Early Israel: Cultic Praxis, God, and the Sôd Hypothesis [1 ed.] 9781003143932

Citation preview

Early Israel

Early Israel offers the most sweeping reinterpretation of the Pentateuch since the nineteenth-​ century Documentary Hypothesis. Engaging a dozen-​ plus modern academic disciplines—​from anthropology, biblical studies, Egyptology and semiotics, to linguistics, cognitive poetics and consciousness studies; from religious studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, to mysticism studies, cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind—​it wrests from the Pentateuch an outline of the heretofore undiscovered ancient Israelite mystical-​initiatory tradition of the First Temple priests. The book effectively launches a new research area: Pentateuchal esoteric mysticism, akin to a “center” or “organizing principle” discussed in biblical theology. The recovered priestly system is discordant vis-​à-​vis the much-​later rabbinical project. This volume appeals to a diverse academic community, from Biblical and Jewish studies to literary studies, religious studies, anthropology, and consciousness studies. Alex Shalom Kohav teaches at the Department of Philosophy, Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the editor of two recent anthologies, Mysticism and Meaning: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2019) and Mysticism and Experience: Twenty-​First Century Approaches (2020), and a co-​editor of A Paradise of Paradoxes: Finite Infinities, the Hebrew God, and Taboo of Knowledge (in preparation). Dr. Kohav is engaged in the long-​term project of developing ancient Israelite philosophy—​the foundational Hebraic/​ Jewish metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and ethics of early-​antiquity Israel. His forthcoming book, Adam, a Kind of Thinker: Freedom Scales as Selves, Worlds, and Thinking Fields (Hebraic Pluri-​Dimensional Perspectives) elaborates an ontology of “worlds” accessible to human beings.

Routledge Jewish Studies Series Series Editor: Oliver Leaman, University of Kentucky

Jewish Studies, which are interpreted to cover the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, culture, politics, philosophy, theology, and religion, as they relate to Jewish affairs. The remit includes texts which have as their primary focus issues, ideas, personalities, and events of relevance to Jews, Jewish life and the concepts which have characterised Jewish culture both in the past and today. The series is interested in receiving appropriate scripts or proposals. Birth-​Throes of the Israeli Homeland The Concept of Moledet David Ohana The Philosophy of Joseph B. Soloveitchik Heshey Zelcer and Mark Zelcer Israeli Theatre Mizrahi Jews and Self-​Representation Naphtaly Shem-​Tov The Environment and Literature of Moral Dilemmas From Adam to Michael K David Aberbach Postmodern Love in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination Negotiating Spaces and Identities Efraim Sicher Early Israel Cultic Praxis, God, and the Sôd Hypothesis Alex Shalom Kohav For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​ middle​east​stud​ies/​ser​ies/​JEW​ISH

Early Israel Cultic Praxis, God, and the Sôd Hypothesis Alex Shalom Kohav

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Alex Shalom Kohav The right of Alex Shalom Kohav to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​69935-​2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​69941-​3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​14393-​2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003143932 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

To Moses our teacher transcriber and transmitter of the Torah and the Way to Israel’s God

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface: The Pretext Acknowledgments Prologue: The Subtext – When Israel Was Young Introduction: The Text – Israel’s Unparalleled Communication across Millennia

ix xi xxv xxvii

1

PART ONE

The Context

17

1 The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt: From the Magic of Hypostatized Spirituality (Egypt) to the Discriminating Paradigm of Non-​Idolatry (Israel)

19

2 At the Primal Scene of Communication: The Question of Israel’s Esoteric Referent

41

3 On the Notion of the Sôd: YHWH’s Garden versus the Rabbinical Orchard

62

PART TWO

The Metatext

85

4 Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System: Accessing the Torah’s Veiled Axis of Communication

87

viii Contents

5 The Sôd as Poiesis: Probing the Sôd’s Poietic-​Tropological Structure and Multiscalar Power Dynamics

113

6 A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch: Israel’s Universe of Discourse; a Replica of the Torah; Acquiring an Apposite Research Method

143

PART THREE

The Urtext

171

7 The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier: Retrieving the Torah within the Scripture

173

8 Israel’s Noematic Signified: Reverse-​Engineering the Pentateuchal Deific Numinous

210

9 The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel: Recovering the Esoteric Referent of Ancient Israelite Initiatory Praxis

233

PART FOUR

The Code-​text

263

10 Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable: Complex Tropological Entextualization Strategies for the Pentateuchal Numinous

265

11 In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis: The Conundrum of the Eleventh Commandment, Eden’s Theater of Ruptured Doxa and Fractured Epistêmê, and Emergence of “Megaphor”

293

Postscript: The Hors-​texte – Are We Greeks?   Are We Jews? Fast-​Forward to Today Bibliography Index

334 343 372

Illustrations

Figures 4 .1 Structural diagram of an esoteric literary work 5.1 The Sôd’s three continua (with three contexts, three semantic fields, and three grounds linked to Jakobson’s factor/​ functions of literary communication) 5.2 Components of the s-​CODE (including communicative actions; referential fields; sign correlates; type of content; representation type; and brief descriptions) 5.3 Grounds, continua, and contexts of the Sôd, hyletic-​noetic-​ noematic framework, and the semiotic triangle of the sign 6.1 The Pentateuchal “universe of discourse” 6.2 A theoretical model of the Pentateuch’s systemic structures and functions 7.1 Noetic signifier ascertained: cognitive-​deictic pointers of the noetic-​inferential continuum 8.1 Spatial diagram of the Sôd’s Noetic signifier: crossing over to the Promised Land 8.2 The Promised Land as “expanded consciousness” and initiate’s head and body as seen from above 8.3 Noematic signified ascertained: content-​communicative locators of the noematic-​conferential continuum 9.1 Kabbalistic Tree of Life (ten sefirot, given in Hebrew) superimposed over the Edenic Tree of Life (=​seven chakras, 1–​7) 9.2 Hyletic referent ascertained: metacommunicative object identifiers of the hyletic-​deferential continuum 11.1 Edenic megaphor-​in-​formation 11.2 Core Edenic and Pentateuchal megaphors

107 114 115 117 144 145 201 213 222 226 236 248 319 325

x  List of Illustrations

Exhibits 7 .1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7 .5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 7.13 7.14 7.15 7.16 7.17 7.18 7.19 7.20 7.21

In the Image of Elohim Elohim as Plural Form (1) Elohim as Plural Form (2) The Zohar on Five Fingers, the Lily, and the Cup of Benediction The Zohar on Extremities of Heaven The Zohar on Elohim The Promised Land Abram, the Hebrew Who Journeys Derivation of the Word “Hebrew” What and Where Is the Promised Land? How to Conquer the Promised Land The Curious Number Seven Pushed by the Hand of God? Joshua: The Great Shout Abimelek, King of Gerar—​and the Wells The Greater Hekhalot: What Is the Purpose of This Water We Found Water—​and He Called It Seven Gerar Was on the Boundary of the Holy Land The Zohar: The Stone over Which Men Stumble Genesis: Thus Esau Despised His Birthright Genesis: Thy Name Shall Be Called No More Jacob but Israel

182 182 183

Comparison of inferential coordinates in three continua

249

183 184 185 187 188 189 191 191 192 193 194 195 196 196 198 198 201 202

Table 9.1

Preface The Pretext

The preface to Early Israel introduces the book’s overall thesis, that the priests of the First Temple in Jerusalem possessed an idiosyncratic, mystical-​ initiatory praxis centered on their ability to enter into and maintain a living, phenomenal relationship with the Supreme Deity, henceforth to be known as the God of Israel, or simply God. The specific thesis bearing most directly on this book’s investigative focus is that the priests embedded an outline of their praxis within the Pentateuch, otherwise known in Jewish lore as the Five Books of Moses or the Torah. The preface further states the book’s contention that the Garden of Eden is about a state of mind, or a state of consciousness, rather than a place or a physical location. Briefly recounted are the immediate circumstances that led to the author’s research underlying the present book, including his undergoing certain personal-​transformational experiences two decades earlier and his doctoral program that followed. The book claims to launch a new interdisciplinary research area, the ancient Israelite esoteric mystical-​initiatory tradition; the latter has been transmitted to us in a communicable form, in an outline, via the Pentateuch. The preface goes on to describe the specific focus and some details of each of the book’s sections and chapters. As the prominent literary theorist Northrop Frye audaciously put it, “Man’s primary duty is to regain as much as he can of his original state: the garden of Eden is gone as a place, but can be regained as a state of mind.”1 The present book, moreover, contends that the Garden of Eden has always been about a state of mind, or a state of consciousness, rather than a place or a physical location. The book’s thesis is that the priests of the First Temple in Jerusalem possessed an idiosyncratic, mystical-​initiatory praxis centered on their ability to enter into and maintain a living, phenomenal relationship with the Supreme Deity, henceforth to be known as the God of Israel, or simply God. Throughout, the book will bear out the following insight by Ziony Zevit, a noted biblical studies scholar: In terms of the idea of deities, it appears to me that for early antiquity, immanence, presence, and availability were presupposed to be the normal situation while distance and transcendence created (practical and)

xii Preface theological difficulties; for (many) contemporary theologians, transcendence is the norm while closeness and immanence raise theological issues.2 The relationship that the founding initiates have forged with what I will be referring to as the mysterium tremendum of Israel’s God (a term I borrow from Rudolf Otto) is anything but distant or transcendent; it epitomizes one of the most intense, intimate, and personal experiences human beings can have. The specific thesis bearing most directly on this book’s investigative focus is that the priests embedded an outline of their praxis within the Pentateuch, otherwise known in Jewish lore as the Five Books of Moses or the Torah—​ the Teaching. The book itself is thus not as much about the Garden of Eden state of mind per se as it is an account of the research that has validated the presence of a conjectured second-​channel narrative stream within the Pentateuch. The proposition defended in the book is the following: the Hexateuch—​that is, the Pentateuch plus the Book of Joshua—​incorporates the results of a concerted effort by the priests of the First Temple in Jerusalem to transmit, in a disguised and roundabout—​yet at the same time in a retrievable, recoverable—​manner their treasured initiatory tradition’s framework. The latter, as we shall see, includes key themes and, remarkably, even some of the vital induction procedures concerning the aimed-​ for ability to enable access to God. That framework also imparts essential guiding signposts of this inimitable Hebraic way to Israel’s God. It is this early or earliest priestly tradition, the book maintains, that underlies the birth and promulgation of Israel’s one-​off spiritual perspective presented to the world, namely, a monotheistic vision of the sole creator-​deity. And it is this initiatory praxis that has driven the numerous, sometimes obscure, or at times out-​and-​out peculiar if not genuinely bizarre Pentateuchal narrative passages, owing to the priority that this second-​channel, mystical-​esoteric communication has had for the authors of this text over the literal or surface story lines. The two narrative channels—​the overt one and the covert one—​are not always coexisting harmoniously next to or, more frequently, within each other. I will briefly recount here the immediate circumstances that led to my involvement with this likely atypical investigation. This private context is relevant, as will be appreciated while the book unfolds, since a particular mind-​state of the reader about things mystical, for example, is either an impediment or, on the contrary, an enabler, so far as his or her chances of grasping the matter are concerned, and so is the nature of the investigator’s mind-​state. First, whereas my doctoral research—​the principal resource for the present book—​took place between 2004 and 2011, benefiting from a uniquely apposite interdisciplinary PhD program available at the time at the Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, it was preceded by almost two decades with my undergoing some remarkable personal-​transformational experiences, without which the research in question could not have come about. At that

Preface  xiii time, I was fresh from a two-​year stint in Paris, where I studied art and wrote poetry. It was now East Hampton, New York—​the oceanside village famed as the home of the late artist Jackson Pollock and of getaway mansions of seasonal celebrities and vacationing tycoons—​where I had built an artist’s studio in this enclave’s more remote, wooded stretch still favored by artists. In the ensuing years I would become an artist myself, producing artwork being born of a stunning solitude and being so close to nature—​above all being saturated by water and sky and light that were everywhere. For an entire year my phone was unplugged, and I saw no one other than the seagulls and an occasional deer. My rapidly expanding consciousness now accommodated a great many psychic forces that compelled one to contend with both benevolent and certain malevolent, or constricting and disturbing, archetypal powers. I will call someday the psychomental state I was experiencing “oceanic consciousness,” after Freud’s similar designation. My artworks endeavored to capture, both symbolically and metaphorically, what I was experiencing as an unfolding series of consciousness transformations, recording in a visual medium some of the stages of my coming into contact with the three-​millennia-​old priestly tradition, with “years” in the titles in reality taking place in a matter of months or even weeks.3 Second, about that contact. As I simultaneously was drawn to the Torah, its pages suddenly and amazingly seemed sort of like the well-​ known Wittgenstein’s duck-​rabbit drawing.4 The Hexateuch seemed to contain, it turned out, two distinct yet intertwined narratives. If one trained one’s eyes exclusively on the literal narration, the other narrative was imperceivable, indiscernible, and unapparent. Yet to me, then—​and that is the point of my sharing these mementos—​this other narrative was in fact effortlessly and rather firmly visible. If anything, as I have realized, it was quite strange that not many appeared to have noticed this alternative, additional narrative within the Torah (excepting the Zohar, parts of which I also read at that time). The Torah had obviously taken advantage of such means as allegories and other literary tactics; two millennia ago, Philo Judaeus, the Alexandrian philosopher, recognized this, too. I was able to put into practice the information I was gleaning from the Torah and a few assorted, germane sources to which I had been led by my heightened, sensitized, and stirred, expanding attention range: the things I was noticing then would normally be outside my awareness loop. At the same time, I was being reassured by the markers and signals implanted in the text of the Torah that further guided me. In this sense, it was a veritable “catch-​22” situation that effectively prevented most readers from seeing the Pentateuch in this revelatory light: one needed to have already acquired a suitably transformed state of consciousness to be able to perceive, or even just notice, this alternative Pentateuchal narrative, yet the guidance for achieving such a state was embedded in that very narrative, making up its esoteric contents. Third, and most consequentially for the present book, not before fully twenty years had passed did I find a proper way to account for what had

xiv Preface transpired earlier. An account, it will be remembered—​which is one of the many translations of the Greek logos that I gave preference to afterward, when I was driven to dwell on the distinction between contemplation and experience—​is always already at a remove from the experience it accounts for. In 2004, I began a doctoral program with the express aim of attempting a critical, scholarly, compelling account not of my experiences per se but of what appeared to be the facts of the presence within the Pentateuch, plus the Book of Joshua, of an unmistakable outline of Israel’s ancient mystical tradition, albeit disclosed in a necessarily figurative manner (as elucidated throughout this book). At the close of the six and a half years of my research, I had produced a dissertation containing almost a thousand double-​spaced pages, with references alone taking up some sixty-​five pages. One of the committee members characterized it as comprising several dissertations in one; the committee as a whole was not amused yet, thankfully, went along indulging me in this investigative extravagance. But the unconventional size was just the beginning of the singular involvedness that attended this research. As I was quickly learning how to be a researcher, with the one unusual but decidedly beneficial, for my purposes, program requirement being that it had to be interdisciplinary, I have—​unlike what would have been expected in the world of strict academic fiefdoms—​let the research go where it would take me. Beginning with the premise of alteration of consciousness being the apparent subject of the concealed esoteric Pentateuchal narrative, I started attending conferences and making forays, by way of pre-​dissertation phasce papers, into the recently formed consciousness studies field that itself was and remains remarkably multidisciplinary. Along with it came the symposia and research papers in biblical studies and religious studies, literary studies, anthropology, cognitive science, and several others. Philosophy was in the picture for me then only as it took part in the “race for consciousness,” as someone described this rapidly growing field, being represented there by philosophy of mind and phenomenology. The present book, as will be seen, remains fully interdisciplinary; situated most conspicuously in literary studies (as the Pentateuchal text—​qua text—​ must necessarily be viewed through the primary lens of literary theorizing), it makes sustained inroads into close to a dozen distinct academic disciplines and fields. Despite engaging their respective methods and perspectives in order to investigate a colossal and massively complex conundrum that cannot possibly be tackled using limited tools, I obviously would not dream of claiming expertise in all of them or in most or even any of them. My claim, rather, is confined effectively to launching a new interdisciplinary research area, namely, the ancient Israelite esoteric mystical-​initiatory tradition transmitted to us in a communicable and unmistakable, if at the same time only an outline and veiled, form via the Pentateuch, the Torah.5 As I now turn to a chapter-​by-​chapter description of the book’s contents and argument, the reader will note, to begin with, that the word “text” has been

Preface  xv permutated and given emphasis in section headings. Specifically, the preface is subtitled “the pretext”; the prologue, “the subtext”; the introduction, “the text.” Part One—​comprising ­chapters 1 through 3—​carries the heading “the context”; Part Two—​consisting of ­chapters 4 through 6—​“the metatext”; Part Three, “the urtext,” including ­chapters 7 through 9; and finally, Part Four, covering Chapters 10 and 11, has been designated as “the code-​text,” with the postscript section styled “the hors-​texte.” This is of course a not-​too-​subtle highlighting of the simple fact of our looking at and focusing on a text, and nothing other than a text. As will become apparent below, this book is a study, a research monograph doggedly pursuing the aim of attaining substantive answers to its stated research questions. To that end, no academic discipline was seen as inadmissible or inaccessible—​as long as the research itself either leads to it directly or will be deemed to benefit from its tools, methods, or perspectives. It was not seen as possible or desirable to attempt to limit the research to one or even just a few areas of scholarly endeavor; the remarkable complexity of the text in question, as well as the challenge that its singular precedent of an extraordinary spiritual, intellectual, and civilizational message transmitted across millennia epitomizes, demanded doing justice to it research-​wise. That meant that any reduction or narrowing of relevant or suggestive factors, other than focusing on the research questions themselves, would have been counterproductive vis-​à-​vis that research. Thus, the book employs the method opposite to reduction, namely, emergence. As will be detailed in Chapter 4, the basic idea of emergence is more or less the converse of that associated with reduction. If the core idea of reduction is that Xs are ‘nothing more than Ys’ or ‘just special sorts of Ys,’ then the core idea of emergence is that ‘Xs are more than just Ys’ and that ‘Xs are something over and above Ys.’6 Here, I would like to respond to a question that has occasionally arisen in the past. Essentially, it runs as follows: since we are dealing with an anachronistic, archaic text of an extremely remote antiquity, does it make sense to apply to it the tools of the latest disciplinary achievements of twenty-​first-​ century Western academia? Surely the Pentateuchal authors, in composing their pious text, knew nothing of these methods and, if shown them, would have understood naught. This question affords me the opportunity to clarify the meaning of the endeavor undertaken in this book. As the philosopher George Berkeley noted, “they who hear the music do not perceive the notes, and they may be entirely ignorant of them.”7 This book is devoted not only to recovering the notes pertaining to the sublime, thunderous music of the Torah, which everyone can hear even if one cannot appreciate the fullness of its awesome power or distinguish the distinct contributions of its full orchestra’s individual instruments. The present book wishes to analyze and explore this music’s frequently impenetrable complexity and perplexing

xvi Preface authority, among other things. Most importantly, it aspires to alert those who listen to the Pentateuchal grand orchestral composition to the existence within it of an exceedingly precious but not usually noticeable, exquisite and mind-​ transforming mysterious and concealed leitmotif, a mystical-​transformational melodic tributary generated for its transmission to future generations. It is this  very melody that is the entire magnificent Pentateuchal composition’s raison-​d’être and one that gives it its inimitable character, incomparable significance, and unparalleled value. The prologue, titled “When Israel Was Young,” presents a somewhat elegiac, nostalgic, perhaps quixotic snapshot of Israel’s beginnings, tying it to two notions especially promulgated by Edmond Jabès, the French-​Jewish writer: the “desert” and the “book.” It is at that earliest of times when Israel entered its destiny-​molding, mountainous Desert. The preoccupation with the Book came later, quite a bit later, and it is already here, especially here, that one ought to grasp the fundamental sequence of events that this author has personally lived through: the experience—​the desert—​comes first, the book, later. The prologue features the voice of God, as portrayed by Eleazar of Worms, a medieval Kabbalist, and closes with an unforgettable report of King David’s dancing before the Lord when the Arc of the Covenant was brought up to the city of Jerusalem, “with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet” (as phrased by Joseph Heller).8 The introduction, “Israel’s Unparalleled Communication across Millennia,” commences the book-​long quest for what it terms the Sôd, which is the Hebrew word for “secret.” It relates to the never-​settled question of an alleged secret esoteric stratum deliberately concealed within the Pentateuch. Kafka’s novel The Trial prompts a different question, which the introduction frames as follows: Who are the rightful gatekeepers of the authentic entryway to the Jewish tradition? Is it rabbinical Judaism, in all their latest offshoots? What about Christianity’s claims? Finally, should not academic scholars be given the mantle of objective guides here? Yet for all these would-​ be gatekeepers, the genuine Judaic tradition remains padlocked with a tamperproof security device, namely, the Sôd. Also broached are such issues as the nature of a literary project—​is it literally false or literarily true?—​and higher-​scalar effects on our pursuit of meaning. The introduction closes with a consideration of Maurice Blanchot’s war cry—​are humans capable of literature?—​and Jacques Derrida’s talk of the “interrogation of all possible interrogations, the interrogation of God.”9 The latter, alleges Derrida, cannot possibly belong to any book. With the first three full chapters, this study establishes the relevant contexts,  endeavoring to extend them, in Chapter 1, backward in time concerning Egypt, whereas in Chapter 3, broadening the contexts forward into the future, in the direction of the rabbinical era. Both the past and the future are seen as illuminating the investigative present of ancient Israelite sensibility, religiosity, and the crucial question of Israel’s God.

Preface  xvii Chapter 1, “The God of Moses versus the ‘One and All’ of Egypt: From the Magic of Hypostatized Spirituality (Egypt) to the Discriminating Paradigm of Non-​Idolatry (Israel),” argues that ancient Egyptian religious sensibility exemplifies what amounted to a ritualized imbuing of objects-​as-​symbols and conceptions with magical significance. In contrast, the ancient Israelite religion markedly defined itself through a rejection of magical consciousness. The chapter evaluates the significance and import of such otherwise loaded terms as “magic” and “idolatry” and offers an examination of the uses of language in ancient Egypt and Israel (pictorial hieroglyphs in the former versus an alphabet-​based system in the latter). Additional scrutiny includes juxtaposition of deified human rulers and hypostatized spiritual entities against exclusive worship of a single, ineffable, and highest-​scalar God; notions such as cosmotheism (“one-​nature”-​based polytheism as well as “one-​nature”-​ based monotheism) versus monotheism of a “beyond-​nature” sole deity; and the distinction between “I am all that is” and “I am who I am.” Crucially, both religions are seen as assuming positions along a selfsame mystical-​ transformational axis—​but at the opposite ends of that axis. Chapter 2, “At the Primal Scene of Communication: The Question of Israel’s Esoteric Referent,” identifies Eden as a quintessential Primal Scene. A question arises as to whether one should view this scene as a Scene of (1) Instruction, (2) Writing, (3) Interpretation, (4) Origins, or (5) Communication. This chapter makes the case that, while all five modes can be operative for a reader, even simultaneously so, only viewing the Edenic scene as a Scene of Instruction (under certain conditions), and particularly as a Scene of Communication, would be true to the authorial intent. The study’s main thesis regarding the alleged secret, or Sôd, stratum within the Pentateuch is presented with the awareness that, although rabbis have always maintained that such a layer exists, its existence has never before been demonstrated definitively or even plausibly. Israel’s esoteric referent emerges as being tied to the mystical-​initiatory praxis of the First Temple priests, a tradition enabling an interscalar, experiential relationship with the God of Israel. Part One concludes with Chapter 3, “On the Notion of the Sôd: YHWH’s Garden versus the Rabbinical Orchard.” This chapter continues the presentation of the notion of the Sôd begun in the introduction, including here its limited, obscure usage in the rabbinical milieu. The Pentateuch’s Garden of Eden represents a stage for introducing God—​a stage that is set up as a primal, paradisaical Garden of God. In an intriguing if a bit bizarre contrast, the rabbinical sense of how to approach the question of Israel’s God is by way of the well-​known acronym that comprises several rabbinical interpretive strategies, including the inaccessible-​to-​the-​rabbis Sôd. It is PaRDeS, which, as a word, stands for “orchard” in Hebrew. If the Garden of God, as this book defends, is the “megaphor” of a YHWH initiate’s evolving consciousness (the neologism is explained in Chapter 11), the rabbinical orchard (or PaRDeS) is metaphorically seen as an “Orchard of the Uninitiated.”

xviii Preface The quintessential rabbinical interpretive approach, the so-​called midrash, is briefly considered, highlighting its failure to receive the tradition of initiatory praxis enabling direct, experiential access to the God of Israel. The chapter then considers the question of numerous traces of the Sôd stratum, adopting the concept of dual-​channel narration from cognitive psychology. Finally, George Herbert Mead’s notions of cooperative communication are invoked in order to give emphasis to the most important, most consequential realization that the single most urgent cooperative-​communicative intent of the Torah is connected to “God.” Next are Part Two’s conceptions of the Pentateuch’s “metatext” and the three chapters dedicated to it. I am using the term meta-​ in its epistemological sense as “an X about X”: that is, in the case of the Pentateuchal text, its metatext would be about the text proper. Ascertaining whether the Sôd stratum exists is this book’s objective and its main research question; to that end, Chapter 4, “Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System: Accessing the Torah’s Veiled Axis of Communication,” proposes eschewing reductionist approaches as being contrary to this task; instead, it opts for an emergence-​based strategy of applying complex systems dynamics in order to develop the required complexity of conceptual frames for the Sôd’s foregrounding. Several notions are introduced that are allied with the study’s approach and deemed critical for grasping, through “defamiliarization,” the study’s highly idiosyncratic subject and its largely counterintuitive conceptualization frameworks. Among the latter are these four: (1) delayed categorization, which the study extends to what it describes as “much-​much delayed,” or deferred, categorization; (2) recognition of the fundamental dichotomy between the author and the reader, which is crucial to the study’s approach and confirmed here via semiotics and, separately, linguistics; (3) the role of the presentational-​representational difference; and (4) the introduction of a “metachronic” approach, one that is a step removed from the text as a meta-​ discourse and that can utilize as needed a diachronic, a synchronic, or a panchronic approach that combines the first two—​all in order to foreground the emergent meta-​account of the concealed stratum. Turning to Chapter 5, “The Sôd as Poiesis: Probing the Sôd’s Poietic-​ Tropological Structure and Multiscalar Power Dynamics,” there begins the exhilarating process of erecting a theoretical model of the Pentateuch, a procedure that will be finalized in the next chapter. Aiming to continue developing the apposite complexity in accordance with an emergence-​based approach, such a course of action presumes two distinct but overlapping domains within the ancient Israelite religion—​one exoteric, the other esoteric—​duly reflected in the Pentateuchal text itself. The specific indications of the presence of a Sôd stratum in the Pentateuchal text are depicted as a combined and fused result of several compositional devices utilized by the authors/​redactors as their text’s poiesis. Foremost among them are literary tools, which in the Pentateuchal text encompass complex literary notions. The Sôd’s preliminary model in this chapter is largely emerging based on textual indications of three separate

Preface  xix strategies related to all of the main semiotic modalities: (1) allegorical, or the poiesis of multiscalar allegorical-​parabolic projection; (2) indexical, or the poiesis of indirect indexicality; and (3) symbolic, or the poiesis of advanced literary-​semiotic means (such as markedness and the asymmetric noetic parallelism discovered by the study); with (4) the iconic, mostly reserved for the mimesis of the “surface” narratives of the Pentateuch. Finally, still in Part Two, Chapter 6, “A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch: Israel’s Universe of Discourse; a Replica of the Torah; Acquiring an Apposite Research Method,” begins by introducing a conceptual-​ structural diagram that maps the Pentateuchal “universe of discourse” first discussed in Chapter 3. From the diagram’s two esoteric quadrants, this book is primarily focusing on the “individual-​esoteric quadrant,” which sketches a précis of what the book will endeavor to unfold throughout its length: the human-​divine interscalar interactions and the issue of the so-​called induction methods enabling such interactions. As a centerpiece of the book, Chapter 6 presents a theoretical model of the Pentateuch, which schematically encapsulates the exceeding complexity of this text. Continuing the still mostly provisional tracking of the Sôd that began in earlier chapters—​ this time in order to develop the necessary discourse apparati, terminology, and approaches—​and using a transdisciplinary approach, the study develops the Pentateuchal theoretical model by constructing and mapping relevant contexts into demonstrata (Figure 6.2). The Pentateuch emerges as a multipurpose entity comprising a multilevel, multicode, multicontext, multi-​ addressee, multimessage textual production. Engaging (1) Husserl’s noetic-​noematic-​hyletic phenomenological framework; (2) semiotic signifier-​ signified-​referent aspects; (3) Jakobson’s factors/​functions of literary texts; and (4) Habermas’s “communicative actions,” the model consists of (i) manifold discursive planes; (ii) multiple contexts, grounds, and semantic fields; (iii) inferential “continuums,” or domains guiding textual data derivation and constraining data analysis; and (iv) methodology using interrogative “inferential coordinates” and a custom-​developed “noetic-​literary” method. Part Three carries the heading “The Ur-​text,” by which I do not intend the biblical studies’ notion of the earliest text of the Hebrew Bible. Rather, whereas the prefix meta-​ is meant to convey a discourse pertaining to the “aboutness” of something, with the prefix ur-​I aim to point to three inherent and pivotal categories underlying the conceiving and subsequent creation of the Pentateuchal text (in Husserl’s terms, the hyletic-​noetic-​noematic structure of an “act of consciousness”), specifically, here necessarily in reverse order for us as readers of texts, the Pentateuchal signifier (Chapter 7), the cultic praxis’s signified (Chapter 8), and its esoteric referent (Chapter 9). The study’s customized methodology of systematically applying the seven chosen interrogative forms—​the Who, the What, the Where, the Whereto, the When, the How, and the Why—​will be employed in all three domains, in order to ascertain each of the three determinants, the signifier, the signified, and the referent. Chapters 7 through 9 systematically ascertain the triple set of meanings

xx Preface of the esoteric, second-​channel narrative communication transmitted within the pages of the Pentateuch. Chapter 7, “The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier: Retrieving the Torah within the Scripture,” is devoted to research proper, which here refers to data acquisition. First, a selection of available textual research methods is reviewed, ultimately choosing cognitive poetics as the basis for developing the study’s customized, necessarily idiosyncratic research methodology. The research phase in Chapter 7 pertains to the de dicto, or the “as written,” and thus to the specific textual passages in the Pentateuch, as well as to relevant interpretive counterparts from secondary sources and critical literature deemed to denote the narrative trail of the conjectured Sôd stratum. The research methodology used in the book is developed entailing seven “interrogatory forms”—​the Who, the What, the Where, the Whereto, the When, the How, and the Why; a triple set of these forms—​called “inferential coordinates”—​are related to each of the three continua that are the domains of the conjectured Sôd stratum. In Chapter 7, these interrogative forms are used for researching the esoteric signifier. Beginning with the W H O [SETTING], the inferential coordinate focusing on identifying a potential primary character within the hypothesized esoteric narrative, the research leads to Israel’s deity. The next two coordinates, the W H E R E T O [SETTING] and the W H Y [SETTING], are determined as being related, respectively, to the “Promised Land” and to one’s unimpeded ability to worship YHWH. Next, the W H AT [SETTING] is ascertained as being related to the concept and the experience of “crossing over,” of which the designation “Hebrew,” ‘ibrî, is indicative. The conquest of the Promised Land dramatically depicted in the Book of Joshua is proposed as the Torah’s apparent indication regarding the H OW [SETTING]. Turning next to the W H E R E [SETTING], the research foregrounds the puzzling, persistent, highly peculiar portrayal of “wells” and well-​digging in the kingdom of Gerar bordering the Promised Land and involving, almost identically, Abraham and Isaac. Finally, the W H E N [SETTING] is identified with Jacob’s pointedly marked life stages. Chapter 8, “Israel’s Noematic Signified: Reverse-​ Engineering the Pentateuchal Deific Numinous,” is devoted to the analysis of the textual research data assembled in Chapter 7. Here, the data are examined, with special attention to the “traces” of the second-​channel narrative manifesting as incongruous, metaleptic “protuberances” within the first channel’s mimetic unfoldment. As the research moves now into the realm of de re, or “of the thing” itself, which here is still not the final referent, the W H Y [TOPIC]—​that is, “the Why” of the noematic signified—​is determined to be about “access to YHWH.” The W HERETO [TOPIC] is likewise tied to one’s ability to access God; it is deemed to be connected to alteration of consciousness. The W H AT [TOPIC] is identified with the journey to the Promised Land, that is, the process of initiation, whereas the WHO [TOPIC] is designated as implicating the would-​be initiate. Ascertaining the WHERE [TOPIC], the reader is facing one of the most counterintuitive of notions, which in the earliest Hebraic esoteric tradition

Preface  xxi is at the same time perhaps the single most zealously guarded secret: namely, the idea of a bodily connection to the issue of access to God. Thus, the W HER E [TOPIC] is the body of the would-​be initiate. Finally, the W H E N [TOPIC] is, or occurs, when one chooses the path of Jacob, the path of the initiate-​of-​ YHWH-​to-​be, whereas the HOW [TOPIC] concerns the all-​important, zealously guarded induction methods and procedures. Chapter 9, “The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel: Recovering the Esoteric Referent of Ancient Israelite Initiatory Praxis,” arrives at the juncture that is this book’s raison-​d’être: establishing whether a concealed stratum exists within the Pentateuch. Here, our concern is with the hyletic designatum, in other words, the ultimate referential “object” of the entire conceptual apparatus that this study has constructed. The question of the WHAT[OBJECT] is provisionally resolved as being related to the following emerging notion: the body as a Tree of Life. Next, the HOW[OBJECT] is determined to be connected to the divine names MIh and MaH, the “great shout” exemplified in the Book of Joshua, and the particular role that hands play. The WHERE[OBJECT] comprises the seven bio-​energy centers (chakras), whereas the WHY[OBJECT], the WHO[OBJECT], and the WHERETO[OBJECT] are deemed related to the would-​be initiate’s transformation of consciousness, an initiated priest of YHWH, and the adept’s striving to serve the God of Israel, respectively. Finally, the WHEN[OBJECT] indicates the moment when access to God first becomes possible; it is signaled by the experiential phenomena occurring in the initiate’s field of vision at such time, specifically, for example, a pastel-​ colored, transparent, streaky veil seemingly overlying one’s entire visual field. Part Four, titled “The Code-​Text,” consists of two final full chapters. As we shall see, the code that is usually or conventionally assumed to be operative in the Pentateuchal text is largely confined to the surface narrative’s lexical, semantic, and syntactic domains. In contrast, in this book’s research, the conjectured second-​channel Sôd stratum is seen as being formed by way of a separate and distinct, special esoteric code—​not in a sense of encoding, however, but in Roman Jakobson’s sense of a communicative factor associated with what he called the metalingual function. This study assumes that it is this s-​C O D E that takes priority and drives the subservient-​to-​it conventional referential code of the literal, or surface, mimetic narration within the Pentateuch. The Sôd thus is indeed a code—​the s-​C O D E —​in accordance with which the Pentateuch has been constructed—​though not a code in the sense of a cipher. Chapter 10, “Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable: Complex Tropological Entextualization Strategies for the Pentateuchal Numinous,” begins with a question: why is figuration practically invisible in the Pentateuchal text? The Pentateuch demonstrates a remarkable ability to “code” ineffability—​that is, to express that which by definition cannot be expressed, most notably by way of language; framing it as mythological is an error as momentous as viewing philosophy as myth. The chapter exposes the complex tropological

xxii Preface entextualization strategies of the Pentateuchal numinous as being a determined and highly skillful stratagem that has a persistent goal of narrating the story of initiation—​ a transition into a mind-​ state that entails access to the God of Israel. It tracks such systematic Pentateuchal tactics as the following: narratives (plots) as a series of states of consciousness in conflict; target domains of key Pentateuchal narratives; characters and locations as series of asymmetric noetic parallelisms; space (places) as settings for a series of scenes of numinous experiences; time (crucial events marking milestones reached on the journey of initiation) as backdrop for a series of expansions of the initiate’s self-​consciousness; and oscillating metalepses of colliding two-​ channel narratives—​one, the visible “surface” one, and the other, a second-​ channel, embedded noetic one. Chapter 11, “In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis: The Conundrum of the Eleventh Commandment, Eden’s Theater of Ruptured Doxa and Fractured Epistêmê, and Emergence of ‘Megaphor,’ ” is the book’s closing chapter. What is the overarching import and meaning of the priests’ extraordinary communication across the millennia? Communicative intent aside, can one access or even just assess the meaning of the praxis per se that the priests were engaged in? This kind of meaning has little to do with narrativity and narratives. The wide-​ranging discussion in this chapter, traversing philosophical, semiotic, linguistic, anthropological, cognitive-​ scientific, neurobiological, and even psychoanalytic domains, sets the stage for articulating the concept of superconsciousness, the realm of the hyperrational and suprasensory. Turning to analyzing God’s epistemic diktat—​ what the book calls the Eleventh Commandment—​the chapter scrutinizes the Edenic narrative’s three paradoxical paradigms: (1) the question of knowing the difference between good and bad; (2) the notion of being or becoming “as gods”; and (3) certainty versus doubt. Capturing the sheer complexity and qualitative distinction the Edenic drama epitomizes by way of some all-​encompassing metaphor or as any other conceivable figure proves futile; instead, the chapter elaborates a novel figurative-​epistemic conception, a tropological edifice designated by a neologism “megaphor” (from the Greek phoros, “bearing,” and megas, “large, great”). The exceedingly complex, composite Edenic megaphor can be distilled to the following: each and every human being is—​in potentia—​a tree of life. Finally, the Postscript—​ the hors-​texte—​ bearing the title, “Are We Greeks? Are We Jews? Fast-​Forward to Today,” addresses, first, the following question regarding earning the right of closure: does the recovered Sôd stratum represent closure for the text of the Pentateuch? The present study has succeeded in changing, in effect, the paradigmatic view of the Torah and its text, broadening the contexts and utilizing or developing a number of supporting tools and textual markers (such as, for example, markedness) that were not engaged previously or not to the same extent as in this study. If another research effort can reverse, annul, subsume, or supersede

Preface  xxiii the present study, it would have to, at the very least, plausibly account for the same textual markers in a different way. Second, noted are certain trends today conveying a yearning for a magical worldview—​as well as for “the divinization of the human”—​conditions that were precisely what the “Mosaic distinction” discussed throughout this book revolted against. Last, invoking Derrida’s “Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who are we?,” the postscript acknowledges that the priestly archetype this book has been invoking throughout, is today no longer in force. The divine consciousness of the sublime adepts of Israel of old has long been supplanted, at one extreme, by the magic-​enthused consciousness of a neo-​Babylonian Jew in some ultra-​ Orthodox circles—​or, more likely encountered today, the politically turned-​ on ersatz irreligious Jew motivated by “repairing the world” fervor, whose simulacrum of a religion is to do good in the world. A telling illustration of the long simmering trouble within the Jewish mind is the story of an unwholesome fascination Jewish cognoscenti have had with Heidegger, a philosopher who did not merely embrace Nazism but also introduced it into philosophy. “We are quick … to confuse obsessive words with key words.”10

Notes 1 Frye, “Repetitions of Jacob’s Dream,” 98. 2 Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 81n2. 3 In that extraordinary period, I was painting multiple series of luminous paintings with titles such as the Limitless Light series, as well as immense canvases called the Time Being cycle, with individual pieces bearing names beginning with The Year of … . They included such works as The Year of the Grand Inquisitor, The Year of Pain and Pleasure, The Year of Self and Not-​Self, The Year of Shadows, Silences, and Whispers of Emptiness, and also, in time, three-​dimensional large-​ scale installations, including The Year of the Name. I discuss this time in more detail in “Artist’s Afterword,” included in a book on my art by Ori Z. Soltes; see Soltes, Ontogeny of Light, 253–​84. 4 See Chapter 2 for more discussion on Wittgenstein’s duck-​rabbit drawing. 5 Before completing the PhD program, I began teaching in a philosophy department at a state university in Colorado. Eventually I started to identify—​in addition to remaining an artist and poet—​as a philosopher, that is to say, in Bergson’s terms, recognizing the existence within me, since my early twenties, of a distinctively personal, intuitive insight into the scheme of things one might call reality. What’s left is the trifling matter of transcribing that exceptionally real, vivid intuition into a readable format, or a text (easier said than done). 6 Van Gulick, “Reduction, Emergence and Other Recent Options,” 17. 7 Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), 55 (sec. 71). 8 Heller, God Knows, 262. 9 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 78. 10 Jabès, Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, 60.

Acknowledgments

My thanks, first, to Oliver Leaman, the series editor of Routledge Jewish Studies, who has welcomed my work. (I wish to thank Michael T. Miller for the initial introduction.) The anonymous reviewer for Routledge, whose unstinting praise has made this publication possible, deserves my eternal gratitude. My editor, Joe Whiting, and his assistant Grace Rollison, have been both accommodating and helpful throughout. A very special thanks go to my copyeditor, Maureen C. Bemko. A study of this nature—​multidisciplinary and at the same time endeavoring to break new ground—​could not have originated in a vacuum. The long list of cited references alone should give an indication of just how much I have been relying on, and standing on the shoulders of, so many significant and in many cases exceptional authors. The appreciation of their work that I hold is genuine and perhaps palpable throughout this book; my hope is that my own efforts will serve others similarly. Among several seminal thinkers whose work in particular aided this research by providing key strategic perspectives—​ including those pertaining to my gaining entry to various disciplinary tools and understandings—​ I want to mention the following theorists: Roman Jakobson, M. A. K. Halliday, and Paul Thibault (linguistics, semiotics); Charles Peirce and Umberto Eco (semiotics); Claude Lévi-​Strauss, Mary Douglas, and Roy Rappaport (anthropology); Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade (religious studies); Angus Fletcher, Harold Bloom, and Paul de Man (literary criticism); Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jacques Derrida (philosophy); Ziony Zevit (biblical studies); George Lakoff (cognitive linguistics); Aryeh Kaplan (Kabbalah); Roland Fischer and Harry Hunt (mysticism studies, consciousness studies); Jacob Neusner and Michael Fishbane (Jewish studies); Jan Assmann (Egyptology); Wilfred Bion (psychoanalysis); Reuven Tsur (founder of cognitive poetics); and Bernard Baars (experimental and cognitive psychology, consciousness studies). Hundreds more offered, through their respective works, continuous reinforcement. It goes without saying that my adapting or building upon these authors’ findings or stances does not entail their being responsible for the kind of use I have put them to, nor how I have applied them, nor for the results I have obtained while engaging them.

xxvi Acknowledgments I was fortunate to have been able to interact personally with a few from the above list; each has impacted my sense of the direction the research was taking at the time. Ziony Zevit and Paul Thibault were, at different times, my doctoral committee members; their invaluable and generous input during that time is reflected, throughout this book, in the numerous quotes both from their published works, as well as in excerpts from direct communications with me; typically, they clarified some perplexing issue or offered an illuminating perspective. Reuven Tsur, an Israel Prize recipient, has challenged me in his emails from Jerusalem and during my several meetings with him there. Bernard Baars was an inspiration at the consciousness conferences in Tucson and elsewhere. Harry Hunt, a leading theorist of mystical states of consciousness, will be a key contributor to my two edited volumes on that subject; his research had much to offer during the formative stages of my investigation. From among the other members of my committee, I wish to thank, here again, Sheldon (Shaya) Isenberg, Burton Voorhees, Anna Whiteside-​St. Leger Lucas, Brian (Les) Lancaster, and Beverly Rubik, my Union Institute core advisor. Their taking part in my journey has meant that it has been made both viable and real. And it has been a journey, a captivating and gratifying journey, if also arduous and frustrating in the periods when I was clueless. This unconscious conceptual metaphor—​ journey—​ faulty though it may be so far as such metaphors go, does indicate that I have been compelled to explore or sometimes endure many places in order to get to this point—​this book—​including both physical places such as disparate countries and locales, as well as diverse intellectual destinations. My family, and especially my dear wife Julia, have been supportive ever since we became a family. Last but not least, I gratefully and humbly acknowledge the higher power that has seen fit to entrust me with this very journey and has patiently but firmly steered me along this way. The book is dedicated to the memory of Moses, the greatest Kabbalist the world has ever hosted, or ever will. 1 January 2022 Boulder, Colorado

Prologue The Subtext – When Israel Was Young

“Thou shalt not make a book in the image of the Book, for I am the only Book.” This command comes by way of Edmond Jabès, the post-​Holocaust French-​Egyptian Jewish writer. “ ‘Any book unable to resist events is no book,’ he had said.” Jabès didn’t say who the “I” or the “he” was—​though the first statement, being styled like the Ten Commandments, gives us a clue regarding the “I.” Also, “The desert has no book.”1 Jabès intimates, however, that there is a direct link stretching out from the desert to the Book: It seems to me that the essential metaphor in Genesis, the metaphor of the sand, has not been gone into deeply enough. It is only in the desert, in the dust of our words, that the divine word could be revealed. A nakedness, a transparency of the word we have to recover each time if we are to preserve the hope of speaking. Wandering creates the desert. •​ •​

You mean to say that the desert is the true place of the word? Yes. The word has the right to dwell only in the silence of other words. To speak means first to lean on a metaphor of the desert; it means to occupy a whiteness, a space of dust or ash, where the victorious word offers itself in its emancipated nakedness.2

The desert is something that writers on esoteric or mystical subjects often liken to the state of mind of a would-​be mystagogue or initiate, when transitioning from a life that is profane to one of sacredness, mystery, and transvaluation of values and beliefs. When Israel was young—​was still but a runaway mix of confused, complaining, sunken Adams and Eves, mentally and spiritually enslaved yet yearning for limitlessness and light-​bursting timelessness, each carrying with them their tightly constricted consciousness and lower-​ egoic self-​consciousnesses and still being hampered by the delicious chains of the unsanctified, opinionated, all-​knowing existence that they have run away from, from their instinctual, pedestrian, consumerist life ruled by the iron-​fisted collective pharaoh of their alter egos, the colossal androgynous father/​mother of necessities and desires—​it is at that very time that Israel has entered its destiny-​molding, mountainous Desert.

xxviii Prologue We can see, right here, that Israel’s initiatory Desert is not about shifting sands, as the blessed Jabès would imagine. Rather, it entangles the hardness of Sinai’s stone with the harshness of wildness and desolateness, with aridity and terrifying aloneness and forlornness. Waterlessness and its converse, the presence of life-​giving water, will remain a recurring motif in Jews’ Scripture. So will barrenness and desolation, later to be conflated with devastation and ruination when the unbending Divine rule would be exacting Its due for transgressions of the sacred covenant. It is here, however, in the Desert, that the petrifying aloneness will, as part of the initiatory process of self-​ transformation, be transmuted and morphed into solitude. At first this is a life-​affirming, glorious, stunning, rousing solitude. Later, when this exquisite solitude and unspeakable silence—​delightful, delectable silence—​have permeated their consciousnesses and every cell of their bodies, a certain “presence” appeared, a sort of thing that takes away one’s breath and also forever takes away one’s by now already precious solitude. They won’t be deserted ever again; they’ll have the company of the Most High. The Israelites, the scared, motley, wide-​eyed bunch of ragtag slaves now intoxicated by solitude and silence and the sheer breathless beauty of that desolate mountain wilderness, experience something, or somebody, entering their very bodies, every cell of their bodies, their very consciousnesses. Not a case of possession, however. Rather, one of exhilaration, of wondrous joyfulness a bride or groom might experience, fully grasping that from that moment on they will not be alone again, nor independent, anymore. Living on clouds of bliss and blessedness, in an ecstasy of intimate, innermost companionship. This seventh heaven, they are discovering, comes with some truly incredible gifts. (Pace one of the British empiricists—​the one-​of-​a-​kind eighteenth-​ century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, who has occasioned the following offhand analogy in the heat of philosophical rapture, at once giving rise to two separate blunders: “to expect that by any multiplication or enlargement of our faculties, we may be enabled to know a spirit as we do a triangle, seems as absurd as if we should hope to see a sound.”3 One’s faculties, while ambling in such a heavenly desert, may indeed both multiply and enlarge, as well as produce experiential, synesthetic sensations whereby one may in fact see sounds.) These scruffy, ragged Israelites—​now intoxicated with the kind of drink those in love are imbibing—​see not only sounds. They see the voice of God within flames of fire and, in the midst of fire, the letters of God’s voice. As portrayed by Eleazar of Worms, a Kabbalist living in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, “One people has heard the Voice of God speaking out of fire”: He mixes His Voice with the fire and the Voice issues from flame and its form appears against the cloud like a word issuing from a mouth—​cut-​out and sculpted as it were—​by creating a displacement of air. …

Prologue  xxix The Voice issues from the Glory with great force. An angel receives it in his hands, flies with it to the seven angels who are found at the seven gates of the seven heavens, voice after voice, and the last one takes it—​now faint—​ and transmits it to the angel-​messenger. This is the daughter of the Voice, the Voice of the Voice. … As for the Sinai revelation, the Israelites saw the letters inscribed in the Voice: The Voice of God ploughed the flames of the fire; since the letters of the Voice were graven into the tablets like a seal in wax. One people has heard the Voice of God speaking out of fire, as you have heard it. The Voice was divided (and made visible) into seventy languages, but other people did not lend their ears to the visible voice: as you have heard it.4 They have experienced something Israel as a whole will never forget, down through the generations now stretching to three millennia. It is in the genes of every Jew, even one who is proudly irreligious or who is so assimilated that he or she does not even suspect any connection to Jews’ lot. Let us call it qôl Adonai, the Voice of the Lord. The reader will observe how the Hebrew qôl matches the English word call. God’s call. Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book. Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. … To be is to-​be-​in-​the-​book, even if Being is not the created nature often called the Book of God during the Middle Ages. “If God is, it is because He is in the book.”5 Well, yes, the book again. There has to be the Book, or else God—​who did reveal His awesome presence, so much so that His voice, His call, is still heard even now, if one only has the right kind of ears, ears that are more like inner violins—​will imperil the chance that He’ll ever be found. But what of the commandment annunciated by St. Jabès, “Thou shalt not make a book in the image of the Book, for I am the only Book”? A conundrum such as this can only be resolved if it is God Himself who’ll originate the Book. All other books aspiring to be the Book are but so many spurious fabrications and, effectively, idolatries. Harsh, but true.

xxx Prologue “Books are always books of life (the archetype would be the Book of Life kept by the God of the Jews) or of afterlife (the archetype would be the Books of the Dead kept by the Egyptians).”6 Will this God of the Jews be compassionate enough to give us—​the puny, inadequate, wretched, pitiful, not infrequently simply despicable humans—​His Book? Why would He? Should He? “ ‘We speak to break our solitude; we write to prolong it,’ he said.”7 “What is a sacred book? What confers on it the character of the sacred? … Would a book of knowledge be a sacred book? No, because knowledge is human.”8 Finally, “the sacred remains the unperceived, the hidden, the protected, the ineffaceable... Sacred. Secret.”9 The book, even the Book of God, has been written down by Moses, the foremost Kabbalist that ever walked this earth. Or, alternatively, by the priests of YHWH, the Kohanim of the First Temple in Jerusalem built by King David’s son, King Solomon. The Ark of the Covenant—​fashioned during one of the rests amid the meandering in mountainous desert, during distraught wanderings at Sinai intermingled with frenziedly exuberant and recurrently blissful moments of awe and serenity—​contained the Tablets of Commandments and featured two cherubs. The Ark, with its two Cherubim, was centuries later carried into the Temple and placed in the Holy of Holies. A generation earlier, it was ceremoniously brought up to the city of Jerusalem, “with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.”10 Here’s how Joseph Heller, the one-​off originator of the idiom we all have learned to utter from time to time when referring to some hopeless state of affairs as being a “catch-​ 22,” describes this most festive day. It was the day when “all Israel played before the Lord,” the day which King David recalls as the time he “danced before the Lord with all my might”: And then the celebration began. All Israel played before the Lord that day. Even I was carried away and sang hallelujah more times than I can remember. We played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals. You never heard so much music or saw so much rejoicing as there was on the day we brought the ark of the covenant up into the city with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet. There was never such music and such song and such shouting for joy since the spirit of God first moved upon the face of the waters and He said: “Let there be light.” And there was light. And there was I, right out in front, leading them all, dancing before the Lord. I danced before the Lord with all my might, clothed in a robe of fine linen and girded with a linen ephod.11 Has the world ever known a king like that? Still, dancing alone won’t get you intimacy with God’s mysterium tremendum, or else the rabbis—​who are known for high-​spirited dancing before the Lord, with arms raised or hugging the Torah scrolls—​would not have pronounced that prophecy has ceased in Israel. “The Book of God remains the undeciphered Book,” asserts the

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Prologue  xxxi incorrigible Jabès.12 The rabbis will disagree, no doubt; academic scholars, just this once, will concur with the rabbis, though for different reasons. “Could there be a sun for the dark? It would not be a star, but a blazing secret.”13

Notes 1 Jabès, Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, 44, 21, 7, respectively. 2 Jabès, From the Desert to the Book, 68. 3 Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, sec. 142 (original emphasis). 4 Eleazar of Worms, “Book of Words,” n.p. Line arrangements are mine. 5 Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” 75–​76. The italicized passage in quotation marks is by Edmond Jabès, from his Livre des Questions (1990). 6 Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” 78. 7 Jabès, Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, 30. 8 Ibid., 44–​45 (emphasis added). 9 Ibid., 50. 10 Heller, God Knows, 262. 11 Ibid., 262–​63. 12 Jabès, Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, 51. 13 Ibid., 44.

Introduction: The Text Israel’s Unparalleled Communication across Millennia

This book is a “project in recovering a lost religious moment in history.”1 It investigates an obscure subject associated as much with mystery and legend as with hearsay and, hardly incidentally, a lack of germane understanding. The subject in question pertains to the nature of ancient Israelite cultic religion, one that engendered the Pentateuch, or the Torah, “the Teaching.” Specifically, it concerns the never-​settled question of an alleged secret esoteric stratum deliberately concealed within this hallowed text. The book as a whole focuses on the following query: Does such a channel—​this study dubs it the Sôd, the Hebrew for “secret”—​exist? “What to do in order that the secret remain secret? How to make it known, in order that the secret of the secret—​as such—​not remain secret?”—​is how Jacques Derrida depicts the quandary, which comes close, though not quite as this book conjectures, to what the priests have been challenged with.2 The actual difficulty was not hiding the “secret of the secret” per se; that the authors of the Pentateuch have accomplished only too well. Instead, the dilemma entailed a simultaneous enforcement of safeguarding the secret itself and at the same time providing the keys to its discovery—​and recovery. The almost miraculous answer to this seemingly impossible mission taken up by the priests—​what with their conflicting priorities that simultaneously resisted a disclosure of their most precious initiatory lore yet also desired to give a means for its preservation, if a horrendous disaster should ever pay a visitation upon the Holy Temple—​is the Torah, or the text of the Pentateuch. The unaccounted-​for mystery of ancient Israelite religion—​one that Harold Bloom frames as follows: Judaism, like Christianity, is a belated religion: both stem from the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. … The great puzzle remains: what was the archaic Jewish religion? The Kabbalistic answer always has been that Kabbalah was, which is both impossible and yet intriguing —​is given, it is hoped, a cogent resolution by the present book.3 There has in fact been, and still endures in potentia, Israel’s originating or foundational DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-1

2  Introduction: The Text mysticism, the earliest and, as this book contends, most authentic and most powerful of all subsequent Kabbalahs. If this book succeeds in accomplishing the aims it has been tasked with, it is this Pentateuchal mysticism—​I propose to call it Mosaic Kabbalah—​that will be seen as being Israel’s most precious inheritance.4

Gatekeepers of Jewish Ancestral Tradition In Kafka’s novel The Trial the main character’s perpetual inability to get through what this fictional masterpiece calls the “Gate of the Law” could be seen, I contend—​whether intended so by Kafka or not—​as allegorically portraying the failure of countless investigators throughout millennia to “break the code” of the Pentateuchal text as a whole. What is the “Law” in question that the notorious parable in The Trial talks about? Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he can’t grant him admittance now. The man thinks it over and then asks if he’ll be allowed to enter later. “It’s possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not now.” … The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. He sits there for days and years. … Finally his eyes grow dim and he no longer knows whether it’s really getting darker around him or if his eyes are merely deceiving him. And yet in the darkness he now sees a radiance that streams forth inextinguishably from the door of the Law. He doesn’t have much longer to live now. Before he dies, everything he has experienced over the years coalesces in his mind into a single question he has never asked the doorkeeper. He motions to him, since he can no longer straighten his stiffening body. … “What do you want now,” asks the doorkeeper, “you’re insatiable.” “Everyone strives to reach the Law,” says the man, “how does it happen, then, that in all these years no one but me has requested admittance.” The doorkeeper sees that the man is nearing his end, and in order to reach his failing hearing, he roars at him: “No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I’m going to go and shut it now.”5 The “Law” has a door as well as a doorkeeper; the parable—​told to the novel’s protagonist Josef K.—​features a hapless “man from the country” who ends his life without having had the chance to “enter the Law” through that door. Enter expecting what? And is this “Law” some kind of legal world—​since, after all, Josef K. is himself undergoing a rather mystifying and ominous trial? Or is it what, in the Christian tradition in particular, was reserved for the Hebrew Scriptures’ religious observance commandments, calling them “the Law”? In the Jewish tradition today, the Pentateuchal text is perceived more readily as the Torah, that is, “the Teaching.”6 Whether Kafka intended to

Introduction: The Text  3 designate “the Law” as the scriptural Torah, which historically, theologically, and culturally has always been seen as the foundational text of the Hebraic-​ Israelite-​Jewish tradition, is of course a fascinating question. Regardless, the parable is a rather remarkable reflection of the predicament that is faced by a typical inquirer—​“from the country,” as Kafka says, or from a city, from the Jewish community or a Gentile one, from an academic milieu or otherwise—​when, as part of one’s search for life’s significance, amid the abundant offerings of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions, one might attempt to go through “the door” of the Torah and thereby enter the Judaic tradition. By now there are more than a few such doors, with each claiming to be the authentic entryway to the Jewish tradition. This fact alone ought to make a careful seeker or an alert investigator apprehensive. Rabbinical Judaism—​disregarding for the moment all the different Jewish religious denominations of today that fall under this umbrella designation and not infrequently are rather antagonistic vis-​à-​vis each other—​ is not merely “a door” to the Teaching; the rabbis, especially those of the more orthodox varieties, consider themselves to be the “doorkeepers” and the sole rightful inheritors of what they see as their birthright, namely, the ancient Israelite legacy. Christianity, a complex, idiosyncratic religious tradition in and of itself and possessing its own dedicated scripture, the New Testament, likewise claims to be the door to the Hebrew Teaching through its original thesis of supersession of the Pentateuchal covenant by itself, the younger progeny. At the same time, it insists on its connection with the parental Old Testament still being fully intact. Finally, the academic universe, as well, aspires to the status, if not of gatekeepers to this or any other tradition per se, then—​keeping still with the metaphors of Kafka’s parable—​of being their “inspectors general.” That such claims are, strictly speaking, unsustainable, will be seen after one reviews the discussion in Chapter 8 pertaining to the question of “insider” versus “outsider” (with still finer distinctions possible, such as “insider-​ insider,” “insider-​outsider,” and “outsider-​outsider” combinations).7 It is quite true that they are all “doorkeepers,” yet the doors in each case open only to their own respective traditions. In the case of the academy, it is an institution that hardly embraces the notion of the inimitability as well as absolute necessity of initiation, or sanctioned, prescribed experiential access into a religious civilization as complex and sophisticated as the early-​antiquity Israelite one.8 Rabbinical tradition, for its part, can only be seen as being that of an “insider-​ outsider”—​that is, while ostensibly on the inside as Jews per se, nonetheless outside the priestly tradition that spawned both the Temple sacrificial cult and the Pentateuchal text. The Pharisees, or protorabbis, that is, the professed sages who came from all walks of life, were in rather hostile relations with the Sadducees (or the priestly class).9 Therefore, they could not hope to inherit from the latter that which this study assumes to having been in the priests’ exclusive possession, namely, the hereditary inner-​core wisdom, know-​how, and praxis of the ancient Israelite cultic religion.

4  Introduction: The Text It came down to the question of what is deeper and more profound, as well as more real. Is it that which can be obtained by sages’ own wits, without the benefit of the tradition, or only peripherally so, and the associated praxis understood only superficially? Or is the true depth lying with this praxis itself, with its attendant privileged information detailing the minutiae of idiosyncratic initiatory requirements and milestones of the initiate’s path, along with the resultant unprecedented knowledge of one-​of-​a-​kind spiritual realities, including the experiential reality of the Israelite God? This book contends that in the contest of human wits, no matter how endlessly ingenious, or wonderfully nifty, or deeply rational (or, to the contrary, irrational, as the case may have been when their turn came) the rabbis’ claim has been—​as, for example, in a self-​satisfying, well-​known midrash portraying Moses visiting the rabbis’ elevated, mind-​bending discussions and him learning at their feet, so to speak—​it is nothing short of preposterous. The ability to experientially access God, to have a relationship with God—​a phenomenal relationship with that which personifies Awe and Woe, the ultimate mysterium tremendum, as opposed to a reverential supplicatory worship, say, via prayers and breast-​ beatings—​makes it clear that there is no contest between the two implicated perspectives and praxes. As is reasoned in this book, even if the priests would have wished to transfer to the eventually victorious—​both politically and socially—​rabbis Israel’s precious legacy, such esoteric knowledge cannot simply be “transferred,” as, for example, by way of some files, scrolls, books, and so on. The original authors of the Pentateuchal text, as argued in Chapter 4, during the First Temple times, and thus a great many centuries prior to the precarious and ultimately disastrous situation that arose at the close of the Second Temple’s functioning, decided to embed their inner-​core knowledge within the very text that is our focus, the Pentateuch.10 The impetus for such an act—​and the rationale for my positing it—​is that it stands to reason that they wished to disaster-​proof their precious legacy, thereby avoiding the fate of contemporary civilizations such as those of Egypt and Greece whose knowledge, and especially esoteric knowledge, is largely lost to us. From their Southern Kingdom of Judea, from the sacred, elevated precincts of Jerusalem’s First Temple, they witnessed what happened to their fraternal Hebraic Kingdom of Israel, once combined into the United Monarchy under David and Solomon. Heartbreakingly and catastrophically, fully ten of the twelve Israelite tribes disappeared from the face of the earth when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was ravaged by the Assyrians in 722 BC E .

“Fiction of Actuality”: Literally True—​or Fictionally True? If Israel’s God is merely an abstraction, albeit one known to have been ardently worshiped by the ancient Israelites—​which is typically the conceptual base platform found, for example, in biblical studies—​and if what is seen as being really important are, instead, the cultural, generic-​religious, ethnographic,

Introduction: The Text  5 and historicizing achievements of the ancient Israelite civilization—​however noteworthy or even exceptional these may have been—​then, as the present book emphasizes, we are not only getting just a part of the story of ancient Israelite religion and civilization. Worse, we are also getting a distorted, perhaps flawed or even fallacious picture of it.11 Specifically, if we consider “God” solely as an abstraction—​ rather than as the all-​ powerful, highest-​ scalar agency capable of inducing awesome/​awful mysterium tremendum experiences in humans—​then the following three crucial aspects of the ancient Israelite cultic religion, and of the Pentateuch as reflective of the latter, have either been underappreciated, overlooked altogether, or misconstrued tout court. These are, in the order presented below, the questions of mysticism, history, and literature: (1) “Mysticism,” if seen as being completely absent from the ancient Israelite religion and specifically from the pages of the Pentateuch (2) “History,” as encountered in the Hebrew Bible, if regarded either as literally true or literarily false—​without, that is, a more germane grasp of issues and forces involved (3) “Literature,” if it is perceived as being merely fiction, missing the vigorous promise and inimitable role of this uniquely communicative and intellectualizing medium—​thus hardly appreciating that our very mind and its manner of cognitive construal of meaningful accounts of everything it encounters, whether inwardly or in the outside world, is, quite literally, literary in its essence.12 Regarding the first issue, this book problematizes it, making it its principal research question. In particular, the book examines what is involved in having a pseudo-​dichotomy between two conceptual domains, religion and mysticism, focusing on the problematics of (a) a conspicuous absence of overt personal-​ subjective-​ experiential mysticism in the Pentateuch and (b) the failure of existing scholarship to attempt to account for this atypical absence. The second and third issues listed above, while discussed ad nauseam in the literature in many often unrelated or not cross-​referenced sources, are—​the present study signals—​hardly resolved in a way that can satisfactorily account for the textual phenomenon that we shall continue to call, conventionally, the Pentateuch (or the Hexateuch if, intending to highlight the indispensable inclusion of the Book of Joshua within “the Teaching”). From the standpoint of the present book, if the biblical studies have traditionally emphasized the historical as either “literally true” or, conversely, “literarily false,” literary studies, in contrast, have long been engaged in a “war of emancipation,” so to speak, arguing for the “fictionally true” standpoint and staking out a position independent of history or other such factors, be they social, political, or economic, which, it has been argued, are nonliterary per se.13 Such a stance, however, was itself assaulted several decades ago by the so-​called New Historicism in literary studies.14 As to biblical studies, the recent couple of decades saw

6  Introduction: The Text a chasm developing between the “revisionists,” on the one hand, who discount as mere literary fiction or “fictionalized history” the history-​bound narratives of the Pentateuch and who insist that it was a rather late literary fiction at that.15 The more level-​headed mainstream, on the other hand, on linguistic and other hard-​to-​dismiss grounds, objects to the late dating of the Pentateuch.16 Yet this mainstream narrative, nonetheless, in accordance with the prevailing historicist dogmatism, essentially yields to what it perceives as an overwhelming pressure, in cases where the lack of archaeological and other independent evidence confirming the biblical accounts is brought to bear, especially relative to the Exodus and the Conquest narratives.17 My aims in this regard will be to ascertain, to the maximal extent required by the text under consideration—​the Pentateuch—​how the traditionally elusive nature of the literary project is precisely an ideal, as well as perhaps the only possible vehicle for carrying out the Pentateuchal authors’ intentions apropos of their “Derridean” dilemma noted earlier.18 At the same time, it is largely incidental to my purposes to seek the determination of whether the notion of “historical truth” can be updated and brought closer to the twenty-​ first century—​a task already begun by figures such as the historian Pierre Nora, the historian and literary theorist Hayden White, and the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, with biblical studies now also anticipating a change (as framed here by Ziony Zevit): The physicality and sensuality of the volcanic eruption of Thera, of Ahab’s death, and of the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem are gone. Each event, however, is redivivus in the hypothetical reality of the historical account which expresses the “fiction of actuality.” … Contemporary scholarship lacks a poetics of history writing.19

Of Higher-​Scalar Effects A resource-​ imaginative approximation might be offered as regards that which would be missing—​in terms of an investigation of a deeply mystical, spiritually saturated tradition that has broken new ground by instituting a communal worship of what it will call the living God of Israel—​if one were to study such a tradition without a proper grasp of the notion of the living God. First, the linguist and semiotician Paul Thibault describes in semiotic terms how “meaning-​ making activity” is guided by higher-​ scalar forces at work (here building upon Stanley Salthe’s Development and Evolution): Meaning-​ making activity, or semiosis, is cross-​ coupled to physical-​ material processes which constitute the substrate of semiosis. By the same token, the activity is guided and modulated along its trajectory by

Introduction: The Text  7 higher-​scalar semiotic constraints that arise in the symbolic (e.g. semantic) neural space of the individual until activity’s completion.20 Philosopher Henri Bergson invokes, in effect, a similar sentiment: Parents and teachers seemed to act by proxy. We did not fully realize this, but behind our parents and our teachers we had an inkling of some enormous, or rather some shadowy, thing that exerted pressure on us through them. Later we would say it was society.21 The notion that some powers or entities—​Thibault forthrightly calls them “constraints”—​positioned at greater scales of being than one’s own, may exert an influence on our behavioral choices might initially strike us as an artless and absurd assault on human free will. Yet, whether it is called, with Freud, the Superego, a god, or an idea that we seem to be possessed by from time to time, the “symbolic neural space” Thibault invokes appears to be imperative. While I will have significantly more to say on the subject of symbolic space in Chapter 11, let us indulge ourselves a bit with what may seem, on the face of it, a flight of fancy on the part of the philosopher and writer Jean-​Paul Sartre: When, they insinuated, a great idea wishes to be born, it requisitions, in a woman’s belly, the great man who will be the carrier of it. It chooses his condition and his environment; it determines the exact proportion between the intelligence and the obtuseness of his associates, plans his education, subjects him to the necessary ordeals, and composes for him, by successive retouches, an unstable character whose ups and downs it governs until the object of all this care explodes by giving birth to it.22 The aspect of chosenness is further underscored by Sartre in this fashion: The Holy Ghost and I held secret meetings: “You’ll write,” he said to me. I wrung my hands: “What is there about me, Lord, that has made you choose me?”—​“Nothing in particular.”—​“Then, why me?”—​“For no reason.”—​“Do I at least have an aptitude for writing?”—​“Not at all. Do you think that the great works are born of flowing pens?”—​“Lord, since I am such a non-​entity, how could I write a book?”—​“By buckling down to it.”—​“Does that mean anyone can write?”—​“Anyone. But you’re the one I’ve chosen.”23 In the second quote we can see how the Lord—​that is, the highest-​scalar agency (but the point is also valid in cases of just a higher-​scalar agency vis-​à-​vis one’s own)—​can select you for a particular or unique destiny; in the first, we see how a disembodied, indeed, merely abstract idea can be the originating force for its own reification and materialization in the terrestrial

8  Introduction: The Text world. Those, however, who would read these passages as mere musings and literary embellishments of a wistful story of a precocious childhood written by an irreligious, sixty-​year-​old Sartre, a skeptical, perhaps even cynical old warrior of word and thought, a communist no less, are in fact missing what is articulated here—​if anything, with great insight and inimitable mimetic force. The first of the Sartrean episodes graphically expresses, essentially, Christian notions of incarnation, of “Word becoming Flesh.”24 It also seemingly resonates with certain rabbinical innovations vis-​à-​vis the Temple-​ based tradition, such as Messiah-​ related notions—​ innovations, because nothing of the kind approximating rabbinical, sometimes fanciful messianic beliefs is discernible in the original, ancient, or biblical cultic religion of Israel.25 It is YHWH, the God of Moses and Israel, then, who chooses this people to be Its worshipers, servants, agents, and priests—​and not the other way around, since “the activity is guided and modulated along its trajectory by higher-​ scalar semiotic constraints” (as formulated by Thibault above).26 Unlike a physical incarnation of a god within a single terrestrial creature, be it human or animal, or an idea materializing in its reified physical object or subject, Israel’s God creates Its own highly idiosyncratic constraints that will lay open an entire people to the power of its unique semiotic significance.27 This occurs with an absolute separation between the deity and the earthbound humans remaining scrupulously intact.28 The mechanism put forth by Thibault is, in principle, applicable to each of the following two radically different paradigms—​that of Israel’s God constraining the lower-​scalar world of the people of Israel and some other god being a constraining dominance on some group of people; in both cases a higher-​scalar entity would be imposing constraints on lower ones. Yet the similarity of mechanisms does not signify equivalence between the two outcomes or their respective significances. According to the value system spawned by the ancient Israelite cultic religion, thanks to the highest-​scalar guidance from YHWH—​expressed in this instance as the First Commandment—​any competing divinities aspiring for the title of the preeminent deity, while certainly real enough as those challenges go, must be branded, from the perspective of the original Israelite cultic religion, as spurious powers.29 The situation, however, is more complex than that. The lower-​scalar entities are not merely restricted “by higher-​scalar semiotic constraints that arise in the symbolic (e.g. semantic) neural space of the individual until activity’s completion,” as in Thibault’s formulation cited above. They are also simultaneously empowered through such constraints.30 They are empowered to the point of inevitably feeling almost all-​powerful (as, indeed, a “god” or a “messiah” would be). To give in to that—​according to the Edenic story, as well as per the larger Pentateuchal ideational framework—​is tantamount to a revolt against God, with all the ensuing consequences.

Introduction: The Text  9

How Many Jewish Mysticisms? As this book maintains, the mystical-​initiatory praxis relating to the tradition of the priests of the First Temple is dramatically, substantively, and qualitatively different from all subsequent types of Jewish mysticism. The Sôd Hypothesis—​my 2011 dissertation, which the present book significantly revises, truncates, and at the same time enhances, with the aim of presenting the dissertation research in a maximally clear and effectual manner—​draws attention to several kinds of mystically significant periods during long stretches of Jewish history, highlighting their principal differences vis-​à-​vis the original notional intellective-​spiritual world and praxis of those who brought about the Hebrew-​Israelite spiritual tradition and civilization.31 These dissimilarities and distinctions range from a contrast with the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian theologies and sensibilities, to a comparison with Ezekiel’s visionary prophecies, an appraisal of Qumranic esotericism and Merkabah mysticism, a judgment apropos of medieval Kabbalah, and, finally, to rabbinical midrashic interpretive religiosity. None of these resembles (sometimes not even remotely) the Sôd, that is to say, the initiatory framework that this book ascribes to the mystical-​spiritual, sacerdotal praxis of the originating priests. The outline of this praxis, as this book will claim and defend, has been encoded within the Pentateuch as a second-​channel esoteric narrative intertwined with the main channel, or the visible, ostensive, or conventionally read one. The point of the exercise in that primary research of contrasting and juxtaposing the different varieties of Jewish mysticisms was to ascertain the substantive, fundamental, crucial differences between this foundational ancient Israelite priestly tradition and those other traditions and praxes, by specifying, among other things, why the Sôd is not Merkabah mysticism, nor, for that matter, is it the medieval Kabbalah, or the rabbinic midrash. The present book identifies the primary reason for the shifting, in ensuing centuries and millennia, of Judaic notions of spirituality and esoteric-​mystical praxis as being squarely tied to the simply stated but difficult to grasp conception of initiation, as well as to the impact of the absence of this praxis from the succeeding Jewish mysticisms. This lamentable but, as I argue, unavoidable outcome was entirely due to the purposeful intentions of the founding priestly elite, who were entrusted with guardianship of the keys to the tradition’s inner sanctum; their choice, inspired no doubt by the awesomeness of the realm to which they were privileged to receive access, has been the uncompromising caste system of hereditary priesthood. At the same time, such a wall of separation from the profane realm of the life of the broader Israelite society was fully in keeping with the widespread praxes of most initiatory traditions around the world—​praxes centered on secrets and concealment, on slow and gradual advancement, utmost dedication, devotion, and keenness, and, last but not least, on the suitability for one’s initiation into the out-​of-​the-​ordinary and potentially hazardous esoteric-​mystical world, or worlds. Thus, in the

10  Introduction: The Text Hebraic tradition this already considerable universally practiced admission-​ discrimination was further amplified and cemented by the institution of a caste system whereby the priesthood was strictly hereditary.

Interrogation of All Possible Interrogations, the Interrogation of God: Are Humans Capable of Literature? That one must be “capable of literature” if one ever hopes to properly “interrogate God” might strike us as a decidedly peculiar notion. Notwithstanding that, however, according to Derrida such an “interrogation of all possible interrogations” cannot possibly be carried out by way of a book, and thus even literature cannot be of help: When Maurice Blanchot writes: “Is man capable of a radical interrogation, that is to say, finally, is man capable of literature?” one could just as well say, on the basis of a certain conceptualization of life, “incapable” half the time. Except if one admits that pure literature is nonliterature, or death itself. The question about the origin of the book, the absolute interrogation, the interrogation of all possible interrogations, the “interrogation of God” will never belong to a book.32 I am reluctant to admit that Derrida here is actually as sagacious as he is astute. The reason for my reluctance is tied to an exalted vision of the Torah: I do think that if there ever existed, or will ever exist, a book capable of “absolute interrogation, the interrogation of all possible interrogations, the ‘interrogation of God,’ ” it is the Torah, the Jews’ quintessential Book of God. It is in this book that humanity first encountered God—​God with a capitalized first letter, the highest-​scalar living agency conceivable by humans. And it is still the unsurpassed, and principal, place to come across God, if one is to do so through the pages of a book. And yet, this self-​styled “Reb Derissa” (or “Reb Rida”) is right.33 The “interrogation” of God cannot possibly belong to a book, to any book. Even though the written Torah, the Hexateuch, is at the very top of human capabilities for producing literature—​as this book assiduously endeavors to show—​ the Hebrew Scripture is not about some kind of interrogation of God. The God of the Jews would suffer no inquisitions of Himself, as should be obvious to anyone who has engaged in even the briefest of reflections upon the Ten Divine Utterings. As the present book argues, the so-​called Five Books of Moses plus the Book of Joshua, the Hexateuch, the Teaching, is about access to God. “Access” to the God of Israel must be experienced (if one is to ever either mouth or pen anything about it, subsequently). It, the mysterium tremendum of a living God, cannot be properly described, even if attempts to do so were countless. The Teaching can give one entering it a taste of how such access—​ the access to the highest-​conceivable scalar agency—​feels. The Teaching also

Introduction: The Text  11 contains the outline of the priests’ zealously guarded initiatory system itself. It is that very system that has enabled a safe, effective passage of a would-​ be adept of YHWH to the experiential—​that is to say, phenomenally undergoing, awesome and terrifying, tangible, more real than anything a human being can possibly live through—​living relationship with the Wholly Other, the God of Israel.34 The illustrious Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo, aka Philo Judaeus, who wrote extensively on the Hebrew Scripture at the dawn of the modern era two millennia ago and who, grasping the nature of mystical phenomena, had a prescient perspective on the Torah, stated the following about the latter: “Now these are no mythical fictions, such as poets and sophists delight in, but modes of making ideas visible, bidding us resort to allegorical interpretation guided in our renderings by what lies beneath the surface.”35 To be able to do that, namely, be able to make ineffable, or at least indescribable or unutterable ideas visible, the Torah—​that is to say, the text of the Teaching—​must necessarily have been exceedingly “capable of literature” (in Blanchot’s words). As the Zohar—​the magnificent medieval Kabbalistic compendium that, ironically enough, is normally seen as the “Bible” of Jewish mysticism, instead of the Torah itself occupying that lofty title and status—​stated apropos of the Torah, “The tales related in the Torah are simply her outer garments, and woe to the man who regards that outer garb as the Torah itself.”36 Below is an extended extract from the Zohar that is especially relevant for the present book: Rabbi Simeon said: If a man looks upon the Torah as merely a book presenting narratives and everyday matters, alas for him! Such a torah, one treating with everyday concerns, and indeed a more excellent one, we too, even we, could compile. More than that, in the possession of the rulers of the world there are books of even greater merit, and these we could emulate if we wished to compile some such torah. But the Torah, in all of its worlds, holds supernal truths and sublime secrets. … The world could not endure the Torah if she had not garbed herself in garments of this world. Thus the tales related in the Torah are simply her outer garments, and woe to the man who regards that outer garb as the Torah itself, for such a man will be deprived of portion in the next world. … See now. The most visible part of a man are the clothes that he has on, and they who lack understanding, when they look at the man, are apt not to see more in him than these clothes. In reality, however, it is the body of the man that constitutes the pride of his clothes, and his soul constitutes the pride of his body. So it is with the Torah. Its narrations which relate to things of the world constitute the garments which clothe the body of the Torah; and that body is composed of the Torah’s precepts. … People without understanding see only the narrations, the garment; those somewhat more penetrating see also the body. But the truly wise, those who serve the most high King and stood on mount Sinai, pierce all the way

12  Introduction: The Text through to the soul, to the true Torah which is the root principle of all. These same will in the future be vouchsafed to penetrate to the very soul of the soul of the Torah. … Woe to the sinners who look upon the Torah as simply tales pertaining to things of the world, seeing thus only the outer garment. But the righteous whose gaze penetrates to the very Torah, happy are they. … The garment is made up of the tales and stories; but we, we are bound to penetrate beyond.37 I will repeat the last sentence from the Zoharic quote, as it effectively captures this book’s aspirational motto: “The garment is made up of the tales and stories; but we, we are bound to penetrate beyond.”

Notes







1 Ziony Zevit, personal communication, 2010. 2 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking,” 25 (emphasis added). 3 Bloom, foreword to Absorbing Reflections, by Idel, xi. 4 “Kabbalah” is the term normally reserved for the medieval Jewish mysticism centered primarily, though not entirely, on the Zoharic corpus and the Abulafian school; it may thus seem incongruous to apply the same designation to the archaic Jewish religion’s putative mystical beginnings of two millennia earlier. The present book, however, welcomes Bloom’s usage of the term “Kabbalah” apropos of the archaic Jewish religion of the First Temple times; after all, in the English language at least, Kabbalah is now synonymous with Jewish mysticism. 5 Kafka, The Trial (1998 ed.), 215–​17. 6 Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher who brings to biblical interpretation a Greek philosophical perspective, does use the terms (here in their English equivalents) “legislation” and “legislator,” respectively, for the Decalogue and Moses. 7 Such claims are invariably untenable vis-​à-​vis any group or tradition that claims special or exclusive access to an earlier tradition’s inner core and yet lacks the proper means to do so. As Israel Knohl puts it, “No outsider’s eye may witness the mysterious ceremony in the depths of the holy, and only vague bits of information on the cultic system filter out of Priestly circles. The Priestly Torah is also essentially esoteric” (Knohl, Sanctuary of Silence, 152–​53). 8 Initiation here should be seen as an act of acquiring the requisite, indispensable context. In this regard, it is important to grasp what Dell Hymes has described as meanings extraneous to such a context: When a form is used in a context, it eliminates the meanings possible to that context other than those that form can signal; the context eliminates from consideration the meanings possible to the form other than those that context can support. The effective meaning depends upon the interaction of the two. (Recently stated by Joos (1958), this principle has also been formulated by Bühler (1934:183) and Firth (1935:32)]). Hymes, “Ethnography of Speaking,” 12, citing Joos, “Semology”; Bühler, Sprachtheorie, 183; and Firth, Technique of Semantics, 32. Thus, the meanings supplied by would-​be claimants of doorkeeper status apropos of the ancient

Introduction: The Text  13 Israelite tradition should be “eliminate[d]‌from consideration” as being “other than” what the context in question “can support.” 9 See, for example, Schiffman, “Jewish Sectarianism in Second Temple Times”; and additional discussion in Chapter 3. 10 See Elior, Three Temples, for the specifics of transformations that took place during the upheaval in late antiquity that eventually led to the displacement of the priestly caste. This conflict came to a head in the early Common Era; the struggle for the Hebraic-​Jewish discourse in late antiquity first involved the traditional priestly groups allied around the Teacher of Righteousness (the Zadokites) versus the Hasmonean priests seen as usurpers and illegitimate; and then later, the priests as a whole versus the new usurpers, the insider-​outsider Pharisees who became the rabbinical democratic, or egalitarian, alternative to the caste-​based cultic system in place since the earliest times of Israelite history (compare Schiffman, “Jewish Sectarianism in Second Temple Times”). This subject is expanded upon in ­chapter 3. 11 In his survey of recent developments in biblical studies in the preface to the second edition of The Early History of God, Mark S. Smith inadvertently highlights what is ailing in that field. Smith divides recent developments into four categories: (1) the weakening or “altering” of some of the former “axioms” of biblical studies, such as “the older source theory of the Pentateuch (often called the ‘Documentary Hypothesis’)” (xxiii); (2) the impact of literary study (xxv–​xxvi); (3) problems related to the question of historicity of early Israel (xxvi–​xxix); and (4) the expanded role of Ugaritic texts (xxix–​xxx). We see that, for example, anthropology, psychology, religious studies, or semiotics are excluded from this list as though nonexistent and irrelevant, while mysticism, let alone such newer fields as cognitive linguistics and consciousness studies, would be an altogether exotic notion here. Questions of the historicity and provenance of biblical texts thus continue to remain at the forefront of biblical studies’ concerns (along with such models as, for example, the “rhetorical-​emancipatory paradigm” advanced by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her essay “Powerful Words”). Literary studies, although mentioned by Smith, play nowhere near the role they do in the research presented in this book. 12 See, for example, White, Tropics of Discourse; White, Content of the Form; Turner, Literary Mind; Dennett, “Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity”; Gazzaniga, Ethical Brain; Hogan, “Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness”; and Fireman, McVay, and Flanagan, Narrative and Consciousness. 13 As Michael Riffaterre points out in his book bearing the title Fictional Truth, The only reason that the phrase “fictional truth” is not an oxymoron, as ­“fictitious truth” would be, is that fiction is a genre whereas lies are not. Being a genre, it rests on conventions, of which the first and perhaps only one is that fiction specifically, but not always explicitly, excludes the intention to deceive. (Riffaterre, Fictional Truth, 1) 14 See especially Veeser, New Historicism; and Veeser, New Historicism Reader. 15 Alter, “Sacred History and Prose Fiction”; and see, for example, Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel.”

14  Introduction: The Text 16 On linguistic grounds, see, for example, Zevit, “Converging Lines of Evidence Bearing on the Date of P.” To briefly summarize the current views on early Israelite history, these encompass a range from the “traditionalists,” a camp of those who stay uncomfortably close to the “institutional evolution” (Liverani, “Nationality and Political Identity”) described in the Hebrew Bible, such as Nahum Sarna in “Israel in Egypt”; to the European “minimalists,” such as “P. Davies, N. P. Lemche, and T. Thompson, [who would] locate biblical texts generally in the Persian or even Hellenistic period pass[ing] over many linguistic and historical difficulties of their own” (M. Smith, Early History of God, xxvii) and who would tend to dismiss the biblical historical accounts as “ ‘fictive literary composition’ (so Nadav Na’aman) or just ‘intellectual constructs’ and insist that ‘there was no ‘ancient’ or ‘biblical’ Israel.” Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know, 4. Either extreme is eschewed as indefensible by many if not most mainstream biblical scholars (for example, Mark S. Smith and Richard Elliott Friedman) and archaeologists (William Dever). Instead, a consensus has emerged that while “relatively little of the Torah’s story can be verified historically”—​that is, “sufficient evidence from extrabiblical sources and archaeological artifacts is lacking to make judgments for or against historical veracity” (Friedman, “Torah (Pentateuch),” 4:620)—​certain purported historical events are more or perhaps less likely to have occurred than others, or certain dates for composing particular texts or textual strands are more likely than different dating. 17 See Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know; and Dever, Bible with Sources Revealed. With regard to the prominent role of Egypt in the Pentateuchal text (as in Exodus), however, the present study actually strengthens the notion of a palpable Egyptian connection, if not with the provenance of the Hebrew tribes per se, then at least confirming the striking compatibility of the religious-​esoteric mind-​set underlying our text with several significant Egyptian outlooks. As Hans Kippenberg and Guy Stroumsa note in reference to Walter Burkert’s and Jan Assmann’s contributions to their edited volume Secrecy and Concealment, there have been two very different “logics of secrecy,” one Greek, the other Egyptian: Walter Burkert’s analysis of the Greek mystery cults asserts paradoxically that the secret cultic practices and sayings of these cults seemed to have been known to all; that it was rather an “open secret,” like sexuality. Burkert’s main example, the Eleusian mysteries, were commonly known, though anyone who spoke openly about them would be severely punished. Unlike the cult of the sun in Egypt, Eleusis administered no powerful knowledge; what was performed in the mysteries was banal, and came to be highly esteemed only because it was the object of discretion. Hence Burkert draws a new meaning of secrecy from the historical context of Greek and Hellenistic mystery associations: high prestige. Comparing Burkert’s and Assmann’s analyses we may perhaps express the difference in the two logics of secrecy, Greek and Egyptian, in the following way: in Greece, secrecy could and should grant prestige, while in Egypt, it protected powerful sacred knowledge. (Kippenberg and Stroumsa, “Introduction,” xvi–​xvii) As this study will endeavor to show, the ancient Israelite secrecy pattern strongly parallels the Egyptian model.

Introduction: The Text  15 18 As we shall see, this book foregrounds the heretofore-​unsuspected depth and breadth of the literary mastery of the Pentateuchal text, in which the Sôd stratum will be found to be principally embedded via an astonishing array of figurative means. The unlikely, though possible, fictionality of the Exodus and the Conquest, while on the one hand strengthening the main thesis of this study vis-​à-​vis the overall esoteric intent of the Pentateuchal communication, does not imply a later dating of its composition, much less the nonexistence of biblical Israel. Quite the contrary, such a shift of focus to and emphasis on the esoteric dimension strengthens the opposite prospect, namely, that the composition took place earlier rather than later. One reason for such inference is that one detects, as one surveys the progression from the First Temple to the Second, a discernible transition to somewhat different or changed esoteric concerns when contrasted with biblical practices; see, for example, Elior, Three Temples; and Jassen, Mediating the Divine. The practices underlying much of the First Temple cult and religiosity were markedly different from those in subsequent periods, to the point that they were progressively less well understood in later times. 19 Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 76, 78. The expression “fiction of actuality” is from Koselleck, Futures Past, 112. 20 Thibault, Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body, 6. 21 Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 9. 22 Sartre, The Words, 201. 23 Ibid., 186. 24 Compare the reverse notion noted by Hayden White, of “ ‘Flesh made Word,’ as taught in the Gospel according to St. Stephane Mallarmé” (White, Tropics of Discourse, 259). 25 Quite to the contrary, any attempt at human divinization (such as implied by the incarnation tenet and, only marginally less so, by rabbinical messianic fantasies) is explicitly, and strenuously, objected to by the Pentateuchal text as “idolatry.” I will have more to say about the rabbinical worldview and approach to the Torah in Chapter 3. 26 As Thibault elaborates, It is not a question of a mechanistic cause-​and-​effect view of grammar as in, say, Chomsky’s (1965) transformational-​generative model. In such a view, grammar qua competence and individual performance stand in a cause-​and-​ effect relation within the same scalar level of the individual organism. Rather, it is a system of constraints or boundary conditions whereby higher scalar levels informationally constrain lower levels. … The behaviors of the individual organisms involved are entrained to higher-​scalar ecosocial patterns. (Thibault, “Body Dynamics, Social Meaning-​Making, and Scale Heterogeneity,” 136–​37, referencing Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax) 27 I discuss in ­chapter 1 Halliday’s distinctions vis-​ à-​ vis transitivity, which he calls “the cornerstone of the semantic organization of experience” (Halliday, “Linguistic Function and Literary Style,” 81). The ancient Israelite cultic religion introduces a third transitive type presented as its deity, a power that is simultaneously external and internal vis-​à-​vis human subjectivity. The first transitive type specified by Halliday reflects the premodern, archaic humanity that was steeped

16  Introduction: The Text in a magical worldview of objects and forces acting upon the human being; the second type is the modern emergence of human agency and self-​sufficiency. 28 The reason that the last sentence is not stacking its cause-​and-​effect logic upside-​ down, confusing the effect with the cause, is, again, succinctly formulated in the above citation from Thibault, namely, that it is the higher-​scalar constraints that do the constraining of the lower-​scalar entity and not the other way around. In the case of ancient Israel, the lower-​scalar entity would be the Israelites. 29 As pointed out by Assmann, “Whereas polytheism, or rather ‘cosmotheism,’ rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-​ religion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated” (Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 3). This does not mean, however, that false gods are not affecting their adherents, often quite powerfully so. In this sense, they are real enough. 30 I have discussed this in Kohav, “Adam’s Choice.” Compare Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness; Hollenback, Mysticism; and Merkur, Mystical Moments and Unitive Thinking. 31 See Kohav, Sôd Hypothesis, the dissertation as published in 2013. 32 Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” 78. 33 Derrida appears to sign off as “Reb Rida” in “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” 78; and as “Reb Derissa” in Writing and Difference, 300. 34 The term “wholly other” is borrowed from Rudolf Otto. 35 Philo, “On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses,” 125 (emphasis added). 36 Zohar, III. 152, quoted in Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 34, from the translation by Scholem, Zohar, the Book of Splendor, 121f. 37 Ibid., 34–​35.

Part One

The Context

1 The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt From the Magic of Hypostatized Spirituality (Egypt) to the Discriminating Paradigm of Non-​Idolatry (Israel) Are different religions essentially all about the same aims, similar contents, or comparable pursuits and practices, as is sometimes asserted?1 As the following quotes from three different theorists of religion forcefully show, different religions are different precisely because their respective aims, praxes, and worldviews are often incompatible and incongruent vis-​à-​vis each other. Walter Kaufmann sees such differences as choice alternatives, although in practice vast numbers of human beings have historically been subjected, usually by force, to adhere to a particular religion: “Religious people used to take for granted that other religions were simply wrong. Then it became fashionable to suppose that all the great religions agree on essentials. This claim, like other dogmas, was not examined closely in the light of facts. … One refuses to see the major religions as alternatives that challenge us to make a choice.”2 To the above one can add the following by John Bowker, highlighting religions’ different priorities and also their “divergent anthropologies—​ divergent accounts, that is, of what it is to be human”; importantly for this book, Bowker articulates “somatic exploration and exegesis”: Religions are the consequence of somatic exploration and exegesis—​ exploration, that is, of what this body is capable of doing, of experiencing, of being and of becoming. … At their most basic level, religions can best be understood as systems organized … for the coding, protection and transmission of information … which has proved to be of worth and which has been tested through many generations. … Religions … have come, through the centuries, to set different priorities, different techniques, different goals, different values for the enterprise and worth of being human. Thus the exegeses, which issue eventually in different religious systems, are profoundly different. The exegeses of the somatic text amount, in effect, to divergent anthropologies—​divergent accounts, that is, of what it is to be human.3

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-3

20 The Context Mircea Eliade states emphatically, “The encounter—​ or shock—​ between civilizations is always, in the last resort, an encounter between spiritualities—​ between religions.”4

The Enigma of Ancient Israel The question of origins and the enduring enigma of ancient Israelite civilization, despite millennia of scrutiny of its written record—​generally known as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament—​and its attendant disproportionate influence on humanity at large, is still mired in controversy and opacity.5 This atypical civilization introduced, circa 1000 BCE, several wholly original notions.6 One of these was the existence of only one god.7 This god is the creator of all reality and is neither transcendent nor immanent.8 Instead of the binary opposition “transcendent/​immanent,” which came into usage in medieval times, the ancient Israelite religion conceives a generally overlooked yet crucial and unprecedented feature. This feature, which I am judging to be a foremost mark of Israel’s God, is rare in its paradigmatic originality, since it denotes a sharp distinction between Israel’s God and possibly all other conceptions of deities. The singular divergence from the more typical models of the divine goes further than the likewise unparalleled stance related to conception of monotheism. The even more significant characteristic I have in mind is related to what is called “transitivity” in linguistics.9 M. A. K. Halliday, the founder of functional linguistics, categorizes linguistic transitivity as “the cornerstone of the semantic organization of experience”: Transitivity is the set of options whereby the speaker encodes his experience of the processes of the external world, and of the internal world of his consciousness, together with the participants in these and their attendant circumstances; and it embodies a very basic distinction of processes into two types, those that are regarded as due to an external cause, an agency other than the person or object involved, and those that are not.10 The “external cause” of the first transitive type specified by Halliday reflects the archaic humanity that was steeped in a worldview of objects and forces external to and acting on the human being. The second transitive type is the gradual emergence of human agency and self-​sufficiency (it reaches its apogee in the rationalistic viewpoint of modern sciences eschewing any supranatural constitution of reality). In a sometimes desperate search for explanations of life’s and the world’s mysteries, people early on challenged this gradually emerging second transitive type by powerfully strengthening the first-​type transitivity, which was in effect a relapse but on a somewhat higher level of the evolutionary spiral, as it were. It took place by way of endowing the world with magical properties and by populating it with mysterious forces

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  21 and ghost-​like beings, including, at the upper end of the paranormal hierarchy, a great variety of gods. The essential point I wish to convey here is that these gods, as a rule, were seen as fully belonging to the world, notwithstanding their deific status; that is, the gods were seen as being external to human interiority, yet there was no conception of “transcendence” in play that could, at least in some cases, place the gods outside the immanent reality that human beings inhabit. Whether it is the case of Greek gods living atop Mount Olympus and looking and acting much like human beings do, sometimes quite hilariously so, or the Egyptian deities, some of whom, such as Osiris and Isis, likewise mimicked humans, others were symbolized either by natural celestial bodies such as the sun or by certain animals, among them the crocodile.11 It was simply unimaginable that any entity whatsoever could have its being outside “reality” as conceived of by human beings, and not even gods could escape this worldly reality that human beings were born into. Such a sensibility of vivifying, of animating the world would become a permanent feature of human psychology, a feature caused by the insatiable craving of humans to supply reasons and causes, and thus meaning, to an otherwise often inscrutable reality.12 We must examine the Israelite difference with this context in mind. The Pentateuch’s overarching transitivity frame, in contrast to the two transitivity paradigms (one exterior, the other interior) entails a third transitive type, one in which a supreme or ultimate agency—​depicted as the God of Israel and of the whole of creation—​is simultaneously external and internal vis-​à-​vis human beings’ subjectivity. This god—​differentiated as God—​is emphatically unrelated to what James Paxson calls “metamorphic translations among ontological categories,” such as reification or magical ensoulment of objects and entities belonging to the natural world.13 The Mosaic religion of ancient Israel forcefully rejects the first transitive type’s tendency to inflame its imaginative faculties in the direction of a magical outlook. At the same time, it also severely tests, and contests, the second transitive type—​one that tends to become inflamed by the dream of human self-​sufficiency and power. This Hebraic God is concealed, inaccessible, unimaginable, incomparable. Even so, God is closely involved with the world of human beings, both externally in the world per se and internally within human consciousness, freely reading human thoughts, desires, and intentions. The third transitivity claimed here for Israel’s God is bound to mean—​if one thinks this through—​that God “is” entirely outside immanent reality yet has free access to it. Seen this way, to keep insistently asking, “Does God exist?” is patently senseless, since God “is” outside existence as we know it. This God is without form and must not be depicted as any shape or object, living or inanimate. Crucially, the foundational Hebraic or ancient Israelite religion designated any attempt to do so as “idolatry.” Moreover, it branded, not in such exact terms but effectively, the prevalent popular perceptions of divinity-​infused nature—​then as now, often seen as the natural habitat and domain of gods or God or, in today’s

22 The Context parlance, the dominion of “spirituality”—​as abhorrent “pantheism.” It also pressed curious, confusing, wholly original notions such as its conception of the “holy” and its utter repugnance for magic. Such an uncompromising stance—​a determined, total rejection of magic—​ would have been quite deplorable in the minds of both ordinary Israelites of that time and all neighboring peoples; the ancient mind often relied on magic in its search for meaning.14 It must surely be surprising that such a totalizing anti-​magical stance is likewise objectionable to our modern humanity today: magic is everywhere experiencing a massive resurgence, whether in popular movies or even directly within postbiblical religions.15 A magical mind-​ set, as noted above, is, if not a default position of human consciousness complementing human aspiration for autonomy (i.e., self-​sufficiency and independence), then one that is always already lying in wait just beneath the conventional consciousness of our daily exertions in the business of living. It is against this mind-​set that the Mosaic religion of ancient Israel enunciated an implacable struggle. This struggle, however, has apparently been lost, at least so far. The signs of magic’s resurgence and its infiltration of Judaism itself are already unmistakable by the time of the emergence of rabbinical Judaism (post-​Second Temple era), perhaps even as early as the Second Jerusalem Temple period (516 BCE–​70 CE). Rabbinical Judaism’s reintroduction of magical notions into its theology and praxis—​as, for example, in Hasidism and among the ultra-​Orthodox today—​is outside the scope of this chapter. The focus here is instead on the unrelenting struggle of the newly born Hebraic-​Israelite religion with what may be termed magical consciousness, which Egypt vigorously represented: The Biblical image of Egypt means “idolatry.” It symbolizes what “the Mosaic distinction” excluded as the opposite of truth in religion. By drawing this distinction, “Moses” cut the umbilical cord which connected his people and his religious ideas to their cultural and natural context. The Egypt of the Bible symbolizes what is rejected, discarded, and abandoned. Egypt is not just a historical context: it is inscribed in the fundamental semantics of monotheism. It appears explicitly in the first commandment and implicitly in the second. … Egypt’s role in the Exodus is not historical but mythical: it helps define the very identity of those who tell the story. Egypt is the womb from which the chosen people emerged, but the umbilical cord was cut once and for all by the Mosaic distinction.16 Jan Assmann here succinctly captures the fact of the fundamental dichotomy of polar opposites—​Egypt and Israel. However, beyond noting the polarity itself, he does not venture to pass judgment regarding value ascription. If one religion sees another as entailing “the opposite of truth,” it would be indispensable to know why or to know whether it might be correct in its view or perspective.

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  23 It bears pointing out that the question of what constitutes idolatry is not merely a “loaded term,” a rhetorical fallacy calculated to win one’s argument before it even starts. The idolatrous is that which is made so precious in one’s eyes that it blinds the human being—​blinds in a manner that the medieval Kabbalists expressed by the evocative term qĕlipôt, or “spiritual blinders” (sing. qĕlipāh). As will be demonstrated in the following discussion, much of the ancient Egyptian spiritual-​religious worldview, its mystical praxes, and the unsurpassed majesty of its monuments, temples, and what we would today call “art” may have been based on just such “blinders.” As this book suggests, all sorts of magical consciousness, as well as the Mosaic, mysterium tremendum kind of mystical experiences, involve significant alterations of consciousness. Thus, it would be imperative to differentiate among the different systems, traditions, and schools of mysticism by way of some other value markers. Magical consciousness does entail a mystical sensibility, yet it is of a kind recoiled from by the new Mosaic “counter-​religion,” which is based on experiencing the greatest mystery of all: the mysterium tremendum.17 To explore these and related issues at some depth, we must first engage as the main lenses for our endeavor the perspectives originating in the period in which the Mosaic religion emerged: we wish to ascertain the reasons behind the thinking, motivations, and actions. With this in mind, we will exploit some findings by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, including his important misreadings; he nevertheless offers a focused recognition of just how closely the above-​noted Hebraic innovations fit a systematic pattern of opposition to, and strenuous rejection of, the foremost Egyptian tenets and beliefs. Assmann posits the helpful notion of Israel’s foundational religion being a “counter religion” vis-​à-​vis that of Egypt. Beyond this seminal conceptualization, Assmann also attempts an analysis of the specific meaning of Israel’s “Mosaic distinction,” as he memorably characterized it.18 However, we must note that with regard to ascertaining the meaning of the Mosaic distinction in terms of its true significance, Assmann is markedly less successful. His difficulty—​similar to that of most other investigators—​is tied to the following circumstance. The existence of an Israelite priestly, Temple-​based, mystical-​ initiatory system—​outlines of which were embedded as a “second-​channel” esoteric narrative in the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua—​was ascertained only recently.19 Thus, attempts such as Assmann’s—​which lack the primary raison-​d’être of the Israelite religion, not to mention the insights into the “mechanics” of the authentic relationship that took place between the priestly initiates and God, to whose service the priests have dedicated themselves—​ necessarily go only so far. Additionally, they are seriously hampered due to a disregard of the crucial differences between symbols and allegories; as we shall see, polarities such as these are indispensable for comprehending the profound difference wrought by the Mosaic distinction.

24 The Context Second, the question of whether an individual depicted in the Pentateuch as Moses ever existed, specifically and literally, need not concern us here. Nor should we attend to fracases in biblical studies concerning the question of whether the biblical account of the exodus from Egypt ever took place. These issues are important, certainly, but they carry only peripheral import regarding the far more vital and urgent matter, namely, the meaning of the Mosaic religion precisely in its countering the religion of Egypt. Indeed, it is the intense focus itself of the ancient Israelite religion on and its sustained forceful opposition to the most central doctrinal positions of Egyptian religious and esoteric sensibility that serve as an unambiguous proof of a direct connection between the two religions under discussion. It is also the most plausible explanation for the remarkable parallels between the respective religious-​cultic armatures of Egypt and Israel, even if these correspondences themselves point to diametrically inverse, antithetical theological and contrary esoteric positions. Finally, we will consider that the three so-​called Abrahamic religions, namely, rabbinical Judaism of the last two millennia, Christianity, and Islam, must in turn, in light of the above, also be seen as counter-​religions—​or, rather, as counter-​counter-​religions—​for all three are counter to, albeit in very different and specific ways, the original counter-​religion of the ancient Israelite religion (pace Egypt).

Hieroglyphic Images as a Target of the Second Commandment The puzzle presented by the second commandment—​“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”—​has tended to confound scholars no less than average readers. The traditional tendency has been to associate it with idolatry and thus understand it as a prohibition of worshiping anything or anybody other than God.20 The problem with this interpretation, one that typically is not fully recognized, is the notion of “worshiping”: on the one hand, this commandment does not actually talk of worshiping; on the other hand, the preceding commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” already proscribes worshiping anything or anybody other than God. Thus, a careful reader is faced with a pivotal question, one that is the hallmark of the Mosaic distinction: what is idolatry?21 In attempting to shed light on ancient Egypt, Assmann engages a perspective that is far more familiar to us than the obscure Egyptian one, namely, the Judaic-​biblical outlook, and he views Egyptian practices from that more familiar angle. The second commandment is the commandment devoted to iconoclasm.22 The situation Assmann wishes to explore is framed as follows: “The debate between Egyptian iconists and anti-​Egyptian or Biblical iconoclasts has many aspects. … I am choosing one of them for closer study, an aspect which as far as I can see has up to now received only very little attention: the grammatological aspect of iconoclasm.”23

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  25 Ancient Egypt was a country with a culture that has not merely manifested occasional examples of secrecy and concealment of information of one sort or another. Instead, secrecy and concealment were practiced to a degree almost unimaginable elsewhere, both in the contemporaneous era and thereafter. To begin with—​and in a way only partially approximating similar phenomena concerning Hindu Sanskrit or the status of Hebrew among the medieval and later rabbinical circles (where the lingua franca was typically either Yiddish, Ladino, or the languages of the local population in the Jewish diaspora), with Hebrew reserved for sacred study and related commentaries—​the Egyptians deliberately created two languages. Having invented “hieroglyphs as a system of picture writing or natural signification but … also … alphabetic writing as a system of conventional signification,” the Egyptians earmarked one language for sacred purposes (“Hieratic” or “Hieroglyphic”) and the other for ordinary communication (“Demotic” or “Epistolic”).24 The assertion regarding their invention of the two writing systems, however, is disputed.25 Assmann distinguishes two ancient Egyptian languages written in three different scripts.26 One is the Demotic, or vernacular, language, and the other is “classical” language, which has “a cursive form called ‘Hieratic’ and an inscriptional and iconic form called ‘Hieroglyphic.’ ”27 The hieroglyphic picture writing or immediate signification was a matter of esotericism, mystery and the tradition of sacred knowledge, whereas alphabetic writing was a matter of general and profane communication. In this image of ancient Egyptian grammatology, there was thus a close connection between iconicity and sacredness. Religion, priesthood, and mystery used icons, while the alphabet dominated the state, administration, and the public domain. … The sacredness of hieroglyphs was identified with the principle of immediate signification. Immediacy is a key word in this context: the signs conveyed their meaning without mediation either by language or by a conventional code.28 Let us note Assmann’s point about the immediacy of signification in hieroglyphs. It entails a situation diametrically opposite the notions of delayed categorization, as articulated by Reuven Tsur: A [rapid] category with a verbal label constitutes a relatively small load on one’s cognitive system and is easily manipulable; on the other hand, it entails the loss of important sensory information that might be crucial for the process of accurate adaptation. Delayed categorization, by contrast, may put too much sensory load on the human memory system; this overload may be available for adaptive purposes and afford great flexibility, but it may also be time-​and-​energy consuming and occupy too much mental processing space. Furthermore, delayed categorization may involve a period of uncertainty that may be quite unpleasant, or

26 The Context even intolerable for some individuals. Rapid categorization, by contrast, may involve the loss of vital information and lead to maladaptive strategies in life.29 Immediate signification offered through the use of hieroglyphs is precisely what rapid categorization stands for: quick certainty—​due to “a relatively small load on one’s cognitive system”—​as to the immediate answers to enormous, onerous questions of life’s meaning, for example, but at a cost entailing “loss of vital information” (which means that one’s certainty could have been misplaced). Assmann offers an additional point, for which he credits William Warburton and Moses Mendelssohn.30 Their line of reasoning implicates a “confusion of sign and signified,” which ostensibly results in idolatry: In the beginning, people think, speak and write in images; only later do they turn to thinking in arguments, speaking in prose and writing with letters. The danger of picture writing lies in the confusion of sign and signified. Thus, an innocent thing such as a mode of writing can degenerate and turn into idolatry. … In order to avoid the pitfalls of idolatry, God had Moses write down his laws in alphabetic letters, not in pictorial hieroglyphs.31 The argument here, however, is not carried fully to its meaning-​bearing conclusion. Alleging merely a confusion of sign and signified is not enough for the appearance or explanation of idolatry, since the two can be easily fused into one as a symbol.32 The symbol, precisely for this reason, is often hailed as a superior expression.33 Its proponents include thinkers from Goethe and Coleridge down to our present-​day postmodernists.34 It is also not quite enough to sustain the claim of the necessarily and expressly visual distinction attached to idolatry merely by noting the presentational character of hieroglyphic writing (as opposed to a representational one) and the associated problematic rapid categorization (Tsur) or immediate signification (Assmann), as is the case with the hieroglyphs.35 Visual communication, it is true, is very different from verbal communication, yet what exactly turns it into idolatry, and whether a nonvisual entity such as an alphabet-​based depiction or an idea can also be idolatrous, has not been established in Assmann’s analysis. It is to this task I turn next.

“Holistic” Pictorial Communication versus Alphabet-​Based Sequential Verbal Narration Richard Janney and Horst Arndt offer a helpful analysis of the differences between pictorial communication and verbal, language-​ based communication. Their essay compares “holistic” visual/​ pictorial messages with

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  27 “sequential,” or alphabet-​based, language containing “translations” of the pictorial messages into verbal ones: Metaphorically speaking, the sequential symbolic mode possesses a powerful cognitive syntax, but lacks an adequate semantics in the realm of emotions and affective relationships. The holistic pictorial mode, on the other hand, seems to possess the emotional semantics, but lacks the necessary cognitive syntax for unambiguously defining the nature of the affective relationships it represents.36 One need only think of the great works of world literature, however—​ practically all utilizing the “sequential symbolic mode”—​ to realize that the sequential presentation possesses far more than just powerful cognitive syntax; many, though certainly not all, works of literature clearly exhibit a presence of powerful emotional semantics as well. The reverse, however, is not always true, and Janney and Arndt’s essay establishes the “ideational ambiguity” of the pictorial-​graphic messages.37 What is specifically mentioned by these authors as lacking in pictorial communication is such key deictic, or indexical, information as “what literally was done by whom, where, when, and why.” Such critical specifying and orienting information “is perhaps not fully possible in a holistic picture.”38 Herein, then, lies a crucial and, in all probability, fatal quandary pertaining to any hieroglyphic, image-​ based language. “Warburton explains idolatry as a sickness of writing,” Assmann states, “in the same way as more than 100 years later Friedrich Max Mueller explains myth as a sickness of language. Both idolatry and mythology result from a literalistic misunderstanding of metaphor.”39 Assmann concludes as follows: Eric Havelock coined the term “alphabetic revolution” which he interpreted as a Greek achievement leading to abstract thinking, logical reasonment [sic], scientific research, technology and everything else which shaped Western culture. … Yet … the invention of the alphabet (in the sense of non-​pictorial signs relating exclusively to sounds) was not a Greek but a Semitic achievement and … it was in fact ultimately derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.40 The connection between visuality and idolatry, in the end, remains unclear in Assmann’s inquiry, beyond the above-​noted important effect of “immediate signification” that comes with the use of hieroglyphs (but without an assessment of its significance). The standard claim that with images there is the danger of people confusing them with the signified gods is likewise ambiguous in this instance, since there is no indication that the Egyptians worshiped their hieroglyphic writings. In addition, the axis linking the “grammatological revolution” and the “iconoclastic rejection of images,” while potentially and

28 The Context fascinatingly promising, is not developed beyond marking the simple fact of such a link’s promise. In another work, Assmann takes a closer look at the hieroglyphic signification and sees the hieroglyphs as symbols: The Egyptian approach to reality … is marked by a strong belief in the power of symbols. And the power of a symbol resides precisely in the fact that it is not what it represents. This is what imbues symbols with meaning. For, in itself, as a “fetish,” a symbol is nothing—​a piece of stone, or wood, or gold. It is as an element in a bipolar relationship linking it to an entity in the other dimension that it becomes powerful. Its power is, therefore, relational, contextual and conditional.41 Here, Assmann commits a common and decisive error by failing to distinguish between symbol and allegory: it is allegory—​rather than symbol—​that “is not what it represents.” By contrast, as specified by Coleridge, the symbol “always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity, of which it is the representative.”42 Murray Krieger notes that “it is, of course, the participatory power of the symbol, partaking fully rather than pointing emptily, that allows it to overcome otherness, thereby distinguishing it from allegory.”43 Thus Egyptian “sacred symbols—​cult images, cosmic phenomena, royal appearances” are not merely allegories that stand for some other.44 Instead, they themselves are partaking of that other and thus are a “monistic” blend or union with the Other, in this case the relevant gods.45 Assmann further speaks of a “sacred semiosis—​or the process through which something comes to acquire a specific meaning,” which, in the case of Egypt, enables the symbols to “have a distinctive visible form”: They [the sacred symbols] are not gods themselves, but “stand for” and “point to” the divine, serving as vessels for a divine presence which is never substantial but always relational and contextual. But they are not mere images of the bodies of the gods, with the same outward appearance; they are in fact the bodies of the gods. The gods are conceived as powers that are free to assume or inhabit a body of their choice, and the cult images may serve—​for the time of sacred communication—​as their body, as might also, e.g., a cosmic phenomenon such as the sun-​disk, the inundation of the Nile, a tree, an animal or the king.46 In light of what has been noted with regard to the distinction between symbol and allegory, such designates as “stand for” and “point to” vis-​à-​vis the symbol are in this context not only confusing and superfluous but also incorrect, since Assmann himself stresses in this passage that these are actual “bodies” that are “inhabited” by “the powers.” What Assmann does not notice, moreover, is the following: we may actually have here the reasons for both the second

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  29 commandment and its aniconism, along with a likely reason for the objection to hieroglyphic script. The hieroglyph system, as a sacred script that utilizes images, can be easily seen as an inexhaustible panoply of symbols vested with sacred powers. The problem that the early Hebrew tradition might have had with this would be related not to the visual form of the symbol per se but rather to the notion of a symbolic letter—​the hieroglyph—​being the “body” that is “inhabited” by that which it represents. Such a symbol is offensive to the new, revisionary Hebrew religious sensibility due to the symbol’s “monistic” fusion, or even just symbiosis, with what one may call, in today’s terms, “the numinous.” One can see here a decisive distinction between the Egyptian magico-​religious worldview, which infuses certain objects with supernatural significance and power, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the Hebrew innovation—​ a counter-​religion—​that would deny acceptability or legitimacy to such a pantheistic worldview, through a doctrinal abhorrence of it.47 The Hebrew God seems to be insisting on being seen as the Ultimate Other who cannot be parceled out to various objects this side of the transcendence-​immanence divide. YHWH, some dramatic-​fictional anthropomorphic appearances notwithstanding, is the God whose effect may be traced only through history and events, as well as by way of morality, both of peoples and of individuals, elevating some, destroying others. The Hebrew God is also the numinous Other of mystical experiences, which, because they occur within the consciousness of the mystic, are immanent (rather than transcendent), and some of their effects can be registered both psychometrically and empirically.48

Magical Consciousness and Cosmotheism: The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt It assuredly comes as a surprise to hear of rabbis harking back to Egyptian notions of magic. When one speaks of the “magic nature” of Egyptian knowledge, one visualizes a “traditional world picture … based on the idea that the world required the assistance of ritual in order to keep functioning.”49 Students of medieval Kabbalah, especially of its Lurianic variety, as well as of Hasidism and of modern liberal Judaism’s tiqûn ôlām (“mending the world”), will readily recognize the parallel notion of “assistance to heaven.”50 Not only is there no notion of that sort exhibited in the Hebrew Bible itself, but the “Mosaic distinction,” as is argued in this chapter, was distinguished precisely by the acute struggle, for the first time in history, against just such a self-​assured consciousness proffering its patronizing assistance to “heaven” or even just to the world presumably in need of repairs.51 In his 1997 book Moses the Egyptian, Assmann frequently uses the term “cosmotheism,” referring both to polytheism in general and to the specifically Egyptian type of religiosity.52 With Spinoza’s pantheism, the Europe of the Enlightenment rediscovered Egypt as a land peopled with “Spinozists and cosmotheists.”53 Were the Egyptians Spinozists and cosmotheists? At the same time, were they also indulging in esoteric, mystical, or magical arts?

30 The Context The object of the [purported] esoteric monotheism or the “mysteries” of the ancient Egyptians came to be identified [in the eighteenth century] as “Nature.” In the idea of Nature as the deity of an original, nonrevealed monotheism, which survived in Egyptian religion under the almost impenetrable cover of symbols and mysteries, the Hermetic, hieroglyphic, and Biblical discourses on Egypt merge.54 This nature-​based “monotheism” is not to be thought of as devoid of a deity or deities; on the contrary, it was in effect a return to polytheism, albeit united under the singular “Nature,” thus enabling the imaginary “monotheism.”55 “Cosmotheism,” traced back to Egypt, is a crucial notion, because it sheds light on both the Egyptian religious theology and the “Mosaic distinction” that revolted against it. Also, to this very day it is an extremely widespread conception; it is, for example, a key tenet of New Ageism.56 Assmann frames cosmotheism’s essence as follows: “The [Mosaic] counter-​religious antagonism was always constructed in terms of unity [versus] plurality. Moses and the One against Egypt and the Many. The discourse on Moses the Egyptian aimed at dismantling this barrier. It traced the idea of unity back to Egypt.”57 In fact, however, the difference between “I am who I am” and “I am all that is,” Assmann appropriately states, “could not be more pronounced.”58 According to biblical theology, “God” creates existence itself, while remaining outside or beyond existence itself. The Hen kai pan, or “All-​in-​One” formula, and the “I am all that is” description, by contrast, reference existence. Moreover, Plutarch’s treatise De Iside and Osiride … repeatedly states that the Egyptians[’] … Supreme God [was] symbolized … by a crocodile. Horapollo “tells us, that the Egyptians acknowledging a pantokrator and kosmokrator, an Omnipotent Being that was the Governor of the whole World, did Symbolically represent him by a Serpent.” This “first and most divine Being,” according to Eusebius, “is Symbolically represented by a Serpent having the head of an Hawk.”59 While Assmann advises that “we have to understand [such symbols] on two levels” and that what they refer to “is[, at] the level of transcendence, the ineffable and hidden universal god, whom, of course, no image can represent,” this once again conveys an inadequate grasp of either symbols or allegories.60 For if the crocodile or the serpent with the hawk’s head are indeed symbols of the otherwise ineffable deity, such a symbol would be as good as useless unless it does what any symbol is supposed to do: “always partak[ing] of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity, of which it is the representative.”61 “The participatory power of the symbol, partaking fully rather than pointing emptily, [is] that [which] allows it to overcome otherness,” in this case the otherness of the Egyptian deity, the “ineffable and hidden universal god, whom, of course, no image can represent.”62

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  31 The Egyptian symbols of deities do just that—​namely, they do represent, that is to say, stand for, the Egyptian deities. In contrast, Elohim is described as the Hebrew deity’s designation, and while, as a designation, it also represents that which it names, the only symbols involved are the Hebrew alphabetic letters of this name. As individual letters, however, they do not point to anything and reference nothing in the terrestrial or cosmic realities; as letters, their symbolism is confined to representing certain associated sounds that in aggregate make up a word. It is true, however, that the Tetragrammaton, another, special name of the Hebrew deity revealed to Moses at the burning bush, is called the Ineffable Name due to its proscribed, or in any event, today unknown pronounceability. Its letters do not make a recognizable word (except perhaps a composite of several transmutations of the verb “to be”).63 Furthermore, the medieval Kabbalah treats each of its four letters as symbolizing a different existential realm or “domain of being.”64 Can a crocodile or a serpent with a hawk’s head be considered an allegory rather than a symbol? As Coleridge would have it, “an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-​ language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot.”65 Allegory is “a translation of abstract notions into a picture-​language” without, as in the manner of a symbol, “partaking of the reality which it renders intelligible.” Yet allegory is not nothing, and it is meant to convey through its particular features something of the nature of that which it allegorizes. The crocodile and the serpent are both “lying low” in potentially menacing anticipation, while the hawk’s head implies wide vistas and perhaps courage. Does one need, at this point, to stress the radically different conceptualization of the Hebrew deity, whose referential designations—​ Elohim and YHWH—​ are more akin to names rather than either a visible symbol or allegory, such as a crocodile or a serpent with the head of a hawk?66

A Semiotic Perspective: Iconicity and Symbolism (Egypt) versus Indexicality and Allegorization (Israel) Finally, we have a semiotic perspective on what divides ancient Egypt and ancient Israel, at least with regard to esoteric writing that its originators wished to mask. Assmann approaches such a perspective in terms that are highly pertinent, yet the conclusion he derives from it is, as we shall see, erroneous: The fundamental principle that informs all enigmatic modes of writing is deconventionalization.67 Either conventional signs are invested with an unconventional meaning, or new signs are invented to replace the conventional ones. …. Cryptography was possible only with hieroglyphic script,

32 The Context not with the cursive script that was derived from it. …. Hieroglyphs had a dual function: they stood for linguistic units on the phonemic or the semantic plane, and at the same time, like pictorial art, they iconically represented existing things. The process of conventionalization entails the discontinuing of representation on this second (iconic) plane. …. Almost all originally iconic scripts have shed their iconicity in the course of their development. …The development of hieroglyphs was very different. They retained their function as images even after they had become script characters. Their graphic quality, forfeited in the course of conventionalization, could be reanimated at any time.68 Crucially apropos of the Pentateuch, such a position—​namely, that “cryptography was possible only with hieroglyphic script”—​is incorrect. As Paul Hernadi argues, Literary works, just like other verbal constructs, are capable of conveying information from one mind to another. Some critics prefer to approach texts as instruments of mimesis (words representing worlds), others as instruments of communication (messages from authors to readers). Yet literary works communicate and represent at the same time, and criticism as a whole should account for them both as utterances with potential appeal and as verbal signs representing worlds.69 I have noted elsewhere that “the mimetic axis of representation supplies the ostensible historical or other narrative background of its material, which is then presentationally interpreted to be the content of the other major axis, that of communication.”70 The issue I wish to draw attention to here concerns the mimetic axis of representation: anything that represents something else would be considered, semiotically, a sign. According to Peircean taxonomy, there are three types of signs: the icon, the index, and the symbol.71 For cases involving literary works (including in the latter also the Pentateuch), I would add the allegory.72 Thus, we can see that, apart from the iconic function of the hieroglyphs as pictures—​their representational mimetic function—​there could additionally be, in accordance with the Peircean taxonomy of signs, two additional functions of the hieroglyphs, conceivably also co-​opting the indexical and the symbolic functions, as well as the allegorical one (if one takes into consideration just how different the allegorical is from the other three types of signs). Is hieroglyphic communication solely iconic, or could it also be indexical, symbolic, allegorical—​or some combination of them? The referential structure of any communication can, in principle, consist of the following kinds of representations of communicated concepts and/​or information, either singly or in some combination: (1) allegorization; (2) iconicity; (3) indexicality; (4) symbolization; and (5) the literal, or straightforward, narration. These types of mimetic representations, along with their respective

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  33 communicative intents, must each contribute—​to the extent that they are actually present in the text and do so in addition to their respective mimetic content—​to the content of the axis of communication, if intended by the author. It is then up to the reader to read the text in accordance with the way these contents were in fact “encrypted,” or endowed; otherwise readers will find themselves in a postmodern interpretive field of readerly creativity, instead of being on the receiving end of the authorial intention and message. There is no indication that Egyptian hieroglyphic esoteric writing took advantage of allegorization as an encoding tool; however, it may, in addition to its symbolic and iconic aspects, contain occasional indexical information. In contrast, the foremost ancient Israelite esoteric writing—​the Torah, or Pentateuch—​as we shall see throughout this book, entails extensive allegorization and indexicality, by means of which the entextualization of the priestly esoteric legacy has been realized. This chapter has shown that while ancient Israel’s founding religious principles were the polar opposites of the ancient Egyptian ones, in point of fact they are positioned along the selfsame relevant axes, albeit in each case at their opposite ends. Such a realization is both startling and very fruitful in its import. Thus, Egypt’s paradigmatic pattern of palpable iconicity and symbolism, but not of allegorization or indexicality, ought to lead one to probe whether these and/​or the other two semiotic modes of signs—​indexicality and allegoricity—​may have been involved within the edifice of Israel’s esoteric Torah, or Teaching, that is, in the Pentateuchal structure itself. This examination takes place in several subsequent chapters. Thus, it turns out that the extreme polarity between Egypt’s and Israel’s key stances is indeed fully reflected in the semiotic domain as well, as perhaps should have been expected. If Egypt’s sensibility is essentially iconic and symbolic, the Pentateuch’s esoteric “second channel,” the veiled Sôd narrative, is, as we shall see, allegorical and indexical, pointing to direct, experiential knowledge of the access to the Divine.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Kohav, Mysticism and Meaning. 2 Kaufmann, Religions in Four Dimensions, 13. 3 Bowker, Sense of God, x–​xi. 4 Eliade, Two and the One, 11. 5 Technically, the Old Testament is not exactly the same as the Hebrew Bible; among other things, the former contains material, such as the Books of Judith and Tobit, that is absent from the latter. 6 For a dating that is sensitive to a broad context, see Cross, From Epic to Canon. Frank Moore Cross speaks of “evidence, preserved in epic, of Israelite connections with the peoples of the south who moved between Se’ir, Midian, and Egypt at the end of the Late Bronze Age [i.e., prior to 1200 BC E ] and the beginning of the Iron Age [post-​1200 BC E ]” (51).

34 The Context 7 Several earlier and later instances of a notion of oneness of the supreme deity might be mentioned here: one in Egypt, the other possibly in Babylon, while a Greek variation involves the pre-​Socratic philosopher Parmenides and, almost a millennium after Parmenides, Plotinus. Only the Egyptian precedent preceding the full-​fledged Israelite paradigm shift will be briefly noted here, since it helps to highlight the distinctions involved when such occurrences are sometimes mistakenly conflated. The so-​called Amarna texts reference the rule of Akhenaten, Pharaoh Amenophis IV in the fourteenth century B C E , indicating a brief period of Akhenaten’s rule. Akhenaten abolished the traditional Egyptian beliefs and instituted a cult of Amun-​Re, which Assmann calls “the hidden god, whose symbols, images, and names are the many gods.” He comments that “it is this last aspect of Amun’s Oneness that is of particular interest … because it is so closely related to the idea of esoteric monotheism and the ‘god of the mysteries’ ” (Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 194). However, the reason for the very appearance of and the need for the “Mosaic distinction”—​the latter a term that Assmann introduced himself—​is the Mosaic rejection of the notion of deities in the manifested world (of which the sun is a prime example, and “sun-​god” is a key designation of Amun-​Re). Equally important is the extreme brevity of Akhenaten’s rule, after which the cult of Amun-​Re was removed as violently as it had been installed earlier. The Amarna experiment represented a marked aberration in the millennia-​long Egyptian history and its traditional religious sensibilities and therefore cannot be seen as an Egyptian innovation, much less as a part of Egyptian tradition per se. 8 The uncompromising Israelite monotheism sometimes causes difficulty for those who see unmistakable indications of monolatry—​ that is, a worship of God without necessarily excluding the reality of other gods—​in the Hebrew Bible itself and even in its key commandment, “No other gods before me”; why command this if “other gods” do not exist? Yet the Hebrew Bible’s denial of other gods and its insistence on their spuriousness can be seen simply as recognition that even false or nonexistent gods can influence their adherents’ minds. 9 Linguistic transitivity is distinct from the notion of transitivity in philosophy (logic) and mathematics. 10 Halliday, “Linguistic Function and Literary Style,” 81. 11 The specific examples of a crocodile and a serpent with the head of a hawk, including the significance of such symbolization of deities, will be detailed later. 12 As a well-​known psychologist has asserted, “We can’t overcome magical thinking. It is part of our evolved psychology” (Nathan C. DeWall, “Magic May Lurk inside Us All,” New York Times, 28 October 2014, D5). Spinoza indulges in sarcasm in the appendix to the first part of his Ethics, when he extends human craving to imagining “that the gods direct all things for the use of men in order to bind men to them and be held by men in the highest honor” (Spinoza, Ethics, 27). 13 Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 42–​43. 14 See, especially, Soltes, Magic and Religion in the Greco-​Roman World. 15 Victoria Nelson speaks of the ever-​present yearning for a magical worldview, as well as for “the divinization of the human” (Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets, ix). In her book, Nelson traces this by now widespread phenomenon, one that can only be labeled, in terms of the concerns of the present chapter, as “the return of magical consciousness.” 16 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 208–​9.

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  35 17 See Chapter 3; cf. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 377–​79. 18 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 1 et passim. 19 Foregrounding the fact of an existence of “second-​channel” esoteric content within the Pentateuch was the principal task of my dissertation research presented in Kohav, Sôd Hypothesis. 20 This interpretation in the Jewish tradition became practically unavoidable, once “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”—​deemed earlier as the first commandment by the Septuagint and Philo—​was combined, in the Talmud, with “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” as a conjoined second commandment, with “I am the Lord thy God” now becoming the first commandment (the latter was previously seen as a run-​up or preamble to the Ten Commandments). Most Christian traditions consider all three sentences as part of the first commandment (except for Lutheranism, which considers “I am the Lord thy God” a preamble). 21 Jean-​Luc Marion’s groundbreaking philosophical conceptualization of idolatry as “consign[ing] the divine to the measure of a human gaze,” while highly relevant, will not be entered into in the present chapter; I explore this aspect in a forthcoming paper. See Marion, God without Being, 14. 22 Iconoclasm: “the practice of destroying images, especially those created for religious veneration. Free Dictionary, s.v. “iconoclasm,” www.fre​edic​tion​ary.com. 23 Assmann, “Pictures versus Letters,” 297 (emphasis added). 24 “There were two principally different writing systems, presumably in use side by side in ancient Egypt, one referring to things and concepts ‘by nature,’ that is iconically, and the other one referring to concepts and sounds ‘by convention,’ that is by arbitrary signs. …The Hieratic or Hieroglyphic script was interpreted as sacred (hieros =​sacred), inscriptional (glyph =​‘carved’ sign) and iconic, the Demotic or Epistolic script was interpreted as profane (demos =​common people), used for everyday communication (epistole =​correspondence) and aniconic, that is, alphabetic. All this corresponds closely to historical reality as far as Modern Egyptology is able to reconstruct it except one detail: the equation of aniconic and alphabetic signs” (Assmann, “Pictures versus Letters,” 297–​98). 25 Daniels, “Introduction to Part II,” 19; Bottéro, “Religion and Reasoning in Mesopotamia,” 19. Daniels states that “it is universally recognized that the [Mesopotamian] cuneiform … and [Egyptian] hieroglyphic … writing systems are sufficiently dissimilar (one logosyllabic, the other logoconsonantal) that one could not have been adapted directly from the other. But the similarities of earliest attestation (ca. 3200 BC E ) and the combination of logography, phonography, and determinatives are sufficient to convince Egyptologists … or suggest to them … that the idea of writing came from the Sumerians to the Egyptians” (Daniels, “First Civilizations,” 24). 26 Robert Ritner adds a fourth Egyptian script: “The Egyptian script tradition is one of the world’s longest, extending from the end of the fourth millennium B CE to at least the tenth century C E During these four thousand years, four distinct but interrelated scripts were developed, often in complementary usage: Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic. … Hieroglyphs represent the fundamental Egyptian writing system, from which Hieratic, Demotic, and (to a lesser extent) Coptic are cursive derivatives” (Ritner, “Egyptian Writing,” 73). 27 Assmann, “Pictures versus Letters,” 298.

36 The Context 28 Ibid., 299 (emphasis added). 29 Tsur, “Issues in Literary Synaesthesia,” 39. 30 Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist; Mendelssohn, “half a century after the first publication of Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses …, brought grammatology and theology in an even closer connection in his booklet Jerusalem” (Assmann, “Pictures versus Letters,” 308). See Mendelssohn, Jerusalem. 31 Assmann, “Pictures versus Letters,” 309. 32 As Assmann points out in an earlier piece, “hieroglyphs are symbols which represent meaning; in other words, they are visible signs that stand for something invisible” (Assmann, “Semiosis and Interpretation in Ancient Egyptian Ritual,” 87). Such a definition, however, is not fully satisfactory either, since the symbol’s role is to stand for something that cannot be otherwise represented—​and not necessarily for what is merely invisible. See de Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality”; Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream’ ”; and Todorov, Theories of the Symbol. 33 There is also an opposite claim, one alleging the superiority of allegory; see, e.g., Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama; and de Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality.” 34 See, e.g., Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity. 35 The presentational versus the representational was theorized in Shanon, Representational and the Presentational, and, independently, in Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness—​ both following Suzanne Langer’s relevant prior conceptualizations. 36 Janney and Arndt, “Can a Picture Tell a Thousand Words?,” 449. This conclusion, however, is erroneous at least in part, since their examples of “translations” from visual messages into verbal ones are all done in a “telegraphic” manner that is bound to confirm the authors’ assertion of the poverty of emotional semantics in the verbal form. 37 Janney and Arndt, “Can a Picture Tell a Thousand Words?,” 450. 38 Ibid. 39 Assmann, “Pictures versus Letters,” 308. Such a claim loses a significant part of its force if one realizes that practically all the other logoi literalize their metaphors, too. Allegorical interpretation, called allegoresis (see below), is subject to such a tendency; vis-​à-​vis the philosophical logos, the unconscious conceptual metaphors of our childhood category formation are found seamlessly embedded in it. See, e.g., the work of Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, whose analysis posits that even the greatest philosophers were unconsciously dependent on such metaphors. The distinction between allegory and allegoresis entails the difference between two types of allegorization, one originating with the author, the other a tool of the interpreters; the former has been helpfully designated by Jon Whitman as “compositional allegory,” whereas allegoresis is “interpretive allegory” (Whitman, Interpretation and Allegory, xi). 40 Assmann, “Pictures versus Letters,” 310–​11. Whether the “Semitic achievement” of inventing the alphabet derives from Egyptian hieroglyphs or originates in Mesopotamia has not been fully settled; see, e.g., Daniels, “First Civilizations,” 25. In contrast, the link between Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Latin alphabet is more certain: “Egyptian writing had a dominant influence on both the Meroitic and Proto-​Sinaitic scripts, and through the latter, Egyptian may serve as the direct ancestor of the contemporary Latin alphabet” (Ritner, “Egyptian Writing,” 82).

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  37 41 Ibid., 88. 42 Coleridge, “Statesman’s Manual,” 30, cited in Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 5. 43 Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 5. Coleridge’s misplaced venom against allegory, however, would be pertinent vis-​à-​vis allegoresis: “An allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-​language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot” (Coleridge, “Statesman’s Manual,” 30, cited in Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 5). Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and many others beg to disagree; the present chapter endeavors to show the same. 44 Assmann, “Semiosis and Interpretation,” 89. 45 Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 4 et passim. 46 Assmann, “Semiosis and Interpretation,” 89. 47 That this is pantheism, albeit under such terms as “cosmotheism” and even “nature monotheism,” will be argued below. 48 For examples of empirically measurable effects, via sensing the alteration of some aspects of consciousness that are detectable via EEG and/​or fMRI, see, e.g., Fingelkurts et al., “Hypnosis Induces a Changed Composition of Brain Oscillations in EEG.” 49 Assmann, “Officium Memoriae,” 149, 141, respectively (emphasis added). 50 Apropos of tiqûn ôlām, see, e.g., Lancaster, Essence of Kabbalah, 100; and Cooper, “Assimilation of Tikkun Olam.” The idea that there may be something wrong with actively promoting “repairing the world,” let alone that the concept might be tied to Egyptian magic, is so counterintuitive that it might easily seem preposterous. There is another way of framing this ancient human hubris (albeit seeing it only as a modern phenomenon): “Modern culture, whose metaphysics claims that as humans we create all meaning and value, is programmatically idolatrous, for value in a producer/​consumer culture is only measured by what we make” (Isenberg, “Ideals, Pseudo-​Ideals and the Evolution of Consciousness,” 97). 51 As for the Mosaic distinction being a struggle occurring for the first time in history, it was also the last time—​as it has not been replicated since—​but not because that effort resulted in a complete or final victory. Quite to the contrary, magical consciousness has thrived throughout known history and continues to do so in our own day; see, e.g., Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture; compare also Gregory Bateson’s observation: My view of magic is the converse of that which has been orthodox in anthropology since the days of Sir James Frazer. It is orthodox to believe that religion is an evolutionary development of magic. Magic is regarded as more primitive and religion as its flowering. In contrast, I view sympathetic or contagious magic as a product of decadence from religion; I regard religion on the whole as the earlier condition (Bateson and Bateson, Angels Fear, 56; emphasis added) On the “patronizing assistance,” see Walter Isaacson’s article on Henry Kissinger, “The Lion in Winter,” Time, 22 September 2014, 36–​ 38. Isaacson notes the following: “ ‘The most fundamental problem of politics,’ wrote [Kissinger] in his dissertation, ‘is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness’ ” (36).

38 The Context 52

53

The term “cosmotheism” had been coined by Lamoignon de Malesherbes with reference to the antique, especially Stoic worship of the cosmos or mundus as Supreme Being. … Malesherbes could not have found a better term for what seems to be the common denominator of Egyptian religion, Alexandrian (Neoplatonic, Stoic, Hermetic) philosophy, and Spinozism, including the medieval traditions such as alchemy and the [Christian] cabala that might have served as intermediaries. (Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 142) Spinoza’s (in)famous formula deus sive natura amounted to an abolition not only of the Mosaic distinction but of the most fundamental of all distinctions, the distinction between God and the world. This deconstruction was as revolutionary as Moses’ construction. It immediately led to a new appraisal of Egypt. The Egyptians were Spinozists and “cosmotheists.” (Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 8)

54 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 20–​21. 55 “Hen kai pan, One and All,” is the concept [Ralph] Cudworth was trying to substantiate with a vast collection of quotations from Greek and Latin authors [, namely,] the idea of primitive monotheism, common to all religions and philosophies including atheism itself. What is common to all must be true and vice versa; this was the basic assumption of seventeenth-​century epistemology and was also implicit in the idea of “nature” and in the concept of “natural religion.” (Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 81) However, as Assmann notes, Hen kai pan’s provenance is Egyptian, not Greek: [The formula] never appears [in Egyptian sources] exactly as Hen kai pan, but only occurs in more or less close approximations, such as Hen to Pan, To ben kai to Pan, and so on. … Thus as a result of his investigations, Cudworth had demonstrated the formula to be the quintessential expression of Egyptian “arcane theology.” (140) Either way, the concept is far from seemingly innocent nature worship: “The kai in the Greek formula has the same meaning as Spinoza’s sive. It amounts not to addition, but to an equation. In its most common form, the formula occurs as Hen to pan, ‘All Is One,’ the world is God. This is what cosmotheism means” (142). 56 Compare Hanegraaff, New Age Religion. 57 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 168. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 85–​86. 60 Ibid., 202. 61 Coleridge, “Statesman’s Manual,” 30, cited in Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 5. 62 Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 5; Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 202. 63 Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek.

The God of Moses versus the “One and All” of Egypt  39 64 Lancaster, Essence of Kabbalah, 120. See also Vital, Tree of Life. 65 Coleridge, “Statesman’s Manual,” 30, cited in Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 5. 66 Assmann further speaks of visualization of the different forms in which the cosmogonic of the supreme and transcendent God is present in the world. The Egyptian pantheon is a composite form of this divine immanence. The seven bas, the nine shapes or the million beings are variant expressions of the same idea that God is one and many, one and all, Hen kai pan, as the Greek formula runs. (Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 203) The relevant formula cited by Assmann from a Ramesside magical papyrus is “the One who makes himself into millions” (205): In other texts, “million” is said to be his body, his limbs, his transformation and even his name: “million of millions is his name.” By transforming himself into the millionfold reality, God has not ceased to be one. He is the many in that mysterious way, hidden and present at the same time, which this theology is trying to grasp by means of the ba concept. (206) While the medieval Kabbalah has adopted the Ten Sefirot of the Sefer Yetzirah (see Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah) as ten immanent divine potencies, the Hebrew Bible itself has only one, but crucial, clue vis-​à-​vis this issue, namely, the divine names Elohim and YHWH. This will be unpacked in later chapters. 67 Regarding deconventionalization, Assmann refers to Viktor Shklovsky (Theory of Prose), an important member of the Russian formalist movement in literary theory, to discuss the concept of alienation, the goal of which is to heighten awareness and to prevent staleness of perception. Habit, says Shklovsky, makes “life drift on into nothingness. Automatization devours everything, clothes, furniture, women, fear of war.” The function of art is to “alienate” the objects of everyday reality so that they resist automatic perception. The gaze is arrested, orientation is difficult, automatic perception is replaced by conscious, laborious, complicated decipherment. (Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 14) 68 Assmann, Mind of Egypt, 415–​16 (emphasis added). 69 Hernadi, “Literary Theory,” 369 (emphasis added). 70 Kohav, Sôd Hypothesis, 47. 71 Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic.” I wish to distinguish between iconic as visual and iconic as the Peircean, or semiotic, sign category—​the icon. The Peircean “icon” as a sign of something is, of course, related to what it represents, typically by being its visual image, but not necessarily so; the icon need not be exclusively visual. 72 Peircean symbol is of course already subsuming allegory, in the overall semiotic sense that distinguishes all symbolic representations from either icons or indices. However, as proposed in The Sôd Hypothesis, since allegory is quite distinct from the other figurative devices, it must not be subsumed—​in particular with regard

40 The Context to literary works—​under the symbol. See also, e.g., Tsur, “Aspects of Cognitive Poetics,” 300–​301. Hodge and Kress draw attention to the fact that Peirce’s treatment of modality [a kind of truth value attached to a proposition] is fairly rudimentary. Three forms of modality, and three kinds of sign, are not adequate to account for the full range of strategies … ., and semioticians tend to overuse Peirce’s terms for want of anything better. (Hodge and Kress, Social Semiotics, 27)

2 At the Primal Scene of Communication The Question of Israel’s Esoteric Referent

That the Edenic garden is a one-​of-​a-​kind place—​featuring such fanciful oddities as a talking serpent and extraordinary characters such as “God”—​ is immediately obvious to any reader of the Bible. Adding to these the two curious “trees”—​ the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—​thickens the mystery further. This chapter will, early on, identify Eden as a quintessential Primal Scene. A question arises, however, as to whether one should view this scene as a Scene of (1) Instruction, (2) Writing, (3) Interpretation, (4) Origins, or (5) Communication. This chapter makes the case that, while all five modes can be operative for a reader, even simultaneously so, only viewing the Edenic scene as a Scene of Instruction (under certain conditions) and particularly as a Scene of Communication would be true to the authorial intent, all other perspectives suddenly looking spurious. A further question pertains to the following: Should Edenic and other Pentateuchal narratives, even if manifestly fantastic, be seen as literally true—​that is, as presented—​or should they be seen as figuration at work, aiming to instruct and enlighten? This study’s main thesis regarding the alleged secret, or Sôd, stratum within the Pentateuch is presented here with the understanding that, although rabbis have always maintained that such a layer exists, its existence has never been demonstrated definitively or even plausibly. The reason, as we shall see, is readily discernible from a key midrashic passage in which prominent early rabbis seriously discuss the likely literal reference of “the tree whereof Adam and Eve ate” while remaining oblivious to the possible figurative import of this and other, similar Pentateuchal passages. The semiotician Umberto Eco highlights an implicit problem in the Edenic story: “The semantic universe rapidly becomes unbalanced” after God gives his instructions to Adam and Eve; it becomes unbalanced because we humans have a logical problem if something that is so desirable and “good” is designated as “bad”—​as was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.1 Rabbinical tradition, being denied access to the priestly lore due to historical-​theocratic as well as hereditary-​ sectarian reasons, proceeded to contrive the so-​called midrashic approach of free associations tied to the literal, or factual, pegs in the Torah. This study, in contrast, attempts the more authentic tropological alternative, perceiving, DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-4

42 The Context for example, the text’s central but inexplicable Epistemic Commandment to be an authorial invitation to think things through in a communicative and nonliteral way: this commandment is an epistemic and ethical riddle, as well as an invitation to solve it. Israel’s esoteric referent emerges, for the first time ever, as being tied to the mystical-​initiatory praxis of the First Temple priests, a tradition enabling an interscalar, experiential relationship with the God of Israel. Since the hypothesized esoteric-​noetic narrative concealed within the Pentateuch is seen as having been deliberately camouflaged—​but with revealing traces, likewise deliberately embedded—​the primary effort of this study entails mapping seemingly digressive but crucially relevant contexts into textual demonstrata. Thus, the full investigation in this book offers relatively few unambiguous references indicating the Sôd while, in contrast, highlighting extensive evidence of context-​dependent factors.

Of Primal Scenes Staging a Scene Human beings desire much more than just safety, satisfactions of all sorts, happiness. Jean-​Paul Sartre, for example, close to the end of his massive Being and Nothingness, arrives at what at first glance seems to be an improbable contention. Framing it as “the fundamental project of human reality,” Sartre states bluntly, “Man is the being whose project is to be God.”2 The leading mid-​twentieth-​century existentialist philosopher and writer of course supplied a wealth of suitably argued and relevant considerations throughout the length of his book before reaching this seemingly questionable conclusion. At least two and a half millennia ago, a very similar if not wholly identical idea had already been articulated, and in as blunt a fashion as Sartre’s expression. It was mouthed by the Edenic snake, the Talking Serpent of the Garden of Eden’s narrative in Genesis, apropos of “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden” (Gen. 3:3 KJV). “God doth know,” asserted the Serpent, “that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5 KJV). That the archetypal humans are more than eager about the prospect of becoming “as gods”—​and perhaps even becoming God, replacing the Almighty with their own newly divinized selves—​is attested to by their subsequent deed.3 What is a reader of the above supposed to make out of such claims and actions? That the Edenic narrative is a fable is obvious enough to all but the hardened, dyed-​in-​the-​wool literalists? As an applicable statement apropos of another remarkable serpent asserts, When …. we encounter in the opening episode of Spenser’s Faerie Queene a monstrous, book-​vomiting serpent named Error, we have been given more than a set of instructions in how to interpret her. We have been told to interpret in a similar way every other figure we encounter in the

At the Primal Scene of Communication  43 poem. Error tells us not only what she means but what sort of book we are reading, what conventions apply.4 We are, in the case of the Bible, reading “a book that has had a continuous fertilizing influence on English literature from Anglo-​Saxon writers to poets younger than I,” as Northrop Frye stated in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Yet, enigmatically, he also adds the following regarding the book’s literary standing: “Ultimately, as we should expect, the Bible evades all literary criteria.”5 Even so, Stephen Prickett echoes Frye’s highest-​bar estimation of this text as a work of literature: “the Romantic Bible was at once a single narrative work, an on-​going tradition of interpretation, and what I have called … a ‘metatype’: a kind of all-​embracing literary form that was invoked to encompass and give meaning to all other books.”6 He adds that, “as the Romantics were well aware, we owe to [the Bible] even our idea of a book itself,” and he then suggests that the Bible: could be, and was seen by some as, a paradigm of our entire literary culture—​and ultimately of the collective hermeneutical process by which any culture develops and inculcates its distinctive way of understanding the world. For the young Friedrich Schlegel, as for Coleridge, the Bible was the central literary form and thus the ideal of every book, a new supreme genre, which provided a goal for representatives of all other genres.7 A “great code,” a “metatype,” an “all-​embracing literary form … to encompass and give meaning to all other books,” “a paradigm of our entire literary culture,” “the central literary form and thus the ideal of every book”—​the biblical text is the ur-​text of literature, a literary text par excellence and beyond compare. Still, does the biblical text and specifically its first five books, known as the Pentateuch, manage in fact to “evade all literary criteria,” as Frye seems to contend, in spite of its featured figures (such as a Talking Serpent—​a wise serpent, or rather a cunning one, as the text informs us, who is at least as prescient, it would seem, as a philosopher of Sartre’s stature)? The Garden of Eden narrative also features “God” as a key figure or character. (God, however, is not depicted, per se; “he” is “acting” only via voice in what purports to be a dramatization of the primal origins of humanity.) How should an otherwise competent reader react to a staged encounter that includes God’s bizarre, inexplicable prohibition of consuming the fruit of one particular tree—​a most curious tree, it goes without saying—​specified as being the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”? The audacity of the drama’s author is boundless as well as brilliant: in spite of the declared impossibility of representing God in any way, the Edenic narrative is seductively suggestive and, it would seem, extremely effectual. Specifically, the melodramatic scheme employed here manages to achieve the impossible: “Mastering the

44 The Context unmasterable is the philosopher’s wiliest game. No speculative trap is made better than the discourse that puts the unmasterable in the place of mastery. To construct it, however, one must stage a scene.”8 It should be plain apropos of the Garden of Eden that the “unmasterables” here are the very notion of God; the “nondepiction” of God; God’s marvelous “garden” precincts, so to speak; and, last but not least, God’s inscrutable ways. Let us capitalize this pregnant and consequential word, Scene. A scene is a site; an event; a setting; an act; also a vista, panorama; a picture or a tableau. But a scene with a capitalized first letter will also attempt to capture some vital primordial and unconscious event, the “memory” of which, while dim and thus hardly reliable—​that is to say, likely nothing more than a fantasy—​ is at the same time powerfully etched in some deep, perhaps in the deepest, strata of our collective and individual psychic ether, within the latter’s communal arche-​cognizing and protopsychic texture, within its primal textual texture. The event or events in question need not ever have happened in actual fact: what matters is that they seem to be faintly remembered, being suddenly “recalled” via a primal text.9 The Garden of Eden account—​placed at the inception of a historically ancient text known as the Pentateuch, or the Torah, and featuring such primordial symbols as “Garden”; the first, or archetypal, man and woman; animals who are being given their respective designations for the first time, by the first humans; the Talking Serpent; and, most tantalizingly, “God”—​is a primal text par excellence of that type. Five Scenes, All Up on the Edenic Stage What kind of primal scene is the one on display in the Garden of God?10 In recent critical discourse, at least three types of “scenes” have been prominent. These are the Scenes of (1) Writing, (2) Instruction, and (3) Interpretation. All of these, while at first glance similar to one another, are in fact decisively and consequentially distinct. To these, I add a fourth and a fifth Scene: (4) of Origins and (5) of Communication; they will become critical for the present discussion. If, as Lukacher says, “the primal scene is the figure of an interpretive dilemma,” then by choosing one versus some others from among the above five alternatives of the Scene in question will determine one’s ultimate, and perhaps improper or inadequate grasp of this “unperceived event.”11 It will then become, if still not perceptible per se, then at least intelligible in some important sense or another. Again, and crucially: the specific intelligibility evoked by a primal scene entails an implicit choice on the part of the watcher of the scene, since all five types of primal scenes are in principle available for the trial of one’s judgment. Furthermore, the scene that unfolds in the Garden of Eden actually is, simultaneously, all five scenes in one. Yet, as will be argued here, only one of them is not illusory or at least not entailing an incomplete, skewed, or specious view. For example, if the spectator sees the Edenic scene as a Scene of Writing—​ which it is, of course, as it is epitomizing no less than “a paradigm of our entire

At the Primal Scene of Communication  45 literary culture” (as referenced above)—​then the Scene in question, these days, is being viewed through a postmodernist lens. The latter entails, among other things, the infamous “death of the author” inaugurated by Roland Barthes, multiple reader-​response schemes, and seeing the writing’s very textuality as textual meaning.12 Such over-​privileging of the reader in favor of Writing per se (but not the authorial meaning) is associated with repression, as Jacques Derrida, a foremost champion of writing, freely acknowledges: “Writing is unthinkable without repression.”13 Moreover, he states, “in order to describe the structure, it is not enough to recall that one always writes for someone; and the oppositions sender-​receiver, code-​message, etc., remain extremely coarse instruments.”14 Having just referred to Roman Jakobson’s well-​ known classification of factors and functions of a communication as “coarse instruments,” Derrida renders himself vulnerable to scathing Bloomean critique.15 Bloom instead speaks of the Scene of Instruction (which I will be considering next): “The first use …. of a Scene of Instruction is to remind us of the humanistic loss we sustain if we yield up the authority of oral tradition to the partisans of writing, to those like Derrida and Foucault who imply for all language what Goethe erroneously asserted for Homer’s language, that language by itself writes the poems and thinks.”16 Derrida, in this instance, seems to compound his writing hubris even further by looking in the wrong direction, as far as textual meaning is concerned. Under an intriguing heading, “Becoming-​literary of the literal”—​which this book, as a whole, could easily adopt as its own thesis—​Derrida states the following: “[A]‌psychoanalysis of literature respectful of the originality of the literary signifier has not yet begun. …. Until now, only the analysis of literary signifieds, that is, nonliterary signified meanings, has been undertaken.”17 Apropos of the Edenic scene, this chapter contends that it is precisely the signified that has not been identified properly, if at all, and it is the signified that we will be compelled to recognize as Israel’s esoteric referent. The signifier here, in contrast, is writing per se. It seems that Derrida’s emphasis in the above citation apropos of the “originality of the literary signifier” can be read two ways: (1) one should stop looking for the signified; instead, one should exclusively probe the literary signifier; or, (2) one should focus on the literary signifier in order then to ascertain the proper signified. It is this second option that the present book pursues. In contrast, Derrida opts, in effect, for the fetishizing of the signifier: by consistent rejection of Husserlian notions of intentionality, which prioritize human consciousness and its “intending” all facets of reality, including, by implication, such communicative initiatives as authorial intention and meaning, Derrida swings to the opposite camp, which belongs to those who celebrate textual supremacy.18 Scenes of Writing, Instruction, and Interpretation, Juxtaposed Harold Bloom, in a section of his classic A Map of Misreading that precedes “The Primal Scene of Instruction,” leads up to his discussion of the latter by

46 The Context noting that “what Jacques Derrida calls the Scene of Writing itself depends upon a Scene of Teaching. …. [Thus it] is insufficiently Primal.”19 “What makes a scene Primal?” asks Bloom. “A scene is a setting as seen by a viewer, a place where action, whether real or fictitious, occurs or is staged. Every Primal Scene is necessarily a stage performance or fantastic fiction, and when described is necessarily a trope.”20 Further, “[t]‌he first element to note about the Scene of Instruction is its absolute firstness; it defines priority.”21 Bloom adds that “the psychic place of heightened consciousness, of intensified demand, where the Scene of Instruction is staged, is necessarily a place cleared by the newcomer in himself.”22 While Bloom calls the Primal Scene “a truly superior psychological reality,” it is then disappointing to see him diminishing it almost at the outset—​specifically, shrinking it to mere interpretation: “[t]‌he true use of a Scene of Instruction comes where true use must, as an aid to reading, an aid to the pragmatics of interpretation.”23 The chief problem with doing this is that the singular, magnificent promise held out by the Primal Scene of Instruction is suddenly dissipated, or betrayed. We are being told that the newly empowered reader is now armed with “an aid to the pragmatics of interpretation,” as that reader looks at a piece of Primal Writing that at this point purports to be, in effect, a Scene of Interpretation (rather than Instruction). Indeed, the Scene of Interpretation is the postmodernist scene of choice, and it also happens to be the one that the Rabbinic school of Judaism of the last two millennia has summoned up, engaging it almost from the start of its ascendancy. The rabbis have adopted the interpretive modus vivendi as their exclusive manner of discourse, which goes by the name midrash.24 But while they have espoused the midrashic interpretive stance overall—​both vis-​à-​vis the Garden of Eden narrative and the Hebrew Bible, or the Tanakh, as a whole—​they have combined this interpretive method and their views of the Tanakh as representing multiple Scenes of Interpretation with a complementary view of them as the literal Scenes of Origins. The Scene of Origins—​or the Scene of Literal/​Historical Truth—​ is discussed below, and I later return to the question of rabbinical interpretation, offering more detail. In contrast to the rabbinical interpretation, the rise to preeminence of hermeneutical arts of interpretation in the twentieth century’s “post-​post” environment had little to do with the search for origins of any sort. Instead, as exemplified by a foremost theorist of hermeneutics, the “five major areas of [Hans-​Georg] Gadamer’s thought are subjectivity, play, interpretation, tradition, and truth.”25 Gadamer “insists that interpretation is always situated within a community of readers.”26 This insistence—​that interpretation is the reader’s prerogative—​is actually quite logical, for one cannot expect the author of a work to indulge in the hermeneutics of his or her work. The author has no need, or tolerance for that matter, for “interpretations.”

At the Primal Scene of Communication  47 The Scene of Origins, or Historical/​Literal Truth Contrasting Gadamer’s hermeneutical notion of readers’ interpretations and its eschewing of the question of origins is what has been called the “heretic” hermeneutic: “Derrida, as part of his heretic hermeneutic, is obsessed (like Freud and Bloom) with the question of origins, and with the need to undo, re-​write, or usurp origin—​above all, through acts of revisionary interpretation.”27 Is the scene presented in the Garden of Eden a Scene of Origins? Specifically, is that how it all happened, historically and literally—​God, the Serpent, Adam and Eve, and all? Avowed religious “fundamentalists” bear this name precisely because Scripture, in their view, carries the literal words of God. Faith accepts nothing less; the fact that Scripture also makes for literary reading par excellence does not mean, in accordance with their weltanschauung, that the things and events portrayed never took place. Even a talking serpent does not give such readers pause, much less God Almighty acting as a character in a theatrical production. However, a vigilant semiotician notices the kinds of issues semiotics, by definition, must pay attention to, such as, for example, semantic incongruities: Red =​Edible =​Good =​Beautiful =​Yes Blue =​Inedible =​Bad =​Ugly =​No =​Serpent and Apple from which it is only a short step to Serpent =​Apple This shows that the semantic universe rapidly becomes unbalanced by comparison with the pristine situation.28 Umberto Eco asks why the Divine prohibits eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, given that “the semantic universe rapidly becomes unbalanced” after God imparts this proscriptive instruction to Adam and Eve. The semantic universe becomes unbalanced because we humans have a logical problem if something that is desirable (or, “Red =​Edible,” in Eco’s evocative trope), as well as good (Good =​Beautiful), is all of a sudden designated as “bad” (Blue =​Inedible =​Bad =​Ugly =​No). How are we to know, henceforth, what is good and what is bad? That is, how are we to live in such a topsy-​turvy, utterly confusing world? It is precisely the knowledge of the distinction between good and evil that seems to be, quite logically, what we ought to be striving for at all costs. Yet as Eco frames it, simultaneously indulging in a bit sarcasm at God’s expense, we humans do have a huge and hugely troubling enigma on our hands: Obviously, God is above providing an explanation of why the apple is evil; he is himself the yardstick of all values and knows it. For Adam and Eve the whole thing is rather more tricky: they have grown into the habit

48 The Context of associating the Good with the Edible and the Red. Yet they cannot possibly ignore a commandment coming from God. His status in their eyes is that of an AA [code]: he constitutes “yes,” an incarnation of the Positive.29 “Why should knowledge of good and evil be proscribed?” is the semantic conundrum in question, regarding which even semiotics, the science of meaning, throws up its semiological hands in a fit of downright perplexity. While there is no denying the dismay that God’s combined ethical and epistemic Eleventh Commandment—​as I shall name it—​educes, it is at the same time brusquely unambiguous and in-​your-​face with what it dramatically conveys. Is the problem tied to the semiotician’s too-​literal reading of the situation? If that were the case, it would indeed be problematic. As Bloom puts it, straightforwardly, “literal meaning is a kind of death. Defenses can be said to trope against death, rather in the same sense that tropes can be said to defend against literal meaning.”30 By the beginning of the rabbinical era, there is already in place an example of “a kind of death” provided by an all-​too-​literal reading of an otherwise figurative text. The prominent early rabbis are perfectly serious in discussing, in the pages of the Talmud, the question of likely literal reference to “the tree whereof Adam and Eve ate”: What was the tree whereof Adam and Eve ate? R. Meir said: It was wheat, for when a person lacks knowledge people say, “That man has never eaten bread of wheat.” R. Samuel b. Isaac asked R. Ze’ra: “Is it possible that it was wheat?” “Yes,” replied he. “But surely tree is written?” he argued. “It grew lofty like the cedars of Lebanon,” replied he. …. R. Judah b. R. Ilai said: It was grapes, for it says, “their grapes are grapes of gall, they have clusters of bitterness” [Deut. 32:32]; those clusters brought bitterness into the world. R. Abba of Acco said: It was the etrog [citron] as it was written, “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food” [Gen. 3:6]. Consider: go forth and see, what tree is it whose wood can be eaten just like its fruit, and you will find none but the etrog. R. [Y]‌ose said: They were figs. He learns the obscure from the implicit and [the meaning of] a statement from its context, thus: This may be compared to a royal prince who sinned with a slave girl, and the king on learning of it expelled him from court. He went from door to door of the slaves, but they would not receive him; but she who had sinned with him opened her door and received him. So when Adam ate of that tree, He expelled him and cast him out of the garden of Eden; and he appealed to all the trees but they would not [receive him]. …. But because he had eaten of its fruit, the fig-​ tree opened its door and received him, as it is written, “And they sewed fig leaves together” [Gen. 3:7]. …. R. Azariah and R. Judah b. Simeon in the name of R. Joshua b. Levi said: Heaven forfend [that we should conjecture what the tree was]! The Holy One, blessed be He, did not and will

At the Primal Scene of Communication  49 not reveal to man what that tree was. For see what is written: “And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman and the beast” [Lev. 20:16]. Now if man has sinned, how did the animal sin? But [it is killed] lest when it stands in the market place people should say, “Through this animal so-​and-​so was stoned.”31 Is the tree in question—​the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—​a fig tree? A citron, or perhaps even wheat or grapes? Images here fly freely, with the fantastic ready to join in at a moment’s notice. In the end it does not matter: “Heaven forfend [that we should conjecture what the tree was]! The Holy One, blessed be He, did not and will not reveal to man what that tree was.” What passes for exegesis here first asks an inappropriate question and then fails to ask the question that the test begs, namely, what is the reason for the prohibition? It is as patently absurd to ask why the Statue of Liberty is portrayed as a woman or what kind of woman she might be. If one senses that the Edenic narrative, with its fantastic Garden of God and fanciful, symbolic Trees of Life and of Knowledge, as well as the most amazing Talking Serpent, may hold the answer to the query apropos of Israel’s esoteric referent, then such an answer can never be forthcoming from rabbinical discourse. At the Scene of Communication Seeing the Edenic narrative as representing a Primal Scene of Instruction could have resulted in the most pertinent perspective. As we have seen, however, because of the danger of sliding into the interpretive mélange, the instructional stance by itself is not enough: it does not warrant the reader grasping the instruction in question. It is the Author who proffers the instruction, not simply the text. The hapless readers—​when trying to comprehend what it is that a difficult, rich, mysterious, and portentous text intends to convey—​choose to resort to what they, now suddenly sanctimonious, pompously designate as “hermeneutics.” They’ll cite Nietzsche for support: “facts that do not exist, [there are] only interpretations.”32 Such readers merrily proceed to convert their failure to receive the teaching/​instruction into a newly found virtue that seems to offer a patina of dignity. An indulgent interpretation template places one into interpretive paradise, which, alas, has little in common with the Edenic paradise. In such circumstances the Instruction, if there is any to be had, is either not at all received or is so thoroughly warped and corrupted, if not altogether inverted and turned on its head, that the outraged Author might well begin scheming bloody revenge from his eternal abode in heaven. At issue here is a breakdown of communicative transmission. If one takes delivery of a message in a bottle that has washed up on the shoreline, is it helpful to succumb to interpretive indulgence that focuses on exploring the text in the bottle as to its expressive and meaning potential in general, all

50 The Context the while closing one’s eyes to the specific, “authorial” communicative intent of the message? Indeed, Eco has responded to just such outcomes through, as a standard reference observes, “the concept of ‘aberrant coding,’ which refers to the situation where the readers of a text interpret it with a different code than that used by those who constructed it.”33 The resultant “ ‘communication failure’ or ‘communication breakdown’ can be analyzed as sites of sociosemiotic processes involving different codes, purposes, or strategies.”34

The Literal-​Fantastic versus the Figurative-​Logical A Feeling of Wrongness To illustrate how a text can elicit greatly divergent reactions, consider, for example, the following passage: A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill but it is easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks it very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.35 This passage, on the face of it, is either sheer gibberish or a case belonging to cognitive pathology. As Bruce Mangan tells us, confirming our predictably dismayed reaction to the above extract, “no thread of meaning connects one sentence with the next. The objective fact that our organism doesn’t understand this paragraph is represented in consciousness by a certain kind of subjective fringe feeling—​a jagged, disjointed sense of ‘wrong’ movement from sentence to sentence.” This “feeling of wrongness indicate[s]‌that if we were called on to handle this material (say, answer questions about the subject of the paragraph), we would have serious cognitive problems.”36 The reader is nonetheless urged to ponder the above passage a bit and try to ascertain what it is about, before turning to the answer here.37 As one can see from the explanation of the brainteaser, not knowing what it is about is both the source of the cognitive problem with the passage as well as the only solution to its mystery (if one has grasped its “aboutness”). This example, striking though it is, nevertheless is only the simplest possible case of “serious cognitive problems,” in Mangan’s wording, that one can have with a text. To know what the text is about is to ascertain its genre, in effect. One of this study’s conjectures is that, while concealing the (posited) esoteric stratum of the Sôd, its compilers also wished to create the possibility that what they have concealed may be recovered. Yet another assumption is that the semantic incongruities or disjointedness one encounters in the Edenic

At the Primal Scene of Communication  51 story, being expressed in the text as metaleptic clashes, actually require the kind of straightforward logic that someone like Eco relies on and engages in hopes of an eventual resolution.38 As we shall see, the conclusion is inescapable: that the authors of the Pentateuch themselves used specific, consistent, straightforward logic while constructing their narrative enigmas and, crucially, counted on the reader to use logic, too. Certainly, their intended reader of the Sôd stratum was an initiated priest of YHWH, the latter being the God of Israel; all other readers would not be aware of a “second-​channel” narrative in the first place. What I think the compilers could not have imagined, however, is that there would arise yet another, a third type of reader: those who would offer and then insist on their own idiosyncratic or whimsical exegesis of the text in question, an exegesis that would be neither necessarily logical or sensitive to the essentially figurative nature of this ancient text. Instead, such readers’ modus operandi would rely on the literal and the fantastic (or the political and the ideological, in the case of postmodernists): it is this type of reader who has produced the often fanciful rabbinical exegesis and midrashic—​that is to say, ingenuity-​as-​ interpretation—​sensibility, the unreservedly parochial Christian and Islamic readings of the Hebrew Bible impelled by their respective theologies, and the countless partisan exegetes of today empowered by postmodernist theories that absolve them from responsibility to the text and its author. In this endeavor to ascertain what the Pentateuchal text is about—​a most fundamental requirement if one is ever to discover this text’s referents, let alone its foremost esoteric referent, arguably the raison d’être of Israel’s scripture and the meaning of Israel’s very civilization—​we should first answer this question: Is the fact of encountering figuration in a text necessarily a legitimate reason for the reader’s loss of confidence in the meaning communicated thereby—​or at least a complication regarding the latter, due to the now anticipated ambiguity? This issue has a very rich and controversial history, one that cannot be surveyed here. Suffice it to say, however, that the present study’s operating assumptions are on the side of those who value figuration as a means to express the inexpressible, to communicate selectively (that is, only to those who will be capable of grasping the figurative import), and to function simultaneously as memorable literature capable of sustaining readers’ interest for millennia, thereby saving the work in question from oblivion—​and for posterity. Nor is the present investigation assenting to the views of those who tend to deem figuration and other literary means as being anything but objective, in terms of the reliability of their communicated meanings. Markedness, for example, according to Roman Jakobson, is “a fully objective procedure.”39 Within this study’s research method, markedness is a key indicator of instances of the Sôd narrative’s presence.40 Furthermore, “in the case of demonstrative indexicals, character can involve a combination of two mappings: (a) one that maps contexts into demonstrata, and (b) another that maps demonstrata

52 The Context into contents. Nunberg (1977) has suggested that the functions required for (b) should be called referring functions.”41 Since the primary effort of this study entails mapping contexts into demonstrata, it claims few of what could be called “referring functions” as pertaining to the Sôd but massive amounts of what William Hanks calls “context-​dependent factors”: The sheer variety of context-​dependent factors in language lends itself to an equally various range of theories. Some conversational meanings arise through pragmatic processes, such as Gricean implicature, “contextualized” inference (Gumperz 1982), and illocutionary acts, while others involve indexicals, discourse structure, pragmatic presupposition, and so forth. One common way of describing context dependency is to say that literal meanings, such as would be shown in a dictionary, are overlaid in speech by contextual factors.42 “Context-​dependent factors,” “contextual factors,” or “contextualized inference” are all invoked to underscore how much the present investigation explores and even develops where necessary contexts that, when mapped onto the Pentateuchal demonstrata, will lead us to Israel’s esoteric referent. However, as Bernard Baars explains, “the word ‘context’ is not just any mental representation—​it is an unconscious representation that acts to influence another, conscious representation.”43 How are we to acquire the contexts that are needed for the task? Putting it differently, is there a prospect for identifying a literal reference in a figurative expression? Moreover, how can one negotiate an ever-​expanding contextual universe? Is There a Literal Reference for a Figurative Expression? That the Pentateuchal text is a complex, not to say complicated, “system” seems a platitude and a given.44 What is far less if at all appreciated is that any research investigation that aims at grasping the overall complexity of this text must itself be, and be carried out as, a complex system. This term became known by way of the systems theory that had its origins in cybernetics and is based “on principles from physics, biology, and engineering.”45 The recent “systems” approaches insist on what can be framed, in this study’s context, as a “search for meaning when reading.”46 They are not bound by the artifice of disciplinary boundaries. Concerning complexity and system dynamics, a “both-​and” perspective must be at play: In identifying parts and wholes, systems thinking does not reject the value of reductionist compartmentalization and componential analysis; rather, systems thinking strives for a “both-​and” perspective …. that shows how the whole makes the parts what they are and vice versa. For example,

At the Primal Scene of Communication  53 in conceptual systems, metonymic relations (tropes or figures of speech) may have a both-​and meaning.47 The emergentist approach taken by this study for developing appropriate contextual infrastructure will be detailed in Chapter 4. As is noted in William Clancey’s quote, however, emergence as a methodological strategy needs to be balanced, where appropriate, with a reductionist perspective and analysis. Let us return again briefly to the question of primal scenes. Harold Bloom, in a rare but serious misjudgment, links “primal scenes” with imagination and fantasy: “Since the Primal Scenes are fantasy traumas, they testify to the power of imagination over fact, and indeed give an astonishing preference to imagination over observation. …. Yet the imagination, as Freud may not have cared to understand, has no referential aspect.”48 However, imagination in such cases is precisely what exegetes and interpreters resort to, as they endeavor to explain a textual depiction of such Scenes—​often without grasping what lies behind the genuine Primal Scenes. Certainly in the case of the Pentateuchal Primal Scene in the Garden of Eden, it depicts a singular experiential, psycho-​spiritual reality and its notional import, as well as a subsequent attempt to represent the latter via rhetorical-​textual construction. Thus, it will have a definite, determinable referential target, as this study demonstrates. Tomoko Masuzawa, in addition, points out: Everything, to the extent that it comes into the view of psychoanalysis, is already constituted, already derived; it has already taken place somewhere, and, as a rule, it has taken place somewhere other than where it comes to appear; and it behooves psychoanalysis to discern, though perhaps never to re-​present, this “elsewhere.” The question of origin in Freud has to do above all with the process of derivation rather than with some primary state before derivation. The origin is literally a “primal fissure” (Ursprung), not a primary (primär) state. Hence the contrast between Jung’s outlook on religion and Freud’s probe into its origin shows up in the constitutional difference between their objects of attention: on the one hand, universal archetypes and the mythic structure of the unconscious, and on the other, traces (Spuren) of what once took place. One calls for the contemplative gaze, the other, for reading.49 It is precisely the “reading of traces” left deliberately or implanted within the Pentateuchal text that this study endeavors to undertake. The Literal/​Nonliteral Divide and the Question of Literary Competence “The literal versus figurative dichotomy” (the title of a Mark Turner essay) is understood as “a psychological illusion.”50 Albert Katz, however, insists that “the distinction between literal and nonliteral language has implications for

54 The Context the distinction between language and thought.”51 Illusion or not, since the inferential mechanism Begoña Vicente speaks of may well implicate this very dichotomy between the literal and the figurative—​and it is the very issue that the present study addresses—​it is important to ascertain early on whether Turner is correct in some sense that is meaningful for us.52 If Turner and other cognitive linguists have chewed off a bit more than we can swallow, then we must know whether encountering figuration must necessarily be a reason for the reader’s loss of confidence in the meaning communicated thereby. As Margaret Freeman points out: The terms literal and non-​literal may have no theoretical status in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 2005), but natural language speakers notably recognize a distinction in their use of the two terms (Israel 2005). This is not just a matter of folk belief, but involves the tropes of metonymy, metaphor, and irony, all of which involve utterances that indicate scalar levels of tension between literal and non-​literal meaning. It is one of the central precepts of cognitive linguistics that language is underdetermined; that is, that the meaning of an utterance cannot be determined simply by linguistic analysis of the words themselves or by resort to their truth conditional status, but that the full (or at least partial) contextual cultural cognitive dimension of the utterance needs to be accessed for (any) understanding to occur (Ruthrof 1997; Sinha 1999). However problematic the terms literal and non-​literal are, they attempt to capture the disconnect between utterance and event.53 Freeman adds that “much work has already been accomplished in distinguishing the many ways such disconnects may occur, building on the earlier pragmatic theories of speech acts, inferencing, and implicature.”54 Improbably: In the realm of literary criticism, however, the terms take on additional, technical meanings, which have, so far as I know, never been examined or explained. As a result, the significance of the literal versus non-​literal distinction in literary studies has not been adequately recognized in terms either of writer intention and reader interpretation or of establishing the particular qualities of a literary text.55 That “the significance of the literal versus nonliteral distinction in literary studies has not been adequately recognized” might come as quite a surprise to many who may have thought that such distinctions are precisely what the business of literary studies consists of. Yet, as Paul de Man wrote decades ago: In literary studies, structures of meaning are frequently described in historical rather than in semiological or rhetorical terms. This is, in itself, a somewhat surprising occurrence, since the historical nature of literary

At the Primal Scene of Communication  55 discourse is by no means an a priori established fact, whereas all literature necessarily consists of linguistic and semantic elements. Yet students of literature seem to shy away from the analysis of semantic structures and feel more at home with problems of psychology or of historiography. The reasons for this detour or flight from language are complex and go far in revealing the very semiological properties that are being circumvented.56 As we shall see later in this book, the reasons for an aversion vis-​à-​vis figuration may well be a richly deserved reaction to abuses in the unrestrained practice of allegoresis, first by the Greeks in late antiquity and then by Christian interpreters of the Bible, to say nothing of examples of the “wishing-​it-​will-​ make-​it-​so” syndrome, such as the rabbinical doctrines of Oral Torah from Sinai being in fact their own exegesis, or the Islamic dogma’s claim of its priority in originality, despite incontestable, patent borrowing from the earlier Jewish and Christian sources, including even the Talmud.57 All these factors are rather unfortunate, since they immensely complicate the already overburdened task that this study seeks to accomplish, namely, to convincingly demonstrate the extent to which the Pentateuchal text and its putative Sôd narrative rely on figuration as a valid, exceptionally versatile, and apposite literary tool for conveying esoteric knowledge (while effectively denying this communication to those whom the authorial intention excludes, that is, the uninitiated, who, lacking the requisite frame of mind, would not recognize the figures or their meaning). This requires a serious cognitive effort and perhaps a certain leap of faith on the part of those readers whose expertise is outside literary studies altogether. What should they make of the figurative if even literary scholars have misgivings and suspicions about it, “feel[ing] more at home with problems of psychology or of historiography” (in de Man’s words)? This study decisively parts company with those in literary studies who shun the literary domain’s proper birthright and instead engages those theorists who do otherwise.58 “Trajectories Not Previously Entertained in the History of the System” When it comes to the Pentateuchal text, as we shall see, no mere occasional figure, however complex or unusual, will capture the stunning, unparalleled extent and depth of this text’s engagement with figuration. Figuration is, quite simply, almost everywhere in this text’s mimetic sections: in its variable plots, in its characters that are frequently personifications, and in places that are topifications, where space (locations) serve as symbols and time as successive allegories. This kind of systemic and systematic, totalizing figurative-​noetic portrayal is exceptionally difficult to grasp or even just recognize for what it is: “The recognition problem is in identifying that the nonliteral sense is intended; this is especially problematic if a valid literal interpretation is plausible.”59

56 The Context This study evokes Angus Fletcher’s notion of a “semantic barrier, beyond which lies a realm of mystic knowledge,” to describe the reader’s predicament vis-​à-​vis the conjectured Sôd layer.60 The situation also closely resembles the well-​known duck-​rabbit image discussed by Wittgenstein, among others.61 Apropos of the duck/​rabbit figure, Ernst Gombrich states unequivocally, “We cannot experience alternative readings at the same time.”62 A practically identical situation pertains to the Sôd stratum versus the conventional mimetic narratives of the Pentateuch. This book’s most focused attention is therefore devoted to the literal and nonliteral distinction, “in terms either of writer intention or of establishing the particular [literary] qualities of ” the Pentateuchal text, in Margaret Freeman’s wording.63 The study proceeds, as already stated, by mapping contexts into demonstrata, with intense effort devoted to making the deliberately designed unconscious presuppositions conscious.64 To put it differently, the study proceeds by foregrounding what is located in the “deep” background: “[f]‌rom the cognitive perspective, ideas are not objects and meanings are not concepts. Rather, meaning is activated by mappings that are motivated by the focus of attention, the picking out of figure against the grounding of our embodied experience, the corroboration of different significatory systems.”65 A few words are warranted about the above-​mentioned textual demonstrata. As Marga Reimer observes, “The speaker intends to make an assertion about a particular object (the intended demonstratum), but actually succeeds in saying something about some other object (the object demonstrated).” Nonetheless, “the logical conclusion to draw is that demonstration does—​ at least in some cases—​have something to do with the determination of the demonstratum; intentions by themselves are simply not enough.” Certainly, it all depends on “whether the relevant notion of ‘demonstration’ can be given a convincing analysis.”66 Such a demonstration, with an exhaustive analysis of the demonstrata, is precisely what the present study presents. It does so through the development of vital new contexts, by, in Paul Thibault’s words, “mapping new problem spaces to previously learned ones. …. This entails a high level of context-​sensitivity and context-​dependence. …. We are talking about trajectories through a complex semiotic phase space, not decodings—​ trajectories not previously entertained in the history of the system.”67 Will this procedure be convincing enough? Some will grasp that what is demonstrated is “somehow ‘indicated’ by the speaker” and is “what [the speaker] succeeds in ‘indicating.’ ”68 These are the ones who will also accept the following from the well-​known author of a modern theory of indexicality, David Kaplan, and his “Dthat”: “There are situations where the demonstration is sufficiently ill-​structured in itself so that we would regularly take account of the intended demonstratum as, within limits, a legitimate disambiguating or vagueness-​removing device.”69 The conjectured Sôd stratum, while fully intended by the Pentateuchal authors in accordance with the primary conjecture here, is “sufficiently ill-​ structured” from the standpoint of the reader due to the esoteric stratum’s

At the Primal Scene of Communication  57 deliberate concealment behind a noetic-​tropological barrier. To overcome this circumstance, the extensive new contexts supplied by the investigation and mapped onto the authorially supplied demonstrata should be a sufficient “legitimate disambiguating or vagueness-​removing device” for all but the most hardened literalist readers. For the latter, the challenge remains to grasp, if not now, then eventually, not only the principal conceptual chasms between literalized fantasies and historical facts, on the one hand, but also those between the literal and the nonliteral, on the other. The much greater cognitive-​epistemic challenge is to see that the literary craft’s magnificent, inimitable tools—​ such as figuration—​ are not only capable of conveying that which, without them, would likely have remained “inexpressible” or “unspeakable” but also that such communicated representation is just as valid and objective to those whom such communication reaches, as would surely be the case with any conventional proposition. In this book, representation is being contrasted with presentation, with the latter assigned to the conjectured mystical experiences that, according to the study’s thesis, subsequently led to the appearance of the ancient Israelite cultic religion. This corresponds to the hyle of the Husserlian tripartite hyletic-​ noematic-​noetic framework. In contrast, the noematic content (the signified) and especially the noetic signifier are tied to representation. When pondering the literal-​nonliteral distinction, anyone who is feeling uneasy regarding figuration ought to consider the Edenic Serpent: Does one think that the authors of that story meant to portray, literally, a talking serpent? If so, to what possible end? And if you do see that the conclusion, rather obviously, must be that this is a case of figuration at work, why not also elsewhere in the Pentateuchal text? Please also consider the task of the authors who wish to convey initiation-​ related so-​ called “induction procedures” and their often-​ineffable affects: figuration is definitely an option, at times their only viable option. In the end, it is a question of that which Cynthia Edenburg, following Jonathan Culler, calls literary competence; for example, “recognition of genre is tied to literary or aural competence.”70 In utilizing the emergence-​based systems dynamics approach for researching the text of the Pentateuch, this study is also engaging Reuven Tsur’s notion of delayed categorization, reworking the latter into a “much-​much delayed,” or deferred categorization. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4 and elsewhere in this book. Pausing to reflect upon the nature of the marker and its significance is one of this work’s main characteristics. This study adapts the Husserlian tripartite noetic-​noematic-​hyletic phenomenological framework. The visible aspect of the Sôd stratum is to be sought—​as the noesis and the signifier—​in the Pentateuchal textual dimension itself, while the noematic, or signified, meaning of the Sôd is to be ascertained as it arises from the relevant discourse (entailing both discussion and analysis, as well as certain contexts). Finally, the actual intended referent of the Sôd is to be recovered as the hyletic, or experiential, information that, as we shall see, is related to the precious inner-​core initiatory knowledge of

58 The Context ancient Israelite Temple priests. Thus, the all-​important context—​related to the referential function in Jakobson’s classification of factors and functions of a communication—​will be divided in this study into no less than three principal contexts of the Sôd stratum: Context I: Setting (inferential function) Context II: Topic (“conferential” function) Context III: Object (“deferential” function)71 These will be discussed in detail in the subsequent chapters. Here, it is only important to note that these three principal contexts of the Sôd stratum correspond, respectively, to (1) the de dicto (or the textual), namely, the noetic signifier (the Setting); (2) the discursive noematic signified (the Topic, or Content); and finally, (3) the de re—​or intended referential—​hyle (the Object). This last will necessarily be seen as the quintessence of the ostensible communicative intent of the Sôd stratum containing ancient Israel’s principal esoteric referent—​namely, the mystical-​initiatory praxis of the First Temple priests.

Notes 1 Eco, Role of the Reader, 96. 2 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 566. 3 The Serpent’s audience would aim to become not only as gods, however. Since the Hebrew “Elohim” simultaneously stands for both the plural of “god” as well as for “God”—​thereby constituting one of the many mysteries pertaining to the Hebraic conception of God—​the key word in this passage can also be translated as “you’ll be like God” (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 21). It bears noting that in Hebrew there is no capitalization of words, not even of names, thus making the distinction between “gods” and “God” even less pronounced. 4 Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 3. 5 Frye, Great Code, xvi. 6 Prickett, Origins of Narrative, 1. 7 Ibid., 2 (emphasis added). 8 Nancy, Le partage des voix, quoted in Lukacher, Primal Scenes, 45 (emphasis added). 9 See Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”; and Bloom, “Primal Scene of Instruction.” As Ned Lukacher points out, “in the period from Hegel to Derrida, we have discovered that the notion of a transcendental ground of memory and presence has been the organizing fiction motivating the history of Western literature and philosophy” (Lukacher, Primal Scenes, 12). Lukacher replaces the “transcendental ground of memory and presence” with “textual memory,” and it is, he proposes, “in lieu of a human subject, a series of intertextual constructions” (ibid.). 10 Lukacher offers a characterization of primal scenes in general, suggesting that they are a “conjunction of literature/​philosophy/​psychoanalysis and the ensuing revelation/​concealment [regarding which he proposes] the notion of the primal

At the Primal Scene of Communication  59 scene as a trope for reading and understanding” (Lukacher, Primal Scenes, 24.) The word trope, or figure of speech, derives from the Greek trópos or “turn”: we might say that a primal scene is a Scene of Turning, after which things cannot go the same way as before, in a deep mental-​psychic sense. There is, however, an implicit problem whenever turns are invoked: which way to turn? 11 Lukacher, Primal Scenes, 24; Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays, 46. 12 Barthes, “Death of the Author.” Barthes states, “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-​ God)” (1468). Harold Bloom reacted to the alleged death of the author in his inimitable way: “Authorship is somewhat out of fashion at the moment, because of Parisian preferences, but like shorter skirts authorship always does return again” (Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, 3). A decade before Barthes, however, American New Criticism had already declared that a poem “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public” (Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Intentional Fallacy,” 5). 13 Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 226. 14 Ibid. 15 Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 353, 357. 16 Bloom, “Primal Scene of Instruction,” 60 (original emphasis). 17 Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 230 (original emphasis). 18 It is unlikely that Derrida could have meant the second alternative—​perhaps he was only implicitly calling for ascertainment of the literary signified meanings that would be “respectful of the originality of the literary signifier”—​even if it is not entirely clear from the passage quoted. I have borrowed (but reversed) Schirato’s “fetishizing signifieds;” see Schirato, “Intentionality,” 315. 19 Bloom, Map of Misreading, 32, 49. 20 Ibid., 47. 21 Ibid., 51. 22 Ibid., 55. 23 Ibid., 48, 60. 24 The best English translation for midrash is probably “inquiry.” Midrash refers to the old rabbinic method of inquiry into the meaning of Biblical texts, as well as to the literature of that inquiry. Midrashic method is a way of reading the Hebrew Bible that serves as the basis of Judaism as it was created by the rabbis in the generations following the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.). (Green, These Are the Words, 48–​49) According to a reference work, “The name Midrash derives from the root drsh which in the Bible means mainly ‘to search,’ ‘to seek,’ ‘to examine,’ and ‘to investigate’ ” (Encyclopedia-​Judaica, s.v. “midrash”). 25 Valdés, “Gadamer, Hans-​Georg,” 327. Hermeneutics in turn gave rise to reader-​ response theory. Valdés comments that “it is ironic that in a book [Gadamer’s key work, Truth and Method] about truth there is no systematic development of a theory of truth but only numerous statements equating truth with self-​ knowledge” (328). 26 Valdés, “Gadamer, Hans-​Georg,” 328.

60 The Context 27 Handelman, “Jacques Derrida and the Heretic Hermeneutic,” 102. 28 Eco, “On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language,” 84. 29 Ibid., 83–​84. 30 Bloom, Map of Misreading, 91. 31 Midrash Bereshith Rabbah, 15:7, quoted in Handelman, Slayers of Moses, 68 (bracketed insertions are Handelman’s). 32 Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche, 458. 33 Hodge, “Communication,” 133. 34 Ibid. 35 Klein, “Context and Memory,” 83, quoted in Mangan, “Conscious ‘Fringe,’ ” 745–​46. 36 Mangan, “Conscious ‘Fringe,’ ” 746, 747. 37 “If one looks again at this passage, however, this time with the word ‘kite’ in mind, the clouds will lift, instantly. Before rereading the paragraph, the reader will experience a strong, diffuse sense of rightness flooding consciousness. … Here rightness constitutes what [William] James calls our sense of ‘rational sequence’ or ‘dynamic meaning’ ” (Mangan, “Conscious ‘Fringe,’ ” 746). As Mangan notes further, the entire genre of nonsense literature (e.g., Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”) rests on the fact that our general signal of cognitive coherence, the feeling of rightness in its monitoring function, can be tricked in various ways to envelop verbal material that, when analyzed substantively, makes no literal sense. (747) 38 Metalepsis is discussed in ­chapter 10. 39 Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 97. 40 Jakobson developed the concept of “markedness” as a major factor in a number of his works. As Krystyna Pomorska notes, the notion “follows from Peirce’s system” in that “the symbolic function figures as an unmarked category in relation to the index on the one hand and the icon on the other” (Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 97). 41 Miller, “Some Problems in the Theory of Demonstrative Reference,” 71, referencing Nunberg, Pragmatics of Reference. George Miller elaborates that “[David] Kaplan associates the epistemological notion of a thought with the semantic notion of a content, and the epistemological notion of the cognitive significance of a thought with the semantic notion of character” (64). 42 Hanks, “Language Form and Communicative Practices,” 232, referencing Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (emphasis added). 43 Baars, “Fundamental Role of Context,” 761. 44 Compare Colleen Shantz’s insight that because her book “is an attempt to describe experience, one might assume that complexity is a necessity” (Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy, 12). 45 Clancey, “Scientific Antecedents of Situated Cognition,” 13. 46 Anna Whiteside-​St. Leger Lucas, personal communication, 2010. 47 Clancey, “Scientific Antecedents of Situated Cognition,” 12. 48 Bloom, Map of Misreading, 48. 49 Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime, 11–​12 (emphasis added).

At the Primal Scene of Communication  61 50 Turner, “Literal versus Figurative Dichotomy,” 25. 51 Katz, “Figurative Language and Figurative Thought,” 19–​20. 52 See Vicente, “Meaning in Relevance Theory and the Semantics/​ Pragmatics Distinction.” 53 Freeman, “Is Iconicity Literal?,” 65–​66. 54 Ibid., 66. 55 Ibid. 56 De Man, Allegories of Reading, 79. 57 See, e.g., Katsh, Judaism in Islam; and Sharon, Judaism Christianity and Islam. 58 For examples of the latter, see Chase, Decomposing Figures; Paxson, Poetics of Personfication; Paxson, “Revisiting the Deconstruction of Narratology”; and Sinding, “Assembling Spaces.” 59 Katz, “Figurative Language and Figurative Thought,” 21–​22. 60 Fletcher, “Allegory in Literary History,” 42. 61 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 193. 62 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 5, quoted in Jahn, “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-​Person Narratives,” 458n11. 63 Freeman, “Is Iconicity Literal?,” 66. 64 Baars, “Fundamental Role of Context.” 65 Freeman, “Is Iconicity Literal?,” 69 (emphasis added). 66 Reimer, “Demonstratives, Demonstrations, and Demonstrata,” 196, 197, 200. 67 Paul Thibault, personal communication with the author, 2010. 68 Reimer, “Demonstratives, Demonstrations, and Demonstrata,” 200, 199, respectively. 69 Kaplan, “Dthat,” 396. 70 Edenburg, “Intertextuality, Literary Competence and the Question of Readership,” 142. See also Culler, Structuralist Poetics. 71 The first parenthetical item here doesn’t have its first word in quotation marks like the second two due to the latter being neologisms coined by this author; they are elucidated later in the book.

3 On the Notion of the Sôd YHWH’s Garden versus the Rabbinical Orchard

The Unaccounted-​for Mystery of Ancient Israelite Religion Most religions yield significant, distinctive philosophical import. They also often exhibit inimitable, exclusive mystical practices directly associated with their particular theological and spiritual frameworks. And yet, there is a curious but never questioned exception to the above pattern: specifically, the ancient Israelite religion. Judaism today boasts what is being designated as Jewish philosophy in addition to Jewish mysticism, or even several schools or streams of differing Jewish mysticisms. Both philosophy and mysticism, however, seem to appear in Judaism only post-​biblically and are associated with the ascendancy of rabbinical Judaism.1 As the Jewish paradigms shift dramatically with the onset of the Common Era, only the solitary Philo Judaeus, of Alexandria, attempts a dedicated, sensitive-​to-​the-​text-​of-​the-​Torah exegesis.2 This book endeavors to clarify the likely reasons for the above anomaly. To do that, my approach will take it for granted that a religion on the scale of Judaism, with its impact on history and civilization, must entail both philosophical consequences and mystical praxis, and do so from its inception. The question of the direct accessibility of and proximity to the Hebrew God is one example of a reverse parallelism between the ancient Israelite religion and corresponding ancient Egyptian notions. Methods of accessing the God of Israel are in fact the single most secretive aspect of the ancient Hebrew cultic religion and constitute the contents of the hypothesized Sôd channel in the Pentateuch. Accessibility to God in the ancient Israelite cultic religion of the First Temple, at least as far as the temple priesthood is concerned, was based on a radically and qualitatively different notion of “access to God” than either later, in the rabbinical Judaism of the last two millennia, or earlier in ancient Egypt, in that it involved a mystical alteration of consciousness. A complex and dedicated initiatory system entailing mystical induction procedures is what this book proposes as the subject of the conjectured Sôd stratum in the Pentateuch. Such access to God entails what Rudolf Otto calls mysterium tremendum—​a conception wholly inapplicable to mere verbal prayer.3 An ability to access the national deity—​depicted esoterically in several momentous passages in the Pentateuch, such as the all-​night DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-5

On the Notion of the Sôd  63 struggle after which Jacob became Israel, a renaming that signified his psycho-​spiritual transformation; or Moses at the burning bush; or Abraham entertaining three visitors, one of whom is God—​is paramount in and for the early Israelite cultic religion. In a sign of a significant disconnection from the temple-​based religious sensibility, the rabbinical period has practically no accounts of direct encounters with the Divine (excluding Merkabah mysticism or the marginalized medieval Kabbalah, which occasionally—​that is to say, unsystematically and unrelated to the prevailing overall rabbinical theology and praxis—​did offer instances of occasional divine proximity and intimacy, even if of a different import than what has been the result of the systematic, multigenerational, fully devoted initiatory milieu of the priestly cultic tradition). In contrast, the Egyptian “cultic communication is based on the principle that there is no direct confrontation between god and man. Everything in such communication must be symbolic.”4 Hebrew Scripture, reflecting what Jan Assmann calls the “Mosaic distinction,” strongly diverges from such a merely symbolic contact; instead of symbolic communication, it features case after case of just the kind of interrelating between human and God that cannot be described other than as being direct. By dramatic contrast, Egyptian theology conceives of the “more [than] human partner, who is the king … [who] is the sole terrestrial being qualified to communicate with the gods because, according to Egyptian belief, sacred communication cannot take place between a god and a merely human being, but only between god and god.”5 It bears reiterating that the Mosaic distinction involves a rejection of just such an exclusive and highly politicized access to a deity limited only to a king (as well as priests who approach the deity on behalf of a king).6 This, if nothing else, makes the pharaoh a god. Regarding human divinization, the Hebrew religion takes a strongly disapproving view, judging from the import of the Garden of Eden narrative. The full extent of the specific refusal to grant special powers only to kings becomes apparent, however, when one is confronted with the presence of the concealed esoteric “second channel” in the Pentateuch. This narrative stratum is devoted to “storing,” in a figurative-​esoteric manner, the zealously guarded methods of achieving communication with and access to God, an access that is in principle, if not necessarily in practice, open to anyone who is capable of accessing this Sôd channel first. The “completely symbolic character of the Egyptian cult,” which Assmann sees as reserving a key role for “the connection between semiosis and interpretation,” can be recapitulated differently.7 Consider the remarkable statement that “nothing in the Egyptian cult is just what it appears to be.” Here is the whole passage: Nothing in the Egyptian cult is just what it appears to be. The priest is not a priest; the statue is not a statue; the sacrificial substances and requisites are not what they are usually. In the context of the ritual performance all acquire a special “mythical” meaning that points to

64 The Context something else in “yonder world.” Thus, the priest assumes the role of a god and the statue the role of something other than its literal self. Everything in this sacred game becomes a kind of hieroglyph. … The worship of images—​“idolatry” in the terminology of its adversaries—​ and the interpretive character of the Egyptian cult in general as well as of the role of language within the cult in particular, seem closely linked and interdependent. Idols function within a system of semiosis and interpretation; they are not holy in themselves, any more than words have meaning outside the language to which they belong or letters outside their own script.8 Here, then, is another example of why the rabbinical system, with its interpretive midrashic exegesis and limited experiencing, is a throwback to the Egyptian ways: In Egypt ritual interpretation is transformative interpretation. It is part of the ritual itself. Transformation, as well as interpretation, are based on analogy. If A is to be transformed into/​interpreted as B, an analogy between A and B has to be established. Most frequently and typically (but by no means exclusively), this analogy is found on the level of language and in the form of assonance: between mrt “chest” and t3-​mrj “Egypt,” between qnj “stomacher” and qnj “to embrace,” etc. Language provides a network of connections and correspondences where everything coheres and which the priest and the magician use for the purposes of sacramental interpretation.9 The similarity with the rabbinical approach, as we shall see below, is unmistakable. The Mosaic distinction, for its part, sweeps aside this all-​encompassing symbolic view of the sacred realm, which always requires interpretation. The obscure symbols requiring mediation of interpretation are replaced with exposure to a living God’s presence, as in the direct encounters mentioned above: the sacrifices in the Temple that are brought in and eaten together with priests in the presence of God are not symbolic; and neither is the experience of such a sacramental shared meal with the Deity. The experience of the Sabbath, too, is not about interpreting anything but about experiencing. However, the story of Egyptian religion would not be complete without the account of the “symbolic walls and protective zones” it erected as “a response to the experiences of the Persian and Ptolemaic periods” of foreign rule. As Assmann further notes, “an exact parallel is found in Judaea, where Jewish culture surrounded itself with the symbolic wall of the law against the Persian and Hellenistic threat to its cultural identity.”10 Additionally: Mary Douglas has interpreted this stance as typical of an “enclave culture,” which immures itself within a wall of ritual purity taboos. … In Egypt, the symbolic fortifications are “abhorrence, taboo” (purity/​impurity) and

On the Notion of the Sôd  65 “secrecy” (knowledge/​betrayal of knowledge). These boundaries provide a context for the fantastic but probably not totally inaccurate statements made by Herodotus about the purity commandments observed by the Egyptians in their contact with the Greeks and probably with all foreigners. No Egyptian would touch a knife or cooking utensil that had previously been used by a Greek, nor eat the meat of an animal slaughtered with a Greek knife. Nor could any Egyptian ever bring himself to kiss a Greek on the mouth. Though both categories of distinction and self-​segregation (abhorrence and secrecy, impurity and betrayal) had a long history in Egypt, their traditional function had been to divide sacred from profane, not indigenous from alien. Taboos were valid for the priests, not for Egyptians in general. … In the Late Period, the concept “profane” underwent a change, as did the meaning of taboos and secrecy. The sacred objects and rites were protected not so much from the impure and the uninitiated but from the foreigner. Foreigners symbolized the ultimate in impurity and noninitiation.11 There is also another parallel, this time with the ancient Israelite priestly sensibility, one that is notably incongruous vis-​à-​vis the much later rabbinical “textual community.”12 Assmann writes that “the [Egyptian] priests saw their most important function not as the cultivation of written traditions or the interpretation of sacred texts but the performance of religious rites. The texts were nothing other than the indispensable source for the correct performance of the rites.”13 This Egyptian parallel with the Israelite temple priests, in contrast with the much later rabbinical “textual community,” is striking. While for the priests “the Torah” was likely a useful, perhaps indispensable religious and mystical guidebook if not a bona fide manual, both for the cultic rites and for personal mystical experiences and learning about access to the Divine, for the rabbis this text became Scripture, a holy object vested with almost magical powers and significance quite apart from whatever content it contained. The rabbis remained largely unaware of the concealed information meant only for the initiated, hereditary caste of the Temple priests.

Rabbinical PaRDeS, an Orchard of the Uninitiated The passage from Edward Sapir cited below can be easily misconstrued, in the context of the present study: It would be absurd to say that Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” could be rendered forthwith into the unfamiliar accents of Eskimo or Hottentot, and yet it would be absurd in but a second degree. What is really meant is that the culture of this primitive folk has not yet advanced to the point where it is of interest to them to form abstract conceptions of a philosophical order. But it is not absurd to say that there is nothing in the formal peculiarities of Hottentot or Eskimo which would obscure the clarity or

66 The Context hide the depth of Kant’s thought[;]‌indeed, it may be suspected that the highly synthetic and periodic structure of Eskimo would more easily bear the weight of Kant’s terminology than his native German.14 It is exceedingly counterintuitive to suggest—​as is being done here—​that it is Western culture that is in the position of the southern African or Inuit cultures invoked in Sapir’s extract, vis-​à-​vis the ancient Israelite one. Western culture—​which includes modern Judaisms of all varieties—​only now may finally, to borrow Sapir’s words, be “advanced to the point where it is of interest” to it to ponder the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the Hebraic lore. This, as we shall see, can lead to formulations of new conceptions of esoteric knowledge, alteration of consciousness, and theocentric perspectives at a depth and discernment adequate for gauging the epistemic achievement that belongs to the original, or archaic, foundational Hebrew civilization. In forming new conceptions, one can be guided by the words of another well-​known anthropologist, Roy Rappaport: “Unlike the truths underlying physical nature, which must be discovered, those underlying humanity must be constructed.”15 During the three-​thousand-​year provenance of the Hebraic sensibility—​or the intentional act, in Husserl’s terms, that furnished the required impetus, as well as the intension that came to be reflected in this hallowed text—​the ongoing esoteric expectations vis-​à-​vis this text have often associated it with an almost occult efficacy that must have contributed to the enduring fascination with it.16 Perhaps this text’s status as Scripture, too, owes much to such expectations. What we do know for certain is that the rabbinical tradition—​ which, two millennia ago, following the fall of the Second Temple, inherited the archaic Israelite religion, henceforth to become known as Judaism17—​did play a role in perpetuating the tradition of a secret esoteric lore within the Torah, albeit in a rather confusing manner vis-​à-​vis the text in question and the earlier Temple-​and priesthood-​based Hebrew religion. The situation on the ground was complex, and the notion of “inheritance” by the uninitiated Pharisees is used here only in a sense of its historical occurrence, not as a true or full-​fledged bequest by the Temple priests. For example, the biblical scholar Lawrence Schiffman alleges, erroneously as we shall see, that the Sadducees—​the Hasmonean descendants who were in charge of the Temple cult (ironically, if true, given the revolt of their Maccabean ancestors against Greek hegemony)—​“became so Hellenized as to alienate their subjects.”18 The uncompromising Zadokite priests, on the other hand, went on to establish the Qumran Dead Sea community that was removed from the corruption in Jerusalem.19 Yet, something is quite amiss in such a view. Schiffman, later in his essay, plainly contradicts himself: If we can believe Josephus, the Sadducees, the most Hellenized group of Jews, rejected [the Greek dualism of body and soul]. … While it is indeed hard to believe that the Hellenized Sadducees would have rejected this Hellenistic concept, it is possible. After all, the Sadducees were a very

On the Notion of the Sôd  67 conservative group in religious matters. The Pharisees, gradually accepting the Greek division of body and soul, modified their concept of life after death.20 So, it seems that it is actually the Pharisees—​the progenitors of the rabbis—​ who were Hellenizing and not the Sadducees, who remained true (as is to be expected from hereditary priests) to biblical paradigms. Schiffman adds, this time correctly, that “the Bible regards the individual as a unitary being, making no distinction between man’s physical and spiritual aspects.”21 As this study shows, this very premise is one of the keys to unlocking the ancient Israelite esoteric system. That rabbinical Judaism has a profoundly different religious sensibility than the one depicted in the Pentateuch cannot be discussed in adequate detail here. However, two forceful articulations covering two respective mainstream academic perspectives can be offered, the first by a prominent scholar of Judaism, Jacob Neusner, and the second by the well-​known biblical studies scholar Ziony Zevit. First, Neusner’s view: Earlier, Pharisaism had held that the Temple should be everywhere, especially in the home. Now … [Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai] taught that sacrifice greater than the Temple’s must characterize the life of the community. … By making the laws of ritual purity incumbent upon the ordinary Jew, the Pharisee already had effectively limited the importance of the Temple and its cult … [creating] a movement based upon the priesthood of all Israel. … A kingdom was envisioned in which everyone was a priest, a people all of whom were holy—​a community that would live as if it were always in the Temple sanctuary of Jerusalem. … The Temple altar in Jerusalem would be replicated at the table of all Israel. … The rabbis of the later centuries of late antiquity rewrote in their own image and likeness the entire Scripture and history of Israel, dropping whole eras as though they had never been, ignoring vast bodies of old Jewish writing, inventing whole new books for the canon of Judaism. … They reworked the received in the light of what they proposed to give. … The ancient categories remained. But they were so profoundly revised and transformed that nothing was preserved intact. Judaism, as we know it, the Judaism of Scripture and Mishnah, Midrash and Talmud, thereby effected the ultimate transvaluation of all the values, of all the kinds of Judaism that had come before, from remote Israelite times onward.22 One has to bear in mind, while letting Neusner’s verdict properly sink in (namely, that “they [the rabbis] reworked the received in the light of what they proposed to give”), that as a group of non-​priestly, newly empowered custodians (even if many kohanim had no choice but to join the party that remained standing), the rabbis had no formal entry to the hereditary treasure trove of initiatory experiences of the Temple priesthood. In consequence,

68 The Context what the rabbis “rewrote in their own image and likeness” was, to begin with, altogether bereft of the highly idiosyncratic, concealed priestly praxis of hallowed consciousness-​transformational cultic tradition, one that enabled the priests’ continuing access to the God of Israel (or, alternatively, to the associated God-​consciousness). Or so this study argues. Ziony Zevit, for his part, contends that “the end-​product of a radical reformation,” brought about by “a pseudo-​historical, rabbinic tradition,” transformed the ancient Israelite religion “into a new religion”: Although a pseudo-​historical, rabbinic tradition maintains that Judaism evolved from the biblical religion of ancient Israel and that the rabbis who lived after the destruction of the Second Temple guided this evolution through oral teachings originating at Sinai, critical historians think otherwise. A contemporary understanding of the relationship between the religion of ancient Israel and Judaism tends to see rabbinic Judaism as the end-​product of a radical reformation by closely knit circles of like-​ minded, passionately religious men over a period of some 300 years, from about 100 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. These remarkable individuals revamped totally whatever ancient Israelite religion had become by the second Hellenistic century, reforming it in accordance with the sensibilities of their particular form of Judeo-​Hellenistic culture, transforming it into a new religion.23 The rabbinical claims of possessing the keys to the secret knowledge alleged to exist within the Torah—​knowledge that became known in rabbinical tradition as the Sôd, the fourth and last mode of the fourfold rabbinical method of exegesis known as PaRDeS (meaning “orchard”)—​amounted, in the end, to a self-​serving assertion that the Sôd comprises their own so-​called Oral Torah, purportedly originating from the Sinaitic national epiphany. The word parĕdēs, rendered as PaRDeS to highlight the Hebrew consonants, is an acronym for the traditional fourfold manner of Torah interpretation in which P stands for the literal, R for the allegorical, D for the homiletical, and S for the “secret” level of interpretation.24 The rabbinical Oral Torah, however, could not involve any esoteric knowledge of that particular lineage since this was the specific, and secret, domain of the hereditary Temple priests. Instead, what is known as the rabbinical “Oral Torah” comprises such quintessential rabbinical works as the two Talmuds, manifestly reflecting their own, unadulterated rabbinical sensibility. As pithily noted by such authors as Michael Fishbane and Betty Rojtman, the rabbis essentially proceeded to pass off their own exegesis of the Torah for the esoteric secrets they alleged were contained in the Hebrew Bible. (This was not necessarily with any malicious intent; it is enough to presuppose, as does this study, a lack of access to the inner-​core esoteric knowledge amassed by the priests prior to and during the early phase of the First Temple.)25 These secrets were supposed to be especially numerous in the Pentateuch and purportedly

On the Notion of the Sôd  69 planted there by their author, presumably God himself.26 Fishbane frames this emphasis on exegesis as follows: Pharisaic Judaism tried to minimize the gap between a divine Torah and ongoing human interpretation by projecting the origins of authoritative exegesis to Sinai itself. But even this mythification of a chain of legitimate interpreters did not so much obscure the distinction between Revelation and Interpretation as underscore it. From this perspective, the interpretive traditions of ancient [here, rabbinical] Judaism constitute a separate, non-​biblical genre: a post-​biblical corpus of texts which stand alongside the Sinaitic Revelation as revelation of new meanings through exegesis.27 Rojtman unpacks the very methodology of the midrash this way: Jewish [here, rabbinical] hermeneutics based its deductive technique on co-​referentiality. This logical-​institutional operation rests on a partial identification of the (contextual) references of two extracts containing the same term or the same expression. The word—​not necessarily deictic or demonstrative—​functions as a signal, as an index of identity. It is at this level, moreover, that tradition acts, retaining the memory of the signal and not that of its semantic investment: there is a referential coincidence, but the content of this coincidence is not precisely defined, and neither are the limits of its application.28 The opportunities proffered by the midrashic approach were seen in the lack of “limits of its application”; however, such openings as these are of “dubious” import, as Paul Morris puts it.29 Equally if not more troubling—​from the standpoint of the present study—​is Rojtman’s succinct identification of the essence of the midrashic approach as “retaining the memory of the signal and not that of its semantic investment: there is a referential coincidence, but the content of this coincidence is not precisely defined.” The crucial problem such an approach is bound to face is related to the question of meaning—​ specifically, communicated authorial meaning. The failure of midrashic exegesis to ascertain the authorial intent paradoxically also engenders its creative allure: Midrash is “tied” to the authoritative biblical text and proceeds by means of the most intimate relationship between the biblical text and its interpretation. This intimacy is informed by the features of the Hebrew language and particularly by the characteristics of Hebrew orthography. Orthographical structural features can, by a strange process of reversal, be read back into the biblical text. The generation of interpretations is based on the shape of the Hebrew letters, their consonantal-​only form, written representations, the duality of Hebrew letters as number and

70 The Context consonant, the scribal adornment of letters, the added vocalizations and musical notation system, word order, and ways of reading together the ends and beginnings of different words or sections. To these features are added the contextual and non-​contextual significance of sound, letter, word, repetition, the attempts to resolve textual ambiguities at different levels, psychological considerations, theological questions, apparent contradictions, and, of course, the narrative conventions of biblical literature and the natural potentialities of the Hebrew language. It is important to note that midrashic interpretation operates, very often, simultaneously on a number of different levels, from a single letter to the whole biblical text. … This language level of analysis is the ground from which midrash almost always proceeds, albeit often by means of “dubious” etymologies, synonyms and homonyms, rather than from the ideonic, metaphorical, or structural levels.30 Michael Fishbane describes the specifics of the midrashic method, for example, by citing the case of Rabbi Haninah and his changing one letter in a word, thereby changing the passage’s meaning: R. Haninah does not just propose his new reading bonayikh for banayikh. He rather invokes it imperiously, when he says: “Do not read (al tiqre) ‘your sons (banayikh),’ but (elah) ‘your builders (bonayikh).’ ” Indeed, with this exegetical formula (al tiqre … elah) we have crossed to a new hermeneutical frontier. … For all their exegetical delight, when we catch the midrashist in flagrante delicto, as it were, it is not so much his hermeneutical passion that excites our interest as his passepartout: his justification of a theological point on the basis of a biblical passage which conforms neither to the orthography nor to the sense of the original. In a word, the scriptural support is flagrantly non-​scriptural in the most precise sense—​for the midrashist shouts: (al tiqre … elah) “Do not read (this) but (that).”31 Finally, on the subject of rabbinical difference, as Moshe Idel observes, “the study of the Torah [in rabbinical Judaism] is envisioned as a theurgical activity—​that is, as a way of maintaining the world and of affecting the divinity.”32 Notice that the weight is on the “study” of the Torah, rather than, as among the Temple priests during the ancient Israelite period, on the experiential praxis of the mystical-​initiatory system (which is very partially disclosed, in a concealed manner, as an embedded approximation in the Torah itself).33 An issue that is strongly postmodern in its character and import—​namely, interpretation as textual meaning, or, more specifically, the reader’s reception of a text versus authorial intent (and meaning)—​has from time immemorial been at the forefront of one of the most primary and primal struggles for the intellectual

On the Notion of the Sôd  71 fate of humanity, in the quest to ascertain the nature and the meaning of meaning and the related questions of certainty, truth, or the “right” way of living. This book, with its ultimately successful recovery of the Sôd esoteric stratum or, more accurately, the ascertaining of its presence within the Pentateuch, at first glance might seem to be confirming the rabbinical views of the fourfold mode of scriptural interpretation, where one of the four approaches included is the secret, esoteric Sôd. Yet, despite the identical name and even the confirmation of the existence of a concealed esoteric stratum within the Pentateuch, just as rabbinical Judaism indicated but never disclosed or demonstrated, the study’s recovered initiatory information demonstrates that the rabbinical inheritors of the Israelite tradition were inheritors only by default and not ex officio, so to speak. For it becomes patently obvious that the rabbinical tradition, bereft of “prophecy,” as it itself openly acknowledged—​that is, of a mystical-​initiatory, experiential domain on which, as this study shows, the Israelite cultic religion was based—​has merely spread as rumor what it might have heard about the Sôd. As a tradition with a huge literary corpus, it knows next to nothing about the esoteric heritage carried by the priestly class from the earliest days of the First Temple-​based cult. Rabbinical sensibility, bereft of the original, Temple-​based initiatory-​esoteric knowledge, is curiously reflected in most academic Kabbalah researchers based in Israel, beginning with Gershom Scholem. Scholem, the founder of Kabbalah studies, insisted that there is no mysticism in the Hebrew Bible or indeed in the “great religions”: The fact is that nobody seriously thinks of applying the term mysticism to the classic manifestations of the great religions. It would be absurd to call Moses, the man of God, a mystic, or to apply this term to the Prophets, on the strength of their immediate religious experience.34 Scholem’s two well-​known disciples, Joseph Dan and Moshe Idel, likewise persist with this peculiar view. In the case of Idel, he argues that there is nothing concealed in the Hebrew Bible: “In its Biblical forms, Judaism is a rather exoteric and popular type of religiosity.” Only the subsequent, much later outgrowths that departed from the earlier “populism” become involved with secrets and the mystical: “Indeed, it seems that Biblical religion, with its emphasis on the exoteric, has produced at least three different religiosities which departed from this emphasis: the Christian one, gravitating around mysteries, the Qumranic one, emphasizing eschatological secrets, and the Rabbinic one, which includes also an arcanization of the canonic texts.”35 Idel only sees mysticism and esotericism in “the medieval mystical literature, which has strongly esoteric proclivities”; the latter “shows that a shift can be discerned insofar as the meaning of the terms sod, raz and seter are concerned.”36 How is it possible to “arcanize” texts that otherwise are wholly exoteric? Granted, even if the midrashic method could easily overcome such a difficulty, via its “(al tiqre … elah) ‘Do not read (this) but (that)’ ” creative

72 The Context approach as noted earlier by Fishbane, there was still the difficulty expressed by the Zohar.37 It insisted, in almost apocalyptic terms: Woe to the sinners who look upon the Torah as simply tales pertaining to things of the world, seeing thus only the outer garment. But the righteous whose gaze penetrates to the very Torah, happy are they. Just as wine must be in a jar to keep, so the Torah must be contained in an outer garment. The garment is made up of the tales and stories; but we, we are bound to penetrate beyond.38 The Zoharic method, while in many respects quite similar to the midrashic one, is nonetheless to be sharply distinguished from the latter precisely in its ability to perceive, comment on, and elucidate the Pentateuchal esoteric strands, even as its own text is itself profoundly veiled. Indeed, if the Pentateuchal text pretends that it is straightforward and has nothing hidden, the Zohar pretends that it is an esoteric text in its surface narratives, while in reality its real esoteric content is just as concealed as is that of the Pentateuchal text (as we shall see later in the book). The outlines of the esoteric, mystical-​initiatory, inner-​core knowledge of the ancient Israelite cultic civilization, which the rabbis failed to become heirs to, were always displayed right before their eyes, quite visibly in the very text they claimed to fully possess: the Torah.

Dual-​Channel Narration: Fixedness versus Violations and Shifts in Unconscious Contexts How could anyone who wishes to transmit a message, that is, an addresser, pick selectively the addressee who is intended to receive that message? The difficulty is with ensuring, if one is the addresser, that the embedded clues—​ the traces of concealed information, in our case—​remain invisible, that is to say, unconscious, for the unintended addressees. Here we turn to cognitive psychology’s Bernard Baars and his applicable notion of contextualizing experience: The system that computes our orientation to gravity and the visual world is part of the context of our experience. We continually benefit from a host of such contextual processes, without experiencing them as objects of conscious experience. Their influence can be inferred from many sources of evidence … [including from] contexts of thinking, belief, and communication. … Contexts are equivalent to currently unconscious expectations that shape conscious experiences. … For us, the word “context” is not just any mental representation—​it is an unconscious representation that acts to influence another, conscious representation.39

On the Notion of the Sôd  73 Baars lists several “pervasive sources of evidence for unconscious contexts that shape conscious experience,” such as so-​called “top-​down influences” and related effects of ambiguity and “decontextualization,” or “strong violations of context.”40 The ones most relevant for us are “fixedness,” or “being blind to ‘the obvious’ ”: Seen in retrospect or from “the outside,” it is hard to believe that the fixated person cannot see the “obvious” solution. But within the fixating context, the solution is not obvious at all: it is literally impossible to perceive. … Whenever we try to learn something before we have the knowledge needed to make sense of the material, we may find ourselves interpreting it in the wrong context. … A major point is to realize that our notion of “fixedness” depends critically on having an outside point of view in which the mistake is a mistake.41 “ ‘Fixedness,’ ” Baars asserts, “exists in states of mind that we consider to be perfectly correct.”42 Baars gives the following example: Thus the remarkable ability of one stream of speech to capture our conscious experience to the exclusion of any other looks like a contextual fixedness effect. … When there is potentially conscious input, but the right context is not brought to bear on it, it does not become conscious. … Only a change in the fixating context, or giving up on the task, can release us from fixedness.43 This process of shifting the fixating context—​such as, for example, in the text in question for us, from one that automatically sees “knowledge” as something very beneficial, to a notion that there may be a different kind of knowledge/​discourse/​power structure(s) drawn from a numinous encounter with “God” (as will be discussed in the next subsection)—​is, as Baars indicates, extremely difficult. Contexts that are fixated, according to Baars, can be of four kinds: “first, the context of perception/​imagery; second, the context of conceptual thought; third, goal contexts, which evoke and shape actions; and finally, the context of communication that is shared by two people talking to each other.”44 Importantly for this study, Baars again emphasizes the idea that “unconscious presuppositions can become conscious when they are severely violated”: A member of another culture may seem to thrust his face toward a Westerner in a conversation at an unacceptable eight inches away. This experience may be shocking or offensive, but it makes conscious what is normally taken for granted: namely the fact that we, too, adopt a typical social distance. Thus unconscious customs and habits come to the foreground. Custom leads to adaptation and loss of consciousness; this is

74 The Context why children, novices, and strangers can guide us to become conscious again of things we have lost touch with in the process of becoming adults, experts, and members of various in-​groups. … These properties of context have major implications for sociology and anthropology. For instance, all cultures have periodic ceremonies, festivals, and initiation rites using dramatic or even traumatic symbolism; a major function of these events may be to create and renew memorable conscious experiences that invoke and reinforce the unconscious contextual assumptions of the society.45 The notion of two-​channel information flow has important implications for this study. Specifically, by evoking the conjecture (discussed in the next section) of a core group of initiates setting out to communicate with their fellow community members about the possibility of having access to the awesome Absolute Other—​ and thereby securing for the community the highest possible protection, guidance, and beneficence—​we may well begin to comprehend the all-​consuming mission that could have evolved within this group. Since one of the key distinctions that had to be made early on involved a division into exoteric and esoteric realms—​that is, a division between the exoteric information, rituals, and concepts that were to serve as a great nation-​molding religious cult and therefore would be openly described or exercised, and the esoteric information that enabled a more fundamental, direct, and personal access to the Deity (and thus was extremely dangerous, as noted in several passages in Exodus, as at the Sinaitic revelation and the incident with Nadav and Avihu)—​the notion of dual-​channel presentation of all information available for communication had to be the ideal method of choice. Why did all available information have to be communicated? Because the foundational initiates were building the appropriate community for their awe-​inspiring God, and to leave out the information that was the most precious but also the most dangerous when in the wrong hands was unthinkable. Everything essential had to be disclosed, though only on a “need to know” basis. Thus, the dual-​channel conception is, if anything, rather logical under the circumstances. The exoteric information, including exoteric cultic requirements that formed the religious character of the community, such as the Temple sacrifices, purity laws, and the observance of the Sabbath, would be straightforwardly presented as the primary stream (in the sense in which Baars uses the term, namely, the stream that is consciously perceived by the reader, since it is what is most coherent and straightforward). Here also would be the unforgettable literary plots and dramas that would tend to dramatically reinforce the likelihood of the reader’s interest being captured by this primary stream. In contrast, the secondary, or esoteric-​informational stream, would be made anything but apparent, coherent, or likely to attract and hold the reader’s attention. The result, in that case, is all but assured: the overwhelming majority of readers would be conscious of only the primary stream, that is, the surface,

On the Notion of the Sôd  75 ostensive narratives. In order to perceive the secondary stream, one must be able to make conscious what is deliberately crafted to be unconscious. To do so, one must be confronted with a realization that there are, in the text in question, deliberate or sometimes unavoidable clashes of one sort or another between the two channels; these, as will be detailed later in the book, are typically some form of narrative or rhetorical metalepsis. By closely investigating such violations—​or the traces of which we spoke earlier—​however innocuous they may appear at first blush, one may uncover the information intentionally concealed.

Unthinkable Power and Cooperative Communication As stated above, everything had to be disclosed, though only on a “need to know” basis. The idea of such a discriminating communication seems unfeasible, certainly by way of a text and especially considering that, “if it is accepted that all behavior in an interactional situation has message value, i.e., it is communication, it follows that no matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate.”46 One cannot not communicate, it seems, and thus one cannot not “produce and reproduce shared meaning”: A transmission, or informational, model of communication … , it is claimed, continues to dominate lay and much academic thought. … According to the conventional transmission concept, communication is a process of sending and receiving messages or transferring information from one mind to another. [This model, however,] has come under heavy attack in recent years … supplemented, if not entirely supplanted, by a model that conceptualizes communication as a constitutive process that produces and reproduces shared meaning.47 We see numerous such orientations toward meaning, including Derrida’s totalizing “all experience is the experience of meaning. … Everything that appears to consciousness, everything that is for consciousness in general, is meaning. Meaning is the phenomenality of the phenomenon.”48 However, Derrida’s notion of experience, as all-​encompassing as it appears to be, is nonetheless confined to the “book.”49 It is thus limited as well as constituted by just language: it cannot be outside a text or a language. Here, too, the constitutive model—​just as Lévi-​Strauss claims, namely, that “we all know what end a language serves; it serves communication”—​is communication that is tied to meaning.50 Everything is communication, everything is a text, and everything is meaningful—​leaving us full of wonder, certainly, but without a clue as to how to distinguish between, say, levels of wonderfulness or the relative urgency or weightiness of one meaning versus another. The meaning of such terms as “communication” and “meaning” seems to be eroding, to the point of meaninglessness. We have to, therefore, press further and determine how to escape

76 The Context this emerging circularity. As the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead asserts, “You cannot start to communicate with people in Mars and set up a society where you have no antecedent relationship. … [A]‌community that lies entirely outside of your own community, that has no common interest, no co-​ operative activity, is one with which you could not communicate.”51 Mead’s concept of “any genuine communication” as an attempt at “co-​operation” with others emerges as a disclosure of motivations that are behind significant social-​religious and psychological-​societal infrastructures. By applying Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson’s “one cannot not communicate,” one may amend Mead’s notions and say that even when a society is waging a war with an otherwise wholly uncommunicative and radically different enemy, the societies in question are indeed communicating and that, even when ignoring each other, perhaps to an extent of total obliviousness to the other’s existence, it is communication nonetheless, expressing the fact of such obliviousness and radical difference. Mead’s somewhat narrow definition of communication is less important than is this insight of his: In human society there have arisen certain universal forms which found their expression in universal religions and also in universal economic processes. These go back, in the case of religion, to such fundamental attitudes of human beings toward each other as kindliness, helpfulness, and assistance. Such attitudes are involved in the life of individuals in the group, and a generalization of them is found back of all universal religions. These processes are such that they carry with them neighborliness.52 Speaking of religious as well as economic “universal forms,” Mead suggests that “back of these two attitudes lies that which is involved in any genuine communication.”53 This is an authentic key capable of yielding a breakthrough. If the Pentateuch, or the Torah, is at the core of Hebraic religiosity, then, for it to contain a “genuine communication,” it must have as its underlying motivation a “co-​operative” impetus, one that seeks to secure for the community a maximal good (the latter understood in terms germane to that specific community, it goes without saying, as is also explicit in Mead’s argument). If one takes a bird’s-​eye view of the Pentateuch and mentally compares this text with the entire corpus of either religious or secular literature that humanity possesses, one aspect will clearly stand out. There is hardly another piece of writing that foregrounds, to such an extent and power, and provides a level of description for the presence of that which in English is normally designated as “God,” a presence that is at times overt and even anthropomorphically physical (as in the story of Abraham and Sarah’s three visitors, for example), while most of the time being covert—​yet at the same time manifestly felt and expressed. Thus, if one is seeking hypotheses regarding urgent or highly significant information that someone wished to impart to his (or her or their) compatriots—​with the intent of sharing that which was assumed would bring the community the most good and/​or prevent the bad—​one such

On the Notion of the Sôd  77 fundamental hypothesis, as it pertains to ancient Israelites, undoubtedly must be connected to “God.” However, in the Israelite context not just any conception of God will do. Compare, for example, Isaiah 6:1–​7, which contains the prophet’s vision of God as he was worshiping in the Temple, with Rudolf Otto’s notions of the numinous and mysterium tremendum: In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LO R D sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LO R D of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LO R D of hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged (Isa. 6:1–​7 KJV). Consider Otto’s main conceptualizations (here, in Roy Rappaport’s pithy account): The numinous object is a mysterium tremendum in Otto’s famous formulation (1950: chap. 4). It is mysterium because it is beyond creature comprehension. It is incommensurable with us; as Otto puts it, it is “wholly other” (1950: 25ff.). It is tremendum because, first, it is awful in both senses of the word: inspiring awe on the one hand, dread on the other. It is tremendum, second, because it has majestas, absolutely overpowering and perhaps all-​ absorbing (1950: 20ff.). It is tremendum, third, because of its “energy” or, as Otto’s translator called it, “urgency.” “It everywhere clothes itself in … vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement, activity, impetus” (1950: 23). It is experienced as alive in some sense. It is not merely an abstraction but a being, or, if it is not a being, it is something that possesses being, or is actively “be-​ing” itself.54 The similarity between Isaiah’s description—​which can be supplemented by numerous examples of other numinous encounters in the Pentateuch, such as Jacob’s dream of a ladder and angels at Bethel or the episode of Moses and the “burning bush”—​and that of Otto’s formulation is striking. What does such a description presuppose and prefigure? It is about a discovery, through a direct “presentational” experience of God’s existence, immediacy of presence, and awesome, unthinkable power. This power can be unleashed against the

78 The Context puny human being—​or as the passage from Isaiah implies, human beings can seek to align themselves with “the King, the LORD of hosts.” The benefits of the latter are obvious (to someone like Isaiah, who has gone through the numinous experience) and so is the pressing imperative to communicate this knowledge to fellow members of the same community. Isaiah’s is a conception similar to Otto’s numinous in being “wholly other”; the latter, above all, distinguishes the biblical Hebraic religiosity not only from nontheistic varieties of mysticism but also from theistic mysticisms that fail to achieve a complete separation from the “wholly other.” “God” does not merely stand for a marker of conceptual limits of human cognition and mental powers.55 God and gods are also critical in the development of human self-​consciousness, creating an entire range of cognitive-​religious alternatives among the peoples who have sponsored the historical religions. It is a question of which direction the intention to interact—​or not—​with the Absolute Other may take: most religious experiences, both traditional-​ historical and contemporary, line up on one side or the other of the “wholly other” issue.56 The traditions either stress monistic-​unitive, self-​inflating notions (Upanishads, and later Vedanta, e.g., Advaita) or opt for monistic-​“nihilative,” that is, “self ”-​annihilative notions, as in Buddhism and monistic-​“isolative” (e.g., Sankhya yoga and Jainism).57 They may also be theistic-​unitive, as in some versions of Christian and Islamic mysticism in which the absorption of the self in the Absolute takes place through an overwhelming love and yearning for God.58 A final possibility is theistic-​ “copulative” (as in Bhagavad-​ Gita, Ramanuja, Madhva, Caitanya, and Tantra).59 Since what is experienced as either a unity or nihilative nothingness involves a very different conceptualization of God than a “wholly other Absolute,” along with a self that is very different from that which has a relationship with the “wholly other Absolute,” this writer has proposed that the proper semantic as well as religious context for the usage of Otto’s term “numinous”—​as a “Wholly Other”—​must be reserved for situations that are neither unitive nor nihilistic and that involve conceptualizations of the deity that maintain its utter otherness.60 Representative instances include theistic-​ numinous mysticism of the biblical Hebrew cultic praxis as well as some individual theistic-​visionary experiences (kabbalistic, Christian, Islamic). A key difference signified by the theistic-​numinous mysticism (as opposed to other varieties of mystical experiences) is likely to be in a cognitive-​epistemic alteration of consciousness provisionally described as “hyper-​cognition” and entailing what Brian Lancaster calls “cognitive restructuring.”61 There must be cognitive consequences to taking a particular religious stand, whether unitive (theistic unitive, panentheistic unitive, or Zaehner’s panenhenic one); self-​inflating solipsistic; nontheistic; or, as in only one fully developed and recorded historical case, a numinous theistic one. The latter of course is the traditional position of both archaic biblical Hebrew religion and the Judaism that followed, with its “I-​Thou” dynamics that do not entail either

On the Notion of the Sôd  79 of the extremes of unitive mysticisms—​neither the self-​aggrandizement of the “Self is Brahman” formula nor the self-​extinction and subsequent self-​ aggrandizement as part of the illusion of unity with God—​and demand the literal and literally unbridgeable otherness in its conceptualization of the Wholly Other Absolute. Who could have been the person or persons who may have had such mystical encounters with a wholly other “God” and then felt the overwhelming urge and “cooperative” motivation (using Mead’s term) to share the experience with their community? Might not the awesome, astounding numinous experience lie behind a conscious attempt, a posteriori, to formulate the peculiar conditions and the ways of both enabling a direct contact with “God” and—​ especially—​ establishing and maintaining a communal contact with “God” in order to derive benefits from such relationship? Mead, in fact, does continue with just such a line of thought: Occasionally a person arises who is able to take in more than others of an act in process, who can put himself into relation with whole groups in the community whose attitudes have not entered into the lives of the others in the community. He becomes a leader. … Figures of that sort become of enormous importance because they make possible communication between groups otherwise completely separated from each other. The sort of capacity we speak of is in politics the attitude of the statesman who is able to enter into the attitudes of the group and to mediate between them by making his own experience universal, so that others can enter into this form of communication through him.62 We have here not only the schematic outlines of the emergence of a figure such as Moses but also, critically, the likely impetus behind the communication that is the Pentateuch. We can easily visualize a person of Moses’s stature who, having undergone either spontaneous mystical experiences or those resulting from some apprenticeship, forms around him a core group of disciples (that might become the progenitor of the priestly caste), to whom he offers both the induction methods and his evaluative insights into the meaning of the theistic-​numinous encounters with the wholly other, or the Absolute Other, or “God.” Notwithstanding the long-​lasting and ultimately realistic history of the Documentary Hypothesis, it was hardly possible for scholars to imagine the actual religio-​cultural and societal dynamics that could have produced such a text as the Pentateuch.63 Yet we can now meaningfully conjecture the likely scenario and even the likely numeric composition of the group that spawned the earliest Hebrew sensibility and the related texts. As argued by Marshall Scott Poole, while it is a mistake to advance notions that equate whole societies with an individual (in the sense in which, as is often suggested, it is the whole of Israelite society that gives birth to its idiosyncratic religion), it is also

80 The Context unlikely that a single individual is the originating point of a communication of the magnitude of the ancient Hebraic Temple cult: Entertain for a moment the possibility that the individual is not the basic building block of communication theory. … If not the individual, what should be the basic building block of communication theory? A number of alternatives have been presented. Many media researchers would argue for whole societies; organizational researchers would advance entire organizations; and theorists of many types would advocate “discursive formations” of various types. While all of these are worthwhile candidates, I believe that most studies of these entities have in common the following flaw: Each of these large units is so complex in itself that a theoretical analysis is driven to … treat them as giant individuals, much as more micro theories focus on individual human organisms. The problem here is that, again, the influence of other giant individuals on the central subject is omitted from most of these theories. These macro level theories are like the micro level theories which valorize the individual writ large.64 There is also the reverse problem: Focusing on larger units downplays the role of the human as efficient and final cause of communication. While theories at the macro level will always be important to communication, they must ultimately be grounded in human action. There are only two units of analysis which facilitate the detailed study of human communicative exchanges in context, the dyad and the small group. … However, I believe the group is superior to the dyad in one important respect: the group includes multiple others. The dyad provides a useful and realistic model for communication because it includes an other. Including only one other, however, does not adequately capture the complex nature of social situations. Multiple others, up to the number that a communicator can take into account as individuals, should be included in the basic unit.65 Returning to the core group of Hebraic initiates notion, the group commences its multifaceted “universe of discourse” addressed to its community: Thinking is not a field or realm which can be taken outside of possible social uses. There has to be some such field as religion or economics in which there is something to communicate, in which there is a co-​operative process, in which what is communicated can be socially utilized. One must assume that sort of a co-​operative situation in order to reach what is called the “universe of discourse.”66 Mead uses a makeshift term thinking for what, in the context that we are discussing, can be assumed to be the overall resultant impact of the numinous

On the Notion of the Sôd  81 experiences on the group of initiates. Speaking of the “universe of discourse,” by the term discourse one means, after Foucault, “language practice: that is, language as it is used by various constituencies (the law, medicine, the church, for example) for purposes to do with power relationships between people.”67 The core group of initiates did not set out to create Scripture per se. It set out to create a complete, totalizing “universe of discourse,” a power and empowerment structure for an entire people. As a first power circle and therefore at its most rigid and uncompromising—​and thus most empowering—​it was designed for the emerging priestly caste. The spiritual and conceptual exaltation achieved by the core group—​as shown by the present book—​is both unparalleled and unequaled, then or since.68 Subsequently, the core group launched its universe of discourse in ever-​widening circles but also amid diminishing restrictive demands and a corresponding diminution of resultant noetic/​numinous power.69 The universe of discourse that the group had launched then began to engulf, and eventually defined, the whole of the community, now conceptualized as the people to be devoted to, and guided by, “God.” This was the “co-​operative” communication to the emerging community, an overwhelming desire on the part of the core group to enable its community to experience YHWH’s closeness and protection and above all YHWH’s awesome reality.

Notes 1 The Merkabah school of Jewish mysticism originated from Second Temple sources, that is, just prior to but apparently without major frictions vis-​à-​vis the emerging rabbinical weltanschauung. 2 Regarding the paradigm shift at the beginning of the Common Era, see, e.g., Jospe and Wagner, Great Schisms in Jewish History. As for Philo, he freely engaged what he considered the compelling Greek philosophical approaches; because he wrote in Greek rather than Hebrew in his native Alexandria, he had little access to contemporary Jewish thought in Judea and elsewhere. The spirit of the times would not allow the emerging rabbinical midrashic-​magical zeitgeist to distinguish between specifically Greek philosophical conclusions and positions and, more generally, the crucial methods and apparatus necessary for deliberative philosophical inquiry henceforth available for adoption and application to other worldviews. A full millennium after Philo, Maimonides, himself originally a source of controversy in the rabbinical milieu, would adopt Aristotelian positions for his soon-​to-​ become mainstream rabbinical perspectives. 3 See Otto, Idea of the Holy, chap. 4. 4 Assmann, “Semiosis and Interpretation,” 92. 5 Ibid. 6 See ibid., 93–​94. 7 Ibid., 101–​2. 8 Ibid., 102. 9 Ibid., 105–​6. 10 Assmann, Mind of Egypt, 393. 11 Ibid., 394–​95. The work referencing “enclave culture” is Douglas, In the Wilderness.

82 The Context 12 Assmann credits the term “textual community” to Brian Stock. See Assmann, Mind of Egypt, 313. 13 Assmann, Mind of Egypt, 414. 14 Sapir, Language, 153–​54, cited in Shaumyan et al., “Two Paradigms of Linguistics,” 66–​67 (emphasis added). 15 Rappaport, “Logos, Liturgy, and the Evolution of Humanity,” 620 (emphasis added). 16 According to Tim Crane, “Intensionality is a feature of sentences and linguistic items.” Crane, Mechanical Mind, 34. 17 In biblical studies, the religion of the Second Temple period is classified as Early Judaism. 18 Schiffman, “Jewish Sectarianism in Second Temple Times,” 3. 19 See also Elior, Three Temples. 20 Schiffman, “Jewish Sectarianism in Second Temple Times,” 24 (emphasis added). 21 Ibid. 22 Neusner, “Varieties of Judaism in the Formative Age,” 195, 176, 196 (emphasis added). 23 Zevit, “From Judaism to Biblical Religion and Back Again,” 164 (emphasis added). 24 See, e.g., Idel, Absorbing Reflections, 429–​30; and van der Heide, “PaRDeS.” There is a similar fourfold Christian medieval interpretive method: “the literal, or historical; the allegorical, or spiritual; the tropological, or moral; and the anagogical, or mystical” (Leitch, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 9). 25 If one were to invoke Ricoeur’s notions of congruence-​plenitude-​referential levels of textual interpretation vis-​à-​vis rabbinical exegesis, one would have to include in the congruence level the two exegetical methods of the rabbinical tradition, in addition to its own literal-​interpretive one, namely, the allegorical and the homiletical exegeses. See Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences; and compare Halivni, Peshat and Derash; Morris, “Exiled from Eden”; and Neusner, Transformation of Judaism. This is so because all these methods are based entirely on the literal narrative, albeit often amending it, sometimes significantly, as in the case of the midrash. In contrast, one would pointedly exclude from the congruence level the putative fourth method of interpretation, that of the Sôd, or “secret,” had the latter been known to exist in any explicit textual form (it actually is not, other than by some means, and to a partial extent, in key kabbalistic sources such as the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar; such works, however, are only presumed to contain the Sôd-​level Pentateuchal interpretations, since no explicit decodings of these works are known to exist). Similarly, the varied academic approaches to biblical interpretation consisting of primary and secondary sources from ancient times to today, with a vast number of methods, styles, and modern scholarly approaches, can all be safely included in the congruence level of meaning, since they all are based on the literal narrative of the Pentateuchal text. For various interpretive styles, see the following: for historical-​critical, Barton, “Historical-​ Critical Approaches”; for literary, Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative; Bloom and Rosenberg, Book of J; and Jasper, “Literary Readings of the Bible”; for political, Gorringe, “Political Readings of Scripture”; for postmodernist, Carroll, “Poststructuralist Approaches”; Exum and Clines, New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible; Ochs, Return to Scripture; Ochs, Reviewing the Covenant; Ochs and Levine, Textual Reasonings; Penchansky, “Staying the Night”; and Rashkow, “Intertextuality,

On the Notion of the Sôd  83 Transference, and the Reader”; for feminist, Loades, “Feminist Interpretation”; and for sociological, Whitelam, “Social World of the Bible.” 26 Such exceptional esoteric works as, for example, the Zohar, while clearly indicative of rabbinical influences (such as a stark good-​evil dichotomy and the notion of the messianic redeemer), just as clearly stand well outside the rabbinical framework that largely eschewed the mystical. Even when kabbalistic notions have nonetheless been openly embraced by a particular mainstream rabbinical grouping—​such as, for example, eighteenth-​century Hassidism—​they rapidly degenerated into unmitigated superstition and a largely magical outlook. (As discussed in ­chapter 1, it was precisely the magico-​religious outlook and practices of ancient Egypt that were rejected by the ancient Israelite “counter-​religion.”) 27 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 3–​4 (emphasis added). 28 Rojtman, Black Fire on White Fire, 55 (emphasis added). 29 Morris, “Exiled from Eden,” 121. 30 Ibid., 119–​21. 31 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 22. 32 Idel, “Zohar as Exegesis,” 89 (see also 98). 33 David Stern feels that “in a time when classical prophecy had ceased among the Jews, the activity of [rabbinical] midrash served a comparable religious need: it helped to restore the sense of God’s presence through discourse” (Stern, “Midrash and the Language of Exegesis,” 121). This indeed is what the rabbis may have wanted to believe and did believe, yet such a notion is comparable to perpetually discoursing about love versus experiencing a real love relationship. 34 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 6–​7. 35 Idel, “Secrecy, Binah and Derishah,” 312, 342. 36 Ibid., 343. 37 Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 22. 38 Zohar, III. 152, translated in Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 121, cited in Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 34–​35. This passage was cited earlier, in the book’s introduction. 39 Baars, “Fundamental Role of Context” 761 (emphasis added). 40 Ibid., 762–​69. 41 Ibid., 765 (emphasis added). 42 Ibid., 765. 43 Ibid., 765–​66 (emphasis added). 44 Ibid., 770. 45 Ibid., 774. 46 Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson, “Some Tentative Axioms of Communication,” 275. These authors also posit a second “axiom” (the first one was “a metacommunicational axiom …: one cannot not communicate” [277]); “Every communication has a content and a relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication” (278). Their third axiom is as follows: “The nature of a relationship is contingent upon the punctuation of the communicational sequences between the communicants” (281). 47 Craig, “Communication Theory as a Field,” 67. 48 Derrida, Positions, 30. 49 Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” 74–​78. 50 Lévi-​Strauss, “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology,” 43. 51 Mead, “Social Foundations and Functions of Thought and Communication,” 373.

84 The Context 52 Ibid. (emphasis added). 53 Ibid., 374. 54 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 377–​79. Compare with Walter Burkert: Moderns came back to the suggestion that awe was the basic religious feeling; Rudolf Otto substituted a neo-​Latin term, mysterium tremendum, shivering mystery. Shudders of awe are central for the experience of the sacred. The very means of indelible transmission, threat and terror, are correlated with the contents of the religious part of the mental world: the prerogative of the sacred requires the fear of god. (Burkert, Creation of the Sacred, 31) 55 Compare Shanon, “Reasons for Involving the Notion of God.” 56 Otto, “Idea of the Holy”; Kohav, “Ancient Religions as Differing Responses to Self-​God Dichotomy.” 57 Larson, “Mystical Man in India.” 58 Compare Almond, Mystical Experience and Religious Doctrine; and Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane. 59 Larson, “Mystical Man in India.” 60 Kohav, Sôd Hypothesis, 350n147, 351n148. See also Buber, I and Thou. 61 Kohav, Sôd Hypothesis, 350n144, 377n310, 453n816; compare Lancaster, “On the Stages of Perception”; Lancaster, “On the Relationship between Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps”; and Lancaster, Approaches to Consciousness, 251. 62 Mead, “Social Foundations and Functions,” 373 (emphasis added). 63 For a thorough overview of the Documentary Hypothesis, see Friedman, Bible with Sources Revealed. 64 Poole, “Small Group Should Be the Fundamental Unit,” 359. 65 Ibid., 359. 66 Mead, “Social Foundations and Functions,” 374. 67 Wolfreys, Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism, 844. 68 Compare the following: Unlike scholars who espouse a developmental model for Israelite faith, we do not believe that a high level of abstraction and a loftiness of ideals necessarily point to a late date of composition. … Our study shows that PT [Priestly Torah School] should be seen as an example of a cultural oeuvre that refutes the theory of gradual development in the realm of the spirit. (Knohl, Sanctuary of Silence, 222) 69 As Israel Knohl observes, “In HS [Holiness School], the prohibitions are presented as a means to holiness” (Knohl, Sanctuary of Silence, 183n43).

Part Two

The Metatext

4 Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System Accessing the Torah’s Veiled Axis of Communication

Can a Meta-​account Approximate Initiation? In esoteric traditions, being an initiated insider is absolutely crucial for grasping a tradition’s inner-​core knowledge. For example, “Students of cross-​ cultural communication know how often misunderstanding arises because of different assumptions in different cultural groups.”1 Most if not all academic scholars are not initiates, of course, but most are also not aware of or willing to admit the corresponding problem, namely, “that their knowledge is always partial and severely limited by the fact that they had never received initiation or oral instruction.”2 What the present study attempts is to afford a glimpse inside the tradition that informs the Pentateuchal text. It offers such access by constructing a metaconceptual, metadiscursive scaffolding from which one may peek over the epistemic, phenomenological, and cognitive barriers that the tradition in question has deliberately erected. As Steven Wasserstrom remarks: We cannot reproduce original stigmata, but we do still have available to us aenigmata, by which I mean signs. … But does merely imaginative reading achieve interpretive meta-​leverage? Does it allow us to stand aside the self-​ reporting discourse of “experience”? Can we find Archimedean meaning in experience by operating outside of it? Can we, in short, leverage it into understanding? Perhaps, but only if we steer clear of [certain] dangers. On the one hand, we must avoid the Scylla of the emerging cognitive science of religion (the dream of a new cognitivist elite, virtually all of whom are scientists or are at least scientific in orientation); on the other hand, the Charybdis of ever-​more-​attenuated modes of close reading alone (the dream of such old cognitivist elites as those emulating Leo Strauss).3 Here Wasserstrom, an otherwise astute observer of developments in biblical studies, such as a resurgence of interest in “religious experience,” having an apparent animus against “scientific orientation,” seems to be dreading reduction, the old bugaboo of “humanitarian” defenders of religion’s alleged specialness and irreducibility. In any event, the present study chooses the DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-7

88 The Metatext opposite of reduction, namely, the emergentist approach of ever-​widening perspectives, in which no preordained criteria for what may be relevant or useful for reaching our research aims are involved. Clearly, however, “merely imaginative reading [for] achiev[ing] interpretive meta-​leverage,” as Wasserstrom puts it, is the approach of choice only for midrashic or postmodernist hermeneutics, to which this study repeatedly calls attention. By contrast, this book’s custom-​developed methodology and method of close reading of the Pentateuchal text do not entail “ever-​more-​attenuated modes”; rather, thanks to the engaged perspectives, themselves a result of mapping by means of a massive contextual apparatus, the modes involved are suggestive of powerful magnification techniques. At the outset, however, such an attempt to overcome the otherwise inflexible initiatory requirements of any substantive religious-​spiritual tradition must address several inherent problems that confront someone from the outside who seeks to relate to inner-​core knowledge systems of an enormously complex tradition such as the ancient Israelite one. The “endless sidebars to discourses about which you know something,” while a splendid mischaracterization by one of this writer’s critics, are quite necessary and, rather than “intend[ing] to overwhelm [and] elicit awe,” are included for two distinct purposes: (1) to enable the “outsider” reader to follow the discussion, and (2) to enable a formal foregrounding of that which inherently resists such an effort and which otherwise would forever remain behind the epistemic, phenomenological, and cognitive barriers deliberately erected by the Pentateuchal authors. As the playwright Anton Chekhov famously remarked, if in the first act there is a rifle hanging on the wall, it must be fired sometime before the curtain falls. This study has many such “rifles” planted in it; they can all be seen as “firing a shot” sooner or later in one section of the study or another, all contributing to the overall impact. First, the study goes to great lengths to identify and describe those conceptualizations in today’s scholarship that have a direct, critical bearing on the difficult and often counterintuitive Sôd-​ related aspects. Several disciplines, often far removed from either esoteric or biblical concerns, offer valuable insights and, at least in theory, a chance to approximate some of the effects of an initiatory experience. Two such perspectives that the study singles out are, from cognitive psychology, Bernard Baars’ “two-​channel” experiments and, from cognitive poetics, the concept developed by one of its founders, Reuven Tsur, of delayed categorization. Such metadiscursive approximations to or conceptualizations of key aspects of the otherwise indispensable initiatory mystical experience are vital.

Eschewing Reduction and Choosing Emergence E. D. Hirsch has proposed that one may arrive at a determinate meaning of a text through “a reconstructive process for determining the ‘author’s horizon’ ”:

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  89 Hirsch realizes … that critics rarely have direct access to an author’s consciousness. Therefore, he advocates a reconstructive process for determining the “author’s horizon”—​the historical set of typical expectations, prohibitions, norms, and limits that define the author’s intentions as a whole. These ground and sanction inferences about probable textual meaning. For instance, one important element of an author’s horizon is genre, which invariably predetermines interpreters’ expectations for understanding a text. The goal is a reconstruction of the speaking subject’s stance through attention to historical horizon or context. As Hirsch puts it, “The interpreter’s primary task is to reproduce in himself the author’s ‘logic,’ his attitudes, his cultural givens, in short his world.”4 The problem with “reconstructive” prescriptions such as this is not that they are wrong; it is that they are essentially reductive, and in a situation where reduction is ineffectual at best and inappropriate at worst, this will not work.5 According to Lévi-​Strauss: Science has only two ways of proceeding: it is either reductionist or structuralist. It is reductionist when it is possible to find out that very complex phenomena on one level can be reduced to simpler phenomena on other levels. … And when we are confronted with phenomena too complex to be reduced to phenomena of a lower order, then we can only approach them by looking to their relationships, that is, trying to understand what kind of original system they make up. This is exactly what we have been trying to do in linguistics, in anthropology, and in different fields.6 The case mentioned by Lévi-​Strauss—​of “phenomena too complex to be reduced to phenomena of a lower order”—​happens to be our case of the Pentateuchal text. As a result, the version of structuralism that the study proposes, as we shall see presently, is “emergence.”7 Hirsch’s parameters for ascertaining textual meaning are as follows: 1. The author’s cultural given 2. The author’s horizons: a historical set of typical expectations, prohibitions, norms, and limits (that define the author’s intentions as a whole) 3. The question of genre While it would be wonderful if one could estimate correctly such things as the “author’s horizons” and the correct or true “genre” of a text being considered, inferring them properly will almost certainly not work in the case of the Pentateuch and its conjectured Sôd stratum. Both the author’s horizons and the specific genre corresponding to the nature of the conjectured noetic stratum, in accordance with this study’s thesis, were deliberately concealed, in a way that will not be obvious to an uninitiated reader. This may explain why

90 The Metatext no attempt has ever been made to recover the Sôd stratum, certainly in academic scholarship: In biblical scholarship, we have been following in the footsteps of scientists who since the Enlightenment have adhered to the epistemological mechanism of reductionism. In order to describe textual and historical complexes, biblical scholars have, since the beginning of modern biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century, broken down these networks into multiple isolated parts, and these particles have been studied separately. The reverse mechanism, in the science known as emergence, seems until now beyond us.8 Ellen van Wolde invokes “emergence.” As Robert Van Gulick elaborates: The basic idea of emergence is more or less the converse of that associated with reduction. If the core idea of reduction is that Xs are “nothing more than Ys” or “just special sorts of Ys,” then the core idea of emergence is that “Xs are more than just Ys” and that “Xs are something over and above Ys.” … Though the emergent features of a whole or complex are not completely independent of those of its parts since they “emerge from” those parts, the notion of emergence nonetheless implies that in some significant and novel way they go beyond the features of those parts. … The varieties of emergence can be divided into several groups along lines that are similar in at least some respects to the divisions among the types of reduction. For example, emergence relations might be viewed either as objective metaphysical relations holding among real-​world items such as properties, or they might be construed as partly epistemic relations that appeal in part to what we as cognitive agents can explain or understand about such links.9 Van Gulick proceeds to list almost ten different types of current theories of emergence, about the same number as there are for reductionist theories, among which fully six are “metaphysical” emergence types. The “epistemic notions of emergence,” for their part, involve some respect in which we are unable to predict, explain, or understand the features of wholes or systems by appeal to the features of their parts. Emergence in this sense is thus at least in part subjective, i.e., a matter of our cognitive and explanatory capacities and limits rather than just a matter of relations between objective items as in the metaphysical cases.10 Moreover, it has been stressed that “the essence of the emergent phenomena … is that ‘new’ descriptive categories are necessary; in other words the features cannot be described within the vocabulary applicable to the parts; we require

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  91 new terms, new concepts to categorize them.”11 As Chris Lucas and Yuri Milov detail more fully: Generally emergence is defined by saying [that] “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” In other words we cannot predict the outcome from studying the fine details. In some cases if we “know” the outcome we can develop reductionist explanations to describe it—​this is a one to many process, we break down the trait into multiple isolated parts. The reverse process, many to one—​explaining from first principles what global features will appear, seems beyond us. The essence of the emergent phenomena however is that “new” descriptive categories are necessary; in other words the features cannot be described within the vocabulary applicable to the parts, we require new terms, new concepts to categorize them.12 William Clancey additionally observes that “in a complex system (versus a complicated one) some behaviors and patterns result from interactions among elements, and the effects are nonlinear.”13 The present study chooses the “emergentist” model, including its concomitant and necessary aspect of developing either “new descriptive categories” or engaging or otherwise adopting existing ones that were rarely thought of vis-​à-​vis the Pentateuchal text, much less applied to it. This approach takes Hirsch’s three parameters listed above considerably further, by turning reductionist impulses into a global emergentist strategy suitably codified into a theoretical framework and customized methodology. These, in this study, are principally based on Husserl’s hyletic-​noematic-​noetic distinctions and their corresponding expressions, respectively, as experiential-​phenomenal (intentional); conceptual-​discursive; and textual-​cultic, that is, intensional aspects of the Pentateuchal authors’ “act of consciousness” that brought about the Pentateuchal text.14 The following are the key emergence-​ based modeling and research-​ methodology categories and approaches this study engages and employs in order to foreground the conjectured Sôd stratum, building upon Hirsch’s initial investigative criteria (repeating in this list his three, previously mentioned): 1. The author(s)’ cultural given 2. The author(s)’ horizons: the historical set of typical expectations, prohibitions, norms, and limits (that define the author’s intentions as a whole) 3. The question of genre Added to these are the following research-​methodology and developing strategies and categories utilized in the present investigation: 4. Husserl’s hyletic-​noetic-​noematic structure of an “act of consciousness.”

92 The Metatext The Pentateuchal text is being associated with noesis (de dicto); mystical experiences conjectured to have given rise to the ancient Israelite cultic religion are seen as the hyle (de re); the noema is the Pentateuch’s “ontic meaning of [the] act,” also de re.15 5. Of Roman Jakobson’s six factors and six functions of verbal communication, fully four factors and their related functions are proposed as being distinct for the surface narratives’ semantic and referential fields and the conjectured Sôd stratum, respectively.16 Specifically, these are the CODE/​metalingual function, the CONTEXT/​referential function, the ADDRESSER/​emotive function, and the ADDRESSEE/​conative function. Jakobson’s CONTEXT/​ referential function is split into three distinct functions: (a) SETTING/​inferential function (noesis, de dicto; the s-​Signifier); (b) TOPIC/​“conferential” function (noema, de re; the s-​Signified); (c) OBJECT/​“deferential” function (hyle, de re; the s-​Referent).17 6. Instead of a single “ground,” per Ronald Langacker, the Pentateuchal text is being proposed to possess four grounds: (a) a conventional ground; (b) a Hypo-​Ground [noesis; the s-​Signifier]; (c) a Supra-​Ground [the noema; the s-​Signified]; and (d) a Meta-​Ground [hyle; the s-​Referent].18 7. Adapting Louis Prieto’s semiotic notions of code as “fields” of signifiers and signifieds and their correlations. Because of the conjectured “double-​ channel” structural makeup of the Pentateuchal text, our breakdown of code fields would be as follows: “ostensive,” or semantic, referential fields (literal signifiers, signifieds, and referents, all related to the literal, or first-​channel narration); noetic “inferential” field; noematic “conferential” field; and hyletic “deferential” field. 8. Habermas’s four “communicative actions” (the first three being teleological, dramaturgical, and norm-​conformative) are proposed as being actively engaged in the Sôd’s realization (with the fourth, the discursive one, emerging a posteriori); these are being read in conjunction with Husserl’s tripartite hyletic-​noetic-​noematic scheme to prevent the otherwise inevitable misreadings. In contrast, the traditional (rabbinical) reading of the Pentateuchal text is understood as having misread two of these “communicative actions” (the teleological and the dramaturgical), thus affecting the fourth one (the discursive), whereas most academic reading misses altogether the teleological “communicative action” and misreads both the dramaturgical and the discursive ones.19

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  93 9. Finally, the study exemplifies the prescriptions that follow from Wittgenstein’s notions of language games. Greatly expanding upon the question of Pentateuchal “genre”—​Hirsch’s criterion 3 above—​it embarks upon identifying and learning the rules of the “game” being played out in this text. Apropos of category 6(a), there is neither hyle nor noesis—​and thus also no noema—​in the traditional/​conventional accounts of Pentateuchal meaning and/​or significance: since the actual Pentateuchal hyle—​that is, the conjectured numinous mystical experiences enabling access to YHWH—​are not included in the overall (conventional) account, there can be no role for either noesis or noema in such accounts. Only Husserl’s scheme takes cognizance of the key role of the experiential hyle, that is, here, the mystical experiences that are conjectured to have spawned the ancient Israelite cultic religion. With reference to the ninth category, one can cite Nicolas Xanthos, who frames the language games process as follows: It is … enlightening that Wittgenstein’s concepts are rooted in a comparison with games. In order to examine our practices, we must approach them in the same way we would an unknown game whose rules we want to learn. Watching a chess game, if we know nothing about it, we would conclude that the actions performed by the participants are not random, that not all moves are equally possible in all circumstances, that not all moves are equivalent, and so on. We would gradually come to understand the value of the pieces, how to move them, the purpose of the game, and other elements. In short, we would apprehend bit by bit the rules that give meaning to this particular restricted space, these particular objects, these particular movements—​in a word, to this practice, or (language) game. The same concept applies to all of the language games cited above by Wittgenstein.20 In addressing the first criterion, one focuses on the question of the nature of a religion such as the ancient Israelite sacrificial cult. Our modern Western sensibility assumes that “religion,” and more specifically “worship of a deity,” essentially involves a group of nicely dressed men and women in a dedicated building or space reading aloud prayers from a prayer book. That this was not what was meant by worship in ancient Israel becomes patently clear if one realizes that prayer, in a form that we understand it today, is mentioned for the first time in the Hebrew Bible only in the Book of Samuel (where the mother of the future prophet Samuel is depicted as voicelessly praying with her lips, thereby arousing the high priest’s suspicion of her drunkenness, no less [I Sam. 1:9–​18]). Praying as a spiritual practice, especially as an exclusive or sole spiritual practice, was unknown until then in Hebrew lore, and prayer as a “regular daily institution” finds “no reference in biblical books.”21 As

94 The Metatext succinctly put by Ziony Zevit—​first cited in the Preface—​for the ancients, gods were palpably close: In terms of the idea of deities, it appears to me that for early antiquity, immanence, presence, and availability were presupposed to be the normal situation while distance and transcendence created (practical and) theological difficulties; for (many) contemporary theologians, transcendence is the norm while closeness and immanence raise theological issues.22 The priests had a vastly different, and dramatically more potent range of spiritual technologies, ranging from unique meditations to lifelong ascetic and other body-​and mind-​directed practices for ever-​expanding initiatory consciousness transformations. As Abraham Katsh notes, “Though the Bible is replete with prayers of all types, we find no reference in biblical books, with the exception of Daniel, which is of post-​exilic origin, to prayer as a regular daily institution. In biblical times prayers were a personal matter.”23 Israel Knohl observes that “prayer and song … are completely absent from PT’s [Priestly Torah’s] cultic system.”24 Judith Newman has written a monograph devoted to the theme of “scripturalization of prayer in Second Temple Judaism” (the book’s subtitle). She begins her study with: [the] observation that the literature of the exilic and post-​exilic period reflects a great interest in prayer. In contrast to pre-​exilic literature, characters in Second Temple narratives are more frequently depicted as praying. … In short, the literary evidence indicates that prayer and praying became a central feature of religious life in the centuries following the return from the Babylonian Exile.25 When scrutinizing the concept of “religion” with adequate empathy and grasp, one is bound to discern that the semantic range evoked by religion necessarily includes “mysticism.” It is mysticism that is to be seen in such modern euphemisms as “experiences of the divine” and “religious experiences,” yet mysticism per se is strikingly absent from most parts of the Hebrew Bible, especially from the Pentateuch. This curious and unaccounted-​for fact is “the problem” that the present book chooses to address. Is it inappropriate or even absurd to wonder whether the monotheistic religion that features its God as a key literary character in its scripture-​might have something to do with mysticism? I have addressed criterion 2 from the above list—​the author(s)’ horizons: the historical set of typical expectations, prohibitions, norms, and limits (that define the author’s intentions as a whole)—​in my earlier book on the subject (The Sôd Hypothesis) by investigating the notions of initiation and secrecy, including in civilizations contemporaneous with ancient Israel, such as those of Egypt and Greece. The conclusions reached at the end of this process

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  95 were unmistakable: ancient civilizations have typically possessed esoteric, or “inner,” knowledge that was considered exceedingly valuable and even critical to these societies’ well-​being and functioning. In consequence, such inner-​core knowledge was invariably kept secret; access to it was closely guarded and regulated by the societies’ religious, usually sacerdotal, elite, with punishment for any breaches enforced by either the city-​state (as in Athens) or the royal, pharaonic authority (as in Egypt). This leads us to Hirsch’s third criterion: the question of the Pentateuch’s genre.26 Hirsch’s position is that “one important element of an author’s horizon is genre, which invariably predetermines interpreters’ expectations for understanding a text.”27 If the reader assumes that the Pentateuchal text belongs to a genre such as national myths, the history of the Hebrew people, or religious Scripture—​but does not expect it to be a (concealed) mystical or esoteric tractate, or perhaps even a manual, in addition to some or all of its other, more traditional readings—​that reader will never attempt to read it as a mystical work. With that, however, simply knowing that it is an esoteric initiation manual, while obviously necessary, will not be enough for one to “read” the disguised, idiosyncratically presented information. Thus, while a typical “genre is based on what people already know,” to discover the “grammar” of the Pentateuchal Sôd’s “game,” a study of its nature on a par with the present one would be essential.28 One of the conjectured rationales for the creation of the Torah posits that the authors-​compilers of the Pentateuchal text achieved their aim of securely transmitting their precious esoteric information by embedding it in their text—​but at the same time making sure that the “key” to uncovering the “secret” was, in principle at least, accessible to any suitably competent reader. Such a competency includes the ability to perceive that the work in question belongs to the genre of “esoteric manual.” Criteria 4 through 7 in the list above are systematically developed and scrutinized below and in subsequent chapters. What can be said here in relation to criterion number 9 in the list is that, in attempting to uncover the “grammar” of the esoteric language game in the Pentateuchal text—​a Wittgensteinian “game” whose existence is deliberately made to be inconspicuous in the Pentateuch—​ this study focuses on what Xanthos calls “reveal[ing] the concepts that constitute [the game’s] grammar.” He further states: the grammar of a language game—​what we have also called the “rules” here—​is truly the keystone of Wittgenstein’s theory, and uncovering it is the purpose of the analysis. To begin with, we should make it clear that the term “grammar” is not to be understood in its usual acceptation. We must emphasize that grammar has a basically conceptual character for Wittgenstein, although the concepts themselves can sometimes be expressed as propositions. These concepts, or grammatical propositions, are the possibility condition for the moves made in the language games (sometimes called “empirical propositions”).29

96 The Metatext Additionally, he suggests, “this particular grammar is often described, and is made up of the concepts of intention, goal, agent, motive, cause, etc.”30 This is precisely the path chosen in the present study. To enable a better grasp of this game’s largely counterintuitive rules, aims, and methods, I present below half a dozen notions “allied” to the study’s approach through “defamiliarization” of the study’s highly idiosyncratic subject and its conceptualization frameworks. At the same time, such an approach is at the heart of Husserl’s intentional-​act methodology chosen for the study as its overall conceptual framework. The latter (see criteria 4 and 5 in the above list) entails assigning the hyletic aspect of Husserl’s hyle-​noesis-​noema triad to what the study calls the “meta-​ground” related to the posited mystical experiences that were the impetus for the birth of the archaic Hebrew religion. Since noesis is the de dicto component of Husserl’s triad and one that can be allied with Saussure’s “signifier”—​that is to say, noesis stands for (1) textual “expression” (Hjelmslev); (2) the “sign” (Peirce); and (3) literally the “word”—​the development of research methodology has initially concentrated on the noesis.31

Epistemological Blockage, Delayed Response, Delayed and Deferred Categorization The complex semiotic and epistemological nature of what the Edenic narrative symbolically enacts is captured, to an extent, by Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “epistemological obstacle” and epistemological rupture.32 It also can be usefully approached via George Herbert Mead’s notions of “delayed response,” expressed roughly around the same time as Bachelard’s ideas. Those notions were elaborated by Reuven Tsur half a century later as “delayed categorization”: The essential characteristic of intelligent behavior is delayed responses—​a halt in behavior while thinking is going on, this delayed response and the thinking for the purposes of which it is delayed … being made possible physiologically through the mechanism of the central nervous system, and socially through the mechanism of language.33 Reuven Tsur, a key figure in cognitive poetics (who originated this term designating a separate new discipline in his book Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics), transfers the delay from behavior to the realm of thinking, proposing a delay in “categorization.” The distinction Tsur proposes, in an article titled “Issues in Literary Synaesthesia,” is between “rapid and delayed categorization”: A [rapid] category with a verbal label constitutes a relatively small load on one’s cognitive system and is easily manipulable; on the other hand, it entails the loss of important sensory information that might be crucial for the process of accurate adaptation. Delayed categorization, by

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  97 contrast, may put too much sensory load on the human memory system; this overload may be available for adaptive purposes and afford great flexibility, but it may also be time-​and-​energy consuming and occupy too much mental processing space. Furthermore, delayed categorization may involve a period of uncertainty that may be quite unpleasant, or even intolerable for some individuals. Rapid categorization, by contrast, may involve the loss of vital information and lead to maladaptive strategies in life.34 Delayed categorization may “put too much sensory load on the human memory system.” Here, I would suggest changing the word sensory to semantic or cognitive, as semantic and cognitive information affecting categorization is by far more extensive than just the sensory information. Considering, moreover, the present study and its main thesis of a deliberately concealed esoteric narrative, it is imperative to apprehend a further distinction and possibility besides the rapid and delayed categorizations, namely, what I propose to call a “much-​much delayed” categorization. Such a deferred categorization is likely to be psychologically intolerable to a much larger sample of readers of the enigmatic biblical text than envisioned by Tsur in the above quote, perhaps even to most people. The reasons for this include a significant increase in the period of almost total uncertainty during which an investigator must keep “numerous balls in the air.” As classically formulated by Wittgenstein, in the philosophical race it is the one who is able to run the slowest who wins.35

Intention and Agency apropos the Sôd: Authorial Action versus Sentiency of the Reader As hypothesized by the present study, the priestly leaders—​referred to earlier as “the core group of initiates”—​responsible for the origination of the ancient Israelite religious cult at some point made a momentous, far-​reaching decision: they decided to attempt a “disaster-​proof ” written record of their secret lore and thereby secure transmission to posterity of the esoteric core of their tradition. The reason it was necessary to conjecture this is tied to the primary thesis of this study, namely, that there exists a concealed, heretofore undiscovered noetic-​esoteric stratum within the Pentateuch, which the study designates as the Sôd.36 It can hardly be disputed that if such a deliberately concealed layer exists, then it is self-​evident that there is some human agent who must have decided to create such a concealed substratum within the Pentateuch (again, assuming that such a substratum exists), be it an individual author or redactor, or a group of dedicated “compilers,” or even the whole of ancient Israel as a “corporate individual” seen as the overall source and originator of the Hebrew Bible, Israel’s principal cultural creation.37 If an unmarked text, such as a poem, could be argued to sometimes be a product of a spontaneous action, a

98 The Metatext text marked by deliberately concealed material is, ipso facto, simultaneously also marked by virtue of its having been launched as a result of a specific intention. It was important to establish the above for the following reasons. As Paul Thibault observes, “All that is required to get things started is a motivation or intention which provides the initial impetus.”38 Thibault has in mind “intentions [as] emergent properties [that] … are emergent discourse constraints and meanings that agents deploy.”39 It is not required that the intention necessarily be a conscious one: “These patterns of activation do not require conscious planning or deliberation on the part of the agent. Being an agent does not entail this. Rather, being an agent depends on the overall context of the activity.”40 As also noted by Laura Ahearn, “agency … is not synonymous with free will. Rather, practice theorists recognize that actions are always already socially, culturally, and linguistically constrained. Agency is emergent in sociocultural and linguistic practices.”41 I must digress here in order to dispose of a fallacious idea, one concerning the persistent—​ in light of pervasive postmodernist notions—​ preference of, and for, the reader. This preference of and for the reader is clearly not unprecedented in the several millennia of humanity’s cultural history (see, for example, the depiction of allegoresis in ­chapter 1, n.39). The postmodernist assertion of the “death of the author” espoused especially by Barthes, the proliferation of reader-​response theories, and the stunning ascendancy and influence in recent decades of “interpretive” approaches such as hermeneutics have made this idea even more insidious.42 Never mind that the classical schema of “fundamental factors and functions” of a text (especially a literary one) in Roman Jakobson’s celebrated twelve-​aspect diagram are hardly privileging the “addressee.”43 Instead, it focuses on the textual “factors” and “functions” where both the “addressee” and the “addresser” are each just one factor/​function. The problem I wish to highlight here has been succinctly framed by Peter Stockwell: “The opposite of seeing things through rose-​tinted spectacles is to look through a glass, darkly, and perceive in the distorting lens not what is there, but what the viewer is disposed to see.”44 A discerning analysis by Yoshihiko Ikegami spells out, with all due semiotic gravity, the precise way in which the addresser/​author differs from the addressee/​reader.45 Ikegami proposes the term sentient, to be used “as an integrated notion … contrast[ing] with the notion of the agent,” and there is “an underlying cognitive dissymmetry between the person as agent and the person as sentient.”46 As Ikegami frames the problem, There is something remarkable about this dissymmetry. … In view of the general predominance of the notion of the goal over that of the source, it seems to be highly curious that the notion of the human source (agent) manifests itself in a more dominant way (suggesting its higher cognitive salience) than the human goal (sentient). Whence is this reversal of predominance?47

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  99 There is no justification for the reversal of predominance of the human source and for the reader-​response theories’ privileging the reader’s perspective—​ quite the contrary: The reason for this different pattern of dissymmetry must be sought in the different semantic domains in relation to which the notions of the human source and the human goal are prototypically conceived. Thus, the human agent is prototypically associated with the semantic domain of action, while the human sentient is prototypically associated with that of sensation. In the prototypical case of action, the person acts on something other than him-​or herself, affects the latter physically, and may possibly cause a change in the latter. Here the person is conceived of as the locus from which the affecting force issues. In the prototypical case of sensation, on the other hand, the person receives some stimulus from something other than himself and is affected by it psychologically. The person is thus the locus to which the affecting force gets.48 Here, in a nutshell, is the mechanism of author-​initiated action juxtaposed and contrasted with the acted-​upon, generated reader’s sensation and re-​ action (as opposed to action). As Ikegami notes further, action and sensation represent the bodily bases for human semiosis. The former serves as the basis for the type of semiosis in which the subject is clearly separated from the object—​which again will serve as the basis for the type of semiosis with a focus on clearer articulation. The latter underlies the type of semiosis in which the subject is not clearly separated from, but is merged with, the object—​which in turn underlies the type of semiosis in which the orientation is toward blurred articulation.49 The monistic semiosis of the interpretive stand, with its “blurred articulation,” is therefore not a methodology of choice for someone who hopes to ever uncover the Sôd. Rather, the choice should be a “semiosis with a focus on clearer articulation” (in Ikegami’s wording), where a robust dualist attitude separates the author from his or her creation: the text. Another perspective from which to view the reader-​author dissymmetry is what Thibault terms “analytical reconstruction,” which “is best grasped in terms of Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ analysis.”50 In the latter, Foucault has no use for interpretation: “It [‘the archaeology of knowledge’] is not an interpretive discipline: it does not seek another, better-​hidden discourse. It refuses to be ‘allegorical.’ ”51 In the present study, I am of course probing precisely the question of “another, better-​hidden discourse,” yet Foucault here speaks of something entirely different, namely, the interpretive liberties such as one finds, for example, in allegoresis.

100 The Metatext

Utterance Interpretation: Epistemic Asymmetry of Speaker and Hearer The above considerations regarding the “human agent” versus “human sentient,” representing, respectively, the author and the reader, clearly show that from a semiotic perspective there cannot be an equivalence between the two, much less priority or preference given to the reader. In this section, this conclusion will be reinforced by equally serious considerations, this time from a linguistic perspective. The foregoing must give us pause, speaking both metaphorically and literally: we need to switch to a mode of delayed categorization. Delayed categorization, forcibly separating us from a direct flow of the events that the text showers us with, results in our assuming a representational, that is, a more abstract and more mental attitude.52 This attitude normally leads to a whole range of well-​known investigative stances and approaches found in relevant academic disciplines that engage in theoretical model building, on the one hand, while employing diverse empirical and data-​driven methods, on the other. It also encourages more speculative interpretive stances, from hermeneutics all the way to the postmodern license. Our identified problem, however, is that none of these approaches is capable of resolving the Edenic semantic incongruity, as most readers learn to live with this and other such cases, usually by overlooking them to begin with, or by dismissing their importance, or by tacitly assigning such problems to presumed clumsiness or the like on the part of the archaic compiler(s).53 If one takes such a path—​namely, resorting to presumed naïveté or some inadequacy of the ancient authors and their audiences—​then of course no problem exists. But the risk is that one may have underestimated the people whose unparalleled masterpiece one is otherwise admiring and acknowledging. Notwithstanding recognition of the unique brilliancy of the work, one may have contributed to a communication breakdown involving such a text. Could something like this in fact be taking place and doing so in the space of roughly two and a half millennia? Several relevant considerations and insights can be derived from Stephen Neale: Let us call a theory that aims to explain how hearers manage to identify what speakers are seeking to communicate a theory of utterance interpretation, or a theory of interpretation for short. … It is hardly surprising that we have not yet succeeded in producing a theory of interpretation with much empirical clout. There have been successes in some of the sub-​ theories—​phonology and syntax, for example. But there is a widespread suspicion that producing an overarching theory of interpretation will require nothing short of a complete theory of mind.54 Neale’s field is linguistic pragmatism, and he describes no fewer than twenty-​ four critical aspects or factors pertaining to his emerging outline of a theory

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  101 of utterance interpretation: (1) cooperation, (2) meaning, (3) explanation, (4) asymmetry, (5) reciprocity, (6) intention, (7) factorization, (8) speakers, (9) truth, (10) judgment, (11) reference, (12) aphonicity, (13) indexicality, (14) anchoring, (15) mongrels, (16) isomorphism, (17) ellipsis, (18) competence, (19) semantics, (20) pragmatics, (21) underdetermination, (22) indeterminacy, (23) convergence, and (24) formalism.55 Here we have, in effect, a dramatic expansion of Roman Jakobson’s six “fundamental factors” and six “functions” of a text (a doubling of Karl Bühler’s three functions of language).56 Jakobson’s six “factors” and six associated “functions” pertaining to a literary text—​which is what shall concern us in this book—​are reproduced here:57 CONTEXT ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE CONTACT CODE REFERENTIAL EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE PHATIC METALINGUAL Furthermore, Neale’s twenty-​four aspects of interpretation cover not only texts but also “communication that does not involve speech or writing.”58 Instead of being limited to linguistics and poetics, he “construe[s the theory of utterance interpretation] as an empirical theory and, as such, a contribution to cognitive psychology.”59 The author’s death and/​or irrelevance does not even enter Neale’s realm of possibilities in a communicative universe; it would be practically inconceivable here because it would be so utterly incongruous: “The hearer’s or reader’s goal is to identify what the speaker or writer meant. When this has been done, the interpretive problem has been solved.”60 In the subsection on asymmetry, Neale discusses the different perspectives and tasks of “speakers” versus the “hearers,” insisting on “the epistemic asymmetry of speaker and hearer”: The epistemic situations of the speaker and hearer are fundamentally asymmetric: the speaker knows what he means whereas the hearer has to work it out. … Person A intends to communicate something to some other person B. He selects a form of words X that he thinks will, in the circumstances, get across his point (and, perhaps, also get it across in some particular way or other. A knows what he means by uttering, “That’s his bank,” for example. He knows which thing he meant by “that,” who and what relation he meant by “his,” and what he meant by “bank.”61

102 The Metatext What is more, The epistemic asymmetry of speaker and hearer underscores (i) the need to separate the metaphysical question concerning what determines (or fixes) what A means and the epistemological question concerning what is used to identify what A means, and (ii) the need to scrutinize simplistic appeals to contexts, maxims of conversation, salience, and pragmatic factors, which are frequently and mistakenly introduced together with intentions in contemporary discussions, as if these things conspire to bridge certain interpretive gaps.62 We shall soon see just how justified Neale’s second claim is in this citation: the enormous literature devoted to the Edenic narrative has not failed to invoke all such considerations and factors as, for example, those involving “simplistic” contexts and“salience.” And yet, it has still failed in elucidating the semantic incongruity under discussion here. Neale next explains that despite the epistemic asymmetry, the perspectives of A and B are not independent. The asymmetry is reciprocal or complementary as in adjoining pieces of a jig-​saw puzzle. In producing his utterance, A relies on what he takes to be B’s capacity to identify what he intends to convey; B assumes that A is so relying. … So the project of constructing a theory of interpretation may be approached from either of two complementary perspectives, and an adequate answer must make sense of both.63 Neale, however, goes on to note that “the matter is complicated by the fact that in certain circumstances one may seek to disguise one’s intended referent, e.g. in cryptic poetry or diary entries.”64 Another obvious example would be in a religious work containing esoteric information “for certain eyes only.” In the present investigation, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, I am adopting, among other things, Jakobson’s textual factors and functions that were deemed to be more than sufficient for our purposes; Neale’s highly suggestive and evocative considerations, if applied in the full scope of twenty-​ four communicative characteristics in a study such as the present one, could risk overwhelming an already complex and multifaceted methodological approach and thus be too much of a good thing.

Presentation versus Representation: Between the Warm Flesh of the Literal Event and the Cold Skin of the Concept “Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning.”65 This statement by Derrida is not merely poetic and evocative; it is also concise, as we shall see. Benny Shanon in his monograph The Representational and the Presentational convincingly argues against the many inadequacies of representationalism and for the scarcely discussed

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  103 “presentational” account of cognition—​ and a corresponding notion of meaning. The presentational, to use Derrida’s colorful language, is “the too warm flesh of the literal event,” while the representational would seem to befit Derrida’s “cold skin of the concept.” Due to the virtual supremacy that the representational enjoys per cognitive science’s long-​standing consensus, it is understandable why Shanon’s effort is devoted primarily to attempting to dethrone this supremacy. Yet as Derrida states, the meaning is sandwiched “between” these two approaches to cognition and meaning, thus requiring the presence of both.66 Borrowing the term presentational from Susanne Langer, Shanon sees this Derridean “too warm flesh of the literal event,” along with the other non-​nominal adjectival term representational, as not confined to entities; they can also refer to “patterns of behavior, processes, modes of interpretation.”67 The question for us is the following: Is the Edenic narrative composed presentationally or representationally? Second, are we better off interpreting this story—​and the Pentateuch as a whole—​presentationally or representationally? As we shall see, grasping what is at stake here may well prove to be a decisive factor in success or failure to comprehend the issue we face, namely, the Edenic semantic mystery. As Dexter Callender articulates it, “Adam in Genesis is a human incorporated into the sacred world. … The significance of the incorporation motif in Genesis 2, however, is obscured by the recontextualization of the tradition in a ‘historical’ account.”68 In the context of the present discussion this can be seen—​and I suggest must be seen, as will become clear—​through the following critical distinctions. The real (as opposed to implied) authors of the story in question must have actually experienced—​and a direct experience is the hallmark of the presentational—​ the meaning of what Callender calls the “sacred world.” They then decide to write down what they had experienced, if not exactly in the manner of a scientific-​ethnographic description and report, then certainly as a representational account of however they wished to express their experience of this “sacred world.” The question for us, then, is how we should approach such a representational account of a presentational experience. Callender intuitively appreciates what is going on here, noting the obscuring caused by a “ ‘historical’ account.” The main historicity-​centered approach in biblical studies is thus a distraction as regards the “significance” of the narrated attempt at communication. The historical-​critical response or reaction, curiously, must be seen as being itself presentational: persons engaged in it are responding experientially to the apparent narratives in the surface, or ostensive, layer of the text. They are thus in a perfect experiential, presentational mode themselves. We have here two presentational experiences—​ the first by the text’s compiler(s) and the second by the historian, the theologian, the literary critic, or the rabbinical midrashist.69 Such interpreters usually concentrate on the immediate, largely mimetic sense of the stories narrated in the Pentateuch and the related communicative content, and the problem here is that there are two very different presentational experiences that are

104 The Metatext divided by a massive incongruity. The two are simply about very different things: the former concerns the “sacred world” or the numinous theistic mystical experiences, as will gradually become apparent herein, while the latter involves spontaneous engagement with the outstanding mimetic achievement of the Pentateuch.70 It also involves the related questions of the historicity of the portrayed events that are seen as the purported communication axis of the text.71 Here it should be noted that the mimetic axis of representation supplies the ostensible historical or other narrative background of its material, which then—​usually—​is presentationally interpreted to be the content of the other major axis, that of communication. The problem with this, as the present study is intent on demonstrating, is that this historical or in some cases perhaps pseudo-​or semi-​historical content is still only the content of the mimetic axis rather than of the axis of communication.72 It is in the latter that one might hope to recover the communication that this, or any, text might attempt.73 We begin to sense this incongruity, namely, that something does not add up, only when we are not continuing to race along with the seductively captivating narratives, being fully caught up in what, following Tsur, we can characterize as an ongoing presentational experience of rapid categorizations. Put another way, we first of all consider ourselves, as a matter of course, to be competent readers.74 Thus, we are certainly following the stories and largely grasping what is going on, even if some exotic or minor details are not immediately transparent. It is only when someone like Eco comes along that the alarm is sounded, albeit to no avail; even the master semiotician, as we saw in Chapter 2, is confounded as to the meaning, let alone possible purpose, of such apparently nonsensical semantic games as those in the Garden of Eden.75 From the standpoint of the present study, a potentially important piece of communication from an ancient civilization that is one of only the few key progenitors of our modern Western culture, a communication perhaps involving a critical message since it involves such cognitive and epistemic limits as the notion of “God,” is not “getting through” to us. This study also suggests, however, that this otherwise distressing possibility may be a function of a deliberate design on the part of the Pentateuchal compiler(s). Since, as Heidi Muller and Robert Craig observe, without any sarcasm, “we tend to think about communication when we encounter communication problems,” the very recognition of the fact that we have encountered here a vital communication problem—​or even, as we shall see later, a (deliberately orchestrated) communication breakdown—​must be the starting point of a study such as the present one.76

Concealed Axis of Communication and Its Traces: A Metachronic Approach What would a “much-​much-​delayed,” or deferred, categorization approach likely result in? Delayed categorization—​as opposed to the rapid categorization

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  105 of the presentational or direct approach, which is fully swept up by the immediacy of whatever is happening or being encountered—​permits abstraction, representation, theories, higher thought, culture. Deferred categorization, by extension, suggests unheard of cognitive and epistemic potential. Will such a perspective be diachronic or synchronic? Will it be panchronic, combining both? Has Elizabeth Hayes, by claiming to use the panchronic approach—​“a method that is conscious of both the diachronic and synchronic aspects”—​ employed an ideal method?77 Unfortunately, the answer must be no, for the following reasons. As a reader/​addressee and an interpreter, one inevitably follows the addresser/​author. Thus, while it is possible that the addresser may possess a panchronic perspective, it does not necessarily follow that he or she, in composing a text, will seek to have such a panchronic perspective reflected in the text. Moreover, neither the diachronic (historical) nor the synchronic (literary) approaches would bring even marginal clarity to the Edenic semantic incongruity foregrounded by Eco.78 To combine these approaches in an “integrative” manner might well be likened to mixing soup with salad in the same bowl, with the hope of arriving at a truly holistic meal. Put another way, as Tzvetan Todorov asserts, “synthesis is fruitful only if it does not obliterate difference.”79 The situation, however, is even worse, in that, as will be shown below, it is the very antonym of synthesis that is required here, namely, analysis; thus, synthesis here would be less than useless. The “analysis” in question, discussed below, will require an introduction of what I am proposing to call the “metachronic” approach. To state the problem, we are concerned here with both (1) what Paul Grice has called the “anatomy of speaker meaning” and (2) how one may untangle (interpret) the speaker’s or author’s resultant text.80 One of the possibilities regarding the first issue, as M. A. K. Halliday and Christian Matthiessen have suggested, might be a situation of the author indulging in “new semiotic activities” that result in “construing new [conceptual elements] that are being codified for the first time.”81 Grice prefers to cast this in somewhat less positive terms, as the speaker having “what [one] might call a sneaky intention.”82 Be that as it may, problems—​ perhaps even severe problems—​ in interpretation can be safely forecast for the addressee if the addresser is up to no good, with sneaky or even just creatively innovative intentions. This condition may be further intentionally aggravated, especially in mystical and occult works, by the use of invented codes. In such cases, clearly neither a diachronic, nor a synchronic, nor even a panchronic approach would be of any use: the author’s message, if intended only for those who are able to untangle the coded information, will not be received by those oblivious to the peculiar nature of such texts. This study therefore proposes that an approach targeting such a secret textual message might be called metachronic, given that it largely eschews the surface meanings tied to either the synchronic or the diachronic considerations. Where, in the multilayered construction that is language, will such metachronic information be located? In terms of textual mimetic/​

106 The Metatext communicative distinctions, the metachronic information by definition must not be sought, at least initially, in the mimetic axis (i.e., the surface meaning) but only in the axis of communication. Communication, in the case of texts, certainly takes place via language, more specifically via language semantics. Language in turn has been subdivided into domains of syntax, semantics proper, and pragmatics. All the linguists cited so far, in spite of their respective disagreements, are unanimous regarding one notion: any meaning derivable from any text must be carried by the language of the text. However, they disagree regarding which of the three domains—​syntax, semantics, or pragmatics—​is decisive apropos meaning.83 Halliday and Matthiessen make the following assertion: “We contend that the conception of ‘knowledge’ as something that exists independently of language, and may be then coded and made manifest in language, is illusory.”84 This may well be the case of course. However, one can also easily imagine a reverse scenario: a would-​be author conceives of, or arrives at, or somehow obtains certain “knowledge,” couched in language certainly, as rightly insisted by Halliday and Matthiessen. Could we imagine, next, that the addresser, having Grice’s sneaky intention in mind, codes this (linguistically based) knowledge within a verbal text—​but nonverbally and thus nonlinguistically? That is, escaping syntactic, semantic, and even pragmatic representation? Are the “allusions … hidden in codes” that Albert Schutz speaks of reflected in any of the three linguistic domains?85 Most of the codes that Schutz mentions are exercises and manipulations pertaining to words. Upon reflection, one must concede that allusions involving codes that manipulate words must be and will be implicated in the text’s linguistics, likely in its pragmatics. However, what about a code that codes not words but, for example, narratives, or mimetic events, or persons, or ordinary meanings, or just about anything other than simply words? If these not-​specifically-​verbal units are engaged in and for the coding, would “allusions” or, let us say, clues to their existence be found in linguistic structures, such as syntax, semantics, and pragmatics? Again, perhaps. Yes and no. The reader would certainly not be conscious to their existence, since this is the whole intent of the coder. The province of the unconscious has attracted Derrida’s attention, vis-​à-​ vis his notion of différance, in that the unconscious “is differed—​which no doubt means that it is woven out of differences, but also that it sends out, that it delegates, representatives or proxies.”86 This is quite helpful for appreciating that, while there must be “traces” in the form of clues deliberately left in the text for the intended or targeted reader—​which is one of the suppositions of this book—​such traces will not be consciously detectable by the reader/​ interpreter, since “there are no ‘conscious’ traces.”87 Here we can posit a second axis of communication in a text likely containing concealed information; I shall call it the concealed communication axis. It would be relevant to recall that Paul Hernadi has named the horizontal axis the “rhetorical” axis of communication.88 This clearly was a misnomer; the rhetorical tradition of communication, albeit one of the oldest, is but only one of seven—​and by

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  107 Mimetic Axis (Representation)

Traces

Ostensive Communication Axis

Traces

Concealed Communication Axis

Figure 4.1 Structural diagram of an esoteric literary work.

now perhaps one of ten or more—​distinct approaches that contribute, in their separate idiosyncratic ways, to a complex notion of communication.89 Robert Craig lists “seven traditions of communication theory,” as follows: rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical.90 Looking at the matter of the unconscious (and, therefore, unaware) perception as a “dual-​channel” transmission, subsequent chapters will be taking a closer look at communication per se, for that is where the concealed message, if any, would be located—​namely, in the axis of communication, both literal and concealed communication—​with traces left both there as well as in the area of the mimetic axis of the surface narratives (Figure 4.1).

Notes 1 Hodge and Kress, Social Semiotics, 26. 2 As Hugh Urban tells it, It is rather remarkable that very few scholars have tried seriously to grapple with these problems, and even among those who have, the various approaches to the double bind have seldom proved very satisfying. The first and most common approach, which we might call the textual approach, limits itself to historical texts and makes no effort to penetrate the esoteric tradition from within. Within the field of Indian Tantric studies, this is the method adopted by the majority of scholars. … However, the more honest among them … will frankly admit that their knowledge is always partial and severely limited by the fact that they had never received initiation or oral instruction. (Urban, “Torment of Secrecy,” 215)

108 The Metatext 3 Wasserstrom, “Medium of the Divine,” 79–​80. 4 Leitch, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1683 (emphasis added). 5 Sam Gill shows that reduction is a logical and necessary tool that is often critiqued gratuitously: One common defense has been to place the difference in the scholar, by holding that religion scholars are endowed with some special sensitivity that permits them to use scientific theories to the end of studying religion non-​ reductively, that is, studying religious data as religious in contrast to some reductive interest such as that of social scientists. Perhaps as newcomers to academia there has been a failure to recognize that all academic studies are reductive. Reduction means to render data in terms of a chosen perspective, to look at a subject from one perspective or theory among many. This anti-​reductive defense is based on an embarrassing mystification of the academic study of religion and an unfortunate misunderstanding of academic methods. (Gill, “Academic Study of Religion,” 22; emphasis added)

6 Lévi-​Strauss, Myth and Meaning, 9–​10. 7 Van Gulick, “Reduction, Emergence and Other Recent Options.” 8 Van Wolde, Reframing Biblical Studies, 17. 9 Van Gulick, “Reduction, Emergence and Other Recent Options,” 17 (emphasis added). 10 Van Gulick, “Reduction, Emergence and Other Recent Options,” 20. At least two types of “epistemic emergence” are being distinguished, with “both versions … com[ing] in weak or restricted forms and in strong or unrestricted forms” (ibid.): (1) Predictive/​Explanatory Emergence, in which “wholes (systems) have features that cannot be explained or predicted from the features of their parts, their mode of combination, and the laws governing their behavior” (ibid.), and (2) Representational/​Cognitive Emergence, in which “wholes (systems) exhibit features, patterns or regularities that cannot be represented (understood) using the theoretical and representational resources adequate for describing and understanding the features and regularities of their parts” (20–​21). 11 Lucas and Milov, “Conflicts as Emergent Phenomena of Complexity,” n.p. See also van Wolde, Reframing Biblical Studies, 18. 12 Lucas and Milov, “Conflicts as Emergent Phenomena of Complexity” (emphasis added). 13 Clancey, “Scientific Antecedents of Situated Cognition,” 14. 14 “Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The word itself, which is of medieval Scholastic origin, was rehabilitated by the philosopher Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Intentionality’ is a philosopher’s word. It derives from the Latin word intentio, which in turn derives from the verb intendere, which means being directed towards some goal or thing” (Jacob, “Intentionality”). In contrast, “ ‘intensional’ and ‘intensionality’ mean ‘non-​extensional’ and ‘non-​extensionality,’ where both extensionality and intensionality are logical features of words and sentences’ ” (ibid.). 15 Simons, “Meaning and Language,” 123.

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  109 16 See Jakobson, “Closing Statement” and Figure 4.1. 17 The letter s used as a prefix signifies that it pertains to the Sôd. 18 See Langacker, “Deixis and Subjectivity”; and Langacker, “Remarks on the English Grounding Systems.” 19 Habermas’s “communicative actions” are marked up, for completeness, in Figure 5.2, but will not be discussed due to limitations of space; the reader is referred to Kohav, Sôd Hypothesis; and Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1. 20 Xanthos, “Wittgenstein’s Language Games,” n.p. 21 Katsh, “Islam and Judaism,” 69. 22 Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 81n2. 23 Katsh, “Islam and Judaism,” 69. 24 Knohl, Sanctuary of Silence, 148. 25 Newman, Praying by the Book, 1. 26 Jeannine Brown notes “a wide spectrum” in literary studies with regard to one’s position on “the legitimacy of an overarching genre theory”; it ranges from Northrop Frye’s theory of genres to those of scholars such as Hayden White, who “claims that no such compelling genre theory has ever been developed, even while acknowledging the possibility of studying genres from a historical angle” (J. Brown, “Genre Criticism and the Bible,” 116–​17). Derrida, for his part, “argues for a dialectic of genre, a breaking down of genre as a category: ‘[A]‌t the very moment that the genre or a literature is broached, at that very moment, degenerescence has begun, the end begins’ [(Derrida 1980)]” (ibid., 117). Such negativism, however, can be easily brushed aside when, pragmatically if not necessarily “archetypically,” as in Frye’s theory, the reader benefits immensely, and sometimes decisively, if he or she is aware of the particular genre chosen by the author (as was noted in ­chapter 2, in the section “A Feeling of Wrongness”). 27 Leitch, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1683. 28 The quotation is from Devitt, Writing Genres, as cited in J. Brown, “Genre Criticism and the Bible,” 111. 29 Xanthos, “Wittgenstein’s Language Games,” n.p. 30 Ibid. 31 These terms are cited in Hébert, “Sign Structures,” n.p. On the third term, “the word,” see Arnauld and Nicole, La logique ou l’art de penser. 32 Bachelard, Formation of the Scientific Mind. 33 Mead, “Social Foundations and Functions of Thought and Communication,” 376n1 (emphasis added). 34 Tsur, “Issues in Literary Synaesthesia,” 39. 35 The exact quote is, “In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets to the winning post last” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 40e). 36 Ziony Zevit writes of a similar but later group during the Babylonian exile that “gave rise to the collections of book prophets”: “Early in the exile, a certain circle of devoted Yahwists may have started to compile lists of whom they considered bona fide prophets. … [This was] a pious fraternity of which Ezekiel apparently approved, the sōd” (Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 508). Zevit adds in a footnote that “this may be the first reference to some sort of group whose activities eventually resulted in the development of a canon” (508n78). The initiates of the

110 The Metatext core group hypothesized in this study, however, were active many centuries earlier; their mandate must have been not the development of a canon but the creation of the cult of YHWH in the first place. 37 The “corporate individual” comes from Robinson, Christian Doctrine of Man, as cited in Rogerson, “Hebrew Conception of Corporate Personality.” 38 Thibault, Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body, 4. 39 Ibid., 3, 5. 40 Ibid., 4. 41 Ahearn, “Agency,” 7–​8. 42 See Barthes, “Death of the Author.” 43 Jakobson’s diagram was originally published in his 1960 “Closing Statement,” reprinted in Pomorska and Rudy, Roman Jakobson. 44 Stockwell, “(Sur)Real Stylistics,” 15 (emphasis added). 45 The weight that a specifically semiotic meaning entails is highlighted in the following observation: The work is a complex web of signs that carries a complicated structure of interpretations. This semiotic implication triggers the decisive step from the prior understanding that “everything in a work of art is form” to “everything is meaning,” as meaning results from a realization of the semiotically constituted aesthetic structure. (Nadin, “Structure,” 602) 46 Ikegami, “Agent and the Sentient,” 326. 47 Ibid., 326–​27. 48 Ibid., 327. 49 Ibid., 328 (emphasis added). 50 Thibault, Social Semiotics as Praxis, 125. 51 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 139. 52 Compare Shanon, “Reasons for Involving the Notion of God,” 6–​13 and passim. Burton Voorhees observes the following: “In a sense, isn’t a representation simply a presentation in symbolic modality of an original presentation? In some cases, a phenomenalization of noumena?” (personal communication, 2010). Yet, it is precisely the reverse, in that it is the phenomenon that is the “original presentation,” and its re-​presentation can be said to be the “noumenization of the phenomenon” in symbolic modality. 53 As Burton Voorhees reminds, this is “what [Giambattista] Vico called the ‘error of scholars’; i.e., the assumption that people in the past were too simple and ignorant for us moderns, or post-​moderns, to learn anything from their experience” (Voorhees, “Moral Orientation and Critical Thought,” 1). 54 Neale, “This, That, and the Other,” 72. 55 Ibid., 74–​90. 56 Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 353, 357; Bühler, Sprachtheorie. 57 Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 353, 357. 58 Neale, “This, That, and the Other,” 72. 59 Ibid., 73. 60 Ibid., 75–​76. 61 Ibid., 76. 62 Ibid.

Tracking the Sôd through Emergence of a Complex System  111 63 Ibid., 77. 64 Ibid., 80n16 (emphasis added). 65 Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” 74. 66 Sheldon Isenberg and Dennis Owen express this, in their still highly relevant appraisal of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, as follows: “The trick, of course, is to find principles of social organization which are abstract enough to be applied cross-​culturally while still maintaining contact with concrete human experience” (Isenberg and Owen, “Bodies, Natural and Contrived,” 319). 67 Shanon, Representational and the Presentational, 285–​ 86. See also Langer, Philosophy from a New Key, ­chapter 4. 68 Callender, Adam in Myth and History, 211–​12 (emphasis added). 69 “Interpretation, Midrash, is a seeking for the Torah, but more in the mode of making the Torah larger than in opening it to the bitterness of experience” is how Harold Bloom puts it (Bloom, Map of Misreading, 42). It is always easier, it seems, to “mak[e]‌the Torah larger”—​even at a price of distortion and misconstrual—​ than to “[open] it to the bitterness of experience.” 70 Compare Auerbach, Mimesis. 71 Paul Hernadi focuses on a key distinction—​for which he credits Karl Bühler and Roman Jakobson—​between text as mimesis and text as communication (which he, following Bühler and Jakobson, visualizes as a vertical axis of mimesis versus the horizontal axis of communication): Literary works, just like other verbal constructs, are capable of conveying information from one mind to another. Some critics prefer to approach texts as instruments of mimesis (words representing worlds), others as instruments of communication (messages from authors to readers). Yet literary works communicate and represent at the same time, and criticism as a whole should account for them both as utterances with potential appeal and as verbal signs representing worlds. (Hernadi, “Literary Theory,” 369, emphasis added); Bühler, Sprachtheorie; Jakobson, “Closing Statement”) 72 With regard to pseudo-​or semihistorical content, Hermann Gunkel, the originator of the so-​called form-​critical method, begins his book Legends of Genesis with the following question: “Are the narratives of Genesis history or legend?” (1). As he explains, however, “legends are not lies” (3). Nonetheless, Gunkel consistently, in line with the ongoing historical-​critical approach prevalent in biblical studies, interprets events through historical lenses, often, like others, completely misconstruing their meaning; for example, he writes, implausibly, that “in the Esau-​Jacob legend also there are quite evidently historical reminiscences” (21). As we shall see, it makes sense to underscore the issue of concealed information by positing a separate “concealed communication axis” (in addition to an “ostensive communication axis”); see Figure 4.1. 73 Whatever information is obtained via the vertical mimetic axis cannot substitute for the inability to access the axis of communication. Sensing the loss, one might turn to the seeming solution of mapping onto the axis of communication such ersatz conceptualizations as the well-​known fourfold medieval rabbinical scriptural exegesis (known as PaRDeS, or literal, allegorical, homiletic, and secret; see van der Heide, “PaRDeS”) or the similar fourfold Christian medieval interpretive

112 The Metatext method (“the literal, or historical; the allegorical, or spiritual; the tropological, or moral; and the anagogical, or mystical”; Leitch, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 9). Ironically, parĕdēs is the Hebrew word for “orchard,” and in the well-​ known Talmudic story of four rabbis entering the Pardes, the last of the letters of the acronym PaRDeS is S, or Sôd (i.e., “secret”); it thus refers both to the Edenic “garden” and to the mystical state of consciousness in which a direct relationship with “God” is established and maintained. 74 “A semantic theory is an abstract description of [speaker] A’s semantic competence, his knowledge, tacit or otherwise, of the semantics of [language] L.” Neale, “This, That, and the Other,” 84. The same kind of competence is required, and thus presumed, on the part of the listener or reader. 75 Sheldon Isenberg notes that “modern culture idolizes doing over being.” Isenberg, “Ideals, Pseudo-​Ideals and the Evolution of Consciousness,” 106. The doing, it would seem, relates to rapid categorization, whereas “being” would imply not only delayed categorization but also experiencing, which then alters one’s epistemic framework. 76 Muller and Craig, introduction to Theorizing Communication, xi. 77 Hayes, Pragmatics of Perception and Cognition, 2n4. 78 Eco, “On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language.” This was discussed in Chapter 2. 79 Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 58. 80 Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, 299. 81 Halliday and Matthiessen, Construing Experience through Meaning, 24–​25. 82 Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, 302. 83 János Petőfi makes an important distinction: he connects “the competence of the listener” with the surface structure’s “semantic interpretation on the basis of homonymy,” and the competence of the speaker with “the semantic representation on the basis of synonymy” (Petőfi, “Syntactico-​Semantic Organization of Text-​ Structures,” 62; emphasis added). Furthermore, “the competence of the speaker” relates to “synthesis” and “composition,” while that of the listener, to “analysis” and “decomposition.” Thus, again we see that an “integrative” approach such as that advocated by Hayes is inimical to the very task of the interpreter, which is that of analysis rather than synthesis. 84 Halliday and Matthiessen, Construing Experience through Meaning, 3. 85 Schutz, Call Adonoi, 2. 86 Derrida, “Differance,” 151. 87 Ibid., 152. 88 Hernadi, “Literary Theory,” 374, map 2. 89 See, for example, Craig, “Communication Theory as a Field”; and Craig and Muller, “Concluding Reflections.” 90 Craig, “Communication Theory as a Field,” passim.

5 The Sôd as Poiesis Probing the Sôd’s Poietic-​Tropological Structure and Multiscalar Power Dynamics

Positioning the Sôd within the Pentateuch The Sôd’s Three Continuums Lubomír Doležel’s depiction of a model as “metalanguage for descriptions” is apt apropos of what I will be attempting next, namely, assembling a model of the Pentateuchal text and, along the way, developing a meta-​language for the Pentateuchal text’s account.1 As was first detailed in Chapter 4, several emergence-​based modeling and research-​methodology categories are being utilized in this study in order to foreground the conjectured Sôd stratum. These principally range from E. D. Hirsch’s three investigative criteria (the author’s cultural given, the author’s horizons, and the question of genre), to Husserl’s notions of hyletic-​noetic-​noematic structure of an “act of consciousness” and Jakobson’s six factor/​functions of a literary text, and finally to Ronald Langacker’s cognitive-​linguistic “grounds” and Prieto’s semiotic notions of semantic and noetic “fields.” These diverse approaches, as we shall see, will all coalesce in “A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch’s Systemic Structures and Functions” (see Figure 6.2). In this chapter, Figure 5.1, “The Sôd’s Three Continuums,” is presented. Even though much of the rationale underlying it will become progressively appreciated in Chapter 6, it is already indispensable here, for a number of reasons. The diagram in Figure 5.1 lists in the right-​hand column of boxes, Jakobson’s six factor/​functions of a literary text (reproduced in Figure 4.1). The three large contoured shapes on the left of the diagram profile the Sôd’s three “continuums”—​or “worlds of meaning”—​that I am proposing as the three holding arrays, or continuous series, encompassing their individual, distinct realms, or discrete “worlds.”2 These continua will be seen as central for our ability to track, all at once, five of the six sets of factor/​functions pertaining to the Sôd’s second-​channel esoteric narrative. The reason why the concept of the continua is crucial is this: the respective factor/​functions have, with one exception (which we can see in the diagram), unique links to identifiable, specific, distinct conceptual entities distributed among the three continua. DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-8

114 The Metatext

s-CONTACT (phatic function)

NOESIS / Noetic-

Inferential CONTINUUM

s-MESSAGE (poetic function)

POIESIS SETTING

s-CONTEXT (referential function)

INFERENTIAL FIELD (Field of s-Signifiers)

s-CODE (metalingual function) HYPO-GROUND

s-ADDRESSEE (conative function)

NOEMA

Noematic-Conferential CONTINUUM

s-ADDRESSER (emotive function)

TOPIC CONFERENTIAL FIELD (Field of s-Signifieds) SUPRA-GROUND

HYLE / Hyletic-Deferential CONTINUUM

OBJECT DEFERENTIAL FIELD (Field of s-Referents) META-GROUND

Figure 5.1 The Sôd’s three continua (with three contexts, three semantic fields, and three grounds linked to Jakobson’s factor/​ functions of literary communication).

If one has in one’s hands a hard copy of the Pentateuch, perhaps one can visualize simultaneously amassed within it no fewer than six separate continua, or six “worlds of meaning” (including the three “worlds” pertaining to the conventional, or literary reading, which however, pertains only to the first, or visible narrative channel within the Pentateuch). As one can see from

The Sôd as Poiesis  115

Figure 5.2 Components of the s-​CODE (including communicative actions; referential fields; sign correlates; type of content; representation type; and brief descriptions).

Figure 5.1, apportioned among and within the three Sôd-​related continua are five of the six Jakobsonian factor/​functions of a textual communication. The sixth one—​the C ONTAC T , along with its so-​called phatic function—​is carried by the physical book that one holds, being the actual medium of transmission of the Pentateuchal communication. Allotted to the other five factor/​ functions are, first, three separate contexts of the Sôd—​designated as Setting, Topic, and Object—​ representing the Jakobsonian C ON T E XT /​referential function in the three respective contextual ranges. Second are three distinct “grounds,” directed to the ADDRES S EE /​conative function. Third is a single ground—​the Meta-​Ground—​where the ADDRES SE R , that is, the author(s) of

116 The Metatext the Pentateuch, is positioned. Fourth is a single factor/​functional occurrence of the M ES S AGE /​poetic function, marked as the poiesis—​that is to say, the employment of literary craftsmanship exhibited in the text in question; it is present only in the Noetic-​Inferring Continuum. Fifth and finally, the C OD E /​ metalingual function is distributed among the continua, respectively, as “fields” of “inferential signifiers,” “conferential signifieds,” and “deferential referents (Figure 5.2).” The several novel terms appearing above will be more fully unpacked in Chapter 6. It is this notion of a continuum as a distinctive “world of meaning” that will lead us later to the key insight regarding the need for orientation within these worlds—​with the resultant development of a related customized research methodology. A question may be broached: Why exactly are three worlds-​of-​meaning continua being contemplated vis-​à-​vis the putative esoteric Sôd stratum and not, say, two, or five? Let us consider Figure 5.3, which schematically presents the three fundamental aspects of “meaning”: the Signifier, the Signified, and the Referent. It features key theorists throughout history who had something germane to say on the subject of meaning and whose relevant terms-​of-​the-​ art are logged there. Most semioticians have accepted a triadic structure of the sign, in which the referential meaning (the Referent, for our purposes) is associated with the denotatum (object, thing, or referent); whereas the sense-​meaning suggests the designatum and the related-​to-​it Signified (content, sense, meaning, idea, or interpretant). The third element of the sign’s triad, the Signifier—​the expression, symbol, logos, word, sign vehicle, or representamen—​refers to the actual expression of the sign, be it by way of language or otherwise. As Figure 5.3 shows, Husserl’s hyle-​noema-​noesis aspects of the phenomenological intentional act (more about them later) are assigned positions on the semiotic triadic sign-​structure, as follows: hyle is identified with the Referent, or denotation; noema is to be associated with the Signified; and noesis is the Signifier. Each part of the phenomenological hyle-​noesis-​noema triad, as well as their correspondences to the triadic semiotic sign-​aspects, is regarded as a particular context, and seen as distinct from the other two contexts, but also as a specific continuum comprising a particular referential field and a distinct “ground” that pertains to the would-​be addressee, one who is able to receive the communicated esoteric message. Where are these three aspects of meaning lodged? While one is certainly entitled to reply that, as far as the meaning of a text is concerned, these aspects of it are sheltered “in the text” itself, a more helpful procedure would seem to be engaging the concept of a continuum. As distinct “worlds of meaning,” these three aspects pertain to the putative Sôd stratum. I will name them as follows: (1) noetic-​inferential continuum, (2) noematic-​conferential continuum, and (3) hyletic-​deferential continuum. These terms will be elucidated and defended later, but it is important to note here that each name of a continuum refers to one of the constituents

The Sôd as Poiesis  117 REFERENT (Ogden and Richards) Thing (Aristotle) Res (Thomas Aquinas) Thing (Arnauld and Nicole) Object (Peirce) Denotatum (Morris) Thing (Ullman) Bedeutung (Frege) Denotation (Russell) Extension (Carnap) HYLE (Husserl) META–GROUND

{HYLE} C o n t e x t #3 = s-OBJECT s-Referent

SIGNIFIER (Saussure) Symbol (Ogden and Richards) Logos (Aristotle) Vox (Thomas Aquinas) Word (Arnauld and Nicole) Sign, Representamen (Peirce) Sign Vehicle, Sign (Morris) Name (Ullman) Sign (Lyons) Expression (Hjelmslev) NOESIS (Husserl)

HYPO–GROUND

{NOESIS} s-CODE (Metalingual function) s-MESSAGE (Poetic function) s-ADDRESSEE (s-Conative function) C o n t e x t #1 = s-SETTING [De Dicto: the s-Signifier]

SIGNIFIED (Saussure) Reference (Ogden and Richards) States of Mind (Aristotle) Conceptus (Thomas Aquinas) Idea (Arnauld and Nicole) Interpretant (Peirce) Mental Image (Saussure, Peirce) Concept (Lyons) Designatum (Morris, 1938) Significatum (Morris, 1946) Sense (Ullman) Meaning (Frege) Intension (Carnap) Content (Hjelmslev) NOEMA (Husserl) SUPRA-GROUND

{NO E M A} C o n t e x t #2 = s-TOPIC [de Re: the s-Signified]

Figure 5.3 Grounds, continua, and contexts of the Sôd, hyletic-​noetic-​noematic framework, and the semiotic triangle of the sign. Partially adapted from Hébert, “Sign Structures.” Note: “s-​” stands for “Sôd-​related.”

of Husserl’s hyletic-​noetic-​noematic triad. The latter is discussed in the next section. Essentially, noesis is what I will specify as the noetic-​inferential continuum; noema is the noematic-​conferential continuum; and hyle is on a par with the hyletic-​deferential continuum. The point of installing these novel terms is to see the Husserlian terms come alive in an expanded conceptual construct that carries with it some sense of a distinct world-​of-​meaning. Figure 5.1 shows the three continua as three divergent “worlds of meaning,” where each of the continua is greater, or more capacious, than its counterpart

118 The Metatext from the tripartite semiotic aspects of meaning, that is, the signifier-​signified-​ referent. These continua, while including the latter semiotic meanings, in addition incorporate such crucial notions as the three distinctive contexts (one for each continuum, respectively); three distinct “grounds”; and three respective, discrete semantic fields. Finally, in the case of one of the continua, namely, the noetic-​inferential continuum, there is also the poetic function, since this is the realm of de dicto, or “the word.” In this chapter I have a more limited goal, namely, to focus on just one among the many vital elements within the dense armature of the theoretical model of the Pentateuch. This single issue—​the poiesis, or the M E SSAG E (poetic function)—​plays an outsize role within the highly complex, dynamic assemblage that is our Pentateuchal model; however, all of the constituent modules and features of this model are significant and instrumental. The decision to train our lenses on this specific aspect out of the entire model in a chapter dedicated solely to it, even prior to presenting the full model itself, came about for several reasons. Foremost among them is that it is this facet of the model—​the poetic function and the message that it conveys—​that a reader typically and immediately confronts whenever he or she begins to read this—​or any other—​literary text. Hyletic-​Noetic-​Noematic Perspectives A central conceptual lens that this study imposes on its proposed examination of the Pentateuchal text is the Husserlian tripartite division of an “act of consciousness,” that is, the so-​called hyletic-​noetic-​noematic framework. In simple terms, we shall assume that when we confront the existence of a written text such as the Pentateuch—​the noesis, as will be explained shortly—​two additional considerations must immediately be also factored in: first, the text’s content, or the noema; and second, the specific related experience that had to take place, sometime, somewhere, and by somebody (the hyle). The experience obtains meaning, or content (the noema), which in turn may be enabled to acquire a physical manifestation such as a written text (the noesis). While this process chronologically begins with the experience (the hyle) and ends with the latter’s textual depiction (the noesis) while traversing in between the necessary conceptualizing (the noema), our procedure will necessarily entail “reverse-​engineering”: from the given text and its noesis, to ascertaining the text’s (esoteric) content, or meaning (the noema), and finally the hyle, or the very experiences that have led to the creation of the Hebraic Torah being foregrounded and becoming visible. Noesis is identified with the Signifier, that is, with the textual expression of the intentional act presumed to be the underlying impetus for the creation of the Pentateuch and therefore also with the Sôd stratum per se. As can be seen in Figure 5.3, the noesis of the Pentateuchal text—​that is, its “act of meaning itself ” or “the meaning-​giving element of the act”—​is what the present study identifies with the conjectured esoteric Sôd stratum as inscribed in

The Sôd as Poiesis  119 the text itself.3 Noesis excludes the noematic and hyletic issues that will be dealt with separately as, for example, “the esoteric content of Israelite cultic religion” and “archaic Israelite cultic mysticism,” respectively. The Sôd’s noesis is researched, and the Sôd’s noema and hyle recovered, in Chapters 7 through 9. Noesis, as “the meaning-​giving element of the act,” has several meaning-​giving aspects that, at various times in human intellectual inquiry and discourse were, or in some cases still are, “the act’s” focus under various names highlighting its particular unique function.

The Sôd as a Poiesis: Poetic Function in Its Role as the MESSAGE Expressing Things by Indirection A literary text has options open to it that are hardly available otherwise. As Peter Stoicheff observes: A fiction text contains many strategies for metamorphosing the apparent chaos or randomness of phenomenal reality into an order comprehensible to its reader. Usually, a text employs these strategies covertly, and thereby sustains the illusion that it does not mediate between reader and world, but opens a neutral window onto that world for the reader. As a consequence, the strategies recede beneath the surface of the text’s significant intentions, to counsel calmly and imperceptibly the reader’s impression of the text’s neutrality as the reading process continues, maintaining what Roland Barthes skeptically terms “the totalitarian ideology of the referent.” The mimetic text must maintain the reader’s happy ignorance of the illusion in which he is enmeshed, and not disrupt his intuitive belief that it is permitting a linear transmission of reality to him.4 Barthes, as cited in this quote, once again picks an issue that might be dear to the otherwise challenged readers (who, tired of being intimidated by omnipotent authors determined to push some agenda on them, are now free from “the totalitarian ideology of the referent”). Killing off the author, and now also eliminating the author’s referent, is Barthes’s price for the privilege of committing a through-​and-​through fallacy.5 For, although Stoicheff’s point appears to be aligned with literary theorist Michael Riffaterre’s notions of significance versus mimetic meaning, in order to recover the text’s authorial significance—​in a case such as ours where the author’s “significant intentions” are doubly covert—​one must, as we shall see, (1) follow the references leading to the author’s referent (referential function/​C O N T E XT ); (2) grapple with the poetic function of the (secreted) text’s MES S AGE ; (3) contend with this esoteric text’s metalingual function, that is, its multifield C OD E of semiotic indicators; and (4) acquaint oneself with how the conative function that targets a specific A DDR E S S EE is kicking up its heels within the mental greenery of triple

120 The Metatext “grounds” of the Sôd. In other words, one must juggle these four balls, among numerous others, simultaneously, keeping them all aloft. Riffaterre’s distinctions are reasonably congruent with the notions of the Sôd that are being developed in the present book, at times even offering descriptions that could easily be accepted as portrayals of the Sôd. Early in his classic Semiotics of Poetry, Riffaterre suggests that “poetry expresses concepts and things by indirection. To put it simply, a poem says one thing and means another.” He distinguishes “three possible ways for semantic indirection to occur. Indirection is produced by displacing, distorting, or creating meaning.”6 Riffaterre sharply distinguishes between a poem’s “significance” and its “meaning,” the latter conveyed by the mimesis. Like Riffaterre’s significance, the Sôd is “one semantic unit,” to be contrasted with “a string of successive information units” that belong to the text’s mimesis. One reason that biblical studies did not and could not discover the Sôd already becomes apparent here: namely, the field’s exclusive engagement solely with the text’s iconic mimesis (in addition to the details of cultic operation and upkeep). Riffaterre counsels to expect to encounter “the level of significance” above “the mimesis level,” through “a manifestation of semiosis.”7 Riffaterre notes: significance, to put it simply, is what the poem is really about: it arises through retroactive reading when the discovery is made that representation (or mimesis) actually points to a content that would demand a different representation in nonliterary language. Yet my use of significance, however specialized, does not contradict Webster: “the subtle, hidden implications of something, as distinguished from its openly expressed meaning.”8 “Meaning” is the lexico-​grammatical semantics of mimesis, whereas “significance” can only emerge from a semiotic-​discursive “discovery” by the reader. As Riffaterre frames it, “Everything related to this integration of signs from the mimesis level into the higher level of significance is a manifestation of semiosis. The semiotic process really takes place in the reader’s mind, and it results from a second reading.”9 At this point I wish to establish in what way the Sôd also is, in the end, different from Riffaterre’s “significance.” Similarities include what I have discussed in Chapter 4, under the term “delayed categorization,” as that which will ensue as a result of a second or further rereading; another is the required aloofness from the mimetic substratum, understood as that which “the reader has to hurdle.”10 Even so, the first key difference is that in the case of a poem one typically does grasp its significance upon a second or subsequent reading—​in accordance with the (likely unstated but strongly implied) wishes of the poem’s author. As for the Sôd, however, its aims involve a deliberate second-​channel concealment of its very existence.11 The

The Sôd as Poiesis  121 only exception to this concealment is the intended “insider-​insider,” that is, a recipient who is an initiate hailing from the priestly caste.12 A typical reader can and perhaps does read the Pentateuch dozens or more times throughout his or her life, all to no avail since the grip of this text’s magnificent mimesis never diminishes its hold on such a reader, thus preventing the necessary reflection and scrutiny that might have resulted in the emergence of the second channel from its deliberate inconspicuousness. The second key difference is that, unlike Riffaterre’s significance, which is nonreferential in nature (it is the representation/​mimesis that is referential), the Sôd, as we shall see in Chapter 6, emphatically can be referential—​as inferential, “conferential,” and “deferential” referential markers—​albeit manifesting in the Pentateuchal text as what I will call “indirect referential indexicality.” This characteristic of the Sôd, incidentally, will allow us to design a research methodology whose validity cannot be casually dismissed simply through a charge that it is merely an interpretation, one among many possible, or a whimsical and/​or perhaps ingenious theory that one nonetheless can be at liberty either to accept or not. “Trajectories Not Previously Entertained in the History of the System” Anna St. Leger Lucas perceives “significance” as the “symbolic focus” of a literary work, its “unifying matrix” and “pre-​textual generator.” Describing the meaning of Riffaterre’s notion of hypogram, with its relation to the “puzzle of textual significance,” she elucidates the former as follows: The reader’s praxis is the reverse of the writer’s as he attempts to solve the puzzle of textual significance. Faced with apparent “ungrammaticalities” (Riffaterre’s term), incongruities which block mimetic or referential meaning, he seeks a common element in these variants and thereby the generating model and matrix. When he finally solves the puzzle, everything points to one symbolic focus, one unifying matrix, which itself refers to the pre-​textual generator: its hypogram.13 Regarding the above, Paul Thibault invokes “mapping new problem spaces to previously learned ones” and “trajectories through a complex semiotic phase space, not decodings—​trajectories not previously entertained in the history of the system”; these notions would seem to be apt descriptions of the procedures adopted in this book: The idea of a “puzzle” is interesting. We are touching on difficulties of interpretation, as in the [Pentateuchal] text. … The puzzle (problem space) is not a matter of decoding grammatical difficulties and incongruities but of mapping new problem spaces to previously learned ones. Unlike encoding/​decoding, this entails a high level of context-​sensitivity and context-​dependence. … We are talking about trajectories through a

122 The Metatext complex semiotic phase space, not decodings—​trajectories not previously entertained in the history of the system. It is a constructive process not a passive coding one. This also allows for elaboration and reorganization with experience. This seems to be absent from Riffaterre.14 Riffaterre pinpoints the frequent evidence of a reverse relation between the accuracy of some aspect of the depiction of significance—​the Sôd in our case—​and the mimetic representation: “It is when the description is most precise that the departures from acceptable representation induced by structures make the shift toward symbolism more conspicuous. Where the reader most expects words to toe the line of non-​verbal reality, things are made to serve as signs, and the text proclaims the dominion of semiosis.”15 This quotation must seem opaque, yet it is an exact portrayal of what happens when in the “matrix” (as Riffaterre calls it), or in our case in the Sôd channel, the author wishes to indicate a very precise description of something specific: this would usually come at the price of “departures from acceptable representation,” creating many a memorable and highly puzzling passage. A couple of illustrations from the Pentateuch can be given here. The first is from Genesis (30:37–​39); it describes a highly curious procedure employed by Jacob to turn most of the flock of normal sheep under his care into sheep with “streaked, speckled, and spotted” wool. Most commentators are perfectly happy, though some are simply resigned, to just call this a case of magic, as though such a characterization explains it.16 Instead, this passage and its graphic verbalizations are meant as a marker of a critical point in the would-​be initiate’s progress: this is the stage, prior to Jacob’s all-​night struggle whereupon he is renamed Israel, when Jacob’s physical field of vision contains streaked, speckled, and spotted formations, in light, pastel-​like, uniform color but with watercolor-​like transparency, formations that are superimposed on the initiate’s visual field as though painted over his imaginary glasses. (This assertion cannot be discussed in greater detail here but will become plausible and clearer in light of the research presented in Chapter 7; here, it is given only as an illustration of Riffaterre’s point.) A second highly evocative example can be drawn from a celebrated passage in Exodus: “And YHWH said, “Here is a place with me, and you’ll stand up on a rock; and it will be, when my glory passes, that I’ll set you in a cleft of the rock, and I’ll cover my hand over you until I’ve passed, and I’ll turn my hand away, and you’ll see my back, but my face won’t be seen.”17 What can one make of the “back” of God that can be seen and of his “face” that cannot? Much speculation has resulted in nothing approximating either common or uncommon sense. Yet when read at the Sôd level—​which requires, in Angus Fletcher’s words, “think[ing one’s] way through a semantic barrier”—​the rather infelicitous or perhaps even humorous, paronomastic “backside” of God—​clearly an immanent aspect of the Divine that in the Kabbalah has been associated with the ten sefirotic divine potencies—​will be understood.18 More about this below.

The Sôd as Poiesis  123 The Telltale Word from the “System” The above-​quoted passage from Exodus 33 is an indication of how to properly view the sefirotic Tree of Life—​that is, the “Tree of Life” schematically rendered as the Ten Sefirot—​when the latter is superimposed over the human figure: namely, facing away on the reader’s page. This crucial information given to an initiate results in, among other things, properly associating the sefirah of gĕbûrāh, or strength/​bravery, with the right hand, as it should be logically. In this way, the rabbinical tradition’s overwhelmingly unbalanced, even unhealthy emphasis on the supposedly always positive, much-​favored ḥesed, or “lovingkindness,” which it wrongly attributes to the right hand—​and prescribed as one of the Ultimate Sacred Postulates of rabbinical Judaism—​is corrected by being properly correlated with the Torah’s Sôd-​level guidance.19 As we will witness in Chapter 7, the entire Sôd matrix will begin to come into view after the identification of the “one word in the system [that] has been provided,” which will be the key. In Riffaterre’s words: Once one word in the system has been provided, the words that it generates have a very high likelihood of occurrence. It is further increased by the restrictions on choice that are imposed by the valorization. If the text conforms to this probability (as in a tautological sequence, for instance), it corresponds to the reader’s expectations, and the representation is verisimilar and even typical, or rather exemplary. If the text does not conform to this probability (as in an oxymoronic sequence), the representation appears to be fraught with meaning. In both of these cases, the text is not simply discovered as it is read. It is recognized, and it is compared to the stereotyped sentences it reproduces or transforms. The entire mimesis is thus perceived not in relation to referents or signifieds, but rather in relation to verbal forms, to words that are already arranged in texts.20 As we shall discover later, the “one word in the system [that] has been provided” in the double-​channeled text of the Pentateuch is the Hebrew designate for “God,” customarily capitalized in English to distinguish it from the less dignified, lesser-​ranking “god,” or pagan “gods.” This (key)word is the linguistically unviable designation “Elohim” (as will be elaborated in a later chapter). An example that can be given from Genesis of what Riffaterre calls “tautological sequence” wherein “the representation is verisimilar and even typical” involves the so-​called wells of Beersheba and Gerar: the text pays an inordinate amount of attention to portraying each of the three patriarchs devoting much of their time to the subject of wells in general. Even the name of the place where some of this is happening, Beersheba, stands for “Seven Wells.” Verisimilitude is mentioned not because the depicted wells indicate real wells (they do so, of course, mimetically, but do not do so in the Sôd’s second-​ channel matrix). Rather, the (seven) wells are verisimilar to bodily chakras

124 The Metatext that, as many students of mysticism know, are an essential part and parcel of the “spiritual technology” used in numerous mystical induction techniques.21 Riffaterre’s second possibility, “an oxymoronic sequence [in which] the representation appears to be fraught with meaning,” can be exemplified by the very puzzling passages related to the patriarchs Abraham and Isaac. They each in turn present their wives as sisters—​who as a result end up being taken to harems: Sarah to that of the pharaoh of Egypt (Gen. 12:11–​20), and both Sarah and Rebecca to that of Abimelek, the king of Gerar.22 Both incidents, involving two different couples separated by a generational time frame, feature the selfsame location, Gerar, and in both cases its king is named Abimelek. In this case, there is no verisimilitude at all, so the ire of some feminist writers is quite misplaced.23 Rather, what is involved here is a “semantic barrier” (to use Fletcher’s term once again). One needs to reconceptualize the “wives” as “sisters” equaling soul forces (as was done in medieval Kabbalah) or, in more contemporary terminology, as hierarchical levels of long-​term alterations of consciousness. The latter is perhaps more readily graspable in the curious double marriage of Jacob: first to Leah, portrayed in a hardly credible substitution-​trick yarn, and then to Rachel, he thus having worked a total of fourteen years for both of his brides. Incidentally, it is only after acquiring the second wife (and two additional formal, or sanctioned, concubines) that Jacob undertakes his “magical” experiments with the speckled and striped sheep and only after that, upon his departure-​escape back to the Land of the Promise, that he, while on his way, becomes Israel. One must achieve a certain grade of one’s expansion of consciousness—​symbolized by the putative “marriages”—​before one sees the “speckled and striped sheep,” that is, having his field of vision affected. The latter itself is another indication of one’s advancing status as a would-​be initiate. From the above discussion, it is clear why, as Riffaterre claims, “the entire mimesis is thus perceived not in relation to referents or signifieds, but rather in relation to verbal forms, to words that are already arranged in texts.” Or, rather, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that while mimesis is indeed tied to referents or signifieds and continues to be so, the nonmimetic significance is indicated by the “verbal forms,” or the signifiers: “Literary description of reality only gives the appearance of referring to things and signifieds. In point of fact, poetic representation is founded on a reference to signifiers.”24 This “reference to signifiers” will be designated as “indirect references,” since such signifiers do in fact point or refer to their own “things and signifieds,” namely, to the various constituent aspects of the matrix of Sôd.

The Sacred as a Cognitive Boundary: On the Allegoricity of the Pentateuchal Mimesis Anttonen’s Theory of the Sacred as a Cognitive Boundary Among the most memorable of all symbolic meaning-​making resources of the ancient Israelite sensibility—​one that even the later rabbinical innovators,

The Sôd as Poiesis  125 who otherwise had to rely on an awareness more in line with their uninitiated status, could not abandon—​was the foundational, all-​important “site of memory” represented by Egypt.25 It is in Egypt that the Hebrew Deity announces its very actuality, in the “prime-​time” setting of the superpower of that time. The principal Israelite site of memory had to be located in Egypt: the quintessential Egyptian sensibility, as we saw in Chapter 1, pertained to that which the Hebrew Deity—​and therefore also the original Hebraic sensibility—​ found to be abhorrent (i.e., fallacious), namely, a magical ensoulment of the whole of reality. The semiotic sign-​types within our main focus are the iconic, the indexical, the symbolic, and the allegorical—​that is, they are somewhat different in comparison to the Peircean tripartite classification, as was explained in Chapter 1. The iconic aspect of the Pentateuchal mimesis largely coincides with the numerous literal Pentateuchal narratives that are more akin to literary fiction than myth. Yet, the Pentateuchal mimesis also contains other semiotic modalities engaged during the construction of this text. Since the semiotic theory seems to insist on adhering to Peirce’s original conflating of the symbolic and the allegorical into one sign, namely, the symbolic, and for good reason, I need to justify my departure from this particular approach. I underscored the distinction between the symbolic and the allegorical earlier by invoking Coleridge’s precise formulations.26 Let me also cite Reuven Tsur’s germane argument: Traditionally, both [allegory and symbol] suggest a kind of “double-​ talk”: talking of some concrete entities and implying some abstract ones. But whereas in allegory the concrete or material forms are considered as the “mere” guise of some well-​defined abstract or spiritual meaning, the symbol is conceived to have an existence independent from the abstractions, and to suggest, “somehow,” the ineffable, some reality, or quality, or feeling, that cannot be expressed in ordinary, conceptual language. … Traditional allegory bestows well-​differentiated physical shapes and human actions upon clear-​cut ideas, which can be represented in clear, conceptual language as well; by contrast, the symbol manipulates information in such a way that some (or most) of it is perceived as diffuse, undifferentiated, global.27 Tsur’s distinctions match my own sense of the Sôd comprising “clear-​cut ideas, which can be represented in clear, conceptual language” and which were subsequently, in the Pentateuch, “bestow[ed with] well-​differentiated physical shapes and human actions”—​principally by means of allegory, as we shall see. At this stage in the study, do we have any notion of what could be the nature of the “clear-​cut ideas” that might underlie some if not most of the Pentateuchal mimesis, if some of the latter was meant to be allegories? I have detailed, in The Sôd Hypothesis, how a massively ritualistic, cultic religion such as the ancient Israelite one seemed to lack, to a peculiar degree amounting to

126 The Metatext complete silence, any depiction of or even the slightest reference to a practice enabling an adherent of this religion to have experiential access to the God whom Israel worshiped. As further discussion there has shown, such knowledge of the methods of access to a group’s deity or deities is typically among the most prized possessions of any particular religious or spiritual-​ mystical tradition and is usually zealously guarded by the group in the form of its treasured, secret lore. It is precisely the knowledge of such a secret lore that distinguishes the insiders of a tradition from those who are outsiders. Since the Israelites believed that their deity was “awesome” to a degree that closely fits Otto’s description of mysterium tremendum, I have concluded that the absence of any mention of techniques or procedures that would enable mystical “access” to God is due to a deliberate restricting of those who can be given these tools of access.28 The obvious assumption here would be that only the Temple priests, and from among them only a certain, hierarchically determined minority, had been given the keys to this inner knowledge of the methods of access. I have also made a further conjecture that the reason the compilers of the Pentateuch could not completely avoid the subject of this esoteric core knowledge of experiential mystical practices was connected to their, in retrospect, well-​justified fears of this treasured knowledge being irretrievably lost should a terrible disaster visit their land and/​or their Temple. Their ingenious solution, as conjectured in my earlier research, was related to a decision vis-​à-​vis the Pentateuch—​ostensibly a veritable testament to absence of secrecy—​with a seemingly unparalleled openness in both the details of doctrine and the cult. And yet, the most precious, core esoteric knowledge was embedded in this text, too—​in a concealed manner that deliberately allowed for the discovery of it. In order to see the latter, one “only” had to be an insider or an initiate of a sufficient grade to “receive” the knowledge in question. These were all conjectures, albeit well-​ articulated and thoroughly considered, with very serious reasons and reasoning behind them. We will be testing them, beginning with what I designate as multiscalar allegorical-​ parabolic projection. We can approach this notion and its applicability to the Pentateuchal text by attempting to see the Pentateuchal compilers’ esoteric task, discussed above, through their eyes. What are the options and/​or tools available to them, one may ask, bearing in mind the dilemma concerning the need for simultaneous concealment and disclosure? It would seem that the venerable idea of employing allegory would be among the first options suggesting itself and amenable to consideration.29 The straightforward and rather logical reason for such an assumption is that allegory, by its very nature, embodies the principle of simultaneous concealment and disclosure. The single most important issue in esoteric-​mystical lore is a transformation of the initiate’s or would-​be initiate’s consciousness.30 That transformation, among other things, may then enable access to one’s deity, and when thinking of how to possibly allegorize such a shift in consciousness, spatial as well as human-​body related metaphors or allegories are almost indispensable:

The Sôd as Poiesis  127 There are two most fundamental conceptual structures which the cultural and religious discourse on the sacred is linked to: these are the notions of “human body” and “territory.” As a source of information, the human body is a major stage for people to express in image schemata the conceptual division of “internal” and “external.” Mary Douglas has done valuable work in showing how any society creates its ontological and thus also economic, political and religious universes by the symbolic relations between internal and external boundaries of the human body and the society. In my own research, however, I have replaced the idea of the society with the idea of the territory.31 Veikko Anttonen builds his “theory of the sacred as a cognitive boundary” on the distinction between the inside and the outside of both the body and territory.32 The sacred is “a culturally dependent cognitive category which at the same time ‘separates’ and ‘binds.’ ” Anttonen next attempts a cognitive-​ psychological explanation of the appearance of the sacred as an ontological phenomenon. The sacred “is generated as a boundary in situations when the focus of a community or a person shifts from the inside to the outside or from the outside to the inside.”33 But how is it generated? Anttonen offers a very plausible answer: Ritual is the cultural process par excellence to deal with the inside and the outside across their defining boundaries and what’s important—​to create liminal space to bring up new connections between them. Within this methodological approach I am inclined to conceptualize religion as a context-​dependent cultural system of human behavior which is created in any social and historical setting in the very same process as people mark cognitive boundaries of the human body and the territory into their symbolic communication of values and establish the rules for their transformation.34 The sacred is thus generated by way of ritual, a “cultural process [of] deal[ing] with the inside and the outside across their defining boundaries … to create liminal space.” The Esoteric Source Domain of the Pentateuchal Text When the Israelite Pentateuchal writer picks and conceives—​ based not only on the earliest tribal and national epic traditions but also on “counter-​ religious” grounds vis-​à-​vis the Egyptian magical religious worldview—​the superpower of the day, Egypt, as Israel’s “site of memory” or the place of its “cultural memory,” he creates Israel’s sacred as “a culturally dependent cognitive category which at the same time ‘separates’ and ‘binds.’ ”35 Egypt is separated from the land of Israel geographically, among other ways. Egypt, moreover—​if we risk here what may seem to be tautology—​represents the outside of Israel’s territory. Since, according to Anttonen, the sacred “is

128 The Metatext generated as a boundary in situations when the focus of a community or a person shifts from the inside to the outside or from the outside to the inside,” we can conclude that by focusing on the territorial outside (Egypt), Israel is moving to center its national consciousness internally, within its “body,” both as a people and as the physical body of the initiate-​in-​the-​making: “The outside of the human body is continuous with the inside of the territory; they both are perceivable aspects of social life. The inside of the human body is continuous with the outside of the territory: they both are invisible.”36 What could such a shift inward mean? In accordance with the thesis of the present study, the conjectured, concealed, inner-​ core esoteric knowledge concerns a mystical transformation of the consciousness of a would-​ be Israelite initiate who thereby gains access to the national deity, with its awesome powers. It is not difficult to project an allegorical schema onto a territorial and religious “other” (Egypt) that includes a concept of an inner state of consciousness possessed by a would-​be initiate at the beginning of his journey of transformation—​a journey in time here represented both spatially and temporally—​as the Exodus from Egypt. If the Pentateuchal writer had done only this, then the resulting text would already amount, in its essence, to a remarkable esoteric manual of individual transformation-​of-​­consciousness induction procedures and related conceptualizations, including allegorical ones. Yet the Pentateuch, as we shall see, endeavors to create both coded esoteric instructions to individual initiates, partially via parabolic projection onto the Exodus story, and a national exoteric program of transformation of an entire people into what it would call “a nation of priests and a holy people,” in effect, a nation of initiates—​or, rather, spiritual aspirants given the hereditary nature of the priestly cult—​a feat, nonetheless, unparalleled in the history of humanity. “Meaning” can be thought of as a “target cognitive model,” and it can be “projected from the story [as] a parable.”37 The source domain in the Pentateuchal text, in accordance with our conjecture—​which will be confirmed by our research—​is the narrative of mystical transformation of consciousness progressively acquired by a would-​be initiate. This narrative is projected onto the target domain, the story of Egypt’s enslavement of Israel, the Exodus from Egypt, and the eventual conquest of the Promised Land. But while this parabolic projection utilizes allegory—​in which one story substitutes for another—​the target-​domain allegorical story contains within it iconic details of the source-​domain story, as we shall see. For a preliminary example, let us recall the two almost identical incidents from Genesis cited earlier in this chapter, both involving the kingdom of Gerar: Genesis 20:1–​18, regarding Abraham and Sarah, and Genesis 26:7–​11, involving Isaac and Rebecca. What is usually not noticed in these passages is that, as Aryeh Kaplan states, Gerar was “on the southwest border of the Holy Land.”38 If the kingdom of Gerar was on the border of the Holy Land, this would indicate, in the source domain, that whatever has transpired with the above-​mentioned characters there, especially the bizarre episodes involving

The Sôd as Poiesis  129 wife-​sister misrepresentations by the two patriarchs, resulting in their wives being taken to the harem of the king of Gerar, could potentially provide us with specific information about how, where, and when to achieve “penetration” of the border that leads to an exalted state of consciousness (see Chapters 7–​9, where such an understanding is unfolded and defended). There were additional strange aspects to these incidents. For example, the king of Gerar seems to be the selfsame person in both cases and, in any event, is named Abimelek in both cases. Not only is it the same name or person even though the two patriarchs are separated by a generation, but it is, implausibly, a Hebrew name that stands—​incongruously in the target domain of the literal narrative—​for “my father the king.” Such a designation can only indicate God, and specifically Abraham’s God, within the context of searching for an entry into the divine consciousness represented by the Holy Land. However, the more involved aspect of Abraham’s “residing” or “dwelling” in Gerar and later in Beersheba, as well as Isaac’s likewise living in the selfsame places later, is the persistent issue of mysterious wells (mysterious because they seem to be ubiquitous and peculiar). We shall discuss these passages in more detail and, more importantly, in terms of their import vis-​à-​vis the Sôd, in the research and data analysis sections of this book (the former in Chapter 7; the latter, in Chapters 8 and 9). Here I wish only to give a specific example of the “iconicity within the allegorical” principle formulated above.

Principal Characteristics of the Sôd’s Poietic-​Tropological Structuring: Select Literary Stratagems I am identifying a triple structure of the Sôd’s poiesis based on three separate literary strategies employed by the Pentateuchal authors: (1) multiscalar allegorical-​ parabolic projection; (2) indirect indexicality; and (3) several additional advanced literary-​compositional methods and devices, such as (a) markedness; (b) a special, esoteric code (not in a sense of encoding but in the Jakobsonian sense of a communicative “factor” associated with the metalingual function); (c) a dedicated genre; and, finally, an extensive use of what I have designated (d) “asymmetric noetic parallelism.” In each case, examples illustrating these strategies will be culled from the Pentateuch. Yet the proposed literary model’s viability and validity—​ and, later, the overarching, multifaceted theoretical model of the Pentateuch that will be finalized in Chapter 6—​ can be properly established and confirmed only during the research and analysis phase of this study, in Chapters 7, 8, and 9. Multiscalar Allegorical-​Parabolic Projection First, let us consider parabolic projection. As Mark Turner observes, “The boundaries of our invention in conceiving the source, conceiving the target, and projecting from one to the other are governed by the invariance principle.”39 He states that the invariance principle:

130 The Metatext does not require that the image schema projected from the source already exist in the target before the projection, but instead that the result of the projection not include a contradiction of image schemas. … In these and a variety of related ways, parable is constrained: Not just anything can be projected in just any way. We have choice in our conception of the source, in our conception of the target, and in what is to be projected from one to the other. We are constrained to line these choices up so as to avoid an image-​schematic clash in the target. … There are many ways to avoid such a clash. We have choice in what we recruit to the source, what we recruit to the target, and what we project to the generic space. We can vary all of these choices in order to meet the constraint.40 In projecting a narrative of a mystical initiatory process on the target domain of the story of enslavement in Egypt, followed by Exodus, and, finally, the conquest of the Holy Land, the ingredients within this parabolic projection avoid an image-​schematic clash; the source domain images/​notions are, in other words, congruent with the target domain’s realization. This would not be the case had the Pentateuchal authors selected a target domain largely incongruent with the source domain. For example, projecting the story of initiation not on a voyage from one place to another would lack the necessary aspect of an unfolding process and the time element involved. In addition, not picturing the place of origination of such a voyage as a less-​than-​desirable one and, conversely, the place of destination as a place of untold riches, both spiritual and material, freedom, and ideal harmony—​a “land flowing with milk and honey”—​would not be conducive to a good fit between the source and target domains. To give a comparison, another ancient classic, The Odyssey, sometimes said to be about the initiatory voyage of self-​discovery, ends where it begins, on the hero’s home island of Ithaca. The Odyssey’s symbol of initiation, in consequence, is a circle; with Exodus, the symbol is an arrow. The foremost and most admired character trait of Odysseus is his legendary cunning; cunning helps him devise the Trojan horse, and cunning gets him, in the end, back home, in spite of formidable obstacles. Odysseus is a progenitor of the Western type of man—​clever, inventive, and, together with his wife, Penelope, faithful and honorable. Yet, he is anything but an initiate. The most one can grant him is that, as a result of his journey, he has been initiated into adulthood or into life itself; he has learned a great deal and may have evolved from a cunning young man to a wise old man in the end. The Exodus narrative is radically different. The future home that awaits the Israelites who have just left their enslavement in Egypt is full of indeterminate wonder that God’s promise engenders. The archetypal prototype of an Israelite initiate-​in-​the-​making, Jacob, must, like the Israelites as a whole in the Exodus, rely on God in terms of his future rather than on his own considerable cunning; his future, including even his place of residence, is uncertain. True, Odysseus cannot be sure whether Penelope has remained faithful

The Sôd as Poiesis  131 to him after all these years, and there is also the matter of the many dozens of her suitors who will need to be dealt with. But Odysseus’s yearning to return home is motivated precisely by the draw of the familiar and the certain, of love, family, and his people. By contrast, nothing is certain in the Israelites’ future; there is only God’s promise conveyed via Moses. Moses is certain of course, yet his certainty is based not on past memories, like Odysseus’s certainty. Instead, his certainty derives from his high-​initiate status as one having direct contact/​experience of God, through his transformed consciousness, which enables such a relationship. The future homeland of the Israelites is not merely new; a home of this kind is literally unheard of in the annals of humanity. Mere cunning will never get them there, because both the destination and the dangers and obstacles along the way are of a fundamentally different nature than those encountered by Odysseus. The destination here is not the old home experienced previously; it is a new, transformed consciousness containing awareness of God’s all-​powerful presence and participation in the life of humanity. The obstacles in their path, too, are of a sort that readily relate to the obstacles encountered by a would-​be initiate. This initiation process is very different from the initiation, if we may call it that, of Odysseus. It is an initiation into a transformed, mystical consciousness of YHWH, whereas Odysseus’s initiation is vis-​à-​vis life’s vagaries and a strength of character and resolve that must be developed and evidenced, in order to become a man of Greek sensibility, which is the Western sensibility. Thus, the principle of avoidance of an image-​schematic clash between the source and the target domains precludes a convincing argument in favor of The Odyssey as a parabolic projection of an initiation into a mystical-​religious cult akin to the cult of YHWH. Indeed, the unpersuasive attempts since ancient times to use allegoresis, or unwarranted allegorical interpretation, evidence this very problem, namely, an image-​schematic clash between the source and the target domains (see the description of allegoresis in ­chapter 1, n.39). Indirect Indexicality I turn now to “indirect indexicality” and the question of constraints on the latter’s applicability to the Sôd hypothesis. I have in mind here development of a deictic array—​to include factors such as those captured by the interrogatives “what,” “where,” “why,” and so on—​that will help foreground the concealed aspects of the Sôd in accordance with the theory being developed in this book. This presupposes specific induction procedures into certain mystical states and, in consequence, necessarily involve—​ in accordance with the current understanding of mystical states and the ability to achieve them—​ the initiate’s physical body.41 The body here is simultaneously the vehicle to effect mystical states and a deictic center to which most if not all indirect (i.e., concealed, for the most part “noetically”) indexical references point or relate. How can one be sure that an “indirect indexicality” belonging to an allegedly concealed narrative is indeed there, in the text, and not a figment

132 The Metatext of one’s imagination? If such an alternative indexical array exists—​ and is assumed to be different from the indexicality of the ostensive, or visible, or surface narrative “reality”—​it must have been embedded, through deliberate design, by the authors. Put another way, the author-​compilers had to mark the presence of a concealed stratum through what is called here indirect indexicality; otherwise, the concealed stratum would remain completely and forever invisible. As Langacker frames this, “In both nominal and clausal realms, overt marking signals an attempt by C [the conceptualizer] to bring matters ‘under control’ with respect to what is primarily at issue.”42 We see once again the untenability of the ambitions of hermeneutics and reader-​response theories and the fallacy of postmodernist claims of textual indeterminacy and resultant interpretive license. The conceptualizer (our author-​redactor) “seek[s]‌active control over the way discourse referents are constructed.” Such a control is carried out, as Langacker states, through “overt marking.” Moreover, “it only stands to reason that markedness should correlate with departures from immediate reality, the location of the ground.”43 The “immediate reality” with its ground is what this study proposes we understand as being the mimetic or surface narratives normally capturing the reader’s full attention. By contrast, any markedness, or deliberate efforts at controlling “the way discourse referents are constructed,” would relate to the concealed ground(s). When, for example, God is marked as “Elohim” and “the Lord” as “YHWH,” these specific, intensional markings—​ as we shall see in Chapters 7 and 8—​will lead us to the specific communicative transmissions that were intended by the compilers, that is, to the concealed Sôd stratum. It is important to reiterate that, as Jakobson insists, “the distribution of the marked and unmarked series in binary oppositions cannot be regarded as a subjective operation on the part of the interpreters but is instead given directly in the linguistic system itself, and the process whereby it is abstracted on the basis of linguistic analysis is a fully objective procedure.”44 This statement underscores not merely the legitimacy of the issues raised in the present study but, more urgently, the imperativeness of attempting to meet the ancient writers on their own terms, that is, the terms of the multilevel discourse that they have inaugurated. Markedness as a Crucial Scheme As Benjamin Hrushovski observes, “the necessity of a linear presentation, segmented into parts, dictates a great deal in the nature of the presented ‘world’ in works of fiction.”45 This is indeed the case, and dramaturgical, teleological, and even the norm-​conformative communicative actions can readily be seen as being presented linearly in the Pentateuch. Yet there is also a discursive communicative action vis-​à-​vis the text of a work of fiction that, since it concerns the discourse generated by such a text, including by some or all of the three other communicative actions affecting it, can have a nonlinear

The Sôd as Poiesis  133 component. As we shall see, the author(s) of the Pentateuch took considerable advantage of these nonlinear literary devices in order to expand the range of forms or expressions that the Sôd can take. Perhaps the single most important example of such devices is the notion of markedness. Originating with Roman Jakobson’s colleague Nikolai Trubetzkoy, it was developed as a major factor by Jakobson in a number of his works.46 As Krystyna Pomorska notes, the notion “follows from Peirce’s system” in that “the symbolic function figures as an unmarked category in relation to the index on the one hand and the icon on the other.”47 To begin with, “in comparison to the unmarked term, the marked term provides more information.”48 Equally important, as Riffaterre notes, is the fact that “the unmarked form antedates the text, the marked one does not,” thus compelling a closer scrutiny of the marked items.49 Similar to Peter Groves, Elmar Holenstein speaks of “the priority of the unmarked sign in the build-​up of language,” yet without any implied value judgments.50 Instead of being perfunctorily judgmental, Holenstein comes to the following vital conclusion: “A semantics limited to the use of linguistic entities proves inadequate. … A linguistic structure as fundamental as the opposition marked/​unmarked cannot be satisfactorily elucidated without recourse to the ‘material’ or qualitative nature of phenomena.”51 The marked must be analyzed in order to be properly understood; after all, that is why it was marked.52 The enormous importance of markedness will be readily seen vis-​à-​vis the Pentateuchal text. Surprisingly, however, it appears that concepts, names, or places that were obviously deliberately, specifically, and very noticeably marked in the Pentateuchal text were more often than not treated as unmarked by either general readers of the Hebrew Bible or biblical and literary scholars alike. Precious information—​including one item that will be the starting point and thus a crucial key in this study’s research section—​was and is typically being ignored. The examples that will be given here, while important in and of themselves, are only the beginnings of a discovery of a truly widespread practice of using markedness as a stratagem throughout the Pentateuchal text. The very designations of the Hebrew deity—​God and the Lord—​are unmarked in translations from Hebrew. In the original, YHWH and Elohim are, indisputably, marked. God is ˺Ēl in Hebrew. Before one assumes that the problem thus lies with translations, however, one must realize that in this and most other cases such translations merely reflect how the text is being perceived. The strongly and conspicuously marked names YHWH and Elohim, even in the Hebrew usage among native Israelis today, are typically employed in the same unmarked sense, that is, merely as “God.”53 Asymmetric Noetic Parallelism Finally, my own new conception of esoteric “asymmetric noetic parallelism” is introduced below. Its scheme and its logic depend on markedness typically

134 The Metatext perceived as trivial or unimportant, even as irrelevant details (as seen, for example, in the Jacob-​Esau parallelism). And, since markedness, according to Jakobson, is “a fully objective procedure,” esoteric parallelisms cannot be viewed as constructs arbitrarily erected by a researcher. Rather, they would have been deliberately constructed by the author-​compilers, in an attempt to convey complex esoteric distinctions and values. If the foregoing discussion in this chapter was perhaps not convincing enough  in spite of varied supporting arguments and evidential proofs regarding, on the one hand, the fundamental literariness of the Pentateuchal text (“literariness,” in that this text evinces a most remarkable array of sophisticated literary methods) and, on the other hand, the deliberate and remarkably creative role played by the author-​ compiler-​ redactors who originated this text, then the next discussion should dispel any lingering doubts in this regard. As we turn to parallelism—​a quintessential and once a universally manifested literary phenomenon—​ vis-​ à-​ vis our focus text, we might consider the following puzzling circumstance. Why did it take an anthropologist, Mary Douglas, to recognize the unmistakable presence of parallel construction techniques, including the ring composition in an entire Pentateuchal section, the Book of Numbers, as literary phenomena?54 As Jakobson has shared, “Apparently there has been no other subject during my entire scholarly life that has captured me as persistently as have the questions of parallelism.”55 As for Pomorska, she calls parallelism “a capital, probably even primordial, element of literary art.”56 Douglas discovers a gap between the preexilic literary culture of Temple priests and the postexilic one. She senses a “dumbing down, a general lowering of scholarly standards.”57 The disconnect from the original inner-​ core knowledge derived from the First Temple priests and their “high style” in literary composition had already begun at the time of the Babylonian exile and upon the return.58 The cultural (especially in terms of the literary) and overall intellectual sophistication exhibited by the authors of the Pentateuchal text, including as it pertains to what Douglas considers the more specifically priestly books of Leviticus and Numbers, was simply above the level of the new, apparently uninitiated priestly readers.59 In a subsequent volume entirely devoted to the subject of ring composition, Douglas presses what must have been an insistent and natural question for an anthropologist: “Why is ring composition practiced all over the world?”60 She finds a coherent answer in the following arguments: I am more concerned to emphasize ring composition’s exegetical function. It controls meaning, it restricts what is said, and in doing so it expands meanings along channels it has dug. Though it never completely escapes ambiguity, writing in a ring puts various strategies at the writer’s disposal; when he chooses one path or another he ties the meaning into a recognizable, restricting context. Ring composition is not poetry but it puts syntactic-​like restrictions on the writer.61

The Sôd as Poiesis  135 Douglas adds that “it is worth pausing to reflect on why restraints are necessary.”62 Clearly, with ancient parallelism we are not in postmodernist territory (where one instead flaunts indeterminacy or at least the polyvalency of meaning and unrestrained creativity). The ancient writers, it would seem, took enormous pains to enable, or at least ease as much as possible, a concise transmission of their communicated meaning. A second conclusion that I am intent on substantiating through the present subject of parallelism—​but also via the other key words discussed above, such as markedness—​is that the Pentateuchal text is a literary gem, and not only in the Bloomian sense of the J stratum rivaling Shakespeare. It is—​much more than the mere mimetic iconicity to which Bloom responds in The Book of J—​a cornucopia of literary construction methods and devices employed at a level of sophistication that poses an intellectual barrier for modern interpreters, whose literary sensibilities have been nurtured on a lethal diet of cultural correctness and postmodern “openness.”63 It is a barrier that even the smartest editors of the Pentateuchal text could not envision in their projections of the ideal reader; this cultural dumbing down (to repeat Douglas’s sobering judgment) further complicates the already practically impenetrable noetic/​esoteric barrier constructed by these editors.64 Douglas reproduces two diagrams that deserve mention here. One is by Jacob Milgrom and is a “pedimental composition” of the “theological structure of the Hexateuch.”65 The diagram is an impressive graphic display of the “theological structure,” with the Sinaitic theophany in the center and on top.66 The other diagram is a verbal presentation of Genesis 2:5–​3:24, which is the Garden of Eden story.67 The selection foregrounds insistent verbal parallels, such as between ̓ādām (first man; human being) and ̓adāmāh (ground; soil); ̓îš (man) and ̓išāh (woman); ʻarôm (naked—​i.e., Adam and Eve) and ʻarûm (sly, shrewd—​used vis-​à-​vis the serpent). Although others have frequently noted these very obvious correspondences, Douglas’s format puts them in the context of her larger frame of parallelism at work within the Pentateuch.68 In the present study I am developing an even larger framework, one driven by the esoteric code discussed throughout this book. In this esoteric-​priestly context, the largely overlooked mimesis-​based books of the Pentateuch—​Genesis, Exodus, and the Book of Joshua—​emerge as no less esoteric and no less likely to have been composed within the priestly circles than the more obviously “cultic” Books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, quite to the contrary. In this section, I want to introduce yet another expansion of the viewpoint pertaining to the Pentateuchal compilers’ consummate creative achievement, one that, similar to the ring composition and other such exquisite archaic devices, usually escapes the reader’s notice. However, the difference between this aspect of the Sôd’s realization within the Pentateuchal text and the ring parallelism Douglas discovers in Numbers is that the former has been deliberately concealed under a noetic veil, to be unveiled only by an initiate of the cult of YHWH, whereas the latter, namely, the failure to notice and appreciate ring composition and other structural parallels, is mainly due to our cultural crudeness and lack of poetic

136 The Metatext sensitivity.69 Regarding the former, I propose that the notion of parallelism in the mimesis-​based narratives has been exploited by the compilers very extensively but in a peculiar way that compels me to assign to this phenomenon a special designation: asymmetric noetic parallelism. Asymmetric noetic parallelism differs from the structural parallelism of the kind found in a ring composition in two principal ways. First, in contrast with structural parallelism, it is embedded in the narratives themselves, as part of either the plot, the chosen characters, or other mimetic aspects.70 Thus, while such parallelisms are typically visible to the reader, they remain unappreciated other than being observed superficially. Second, although the term “parallelism” suggests that some kind of symmetry is likely to be implicated, asymmetric noetic parallelism, again in contrast with structural parallelism, begins with the intuitive premise of the symmetry of the parallel items under consideration but typically concludes by stressing their pronounced inequality and underlying dissimilarity.71 Thus, this parallelism of an esoteric variety uses the reader’s initial assumption of symmetry between the introduced parallelisms to propose—​to the esoterically inclined reader—​a strongly counterintuitive notion at the heart of most esoteric traditions: some things that normally appear equal are not so in reality, if examined closely. More specifically, it is in this dramatic way that critical esoteric information can be communicated. The examples that can be given here—​to be more fully elaborated during the research and analysis phases of this study—​are the following key asymmetric noetic parallelisms found in Genesis: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

The twin brothers, Jacob and Esau Two half-​brothers, Isaac and Ishmael Sarah versus Hagar The wives of Jacob: Rachel versus Leah and the two “handmaidens” Parallelism between the three patriarchs, their careers, their marriages, their circumstances, and so on (6) Moses, the prince of Egypt, versus Joseph, the ruler of Egypt (7) Moses versus Pharaoh (8) Joseph versus the other sons of Jacob/​Israel Many more such parallelisms can be readily perceived within the Pentateuchal text. The first impression one may get from looking at this list is that it is standard fodder for the typical rabbinic midrash, and it is. This perception, however, entails a false impression of the rabbinic perspicacity, for the rabbinical approach uses the textual data only as a launching pad for an exegesis that pursues new theological vistas, typically with a rather callous, as well as curious, disregard for the communicative intent of the text itself.72 With regard to the Jacob-​Esau narratives, for example, no one has ever attempted to explain why the sacred story would include redundant, in one case, and rather childish, in another, pseudo-​factual information such as the detail that the putative brothers were twins and yet that it was specifically Esau who was

The Sôd as Poiesis  137 the actual firstborn. Indeed, any esoteric unraveling must invariably start with the question of “why.” If one does not insist on such a question, one in effect refuses an open invitation to a dialogue extended by the author: the author is offering the dialogue but only to those who are capable of withstanding the mimetic pressure to hurry up along the narrative vistas. Any interpretation of the Esau-​Jacob narrative that aspires to coherency as well as pertinence must be able to account for the presence of specific bits of information fed to the reader by the text, such as its explicit, curious insistence on Jacob and Esau being twins, as well as on the firstborn status of Esau. The usual habit of paying no attention to what are otherwise rightfully—​from the perspective of a noninitiated reader—​regarded as petty or irrelevant details is not merely showing disrespect to the authors; it is also, as this discussion is at pains to call attention to, an assured way to misunderstand and fail to receive the intended communication. The esoteric meaning being communicated in this specific manner, which includes in the Esau-​Jacob segments the otherwise extraneous and rather useless pseudo-​fact of a twin birth of the brothers—​with one specified as the firstborn, yet the other nonetheless usurping the (spiritual-​initiatory) “blessing” merited by that status—​is the following: the would-​be initiate is here symbolized by a selfsame figure, a composite “Jacob-​Esau” seen as everyman. The everyman is typically born as an Esau (thus he is always a firstborn, in this sense), but he cannot “receive the blessing” of becoming an initiate because of his unsuitable qualities. Only if the everyman Esau chooses the path of a Jacob—​by becoming “Jacob”—​would he be on a path of initiation into the inner core of the religion of YHWH. Jacob, the symbol of an Esau who overcomes his “Esauness,” is said to “usurp” the “blessing” from that “Esauness,” yet in reality no usurpation is taking place since only a “transformed Esau”—​that is, a Jacob, an archetype of the would-​be initiate who later actually becomes one when he receives an esoteric name, “Israel”—​can receive it.73 Thus, the authors of Genesis use the asymmetric parallelism of Jacob-​Esau as a highly sophisticated literary device that, because of its esoteric content, remains—​as was fully intended by the compilers—​incomprehensible to most readers, whether lay ones, traditional-​ rabbinical, or academic.

Notes 1 “Text interpretations (and all text descriptions) are expressed in terms of a model. The purpose of models as tools of empirical study is to provide us with a metalanguage for descriptions” (Doležel, “Literary Text, Its World and Its Style,” 190). 2 “Worlds of meaning” comes from Schlenker, “Indexicality and de se Reports.” 3 Simons, “Meaning and Language,” 123 (emphasis added); Føllesdal, “Thetic Role of Consciousness,” 13. 4 Stoicheff, “Chaos of Metafiction,” 85–​86. The Barthes quote is from his essay “To Write,” 138.

138 The Metatext 5 I discuss the “killing of the author” in ­chapter 2 and in the Postscript. See also Barthes, “Death of the Author.” 6 Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, 1, 2. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 Ibid., 167n3. 9 Ibid., 4. 10 Ibid., 5. 11 Baars, “Fundamental Role of Context.” 12 That is, not any initiate nor of any tradition whatsoever: because of the indispensable role of context and background, it must be an initiate of the tradition in question—​here, the esoteric priestly core of the Israelite cultic religion of the First Temple era. 13 Whiteside-​St. Leger Lucas, “Hypogram,” 554. 14 Thibault, personal communication, 2010 (emphasis added). 15 Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, 6. 16 Here is a typical example: “It is unclear if this was believed to work genetically, or was thought to be a practice of sympathetic magic, or was thought to be miraculous” (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 103–​4). 17 Exod. 33:18–​23; see Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 289–​90. 18 Fletcher, “Allegory in Literary History,” 42. 19 The term “Ultimate Sacred Postulates of rabbinical Judaism” originates in Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. 20 Riffaterre, Text Production, 201. 21 On bodily chakras and mysticism, see Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness. 22 See Gen. 20:1–​18 regarding Abraham and Sarah; see Gen. 26:7–​11 on Isaac and Rebecca. Referring to Gen. 12:13—​“Say you’re my sister … and I’ll stay alive”—​ R. E. Friedman observes: All commentators have agonized over this. Abraham constructs a lie and puts Sarah in a compromising position. This may mean that he thinks that he simply has no real choice: it is either lie or die. Or it may convey that Abraham—​like other biblical heroes—​is not perfect. We cannot know. (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 52) This passage by Friedman reflects exactly what happens when one insists on reading the Pentateuchal text literally. Friedman, even after saying that “in fact [Abraham] turns out to be wrong. There is no evidence in the Bible that the Egyptians or anyone else ever did what Abraham fears they would do. Here and in two other cases in which Abraham and his son Isaac claim that their wives are their sisters, the Egyptian and Philistine kings send the couple away when they find out that she is his wife” (52), he fails to consider the implications of what he has just said, namely, that there must be a radically different explanation, one that cannot be sought in literal meaning. 23 See, e.g., Rashkow, “Intertextuality, Transference, and the Reader in/​of Genesis 12 and 20.” 24 Riffaterre, Text Production, 201. 25 The notion of “sites of memory” is a term originating with Pierre Nora. 26 See Coleridge, “Statesman’s Manual,” 30, cited in Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 5. 27 Tsur, “Aspects of Cognitive Poetics,” 300–​301.

The Sôd as Poiesis  139 28 For the description of mysterium tremendum, see Otto, Idea of the Holy; see also, Chapters 3 and 9. 29 See Fletcher, Allegory; Quilligan, Language of Allegory; McClelland, “Allegory”; and Whitman, “Retrospective Forward.” 30 Hollenback, Mysticism; Hunt, “Experiences of Radical Personal Transformation in Mysticism, Religious Conversion, and Psychosis”; Merkur, Mystical Moments and Unitive Thinking; Wulff, “Mystical Experience.” 31 Anttonen, “Rethinking the Sacred,” 40 (emphasis added). In this passage Anttonen cited Johnson, Body in the Mind, 13 (for the quoted words), as well as Douglas’s Natural Symbols and Purity and Danger. 32 Anttonen, “Rethinking the Sacred,” 42. 33 Ibid., 43. 34 Ibid. (emphasis added). 35 Anttonen, “Rethinking the Sacred,” 43 (for tribal and national epic traditions, see Cross, From Epic to Canon; for Egyptian magical religious worldview, see Assmann, Moses the Egyptian; for Egypt as Israel’s “site of memory,” see Nora, “Between Memory and History”; and for Egypt as the place of “cultural memory,” see Assmann, “Officium Memoriae”). It would have to be a “he,” on the basis of this study’s assumption that the Pentateuchal text, being based on the underlying inner-​core esoteric mystical system, is a product of the all-​male priestly Temple caste (notwithstanding Harold Bloom’s inspired proposal of a “court poetess” being the author of J; see Bloom and Rosenberg, Book of J). 36 Anttonen, “Rethinking the Sacred,” 43 (emphasis added). 37 Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 125; see also 132. 38 Kaplan, Living Torah, 89n20. Kaplan makes no inferences from this. 39 Turner, Literary Mind, 31. 40 Ibid., 53–​54, 109 (emphasis added). 41 See Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness; Kohav, “Introduction: Unutterable Experiences”; and Kohav, “Explanatory Mechanisms of Altered States of Consciousness.” 42 Langacker, “Remarks on the English Grounding Systems,” 33. 43 Ibid., 34 (emphasis added). 44 Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 97 (emphasis added). 45 Hrushovski, “Structure of Semiotic Objects,” 364–​65. We have encountered this scholar earlier as Benjamin Harshaw (also spelled “Harshav” in some works). 46 Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 93. 47 Ibid. 48 Holenstein, Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language, 131. 49 Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, 26. 50 Holenstein, Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language, 132 (quote); Groves, “Markedness,” 385. 51 Holenstein, Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language, 135–​36. 52 A typical example of the consequences of inattention to the opposition marked/​ unmarked can be taken from Jan Soggin, “Abraham and the Eastern Kings,” 287. After stating that “in v. 13 Abraham is called hāʻibrî, which seems to mean here nothing more than ‘descended from ʻēber’ (Gen 10:24 and 11:16),” he notes that “this qualification is unique in the patriarchal traditions and should not be linked, therefore, with ethnic movements and social upheavals in the second millennium,” yet he fails to realize that the very fact of the qualification’s

140 The Metatext

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54

55 56

“uniqueness” is what marks the term. It is thus imperative to investigate the term hāʻibrî, “the Hebrew,” further. The present study, in contrast, sees an apposite and extremely close connection between hāʻibrî and maʻabar (“passage”) or laʻabor (“to pass”; “cross over”). Of course, one must concurrently see, as does the present study, that Abraham has not only traveled from one land to another; far more important is his inner “passage” from a narrow consciousness to one that allows God in, a “crossing over” to a vastly expanded state of consciousness. It may be objected that “God” with a capitalized first letter is also a marked term, and I agree. However, “God” is marking something very different from either YHWH or Elohim. See Douglas’s Jacob’s Tears and Thinking in Circles. Adele Berlin’s Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism, an important attempt by a biblical scholar to tackle the subject of biblical parallelism, has essentially focused on linguistics while insisting that it “serve[s]‌the poetic function” (130, passim) in the Jakobsonian sense. Yet, it is the literary (as opposed to the linguistic) that most profoundly “serves” the poetic function, and the literary, in the sense being discussed in the present chapter, is almost totally absent in Berlin’s book. Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 100. Ibid., 99. Jakobson describes the phenomenon of parallelism (which he claims is “well known from Biblical versification” (101) as follows: There is a system of steady correspondences in composition and order of elements on many different levels: syntactic constructions, grammatical forms and grammatical categories, lexical synonyms and total lexical identities, and finally combinations of sounds and prosodic schemes. This system confers upon the lines connected through parallelism both clear uniformity and great diversity. Against the background of the integral matrix, the effect of the variations of phonic, grammatical, and lexical forms and meanings appear[s]‌ particularly eloquent. (103) He adds that parallelism confers particular importance on each similarity and on each contrast. One experiences the link between the external form and the signification. The perception of similarities and contiguities within the couplet united by parallelism leads automatically to the need to find an answer to the unconscious questions: what links the two lines? Is it an association by similarity or by contrast? Or is it an association through contiguity, and, if so, is it a contiguity in time or in space? All of which leads finally to the essential question for the comprehension of the verse: what is the hierarchical relation between the parallel units? … This rich orchestration of parts and of the whole should put to rest once and for all the empty remarks about the poverty and monotony of systems of parallelism in verse. (103–​4)

57 Douglas, Jacob’s Tears, 113. 58 Ibid., 115. 59 Douglas also discusses the meaning of rabbinical exegesis in light of her theme of parallelism discovered in the Hebrew Bible: “The early rabbis in the first

The Sôd as Poiesis  141 century had an elaborate technique of interpretation based on parallelism, but their prime concern was not to discover the original meaning of a text, but to exploit its implications” (Douglas, Jacob’s Tears, 118–​19; emphasis added). Like many other evaluators of the rabbinical method, such as Neusner in his 1996 essay “Varieties of Judaism in the Formative Age” and Fishbane in The Garments of Torah, Douglas determines, vis-​à-​vis the rabbinical approach, that: instead of the task of decoding the original writer’s style, the latter commentator is encouraged to display his own ingenuity. Freely seeking connections between words and phrases in the original manuscript, the exegete makes a new composition parallel to the first. This peculiar method in itself accounts for some of the loss of the meanings originally written into the Pentateuch by the redactors. … The objective is not to make a textual analysis of the original composition itself[;]‌it is a meditation on divine things, a midrash. … The new reading shatters the world and presents the shaken image through a kaleidoscope. This method of reading rests on an essentially arbitrary principle: the free selection of the second, the “intersecting verse,” depends on the commentator, and in default of clues in the text, the meaning alleged to be “deeper” will generally be a moral axiom. It would be a fine method for developing pious analogies—​very good for devotional reading, but useless for revealing what the original texts were about. (Douglas, Jacob’s Tears, 119–​20; emphasis added) 60 Douglas, Thinking in Circles, 12. 61 Ibid., 13 (emphasis added). 62 Ibid., 13. 63 Compare Mary Douglas’s discussion in Thinking in Circles (139ff) of the “Rubbish Theory” and its application for our own times. 64 Compare, e.g., Douglas’s view: Why is it important to know the construction [of a text]? This leads to another point: in a ring composition the meaning is located in the middle. A reader who reads a ring as if it were a straight linear composition will miss the meaning. Surely that matters! The text is seriously misunderstood, the composition is classed as lacking in syntax, and the author dismissed with disdain. Surely, misrepresentation does matter. (Douglas, Thinking in Circles, x) 65 Douglas, Thinking in Circles, xiv. Milgrom’s diagram originally appeared in Milgrom, JPS Torah Commentary, xix, and was reprinted in Douglas, Thinking in Circles, xiv, as figure I. 66 I note here that in developing such a “theological structure,” Milgrom finds it necessary to speak of the Hexateuch (as opposed to the Pentateuch), which includes the Book of Joshua. 67 Douglas, Thinking in Circles, 15. 68 The format is derived from Robert Murray’s unpublished lecture notes. Douglas, Thinking in Circles, 151n34. 69 As noted by Hanks, “Bakhtin observed that the parallelistic style tends to arise in discourse in which there is dialogue with the reader (covert or overt) (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1985[1928]:95–​96)” (Hanks, “Discourse Genres in a Theory of

142 The Metatext Practice,” 681). We can thus see here another indication of the absence today of a true readerly dialogue with the Pentateuchal text. 70 As pointed out by Jakobson, in prose[,]‌semantic units differing in extent play the primary role in organizing parallel structures. In this case, the parallelism of units connected by similarity, contrast, or contiguity actively influences the composition of the plot, the characterization of the subjects and objects of the action, and the sequence of themes in the narrative. (Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 107; emphasis added) 71 Compare Ducrot and Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, 185–​86, on the term “parallelism” suggesting symmetry. 72 Compare Douglas, Jacob’s Tears; Fishbane, Garments of Torah; Fishbane, Exegetical Imagination; Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking; Neusner, Self-​Fulfilling Prophecy; Neusner, “Varieties of Judaism in the Formative Age”; and Zevit, “From Judaism to Biblical Religion and Back Again.” 73 As Richard Gray observes apropos of Jungian notions, “the self mediate[s]‌ a superordinate reality to which it and the whole of the material universe [are] equally bound and from which both emerged” (Gray, Archetypal Explorations, 13). The self of an Esau mediates a limited superordinate reality that is dramatically expanded by a self of a Jacob (symbolized by him becoming “Israel”).

6 A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch Israel’s Universe of Discourse; a Replica of the Torah; Acquiring an Apposite Research Method

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch Resuming the still mostly provisional tracking of the Sôd that began in earlier chapters, this time in order to develop the necessary discourse apparati, terminology, and approaches, this chapter presents what it proposes as a theoretical model of the Pentateuch. The model aims to encapsulate the full scope of the structural dynamics within the text in question, as it endeavors to include most if not all of the many highly pertinent and crucial aspects and elements of the breathtaking complexity that the Pentateuchal text entails, and warrants (Figure 6.2). A question may be posed, however: Why go through this fascinating but taxing exercise? After all, this book’s stated aim is to ascertain whether any such thing as an embedded and concealed “second-​channel” narrative strand is really present within the Pentateuch. The answer is that it is to that very end that a model of the Pentateuchal text has been constructed, so that if a second-​ channel narrative strand does exist, the model’s key features would furnish this elusive strand’s attendant elements and characteristics. And once we have these elements and characteristics of a second-​channel narrative, we should be in a position to develop a suitable research strategy as well as the all-​important research method that will enable us to actually search for such a second channel—​with answers to the research questions that will be forthcoming from the Pentateuchal text itself. I will be progressively unpacking the aspects and perspectives incorporated into the proposed theoretical model of the Pentateuch. The aim here is not only to conceptualize those textual foci and vortices that would carry, with all the necessary potency and urgency, the conjectured esoteric second channel—​if it should be present in this text. An equally important objective is to discover, through the maze of emerging conceptual and perspectival complexity, a research method that will offer a plausible and compelling manner of demonstrating the very presence of this invisible-​to-​the-​naked-​eye-​of-​a-​ noninitiated-​reader narrative. This research method, as we shall see, entails “pointers,” “locators,” and “coordinates” specially formulated and designed DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-9

144 The Metatext

COVENANTAL RELATIONS WITH THE “ABSOLUTE OTHER”

Community-wide

Individual Individual observance: – Sabbath & Holy Days – Dietary Laws – Temple Pilgrimages – Personal Sacrificial Offerings

Temple Cult Holiday Cycle Pentateuchal text as: – Witness – Guide / Law EXOTERIC

EXOTERIC

ESOTERIC

ESOTERIC

Community-wide

Individual

Core Group of Initiate-Priests:

– Self-YHWH encounters The Who The Why

– Office of the High Priest

– Induction methods The What The Where The How The When

– Temple Cult Maintenance – Production of Cultic Laws, Rituals, & Texts – Initiatory Rites & Training of Priests

– Overall aims The Whereto

– Relations with Political Powers & Cultural Elites PENTATEUCHAL “UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE”

Figure 6.1 The Pentateuchal “universe of discourse.”

as part of this study to enable searching and locating the relevant data and deriving consequent insights and comprehensions. The multiple orientations and schemes that made possible the development of a theoretical model of the Pentateuch were listed first in Chapter 5. Here, we will continue unpacking them. Two additional cogent and useful perspectives, which include Habermas’s four “communicative actions”—​ dramaturgical, teleological, norm-​conformative, and discursive—​as well as the mimetic, diegetical, and diatactical planes of the Pentateuchal text, are marked up in Figure 6.2 for completeness but will not be entered into due to limitations of space.1

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  145

Figure 6.2 A theoretical model of the Pentateuch’s systemic structures and functions.

Jakobson’s Model of Literary Communication (continued) Second, I turn once again to Jakobson’s factors and functions of communication that a literary text—​as opposed to, say, a car manual or a treatise on some medical or scientific subject—​necessarily possesses. It must possess these factors and functions if it is to carry the meaning intended by a sender

146 The Metatext of the communication, that is, the author of the literary work, to the intended recipients of the communication. These factors and their associated functions are reproduced here again, this time in a manner different from the iconic form given to them by Roman Jakobson (see Figure 4.1). They are: A D D R ES S EE :

Conative function Emotive function C O N T EX T : Referential function MES S AGE : Poetic function C O D E : Metalingual function C O N TAC T : Phatic function A D D R ES S ER :

These factor/​functions, as they pertain to the Pentateuchal text, have of course been studied previously by investigators; if anything, they’ve been scrutinized in unparalleled detail. However, all this effort was extended solely apropos of the highly visible and decidedly obvious literal narration of and within the text in question. With the exception of the CO NTAC T /​phatic function—​pertaining to the actual conduit of transmission by way of which the imparted communication is being carried (here, the Pentateuchal text itself)—​all of the other factor/​functions, as we shall see, will be dramatically different if the author is communicating through the medium of the very same text a separate array of information to a specific addressee. If one scrutinizes Jakobson’s model of verbal communication, it would seem that the conventional—​ that is, either in biblical studies or literary studies—​figure/​ground mapping of the Pentateuchal text, while apparently accounting for all of the six Jakobsonian factors/​functions, as indeed it must in accordance with Jakobson’s conception, is at the same time oblivious to no less than five of these factor/​functions that can be assumed to pertain to the Sôd stratum. What is typically missing from the interpretive accounts of the Pentateuchal text are the following alternative or additional factor/​functions, or those that would pertain to the second-​channel Sôd stratum within the unique, “two-​ channel” construction. I will assume that this text’s authors employ a deliberately misdirecting mimetic narrative, with its conventional C OD E , C ON T E XT, A D D R ES S EE ’s conative function, the conventional M E SSAG E ’s poetic function, and the conventional ADDRES S ER ’s emotive function. These conventional factor/​functions are set up as “attractors” designed to siphon off the reader’s attention toward the first, or literal, channel and away from the text’s esoteric second channel. The Pentateuchal text, however, incorporates a second set of Jakobsonian factors and functions. The only factor that remains the same in both sets, again, is the CO NTAC T (phatic function), which in both cases is the Pentateuchal text as an entity itself. As such, then, the phatic function does not pertain to any of the continua that the text in question supports; rather, the s-​C ONTACT itself supports all of them, as the enabler of their very existence.

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  147 As Jakobson succinctly formulates his distinctions: The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (“referent” in another, somewhat ambiguous nomenclature), seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication.2 I shall mark throughout this book the factor/​functions pertaining to the Sôd by adding the prefix “s” to them (sometimes also italicized for emphasis). We will review most of the Jakobsonian s-​factors and their related functions further on, turning first to consider further the semiotic tripartite designations of “meaning’s” three aspects (signifier, signified, and referent); Husserl’s tripartite noetic-​noematic-​hyletic framework; and notions of “ground” (Langacker) and semantic “field” (Prieto). A Husserlian Reading of the Pentateuch (continued) Third, let’s reiterate that a key conceptual lens that this study imposes on its proposed examination of the Pentateuchal text is the Husserlian triadic division of an “act of consciousness,” namely, the so-​called hyletic-​noetic-​ noematic framework. The noesis of the Pentateuchal text, that is, its “act of meaning itself ” or “the meaning-​giving element of the act,” is what the present study identifies with the conjectured esoteric Sôd stratum within the text itself.3 It is thus excluding the noematic and hyletic issues that are being dealt with separately as, for example, “the esoteric content and meaning of Israelite cultic religion” and “archaic Israelite cultic mysticism,” in that order. The Question of Grounds Fourth, I turn to the subject of figure-​ground dynamics. As Frank Brisard describes it, incorporating Langacker’s cognitive-​ linguistic approach, “Typical of grounding predications is that the conceptual relationship which they specify is left ‘offstage’ or ‘unprofiled,’ in contrast with some of the more ‘objective’ deictic expressions in lexicon and grammar (such as I, here, or now).”4 Such an underlying, overarching “ground” in the Hebraic tradition would be the conjectured system of esoteric induction procedures leading into mystical states—​called the Sôd in this study—​and this ground, moreover, is assumed to be the treasured inner-​core mystical-​initiatory praxis of the ancient Israelite tradition and the impetus behind the construction of the Pentateuchal text. Thus, our efforts from this point onward will focus on

148 The Metatext foregrounding and highlighting this “offstage” ground. We will attempt to draw the latter out onto the “main stage” of research and scrutiny, in effect turning the ground into the “figure,” or the focal and now-​visible strata of our text. This will be accomplished, first, through developing a suitable methodology for a procedure that reverses deeply ingrained traditional figure/​ground roles and is customized for the unique structure of the Pentateuchal text. This methodology will then be used in subsequent chapters to conduct textual research designed to yield the data required to either confirm or disprove the study’s main thesis. The problem before the compilers was, hence, how to embed some, or at least the essence of, this information—​while simultaneously concealing and revealing it. In part, the solution was, as will be seen later, to construct whole large sections of the Pentateuch as parabolic projections of the ground, with the latter becoming the source domain, while the visible or “surface” mimetic narratives would be the target domains. Would we be able to foreground and identify any specific connections between the two domains? This would be critical for the question of the validity of the study’s main conjecture—​the existence of a concealed mystical stratum. In this regard, Brisard points out that “the act of grounding is not one that exhibits a referential character per se. Rather, it builds upon an already presupposed act of reference as contained within the profiled portion of a predication and, in a way, qualifies a designated referent’s relation to the physical, mental, or social world that is at issue at a given moment in discourse.”5 This, then, is the “noetic” aspect of the recovery of the grounded source domain.6 However, that grounding predications “never indicate … referents as such, or only schematically,” as stated by Brisard, is not necessarily the case vis-​à-​vis the Sôd.7 As we shall see, some grounding predications, often quite unexpectedly, may involve precise referents, if not indicating the entirety of a particular issue or object under (the concealed) consideration, then at least to some crucial aspect of it.8 With this understood, how should one attempt to find the way to the all-​ important ground, the source domain? If “all the forms used in conjunction with each other function in various ways to enact and to specify the overall discourse event,” where can one begin such a recovery of the ground that, in the present study, might be recognized as the Sôd?9 In fact, we began this process in Chapter 5, where one type of a semiotic form, the allegory in the form of parabolic projection, was posited as accounting for some of the most memorable and critical narratives of the Pentateuchal text, namely, the Esau-​Jacob and Abraham/​Sarah–​Isaac/​Rebekkah cycles (the latter involving the wife/​ sister substitutions). This was understood, however, as only a partial recovery of the concealed stratum, a limited recovery that, moreover, is conditional and admittedly only somewhat helpful without the other, more complex, and difficult aspects of the Sôd yet to be discussed. The diagram of the Pentateuchal model’s systemic structures and functions (Figure 6.2) features, however, no fewer than four distinct grounds that I’ve

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  149 designated as follows: (1) supra-​ground; (2) meta-​ground; (3) hypo-​ground; and finally, (4) the conventional ground. In a typical text, to be sure, one speaks only about one ground, which is normally counterpoised with what is called “figure” or focal object(s) or event(s) that are foregrounded. However, the Pentateuchal text is not a typical text, never more so than after the introduction of the present study’s thesis of an embedded noetic stratum within it. What is meant by (4) above is the conventionally discussed “ground” that would be expected in a typical reading of the Pentateuch, namely, its conventional context for the main mimetic and ritual activities described in this text. Within biblical studies, for example, or in a New Historicist account, the context is one that offers a sociological, cultural, linguistic, theological, archaeological, historical, or related type of background explanation, while the more traditional approaches scrutinize the descriptions of the Temple cultic activities and the great mimetic cycles of the Pentateuch. The typical aim in soliciting such “background information” is to shed light, via support derived from this kind of context, onto what is so strongly foregrounded, namely, what Figure 6.1 names “Sites of Memory” (e.g., the patriarchal cycles, Egyptian slavery, Exodus, and the Conquest) and “Exoteric Worship of YHWH” (the Temple cultic practice and writing and redaction of the Pentateuchal text). In contrast, the three additional esoteric grounds proposed here—​supra-​ ground, meta-​ ground, and hypo-​ ground—​ all relate to the conjectured concealed esoteric stratum and its putative origin in the esoteric core-​ knowledge initiatory practices of the ancient Israelite religious tradition. As grounds, they all specify “conceptual relationship[s that are] left ‘offstage’ or ‘unprofiled,’ ” as worded by Brisard above. Thus, they would have to be “moved to the center stage” and “profiled,” if we wish to determine what they concern. We need to clearly distinguish the ways in which they differ from one another.

The s-​C O DE , the s-​A D D RESSEE , the AD D RESSER , the s-​C ONTEXT Components of the s-​C ODE : Semantic Fields Fifth, I will now resume—​having covered already the poetic function in Chapter 5—​consideration of the remaining factor/​functions of the Sôd, in terms of how they are positioned and reflected within the three continua of Sôd’s “worlds of meaning.” I begin with the s-​C OD E (metalingual function), then discuss the s-​A DDRES S EE , the A DDRES S ER , and, finally, the s-​C ON T E XT , with its all-​important referential function. It was Roman Jakobson who “proposed to study language as a code,” and the metalingual function was defined by him “in terms of translation between codes.”10 More broadly, Luis Prieto has proposed that “the code which is used in a semiotic act is that semiotic structure on which the sender’s and receiver’s knowledge of the signals is based.”11 As Winfried Nöth relates, “In Prieto’s

150 The Metatext definition, codes consist of correlations between two ‘universes of discourse,’ called the semantic field (the field of signifiers) and the noetic field (that of signifieds).”12 The code that is usually or conventionally assumed to be operative in the Pentateuchal text is largely confined to the surface narrative’s lexical, semantic, and syntactic domains. In contrast, the conjectured second-​channel Sôd stratum is being built up by way of a separate and distinct s-​C OD E and its associated metalingual function, entailing a purposeful and elaborate literary construction. Indeed, this study assumes that it is the s-​C OD E that takes priority and guides the subservient-​to-​it conventual C OD E of the literal, or surface, mimetic narration within the Pentateuch. The Sôd thus has not only a triple set of CONTEX TS —​as Setting, Topic, and Object—​in turn consisting of three grounds (meta-​, supra-​, and hypo-​ground). The Sôd is also a code—​ the s-​C O DE —​in accordance with which the Pentateuch has been constructed (though certainly not a code in a sense of a cipher). The present study adapts Prieto’s notion of code as “fields” of signifiers and signifieds and their correlations. However, because we are dealing with two very different sets of signifiers due to the conjectured “double-​channel” structural makeup of the Pentateuchal text, our breakdown of code fields would be as follows: (1) “Ostensive,” or semantic, referential fields (literal signifiers, signifieds, and referents, all related to the literal, or first-​channel narration) (2) Noetic inferential field (the field of s-​Signifiers) (3) Noematic conferential field (the field of s-​Signifieds) (4) Hyletic deferential field (the field of s-​Referents) The hypo-​ground of the Sôd stratum is being assigned to the realm of noesis per se, namely, the noetic-​inferential continuum. And as we can see in Figure 6.2, this noetic realm consists of the s-​A D D RE SSE E (or the initiate-​ reader who is able to divest him-​or herself from the mimetic power of the ostensive narratives); the s-​C ODE ; one of the three types of s-​C ON T E XT , specifically the s-​S ETTI NG ; and the s-​M ES S AGE , or the poetic function, which was considered in Chapter 5. We shall consider them all as being fully and entirely noetic; that is, they all contribute to the structure of the Sôd (as it is expressed de dicto, or “as written.”13 Codes are not only correlations but also constraints.14 In the case of literature, the constraints are doubled: “Literature illustrates the imposition of a second code on a language (for example, the formal constraints of a poetry or the narrative).”15 In contrast with the code, the poetic message is “the total information communicated by an utterance in given circumstances.”16 As Jakobson notes, “A message sent by its addresser must be adequately perceived by its receiver. Any message is encoded by its sender and is to be decoded by its addressee. The more closely the addressee approximates the code used by the addresser, the higher is the amount of information obtained.”17

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  151 The A D D R E S S EE of the Sôd Regarding the intended ADDRESSEE ’s conative function, this function refers to “expressing endeavor or effort” (as defined at www.dic​tion​ary.com), perhaps expressing the idea of a discriminating effort involved; simply put in our case, there are here two different ADDRESSEES intended and thus the effort required. On the one hand are those who can resist being carried along by the deliberately amplified power of the surface narratives and thus are able to perceive the “second channel” of the esoteric-​noetic stratum (the s-​A DDRESSEE ). On the other hand are the vast majority of readers, who are unable to do this, due to not being properly sensitized via initiatory, mystical experiences germane to the ancient Hebraic cultic religion. The conjectured s-​A DDRESSEE , to be addressed on the Sôd level of the Pentateuch, must be situated not at the conventional “ground” but either at the hypo-​ ground—​ the noetic Sôd of the textual signifier—​or even at the meta-​ground of the hyletic experiences of the mysterium tremendum. It is the former, however, the noetic hypo-​ground, where this study—​being an s-​A DDRESSEE itself—​must be situated. The noetic hypo-​ ground is the Sôd’s “signifier,” or its textual expression, even if it is camouflaged; it is nevertheless something more tangible than the more elusive Sôd’s hyletic “object.” The latter’s overwhelming significance and meaning is deferred; it must be inferred via the signifier and a process called in this study “deferentiality.” The A D D R E S S ER : Pentateuchal Authors The s-​A D D R ES S ER ’s emotive function (that is, a referencing “pertaining to emotion,” as defined at www.dic​tion​ary.com), in accordance with this study’s thesis, is the phenomenological ground of the ancient Israelite cultic religion and civilization, namely, the mysterium tremendum actuality of the God of Israel; the study names this ground “meta-​ground.” The s-​A D D RE SSE R is collectively the putative “compilers” or authors of the Pentateuchal text, conjectured by this study as being the top-​level priests of the First Temple. This factor and the related s-​emotive function will remain largely unexplored in the present study since it is located at the meta-​ground and thus outside the study’s scope (which is limited to establishing, as conclusively as the Pentateuchal text allows, the existence within it of a second-​channel esoteric narrative and to ascertaining its nature). Rethinking Context and the Referential Function Dell Hymes posits two separate referential functions: one “referential” proper, the other “contextual (situational).”18 He pairs the referential function with what he calls the “topic” and identifies the “contextual” function with the “setting (scene, situation).”19 This dichotomous distinction, while from the standpoint of the present study not quite enough (as we shall see presently),

152 The Metatext becomes a decisive feature in this study’s decision to opt for a tripartite division of the Sôd’s C ONTEX T . The present study is proposing just such an expanded notion of the s-​C O NTEX T ; specifically, as can be seen in Figure 5.1, I am distinguishing between three types of contexts apropos of the Sôd stratum: (1) s-​C O N T EX T 1 =​s-​S ETTI NG (inferential function) (2) s-​C O N T EX T 2 =​s-​T O PI C (conferential function) (3) s-​C O N T EX T 3 =​s-​O BJ ECT (deferential function)20 These three contexts are associated with specific grounds, and, through their respective grounds, they also partner with the s-​C OD E through “fields” of “universes of discourse.”21 The term “OBJ E C T ” above is borrowed from Peirce’s designation of the Referent (see Figure 5.2); “SE T T I N G ” and “T OP I C ” are adapted from Hymes’s “Ethnography of Speaking,” as cited above. Finally, the terms “conferentiality” and “deferentiality” are being introduced here to account for the different referentialities of the no fewer than four different contexts now seen as being co-​present in the Pentateuch (the fourth context’s referentiality is related to the literal reading of the Pentateuch). We thus have the s-​C O NTEX T being split into three—​the s-​S E T T I N G , s-​T OP I C , and s-​O B J EC T —​and relate these three distinct contexts, respectively, to the noesis of the Sôd, its noema, and its hyle. In turn, these three Sôd contexts embody the inferential, conferential, and deferential semantic fields, respectively (as well as the three grounds: the hypo-​ground of the SE T T I N G ; the supra-​ground of the TO P IC ; and the meta-​ground of the OBJ E C T (see Figure 5.1). It is at this point that the notion of reference, as well as its fundamental distinction from a meaning that a reference may simultaneously carry, emerges as the first basic quandary pertaining to the communicative stakes associated with a discourse. The problem is that often the reference itself is seen as its very meaning. This, however, is a fallacy punishable by the failure to be on the receiving end of the communicated meaning. A forceful contrast between reference and meaning is illustrated by Umberto Eco in the following exchange, featuring a talking computer eponymously named Charles Sanders Personal (a thinly disguised stand-​in for the philosopher and semiotician C. S. Peirce): Smith [Dr. Smith, Dept. of Cognitive Sciences of Svalbards University] –​There are cases in which the grammatical structure of a sentence is determined by its referent. CSP [Charles Sanders Personal, Antipodean Computer] –​Pardon? Smith –​If I say it eats meat, then you understand that it must be a living being but not a human being. This living being is the referent of my sentence, not its meaning. … CSP –​First of all, on this planet nobody utters it eats meat out of context. They would say so only in the course of a longer discourse. … Obviously

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  153 people on this planet frequently use sentences in order to say that something is the case. However, in order to use a sentence referentially you must grasp its meaning, and in the process of grasping the meaning of it eats meat the use of it depends on a previous interpretation, not necessarily on a referent. Suppose that a child, let us say, Jane, indicates a toy and utters that he eats meat. By inference, I interpret that Jane thinks that toys are living creatures. Thus I refer he to what I suppose is meant by Jane.22 “Believe me,” intimates Charles Sanders Personal a bit later, “it is very difficult for many of them to dissociate meaning from reference.”23 As the above passage reveals, the difficulty is tied to the question of context, or contexts. Indeed, as described by Bernard Baars: Whenever we try to learn something before we have the knowledge needed to make sense of the material, we may find ourselves interpreting it in the wrong context. … A major point is to realize that our notion of “fixedness” depends critically on having an outside point of view in which the mistake is a mistake. … Thus the remarkable ability of one stream of speech to capture our conscious experience to the exclusion of any other looks like a contextual fixedness effect. … When there is potentially conscious input, but the right context is not brought to bear on it, it does not become conscious. … Only a change in the fixating context, or giving up on the task, can release us from fixedness.24 But this process of making sense is still more complicated than that. Jay Lampert frames it thus: The content of an act of consciousness cannot be named without being contextualized, cannot be contextualized without passing through ordered perspectives, cannot be viewed in perspective without referring forwards to a limit-​point, and cannot refer forward to a limit point without being a backward referent and in turn referring backwards and then forwards to the processes of its own history.25 Meir Sternberg suggests how these seemingly discouraging considerations might pertain to biblical exegesis: For all the exertions of biblical linguists, the quality and range of the linguistics available do not come up to standard. Apart from everything else, they labor under the triple disadvantage of having to derive a language system from a small closed corpus largely governed by artistic norms of which microlinguists have little awareness and even less knowledge. Where do the rules of language end and the conventions of discourse begin? … When does the code operate and when the context? … These and

154 The Metatext other cruxes await systematic exploration in terms that still have the ring of a paradox: a context-​sensitive linguistics.26 The “context-​sensitive linguistics” that Sternberg invokes is one way to describe the backdrop to the approach that the present study of the Pentateuch is undertaking. “Meaning” will be emerging as part of “contextual integration and building up of relationships between semiotic forms,” in Paul Thibault’s pithy phrase.27 And, as he adds elsewhere, “All semiotic forms are indexical when deployed in some context.”28

“Footprints” of the Sôd: Deictic Inferentiality, Connotational “Conferentiality,” and Denotational “Deferentiality” I have applied earlier the three Husserlian aspects of the intentional act that is the Pentateuchal text—​its hyle, the noesis, and the noema—​and correlated them with the three aspects of a sign. In consequence, the conjectured esoteric stratum is itself here seen as a single “sign” consisting of the sign’s “referent,” or “object,” its signifier, and its signified, respectively. Next, we must determine how to go about gathering or otherwise selectively foregrounding data from the text that relate—​separately and specifically—​to each of the three grounds. It is to this task that I now turn. Deixis as Access Since we are discussing a “sign” that might represent the conjectured embedded stratum within or as part of a fully “visible” or “surface” text, the following considerations must also be taken into account: (1) The potential for reference can be expected to exist only with regard to the apparent, visible textual material, with its semantic-​representational texture—​and not vis-​à-​vis the Sôd stratum—​ because anything not reflected in the text’s lexico-​grammatical semantics can only aspire to an inferential status.29 (2) Since even the “expression,” or the signifier of the Sôd stratum itself—​ normally the only thing quite visible as an expression—​is of a concealed nature, it then must also be somehow wrested from the Pentateuchal text. What is deixis? The terms “indexicality” and “deixis” are “very closely connected,” both deriving from semiotics: [Indexicality and deixis] are of course very closely connected. Peirce’s term “index” is but one of a set of grammatical and philosophical terms, traditional and modern, all of which are based, in one way or another, upon the notion of pointing: “deixis,” “demonstrative,” “ostension,” etc. Bühler (1934), to whom we are indebted for the modern employment of

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  155 the term “deixis,” draws a general distinction between pointing words (Zeigwörter) and naming words (Nennwörter), calling the former signals and the latter symbols.30 Deixis “orients us within a situation without calling attention to itself ”: Deixis is not limited to a few selected words such as I, you, and this. It is also, as defined by Peirce (Buchler 1955) in his description of the same phenomenon, the function that connects all language use to situations. … Revzin (1974), in an essay on the possible origins of language, called deixis “the primordial function of gesture” (p. 18) and found in deictic signals “the concepts conveyed in modern language by words of the type ‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘near,’ ‘distant,’ and by different grammatical categories. … The deictic function is not only a phylogenetic or ontogenetic stage in the development of language, but the continuing prerequisite for all reference” (Lyons 1975). … If [deictic] cues were removed from verbal articulation, they would have to be supplied by inference or other contextual cues. Like zero in mathematics and the dark space in the theater, deixis orients us within a situation without calling attention to itself.”31 The principal difference between indexicality (or deixis) on the one hand and referentiality on the other is depicted in an essay by Paul Bouissac: Semiotic and linguistic traditions have consistently distinguished two categories of verbal as well as nonverbal expressions: indexical ones and referential ones. The former are usually designated by the generic term deixis (a transliteration of the Greek δειξις, which is the nominal form corresponding to the verb δεικνύναι, “to show, to point”); the latter can be considered an instance of the general notion of “representation” or “modeling.”32 As William Hanks argues, “What is basic to deixis is the access (cognitive, perceptual, spatiotemporal) that participants have to objects of reference in the current speech event. Access, like awareness, is an intensional arc from participants to objects, and this inherently orients deixis towards the denotatum.”33 “Access” to grounded meanings of the Sôd can only be inferential since such meanings are, to use Sebastian Shaumyan’s expression, “parasitic on linguistic meaning” and, moreover, involve deliberately concealed material.34 Since I have proposed no fewer than three separate grounds for the Sôd, the present study constructs three types of inferential access: (1) Deictic inferentiality (to access the signifier/​noesis) (2) Connotational conferentiality (to access the signified/​noema) (3) Denotational deferentiality (to access the referent-​object/​hyle)

156 The Metatext Most critical is the first inferential access, since this is how we must locate the Sôd stratum if it exists. The philosopher Gottlob Frege seems to concur when he speaks of the “information that [the referent] gives about the object in order to allow it to be located.”35 This would be in the mode of a noetic signifier, which the study proposes to flesh out by way of “deictic inferentiality.” The second inferential access—​ connotational conferentiality—​ refers to “meaning, that is … the way in which it designates this object”; it is the signified, a noematic conceptualization of the meaning and conceptual content of the esoteric system originating from the early mystical experiences of the founders of the ancient Israelite religious cult.36 Our presumed referent (or object) is the conjectured, intense mystical experiences of dualist-​theistic, or “I-​Thou,” nature. It would need to be confirmed via the proposed third inferential access, namely, the “denotational deferentiality.” Referential Function (continued) Let us delve further into the question of a distinction between the referential and deictic (indexical) functions. According to Carl Follingstad, deictic particles’ “full interpretation relies on the enrichment of the context.”37 Not any kind of context, however. As Follingstad notes, “[David] Crystal defines ‘deixis’ … as ‘features of language which refer directly to the personal, temporal, or locational characteristics of the situation within which an utterance takes place, whose meaning is thus relative to that situation; e.g., now/​then, here/​there, I/​you, this/​that are deictics (“deictic” or exophoric words) … (1996:96).”38 Clearly, in our case we are talking about the situational context of the S E TTIN G , rather than referential determination of the T OP I C , or “content,” as the context. Bouissac speaks of “two human competencies [that] must be distinguished,” one of which, the deictic competency: enables an organism to structure its environment with respect to a self-​ centered perspective and to manipulate signs in relation to this context along the flux of changing interactive situations. The [other, the referential competency] makes it possible for the brain to engage in modeling, i.e., constructing and objectifying in a more or less abstract manner spatial representations irrespectively of the position of the self or in which the self does not occupy a privileged position.39 Elaborating further, Bouissac points out just how different the two modes are: “Reference to space in [the referential] mode is strikingly different from the process involved in deictic behavior. It does not concern space here and now, but a representation of space from which the structuring organism (Homo sapiens sapiens) is twice remote, both as ego and as other, and within which various kinds of relations can be expressed.”40

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  157 In our case of a conjectured concealed stratum, both the referential and deictic (or situational) frameworks are represented, or presented, though not directly—​as they would have been if they were part of the ostensive or “surface” narratives. Instead, they are ascertainable only inferentially. These inferential frameworks—​one situational (deictic), the other a content-​or topic-​ related significatum, that is, the signified—​are dubbed in this study deictic inferentiality and conferentiality, respectively.41 The third triadic element, the designational “object,” likewise requires “identifiers,” or designations to account for the manner of accessing it; this study names it deferentiality. I will first take up the most unexpected (“conferentiality”), then the most interesting one (“deferentiality”), and finally “inferentiality,” perhaps the most important one for this study’s research section and for the proof of the study’s viability. Conferentiality is my neologism that seeks to combine referencing and conferring, or “bringing together.”42 Conferencing refers to such characteristics of the signified as its being the “content” of the sign, or its “sense” or “meaning,” its “concept,” “interpretant,” “idea,” or “significatum” (see Figure 6.1); it also encompasses Bouissac’s notion of referential “modeling,” cited above. Conferentiality will be instrumental in identifying the Sôd’s noema and the associated supra-​ground. In contrast, deferentiality (also deferring, deference, deferral, or deferential) carries both of its apparent semantic meanings: to defer as yielding or submitting to another’s authority or wishes, and to defer as in delaying or postponing something.43 This term’s fit vis-​à-​vis the Sôd’s hyletic “object”—​ that is, its presumed experiential-​mystical provenance, which also carries such designations (see Figure 6.1) as “denotatum” and “thing” or “res”—​is rather close, for several reasons. According to this study’s thesis, the conjectured original, numinous mystical experiences of the founders of the ancient Israelite cultic religion are the hyletic experiences underlying the (also conjectured) Sôd stratum in the Pentateuchal text. In consequence, the former clearly would need to be deferred to—​as the impetus that both directed and constituted the Sôd stratum’s compositional embeddedness into this text. The second semantic meaning of deferring, in the sense of something being delayed or postponed, is equally if not more pertinent. As noted by Anna Whiteside-​St. Leger Lucas, “Derrida’s signs are not so much signs as traces of them. … The gaps between these traces are a free space for the reader to construe as she or he will: a space/​trace forever protean and incomplete, both absent and imminently (immanently) present.”44 Yes, these are but traces in lieu of clear signs (even if I, in the present study, am foregrounding, through an appropriate conceptualization, precisely a sign, in its three aspects). But Derrida, as we can see, misreads here the necessary deferring of meaning, before it can be incorporated back into the meaning’s final closure, for the deferring that means something entirely different: [Derrida’s] deconstruction (or deconstruction theory) exploits aporia by seeking out the break in a given system. He interprets this aporia as

158 The Metatext an “anti-​sign” of the subversive difference. This difference, now known as “différance” (Derrida’s spelling) is, in itself, significant. Defined by Derrida as both differing and deferring, no sign is ever ultimately definable, since meaning is forever deferred.45 Yet, in an act of consciousness, as in an act of communication, a deferring of meaning that does indeed take place is of a very different nature and with very different consequences than the Derridean endless deferral: The objectivity of the results of synthesis is just what is always going on in ongoing consciousness. The struggle for objectivity and the struggle for a stream of consciousness depend on one and the same presupposition, namely that what is present now has been accessible all along. Objectivity is stored in the past. And in so far as objectivity depends on an ideal of epistemic closure which is always deferred, it is the present’s reference backward to the past that is the storehouse of the future’s backward referents.46 Articulating the above was essential in order to grasp the notion of a simultaneous epistemic deferral and eventual, achievable epistemic closure, if we are to properly understand the role of the hyletic “object” of the Sôd stratum I have designated as the meta-​ground. Before deferentiality can be utilized to uncover this object’s full meaning, the other two proposed meanings must first be ascertained and foregrounded. The first is the inferential meaning, whose task would be to establish the (indirect) deictic-​indexical framework, which will become ipso facto, if ascertainable, the sought proof of the existence in the Pentateuchal text of a concealed noetic esoteric stratum (the signifier). The second is conferential meaning, related to the conceptual content of such a concealed stratum (the signified). Next, and critically for the present study, I turn to deictic inferentiality, a notion developed here to help foreground the hypo-​ground of the Sôd’s expression in the Pentateuchal text, that is, its de dicto signifier. Traditionally, as already noted, deixis “enables an organism to structure its environment with respect to a self-​centered perspective and to manipulate signs in relation to this context along the flux of changing interactive situations.”47 Put differently, “deixis is the encoding in utterance of the spatio-​temporal context and subjective experience of the encoder.”48 Yet, if we recall Frege’s notion, previously cited, concerning “the information that [the referent] gives about the object in order to allow it to be located,” the spatiotemporal context alone will not suffice for attempting to locate the noetic-​esoteric stratum within the Pentateuch, as we shall see. Moreover, the “subjective experience of the encoder” Keith Green speaks of is altogether out of place here: the conjectured Sôd stratum is not about a personal-​subjective experience of the encoder—​that is, not about having a so-​called egocentric or self-​referential perspective—​but rather about that of the esoteric protagonist, the would-​be initiate who undergoes a variety of experiential states and is the conjectured focus of the Sôd

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  159 narrative.49 Thus, again, the relevant situational context cannot be limited to spatiotemporal factors; as Keith Green notes, “Following Sperber and Wilson (1995), context can be seen as the set of possibilities which exist in the universe of discourse and situation of utterance for the interpretation of that utterance.”50 Such possibilities vis-​à-​vis situational encoding—​and therefore also vis-​à-​vis its interpretation—​could easily extend from the merely spatiotemporal WHER E and WHEN , to the more discursive W H Y, W H O , or HOW (it is these five, plus W HER ETO and WHAT , that will interest us, as we shall see).

Research Methodology Framework: “Pointers,” “Locators,” and “Identifiers” of the Sôd Discourse Deictics According to John Lyons, “It is now widely accepted that much of the information that is transmitted, or conveyed, in everyday language behavior is implied rather than asserted, and that what is implied (in the broadest sense of ‘imply’) often depends crucially upon the deictic features of the utterance.”51 What concerns us in this study is the question of deixis within a narrative: [Karl Bühler] noticed that what he called the Zeigfeld, the deictic field, operates in three different modes. The first, which he called ad oculos, operates in the here-​and-​now of the speaker’s sensible environment. Thus, when the speaker points to an object and says “this,” those who share his or her sensible environment perceive what he or she is indicating. The second, which he called anaphora, operates on the context of discourse itself considered as a structured environment. When a speaker or writer uses the word “this” to refer to something in his or her own discourse, those who are following the speaker’s words can easily understand what is being referred to. The third mode in which the deictic field can operate is that of imagination and long-​term memory, which Bühler called deixis at phantasma.52 Peter Jones objects to what he calls the “standard account of deixis” that insists on deixis always or necessarily being egocentric.53 Hanks concurs: “In theory at least, one could imagine any number of alternative indexical pivots, logocentric, person-​centric, event-​centric, and so forth. Given that acts of reference are interactively accomplished, a sociocentric approach is certain to be more productive than an egocentric one, even when the speaker is the primary ground of reference.”54 Apropos of the esoteric Pentateuchal narrative stratum, it must be assumed a priori that the “indexical pivot” pertaining to it is indeed not egocentric or subjective as regards the narrative speaker, implied author, and the like, within the surface mimetic narration. Instead, since the latter is the target domain, it must be supposed that in the source domain of the concealed stratum a rather

160 The Metatext different indexical/​deictic center is involved. This is even more likely because we are envisioning a (possibly narrative) material of a different nature and content than that belonging to the target domain. I will now introduce a crucial assumption, to be verified later through the research itself as part of the present study. Since, as has been argued in the preceding chapters, the conjectured concealed noetic stratum within the Pentateuch involves inner-​core knowledge of induction methods presumably enabling access to the tradition’s deity, we shall assume that the concealed stratum pivots, indexically (or deixically), around the physical body of a would-​ be initiate. This assumption will become readily meaningful if one considers both the presumed subject of such esoteric information—​mystical transformation of the participant’s consciousness intended to enable access to the God of Israel—​as well as the mechanisms underlying induction procedures and methods.55 In consequence of such a perspective, the would-​be initiate’s body is at the center of a concealed, and therefore indirect, indexical-​deictic framework that should offer manual-​like clues to a priestly experiencer—​as well as to us, the investigators—​regarding the manner in which he needs to proceed in order to achieve his initiatory aims.56 Deictics: The Prerequisite for All Reference  Next, I turn to the critical part of the research methodology being developed here, namely, the analysis of the “expression” of the Sôd, or its s-​Signifier. The context of this “expression of the Sôd” has been designated as the Setting, or s-​S E TTIN G ; it is related to a contextual “ground,” specifically, the hypo-​ ground. Once again, the notion that it is a “ground” is important, since, according to Brisard’s statement quoted earlier, it is “typical of grounding predications … that the conceptual relationship which they specify is left ‘offstage’ or ‘unprofiled,’ in contrast with some of the more ‘objective’ deictic expressions in lexicon and grammar (such as I, here, or now).” What Brisard has in mind when he mentions “the more ‘objective’ deictic expressions” is that deixis, while usually easily identifiable in any typical discourse, must be replaced by “inference or other contextual cues” when we are confronted with an “offstage” or “unprofiled” situation. As Mary Galbraith frames it, “If [deictic] cues were removed from verbal articulation, they would have to be supplied by inference or other contextual cues.”57 Furthermore, “deixis governs such grammatical and epistemological categories as topicalization (Buchler 1955), orientational mapping (Buchler 1955), unique reference (Gale 1967), narrativity (Bruder, et al. 1986), and induction (Apel 1980).”58 Moreover, while “inference or other contextual cues” must be relied upon in the absence of deictic expressions, they are necessary even when deixis is present, assisting in “context-​creation.”59 By now, as Peter Stockwell remarks, “it is almost impossible to talk plausibly about deixis without considering cognition.”60 To account for the specifics of cognitive deixis, along with the “Deictic Shift Theory,” a similar theory has been proposed under the name Deictic Center Theory.61 This theory “cut[s

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  161 deixis] adrift from its physical moorings in the speech situation” and funnels it “into the purely textual realm of fiction”: “Deictic center (DC) theory attempts to model the consequences of shifting deixis out of the here/​now, I/​ you of face-​to-​face interaction, where it is anchored in real-​world situations, into the purely textual realm of fiction, where deixis is cut adrift from its physical moorings in the speech situation.” Furthermore, it is the “plasticity of deictic centering that forms the basis for the deictic structure of narrative.”62 From the standpoint of the present study, the key element here is that cognitive deixis “opens a conceptual window through which the story world can be glimpsed,” through such “components of the deictic center” as “the WHERE, the WHEN, the WHO, and the WHAT.” The conceptual window “provides the listener/​reader with two shifting foci, an origin and a content perspective.”63 To these perspectives of origin and content that relate to the “surface” narratives of the Pentateuchal text this study adds a second set of focalizing and focalized perspectives, one related to the conjectured esoteric-​ noetic stratum in the Pentateuch. This set would presumably be noticed and accessed by the intended s-​A DDRES S EE through the story’s concealed deictic window. The deictic center of this concealed content will, of course, have its own “components of the deictic center” such as “the WHERE, the WHEN, the WHO, and the WHAT.” The notion of a “deictic center” and its “conceptual window” will be seen in this study from the broader conception of a continuum, whereas the vague designation “components” of the deictic center will be reframed in this study as coordinates of a continuum. Traces of a Disguised Deictic Center How can one find the deictic “traces” that, according to this study’s thesis, must have been deliberately left visible in the Pentateuchal text? Since we cannot expect such traces to be distinguished in a simple deictic manner—​ that is, by the “here,” “there,” and so on—​perhaps they are tied to what Bühler has called “naming words.”64 Further, as Follingstad points out, “there are different types of deixis: person deixis, spatial deixis, temporal deixis, social (status) deixis, and discourse deixis, to name a few.”65 It would seem, upon reflection, that in identifying implied or otherwise noetically camouflaged information, we need to focus on what Follingstad calls “discourse deixis.” What would discourse deictics look like when they were not specified? A point made by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson may be pertinent: “The use of an expression involves reference to what the expression refers to.”66 This “what” of the object referred to arguably contains or can contain much more than what is strictly meant by that term; it potentially also carries such other locative specifics as “where,” “when,” “whereto,” and—​critically for any discourse—​such identifying information as “how,” “why,” or “who.” As Hymes put it, “the cognitive role of speech is not all-​or-​nothing, but a matter of what, where, and when.”67

162 The Metatext Vladimir Alexandrov observes: Anna Karenina is like [a]‌newspaper article in that it refers to a world of individuals, customs, places, events, and the like. But these are placed into a matrix of relations that make them echo each other, repeatedly and complexly, and thus produce multiple additional meanings. … By contrast, the newspaper article will eschew this kind of matrix almost entirely in its attempt to report the simple who, what, when, where, why, and how of events, and any speculation about meanings beyond this will be largely a result of the reader’s own intelligence, knowledge, imagination, or ingenuity. In other words, both the determinacy and polyvalence of artistic discourses are facts, but these are not in essence different from what we find in everyday uses of language. Thus, the quiddity of a literary work is accessible in the same terms as those that apply to the reader’s mundane use of language.68 To state that “the quiddity of a literary work is accessible in the same terms as those that apply to the reader’s mundane use of language,” such as in a newspaper article, is to reduce such a quiddity in a work of literature to a mere skeleton of the narrative or the outline of the plot. The present study, to the contrary, understands this approach not reductively but as an emerging inquiry arriving at three sets of inferential coordinates (in the three posited continua) that at first glance are practically identical to Alexandrov’s “simple who, what, when, where, why, and how of events.” Crucially, however, the linguistic and conceptual forms such as “the What,” “the Where,” and so on, are not identical to the “simple who, what, when, where, why, and how of events”; the difference between them is indicated by the definite article. One of the uses of the definite article is “as a function word before a singular substantivized adjective to indicate an abstract idea,” according the Merriam-​ Webster’s online dictionary; similarly, here “the What,” “the Where,” and so on, indicate abstract notions that are, in our case, an invitation for a discursive-​inferential exploration (rather than indicating a mere skeleton of the essentials of an event, as in a newspaper article). De Dicto: Setting-​Indicative Pointers as Indexical Coordinates of the Noetic-​Inferential Continuum Let us recall the seven key “components” (as Zubin and Hewitt call them) of a concealed deictic center, an implied center that I posit might exist. The present study calls these elements “coordinates.” In the case of the noetic signifier, these are the indexical coordinates of the noetic-​inferential continuum. Here (paraphrasing Alexandrov), the operative code is assumed to be the esoterically conditioned inferential field from which the compilers of the Pentateuch selected their choices of suitable narrative and coded imagery.69 The context is

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  163 the largely parabolic s-​S ETTING , where a coded setting is reflected in the text itself. Finally, the noetic-​inferential continuum’s hypo-​ground, like all grounds, “appears to be about the procedures that allow an interpreter to address such referential concerns on an inferential basis (with locations in space and time as potential physical correlates to the schematic instructions that grounding predications proffer).”70 It is onto this hypo-​ground that the source domain for the noetic signifier is mapped onto the visible or “surface” mimetic narratives. Zubin and Hewitt describe a “conceptual window” of the story world and a deictic center, calling “the components of this center the WHERE, the WHEN, the WHO, and the WHAT”: Deixis is not just a special subcomponent of narrative language, but rather a central structuring framework from which the narrative emerges. … The story is not addressed to the audience in the way conversation or a lecture is; rather, it opens a conceptual window through which the story world can be glimpsed. … Just as a given person is limited in his or her experience of the real world, so the [Deictic Center] provides only a limited current view of the story world, like a moving window establishing a perspective from and through which events in the story world are viewed. The window is deicticly centered in the sense that the current contents of the window presuppose a center in space, time, and character from which events are depicted. We call the components of this center the WHERE, the WHEN, the WHO, and the WHAT. … The window of the deictic center … provides the listener/​reader with two shifting foci, an origin and a content perspective. … The four basic components of the deictic center construct we use to account for deictic tracking in narrative, labeled the WHO, the WHERE, the WHEN, and the WHAT … may have different status at different times in the narrative; all components have current content and a history.71 Crucially, I add three additional coordinates to Zubin and Hewitt’s four “components.” Any narrative, I will argue, needs all seven indexical coordinates for a complete picture, and possibly more than seven. These seven indexical coordinates of the noetic-​inferential continuum of the hypo-​ground (the s-​S ETTIN G ) shall be designated as setting-​indicative pointers. They will be distinguished from the coordinates of the other two continua, the supra-​ ground and the meta-​ground, which will be called content-​communicative locators of the noematic-​ conferential continuum and metacommunicative object identifiers of the hyletic-​deferential continuum, respectively. Thus, this method, in the case of the noetic-​inferential continuum, can be expected to enable research on the study’s thesis, namely, that a concealed stratum exists within the Pentateuchal text. It also becomes the basis for the recovery, from within the noematic-​conferential continuum, of the signified, or the conceptual content, of this stratum, if it exists. Finally, vis-​à-​vis the hyletic-​deferential continuum, this approach should generate a (re)construction of the particulars

164 The Metatext of the conjectured esoteric induction system used for initiation of the Temple priests into the inner-​core mystical experiences and knowledge, again if the concealed stratum exists and it pertains to such “inner-​core” material. It must be emphasized that although the proposed seven interrogatory “coordinates” are identical in all three continua—​namely, the What, the Where, the When, the How, the Whereto, the Why, and the Who—​they obviously are expected to yield very different answers, since their respective spheres of inquiry are confined to the respective continua’s particular semantic fields of the s-​C OD E . Hanks’s explanation invoking a key element of what he calls the “indexical framework”—​namely, the indexical form this—​enables us to peer into “the other side” of the “inferential coordinates”/​indexical framework divide: I am applying the Figure-​Ground dichotomy to the internal semantic structure of individual grammatical forms. A term such as “this” incorporates within its own relational structure both figure (denotatum) and ground (indexical origo). Whereas speakers must choose between perfective and imperfective aspect, or proper vs. common nouns, they do not choose between an indexical and a referential object. Rather, they identify the referential in relation to the indexical.72 “This” is what may well be the answer to the question “What?”—​assuming of course that we identify that which “this” points to. Similarly, “Where?” can yield either “here” or “there”; “When?” can be said to correlate with “now” or “then”; “Who?” may be either “he,” “she,” or “it”; “Whereto?” might be “there” or “here.” The only coordinates from our coordinate set that do not yield any straightforward, simple deictic forms are “Why” and “How,” indicating that a more discursive answer must be sought. However, in a case such as ours—​where the notion of “this” is seen as an emerging construction dependent on and constrained by a specific C ON T E XT /​C OD E /​M E SSAG E continuum—​“this” is not merely a reply to “What?” but is a generative outcome of a sustained, data-​driven investigation attempting an adequate response to the specific “the What” rather than simple “what.” In doing this—​namely, conducting emergence-​ based, generative research and analysis seeking “the What” and the other six coordinates—​one is both enabled and doubly constrained by (1) the particular continuum in which the investigation is conducted; and (2) by the other two continua (since the Husserlian hyletic-​ noetic-​noematic framework is a unified whole). We now have the methodological outline for attempting to answer the following questions: (i) Can we identify textual Pentateuchal data likely to be assigned to the setting-​indicative pointers of the noetic-​inferential continuum and its center that might exist as a conceptual “window” within the s-​S E T T I N G , or the hypo-​ground?

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  165 (ii) Will such data, if available, be ipso facto the validation of the conjectured main thesis of the present study, namely, that the Pentateuchal text contains a “dual-​channel” concealed esoteric stratum? (iii) Will such textual data, if available, be sufficient to offer a platform upon which a reasonably full and accurate account of the embedded information can be derived or constructed? The answers to these questions will be forthcoming in Chapters 7 through 9. De Re: “Content-​Communicative Locators” as Symbolic Coordinates of the Noematic-​Conferential Continuum Here again is John Lyons’s statement about signals and symbols: “Bühler (1934), to whom we are indebted for the modern employment of the term ‘deixis,’ draws a general distinction between pointing words (Zeigwörter) and naming words (Nennwörter), calling the former signals and the latter symbols.” I have utilized this notion of symbolic “naming words” for designating the s-​T O P I C (the noematic Signified; the subject); the latter has been termed the noematic-​conferential continuum, or the supra-​ground. The signaling “pointing words” are conceptualized as the coordinates of the noematic-​ conferential continuum, to be called “content-​communicative locators”; they will be exploited to construct this study’s research method. Again, while the three continua of the Sôd will have the same seven coordinates—​the What, the Where, the When, the How, the Whereto, the Why, and the Who—​there is to be expected a vast difference in the “answers” they will elicit. The three sets of coordinates, besides indicating three different domains, will be seen as necessarily yielding very different data. The reason for this assertion is that the s-​S ETTI NG of the noetic-​inferential continuum concerns the “scene” or “situation” (expected to be reflected in the textual sphere itself), whereas the s-​T OPI C of the noematic-​conferential continuum relates the “theme,” “the subject,” or “the issue.” This is de re—​“of the thing”—​and it involves what I have designated as the “conferential field” of the noematic s-​Signified. The s-​S ETTI NG is about the situation; the s-​T OP I C has to do with the subject. Finally, the hyletic-​deferential continuum of the s-​ OB J E C T, considered next, involves the object or denotation of the Sôd stratum (with the latter seen as a “sign,” as discussed earlier). De Re: “Metacommunicative Object Identifiers” as Iconic Coordinates of the Hyletic-​Deferential Continuum The reverse-​engineering method to be used for reconstituting the hyletic “object” of the conjectured Sôd stratum is thus schematically outlined. What can be said here, still somewhat obscurely or mysteriously, is what Dagfinn Føllesdal states with regard to the “mysterious” Husserlian “determinable X”: “The determinable X has to do with reification, or individuation.”73 Or,

166 The Metatext as W. V. Quine asserts, “I reserve ‘full reification’ and ‘full reference’ for the sophisticated stage where the identity of a body from one time to another can be queried and affirmed or conjectured or denied independently of exact resemblance.”74 A partial reification of the treasured and zealously guarded initiatory system of the ancient Israelite cultic religion, the first step of which is the recovery of the Sôd noetic signifier that is undertaken in Chapter 7, will be attempted in Chapter 9.

Notes 1 Regarding Habermas’s communicative actions, the reader is referred to Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action; and Kohav, Sôd Hypothesis. Apropos of mimetic, diegetical, and diatactical planes, see Genette, Narrative Discourse. As Hayden White explains, Considered as a genre, then, discourse must be analyzed on three levels: that of the description (mimesis) of the “data” found in the field of inquiry being invested or marked out for analysis; that of the argument or narrative (diegesis), running alongside of or interspersed with the descriptive materials; and that on which the combination of these previous two levels is effected (diataxis). The rules which crystallize on this last, or diatactical, level of discourse determine possible objects of discourse, the ways in which description and argument are to be combined, the phases through which the discourse must pass in the process of earning its right of closure, and the modality of the metalogic used to link up the conclusion of the discourse with its inaugurating gestures. (White, Tropics of Discourse, 4–​5) 2 Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 353. 3 Simons, “Meaning and Language,” 123 (emphasis added); Føllesdal, “Thetic Role of Consciousness,” 13. 4 Brisard, “Introduction,” xi–​xii. 5 Ibid., xiv. 6 On the term “noetic,” compare Prieto’s noetic field of signifieds, to be discussed later, and Angus Fletcher’s “noetic character” of hyponoia, which this study evokes vis-​à-​vis its “noetic-​literary” research method. See Prieto, Messages et signaux, 43–​45; and Fletcher, “Allegory in Literary History,” 42. In all other cases, however, it is Husserl’s usage of the term “noetic” that is evoked in the present study. 7 Brisard, “Introduction,” xv. 8 An example would be the previously mentioned enigmatic issue of wells at Gerar, in Genesis, and the number seven persistently associated with them. The “seven,” which is also repeatedly invoked in the Book of Joshua (see Exhibit 7.11, chap. 7), is a specific reference, as will be determined, to the seven chakras in the body of a would-​be initiate. Thus, these passages illustrate my point of the grounding predications (here the seven wells and the conspicuous repeated usage of “seven” during the conquest of Jericho scene), while ostensibly build[ing] upon an already presupposed act of reference as contained within the profiled portion of a predication and, in a way, qualify[ing] a designated

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  167 referent’s relation to the physical, mental, or social world that is at issue at a given moment in discourse. (Brisard, “Introduction,” xiv) The grounding predications at the same time function as precise referents vis-​à-​vis certain crucial aspect of the Sôd’s second-​channel narrative (see ­chapters 8 and 9 for an extended discussion). 9 Brisard, “Introduction,” xv. 10 Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics, 209; Alexandrov, Limits to Interpretation, 44. 11 Prieto, Pertinence et pratique, 129, quoted in Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics, 210. 12 Prieto, Messages et signaux, 43–​45, quoted in Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics, 210. 13 If one transposes Prieto’s “noetic field (that of signifieds)” (Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics, 210) into the Husserlian framework, as I am doing, it becomes, instead, a noematic field of signifieds, “the meaning given in the act” (Føllesdal, “Thetic Role of Consciousness,” 13); whereas Prieto’s “semantic field (the field of signifiers)” is renamed here the noetic field of signifiers. 14 Ducrot and Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, 104; Thibault, “Code,” 126–​27. 15 Ducrot and Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary, 104. 16 Ibid., 29. 17 Jakobson, “Shifters and Verbal Categories,” 386 (emphasis added). As Alexandrov describes it, a listener’s attention to the “metalingual function” is a necessary and to some extent an automatic feature of her focus on the denotative or referential dimension of a speaker’s message. Another way of putting this is that by focusing consciously on the codes utilized in discourse, the listener can discover at least some of the contexts that are essential for understanding the message. (Alexandrov, Limits to Interpretation, 34) 18 Hymes, “Ethnography of Speaking,” 31. 19 Ibid., 25. 20 The term “inferential function,” in the sense used here, is my own, as are the terms “conferential” and “deferential.” 21 This is in the sense used in Prieto, Messages et signaux. 22 Eco, “On Truth,” 51–​52. 23 Ibid., 57. 24 Baars, “Fundamental Role of Context,” 765–​66 (emphasis added). 25 Lampert, Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl’s “Logical Investigations,” 194. 26 Sternberg, Poetics of Biblical Narrative, 21 (emphasis added). 27 Thibault, personal communication with author, 2010. 28 Thibault, Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body, 126. 29 “A singular term is directly referential if it determines an individual that is the propositional content corresponding to that term; a singular term is not directly referential if it determines a propositional content that, together with a set of circumstances, determines an individual” (Miller, “Some Problems in the Theory of Demonstrative Reference,” 71; emphasis added).

168 The Metatext 30 Lyons, “Deixis and Subjectivity,” 106 (emphasis added). “Ostension” is “the attempt to provide a non-​linguistic definition of a term by pointing at something to which it applies” (A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names, s.v. “ostension,” Philosophy Pages, accessed 13 February 2021, www.phil​osop​hypa​ges.com). 31 Galbraith, “Deictic Shift Theory and the Poetics of Involvement in Narrative,” 21–​22, citing Revzin, “From Animal Communication to Human Speech”; and Lyons, “Deixis as the Source of Reference.” 32 Bouissac, “Deixis vs. Modeling in the Phylogeny of Artistic Behavior,” 405. Bouissac explains that the determination of I, you, here, now in the normal use of language varies with each situation, a characteristic that Roman Jakobson … captured by categorizing these linguistic forms by the metaphorical term “shifter,” thus indicating that their content shifts as situations change. By contrast, referentiality applies to those linguistic expressions whose meaning is determined relatively independently from the situations in which they are produced. (ibid.) 33 Hanks, “Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference,” 60 (emphasis added). 34 Shaumyan, “Two Paradigms of Linguistics,” 24. As Frank Brisard notes, the act of grounding is not one that exhibits a referential character per se. Rather, it builds upon an already presupposed act of reference as contained within the profiled portion of a predication and, in a way, qualifies a designated referent’s relation to the physical, mental, or social world that is at issue at a given moment in discourse. … Grounding predications, in other words, tend to set up a path and point out a region in which to look for intended referents, but they never indicate these referents as such, or only schematically. (Brisard, “Introduction,” xiv–​xv; emphasis added) 35 Gottlob Frege quoted in Ducrot and Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, 249 (emphasis added). 36 Ducrot and Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary, 249. 37 Follingstad, Deictic Viewpoint in Biblical Hebrew Text, 134. 38 Ibid., 140, citing Crystal, Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 39 Bouissac, “Deixis vs. Modeling in the Phylogeny of Artistic Behavior,” 412 (emphasis added). 40 Ibid. 41 Significatum is from Morris, “Exiled from Eden.” 42 FreeDictionary.com provides this entry for “conferential”: “Medieval Latin cōnferentia, from Latin cōnferēns, cōnferent-​, present participle of cōnferre, to bring together; see confer.” 43 Compare the following: Quine (1971) has noted that the referent of a deictic expression is not always the demonstratum of the associated demonstration. We point to a gas gauge, for example, in order to show that there is gasoline in the tank. Quine calls this deferred ostension and notes that it occurs very naturally when we have a correspondence in mind between the demonstratum and the referent. (Miller, “Some Problems in the Theory of Demonstrative Reference,” 68, citing Quine, “Inscrutability of Reference”)

A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch  169 44 Whiteside-​St. Leger Lucas, “Sign,” 626–​27. 45 Ibid., 626. 46 Lampert, Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl’s “Logical Investigations,” 187 (emphasis added). 47 Bouissac, “Deixis vs. Modeling in the Phylogeny of Artistic Behavior,” 412 (emphasis added). 48 Green, “Deixis and the Poetic Persona,” 121–​22. 49 As Friedrich Block observes, “In the aesthetic process, there is hence an oscillation between various operation modes: between differing and connecting, designating and meaning, seeing and reading, or self-​referentiality and alloreferentiality” (Block, “Form of the Media, 721; emphasis added). 50 Green, “Deixis and the Poetic Persona,” 125 (emphasis added), citing Sperber and Wilson, Relevance. 51 Lyons, John. “Deixis and Subjectivity,” 109 (emphasis added). 52 Galbraith, “Deictic Shift Theory and the Poetics of Involvement in Narrative,” 23–​24. Unlike Bühler, Peter Stockwell recognizes any number of deictic fields within a literary work: The world of a literary text consists of one or more deictic fields, which are composed of a whole range of expressions[,]‌each of which can be categorized as perceptual, spatial, temporal, relational, textual and compositional in nature. A set of expressions which point to the same deictic center can be said to compose a deictic field. They are usually arranged around a character, narrator or narratee, the relatively central entity-​roles in the text, though of course animals, plants, landscape elements and other objects can also form deictic centers in imaginative literature. (Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 47) 53 Jones, “Philosophical and Theoretical Issues in the Study of Deixis,” 27ff. 54 Hanks, “Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference,” 53. 55 Compare Hollenback, Mysticism; Hunt, “Experiences of Radical Personal Transformation in Mysticism, Religious Conversion, and Psychosis”; Merkur, Mystical Moments and Unitive Thinking; and Wulff, “Mystical Experience.” 56 In Thibault’s opinion “the point about indexicality pivoting around the body is fundamental. This then suggests it is about co-​orientation of bodies in space, time and …? Imagination.” Paul Thibault, personal communication, 2010. Burton Voorhees adds, “AXIOM 1: YOU ONLY HAVE YOUR BODY.” He suggests that by providing the indications of practice, and establishing the particular story, the induction manual produces the frame within which the induced experience is to be cast. It dictates the “set” required of the potential initiate and the “setting” within which experience is interpreted. (Burton Voorhees, personal communication, 2010) 57 Galbraith, “Deictic Shift Theory and the Poetics of Involvement in Narrative,” 22 (emphasis added). 58 Ibid., 23 (emphasis added). For the sources referenced in the quote, see Buchler, Philosophical Writings of Peirce; Gale, “Indexical Signs, Egocentric Particulars, and Token-​Reflexive Words”; Bruder et al., Deictic Centers in Narrative; and Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy.

170 The Metatext 59 Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 46. 60 Ibid. 61 The former is found in Galbraith, “Deictic Shift Theory and the Poetics of Involvement in Narrative”; and Segal, “Narrative Comprehension and the Role of Deictic Shift Theory,” while the latter is from Zubin and Hewitt, “Deictic Center.” 62 Zubin and Hewitt, “Deictic Center,” 130. 63 Ibid., 130–​33. 64 Cited in Lyons, “Deixis and Subjectivity,” 106. Bühler “draws a general distinction between pointing words (Zeigwörter) and naming words (Nennwörter), calling the former signals and the latter symbols” (ibid). 65 Follingstad, Deictic Viewpoint in Biblical Hebrew Text, 140. 66 Sperber and Wilson, “Irony and the Use-​Mention Distinction,” 300, as cited in Follingstad, Deictic Viewpoint in Biblical Hebrew Text, 145 (emphasis added). 67 Hymes, “Ethnography of Speaking,” 19. 68 Alexandrov, Limits to Interpretation, 55–​56 (emphasis added). 69 “Focusing on [linguistic codes] allows one to identify the culturally conditioned semantic fields from which the speaker selects the specific words, phrases, and attendant ideas that constitute that utterance” (Alexandrov, Limits to Interpretation, 35). 70 Brisard, “Introduction,” xvi. 71 Zubin and Hewitt, “Deictic Center,” 130–​33 (emphasis added). 72 Hanks, “Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference,” 62. 73 Føllesdal, “Gödel and Husserl,” 391. 74 Cited in ibid.

Part Three

The Urtext

7 The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier Retrieving the Torah within the Scripture

The Study’s Research Questions Primary Question: Is There a Deliberately Concealed Alternative Narrative in the Pentateuch? The question of the existence of a deliberately concealed alternative narrative in the Pentateuch is a key issue and a subject in and of itself, irrespective of the nature or content of such an additional stratum. From the standpoint of the availability of a suitable method, too—​one that would enable a convincing study associated with strong claims of validity—​focusing on a tangible, specific question is clearly desirable. A conclusive answer to this question will inevitably affect any notion of Pentateuchal or Hexateuchal theory, certainly if the answer is a convincingly positive one. Historically, not only did this question remain unanswered, but even the very notion, while clothed in mystical whispers and hints within the rabbinical lore, if taken seriously, must prompt a fundamental reevaluation and reorientation in biblical studies, as well as in many cognate or otherwise relevant fields.1 Thus, the above question presents itself as an especially worthwhile choice for the role of a central research question of the present study. Secondary Question: Does the Conjectured Concealed Stratum Concern a Mystical Initiation System? Putting the secondary research question another way could be this: “Is It a Narrative of Numinous ‘I-​Thou’ Encounters?” Closely related to the proposed central research question regarding the existence of a concealed alternative narrative within the Pentateuch must be a question linked to what such a narrative could be about. If a researcher were to approach such a research question without a tentative working notion, or supposition, or hypothesis, or any conjecture whatsoever, the research then could justifiably be likened to a proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. No textual method currently known can be efficacious in such a case.2 And so the question, “What could Pentateuch’s concealed narrative possibly be about?” must be addressed at DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-11

174 The Urtext the outset, even if any possible speculation at this stage will then have to be verified via the research itself—​or rejected and replaced by a different explanation that might be more pertinent to the emerging concealed narrative. I shall address this question of a preliminary, tentative, and conjectured thesis apropos of the subject matter of the (also) conjectured concealed stratum in the Pentateuch in the section “Assumptions and Limitations.”

Selecting the Research Method I’d like to begin the all-​important data acquisition section by citing Martin Joos, from his “Semantic Axiom Number One”: Here we focus on one purpose and one device: How to introduce a valiant knight, but without explicitly saying that he was valiant, by inserting just one piece of crucial evidence AND VEILING IT so that unqualified hearers (small children? servants? Yokels? uninstructed foreigners?—​ [Wolfram] could not have been thinking of philologists, of course) will not notice that the narration at this point contains anything significant at all. Such outsiders would later say: “Well, I suppose he was valiant all right, but Wolfram never told us in advance of narrating the man’s next demonstration of valor, now did he?” The answer is that Wolfram never omitted to tell us, right in the initial introduction; and if we or any member of his intended audience didn’t catch him in the act, Wolfram is one-​up on us, like a skilled modern mystery writer.3 The working assumption in our search for relevant-​for-​the-​Sôd data—​that is, the embedded veiled references, albeit mainly figurative and largely inferential ones, that pertain to the esoteric second-​channel narrative within the Pentateuch—​is that such data exist and are deliberately and even visibly placed in front of the reader’s very eyes. This study’s research methodology—​as opposed to its research method—​ has been developed in Chapter 6. It entails the application of three sets of seven deictic coordinates—​the WHAT , the WH E RE , the W H E N , the HOW , the W H E R E TO , the WHY , and the WHO —​in each of the three continua assigned to the putative esoteric stratum within the Pentateuch. The research method, as distinct from this methodology, as we shall see, will be a noetic-​inferential tactical approach devised in the present study. It combines cognitive, semiotic, literary, and phenomenological perspectives, among others. If even an income tax form—​which typically contains, next to preprinted standardized questions, mostly numbers rather than words—​is a text, then the notion of textual analysis, like the question of what constitutes a text, is far from being a simple one or a straightforward one.4 Such a conclusion is reinforced by a wide range of sociological field research approaches, which in one way or another end up as written summaries or reports, thus becoming, in effect, texts. These texts then must be analyzed in some manner to make

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  175 sense of the data presented in textual form, and it is in such a roundabout manner that so-​called textual analysis obtains its raison d’être in the universe of variegated research methods. Survey of Available Textual Research Methods Textual analysis goes about its task by sharing this designation with more than a dozen specific methods. Some, like content analysis or grounded theory, are used in the overwhelming majority cases; others, such as functional pragmatics, whose original German sources, as of this writing, have not even been translated and published in English, are used in very few studies.5 As Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior point out, “the majority of introductions to text analysis reflect the disciplinary traditions of two fields: linguistics and sociology. It is important to recognize this fact because a disciplinary tradition directs the goals of the analysis, the kinds of questions that the analysis addresses, and the kinds of disciplinary conversations that have shaped the approach.”6 Omitted from this description is a discipline that is related to at least some of the potential goals of text analysis, in the case of some texts—​namely, literary criticism or literary studies.7 This appears to be typical for the sociology-​centered method reviews and is thus understandable, but it is more difficult to excuse in surveys that purport to cover all “textual practices.” In contrast, as we shall see, the noetic-​literary textual analysis custom-​developed in this study reflects the disciplinary traditions of several fields other than linguistics and sociology, such as literary studies, esotericism, cognitive science, semiotics, and philosophy (phenomenology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind). Several textual research methods were reviewed before this noetic-​literary method was selected.8 The first was content analysis.9 Next came grounded theory, followed by ethnographic methods.10 The review then turned to Greimasian narrative semiotics and to SYMLOG.11 The last two methods assessed were critical discourse analysis and functional pragmatics.12 Research Method Selected: Customized Noetic-​Literary Textual Analysis Cognitive poetics is a very young discipline and has two distinct trends that emphasize either the “cognitive” or the “poetics” or the literary as the discipline’s focus. The former is represented especially by Reuven Tsur, whose notion of “delayed categorization,” for example, has been adapted and expanded as one of the important theoretical and methodological concerns of this study. The latter trend is well attested to in the works of Peter Stockwell; it focuses, as we shall see below, on the “literary reading” of texts, engaging the literary context.13 This, too, is especially relevant for the study, in that its noetic-​literary research method is closely engaging the specifically literary armature of the Pentateuchal text, discovering that the embeddedness of the Sôd stratum is achieved primarily via the multifarious use of figuration.

176 The Urtext Stockwell writes that “cognitive poetics is not the study of texts alone, nor even specifically the study of literary texts; it is the study of literary reading.”14 He also states: a trivial way of doing cognitive poetics would be simply to take some of the insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, and treat literature as just another piece of data. … In my view, treating literature only as another piece of data would not be cognitive poetics at all. This is simply cognitive linguistics. Insights from that discipline might be very useful for cognitive poetics, but for us the literary context must be primary. … The process of engaging in cognitive poetic analysis offers a raised awareness of certain patterns that might have been subconscious or not even noticed at all.15 Among the categories of “raised awareness of certain patterns” of textual features that became the focus of cognitive poetics’ attention there is a list worth attention.16 Specifically, • • • • • • • • • • •

Figures and grounds17 Prototypes Deixis Narrative Cognitive grammar Conceptual metaphor Scripts and schemas Contextual frames Possible worlds and mental spaces Text worlds Literature as parable18

From the standpoint of the present study, the above list of factors or subjects contributing to the project of cognitive poetics is not nearly complete or adequate. At least one major and perhaps even defining aspect of literary texts is missing from it entirely or at least reflected unsatisfactorily, namely, figuration (even if parables and conceptual metaphors are included there). Another missing issue especially pertinent for us is the question that I will articulate as the “literary means of creation of crucial esoteric meaning.” The entries on conceptual metaphor and “literature as parable,” as we shall see, do not begin to exhaust the crucial, immeasurable role of figuration and, vis-​à-​vis the Pentateuchal text in particular, barely scratch the surface, whether conceptually, thematically, or, most importantly, in terms of the text’s principal message content. Metaphor, whether conceptual or otherwise, and parable, while fully in evidence in the Pentateuch, are dwarfed by the persistent, systematic, and forceful usage of the following major tropes and techniques:

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  177 • • •

Embedding19 Metalepsis20 Personification

These critical omissions must not be seen only as resulting from the scant usage of, for example, personification tropes in modern literary forms and a lack of prestige assigned to such usage by the consensus in literary criticism, following medieval overuse.21 This is despite a convincing defense and even exaltation of personification by someone of the stature of Paul de Man, who called it a “master trope of poetic discourse.”22 According to James Paxson, “Personification is a prime poetic mark of theoretical self-​awareness and maturity, a signal not of the failure of the literary imagination, but of its success and fulfillment.”23 Even more decisive must be the reason that became the subject and thesis of the present study, namely, the conjectured presence of a deliberately concealed, “second-​ channel” esoteric narrative within the Pentateuch; personifications, including substantialization, anthropomorphism, and topification, as we shall see, are the principal literary means of creating crucial esoteric meaning in the Pentateuchal text.24 As a result of these omissions, in addition to the specific, unique requirements of the Pentateuchal text that are not expected to be part of any standard cognitive-​poetic cache of techniques and concepts, this study formulates its own idiosyncratic, noetic-​ literary research method. While the term “noetic” is mostly used in this study in its Husserlian phenomenological sense, its more established usage is, according to the online Oxford Dictionaries site, “relating to mental activity or the intellect.”25 I shall cite here the highly evocative, crucial description of hyponoia by Angus Fletcher: The older Greek term for allegorical meaning refers us to a veiling function of language. Hyponoia (ὑπόνοια) was the term which, Plutarch tells us (De audiendis poetic 4.19), the “ancients” had used, and it implies a hidden meaning, a conjectural or suppositious sense, buried under the literal surface. Plato (Republic II. 378d), Euripides (Phoenicians 1131–​ 33), Aristophanes (Frogs 1425–​31), Xenophon (Symposium III, 6), all use hyponoia to mean what is later subsumed under allegory. Hyponoia furthermore has a noetic character; the reader or listener will have to think his way through a semantic barrier, beyond which lies a realm of mystic knowledge.26 Fletcher’s description of hyponoia appears to be far more pertinent to, or even almost an accurate description of, the conjectured concealed Sôd narrative within the foundational text of the Hebrew civilization than anything evidenced by Greek writings themselves. It is in this sense of the “noetic,” then, that this study designates its noetic-​literary research method: we “will have to think [our] way through a semantic barrier, beyond which lies a realm of mystic knowledge.”

178 The Urtext

Assumptions and Limitations As Paul Niquette states, “Discovery is nourished by assumptions. If you don’t have enough data, you what?—​assume something. When there is too much of the stuff or it’s riddled with contradictions, what else can you do? Assume something. ‘But!’ bellowed the instructor while commencing an exaggerated scrawl across the top of the blackboard: ‘Make your assumptions explicit!’ ”27 Furthermore, as theorized by René Girard, “If a significant breakthrough must occur, it will occur in the form of a hypothesis remote enough from the data to permit a real confrontation with them.”28 L. David Ritchie points out that “data include any patterns in a medium that can be interpreted as relevant to some context.”29 Below are listed several fundamental assumptions and limitations that have accompanied the development and progress of this study. The assumptions, which are to be tested and verified—​or refuted—​by the unfolding study, if acknowledged at the outset as having been made here, help guide the research in a fruitful and insightful manner. Complementing the assumptions, the limitations help focus the study into a manageable and coherent whole. The Study’s Assumptions The following are either explicit or implicit assumptions that the present study either takes for granted or embraces as its modus operandi: (1) The authors of the Pentateuchal text and their cognitive, epistemic, psychological, and aesthetic thought processes and functions are, principally and fundamentally, generally congruent with our modern notions and sensibilities, with the following proviso.30 Counterintuitively—​and resisting the implicit bias of the modern Western sense of superiority over cultures removed from today’s Western societies either geographically or historically—​the emerging cognitive, epistemic, psychological, and, most apparent in the present study, superior aesthetic sensibilities of the ancient Israelite Temple and court elite some three millennia ago were so advanced, it would seem, that this circumstance’s effect may pose difficulties for us today approximating the level of interpretive incongruousness. (2) Since, as was determined in Chapter 1, the “Mosaic distinction” entailed a fundamental rejection of the magical worldview that permeated Egyptian religious sensibility and against which the Mosaic “counter-​religion” defined itself, practically all instances in the Pentateuchal text of what would normally be seen as either miracles or magic will be considered, on the contrary, as instances of especially valuable coded esoteric information that typically has nothing to do with miracles, magic, or the supernatural.31

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  179 (3) The conjectured concealed esoteric narrative likely involves, in a principal way, the human body, especially its proprioceptive/​somatic aspect.32 While the “ ‘body’ has become a critical term for religious studies,” it seems that “ ‘mysticism,’ for instance, has largely dropped out.”33 This reflects a massive lack of comprehension regarding mystical phenomena, which are, invariably, closely connected with the body and bodily states.34 This assumption of proprioceptive/​ somatic conditioning of mystical experience is tied in the present study to the conjectured concealment of the details of an esoteric system that can enable one to experience the numinous—​all the while openly portraying, in the surface narrative, the cultic rituals involving the three other elements of “the holy,” namely, the sacred, the occult, and the divine.35 (4) These assumptions allow us to suppose that the deictic center of the conjectured concealed esoteric narrative within the Pentateuch is likely to be located in the human body.36 Similarly, the seven deictic components—​ the WHER E , the WHEN , the WHO , the WHAT , the W H Y , the W H E RE T O , and the HOW —​would be coordinated with the conjectured priestly system of transformation of consciousness, a system of a “narrative of the numinous” or the way to the numinous. This conjecture, if verified during the study, would be the study’s answer to the secondary research question formulated above. The Study’s Limitations All research must have limitations on its scope, level of detail, or range of application and consequences of its results. The following are the limitations deliberately imposed at the outset on the present study: (1) The study’s investigation is limited to the Pentateuchal text, without either an expectation or assumption that its findings may or should be applicable to either the rest of the Hebrew Bible or the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The notable exception to this is the Book of Joshua (which is included in the investigation). (2) The study does not set itself the goal of interpreting every single sentence or passage within the Pentateuch in terms of its potential esoteric import, in line with this study’s arguments and approach. The study attempts to recover from the Pentateuchal text only the most fundamental, structural-​ definitional elements that most pertain to the “load-​bearing” architectonic framework of the conjectured esoteric-​noetic stratum. (3) Finally, a detailed and systematic description of the mystical system conjectured to be associated with the ancient Israelite cultic religion and potentially emerging from within the Pentateuch—​especially its specific procedural and induction methods—​is outside the scope of this study.

180 The Urtext

The Pentateuchal Noesis as the Study’s Data The present chapter seeks to identify the key textual data from the Pentateuchal text that are congruent with the notions developed in preceding chapters. Specifically, the research proper is to focus on the de dicto, that is, “of the word,” or “as written,” textual signifier—​a signifier, moreover, that is assumed to be of a “noetic” and esoteric nature. The goal here is to select and magnify, in a suitable and plausible manner, including via other relevant and/​or helpful texts, the data chosen for scrutiny. Yet the scrutiny itself, in the research phase to which this chapter is devoted, will generally not advance to analysis of the data beyond the modicum of logical congruity expected of a narrative, including an esoteric one. The analysis of these data is offered in Chapters 8 and 9, where this, in effect, becomes the de re, or “of the thing,” investigation of the noematic, or the signified-​related, content of the conjectured Sôd stratum, as well as its hyletic “object.” It is important to realize that for the data selection from the Pentateuchal text we do not need to engage any particular textual research method discussed earlier; adopting a specific textual research method, without some grasp of what the noetic signifier might look like, would be tantamount to counting future profits of an enterprise that is yet to determine its product. At this stage we do not need any textual method per se: at this point we are to search, inferentially-​noetically, for the traces of the conjectured concealed stratum—​ traces that, in accordance with this study’s thesis of a “double-​channel” narration within the Pentateuch, were deliberately planted within this text. To identify these traces, we shall utilize the “cognitive-​deictic pointers,” specifically, the inferential coordinates of the noetic-​inferential continuum elaborated in Chapter 6. There, the following question was raised, with the assurance that it will be taken up here: Can textual data be identified from the Pentateuchal text by way of the “cognitive-​deictic pointers” of the noetic-​inferential continuum? Expressed another way, can we utilize the newly developed conceptualization of the de dicto noetic signifier? This specific continuum, the noetic-​inferential continuum, as determined in Chapter 6, consists of (1) a particular semantic field of the code (the inferential field); (2) a particular type of context (the s-​ S ETTIN G ); and (3) the poetic function, namely, the poiesis and its s-​M E SSAG E . It is also associated with what was identified as the hypo-​ground (which is the esoteric source domain that is mapped onto the visible, or “surface,” mimetic narratives). These constructed conceptualizations and models will now be tested in the actual and specific research involving the Pentateuchal text itself. The data selection, therefore, is guided and constrained by our readerly (1) inferential sense of a developing circumlocutory, veiled “second-​channel” narrative only indirectly related to the semantic and syntactic “ostensive” or “surface” narrative; (2) our attempt to determine the context of the “second-​ channel” narrative in its strict de dicto, or as-​presented-​in-​the-​text manner; and (3) our deconstruction of the immense literary-​poetic and cognitive-​poetic

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  181 possibilities that the Pentateuchal compilers took advantage of in such an extensive and determined way. The latter, however—​namely, analysis of the data—​will be applied in a more substantial fashion in Chapters 8 and 9, where the data selected will be analyzed.

The WHO [SETTING] Out of the seven proposed “cognitive-​deictic pointers”—​the seven indexical “coordinates” of the noetic-​inferential continuum—​we begin our study’s research and data selection with the WHO [SETTING]. The reason for this particular choice is as follows. As one surveys the Pentateuchal text with an eye toward a possible inferential opening—​ deliberately planted there in accordance with one of the study’s assumptions—​ one issue stands out to such a conspicuous extent that it has even been a cornerstone of the so-​called Documentary Hypothesis in biblical studies, albeit in a very different sense from the one pursued here.37 It is the usage of two crucial names for the Hebrew deity, Elohim and YHWH—​usually translated as God and the Lord, respectively—​sometimes appearing separately, at other times jointly. Both of these names are strongly marked. In today’s Israel the usual translations given above, interestingly, are also fully adequate for modern Hebrew speakers—​in that these names are being used, in their Hebrew originals, in the very same semantic sense as that carried by the translations. However (and this is crucial), understood this way these names do not attempt the unpacking of what their markedness is about. As Zhang Longxi puts it, “Is the English word God always exactly identical with the Latin Deus? And do these words always precisely translate the Hebrew word Elohim?”38 Nor, it goes without saying, would other versions or substitutes used in lieu of YHWH, such as the Tetragrammaton or the presumptuous, misguided “Yahweh,” or the respectful but further distancing designation Ha-​ Shem (“the Name”) of the ultra-​Orthodox fare any better in addressing the marked mystery of these names. I say “misguided,” because the pronunciation of this name was, and continues to be, proscribed in the Jewish tradition, and for a very good reason, apart from the name’s traditional association with utmost holiness: no one knows the proper pronunciation of this name; it was pronounced only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, in the Temple’s Holy of Holies, and only by the High Priest. With regard to the two divine names, our research’s starting point will focus on Elohim, for the following two reasons. The name YHWH possesses a complex structure possibly connected to the permutations of the verb “to be” in various tenses.39 As such, it seems to belong, due to its discursive nature, to the noematic-​conferential continuum—​rather than the noetic-​inferential continuum, which is our target domain—​since we are accessing the de dicto noetic signifier.40 In any event, second and more urgently, Elohim is the very name that is a direct bridge between the divine and the human being, as stated

182 The Urtext in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Exhibit 7.1). It is also the name to which the Zohar devotes much crucial scrutiny, as we shall see later in Exhibits 7.4 and 7.6. Apart from noting in passing that the “man” created by Elohim in his “image” is both “male and female”—​thus indicating that “man,” or “Adam” in Hebrew, is here used in the sense of “human being”—​we can see that the markedness of the name Elohim is tied, to begin with, to the word “image.”41 Yet, an even greater difficulty—​typically understood by this study as the very sign or signal of markedness—​is connected to the name itself (Exhibits 7.2 and 7.3).

Exhibit 7.1  In the Image of Elohim. ‫ש ֥ה אָ ָד֛ם ְּבצַלְ מֵ ֖נ ּו ִּכ ְד מוּתֵ ֑נ ּו וְ י ְִרדּ ּו ֩ בִ ְדגַ ֙ת הַ ָּי֜ם‬ ׂ ֶ ‫ ַו ּיֹ֣א מֶ ר אֱל ִֹ֔הים ַנ ֽ ֲע‬Genesis 1:26 ֙ ‫ש מַ ֗יִם וּבַ ְּבהֵ מָ ה‬ ָ ּׁ ַ‫וּבְ ע֣ו ֹף ה‬ ‫ש עַ ל־הָ אָ ֶֽרץ׃‬ ׂ ֥ ֵ‫ש הָ ֽר ֹמ‬ ׂ ֶ‫וּבְ כָ ל־הָ ָ֔א ֶרץ וּבְ כָ ל־הָ ֶ ֖ר מ‬ ‫ ַו ּיִבְ ָר֙א אֱל ִֹה ֤ים׀ אֶ ת־הָ ֽאָ ָדם ֙ ְּבצַלְ ֔מו ֹ ְּב ֶצ֥לֶם אֱל ִֹה֖ים ָּב ָר֣א א ֹת֑ו ֹ זָכָ ֥ר‬Genesis 1:27 ‫ּונְקֵ בָ ֖ה ָּב ָר֥א א ֹתָ ֽם׃‬ Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. KJV

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. KJV

Exhibit 7.2  Elohim as Plural Form (1). The most interesting thing about Elohim is the fact that it is a plural form. The Bible acknowledges that fact by using it when speaking of “other gods.” Then plural verbs or adjectives are used with it, as required by the rules of proper grammar. But when the same plural word is used to refer to the God of Israel, those rules are intentionally violated and Elohim is treated as though it were singular. . . . This is, of course, no accident. The point is that Elohim in this context is used as a collective. All the powers that once belonged to all the deities of the pantheon—​such

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  183 as love, power, wisdom, war, fruitfulness—​are now concentrated in this single Being Who contains them all. Arthur Green, These Are the Words, 10

Exhibit 7.3  Elohim as Plural Form (2). The odd fact that Hebrew uses a plural noun to designate the sole God of Israel has been explained in various ways. It is not to be understood as a remnant of the polytheism of Abraham’s ancestors, or hardly as a “plural of majesty”—​if there is such a thing in Hebrew. Some scholars take it as a plural that expresses an abstract idea (e.g., zekunim, “old age”; neurim, “time of youth”), so that Elohim would really mean “the Divinity.” More likely, however, it came from Canaanite usage; the early Israelites would have taken over elohim as a singular noun just as they made their own the rest of the Canaanite language. Louis Hartman, “Names of God” (1997) The discussion above draws attention to the automatic tendency to read Elohim as “God” (as though this word explained anything). Even with the first letter capitalized, one merely gets a designation and nothing else. Yet “Elohim,” as is clear from these passages, is better read as “powers”—​but not as “the powers that once belonged to all the deities of the pantheon,” and certainly not as “love, power, wisdom, war, fruitfulness,” as such terms clearly are likewise scarcely helpful.42 And since “image” is hardly the right translation for what Elohim and the human being share—​given the emphasis in the Pentateuchal text on the offensiveness and unacceptability of images, as well as the ontological gulf separating the two comparables in this metaphor of human “likeness” as being supposedly akin to the divine—​we might do better to focus on the “powers.”43

Exhibit 7.4  The Zohar on Five Fingers, the Lily, and the Cup of Benediction. Rabbi Hizkiah opened his discourse with the text: As a lily among thorns, etc. (S[ong of] S[ongs,] II, 2). “What,” he said, “does the lily symbolize? It symbolizes the Community of Israel. . . . as the lily possesses thirteen leaves, so the community of Israel is vouchsafed thirteen categories of mercy which surround it on every side. For this reason the term Elohim (God) mentioned here (in the first verse of Genesis) is separated by

184 The Urtext thirteen words from the next mention of Elohim, symbolizing the thirteen categories of mercy which surround the Community of Israel to protect it. The second mention of Elohim is separated from the third by five words, representing the five strong leaves that surround the lily, symbolic of the five ways of salvation which are the ‘five gates.’ This is alluded to in the verse ‘I will lift the cup of salvation’ (Ps. CXVI, 13). This is the ‘cup of benediction,’ which has to be raised by five fingers and no more, after the model of the lily, which rests on five strong leaves in the shape of five fingers. Thus the lily is a symbol of the cup of benediction. Immediately after the third mention of Elohim appears the light which, so soon as created, was treasured up and enclosed in that b’rith (covenant) which entered the lily and fructified it, and this is what is called ‘tree bearing fruit wherein is the seed thereof’: and this seed is preserved in the very sign of the covenant.” The Zohar 1:1a, Haqdamat Sefer ha-​Zohar (1984 ed.), 1:3 One famous source does investigate the name Elohim at some length, albeit so obscurely that even Kabbalistic literature, to say nothing of academic literature, usually avoids such passages; this source is the Zohar. Who would have thought, however, that the author(s) of the Zohar would place the arguably single most important key to this enormous, multivolume magnum opus right at the very beginning, inside the “discursive and fanciful” preliminaries to “the main body of the Zohar”?44 Yet the extraordinary emphasis that the Zohar itself places on the very first word of the Bible should have alerted any shrewd investigator to just such a possibility.45

Exhibit 7.5  The Zohar on Extremities of Heaven. In the Beginning. R. Eleazar opened his discourse with the text: Lift up your eyes and see: who hath created these? (Is. XL, 26). . . . [I]‌t is the mysterious Ancient One, whose essence can be sought, but not found, that created these: to wit, Mi (Who?), the same who is called “from (Heb. mi) the extremity of heaven on high[.]” . . . That extremity of heaven is called Mi, but there is another lower extremity of heaven which is called Mah (What?). . . . [L]est thou sayest there is for thee no abiding and no healing, “Mi will heal thee” [Lam. II, 13]. Of a surety the veiled One, the most High, the sum of all existence will heal thee and uphold thee—​Mi, the extremity of heaven above, Mah, as far as the extremity of heaven below. And this is the inheritance of Jacob, he being the “bolt that passes from extremity to extremity” (Exod. XXVI, 28), that is, from the higher, identical with Mi, to the lower, identical with Mah, as he occupies a position in the middle. Hence “Mi (Who) created these.” Said

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  185 R. Simeon, “Eleazar, son of mine, cease thy discourse, [otherwise] there may be revealed the higher mysteries which remain sealed for the people of this world.” The Zohar 1:1a–​2a, Haqdamat Sefer ha-​Zohar (1984 ed.), 1:4–​6

Exhibit 7.6  The Zohar on Elohim. R. Simeon wept a while and then said: “Eleazar, what is meant by the term ‘these’? Surely not the stars and the other heavenly bodies, since they are always visible, and were created through Mah, as we read, ‘By the word of the Lord were the heavens made’ (Ps. XXXIII, 6). Nor can it imply the things inaccessible to our gaze, since the vocable ‘these’ obviously points to things that are revealed. This mystery remained sealed until one day, whilst I was on the sea-​ shore, Elijah came and said to me, ‘Master, what means ‘Mi (Who?) created these?’’ I said to him, ‘That refers to the heavens and their hosts. . . .’ Then he said to me, ‘Master, the Holy One, blessed be He, had a deep secret which He at length revealed to the celestial Academy. It is this. When the most Mysterious wished to reveal Himself, He first produced a single point which was transmuted into a thought, and in this He executed innumerable designs, and engraved innumerable gravings. He further graved within the sacred and mystic lamp a mystic and most holy design, which was a wondrous edifice issuing from the midst of thought. This is called MI, and was the beginning of the edifice, existent and non-​existent, deep-​buried, unknowable by name. It was only called MI (Who?). It desired to become manifest and to be called by name. It therefore clothed itself in a refulgent and precious garment and created EleH (these), and EleH acquired a name. The letters of the two words intermingled, forming the complete name ELoHIM (God). . . . And once MI became combined with EleH, the name remained for all time. And upon this secret the world is built.’ Elijah then flew away and vanished out of my sight. And it is from him that I became possessed of this profound mystery.” R. Eleazar and all the companions came and prostrated themselves before him, weeping for joy and saying, “If we had come into the world only to hear this we should have been content.” The Zohar 1:1b–​2a, Haqdamat Sefer ha-​Zohar (1984 ed.), 1:6–​7 Exhibits 7.4, 7.5, and 7.6 contain three passages extracted from the prologue in the Zohar. We learn from these extracts that (1) “Elohim” consists of Mi (Who?) and EleH (“these”); (2) in addition to Mi, an “extremity of

186 The Urtext heaven,” there is “another[,]‌lower extremity of heaven which is called Mah (What?)”; finally, (3) “Elohim” is closely connected with “the lily [which] symbolizes the Community of Israel”; “the lily … rests on five strong leaves in the shape of five fingers.” Curiously, the Zohar seems to be developing, on the face of it, a similar set of interrogative deictics—​namely, Mi and Mah (or Who? and What?)—​ to that being utilized in the present study. As we shall see, the similarity is both superficial and deeply congruent: it is superficial in terms of what these forms specifically designate—​Mah and Mi are divine names, whereas our seven interrogative forms are methodological devices in the context of our “emergentist” approach to the Pentateuchal text’s conjectured Sôd stratum. Yet, ultimately, both the Zoharic and our approaches attempt to locate and situate the esoteric discourse within the Pentateuch with the help of identical interrogative deictics that, in the case of the Zoharic theology, are, literally, divinities.46 Here is a summary of the data related to “The Who”: I. The divine names Elohim and YHWH have been selected as the likely carriers of the marked content, at the signifier level in the case of Elohim, of the notion expressed by “the Who.” II. Especially with regard to Elohim, this choice was reinforced by the Zoharic conceptualizations that implicate this name in an elaborate scheme involving the “Community of Israel.” III. The Pentateuch itself is no less emphatic vis-​à-​vis Elohim’s critical role, connecting Adam’s creation with the “image” of Elohim. Moreover, ‫ש מַ ֖יִם וְ אֵ ֥ת הָ אָ ֶֽרץ׃‬ ָ ּׁ ַ‫אש֖ית ָּב ָר֣א אֱל ִֹה ֑ים אֵ ֥ת ה‬ ִ ׁ ‫( ְּב ֵר‬Gen 1:1), or “In the beginning God [Elohim] created the heaven and the earth” (Gen 1:1 KJV): whether read as (1) “It was Elohim who created etc.,” or (2) “It was Elohim who was created in the beginning,” the preeminent role of Elohim is not in doubt. IV. Since Elohim is a plural form used as a singular, the “image” of Elohim is likely to involve “powers”; thus, the human creature might also have access to these unspecified powers. V. Finally, the Zohar deconstructs Elohim as Mi ELeH (‫מי אלה‬, or Who [are] These?), thus also stressing the plurality implicated in this name. At the same time, the Zohar introduces MaH, or What? as the “lower extremity of heaven” (with Mi being “the extremity of heaven on high”). MaH, incidentally, created the “stars and the other heavenly bodies,” via (or perhaps by being) “the word of the Lord.”

The WH ERETO [SETTING] and the WHY [SETTING] The first Hebrew, Abraham, begins his career as a God’s chosen (Neh. 9:7) with the Lord’s command to leave his homeland in Mesopotamia and go “unto a land that I [the LO RD ] will shew thee.” It is the selfsame land to

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  187 which the LO R D intends to bring the children of Israel after “bring[ing them] out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and … rid[ding them] out of their bondage” (Exod. 6:6 KJV) (Exhibit 7.7). It is unclear why or for what Abraham should go to the Promised Land.47

Exhibit 7.7  The Promised Land. Genesis 12:1 ָ ִ‫ַו ּיֹ ֤א מֶ ר יְהוָה ֙ אֶ ל־אַ בְ ָ ֔רם ל ְֶך־לְ ָך ֛ מֵ אַ ְרצְ ָך ֥ ּו ִמ ּ ֽמוֹל ְַד ְּת ָך ֖ ּו ִמ ּ ֵב ֣ית אָ ב‬ ‫ש ֥ר‬ ֶ ׁ ֲ‫֑יך אֶ ל־הָ אָ ֶ֖רץ א‬ ָ ּ‫אַ ְראֶ ֽך‬ Genesis 12:1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: KJV

Exodus 6:8 ‫אתי ֙ אֶ ת־י ִ ָ֔די לָתֵ ֣ת א ָֹ֔ת ּה לְאַ בְ ָרהָ ֥ם לְ יִצְ חָ ֖ק‬ ִ ֙‫ש‬ ׂ ָ ‫ש ֤ר ָנ‬ ֶ ׁ ֲ‫את ֤י אֶ ְתכֶ ם ֙ אֶ ל־הָ ָ֔א ֶרץ א‬ ִ ֵ‫וְ הֵ ב‬ ‫ש֖ה אֲ ִנ֥י יְה ָו ֽה׃‬ ָ ׁ ‫ּו ֽלְ ַי ֲעק ֹ ֑ב וְ נָתַ ִּת ֙י א ֹתָ ּ֥ה לָכֶ ֛ם מו ָֹר‬ Exodus 6:8 And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for an heritage: I am the LORD. KJV

Thomas Cahill, however, offers a perspective on Abraham’s journeying that is rather startling in its implications (Exhibit 7.8). The exodus from Egypt and the subsequent journey to the Promised Land make more sense, on the face of it: deliverance from the bondage of slavery.48 Yet there is a further purpose of the exodus, stated as follows: “And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me” (Exod. 4:22–​23 KJV). Perhaps somewhat similarly, prior to leaving Mesopotamia for another, unknown land, “Sarah and Abraham yearned for some other place, yet undefined, where they could not only plant their convictions, but also nurture them to fruition.”49 Remarkably, despite the obviously central importance of the notion of the Promised Land, both in originating Abraham’s establishment of the Hebrews in history (as reported in Genesis) and in becoming the sacred homeland for the Israelites, hardly any of the perhaps two dozen main secondary sources as well as encyclopedias that I have consulted regarding the subject of the Promised Land discuss it from the perspective of “the W H E RE T O ”—​that is, as a foremost aspiration of Israel’s national identity and history and, therefore, necessarily a crucial aspect of the Pentateuchal master narrative, whether exoteric or esoteric. Let us remember, too, that the Israelites will need to conquer this land, a notion presented in the Book of Joshua, and that, in accordance with the penultimate Pentateuchal conceptualization, the Temple of the

188 The Urtext God of Israel may be located only in this land of the Promise, specifically in Jerusalem. The Promised Land is therefore the W H E RE T O [SETTING], whereas the WHY [SETTING] is tied to the notions of (1) liberation from enslavement, or from some confined, restricted, oppressive environment, and (2) serving or worshiping the God of Israel, or at least a search for a congenial milieu dedicated to unshackling one’s “self ” (with a proviso forcefully stipulated in the Edenic story that one does not aim to worship one’s self). As Northrop Frye observes, “all the high points … that is, the garden of Eden, the Promised Land, Jerusalem, and Mount Zion[,]‌are interchangeable synonyms for the home of the soul.”50 One could be seeking to reach the Garden of Eden or Mount Zion much as one seeks the Promised Land: these are all places and locations where—​in accordance with the Pentateuchal text—​the God of Israel can be found.

Exhibit 7.8  Abram, the Hebrew Who Journeys. If we had lived in the second millennium B.C.[E.], the millennium of Avram, and could have canvassed all the nations of the earth, what would they have said of Avram’s journey? In most of Africa and Europe, where prehistoric animism was the norm . . ., his wife is barren as winter, they would say; a man cannot escape his fate. The Egyptians would have shaken their heads in disbelief . . . “Copy the forefathers.” The early Greeks might have told Avram the story of Prometheus, whose quest for the fire of the gods ended in personal disaster. Do not overreach, they would advise; come to resignation. In India, he would be told . . . do not set yourself the task of accomplishing something in time, which is only the dominion of suffering. In China, the . . . sages . . . would caution that there is no purpose in journeys or in any kind of earthly striving. . . . The ancestors of the Maya in America would point to their circular calendars . . . and would explain that everything that has been comes around again. . . . On every continent, in every society, Avram would have been given the same advice that wise men as diverse as Heraclites, Lao-​Tsu, and Siddhartha would one day give their followers: do not journey but sit; compose yourself by the river of life, meditate on its ceaseless and meaningless flow . . . until you . . . have come to peace with the great wheel. Thomas Cahill, Gifts of the Jews, 63–​64

The WH AT [SETTING] Meir Sternberg, an influential Tel Aviv-​based literary critic and theorist of poetics, devotes a 730-​page tome, Hebrews between Cultures, to the goal of establishing the following startling proposition: “ ‘Hebrews’ stands to ‘Israel’

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  189 as hatename to honorific: the shifts between them reflect the dynamics of code-​ switching, viewpoint, value, power in intercultural strife and translation.”51 Sternberg frames this issue thus: “An Englishman lives in England and speaks English. A Frenchman lives in France and speaks French. A Spaniard lives in Spain and speaks Spanish. Yet here I am, a Jew living in Israel and speaking Hebrew. Yehudi, yisra’el, ibrit: Why three words instead of one? Why these words?”52 As we shall see, Sternberg’s is an excellent example to use for refuting the notion—​often attributed to very wise persons—​that asking the right questions either is more important than having the answers or is even equivalent to practically having the right answers. The question Sternberg raises—​why different designations among the people that originated the Hebrew Bible and among their modern descendants—​is indeed not only legitimate but, from the standpoint of the present study, must be asked if one is serious about the critical designations that the Pentateuch uses to specifically mark its communicative intent. As to Sternberg’s choice of a “hatename” vis-​à-​vis the ancient Israelite culture’s multiple self-​designations, his thesis would be far more plausible had he chosen the name “Canaanite” as the purported “hatename”: as Ziony Zevit points out, Israelite culture is Canaanite.53

Exhibit 7.9  Derivation of the Word “Hebrew”. The derivation of the word Hebrew (Hebr. ‘ibrî) is uncertain. It may be related to the verb ‘ābar, “to cross over or beyond.” Thus, the Hebrews would be understood as “those who crossed over” or “the ones from beyond,” meaning probably from the other side of the Euphrates River (Josh. 24.3) or perhaps the Jordan River (Gen. 50.10). Along this line, the Septuagint translates “Abram the Hebrew” in Genesis 14.13 as “Abram, the one who crossed over.” Douglas Knight, “Hebrews,” in Oxford Companion to the Bible, 273 The meaning of the word “Hebrew,” as Douglas Knight points out, is “uncertain,” and several hypotheses exist.54 The explanation excerpted in Exhibit 7.9 is, from the standpoint of this study, both very plausible and logical and, crucially, very significant as far as its marked content is concerned. The logical aspect referred to relates to the circumstance that Abram was, in fact, journeying from afar. The markedness, however, should be considered in light of the other fact, namely, that the Pentateuch is a deliberately and highly inventively composed intensional text; it does not tend to use key names and designations frivolously, quite to the contrary. The specific inference will be determined in Chapter 8; here one can note that the designation “Hebrew” as “the one who crossed [or crosses] over” certainly also applies

190 The Urtext to Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, before he—​ and subsequently the whole people—​are renamed Israel (or children of Israel, Israelites). Clearly, the notion of “crossing over,” in the context of the W H E RE T O [SETTING] and the WHY [SETTING] discussed in the preceding section—​where the W H E RE T O [SETTING] was determined to be the Promised Land, while the W H Y [SETTING] was seen as tied to the ability to serve God—​is bound to be extremely, perhaps even exceptionally significant, whether for Abram and Sarai or the whole people originating from them. Thus, I will consider this notion—​“crossing over”—​ and the designation “Hebrew,” as emblematic of the W H AT [SETTING].

The HOW [SETTING] We have determined that the notion of the Promised Land is “the W H E RE T O ” of the noetic-​ inferential continuum. The latter, we must keep in mind, comprises (1) the inferential field; (2) the s-​C ON T E XT ’s “setting”; and, as a de dicto continuum, (3) the text’s poiesis, that is, the s-​M E SSAG E of the poetic function. This notion, the “Promised Land,” is also closely related to the noetic-​inferential continuum’s WHY . At the same time, the very act of “crossing over,” of journeying toward the Promised Land, is the W H AT , that is, the essence or crucial meaning—​in a yet undetermined manner or sense—​ of the narrative itself. To discuss the next cognitive-​deictic pointer, the HOW [SETTING], may seem superfluous: after all, both Abraham and later the former Hebrew slaves and the succeeding generation born in the desert do arrive, successfully, in the Promised Land. If that were the case, namely, that the HOW is superfluous here, then why have the Book of Joshua at all? Indeed, the rabbis—​when they have suddenly found themselves to be the inheritors of the priestly lore, in the wake of the Second Temple’s destruction—​did decide, in placing the Book of Joshua outside the canonized Torah proper, or the Pentateuch, that this material, if not superfluous per se, is not as essential as the so-​called Five Books of Moses. It seems that their reasoning was as straightforward in this case as it was misguided: after all, they reckoned, since Moses dies at the end of Deuteronomy, how could the Book of Joshua, discussing events subsequent to Moses’s death, be included in the “books of Moses” series? The obsessively creative midrashists sometimes startle one with their childlike literal-​mindedness.55 The Book of Joshua is about the HOW . Abraham and his large assembly do arrive in the Promised Land unimpeded. Yet he is compelled to buy his way into belonging there, as demonstrated by his ready willingness to purchase burial plots for himself and Sarah (Gen. 23). If this is home, it is a rather peculiar homecoming (Exhibit 7.10). With regard to the large grouping of Hebrews in the exodus from Egypt—​the former slaves now journeying to their predestined home—​the situation, in contrast, is stripped of any ambiguity: the Promised Land must be conquered, or else they might as well go

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  191 to some other place. The Book of Joshua shows us how this is accomplished (Exhibit 7.11).

Exhibit 7.10  What and Where Is the Promised Land? First, there is the problem of arriving. What or where is the place? . . . What is Abraham looking for? Why does he not seek sanctuary—​is he above it? The audience has been listening and waiting for him to arrive somewhere on his journey without momentousness. But he arrives nowhere. . . . Yet there is not necessarily something to cause fear for a man like Abraham who is well endowed with family and herds and retainers, and who speaks the language. In place of fear, we sense an anxiety not fully revealed. He is not running away and he is not arriving. . . . This is the most anticlimactic journey that ever was, the opposite of all the heroic journeys. David Rosenberg, Abraham, 146 (emphasis added)

Exhibit 7.11  How to Conquer the Promised Land. WTT Joshua 6:1-​5 ‫וִ ִֽיריחו ֹ ֙ ס ֹ ֶג ֶ֣רת ו ְּמסֻ ֶ ּג ֶ֔רת ִמ ּ ְפ ֵנ ֖י ְּב ֵנ֣י ִי ְׂש ָראֵ ֑ל אֵ ֥ין יו ֹ ֵצ ֖א וְ אֵ ֥ין ָּב ֽא׃‬ ‫חו ֹ וְ אֶ ת־ מַ לְ ּ ָכ ּ֑ה ִּגבּ ו ֵ ֹ֖רי הֶ חָ ֽיִל׃‬ ֖ ‫ַו ּיֹ ֤א מֶ ר יְהוָה ֙ אֶ ל־יְהו ׁ ֹֻש֔עַ ְראֵ ה ֙ נָתַ ִּ֣תי בְ ָי ְֽד ֔ ָך אֶ ת־י ְִרי‬ ‫ש‬ ׂ ‫ְש ֣י הַ ִּ מלְ חָ ֔ ָמה הַ ּ ֵק ֥יף אֶ ת־הָ עִ ֖יר ּ ַפ ֣עַ ם אֶ חָ ֑ת כּ ֹ ֥ה תַ ֲע‬ ֵ ׁ ‫וְ סַ בּ ֹתֶ ֣ם אֶ ת־הָ עִ ֗יר כּ ֹ ֚ל אַ נ‬ ‫ש ׁ ֶ֥שת י ִָמֽים׃‬ ֵׁ ‫יעי‬ ִ֔ ִ‫וְשבְ עָ ֣ה כ ֹהֲ ִנ֡ים ִי ְׂשא ּו ֩ ׁ ִשבְ עָ ֙ה ׁשו ֹפְ ֤רו ֹת הַ ּיֽו ֹבְ לִ ים ֙ לִ פְ ֵנ֣י הָ אָ ר֔ ו ֹן וּבַ ּיו ֹם ֙ הַ ּׁ ְשב‬ ִׁ ‫ש ֣בַ ע ּ ְפעָ ִמ ֑ים וְ הַ כּ ֹ ֣הֲ ִנ֔ים י ְִת ְקע ֖ ּו ַּב ּׁשו ֹפָ רֽ ו ֹת׃‬ ֶ ׁ ‫ּ ָתס ֹ ֥בּ ּו אֶ ת־הָ עִ ֖יר‬ ‫ש ְ מעֲכֶ ם ֙] אֶ ת־ק֣ו ֹל הַ ּׁשו ֔ ָֹפר י ִָר֥יע ּו כָ ל־‬ ָ ׁ ‫[כ‬ ְּ )‫ש ְ מעֲכֶ ם‬ ָ ׁ ‫(ב‬ ְּ ‫וְ הָ ָי֞ה ִּב ְ מ ׁש ֹ ְ֣ך׀ ְּבקֶ ֶ֣רן הַ ּיו ֹבֵ ֗ל‬ ‫הָ עָ ֖ם ְּתרוּעָ ֣ה גְ דו ֹ ָל֑ה וְ ָנ ֙פְ ָל ֜ה חו ֹמַ ֤ת הָ עִ יר ֙ ּ ַת ְח ּ֔ ֶתיהָ וְ עָ ֥ל ּו הָ עָ ֖ם ִא ׁ֥יש נֶגְ ּֽדו ֹ׃‬ KJV

Joshua 6:1 Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in. 2 And the LORD said unto Joshua, See, I have given into thine hand Jericho, and the king thereof, and the mighty men of valour. 3 And ye shall compass the city, all ye men of war, and go round about the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days. 4 And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horns: and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets. 5 And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the

192 The Urtext people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him. Joshua 6:1–​5 Since a failure to grasp the meaning of the manner in which Jericho was captured would indicate as well one’s failure to grasp the meaning of the Promised Land, we need to fathom the significance of the number seven, so conspicuously displayed in the reproduced passage in Exhibit 7.11, as well as the crucial meaning of the “great shout.” Biblical scholars Mark S. Smith and Daniel Fleming dispose of the problem of the “seven” in a way that is hardly satisfactory (Exhibits 7.12 and 7.13). What we have in Smith’s quote is the sort of explanation that appeals to the “widespread cultural convention”: everyone has been using the “seven” formula, therefore why not the Book of Joshua (as well as Genesis)? Fleming goes a step further and indicates what is essentially also a widespread consensus: the events described in Joshua 6 are unquestionably “miraculous” and are “not a siege but a celebration of Yahweh.”56 Michael David Coogan’s “final parade example” cited in Smith’s quote even parodies the text. Richard Hess, in contrast, pays attention to the curious dynamic at work (Exhibit 7.14).

Exhibit 7.12  The Curious Number Seven. Crucial to Genesis 1 is its most prominent organizational feature—​the seven days. This now seems so integral to the modern view of biblical creation that we tend not to recognize its dramatic importance, namely that this was a completely priestly innovation. No other creation account in the Bible, or more broadly speaking, in the ancient Near East, uses this structure. In contrast, the seven-​day structure for other sorts of biblical narratives is well known. Seven-​day units are common in biblical literature. For the scale of numbers up to ten, seven was the number used to mark completion or fullness. Seven days is the length of the journey in Genesis 31:23. . . . In what the biblical scholar Michael David Coogan cleverly calls a “final parade example,” the fall of Jericho occurred on the seventh day after seven priests with seven trumpets marched seven times around the city (Joshua 6:15–​16). Seven is also the well-​known number of years of prosperity and scarcity in the Joseph story in Genesis 41:26–​31. . . . Clearly the use of seven was a widespread cultural convention. Mark S. Smith, The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1, 87–​88

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  193

Exhibit 7.13  Pushed by the Hand of God? Such warfare [as Jericho’s fall in Joshua 6] needs no siege engines and is engaged rather by ritual procession. Priests, not the hero Joshua, stand at the center stage once battle begins. Above all, the wall falls as if pushed by the hand of God. . . . [However,] in a narrative core, Yahweh gives victory when the people shout, perhaps by supernatural power but not by ritual. . . . Emphasis on the miraculous fall of Jericho’s wall and participation of ark and priests displays not a siege but a celebration of Yahweh. . . . Both in the Bible and in wider ancient Near Eastern literature, accounts of warfare under divine oversight build the details of battle onto a framework rooted in religious thought. Such stories may invoke divine power at a distance or let the gods walk directly onto the stage of human affairs, but all share a theoretical foundation that expects the supernatural to invade and infuse nature. Daniel Fleming, Seven-​Day Siege of Jericho, 211–​28 We are left with the following, equally unsatisfactory choices vis-​ à-​ vis the Pentateuchal conundrum of the actual “conquest” of the “Promised Land”: either (1) to ascribe the descriptions of Jericho’s demise to some obscure Hebraic ritual that partakes of the seemingly widespread near obsession with the number seven in early antiquity and the ancient Near East, or (2) to continue appealing to the old standby, an invocation of a “miracle” occurring—​or “magic” allegedly being worked—​in the scene in question. Such theories are, to be sure, not completely off base, given the implausibility of massive city walls crumbling as a result of mere shouting, however loud the latter may be, or of circling the walls in whatever formation, military orecclesiastical. Yet by quickly settling on an explanation of this sort, one opts for an automatic, and rather useless in the context of the conquest of Jericho, assumption of the role of the fantastic and the supernatural. One of the presumptions of the present study, as we have seen, is that instances in the Pentateuchal text of seemingly miraculous or magical occurrences are, instead, instances of esoteric information. The present study’s basic maxim is that, in the context of ancient Israelite cultic sensibility, it is always anathema to invoke terms such as “magic” and “miracle” in lieu of relevant explanation or interpretation. (As with the other indexical coordinates discussed in the present chapter, we need to postpone our deconstruction of them until Chapters 8 and 9.)

194 The Urtext

Exhibit 7.14  Joshua: The Great Shout. Joshua 5:13–​15 And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries? 14 And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What saith my lord unto his servant? 15 And the captain of the LORD’S host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so. KJV 13

The strange confrontation of 5:13–​15 resembles that between Jacob and the man of God at Peniel (Gen. 32:22–​32) and that between Moses and the burning bush (Exod. 3:1–​4:17). In each case, the human protagonist encounters a divine messenger before facing a life-​and-​death conflict, but there is a significant difference with Joshua. Unlike the other two figures, Joshua does not wrestle or argue with the messenger. . . . In language that duplicates God’s command to Moses in Exodus 3:5, Joshua is instructed to remove his sandals because the place is holy. As with Moses, the place is holy because it is where God meets with his chosen leader in a special way. . . . A ceremony will overcome Jericho’s walls. Elsewhere in the Ancient Near East among pre-​battle rituals there is no comparison to it. . . . The loud shout (Heb. tĕrû‘â) joins the sound of the trumpets with that of the warriors of Israel. . . . The shout described the noise of the trumpets when Israel began its journey in the wilderness (Num. 10:2–​6) and when the ark entered Jerusalem in procession (2 Sam. 6:15–​16). . . . This activity [the capture of Jericho] is punctuated by the frequently repeated phrase, blew the trumpets. All the activity begins and ends with the sounding of the trumpets. It and the daily marching around Jericho describe a spectacle of sight and sound. The expression “cross over” (Heb. ‘ibrû) appears three times in verses 7 and 8. Richard Hess, Joshua, 138–​39, 142–​43, 145

The WH ERE [SETTING] Given that we have just discussed the conquest of Jericho depicted in the Book of Joshua, the question of the Where would seem to be, on the face of it, also superfluous. As one assumes, logically, the Where is where we are being

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  195 shown the conquest of the Promised Land. This assumption, however, is not the operative scheme of the Pentateuchal esoteric construction: while inherently and even strictly logical, the logic and concerns of the Sôd’s expression are of a very different kind, as we shall see presently. The Where in the context of the WHER ETO , the W H Y , and the W H AT —​all three of which point to the Promised Land—​must be about getting through to this land. And getting through entails crossing the land’s border, someplace ideally suitable. We may, therefore, think that because Jericho is located on the border, it is the place where the WHERE is encoded, too, in addition to the HOW . The s-​A D D R E S S E E ’s growing sense, as he or she attempts to untangle these complex symbolizations and attributions, might well be that it would be exceedingly difficult to embed two or more separate and dissimilar cognitive-​ deictic pointers simultaneously within the same textual section. Doing so would risk looking at, on the one hand, a convoluted and tortuous textual presentation and, on the other, a proportionate decline in the chances of proper readerly reception and comprehension of the intended communication. Therefore, it is perhaps advisable to search for other border-​based locations discussed in the Pentateuch rather than opt for something entirely different.

Exhibit 7.15  Abimelek, King of Gerar—​and the Wells. (a) And Abraham traveled from there to the Negeb country and lived between Kadesh and Shur and resided in Gerar. And Abraham said of Sarah, his wife, “She’s my sister.” And Abimelek, king of Gerar, sent and took Sarah. (Gen. 20:1–​2) (b) And Abraham criticized Abimelek about a water well that Abimelek’s servants had seized. (Gen. 21:25) (c) And Abraham stood seven ewes of the sheep by themselves. And Abimelek said to Abraham, “What are these seven ewes that you’ve stood by themselves?” And he said, “Because you’ll take these seven ewes from my hand so that it will be evidence for me that I dug this well.” On account of this he called that place Beer-​sheba. (Gen. 21:28–​31) (d) And he planted a tamarisk in Beer-​sheba and he called the name of YHWH El Olam. (Gen. 21:33) ‫ש ֥ם יְה ָו ֖ה אֵ ֥ל עו ֹ ֽ ָלם׃‬ ֵ ׁ ‫א־ש֔ם ְּב‬ ָ ׁ ‫ש ֑בַ ע ַו ִ ּי ְ֙ק ָר‬ ָ ׁ ‫֖של ִּבבְ אֵ ֣ר‬ ֶ ׁ ֶ‫ִט ֥ע א‬ ַ ּ ‫ ַו ּי‬WTT Gen. 21:33 Translation by Richard Elliott Friedman, in his Commentary on the Torah, 69, 72, 73

196 The Urtext

Exhibit 7.16  The Greater Hekhalot: What Is the Purpose of This Water. The guardians at the door of the Sixth Chamber act as if they are casting millions of waves of water at this individual. Actually, however, there is not even a single drop. If the individual says, “What is the purpose of this water,” they pursue him and say, “You miserable creature! You are probably a descendent of those who kissed the Golden Calf! You are not worthy of seeing the King and His Throne.” He does not have a chance to move before they cast millions of steel axes at him. The Greater Hekhalot, 54

Exhibit 7.17  We Found Water—​and He Called It Seven. (a) And there was a famine in the land (other than the first famine, which was in Abraham’s days), and Isaac went to Abimelek, king of the Philistines, at Gerar. And YHWH appeared to him and said, “Don’t go down to Egypt. Reside in the land that I say to you. Stay on this land, and I’ll be with you and bless you, for I’ll give all these lands to you and your seed. (Gen. 26:1–​3) ‫ש֖ר‬ ֶ ׁ ֲ‫ל־ת ֵר֣ד ִמצְ ָ ֑ר ְי מָ ה ׁ ְשכ ֹ ֣ן ָּב ָ֔א ֶרץ א‬ ֵ ּ ַ‫ ַו ּי ֵָר֤א אֵ לָיו ֙ יְה ָו֔ה ַו ּיֹ ֖א מֶ ר א‬WTT Gen. 26:2 ָ ‫א ֹמַ ֥ר אֵ ֽ ֶל‬ ‫יך׃‬ (b) And so Isaac lived in Gerar. And the people of the place asked about his wife, and he said, “She’s my sister,” because he was afraid to say, “My wife,” or else “the people of the place will kill me for Rebekah, because she’s good-​looking.” (Gen. 26:6-​7) (c) And the Philistines envied him. And the Philistines stopped up all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in his father Abraham’s days, and they filled them with dirt. (Gen. 26:14–​15) (d) And Isaac went back and dug the water wells that they had dug in the days of his father Abraham and that the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham’s death, and he called them by names, like the names that his father had called them. (Gen. 26:18) (e) And Isaac’s servants dug in the wadi and found a well of fresh water there. And the shepherds of Gerar quarreled with Isaac’s shepherds, saying, “The water is ours.” And he called the name of the well Esek [“challenge”] because they tangled with him. And they dug another well, and they quarreled over it also, and he called its name Sitnah [“accusation”]. And he moved on from there and dug another well,

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  197 and they did not quarrel over it, and he called its name Rehovot [“wide spaces”] and said, “Because now YHWH has widened for us, and we’ve been fruitful in the land.” (Gen. 26:19–​22) (f) And he went up from there to Beer-​sheba. And YHWH appeared to him that night and said, “I’m your father Abraham’s God. Don’t be afraid, because I’m with you, and I’ll bless you. (Gen. 26:23–​24) (g) And [Abimelek and Ahuzat] said, “We’ve seen that YHWH has been with you. . . . You are now blessed by YHWH.” (Gen. 26:28–​29) (h) And it was in that day, and Isaac’s servants came and told him about the well that they had dug and said to him, “We found water.” And he called it Seven. On account of this the name of the city is Beer-​ sheba to this day. (Gen. 26:32–​33) ‫ ַוי ְִה ֣י׀ ַּב ּי֣ו ֹם הַ ה֗וּא ַו ָּיב ֹ ֙א ּו ֙ עַ בְ ֵד֣י יִצְ ֔ ָחק ַו ַּי ִּג ֣ד ּו ל֔ ו ֹ עַ ל־אֹד֥ו ֹת‬WTT Gen. 26:32 ‫ש ֣ר חָ פָ ֑ר ּו ַו ּיֹ֥א ְמר ּו ל֖ ו ֹ מָ ָצ ֥אנ ּו מָ ֽיִם׃‬ ֶ ׁ ֲ‫הַ ְּבאֵ ֖ר א‬ ‫ש֔בַ ע עַ ֖ד הַ ּי֥ו ֹם‬ ֶ ׁ ‫שם־הָ עִ יר ֙ ְּבאֵ ֣ר‬ ֵ ׁ ‫ל־כ ֤ן‬ ֵ ּ ַ‫ ַו ּי ְִק ָר֥א א ֹתָ ּ֖ה ׁ ִשבְ עָ ֑ה ע‬WTT Gen. 26:33 ‫הַ ֶז ּ ֽה׃‬ Translation by Richard Elliott Friedman, in his Commentary on the Torah, 89–​92 (The renderings of Esek, Sitnah, and Rehovot in square brackets are from Aryeh Kaplan, The Living Torah, 121.) Such a location, along with some very peculiar, puzzling scenes and dialogues connected to it—​all signs of marked material indicating the need for heightened scrutiny—​indeed exists. Yet one would never succeed in identifying it, unless one is willing to go through each and every onomastic term in the Pentateuch pertaining to names of persons or locations, while anticipating that some if not all were deliberately marked. The location in question that stands out as eminently pertinent is Gerar. Aryeh Kaplan notes that “Gerar [was the] capital of the Philistine nation, toward the south of the Holy Land, near the coast” and was “on the southwest border of the Holy Land.”57 The kingdom of Gerar is singularly strange and peculiar. To begin with, its Philistine king has a Hebrew name (Abimelek) which, moreover, stands for “my father the king.” Such a designation, in the present context, can only indicate the God of Abraham.58 Further, it is this selfsame king who is featured a full generation later when it is Isaac’s turn to reside in Gerar.59 The king acts exactly the same way vis-​à-​vis both patriarchs’ wives (“takes” them to his harem, then releases them when threatened by God). Finally, there is the persistent and perplexing issue of the “wells,” likewise involving Abimelek (see Exhibit 7.17). In particular, Exhibits 7.15(c), 7.17(d), 7.17(e), and 7.17(h) are obviously, decidedly

198 The Urtext obscure, attempting to hint something in a deliberate but somewhat clumsy way. Ostensibly, the issue is water, yet Exhibits 7.16 and 7.19—​with passages from the Greater Hekhalot and the Zohar, respectively—​give us the idea that the wells and the “water” may not necessarily be exactly what their semantic meaning entails. They may be, rather, stand-​ins for something else, being thus either symbols, metaphors, or allegories. We shall resolve this and other related issues in Chapter 8, since here our task is to select the pertinent data.

Exhibit 7.18  Gerar Was on the Boundary of the Holy Land. This chapter [Gen. 26] is the only place where we see Isaac without Abraham or Jacob, and it is here that we see Isaac’s life literally as a carbon copy of Abraham’s. While it had been Abraham’s task to blaze spiritual trails, it was Isaac’s mission to consolidate them. (Note 26:1, first famine) Gerar . . . was on the boundary of the Holy Land. From the context, it seems that Isaac was headed toward Egypt. This is difficult to understand, since Isaac lived in Beer Lachai Roi, which is to the west of Gerar, on the way to Egypt. It is possible that Isaac went to Gerar because of Abraham’s previous treaty (cf. Ramban). Alternatively, this is connected to the following sentence, and Isaac went to Gerar at God’s command (Josephus, Antiquities 1:18.2). (Note 26:1, Gerar) Aryeh Kaplan, The Living Torah, 119n26:1

Exhibit 7.19  The Zohar: The Stone over Which Men Stumble. And it shall come to pass, as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests that bear the ark of the LORD, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of Jordan, that the waters of Jordan shall be cut off from the waters that come down from above; and they shall stand upon an heap. Joshua 3:13 KJV “And he looked, and behold a well in the field, and, behold, three flocks of sheep lying there by it” (Genesis 29:2). “Well” is the level of “The Lord of all the earth” (Joshua 3:11 and 13); “in the field”—​a field of sacred apples; “three flocks of sheep”—​three supernal, sacred levels. . . . When she is filled, then, to be sure, “out of that well they watered the flocks” (Genesis 29:2)—​these are all the crowds and the holy companies,

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  199 all of whom drink and refresh themselves from the well, as befits each one of them. “And the stone at the well’s mouth was great” (ibid.). This is the stone over which men stumble, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. The Zohar 1:151b–​152a, Sitrei Torah (“A Well,” 1989 ed.), 392–​93

The WHEN [SETTING] Finally, by now the reader must have conceded that the journey of the patriarchs probably also leads to the Promised Land, no matter how outlandish the manner of their conquest depicted in the Book of Joshua and regardless of the bizarre situations involving their wives and the persistent, insistent talk of wells and water. The curious “bartering” of patriarchs’ wives, all this in the intriguing desert kingdom of Gerar located on the border with this Promised Land and ruled by the king who bears a Hebrew name Abimelek—​that stands for “my father the king”—​is a challenge that cannot be dismissed casually. The last of the seven cognitive-​deictic pointers of the noetic-​inferential continuum is the WHEN [SETTING], and indeed, it would be interesting—​and for a would-​be initiate vital—​to know whether the Pentateuchal text gives any indication as to the proper timing of either the beginning of the journey to the Promised Land or its conquest. Again, one may demur that both of these events have already been covered in this section of the study, specifically during the discussion of other indexical coordinates. Abraham begins his journey upon the Lord’s command, and Joshua likewise attacks Jericho when instructed to do so by Israel’s God. These commands, however, are not clearly marked, in that they are not the indexical coordinates proper that we are seeking in order to situate the emerging esoteric stratum, within what was named as the noetic-​inferential continuum. For example, how do we know that either Abraham or Joshua is ready to receive God’s guidance? Thus, the issue of timing is bound to be far more technically specific than just a mere reference to God’s involvement. The research above involved two of the patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac, whose lives, as pointed out by Aryeh Kaplan in Exhibit 7.18, were “literally … a carbon copy” of each other. Certainly the Gerar-​related sections of Genesis indicate as much, and we shall inquire regarding the meaning of this curious redundancy in Chapter 8. The remaining, and crucial, patriarch, Jacob, who as the father of the twelve tribes, the “children of Israel” (“Israel” being Jacob’s initiatory name), must therefore be at the heart of the evolving esoteric account, has a famously eventful career (see Exhibits 7.20 and 7.21). As noted in Chapter 5 apropos of the “ringstraked [streaked], speckled, and spotted” cattle (Gen. 30:38–​39, cited in Exhibit 7.21), Richard Elliott Friedman states what is generally accepted by most readers: “It is unclear if

200 The Urtext this was believed to work genetically, or was thought to be a practice of sympathetic magic, or was thought to be miraculous.”60 As stated earlier, however, we cannot accept any explanation pertaining to any part of the Pentateuchal text if it resorts to magic or the miraculous. Harold Bloom notes that “our father Jacob, who became Israel, is a man to whom everything comes hard and belatedly.”61 This certainly is the case, and the significance of this fact should by now be apparent to the reader of this study: rapid categorization and therefore also rapid actions are not the way either to the conjectured concealed Sôd stratum within the Pentateuch or to the Promised Land (whatever its ultimate meaning, yet to be determined in Chapters 8 and 9). Jacob’s nemesis, Esau, demonstrates what we can grasp readily, namely, that it is rather easy to get on with life by quickly acquiring a profession or occupation and a spouse. It is far more difficult to avoid the serious mistakes that such quick actions tend to bring, most especially if one intends to become, at some point, a “God-​wrestler,” as does Jacob. As Brian Lancaster argues, “The essence of spiritual growth is conveyed by the story of Jacob’s transformation into Israel, for the name ‘Jacob’ signifies the lower self, whilst ‘Israel’ is the higher self. And transformation does not come about without a struggle.”62 One would need to account for the following (discussion of which has to be postponed until Chapter 8): • • • •

Why could Isaac not also bless Esau, in addition to his blessing Jacob? What could the “blessing” be about? Since Jacob states to his father explicitly that he is Esau, is he a liar, too (in addition to being an opportunist and an impostor)? What is the meaning of the “magical” procedure in which Jacob engages vis-​à-​vis Laban’s flocks of sheep?

We see that certain key stages in Jacob’s life mark his own personal journey to the “Promised Land” (even if he is portrayed as already located there some or most of the time). These, we shall surmise for now, are the textual indications of the W HEN [SETTING]—​and of the related stages of the progress along the initiate’s journey: • • • • • • •

Jacob’s effort in securing Isaac’s blessing Jacob’s departure to search for a wife His marriage to Leah His marriage to Rachel His acquiring wealth in the form of flocks, by way of “[bringing] forth cattle [that were] ringstraked, speckled, and spotted” His struggle at Peniel, where he attains a new name, Israel Finally, the birth of his last son, Benjamin, the only one among Jacob’s sons to be born in the Promised Land (with Benjamin’s mother, Rachel, dying in childbirth).

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  201

WHAT[SETTING] “CROSSING OVER” TO THE “HOLY LAND”

WHEN[SETTING] WHY[SETTING] ESCAPE SLAVERY Ability to serve YHWH

THE JACOB NARRATIVE SAGA

de dicto

s-SETTING (s-CONTEXT 1)

Noetic-Deictic Center

WHO[SETTING] ELOHIM

INFERENTIAL FIELD

WHERE[SETTING]

“SCENE” “SITUATION”

THE WELLS

Presented mimetically in the

SURFACE NARRATIVE

HOW[SETTING] CONQUEST OF JERICHO

WHERETO[SETTING] PROMISED LAND

Figure 7.1 Noetic signifier ascertained: cognitive-​deictic pointers of the noetic-​ inferential continuum.

Exhibit 7.20  Genesis: Thus Esau Despised His Birthright. Gen. 25:31–​34 KJV 31 And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright. 32 And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me? 33 And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob. 34 Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.

202 The Urtext Gen. 27:22–​24 KJV 22 And Jacob went near unto Isaac his father; and he felt him, and said, The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. 23 And he discerned him not, because his hands were hairy, as his brother Esau’s hands: so he blessed him. 24 And he said, Art thou my very son Esau? And he said, I am. Gen. 27:34–​38 KJV 34 And when Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, and said unto his father, Bless me, even me also, O my father. 35 And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing. 36 And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. And he said, Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me? 37 And Isaac answered and said unto Esau, Behold, I have made him thy lord, and all his brethren have I given to him for servants; and with corn and wine have I sustained him: and what shall I do now unto thee, my son? 38 And Esau said unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.

Exhibit 7.21  Genesis: Thy Name Shall Be Called No More Jacob but Israel. Gen. 30:38–​39 KJV 38 And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink. 39 And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted. Gen. 32:26–​30 KJV 26 And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. 27 And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. 28 And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  203 And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. 30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. 29

Gen. 35:18 KJV And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing, (for she died) that she called his name Benoni: but his father called him Benjamin. ‫ש ּה ֙ ִּכ ֣י ֔ ֵמתָ ה ו ִַּת ְק ָר֥א ׁ ְש ֖מו ֹ ּ ֶבן־או ֹ ִנ ֑י‬ ָ ׁ ְ‫ְהי ְּב ֵצ ֤את נַפ‬ ֞ ִ ‫ ַוי‬WTT Gen. 35:18 ‫וְ אָ בִ ֖יו קָ ָֽרא־ ֥לו ֹ בִ ְני ִָמֽין׃‬

Notes 1 Those mystical whispers and hints within the rabbinical lore are never more than hints, however, in consequence becoming a fertile ground for massive speculation and mystical explorations such as in the Merkabah school and later in Kabbalistic creativity. 2 On current textual methods, see, for example, Bazerman and Prior, What Writing Does and How It Does It; and Titscher et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis. 3 Joos, “Semantic Axiom Number One,” 261. 4 On tax forms as text, see Bazerman and Prior, “Introduction,” 6–​7. 5 See Titcher et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, 183. 6 Bazerman and Prior, “Introduction,” 5. 7 The book edited by Bazerman and Prior, What Writing Does and How It Does It, does, however, unlike their description above, include a chapter on poetics; see, e.g., Eubanks “Poetics and Narrativity.” See also Coulthard, Advances in Written Text Analysis, especially the chapter by Catherine Emmett. 8 See details of the review in Kohav, Sôd Hypothesis; also, see Titscher et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis. 9 Apropos of content analysis: Originally the term referred only to those methods that concentrate on directly and clearly quantifiable aspects of text content, and as a rule on absolute and relative frequencies of words per text or surface unit. Subsequently the concept was extended to include all those procedures which operate with (syntactic, semantic or pragmatic) categories, but which seek at least to quantify these categories by means of a frequency survey of classifications. (Titscher et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, 55; emphasis added) 10 On grounded theory, see Titscher et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, 74–​77, 85; Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists, 26–​27; and Strauss and Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research, 46. Ethnography

204 The Urtext analyses language and text in the context of culture: culture “denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life” (Geertz 1973:89) (Titscher et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, 91, quoting Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures) An ethnographic research method does not seem to be appropriate for the proposed research, since all we have is a textual document, and no “participant observation” in the form of anthropological fieldwork is possible in our case. 11 Titscher and colleagues describe the Greimasian narrative semiotics method as follows: The theoretical basis of narrative semiotics is to be found in the semiotic studies of Charles S. Peirce, Charles Morris and in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. … The narrative component of Greimas’s method derives from Russian formalism (Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsk[y]‌), and in particular from Vladimir Propp’s (1958 [1928]) analysis of Russian fairy tales, in which there is an emphasis on the role of form in the transmission of meaning. (Titscher et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, 125–​26, citing Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale) SYMLOG “stands for ‘A System for the Multiple Level Observation of Groups’ ” (Ibid., 136; see also ibid., 137, 142). 12 Apropos of critical discourse analysis, two approaches can be highlighted: (1) “critical discourse analysis in the form developed by Norman Fairclough,” and (2) the “discourse-​historical method of Ruth Wodak” (Titscher et al., Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, 144). The theoretical framework … is derived from Louis Althusser’s theories of ideology, Mikhail Bakhtin’s genre theory, and the philosophical traditions of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Michel Foucault has also been a major influence on some exponents, including Norman Fairclough. (ibid., 144–​45) 13 Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 2. 14 Ibid., 165. 15 Ibid., 5–​7. 16 Compare Gavins and Steen, Cognitive Poetics in Practice; Semino and Culpeper, Cognitive Stylistics; and Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics. 17 The figure/​ground dichotomy is a key element in human cognition, since without it “we would only be able to perceive a ‘flat’ field of interlocking shapes and colors in our environment” (Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 15). This dichotomy becomes an important feature in literary works. 18 Stockwell concludes the section on figures and grounds by describing several additional concepts, that of attention, neglect, attractors, inhibition of return, and redundancy: Attention is typically caught by movement (in the visual field); in fact, elements in view that remain static are swiftly lost to attention. In textual terms,

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  205 this means that “newness” is the key to attention: literature is literally a distraction that pulls attention away from one element onto the newly presented element. I will call these objects or devices attractors in this context. (Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics, 18) Literature is literally a distraction. This indeed is one of my key premises, even if the surface-​mimetic narrative also contains important information on the sacred and divine aspects it reveals to the reader through its ostensive structures. But the surface narrative—​it will be assumed—​also takes pains to distract readers’ attention from an additional, and very different, narrative. 19 James Paxson notes that narrative embedding “join[s]‌the panoply of deconstructive master tropes, such as catachresis, prosopopeia, or allegory, celebrated by such poststructuralists as Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, or Hillis Miller. From the start, narrative embedding signals the deconstruction of narrativity” (Paxson, “Revisiting the Deconstruction of Narratology,” 133). While this does pertain to the conjectured embedded esoteric stratum within the Pentateuch, it is important to stress that the embedding envisioned by this study as being present in the text in question is not of the kind that is normally discussed in literary criticism; that is, the “inset” type not intended to be concealed (and thus quite visible and noticeable to the reader). Rather, and uniquely, the Pentateuchal authors, as we shall see, have employed an embedding that consists almost entirely of multiple “series” of personifications, anthropomorphisms, topifications, and other “substantialization” or “materialization” tropes. Thus, this sort of embedding is not a mechanical inset but an organic, structural, narrative-​constructing texture itself implicating everything, from the plot to characters and their interactions. 20 As David Herman and Michael Schuldiner suggest, there are several types of narrative metalepsis, or violations of story-​world integrity. One, which Schuldiner calls “first degree metalepsis,” involves interaction between the story-​world and the “real world of the reader.” The “second degree metalepsis” pertains to violations of distinct narrative planes within different story-​worlds (Schuldiner, “Writer’s Block and Third Degree Metalepsis”; Herman, “Toward a Formal Description of Narrative Metalepsis”). 21 Compare Paxson, Poetics of Personification; and Paxson, “Revisiting the Deconstruction of Narratology.” 22 De Man as quoted in Chase, Decomposing Figures, 48. 23 Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 175. 24 On the types of personification, see Paxson, Poetics of Personification. 25 Noesis is the de dicto element of the semiotic triad, one that is associated with Saussure’s “signifier,” that is, with (1) textual “expression” (Hjelmslev); (2) the “sign” itself (Peirce); and (3) literally the “word.” Arnauld and Nicole, La Logique. This study conceptualizes noesis—​ “the meaning-​ giving element of the act” (Føllesdal, “Thetic Role of Consciousness,” 13). It is the expression aspect of the Husserlian hyletic-​noematic-​noetic framework consisting of the Sôd’s logos and its poiesis (including in the latter the notion of technê). The noesis of the Pentateuchal text, that is, its “act of meaning itself ” (Simons, “Meaning and Language,” 123) or Føllesdal’s “meaning-​giving element of the act,” is what the present study identifies with the conjectured esoteric Sôd stratum expressed in the text itself. 26 Fletcher, “Allegory in Literary History,” 42. Fletcher cites Pépin, Mythe et allégorie, 85–​86, for the classical authors using hyponoia.

206 The Urtext 27 Niquette, “Discovering Assumptions.” 28 Girard, “Differentiation and Undifferentiation,” 124. 29 Ritchie, Information, 19. 30 I therefore am parting company here—​regarding the ancient Israelite civilization—​ with Julian Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and those who argue for fundamental and deep-​seated differences in the psychic makeup of people in early antiquity vis-​à-​vis modern human beings today, a pronounced tilt toward a more holistic experience of the world in antiquity notwithstanding. 31 On the Mosaic references, see Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. 32 See, e.g., Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness. 33 LaFleur, “Body,” 36. 34 Fischer, “Cartography of Ecstatic and Meditative States”; Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness. Our assumption shall be that it is through one’s body and its proprioceptive capabilities, especially of the somatic variety but also through the so-​called ecological proprioception—​both belonging to the nonconceptual forms of self-​consciousness (compare Bermúdez, Paradox of Self-​Consciousness; and Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness)—​that mystical experience proper is able to take place. In contrast, it is assumed that no mystical experience per se results from activities such as prayer or contemplation. There are many reasons as well as substantial evidence that can lead to such a supposition (see, e.g., Bermúdez et al., Body and the Self; d’Aquili, Spectrum of Ritual; Lex, “Neurobiology of Ritual Trance”; Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity; and Sansonese, Body of Myth). In the yogic traditions, for example, the notion of the body as the key to mystical phenomena is taken for granted; see Avalon, Serpent Power; Condron, Kundalini Rising; Eliade, Patanjali and Yoga; Mookerjee, Kundalini; Mumford, Chakra and Kundalini Workbook; Parwha Kaur, Kundalini Yoga; Silburn, Kundalini; and J. White, Kundalini, Evolution and Enlightenment. 35 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. As Christopher Morray-​ Jones notes in the context of the Merkabah and Hekhalot mystical practices, “the ‘ascent’ through the heavens could also sometimes be understood to be a ‘descent’ within the ‘temple’ of the body” (Morray-​Jones, “Temple Within,” 174). Morray-​Jones adds that “the ‘descent within’ and the ‘ascent without’ may best be understood as two aspects or dimensions of a single transformational process, not mutually exclusive conceptual alternatives” (176). 36 The notion of a deictic center is discussed in Chapter 6. 37 Regarding the Documentary Hypothesis, see Friedman, Bible with Sources Revealed, 3–​5. 38 Zhang, Allegoresis, 18. 39 As explained in a relevant chapter of the compilation Jewish Ideas and Concepts, In the opinion of many scholars, YHWH is a verbal form of the root hwh, which is an older variant of the root hyh “to be.” The vowel of the first syllable shows that the verb is used in the form of a future-​present causative hiph’il, and must therefore mean “He causes to be, He brings into existence” (Hartman et al., “Names of God,” 39) Compare the Zohar’s explanation: “The Yod is the symbol of the head of all creatures; the two Hé’s represent the five fingers of the right hand and the left; the Vau is the symbol of the body.” Zohar (1984 ed.), 3:130.

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  207 40 Terrance Wardlaw cogently argues that “the appearance of ‫[ יהוה‬YHWH] within the Pentateuch seems to be unmotivated from a literary standpoint since the Tetragrammaton is the Lord’s default name” (Wardlaw, Conceptualizing Words for God within the Pentateuch, 202; emphasis added). Wardlaw means that there seem to be no recognizable, overarching, marked phenomena which are associated with the Tetragrammaton, and which determine its selection. On the other hand, the appearance of ‫[ אלהים‬Elohim] seems to be significant as part of the literary structure of the Pentateuch, and there may be a unifying thematic link between most occurrences. (194) Wardlaw goes so far as to conclude that YHWH is the unmarked name, yet this may only be so in the context on which he focuses, namely, the literary function. I see YHWH’s glaring markedness manifested vis-​à-​vis the somewhat less marked “God”—​ that is, less marked in all languages other than Hebrew, as is argued in this section. 41 The Hebrew indicates that the man created by Elohim is made in “his” image; however, it would be preposterous to see here anything more than Hebrew linguistics: the Israelite deity does not possess a gender. Furthermore, “the man” is also how modern Hebrew speaks of the human being, that is, as ֙ ‫הָ ֽאָ ָדם‬. 42 A. Green, These Are the Words, 11. 43 Mark Smith notes that “Edward L. Greenstein translates ’elohim here as ‘the Powers’ ” (M. Smith, Priestly Vision of Genesis 1, 225n62, referencing Greenstein, “Presenting Genesis 1”). See the rest of Smith’s note for additional sources that include objections to this view. Any talk of “powers” in a human being, it must be realized at once, are only in potentia: the Edenic narrative makes it clear that human beings have been pushed out from the confines of the “garden,” where they did have a chance to obtain, or perhaps even already possessed, the “powers.” Thus, the latter cannot mean such fundamental and specifically human capacities as speech or the conventional mental abilities. 44 In an ironic, revealing remark, Zohar translators Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon state in a footnote that the prologue, a preliminary exposition of Gen. I, serves to introduce the reader to the circle of R. Simeon and his colleagues, and to give him an idea of the scope and nature of their discussions. It is somewhat more discursive and fanciful than the main body of the Zohar. (Zohar, 1984 ed., 1:3) The fanciful introductory passage turns out to be anything but that. 45 Wardlaw cites Menakhem Perry’s highlight[ing] the importance of initial position in a text: “The initial stages of the text-​continuum are not, for those following them, merely material for further extension and development; their relationship is not simply one of additive cumulation. The initial stages set in motion several modes of ‘prospective activity,’ of conditioning and subordination with regard to sequel; and the initial stage’s own contribution to the whole may also be influenced by its mere location in the order of information given in the text.” (Wardlaw, Conceptualizing Words for God within the Pentateuch, 196n8, quoting Perry, “Literary Dynamics,” 43)

208 The Urtext 46 Here we might have a Zoharic indication, or perhaps even confirmation, that this study’s method is germane to its esoteric framework. 47 Abraham “must leave his homeland without knowing for what he is giving it up” (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 49n12:1). Friedman notes regarding ֛ ‫ל ְֶך־לְ ָך‬ (which he translates as “go”) that “much has been made of the second word in this phrase, lĕkā, which means ‘for you.’ No translation quite captures the sense of the Hebrew (‘Go you,’ ‘Get you,’ ‘Go for yourself’)” (48n12:1). Gershon Winkler translates ֛ ‫ ל ְֶך־לְ ָך‬as “go to your self ” (Winkler, Way of the Boundary Crosser, 13). 48 And yet, as Michael Walzer points out, “Pharaoh is never explicitly called a tyrant in the Book of Exodus, though he is known ever after in Jewish literature as the first of the tyrants. … Nor is the oppression of the Israelites actually called unjust (it is called cruel)” (Walzer, “House of Bondage,” 85). In the context of this study’s figurative identification of the Egyptian slavery with the lower grade state-​of-​ consciousness that, epistemically, corresponds with the Platonic doxa, Waltzer’s distinctions become meaningful and significant. 49 Winkler, Way of the Boundary Crosser, 12. 50 Frye, “Exodus,” 75 (emphasis added). 51 Sternberg, Hebrews between Cultures, back cover text. 52 Ibid., xi. 53 When used to refer to the ideational culture of non-​Israelites in the Iron Age, the term “Canaanite” is problematic because it is not a correlate of the term “Israel.” The former refers to a vast area covering contemporary Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria; the latter to an ethnos occupying territory in parts of contemporary Israel, Jordan and southern Lebanon. Thus, by geographic definition, Israelite culture would be Canaanite. (Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 116n50) Assmann observes a similar dynamic at work here: Could it be that Canaan is just a narrative symbol for the heathen, the unconverted, and the apostates among the Israelites’ own ranks? Could it be that conquest, therefore, is but another narrative symbol of conversion? … Could it be that exodus, like conquest, is just another metaphor for conversion? (Assmann, “Memory, Narration, Identity,” 12) What Assmann designates as conversion, the present study frames as alteration of consciousness. 54 Knight, “Hebrews.” 55 Gedaliahu Stroumsa asks, What was, in Origen’s time, the Jewish reading of Joshua? The answer is striking: the Rabbis do not seem to have cared much about Joshua and his conquest of the Land. There is no Midrash on Joshua, as there is on other biblical books, and only little lore can be found in Talmudic and later Hebrew literature on these chapters. (Stroumsa, “Old Wine and New Bottles,” 260) 56 Robert Polzin likewise speaks of “the miraculous taking of Jericho (6), followed by a ‘realistic’ account of the initial setback and final victory at Ai (7–​8)” (Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist, 113).

The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier  209 57 Kaplan, Living Torah, 47n10:19, 89n20:1. 58 Kaplan, Living Torah, 89n20:2 cites Rashi et al., to the effect that such were the titles given to the Philistine kings (and also to Persian ones), but this is unconvincing, especially in the present context. 59 Kaplan’s explanation here, again, is hardly convincing: “Abimelekh[:]‌Probably not the same as the one involved with Abraham. … According to one source, this was the previous Abimelekh’s son (Targum on 26:28)” (Kaplan, Living Torah, 119n26:1). 60 Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 103–​4. 61 Bloom and Rosenberg, Book of J, 209. 62 Lancaster, Essence of Kabbalah, 153–​54.

8 Israel’s Noematic Signified Reverse-​Engineering the Pentateuchal Deific Numinous

Recovery of the Sôd’s Noematic Signified: Emergence of Pentateuchal “Content and Meaning Given in the Act” Overview of the Sôd’s Noetic Signifier As we turn now to making sense of the data assembled in Chapter 7, I will rely on cognitive poetics as well as an allied discipline that became prominent in the last three decades: cognitive linguistics.1 To get a sense of the complexity and difficulties involved, we must realize that practically all of the almost dozen passages selected and extracted from the Pentateuch in the preceding chapter have some fundamental incongruity or at least some discordant, inexplicable abstruseness, of either a semantic nature or related to difficulties involving the logic of narrative congruence. These data were assembled in accordance with a conjectured notion of a concealed additional or alternative narrative, specifically, a “noetic” narrative that required, in Chapter 7, the application of cognitive-​deictic pointers, that is, the indexical coordinates of what this study terms the noetic-​inferential continuum (see Chapters 6 and 7). However, even when the narrative is construed as “noetic,” many questions and logical gaps persist; we can even say that our noetic-​signifier narrative has drawn attention especially to the disjointed, even chaotic nature of the logic underlying the events presented and their portrayals. Yet this fact alone is only a “working problem” for us, in the sense that in the present chapter we will endeavor to account for the disparities and discrepancies in the data and the associated narration. As the present study understands it, the deliberately designed “traces” of the—​still only conjectured at this point—​ “second-​channel” narrative are the incongruous “protuberances” amid the “first-​channel” unfoldment of the mimetic surface, or ostensive, narrative. Our challenging task, then, is to elucidate this issue so that the reader of the Pentateuch can suddenly shift his or her perspectival focus from the first channel to the second, the noetically concealed channel; it is almost impossible to see them both simultaneously, certainly at first. As already mentioned elsewhere in this study, this process is akin to viewing the well-​ known Wittgensteinian duck-​rabbit picture, with a similar difficulty involved. DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-12

Israel’s Noematic Signified  211 Moving now into the realm of de re (or “of the thing” itself), that is, the ostensible subject matter of the conjectured embedded esoteric stratum, we must realize first that at the stage of identifying the noematic signified, “the thing” here is still not the final referent. That will come in the next phase, under the hyletic “object.” Here, I shall attempt to recover what was termed in Chapter 6 the “content,” or topic, of our gradually emerging “second-​ channel” narrative, which will be the noematic signified of the latter. What we have at the moment, though, in terms of the noetic-​signifier data assembled in Chapter 7, is a vague network of loosely associated notions and not yet fully formed, and in some sense even deformed, ideas. These can be summarized as follows: • • •

• • •

•

Our text has a leading (in literary terms) “character,” a supernatural agent, or “God,” who seems to combine in itself multiple “gods” or “powers.” As claimed by the text, this supernatural and all-​powerful agent creates the human being—​of both genders—​in its putative “image” and “likeness.” “God”—​clearly an appropriate assignee for the W H O [SETTING] cognitive-​ deictic pointer—​eventually establishes a close relationship with one particular human being, Abram/​Abraham, whom he commands to leave his native Mesopotamia. Abram/​Abraham is to leave for what will be known henceforth, referentially, as the “Promised Land” (due to it being promised by YHWH to Abraham and his descendants [Gen. 12:7]); it is in the direction of Canaan. Since later on, in the Exodus, an entire people, the “Hebrews,” will also be commanded to journey toward the very same location, namely, toward the Promised Land, the WHERETO [SETTING] was determined to be the latter. The WHY [SETTING] was equated with a sense of liberation, as well as with one’s ability to worship this God in the new, more suitable circumstances. Since Abram is specifically called “the Hebrew” (=​“the one who crosses over”), however, I have identified the WHAT [SETTING] as being related to the act of crossing over—​and specifically crossing over into what must be recognized here already as a rather mystifying “Promised Land”—​due to the following: (1) the extreme attention paid to this particular location; (2) the obscure, puzzling circumstance of both Abraham and Isaac residing for prolonged periods in Gerar—​on the border with the “Promised Land”—​when they have already both been, seemingly at their will and without any particular difficulty, inside the latter; and (3) the fact that it is only if Abraham goes “unto a land that I will shew thee” (Gen. 12:1 KJV) (=​the “Promised Land”) that YHWH promises to Abraham to “make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Gen 12:2–​3 KJV). The final three “cognitive-​deictic pointers” to the textual and contextual S E TTIN G of this emergent noetic narrative all relate to the particular

212  The Urtext circumstances of the act of crossing over to the Promised Land: the HOW [SETTING] describes the curious manner of conquering a border town, Jericho; the WHERE [SETTING] seems to be in another border location, the kingdom of Gerar, with its no less curious wells and rather odd king, Abimelek, bearing a Hebrew honorific name, that of God’s being “my father the King,” and where both Abraham and, a generation later, Isaac reside for extended periods; and finally, the W H E N [SETTING] is conjectured to be reflected, somehow, in Jacob’s rather outlandish life stages. This is our noetic signifier—​a text-​based, emerging, loose, surely seen as disjointed, and, if anything, peculiar “narrative.” It is not exactly incoherent, since we were able to follow scrupulously not merely the text but the logic of the text itself. Yet perhaps the earlier-​invoked term “traces” or hints might be a fairer description of what has been assembled so far. At this juncture an investigator, as well as any critical reader of our focus text, has three options vis-​à-​vis the information teased out from the text: 1. Accept everything at face value, namely, as a coherent narrative in which the obvious miracles and apparent magic—​such as the walls of Jericho crumbling as a result of loud shouts and Jacob’s sheep being born with certain markings—​are to be accepted as consequences of God’s will and power (the “traditionalist,” or literal, option). 2. Dismiss such occurrences of supernatural events as mere magic and the province of the miraculous and, therefore, instances of fantasy (the “scientific,” or secular, option). 3. Look at the Pentateuchal text in the manner of the present study—​bearing in mind the “Mosaic distinction.”2 This distinction abhors magical and fantasy-​based worldviews and at the same time allows for the possibility of an embedded esoteric “dual-​channel” transmission—​as a text that takes advantage of literary mastery to compose a complex literary creation to express something yet to be determined (the esoteric, or “literary,” option). As Philo Judaeus put it two millennia ago, in cases depicting things mystical “we must turn to allegory, the method dear to men with their eyes opened.”3 “Allegory,” says our contemporary, Michael Sinding, is a Mount Everest for critics. It drives some to renounce theory and descend to particulars, while inspiring others to new heights. Northrop Frye’s work on allegory “obstinately adhered to a much larger theoretical structure” (vii), and so became Anatomy of Criticism. Allegory was the paradigmatic figure for the semiological theory of rhetoric Paul de Man envisioned for deconstruction. I suggest we can assess aspiring frameworks by how they meet the challenge of allegory, and that cognitive rhetoric fares better than most. … Allegory has been a shaping force in the growth of blending theory, too.4

Israel’s Noematic Signified  213 One slowly awakens to the many exceptional features of and opportunities offered by figuration in general, that rather than being merely some pretty embellishment of poetic fancy it is a tool of choice of “adults in the room.”5 As Samuel Levin puts it, “When we encounter a sentence like ‘The earth pirouettes around the sun,’ we do not question whether it is true or false, we ask: ‘What could it mean?’ ”6 At the same time, one must be on guard: “It is one thing to use a metaphor and quite another to be used by it,” warns Seymour Chatman.7 Speaking of literalness versus literariness, Michael Silverstein offers: poetry in the sense of using textually bound figurative language indexically presupposes—​and hence invokes—​the existence of grammar and lexicon in some asymptotically literal denotational modality, which literalness is thus experienced (and experienceable) only to the degree to which and in the manner in which we can experience entextualizing figuration. Literalness in any empirically experienceable denotational entextualization is just poetic figuration degree zero, that is, meaningfulness (or that aspect of meaningfulness) of words and expressions completely independent of emerging (en)text(ualization)-​ in-​ context—​ an obviously merely theoretical extreme invoked by actual usage.8

Egypt

The Hebrews

Gerar Jericho Abraham the Hebrew

Promised Land

Mesopotamia

North

Figure 8.1  Spatial diagram of the Sôd’s Noetic signifier: crossing over to the Promised Land.

214  The Urtext The interesting thing about the third option is that in today’s scholarly environment one would automatically tend to assume that the notion of a supernatural agent, or “God,” would here be likewise written off, discarded, or at least discounted along with the other magical and supernatural notions, images, and concepts. Yet it is precisely the present study’s position that a notion of a supernatural agent such as God is at the very foundation of typical religious experiences, most especially in the case of numinous mysticism, as described by Rudolf Otto and involving what Otto termed mysterium tremendum.9 Experiences, by definition, even those affecting one’s judgment to the point of distorting reality and the like, are not in and of themselves “fantasy.” They are, on the contrary, an empirical, directly observable part of that very reality. In order to proceed with the third option—​attempting to investigate the assembled data as a noetic signifier that, moreover, is a sophisticated literary presentation with everything this may entail—​we shall engage, first of all, certain cognitive-​linguistic conceptualizations and, second, poetics per se, since it is the theory of literary expression. Our goal is to arrive at a position from which we may attempt a recovery of both the noematic signified and the hyletic object or referent.

The WH Y [TOPIC] and the WHERETO [TOPIC] We now begin our noetic-​ literary search for “content-​ communicative locators,” or the symbolic coordinates of the noematic-​ conferential continuum. These were designated as being about the “topic,” or the content aspect of the overall context of the conjectured Sôd stratum. Such content will be the noematic signified of the noetic signifier, that is, of the textual data decided on in Chapter 7. Our point of entry is not really difficult. If the W H Y [SETTING] was determined to be—​strictly based on the Pentateuchal text itself—​connected to a sense of liberation as well as one’s ability to “serve” this God, our necessary conclusion must be that the perplexing “Promised Land” is where one could “access” God, that is, have access to God. You cannot serve someone without having some-​ kind-​of-​access to him or her, regardless of what one may mean by “serve.” Thus, the WHY [TOPIC]—​that is, “the Why” of the noematic signified—​can be assumed to be about “access to YHWH.” The conjectured Sôd layer’s reason for being, in terms of its intermediary, or signified-​noematic, meaning, seems to concern one’s ability to access the God of Israel. We can see at once both the potential danger involved and thus the reasons for the extreme caution practiced by the Pentateuchal compilers, as well as the depth of rabbinical unawareness of this crucial communicative aspect of the Torah—​ to say nothing of others who likewise claim to be interpreting the Hebrew Scripture. No wonder prophecy has ceased in Israel since the fall of the Second Temple (as the rabbis were compelled to acknowledge).10

Israel’s Noematic Signified  215 The WHER E TO [TOPIC] is the next logical link, and it turns out to be a much more complex coordinate. We have determined earlier, apropos the “setting” aspect of the Sôd’s tripartite context, that the W H E RE T O [SETTING] is the “destination of the Hebrews,” of those who “cross over” (first “Abraham the Hebrew” and, in Exodus, “the Hebrews”). This destination was designated as the “Promised Land.” The latter, however, has raised secondary questions pertinent to the focus of this study: for example, why exactly did that specific geographical area and location have to be the beneficiary of such a unique choice, given the rather general and seemingly noncommittal scheme of things reflected in the noetic signifier regarding this destination? The Hebrews in Egypt, as well as Abraham, are simply told to go there, with no explanation given to them for why that precise location is God’s unique choice.11 Is there something special or perhaps even paranormal about that land, a land destined to become known as the Holy Land? Now, however, it seems that we may have a clue to the likely intended signified. If the W HY [TOPIC] is about one’s ability to access the God of Israel (=​the reason “why” to go on the Journey, to “cross over,” and so on), then the destination itself must be related somehow to that very ability, or to the notion of “access to the deity.” The WHER ETO [TOPIC] is therefore also tied to one’s ability to access God: the destination, the aim of the journey in question, as well as the journey itself, appear to be access to God per se. The Logic of a Means of Access to a Supramundane Entity Here, we must begin to confront demanding conceptual difficulties that will arise in the course of the data analysis undertaken in this chapter. How can one think of “access” to a supramundane entity, a supernatural agent? The notion itself, on logical grounds alone, seems oxymoronic. Yet, as one is compelled to realize—​pace Gershom Scholem—​it is “mysticism” that is the experiential link to the divine.12 Frances Flannery and her colleagues, for example, remind us that “[William] James’s primary paradigm for religious experience was mysticism, which he claimed was the essential nature of all religious experience,” and April DeConick plainly states that, “broadly speaking, [mysticism] has come to describe for us organized practices used to [e]‌licit direct contact with the divine.”13 More to the point, mysticism of course is not only “organized practices” for enabling “direct contact with the divine”; it also first and foremost involves phenomenal experiences of a certain kind. These experiences typically lead to or entail altered states of consciousness (ASCs) of one sort or another.14 Lest the reader think that I will now claim the confirmation of what the study’s secondary research question seeks to ascertain, namely, the presence of mysticism in the Pentateuchal text, I hasten to insist that such a claim is not being made at this juncture. This would indeed be premature; at this point in the study, I seek only to follow the logic of the evolving discussion. The latter has led us to a link between “serving God” and “access to God,” then

216  The Urtext to the one between “access to God” and the “Promised Land.” And since “access to God” has been identified earlier with “mysticism,” it appears now that “Promised Land,” or at least the presumed “destination” of the Hebrews, may be tied to alteration of consciousness. And this logic itself demands that yet another possibility be entertained now, specifically that the “Promised Land” notion itself may be a trope, a figural concept—​ designed as such by the Pentateuchal authors for the conjectured concealed noetic-​noematic-​hyletic stratum. However, one must not proceed hastily; certain potential objections first need to be addressed. As Tzvetan Todorov stresses, “We must insist on the fact that we cannot speak of allegory unless we find explicit indications of it within the text. Otherwise, we shift to what is no more than a reader’s interpretation; and at this point every literary text would be allegorical.”15 Are there any explicit indications of the presence of a trope in the “Promised Land” notion? The answer must be no. Yet James Paxson notes, in the case of “narrative embedding[,]‌… the master trope in a critical deconstruction of narratology, embedding becomes not a concept of narrative, but the concept of narrative poetics, tropology, and in turn general cognition. … Narrative embedding signals cognitive modalities and fields of invention well outside the received domain of ‘fiction’ or literary narrative to which it has been tethered.”16 If this master trope “signals cognitive modalities and fields of invention well outside the received domain of ‘fiction,’ ” and it does so in a situation where its very presence is concealed—​ in accordance with our conjectures—​then indeed Todorov’s otherwise well-​ justified demand regarding the need for explicit indications of “allegory” becomes in our case inapplicable. An implicit indication must suffice here if we ever hope to recover a deliberately concealed, noetically camouflaged stratum. Moreover, we must keep in mind that here we are well outside the referential realm and even past the inferential field that was the domain of the noetic-​ inferential continuum (researched in Chapter 7 for the textual data selection). At present we are investigating the noematic-​conferential continuum, and our domain is what was termed in Chapter 6 the “conferential” field.17 This is, in the case of the Pentateuch and its conjectured Sôd stratum, a field of textual traces, hints, and clues; of discursive scrutiny; of the text’s intended yet conceptually veiled content, namely, the noematic signified arising out of the textual signifier. We seek to identify either the possible theme (“topic”), the subject (“content”) of the conjectured esoteric layer, or the key issue or problem that might be implicated. If the presence of an embedded stratum signals, in Paxson’s terms, “cognitive modalities and fields of invention well outside the received domain of ‘fiction,’ ” then embedding itself, in its turn, is signaled via the presence of metalepsis.18 I will propose in Chapter 10 that narrative metalepsis is among the foremost indications or signs of Pentateuchal externalization of the esoteric ineffable. Yet here metalepsis—​or violations of storyworld integrity—​ already needs to be recognized as present in several of the selected data samples. For example:

Israel’s Noematic Signified  217 (1) What is the significance of the otherwise puzzling wells (see exhibits 7.15 and 7.17) almost incessantly discussed in certain sections of Genesis?19 (2) Why would Abraham and then, a generation later, Isaac—​a puzzling redundancy—​reside for prolonged periods in Gerar, on the border of the Promised Land (rather than in the “land of the promise” itself)?20 Gerar’s king, too, is hardly a welcoming host (see exhibits 7.15 and 7.17). (3) Why is it specified—​that is, marked—​that Jacob and Esau were twins (see exhibit 7.20)? (4) Why did the progenitor of the Israelites, Jacob, need to lie, trick, and deceive both his revered father and his only brother to receive the “blessing” (see exhibit 7.20)?21 (5) Why does Jacob perform seemingly magical activities to secure wealth while in effect cheating his father-​in-​law out of his flocks (see exhibit 7.21)? Many more such ostensive incongruities and fissures in the text’s own narrative-​ conceptual integrity can be cited, but the point has been abundantly made. I will analyze these and other passages below, when we attempt to recover the remaining coordinates (the remaining “content-​communicative locators” of the noematic-​conferential continuum, which we are currently investigating). I have provisionally identified the WHER ETO [TOPIC] with alteration of consciousness or, rather, with a certain, still to be ascertained state of consciousness. One must keep in mind that the present study, presented in a text format, necessarily follows a linear mode, yet the seven content-​ communicative locators of the noematic-​conferential continuum are all interconnected: they are, or are supposed to be, the conferential coordinates, or content-​related aspects, of the selfsame concealed second-​channel stratum. In consequence, some of the determinations regarding the likely meaning or referential identity will either be revised or more firmly established during the process of this analysis; different coordinates will add their respective contributions to the evolving, emerging picture of a single whole.

The WHAT [TOPIC] and the WHO [TOPIC] Now that we have determined that the WHY of the noematic-​conferential continuum is associated with having access to the God of Israel, whereas the W HER E TO , in consequence, might be connected to altered states of consciousness, we might ask regarding the WHAT [TOPIC], What is, or might be, going on here? In Chapter 7, it was determined that another “what,” the W H AT [SETTING], is tied to the word, or the notion, “Hebrew”—​and its semantic import of “crossing over,” specifically crossing over to the Promised Land (as the textual context demands). Now, however, with the Hebrews’ destination somehow possibly connected to alteration of consciousness, we could be justified in returning to Thomas Cahill’s highlighting of Abram’s unprecedented deed (see exhibit 7.8), namely, journeying in the wake of God’s command. If the

218  The Urtext putative destination of a journey is a certain state of mind—​one that would enable “access” to God, perhaps on a more regular basis than that which provided the original impetus for Abram to leave his homeland—​then the “journey” itself becomes highly intriguing. The very notion of enabling one’s access to a deity has traditionally been a key aspect of a group’s or a tradition’s fundamental esoteric knowledge, one that fell under the purview of such a tradition’s group-​initiation practices. Thus, we can here readily assume that Abram’s journey is one of the initiate-​to-​be; more than that, Abram’s journey is probably the “journey of initiation.” The same, of course, could apply to the Exodus from Egypt, except that it involves a “group initiation” journey. The question that suggests itself at this point is this: Is initiation a journey? The several dictionaries that I have consulted all show the semantic meaning of journey to be essentially tied to (1) “traveling from one place to another,” or (2) “the act of traveling from one place to another,” or (3) “a traveling from one place to another, usually taking a rather long time.” Does initiation necessarily involve a journey, and a prolonged journey at that? Although one may certainly have to travel to reach a particular group or teacher, or else a particular location or place, initiation per se hardly involves travel or journeying. It seems, therefore, that a cognitive, or conceptual, metaphor is at work here. This is as if saying that L I F E I S A JOU RN E Y , where the target domain, journey—​by being mapped onto the source domain, life—​ supplies most of the concepts that a journey is associated with, to model a specific idea of “life,” one that is much like a long and perhaps difficult, unpredictable, but also fascinating journey.22 We might be looking at I N I T I AT I ON I S A J O U R NEY for virtually the same reasons. And yet there is, from the standpoint of this study, a key, principled difference between a conceptual metaphor as envisioned in, and applicable to, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory and a metaphor such as I N I T IAT IO N IS A J OURNEY . The former involves so-​ called primary conceptual metaphors, which are largely unconscious yet powerfully effective vis-​à-​vis our very thinking, due to their having been hardwired into our neuronal circuitry since childhood.23 The latter, by contrast, if it is indeed applicable to the Pentateuchal text, would be a literary metaphor, that is to say, a literary device deliberately employed by the composers of this text.24 Nothing is hardwired regarding this particular instance or kind of metaphorical usage, not even in the Pentateuchal compilers’ brains let alone the typical reader’s brain. Still, if it is a metaphor, it involves substitution: The cognitive paradigm sees metaphor as a means whereby ever more abstract and intangible areas of experience can be conceptualized in terms of the familiar and concrete. Metaphor is thus motivated by a search for understanding. It is characterized, not by a violation of selection restrictions, but by the conceptualization of one cognitive domain in terms of components more usually associated with another cognitive domain.25

Israel’s Noematic Signified  219 Indeed, it is quite handy to conceptualize such “intangible areas of experience” as mystical initiation “in terms of the familiar and concrete,” which the notion of a journey readily offers. And if at the same time such a substitutionary procedure were to veil or camouflage one’s intended subject—​yet also at the same time represent a ready opportunity to have the latter recovered if properly approached—​then so much the better, since, in accordance with this study’s proposal, simultaneous concealment and accessibility was one of the principal aims of the Pentateuchal compilers. Since “metaphor constitutes reality by means of representation and identity insofar as similarity emerges out of an initial perception of difference,” even if no journey is involved in initiatory activities per se, there nonetheless are strong similarities between the two.26 The similarities are compelling, and the advantages of adopting this metaphor are numerous: • • • •

Initiation, like a journey, takes time. Both can be dangerous and often unpredictable. At the end of the journey one finds himself or herself in a new place not only geographically but also mentally/​psychologically; this mimics initiation well. A journey readily lends itself to mimetic narration, with memorable, impressive visuality and unmatched opportunities for both coding information that needs to be concealed and representing ideas and feelings.

But if the W HAT [TOPIC] is thus to be recognized as the deliberately created literary metaphor INI TI ATI ON I S A J O UR NEY , then what would be the starting and ending locations in this image-​schema? We see that while Abram begins his journey in Mesopotamia and the Hebrews of the Exodus, in Egypt, both end up in the Promised, or the “Holy,” Land. Yet, if the journey itself is a conceptual metaphor representing initiation, what are the points of origin and the destination here? Initiation, we have assumed earlier, is an activity leading the candidate into an altered state of consciousness, which in turn then enables, or represents, access to God. It is therefore not difficult to suppose that the commencement of the journey—​it’s the point of departure—​is the very opposite of its destination, which is the putative access to God and a corresponding alteration of consciousness. Regarding these, we shall use, for the limited purposes of the present study, the terminology that is common both in Kabbalistic sources and in popular “occult” and “New Age” literature, namely, “expanded” or “higher” consciousness, to be contrasted with “restricted” or “lower” consciousness.27 Thus, the WHERETO [TOPIC] can be seen now as “expanded consciousness.” What does it mean to have a geographical location—​however fabulous it is, by virtue of uniquely being God’s gift to the Israelites—​stand in for an altered state of consciousness? It means, clearly, that this represents an allegory, a conceptual allegory: “An allegory is but a translation of abstract

220  The Urtext notions into a picture-​language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses.”28 It is, moreover, a “compositional allegory,” that is, one originating with the author (as opposed to an “interpretive allegory” of allegoresis that is a (fallacious) tool of the interpreters).29 The reason I can claim authorial, or compositional, allegory here—​rather than indulging in allegoresis by proposing “interpretive allegory”—​is tied to the import of the entire foregoing analysis. It involved “content-​communicative locators” and was carried out within the confines of the noematic-​conferential continuum—​ and, prior to that, in Chapter 6, it entailed a tripartite, multistage network of communicated textual signification. To use Michael Silverstein’s description, such a conceptualization, as we shall see even more clearly in the pages that follow, is “a dynamic figuration that implicitly transforms one literal/​ figurative occurrence into another, at an even higher, global meta-​level of semiosis that can be read as a significance of the whole textual segment in which recurrences are located.”30 Silverstein further speaks of a “grammar and lexicon in some asymptotically literal denotational modality” and of “experienc[ing] entextualizing figuration.”31 Philip Eubanks specifically links metaphors and narration, via his notion of “licensing stories”: Aristotle and others have noted that most metaphors can be made into mini-​narrations. This suggests something about the fluid interface between metaphor and story. … When we select our metaphors, we validate our stories; conversely, when we comprehend the world through story, we license some metaphors and not others. Moreover, because what I call licensing stories overarch the more localized function of mapping, story is one of the chief means through which we understand and deploy metaphor.32 Thus, to grasp the intended import of these metaphors and allegories that we see emerging, being foregrounded from the Pentateuchal text by the present study, the related mini-​narrations—​as well as the entirety of both layered narratives, both the ostensive, or surface one, and the conjectured concealed narrative—​must be seen as concept upon concept laid out for us in a narrative form. This conclusion will be further reinforced and supported with new findings as the analysis continues to unfold. Finally, we can without difficulty at this point designate the W H O [TOPIC] as implicating the would-​be initiate. Next, I turn to perhaps the single most counterintuitive and therefore singularly most challenging subject of the WHER E [TOPIC].

The WH ERE [TOPIC] It is here in the study’s progression that the Wittgensteinian duck/​rabbit images that were invoked earlier, with their difficult-​to-​cross visual fault

Israel’s Noematic Signified  221 line, become instructive. I consider the fault line between the two channels of the “dual-​channel” Pentateuchal narrative conjectured by this study—​ one narrative conscious, visible, ostensive, and mimetically powerful, and the other normally remaining below the threshold of awareness of most readers—​as fully intended by the ancient authors. In accordance with our thesis, the only way possible to “see” the built-​in metaleptical disruptions and distortions that are indicative of the presence of the “second channel” narrative—​unless one is an initiated priest of Jerusalem’s First Temple—​is to grasp the import of the conclusion reached by Reuven Tsur with regard to what he calls “delayed categorization”: “Delayed categorization … may put too much sensory load on the human memory system. … Furthermore, delayed categorization may involve a period of uncertainty that may be quite unpleasant, or even intolerable for some individuals. Rapid categorization, by contrast, may involve the loss of vital information.”33 By rapidly forming categories and conclusions, we derive comfort in the quick elimination of uncertainty—​yet at the price of endemic miscategorizations and misapprehension. With regard to the Pentateuchal text, such miscategorizations and especially the loss of vital, communicated information are the price of the rapidity with which we normally read this text. The present study consciously avoids the pitfalls of rapid categorization. Even so, the conceptual-​cognitive-​noetic barrier to be breached here is so counterintuitive and unusual that, by comparison, conceptual metaphors and allegories discussed earlier are the stuff of child’s play. Yet, if one fails to grasp this particular “content-​communicative locator,” the W H E RE [TOPIC], a switch onto the second-​channel narrative track is effectively impossible; one continues to stubbornly see only the duck or only the rabbit, never the two simultaneously (in our case, however, only the duck of the mimetic narrative, but almost never the rabbit of the Sôd stratum). Where, or what, is the WHERE [TOPIC]? Our automatic response, supported by what we take to be the obvious logical and conceptual substance of the Pentateuchal narrative itself, is that the WHERE , clearly, is in the Promised Land, indeed, that the WHERE is the Promised Land. The “Promised Land,” however, has already been assigned to the WHER E T O [SETTING] (see Chapter 7), whereas the WHAT [TOPIC] was seen earlier in this chapter as “initiation,” that is, the J O U R NEY T O the Promised Land. We are thus threatened by a confusing circularity. Worse than the threat of circularity, however, is the apprehension we experience pertaining to the odd, unaccounted-​for passages in Genesis pertaining to the kingdom of Gerar (see exhibits 7.15 and 7.17), which, with their subject matter of the wells, belong to the WHERE[SETTING]. Yet the WHERE[TOPIC] here in the noematic-​conferential continuum, where much revolves around the “Promised Land” and its principal, albeit still conjectured connection to (1) the “access to God” (the WHY[TOPIC]); (2) “expanded consciousness” (the WHERETO[TOPIC]); (3) initiation, as the journey to the Promised Land, that is, expanded consciousness (the WHAT[TOPIC]); and (4) the would-​be initiate (the

222  The Urtext

EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS

THE HEAD

Jericho

Gerar [bodily chakras below, along the vertical axis of the spine]

[the view directly from above, with rest of the body below]

Figure 8.2 The Promised Land as “expanded consciousness” and initiate’s head and body as seen from above. WHO[TOPIC])

perhaps also ought to be related to these same issues. And, in fact, there is a connection between the Gerar-​related passages in exhibits 7.15 and 7.17 and these issues: the marked, peculiar circumstance that Gerar—​as well as Beersheba (see exhibit 7.17[h]‌)—​were in fact on the border of the Promised Land (see exhibit 7.18). Let us extract the schematic image of the Promised Land from Figure 8.1 and signify the words “Promised Land” by “expanded consciousness” (Figure 8.2). Where is this putative expanded consciousness? Presumably in one’s head, if we disregard for the moment the claims of recent consciousness studies that extend to the phenomenon of consciousness the influence of the whole body, a notion known as the “embodied mind” or “embodied consciousness.”34 Thus, if one were to assume a bird’s-​eye view, looking downward on Figure 8.2, the circle representing “expanded consciousness” can be seen as representing the human head (complete with two ears and nose). Is there anything below this schematic head, which occupies our entire field of vision? Presumably it is the human body that is located below the head.35 Lest I am accused of engaging in a silly game, I wish to state that here we have approached what perhaps is the single most important “secret” of the esoteric system we are recovering (as well as its single most difficult, most counterintuitive concept, as noted above). If the initiate’s expanded state of mind and consciousness can be represented by a geographical landmass known as the Land of Israel (or the Promised Land), then this same land area can indeed represent the initiate’s head and, moreover, his body, too. It is the contention of the present study that the WHERE[TOPIC] is, in fact, “the physical body” of the would-​be initiate. If, as claimed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas, “everything symbolizes the body,” why not a “promised land” where that body’s higher consciousness must be won and secured?36 Daniel Punday, for his part, notes the recent trend: “the body has emerged as a site where the power and problems of reference play themselves out.”37

Israel’s Noematic Signified  223 The Body of a Would-​Be Initiate I defer, once again, the question of wells, as well as of the kingdom of Gerar, until the next discursive part (Chapter 9), where I will seek to ascertain the hyletic “object” of the Sôd. With regard to the body and its key role in mystical experiences (which in Eastern religions is not considered to be secret), in the Abrahamic traditions even the very topic seems to have eluded most medieval, let alone modern, Kabbalists and their counterparts in Christianity and Islam (the Sufis are a possible exception).38 Ziony Zevit states flatly that “the understanding of much contemporary study is that religion is something of the mind cut off from our five senses, our limbs, and our organs. It is a religion of some fourth dimension, not of any three-​dimensional world. … These comprehensions may be modern or medieval, but they certainly are not ancient.”39 In the earliest Hebraic esoteric tradition, which this study attempts to recover and which is seen as undergirding the ancient Israelite cultic religion and civilization, the bodily connection is perhaps the single most zealously guarded secret. In the Western scientific milieu, the notions of a bodily basis of cognition, consciousness, and certainly of procedures for induction into mystical and other altered states of consciousness have only recently made significant inroads into mainstream thinking. This shift is occurring some three thousand years since this idea became the basis of ancient Israelite sensibility, which, according to this study’s thesis, is responsible for the origination of the Pentateuch and its cultic framework as a whole. There are serious and compelling reasons for the seemingly bizarre assertion that the WHERE [TOPIC] is “the body” of the would-​be initiate, and these reasons will become increasingly apparent as we untangle each content-​ communicative locator, and especially the metacommunicative object identifiers of the hyletic-​deferential continuum, in Chapter 9. This bizarre aspect is caused by a clash between the two channels or two narratives I have spoken about intermittently in this study: that the “Promised Land” belongs to the ostensive, or primary mimetic narrative, whereas the initiate’s body is fully in the second-​channel narrative, which is concealed from the reader and remains at the unconscious level. Clashes between the two narrative channels are bound to emerge here and there. What we seem to be uncovering are the emerging literary-​figural devices that carry complex communicative import: one trope builds on another in a manner likely unparalleled in narrative fiction. If, for example, the “journey” to the “Promised Land” is a literary metaphor for “initiation” and the “Promised Land” is an allegory of “expanded consciousness,” and if “expanded consciousness” is a metonym of the “human body,” what is the relationship between “Promised Land” and “human body”? Here the two channels come momentarily together in an exquisite metaleptic violation of storyworld integrity, its narrative logic being severely challenged. And yet it is precisely the narrative logic of the respective tropological series that, as we

224  The Urtext shall see, makes possible the recovery of the putative authorial communication in the Pentateuchal text.40

The WH EN [TOPIC] and the HOW [TOPIC] One would think, initially at least, that the W H E N , since we are talking about the “journey” of initiation, is related to when Abraham begins his trip toward Canaan, or when the Hebrews leave Egypt, thus beginning the Exodus. Such understanding is certainly correct, in terms of the main mimetic narrative. And yet, if one reframes the question as “When should one’s journey of initiation begin?” we become aware of the aspect pertaining to one’s readiness for such a trip. Is there a signal, a sign that indicates that one is indeed “ready”? Jacob, the Pentateuchal initiate-​in-​the-​making sans pareil, should personify numerous such issues and questions. We see, for example, that Jacob begins his independent life—​his journey of initiation?—​with the outrageous act of tricking both his twin brother Esau and his venerable father Isaac into letting him, Jacob, usurp “the blessing” due the firstborn, Esau (see exhibit 7.20). On the face of it, this seems an inauspicious or, rather, inglorious beginning for the progenitor of the future “nation of priests” of the most high God. But to read this way is akin to likening Joshua and his exploits in Jericho and elsewhere to General Patton, as in a passage from William Dever cited in an endnote earlier—​that is, to read rapidly and superficially, without pausing, however briefly, for the deliberately marked and prominently displayed communicative intent within the text. For a writer to specify that the two brothers were twins—​in a text where everything is rife with significance and where the author could just as easily have stated that they were just brothers, Esau older, Jacob younger—​is to mark a vital, surely consequential distinction. In a deliberately concealed, esoteric narrative with a noetic barrier, the intended addressee thus must arrive at the marked significance by him-​or herself. Contrary to the postmodernist insistence on the indeterminacy, or at least the endless multiplicity and plurivocity of meaning, there is only one intended—​and thus the only possible—​meaning here. It, this sole meaning, is reinforced by the curious “blessing” that can be bestowed on only one of the brothers, not on both of them. The seemingly magical blessing, however, does not in itself secure, for example, special riches for Jacob, since Esau becomes just as, if not more, wealthy than his “blessed” brother. Nor does this blessing ensure happiness in life, as demonstrated similarly in the text; arguably, it does the reverse. There is, once again, one and only one aspect that makes Jacob’s life dramatically different from Esau’s: Jacob is destined to become “Israel,” after he encounters “God.”41 In addition, Jacob’s life is filled with and is fulfilled by his extraordinary relationship with this “God,” who indeed will become known as “the God of Israel” or, alternatively, “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Israel’s Noematic Signified  225 Why can’t Esau be blessed with the same kind of life? The narrative itself very clearly explains the reason: because Esau himself rejects it, even if he belatedly does beg and cry in front of his father. Neither Isaac nor anyone else can “bless” him with a life that Esau does not wish to choose for himself. At this point one must realize that the Esau-​Jacob narrative of contention and sibling rivalry is an example of what in Chapter 5 I proposed to call asymmetric noetic parallelism—​a literary device employed by the authors of the Pentateuchal text in numerous places. The reader is invited to compare the two brothers and their respective lives, with the narrative clearly favoring only one of them, Jacob. Jacob is unmistakably an initiate-​in-​the-​making, and the narrative is at pains to communicate that the putative “blessing” is, rather, one’s own fateful decision vis-​à-​vis the path of initiation. Who is one struggling with in such situations? Who is one’s Esau? Anyone—​and not necessarily a spiritual master—​who considers this matter carefully will come to a reasoned conclusion: with regard to spiritual matters of this nature, one has only oneself to contend with.42 One can decide to be a “regular,” or ordinary, everyman; this is portrayed in the case of Esau by his marrying a local, that is to say, an immediately available, “regular” girl; by his enjoying such natural activities as hunting and other physical pursuits; and by his generally being quite contented with life as it is. The emphasis is on Esau as a typical representative of humanity, a well-​adjusted representative at that, quite happy without God’s presence in his life (though he is likely to rapidly absorb some local expression of religiosity, often in common with his wife’s perspectives). In contrast, the would-​be initiate Jacob must “travel” and “work” for his future wives. These wives, however, are allegorical stand-​ins for “soul forces,” or levels of spiritual attainment expressed as successive expansions of consciousness: woman as the objectified other has—​at least she had in ancient times if not today—​a natural, even default status for symbolization and tropological purposes.43 What we have therefore represented as the Esau-​Jacob-​twins narrative is a remarkable composite personification or hypostasization of an idea, the idea that a human being, at least with regard to the question of initiation, can have two very different outcomes as far as one’s life is concerned.44 It is thus also another type of trope, an allegory in which the Esau-​Jacob twins represent any individual human being. The choice that one makes marks him or her as becoming either an “Israelite”—​that is, “one who wrestles with God”—​or one who is either divorced altogether from such issues or is devoted to other gods. Everyone, the Jacob-​Esau narrative implies, has a chance to become a self-​chosen seeker, an initiate-​to-​be of the God of Israel (provided, insists the context, that the “blessing” and related guidance one receives come from an “insider-​insider” like Isaac.45 Here, there is no “stealing the blessing” or possibility of trickery: if one deceives anybody, then the deceived person is only oneself, “deceived” by oneself.)

226  The Urtext The W HEN [TOPIC], in accordance with the above explication, is or finally occurs when one chooses the path of Jacob, the path of the initiate-​of-​YHWH-​ to-​be. Its hallmark is the “stealing of the blessing”: one needs to secure a trusted teacher from the tradition’s inside. Failure to discriminate between the true “insider-​insider” and those who offer their own particular version of the coordinates in the three continua will separate the undeserving seeker from the seeker self-​selected for the path of Jacob/​Israel (versus a seeker whose path will lie elsewhere). Finally, the HOW [TOPIC] concerns the all-​ important, zealously guarded induction methods and procedures. This realization will suffice for now, in the noematic-​conferential continuum currently under discussion (Figure 8.3); it will be unpacked further in Chapter 9.

WHAT[TOPIC] INITIATION Journey to the Promised Land

WHEN[TOPIC]

WHY[TOPIC]

“STEALING” THE BLESSING

ACHIEVE ACCESS TO GOD OF ISRAEL Escape restricted consciousness

Choosing the path of Jacob

de re s-TOPIC [CONTENT] (s-CONTEXT 2)

Noematic-Content Center

CONFERENTIAL FIELD

WHO[TOPIC]

WHERE[TOPIC]

“THEME” “SUBJECT”

THE BODY

“THE ISSUE”

THE WOULD-BE INITIATE

Recovered diatactically from the SUPRA-GROUND SÔD NARRATIVE

HOW[TOPIC]

WHERETO[TOPIC]

INDUCTION PROCEDURES

EXPANDED OR “HIGHER” CONSCIOUSNESS

To be disclosed as s-Object

Figure 8.3  Noematic signified ascertained: content-​ communicative locators of the noematic-​conferential continuum.

Israel’s Noematic Signified  227

Notes 1 As Margaret Freeman states, Literary critics focus on the emotional and aesthetic effects of literary works, cognitive linguists on accounting for the way language characterizes meaning. From a cognitive perspective, literary critics are engaged in mapping the meanings of texts from various contextual domains. They are interested in the results of these mappings, not the means by which they accomplish them. Analyses of these means, however, can reveal the principles on which the mappings are made. (Freeman, “Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies,” 1179–​80) 2 The term “Mosaic distinction” is borrowed, once again, from Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. 3 Cited in Barney, Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, frontispiece. 4 Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 503. 5 Compare the view that “speaking figuratively to a child only wastes mental effort. Children don’t indulge in it much” (Niquette, “Literally”). 6 Levin, Metaphoric Worlds, 14. 7 Chatman, “Characters and Narrators,” 191. 8 Silverstein, “Improvisational Performance of Culture,” 274. 9 Otto, Idea of the Holy. See also Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. 10 As David Stern relates, At the end of days, God will address all mankind in its voice. In the meantime—​since Moses and until the world-​to-​come—​the repository of that voice is to be found in midrash, particularly in the way midrash represents God speaking to mankind—​in homiletical exegeses like those in our chapter in V[ayikra] R[abbah], but also every time midrash makes use of that all-​so-​ common yet bold formula amar ha-​kadosh barukh hu, “The Holy One, blessed be He, said,” following which God speaks, not in the words of Scripture but in the language of midrash’s own invention, as if through the mouth of the darshan. (Stern, “Midrash and the Language of Exegesis,” 120–​21) 11 Since, per William Dever, “no one had ever found any archaeological evidence for the Exodus from Egypt” and since “the comprehensive conquest saga in the Book of Joshua is a fictive literary composition aimed at presenting the occupation of the entire Land of Israel, initiated and guided by the Lord and carried out by the twelve tribes under Joshua,” “George Mendenhall [has] proposed that the Israelites were indigenous to Canaan; what happened, according to Mendenhall, was ‘an internal revolution that was religiously motivated’ ” (Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, 5, 39, quoting Na’aman, “ ‘Conquest of Canaan,’ ” 280–​81; emphasis added), 53. As George Mendenhall describes it, “there was chaos, conflict, war, but of one thing we can be absolutely certain. Ancient Israel did not win because of superior military weapons or superior military organization. It did not drive out or murder en masse whole populations. The gift of the land meant

228  The Urtext merely that the old political regimes and their claim to ownership of all land was transferred to God Himself ” (Mendenhall, Tenth Generation, 225, quoted in Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, 53). However, we may well keep in mind that if in fact the Exodus and the Conquest never happened, a coherent and plausible theory of ancient Israelite civilization must be prepared to account for the following difficulty: Why would anyone invent such a narrative, which includes a highly atypical and, moreover, counter-​psychological, inglorious story of origins involving Egyptian servitude? No ethnic or religious group or people in history has ever deliberately invented humiliating and/​or shameful origins or ancestry, while examples to the contrary abound. As noted in Chapter 7, according to Ziony Zevit the ancient Israelite culture is Canaanite (Zevit, Religions of Ancient Israel, 116n50). 12 As cited in Chapter 3, Gershom Scholem has insisted that “nobody seriously thinks of applying the term mysticism to the classic manifestations of the great religions” (Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 6–​7). 13 Flannery et al., Experientia, Volume 1, 3; DeConick, “What Is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism?,” 2. 14 See, e.g., Dietrich, “Functional Neuroanatomy of Altered States of Consciousness”; Dittrich, “Standardized Psychometric Assessment of Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs)”; and these works by Harry Hunt: “Cognitive Psychology of Mystical and Altered-​ State Experience,” On the Nature of Consciousness, “Relations between the Phenomena of Religious Mysticism,” “Some Developmental Issues in Transpersonal Experience,” and “Experiences of Radical Personal Transformation.” The range of definitions of mysticism and ASCs, reflecting diverse approaches, is dazzling, indicating the underlying theoretical deficiency: “the science of union with the Absolute” (Underhill, Mysticism); “trance” or “trance states” (Winkelman, “Trance States,” and Shamans, Priests and Witches, 93ff); “experiences of radical personal transformation” (Hunt, “Experiences of Radical Personal Transformation”); “temporary change in the overall pattern of subjective experience” (Farthing, Psychology of Consciousness, 205); “falling by definition outside the realm of ordinary discourse” (Wulff, “Mystical Experience,” 397); “variations in conscious state” (Hobson, “States of Consciousness,” 435); and so on, with many more such characterizations readily available. The last two in particular show the conceptual gap that is possible and that, in fact, exists. 15 Todorov, The Fantastic, 73–​74. 16 Paxson, “Revisiting the Deconstruction of Narratology,” 128 (emphasis added). 17 As noted in Chapter 6, conferentiality is a neologism that combines referentiality and conferring, or “bringing together.” Conferencing refers to characteristics of the signified such as being the “content” of the sign, or its “sense” or “meaning,” its “concept,” “interpretant,” “idea,” or “significatum” (see Figure 6.1); it also can contain Bouissac’s notion of referential “modeling,” cited in Chapter 6. 18 Nelles, Frameworks, 152–​57. 19 For example, “And Abraham stood seven ewes of the sheep by themselves. And Abimelek said to Abraham, ‘What are these seven ewes that you’ve stood by themselves?’ And he said, ‘Because you’ll take these seven ewes from my hand so that it will be evidence for me that I dug this well.’ On account of this he called that place Beer-​sheba” (Gen. 21:28–​31); “And it was in that day, and Isaac’s servants came

Israel’s Noematic Signified  229 and told him about the well that they had dug and said to him, ‘We found water.’ And he called it Seven. On account of this the name of the city is Beer-​sheba to this day” (Gen. 26:32–​33). The translation is from Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah. 20 Aryeh Kaplan’s puzzlement (see Exhibit 7.18) is quite palpable: Gerar … was on the boundary of the Holy Land. From the context, it seems that Isaac was headed toward Egypt. This is difficult to understand, since Isaac lived in Beer Lachai Roi, which is to the west of Gerar, on the way to Egypt. It is possible that Isaac went to Gerar because of Abraham’s previous treaty (cf. Ramban). Alternatively, this is connected to the following sentence[:]‌“and Isaac went to Gerar at God’s command” (Josephus, Antiquities 1:18:2). (Kaplan, Living Torah, 119n26:1) 21 Regarding inglorious origins, it is hard to paint a more disagreeable picture of an eponymous ancestor than that of Jacob, who was destined to become Israel. We must keep this, surely an instance of a strongly counterintuitive narrative design that can be properly decoded only through the recovery of the Sôd, in mind when we consider other and especially seemingly more sinister Pentateuchal descriptions: our focus text is awash with counterintuitive concepts and narrative developments, some, as we shall see, far more counterintuitive than others. Thus, one should be considerably more guarded than William Dever is in his assessment of the Book of Joshua: The book of Joshua has long been controversial. Even a superficial reading  reveals it to be an extraordinarily chauvinistic work, glorifying the military exploits of a ruthless, brilliant general who makes Patton look like a teddy bear. Joshua carries out a systematic campaign against the civilians of Canaan—​men, women, and children—​that amounts to genocide. … These are stories that we might well hope have no basis in fact. Why not just excise them from the Bible, as unworthy of its grand themes? How did they ever get into the Canon, or collection of Holy Writ, in the first place? (Dever, Who ere the Early Israelites, 38–​39) Dever does not take his questions—​addressed to the Pentateuchal compilers (and the later redactors of the canon)—​to the next, logical step, as does the present study: Could there have been another reason for the story’s inclusion, other than the one that a literal reading practically forces one to assume? 22 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. 23 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 256–​57. 24 Levin stresses that Lakoff and Johnson’s “primary concern is not with poetic metaphors but with such as occur commonly in everyday language and which betoken the influence of a certain other class of metaphors, which they call ‘conceptual’ ” (Levin, Metaphoric Worlds, 4). In Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh, however, the pervasive presence of conceptual metaphors is traced to philosophy and even to causality. Thus the issue is, rather, that what Lakoff and Johnson call “primary conceptual metaphors” are largely unconscious, whereas

230  The Urtext literarily constructed conceptual metaphors are presumed to be instances of fully conscious use of a literary device. 25 J. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization, 133, quoted in Wardlaw, Conceptualizing Words for God, 42 (emphasis added). 26 Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, 55. 27 Aryeh Kaplan, for example, writes as follows about these notions: The two states of consciousness that [the Baal Shem Tov] discusses are [Môḥîn DeGadĕlût] and [Môḥîn DeQātĕ ̣nût], or more commonly, simply Gadlut and Katnut. … The word [môḥîn] literally means “brains,” and in [Isaac Luria’s] terminology, refers to “mentalities.” In the context used by the Baal Shem, however, the term [môḥîn] actually should be translated, “states of consciousness.” Gadlut means “maturity” or “greatness,” while Katnut means “immaturity” or “smallness.” Actually, then, the best way to translate [Môḥîn DeGadĕlût] would be “expanded consciousness,” while [Môḥîn DeQātĕ ̣nût] would be “constricted consciousness” (Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, 278). My use of these terms, it must be emphasized, does not imply equivalence between results obtained in these very different, albeit all Jewish systems. The initiatory system emerging from the Pentateuchal text, to begin with, indicates a most potent alteration of consciousness and therefore one that is particularly dangerous for unqualified/​unprepared individuals. Otto’s descriptions of mysterium tremendum in his book The Idea of the Holy come close to what is achievable in the “Mosaic” system. 28 Coleridge, “Statesman’s Manual,” 30, cited in Krieger, “ ‘Waking Dream,’ ” 5, previously cited in Chapter 1. 29 Whitman, Interpretation and Allegory, xi. This subject is discussed in ­chapter 1, n.39. 30 Silverstein, “Improvisational Performance of Culture,” 274. Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs speak of a distinction between discourse and text. At the heart of the process of decentering discourse is a more fundamental process—​entextualization. … It is the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—​a text—​that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. A text, then, from this vantage point, is discourse rendered decontextualizable. (Bauman and Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives,” 243) 31 Silverstein, “Improvisational Performance of Culture,” 274. Is that enough to obviate an accusation, on the contrary, of me actually practicing allegoresis, that is, merely interpreting the Promised Land as an allegory of “expanded state of consciousness”? Not having an explicit textual indication to this effect—​something which is demanded by Todorov, as we saw earlier—​leaves me open to this charge. However, in the noematic-​conferential continuum—​where we must rely not on direct referentiality or even inferentiality but on something even more ephemeral (which was styled as “conferentiality” in this study)—​we are searching for the “subject,” the “issue,” or “topic” of the conjectured noetic-​noematic stratum. I am not claiming here any “hard” information about the “object” of the alleged concealed stratum, not yet. That is being deferred until the next part of the data analysis, in ­chapter 9.

Israel’s Noematic Signified  231 32 Eubanks, War of Words in the Discourse of Trade, 104–​5. 33 Tsur, “Issues in Literary Synaesthesia,” 39. 34 See Kohav, “Post-​ Human versus the Robo Sapiens”; Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh; Newton, review of The Bodily Nature of Consciousness by Kathleen Wider; Newton, “Sensorimotor Theory of Cognition”; Sheets-​ Johnstone, Giving the Body Its Due; Sheets-​Johnstone, “On Bacteria, Corporeal Representation, Neanderthals, and Martha Graham”; and Varela et al., Embodied Mind. 35 As Ziony Zevit comments, “The ‘seen from above’ view ends up being useful. This discussion could be preceded by the following discussion of plot and directionality in cinematic presentations of plot vs. plot as what happens on a stage” (Ziony Zevit, personal communication, 2010). 36 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 122. 37 Punday, Narrative Bodies, 1. Compare Gilles Deleuze’s passage: Spinoza offers philosophers a new model: the body. He proposes to establish the body as a model: “We do not know what the body can do …” This declaration of ignorance is a provocation. We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the will and its effects, of the thousand ways of moving the body, of dominating the body and the passions—​but we do not even know what a body can do. Lacking this knowledge, we engage in idle talk. As Nietzsche will say, we stand amazed before consciousness, but “the truly surprising thing is rather the body ….” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 17–​18; emphasis original) 38 Elliot Wolfson succinctly captures the prevailing zeitgeist in medieval Kabbalah: The imaging of the formless God in iconic forms is related in the Zohar to the hermeneutical act of reading. To see God is to read the sacred text of Torah, which is the embodiment of God. There is no corporeality without textuality and no textuality without corporeality. The gap between revelation and interpretation is fully closed, inasmuch as interpreting scripture is itself a revelatory experience. (Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, 11; emphasis added) 39 Zevit, “Philology and Archaeology,” 36. 40 An interesting example of figural logic at work is a computer “screensaver” that I have obtained. In it, a roving painted eye moves across the screen watching a flying bee. Separately, the letter M floats in midair. After the three elements somersault and have fun with one another for some time, they all line up, first the eye, then the bee, then the letter “M.” Only then does the viewer realize that the three stand for eye-​bee-​M, or “IBM.” Thanks go out to my son Jacob for mentioning this screensaver to me, after his visit to a local IBM facility, and to my wife for obtaining it for me. 41 “And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved” (Gen. 32:30 KJV); “And God said unto Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there: and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother” (Gen. 35:1 KJV). 42 As Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel-​laureate Yiddish writer, has stated, rather riotously: there is free will, and we cannot do anything about it.

232  The Urtext 43 Compare Michael Sinding’s observation that “the soul is conventionally feminine, so its aspects [in Psychomachia] are personified as women” (Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 508). 44 As James Paxson states, “Personification is a prime poetic mark of theoretical self-​ awareness and maturity, a signal not of the failure of the literary imagination, but of its success and fulfillment” (Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 175). 45 The designation “insider-​insider” was explained in ­chapter 5.

9 The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel Recovering the Esoteric Referent of Ancient Israelite Initiatory Praxis

This study has now attained the stage that is its raison-​d’être: conclusively demonstrating whether a concealed stratum exists within the Pentateuch. Here, our concern is with the hyletic designatum, the ultimate “object” of the entire conceptual scheme that this study has erected as being the Pentateuchal authors’ specific esoteric referent of their praxis. This is the realm of the hyletic-​deferential continuum, where “metacommunicative object identifiers” will be the iconic coordinates guiding our analysis. We have arrived at this point in our analysis largely by applying a logical-​ associative approach to the textual information given. We must now begin introducing the more broadly derived notions and considerations, in accordance with the concept of encyclopedic semantics. As John R. Taylor notes, “Meaning cannot be restricted to a tightly circumscribed ‘linguistic-​ semantic’ definition.”1 Furthermore, Ronald Langacker states that “contextual meaning is clearly encyclopedic in scope and cannot be determined algorithmically as a compositional function of component lexical items. For one thing, it includes particulars of the speech situation that are not linguistically coded.”2

The WHAT [OBJECT] I begin with what was the point of departure for our research of textual data, namely, this deeply marked assertion in Genesis 1:27: “So God [Elohim] created man in his own image, in the image of God [Elohim] created he him; male and female created he them” (see exhibit 7.1). Elohim is the W HO [SETTING]—​our textual datum from Chapter 7 identified as “the Who” of the noetic-​inferential continuum. If we knew what “the image of Elohim” is, we would perhaps have a key to how the author of Genesis sees a human being’s essence or the like; even the reverse should be, in principle, possible too—​namely, discovering “the image of Elohim” via some feature belonging to humans. As we shall see, the First Temple’s priests of YHWH had here specifically intended to communicate a situation in which one is to learn something DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-13

234  The Urtext essential about the human being from comparison with “the image of Elohim,” not necessarily the other way around. We have determined, in the section in Chapter 7 devoted to the WHO [SETTING], that the semantic difficulty of “Elohim” deriving from its plural designation suggests multiple “powers” or “forces” connected with it.3 Calling here upon “encyclopedic” knowledge (as opposed to some narrow linguistic meaning), one can certainly see a particular notion in Jewish mystical lore that also carries the import of multiple “powers” or “forces”: the preeminent concept of the Ten Sefirot that originates with the Sefer Yetzirah. As Edward Hoffman describes it: The Book of Creation tersely relates, “Ten Sefirot alone … [u]‌nderstand with wisdom and be wise with understanding. Examine with them and search among them. Know, think, and visualize.” However, this ancient tract does not explain what the Sefirot are or how they were created. At least in written form, this important feature of the Kabbalah came later. Rather, the Sefer Yetzirah succinctly recounts that the Sefirot are in some manner, together with the twenty-​two Hebrew letters, representations of the vital forces of the universe.4 Furthermore: Just as no use is made of the term kabbalah in the Zohar, so there is hardly any mention of sefirot, apart from in the later sections. Instead we have a whole string of names: “levels,” “powers,” “sides” or “areas” (sitrin), “worlds,” “firmaments,” “pillars,” “lights,” “colors,” “days,” “gates,” “streams,” “garments,” “crowns,” and others. Each term designates a particular facet of the nature or work of the sefirot.5 The sefirot, like Elohim, are implicated in the creation of reality: SEFIROT … [is] a fundamental term of the Kabbalah. It was coined by the author of the Sefer Yezirah who designated by it the ten primordial or ideal “numbers” (from the Hebrew root safor, to numerate). From the first sources of kabbalistic literature onward it was used in a much wider sense and denotes the ten stages of emanation that emerged from Ein-​Sof and form the realm of God’s manifestation in His various attributes. Every single sefirah points to an aspect of God in His capacity of Creator, forming at the same time a whole world of divine light in the chain of being. The whole of the ten Sefirot, forming the “Sefirot[ic] Tree,” is conceived as a dynamic unity in which the activity of God reveals itself. The rhythm of the unfolding Sefirot is the fundamental rhythm of all creation and can be detected on each of its different levels.6 There must be a reason why no one, as far as can be determined, has ever proposed an identity or at least a connection between the Elohim and the Ten

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  235 Sefirot.7 (This reason is likely to be connected to a seemingly incomprehensible reference in Sefer Yetzirah 1:2 to the sefirot being “ten sefirot bĕlî mah,” since this very reference, if it is not perceived properly, is what prevents one from making a connection between the sefirot and Elohim; if understood properly, it allows for and even compels recognition of such a connection, as we shall see.) Are the Ten Sefirot the “image,” or proto-​ontological manifestation of Elohim into immanence, in accordance with which, as stated in Genesis 1:27, the human being is created? An association between the sefirot and the human being has been frequently claimed.8 It is the correlation between the sefirotic array and Elohim that was seemingly avoided, which as a result has left the “image of Elohim” unestablished.9 For us, here, the sefirotic elaboration of the “image of Elohim” by the Sefer Yetzirah and the relevant Zoharic passages that lead one toward grasping the meaning of the Yetziratic expression ten sefirot bĕlî mah will be important for two crucial reasons. First, the ten-​sefirotic array representing the “forces” or “gods” that presumably constitute Elohim, when combined with the import of the ubiquitous “wells” (discussed below, in the W H E RE [OBJECT] section), will necessarily lead us to the seven chakras within the human body. The latter are, I will argue, unmistakably implicated in the Pentateuchal text, while the ten sefirot are both a numerical and conceptual later elaboration of the chakra-​based framework. Second, the Zohar’s enabling the determination of the meaning of the “mah”—​albeit requiring some serious kabbalistic juggling on the part of the investigator (see the excursus section below) is critical for establishing one of the very few genuine Hebraic “words of power”; while not spelled out by and in the Pentateuch, these words of power, as the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah show, are implicitly carried by the marked entities in the Pentateuchal text and were likely to be simply given orally to would-​be initiates. There is also an additional consideration. Indications of some tenuous borrowing from ancient Mesopotamia contributing to the construction of the sefirotic Tree of Life perhaps can be granted.10 The reason for such a consent may be due to the ubiquity of “sacred trees” in early antiquity’s royal and sacral art and especially because of the enormous role Mesopotamia played in Israel and Judah’s fortunes, including the Babylonian exile and, later, a voluntary sojourn there. First, the exile that ensued after the destruction of the First Temple had already begun the process of a gradual loss of the original Sôd-​related system and knowledge. Then, many centuries later and already in the Common Era, the thriving Jewish community in Babylonia produces the magnum opus of the rabbinical corpus, the Babylonian Talmud. Many parallels between Babylonian sensibilities and rabbinical novelties can be discovered, even beyond what Simo Parpola finds, such as the dramatic entry into Judaism, via rabbinical creative efforts, of an extensive demonological framework that included a sharp division into positive and negative, or evil, forces. While an earlier and similar influence has been ascribed to

236  The Urtext

Keter

top of head 7

Bînāh

left hemisphere

FOREHEAD

6

Ḥākĕmāh

right hemisphere

Da‘at throat 5

Ḥesed left arm

Hôd

Tipĕ’eret

Gĕbûrāh

Heart 4

right arm

ABDOMEN

Neṣaḥ

3

left leg

right leg

Yĕsôd

Genitals 2

Malĕkût

Perineum 1

Figure 9.1 Kabbalistic Tree of Life (ten sefirot, given in Hebrew) superimposed over the Edenic Tree of Life (=​seven chakras, 1–​7). The view is of the body facing away from the reader. In the Sefirotic tree, the abdomen and forehead chakras are split into two sefirot each, and the heart chakra obtains two additional sefirot. The Hebrew names, where present, indicate the sefirot (totaling eleven, with the “pseudo-​sefirah” daʻat).

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  237 Persian Zoroastrianism, the rabbinical demonology is actually more akin to Babylonian models.11 The Pentateuchal text knows next to nothing about the sefirot, and it certainly strenuously rejects a dualistic division of reality. It does have, of course, the two celebrated trees—​ the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—​and the idea of using trees as symbols may have indeed been borrowed. This idea, in any case, is of far less importance than Parpola imagines, since trees, like other ubiquitous objects serving significant functions in people’s daily lives, such as wells or houses, are natural and highly apposite candidates for human environmental preferences and especially for symbolization or mythologizing activities.12 Moreover and decisively, as this study demonstrates, the Pentateuchal text marshals such a singular and superior array of conceptual tools and methods that to compare any sacred tree from Babylon or Assyria, or indeed from anywhere else, with the Edenic trees is not feasible, beyond the mere fact of trees being utilized in both cases.13 The symbolic significance of the Hebraic framework remains beyond compare. The question of the WHAT [OBJECT] will thus be provisionally decided as being related to the following emerging notion: THE BO DY AS A T RE E OF L I F E . The human being is endowed with seven spiritual-​somatic potencies (the seven “chakras,” as discussed in detail later), and these, for the Homo erectus who eventually becomes Homo sapiens and finally Homo sapiens sapiens, do line up vertically (thus resembling a tree). Excursus: Deconstructing Bĕlî Mah If one focuses carefully on the material already covered, one realizes that the sacred initiatory “mantras” of the Hebraic system are in fact also given. For these, however, we must turn to both the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar for their respective elaborations of the Pentateuchal notions. As we concluded in the datum summary for the WHO [SETTING] (Chapter 7), the Zohar deconstructs Elohim—​from the very same letters—​as Mi ELeH (‫מי אלה‬, or “Who [are] These?”). At the same time, the Zohar introduces MaH, or “What?” as the “lower extremity of heaven” (with Mi being “the extremity of heaven on high”). MaH created the “stars and the other heavenly bodies,” via—​or perhaps by being—​“the word of the Lord” (see exhibit 7.6). It thus stands to reason that Mi, as a part of the sacred name Elohim, is itself a divine designation, an “extremity of heaven on high.” And MaH, the “lower extremity of heaven” that creates the “stars and the other heavenly bodies,” appears to be a divine alias, too. There are also additional indications of the latter’s divine status.14 Thus, the “ten sefirot bĕlî mah,” or “ten sefirot without MaH” specified by the Sefer Yetzirah could be—​and I would argue should be—​understood as the sefirot without, or lacking, the divine power potency designated as MaH.15 As the Zohar portrays it:

238  The Urtext When the most Mysterious wished to reveal Himself, He first produced a single point which was transmuted into a thought, and in this He executed innumerable designs. … He further graved within the sacred and mystic lamp a mystic and most holy design, which was a wondrous edifice issuing from the midst of thought. This is called MI, and was the beginning of the edifice, existent and non-​existent, deep-​buried, unknowable by name. It was only called MI (Who?). It desired to become manifest and to be called by name. It therefore clothed itself in a refulgent and precious garment and created EleH (these), and EleH acquired a name. The letters of the two words intermingled, forming the complete name ELoHIM (God).16 Here we clearly have the classical Kabbalistic description—​ massively expanded later on in the Lurianic Kabbalah—​of God’s creation: first of a “single point” of light or “thought,” and then of the sefirot. The creation of the latter consists of a process that continues with the original “point” becoming a “lamp,” in which a “wondrous edifice … called MIh” is “engraved,” and this MIh, desiring “to become manifest and to be called by name … clothed itself in a refulgent and precious garment and created ELeH.” What is described is the process of manifestation, that is, the birth of tangible, immanent reality (which nonetheless does not have to be the physical one, yet). So what are these ELeH, what is this “refulgent”—​ that is, radiant, brilliant—​“and precious garment” that hides the “existent and non-​existent, deep-​buried, unknowable by name” MIh? There is no question at this point that the Zohar is here talking about the sefirot. What is still unclear, however, is whether it is MIh that are the ineffable sefirot, since MIh is “existent and non-​existent”; or the ELeH, “a refulgent and precious garment”; or their combination, a merging of both. This will be decided below. We thus see that Elohim consists of “MI” (Who?) and “EleH” (these). MI (or MIh), however, is also associated with MaH (see exhibit 7.5): “It is the mysterious Ancient One, whose essence can be sought, but not found, that created these: to wit, Mi (Who?), the same who is called ‘from (Heb. mi) the extremity of heaven on high[.]‌’ … That extremity of heaven is called Mi, but there is another[,] lower extremity of heaven which is called Mah (What?).”17 And MaH is also, like MIh, related to Elohim (as well as to YHWH, as we shall presently see): “When the letters of ‫ מה‬are spelled out we have: ‫מם הא‬. The total of this is 86. This is the same as the gematria [numerical value] of ‫[ אלהים‬Elohim].”18 Each member of the human species—​according to the combined framework of the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar—​is a walking “Tree of Life” endowed with the ten sefirot—​or at least the seven sefirot that pertain to the seven chakras (Figure 9.1) supposedly resembling the powers of Elohim. Yet, most human beings can hardly speak of possessing any unique or extraordinary sefirotic powers.19

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  239 This locution—​bĕlî mah—​is a real quandary for practically all modern writers on Kabbalah. As we shall see, however, this expression contains one of the few principal keys to the Sôd stratum’s “hard” information. The overwhelming majority of commentators render the essentially nonsensical literal meaning of bĕlî mah, “without what,” as either “nothingness” or “ineffable.” Aryeh Kaplan expresses the understanding that most other Kabbalistic writers also follow: The Hebrew word here is Beli-​mah. … This word can … be translated as meaning closed, abstract, absolute or ineffable. This word occurs only once in scripture, in the verse, “He stretches the north on Chaos, he hangs the earth on Nothingness (Beli-​mah)” (Job 26:7). According to many commentaries, the word Beli-​mah is derived from the two words, Beli, meaning “without,” and Mah, meaning “what” or “anything.” The word Beli-​mah would then mean “without anything,” or “nothingness.” According to this interpretation, the designation “Sefirot of Nothingness” is used to indicate that the sefirot are purely ideal concepts, without any substance whatever. Unlike letters which have form and sound, the sefirot have no intrinsic physical properties. As such, they are purely conceptual. Other sources state that Belimah comes from the root Balam … meaning “to bridle.” … This second interpretation seems to be indicated by the Sefer Yetzirah itself, since it later says, “Bridle (balom) your mouth from speaking of them” (1:8). According to this, Belimah would be translated as “ineffable.” The text is speaking of “Ten Ineffable Sefirot,” indicating that they cannot be described in any manner whatever. … According to both interpretations, the Sefirot are distinguished from the letters. While the letters are primarily modes of expression, the Sefirot are inexpressible by their very nature.20 However, as we have witnessed in the present study on several occasions, terms such as “nothingness” or “ineffable” are quite meaningless in this context and therefore also useless for one’s efforts to grasp the communicated authorial intent. Worse, in a tradition such as this one, containing the priestly esoteric lore of the ancient Israelite cultic religion—​which the authors of both the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar endeavor to emulate and continue, in some cases even to expand—​meaningless or useless words seem to be anathema.21 It is safe to say that whenever a word or a passage in the Pentateuch (as well as in the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar) is seemingly either oxymoronic or useless, it is likely a metaleptic junction point of the two narrative channels conjectured by this study and, therefore, also likely to contain valuable and at times even crucial esoteric information. Elohim without MIh is ELeH, “these,” whereas something without MaH is called the “Ten Sefirot Bĕlî Mah.” If we take into account that the sefirot are without Mah (bĕlî Mah), and if ELeH is Elohim without MIh, then EleH, “these,” appear increasingly to be the ever-​elusive sefirot themselves.22

240  The Urtext Moreover, we might recall the theory that the sefirot are created precisely in order to become the immanent aspects and tools of the transcendent deity, that is, to be its “garment”—​and garments are usually quite immanent.23 Here, the momentous realization that one can, and should, arrive at is that if EleH require MIh in order to become Elohim, then perhaps the “Ten Sefirot Bĕlî Mah” require MaH in order to become Elohim, too, or to become something likewise remarkably powerful and singularly exceptional. Thus, the sefirot, or the EleH (“these”), are seen not only as the immanent aspect of the Hebrew deity, Elohim, but also as factors pertaining to human beings as well.24 It is therefore sensible at this point to consider the possibility that the sefirot could be the putative “image” shared by both Elohim and human beings. Such a proposal, in spite of its logical simplicity and inherent beauty, has not been discussed, it seems, in either the traditional rabbinic, mystical Kabbalistic sources—​excepting, as always, the Sefer Yetzirah, the Zohar, and the Bahir—​or in the scholarly literature.25

The HOW [OBJECT] It has been determined in Chapter 8 that the HOW [TOPIC] is related to induction procedures that lead into altered states of consciousness assumed by this study to belong to an inner-​core esoteric knowledge framework embedded by the priestly compilers within the Pentateuchal text. Now, I will start the recovery process of the HOW [OBJECT], including some of the most salient of the induction procedures and methods of this esoteric system. Some, as we shall see, are explicitly, visibly planted into the text, albeit requiring a proper grasp, while others must be derived through the logical-​associative recovery methods developed by this study and applied earlier.26 First, I go back to exhibits 7.11 and 7.14, which detail Joshua’s conquest of Jericho (the HOW [SETTING]). What especially interests us now is the “great shout” ((‫גְ דו ֹ ָל֑ה ְּתרוּעָ ֣ה‬, as a result of which Jericho’s walls “fall down flat”: “And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him” (Josh. 6:5 KJV). We should be mindful here that Jericho, like Gerar, is on the border with the Promised Land (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2), that is, bordering the body of the initiate in the making (see Figure 8.2). Now, it happens to be an engineering/​technological fact that no sound, no matter how loud, intense, or high pitched, can possibly shatter any wall. The human beings guarding the wall, it is true, may go deaf if the sound is extremely loud, but the walls themselves will be impervious. Thus, we can consider the Joshua narrative to be an example of a divine miracle or sheer fantasy—​or we must seek an alternative explanation. I have already emphasized that the Mosaic distinction, to use once more Jan Assmann’s term, derives in part from the forceful rejection of the magical worldview such

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  241 as that of the ancient Egyptians. Furthermore, the ancient Israelite esoteric lore—​as one must increasingly recognize in the unfolding of this study—​is essentially rational, built upon its compilers’ advanced knowledge of human psychosomatic and biological foundations, in its project to establish a highly sophisticated, singular mystical initiation system. It can be considered to be, in effect, an unparalleled foray into human consciousness-​and cognition-​related potential. Given these indications, we therefore are compelled to search for an alternative explanation. Our search is soon rewarded in a closer interrogation of the Joshua text. In the second-​channel narrative where “Jericho” is on the border with one’s body, the “great shout” should be seen as an inner sounding that is silent on the outside; this imaginary inner sounding can be as loud as one’s imagination allows—​that is, it can be exceptionally loud. And the walls? If the sounds in question are a “mantra” such as a divine name, the inner “walls” separating one from a more-​expanded consciousness can indeed crumble. This constitutes another principal secret of the system we are recovering; in contrast, in Indian traditions mantra meditation, as a method of induction, is not a secret at all.

The WHERE [OBJECT] Seven Etheric Knots of the Body This section, like the two preceding it, is exceedingly counterintuitive. For example, how does one connect such odd, persistent talk of digging wells (exhibits 7.14 and 7.15) with the would-​be initiate’s body and, specifically, with one’s chakras? I will turn to the subject of chakras shortly; here I will remind the reader that the wells in question are being dug in the kingdom of Gerar, which was “on the southwest border of the Holy Land. … Some … suggest that this Gerar was … between Kadesh and Shur.”27 The Holy, or Promised, “Land,” as we have determined earlier, is a destination of initiates-​to-​be: it can be read either literally as the “Holy Land” or as a stand-​in for the (1) expanded consciousness of (2) the would-​be initiate—​the W H E RE T O [SETTING] and the W HER E TO [TOPIC], respectively. At the same time, however, the W H E RE [TOPIC] is the would-​be initiate’s body (see Figure 8.2). Once again, our knowledge—​derived from “encyclopedic” sources located extratextually vis-​à-​vis our focus text, that is, “includ[ing] particulars of the speech situation that are not linguistically coded”—​is crucial here.28 That is to say, unless one understands that, to achieve an expanded or indeed any altered state of consciousness, one must in some specified way involve the participant’s body, no progress is possible in grasping the intended esoteric communication of the Pentateuchal text.29 Thus, Gerar’s location is a crucially marked piece of information; its being on the border of the Promised Land—​and, therefore, right next to, or on one’s body (see Figure 8.2)—​is

242  The Urtext vitally significant. And what Abraham and then, a generation later, Isaac both do there, in an ongoing, almost obsessively insistent way, is digging (the seven) wells. Anyone even just cursorily acquainted with mysticism would have heard of Hindu mysticism’s bodily chakras, which must be “awakened” or “opened” so that the “goddess Kundalini,” a putative bio-​force envisioned as a “serpent” and a divinity, may rise from the bottom of one’s spine toward the top of one’s head.30 This phenomenon is typically described as the very essence of spirituality, in a conceptualization of spirituality that is fundamentally at odds with Christian and rabbinical Jewish notions of a belief-​, text-​, and prayer-​based sense of the spiritual. Yet, as we shall see, such a notion of psychosomatically derived, spiritually enhanced states of consciousness, and certainly such a manner of arriving at spiritually meaningful states, is in its essence congruent with ancient Israelite ideas on this subject and related practices, notwithstanding the existing critical differences between the two ancient civilizations, Israel and India, and their respective aims (these will be underscored below). Shakti Khalsa Parwhat Kaur has called chakras “energy centers” and “centers of consciousness.”31 In the early twentieth century Arthur Avalon termed them “etheric centers” and “sense organs for the astral body.”32 For others, they were “primal libido centers,” “psychic centers,” “whirling wheels,” “lotuses,” “energy transformers,” and “knots.”33 Are the ubiquitous wells that were persistently dug in Gerar on the border with the Promised Land, first by Abraham and then by Isaac, chakras? Equally significant, are these wells and the sefirot discussed in the preceding section related? Albert Schutz, for example, not only takes it for granted that the wells (and the “windows” of the Zohar) are the same as chakras but also explicitly equates the seven “spiritual sense organs” with the Ten Sefirot, saying that “the emblems, names, and placements of the points of awareness are shown on the Tree of Life [and] the body of Adam Kadmon.”34 Ken Wilber, likewise, seems to think that the seven chakras of Hindu traditions and the Ten Sefirot of the Kabbalah are about the same thing, regardless of the discrepancy between the numbers. He does not broach the wells of the Genesis narrative.35 Yet, just as the Sefer Yetzirah insists that there are precisely ten sefirot, Genesis insists on precisely seven wells. The place where the well-​digging takes place is called Beersheba, or Seven Wells. Thus, one must conclude that just as the seven wells must not be confused with the Ten Sefirot, in exactly the same way the seven chakras of the Hindus must not be confused with the Ten Sefirot. However, the seven chakras and the seven wells (or the seven “windows” of the Zohar), as stated above, indeed seem to be identical or to concern the same thing. The chakras are described in all available literature, with only minor discrepancies, as located along the spinal axis: the first chakra is near the perineum; the second is just above the genitals; the third is

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  243 near the navel, in the solar plexus; the fourth is at the center of one’s chest, on the level of one’s heart; the fifth is around one’s throat; the sixth is in the area of one’s forehead, between the two eyes; and, finally, the seventh is located at the top of one’s head. By contrast, the Ten Sefirot, when placed on the body of Adam Kadmon, the primordial human archetype—​which I am simply extending to the body of each and every human being—​are located as pictured in Figure 9.1. The Image of Elohim We now have, it seems, enough information to make a decision regarding the “image of Elohim.” Figure 9.1 suggests that the similarities as well as the tension between the ancient Hebraic and Hindu systems, as well as between the ancient Hebraic and the medieval Kabbalistic conceptualizations, are beginning to come into view. The Mesopotamian “sacred tree” is of no use here since it is so rudimentary—​that is, without any conceptual backing or imperatives.36 It appears that what the Pentateuchal text places such enormous emphasis on—​the seven wells that, moreover, have to be “dug” utilizing seven “great shouts,” and so on—​are the seven Zoharic “windows” that are in effect identical to Hindu chakras. The Ten Sefirot of the Sefer Yetzirah (third or fourth century CE), and subsequently of the medieval Kabbalah, can be seen—​and I would argue must be seen—​as an elaboration of the seven-​chakra scheme whereby three of the chakras—​the first at the abdomen/​solar plexus, the second at one’s chest level, and the third at the forehead—​are each split into two sefirot. The result, in my opinion, is a magnificent, Leonardesque diagram (Figure 9.1) configuring the entire human body, with more opportunities for theoretical and experiential expansion. Unfortunately, this came, in the case of the medieval Kabbalah, as noted earlier, at the price of the good-​ evil dichotomy introduced via the left-​ right split.37 The differences between the Hebraic system emerging from the Pentateuchal text and the Hindu approaches are discussed below. As regards the medieval Kabbalah, it seems to hesitate vis-​à-​vis the Daʻat, or knowledge in Hebrew—​the throat chakra in the Hindu system—​as well it should: knowledge, or rather epistemic capabilities, is the very axle around which the entire Edenic narrative pivots (as will be discussed in Chapter 11). The Tree of Life planted by the Lord in Garden of Eden cannot be seen in this study as it was in the medieval Kabbalah’s Tree of Life (depicted as the “Tree of Sefirot”). The Edenic Tree of Life contains the seven chakras, and so does the human being created in the symbolic and iconic image of Elohim. While it is a simpler framework than the one entailing the Ten Sefirot, its seemingly lesser sophistication signifies a crucial Mosaic distinction: YHWH’s reality is all good, with evil being introduced only when one is seduced by the self-​delusional powers that come with partaking of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This will be further unpacked in Chapter 11.

244  The Urtext Turning now to discuss the Hebrew-​Hindu differences, let us note something that has never been flagged before. The descriptions of Hindu chakras do differ from the image of the window in the Zoharic portrayal or in the depiction of wells in Genesis, and they do so in one specific respect: they all invoke a peculiar surface imagery, that is, the Hindu chakras are all more or less seen as though being on the frontal surface of one’s body’s, in spite of their presumed location along the spine. Thus, as noted earlier, they have been called “energy centers,” “centers of consciousness,” “etheric centers,” “sense organs for the astral body,” “primal libido centers,” “psychic centers,” “whirling wheels,” “lotuses,” “energy transformers,” “knots”; whereas both a window and a well imply a third, additional dimension: depth. As we shall see, this seemingly insignificant metaphorical idiosyncrasy finds its origins in the drastically differing aims of the two systems. Specifically, the entire Hindu cultural-​religious sensibility stresses, as far as an outside observer can determine, the awakening of the Kundalini “serpent” energy from its presumed location at the lowest chakra and having it successfully rise ever upward along one’s spine and through the other chakras, simultaneously “opening,” or activating, them. When this bio-​energy reaches the top of one’s head, this is deemed to be the ultimate measure resulting in the coveted state of samādhi. As “one of the most ancient treatises on yoga, Hatha Yoga Pradipika,” succinctly states, “he who can induce [the great goddess Kundalini] to move [upward] is liberated.”38 Regarding the aims, John White adds that “something akin to the kundalini experience [is seen] as having significance in ‘divinizing’ a person. … [It is] a key to attaining godlike stature.”39 This is almost a verbatim version of that which was mouthed by the sly serpent in the biblical garden of Eden: “In the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5 KJV). “Ye shall be as gods,” proclaims the biblical serpent—​and so does the Kundalini serpent of Hinduism. But where the Hebrew God punishes the Garden of Eden serpent, followers of many Eastern religions worship the Kundalini serpent as a goddess. As was argued in Chapter 1, it is precisely this “divinization” issue that cannot be simply dismissed or discounted as nothing but a metaphor. The problem is that, in accordance with both traditions, one will feel oneself a god once one’s “eyes open” and one sees one’s—​and humanity’s—​“nakedness”: the apparent affect and the effects of this acquired feeling of dramatically increased abilities and powers will create such a reaction and attitude. But the Hebrew God, in accordance with the Edenic narrative, will suffer no human gods.40 Is there such a thing as the Kundalini “serpent”? And does the would-​be initiate, within the esoteric system emerging from the Pentateuchal text, experience the rising of Kundalini-​like subtle energy, in a manner similar to how it is described in Kundalini yoga? The answer to both questions must be yes. The crucial difference between the two traditions, however, is that the ancient Hebraic system is not involved with the efforts to “awaken” the Kundalini bio-​energy

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  245 and with attempts to raise it upward, let alone to worship it as a goddess. It apparently does not concern itself with the latter phenomenon, beyond the all-​important, severe warning to the aspirant—​forcefully communicated in the Edenic narrative—​not to think of himself as a god (or a Messiah) once the process has commenced. Rather, the Hebraic tradition chooses to focus, as we have seen in Genesis, on the wells (i.e., the chakras)—​but, once again, not as it is done in Hinduism. In that tradition, it seems, the opening of the chakras is the consequence of “Kundalini’s” transit through them. By contrast, the Hebrew way is to “dig the wells” and ignore the serpent goddess altogether, or rather let this bio-​energy do what it will naturally, all by itself. The “digging” is a closely fitting metaphor here, for, as Schutz says, “The higher energies cannot be released unless the gates of perception are awakened and cleared from negative forces that are called dust, stones, and uncleanliness in the scriptures.”41 And how should one “dig” the “wells,” trying to remove the “stones” that block the “waters” from us? “The work of purifying is done by leading the words of power with the right hand in an orderly and harmonious fashion into the body.”42 The “words of power” are divine names.43 The right hand’s essential role is undeniably marked in Genesis 35:18 (see exhibit 7.21): “And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing, (for she died) that she called his name Benoni: but his father called him Benjamin.” ‫ בִ ְנ ָי ִמֽין‬stands for “son of the right [hand].”44 Furthermore, Benjamin is the only son of Jacob who is born in the Promised Land—​thus it is a doubly marked piece of esoteric information.45

The WHY [OBJECT], the WHERETO [OBJECT], and the WHO [OBJECT] In the present section involving the hyletic “object”—​ that is, the actual “thing” or “denotation” of the emerging esoteric Sôd stratum—​we already possess much information regarding this alleged stratum. Our scrutiny of the Pentateuchal text, in accordance with the methodology and research method developed and adopted by the study, has thus far yielded the following: (1) The human being’s putative “image” shared with Elohim pertains to the Edenic “Tree of Life” (the WHAT [OBJECT]).46 (2) The human being possesses “seven wells” or chakras that need to be “dug” by a would-​be initiate (the WHER E [OBJECT]). (3) The “wells” are simultaneously a metonym for chakras and a metaphor, via the associated water connotation, for spirituality.47 (4) At the same time, the “digging” of “wells” is equivalent to “bringing down the walls of Jericho,” since both activities are about the required initiatory work that enables the putative esoteric system’s alteration of consciousness.48 (5) There are two separate narrative treatments, one in Genesis and the other in Joshua, because the former—​with its well digging—​highlights

246  The Urtext the physical, or bodily, chakras (the WH E RE [OBJECT]) and connects the “digging” aspect with a water-​symbolized spiritual quest, whereas the latter—​the “conquest of Jericho”—​foregrounds the mantra-​like application of divine names (the HOW [OBJECT]). (6) Furthermore, the “digging of wells”—​and the simultaneous “conquest of Jericho”—​is to be done via an inner “great shout.” That is, the mantra-​like sounding of the divine names MIh and MaH projects their vibrations to selected chakras by way of the right hand, thereby leading reverberations of both Elohim (via MIh) and YHWH (via MaH) into the initiate’s body (the WHER E [OBJECT] and the HOW [OBJECT]). (7) The “well digging,” in turn, and the associated “bringing down the walls of Jericho” are a metonym and a metaphor, respectively, for the acquisition of an altered state of consciousness, which is itself allegorized as the “Promised Land.” In light of the foregoing, the next set of three “metacommunicative object identifiers”—​the WHY [OBJECT], the WHER ETO [OBJECT], and the W H O [OBJECT]—​is determined with relative ease. The WHY [OBJECT] of the emerging hyletic object of the conjectured esoteric-​noetic stratum, as has been made clear throughout this study, is to effect a would-​be initiate’s transformation of consciousness, one that will be consistent with the candidate’s eventual ability to develop an “I-​Thou” relationship with the God of Israel. The W H O [OBJECT]—​unquestionably at this juncture in our study—​is the would-​be initiated priest of YHWH, whereas the WHERETO [OBJECT] is the direction of the intention of this WHO [OBJECT]: it is related to striving to serve the God of Israel.

The WH EN [OBJECT] This section focuses on the final “metacommunicative object identifier” of the hyletic-​ deferential continuum, namely, the W H E N [OBJECT]. We have already determined that the WHEN [TOPIC] is about procuring the Blessing, that is, choosing the path of Jacob. This is an example of an asymmetric noetic parallelism, in that the Jacob-​Esau twins are a personification or perhaps hypostasization of a foremost proposition within the esoteric realm of the emerging Sôd stratum: a human being naturally falls into the life of an ordinary member of his or her society—​or can choose the journey toward the Promised Land of altered consciousness, altered in accordance with the tenets that the founders of the ancient Israelite cult designed to enable access to the “God of Israel.” The latter is the very deity whom Jacob encounters at Peniel “face to face” and who renames him Israel. We see that the emerging esoteric narrative is awash with a variety of literary figures—from metaphors and metonyms, to allegories and personifications, not to mention the extensive use of both narrative and classical-​rhetorical metalepsis (both will be discussed in Chapter 10). Recall that the Peniel

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  247 encounter between Jacob and “man” (֙ ‫)איש‬ ִ (Gen. 32:25) is, as Jacob himself describes it, really an encounter with Elohim.49 Now, following the logic of this highly figural narrative itself, we are compelled to recognize that this encounter represents precisely the principal aim of the putative initiation: being able to encounter God and establish ongoing access and a living relationship. The renaming of Jacob as Israel is an additional confirmation of the ultimate status achieved by Jacob—​that of having become “Israel.”50 Jacob, therefore, is now fully in the Promised Land, that is, he has at last arrived at the state of consciousness that has been allegorized as the “Holy Land.”51 Afterward, he is to meet for the last time with his twin brother, that is, with his own former self that he will never encounter again: “I have seen thy [Esau’s] face, as though I had seen the face of God” (Gen. 33:10 KJV), says Jacob, now called Israel.52 Prior to this decisive transformation marked by his changed name, however, Jacob, the initiate-​in-​training, goes through certain critical stages in his path toward becoming Israel, stages that have caused an unbelievable amount of exegetical fantasy throughout the millennia.53 His marriages, first to Leah—​by way of “working” seven years to earn the right to marry the younger daughter of Laban and being fooled in a childish scheme of bride-​ substitution on the wedding night—​and then, after yet another seven years of steadfast laboring, finally marrying his true love, Rachel, as well, indicate a Don Quixote-​like character worthy of a Cervantes narrative style and, above all, irony. Our seemingly naïve hero Jacob, however, in the end shows that he is instead, if anything, apparently rather sly and not one to be taken for granted, as when he carries out his magic trick with Laban’s flock of sheep, in the process transferring their ownership to himself. The above reading, in essence, is the typical fare normally accepted at face value by the exegetes, since in their eyes the status of the Scripture guarantees the story’s reliability and viability, ironic or not. Also, the unavoidable text had to be reckoned with, with the only “creative” breathing space afforded by midrashic freedoms, accorded by the “Oral Torah” of the rabbis, or the postmodernist unlimited interpretive license that dissolves into fantasy and indeterminacy, respectively. Yet the Pentateuchal text’s authors, as we saw in many parts of this study, while masterfully adopting a Cervantes-​like, ironic-​comical perspective here or a Shakespeare-​like dramatic flair there—​as, for example, in the Jacob-​Esau narrative or the Joseph cycle—​had something else in mind throughout. Their foremost aim has been to embed a second-​channel noetic narrative that should be invisible to most readers while, in principle, recoverable by a receptive, unrushed reader whose esoteric competency would be approximating the level of the authors of the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah. Such a competency would additionally benefit if reinforced by a Blanchot-​like view of literature as “radical interrogation,” or perhaps as “the absolute interrogation, the interrogation of all possible interrogations, the ‘interrogation of God’ ” (as Derrida would

248  The Urtext

WHAT[OBJECT] THE BODY AS A TREE OF LIFE Human being with sefirotic spiritual-somatic potencies

WHEN[OBJECT] WHY[OBJECT]

EXPERIENTIAL PHENOMENA

TRANSFORMATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS I-Thou relationship with the God of Israel

Observing a transparent, pastel-colored streaky “veil” covering one’s visual field

de re

s-OBJECT (s-CONTEXT 3)

Hyletic-Denotational Center

WHO[OBJECT] INITIATED PRIEST OF YHWH

DEFERENTIAL FIELD

WHERE[OBJECT]

“THING” “DENOTATION”

Recovered diatactically from the

THE SEVEN CHAKRAS

META-GROUND SÔD NARRATIVE

HOW[OBJECT] DIVINE NAMES MIH AND MAH The “great shout” The hand

WHERETO[OBJECT] SERVING THE GOD OF ISRAEL

If initiation unsuccessful, becoming a messianic surrogate, a “god”

Figure 9.2 Hyletic referent ascertained: metacommunicative object identifiers of the hyletic-​deferential continuum.

have it).54 From such a perspective—​insisted on, it must be kept in mind, by the text in question itself—​Jacob’s “marriages” are metaphorical as well as metonymic depictions of acquisitions of successive altered states of consciousness, or “souls” of the Kabbalah, beyond the one all humans are born with, the so-​called “animal soul,” the “nepeš.”55 They are the “rûaḥ” and “nĕšāmāh,” pertaining to Leah and Rachel, respectively.56 Becoming “Israel” signifies arrival at the “ḥayāh” soul level, or the fourth “soul.”57 This is where access to God first becomes possible.58 The “ringstraked, speckled, and spotted” flocks, as specified earlier in this study, are metonymic, iconic representations of changes in the initiate’s field of vision at such time, specifically, the pastel-​colored, transparent streaks and spots seemingly overlying everything in one’s visual field, though not disturbing it (Figure 9.2).59

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  249 Table 9.1 Comparison of inferential coordinates in three continua Noetic-​ Inferential Noematic-​ Continuum Conferential [Setting] Continuum [Topic/​ Content] The W HAT

The W HO

The W HY

The W HERE The W HERETO

The W HEN

The HOW

Hyletic-​Deferential Continuum [Object]

Crossing over to the Holy Land

Initiation: Journey to The body as a Tree of the Promised Land Life: Human being with seven spiritual-​ somatic potencies (the seven chakras) Elohim Would-​be initiate The initiate: Initiated priest of YHWH Escape from Escape from Transformation slavery; ability restricted of initiate’s to serve YHWH consciousness; consciousness Access to YHWH (as per Hebraic priestly initiation tradition) The wells The body The seven bio-​energy centers (chakras) Promised Land Expanded or higher “I-​Thou” relationship consciousness with the God (alteration of of Israel (if initiation consciousness) is disastrous, then becoming a messianic surrogate, a “god”) The Jacob Stealing the Experiential narrative saga Blessing: Choosing phenomena: the path of Jacob Transparent, pastel-​ colored streaky veil over visual field Conquest of Induction procedures Divine names MIh and Jericho (revealed in the MaH; the “great Object) shout;” the role of the hand

Notes 1 J. Taylor, Cognitive Grammar, 590. 2 Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 1:157–​58. In spite of going beyond that which is strictly linguistically coded, such an approach must not be equated with the postmodernist interpretive license; quite to the contrary. The present study’s consistent effort is tied to the authorial perspective and its Jakobsonian poetic function that carries the text’s message; everything in this study—​from the proposed theoretical model to the research methodology and methods—​is maximally devoted to the recovery of the text’s communicative intent rather than a reader-​response perspective.

250  The Urtext 3 Jean-​Luc Nancy equates such a state with “being” itself: Being singular plural: these three apposite words, which do not have any determined syntax (“being” is a verb or noun; “singular” and “plural” are nouns or adjectives; all can be rearranged in different combinations) mark an absolute equivalence, both in an indistinct and distinct way. Being is singularly plural and plurally singular. Yet, this in itself does not constitute a particular predication of Being, as if Being is or has a certain number of attributes, one of which is that of being singular-​plural—​however double, contradictory, or chiasmatic this may be. On the contrary, the singular-​plural constitutes the essence of Being, a constitution that undoes or dislocates every single, substantial essence of Being itself. (Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 28–​29) 4 Hoffman, “Tree of Life and the ‘City of the Just,’ ” 7, 8. The Sefer Yetzirah (Book of creation) is by an anonymous author and was probably composed in the early centuries of the Common Era. See Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah. 5 Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:269. 6 Scholem, “Sefirot.” 7 No one outside the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah, that is, though in these two sources it is done in a manner that requires intensive decoding, which I am undertaking here. Elohim, however, is typically “assigned” in Kabbalistic sources to one or the other specific sefirah and never, it seems, to the entire sefirotic array. 8 One of the major concepts in theoretical Kabbalah, especially in the Lurianic Kabbalah, is the concept of Adam Kadmon, or the primordial human being. Adam Kadmon “acts as a filter through which the light of the Infinite is emanated,” namely, the sefirot: Based on the biblical statement that Adam, the first human, was made in the image of God, kabbalists described the pattern of the sefirot within [the emanated from the Eyn Sof] ray of light in terms of the human body, a cosmic figure whom they called Adam Kadmon (Primordial Human). This Adam Kadmon acts as a filter through which the light of the Infinite is emanated, especially from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, representing the human organs of vision, hearing, smell, and speech. … In Etz Chayyim, Vital states clearly that the description of the cosmic Emanator as an archetypal human with eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and so on is only an analogy used to “appease our ears,” enabling us to speak of something that would otherwise be too deep and too close to the Infinite for us even to imagine. (Menzie and Padeh, introduction to Tree of Life, xxii, xxiii) It is apparent that Isaac Luria (whose ideas are presented in Vital’s Tree of Life) decodes the biblical statement that the human creature was made in the image of God, that is, in the image of Elohim, by constructing an elaborate, fascinating, and extensive theological theory, at the root of which lies this primordial, or “archetypal,” Adam. It is this Adam, created in the image of Elohim, who “acts as a filter through which the light of the Infinite is emanated.” The emanated light of the Ain Soph is “filtered” through this Adam Kadmon—​who seems to personify the Ten Sefirot—​and thereafter is split into ten lights of the sefirot. Thus, Luria’s grand theory moves from the unimaginable Ain Soph, through worlds upon worlds, downward toward the human being, who is steeped in the coarseness of the last

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  251 rung of the ladder of worlds, with its materiality and extreme remoteness from the Infinite Light, and chafing as he or she does under multiple layers of qĕlipôt, spiritual blinders. It is a magnificent edifice. We, however, are not personally privy to the privileged information that Isaac Luria, the “human angel,” as he was called, apparently had access to, information regarding the exalted regions in proximity to Ain Soph. I thus must choose the opposite direction: from the human being, upward, as high as possible. 9 Moshe Idel traces within the history of Kabbalah itself such a vacillating movement of the sefirot’s home ground in the scheme of things, now toward the human being, now toward high theosophical heaven. “Modern scholarship,” he states, “seems to have neglected … [an] ancient view [that] claim[s]‌the presence of ten things in man. … At the beginning of Spanish Kabbalah, R. ‘Ezra was already referring to the ten Sefirot within lower man” (Idel, Kabbalah, 146, 153). Idel proceeds to identify these “ten things in man”—​the latter obviously a rather awkward turn of phrase—​with “psychological processes or human qualities” (146). 10 For critique of this unsubstantiated borrowing, see Cooper, “Assyrian Prophecies”; and Parpola, “Assyrian Tree of Life.” 11 See Parpola, “Assyrian Tree of Life” and compare Sasson, Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, 1896ff. Yitzhaq Feder observes that “ritual knowledge was a ‘technology’ that was sought after and shared” and thus one may surmise that the same was true for conceptual knowledge (Feder, “Levantine Tradition,” 110). 12 For the former, see, e.g., Orians and Heerwagen, “Evolved Responses to Landscapes,” 560; and for the latter, H. Schwartz, Tree of Souls. 13 Feder speaks of the existence of a context in which ritual traditions were actively exchanged between Semites and Hurrians. The latter were responsible for transferring these traditions to Anatolia. Regarding the transmission of these traditions to Israel, several historical scenarios must be taken into consideration in accordance with the diversity of opinion as to the origins of the Israelites. One of the most likely of these would involve direct contact with the Semitic population of Syria or Canaan either in the Late Bronze Age or slightly afterwards. (Feder, “Levantine Tradition,” 111) The ritual or cultic traditions Feder has in mind here include, for example, “the use of blood to eliminate sin and impurity” (101). In accordance with this study, such ritual knowledge in any event belongs to the exoteric sphere of the ancient Israelite cultic praxis, whereas questions and issues pertaining to the esoteric side of the latter, such as initiatory information or its epistemic consequences, seem to be wholly Israelite. 14 The name YHWH, when all its letters are fully spelled out in accordance with each letter’s own pronunciation, can take four different forms, depending on whether the letter waw is spelled with an aleph or a yod, and the letter heh with an aleph or another heh. These forms of YHWH are usually called by the numerical values of the particular form, as follows: AV =​72 (‫ ;)יוד הי ויו הי‬SaG =​63 (‫;)יוד הי ואו הי‬ BeN =​ 52 (‫ ;)יוד הה וו הה‬and MaH =​ 45 (‫ ;)יוד הא ואו הא‬see Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, 237–​38. As Aryeh Kaplan notes, “The name Mah has a numerical value of 45, the same as that of Adam (‫)אדם‬, meaning ‘man’ ” (241). Yechiel

252  The Urtext Bar-​Lev observes that, “according to the Vilna Gaon, the form which adds up to 45 is the Ineffable Name of God, the Tetragrammaton as it was pronounced by the High Priest on Yom Kippur” (Bar-​Lev, Song of the Soul, 142). Thus, the name MaH, considered by some Kabbalists as particularly holy since it contains the alephs throughout, is indeed a surrogate for YHWH. The “lower extremity” expression (used in the Zoharic quote in R. Eleazar’s discourse regarding MaH) then coincides with the fact that MaH is the lowest in number, 45, out of the four possible forms, as well as lower than MIh (which adds up to 50). MIh is often attributed to the sefirah of bînāh, with her fifty Gates of Understanding, whereas MaH is associated with Malkhut and thus is situated much “lower.” See Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 330n230. 15 Aryeh Kaplan relates the gist of the Sefer Yetzirah’s position on the sefirot as supposedly being only concepts: “The Sefirot are purely ideal concepts, without any substance whatever. Unlike letters which have form and sound, the Sefirot have no intrinsic physical properties. As such, they are purely conceptual” (Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 25–​26). Crucially, however, seeing the sefirot as “purely conceptual” would miss their entire role and raison d’être: apropos of the human being, the sefirot are psychosomatic potencies that are normally dormant. As the recovery of the Sôd will show, only the divine names MIh and MaH, if properly engaged, can activate the sefirotic powers. 16 Zohar (1984 ed.), 1:6–​7. 17 Zohar (1984 ed.), 1:4–​6. 18 Haralick, Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, 199. 19 Mystics have frequently claimed increased or new, exotic powers such as, among others, clairvoyance and clairaudience. Scholarly, and in particular empirical-​ clinical research, only very recently began investigating such claims of altered abilities; see, for example, Carter et al., “Meditation Alters Perceptual Rivalry”; Davidson et al., “Alterations in Brain and Immune Function”; Davidson and Lutz, “Buddha’s Brain”; Griffiths et al., “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-​ Type Experiences”; and compare Hollenback, Mysticism; and Wittmann et al., “Effects of Psilocybin.” An early pioneer in such research was Roland Fischer; see his “Time Contraction and Psychomotor Performance Produced by Psilocybin”; “Cartography of Ecstatic and Meditative States”; “Cartography of Inner Space”; “Transformations of Consciousness” (parts I and II); as well as Fischer and Landon, “On the Arousal State-​Dependent Recall of Subconscious Experience.” Most of this research, however, has focused on more conventional human abilities such as attention or memory-​related affects and emotions such as fear; few if any studies focus on enhancement of epistemic-​cognitive capacities, which, as this study suggests, confirming Kabbalistic claims regarding the Môḥîn Gadĕlût or “expanded consciousness,” accompany some mystical experiences. During an intense religious experience of a mystical nature, the “self ” and its “point of view” and “perspectives” are engaged in a transformative relationship with extra-​egoic transcendent entities, for example, God. Although the most intense phase lasts from several seconds to several months (Kohav, Water from Fire) the experiencer’s sense of self and its perspectives can undergo dramatic changes. These can result in the self’s assuming a theocentric perspective (compare Kohav, “Ancient Religions as Differing Responses to Self-​God Dichotomy”), whether through (1) a unitive type of mysticism as in Christianity, some versions of Islam,

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  253 and Indian religions (Larson, “Mystical Man in India”); (2) a theistic-​dualist kind (Judaism); or (3) intermediary alternatives, including “monistic” (Meister Eckhart, Shankara, Kundalini yoga, Sankhya yoga, Jainism) and “nihilative” mysticism (Islam, Buddhism; see Larson “Mystical Man in India”). A theocentric perspective involves powerful alterations in the experiencer’s epistemic framework, amounting to “cognitive restructuring” (compare Hunt, “Synaesthesia, Metaphor and Consciousness”; Kohav, “Adam’s Choice”; Lancaster, Approaches to Consciousness, 251; and Merkur, “Interpreting Numinous Experiences”). Among other things, an increase in the intensity and complexity of the cross-​ modal synesthesias (Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness) is expected during an ASC, due to either trophotropic or ergotropic arousal (Fischer, Cartography of Ecstatic and Meditative State”). Finally, we must consider the Zoharic “ ‘cup of benediction,’ which has to be raised by five fingers and no more, after the model of the lily, which rests on five strong leaves in the shape of five fingers. Thus the lily is a symbol of the cup of benediction” (see Exhibit 7.4). This indicates a critical role for the hand to play in the inductive-​initiatory process. The Hebrew Bible, too, offers copious references to the hand, or arm, or, specifically, the right hand or arm of YHWH, usually within the context of either a major expenditure or demonstration of force by the Lord, or his insertion of himself into the affairs of humans in a dramatic way. When the right hand of God is involved, we are certain that his presence is definitely felt in some significant way by the people. Because investigation of this aspect, while vital to the esoteric system under discussion, would digress from the present study’s focus, I will postpone discussion of the hand’s specific role for a future writing project. 20 Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 25–​26. 21 The expansion, especially on the part of the Zohar, is not always to be welcomed from the standpoint of this study, in that some Zoharic notions, being partially affected by the rabbinical theology of good and evil, for example, indeed clash with the Pentateuchal religious-​mystical worldview. 22 Eleh is the plural of zeh (masc.) or zoʼt (fem.), both meaning “this.” And zeh and zoʼt are identified in many classics of Judaism and the Kabbalah (e.g., the Talmud, the Zohar, J. Gikatilla) with some of the most cherished Hebraic concepts imaginable, including God, Torah, circumcision and Covenant, tithes and sacrificial offerings, and even Jerusalem. All this is possible because a demonstrative pronoun such as zeh affords any such interpretation, as, for example, in “zeh ʼēlî”—​ “this is my God” (Exod. 15:2). God is thus identified with zeh (i.e., zeh is my God). See Rojtman, Black Fire on White Fire. 23 Compare Scholem, “God.” 24 Moshe Idel, as noted above, speaks of “psychological” and “human spiritual” sefirot, distinguishing them from the “divine” sefirot: The psychological understanding of the Sefirot occurs in an explicit way in ecstatic Kabbalah and, later on, in Hasidism; this phenomenon is probably related to their shared intense interest in extreme forms of devekut. When a certain mystical system focuses on inner experiences more than on theurgical activity, the entities to be activated are no longer the objectively existing divine Sefirot but rather the human spiritual Sefirot. (Idel, Kabbalah, 146)

254  The Urtext 25 Idel, in describing the human-​based “sefirot in man,” sees it as the result of a historical progression, from the theosophism of Lurianic Kabbalah to “the early Hasidic masters” who “reinterpret[ed] the zoharic and Lurianic theosophical systems as referring to psychological processes”: This shift in focus from the theosophical to the human experience, from the Sefirot as divine to the Sefirot in man, had important implications for the subsequent evolution of Jewish mysticism. What is novel and important in Abulafia is not his assumption of the existence of ten Sefirot in the human soul but his understanding of the names of the Sefirot, according to theosophical nomenclature, as processes taking place within man. … The ascent of Lurianic Kabbalah, with its emphasis on theosophy, … contributed to the suppression of the psychologistic [sic] understanding of the Sefirot or divine configurations (parzufim). … It remained for Hasidic mysticism to reinterpret the zoharic and Lurianic theosophical systems as referring to psychological processes. This reinterpretation is part of a more comprehensive change of attitude to[ward] Lurianism, parts of which, like Lurianic kavvanot, became problematic and were sometimes even explicitly rejected. Like Abulafia, the early Hasidic masters emphasized the importance of unitive and ecstatic phenomena and also envisaged the previous theosophies as allegories of human spiritual powers and processes. (Idel, Kabbalah, 149, 150) Apart from being oblivious to the possibility of a Hebraic mystical system some three thousand years before either Isaac Luria or the eighteenth-​century Hassidim—​a system that, moreover, not only envisioned the sefirotic realm (a factor that, full two millennia later, occasioned the Sefer Yetzirah’s explicit description of the sefirot) but constructed a parallel divine/​human framework based on the shared “image” of the Ten Sefirot—​Idel, like most other modern investigators of Jewish mysticism, can perceive the human part of the equation, vis-​à-​vis the sefirot, only as being confined to “the human soul” (or, in the modern vernacular, to “psychological processes”) and never to the mystic’s body (that is, its psychosomatic context). This may seem surprising, since the sefirotic array has been, and continues to be, constantly compared in books on the Kabbalah to the shape of the human body, not the human soul—​since obviously no one has ever seen the shape of anyone’s soul. Indeed, the “sefirotic tree,” commonly known as the Tree of Life, is pictured in virtually any book on Kabbalah as some version of Figure 9.1 (compare, e.g., Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 24; Lancaster, Essence of Kabbalah, 49; and Zohar [2004 ed.], xi), except for the three horizontal arrowed lines with dotted circles, in the case of two of them, centered in them, which is my addition (to be discussed later in this book). Figure 9.1 corrects a major error typically encountered in such diagrams: the sefirah of ḥesed (lovingkindness) belongs to the left arm, while gĕbûrāh (power) belongs to the right, rather than the opposite way depicted in practically all the sources. Due to this error and the unhinged emphasis on ḥesed, much of rabbinical sensibility is heavily unbalanced in favor of “lovingkindness” and disfavoring force, being lopsided vis-​à-​vis power, or strength. Full treatment of this issue, however, is outside the present study’s scope. 26 In accordance with the time-​ honored esoteric tradition, the present study withholds certain critical, vital information so that no possibility will exist for this information to be put to direct experiential use; the latter must be done via

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  255 a qualified teacher. While such teachers are hardly available at the present time, the reason for this precaution is the extreme potency of this system, which can, in cases of unsuitable or unprepared individuals, lead to highly undesirable results. From the standpoint of this study, however—​which is mainly concerned with establishing and validating the thesis of the presence of a concealed initiatory stratum within the Pentateuch—​the recovered system need not be complete for the disclosed information to validate the study’s premise. 27 Kaplan, Living Torah, 89n20:1. 28 Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 158. 29 On the participant’s body, see Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness; Newton, review of Bodily Nature of Consciousness, by Wider; and Sheets-​Johnstone, Giving the Body Its Due. 30 Condron, Kundalini Rising; Krishna, Kundalini; Mookerjee, Kundalini; Mumford, Chakra and Kundalini Workbook; Parwha Kaur, Kundalini Yoga; Silburn, Kundalini. Harry Hunt describes the rising of Kundalini energy from the standpoint of transpersonal psychology as follows: The tactile-​kinesthetic basis of this practice, rather than reflecting any interior physiology as has commonly been maintained, is also demonstrated by the fact that the activation of the Kundalini, or serpent power, normally latent at the base of the [internal visual-​kinesthetic] central channel, involves the deliberate contractions of these muscle columns—​described as “milking the nails” (Bernard 1950). On Angyal’s model of the kinesthetic bases of somatic hallucinations in schizophrenia, we would expect that such contractions, held within a state of meditative and introspective detachment, would feel as though they were being imposed by an impersonal force. Combined with the deliberate cultivation of other image modalities, the result would be the spontaneous synesthetic cross-​flows that are the point of the practice. (Hunt, On the Nature of Consciousness, 205) 31 Parwha Kaur, Kundalini Yoga, 47, 53. 32 Avalon, Serpent Power, 8. 33 Mumford, Chakra and Kundalini Workbook, 197; Mookerjee, Kundalini, 11; Silburn, Kundalini, 25; Rawson, Tantra, 27; Condron, Kundalini Rising, 82; and Wilber, “Are the Chakras Real?,” 120, passim. Albert Schutz calls the chakras “points of awareness” and “spiritual sense organs” and notes that they have also been called “flowers, candles, doors of perceptions, gates of conception, lights, lamps, and Kelim (the tools) … the cups of benediction, lightened faces, cherubs, wheels, cauldrons and the feathers of headgears of the American [I]‌ndians. They are the Roses of the Sufis and lotus flowers in India, China, Japan and Egypt” (Schutz, Call Adonoi, 43, 82n6). Schutz also cites the Zohar’s notion of seven “windows” (82n7). The ancient Hindu and Buddhist books involving chakras are given various dates, the majority of them apparently not older than the latest millennium, but some quite a bit older. Mircea Eliade gives a date for the “composition of the most ancient hymns of the Rig Veda” as circa 1500 to 1200 B CE ; composition of the Bhagavad-​Gita as circa 100 B CE to 100 CE ; and dates the life of “Patanjali the grammarian (identified by some with the author of the Yoga Sutras)” as being in the second century BC E . Eliade, Patanjali and Yoga, 201–​2. By way of comparison, the Encyclopedia Judaica’s “Timeline” gives ca. 1280–​1270 B C E for the Exodus from Egypt and Mount Sinai national theophany and ca. 1240

256  The Urtext for the death of Moses and the conquest of Canaan by Joshua, whereas 538 is the date of the return to Zion from the Babylonian exile and the subsequent canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures. 34 Schutz, Call Adonoi, 43. Schutz, however, does not explain why he can do so, that is, equate the chakras with the Ten Sefirot, nor does he offer a clarification for either the discrepancy in numbers (i.e., ten versus the seven) or the discrepancy in placements (i.e., the seven chakras are all situated along the spine, whereas the Tree of Life array of sefirot is usually depicted in three vertical columns, with some of the sefirot being substantially removed from the spine, such as the gĕbûrāh and ḥesed, which are identified with the arms). 35 Wilber, “Are the Chakras Real?,” 121. 36 See Parpola, “Assyrian Tree of Life.” 37 Compare the following: B CE B CE

The Pythagoreans, the Metaphysics [of Aristotle] tells us, claim that “… there are ten principles, which they arrange in two columns of cognates—​limited and unlimited, odd and even, one and plurality, right and left, male and female, resting and moving, straight and curved, light and darkness, good and bad, square and oblong.” (Farmer et al., “Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies,” 54) 38 J. White, Kundalini, Evolution and Enlightenment, 22. 39 Ibid., 17. 40 The reasons for such acute recoiling vis-​à-​vis human divinization are discussed in ­chapters 1 and 11, where the Edenic narrative is analyzed from the esoteric perspective being reconstructed in the study. 41 Schutz, Call Adonoi, 33. 42 Ibid., emphasis added. Cf. also Exhibit 7.19. 43 Here is an example of how a metaleptic conjunction of the two narrative channels might lead readers to misapprehend the text’s meaning. Richard Elliott Friedman renders ‫ש ֥ם יְה ָו ֖ה אֵ ֥ל עו ֹ ֽ ָלם‬ ֵ ׁ ‫א־ש֔ם ְּב‬ ָ ׁ ‫( ַו ִ ּי ְ֙ק ָר‬Gen. 21:33; see Exhibit 7.15) as “and he called the name of YHWH El Olam” (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 73). This interpretation is hardly satisfactory, for even if the translator had rendered the Hebrew of “El Olam” into English, as he perhaps should have done in an English-​language text—​possibly as “Lord of the Universe,” as Kaplan has it in The Living Torah (95)—​he overlooks the idea that is otherwise plainly visible in the Hebrew. Even if Abraham suddenly starts calling YHWH by a new or additional designation or epithet, “El Olam,” as seems to be the case in the Friedman’s rendering, something essential is still missing. Wayiqĕrāʼ šām bĕ-​šēm YHWH ʼēl ʻôlām expresses something that Kaplan’s translation—​“and there he called in the name of God, Lord of the Universe,” Living Torah, 95—​likewise lacks. Called what in the name of God, and called to whom? Rather, the passage states that in Beersheba, Abraham called out the name of the God of the Universe, YHWH. As we shall see later, such calling out, or sounding, of God’s certain and specific names at the “place of Seven Wells,” Beersheba, is crucial to one’s progress, as the very sounds of these names of power—​along with other indispensable factors—​will demolish the “walls of Jericho” that prevent us from entering the Promised Land of expanded, divine consciousness. As we

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  257 know from the text, God reveals his name YHWH for the first time much later, to Moses in Exodus 3:15. But the Kabbalistic meaning I am ascribing to the otherwise unintelligible passage still stands, for other divine names of power can be sounded during the “siege of Jericho.” Both the Jewish Publication Society’s and Everett Fox’s translations of this passage are closer to the Kabbalistic meaning on which I insist than either Friedman’s or Kaplan’s; the JPS translation (see Pelikan, Sacred Writings) is “invoked there the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God,” while Fox’s (Five Books of Moses) is “called out the name: YHWH God of the Ages.” 44 The marked instances where the hand of the Lord (or of Moses, as a conveyor of the divine force) is specified are numerous. Here are the following examples (in Friedman’s translation): And YHWH said to Moses, Now you’ll see what I shall do to Pharaoh, because with a strong hand he’ll let them go. (Exod. 6:1) … and I’ll put out my hand and strike Egypt with all my wonders that I’ll do among them, and after that he’ll let you go. (Exod. 3:20) … with strength of hand YHWH brought us out from Egypt (Exod. 13:14, 16). And I shall bring you to the land that I raised my hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and I shall give it to you as a possession. I am YHWH. (Exod. 6:8) … as YHWH had spoken by Moses’ hand. (Exod. 9:35) Your right hand, YHWH, awesome in power, your right hand, YHWH, crushed the foe. (Exod. 15:6) You reached your right hand: earth swallowed them. (Exod. 15:12) At the power of your arm they’re silent like stone. (Exod. 15:16) And it was: when Moses would lift his hand, then Israel would predominate; and when he would rest his hand, then Amalek would predominate. (Exod. 17:11) (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 188–​90, 200, 213–​14, 219–​20, 227) Friedman wonders regarding the first quote, “With whose strong hand [he’ll let them go]? God’s or Moses’ own?” Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 189n6:1. Ziony Zevit thinks that the ambiguity here “is a feature of Hebrew syntax/​linguistic structure.” Zevit, personal communication, 2010. Yet, it is easy enough to imagine that the sophisticated authors of our text would have had no problem formulating this passage in a way that would avoid vagueness. To this intentional Kabbalistic ambiguity of the Torah, I will add some more, by throwing in the coded possibility and, in my view, likelihood—​that of the hand of the initiate-​to-​ be, for whom, after all, this information was intended. Finally, Exodus 17:15–​16 should capture our attention: “And Moses built an altar and called its name ‘YHWH is my miracle.’ And he said: ‘Because of the hand that is upon the seat of Yah, the war of YHWH with Amalek is from generation to generation’ ” (‫ ׁש ְ֖מֹו י ְהוָ ֥ה׀ נִּסִ ֽי׃ ַו ִּי֥בֶן מ ֶ ֹׁ֖שה ִמז ֵ ְּ֑ב ַח ַוּיִק ָ ְ֥רא‬and ‫ַל־ּכ֣ס ָ֔יּה ִמ ְלחָמָ ֥ה‬ ֵ ‫ו ַּ֗י ֹאמֶר ּכִ ֽי־י ָ ֙ד ע‬ ‫ַיהו֖ה ּבַ ֽ ֲעמ ֵָל֑ק מ ִּ֖ד ֹר ּדֹֽר׃‬ ָ ‫[ ל‬my translation]). Friedman states regarding kî yād ʻal kēs Yāh, “No one is sure what this means,” while translating it as “hand on YH’s throne”

258  The Urtext (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 228n17:16). Friedman renders nisî as the incomprehensible “my standard,” while Aryeh Kaplan, Everett Fox, and the JPS use a slightly more meaningful yet still irrelevant “my banner” (the JPS uses “banner” in a footnote, while leaving the Hebrew nisî in the English translation, as does the King James version). Kaplan notes that Targum and Rashi rendered YHWH nisî as “God is my Miracle,” and that the Septuagint renders kî yād ʻal kēs Yāh as “With a secret hand, God wages war” (Kaplan, Living Torah, 342n17:15, 16). The translators’ apparent difficulty here is directly related to the metaleptic intrusion of the concealed esoteric Sôd stratum. I will discuss this passage further as it pertains to the significance of Amalek and “the war of YHWH with Amalek is from generation to generation” in Chapter 11. 45 Rachel gives birth to two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, out of Jacob’s total of twelve and dies giving birth to Benjamin. We all know what an illustrious future awaits Rachel’s son Joseph, who is not only destined to become the leader of the most advanced country of his time, the superpower Egypt, but also carries the Kabbalistic torch, the “Blessing,” which his father Jacob “stole” from Esau. These two roles are the same when considered Kabbalistically; we are talking about Egypt in this case, and Joseph, as the ruler of Egypt, represents the initiate who rules (his) lower consciousness. But Rachel’s second son, Benjamin, Jacob’s youngest and thus Kabbalistically the ultimate fruit of all his strivings, hardly ever receives top billing, or even any billing at all. The first “Bibi” is all but invisible—​or so it seems. (I hope to be forgiven for the insouciant reference to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s nickname.) Yet if one looks closer, beginning with the name itself, one is confronted with peculiar bits of additional information. Aryeh Kaplan, for example, notes that “Benjamin … [is] Binyamin in Hebrew, literally ‘son of the right.’ Some interpret this as ‘son of the right hand,’ meaning a son of strength (Ramban)” (Kaplan, Living Torah, 169, note to Gen. 35:18). 46 An in-​depth investigation of the enormous significance of this specific finding is beyond the present book’s specific and thus limited scope. For example, an indispensable aspect of the emerging inner-​core esoteric system of the ancient Israelite cultic religion, as perceived in this study, relates to what I term “Kabbalistic sacrifices”; the latter are identified with the “fire [that] supports water” discussed in the Sefer Yetzirah (see the next note). The “Kabbalistic sacrifices,” as I conceptualize them, are developed using the sefirotic Tree of Life framework; they will be described in a future book devoted to the subject. 47 We have already discovered the close connection between the sefirot and the letter mem, through the divine names MIh and MaH. MIh and MaH are required, we have established, for the sefirot to be “manifested,” or rather, to be felt by us, somehow. Mem also corresponds to water—​the Hebrew word for water is maîm—​ and “water” is what we hope to find as we dig our “wells.” Thus, we are beginning to grasp what kind of water we are looking for, and what kind of water the forefathers in Genesis found in their wells. There are complex issues pertaining to this notion of the search for spiritual “water”; how complex they are can be seen from the Sefer Yetzirah’s esoteric symbolism: Three Mothers AMSh (‫ )שמא‬air, water, and fire. Fire is above, water is below, and air of Breath is the rule that decides between them. And a sign of this thing is that fire supports water. Mem hums, Shin hisses, and Alef is the breath of air that decides between them. (Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 243, stanza 6:2)

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  259 There is critical information conveyed here pertaining to the conjectured esoteric ancient Israelite inner-​core mysticism that has not been adequately treated in the literature; see, e.g., Blumenthal, Understanding Jewish Mysticism, 42; Glotzer, Fundamentals of Jewish Mysticism, 191, 195; and Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah. It is, however, outside the scope of the present study. 48 The Jericho narrative in the Book of Joshua is also explicitly connected to the well digging in Genesis via the overdetermined, persistent stress on the number seven (which is the number of chakras in the human body). 49 “And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved” (Gen. 32:30 KJV; see exhibit 7.21). 50 The meanings of Yiśĕrāʼēl are several. One meaning is “the Prince of God” (šar =​prince, minister). Richard Elliott Friedman offers another: “the one who struggles with God,” that is, a “God-​wrestler” (R. Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 112–​13n32:29). Robert Haralick, on the other hand, points out that Israel also means “the inheritance, or possession of God” (yĕrušāh =​inheritance). Haralick, Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, 151. Thus, one can see that the initiate within the ancient Israelite esoteric system who is called Israel is assured of first wrestling with God issues and then eventually becoming God’s prince/​priest/​ warrior and God’s inheritance, that is, a custodian of God knowledge, blessing, and empowerment. 51 It is here that one may undergo what must have been the torturous predicament of the innumerable exegetes who had no access to the esoteric level: why must God so unfairly punish his greatest and most loyal servant, Moses, by making him die without allowing him to enter into the Land of the Promise? The otherwise nonexistent, contrived punishment seems to be, rather, these investigators’ own lot, namely, being reduced to clueless explicators of an inaccessible-​to-​them text. God does not punish Moses; it is the very logic of the composition of this consummate text that makes it impossible for Moses to enter the Holy Land. Moses, whose persona is a personification of the highest possible soul/​consciousness state, the Yĕḥîdāh—​and of the related altered state of consciousness—​already “resides” in that “land,” at least since the “burning bush” encounter with YHWH. The Sôd-​related storyworld that is being uncovered in this study takes priority for the Pentateuchal authors and would collapse if its own figurative dimensions and framework were violated. 52 This statement has likewise tended to frustrate commentators, especially rabbinical ones, who saw Esau as evil incarnate (see, e.g., the Talmud’s Bava Batra 16b). Although the following description by Michael Sinding pertains to a very different text and context, that of Kafka’s K, it seems nonetheless relevant here: “A dual self accuses itself, conscious of and torn between roles on both sides” (Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 514). God is reflected in Esau’s face because it reminds Jacob of the distance that now separates him from ordinary human beings. 53 Harold Bloom, in a rare but serious misjudgment, links “primal scenes” with imagination and fantasy: “Since the Primal Scenes are fantasy traumas, they testify to the power of imagination over fact, and indeed give an astonishing preference to imagination over observation. … Yet the imagination, as Freud may not have cared to understand, has no referential aspect.” Bloom, Map of Misreading, 48. Yet imagination in such cases is what exegetical interpreters resort to when they endeavor to explain a textual depiction of such scenes yet lack a grasp of that which lies behind the true Primal Scenes. Certainly in the case of the Pentateuchal

260  The Urtext primal Scene of Instruction in the Garden of Eden, its experiential reality and a subsequent attempt to represent the latter via a rhetorical-​textual construction have, on the contrary, a definite referential object, as this study is at pains to demonstrate. Tomoko Masuzawa, in addition, points out that: everything, to the extent that it comes into the view of psychoanalysis, is already constituted, already derived; it has already taken place somewhere, and, as a rule, it has taken place somewhere other than where it comes to appear; and it behooves psychoanalysis to discern, though perhaps never to re-​present, this “elsewhere.” The question of origin in Freud has to do above all with the process of derivation rather than with some primary state before derivation. The origin is literally a “primal fissure” (Ursprung), not a primary (primär) state. Hence the contrast between Jung’s outlook on religion and Freud’s probe into its origin shows up in the constitutional difference between their objects of attention: on the one hand, universal archetypes and the mythic structure of the unconscious, and on the other, traces (Spuren) of what once took place. One calls for the contemplative gaze, the other, for reading. (Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime, 11–​12)

54 55

56

57

It is precisely the “reading” of traces left deliberately or implanted within the Pentateuchal text that I am endeavoring to undertake in this study. Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” 74–​78. I am employing the transliteration scheme used in biblical studies (which is different from the more common pronunciation-​based transcribing practice common in the Kabbalah literature). Writing on the subject of Prudentius’s Psychomachia (meaning “the contest of the soul” and dated to ca. 400 C E ), Sinding notes that “the soul is conventionally feminine, so its aspects are personified as women.” Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 508. Allegorical personifications of the soul’s aspects, such as Faith, Pride, Humility, Hope, and so on are represented as human females. The difference in the pointedly older Genesis text is that, in accordance with the perspective being developed here, it is not the different aspects of the soul that are personified in the Pentateuchal text as women but rather different soul levels (see the next note for the representation of the second-​highest soul level as a masculine child, Benjamin). From the standpoint of today’s consciousness studies, these soul levels are different and ever more dramatic alterations of consciousness. R. E. Friedman notes in his running Pentateuchal commentary that the sons of Jacob are called for the first time “sons of Israel” only when they arrive in Egypt (Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, 139n42:5). He also notes that “the nation is called ‘children of Israel’ 350 times in the Torah but never called ‘children of Jacob’ ” (140). Friedman does not tell us the reason for this, but its significance is obvious if one bears in mind the esoteric meaning of Egypt. Sons of Israel, children of Israel, can only be so called if they relate to the world as seen in the light of superior consciousness. Egypt would be seen as the symbol of the restricted consciousness, while the Promised Land would be its very opposite, and so on. Otherwise, they would be like “regular folks” everywhere, namely, they would just be sons of Jacob. Recall that Israel signifies the initiate, the adept, one who has searched and has found, a servant and priest of the Most High. The distinction of course is felt quite keenly in today’s Israel, where the people are undoubtedly

The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel  261 children of Jacob but typically fall well short of being children of Israel, certainly individually. An Israeli is not automatically a son of Israel, the Initiate of YHWH. For that to occur, he or she would have to conquer his or her own personal Promised Holy Land and live there. 58 I am engaging here, as elsewhere, those medieval Kabbalistic terms that can be seen as helpful articulations of the Pentateuchal notions and/​ or noetic narratives. This must not be seen as equating the ancient and medieval systems; the terms are helpful in the same way as the modern literary or philosophical terms engaged in this study. In the medieval Kabbalah, five souls or soul levels are conceptualized: nepeš (or the “default” soul of a human being represented in Genesis by Esau and his locally derived wives), rûaḥ, nĕšāmāh, ḥayāh, and yĕḥîdāh. See, e.g., Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, 236; and Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 89–​90. While the attainment of rûaḥ and nĕšāmāh is allegorized in Genesis as Jacob’s marrying Leah and then Rachel, the attainment of the ḥayāh soul level is represented by the birth of Benjamin, or “son of the right [hand],” the only son of Jacob to be born in the Holy Land. His mother, Rachel, alias nĕšāmāh, dies during the labor: unlike rûaḥ and nĕšāmāh, which are the two soul levels that can coexist, the ḥayāh soul level is so dramatically different from the three preceding soul levels in its associated epistemic-​cognitive framework that—​intimates the Sôd narrative—​the nĕšāmāh level must “die” to make room for the far more advanced altered state of consciousness that actually enables access to YHWH. With regard to the final, or fifth soul level, the yĕḥîdāh, the Pentateuchal text shows that only Moses possesses it (and perhaps also Jacob), since it is he who leads everyone else to the Holy Promised Land—​the latter itself representing the ḥayāh soul level, the ostensible initiatory aim of the emerging esoteric system of the Sôd narrative. We could go so far as to suppose that Moses himself symbolizes the yĕḥîdāh soul level in the Pentateuch, perhaps even being a personification of it. 59 I have personally experienced this phenomenon, which underscores the indispensability of firsthand experiences for grasping discussions on mystical phenomena and esoteric subjects (compare Shanon, “Hallucinations,” 6ff). Other systems are likely to differ in their respective methods and results, including the accompanying “sights and sounds,” and in many cases very significantly so. One dramatic, and contrasting, example is given by Benny Shanon of the Hebrew University, who has written extensively on his personal experiences with a traditional native South American hallucinogenic liquid, ayahuasca, which causes altered states of consciousness (see esp. Shanon, “Ayahuasca Visualizations”). He writes of the substance’s effect on him on one occasion: I saw an enchanted city, all constructed of gold and precious stones. It was of indescribable beauty. The scene that I was seeing appeared to be in front of my eyes and, at the same time, separated from me—​just as a scene in the theatre would be. Every now and then I would turn my head aside and away from the scene of the vision. Returning my gaze, I would come back to the same visionary scene I had inspected before this turn. Shanon, “Hallucinations,” 8 (emphasis added) This description, by depicting a radically different phenomenon from the one that Genesis describes via the “ringstraked, speckled, and spotted” flocks of Jacob, helps one see the difference: Jacob’s experience is not of a hallucinatory nature (as

262  The Urtext is the experience Shanon describes), in that no “false judgment on the part of the cognitive agent” (5) is involved: the spots and streaks do not create any new, and illusory, visual content (such as the “enchanted city”). Furthermore, no theatrical-​ like scene apart from the experiencer’s immediate reality is involved either. Moses’s burning-​bush episode seems to be of the same kind as Jacob’s spotted and streaked visual phenomena, since it is indicated that “the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed” (Exod. 3:2 KJV); Moses, too, is thus at a stage of initiation similar to Jacob’s—​it is at such time that one has, for the first time, a direct encounter with Israel’s God.

Part Four

The Code-​text

10 Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable Complex Tropological Entextualization Strategies for the Pentateuchal Numinous

Chapters 7 through 9 have systematically ascertained the triple set of meanings of the esoteric, second-​channel narrative communication transmitted within the pages of the Pentateuch. This message communicated across almost three millennia was designated in the present book as the Sôd; the threefold set of its meanings is summarized in Table 9.1. The first set of meanings of the Sôd—​ investigated in Chapter 7—​pertains to its noetic signifier: the de dicto, or the “as written” passages and designations actually appearing in the Pentateuchal text itself. The second set, sketched out in Chapter 8, entailed a discursive exploration of the noetic signifier’s data, aiming to arrive at the noematic signified of the Sôd. Finally, in Chapter 9, it was at last possible to chart and reverse-​engineer the third set of the Sôd’s meanings, its all-​important hyletic referent: that is, the precious details meant to be preserved for posterity by way of an audacious literary-​religious communicative transmission through time and space, an esoteric broadcast in search of qualified and competent recipients. We are now in possession of the information communicated by the Pentateuchal authors, information that is almost certainly addressed to intended mystical adherents of the Hebraic initiatory tradition, the latter to be sourced from the pool of the Kohanim, the hereditary priestly caste. This tradition possessed a highly sophisticated initiatory program designed to enable psycho-​spiritual, mystical, consciousness-​transformative access to YHWH, the God of Israel, by way of significant alterations of the initiates’ consciousness, to be accomplished via decidedly idiosyncratic and specific goals and means developed within the tradition. The hyletic-​deferential set of meanings establishes that the Torah, or the Teaching, intends to convey to a would-​be Hebraic “spiritual warrior” the outlines of the path that leads to a mind-​bending, consciousness-​altering and consciousness-​expanding mental-​spiritual state—​a state that enables a relationship with the highest-​scalar divine agent that is conceivable by the human mind (as per the terms of Israelite discourse). That much, no less, has been determined so far, with the specific research questions that were formulated at

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-15

266  The Code-​text the start of Chapter 7 having been addressed. Has this book’s task, then, been accomplished and could we now simply head to the summary and conclusions section of the book? Indeed, one could do that. And yet, if the reader now has a sense that, paraphrasing Derrida, he or she just had “the secret” disclosed to them but that the secret per se has nonetheless not been revealed, there are in fact substantive reasons for just such an unease. For one thing, to experience a measure of the mysterium tremendum’s powers—​and thereby to understand things otherwise inaccessible to “regular” folks—​requires just that: experiencing it. Otherwise, a reader merely reading about things mystical is necessarily bound to be in the dark about that, which in the philosophy of mind is termed qualia, or that unspecified, indeterminate sense of experiencing being something. Second, the extraordinarily masterly literary skills with which the Pentateuchal authors did articulate a certain measure of this otherwise unmeasurable, inexpressible qualia of alteration of consciousness involved in their distinctive initiatory praxis—​along with supplying, in the text, some decipherable-​only-​by-​initiates details of the specific induction procedures and the milestones of the journey of transformation—​are normally unappreciated by both lay and academic readers alike. The present chapter endeavors to address two associated issues that are especially relevant for the research presented thus far in the book. One of the issues concerns the question of ineffability, a standard notion habitually invoked apropos of religious experiences and associated texts. The other, and related, concern requires taking a close look at the highly idiosyncratic literary armature of the Pentateuchal text and the fascinating, indispensable literary strategies the Pentateuchal text exhibits—​a discussion that will go further than the exploration of the Sôd’s literary poiesis undertaken in Chapter 5. In the latter, the analysis has focused on such literary devices as those linked to semiotic modalities, namely, the allegorical (the poiesis of multiscalar allegorical-​ parabolic projection); the indexical (the poiesis of indirect indexicality); the symbolic (the poiesis of advanced literary-​semiotic means such as markedness and asymmetric noetic parallelism); and the iconic (reserved for the mimesis of the “surface” narratives of the Pentateuch). What has not been addressed so far, at least not directly, is the overall question of the crucial role of the literary worlds and their ability to portray the very ineffability of things mystical, including “God.” Almost without parallels, the Pentateuch demonstrates a remarkable ability to “code” ineffability—​that is, express that which by definition cannot be expressed, most notably by way of language. As I will argue, this feat has been realized in the Pentateuchal text by the use of figuration and figurative means: both locally—​as part of the coloring and spicing of the intricacies and particulars of the narratives—​as well as globally, affecting the very construction and structure of the textual narration itself.

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   267

The Code-​Text: Figuration Set Free and Reassembled as Tropological Paradise I will begin with the following question, given the above assertion of the omnipresence of figuration in the Pentateuch: Why is figuration practically invisible in the Pentateuchal text? One answer is that it is one thing for an obvious case of figuration to be obscure or indeterminate as regards its meaning and import; it is quite another to appear altogether absent to the naked, or even to a fortified eye of the reader—​all the while being there nevertheless, in the text, carrying, moreover, the crucial, precious, and surely intended meaning. That’s the claim that the present book stakes apropos of the Pentateuchal Torah, and it is the selfsame claim that the Zohar makes, albeit couched in very different terms. What is the case here is that the totality—​the entirety—​of the Pentateuchal text is laced through and through with structural as well as veneering figurative devices and ploys. But because of the effectual effort by its authors to utilize techniques such as, among others, personification allegories and hypostatization, most readers tend to view the resultant figures as literal or even historical chronicles even though they are communicated as mythological yarns. As this book is at pains to show, these outward legends and fairy tales carry complex figurative esoteric meanings. Difficult, exceedingly ineffable, yet concise and significant informational and instructional messages are camouflaged as fanciful, powerfully captivating plots and highly evocative and engaging intrigues, schemes, and actions. Framing them as mythological is an error as momentous as viewing philosophy as myth. “Abstract notions,” states Derrida, “always hide a sensory figure.”1 Yes, certainly, but why only abstract notions? Ineffable notions and experiences, as well as thought that is hyperabstract—​thought that is beyond the powers of abstraction—​are likewise secreting figures (as we shall see). The complex tropological entextualization strategies of the Pentateuchal numinous, when foregrounded and made apparent, if not completely transparent, will show a determined and highly skillful stratagem that has a persistent goal of narrating the story of initiation—​a transition into mind-​states that entail access to the God of Israel. We will closely track such systematic Pentateuchal tactics as the following: (1) narratives (plots) as a series of states of consciousness in conflict; (2) characters and locations as series of asymmetric noetic parallelisms; (3) space (places) as settings for a series of scenes of numinous experiences; (4) time (crucial events marking milestones reached on the journey of initiation) as backdrop for a series of expansions of the initiate’s self-​consciousness;

268  The Code-​text (5) oscillating metalepses of colliding two-​channel narratives—​one, the visible “surface” one, and the other, a second-​channel, embedded noetic one. Seeing these narratives as, say, morality tales involving curious and at times outlandish but otherwise perfectly natural if also archaic extended families and patriarchal clans is equivalent to being excluded from the circle of the recipients for whom the underlying esoteric information is intended. Instead, the attentive reader who has resolved to experience the full import of our focus text will realize that in this case, in the words of Arthur Melzer, the “normal ‘literal’ reading is not only a constructive process, but also … a suppressive one, shutting our eyes to things that do not seem to fit.”2 Furthermore: this filtering process is a large part of what makes esoteric writing possible. It turns out that you can plant all kinds of “pointers”—​problems and contradictions—​right there on the surface of the text and they won’t be noticed. You can hide things in plain sight. Either the reader, busy constructing the meaning for himself, eager to make sense of it all, will not notice them at all, or if he does, he will just dismiss them as part of the standard level of meaningless noise to be encountered in every text.3 Melzer then explains: one has to stop one’s mind from grabbing a few words and running off to construct meaning. One has to stay glued to the text, slowly reading every word, but above all one has to stop filtering out the things that don’t fit. One has to see the text in its messiness. It is only through a literal reading in this precise sense that one can encounter the textual problems that legitimate and guide an esoteric interpretation.4 In other words, instead of a reader “grabbing a few words and running off to construct meaning,” a very different significance will emerge—​aligned with the authorial intentions, as this book argues—​if the reader were to stop in his or her tracks, and do so continually. Such a reader will realize that almost everything in the Pentateuchal text—​including the names of locations and of characters, as well as the narratives, with their plots and events—​is figural, tropological, pregnant with esoteric meaning, often on several planes.5 It is only then that one has a chance to go to the next step of inquiring as to the intended meaning of those figures, some being superimposed on other figures. Unlike literal meaning where “linguistic forms … resemble their meanings, either in the Saussurean symbolic sense or interpreted as their representations,” the “nonliteral, figurative language … requires domain mapping.”6 It is precisely the latter that this chapter endeavors to accomplish. But why figuration? Apart from the already stated requirement that the Pentateuchal authors had to both conceal and reveal—​but reveal only to

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   269 the “deserving” and intended audience—​and for which task figuration is ideally suited, figuration is indispensable in actually making thought, especially abstract thought, possible in the first place (as noted in the Derrida quote above). Jeffery Donaldson, speaking mostly of metaphor (but we might justifiably extend his comments to figuration in general), bluntly states, “Metaphor says: ‘You say I can’t think the impossible? There, I just did it.”7 He suggests, in particular, that figuration is essential for that which we designate as “spirit”: “Metaphor is intrinsic in the properties and experiences that we associate with spirit, spiritual thinking, and spiritual reality. Metaphor is spirit’s missing link, the link whose absence is the very meaning of spirit.”8 Even more motivating , as couched by Paul Ricoeur, is the view that “the metaphor is not the enigma but the solution of the enigma.”9 Perhaps so. Paul de Man, describing Condillac’s eighteenth-​century insights, conveys a transition from seeing “concepts as tropes and tropes as concepts,” as well as the “recognition of language as trope,” to the question of narrative: From the recognition of language as trope, one is led to the telling of a tale, to the narrative sequence. … The temporal deployment of an initial complication, of a structural knot, indicates the close, though not necessarily complementary, relationship between trope and narrative, between knot and plot. If the referent of a narrative is indeed the tropological structure of its discourse, then the narrative will be the attempt to account for this fact.10 It is precisely such an attempt by the authors of the Pentateuchal narratives to account for their overwhelmingly tropological structures that is the focus of the present chapter.

The Question of Israel’s Ineffable If anyone were to try to describe an encounter with the mysterium tremendum—​ as stunningly as in Isaiah 6:1−7—​a frustrating and deeply disconcerting question of ineffability inevitably arises. A person who had such an encounter might have to wrestle with unsettling doubts. “Can you imagine what it would be like to be spoken to by God?” asks Ted Cohen. “Can you imagine believing God is speaking to you?”11 The question of self-​doubt, as well as the highly perturbing apprehension regarding certainty versus doubt, which is one of the key concerns of the Pentateuchal authors, is discussed in some detail in Chapter 11. Here, our main focus is on ineffability and the imperative to endeavor surmounting it by means of figuration, as this is one of the key tasks that the Pentateuchal authors set before themselves so that the story of initiation into the mysteries of the God of Israel could be told. How exactly did they manage to solve the problem of ineffability, which by definition is well-​nigh unsolvable?

270  The Code-​text The term “ineffability” itself is an ambiguous umbrella designation. Investigating it leads one to the limits of what the Greek philosophers called logos, that is, the limits of rationality and reason, though not of discourse tout court.12 The ineffable, whether in reference to an indescribable experience, thought, or feeling is, in principle, analogous to the so-​called qualia of current philosophy of mind: both are impossible to express.13 And yet there is a difference between them. Qualia pertains to much if not all of our “normal” experience of living in the world; it is that indescribable, indefinable quality that characterizes the inexpressible “feel” of even the most average sensory interactions and sensations of the human agent. In contrast, the ineffability considered in this chapter is not limited to the senses; a thought, for example, could be seen as ineffable, and obviously “God” must be seen as ineffability personified. André Kukla notes the following parallel: The idea that there is an ineffable being, or truth, or experience, and that this ineffability profoundly matters to our assessment of the human condition, is one of the meanings (the non-​pejorative one) of the much-​ abused term “mysticism.” … In contrast, mathematical ineffabilism is a distinctly heterodox point of view concerning some relatively arcane foundational issues in set theory and metamathematics. … Despite their very different social situations, there are substantive similarities between religious and mathematical ineffabilisms. Both of them involve the claim that we are able to understand or come to know certain truths which it is beyond the power of language to express.14 Mystical ineffabilism is pithily articulated in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”15 What exactly is this inexpressible mystical that “shows itself ”? It may be inexpressible, as such, yet Wittgenstein is able to clarify what he has in mind: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is. The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling.”16 However, Kukla remarks on a differing “line of thinking in contemporary cognitive science”: Fodor, Chomsky, and McGinn have argued, each in his own way, that there are bound to be some hypotheses that the human mind is incapable of entertaining. … The point of departure is the familiar cognitive-​ scientific thesis of “epistemic boundedness” (Fodor) or “cognitive closure” (McGinn). The destination, after a not very arduous journey, is the thesis of ineffability. Very roughly, the idea of this argument from epistemic boundedness is that human minds have limitations on what they can think; and what we can’t think, we can’t say.17

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   271 These two contentions regarding ineffability “run in opposite directions”: The mystical argument supports the ineffability thesis on the basis of certain extraordinary capacities of the human mind: the reason we’re supposed to believe in the ineffable is that we (or some of us) are capable of grasping truths that defy formulation. In contrast, the argument from epistemic boundedness supports the ineffability thesis on the basis of certain of the mind’s incapacities: it’s because there are purported to be facts that the mind can’t grasp that we should believe in the existence of an ineffable realm.18 Two points can thus be noted apropos of the ancient Israelite ineffability. First, we can posit that Kukla’s first argument for ineffability—​the mystical circumstance proper, according to which there are experiences that human languages are simply unable to express—​is quite likely to apply to the experiences of ancient Israelite priests involving direct human-​ Divine interactions. The closest to any coherent description—​but not the expression—​ of such encounters would have to be Isaiah’s (and Rudolf Otto’s) relevant passages, cited in Chapter 3. Here we may well suppose that these experiences, given that we are talking about human beings interacting with the highest-​scalar agent imaginable or possible (by definition), lead the human agent to some extraordinary states of mind—​along with, likely again, remarkable and unusual new capabilities and associated insights and understandings, whether cognitive, epistemic, or (why not?) broadly philosophical. Such discernments, if genuinely advanced, may well be beyond any language’s ability to articulate them; after all, languages have developed as a means of communication among the majority of human beings, and the majority’s relevant needs usually entail the lowest common denominator in cognition and conceptualizations alike. But, second, must we not also consider the possibility, formulated above, as the argument for ineffability from epistemic boundedness? It would seem that those with whom the priests might theoretically wish to share the point of their experiences—​the people of Israel, the plain folks—​would simply be unable to “receive” any such information, being indeed “epistemically bounded.” In just such a sense, the Hebrew word kabbalah stands for “receiving”; not everyone will be capable of “receiving” the ineffable message that is narrowly reliant on the proper experiential, mystical-​initiatory expansion of one’s consciousness. We have succeeded here in separating that which is often conflated, namely, the ineffability experienced by those who experience mystical realms, as well as the ineffability necessarily experienced by those who have not experienced any such alterations of consciousness.19 Such potential recipients of the mystic’s claims would be significantly circumscribed in their epistemic-​cognitive capabilities due to their built-​in “epistemic boundedness” or “cognitive closure.”

272  The Code-​text Only a reader who is not epistemically bounded and—​a further constraint—​ not bounded, in any given case, in just the required epistemic receptivity sense for this specific instance of mysterium tremendum, would be in a position of being able to relate to the latter. However, there will remain—​ in all cases—​ the mystical ineffability, pertaining to the actual experiences of the mystic. These experiences can perhaps be “shown” to outsiders (in the Wittgensteinian sense, that is, perhaps via poetic or artistic works) but not expressed or represented in any substantive or precise way, such as via propositional language. What can be expressed explicitly and clearly, however, are the details of the so-​called induction procedures, or the concrete, highly particularized methods of a particular initiatory tradition. These can be disclosed in a manual, for example; however, this is rarely being done. The induction methods—​leading as they do to altered states of consciousness and thus being potentially dangerous if carried out without the supervision of initiated teachers—​are more typically taught “from mouth to ears,” that is, from masters to disciples. Concerning ancient Israelite ineffability specifically, since no outsider to the hereditary priestly caste could ever have been considered a candidate for initiation, written manuals were wholly out of the question. But even the very notion of initiation itself was concealed from the broader Israelite populace, to say nothing of foreigners; this was the priests’ privileged patrimony, their lifelong birthright training involving exceedingly esoteric matters that would have confused outsiders. It is with this context in mind, and due to seeing indications of a “second channel” as a deliberate authorial communication in the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, that the present author went on to postulate and to develop the Sôd Hypothesis. The priestly authors of the Pentateuch chose to present their awesome experiential ineffable not as a main or primary narrative channel but rather as a concealed second channel, concealed in a manner not unlike the well-​known duck-​rabbit—​or old hag/​young beauty—​figures: one cannot simultaneously see both figures. The second channel requires considered foregrounding, a deliberate mental exercise based mainly on the so-​called markedness, which would be special features in the ostensive narrative that “mark” the presence of the concealed narrative.20 The bulk of the present chapter highlights the systematic and highly efficacious efforts by the authors of the Pentateuch to construct a second narrative channel that is inconspicuous and invisible to the uninitiated. Their efforts entailed a massive, comprehensive “coding” of this second channel contained by the first one, which is the conspicuous, highly visible literal narrative. If we invoke the language of cognitive linguistics, the first channel is the target domain, that is, the ostensive literal historical-​literary-​cultic narrative placed straightforwardly before the reader. It is erected with the controlling support of their “source domain,” namely, the story of initiation into the mysteries of the God of Israel. It is one of the theses of this book that it is through such an elaborate, systematic, and systemic cross-​domain mapping that the

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   273 conjectured aim of the authors of the Pentateuch was achieved: namely, to show (but not represent, as that is impossible) the following: (1) the ineffable, unspeakable in its majesty and fearsome, awe-​ inspiring, encounters with YHWH, the God of Israel; (2) the stages through which the would-​be initiate must pass, in his epistemic, cognitive, and, concurrently, even biological or psychosomatic transformations, including dangerous, difficult psychological periods of the (likewise) ineffable inner struggles and strivings, marked by certain signs and symbols of a transforming, ever-​larger conscious awareness; and finally, (3) some of the key induction procedures used in this Hebraic system of priestly initiation, which, though not ineffable, the authors elected to “show,” too, rather than just describe and list. Keeping in mind the staggering dangers involved for those improperly prepared, the priests’ decision to issue their cautious communication essentially only to those in a position to “receive” it is fully understandable.

Why Is Figuration Invisible in the Pentateuchal Text? This chapter’s focus is related to a renewed appreciation of the Pentateuchal authors’ astonishingly advanced literary skills, which it endeavors to foreground. Readers, however, remain oblivious to the presence of figuration in a scripture, where it is far from obvious and where it has been deliberately obscured because the authors intended it only for initiates or would-​ be initiates. As Michael Silverstein contends, one can “choose the language in which we speak so as to preclude comprehension on the part of some individuals”: It is frequently through speech that we set social boundaries on an interaction, rather than through the physical separation of participants. To characterize such behavior abstractly, we note that we can choose the language in which we speak so as to preclude comprehension on the part of some individuals present; we can use a language all understand, but with pronominal markers that make the intended boundaries of participation clear; we can use phraseology only some can understand; we can spell out the written representations of words in the presence of those illiterate in some written language; and so forth. This purposive privacy function of the speech behavior is simultaneous with, but analytically distinct from, whatever referential function there is in the event for speaker and intended hearer(s), for only they participate in those roles in the referential communication.21 There are two primary assumptions made in this chapter. First, the figuration at work in the Pentateuchal text is deliberately obscured due to the authors’ “double-​channel” presentation, which seeks to simultaneously conceal and reveal. The specific assumption here is that the priests of the First Temple in Jerusalem wished to craft a “disaster-​proof ” transmission of their

274  The Code-​text initiatory lore to future generations making their secret tradition public—​ yet do so without revealing it to the uninformed: the esoteric information was to be placed squarely before the readers’ eyes, but it had to be “visible” only to those who would be competent enough to “receive” material of this nature. Second, I am presuming that it is wholly wrong and counterproductive to approach an ancient text such as the Pentateuch with a scarcely defensible bias against key literary devices and strategies that may well have been engaged in the work in question. The notion of literary figuration does have a checkered, at times even disreputable history in philosophy and linguistics, a reputation that in some respects endures to this day. This remarkable intellectual device and tactic—​figuration—​was particularly disdained, until recently, by philosophers, for example Hobbes, Locke, Ayer, and Carnap.22 As James Paxson points out, moreover, using the example of personification, figuration “can work less to clarify meaning and reduce uncertainty than to complicate meaning and raise uncertainty.”23 Thus, it is—​counterintuitively—​precisely this feature of figuration that signals a certain equivocality of meaning that the authors of the Pentateuch needed if they wished to create a disaster-​proof actual transmission yet did not wish to reveal their precious esoteric lore to the uninitiated or otherwise inappropriate recipients. My goal here is to find answers to the following two questions: (1) Why is the profuse figuration lattice undergirding the Pentateuchal text invisible to such an extent? (2) What are the specific figurative-​communicative devices utilized by this text on an all-​encompassing scale? As we shall see, these fundamental aspects of the Pentateuchal storyworld are impossible to grasp—​ in their authorially intended import—​ without the necessary acceptance of the second-​channel hypothesis. Understood historically or literally, the Pentateuchal picture is but a compendium of charming archaic yarns replete with bizarre acts and miraculous legends. As Michael Sinding notes, “figures … have variants, and allegory ranges from the explicit extended metaphor to the riddle or enigma.”24 We see at once that the answer to our question regarding the invisibility of figuration at work in the Pentateuch must be tied to its gravitating toward the enigmatic. Sinding recounts J. Hillis Miller’s argument that “the word and the concept of allegory in English is part of a chain of related terms and concepts, including parable, symbol, image, sign, emblem, figure, aphorism, metaphor, and translation.”25 Further, “others link it to ambiguity, allusion, aenigma, and irony. … Frye also speaks of a ‘sliding scale’ of works, ‘ranging from the most explicitly allegorical, consistent with being literature at all, at one extreme, to the most elusive, anti-​explicit and anti-​allegorical at the other.’ ”26 Our task will thus demand unraveling a lengthy and complex puzzle—​one whose creation has involved embedding strategies that are essentially and primarily figurative in nature. I will proceed by endeavoring to assess the extent to which the Pentateuchal text reflects its authors’ mastery of literary technê, or craft, as well as an

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   275 exquisite poetic sensibility (poiesis).27 Technê and poiesis enabled these authors to express the sublimity of experiencing the divine while simultaneously embedding the inner-​ core mystical initiation tradition of ancient Israelite cultic religion via an audacious literary modus operandi. As we shall see, there is hardly a single “load-​bearing” element in the literary armature of the Pentateuchal text’s mimetic sections that does not originate via a stunning tropological scheme. The remarkable point to be kept in mind is that this construction is accomplished in a highly idiosyncratic, unprecedented way intended to minimize if not altogether circumvent the typical reader’s chances of recognizing the figurative frame fortifying this text and, through it, the projected esoteric signification. It would be important here to sharply distinguish the Pentateuchal tropological constructions—​with their single-​focused aim of communicating information about specific mystical induction procedures and experiential states of consciousness—​from a notion of mysticism allegedly arising from figuration.28 The present book’s contrary understanding of mysticism, particularly in the case of mysticism arising from the Pentateuchal text, is one that is especially unlike “tropological mysticism.” The former presupposes, first, intense hyletic, that is, experiential mystical practices among the core group of initiate-​priests whose intention, second, using these experiences as their initiatory lore that simultaneously needs to be saved for posterity is then, third, transposed into an intensional text containing the de re noematic content and, as textual presentation, the de dicto noesis. We will look, first of all, at the nature of the Pentateuchal text’s narrative design strategies. Next, we will scrutinize the text’s notions of a character, or “hero,” formation, and, finally, its spatial and time-​related aspects. As we shall see, no customary literary facet or characteristic has been allowed by the Pentateuchal compilers to remain passively idle; all were recruited for the specific goal of carrying the esoteric communication forward and entrusted to play some vital role in that all-​encompassing effort.

Narratives (Plots) as Series of States of Consciousness in Conflict: Source Domain of Key Pentateuchal Narratives Donald Polkinghorne points out that “narrative meaning is created by noting that something is a part of some whole and that something is the cause of something else.”29 In a narrative, imagination is involved, but it differs greatly from imagistic fantasy: “We … use the narrative scheme to inform our decisions by constructing imaginative ‘what if’ scenarios” to explore, as one does, for example, in a game of chess, the potential sequence of events and their outcomes.30 As Kai Mikkonen argues in the reverse case—​that is, involving events that have already occurred—​“the notion of travel is prone to give identity and narrativity to a series of events since it ‘humanizes’ the experience of time and space.”31 Mikkonen highlights the dynamics between

276  The Code-​text “consecutiveness and consequence” in a narrative—​a feature that, as we shall see, is one of the main indications of the innate figurativeness of Pentateuchal narrativity: The travel story … foregrounds tension between consecutiveness and consequence. … The cultivated tension or “confusion” between sequence and consequence, further, is an indication of narrativity. Roland Barthes observed … that “Everything suggests, indeed, that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by; in which case narrative would be a systematic application of the logical fallacy denounced by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoc [after this, therefore because of it]—​a good motto for Destiny.”32 Further, “most classical, episodic travel stories, from Homer to Joyce, capitalize on detouring, deterritorialization and open time. They occlude causal relations, present examples of the discontinuous, the amorphous, and the surprising.”33 I shall return presently to the issue of “consecutiveness and consequence” as it plays out in the Pentateuchal text. Key Pentateuchal narratives—​whether involving the three patriarchs in Genesis, the Exodus from Egypt, or the so-​called Conquest in the Book of Joshua—​systematically map onto an esoteric narrative, a narrative pertaining to a set of specified “meditative” and other inductive activities intended to introduce a would-​be initiate into a mystical state that this particular system allegorizes as the Promised, or Holy, Land. The so-​called source domain—​“the conceptual domain that we try to understand”—​is the realm of consciousness and its mystical-​initiatory transformation, along with key initiatory information related either to inductive procedures and conditions or to the depiction of unfolding perceptual and epistemic changes at various stages of the initiate’s “journey” of transformation.34 Practically all main Pentateuchal narratives can be understood as the target domain—​that is, “the conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions.”35 It is often the interplay between consecutiveness and consequence in these narrative “journeys” that reveals, upon appropriate scrutiny, the disguised figurative and messaging nature of Pentateuchal causal relations between characters, locations, and destinations reached or used as dwelling places. The distinct markedness of names, actions, and/​or practically any narrative detail carries communicative import. We can chart some of the transformative stages of the initiate’s figurative journey in the Pentateuchal text. However, unlike Mikkonen’s aforementioned “cultivated tension or ‘confusion’ between sequence and consequence” in a story, the Pentateuchal Sôd narrative, which consistently requires straightforward logic for its decoding, actually uses sequence as a primary indication of esoteric consequence:

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   277 (1) Abraham begins his journey to the Promised Land (start of initiatory journey). (2) Isaac is ready to be sacrificed and Abraham ready to carry out the sacrifice, if that is God’s will (some crucial initiation test of one’s determination—​not to be understood literally—​a key condition for “I-​ Thou” relationship with, and access to, YHWH). (3) Abraham and, separately, Isaac dig wells in Gerar, for extended periods (seeking spiritual “water,” by “cleansing” the chakras). (4) Jacob secures “the Blessing” (deciding to start the journey of initiation). (5) Jacob “works” for seven years for Leah, then another seven years for Rachel (achieving successive altered states of consciousness, first the soul level “rûaḥ,” then the “nĕšāmāh”). (6) Using what seems to be magic, Jacob cheats his father-​in-​law, Laban, out of his flocks when the latter become “ringstraked, speckled, and spotted” (Jacob reaches an advanced stage of transformation of consciousness when the initiate literally sees a transparent, pastel-​like veil with spots and streaks all across his visual field; it is a prerequisite to reaching the next soul-​level, the ḥayāh). (7) Jacob becomes “Israel” at Peniel (final transformation of Jacob’s consciousness, reaching the second-​highest possible soul level, the ḥayāh). (8) The only sons of Rachel (who represents the nĕšāmāh soul level), Joseph and Benjamin, seem to be very different, yet they share common elements. One is the multicolored “coat” of Joseph.36 There is also the tribal flag of Benjamin, which contained “the colors of all other tribes” (a very advanced stage of initiation is indicated—​that is, the ḥayāh—​when “all colors appear at once.”37 (9) Benjamin is the only son of Jacob who is born in the Promised Land (the “son of the right [hand]” brings/​is the exalted state of consciousness, namely, the ḥayāh soul level). (10) Joseph, on the other hand, becomes the viceroy of Egypt’s pharaoh, practically ruling the world’s most advanced country of that time (the expanded consciousness rules the “small” self of the restricted consciousness). Some of the source domain’s inputs here—​in other words, allusions pertaining to the esoteric realm but presented in figurative narratives—​seem to repeat or overlap, while their mimetic translations in the target domain remain distinct, for example (1) and (4) in the above list, or the selfsame actions by Abraham and Isaac a generation apart, in (3). Such an overdetermination of emphasis signals critical importance of the information imparted. Sinding stipulates the nature of allegorical metamorphosis involved when composing a figurative, or fictional, narrative, as follows: To turn a sentence into an allegory, we must imagine entailments as participants in a rich scene, with a fictional existence. To do this, we

278  The Code-​text must blend mapping elements and structure with the generic structure of a coherent scene, which we abstract from the space of everyday experience. This must include at least a three-​dimensional setting with objects, agents, relations, events and actions. This makes any allegory a blend, because in addition to the metaphorical mapping, the allegory integrates this generic space of folk physics.38 There can hardly be richer, in Sinding’s sense, fictional scenes than those involving the otherwise baffling “wells” of Genesis 21 and 26; or the curious, mystifying procedure in Genesis 30:37−39 employed by Jacob to turn most of the flock of normal sheep under his care into a flock of “streaked, speckled, and spotted” sheep; or the mystery pertaining to the walls of Jericho, in Chapter 6 of the Book of Joshua. In such cases the authors of the Hexateuch (Pentateuch plus the Book of Joshua) needed to imagine, in Sinding’s words, the “entailments as participants in a rich scene, with a fictional existence”; what needed translation from the source domain to the target domain was specific experiential-​visual information. The latter, in such cases, is sometimes transposed iconically, that is, literally, and the narrative as a result tends to assume the intentionally miraculous—​that is, implausible—​form alerting the reader to the importance of the imparted information. In the above examples, the miraculous procedures of Jacob concerning his sheep or the Israelites at the walls of Jericho convey some specific aspect of the induction methods used to achieve the desired mystical altered state of consciousness, such as the “great shout” portrayed in the case of Jericho’s conquest, or the resultant effects on the would-​be initiate’s field of vision shown in the case of Jacob’s puzzling “ringstraked, speckled, and spotted” sheep. Likewise with the ubiquitous wells: similar to the two other examples given, the intended reader could be relied on to discern that the “wells” are in reality his bodily chakras. All other readers are expected to be carried speedily along by the massive, mesmerizing narrative tidal waves of the target domain’s remarkable mimetic scenes, for which the Pentateuch is legendary. In addition to those named in the above list, many other instances and indications of the initiatory progress and accompanying expansion of (self-​) consciousness can be cited from the Pentateuchal text, but the point has been made with sufficient emphasis.

Characters and Locations as Series of Asymmetric Noetic Parallelisms I turn now to the concept of “asymmetric noetic parallelism,” first introduced and discussed extensively in Chapter 5. Here the concept applies primarily to the narrative saga of the Jacob-​Esau twins, but with an awareness that this literary device represents a pervasive, recurring scheme operating throughout the Pentateuch. The notion encapsulates a persistent Pentateuchal compositional strategy, with analogous character-​and location-​related parallelisms

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   279 appearing throughout this text. Listed below are some of the most conspicuous instances of asymmetric noetic parallelism in the Pentateuchal text. We must bear in mind, however, that such parallelisms in the text in question are not limited to either individuals or places. The overarching principle in asymmetric noetic parallelism seems to be juxtaposition, contrast, and dissimilarity: Characters (persons) A. B. C. D. E. F. G.

Abel versus Cain Sarah versus Hagar Isaac versus Ishmael Jacob versus Esau Rachel versus Leah Joseph versus his brothers Moses versus Aaron, Miriam, Korah, and other human beings

Locations H. Garden of Eden versus the rest of terrestrial world I. Promised/​Holy Land versus Egypt J. Bethel, Peniel versus other sites K. Sinai wilderness versus other territories and terrains L. Gerar, Jericho versus other locales M. Tent of meeting/​Tabernacle versus other settings Categories (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Conceptual discrepancies and differentiation (persons, locations) Experiential deviation or divergence (persons, locations) Cultic distinctions or peculiarities (some locations) Differences in conceptualizations of the divine (some persons, locations) Teleological markedness (persons, locations) Disparities in levels of self-​awareness, or “soul” levels (persons) Sôd-​related wide-​ranging information (persons, locations) Iconic representations of specific “hard” or vital, indispensable information (scenes of numinous experiences; locations)

In this list, all paired characters and locations, without exception, display mutual conceptual difference, differentiation, and experiential divergence. The latter pertains to consciousness states in their experiential aspect, vis-​ à-​vis the juxtaposed and contrasted characters and/​or locations. Equally so, all items listed pertain to Sôd-​related information, though only a few signal that they may be iconic, that is, literal representations of specific “hard” information that typically is an indispensable part of the initiation/​induction

280  The Code-​text procedures and methods within the esoteric system of initiation (for example, item L in the above list; this is explained later in this chapter). All listed locations represent key scenes of numinous experiences. Some of the main Pentateuchal characters and locations are to be seen as tropes or figurative “stand-​ins,” representing personification allegories and hypostatization (Leah, Rachel, Sarah, Hagar, Jacob, Esau, etc.) and, in the case of locations, topifications, that is, “translation[s]‌of an abstraction into a geographical locus.”39 Two related conceptualizations of postbiblical Jewish mysticism can be “reverse-​engineered” and seen as later-​formulated target domains, such as the Ten Sefirot schema originating from the Sefer Yetzirah, as well as the five souls or soul levels assigned to the human being by the medieval Kabbalah.40 Although these two notions are today fundamental to Jewish mystical lore, they are not explicitly reflected in the Hebrew Bible. Still, their connection with the latter is far stronger than a mere echo; indeed, these later conceptualizations were based on specific biblical imagery. One example may be seen in the link between the putative “image” shared by Elohim and the human being.41 Another is the Edenic “Tree of Life” possessing the seven “wells” or chakras included in the Ten Sefirot, thus constituting a proto-​ Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The presence of the embedded Sôd stratum signals, to borrow from James Paxson, “cognitive modalities and fields of invention well outside the received domain of ‘fiction’ ”; these pertain to the source domain in each specific instance (namely, the Hebraic initiatory praxis).42 Here, however, I wish to foreground that which does belong to the realm of “fiction” or, rather, poetics, namely, figuration and its strategic role in carrying these extraliterary “cognitive modalities and fields of invention” within the target domain. The recovery of the deliberately concealed second-​channel esoteric narrative directs our attention to the figurativeness of most if not all Pentateuchal characters and locations, including the actual geographical places. It is to those that I will turn next.

Space (Locations) as the Setting for a Series of Scenes of Numinous Experiences “The pertinence of time, text, ritual, story, and belief to understanding religion has been long recognized; not so the spatial dimension,” writes Ziony Zevit.43 He extends the discussion of spatial dimension to a notion of sacred space, which is “widely bandied about as a self-​evident truism [but] is actually vague and diffuse.”44 He proposes that there are three facets to sacred space: (1) geographical, (2) thematic, and (3) mythic-​symbolic, with “archaeology [being] familiar primarily with geographical space” and “religiology, in contrast, tend[ing] to consider a site in terms of its thematic and mythic space.”45 As this book contends, however, there is nothing mythical in the Pentateuch, and its thematic space—​as well as thematic time and “story”—​needs to be

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   281 fundamentally revised if one is to account for the concealed and thus heretofore missed esoteric narrative. This chapter proceeds by inviting into the discussion and engaging what Paxson calls extratextual “cognitive modalities and fields of invention well outside the received domain of ‘fiction.’ ”46 This process enables one to determine that the key locations in the Pentateuchal text—​those most pregnant with meaning and significance—​are in fact not “mythic-​symbolic” (though they may be “thematic,” in Zevit’s designation). The Sôd’s logos is not mythical. Rather, it is concerned with specific initiatory-​ induction details and related matters and themes. The Mosaic “counter-​religion,”47 as stressed throughout this book, abhors a magical and fantasy-​ burdened worldview. The Sôd—​ that is, the hypothesis pertaining to the presence of a second-​channel mystical-​initiatory narrative within the Pentateuch—​fully conforms to this key characteristic, whereas a mythical perspective would entail precisely that which such a characteristic insistently and vehemently rejects. “Mythopoets” would not be a proper designation for the authors-​compilers of the Pentateuchal text; they were high-​level, advanced initiate-​priests. A recent apposite treatment of space in the Hebrew Bible appears in a book by Luke Gärtner-​Brereton. As he argues in relation to the methodology Vladimir Propp developed on the basis of the Slavic fairy tale, the latter does not apply to the ancient Hebrew narrative, where the narrative “appears to operate [as] a traditional stage-​play”: In terms of its structure, the Slavic fairy tale seems to resonate with our own modern aesthetic (that is to say “cinematic”) tastes, wherein spaces are merely ancillary to the movement of characters. Indeed the “journeying” characteristic of the Proppian fairy tale seems deeply congruous with the roving style cinematography typified in modern cinema[,]‌ where the camera follows a character on his/​her journey, moving from place to place toward some final goal or end. What we see in Hebrew narrative, however, particularly in smaller episodic narrative units, is a tendency to grant a certain primacy to space, both ideologically and at the mechanical level of narrative construction itself. Biblical Hebrew narrative appears to operate under similar mechanical constraints to those of a traditional stage-​play—​where space is central, characters are fluid, and objects tend to take on a deep significance.48 Gärtner-​Brereton adds, “It is somewhat curious, however, that this ‘spatial’ dimension to the HB [Hebrew Bible] has gone all but unnoticed in the field of modern biblical studies to date; testament perhaps to our own over-​familiarity with the dominant modern cinematic aesthetic.”49 He traces the precise nature of this distinction between “stage-​play” and the “cinematic” narration characteristic of the Proppian focus as follows:

282  The Code-​text The Slavic fairy tale follows a major character on his/​ her journey throughout a mythical landscape, wherein “spaces” (specific land masses) are merely incidental to the movement of the hero on his quest, and movement is somewhat necessary to the story itself. Within the Hebrew aesthetic[,]‌however, this depiction of “space” is inverted—​the hero’s journey takes place largely “off-​stage” (precisely as un-​narrated), periodically interrupted by the protagonist’s arrival at key spaces in the course of the overarching journey (typically a location of great importance, a noteworthy mountain or city, etc.).50 Crucially, the biblical use of places—​unlike, for example, in Homer—​is anything but incidental: The Bethel narrative seems to suggest that “space” itself can function as a kind of dramatis personae in its own right or, perhaps more accurately, that spaces within the Hebrew aesthetic possess their own ontological “value” (cf. Amit 2001). This notion of value in particular raises still more questions; chiefly, if spaces, like characters, are imbued with their own inherent (negative/​positive; heroic/​villainous) value, to what extent then does one influence the other? To what extent are characters themselves determined to some degree by the spaces in which they act and, beyond this, is there some larger scheme, some defining framework from which spaces gain their ontological value?51 “Is there some larger scheme, some defining framework from which spaces gain their ontological value?” is how Gärtner-​Brereton phrases his emerging insight. Neither Robert Alter, in his Art of Biblical Narrative, nor Gärtner-​ Brereton, however, reaches a determination or realization that the “crucial junctures” (Alter) and “key spaces” (Gärtner-​Brereton) that are so prominent in Pentateuchal narratives concern, as this book argues, some specified numinous-​mystical experience to which a relevant character in each case is subjected. To begin with, any “location” in the Pentateuchal text where God appears more or less “in person” (prosopopeia), or as a narrative character, is a figurative representation of a relevant altered state of consciousness: -​ -​ -​

The Garden of Eden Bethel and Peniel Sinai, during the national (group) epiphany

The two channels of narratives—​ one a “surface” mimetic channel, the other the “embedded” esoteric/​ noetic one—​ fuse at such locations, producing “places,” real or fictive, where God clearly has a mimetic-​narrative role. Certain spaces, to adopt Elana Gomel’s wording, “refuse to be mere places”; these are “impossible spaces,” such as, for example, the Garden of Eden in Genesis.52 Impossible, yes—​in the sense of a physical space. Yet the

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   283 Pentateuchal authors unquestionably imagined it, as well as some other such impossibilities, and presented them as fully imaged, magnificent figurations, as tropes masquerading as places. Situations and locations in which God is having a mimetic role ipso facto amount to presenting, in a narrative form, access to God. This, in turn, however, is tantamount to saying that the protagonist who has access to God is experiencing an altered state of consciousness. On the other hand, locations such as Gerar (Gen. 21, 26) do not feature God or any divine figure at all, and yet they too were intended to represent an altered state of consciousness, one corresponding either to the nature of the activity described as taking place at that location or to the area’s particular circumstances. Both Gerar and Jericho (Josh. 6) are figurative representations—​specifically, topifications—​of one of the customized induction methods of the ancient Israelite initiatory domain: Gerar highlights the crucial role of the wells (=​chakras) and the related “digging” (=​the role of the hand, in a gestural mudra), while Jericho foregrounds the requisite role played by the “great shout” (=​mantra-​like inner sounding of certain specific, that is, marked, “divine” interrogative pronouns). Both Gerar and Jericho, although “located” only en route to (or rather on the borders of) the more noticeably and specifically God-​infused destination, also reflect an advanced altered state of consciousness. I use the singular for “destination” here because the two locations are actually fused into one in the second narrative channel, the Sôd: the induction activities described in each are meant to be carried out simultaneously. Gärtner-​Brereton notes that “among those works which do seek to thematize ‘space,’ one typically reads of ‘sacred geography’ within the Hebrew Bible[:]‌those ideological spaces of great political/​ religious importance for Israel, or in highly abstract terms as ‘social’ or ‘religious’ space (cf. Fishbane).”53 Another term sometimes used is “metaphysical space.”54 In contrast, this book moves away from what Gärtner-​Brereton characterizes as “highly abstract terms.” Since the spaces in question in the Pentateuchal text are figurative stand-​ins, or topifications, for mystical-​numinous experiences of altered states of consciousness, one ought to employ specific descriptive terms reflective of their experiential condition rather than such ambiguous designations as “religious,” “sacred,” or “metaphysical.” Such explicit descriptive terms will be related then to the source domain rather than to the figurative expressions in the Pentateuchal text’s target domain, that is, they’ll be linked to the initiatory-​inductive framework controlled by the priests. I conclude this section by stipulating that spaces/​locations in the Pentateuch are not only scenes of numinous experiences and concomitant alterations of consciousness but also, in some cases, instances of specific esoteric or induction details being conveyed to a competent reader via the topification schemes. It is not unusual that in such cases the one-​to-​one mappings from the second-​ channel narrative to the ostensive or surface one of the target domain have an iconic character; some vital piece of initiatory information that cannot be conveyed readily or at all via a layer of figuration—​such as, for example, the

284  The Code-​text “great shout”—​has from time to time been embedded literally and placed openly in front of the reader’s eyes.

Time Intervals as Successive Expansions of the Initiate’s Self-​Consciousness Gärtner-​Brereton does arrive at a momentous realization, namely, that “both characters and spaces within the [Hebrew Bible] gain their value from some other, more fundamental, framework.” The insight, however, instantly fades on the imposition of Gärtner-​Brereton’s conventional, and conventionally immaterial, “ideological” and “religio-​ political,” “nationalistic” agenda, which he supposes to be the Hebrew Bible’s “ideological backbone” and its “more fundamental framework.”55 I have focused on the extraordinary extent to which the Pentateuchal text makes use of figuration to achieve its communicative aims. So far, we have traced the signs of the following text-​and narrative-​construction strategies vis-​à-​vis the Pentateuch: •​ •​ •​

Narrative as a series of states of consciousness in conflict Characters and locations as a series of asymmetric noetic parallelisms Space (places) as a series of scenes of numinous experiences

Following this line of esoteric inquiry offers us signals for understanding “time”—​ time frames, stretches of time, intervals—​ in the Pentateuchal narrative presentation as a series of expansions of the initiate’s self-​ consciousness. I have in mind both the mimetic and the Sôd narratives, intertwined as they are within the Pentateuch. To start with, I will, with Susan Friedman, “define narrative most simply as the representation of movement within the coordinates of space and time.”56 Conventionally, this “movement” is seen as plot. On the other hand, Monika Fludernik contends that in her earlier book “the definition of narrativity (traditionally based on the plot) has been replaced by a conception of representation of, and by means of, consciousness.”57 Fludernik states that her model: defines narrativity as based on experientiality. This redefinition of narrative as rendering not necessarily a plot but a character’s or narrator’s experiential reality was influenced by insights from conversational narratives in which the point of the story is not merely “what happened” but, especially, what the experience meant to the narrator and what he or she wanted to convey with it.58 Such an attempt to reflect, via the narrative, “what the experience meant to the narrator,” or to the particular character becomes even more pronounced and specific in the Pentateuchal Sôd stratum. The experience in question—​which is the overwhelming concern of the Pentateuchal text,

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   285 as the present book and my earlier study, The Sôd Hypothesis, contends and foregrounds—​is the initiatory induction into particular, identifiable altered states of consciousness. We have seen the role played in this regard by narration per se (narration as a series of states of consciousness in conflict), by characters and locations (as a series of asymmetric noetic parallelisms), and by space (locations as a series of scenes of numinous experiences). What about time? Here we encounter a double complexity and, therefore, a twofold difficulty. First, since time, or its duration, cannot be represented directly in a narrative either visually (for example, in diagrams) or verbally, one typically employs spatial schemas to represent elapsed time. In her edited volume devoted to spatial representation and its link to higher thought, Merideth Gattis observes that “one of the primary candidates for sharing computational structure with abstract cognition is spatial cognition.”59 Specifically, “despite the far-​reaching transfer [across widely disparate domains] required, a look at the world around us suggests that spatial schemas are adapted for three basic purposes in abstract cognition: they are used as memorial structures, as communicative structures, and as logical structures.”60 Dedre Gentner argues that “we often talk about time in terms of space: of looking forward to a brighter tomorrow, of troubles that lie behind us, or of music that played all through the night. The language of spatial motion also seems to be imported into time, as when we say that the holidays are approaching, or that a theory was proposed ahead of its time.”61 And Brendan McGonigle and Margaret Chalmers note this: “Spatial schemas for abstract thought would emerge in adults from what once were quite separable components, now fossilized in Vygotsky’s terms as an integrated scheme or data structure and subject to culturally evolved and transmitted representations of space such as geographical maps based on Cartesian co-​ordinates.”62 The Hebrews leave Egypt, traverse the Sinai Peninsula with its desert wilderness, and, a generation later, arrive at the Promised Land; Jacob, before he becomes Israel at Peniel, goes to Haran to marry Leah and then Rachel. As we can construe by now, these goings and comings are about states of consciousness in conflict, with locations signifying scenes of numinous experiences; the putative wives-​as-​symbols represent successive expansions of consciousness: Leah, the rûaḥ soul level, and Rachel, the nĕšāmāh. With regard to the latter and the imputed connection between “wives” and “soul” or “soul levels,” consider the following observation by Jane Hill and Bruce Mannheim: “The category system creates a particular cultural hegemony, the unquestioned acceptance, by both men and women, of men as a normative, unmarked category of person. … The hegemonic structure is reproduced below the speaker’s threshold of awareness, unconsciously.”63 Paxson, in addition, asks, “What, aside from grammatical gender, was responsible for the fact that all personification figures prior to the sixth century [CE] were exclusively and necessarily female?”64 Thus, the second and more counterintuitive realization awaiting the would-​be initiate and the like-​minded receptive reader

286  The Code-​text of the Pentateuch is that the spatial distances and journeys on land such as those mentioned above are not merely spatial schemas helping the author to represent time flow. The time flow, in its turn, also represents expansions and transformations of the character’s consciousness. For example, the time that it took Jacob to marry Leah [=​arriving at the rûaḥ soul level]—​seven years of “working” for her father—​represents a progressive expansion of Jacob’s consciousness, starting from the nepeš soul level of an Esau, or everyman, and so on.

Oscillating Metalepses of Colliding Narratives Finally, I turn to what arguably is the single most spectacular feature of the Sôd-​infused Pentateuchal text: the presence in it of multiple types of metalepsis. This feature, however, can be observed only if one also, simultaneously, perceives all other figuration strategies of this text discussed so far. In addition to this already difficult condition, metalepsis is a complex, far-​from-​easy notion. To make it even more confusing, the term is used in widely differing senses in classical rhetoric and more recent narrative studies. Referring to the former, Harold Bloom writes that “we can define metalepsis as the trope of a trope, the metonymic substitution of a word for a word already figurative.”65 However, as James Paxson notes, one needs to distinguish between “ ‘cofigural metalepsis’ of classical rhetoric and ‘transdiegetic metalepsis’ of modern narratology.”66 Numerous examples of metalepsis in the classical sense can be cited from the Pentateuchal text. First, the walls of Jericho are a metonymic substitution for a figurative “wall” between a “lower” state of consciousness and another, called the Promised Land or Holy Land. The wells of Gerar (Gen. 21, 26) are a metonymic substitution for a conceptual trope called “chakras,” the latter a figure for certain areas along the spine asserted to be akin to a bio-​vortex. The serpent in the Garden of Eden—​Eden itself a topification representing a state of consciousness essentially the same as the one represented by the Promised Land—​is a metonymic animification of a bio-​process alleged to take place along one’s spine in between the chakras, when one is properly inducted into associated altered states of consciousness, and so on.67 Yet, second, when one perceives all or at least many of the resultant metaleptic collisions within the Pentateuchal text and observes that the whole text is a multinarrative that includes two principal, or dual-​channel, communicative domains—​one the Sôd, the other the “surface” mimetic one—​separated by a “semantic barrier,” it is the narrative metalepsis as conceived and defined in recent narratology that comes to the fore.68 It is, as first proposed by Gérard Genette (here in Paxson’s wording), “the direct intermingling or collapsing of the elements belonging to two distinct levels of diegesis.”69 The following are some renderings of the meaning or import of narrative metalepsis: “transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels”;70 “contamination of levels in a hierarchical structure as it occurs in narrative … known as metalepsis

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   287 … produces a ‘short-​circuiting’ of levels.”71 Narrative metalepsis is “a technique for … ‘violations of ontological boundaries.”72 It is useful for “the foregrounding … of the ontological dimension of recursive embedding.”73 David Herman argues: in functional terms, then, we can say that metalepsis stems from disrespecting (or actively abolishing) the distinction between a storyworld and the world(s) from which addressees or recipients relocate in order to engage in a “fictional pact” vis-​à-​vis the storyworld in question. … The [metaleptic] transposition dissolves the border not just between diegetic levels, but also between the actual and the non-​actual—​or rather between the two different systems of actuality subtending W2 and W1 [the “world of the telling” and “the world of the told,” respectively]. And given that statements about W1 acquire epistemic, alethic, axiological and deontic values by virtue of the relation between W2 and W1, transporting (elements of) W2 and W1 destabilizes the modal structure not only of the storyworld but also of the reference world by which it is framed and delimited. Indeed, in such contexts we can no longer talk about a reference world at all.74 The present study, however, indicates that Herman’s statement apropos of metalepsis alleging “destabiliz[ing of] the modal structure not only of the storyworld but also of the reference world” may be a bit hasty and is certainly so vis-​à-​vis the Pentateuchal narrative metalepsis. We can assert now that the embedded Sôd narrative is not “an inset narrative.”75 Rather, it emerges from the compelling figurative implications of the surface, or dominant, first-​channel mimetic narrative. The two channels are closely intertwined and fused without, however, losing their distinction. As Paxson, citing William Nelles, likewise notes, narrative embedding is linked with metalepsis and vice versa; according to Nelles, metalepsis is “the signal trope of embedding.”76 The question now however, is this: How certain one can be apropos of the recovered embedded signified, in terms of a potential closure? Although this question differs from the question of validity, we do wish to assess the degree and the reality of the Sôd’s embedding, when seen through its narrative-​ metaleptic corollary. Paxson enlists Derrida to support his contention that “narrativity subverts [the] purpose” of securing a “cognitive or epistemological closure”: The signified of that signifier called narrative embedding turns out to be the lack of purchase the sign as a system has on cognitive or epistemological closure. If putting narratives inside other narratives presumes to aid arrival at some ontological origin, then narrativity subverts that

288  The Code-​text purpose. As Derrida fondly reminds us, framing, as a representational act, mainly exposes representation and thus deferral.77 It is here that I would depart from the endless Derridean deferring of signification and, consequently, from Paxson.78 The Sôd’s signified, as well as its referent, must both indeed be deferred but only until an adequate conceptual scaffolding had been erected. With the latter in place, the recovery first of the Sôd’s textual signifier (noesis), then of the emerging signified (noema), and, last, of the hyletic referential object can proceed apace. There is indeed representation, in the noetic signifier and then in the noematic signified. With the emergence of the hyletic referent, however, the chain of representations comes to its end. What interests us here, as readers of the Pentateuch, is the question of metaleptic intrusions, perhaps even protrusions of the hyletic referent into the ostensive, or surface, storyworld—​the visible storyworld that has been the focus of practically all extant exegeses for the millennia of this text’s existence. This remarkable multilevel textual prosthesis, as an aesthetic spectacle extraordinaire, strongly intensifies the reader’s experience, primarily through the dramatic emergence of the noematic signified. A verbal-​literary chiaroscuro of meaning is now seen as being pasted in random patches throughout the text as though—​incongruously—​in some pointillist painting intoxicated by semiosis. (The fitting incongruousness of this simile is aided by the divergent techniques of Renaissance chiaroscuro and nineteenth-​century pointillism). Finally, and at their highest intensity, the second channel’s disruptions of and interferences with the flow of the first-​channel, ostensive, surface narrative increase still more, owing to the textual noetic signifier; they exhibit high-​ pitched, dizzying somersaults of narrative-​ mimetic implausibility, obfuscation, and sometimes outright perplexity and inexplicability. An outstanding example of such multilayered metaleptic protrusion from within the Pentateuch of, first, the noematic signified (“The Tree of Knowledge is a sham!”) and, second, the hyletic referent (“Choose the Tree of Life so you can remain in close contact with God”) is the Edenic confrontation between God and the first humans. Why the maddening prohibition? The seemingly unfathomable riddle prompts Umberto Eco to utter the following exasperated (but, as always with Eco, tongue-​in-​cheek if not utterly sarcastic) remark: “Obviously, God is above providing an explanation of why the apple is evil; he is himself the yardstick of all values and knows it.”79 Regarding such ensuing narrative metalepses, in terms of one’s ability to detect and recognize the latter, the notion of “framing” (invoked by Derrida and Paxson) is highly apposite. As Manfred Jahn tells us: A frame [is to] be understood, as in Perry 1979, to denote the cognitive model that is selected and used (and sometimes discarded) in the process of reading a narrative text. According to [Menakhem] Perry, a frame

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   289 stores and structures the answers to questions like “What is happening? What is the state of affairs? What is the situation? Where is this happening? What are the motives? What is the purpose? What is the speaker’s position?” But while in Perry the term remains largely an undefined primitive, a more explicit theory of frames has been available from artificial intelligence research since about 1975.80 The two frames—​the Pentateuchal text containing the Sôd-​infused priestly communicative intent and message and the Pentateuchal text without any such notion—​are markedly different. These two frames intersect at various points, sometimes even coinciding and at other places colliding with each other. This book has argued in favor of a Pentateuchal frame—​that is, in favor of a particular cognitive model with which to view the Pentateuch—​that contains a two-​channeled narrative structure: the conventional “surface” narrative and the embedded Sôd narrative. As a result, and if, as David Herman and Michael Schuldiner suggest, there are several types of narrative metalepsis, or violations of storyworld integrity, the Pentateuchal text utilizes no fewer than two of the main varieties. One, which Schuldiner calls “first degree metalepsis,” involves interaction between the storyworld and the “real world of the reader”; the other, the “second degree metalepsis,” refers to violations of distinct narrative planes between different storyworlds.81 The Pentateuchal text is awash with this latter type of second-​degree narrative metalepsis, as the two competing narrative strands—​one “ostensive,” or “surface,” and the other concealed but, as this study shows, effectively dominant—​produce an ongoing metalepsis of various personifications and topifications between the storyworlds, crisscrossing into and out of each other’s storyworld domains. Yet, remarkably, the Pentateuch throughout evinces the first-​degree metalepsis as well. The embedded Sôd narrative storyworld, as part of its import and its communicative intent, necessarily interacts with the “real world of the reader”: it directly addresses the would-​be-​initiate reader and even implicates his physical body (the chakras; the hand; the mantra-​like silent sounding of divine names in one’s head and, indeed, throughout one’s entire body; and so on). The above conjures up a stunning vision. The incessantly oscillating, ongoing double narrative metalepses of both the first and second degrees—​ an exhilarating reading experience for someone capable of seeing now one narrative channel, now the other; now development related to a fictional storyworld, now information directly addressing me, the reader—​make the Pentateuchal text, already inestimably privileged within the story of humanity as it is, approaching what the Hebraic/​Jewish tradition has always maintained: a divine achievement.82 The two transdiegetic metalepses, encompassing the entire text, in addition to numerous “local” cofigural, or classical-​rhetorical metalepses, enable and bring into being the Pentateuchal entextualization and externalization of Israel’s esoteric ineffable.83

290  The Code-​text

Notes

1 Derrida, “White Mythology,” 210. 2 Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 300. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 301. 5 Thomas Dozeman has described a “biblical geography,” noting how the latter was seen at different periods either as “religious geography” or “geography of religion” (Dozeman, “Biblical Geography and Critical Spatial Studies”). “Biblical geography represents a complex genre, which has yet to receive thorough literary-​ critical investigation,” he writes, adding that “most debates about geography in biblical studies focus on historical problems, such as the specific location of a city or a region, and not on ideological construction” (87). However, neither religious geography nor geography of religion or the historical geography of more recent times come anywhere near the conception advanced in this book pertaining to a tropological “coding” of the ineffability of mystical-​initiatory experiences of the ancient Israelite priestly praxis, resulting in a “geography of mystical stages and states” and a cartography of the induction and other procedures entailed in this tradition. 6 Lewandowska-​Tomasczyk, “Nature of Negation,” 87−88. 7 Donaldson, Missing Link, 204. 8 Ibid., 359. 9 Ricoeur, “Metaphorical Process,” 144. 10 De Man, “Epistemology of Metaphor,” 21−22. 11 Cohen, Thinking of Others, 54. 12 Compare, for example, Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought. 13 On qualia, see, for example, Levine, “Materialism and Qualia”; and Dennett, “Quining Qualia.” 14 Kukla, Ineffability and Philosophy, 1 (emphasis added). 15 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 107 [6.522] (original emphasis). 16 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 107 [6.44, 6.45]. 17 Kukla, Ineffability and Philosophy, 1−2, 52. Kukla cites Fodor, Modularity of Mind; Chomsky, Reflections on Language; and McGinn, “Can We Solve the Mind-​ Body Problem?” 18 Kukla, Ineffability and Philosophy, 52−53 (original emphasis). 19 For an extended treatment of the subject of ineffability, see Scharfstein, Ineffability. 20 As discussed in detail in ­chapter 5, the notion of markedness as a major factor was developed by Roman Jakobson in a number of his works; see Jakobson and Pomorska, Dialogues, 93. 21 Silverstein, “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description,” 17 (emphasis added). 22 See, e.g., Camp, “Metaphor in the Mind”; and de Man, Allegories of Reading, 79. 23 Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 165 (emphasis added). 24 Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 511. 25 Miller, “Two Allegories,” 356. 26 Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 519n16. Sinding cites Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 91. 27 See Parry, “Episteme and Techne.” 28 See Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism; Karasick, “Of Poetic Thinking,” 6; Drob, Kabbalah and Postmodernism, 42.

Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable   291 29 Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, 6. 30 Ibid., 14. 31 Mikkonen, “ ‘Narrative Is Travel’ Metaphor,” 287. 32 Ibid., 292. 33 Ibid., 297–​98. 34 www.prince​ton.edu/​~acha​ney/​tmve/​wiki1​00k/​docs/​Conc​eptu​al_​m​etap​hor.html; accessed Aug. 31, 2014. 35 Ibid. 36 “Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours” (Gen. 37:3 KJV). 37 Ruder, National Colors of the People of Israel, 115n3 (emphasis added); Schutz, Call Adonoi, 58. 38 Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 510. 39 Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 43. 40 Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah. 41 It is specified that it was “Elohim” who “created man in his own image” (Gen. 1:27). 42 Paxson, “Revisiting the Deconstruction of Narratology,” 128. 43 Zevit, “Preamble to a Temple Tour,” 74. 44 Ibid., 74. 45 Ibid., 76–​77. 46 Paxson, “Deconstruction of Narratology,” 128. 47 Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. 48 Gärtner-​Brereton, Ontology of Space, 4–​5. 49 Ibid., 5. 50 Ibid., 28–​29. 51 Gärtner-​Brereton, Ontology of Space, 45. Gärtner-​Brereton cites Amit, Reading Biblical Narratives, 125. 52 Gomel, Narrative Space and Time, 3. Gomel defines impossible spaces as “textual topologies that defy the Newtonian-​Euclidean paradigm of homogenous, uniform, three-​dimensional spatiality” (3). 53 Gärtner-​Brereton, Ontology of Space, 38. Gärtner-​Brereton references Fishbane, Biblical Text and Texture, 112–​13. 54 Herion, “Why God Rejected Cain’s Offering,” 55. 55 Gärtner-​Brereton, Ontology of Space, 47. 56 Friedman, “Spatialization,” 217. 57 Fludernik, “Time in Narrative,” 610. Fludernik’s earlier book is Towards a “Natural” Narratology. 58 Fludernik, “Time in Narrative,” 610 (emphasis added). 59 Gattis, “Space as a Basis for Abstract Thought,” 1. 60 Ibid., 2. 61 Gentner, “Spatial Metaphors in Temporal Reasoning,” 203. 62 McGonigle and Chalmers, “Spatial Representation as Cause and Effect,” 250. 63 Hill and Mannheim, “Language and World View,” 389–​90 (emphasis added). 64 Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 6. 65 Bloom, Map of Misreading, 74. 66 Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 180n6. 67 See, e.g., Silburn, Kundalini. 68 Fletcher, “Allegory in Literary History,” 42. 69 Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 77.

292  The Code-​text 70 Malina, Breaking the Frame, 1. Debra Malina outlines the essentially Genettean narrative taxonomy as follows: “(extratextual) reality, the fictional frame (extradiegetic level), the main story (diegesis), and the story-​ within-​ the-​ story (hypodiegesis)” (1). 71 Pier, “Metalepsis,” 303. 72 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 227. 73 Ibid., 120, cited in Herman, “Toward a Formal Description of Narrative Metalepsis,” 132. 74 Herman, “Narrative Metalepsis,” 134–​35. For “statements about W1 acquire epistemic, alethic, axiological and deontic values,” see Doležel, “Narrative Modalities”; and Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, 109–​23. 75 See, e.g., Paxson, “Deconstruction of Narratology,” 131. 76 See ibid., 127–​28. 77 Paxson, “Deconstruction of Narratology,” 130, quoting Derrida, Dissemination, 297. 78 On Derridean deferring of signification, see Whiteside-​St. Leger Lucas, “Sign.” 79 Eco, “On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language,” 83. The full quotation is in ­chapter 2 of the present book. 80 Jahn, “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-​Person Narratives,” 441–​ 42. Jahn quotes Perry, “Literary Dynamics,” 43. 81 Schuldiner, “Writer’s Block and Third Degree Metalepsis in Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel, Maus.” 82 Regarding my phrase “incessantly oscillating,” I would note that Debra Malina also invokes the term “oscillation” vis-​à-​vis narrative metalepsis. However, she contends that “even to name these movements as ‘bidirectionalities’ or ‘oscillations,’ for example, is already to oversimplify.” Malina, Breaking the Frame, 139. 83 I have used here Paxson’s terms “transdiegetic” and “cofigural.” Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 180n6.

11 In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis The Conundrum of the Eleventh Commandment, Eden’s Theater of Ruptured Doxa and Fractured Epistêmê, and Emergence of “Megaphor” The Perils of a Restrictive Concept of Experience The Meaning of Priestly Praxis A key conceptual lens that this study, as stated before, has imposed on the Pentateuchal text is the Husserlian triadic division of an “act of consciousness,” in addition to its utilizing of Jakobson’s factors and functions of a literary text, as well as several other theoretical perspectives. The Pentateuchal authors’ act of consciousness is an undertaking of intentional communication. Such an act, in accordance with Husserl’s notions of phenomenological intentionality, has to encompass three things. First is the noesis, or the “act of meaning itself ” or “the meaning-​giving element of the act” within the text itself.1 Second is the noema, or the topic and/​or the content—​the “aboutness” of the communication’s meaning. Third and final is the hyle, or the very object or specific details of the communicative message, in this case certain particulars of the priestly esoteric-​mystical praxis—​a very meaningful, highly significant information indeed. Clearly, all three aspects of this act of conscious intention, as we saw in the chapters devoted to them, are brimming with vital meaning. However, in the words of Ruth Garrett Millikan, “The act of identifying the referent of a term … is not the same as the vague affair ‘coming to know what the term means.’ ”2 Substituting “communication” for “term” in Millikan’s quote, we obtain this: having identified the all-​important signifier, the signified, and the referent of the Pentateuchal communicative message (pulled together in the three columns of Table 9.1)—​all of them of the essence, that is, indispensable meanings—​we have not as of yet, however, come to know the larger, or the overarching import and meaning of this extraordinary communication across the millennia. As Charles K. Ogden and I. A. Richards put it, “if … we can substitute the word ‘intend’ for ‘mean’ it will be clear that we have a quite different kind of ‘meaning’ from any involved when ‘intention’ cannot be so substituted.”3 Communicative intent aside—​now that we have plausibly ascertained the meanings of that which is (in accordance DOI: 10.4324/9781003143932-16

294  The Code-​text with this book’s thesis) the mission of the Pentateuchal text to transmit via its second-​channel narrative—​can we now access or even just assess the meaning of the praxis per se that the priests were engaged in? That is, the significance, for example, of the “I-​Thou relationship with the God of Israel” (see “the Whereto,” right-​hand column, Table 9.1)? This kind of meaning—​in the sense of a certain meta-​signification or the wide-​ranging import of the priestly praxis—​will have little to do with narrativity and narratives; after all, as François Rastier states, “the processes by which we assign meaning are neither sequential nor linear.”4 To begin with, there is the following, rather startling realization with which one must suddenly contend. The entire sophisticated apparatus and the related toolkit that one can marshal via the resources of, for example, semiotics—​the very field specifically and solely dedicated to the pursuit of meaning—​are, it would appear, insufficient or even inadequate to the task of unpacking the riddle of the Edenic “garden of semiosis”: that is, the conundrum set up by the enigmatic Lord God of the Edenic garden, as well as the ability to judge the full significance of that particular Primal Scene. We saw in Chapter 2 how eminent semiotician Umberto Eco is reduced to simply noting that “the semantic universe rapidly becomes unbalanced” as the “Red =​Edible =​Good =​Beautiful =​Yes”—​Eco’s semiotic notation of the rationally attractive fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—is instead to be seen, on God’s uncompromising, stern orders, as “Blue =​Inedible =​Bad =​Ugly =​No =​Serpent and Apple.”5 Many and perhaps most readers instead, guided by their own lights, go a commonsensical step further than the obviously perturbed yet still circumspect Eco and declare in typical fashion, on the one hand, such Deity to be a “primitive anthropomorphic God opposed to truth … [t]‌he judgmental wrathful God who suppresses curiosity and truth.”6 They may, to the contrary, see this Hebraic God as a sort of loving parent who outwardly punishes his children but in reality sagaciously leads them out into the real world, where they’ll have to learn by themselves life’s good-​and-​evil tribulations and thereby, in the end, emerge triumphant both in conquering nature and as intellectual goliaths spawning the marvels of sciences and technology and becoming self-​sustained masters of thought and wisdom. Or so the conventional spin would have it. The problem here, as was stressed already in Chapter 10 in particular, is once again related to the omnipresence of figuration in the Pentateuch. Figures of course are the creation of language—​or rather of its users, human beings. The express purpose of expanding the range of language’s capabilities is obvious enough; figuration is implicated in multiple activities and accomplishments of human beings, including thought itself. Antal Borbely describes the sheer complexity and density of approaches to figuration that were mounted by the various ancient and modern disciplines, all trying to make sense of its continuing dazzle and perplexity:

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  295 Figurativity has been defined in multiple and often confusing ways that correspond to the various disciplinary contexts in which it is invoked (Fahnestock, 1999). Thus, we have figurativity as ornamentation and persuasion in discourse (rhetoric); figurativity as syntactic/​semantic relations (linguistics); figurativity as conceptual/​ semantic relations of thought (cognitive sciences); and, finally, … figurativity as dynamic relations of mentation (psychoanalysis). … Each level of figurativity entails a different notion of metaphor and metonymy, and each level works with distinct entities as sources and targets: words, concepts, and psychodynamics. Thus, each level has a different basis for the metaphoric incongruence criteria: syntax, semantics, and temporality.7 From the standpoint of the present study, there is omitted from Borbely’s “levels of figurativity” yet another such level, specifically, the one that is the subject of this book. The omission is hardly deliberate; rather, the consensus culture, including almost all academic disciplines, that is almost entirely devoted to operations of our daytime consciousness is quite unaware of another region of the mind, or is only marginally aware. Whereas the unconscious region of the human mind—​the unconscious proper that is the domain of traditional psychoanalysis—​is in Borbely’s list, the other nonconscious expanse of the mind is not; it has been given various descriptive designations, among them hyperconsciousness, superconsciousness, expanded consciousness, and so on. The human being who either accesses with intent or else inadvertently hazards into this mysterious region ipso facto becomes cognizant of it (to whatever extent his or her particular experience allows). And so, the question regarding this is the following. Given that such an experience is an ineffable one par excellence; given that such occurrences are exceedingly meaningful (as is attested to by countless mystics); given that it has been asserted over and over again that such extraordinary happenings entail, as they typically do, intense personal events of a mental and spiritual nature, including those described as dramatically transformative; and finally, given that such often-​disorienting cases normally result in one’s inability to represent what can only be described as indescribable and unrepresentable, do the authors of the Pentateuch—​or the Torah, the foundational Teaching of the Hebraic religion and civilization—​actually manage to represent this highest-​of-​values and its associated meanings? It would be a pity, though fully understandable in view of the above givens, if such an attempt to denote the unrepresentable, or to express the inexpressible—​yet most precious—​meaning was absent from the Teaching. This final chapter is about elucidating this issue. Slippages between Systems and the Phenomenal Realm As I have noted elsewhere while referencing Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus regarding the limits of what can be expressed in language, the mystic is exempted from the philosopher’s often desperate predicament of trying to

296  The Code-​text force logic to speak the language of ineffability.8 Since it goes with the territory, the mystic also does away with the commonsensical logic of those who are uninitiated into the mysteries. What separates the mystic from the common man and philosopher alike? In a word, it is experience—​experience of things that are time and again designated as ineffable, inexpressible. The linguist and semiotician Paul Thibault has remarked on such a perspective, noting the following: this almost suggest[s]‌that the mystic experience is preconceptual and in a very real way beyond language. There is a mistaken post-​modernist and social constructionist notion that the categories of language slice up reality. They don’t and can’t. They slice up or digitalize the continuum of meanings. Experience and reality are just too complex to be “sliced up” in this way by language. This does not mean language is other than complex—​it is very complex, as you well appreciate. My point is that reality is more complex still.9 The “slicing up” of the “continuum of meanings,” in fact, goes beyond just the postmodernists and social constructionists; it inevitably occurs in any number of disciplines whenever they offer their respective theoretical constructs apropos of their disciplinary segments of, or perspectives on, reality. Multiple, often disparate meanings of “reality” ensue. M. A. K. Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics, sees such slices as a hierarchy of meaning systems, nested in a sort of Russian-​doll fashion (that is, consisting of several other, progressively smaller dolls within each other), with wider realms of “systems” comprising all the previous, less complex ones: A physical system is just that: a physical system. What is systemized is matter itself, and the processes in which the system is realized are also material. But a biological system is more complex: it is both biological and physical—​it is matter with the added component of life; and a social system is more complex still: it is physical, and biological, with the added component of social order, or value. So then a semiotic system is still one step further in complexity: it is physical, and biological, and social—​and also semiotic: what is being systemized is meaning. In evolutionary terms, it is a system of the fourth order of complexity.10 Yet semiotic systems, to say nothing of those that are of lower orders of the hierarchical complexity, are not exhausting all meaning attainable by human beings. As symbolic representations focused on interpreting reality by way of multiple specific disciplinary stratagems that lie beneath them and operating via signs in their respective domains—​as icons, indices, and symbols proper, in accordance with the Peircean scheme—​semiotic systems are necessarily at a palpable remove from direct experience. Certainly, the multiple lower-​level systems included within the semiotic one, while perhaps dynamic themselves,

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  297 never allow that the observer—​that is, the human being who is conducting the semiosis, since it is he or she who is the agent having the experience—​ is possessing a consciousness that is not a static entity but, as I contend, a dynamic one. Moreover, as one knows from quantum mechanics, the human observer is not incidental even when the aim is to explore the “objective” physical reality: he or she is definitely, albeit unintentionally, influencing the outcomes in what was always seen as the detached-​from-​human-​presence realm of supposedly objective reality. As Halliday puts it, there is a “slippage between system and phenomenal realm.”11 The reason for the slippage should be obvious: the phenomenal realm is about experience, whereas the systems in question are all symbolic representations, that is to say, mental abstractions. Usually, though clearly not always, the symbolic vehicle utilized by human beings is language, and “the language of ordinary human beings [as opposed to that of mystics] is only appropriate to the rational, can only describe the rational, can only make statements in terms of rationality,” as phrased by the pioneering psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion.12 The acclaimed anthropologist Claude Lévi-​Strauss is even more dismissive: “Language, an unreflecting totalization, is human reason which has its own reasons and of which man knows nothing.”13 Both psychoanalysts’ and anthropologists’ fields of research are in close, intimate proximity to the human being. Thus, their theorizing favors authentic mental habitations of humans, notably including such extremes as those occupied by “primitive peoples,” the mystics, and the mentally ill. Their worlds are nothing like the systems of the physicists and those working in other “hard” sciences, such as biologists, sociologists, and even psychologists, nor are they like the systems of linguists and semioticians (with the last two’s symbolic preoccupations in this instance easily extended to include philosophers). Halliday frames this as follows: “every theory is a metaphor for what it is theorizing … [and] language theorizes the human condition.”14 Granted; my point, however, is that the human condition—​or its potential, as is explicitly argued in this book—​also extends to regions and capacities that are beyond the powers of language to theorize or metaphorize.15 Here we apparently have come back to the Wittgensteinian quandary apropos of language’s ability to adequately represent, or even represent at all, that which is directly presented to the consciousness of a mystic, that is to say, a person who in effect has characteristically managed to break away from conventional reality. Besides the mystics, it is the “savages”—​as Lévi-​ Strauss called them, in the vernacular of his times—​who also have access to the realms where dependence on language is held back and where a built-​in bias favoring rationality does not exist.16 Bypassing Intellects, the Senses, and (Even) Language The French philosopher Henri Bergson observed that “the attitude of commonsense, as it results from the structure of the senses, of intelligence and

298  The Code-​text of language, is nearer to the attitude of science than to that of philosophy.”17 As I noted elsewhere, it is surely counterintuitive to be urged to see in the scientific approach the rule of the commonsensical.18 Bergson’s fundamental insight—​ that “the philosopher did not arrive at unity, he started from it. … The process [of] philosophy … is not a synthesis but an analysis”—​is deeply relevant for us in this chapter.19 It urges us to recognize the straightforward and simple fact that, in Bergson’s words, “the structure of the senses, of intelligence and of language” is such that they intrinsically must always begin with and operate by way of analysis, that is to say, by way of what we designate through the term “rationality.” In contrast, declares Bergson, the philosopher presupposes some essential, basic unity of it all and then begins to analyze. One can see how the largely unconscious commonsensical synthesis of the raw information one is showered with into some sensed or suspected unity of reality is being done not merely by common people (to whom one would ascribe the possession of a commonsensical outlook) but, crucially, also by scientists, with their dependence on the empirical data and thus the senses, as well as by others, listed by Halliday above, such as biologists and semioticians. And if the semioticians, then also by linguists and philosophers, among others—​that is, all those who use language and who rely on their intelligence and their respective academic enclaves. Bergson, himself a philosopher, emerges as an exception that proves the rule. With intent, I am also excluding psychotherapists and anthropologists, whose raw human data tends to force their conceptualizations further than, or even bypassing, their own intellects, senses, and languages. We are beginning to see here that perhaps the phenomenologist Husserl’s war cry—​to the things themselves!—​is, in the end, misplaced, as such a direction is merely commonsensical, too. “The things” are the phenomena, that is, the dominion of our senses; the human being is the observer who, at the center of it all, is looking in all the wrong places—​that is, within the phenomena—​using his reasoning-​biased intellect and what distinguishes him from other animals, language. Language, however, is all but mute and deaf when it comes to describing the ineffable experiences brought about as part of an all-​encompassing discernment of, and alertness vis-​à-​vis, unity. Such experiences, needless to say, are also accompanied by relevant, highly idiosyncratic phenomena. (Thus, Husserl could have been correct apropos of “things themselves” had he been more open to all phenomena and all experience, including the possibility of mystical alteration of consciousness; as Jean-​Luc Marion tells it, a phenomenon as normally conceived—​in both Kant’s and Husserl’s phenomenology—​is conditioned in the former by “its horizon,” while in Husserl it is reducible “to an I.”20 Yet, in the ancient Hebraic mystical tradition tracked in this book, the “I” of the initiate is seen as magnified manifold, thus experiencing radically different phenomenal vistas than what was available to his former, much smaller or lower self.) Max Scheler, the early twentieth-​century German philosopher, describes the context of the exact juncture of the argument we have arrived at now:

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  299 There is nothing more disastrous for all of epistemology than to establish at the beginning of one’s methodological procedure a too narrow, restrictive concept of “experience,” to equate the whole experience with one particular kind of experience and with that mental attitude that is conducive [only] to it, and then to refuse to recognize as “primordially given” anything that cannot be reduced to this one kind of experience.21 It is my contention that Halliday’s systemizing orders of complexity, each more amplified than the next, and including all preceding ones—​first the physical; then, biological; next, social; and finally, the semiotic—​stop short of what can arguably be seen as the most important “system” of significance of all. All of these systems pertain to a particular respective “slice of reality” (returning here to Thibault’s turn of phrase) and, importantly, denote some associated, specific experience. Each subsequent system is broader, or more encompassing, than the preceding ones and includes those that come later. Casting an even wider net, let us look for a system of meanings and perspectives that includes the physical, the biological, the social, and the semiotic systems—​and be ampler still, or still more encompassing, than all of them. What kind of experience will such an outlook afford or support? As we shall see later, there are significant reasons to single out the anthropological perspective or the psychoanalytic one: they—​one an academic domain and the other a health-​professional one—​attempt to go further than others in ascertaining both the triumph and the tragedy, as well as the profound mystery of being a human being. World of Symbolization: The Veil of Maya Terrence Deacon, in his book The Symbolic Species, states that “though we share the same earth with millions of kinds of living creatures, we also live in a world that no other species has access to.”22 A separate world in addition to the one we inhabit jointly with all other animals? Well, yes; it is the world of symbolization, where, thanks to language, we are able think—​think by way of symbolic representations.23 The link here, via language, with Aristotelian logos is intact, by way of symbolic representations that can be seen as the modus operandi of all mental and disciplinary systems. Yet, just like nonhuman animals aren’t aware of humans’ symbolic world of representations and meanings easily accessed by way of symbols, most people are not aware of yet another “world” also accessible, in principle, to humankind. It is this psychological and, I will argue, psycho-​mental realm that (some) anthropologists and (some) psychotherapists have encountered, explored, and reported on, along with the mystics and a few solitary philosophers. Is this mysterious realm reachable via symbols, too? Henri Bergson insisted, in Ernst Cassirer’s words, that “metaphysics … is the science that aspires to dispense with symbols.”24 Cassirer, the philosopher

300  The Code-​text who, as the author of the multivolume The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, is a preeminent authority on the subject of symbolism, further portrays Bergson’s philosophy—​positioned, as he says, as “perhaps the most radical rejection of the value and justification of symbolic formation in the whole history of metaphysics”—​in this way: It is only when we succeed in forgetting everything that is merely symbolic, when we tear ourselves away from the language of words and the language of spatial images and analogies, that true reality touches us. … In place of the discreteness in which all conceptual effort moves and in which it entangles us more and more as it progresses, it is now life itself that holds us in its unbroken unity and constancy.25 If it is “only when we succeed in forgetting everything that is merely symbolic” that the true reality touches us, then what was it earlier, when what we thought of as the reality was approached by us by way of symbols, by means of our disciplinary systems? It is th[e]‌act of [symbolic] formation which now appears as the actual veil of Maya. … Bergson regards all symbolic formation not only as a process of mediation, but also as one of reification, and this is the basis of his critique of symbols. The thing-​form seems to him the prototype of all mediated apprehension of reality. … [He] seek[s] to save the “unconditioned” from being distorted and rigidified by the category of conditionedness. … How can we hope to come closer to the essence of life by artificially interrupting its flow, by dividing it into classes and genera? This essence defies all our conceptual classifications … [T]he stream of life cannot be captured in the nets of our empirical-​theoretical conceptual thinking but must always slip through them and overflow them.26 We now can see the reason why some so-​called “primitive” peoples have been able to maintain their bond with the broader and, as Bergson would say, more genuine or true reality: their comparative freedom from symbolizations affords more of life, not less. Our Westernized worldview sees them as living in an illusory, indeed magical world, yet it is we who are encumbered and mentally impaired by the veil of Maya (as the Hindu myth calls that which conceals the true reality). This illusions-​generating net or veil is woven by and interlaced with our incessant symbolization. Bio-​physiology of Understanding and Meaning: States of Consciousness, Shifts in Attention and Noticing Erwin Goodenough explains the paradoxical-​sounding notion held by Philo of Alexandria, the ancient Jewish philosopher known as Philo Judaeus, that

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  301 entails “extinguishing the light of human thought” in order to reach “the Light of Being”: All categories and classifications are, as Philo said, illusions, false perceptions. The mystic achieves his end when every one of his own formulations lose[s]‌value, and in the complete nothing of human categories he finds the all and only of reality. As Philo said, the Light of Being can come to us only when the light of human thought is extinguished.27 In a similar example of a “thought-​extinguishing” idea, Bertrand Russell noted that Wittgenstein “has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn’t agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking.”28 Be that as it may, Wittgenstein, it seems, never gave up on “propositions” as the mainstay of his philosophical thinking. And, as I have noted in “The Problem, Aporia, and Mysterium of Mysticism,” a “mystical alteration of consciousness cannot be coerced or obtained by way of logical inferences and propositions.”29 Wittgenstein persistently insists on the distinction between what he calls states of consciousness and dispositions: I want to talk about a “state of consciousness,” and to use this expression to refer to the seeing of a certain picture, the hearing of a tone, a sensation of pain or of taste, etc. I want to say that believing, understanding, knowing, intending, and others, are not states of consciousness. If for the moment I call these latter “dispositions,” then an important difference between dispositions and states of consciousness consists in the fact that a disposition is not interrupted by a break in consciousness or a shift in attention.30 Elsewhere, Wittgenstein also, and crucially, includes in the above list of “dispositions”—​or general mental outlooks, I take it—​meaning: “Meaning is as little an experience as intending. But what distinguishes them from experience? —​They have no experience content. For the contents (images for instance) which accompany and illustrate them are not the meaning or intending.”31 And he adds that “understanding is not a mental process. (A pain is growing more or less; the hearing of a tune or a sentence: these are mental processes.)”32 Addressing properly such a stance is outside this book’s scope. Besides, many other philosophers to this day feel uncertain or are often divided on this or that Wittgensteinian tenet. The reader nonetheless, after having just encountered this somewhat disquieting perspective on meaning that supposedly is divorced from experience and a view of understanding as not being a mental process, may be put at ease by a small but vital detail: all along, Wittgenstein, it seems, has in mind only linguistic understanding and meaning (as, in accordance with him, what falls outside language is by definition nonsensical).33

302  The Code-​text Two words, though, that have been used in one of the above quotations can inform us just how mistaken is the path that stakes everything on language alone. Wittgenstein’s “dispositions”—​such as believing, understanding, knowing, intending, and meaning—​ aren’t supposed to change or be interrupted when there is “a break in consciousness or a shift in attention.” This formulation, fortuitously, offers me the opportunity I was on the lookout for at this juncture in the book, to underscore the converse of precisely that which Wittgenstein insists on. Importantly, I am not using the expression “state of consciousness” in the same context as does Wittgenstein, as will be explained presently. The phrase “state of consciousness” is not meant merely to signify a mood or other affective state or condition we typically experience from moment to moment. Those, such as the experience of pain, pertain not to the state of one’s consciousness but rather to its bio-​sensory awareness: something that humans share with other animals. In a fundamental contrast, the terms “altered state of consciousness” or “alteration of consciousness” do not refer to such sensory awareness (even if many of the induction techniques meant to induce the former utilize the inductee’s biological organism). The vast majority of adult human beings typically “inhabit” the conventional or common (if not always commonsensical) state of consciousness. This condition comprises or encompasses the entirety of a specific individual’s cherished beliefs, hoard of knowledge, and values, as well as standby perspectives on diverse stockpiles of meanings and understandings amassed in the course of one’s life. Correlated with this “normal waking state,” as the neuroscientist Christof Koch points out, there coexist “different levels or states of consciousness [that] are associated with different kinds of conscious experiences.”34 As Koch points out: The awake state in a normal functioning individual is quite different from the dreaming state … or from the state of deep sleep. In all three cases, the basic physiology of the brain is changed, affecting the space of possible conscious experiences. Physiology is also different in altered states of consciousness, for instance, after taking psychedelic drugs when events often have a stronger emotional connotation than in normal life. Yet another state of consciousness can occur during certain meditative practices, when interoceptive perception and insight may be enhanced compared to the normal waking state.35 What does it mean to be conscious? Koch presents the notion of arousal that is a key measure: To be conscious of anything, the brain must be in a relatively high state of arousal (sometimes also referred to as vigilance). … The level of brain arousal, measured by electrical or metabolic brain activity, fluctuates in a circadian manner, and is influenced by lack of sleep, drugs and alcohol, physical exertion, and so on in a predictable manner. High arousal states

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  303 are always associated with some conscious state—​a percept, thought, or memory—​that has a specific content.36 But it is the following observation that is most important and highly pertinent for this chapter’s principal focus: “In some obvious but difficult to rigorously define manner, the richness of conscious experience increases as an individual transitions from deep sleep to drowsiness to full wakefulness.”37 Speaking of “full wakefulness,” Koch intends the baseline “normal waking state” (as he calls it in the earlier quotation). However, as I have noted elsewhere, beyond the full wakefulness of the normal waking state there are additional stages of ever-​increasing wakefulness. They include stages—​let us call them distinct modalities of consciousness, or paradigmatic modes of consciousness—​that entail such extraordinary arousals as to be to the “normal waking state” as the latter is to the state of deep sleep.38 Harry Hunt portrays in the following excerpt the recent history of the research of such stages of increasing wakefulness: Roland Fischer (1975a), extending earlier work by West (1962), Venables (1963), and Silverman (1967), showed how mystical, creative-​visionary, and psychotic experience[s]‌occur at the extremes of physiological arousal. These states occur in settings of either very high or very low, central or autonomic arousal, verging on loss of consciousness and linked by what Fischer terms “arousal rebound.”39 The intensity and vibrancy of conscious experience in such altered modalities of consciousness is beyond almost anything we experience while in our habitual conscious state; it is this dramatic and unusual opening out into endless and timeless vastness that often necessitates descriptions such as “ineffable,” “unspeakable,” or “inexpressible.”40 Elsewhere, I have identified just four—​but also no fewer than four—​distinct paradigmatic modalities of consciousness and designated each as a separately named “world.” The Logical World that Wittgenstein spoke of—​which I am naming the Reflective World, where logos reigns—​while removed and further along from what I am calling the Affective World we humans generally inhabit, is still not yet the suprarational Ineffable World, the habitat of his beyond-​language nonsensical, as Wittgenstein called it, or non(-​)sensical as I am labeling it. Finally, still farther away is the Silent World of the beyond-​the-​mental noumenal.41 It is in the Reflective World where the entire range of symbolic representations, including language, is being played out.

The Ineffable World Believing, understanding, knowing, intending, and meaning—​concepts in Wittgenstein’s earlier quotation—​in fact can and will be affected, sometimes radically so, by the specific modality of consciousness one is experiencing.

304  The Code-​text One’s attention, too, is refocused in step with the latter, and one’s extent of and capacity for noticing—​that is, becoming aware of or focusing on what may have seemed superfluous earlier, or on unusual and diverse things—​suddenly shifts or expands. That which went unnoticed or ignored before, now appears inside the orb of one’s attention span and one’s beliefs, understanding, knowing, intending, or indeed meaning, profiled against the now-​enlarged or else an entirely new, heretofore unfamiliar aspect of reality. Wittgenstein is right of course that reaching meaning and understanding may not at all be like experiencing pain. Yet, the manner of arriving at understanding or the meaning involved—​at least initially, while engendering them—​is some kind of persistent, ongoing assessment or ascertaining and adjudicating of the insight’s progression, often an unconscious one, even if Wittgenstein doesn’t wish to call it a mental process. Moreover, as, for example, Margaret Freeman makes clear, “From the cognitive perspective, ideas are not objects and meanings are not concepts. Rather, meaning is activated by mappings that are motivated by the focus of attention, the picking out of figure against the grounding of our embodied experience, the corroboration of different significatory systems.”42 Different meanings are “activated” depending on the nature and scope of one’s attention and the state of one’s abilities related to noticing. Superconsciousness: The World of the Hyperrational and Suprasensory Mircea Eliade, in his classic book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, verbalizes such elusive and controversial notions as superconsciousness (which he also refers to as transconsciousness): The yogin works on all levels of consciousness and of the subconscious, for the purpose of opening the way to transconsciousness. … The importance that all authors ascribe to the yogic states of superconsciousness shows us that the final reintegration takes place in this direction, and not in trance, however profound. … [T]‌he recovery, through samādhi, of the initial nonduality introduces a new element in comparison with the primordial situation. … That element is knowledge of unity and bliss.43 Eliade notes that Patanjali, the celebrated author of Yoga Sutras (the latter, however, was apparently written by several writers under this assumed name between the second and fourth centuries of the common era), was aiming “to abolish the first two categories of experiences (respectively produced by logical and metaphysical error) and to replace them by an ‘experience’ that is enstatic, suprasensory, and extrarational.”44 Such experiences, such “ ‘states[,]‌’ are difficult to understand. They correspond to experiences too far removed not only from those of normal consciousness but also from the extrarational (mystical or poetic) experiences comprehensible to Occidentals.”45 Speaking of “the poetic imagination” and “an intuition of Bergsonian type,” Eliade claims:

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  305 what sharply distinguishes yogic meditation from these two irrational “flights” is its coherence, the state of lucidity that accompanies and continually orients it. For the “mental continuum” never escapes from the yogin’s will. It is never enriched laterally, by uncontrolled associations, analogies, symbols, etc. At no moment does this meditation cease to be an instrument for penetrating into the essence of things—​ that is, finally, an instrument for taking possession of, for “assimilating,” the real.46 Here we are being signaled that even the Bergsonian “philosophical” intuition, which is allegedly disentangled from symbols, nevertheless does not quite reach all the way to “the real.”47 In my proposed classification above, the otherwise indispensable intuition, while it does leave behind both the Affective and the Reflective Worlds, establishes its stomping ground in the Ineffable World, sharing it with a mysterious epistemic and psychomental state I propose to call illumination. Beyond the Ineffable World, however, is yet what I am referring to as the Silent World, the realm of “the real.” What is “the real”? Howard Caygill writes that Kant discerns “the distinction between phenomena and noumena as one of the oldest and noblest achievements of ancient philosophy. In [Prolegomena] it is clear that he is referring to Plato’s distinction between the apparent world of sensible phenomena and the ‘real’ intelligible world of ideas.”48 [Kant] re-​states the distinction; but his re-​statement is very far from the classical distinction between the real world of ideas and the phenomenal world of sensibility. The most salient feature of noumena is that they are not objects of intuition but problems “unavoidably bound up with the limitation of our sensibility,” namely “whether there may not be objects” for a “quite different intuition and a quite different understanding from ours” ([Critique of Pure Reason], A 287/​B 344).49 A noumenon, “in the philosophy of Kant, [is] an object as it is in itself independent of the mind, as opposed to a phenomenon. Also called thing-​in-​ itself.”50 If the “phenomenal world of sensibility” rather straightforwardly matches up with our Affective World, and “the real world of ideas” with the Reflective World, then the Kantian noumena—​comprising “objects” that call for a “quite different intuition and a quite different understanding from ours”—​may well resemble the Ineffable World. It is my contention that, in any event, this biomental level (using here Eliade’s term) designated as the Ineffable World epitomizes the paradigmatic vistas of the Pentateuch’s Sôd narrative.51 It is assumed here that the “Silent World,” by comparison with the Ineffable World, is so far advanced even from this realm where the initiated priests of YHWH normally functioned that it is all but inconceivable by a human being. Perhaps pointing to someone like Moses in this regard may give

306  The Code-​text us an intimation about this exalted realm of the spirit, and Moses, as has been understood by those in the know, is incomparable.52 Eliade relates that Patanjali: defines Yoga as “the suppression of states of consciousness.” … Hence yogic technique presupposes an experimental knowledge of all the “states” that “agitate” a normal, secular, unilluminated “consciousness.” These states of consciousness are limitless in number. But they fall into three categories, respectively corresponding to three possibilities of experience: (1) errors and illusions … ; (2) the sum total of normal psychological experiences (everything felt, perceived, or thought by nonadept …); (3) the parapsychological experiences brought on by the yogic technique.53 The adept “finds a sacred world corresponding to a new mode of being that is inaccessible to the ‘natural’ (profane) level of existence. … By liberating himself [from ‘conditioned modes of existence’], man creates the spiritual dimension of freedom.”54 Human Being, “Liberated in This Life” I have cited above Mircea Eliade’s helpful understandings of the yoga traditions of India not because those traditions bespeak an identical import—​ same outcome, values, practices, or aims—​as do the ancient Israelite ones. Quite to the contrary; as emphasized in Chapter 9, in spite of certain illuminating similarities between these traditions, there are fundamental contrasts between the Hebraic and Hindu praxes concerning their specific aims and, critically, outcomes. In this regard, I will only highlight here, in passing, the respective notions of “the spiritual dimension of freedom” mentioned by Eliade in the passage cited above. As he elaborates, “Yoga results in the nonconditioned state of samādhi or of sahaja, in the perfect spontaneity of the jivan-​mukta, the man ‘liberated in this life.’ ”55 Fearlessness, that is, being unafraid of, for example, old age and death, is emphasized.56 Also emphasized are bliss; acquisition of miraculous powers; and, above all, “emancipat[ion of] man from his human condition, to conquer absolute freedom, to realize the unconditioned.”57 These laudable objectives—​one ought to be able to discern the stunning triumphs achievable by yogic praxes—​are, however, wholly centered and focused upon the man, the human being. In a rather different manner, yet with the selfsame emphasis on the centrality of the human being, another illustrious civilization—​the ancient Greek one—​proclaimed, in the immortal words of the ancient sophist Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things. The allied humanism of European centuries of the Renaissance has been superbly captured in Leonardo’s celebrated sketch Homo Mensura (which is the Latin version of Protagoras’s motto). As already quoted in Chapter 9, “something akin to the [yogic] kundalini experience [is seen] as having significance in ‘divinizing’ a person. … [It

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  307 is] a key to attaining godlike stature.”58 As I discuss there and stress again in this chapter, the ancient Hebraic motivation and aims are profoundly different. The latter, a singular paradigm whose relevance, I contend, has not diminished in the three millennia since its appearance, has had its aspiration reserved for the aim of having access to—​and winning the goodwill of—​the highest scalar agency conceivable, “God.” This unparalleled power source lies outside the human being even when the human interlocutor, the would-​be initiate of YHWH, is transformed inwardly due to this very access to God and attains some of the powers that aren’t necessarily dissimilar to those that a master yogin possesses. But the Hebrew priest was, in a crucial contrast, acquiring the ability to serve God, with Moses as the principal exemplar of a servant of God. The menace of messianic delusions was present and was real here too, due to the vast enlargement of the “self ” in both traditions.59 But the Israelite priestly tradition, unlike the yogic ones, has strenuously forewarned its neophytes about the hazards of self-​divinization and taught them to resist these potent, idolatrous vulnerabilities. The limitless vastness of God held the human hubris not merely in check; as it was awe personified, it instilled wonderment, dread, and deepest veneration all at once. The Ineffable World, being a “world”—​that is to say, a psycho-​mental realm with a suitable breadth and gamut of experiences that are occurring and achievable in it—​includes virtually most of the “higher psychic energy experiences,” as Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili call them, and thus also both the Hebraic and Hindu scope of experiences and practices alike.60 Laughlin et al. “hypothesize four categories of ergotropic-​trophotropic events and their sensorial concomitants, which may occur during extraordinary phases of consciousness.”61 They also specify the following: We would expect the imagery and intuitive insights associated with psychic energy experiences to vary substantially more from individual to individual, and from culture to culture, than we would somatic and affective components. Much of the apparent diversity in psychic energy experiences cross-​culturally derives primarily from different codes used after the fact to describe the more symbolic and interpretive aspects of the experience.62 Not necessarily just after the fact. In the ancient Israelite tradition that we are rediscovering in this book, the neophyte was primed from very early on—​ indeed since childhood, as all children of the hereditary priestly caste families were reared to be always in awe of God. But the “somatic and affective components,” as has been emphasized elsewhere in this book, are of course practically identical in all human beings. That being the case, it then enables us to benefit from bringing into play prominent examples of “higher psychic energy experiences” from other traditions, as well as from the research in medicine and some modern academic disciplines.

308  The Code-​text Wilfred Bion’s “O” and Rappaport on Lies and Alternatives Above, we have caught sight of India’s yogic “parapsychological experiences,” as Eliade calls them. Other investigators, including in the academic and medical worlds, have likewise probed the Ineffable World, in some cases establishing absolute indispensability of this psycho-​mental realm for grasping the human being in its totality, including religious and cultural manifestations of historical humanity and the outermost, extreme mental-​cognitive, cerebral reaches of the human mind. I will single out two groundbreaking efforts in this regard. As in the case of the yogic traditions, they are only meant to illustrate, in their distinct ways, the Ineffable World that we are exploring, in order to have an additional handle on the ancient Israelite priestly mental outlook that shaped the Pentateuchal compositional and intellectual formations. Such recent determinations are taking place in some of our contemporary academic disciplines or medical professions offering a present-​day research perspective. Regarding the former, I have in mind anthropology and in particular Roy Rappaport and, apropos of the latter, Wilfred Bion and his pioneering brand of psychoanalysis. Bion’s most remarkable contribution is his discovery of a domain that he named “O.” As James Grotstein, a key interpreter of Bion’s psychoanalytic theory and praxis, explains, “O is first cause and marginalizes and replaces Freud’s and [Melanie] Klein’s libidinal and death instincts as ‘first cause,’ the deepest source of mental and biological life.”63 O is crucial, and yet we normally are not cognizant of it: O is Bion’s arbitrary iconic term for … the original and fundamental domain that is unknown and unknowable to us, one that both subtends and interpenetrates consciousness as well as the unconscious and transcends them, one that expresses the Absolute Truth about an Ultimate Reality that is always evolving (always in flux) and is indicative of inner and outer cosmic unknowability, infinity, and ultimate indivisibility, Ananke (Necessity), chaos, complexity, and, finally, “godhead”—​that is, the imagined Presence of the fabled one within us who “knows” all the Ideal Forms and noumena, but who is incomplete and seeks to become incarnated (realized) in the human being by being transformed from an inherent pre-​conception to a human conception → concept in the vale of experience.64 “The intrinsic aim of [Bion’s] psychoanalysis,” Grotstein affirms, “is to help the analysand transcend the veils of illusion (sensory images and symbols that represent the other) that obtrude between him and the Other and between him and his Being-​in-​itself.”65 Furthermore, he writes: words depict but do not encompass Truth. They are a transient reward for the achievement of the depressive position but, like Derrida’s erasures, must be barred and erased once we use them so that we can keep our

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  309 rendezvous with the ineffable, inscrutable, unknowable—​that domain where words and their quotidian meanings end and O begins.66 Bion devised a system of basic notations—​such as L for love, H for hate, K for knowledge, and so on—​aiming to avoid the associated baggage that would normally come with these words. Relevantly for our discussion ahead, applicable to the distinction between the Trees of Knowledge and of Life, Bion states that “interpretations are part of K. The anxiety lest transformation in K leads to transformations in O is responsible for the form of resistance in which interpretations appear to be accepted[,]‌but in fact the acceptance is with the intention of ‘knowing about’ rather than ‘becoming.’ ”67 Bion himself can be seen as a mystic, though not a religious but “a psychoanalytic and an epistemological” one.68 He writes: my theory would seem to imply a gap between phenomena and the thing-​ in-​itself and all that I have said is not incompatible with Plato, Kant, Berkeley, Freud and Klein, to name a few, who show the extent to which they believe that a curtain of illusion separates us from reality. … [Some] consider … that the gap cannot be bridged because the nature of the human being precludes knowledge of anything beyond phenomena save conjecture. From this conviction of the inaccessibility of absolute reality the mystics must be exempted.69 What is more: the belief that reality is or could be known is mistaken because reality is not something which lends itself to being known. It is impossible to know reality for the same reason that makes it impossible to sing potatoes; they may be grown, or pulled, or eaten, but not sung. Reality has to be “been”: there should be a transitive verb “to be” expressly for use with the term “reality.”70 It is impossible to sing potatoes, just like “what can’t be said, can’t be said,” as Frank Ramsey once remarked apropos of Wittgenstein’s notions of the unsayable, “and it can’t be whistled either.”71 It is the inexpressible qualia of being that is discussed in philosophy of mind. The recourse is to “showing” rather than saying, as Wittgenstein suggested; that is, indirect means are used: “To meet the patient in that metaphysical realm of O beyond the senses, the analyst relies on the same tools as the poet—​metaphors, similes, symbols—​which link external images to internal experience in an effort to communicate verbally something of a hidden, non-​verbal world.”72 Symbols, here again. However, here we are speaking of the figurative being symbolic, not merely of language as a whole being symbolic. As a final espying, in this brief survey of some traditions and disciplines that take the notion of a postlinguistic, hyperrational, extrasensory, and

310  The Code-​text megaconscious realm seriously indeed, I wish to bring back Roy Rappaport, the anthropologist who broke new, instructive ground in investigating human capabilities and beliefs, conventions and rituals (and who was already called upon earlier in this book). As he notes apropos of language: That language permits thought and communication to escape from the solid actualities of here and now to discover other realms, for instance, those of the possible, the plausible, the desirable, and the valuable, has already been emphasized. This was not quite correct. Language does not merely permit such thought but both requires it and makes it inevitable.73 The irony of the import carried by this remark should not be lost on us. Language makes it inevitable that, thanks to it, we can “discover other realms, for instance, those of the possible, the plausible, the desirable, and the valuable.” Yet the one (or more) realm(s) that the mystic encounters, the experiential realms of the spirit rather than the symbolic dominion that language represents, language cannot reach. Language even succeeds in thwarting one’s efforts to reach such realms. And, while most of humanity is positioned this side of language, there exist in language, says Rappaport, two disastrously problematic entailments of its otherwise paradigmatic, decisively consequential advent, namely, the “lie” and “alternative”: When a sign is only conventionally related to what it signifies, as in Peirce’s sense of symbol, it can occur in the absence of its signification or referent. … The very freedom of sign from signified that enlarges by magnitudes the scope of human life also increases by magnitudes possibilities of falsehood. … The concept of lie … denote[s]‌a family of forms of falsehood, some of whose less well-​known members … I call “Vedic Lies,” “Diabolical Lies,” “Gnostic Lies,” “Lies of Oppression” and “Idolatrous Lies,” [as well as its] most familiar and most fundamental form, the “Common” or “Vulgar” lie.74 Yet, “the common lie is not the only vice intrinsic to the very virtue and the very genius of language. … Language’s second problem is alternative.”75 Rappaport explains: Whereas the problem of the “Lie” follows, in the main, from the symbolic relationship between the sign and the signified, problems set by Alternatives arise, as much or more from the ordering of symbols through grammar, language’s other sine qua non. Grammar makes the conception of alternatives virtually ineluctable. If there is enough grammar to think and say “YHVH is God and Marduk is not,” or “Socialism is preferable to capitalism” there is, obviously, enough to imagine, say, and act upon the opposite. … Grammar makes it possible to conceive of alternative worlds, that is, of alternative orders governed by either the laws

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  311 of Marduk or those of YHVH, or of worlds organized in terms of the principles of socialism or of capitalism.76 Expanding on “alternative worlds” or “alternative orders,” he writes: we come to the underlying matter of the “reality” of such orders, to the matter of WHAT IS, of what is actual and what is only a figment of fear or yearning, for what, out of the range of conceived or conceivable alternatives, can “truth” be claimed? Marduk or YHVH? A Triune or Monophysite divinity? At a lower level what is honorable, what dishonorable, what moral, what immoral? … It is not merely a question of what order does prevail but which one should prevail.77 As part of the threat of increasing confusion and disorder and being far from paths leading to real freedom (as opposed to merely freedom of choices), alternatives diminish our sense of veracity. The Experience of Being (Being-​Itself) We are now in the same position with which we started this chapter. The lengthy detour was necessary to facilitate our renewed appreciation of meaning’s diversity of contexts and especially to discern its direct dependency on the paradigmatic states of consciousness of the inquirer. In addition, we have tracked the vagaries of language—​our supreme enabler of sublime as well as diverse meanings, yes, but with the concomitant, almost unrestricted freedom to both confuse and mislead, both empower by way of fallacious ideas as much as to incapacitate and enervate due to the profusion of alternatives. The alternatives are a veritable cornucopia of continual choices to be made and selection routes each seemingly as real, as valuable, or as true as the other. And, as if that were not enough, language, as we have seen, is itself a principal barrier vis-​à-​vis one’s chances of achieving one of the key mystical altered states of consciousness, namely, attaining a paradigmatic level that I have designated as the Ineffable World. By now we have determined, I believe convincingly, that while language—​ in its straightforward grammatical manner consisting of “propositions,” a manner of discourse most people, but especially philosophers, habitually employ—​will at best be a nuisance, or worse, when it comes to the Ineffable World, it nonetheless has certain formidable resources that I have been styling under the umbrella term “figuration.” Figuration enables a considerable success in evoking, if not quite portraying that particular “world” (though it must utterly fail vis-​à-​vis the one beyond it, the Silent World). This of course necessitates a certain sensitivity toward and grasp of the figurative mode of discourse, never more so as in the case of a text such as the Pentateuchal one, where the built-​in ambiguity and equivocality of figurative solutions are purposefully used to exclude the not-​intended recipients.78

312  The Code-​text Roy Rappaport, for his part, distinguishes three levels of meaning (which, as we shall see, can be suggestively apportioned among the four “worlds” I have brought into the discussion): (1) low-​order meaning; (2) higher-​order meaning; and (3) highest-​order meaning. The low-​order meaning is meaning “in its simple, everyday semantic sense.”79 Higher-​order meaning reaches “beyond simple semantic meaning to meaningfulness.”80 Crucially, “whereas the paradigmatic household of low order meaning is the taxonomy, the vehicle of higher order meaning is metaphor.”81 In contrast, the highest-​order meaning “is grounded in identity or unity. … It is not so much, or even at all, intellectual but is, rather, experiential. … Those who have known it in its more intense forms may refer to it by such obscure phrases as ‘The Experience of Being’ or Being-​Itself.”82 Rappaport adds: [The above] ranking is … justified because it is not simply an ordering of three types of signification, but a hierarchy of meaningfulness. Distinction [as by way of taxonomy], similarity [as in metaphor], and unification not only imply or even entail different relations—​symbolic, iconic, and indexical—​ between signs and their significata, but different relations between signs and those for whom they are meaningful.83 One can make the argument that the low-​order meaning category applies not only to the Affective World most of humanity has colonized but also, and in this case counterintuitively, to the Reflective World. The latter embraces the sciences and concerns the overall academic sensibility, including most philosophy that relies on the straightforward, conventional language symbolism expressed via grammatically configured “propositions.” Metaphors, especially a great many of so-​called “dead” or ossified cliché metaphors that are but formulaic platitudes, are used in these two “worlds,” and the prevailing mental-​ cognitive attitude is distinction, discrimination. This changes dramatically for anyone who has succeeded in attaining the Ineffable World: there, language generally fails but for the advent of figuration that attempts to show in lieu of saying (to borrow Wittgenstein’s evocative words). In the Silent World, all traces of language have been completely expunged; as one can tell from the Pentateuchal exemplary instance of someone who has visited and inhabited the Silent World for prolonged periods; Moses, the prototypical servant of YHWH, is even described as being “slow of speech” or having some such handicap. For us, it would be important to grasp that for someone like Moses—​if he intended to mold the destiny of a whole people, thus making it imperative that he communicate with them—​language was the only choice, that is to say, it was rather mandatory. Such a communication had to be transmitted simultaneously at the levels of both the Affective and the Ineffable Worlds, yet be guided by the experiential, nonverbal vistas of and transformations he must have undergone in the Silent World. The reader will notice that I have omitted

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  313 the Reflective World’s involvement in this case. This province or dominion of logos is essentially a more formalized but still commonsensical framework.84 The task of this logos is to ground as well as constrain the mind by way of sensible linguistic categories and fully evident, palpable, and observable phenomena, and it is likewise sensible (one hopes) for logos to be largely excluded from the highest-​ meaning communication attempted in the Pentateuchal text’s esoteric channel. This obviously is not so at the literal level, which has to rely on the conventional and commonplace perceptual depiction, even while portraying some extraordinary happenings. If the highest-​order meaning is to be associated with the Ineffable World, what kind of meaning would be that belonging to the Silent World? Good question, as they say; we can never know the answer to it, since one can hardly speculate about human beings akin to Moses who could have plausibly claimed to having paid a sustained visit to the Silent World. “ ‘The Experience of Being’ or Being-​Itself,” stipulated by Rappaport as that which “those who have known [higher-​order meaning] in its more intense forms may refer to,” is represented in the Hebrew Bible most manifestly by its foremost actor, the highest-​scalar—​or even beyond-​all-​scales—​ conceivable agent: God. God—​or Dieu in French, or Išten in Hungarian, or Bog in Russian, or even Elohim in the Hebrew of the Hebrew scripture that launched the God conception in the first place—​is only a placeholder for the Hebraic deity, the transcendent Creator of all existence, all being. However, the Hebrew scripture provides numerous specific names for its supreme, sole deity, among them none more important than the so-​called Ineffable Name, the Tetragrammaton YHWH, God’s most personal or intimate name (as the Jewish tradition holds). It is also unpronounceable as far as names or words go, and, indeed, mere mortals have been proscribed from attempting to do so by Jewish religious authorities. On the face of it, it is barren of meaning: just three Hebrew letters—​one of them repeated—​juxtaposed next to each other in a manner that does not suggest any sense or significance. And yet, as noted in Chapter 1, Thorleif Boman, among others, picks out a complex composite of several transmutations of the verb “to exist” in the Tetragrammaton.85 Indeed, from the standpoint of the Silent World—​and looking “down” onto the Ineffable World and lower, the Reflective and Affective Worlds—​the consensus notion of Existence that we routinely, as a matter of course, conflate with Being is but a motley production of phenomenal displays, spectral movements of colors and masses, and “down-​to earth” thoughts of vivified, that is to say, flesh-​brought-​to-​life humans. We mistake the reality of our constricted, constrained-​in-​innumerable-​ways existence with the Real, the real Reality, not unlike what we have always been doing, for example, prior to Copernicus, when we were certain that the Earth was the center and focus of It All.

314  The Code-​text Ultimate Sacred Postulates The vital takeaway apropos of language from Rappaport’s insights is that its very symbolism creates built-​in uncertainty. As he explained in the earlier quote, “whereas the problem of the ‘Lie’ follows, in the main, from the symbolic relationship between the sign and the signified, problems set by Alternatives arise, as much or more from the ordering of symbols through grammar, language’s other sine qua non. Grammar makes the conception of alternatives virtually ineluctable.”86 Religion aspires “to stand against the dissolvent power of lying words and many words,” Rappaport states, by “fabricat[ing] the Word … upon which the truths of [religious] symbols and the convictions that they establish stand.”87 Rappaport’s single most valuable conception in this regard is that of “Ultimate Sacred Postulates”: The expressions I have called “Ultimate Sacred Postulates,” those crowning bodies of religious discourse, typically possess certain peculiar features. On the one hand they can be falsified neither logically nor empirically. On the other hand they can be verified neither objectively nor logically. And yet they are taken to be unquestionable. I take this characteristic to be of the essence, defining sanctity as the quality of unquestionableness imputed by congregations to postulates in their nature objectively unverifiable and absolutely unfalsifiable.88 From within the Jewish religion, for example, Rappaport recognizes the so-​ called Shema as being its Ultimate Sacred Postulate: To establish God’s existence as a social fact through the ritual recitation of, say, the Shema, makes it immediately possible to interpret the sentence “The Lord our God the Lord is One” as a report or description of a state of affairs existing independently of the sentence or, at least, any instance of its utterance. Such a construction is, of course, validated by the enduring public nature of Ultimate Sacred Postulates. None of those who has recited the Shema in the last 3,000 years or so has enunciated it de novo. … Ultimate Sacred Postulates thus appear as statements to those who give voice to them. Their ultimately performative grounding … becomes clear when the effects of the cessation of their liturgical expression is considered. If no one any longer recited the Shema, “The Lord our God the Lord is One” would cease to be a social fact, whatever the supernatural case might be.89 Crucially in terms of our discussion, Rappaport underscores that Ultimate Sacred Postulates do not and cannot originate from ordinary experiences: “The notion of the triune nature of God [in Christianity], for example, or of God’s Oneness are not ideas that would emerge out of anyone’s daily life, nor even from extrapolations from it. Indeed, if sacred postulates are without material

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  315 significata and are in contradiction of ordinary logic, they stand in opposition to ordinary experience.”90 Apart from the Shema—​the Ultimate Sacred Postulate of God’s Oneness—​ at least one of the Ten Commandments is unmistakably likewise among Judaism’s Ultimate Sacred Postulates. From the standpoint of my endeavoring to introduce, shortly, a crucial new conception—​the compound figure I have named megaphor—​it would be important to grasp what the Ultimate Sacred Postulates are, as well as what they are not. If we look at “The Lord our God the Lord is One” or “I am the Lord thy God,” it is quite clear that these straightforward declarations contain no metaphors or any other figuration. The rest of the Ten Commandments focus on proscriptions and mandates; they either are proscribing or decreeing some action. Here, too, there are no figurative substitutions or indirect, veiled expressions requiring lengthy interpretations. We turn next to consider what I am calling the “Eleventh Commandment,” the incomprehensible or even, on the face of it, seemingly unintelligible and surely counterintuitive Edenic injunction to steer clear of consuming the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good Evil, on the pain of death.

The Eleventh Commandment Analyzing God’s Epistemic Diktat As discussed in Chapter 2, since the Edenic narrative includes such obviously fabulous characters as a talking serpent, the reader in effect has been told that the narrative’s modus operandi is based upon figuration. It is worth repeating the passage already cited there: When … we encounter in the opening episode of Spenser’s Faerie Queene a monstrous, book-​vomiting serpent named Error, we have been given more than a set of instructions in how to interpret her. We have been told to interpret in a similar way every other figure we encounter in the poem. Error tells us not only what she means but what sort of book we are reading, what conventions apply.91 Thus, the entire Edenic drama, including all of its characters, is a totalizing figurative endeavor intending to convey something of great importance: it is here that not only does “God” enter the human realm but we are also given a portrayal of the putative creation of (archetypal) humans in the first place, with the ensuing dramatic enactment of big meta-​questions pertaining to their existence. In short, the Eleventh Commandment—​really the first one if considered chronologically in the text of the Pentateuch—​is part of an elaborate figurative construct meant to convey a crucial, indeed fateful, paradigm-​ transforming information. It would thus be imperative to unpack it, given that the deliberately camouflaged figurative riddle—​formed so that only those

316  The Code-​text who are able to solve it are to be on the receiving end of one of the most significant doctrines of the Hebrew tradition, as we shall see—​cannot possibly be disentangled by way of our usual, that is to say, commonsensical or ordinary thinking. Is the Garden of Eden one big metaphor? Is it an allegory? And what of the two paradigmatic Trees, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life? Surely they are symbols. Is the Talking Serpent a personification of something? As quoted in Chapter 10, Michael Sinding observes that “figures … have variants, and allegory ranges from the explicit extended metaphor to the riddle or enigma.”92 He then points to J. Hillis Miller’s statement that “the word and the concept of allegory in English is part of a chain of related terms and concepts, including parable, symbol, image, sign, emblem, figure, aphorism, metaphor, and translation.”93 Moreover, “others link it to ambiguity, allusion, aenigma, and irony.”94 We see a staggering variety of figurative possibilities available to authors, with the result affording not only a fabulously rich imagery and breadth of thought achievable but also, less happily, a resultant ambiguity and sometimes even incomprehension. This handicap impinges on the impact wielded by most literary works and, not infrequently, works of philosophy as well. Yet, as one empirical research study concluded, “even fleeting and seemingly unnoticed metaphors in natural language can instantiate complex knowledge structures and influence people’s reasoning in a way that is similar to the role that schemas, scripts, and frames have been argued to play in reasoning and memory.”95 The researchers add that “metaphor is incredibly pervasive in everyday discourse. By some estimates, English speakers produce one unique metaphor for every 25 words that they utter.”96 At the same time, “even minimal (one-​word) metaphors can significantly shift people’s representations and reasoning about important real-​ world domains.”97 The research in question has focused on average people, including inquiry into participants’ political views (which, as it happens, took a backseat to the influence of metaphors). As noted earlier, average people, with their conventional thinking, mentally inhabit the Affective World. The Ineffable World in which this author sees the Edenic drama taking place does not operate by way of commonsensical thinking. Nor does it have recourse to what the Reflective World of, for example, academia pivots on, namely, the abductive-​inductive-​deductive manner of making sense of reality (invoking here Peircean classification). Perhaps unexpectedly, while scholarly or scientific thinking has to be, as claimed, rigorous, it is laced and fortified throughout with many of the same or similar conceptual and other metaphors that laypersons are routinely either afflicted by or blessed with (depending on one’s perspective). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have found that even the most demanding or groundbreaking philosophical thought is often based on unconscious conceptual metaphors that future great philosophers internalize since childhood.98 As they point out in the 2003 afterword to their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By:

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  317 There are … four false views of metaphor. In the Western tradition, they all go back at least as far as Aristotle. The first fallacy is that metaphor is a matter of words, not concepts. The second is that metaphor is based on similarity. The third is that all concepts are literal and that none can be metaphorical. The fourth is that rational thought is in no way shaped by the nature of our brains and bodies.99 It is my contention that in order to communicate some deeply counterintuitive understandings—​which at the same time represent conceptions of enormous value and momentous magnitude pertaining to the mysterious Ineffable World, which a would-​be Hebraic initiate was invited to discover—​ the Pentateuchal authors could not possibly rely on the more typical figurative means, much less on the scientific-​like language presenting things as logical elaborations of propositions. These authors could not have used commonplace or typical body-​based tropes.100 Had they done so, such tropes would still require an extra mental effort relative to a merely literal grasp of words and sentences. Instead, they devised a very different kind of figurative stratagem, one entailing intentionally created conceptual schemes that contrast sharply from the characteristically unconscious, universally employed conceptual metaphors described in Lakoff and Johnson’s work. I have named such purposely and deliberately created tropological edifices megaphors (from the Greek phoros, “bearing,” and megas, “large, great”). Edenic Narrative’s Three Paradoxical Paradigms The Edenic enigma, I will argue, is staged as an unfolding mental/​spiritual drama in order to address three complex and deeply counterintuitive issues. All three are the core concerns in the affairs of all of humanity and among its most fundamental disquiets and aspirations: (1) The question of knowing the difference between good and bad (2) The notion of being or becoming “as gods” (3) Certainty versus doubt, which has attracted the energies of philosophers (Western or Eastern) from the beginning. This is also what religions, from time immemorial, have risen to address by assuaging doubts and proffering their most-​assured certainties. Why is knowledge of good and evil being proscribed? Because, states one of the actors of the Edenic primal scene, the serpent, “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof [of “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden” (Gen. 3:3 KJV)], then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5 KJV). There are two issues here, and both, inexplicably, are sharply forbidden by the God of the Pentateuch, on the pain of death, no less: (1) the human striving to become “as gods,” and (2) the human desire to “know good and evil,” that is, to know what is

318  The Code-​text one and what is the other.101 The two issues are in fact interconnected, for one of the characteristics of being a god, one imagines, is the power of discernment. Crucially, along with discernment, one also obtains certainty. However, we still do not know why human deification is so abhorrent within the ancient Israelite initiatory framework. “Ye shall be as gods,” the biblical serpent teases, and the same is promised by the Kundalini serpent of Eastern traditions.102 But where the Hebrew God punishes the Garden of Eden serpent, the billion-​plus followers of Eastern religions worship the Kundalini serpent as a goddess. The emerging Edenic megaphor entails several bipolar, binary conceptual struggles, among them certainty versus uncertainty (or doubt), good versus evil, and God’s divinity versus human divinity. Viewed this way, the Garden of Eden narrative holds the key to at least three primary paradigms of the priestly initiatory framework of ancient Israelite civilization, none of which is readily understood in accordance with our twenty-​first-​century sensibilities. One issue is “knowing good and evil”; another is being, or becoming, “as gods.” These issues are not usually linked together, since knowing good and evil is a common trait, or at least a natural striving of human beings, among uneducated masses no less than among the elites. In other words, even though one can be, and usually is, far removed from the condition of “being as a god” or being “divinized”—​as in John White’s formulation—​one is nonetheless perfectly able to enjoy the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.103 One just “knows” what is right and what is wrong, and one “knows” without any trace of doubt. This leads to the third paradigmatic conundrum discernible in the Garden of Eden story: certainty versus doubt. Human beings are normally quite certain of their own opinions, while remaining doubtful about anything connected to God, beginning with God’s very existence. But, insists the Edenic story, the conventionally accepted evil is not really evil, since that kind of evil exists only in our good-​evil framework, far from God’s perspective. There are two specific evils that are recognized as such by the ancient Israelite priestly-​initiatory framework. One is that which is proclaimed to be the object of YHWH’s eternal battle, namely, the human doubting of God.104 The second is human hubris in striving to become “divinized” (when attempted by the would-​be god himself or herself) or when deified by others.105 Thus, each Edenic “tree” in question, in offering its respective “fruit,” is tendering the promise of certainty, albeit certainty of different kinds. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil offers certainty in the very knowledge that one obtains or uncovers or inherits; knowledge, insists the related conceptual metaphor, is power, the power of certainty, irrespective of the harm this brings if such certainty proves to be misplaced. Yet the other “tree,” the Tree of Life, also promises certainty, albeit of a different kind. The ancient Israelite system strongly advises one who is “hungry”—​the would-​be initiate, a seeker—​to “partake” from the Tree of Life. It even goes so far as to consider doubt, most specifically doubting YHWH, as the highest possible evil. This, in effect, connects

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  319

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD

INPUT 1: What one thinks of as knowledge and certainty could be neither

PENTATEUCHAL MEGAPHOR IN FORMATION CERTAINTY = RAPID CATEGORIZATION =

INPUT 2: Opining (doxa) on good and bad is not knowledge, though it makes one confident and akin to being a god

DOXA (“WHAT IS AND IS NOT”)

Figure 11.1 Edenic megaphor-​in-​formation.

the two “trees,” as both thus prove to be concerned with similar, and perhaps identical, issues—​but from the polar opposite perspectives: certainty versus reality, knowledge versus understanding or wisdom, faith in God versus faith in one’s own judgment (Figure 11.1). The conventional reading of the Edenic confrontation sees it as a struggle to acquire consciousness—​a key, fateful misreading, as we will see. Zoltán Kövecses and colleagues, in a typical example, describe the essence of the Edenic narrative—​without hesitation, unlike Eco, who prefers leaving things as a paradox or unresolved rather than make a hasty misapprehension—​as follows: “In the Biblical Genesis, Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, a physical action, which we interpret as a metaphor for acquiring consciousness. It is a striking feature of the story that the first experience to accompany consciousness is a metonymically expressed emotion—​the emotion of shame, resulting from the physical experience of nakedness.”106 There are, in fact, several interpretive errors in this passage. To begin with, for a creature to become aware of its nakedness means, rather, that it acquires self-​consciousness, not consciousness.107 There is a fundamental difference between the two.108 The distinction is underscored in the Edenic narrative by the indications that Adam and Eve did have consciousness all along, and this entails the second erroneous assumption in the above citation. God could not have possibly “commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:16–​17 KJV), if Adam did not possess consciousness already;

320  The Code-​text Adam also would hardly be able to give “names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Gen. 2:20 KJV) without possessing that essential endowment we call consciousness. What Adam and Eve did lack, then, prior to disobeying God’s command, is a sense of “self,” even in the latter’s restricted sense of an ego. We all know that human beings invariably possess such a sense of self, and it is fundamental to the functioning of human society and civilization. On a research level, Kai Vogeley and colleagues have shown empirically that the “self ” of our self-​consciousness exists and can be tracked.109 Yet we also know that some traditions (e.g., Buddhism) insist that the self is illusory and must be overcome, whereas certain proposals within consciousness studies discuss PCE, or “pure consciousness experience,” which, because it is allegedly contentless, also eliminates the self.110 Thus, one may form the wrong idea that the Pentateuchal problem apropos of the Tree of Knowledge may similarly lie in objecting to the formation of such a problematic self. It does oppose it, strenuously so, but only because the Edenic narrative points to the path of avoiding or overcoming the restricted consciousness of the ego. (Its allegorical representation in the Pentateuch is the Egypt of the Hebrew slaves—​and achieving the higher self of much expanded consciousness is what is represented by the Promised Land.111) This path leads to the Tree of Life, as argued below. The third failing in the above quotation from Kövecses et al. involves their neglecting to consider the other “tree” of the Edenic narrative, the Tree of Life; this of course has always been the case when interpreting the Edenic story. The lower self linked to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is associated, epistemically, with doxa, or the illusory knowledge that gives (false) certainty to the one possessing it, as well as with the epistêmê of philosophers; while the greater self of the Tree of Life brings a qualitatively and quantitatively different epistemic range.112 The Edenic dilemma, therefore, concerns a choice facing each human being: either choose the lower self and never know the Edenic intimacy with the God of Israel, in effect choosing the life of an Esau, the everyman of typical humanity, including even those operating in the Reflective World of academia—​or opt for the life of initiation and a much-​expanded self. The narrative equates the former with being enslaved or even with death, the self-​inflicted punishment meted out for transgressing God’s well-​intended, highly beneficial, and quite necessary-​for-​ a-​would-​be-​initiate prohibition. “Death” is life outside the Garden of Eden’s enlarged self, whereas “life” is to have the capacity to experience a relationship with YHWH. The Grand Edenic Megaphor: A Reenactment Let us begin a closer look at the Edenic theater stage by supposing that the conundrum enacted there is a concerted effort at a communicative transmission of some supreme importance (given that it includes such actors as God).

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  321 The anthropologist James Fernandez, in his in-​depth exploration of metaphor, offers a classification of communications that comprise signals, sign-​ images, and symbols: The same item or token of communication can be, according to the situation, a sign-​image, pregnant with felt but unconceptualized meanings; a symbol, possessed of fully conceptualized and often articulated meanings; or a signal, whose meaning lies in the orientation it gives to interaction. For example, a cross on a hill, simply a signal to some citizens of Jerusalem that a public event is to take place, is to others a sign-​image which they take up and preserve within a religious tradition. To the clergy within this tradition, the cross becomes a symbol.113 For thousands of years conventional readers saw the two extraordinary Edenic trees as symbols—​symbols of knowledge and of life, respectively, as their names ostensibly called for—​with all that such nebulous (in this context), albeit “fully conceptualized and articulated meanings,” carried by our ossified ideas that stand for them, suggest. Was there ever an attempt to see these symbols as some “signal, whose meaning lies in the orientation it gives to interaction”? Or how about seeing them, along with this entire dramatic enactment pitting God against the know-​it-​all serpent and the archetypal humans, as “a sign-​image, pregnant with felt but unconceptualized meanings”? “Every cognition,” states Peirce, “involves something represented, or that of which we are conscious, and some action or passion of the self whereby it becomes represented.”114 We may add, with Lakoff and Johnson, that almost all our conceptual cognitions—​each involving, as Peirce says, “something represented”—​can more likely than not also be implicated as being based on unconscious conceptual metaphors. We already know that which is the typical representation arising from our habitual cognizing of the Edenic drama: knowing good versus bad is a most desirable, indeed life-​ benefiting, consciousness-​engendering and altogether necessary thing. As a result, we automatically are fully behind our mythic progenitors Adam and Eve, what with their prudent, even sagacious consumption of the forbidden fruit that leads to such knowledge. Indeed, pursuing knowledge of any sort will come to be associated for the human species with the highest of virtues. Peirce adds, suggestively, as we shall see, the following: “Good and bad are feelings which first arise as predicates, and therefore are either predicates of the not-​I, or are determined by previous cognitions (there being no intuitive power of distinguishing subjective elements of consciousness).”115 The exteriorized or objectified rational mind represented by the Talking Serpent starts out as the not-​I for the humans but soon enough takes over as their lower, that is to say, egoic I, henceforth to become the ruler of the overwhelming majority of individual humans and hence of humanity’s destiny as a whole.

322  The Code-​text However, the scene in question does have an unmistakable and, in point of fact, particularly strong communicative signal: the humans choose not to pay attention to it. The signal cries out, Stay away from the Knowledge tree; proceed, instead, toward the Tree of Life. The human couple succumbs to the red herring proffered by the serpent, according to whom the ban of knowledge is due to this rather evidently selfish God’s not wanting the human creatures to become gods or “as gods.” And the sign-​image, or image-​schema, “pregnant with felt but unconceptualized meanings”? Seen as an image-​schema, the Edenic stage or scene is forecasting the future of humanity, particularly of its Western variety: Western philosophy—​which is more responsible for its associated civilization’s fate than it is normally given credit for—​begins in Greece, with that civilization’s obsessive yet admirable preoccupation with the rational mind. All the forthcoming triumphs of science and technology are already at play in Greece, in potentia, having been inseminated there for both good or bad, delivering the future that is guided, or rather coerced by the Latin motto scientia potentia est, or “knowledge is power,” to enable the human-​fabricated godliness. But in addition, the image-​schema that underlies and brings about the Tree of Life symbolism (explored earlier in Chapter 9 and reflected in Figure 9.1) is conveying the notion of multiple potencies of Elohim (God) and the human creature alike. Between the two arboreal symbols, the humans opt for knowledge, due to their finding the argument of the rational mind—​personified by the Serpent—​as being self-​evidently compelling, namely, the notion that “God” is likely consumed by a lowly, self-​serving motive of wishing to deny them the status of gods. Adam and Eve thus completely ignore the signal from God pointing to “Life.” Their fate, and humanity’s destiny, is now sealed; it is tied, henceforth, to knowledge rather than to “life.” It is at this point of our cognizing in search of an illuminating representation, in order to comprehend the conundrum played out in Eden, that we are given a chance to fathom, at last, the following. The external-​to-​us and wholly abstract symbol, the Tree of Life—​which, as this appellation specifies, is a stand-​in for another abstraction, “life”—​just may turn out to be, here too, entangled with our selfhood, our very self-​consciousness, rather than as it is seemingly portrayed in the text, being delegated to an unfamiliar and not-​too-​eye-​catching or alluring not-​I. At the outset, the newly minted humans, it would seem, have already been given just that: Life. Humans were created as conscious beings, but more than that, the humans, exclusively among all living creatures, develop self-​consciousness, the distinctive inner world at the center of which is the “I” of each individual human being that is capable of introspection. This “I,” however, can be as simple as what in a forthcoming work I call the Sentient: a living, even conscious entity given over entirely to instincts. It can be gradually enlarged to encompass, as I detail there, at least six additional grades of ever-​expanding self-​ consciousness. The relevant point here is that the egoic self-​consciousness described above as springing forth from the mouthwatering fruit of the

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  323 Tree of Knowledge, while a significant step above the instinctual life of the Sentient now graduating into a conventional Persona or perhaps into a still-​ higher notch, is going to become the end-​all and final Self-​growth—​unless it is somehow rendered less poisonous, less dictatorial, less overwhelmingly a know-​it-​all. The prospect of being prevented from a literally God-​given possibility (as per Edenic narrative) of achieving a much, much broader, richer, and, by far, markedly mind-​extended-​and-​magnified life must be at the heart of the “megaphor” that is now emerging as the apposite representation of this ideo-​psycho-​drama that ends, as foretold by God, with the death of the humans. This last comes as a surprise, since if anything God seems to have either lied (the Serpent’s version) or at least exaggerated just a bit, not unlike in the case reported by Mark Twain apropos of the somewhat exaggerated news of his own demise. But, if one has been following the logic of the slow unpacking of this grand Edenic megaphor (see Figure 11.1), it should become apparent that a life lived exclusively as an Egoic “I”—​that is, knowing what is good and what is not-​good, and this on the strength of one’s own wits, the lot of humanity in a nutshell—​is so much an impoverished, nearly machine-​like existence as to be a good candidate for the status of a ghostly robot rather than a god. The “not-​I” represented by the Tree of Life is, or rather could be potentially, one’s “higher,” much-​enlarged “I,” that is, one’s Self (the Môḥîn Gadĕlût, or expanded consciousness, a term discussed in Chapter 8). Fernandez frames the circumstances attending acquisition of an identity thus: “In the growth of human identity, the inchoate pronouns of social life—​the ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘he,’ ‘it’—​gain identity by predicating some sign-​image, some metaphor upon themselves.”116 In the case of the Self-​identity, however, and not merely an egoic “I,” it is not social life that it is a pronoun of; this much-​larger, inchoate “I” belongs to the inner world of one’s expanding consciousness. The Edenic megaphor—​aiming both to represent and to express this suitably complex dynamics, one that also entails multiple planes of reference and a composite structural distinctiveness—​cannot, as we shall see, commission only metaphors, no matter how complex they may be. Fernandez explains this as follows: While the phenomenological account of a religious experience or any expressive event remains uncertain in nature and perhaps as densely metaphoric as the experience itself, understanding may be sharpened by scrutinizing the network of associations brought into play in metaphoric predications and performances. Association may be by contiguity or by similarity. Metonym is commonly understood as resting on contiguity in the same frame of experience as the subject and metaphor as resting on similarity, perceived or felt (structural or textual), of experiences in different domains. The complexity of expressive experience lies in the interplay of contiguity and similarity associations in the predications upon the pronouns participating in this experience.117

324  The Code-​text The most important of similarity associations in the Tree of Life figure pertains to the image of a tree; it is intended as a metaphor for the human body (see Figure 9.1). As to contiguity associations here, the most pivotal one concerns “life”: it is the expanded, much-​enriched life and consciousness that awaits the human being who succeeds in tasting the fruit of this Tree. Thus, “life” is a metonymic stand-​in for the transformed and expanded consciousness and the self-​consciousness of a would-​be initiate. The image-​schema that is revealed to an aspirant of the Hebraic initiatory lore is one relating to the ten Tree of Life potencies: respectively, of Elohim and the human being, that is, the Ten Sefirot discussed in Chapter 9. The emerging grand Edenic megaphor’s compound figurative armature combines the following component structures: (1) Garden of Eden [an allegory of God’s Garden; also, a metaphor and a topification of divine consciousness]118 (2) Garden of Eden narrative [a parable, illustrating fundamental religious/​ moral guiding principles] (3) Eleventh Commandment [a paradox; an enigma or riddle begging to be solved] (4) Tree of Life [symbol of life] (5) Tree (metaphor for human body) (6) Life (metonym for expanded consciousness) (7) God, a key character at Eden [prosopopeia, a personification of an otherwise-​unimaginable and invisible entity] (8) Adam and Eve’s intimate proximity to God [hypostatization, a reification of the concept of expanded consciousness] (9) Key potencies of Elohim and, respectively, the human being [image-​ schema; see Figure 9.1] (10) The Talking Serpent, who tempts the humans with the idea of becoming gods [metonymic animification of a bio-​ process alleged to take place along one’s spine and leading to much-​expanded self-​ consciousness (along with a messianic complex entailing a “divinized” self-​identity)]119 (11] Disjointed alignments between the storywolds of the Garden of Eden and, first, the esoteric world of a would-​be initiate conveyed via the text’s Sôd-​level second channel, and, second, with the reader’s own private world [dual narrative metalepsis, entailing violations of narrative planes between these distinct storyworlds]120 The resultant composite Edenic megaphor can be formulated as follows: You are a Tree of Life. In other words, each and every human being is—​potentially—​a Tree of Life. In practice, needless to say, almost all human beings camp out—​for life—​under the broad and inviting, comforting shade cast by the Tree of Knowledge (Figure 11.2).

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  325 Intuition What you perceive as truth and/or knowledge at any given time or in any situation depends entirely on your state of consciousness

Doxa vs. Epistêmê vs. Illumination Where there is interpretation resulting in “knowledge,” that is the point of the greatest epistemic danger to the would-be initiate (and ordinary human being alike)

Primal Scene God’s-eye view A targeted altered state of consciousness represented as a “garden” where humans interact with God Two mysterious symbolic “trees”

Poiesis and Technê Grand Edenic Megaphor of Life [1] Garden of Eden [allegory of God’s Garden; also, a metaphor and a topification of divine consciousness] [2] The Garden of Eden narrative [parable, illustrating a profound religious/moral principle] [3] The Eleventh Commandment [paradox; enigma or riddle begging to be solved] [4] Tree of Life [symbol of life] [5] Tree (metaphor for human body) [6] Life (metonym for expanded consciousness) [7] God, key character at Eden [prosopopeia, a personification of an unimaginable entity] [8] Adam and Eve’s intimate proximity to God [hypostatization, a reification of the concept of expanded consciousness] [9] Potencies of Elohim and the human being [image-schema] [10] The Talking Serpent tempts the humans with the idea of becoming gods [metonymic animification, of a bio-process alleged to take place along one’s spine and leading to expanded self-consciousness] [11] Clash between the storywolds of the Garden of Eden and of the would-be initiate, as well as with the reader’s world [dual narrative metalepsis, entailing violations of narrative planes between these distinct storyworlds]

Edenic Megaphor of Life

You are a Tree of Life Core Pentateuchal Megaphor

YHWH, ‘HE’ (IS) THE ELOHIM (Hebraic Ontological, Epistemic, and Phenomenological “Power” Koan)

Figure 11.2 Core Edenic and Pentateuchal megaphors.

Rupturing the Doxa, Fracturing the Epistêmê, and Going beyond Intuition The celebrated riddle of the Sphinx in Greek mythology expresses a simple folk insight about human life’s predetermined, inevitable path from birth to old age, which Oedipus quickly surmises.121 The riddle doesn’t aim to impart

326  The Code-​text some vital new knowledge. In marked contrast, the bafflement provoked by the Pentateuch’s Eleventh Commandment is due to an epistemic-​cognitive chasm separating initiated priests from their would-​be interpreters: the cognitive enigma masquerading as an imperious order by a tyrannical ruler that otherwise makes no sense whatsoever is designed to challenge the mind. For those who take up the embedded challenge, it becomes at some point obvious that it is a conventional predilection that demands an automatic assumption of the unconscious conceptual metaphor claiming that “Knowledge is Good” (or “Knowledge is Power”). Is knowledge always good? What if it is false, incorrect, or fallacious knowledge? Granted, you would not call it knowledge in that case. Alas, however, vast majorities of human beings rely on just such knowledge to carry them through life’s vicissitudes and are convinced that it is the knowledge they possess that sustains them. Apart from psychologists who know just how predisposed humans are to err, philosophers have readily discerned at least the distinction between what has been called folk philosophy and philosophy proper. Greek philosophers have dubbed the former doxa, or the mere opinion-​based pseudoknowledge of the masses; true knowledge (gnôsis/​ epistêmê) belongs, according to Plato, only to philosophers. Yet, as already mentioned, most philosophers and thus their writings are also frequently under the sway of unconscious conceptual metaphors that render them flawed too. Spinoza has retained in his work (which was written in Latin) the sense of the Greek term doxa by calling it opinio: Like other rationalists, Spinoza distinguishes two representational faculties: the imagination and the intellect. The imagination is a faculty of forming imagistic representations of things, derived ultimately from the mechanisms of the senses; the intellect is a faculty of forming adequate, non-​imagistic conceptions of things. He also distinguishes three “kinds of knowledge.” The first or lowest kind he calls opinion or imagination (opinio, imaginatio). It includes “random or indeterminate experience” (experientia vaga) and also “hearsay, or knowledge from mere signs”; it thus depends on the confused and mutilated deliverances of the senses, and is inadequate.122 Spinoza goes on to assume the reality of two additional types of knowledge: The second kind of knowledge he calls reason (ratio); it depends on common notions (i.e., features of things that are “common to all, and equally in the part and in the whole”) or on adequate knowledge of the properties (as opposed to the essences) of things. The third kind of knowledge he calls intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva); it proceeds from adequate knowledge of the essence or attributes of God to knowledge of the essence of things, and hence proceeds in the proper order, from causes to effects. Both the second and the third kinds of knowledge are

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  327 adequate. The third kind is preferable, however, as involving not only certain knowledge that something is so, but also knowledge of how and why it is so.123 Spinoza’s knowledge taxonomy goes a crucial step beyond Greek epistêmê—​ the latter essentially corresponding to his ratio, the second kind of knowledge—​and posits the third, or intuitive knowledge (which is then taken up again by Bergson some two centuries later). However, we are not really told how one goes about achieving such knowledge. Bergson, as discussed earlier in this chapter, sees what Spinoza calls the second kind of knowledge, the knowledge of ratio, as being hardly adequate; rather, it is a veritable veil of Maya, the veil of illusion. As to the knowledge brought on by intuition, it is at that point unregimented, being emancipated from the symbolization and conditioning imposed by reason and language operating within the second kind of knowledge. Yet scientia intuitiva is not the final or ultimate knowledge level accessible by human beings. As this book has endeavored to highlight throughout its chapters, Pentateuchal logic requires a detection of an even more difficult, rarefied notion of a “representational faculty” included—​in potentia—​among the human cognizing capabilities. With a nod to the numerous meditative traditions in the history of humanity, I have designated the name for this mysterious and perplexing, often profoundly counterintuitive knowledge plane, as well as associated cognitive faculty, as “illumination.” This fourth kind of knowledge is not correlated with scientia intuitiva but rather—​at least in the ancient Hebraic initiatory tradition—​with what I have described as (borrowing the term from Rudolf Otto) the mysterium tremendum. If the doxastic knowledge relies on opinio and imaginatio, and the province of the intellect—​which, as per my taxonomy, includes such aspects as inspiration and intellection—​depends on ratio and logos, along with their attending symbolization, the scientia intuitiva of the third kind of knowledge hinges on the exceptional if inexplicable force of an intuitive, instantaneous grasp. In contrast to these three kinds of knowledge, illumination’s mysterium tremendum remains still more mysterious and as a result very rarely if ever admitted within the boundaries of what human consensus, whether of the doxastic variety or when testing the limits of philosophical tolerance for uncertainty as regards knowledge’s provenance, allows. As was detailed above, certainty, even if it is likely to be unsound, is more prized by human beings than a chance to access perhaps the highest and truest form of knowledge that is achievable, albeit conditionally and very rarely. Illuminative knowledge does not have readily available representational equivalences and means that would enable one possessing such knowledge to properly express it. Images fail; language, with its undesirable propensities discussed earlier, must not be used if one wishes to avoid the duplicitous unconscious conceptual metaphors language is saturated with, and likewise if one stresses about the tautological import of much of the reasoning’s

328  The Code-​text propositional activity (pointed out by Wittgenstein); finally, the intuitive breakthroughs sometimes resulting in spectacular solutions and breathtaking, idiosyncratic philosophical perspectives (as argued by Bergson) are simply inapplicable for capturing the knowledge-​sphere where the mysterium tremendum reigns. What if anything, then, can represent, or else present, this knowledge realm’s superior, unimaginable insights and comprehensions? The answer to this last question—​namely, how to represent the ostensibly unrepresentable fourth kind of knowledge, illumination—​is given by the ancient Israelite priests in their magnificent Torah, or Teaching, encapsulated above all in the Garden of Eden narrative. They have risen to the occasion by creating what this book calls the megaphor, including its multiplane, complex, compound constituent elements and multifaceted literary-​semiotic-​semantic-​ physiological (etc.) correspondences, correlations, and associations. Indeed, “megaphor” is the only possible answer, it would seem, given its enormous flexibility to engage, simultaneously, multiple and occasionally even mutually incongruous or odd, counterintuitive methods, channels, and other intellectual resources. A particularized example of this was offered, at the end of the preceding section, in the itemized list of the constitutive elements of the grand Edenic megaphor, “You are a Tree of Life.”

Notes 1 Simons, “Meaning and Language,” 123; Føllesdal, “Thetic Role of Consciousness,” 13. 2 Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, 156 (emphasis added). 3 Ogden and Richards, Meaning of Meaning, 191–​92. 4 Rastier, Meaning and Textuality, 146. 5 Eco, “On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language,” 84. 6 Reiner, Bion and Being, 58. 7 Borbely, “Metaphor and Psychoanalysis,” 416 (emphasis added). Borbely references Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science. 8 Kohav, “Introduction: Unutterable Experiences of Consciousness Alteration,” 2. 9 Paul J. Thibault, personal communication, 2010 (emphasis added). 10 Halliday, “On Matter and Meaning,” 200. 11 Ibid. 12 Bion, Cogitations, 371. 13 Lévi-​Strauss, Savage Mind, 252. 14 Halliday, “On Matter and Meaning,” 210–​11. 15 Freud apparently was fond of quoting Charcot’s quip that “theory is good, but it doesn’t stop things from existing.” Quoted in Reiner, Bion and Being, 126. 16 See Lévi-​Strauss, Savage Mind, 263. 17 Bergson, “Philosophical Intuition,” 104. 18 Kohav, “Introduction: Unutterable Experiences of Consciousness Alteration,” 2. 19 Bergson, “Philosophical Intuition,” 103.

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  329 20 Marion, Being Given, 189. 21 Max Scheler quoted in Steinbock, Phenomenology of Mysticism, 6. 22 Deacon, Symbolic Species, 21. 23 Ibid., 22. 24 Cassirer, Phenomenology of Knowledge, 36. 25 Ibid. (both quotes). 26 Ibid., 36–​37. 27 Goodenough, Psychology of Religious Experiences, 158. 28 Bertrand Russell, “Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell,” 20 December 1919, quoted in Nieli, Wittgenstein, vi. 29 Kohav, “Introduction: The Problem, Aporia, and Mysterium of Mysticism,” 16. 30 Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 2:45, quoted in McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning, 94. 31 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 217, quoted in McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning, 4. 32 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 154, quoted in McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning, 4. 33 See the entry “Understanding,” in Glock, Wittgenstein Dictionary, 372–​76. 34 Koch, “Neurobiology of Consciousness,” 1139 (emphasis added). 35 Ibid. (original emphasis). Michael Gazzaniga makes an additional distinction, between “levels” of consciousness and “layers” of consciousness: levels seem to be synonymous with “states” of consciousness, whereas layers refer to the brain’s layered architecture, different parts of which function in parallel (Gazzaniga, Consciousness Instinct, 112–​13). 36 Koch, “Neurobiology of Consciousness,” 1139 (original emphasis). 37 Ibid. (original emphasis). 38 The term “modalities of consciousness” is borrowed from Eliade, Yoga, 37. 39 Hunt, “Experiences of Radical Personal Transformation,” 376. Hunt references Fischer, “Cartography of Inner Space”; West, Hallucinations; Venables, “Selectivity of Attention, Withdrawal, and Cortical Activation”; and Silverman, “Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia.” 40 Kohav, “Introduction: Unutterable Experiences of Consciousness Alteration,” 9–​10. 41 Kohav, “Artist’s Afterword,” 256. 42 Freeman, “Is Iconicity Literal?,” 69. 43 Eliade, Yoga, 99 (original emphasis). 44 Ibid., 37. Enstasis stands for “contemplation of one’s own self ” (per Wiktionary). According to another source, Enstasis means a “standing within.” It can be contrasted with dis-​stasis (non-​ standing). It can also be contrasted with ecstasy or ec-​stasis (a standing out of). The word “enstasis” is normally attributed to Mircea Eliade, who used the word in his 1954 book on yoga to describe yogic samadhi. (J. Glenn Friesen, “Enstasis,” accessed 4 July 2021, https://​jgfrie​sen. wordpr​ess.com/​gloss​ary/​ensta​sis/​) 45 Eliade, Yoga, 171–​72. 46 Ibid., 73 (original emphasis).

330  The Code-​text 47 As I have noted in Kohav, “Introduction: Unutterable Experiences of Consciousness Alteration,” intuition is a multidenotational, multifarious, and multifaceted complex notion that, like “instinct,” “intelligence,” or “knowledge,” has taken sometimes very different meanings in philosophies of thinkers who employ it. For example, Charles Peirce’s usage of it pertains to perception, whereas Bergson is identifying what he calls philosophical intuition. The latter correlates with “immediate knowledge. Often used as a synonym for intuitive knowledge; knowledge unmediated by any factors (for example, signs)” (Colapietro, Glossary of Semiotics, 117). 48 Caygill, Kant Dictionary, 301–​2. 49 Ibid., 302. 50 “Noumena,” Free Dictionary, www.thefre​edic​tion​ary.com/​noum​ena. 51 Eliade, Yoga, 43. 52 A well-​known rabbinical midrash that has Moses learning in a heavenly academy from the leading rabbis is an example of wishful thinking. 53 Eliade, Yoga, 36. 54 Ibid., 100. 55 Ibid., 339–​40. 56 Ibid., 268. 57 Ibid., 85–​90, 95. 58 J. White, Kundalini, Evolution and Enlightenment, 17. 59 In Buddhism, a religion also originating in India, the self is seen as being illusory. 60 Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili, Brain, Symbol and Experience, 319. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 322 (original emphasis). 63 Grotstein, Beam of Intense Darkness, 115. 64 Ibid. (original emphasis). 65 Ibid., 123 (original emphasis). 66 Ibid., 117. 67 Bion, Transformations, 159–​60. 68 Grotstein, Beam of Intense Darkness, 2. 69 Bion, Transformations, 147. 70 Ibid., 148. 71 Ramsey quoted in Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, 20. 72 Reiner, Bion and Being, 47. 73 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 8 (original emphasis). 74 Ibid., 11 (original emphasis). 75 Ibid., 17. 76 Ibid. (original emphasis). 77 Ibid., 18 (original emphasis). 78 A rather startling, but telling, distinction between (some) pathological states of consciousness and the healthy but altered ones is the “desymbolized thinking/​ experience” of the former—​a “breakdown in metaphorical thinking [that] is one form of what we call ‘concrete’ ” (Frosch, introduction to Absolute Truth and Unbearable Psychic Pain, xix). 79 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 70. 80 Ibid., 70–​71. 81 Ibid., 71. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 72 (original emphasis).

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  331 84 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus even insists, (in)famously, that logic consists of mere tautologies and that the bulk of philosophy merely offers us that which are always already foregone conclusions in the premises of a particular thesis. See Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, 49–​51. 85 Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek. Andrea Moro, noting that “in addition to the sign of tense and the sign of affirmation, there is now the idea … that the verb to be is also an expression of identity, not to mention that some see in this verb a predicate of existence,” claims that in Hebrew, like in some other languages, “the verb to be doesn’t exist: its function is realized by a pronoun that isn’t always required” (Moro, Brief History of the Verb “To Be,” 55, 169; original emphasis). As Moro himself explains, however, this applies exclusively when “the verb to be only performs the role of providing a landing site for movement of the predicate” (169) or as an expression of identity. As a sign of tense, as well as a predicate of existence—​crucially—​Hebrew is happy to oblige with no less than several possibilities. 86 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 17. 87 Ibid., 21. 88 Ibid., 281. 89 Ibid., 279. 90 Ibid., 309. 91 Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 3. 92 Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 511. 93 Miller, “Two Allegories,” 356. 94 Sinding, “Assembling Spaces,” 519n16. 95 Thibodeau and Boroditsky, “Metaphors We Think With,” 9. 96 Ibid., 10. 97 Ibid. 98 See Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. 99 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 244. 100 Mark Johnson and Don Tucker speak of the evidence for the embodiment of mind, thought, and language that has emerged over the past four decades, within what is known as embodied cognition theory. Much of this evidence comes from cognitive linguistics, which investigates how meaning, thought, and language arise from sensory, motor, and affective processes. This body-​based meaning is then recruited for abstract thought via conceptual metaphors. (Johnson and Tucker, Out of the Cave, 15) 101 That the Eleventh Commandment’s prohibition is not about morality is pointed out by Gilles Deleuze in his book on Spinoza: “Because Adam is ignorant of causes, he thinks that God morally forbids him something, whereas God only reveals the natural consequence of ingesting the fruit” (Deleuze, Spinoza, 22). While the point made is on target—​even if the origin of the idea that “God morally forbids him something” is likely tied to the name of the tree in question, that is, the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”—​Deleuze does not explain that the “fruit” in question is a lower grade of knowledge. 102 The “goddess Kundalini,” as discussed in ­chapter 9, is a putative bioforce envisioned as a “serpent” as well as a divinity that rises from the bottom of one’s

332  The Code-​text spine toward the top of one’s head. This phenomenon is typically described as the very essence of spirituality, in a conceptualization of spirituality that is fundamentally at odds with Christian and rabbinical Judaism’s notions of a belief-​, text-​, and prayer-​based sense of the spiritual. Yet it seems that such a notion of psychosomatically attained spiritual states of consciousness is congruent with ancient Israelite ideas on this subject—​existing, all-​important differences between the two ancient civilizations, Israel and India, and their respective aims, and crucially in interpretations of the effects of this psychosomatic bioforce—​notwithstanding. 103 The reference is to J. White, Kundalini, Evolution and Enlightenment, 17. 1 04 Why would YHWH, the “God of heaven and earth,” need to “have war with Amalek from generation to generation”? Who, or what, is Amalek, pictured as a warrior tribe in the Sinai? Medieval Kabbalists have long associated Amalek with doubt; both Amalek and ‫ספק‬, “to doubt,” carry the same numerical values of 240 (Haralick, Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, 75–​76). Regarding Gematria, or Hebraic letter-​based esoteric numerology, we have once again a misjudgment by the otherwise frequently indispensable Harold Bloom: The techniques of Gematria were a kind of parody of the sometimes sublime Kabbalistic exaltation of language, and of the arts of interpretation. For Gematria is interpretive freedom gone mad, in which any text can be made to mean anything. But its prevalence was itself a mark of desperation that underlay much of Kabbalah. (Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, 46) Having acknowledged that “all Kabbalistic theories of emanation are also theories of language” (25), perhaps via the impact of Sefer Yetzirah’s overwhelming preoccupation with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Bloom fails to note—​ given that language consists of sentences, sentences consist of words, words consist of letters, letters are sounds, and sounds are vibrations—​that vibrations can be measured numerically. Curiously, because of his stance in this case, Bloom fails to recognize Amalek as a trope, specifically, a reified personification of “doubt”—​which clarifies why YHWH promises to fight forever “Amalek,” which is otherwise ostensibly a mere desert tribe. 105 See, for example, Exodus 17:7–​16. 106 Kövecses, Palmer, and Dirven, “Language and Emotion,” 134. 107 Gregory Bateson, in a dialogue with his daughter apropos of this passage, states that it is about “not sexuality but self-​consciousness. Remember, after eating the apple Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness” (Bateson and Bateson, Angels Fear, 101). 108 Bermúdez, Paradox of Self-​ Consciousness; Gallagher and Shear, Models of the Self. 109 Perspectival alterations of the self are empirically distinguishable from one another. See Vogeley et al., “Mind Reading”; Vogeley and Fink, “Neural Correlates of the First-​ Person-​ Perspective”; and Vogeley et al., “Essential Functions of the Human Self Model.” If the first-​person perspective (1PP, phenomenal level) is related to the brain’s left hemisphere, the egocentric point of view (cognitive level) relates to its right hemisphere. Vogeley and Fink, “Neural Correlates of the First-​Person-​Perspective.” Likewise, 3PP (allocentric) and 2PP (“theory-​of-​mind”) entail right-​hemispheric activity.

In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis  333 110 Forman, Problem of Pure Consciousness. See, however, Merkur, review of Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, by Forman; and Shear and Jevning, “Pure Consciousness.” 111 See Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah, 278. 112 Sheldon Isenberg expresses a similar notion: “A key hermeneutical question for any ideal is the level of consciousness, or the paradigm of reality, from which it emerges and in which it is embedded” (Isenberg, “Ideals, Pseudo-​Ideals and the Evolution of Consciousness,” 100). Isenberg and Gene Thursby also argue that “the transcendence available in traditional cultures was not merely the gift or sacrifice of the individual for the community of individuals. Transcendence was also a matter of ontological and epistemological levels. One of the results of the belief in a materialist cosmology is that ultimately all existents occupy one ontic level. In traditional cultures, on the other hand, reality was experienced as multi-​ leveled” (Isenberg and Thursby, “Esoteric Anthropology,” 189). 113 Fernandez, “Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture,” 120. 114 Peirce, “Questions concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” 30. 115 Ibid., 33. 116 Fernandez, “Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture,” 122. 117 Ibid., 125. 118 As cited in ­chapter 10, topification is “translation of an abstraction into a geographical locus” (Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 43). 119 “Giving animal traits or characteristics to people or non-​living objects.” www. urba​ndic​tion​ary.com/​def​i ne.php?term=​Animif​i cat​ion 120 For an extensive discussion of Pentateuchal metalepsis, see ­chapter 10. 121 The riddle asks what creature walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening. Oedipus’s response was that it is man, who crawls as an infant, walks upright when grown, and uses a cane when old. 122 Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, s.v. “Spinoza, Baruch,” 1016. 123 Ibid. (original emphasis).

Postscript: The HORS-​TEXTE Are We Greeks? Are We Jews? Fast-​Forward to Today

Earning the Right of Closure: Does the Recovered Sôd Stratum Represent Closure for the Text of the Pentateuch? It may seem peculiar that someone who strenuously advocated the use of delayed and “much-​much delayed” conceptualizations—​as difficult or sometimes even as psychologically painful as the latter may be, due to the uncertainty and the accompanying tension this may engender—​would then assert that his own study of a most complex, multivalent, and multicivilizational, paradigmatically central text represents a closure vis-​à-​vis this text, with all that such a claim entails. My point throughout, however, has been that the deferred categorization is essential when attempting to solve a difficult, far from obvious problem or question, not that one can never arrive at a solution. The latter is the position of postmodernism, an approach I emphatically eschew due to its endless, intrinsic fallacies and sheer speciousness. For example, as Roland Barthes has declared: Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. … [By contrast,] in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, “run” (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.1 I certainly agree with what this passage contrasts. Yet Barthes advocates that which I oppose, namely, the “killing off the author” (as I put it in Chapter 5). This indeed leads, in the case of the Pentateuch at least, to all kinds of “ceaselessly posit[ed] meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it,” as Barthes breathlessly affirms, including the precious patrimonial, national-​spiritual meaning that was intended by our text’s authors for a transmission to us—​both their direct descendants and implicitly to all humanity. As regards this cross-​generational,

Postscript: The Hors-​texte  335 millennia-​spanning communication, the present writer can state, with Tomoko Masuzawa, that “I have situated myself as the latest receiver of this transmission, the last in line for the moment, insofar as I have the task at hand of closing the text. … Let me announce quickly, with a phrase lifted from Lévi-​ Strauss, ‘Today we can, perhaps, perceive better.’ ”2 Hayden White describes the process that earns one the right of closure as follows: Considered as a genre … discourse must be analyzed on three levels: that of the description (mimesis) of the “data” found in the field of inquiry being invested or marked out for analysis; that of the argument or narrative (diegesis), running alongside of or interspersed with the descriptive materials; and that on which the combination of these previous two levels is effected (diataxis). The rules which crystallize on this last, or diatactical, level of discourse determine possible objects of discourse, the ways in which description and argument are to be combined, the phases through which the discourse must pass in the process of earning its right of closure, and the modality of the metalogic used to link up the conclusion of the discourse with its inaugurating gestures.3 This study has been conducted largely at the diatactical level of discourse, following “the modality of the metalogic used to link up the conclusion of the discourse with its inaugurating gestures.” Still, one may legitimately wonder whether claiming closure vis-​à-​vis the Pentateuchal text implies that no one will ever be able to give another, and perhaps more correct or more germane explanation, to those textual fissures and incongruities that this study has utilized in developing its research framework and its conclusions. The research presented in this book is falsifiable, that is, it is certainly conceivable that another approach building upon a different theory might indicate that the present study is either incorrect for some yet unknown reason, is incomplete, or is of lesser importance than that newer theory. In that case, my claim of closure would have to be rescinded or voided. Then why entertain the notion of closure vis-​à-​vis the Pentateuchal text at all? The answer must be that the present study has changed, in effect, the paradigmatic view of the text in question, broadening its contexts and utilizing or developing a number of supporting tools and textual markers (such as, for example, markedness) that were not engaged previously or not to the same extent as in this study. If another research can reverse or annul or subsume or supersede the present study, it would have to, at the very least, plausibly account for the same textual markers in a different way.

Open Access to Information versus Limits and Liminality In his sweeping survey of humanity’s literary history of “forbidden knowledge,” the literary critic Roger Shattuck states, at the outset, the following:

336  Postscript: The Hors-​texte In matters of the mind and its representations, Western thinkers and institutions increasingly reject limits of any kind as unfounded and stultifying. We have outgrown the need to punish heresy and blasphemy. Both scientific research and the worlds of art and entertainment rely on an unspoken assumption that total freedom in exchanging symbolic products of mind need not adversely affect the domain of daily living and may well enhance it.4 Then, halfway through his book, Shattuck restates this observation: Open knowledge as a modern achievement appears to have left behind the tradition of esoteric knowledge only for initiates. Today, the principle of open knowledge and the free circulation of all goods and ideas have established themselves so firmly in the West that any reservations on that score are usually seen as politically and intellectually reactionary.5 It does not really matter whether Shattuck himself agrees with and condones such widespread views. What is more relevant in terms of the present study is that he captures in the above two passages the gist of the (post)modern Western sensibility that fully expects, whether on behalf of a busy suburban mother or a no-​less-​preoccupied academic, to say nothing of corporate managers and other personnel, to have the worlds’ “secrets” available at any time, in neat paperbacks delivered to one’s home, preferably in one or two days, say by Amazon.com. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech, coupled with a consumer-​paradise state of mind, are conflated with an expectation of “open access” to the world’s most precious esoteric and initiatory knowledge. What remains altogether unappreciated, for example, is that—​wholly counterintuitively—​it is precisely the notion, and imposition, of limits that begins offering access to such knowledge, by starting a would-​be initiate on a journey of transformation, not a journey in search of knowledge or “information.”6 The “free circulation of all goods and ideas” and “exchanging symbolic products of mind” will never make anyone an insider to any tradition, save the tradition of the Western liberal marketplace of goods and services. One is not in any danger of experiencing the predicament of, for example, Lévi-​Strauss, described in his book Tristes tropiques (1955). As Shattuck relates it: Having devoted five years to fieldwork among isolated Indians in Brazil, [Lévi-​Strauss] finds himself the victim of a “mental disorder.” He has become lost, suspended between two cultures. Insofar as he has entered, as ethnographer, into the Indian culture he is studying, he has lost track of his own culture and of the hard-​earned scientific disciplines that led him to this enterprise. Insofar as he remains detached from the culture under study, he lacks essential connections with it that would permit full understanding. Lévi-​Strauss’ final pages develop a crescendo of tragic

Postscript: The Hors-​texte  337 meditation over his double bind. “There is no way out of the dilemma.” His “sin” is to be bound to two cultures, and, therefore, to none.7 With regard to Lévi-​Strauss himself, it is of course ironic that the very person who used the “dilemma,” or dichotomy, as a cornerstone of his structuralist approach based on binary oppositions that became influential in a number of fields could not extricate himself, at least at the time of his writing about it, from the “abyss,” as he put it, of a liminal no-​man’s land. After the desert wanderings in such a state, who knows? He may have had a revelation in store for him, as well as a “conquest” or acquisition of a transformed consciousness. The market-​driven, libertarian demand for the free circulation of goods and ideas does not necessarily bring with it enlightenment, however much these are conflated. In her timely and disturbing book, Victoria Nelson traces a curious and by now widespread phenomenon, one that can only be labeled, in terms of the concerns of the present book, especially its discussion of ancient Egypt in Chapter 1, as “the return of magical consciousness”: Shakespeare’s worldview of the Renaissance—​the worldview that holds there is another, invisible world besides this one, that our world of the senses is ruled by this other world through signs and portents, that good and evil are physically embodied in our immediate environment—​is alive and well today in science fiction and supernatural horror films that build on a three-​hundred-​year tradition of the secularized supernatural and behind that on the millennia-​old beliefs Western culture shares with older societies around the world.8 Nelson goes on to explain that a “subtle paradigm shift … is now under way: Western culture is on the verge of adjusting its dominant Aristotelian mode of scientific materialism to allow for the partial reemergence of Platonic idealism.”9 Specifically: In the current Aristotelian age the transcendental [sic] has been forced underground, where it has found a distorted outlet outside the recognized boundaries of religious expression. As members of a secular society in which the cult of art has supplanted scripture and direct revelation, we turn to works of the imagination to learn how our living desire to believe in a transcendent reality has survived outside our conscious awareness. We can locate our repressed religious impulses by looking at the supernatural in fantastic novels and films. … We can locate our unacknowledged belief in the immortal soul by looking at the ways that human simulacra—​puppets, cyborgs and robots—​carry on their role as direct descendants of graven images.10 While the reference to “Platonic idealism” in this context is misplaced, the ever-​ present yearning for a magical worldview—​as well as for “the divinization of

338  Postscript: The Hors-​texte the human”—​is precisely what the “Mosaic distinction” discussed throughout this study revolted against.11 After two millennia of rabbinical Judaism, which itself has been saturated with magical fantasies extending to its very theology, it is hard to appreciate the fact that the foundational or biblical Israelite religion was uniquely, strenuously, and dramatically opposed to superstition, idolatry, or magic.12 At the same time, it also hardly tolerated “transcendence.”13 It is not “Platonic idealism” that is reemerging today; rather, it is the ancient Egyptian magical worldview, which in its heyday involved reification of the cosmos and the gods with literally living symbols—​such as the crocodile, as noted in Chapter 3. This neo-​Egyptian magical realism is mixed with a neo-​Mesopotamian superstitious paganism that vivifies and reifies reality with an invisible array of forces. Such a crudely articulated but persistent worldview, encountered today not only in popular cinema and literature but also, at times, in today’s religions, endows both inanimate objects and a variety of “spirits” with sentience, significance, and reality.

Are We Greeks? Are We Jews? But Who Are We? “We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history … that is, in hypocrisy,” says the ever pithy Derrida: Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history. We live in and of difference, that is, in hypocrisy. … Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who are we? Are we (not a chronological, but a prelogical question) first Jews or first Greeks? … To what horizon of peace does the language which asks this question belong? From whence does it draw the energy of its question? Can it account for the historical coupling of Judaism and Hellenism? And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet?”14 The reference “the most Hegelian of modern novelists” is to James Joyce. But who are the Greeks that are meant here? Surely not the friendly but today hardly instrumental people living on the shores of the Aegean and the Mediterranean Seas and speaking the language in question. Is the Jew today represented by magic-​enthused, neo-​Babylonian adherents of certain ultra-​Orthodox sects? Or, at the other extreme and by the far more ubiquitous, turned-​on ersatz Jew motivated by tiqûn ôlām (“mending the world”) fervor, whose simulacrum of a religion is to do good in the world? That “doing good in the world” or “mending the world” may be a harmful or at least unhelpful thing remains spectacularly misapprehended in Jewish circles in general, even though, since times of yore and in many languages of the world, it has been disdainfully captured in the folk wisdom about good intentions paving the road to hell.

Postscript: The Hors-​texte  339 The inimitable James Joyce’s “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet?” reflects a valid concern, perhaps even a worry. Anyone whose intellect had been forged in fires raging between extremes would worry about all minds becoming neutered and developing a sterilized, plain-​vanilla flavor. Derrida’s disconcerting maxim, too, about the difference between the Jew and the Greek and us living in and of this difference—​which he equals with hypocrisy—​is astutely insightful in its structure; only the specifics of the drawn parallel, it seems, are misidentified in this case. The insight is valuable, regardless, since it focuses on possibly the single most consequential and forever critical issue: identity. We Jews can never be Greeks, not even today; instead, we are condemned to live in and of the difference between the subconscious echo of resplendent ancient priestly adepts of Israel’s God, on the one hand, and their present-​day manic caricatures, on the other. In light of this study’s findings (and still paraphrasing Derrida), this is, then, hardly a unity in what is called Jewish history. An instance of a scandalous, deeply revealing illustration of the self-​ conscious mental corrosion of countless Jewish intellectuals could serve to reinforce and magnify this picture. Anyone who hasn’t followed the unwholesome fascination Jewish cognoscenti have had with Heidegger, the “man [who] was a devil,” as Sir Karl Popper put it, has missed a most revealing opportunity to examine what the Jewish psyche has been reduced to, ever since it unshackled the rabbinical mind-​cuffs in the last century.15 Among the long list of Jewish thinkers who were compelled to engage with Heidegger (often critically, yes, but engaged nonetheless and apparently enthralled) were Levinas, Buber, Leo Strauss, Heschel, and Hans Jonas, to name a few from among the addicts: The German philosopher influenced an astonishingly wide array of twentieth-​century Jewish philosophers, theologians, and scholars. Some were actually students of Heidegger. Another distinguished Jewish student of Heidegger, Hans Jonas, would later describe their relation to their teacher as unhealthy, something like the relationship to the Lubavitcher [Rebbe], such as if Heidegger was a tsaddik, a miracle-​working rabbi, or a guru.16 The Jewish literati’s fascination with a philosopher who not merely embraced Nazism but introduced it into philosophy has been both refocused today and spread to non-​European areas of the world: “The Jewish Heideggerian temptation remains alive and well in the twenty-​first century. To be sure, its proponents are no longer European but rather Anglo-​American and Israeli thinkers. … Yet unlike their twentieth-​century counterparts, they do not write in opposition to Heidegger or in order to supplement his thought in distinctly Judaic ways.”17 Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? Are we Germans? But who are we? “We”—​ we are ready to embrace any dimwitted demagogue, and the worse, the better. We cling to the “bettering-​the-​world” sanctimonious fantasy, all the

340  Postscript: The Hors-​texte while drifting in our own malfunctioning diasporic ship, an almost sinking and inexorably melting-​away carcass of a vessel. Battling who knows what psychopathological chimeras, we just know the way to humankind’s social-​ engineered Promised Land, all the while missing out on either the physical Promised Land’s promise or the promise of the exalted, supreme consciousness that alone guarantees an authentic life’s intimate bond with the God of Israel. The tiqûn ôlām pseudo-​religious credo—​the repairing-​the-​world presumptuous, know-​it-​all mania—​blatantly and persistently flouts the Eleventh Commandment investigated in this book. The transgression in question, as set out in the Garden of Eden’s tragic but reflective of human life’s inexorable psychomental drama, is punishable by “death”—​starting with the death of one’s will for self-​preservation and capacity for discrimination. I will close with Mark Twain’s haunting words, written to the Congress of the United States sometime after his 1867 trip to the Holy Land, petitioning for a physical memorial for the biblical Adam: Mr. Darwin had left Adam out altogether. We had monkeys, and “missing links,” and plenty of other kinds of ancestors, but no Adam. … I said there seemed to be a likelihood that the world would discard Adam and accept the monkey, and that in the course of time Adam’s very name would be forgotten in the earth; therefore this calamity ought to be averted; a monument would accomplish this.18 Humanity at large, and certainly the majority of today’s Jewish people, have been dazzled by the promise of science and “progress,” what with the monkey and all, and have thereby become fully “Greek.” In the whimsical “diaries” of Adam and Eve that are vintage Mark Twain, Eve is described (by Adam) as “born scientific,” a conclusion he reaches because of her hankering for “demonstrations.”19 Adam goes on to say: She has been climbing that tree again. She said nobody was looking. Seems to consider that a sufficient justification for chancing any dangerous thing. Told her that. The word justification moved her admiration—​and envy, too, I thought. It is a good word. I advised her to keep away from the tree. She said she wouldn’t. I foresee trouble. Will emigrate.20 Yes, we all will have to keep emigrating. We keep assuming that no one is looking.

The Study’s Implications According to this book’s thesis, the Pentateuchal text’s dual-​channel narratives—​ one highly visible, the other embedded, concealed, and targeted to an exclusive recipient—​were purposely constructed to jointly work this text’s literary

Postscript: The Hors-​texte  341 magic and carry out its authors’ wishes. What significance is a study such as the one presented in this book likely to have? It succeeds in foregrounding the embedded secret stratum in a manner that is not only consistent and congruent with the text itself but also with the latest developments in cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and cognitive poetics. The ubiquitous term cognitive, it would seem, as well as what it represents, is shaking up numerous disciplines, among them religious studies, anthropology, and literary studies. This new cognitive paradigm falsifies several former approaches that, it now becomes clear, perhaps even more conclusively, are inadequate and, in the end, incoherent despite their typically self-​evident, commonsensical flavoring. Here belong such schemes as (1) the New Historicism, the final phase of the larger historicist program that still holds biblical studies in its deadly embrace; (2) reader-​response criticism, whose false premise is laid bare by semiotics, an approach that is complementary to the cognitive one; and finally (3) postmodernism, whose license is wildly untenable. This study, therefore, can serve as an example, perhaps even as a paradigmatic case of presenting a foremost text of the Western world, with regard to which all such fallacious approaches can only impotently grind their ideologically laden teeth; they can never hope to discover or substantiate this text’s raison-​d’être. More specifically, as well as more broadly, this study’s findings may necessitate significant reevaluations in a number of fields. Foremost among them are, logically, biblical studies and religious studies, where a critical misjudgment pertaining, in both cases, to their principal subject—​the Hebrew Bible, as well as “religion” as a domain, respectively—​must be recognized and addressed. To a lesser but considerable extent, a reexamination or adjustment of existing models is also probable in such areas as the anthropology of religion and linguistic anthropology, psychology of religion, literary studies, and communication studies. As regards the Pentateuch, or the Torah as “the Teaching,” it now attains a more specific as well as more meaningful import. The teaching in question involves the ancient initiation into the Hebraic-​Israelite cultic worship of YHWH, the God of Israel. Today, some three millennia later, the questions that this study raises—​given that it has succeeded in uncovering a precious, singular message communicated to both the Jewish people and humanity at large, communicated across the chasm of time, space, and the multifarious, desperate, not-​ infrequently-​ despicable, yet occasionally awesome human search for meaning that we call history—​might be rendered via the following ruminations: (1) Can the highest-​scalar-​imaginable conception still evoke a mysterium tremendum-​type of awe in human beings, debased as we are by our progress that, alas, has failed to secure us either peace or happiness? (2) Can the transformation or alteration of consciousness indicated in the ancient Israelite inner-​core mystical-​initiatory tradition be attained by a modern, or even a postmodern, human being?

342  Postscript: The Hors-​texte (3) Framing it differently, what, if any, is the communicated information’s intent vis-​à-​vis us, the people of the twenty-​first century CE? These questions, for obvious reasons of the book’s scope and size, cannot be addressed here. Yet they indicate an auspicious range of implications engendered by the present text.

Notes

1 Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 1469. 2 Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime, 57. 3 White, Tropics of Discourse, 4–​5 (emphasis added). 4 Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, 5. 5 Ibid., 167. 6 In the Jewish tradition, for example, the paramount notion of the Sabbath observance abounds with restrictions and limitations on what one can and cannot do on that day. It is the very restrictions that generate the sense of specialness, including “holiness,” by separating one from the accustomed experiences of space, time, and relations with the outside world. Such restrictions carrying the divine sanction lead to altered states of consciousness, albeit not of an exceedingly advanced nature as in the ancient priestly praxis, and thus to new perspectives and visions of reality. 7 Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, 333. 8 Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets, vii. 9 Ibid., viii. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., ix (“divinization of the human” quote). 12 With regard to magical fantasies extending to rabbinical Judaism’s very theology, I have in mind here primarily the ultra-​Orthodox and especially the Hasidic varieties of Judaism today, where fantastic, magical expectations, for example apropos of the future, or Third, Jerusalem Temple coming down from heaven—​when the Messiah arrives—​already fully built, are commonplace. 13 This last will surely come as a surprise to many readers, yet the fact remains that the Pentateuch and the Hebrew Bible as a whole do not indulge in speculations about the “other world” and consistently as well as insistently oppose such associated phenomena as ghosts, communications with the dead, or fortune-​telling. 14 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 153. 15 Quoted in Aschheim, “Fatal Attraction,” 33. 16 Ibid. 17 Aschheim, “Fatal Attraction,” 36. On Heidegger’s insertion of Nazism into philosophy, see Faye, Heidegger. 18 Twain, Diaries of Adam and Eve, 7. 19 Ibid., 59. 20 Ibid., 62.

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Index

Note: Figures are indicated by italics. Tables are indicated by bold. Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by ‘n’ and the endnote number e.g., 20n1 refers to endnote 1 on page 20. aberrant coding and interpretation of text 50 Abimelek 124, 129, 195, 196–​7, 199, 209n59 Abraham 63, 124, 129, 139–​40n52, 277; and Abimelek 195, 197; and God 211; and Isaac 199; and the Promised Land 186–​7, 190–​1, 217; and Sarah 138n22 Abraham (Rosenberg) 191 Abram 188, 189; and journey as initiation 217–​18, 219 Absolute Other in numinous mystical experience 74, 78–​9 abstract thought and figuration 269, 285 Adam and Eve 47–​9, 321–​2, 340; and consciousness 319–​20; and the sacred world 103 Adam Kadmon 242–​3, 250–​1n8 Affective World 303, 305, 312, 313, 316 agents and agency 98–​9 Ahearn, Laura 98 Akhenaten 34n7 Alexandrov, Vladimir 162 allegory 32, 128, 148, 212, 219–​20, 316; and allegoresis 36n39, 55, 99; and concealment and disclosure 126; and Hebrew scripture 11–​12, 33; and mysticism 216; and the Promised Land 230n31; and symbol 28–​9, 31, 125 alphabet-​based communication 26–​7, 36n40 Alter, Robert 282 Amalek 257–​8n44, 332n104 analysis and language 298

Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred (Bateson and Bateson) 37n51, 332n107 Anttonen, Veikko 127–​8 d’Aquili, Eugene G. 307 archaeology and biblical narratives 6 archaeology of knowledge (Foucault) 99 Ark of the Covenant xxx Arndt, Horst 26–​7 Art of Biblical Narrative (Alter) 282 Assmann, Jan 6, 16n29, 23, 208n53; and Egypt and Israel 22; and Egyptian religion 34n7, 39n66, 63–​5; and hieroglyphs 28–​9, 31–​2, 36n32; and iconoclasm 24–​5; and idolatry 26, 27 asymmetric noetic parallelism xxii, 133, 136–​7, 225, 246, 267, 278–​80, 284–​5 Avalon, Arthur 242 ayahuasca 261n59 Baars, Bernard 52, 72–​4, 88, 153 Babylonian exile 94, 109n36, 134, 235 Bachelard, Gaston 96 Barthes, Roland 45, 59n12, 98, 119, 276, 334 Bateson, Gregory 37n51, 332n107 Bazerman, Charles 175 Beersheba 123, 129, 197, 222, 242, 256n43; see also seven wells being 250n3 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 42 Being-​Itself 311–​13 Bělî MaH 237–​40 Benjamin 245, 258n45, 277 Bergson, Henri 7, 297–​8, 299–​300

Index  373 Berkeley, Bishop George xv, xxviii Berlin, Adele 140n54 Bethel narrative and space 282 biblical geography 290n5 biblical religion 68, 71 biblical studies 13n11, 14n16; and conclusions of this study 340–​1; and contextual reading 149; and historical-​critical approach 103, 111n72; and history 24; and reductionism 90 Bion, Wilfred 297, 308–​9 Black Fire on White Fire (Rojtman) 69 Blanchot, Maurice xvi, 1, 10 Bloom, Harold 1, 48, 59n12, 259–​60n53, 286; on Gematria 332n104; on Jacob 200; on the Pentateuch 135; on primal scenes 45–​6, 53; on the Torah 111n69 Boman, Thorleif 313, 331n85 Book, the and God xxix–​xxxi Book of J, The (Bloom) 135 Borbely, Antal 294–​5 Bouissac, Paul 155, 156, 168n32 Bowker, John 19 Breaking the Frame (Malina) 292n70, 292n82 Brisard, Frank 147, 148, 160, 168n34 Brown, Jeannine 109n26 Buber, Martin 339 Buddhist mysticism 78 Bühler, Karl 159, 161, 165 Burkert, Walter 14n17, 84n54 Cahill, Thomas 187, 188, 217 Call Adonoi (Schutz) 256n34 Callender, Dexter E. 103 Canaan 208n53, 211, 224, 227–​8n11, 229n21 Canaanite and non-​Israelite 208n53 Cassirer, Ernst 299–​300 caste system of hereditary priesthood 9–​10; and history 13n10 Caygill, Howard 305 chakras 123–​4, 166n8, 238, 241–​6, 249, 255n33; and Gerar 222; and the seven wells 123–​4, 166n8, 235, 259n48, 277, 278, 280, 283, 286; and the Tree of Life 236, 256n34 Chalmers, Margaret 285 Chatman, Seymour 213 Chekhov, Anton 88 Chomsky, Noam 15n26, 270 chosen people and higher-​scalar constraints 8–​9

Christian mysticism 78 Christianity 3, 8, 55 Clancey, William 91 cognitive boundary and the sacred 124–​9 cognitive linguistics 54, 176, 210, 227n1 cognitive poetics 88, 96, 175–​6, 210 Cognitive Poetics (Stockwell) 169n52, 204–​5n18 cognitive restructuring and mystical experience 78–​9 cognitive-​deictic pointers of the noetic-​ conferential continuum 180, 181–​203, 201, 210, 211–​12 Cohen, Ted 269 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 28, 31, 37n43 Commentary on the Torah (Friedman) 58n3, 138n16, 138n22, 195, 196–​7, 256n43, 257–​8n44, 260n57 communication: and asymmetric noetic parallelism 137; and concealed axis 106–​7; and factors and functions of a text 115–​16, 115; and meaning 75–​6, 293–​4; and mimesis 111n71; and presentation or representation 102–​4; and referential structure 32–​3; and structural axes in esoteric works 107, 111–​12n73; and symbols 321; and two-​channel texts 74–​5 Communication, Scene of xvii, 41, 49–​50 community and communication 46, 65, 74, 76–​7, 79, 80 Community of Israel and Elohim 183–​4, 186 concealed communication axis in esoteric texts 106–​7, 107 conceptual-​cognitive-​noetic barrier 221 Conceptualizing Words for God within the Pentateuch (Wardlaw) 207n45 conferentiality 152, 157 consciousness, altered states of 303, 341; and Abram’s journey 217–​18; and the chakras 244–​5, 286; and ergotropic-​trophotropic events 307; and the “great shout” 278; and the human body 223; and the ineffable 271; and the Ineffable World 311; and initiation 219; and Jacob’s marriages 248; and mystical experience 266; and mysticism 215; and “not-​I” 323; and physiological processes 160, 206n34, 222; and the Promised Land 124, 128–​9, 139–​40n52, 216, 222–​3; and

374 Index the seven wells of Beersheba 246; and the Sôd stratum 179; and their effects 252–​3n19; and Wittgenstein 301 consciousness, levels of 295, 302–​3, 329n35, 333n112 consciousness, modalities of 303–​6 consciousness and illusion 308–​9 content-​communicative locators 163, 165; and the noematic-​conferential continuum 214–​26, 226 context-​dependent factors 52 contexts of the Sôd stratum 117, 150, 152, 160, 165; s-​object 226, 248; s-​setting 163, 164–​5, 180, 201; s-​topic 226 context-​sensitive linguistics 154 contextual fixedness 153 contextual function 151 contextualizing experience and esoteric communication 72–​3 continuum of meanings 296 continuums and the Sôd’s second-​ channel narrative 113–​18, 114, 117 Coogan, Michael David 192 cosmotheism xvii, 16n29, 29–​30, 38n52, 38n55 Craig, Robert 104 Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Burkert) 84n54 Cross, Frank Moore 33n6, 139n35 cuneiform and hieroglyphics 35n25 customized noetic-​literary textual analysis 175–​7 David dancing before the Lord xxx Deacon, Terrence 299 “death of the author” 45, 59n12, 98, 334 DeConick, April 215 deferentiality 152, 156, 157–​8 deictic center, concealed 161–​2, 178 Deictic Center (DC) theory 160–​1, 163 deictic competency 156 deictic components xx–​xxi, 159, 161–​3, 179, 201, 226, 245–​6, 248, 249; how 190–​4, 226, 240–​1; what 188–​90, 211, 217–​19, 233–​7, 236; when 199–​203, 212, 224–​6, 246–​8; where 194–​5, 212, 220–​2, 223, 241–​3; whereto 187–​8, 190, 215, 217, 219, 221, 241, 246; who 181–​6, 211, 220, 222, 234, 237; why 188, 190, 214–​15 deictic fields 169n52 deictic function 155, 156 deictic inferentiality 155, 156, 157, 158

deixis 154–​5, 156, 158–​64, 168n32, 174, 186 delayed categorization 25–​6, 100, 104–​5, 175, 334; and rapid categorization 96–​7, 221 Deleuze, Gilles 231n37, 331n101 Demotic script 25, 35n24, 35n26 Derrida, Jacques xvi, xxiii, 1, 10, 59n18; and dialectic of genre 109n26; and différance 106, 157–​8; on Jews and Greeks 338–​9; on meaning 75, 102–​3; and narrative embedding 287–​8; on writing 45 descriptive categories and emergent phenomena 90–​1 Desert, the and initiation xxvii–​xxviii Development and Evolution (Salthe) 6 Dever, William 227–​8n11, 229n21 différance (Derrida) 106, 157–​8 divinization of a person 34n15, 42, 63, 244, 306–​7, 318, 337–​8; and knowledge of good and evil 317–​18 Documentary Hypothesis 79 Dolelžel, Lubomir 137n1 Donaldson, Jeffrey 269 Douglas, Mary 134–​5, 140–​1n59, 141n64, 222 doxa and epistêmê 326 Dozeman, Thomas 290n5 Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (Berlin) 140n54 Early History of God, The (Smith) 13n11 Eco, Umberto 41, 47–​8, 50, 152–​3, 288, 294 Edenburg, Cynthia 57 Edenic garden 41; and the chakras 243; as primal scene 44–​50, 53; and the Promised Land 286; as a state of consciousness xi–​xii, xvii; see also Serpent of Eden, the Edenic megaphor xvii, xxii, 318, 319, 320–​4, 325, 328 Edenic narrative 42, 49, 96, 340; and consciousness 319–​20; and Elohim 207n43; and figuration 315–​16; and God 43, 288, 294; and illuminative knowledge 328; and impossible spaces 282–​3; and literature 43–​4; and paradoxical paradigms 317–​20; and parallelism 135; and presentation or representation 103; and semantic incongruity 100, 102; and symbols 321; and three paradoxical paradigms xxii

Index  375 egoic “I” 321, 323 Egypt as the site of memory 125, 127–​8 Egyptian hieroglyphic writing: and Demotic script 35n24; and ideational ambiguity 27; and indexical information 33; and other scripts 35n26; and Peircean taxonomy of signs 32; and the second commandment 24–​6; and symbols 28–​9 Egyptian magical worldview 338 Egyptian religion xvii, 21, 39n66, 178; and All-​in-​One formula 30, 38n55; and foreign influence 64–​5; and hieroglyphs 25; and idolatry 22–​3; and Mosaic religion 24; and supernatural power in objects 29; and symbolic nature of divine contact 63–​4 Eleazar of Worms xvi, xxix Eleventh Commandment 42; and Edenic megaphor xxii, 315–​17; and literalness 48; as paradox/​enigma 324, 325, 326; and scientia 340; and types of knowledge 331n101 Eliade, Mircea 20, 255n33, 304–​5, 306 Elior, Rachel 13n10, 15n8 Elohim 31, 58n3, 181–​6; and Bělî MaH 237–​40; as keyword in the Sôd 123; and markedness 132, 133; and the Tree of Life 324; see also image of Elohim embodied cognition theory 331n100 emergence research methodology xv, 90, 91–​3, 108n10, 113, 162 enstasis 329n44 epistemic asymmetry 100–​2 Esau 200, 201–​2, 224–​5; see also Jacob-​Esau narratives esoteric codes 105–​6; and the concealed deictic center 162–​3; and parallelism 135–​6; s-​code xxi–​xxii, 114, 115, 117, 149–​50, 152, 164 esoteric knowledge: and asymmetric noetic parallelism 136; and contemporary Western culture 66, 336–​7; and exclusion of the uninitiated 55, 74–​5, 89, 95, 268, 273; and exoteric religion 71–​2; and human physiology 240–​1; and initiation 87, 88, 128, 149, 160, 218; and the Jacob-​Esau narratives 137; and mystery cults 14; preservation and transmission 4–​5, 10, 72–​4, 95, 97–​8, 126, 134; and the Torah 68 esoteric/​exoteric division and two-​channel text 74–​5

Ethics (Spinoza) 34n12 Eubanks, Philip 220 exegesis 51, 68–​9, 82n25, 153–​4 exilic literature 94, 109n36 Exodus, Book of 122, 187 Exodus narrative and initiation 130–​1, 218 experience and reality 298–​9 experiential access to God 4, 10–​11, 62–​3, 77–​8, 214; and divinization 307; and exclusion of the uninitiated 126; and the human body 160; and initiation 131; and Israelite religion 93; and mysticism 215–​16; and transformation of consciousness 246 experientiality and narrativity 284 Faerie Queene (Spenser) 42–​3 fairy tales 281–​2 Feder, Yitzhaq 251n13 Fernandez, James 321, 323 fictional truth 5–​6, 13n13, 278 Fictional Truth (Riffaterre) 13n13 figuration 51–​2, 176, 213, 294–​5, 311; and the Eden narrative 315–​16; and the Pentateuchal text 55, 267–​9, 273–​5, 283–​4; and transmitting esoteric knowledge 57–​8 figurative versus literal dichotomy 53–​4 First Temple priesthood 134, 151, 221, 233–​4, 273–​4; and mystical-​initiatory praxis xi, xii, xvii, 42, 58, 62, 71, 138n12; and preservation of esoteric knowledge 4–​5, 9, 10 Fischer, Roland 252–​3n19, 303 Fishbane, Michael 68, 69, 70, 141 Flannery, Frances 215 Fleming, Daniel 192, 193 Fletcher, Angus 56, 122, 177 Fludernik, Monika 284 Føllesdal, Dagfinn 165 Follingstad, Carl 156, 161 Foucault, Michel 45, 81, 99, 204n12 framing and narrative metalepses 288–​9 Freeman, Margaret 54, 56, 227n1, 304 Frege, Gottlob 156, 158 Freud, Sigmund xiii, 7, 53, 259–​60n53, 328n15 Friedman, Richard Elliott. 58n3, 138n16, 138n22, 195, 199–​200, 256n43, 257–​8n44, 260n57 Friedman, Susan 284 From Epic to Canon (Cross) 33n6, 139n35

376 Index Frye, Northrop xi, 43, 109n26, 188, 274 fundamentalist religion 47 Gadamer, Hans-​Georg 46 Galbraith, Mary 160 Garden of Eden see Edenic garden Garments of the Torah, The (Fishbane) 141 Gärtner-​Brereton, Luke 281–​2, 283, 284 gatekeepers and tradition 1 Gattis, Merideth 285 Gazzaniga, Michael 329n35 Genesis, Book of 103, 111n72; and asymmetric noetic parallelism 136; and Elohim 182; and Esau 201–​2; and Jacob/​Israel 202–​3; and Jacob’s sheep 122; and the Promised Land 187; and the wives/​sisters of the patriarchs 124, 128–​9, 138n22 Genette, Gérard 286–​7 genre, question of 89, 93, 95, 109n26 Gentner, Dedre 285 Gerar, kingdom of xx, 124, 128–​9, 195, 211, 217, 283; and the Holy Land 197–​8; and the human body 241–​2; and the Promised Land 221, 222, 229n20 Gifts of the Jews (Cahill) 188 Gill, Sam 108n5 Girard, René 178 God: and Abimelek 129; and the Absolute Other 78–​9; as an abstraction 4–​5; backside of 122; and Being-​Itself 313; conceptualization of 31; and the Eden narrative 43–​4, 288, 294; and the Eleventh Commandment 315; experiential access to 4, 10–​11, 62–​3; interrogation of 10; and Isaiah 77; and linguistic transitivity 21–​2; and locations/​space 283; and marking 132; and mystical experience 214; and the noetic-​signifier data 211; and the Pentateuch 76; and Ultimate Sacred Postulates 314–​15; and universe of discourse 81 gods 21, 28, 30–​1 Gombrich, Ernst 56 Gomel, Elana 282, 291n52 Goodenough, Erwin 300–​1 Gray, Richard M. 142n73 Great Code, The: The Bible and Literature (Frye) 43 Greater Hekhalot, The 196, 198

Greek gods 21 Greek mystery cults 14n17 Green, Arthur 182–​3 Green, Keith 158, 159 Grice, Paul 105, 106 Grotstein, James 308–​9 ground(s) and the Sôd 145, 147–​9, 152, 163; and deixis 155–​6, 160–​1 Gunkel, Hermann 111n72 Habermas, Jürgen 92, 166n1 Halliday, M. A. K. 20, 105, 106, 296–​7 Handelman, Susan 47, 48–​9 Hanks, William 52, 155, 159, 164 Hartman, Louis 183 Hasidism 22, 29, 253n24, 254n25 Hatha Yoga Pradipika 244 Hayes, Elizabeth 105 Hébert, Louis 117 “Hebrew,” derivation and meaning of 189 Hebrew alphabet: and exegesis 69–​70; and the Mother letters 258n47 Hebrews between Cultures (Sternberg) 188–​9 Heidegger, Martin xxiii, 339 Hekhalot 196, 198, 206n35 Hellenistic concepts and Israelite religion 66–​7, 68 Heller, Joseph xvi, xxx heretic hermeneutics 47 Herman, David 205n20, 287, 289 hermeneutics 46, 59n25 Hernadi, Paul 32, 106–​7, 111n71 Hess, Richard 194 Hewitt, Lynne E. 163 Hexateuch xii, xiii, 5, 10, 135, 278 hieroglyphs see Egyptian hieroglyphic writing higher-​scalar forces and effects 6–​8, 10–​11, 16n28 Hill, Jane 285 Hindu mysticism 78, 242, 243, 244; and Hebraic praxis 306, 307 Hirsch, E. D. 88–​9, 95, 113 historical truth 6 history 5, 6, 24, 47 Hoffman, Edward 234 Holenstein, Elmar 133 Hollenback, Jess Byron 169n55, 252n19 Holy Land: and Gerar 197–​8; and initiatory process 130, 215, 219, 241;

Index  377 and Pentateuchal narratives 276; and states of consciousness 128–​9, 247 Hrushovski, Benjamin 132 human body and initiation 160, 178, 222, 223; and the chakras 242–​3; and Elohim 186; and Israelite esoteric lore 241; and Jericho 240; and the sefirot 235, 251n9; and the Tree of Life 237, 238, 324 Hunt, Harry xxvi, 36n35, 206n34, 228n14, 253n19, 255n30, 303 Husserl, Edmund 91–​2, 96, 166n6, 298; and “determinable X” 165; and intentionality 45, 66, 293; and noetic-​ noematic-​hyletic phenomenological framework 57; see also hyletic-​ noetic-​noematic phenomenological framework (Husserl) hyletic-​deferential continuum 117, 163, 165–​6, 223, 233, 246, 248, 249 hyletic-​noetic-​noematic phenomenological framework (Husserl) 57–​8, 96, 113, 118–​19, 164, 205n25; and act of consciousness xix, 91–​3, 293; and contexts of the Sôd 152; and theoretical model of the Pentateuch 145, 147, 154; and the three continuums in the Sôd channel 114, 116–​17, 117 Hymes, Dell 151 hyponoia 177 iconoclasm 24–​5 “Ideals, Pseudo-​Ideals and the Evolution of Consciousness” (Isenberg) 37n50, 112n75 ideas and their reification 7–​8 Idel, Moshe 70, 71, 251n9, 253n24, 254n25 idolatry 22–​3, 24, 26, 27, 63–​4 Ikegami, Yoshihiko 98–​9 illumination 305, 325, 327–​8; and the “I” 322; and the Ineffable World 307–​8, 312; and samādhi 244, 304, 306, 329n44 image of Elohim 182, 186, 207n41, 233–​4; and Adam Kadmon 250–​1n8; and the sefirot 234–​5; and the Tree of Life 243–​5 immanence xi–​xii, 21–​2, 29, 94 immediate signification and hieroglyphs 25, 26, 27

In Search of Dreamtime (Masuzawa) 260n53 indexical coordinates of narrative 162–​4 indexicality 33, 56, 154, 169n56; indirect 131–​2 indirection and poetry 119–​20, 121 ineffability 266, 267, 269, 270–​3, 295, 298, 327–​8 Ineffability and Philosophy (Kukla) 270–​1 Ineffable World 303, 305–​6, 307, 308, 312, 316, 317 inferential access to meaning 155–​7 initiation 94–​5, 163–​4, 267–​8; and esoteric knowledge 87, 107n2; and the Exodus narrative 130–​1; and the human body 160, 178; and the Jacob-​ Esau narratives 137, 200–​1, 224–​6, 246; as a journey 217–​19, 221, 285; and Pentateuchal narratives 276–​8; and secrecy 272; and transformation of consciousness 126–​7, 128; and the wives/​sisters of the patriarchs 124 initiatory lore and its preservation 1–​2 inside/​outside and the sacred 3, 127–​8 Instruction, Scene of xvii, 41, 45–​6 intentionality 45, 108n14, 293 interpretation of text: and author's horizon 89; and contextualizing experience 72–​4; diachronic, synchronic and panchronic 105; and emergentist model 91–​3; and epistemic asymmetry 100–​2; and experiential presentation of the sacred world 103; and imaginative reading 87; and initiatory tradition 88; and meaning 50; and the reader 46, 49; and reader-​ response theories 98–​9; and readers' preconceptions 95, 98, 123 interrogation of God 10 Isaac 124, 129, 211, 217, 277; and Abraham 199; and Esau 202; and Gerar 197; and the wells 196–​7 Isaiah, Book of 77, 78 Isenberg, Sheldon (“Shaya”) 37n50, 111n66, 112n75, 333n112 Islam 55, 78 Israel, Sons of 260–​1n57 Israelite civilization 20, 206n30, 227–​8n11, 318 Israelite cultic religion 5, 8, 15–​16n27, 71, 138n12, 151, 251n13, 338; and esoteric knowledge 3, 147, 193, 223,

378 Index 239, 251n13, 258n46; and God 62–​3; and the human body 223; mystical sources of 57, 92, 93, 119, 157, 179; and mystical-​initiatory praxis 72, 166, 179, 275, 341; and rabbinical revisionism 67–​8 Jabès, Edmond xvi, xxvii–​xxviii, xxix, xxxi Jacob 63, 212, 217, 231n41, 277, 285; and Benjamin 245, 258n45; as candidate for initiation 224–​6, 247; and Esau 201–​2; and Israel 190, 199–​200, 259n50; and Leah and Rachel 124; and the sheep 122, 248, 261–​2n59 Jacob-​Esau narratives 136–​7, 200–​1, 224–​6, 246, 259n52 Jacob’s Tears (Douglas) 140–​1n59 Jahn, Manfred 288–​9 Jakobson, Roman xxi, 45, 51–​2, 92; and factors and functions of a text 101, 113–​15, 114, 145–​7; and language as code 149, 150; and markedness 132, 133; and parallelism 134, 140n56 James, William 215 Janney, Richard 26–​7 Jaynes, Julian 206n30 Jericho 191–​4, 212, 283; and the “great shout” 192, 194, 240–​1; and the seven wells 245–​6 Jewish thought versus Greek 338–​40 Johnson, Mark 218, 229–​30n24, 316–​17 Jonas, Hans 339 Jones, Peter 159 Joos, Martin 174 Joseph 192, 247, 258n45, 277, 291n36 Joshua (Hess) 194 Joshua, Book of 187–​8, 190–​1, 198, 208n55, 229n21; and the fall of Jericho 191–​2, 194; as fiction 227–​8n11; and initiation xxi journeys and initiation 217–​19, 221, 285 Joyce, James 338, 339 Judaism, post-​biblical 62, 81n2; and prayer 93–​4; and the Temple cult 67–​8; and Western culture 66 Jung, Carl 53 Kabbalah 1, 9, 12n4, 83n26, 261n58, 280; and Adam Kadmon 250–​1n8; and Amalek 332n104; and Bělî MaH 239; and the chakras 242, 243; and

Elohim 183–​6, 238; and exegesis 82n25; and experience of God 63; and the human body 223, 251n9; and qělipôt 23; and reading scripture 231n38; and states of consciousness 230n27; and Tetragrammaton 31; and the Torah 72; and the Tree of Life 236; see also Sefer Yetzirah; sefirot; Zohar Kabbalah (Idel) 253n24, 254n25 Kafka, Franz xvi, 2–​3, 259n52 Kant, Immanuel 65–​6, 305 Kaplan, Aryeh 128, 197, 199, 209n59, 229n20, 230n27; and Bělî MaH 239; and Sefer Yetzirah 252n15, 258–​9n47 Kaplan, David 56 Katsh, Abraham 94 Katz, Albert 53–​4 Kaufmann, Walter 19 Knight, Douglas 189 Knohl, Israel 94 knowledge 73, 106, 319, 326–​8, 330n47, 335–​6; and experience of God 33, 57–​8; and hyponoia 177; and the Kabbalah 234, 243; and language 112n74, 153–​4, 316; and ritual 251n11, 251n13; and the sacred xxx, 25, 56, 309; and secrecy 65; and yoga 304, 306; see also esoteric knowledge; Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil Koch, Christof 302–​3 Kohanim 265 Kövecses, Zoltán 319 Krieger, Murray 28, 37n43 Kukla, André 270–​1 Kundalini serpent 242, 244–​5, 255n30, 318, 331–​2n102 Laban 277 Lakoff, George 218, 229–​30n24, 316–​17 Lampert, Jay 153 Lancaster, Brian (“Les”) 78, 200 Langacker, Ronald 113, 132, 233 Langer, Susanne K. 36n35, 103 language and communication 75, 81, 106, 153–​4, 296–​8, 310, 312, 314 language as trope 269 language games 93, 95–​6 Larson, Gerald James 253n19 Laughlin, Charles D. Jr. 307 Law, parable of the 2–​3 Leah 124, 247, 248, 261n58, 277, 285, 286 Legends of Genesis (Gunkel) 111n72

Index  379 “Levantine Tradition, A” (Feder) 251n13 Levin, Samuel 213, 229n24 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 75, 89, 297, 336–​7 Lewandowska-​Tomasczyk, Barbara 268 liberation and yoga 306 lies and alternatives in language 310–​11, 314 linguistic structures 106, 133 linguistic transitivity 15–​16n27, 20–​1, 34n9 literal meaning and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil 47–​8 literal/​nonliteral divide 53–​5, 56, 57 literary signifier 45, 59n18 literary studies 54–​5 Living Torah, The (Kaplan) 196–​7, 198, 209n59, 229n20, 256n43, 258n44, 258n45 Lucas, Chris 91 Lukacher, Ned 44, 58–​9n10, 58n9 Luria, Isaac 250–​1n8 Lurianic Kabbalah 29, 238, 250n8, 254n25 Lyons, John 159, 165 magic 212, 337, 342n12; and Egypt 29; and the fall of Jericho 193; and Israelite religion 21–​2; and Jacob’s sheep 199–​200 magical consciousness xvii, 22, 23, 29–​31, 34n15, 37n51, 337 MaH xxi, 237–​8, 239–​40, 246, 258–​9n47 Malina, Debra 292n70, 292n82 Man, Paul de 54–​5, 177 Mangan, Bruce 50, 60n37 Mannheim, Bruce 285 mantras 237, 241, 246, 283, 289 Map of Misreading, A (Bloom) 45–​6, 111n69, 259–​60n53 mapping contexts into demonstrata 51–​2, 56–​7 mapping problem spaces 121–​2 Marion, Jean-​Luc 298 markedness 51–​2, 60n40, 132, 133–​4, 139–​40n52 Masuzawa, Tomoko 53, 260n53, 335 Matthiessen, Christian 105, 106 Maya, veil of 300 McGinn, Colin 270 McGonicle, Brendan 285 Mead, George Herbert xviii, 76, 79, 80–​1, 96

meaning: and author’s intention 101–​2, 105; and communication 75–​6, 293–​4, 321; and context 154; continuum of 296; and factors and functions of a text 145–​6; figurative and literal 53–​5, 268; and inferential access 155–​6; and interpretation of ancient texts 50–​2, 70–​1, 89; and the Jacob-​Esau narratives 224–​5; and linguistics 233, 301; and mapping 56, 304; and narrative 275; and presentation or representation 102–​4; Rappaport’s levels of 312; and reference 152–​3, 161–​2; and significance 120; and the Sôd stratum 158; and transformation of consciousness 128; worlds of in the Pentateuch 113–​18 meaning-​making activity 6 “megaphor,” author’s theory of 270, 315, 317; see also Edenic megaphor Melzer, Arthur 268 Mendelssohn, Moses 26 Mendenhall, George E. 227–​8n11 Merkabah mysticism 9, 81n1 Merkur, Dan 333n110 Mesopotamia 235 Messiah and messianic notions 8, 15n25, 83n26, 245, 248, 249, 307, 324, 342n12 metachronic approach and esoteric codes 105–​6 metacommunicative object identifiers 163, 165–​6, 223, 233, 246, 248, 249 metalanguage 113, 115, 150 metalepsis 75, 205n20, 216–​17, 246, 286–​7, 289, 324 metalingual function xxi, 92, 114, 116, 117, 119, 129, 149–​50, 167n17 metaphor 213, 229–​30n24, 269, 312, 316–​17; and initiation 218–​19; and narration 220 Metaphoric Worlds (Levin) 229n24 Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson) 316–​17 Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis (Titscher et al.) 203–​4n10, 203n9, 204n11, 204n12 midrash 46, 59n24, 83n33, 227n10; and failure of exegesis 69–​70; and mimetic interpretation 103; and the Mosaic distinction 64 MIh xxi, 238, 239–​40, 246, 258–​9n47 Mikkonen, Kai 275–​6 Milgrom, Jacob 135

380 Index Miller, J. Hillis 274, 316 Millikan, Ruth Garrett 293 Milov, Yuri 91 mimesis and texts 32–​3, 125; and communication 111n71; and esoteric codes 105–​6; and figuration 55–​6; and presentation or representation 103–​4; and significance 119, 122; and verbal forms 123, 124 Monk, Ray 331n84 monotheism xii, xvii, 20, 30, 34n7, 34n8 Moro, Andrea 331n85 Morris, Paul 69–​70 Mosaic and Egyptian religions 24 Mosaic distinction, the 22, 23, 29, 63–​4, 178, 212, 338 Mosaic Kabbalah 2 Moses 63, 79, 194; as initiate 131; and the Promised Land 259n51; and the Silent World 312; and YHWH 257–​8n44 Moses the Egyptian (Assmann) 29, 38n52, 38n53, 39n66 Mount Zion 188 mudra 283 Muller, Heidi 104 multiscalar allegorical-​parabolic projection in the Pentateuch 129–​30 mysterium tremendum xii, 4, 62, 77–​8, 84n54; and God 214; and ineffability 269; and magical consciousness 23; and scientia intuitiva 327–​8 mystical experience 158–​9, 266, 296; and the human body 178, 222; and Israelite religion 93; and locations/​ space 283 mystical ineffabilism 270, 271–​2 mystical-​initiatory praxis xi–​xii, 147–​8, 163–​4, 173–​4, 206n34, 206n35, 341; and the Exodus narrative 130; and the ineffable 272; and the seven wells 244–​5 mysticism 5–​6, 178, 275; and access to God 215–​16; alleged absence of in the Bible 71, 94, 125–​6; Jewish traditions of xiv, 9–​10, 254n25, 258–​9n47, 280; and Kundalini serpent 331–​2n102; and Wittgenstein 301; and world religions 78, 228n12 Na’aman, Nadav 14n16, 227n11 “Names of God” (Hartman) 183 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 250n3

narrative embedding 205n19, 216, 287 narrative metalepsis 205n20, 216–​17, 286–​9 narrativity 275–​6, 281–​2, 284–​6 Neale, Stephen 100–​2 Nelles, William 287 Nelson, Victoria 34n15, 337 Neusner, Jacob 67–​8, 82n25, 141n59 New Historicism 5, 149, 341 Newman, Judith 94 Nietzsche, Friedrich 49–​50, 231 Niquette, Paul 178 noematic-​conferential continuum 117, 163, 165, 249 noesis 92, 118–​19, 180, 205n25 noetic signifier of the Sôd 210–​15, 213, 288 noetic-​inferential continuum 117–​18, 150, 162–​3, 164, 165, 180, 201, 210, 249 Nora, Pierre 6 Nöth, Winifred 149–​50 not-​I 321, 322, 323 noumena 110n52, 303, 305, 308 numinous, the 77–​8, 80–​1, 103–​4, 280–​4 oceanic consciousness, author’s experience of xiii Odyssey, The (Homer) 130–​1 Ogden, Charles K. 293 On the Nature of Consciousness (Hunt) 206n34, 255n30 Oral Torah 55, 68, 247 Origins, Scene of 47–​9 Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Jaynes) 206n30 Otto, Rudolf xii, 62, 77–​8, 214 pantheism 21–​2, 29 parallelism in literature 134–​5, 140n54, 140n56 PaRDeS xvii, 68 Parpola, Simo 235, 237 Parwha Kaur, Shakti Khalsa 242 Patanjali 304 Paxson, James 21; and cognitive modalities 280, 281; and figuration 274; and metalepsis 286; and narrative embedding 205n19, 216, 287–​8; and personification 177, 232n44, 285 Peirce, Charles S. 125, 133, 152, 310, 321, 330n47; and deixis 154–​5; and taxonomy of signs 32, 39–​40n72, 39n71

Index  381 Peniel encounter of Jacob and Elohim 194, 203, 231n41, 246–​7, 277 Perry, Menakhem 207n45, 288–​9 personification tropes 177, 232n44 Pharisees 3, 13n10, 66–​7, 69 phenomenological intentionality 116, 293 phenomenology 57, 87, 88, 151, 174, 177, 298, 323 Philo Judaeus xiii, 11, 62, 300–​1 Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson) 229–​30n24 poetry and literalness 213 poiesis (poetic function) xviii–​xix, 118, 150, 180, 266; and the ineffable 309; and technê 275; and triple structure 129 Polkinghorne, Donald 275 Pomorska, Krystyna 133, 134 Poole, Marshall Scott 79–​80 postmodernism 33, 45, 46, 51, 70–​1, 98, 132, 135, 334 prayer 62, 93–​4, 206n34 presentation, linear 132 presentation or representation 102–​4, 110n52 Prickett, Stephen 43 priestly tradition 9–​10, 94, 265, 307 Priestly Vision of Genesis, The (Smith) 192 Prieto, Luis J. 113, 149–​50 primal scenes 41–​50, 53, 259–​60n53 Prior, Paul 175 Promised Land, the 187–​8, 190, 195, 199, 211–​12, 276, 340; and Abraham 191; and access to God 215–​16; and alteration of consciousness 222, 230n31; and conquest of Jericho 191–​3; and Eden 286; and Gerar 221–​2; and the human body 222, 223; and Moses 259n51 Propp, Vladimir 281–​2 psychoanalysis 45, 53, 297, 308–​9 Punday, Daniel 222 qělipôt 23 Quine, W. V. 166, 168n43 Qumran community 66 Rabbinical Judaism: and the Babylonian exile 235; and contemporary Western culture 339; as doorkeepers 3; and Egyptian religion 64; and esoteric knowledge 3–​4, 41, 66, 67–​9, 71,

214; and magic 22; and midrashic exegesis 69–​70; and misreading of the Pentateuch 92; and parallelism 136; and the Scene of Instruction 46; and the sefirot 123; and the Torah 65 Rachel 124, 200, 247, 248, 258n45, 261n58, 277, 285 Ramsey, Frank 309 Rappaport, Roy 66, 77, 310–​11, 312, 313, 314 Rashkow, Ilona N. 138n23 ratio 326–​7 reader-​response theories 98–​9 reductionism in interpretation 89–​90, 108n5 reference and meaning 152–​3, 161–​2 referential function 58, 92, 115, 149, 151–​4, 156–​9 Reflective World 303, 305, 312, 313, 316 Reimer, Marga 56 religions and beliefs 19, 53, 62, 76 religious studies and conclusions of this study 341 Representational and the Presentational, The (Shanon) 102–​3 research and this study xx, 173–​5, 178–​9 Richards, I. A. 293 Ricoeur, Paul 269 Riffaterre, Michael 13n13, 119–​20, 122, 123–​4, 133 Ritchie, L. David 178 Ritner, Robert 35n26 rituals 29, 74, 179, 251n13, 310, 314; and Egyptian religion 63–​4; and Jericho 193–​4; and purity 67; and sacred boundaries 127 Rojtman, Betty 68, 69, 253n22 Rosenberg, David 191 Russell, Bertrand 301 Sadducees 3, 66–​7 samādhi 244, 304, 306, 329n44 Sapir, Edward 65–​6 Sarah 124 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 7–​8, 42 Scharfstein, Ben-​Ami 290n19 Scheler, Max 298–​9 Schiffman, Lawrence 66–​7 Scholem, Gershom 71, 228n12 Schuldiner, Michael 205n20, 289 Schutz, Albert 106, 242, 245, 255n33, 256n34 scientia intuitiva 326, 327

382 Index scientific materialism 337 second-​channel narrative stream within the Pentateuch xii, xv–​xvi, 42; and asymmetric noetic parallelism 278–​80; and author’s research xiii, xx–​xxi, 143, 173–​4, 180–​1; and the chakras 235; and cognitive paradigm 340–​1; and the concealed deictic center 162–​3; and concealed grounds 149; and dating of text 15n18; and disambiguation 56–​7; and exclusion of the uninitiated 89, 120–​1, 126, 221; and factors and functions of a text 146–​7; and framing and narrative metalepses 289; and the human body 223; and indirect indexicality 132; and the ineffable 272–​3; and logic 51; and metaleptic conjunction 256–​7n43; and noetic signifiers 288; and “one word” key 123; and other Jewish mystical traditions 9; and preservation of esoteric knowledge 1, 95, 97–​8, 247, 273–​4; and Rabbinical Judaism 71; and s-​addressee 151; and structure of the text 92, 164–​5; and the three continuums 113, 114; and traces in first channel narrative incongruities 210 secrecy, guardianship and preservation 1–​2, 94–​5; and Greek mystery cults 14n17; and mystical-​initiatory praxis 9–​10 Sefer Yetzirah 234–​5, 238, 242, 243, 252n15, 254n25, 258–​9n47, 280; and Bělî MaH 239; and MaH 237 sefirot 122–​3, 234–​40, 236, 252n15, 280, 324; and Adam Kadmon 250–​1n8; and the chakras 242, 243, 256n34; and God 39n66, 250n7; and the human body 251n9; and mem 258n47; and psychological processes 253n24, 254n25 self-​consciousness 320, 322–​3 semantic and noetic fields 150 semantic barriers 56, 122, 124; and hyponoia 177; and narrative metalepsis 286–​7 semiotics 6–​8, 39–​40n72, 39n71, 110n45, 294, 310; and codes 149–​50; and deixis 155; and esoteric writing in Egypt and Israel 31–​3; and meaning 116, 119–​20, 296–​7; and the Pentateuch 125; and reader-​response theories 98–​9; and semantic incongruities 47–​8

Semiotics of Poetry (Riffaterre) 120 Serpent of Eden, the 42, 57, 315, 317–​18, 321–​2; and Kundalini serpent 244 serpent power and the chakras see Kundalini serpent setting-​indicative pointers 163 seven in biblical narratives 192, 195, 228–​9n19 seven wells 197–​8, 283; and the chakras 123–​4, 166n8, 235, 242, 259n48, 277, 278, 280, 283, 286; and digging metaphor 245–​6; and water 258–​9n47 Seven-​Day Siege of Jericho (Fleming) 193 Shanon, Benny 102–​3, 261–​2n59 Shattuck, Roger 335–​7 Shaumyan, Sebastian 155–​6 Shema 314, 315 Shklovsky, Viktor 39n67 significance: and mimesis 119–​20, 122; and symbolic focus 121 signifier, signified and referent 116, 117, 124 signs 154; icon, index and symbol 32–​3; and the signified 45, 57, 310 Silent World and “the real” 303, 305, 311, 312–​13 Silverstein, Michael 213, 220, 273 Sinding, Michael 212, 274, 277–​8, 316 Smith, Mark S. 13n11, 192, 207n43 Soltes, Ori Z. xxiiin3 space in narratives 280–​4 spaces, impossible 282–​3 spatial representations and time 285 Sperber, Dan 161 Sphinx, riddle of the 325–​6, 333n121 Spinoza, Baruch 29, 34n12, 38n53, 326–​7 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Deleuze) 231n37 Stern, David 83n33, 227n10 Sternberg, Meir 153–​4, 188–​9 Stockwell, Peter 98, 160–​1, 169n52, 175–​6, 204–​5n18 Stoicheff, Peter 119 Stroumsa, Gedaliahu 208n55 superconsciousness 304 symbolic communication with God/​ gods 63 symbolic space 7, 8 Symbolic Species, The (Deacon) 299 symbolization 299–​300

Index  383 symbols, sign and signified 26, 28, 30–​1, 36n32, 297 systems theory and complexity 52–​3 taboo and Egyptian religion 65 Talmud on Adam and Eve and the Tree 48–​9 Taylor, John R. 233 Temple cult 66, 67, 71 Ten Commandments 315 Tetragrammaton 31, 181, 207n40, 251–​2n14, 313; see also YHWH textual analysis 174–​7, 203n9 textual signifiers 180 theistic-​numinous mysticism 78–​9 theoretical model of the Pentateuch 143–​4, 145 Theory of Prose (Shklovsky) 39n67 These Are the Words (Green) 182–​3 Thibault, Paul 6–​8, 15n26, 56, 98, 121–​2, 154, 296 Thinking in Circles (Douglas) 141n64 Three Temples (Elior) 13n10, 15n8 time 284, 285 Todorov, Tzvetan 105, 216, 230n31 Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Tsur) 96 Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) 270, 331n84 transcendence xi–​xii, 21, 29, 30, 94, 333n112, 338 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil 41–​3, 47–​8, 49, 237, 309, 317–​18, 320–​1, 322–​3 Tree of Life 235–​7, 236, 280, 318, 320, 322; and the chakras 243, 256n34; and human body 324; and image of Elohim 245; and “not-​I” 323 Trial, The (Kafka) xvi, 1, 2–​3, 259n52 Tristes tropiques (Lévi-​Strauss) 336–​7 tropological structures 269, 275, 286 Trubetzkoy, Nikolai 133 truth 4–​6, 47–​9 Tsur, Reuven 25–​6, 57, 88; on allegory and symbol 125; and delayed categorization 96–​7, 175, 221 Turner, Mark 53, 54, 129–​30 Twain, Mark 340 Ultimate Sacred Postulates 314–​15 universe of discourse 81, 144, 150, 152 Urban, Hugh 107n2

Van der Heide, Albert 82n24, 111n73 Van Gulick, Robert 90, 108n10 van Wolde, Ellen 90 verbal communication, factors and functions of 92 Vicente, Begoña 54 visual phenomena, visions and hallucinations 122, 248, 261–​2n59, 277, 278 Vogeley, Kai 320 Voice of God xvi, xxviii–​xix Voorhees, Burton 110n52, 110n53, 169n56 “Waking Dream” (Krieger) 37n43 Warburton, William 26 Wardlaw, Terence 207n40, 207n45 Wasserstrom, Steven 87–​8 Western culture 336–​40 White, Hayden 6, 166n1, 335 White, John 110n53, 244 Whiteside-​St. Leger Lucas, Anna 121, 157–​8 Wilber, Ken 242 Wilson, Deirdre 161 Winkelman, Michael 228n14 Winkler, Gershon 208n47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 93, 95, 301–​2, 303–​4, 331n84; on the inexpressible 270, 309 Wittgensteinian duck-​rabbit image 56, 210, 220–​1 wives of the patriarchs 129, 199; as metaphors for levels of spiritual attainment 124, 225, 248, 261n58, 285–​6; see also Leah; Rachel Wolde, Ellen van 90 Wolfson, Elliot 231n38 Word becoming Flesh 8 worlds of meaning in the Pentateuch 113–​16 writing, language and textual meaning 45 Writing, Scene of 44–​5, 46 Writing and Difference (Derrida) 1 Xanthos, Nicolas 93, 95–​6 YHWH 181, 186, 206n39, 207n40, 251–​2n14; access to 214; and Amalek 257–​8n44, 332n104; and calling the name of God 256–​7n43; and higher-​ scalar constraints 8; and history 29;

384 Index and initiation 131; and markedness 133; and Moses 257–​8n44; and universe of discourse 81 yoga 244, 304, 306, 308; see also Kundalini serpent Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Eliade) 304 Yoga Sutras (Patanjali) 304 Zadokite priests 66 Zaehner, Robert Charles 78

Zevit, Ziony xi–​xii, 6, 68, 94, 208n53; and exilic literature 109n36; and religion as non-​physical 223; and sacred space 280–​1 Zhang Longxi 181 Zohar 198–​9, 207n44; and Elohim 183–​6, 238; and MaH 237–​8; and the Torah 11–​12, 72; and words of power 235 Zoharic windows and the chakras 242, 243 Zubin, David A. 163