modern versions based on it) is different from the traditional Hebrew numbering and, hence, differs as well from most modern Jewish and Protestant translations: in the Old Greek, Psalms 9 and 10 appear as a single Psalm 9. As a result, through most of the Psalter, the Old Greek numbering is one less than the Hebrew. The discrepancy disappears after Psalm 147, which appears in the Old Greek as two psalms, 146 and 147.
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* Though it sometimes did; for example, Solomon’s copious sacrifices in 1 Kings 3:4–5.
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* In fact, it is noteworthy that neither of these laws is stated in a neutral formulation, such as “If a person should do such-and-such to another person . . .” Rather, they are addressed to the potential victimizer, as if God were somehow closer to him than to the victim: “Under normal circumstances,” God is saying, “I’d like to help you out, but if I hear the cry of the victim, I’ll have no choice but to intervene.”
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* A heavenly God would of course have easy access to the words of humans down below, since sound was conceived to travel upward. Thus God says, “The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is so great! . . . I will go down and see if they have gone astray, as their cry that has reached Me [indicates]” (Gen 18:21–22). In the Babylonian Atra-ḫasīs epic, the gods resolve to destroy the world because the noise that the humans below are making is so great, and it reaches the gods so clearly in heaven that it is preventing them from sleeping (frag 1, col 1, 2–8).
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* This was the distinctive mark of the Nazirite, who was vowed to God (see Num 6:5).
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* This is considered to be the first of the Ten Commandments by most Christians, but the second commandment according to traditional Jewish interpreters, the first being the previous sentence, “I am your God, the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the place of [your] servitude.” This is interpreted by Jews as a requirement to believe in God’s existence and intervention in human h
istory. The second commandment, according to Jewish interpreters, consists of what Christians generally hold to be the first and second, namely, the prohibition of worshiping any other god and the prohibition of worshiping a sculpted image.
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** As already mentioned, Jews at an early stage ceased pronouncing this name, substituting for it “my Lord.” As a result no one knows for sure which vowels originally joined these consonant sounds together. YHWH is the usual transcription of the four Hebrew consonants, and the all-capitals LORD is their usual rendition in English Bibles.
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* That is, the other gods.
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* In Hebrew, this phrase is literally “was not seen by you.”
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* In these last two examples, the pronunciation of the verb has apparently been altered by ancient scribes, so that “see the face of God” became “be seen [before] the face of God,” and “all your males will see” became “all your males will be seen”—in both cases because of what was later a scandalous idea, seeing God.