Work and Creativity: A Philosophical Study from Creation to Postmodernity 1978708971, 9781978708976

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PRAISE FOR WORK AND CREATIVITY “LaCocque concludes his new book, Work & Creativity, by quoting Paul Ricoeur: ‘Every tradition lives by grace of interpretation, and it is at this price that it continues, that is, remains living.’ There is no more fitting conclusion, as LaCocque also dedicates his latest book to his friend and colleague, Paul Ricoeur, with whom he produced Thinking Biblically in 1998. LaCocque models the depth and breadth of a person whose teaching has always been anchored by his own studies and reflection. I do not know another biblical scholar who embraces contemporary ‘intertextuality’ while carefully noting issues in the original biblical Hebrew, classic Greek, Aramaic, and Latin translations. Then insightfully engaging Karl Marx, the post-Marxist “Frankfurt School of Sociology” founded in 1923, Emmanuel Levinas, and Sigmund Freud and his disciples. LaCocque has created a rare intellectual feast by dynamically weaving his career-defining biblical insights with a literal library of classic thinkers.” —Rabbi Joseph A. Edelheit, St. Cloud State University, emeritus “This breakthrough book proves that biblical studies have much to offer other disciplines such as psychology and philosophy, and vice versa, and will appeal to scholars in all these disciplines. The topic of labor offers an excellent example of the rich vein of interdisciplinary studies as the way of the academic future.” —Doreen McFarlane, St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Niagara Falls, Ontario “In a time in which satisfying work is more and more scarce, in which working people, for the majority, hate their work, and in which pyramid schemes multiply promises of early retirement to those for whom work has become a chore and a humiliation, LaCocque’s book on work is a fulgurant revelation of humanity’s lost and forgotten identity outlined in Genesis 2 as a homo faber whose task is to nurture and protect the seeds of redemption planted in our world by the Creator and, as such, fully realize His creative project. Drawing on the work of twentieth-century philosophers, psychoanalysts, and sociologists, LaCocque offers a profound rereading of the creation story and gives us back our sacred vocation and responsibility as co-creators of the world rather than passive victims in an economic context where, increasingly, work has become distorted into modes of oppression rather than of redemption.” —Abi Doukhan, Queens College, City University of New York

“LaCocque’s dialogue between Genesis and modern thought, between the fruit of the tree in the garden and the fruits of human labor, yields a rare work of deep learning and originality. The dialectical criticism of this book offers striking juxtapositions and poetic reflections that honor, challenge, and connect biblical and philosophical traditions.” —Brian Britt, Virginia Tech

Work and Creativity

Work and Creativity A Philosophical Study from Creation to Postmodernity André LaCocque

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lacocque, André, author. Title: Work and creativity : a philosophical study from creation to postmodernity / André LaCocque. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and indexes. | Summary: “This book provides a hermeneutical reflection on the biblical notion of labor, combining texts from the book of Genesis with the conceptions of work in psychoanalysts and philosophers such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019045694 (print) | LCCN 2019045695 (ebook) | ISBN 9781978708976 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978708983 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Work—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Work—Biblical teaching. | Work. | Labor—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Labor—Biblical teaching. | Labor. Classification: LCC BT738.5 .L33 2020 (print) | LCC BT738.5 (ebook) | DDC 261.8/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045694 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045695 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To Paul Ricoeur In memoriam

Contents

Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Part I: Philosophy 5 What about the J Tradition? 5 The Bible and Cuneiform Texts: A Primary Stage of Intertextuality 8 What Do Philosophers Say? 14 First Excursus: The General and the Particular 17 The Garden Raises the Problem of Space and, Subsidiarily, of Evil 18 Homo Faber 22 Home and Exile: Encountering the Other 23 Once More on Production 27 Adam Is a Property Tenant 30 The Relationship with God 37 Work Mechanized 40 Today’s “Surplus Value” 46 Entelechy 46 Part II: Psychoanalysis 49 Introduction 49 A Response to Sigmund Freud 50 On Freud’s Theory of Phylogenesis 51 Libido or Aedificatio? 52 Work as Knowledge 55 Work, Knowledge, and Death 56 Second Excursus: Ernest Becker 58 Work and Civilization: Morality and Guilt 60 ix

Contents

x

Work and Worldview 63 Third Excursus: The Commandment 66 Synopsis 69 Part III: Dialectical Criticism 77 For a Dialectical Understanding 77 Peripeteia 79 A Concluding Reflection on Dialectical Work and Creativity 82 Dialectic Is Dialogical 83 The Enigmatic (Dialectical) Relationship of Israel and Land 92 On Lex Talionis 93 On Divorce 94 On Kashrut 95 Genesis 3 Revisited 96 Rebellion 97 Back to the Tree of Knowledge 98 Postscript: Dialectical Criticism among Other Methodologies 100 Bibliography 107 Index of Interpreted Biblical Texts

121

Index of JewishTraditional Literature Cited

123

Index of Names Cited

125

About the Author

133

Abbreviations

ABD ANET ASEEES b. BibInt cent. circ. D E HALOT IDB J JBL LXX MT NBS NJPS NRSV OUD P Par. R. R.

The Anchor Bible Dictionary Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed., ed. James Prichard, 1969. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Babylonian Talmud Biblical Interpretation century circa Deuteronomist Elohist The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible Yahwist Journal of Biblical Literature Septuagint Masoretic text Nouvelle Bible Segond New Jewish Publication Society Translation New Revised Standard Version Oxford Universal Dictionary Priestly parasha Rabbi Redactor

xi

xii

TDNT y. VT Vul.

Abbreviations

Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols., 1964–1976. Jerusalem Talmud Vetus Testamentum Vulgata

Introduction

At a time when the “selfish system”—an eighteenth-century expression designating inchoate capitalism—prevails in our society, some responsive reflection on work is appropriate. It is incontrovertibly an existential ingredient of human life and even, as I shall argue, the central value at the root of the imago dei. Furthermore, our study of work in its full vantage will serve as a fitting introduction to appreciating the impact of my thesis, namely, taking advantage of a philosophical notion, a dialectical method of interpretation (or of criticism). Work in the Bible and in philosophy will serve as a heuristic springboard for this old-new method and as evidence for its use as criticism. Now, in Genesis 2:15 we find a text that readily highlights its focal point on work as intrinsically belonging to the very creation of the human being. This point is of the utmost importance but is sadly minimized by some modern exegetes; it will permeate the essay that follows, especially in parts 1 and 2, before becoming the substructure of part 3. Concomitantly, it claims to explore formal and kerygmatic aspects in the theme of work in Genesis 2–3 that pass generally unnoticed. As a matter of fact, introducing the present analysis of work in Genesis 2–3 inevitably raises a hermeneutical issue. Namely, I must appeal to the testimony of modern exegetes, sociologists, philosophers, ethicists, and psychologists. To tackle this issue, I start my approach to the text of Genesis with a sociological remark regarding the initial nonseparation of house economy on the one hand and external places of work on the other. The field “to till and guard” according to Genesis 2:15 is part and parcel with the oikos of Adam (and Eve, as will be clear in what comes later), so that a whole range of sociological issues taking into account the oft-modern distance between home 1

2

Introduction

and place of the worker’s occupation is not covered by the myth of origins as we have it in the biblical text under consideration.1 True, Genesis 2:15 is no isolated tradition; it belongs to a broad biblical Weltanschauung (worldview). Israel’s society evolved from hoary origins of work and work distribution. With this development, a complete and complex legislation—within the Torah—was created to take control of labor in these further aspects. Now, it so happens that, more often than once, the Western sociology of work corresponds to the one prevailing in the ancient world, at least in terms of its problematic, as I shall show. Hence, Genesis 2–3 is inscribed in a sociological context on which modern sociologists (like Max Weber), philosophers (like Karl Marx), and psychoanalysts (like Sigmund Freud) have brought their analytical expertise. This phenomenon, I argue, opens the gate to a vivid dialogue between the Bible and the literary sciences. Today in biblical scholarship (after its acknowledgment and use in the secular domain), the principle of so-called “intertextuality” is consensually recognized as a valid method of exegesis. About any text (biblical or not), it acknowledges the relationship with, and sometimes the dependence on, other texts, be it within the same literature or in cognate ones. As we shall recall further, Genesis 2:15 belongs to an expanded literary tradition aptly called J ([Jahwist] Yahwist source) so that it cannot be read at the exclusion of the whole composition. Besides, we find the very material used by J for his/their account of world origins to be consistent with old Mesopotamian narratives, thus widely extending the field of the intertextuality of the biblical text to the narrative of other ancient myths. On our way toward an appropriate method of criticism, there is a still broader definition of intertextuality that I am militating for in the present analysis, although hardly used by biblical scholars. As far as Genesis 2:15 is concerned, for instance, it implies that the text’s scope embraces in a vast historical and universal breadth a horizon that includes our twenty-first-century reading. Practically, to the extent that present readers do focus on the theme of labor, it appears that the work of the twenty-first-century worker is of the same essence as the work of the ancient Near Eastern laborer. Consequently, the issue of the textual relevance of Genesis is illuminated. Therefore, the issue of relevance does not demand a tremendous exercise on the part of the 1.  I take this as one aspect of the possible discrepancy of the text with modern conception of labor. Remarkable, however, is the postmodern partial return to a familial economy thanks to an electronic equipment allowing work/production to be performed at home (as is my case in writing this book!). Carl Jung stresses the continuity between ancient and contemporary consciousness. Walter Benjamin, however, opposes Jung on the matter of archaic images and collective unconscious. He rather speaks of the dialectic of primal history and modernity (see Correspondence, 554). In addition, Louis Aragon evokes the famous “passage de l’opéra” in Paris that straddles two streets and two eras, the past century (the nineteenth century) and modernity (the twentieth century). Aragon does not call it dialectic, but it is what it actually is (Le Paysan de Paris. [Paris: Gallimard (Folio), 1953]).



Introduction 3

interpreter’s imagination because it is historically implicated as a perennial theme. As a theme (i.e., work/labor), the question of biblical relevance need hardly be asked. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that labor as a producing activity is “the source of all value,” to cite Adam Smith.2 This is not to say that we are not dealing with a whole series of other issues. Focusing on work, it is evident that from the beginning it has been problematic and has demanded a plurality of treatments, as we find them in ancient and modern, biblical and nonbiblical, textual and philosophical, reflection. What indeed underpins the whole complex is the anthropology of work. The insight of Genesis 2:15 about human work is impressive because the text strikingly includes labor within the very act of the creation of Adam, who is thus congenitally a homo faber. The text is decidedly imposing, especially when the reader realizes that it claims to report of a pre-lapsarian (before the “Fall”) condition. That is, Genesis 2:15 is about the essence of the human being qua created by God. Work belongs, according to J, to anthropology.3 In what follows—and before I show how important it is to select a textual theme for proposing a critical method of interpretation (part 3)—I intend to reflect on this anthropological dimension by focusing first on the nature of J as conveyor of the kerygma (message). Second, zooming on the notion of work, I shall attempt to rediscover its centrality in the J vision of cosmic and anthropological origins. At that point, we shall witness a so-to-speak expansion of theology to enclose sociology, and naturally this expansion will open the gate to a sociological and philosophical reflection on the biblical text, thus furnishing a “language” to textual criticism. In other words, the biblical text ceases to belong exclusively to the domain of the theologian. From an in illo tempore (in that hoary time) abstract projection, we shift to the practical quomodo (how) of the genesis of humanity and world. What should we understand by “work,” and what kind of wisdom will the notion convey when reflected on philosophically? Furthermore, what does it ethically imply hic et nunc (here and now)? Eventually, when the substrate ground will be stabilized, the notion of work will allow a reflection in depth on its dialectical nature and its exemplary status for further epistemological inroads (part 3). For this task, I have found appropriate help from philosophers such as Karl Marx (1818–1883), the post-Marxist “Frankfurt School of Sociology” (founded in 1923), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), and several others, and in a second part of this book, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his disciples. 2.  Adam Smith, On Labor Value (New York: P. F. Colliers, 1911); idem, An Inquiry into the National and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: Books 1-3, ed. Andrew Skinner (London/New York: Penguin Classics, 1986 [original 1776]). 3. On J, see my development and critique below.

4

Introduction

Admittedly, the biblical text is theological rather than philosophical, but an easy transposition from the former to the latter for the sake of discovering a fitting expressive language sheds a welcoming light, I think, on the central importance of work and its necessary liberation from the “fetishism of commodities,” as says Marx.4

4.  Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 3 vols. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906–1909), 1:83–84. In a recent article of Atlantic (atlantic.com of Feb. 29, 2019) signed by Derek Thompson, “Working Is Making Americans Miserable,” modern teens’ priority of career is higher than family and kindness to others (95 %). “Without work most people tend to feel miserable.”

Part I

Philosophy

WHAT ABOUT THE J TRADITION? Let us start with J, the traditional conveyor of the biblical narrative under consideration here. Of importance is the question of its Sitz im Leben (setting in life). Evidently, it will depend to a large extent on the date of its composition. Now, unfortunately, scholarship is still far from solving this problem. A strong proposal has been to see the author J as a court scribe during the reign of David or Solomon, that is, ca. 950–900 BCE. He was a royalist but with an implied criticism of the actual kings in Israel. If so, J would be the oldest literary source in the Pentateuch.1 The scholars in favor of this theory select several literary features such as J’s anthropomorphisms of God and the preference for calling God YHWH rather than Elohim as found in P’s creation history (Gen. 1:1–2:4a). Furthermore, the theme of the conquest of Canaan seems to serve as conclusion to the retrospective of J.2 Therefore, there would be a wonderful arc from the creation of humanity to the beginning of Israel’s national history, that is, a trajectory from the general to the particular, the latter being informed by the former (see Gen. 12:1ff). Convincing as this theory is, there are, however, serious doubts as to the solidity of its conclusions. Among other things, there is, for instance, the notable textual absence of a clear monarchical institution and of the Jerusalemite/Zion 1.  So since Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. John Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003) and, especially, since Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton: A Religio-Historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12, trans. K. William Whitney, Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006). 2.  For Martin Noth, this feature belonged already to a previous oral version (Grundlage). See A History of Pentateuchal Traditions, trans. Bernhard W. Anderson (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2000).

5

6

Part I

ideological complex.3 In fact, nowadays, scholars react strongly against the former consensus and advance the theory of a (post)exilic dating for J. Thus, John van Seeters, among the most outspoken scholars,4 and Rolf Rendtorff, who rejects the entire “documentary hypothesis”5 argue for a return to Martin Noth’s “major unities,” although not as “themes” à la Noth, but as independent units. Furthermore, the story of origins, according to him, is not an introduction to a J history of salvation (as it would for van Seeters). About this, Frank Crüsemann agrees and writes about “Die Eigenständigkeit der Urgeschichte” (“the independence of the origins tradition” [nomen est omen]).6 My own stance will be seen, I suppose, as a compromise. The alleged absence of the monarchical in J’s Urgeschichte is relative, and so is the silence about the Jerusalem/Zion complex. Adam is king, and symbolically Jerusalem is the world, here microcosmically represented by the Garden.7 As to the problem of an implied criticism of the Solomonic hubris and of the validation of David’s kingship in the tenth century, both make sense. I refer the reader to Hans W. Wolff’s “The Kerygma of the Yahwist.”8 As we know, David had a hard time imposing his nationalistic unification of the north and south of the country. J was in favor of the king, but he included a formidable caveat: the king in Israel is but representative of the paradigmatically human universal kingship. The latter is not only over Israel-Judah but also over the world. In other words, J may well have been composed under the reign of David or Solomon, and he may have seen Adam as royal, but then we must remem3.  On the Zion ideology, see 2 Sam. 7:8–17; 23:1–7; 1 Kings 8:46–53; 9:2–9; Pss. 46; 48; 76. 4.  See, for example, John Van Seeters, The Yahwist: A Historian of Israelite Origins (Winona Lake, IN: Wm. Eisenbrauns, 2013). He sees J as providing a “prologue” and a “framework” to an earlier Deuteronomistic history. Actually, he compares J with the Jewish historian Josephus, a writer who also creatively used previous sources for his composition. 5. Rolf Rendtorff, Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuchs, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977; repr. 2015). 6.  Frank Crüsemann, “Die Eigenständigkeit der Urgeschichte: ein Beitrag zur Diskussion um den ‘Jahwisten,’” in Die Botschaft und die Boten, Festschrift für Hans Walter Wolff zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Jörg Jeremias and Lothar Perlitt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981). 7.  On Adam as king, see, for example, Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer (PRE) 12 in fine and 13. The location of Eden in Genesis 2–3 is problematic. True, Genesis 2:8 (“in the east”) and 3:24 (“at the east of the Garden of Eden”) seem to point to a country east of the locus from where J is speaking. But the texts are imprecise, and it is not said from where they orient the readers. In fact, it is suggested in my The Trial of Innocence: Adam, Eve, and the Yahwist (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2006] that Eden is the Land of Israel ideologized. I wrote, “In summary, according to J’s cosmology, ‘east of Eden’ means Mesopotamia, from Armenia to the Persian Gulf. West of this region is Eden, that is, Palestine. A Palestine transfigured, to be sure, but a non-mythic geographical country all the same; Eden is retrievable” (65). Eric M. Meyers and John Rogerson state, “Human society was viewed as an integral part of the larger cosmos, and it was the king’s function to maintain the harmony of that integration” (“The World in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Bible, ed. Howard Clark Kee, et al., 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 139). 8. H. W. Wolff, “The Kerygma of the Yahwist,” in The Vitality of Old Testament Traditions, ed. Walter Brueggemann and H. W. Wolff (Atlanta: John Knox, 1975), 41–66. The original article appeared in German as “Das Kerygma des Jahwisten,” Evangelische Theologie 24 (1964): 73–98.



Philosophy 7

ber that being a king in Israel means indeed “to serve [work/till] and to keep [guard].”9 Kingship here is centrifugal rather than centripetal as it is among the “nations.” In the background of the entirety of Israelite history, we find the conviction that humans in general are a corrupting factor in the world, but human work, insofar as it reflects integrity and righteousness, is able to retrieve paradise here and now, and so is the king’s vocation.10 This situation in which the guiding ideology is that work, especially the work of the king, can help to restore paradise would be the Sitz im Leben of a tenth-century J composition. Earlier, I spoke of an “arc” of texts, that is, a trajectory of traditions going from the narrative of creation to the story of the conquest of Canaan and eventually to the David-Solomon era. Appropriately, when we take stock of the multifaceted evolution of the tradition and focus on its further terminus ad quem, that is, the question of a (post)exilic J, the Sitz im Leben will have shifted to fit an entirely different set of circumstances. Jeremiah 30–33, for instance, insists on the central theme of “building and planting” to characterize the expected restoration after the exile.11 From then on, a renewed reading of Genesis 2–3 on work discerns a different thesis or purpose to the text, in which Genesis 2:23–24 on the expulsion from Eden becomes prominent.12 Here again, we are dealing with an “arc,” a Geschehenbogen, as Claus Westermann says,13 yet its purpose is now a far cry from what we attempted to unveil in the tenth-century version of J. To reinvent a story of origins in the sixth or fifth century is now in order to contribute—with what tremendous power—to the understanding of how history went wrong. It has brought over even the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its population. This “late J,” in the words of F. V. Winnett,14 saw in the very anthropology of the Urmensch the seed of evil and of the corruption of human nature by hubris. From the hubris of King Solomon denounced in a previous   9.  See 1 Samuel 8:4–22, especially v. 7 (the election of a king in Israel is equated with a rejection of God). Deuteronomy 17:14–20 insists also on the limitations of royal authority. The king is servant of the Torah and of his people; in fact, he is subject to the Law like any other citizen. 10.  More on this notion below. In the myth of Ziusudra, the Sumerian pendant of the biblical Noah, he is king and “the preserver of the name of vegetation (and) of the seed of mankind” (“The Deluge,” lines 259–60 [italics original], trans. S. N. Kramer, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. James B. Pritchard, 3rd ed., [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969], 44). 11.  It is Jeremiah’s “Book of Consolation”, see 1:10; 29:5. See also Isaiah 60:21 (“they [Israel] are the shoot that I planted, my handiwork in which I glory.”) 12. Incidentally, “Eden” is the Akkadian edinu, the Sumerian eden (“plain, desert”; it is used euphemistically in Genesis, where it becomes “delight”). In the Bible, see Ezek. 28; 31; Isa. 51:30, etc. G. von Rad rightly stresses that Eden is no voluptuous Elysium as is shown in Gen. 2:16–17. 13.  Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, trans. J. J. Scullion, Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, 1984), cited by Paul Ricoeur in André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, “Thinking Creation,” in Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 35. 14. Frederick V. Winnett, “Re-Examining the Foundations,” Journal of Biblical Literature 84 (1965): 1–19.

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Part I

critique by J, we shift to a universal hubris as sin denounced as innate. The human in general (and, we may read between the lines, Babylon in particular) is fallible and disobedient.15 On a more positive note, the following essay wants to be a celebration, an acknowledgment of the marvel of life, language, communication, love, procreation, and art/creativity. THE BIBLE AND CUNEIFORM TEXTS: A PRIMARY STAGE OF INTERTEXTUALITY In that day and age, Israel experienced the tremendous power of the Mesopotamian civilization.16 It is thus not utterly surprising to find in Israelite tradition of the restoration (return to Zion) a Babylonian influence, even though it is paradoxical after the exile.17 Akkadian epic of the second millennium inspired the Jewish mythical reconstruction of world origins. Actually, J is replete with parallels with the Mesopotamian creation epics.18 Thereabout, some brief remarks are apropos. The Mesopotamian creation stories remain decisively mythical. Here, human work is slaving for the gods. Work is essentially cultic; it consists, for instance, in building temples. For the rest, the task is felt as hard labor, so humans rebel against the gods who respond by crushing humanity with a universal flood. Genesis 2–3 offers a sharp contrast. J demythologizes both Adam and his work. Genesis 2:15, in parallel with Genesis 1 (P), for instance, magnifies the divine blessing in the human capacity “to be fruitful and multiply” (1:28, see 2:24), thus allowing the couple to “recreate itself.”19 In fact, in a stroke of 15.  See Hans H. Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist: Beobachtungen und Fragen zur Pentateuchforschung (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1976); he writes, “The crisis of history provided the impetus to become aware of history, both in itself and in its relevance for theology” (182). This process can be compared to the transfer of a written article from its time and space to a new publication for a changed audience and its environment. It clearly alters its function, all but reorienting its earlier being. The principle of “reader response criticism” plays a major role here. In part 3, an all-embracing reading of J throughout its historic evolution will be called “dialectical interpretation.” 16.  More so relatively speaking than the Egyptian one. 17.  To recall, Second Isaiah saw the people of Israel “as formed through the experience of the exile” in Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 2:605. 18.  See David Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant: Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1987). 19.  So Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, “Genesis 1–11,” in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, ed. James Stokes Ackerman and Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974), 44. See also Genesis 9:1. I am intentionally using here the term “parallel” out of respect for structuralism’s emphasis on notions like the detection of traces of model texts in any given composition, or “imitations,” etc. (It is what Julia Kristeva calls “intertextuality” and is much stressed by Harold Bloom and Michael Fishbane, among others). In fact, the notion started with the Russian scholar Michael Bakhtin, who does not use the term “intersubjectivity” or “intertextuality” but speaks of



Philosophy 9

genius, J makes the human work the mirror image of God’s work—see the multiple terms to describe divine action in Genesis 2–320 expressing a greater opinion of and praise for the “tilling and keeping” of God’s Garden, that is, of God as Gardener. YHWH plants a garden and plants Adam in the garden,21 Adam in ’adamah. The garden’s vegetation is for the human’s nourishment and not for the gods, and, as in the old Babylonian Atrahasis, for instance, the “keeping” of the land is not a shift from a divine duty to a human one.22

“dialogism” and of “polyphony.” The Bulgarian scholar Julia Kristeva coined the term to describe the influence of a (set of) text(s) on another (set of) text(s), that is, how texts relate to each other and to their constantly changing contexts. See M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), and, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee, Slavic Series 8 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). Julia Kristeva, “‘Nous deux’ or a (Hi)story of Intertextuality,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Roudiez et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Contemporaries Harold Bloom (in The Book of J, trans. David Rosenberg [New York: Random House, 1991]) and Michael Fishbane (Biblical Text and Texture. Close Readings of Selected Texts [New York, Schocken Books, 1979]) also underscore the notion. 20.  On God’s constant activity through maintenance of life, see, for instance, Psalm 104. In an ambivalent statement where the “master” of work may be intentionally identified as God or a human patron, b. Nedarim 49b reads, “Great is the value of labor, since it honors its master” (my trans.). Similarly, in another register, human love is reflection of divine love. See Benedictine Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Le livre des oeuvres divines (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011); see also Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 224. See Judg. 2:7–10 and Josh. 24:31; Ps. 145:4, 9–10, 17; Isa. 5:12; Job 14:15; 34:19 (note the anthropomorphisms); all works are made wisely: Ps. 104:24, etc.; cf. John 1:1–3; 6:28–29. See Robert North, “Works of God,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. George A. Buttrick, 4 vols. (New York: Abingdon, 1962), 4:872–73. 21.  Note the historical echo to this with Israel being “planted” in a country that was not theirs in Joshua 24:13: “I [God] gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruits of vineyards and olive yards that you did not plant” (NRSV, my ital.). This high opinion of human work stands in stark contrast with the Greek and Latin negative view of labor as drudgery opposed to the leisure necessary for contributing to the increase of culture. Labor is close to slavery, says Aristotle, Politics, 8.1.4–8.2.1 (= 1337b.2–13). Already then the worker (mainly the peasant) was exploited (they were called coloni in Italy). There is, however, in the ancient Greek another usage of the word ergon/ergazomai that designates work as a social and ethical task, especially in Hesiod for whom work is a divine plan for human life (see Of Works and Days [eighth to seventh centuries]; Hesiod, himself a peasant and poet, promoted hard labor against those who were considered as the elite in Greek society). In the New Testament, the term is used infrequently (so Georg Bertram, “ergon,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976], 2:635–55). Thomas Carlyle’s words on work also deserve mention. He says, “[W]ork is alone noble. . . . Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness” (Past and Present, part 1 [New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1843], 154, 198). Anticipating my part 2, I’ll say that biblical work contrasts also with Freud’s discovery in the human soul of “the most universal endeavor of all living substance—namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1950], 86), which is, ultimately “a continuous descent toward death” (Freud, The Ego and the Id [London: Hogarth Press, 1950], 66). 22.  Atrahasis 1.iv, Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. (World’s Classics). (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14: “Let man bear the load of the gods.”

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Insightfully, David Damrosch considers Genesis 1–11 as transforming “the old stories of creation and flood in order to reflect on the nature of culture.”23 The modern readers of Genesis should be sensitive to the amazing originality of Israel’s tradition in the ancient Near Eastern world. The demythologization process as we find here is unique and revolutionary. Suddenly, Israel secedes from the concert of nations and proclaims its freedom from slavery. In the Near Eastern background, Nahum Sarna says, “The position and function of man in the scheme of creation paralleled precisely the status of the slave in Mesopotamia, while the receipt of authority by the god Marduk and his consolidation of power by the exhibition of overwhelming force were symbolic of the Babylonian conception of the human rulership of the state.”24 He adds, “[T]his Genesis story represents a complete break with the Near Eastern tradition” where “the goal of man on earth was to integrate himself harmoniously into the cosmic rhythm.”25 For the sake of this task, the role of the Near Eastern king was prominent. He is the link binding humanity with divinely inspired nature, and his own psyche consequently participates in the superhuman. It is thus totally understandable to see in historic Israel a strong reluctance to the popular desire of having a king “like all other nations” (1 Sam. 8:5–18). As a compromise, the king in Israel is described not as primar23. Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant, 119. It remains a fact that in both the ancient Mesopotamian myth and in Genesis humanity’s divine creation and humanity’s toil are associated. It is with surprise that one reads Jerome T. Walsh’s following statement about Genesis 2:4b–17: “Man is present in a completely passive role” [sic] (“Genesis 2:4b–3:24: A Synchronic Approach,” in “I Studied Inscriptions From Before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11, ed. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura, (Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 4) [Winona Lake, IN: Wm. Eisenbrauns, 1994], 363). Julian Morgenstern, The Book of Genesis, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1965) goes even further: Genesis 2:15, he thinks, “is clearly out of place” (58). “Verses 10–15,” he adds, “are not an integral part of the narrative” (58). Incidentally, let me also stress here that the Genesis term for “tilling” is ‘abad, that is, the very Hebrew root for slavery (see v. 5), even though the text immediately neutralizes this negative sense of the word by underscoring the bliss of “freely eat[ing] of every tree of the garden” (2:16). From a Marxian point of view that interests us here, there is “a permanent struggle between the various coexisting modes of production,” as Fredric Jameson says (Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971], 97. From this perspective, Adam’s work as an agriculturist may be seen as advocating a return to the Earth—not necessarily Tolstoyan. Reference can be made to Noah’s planting of vines; Micah’s glorification of land; Ezra; Nehemiah. . . . 24.  Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis: The World of the Bible in the Light of History (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 7. Note the contrast with Israel’s figure of creation: the Babylonian world starts with evil being coextensive with it. Goodness is only the result of violence and destruction by the gods. In Israel, evil is history-bound; it does not belong to being. (See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil [Boston: Beacon Press, 1967]). Biblical “evil” is a symbol, and as Ricoeur famously says, “The Symbol gives rise to Thought.” Henri Bergson earlier had been impressed with the capacity of “our reason, endowed as it is with the idea of space and with the power to create symbols . . . prevents . . . the confusion of the event’s explanation with the event itself” (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience [Paris: Ancienne Librarie Germer-Baillière, 1889], 125, my trans., my ital.). 25. Sarna, Understanding Genesis, 9, 11.



Philosophy 11

ily a great warrior but rather as attributed with “justice [as] the girdle of his loins and truth the belt of his hips” (Isa. 11:5; cf. 16:5).26 As G. Castellino remarks, the Genesis tradition attributes to different human characters the origins of the various businesses and functions, whereas in Mesopotamian texts the initiative is divine. The gods must teach the humans and so they remain forever in control.27 Adam is a homo faber, as God is a deus faber. God and Adam. In such a conception, God is involved with his creation, and Adam is immediately and indispensably a social being in relationship with the “other.”28 So much so that Genesis 2:4b specifies the background of its anthropology in this way: “there was [in the ‘beginning’] no human to till the ground” (that is, as we saw above, no one encountering the non-self, God and the world), so that the earth started by being a desert (2:5). All is changed with the newly created Adam’s involvement with the world. That is why Genesis 2:15 does not indulge in abstractly reflecting on Adam per se but, remarkably, speaks of the human as situational—he is set immediately in a chronotope (a spatiotemporality), Mikhail Bakhtin would say. The chronotope here is concretized in a “field” and “Eden.” Rudolf Smend 26.  Pedersen writes, “He does not employ the usual royal instruments of power, because they are un-Israelitish, even superfluous” (Israel: Its Life and Culture, 2:92). He quotes Jer. 22:15–16; Zech. 9:9–10. The Israelite kingship charter, of course, is found in Deut. 17:14–20; cf. 1 Sam. 8:11–18. 27.  G. R. Castellino, “The Origins of Civilization According to Biblical and Cuneiform Texts,” in “I Studied Inscriptions,” 93. To this we add that, contrary to Near East’s cult of the (kingly and heroic) personality, Scripture uses what Gerhard von Rad labels “sober realism” (Genesis: A Commentary, rev. ed., OTL [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972] = Das erste Buch Mose: Genesis [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1949], 20). Within a meager commentary on Gen. 2:15 (60), von Rad, however, comes with this great citation of Emil Brunner (Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology [London: Lutterworth Press, 2003], 346 = Der Mensch im Widerspruch [1939], 357): “That is the immense double statement, of a lapidary simplicity, so simple indeed that we hardly realize that with it a vast world of myth and Gnostic speculation, of cynicism and asceticism, of the deification of sexuality and fear of sex completely disappears” (von Rad, Genesis, 63, 67). In Isaiah 28:24–26, we shall see that God teaches the human how to work, but the parallel with the Mesopotamian traditions stops there. God does not teach to keep control but, on the contrary, to delegate control to the human. He is a Father, not an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent sent by gods or dictators. 28. Recently, La Commission Éthique et Société de la Fédération Protestante de France has published a document that says, “[T]he human being, from birth to death, is a being in relation.” Furthermore, it recalls, “the aim of marriage is a loving relationship, not just for procreation. Children are God’s grace extended to the couple, not a due” (“PMA/GPA: L’interpellation de la Fédération protestante de France,” Réforme 3750 [Apr. 18, 2018], https://www.reforme.net/idees/ opinions/l’interpellation-de-la-federation-protestante-de-france-sur-la-pmagpa/). In another article, about the ethics of Jean Calvin, François Dermange says, “Against the Middle Ages and its valorization of the monk’s ideal of a daily contemplation and prayer, the Reformation has elevated the daily secular occupation to the rank of vocation in the service of God and neighbor” (“Série ‘Calvin autrement’ (4/5): Les protestants et l’éthique du travail,” Réforme 3752 [May 9, 2018], https:// www.reforme.net/bible/theologie/serie-calvin-autrement-45-les-protestants-et-l’ethique-du-travail, my trans.). Calvin quotes 2 Thess. 3:10 (“Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”). Note that P in Genesis 1 is not immune to anthropomorphisms; see “God said”/“God saw”/God “rested,” but, compared to J, P is more restrained.

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emphasizes this feature in which he perceives what he thinks is J’s farmer milieu.29 But Claus Westermann is right when he insists, “every human occupation shares in some way in the ‘tilling and keeping.’”30 Whether a farmer or a philosopher, Adam is at work, and as such he is a subject rather than an object. A heuristic parallel may be drawn, I believe, with Genesis 2:19, where Adam names the animals,31 whereas God is the one who calls the names of the creatures featured in Genesis 1. J thus appears as an audacious theologian.32 For him,33 work is the common denominator between God and Adam. The issue of naming, either by God (P) or by Adam (J) will, to be sure, constitute as challenge for the “dialectical criticism” in part 3. Besides introducing us to a field that proves ambivalent—as it announces the catastrophe, so to speak, of Genesis 3, where, however, man and woman “form the subject”34—the subjectivizing of the human as a theme brings theology and philosophy together. As a matter of fact, J seems to be conscious of doing so. He inserts into the myth of creation a “tree of knowledge.” It constitutes, originally, a forbidden realm, into which eventually Adam and Eve will barge. As a consequence of “eating of its fruit,” man and woman are described as knowing good and bad (3:5), for “eating the fruit” is “source of wisdom” (3:6). Now, adds the text, “they perceive and their eyes as being opened” (3:7).35 In part 3, I shall be dealing at length with this new development.

29.  See n. 23. See Michael Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope of the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Rudolf Smend, Biblische Zeugnisse: Literatur des alten Israel (Frankfurt: Fischer Bücherei, 1967). On the human chronotope in the world, see Pirqe Avot (PA) 4:3: “No one is without a place, and no word without its time” (my trans.). 30. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 221. About the Garden, we should listen to Paul Ricoeur pointedly saying that space “serves as metaphor for all other expressions of point of view” (Time and Narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, 3 vols. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988], 2:94.) 31.  More on this in conjunction with “silence;” see n. 54. 32.  Or is it more accurate to call him a historian with Rolf Rendtorff and John van Seeters, as we saw previously? One quality, as Robert Musil would say, does not exclude others. After all, even in Rendtorff’s opinion J is at least an interpreter. 33.  No, Harold Bloom, not her! See The Book of J, 10, 11. 34. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 192. 35.  Why is access to the “tree of knowledge” forbidden? It is so because of its anachronistic nature in the pre-lapsarian era. Philosophizing or the acquisition of knowledge is only at home in post-lapsarian times, when it is a quest for the “good life.” That the “tree” as symbol for this quest predates the “Fall” is a reflection of the irony of J, a master of ambiguity. For Adam and Eve to have their eyes opened does not mean that previously they were blind but that there was no need for them to look for something they already enjoyed. Harold Bloom writes, “To open one’s eyes is to see everything, all at once, and so to see oneself as others might see one, as an object” (Bloom, The Book of J, 183).



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“Tilling” (literally “working”36) and “keeping” are not the only terms used biblically to designate work/labor in the Hebrew Bible. Other denominations, such as ‘amal (with a hint of pain and suffering) or mel’akhah (also used for God’s work of creation)37 are present. In what follows, nevertheless, I shall continue to highlight Genesis 2:15 and the terms “tilling/working” and “keeping,” if only because this particular text takes the reader to an appreciation of pre-lapsarian labor in sharp contrast with a post-lapsarian condition, which happens to be the universal one at hand. This contrast is of primordial importance and will be broached again in part 3. In 1961, the late Scandinavian biblical critic Ivan Engnell wrote an article called “Work in the Old Testament,”38 in which there is an unfortunate confusion of the issues. From start to finish, Engnell emphasizes his understanding of work as “entirely negative.” In fact, his article is tendentious. Any aspect one could deem “redeeming” in the texts is said to be “anachronistic.”39 On Genesis 2:15, for instance, Engnell’s reading is preempted by a prejudicial dogmatism according to which work is a negative notion; it used to be altogether absent in the Garden. This brings the author to a paradoxical view of work in general. He justly mentions the reconstruction of Jerusalem after the exile and says that in the “K-work (I Chron. – Neh.)” we are not dealing with “work as such, but [with] . . . an act of worship.”40 The author forgets that both senses are included in the single Hebrew word ‘abodah.41 Perhaps 36.  The translation “tilling” rather than “working” in Genesis 2:15 is justified. In the immediately following tannaitic times, the term po‘alim (workers; an all-inclusive term) means laborers in the field, tillers. 37.  See Gen. 2:2; Prov. 24:27; Dan. 8:27; Ps. 107:23; etc. See the entries for these words in Walter Baumgartner, Ludwig Koehler, and Johann J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of Old Testament, trans. Mervyn E. J. Richardson, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–1999); (hereafter, HALOT). Isaiah Gruber notes that, according to the Rabbis of old, mel’akhah refers to creative activity in imitation of God’s work. The term ‘abodah appears 145 times and its translation in the LXX is puzzling: there are some thirty different versions of the term in Greek. Sometimes, as expected, the translation is ergon (35 percent), but also leitourgia (43 percent [see n. 85 in part 2]), and other renditions, thus showing inconsistence. See I. Gruber, “Conventions and Transgressions: Concept of Work in the Monastic Tradition” (ASEEES: Convention Concepts Monastic Labor Work, 12 November 2017). 38.  Ivan Engnell, “Work in the Old Testament,” Svensk exegetisk årsbok 26 (1961): 5–12. 39.  See, for example, Engnell, “Work in the Old Testament,” 7 n. 5. Even if he were right, it remains that in a biblical tradition—“before” or “after”—work was regarded as eminently positive, thus creating a dialectic relation with its negativity. This excels all other considerations. As to a definition of “dialectic,” see the fifteenth-century philosopher Abraham Shalom, “A man is not called a hero of wisdom, until he can demonstrate a proposition two ways, once positively and once negatively, for a matter is only known through its opposite” (cited by Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015], 104. 40.  Engnell, “Work in the Old Testament,” 8. 41.  It is, therefore, with a certain relief that we read Engnell’s statement, in his article’s conclusion, “the two meanings [‘worship’ and ‘serve’] go hand in hand” (“Work in the Old Testament,” 12). Furthermore, Engnell has written another article, “‘Knowledge’ and ‘Life’ in the Creation Story,” where he accurately stresses the correspondence procreation-creation (Wisdom in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. Martin Noth and D. Winton Thomas, VTSup 3 [Leiden: Brill, 1969], 103–19).

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still more tendentious is his negative interpretation of the famous text of Proverbs 31:10ff. about the wise/diligent wife and her labor.42 What is evident is that he has missed the target. For it is in truth crucial to take seriously the contrast between pre-lapsarian and post-lapsarian conditions as I mentioned previously. Before the so-called Fall, work is co-creation with God; it belongs to the very being of the human.43 WHAT DO PHILOSOPHERS SAY? It behooves us to explore the Sages’ perception. To do so, our focus will be on modern philosophers for two reasons. One is the extraordinary development of the sociological epistemology that philosophers reflect upon; second is its heuristic relevance. Philosophy could frown at the particularity of the 42.  Engnell, “Work in the Old Testament,” 11. 43.  The matter does not exclusively concern Adam as an individual (pace Engnell). Work in Genesis 2:15 is an alpha striving toward its omega, an original and eschatological notion whose transcendence is launched and retrieved thanks to human creativity. In between these two extremes, labor is marked by relativity and even, in the “raw,” by rebellion against the Creator. The biblical texts at that point become unavoidably ambivalent—a dialectical challenge. The Maharal of Prague Rabbi Judah Loew (sixteenth century) tells us that when God handed down to Moses the tablet of the Law (the Decalogue in Exod. 20; Deut. 5), one end of the tablet was in the hands of God, the other end in the hands of Moses. The middle third, however, was the field where the divine and the human met, but without confusion (J. Taan, 68c). Let us recall, a this point, the heuristic figure used by Hans-Georg Gadamer of a hermeneutics of play (also present in Freud’s works). It takes place in between players’ performance and the game’s rules, a “fusion of horizons” (H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. J. Marshall, 2nd ed. [New York: Crossroad, 1992]). Hence, an ambivalence and also a tremendous promise; a conception that recalls what, much later, Donald Winnicott would call a “transitional space” (The Child and the Outside World: Studies in Developing Relationships [London: Routledge, 2015]). Besides, after Hermann Gunkel’s famous saying, we should keep in mind that “Urzeit wird Endzeit” (Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton). The Maharal’s pattern is of major importance. We may extend it to the relationship of the so-called “real Jesus” and our quest for understanding his kerygma. We can, in this context, accept Hayden White’s statement that history has in itself no meaning, so that only its narrativation gives meaning to it (see The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007, ed. Robert Doran [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010], 26–57). Consequently, Jesus’s history makes no sense until we, the readers, make sense of it through our own receptive narrativation. I am glad to read what Paul Ricoeur states in the wake of von Rad’s Theology of the Old Testament (see below n. 43 in part 2): “‘retelling’ (wiedererzählen) remains the most legitimate form of discourse on the Old Testament. The Entfaltung [development] of hermeneutics is the repetition of the Entfaltung which presided over the elaboration of the traditions of the biblical base” (The Conflict of Interpretations, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974], 47). Text meets text, and meaning is like a spark springing from the shock of two flint stones. Then the third, medium, tier of the pattern is reached: the “real Jesus” on the top and our interpretive narrative at the bottom meet in the “in between” and becomes Gospel, Good News. Indeed, if we identify Jesus’s kerygma as text, we must remember Bakhtin’s teaching that a text becomes alive when meeting another text or context. The text is dialogical and intersubjectival (“A Method for Human Sciences” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 162). Ricoeur speaks of a “signal to us to cooperate with the work, to shape the plot ourselves” (Time and Narrative, 2:25).



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biblical “remembrance” (= reenacting) of Israel’s Heilsgeschichte but certainly not at a Scripture reflection on the “beginning of the world and of the human race.”44 The biblical kerygma is addressed not only to the Israelites but also to human beings of all kinds and all times and all spaces and not only to faith but to reason.45 We are thus justified in looking into what universal philosophy—but especially the Western philosophy that owes so much to the Aufklärung—has to say about human beings and their work, whether it agrees with P and J. An immediate result of modern philosophical conception is the promotion of human productive activity to a level that excludes the instinctual from selfish satisfaction of human needs.46 In conformity with Scripture where humans are not acted on by their instincts like animals but deliberately act as co-workers with the Creator, they are, in philosophical terms, independent self-reflexive beings (philosophy as activity more than doctrine). Furthermore, it is by working that they contribute to their self-preservation. According to the Bible, they are not to ward themselves off in a circular mode, but in an extraverted drive, they are to ward off (šamar) the Garden against any deteriorating forces.47 In other words, biblical and nonbiblical work serves ends outside of itself. YHWH’s “Garden” granted to the human being is no paradise of farniente (a Greek Arcadia) but is a gerundive, something to be built (or “tilled”).48 In fact, Eden is a pre-paradise, fulfilled only if the humans make it a paradise through their labor. Many a philosopher would not take exception to this idea. Even before the creation of Eve and before Adam’s discovery of sexuality, human eroticism expresses itself in co-creation. For Ernst Bloch, for instance, in Das Prinzip Hoffnung, the very “root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts.”49 44. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 64. 45.  Specifically, Israel’s history starts with Genesis 12:1 (the call of Abram/Abraham). It is strikingly preceded in the book of Genesis by eleven chapters that concern the whole world and all nations! This textual phenomenon cannot be overemphasized. 46.  Cf. Sigmund Freud’s “pleasure principle” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey. [1930; repr., London: Penguin, 2002]). 47.  See discussion on matter as obstacle (notes 68–75 and the texts referenced there). 48.  In a striking statement of Rabbi Hayim of Volozhyne (on b. Sanhedrin 90a), “The humans themselves build the world to come.” This is apparently not unique to Israel’s philosophy. Margaret Mead tells us, “To the Arapesh [of New Guinea] the world is a garden that must be tilled [without selfishness]” (“Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies,” in The Gendered Society Reader, ed. Michael S. Kimmel [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 48–50). On the human as a gerundive, I refer to Gerardus van der Leeuw, “L’Anthropomorphisme comme forme de l’anthropologie” Le Monde Non-chrétien 2, 1947, 170–86, see 172. See my Trial of Innocence, 62. 49.  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols. [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986]), 1:375–76.

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Bloch goes on in Tendenz, Latenz, Utopie50 to say that the transformation and genesis of the New is already fermenting in nature. Thus, “[n]othing will stay as it was given [to us].” In a remarkable speech at Trier on May 18, 1968, he spoke of a category of the possible and of matter as “being-as-possible.”51 Bloch stresses the tie between work and imagination, which, by the way, Theodor Adorno characterizes in Aesthetic Theory as “the differential of freedom at the heart of determination.”52 Thus, work fundamentally precedes our cognitive attempt to give meaning to the world. As Emmanuel Levinas insists, from the start we “live from” the world, “we live from ‘good soup,’ air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc. These are not objects of representations. We live from them.”53 Surprisingly, Genesis 2 describes pre-lapsarian work in a surrounding of silence.54 Its transcendence will eventually be discourse, language. This is why the encounter with the other follows (in the person of the Feminine), thus transforming the movement from centripetal into centrifugal.55 This point needs clarification. In Levinas’s philosophy centered on “the other,” work in Genesis 2 appears as the primordial relationship with the world (qua other). Before the intrusion 50. Bloch, Tendenz, Latenz, Utopie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 280–81. 51.  It is an important hint to a dialectical reading. We shall note the parallel thus established with Paul’s exclamation in Romans 8:22: “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.” About utopianism, there has been at least since the Renaissance a long series of utopias suggested by thinkers like Francis Bacon, for instance, and his Nova Atlantis (1627; repr., [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1915]). Bacon’s work, a “science fiction” premiere, opens the gate to an “ars inveniendi” that will be imitated or renewed by many a successor. I shall invoke here not only Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Soli (1568–1639), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Thomas More’s De optimo rei publicae statu sive de nova insula Utopia (1516), and even Jules Verne (1828–1905), but also, of course, Marx and Proudhon. Clearly, they all are technically oriented with the cryptic or proclaimed purpose of a Promethean establishment of a new world, veritable retrieval of the original Garden, or rather its altogether replacement by a secularized paradise. Fredric Jameson is a stark supporter of utopia’s value. “The Utopian idea . . . keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is” (Marxism and Form, 110–111). 52. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hulot-Kantor (London: Continuum, 2004), 229. 53. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. (Pittsburgh, PN: Duquesne University Press, 1969], 110. 54.  Adam starts speaking only from v. 19 on by naming the animals. On the silence surrounding work in Genesis 2:15, see also n. 87 and the text referenced there. 55.  For psychologist Donald Winnicott, the other is primarily and primordially the mother, something J could not theorize about for obvious reasons (Adam and Eve have no mother; they were beings without umbilicus!—the latter is replaced by their wound at their division). J’s focus is rather on the companion of Adam, Eve, who herself will become a mother in Genesis 4—a “production” (4:1), a travail, that also reflects upon the child; we all are born in a state of panic, confronting for the first time a hostile world (see Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth [1924; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1994]). Cain—“the one produced”—exteriorizes his horror to be born by killing his alter ego, Abel (see my Onslaught Against Innocence: Cain, Abel, and the Yahwist [Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010]). See also Donald Winnicott, The Child and the Outside World.



Philosophy 17

of the other in the person of Eve, the other is the Garden as a whole. It is precisely the intervention of another human being, which makes the relationship problematic.56 An individual particularity (“Woman,” Gen. 2:23) replaces the diffuse generality (“world”). And it now happens that her dissatisfaction, her “exile,” and her vulnerability (Genesis 3) perturbs the “enjoyment”57 of the self’s “acclimation” to the world. Adam learns that his enjoyment is drastically devalued by the ability of the female and of the world she incarnates to become hostile instead of friendly. Then the relation with the world becomes hard, and liberty becomes difficult (Gen. 3). The other decentralizes the self.58 FIRST EXCURSUS: THE GENERAL AND THE PARTICULAR The “election” of the feminine in Genesis 2 brings to mind the election of the people Israel. What we perceive in the historiography of this particular case will depend on our assessment of the Here and Now. “Now” is historical, hence transient, but also universal. “Here” also is limited, but, as microcosmic, it similarly conveys universality. Consequently, the universal can only be grasped through the particular—a fact already underscored by Eve’s uniqueness. Israel’s particular election is the way to the general election of humanity—an idea strongly emphasized by J. That’s how Israel is a redeemer, how Israel is “messianic”: by being priest and king among the nations (see Exod. 19:6). The nations witness Israel’s history and read their Scriptures to learn about the Here and Now of their own election. Election does not exist per se; in the general case as in the particular, one must elect to be elected.59 The knowing subject, the sharing subject, gives 56.  This is the existential basis of the universal female humiliation by the male gender (cf. JeanPaul Sartre’s other as a “hole in the world,” or “l’enfer c’est les autres” in No Exit (Huis clos) (1944; [New York: A. A. Knopf, 1962]). 57.  Another key notion in Levinas’s philosophy. 58.  To Levinas’s absolute “other,” Paul Ricoeur responded by stating the self as another and the other as another self, see his Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990); in trans. by Kathleen Blamey, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The issue of the “other” is another nest of contradictions in need of dialectical solution; see part 3 of this book. Cf. Genesis 3:11–12: “‘Who told you?’ . . .‘The woman you set at my side.’” See Pierre Gisel, La Création: Essai sur la liberté et la nécessité, l’histoire et la loi, l’homme, le mal et Dieu (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1980), 287–88, (my trans.): “I am born in the others’ world: the other and this third party that is the very world . . . the creation, which precedes me and welcomes me . . . the creation that I must shape.” See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 343. 59.  In a strong Jewish tradition, when God wanted to hand down the Decalogue to humanity (in general), nation after nation refused it because recognizing their particular sins in the mirror of the Law. Only Israel accepted the challenge, they elected to be elected. (See Mek. Bahodeš, Yitro 5, 221–22, ed. H. S. Horovitz, [1931]).

18

Part I

reality to something for the first time that did not exist but was only something potential. Redemption is subjective and objective. Often, the particular blots out the universal. Due to the blindness of witnesses, the particular of Capernaum’s paralytic man picking up his cot and going home may well hide the universal of the forgiveness of sin (Mark 2:6ff.). For the occultation of the universal is “easy,” Jesus says. The crux of the matter reflected in the “Scribes’” attitude goes beyond misunderstanding. They miss the point by letting the miracle to remain “trite,” voiceless. By transposition, if the universal is hidden, the narrative amounts to Adam remaining a private individual and J’s story of origins a child’s lullaby. For “there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go behind there [i.e., the appearance],” that is, reach self-consciousness, Hegel says.60 This achievement is through work. That is why Karl Marx concluded that the human is “the result of his labor.”61 THE GARDEN RAISES THE PROBLEM OF SPACE AND, SUBSIDIARILY, OF EVIL Philosophically speaking, Genesis 2–3 gives primacy to the issue of space. I have tackled this problem in previous works of mine. There, I have repeatedly insisted on the sixteenth-century Jewish notion of tsimtsum, that is, contraction of the Creator as he makes room for the non-divine in the universe. God “shrinks” his divinity for the sake of creating humans and setting them up as citizens in the divine realm.62 According to philosopher Hans Jonas, God’s gracious “shrinkage” is concomitantly the very root of evil: God has from the beginning forbidden himself to intervene, leaving to his creature the care and the work of 60.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. M. J. Inwood (1807; repr., [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018]), 162. Let us note that “self-consciousness” must not be understood as in the modern sense of “the reflection on the ego as an embarrassment . . . to know that one is nothing,” in the words of Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jeffcott (1951; repr., [London: Verso, 2006]), 46. Adorno says, “In Hegel, selfconsciousness was the truth of self-certainty . . . the ‘native realm of truth’” (46). 61.  Marx-Engels Gesamptausgabe. Part 1 (out of 4, mainly dealing with Das Kapital), vol. 3 (1933; repr., [Berlin: Dietz Verlage, 1972]), 150. 62. The notion was fathered by the mystic Isaak ben Solomon Ashkenazi Luria (1534–1572; Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg refers also to the Hasidic Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav in Likutei Moharan, 64:4, see p. 183 of Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers [New York: Schocken Books, 2015]). Note that this notion of divine “self-shrinking” implies also that God is in exile in His creation. See The Trial of Innocence, 83–86. Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death [New York: The Free Press, 1973], 161) says, “The point is that if the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it.”



Philosophy 19

redemption.63 By “tilling” the ground, Adam puts his mark on it; and by “keeping” the Garden he prevents himself from becoming an object among other objects, while as it were, usurping from God the possession of the created space. “Keeping” the Garden as space may indeed be understood as a defense against external enemies, yet the internal ones are by no means to be excluded. The humans need to adapt themselves to the reality of an ambiguous special and moral Other. At the antipode of “keeping” is solipsism, selfsufficiency. We might paraphrase the commandment implied in Genesis 2:15 as “keep the Garden as the Garden!” Such protection obviously has much to do with ecology.64 Human labor must aim at cultivating the cosmos into a garden. As Voltaire said, “il faut cultiver notre jardin” (Candide, chap. 30). Now, by definition (and by a sort of contradiction), work meets resistance and must overcome an obstacle—so that what is given must also be conquered; see discussion on the Promise Land! In the Bible, this designates the process of transfiguring matter into spirit.65 If we were to imagine an “ideal” universe without struggle, we would paradoxically evince an unlivable world. As written in my The Trial of Innocence, “The absence of possibility of drama, even of evil, would make of the creation a music-box with little characters dancing around without a fault. Then God is really how Voltaire saw Him: a clockmaker.”66 The theology or philosophy of evil is here dialectical. As we shall further see, Emmanuel Levinas identifies (problematic) matter with the “Other.” The resistances that work encounters are the dual resistance of the other and toward the other. We are in utter ambivalence––Freud speaks of repression, ambivalence, and conflict. The I, in relation to the other, needs to refuse to act “negatively; it has a positive structure: ethical.”67 Levinas adds that it is “the resistance of what has no resistance—the ethical resistance.”68 63.  Hans Jonas, Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz: Eine Jüdische Stimme (Tübingen: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987); see in English: “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” The Journal of Religion 67 (1987): 1–13. Even pessimistic Theodor Adorno envisions redemption. He writes, toward the end of his book Minima Moralia, “[T]he attempt to consider all things, as they would be portrayed from the standpoint of redemption . . . as it will one day lay there in the messianic light” (274). 64.  On this matter, see an interesting page in Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 20. See n. 108 (P. Gisel). 65.  See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 141. See also Bergson, who says, “[On] the inertia of matter, we shall say that it cannot by itself move or by itself stop moving. All bodies keep resting or moving as long as there is no intervention of a force. In both cases, one refers necessarily to the idea of activity” (Essai, 108, my trans.). 66. LaCocque, The Trial, 87. 67. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197. 68. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199.

20

Part I

After the so-called “Fall,” a state of rebellion perpetuates itself. Levinas states, “Work is always in a certain sense an abortive action. I am not entirely what I want to be.”69 The philosopher is obviously speaking of the postlapsarian situation. In this new context, work becomes painful labor, without, however, losing its dimension of enjoyability. “Sweat” marks it,70 but it is productive and thus remains essentially what it used to be in the pre-lapsarian era. Nowadays it is a productivity and enjoyment severely limited, it is true, by death.71 Besides its horror, the intervention of death is dialectically, as I said, the intervention of the endless Sabbath, the “cessation” of work.72 This raises, of course, an important problem, for if death is a rest, it also marks the emergence of consciousness of time—so that from space, with which we started the present development, we shift our attention to chronos. Death implies that I must accomplish my task now before it is too late.73 Rest and dread. It is death that raises the metaphysical problem of Being. This feeling of inadequacy that Genesis 3 so powerfully illustrates lies in its textual background and, by the way, reverses Freud’s terms, according to which work represses sexuality to produce civilization.74 According to J source, in 69. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 228. 70.  “By the sweat of your brow” (Gen. 3:19). 71.  “To dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). b. Baba Bathra [BB] 75b: “[God] has decreed that Adam be mortal.” (my trans.) 72.  But not its renunciation. Micah 4:4 (“they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees”) must be read within its context that speaks of “plowshares” and “pruning hooks” (4:3). There is no textual argument here against labor. Micah is exalting peace and fulfilling agrarian work (pace Engnell). 73.  Franz Rosenzweig states that the Sabbath merely confirms the workday. It does not seek that which would be absent in the workday, but it expresses fully what the workday says partially and occasionally. See Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God, trans. Nahum Glazer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 96. To recall, the Hebrew verb translated “to place” in 2:15 (wayannihehu) is alluding to rest (nuach). That is why the Midrash connects it here with menuchah and renders our text as “He gave him repose in the Garden of Eden” (see Mat. Kehunah). Rešasim leBik‘ah says, “As one who gently places down a precious treasure giving it fullest care and attention” (Bereishis/Genesis [New York: Mesorah Publications, 1977], 1:99). About J’s dialectical composition, the following Ricoeurian statement applies: “The narrative may move forward and backward combining the present from the point of view of the interpreter of a remembered past or as the past memory of an anticipated future, etc.” (Time and Narrative, 2:94). Earlier, I spoke of “the irony of J, a master of ambiguity,” we can indeed wonder whether with his narrative we are on earth or in heaven; whether the human acquisition of knowledge is a progression or a regression; the divinization of the human is real (Gen. 3:22) or a monstrous sham; Eden for ever inaccessible, or retrieved by the righteous among the faithful? . . . In all of this and more, J comes with a polyphonic narrative in which the narrator “‘converses’ with his/her characters and becomes a plurality of centers of consciousness irreducible to a common denominator” (Time and Narrative, 2:96). J’s emplotment is the opposite of the epic whose evocation of the past displays no ties with the contemporaneous narrator and his/her public (see 2:155). 74.  Pharaoh’s successful overburdening of the Hebrews in Egypt to contain their procreativity is a particular case that cannot be overblown into a general definition of work (Exod. 1). Northrop Frye says, “The efficient cause of civilization is work, and poetry in its social aspect has the function of expressing, as a verbal hypothesis, a vision of the goal of work and the forms of desire” (The Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957], 105–106).



Philosophy 21

contrast, Adam is ab origine a civilized being and not through repression of Eros but, on the contrary, through its discovery. It is only through a distortion of his sexuality that Adam risks reverting to his potential animality—also in Genesis 3’s background, like the “general” to which the feeling of inadequacy was the “particular.” For Adam’s sexuality is highly ambiguous; sexuality, like work, needs redemption.75 Both, however, are from the start stamped with the divine blessing. True, sex can become obsession, and labor can become toil (à la Gen. 3:17–19), although, as genuine, they destroy the illusion of instinctual selfish gratification. The consequence of the distortion of Eden’s order is dire. Work becomes drudgery.76 As toil, work is self-destructive and marked with negativity, in opposition to work in Genesis 2 that, as a divine gift, guarantees peace and fulfillment. We are thus facing an intrinsic ambivalence. Not only the ‘abodah77 granted by God to Adam carries potentially its own reversal—as indeed it becomes through Adam’s disobedience and egocentricity in Genesis 3 or 1178—but, even in its dimension as toil, work continues dialectically to have a constructive side: productivity, procreation, and culture.79

75. A distorted sexuality, when from “rencontre émerveillée” it becomes “lieu de sujétion” as Pierre Gisel says (La Création, 52). Marcuse (Eros and Civilization, 3) speaks of people “enjoy[ing] more sexual liberty than ever before. But the truth is that this freedom and satisfaction are transforming the earth into hell.” We shall reflect in part 2 on the intimate relation of sex and labor. Marcuse (Eros and Civilization, 5) falls into a trap when he says that humanity should strive toward “[m] ak[ing] the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor.” But he cites Freud, according to whom “[t]he uncontrolled Eros is just as fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinct” (Eros and Civilization, 7). That is why civilization means the deviation “from sexual activities onto their work” (Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis [New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1943], 273). We may perhaps listen to E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime [New York: Random House, 1975], 30: “Freud would . . . see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America for ever.”) 76.  Few critics have been as articulate on that matter as Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 175, comes with a remarkable quote of his I do not resist reproducing here: “[E]njoyment is separated from labor, the means from the end, exertion from recompense. Eternally fettered to a single little fragment of the whole, man fashions himself only as a fragment; even hearing only the monotonous whirl of the wheel which he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and, instead of shaping the humanity that lies in his nature, he becomes the mere imprint of his occupation, his science” (see F. Schiller, The Aesthetic Letters, Essays, and the Philosophical Letters, trans. J. Weiss [Boston: Little Brown, 1845], 22). 77.  The word ‘abodah does not appear in Genesis 1–3, although it is present some 140 times in the Hebrew Bible, according to HALOT, ad loc. It is a general term for work. It is used for the labor of a slave in Exod. 1:14; 5:11; 6:6; Lev. 25:39, and, by contrast, for the work of God in Isaiah 28:21. In the sense of worship, see Josh. 22:27; Exod. 12:25–26; 30:16; and 1 Chron. 9:28. 78. Franz Kafka speaks rather of human impatience: “Impatience got people evicted, and impatience kept them from making their way back” (The Zürau Aphorisms, trans. Michael Hofmann [London: Harvill Secker, 2006], 5). b. Yebamot 79a prefers shame, tenderness, and generosity as a return to Eden. 79.  Cf. Gen. 4:17–22; 5:28–29; 11:3–7a. Sigmund Freud recognizes rules and imperatives, primordially coming from the parents in terms of prohibitions. These, he says, are interiorized and sublimated into “ideals,” and eventually into the Superego. The result of which, in the words of Ricoeur, is a “wounded Cogito” (Conflict, 243). Note that Freud states that culture started with the

22

Part I

HOMO FABER Expectedly, this positive aspect of work has called the attention of philosophers. The homo faber of the origins continues since time immemorial to be the homo fecundus. Consequently, philosophy is not only fascinated by the homo qua sapiens but concomitantly by the human as producer, procreator, and achiever of high social development. What do philosophers say about human productivity? The great (and controversial) G. H. Friedrich Hegel, a man who was far from ignorant about Genesis,80 early on focused on practical human activity. He thought that the subject matter of philosophy is the history of human experience, as limited and frustrating as it may be. In this context, the term “history” is important because it takes into account the continuous striving of human function toward a teleological order, that is, “what there is, in truth.”81 True, the exile from Eden, to which we shall return, looks entirely negative. Not so, however, in Rabbinic Judaism, for which exile is a way to redemption. Saadia Gaon (892–942) sees exile as striving toward purification82; and, earlier, b. Pesahim 87b saw it as the opportunity offered to Israel to make many proselytes among the nations.83 In fact, God himself is in exile (from the world he created) and present only in the face of the exiled other. Levinas beautifully speaks also of the divine traces in history and the present. Thus, God reveals himself while remaining inaccessible, as Exodus

prohibition of hoary human desires: incest, cannibalism and murder. Ricoeur call this the folly of imperative (Conflict, 127). 80.  Hegel started as a student of theology in Tübingen and wrote essays on the philosophy of religion. 81.  Paul Ricoeur says that Freud discovers through interpretation “something like an archaeology of the subject” and Hegel a teleology of the object. Both are transcended symbolically in the alpha and the omega of the phenomenology of religion (Conflict, 21–23). He adds, “Only a subject with a telos can have an archê” (161), and he speaks of “the dialectic between archaeology and teleology” (173). As we shall further see, this notion is dear to Jürgen Habermas, for whom there is a telos of mutual understanding built into linguistic communication. Habermas often speaks of teleological structure “shared in interpretations.” In “Auto fahren: Der Mensch am Lenkrad,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Nov. 27, 1954), he said that driving a car is, “something like a hermeneutic science” in which the driver must translate foreign texts, words, styles, manners and quirks. On this, there is congruence with the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. (Incidentally, I recommend Brian Britt, Walter Benjamin and the Bible [New York: Continuum, 1996]. See also Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought, trans. Michael Winkler [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010]. I owe them much for the material on Walter Benjamin in the present book). 82.  Saadia ben Yosef Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (trans. Samuel Rosenblatt), Yale Judaica Series [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 294. On “exile” see 1 Pet. 2:11; cf. 1:1, 17. 83.  Rabbi Eleazar said that God scattered Israel among the nations for the sole end that proselytes should wax numerous among them. Rabbi Hoshaiah, in his turn, said that God did Israel a benefit when he scattered them among the nations. See also Abi Doukhan, Emmanuel Levinas: A Philosophy of Exile, Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 143 n. 3.



Philosophy 23

3:14—the crucial revelation to Moses of the divine name YHWH—strikingly expresses it.84 HOME AND EXILE: ENCOUNTERING THE OTHER The “other” plays here a decisive role.85 The other—the non-human—is shown in Genesis 3 to rebel against the exclusive possession of the world by Adam. The other also wants to be “like God,” knowing (that is, deciding—a very suspicious decision, indeed) what is good and what is bad. The mythological “serpent” is the concretization of the defiant other’s desire, which is seen in its turn as imperialistic. It leaves to the self of Adam no other recourse but to co-eat the forbidden fruit to reestablish autonomy and his mastership over creation. Earlier, I mentioned Adam’s oikos (home) implied in the peace and delight of the Garden to be kept as such. The issue debated in Genesis 3 between the human and the animal (the I and the competitive other) is one of occupation: Whose home is the universe? Levinas, in particular, insists on the importance of the I’s dwelling as microcosmic.86 As a motif in Genesis 2–3, home is counterbalanced by the human exclusion from the Garden of Eden: home becomes exile—but exile occurs only as long as there is home. Conflicting visions of the world depend on these alternatives. That is why the Genesis narrative describes Adam and Eve’s ill-inspired rebellion as having a cosmic effect. Representation has now fundamentally changed: the world has become different. True, physically speaking, the world remains the same as it was before, but what is altered is the human relation to its ontological reality: by hand and thought, by interpretation and imagination, by comprehension and representation—in other words, by work. 84.  Friedrich W. S. S. Schelling (1775–1854) spoke of a two-sided divine act, a negative one in God’s withdrawal and a positive, affirming one in opening himself up. Humanity must bring God’s history to its end. See Schelling, The Ground of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce Matthews (New York: SUNY Press, 2007). See also Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 50: “[The Absolute] ‘absolves’ itself from the relation in which it presents itself.” 85.  For Martin Buber, “the uniqueness of man is to be found not in the individual, nor in the collective, but in the meeting of I and Thou” (The Knowledge of Man: A Philosophy [San Francisco: Harper Torchbook, 1966], quoted in Maurice Freedman, “Martin Buber’s Final Legacy: ‘The Knowledge of Man,’” Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 5/1 (1965): 4–19, here 16). Elsewhere, Buber also says, “Every man’s foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and neverrecurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even greatest, has already achieved.” He quotes Rabbi Zusya before his death: “In the world to come I shall not be asked ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” (Buber, The Way of Man [New York: Citadel Press, 1967], 16 and 10). 86.  And not only the human dwelling, but also the humans themselves, see m. Sanh. 4:5; b. Avot de Rabbi Nathan [ARN] A, ed. Schechter [New York: Feldman, 1967], 31, 46a; and Philo, De Plantatione 28–30. The death of one is the death of all.

24

Part I

Yet Genesis 2 does not describe a static situation, and human work is not a perpetual circular movement. Hegel, as we saw, speaks of the human function as teleological. We could thus expect this inner dynamism to imply some kind of expressionism, especially accompanying its textual presentation, that is, a progressive clarity as regards its signification. Yet, to our surprise, silence surrounds the humans’ activity in Genesis 2:15, meaning that it is in need of being transcended by discourse, by language, if its purpose is really communication.87 “At each instant [language] exceeds this labor by the generosity of the offer it forthwith makes of this very labor.”88 Hence, the encounter with the other (in Gen. 2:16) needs a following up. The male gardener Adam must involve the feminine. Then, instead of potentially being centripetal, work really becomes centrifugal, and instead of egocentric human activity (“you [sing.] shall eat”), it becomes altruistic. Not by idealism but by adherence to one’s true identity. The one addresses the other—and its imperialism—with abandon: “what is mine is yours, and what is yours remains yours” (PA 5:10). The centeredness occupied by the other is not countered but confirmed. Becoming human is choosing foreignness, attendance instead of possession. By contrast, the serpent’s promise takes power for granted, while truth as the force that relativizes power retreats.89 Truth’s kinship is not with might but with justice. Isaiah 59:15 opposes truth and forensic evil: “Truth is lacking and whoever turns from evil is despoiled.” The serpent’s discourse, per contra, has been about the conveyance of a knowledge bestowed magically by absorbing a substance (the popular “apple”). Through this passage ritual, the “I” was supposed to inflate its interiority into a divinized self, and thus to 87.  Speaking is taking possession. Friedrich Nietzsche reconstructs the origins of language as rulers expressing power: “they seal everything and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it” (On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Vintage Books, 1989], 26). In biblical conception, however, the Nietzschean “rulers” are all human beings present in paradigmatic Adam. 88. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 174. 89.  Power, of course, permeates history and prevails as a human mind-set in general. In literary criticism, reference can be made to the so-called “New Historicism” that sees meaning as constrained by power. Any text, including no doubt the Bible, is a mirror image of the dominant ideology of the producing society. To this, I would retort by invoking the mutuality of reflection and creativity. The text is both the product of its creative milieu and creates in turn the said milieu. This phenomenon is crucial. As an example, Israel is authoring Scripture and Scripture is authoring Israel (if only in its prescriptive aspect). Then the text reverts to itself and commands to itself to say what it needs to say! As Gisel writes, “The Word can lie within the scope of creation because creation lies within the scope of the Word” (La Création, 259). Hayden White says, “Historical knowledge, in short, is human self-knowledge and specifically knowledge of how human beings make themselves through knowing themselves and come to know themselves in the process of making themselves” (The Fiction of Narrative, 266). Furthermore, what often characterizes biblical texts is subversion, that is, an anti-power criticism. So, Erich Fromm describes the Hebrew Bible as “revolutionary” in his book on You Shall Be As Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition (Dallas: Spring, 1966), 7. As we saw regarding the literary source J in its initial tenth-century setting in life, it backed Israelite monarchy of the time while being programmatic for a reform of the Solomonic regime.



Philosophy 25

abandon its commission of “keeping.” There is then not any longer any ethical involvement and responsibility with the alterity of the world and, more decisively, of the other. This is the antipode of Levinas’s stance, according to which “the foundation of knowledge is ethics,” that is, the encounter with the other. For him, the only factor of the self’s discovery of truth is the conversion of the self’s interiority into exteriority, the exteriority of the other, whose face operates, by its intrusion into my solipsism, this conversion. Truth is the otherness of the other: This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman for out of Man this one was taken. (Gen. 2:23 [NRSV])

This is the very beginning of moral consciousness Yet actually the self chooses its self-exile, an ontological exile concretized in the biblical myth in two ways, first by “evacuating,” so to speak, the person of Adam from the dialogue reported in Genesis 3:1ff., and, second, by the human exclusion from the garden of innocence.90 In this respect, once more, Hegel’s conception of reality is worth consideration. For him, negativity is constitutive of all finite things, meaning that everything is actually forced to seek remedy to an existence without substance. This is the condition for things to convert from being objects to subjects, dynamically oriented toward their being what they can be. Now veritably the word “dialectic” comes center stage. We shall return to this central Hegelian concept, called Aufhebung (generally translated “sublation” = “having both the opposite meanings of ‘destroy’ and ‘preserve,’ 1865”: OUD, ad loc.). Let us, nevertheless, note already here that at this point we find the very root of Levinas’s stress on the intrinsic dependence of the I upon the other/Other while maintaining an individual identity.91 A parenthesis 90.  The following quote from Nietzsche looks like a modern retelling of Genesis 3: “The lawbreaker is a debtor who has not merely failed to make good the advantages and advance payments bestowed upon him but has actually attacked his creditor; therefore he is not only deprived henceforth from all these advantages and benefits, as is fair—he is also reminded what these benefits are really worth. The wrath of the disappointed creditor, the community, throws him back again into the savage and outlaw state against which he has hitherto been protected: it thrusts him away—and now every kind of hostility may be vented upon him.” (Genealogy, 71, ital. orig.) 91.  Levinas says that man is in the accusative mode before being in the nominative (Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence [Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2004], 143). About the dialectical, it is something like the thirteenth rule of interpretation of Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha in Sifra, Introduction, 7 (on the background of his principle that diberah torah kilešon benei adam [the Torah speaks the language of humans]): šenei ketuvim amachišim zeh et zeh [resolution of contradictions between two verses, see, e.g., Exod. 13:6 vs. Deut. 16:8 with harmonization in Lev. 13:14]. Fredric Jameson calls attention to Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole. He adds other pairs, such as synchronism and diachronism. In the tensivity of pre-lapsarian and

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on the Hebrew tensive syntax will clarify the issue and provide an example of what we shall be dealing with in part 3. In the biblical Hebrew language, as a matter of fact, Hegelian dialectic is already very much present. As an example, let’s consider the word kisse’, whose basic sense designates a throne.92 As this is not actually how a chairas-such appears, “throne” implies its own negation. When this is taken into consideration, we must assert that any given chair is not just what it looks like but conveys its own “otherness” by negating its negation, or by reaching its “synthesis,” a push toward “the whole,” Hegel would say. It is how the chair reaches its intrinsic meaning; it is set in relation to others (a throne in a palace, with other chairs and other objects). The chair-as-such is isolated; the chair as throne is relational. From an archipelago of things, from an ocean of chairs, thrones coalesce into an organized world: the world as a palace, with the human king in the middle. Transposed to anthropology, otherness means for humans that they need to work on themselves and on the world to become free; humans need to transcend themselves from objects into subjects, thus demonstrating human power over things. Authentic power, instead of being oppressive, consists in hoisting things from the anonymity of the trivial—“chairs”—to the distinction “glorious and majestic” (Ps. 8:6) of “thrones.”93 Now, what is true of things is truer of human beings. For this is the condition for Adam to be recognized by other human beings as bringing the static things to what dynamically they can be. Thereby, Adam negates the independence of objects; he makes them media for his as well as their fulfillment. From this perspective, the tilling and keeping (watching, warding) in Genesis 2:15 is transformative. The perfection of creation is a perfectionizing, a gerundive. It is made dependent on the human to bring the object to its plenitude (šalem/šalom). This is precisely why and how Adam is proud of his work. Per contra, Genesis 3:17–19 shows the disfiguration of this pride. Adam finds the object’s fulfillment always elusive and out of reach, like in the Greek myth of Sisyphus. In short, human work, even as constantly unfulfilled, is the vocation of the human qua cosmic being. As such, it is wrought with the vision of creation’s perfectibility—a vision that concerns both the individual and the collective. post-lapsarian, the former would be the system; the latter is part to the whole. We pass from labor as system to work as instance, a “strange act” (Robert T. Tally, Jr., Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (Marxism and Culture) [London: Pluto Press, 2014], 51.) See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1906-1911), trans. Wade Baskin; ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 92.  See Gen. 41:40; Deut. 17:18; 1 Kings 1:46; etc. (See also HALOT, ad loc., 446). 93.  “[T]he chairs, with each its separate individuality” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter: A Romance [Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850], 42).



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“Adam” in Genesis 2–3 is both personal and communal because the things being brought to perfection are also and primordially human perfection/fulfillment, all what they can be—“from zero to infinity,” from dust to garden, retrieved. ONCE MORE ON PRODUCTION Paraphrasing Hegel, Herbert Marcuse writes, “[T]he infinite is the mode of existence in which all potentialities are realized and in which all being reaches its ultimate form.”94 It is so because, for Hegel, the union of subject and object is a prerequisite to freedom. The human is the only being capable95 of transforming the objective conditions to instrumentalities for its subjectivity. As such, this transformation brings things to the freedom of their potentialities and also those of nature by organizing it according to reason. Hence, “the world is in its essence the product of the human being’s historical activity.”96 The productive human being acts as interpreter or sense-giver. The tree that fell in the forest without witness means (provisionally) nothing. It is a non-event. It becomes an event inasmuch as the human interprets it and thus gives reality to it.97 Conversely, the interpreter in turn is realized by her interpretation. The writer creates the object of her writing and is created in the process.98 The value of this reciprocal move will depend on the quality of the object interpreted and the quality of the interpreter.99 In other words, the fulfillment of the interpreter’s self-consciousness is the very essence of 94.  Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 69. 95.  To recall, human capability is a favorite Ricoeurian theme. 96. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 39, ital. mine. For Erich Fromm also, “man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers.” This is true, he says, of Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, and Marx. (See Marx’s Concept of Man [New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961; repr., London: Continuum, 2004], 26; see the detailed description of the productive character orientation in Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics [Rinehart & Co., New York, 1947].) In Marx’s Concept of Man, he writes about Goethe’s Faust (“Prologue in Heaven,” the last words of Faust): “Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life . . . He has given up the greed for having, and is fulfilled by being” (chap. 4: “The Nature of Man,” section 1, 5). 97.  As Julian Morgenstern says (The Book of Genesis, 41), “Not until a thing had received its name [Gen. 2:19–20] was it considered really complete and existent.” Expectedly, naming (understood as interpreting the thing’s identity) is seen as a kingly privilege (2 Kings 23:34; 24:17; Dan. 1:7). 98.  Emmanuel Levinas writes, “Labor transforms the world but is sustained by the world it transforms” (Totality and Infinity, 40–41). 99.  On the mutual authorship/creation of Israel and Scripture, see above (esp. n. 46 and n. 89). The quality of Jesus as interpreter, for example, is reflected in the quality he conveys to the object interpreted. The mutual relationship of interpreter and interpreted is a one-flesh becoming, which no one can put asunder, inasmuch as God joins them together. About the critical role of the “interpreter,” see n. 100.

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things. Things need human interpretation or the discovery of the self behind all things in order for those things to just be.100 Suffice it to remember that historiography, electing as it inevitably does some people and some occurrences while ignoring others, is a matter of historians’ imagination/interpretation. Things (debarim in Hebrew, literally “words”) are the objectification of the subject (the human “I”): “Subject and object cannot be separated.”101 Speaking of potentialities à la Hegel, we note that they may find a biblical correspondence in what is called the dabar (logos). In biblical thinking, there is a dabar in everything created.102 This is confirmed by the divine and 100.  To be means to be interpreted. In reference to the Bard, let us remember that Hamlet, going so far as to risk minimalizing the notions of good and evil, says, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (Act 2, sc. 2, in the mouth of Hamlet). See above on Adam being recognized by other human beings. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 40th-anniversary ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 434, evokes “the aged Kant” who thought that, “We are free to conceive ‘history’ as we please, just as we are free to make of it what we will.” White also emphasizes the relation of reality and truth: “reality is one thing and truth quite another. In the end, reality is what it is; truth is importantly about [something] . . . from particular perspectives . . . none of which can claim universality” (xxviii). Introducing Metahistory, Michael S. Roth paraphrases White: “The past became available to us only through a poetic act of construction” (xi). And he adds, “There was no reality that could be considered apart from some meaningful emplotment of it” (xiii). White himself stresses “what is real rather than what is true” (65). As for Fredric Jameson, Robert Tally says, “Today, Jameson asserts, everything ‘cries out for commentary, for interpretation, for decipherment, for diagnosis’” (Fredric Jameson, 52). Jameson, in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), writes a long chapter on “Interpretation”: History is inaccessible but through a textual form, through its narrativation (see also Hayden White’s statement in n. 46). Jameson (The Political, 9), says, “Interpretation . . . consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code.” 101.  So Fromm (Man for Himself, 132). Marx says, “[M]y object can only be the confirmation of one of my own faculties [the example given is music].” Conversely, “human sense . . . comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009], 108, ital. orig.). Marx also writes, “Suppose a being which neither is an object itself nor has an object. . . . [I]t would be solitary and alone. . . . For, as soon as I am not alone, I am another—another reality than the object outside me” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 155, ital. orig.). As his contribution to the Gifford Lectures of 1986, Paul Ricoeur authored Oneself as Another. Indeed, that Soi-même is comme un autre is the first ontological miracle. The human being is capable of objectifying soi-même and developing knowledge of the self (gnōthi seauton). But the second miracle is the Other as oneself; that is, the other, the stranger, becoming one with me, the two of us becoming one flesh (Gen. 2:24; Lev. 19:18; Mat. 19:19, etc.). Paul Claudel’s “Christ is in me more myself than I am” expands to having an Other becoming more me than I am to me. This phenomenon is called love. Levinas, to recall, said, “[T]he Other counts more than myself” (Totality and Infinity, 241). 102.  See Ricoeur’s statement: “Speech is always necessary if the world is to be recovered and made hierophany” (The Conflict of Interpretations, 13). Contrast this biblical theme with the Mesopotamian myths where nature is purposeless and the gods are capricious and ethically indifferent. The Kabalist Rabbi Abraham b. Shmuel (Abulafia) says, “God’s language penetrates things, and leaves them behind as his signatures in them” (cited by Gershom Sholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala,” Diogenes 79–80, 1972, 185); see Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 [1916], ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 325. Martin Luther writes, “For what is the whole creation but the word of God spoken forth or uttered?” (The Creation: A Commentary on the First Five Chapters of the Book of Genesis, trans.



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Mosaic gift of the Torah (torat ’Elohim and torat Moshe) that decisively attributes to Israel an ethical identity.103 Obedience to the Law, emphasized especially by the Prophets, fills the people’s horizon, so that anything else is marginalized as superfluous. “The change in culture to which this gave rise meant that popular life became divorced from nature.”104 Hence, historically, the exile from the Land could (and now can) be tolerated. Later, Jewish mysticism would speak of inner sparks snuggled—or rather imprisoned, as it were—in tree-bark (klippot). These debarim or sparks need their liberation from the bark105—the bark being what Hegel calls inner negativity, self-contradiction. The (reified) dabar in the object is the object’s hidden essence, “the Universal immanent in it.”106 It fulfills itself through entelechy (Aristotle, On the Soul, ii.1). As we saw, for this liberation to happen, things must negate their negativity (the latter being a flight from guilt). How do they proceed to such a goal? They do this through suffering. Through enduring labor, like “the pangs of childbirth,” of which Hosea speaks (13:13), the things’ essence issues from the condition in which they exist, that is, their inertia. Adam overcomes that indolence of sorts107 by “tilling and keeping” the Garden of Eden, that is, as the metaphoric story unfolds, by encountering the other—the otherness of the Garden, and then the otherness of his “helpmate.” Pre-lapsarian and post-lapsarian Adam is a tiller, never isolated, and always relational. Thus, ecology belongs to human ontology.108 The subject determines itself through its relation to other things.

Henry Cole [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1858], 44). Jean Calvin concurs: God “a imprimé certaines marques de sa gloire en toutes ses oeuvres” (L’Institution de la religion chrétienne [Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1955], 17). 103.  The ethical is supreme. It allows a prophet like Amos to put the nations on the same ethical footing as Israel (1:2ff.; cf. Zech. 8:21ff.; 14:9–10). 104. Pedersen, Israel, 2:568. 105.  See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941; repr., 1995), 268; 268ff.; 280 and esp. 311. On the liberation of the sparks, called tikkun (mending) in Lurianic Kabala, see Major Trends, 233. There is here clearly a trace of Gnosticism (e.g., like in the Gospel of John). There is kinship and difference in Meister Eckhart’s use of the term “ground” to identify the divine spark in the intersection between the divine and the individual. He writes, “Here, God’s ground is my ground and my ground God’s ground. The ground of the soul in the absolute one . . . bears his Son, more precisely: in the ground of the soul, and in this way he bears me as himself” (Burkhard Mojsisch and Orrin F. Summerell, “Meister Eckhart,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011], https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/sum2011/entries/meister-eckhart). 106. G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. Walter Henry Johnston and Leslie Graham Struthers (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 1:45. 107.  To recall, Franz Kafka was mentioning humans’ “impatience” as preventing them from returning to paradise (see n. 78). 108.  The refusal to acknowledge human responsibility in the present ecological disaster is an attack on humanity’s being. The thing possessed has obliterated the possessor. . . . Pointedly, Pierre Gisel writes of Adam that “he is in relation with the ground from which he was extracted, with the

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ADAM IS A PROPERTY TENANT The “tilling and keeping” work makes Adam a dispatched (i.e., non-absolute) possessor of the Garden.109 The relation of work to property is all-important. Work appropriates objects to the human in such a manner as to make the objects belong part and parcel to human personality. Language betrays this relation. It is one way to say, like in English, “the man’s sword” (thus focusing on property110), yet shifting to Hebrew, in which the terms are reversed, the discourse evokes another context: hereb ha-’ish, which focuses on the human property owner (hereb is determined by ha-’ish). Here, property does not remain anonymous but is “animated” by the possessor. If I lose my favorite pen, it will not be indiscriminately replaced by one of the millions of pens around. Its substitute needs to be “tamed” (in French “apprivoisé” = made private and personal) to become my pen. In Hegel’s wording, the object needs first to become a subject through human labor. Work and property’s relationship demands more reflection. Tilling and keeping the Garden is different from simply taking it over as property. The ground here belongs not to the tiller but to the divine owner/planter. The human worker is a tenant; he or she is the “lieutenant” of God. This implies that in the post-lapsarian as in the pre-lapsarian world, the all-important human property ownership (the latifundia landlord) is only justified as tenancy, accountable to the true Owner, the Creator (Ps 24:1), and to be dealt with as such by the tiller/keeper (sharecropper). This implies, at the very least, humility and thankfulness, that is, the “offering [to God] of the fruit of the ground” (Gen. 4:3) and the sharing with others (Isa. 58:3; Luke 3:11; Acts 2:45). Hegel, Marx, and Marcuse, among others, are thinking philosophically, of course, not theologically.111 Property ownership makes them, along with most philosophers, uneasy. Marx’s foe—from a different perspective—PierreJoseph Proudhon says, “La propriété, c’est le vol.”112 But Marx was not an garden he is called to till, with the animals he names, with the woman without whom he still is nothing, and with God who gives him his meaning” (La Création, 40). 109.  On tenancy and exile, see P’s parallel with Israel history: Canaan is “the land where you dwell as a stranger” (Gen. 17:8; 28:4). In an uncanny parallel with the Promised Land, both given and conquered, the human’s work is taking possession. But, as Meyers and Rogerson say (“The World in the Hebrew Bible,” 89), “As a whole, Israelite law was more concerned with personal than with property rights.” 110.  See the sarcastic text of Isaiah 10:15: “as though the staff lifted the man!” [JPS] 111.  Hegel comes close to a theological notion of revelation when he says, “Revelation . . . is unmediated transition to, the coming-to-be of, nature . . . as its own world. . . . Revelation in conception is the creation of nature as spirit’s own being, in which it acquires the affirmation and truth of its freedom” (Philosophy of Spirit, trans. William Wallace [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894], 392, ital. orig.). 112.  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété ? (Paris: La Librairie de Prévot, 1840), 2. Proudhon also takes exception to Marx in his Philosophie de la misère, to which Marx famously responded with his own Misère de la philosophie (1847) (The Poverty of Philosophy, trans. H. Quelch [Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1910; repr., Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2014]).



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anarchist; he rather dreamed of the abolition of private property through its collectivization in a socialist society.113 Work in any form is oriented toward consumption (hence, toward the disposition of something after taking possession of it): right after assigning Adam to work in Genesis 2:15, the following verse reads, “you shall freely eat of every tree of the garden” (Gen. 2:16). Food is the concretization of human relation (partly by absorption) with nature.114 Human beings are to absorb within themselves the substance of all things as a medium for their self-development, thus making of consumption not an end but a means to a superior achievement on the way to self-consciousness. Eating is transformative. I cannot resist quoting Vladimir Nabokov, although he was not speaking of food but of making poetry: thus, by transposition, eating is “transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce . . . an organic miracle.”115 As such, eating fills the human horizon. There is, evidently, no life outside of this symbiosis with nature. Per contra, famine attacks Being. It compels one to mobilize all energies to the mere support of the basic human (and animal) needs, energies that should be harnessed to poetic creativity. In summary, feeding is not just the satisfaction of a physical need but of an ontological need. Characteristically, communion is established that way with the world and, strikingly, with other human beings. As a matter of fact, repast is universally acknowledged as being one of the two principal instruments for human communion. The other one, of course, is sexuality. That is why, in the Bible in general, eating is equated with sexuality, for which it may serve as a metaphor (see Exod. 2:20–21; Prov. 30:19–20).116 From Genesis 2:15 on the topic of work, 2:16–17 progresses to consumption, and 2:18 to the meeting of male and female. This trilogy is more a unit than a succession, although spread in time. Yet, Adam is to eat all the fruits of the Garden—but one.117 The exception is decisive.118 It is so seen from different viewpoints. First, we learn that 113. In All My Sons: A Drama in Three Acts, Arthur Miller says, “[W]hen you drive that car you’ve got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man [Miller alludes to the brotherhood of soldiers on the front line]. . . . Otherwise what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it” (All My Sons [New York: Penguin Classics, 1947, 2000], Act 1 (6/8; said by Chris). 114.  The principle involved is you are what you eat; Ezekiel eats the divine word and thus becomes that word (Ezek. 3:1). Eating is ritual; it is a sacred act. It accedes to that supreme level through its blessing called birkat ha-mazon in the Jewish prayer book (Siddur). 115.  Vladimir Nabokov (under the name of the fictitious Dr. Charles Kinbole), foreword to Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos (1962); repr., [New York: Berkeley Books, 1985]), 8. The substitution made possible of eating for poetry is most interesting. Both are re-shaping, “transforming the world” (8). 116.  The stem of the verb “to eat” in the Hebrew text of Genesis 2–3 appears 23 times! 117.  Gen. 2:17. On “all but one,” I refer to my study in The Trial, 90–98. 118.  The prohibition in Genesis adumbrates the kashrut concept in the Torah. See n. 123.

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Adam is a command-able being. God’s prohibition acknowledges human capability: “you could but you may not”—from capability to culpability. It recognizes in advance the human capacity of knowing good and bad/evil, which is properly a divine capacity (Gen. 3:22).119 Besides, the commandment not to eat the fruit of one tree in the Garden betrays the intrinsic resistance of nature, as we saw and as I shall further develop.120 Marcuse says, “[W]ork is a priori power and provocation in the struggle with nature; it is overcoming of resistance.”121 The amazing all-pervasive human aggressiveness and violence reveals a reason (nous) that is “increasingly antagonistic to those faculties and attributes which are receptive rather than productive, which tend toward gratification rather than transcendence,” he adds.122 The ego must constantly reassert itself against the world in its negativity. Within this perspective, Freud’s idea that “[b]eing is essentially the striving for pleasure”123 sounds, at least at times, somewhat obscene, especially 119.  “Good and evil” is a so-called merism; it may mean “totality” (see Gen. 3:22), as opposed to “nothingness” in Gen. 24:50; 31:24, 29; Deut. 1:39. On its dialectical nature, the following Midrash is striking: “When God first created the trees they rejoiced to be alive, for existence seemed so good. But when, the next day, He created the iron, the trees all trembled with fear and said, ‘This iron will chop us down.’ But God reassured them, ‘No, not until you trees yourselves furnish the handle to the axe, will the iron have power over you’” (quoted in Morgenstern, The Book of Genesis, 39). See Midrash Rabba, Par. 5:10. Let us note in passing that Nietzsche’s imagination of a conflict of interpretations between “the noble man” and the “man of ressentiment” (resentment) in The Genealogy (esp. 40) is to be taken cum grano salis. Although the noble man calls anyone who is not like him bad, the resentful man calls the noble man (i.e., the powers that be) bad. To recall, Nietzsche sees in the categories of “good and evil” a reflection of a “slave/herd morality.” He militates for a “good and bad” contrast, à la “master morality.” Nietzsche, as a matter of fact, construes human existence in a naturalistic way. The gulf is deep between Nietzsche’s views and the biblical conception according to which “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised . . . slave and free, but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11), and in still stronger words, Paul says, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). From such a perspective, Nietzsche’s “noble man” becomes a ludicrous vestige of a spurious hierarchy. 120.  For Paul Beauchamp, “all but one” is equivalent to “all but all.” If one thing of the complex unit is forbidden, then everything is (L’un et l’autre Testament, vol. 2, Accomplir les Ecritures [Paris: Seuil, 1990], 122.). In n. 121, I said that the prohibition against eating one fruit of the garden adumbrates the kashrut in the Law. So, by extension, if not all things edible are kosher, then, strictly speaking, no food is! Food is transitory; sustaining life as a necessity is for a time only. The pious one eats with reserve. The allowance of eating in Genesis 2 is for enjoyment only and for remembrance that the human and the animal conditions are vulnerable. With Gen. 3:17–20, alimentation goes through a character change, according to a condition change. (On the contingency of food in Jesus’s teaching, see Mark 7:19, “thus [Jesus] declared all foods clean [= kosher],” a possible daring but illuminating apocryphon). Similarly, the old sacrificial system is not jettisoned, it finds its fulfillment in Jesus’ death (see Rom. 3:25; 4:24–25; 1 Cor. 15:13). 121. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 100. 122. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 100. 123. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 115, paraphrasing Freud. For this latter, the hub of the pleasure-principle is in the Id (see Totem and Taboo, Standard Ed., ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud [London : Hogarth Press, 1953–1974], vol. 13, 877). Furthermore, for Thorstein Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class. [New York: Modern Library, 1934], 177; cited by Norman Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, 2nd ed. [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University



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when set within the framework of the immense suffering of humanity and of humans torturing humans. Freud’s idea is romantic and even bourgeois. What is true of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey and his hedonism is certainly not true of Moses or Jesus. It is not only a matter of fate but of existential choice on their part. Rather, in “pleasure,” I see more of an all-encompassing principle of the universal aim to creativity.124 Both Dorian Grey and his painter, or Sade and Jesus, are involved in the creation of a discrete world, the quality of which one recognizes in its fruit.125 What is the “good” fruit and what is the “forbidden fruit?” All creatures, whether in the Bible or in Western philosophy, are conceived as ambiguous; they are willing and reluctant. That is, they are accomplices to their own thralldom, but they are dialectically freeable and redeemable; they are able to negate their negativity and to make their inner “goodness” operative.126 The “goodness” of the created—stressed so much by the P source in Genesis 1—is not just an aesthetic goodness but also and above all a dynamic “goodness for.” Beings and things created are appropriately equipped for fulfilling Press, 1985], 255, where he paraphrases Veblen and says, “the logic of leisure is the logic of “reputable wastefulness and futility.” 124.  Even routine chores like washing vegetables or ironing a shirt create order and stability. Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) is credited with the statement that, “A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.” Walter Benjamin, in a letter to Gershom Scholem on Sept. 1917, says, “the person who is learning continually transforms himself into the person who is teaching . . . everything is education” (“To Gershom Scholem,” in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. and annot. by G. Scholem and T. W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994], 94). At this point, acknowledgment must be paid to Rollo May (1909–1994), who saw creativity as the ultimate aim of all people. He says, “Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity, as Webster’s rightly indicates, is basically the process of making, of bringing into being” (The Courage to Create [New York: Norton, 1994], 40, ital. orig.). He also says, “By the creative act . . . we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death” (6). For Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), to recall, thinking is producing, constructing. Furthermore, knowledge of an object depends upon our production of that object in the first place. Otto Rank (1884–1939) agrees: the one who cannot create is the artiste manqué (cited in Becker, Denial, 184; see Rank, Art and Artist, 25). Rank expounded on “the human urge to create.” This urge is made self-evident through “religion and mythology and the social institutions corresponding to these.” He adds, “The neurotic suffers fundamentally from the fact that he cannot or will not accept himself. The artist not only accepts his personality but goes far beyond it.” The neurotic as an “artiste manqué” is unable to produce art, unable to affirm his individual creative self. Eric Erikson emphasizes Freud’s statement that “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humaneness” (Civilization and Its Discontents, my ital.). 125.  Freud himself says that the ego “dethrones the pleasure principle . . . and substitutes for it the reality-principle” (New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis [New York: Norton, 1933], 106). 126.  The prophet Jeremiah exhibits a striking example of negation of negativity in 24:6; 31:40; 42:10 (versus 1:10; 12:15; 18:7). To recall, the “goodness” of creatures in Genesis 1:1—2:4a (P) is to be understood as “good for [fulfilling their purpose].” As Levinas writes, “Goodness consists in taking up a position in being such that the Other counts more than myself” (Totality and Infinity, 241). The ego, individual or collective, needs recognition by another ego. That is the only salutary item in life.

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a vocation (the P version of creation uses the term tob for the purpose of creation’s teleology). Vocation (the liberation of the sparks from the bark, as we saw previously) implies obstacles.127 True, these are not bad per se, and they can go through entelechy to their own transfiguration,128 but they meanwhile embody the inner negativity of everyone and everything in the world, that is, their opposition to consciousness. I have previously written, “[T]he resistance of creation is an absolute necessity. . . . Humans in a neutral milieu, without task, without work, without goal, are aimlessly floating in a weightless terrifying void, like an astronaut severed from a spatial capsule.” 129 On the contrary, by transcending their negativity in their work, human beings are made co-creators with the God of the universe. Hegel had taken us from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, that is, to Marx. This passage is natural, for Marx reacted to the former system of Hegel and, particularly, to his political conservatism. Fundamental for Marx is that human work (or praxis) shapes history and is dependent for its form on material and transient conditions (“dialectical materialism”). As is evident in his writings, Marx dedicated the whole of his life as a philosopher to produce a heuristic worldview on human labor, mainly by denouncing the radical disharmony between individuals and their work (or system of production).130 In an audacious “prophetic” vision, he saw human praxis aiming for a classless society. In so-called “orthodox” Marxism, historical determinism leads “inevitably” to a socialist economic system whereby each person is remunerated according to their production and, eventually, to a communist system whereby one is remunerated according to one’s needs. As a foundation for his theory, Marx affirmed that the proletariat is the true owner of production and, if indeed as a property it has been stolen, the robbers are the greedy capitalists. They “inevitably,” as the Manifesto says, lead to a revolution of the producers.131 As we shall see later, Marxist Herbert Marcuse diagnosed this proletariat dire situation as the “one-dimensionality” of industrial society. Against Marxian utopia, however, one must be aware with Genesis 2–3 that “sin and revolt [are] part of the human condition,” as Claus Westermann 127.  A notion already encountered previously, see the development on the resistance of the matter and the reference to The Trial (87), in n. 66 and the context referenced there. With the term “vocation,” we find ourselves at a far cry from the etymological root of the word “good/gut” as “the man of war,” “the godlike race [the Aryans],” of Nietzsche, Genealogy, 31. 128.  See, for example, Isa. 45:7 (“I make weal and I create woe”). 129. LaCocque, The Trial, 87. Psychoanalytically speaking, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” as Norman Brown says (Life, 13). As birthing is painful labor—and is the cornerstone of human existence—so is the creation of the universe overcoming all inner and outer resistance. See also Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil (New York: The Free Press, 1975). 130.  See Marx, Capital. 131.  See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; repr., [Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008]).



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says.132 From such a perspective, the Marxian project is an attempt at exonerating human beings—at least the masses of proletarians—from all fault and guilt. To the extent that they belong to that class, they are pure and innocent, qua exploited.133 They are defended and their integrity restored by the Party, which incarnates the Communists as a clean, errorless society—a twisted meaning of Adam, God’s co-worker, “tilling and guarding”! In fact even if it looks paradoxical, when we shift focus to the extreme rightwing National Socialism, we find a similar claim to a guiltless humanity, provided that people adopt fascism as their way of life, whether under the Austro-German Hitler, the Italian Mussolini, or the American Trump. The striking phenomenon of Nazis annihilating millions of people without the feeling of self-reproach belongs to this core negativity. From this point of view, we can understand that, whether in its leftwing or in its rightwing version, the true matter is an aversion to the teaching of Judaism or JudeoChristianity. They are accused of having immersed humanity into guilt, while hypocritically lulling people into a false comfort.134 Of course, it is without surprise that we find under Nietzsche’s pen the plea for jettisoning “the Christian God.” He says, “[T]he prospect cannot be dismissed that the complete and definitive victory of atheism might free mankind of this whole of guilty indebtedness toward its origin, its causa prima. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.”135 Yes, this Nietzschean creed is expected. More surprising, however, is his atheistic “messianism.” He salutes “this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness—he must come one day.”136 Is there any additional worth in this philosophic-mystic substitution to Judeo-Christianity? And indeed, both J and the Jewish tradition in general set their hope not on a future sociological revolution—although this may help, (see Dan. 11:34, 132. Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 67. As Marcuse says (Eros and Civilization, xv), “Free people are not in need of liberation, and the oppressed are not strong enough to liberate themselves. These conditions redefine the concept of Utopia.” 133.  This kind of escapism is unacceptable; but there is some truth in the claim that the exploitation of the producers by the capitalists exonerates them from general culpability. What is unacceptable is not the fact but the excuse it provides. See, however, Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society ([London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964; repr., Routledge Classics, 2002]), 32: “This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument.” 134.  Religion is “an opium for the people,” Marx and Engels say (On Religion [New York: Dover Publications, 2008], 42). On this same score, Nietzsche is to be mentioned (see Genealogy, 35–36); and also Freud (Totem and Taboo; The Future of an Illusion; Moses and Monotheism; etc.). Their critique is in fact aimed at all ideologies and “illusions.” This, Paul Ricoeur says, needs become “an instrument for a self-criticism (critique interne), which belongs to the work of distanciation that all understanding of the self in front [and not behind] the text requires” (Exegesis: Problèmes de méthode et exercices de lecture, ed. François Bovon and Grégoire Rouiller, 179–200, [Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1975], 227). 135. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 91. 136. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 96. Nietzsche also wrote The Antichrist in 1895.

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which speaks of the incipient Maccabean revolt against the persecutor Antiochus IV as a “little help”) but on divine care for humanity he created (cf. Gen. 12:1ff).137 For our concern, this implies that all philosophical theory and call to praxis can only be proximate or analogue, mimetic or metaphorical. Let us note, at this point again, the dramatic passage from Genesis 2:15 (work and food enjoyment) to a further textual shift in Genesis 3:6 (eating become an act conducing to work distortion): “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food . . . she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband . . . and he ate. . . . [As] you have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (NRSV). Now, Karl Marx, we just saw, called attention to the alienation of work in capitalist society that, he says, makes a human feel free “only in his animal functions—eating, drinking and procreating . . . [thus] reduc[ing] him to an animal.”138 At first blush, the parallel may be striking, but, in truth, the chasm between Marx’s view and the biblical vision is large. It is not at the point of the capitalistic monster’s advent that humanity returned to animality but much earlier. In fact, J says, it is when within the sacred text we reach the fundamental schism from innocence to rebellion that the threat exists of a catastrophic return to the initial chaos. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and vice versa.139 As we shall see in part 2, a similar mistake is present in Sigmund Freud’s (and Charles Darwin’s) displacing the periphery to the center. In Genesis 3:6, Adam turns his back to work and adopts consumption, although, contrary to the animal whose activity is turning to itself and is instinctive, “man makes his life activity an object of his will and consciousness.”140 137.  According to Gerhard von Rad, Genesis 12:1–3 does not only constitute the conclusion of the story of origins, but provides the key to its very understanding (Genesis, Introduction, section on “Construction of the history of origins”). 138.  Marx, in Early Philosophical Manuscripts’ Alienated Labor, xxiii, nevertheless, recognizes in capitalist societies a dynamism that he finds missing in earlier ones. Jameson alternates “alienation” and “reification” (Tally, Fredric Jameson, 132–33). 139.  The phrase was coined by Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) in Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1906; repr., Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992). It is the “omnia ubique” of Nicolas de Cusa (1401–1494) or his “coincidentia oppositorum” and that Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), speaking of the all-powerful Universal, calls “the inner artist” that gives form and provides model to the whole matter. A saying by Jacob Boehme comes to mind: “Being is a combination of contrasting opposites, of the yes and the no. The yes is impossible without the no” (Boehme, Of True Resignation or Dying to Self (1600); quoted in Alexandre Koyré, La philosophie de Jacob Boehme [Paris: Vrin, Bibliothèque d’histoire de la philosophie, 1929], 395–96). Freud in 1910 comments, “The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of the development of the race” (Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson, ed. James Strachey [New York: Norton, 1989], 60; according to Norman Brown, “Freud’s most elaborate study of sublimation.” Life, 140). 140.  Karl Marx, quoted in Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, 81.



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THE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD The mythological serpent insists on eating as a means—as I emphasized previously—aiming for a further fulfillment of desire, but this time the desire is for self-divinization, which in the narrative ends up to being alienation— alienation from man’s environment, from his species (in the person of his wife), and from himself.141 This, continues Marx, “changes [humanity’s] advantage over animals into a disadvantage in so far as his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.”142 But Marx fails to realize that God is the one who “plants the garden in Eden” (Gen. 2:8) and not humanity. The latter is thus here not a cosmic property owner and the judge of what is good and bad in his domain, but a tenant (as we saw; see also Mark 12 [the parable of the wicked tenants]). Furthermore, he is not the tenant by exercising authority over another man (capitalistic servitude) but by commission of God, of whom he is the representative (and enjoying a supreme freedom; as “ambassadors” humans are imbued with the authority of their sender). Labor in this context is creative, and labor is a grateful, loving offering. By way of analogy, let us turn to Genesis 40 on Joseph’s relationship with the Pharaoh’s cupbearer and chief baker in Egypt, the land of plenty (see v. 2). The king’s baker has “all sorts of baked food for Pharaoh” (v. 17), but “the birds are eating it out of the basket!” “The birds.” What are they metaphors for? Marx, of course, would have no trouble identifying them with the capitalist exploiters of the proletariat. The biblical “baker” is anyone producing, anyone who is exploited and eventually will be annihilated by “Pharaoh,” that is, the systemic powers that be.143 Significantly, the other personage in the story, the cupbearer, escapes the “Tontons Macoutes agents” of the dictator. True to the reality principle, however, he “did not remember . . . but forgot [Joseph]” (v. 23). We are in full metaphor for (ancient or modern) alienated labor, so that the biblical text may be read as testifying to the ambivalence of work. Exploited work leads to destruction, whereas work remains essentially an enduring bliss—the Pharaoh, the cupbearer, and the baker must be fed, and so to their contentment, especially of the Pharaoh of course! Even the most dehumanizing work, as in modern industry for instance, can still refer to “a living, holy and acceptable sacrifice” (see Rom. 12:1).144 The baker had no 141.  See Pierre Gisel (La Création, 40) in n. 108. To recall, Freudian “desire” is epistemologically central in his works. See here below on “desire,” (see p. 49). 142. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, xxiv. 143.  See Nietzsche’s ambivalent judgment in Genealogy, 33–36 on “the Jews” as a subversive priestly caste (“resentful,” he says), in which we should emphasize subversion rather than resentment. 144.  My brother-in-law, Jean Tournay, who died when he was seventeen years old in the Mauthausen concentration camp, sang church hymns with his last breath. (It is said that people sang hymns

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time for this realization; the cupbearer blocked all remembrance to the unveiling of the existential truth, albeit crucial to his profession and survival; and Pharaoh was anyway impermeable to “truth and reality” (Otto Rank). Both in the Bible and, incidentally, in Marx’s writings, the relationship of the human’s creation [subjective and objective] with the human’s work is striking. Humans’ creation is by their labor, Marx says,145 a concept that sounds “biblical.” This Marxian agreement with J is all the more remarkable in view of Marx’s criticism of biblical creation narrative as making humanity and nature unreal in their essential beings.146 But his critique is spurious. If indeed labor creates man, it is because labor is God’s commandment: God orders humans to create themselves through their work. Labor is not magic; its creativity is by participation and not by nature. In fact, as we saw, humanity’s work is adumbrated by the fact that God himself is working. He is a deus faber. J describes him anthropomorphically, as creating, making, shaping, planting, and setting. God also, therefore, meets the resistance of the matter (that he himself created, like he created the rebellion prone humans). Other biblical traditions exhibit him as struggling with cosmic monsters, Rahab (the Arrogant One), Leviathan (the Coiled One), Tanninim (Dragons), Yam (Sea), Tehom (Precipice), etc.147 In the New Testament, God symbolically struggles with Satan (John 3:19–21; recall the ethical dualism of apocalyptic literature). Metaphorically, God is struggling, and there is no one to help him. He faces demons and vacuity. Today, we would probably express this notion in the night the Titanic sunk.) Sacrifice is not optional. It is either an offering to God or to the “other” as a gift, or it is a forced dependence upon another person: “Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his/her own egotistic need,” Marx says (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, xiv and 7). At the antipode is the gift. Pierre Bourdieu says, “Because it is gratuitously granted and without expecting anything in return, the gift emerges as one of the supreme achievements of humanity” (Anthropologie économique: Cours au Collège de France 1992–1993 [Paris: Seuil, 2017], 5, my trans.). See also Marcel Maus, Sociologie et anthropologie (cf. “Essai sur le don”), 1925. (Collection Quadrige). [Paris: PUF, 1973] (with an Introduction by Claude Lévi-Strauss). Only the sacrifice to God and the gift to humanity are able to defeat tyranny. In this context, Philip Roth’s suggestion about Primo Levi’s literary labor comes to mind. It is, he says, entirely “dedicated to restoring to work its humane meaning, reclaiming the word Arbeit from the derisive cynicism with which Auschwitz employers had disfigured it” (Reported in The New York Review of Books, March 8, 2018, 17; see also a New York Times article from 1986 [https://www. nytimes.com/1986/10/12/books/a-man-saved-by-his-skills.html]). In the Hebrew Scripture, there is an economy of gift, or sharing, in the jubilee theology for instance; see also Deut. 27:19. 145.  Already for Hegel labor is the self-confirming essence of humanity. Humans are self-creating, a process, the result of their own labor. 146.  In his Third Manuscript, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, xi, for instance. 147. In P’s Gen. 1:21, the tanninim correspond to the “serpent” of J’s Genesis 3. See also Job 26:12–13; 40:15, 19; Ps. 104:19–24. Cf. Hab. 3:10 (“Loud roars the Tehom”). In Second Isaiah, Mark McEntire says, the desert “represents a combination of brutal struggle and creative power.” (A Chorus of Prophetic Voices: Introducing the Prophetic Literature of Ancient Israel [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015], 82).



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terms of God fighting a resistance within him. He is a field of opposites—an urgent invitation to a dialectical interpretation—and it is fitting to descry with P the incipient created earth as tohu wa-bohu, an abyss (Gen. 1:2), a cosmic dimension not lost forever, but pushed back to behind the stage. Before Adam appears in the Garden, there was “no plant of the field . . . and no herb . . . [for] there was no one to till the ground, . . . [only] the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:5–6). Yet, it is an emptiness that calls for being filled—an “impossible possibility,” Karl Barth would say! The decisive act of creation occurs when “the Lord God planted [what can only then be called] a garden” because at that point the ground became “inspired” by the human one who “became a living being” (Gen. 2:8, 7). Life. Adam, the one endowed with life by God’s Spirit, gives life to both the world around as his other, and, as it were, to God as his Other, as he makes the latter triumph over chaos and death. Adam bestows to all the life of God.148 There occurs a symbiosis between Creator and creature and not just a correspondence. From the very beginning, God is incarnate. As in the artwork, the human allows for the divine incarnation. Within this context, it is clear that killing a human being provokes a lessening in God’s being. Any murder is deicide, as well as fratricide, according to Genesis 4. By contrast, labor is anti-murder, a life-giving love that creates the other. When Adam is set in the Garden, he becomes an anti-crime. This is expressed in our text as “guarding.” Lévinas, to recall, strikingly evokes the human anxiety about being murdered. The human face, he says, has in large writ the petition, “Do not kill me!”149 In other words, anyone on earth is a potential victim, in need of being protected/guarded—the guardian of Genesis 2:15 must be guarded, an “Inversion narrative” as we shall see in part 3). Furthermore, as it is true of the Creator himself, space or world is “always already there,” to use a Ricoeurian expression.150 It is there even before the human has consciousness of it. By “tilling,” Adam as a latecomer acknowledges—in fact grants to it—its reality and, further, sets his seal on it.151 Thereby, he “keeps/guards” it and thwarts it from absorbing him. He 148.  Adam as God incarnate: only an oxymoron can attempt to render the complexity of the notion; it is something like “an exact fantasy’” to use Theodor Adorno’s wording. See the reference on “parable” n. 176. 149. See LaCocque-Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, 357. After all, originally the purpose of the common handshake is to give proof that one has no hidden weapon—unless, of course, one is ambidextrous, like probably Ehud in Judg. 3:15–30, an ironic text mixing comedy and tragedy. Note that, according to J, the human instrument par excellence is a tool, not a weapon. Adam is not a warrior but a worker, that is, a poet (see The Trial of Innocence, 274). 150.  So also is evil (Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 257: “Every individual finds evil already there.” See my The Trial, 25). 151.  Bergson writes, “[T]he act that carries the mark of our personality is truly free, for only our ego will claim its paternity” (Essai, 132, my trans.).

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will not become himself an object in the midst of other objects. The human being is the soul of the cosmos, the mind and the reason of it.152 WORK MECHANIZED When work is mechanized and standardized, it becomes toil and drudgery. Mechanization is not just robotry; mechanization characterizes any work without freedom, alienated from “the ground,” that is, from its natural roots, thus becoming abstract and negatively impactful on the laborer. From gift to humanity and sacrifice to God, labor is turned to itself with the admitted hidden aim of exercising power, even grandiosity (“you will be like God”). From gift, work becomes “self-inflation,” self-righteousness. And then the ground of work is “cursed” (Gen. 3:17–19; cf. 4:11). Instead of self-realization, work becomes self-negation. In the mirror of Genesis 3, human work looks like the vain efforts of Sisyphus. Hegel, Marx, and the so-called “Frankfurt School” endlessly reflect on this objective paradox. Marx who, to recall (see n. 178 and the text referenced there), said that man [sic] creates himself by his labor, now says that as the division of labor develops, labor and its products become separate from a person, as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer . . . an objectification of labor. . . . Consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself. At work, he [the worker] feels homeless.153

The human being, continues Marx, is a “crippled monstrosity” in need of “becoming a fully developed human being.”154 To readers of the Bible, Hegel’s “controlling and curbing” (of dehumanized work) makes them think of the “tilling and keeping” of Genesis 2:15 in contrast to the “cursing of the ground” in Genesis 3:17–19. The passage from the one to the other is typically introduced by a lie (in the mouth of the “serpent”): “you will not die [but] you will be like God” (Gen. 3:4–5). Now, in opposition to this deceptive fantasy, the truth (or the mind) for Hegel is the 152.  This is why Kierkegaard regards the human individual as the truth of the universe (see n. 155). Max Weber (1864–1920) shares the same emphasis. So, for example, although Marx denounces the external domination of the State, Weber shows that there are other forms of domination, as seen in the one he calls a charismatic leader, for instance, including the “great demagogue.” The same critique would apply to Freud’s traditional “domination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore.” (Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed., and introduced by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [London: Routledge, 2009], 79). 153. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 95, 98. Emile Zola risks an oxymoron: La Bête humaine (Oxford World’s Classics), trans. Roger Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [reissued] 2009). 154. Marx, Capital, 1:396.



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essence of the universal, and “the essence of the mind [truth] is freedom,”155 the liberation from a sham self-centeredness. Freedom is nothing else but assurance of complete appropriation of the world as property156—a notion that claims to dis-alienate the world-as-the-other. Thus, “the truth [that the human] envisions is not an object for passive contemplation, but is objective potentiality calling for realization.”157 And it follows from this premise that the serpent’s lie (Gen. 3:4–5)—or lies in general—sterilizes freedom, the mind, and the universal. By this word, “universal,” we should understand a historicized abstraction of what Genesis 1 calls tob (“good for”), which is not confined to the aesthetic. As Marcuse—to whom and to whose colleagues of the Frankfurt School we now turn—says, “the concept of beauty comprehends all of the beauty not yet realized.”158 It is how “beauty” becomes a universal. With the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research (founded in 1924), we reach the point of what I consider to be the utmost relevance of Neo-Marxism. Philosophers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and the school’s second generation, Jürgen Habermas, and Hannah Arendt have come with a strongly influential “critical theory of society” that continues Marx while rejecting Marxism as a dogma. Marx had insisted on what Bakhtin would later call the “chronotopical” [spatiotemporal] influence on the making of a given society (and its literary production).159 The school, under the impact of Nazism as the archenemy, denounced the hidden forces that strive to shape culture. One of these forces, and preeminent in the modern world, is exploitative capitalist “ideology.” It alienates workers from their labor and, decisively, from themselves. It is thus a striking historical paradox and puzzle to see the exploited class embrace fascism and, later on, exploitative capitalism. Only a powerful camouflage is able to present the capitalistic status quo as an ideal condition. 155. The ultimate mind Hegel calls Weltgeist. See Lectures on the Philosophy of History, ed. Peter Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 17. Søren Kierkegaard opposed Hegel’s stance, as for him the individual is the truth, the only reality. Kierkegaard’s existentialism, of course, is an attack against rationalism (see his Gesammelte Werke [Jena: Diederichs, 1910], 7:28). 156.  We should rather speak of tenancy, as we saw previously. 157. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 225. Humanity is a project. By contrast, the human lie responds in kind to the serpent’s lie, for, as Eric Smilévitch says, “one lies as much and as well with one’s body as with one’s mouth” (Commentaire du Traité des Pères, Pirqé Avot [Lagrasse: Verdier, 1990], 34, my trans.). 158. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 218, ital. orig. On Bakhtin’s “chronotope,” see n. 29. Note that Nietzsche also comes with the same phrasing (“good for”) in Genealogy, 169. On the Frankfurt School, see Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School [London: Verso, 2016]). 159.  Note the importance of the geographical factor in Max Weber’s sociology (see n. 51 in part 2).

42

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Only propaganda can twist reality into an illusionary universe. Flabbergasted, Horkheimer and Adorno thought that humanity is “sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”160 Capitalism’s myopic conception ignores all moral values or even consequences of letting profit prevail over humanity (“instrumental reasoning”).161 Marcuse sees the guilty party not in something like that but rather in the consumerism and the masses’ sham culture. In such an environment, revolution is made impossible as capitalism endlessly replaces alleged needs with new, no less artificial ones. As for Habermas, he opposes relativism but also takes exception to the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory.” He promotes instead a communicative rationality (kommunikative Rationalität), that is, a “speech act” theory. He rejects “one sided rationalization” such as prevailing in markets and administrations and strives toward a deliberative democracy that he dubs dialogical [we shall say dialectical] consensus (Einverständnis) or agreement of all concerned. Habermas says that humanity has three fundamental interests: labor, communication, and emancipation. What is to be eradicated is what has been called “the tyranny of the quantifiable.”162 In reality, to escape this tyranny, we are to deny it by a heroic choice of living “as if” it did not exist or, at least, was not determined. In this context, we shall retain the anonymous paraphrasing of William James: “Our very risk to act ‘as if’ there is an ultimate meaning to life will produce a certainty in our hearts that is denied by rational mind. Once the horizon of one’s life points to something beyond it, one is opened to the possibility of achieving very high states of consciousness that are denied to those who hesitate to act.”163 For our purpose, the classic stances of the Institute for Social Research are more directly appropriate. Clearly, as a matter of fact, the present inquiry is about meaning through interpretation and criticism. Thus, before we shift our attention back to other philosophers of the Frankfurt School we note with Habermas the constructive difference between a historiographic approach on the one hand and, on the other, a generic one like “Sage” as we find in the 160.  Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Cultural Memory in the Present), ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jeffcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). The Enlightenment has fatally split external nature and society. 161.  Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry [Kulturindustrie]: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94–136. 162.  Quoted in Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 97. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981); see esp. vol. 1. In short, with the “Fall,” what used to be unique as art, is now replaced by quantitative production. On Habermas, see Stephen Müller-Doohm, Habermas: A Biography, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). 163. “William James,” Pursuit of Happiness, available at http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/ history-of-happiness/william-james/. Sifré, par. Eqev, on Deut. 11:13 reads, “All you do, do only through love.”



Philosophy 43

Hexateuch (the Pentateuch plus Joshua). Although the former holds to the facts and finds in them the truth, the latter stresses rational acceptability, or practical reason, or again correctness. In other words, we face the difference between what scholarship has established as Historie (based on historical facts) and Geschichte (based on interpretation, spirituality, and vision).164 We are certainly within the domain of “practical reason” when the school states that nothing historical really fulfills the tob of creation, which remains a promise until a possible telos. Meanwhile, the most powerful way of realization is love.165 On this score, Marcuse, employing a dialectical methodology, says, “[E]ach thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.”166 True, love is not mentioned here, and the content of Marcusian “becoming” remains unexpressed, a vacuum demanding a fill. Conversely, if nothing really fulfills the tob in (secular) history, neither does anything bring the antipodal negative (like cruelty) to absoluteness. Cruelty, Marcuse also says, is “an almost inexhaustible force in history and imagination.”167 According to the New Testament Gospel, it is ultimately death that fulfills the ra‘, that is, the very opposite of the tob, and must be ultimately overcome by Christ’s death.168 In the light of Jesus’s teaching and previously that of Song of Songs 8:6–7, death’s finality is negated by love.169 164. “Work,” Kahlil Gibran says, “is love made visible” (The Prophet [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923], “On Work”). On this score, Mikhail Bakhtin’s creation of a “prosaics” is particularly helpful (see Gary S. Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990]). 165.  Love brings us into the domain of interpretation, of course. Hilary Putnam’s presentation of Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. W. W. Hallo (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) says, “As the believer anticipates so strongly the future redemption that it virtually is happening now, so the lovers see their love as a future fulfillment that is simultaneously present and on its way to its fullness in the future. . . . After all, the whole content of revelation is love. The love between the Lover and the Beloved culminates in ‘matrimony,’ that is, redemption” (Jewish Philosophy and Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008], 51, 54). That is why, for the Christian, the Christ fulfills the tob of Genesis 1 and all the Universals. 166.  Cf. Douglas Kellner’s introduction to the second edition of Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: What is is the enemy of what ought to be (see p. xxv). Speaking about the sign, Jacques Derrida says that it is where “the completely other is announced as such . . . in that which is not it” (Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 69). And Nietzsche says, “What is perfect is supposed not to have become” (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], ¶ 145). 167. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 217. 168. Death as the last enemy (1 Cor. 15:26). Incidentally, the New Testament is in part the Christian “Oral Torah.” Both the New Testament and the Rabbis base their statements on the written Torah. As Jacob Neusner says, “Proof-texts constantly take the measure of the structure” (Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism: The Theological System [Leiden: Brill, 2002], 70). He adds, “Constant citations of Scriptural texts . . . signal the presence of a profound identity of viewpoint [between the sages]” (272). 169.  See also Isaiah 25:7–8: “[The Lord] will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces” (NRSV). On the inseparability of love and death, see Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology (New York: Dover Books, 2011), 234.

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Part I

The teleological quality of the universal implies a vision of nature “as a task to be accomplished or, rather, yet to be undertaken.”170 Unfulfilled, the object becomes oppressive. Nature displays an aspect of horror, as if avenging itself of the hurdles against its being carried out.171 Only the work of Art is projecting a liberated object. Art is liberating, akin to the transcendence dwelling in the object.172 Incidentally, this is the key for understanding the intrinsic kinship of Art and Scripture (as poetry). From start to end the Bible is naturally metaphoric art. So is Jesus’s teaching. He says, “[E]verything comes in parables” (Mark 4:11). Matthew 13:34 goes so far as to state, “without a parable he told them nothing.”173 Speaking of Art as the apex of humanity’s work, we return once more to Marx, for whom “man is what he does [Art!] and whose ‘nature’ unfolds and reveals itself in history.”174 Fromm adds, “Marx’s fundamental idea: man makes his own history; he is his own creator.”175 But if it is true that circumstances make a person, a person also makes circumstances. Hence, Marcuse comments, “[F]acts are what they are only as moments in a process that leads beyond them to that which is not yet fulfilled in fact.”176 On this score, Job 28, for instance—a poem on wisdom that some scholars consider as central to the book177—describes a process of production that 170. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 241. On that score, see Jacques Derrida’s pun on “difference” and “différance.” The full meaning of all language is differed. See Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). One thinks of Franz Kafka’s compositionally always-differed ending. His stories, Benjamin says, are pregnant with a “moral to which they never give birth” (Selected Works, 2:497). A term antipodal to différance is “trace,” that is, the mark of an anterior presence. This is remarkable because for Derrida philosophy is “the quest for the proper word and the unique name” (see Margins of Philosophy, 27). As to the meaning being “different,” I shall refer to an author different from Derrida (!), namely, Adorno in Minima Moralia, 48. He denounces the false security provided by the Party. It is a security “paid for with permanent fear, sycophancy, mutual backscratching and ventriloquy.” Meaning will eventually be different. 171.  Strikingly, Genesis 9:5 says that God will “require a reckoning from every animal,” as well as “from human beings, each one for the blood of the other” (NRSV). 172.  See Robert Musil, The Man without Quality (New York: Prabhat Books, 2008) about the constant antagonism between the scientist holding fast to the fact and the artist breaking out of the confinement of matter (see n. 162). Speaking of art in the modern world, one cannot but refer to Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. James Avery Underwood (New York: Prism Key Press, 2012): with the modern dimension of reproduction, art has lost its uniqueness resulting from its religious origin. The liberation conveyed by art promotes mimesis or the “non-identical,” as Habermas emphasizes in his critique of Nazi “instrumental reason” (“Eine Art Schadenabwinklung,” Die Zeit [July 11, 1986], cited by Saul Friedländer, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe [Bloomington, IN, Bloomington University Press, 1993], 49). See also Habermas in n. 165. 173.  Parabolē means replacing one object by another for the sake of illustration. 174.  In the words of Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, 41–42. 175. Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, 278. 176. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 152. 177. See, for example, Victor Reichert, Job with Hebrew Text and English Translation, Commentary (Hindhead: Soncino Press, 1946), 140; Claus Westermann speaks of a “Ruhepunkt” in Der Aufbau des Buches Hiob (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1956), 107.



Philosophy 45

transforms the world from potentiality to actuality and quasi-fulfillment.178 For Hegel this would be a model of human rational activity. This may be contrasted with the present proletariat’s lot in Marx’s view, as for him distorted labor is the very negation of reason, as it is the non-fulfillment of positive human potentialities.179 The actual exploited proletariat, we could say, is the very negation of ‘abodah (as envisaged by J in Genesis 2) and consequently the negation of human essence—“the complete loss of man,” as Marx says.180 This is another way to reaffirm, this time in a negative mode, that human creation and human work belong together.181 Work’s alienation entails human alienation. ‘Abodah is now the toil of the ‘ebed (the slave), and qua slaves humans are subservient to matter instead of being freed from its domination by unveiling nature’s essence.182 Then, the human reveres “the fetishism of commodities,” Marx says.183 Marx drastically contrasts this with work as glorified in his utopian communist society. Then work is so essentially different from work in capitalist society that he hesitates to call it also “labor.” Unavoidably, this ambivalence of Marxian “work” evinces, for the student of the Bible, the ambivalence of the word ‘abodah, which, besides the sense of thrall, conveys also the all-important aspect of worship, a far cry from bondage. Work as offering and gift. Work as worship. This naturally leads us to raise a question, to that we now turn: what is Marx’s utopia?184 178.  This is true, although human work towards discovering the Earth’s secret/wisdom is powerless. This is a distressing statement, for the goal of work in such an attempt is a matter of life or death (see Baruch 3:27–31 and the background of Deuteronomy 8:9: “A good land . . . a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing. . . . You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you”). 179.  On this score, “distorted labor” is equivalent to murder—“killing me softly” (Roberta Flack, 1973). Murder steals another’s life but also another’s “positive human potentialities.” 180.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt, 1927), 1:619. (See the English translation in Collected Works, 1851–53 [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973]). In addition, few pages have been written with more outrage and compassion than Virginia Woolf’s on the female proletariat’s bondage in “Life as We Have Known It: Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewely Davies,” in Street Haunting and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1948), xv. To this, we might add Adorno’s statement: “The admission of women to all possible supervised activities hides the perpetuation of their dehumanization. They remain in large firms what they were in the family, objects” (Minima Moralia, 94). 181. This congruence is remarkable from various points of view. I refer here again to Erich Fromm’s critique: “Marx’s fight against God is, in reality, a fight against the idol that is called God” (Marx’s Concept of Man, 11). 182.  The notion of ‘ebed is part and parcel with ‘abodah, whose negativity it evinces—an intrinsic dialectic! 183. Marx, Capital, 1:83–84. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno echo Marx’s statement: “[T] hought is being turned inescapably into commodity and language into celebration of the commodity” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiv). Earlier, Henri Bergson pointed to the fact that, rather than acting, we are mostly acted on (Essai, “Quadrige,” [Paris: PUF, 2013], 174). 184.  In time, so-called “revisionists” spoke of “the utopian thinking of Marx.” I refer to Jürgen Habermas’ works, esp. Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974). On utopia, see n. 51.

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TODAY’S “SURPLUS VALUE” In today’s economy, as also otherwise, we are entering a new era, the era of incipient robotics.185 It has actually started, for example, in the assembly lines, the car industry, delivery drones, thinking machines (computers), etc.186 This means that—using Marx’s terminology—the “surplus value” (Mehrwert)187 of time-production is assuredly to increase to such a degree as to devalue (or perhaps magnify?) the Marxian analysis.188 Labor, ‘abodah, will be steadily delegated to machines and lose all dimension of work and still more so of worship. We may, therefore, wonder whether this development inaugurates a time of senselessness or, on the contrary, brings about a formidable opportunity of freedom to invent and create the true concreteness of labor, independently from the market economy as Marx had deplored it. Marx says, “Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation.”189 This outcome, however, depends on human freedom, as it will express itself through revolution, he says, although there is no guarantee that it will eventuate into socialism. In fact, Marx allows for the possibility of a long-lasting barbarism.190 ENTELECHY The Hegelian-Marxist dialectical analysis may foundationally apply, I argue, to the revolutionary biblical view of work as part and parcel with Adam’s 185.  See above under “Work Mechanized.” 186.  Adorno (Minima Moralia, 53) writes, “Like Fascism itself . . . [the robots] combine the utmost technical perfection with complete blindness. ‘I have seen the world-spirit,’ not on horseback but on wings and headless, and this at once refutes Hegel’s philosophy of history.” 187.  The “surplus value” yielded, for instance, by slave societies like classical Greece and Rome. 188.  Cf. Marcuse’s caveat in Eros and Civilization, 89–90: “What is retrogressive is not mechanization and standardization but their containment, not the universal coordination but its concealment under spurious liberties, choices, and individualities.” Marcuse’s statement is not unproblematic. One may wonder whether the premise on mechanization and standardization does not automatically yield the very outcome decried by Marcuse. 189. Marx, Capital, 1:837. Norman Brown cites Freud’s “On Negation,” and says, “[Negation] is a dialectical or ambivalent phenomenon, containing always a distorted affirmation of what is officially denied” (Life, 160; Freud, “On Negation,” 5 pages in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., vol. 19. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1954–). An important point is to realize that the Rabbis’ sense of justice is based upon the principle of “middah keneged middah [measure for measure],” that is, of stasis/ stability (incidentally in the background of the lex talionis). This for them is the rule of economics. Although Marx deals with market economics, the Rabbis deal with a “distributive economics,” that is, with barter, itself based on a true value of things as recognized by the two parties in exchange (see Neusner, Rabbinic, chapter 7). Here, work is a commodity. As such, it has a value that market economy cannot quantify. Work produces something valuable that must be appreciated and respected. 190. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 190. Adorno echoes Marx’s pessimism. He refers to the disintegration of personal characteristics in mechanical labor economy as “the pathogenesis of schizophrenia” and a “psychotic character prerequisite for all totalitarian mass movements” (Minima Moralia, 254).



Philosophy 47

creation and creating. To start with, it is evident that Genesis 2–3 is addressed to humans historically in bondage with work-as-thrall.191 That the Bible, however, describes work as originally positive, even as worship (‘abodah) sounds like good news to both the original recipients and to us today. Fundamentally, it means that human toil is to be honored,192 not just in its present shape but also in its teleological dynamic striving toward its fulfillment193— Genesis 2 as beginning and end, an entelechy. As such, it is an ever-present potentiality, an already/not-yet reality.194 Per contra, when the kerygma of Genesis 2 is disregarded—especially by capitalist policy makers—positivism triumphs and, with it, totalitarianism. The so-called “facts” replace critical thinking, and the market economy is conceived of as an inescapable given. This is the very basis of fascism.195 With it, we witness the disembodiment

191.  In opposition to reading biblical texts as abstract dogmatic statements, let us say with Julian Morgenstern, “Israel’s history has ever been the chief source of its knowledge of God” (The Book of Genesis, 13). In his Social-Scientific Criticism, John H. Elliott has convincingly shown that “all knowledge is socially conditioned,” so that all creative expression is “shaped by the ‘constraints of history,’ the constraints of personal and social experience and of frameworks of plausibility that communicators share with their contemporaries” (John H. Elliott, What is Social-Scientific Criticism? Guides to Biblical Scholarship [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993], 37). It is thus without surprise that we read that evil is already defeated, for instance, in the major event of the exodus from Egypt (Ps. 77:11–15). On this notion, the book of Isaiah is illuminating: in Isaiah 45:11, a parallel is drawn between God as maker and the works of his hands in history. Isaiah 41:4 reads, “Who has wrought and achieved this?” (NJPS). In Isaiah 60:21, there is an association of “planting” with the “work” of God, and Isaiah 64:8 says, “[W]e are all the work of your hands” (NRSV). 192.  See John 17:4–5. Jesus himself was a carpenter according to Mk. 6:3 (cf. Mat. 13:55). As to Mary, an old Christian tradition said that she was a veil weaver. 193.  See Philippians 1:6 (“The one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion”). Incidentally, in Philippians 2:13, we find the only text in which energein is used for human activity (G. Bertram, TDNT, “ergon,” 2:635–55). See the beautiful greetings by Paul in 1 Thessalonians 1:3: “remembering . . . your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope.” 194. “Already,” qua promise striving toward its concretization and already imagined and shared; “not yet,” qua promise still in need to reach its self-achievement in the telos of time. Walter Benjamin said that it is a “historical task” to “disclose this immanent state of perfection and make it absolute, to make it visible and dominant in the present “ (“The Life of Students” in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1996–2003], 1:37). For more examples of the idea of already-not yet, see Pss. 96:10 and 145:10–21. In the New Testament, see Matthew 12:28 // Luke 11:20 (“already”) and Mark 11:17 (“not yet”). 195.  In the 1960s, Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113–23) expressed, as we saw, their disappointment about the “mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the spell of despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia,” as we saw previously. The authors see the cause of this in the fear of truth, which petrifies enlightenment itself. Adorno says it clearly: “the existence of foolish and blatant junk expresses the triumph, that human beings managed to produce out of themselves a piece of what otherwise ensorcels them as toilers . . . by themselves creating what they feared” (Minima Moralia, 247). In addition, Ernest Becker writes (Denial, 135), “In group behavior anything goes because the leader Okays it. It is like being an omnipotent child again.” Accompanying European fascism of the twentieth century there was a technique of dismissing “unsavory news” as “mere propaganda.” This increased the horror of war this denial was supposed to sweeten.

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of truth.196 Truth loses all foundation in rationality. Marcuse insightfully sees in this: a process of breakdown for all rational laws and standards, an exaltation of action regardless of the goal, a veneration of success . . . [with] no supra-individual laws to restrain them and no valid principle to judge them.197

He concludes, “Freedom is on the retreat in the realm of thought as well as in that of society.”198 It is with these pessimistic words that I want to conclude this part of the present work. There is hope, nevertheless, that, by the grace of God and by a human burst of consciousness, humanity will be able to repeat, with the prophet, “God delights in showing clemency. He will have compassion upon us.”199

196.  As the present US situation under Donald Trump demonstrates. 197. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 406. 198. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 420. 199.  Micah 7:18–19.

Part II

Psychoanalysis

INTRODUCTION In this part, I shift the attention to another crowd of thinkers with another agenda. Actually, Sigmund Freud and other psychologists and psychoanalysts are philosophers whose philosophy’s viewpoint is the human soul (psyche). They also are interested in work and creativity, especially on their impact on the individual and the collectivity. This inquiry is perfectly legitimate, and my criticism of Freud’s theory is not to be inferred as a negative opinion regarding psychoanalysis as a whole. On the contrary, as there is an ontology of work, there is also a psychology of labor. As I shall highlight in what follows, Freud’s vision of work is set in contrast to the so-called “pleasure principle.” The Austrian creator of psychoanalysis claims to ferret out the presence of Eros in most or all human activity. In fact, as I protested in part 1, the theory inflates a peripheral drive and moves it to the center stage, pushing aside another more important principle, namely, human creativity. For Freud, the essence of wo/man is desire, as I said previously. It is an unleashing of energy toward pleasure. Now, although this Freudian stance is not wrong per se, it must be realized that there is more to human desire than pleasure, namely, the wish to create, that is, to put one’s mark on world reality. The child lies in the fresh snow and imprints his or her image. Thus, to say with Freud (after Aristotle) that the human seeks happiness demands a characterization of happiness. Happiness lies in creativity. Hedonistic happiness will not do because it clashes with the reality-principle. Only creativity is able to neutralize repression (to recall, maturity for Freud demands renunciation of the pleasure-principle in favor of reality). Repression is at the very center of universal neurosis, and indeed, it is the ground on which psychoanalysis is 49

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built. Its neutralization is liberation, and neutralization depends on a diacritical resolution of the antagonism between the principles. Regarding the dialectical criticism that I promote in part 3, it does not displace psychology any more than it displaced philosophy. But its aim is in part to thwart all mythologizing and allegorizing of the biblical text. To take an example drawn from the Genesis text we have selected from the beginning for the present essay, I shall focus on the character Eve. Contrary to the psychoanalysis of the text of Genesis 3, Eve, wife of Adam according to the patent text, is not hiding her true identity as being also his mother under a narratival disguise of the Oedipal complex. This is coercing the text into fitting a preconceived and uncalled for pattern. Dialectically, nevertheless, we may perhaps arrive at a heuristic synthesis about the female multifaceted role in life, not to be in a reductionist way summarized as passive erotic. This is just one example of a positive criticism of psychoanalysis. The latter typically contains inner contradictions, an open invitation, as we saw, to a dialectical solution. Psychoanalysis per se in this particular case is found wanting, but it is helpful! A RESPONSE TO SIGMUND FREUD1 Turning to a psychological voice, our exploration, by necessity, will be partial, not only because Freud’s works are extremely rich in substance and obviously not entirely dedicated to the problem of work/labor/performance, but also, in the words of Marcuse, because “[t]he psychical sources and resources of work, and its relation to sublimation, constitute one of the most neglected areas of psychoanalytic theory.”2 Freud, with Copernicus and Darwin, belongs to the geniuses that have moved humans from center stage. This move is all-important and, in a way, can be seen as one tripartite insight. Although, because of this, it should be treated as a unit, I confess my total ignorance of cosmological and biological science. Therefore, Copernican heliocentric cosmology will remain in the background and Darwinian evolutionary theory will, by necessity, receive here short shrift. Suffice it here to say that, apart from Copernicus (followed by cosmologists like Galilee, Kepler, Newton) about whose work, as I said, I have no competence; as far as Freud and Darwin are concerned, my admiration has limits. Both giants have mistaken the periphery for the center. For all their respective import—these, as well as Marx and Nietzsche, masters of 1.  Part 2 is inspired by Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of Freud’s works in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974). 2. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 74.



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“hermeneutic of suspicion”—sexuality à la Freud and evolution à la Darwin are usurpers.3 In what follows, I shall show how this is true of Freudian doctrine. It remains, however, that they have debunked the “false consciousness,” the “immediate consciousness” of the false “Cogito,” entailing an initial misinterpretation, for consciousness is not a “given” but a task, “a dialectic of the unconscious,” as Ricoeur says.4 ON FREUD’S THEORY OF PHYLOGENESIS According to Freud, society is originally based on the authority/despotism of a hoary and paradigmatic Father.5 He enjoys his woman or women and dominates over his sons by engendering them and by distributing to them the work to be done. Under his disciplinary control his sons are constrained from the pleasure principle. From the beginning, the sons are thus under domination. They are collectively—but also compulsively—producers; they constitute the “labor force.”6 This Freudian reconstruction, based on the myth of Oedipus, is powerfully suggestive, to be sure. Yet in reality, not every father is a castrating despot and not every son is in thralldom.7 What is overwhelmingly more accurate is the father’s transmission of work “apprenticeship” to his daughters and sons.8 As initiators, the father and the mother set the children’s life on the track to performance. They teach a trade—even if only through being a model of 3.  The same mystifying twisted view is denounced in Max Weber’s criticism of Karl Marx’s anthropology that it is “raising a segmental perspective to paramount importance and reducing the multiplicity of caused factors to a single-factor theorem” (From Max Weber, 46). It is true that “Freud’s object of study is . . . less sexuality as such than desire and its dynamics as a whole” (Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 64). About Charles Darwin, suffice it to quote here Ernest Becker (Denial, 150; see also the Excursus on Becker here below): “‘Conscience.’ For the great philosopher Immanuel Kant it was one of the two sublime mysteries of creation, this ‘moral law within’ [the hu]man, and there was no way to explain it—it was just given.” 4. See Ricoeur, Conflict, 108. He also writes, “First there was the cosmological humiliation inflicted upon man [sic] by Copernicus, who destroyed the narcissistic illusion by which the home of man remained at rest in the center of the universe. Then there came biological humiliation, when Darwin put an end to man’s claim to be unconnected with the animal kingdom. Finally came psychological humiliation. Man, who already knew that he was lord of neither the cosmos nor all living things, discovers that he is not even lord of his own psyche” (152). 5.  We should keep in mind what Freud himself confesses, “At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father” (Totem and Taboo, Standard Edition, vol. 13, pt. 4, sec. 6). 6.  See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 194. 7.  By the way, the absence of the mother and daughters’ roles is blatant. It is true, however, that this absence is relative for woman qua mother plays a central role in Freud’s representation: desire is multiform and basically represents the mother. Anxiety, for instance, is for Freud “the anxiety of separation from the protective mother” (The Ego and the Id, 87). It does not detract, however, from attributing a passive role to the female. 8.  Jesus is a carpenter, the son of a father who is a carpenter (Mat. 13:55). “Apprenticeship” must be broadly understood, of course.

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ethics—that is not an adjuvant to life but an existential quality that is true creativity. Father and mother are facilitators.9 True, not all parents fulfill the task for which they are accountable and, in the best of cases, not all children are willing to welcome their bequest. They are not necessarily producers, that is, giving freelance to their creativity. Due to circumstances or to fate, some or many are incapacitated. Evidently, this abnormal situation is more than a lack of opportunity. Be that as it may, the socalled “right to labor”—whether claimed or ignored—is not just a legal right. It is, on a deeper level, an ontological demand. That is why the outcome of incarceration, for instance, is sheer chaos. About this, I’d say that the alternative comes in terms of work: serving the community for a certain number of days. This is admissibly forced altruism, but the punishment is commensurate with the crime, itself destructive of society and its creativity. More broadly speaking, that millions of human beings must struggle daily for sheer survival is an immense tragedy, also from the point of view of missed creativity––although there is an effort each being is making to exist! How many Einsteins does humanity lose day in and day out? (See Pirke Avot 3:17: “without flour no Torah” [my trans.]; see also Rabbenu Yona’s commentary ad loc.). Before leaving this topic, it behooves me to strike a warning note. Speaking of innate human rights (like the right to work) belongs to ideology or, rather, to a distinctive definition of ideology. In this sense, it is similar to Hegel’s “Zeitgeist.” I must emphasize the point that Ideological (or Political) criticism addresses issues that are different from our own here. Although its problem is purely sociological, ours will, in part 3, shift to a textual/literary/interpretational criticism. True, we shall see that Dialectical criticism is but a subdivision of Ideological criticism but with its own integrity. As method of interpretation, it cannot be confused with Political, Sociological, Feminist, New Historical, etc. These belong mainly to “higher criticism,” whereas Dialectical criticism, as I am (re)launching it here, is “lower criticism” (at the level of the text). LIBIDO OR AEDIFICATIO? Work in the Bible is the anti-inertia drive or the “life instincts” à la Freud––it is a fight with death. What Freud identified as the sexual or libido, Genesis 9.  To recall, the Sages used to support themselves with a craft of some kind. Jesus was a carpenter; Paul was a tentmaker (Acts 18:3); Rabbi Hillel had a profession (b. Yoma 35b); Rabbi Akiba was a shepherd (see b. Nedarim 50a). Ancient Rabbis said that a man who does not teach his son a good trade (’ummanuth) makes him into a robber. According to Abraham Maslow, to raise a child beats any creative art. In the Talmud, see b. Ber. 63a; b. Kid. 31a; m. Kid. 82a; g. Kid. 82b. The biblical identification of Israel as “sons of Jacob/Israel” reveals a fundamental appreciation for the generations’ relationship (see the praise of the patriarchs and matriarchs).



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2–3 claims to be more profoundly labor as life dynamics. This, of course, would not make sense if work was seen as something external to the life process or “life principle.” Fundamental here is the notion of homo faber, as we saw. Adam is ontologically faber, that is, creator. Even Freud’s intuitive projection that he expresses in terms of Thanatos (the death instinct) needs to be reinterpreted as the human struggle against matter’s resistance—matter in the broadest sense of physical or intellectual material to be shaped by human creativity.10 The confrontation of nature and human creativity! In the aforementioned Benjamin’s oeuvre (Selected Writings), the author criticizes Karl Kraus (1874–1936). He insists on nature’s symbol of destruction and calls “real humanism” Karl Marx’s vision. Within this perspective, “creative existence” [of the individual] is but a “fetish.” The aim of the critique is clear: “there is no idealistic but only a materialistic deliverance from myth” (Selected, 1:487). Humaneness “must be abandoned on the level of individual existence. So that it can come forth at the level of collective existence” (Correspondence, 276). In the former, Walter Benjamin sees the Unmensch, the antithesis of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and in real humaneness the liberating synthesis. Benjamin’s Marxist a priori is evident. His “collective existence” has clashed nowadays with a severe drawback, even with repulsion after the historical and social discovery of what it means in Communist states and, previously, in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, a distinction must be made between the bourgeois Romantic “apotheosis of creativity,” reflecting as it does the heroic self-centeredness of the epic and the human co-creation with God I expound in the present essay. Walter Benjamin is not exempt from subjective preconceptions. His “attraction” to Goethe’s Elective Affinities, for example, where in chapter 4 of the book Goethe justifies chemically (materialistically) marital infidelity, is suspect. Benjamin was not a model of steadfast conjugality! Sexuality does not fill the horizon. It is encompassed in creativity. Sexuality is work.11 Although not all human beings are Platos, Beethovens, or Einsteins, 10.  While writing these lines, I unavoidably experience the resistance of the unexpressed! And, if the “unexpressed” amounts to “Thanatos” [within the Id], then its delivery is “bios” (Eros) [promotion to consciousness], life creating—or at the very least a work of organizing language and, beyond it, matter. Let us note at this point that, whereas it would be difficult to see in J’s narrative of origins the Marxian struggle between social classes, it may be transposed into the struggle of the divine order with matter. Very present is the inner contradiction—“the notion of contradiction is central to any Marxist cultural analysis,” Jameson says (The Political Unconscious, 80)—“within the general unity of a shared code” (84), both terms of the contradiction belonging to God’s creation. As for LéviStrauss, he emphasizes the point that the notion of dialectic is omnipresent in myth (“The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 206–231 [New York: Basic, 1963]; see, e.g., 221). 11.  Is it permitted to take literally the usual phrase “making love”? At any rate, the biblical expression “making the truth” (tēn alētheian poiein), at least in the sense of acting according to the truth,

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almost all are able to procreate.12 Children are the most magnificent work/ creation possible because they are the living outcome of the ultimate human productivity, hence the proof par excellence of co-creation with God. Sex is expression of love, and love is the capacity of I to create Thou and Thou to create I. Mutual love is mutual creation. Its fruit is the child. Because it is so central, labor, and its accessory sex, is all the more susceptible to distortion. Labor can be and actually is disfigured into exploiting and being exploited. So is also sex: it can be and actually is marred today more than ever. What this means is that not all work or all “pleasure” will do in terms of creativity. Work is communion with the otherness of the world. Freud did not emphasize enough this non-egocentricity, this extraversion of life. Rather than Freud’s focus on the self and its neuroses, Levinas’s theory of encounter with others must be preferred. Then labor and love merge. What fills the horizon is not just sex or sheer activity for its own sake but the encounter with the other and the Other.13 Such dynamism attached to work or, à la Freud, to the “performance principle,” depicts the human being as a historical being. The myth of the Garden could appear as static, but the text immediately breaks the status quo: the Garden is the Garden only when “tilled and kept” (see Gen. 2:5, 15). In other words, the Garden and the Gardner are in the process of becoming. Intersubjectivity transcends the objectivity of the world.14 This is the aim of labor and also its definition. What is called “work” is what transforms “outthere” into “here-in.” If one imagines a three-tiered space, with one end-tier objective and the other end-tier subjective, the whole field of action occurs in the intermediary tier. There, the objective and the subjective meet, and their may be a remote parallel (cf. H. Braun, “poieo,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged in One Volume [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985], 897). (Another example is provided by Jer. 9:23: “for I YHWH make kindness, justice and righteousness in the world.”). It is striking to add here Freud’s “work of mourning” (on the self’s past), and Ricoeur’s “work of memory” (on the present traces of the past). 12.  I am not suggesting that sexuality is “limited” to procreativity but that it needs to be understood as broadened to creativity (which the very term provides). “Protected sex,” for instance, is still a legitimate part of the libido to the extent that, insofar as it expresses love, it is creative work. Sex is not an end per se. Incidentally, priestly celibacy and chastity implies a rejection not only of the fundamental human libido but of the world as such. Priests everywhere repressively regulate public sexuality. 13.  God is the Other par excellence. Israel insists on divine transcendence and uniqueness: “our Lord is unique” (YHWH ’echad, Deut. 6:4). All the “others” of the world are ultimately reflections of God’s otherness. Transcendence is thus not sheer aseity. 14.  This is a far cry from Freudian “freedom of the libidinal subject-object which the human organism is and desires” (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 36). For Marcuse, paraphrasing here Nietzsche, “the central proposition [is] that ‘joy wants eternity’—wants itself and all things to be everlasting” (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 113).



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meeting is called “work.” This latter transforms the other two tiers as well as the very one that is transforming.15 WORK AS KNOWLEDGE In what precedes, I have stressed the inner relationship of post-lapsarian work on the one hand and “the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:17) on the other. It is indeed one more ingredient in J’s anthropology: labor in Eden used to be independent of knowledge of good and evil, but not so after the “Fall” when human creativity becomes unimaginable without such knowledge. According to Freud, the Id does not share in that knowledge; the Id knows “no values, no good and evil, no morality.”16 For J, notwithstanding, the Freudian Id would, at most, be precreational. There is no Adamic human without knowledge of good and evil, except in the mythic “Garden,” where it was unnecessary. In the present world, however, creativity demands ethics. Friedrich Nietzsche also “relativizes” morality. He says that the birds of prey and the lambs as food cannot but be what they are. Nietzsche forgets that the human being—Nietzsche’s ultimate “target”—is neither bird of prey nor lamb but is able to choose to be one or the other. As a good friend of mine said, “I prefer to be robbed than to be the robber.”17 To which Nietzsche would retort, “Weakness is being lied into something meritorious?”18 Yet, a repentant felon could have uttered my friend’s statement, for instance!19 Furthermore, it would be difficult to ignore the Pauline declaration put alternatively in God’s mouth and in his own, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. . . . Whenever I [Paul] am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9–10; cf. 1 Cor. 1:25: “God’s weakness is stronger 15.  In contrast, mechanized labor transforms the objective into another objective, and it transforms the transformer into a slave. Her work is not for her sake but for productivity’s sake to the benefit of someone else, the exploiter. 16. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 105. Nietzsche (Genealogy, 35–36) speaks of Israel’s “revaluation” (of all values). Parenthetically, Jameson designates Joseph Conrad as a model of it (The Political Unconscious, 65). 17.  As Nietzsche says, “being just is always a positive attitude” (Genealogy, 74, ital. orig.). See LevR. 27:5 (on Qoh. 3:15), (in Neusner, Rabbinic, 49–50: Even in a case “in which a righteous man pursues a wicked man, ‘God seeks what has been driven away’.”) 18. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 1:13–14. 19.  On this matter, I find a more dialectical view in Joseph Conrad’s “Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River” (1895). Conrad’s Nineteen Books (Copenhagen: Titan Read, n.d.); the story is also published by New York: Random House, 1996, which is one of the most powerful studies on racial relations I know of. Conrad speaks of strength in Mrs. Almayer’s weakness and of weakness in Mr. Almayer’s appearance of strength (see Chap. X, circ. 8 p. down; Chap. XI, circ. 14 p. down). To recall, regarding kingship in Israel, there is a “curious combination of universal power with lowliness” (J. Pedersen, Israel, 2:93).

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than human strength” [NRSV]), etc. Within this perspective, weakness is no congenital flaw but a deliberate choice, a tremendous courage to deny the aphorism, “The powerful is always right.” The biblical trajectory is consistently subversive. Yet, at this point, J comes with an astounding association of the knowledge of good and evil on the one hand and death on the other: “for in the day that you eat of it [the tree of knowledge], you shall die” (Gen. 2:17). This association of knowledge with death demands reflection—and dialectical treatment. WORK, KNOWLEDGE, AND DEATH From a biblical viewpoint, death is the final defeat of the human being—and the ultimate enemy to overcome. Death obliterates everything human and non-human, both the “tiller” and the “Garden.” That is why death is the great mystery, an ultimate negation that surrounds the negation of negation implied in work. Death is another term for the matter’s resistance we spoke about previously, the resistance that must be overcome by human work, while, concomitantly, death is also the final Sabbath. “It is death that raises the metaphysical problem of Being,” I said before. In other words, although Adam is co-creator, death (or the threat of death, see Gen. 2:17) prevents him from being divinized, that is, from being absolute—for indeed the line of demarcation between the human and God is thin.20 Astoundingly, Genesis 3:22 says, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” [NRSV]. Adam is the imago dei, “gardener” with the Gardener, and creator with the Creator. Biblical anthropology is part and parcel with theology. It remains, however, that Adam’s being is set within the realm of relativity. He is not his own reference.21 20.  John Milton says of humans that they are “[h]oly, divine, good, amiable, or sweet” (Paradise Lost [New York: Penguin Putnam,] {repr.}, 2003, 10.896). It is the Jewish ’adam qadmon or the William Blakian “absolute man.” Jacob Neusner uses the terms of “complementarity,” “coherence,” “correspondence” (see Rabbinic, chapter 8); he writes, “Humanity on earth incarnates God on high” (163). Goethe in Elective Affinities, trans. David Constantine. Oxford World Classics. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 161 says, “The highest and the best in man is formless, and one ought to be wary of giving it form except in noble acts.” 21.  In the ambient religious world, the gods may be good and bad at the same time. The notion of imago dei is present in Genesis 1:26–27 and 5:1–3. In Genesis 2, the expression “living being” (nepheš chayah) that characterizes also the animals replaces it (2:7, 19). From a dialectical point of view, the classified similarity of humans and animals relativizes the human uniqueness as being the imago dei and conversely maximizes the human incomparability in the creation. Thus, “dialectical criticism” prolongs the line initiated by “literary criticism.” The imago dei may, of course, become a major temptation of self-seduction. Through a grave misinterpretation, this notion—and even the whole P’s tradition on origins—has been read as a blank check to abuse nature as if humanity was owner, not tenant, of the “garden.” As to the J’s version of it, it is clear that Genesis 3 needs Genesis



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The greatest representative of the natural world qua creature, “the serpent, more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made” (Gen. 3:1 [NRSV]), says, “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). To this arrogance, God is said to respond with, “until you [Adam] return to the dust [the very ‘food’ of the serpent, according to 3:14] . . . to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19).22 Death is the ultimate limit to human creativity. Before death, the potentialities are limitless. Work fills the horizon—and disappears with it. Does knowledge/science really bring death? Like everything falling into human hands, science gets disrupted.23 It soon becomes a subjective and twisted decision about what is good and what is bad. Thus, instead of actually acceding to infinity, science plays God and pretends to reach final truth. It declares its technical discoveries to be the existential good, a claim that, in effect, dismisses it as not any trust worthier than non-scientific knowledge. Here, Kierkegaard must be recalled (see his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments).24 Even the Nazarene, entitled more than anyone else to be praised as the veritable “Son of Man,” that is, the true Man, the original Adam redivivus (bar ’enash/ ben Adam, says the book of Daniel),25 even he refuses to be seen as the incarnation of goodness. He says, “Only God is good!” (Mark 10:18). There is, as we saw, some kind of collusion of the ego’s work with death. When Freud, for instance, speaks of “the ego meeting with a fate like that of the protozoa which are destroyed by the products of disintegration that they themselves have created,”26 the parallel with Ezekiel 20:25–26’s and Paul’s criticism of “the law” (which can be identified with Freud’s “Performance 2 and Genesis 2 needs Genesis 3 in the background. Evil is always distortion of good—Augustine was right. 22.  Otto Rank writes, “[I]t is just as unbearable to be God as it is to remain an utter slave” (Beyond Psychology [New York: Dover Books, 2011], 196). 23.  See Genesis 6:12: “And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth.” Modern science does not escape this criticism. As Gisel says, science “has become a religion” (La Création, 180). In this case as well the periphery has usurped centrality. 24. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). For Kierkegaard, “Subjectivity is truth” so that all objective knowledge is subject to doubt as are all constructed systems. Faith is an existential leap. Already the sixteenth-century Reformers insisted on the paradox of divine revelation rather than on its rationality (in confrontation with what we shall see in n. 75 below about the Rabbinic viewpoint; only dialectics can take us out of the impasse). Martin Luther in particular stressed the nonphilosophical way of thinking introduced by Scripture, starting with the notion of God’s “ungraspability.” God makes himself known through his works and through his word. 25.  In Colossians 1:15–16, Paul says of Christ that “he is the image of the invisible God . . . in him all things in heaven and on earth were created . . . all things have been created through him and for him . . . in him all things hold together” etc. 26. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 89.

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Principle”) comes to mind. Ezekiel says (in the name of God), “I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live,” and Paul says, “While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law”––here, Freud would say, “by our super-ego”––“were at work in our members to bear fruit for death” (Rom. 7:5 [NRSV]; see the context). But Paul’s doctrine adds an important amendment, and it could be a kind of an anticipated response to Freud’s statement that the “pure culture of the death instinct may hold sway in the super-ego.”27 For Paul, the death instinct—if there is anything like this for real28—has found its ultimate target in Jesus’s death and, therefore, we are no longer “slaves . . . but in the new life of the Spirit” (Rom. 7:6). Consequently, the affinity of sorts between work and death receives its deathblow (pun intended). I shall not leave the theme of death without indicating my agreement with Pierre Gisel who sees in the empty grave of Jesus a necessary metaphor for “a radical reversal in the radical site that death constitutes. [Thus] we bear witness, at the heart of the discontinuous, to the perennial recreation by God.”29 SECOND EXCURSUS: ERNEST BECKER How could we speak of the meaning of death without mentioning the classic book by Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death? In terms of introducing his insightful reflection, I shall first quote him on “good and evil” in a companion volume of his. He writes, The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn’t make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over evil.30

And, on death, he says, 27. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 77. 28.  On Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, see n. 33 below and the text referenced there. Few psychoanalysts have been as vehement in denouncing the falsity of Freud’s death instinct—as well as of the Oedipus complex—than Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957); see Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Socialist Reproductions, 1972). He says, “Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness,” and “Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it.” (Character Analysis [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980], Preamble (1933), ital. org.). 29. Gisel, La Création, 102. 30. Becker, Escape from Evil, 135–136, ital. mine.

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The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.31

Finally, Becker concludes regarding human work and creativity: Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life.32

And, There is the type of man who has great contempt for “immediacy,” who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the “introvert.” He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one’s true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and mankind with the peculiar quality of his talent?33

An anti-Prometheus statement, indeed! For Becker, Freud erred in his conception of sexuality as repression par excellence. Becker decisively says, “Consciousness of death is the primary 31. Becker, Denial, xvii, ital. mine. 32. Becker, Denial, 185. See also Donald Winnicott, who writes, “Somewhere in the scheme of things there can be room for everyone to live creatively” (“Living Creatively,” in Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis [New York: Norton, 1970], 39–44). And in Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005), 73, he says, “it is only by being creative that the individual discovers the self.” The American poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote, “Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: the creative act” (World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, ed. Bradford Morrow, “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation,” (1957) [New York: Directions, 1987], 43). 33. Becker, Denial, 84. Expressing one’s uniqueness is what Carl Jung calls “individuation” (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW, 2nd ed., trans. F. C. Hull [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966], 7:266). The individual uniqueness, however, does not imply radical separateness. To recall, the Jungian “archetypes” are independent of cultural and historical contexts. The archetypes are universal and impersonal.

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repression, not sexuality.”34 After Otto Rank, he calls the Freudian Thanatos, “[t]he fiction of death as an ‘instinct.’”35 Freud, of course, thought that there is an instinct of Thanatos (a sort of nostalgie de la boue) that eventually triumphs over the struggle for survival, which so far negated death: Marcuse paraphrasing Freud writes, Behind the definition of the subject in terms of the ever transcending and productive activity of the ego lies the image of the redemption of the ego: the coming to rest of all transcendence in a mode of being that has absorbed all becoming, that is for and with itself in all otherness.

Meanwhile, so to speak, “the performance principle enforces an integrated repressive organization of sexuality and of the destruction instinct.”36 Becker challenges such ideas. WORK AND CIVILIZATION: MORALITY AND GUILT Freud’s emphasis on guilt as the cement of civilization is again based on the myth of Oedipus. The pattern is well known: In illo tempore, the Father was massacred and even, his sons having turned into anthropophagous, devoured by them, who, eventually, took ownership of the women. This left an indelible mark on the human soul throughout all generations. Civilization consists in damming in the flow of guilt that eventuated from this parricide/incest.37 Biblically speaking, human (sense of) guilt is incontrovertible. The kinship with Freud’s reconstruction of origins goes as far as recalling Adam’s rebellion against the Father par excellence, namely, God. But the parallel stops here because in Genesis the source of guilt is the humans jettisoning their commandability. The divine commandment is deemed intolerable. Adam and Eve want to mold their own knowledge of good and evil as they please. Rebellion against the Superego? Yes, but less so on the level of the libido than on the level of interconnection, as Habermas would have it. “In the [biblical] 34. Becker, Denial, 96, ital. orig. As Norman O. Brown writes, “Freud not only regards ‘higher mental operations, scientific, artistic, ideological activities’ as sublimations of sexual energy, but also the less high but more fundamental activity of work” (Life, 135, ital orig.). Besides, Thanatos designates a primordial hostility of the human to the human. 35. Becker, Denial, 99. 36.  Marcuse on Freud, Eros and Civilization, 120, 121. 37.  See Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990); see also Moses and Monotheism (1939; see section #7, “The Return of the Repressed”). The feeling of guilt “is in fact introduced as a ‘means’ used by civilization to tame aggressiveness” (Ricoeur, Conflict, 129). Furthermore, one finds a scene akin to incest in Genesis 9:20–27 (Noah’s “nakedness” ogled by Ham).



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beginning,” work consisted in encountering the otherness of Creator and creature. Now, love is dead—and not just in the realm of sexuality. “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”38 God and the world have become hostile; both are seen as withdrawn into their alterity. The effect is an affect: labor is producing thorns and thistles; the producer is looking at her production and is constantly disappointed.39 Nothing is definitive any longer; everything needs endless repetition. Nothing is perfect; everything is transitional. Even the human’s oath of love and fidelity proves insufficient; it must be continually reassessed (“I love you!”). The covenant must be renewed and, thus, is loaded with its own curse; it carries its own mortality. The family car must go eventually to scrap, like everything else—even the car owner, for that matter! Hence, humans are oppressed with guilt and shame.40 Their so-called achievements remain forever “unfinalized,” as Bakhtin says. Yet, like everything else “outside of the Garden,” “unfinalizability” is not without its silver lining. It evinces the assumption of taking responsibility,41 the assumption of work, precisely, with the wish that, maybe, the next time around my act will reach its goal and render all other acts unnecessary. “For Bakhtin, creativity and responsibility were inseparable,” as Garry Morson and Caryl Emerson state.42 Bakhtin stresses “the personal responsibility of creating a second consciousness in the artwork.”43 Although Freud in a bourgeois mode regards creativity as an exception, Bakhtin, so to speak, rephrases the romantic “Leben heisst kämpfen” (to live is to fight) into 38.  It is the Hobbesian “bellum omnium contra omnes” and “homo homini lupus” (see Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth ecclesiasticall and civill, ed. Richard Tuck [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991]; Decive: The Latin Version, The Clarendon Edition of the Philosophical Works of Thomas Hobbes 2nd ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Freud cites with approval Hobbes in his Civilization and Its Discontents. In classical Greek, there is one word for the workman and the beast of burden, ponēros. It also designates the cowardly! 39.  See Genesis 3:17–19. Ernest Becker writes, “[A]s long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. Faith poses a new life task, the adventure in openness to a multidimensional reality” (Becker, Denial, 92). 40.  As far as Israel is concerned, see Ezekiel 20:43, e.g., “There you shall remember your ways and all the deeds by which you have polluted yourselves; and you shall loathe yourselves for all the evils that you have committed.” 41.  The Law guaranties the human right to be subjects by stressing their responsibility: through obedience to the Law, humanity passes from guest to tenant in the Garden, and the gift becomes duty (Gabe ist Aufgabe). 42.  Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 41. Freud also speaks of, “The ego feeling . . . is a shrunken vestige of . . . a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed the inseparable connection of the ego with the external world” (Civilization and Its Discontents, 13). 43.  See Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 82. Nietzsche also at this point becomes a poet. He writes, “The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate . . . this sovereign man calls it his conscience” (Genealogy, 60, ital. orig.; a little further on, he speaks of a “second innocence” [91]). On art, see n. 172 in part 1 and the text it references.

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“Leben heisst schöpfen” (to live is to create), and we note that Bakhtin also remarkably speaks of “man the builder.”44 The Bible metaphorically designates the apex of art as uttering the Name, that is, the ultimate and absolute word, for, at the end like “in the beginning was [and will be] the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Ezekiel 20, for instance, gives expression to the telos by six times repeating the so-called “recognition formula” in a striking development around the divine Name.45 Tennessee Williams (Suddenly Last Summer) expresses this in a splendid formulation. He says: “We’re all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God’s name with wrong alphabet blocks.”46 In a kind of kabalistic formulation, we could say that language is understandable because it always contains as an ore the eschatological spelling of God’s Name; and the Bible as a whole is its symbolic icon. In other words, human liberation from social and economic domination engrained in culture is not through the refinement of instincts but through creativity—unless creativity is understood as refinement of instinct. Creativity is not an exception, that is, the fruit of an explosion of inspiration. It is the very human soul. The human is homo creator.47 True, the unsatisfactory outcome of labor is ground enough for stirring rage in the human soul. Freud gives a large place to “destructive instincts,” in fact using the latter word as a shield against questioning its actual existence—calling it an “instinct,” implying certain irresistibility to it. In reality there is no need to imagine the presence of “destructive instincts.” The will to destroy—a by-product of the will to power—is once more to be seen in reference to labor. “Unfinalized” labor or, worse, “alienated labor,” is the reverse side of original work and as such, dialectically, an anti-labor. Thus, it is not as a vague instinct or as work’s nature that it evinces rage at the inaccessibility of the “pleasure principle.” The destructive impulse is rebellion against human limitations. As such, these sterilize creativity and transform it into anti-creativity, destruction.48 44.  Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres, 35. Ricoeur, in the wake of Freud, writes, “Existence . . . is desire and effort” (Conflict, 21). See already Rabbi Abba in b. Taanit 4a (“stones” in Deut. 8:9 is to be read as “builders,” so that the text means that the builders “are iron”). 45.  “You shall know that I am YHWH, dealing with you for my Name’s sake” (20:44 and passim). 46.  Published by Dramatists Play Service (1990). A possible echo to this is Fredric Jameson’s demand that, “for good or ill, the dialectic requires you to say everything simultaneously whether you think you can or not” (The Modernist Papers [London: Verso, 2007], xi). 47.  No work is more creative than the work of love. Hence, it amounts to the same thing to say that the human is homo amans, a far cry from Freud’s conception of work as unpleasurable. (On love, see n. 10 above and the text it references.) After all, during “the last quarter of hour” (Baal Shem Tov), one shall not wonder about their sexual life, but about what impact on world (through creativity) they are leaving behind. 48.  Suffice it to think of voters’ rage when political campaign promises remain dead words after the candidate’s election. Let us also note with Paul Ricoeur that Freud uses the term “work” in other



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On the matter of enjoyment as the opposite of work (a Fourier influence upon Freud), let us recall that psychoanalysis sees work as belonging to the human fight against death. An accurate proposition. But then, Genesis 2:15 itself must be read against that background. If, indeed, as Hegel says, “The hour of birth is the hour of death” (in Science of Logic, I, 142), J adds that the hour of birth is concurrently immortality through creativity “in the garden.” The reality of life is complex: there is no life without the defeat of death. In other words, Gen. 2:15 acknowledges the mortality-immortality of the human creature. Adam is a dialectical being (hence, the invention of the notion of immortal soul). Work as non-enjoyment is certainly something that is initially unheard of in the Garden! At least before the tragedy. But there is an after. And what a change it brings! From “tilling” (“working” in Hebrew) and “keeping” (the Garden as Garden), we come to a situation wherein both terms are completely distorted. “Tilling”? Yes, but for what pitiful results? “Keeping”? Yes again but the Garden is constantly on the brink of turning back to the precreation condition of desert—the tohu va-bohu of P’s Genesis 1:2 and J’s statement “no plant of the field [and] no herb of the field.” Life in the Garden has become an endless struggle, and its outcome is exactly the opposite of what Eve and Adam were expecting after the empty promise of the “serpent” 49: they behave as animals and they die. There is, nevertheless, some basis for hope or comfort, even one of formidable import, namely, the continuation of the dialogue with the Creator that the whole Bible reports about. As the Jewish “oral” tradition has it, the last (Hebrew) word that the primal couple hears before being expelled from Eden is “you shall return” (tashub, Gen. 3:19).50 It is with that resounding promise of the miracle of miracles to come that the human being continues actually “tilling” and “keeping.” WORK AND WORLDVIEW Max Weber writes that “all religions have demanded as a specific prescription that the course of the world be somehow meaningful . . . this claim naturally emerged first as the customary problem of unjust suffering,”51 and assertions than the one I use here: Ricoeur lists “the work of analysis, the work of becoming conscious, and dream work” (The Conflict, 185). 49.  Gen. 3:4–5: “you will not die”; “you will be like God.” 50.  The insistence of Ps. 90:3 on the verb shub is striking, “You turn us back to dust and say, ‘turn back [repent] you sons of Adam’.” Note that the expulsion is not so much displacement as disorientation, not so much loss as trial (see my The Trial, 265). 51. Weber, From Max Weber, 6. Fredric Jameson rejects the question of “meaning” as “impermissible” and pragmatically replaces it with “how does it work?” (The Political Unconscious, 28). If, however, “meaning” is not taboo but designates what is true in a particular language, then such

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it “has tended to progress step by step towards an ever-increasing devaluation of the world . . . and towards ‘an other-worldly solution’.”52 On the other hand, Weber acknowledges religions’ need for the powers to consecrate their legitimacy.53 This ambivalence is a fitting introduction to our inquiry into the biblical view of the world. From what precedes it is clear, I hope, that the world qua field for human activity is far from being rejected as a non-value. Weber, however, had no difficulty in describing what he called “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions” or “Directions of the Abnegation of the World.”54 He contrasts this with “active asceticism,” which, operates within the world; rationally active asceticism, in mastering the world, seeks to tame what is creatural and wicked through work in a worldly “vocation” (inner-worldly asceticism). Such asceticism contrasts radically with mysticism, if the latter draws the full conclusion of fleeing from the world (contemplative flight from the world).55

Indeed, the negative dimension of the world is very strongly emphasized in the biblical view. Genesis 3 and especially 6:12 and Jeremiah 17:9 describe it as corrupted by human hubris, and some texts of the New Testament say that “the Prince of the world” is Satan (and what this metaphor stands for); see John 12:31; 14:30; and 16:11. Ephesians 2:2 reads, “[Y]ou once lived following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient” (NRSV). It is clear that we are no longer living in the Garden. Although the primal world depended on the holy creativity of Adam, the actual world reflects the relativism sees itself transcended when the biblical language is seen as representative of “the language of languages,” that is, the penultimate—and only available—expression of truth, as the present essay assumes (see under “Tennessee Williams,” above [n. 45]). By “language of languages,” I do not mean the wonderful Hebrew language per se (called the Holy Language by the Rabbis, for instance in y. Shabb. 1:3), but the ultimate metalanguage (of Hebrew?) as object language and, through this mediation, all languages as representatives. On the same level as in J’s myth, there are a pre-lapsarian era and a post-lapsarian era, so there are also a pre-Babelian language (the one that God himself spoke with the humans) and a post-Babelian language, after the disastrous Babelian dispersion (Gen. 11). To recall, Hegel evokes Absolute Spirit wherein all contradictions are presumably annulled and which Jameson expectedly calls “a mystical vision of identity” (51). 52. Weber, From Max Weber, 7. It is the Hobbesian state religion that promotes the idea of sham reward and punishment. 53. Weber, From Max Weber, 5. 54. See From Max Weber (chaps. 11; 13, etc.). Weber makes a special case with the Christian mystics and monks, who minimize the import of action for the sakes of otherworldly meditation—what he calls “objectless devotion” (chap. 13, sec. 4). See the acerbic criticism of asceticism in Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 115–116. 55. Weber, From Max Weber (chap. 16/4). Having recourse to statistics, Weber reports a “greater indifference toward the good things of this world” among Catholics that occasions a lagging in leadership in the modern world (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [New York: Penguin, 2017], 40).



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deviousness of his children. But as humans are the very soul of the universe,56 so the universe is the “place” (Hebrew, maqom) of present human creativity; hence an inner self-contradiction that reflects the complex human nature. To the negativity of the world responds a positive projection, at least in hope. This is the very aim of work; work is the instrument of hope. From this perspective, it must be stated that there is, biblically speaking, a condemnation of the world (see in particular the Johannine texts cited previously) but no contempt of it. Scorn would amount to an outrageous mockery of human suffering, as Weber recalls in the previously quoted statement with which I started this section. Yet, there is a certain Jewish-Christian disregard for the ‘olam ha-zeh (“this world,” in the Jewish traditional literature) in favor of its replacement by a ‘olam ha-ba (“the coming world”) totally foreign to our own. But even the book of Revelation, an apocalypse with a keen interest in the “other world,” construes it as a gathering of treasures from the kings of this world (“the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it,” Revelation 21:24). The model is provided by Isaiah 2:2–5 and Micah 4:1–5: foreign kings bring their earthly treasures to Jerusalem; see also Isaiah 60–62; 66; esp. Isaiah 61:5–6 (“you shall enjoy the wealth of the nations and in their riches you shall glory” [NRSV]) and Psalm 47:9 (“The princes of the peoples gather as the people of the God of Abraham” [NRSV]). So the tension is stark between, on the one hand, a vision of the world as ruled by forces hostile to God (see, for instance, 1 John 3:8–10 [“the works of the devil . . . ”]) and whose wisdom is folly for God (see 1 Cor. 3:19; James 1:27; 4:4),57 hence a world that is “passing away” (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 7:31; 1 John 2:15–17) and, on the other hand, the lament that the world is “groaning” in pain and is thirsty for justice (Rom. 8:22). We might also evoke that striking declaration in the Johannine literature that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16, cf. 1 John 2:2; 2 Cor. 5:19).58 With these words, all dualism regarding the world is dialectically neutralized. True, the world in which the human labors is a disfigured “Garden,” and all efforts toward its healing are pitifully limited. In a way, it looks like the world itself is hostile and inclined to enjoy evil rather than good. Its ruler (and its rulers) is (are) satanic; seldom are there exceptions. Work 56.  On Kierkegaard, see n. 152 in part 1 above. 57.  James 4:4 reads, “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” 58.  In light of Genesis 3:19 (in which Adam’s work is hardly productive at the sweat of his brow) the Christian understanding of work “saw labor as a punishment for and expiation of First Man’s Original Sin,” says C. W. Reines (“The Jewish Conception of Work,” Judaism 8 [1959]: 329–37, here 330). Reines adds that Christianity “assigned no inherent value to labor” (331) with the exception of Calvinism and Puritanism. Genesis 2:15, he says, refutes this understanding (332 nn. 16, 17).

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itself appears as a guinea pig running endlessly in its spinning wheel. But it is also the world that God has created to be “good” (tob) and potentially, by entelechy, the Garden in Eden. God loves this world. The Jewish tradition insists that it is one of all the possible worlds that God first unsatisfactorily tried to create, so he could blot this one out and fashion another universe. Yet, in his graciousness, he decided to maintain the present one.59 Speculating upon the first (Hebrew) letter of the first word of the Bible, the letter beth, ancient Rabbis said beth is closed on three sides and open only on one, that is, toward the future. It forbids theorizing on what came before, above, and below the “beginning” of the cosmos (see b. Hagiga 11b; b. Tamid 32a). Incidentally, this famous Rabbinic saying is non-Gnostic in contrast with what we saw previously regarding the tikkun of the world by the release of the “sparks” (see n. 105 in part 1). The world is the place (maqom) where everything is decisively happening, from alpha to omega. All is done here and now; there is no alternative besides. That is why the human work is itself decisive, entailing struggle, love, creativity, and responsibility. All the rest, as Rabbi Hillel would say, is commentary. THIRD EXCURSUS: THE COMMANDMENT Commandment is not univocal! Virginia Woolf, for instance, says, “[T]he mind cringes to the accustomed tyrant, one must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself.”60 The biblical commandment has nothing to do with this. The divine prohibition to eat a certain fruit, as trivial as it may look, is intentionally so. It had to be most insignificant, so as to be ideally replaceable with anything else, the point being clear that God is expecting something from his creature. True, the forbidden fruit does not remain unspecified: it is the fruit of the tree of knowledge and so it is, at least prima facie, imbued with decisiveness. Yet, why creating such a tree in the first place if it is in its essence “inhuman”? Is not the rest of creation at the service of humans? Whatever the message the forbidden fruit conveys, it is purely an exception, a kind of negation of the usefulness of the ordinary. One remembers Paul Beauchamp’s excla59.  So Rabbi Abbahu in GenR. Bereshith 3:7, “God created worlds and destructed them until he said, ‘This one is suitable’.” In this respect, the constant affirmation of God’s sovereignty over nature implies the constant possibility of its dissolution (see Jud. 5:4–5 [“the earth trembled . . . the mountains quaked”]; Mic. 1:2ff. [“Then the mountains will melt under him and the valleys will burst open like wax near the fire”)]; Hab. 3:6 [“The eternal mountains were shattered; along his ancient pathways the everlasting hills sank low”]; etc. (all NRSV); also b. Shabb. 88a (“If Israel accepts my Torah, well and good, but if not, I shall return you to chaos and void” [Neusner’s trans., Rabbinic, 41]). 60. Woolf, “Street Haunting,” 12.



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mation: “all but one, then all but all.”61 In creating the tree of knowledge, God seems to have forgotten the human! As a matter of fact, this particular tree is purposeless. It is no good for God or for the human—presence of chaos or the absurd à la Samuel Beckett in the very midst of the excellence of creation, the Garden of Eden! In reality, this notion of prohibition must be treated dialectically. The forbidden tree is one more element of alternative in J’s narrative of origins. Nothing here is one-sided, nothing remains in a status quo. The tree of knowledge is a temptation, a possible reversal and destruction of the whole divine construction. From the beginning, God puts himself at risk. “All” could be “nothing.” Like in the game of mikado, if you withdraw one piece, the whole thing crumbles down. The forbidden as a commandment addressed to Adam implies that anything else of the same nature could have been commanded. Independently of its content, the prohibition is a paradigmatic example of God’s interpolation engaging the human to take responsibility in his or her part of the dialogue. But as far as it specifically forbids the human appropriation of certain knowledge, its exceptionalism is neutralized. No, God did not forget humanity in creating that particular tree. It is precisely “knowledge” that is out of bounds in the Garden because knowledge is both equivocally unnecessary— as alleging that there is something “evil” to be known in God’s creation— and belonging necessarily to a foreign economy, the economy of the “after.” Eating the fruit of knowledge in the Garden would introduce hybridism and destroy simplicity. In short, the commandment in the pre-lapsarian era was essentially replaceable. Its raison d’être was the all-important message that God is expecting something from his creature. In the post-lapsarian era, however, the non-replaceability of the commandment is revealed. From the outset, the prohibition was to refrain from (a certain kind of) knowledge (marked by discrimination between good and—in a dumbfounded way––evil!). Let us note furthermore that divine commandment preexists the prohibition to eat from a given tree. The very first word that both creates and ad61.  See n. 120 in part 1. David Robertson (The Old Testament and the Literary Critic, Guides to Biblical Scholarship [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977], 36) on Job 3:3, says, “[Job] curses God. To be sure, he does this indirectly. His curse of his birthday is in effect a curse of all days (of all the days that follow). That is, he curses all creation by cursing what is for him its most significant part—the day of his birth—and to curse the creation is by implication to curse the creator.” An interesting contrast is found in Deut. 26:63–65, that shows that all the former generation doomed to die without entering the Promised Land (see Nb. 14:29–35) is, however, still present in the following Conquest! To use a more pedestrian simile than a biblical one, I shall refer to Paul Auster, 4,3,2,1, in which the central character Ferguson comes to the conclusion that, as God is “everywhere else, He necessarily had to be with Ferguson and if He was absent [there], He was in no place at all” ([New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017], 191).

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dresses Adam is the imperative “till/work and guard!” And at this particular time, the commandment is non-dialectical, for it stays the same “before” and “after.” With it, an important point is made that the divine expectation is for the humans to act, not to react or adapt themselves to preexisting external conditions (pace Charles Darwin, although I have no problem with evolutionism, see n. 61 above). This is so for the good reason that, according to J, the external condition does not exist before the humans create it (see again Gen. 2:5). Adaptation comes later, after a projection of the human creation act into space and time.62 Yet, what does God expect? A confirmation. By evoking God’s commandment, we must realize that the focus in this operation is on God, the one who commands. As to the humans, they are limited and there is, as it were, a red line bordering their humanity.63 Hence, the knowledge humans desire precisely crosses over that border. It is the story of Genesis 3. Paradoxically, God has put himself in jeopardy: there was no guarantee that the ones commanded would be open to the commandment—they may block it. The primal couple could, for instance, just have pretended to “till and guard.” On the human side, thus, Adam and Eve are put in the situation of obeying or disobeying, that is, of confirming or destabilizing the Lord God. Disobedience amounts to deicide, or at least to the negation of God. A prophetic text will clarify the issue. Isaiah 43:12–13 comes with an astounding divine saying: “You are my witnesses, says YHWH, I am God, and also henceforth I am he.” That is, as read by the Midrash: as long as you are my witnesses, I am God; with your acknowledgment or denial, I stand or fall!64 This reading may not be the most evident of the patent text, but it certainly reveals an understanding of God’s dependence informed by a long commerce with Scripture. If need be, suffice it to remember how the Bible dares speaking of God’s repentance (a biblical anthropomorphism).65 In other words, the commanding God in Genesis and elsewhere is risking his all. He 62.  Then the Darwinian “adaptation” to external conditions becomes an arguable theory. But, as I said, Darwin brings the periphery to the center, for in reality “adaptation” is only secondary to (human) ontology. 63.  The line is dialectically a forbidding frontier and a protection: one is truly human inside the hedge (siyag in Hebrew, like the hedge around the Torah, according to PA 3:13; ARN A 1:4). Outside of the border, one jeopardizes one’s humanity and who knows what will be the dreadful substitute? 64.  Sifre Deut. 346 (L. Finkelstein ed.). This interpretation is also attributed to R. Shimon bar Yohai, possibly the author of the kabalistic Zohar. See also Sifra 195:1 (I. H. Weiss) that dares asking, after citing Lev. 19:1–4, “You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy”: “perhaps the sense is this: ‘If you sanctify me, then lo, I shall be sanctified, and if not, I shall not be sanctified?’” (Neusner, Rabbinic, 52). In another text, NumR. 2:2, a Midrash on Ps. 20:6, the MT biyešu`athekha (your salvation) is read wayivvaša (and God was saved), “as it were, God himself was saved [by saving Israel].” Apparently, Martin Luther said “God himself cannot exist without wise men,” (cited in Nietzsche, The Genealogy, § 129). 65.  See Gen. 6:6–7; Exod. 32:14; Deut. 32:36; 2 Sam. 24:16; Ps. 135:14; Amos 7:3; etc.



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is jeopardizing his own identity, his own divinity, no less! He puts himself in need of human endorsement and later may well have to regret his temerity and repent! A parallel wisdom text, Job 2:3, mythically pictures God as betting on Job’s fidelity, no matter what (he wagers that “[Job] will persist in his integrity”). God’s stake is about more than Job’s innocence, for if God loses his bargain, he becomes a gullible, ineffectual character. He is no-God. In other words, everything now depends on Job.66 True, Job is textually construed as a particular case, but it reflects a general situation: strikingly, Israel worships a vulnerable God. The situation is the following: the all-powerful God uses his might to turn himself weak in behalf of his beloved creature. This constitutes the paradox of paradoxes. It extends itself to involve a Janus-like double-face: On the one end, God expresses his willingness to pursue dialogue with the humans; on the other end, the dialogue on his part is in the form of a commandment. The result of this egregious match between “thesis” and “antithesis” is a “synthesis” in which the divine commandment is indeed a prayer—may Job indeed be the model of integrity that God expects him to be! Job must redeem Adam’s lack of integrity. Will he do that? He will, and “the Lord restored Job’s fortunes when he prayed on behalf of his friends” (42:10). So, Job resumed his activity: “He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, one thousand yoke of oxen, and one thousand she-asses” (42:12)—not a sinecure! Fortunately his creativity was helped by his procreativity: “He also had seven sons and three daughters” (42:13). SYNOPSIS What have we learned from this dialogue among the biblical, the philosophical, and the psychoanalytical? Much, I believe, and first and foremost the inseparability of human ontology and human insertion into society. Work in Genesis 2–3, according to a major tradition that J forwards in writing, belongs to God’s creation of Adam. Was it a private tradition of the J author(s) or a widespread belief in historic Israel? We shall never know. Chances are that the J’s composition had an exilic or postexilic terminus ad quem. Under its narrative’s latest form, it corresponds in depth with the cultic Weltanschauung of the priestly source (P). The latter appears as a much more patterned tradition, 66.  See my, “The Deconstruction of Job’s Fundamentalism,” JBL 126 (2007): 83–97, and “Justice for the Innocent Job” (BibInt, 2011, 19–32). While ancient Near Eastern kings and gods go ritually through death and resurrection (during New Year festivals, the so-called Enuma elish, see ANET, “Akkadian Myths and Epics”[trans. E. A. Speiser], 60–72), YHWH’s “death and resurrection” are biblically reinterpreted as renewal of God’s covenant with his people (see Jer. 31:31–34). Such is God’s (and Israel’s) regeneration of sorts.

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as is evident in Genesis 1:1–2:4a. But in both J and P the human creature is central, the crown and viceroy of the world, either as ruler in J or as priest in P. It is therefore of the utmost importance that Genesis 2–3 teaches that work intrinsically belongs to human ontology, including its social and cosmological dimensions. Adam is intrinsically and genetically homo faber. Because of J’s conviction to that effect, the J tradition “retraces” the world origins to Adam as an already civilized human being—the human work as cultural— thus bypassing the millions years of universal existence modern science tells us preexisted the evolution of homo sapiens. In other words, it is clear that the biblical narratives on origins do not have the purpose of shaping up a scientific cosmogony. Adam is no Neanderthal, and Genesis does not refer to a hoary time when probably the economic activity was minimal. True to character, when the Genesis texts introduce him, Adam is a working, producing, and transforming human being, and Scripture audaciously draws a parallel with the Creator himself as being a deus faber. J, in particular, speaks of the essence and not of the accidental. That the paradigmatic Adam/Eve—“l’homme exemplaire,” Pierre Gisel says67—could be a performing character in Genesis 2–3 (and elsewhere) is an open invitation to all recipients of the tradition to reflect on their own performance.68 Yet, even before doing so, we have to wonder what brought J, a theologian,69 to describe the primal ancestor of humanity as being ab origine a conscious doer. Partially, the answer lies in the decisive fact that J (the Yahwist), like P (the Priestly), E (the Elohist), or D (the Deuteronomist), is interpreting his/their own actual condition and projecting in the remotest past his/their ego’s essence. His/their interpreting grounds are experiential. His/their reconstruction of origins is not made on a sheer tabula rasa but rather against an intellectual and psychological personal background. Ultimately, we must realize that J’s story of origins is a mirror of the poet(s) J’s soul. Against this backdrop, it becomes possible to turn to a reflection on the nature of human activity. To what goal is human praxis aiming? Both the biblical and the philosophical agree in understanding the objective world as striving toward fulfillment.70 The Jewish tradition is most impressive in this regard. It says that God has associated himself with human collaborators in that project, making them co-creators with him.71 67. Gisel, La Création, 41. 68.  Work, however, before being performance, is a divine gift. 69.  Pace Rolf Rendtorff (Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuchs; see above nn. 5 and 32). John van Seeters defends his stance of the existence in antiquity of authors, so that there is anachronism in speaking of editors and redactors (The Yahwist, see n. 4 above). 70.  “The whole creation is groaning in labor pains” (Rom. 8:22). 71.  See, for instance, Redaq (Rabbi David Qimchi) on Gen. 2:8. In P’s work, the very first term (which becomes also the first word of the Hebrew Bible, repeated by the way as a first term in the Gospel of John) is to be understood as meaning more than “in the beginning.” Be-re’shith displays



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The universe is incomplete and on the relative side rather than the absolute as long as human work is distorted and factually crippled.72 Here lies the significance of human praxis. Previously, I stressed that one of the senses of the word “labor” (‘abodah) in the Hebrew Bible is worship, offering, “living sacrifice,” “spiritual worship,” Paul says in Romans 12:1. No other notion can surpass this one regarding the nobility and glory of work. With this I have laid bare the point of conjunction of the biblical and the philosophical. What the tradition-carrier J reconstructs theologically, the philosophers reflect on philosophically. Such has been our warrant for calling to the bar of witnesses thinkers who were not necessarily Bible readers, and even some who looked at traditional Judaism and Christianity negatively. The main question in this inquiry has not been about the legitimacy of religion but about the ground experience of the human at work, its quid, cur, and quomodo. The result is a human condition whose complexity leads to a severe selection of only one term of the inner contradiction or to a dialectical interpretation of the whole. Then we discovered a striking confluence of modern sociology of labor, especially since Hegel and more so with Marx and his disciples (at times antagonists). Strikingly, the centrality of the performing aspect of human ontology did not escape them. A decisive common outcome of their reflection has produced a drastic criticism of modern labor designs and a call for a different praxis. As Theodor Adorno writes, “[T]he relationship of life and production, which the latter degrades in reality into an ephemeral appearance of the former, is completely absurd.”73 Adorno’s judgment is far from unique, as we abundantly saw. Of importance for us here is the impressive relevance of the biblical text exegesis when the reading is contextualized within our time filling “la condition humaine” (André Malraux).74 Paradoxically as it may seem to some, exegesis and philosophy have led us to a decisive option for a praxis marked by humaneness and compassion. The crucial biblical notion of love is not a far-fetched abstraction.75 a dimension of excellence: “For excellence, God created heaven and earth.” See, with some caution (absentiae causa), Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 93–98. More to the point, Georg Bertram, “ergon,” 2:635–55 refers to Genesis 49:3 (“first fruits,” re’shith ’oni) and Daniel 7:27 (LXX, archai). In Colossians 1:18, “Christ himself is the archê as the image of God. . . . As archê, he is the norm for creation by and for which all things were made (cf. 1:16b)” (82, ital. mine; see Col. 1:15–20). See PA 3:14 and Rashi ad loc. I refer also to Augustine, Confessions 10.12 (trans. F. J. Sheed [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993; repr., 2006]). 72.  “As purely human work [i.e., not reflecting God’s work] . . . ergon acquires a negative sense,” says Bertram, “ergon,” 2:654. 73. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 15. 74.  See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018). 75.  Ernest Becker says, “When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his

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In this part of this essay, I tackled the Freudian (and anti-Freudian) psychoanalysis of work and production. As is well known, Freud puts sexuality at the center of human essence, both as phylogeny and as ontogeny. In the latter, Freud distinguishes a tripartite complex of Ego, Id, and Superego. To such sex-oriented anthropology, I take exception. There is, of course, no way to deny a major role of the libido in human existence. The problem, however, is whether this occupies the center stage. I think not. In a discussion of the Freudian system, in the section titled “Libido or aedificatio,” my stance is firmly for “aedificatio,” that is, for setting work/labor/ creativity as the existential basis of human life. This I consider as the fulcrum of parts 1 and 2. The divine is deus faber and the human is homo faber.76 The “faber-ness,” that is, creativity, is what puts them both, God and humanity, in communion with one another. That is what the imago dei signifies. From the myth of an atavistic conflict between father and sons, imagined by Freud, the focus dramatically shifts to the dialogical and ethical interrelationship with the other/Other—à la Habermas and, more so, à la Levinas. Per contra, Freud’s reconstruction is strikingly non-ethical and deterministic. The ethical is a mere effect of unconscious sublimation. Determinism: significantly, a common reproach to the biblical myth of Adam and Eve is that it brings about the determinism of an “original sin,” transmitted automatically from generation to generation. The paradox, however, is that this critique happens to be truer as regards the Freudian myth of origins, rather than the biblical. Here, the Adamic sin is “original” in the historical and paradigmatic sense of the term. It is the sin that is repeated from generation to generation, from individual to individual. Yet, no determinism is implied.77 The human tempown being” (The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man [New York: George Brazillier, 1968]). 76.  See Ps. 90:17: work is established by God’s blessing (cf. Ps. 128:2; Job 5:7). The Maharal of Prague says, “It is impossible to man, due to the nature of his creation, to be idle. . . . He moves on the contrary sturdily toward his perfection” (Sifrey Maharal [Beney Braq, 1980], ad PA 2:8). In the same chapter of PA, Mishna 16 says, “You are not [obliged] to finish your work but you are not free to withdraw from it.” It is impossible to speak biblically of a deus libidinosus, as far as YHWH is concerned. By contrast, we may evince the Mesopotamian and Canaanite gods or the Greco-Roman ones. An unforeseen result of divine sexuality is the gods’ severe limitation. It sometimes borders on the ridiculous (Zeus’s infidelities to Hera, for instance). Of course, the gods are not only libidinous; they are also cruel. Nietzsche says, “What was at bottom the ultimate meaning of Troyan Wars and other such tragic errors? . . . [T]hey were intended as festival plays for the gods; and . . . no doubt also as festival plays for the poets” (Genealogy, 69). To this unreason, Scripture opposes a reasonable God. God and the humans share the same logic; hence, their dialogue makes immediate sense. Neusner says that the Rabbis “thought philosophically about Scripture” (Rabbinic, 7). For them, “history bore no meaning” as Scripture’s lessons are “not of history . . . but of logic” (9). 77. Maimonides says, “It is impossible for the humans to be naturally born good or bad . . . though it is possible that they be naturally prone to do good or bad, that is, that one of the two be to them easier than the opposite.” He adds, “That God knows all the things in the world does imply



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tation, says J, finds expression in “you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5). No one (but Christ, for the Christian)78 escapes this; it is a historical and ethical conclusion, not one already settled in advance or predestined. Freud escapes the escape. What actually remains of the “murdered father myth” is guilt that he deems indelible because instinctual. But biblical sin is not instinctual. It is moral. On this tremendous difference, I referred in the bulk of this essay to the work of ethics philosophers like Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Buber, Ernest Becker, Emmanuel Levinas, Rollo May, others. Bakhtin in particular, as I said, stresses “the personal responsibility—one of his favorite terms—of creating a second consciousness in the artwork,”79 and we should understand the word as imbued with an extensive meaning, performed by the one he calls “man the builder.” Ernest Becker concurs: “one kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life.”80 He adds, “This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man [sic]. What is one’s true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation?”81 If so, it becomes understandable that humanity, according to J, is commandable. “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” (Gen. 2:17)—for the fruit of that tree, far from being magical, is (circumstantially) poisonous. Although Freud allows the Ego no room for any (extrinsic) commandment, it is central in biblical tradition. It is true that work for the Austrian psychoanalyst is mainly negative. It ominously prevents the laborer from enjoying the “pleasure principle.” “Pleasure” is only accessible—and only in part—after work, during leisure time. A contrario, the biblical tradition puts work under the umbrella of a divine commandment: “you may freely eat . . . but not . . .” (Gen. 2:16–17). Thereby, paradoxically but fundamentally, working becomes a “pleasure” because it is now a dialogical and responsible reality. Working brings up its own reward—and “reward” implies neither their necessity nor that people are under coercion. Everyone, on the contrary, freely acts” (Maimonides, Commentary to Pirke Avot [Appendix to The Guide of the Perplexed]); see n. 64, below; ad PA 1:14 and 3:15. See also b. Berakhot 33b: “All is in the hands of Heavens, but the fear of Heavens,” in reference to Deut. 10:12. There may be something of a corrective in Max Weber’s notion of charisma, a core concept in the emergence of the Hasidic Tzaddiq or the Russian Orthodox Starets. Kille’s critique is pertinent (see his Psychological Biblical Criticism. Guides to Biblical Scholarship [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001], 126–27). He calls the Freudian interpretation of Genesis “reductionism” (127). See also his critique of Fromm’s selectivity in treating the Genesis text (128–29). By contrast, he praises the Jungian respect for the text, his dynamism and his universality (archetypical). Of all psychoanalytical commentators, however, his preference goes to Lyn Bechtel’s “developmental theory.” 78.  See Mat. 4:8–10. But, if one—here, Christ—then potentially all, Beauchamp would say. (See n. 120 in part 1.) 79.  See Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 82. As we saw, Nietzsche speaks of “second innocence” (Genealogy, 91). 80. Becker, Denial, 184. 81. Becker, Denial, 82.

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that an obstacle has been successfully plowed over. As a divine commandment labor is a mitzvah, an offering, an act of worship (‘abodah).82 In Freud’s view, work belongs (negatively) to the “sensuous” (Marcuse uses this term rather than “libido”). Freudian work is by its nature only sensuous. However, it may at times paradoxically border on the anti-libidinal. As to morality, it is still something else. It is “imported” by the Superego.83 Work is not considered from the standpoint of this pole of human existence. At the center is the pleasure principle, to which work appears as marginal and antagonistic. Freud’s and Marx’s philosophies share a concept of pleasure as absence of labor, at least alienated labor—even if for vastly different reasons. As such, however, it brings up nothing but the satisfaction of basic needs (food and board) and, more often than once, of spurious objects that the capitalist propaganda claims to be modern necessities. Reciprocally, labor itself is absence: absence of rest, of relaxation, of enjoyment. Is it absence of libido? A forced substitute for the sensuous? Is the human being happy within an absence? Can the ideal be summarized as farniente, idleness? To ask is to respond. This is so for Freud and Marx. But when we turn our attention to the biblical, we find a radical reinterpretation of pleasure or the aesthetic. Isaiah 52:7, for instance, speaks of “how beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the herald announcing peace, announcing good things [tob], announcing salvation, telling Zion, ‘Your God is King.’”84 There is no better biblical example probably of the definition of beauty than Song of Songs 4:1–5 supposed to impress the reader with the physical features of the Shulammite: “How beautiful you are, my love, how very beautiful! . . . Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes. . . . Your neck is like the tower of David, built in courses; on it hang a thousand bucklers, all of them shields of warriors” (NRSV).85 About this redefinition of “beauty,” see what Psalm 48:3 says of the sacred mountain, claiming that Mount Zion is most “beautiful [yapheh], the rejoicing of 82.  As work in Jewish tradition is one of the main mitzvoth [good deeds], it brings about internally, so to speak, its own remuneration, like the reward of a mitzvah is another mitzvah (see PA 4:2). Joseph H. Heinemann says, in his study of the tannaitic (= Mishnaic) view of work and worker (“The Status of the Labourer in Jewish Law and Society in the Tannaitic Period,” Hebrew Union College Annual 25 [1954]: 263–325): “Work and the worker were held in high esteem in tannaitic times . . . in sharp contrast to the Greek thought, which considered physical work to be unworthy of a free man . . . Labour (mel’akhah) is praised throughout tannaitic literature [see PA 1:10]. . . . It was held second in importance only to the study of the Torah; but it is stated, more than once, that study of the Torah, which is not accompanied by work, will do no good and lead to sin” (265). Heinemann goes on to discuss “the esteem in which productive work and the workman were held by the law [oral Torah]” (323). Scripturally, he refers in particular to Matthew 20:1–16 (human workers) and Psalm 102:25 (divine work of creation). 83.  The Super-go is “paternal,” authoritative, dictating, and, at the limit, autocratic and exploitative. 84.  This text is echoed in Romans 10:15. See also Isaiah 40:9–26. 85.  See also 7:4: “your nose is like a tower of Lebanon” (!)



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the whole earth,” clearly an intentional hyperbole. Aestheticism has shifted from the pleasure principle à la Freud, to a theological/ethical interpretation. What is now “beautiful” is what corresponds to the ultimate value of worship (‘abodah, “work”) and of the fulfillment of the tob (“good for”).86 There is, biblically speaking, no problem I can see in having “judgment” as the synthesis of pleasure and the “faculty of the mind” (Kant). Immanuel Kant speaks of “Beauty as the Symbol of Morality” in his Critique of Judgment. Strikingly, J sets up a continuum between work and knowledge of good and evil, that is, labor and judgment. What is stupendous here is that there is no grading scale of “lower” and “higher” human faculties. Work—any work, at the mill, the office, the study, the kitchen—is creative, a co-creation with the Creator, the Creator not only of earth (and the earthly) but also of heaven (and the transcendent).87 Incidentally, noticeable is the contrast between the Jewish and, let’s say, the Lutheran understanding of labor.88 In Jewish tradition, work is one of the four main mitzvoth, along with the study of the Law, good deeds, and prayer. This clearly is indicative of an entirely different reading of Scripture than the one of Ivan Engnell and other Christian exegetes.89 Eventually, we have become more acutely conscious that work means encountering the other, that is, the world. This seems a truism, but far from it, for the world is complex and its full acknowledgment is not evident. To that effect, labor is a reflection of the world’s nature and vice-versa. Asking what is world is asking what kind of human creation is bearing upon it. For both world and work are inextricably mixed. Thus, we arrive at the conclusion that, if indeed the earth is ruled by the “Prince of the world,” it is because my work has made it that way. I have missed the encounter for the sake of self-serving egoistic aims and further disfigured the universe by my greed. Fortunately, nevertheless, there is an implied blessing in the limitations of my (cursed) labor. Labor belongs to the already/not yet of eschatology. The 86.  Incidentally and retrospectively, we better understand why the LXX has selected a rendering of Hebrew “labor” as leitourgia (see n. 37 in part 1). Marcuse comes close to this idea when, in a poetic vein, he writes of aesthetics that it is a realm “in which order is beauty and work is play” (Eros and Civilization, 166). 87. In J’s myth of Eden, we never know whether the drama is occurring in heaven or on earth, although there is a geographical description of the place (cf. Gen. 2:10–14). 88.  This I say, with the backing of Max Weber, in contrast to Calvinism and Puritanism. Luther is, however, to be credited for his conception of calling (vocation) as an assigned task to be fulfilled. Luther, of course, was reacting to the denounced idleness of monasticism, but as he was also rejecting the idea of salvation by works, he felt torn between two imperatives and sidetracked labor as the only acceptable life before God. 89. Qoheleth 3:22 says it clearly: “There is nothing better than that all should rejoice in their works, for it is their lot.” Cf. Isaiah 28:24–26, in which God instructs the humans well and teaches them how to work right. And Proverbs 18:9 concludes, “One who is slack in work is close kin to a vandal” (NRSV).

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not-yet is evident and informs the principle of hope (à la Ernst Bloch): Isaiah 65:22–23, 25 says, “My chosen ones shall outlive the work of their hands. They shall not toil for no purpose; they shall not bear children for terror, but they shall be a people blessed by the Lord. . . . Nothing evil or vile shall be done, said the Lord” (NJPS). The already is prayer and is ushered in by the Sabbath. The Sabbath is what saves the human being from being Faustian. Strikingly, although psychoanalysis’s starting point is man as disease, the biblical standpoint is the human as “cured” through their participation in Creation (so as the infant participates in the mother’s plenitude), including the “resting”/ peace of knowing that his or her work is brought to completion in the Creator’s “very good.” Hence, the human fulfillment does not consist in retrieving a state of childhood innocence (irresponsibility) but in the supreme Art of achieving a “second/mature innocence.”

Part III

Dialectical Criticism

FOR A DIALECTICAL UNDERSTANDING My study has been so far about a biblical and nonbiblical theme: work. This topic was not random. Nothing can be more averse to disincarnation than work. Work is incarnation par excellence. As we saw, this characteristic is all the more striking as God is described as being himself at work and thus “incarnate” (in the most general sense).1 How important the notion of work is! In other words, homo faber reflects a “trace” (à la Levinas) of deus faber. Work for work, it is basically the same effort toward the perfection of the world through a creativity that the Bible uniformly described as covenantal.2

1.  Thomas Hobbes dismissed spirituality from a philosophical point of view, “unless God had himself a body.” (Half of his Leviathan is about religion). The response to Hobbes is the divine incarnation (before, during, and after Christ). Hence, while Hobbes acknowledges the instrumentality of work as attributing value to the world, the cause of such property must be seen in the fact that human labor reflects the divine creativity that reveals him as incarnate ab initio. The term “incarnate,” of course, brings to mind the Christian dogma of the “double nature in Christ.” The French language goes so far as introducing a hyphen between “Jesus” and “Christ.” Is it an invitation to literalism or to symbolism? From the point of view I defend here, it is to be understood as a dialectical intuition. There is no way to see Jesus as divine and not human. There is no way, for that matter, to see him human and not “Son of God.” True, those terms are set in some kind of inner contradiction. The latter, however, is “reconciled” in the Nazarene becoming “a life-giving spirit. . . . [He] is from heaven” (1 Cor. 15:45, 47). In biblical wisdom literature, Wisdom is divinized (see Prov. 3:19; 4:7). In Jewish mysticism, the thirteenth-century book called the Zohar (ii fol. 60a) says, “The Torah is no other than the Holy One, blessed be He” (see Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010], 177). 2.  The Maharal of Prague (Sifrey Maharal, ad PA 4:6) says, “The human does not achieve actual perfection; remains only the effort of the tension towards a realized perfection that s/he will never reach.”

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A further dimension of labor is its universality, as much temporal as spatial; work is chronotopical or spatiotopical. This fact highlights its paradoxical nature. Because it is biblical and sacramental or sacred, labor is worship (‘abodah). It belongs to the sacrificial, to the “gift,” as Marcel Maus and Pierre Bourdieu stress. By nature, a gratuitous gift with the extraordinary, indeed miraculous quality it displays, “all that is mine is yours, and all that is yours remains yours” (Pirke Avot 5:10). Yet, because work fills the spatiotemporal reality, it is also servitude (the ‘abodah of the ‘ebed, the servant). It is the price to pay for its “incarnation.” Were labor only worship, its spirituality would be ethereal and no bridge would straddle the sacred and the secular. Within such dichotomy, the theological and the philosophical are “like two ships in a flowing river sailing side-by-side with only a narrow space between them but without ever encountering each other,” to use a Sartrian figure—or a Longfellow metaphor. As a matter of fact, this situation has historically prevailed. Generally speaking, the theologian and the philosopher ignore each other.3 Yet, such a wall separating the one from the other creates a situation whereby, as we have repeatedly signaled, there is an evident embarrassment in many a Christian exegete regarding biblical work and its valuation, especially in Genesis 2:15. Exegesis then is not illuminated by a philosophical reflection that broadens the scope of the theme to embrace universal work. This, as I have said all along, is wrong. Work is not all worship or all drudgery, all spiritual/sacred (stirring the interest of the theologian) or secular (inciting the interest of the philosopher). The mistake lies in the conjunction “or.” The truth of the matter is in replacing “or” with “and.” Then, labor is double-natured. Indeed, the notion of work would not be very impactful (Wirkungsgeschichtlich) were it not seen in the Bible as audaciously susceptible of being recognized as such in a bilevel interpretation: the glory of work as described in Genesis 2:15 and tarnished by and through the workers’ rebellion against the Faber par excellence. Although its divine nature is not discarded. Actually, this nature is retrievable in the realm of righteousness (as a praxis à la Marx). It is where the “dialectic,” as philosophers would call it, intervenes. The notion is central in this book. It comes directly from the philosophy of Hegel and the throng of thinkers he influenced, most noticeably Karl Marx and his disciples. We should at this juncture note with gratitude that philosophy provides a heuristic vocabulary to the exegete of the Bible and to the theologian. A contrario, without philosophers, we would be like “children playing with the wrong alphabet blocks,” as Tennessee Williams says. For philosophy does not only provide a technical vocabulary to thinkers, including of course 3.  Col. 2:8 may play a negative role.



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theologians, but the right “alphabet blocks,” that is, the scientific names of objects.4 Philosophy operates the indispensable conversion from subjectivity and prejudice to factuality and truth. It behooves us to reflect in some depth on the heuristic impact of the notion of dialectic. Dialogein means to converse or argue in view of reaching a certain conclusion. In ancient Greek philosophical culture, it had become a current rhetorical art.5 Paradox plays here a crucial role. Although an argument seems to go in a straight line toward a simple goal, it suddenly meets a contradiction that demands a reassessment of the whole issue; there occurs the so-called peripeteia.6 Then, by the way, if indeed dialectic implies inner contradiction, work is clearly a good candidate. J’s narrative of origins is especially explicit about the double nature of labor, to which the conjunction of Genesis 2:15 and Genesis 3:17–19 testifies. PERIPETEIA Against this background, J’s statement in Genesis 2:15 appears as the peripeteia or antithesis and Genesis 3:17–19 as the (experiential) thesis. It is as a matter of fact evident that hard labor and disappointing production mirror the recipients’ actual condition. They recognize themselves in the description of Gen. 3 rather than in the one of Gen. 2. The latter, therefore, appears as paradoxical and clashes with the experiential backdrop. Thus, chronology is defeated: Gen. 3 actually and existentially precedes Gen. 2! Such a structural phenomenon is not unusual in biblical literature. The gospels offer a good example. Chronologically, their figure of Jesus is painted from birth or baptism to death on the cross. Yet, kerygmatically, the narrative “regrediently” proceeds from the point of the end towards which the narrative trajectory is still provisionally “progredient.” There occurs a sort 4.  As Walter E. Rast says, “Theology has to come to grips with a great number of forces and influences in contemporary culture” (Tradition History and the Old Testament. Guides to Biblical Scholarship [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972], 77). Rast refers to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s contention that the human beings grasp the world through inherited language. The point is decisive. Walter Benjamin, Uwe Steiner says, “describes postlapsarian human language as a parodistic distortion of the divine language.” (Walter Benjamin, 47). Here again the pattern of thesis (divine language), antithesis (human language), and synthesis is clear: there is a dabar in everything created. The (reified) dabar in the object is the object’s hidden essence, “the Universal immanent in it,” as Hegel said (see n. 106 in part 1). 5.  Reference should be made to Socrates and Plato, to Aristotle, to Plotinus, etc. See especially Aristotle’s Poetics. 6.  Peripeteia means “reversal of fortune, turning point.” See Aristotle in The Poetics about the tragic turning from good to bad; Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex uses peripeteia (toward the end of the play, see 1450a 32).

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of short-circuiting of the Heilsgeschichte, so as to allow for a retrospective reading and a countercurrent movement from the end to the beginning. In a synthesis of the two ends of the trajectory, the cross is ever-present and gives an ultimate meaning to the whole in its every detail. This shows that the Hegelian antithesis may precede the thesis, thus making the pattern read “antithesis—thesis—synthesis.”7 In the case of the J’s narrative of origins, the synthesis is the spark that is produced by the clash of the flint stones of work as benediction and work as curse (or, at least, occurring on a ground that is cursed [Gen. 3:17]). Work is simul one and the other, peccator and justus, servitude and sacrifice. Now, this provisionary conclusion involves a much deeper dialectical complex. Work, as we saw previously, intrinsically belongs to ontology. The human being is homo faber, like his or her Creator is deus faber. Without being faber, the human is nothing. Thus, stating that human productivity is the result of benediction and curse means that the human being is a hybrid mixture of the highest and the lowest, that is, of the divine (“see, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” [Gen. 3:23 NRSV]) and the demoniac (“the Lord God saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” [Gen. 6:5 NRSV]). Human corruption produces a corrupt labor, and a “mechanized labor,” as we saw, reflects human hybridism (productivity and robotics). In part 1, I said that a comparable dialectic is detectable in the fact that “Israel is authoring Scripture and Scripture is authoring Israel” (see n. 89 in part 1). True, in this latter case there is no hybridism involved, but the structural kinship is clear. At the other end of the trajectory that starts with Genesis, we find the “Second Adam” of 1 Corinthians 15:45 (“‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” [see n. 7 below]). Now, the new Adam is described in the Gospel as encountering an impressive throng of possessed men and women during his ministry.8 The point, it seems, is for the readers to conclude that they are themselves to a certain degree demoniac, “in need of the physician” (Mk. 2:17). The good news—the gospel—is that they can be healed; they can retrieve their divinely granted identity as imago dei. Thesis–antithesis. The synthesis lies in the fact that, even purified, the former sick person remains fallible (“See, you have been made well! Do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse happens to you” [Jn. 5:14, NRSV]). In 7.  See what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:45–46: “‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven” (NRSV). 8.  In the ancient world, illness was seen as a rupture of community, so Jesus’s healings are also the restoration of social wholeness.



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other words, no one becomes an angel but, as Martin Luther so powerfully stated, one is “simul justus et peccator.” Transposed in terms of labor, work is always inept and also transcended, as the divinely appointed Sabbath demonstrates. The dialectical dimension of work is revealed in its “binary compound.” On the one hand, work is a Sisyphus-like chore that, on the other hand, contributes to the divine creatio continua.9 A similar dialectic applies to Sabbath, which is a paradigmatic return to the timelessness of the beginning. It celebrates “creation perfected and accordingly at rest.”10 Biblically speaking, human performance is forgiven performance. To be sure, Karl Marx did not arrive to such a conclusion. Neither did Sigmund Freud. Both the philosopher and the psychoanalyst, followed by their respective disciples, struggle with a recalcitrant concept. They intuit more than they discover the teleological essence of work.11 The advantage of the theologian is evident, but what the theologian might have been content with—that is, a mere faith statement—is now, thanks to philosophy and psychoanalysis, intellectually enriched. There is a philosophy of work and a psychology of labor that cannot be ignored. They both contribute to the understanding of the world in its spatiotemporality. They build up our consciousness and, through their moral insight, our conscience. Thanks to philosophy and psychology, along with their associated fields, work is appraised in its universality, that is, as human labor as such, and a whole panel of the notion is unveiled. One of its aspects—as the science of knowledge, for instance, emphasizes—is suffering. I mentioned it repeatedly before. True, working in certain conditions is eminently satisfying. Human art magnifies human value. The artist may feel fulfilled in the painting, the sculpting, and the writing of the object. The created product may even overwhelm the artist. But artists are a rare breed. Not every shoemaker like Jacob Boehme is also mystically inspired. The common denominator of human labor is elsewhere: in a shared suffering. After all, one of the biblical terms for work is ‘amal with a hint of pain and distress. I also said above that entelechy occurs through strain, through the pangs of birthing.12 Through the pangs of birth, the woman in labor produces the miracle of the child. Happiness about the work well done, along with the sadness attendant to the immense effort often for a pitiful result, present us with a full paradox and a full dialectical challenge.   9.  See, for example, Ps. 104; Job 12; etc. Paul Ricoeur mentions the psychoanalytical role of “to show while concealing” (Conflict, 12). 10. Neusner, Rabbinic, 109. 11.  On this, let us note that Walter Benjamin is much more specific; see his “The Life of Students,” in Selected Writings, 1:37–47. 12.  I referred in n. 68 in part 1 to Hosea 13:13.

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Genesis 3:4–7 is illuminating. although pre-lapsarian work was effortless and human feeding was “of every tree of the garden,” now parturition is the name of the game: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing, in pain you shall bring forth children” (Gen. 3:16 [NRSV]). There is no labor without pain (“by the sweat of your face,” says Gen. 3:19). A curse? Yes, but with silver lining. Now, work becomes more personal than ever before. Work is now my child. Work is both private and universal; it is both properly mine and also the fruit of encountering the other. As in art that means nothing without a public or a recipient,13 there is also here a dialectic process: the recipient of work gives meaning to the labor of the provider.14 That is, the initial suffering gift of the grantor (overcoming the resistance of the matter or the unexpressed) finds its double hanger in the suffering reception of the grantee (overcoming solipsism or autonomy). In the process of transmission (masorah), the receiver (by qabalah) accedes, through interpretation, to the status of meaning-giver. Israel is “authoring Scripture and Scripture is authoring Israel.” Work is fundamentally dialogical. The painter paints for the onlooker; the car builder builds for the driver; the writer addresses readers; the cook creates food for the consumer; the lover makes love to the beloved. Michael Bakhtin insists on this point; Emmanuel Levinas sees the Other filling the horizon; Karl Marx, Erich Fromm, and others fight to grant labor its majesty; the Bible plumbs the ontological depth of human doing. A CONCLUDING REFLECTION ON DIALECTICAL WORK AND CREATIVITY All along this essay, the focus has been set on work, its Janus-like nature of creativeness and destructiveness; its meaningfulness and absurdity; its distortions and glory. In the Hebrew language, we saw, this dialectical nature is expressed in the dual sense of one word: ‘abodah (bondage and worship [see the ambiguity of the word “service” in English or French, in reference to bondage and to worship]). So, we have learned from the Bible, but also from philosophers and psychologists, that work carries within itself its own contradiction. Sigmund Freud, for one, at times identifies work with servitude and non-work with contentment and happiness. We cannot agree with Freud on this point. He simplistically sacrifices one of the two terms of the dilemma instead of maintaining the paradox and use a dialectical un13.  Even if you play piano in an empty room, you become your own recipient as well as provider. 14.  “The Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam, and while he slept, He took one of his sides and closed up the flesh at that spot. . . . Then Adam said, ‘This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’ . . . a fitting helper for him [me]” (Gen. 2:21–23, 18, my trans.).



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derstanding to solve the inner clash between thesis and antithesis: work as good and bad. DIALECTIC IS DIALOGICAL The dialectical approach starts with welcoming the difference (dia-legein). Now, “difference” permeates the biblical kerygma. Here the issue is consistently the meeting with alterity. So, as regards biblical literature, I now pursue my investigation. Certainly such criticism demands a large margin of interpretation of the text. By this, I mean a definitely nonliteralist approach to the text. In what follows, I shall proceed using the rhetorical formula ex negativo, like the refusal of X or Y implies, dialectically its antipode in what is not refused but affirmed. As an example, the refusal of the flat, monological, reading of the text positively implied an agreement with the dialogical interpretation of the text. This is something I have covered in parts 1 and 2 of the present book. Dialectical criticism refuses interpretation marked by: simplicism; univocal systemism; uni-dimensional dogmatism; late additions theory; unilateral divine revelation; and spurious creationism. A textual example that meets most of these “refusals” is found in the dual divine voice ordering the sacrifice of Isaac and its prohibition (Genesis 22). It is evident that the reversal in God’s command does not obliterate the initial scandalous divine demand. As to the refusal of simplicism, let me refer once more to the “tree of knowledge” that demands distancing from a narrow exegesis ignoring the complexity of the motif. Knowledge is not to be unilaterally rejected, on the basis of Gen. 2:17, as necessarily pernicious. Paradoxically, the notion of knowledge is both destructive and constructive. Without knowledge, the human is not just a moron, he or she is not at all. Knowledge is both indispensable but, when inflated, makes the sage play God. To recall, the tree of knowledge stands in the pre-lapsarian Garden.15 Its fruit is forbidden as if it were poisonous. In the post-lapsarian world, however, it becomes accessible and unavoidable.16 On that score, we are thus again dealing dialectically with a symbol and any simplistic reading of the Genesis text is defeated.17 15. A cognate of “knowledge” is wisdom (chokhmah). It is said to have been created “at the beginning of [God’s] works” (see Job 28; Prov. 1, 8, 9; Sir. 24; etc.; n. 1 above; cf. ABD 6:920ff., esp. 926–27). 16.  See again Gen. 3:22. 17.  Paul Ricoeur’s definition of the symbol is striking: “I define ‘symbol’ as any structure of signification in which a direct, primary, literal meaning designates, in addition, another meaning which is indirect, secondary, and figurative and which can be apprehended only through the first” (Conflict, 12–13, ital. orig.). Andrew Kille writes, “Jung understood symbolic language far more positively than

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One of the most amazing texts is found in the next biblical book, Exodus. Exod. 4:24–26 reads, “The Lord met [Moses] and tried to kill him.” In an early essay on Exodus 1–4 I wrote in 1967,18 I stressed the paradoxes within the narrative. God chose Moses—perhaps actually an Egyptian man, as Freud says—to lead his people out enslaving Egypt. But suddenly, in an astounding reversal, God decides to kill him (4:24)!19 What does God want? A living Moses or a dead Moses? Well, a living-through-death Moses, a kind of reborn Moses. In the process, his wife Zippora saves his life through an actual and symbolic shedding of blood (Moses’ or his son’s?). She cries, “You are to me a bridegroom of blood!” (4:25).20 Here also Moses is described as someone whose blood is shed, as a survivor, as a martyr that outlives a lethal ordeal. He emerges to another world. The husband of Zippora is not her husband anymore; to her he has become like a ghost.21 Exod. 4:26 introduces a further textual tension. The MT speaks of YHWH separating from Moses, but the Samaritan version has, “he [Moses] separated from her.” Then Aaron comes to him (4:27, which uses the same word as for God’s attack in verse 22) and, as a priest, substitutes himself to Zippora. The dialectical nature of the narrative is clear. Life and death go side by side. In a way, God has been successful in his attempt at killing his messenger. By transposition, it is as if Moses carries stigmata. His humanity is stamped with transcendence (Exod. 34:29–30). When he speaks to the people, he must veil his face (Exod. 34:33). Shifting from individual to collectivity, there is something of the same tension in the divine decree against the people’s permission to cross over to the Promised Land (see Deut. 9:14; 3:27). By the way, as I shall elaborate here, even the different names given to the biblical fourth book build a dialectic: “Numbers” is a story of life; “Bamidbar” is a story of death. Are not the forty years in the wilderness (bamidbar) a desperate push toward the crossing over? Is it all for naught? Does God want the people’s life or their death? Will the desert be their grave or the anteroom to their fulfillment? Is the expected Conquest mere fantasy, illusion, and utopia? Will the “crossing over” remain forever delayed until allegedly a future generation? And, in that Freud. Symbolism is the means of unconscious expression, not repression” (Kille, Psychological Biblical Criticism, 99). 18.  Le devenir de Dieu (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1967), see pages 148–55. 19.  Note the uncanny parallel with Balaam sent by God in Num. 22:20 followed by God’s wrath against him in 22:22. (The expression “on the way” is present in both Exod. 4:24 and Num. 22:22). 20. Zippora’s cry seems to indicate that the text means Moses’s blood The fact that the adult Moses was not until then circumcised (?, see Rashi here: he thinks that 4:25 is addressed to the child and means, “you are for me the cause of a husband of blood”) would point to him as a non-Israelite. 21.  After that, Zippora leaves Moses and returns to Midian. Later, her father, Jethro, brings her back to Moses (Exod. 18:2, some 14 chapters after God’s “attack”!).



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mirror, is human life but a terrible joke? A “nothing” as the Spies reported in Numbers 13:28?22 Implicitly perhaps, the reader is invited to “die” (see Ps. 44:22) with the lion Moses on “this side of the river,” rather than to “cross over” with the lamb of the “next generation” (see Deut. 31:29). After all, the final Redactor could have told the story in the desert as a comedy, with a Mosaic triumphal crossing with the people. The lesson would then appear as powerful— although it would not. That’s the immense force of biblical dialectic. A flimsy approach that dialectical criticism debunks is text as grounding systems. The systemic thrives in the non-exceptional. But the Bible happens to be full of the unconventional or subversive (feminine or other—see my The Feminine Unconventional).23 In the book of Ruth, Boaz is a man of system (Law); this is the thesis. Ruth is a woman of subversion (freedom); this is the antithesis. As usual, the antithesis demands the continual presence of the thesis, without which the antithesis would operate in the void. The revolutionary demands the steady opposition of the conservative and vice-versa. Then, reaching the level of synthesis, Ruth submits to the Law and Boaz to a “difficult liberty” (Levinas). Thesis alone is sterile; it remains an unfulfilled promise, a fig tree with no figs (see Mk. 11:13, 21); the antithesis alone is Boaz’s and Ruth’s widowhood—potentially an impotent condition (pun intended). The synthesis occurs when thesis and antithesis “become one flesh” and produce the child Obed. Obed (whose name happens to mean “working”) transcends dogmatism and determinism. Perhaps even more striking on that score is King Solomon’s prayer of dedication of the newly built Temple in 1 Kings 8:27–30: “God’s dwelling place is in heaven” [antithesis], not on earth [thesis],24 but “God’s name dwells in the Temple” [synthesis]). On another level, the paradox continues with the Temple being house of prayer not only for Israel but also for the nations (8:43; cf. Isa. 56:7).25 22.  D. Winnicott, Home is Where We Start From, 82. 23.  The Feminine Unconventional: Four Subversive Figures in Israel’s Tradition. Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006). In this regard, Karl Marx takes “ideology” in a reductionist sense as “false consciousness” promoted by the dominant class. 24.  See also Acts 7:48; 2 Cor. 5:1. 25.  Note that the Garden of Gen. 2–3 is part of the structure of the (future) Temple; see the floral motif in the Temple of Solomon (1 Kings 6:18, 29–33). The menorah is described as a tree, associated with the Tree of Life (see N. Perrot: “Les représentations de l’arbre sacré sur les monuments de Mésopotamie et de l’Elam” Babyloniaca 17:5–144). According to some sources, Eden is “the holy of holies and the dwelling of YHWH.” For Philo of Alexandria, the Temple was a microcosm (Noah’s Planting, 12; Questions on Exodus, 2.85).

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A further example is offered in the amazing text of 2 Samuel 23:1–7, which celebrates King David as “the Anointed of the God of Jacob.” This comparatively unusual divine title––as well as other vocabulary parallels––lead us to recognize a “material associated with Balaam.”26 Such use of the Moabite visionary to attribute the gift of prophecy to King David is surprising. Again, as in preceding and following examples exhibited here, there is a display of inner contradictions, especially when we take into consideration texts like Psalms 20, 24, 46, 76, 84, 132, and 146, all of which mention the unusual “God of Jacob,” and “link the God of Jacob explicitly with Zion and the Temple.”27 Not so, evidently, when the title appears in Num. 24:1, 3 in the Balaam story. Indeed a graver problem is due to Balaam’s ambiguity in Israel’s tradition. True, his particular vision reported in the Numbers text is positive; in general, however, texts are hostile to Balaam (see Num. 31:16; Deut. 28:5–6; Neh. 13:2). Hence, the question arises: is there some derogation in describing the “prophet” David in terms proper to Balaam? A flawless David according to 2 Sam. 23 is better seen as an antithesis to Num. 24 and, by ricochet and dialectic, a redemption of Balaam as oracle-bringer regarding Israel. This process of recuperation of a former text or tradition28 by a subsequent one is called “inversion narrative.”29 However, Numbers reports that Balaam was unable to curse Israel in the plains of Moab, because of a kind of predestined blessing attached to them since the days of the Patriarchs, as says the Targum here. The blessing shields the people. It does not dictate anything but sets a barrier (siyag) around a secure Israel, who can trust their providential protection. At any rate, because of the perpetual blessing that accompanies them, the eventual blessing by Balaam falls short of the target. It is motivated by envy, Rashi says. The negativity of Balaam’s speech is emphasized by a text like Deut. 23:4–6, stressing the inner contradiction in the diviner’s discourse—and thus, a new level of dialectic is reached. For my demonstration, examples are endless. Qoheleth starts his book by saying, nihil sub sole novum (1:10 Vul.), but do not prophets announce a new heaven and a new earth (see Isa. 65:17; Ezek. 18:31)? In fact, although it can 26.  Cf. Num. 24:3–9. See Mahri Leonard-Fleckman, “Utterance of David, the Anointed of the God of Jacob (2 Samuel 23:1–7),” JBL 137 (2018): 667–83. 27.  Leonard-Fleckman, “Utterance,” 679. 28.  The Numbers tradition on Balaam is to be dated early; see Leonard-Fleckman, “Utterance,” 675. 29. See Aryeh Amihay, “Biblical Myths and the Inversion Principle: A Neostructuralist Approach,” JBL 137 (2018): 555–79. He also mentions Absalom and the Aqeda; Noah and Enoch in the Second Temple literature; the legend of Moses and Isaiah 6 (see Josephus), etc.



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be said that, generally and realistically speaking, nothing ever seems happening that is really new, something radically new occurs that changes the world configuration! Unexpectedly, the Berlin wall collapses! Of course, a dialectical thinking permeates Freudian anthropology. Freud, I said previously, is one of the three iconoclasts who decentralized the human being in the universe (with Copernicus and Darwin). For psychoanalysis, the human is a highly paradoxical being, torn between sanity and neuroses, between Eros and Thanatos. So that it is impossible to read Freud without having recourse to a dialectical interpretation. This also applies to Karl Jung’s conjugation of animus–anima. There cannot be a relationship between male and female if there is no femininity in the male and masculinity in the female. In their encounter is found the resolution of the dilemma. Now, what is true of Freud and Jung is also true of the biblical. These days, I am rereading the fabulous fourth book of the Torah (Pentateuch). Its title . . . but precisely what title? I said. The Hebrew says, Bamidbar, that is, as the modern idiom would say, “In hell!”30 Then the book is speaking of collective death. But, ever since the Talmud and the first translations of the document into Aramaic, Greek, and other tongues, it is called “Numbers,” that is, it speaks of life, abundant life (see Num. 2:31, the population in the desert is 603,550!). It is true that this first census belongs to the past and the death of a whole generation (see Num. 14:29, 32, 33, 35). Only the second census (Num. 26) points to life and the Promised Land. If Deuteronomy is almost entirely a divine discourse, the book of Numbers is almost entirely in the voice of the people (14:1). God says, “bamidbar,” and the people say “Numbers”: we are numerous and a nation of survivors. Who is right? The reader must realize that, indeed, as many as 600,000 people surviving in the desert for forty years is not short of miraculous, even if all the figures are exaggerated in order to make the point. To Bamidbar responds Numbers, to Numbers responds Bamidbar. It is thus not surprising that we read a document that is shot through with paradoxes. This feature is important, for the ancient Midrash, among other sources, has been sensitive to the constant inner contradictions in Bamidbar. It is clear, for instance, that the report of the Spies returning from a foray into Canaan (Num. 13–14) is ambiguous. Avivah G. Zornberg (whose knowledge and intelligence of the Midrash and psychoanalysis are so gratifying31) stresses the fact that the Spies confirm, on the one hand, God’s description of the Land as “good,” and “flowing with milk and honey” (Num. 13: 27, 30.  “A great and terrible wilderness” (Deut. 1:19). 31.  A. G. Zornberg, Bewilderments. She says that the episode is at the heart of the book of Numbers.

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cf. Exod. 3:8), but shockingly, they destroy their whole appraisal with the word ’efes, that is something like, “but all this means nothing” (Num. 13:28, in NRSV’s translation, “Yet”) for, they say, the Canaanites are unbeatable “giants” (nefilim; ibid.). The result is a popular reception of the bad news without discussion and even with the intent of lynching the disagreeing pair of Caleb and Joshua (Num. 14:10). The word of God and the word of the crowd. The final Redactor of Numbers, of course, could have deleted the reaction of one of the two protagonists, but he did not, maintaining a taught tension between the two. As Donald W. Winnicott says, “Toleration of one’s destructive impulses results in a new thing: the capacity to enjoy ideas, even with destruction in them.”32 And what shall we do with the sequel of the Spies’ episode? The text says that the people repented exceedingly and launched an attack against the Amalekites (after their initial refusal to go up to Canaan). But then we encounter a striking paradox: God refuses their repentance! Moses tells the Israelite assailants, “it will not succeed” (14:41) and, indeed, instead of becoming instrumental for reconciliation with God, the attackers are massacred by the Amalekites (14:45)!33 We are today as shocked as the actual witnesses were, perhaps even more so for we wonder why “R” (the Redactor) thought appropriate to relate this episode in the first place. What lesson are we supposed to draw from it, but that history is always complex, full of paradoxes, full of self-contradictions. The truth of the matter is that there is no way to bask in self-indulgence, and there was arguably self-indulgence in the people’s “mourning exceedingly” (14:39) and thus manipulation of the divine in the expectation of triggering an automatic divine recompense. The biblical kerygma is definitely not romantic. It unswervingly engages the reader: “and you, what do you say that I am?” (Mk. 8:29). The dialectical nature of the message prevents it from being what the French call, “une image d’Epinal” (edulcorated). It is addressed to a recipient whose heart is the nest of both love and hate, and it comes from a God whose absence was blatant in Auschwitz. “[S]uddenly, our vision is incomplete, and god becomes patently real,” Avivah Zornberg says.34 Is it not equally shocking when the low clergy rebels against Moses in Num. 16—after the high clergy did so in Num. 12—and God orders the ground to swallow them all? Were they wrong when they argued, “the whole com32. DWinnicott, Home Is Where We Start From, 82; cited by A. G. Zornberg, Bewilderments, 141. She also refers to b. Ber. 54a. Paraphrasing her, we could say that the people’s ambivalence reflects the enigma of God’s absence in his very presence. 33.  See also the amazing text of Job 9:22 (“[God] destroys both the blameless and the wicked.”) 34. Zornberg, Bewilderments, 167.



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munity is entirely holy [not just you, Moses] and in their midst is God?” (16:3; cf. Exod. 25:8). They are uncontroversially right, but what is right in someone’s mouth is wrong in another’s, and the circumstances are decisive. In Num. 16, the dogmatically right saying expresses rebellion and deserves capital punishment. All the same, the story is hard to “swallow!” As I said, another rebellion came from the high clergy. In Num. 12, there was a clash between Miriam (and Aaron) and Moses. We could put it this way: Thesis, Moses represents hierarchically distance and difference. Conscious of his special election, he has separated from his wife Zippora. Antithesis: In Num. 12, Miriam criticizes her brother Moses. In her eyes, he is a prig. Who does he think that he is? He arbitrarily separates not just from his spouse but from the common.35 Consequently, Miriam is hit with leprosy. Synthesis: Miriam is restored to the community (12:14) after Moses intercedes in her behalf (12:13). Thus, Miriam is reestablished as prophetess—so what she said was right—and Moses is reaffirmed as different (12:6-8)—so what he said was also right! Avivah Zornberg calls attention to the so-called “Tale of the Sisters” in Numbers 27. There is a divine triumphal acknowledgment of the daughters of Zelofehad in the ringing ken (Yes!) of verse 7. On this, the Jewish tradition is most illuminating. The five sisters are right, it is said, because their discourse corresponds to the book “already written before God” (cf. 27:11, so understood by the Jewish tradition). This “book” is the original version of reality that the sisters were expected to duplicate, or mirror. This is exactly what predestination is all about. There is no divine dictation of things to come; there is no manipulation or robotization. In fact, the whole book of Numbers has been a depressing series of misspeaking and misacting on the part of the people in the wilderness. But, now at last an act occurs that confirms its divine predestination. As Zornberg says, “God can at last draw breath and say, ken—Yes!” (269). After the distortions of language all along the story in the desert, what the sisters say sticks to the model in heaven. Thus, the dialectical nature of the human langue is upheld.36 Dialectical criticism operates the reconciliation of contradictions, the healing of rifts. In part 1 of this essay, I referred to Song of Songs (8:6–7 and 4:1–5). One of the most vexing aporias in Hebrew Scripture scholarship is the Song’s 35.  The same argument as we saw expressed in Num. 16:3. 36.  The matter is language. The sisters’ dibbur unveils the inherent dabar, the created and creative Word (see above n. 102 in part 1 and the text referenced there).

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nature: romance (between a male and a female) or allegory (loving relationship between God and Israel or between Christ and Church)? In Christianity, ever since Origen (185?–254?) and Hippolytus (170–235?), and, to a certain extent, in a transposition from Jewish mysticism, the allegorical reading is preferred. But the issue is hotly debated until this day and seems unsolvable. A dialectical approach to the subject, nonetheless, sheds light on the problem. In similitude with the here much repeated formula of homo faber reflecting deus faber, the Song shows that homo amans conforms to deus amans. Therefore, as regards the Song’s nature, we must remember Nicholas de Cusa’s phrase, “coincidentia oppositorum”: the “carnal” and the “spiritual” cross-fertilize, so to speak.37 This means that the description and understanding of deus amans (like of deus faber) is impossible except in anthropological terms. Song of Songs provides an audacious example of it. As such, the Song is a spiritual piece that definitely does not blot out the carnal but confirms it; as Paul said, “it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual” (1 Cor. 15:46). The tractate b. Yebamoth 63b gloats about Proverbs 18:22: “He who finds a wife has found happiness and has won the favor of YHWH.” If we take the biblical text literally, Yebamoth says, we learn how beneficial a good spouse is, “as the [sacred] text takes care of praising her.” And if the wife here is symbol for Torah, “we learn how beneficial is a good spouse, as the Torah is compared to her.” The same dialectic applies to the Song. There is no need to being stuck in an aporia about the textual identity of the Shulammite of the Song. She is the “good wife” and the Torah! One could say the same about the ‘almah (the young woman; in LXX, parthenos) of Isaiah 7:14, or something along the same line. The dialectical is akin to the paradoxical. Here, the paradox is that the more one insists on the allegorical sense of the Song, the more critically subversive is its literal nature. As a case in point, let us focus on Song 8. Obviously, we have reached the summit of the poem and its paean to (divine?) love: šalhevetyah (that NRSV translates “a raging flame” and NJPS “[a] blazing flame,” and the French NBS, more literally, “une flamme du Seigneur (Yah).” But then comes the surprise: 8:5–6 reads, “under the apple tree I roused you [masc. pron.]; it was there your [masc.] mother conceived you [masc.], she who bore you [masc.] conceived you [masc.]. Let me be a seal upon your [masc.] heart, like a seal upon your [masc.] hand” (NJPS)! The Song, in the name of a striking perfect equality of the genders, has introduced 37.  On Nicholas de Cusa (1401–1494) in De Visione Dei 36:2 and Giorgio Bruno (1548–1600) (reason as the inner artist), see Albert Schwegler, History of Philosophy, trans. J. H. Seelye (New York: Appleton & Co., 1856), 16.



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a stark paradox, whereby it is now the female (mother), that is Israel according to the allegory, that gives birth to the male, that is God, and rouses him! Only the dialectic can solve the dilemma. The gendered order of male rousing female and, conversely, female rousing male is unsettled, as well as the relationship marked by the male God conceiving Israel and rousing her—in a highly dramatic (and bloody) scene, Israel becomes the bride of God (see Ezek. 16:8–14). Such a paradox is possible and has a name: love. Human love (male and female) is but a trace of divine love; it is the redeeming factor in post-lapsarian history. Dialectic stands against unilateral divine revelation: in part 1, I stressed the wisdom of Paul Beauchamp, who reads “all but one” in Genesis 2:16–17 as implying that the prohibition is de facto to be understood as “all but all.”38 It is, indeed, a good example of dialectical reading. Shall we also in this light infer from Deuteronomy 6:4 (on the uniqueness of Israel’s God) a warrant, in reverse, of the uniqueness of his creatures—something like: if one then all? Yes. Dialectically speaking, God is no-man, he is incomparable, unique, but, on the other hand, all humans are his imago and, consequently, also unique.39 Martin Buber much underscores this human characteristic.40 As said in part 1, all murder is not only fratricidal but deicidal. The opposition of the dialectic to any one-dimensional dogmatism is all important. Many Christian institutions, for instance, are grounded in a rigid understanding of biblical doctrine. The very notion of a catechism (not an exclusively Roman Catholic feature) is a case in point. Catechism is by nature anti-dialectical. Take, for instance, the controversial Mariolatry based as it actually is on a flimsy literal understanding of Matthew 1 and Luke 1. In reality the gospel text is midrashic, that is, a far cry from historical. “Mary” is here a symbol (admittedly based on a real character). So is her stated parthenogenesis. No dogma can be constructed on this flabby basis.41 Had clerics realized this, a formidable misunderstanding would have been avoided. Furthermore, the accent in the fictional Gospel narrative in question is on Mary’s child, Jesus, not on her per se. Structural analysis reveals what constitutes a symbol. Actually, as Saussure says, the meaning of the symbol comes as “a synthesis of units of meanings which are understood immediately.” True, these “units of meaning” are in 38.  See n. 120 in part 1 and the texts referenced there. 39.  See Lev. 20:26; PRE 12; Qur’an 50:16 says “God is “closer to man than his jugular vein.” 40.  See Kenneth P. Kramer with Mechthild Gawlick, Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Practicing Living Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 2003). 41.  So also in Islam: see Qur’an 3:49, 58, 62, etc.

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mutual opposition, but opposition is precisely the “intelligible form par excellence,” for, “[i]n language, there are only differences.”42 So, we get the following pattern: as a thesis, we have a virginal holy woman called Mary (whose son Jesus is thus endowed with primogeniture). But the story featuring her is an aggadah, a tale carrying a kerygmatic lesson, the antithesis. The two units are set in opposition, which is the “intelligible form par excellence.” The synthesis is reached with the meeting of aggadah and history. Mary, mother of Jesus, is a heroine and a subversive one at that (see Mat. 1:3–6, 16). By means of dialectic, we realize that Mary is a symbol of dedication and purity, even of holy dissidence, hence to be honored but not worshiped. As she is also a symbol of her people Israel, I tie the knot with “Israel and her land” in what follows. THE ENIGMATIC (DIALECTICAL) RELATIONSHIP OF ISRAEL AND LAND This is obviously a very complex issue. Can dialectical criticism shed any light on it? Yes, provided that we take the biblical rapport of Israel as landowner and Israel as resident alien in her own land.43 A dialectical resolution is in the background of Joshua 24:13: “I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you did not build . . . olive groves that you did not plant.” A temporary dimension marks the occupation of the land before its actual occupation and, ominously, after as a possibility. When Israel experienced exile in Babylon and elsewhere, prophet after prophet emphasized this character of Zion. The clash between ownership and exile becomes symbolic and, as such, the very identity of the people of Israel is deeply affected. Israel is citizen of the Promised Land and in exile throughout the world, that is, in Diaspora (cf. Deut. 28:25; Jn. 7:35). So, if indeed there is a “conflict of interpretations” (say between hermeneutics and structuralism, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and phenomenology), only a dialectical resolution is capable of bringing all of them in a bundle with a synthetic message. I will explore the dialectic against unilateral divine revelation more in the next section. 42. Saussure, Course, 120. See Ricoeur, Conflict, 77, 82. Kate Atkinson, though in a book that has no scholarly pretention, pointedly says, “The difference between presence and absence. Reading and writing. Playing and listening. The world was just an endless dialectic” (Transcription [New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2018], 216). 43. Owners? See Deut. 1:25; 9:6; Ps. 105:11. Not owners but renters? See the crucial text of Lev. 25:23, “the land is Mine; with Me you are but aliens and tenants”; cf. Ps. 39:13; 1 Chr. 29:15. See also the notion of ger [stranger] in the Bible (cf., e.g., Lev. 25:23; Deut. 10:18–19; Jer. 35:7). Risking an oxymoron, we could say that to the Israelite’s identity belongs a dimension of being an “autochthonous stranger.”



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ON LEX TALIONIS Some biblical statements have been “eisegetically” read without nuance. Take for instance the law of the talion, repeated three times in the Hebrew Bible (Exod. 21:24; Lev. 24:20; Deut. 19:21). The notion has been understood literally (as in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere) with disastrous results. Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth unblocks such rigidity: “but I am telling you” (Mat. 5:22, 28, 32, 34, 39).44 His teaching is summarized in the so-called “Golden Rule” in Mat. 7:12; Lk. 6:3 (“Do to others as you wish them to do to you”).45 Hence, the lex talionis is reinterpreted along a process that Paul Ricoeur calls “amplification [of justice by love].”46 Originally, it was anyway meant to limit the abuses of vendetta—something like “only one eye for an eye”—but now, prolonging the trajectory implied in the legislature, Jesus audaciously indicates the ultimate aim of the restriction, namely, love.47 In an episode reported in John 8:7, Jesus famously says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” The dialectic is clear. Like in the extraordinary parable of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10), the Lukan Jesus reverses the terms of the equation in this episode of the “adulterous woman.” The focus shifts from the accused (like it does from the “external” neighbor in the Lukan simile) to the crowd of accusers and their moral responsibility. “An eye for an eye”—but who will be the one who can exert the lex? Who will act without hypocrisy? What is expected from Jesus’ disciples is not the appointment of an allegedly righteous tribunal of inquisition, but the confession that the lex talionis is impractical as such in the name of love. The law entails its own self-contradiction, not by intrinsic weakness, but by an intrinsic mobility toward its fulfillment marked by love.48 From the outset, its intrinsic telos 44.  See also Jn. 1:38, cf. Mat. 23:7–8. 45.  See also Tobit 4:15; Romans 13:10; Didache 1:2; b. Shabbat 31a; etc. 46.  Ricoeur, “Love and Justice” = W. G. Jeanrond and J. L. Rike, eds. Radical Pluralism and Truth: David Tracy and the Hermeneutics of Religion (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 187–202. 47.  In part 1, I spoke about the historical “arc” from creation to Israel’s inchoate destiny (Gen. 12). Paul Ricoeur also speaks of the “arc” binding explanation and understanding (“The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, 75–88 [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991], 88). Dialectical criticism affects understanding. That is, the reader, facing inner contradictions within the text, must find a way to solve the issue while maintaining both terms of the opposition [coincidentia]: the way is to trace the arc of explanation toward understanding. 48.  A Baraitha on Nedarim 62a deduces from Deut. 30:20 (“by loving YHWH your God, heeding his commandments, and holding fast to him”) that one may not obey the commandments in order to receive honors. “What is needed is to learn by love.” Besides, note that Jesus’s conception of the Law is not unique. The great Maimonides (twelfth century) defends a similar standpoint in his “Commentary to the Treaty Avot” or “Treaty of the Eight Chapters,” which is an appendix to the Guide to the Perplexed (Hebrew, ed. Yoseph Kappah, Mishna im perush Harambam [Jerusalem, 1963], 2:247–304; see also, e.g., Jacob Neusner, A History of Mishnaic Law (Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity), [Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007]). Maimonides writes, “If [a prophet] dictates to annul one of the positive commandments of the Torah or

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has transcended the lex talionis. Without its telos, that is, love, the talion is purposely impossible, as impossible as other commandments and prohibitions like praying for one’s foes and their welfare (Mat. 5:44; Lk. 6:28), that is, love transcending even a justified hatred. ON DIVORCE In my recent book Jesus the Central Jew,49 I discuss Jesus’s interpretation of the law on divorce (Deut. 24:1; Mat.19:7-8; in that book, pp. 78–81). Using here dialectical criticism, it may be said that Jesus’s originality consists in shifting the notion of divorce from being thesis—conducive to becoming a dogma—to antithesis. Jesus re-establishes Genesis 1:24 with the impregnable status of primal thesis. The notion of genders becoming one flesh is unique, simple, and unconditional. Divorce is antithetically complex, multiform, and floating according to motives and circumstances. The clash between the two is a matter of invariable versus variable; one of the two cannot substitute the other. De jure Deuteronomy 24:1 (which Mat. 19:8 and Mk. 10:5 attribute to Moses, not to God) remains valid but must be set in the light of Genesis 1:24: divorce in Deuteronomy, Jesus says, is de facto a concession to human weakness (Mat. 19:8).50 Drawing a synthesis is a hard task. The point I suggested in the aforementioned book is to be found in the words “what God has joined together, let no human separate” (Mat. 19:6). The inner contradiction lies in God joining and humans separating. In this controversy, what Jesus is rejecting is the second term of the proposition (humans disjoining). Hence, the key to the textual puzzle is the necessity of God separating and not humans. In other words, as the hand of God is recognizable in “man and woman becoming one flesh,” God’s hand must be recognizable in the separation of such and such a man and such and such a woman. Then the synthesis is reached. to transgress one of its prohibitions, we must obey to all of his words, and whoever would transgress them would be liable of death by heaven. . . . [As b. Sanhedrin 90a says], ‘In all matters, if a prophet says to transgress Torah’s words, obey him, with the exception of idolatry’.” 49.  André LaCocque, Jesus the Central Jew: His Times and His People, Early Christianity and Its Literature 15, (Atlanta: SBL, 2015). 50.  CD 4:21 also refers directly to Gen. 1:24. Of course, not everyone agrees with Jesus’s opinion. In b. Yebamoth 63b, we read, “A bad spouse is a pain for her husband. What is a healing for him? Divorce, and he will be healed.” And a little earlier: “It is fulfilling a commandment to get separated from a bad spouse, Rabba says, as it is written, ‘Expel the scoffer and contention departs, quarrel and contumely cease’” (Prov. 22:10 NJPS). A different note is struck in b. Sanhedrin 22a: “Divorce is a very serious matter. According to Rabbi Eliezer, upon the one who ditches his first wife even the altar sheds tears” (he cites Mal. 2:13–14: “she is your partner and covenanted wife” [NJPS]).



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Under the leadership of Jesus, we have just juxtaposed P’s Genesis 1:24 in its characteristic tabular style, and the narratival composition of J’s that made Deut. 24:1 possible (see Gen. 3:10–12). Such audacious juxtaposition impacted the issue of divorce. It will also impact their respective notions of work in the cosmos. One may, indeed, wonder whether the human being is “to have dominion over all the earth” (1:26 P) or to (lovingly) “till and guard” the Garden (2:15 J). P’s image is rather brutal. It evokes setting one’s foot on the carcass of a slaughtered animal (yarad). The distance from the pastoral portrait of the human in the Garden is considerable. Only a dialectical synthesis is able to overcoming the difference. Working and guarding establish Adam as ruler of the world. His gardening belongs to his rulership and his rulership is characterized as his careful gardening.51 This is illuminated by tradition-historical criticism, of which I’ll say more in what follows and said already in the previous footnote. ON KASHRUT That is why, in a more general way, Jesus reinterprets the laws of the kashrut. True, this time over, the (dietetic) laws are not “impossible,” as they were in the preceding example (of the talion). The narrator’s marginal note in Mark 7:19, nevertheless, reads, “thus, he [Jesus] declared all foods clean.” This conclusion is unimpeachable and it reverses, once more, the logically possible one that kashrut be from now on dismissed, void and of no avail. On the contrary, all foods have now entered the category of kashrut. Jesus boldly extends the scope of the kashrut keeping to include that “whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile” (Mark 7:18), but he can do so because, according to the dialectical law of contradiction, he and his disciples do not eat forbidden foods (perhaps not to scandalize; see Mat. 17:27; cf. Mk. 9:42). It is why, incidentally, Jesus’s statement in Mark 7:19 does not stir any reaction from the crowd around, that could have been justifiably appalled by a sheer rejection of a central tenet of Jewish practice. However, although Paul and Luke do not even mention this potential theological bomb as a Jesus logion, a polemic erupted between Peter and Paul on that very topic.52 51.  Did the literary sources’ creators initially intend such a conclusion? Probably not, but the final R (Redactor) is more than a collector of traditions. Indeed, we owe to tradition-historical criticism the assumption of “events as being connected with each other, that what was experienced in an earlier event had a continuity with something which occurred later” (Rast, Tradition History, 75). This is called “typology” and is decisive for reading the New Testament’s “prolonging” the Prime Testament’s themes and motifs. Jesus’s reinterpretation of Deuteronomy 24:1 is a case in point. 52.  See, for example, Acts 10:14–15; 11:1–9; 1 Cor. 10:23 (“all things are lawful”); 10:25 (on eating anything sold on the market); Col. 2:21–23; etc.

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The issue can unfold in a systematic way, thanks to a midrashic mediation. (a) According to Deut. 8:3, out of God’s mouth comes the manna. (b) To man’s mouth it goes (see Yoma 75b), and Ps. 78 is read as implying that the food is totally absorbed (’akhul). (c) As such, the food absorbed produces no waste elimination (and thus is purely kosher). (d) Jesus rakes in all foods into the category of manna. It is so kosher that its elimination (waste) is only a vestige of the time when it was non-kosher but does not fall under the Law. At any rate, we learn that a law of the Torah can become obsolete according to circumstances. So the law of talion, as we saw, or the one of the alleged “sotah” [faithless wife] in Num. 5:11–31, see Sotah 2a; 47ab. In b. Menachot 99b, R. Otniel b. Kenaz says, “Sometimes, the unmaking [bitul] of the Torah is its fulfillment” (cited by Zornberg, Bewilderments, 220). GENESIS 3 REVISITED The “arc” can become a circle. Strikingly, our exploration of sources and texts means little without the Genesis background. It is obviously our sourcetext and to it, hopefully better equipped, we return. Genesis 2–3 is not a novel but a short story told by a skillful storyteller. This implies that as readers we are confronted by an oral communication that is in the “image of a collective experience,” Walter Benjamin says.53 J might be called the biblical master of dialectics. It is nowhere more evident than in his narrative on the origins. In Genesis 3, for instance, the humans have their eyes open and realize their nakedness—otherness. True, beforehand they were naked and mutually “other,” but now they become conscious of it. With such consciousness of nakedness, J singles out the most ambivalent reality of human life. The primal couple feels the need for loincloths already in Eden (Gen. 3:20) where, to recall, there are no other witnesses than themselves! Without clothes they are aware of their deep vulnerability—a vulnerability vis-à-vis one another! For at least one aspect of their nakedness brings about shame, a striking novelty in the Garden. Lyn Bechtel stresses the necessity of distinguishing between shame and guilt. There is, she says, a guilt-culture and a shame-culture.54 She thus leads us to apply the dialectical model to a socio-psychological complex. Shame is more dynamic than guilt. Bechtel says that this can be a positive develop53. Benjamin, Selective Writings, 3:157. 54.  Well, they actually are two peas from the same pod, but not identical. Shame may be the very condition for forgiveness (see Ezek. 16:63). Rav (= Abba Areka), in b. Berakoth 12b says, “Whoever is shameful after a transgression will see the forgiveness of all his faults.” The other kind of shame, which consists in making another one lose face, is severely condemned by the Talmud. In b. Baba Metsia 58b, it amounts to “shedding blood.”



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ment. That is why in Genesis 3, it is YHWH himself that provides the loincloth to Adam and Eve.55 For nakedness or sex is also power, that is, a powerful drive that many a human being finds irresistible and is, besides, the means for procreation, human work par excellence. Again we meet the coincidentia oppositorum (cf. Gen. 2:25) that needs to be solved by dialectic, so as to turn nakedness into strength, like we saw in part 2 when dealing with the work of “making love” and its inherent creativity.56 Yet, the “reconciliation” goes further. In conformity with all other cases when there is a clash of inner contradictions, one of the opposite members can become subversive. Thus, the prophet Isaiah walks naked “for three years” in the Jerusalem streets (Isa. 20:3), a powerful sign of the vulnerability of Israel. REBELLION The discovery of Adam and Eve’s nakedness is preceded in the text by their rebellion. On this point once more, the narrative is highly ambivalent. Should we follow Ellen van Wolde and see Genesis 3 as the story of a “necessary” disobedience?57 Is not the contrary truer: an unnecessary disobedience? Only a dialectical reading takes us out of the impasse. Disobedience is from the start a possibility; it is the only warrant to freedom granted by the Creator—the human cannot be the imago dei without it. It is, however, absolutely unnecessary and lethal (“for the day that you eat of it, you will certainly die” [Gen. 2:17], that is, become mortal without remission). Though, once the humans choose to disregard the prohibition and take advantage of their freedom, disobedience becomes dialectically “necessary,” if only for them to reach their worldly maturity through the “knowledge of good and evil” (ibid.). So, what was unnecessary in one economy (in the divine realm of Eden) becomes necessary in the next (the human realm of the present world). In terms of work, its nature is transformed and metamorphosed; from being gift and worship (‘abodah), it becomes a conquest, which is another type of freedom. In conclusion, it is “unnecessary” to reject off-hand the classic pattern “sin and fall” and replace it with the theme of human maturation,58 for in fact both patterns dialectically coincide. 55.  Lyn M. Bechtel, “Genesis 2.4b–3.24: A Myth about Human Maturation,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 67 (1995): 3–26. She calls her reading “a developmental theory.” 56.  See n. 10 in part 2. 57.  Ellen van Wolde, Words Become Worlds: Semantic Studies of Genesis 1–11 (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 58.  So Samuel Driver, Hermann Gunkel, Umberto Cassuto, and Lyn Bechtel and, among the psychologists, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and others.

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Let me insist: “necessity” (at the core of the expression felix culpa59) is a matter of standpoint or perspective. The great divide, of course, is human transgression (Genesis 3) that deeply affects the nature of their work. The contradiction finds an implied redemption in the fact that the unnecessary and lethal human rebellion becomes a necessary ingredient for human survival in the post-lapsarian era. Only a dialectical approach can maintain both terms simultaneously. Hence, from now on “work” and “dialectic” are together form and meaning. BACK TO THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE As seen repeatedly, the motif of the tree of knowledge is very puzzling, especially in its textual conjunction with death.60 I shall here deal with the topic’s inner contradictions and conclude with the possibility of a dialectical “solution.” Knowledge in association with death means that the former is developing a consciousness of the latter. The key is in the realization that the ethical belongs to the ontic. Knowledge is lethal to the extent that it shuns innocence, while innocence is immortal, and as such life-giving. Innocence eats of the fruit of all the Eden trees, but, paradoxically, one of them contradicts all the others. It drags all others into the zone of danger. Not by itself, however, but by a kind of contamination through the evil intention of the eater (“you shall be like God”). In other words, symbolically it could be any tree of the Garden. The issue is not the impossible identification of the “bad” tree, but human innocence and its loss, hence of lifefulness and death. Death was not an impossibility in the Garden; it was potentially present in the resistance of the matter and had to be fended off by eating of the fruit of the “tree of life.” But now, this tree is inaccessible; the Garden is closed and guarded (but not tilled [Gen. 3:23]) by cherubim (Gen. 3:24). Death has become omnipresent. It is constantly on the human mind.61 We die before we die. Yet death is paradoxically setting a limit that makes existence possible. If there were no death-limit, there would be no work, no creativity, no productivity, and no artwork. These would be always delayed to a spurious “tomorrow,” and for what purpose? Only the consciousness of death makes creation and procreation possible.62 59. The phrase coincidentia oppositorum comes from Nicolas de Cusa (De Conjecturis, viii [1441–1442] and often in his works). The earliest known use of the term felix culpa appears in the Catholic Paschal Vigil Mass Exsultet: O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem. 60.  See especially in part 2, “Work, Knowledge, and Death” and “Third Excursus” (on the commandments); see also in part 3 on “the refusal of simplicism.” 61.  Even interpretation, Ricoeur says, “is part of the art of handling resistance” (Conflict, 179). 62.  That is why love and death are coupled in myth in general and in Song of Songs in particular (see 8:6). According to Prov. 27:20, both are insatiable. In Mesopotamian myth, the goddesses Ishtar



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It is within this perspective that Genesis 3 can come up abruptly and unexpectedly with the evil spirit that permeates the mythic discourse of the serpent. Against the background of Genesis 2 and its established order (thesis), Adam and Eve’s rebellion comes as the contradictory antithesis. Then, after the threat (“the day you eat” [Gen. 2:17]), one expects a total destruction. This is not what happens, though. The dialogue with God continues uninterrupted, and so does the human’s work. Although the new situation has obviously deteriorated, it is clear that it is not hopeless, that is, ending with the vacuity of death. There is no death sentence as far as the God-human relationship is concerned. In short, a synthesis is obtained, a coincidentia oppositorum. Felix culpa? Not quite, but the phrase carries an evident intuition. Before leaving this topic, I want to reflect on a couple of corollaries to it. According to Genesis 2–3, both the tree of knowledge and the serpent are pre-lapsarian, as if there was to the present time an impending predestination. In the spirit of the narrative, it has become inconceivable, for example, that the tree fruit and the serpent’s cunning remain forever mere possibilities without the humans “falling” into the trap. Forever and ever, Adam would contemplate the possibility of eating the forbidden fruit and, in the long run, the temptation would be too strong to resist.63 If so, the question arises, is the “Fall” predestined and, with it, the individual “finalizability” for salvation or curse, à la Calvin––thus sterilizing the meaning of work for all practical purposes? The answer is yes and no, and I direct the reader back to my interpretation on the “necessary” and “unnecessary.”64 The equivocality is taken away, like in an individual retrospective experience, when it is realized that such and such an existential event of the past was forecasting a contemporary development. The past occurrence was not necessary at the time it happened, but is now in retrospect necessary for the present to be what it is. Another initial point of departure would have produced a different “predestination” for a different result.65

(love) and Ereshkigal (netherworld) are sisters. A Rainer Maria Rilke’s saying (on art and death) comes to mind: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.” (First Elegy of Duino Elegies [1922], trans. Stephen Mitchell [Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publ., 1992].) 63.  Like the not so secret desire of the people in the desert to return to Egypt (see esp. Num. 14)—a sad memory of bamidbar endlessly reenacted. 64.  See Maimonides in his introduction to “Chapter 8” of the PA (ad 1:14): “It is impossible for one to be naturally good or evil like to know a profession. . . . In no way is he coerced to act or be thwarted to act” (2:260–61). 65.  Olivier Abel’s oxymoron says it all: “la liberté prédestinée” (in Cahier de l’Herne Ricoeur, 229).

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Furthermore and deeper on, the concepts of “pre-lapsarian” and “postlapsarian” belong to a historical dimension. Paradigmatically, nevertheless, there is no before and no after according to Scripture.66 What this implies is that the historical sequence of things signifies the disorder of the post-lapsarian world, while the paradigmatic timelessness (a characteristic of myth) of the Jewish worldview contemporalizes past, present, and future. What I categorize as “pre-lapsarian” is not replaced by the so-called post-lapsarian, but their junction must be understood dialectically. As Jacob Neusner says, “A deed or occurrence does not designate an event, it merely provides a datum for classification within the pattern.”67 So, when Fredric Jameson68 asks, “[H]ow does it work?” the Jewish worldview responds: it works as do paradigms in an ever-present anakephalaiosis (recapitulation; see Ephesians 1:10). Another corollary: Are limitation, pain, and death to be understood as chastisement? No, Lyn Bechtel says. But, as Andrew Kille appropriately asks, is “expulsion from the garden” not a “violent and forceful” feat? Is it not assimilative with a “parent sending a child off into the world?”69 The point is elsewhere. Human maturation is one thing, but chastisement is not to be denied as incompatible with human access to wisdom. For maturation is incontrovertibly both progredience toward fulfillment and perfection and a taking distance from innocence. Parental or divine punishment (like in Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment) is no revenge move but means to return to innocence, although the return is not to an unchanged status quo ante. The new situation is marked by dialectic. Hence, Paul Ricoeur calls for a “second naïveté,”70 which is an informed naïveté, a matured innocence. The notion of justice is here at stake. POSTSCRIPT: DIALECTICAL CRITICISM AMONG OTHER METHODOLOGIES Needless to say, the dialectical way of criticism has no aim to dislodge other methods of interpretation. In fact, all interpretations are valid, but a stronger one can relativize others already in place. The present work may be taken as an outline or projection of an old-new kind of critical method.71 66.  A principle much stressed in Rabbinic Judaism (’ayn muqdam u-me’uchar batorah): one of the principles of Talmudic hermeneutics. See Adin Steinsaltz, The Talmud. The Steinsaltz Edition. A Reference Guide, trans. Israel V. Berman. Ed. Baruch Goldberg, (New York: Random House, 1989), 149. 67. Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism, 118. 68. Jameson, The Political, 28. 69. Kille, Psychological, 122. 70. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 352. 71. Ricoeur, Conflict, 68: “[In polysemy], the old and the new are contemporaneous in the same system.”



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True, my survey in terms of historical and hermeneutical expanse of work is now completed. Methodologically, the dialectical interpretation has proven to be the most heuristic of all. But not all is said with this conclusion. It remains to see how the dialectical method of criticism figures out within the concert of advocated and used critical guides. Within this perspective, we must stress the point that no method of interpretation is meant to replace former ones, but to contribute with them to a better understanding of text, oral or written. After all, our inquiry into work and creativity has been founded on texts, biblical or philosophical. I am speaking of any text, sacred or secular. However, because the present essay has started with the biblical book of Genesis and has referred several times to that source of information providing as it does the right perspective about work or creativity, may I be permitted to concentrate, in this Postscript, on biblical scholarship? The richness of methodological information this scholarly field does mirror, perhaps in a more concentric way, the immense expanse of both biblical and secular literary criticism. Thus, at this point, we turn to biblical literary criticism. David Robertson pointedly speaks of “Literature as Metaphor.”72 In such a case, dialectical criticism is dealing not primarily with facts but with their literary metaphorical interpretation, and thus criticism brings about an interpretation of interpretation. Synecdoche plays a major role here, which certainly helps dialectical synthesizing. As Robertson writes, “Whatever the text, once it is chosen it is considered as if it were written by one author, whose text is always assimilative, inclusive.”73 Like “Literary Criticism,” dialectic deals with the biblical text in its present form.74 It also attributes to interpretation a decisive role to resolving textual tensions (like in “Reader-Response Interpretation”).75 This explains the multiplicity of interpretation methods nowaday on the market: linguistic, structuralist, literary, sociological, psychological, reader-oriented, feminist—and now philosophical and dialectical. Dialectical criticism sheds light also on the vexed problem of canonization of Scripture. I want to deal here with the so-called “later additions” in the biblical texts. For instance, in another book of mine, Romance, She Wrote,76 I identified the mention of “Solomon” in Song 1:1 as “inauthentic” 72.  See Robertson, Literary Critic, 5. 73. Robertson, Literary Critic, 6, 7. 74.  It is the text as a whole; Paul Ricoeur speaks about the text as a “work” (see “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, an Anthology of his Work, ed. C. E. Reagan and D. Stewart [Boston: Beacon, 1978], 184–210. 75. On Reader Response Interpretation, see the important work of Daniel Patte. See especially Global Bible Commentary (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004) of which Patte is the General Editor with Associate Editors: J. Severino Croatto, Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Teresa Okure, and Archie Chi Chung Lee. 76.  André LaCocque, Romance, She Wrote: A Hermeneutical Essay on Song of Songs (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998); repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006]

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or as a later addition to the “original.” But, set in more general terms, where does “inspiration” start and end? Is the word “Solomon” in Song 1:1 (on the model of being mentioned in 3:9, 11 and 8:11–12) to be erased? Such a radical proposition has never been to my knowledge suggested by scholars. Yet, to maintain it is equally problematic as it leads the poem to deviate toward a dubious direction.77 Yet if we apply dialectical criticism to this issue, we obtain something like the following: the name “Solomon” in Song 1:1 as thesis; its scholarly disregard as antithesis; and their meeting with the Song’s genuine purpose as synthesis. True, the actual author of the Song is not Solomon but most probably a female writer.78 “Solomon” is thus spurious, but it is not ignorable. From the outset, it elevates the Song to a royal level. It is like a warning shot to the reader that “what you are about to read as a bucolic love song is in reality going beyond the hem of a popular ballade. Its creator is kingly and its plot is regal!” Thus, a surface reading will not do. The Song’s text is not “flat” but bi-leveled. It is dialogical as it is inviting readers to converse with Solomon, the sovereign of wisdom: a king or a queen is speaking here! The message is imbued with majesty and decisiveness. Indeed, there are also two levels of approach to the text: a literal level and an interpretational (allegorical) level. The former is setting the foundation, the latter builds on it. I spoke of “higher criticism” and “lower criticism,” with dialectical criticism belonging to the latter. Let us add here that lower criticism and higher criticism take us to “the great opposition . . . between explanation of nature and understanding of history,” Paul Ricoeur says.79 The oldest of the biblical critical disciplines is called textual criticism. Ralf Klein says that it “claims at recovering the original copies of the Biblical books,” that is, “to recover the best text” as well as to retrieve the history of its transmission80—a legitimate scholarly query. But now, because there is indeed “a transmission of the text” with a more or less bumpy history, there is concomitantly a constant danger of corruption in spite of the extraordinary 77.  Instead of seeing these additions as necessarily representing other traditional sources, compatible or incompatible with the “original,” we must with Paul Ricoeur realize that “the tradition corrects itself through additions, and these additions themselves constitute a theological dialectic” (Conflict, 46; my ital.). Claude Levi-Strauss shows that all versions of the (Oedipus) myth are valid and contribute to its integrity (“The Structural Study of Myth,” 213); “Every version belongs to the myth” (215). So, we could ask, is a text endowed with more authority when created in the sixth century rather than in the third? As Italo Calvino writes, “After [a person] has read [a] book, his whole life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading” (Mr. Palomar [London: Picador, 1986], 110–111, cited by A. G. Zornberg, Bewilderments, 302). 78.  See the discussion of this theme in Romance, She Wrote, esp. 39–53. 79.  Paul Ricoeur, “La tâche de l’herméneutique,” in Exegesis, 185 (my trans.; ital. orig.). 80.  Ralf Klein, Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: The Septuagint after Qumran. Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974).



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care displayed by the copyists of the Tanakh—incidentally a care confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thus, I am not alluding to copyist mistakes with my problem of later additions to the text. There is a difference between unconscious mistakes and conscious interventions into the integrity of the text. Even alleged accidents of letters in the received tradition are not to be disregarded. When in Psalm 80:14, for instance, we stumble upon the suspended letter ‘ayin in the word ya‘ar, Rabbis saw in this a double-entendre. They said that the ‘ayin can be at times read as ’aleph and, instead of “forest,” the meaning can thus be “river.” Hence, according to the variations of events in history, the text of the Psalm may intend, instead of a crocodile emerging from the copse, a hippopotamus from the stream, that is, allegedly a peaceful animal (sic). The crocodile and hippopotamus are both symbols for either war or peace in consequence of Israel’s fidelity or infidelity. We are thus to maintain both options in a dialectical reading.81 Then come “Form Criticism” and “Tradition Criticism.” J. Coert Rylaarsdam says that they go with “Literary Criticism,” not only interrelated but also complementary.82 “Historical criticism”83 deals with complex problems that can be summarized as focusing on the role of the final redactor(s). As the issue is inconclusive, “Tradition History” or “Redaction Criticism” has to take over with its stress upon Israel’s credos (so Gunkel, Mowinckel, von Rad).84 The concentration is on Gattungen (categories) like legend, hymn, lament, etc. “Who used a given form? In what context? and for what purposes?”85 The key here is the Sitz im Leben [setting in life] of any given tradition. To what extent does this relate to the inquiry of the present essay? It is evident that any text’s setting-in-life is central. The “form,” “context,” and “purposes” of any specific statements about work and creativity highlight form criticism’s interest in the social and political milieu responsible for creating the text. As we saw, Genesis 2–3 authorship (J), its date of composition (eventually [post-]exilic), and its Gattung (narrative on the origins) determine its understanding. Thus, although we are still with text criticism on the “lower level” of criticism (the textual level) the interrelation of the two levels must be emphasized. It is marked, for instance, by the use of metaphor, by which one thing (narratival) denotes another thing (ontological and 81.  See GenR. 65 and Rashi ad Ps. 80:14. 82. J. Coert Rylaarsdam, “Editor’s Foreword” to Gene M. Tucker, Form Criticism of the Old Testament, Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). 83.  See J. Maxwell Miller, The Old Testament and the Historian, Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). 84.  See Norman Perrin, What Is Redaction Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969). See also n. 71, below. 85.  Rylaarsdam, “Editor’s Foreword” to Tucker, Form Criticism, v.

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political) without losing trace of the former. Metaphor is more than decorative. It is enticement to dialectic. Metaphor is like a simile/parable in need of being deciphered. Eve’s dialogue with the serpent, for instance, is a case in point. All elements in this narrative are set in mutual opposition. Does the serpent speak the language of Eve, or Eve the language of the serpent? Is the serpent itself to be interpreted as incarnation of evil, or is it created “good” like the rest of creatures but choosing to do harm to the humans and to the whole creation? Is Eve gullible by female nature, by naïveté or by guile? Is she representative of femininity or just of human weakness? Is Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit after his wife (3:6) a sign of individual stupidity or is it conspiratorial? In fact, in all cases both contrasting terms must be maintained. Adam is both naïve and cunning. Eve is both gullible and receptive. Her femininity involves warm welcoming but here her receptivity harbors a hidden agenda. Evidently, reading dialectically the characters of Adam, Eve, and the serpent in Genesis 3 works decisively as regards human ontology according to J. As for “Tradition History,” as we saw, it becomes center stage with Gerhard von Rad and his Theology of the Old Testament86: the present is illuminated by events of the past (typology—an “academically abominable” category, according to Timothy K. Beal87). There is historically an ongoing reassessment of Israel’s “creeds.” Clearly, with the “Tradition History and the Old Testament,”88 we are on our way to a full dialectical criticism. We now have stepped from level one to level two, that is, to interpretation. What this entails is a dialectical approach that takes seriously the category of narrative by contrast with historiography. The emphasis rests squarely on the symbolism/metaphorism of the text: an invitation, as I said, to make sense of inner or outer oppositions. Work is clearly a case in point. On this second level of criticism, that is, the interpretative, psychology is eminently a science of interpretation and a powerful instrument for our quest (see part 2). As Andrew Kille writes, “psychological analysis of biblical images and symbols . . . can highlight archetypal commonalities and psychic valences of such images as the tree of life or the primordial garden.”89 We note the succession, image, symbol, archetype, and psychic valence, to which we add, dialectic. 86. Rad, Theology of the Old Testament. 87.  Timothy Beal, “Ideology and Intertextuality: Surplus of Meaning and Controlling the Means of Production,” in Reading between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell, 27–39 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 31. 88. Rast, Tradition History and the Old Testament. 89. Kille, Psychological, 14.



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Finally, we turn to “Postmodern Biblical Criticism.”90 A. K. M. Adam starts his book with a humorous citation of the Lenbachhaus Gallery in Munich: “You can think the opposite.”91 Postmodern biblical criticism comes as a refusal of systematic resolutions to the ambiguities of the text. As Adam says, “words and symbols are in every case ambiguous”—and the reader must keep it this way.92 Here, the central issue is “How do we know?”93 Postmodern interpreters promote a radical “hermeneutics of suspicion” and use philosophy as a discourse of demystification. The interpreter is center stage, especially as far as so-called “deconstruction” à la Jacques Derrida is concerned. Here, as Adam says, “differences [inner oppositions] are not natural or given, but are made. . . . [Something] exists by virtue of our distinguishing it from other things.”94 This idea is in the background of my remark in part 2 about the tree that falls in the forest without a human witness.95 Deconstruction concludes, “There is no things there, only not-the-other-things. In a deconstructive nutshell, there is no presence that escapes being entangled in the infinitely vast tangle of differential relations.”96 Granted, but when deconstruction concludes, “Meaning is what we make of texts, not an ingredient in texts,”97 the contrast seems exaggerated. Is text an empty form conveying no meaning? In terms of mediated communication, if we substitute text with a beloved person, is love based only on the fact that the “significant other” (significant!) is distinguished from all other (wo)men? In that case, anyone would do, for anyone is unique. Why is the loved one selected in the first place, if it is not because of perceived intrinsic quality? True, the word “perceived” here is what deconstruction would emphasize, but perception is not necessarily subjective. Objectivity is not principally ruled out. Is not Gadamer’s “fusion of the horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) a better understanding of the process of interpretation or of loving relationship? Dialectical criticism stands rather on the latter side.98 90.  See A. K. M. Adam, Postmodern Biblical Criticism, Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). 91.  Ibid., xiv. 92.  Ibid., 7. 93.  But, after Wilhelm Dilthey, Ricoeur thinks that the central question is not this one, but “it is rather to ask: what is the mode of Being of that being who cannot exist without understanding?” (Exegesis, 190). See Dilthey, “Origine et développement de l’herméneutique,” in Le monde de l’Esprit, 1:319–340 (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1947). 94. Adam, Postmodern, 29. 95.  See n. 97 in part 1 and the text it references. 96. Adam, Postmodern, 30. 97.  Ibid., 33. As to the latter limb of the statement, Ricoeur’s echo in Exegesis, 83–84 is more restricted. He says, “[A]n individuality can only be grasped through comparison and contrast” (my trans.). 98. Gadamer’s Horizontverschmelzung would gain still more credibility with the adoption of the Maharal of Prague’s tripartite pattern with the tertium quid, the middle third of the field where the

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We thus arrive at the end of this short review of modern and postmodern methodological criticisms and of the liberating role of dialectical interpretation in that concert. In every case, as Paul Ricoeur says, “Every tradition lives by grace of interpretation, and it is at this price that it continues, that is, remains living.”99

divine and the human meet, but without confusion. See n. 43 in part 1 and the text it references. See also my “A propos de l’herméneutique de Paul Ricoeur” in Paul Ricoeur, Myriam Revault d’Allonnes et François Azouvi, eds., Cahiers de l’Herne. Paris: Ed. de l’Herne, 2004, 120–124. (See in the same “Cahier,” Richard Kearney, “Entre soi-même et un autre: l’herméneutique dialectique de Ricoeur,” 205–18.) 99.  Conflict, 27 (in the French original, 31).

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Index of Interpreted Biblical Texts

Genesis 1:1–2:4, 39 1:2, 39 1:21, 38n147 2–3, 17, 79, 85n25 2:7–8, 39 2:10–14, 75n86 2:15, 11n27, 54, 95 2:16–17, 24, 31, 73, 55, 56, 83, 99 2:19–20, 27n97 2:21–23, 17, 24, 82n14 2:24, 28n101 3:1, 57 3:4–5, 40, 57, 72 3:16, 82 3:17–20, 40, 20n71, 32n120, 63, 80, 96 3:22–23, 32, 32n119, 80, 98 4:17–22, 21n79 6:5, 80 17:8, 30n109

Leviticus 13:14, 25n91 25:23, 92n43 25:33, 61n43

Exodus 1, 20n74 2:20–21, 31 4:24–26, 84, 83n17 13:6, 25n91 21:24, 91 34:29–33, 84

Ruth, 85

Numbers 2:31, 87 5:11–31, 96 12, 89 13–14, 87, 88 16:3, 89 22:20–22, 84n19 24:1–9, 86, 84 Deuteronomy 6:4, 54n12 8:3, 96 23:4–6, 86 24:1, 94, 95 26:53–65, 66n60 30:20, 93n48

1 Kings 8:27-30, 85

121

122

Index of Interpreted Biblical Texts

Isaiah 28:21, 21n77 28:24–26, 11n27 43:12–13, 68 52:7, 74 59:15, 24

Malachi 2:13–14, 94n50

Jeremiah 1:10, 7n11 31:31–34, 68n65

Proverbs 2:10, 94n50 30:19–20, 31

Daniel 7, 57 11:34, 35

Job 2:3, 68n65, 69 3:3, 66n60 28, 45

Index of Jewish Traditional Literature Cited

ABBREVIATIONS b. = Talmud of Babylon y. = Talmud of Jerusalem g. = Gemara

m. = Mishna t. [Tosefta tractates]

TALMUDIC DOCUMENTS Berakoth, 96n54 Shabbat, 93n45 Pesahim, 22 Yoma, 96 Taanit, 62n43 Hagiga, 66 Sotah, 96 Yebamot, 21n78, 94n50

Nedarim, 93n48, 9n20, 51n8 Kidushin, 51n8 Baba Bathra, 30n71 Baba Metsia, 96n54 Sanhedrin, 94n50 Tamid, 66 Abot de Rabbi Nathan [ARN], 11n28 23n86

MIDRASHIC DOCUMENTS Genesis Rabba [GenR.], 65n58 Leviticus Rabba [LevR.], 55n15 Mat. Kehunah [Matnoth Kehunah] = commentary in Mid. R. on Torah, 73n77, 89, 92, 93 Mek[ilta] bahodeš, 17n59 Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer [PRE], 6n7

Pirqe Avot [PA], 11n28, 12n29, 24, 68n62, 68n70, 71n75, 72n76, 73n81, 77n1, 99n64, 101n76, 112 Siddur, 31n114 Sifra, 25n91, 68n63 Sifré, 42n163 68n63 123

124

Index of Jewish Traditional Literature Cited

DEAD SEA SCROLLS CD = The “Damascus Document,” 94n50

Index of Names Cited

(Rabbi) Abba Areka [Rav] (160–247), 96n54 (Rabbi) Abbahu (ca. 279–320), 65n58 Abel, Olivier, 99n65, 107 (Rabbi) Abraham B. Shmuel [Abulafia] (1240–1292), 28n102 Ackerman, J. S., 8n19, 111 Adorno, Gretel, 107 Adorno, Theodor, 16, 16n52, 18n60, 19n63, 33n124, 39n148, 41, 42n160, 42n161, 44n170, 45n180, 45n183, 46n186, 46n190, 47n195, 71, 71n72, 107, 117 (Rabbi) Akiba (ca. 50–132), 51n8 Almayer, 55n18, 109 Amihay, Aryeh, 86n29, 107 Anderson, Bernard W., 5n2, 115 Antiochus IV, 35 Aqeda, 86n29 Aragon, Louis (1897–1982), 107 Arapesh, 15n48 Arendt, Hannah, 41, 71n73, 107 Aristotle, 29, 9n21, 79n5, 79n6, 107 Armenia, 6n7 Atkinson, C. F., 115 Atkinson, Kate, 92n42 107 Atrahasis, 9, 9n22 (Saint) Augustine, 56n20, 70n70, 107

Auschwitz, 19n63, 37n144, 88, 112 Auster, Paul, 66n60, 107 Aveling, Edward, 114 Azouvi, François, 105n98, 107, 116 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626), 16n51, 107 Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975), 11, 41, 8n19, 12n29, 43n164, 61, 61n41, 61n42, 61n43, 62n44, 69, 73, 82, 107, 114 Balaam, 86, 84n19, 86n28 Barnes, Hazel E., 97n58, 117 Barth, Karl (1886–1968), 38 Baskin, Wade, 25n91, 114 Bass, Alan, 43n166, 109 Baumgartner, W., 13n37, 108 Beal, Timothy K., 104n87, 108 Beauchamp, Paul (1924–2001), 32n120, 73n77, 91, 108 Bechtel, Lyn, 69, 96, 100, 97n55, 97n58, 108 Becker, Ernest (1924–1974), 18n62, 33n124, 34n129, 47n195, 50, 58, 59, 60, 61n38, 61n39, 73, 73n77, 73n79, 73n80, 108 Beckett, Samuel (1906–1989), 66 Van Beethoven, Ludwig (1770–1827), 54 125

126

Index of Names Cited

Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940), 41, 22n81, 28n102, 33n124, 44n170, 44n172, 47n194, 53, 79n4, 81n11, 96, 96n53, 108, 117 Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), 10n24, 19n65, 39n151, 45n183, 108 Berlin, 86 Berman, Israel V., 100, 118 Black, John S., 5n1, 118 Blamey, Kathleen, 17n58, 116 Bloch, Ernst (1885–1977), 15, 16, 15n49, 16n50, 75, 108 Bloom, Harold, 8n19, 12n35, 108 Boehme, Jacob (1575–1624), 36n139, 81, 108 Bostock, Anna, 58n27, 116 Bourdieu, Pierre, 37n144, 78, 108 Bovon, François, 35n134, 108 Boyarin, Daniel, 13n39, 108 Braun, H., 53n10, 109 Britt, Brian, 22n81, 109 Bromiley, Geoffrey, 5n21, 112 Brown, Norman, 21n76, 32n123, 34n129, 36n139, 46n189, 59n33, 109 Brueggemann, Walter, 6n8, 118 Brunner, Emil, 16, 109 Bruno, Giordano, 36n139, 90n37 Buber, Martin, 23n85, 43n165, 73, 91, 109, 115 Bullock, Marcus, 28n102, 108 Buttrick, George A., 9n20, 115 Calvin, Jean, 11n28, 28n102, 99, 109 Calvino, Italo, 102, 109 Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639), 16n51 Carlyle, Thomas(1795–1881), 9n21, 109 Cassuto, Umberto (1883–1951), 97n58, 109 Castellino, G. R., 11, 11n27, 109 Dr. Charles Kinbole, 31n115 Chi Chung Lee, Archie, 101n75 Claudel, Paul (1868–1955), 28n101 Cole, Henry, 28n102, 113

Conrad, Josef (1857–1924), 55n15, 55n18, 109 Constantine, David, 55n19, 119 Copernicus, Nicholas (1473–1543), 50, 51n3, 87 Croatto, Severino (1930–2004), 101n75 Crüsemann, Frank (1938–), 6, 6n6, 109 de Cusa, Nicolas (1401–1494), 36n139, 60n37, 66n59, 90 Dalley, Stephanie, 9n22, 109 Damrosch, David, 8n18, 9, 113 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882), 50, 68, 50n2, 51n3, 67n61, 87, 109 Davis, Madeleine, 59n31 Dermange, François, 11n28 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 43n166, 44n170, 105, 114 Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911), 105, 109 Doctorow, E. L., 21n75, 109 Doran, Robert, 14n43, 118 Dorian Grey, 33 Dostoevsky, Feodor (1821–1881), 8n19, 100, 108, 114 Doukhan, Abigail, 22n83, 109 Driver, Samuel (1846–1914), 97n58 (Meister) Eckhart (1260–1328), 29n105, 114 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), 52, 54 (Rabbi) Eleazar ben Azariah (1st c. CE), 22n83 (Rabbi) Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (1st–2nd c.), 6n7, 94n50 Elliott, John H., 47n191, 110 Emerson, Caryl, 8n19, 12n29, 43n164, 61n41, 61n42, 73n78, 107, 108, 110, 114 Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895), 18n61, 34n131, 45n180 Engnell, Ivan (1906–1964), 13, 13n3814n43, 20n72, 75, 110 Ereshkigal, 98n62



Index of Names Cited 127

Erikson, Erik (1902–1994), 33n124, 97n58 Faust, 27n96, 76, 119 Fewell, Danna N., 104n87, 108 Finkelstein, L., 68n63 Fishbane, Michael, 8n19, 110 Flack, Roberta, 45n179, 110 Freedman, Maurice, 23n85, 110 Freud, Anna (1895–1982), 32n123 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 32n123 Friedrich, Gerhard, 9n21, 108 Friedländer, Saul, 44n172, 115, 111 Fromm, Erich (1900–1980), 24n89, 27n96, 28n101, 36n140, 41, 44, 44n174, 44n175, 69, 82, 110 Frye, Northrop (1912–1991), 20n74, 111 Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002), 14n43, 105, 79n4, 105n98, 111 Galilee, Galileo (1564–1642), 50 Gawlick, Mechthild, 91n40, 111, 112 Gerth, H. H., 40n152, 118 Gibran, Kalil (1883–1931), 43n164, 111 Gisel, Pierre, 17n58, 19n64, 21n75, 24n89, 29n108, 37n141, 57n22, 58, 58n28, 69n66, 70, 111 Glazer, Nahum, 20n73, 115 von Goethe, Johann W. (1749–1832), 27n96, 53, 55n19, 119 Goldberg, Baruch, 100n66, 112 Graham Struthers, Leslie, 29n106, 111 Grene, David, 117 Gros Louis, Kenneth R. R., 8n19, 111 Gruber, Isaiah, 13n37, 111 Grundfest Schoepf, Brooke, 52n9, 113 Gunkel, Hermann (1862–1932), 5n1, 79n58, 103 Habermas, Jürgen (1929–), 22n81, 41, 42, 42n162, 44n172, 45n184, 60, 72, 111, 115 Hallo, W. W., 43n165, 117

(Rabbi) Hayim of Volozhyne [Reb Chaim Volozhiner] (1749–1821), 15n48 Hegel, Friedrich (1770–1831), 18, 18n60, 22, 22n80, 22n81, 24, 25, 26, 27, 27n94, 27n96, 29, 29n106, 30, 30n111, 34, 38n145, 41n155, 40, 45, 46n186, 47, 52, 63, 63n50, 71, 78, 80, 107, 114 Heinemann, Joseph H., 73n81, 107 Hesiod (8th–7th c.), 9n21, 111 Hess, Richard S., 10n23, 118 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 9n20, 111 (Rabbi) Hillel (1st c. CE), 51n8, 66 Hippolytus (170–235?), 90 Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 35 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), 33n124, 60n37, 77n1, 111, 112 Hodgson, Peter, 41n155, 111 Hofmann, Michael, 21n78, 112 Holquist, Michael, 8n19, 12n29, 107, 108 Hollingdale, R. J., 24n87, 43n166, 115 Hong, Edna H. and Howard V., 57n23, 112 Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973), 41, 42, 42n160, 45n183, 47n195, 112 (Rabbi) Hoshaiah (d. 350 CE), 22n83 Hull, F. C., 59n32, 112 Hulot-Kantor, Robert, 16n52, 107 Idel, Moshe, 77n1, 112 Ihde, Don, 116 Institute for Social Research, 41, 42 (Rabbi) Isaak ben Solomon Luria [The Ari] (1534–1572), 18n62, 29n105 (Rabbi) Ishmael ben Elisha (1st–2nd c.), 25n91 Ishtar, 18n62 Jacobson, Claire, 52n9, 113 Jacobson, Evelyn M., 33n124, 117 Jacobson, Manfred R., 33n124, 117

128

Index of Names Cited

James, William (1842–1910), 42, 112 Jameson, Fredric (1934–), 10n23, 16n51, 25n91, 28n100, 36n138, 50n2, 52n9, 55n15, 63n50, 100n68, 112, 118 Janus, 69, 82 Jeanrond, W. G., 90, 112, 116 Jeffcott, Edmund F. N., 42n160, 107, 112 Jeffries, Stuart, 41n158, 112 Jennings, Michael W., 28n102, 47n194, 112 Jeremias, Jörg (1900–1979), 112 Jesus Christ (7 BCE?–30 CE?), 14n43, 18, 27n99, 32n119, 32n120, 33, 43, 44, 47n192, 58, 51n7, 51n8, 77n1, 79, 91, 91n38, 92, 93, 93n48, 94, 94n50, 95, 95n51, 96, 113 Jethro, 84n21 Job, 9n20, 38n147, 44n177, 45, 69, 66n60, 68n65, 71n75, 81n9, 83n15, 88n33, 109, 116 Johnston, Walter H., 39n106, 111 Jonas, Hans (1903–1993), 18, 112 Josephus (37–100), 6n4, 86n29 Jung, Carl (1875–1961), 59n32, 72n76, 83n17, 87, 97n58 112 Kabala, 29n105 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), 21n78, 29n107, 44n170, 112 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 28n100, 50n2, 75, 112 Kaufmann, Walter (1921–1980), 24n87, 109, 115 Kearney, Richard, 105n98, 112 Kee, Howard C., 6n7 Kellner, Douglas, 43n166, 112 Kepler, Johannes (1571–1650), 50 Kierkegaard, Søren (1813–1855), 40n152, 41n155, 57, 57n23, 59, 63, 112 Kille, Andrew, 72n76, 83n17, 104n89, 100, 104, 112 Kimmel, Michael S., 15n48, 114 Kittel, Gerhard (1888–1948), 9n21, 108

Klein, Ralf, 103, 102n80, 113 Knight, Paul, 15n49, 108 Koehler, Ludwig (1880–1956), 36n37, 112, 113, 118 Koyré, Antoine, 36n139, 108 Kramer, Kenneth P., 91n40, 111, 112 Kramer, S. N. (1897–1990), 7n10, 115 Kraus, Karl (1874–1936), 53 Kristeva, Julia, 8n19, 113 LaCocque, André (1927–), 7n13, 19n66, 34n129, 39n149, 94n49, 101n76, 80, 113, 116 Van der Leeuw, Gerhardus (1890– 1950), 15n48, 118 Lenbachhaus, 105 Lenkrad, 22n81, 111 Leonard-Fleckman, Mahri, 86n26, 86n27, 86n28, 113 Levi, Primo (1919–1987), 37n144, 117 Leviathan, 38, 60n37, 77n1 Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–1995), 6n5, 16, 16n53, 17, 17n58, 19, 19n65, 19n67, 19n68, 20n69, 22n81, 22n83, 23, 23n84, 24, 24n88, 25, 25n91, 27n98, 28n101, 33n126, 39, 43n165, 54, 72, 77, 82, 85, 111, 113, 114, 115 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009), 31n144, 52n9, 102n77, 113 Lingis, Alphonso, 16n53, 113 M. Llewely Davies (1861–1944), 45n180 (Rabbi) J. Loew [The Maharal of Prague] (16th c.), 14n43, 71n75, 77n2, 105n98, 113 Longfellow, H (1807–1882), 78 Luke, David, 119 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 30n102, 57n23, 68n63, 75n87, 75, 110, 113 Maimonides [Rambam] (1135–1204), 72n76, 93n48, 99n64, 113 Malraux, André (1901–1976), 70n71, 113



Index of Names Cited 129

Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979), 19n64, 21n75, 27, 27n94, 27n96, 30, 32n119, 32n121, 32n123, 34, 35n132, 41, 41n157, 41n158, 42, 43n166, 43n167, 44, 44n170, 44n176, 46n188, 48n197, 50, 50n1, 51n6, 54n13, 59, 60n35, 74, 74n85, 112, 113 Marduk, 10n23 Marshall, D. J., 14n43, 111 Marx, Karl (1818–1883), 2, 3, 4, 8, 10n23, 13, 18, 18n61, 25n91, 27n96, 30, 30n112, 34, 34n130, 34n131, 35, 35n134, 36, 36n138, 36n140, 37, 37n142, 37n144, 38, 40, 40n152, 40n153, 40n154, 41, 44, 44n174, 44n175, 45, 45n180, 45n181, 45n183, 45n184, 46n188, 46n189, 46n190, 47, 52n9, 57n23, 71, 74, 78, 81, 81n12, 110, 112, 113, 114 Maslow, Abraham (1908–1970), 33n124, 51n8 Matthews, Bruce, 23n84, 117 Maus, Marcel (1872–1950), 37n144, 77n2, 114 Mauthausen, 31n144 May, Rollo (1909–1994), 33n124, 73, 114 McCarthy, Thomas, 42n162, 111 McEntire, Mark, 38n147, 114 McGee, Vern W., 8n19, 108 McLaughlin, Kate, 12n30, 116 Mead, Margaret (1901–1978), 15n48, 114 Meisel, Perry, 25n91, 109 Menzies, Allan, 5n1, 118 Mesopotamia, 2, 8, 6n7, 9n22, 10n23, 11n26, 28n102, 71n75, 85n25, 98n62, 109, 115 Meyers, Erich M., 6n7, 30n109, 114, 117 Miller, Arthur (1915–2005), 7n13, 114 Miller, J. Maxwell, 103n83, 114 Milligan, Martin, 28n101, 114 Mills, C. Wright, 40n152, 118 Milton, John (1608–1674), 55n19, 114 Miriam, 89

Mitchell, Stephen, 98n62, 116 More, Thomas (1478–1535), 16n51 Morgenstern, Julian, 10n23, 27n97, 32n119, 47n191, 114 Morrow, Bradford, 59n31, 116 Morson, Garry, 43n164, 61, 61n41, 61n42, 73n78, 110, 114 Moses, 14n43, 22n81, 23n85, 33, 35n134, 51n5, 60n36, 83n17, 84n20, 84n21, 84, 85, 86n29, 88, 89, 94, 110 Mount, Ferdinand, 9n20, 114 Mowinckel, Sigmund (1884–1965), 103, 115 Müller-Doohm, Stephen, 42n162, 115 Munich, 105 Musil, Robert (1880–1942), 12n32, 44n172, 115 Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945), 35 Nabokov, Vladimir (1899–1977), 31, 31n115, 115 (Rabbi) Nahman of Bratzlav (1772– 1810), 18n62 Neanderthal, 70 Neusner, Jacob (1932–2016), 43n168, 46n189, 55n16, 55n19, 65n58, 68n63, 71n75, 81n10, 93n48, 100n66, 115 Newton, Isaac (1643–1727), 50 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), 35, 43n166, 24n87, 25n90, 32n119, 34n127, 35n134, 35n135, 35n136, 37n143, 41n158, 43n165, 50, 54, 54n13, 55, 55n15, 55n16, 55n17, 61n42, 64n53, 68n63, 73n78, 115 Nin, Anais, 112 Noah, 7n10, 10n23, 60n36, 85n25, 86n29 North, Robert, 9n20, 115 Noth, Martin (1902–1968), 5n2, 13n41, 110 Oedipus, 50, 51, 58n27, 60, 79n6, 102n77, 117 Okure, Teresa, 101n75

130

Index of Names Cited

Origen (185? –254?), 90 (Rabbi) Otniel B. Kenaz, 95n52 Palestine, 6n7 Patte, Daniel, 101n75, 115 (St.) Paul, 16n51, 32n119, 47n193, 55, 58, 71, 74n83, 80n7, 89n36 Pearson, Roger, 401n153 Pedersen, Johannes (1883–1977), 8n17, 11n26, 29n104, 55n18, 115 Pellauer, David, 7n13, 12n30, 113, 116 Perlitt, Lothar, 6n6, 109, 112 Perrin, Norman (1920–1976), 103n84, 115 Perrot, Nell, 85n25, 115 Persian Gulf, 6n7 Pharaoh, 20n74, 37, 37n143 Philo (20 BCE–50 CE), 24n89, 85n25, 115 Piaget, Jean (1896–1980), 97n58 Plaice, Neville, 15n48, 108 Plaice, Stephen, 108 Plato (428–348), 53, 79n5 Plotinus (205? –270), 79n5 Pritchard, James B. (1909–1997), 7n10, 111 Prometheus, 59 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809–1865), 16n51, 30, 115 Putnam, Hilary, 43n165, 55n19, 115 Quelch, H., 30n112, 109 (Rabbi) David Qimchi (Redaq [1160– 1235]), 70n70 Rabba (1st half of 4th c. CE), 94n50 von Rad, Gerhard (1901–1971), 7n12, 11n27, 14n43, 43n169, 56n21, 58n27, 59, 115 Rahab, 38 Rank, Otto (1884–1939), 16n55, 33n124, 37n143, 43n169, 56n21, 58n27, 59, 110, D01.201, 115 Rast, Walter, 79n4, 116

Rav (see above Rabba Areka), 96n54 Reagan, Charles E., 101n74, 116, 118 (Rabbi) Redaq. See David Qimchi Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957), 58n27, 116 Reichert, Victor, 44n177, 116 Reines, C. W., 65n57, 116 Rendtorff, Rolf, 5n2, 12n32, 70n68, 116 Revault d’Allonnes, Myriam, 105n98, 107, 116 Rexroth, Kenneth (1905–1982), 59n31, 116 Richardson, Mervyn E., 13n37, 108, 113, 118 Ricoeur, Paul (1913– 2005), 7n13, 10n24, 12n30, 14n43, 17n58, 21n79, 22n81, 28n101, 35n134 39n149, 39n150, 50, 51n3, 60n36, 61n43, 62n47, 102, 106, 81n9, 92n42, 93n46, 93n47, 98n61, 99n65, 100n70, 100n71, 101n74, 102n77, 102n79, 105n93, 105n97, 105n98, 107, 112, 113, 116, 118 Rike, J. L., 93n46 Rilke, Rainer M. (1875–1926), 98n62, 116 Robertson, David, 66n60, 101, 101n72, 101n73, 107, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118 Rogerson, John, 6n7, 30n109, 114, 117 Rosenberg, David, 8n19, 108 Rosenblatt, Samuel, 112 Rosenzweig, Franz (1886–1929), 20n73, 43n165, 111, 117 Roth, Michael S., 37n144 Roth, Philip, 37n144 Roudiez, Leon S., 8n19, 113 Rouiller, Grégoire, 35n134, 113, 116, 117 Rylaarsdam J. Coert (1906–1998), 103n82, 103n85, 117 (Gaon) Saadia ben Yosef (ca.885–942), 22, 22n82, 111



Index of Names Cited 131

(Marquis) de Sade D. A. F. (1740– 1814), 32n123 Sarna, Nahum, 10n23, 10n24, 10n25, 117 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980), 17, 117 Satan, 38n146, 64, 66 Saudi Arabia, 93 de Saussure, Ferdinand (1857–1913), 25n91, 92n42, 109 Saussy, Haun, 25n91, 109 Schelling, Friedrich W. S. S. (1775– 1854), 23n84, 117 Schiller, Friedrich (1864–1937), 21n76, 117 Schmid, Hans H., 8n15, 117 Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin, 42n160, 112 Schoepf, Brooke G., 52n9, 113 Scholem, Gershom (1897–1982), 29n105, 33n124, 117 Schwegler, Albert, 78n3, 117 Scullion, J. J., 7n13, 118 Seelye, J. H., 90n37, 118 van Seeters, John, 6, 6n4, 12n32, 70n68, 119 Serpent, 23, 24, 37, 40, 7n14, 41n157, 57, 63, 70, 99, 103, 104 Shalom (d. 1492), 13n39 Sheed, F. J., 70n70, 107 Shepherd, Ray, 51n8 (Rabbi) Shimon bar Yohai (2nd c. CE), 68n63 J. de Silentio. See Kierkegaard Sisyphus, 26, 40, 81 Smend, Rudolf (1851–1913), 11, 17, 117 Smilévitch, Eric, 8n15, 117 Smith, Adam, 117 Socrates (470? –399), 79n5 Solnit, Rebecca, 42n162, 113 Solomon, 5, 6, 7, 17, 18n62, 24n89, 85, 85n25, 102 Sophocles (496–406?), 79n6, 117 Speiser, E. A., 68n65 Spinoza, Baruch (1632–1677), 27n96 Spivak, Gayatri C., 44n170, 109

Stalker, D. M. G., 115 Stamm, Johann J., 13n37, 108, 113, 118 Starets, 72n76 Steiner, Uwe, 22n81, 79n4, 118 Steinsaltz, Adin, 100n66, 119 Steuer, Daniel, 42n162, 115 Stewart, David, 101n74, 116, 118 Strachey, James, 15n46, 32n123, 36n139, 46n189, 60n36, 110 Tanninim, 38n146, 38n147 Tehom, 38n146, 38n147 Thomas, D. Winton, 13n41, 110 Thompson, Derek, 118 Tiedemann, Rolf, 16n52, 107 Titanic, 37n144 Tolstoy, Leon (1828–1910), 10n23 Tontons Macoutes, 37 Tournay, Jean (1925–1942), 37n144 Tracy, David, 93n46, 112 Trier, 16 Trump, Donald, 35, 48n196 Tsumura, D. Toshio, 10n23, 118 Tuck, Richard, 60n37, 111 Tucker. Gene M., 103n82, 103n85, 117 Tyson, Alan, 36n139, 110 Tzaddiq, 72n76 Underwood, James A., 44n172 Verne, Jules (1828–1905), 16n51 Viertel, John, 45n184 Voltaire (1694–1778), 19 Wallace, William, 30n111, 111 Walsh, J. T., 10n23, 118 Warrender, Howard, 60n37, 112 Weber, Max (1864–1920), 2, 40n152, 41n159, 118 Weinsheimer, J., 14n43, 111 Weiss, I. H., 68n63 Weiss, J., 72n76, 117 Wellhausen, Julius (1844–1918), 5n1, 118

132

Index of Names Cited

Westermann, Claus (1909–2000), 7, 7n13, 12n30, 12n34, 15n44, 35, 35n132, 44n171, 70n70, 118 White, Hayden, 14n43, 24n89, 28n100, 117, 118 Whitney, Jr., K. William, 5n1, 112 Wilde, Oscar (1856–1900), 33 Wilkinson Duran, Nicole, 101n76 Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983), 62, 66n60, 78, 118 Winkler, Michael, 22n81 Winnett, Frederick V., 7n13, 118 Winnicott, Clare, 63n51 Winnicott, Donald W. (1896–1971), 14n43, 16n55, 59n31, 61n39, 118, 119 van Wolde, Ellen, 97, 97n57, 119 Wolff, Hans W., 6, 6n6, 6n8, 108, 112, 119

Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941), 45n180, 66, 119 Wright Mills, C., 40n152, 119 Yam, 38n146 (Rabbenu) Yona (13th c.), 52 Zalta, Edward N., 29n105, 114 Zeus, 71n75 Zion, 5n2, 6, 6n3, 8, 74, 85n25, 92 Zipporah, 82, 84, 89 Ziusudra, 7n10 Zohar, 68n63, 77n1 Zola, Emile (1840–1902), 40n153, 119 Zornberg, Avivah G., 18n62, 87, 87n31, 88, 88n32, 88n34, 89, 95n52, 102n77 (Rabbi) Zusya (18th c.), 23n85

About the Author

André LaCocque is professor emeritus of Hebrew Bible at Chicago Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois, and the founding director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Studies at CTS. He is the author of numerous books, including Ruth: A Continental Commentary, Esther Regina: A Bakhtinian Reading, Thinking Biblically with Paul Ricoeur, a trilogy on innocence in Genesis 1–11, and Jesus the Central Jew: His Times and People.

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