The Mind in the Body

“[In the Old Testament], human faculties and bodily organs enjoy a measure of independence that is simply difficult to grasp today without dismissing it as merely poetic speech or, even worse, ‘primitive thinking.’ […] In short, the biblical character presents itself to us more as parts than as a whole”
(Robert A. Di Vito, “Old Testament Anthropology and the Construction of Personal Identity”, p. 227-228)

The Axial Age was a transitional stage following the collapse of the Bronze Age Civilizations. And in that transition, new mindsets mixed with old, what came before trying to contain the rupture and what was forming not yet fully born. Writing, texts, and laws were replacing voices gone quiet and silent. Ancient forms of authorization no longer were as viscerally real and psychologically compelling. But the transition period was long and slow, and in many ways continues to this day (e.g., authoritarianism as vestigial bicameralism).

One aspect was the changing experience of identity, as experienced within the body and the world. But let me take it a step back. In hunter-gatherer societies, there is the common attribute of animism where the world is alive with voices and along with this the sense of identity that, involving sensory immersion not limited to the body, extends into the surrounding environment. The bicameral mind seems to have been a reworking of this mentality for the emerging agricultural villages and city-states. Instead of body as part of the natural environment, there was the body politic with the community as a coherent whole, a living organism. Without a metaphorical framing of inside and outside as the crux of identity as would later develop, self and other was defined by permeable collectivism rather than rigid individualism (bundle theory of mind taken to the extreme of bundle theory of society).

In the late Bronze Age, large and expansive theocratic hierarchies formed. Writing increasingly took a greater role. All of this combined to make the bicameral order precarious. The act of writing and reading texts was still integrated with voice-hearing traditions, a text being the literal ‘word’ of a god, spirit, or ancestor. But the voices being written down began the process of creating psychological distance, the text itself beginning to take onto itself authority. This became a competing metaphorical framing, that of truth and reality as text.

This transformed the perception of the body. The voices became harder to decipher. Hearing a voice of authority speak to you required little interpretation, but a text emphasizes the need for interpretation. Reading became a way of thinking about the world and about one’s way of being in the world. Divination and similar practices was the attempt to read the world. Clouds or lightning, the flight of birds or the organs of a sacrificial animal — these were texts to be read.

Likewise, the body became a repository of voices, although initially not quite a unitary whole. Different aspects of self and spirits, different energies and forces were located and contained in various organs and body parts — to the extent that they had minds of their own, a potentially distressing condition and sometimes interpreted as possession. As the bicameral community was a body politic, the post-bicameral body initiated the internalization of community. But this body as community didn’t at first have a clear egoic ruler — the need for this growing stronger as external authorization further weakened. Eventually, it became necessary to locate the ruling self in a particular place within, such as the heart or throat or head. This was a forceful suppression of the many voices and hence a disallowing of the perception of self as community. The narrative of individuality began to be told.

Even today, we go on looking for a voice in some particular location. Noam Chomsky’s theory of a language organ is an example of this. We struggle for authorization within consciousness, as the ancient grounding of authorization in the world and in community has been lost, cast into the shadows.

Still, dissociation having taken hold, the voices never disappear and they continue to demand being heard, if only as symptoms of physical and psychological disease. Or else we let the thousand voices of media to tell us how to think and what to do. Ultimately, trying to contain authorization within us is impossible and so authorization spills back out into the world, the return of the repressed. Our sense of individualism is much more of a superficial rationalization than we’d like to admit. The social nature of our humanity can’t be denied.

As with post-bicameral humanity, we are still trying to navigate this complex and confounding social reality. Maybe that is why Axial Age religions, in first articulating the dilemma of conscious individuality, remain compelling in what was taught. The Axial Age prophets gave voice to our own ambivalance and maybe that is what gives the ego such power over us. We moderns haven’t become disconnected and dissociated merely because of some recent affliction — such a state of mind is what we inherited, as the foundation of our civilization.

* * *

“Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.” (Matthew 6:2-4)

“Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.” (Matthew 18:8-9)

The Prince of Medicine
by Susan P. Mattern
pp. 232-233

He mentions speaking with many women who described themselves as “hysterical,” that is, having an illness caused, as they believed, by a condition of the uterus (hystera in Greek) whose symptoms varied from muscle contractions to lethargy to nearly complete asphyxia (Loc. Affect. 6.5, 8.414K). Galen, very aware of Herophilus’s discovery of the broad ligaments anchoring the uterus to the pelvis, denied that the uterus wandered around the body like an animal wreaking havoc (the Hippocratics imagined a very actively mobile womb). But the uterus could, in his view, become withdrawn in some direction or inflamed; and in one passage he recommends the ancient practice of fumigating the vagina with sweet-smelling odors to attract the uterus, endowed in this view with senses and desires of its own, to its proper place; this technique is described in the Hippocratic Corpus but also evokes folk or shamanistic medicine.

“Between the Dream and Reality”:
Divination in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy
by Robert A. Kottage
pp. 50-52

A definition of haruspicy is in order. Known to the ancient Romans as the Etrusca disciplina or “Etruscan art” (P.B. Ellis 221), haruspicy originally included all three types of divination practiced by the Etruscan hierophant: interpretation of fulgura (lightnings), of monstra (birth defects and unusual meteorological occurrences), and of exta (internal organs) (Hammond). ”Of these, the practice still commonly associated with the term is the examination of organs, as evidenced by its OED definition: “The practice or function of a haruspex; divination by inspection of the entrails of victims” (“haruspicy”).”A detailed science of liver divination developed in the ancient world, and instructional bronze liver models formed by the Etruscans—as well as those made by their predecessors the Hittites and Babylonians—have survived (Hammond). ”Any unusual features were noted and interpreted by those trained in the esoteric art: “Significant for the exta were the size, shape, colour, and markings of the vital organs, especially the livers and gall bladders of sheep, changes in which were believed by many races to arise supernaturally… and to be susceptible of interpretation by established rules”(Hammond). Julian Jaynes, in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, comments on the unique quality of haruspicy as a form of divination, arriving as it did at the dawn of written language: “Extispicy [divining through exta] differs from other methods in that the metaphrand is explicitly not the speech or actions of the gods, but their writing. The baru [Babylonian priest] first addressed the gods… with requests that they ‘write’ their message upon the entrails of the animal” (Jaynes 243). Jaynes also remarks that organs found to contain messages of import would sometimes be sent to kings, like letters from the gods (Jaynes 244). Primitive man sought (and found) meaning everywhere.

The logic behind the belief was simple: the whole universe is a single, harmonious organism, with the thoughts and intensions of the intangible gods reflected in the tangible world. For those illiterate to such portents, a lightning bolt or the birth of a hermaphrodite would have been untranslatable; but for those with proper training, the cosmos were as alive with signs as any language:

The Babylonia s believed that the decisions of their gods, like those of their kings, were arbitrary, but that mankind could at least guess their will. Any event on earth, even a trivial one, could reflect or foreshadow the intentions of the gods because the universe is a living organism, a whole, and what happens in one part of it might be caused by a happening in some distant part. Here we see a germ of the theory of cosmic sympathy formulated by Posidonius. (Luck 230)

This view of the capricious gods behaving like human king is reminiscent of the evil archons of gnosticism; however, unlike gnosticism, the notion of cosmic sympathy implies an illuminated and vastly “readable” world, even in the darkness of matter. The Greeks viewed pneuma as “the substance that penetrates and unifies all things. In fact, this tension holds bodies together, and every coherent thing would collapse without it” (Lawrence)—a notion that diverges from the gnostic idea of pneuma as spiritual light temporarily trapped in the pall of physicality.

Proper vision, then, is central to all the offices of the haruspex. The world cooperates with the seer by being illuminated, readable.

p. 160

Jaynes establishes the important distinction between the modern notion of chance commonly associated with coin flipping and the attitude of the ancient Mesopotamians toward sortilege:

We are so used to the huge variety of games of chance, of throwing dice, roulette wheels, etc., all of them vestiges of this ancient practice of divination by lots, that we find it difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically. It is a help here to realize that there was no concept of chance whatever until very recent times…. [B]ecause there was no chance, the result had to be caused by the gods whose intentions were being divined. (Jaynes 240)

In a world devoid of luck, proper divination is simply a matter of decoding the signs—bad readings are never the fault of the gods, but can only stem from the reader.

The Consciousness of John’s Gospel
A Prolegomenon to a Jaynesian-Jamesonian Approach
by Jonathan Bernier

When reading the prologue’s historical passages, one notes a central theme: the Baptist witnesses to the light coming into the world. Put otherwise, the historical witnesses to the cosmological. This, I suggest, can be understood as an example of what Jaynes (1976: 317–338) calls ‘the quest for authorization.’ As the bicameral mind broke down, as exteriorised thought ascribed to other-worldly agents gave way to interiorised thought ascribed to oneself, as the voices of the gods spoke less frequently, people sought out new means, extrinsic to themselves, by which to authorise belief and practice; they quite literally did not trust themselves. They turned to oracles and prophets, to auguries and haruspices, to ecstatics and ecstasy. Proclamatory prophecy of the sort practiced by John the Baptist should be understood in terms of the bicameral mind: the Lord God of Israel, external to the Baptist, issued imperatives to the Baptist, and then the Baptist, external to his audience, relayed those divine imperatives to his listeners. Those who chose to follow the Baptist’s imperatives operated according to the logic of the bicameral mind, as described by Jaynes (1976: 84–99): the divine voice speaks, therefore I act. That voice just happens now to be mediated through the prophet, and not apprehended directly in the way that the bicameral mind apprehended the voices and visions. The Baptist as witness to God’s words and Word is the Baptist as bicameral vestige.

By way of contrast, the Word-become-flesh can be articulated in terms of the bicameral mind giving way to consciousness. The Jesus of the prologue represents the apogee of interiorised consciousness: the Word is not just inside him, but he in fact is the Word. 1:17 draws attention to an implication consequent to this indwelling of the Word: with the divine Word – and thus also the divine words – dwelling fully within oneself, what need is there for that set of exteriorised thoughts known as the Mosaic Law? […]

[O]ne notes Jaynes’ (1976: 301, 318) suggestion that the Mosaic Law represents a sort of half-way house between bicameral exteriority and conscious interiority: no longer able to hear the voices, the ancient Israelites sought external authorisation in the written word; eventually, however, as the Jewish people became increasingly acclimated to conscious interiority, they became increasingly ambivalent towards the need for and role of such exteriorised authorisation. Jaynes (1976: 318) highlights Jesus’ place in this emerging ambivalence; however, in 1:17 it is not so much that exteriorised authorisation is displaced by interiorised consciousness but that Torah as exteriorised authority is replaced by Jesus as exteriorised authority. Jesus, the fully conscious Word-made-flesh, might displace the Law, but it is not altogether clear that he offers his followers a full turn towards interiorised consciousness; one might, rather, read 1:17 as a bicameral attempt to re-contain the cognition revolution of which Jaynes considers Jesus to be a flag-bearer.

The Discovery of the Mind
by Bruno Snell
pp. 6-8

We find it difficult to conceive of a mentality which made no provision for the body as such. Among the early expressions designating what was later rendered as soma or ‘body’, only the plurals γυα, μλεα, etc. refer to the physical nature of the body; for chros is merely the limit of the body, and demas represents the frame, the structure, and occurs only in the accusative of specification. As it is, early Greek art actually corroborates our impression that the physical body of man was comprehended, not as a unit but as an aggregate. Not until the classical art of the fifth century do we find attempts to depict the body as an organic unit whose parts are mutually correlated. In the preceding period the body is a mere construct of independent parts variously put together.6 It must not be thought, however, that the pictures of human beings from the time of Homer are like the primitive drawings to which our children have accustomed us, though they too simply add limb to limb.

Our children usually represent the human shape as shown in fig. i, whereas fig. 2 reproduces the Greek concept as found on the vases of the geometric period. Our children first draw a body as the central and most important part of their design; then they add the head, the arms and the legs. The geometric figures, on the other hand, lack this central part; they are nothing but μλεα κα γυα, i.e. limbs with strong muscles, separated from each other by means of exaggerated joints. This difference is of course partially dependent upon the clothes they wore, but even after we have made due allowance for this the fact remains that the Greeks of this early period seem to have seen in a strangely ‘articulated’ way. In their eyes the individual limbs are clearly distinguished from each other, and the joints are, for the sake of emphasis, presented as extraordinarily thin, while the fleshy parts are made to bulge just as unrealistically. The early Greek drawing seeks to demonstrate the agility of the human figure, the drawing of the modern child its compactness and unity.

Thus the early Greeks did not, either in their language or in the visual arts, grasp the body as a unit. The phenomenon is the same as with the verbs denoting sight; in the latter, the activity is at first understood in terms of its conspicuous modes, of the various attitudes and sentiments connected with it, and it is a long time before speech begins to address itself to the essential function of this activity. It seems, then, as if language aims progressively to express the essence of an act, but is at first unable to comprehend it because it is a function, and as such neither tangibly apparent nor associated with certain unambiguous emotions. As soon, however, as it is recognized and has received a name, it has come into existence, and the knowledge of its existence quickly becomes common property. Concerning the body, the chain of events may have been somewhat like this: in the early period a speaker, when faced by another person, was apparently satisfied to call out his name: this is Achilles, or to say: this is a man. As a next step, the most conspicuous elements of his appearance are described, namely his limbs as existing side by side; their functional correlation is not apprehended in its full importance until somewhat later. True enough, the function is a concrete fact, but its objective existence does not manifest itself so clearly as the presence of the individual corporeal limbs, and its prior significance escapes even the owner of the limbs himself. With the discovery of this hidden unity, of course, it is at once appreciated as an immediate and self-explanatory truth.

This objective truth, it must be admitted, does not exist for man until it is seen and known and designated by a word; until, thereby, it has become an object of thought. Of course the Homeric man had a body exactly like the later Greeks, but he did not know it qua body, but merely as the sum total of his limbs. This is another way of saying that the Homeric Greeks did not yet have a body in the modern sense of the word; body, soma, is a later interpretation of what was originally comprehended as μλη or γυα, i.e. as limbs. Again and again Homer speaks of fleet legs, of knees in speedy motion, of sinewy arms; it is in these limbs, immediately evident as they are to his eyes, that he locates the secret of life.7

Hebrew and Buddhist Selves:
A Constructive Postmodern Study
by Nicholas F. Gier

Finally, at least two biblical scholars–in response to the question “What good is this pre-modern self?”–have suggested that the Hebrew view (we add the Buddhist and the Chinese) can be used to counter balance the dysfunctional elements of modern selfhood. Both Robert Di Vito and Jacqueline Lapsley have called this move “postmodern,” based, as they contend, on the concept of intersubjectivity.[3] In his interpretation of Charles S. Peirce as a constructive postmodern thinker, Peter Ochs observes that Peirce reaffirms the Hebraic view that relationality is knowledge at its most basic level.  As Ochs states: “Peirce did not read Hebrew, but the ancient Israelite term for ‘knowledge’–yidiah–may convey Peirce’s claim better than any term he used.  For the biblical authors, ‘to know’ is ‘to have intercourse with’–with the world, with one’s spouse, with God.”[4]

The view that the self is self-sufficient and self-contained is a seductive abstraction that contradicts the very facts of our interdependent existence.  Modern social atomism was most likely the result of modeling the self on an immutable transcendent deity (more Greek than biblical) and/or the inert isolated atom of modern science. […]

It is surprising to discover that the Buddhist skandhas are more mental in character, while the Hebrew self is more material in very concrete ways.  For example, the Psalmist says that “all my inner parts (=heart-mind) bless God’s holy name” (103.1); his kidneys (=conscience) chastise him (16.7); and broken bones rejoice (16:7).  Hebrew bones offer us the most dramatic example of a view of human essence most contrary to Christian theology.  One’s essential core is not immaterial and invisible; rather, it is one’s bones, the most enduring remnant of a person’s being.  When the nepeš “rejoices in the Lord” at Ps. 35.9, the poet, in typical parallel fashion, then has the bones speak for her in v. 10.  Jeremiah describes his passion for Yahweh as a “fire” in his heart (l�b) that is also in his bones (20.9), just as we say that a great orator has “fire in his belly.” The bones of the exiles will form the foundation of those who will be restored by Yahweh’s rãah in Ezekiel 37, and later Pharisidic Judaism speaks of the bones of the deceased “sprouting” with new life in their resurrected bodies.^[7]  The bones of the prophet Elijah have special healing powers (2 Kgs. 13.21).  Therefore, the cult of relic bones does indeed have scriptural basis, and we also note the obvious parallel to the worship of the Buddha’s bones.

With all these body parts functioning in various ways, it is hard to find, as Robert A. Di Vito suggests, “a true ‘center’ for the [Hebrew] person . . . a ‘consciousness’ or a self-contained ‘self.’”^[8] Di Vito also observes that the Hebrew word for face (p~n§m) is plural, reflecting all the ways in which a person appears in multifarious social interactions.  The plurality of faces in Chinese culture is similar, including the “loss of face” when a younger brother fails to defer to his elder brother, who would have a difference “face” with respect to his father.  One may be tempted to say that the j§va is the center of the Buddhist self, but that would not be accurate because this term simply designates the functioning of all the skandhas together.

Both David Kalupahana and Peter Harvey demonstrate how much influence material form (rãpa) has on Buddhist personality, even at the highest stage of spiritual development.^[9]  It is Zen Buddhists, however, who match the earthy Hebrew rhetoric about the human person. When Bodhidharma (d. 534 CE) prepared to depart from his body, he asked four of his disciples what they had learned from him.  As each of them answered they were offered a part of his body: his skin, his flesh, his bones, and his marrow.  The Zen monk Nangaku also compared the achievements of his six disciples to six parts of his body. Deliberately inverting the usual priority of mind over body, the Zen monk Dogen (1200-1253) declared that “The Buddha Way is therefore to be attained above all through the body.”^[10]  Interestingly enough, the Hebrews rank the flesh, skin, bones, and sinews as the most essential parts of the body-soul.^[11]  The great Buddhist dialectician Nagarjuna (2^nd Century CE) appears to be the source of Bodhidharma’s body correlates, but it is clear that Nagarjuna meant them as metaphors.^[12]  In contrast it seems clear that, although dead bones rejoicing is most likely a figure of speech, the Hebrews were convinced that we think, feel, and perceive through and with all parts of our bodies.

In Search of a Christian Identity
by Robert Hamilton

The essential points here, are the “social disengagement” of the modern self, away from identifying solely with roles defined by the family group, and the development of a “personal unity” within the individual. Morally speaking, we are no longer empty vessels to be filled up by some god, or servant of god, we are now responsible for our own actions, and decisions, in light of our own moral compass. I would like to mention Julian Jayne’s seminal work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, as a pertinent hypothesis for an attempt to understand the enormous distance between the modern sense of self with that of the ancient mind, and its largely absent subjective state.[13]

“The preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous chapter is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man.”[14]

This hypothesis sits very well with De Vitos’ description of the permeable personal identity of Old Testament characters, who are “taken over,” or possessed, by Yahweh.[15] The evidence of the Old Testament stories points in this direction, where we have patriarchal family leaders, like Abraham and Noah, going around making morally contentious decisions (in today’s terms) based on their internal dialogue with a god – Jehovah.[16] As Jaynes postulates later in his book, today we would call this behaviour schizophrenia. De Vito, later in the article, confirms, that:

“Of course, this relative disregard for autonomy in no way limits one’s responsibility for conduct–not even when Yhwh has given “statutes that were not good” in order to destroy Israel “(Ezek 20:25-26).[17]

Cognitive Perspectives on Early Christology
by Daniel McClellan

The insights of CSR [cognitive science of religion] also better inform our reconstruction of early Jewish concepts of agency, identity, and divinity. Almost twenty years ago, Robert A. Di Vito argued from an anthropological perspective that the “person” in the Hebrew Bible “is more radically decentered, ‘dividual,’ and undefined with respect to personal boundaries … [and] in sharp contrast to modernity, it is identified more closely with, and by, its social roles.”40 Personhood was divisible and permeable in the Hebrew Bible, and while there was diachronic and synchronic variation in certain details, the same is evident in the literature of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. This is most clear in the widespread understanding of the spirit (רוח (and the soul (נפש – (often used interchangeably – as the primary loci of a person’s agency or capacity to act.41 Both entities were usually considered primarily constitutive of a person’s identity, but also distinct from their physical body and capable of existence apart from it.42 The physical body could also be penetrated or overcome by external “spirits,” and such possession imposed the agency and capacities of the possessor.43 The God of Israel was largely patterned after this concept of personhood,44 and was similarly partible, with God’s glory (Hebrew: כבוד ;Greek: δόξα), wisdom (חכמה/σοφία), spirit (רוח/πνεῦµα), word (דבר/λόγος), presence (שכינה ,(and name (שם/ὄνοµα) operating as autonomous and sometimes personified loci of agency that could presence the deity and also possess persons (or cultic objects45) and/or endow them with special status or powers.46

Did Christianity lead to schizophrenia?
Psychosis, psychology and self reference
by Roland Littlewood

This new deity could be encountered anywhere—“Wherever two are gathered in my name” (Mathew 18.20)—for Christianity was universal and individual (“neither Jew nor Greek… bond nor free… male or female, for you are all one man in Christ Jesus” says St. Paul). And ultimate control rested with Him, Creator and Master of the whole universe, throughout the whole universe. No longer was there any point in threatening your recalcitrant (Egyptian) idol for not coming up with the goods (Cumont, 1911/1958, p. 93): as similarly in colonial Africa, at least according to the missionaries (Peel, 2000). If God was independent of social context and place, then so was the individual self at least in its conversations with God (as Dilthey argues). Religious status was no longer signalled by external signs (circumcision), or social position (the higher stages of the Roman priesthood had been occupied by aspiring politicians in the course of their career: “The internal status of the officiating person was a matter of… indifference to the celestial spirits” [Cumont, 1911/1958, p. 91]). “Now it is not our flesh that we must circumcise, we must crucify ourselves, exterminate and mortify our unreasonable desires” (John Chrysostom, 1979), “circumcise your heart” says “St. Barnabas” (2003, p. 45) for religion became internal and private. Like the African or Roman self (Mauss, 1938/1979), the Jewish self had been embedded in a functioning society, individually decentred and socially contextualised (Di Vito, 1999); it survived death only through its bodily descendants: “But Abram cried, what can you give me, seeing I shall die childless” (Genesis 15.2). To die without issue was extinction in both religious systems (Madigan & Levenson, 2008). But now an enduring part of the self, or an associate of it—the soul—had a connection to what might be called body and consciousness yet had some sort of ill defined association with them. In its earthly body it was in potential communication with God. Like God it was immaterial and immortal. (The associated resurrection of the physical body, though an essential part of Christian dogma, has played an increasingly less important part in the Church [cf. Stroumsa, 1990].) For 19th-century pagan Yoruba who already accepted some idea of a hereafter, each village has its separate afterlife which had to be fused by the missionaries into a more universal schema (Peel, 2000, p. 175). If the conversation with God was one to one, then each self-aware individual had then to make up their own mind on adherence—and thus the detached observer became the surveyor of the whole world (Dumont, 1985). Sacral and secular became distinct (separate “functions” as Dumont calls them), further presaging a split between psychological faculties. The idea of the self/soul as an autonomous unit facing God became the basis, via the stages Mauss (1938/1979) briefly outlines, for a political philosophy of individualism (MacFarlane, 1978). The missionaries in Africa constantly attempted to reach the inside of their converts, but bemoaned that the Yoruba did not seem to have any inward core to the self (Peel, 2000, Chapter 9).

Embodying the Gospel:
Two Exemplary Practices
by Joel B. Green
pp. 12-16

Philosopher Charles Taylor’s magisterial account of the development of personal identity in the West provides a useful point of entry into this discussion. He shows how modern assumptions about personhood in the West developed from Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries, through major European philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (e.g.,Descartes, Locke, Kant), and into the present. The result is a modern human “self defined by the powers of disengaged reason—with its associated ideals of self-responsible freedom and dignity—of self-exploration, and of personal commitment.”2 These emphases provide a launching point for our modern conception of “inwardness,” that is, the widespread view that people have an inner self, which is the authentic self.

Given this baseline understanding of the human person, it would seem only natural to understand conversion in terms of interiority, and this is precisely what William James has done for the modern west. In his enormously influential 1901–02 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University, published in 1902 under the title The Varieties of Religious Experience, James identifies salvation as the resolution of a person’s inner, subjective crisis.Salvation for James is thus an individual, instantaneous, feeling-based, interior experience.3 Following James, A.D. Nock’s celebrated study of conversion in antiquity reached a similar conclusion: “By conversion we mean there orientation of the soul of an individual, his [sic] deliberate turning from in different or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which involves a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right.” Nock goes on to write of “a passion of willingness and acquiescence, which removes the feeling of anxiety, a sense of perceiving truths not known before, a sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without and an ecstasy of happiness . . .”4 In short, what is needed is a “change of heart.”

However pervasive they may be in the contemporary West, whether in-side or outside the church, such assumptions actually sit uneasily with Old and New Testament portraits of humanity. Let me mention two studies that press our thinking in an alternative direction. Writing with reference to Old Testament anthropology, Robert Di Vito finds that the human “(1) is deeply embedded, or engaged, in its social identity, (2) is comparatively decentered and undefined with respect to personal boundaries, (3) is relatively trans-parent, socialized, and embodied (in other words, is altogether lacking in a sense of ‘inner depths’), and (4) is ‘authentic’ precisely in its heteronomy, in its obedience to another and dependence upon another.”5 Two aspects of Di Vito’s summary are of special interest: first, his emphasis on a more communitarian experience of personhood; and second, his emphasis on embodiment. Were we to take seriously what these assumptions might mean for embracing and living out the Gospel, we might reflect more on what it means to be saved within the community of God’s people and, indeed, what it means to be saved in relation to the whole of God’s creation. We might also reflect less on conversion as decision-making and more on conversion as pattern-of-life.

The second study, by Klaus Berger, concerns the New Testament. Here,Berger investigates the New Testament’s “historical psychology,” repeatedly highlighting both the ease with which we read New Testament texts against modern understandings of humanity and the problems resident in our doing so.6 His list of troublesome assumptions—troublesome because they are more at home in the contemporary West than in the ancient Mediterranean world—includes these dualities, sometimes even dichotomies: doing and being, identity and behavior, internal and external. A more integrated understanding of people, the sort we find in the New Testament world, he insists, would emphasize life patterns that hold together believing, thinking, feeling, and behaving, and allow for a clear understanding that human behavior in the world is both simply and profoundly em-bodied belief. Perspectives on human transformation that take their point  of departure from this “psychology” would emphasize humans in relation-ship with other humans, the bodily nature of human allegiances and commitments, and the fully integrated character of human faith and life. […]

Given how John’s message is framed in an agricultural context, it is not a surprise that his point turns on an organic metaphor rather than a mechanical one. The resulting frame has no room for prioritizing inner (e.g.,“mind” or “heart”) over outer (e.g., “body” or “behavior”), nor of fitting disparate pieces together to manufacture a “product,” nor of correlating status and activity as cause and effect. Organic metaphors neither depend on nor provoke images of hierarchical systems but invite images of integration, interrelation, and interdependence. Consistent with this organic metaphor, practices do not occupy a space outside the system of change, but are themselves part and parcel of the system. In short, John’s agricultural metaphor inseparably binds “is” and “does” together.

Ressurrection and the Restoration of Israel:
The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life
by Jon Douglas Levenson
pp. 108-114

In our second chapter, we discussed one of the prime warrants often adduced either for the rejection of resurrection (by better-informed individuals) or for its alleged absence, and the alleged absence of any notion of the afterlife, in Judaism (by less informed individuals). That warrant is the finality of death in the Hebrew Bible, or at least in most of it, and certainly in what is from a Jewish point of view its most important subsection, the first five books. For no resurrections take place therein, and predictions of a general resurrection at the end of time can be found in the written Torah only through ingenious derash of the sort that the rabbinic tradition itself does not univocally endorse or replicate in its translations. In the same chapter, we also identified one difficulty with this notion that the Pentateuch exhibits no possibility of an afterlife but supports, instead, the absolute finality of death, and to this point we must now return. I am speaking of the difficulty of separating individuals from their families (including the extended family that is the nation). If, in fact, individuals are fundamentally and inextricably embedded within their fam ilies, then their own deaths, however terrifying in prospect, will lack the final ity that death carries with it in a culture with a more individualistic, atomistic understanding of the self. What I am saying here is something more radical than the truism that in the Hebrew Bible, parents draw consolation from the thought that their descendants will survive them (e.g., Gen 48:11), just as, conversely, the parents are plunged into a paralyzing grief at the thought that their progeny have perished (e.g., Gen 37:33–35; Jer 31:15). This is, of course, the case, and probably more so in the ancient world, where children were the support of one’s old age, than in modern societies, where the state and the pension fund fill many roles previously concentrated in the family. That to which I am pointing, rather, is that the self of an individual in ancient Israel was entwined with the self of his or her family in ways that are foreign to the modern West, and became foreign to some degree already long ago.

Let us take as an example the passage in which Jacob is granted ‘‘the blessing of Abraham,’’ his grandfather, according to the prayer of Isaac, his father, to ‘‘possess the land where you are sojourning, which God assigned to Abraham’’ (Gen 28:1–4). The blessing on Abraham, as we have seen, can be altogether and satisfactorily fulfilled in Abraham’s descendants. Thus, too, can Ezekiel envision the appointment of ‘‘a single shepherd over [Israel] to tend them—My servant David,’’ who had passed away many generations before (Ezek 34:23). Can we, without derash, see in this a prediction that David, king of Judah and Israel, will be raised from the dead? To do so is to move outside the language of the text and the culture of Israel at the time of Ezekiel, which does not speak of the resurrections of individuals at all. But to say, as the School of Rabbi Ishmael said about ‘‘to Aaron’’ in Num 18:28,1 that Ezekiel means only one who is ‘‘like David’’—a humble shepherd boy who comes to triumph in battle and rises to royal estate, vindicating his nation and making it secure and just—is not quite the whole truth, either. For biblical Hebrew is quite capable of saying that one person is ‘‘like’’ another or descends from another’s lineage (e.g., Deut 18:15; 2 Kgs 22:2; Isa 11:1) without implying identity of some sort. The more likely interpretation, rather, is that Ezekiel here predicts the miraculous appearance of a royal figure who is not only like David but also of David, a person of Davidic lineage, that is, who functions as David redivivus. This is not the resurrection of a dead man, to be sure, but neither is it the appearance of some unrelated person who only acts like David, or of a descendant who is ‘‘a chip off the old block.’’ David is, in one obvious sense, dead and buried (1 Kgs 2:10), and his death is final and irreversible. In another sense, harder for us to grasp, however, his identity survives him and can be manifested again in a descendant who acts as he did (or, to be more precise, as Ezekiel thought he acted) and in whom the promise to David is at long last fulfilled. For David’s identity was not restricted to the one man of that name but can reappear to a large measure in kin who share it.

This is obviously not reincarnation. For that term implies that the ancient Israelites believed in something like the later Jewish and Christian ‘‘soul’’ or like the notion (such as one finds in some religions) of a disembodied consciousness that can reappear in another person after its last incarnation has died. In the Hebrew Bible, however, there is nothing of the kind. The best approximation is the nepes, the part of the person that manifests his or her life force or vitality most directly. James Barr defines the nepes as ‘‘a superior controlling centre which accompanies, exposes and directs the existence of that totality [of the personality] and one which, especially, provides the life to the whole.’’2 Although the nepes does exhibit a special relationship to the life of the whole person, it is doubtful that it constitutes ‘‘a superior controlling center.’’ As Robert Di Vito points out, ‘‘in the OT, human faculties and bodily organs enjoy a measure of independence that is simply difficult to grasp today without dismissing it as merely poetic speech or, even worse, ‘primitive thinking.’’’ Thus, the eye talks or thinks (Job 24:15) and even mocks (Prov 30:17), the ear commends or pronounces blessed (Job 29:11), blood cries out (Gen 4:10), the nepes (perhaps in the sense of gullet or appetite) labors (Prov 16:26) or pines (Ps 84:3), kidneys rejoice and lips speak (Prov 23:16), hands shed blood (Deut 21:7), the heart and flesh sing (Ps 84:3), all the psalmist’s bones say, ‘‘Lord, who is like you?’’ (Ps 35:10), tongue and lips lie or speak the truth (Prov 12:19, 22), hearts are faithful (Neh 9:8) or wayward (Jer 5:23), and so forth.3 The point is not that the individual is simply an agglomeration of distinct parts. It is, rather, that the nepes is one part of the self among many and does not control the entirety, as the old translation ‘‘soul’’ might lead us to expect.4 A similar point might be made about the modern usage of the term person.

[4. It is less clear to me that this is also Di Vito’s point. He writes, for example: ‘‘The biblical character presents itself to us more as parts than as a whole . . . accordingly, in the OT one searches in vain for anything really corresponding to the Platonic localization of desire and emotion in a central ‘locale,’ like the ‘soul’ under the hegemony of reason, a unified and self-contained center from which the individual’s activities might flow, a ‘self’ that might finally assert its control’’ (‘‘Old Testament Anthropology,’’ 228).]

All of the organs listed above, Di Vito points out, are ‘‘susceptible to moral judgment and evaluation.’’5 Not only that, parts of the body besides the nepes can actually experience emotional states. As Aubrey R. Johnson notes, ‘‘Despondency, for example, is felt to have a shriveling effect upon the bones . . . just as they are said to decay or become soft with fear or distress, and so may be referred to as being themselves troubled or afraid’’ (e.g., Ezek 37:11; Hab 3:16; Jer 23:9; Ps 31:11). In other words, ‘‘the various members and secretions of the body . . . can all be thought of as revealing psychical properties,’’6 and this is another way of saying that the nepes does not really correspond to Barr’s ‘‘superior controlling centre’’ at all. For many of the functions here attributed to the nepes are actually distributed across a number of parts of the body. The heart, too, often functions as the ‘‘controlling centre,’’ determining, for example, whether Israel will follow God’s laws or not (e.g., Ezek 11:19). The nepes in the sense of the life force of the body is sometimes identified with the blood, rather than with an insensible spiritual essence of the sort that words like ‘‘soul’’ or ‘‘person’’ imply. It is in light of this that we can best understand the Pentateuchal laws that forbid the eating of blood on the grounds that it is the equivalent of eating life itself, eating, that is, an animal that is not altogether dead (Lev 17:11, 14; Deut 12:23; cf. Gen 9:4–5). If the nepes ‘‘provides the life to the whole,’’7 so does the blood, with which laws like these, in fact, equate it. The bones, which, as we have just noted, can experience emotional states, function likewise on occasion. When a dead man is hurriedly thrown into Elisha’s grave in 2 Kgs 13:21, it is contact with the wonder-working prophet’s bones that brings about his resurrection. And when the primal man at long last finds his soul mate, he exclaims not that she (unlike the animals who have just been presented to him) shares a nepes with him but rather that she ‘‘is bone of my bones / And flesh of my flesh’’ (Gen 2:23).

In sum, even if the nepes does occasionally function as a ‘‘controlling centre’’ or a provider of life, it does not do so uniquely. The ancient Israelite self is more dynamic and internally complex than such a formulation allows. It should also be noticed that unlike the ‘‘soul’’ in most Western philosophy, the biblical nepes can die. When the non-Israelite prophet Balaam expresses his wish to ‘‘die the death of the upright,’’ it is his nepes that he hopes will share their fate (Num 23:10), and the same applies to Samson when he voices his desire to die with the Philistines whose temple he then topples upon all (Judg 16:30). Indeed, ‘‘to kill the nepes’’ functions as a term for homicide in biblical Hebrew, in which context, as elsewhere, it indeed has a meaning like that of the English ‘‘person’’ (e.g., Num 31:19; Ezek 13:19).8 As Hans Walter Wolff puts it, nepes ‘‘is never given the meaning of an indestructible core of being, in contradistinction to the physical life . . . capable of living when cut off from that life.’’9 Like heart, blood, and bones, the nepes can cease to function. It is not quite correct to say, however, that this is because it is ‘‘physical’’ rather than ‘‘spiritual,’’ for the other parts of the self that we consider physical— heart, blood, bones, or whatever—are ‘‘spiritual’’ as well—registering emotions, reacting to situations, prompting behavior, expressing ideas, each in its own way. A more accurate summary statement would be Johnson’s: ‘‘The Israelite conception of man [is] as a psycho-physical organism.’’10 ‘‘For some time at least [after a person’s death] he may live on as an individual (apart from his possible survival within the social unit),’’ observes Johnson, ‘‘in such scattered elements of his personality as the bones, the blood and the name.’’11 It would seem to follow that if ever he is to return ‘‘as a psycho-physical organ ism,’’ it will have to be not through reincarnation of his soul in some new person but through the resurrection of the body, with all its parts reassembled and revitalized. For in the understanding of the Hebrew Bible, a human being is not a spirit, soul, or consciousness that happens to inhabit this body or that—or none at all. Rather, the unity of body and soul (to phrase the point in the unhappy dualistic vocabulary that is still quite removed from the way the Hebrew Bible thought about such things) is basic to the person. It thus follows that however distant the resurrection of the dead may be from the understanding of death and life in ancient Israel, the concept of immortality in the sense of a soul that survives death is even more distant. And whatever the biblical problems with the doctrine of resurrection—and they are formidable—the biblical problems with the immortality that modern Jewish prayer books prefer (as we saw in our first chapter) are even greater.

Di Vito points, however, to an aspect of the construction of the self in ancient Israel that does have some affinities with immortality. This is the thorough embeddedness of that individual within the family and the corollary difficulty in the context of this culture of isolating a self apart from the kin group. Drawing upon Charles Taylor’s highly suggestive study The Sources of the Self,12 Di Vito points out that ‘‘salient features of modern identity, such as its pronounced individualism, are grounded in modernity’s location of the self in the ‘inner depths’ of one’s interiority rather than in one’s social role or public relations.’’13 Cautioning against the naïve assumption that ancient Israel adhered to the same conception of the self, Di Vito develops four points of contrast between modern Western and ancient Israelite thinking on this point. In the Hebrew Bible,

the subject (1) is deeply embedded, or engaged, in its social identity, (2) is comparatively decentered and undefined with respect to personal boundaries, (3) is relatively transparent, socialized, and embodied (in other words, is altogether lacking in a sense of ‘‘inner depths’’), and (4) is ‘‘authentic’’ precisely in its heteronomy, in its obedience to another and dependence upon another.14

Although Di Vito’s formulation is overstated and too simple—is every biblical figure, even David, presented as ‘‘altogether lacking in a sense of ‘inner depths’’’?—his first and last points are highly instructive and suggest that the familial and social understanding of ‘‘life’’ in the Hebrew Bible is congruent with larger issues in ancient Israelite culture. ‘‘Life’’ and ‘‘death’’ mean different things in a culture like ours, in which the subject is not so ‘‘deeply embedded . . . in its social identity’’ and in which authenticity tends to be associated with cultivation of individual traits at the expense of conformity, and with the attainment of personal autonomy and independence.

The contrast between the biblical and the modern Western constructions of personal identity is glaring when one considers the structure of what Di Vito calls ‘‘the patriarchal family.’’ This ‘‘system,’’ he tells us, ‘‘with strict subor dination of individual goals to those of the extended lineal group, is designed to ensure the continuity and survival of the family.’’15 In this, of course, such a system stands in marked contrast to liberal political theory that has developed over the past three and a half centuries, which, in fact, virtually assures that people committed to that theory above all else will find the Israelite system oppressive. For the liberal political theory is one that has increasingly envi sioned a system in which society is composed of only two entities, the state and individual citizens, all of whom have equal rights quite apart from their famil ial identities and roles. Whether or not one affirms such an identity or plays the role that comes with it (or any role different from that of other citizens) is thus relegated to the domain of private choice. Individuals are guaranteed the free dom to renounce the goals of ‘‘the extended lineal group’’ and ignore ‘‘the continuity and survival of the family,’’ or, increasingly, to redefine ‘‘family’’ according to their own private preferences. In this particular modern type of society, individuals may draw consolation from the thought that their group (however defined) will survive their own deaths. As we have had occasion to remark, there is no reason to doubt that ancient Israelites did so, too. But in a society like ancient Israel, in which ‘‘the subject . . . is deeply embedded, or engaged, in its social identity,’’ ‘‘with strict subordination of individual goals to those of the extended lineal group,’’ the loss of the subject’s own life and the survival of the familial group cannot but have a very different resonance from the one most familiar to us. For even though the subject’s death is irreversible—his or her nepes having died just like the rest of his or her body/soul—his or her fulfillment may yet occur, for identity survives death. God can keep his promise to Abraham or his promise to Israel associated with the gift of David even after Abraham or David, as an individual subject, has died. Indeed, in light of Di Vito’s point that ‘‘the subject . . . is comparatively decentered and undefined with respect to personal boundaries,’’ the very distinction between Abraham and the nation whose covenant came through him (Genesis 15; 17), or between David and the Judean dynasty whom the Lord has pledged never to abandon (2 Sam 7:8–16; Ps 89:20–38), is too facile.

Our examination of personal identity in the earlier literature of the Hebrew Bible thus suggests that the conventional view is too simple: death was not final and irreversible after all, at least not in the way in which we are inclined to think of these matters. This is not, however, because individuals were be lieved to possess an indestructible essence that survived their bodies. On the one hand, the body itself was thought to be animated in ways foreign to modern materialistic and biologistic thinking, but, on the other, even its most spiritual part, its nepeˇs (life force) or its n˘eˇs¯amâ (breath), was mortal. Rather, the boundary between individual subjects and the familial/ethnic/national group in which they dwelt, to which they were subordinate, and on which they depended was so fluid as to rob death of some of the horror it has in more individualistic cultures, influenced by some version of social atomism. In more theological texts, one sees this in the notion that subjects can die a good death, ‘‘old and contented . . . and gathered to [their] kin,’’ like Abraham, who lived to see a partial—though only a partial—fulfillment of God’s promise of land, progeny, and blessing upon him, or like Job, also ‘‘old and contented’’ after his adversity came to an end and his fortunes—including progeny—were restored (Gen 25:8; Job 42:17). If either of these patriarchal figures still felt terror in the face of his death, even after his afflictions had been reversed, the Bible gives us no hint of it.16 Death in situations like these is not a punishment, a cause for complaint against God, or the provocation of an existential crisis. But neither is it death as later cultures, including our own, conceive it.

Given this embeddedness in family, there is in Israelite culture, however, a threat that is the functional equivalent to death as we think of it. This is the absence or loss of descendants.

The Master and His Emissary
by Iain McGilchrist
pp. 263-264

Whoever it was that composed or wrote them [the Homeric epics], they are notable for being the earliest works of Western civilisation that exemplify a number of characteristics that are of interest to us. For in their most notable qualities – their ability to sustain a unified theme and produce a single, whole coherent narrative over a considerable length, in their degree of empathy, and insight into character, and in their strong sense of noble values (Scheler’s Lebenswerte and above) – they suggest a more highly evolved right hemisphere.

That might make one think of the importance to the right hemisphere of the human face. Yet, despite this, there are in Homeric epic few descriptions of faces. There is no doubt about the reality of the emotions experienced by the figures caught up in the drama of the Iliad or the Odyssey: their feelings of pride, hate, envy, anger, shame, pity and love are the stuff of which the drama is made. But for the most part these emotions are conveyed as relating to the body and to bodily gesture, rather than the face – though there are moments, such as at the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey, when we seem to see the faces of the characters, Penelope’s eyes full of tears, those of Odysseus betraying the ‘ache of longing rising from his breast’. The lack of emphasis on the face might seem puzzling at a time of increasing empathic engagement, but I think there is a reason for this.

In Homer, as I mentioned in Part I, there was no word for the body as such, nor for the soul or the mind, for that matter, in the living person. The sōma was what was left on the battlefield, and the psuchēwas what took flight from the lips of the dying warrior. In the living person, when Homer wants to speak of someone’s mind or thoughts, he refers to what is effectively a physical organ – Achilles, for example, ‘consulting his thumos’. Although the thumos is a source of vital energy within that leads us to certain actions, the thumos has fleshly characteristics such as requiring food and drink, and a bodily situation, though this varies. According to Michael Clarke’s Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer, Homeric man does not have a body or a mind: ‘rather this thought and consciousness are as inseparable a part of his bodily life as are movement and metabolism’. 15 The body is indistinguishable from the whole person. 16 ‘Thinking, emotion, awareness, reflection, will’ are undertaken in the breast, not the head: ‘the ongoing process of thought is conceived of as if it were precisely identified with the palpable inhalation of the breath, and the half-imagined mingling of breath with blood and bodily fluids in the soft, warm, flowing substances that make up what is behind the chest wall.’ 17 He stresses the importance of flow, of melting and of coagulation. The common ground of meaning is not in a particular static thing but in the ongoing process of living, which ‘can be seen and encapsulated in different contexts by a length of time or an oozing liquid’. These are all images of transition between different states of flux, different degrees of permanence, and allowing the possibility of ambiguity: ‘The relationship between the bodily and mental identity of these entities is subtle and elusive.’ 18 Here there is no necessity for the question ‘is this mind or is it body?’ to have a definitive answer. Such forbearance, however, had become impossible by the time of Plato, and remains, according to current trends in neurophilosophy, impossible today.

Words suggestive of the mind, the thumos ‘family’, for example, range fluidly and continuously between actor and activity, between the entity that thinks and the thoughts or emotions that are its products. 19 Here Clarke is speaking of terms such as is, aiōn, menos. ‘The life of Homeric man is defined in terms of processes more precisely than of things.’ 20 Menos, for example, refers to force or strength, and can also mean semen, despite being often located in the chest. But it also refers to ‘the force of violent self-propelled motion in something non-human’, perhaps like Scheler’s Drang: again more an activity than a thing. 21

This profound embodiment of thought and emotion, this emphasis on processes that are always in flux, rather than on single, static entities, this refusal of the ‘either/ or’ distinction between mind and body, all perhaps again suggest a right-hemisphere-dependent version of the world. But what is equally obvious to the modern mind is the relative closeness of the point of view. And that, I believe, helps to explain why there is little description of the face: to attend to the face requires a degree of detached observation. That there is here a work of art at all, a capacity to frame human existence in this way, suggests, it is true, a degree of distance, as well as a degree of co-operation of the hemispheres in achieving it. But it is the gradual evolution of greater distance in post-Homeric Greek culture that causes the efflorescence, the ‘unpacking’, of both right and left hemisphere capacities in the service of both art and science.

With that distance comes the term closest to the modern, more disembodied, idea of mind, nous (or noos), which is rare in Homer. When nous does occur in Homer, it remains distinct, almost always intellectual, not part of the body in any straightforward sense: according to Clarke it ‘may be virtually identified with a plan or stratagem’. 22 In conformation to the processes of the left hemisphere, it is like the flight of an arrow, directional. 23

By the late fifth and fourth centuries, separate ‘concepts of body and soul were firmly fixed in Greek culture’. 24 In Plato, and thence for the next two thousand years, the soul is a prisoner in the body, as he describes it in the Phaedo, awaiting the liberation of death.

The Great Shift
by James L. Kugel
pp. 163-165

A related belief is attested in the story of Hannah (1 Sam 1). Hannah is, to her great distress, childless, and on one occasion she goes to the great temple at Shiloh to seek God’s help:

The priest Eli was sitting on a seat near the doorpost of the temple of the LORD . In the bitterness of her heart, she prayed to the LORD and wept. She made a vow and said: “O LORD of Hosts, if You take note of Your maidservant’s distress, and if You keep me in mind and do not neglect Your maidservant and grant Your maidservant a male offspring, I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life; and no razor shall ever touch his head.” * Now as she was speaking her prayer before the LORD , Eli was watching her mouth. Hannah was praying in her heart [i.e., silently]; her lips were moving, but her voice could not be heard, so Eli thought she was drunk. Eli said to her: “How long are you going to keep up this drunkenness? Cut out the boozing!” But Hannah answered: “Oh no, sir, I am a woman of saddened spirit. I have drunk no wine or strong drink, but I have been pouring out my heart to the LORD . Don’t take your maidservant for an ill-behaved woman! I have been praying this long because of my great distress.” Eli answered her: “Then go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of Him.” (1 Sam 1:9–17)

If Eli couldn’t hear her, how did Hannah ever expect God to hear her? But she did. Somehow, even though no sound was coming out of her mouth, she apparently believed that God would hear her vow and, she hoped, act accordingly. (Which He did; “at the turn of the year she bore a son,” 1 Sam 1:20.) This too seemed to defy the laws of physics, just as much as Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish, or any prayer uttered at some distance from God’s presumed locale, a temple or other sacred spot.

Many other things could be said about the Psalms, or about biblical prayers in general, but the foregoing three points have been chosen for what they imply for the overall theme of this book. We have already seen a great deal of evidence indicating that people in biblical times believed the mind to be semipermeable, capable of being infiltrated from the outside. This is attested not only in the biblical narratives examined earlier, but it is the very premise on which all of Israel’s prophetic corpus stands. The semipermeable mind is prominent in the Psalms as well; in a telling phrase, God is repeatedly said to penetrate people’s “kidneys and heart” (Pss 7:10, 26:2, 139:13; also Jer 11:20, 17:10, 20:12), entering these messy internal organs 28 where thoughts were believed to dwell and reading—as if from a book—all of people’s hidden ideas and intentions. God just enters and looks around:

You have examined my heart, visited [me] at night;
You have tested me and found no wickedness; my mouth has not transgressed. (Ps 17:3)
Examine me, O LORD , and test me; try my kidneys and my heart. (26:2)

[28. Robert North rightly explained references to a person’s “heart” alone ( leb in biblical Hebrew) not as a precise reference to that particular organ, but as “a vaguely known or confused jumble of organs, somewhere in the area of the heart or stomach”: see North (1993), 596.]

Indeed God is so close that inside and outside are sometimes fused:

Let me bless the LORD who has given me counsel; my kidneys have been instructing me at night.
I keep the LORD before me at all times, just at my right hand, so I will not stumble. (Ps 16:7–8)

(Who’s giving this person advice, an external God or an internal organ?)

Such is God’s passage into a person’s semipermeable mind. But the flip side of all this is prayer, when a person’s words, devised on the inside, in the human mind, leave his or her lips in order to reach—somehow—God on the outside. As we have seen, those words were indeed believed to make their way to God; in fact, it was the cry of the victim that in some sense made the world work, causing God to notice and take up the cause of justice and right. Now, the God who did so was also, we have seen, a mighty King, who presumably ranged over all of heaven and earth:

He mounted on a cherub and flew off, gliding on the wings of the wind. (Ps 18:11)

He makes the clouds His chariot, He goes about on the wings of the wind. (Ps 104:3)

Yet somehow, no matter where His travels might take Him, God is also right there, just on the other side of the curtain that separates ordinary from extraordinary reality, allowing Him to hear the sometimes geographically distant cry of the victim or even to hear an inaudible, silent prayer like Hannah’s. The doctrine of divine omnipresence was still centuries away and was in fact implicitly denied in many biblical texts, 29 yet something akin to omnipresence seems to be implied in God’s ability to hear and answer prayers uttered from anywhere, no matter where He is. In fact, this seems implied as well in the impatient, recurrent question seen above, “How long, O L ORD ?”; the psalmist seems to be saying, “I know You’ve heard me, so when will You answer?”

Perhaps the most striking thing suggested by all this is the extent to which the Psalms’ depiction of God seems to conform to the general contours of the great Outside as described in an earlier chapter. God is huge and powerful, but also all-enfolding and, hence, just a whisper away. Somehow, people in biblical times seem to have just assumed that God, on the other side of that curtain, could hear their prayers, no matter where they were. All this again suggests a sense of self quite different from our own—a self that could not only be permeated by a great, external God, but whose thoughts and prayers could float outward and reach a God who was somehow never far, His domain beginning precisely where the humans’ left off.

One might thus say that, in this and in other ways, the psalmists’ underlying assumptions constitute a kind of biblical translation of a basic way of perceiving that had started many, many millennia earlier, a rephrasing of that fundamental reality in the particular terms of the religion of Israel. That other, primeval sense of reality and this later, more specific version of it found in these psalms present the same basic outline, which is ultimately a way of fitting into the world: the little human (more specifically in the Psalms, the little supplicant) faced with a huge enfolding Outside (in the Psalms, the mighty King) who overshadows everything and has all the power: sometimes kind and sometimes cruel (in the Psalms, sometimes heeding one’s request, but at other times oddly inattentive or sluggish), the Outside is so close as to move in and out of the little human (in the Psalms as elsewhere, penetrating a person’s insides, but also, able to pick up the supplicant’s request no matter where or how uttered). 30

pp. 205-207

The biblical “soul” was not originally thought to be immortal; in fact, the whole idea that human beings have some sort of sacred or holy entity inside them did not exist in early biblical times. But the soul as we conceive of it did eventually come into existence, and how this transformation came about is an important part of the history that we are tracing.

The biblical book of Proverbs is one of the least favorites of ordinary readers. To put the matter bluntly, Proverbs can be pretty monotonous: verse after verse tells you how much better the “righteous” are than the “wicked”: that the righteous tread the strait and narrow, control their appetites, avoid the company of loose women, save their money for a rainy day, and so forth, while the “wicked” always do quite the opposite. In spite of the way the book hammers away at these basic themes, a careful look at specific verses sometimes reveals something quite striking. 1 Here, for example, is what one verse has to say about the overall subject of the present study:

A person’s soul is the lamp of the LORD , who searches out all the innermost chambers. (Prov 20:27)

At first glance, this looks like the old theme of the semipermeable mind, whose innermost chambers are accessible to an inquisitive God. But in this verse, God does not just enter as we have seen Him do so often in previous chapters, when He appeared (apparently in some kind of waking dream) to Abraham or Moses, or put His words in the mouth of Amos or Jeremiah, or in general was held to “inspect the kidneys and heart” (that is, the innermost thoughts) of people. Here, suddenly, God seems to have an ally on the inside: the person’s own soul.

This point was put forward in rather pungent form by an ancient Jewish commentator, Rabbi Aḥa (fourth century CE ). He cited this verse to suggest that the human soul is actually a kind of secret agent, a mole planted by God inside all human beings. The soul’s job is to report to God (who is apparently at some remove) on everything that a person does or thinks:

“A person’s soul is the lamp of the LORD , who searches out all the innermost chambers”: Just as kings have their secret agents * who report to the king on each and every thing, so does the Holy One have secret agents who report on everything that a person does in secret . . . The matter may be compared to a man who married the daughter of a king. The man gets up early each morning to greet the king, and the king says, “You did such-and-such a thing in your house [yesterday], then you got angry and you beat your slave . . .” and so on for each and every thing that occurred. The man leaves and says to the people of the palace, “Which of you told the king that I did such-and-so? How does he know?” They reply to him, “Don’t be foolish! You’re married to his daughter and you want to know how he finds out? His own daughter tells him!” So likewise, a person can do whatever he wants, but his soul reports everything back to God. 2

The soul, in other words, is like God’s own “daughter”: she dwells inside a human body, but she reports regularly to her divine “father.” Or, to put this in somewhat more schematic terms: God, who is on the outside, has something that is related or connected to Him on the inside, namely, “a person’s soul.” But wasn’t it always that way?

Before getting to an answer, it will be worthwhile to review in brief something basic that was seen in the preceding chapters. Over a period of centuries, the basic model of God’s interaction with human beings came to be reconceived. After a time, He no longer stepped across the curtain separating ordinary from extraordinary reality. Now He was not seen at all—at first because any sort of visual sighting was held to be lethal, and later because it was difficult to conceive of. God’s voice was still heard, but He Himself was an increasingly immense being, filling the heavens; and then finally (moving ahead to post-biblical times), He was just axiomatically everywhere all at once. This of course clashed with the old idea of the sanctuary (a notion amply demonstrated in ancient Mesopotamian religion as well), according to which wherever else He was, God was physically present in his earthly “house,” that is, His temple. But this ancient notion as well came to be reconfigured in Israel; perched like a divine hologram above the outstretched wings of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies, God was virtually bodiless, issuing orders (like “Let there be light”) that were mysteriously carried out. 3

If conceiving of such a God’s being was difficult, His continued ability to penetrate the minds of humans ought to have been, if anything, somewhat easier to account for. He was incorporeal and omnipresent; 4 what could stand in the way of His penetrating a person’s mind, or being there already? Yet precisely for this reason, Proverbs 20:27 is interesting. It suggests that God does not manage this search unaided: there is something inside the human being that plays an active role in this process, the person’s own self or soul.

p. 390

It is striking that the authors of this study went on specifically to single out the very different sense of self prevailing in the three locales as responsible for the different ways in which voice hearing was treated: “Outside Western culture people are more likely to imagine [a person’s] mind and self as interwoven with others. These are, of course, social expectations, or cultural ‘invitations’—ways in which other people expect people like themselves to behave. Actual people do not always follow social norms. Nonetheless, the more ‘independent’ emphasis of what we typically call the ‘West’ and the more interdependent emphasis of other societies has been demonstrated ethnographically and experimentally many times in many places—among them India and Africa . . .” The passage continues: “For instance, the anthropologist McKim Marriott wanted to be so clear about how much Hindus conceive themselves to be made through relationships, compared with Westerners, that he called the Hindu person a ‘dividual’. His observations have been supported by other anthropologists of South Asia and certainly in south India, and his term ‘dividual’ was picked up to describe other forms of non-Western personhood. The psychologist Glenn Adams has shown experimentally that Ghanaians understand themselves as intrinsically connected through relationships. The African philosopher John Mbiti remarks: ‘only in terms of other people does the [African] individual become conscious of his own being.’” Further, see Markus and Mullally (1997); Nisbett (2004); Marriot (1976); Miller (2007); Trawick (1992); Strathern (1988); Ma and Schoeneman (1997); Mbiti (1969).

The “Other” Psychology of Julian Jaynes
by Brian J. McVeigh
p. 74

The Heart is the Ruler of the Body

We can begin with the word xin1, or heart, though given its broader denotations related to both emotions and thought, a better translation is “heart-mind” (Yu 2003). Xin1 is a pictographic representation of a physical heart, and as we will see below, it forms the most primary and elemental building block for Chinese linguo-concepts having to do with the psychological. The xin1 oversaw the activities of an individual’s psychophysiological existence and was regarded as the ruler of the body — indeed, the person — in the same way a king ruled his people. If individuals cultivate and control their hearts, then the family, state, and world cold be properly governed (Yu 2007, 2009b).

Psycho-Physio-Spiritual Aspects of the Person

Under the control of heart were the wu3shen2 of “five spirits” (shen2, hun2, po4, yi4, zhi4) which dwelt respectively in the heart, liver, lungs, spleen, and kidneys. The five shen2 were implicated in the operations of thinking, perception, and bodily systems and substances. A phonosemantic, shen2 has been variously translated as mind, spirit, supernatural being, consciousness, vitality, expression, soul, energy, god, or numen/numinous. The left side element of this logograph means manifest, show, demonstrate; we can speculate that whatever was manifested came from a supernatural source; it may have meant “ancestral spirit” (Keightley 1978: 17). The right side provides sound but also the additional meaning of “to state” or “report to a superior”; again we can speculate that it meant communing to a supernatural superior.