Experiencing Presence in the Second Temple Period: Revised and Updated Essays (Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology, 111) 9789042947061, 9789042947078, 9042947063

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C O N T R I BU T I O N S TO

BIBLICAL EXEGESIS & THEOLOGY

111

Angela Kim Harkins

Experiencing Presence in the Second Temple Period: Revised and Updated Essays

PEETERS

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD: REVISED AND UPDATED ESSAYS

CONTRIBUTIONS TO BIBLICAL EXEGESIS AND THEOLOGY SERIES EDITORS K. De Troyer (Salzburg) G. Van Oyen (Louvain-la-Neuve) ADVISORY BOARD Reimund Bieringer (Leuven) Lutz Doering (Münster) Mark Goodacre (Duke) Bas ter Haar Romeny (Amsterdam) Annette Merz (Groningen) Madhavi Nevader (St Andrews) Thomas Römer (Lausanne) Jack Sasson (Nashville) Tammi Schneider (Claremont)

Angela Kim Harkins

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD: REVISED AND UPDATED ESSAYS

PEETERS leuven – paris – bristol, 2022

ct

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. © 2022 — Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven ISBN 978-90-429-4706-1 eISBN 978-90-429-4707-8 D/2022/0602/16 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechan­ ical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are so many individuals who have helped to shape the ideas and thoughts that appear in this volume. First, my gratitude goes to my friends and conversation partners, many of whom have been involved in the “Religious Experience in Antiquity” and the “Mysticism, Esotericism, Gnosticism in Antiquity” program units of the Society of Biblical Literature, the CISSR (Bertinoro, Italy) and the Barton College Scholars Conversation, hosted by Rodney A. Werline: Luca Arcari, Giovanni Bazzana, Jung Choi, John Collins, Mary Rose D’Angelo, April D. DeConick, Daniel Falk, Frances Flannery, Mary Foskett, Matthew Goff, Maxine Grossman, G. Tony Keddie, Jonathan Klawans, Dominika Kurek-Chomycz, Harry Maier, Ari Mermelstein, Françoise Mirguet, Lawrence H. Schiffman, Colleen Shantz, Loren Stuckenbruck, Rod A. Werline, and Larry Wills. I have also learned so much from Eileen M. Schuller and her work on the Thanksgiving Hymns throughout the years. Kelley Coblentz Bautch has been an important mentor and treasured friend, and I have learned much from her areas of expertise and her kind generosity as a scholar. I appreciate too the supportive encouragement from pioneering scholars who work in emerging fields of inquiry into religious experiences: Armin Geertz, Richard Sosis, and Patrick McNamara. A significant number of the essays in this collection were produced during a sixteen-month fellowship funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement number 627536 RelExDSS FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IIF. I am grateful to the support that I received from the European Union, and from my research host, Professor Charlotte Hempel, of the University of Birmingham. I treasure the time spent in England during this fellowship when my son was small. I greatly admire Charlotte’s courage and tenacity in the field of Dead Sea Scrolls research. I could not have done this work without her encouragement and support. I am also deeply grateful to Kristin De Troyer who accepted this volume for the CBET series. Hayden G. Cowart and Sheila Boll offered valuable assistance in the editing of these essays and should be praised! I am grateful to Albrecht Doehnert at De Gruyter Press, Nicole Tilford at the SBL Press, and to the journals published by Sage and Brill, who granted permissions for the republication of the essays that appear in this volume. I also wish to thank Elisabeth Hernitscheck at Peeters for her

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careful preparation of this CBET volume and her valuable expertise. Her sharp eyes and efficient work has helped me immeasurably. I take full responsability for any remaining errors. In closing, I dedicate this work to my beloved husband, Franklin, and to our wonderful son, Joseph Siwoo-Kim Harkins. Joseph was only a twinkle in the eye when these ideas were percolating in my mind in 2011. In addition to my life-long love of reading, nothing has made me more aware of the religious experiences of a flesh-and-blood embodied self than the experiences of being a wife and mother. I could not have done any of this work without Franklin’s tireless love, gentle care, and daily encouragement. Together Franklin and Joseph remind me that no matter how dark the day, my life has been abundantly blessed by them. My heart is filled to the brim and overflowing. West Roxbury, MA, USA August 16, 2021

ABBREVIATIONS AB ABRL AcBib AOAT BA BibInt BZAW CBR CBET CBQ CBQMS ConBNT CSCO DCLS DJD DSD ECL EJL ExpTim FAT FC FRLANT HSM HTR HUCA IOQS JAAR JBL JECS JJS JPS JQR JR JSJ JSJSup

Anchor Bible Anchor Bible Reference Library Academia Biblica Alter Orient und Altes Testament Biblical Archaeologist Biblical Interpretation Series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Currents in Biblical Research Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology Catholic Biblical Quarterly Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series Coniectanea Biblica: Neotestamentica Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Dead Sea Discoveries Early Christianity and Its Literature Early Judaism and Its Literature Expository Times Forschungen zum Alten Testament Fathers of the Church Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Harvard Semitic Monographs Harvard Theological Review Hebrew Union College Annual International Organization of Qumran Studies Journal of the American Academy of Religion Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Early Christian Studies Journal of Jewish Studies Jewish Publication Society Jewish Quarterly Review Journal of Religion Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods Supplement Series

VIII JSNT JSNTSup JSOT JSP JSPSup JTS KEK LCL LHBOTS LNTS LSTS NovT NovTSup NTL NTOA NTS OBO OTL RB RevQ RSR SBLSS SCS SDSSRL SJ SJOT STDJ SUNT SVTP TANZ TBN TDNT TSAJ TUGAL VC VT WBC WMANT WTJ WUNT ZAW ZNW

abbreviations

Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series Journal of Theological Studies Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar über das Neue Testament Loeb Classical Library The Library of Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament Studies Library of New Testament Studies Library of Second Temple Studies Novum Testamentum Novum Testamentum Supplement Series New Testament Library Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus New Testament Studies Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Old Testament Library Revue biblique Revue de Qumran Religious Studies Review Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series Septuagint and Cognate Studies Studies in Dead Sea Scrolls & Related Literature Studia Judaica Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigraphica Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter Themes in Biblical Narrative Theological Dictionary of the New Testament Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen ­Literatur Vigiliae Christianae Vetus Testamentum Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Westminster Theological Journal Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I: Experiencing Presence through Mourning Prayers and Ritual Emotions  1. The Function of Prayers of Ritual Mourning in the Second Temple Period  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2. The Pro-social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer   .  .   3. A Phenomenological Study of Penitential Elements and their Strategic Arousal of Emotion in the Qumran Hodayot (1QH cols. 1[?]–8)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4. The Emotional Re-experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives found in the Admonition of the Damascus Document   .  .  .  .  5. Emotion and Law in the Book of Baruch  . . . . . . . . . . .   6. The Imaginative Experiencing of Psalm of Solomon 8 .  .  .  .  7. Ritualizing Jesus’ Grief at Gethsemane  . . . . . . . . . . . .   8. Sticky Emotions from Second Temple Prayers: A Study of Paul’s Grief in 2 Corinthians  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 25 51 71 95 115 133 159

Part II: Religious Experience of Spaces and the Exegetical Generation of New Texts   9. Experiencing the Solidity of Spaces in the Qumran Hodayot . 10. The Performative Reading of the Hodayot: The Arousal of Emotions and the Exegetical Generation of Texts   .  .  .  .  .  . 11. The Garden Space in Odes of Solomon 11 and the Reinvig oration of Memories about Paradise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. Religious Experience through the Lens of Critical Spatiality: A Look at Embodiment Language in Prayers and Hymns   .  .

187 203 219 245

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Information about the original publication of the selected contributions  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

INTRODUCTION This volume brings together a number of my essays that use integrative and interdisciplinary approaches to contribute new insights to the understanding of religious experience in ancient Judaism and Christianity. This line of inquiry applies the scholarly understanding of the mind and the body to the study of ancient material culture and texts.1 Building on the text-centered work that characterizes much of Second Temple studies, these essays seek to reintegrate ancient Jewish and Christian texts with various aspects of the flesh-and-blood experience of religion by using performance-based methods, ritual studies, integrative cognitive science approaches, and emotion studies.2 This volume aims to overcome the common mind–body dualism that dominates the study of ancient texts by offering ways to imagine the integrative phenomenological experience of these texts for ancient peoples.3 This reintegration of the mind and body Early and important studies of religious experience can be seen in the collections edited by April D. DeConick, Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, SS 11 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006); Frances Flannery, Colleen Shantz, and Rodney Alan Werline (ed.), Experientia, Volume 1: Inquiry into Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, SS 40 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2008); Colleen Shantz, Rodney A. Werline (ed.), Experientia, Volume 2: Linking Text and Experience (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012). The two Experientia volumes grew out of the work of the Religious Experience in Antiquity program unit of the Society of Biblical Literature. 2 Key studies that have informed these essays include Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); eadem, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Moshe Idel, “Mystical Techniques,” in Essential Papers on Kabbalah, ed. Lawrence Fine (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 438–94; Armin W. Geertz, Global Perspectives on Methodology in the Study of Religion,” MTSR 12 (2000): 49–73; Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 202–36; eadem, The Politics of Piety (Princeton University Press, 2005); Jeffery J. Kripal, “The Rise of the Imaginal: Psychical Research on the Horizon of Theory (Again),” RSR 22 (2007): 179–91; Amira Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Readers new to cognitive approaches should consult the important volume edited by Niki Kasumi Clements, Religion: Mental Religion, Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks (Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference USA, 2017). 3 This push to reintegrate the mind and body in biblical studies is well-described by Frances Flannery, “The Body and Ritual Reconsidered, Imagined, and Experienced,” in Experientia, Volume 1: Inquiry into Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, 13–18. 1

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is needed in the discipline of biblical studies, which often studies revelatory texts or prayers apart from the details of bodily states of trembling, collapsing, and ascent to otherworldly realms. More than twenty years ago, I began studying the Qumran Thanks­ giving Hymns (Hebr., hodayot), a collection of ancient Jewish prayers from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The largest scroll of these prayers was found in Cave 1 and several fragmentary copies were found in Cave 4. Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the study of ancient Jewish prayers had been long neglected. Approximately twenty percent of the manuscripts from the Qumran Scrolls can be classified as prayer texts. My doctoral dissertation on the Thanksgiving Hymns was based on historical-critical approaches of form criticism and redaction criticism, work that was published as a series of journal articles.4 I quickly became dissatisfied with these methods because I did not find that they helped me to understand the religion of the ancient Jews who prayed and transmitted these prayers. These lingering questions led me to seek out alternative ways of examining how the ancient Second Temple reader may have experienced these prayers. A turning point in my scholarship was my 2012 book on the Thanksgiving Hymns, which applied performance-based approaches and emotion studies to this prayer collection.5 That study begins with the observation that the flesh-and-blood experience of reading a prayer collection in a scroll apparatus guides the reading of the compositions in a serial rather than random order. Up to this point, much of the scholarship on the hodayot had focused on individual compositions or on smaller collections within the larger scroll, oftentimes drawing on exegetical points of interest with other canonical texts and the biblical psalms. The bulk of these studies targeted the compositions that were easily readable Angela Y. Kim, “Signs of Editorial Shaping of the Hodayot Collection: A Redactional Analysis of 1QHa–b and 4QHa–f,” Ph.D. dissertation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2003); eadem, “Authorizing Interpretation in Poetic Compositions in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Later Jewish and Christian Traditions,” DSD 10 (2003): 26–58; Angela Kim Harkins, “Observations on the Editorial Shaping of the So-called Community Hymns in 1QHa and 4Q427 (4QHa),” DSD 12 (2005): 233–56; eadem, “The Community Hymns Classification: A Proposal for Further Differentiation,” DSD 15 (2008): 121–54. 5 Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions, Ekstasis 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). Preliminary studies appeared as eadem, “Reading the Qumran Hodayot in Light of the Traditions Associated with Enoch,” The Journal Henoch: Studies in Judaism and Christianity from Second Temple to Late Antiquity 32 (2010): 359–400; eadem, “The Performative Reading of the Hodayot: The Arousal of Emotions and the Exegetical Generation of Texts,” JSP 21 (2011): 55–71. 4



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or that had the most interesting imagery. These studies presumed a modern reader’s freedom of random access, without regard for how an ancient reader might have experienced reading a scroll apparatus. My investigation of the possible effects of reading the Thanksgiving Hymns collection in series, as a scroll demands, also brought these prayers into conversation with other contemporary non-biblical visionary traditions, like the angel traditions from the Enochic writings. This research into the embodied religious experience of ancient Jewish prayers from Qumran then led me to investigate other ancient Jewish and Christian prayers and visions. The essays collected in this volume were written over the past twenty years for various conferences and invited workshops, and thus have been scattered in various conference proceedings. I have gathered them together in this volume to consolidate my work on the religious experience of ancient Jewish and Christian texts. These studies go well beyond traditional historical-critical approaches and introduce new methods used in the study of religion generally.6 In this introduction, I discuss the significant changes that have taken place in the past generation of scholarship, with attention to the changes in the humanities and social sciences, to explain why integrative approaches to the study of ancient texts have gained a foothold in recent years. Different questions have brought new energy to the study of the lived experience of these ancient texts.7 Changing Attitudes toward the Second Temple Period in the Twentieth Century Key events of the twentieth century have led to a clear shift in how scholars understand the time period after the return from exile in the late sixth century BCE until the Jewish Revolts in the early second century CE. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the Holocaust, and the formation of the modern state of Israel brought new awareness to the Jonathan Klawans illustrates well how religious studies can be applied to some of the most basic questions about the identification of the group associated with the Scrolls, “The Essene Hypothesis: Insights from Religion 101,” DSD 23 (2016): 51–78. 7 Some work has been done on the diversification of methodological approaches to the study of the Scrolls; see Maxine L. Grossman (ed.), Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls: An Assessment of Old and New Approaches and Methods (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); A.K. Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens; Carmen Palmer, Andrew R. Krause, Eileen Schuller, and John Screnock (ed.), Dead Sea Scrolls, Revise and Repeat: New Methods and Perspectives (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020). 6

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ideological bias against Judaism in the modern period and a new interest in the study of the Second Temple period. Prior to these events in the mid-twentieth century, the Second Temple period was long neglected by scholars who were motivated by a disciplinary search for origins. The field has experienced tremendous growth in recent decades due to the completion of the publication of the enormous cache of Dead Sea Scrolls. While the microfiche of all of the scrolls were made publicly available by the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA (USA) in 1991, the publication of the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series (DJD) gave all interested people, especially those without the requisite paleography skills needed to read the microfiches, a way to read the Dead Sea Scrolls. The DJD series, which began in 1951, has produced approximately thirty new critical editions since its revival in the 1990s.8 The explosion of the Emanuel Tov, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). The Seiyal Collection I, DJD 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Patrick W. Skehan et al., Qumran Cave 4. IV: Palaeo-Hebrew and Greek Biblical Manuscripts, DJD 9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell, Qumran Cave 4. V: Miqsat Ma’aśe Ha-Torah, DJD 10 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Harold Attridge et al., Qumran Cave 4. VIII: Parabiblical Texts, Part 1, DJD 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Eugene Ulrich et al., Qumran Cave 4. VII: Genesis to Numbers, DJD 12 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Magen Broshi et al., Qumran Cave 4. XIV: Parabiblical Texts, Part 2, DJD 19 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Eugene Ulrich et al., Qumran Cave 4. IX: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Kings, DJD 14 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); M. Baillet et al., Les ‘Petites Grottes’ de Qumran (Planches), DJD 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962 repr. 1997); M. Baillet et al., Les ‘Petites Grottes’ de Qumran (Textes), DJD 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962 repr. 1997); Joseph M. Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4. XIII: The Damascus Document (4Q266–273), DJD 18 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); P. Benoit et al., Les grottes de Murabbaat (Planches), DJD 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961 repr. 1997); P. Benoit et al., Les Grottes de Murabbaat (Textes), DJD 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961 repr. 1997); George Brooke et al., Qumran Cave 4. XVII: Parabiblical Texts, Part 3, DJD 22 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Hannah Cotton and Ada Yardeni, Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek Documentary Texts from Nahal Hever and Other Sites. With an Appendix Containing Alleged Qumran Texts, DJD 27 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Torleif Elgvin et al., Qumran Cave 4. XV: The Sapiential Texts, Part 1, DJD 20 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Mary Joan Winn Leith, Wadi Daliyeh. I: The Wadi Daliyeh Seal Impressions, DJD 24 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); James A. Sanders, The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11, DJD 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Eugene Ulrich et al., Qumran Cave 4. X: The Prophets, DJD 15 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Philip Alexander and Geza Vermes, Qumran Cave 4. XIX: Serekh Ha-Yahad and Related Texts, DJD 26 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Esther Eshel et al., Qumran Cave 4. VI: Poetical and Liturgical Texts, Part 1, DJD 11 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Florentino García Martínez et al., Qumran Cave 11. II: 11Q2–18, 11Q20–31, DJD 23 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Émile Puech, Qumran Grotte 4. XVIII: Textes Hébreux (4Q521–4Q528, 4Q576–4Q579); DJD 25 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Joseph Baumgarten et al., Qumran Cave 4. XXXV: Halakhic Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); James Charlesworth et al., Miscellaneous Texts from the

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DJD volumes, which took place under the leadership of the Israeli scholar Emanuel Tov, effectively decentralized the role that western biblical scholars had in the study of the Second Temple period. Many of these volumes, more than twenty, were dedicated to the publication of the extremely fragmentary scrolls from Cave 4. This massive publication output led to what Charlotte Hempel describes as a “democratization of the scholarly community” because it allowed for unprecedented access to the Dead Sea Scrolls by all who may be interested.9 Even so, the technical skills that were required for serious work on these fragmentary texts resulted in the creation of a specialized field of Dead Sea Scrolls studies. This area of study developed very distinctive characteristics and concerns given the specialized skills of philology and paleography needed to produce and use these critical editions. The scrolls from Cave 4, which constituted a significant portion of the DJD volumes, still require a good deal of technical expertise to interpret in a meaningful way. The effect of this demand of specialization could be perceived as a tendency toward insularity among Qumran scholars. Nevertheless, the overall energy and interest in these ancient Jewish texts from the late Second Judaean Desert, DJD 38 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Esther Chazon et al., Qumran Cave 4. XX: Poetical and Liturgical Texts, Part 2, DJD 29 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Stephen Pfann and Philip Alexander, Qumran Cave 4. Vol. XXVI: Cryptic Texts and Miscellanea, Part 1: Miscellaneous Texts from Qumran, DJD 36 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); John Strugnell et al., Qumran Cave 4. XXIV: 4QInstruction (Sapiential Texts), Part 2, DJD 34 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Devorah Dimant, Qumran Cave 4. XXI: Parabiblical Texts, Part 4: Pseudo-Prophetic Texts, DJD 30 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Émile Puech et al., Qumran Grotte 4. XXII: Textes Araméens, premiere partie 4Q529–549, DJD 31 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Dana M. Pike and Andrew C. Skinner, Qumran Cave 4. XXIII: Unidentified Fragments, DJD 33 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Eugene Ulrich et al., Qumran Cave 4. XVI: Psalms to Chronicles, DJD 16 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Douglas M. Gropp et al., Wadi Daliyeh II and Qumran Miscellanea, Part 2, DJD 28 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Shemaryahu Talmon et al., Qumran Cave 4. XVI: Calendrical Texts, DJD 21 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Emanuel Tov, Introduction and Indexes, DJD 39 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Frank Moore Cross et al., Qumran Cave 4. XII: 1–2 Samuel, DJD 17 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Émile Puech, Qumran Grotte 4. XXVII Textes en Araméen, deuxième partie, DJD XXXVII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009); Hartmut Stegemann and Eileen Schuller, translated by Carol Newsom, Qumran Cave 1.III: 1QHodayota: With Incorporation of 4QHodayota–f and 1QHodayotb, DJD 40 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009); Eugene Ulrich and Peter W. Flint, Qumran Cave 1.II: The Isaiah Scrolls: Part 1: Plates and Transcriptions, DJD 32.1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011); Eugene Ulrich and Peter W. Flint, Qumran Cave 1: II. The Isaiah Scrolls: Part 2: Introductions, Commentary, and Textual Variants, DJD 32.2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011). 9 Charlotte Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context, TSAJ 154 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 6.

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Temple period has invigorated related fields, such as Septuagint studies, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and the study of apocalypticism.10 In short, the field of biblical studies has been transformed by the discovery of the Scrolls in 1947, which brought to light many Second Temple texts, including a significant number of prayer texts that had been unknown previously. The growth of Second Temple studies generated a new interest in ancient Jewish prayers, a long-neglected category of writings that has grown considerably in the late-twentieth century.11 Historical–critical scholars of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century sought first Some of this can be seen in the most recent publications targeted at a broader readership: Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins, The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Timothy Michael Law, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); John J. Collins, The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); John J. Collins, Apocalypse, Prophecy, and Pseudepigraphy: On Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015); Jonathan Klawans and Lawrence M. Wills, The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Lawrence M. Wills, Introduction to the Apocrypha: Jewish Books in Christian Bibles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); Lawrence M. Wills, Introduction to the Apocrypha: Jewish Books in Christian Bibles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 11 Significant studies of Second Temple prayers include Peter W. Flint, The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, STDJ 17 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Daniel K. Falk, Daily, Sabbath, and Festival Prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ 27 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Rodney Werline, Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: The Development of a Religious Institution, EJL 13 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); Mark Boda, Praying the Tradition: The Origin and Use of Tradition in Nehemiah 9, BZAW 277 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999); Judith H. Newman, Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Atlanta: SBL Press, 1999); Richard J. Bautch, Developments in Genre between Post-exilic Penitential Prayers and the Psalms of Communal Lament, AcBib 7 (Atlanta: SBL, 2003); James L. Kugel, Prayers that Cite Scripture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Mark J. Boda, Daniel K. Falk, and Rodney A. Werline (ed.), Seeking the Favor of God, Vols. 1, 2, 3 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006, 2007, 2008); Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens; Jeremy Penner, Patterns of Daily Prayer in Second Temple Period, STDJ 104 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Mika S. Pajunen, The Land to the Elect and Justice for All: Reading Psalms in the Dead Sea Scrolls in Light of 4Q381 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); Stefan C. Reif and Renate Egger-Wenzel (ed.), Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions: Emotions Associated with Jewish Prayer in and Around the Second Temple Period, DCLS 26 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015); Mika S. Pajunen and Jeremy Penner (ed.), Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period, BZAW 486 (Berlin: De Gruyter Press, 2017); Judith H. Newman, Before the Bible: The Liturgical Body and the Formation of Scriptures in Early Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Daniel K. Falk and Angela Kim Harkins, “Early Jewish Prayer,” in Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters, 2nd edition, ed. Matthias Henze and Rodney A. Werline (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), 461–86; Angela Kim Harkins and Barbara Schmitz (ed.), Selected Studies on Deuterocanonical Prayers, CBET 103 (Leuven: Peeters, 2021). 10



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and foremost to understand the origins of ancient Israel, and so were disinterested in the Second Temple period. This was not, however, without ideological motivation to emphasize Christianity’s dramatic and unique emergence from its Jewish context. Samuel Balentine details how these ideological biases that were routine in the early-twentieth century hindered the study of ancient Jewish prayers for much of the twentieth century.12 In contrast, the close of the twentieth century decisively acknowledged the Second Temple period as a critical one for understanding ancient Jewish prayers and a renewed appreciation for the Jewishness of early Christianity.13 It should be noted that the discovery of the Scrolls post-dates many classic historical-critical studies of the early-twentieth century whose methods had long been applied to ancient Jewish prayer texts. The approach known as form criticism had been developed without the additional data of the ancient Jewish prayers from Qumran. Because it was largely based on the biblical psalter, the categories and types associated with this approach have proven to be inadequate in describing the breadth of ancient Jewish prayer collections.14 For example, Second The ideological biases behind the modern interpretation of ancient Jewish prayers have been well described by Samuel Balentine in Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 1–32. Johannes Hempel lamented the fact that prayers had been held in distain in a post-Enlightenment milieu, especially among scholars who preferred rational intellectualism over piety, see Johannes Hempel, Gebet und Frömmigkeit im Alten Testament (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1922), 3. Others have noted the ideological bias against praxisbased religion among scholars of ancient Judaism and Christianity; see Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Greenberg had also critiqued the scholarly bias in favor of ‘simple spontaneous heartfelt prayer’ and against formal prayers in his study, Biblical Prose Prayers as a Window to the Popular Religion of Ancient Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 39. Critique of the discipline’s longstanding prioritization of religious thought (teachings, doctrines, texts) over religious practices (rituals, rites, liturgy) has continued, especially in the past twenty years, largely as a result of the increased globalization of the study of religion which has led to the incorporation of scholarly perspectives from practice-based religious traditions like Islam. Here see the work of Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Phenomenological understandings of religion from an embodied and integrative perspective have emerged to balance a longstanding preoccupation with texts alone, see Armin Geertz 2010 and 2000. 13 An important study of the changes in the scholarly accounts of the Second Temple period that bridges the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century is Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1986). First published in 1986, it was republished in 2006 and is now in its third edition (2014). 14 Herman Gunkel and Joachim Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen: die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels, Göttinger Handkommentar zum Alten Testament (Göttingen: Ergänzungsbd., 1933; repr. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966); Gunkel, The Psalms: A 12

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Temple prayers embedded in narrative were routinely severed from their larger literary context, thereby stripping away important details of the preparatory practices for these prayers, which often included various mourning practices.15 To this day, some scholars continue to rely upon the scholarly categories that predate the 1940s, and regard these early-twentieth-century understandings of prayer as if they were absolute, timeless categories. It is also the case that Second Temple prayers found in texts recognized today as canonical (e.g., MT) are regularly prioritized over other literary contexts that are outside the MT, such as those preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint (LXX, a.k.a. the deuterocanon/ apocrypha), and the pseudepigrapha. Biblical scholars of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries did not concern themselves with the beginnings of Judaism in the Second Temple period because of their search for origins. For early scholars, this work was also colored by a common cultural anti-Jewish ideology that often turned to ancient forms of Judaism as points of contrast with early Christianity instead of as points of continuity.16 This long-standing disciplinary Form-Critical Introduction, trans. T.M. Horner (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, repr. 1967, originally published in 1926). 15 The severing of the prayer from any literary context and with no regard for the non– verbal performative or ritual aspects of prayer were typical. Form criticism’s emphasis on form and setting in life (Sitz im Leben) has long dominated the study of prayers and reflect the impact of Herman Gunkel’s classic study, Einleitung in die Psalmen: Die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1928); and Hermann Gunkel and J. Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen, HAT II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1933). S. Mowinckel (The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, 2 vols. [Oxford: Blackwell, repr. 1962], 1.12–22) critiqued Gunkel for overemphasizing interiority and disregarding the significance of ritual contexts. Even so, the analysis of form without content is still the prevailing way of thinking about biblical prayers. These biases about the study of prayer extended beyond the biblical literature to the study of ancient Jewish prayer. Uri Ehrlich (Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to Jewish Liturgy, TSAJ 105 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004]) discusses how the preoccupation with the verbal without regard for the performative has also characterized the study of rabbinic prayers in the 19th c. 16 For a discussion of this bias, see Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine. See too the important discussion of the long-lasting influence of scholars like Wm. Bousset (1865– 1920) on the religionsgeschichtliche Schule by Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “Kyrios Christos in Light of Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Second Temple Judaism,” Early Christianity 6 (2015): 30–50. She discusses the impact of these early twentieth century perspectives on the scholarly understanding of Second Temple Judaism with attention to the recent republication of his influential work, Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenäus, 2nd ed. G. Krüger, FRLANT 21 (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1921); translated and republished as Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. J.E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970). This English edition has been revised with a new introduction by L.W. Hurtado and reprinted (Waco: Baylor



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bias is well known and worth repeating here, if only to remind us that history as it is known in the discipline of biblical studies is not without its own specific cultural identity. Biblical scholarship was openly disdainful of particular historical eras, like the Second Temple period, and thus systematically neglected them. Joseph Blenkinsopp explains: De Wette’s enthusiasm for the literary remains of early Israel was not matched by his attitude to the religion of post-exilic Judaism. The degenerative view of religious development throughout the biblical period, which would appear very clearly in Wellhausen’s Prolegomena of 1883, is already detectable in Herder’s characterization of post-exilic religion as pharisaical and slavishly legalistic. Along similar lines, de Wette spoke of Second Temple Judaism as a hybrid intellectual system lacking that essential quality of Gefühl (feeling, soul) which alone gives life. It was, he said, “ein Chaos welches eine neue Schöpfung erwartet” (“A chaos calling for a new creation”). His friend and colleague Schleiermacher went further by calling into question the link between the Old and New Testaments. A century later Adolf Harnack, in his study of the second century Gnostic Marcion, would make the same point more trenchantly: whatever may have been the theological exigencies and perceptions of the first or the sixteenth century, there was no longer any need for the Christian church to burden itself with the Jewish Scriptures.17

While the emphasis of the history of religions school on a broad examination of the diverse cultural contexts of the biblical text has deepened the scholarly understanding of these texts, Second Temple Judaism has only been recognized as a significant cultural framework for the study of the bible from the latter part of the twentieth century onward. The space created for the study of the Scrolls that were discovered in 1947 represented a tremendous shift in scholarly attention away from the origins of ancient Israel to the late Second Temple period. This collection reflects the keen interest in the Second Temple period that characterizes the biblical scholarship of the past two generations. Notable Twenty-First Century Shifts in Perspective Two interrelated shifts of perspective from the twenty-first century can be detected in the studies that appear in this volume. The first is the growing University Press, 2013). A helpful presentation of the German cultural origins of historical criticism is Michael Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 17 Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible, ABRL (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 6–7.

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loss of optimism concerning the certainty of modern historical reconstructions. The second is the globalization of the study of religion in the past twenty years. These have led to a broadening of methods to include integrative approaches that investigate the flesh-and-blood experience of reading and imagining ancient texts. This expansion has opened the door to various phenomenologically based approaches, cognitive science approaches, including emotion studies, and performance-based approaches that are more commonly used in religious studies and ritual studies. Significant challenges to the long-held dating of the Qumran archaeological site were taking place at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Based on details from the beginning of the Damascus Document (CD 1:3–11), early scrolls scholars dated the Qumran movement to the second century BCE.18 The turn of the century raised a number of serious challenges to our ability to extract historical data from texts. The methodological complications of reading history from the Damascus Document were well described by Maxine L. Grossman in her 2002 study.19 Around the same time the traditional second-century dating of the Qumran movement was seriously challenged by Jodi Magness, who argued persuasively for a date in the first century BCE.20 This diminished optimism about the ability to recover history from ancient texts can be seen in the dramatic changes to the scholarly understanding of the Teacher of Righteousness in the twenty-first century. The Teacher was a figure whom Eleazar Sukenik understood to be an historical charismatic hero. Scholars today doubt that his existence can be reconstructed from the textual evidence that has survived.21 My 2012 See Angela Kim Harkins, “How Should We Feel about the Teacher of Righteousness?” in Is There a Text in This Cave? Studies in the Textuality of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honour of George J. Brooke, edited by Ariel Feldman, Maria Cioatã, and Charlotte Hempel (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 493–514 and the bibliography that is given there. 19 Maxine L. Grossman, Reading for History in the Damascus Document, STDJ 45 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Also the synthesizing discussion in John J. Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community: The Sectarian Movement of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 20 Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, SDSSRL (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002); eadem, Debating Qumran: Collected Essays on Its Archaeology (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). Non-specialists will benefit from the excellent essays by Jodi Magness, “Methods and Theories in the Archaeology of Qumran,” (89–107) and Hayim Lapin, “Dead Sea Scrolls and the Historiography of Ancient Judaism,” (108–127), both of which are in Maxine L. Grossman, Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls: An Assessment of Old and New Approaches and Methods (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 21 Angela Kim Harkins, “Who is the Teacher of the Teacher Hymns? Re-examining the Teacher Hymns Hypothesis Fifty Years Later,” in A Teacher for All Generations: 18



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discussion of the Teacher of Righteousness raised serious questions about the optimistic way early Scrolls scholars moved from the vivid imagery in a subset of the Thanksgiving Hymns collection known as the Teacher Hymns directly to an historical reconstruction of the Teacher of Righteousness. Early scholars had identified the concrete first-person language as an autobiographical authorial voice and equated it with the historical Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in other writings from Qumran.22 This direct correlation, however, relied heavily on assumptions about modern Romantic authorship that understood the authorial voice as strong and unique; it did not cohere with Second Temple compositional techniques for prayers, which favored stereotypical language and pseudepigraphy.23 Charlotte Hempel depicts this general loss of confidence in reconstructing history from texts with a pair of marvelous images that compare the Teacher of Righteousness in early scholarship to the figure of John Wayne and the Teacher in later scholarship to the Wizard of Oz—an illusory figure who only seems to loom large.24 The changing understandings of the Teacher of Righteousness illustrate the shift away from historical origins and toward reception history. Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, 2 Vols., ed. Eric F. Mason et al., JSJSup 153 (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 1: 449–67. Other models for thinking about the Teacher of Righteousness do well to highlight the mediation of this figure in memory: Loren T. Stucken­ bruck, “The Teacher of Righteousness Remembered: From Fragmentary Sources to Collective Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity: The Fifth Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium. Durham, September 2004, ed. Stephen C. Barton, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, and Benjamin G. Wold, WUNT 212 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 75–94; idem, “The Legacy of the Teacher of Righteousness in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in New Perspectives on Old Texts, ed. Esther G. Chazon, Betsy Halpern-Amaru, and Ruth Clements, STDJ 13 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 23–49; Travis B. Williams, History and Memory in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Remembering the Teacher of Righteousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 22 Early scholars who argued strongly that the vivid language in the Teacher Hymns of the Thanksgiving Hymns could be used for historical identification included: Gert Jeremias, Der Lehrer der Gerechtigkeit, SUNT 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963); Jürgen Becker, Das Heil Gottes: Heils- und Sündenbegriffe in den Qumrantexten und im Neuen Testament, SUNT 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964); and HeinzWolfgang Kuhn, Enderwartung und Gegenwärtiges Heil: Untersuchungen zu den Gemeindeliedern von Qumran mit einem Anhang über Eschatologie und Gegenwart in der Verkündigung Jesu, SUNT 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966). 23 Harkins, “Who is the Teacher of the Teacher Hymns?” Important studies on the stereotypical language in Second Temple prayers are Judith H. Newman, Praying by the Book; Esther Chazon, “Scripture and Prayer in the ‘Words of the Luminaries’,” in Prayers that Cite Scripture, ed. James L. Kugel (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2006), 25–41. 24 Charlotte Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context, TSAJ 154 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 5.

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This loss of optimism regarding historical reconstruction reflects recent changes in the discipline of history, which has experienced the decline of what is known as modern historicism. In an extremely stimulating study, Greg Anderson describes how the discipline of history has struggled during the past thirty years to respond to postcolonial critiques. The methods and models that are routinely used by historians—and biblical scholars— are all deeply inflected by post-Enlightenment modernity.25 Significant critiques have been directed against the claim to universalize a very specific and culturally-bound understanding of the past. Anderson explains: [H]istoricism is thus a mode of knowledge production that allows us only to tell certain very specific kinds of stories about the past, stories that will always be grounded in Europe’s peculiarly secular, “scientific” understandings of cause and effect, time and space, agency and subjectivity, truth and reason, and so on. And this means that we cannot tell meaningful stories about experiences in lifeworlds where, say there was no self-evident distinction between orders of nature and culture, where human individuals were not the only possible subjects and actors, where deceased ancestors continued to influence events from beyond the grave, where gods and other ‘supernatural’ forces controlled the very conditions of existence, where life itself was not bound by secular laws of science. For when we try to historicize such lifeworlds in the conventional manner, we will always end up infantilizing them as “pre-political,” “pre-capitalist,” “pre-scientific,” or generally “pre-modern,” defining them by what they have not yet but, it seems, inevitably will become. In the process, the heterogeneous truths and rationalities that once animated the essential fabrics of those worlds, making them whatever they really once were, are quite literally lost in translation.26

Anderson refers to his own work as epistemological. This philosophical designation appropriately describes his critique of the pervasive systematic worldview of post-Enlightenment modernity, which profoundly impacts history and the disciplines that intersect with it. While postcolonialism is usually associated with the humanities, especially literature, this epistemological framework is also having an impact on the social sciences.27 For biblical scholars, it is important to see that history as a discipline Greg Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: The Case for an Ontological Turn,” American Historical Review (June 2015): 786–810; idem, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 26 Anderson, The Realness of Things Past, 45–46. 27 Julian Go, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 25



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challenges the framework of an objective disembodied universalism of ideas that relies on essentializing realia, with no regard for their particularities.28 Postcolonialism has rejected the modern essentializing models of disembodied texts that divide texts from the flesh-and-blood people who wrote, read, and transmitted them. This redirection of scholarly energy has emerged as a move away from scholarly models of the past that feature institutions at the expense of individuals. My 2012 monograph on the Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns brought attention to the individual embodied experience of reading and handling an apparatus like a scroll, which directs the reading of prayers in a serial order, and applied this understanding to the literary and theological themes that appear in this ancient Jewish prayer collection.29 While it was commonplace to think of ancient readers within institutional models like the wisdom schools and the Temple cult, the evidence to support such models is slight.30 Biblical scholars tend to begin by imagining the institution of the palace or the temple, and only secondly—if at all—the individual sage or prophet who is found within it. Important shifts away from large institutional models in favor of individual experience has taken place in the social sciences and anthropology since the 1980s.31 The scholarly emphasis on Go, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, 30, writes that the first wave of post­ colonialism from the 1950s decisively critiqued the Eurocentrism and its claim to universal truths. In the following account, Go references the Igbo post-colonial poet, Aimé Césaire, and writes: “Enlightenment universalism was Eurocentric, yet purported to be objective. Césaire thus strove for a different kind of universalism. ‘I have a different idea of a universal,’ he wrote in 1956, ‘It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all’,” see Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” Social Text 28.2 (2010 [1956]): 145–52, here 152. 29 Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens. 30 The massive data compiled from the Scrolls in favor of a Qumran scribal school is striking, especially when compared to the scant material evidence in favor of other institutional models commonly used for ancient Israel. It is important to recognize the massive data compiled and proposed by Emanuel Tov as evidence of his theory of a Qumran scribal school. This offers an abundance of data that is incomparable to that offered for other institutional models in other areas of biblical studies. See E. Tov, “Further Evidence for the Existence of a Qumran Scribal School,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years after their Discovery: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20–25, 1997 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, in collaboration with the Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, 2000), 199–216; idem, Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 31 See Harkins, “How Should We Feel about the Teacher of Righteousness,” 494 where I make reference to Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 87–102 and Stephen S. Bush, “Are Religious Experiences Too Private to Study?” Journal of Religion 92 (2012): 199–223. More recently, see the excellent discussion by Judith H. Newman, 28

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institutional models simplifies complex realities and over-determines the people of the past, causing them to become predictable, uniform, and undifferentiated. In the case of biblical studies, postcolonialism’s penetrating critiques of historicism’s universalization of institutions (viz., religious institutions like the Temple, state institutions like the Court) and the essentializing of complex realities into disembodied ideas should become a larger part of the scholarly conversation about how to read and analyze Second Temple texts. The disembodied and purely discursive understanding of the bible has become so routinized in modern biblical studies that Second Temple scholars seldom raise questions about the social or physical realities of ancient readers. Such a valorization of immaterial, discursive systems produces histories of the past that serve the dominant cultures that understand such narratives as conveying objective, timeless truths. This collection of essays on ancient Jewish and early Christian texts reflects my growing desire to investigate the complexities of ancient flesh-andblood readers. The second major influence on the work found in this volume is the steady inclusion of global perspectives in the study of religion.32 As already mentioned, a significant expansion of perspectives took place in the 1990s with the inclusion of Israeli scholars on the Dead Sea Scrolls editorial team and the appointment of Emanuel Tov as the editor-in-chief of the publication process.33 More recently, a dramatic broadening of scholarly perspectives occurred after September 11, 2001 (9/11), when universities in North America rushed to hire faculty with expertise in non-western religions, especially Islam. This shift to include scholars of multi-cultural and diverse religious backgrounds began in the late-twentieth Before the Bible: The Liturgical Body and the Formation of Scriptures in Early Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. Sidnie White Crawford has also brought a much-welcomed way of conceptualizing the scribe as an individual, not as an undifferentiated group; see her work, Scribes and Scrolls at Qumran (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019). 32 The discussion of global perspectives was presented as a conference paper, Angela Kim Harkins, “Thoughts on the Globalization of the Academy and Future Prospects for Biblical Studies,” Plenary Presidential Panel for the 2020 New England / Eastern Canada Regional SBL Meeting in Boston, MA, on March 6, 2020. 33 Magen Broshi, “Fifty Years of Dead Sea Scrolls Research in Israel,” SJ 8 (1999): 83–90; Emanuel Tov, “Israel Scholarship on the Texts from the Judean Desert,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls at Fifty: Proceedings of the 1997 Society of Biblical Literature Qumran Section Meetings, ed. Robert A. Kugler and Eileen M. Schuller, EJL 15 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 123–27; idem, “Israeli Scholarship on the Biblical Texts from the Judean Desert,” in Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, Septuagint, Collected Essays, Volume 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 3:337–52.



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century, but the lasting impact of this continues to this day. Along with postcolonialism, this broadening of scholarly perspectives has left a significant mark on the ideas found in this volume. In the case of theoretical approaches, anthropology of religion and cognitive literary theory have helped to illuminate aspects of the material body that nuance how we imagine the phenomenological experience of religion and how fleshand-blood readers may have performed first-person prayers.34 The shift toward phenomenological studies in the social sciences and the move toward ethnography, especially cross-cultural anthropology, have produced complicated models of human experience that caution against over-determining the people of the past. The work of anthropologists like Tanya Luhrmann, Saba Mahmood, Amira Mittermaier, and Michael Lambek has been an important influence on the essays in this volume. Tanya Luhrmann’s ethnographic studies of the vivid experiences of presence from religious rituals has provided a useful framework for my own thinking about the phenomenological experience of prayer.35 So too, Saba Mahmood’s study of Islamic revival among Egyptian women has challenged the commonplace modern western paradigm of the self as active.36 Both Saba Mahmood and Michael Lambek offer important critiques of the modern notion of agency by examining alternative models of subjectivity, like the passive self.37 Mahmood’s work focuses on Muslim women’s This renewed interest in prayer and religious experience can be seen in the work of by Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, When God Talks Back (New York: Knopf, 2012); G. Giordan, “You Never Know. Prayer as Enchantment,” in Sociology of Prayer (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 1–8. These new understandings of prayer and religious experience have emerged in the work of scrolls scholarship in the following representative studies: Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens; Maxine L. Grossman, “Religious Experience and the Discipline of Imagination: Tanya Luhrmann Meets Philo and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” DSD 22 (2015): 308–324; George Brooke, “Aspects of the Theological Significance of Prayer and Worship in the Qumran Scrolls,” in Prayer and Poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Essays in Honor of Eileen Schuller on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, ed. Jeremy Penner, Ken M. Penner, and Cecilia Wassen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 35–54. 35 Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); eadem, When God Talks Back; eadem, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 36 Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent”; eadem, The Politics of Piety. 37 Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent”; Michael Lambek, “How to Make Up One’s Mind: Reason, Passion, and Ethics in Spirit Possession,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79 (2010): 720–741, esp. 731–32. An important study that takes up Lambek’s ideas is Giovanni B. Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ: Spirit 34

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religious rituals, and Lambek draws on his fieldwork with the Malagasy people of Madagascar. Notable here too is Amira Mittermaier’s ethnography of dreamers and visionaries in Cairo, which makes the case that people of this world can be and are profoundly connected to otherworldly beings and realia in surprising and uncultivated ways.38 The cross-cultural perspectives of these anthropologists have been significant influences on my study of the Second Temple period.39 Both the globalization of the academy and the diminished optimism in ‘objective’ historical reconstructions from texts alone reflect the impact of postcolonialism, a perspective that has been present in various areas of the humanities since the 1950s. While postcolonialism is largely identified as a movement in various disciplines of the humanities (especially in literature, critical theory, and history), it is also making an impact on the social sciences through the work of scholars like Julian Go, Post­ colonial Thought and Social Theory (2016). Feminist studies began to appear with regularity in the biblical scholarship of the 1980s, marking an important shift away from timeless texts toward flesh-and-blood contexts.40 Feminist biblical studies are a significant re-orientation to the Possession and Exorcism in the Early Christ Groups (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 38 Amira Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); eadem, “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities Beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18 (2012): 247–265. 39 Other significant anthropological influences in this volume: Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); idem, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Thomas J. Csordas (“Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18 [1990]: 5–47) makes the argument that the body, including the embodied mind, is a legitimate subject of study for anthropology. See also Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology”; Tanya Luhrmann and Rachel Morgain, “Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience,” Ethos 40 (2012): 359–89. 40 See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983); eadem., Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Adela Yarbro Collins (ed.), Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship (Chico: Scholars Press, 1985); Ross Shepard Kraemer, Maenads, Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics: Sourcebook on Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988); Amy-Jill Levine (ed.), “Women Like This” New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, EJL 1 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991); Ross Shepard Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions Among Pagans, Jews and Christians in Greco-Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D’Angelo, Women & Christian Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Stephen P. Ahearne-Kroll,



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body, opening the door for contextual studies that followed shortly thereafter.41 In both feminist studies and contextual studies, scholars have looked outside the dominant culture for contrapuntal readings that reintegrate marginalized perspectives with what is understood as mainstream. The reintegration of the body into text-based disciplines can be seen in the multiple waves of feminist studies that have brought women’s voices and discussions of embodiment and cultural context from the periphery into conversation with mainstream scholarship. In turn, feminist and contextual scholarship have been important entry points for scholars studying intersectionality in the academy.42 Historical inquiry has long been a strong component of biblical studies; even so, history and how scholars study history reflects culturally specific values and assumptions that are prized in the dominant culture. The studies in this volume challenge how Second Temple scholars, trained in traditional biblical studies approaches, imagine their task of historical reconstruction. Biblical scholars and scholars who actively study the texts and material culture of the Second Temple period continue to be actively engaged in historical questions. History as a discipline has also undergone its own changes during the past thirty years. In the past generation, history has been more concerned with the recovery of vernacular data, the material culture of women and children, and the serious study of neglected fields of inquiry, like ritual practices and prayer texts. Paul A. Holloway, and James A. Kellhoffer, Women and Gender in Ancient Religions: Interdisciplinary Approaches, WUNT 263 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); Elliot R. Wolfson (“The Body in the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment,” JQR 95 [2005]: 479–500, 479) makes the point well that feminist scholars are largely responsible for pushing to integrate studies of embodiment into post-biblical text-based scholarship of later forms of Judaism that reach into the medieval period. 41 Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2000); Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia (ed.), They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009); Jin Young Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Gale Yee, Towards an Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics. An Intersectional Anthology (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2021). 42 Feminist scholarship continues to be an important entry point for other contextual approaches and conversations about intersectionality: Deryn Guest, Beyond Feminist Biblical Studies (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, 2012); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (ed.), Feminist Biblical Studies in the Twentieth Century: Scholarship and Movement (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014); Benjamin H. Dunning (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Joseph A. Marchal, Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Susanne Scholz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

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In addition to broadening our data for how we think historically about the people of the past, these changes in the discipline of history urge biblical scholars to think more broadly about how these ancient texts can be understood in the context of the lived experience of religion. The essays in this volume urge scholars of the Second Temple period to expand the kinds of approaches that they typically use to study the texts of this era. Many of these changes are effects of feminist studies and postcolonialism in the humanities, both of which consider the embodied aspects of texts. The Organization of the Collection The majority of the essays in this volume are studies of ancient Jewish and Christian prayers, texts that require methodological approaches that go beyond traditional historical-critical methods. The performancebased methods and phenomenological approaches that appear in this volume have challenged the mind-body dualism and cognicentrism of biblical studies.43 The studies in this volume illustrate how I have applied emerging methods associated the cognitive sciences (especially those that fall under the heading of cognitive literary theory) to these ancient prayers.44 In my view, interest in cognitive-science based approaches reflects postcolonialism’s attention to the flesh-and-blood experiences of ancient readers, showing how embodiment can offer new ways of thinking about the complexity of the lived experiences of prayers and rituals without overdetermining those experiences. The integration of the mind and body in early Christian studies can be seen in the work of Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Colleen Shantz (Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 20–66) discusses the undue emphasis on texts and textuality as a ‘cognicentrism’. Other studies of early Christian writings include Risto Uro, Ritual and Christian Beginnings: A Socio-Cognitive Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); István Czachesz, Cognitive Science & the New Testament: A New Approach to Early Christian Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 44 Readers may be interested in the work of Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); idem, Religion, Neuroscience and the Self: A New Personalism (New York: Routledge, 2020); Armin W. Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen, Religious Narrative, Cognition and Culture: Image and Word in the Mind of Narrative (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2011). For recent applications of cognitive science to narrative, see Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); Elaine Auyoung, When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 43



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Many essays in this volume examine the role of emotions and references to the body that appear in ancient Jewish and early Christian texts that describe and reference foundational events from Israel’s past. Instead of the historical-critical inquiry into dating, these essays focus on the enduring questions: What did these Second Temple prayers do to ancient readers? What function did these prayers have within larger social mechanisms that generate commitment to the religion? While we cannot speak definitively about the historicity of the liturgies, rituals, or rites for these prayers and narratives describing ritual scenes, we can assume that these emotionally arousing texts were read immersively and thoughtfully contemplated by the people of the past. In other words, instead of investigating purely historical or exegetical questions as ends in themselves, the essays in this volume explore the question of function and the effect that such writings might have had on flesh-and-blood readers and hearers based on what we know heuristically about the body and the cognitive processes of the mind. Eleven essays appear under two major headings: (1) “Experiencing Presence through Mourning Practices and Prayers”; and (2) “Religious Experience of Spaces and the Exegetical Generation of New Texts”. While these different headings create some division between the essays, there are many points of continuity across these two sections. The volume seeks to understand how Second Temple texts were experienced by ancient readers who sought to re-connect themselves to the past through the immersive reading of foundational events. A significant number of these studies relates these religious experiences to larger social mechanisms, like covenant renewal, that function as an occasion for recommitment to the group. The first half of the volume is entitled “Experiencing Presence through Mourning Prayers and Ritual Emotions”. The essays that appear here explore how narratively described emotions in prayer and ritual emotions of covenant re-making practices can be enacted imaginatively by a reader to assist in the immersive reading and the experience of presence. In addition to the first-person voice of the prayers themselves, these essays discuss the references to emotional states that are accessed through the accompanying practices of fasting and weeping, and the bodily postures of collapsing, falling, and prostration that are described alongside these prayers. The majority of essays in this section discuss how emotions, especially grief, and the practices associated with the foundational experience of covenant breaking and re-making at Sinai can be said to have cultivated certain ritual predispositions in the ancient reader and hearer. These studies propose that the imaginative reading of these texts can lead to the sensory perception of felt presence. Both mourning practices

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and the emotion of grief function to cultivate a state of rumination, an on-going cognitive state that makes experiences of presence from absence. Important shifts in bereavement studies have taken place since Sigmund Freud’s early and highly influential study, “Mourning and Melancholia,” published in 1917 and popularized through the work of Erich Lindemann.45 According to Freud’s account of well-functioning mourning, the process of decathexis or “grief work” is one in which the bereft endeavors to detach him- or herself from the deceased beloved. While popular western attitudes toward grief and mourning aim to sever the bereft’s emotional ties to the deceased, cross-cultural bereavement studies have introduced new understandings of grief that highlight the importance of continuing bonds with the deceased.46 This move is a significant departure from the earlier view of Freud. This new understanding of grief highlights the role of rumination in the mind’s ability to make presence from absence. In addition to the shift in bereavement studies that has moved away from decathexis toward continuing bonds, the study of grief is also complicated by the modern assumption that authentic emotions are spontaneous expressions of an interior state. Our discussion of grief requires a pre-modern understanding that acknowledges its highly ritualized and performative aspects.47 In antiquity, the social expression of grief (known as mourning) was highly regulated by public policies; it was not viewed principally as the spontaneous outpouring of interior anguish. Performative mourning was used in other social contexts besides grieving the death of a loved one.48 Because such emotions display themselves in the Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1917, reprinted in 1957), 237–59. Freud’s view was popularized through Erich Lindemann, “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief,” in Beyond Grief: Studies in Crisis Intervention, ed. Erich Lindemann and Elizabeth Lindemann (New York: Aronson, 1979), 58–77. 46 George Hagman, “Beyond Decathexis: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Understanding and Treatment of Mourning,” in Meaning Reconstruction & the Experience of Loss, ed. Robert A. Neimeyer (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2000), 13–31; and Dennis Klass and Edith Maria Steffen, “Introduction: Continuing Bonds— 20 Years On,” in Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions for Research and Practice, ed. D. Klass and E.M. Steffen (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1–14. 47 Gary Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited.” 48 Christopher Degelmann, “Symbolic Mourning: The Literary Appropriation of Signs in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome,” in Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics, ed. Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, and Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli in cooperation with Elisabeth Begemann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 447–67. For a slightly different perspective, see David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical 45



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body through the blanching of the skin, trembling, or the shedding of tears, they are costly displays that participate in larger social mechanisms that cultivate commitment within groups. Many of the essays in Part I of the collection explore how these emotions participate in covenant remaking rituals. The essays in Part I, many of which focus on the period after the exile, apply integrative approaches to understand ancient Judaism and early Christianity.49 I argue that the ritual experiencing of grief was a strategy by which communities after the rupture of the Babylonian exile were able to access with first-hand vividness continuity with foundational events, either real or imagined, from a long ago past. Key emotions of grief and desolation cultivated self-diminishment and the decentering effects of liminality, thereby creating a heightened receptivity to the ritual moment. While the effects of prayers of ritual mourning are diverse and undetermined, they can be thought of as a bridge for readers of these Second Temple texts to the mythic foundational narratives in which God is said to have a palpable presence in the wilderness. The performative emotions that are strategically aroused by the retelling of Israel’s history of past failings are key in the ritual’s effectiveness because they allow individuals to access key foundational narratives from a distant past with the vividness of first-hand experience.50 I examine the way in which Second Temple prayers deploy the effects of emotions in two interrelated ways. The first way that emotion is used is in the retelling of foundational narratives from the books associated with Moses. These stories include the patriarchal period, the exodus, the covenant, and the wilderness rebellions. Thus, emotion serves a pedagogical purpose, namely to create strong and palpable memories of these foundational stories within readers and hearers. Emotion can also be said to function in a second related way: to cultivate a desired ritual predisposition in readers and hearers, in whom the visceral remembering of God’s presence in the foundational stories of the past can generate an experience of presence in the ritual moment. These Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 244–58; who discusses grief as a different type of emotion altogether. Konstan writes that grief is an experience that is not regulated by social standing or contexts, and thus does not demand a kind of socially embedded ‘action readiness’ response like the other classical emotions (247–48). 49 The Second Temple Period is understood roughly as the period 519 BCE–70 CE. Some essays in this volume, however, move beyond this time period. 50 Performative emotions are ritually scripted emotions: see Gary L. Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse,” History of Religions 39 (2000): 211–46; reprinted in Religion and Emotion, ed. J. Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 185–222.

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two effects of emotion worked together to achieve larger social aims in the Second Temple period such as re-commitment to the covenant. The first essay, “The Function of Prayers of Ritual Mourning in the Second Temple Period,” is a study of Daniel and his vision of the angel in chapter 9. While this passage is often discussed as the parade example of the interpretation of older prophetic texts (viz., Jeremiah) that characterizes the process of scripturalization in the Second Temple period, our discussion analyzes the scene in terms of its visionary experience and relates the mourning practices and grief emotions to broader questions about religion generally. Daniel’s perceptible experience of presence in the form of a vision or voice offers reassurance during times of political instability or uncertainty. The second essay, “The Pro-Social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer,” examines how the distinctive mourning emphasis of Ezra’s prayer contributes to pro-social effects of commitment and resolve among the ancient readers who may have been moved by the show of support for Ezra. Ezra is described in a way that harks back to Moses and the covenant remaking scene after the golden calf, as it is retold in Deuteronomy 9. The third essay, “A Phenomenological Study of the Penitential Elements and their Strategic Arousal of Emotion in the Qumran Hodayot (1QH cols. 1[?]–8),” discusses the experiential aspects of a group of prayers known as the first group of Community Hymns (cols. 1[?]–8), which has literary features that set it apart from the context of the larger ḥodayot collection. This essay places the prayer themes and references to falling down in conversation with the covenant remaking event in the foundational story of the golden calf. Another Qumran essay entitled, “The Emotional Re-experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives found in the Admonition of the Damascus Document,” follows a similar line of inquiry, with emphasis on the way the emotions of grief, desolation, and regret are associated with the breaking of the covenant. This essay examines how the strong emotional language in the Admonition section (cols. 1–8 and 19–20) of the Damascus Document can be understood to prepare the readers and hearers for the subsequent hearing of the legal material that follows it. Similar to the biblical presentation of legal corpora found in Deuteronomy, the Damascus texts preface the legal material with an emotionally charged narrative of the moral failings and rebuke of Israel. Not only does the Damascus text replicate the general literary pattern found in Deuteronomy’s covenant re-making scene, it actualizes the foundational story through the deployment of emotions. This essay proposes that the Admonition generates the emotional effect of self-diminishment, which assists in staging the experience of



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divine presence for the group during covenant re-making. The Admonition functions to generate an experience of liminality, which is one of the effects of being in the presence of a sovereign deity. The next essay, “Emotion and Law in the Book of Baruch,” is a similar study that applies this understanding of emotions to the deuterocanonical book. It describes how self-diminishing emotions aroused by the retelling of foundational narratives of moral failings in the wilderness serve to actualize the text for Second Temple readers. Emotions of grief and regret not only serve the pedagogical purpose of heightening receptivity to those memories, but they also stage the presence of the deity by simulating the self-diminishment that would be experienced. Ritual emotions can be said to function in a propaedeutic way by heightening receptivity to the subsequent hymn on Wisdom (Torah) that appears in Bar 3:9–4:4. The next essay is entitled, “The Imaginative Experiencing of Psalms of Solomon 8.” The eighteen Psalms of Solomon comprise a discrete collection that was transmitted in antiquity both independently as a separate collection and also alongside other Solomonic works such as the Wisdom of Solomon and the book of Sirach. Similar to the previous two essays, this discussion of Pss. Sol. 8 applies enactive approaches to the scriptural allusions to foundational events and discusses how these references can be understood within a framework in which God’s presence is made perceptible in his absence. The association that the Psalms of Solomon have with the biblical king is long and widely attested. The Psalms of Solomon were also circulated with the forty-two Odes of Solomon to form a non-biblical corpus of Solomonic pseudepigrapha consisting of sixty compositions. The seventh and eighth essays in Part I describe how the grief from these Second Temple rituals of covenant remaking can be understood in two different New Testament texts. The first essay, “Ritualizing Jesus’ Grief at Gethsemane,” situates Jesus’ grief at Gethsemane in the shadow of the Temple within the wider Second Temple ritual context of covenant re-making. Without denying that Jesus’ grief was also personally experienced, I argue that ritual emotions should be considered in the analysis of this passage as it appears in Matthew’s and Mark’s gospels. The final essay in this part of the volume is an unpublished essay entitled, “Sticky Emotions from Second Temple Prayers: A Study of Paul’s Grief in 2 Corinthians.” I use Sara Ahmed’s social and political theory about emotion to argue that ritual remembrances from Second Temple covenant remaking events can be understood to move Paul from the ‘outside-in’. Both essays critique the modern tendency to understand emotions strictly as spontaneous eruptions from within the individual and suggest that the

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cultural influence of Second Temple rituals is an overlooked way of understanding the grief of Jesus and Paul. Part II of the volume is entitled “Religious Experience of Spaces and the Exegetical Generation of New Texts”. These essays highlight how experiences of the body can be understood with more complexity and nuance than allowed by the typical application of the five senses described by Aristotle.51 My most recent work has investigated how ancient Jewish and early Christian writings include details about the speaker’s interoception and proprioception. Interoception is the awareness of the interior physiological states that are experienced through the skin or viscera (e.g., temperature, pain, visceral sensations, vasomotor flush, hunger, thirst).52 Proprioception is the awareness of specific types of kinaesthetic details that have to do with the body’s equilibrium (e.g., gaining and losing one’s balance, falling, and the sensation of the body moving through space). 53 These narrative details offer important data that are often not discussed in historical-critical studies of ancient Jewish and early Christian Yael Avrahami critiques the cultural specificity of the Aristotelian sensorium and helpfully expands it to include kinaesthesia and speech; see Yael Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible (London: T & T Clark, 2012). Her first chapter offers a cross-cultural anthropological study of sensory perception (4–64); and the seven senses are discussed in detail in chapters two (65–112) and three (113–88). 52 A.D. Craig, “How do you Feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 655–66, here 655. 53 My forthcoming essay “Retelling Foundational Events in Psalm 106: Experiencing and Remembering the Past,” describes how spaces and the bodyless deity are described with kinaesthetic details. While modern readers might quickly pass over these references to the surrounding environment and to God in psalm 106 (viz., the sea in vv. 9, 11, the earth in v. 11, fire in v. 18, and also the bodyless God of Israel in v. 9, 26, 44), and understand them as literary details, renewed attention to the kinaesthetic language ascribed to the environment and to God can assist in generating a quality of vivid presence, especially when we consider how non-Western cultures do not assume these spaces are inert or passive, but dynamic and powerful. This essay is forthcoming in Psalms: From Biblical Texts to Religious Traditions. The Erfurt Psalms Volume. Conference Proceedings of the Psalms in Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present, held Oct 24–26, 2018. Edited by Claudia Bergmann, B. Kranemann, Tessa Rajak, and Rebecca Sebbagh. These aspects of embodied awareness are also prominently featured in my forthcoming essay, “Immersing Oneself in the Narrative World of Second Temple Apocalyptic Visions,” for Re-Imagining Apocalypticism: Apocalypses, Apocalyptic Literature, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Lorenzo DiTommaso and Matthew Goff, EJL series, which proposes that apocalypses seek to make revelatory experiences accessible with first-hand vividness, what we might call an experience of presence. Presence is a cognitive state in which a reader gains awareness of ‘being’ in a particular narrative world, an otherworldly space. The first-person voice is the mechanism by which a reader could gain access to an immersive experience of the narrative world of the apocalypse, thus experiencing in part the things that the seer sees, and the awe and wonder of these visions with the vividness of presence. 51



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writings. By applying bio-cultural models of the human person, these studies complicate how textual references to the body can be imagined and experienced by flesh-and-blood readers. These theoretical frames highlight the limitations of modern biblical studies approaches to ancient Jewish texts, especially prayer texts, and show the advantages of interdisciplinary and integrative methods.54 The cognitive literary approaches55 that have been especially important for the most recent studies that appear here are enactive reading56 and eco-criticism.57 These approaches break down the strong Cartesian divide between the mind and body, which has long prevailed in the humanities. The theoretical framework of enactivism helps to defamiliarize the usual discussions of embodiment by complicating how we describe sensory perceptions of the body to account for this mental imaging process. Texts that describe multi-sensory perceptions assist in moving a reader to a state of experiencing, as sensorimotor areas and their cognitive processes are stimulated.58 According to this phenomenological model, senses do not operate independently from the integrated movements of a body and the embodied mind.59 Armin W. Geertz, “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion,” MTSR 22 (2010): 304–321; idem, “Religious Bodies, Minds and Places: A Cognitive Science of Religion Perspective,” in Spazi e Luoghi Sacri: Espressioni ed Esperienze di Vissuto Religioso, ed. Laura Carnevale (Santo Spirito [Bari]: Edipuglia, 2017), 35–52. 55 For a helpful survey of cognitive science approaches to the study of literature and other media, see Lisa Zunshine, ed., Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 56 Anežka Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment,” Semiotica 189 (2012): 23–48; Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014); idem., “Ungrounding Fictional Worlds: An Enactivist Perspective on the ‘Worldlikeness’ of Fiction,” in Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology, ed. Alice Bell and MarieLaure Ryan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 113–31. 57 Nancy Easterlin, “Loving Ourselves Best of All,” Mosaic 37 (2004): 1–18; Marie-Laure Ryan, “The Text as World: Theories of Immersion,” in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 61–84. Related to the analysis of literary spaces, but not representative of eco-criticism, is the work of Elaine Scarry, “On Vivacity: The Difference Between Daydreaming and Imagining-Under-Authorial-Instruction,” Representations 52 (1995): 1–26. 58 See G. Gabrielle Starr, “Multisensory Imagery,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine, 275–91; eadem, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). For an application of enactive processes to ancient texts, see Aldo Tagliabue, “An Embodied Reading of Epiphanies in Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales,” Ramus 45 (2016): 213–30. 59 Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks, “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science 20 (2009): 989–99. 54

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The first essay in Part II is the most recent study in this volume. This essay, “Experiencing the Solidity of Spaces in the Qumran Hodayot,” examines the effects of the first-person voice and the language of proprioception and interoception on the reader. Second Temple narrative prayers in first-person voice make otherworldly spaces accessible with first-hand vividness, what we might call an experience of presence. Presence is a cognitive state in which a reader gains awareness of ‘being’ in a particular narrative world or otherworldly space. The first-person voice is the mechanism by which a reader could have gained access to an immersive experience of the narrative world of the prayer, thus experiencing in part the things that the speaker describes with the vividness of presence. I use cognitive literary theory to imagine how otherworldly spaces achieve the quality of solidity and create compelling narrative worlds for readers. These embodied experiences are described as fragmentary references to the hymnist’s interoceptive experiences (bodily experiences associated with the viscera, including pain, hunger, temperature, and also emotions) or proprioceptive experiences, which presume an extended body moving through space (movement, balance, and any kind of kinesthetic action). This essay is followed by the oldest piece in the volume, “The Performative Reading of the Hodayot: The Arousal of Emotions and the Exegetical Generation of Texts,” which dates to 2011. In this study I apply performance-based approaches and affect theory to two anonymous hodayot (1QH 11:6–19 and 13:22–15:8). I argue that when a text was read ritually, the reader was expected to re-enact the specific emotions that are described in the text itself. In the case of the Qumran hodayot, the reading of 1QH 11:6–19 may be understood as an actualization of the text that led to further exegetical insights into this narrative world and to the generation of 1QH 13:22–15:8. In this study, the reader’s physical display of emotion plays a role in the group’s authentication of the new text that was produced. The third and fourth essays in Part II move beyond the Second Temple period. “The Garden Space in Odes of Solomon 11 and the Reinvigoration of Memories about Paradise” looks at how the sensory details about being in paradise could be enacted and generate a further glimpse of what paradise may be like. The fourth and final essay, “Religious Experience through the Lens of Critical Spatiality: A Look at Embodiment Language in Prayers and Hymns,” discusses the religious spaces in Nehemiah 9 and in Ephrem’s Hymns on Paradise.

PART I

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE THROUGH MOURNING PRAYERS AND RITUAL EMOTIONS

THE FUNCTION OF PRAYERS OF RITUAL MOURNING IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD1 Performative expressions of grief are enacted and reenacted in all major religions. This essay will discuss how we might understand a different function of the ritualized mourning practices that accompany the prayers from the Second Temple period. We propose that prayers from this time strategically arouse grief in order to generate first-hand perceptions of foundational events and, in effect, to create presence from absence. This type of study falls under a larger category of embodied cognition which understands experiential frames to assist in the imaginative enactment of new experiences.2 Second Temple prayers are often situated in a narrative context that describes practices of self-diminishment: fasting, sackcloth, ashes, depilatory acts, anguished weeping, collapsing, hands opened in supplication. The prayers themselves also contribute to the diminishment of the pray-er through the enactment of petitions, confession of sinfulness, and confession of God’s greatness. The effects of these practices and prayers can predispose one to experientially reenact grief, which can in turn lead to rumination, a cognitive state in which presence is made from absence. Such experiences, while they are not predetermined to happen, can help us to imagine how prayers and mourning practices functioned to participate in the generation of apocalyptic visions in the Second Temple period. The first topic that I will explore is how the cultivation of the emotional state of grief and rumination are natural cognitive processes that are designed to produce experiences of presence from absence. By this I mean a sensory perception of the presence of otherworldly beings, either as a perception of alterity, or as an experience of a vision or voice. Secondly, we will consider how such ritual experiences might be understood as social mechanisms that assisted in generating an awareness of 1

2

The author gratefully acknowledges that this research was funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement number 627536 RelExDSS FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IIF. Lawrence Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5.1–2 (2005): 14–57.

4

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

God’s presence during a period in which the deity’s absence was especially felt during times of political uncertainty. The reuse of traditional scriptural language in the composition of prayers during the Second Temple period thwarts any attempt to recover a text’s original historical author.3 While form criticism is useful for drawing attention to larger patterns in prayer forms and historical contexts, it unhelpfully severs prayers from their larger narrative contexts. Because historical criticism focused on origins, many prayers from the Second Temple period were unaccounted for by classic form-critical categories which were oriented toward ancient Israelite religion. As firstperson texts, prayers are more helpfully understood through performance studies than form criticism. While we cannot fully recover the historical author of Second Temple prayers, we can aim to understand the kinds of responses that these texts elicited in the one who prays them and in those people who witnessed and possibly participated in these prayer events. This focus on the performance of and responses to prayers as texts that were enacted and re-enacted also draws our attention to the role of emotion as scripted experiences that are strategically performed. Emotional language in Second Temple prayers are not records of an “original” interiority of a now unknown ancient author but rather a highly rhetorically first-person script by which ancients sought to cultivate desired dispositions in the ritual performer and spectators. In other words, we will examine these Second Temple prayers, not from the usual historical-critical questions that seek to know who authored the prayer. We also will not seek to investigate the process of how the prayer came to be composed and the manner in which scripture is interpreted or redeployed in the prayer. Instead, we will ask the question of how can the prayer (and the things that happen subsequently) be understood to function as a social mechanism that enhanced cooperative living and synchronous behavior? In this way, our interest in Daniel’s prayer goes past the text of the prayer itself (Dan 9:4b–19) to include the subsequent visionary experience of the angel Gabriel (Dan 9:20–27). While we will discuss how the self-diminishing practices and prayers together can be understood to contribute to the cultivation of the vision of Gabriel, the encounter itself is not one that is determined to happen. Instead, Daniel’s experience of the angel is presented as an unpredictable and unexpected event, 3

Judith H. Newman, “The Scripturalization of Prayer in Exilic and Second Temple Judaism,” in Prayers that Cite Scripture, ed. James L. Kugel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 7–24; Esther G. Chazon, “Scripture and Prayer in ‘The Words of the Luminaries’,” in Prayers that Cite Scripture, 25–41.

THE FUNCTION OF PRAYERS OF RITUAL MOURNING

5

even though the practices and prayers are the necessary conditions for its possibility.4 Daniel is acted upon by the vision: “And while I was speaking in the prayer, the man, Gabriel whom I had seen in a vision previously flying swiftly, came to me, at the moment of the evening sacrifice” (‫וְ ֛עוֹד‬ ‫יעף נ ֵֹג ַ֣ע ֵא ֔ ַלי‬ ָ ֔ ‫יתי ֶב ָחז֤ וֹן ַבּ ְתּ ִח ָלּ ֙ה ֻמ ָ ֣עף ִבּ‬ ִ ‫יאל ֲא ֶשׁר֩ ָר ִ֙א‬ ֵ֡ ‫ֲא ִנ֥י ְמ ַד ֵ ֖בּר ַבּ ְתּ ִפ ָלּ֑ה וְ ָה ִ ֣אישׁ גַּ ְב ִר‬ ‫ת־ע ֶרב׃‬ ֽ ָ ‫;כּ ֵ ֖עת ִמנְ ַח‬ ְ Dan 9:21). Here, what I wish to note is Daniel’s experience of the angel is reported as “happening to” him; the otherworldly being is said to come at Daniel unexpectedly like something swooping out of the sky. Events like this are constitutive of how Daniel comes to be regarded as a ‘visionary,’ ‘seer,’ or ‘prophet,’ by later Jewish and Christian communities. The event also illustrates how the ancient self-negotiated and was transformed by unexpected encounters with the otherworld. The prayer in Daniel 9 is an ideal passage to examine as a griefinduced religious experience. The chapter begins with Daniel consulting the books of the sixth-century BCE prophet Jeremiah in the hopes of seeking an answer to the question of how long the exile will last. After engaging in highly-stylized funerary rites of fasting, sackcloth, and ashes, Daniel offers a prayer that includes a lengthy confession of sin that specifies not only his and the people’s sinfulness, but also that of every Israelite everywhere and at every time in history (9:5–8). Daniel’s confession of God’s greatness (9:15) underscores the people’s sinfulness, the just nature of their dire straits, and God’s righteous judgment to enforce the curses described in the Mosaic Law (9:4b; 9:7a; 9:14–16). The prayer concludes with a series of petitions pleading for God’s attention that refer to features of embodiment that evoke a sense of the deity’s presence (9:17–19). These petitions further subordinate Daniel, who has already positioned himself among the sinful in the preceding confession of sins. Here, vivid and striking imagery about the invisible deity’s rhetorically constructed body is found (e.g., God’s mighty hand [v. 15], God’s shining face [v. 17], inclining ear [v. 18], open eyes [v. 18], and acting body [v. 19]). The prayer is then followed by a vision of the angel Gabriel who answers Daniel (9:20–23) and reveals an interpretation of the Jeremian prophecy (9:24–27). Many details from Daniel 9 cohere with Second Temple prayers and practices: highly stereotypical and scripturalizing language and stylized gestures. At the same time, several referential details have been 4

Amira Mittermaier, “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities Beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18 (2012): 247–65. Dreams, like visions, are unpredictable and cannot be cultivated; instead, such experiences are given (254).

6

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

incorporated into the presentation that suggest a high degree of realism. These include the specification of a date which identifies the imperial ruler at the time (vv. 1–2), the occasion for the prayer which is Daniel’s personal longing to know an answer to the end of the devastation (vv. 2–3), the vividness with which the deity’s body is described (vv. 17–19), the first-person reporting of events, the details about the precise moment when the angelic encounter occurred (vv. 20–23), and the lengthy quoting of the angel’s words themselves (vv. 24–27). All of these details make for a dynamic account that can be easily visualized in the mind’s imagination, making the retelling of the events vivid and compelling for subsequent readers. According to the biblical text, Daniel cultivated a visionary experience of the angel Gabriel in such a state of heightened receptivity. This is presented to the reader as the mechanism by which Daniel came to acquire a new understanding of Jeremiah’s sixth-century prophecy. In addition to the practices and prayers, Daniel’s meditation upon and reenactment of the prophet Jeremiah’s anguish would have added a further layer of selfdiminishment to Daniel’s experience. Both Jewish and Christian groups in antiquity found the chronomessianic aspects of Daniel’s vision to be compelling enough to form communities of resistance that banded to revolt against much larger imperial powers, such as the Jewish Revolt against Rome in 67–74 CE, an act that ultimately led to the destruction of the Second Temple.5 While we cannot verify the historicity of the events, the vividness of the description and realistic elements would have allowed later readers to receive these writings as if they had actually happened. Experiences of texts, whether fiction or non-fiction, are capable of producing similar types of embodied responses in the reader. Our conclusion will discuss briefly how these textualized experiences of prayer and visions might have contributed to actual human experiences of heightened commitment and solidarity.

GRIEF-INDUCED EXPERIENCES If grief is understood to be a complex state of desolation marked by personal longing, the study of emotions is a logical place at which to begin an investigation of how religious practices and prayer can be said 5

Anthony J. Tomasino, “Oracles of Insurrection: The Prophetic Catalyst of the Great Revolt,” JJS 59 (2008): 86–111.

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to function in Second Temple times. Integrated approaches that examine the human experience of emotion show that regions of the brain that are aroused during first-hand experiences of certain emotions such as disgust or pain are similarly activated when individuals read enactively about such experiences or are asked to empathize with them. The human mind’s capacity for imaginative engagement with the experiences of others, whether those events are read about or heard as second-hand reports, appears to have to do more with how those events are transmitted rather than about whether they are verifiably true or not.6 While this point may be obvious to anyone who has found him or herself engrossed by a novel, it needs to be stated in discussions like these because too often, the conversation can turn to questions of historicity: was there really a historical Ezra? Did Daniel really see an angel? Were these texts really written by a historical Teacher of Righteousness? Such maneuvers deflect attention away from what I think are the more interesting questions concerning prayer’s function in antiquity, and they say more about our disciplinary pre-occupations than about the experience of these texts in the Second Temple period. Richly contoured imaginative worlds are constructed by the rhetorical use of language and the first-person voice which draw a reader into the text and assist in the generation of an experience of that text. A text’s capacity to compel a reader to have certain types of experiences or to act in a particular way does not hinge upon its historical facticity.

MODERN AND PRE-MODERN MOURNING RITUALS The ancient context of the Book of Daniel requires a pre-modern understanding of grief which highlights its ritualized and performative aspects. In antiquity, the social expression of grief (known as mourning) was highly regulated by public policies; it was not viewed principally as the spontaneous outpouring of interior anguish. Meyer Abram’s metaphors 6

Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); eadem, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Knopf, 2012; eadem, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020); Cain Todd, “Attending Emotionally to Fiction,” Journal of Value Inquiry (19 February, 2013): 449–65; Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Elaine Auyoung, When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Greg Anderson, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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of the mirror and the lamp may be helpful here. The lamp signifies the modern emphasis on the self’s interior which erupts forth in unique brilliance.7 In contrast, the pre-modern conceptualization, represented by the mirror, is one in which the self engages in a complex mimetic process of enacting and reenacting received patterns. The expectation that prayers express the distinct interiority of the pray-er resonates with modern readers, but it may not be the best way to describe pre-modern experiences of prayer. While modern expressions of grief and ritual mourning highlight the heart-felt anguish felt over the loss of a personal relationship, pre-modern understandings of mourning emphasize its ritualized and performative aspects. In pre-modern societies, grief was routinely enacted by professionals who had neither personal experience of nor strong affection for the deceased, highlighting the performative dimension of mourning. The social expression of grief was also highly regulated by public policies. Glimpses of the social regulation of grief today in the public policies that frequently restrict who has the right to grieve in the workplace, oftentimes excluding unmarried partners; ex-spouses; and in some instances, although less-frequently now, same-sex partners. Modern Western Englishspeaking cultures have also developed highly individualized expressions of grieving with more and more people designing their own mourning rituals (e.g., roadside memorials; memorializing the life of loved ones with a funerary tattoo made from the ashes of the dearly departed). Some attribute the modern emphasis on the increasingly private individualization of grief (even in forms of public mourning) to Romanticism, which celebrated conjugal love, not arranged marriages.8 The expectation that grief expresses the distinct interiority of the individual resembles the modern ideal of prayer as an individual’s heartfelt private conversation with God.9 Even so, it is still the case that many cultures and religions preserve a tradition of ritualized mourning. Anthropologists recognize that rituals do not predetermine that uniform experiences will occur among masses of individuals; yet in the case of mourning, the media perpetuate these illusory images of a comprehensive 7

8

9

Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971 [1953]). Tony Walter, “The New Public Mourning,” in Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice: Advances in Theory and Intervention, ed. M.S. Stroebe et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2008), 241–62. P. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years (London: Allen Lane, 1981). John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.xx.4,5,16.

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and consistent public experience of grief. Tony Walter in his essay on “the New Public Mourning” writes about how decisions about which images are used in news coverage of public mourning influence how people perceive a grieving nation or even globe.10 Walter traces this back to the late 1990s to England’s mourning over the death of Princess Diana. While the “few who came to pay respects were in tears, and even fewer cried aloud, television cameras focused on the one person in tears, cutting away to an apparently large crowd, giving the [misleading] impression of thousands in tears.”11 These critiques of the illusory nature of the socially normative role of mourning during certain occasions help to reinforce our concern to keep in mind that states of grief aroused by practices of mourning had diverse purposes and produced multiple and undetermined responses in individuals that exceed that of lamenting over death. While the modern mind typically understands emotions as a glimpse of a person’s interiority that erupts forth, “the classical conception of the emotions… looked more to agency and effect on social standing than on one’s interior experiences.”12 For the ancients, emotions were not uniformly accessible to all since the passions (pathe) were experienced and negotiated only within the context of a highly stratified society. Emotions that are understood as universal today would simply not have been available to those without power or privilege (e.g., indignation presumes a person’s dignity). In antiquity, grief, i.e., distress marked by personal loss, differed strikingly from the classical Greek notion of pathe because grief was experienced by all, regardless of one’s power or prestige, making it closer to a physical pain than a passion.13 So too, modern studies have begun to recognize that grief is less like an emotion and more like a complex state of distress in response to loss.14 10 11 12

13

14

Walter, “The New Public Mourning,” 241–62. Ibid., 247. David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 258. Daniel King, “Galen and Grief: The Construction of Grief in Galen’s Clinical Work,” in Unveiling Emotions II. Emotions in Greece and Rome: Texts, Images, Material Culture, ed. A. Chaniotis and P. Ducrey (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013), 251–72. G.A. Bonanno, “Grief and Emotion: A Social-Functional Perspective,” in Handbook of Bereavement Research: Consequences, Coping, and Care, ed. M.S. Stroebe et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001), 493–516. The English word emotion has been critiqued by T. Dixon (From Passions to Emotions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]) for being an overly inclusive word in the modern period, masking significant distinctive elements and experiences that were recognized in premodern societies. Dixon’s point is important and significant; however, the word emotion remains useful insofar as it refers to the biological expression of endocrine changes or heart palpitations, e.g., the physiological changes that could be detected by

10

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There were several ways of describing the experience of grief in antiquity. The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo describes grief (lupē) as generating powerlessness, a sense of immobility, smallness, and the loss of words (Her. 270; Mos. I. 139; Prob. 159; Virt. 88; Ios. 214).15 The natural regret that arises in states of longing perhaps can account for grief’s wellattested association with guilt or sinfulness, and may perhaps reflect the effects of a natural process of ruminating over what had or had not been done during the lifetime of the deceased.

RUMINATION—MAKING PRESENCE FROM ABSENCE The cognitive and emotional processes, known collectively as rumination, that occur naturally during grief can be said to resemble those experienced during the ritualization of mourning which is enacted and reenacted in religious contexts. Pascal Boyer and Pierre Liénard distinguished such ritualization behaviors from mundane routinization, in which repetitive acts come to be performed with some degree of automaticity over time.16 They acknowledge that many naturally occurring experiences that are neither religious nor ritualized exhibit such features. Martin and Tesser write that it is possible to define rumination generically as a reference “to several varieties of recurrent thinking, including making sense, problem solving, reminiscence, and anticipation.”17 Ritualized experiences of grief within the context of highly controlled public expression of mourning can arouse the state of rumination, a phenomenon that naturally resembles the repetitive behaviors of ritualization, albeit with certain differences.

15

16

17

another in the form of trembling, tears, blushing, etc. In this sense the discussion offered here is a redescriptive project that uses the language of religion and religious experience but which acknowledges that ancient societies would not themselves categorize their experiences of grief as ‘emotion.’ See Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Jerome Neyrey, “The Absence of Jesus’ Emotions—The Lucan Redaction of Lk 22,39– 46,” Biblica 61 (1980):153–71, esp. 156–57. Pascal Boyer and Pierre Liénard, “Whence Collective Rituals? A Cultural Selection Model of Ritualized Behavior?” American Anthropologist 108 (2006a): 814–27, here 815; P. Boyer, “Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action Parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006b): 595–613, here 606, 611. Leonard L. Martin and Abraham Tesser, “Clarifying Our Thoughts,” in Ruminative Thoughts: Advances in Social Cognition 9, ed. Robert S. Wyer, Jr. (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.), 189–208, here 192.

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In the context of mourning, rumination is an obsessive on-going longing for that which has been lost. Enacting the practices associated with mourning by performing highly stylized funerary behaviors and by uttering self-deprecating statements of sinfulness can generate a predisposition to experience bodily the self-diminishing state associated with grieving and rumination, although such experiences are not predetermined to happen.18 The naturally associative aspects of memory and emotion can generate a state in which personally significant memories of loss or devastation can be imagined from cultivating practices such that a state of vivid bodily ‘experiencing’ is achieved.19 Cognitive processes associated with ritualized experiences of mourning can be said to share similarities with other naturally occurring states of distress due to personal loss which are not occasioned by death. A psychobiological study comparing grief experienced as a result of death and as a result of rejected romantic love demonstrated this, concluding that common areas of the brain are activated. Such ritually induced intrusive cognitive states fit the kinds of natural experiences that Boyer and Liénard associate with ritualized behavior.20 The complex state of grief can be described as a strong “yearning and sadness,” sometimes accompanied by feelings of guilt over what has been lost.21 Individuals in bereavement often report experiences of intense introspection and examination. Studies of the post-traumatic growth that sometimes follows grief have noted the critical role of rumination in bereft individuals, observing a correlation between rumination and experiences of transformation.22 While rumination was previously thought to be maladaptive by prolonging the bereavement process, preventing an 18

19

20 21

22

For a discussion of the performative aspects of mourning practices and penitential prayer language, see Angela Kim Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study of Penitential Elements and their Strategic Arousal of Emotion in the Qumran Hodayot (1QHa cols. 1[?]–8),” in Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions, ed. Stefan C. Reif and Renate Egger-Wenzel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015): 297–316. Tanya M. Luhrmann and Rachel Morgain, “Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience,” Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 40.4 (2012): 359–89; also Thomas Csordas, The Sacred Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Boyer and Liénard, “Whence Collective Rituals?” and idem, “Why Ritualized Behavior?” M.K. Shear, “The Cutting Edge: Getting Straight about Grief,” Depression and Anxiety 29 (2012): 461–64. P. Bray, “Accentuating the Positive: Self-actualising Post-traumatic Growth Processes,” in How Trauma Resonates: Art, Literature, and Theoretical Practice, ed. M. Callaghan (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014), 149–62; L. G. Calhoun et al., “Positive Outcomes Following Bereavement: Paths to Posttraumatic Growth,” Psychologica Belgica 50 (2010): 125–43.

12

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individual from moving beyond their grieving, more recent studies have shown that this is not an avoidance strategy but rather a way by which the bereaved continually confronts the reality of the loss, ultimately resulting in a greater frequency of reported experiences of transformative growth.23 In the case of both romantic love and death, grieving can also bring about an intense idealization of the one who is lost, a phenomenon detected in fMRI studies.24 Such states of hyperawareness and imaginative rumination can be the means whereby the bereaved creates presence from absence. Goodkin and others have included this sense of vivid contact with the deceased in their definition of grief: “Grief includes depressed mood, yearning, loneliness, searching for the deceased, the sense of the deceased being present, and the sense of being in ongoing communication with that person” (italics mine).25 In other words, the naturally occurring cognitive processes associated with grief, viz., rumination, make it possible to perceive the presence of someone who is not physically there. The natural rumination over vivid episodic memories suggests an evolutionary response in which “both separation and grief reactions are deficit-driven reactions to loss of a loved one, whose function is reunification.”26 These aspects of grief are especially interesting if we consider the bodily emotional and cognitive processes that enable the generation of an experience of presence and strong desire for eventual reunification to be the mechanism by which Second Temple communities were able to recover an experience of foundational events with first-hand intensity after the rupture of the exile. The psychophysiology of longing, vivid presence, and idealization that accompanies the experience of grief is not phenomenally dissimilar to the Deuteronomic activity of “searching” or “seeking” which is the theological underpinning of these Second Temple prayers. Pascal Boyer calls the general cognitive processes that allow for the vivid perceptions of someone who is not there to be an expression of the 23

24

25

26

M. C. Eisma et al., “Avoidance Processes Mediate the Relationship between Rumination and Symptoms of Complicated Grief and Depression Following Loss,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 122 (2013): 961–70. J. Archer and H. Fisher, “Bereavement and Reactions to Romantic Rejection: A Psychobiological Perspective,” in Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice, ed. M.S. Stroebe et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2008), 349–71. K. Goodkin et al., “Physiological Effects of Bereavement and Bereavement Support Group Interventions,” in Handbook of Bereavement Research: Consequences, Coping, and Care, ed. M.S. Stroebe et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001), 671–703, here 672. Archer and Fisher, “Bereavement and Reactions to Romantic Rejection,” 359–60.

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evolutionary adaptiveness of imagination, which participates in the larger aim of prosociality by constructing an ethical constraint.27 The ability to imagine vivid egocentric emotional memories (such as the ones that are generated from ruminative states of grieving) can contribute to the imaginative processes that can compel one to follow a law, even if no one is watching. This is because one can mentally construct the presence of someone who is not there and vividly imagine the consequences for not performing the right behavior.28 In this way, the mind’s capacity to make presence from absence is an adaptive function. The prayer in Dan 9, like other prayers from this period, surely spoke to the experiences of longing for God had by those who returned to Judea after the sixth-century expulsion by the Babylonians. This emphasis on mourning and rumination may have assisted in cultivating states of rumination and other imaginative processes that allowed groups throughout the Second Temple period to access God’s presence. This may help us to understand the relationship that these prayers of ritual mourning have with covenant remaking experiences.29 The rumination aroused by these practices and prayers have the capacity to create vivid egocentric emotional memories and states of longing and rumination that would have allowed for a way of perceiving God’s presence during times of great political uncertainty when God’s absence would be most acute. Imaginative emotional memory-making would have been instrumental for these communities to access foundational events from the past with the intensity of first-hand experience. In so doing, the emotional memory frame would also allow for the creative updating of those received traditions, allowing the foundational events from the past to be re-imagined in such a way as to maintain their adaptive relevance in new circumstances.30 The vividness with which Jeremiah’s sixth-century prophecy concerning the duration of the exile has been preserved in a book that is highly charged emotionally, can be understood to be a foundational event of revelatory disclosure upon which Daniel meditates.

27

28 29

30

Pascal Boyer, “What are Memories for? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture,” in Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. P. Boyer and J.V. Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3–28, here 16. Ibid., 18–20. E. Lipinski, La liturgie pénitentielle dans la Bible (Paris: Cerf, 1969); O.H. Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des deuteronomistischen Geschichtsbildes im Alten Testament, Spätjudentum und Urchristentum, WMANT 23 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967). Boyer, “What are Memories For?” 16–18.

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PETITION, CONFESSION,

AND IMAGINATIVE

MEDITATION

Rumination allows for the re-experiencing of past foundational events with a first-hand intensity. In a similar way, the cognitive processes that are aroused in states of grief can allow for an imaginative generation of presence from absence. Mourning and rumination is a natural process which may be the mechanism by which communities of this time maintained a sense of divine palpable presence and continuity with the past. Daniel’s practices of mourning, his prayer, and meditation upon Jeremiah’s prophecy can be said to assist in the cultivation of a predisposition for experiencing the emotional state of grief, without predetermining that it would happen. Ancient prayers were not spontaneous unique expressions of the ritual actor; they were reenactments styled on traditional prayer components: petitions, confessions of sin, and confessions of God’s greatness. The discursive prayer elements that are also associated with this type of prayer (viz., petitions, confessions of God’s greatness, and confessions of the speaker’s sinfulness) are understood here as strategies for placing the speaker in a position of subordination to the deity. The embodied sensation of smallness could also generate perceptions of alterity,31 an experience by which the sovereign deity’s presence could be known. The prayer, in conjunction with Daniel’s imaginative meditation upon Jeremiah’s prophecy, works to layer multiple self-diminishing experiences so that a state of mourning and rumination can be achieved. Petition and Confession Ancient ritual prayers of petitioning did not assume that God would respond to the request at hand—although they certainly sought to compel him to do so.32 While conceptualizing petition as a need to which God should eventually respond prevails in modern times, the pre-modern world can be said to understand petitionary prayer as a highly stylized ritual script that aimed to generate a vivid experience of the deity’s presence within the practitioner, one that would also affect the witnesses at hand.33 31

32

33

Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18.1 (1990): 5–47, here 36–37. Angelos Chaniotis, “Emotional Community through Ritual. Initiates, Citizens, and Pilgrims as Emotional Communities in the Greek World,” in Ritual Dynamics in the Ancient Mediterranean: Agency, Emotion, Gender, Representation, ed. A. Chaniotis (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2011), 264–90, here 265–66. Angelos Chaniotis, “Staging and Feeling the Presence of God: Emotion and Theatricality in Religious Celebrations in the Roman East,” in Panthée: Religious Transformations

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These practices along with the prayer allow Daniel to achieve a decentering of the self that makes possible the crucial perception of alterity. According to Angelos Chaniotis, performative emotions within ritual contexts, seek to generate vivid sensations of alterity, usually of being in the real presence of the deity, so as to construct compelling religious experiences for the spectators who are present.34 In this sense, the intense and highly emotional experiences expressed by the first-person voice in the prayer are not solely to cultivate an experience in the one who prays. The cognitive processes of rumination that accompany grief can help to generate perceptions of the other because the experience of grieving is one in which the bereaved is acutely aware of the absence of the one who is gone. The appearance of the heavenly being is part of the staging of the immanent experience of heavenly beings and is timed to coincide with the evening sacrifice (Dan 9:20–23).35 The invisible and distant God is rhetorically constructed by the prayer which recollects the deity’s saving deeds in the Exodus from Egypt (Dan 9:15–16) and the frequent mention of divine punishment for disobedience. With this in mind, it is notable that the prayer meditates upon the invisible God’s face, ear, eyes, and hand, thereby rhetorically constructing the physical human-like body of the deity which may even account for the vividness of the vision of the otherworldly agent who appears in human form as the angel Gabriel. It is helpful to remember that the cumulative effect of these petitionary prayer elements, petition and confession of sin, converges with the outcome of funerary practices: self-diminishment. In other words, petitionary prayer is far more about the performative reenactment of the subordinating behavior of beseeching than about that which is being petitioned.36 Second Temple ritual practices and prayers that generate the desired emotional state of grief-stricken desolation also serve to transform the individual from a state of longing to joy.37 The same can be said about the confessional language used in Daniel’s prayer, which include both the confession of sins and confession of God’s greatness. While

34 35

36 37

in the Graeco-Roman Empire, ed. Laurent Bricault and Corinne Bonnet (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 169–89. Chaniotis, “Staging and Feeling the Presence of God.” Incidentally, the synchronization of the performance of penitential prayer with the incense offering of the Jerusalem Temple appears in Jud 9:1. Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study of Penitential Elements,” 297–316. This phenomenon of the transformative role of ritually experienced emotions of mourning and desolation in ancient Israelite religion is described well by Gary A. Anderson, A Time to Mourn, a Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).

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Second Temple prayers often include a confession of sins, the transgressions are not personal crimes. Daniel confesses the sinful violations of the covenant in the first-person plural (Dan 9:5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16), all of which are stereotypical statements of Israel’s wrongdoings, even though it is not clear that Daniel himself is guilty of these deeds.38 While the modern mind is accustomed to viewing these petitionary elements and confessional statements (both the confession of sins and the confession of God’s greatness) as the spontaneous outpouring of the pray-er’s innermost thoughts, the language of the prayer and the larger ancient cultural context indicate that these are performative reenactments of highly stylized ritual components.39 All of these elements highlight the speaker’s diminution and subordination vis-à-vis the deity, and can be recognized as strategies for bringing about self-diminishment. Reenacting Jeremiah’s Anguish If Dan 9 is understood as a scripted performance for decentering in which the funerary acts and the prayer elements contribute to the successive layering of self-diminishment, a further mechanism for decentering can be identified in Daniel’s imaginative meditation upon the sixth-century prophet Jeremiah. The report of Daniel’s ritualization of mourning can be said to be a reenactment of the prophet’s anguish and distress. The specific prophecy concerning the duration of the exile is found in Jeremiah 25 and 29. It is not said that Daniel went to a specific scriptural text, but rather that Daniel consulted books and perceived in them the number of years that Jerusalem must lie in devastation (viz., 70). While the modern mind may imagine the seer gazing intently at a specific text from the Book of Jeremiah, a scroll apparatus would not allow for random access. It is more likely that Daniel was pouring over the scrolls associated with Jeremiah—reading and re-reading them—while pondering their contents as he performed the practices and prayer. Meditation upon Jeremiah’s career, which was marked by desolation, rejection, and anguish, would have been a further means by which Daniel was able to layer self-diminishing experiences to bring about a decentering experience. Such an imaginative reading can generate an experience of “presence,” 38

39

In another example, Ezra passionately confesses the sin of intermarriage, including himself among the guilty, even though it is clear that he himself has never committed this deed (e.g., Ezra 9:6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 15). Moses also uses the first-person plural to confess the sin of the golden calf, but clearly he played no part in the crime (Exod 34:9). Gary Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse,” History of Religions 39 (2000): 211–46.

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that is, a perception of being in the space that has been constructed by the rhetorical elements in the text.40 The image in Dan 9:2 is of Daniel pouring over a scroll and imaginatively meditating upon and visualizing Jeremiah’s prophetic career as it was expressed by his anguished experiences highlights an enactive reading which could have heightened his own emotional experience of the sixth-century prophecy. Daniel’s practices and prayers can also be understood as initiating a decentering process that allowed for the natural processes of problem-solving to happen, expressed in the biblical text as a new interpretation of Jeremiah’s prestigious 6th c. prophecy. The firstperson speech that often characterizes the discourse of the prophetic utterance is also a means by which Daniel could have accessed a richer and more imaginative experience of Jeremiah’s prophecies. Studies of narrative theory and cognitive science suggest that the activity of reading empathically can engage sensory faculties of perception that make possible a vivid enactive experience of events described in the texts.41 Daniel can be understood as performing an affective reenactment of the intense grief felt by the prophet Jeremiah, particularly as these emotions are described in Jeremiah 25–29 and especially in the biographical sections in Jer 27–29. The reader is only told that Daniel is actively meditating upon the content of the book of Jeremiah; we are not told that Daniel focused on a particular passage. It may be that the mourning and first-person prayer vividly recreated the emotions of desolation and grief that were experienced by the prophet and expressed in Jer 25 and 29, which speak of the Babylonian devastation as a manifestation of the invisible God’s just punishment of a disobedient people. Jeremiah’s career spanned key decades in Judean history, posing distinct challenges as he preached to an unreceptive community who rested confidently in the fact that they had earlier escaped the Assyrian destruction that had been experienced by the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. In addition to being pained by this international crisis, Jeremiah was also 40

41

Anežka Kuzmičová writes that presence is “the sense of having physically entered a tangible environment,” in her essay, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment,” Semiotica 189 (2012): 23–48, here 24. According to Kuzmičová, the passage must be detailed and long enough for the reader to mentally enact the kinesthetic behavior; it cannot be a fleeting summary reference. See also István Czachesz, The Grotesque Body in Early Christian Discourse: Hell, Scatology, and Metamorphosis (Sheffield: Equinox, 2012), 172. The most effective rhetorical details for enactive reading are the use of the first-person voice and reports of kinesthetic movement; Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative,” 27–28; Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 94–113.

18

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greatly anguished by personal challenges to his authority, as is reported in his dramatic public controversies with the false prophet Hananiah (Jer 27–29). Placing the fictive literary setting of the book of Daniel within the context of the tumultuous events during Jeremiah’s lifetime suggests that the uncertainty of the Babylonian era resonated deeply for the author of Daniel, whom many believe to have written and compiled traditions during the second century BCE.

REENACTING GRIEF AS A DECENTERING TECHNIQUE Patrick McNamara discusses how various practices can be used to decenter the self, and he notes that the right temporal prefrontal regions of the brain are responsible for what he calls the ‘anatomy of the Self’ and religious experience.42 The social mechanisms and practices by which religion contributes to the on-going and dynamic process of transforming the self include: “prayer; meditations; mental exercises involving the imagination; confessing sins before God and forming resolutions and goals concerning better behaviors; reading and studying scriptural texts; private rituals and devotional practices.”43 The involvement of the body in various behaviors and gestures is a critical part of the transformative cognitive processes. These integrative models of embodied cognition understand the self phenomenologically as “grounded and situated in social and bodily contexts.”44 Daniel’s practices and prayers can also be understood as initiating a decentering process that allowed for the natural processes of problem solving to happen, expressed in the biblical text as a new interpretation of Jeremiah’s prestigious 6th c. prophecy. Emotions that are strategically performed within ritualized settings play a key role in the experiences attributed to Daniel. While the ongoing reenactment of performative emotions does not predetermine 42

43 44

Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146. Ibid., 148. S. Schüler, “Synchronized Ritual Behavior: Religion, Cognition, and the Dynamics of Embodiment,” in Religion and the Body: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, ed. D. Cave and R.S. Norris (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 81–101, here 90; Armin W. Geertz, “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 304–21; E.R. Smith, “Social Relationships and Groups: New Insights on Embodied and Distributed Cognition,” Cognitive Systems Research 9 (2008): 24–32; S. Gallagher, “The Practice of Mind: Theory, Simulation, or Primary Interaction?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001): 83–108.

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that transformative cognitive processes will occur (e.g., rumination, the sensations of smallness, the awareness of alterity), the cultivation of these perceptions through imaginative practices of meditation is the necessary precondition for their occurrence.45 Religious communities use a number of practices for training and disciplining bodily sense perceptions in order to generate within their members a predisposition to experiencing religion. Tanya Luhrmann’s recent work, How God Becomes Real, as well as her study of the spiritual experiences of contemporary evangelical Christian groups, highlight the enormous energy and effort that is expended in order to create an experientially accessible presence of the deity for religious communities.46 Both Mahmood and Luhrmann describe how sensory imagination and emotional energies are carefully trained through self-cultivating practices of prayer and meditation to generate the necessary predisposition to experience God vividly in the here and now. In doing so, religious subjects could be said to interact with God, Jesus, Muhammad, or any number of holy men and women whom “they have never met face-to-face,” thus broadening and complicating how we understand the possible relationships and experiences that are constitutive of the self.47 From a modern perspective, we might describe the events in Daniel 9 as the cultivation of religious experience through practices and imaginative meditation, but it would be a mistake to conclude that such effects were determined to happen or that they could be mechanically replicated. In this sense, visionary experiences cannot be generated at will. Instead, one might speak of the cultivation of a predisposition for these experiences, but natural explanatory theories cannot fully account for the unpredictable occurrence of prophetic visionary experience that are phenomenologically indistinct from the unpredictability of dreams.48 As Haug and Bauman write, “Religious experiences are best termed emergent precisely because the mixture of cognitive-emotional processes will not account for the complex, dialogical characteristics of religion.”49 45

46 47

48

49

Tanya M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real; eadem, When God Talks Back; Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 132–56, 189–226. Amira Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 230. Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2011), 112–13. James W. Haag and Whitney A. Bauman, “De/Constructing Transcendence: The Emergence of Religious Bodies,” in Religion and the Body (2012): 37–55.

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PRAYER AS A SOCIAL MECHANISM Daniel’s chronomessianic understanding of Jeremiah’s prophecy has been read and re-read by Jewish and Christian communities throughout the centuries who have used this text to support their own revolts and resistance movements. Perhaps the most famous of these political movements is the great Jewish Revolt that resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. This raises important questions about how the prayer and angelic vision found in Dan 9 functioned to enhance prosocial aims. This section offers three ways in which we could imagine Dan 9 contributing to cooperative living and intensify commitment. The Display of Grief and Self-Abasement as a Costly Display of Deep Commitment First, the ritually correct display of self-abasement on the body of the pray-er (Daniel) could have increased the power and prestige that he enjoyed within the group by signaling his commitment to the group, thus generating entitativity among members and compelling them to behave in cooperative ways.50 David Lambert has already argued persuasively that fasting is not an expression of interior sinfulness but rather a ritualized performance and socially meaningful display that can have multiple and diverse purposes.51 In this framework, the non-violent behaviors of abstaining and fasting from foods and the performance of self-diminishing practices and prayers could be understood as compelling signals of deep commitment that effected a strengthening of the social bonds that tied together the ancient communities who read the Book of Daniel. The display of emotion can produce the additional social benefits of a convergence of emotional states among individuals (explained by some scholars as emotional contagion or by the concept of mirror neurons), thereby resulting in greater behavioral synchrony.52 50

51

52

McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, 30–31; Joseph Henrich, “The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion: Credibility Enhancing Displays and their Implications for Cultural Evolution,” Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (2009): 244–60; Richard Sosis, “The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual: Rituals Promote Group Cohesion by Requiring Members to Engage in Behavior that is Too Costly to Fake,” American Scientist 92 (2004): 166–72. David Lambert, “Fasting as a Penitential Rite: A Biblical Phenomenon?” Harvard Theological Review 96 (2003): 477–512. G. Schoenewolf, “Emotional Contagion: Behavioral Induction in Individuals and Groups,” Modern Psychoanalysis 15 (1990): 49–61; E. Hatfield, J.L. Cacioppo,

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A Mechanism for Adaptive Transformation of Foundational Events The practices, prayer, and resulting vision in Dan 9 can be understood as providing a social mechanism for the updating of traditional narratives, thereby allowing later communities to use the power and prestige of Jeremiah’s received prophecy in a new age—a community to adapt and transform older folktales and ethnic narratives into new national histories.53 The new narratives are compelling because they retain their emotional impact, even though they have been significantly altered.54 Dan 9 recasts and renews the sixth-century BCE Jeremian prophecy in a way that meets the needs of the second century community, while retaining the prestige and emotional impact of the foundational prophecy which was disclosed during the Babylonian period. The evolutionary advantage of staging such ritualized experiences and otherworldly encounters is that it allows the Judean community an opportunity to update the tried-andtrue sixth century prophecies in Second Temple times. One could say that the long-standing judgments understood to be issued by the deity long ago concerning the duration of the exile (e.g., Jeremiah’s original prophecy) has been reimagined within a newly constructed revelatory framework that both stages the encounter with the angelic being and also authenticates the content that is revealed. Daniel’s practices and prayer aroused an emotional state that allowed for the creation of a vivid meditation on the sixth-century prophecy, which then became the emotional frame for its revision, thereby allowing it to address the specific concerns of a much later, second-century Hellenistic Jewish community. The Complexity of Ancient Revelatory Experiences Thirdly, and most directly related to our previous discussion of grief and rumination, ritually-induced grief cultivated a state of rumination that heightened Daniel’s receptivity to perceive the presence of otherworldly agents. In the case of Dan 9, this expressed itself as a visionary experience of the angel Gabriel (Dan 9:21–27), and a revealed interpretation of the Jeremian prophecy. The reenacting of mourning practices of selfdiminishment occurs in Dan 10 when Daniel has an experience of the angel Michael, but this time at the bank of the Tigris River (Dan 10:2–18).

53 54

R.L. Rapson, “Emotional Contagion,” Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 2 (1993): 96–99. Pascal Boyer, “What are Memories For?” 3–28. Ibid., 10.

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Ruminative mourning could have generated an altered state of consciousness that allowed for the cultivation of a vivid perception of that which is longed for, the immediacy of otherworldly contact during a politically fraught time. The textualized record of Daniel’s prayer and vision had this-worldly consequences for the groups that inherited them, effectively emboldening small disenfranchised groups to revolt against much larger imperial powers.55 This is not dissimilar to the role that visionary experiences and omens played in shoring up the resolve of Greco-Roman troops who were fatigued by battle.56 Daniel’s encounters with otherworldly beings were constitutive of communities came to understand him as a prophet or a seer. Otherworldly experiences contribute to the negotiation of power and authority in this world.

CONCLUSION How can we consider the complexity of Daniel’s experience as it would have been experienced in its time? Revelatory experiences such as dreams and visions have, in many cultures throughout time, been a mechanism by which disenfranchised people were able to access the power of the supernatural world—a power that often unpredictably ruptured the earthly hierarchical power structures.57 Was Daniel a seer, or was he a prophet?—regardless of how precisely Jews and Christians come to understand him, it is clear that he was known for his otherworldly visionary experiences. These events were constitutive of his identity in this world and had lasting implications for the communities that inherited his legacy. The figure of Daniel is able to access multiple new relationships with beings who are not of this world. In this respect, Daniel negotiates multiple realms of experience, and in so doing, he reminds readers that there is more than this world. The possibility of an otherworldly realm, one that is vividly accessed by Daniel, contributed to how later readers of this book chose to act in the social and political worlds in which they lived.

55 56

57

Tomasino, “Oracles of Insurrection.” Steven Weitzman, “Warring against Terror: The War Scroll and the Mobilization of Emotion,” JSJ 40 (2009): 213–41; Jean Duhaime, “The War Scroll from Qumran and the Greco-Roman Tactical Treatises,” RevQ 13 (1988): 133–51, esp. 150. Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter, 13.

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This way of understanding Daniel’s visionary experiences is part of a larger interest in recovering the embodied experiences of individuals in an emerging area known as phenomenological approaches to anthropology.58 Especially useful is the work by Amira Mittermeier, who writes how experiences ‘from elsewhere’ that happen to an individual, like dreams or visions, are constitutive of the self. While disciplined practices and focused concentration of prayer and contemplation are certainly key in cultivating the necessary predispositions for religious experiences like Daniel’s vision of the angel Gabriel, his identity as a prophet or as a seer is itself constituted by these experiences in socially meaningful ways.59 As events, they reveal how transformations in status and authority happen within living religious communities, effectively “rupturing hierarchical power structures, ratiocentric paradigms, and psychoanalytic idioms all at once.”60 The question is not whether Daniel’s claim of angelic visions and revelation were authentic or fraudulent; such assessments can never be proven and ultimately divert attention away from the dynamic construction of identity and the ongoing negotiation of relationships and power that is taking place.61 This discussion of Daniel’s experience has been an attempt to recover what individual experiences from the past might have been like, based on a textual record. While such a task has long been recognized to be difficult and challenging, not to consider subjective experiences as data for understanding the past can lead to over-determined monochromatic images of the self in antiquity that inevitably (and wrongly) reserve any high-definition texturing such as complexity, contingencies, competing desires, to the world of the observer alone.62 We can only speculate about the cognitive processes that would have assisted a figure such as Daniel to have the kinds of visionary experiences that are reported in chapter 9. The ritualization of mourning could have generated the presence of otherworldly agents in a way that met the 58

59

60 61 62

Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 87–102. Mittermaier (Dreams that Matter) writes that the dreams that happen in the Muslim group that she studies are worthy of examination: “By calling into question conventional parameters of the ‘real,’ they invite a more radical rethinking of community and subjectivity. They exceed the logic of self-cultivation by allowing space for the prophetic, alterity, and elements of rupture.… Ultimately, it is the dream’s agency that matters, more so than the dreamer.” (5) Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter, 13. Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter, 27–28. Desjarlais and Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” 96.

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needs of a languishing second-century community who was being harshly persecuted by imperial powers. We can say with more certainty that this account of Daniel’s experience of otherworldly encounter was received as evidence of the deity’s presence (indirectly mediated through angels) by the Jewish and Christian communities in antiquity who understood themselves as heirs to his legacy, and that this prayer text heightened their commitment to cooperative living. Who was the historical Daniel? Was he real? In some ways, the question is not relevant for understanding how this text functioned in antiquity. Because emotive and cognitive processes are similarly enacted in the reading of fiction and non-fiction, the question of historicity is peripheral for a discussion of how a text would have been experienced as real.63 Later communities who received the tradition of Daniel’s prayer and the angelic revelation of the interpretation of Jeremiah’s prophecy could have experienced this text in compelling ways, even though it could not be proven or disproven to be historical in their own day or in ways that would satisfy modern sensibilities. These apocalyptic visions functioned as evidence of God’s palpable nearness to Second Temple readers, despite their lived experience as politically subjugated peoples. Otherworldly experiences were known to have had significant this-worldly consequences— they were generative of meaning, constitutive of identity, and reminders of God’s unexpected presence in the here and now.

63

Within the context of literary studies, see Cain Todd, “Attending Emotionally to Fiction,” and Auyoung, When Fiction Feels Real; for a perspective from the discipline of history, see Anderson, The Realness of Things Past.

THE PRO-SOCIAL ROLE OF GRIEF IN EZRA’S PENITENTIAL PRAYER1 Inquiry into what modern scholars call emotions and how they function within ritual reenactments can serve as a useful point of entry into a new integrative scholarly conversation taking place among the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. This study of Ezra’s prayer (Ezra 9:6–15) uses recent integrative approaches to understanding human experience to propose that grief played an instrumental role for the Judean community during the Second Temple period. Because the arousal of emotion has the capacity to generate perceptions of events that have the vividness of lived experience, even those that were not had first-hand, the reenactment of grief could be understood as a strategy for accessing foundational events after the disruptive breach of the exile. In the shadow of the newly built Second Temple, Ezra dramatically performs a series of mourning rituals and offers a penitential prayer (Ezra 9). In so doing, he reenacts behaviors and words that look back to two significant and relevant moments in Israel’s history: the remaking of the Sinai covenant after the golden calf (Exod 32–34 / Deut 9); and the inauguration of the first Temple, which epitomizes the beginnings of a new nation state (1 Kgs 8 / 2 Chr 6–7). Ezra’s religious and political roles converge in his compelling performance of ritual grief that can be understood to have moved the hareidim and the larger Judean community to act in a cooperative way by agreeing to the difficult decree of divorcing their foreign wives and abandoning their children whom they had acquired during their time in exile. 1

I wish to acknowledge in gratitude the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under the grant agreement number 627536 RelExDSS FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IIF which funded this research. In a special way, I wish to thank my host at the University of Birmingham, Charlotte Hempel. This essay has benefited much from conversations with the following individuals: Richard J. Bautch, Franklin T. Harkins, Ari Mermelstein, Françoise Mirguet, Richard Sosis, and Rodney A. Werline. Any errors remain solely my own. Various portions of the paper were presented at very different interdisciplinary venues in 2014 and early 2015 at which I received much helpful feedback: Law and Emotion Conference at Yeshiva University’s Cordozo Law School (April 2014), ISBL in Vienna, James Barnett Lecture Series in Humanistic Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, Prayer workshop at the University of Toronto, and the 2014 Barton College Scholars Conversation. I am grateful to all of the organizers and participants for their feedback.

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UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES THEN AND NOW Scholarship on emotions in the last generation has overturned longstanding models that saw them solely as eruptive drives that required restraint and control.2 The study of emotions has been complicated by controversies over what exactly is meant by this word, especially in English language works.3 Emotions are understood here as the physical changes that take place in the body (heart palpitations and endocrine changes) that are then processed by the brain in various higher-order cognitive processes. Emotion studies were influenced early on by Paul Ekman’s universalizing claims about emotion and their distinct 2

3

New developments in brain-imaging technology, as well as the popular works by neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio on emotions (The Feeling of What Happens: The Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness [New York: Harcourt, 1999]; idem, Descartes’ Error: Emotions, Reason, and the Human Brain [New York: HarperCollins, 1994]), have made integrative studies of human experiences and embodied cognitive processes available to a wide readership, thus allowing for new vistas in understanding religion in antiquity. Scholars interested in the study of ancient emotions or in a critique of Damasio’s work should see Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). A useful articulation of the interdependence of affect and cognition is that by J. Storbeck and G.L. Clore, “On the Interdependence of Cognition and Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 21 (2007): 1212–37, which gives a helpful survey and assessment of the various scholarly positions regarding the relationship between the two. Especially useful here is Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); A. Wierzbicka, (Emotions across Languages and Cultures [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 21) also writes that the English word for emotion collapses aspects of the biological processes with what are also known as feelings (2). Inconsistencies in how the word ‘emotion’ is understood in English-speaking contexts and also crossculturally have impeded emotion research; see J. Panksepp, “Toward a General Psychobiological Theory of Emotions,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (1982), 407–67, esp. 449. For a survey of the striking differences in emotion study in the social sciences and the natural sciences, see C. Lutz and G.M. White, “The Anthropology of Emotions,” Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 405–36.While the topic of emotion and Judaism is not frequently engaged in scholarship, the emergence of interdisciplinary emotion studies has invigorated discussion in this area; see Gary A. Anderson, A Time to Mourn, a Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion (University Park: Penn State, 1991); Saul M. Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Approaches that engage the cognitive science of religion include Thomas Kazen, Emotions in Biblical Law: A Cognitive Science Approach (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011); and A.K. Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 37–45. For useful general discussions of Judaism and emotion, see J. Gereboff, “Judaism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed. J. Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 95–110; S. Ross, “General Introduction” in Judaism and Emotions: Texts, Performance, Experience, eds. S. Ross, G. Levy, and S. Al-Suadi (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 1–13.

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recognizability,4 but it is now clear that emotions are far more complex and well-integrated into cognitive processes. The classic Cartesian separation between mind and body has been challenged by studies that demonstrate how emotions participate in high-order cognition, including decision-making processes. Scholars also recognize now that sensory perceptions are not experienced in the body in the same way for all people.5 To this end, studies of emotions from an evolutionary anthropological perspective highlight their adaptive relevance and help to describe their social construction. Emotions, which play a crucial role in appraisal systems, undergo change within cultures over time and display variation among people.6 4

5

6

P. Ekman and W.V. Friesen, “Constants across Cultures in the Face and Emotion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 (1971), 124–39; P. Ekman and W.V. Friesen, Pictures of Facial Affect (Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1976); P. Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003); M.D. Pell et al., “Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 33 (2009): 107– 20. While significant in its time, Ekman’s studies are now critiqued throughout the scholarship on emotions. Natural sciences have emphatically demonstrated that sensorial experiences and emotions are not the same for all peoples; instead, sensory perceptions are dynamic, plastic, and highly adaptive. Neurobiologist Walter Freeman’s study of the physiology of perception demonstrates that the brain creatively processes in ways that create unique experiences for individuals. He writes, “An act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stimulus. It is a step in a trajectory by which brains grow, reorganize themselves, and reach into their environment to change it to their own advantage,” taken from W. Freeman, “The Physiology of Perception,” Scientific American 264 (1991): 78–87 (85). Psychologists recognize that certain individuals can experience a heightened sensory perception, known as synaesthesia, and an enhanced openness to experiences known as absorption. For a helpful overview of the different types and forms of synaesthesia, a wide-ranging phenomenon, see A. Rogowska, “Categorization of Synaesthesia,” Review of General Psychology 15.3 (2011): 213–27. S.M. Roche and K.M. McConkey, “Absorption: Nature, Assessment, and Correlates,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59 (1990): 91–101; M.L. Glisky, D.J. Tataryn, B.A. Tobias, J.F. Kihlstron, and K.M. McConkey, “Absorption, Openness to Experience, and Hypnotizability,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 (1991): 263–72; R.J. Pekala, C.F. Wenger, and R.L. Levine, “Individual Differences in Phenomenological Experience: States of Consciousness as a Function of Absorption,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48 (1985): 123–32. See the excellent overview contrasting universalistic and presentist views of emotion by Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context 1 (2010): 1–32 (1–9). See R. Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); G.L. Clore and A. Ortony, “Appraisal Theories: How Cognition Shapes Affect into Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett (New York: Guilford Press, 3rd ed, 2008), 628–44; E. Jablonka and M.J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).

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Universalizing understandings of emotions and human experience are often associated with Enlightenment and modern approaches that ultimately seek to extend normative values and understandings of the present into the past.7 Scholars are right to be suspicious of universalizing tendencies as they often run roughshod over the diverse and particular instantiations of experience, frequently with negative consequences for Judaism.8 Thomas Dixon has argued that modern understandings of and assumptions about emotion held by psychologists and scientists today proceed from the overly inclusive and constructed meanings advanced by English-speaking thinkers of the eighteenth century.9 In other words, most modern assumptions about emotion do not align with pre-modern notions of the passions and the affections. Looking at emotions from a historical perspective is, therefore, a significant way of considering them, although such historical studies do not claim to diagnose actual individuals and their bodily experiences of emotions, but only how select people chose to disclose and represent how they felt in the texts and other media that have survived.10 7

8

9

10

Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 132–53; R.T. McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 2003), 255; cf. D. Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The negative consequences of Enlightenment universalizing tendencies on understandings of Judaism are wide-ranging and have been discussed in the literature; see Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance, 7–8; Joel S. Kaminsky, Yet I loved Jacob (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 5; Joseph Blenkinsopp, “YHWH and Other Deities: Conflict and Accommodation in the Religion of Israel,” Interpretation 40 (1986): 354–66 (360); A.K. Harkins, “Biblical and Historical Perspectives on ‘the People of God’,” in Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, ed. Franklin T. Harkins (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 319–39 (325–29). Dixon, From Passions to Emotions; idem, “Revolting Passions,” Modern Theology 27 (2011): 298–312. A good example of a historical study of emotions is Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); and eadem, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821–45. Rosenwein’s most recent definition of emotional communities is as follows: “emotional communities are largely the same as social communities—families, neighborhoods, syndicates, academic institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, princely courts. But the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling, to establish what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them (for it I about such things that people express emotions); the emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage tolerate, and deplore,” from “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” 11.

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EMOTIONS AND THE EXPERIENCING SUBJECT: MODERN AND PRE-MODERN PERSPECTIVES A look at how ancient societies expressed emotions and sensibilities in the writings from the past can sharpen the contrasting assumptions that modern scholars hold about emotions that are embedded in cultures from the past. Modern neurobiological studies of emotion and cognitive processes presume that emotion is foremost an interiorly felt experience. In contrast, emotion in ancient times was a public psychosocial phenomenon, a point that is highlighted in Daniel Gross’s study of emotions from the classical Greek period.11 Emotions were not simply experienced universally with differing degrees of intensity; such an expectation assumes an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment worldview. In antiquity, social elites had a privileged access to certain emotions that would not have been accessible to those of a slave class. One example of this is indignation, an emotion that presumes that the subject has dignity at the start.12 A historical approach to the topic of emotions highlights these culturally specific social and political aspects. Interestingly, grief was not included among the pathê (e.g., anger, pity, fear, indignation, envy, etc.) that Aristotle catalogued in his work on rhetoric.13 According to David Konstan: The emotions that Aristotle identifies and analyses are social, in the strong sense that they are responses to behavior by conscious agents. They are not typically elicited by inanimate objects. What is more, they are deeply enmeshed in a world of competitive honour and esteem (doxa), in which people are intensely aware of their status relative to their peers, their inferiors, and their betters, and of the effects on their public standing of other people’s attitudes and actions. Rather than a mere reaction to an impinging event or circumstance, a pathos is part of a social transaction. The natural fact of death stands outside this system.14 11

12

13

14

For a discussion of the significant psychosocial and political dimension of emotion in antiquity see Gross, The Secret History of Emotion; also Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages; Angelos Chaniotis, “Staging and Feeling the Presence of God: Emotion and Theatricality in Religious Celebrations in the Roman East,” in Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco-Roman Empire, ed. L. Bricault and C. Bonnet, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 177 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 169– 89. For a further discussion of indignation in the Hebrew Bible, see Françoise Mirguet, “What is an ‘Emotion’ in the Hebrew Bible?: An Experience that Exceeds Most Contemporary Concepts,” BibInt 24 (2016): 442–65. David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 244–58. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 248.

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Grief was different from the other pathê because the deceased lacked an intention to harm the bereaved, making the experience of grief closer to a physical pain.15 At the same time, grief was a highly controlled, ritualized experience that was governed by public norms and socially controlled.16 This study of emotions in the Second Temple period is a redescriptive project that uses categories and language foreign to the ancient period.17 Emotion studies will not be used to argue that Ezra or any of the figures associated with him was an actual historical person;18 although, it is assumed that the account of Ezra’s prayer and the events that followed would have been received by subsequent Second Temple readers as actual experiences had by real people. The language of emotion and the body can rhetorically construct figural beings whose experiences would have been imagined as real by subsequent readers of the text. The contemporary neuropsychological studies of emotion and the body used here are offered only as a heuristic model for understanding how the body’s arousal of emotions participates in other cognitive processes, not as a diagnostic one that can verify whether emotions were actually aroused (or not) in a particular Second Temple recitation of a particular prayer. On this point, Gary Ebersole is correct to critique attempts to evaluate the authenticity of emotions displayed in a ritual context as a strictly modern concern.19 What is crucial about ritually performed emotions is not whether they stem from a genuine interior state, but that they were executed in the precise manner required by the rite. In ritual contexts, the prevailing modern concern with distinguishing real from false emotions is unimportant. Gary Ebersole writes that reenacted emotions are often devalued because the modern assumption is that spontaneous affect is more authentic than the scripted variety, and thus “prematurely foreclose any serious inquiry into either the local discourse about tears or the multiple ways in which specifically (and differently) situated social agents at 15 16

17 18

19

Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 247. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 252–53 where he cites Plato, Republic 395E12; 605C12; Laws 958E7; Sophocles, Electra 846; Euripides, Helen 166. Nongbri, Before Religion, 21. The extreme unlikelihood of certain details that are given about Ezra is described well by Lester L. Grabbe, “The Law of Moses in the Ezra Tradition: More Virtual than Real?” in Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial Authorization of the Pentateuch, ed. J.W. Watts (Atlanta: SBL, 2001), 91–113. Gary Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse,” History of Religions 39 (2000), 211–46, repr. as 185–222 in Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. J. Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); see too Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 39.

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times strategically manipulate the local sociocultural understanding of tears for their own intents and purposes.”20 Emotions are bodily. The possibility of emotions’ external display carries a political dimension. The efficacy of the performative emotions that are experienced in ritual does not rely upon them being spontaneous and heartfelt expressions of the interiority of the religious practitioner. In the case of mourning rites, relevant for our discussion of Ezra’s prayer, the performance of certain ritual behaviors is aimed at generating the desired emotional and cognitive state within the religious practitioner (i.e., grief) so that the display of emotions can further his political and social aims. While scholars often focus on the ways in which such ritual performances of prayer are intended to express a private communication between the practitioner and the deity, this study wishes to demonstrate that ritual behaviors also exert an important pro-social force upon the community who witnesses these actions taking place. Here the work of Angelos Chainotis is useful in highlighting the ways in which ritually performed emotions in antiquity sought to influence the performers and the spectators (viz., the observers of religious rites).21 While the modern assumption is that prayer moves vertically as a form of personal communication between the pray-er and the deity, ancient rituals sought to make the deity vividly present by creating an experience that was directed horizontally among the spectators and participants.22

EMOTIONS AND THE CULTIVATION OF THE SELF Modern integrative approaches that use bio-cultural models tend to presume and prioritize the palliative and therapeutic effects of religion, and so emphasize the cultivation of positive emotional experiences, but ancient experiences do not always share the same concern to care for practitioners.23 David T. Bradford critiques the emerging field’s assumptions about the overwhelmingly positive effects of religious experience with examples from the Byzantine mystic Symeon the New Theologian 20 21 22 23

Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited,” 187. Chaniotis, “Staging and Feeling the Presence of God,” 169–89, esp. 169. Chaniotis, “Staging and Feeling the Presence of God,” 175–76. Studies of religion as a motivational force are concerned to highlight the positive and palliative effects of religiosity; see M. Inzlicht, A.M. Tullett, and M. Good, “The Need to Believe: A Neuroscience Account of Religion as a Motivated Process,” Religion, Brain & Behavior 1 (2011): 192–251.

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(949–1022 CE), whose reports reflect a range of negative emotions.24 While contemporary accounts of otherworldly journeys or near death experiences are redolent of positive states of affect (peace, harmony, tranquility), pre-modern accounts are riddled with pangs of despair, terror, and dislocation. Similarly, ancient reports of journey experiences often include passages through places of punishment that vividly and viscerally arouse experiences of fear and desolation.25 When applying recent research from the social sciences to ancient texts, the prevailing perspective that emerges is an orientation to the cultivation of the self. A fine illustration of this modern preoccupation can be seen in Patrick McNamara’s stimulating study entitled The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, which offers important insights for scholars of ancient religions.26 Speaking from an evolutionary perspective, McNamara notes the adaptive advantages of cultivating an executive Self, placing a premium on its agentive capabilities. According to McNamara, the formation of an executive Self occurs through various decentering processes in which the individual enters into a liminal state, during which a heightened state of receptivity can allow for the desired transformative processes to take place. The executive Self is one that governs and manages the integration of the fractured selves and, as such, offers distinct evolutionary advantages, but it requires a great investment of time and energy. The sustained manifestation of virtuous ethical behavior is difficult and takes time, resulting in the costly display of behaviors that cannot be faked, but which proves to be valuable for pro-social communal living.27 McNamara reasons: Willingness to perform costly religious behaviors for relatively long periods of time can function as reliable signals of willingness and ability to commit to cooperation within the group. Included in such costly religious behavioral patterns are the hard-to-fake virtues and character strengths, as free riders would not be willing to incur the costs of developing and practicing such virtues. Free riders could not build a 24

25

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27

D.T. Bradford, “Emotion in Mystical Experience,” Religion, Brain & Behavior 3 (2013): 103–18 (107). Bradford here refers to the work of I. Hausherr, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982). Bradford’s basic point about the cultural variation of the emotions reported in mystical experiences is also illustrated by Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: University Press, 1987). For the cultural context of emotion, see Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures. Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 105–06, discussed as the spatial movement from otherworldly places of punishment to places of paradise. Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, 30–31.

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centralized executive Self. Sustaining virtuous behavior is, to say the least, difficult. That is why character and virtue cannot be faked, at least over the long term.28

Here, McNamara’s point that “character and virtue cannot be faked, at least over the long term,” must be qualified since, as it stands, it suggests a kind of determinism. At most we can say that religious practices can cultivate a predisposition for virtuous behavior, but they can never predetermine anyone to be truly virtuous. Using an evolutionary model, McNamara proposes that individuals who succeed in cultivating a virtuous executive Self have a distinct evolutionary advantage insofar as they are thought to be more desirable and worthy reproductive mates. Yet, imagining the cultivation of an executive Self narrowly as having a reproductive aim does not account for why religious leaders in antiquity or throughout time practice celibacy or other forms of asceticism (sensory deprivation, fasting, seclusion) that would be counter to the flourishing of a biological family system. Instead, one might suggest that McNamara’s model of the self is more useful when it is expanded beyond the range of reproductive aims by imagining how the cultivation of virtuous predispositions operationalizes systems of prosociality that make possible the creation of larger, more inclusive fictivekin groups that are not restricted to genetically-based relationships. Indeed, this is an important insight from scholars of evolutionary anthropology: that humans have developed ritualized practices that succeed in forming synchrony and pro-sociality among unrelated persons in ways that other species cannot. Costly displays and credibility-enhancing displays can be useful for an individual to more or less reliably assess another person’s virtue and capacity to be a religious leader.29 Costly displays are behaviors and gestures that restructure the power and prestige enjoyed by a distinguished member of the group, resulting in greater commitment and cooperation among individuals.30 Credibility-enhancing 28

29

30

McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, 30–31. Also see Richard Sosis, “The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual: Rituals Promote Group Cohesion by Requiring Members to Engage in Behavior that is Too Costly to Fake,” American Scientist 92 (2004): 166–72. This process of assessment thus falls under the larger process of epistemic vigilance, which according to D. Sperber is a need to evaluate the authority and credibility of the expertise of various individuals. D. Sperber, F. Clément, C. Heintz, O. Mascaro, H. Mercier, G. Origgi, and D. Wilson, “Epistemic Vigilance,” Mind & Language 25 (2010): 359–93. Joseph Henrich, “The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion: Credibility Enhancing Displays and their Implications for Cultural Evolution,” Evolution and Human Behavior 30 (2009): 244–60.

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displays are behaviors and gestures that signal an individual’s authentic or deep commitment to the group.31 McNamara’s understanding of the self is largely a modern construction and places a premium on the agentive and “executive” capabilities of the self. The conceptualization of the self in studies of subjectivity today relies heavily on the particular dynamics that are thought to work upon the self and modern Western society and assumes that the self can possess virtues and dispositions like one can acquire private property. McNamara’s model of the executive Self relies on earlier formulations of the self, as they have been developed by anthropologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.32 This idea of the “possessive individual” emerges in the seventeenth century and is a modern notion of the self that highlights an economic exchange model of the self which acquires habits and virtue in the same way one can acquire private property.33 It is within this system of ongoing accumulation and acquisition of habits that the self is then formed.34 While the critical work of these modern scholars is insightful and useful for studying contemporary critical issues concerning gender, race, and class, the theoretical observations about the modern self and society that they yield cannot be easily transferred onto our study of Second Temple experience. 31

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34

Credibility-enhancing displays are related to the idea of epistemic vigilance in which listeners avoid gullibility by looking for signals that the information that is being received is trustworthy. This usually includes a social evaluation of the source of the information, in our case, the figure of Ezra. A number of cognitive mechanisms, both the individual and also articulated in social mechanisms, work to ensure that the new knowledge is reputable and valid. See Sperber et al, “Epistemic Vigilance,” 359–93. One might add that the modern notions of the self that McNamara is concerned to describe is based on first-hand experiences of the social forces and expectations that are at work on the modern person; we just don’t know all of the elements, social forces, and expectations that would have been at work for these Judean communities, this would especially difficult to recover given the fact that many scholars hold the view that the events reported in the book of Ezra are highly stylized and thoroughly redacted. See B. Skeggs, “Exchange, Value and Affect: Bourdieu and ‘the Self’,” in Feminism after Bourdieu, eds. L. Adkins and B. Skeggs (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 76–95. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus is a creative reformulation of “concepts originating in the proto-structural anthropology of Durkheim and Mauss, the post-Sausserian structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss and in the psychological genetic structuralism of Jean Piaget”; see Omar Lizardo, “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 34 (2004): 375–401 (376). Bourdieu reformulates the role that M. Mauss had assigned to “technologies” or “techniques.” Mauss himself uses the term “habitus” to refer to “the techniques and work of both collective and individual practical reason”; P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); M. Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Journal de psychologie normal et patholigique (1935): 271–93; repr. M. Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, introduction by C. Levi-Strauss (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 4th edn, 1968), 364–86.

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New studies in anthropology have sought to identify the ways that modern Western cultural assumptions operate in the study of other cultures and time periods, allowing for heightened awareness of both the past and present.35 Anthropologist Amira Mittermaier describes the fundamental contrast between modern and pre-modern understandings of subjectivity in the following way: The shift from the autonomous subject to a subject that is subjected to language, epistemes, or power constitutes a return to an older meaning of the term ‘subject’. Whereas in the nineteenth century subjectivity came to be closely associated with inner affective states, personal feelings, thoughts, and concerns that were dichotomously opposed to an objective reality ‘out there’, the term suget (subject) in the twelfth century meant ‘the one who is under the dominion of a monarch or reigning prince; one who owes allegiance to a government or ruling power, is subject to its laws, and enjoys its protection.’36

Instead of seeing the body as an outward eruption of interiority, in antiquity the body’s performance of ritually experienced emotions was the means for acquiring the potentiality of the self. Saba Mahmood appeals to ancient Aristotelian understandings, not modern ones, when she describes the potentiality of the self as “the abilities one acquires through specific kinds of training and knowledge. This usage of potentiality implies that in order to be good at something one undergoes a teleological program of volitional training that presupposes an exemplary path to knowledge— knowledge that one comes to acquire through assiduous schooling and practices.”37 One limitation of modern models of subjectivity that have been developed in the twentieth century is their prioritization of the cultivation of the self which is always understood primarily in individual terms, with an accompanying focus on the agentive capabilities of the self, leaving the pro-social benefits of the self as producing only a secondary 35

36

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See the useful review of scholarship and the recent shifts in the larger field of Anthropology to account for experiences of embodiment in R. Desjarlais and C.J. Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 87–102; Thomas Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18 (1990): 5–47; also useful is D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Amira Mittermeier, “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18 (2012): 247–65 (262 n. 10). Here Mittermeier cites J. Biehl, B. Good, and A. Kleinman, Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 6. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 147.

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outcome.38 This would be the reverse in an ancient (pre-modern) context, where the social benefits of religious practices would have aimed principally at a desired community goal, which in the case of Second Temple Judea would have been the reconstitution of the religio-political state after the exile. While biblical scholars find the complex literary text of the Book of Ezra to be evidence that the figure of Ezra is a constructed persona and not a historical person,39 the scenes in Ezra 9 and 10 are understood here to be instances of literary realism. These chapters illustrate the pro-social benefits of the instrumentalization of emotions to create greater cooperation among a heterogeneous group of unrelated individuals and, whether these scenes were literary or historical, subsequent readers would have been similarly moved by them. For ancient readers of this text, Ezra and his community of Judeans would have been perceived as actual people.40 The events in Ezra 9–10 illustrate how the Judean community mirrored the performative grief (weeping) displayed by the religious leader (Ezra 10:1). This modeling behavior is also accompanied by the prosocial and tangible expression of their dedication to the covenant in their agreement to Ezra’s decree of forced divorce. Subsequent Second Temple readers of this text would have been expected to mirror the Judeans in turn. The general descriptive pattern that is observed by neuroscientists 38

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See the critique of modern western understandings of the self as one that is predetermined to be an agent acting in resistance to culture made by S. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 202–36. S. Harter (The Construction of the Self: Developmental and Sociocultural Foundations [New York: Guilford, 2nd edn, 2012], 281–328) raises important cross-cultural distinctions based on the collection of essays edited by M. F. Mascolo and J. Li, Culture and Developing Selves: Beyond Dichotomization (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) which cautions against the reductivist dangers of making too simple a division between individualistic, oftentimes Western, and collectivisitic, oftentimes Eastern, cultures. The story of Ezra is a fictionalized midrashic interpretation of Nehemiah according to T.W. In Der Smitten, Esra: Quellen, Überlieferung und Geschichte (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973), 88; and described as “political and religious propaganda” by D. L. SmithChristopher, “The Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9–10 and Nehemiah 13: A Study of the Sociology of the Post-Exilic Judean Community,” in Second Temple Studies, vol. 2: Temple Community in the Persian Period, ed. T.C. Eskenazi and K.H. Richards (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994), 243–65, esp. 258; Y. Dor, “The Composition of the Episode of the Foreign Women in Ezra IX–X,” VT 53 (2003): 26–47. Dor’s position is that the prayer is secondary to its literary context which shows signs of redactional layers. It is the modern mind that prioritizes empirical (historically verifiable) events as more “real”—an ancient reader would have assumed that these figures were real persons. In any event, a reader can be persuaded by a rhetorically powerful literary scene, including those that are known to be fictional. See C. Todd, “Attending Emotionally to Fiction,” Journal of Value Inquiry 46 (2012): 449–65.

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like McNamara and by ritual theorists is that cognitive processes have a kind of plasticity to them that allow them to be transformed. In the case of the readers of Ezra 9–10, the expectation is that the mirroring of affect would have, in turn, created the predisposition to humility, the precondition for their obedience to the covenant, although this would not have predetermined them to be obedient. Decentering practices likely allowed for the reorganization of power and the transformation of the self, moving subsequent readers also to consent (cognitively) to the obligations of the covenant.

GRIEF AND THE STUDY

OF

SECOND TEMPLE PRAYERS

These new integrative approaches come at a time when scholarship on the Second Temple period is beginning to mature. The close of the twentieth century decisively acknowledged the Second Temple period as a critical one for understanding ancient Judaism as well as Christianity. Second Temple Judaism as a field of study emerged dramatically during the second half of the twentieth century, largely due the impact of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947.41 The Scrolls not only expanded our scholarly scope to include previously unknown texts that stand outside the canonical Bible; they also refreshed our perspective on canonical texts associated with the time after the exile, such as the Book of Ezra. While the category known generally as “penitential prayer”42 is 41

42

The sharp rise in scholarship relating to the Second Temple period and a reinvigorated interest in Hellenistic Jewish works from this era that had long been known to scholars, but overlooked, took shape in the second half of the twentieth century. This trajectory is illustrated well in Steve Mason, “Second-Temple Studies: Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi,” (paper presented at the York University Symposium on The State of Jewish Studies: Perspectives on Premodern Periods, December 6–8, 2014), 1–47 (3–6), to be published as Carl S. Ehrlich and S. Horowitz, eds., A Handbook of Jewish Studies, Vol. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming). While I refer here to how the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a catalyst for renewed attention to this time period, readers should refer to Mason’s essay for a comprehensive and nuanced description of the multiple ways in which the traditional fields of Biblical Studies and the related discipline of Classics have changed in the Americas and in Europe during the second half of the twentieth century. I am very grateful to S. Mason for sharing a pre-publication version of this research with me. While significant variety exists in the specific prayers that are included in lists called “penitential prayers,” classic examples of this type of prayer include: Ezra 9:5–15 (which lacks a petition [!]); Neh 1:4–11; 9:6–37; Dan 9:3–19, and various post-biblical prayers (e.g., 4Q504). While Solomon’s prayer (1 Kgs 8:22–53) is not always included in penitential prayer lists, it does contain many features. See Mark J. Boda, Praying the Tradition: The Origin and the Use of Tradition in Nehemiah 9 (Berlin: De Gruyter,

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recognized as appearing in Second Temple writings, it escaped systematic classification by early form-critical scholars, who referred to these texts in a variety of ways as “prayers of repentance,” “prayers of confession,” and “petitionary prayers.”43 To this day, scholars who rely upon the literary categories that predate the 1940s and subsequent ones that were strongly influenced by them continue to raise questions about the validity of “penitential prayer” as an actual form-critical category.44 The scholarly lack of attention to this category of prayer can be accounted for by the observation that early historical-critical scholars and those reliant on their work were disinterested in the Second Temple period in general, resulting in the accident that this category of prayer did not play a significant role in many traditional form-critical classification systems which tended to be oriented toward historical origins.45 It is also the case that a more dynamic understanding of penitential prayers as a set of recognizable experiences, instead of as a strict literary form, can allow similarities to be observed across time periods.46 And, while scholars have long recognized that penitential prayers are associated with covenant renewal experiences, the precise role in life (Sitz im Leben) that such prayers played in these experiences has never been articulated sufficiently.47

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1999), 209–13; Judith H. Newman, Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars, 1999), 24–52. Eileen M. Schuller, for example, appeals to the authority of this earlier scholarship when she speaks about the lack of coherence in the form critical descriptions of these texts and expresses skepticism that this is a formal literary category; “Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: A Research Survey,” in Seeking the Favor of God, Vol. 2, ed. M.J. Boda et al. (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007), 1–15. She writes, “I did not get the sense that ‘penitential prayer’—in the way it is being defined by this consultation—is fully established or the norm as a working category when prayer in Second Temple Judaism is discussed” (8). Considerable variation exists among the compositions that are identified under this category, so noted by Schuller, “Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism,” 12–14. Early scholars of historical criticism sought to identify points of continuity between the earliest forms of Israelite religion and later Christianity; they were not concerned with the emergence of Judaism and the Law after the exile. This point has been well-described by J. Levenson, “The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism,” in The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 1–32. See too the critique of G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) in B. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 669. Rodney A. Werline, “Reflections on Penitential Prayer: Definition and Form,” in Seeking the Favor of God, Vol. 2, ed. M.J. Boda et al., 209–26. R.A. Werline, “Impact of the Penitential Prayer Tradition on New Testament Theology,” in Seeking the Favor of God, Vol. 3, ed. M. J. Boda (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2008), 149–83, esp. 183. While the Sitz im Leben of the penitential form has not been conclusively identified, previous scholars have proposed that it was located in Second Temple covenant-renewal

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The growing scholarly interest in penitential prayers is evidenced by a flush of publications in the last fifteen years which have looked anew at these Second Temple texts.48 These studies make this fresh inquiry into Second Temple prayer using interdisciplinary approaches especially timely. Integrative approaches attend to the body, its displays of emotion, and the ways in which the body can be understood as a locus of power and prestige within religious communities. These approaches do not aim to replace historical-critical methods, but rather to complement and sometimes critique them. More importantly, they can help to shed light on fundamental questions that historical-criticism does not ask, such as: Why did penitential prayers proliferate in Second Temple writings? What function did they serve for Judeans at that time? One clear benefit of the recent collaboration of religious studies scholars and those in the emerging field of cognitive study of religion49 is a new perspective on how religious actions and experiences contribute to pro-sociality and entitativity.50 Such studies can help to explain how communities endured and persisted over time in changing, and sometimes adverse, circumstances. Understanding the communal benefit of public prayer practices is an interest that governs the remainder of this essay. By broadening our analytical scope to attend to the phenomenal experience of these prayers, we can examine them in the light of the

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ceremonies; Odil H. Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten. Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des deuteronomistischen Geschichtsbildes im Alten Testament, Spätjudentum und Urchristentum (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967), 134–35; E. Lipinski, La liturgie pénitentielle dans la Bible (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 37–38. Rodney A. Werline, Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: The Development of a Religious Institution (Atlanta: Scholars, 1998); Newman, Praying by the Book; Richard J. Bautch, Developments in Genre between Post-Exilic Penitential Prayers and the Psalms of Communal Lament (Atlanta: SBL, 2003); M.J. Boda et al. (ed.), Seeking the Favor of God, Vols. 1, 2, 3 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006); M.D. Matlock, Discovering the Traditions of Prose Prayers in Early Jewish Literature (London: T&T Clark, 2012). Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For a useful historical overview of the emerging cognitive science of religion field, see J.L. Barrett, “Cognitive Science of Religion: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50 (2011): 229–39; S.E. Guthrie, “A Cognitive Theory of Religion,” Current Anthropology 21 (1980): 181–94; idem, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The term entitativity has been defined as “the perception that an aggregate of individuals is bonded together in some way to constitute a group,” D.L. Hamilton, S.J. Sherman, and L. Castelli, “A Group by any other Name…: The Role of Entitativity in Group Perception,” in European Review of Social Psychology, ed. W. Stroebe and M. Hewstone 12 (2002): 139–68, here 141.

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mourning rituals with which they are presented and thereby gain insight into their larger social function. Penitential prayers are first-person prose prayers containing strong petitionary and confessional elements. They are performed by religious leaders and other dignitaries of high status (e.g., Solomon, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, Judith, and we might even include Moses), and they appear together with highly stylized acts of mourning and self-abasement. They also reuse scriptural language in the retelling of foundational events of covenant making and deliverance,51 and in so doing, effectively reconstruct memories of the past in order that older narratives might better meet “the demands of a new way of life” after the exile.52 This study is especially interested in the ritualization of grief, desolation marked by a sense of personal loss. The reenactment of grief through the performance of prayers and mourning gestures, and its outward display in the form of tears or trembling, can produce a pro-social effect upon the community that observes it. The expression of tears, trembling, blanching, blushing, sweating, or some other physical manifestation can be understood as a mechanism for signaling costly displays or credibilityenhancing displays which serve a pro-social purpose.53

EZRA’S MOURNING RITES AND PENITENTIAL PRAYER AS COSTLY CREDIBILITY-ENHANCING DISPLAYS

AND

The ritualization of the bodily arousal of grief can be redescribed as a strategy by which communities after the rupture of the Babylonian exile were able to recover an experience of continuity with foundational events from the distant past, whether real or imagined. Grief allows for a natural process of self-diminishment54 which can recreate the conditions of encounter.55 51 52

53 54

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Newman, Praying by the Book. T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), 144; also important is the discussion of the adaptive relevance of emotional memories in new and changing circumstances in P. Boyer, “What are Memories For? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture,” in Memory in Mind and Culture, eds. P. Boyer and J.V. Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3–28. Henrich, “The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion,” 244–60. See the useful discussion of lupê (grief) as that which “contracts and shrinks its victim,” by Jerome H. Neyrey, “The Absence of Jesus’ Emotions – The Lucan Redaction of Lk 22,39–46,” Biblica 61 (1980): 153–71 (156); Philo, Quis Her. 270; Mos. i. 139; Quod Omn. Prob. 159. In the moment of encounter, the close proximity of the individual to the deity would result in a sense of diminishment and unworthiness as well; such is the natural response of the prophet Isaiah upon seeing the heavenly vision in Isa. 6.

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This bodily perception of divine immediacy would replicate the event when Moses received the Law during the foundational first remaking of the covenant in Exod 32–34 / Deut 9. The strategic arousal of grief can allow Ezra, a Second Temple figure, to vividly experience the sensations of divine encounter associated with the foundational remaking of the covenant. Form-critical studies of penitential prayers often sever the discursive prayer tradition from its larger literary context which usually describes the individual engaging in various mourning practices. As a consequence, these studies have failed to attend sufficiently to the phenomenal experience of the ritual and the possible social and political consequences of it. Prior to verbalizing the prayer in Ezra 9:6–15, Ezra performs a series of mourning rites and gestures: And upon hearing this word, I tore my garments and cloak, and ripped the hair from my head and beard, and sat appalled. And at the evening sacrifice, I arose from my fasting/humiliation (‫ )קמתי מתעניתי‬with torn garments and cloak, and I fell down on my knees and opened my hands [in supplication] (‫ )ואפרשה כפי‬to the LORD God. (Ezra 9:5)

Ezra’s emotional anguish is unmistakable, and the events are easily imaginable for subsequent readers. In the Hebrew Bible, grief is not bound by lexemes but often expressed by a range of behaviors or experiences associated with mourning.56 The description of Ezra’s grief is so vividly described as to bear the qualities of lived human experience. Yonina Dor describes Ezra’s behavior in chapter 9 as “dramatic and heartfelt, like that of a prophet.”57 These mourning rituals set the stage for Ezra’s enactment of stereotypical prayer elements. Ezra begins with a communal confession of sin that uses classic imagery of Israel’s disobedience. The entirety of Israel’s history up until the time of the exile is reduced to an infidelity deserving of punishment, not deliverance (Ezra 9:6–7, 15),58 but God’s mercy has 56

57 58

“Mourning” refers to the social practices surrounding the emotions and feelings associated with grief. The primary emotion associated with grief is an intense desolation that arises from an experience of personal loss. See the discussion of grief in this volume by F. Mirguet; also the discussion by Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 16, 244–58. Dor, “The Composition of the Episode of the Foreign Women in Ezra IX–X,” 29. For a discussion of the formal literary components of the prayer see: Bautch, Developments in Genre, 72–86; H.G.M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah, WBC (Waco: Word Books, 1985); Fensham, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 128; J. Blenkinsopp, Ezra–Nehemiah: A Commentary, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1988), 181.

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been made manifest in the Persian kings who permit the return to the holy city and make provision for the rebuilding of the Temple (9:8–9). As a performative text, Ezra’s prayer should not be read as the eruptive outpouring of his interior thoughts, as modern minds tend to assume about emotional prayer.59 While he includes himself among the guilty ones through the collective first-person voice, he himself has not committed the crime of intermarriage, and so he cannot be speaking from his own personal experience.60 Furthermore, it is worth saying that, although this prayer lacks a petition to God, petitionary elements should not be understood principally as reflecting the actual expectations of the petitioner. Instead, these formal literary components associated with penitential prayer—the confession of sin, declarations of unworthiness, summaries of God’s saving acts in history, and petitions—are all highly scripted statements that seek to position the speaker in a subordinate position vis-à-vis the deity. In other words, penitential prayers should not be understood as expressing the outpourings of an individual’s interiority. Together with the mourning practices, the enactment of first-person discursive prayer traditions in Ezra 9 assists in, but cannot wholly account for,61 the cultivation of a subjectivity that James Kugel has described as a sense of “smallness”62 which successfully arouses the self-diminishing emotions of desolation and longing. 59

60

61

62

The assumption that effective prayer is the expression of an affective interior state can be traced to the wide influence of the Reformers who urged the idea of prayer as an expression of individual heartfelt need and not as the performance of scripted memorized prayers: see Zwingli, True and False Religion, 3.281; Luther, Simple Way, 43.201–202; Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes, 205a. The idea of prayer as an individual’s heartfelt conversation with God can be found in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.xx.4,5,16. For a discussion of these Reformers on the idea of Christian prayer, see M. Parsons, “John Calvin on the Strength of our Weak Praying,” Evangelical Review of Theology 36 (2012): 48–60. D. Lambert is right to note the dynamic of unequal relationships in the context of the Qumran communities: “we do not have an inner experience of consciousness, but a performance designed to highlight God’s magnanimity and the sect’s status as its recipient,” see “Was the Dead Sea Sect a Penitential Movement?” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. T.H. Lim and J.J. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 505. Here I do not claim that practices and discursive traditions are the sole cause for the generation of subjectivity. The dangers of reducing experience to simply these two factors is addressed by applying Aristotelian emergence theory (Metaphysics, Book VIII, part 6) to the modern discussion of religious experience; see J.W. Haag and W.A. Bauman, “De/Constructing Transcendence: The Emergence of Religious Bodies,” in Religion and the Body: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, ed. D. Cave and R.S. Norris, Numen Book Series 138 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 37–55, esp. 48–51. James L. Kugel, In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief (New York: Free Press, 2011), 17. The generation of this subjectivity is related to the

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43

Ezra’s bodily display of emotion can be understood to have had significant social consequences. Firstly, the arousal of grief is reported in the form of Ezra’s tears and trembling. If we think of emotions specifically as heart palpitations or changes in endocrine levels, we might imagine Ezra’s emotions expressed by blushing or blanching of the face, and as perspiration. Emotional memories of Israel’s past transgressions are recalled by Ezra and re-experienced in his body.63 Such highly charged episodic memories allow for a mental time-travel that make possible an “imaginative engagement with the past.”64 The bodily performance of self-abasement and the generation of a subjectivity of smallness resemble phenomenally Moses’ intimate moment of encounter with the deity at Sinai, thus allowing Ezra to re-experience the conditions of the first re-making of the covenant. Ezra’s emotions of grief reenact those of Moses during the aftermath of the golden calf and present him as a Mosaic authority. The reenactment of emotion makes critical moments of past foundational events experientially accessible in the present, thereby serving to bridge the rupture of the exile. Because emotions allow experiences to be “refelt” in the body,65 Ezra’s grief enables him to know with the intensity of first-hand experience what it was like to be there at Sinai after the golden calf episode, when Israel first had the occasion to remake the covenant with YHWH. As we shall see in the next section, Ezra enacts behaviors that will assist him in uniting the fragile Second Temple community by imitating acts performed by Moses—the ideal Lawgiver—and Solomon—the King of the idealized first Temple.66 When mourning rites are performed by distinguished individuals of high status, the self-abasement and concurrent emotions of desolation and grief can be considered as costly displays insofar such actions reorganize the power and prestige that they routinely enjoy as earthly sovereigns or esteemed leaders.67 They can also serve as credibility-enhancing displays that can further elevate or influence the

63

64 65

66

67

various decentering practices that are engaged and helpfully described in McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience. This kind of vivid emotional memory can be understood as the vivid episodic memories that are discussed in Boyer, “What Are Memories For?” 5–6. Boyer, “What are Memories For?” 7. Rebecca S. Norris, “Examining the Structure and Role of Emotion: Contributions of Neurobiology to the Study of Embodied Religious Experience,” Zygon 40 (2005): 181– 99. Some discussion of Ezra 9 in light of Solomon’s prayer can be found in Werline, Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism, 46–53. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 125–67.

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religious and spiritual authority that these individuals enjoy. When understood in this way, Ezra’s prayer and ritual behaviors can be said to have effected political and social changes.

THE PRO-SOCIAL EFFECTS OF PENITENTIAL PRAYER In what follows, I wish to discuss yet another way integrative approaches can help us to understand the complexities of penitential prayers during the Second Temple period. In addition to understanding prayer as vertical communication with God, the expression of ritual emotion can be understood as having had a horizontal effect on the Judeans who witnessed the prayer. The initial group who responded to Ezra is identified as “all who trembled (‫ )כל חרד‬at the words of the God of Israel” (Ezra 9:4). According to Joseph Blenkinsopp, the Second Temple hareidim can be understood in light of Isa 66:2, 5, as a distinct “prophetic-eschatological group whose members have a well-defined identity over against their fellow Jews.”68 Ezra’s audience is then reported as becoming increasingly inclusive by the additional reference to “a very great assembly of men, women, and children” (10:1). Finally, the reader is told that “all of the people of Judah and Benjamin had assembled within three days” (Ezra 10:9).69 These onlookers saw that Ezra was experiencing something notable, although they did not fully understand its precise nature. This is not unlike the case of Daniel’s vision, where the people around Daniel could see that something has happened to him but they did not have access to the vision itself (Dan 10:7–8).70 Just as the reader is told that news about Ezra circulates in a progressively wider and broader way to eventually include all segments of society, so too, the literary style shifts between chapters 9 and 10 to indicate that Ezra’s status has changed in the eyes of the community. Ezra’s post-prayer transformation into a Mosaic Lawgiver can be seen in a shift in the language found in Ezra 10, which reuses phrases from the Deuteronomic retelling of the golden calf episode. Language reserved for Moses is now used to describe Ezra’s ritual gestures of mourning after the prayer. For example, after his prayer, Ezra totally collapses before the Temple (‫ומתנפל לפני בית האלהים‬, Ezra 10:1), in the same way 68 69

70

Blenkinsopp, Ezra–Nehemiah, 178. Noted by W. Oswald, “Foreign Marriages and Citizenship in Persian Period Judah,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 12 (2012), 1–17, esp. 7. Chaniotis, “Staging and Feeling the Presence of God,” 169–89.

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45

that Moses had collapsed during his prayer after the golden calf. In the Tanak, the hitpael form of the verb ‫ נפל‬is reserved for Ezra and Moses, appearing only here in Ezra 10:1 and in the Deuteronomic passages about the calf cult (Deut 9:18 and twice in v. 25). Also, at the house of Jehohanan, son of Eliashib, Ezra is said to have fasted in the manner of Moses’ fast on Sinai by neither eating bread nor drinking water: “He (Ezra) neither ate bread nor drank water because he was mourning over the exile” (Ezra 10:6, ‫)לחם לא־אכל ומים לא־שתה כי מתאבל על־מעל הגולה‬. Notably, prior to his prayer, Ezra is said to arise from his fasting in Ezra 9:6 (‫)קמתי מתעניתי‬, but post-prayer Ezra is said to fast in the manner of Moses just before he received the tablets of the Law in Deut. 9:9 and immediately after hearing about the crime of the golden calf: “I (Moses) neither ate bread nor drank water” (Deut 9:18, ‫)לחם לא אכלתי ומים לא שתיתי‬. Such shifts in the language used for the ritual act of fasting may signal to the reader that Ezra’s elevation to Mosaic status occurred as a result of his emotional prayer. Ezra not only mirrors the stereotypical mourning gestures that Moses had performed at Sinai, he also imitates acts that were performed by Solomon at the dedication of the Temple, a political ceremony with religious significance. Ezra’s penitential prayer in chapter 9 and Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the Temple in 1 Kgs 8 share similarities: both are tied to the national and religious institution of the Temple in Jerusalem and both are performed during critical moments. In both Ezra’s and Solomon’s prayers, scripturalized language is used to describe Israel’s failure to uphold covenant obligations, although Solomon’s prayer uses a number of imperfect forms that suggest future scenarios of sinfulness. In this way, Solomon’s prayer presents itself as providing a mechanism for the future restoration of a broken relationship, which Ezra enacts. In the shadow of the Second Temple, Ezra reenacts certain behaviors that Solomon is also said to have performed at the dedication of the first Temple. Like Solomon, Ezra prays from a kneeling position (Ezra 9:5, ‫;ואכרעה על ־ברכי‬ cf. 1 Kgs 8:54; 2 Chr 6:13) and stretches out his hands (some form of the expression, “to stretch out one’s hands” appears in Ezra 9:5, ‫;לפרוש כפים‬ cf. 1 Kgs 8:22; 2 Chr 6:12). Furthermore, Ezra speaks disparagingly about himself and the Judeans as “slaves” and makes reference to their “servitude” (Ezra 9:9, “for we are slaves [‫]עבדים אנחנו‬, but our God has not forsaken us in our servitude [‫]בעבדתנו‬,” cf. 1 Kgs 8:23, 28, 30, 52; cf. 2 Chr 6:19, 20, 21). In a manner similar to the biblical king who declares all parties to be guilty before YHWH, Ezra implicates himself in the confession of sins, even though he has not personally made an

46

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unlawful marriage. In many ways, Ezra mirrors Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the first Temple in which the king included his own sins along with the sins of Israel and along with those of the foreigners in their midst since “no one is without sin” (see 1 Kgs 8:41–45, esp. v. 46; cf. 2 Chr 6:32–33). Both Ezra and Solomon perform public prayers at the Temple that require them to take on the humble posture of an unworthy individual.71 It is by virtue of the great status that each leader already enjoys that his ritual actions are able to achieve the most dramatic and compelling effect. Despite the impressive credentials that he possesses, Ezra is, nevertheless, very much an outsider to the Judeans in Jerusalem, and his ritual actions and prayer can be understood as a means by which he demonstrates his commitment and trustworthiness to the group.72 Ezra is a social elite. He is both a scribe and priest of Aaronite lineage (Ezra 7:1–6). He is appointed as an official by the Persian King Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:11–16, esp. 7:25–26); and he understands his mission to be a divinely appointed one. Ezra’s dramatic self-abasement becomes a costly display in which he exchanges the esteem that he enjoys for a state of vulnerability. We might helpfully understand Ezra’s strategic performance of debasing mourning rites and public declarations of unworthiness as a costly display that communicates his trustworthiness to a group who does not know him, and these actions as instrumental in forming lasting pro-social bonds among the returnees whose ties had been severed by the exile. Ezra’s display of ritual emotions demonstrates his worthiness by reenacting gestures and discursive traditions performed by both Moses and Solomon, figures from Israel’s past who poignantly stand for two longed for hopes of the Second Temple community: the Sinai covenant and the Temple/ nation state. The Judeans who are sympathetic to Ezra can be said to mirror Ezra’s own emotional display of tearful tremors (Ezra 9:6 and 10:1) and are identified by their bodily state of “trembling” (‫ כל חרד‬in Ezra 9:4; ‫ החרדים‬in 10:3).73 The LXX makes the mirror response of the onlookers 71 72 73

Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 125–67. Sosis, “The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual,” 166–74. This could be understood as an instance of emotional contagion; see E. Hatfield, J.L. Cacioppo, R.L. Rapson, “Emotional Contagion,” Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 2 (1993), 96–99; G. Schoenewolf, “Emotional Contagion: Behavioral Induction in Individuals and groups,” Modern Psychoanalysis 15 (1990): 49–61. The Ezra’s supporters are people who are known as “tremblers” may indicate that these people engaged in such practices or that they had otherwise cultivated a predisposition

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47

more explicit than the MT by adding that Ezra also shook before beginning his petitionary prayer: And at the evening sacrifice I arose from my humiliation. And upon tearing my garments, I trembled, and I bowed down on my knees and spread out my hands to the Lord God. (Ezra 9:5 LXX) καὶ ἐν θυσίᾳ τῇ ἑσπερινῇ ἀνέστην ἀπὸ ταπεινώσεώς μου καὶ ἐν τῷ διαρρῆξαί με τὰ ἱμάτιά μου καὶ ἐπαλλόμην καὶ κλίνω ἐπὶ τὰ γόνατά μου καὶ ἐκπετάζω τὰς χεῖράς μου πρὸς κύριον τὸν θεὸν.

These onlookers ultimately consent to Ezra’s legislation with a public recognition of his authority as Lawgiver through their spokesperson, Shechaniah son of Jehiel (Ezra 10:2–4), and through their public and unified assent to Ezra’s legislation of forced divorce (10:12–14), which reenacts the people’s assent to the covenant at Sinai (Exod 24:3, 7). Ezra’s display of performative emotions in the form of weeping (Ezra 10:1) and in his anguished confession of sins (9:6–7, 10–12, 15; 10:1) is presented to the reader as having been efficacious in generating emotions of similar valence and intensity within the people. Ezra’s emotional anguish may well have signaled his commitment and credibility to the Judean onlookers. As such, they may be understood as what evolutionary anthropologists describe as costly and credibilityenhancing displays, both of which work to cultivate cooperative living.74 The greater the status of the individual at the start, the more dramatic and compelling the effect is upon the community who sees it happening. The public humbling of Moses and Solomon which Ezra reenacts can be understood as a costly display insofar as it reorganizes the power dynamic of the leader; these demonstrations of the leader’s worthiness to lead is achieved by the ritual display of his unworthiness. As a ceremonial performance, acts of self-diminishment cultivate the necessary predisposition for humility that is a precondition for obedience to the Law, not only demonstrating the leader’s commitment and fidelity to the covenant, but also moving the people to follow him. Such displays can be understood as part of a social mechanism that aids the community of on-lookers in heightening their receptivity to the common goal of covenant renewal. As concepts borrowed from evolutionary anthropology, costly and credibility-enhancing displays are useful for illuminating prayer’s social function in covenant renewal experiences in the Second Temple period.

74

toward experiencing affect in a heightened register. Ezra’s trembling could be understood as signaling the depths of his emotional fervor. Henrich, “The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion,” 244–60.

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Ezra is a figure with the highest credentials. His actions and prayer work to further align him with the cultural memories of Moses and Solomon, leaders who played a key role during two pivotal emotionally charged moments in Israel’s history: the re-making of the Sinai Covenant after the golden calf and the dedication of the first Temple. It is Ezra’s arousal of emotion that moves the people known as the hareidim (“tremblers”) and allows him to secure their loyalty. With their initial support, Ezra is able to promulgate the difficult decree of forced divorce of foreign wives who had been acquired in Babylon to the entirety of the Second Temple community. The Book of Ezra ends with the astonishing list of names who pledge to renew their commitment to the Law. This mirroring of emotion is then followed by the pro-social and tangible expression of their dedication to the covenant in their support for Ezra and their overwhelming agreement to his innovative legislation in the form of a lengthy register of names. Both the names of those who pledge their consent to this difficult law of divorce, and, of course, the names of those who chose not to sign (!) convey elements of realism to subsequent Second Temple readers. The events in Ezra 9–10 have the capacity to move later readers and listeners to experience the vivid depiction of events with their own states of bodily arousal, thus generating perceptions of events with qualities of lived experience. Even though these later readers were not present at the event, the vividness of the text would allow them to imagine themselves there with Ezra in the shadow of the Second Temple. The reenactment of affect allows subsequent readers to re-experience this event and generate a predisposition of humility before the Law, the necessary precondition for obedience, without, of course, predetermining that obedience would result.

CONCLUSION The foregoing analysis of Ezra’s grief within the larger narrative of Ezra 9–10 can illuminate penitential prayer’s role in covenant renewal during the Second Temple period. Ritual practices and discursive prayer traditions contribute greatly to the cultivation of an emergent subjectivity of smallness within the one who prays. In the case of Ezra, we can imagine that the generation of humility likely simulated the conditions of a divine encounter during a time of covenant renewal, allowing him to access the emotional experiences of Moses at Sinai and Solomon at the dedication of the first Temple. Ezra’s self-abasement can also be fruitfully

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49

understood as a part of a larger social mechanism of costly and credibilityenhancing displays that facilitated cooperative living after the exile. Ezra’s penitential prayer had significant political consequences for his own status in the eyes of the Judeans and yielded important pro-social benefits for the community. Our brief consideration of Ezra 9–10 illustrates how the instrumentalization of emotions in the process of imaginative remembering could have served as an effective strategy for experiencing continuity with the past after the breach of the exile. The arousal of emotions in the vivid and dramatic presentation of events concerning Ezra’s handling of the intermarriage crisis can be understood as a means by which later readers could access foundational events from the distant past, including the heavily charged episodes at Sinai, with the vividness of first-hand experiences. This was surely an effective means for the fragile Second Temple community to establish a visceral continuity with the past, even if it were an imagined past. While more and more biblical scholars take the complex literary text of the Book of Ezra as evidence that the figure of Ezra is a constructed persona and not a historical person, ancient readers of this text surely would have assumed that Ezra and his Judean community were actual people.75 While there may have been a historical Ezra, we unfortunately do not have the means for recovering him. In this study we have understood Ezra and the Judean hareidim as instances of literary realism. The author’s attention to the body and the body’s experiences of emotion in the portraits of Ezra and the Judeans who accompany him aims to represent these figures as realistically as possible. Even if the characters and events in Ezra 9 and 10 are taken to be highly-stylized literary constructions, it is still the case that these events would have been moving for readers and hearers imagining these events.76

75

76

It is the modern mind that prioritizes empirical (historically verifiable) events as more real; an ancient reader would have assumed that these figures were real persons. In any event, any reader can be persuaded by a rhetorically powerful literary scene, real or fictive, when reading a narrative empathetically; Patrick C. Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 122–51. The events surrounding the Second Temple were remembered with deep ambivalence as the dramatic episode of rejoicing and weeping during the laying of the foundation (Ezra 3:10–13). According to 1 Esdr 9:36, the story ends with, “they sent them away with their children”; the MT of Ezra 9:44 is corrupt here and requires emendation; Blenkinsopp, Ezra–Nehemiah, 200–201. Even though the MT lacks a clear statement of the full execution of the dismissal of wives and children, the rhetorical force of the

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EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

The arousal of emotions in the vivid and dramatic presentation of events concerning Ezra’s handling of the intermarriage crisis can be understood as a strategy by which subsequent readers were able to imaginatively locate themselves with Ezra and the early Second Temple community. The Judeans’ responsiveness to Ezra’s weeping and their overwhelming assent to his decree can be said to function as a powerful and compelling model for later readers, urging them to act with similar dedication. The final form of the book of Ezra, with its powerful narrative of Ezra’s deeds and the dramatic demonstration of commitment on the part of the Judean community, makes a clear statement to its readers: covenant renewal comes at a great cost and there is no room for free-riders in Second Temple Judaism.

many names who have pledged themselves to the new covenant is one that is consistent with the reading in 1 Esdr 9:36.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF PENITENTIAL ELEMENTS AND THEIR STRATEGIC AROUSAL OF EMOTION IN THE QUMRAN HODAYOT (1QH COLS. 1[?]–8)1 While the bulk of the energy in Scrolls scholarship has been channeled into efforts to reconstruct the texts and their literary antecedents, very little attention has been given to their experiential aspects.2 Of particular interest is the role that emotions play in the experiential performance of the Qumran prayers known as the first group of Community Hymns (=CH I) found in the first eight columns of the Cave 1 hodayot scroll.3 Materialist and naturalistic understandings of the body from the social sciences can shed light on the ancient experience of these prayers at Qumran. Emotions are both visceral and cognitive. Their arousal is understood here as measurable changes in heart palpitation and endocrine levels. Performative emotions are scripted, not spontaneous displays,4 1

2

3

4

The author wishes to acknowledge that some of the research that appears in this essay has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement number 627536 RelExDSS FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IIF. This paper was also presented at the Yeshiva University Dead Sea Scrolls Seminar, April 2014, and the author is also grateful for the feedback that was received at that time. Ehrlich’s important study of the Amidah or the Eighteen Benedictions begins with the observation that research since the nineteenth century has focused on the verbal and textual aspects of this prayer collection with no regard for the non-verbal aspects of the performance of these prayers. Ehrlich’s critique of scholarship on rabbinic prayer as being too concerned with verbal and textual matters at the expense of the embodied aspects of prayer applies well to the type of research that has been done on Qumran prayers as well. See Ehrlich, Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to Jewish Liturgy. TSAJ 105. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Readers are greatly aided by a number of recent publications of the Cave 1 scroll of the hodayot: Eileen M. Schuller and C. Newsom, The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms): A Study Edition of 1QHa, SBLEJL 36 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012); Hartmut Stegemann and Eileen M. Schuller, translation by Carol Newsom, Qumran Cave 1.III: 1QHodayota with Incorporation of 1QHodayotb and 4QHodayota-f, DJD 40 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). See too the critical edition of the Cave 4 mss of the hodayot in Eileen M. Schuller, “Hodayot,” in Qumran Cave 4.XX: Poetical and Liturgical Texts, Part 2, ed. E.G. Chazon, DJD 29 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 69–254. The language of performative emotions is taken from Gary Ebersole, “The Poetics and Politics of Ritualized Weeping in Early and Medieval Japan,” in Holy Tears: Weeping

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and as such they are not driven by the interior state of the person who displays them.5 The broadening of the discipline’s traditional focus on literary and textual features to include the experiential facets of religion raises the prior question of how penitential elements themselves should be understood. While their presence is often observed in prayer texts from the Second Temple period, they do not need to be understood exclusively within the rubric of a literary form. Classic penitential elements, along with the rites of mourning that are often associated with them, are not the outpouring of the interiority of the individual who enacts them. Thus, the first-person confession of sins does not express personal transgressions,6 nor is it the case that the petitions themselves should be understood as the articulation of what is hoped that God will do. Like the confession of sins, the act of petitioning places the individual within a subordinate position in relation to the sovereign deity. Both confessions and petitions are scripted strategies for arousing emotional states of smallness that can lead to a decentering of the self, effectively creating the optimal conditions for liminality that can lead to states of heightened receptivity within the religious practitioner.7 Such an experiential effect may account for the references to covenant experiences that often accompany penitential prayers in the Second Temple period, an association that was previously noted by Odil H. Steck and Edward Lipinski.8

5

6

7

8

in the Religious Imagination, ed. K. Patton and J.S. Hawley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 25–51. For a discussion of how scripted ‘performative emotions’ can be understood within the ritual reading of the Qumran hodayot (cols. 9–28[?]), see Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions, Ekstasis 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). For a helpful cross-cultural discussion that highlights the limitations of modern conceptualizations and assumptions about emotions as being both universalizing and spontaneous see Gary Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1991), 1–18, here 5; also useful is Saul Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). David Lambert’s point is well taken when he writes, “we do not have an inner experience of consciousness, but a performance designed to highlight God’s magnanimity and the sect’s status as its recipient” [“Was the Dead Sea Sect a Penitential Movement?” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. J.J. Collins and T.H. Lim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 501–13, here 505]. Patrick J. McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). While the Sitz im Leben of the penitential form has not been conclusively identified, Steck and Lipinski have proposed that it was located in Second Temple covenant-renewal ceremonies; a suggestion that is worth considering given the mention of covenant that appears in CH I; See O.H. Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten:

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF PENITENTIAL ELEMENTS

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY

OF

53

PENITENTIAL PRAYER ELEMENTS

In her essay from 2007, Eileen Schuller raises a number of significant points about the problems with scholarly terminology, noting that the category of penitential prayer has not been a self-evident one for all scholars, some of whom prefer to use the language of prayers of repentance or prayers of confession.9 Such classificatory matters arise from the limitations of form criticism and the problems of securing a literary genre. Formally, this group of prayers is thought to contain distinctive features, although elements are not consistently present among exemplars of this type: (1) the confession of sinfulness, (2) petitions for assistance that in the biblical instances are set off by the phrase, “and now” [‫)]ועתה‬, and (3) some expectation of the prayer’s efficacy.10 While significant variety exists in the specific prayers that are included in lists called penitential prayers,11 classic examples of this type of prayer include: 1 Kgs 8:22–53 (Solomon’s dedicatory prayer at the Temple)12; Ezra 9:5–15 (which ironically lacks any petition [!] and is simply a confession of sins); Neh 1:4–11; 9:6–37; Dan 9:3–19; Bar 1:15–3:8; the Prayer of Azariah; Tob 3:1–6; 3 Macc 2:1–10, and 4Q504 (Dibrei ha-me’orot). While the category is unsatisfactory, the grouping of prayers associated with the term penitential prayer is frequently discussed within the context

9

10

11

12

Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des deuteronomistischen Geschichtsbildes im Alten Testament, Spätjudentum und Urchristentum, WMANT 23 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967), 134–35; E. Lipinski, La liturgie pénitentielle dans la Bible, LD 52 (Paris: Cerf, 1969), 37–38. E.M. Schuller, “Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: Research Survey,” in Seeking the Favor of God. Vol. 2: The Development of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism, EJL 22 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007), 1–15, here 12. Some think that these penitential elements are Second Temple developments of the classic lament form, which are then traced back to an annual covenant renewal ceremony by form critics; S. Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 1:154–157; G. von Rad, “The Form of the Hexateuch,” in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, GSAT (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), 1–78; Albrecht Alt, “The Origins of Israelite Law,” in Essays on the Old Testament and Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), 79–132; G.E. Mendenhall, “Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East,” BA 17 (1954): 26–76. Considerable variation exists among the compositions that are identified under this category, so noted by Schuller, “Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism,” 12–14. Solomon’s prayer is not always included in penitential lists, but it does share many of their features. See Mark Boda, “Appendix D: Connections between Penitential Prayer and Solomon’s Prayer,” in Praying the Tradition: The Origin and the Use of Tradition in Nehemiah 9, BZAW 277 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), 209–13; see too Judith H. Newman, Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism, EJL 14 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 24–52.

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of covenant and the theological concerns of Deuteronomic Theology. The book of Deuteronomy speaks especially well to the experience after the exile even though it is not considered to be a text produced in Second Temple times. As a category of prayer that is associated with the time after the exile, penitential prayer represents a distinct development from communal lament, insofar as it presumes guilt instead of innocence.13 The introduction of the confession of sin is the distinguishing feature for penitential texts, and it is absent from laments that feature the psalmist’s claims of innocence in the face of enemy violence.14 Deuteronomic theology understands a direct correlation between sinfulness and the experience of political destruction; the possibility of restoration comes from God’s mercy, not Israel’s merit. The theology of Deuteronomy presumes that the devastation that is being experienced is a lesser punishment than what is actually deserved given the clear stipulations and warnings found in the Mosaic Law. It also expresses what can be considered a prophetic expectation of some response, that God will eventually restore Israel in the plenitude of his mercy. Within the literary setting of Deuteronomy, Moses speaks prophetically of both the destruction that is to come, and the hopeful expectation of restoration in the future.15

13

14

15

Richard Bautch, Developments in Genre between Post-Exilic Penitential Prayers and the Psalms of Communal Lament, AcBib 7 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2003). Penitential prayer differs from the lament form insofar as it lacks the complaint (“why?” or “how long?”) which presumes that the speaker claims innocence and that the punishment is undeserved. In contrast, the penitential form acknowledges and confesses the sinfulness of the afflicted. See the thesis by Boda, Praying the Tradition; also discussed in his essay, “Form Criticism in Transition: Penitential Prayer and Lament, Sitz im Leben and Form,” in Seeking the Favor of God. Vol. 1 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006), 181–92. Also relevant is Boda, “Confession as Theological Expression: Ideological Origins of Penitential Prayer,” in Seeking the Favor of God. Vol. 1, 21–50. Boda (“Form Criticism in Transition,” 184) writes that some scholars insist that the element of confession of sins had always been an aspect of the form of communal lament; see H. Gunkel and J. Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen, HAT II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1933), 131–33; A. Weiser, The Psalms: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Knox Press, 2000), 74–76; Mowinckel, Psalms in Israel’s Worship, 1:183. Cf. C. Westermann, “Struktur und Geschichte der Klage im Zweiten Testament,” ZAW 66 (1954): 44-80, here 72–73 who says that there is some relationship to lament, since penitential prayer originates in the laments of the psalter, but that it comes to be inflected with Deuteronomic ideology during Second Temple times. Discussed by Gerhard von Rad, Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Knox, 1966), 23–30; Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy 1–11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 13–17; Peter Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), 62–63; Rodney Werline, Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: The Development of a Religious Institution, EJL 13 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 17.

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55

Studies of penitential prayer have long used traditional historicalcritical approaches in understanding and analyzing these texts, yet “those who offered such prayers probably did not first think of these prayers in literary terms and with a view toward the development of a tradition. They probably first thought of the prayers within their own experience of God, their history, their people, and themselves”.16 And so, while it is valuable to describe the literary features of penitential prayer formally, classic form-critical categories are scholarly frameworks that were established prior to WWII and the discovery of Qumran prayers.17 While the earliest form-critical scholarship does not consistently acknowledge the presence of such a genre,18 it is clear that the most recent scholarship on prayer literature from the Second Temple period, while in no way exhaustive, indicates that a significant number of prayers can fall under the experiential frame of penitential prayer. These texts were not fixed in a rigid way; forms and language were frequently redeployed in the composition of these prayers. Conceptualizing penitential elements within an experiential frame rather than as a strictly literary form can help to explain why it is that some prayers that fall within the ambit of ‘penitential’ fail to conform precisely to formal expectations.19 The social-scientific language of ‘category of knowledge’ can help to place these prayers into a context that can account for the dynamic set of experiences that they entail.20 Thinking about penitential elements as recognizable modality-specific representations which were intended to be reconstituted as needed in ritually appropriate moments can help us to appreciate how these types of prayers came to be adapted and applied in flexible ways in new historical circumstances.21 Elements of penitential 16

17

18

19 20

21

Rodney Werline, “Defining Penitential Prayer,” in Seeking the Favor of God. Vol. 1, xiii-xvii, here xiv. Penitential prayer was considered a subset of the larger category of lament by Westermann in “Struktur und Geschichte der Klage im Alten Testament,” 44–80. See Schuller’s point that penitential prayer as an operative scholarly category is not firmly established, “Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism,” 10–12. E.g., the absence of a petition in Ezra’s prayer (Ezra 9:6–15). L.W. Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5 (2005): 14–57. Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” considers how cognitive processes work to create mundane knowledge about objects and experiences and applies these processes to the construction of religious states. Barsalou uses multiple theories about the representation of knowledge that consider the physical embodiment of the individual. These include simulation theories, embodied theories, and situated theories of knowledge. Barsalou integrates all three, but most important for our study are the simulation theories in which egocentric visualizing and imagining of experiences takes place with some degree of automaticity. The high variability and adaptability of

56

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experiences such as the confession of sins, petitions for assistance, and the ritualized gestures of humbling the self together construct a highly associative category of experience that can be constructed and reconstructed during ritual moments. This is because the areas of the brain that govern the processing of sensory perception and higher-order cognition are connected in rich two-way networks to one another. Lawrence Barsalou writes that [P]eople establish entrenched simulations of frequently-experienced situations, where a given simulation includes (among many other things) a variety of bodily states, such as facial expressions, arm movements, and postures. When environmental cues trigger the simulation of a social situation, part of the simulation is expressed in relevant bodily states. Conversely, if the body is configured into a state that belongs to one of these simulations, the state retrieves the simulation, which then affects social information processing.22

In the studies discussed by Barsalou, reading a text that mentions an object can stimulate areas in the brain that simulate the appropriate visualizing and phenomenal handling of that object or stimulate other bodily states, including appropriate emotional responses.23 Psychological studies have also demonstrated how the performance of the body in precise ways (e.g., smiling or frowning; nodding or shaking the head) can successfully generate the desired emotion within an individual or influence positive or negative perceptions.24 In other words, the body’s expression of emotion is not the spontaneous expression of an interior state, but rather, it can be understood to play an instrumental role in the generation of a desired cognitive state. The reenactment of these penitential acts can stimulate areas of the brain which then generates the appropriate cognitive state in the religious practitioner: desolation and self-diminishment. Texts that are considered to be penitential are said to have proliferated during the Second Temple

22 23 24

penitential prayer and practices cannot be accounted for when we consider them only as literary data; Rodney A. Werline, “Reflections on Penitential Prayer: Definition and Form,” in Seeking the Favor of God. Vol. 2, 2:213. Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” 29. Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” 27, 28. P. Ekman, Emotion in the Human Face, Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); also Barsalou et al., ‘Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” which states, “participants tended to express positive emotions on their faces and in their voices for positive concepts, but to express negative emotions for negative ones. These results further indicate that participants were simulating the experience of being there, not only orienting visual attention to where the object would be in a typical setting, but also generating appropriate emotional responses” (27).

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57

period as a response to the political loss of land due to the exile.25 In the context of the Second Temple period, this emotion is best described as grief, which is desolation marked by the experience of personal loss. The longing that is expressed in these texts is a grieving for the early covenant relationship with YHWH, prior to the destruction of the Temple and loss of the land. As a set of recognizable elements, the penitential experience can be creatively redeployed and adapted to changing circumstances during the Second Temple period. The social-scientific language of ‘category of knowledge’ can help to conceptualize these prayers broadly to include the dynamic set of experiences that they entail.26 According to Werline, the penitential activity of “searching” and “seeking” was joined to the act of “repentance,” and came to be known as a programmatic set of acts.27 The strategic arousal of desolation, and with it the awareness of sinfulness, reenacts strategic emotions that can be described as a strong “yearning and sadness” over a loss, sometimes accompanied by complex feelings of guilt.28 Individuals in bereavement often report experiences of intense introspection and examination. The psychophysiology of longing that accompanies the emotion of grief is not phenomenally dissimilar to that of “searching” or “seeking,” especially when accompanied by various rites of mourning which come to be associated with penitence in the Second Temple period.29 Certain prayer elements that diminish the self and lend themselves to reenactment through the use of the first-person voice and language about the body. 25

26 27

28

29

General studies on the emergence of penitential prayer and its Deuteronomic theology include the important study by Werline, Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism. Scholars have long wondered if the Sitz im Leben for these prayers is some kind of covenant ceremony; see Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten; E. Lipinski, La liturgie pénitentielle; K. Baltzer, The Covenant Formulary: Jewish and Early Christian Writings (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971); H. Graf Reventlow, Gebet im Alten Testament (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1986). Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” 14–57. Rodney A. Werline, “Prayer, Politics, and Social Vision in Daniel 9,” in Seeking the Favor of God. Vol. 2, 17–32. Werline explains that the majority of studies of penitential prayer have hitherto been concerned with traditional form criticism, redaction criticism, and canonical criticism, thus yielding results that prioritize the literary text (17). M.K. Shear, “The Cutting Edge: Getting Straight about Grief,” Depression and Anxiety 29 (2012): 461–64, here 462. Reif observes that “while certain individual aspects of the worship described may be found earlier it is only these late sources that contain lengthy and complex amalgams of so many such elements” see S.C. Reif, Judaism and Hebrew Prayer: New Perspectives on Jewish Liturgical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 39. See Werline, “Reflections on Penitential Prayer: Definition and Form,” 212–13. Also, Hogewood, “The Speech Act of Confession: Priestly Performative Utterance in Leviticus 16 and Ezra 9-10,” in Seeking the Favor of God. Vol. 2, 69–82.

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The first-person voice is a significant means by which the religious practitioner is able to access the scripted affective experiences of the subject in the prayers.30 They are designed to strategically arouse emotions of grief and desolation in the religious practitioner. The reenactment of these emotions by performing the appropriate gestures and the scripted confession of sins, is a significant part of the penitential experience for the religious practitioner.31 In certain Second Temple prayers, individuals who are said to confess sins seek to take on the posture of a wretched sinful state, but they are not personally guilty of the sins that they confess: Moses in Exod 34:932; Ezra in Ezra 9:6–15; and Daniel in Dan 9:4–19. As a scripted reenactment of affect, the confession of sins is not the spontaneous verbalization of an actual personal transgression on the part of the speaker. So too, the petitioning of the deity is a performance that serves to further situate the religious practitioner in a state of supplication and subordination. In light of this reasoning, the expected efficacy of the act of petitioning is not so much that God is moved to act in accord with our will and contrary to his predetermined course of action. In many Second Temple prayers, the petitionary language asks for knowledge or understanding (not that God change his course of action), as we see in 1QH 8:24.33 Even so, the significant experiential effect of petition is the sensation of sub-ordinance and smallness that results from taking on the posture of supplication. 30

31

32

33

S. Gillmayr-Bucher has described the function of the first-person voice and language about the body in the psalms to invite reenactment by the one who prays these texts; see her essay “Body Images in the Psalms,” JSOT 28 (2004): 301–26. On prayers as a script of affective experiences that are supposed to be reenacted, see Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 69–113. See Bautch (“The Formulary of Atonement [Lev 16:21] in Penitential Prayers of the Second Temple Period,” in The Day of Atonement: Its Interpretations in early Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Th. Hieke and T. Nicklas, TBN 15 [Leiden: Brill, 2012], 33–45) who writes that acts of contrition become part of a cultic form in Lev 16: “With contrition included, the cultic confession motif associated with the Priestly writer is thus a process with four parts, contrition-confession-sacrifice-reparation” (here 35). Bautch concludes that Second Temple prayers, “selectively and strategically… express sorrow for sin rather differently than is done on the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16” (44). Also, Daniel K. Falk, “Scriptural Inspiration for Penitential Prayer in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Seeking the Favor of God. Vol. 2, 127-57, here 135. Even though he is not guilty of any crime, Moses draws himself into the events by saying: “If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance,” (Exod 34:9, ‫)וסלחת לעוֹננוּ וּלחטאתנוּ וּנחלתנוּ‬. M. Weinfeld (“‫הבקשות לדעת‬,” Tarbiz 48 [1979; Hebr]: 186–200) traces themes of repentance and forgiveness, and more relevant for our discussion: revealed knowledge, present in the Amidah and various Qumranic and biblical antecedents.

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The efficacy of the prayer does not lie in whether or not the specific petition is answered by God and fulfilled but rather in the experience’s ability to simulate the experience of smallness which comes from being in the presence of God. The goal of both the confession of sins and the petitionary formulae is to generate self-abasement which anticipates what will be experienced during the encounter with the sovereign deity, however it may be realized.

PENITENTIAL ELEMENTS IN COMMUNITY HYMNS I The large Cave 1 scroll of the hodayot is generally divided into three literary groupings known as Community Hymns I (=CH I), Teacher Hymns (=TH), and Community Hymns II (=CH II). The section that this paper is concerned with consists of the first two sheets that are thought to contain columns 1–8, if one presumes that each sheet had exactly 4 columns.34 The first four columns are extremely damaged, with column 4 being the best preserved. Columns 2 and 3 are often presented as reconstructed from fragments alone in the critical editions, and usually little to nothing is reconstructed for column 1. It is worth remembering too that Sukenik’s early photographs indicate that there were stitch holes at the edges of the hodayot sheets, but in fact, all of the sheets were found loose and disconnected, and in two separate clumps.35 The first group of Community Hymns known from the first eight columns of the Cave 1 scroll of the hodayot differs from the TH and CH II which together comprise columns 9–28[?] insofar as it does not enjoy multiple attestation among the earlier Cave 4 manuscripts.36 No clear and 34

35

36

Notice for example that 1QS does not have a regular number of columns per sheet, so it cannot be presumed that such a practice was standard. Perhaps there were fewer columns prior to 1QH col. 4. The first edition of this scroll was published by Sukenik (‫[ אוצר המגילות הגנוזות‬prepared for the press by Avigad] =Eng. The Dead Sea Scrolls of the Hebrew University [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1955]) but the published column numbering did not reflect a reconstructed text. Instead it presents the sheets and fragments of 1QHa from large to small. It is common to find in the older literature references to this numbering from the Sukenik edition. It varies by nine cols. and a few lines from the critical edition in DJD 40, now available widely as E.M. Schuller and C.A. Newsom, The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms): A Study Edition. For an excellent review of scholarship on the hodayot see E.M. Schuller, “Recent Scholarship on the Hodayot 1993-2010,” CBR 10 (2011): 119–62; also E.M. Schuller and L. DiTommaso, “A Bibliography of the Hodayot, 19481996,” DSD 4 (1997): 55–101. Angela Kim Harkins, “Another Look at the Cave 1 Hodayot: Was CH I Materially Part of the Scroll 1QHodayota?” DSD 25 (2018): 185-216; eadem, “A New Proposal for

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indisputable instance of Cave 4 manuscripts overlapping with columns 1(?)–8 of 1QHa exists.37 Only two fragments (1 and 2) are placed among the eight columns of 1QH by the editors of DJD 29, but these two fragments do not contain compelling evidence as CH I overlaps.38 Also, the CH I material is associated with the Teacher Hymns material since both were copied by the same elegant scribal hand, but it differs significantly from the TH in its orthographic patterns and literary themes, suggesting that there were different origins for these compositions.39 The language and imagery in the CH I section is distinctive from the rest of the hodayot scroll.40 It is only in this group that one finds an explicit reference to the name of Moses (1QH 4:24). While this is an especially fitting citation given the Deuteronomic allusions that prevail in this section of the scroll, such explicit mention of any illustrious figure from Israel’s history is a departure from what is otherwise found in the hodayot. The classic Deuteronomic theme of “loving what God loves” and “hating what God hates” is present in 1QH 4:36; 6:21–22; 31–37; 7:30–32.41 Also, passages like 1QH 7:23 resonate especially well with the covenantal passage found at the beginning of the Community Rule, both of which appeal to the Deuteronomic imagery of loving God first, with the heart (‫ )לב‬and then with the soul (‫)נפש‬. Such a theme appears in the opening of 1QS 1:1–15. “to seek God with [all the heart and soul] doing what is good and right before him, as he commanded through Moses and through all his servants the prophets, and in order to love all that he has chosen and to hate all that he has rejected, keeping away from all evil and adhering to all good works.”42

37 38

39

40

41

42

Thinking about 1QHA Sixty Years after Its Discovery,” in Texts from Cave 1 Sixty Years after Their Discovery, ed. D.K. Falk et al., STDJ 91 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 101–34. See the table found in Schuller, DJD 29.72. The two fragments do not contain any distinctive language and the second fragment is especially small, consisting of two lines of four letters: a trace of a final nun in the first line and a final yodh and the two clearly visible letters resh and ayin (DJD 29.135). Schuller, the editor of this text, describes the placement of 4Q428 frg 2 as ‘tentative’ (134). Harkins, “Another Look at the Cave 1 Hodayot: Was CH I Materially Part of the Scroll 1QHodayota?” 192–94. A.K. Harkins, “The Community Hymns Classification: A Proposal for Further Differentiation,” DSD 15 (2008): 121–54, esp. 138 ff. An example of Deuteronomic language can be seen in the following petition found in the first group of CH: “Strengthen [his] loi[ns that he may sta]nd against spirits [and that he may w]alk in everything that you love and despise everything that [you] hate, [and do] what is good in your eyes” (1QH 4:35–37). Mermelstein’s discussion of the social-construction of emotion in the hodayot and 1QS is a useful way of imaging how the rhetoric of emotion appears in these passages related

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61

One significant penitential element, the confession of sins (‫להתודה‬ from the root ydh) appears in CH I,43 where it is joined to the act of prostration, the physical act of humbling oneself. In 1QH 4:29–31 the speaker says: (29) [Blessed are you, O God of compassi]on on account of the spirits that you have placed in me. I will [f]ind a ready response, reciting your righteous acts and (your) patience […]k (30) and the deeds of your strong right hand, and confessing (‫להו֯ ֯דות‬ ֯ ֯‫ )ו‬the transgressions of previous deeds, and c[ollaps]ing in on myself (‫)ולה]תנפ[ל‬, and begging for mercy concerning (31) [. . . . .] my deeds and the perversity of my heart, because I have wallowed in impurity. But from the council of wor[ms] I have [de]parted, and I have not joined myself to [. . . . . .]).

The programmatic language of confessing one’s sinfulness and utter depravity that appears in this particular passage is conveyed in the highly personalized first person voice which can be imagined as a scripted set of emotions for a reader to reenact.44 The sin that is confessed does not specify any transgression or crime, but rather gives a generic statement of depravity that in turn allows for the expression of the performative emotion. Another notable act that appears in this same passage is that of collapsing. It appears here in 1QH 4:30 and also in 1QH 5:12 and 8:24. In the specific composition that Jacob Licht entitled, “Request” (‫ )בקשה‬found in column 8,45 the act of falling down and begging for mercy is joined to the language of “seeking” (biqesh) and covenant: For] (24) through my knowledge of all these things I will find the proper reply, collapsing in on myself (‫)להתנ֯ ֯פ ֯ל‬ ֯ and be[gging for me]rcy [continuously] on account of my transgression, and seeking a spirit of understand[ing] ([‫)ולבקש רוח ֯בי֯ נ֯ ]ה‬, (25) and strengthening myself through your holy spirit, and clinging to the truth of your covenant,

43

44 45

to covenant; Ari Mermelstein, “Love and Hate at Qumran: The Social Construction of Sectarian Emotion,” DSD 20 (2013): 237–63; also for a discussion of the Deuteronomic themes in col. 4 of this section of the hodayot, see Harkins, “The Community Hymns Classification,” 145–54. So too, the penitential element, ‘to confess sins’ appears in 1QS 1:24 (in the qal) and in the Admonitions section of CD 20:28 (in the hithpael form); see Krašovec, “Sources of Confession of Sin in 1QS 1:24–26 and CD 20:28–30,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years After Their Discovery 1947-1997. Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20-25, 1997, ed. L.H. Schiffman et al. (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000), 306–21. For a discussion of the vocabulary for confession (‫ )ידה‬see Boda, “Words and Meanings: YDH in Hebrew Research,” WTJ 57 (1995): 277–97. Gillmayr-Bucher, “Body Images in the Psalms,” 301–26. J. Licht, The Thanksgiving Scroll: A Scroll from the Wilderness of Judaea. Text, Introduction, Commentary and Glossary (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1957 [Hebr.]), 200.

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and serving you in truth and (with) a perfect heart, and loving the word of [your] mou[th].

Here, the act of “seeking” is joined to the experience of understanding, reflecting the transference of the penitential practice of “seeking the LORD your God” (Deut 4:29; cf. “seeking my face” in 2 Chr 7:14) to “seeking the Torah” (Jub. 1:12, 15 and 23:26). These acts of collapsing and “begging for mercy” which appear here and elsewhere in the CH I section of the scroll reflect experiential elements associated with the penitential act of confessing sin. The Hebrew word for “prostration” (‫ )להשתחות‬more than 115 times. It is translated fairly consistently as προςκυνέω in the LXX, yet the specific Hebrew word that appears in the CH I (‫ )להתנפל‬is attested only four times in the Hebrew Bible.46 While translations often render this word as some form of the verb “prostrate,” it is based on the root “to fall”, and carries the connotation of “collapse”. It appears thrice in the Deuteronomic retelling of the Golden Calf episode (Deut 9:18, 25 [twice]) and once within the context of Ezra’s own report of his elaborate ritualized posture of collapsing amidst his grieving in Ezra 10:1.47 In Deut 9, Moses recounts his intercessory acts of praying along with the act of total collapse and fasting from food and water on behalf of Israel (cf. Jub. 1:19–21). Instead of the ordinary word for prostration, ‫להשתחות‬, the word ‫ להתנפל‬conveys the extraordinary image of the hodayot speaker in a state of physical collapse and total submission. It is striking that this form appears as many as three times in CH I. The Hebrew word that appears in this hodayah for collapse (‫)להתנפל‬ is one that evokes the powerful prayer of Moses in the remaking of the covenant after the golden calf (Deut 9:18, 25), and Ezra in the remaking of the covenant after the exile (Ezra 10:1; cf. LXX 1 Esd 8:88; Vulg. 3 Esd 8:92). Modern readers may baulk at the idea of Moses and Ezra in a state of total collapse and submission during these key moments since they are so contrary to how we might remember these figures acting elsewhere in Israel’s story.48 Understandings of the self that prevail in many scholarly discussions are deeply rooted in epistemic frameworks that are established after the Enlightenment, and thus profoundly influenced by 46

47

48

According to Heinrich Greeven (TDNT 6:758–766), 164 of the 171 instances of ‫ להשתחות‬in the MT are translated as προςκυνέω in the LXX (760). This is accompanied by praying, confession of sins, weeping, before the house of God (Ezra 10:1), and also includes fasting from food and water (10:6). E.g., Moses actively leading the Israelites out of Egypt; or Ezra actively sojourning across the Transjordan into Judea.

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63

the characteristics and traits that were prized in that modern era, viz., agency. It is becoming increasingly common to see discussions about the self, sometimes referred to as an agentive self or an executive self.49 While this modern conceptualization of the self as active and holding executive power, strongly appeals to us as modern readers, it is profoundly inadequate for speaking about global cultures and the people of the past because it overdetermines non-western people according to a modern ideal. In this same hodayah entitled “Request” in column 8, language that is redolent of Moses’ entreaty in the golden calf episode appears with two negative petitions in lines 33 and 36, shortly after the above-mentioned reference to collapsing, begging for mercy, and seeking a spirit of understanding (8:24–25). This same passage, 1QH 8:29–36, references covenant demands and obligations: (29) I know that no one can be righteous apart from you, and so I entreat you (‫ )ואחלה‬with the spirit that you have given to me that you make (30) your kindness to your servant complete [for]ever, cleansing me by your holy spirit and drawing me nearer by your good favour, according to your great kindness [wh]ich you have shown (31) to me, 49

Carol A. Newsom idealizes the modern agentive self in her concluding discussion to “Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism,” originally published in JBL 131 (2012): 5–25 and most recently included in her volume, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, FAT 130 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 189–209. Newsom writes, “Recent work in the neuroscience of the self, as well as cross-cultural studies of agency, provides a context in which one can see how the particular formulations of the moral self in biblical and extrabiblical texts provide the necessary elements required for the development of an executive self, configuring and reconfiguring the basic options for constructing agency,” Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, 209. The prioritizing of the modern agentive self is also one that appears in Judith H. Newman’s recent book on Second Temple prayer, Before the Bible: The Liturgical Body and the Formation of Scriptures in Early Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). In her discussion of the formation of the scribal self, she writes, “Prayer serves in the formation of the self by helping to constitute a strong central executive self, serving to bolster conscious agency in the world” (18). Her study conceptualizes the idea of the self in ancient Judaism as half-way towards the development of a modern western notion of a self which is understood as the cultural achievement of the modern west (30). In this spectrum, Newman writes that those who have a fully developed modern western self possess “a sense of inwardness, freedom, and individuality with clear demarcations between self and other” (30). This is contrasted with non-western cultures which have no-self. Here, Newman appeals to Godfrey Lienhardt’s study of the Dinka people of the southern Sudan in his often-cited, but deeply problematic work, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), which concluded that the Dinka people, as a non-modern culture, had not achieved a notion of the self. Newman’s privileging of the modern western self as the height of achievement dangerously places non-western peoples in a continuum in which they are bound to be viewed as culturally deficient.

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EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

and causing [my feet] to sta[nd in] the whole station of [your] good fa[vour], which you have cho[sen] for those who love you and for those who keep [your] commandments [that they may take their stand] (32) before you forever, and [atone for iniquity], and savou[r] what is pleasing, and mingle myself with the spirit of your work, and understand your deed[s] (33) l[ ] not y [ ] w and let there not c[o]me before him any affliction (that causes) stumbling from the precepts of your covenant, for [ ] (34) your face. And I kno[w that you are a God] gracious and compassionate, patient and abounding in kindness and faithfulness, one who forgives transgression and unfaithful[ness ], (35) moved to pity concerning a[ll the iniquity of those who love] you and keep [your] commandments, [those] who have returned to you in steadfastness and (with) a perfect heart [ ] (36) to serve you [in to do what is ] good in your sight. Do not turn away the face of your servant [and do no]t reject the son of your handmaid (1QH 8:29–36).

The language for “entreating” or “mollifying” God that appears here in line 29 is strongly reminiscent of the paradigmatic scene preserved in Exod 32, where Moses returns from his stay atop Mount Sinai only to find Aaron and the Israelites down below engaging in a flagrant worship of an idolatrous cult. In that remarkable moment of intercessory prayer, Moses implores the LORD his God (‫אלהיו‬ ָ ‫ )וַ יְ ַחל משה את ְפּנֵ י יהוה‬to put aside his righteous anger and to not destroy Israel, even though such destruction is exactly what Israel deserves.50 Not surprisingly, the passage in Exod 32:11–14 references characteristic features of the penitential category of knowledge: a petition, acknowledgement of guilt, participation in acts of mourning (Exod 33:4–6). Here too, Moses’s prayer includes priestly language of expunging the sin of the golden calf; he says that perhaps he can make atonement for Israel’s sin (‫את ֶכם‬ ְ ‫אוּלי ֲא ַכ ְפּ ָרה ְבּ ַעד ַח ַטּ‬ ַ in Exod 32:30).51 Significantly, these elements precede the singular experience of divine encounter both in the form of beholding the divine 50

51

The golden calf episode has a strong Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic association and it is commonly recognized as a commentary on the illegitimate cult established by Jeroboam in 1 Kgs 12. Ernest W. Nicholson (Exodus and Sinai in History and Tradition, Growing Points in Theology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973]) argues that there are signs of Deuteronomic editing of Exod 19:3b–8 and Exod 24:3–8; so following a line of scholarship set by Lothar Perlitt, Bundestheologie im Alten Testament, WMANT 36 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1969), 190 and the discussion of the identification of D elements in sections of the Sinai pericope (Exod 19–34) by Joseph Blenkinsopp, “What Happened at Sinai? Structure and Meaning in the Sinai-Horeb Narrative (Exodus 19-34),” in Treasures Old & New: Essays in the Theology of the Pentateuch (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 155–174. See also Christine E. Hayes, “Golden Calf Stories: The Relationship of Exodus 32 and Deuteronomy 9-10,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation, ed. H. Najman and J.H. Newman, JSJSup 83 (Leiden: Brill 2004), 45–93. Hogewood, “The Speech Act of Confession,” 81–82.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF PENITENTIAL ELEMENTS

65

effulgence (Exod 33:18–23) and in the form of a covenant experience in the making of the second set of tablets and the reception of Laws in Exodus 34. The radiance of Moses’s face can be understood as a manifestation of the transformative experience of the encounter with the deity on the mountain; a bodily sign of the arousal of emotion in response to his experience of the real presence of the deity. Presumably, God is so moved by these acts that he restores the covenant with Israel.52 Notably, in the version of these events found in Deut 9, it is Moses who performs the self-diminishing acts of collapsing and fasting (Deut 9:18–25), even though he himself is not guilty of the crime of idolatry. It is significant that the penitential elements found in the CH I section of hodayot are also accompanied by Deuteronomic covenant language and references to joining the covenant. The arousal of the emotions of desolation and guilt generate a cognitive state of liminality that allows the religious practitioner to experience a heightened state of receptivity. Thus it is significant that references to the law and to covenant fidelity are associated with these Second Temple prayers. It is notable that it is in this section of the hodayot scroll, CH I, in the lengthy composition known as 1QH 5:12–6:33, we see various self-diminishing elements with strong Deuteronomic associations appearing within a covenant-making scene.53 In a passage that begins after the vacat in 1QH 6:27, the speaker reports his entry into the covenant and the various pledges that he has made: And as for me, I have knowledge by means of your abundant goodness and by the oath I pledged upon my life not to sin against you (29) [and] not to do anything evil in your sight. And thus I was brought into association with all the men of my counsel. According to (30) his insight I will associate with him, and according to the amount of his inheritance I will love him. But I will not regard evil, and a b[rib]e (given) in wi[cked]ness I will not acknowledge. (31) [And] I will no[t] exchange your truth for wealth nor any of your judgments for a bribe. But according as [… a per]son, (32) [I will l]ove him, and according 52

53

So too, the description of God that appears in the aftermath of the golden calf is also echoed here in this hodayah: “The LORD, the LORD, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation” (Exod 34:6–7). A.K. Harkins, “Observations on the Editorial Shaping of the So-called Community Hymns from 1QHa and 4QHa (4Q427),” DSD 12 (2005): 233–56, here 243–50. On the numbering of this composition, see Hartmut Stegemann, “The Number of Psalms in 1QHodayota and Some of Their Sections,” in Liturgical Perspectives: Prayer and Poetry in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 19–23 January, 2000, ed. E.G. Chazon et al., STDJ 48 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 191–234.

66

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

as you place him far off, thus I will abhor him. And I will not bring into the council of [your] tr[uth any ] who turn away (33) [from] your [co]venant. Vacat

Notably, in the entirety of the hodayot scroll, language about the speaker’s actual entry into a covenant or council is the most explicit in the section of the scroll known as CH I, the same section wherein penitential elements and language are the most prominent. Here, the preparedness for pledging fidelity to the obligations of the covenant can be understood as a state of heightened receptivity that has been achieved through the decentering experience of collapsing and the strategic arousal of guilt, both of which succeed in generating the sensations of humility and selfabasement. Like the biblical instances of Exod 32–34; Deut 4–5; Ezra 9–10; Neh 9; at Qumran, we can see that there is a coupling of penitential practices and prayers to an experience of the Law and the idea of covenant renewal in which the sequencing of penitential activity always occurs prior to the experience of the Law and covenant.54 This pairing suggests that the performance of penitential behaviors had a preparatory role in the covenant-making experience. The emotions that are aroused are those that create the sensations of smallness that accompanied an encounter with the sovereign deity, such an encounter would be expected for covenant-making events. As a performance, the penitential features are scripted reenactments that do not reflect actual personal states of sin or 54

The authors and compilers of the CD position the Admonitions (“searching it” ‫דרשוהו‬ in CD 1:6) prior to the legal corpus; so too, the redactors of 1QS begin with a reference to humanity searching (‫ )דרשׁ‬with all their heart and soul (cf. Deut 4:29) in 1QS 1:1–2, and the passage concerning the searching in the Torah (‫ )איש דורש בתורה יומם ולילה‬and searching judgment (‫( )ולדרוש משפט‬1QS 6:6, 7) is appropriately sequenced prior to the legal corpus. What is remarkable about the transformation of the object of “searching” (‫ )דרש‬from God in Deut 4:29 to the Law in Jub. 23:26 is that 1QS also associates it with the activity of continuous day and night investigation (cf. Ps. 1.2 and Josh 1:8), suggesting a scenario where sleep deprivation was also physically enacted as a means for generating the transformative state of liminality which would then prepare for the experience of encounter or revelation. See the discussion of nocturnal prayer by Penner (Patterns of Daily Prayer in Second Temple Period Judaism, STDJ 104 [Leiden: Brill, 2012], 165–208); where he discusses the wider practices of nocturnal prayer and phenomenal experiences of the celestial realia thought to be praying in communion with the angelic beings (stars) during the night. In addition to the wide attestation in the ancient world for praying at night, there is also the data from contemporary sleep-specialists that humans naturally experience a state of wakefulness in the middle of their sleep cycle during which time it was customary to participate in a range of activities. In such a scenario, the experience of liminality can come naturally during these nocturnal moments of wakefulness in which the practitioner moves from a sleep-induced state to wakefulness, or when one might be praying in a sleep-deprived state.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF PENITENTIAL ELEMENTS

67

guilt. The decentering experience of the arousal of desolation is one that can make the religious practitioner predisposed to a state of heightened receptivity to the covenant-making experiences that follow these penitential elements in CH I, without predetermining that they will happen.

SOME PROVISIONAL CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE STUDY PENITENTIAL ELEMENTS IN 1QH COLS. 1[?]–8

OF

The display of performative emotions is a critical feature of the experience of penitential prayer. Performative emotions are not the expression of private heart-felt expressions of interior states (as Calvin would urge), but rather outward physical displays that serve a ritual purpose. As I have suggested elsewhere, the public display of such emotions can function politically as well to confirm and elevate the power and prestige of the religious practitioner, and so it is important that the strategic reenactment of affect be detected on the body.55 Thus far, we have proposed that the reenactment of the penitential acts of ‘searching’ and ‘seeking’ and repentance is an intentional performance of scripted affect that is designed to recreate the sensations of desolation and loss in the religious practitioner. Notably, in the biblical instances of these prayers, the speaker of the prayer (Moses, Ezra, Daniel) does not confess actual sins, but rather rehearses a number of predictable sins (e.g., idolatry and covenant infidelity) in the first-person voice. So too, the unnamed speaker of the Qumran hodayot confesses sins in the firstperson voice as a strategy for arousing the critical emotions of desolation and longing a restored relationship with YHWH. In the prayers in the group known as CH I, the model of humility is Moses himself. Like others who are associated with penitential experiences (Moses, Ezra, Daniel), the expression of desolation and longing brought about by the confession of sins, petitions, and performing the postures of supplication are part of a highly stylized enactment of self-abasement that generates liminality. These practices create a predisposition for humility and simulate the bodily sensations that one may expect to have when one finds oneself in the presence of a sovereign. Performing prayers that highlight penitential elements can contribute to the cultivation of mental imagery 55

Here, emotions are understood as biological changes in heart palpitations and endocrine levels. They can be useful in a stratified and hierarchical society in distinguishing among individuals and conferring power and prestige as well, see Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens.

68

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

that can in turn generate a predisposition for the kinds of experiences that are being described.56 The references to covenant obligations and duties that appear in the first group of Community Hymns suggests that the phenomenal reenactment of encountering is one which calls to mind foundational event of the Sinai covenant between Moses (Israel) and YHWH. In closing, this inquiry into the phenomenal experience of performing penitential prayer raises further questions about the compatibility of petitionary elements and the larger deterministic theology expressed in the Scrolls.57 Penitential elements in Second Temple prayers such as those in the first group of the hodayot are wholly consistent with the determinism expressed elsewhere in the Scrolls since both penitence and determinism presume a magnification of God and a diminution of the religious practitioner. Penitential elements are compatible with a highly deterministic theology if one maintains, as we have done, that the confession of sins does not articulate an actual interior state and that petitions do not seek to alter the course of events that have been preordained. Both confession of sin and petitioning are scripted strategies for arousing the crucial emotions of desolation and longing and seek to generate the sensations of smallness. As such, they aim to create a predisposition for a desired state that is thought to be necessary for simulating the encounter with the almighty sovereign, although it is important to note that such an experience is not predetermined to happen. In the Second Temple period, being able to access experientially the sovereign God with the vividness of a first-hand encounter would have been an important way of recovering the lost intimacy and relationship 56

57

For anthropological studies on the significant role that sensory experience and mental imagining has in religious experiences see R. Noll, “Mental Imagery Cultivation as a Cultural Phenomenon, with Commentary,” Current Anthropology 26 (1985): 443-61; Tanya M. Luhrmann and R. Morgain, “Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience,” Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 40 (2012): 359-89. For useful overviews of determinism at Qumran, see Mladen Popović, “Determinism,” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. J.J. Collins and D.C. Harlow (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010): 533–35; Jonathan Klawans, “The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, and the Study of Religious Belief: Determinism and Freedom of Choice,” in Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls: An Assessment of Old and New Approaches and Methods, ed. M. Grossman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 264–83; Jean Duhaime, “Determinism,” in The Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. L.H. Schiffman and J.C. VanderKam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 194–98; C. Stauber, “Determinism in the Rule of the Community (1QS),” in Celebrating the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Canadian Collection, ed. Peter W. Flint et al. (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2011), 345–58.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF PENITENTIAL ELEMENTS

69

with God after the disruption of the exile and destruction of the first Temple. When imagined in this way, the strategic arousal of emotion is a mechanism for ensuring continuity with foundational events after the exile. As an elect community, the affective reenactment of the highly stylized penitential practices performed by the speaker of the CH I prayers is all the more dramatic and compelling to God since the selfabasement of the elect Qumran community member is more notable and dramatic than that of a truly wretched person.58 The ritually correct display of self-abasement on the body of the pray-er can serve to reinforce or increase the power and prestige that the individual enjoys within the group and also function instrumentally as a costly display of commitment, generating entitivity among its members and compelling them to behave in pro-social ways.59 This pro-social aspect to emotion’s display in penitential prayer contexts is compatible with the themes of covenant renewal that are found with these Community Hymns. In closing, the penitential and petitionary elements in the CH 1 group of hodayot highlight the Yahad’s understanding of a sovereign deity and they are consistent with the expressions of deterministic theology found elsewhere in the Scrolls. While it is altogether appropriate that a supplicant would petition one who is supremely powerful; it would have been unseemly to presume that the sovereign would respond in kind to the request. The efficacy of the penitential and petitionary elements in CH I lies in the way in which they are both strategies for generating an experiential sense of smallness within the pray-er. The more one finds himself in the presence of God’s glory, the more one’s sense of unworthiness is magnified. The confession of sins and the confession of the greatness of God are not incompatible phenomena; in fact, they share the same root ydh, and are intimately related to one another. 58

59

Lambert (“Fasting as a Penitential Rite: A Biblical Phenomenon?” HTR 96 [2003]: 477-512) writes, “If fasting constitutes the adoption of the persona of the afflicted, then the higher the status of the one fasting, the more dramatic his or her descent” (485). In this sense, the performance of the prayers is best actualized by a highly esteemed member of the community. This also helps to explain the pervasive themes of selfabasement in the hodayot hymns in general—they do not describe a reality as it exists, but a condition that hopefully will be created. McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience, 30–31. Also see Richard Sosis, “The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual: Rituals Promote Group Cohesion by Requiring Members to Engage in Behavior that is Too Costly to Fake,” American Scientist 92 (2004): 166–72; G. Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse,” in Religion and Emotion, ed. J. Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 185–222, esp. 187; also see the discussion by Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 108–109.

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES FOUND IN THE ADMONITION OF THE DAMASCUS DOCUMENT1 The Damascus Document (D) has long been recognized as one of the most important non-biblical texts from Qumran.2 Two literary sections of D are often referenced: the Admonition and a corpus of laws (cols. 9‒ 16).3 The Admonition begins with a series of sermon-like reproaches 1

2

3

The author gratefully acknowledges that this research was funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme under the grant agreement number 627536 RelExDSS FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IIF. The discussion found here has been greatly enriched and stimulated by conversations with Charlotte Hempel (my University of Birmingham host), Max Grossman, Franklin Harkins, Reinhard Kratz, Ari Mermelstein, Jim VanderKam, and the anonymous reviewer of this essay—it goes without saying that any infelicities remain my own. I wish to dedicate this essay to Professor C.T.R. (Robert) Hayward, a wonderful friend and generous colleague, on the occasion of his well-deserved retirement from thirty-five years of teaching at Durham University. I have greatly enjoyed our many conversations about texts and their interpretation. In addition to the two medieval copies of the text formerly known as the Zadokite Fragments from the Cairo Geniza (CD= Cairo Damascus AB), as many as ten mss of D have been discovered at Qumran: eight from Cave 4, one from Cave 5, one from Cave 6. Hartmut Stegemann, “Towards Physical Reconstructions of the Qumran Damascus Document Scrolls,” in The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery, ed. Joseph M. Baumgarten et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 177‒200 and Charlotte Hempel, The Damascus Texts, Companion to the Qumran Scrolls 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); the latter is especially useful for the presentation of the different names of the Cave 4 mss of D over the years (19‒25). These Qumran mss bear many close textual parallels to the two medieval copies of CD. The small bit of overlapping material and variations between the copies of CD have been attributed to various causes ranging from scribal errors to full-blown editing. The overlap that exists between CD 7:5b‒8:19, 21b, and 19:1‒34a complicates the relationship between mss A and B; see Liora Goldman, “A Comparison of the Genizah Manuscripts A and B of the Damascus Document in Light of Their Pesher Units,” in Meghillot: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls IV, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher and Devorah Dimant (Jerusalem: University of Haifa Press/Bialik Institute, 2006), 169‒89 (Hebr.); Michael A. Knibb, “The Interpretation of Damascus Document VII, 9b-VIII, 2a and XIX, 5b-14,” RevQ 15/57 (1991): 243‒51; Joseph M. Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4.X: The Damascus Document (4Q266‒4Q273) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Hempel, The Damascus Texts, 77‒79; Menahem Kister, “The Development of the Early Recensions of the Damascus Document,” DSD 14 (2007): 61‒76. The annotated translation of D by Joseph Angel (“Damascus Document,” Outside the Bible, ed. Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman [Philadelphia: JPS, 2013], 2975‒3035) helpfully incorporates the Cave 4 mss.

72

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

(1:1‒4:12a and 5:20‒6:11a) that constructs a particular theological and narrative context for the legal material which is integrated within this section (cols. 1‒8; 19‒20) and which is constitutive of the halakhic half of the text (cols. 9‒16).4 While much has been written on D, Charlotte Hempel has rightly pointed out how rarely scholars have considered the relationship between these two literary sections.5 Neglecting one in favor of the other reflects scholarly tendencies to carry over modern literary and disciplinary specializations to the study of ancient phenomena.6 The prevailing interest in the study of the Admonition section has been to recover details about the historical origins of the community behind this text, a quest that has been soundly critiqued by Max Grossman.7 The present study will consider D holistically in order to propose a possible way of understanding the experiential effect of sequencing these vividly negative narratives prior to the laws and to ponder how the reading of such texts might have contributed to the reception of laws governing community 4

5

6

7

Cols. 19‒20 are attested in CD-B, written on recto (19) and verso (20). Based on the slightly different bottom margins for these cols., it is not possible to determine if additional material followed CD-B 20:34; Hempel, The Damascus Texts, 20; Maxine Grossman, Reading for History in the Damascus Document (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 128. The text known as 4Q266 4 I and 4Q267 3 may contain some evidence for CD-B col. 20, but nothing has survived that overlaps with 20:13‒15, a passage that makes what appears to be an allusion to a “unique Teacher” (‫)יורה היחיד‬, presumably the Teacher of Righteousness; Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4.X: The Damascus Document, 46‒47, 98‒99. Hempel, The Damascus Texts, 71‒74, notes that the seam between the Admonition and the halakhic sections is not well-preserved, making it impossible to speak with precision about the literary transition between them; even so, one should not draw the conclusion that these two parts are totally unrelated (44‒53); eadem, “Community Origins in the Damascus Document in the Light of Recent Scholarship,” in Provo International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Donald W. Parry and Eugene C. Ulrich (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 316‒29; rev. and repr. as “The Damascus Document and Community Origins,” in The Qumran Rule Texts in Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 65‒78, esp. 65. Steven D. Fraade, “Nomos and Narrative before ‘Nomos and Narrative’,” in Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 17‒34, esp. 29. Grossman, Reading for History; also Steven D. Fraade, “Ancient Jewish Law and Narrative in Comparative Perspective: The Damascus Document and the Mishnah,” in Legal Fictions, 227‒54; here Fraade proposes that a more accurate title for the work as a whole (in light of the new data from the 4QD mss which indicate a larger percentage of legal material) would be something like: “Elaboration of the Laws” (229‒30), recalling an even earlier suggestion made by Hartmut Stegemann (Der Essener, Qumran, Johannes der Täufer und Jesus [Freiburg: Herder, 1993], 165) that the closing words in 4Q266 f.11 20‒21 would have been a better title than the current ‘Damascus Document;’ ([‫התורה] האחרון‬ ֯ [‫]מ[דר]ש‬ ֯ ‫]ע[ל‬ ֯ ‫הנה הכו[ל‬, “Der lezte Ausforschung der Torah”); also Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4.X: The Damascus Document, 76‒77.

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

73

life.8 To this end, we seek to texture and complicate the experience that D may have had on its readers and hearers. The move to recover the complexities of the “on the ground” experience of D for ancient sectarians reflects a shift that began among select anthropologists in the 1980s to move away from over-determined models of social structures which exert influence on people through institutionalized practices and discourses (e.g., “political systems, kinship structures, cultural histories, symbolic meanings”), in order to consider how embodied experiences might offer insights into lived experience.9 While the recovery of individual experiences has long been recognized as difficult, not considering subjective experiences as data for understanding the past can lead to over-determined monochromatic images of the other that inevitably reserve high-definition texturing such as complexity, contingencies, and ambivalence to the world of the observer alone.10 One way of recovering textured experiences of the past is to look to interdisciplinary explanatory theories of religion from anthropology and cognitive science of religion that seek to describe the range of bodily experiences that are involved in the processing of emotions and memory, and the formation of subjectivity. The interdisciplinary studies used here offer heuristic theories about human emotion and memory11 and draw upon ethnographic studies of contemporary societies that examine how highly imaginative embodied meditative practices and emotion contribute to the cultivation of religious experiences.12 8

9

10

11

12

Even though there are differences between the Qumran D mss and CD, it seems reasonable to assume that there was a general patterning of hortatory narrative prior to laws in D. Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 87‒102 (96). An important texturing of the communities of D appears in Grossman, Reading for History, 184‒209. It is worth mentioning the contributions of feminist studies to our understandings of embodiment, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity; a point that was well made by Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Body in the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment,” JQR 95 (2005): 479‒500 (479). Desjarlais and Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches,” 95‒96; Stephen S. Bush, “Are Religious Experiences Too Private to Study?” JR (2012):199‒223; also Amira Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); eadem, “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 18 (2012): 247‒65. Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); idem, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Robert N. McCauley and Emma Cohen, “Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion,” Philosophy Compass 5 (2010): 779‒92. Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18 (1990): 5‒47; idem., “Imaginal Performance and Memory in Ritual Healing,” in The Performance of Healing, ed. Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman (London: Routledge, 1996),

74

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

Integrative research into cognitive and emotion processes can shed light on possible ways of understanding how the sequencing of the Admonition section before the halakhic material in D could have been experienced by the ancient readers and hearers. The re-experiencing of emotions according to the theological pattern of covenant-making, breaking, and re-making can be understood as constructing a malleable framework of experiences within which each community member—regardless of his or her spiritual standing—could have imagined him-/herself. Embodied reading which vividly enacts the experiences that are described (enactive reading)13 allows for the formation of egocentric episodic memories that are crucial for the mind’s ability to anticipate future events such as the divine punishments that result unfailingly from treachery. Because ritually aroused emotions are re-experienced in the body, even community members who had never committed open treason against the group could have imagined the consequences of disobedience with the vividness of first-hand events.14 The emotional re-experiencing of the Admonition could have effectively shaped future decision-making processes by predisposing community members to obey the laws that they were about to receive, without predetermining their obedience. This understanding of D’s sequencing of hortatory historical narratives before laws suggests that the rhetorical structure is strategic and can be said to assist in the intensification of the covenant experience.15 Notably, D’s macrostructure resembles that of the book of Deuteronomy, which legislates the ongoing reenactment of covenant experiences. Passages that presume the re-making of the

13

14

15

91‒114; Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); eadem, When God Talks Back (New York: Knopf, 2012); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). During enactive reading, compelling reference to an object can stimulate sensory and motor areas in the brain that govern the appropriate visualizing and phenomenal handling of that object. It can also arouse other bodily states, including appropriate emotional responses; see Anežka Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment,” Semiotica 189 (2012): 23‒48, esp. 25‒26. Rebecca Sachs Norris (“Examining the Structure and Role of Emotion: Contributions of Neurobiology to the Study of Embodied Religious Experience,” Zygon 40 [2005]: 181‒99) writes: “That emotion can be refelt in the present when it is recalled enables religious feelings to be layered and developed, because each time a ritual gesture is repeated the emotion is recalled and new emotional memories laid down in association with the old ones to be recalled the next time” (192‒93). NB, instead of emotions recalling memories, it is better to think of emotions as reinvigorating or reconstituting them. The strong covenant orientation of the Admonition has long been recognized; Philip R. Davies, The Damascus Covenant: An Interpretation of the “Damascus Document” (Sheffield: JSOT, 1983); Stephen Hultgren, From the Damascus Covenant to the Covenant of the Community (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

75

covenant upon entry into the land (Deuteronomy 27) are compatible with references found in D to “the new covenant of the land of Damascus” (‫הברית החדשה בארץ דמשק‬, CD 6:19; 8:21; 19:33‒34; and 20:12). This essay explores how diverse ancient readers and hearers would have experienced these hortatory narrative passages. Our study offers two proposals about the ancient experience of the Admonition. The first is that an embodied reading and re-experiencing of these stories could have constructed an experiential frame that was not inconsistent with the emotions that would have been felt by Israel during the foundational event of remaking the covenant at Sinai/Horeb. The second is that this theological framing implicates each reader and hearer in the classic event of covenant breaking and could have generated a sensation of self-diminishment, the very effect that would naturally arise from an encounter with a sovereign and terrifying warrior-deity.16 Such a staging of divine immediacy could have recreated the palpable presence of the deity that is associated with foundational law-giving experiences, thus sanctifying the corpus of laws that follows the Admonition.

THE NARRATIVE PATTERN IN THE ADMONITION Many scholars acknowledge that the Admonition is a composite work that presents a series of sermonic historical episodes alongside various legal elements (viz., “le petit code” [CD 6:12‒7:4a],17 the expulsion ceremony, and catalogue of transgressors). These legal components help to orient the readers and hearers of the Admonition to the significant body of halakhic laws found in cols. 9‒16 and give coherence to the whole.18 Karin Finsterbusch has previously discussed the ways in which the hortatory narrative sections from the Admonition resemble the Deuteronomistic view of Israel’s history and the theological patterning of sin, punishment, and covenant re-making.19 She writes that these portions of 16

17

18 19

A typical feature of classic biblical theophanies (Exod 19; Ps 29; Hab 3) is earth’s trembling, the terrified response to the approaching warrior-deity, Samuel E. Loewenstamm, “The Trembling of Nature during the Theophany,” AOAT 204 (1980): 173‒89. These precepts were called “le petit code” by Albert-Marie Denis, Les thèmes de connaissance dans le Document de Damas (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1967), 124, 139. Also Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “A Literary Analysis of Damascus Document VI, 2-VIII, 3,” RB 78 (1971): 210‒32. Hempel, The Damascus Texts, 44‒53. Karin Finsterbusch, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Deuteronomistic Movement,” in The Hebrew Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Nóra Dávid et al. (Göttingen:

76

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

the Admonition prepare the readers and hearers to receive the laws and serve a paraenetic function.20 The rhetorical style of the Cave 4 mss of D shows a strong alignment with Deuteronomy which legislated the ongoing reenactment of a covenant ceremony.21 Early texts of D locate the ceremonial cursing with the third month, in what James VanderKam has argued is a reference to Shavu‘ot.22 A similar hortatory style appears with language reminiscent of the Moses’ exhortation to choose life (blessings) and not death (curses) (Deut 30:19‒20) appears in 4Q270 f.2 ii, 19‒21.23 These and other passages point to a lived practice of reenacting the covenant which call to mind Deuteronomy’s legislation that the covenant must be remade upon entry into the land (Deut 27:1‒8).24 According to Steven Fraade, Deuteronomy’s influential innovation of multiple covenant ceremonies can be seen in the Qumran texts 4QMMT and 1QS.25 In addition to the observations that scholars have previously made about the rhetorical structure and purpose of the Admonition section of D, we wish to propose that the Deuteronomistic pattern of sin, punishment, and covenant re-making could have created an experiential frame that allows for the re-invigoration of emotional memories of broken covenant, viz., the golden calf (Exod 32) and related stories of calf cults (1 Kgs 12:28‒33)—events that were so foundational that it is impossible

20 21

22

23 24

25

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 143‒54. Finsterbusch expands upon a preliminary proposal about the duration of Dtr’s influence made by Odil Hannes Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1967). Finsterbusch, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Deuteronomistic Movement,” 147. Steven D. Fraade, “Law, History, and Narrative in the Damascus Document,” in Meghillot: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls V‒VI. A Festschrift for Devorah Dimant, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher and Emanuel Tov (Jerusalem: University of Haifa Press/Bialik Institute, 2007), 35‒55; idem, “Deuteronomy and Polity in The Early History of Jewish Interpretation,” in Legal Fictions, 211‒26, esp. 219‒20; idem, “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Miqṣat Ma’aśe Ha-Torah (4QMMT): The Case of the Blessings and Curses,” DSD 10 (2003): 150‒61, repr. in Fraade, Legal Fictions, 93‒106. 4Q266 f.11 16‒18 (with overlap in 4Q270 f. 7 ii 11‒12) states: “All [the inhabitants of] the camps shall congregate in the third month (‫ )יקהלו בחודש השלישי‬and curse those who turn to the right [or to the left of the] Law.” James C. VanderKam, “Shavu‘ot,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 871‒72; also Jub. 1.1; 6:10‒11, 17‒19; 14:1, 18, 20; 15:1; 16:13‒14; 22:1, 15, 30; 2 Chr 15:10‒13, and Acts 2; also Fraade, “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Miqṣat Ma‘aśê Ha-Torah (4QMMT),” 98‒99, esp. n. 21; idem, “The Damascus Document and the Mishnah,” 232; Daniel K. Falk, Daily, Sabbath, and Festival Prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 230‒35. E.g., 4Q270 f.2 ii 19‒21 and Deut 30:19. E.g., 4Q270 f.2 i, contains a list of curses that Baumgarten has described as comparable to that in Deuteronomy 27; Qumran Cave 4.X: The Damascus Document, 143. Fraade, “Deuteronomy and Polity,” esp. 219‒22; also, idem, “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” 155‒59.

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

77

to imagine that they were unknown to the readers and hearers of D. In such a scenario, emotions’ associative processes could have reinvigorated these memories of Israel’s past, allowing readers and hearers of the Admonition to access foundational events of covenant-making, -breaking, and re-making with the vividness of first-hand experience. To this end, we will begin by highlighting the performative elements in the Admonition (CD 1:1‒3:12) that accentuate its relationship to Deuteronomy in order to recover some of the experiential complexity of the readers and hearers of D. Then we will discuss how certain lexemes and scriptural allusions in CD 1:1‒3:12 would work well within an experiential frame to reinvigorate emotional memories of that pivotal moment of sin in the wilderness—the principal occasion that necessitated covenant re-making.26

THE DAMASCUS DOCUMENT’S RHETORICAL RESEMBLANCE TO DEUTERONOMY While it is not possible to know with certainty the specific ritual context of D, the text’s rhetorical features resemble the book of Deuteronomy. The opening of the Admonition has the qualities of a prophetic call that could be understood as a reenactment of the Mosaic tradition known from Deuteronomy. The beginning of the medieval Damascus text—“And now, listen (‫ )ועתה שמעו‬all you who know righteousness and understand the deeds of God!”—recalls Moses’ powerful invocation in Deut 4:1: “And now, listen, O Israel!” (‫)וְ ַע ָתּה יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל ְשׁ ַמע‬.27 Just as the hortatory Deuteronomic style summons those within ear-shot to a covenantal moment, so too, the Admonition, especially as it appears in the Cave 4 mss, shares this orientation. The fluidity arising from a performative text can be detected in the variations that appear in the invocations found in the overlapping sections from Cave 4 that correspond to CD 1:1; 2:2, 14; cf. 6:3. In the beginning of the earliest copy of the Qumran D manuscripts known as 4Q266, we find an exhortation to the “[s]ons of light” (4Q266 f.2 i 6‒7); but, unlike 26

27

See the stimulating study of how CD 1:1‒2:1 can be read as contributing to the construction of sectarian identity by Max Grossman, “Cultivating Identity: Textual Virtuosity and ‘Insider’ Status,” in Defining Identities: We, You, and the Other in the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Florentino García Martínez and Mladen Popović (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 1‒11. Some variation of this invocation also appears at Deut 4:1, 5:1, 6:4.

78

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

the opening invocation found in the Cairo text to “all those who know [ri]ghteousness and [consider the works of God],” the Qumran text contains a sizeable passage concerning ritual purity in fragment 1 that continues on through 2 i, 1‒6.28 The variations in these invocations may be understood as markers of a dynamic performative text and signs that the text was community-specific.29 Even so, in all instances there is a general recognition that the intended audience is a group of individuals who can be understood broadly as an elite remnant. It is clear from the legal material, especially the penal code known from CD 14:18‒23 and various Cave 4 mss of D (4Q266, 4Q267, and 4Q270),30 that the historical audiences of the different manuscripts of D were highly stratified, consisting of individuals of varying levels of holiness who regularly moved between and negotiated different states of purity.31 The emphasis on ritual purity found at the beginning of 4Q266 suggests that the community for which this text was performed may have enjoyed a heightened sense of holiness; nevertheless, it was also a community that knew the broad range of spiritual failings, as we might expect given the circumstances referenced in the penal code. 28

29

30

31

The physical details of 4Q266 (early first century BCE) indicate that these fragmentary references to the correct observance of ritual times came at the very beginning of the scroll (f.1, 1‒25 and 2 i, 1‒6). The sequencing of the Admonition as (1) 4Q266; (2) CD-A 1‒8; (3) CD-B 19‒20 was proposed by Józef T. Milik, Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea (London: SCM, 1959), 151‒52; Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4.X: The Damascus Document, 31‒35. Angel’s translation (“Damascus Document”) helpfully presents these sections in this order. This is notable given the strong convergence generally observed between the Cave 4 mss and CD-A. In his comments on the Cave 4 mss, Baumgarten notes that of the “approximately 326 lines, complete or partial, which parallel the Genizah text there are less than thirty significant variants” (Qumran Cave 4.X: The Damascus Document, 6). While the variations between CD and the 4QD manuscripts may have arisen from different recensions, there is also the possibility of accidental loss, as suggested by Hempel, The Damascus Texts, 24. Even so, the discussion of the experiential effect of reading D does not depend upon deciding whether these differences are due to deliberate redactional shaping or to accidental loss of material. Joseph M. Baumgarten, “The Cave 4 Versions of the Qumran Penal Code,” JJS 43 (1992): 268‒76; Charlotte Hempel, “The Penal Code Reconsidered,” in Legal Texts and Legal Issues, ed. Moshe J. Bernstein et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 337‒48; Aharon Shemesh, “Expulsion and Exclusion in the Community Rule and the Damascus Document,” DSD 9 (2002): 44‒74; idem, “The Scriptural Background of the Penal Code in the Rule of the Community and Damascus Document,” DSD 15 (2008): 191‒224; and Reinhard G. Kratz, “Der Penal Code und das Verhältnis von Serekh ha-Yachad (S) und Damaskusschrift,” RevQ 25/98 (2011): 199‒227, especially 199‒201. Grossman, Reading for History, 112‒14, where, in commenting on the language of “the covenant that God established for the first ones” (4:9), she writes that purity status is “dynamic and flexible”—meaning it can be lost and gained, by both covenanters and outsiders (113).

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

79

According to the Admonition, Israel brazenly refused to uphold the law that had been received and so ignited the wrath of God. The expression “each one chose according to the wantonness of his heart” (‫ )ויבחרו איש בשרירות לבו‬is one of the characteristic ways of speaking about those members whose willful breaking of the laws (3:5; 8:8, 19:20, 33; 20:9‒10) resulted in extermination—literally being cut-off—from the community (‫בה הם נכרתים‬, 3:1; ‫ויכרת זכורם במדבר‬, 3:6‒7; ‫ומלכיהם בו נכרתו‬, 3:9). As CD 3:10‒12 makes clear, “And they were handed over to the sword because they abandoned the covenant of God, they chose their own will, and they turned to follow their wantonness, each one acting according to his/her own willfulness” (‫ויסגרו לחרב בעזבם את ברית אל‬ ‫)ויבחרו ברצונם ויתורו אחרי שרירות לבם לעשות איש את רצונו‬. This passage epitomizes the understanding of the self that prevailed for the readers and hearers of D. In contrast to modern notions of subjectivity that prize agency and autonomy, the ideal for the communities of D is what Saba Mahmood calls the “docile subject.”32 The sectarians receive their chosen status which God has determined for them, but this state is something that can be lost by willful disobedience, which is often depicted in embodied language as a physical straying or as walking on “unmarked paths” (e.g., ‫הם סרי דרך‬, 1:13; ‫ויתעם בתוהו לא דרך‬, 1:15‒16) and as acting in accord with “their (own) will” (‫רצונם‬, 2:21) or in accord with “the stubbornwantonness of their heart” (‫ בשרירות לבם‬in 2:17‒18; 3:1; 5‒7; 11‒12). While a positive example of faithfulness to the covenant is offered by the great ancestors, it is noteworthy that Abraham is said to have “not chosen to follow the will of his own spirit” (‫ולא בחר ברצון רוחו‬, CD 3:2‒3). The Admonition section is directed toward a single remnant community, but given the pluriformity of the documents and the references to multiple social groups throughout the different D manuscripts, the historical situation was likely multiple communities that lived in the midst or in close proximity to outsiders.33 In addition to exhorting listeners Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 202‒36. Shemesh (“Expulsion and Exclusion”) notes well that one of the distinctions between the crimes that demand expulsion and those that stand the chance of rehabilitation into the community is the distinction between unintended crimes and those that show willful defiance and “autonomous” decision-making to despise “the Laws of the Many” (66‒67). Cf. CD 8:8: “each one chose according to the wantonness of his heart” (also CD-B 19:20; 20:9). 33 For the diversity of the D communities see CD-B 19:2‒3 (“and if they live in camps according to the rule of the land which was there from antiquity and marry women according to the custom of the Law and beget children and live life according to the Law”) and 1:20‒21; 7:5; 20:2; and 20:5—all of which reference those who walk in “perfect holiness,” widely understood to be celibacy (Josephus, B.J. 2.122 and Philo, 32

80

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

against the wanton behavior of those (past and present) who have been severed from the community, the D manuscripts sort individual members into groups of varying levels of spirituality.34 Collectively, this elect remnant can be understood as a thoroughly mixed assembly of various types of people: those who rebelled flagrantly against the group and were in the process of being “cut off” with no hope of return; those who transgressed in more minor ways but had the opportunity to be rehabilitated back into the group; and those who did not commit open treason against the group but who may have secretly contemplated disloyalty. The inaction of this third type may have been due to either lack of courage or lack of opportunity, and their outwardly correct behavior may not truly reflect their interior disposition. In addition to these groups, there are also spiritually elite individuals who possess a pre-eminence, a “perfect holiness” (‫תמים הקדש‬, CD 7:5; 20:7). The complex stratification and internal diversity of the readers and hearers of D indicate scenarios in which individuals move constantly between states of inclusion and exclusion, with the most grievous offenses (viz., flagrant crimes committed by longstanding members, CD 14:24) marked as especially deserving of expulsion. The Admonition would have been read and heard by individuals whom we can imagine as including the brazen offenders, the ostensibly innocent, the pre-eminently holy, and everyone in between. How might these spiritually diverse individuals have experienced the reading and hearing of the first three columns of the Admonition? Re-experiencing Foundational Events through the Emotional Narratives of the Admonition (CD 1:1‒3:12) We propose that the narratives in the Admonition could have constructed a malleable experiential frame that was consistent with and assisted in the reinvigoration of emotion memories about foundational events. The discussion in this section builds upon Max Grossman’s astute exegetical analysis Apologia pro Iudaeis, from Eusebius, Praep. Ev. 8.6‒7); see John J. Collins, Beyond the Qumran Community (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010), 2‒6. Diversity among the groups of D is also expressed by varied references to involvement in the Jerusalem Temple; see CD 16:13‒17; 9:13‒14; 11:17‒21; 4Q266 5 ii; and 4Q271 2; Charlotte Hempel, The Laws of the Damascus Document (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 37‒38; and Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (Garden City: Doubleday, 1995), 282; and Angel, “Damascus Document,” 3032n49. 34 See Grossman’s nuanced discussion of the complexity of the group known as “Israel” in Reading for History, 117‒18.

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

81

of the references and allusions to the golden calf episode in CD 1:12‒2:1.35 The highly charged sin of the golden calf would not have been unknown to the Qumranites, even though it is not cited directly in D. Significantly the golden calf provides the foundational occasion for the remaking of the Sinai covenant (Exodus 34). A calf cult has also been inscribed into the national Deuteronomistic history of Israel at the moment of the severing of the northern kingdom from the southern kingdom of Judah with scholars identifying the crucial link to Jeroboam’s idolatrous calf cults at Bethel and Dan: “these are your gods, O Israel!” (‫ֹלהיָך יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל‬ ֶ ‫א ֶלּה ֱא‬, ֵ Exod 32:4, 8 and 36 1 Kgs 12:28). The event of the calf (or calves) was the occasion for the destruction of the guilty (Exod 32:27‒29; 1 Kgs 12:26‒33) and, according to the Deuteronomistic Historian (DtrH), the root cause for the destruction of the Northern Kingdom (2 Kgs 17:16, 21‒23).37 This section will discuss how the hortatory narratives in CD 1:1‒3:12 can be said to be compatible with the larger experiential pattern that harks back to these foundational stories of covenant brokenness. In her stimulating discussion of CD 1:1‒3:12, Max Grossman proposes that images that can be linked to the golden calf function to cultivate identity by helping readers associate contemporary outsiders with figures and characters from foundational stories.38 She writes that hearing the Admonition and the masterful interpretive maneuvering between scriptural 35 36

37

38

Grossman, “Cultivating Identity,” 6‒10. Aaron’s calf is singular, so the quote in Exod 32:4 must originate from Jeroboam’s institution of two cults, although compare Neh 9:18 in which the declaration appears in singular form; see Moses Aberbach and Leivy Smolar, “Aaron, Jeroboam, and the Golden Calves,” JBL 86 (1967): 129‒40; Leivy Smoler and Moses Aberbach, “The Golden Calf Episode in Postbiblical Literature,” HUCA 39 (1968): 91‒116; Konrad Schmid, “Israel am Sinai: Etappen der Forschungsgeschichte zu Ex 32‒34 in seinen Kontexten,” in Gottes Volk am Sinai: Untersuchungen zu Ex 32‒34 und Dtn 9‒10, ed. Matthias Köckert and Erhard Blum (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 2001), 9‒40; Christine E. Hayes, “Golden Calf Stories: The Relationship of Exodus 32 and Deuteronomy 9‒10,” in The Idea of Biblical Interpretation: Essays in Honor of James L. Kugel, ed. Hindy Najman and Judith H. Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 45‒93; Karla R. Suomala, Moses and God in Dialogue: Exodus 32‒34 in Postbiblical Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); Pekka Lindqvist, Sin at Sinai: Early Judaism Encounters Exodus 32 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008); James W. Watts, “Aaron and the Golden Calf in the Rhetoric of the Pentateuch,” JBL 130 (2011): 417‒30. Also, 2 Kgs 10:29 and 17:16 refer back to Jeroboam’s cult. The calf event receives mention in other historical surveys (e.g., L.A.B. 12:2‒7; Acts 7:39‒41). While biblical references to the golden calf are rare, they do appear in two prayers; the recital of history found in Neh 9:18 and Ps 106:19‒20, the latter follows the Deuteronomic retelling by placing the calf at Horeb. The psalmist’s reference to the Israelites who “exchanged their glory” (‫בוֹדם‬ ָ ‫ת־כּ‬ ְ ‫וַ יָּ ִמירוּ ֶא‬, Ps 106:20) also brings to mind Hos 4:7: “I will exchange their glory for shame” (‫אָמיר‬ ִ ‫בוֹדם ְבּ ָקלוֹן‬ ָ ‫)כּ‬. ְ Grossman, “Cultivating Identity,” 7.

82

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

passages can “leave sectarians with a confirmed, internalized self-consciousness of their own insider status.”39 This discussion of CD 1:13‒14 builds upon her important exegetical insights but departs from her conclusion by proposing that all readers and hearers, regardless of their standing as spiritually perfect or as brazen offenders, would have been able to re-experience what it was like to be guilty after the calf event since all of Israel, including Aaron the priest, was guilty.40 For the preeminently holy or the ostensibly innocent readers and hearers of D, the effect of re-experiencing of Israel’s deeply humiliating covenant moment at Sinai/Horeb would have likely led to an introspective and scrupulous examination of his or her personal unworthiness and not a confirmation of one’s elite spiritual status.41 The re-experiencing of the narratives, especially the negative emotions of unworthiness, could then be said to generate a sense of diminishment that can naturally recreate sensations that resemble those that arise naturally from a divine encounter. Conceptualizing the hortatory narratives as a recognizable pattern of sin, punishment, and covenant-remaking can give us insights into how these texts could have been empathically engaged by the diverse readers and hearers of D. The hortatory elements that we will discuss can be said to construct what psychologists call a “category of knowledge,” a way of describing how “objects, settings, events, actions, mental states, properties, relations” can construct a malleable experiential frame which can then provide “rich inductive inferences” as it is reconstructed.42 The areas of the brain which govern the processing of sensory perception, including emotion, and higher-order cognition are connected in many rich two-way networks to one another. Lawrence Barsalou writes: [P]eople establish entrenched simulations of frequently-experienced situations, where a given simulation includes (among many other things) a variety of bodily states, such as facial expressions, arm movements, and postures. When environmental cues trigger the simulation of a social situation, part of the simulation is expressed in relevant bodily states. Conversely, if the body is configured into a state that belongs to 39 40

41

42

Ibid., 10. Even Moses who was not present at the golden calf includes himself by using the firstperson plural in his confession to YHWH: “May you forgive our iniquities and our sins” (Exod 34:9). Holiness is not characterized by confidence but by humility. Such is the model presented by the prophet Isaiah who, upon seeing a vision of the heavenly Temple, was immediately overwhelmed by his personal unworthiness (Isa 6:5). The same is true for Moses (Num 12:3). Lawrence W. Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5 (2005): 14‒57 (23).

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

83

one of these simulations, the state retrieves the simulation, which then affects social information processing.43

This integrative way of understanding how embodied knowing, reading, and remembering moves away from conceptualizing memories as static files that are simply retrieved. Instead, experiential frames are constructed in areas of the brain that govern sensory perception and motor processes and reconstructed in incomplete or partial ways that are sufficient to provide enough representational information for meaningful and associative ways of knowing; “once an entity has been assigned to a category, category knowledge provides rich inductive inferences that guide interactions with it.”44 These forms of embodied knowing can be adapted and personalized. Such dynamic cognitive processes are aroused during practices of enactive reading, a way of describing how a text can create an embodied experience within a reader.45 Empathic and egocentric engagement with the hortatory narratives can be deepened by on-going practices of re-experiencing emotional states, imaginative visualization, and bodily postures. While these processes do not rely upon the historicity of the events that are being described, they do depend upon the rhetorical vividness of the descriptions.46 The emotions and embodied experiences aroused by the Admonition are compatible with the Deuteronomistic patterning of covenant-making, -breaking, and -remaking could have successfully constructed an experiential frame that would have assisted in the associative reinvigoration of emotional memories of similar events from Israel’s past. If we consider the Admonition as constructing a “category of knowledge,” the enactive reading of these narratives can, through associative processes, cognitively and physically allow for the re-experiencing of foundational events of sin and punishment. CD 1:5‒11 The opening narrative in CD 1:1‒2:1 has been heavily commented on by scholars interested in the origins of the community.47 Here the group 43 44 45 46

47

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 16. Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative,” 25‒26. Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” 39; Cain Todd, “Attending Emotionally to Fiction,” Journal of Value Inquiry 46 (2013): 449‒65. Note the general skepticism over a straightforward historical reading of the scrolls: Hempel, The Qumran Rule Texts in Context, 4‒5; George J. Brooke, “The ‘Apocalyptic’ Community, the Matrix of the Teacher and Rewriting Scripture,” in Authoritative

84

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

is presented as the faithful remnant within Israel’s history of treacherous acts, who has been divinely preserved during the period of wrath (1:8‒9). The reference to a 390-year period in 1:5‒11 almost certainly harks back to a scriptural passage in Ezek 4:4‒6 and 9‒12, in which the prophet parses the monolithic theological idea of “Israel” by pronouncing that there will be 390 days of punishment for the sins of the house of Israel and 40 days for the punishment of the house of Judah. One might even say that this scriptural reference highlights the “cutting off” of the northern kingdom from the southern, an event which according to DtrH (2 Kgs 17:16) was caused by Jeroboam’s false calf cults at Bethel and Dan (1 Kgs 12:26‒33): the severed house of Israel, akin to the treacherous idolatrous community, is decisively destroyed, while the house of Judah (the remnant) is spared. While the chronology that appears here (CD 1:5‒11) has long been read as offering historical details about community’s origins, it is also the case that the specification of the number of years of punishment contributes to the concrete realism of the narrative and facilitates enactive reading. The main clause—“they are like the blind ones and like those who feel along for (the) way” (‫ויהיו כעורים וכימגששים דרך‬, CD 1:9)— offers a vivid embodied image that can facilitate a hearer’s or reader’s ability to imaginatively personalize these events in his or her mind’s eye, thus maximizing the text’s experiential impact. Again, if we presume that the targeted audience included those elect members who enjoy varying degrees of holiness (but who may have unspoken urges to be unfaithful), the image of groping blindly (1:8‒9) presents these individuals with an appropriate visual metaphor for meditating on their spiritual struggles. Within a thoroughly mixed community—that is, one that has within it those who may secretly be contemplating rival teachings but who have not yet acted on these impulses—some can only be reached through a self-guided examination of their own spiritual state. It is also the case that this opening vignette, with its strongly deterministic perspective, could have been heard by anxious readers who would have earnestly hoped that they were counted eternally among the elect, but who may have been fearfully aware of their own failings.

Scriptures in Ancient Judaism, ed. M. Popović (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 37‒53; Philip R. Davies, “What History Can We Get from the Scrolls, and How?” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Texts and Contexts, ed. C. Hempel (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 31‒46; Grossman, Reading for History, esp. 209; Michael A. Knibb, “Exile in the Damascus Document,” JSOT 25 (1983): 99‒117 (110).

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

85

CD 1:13‒14 A quotation of Hos 4:10 appears here in CD 1:13‒14: “like a cow that is stubborn, so Israel is stubborn” (‫)כפרה סורירה כן סרר ישראל‬. Max Grossman demonstrates well that this reference from Hos 4:12‒19 in CD 1:13‒14 is an allusion to the calf crimes of Israel’s past.48 The Hosean passage memorializes the sinfulness of the north in two places, one of which, Bethaven, is a pejorative pun on the false cult in Bethel49 that was established by Jeroboam (1 Kgs 12:26‒33). The root word “stubborn” (‫ )סרר‬that appears in the Hosean passage can be understood as a pun on the lexeme for “waywardness” (‫ )סור‬that appears in Exod 32:8 “They have turned aside quickly from the way that I have commanded them; they have made for themselves a molten calf and they have worshipped it and sacrificed to it” (‫יתם ָעשׂוּ ָל ֶהם ֵ ֖עגֶ ל ַמ ֵסּ ָכה וַ יִּ ְשׁ ַתּ ֲחווּ־לוֹ וַ יִּ זְ ְבּחוּ־לוֹ‬ ִ ִ‫ן־ה ֶדּ ֶרְך ֲא ֶשׁר ִצוּ‬ ַ ‫סרוּ ַמ ֵהר ִמ‬, ָ 50 Exod 32:8). The book of Hosea contains a noticeable density of bovine imagery, oftentimes choosing to use diminutive words for female or adolescent forms of cattle to ridicule what may have been an imposing tauromorphic cult at the northern shrines. Each of Hosea’s animal references refers pointedly to the willful idolatry and wanton sin of the north: calf (“With their silver and gold they made idols for their own destruction; your calf is rejected, O Samaria [‫ …] זָ נַ ח ֶעגְ ֵלְך שׁ ְֹמרוֹן‬The calf of Samaria [‫]עגֶ ל שׁ ְֹמרוֹן‬ ֵ shall be broken to pieces,” Hos 8:5, 6); heifer (“Ephraim was a trained heifer [‫]א ְפ ַריִ ם ֶעגְ ָלה‬ ֶ who loved to thresh, and I spared her fair neck [‫ארהּ‬ ָ ָ‫]וַ ֲאנִ י ָע ַב ְר ִתּי ַעל־טוּב ַצוּ‬,” Hos 10:11];51 calves (“The inhabitants of Samaria tremble at the calves of Beth-aven [‫]ל ֶעגְ לוֹת ֵבּית ָאוֶ ן‬,” ְ Hos 10:5; “And now they keep on sinning and make a cast image for themselves, idols of silver made according to their understanding, all of them the work of artisans. ‘Sacrifice to these,’ they say. People are kissing calves [‫ ”!]א ְֹמ ִרים ז ְֹב ֵחי ָא ָדם ֲעגָ ִלים יִ ָשּׁקוּן‬Hos 13:2). Ancient readers of CD 1:13‒14 would not have missed these pointed attacks on the illegitimate northern cults of Jeroboam the Ephraimite. Emotion memories of the foundational 48 49 50

51

Grossman, “Cultivating Identity,” 6‒7. See Amos 4:4; 5:5; NB that Aaron was also associated with Bethel. NB that this verb from Exod 32:8 appears in Hos 4:18 to describe the excessive drinking of Ephraim (Samaria): ‫סר ָס ְב ָאם‬. ָ For further discussion of Hos and CD 1:13‒14, see ibid., 7; Jonathan G. Campbell, The Use of Scripture in the Damascus Document 1‒8, 19‒20 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995), 30, 62‒63, 66; Barbara Fuss, ‘Dies ist die Zeit, von der geschrieben ist…’: die expliziten Zitate aus dem Buch Hosea in den Handschriften von Qumran und im Neuen Testament (Aschendorff: Münster, 2000).

86

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

event of transgression, as it was colorfully told in Israel’s story of origins (the golden calf) and in her national history (Jeroboam’s false calf cults), would have been reconstructed by readers and hearers of this highly charged cow reference in CD 1:13‒14.

CD 2:14‒3:12 The second narrative in the Admonition section has a cosmic timeless quality and a strong deterministic perspective which leads easily into the story of the Watchers (CD 2:14‒3:12), a tale of the primordial origins of evil. While the angels have been read as ciphers for wayward priests, according to the text as it is presented, the fallen angels principally illustrate the dangers of wantonness and acting according to one’s own desires: ‫( בשרירות לבם‬CD 2:17‒18) and ‫( בעשותם את רצונם‬2:20‒21).52 Here the holy angels further illustrate the recurring themes of wantonness and willful desires among the most highly esteemed, which themes could also help to reinvigorate emotion memories of the covenant event in which the pre-eminent people of Israel, YHWH’s special possession (‫)סגֻ ָלּה‬, ְ 53 was quick to rebel. While Aaron was personally guilty of fashioning the molten object (Exod 32:2‒5, 21‒24), the passage highlights the holy people’s fleshly proclivities and their demands for an idol to worship (Exod 32:1).54 52

53 54

The popular reading of the Watchers as wayward priests is not conclusive. Some form of this thesis has been advanced by David W. Suter, “Fallen Angel, Fallen Priest: The Problem of Family Purity in 1 Enoch,” HUCA 50 (1979): 115‒35; George W.E. Nickelsburg, “Enoch, Levi, and Peter: Recipients of Revelation in Upper Galilee,” JBL 100 (1981): 580‒85; Martha Himmelfarb, “Temple and Priests in the Book of the Watchers, the Animal Apocalypse, and the Apocalypse of Weeks,” in Between Temple and Torah: Essays on Priests, Scribes, and Visionaries (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 79‒92. Not all scholars are convinced by these arguments, see the important discussion by Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Sitting by the Waters of Dan, Or the ‘Tricky Business’ of Tracing the Social Profile of the Communities that Produced the Earliest Enochic Texts,” in The Early Enoch Literature, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini and John J. Collins (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 257‒82. It may be that the Watchers story could have reinvigorated emotion memories of the treacherous priests from the Seleucid period who would play an ignominious role similar to that of Aaron and to the bogus priests whom Jeroboam appointed at Bethel and Dan. Israel is a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” (‫מ ְמ ֶל ֶכת כּ ֲֹהנִ ים וְ גוֹי ָקדוֹשׁ‬, ַ Exod 19:6). Other evidence of the people’s fleshly proclivities: they “rose up to revel” after sacrificing to the calf (‫וַ יָּ ֻקמוּ ְל ַצ ֵחק‬, Exod 32:6). Joshua hears the “sound of singing” (‫קוֹל ַענּוֹת‬, 32:18) but Moses sees them “dancing” (‫וּמחֹֹלת‬, ְ 32:19); the LXX words in Joshua’s report are the sound of those drunk with wine (φωνὴν ἐξαρχόντων οἴνου ἐγὼ ἀκούω).

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

87

THE SWORD AND THE IDEA OF COVENANT The invisible God’s judgment is made known by the Admonition’s recurring image of the sword (e.g., 1:3‒4, 17, 21; 3:11; 7:13; 8:1; 19:10, 13), a truly fitting instrument to both wield the punishment of being severed from the covenantal community55 and to remind readers that their willful actions have implications for the cutting of the covenant agreement. In these passages, the image of the sword predominates as the means by which the invisible God’s presence is made manifest to the people (e.g., “he gave them up to the sword,” ‫ ֺֹיתנם לחרב‬in CD 1:4; and “to deliver them over to the sword that avenges the vengeance of the covenant” ‫ להסגירם לחרב נקמת נקם ברית‬in 1:17‒18).56 The image of the sword and language of cutting speaks well to the range of consequences for wayward behavior. The recurring references to the sword and to cutting that appear in the Admonition allow for a concrete visualization of the presence of the invisible warrior-deity whose terrifying judgment has this-worldly consequences. The sword is also the means by which judgment is executed against a portion of the idolaters in the golden calf story: “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor’” (‫ישׁ־ח ְרבּוֹ ַעל־יְ ֵרכוֹ ִע ְברוּ וָ שׁוּבוּ ִמ ַשּׁ ַער ָל ַשׁ ַער‬ ַ ‫ֹלהי יִ ְשׂ ָר ֵאל ִשׂימוּ ִא‬ ֵ ‫ֹה־א ַמר יְ הוָ ה ֱא‬ ָ ‫כּ‬ ָ ‫ישׁ־א‬ ֶ ‫בּ ַמּ ֲחנֶ ה וְ ִה ְרגוּ ִא‬, ַ Exod 32:27). Even ‫ת־קר ֹבוֹ‬ ְ ‫ת־ר ֵעהוּ וְ ִאישׁ ֶא‬ ֵ ‫ת־א ִחיו וְ ִאישׁ ֶא‬ though all of the people are said to have participated in the calf cult, only three thousand are executed in this bloody pruning of the group. Highly-charged elements in the Admonition express rebellion and willful disobedience and construct a malleable frame that we have proposed is not incompatible with foundational stories of covenant-breaking and -remaking: a stubborn cow (CD 1:13‒14); an avenging sword (1:3‒4, 17, 21; 3:11; 7:13; 8:1; 19:10, 13); the dangers of willful and wanton desires of pre-eminent beings (CD 2:14‒3:12).57 While events from Exodus 32‒34 and Deuteronomy 9 are not discussed outright at Qumran, they play a constitutive part in Israel’s story of origins as a covenant people 55

56

57

E.g., “the sons of Noah and their families were cut off with it (viz., God’s anger)” (‫בׂנׂי נח ומשפחותׂיהם בה הם נכרתים‬, CD 3:1); “the males (those who had eaten blood) were cut off in the wilderness” (‫ויכרת זכורם במדבר‬, CD 3:6‒7). The word for sword is also used in the general expression for violence: “those who pursued violently (‫ )וירדפום לחרב‬the ones who walked perfectly” (CD 1:21). See Grossman, Reading for History, 122‒24 for a discussion of the rhetorical effect of these repetitions.

88

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

at Sinai/Horeb and are inscribed into Israel’s early national history (1 Kgs 12:28‒33). An idolatrous cult precipitated the cutting off of a portion of the covenant community (e.g., Exod 32:27‒29) and was seen as the ultimate cause for the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (2 Kgs 17:16). These stories of covenant-breaking provide the foundational occasions for the remaking of the covenant and, along with it, the re-issuing of laws.

THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE ENACTIVE READING OF THE ADMONITION Narratives can move readers’ affective states and construct compelling emotional episodes in their imaginations that become emotional memories.58 One of our readerly responses to narrative is empathy—that is, “our willingness and ability to simulate other people’s situations and thereby to some degree experience the emotions they are likely to be feeling.”59 References to the embodied experiences that involve the extension of the body and its locomotion appear throughout the Admonition (e.g., “they were like the blind and like those groping for a path” [‫ ]ויהיו כעורים וכימגששים דרך‬in 1:9; being “cut off” by the “sword” [1:3‒4, 17, 21; 3:11; 7:13; 8:1; 19:10, 13]; “walking perfectly” [1:20‒21; 2:15; 3:2] or “straying” from the way [1:13‒14; 2:13, 16; 3:1; 4:1]; “digging a well” [3:16]; “eating blood” [3:6]). According to Anežka Kuzmičová, embodied language contributes to heightened experiences of enactive reading and produce intense vicarious experiences.60 It is thought that a primary purpose for the human mind’s capacity to imagine with great experiential detail and with emotional depth is to imagine oneself in future situations so as to anticipate decision-making scenarios.61 These emotional aspects of the episodic vignettes in the Admonition section are worth considering when addressing the larger experiential effect of sequencing these narratives prior to the laws. The highly rhetorical and stylized 58

59 60 61

According to Patrick C. Hogan, the human mind has evolved to respond to certain universal patterns that frequently recur in world literature; Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative,” 23‒48. Hogan, Affective Narratology, 243. Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative,” 25‒26. Pascal Boyer, “What are Memories For? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture,” in Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3‒28.

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

89

narratives of history found in the Admonition section construct what Steven Fraade terms a “nomo-narrative world” and a theological context for the reception of the laws that follow.62 Ancient readers’ and hearers’ re-experiencing of the emotional contours of the Admonition may have played a strategic role in preparing those individuals for the reception of the laws that follow. The emotional re-experiencing of the hortatory narratives could be understood to serve a larger social function within the communities of D—by cultivating a predisposition to obeying the law without predetermining that this would happen. The strategic role of emotion memories of Israel’s past understands the plasticity of memory reconstruction and reconsolidation to be an opportunity for what psychologists call adaptive modification.63 Newly consolidated episodic memories retain and repurpose the emotional currency of past narratives, and may have offered readers and listeners of D a personal experience of continuity with foundational events that were long gone. The strategic and successive reconstruction of episodic affective memories could have been a way of reexperiencing events of long ago with the vividness of first-hand sensory experiences, thus allowing for their quintessential feature—to envision contingencies in the future. In this way, empathic reading and affective re-experiencing can be understood to guide the decision-making process. This “mental time travel” is the ability to imagine experientially circumstances in the past and future in a vivid and compelling way, and it is thought to be crucial for human decision-making.64 The hortatory narratives in the Admonition are highly stylized presentations that are not useful for reconstructing the past; their histories are only illusory. Instead the Admonition creatively constructs an experiential framework for a new national story that retains all of the emotional impact of old ethnic identity-forming foundational narratives.65 The DtrH pattern of covenant-making, -breaking and -remaking provides a malleable experiential frame that allowed readers and hearers to reinvigorate emotion-laden cultural memories about wanton and willful transgressions, 62 63

64

65

Fraade, “Introduction,” Legal Fictions, 14. Jonathan L.C. Lee, “Reconsolidation: Maintaining Memory Relevance,” Trends in Neuroscience 32 (2009): 413‒20. Endel Tulving, “On the Uniqueness of Episodic Memory,” in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory, ed. Lars-G. Nilsson and Hans J. Markowitsch (Ashland: US Publishers, 1999), 11‒42; idem, “Origin of Autonoesis in Episodic Memory,” in The Nature of Remembering: Essays in Honor of Robert G. Crowder, ed. Henry L.I. Roediger et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001), 17‒34. Boyer, “What are Memories For?” 15‒16.

90

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

swift and decisive punishment, and the remaking of the covenant relationship. We can imagine Israel’s mythical past at Sinai/Horeb and also her political national narrative (1 Kgs 12:26‒33; 2 Kgs 17:16‒18) as the constitutive experiences that were re-invigorated and re-experienced by the Second Temple readers and listeners of the Admonition. Even though there is no explicit mention of calf stories in the Scrolls, one should not then draw the conclusion that they were unknown or forgotten since there was a well-established practice of not explicitly mentioning them. Later rabbinic tradition identifies Exod 32:21‒25 (Moses’ interrogation and Aaron’s admission of guilt), as a passage that is so embarrassing that it can only be read, never translated (M. Meg 4:10; t. Meg. 3:31‒38; y. Meg. 75c; b. Meg. 25a‒b).66 Josephus’s complete refusal to mention the calf crime in his writings is explained by Louis Feldman as stemming from his own sacerdotal identity and a deep embarrassment over the damning portrait of Israel’s highly esteemed priestly figure Aaron.67 It is not surprising that the authors of D would want to avoid explicit reference to this terrible event, since they themselves were not anti-Aaronite.68 In light of the priestly concerns of the communities of D,69 perhaps a similar reasoning can account for the Scrolls’ general, although not complete, silence about the golden calf story.70 The scandalous 66

67

68

69

70

Louis H. Feldman, “Philo’s Account of the Golden Calf Incident,” JJS 56 (2005): 245‒64, esp. 245‒46. Idem, Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible (Berkeley: University of California, 1998), 72; and idem, Studies in Joseph’s Rewritten Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 61‒62. Reference to Aaron appears at CD 1:7 // 4Q266 2 i 11 // 4Q268 1 14; CD 6:2 // 4Q267 2 8; CD-B 19:11 and 20:1; notably, there is no reference to the “sons of Aaron,” see Charlotte Hempel, “The Sons of Aaron in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Flores Florentino: Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish Studies, ed. Anthony Hilhorst et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 207‒24, esp. 210‒12; for a full discussion of Aaron references in the DSS, see C. Hempel, “‫’ ַא ֲהרוֹן‬aharôn“ in Theologisches Wörterbuch zu den Qumrantexten, ed. Heinz-Josef Fabry et al. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2010), 1:76‒81. Liora Goldman, “The Exegesis and Structure of Pesharim in the Damascus Document,” in The Dynamics of Language and Exegesis at Qumran, ed. Devorah Dimant and Reinhard G. Kratz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 193‒202. The opening of the Book of Jubilees may have the calf event in mind when God reveals that Israel will quickly transgress after the making of the covenant (Jub. 1:5‒18); the Temple Scroll begins with Exod 34, the event of covenant remaking just after the golden calf—a structuring that suggests that the golden calf constituted a pivotal moment in Israel’s self-understanding. I am grateful to Professors James VanderKam and Reinhard Kratz for these suggestions. The hymns found in the beginning of 1QH (cols 1?‒8) contain allusions to the Deuteronomic retelling of the golden calf. The hitpael of ‫ נפל‬is used to describe the distinctive prayer posture used by Moses (the verbal form appears only at Deut 9:18, twice at 9:25 and Ezra 10:1 in the entirety of the Tanak) appears as many as three times at 1QH 4:30 (‫ ;)ולה]תנפ[ל ולהתחנן‬5:12 (‫התנפל ֯ל ֯פנ֯ ]י אל‬ ֯ ‫;)ל‬ ֯ and 8:24 ( ֯‫)להתנ֯ ֯פ ֯ל ֯ול ֯ה ֯ת]חנ[ן‬. ֯ Also in this cluster of hodayot, the verb used to describe Moses’

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

91

story of an idolatrous cult at the origins of Israel’s covenant experience would not have been unknown to the authors, readers, or hearers of D. Allusions to the calf (instead of explicit citations) would be sufficient to reinvigorate further emotion memories about it through the experiential frame provided by the Admonition’s Deuteronomistic view of history. The reluctance to make explicit mention of the calf apostasy may have been more than just profound embarrassment; it may have been a strategy for denying the deplorable story any performative power in a public retelling. The reuse of old emotionally-laden foundational narratives could play a compelling role in the decision-making process by allowing for the vivid imagining of the consequences for wrong behavior, thus restricting impulsiveness and constraining behavior.71 In this sense, we might say that the hortatory narratives in the Admonition contributed to cooperative living by assisting individual readers of D (especially those readers who may have not acted upon their desires but who in secret may have been drawn to wrong teachings) in vividly remembering the past so as to constrain and direct decision-making processes in the present. Here, even those elite readers and hearers of the Admonition who are said to possess a “perfect holiness,” along with those who have not openly committed treason against the group, would have been able to imagine vivid scenarios of following or disobeying the law, thus predisposing their decisionmaking processes to choose obedience, without predetermining them to be obedient.

CONCLUSION: STAGING DIVINE IMMEDIACY We have proposed understanding the Deuteronomistic view of history, as it appears in the hortatory narratives of the Admonition, as a “category of knowledge.” Memories of events from Israel’s past that share a similar

71

entreaty before the LORD in Exod 32:11 (‫ֹלהיו‬ ָ ‫ת־פּנֵ י יְ הוָ ה ֱא‬ ְ ‫ )וַ יְ ַחל מ ֶֹשׁה ֶא‬is used by the speaker in 1QH 8:29 (“I entreat (you)” [‫ ;)]ואחלה‬see Angela K. Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study of Penitential Elements and Their Strategic Arousal of Emotion in the Qumran Hodayot (1QH cols. 1[?]‒8),” in Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions: A Study of the Emotions Associated with Prayer in the Jewish and Related Literature of the Second Temple Period, ed. Renate Egger-Wenzel and Stefan C. Reif, DCLS 26 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 297-316. Other discussions of allusions to the golden calf story in the DSS: Moshe J. Bernstein, “4Q159 Fragment 5 and the ‘Desert Theology’ of the Qumran Sect,” in Emanuel: Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of Emanuel Tov, ed. Shalom M. Paul et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 43‒56; Grossman, “Cultivating Identity.” Boyer, “What are Memories For?” 19.

92

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

pattern of sin, punishment, and covenant re-making can be understood as being reinvigorated through emotion’s naturally associative processes. Many images in CD 1:1‒3:12 are compatible with the Deuteronomistic view of history and the theological pattern constructed by stories about Israel’s apostate cults. By experientially placing themselves within narratives of repeated failure to uphold the obligations of the Law, Second Temple readers and hearers of the Admonition could have cultivated a predisposition for cooperative living and obedience to the Law (without predetermining that obedience would occur). According to Angelos Chaniotis, the ancient staging of dramatic religious experiences assisted both religious practitioners and spectators in generating the desired effect of making deities vividly accessible in the life of the community.72 The bodily perceptions of self-diminishment aroused by the enactive reading of the Admonition can be imagined as contributing to the staging of the deity’s palpable presence.73 YHWH becomes viscerally accessible to the readers and hearers of D in the certainty and decisiveness with which punishment happens in the Admonition and in the reinvigorated cultural memories from Israel’s past. In the foundational experience of the revelation of the Law at Sinai, the covenant moment is marked by sensations of fear and awe (Exod 19: 16‒25); so too, the Admonition prepares its readers and hearers for a similar self-diminishing experience. The medieval copy of CD-B culminates with a collective confession of sin uttered in the first-person plural: “We have wickedly sinned, we and our ancestors by living contrary to the covenant laws and true are your judgments against us” (20:28‒30).74 72

73

74

Angelos Chaniotis, “Staging and Feeling the Presence of God,” in Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco-Roman Empire, ed. Laurent Bricault and Corinne Bonnet (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 169‒89. Ritually performed emotions did not solely generate immanent experiences that were constitutive of social life, they were also the means by which religious communities created accessible experiences of the sacred. Catherine M. Bell (Ritual Theory: Ritual Practice [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 130) had made a similar point; also see Thomas J. Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 72. NB that religious experiences are not predetermined to occur; they rely upon a confluence of factors; see James W. Haag and Whitney A. Bauman, “De/Constructing Transcendence: The Emergence of Religious Bodies,” in Religion and the Body: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, ed. David Cave and Rebecca Sachs Norris (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 37‒55. DtrH’s emphasis on the people’s covenantal failings expresses itself here in CD-B 20:28‒30, a passage that is not unlike the confessions made by Moses (Exod 34:9) and Ezra (Ezra 9:6‒7; 10‒15) who were both innocent of the crimes that they confessed. That confession was a strategy for self-diminishment and not an expression of interior

THE EMOTIONAL RE-EXPERIENCING OF THE HORTATORY NARRATIVES

93

This presents a self-understanding that lingers as readers and hearers move into the legal portion of D. The self that is thereby cultivated through the emotional re-experiencing of the Admonition could have generated sensations that naturally occur when one is in the presence of a sovereign “other”—thereby constructing an experience in which the laws that were about to be promulgated could be understood as somehow having come from a divine encounter.

sin, see Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study of Penitential Elements.” 4Q266 and 4Q267 contain some overlap with the larger literary section in which this confession appears in CD-B 20:27b‒34, although not with 20:28‒30. Material may have followed this literary section in 4Q266, but not enough text has survived; see Hempel, The Damascus Texts, 33.

EMOTION AND LAW IN THE BOOK OF BARUCH Baruch uses emotion in two interrelated ways that highlight the teleological aim of the book, which moves generally from mourning to joy, an affective pattern that is well attested in the Second Temple period.1 The first way that emotion functions is in the retelling of foundational narratives associated with Moses in the wilderness, key among them being the Exodus, the wilderness rebellions, and, of course, the giving of the Law. Here emotion serves a pedagogical purpose to create strong and palpable memories of these foundational stories within its readers and hearers. Emotion can also be said to function in a second, related way in the book of Baruch: to cultivate a desired ritual predisposition in its readers and hearers. The emotional remembering of God’s presence in the foundational stories of the past can generate an experience of presence in the ritual moment, thus re-creating the emotional effects of the encounter with the deity that commemorates the giving of the Law in the wilderness. These two effects of emotion in Bar 1:15–3:8 work in a propaedeutic way to heighten receptivity to the hymnic discourse on Wisdom (Torah) in Bar 3:9–4:4. While modern scholars have long understood the historical prologue as a highly idealized and fictive setting for the prayer that follows (and rightly so!), new questions can be asked of this book, which is cast in the Babylonian era. Even if the sections of the book of Baruch were composed independently and only brought together at a later time (which seems very likely), the literary shape of book as we have it abides by a certain recognizable sequence of events. The prayer itself shows signs of literary resemblance to other known texts like Daniel 9. Baruch 1:15–3:8 is prefaced by a ritual context in which the assembled people re-enact various self-diminishing activities (Bar 1:1–14). The penitential prayer (Bar 1:15–3:8) is followed by a splendid personification of Lady Wisdom, who is identified as the Law (3:9–4:4). This sequencing replicates the 1

Gary A. Anderson, A Time to Mourn, a Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); also relevant is Saul M. Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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pattern of a visionary encounter with a heavenly agent, which follows practices of ritual diminishment and the praying of a penitential prayer or confession of sins (viz., Dan 9–10, 2 Chr 6–7, Jos. Asen. 10–13)—a sequencing that harks back to the foundational experience of Moses and the encounter with the deity during the remaking of the tablets in Deut 9–10. Our discussion of emotion and law in the book of Baruch brings together two topics that may strike readers as oddly joined. To start, emotion and its relationship to religion is a relatively new topic of inquiry that has emerged in the late 20th century,2 and so, it is also the case that emotion and law have not frequently been considered in the context of Jewish studies. According to Joel Gereboff, medieval Jewish philosophy rarely discussed emotion systematically or formally, and scholarship on the Judaisms of the modern period tended to highlight it as an ‘ethical-monotheism,’ prioritizing its rationalism, with little regard for its use of emotions.3 According to Sarah Ross, even areas like Jewish mysticism, where one might expect the study of emotions to be an obvious focus, were not themselves seriously engaged until the midtwentieth century with the work of Gershom Scholem.4 Even so, recent studies have highlighted more and more the significant role of emotions in cognitive processes, especially decision-making processes, a relevant association in the context of the Law.5 These shifts have succeeded in integrating the emotions in the understanding of human experiences, especially their role in cognitive processes.6 These understandings of the embodied mind help to break down the powerful influence that Cartesian dualism continues to hold over the imaginations of many scholars in the 2

3

4

5

6

A key study is John Corrigan, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Joel Gereboff, “Judaism,” The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed. Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 95–110. Sarah Ross, “General Introduction,” in Judaism and Emotion: Texts, Performance, Experience, ed. S. Ross, G. Levy, and S. Al-Suadi (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 6; Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: Schocken Publishing House, 1946). Pascal Boyer, “What are Memories For? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture,” in Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. P. Boyer and J.V. Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3–28; Thomas Kazen, Emotions in Biblical Law: A Cognitive Science Approach (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011). R. Desjarlais, and C.J. Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 87–102; T. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18 (1990): 5–47; D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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humanities, and in so doing, open the door to a fruitful inquiry into emotions and law.7 As is true for many post-biblical Jewish texts, ritual studies and other approaches that consider the role of the body and materiality have not been widely applied to the book of Baruch.8 The emerging field of study that concerns itself broadly with the study of emotions has successfully introduced new questions about texts and how we might imagine prayers like Bar 1:15–3:8 to have been experienced emotionally by ancient readers. Ancient emotions, which have been long neglected by historians and by scholars of ancient religions, are today becoming an increasingly prominent subject of research. Because emotions bridge the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, their study can be complicated.9 Studies that situate emotion in a historical context often speak of the anachronism that the English word ‘emotion’ brings to our understanding of the past.10 Along with the limitations of our English language, western 7

8

9

10

Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). A key study on the material turn in the study of religion is Manuel A. Vásquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a discussion of ritual studies and their application to post-biblical Jewish works— especially rabbinic texts—see the comprehensive discussion by Mira Balberg, “Ritual Studies and the Study of Rabbinic Literature,” CBR 16 (2017): 71–98. She writes, “Most recently, the ‘material turn’ in Religious Studies, which called for shifting emphasis from texts to things and from thought to practice as ways of getting to know the religion of ‘real people’ as opposed to that of learned elites (e.g., Vasquez 2011; Houtman and Meyer 2012; Hutchings and McKenzie 2016) heralded rituals as sites in which religious subjectivities and modes of being truly come to the fore” (72). The following is a select bibliography of references that highlight the historically relevant aspects of emotion studies as they might relate to our investigation of the book of Baruch. To begin with, some key studies of the intersection between the natural sciences and the humanities: Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999); Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For studies of emotions in ancient Greece and Rome: Robert A. Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Angelos Chaniotis, ed., Unveiling Emotions: Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012). Studies focused on Second Temple texts and emotions: Renate Egger-Wenzel and Jeremy Corley ed., Emotions from Ben Sira to Paul (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Françoise Mirguet, An Early History of Compassion: Emotion and Imagination in Hellenistic Judaism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). For more on this topic, see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca:

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English-speaking cultures carry distinct cultural assumptions about emotions that can color the scholarship on them.11 It is also the case that in the modern world, the tendency is to think of emotions as universalizable and accessible to all, but this was not the case in the ancient world.12 Emotions were coded by certain social expectations and worked to move individuals and groups toward a readiness to act.13 Rather than focusing on the original author or the original composition of the text, our study will consider the possible effects of reading this prayer within the larger context of the biblical book of Baruch, which presents the prayer within a detailed ritual setting. The scholarly reorientation from the compositional origins of a text to the effects of reading or hearing a text is one that gives increased attention to the physical aspects of reading as an activity conducted by flesh-and-blood individuals, rather than seeking a disembodied and purely-discursive historical analysis of ancient writings. Michael Swartz does well to remind us that the process of reading in ritual contexts is far more complex from an integrative perspective than most text-based scholars may realize: “Indeed, the force of recitation needs to be taken quite seriously as a potent form of ritual behavior and as an example of the actualization of sacred space in time. Memorization, recitation and performance, we must remember, are physical acts, requiring intensive preparation, stamina, and physical prowess.”14 By considering the role of performativity and ritual emotion in the book of Baruch, the penitential prayer and the hymnic praise of wisdom could be said to present readers with a coherent sequence in which a penitential prayer is followed by divine encounter in the Second Temple period. This pattern is modeled on the Deuteronomic account of Moses whose self-diminishing practices and prayer after the golden calf incident

11

12 13

14

Cornell University Press, 2006); and Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” The American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813–36. For English speakers, the emotional description ‘to be upset’ suggests something that has been ‘knocked-down’ or ‘overturned,’ thus suggesting that the non-emotional state is the norm. For other modern cultural assumptions about emotion and emotion language see Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Noted by Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 4–5. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks; Mirguet, An Early History of Compassion: Emotion and Imagination in Hellenistic Judaism, 9–10. Michael D. Swartz, “Ritual about Myth about Ritual: Towards an Understanding of the Avodah in the Rabbinic Period,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 135–155, here 153. See too, Ophir Münz-Manor, “Narrating Salvation: Verbal Sacrifices in Late Antique Liturgical Poetry,” in Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity, ed. Annette Y. Reed and N. Dohrmann (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 154–66; notes at 315–319.

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(Deut 9:25–29) were followed by an encounter with YHWH, who remakes the tablets of the covenant (Deut 10:1–5). Other Second Temple passages amplify this pattern, in which confessional prayer is followed by some perceptible religious experience. The Chronicler’s revision of Solomon’s prayer in 2 Chr 6–7 describes an immediate and perceptible response from heaven in the form of fire that consumes the sacrifice, along with the detail that “the glory of the LORD filled the temple” (2 Chr 7:1). The Chronicler’s version is notably distinct from that of the Deuteronomistic historian, who included the statement that God had heard and acknowledged Solomon’s prayer at the conclusion of the seven-day festivities (1 Kgs 9:1–9). Practices of self-diminishment and a mournful prayer are followed by a visionary encounter with a heavenly being in other Second Temple texts.15 The funerary practices and prayer of the beautiful Aseneth (Jos. Asen. 10–13) are followed by an encounter with a “man from heaven” (14:4): “his face was like lightning, and his eyes were like the light of the sun, and the hairs of his head were like flames of fire, and his hands and feet like iron from the fire” (πλὴν τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ἦν ὡς ἀστραπὴ καὶ οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ αὐτοῦ ὡς φέγγος ἡλίου καὶ αἱ τρίχες τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ ὡς φλὸξ πυρὸς καὶ αἱ χεῖρες καὶ οἱ πόδες αὐτοῦ ὥσπερ σίδηρος ἐκ πυρός, Jos. Asen. 14:9). This heavenly angel then reveals to Aseneth various instructions (14–17). So too, Daniel’s prayer (Dan 9:4–19) receives a response in the form of a vision of the angel Gabriel in 9:20–27; and the deuterocanonical Prayer of Azariah (LXX Dan 3:24–45) is followed by a report of the appearance of the fourth being in the flames, presumably a fiery angel (LXX Dan 3:46–51).16

THE LITERARY CONTEXT OF THE PRAYER: THE HISTORICAL PROLOGUE (BAR 1:1–14) While Jeremiah’s name appears nowhere in the book of Baruch, there is a strong and early tradition that identifies this work with that prophet. 15

16

This pattern could even be said to extend beyond the Second Temple period to texts like the Shepherd of Hermas in which Hermas, the protagonist, similarly encounters heavenly agents after engaging in self-diminishment and mournful confession of sins; see the Book of Visions. Angela Kim Harkins, “Ritual Mourning in Daniel’s Interpretation of Jeremiah’s Prophecy,” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 2.1 (2015): 14–32; an expanded discussion may be found in eadem, “The Function of Prayers of Ritual Mourning in the Second Temple Period,” in Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period, ed. Mika S. Pajunen and Jeremy Penner; BZAW 486 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 80–101.

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Instead of mentioning the prophet by name, the book of Baruch begins with a clear attribution to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch the son of Neriah (Bar 1:1–2, a figure mentioned in Jer 32:12; 36:4; 43:3; 45:1), and is set in a fictive literary context that presumes the Babylonian era, specifically the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar. The opening words of Baruch (καὶ οὗτοι οἱ λόγοι τοῦ βιβλίου, LXX Bar 1:1) are very similar to those found in Jer 36:1 (καὶ οὗτοι οἱ λόγοι τῆς βίβλου οὓς ἀπέστειλεν Ιερεμιας; Jer 36:1 LXX= 29:1 MT).17 In this way, Baruch also resembles the book of Daniel, which is similarly cast in a fictionalized Babylonian period. The book of Baruch is dated to the late Second Temple period. Baruch’s clear reuse of language from Daniel 9:4–19 indicates that it should be dated after 2nd c. BCE.18 The prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 is introduced by a narrative that provides a specifically ritual context in which Baruch addresses the deported Judeans who are assembled in Babylon alongside a river. According to Bar 1:14, Baruch instructs those assembled in the following way: “You should read aloud this scroll that we are sending to you, in order to confess in the house of the Lord on the days of the festivals and at appointed seasons” (καὶ ἀναγνώσεσθε τὸ βιβλίον τοῦτο ὃ ἀπεστείλαμεν πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐξαγορεῦσαι ἐν οἴκῳ κυρίου ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ἑορτῆς καὶ ἐν ἡμέραις καιροῦ).19 The aorist infinitive verb that appears here can be translated as “to declare” or “to confess” (ἐξαγορεῦσαι). The verb, however, has a distinct cultic connotation in the LXX and is used in the context of confessing sin in passages like Lev 5:5; 16:21; 26:40; Num 5:7; and 1 Kgs 8:31. Bar 1:14 could be understood to presume the regular practice of a corporate confession of sins, suggesting that the language of the prayer aims to actualize Israel’s foundational experiences of sin through the ritual experience of remembering. 17

18

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So noted by Sean A. Adams, Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah: A Commentary Based on the Texts in Codex Vaticanus (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 51. Pierre-Maurice Bogaert reasons that this was why these two books circulated so closely in ancient manuscripts; see P.-M. Bogaert, “Le personage de Baruch et l’histoire du livre de Jérémie: Aux origins du livre deutérocanonique de Baruch,” in Studia Evangelica, VII: Papers Presented to the Fifth International Congress on Biblical Studies Held at Oxford, 1973, ed. E.A. Livingstone, TUGAL 126 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1982), 73–81, here 77–78. On the question of the dating of the final form of the book of Baruch, Carey A. Moore investigates the dating of the passage Bar 4:4–5:4 and surmises that the final shaping of the book, understood as the occasion for the adding of Bar 5:5–9, took place in the 1st c. BCE at the earliest. Moore dates the hymn in Bar 4:4–5:4 much earlier, probably around the 2nd c. BCE. See C.A. Moore, “Toward the Dating of the Book of Baruch,” CBQ 36 (1974): 312–20. We understand that what is being read is some form of the book of Baruch, minimally the prayer that we know as Bar 1:15–3:8.

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The general occasion for the prayer is grim and calls to mind the political defeat of the Judeans. According to Bar 1:1–2, the book is set in the fifth year on the seventh day of the month, when the Babylonians had burned Jerusalem in fire. The deported Judeans are said to be gathered and assembled alongside a river, “weeping and fasting and praying” just prior to the penitential prayer. These elements in the prologue cultivate an emotional disposition of regret within the Second Temple reader and hearer. Jeremy Corley notes well how this opening scene in Baruch maps onto the narrative of 2 Esdras 8–10.20 Both Baruch and 2 Esdras 8 preface the penitential prayer with a description of the ritual fasting and weeping of the gathered assembly alongside a river. Not only are the people’s emotional responses to the recited words recorded in Bar 1:14, the prose prologue describes the effects of those emotions, which move the people to act and take up a collection of silver to send to Jerusalem: “…they wept, fasted, and prayed before the LORD, and they collected silver, each one according to his/her ability; and they sent it to Jerusalem, to the priest Jehoiakim, son of Hilkiah son of Shallum, and to the priests and to all the people who were present with him in Jerusalem” (Bar 1:5, καὶ ἔκλαιον καὶ ἐνήστευον καὶ ηὔχοντο ἐναντίον κυρίου 6 καὶ συνήγαγον ἀργύριον, καθὰ ἑκάστου ἠδύνατο ἡ χείρ, 7 καὶ ἀπέστειλαν εἰς Ιερουσαλημ πρὸς Ιωακιμ υἱὸν Χελκιου υἱοῦ Σαλωμ τὸν ἱερέα καὶ πρὸς τοὺς ἱερεῖς καὶ πρὸς πάντα τὸν λαὸν τοὺς εὑρεθέντας μετ᾿ αὐτοῦ ἐν Ιερουσαλημ). I draw attention to these details because they illustrate how emotions were understood to move an individual to a readiness to act—the intended emotional effect of Baruch’s reading is modeled for subsequent readers who should respond similarly to the prayer of Baruch with their personal commitment of heart and resources.

A PENITENTIAL PRAYER (BAR 1:15–3:8) The prayer in the book of Baruch follows the penitential prayer form, which includes a public confession of sins alongside an extended re– affirmation of God’s justice. In this section of Baruch, many references to Deuteronomistic theology and language appear,21 along with allusions and references to other well-known Second Temple penitential prayers. 20

21

Jeremy Corley, “Emotional Transformation in the Book of Baruch,” in Emotions from Ben Sira to Paul, 225–51, here 233. Marko Marttila, “The Deuteronomistic Ideology and Phraseology in the Book of Baruch,” in Changes in Scripture: Rewriting and Interpreting Authoritative Traditions

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The prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 is similarly introduced by a historical narrative in which Baruch publicly reads in the earshot of a distinguished assembly that includes Jechonias—the son of Joachim, king of Judah— and all those who were in Babylon, all of whom have taken on the ritual disposition of weeping and fasting. This is not unlike Neh 9:1–3, which describes how the public performance of ritual mourning practices accompanied penitential prayer (ἐν νηστείᾳ, Neh 9:1).22 It is also notable that the ascription of “righteousness to the Lord” and “the confusion of faces to the people of Judea” that appears in Bar 1:15–18 and repeated in 2:6–10 effectively mirrors Dan 9:7–10, which similarly states this twice. Baruch

Daniel

καὶ ἐρεῖτε τῷ κυρίῳ θεῷ ἡμῶν ἡ δικαιοσύνη ἡμῖν δὲ αἰσχύνη τῶν προσώπων ὡς ἡ ἡμέρα αὕτη ἀνθρώπῳ Ιουδα καὶ τοῖς κατοικοῦσιν Ιερουσαλημ (Bar 1:15)

σοί κύριε ἡ δικαιοσύνη καὶ ἡμῖν ἡ αἰσχύνη τοῦ προσώπου ὡς ἡ ἡμέρα αὕτη ἀνδρὶ Ιουδα καὶ τοῖς ἐνοικοῦσιν ἐν Ιερουσαλημ καὶ παντὶ Ισραηλ τοῖς ἐγγὺς καὶ τοῖς μακρὰν ἐν πάσῃ τῇ γῇ οὗ διέσπειρας αὐτοὺς ἐκεῖ ἐν ἀθεσίᾳ αὐτῶν ᾗ ἠθέτησαν ἐν σοί (Dan 9:7)

And you shall say: To the Lord, our God, belongs righteousness but to us shame of faces as this day, to a person of Iouda, to the inhabitants of Ierousalem, (NETS)

Righteousness belongs to you, O Lord, and the shame of our face belongs to us, on this day, to the people of Iouda and the settlers in Ierousalem and to all the people of Israel, those who are near and those who are farther off, in all the regions into which you have dispersed them there, because of the trespasses that they have perpetrated before you. (NETS)

τῷ κυρίῳ θεῷ ἡμῶν ἡ δικαιοσύνη ἡμῖν δὲ καὶ τοῖς πατράσιν ἡμῶν ἡ αἰσχύνη τῶν προσώπων ὡς ἡ ἡμέρα αὕτη (Bar 2:6)

κύριε ἡμῖν ἡ αἰσχύνη τοῦ προσώπου καὶ τοῖς βασιλεῦσιν ἡμῶν καὶ τοῖς ἄρχουσιν ἡμῶν καὶ τοῖς πατράσιν ἡμῶν οἵτινες ἡμάρτομέν σοι (Dan 9:8)

To the Lord, our God, belongs righteousness but to us and to our fathers shame of faces, as this day. (NETS)

O Master, the shame of our face belongs to us and to our kings and sovereigns and to our ancestors, because we have sinned against you. (NETS)

22

in the Second Temple Period, ed. Hanne von Weissenberg et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 321–46. So too, Ezra 9:3–5 speak of Ezra’s performative display of dismay upon hearing of the people’s sin of intermarriage; repeated in a ritual context in 10:1, 6.

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The first half of the prayer (1:15–2:5) is a confession of sin that largely retells Israel’s foundational experiences in the wilderness during the time of Moses (1:19–2:5), with some reference to the contemporary Judeans. The prayer in 1:15–2:5 speaks first on behalf of those who are in Jerusalem and then for those who are in exile (2:6–3:8), namely, those who are gathered at the river in Babylon. The prayer also moves between a contemporary time and a long ago past. This can be seen in the spoken distinction between the time of the Second Temple period and that of Israel in the wilderness, who is referenced as the “ancestors” (1:15–16, 19; 2:6). The confession of sin in Bar 2:13 includes explicit reference to the experience of being “few in number” and “scattered among the nations” (ἀποστραφήτω ὁ θυμός σου ἀφ᾿ ἡμῶν, ὅτι κατελείφθημεν ὀλίγοι ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, οὗ διέσπειρας ἡμᾶς ἐκεῖ), thus bringing the prayer firmly from the foundational events in the wilderness into the Second Temple Judean experience. Several scholars have divided the prayer in Bar 1:15–3:18 into two different sections, with the second unit beginning in 2:20 and continuing through to the end.23 The first section of the prayer contains the strongest resemblance to Dan 9:4–19. It is in this section that Bar 2:6–19 could be understood as the transition that brings the prayer from the fictive setting of the Babylonian period, to the late Second Temple Judean reader and hearer. Baruch 2:10 references the diminished population and describes being scattered among the nations: “Let your anger turn away from us, for we are left, few in number, among the nations where you have scattered us. Hear, O Lord, our prayer and our supplication, and for your own sake deliver us, and grant us favor in the sight of those who have carried us into exile” (2:13–14).24 Such an experience is appropriate to the fictive Babylonian era. The first-person retelling of the narrative of sin and rebellion assists in blurring the difference between the fictive Babylonian era assembly and the later Second Temple Judean group who not only prays the prayer but also re-enacts the scripted emotions of these events through passages that use the first-person voice. In Bar 2:6–19, the 23

24

B.N. Wambacq, “Les prières de Baruch (1,15 – 2,19) et de Daniel (9,5 – 19),” Biblica 40.2 (1959): 463–75. See the comparative discussion of how wisdom and law appear in the late Hellenistic texts of Ben Sira and the book of Baruch: Shannon Burkes, “Wisdom and Law: Choosing Life in Ben Sira and Baruch,” JSJ 30 (1999): 253–76. Both texts show very different understandings of the afterlife, with Baruch holding onto the notion that this worldly life, even if it is “bowed and enfeebled, with failing eyes and famished soul” is more precious because it can still declare God’s glory and righteousness (Bar 2:18), whereas the dead who are in Hades cannot praise God (2:17) (p. 270).

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implied speaker moves from Israel of the past to the Judeans of the present moment. The ones who give voice to the urgent petitions of the present moment then do so with the proper ritual disposition by standing guilty and carrying the weight of the transgressions of the past history. It is this later Second Temple reader who takes on the subjectivity of “the person who is deeply grieved, who walks bowed and feeble, with failing eyes and famished soul” (2:18). This experience of ritual simultaneity between the past and present is scripted by the text’s change in perspective in Bar 2:13–14.

EXPERIENCING THE PRAYER IN BARUCH 1:15–3:8 History has long motivated modern biblical scholarly questions, yet a drive for historical information surely did not dominate an ancient reader’s interest in the book of Baruch. Here, we will investigate how ancient readers might have responded to the narrative and prayer that is found in Bar 1:15–3:8, with a special focus on the way the text arouses an emotional response in the reader. The topic of emotion and Judaism has only recently become the subject of scholarly investigation.25 How might we think about this prayer as it is presented to us in its literary context of the book of Baruch? How does its narrative frame offer a way of understanding how this text was experienced in antiquity? Rather than severing this prayer from its larger literary context for the sake of comparing its form with other types of penitential prayers—work that has already been done—we do well to examine the text within its literary context in the book of Baruch. It is worth noting that Bar 1:15–3:8 follows other contemporary Second Temple prayers in presenting to the reader the prayer within a larger ritual context wherein multiple mourning practices are enacted and layered to create a state of liminality. Cognitive literary studies have shown well that individuals can be strongly moved by a text, whether it is historical or not.26 This is because experiential frames from lived experiences involve emotions and cognitive 25

26

Gereboff (“Judaism”) notes how rarely Judaism was examined in relation to the topic of emotions. Cain Todd, “Attending Emotionally to Fiction,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 46.4 (2012): 449–65; A.K. Harkins, “The Emotional Re-Experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives Found in the Admonition of the Damascus Document,” DSD 22 (2015): 285–307; eadem, “The Pro-Social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer,” BibInt 24 (2016): 466–91, esp. 490–91.

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processes in complex two-way systems as new experiences are processed and understood.27 These experiential frames are reused in reinvigorating memories, both those from lived experiences and those from learned experiences. Such cognitive processes are highly imaginative egocentric experiences and also vividly engaged in both decision-making processes and the imagining of future actions.28 In other words, what we might call ‘fictional’ worlds, those that exist purely in virtual realities of a narrative or in cyberspace which we learn or read about, may actually be perceived by individuals who have such capabilities for high absorption with the same intensity as real flesh-and-blood events.29 These opening scenes that situate the prayer within a (fictional) ritual context of ceremonial reading suggest that the optimal effect of hearing the text well is to respond emotionally and to respond with some concrete gesture of sacrifice as the listeners in the book of Baruch did. The arousal of certain emotions is especially instrumental in the process of decentering the self, effectively generating conditions for liminality that can lead to heightened states of receptivity in the one praying or hearing the prayer.30 The prayer in Baruch layers self-diminishment with a penitential confession of sins that can be observed in other Second Temple penitential prayers. Daniel engages in typical ritual behaviors of fasting, sackcloth, and ashes 27

28

29

30

Lawrence W. Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5 (2005): 14–57. Daniel L. Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 773–86. Schacter and Addis discuss how the cognitive processes for remembering the past and for imagining future actions share significant areas of overlap. See the anthropological studies by Tanya Luhrmann which demonstrate how modern western individuals who are fully embedded in the post-industrial scientific world, are able to achieve strong experiences of imaginative vividness in otherworldly systems which suggests that religious belief can co-exist, in tension, with other rational belief systems. See T. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); eadem, When God Talks Back (New York: Knopf, 2012). This tension has been extended and recognized in postcolonial critiques of modern Western systems by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). This is also true of the different systems from the ancient world which stand in tension with our modern ways of knowing, noted as a major limitation of our modern historicism, see Greg Anderson, “Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: The Case for an Ontological Turn,” The American Historical Review 120 (2015): 787–810, idem, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). For religion and emotion, see the useful studies by John Corrigan, Eric Crump, and John Kloos, Emotion and Religion: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000); J. Corrigan, Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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while meditating on the books of the prophet Jeremiah (Dan 9:2–3). So too, Ezra engages in practices of tearing his garment and cloak, pulling the hair from his head and beard, and sitting dejected for an extended period-of-time (Ezra 9:3–4)—ritual behaviors that are repeated during the moments just prior to the offering of his prayer (9:5). Then, after the prayer, Ezra’s actions extend to weeping and collapsing before the house of God (10:1) and continued fasting and mourning (10:6). At this point in the narrative, Ezra’s behaviors are not private actions as we might assume with Daniel. Instead, it seems clear that Ezra’s ritual mourning is public; and we are told that it moves Shechaniah and other onlookers to support his cause.31 Similarly, we might expect that the description of the events, including the lengthy list of names in Ezra 10, function together to move Second Temple readers to deepen their commitment and resolve.32 In the case of the penitential prayer found in Neh 9:6–37, the narrative context resembles that of Bar 1:15–3:8 insofar as the prayer is presented to the reader within a larger public cultic context: “the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth, and with earth on their heads” (Neh 9:1). All of these ritual behaviors could be imagined to layer diminishing experiences upon, firstly, the individual who is said to offer up the penitential prayer; but secondly, in the case of the passages where a corporate public setting is presumed, upon the hearers of the text who listen and imagine the emotionally charged events that are being described.33 These mourning practices in the surrounding narrative give rich sensory details that assist in the imagining of the scene by an ancient listener and reader. The narrative elements from the cultic context about the assembly’s experiences, including their responses to the prayer that is prayed, can also be understood to cultivate a particular emotional predisposition in the hearer. While this does not predetermine a certain type of response, such as the response of weeping and contributing funds that is described in Bar 1:5–7, it could cultivate the emotional predisposition that might lead to such a response on the part of the hearer. At the very least, the further emotional engagement of the events on the part of the listener assists in deepening and personalizing the remembering process and can lead to associations with other memories of similar emotional intensity, shaping the reconsolidation of those memories within the framework of the narrative scene. 31 32 33

Harkins, “The Pro-Social Role of Grief,” 466–91. Ibid., 490–91. On this topic, see Olyan, Biblical Mourning, and Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance.

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Several studies highlight the crucial role that bodily practices play in cognitive processes and the generation of subjectivity. For example, Daniel Drubach cites the iconic Sinai Event as an illustrative example of the relationship between first doing and then becoming.34 He writes that after Moses concludes the public reading of the Book of the Covenant at Sinai, the people respond first that they will ‘do’ and then that they will be obedient to the Law (Exod 24:7).35 So too, the generative role of enscripted bodily practices in the formation of ancient Israel is one that Steven Weitzman discusses in his essay on sensory reform in the book of Deuteronomy.36 The correct training of the body and its faculties of sensory perception (seeing and hearing) are necessary preconditions for having a mind that understands (Deut 29:4), one that is ultimately obedient to the Law. The reenactment of bodily practices allows for the generation of the desired subjectivity, one that is predisposed to obedience without predetermining that the individual will actually be obedient.37 According to anthropologist Saba Mahmood, the recurring performance of ritual emotions plays a crucial role in the generation of the desired subjectivity. In her study of Egyptian women, she observes that bodily religious practices—including the performance of ritually prescribed emotions—may or may not express an interior religiosity, but they are crucial for acquiring it: “For the women I worked with, bodily acts (like weeping in prayer), when performed repeatedly, both in public and private, endowed the self with certain qualities: bodily behavior was therefore not so much a sign of interiority as it was a means of acquiring its potentiality.”38 In the case of the emotions enscripted by the Sinai event, the subjectivity of Israel is an aftereffect that is generated from the on-going reenactment of religious practices.39 Bodily practices including the performance of ritual emotions, are considered to be instrumental in acquiring the predispositions for religiosity, here understood to be obedience to the Law, but the process itself does not predetermine that Israel will be obedient. 34

35

36

37

38 39

Daniel A. Drubach, “Judaism, Brain Plasticity and the Making of the Self,” Journal of Religion and Health 41 (2002): 311–22. Drubach, “Judaism, Brain Plasticity,” 314. Drubach here gives a reading of ‘hear’ for the Hebrew ‫נשמע‬, but this is better rendered as “obey.” Steven Weitzman, “Sensory Reform in Deuteronomy,” in Religion and the Self in Antiquity, ed. David Brakke, Michael L. Satlow, and Steven Weitzman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 123–39. In the case of Deuteronomy, Israel is not predetermined to obey, but they are shaped with a predisposition to do so. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton: University of Princeton, 2005), 147. For a detailed discussion of the formation of subjectivity from repetitive ritualized practices of affective reenactment, see Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 25–113.

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To return to the cultic context of the penitential prayer in Baruch, the narrative describes the assembly layering self-diminishing practices. This is joined with the emotional language of the prayer, which itself vividly recalls the foundational experience of the covenant encounter with the deity and the reception of the law, by speaking of the horrific and jarring images of the effects of the violations of that agreement in the form of the covenant curses. Such experiences heighten the Second Temple reader’s receptivity to taking on the emotional disposition of mourning and regret. While this is not determined to happen, the associative role of emotion allows for the reconstitution of memories to take on greater personalization. The ritual experiencing of mourning can bring about actual experiences of rumination, which is a naturally occurring cognitive state that functions to decenter the individual and create an experience of presence.40 The prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 retells the narrative of sin and rebellion and blurs the difference between the foundational community of Israel with the historical community in the Second Temple period. The latter not only prays the prayer, but also re-enacts the scripted emotions of the foundational events through the prayer’s use of first-person voice. The speaker changes from the Israel of the past to the people of the present moment. The ones who give voice to the urgent petitions of the present moment then do so with the proper ritual disposition by standing guilty and by carrying the weight of the historical transgressions of the past. It is this contemporary Second Temple speaker who is then described as “the person who is deeply grieved, who walks bowed and feeble, with failing eyes and famished soul” (2:18). In Bar 2:13–14, the prayer speaks from the Second Temple period and not from the foundational moment in the mythic past, and it is here where the blending of the Israel of the past and present takes place. This experience of ritual simultaneity between the past and present is scripted by the prayer that moves from retelling Israel’s experiences to the contemporary moment of the Judeans in exile. Prayers composed during the Second Temple period often looked to foundational narratives to express God’s saving deeds. These prayers can be said to inculcate key stories of origins and also cultivate necessary ritual dispositions. Both of these aims are achieved by the prayer’s use of language about the body and concrete images. The pedagogical aim 40

On the role of decentering in religious experiences, see Patrick McNamara, The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146–48.

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of the prayer is well-served by the fantastic elements that are associated with the prayer. In the case of Bar 1:15–3:8, details about how YHWH brings Israel out from slavery in Egypt is told with keen attention to the bodily extension of the deity. The prayer reads: you “brought your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and with signs and wonders and with great power and outstretched arm, and made yourself a name that continues to this day” (Bar 2:11). Here, the prayer specifically recalls the deity’s display of bodily power as it is preserved in the Song of the Sea, which depicts YHWH as an enormous divine warrior who single-handedly executed the deliverance from Egypt. In that illustrious hymn, YHWH enjoys a full extension of body and is the only active being identified in this crossing of the sea—Moses, of course, is not mentioned at all. Notably, the LXX is much more graphic in its description of YHWH’s actions. Whereas the Hebrew invokes YHWH as the “Man of War” (‫ ִאישׁ ִמ ְל ָח ָמה‬Exod 15:3), the LXX has a much more active image of YHWH as “the one who smashes battles” (συντρίβων πολέμους Exod 15:3).41 The prayer in Baruch similarly emphasizes the kinaesthetic power of the deity’s body and other fantastic details about his power. Laura Feldt’s study of this wilderness event highlights well how these supernatural details assist in the cultural transmission and actualization of foundational stories, allowing readers to bring together the mythic past and the present in the ritual moment.42 Again, the effectiveness of the narration of the foundational event at the sea relies less upon its historicity and more on its dramatic and emotionally vibrant quality. The foundational events surrounding the arrival at Sinai and the giving of the Law are vividly told with fantastic details that make them memorable. The words of the prayer in Baruch appear in the first-person plural voice and contribute to the ritual experience of simultaneity. By confessing sins in first-person voice, the prayer layers experiences of selfdiminishment with the ritual practices described at the start of the book 41

42

The hymnic account of the crossing of the Sea and defeat of the mighty Egyptians that is preserved in Exod 15 stands in tension with the narrative portions of the book of Exodus wherein YHWH issues the disembodied instructions which Moses then executes. In the surrounding narrative, however, it is Moses whose outstretched arm enacts the key events of the crossing of the sea. Here, in the hymnic version from Exod 15, the deity is so powerful that a single blast of his nostrils is enough to divide the waters (Hebr. ‫רוּח ַא ֶפּיָך‬ ַ ‫וּב‬ ְ Exod 15:8). Laura Feldt, “Religious Narrative and the Literary Fantastic: Ambiguity and Uncertainty in Ex. 1–18,” Religion 41 (2011): 251–83; eadem, “Fantastic Re-Collection: Cultural vs. Autobiographical Memory in the Exodus Narrative,” in Religious Narrative, Cognition and Culture: Image and Word in the Mind of Narrative, ed. A.W. Geertz and J.S. Jensen (London: Equinox, 2011), 191–208.

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of Baruch, where we read that the Judeans wept and fasted in their times of prayer (1:5). In the prayer, we read about the covenant failings of Israel from the time of Moses, and through the time of the judges, the kings, and rulers of Israel and Judah (1:15, 2:1)—all in first-person voice. The affective state that is generated as a result of the layering of ritual practices of mourning and the uttering of first-person confessions of sin can be understood as a state of ritual mourning. While the modern tendency is to understand experiences of grief as eruptions from within the individual, in many cultures both past and present mourning is highly performative and ritualized.43 The performative and ritualized experience of grief does not deny that grief was heartfelt and genuinely experienced in antiquity, but rather emphasizes the highly regulated ways mourning was experienced. Ritual mourning is a state that could lead to further states of religious experience. EXPERIENCING WISDOM AS THE LAW (BAR 3:9–4:4) While it is customary for biblical scholars to separate the prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 from the section that follows (3:9–4:4), we will read them in sequence. The prayer as it appears in its final form makes a strong appeal to the Deuteronomic language and theology, and in this respect it is similar to other penitential prayers from the late Second Temple period.44 This is most clearly presented in the reference to the gruesome devouring of one’s own flesh and blood (Bar 2:2–3), an image that harks back to the horrific covenant curses in the book of Deuteronomy, which report in detail the brutal consequences of failing to uphold the covenant (Deut 28:53–57). The literary context of exile also speaks to the Deuteronomic curse of political disaster and defeat by enemy nations (28:25, 37). A hymn praising Wisdom follows the prayer in Bar 3:9–4:4. In that passage, Wisdom is depicted in highly anthropomorphic language and identified as the Law: “she is the Book of the Commandments of God, the Law that endures forever” (αὕτη ἡ βίβλος τῶν προσταγμάτων τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ ὁ νόμος ὁ ὑπάρχων εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, 4:1). The book of Baruch 43

44

See A.K. Harkins, “Ritual Mourning in Daniel’s Interpretation of Jeremiah’s Prophecy,” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 2.1 (2015): 14–32. See the table of Deuteronomic elements that appear in the book of Baruch found in A. Kabasele Mukenge, L’unité littéraire du livre de Baruch (Paris: Gabalda, 1998), 371–72. For a general discussion of the Deuteronomic theology that appears throughout penitential prayers, see Rodney A. Werline, Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: The Development of a Religious Institution (Atlanta: SBL, 1998).

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then concludes with an exchange between personified Jerusalem and a comforter, wherein Jerusalem openly laments her exiled children and exhorts them to persevere (4:5–29). She is then consoled by a speaker who describes the eventual return of Jerusalem’s children. The book concludes on a hopeful note with the expectation of the eventual restoration of Jerusalem’s splendor (4:30–5:9). The law is mentioned in the penitential prayer twice, at Bar 2:2 and 2:28. The prayer’s contemplation of the sinfulness of Israel enscripts the sensation of diminishment and unworthiness. Rumination and longing are cultivated by the prayer and the emotional reenactment of the regret and desolation over acts of sinful rebellion. Rumination is a naturally occurring cognitive state in which those who mourn are known to also have intense experiences of presence and intersubjectivity with their loved one. The continuing bond that is experienced with the absent party is a naturally produced cognitive state and one that can be ritually achieved as well. In this state, rumination over God is made especially concrete by specifying the request alongside references to God’s spatiality, his body parts and their respective functions of hearing and seeing: “Look down from your holy dwelling, and consider us. Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see” (Bar 2:16–17). This meditation upon the invisible God’s embodied parts is similar to the longing for the deity’s presence that also appears in Daniel 9.45 The prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 is followed by a hymn that praises and personifies Wisdom (Bar 3:9–4:4). When the prayer is read in its literary context in light of both the historical introduction in 1:1–14 and that which follows the prayer, the hymn on Wisdom (3:9–4:4), we see that Wisdom is described vividly such that a reader can easily imagine her with perceptible qualities of luminosity. The hymn’s use of kinaesthetic and spatial language effects the personification of Wisdom. At the culmination of this hymn, Wisdom is identified as the Law in Bar 3:9–4:4, when she is identified clearly “as the book of the commandments of God, the law that endures forever.” The prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 uses language and imagery that draws upon the power of Israel’s wilderness experience in its retelling of the foundational narrative. Here, the prayer in Baruch shares thematic similarities to the prayer in Neh 9, which also highlights Israel’s story of 45

A.K. Harkins, “Function of Prayers of Ritual Mourning in the Second Temple Period,” in Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period, ed. Mika S. Pajunen and Jeremy Penner, BZAW 486 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 80–101.

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origins by retelling it as a story of disobedience and rebellion. Perhaps more significantly, the similarities between the prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 is most like the one prayed by Daniel in Dan 9:4–19, which is followed by an encounter with Gabriel. The prayer is associated with an embodied encounter with an otherworldly being. In the book of Baruch, the poem about Wisdom or the Law in Bar 3:9–4:4 could perhaps be understood to function in the book in a way analogous to the appearance of a heavenly being that follows Daniel’s prayer.

CONCLUSION This essay has proposed that the prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 should be understood within the literary context of the book of Baruch by paying attention to what comes before—references to a ritualized self-diminishment—and what comes after—the materialization of Wisdom who is identified as the Torah. I have proposed that integrative understandings of embodied cognitive processes that take place during reading can broaden and deepen our own understanding of how the prayer in Baruch may be understood within its literary context. Attention to the larger literary context is useful for imagining how this prayer functioned in the Second Temple period to remember key foundational events with episodic vividness. This process of using emotion in the reconstruction of memories about foundational experiences can be understood as contributing to the experience of ritual simultaneity between the past and present moment. The ritual reenactment of grief can bring on actual experiences of rumination, which can assist in making presence from absence. In the context of the late Second Temple period, the experiencing of presence of some heavenly agent was a common effect of the praying of penitential prayers. Recognizing this effect of the prayer suggests that the redactional sequencing of the vivid hymnic praise of Wisdom as Torah follows a recognizable and programmatic pattern. Compositional techniques that imitate scripture or redeploy scriptural language and biblical forms can be understood to function purposefully in the generation of diverse expressions of religion during the Second Temple period. This interpretive process can be imagined as taking place when a prayer’s dramatic portrayal of events arouses strong emotions within the individuals who read and hear it, thereby providing them access to a participatory re-experiencing of foundational events of God’s saving deeds in Israel’s history or of the act of willful rebellion. The historical

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facticity of these foundational events as they are described is a question that is quickly overshadowed by the emotional experience of the vividness of the imagery, the concreteness with which action is described, and the ruminative and multisensory experience of hearing these texts and uttering them in the first-person voice. These experiential aspects of recited prayers offer a gateway for accessing these foundational events in an embodied way. In the process, vivid memories of foundational events of the wilderness narratives can be updated in their details to meet the needs of new circumstances while retaining their emotionally compelling contours. The prayer in Baruch uses dramatic language and imagery and enscripts how later readers and hearers should feel. The language in the prayer blurs the lines between expressing the regret and sin of Israel and the initial exiled Judeans of the 6th c. BCE, on the one hand, and that experienced by the late Second Temple Judeans, on the other hand. The process serves to deepen the act of remembering in a personal way, making a lasting impression on subsequent readers and hearers. These scripted emotional experiences can also be understood to assist in generating the cognitive state of rumination, one in which the mind naturally makes presence from absence. The diminished state of the self in the practice of confessing sins is one in which a re-experiencing of the foundational moment of covenant-making and re-making becomes possible for a late Second Temple community. In the covenant moment, the experience of encountering a terrifying sovereign deity is one that naturally generates a state of self-diminishment. In this sense, the prayer’s cultivation of a diminished state simulates the experience of the encounter with the deity during the act of covenant re-making and makes it accessible to subsequent readers within a ritual setting. With this in mind, perhaps the sequencing of the emotionally charged penitential prayer in Bar 1:15–3:8 and the hymn in Bar 3:9–4:4, the latter of which vividly extols the splendor of Lady Wisdom who is identified as the Law, is intended to replicate this experience of encounter. It is here that we could say that the reader of the book of Baruch is able to encounter Wisdom as the Torah, in a personal and perceptible way, just as Israel encountered the living God in the foundational event of covenant making in the wilderness.

THE IMAGINATIVE EXPERIENCING OF PSALMS OF SOLOMON 8 This discussion of Psalms of Solomon 8 pays special attention to the ways in which allusions to foundational events can contribute to an experience of the text in which God’s presence is made perceptible in his absence. The association that the Psalms of Solomon have with the biblical king is long and widely attested. The eighteen Psalms of Solomon comprise a discrete collection that was transmitted in antiquity both independently as a separate collection and also alongside other Solomonic corpora such as the Wisdom of Solomon and the book of Sirach.1 The Psalms of Solomon were also circulated with the forty-two Odes of Solomon to form a non-biblical corpus of Solomonic pseudepigrapha of sixty compositions.2 1

2

Ancient sources like the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus attest to the independent circulation of the Psalms of Solomon. Six of the eleven Syriac manuscripts of the Psalms of Solomon present this collection together with the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach; Robert R. Hann, The Manuscript History of the Psalms of Solomon, SCS 13 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1982), 113. One can infer that the association of this collection with the biblical figure of Solomon was very ancient and undisputed. For studies on the Psalms of Solomon see Herbert E. Ryle and Montague R. James, Psalms of the Pharisees Commonly Called the Psalms of Solomon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891); Joseph Viteau, Les Psaumes de Salomon: Introduction, texte grec et traduction, avec les principales variantes de la version syriaque par François Martin, Documents pour l’étude de la Bible (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1911); Gerhard Maier, Mensch und freier Wille nach den jüdischen Religionsparteien zwischen Ben Sira und Paulus, WUNT 12 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1971), 264–301; Svend Holm-Nielsen, “Die Psalmen Salomos,” JSHRZ 4 (1977): 51–112; Joachim Schüpphaus, Die Psalmen Salomos: Ein Zeugnis Jerusalemer Theologie und Frömmigkeit in der Mitte des vorchristlichen Jahrhunderts, ALGHJ 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1977); Hann, The Manuscript History; Robert B. Wright, “Psalms of Solomon,” OTP 1 (1983): 639–70; Joseph L. Trafton, The Syriac Version of the Psalms of Solomon: A Critical Evaluation, SCS 11 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1985); Mark Seifried, Justification by Faith: The Origin and Development of a Central Pauline Theme (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 109–35; Mikael Winninge, Sinners and the Righteous: A Comparative Study of the Psalms of Solomon and Paul’s Letters, ConBNT 26 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1995); Joseph L. Trafton, “The Psalms of Solomon in Recent Research,” JSP 12 (1994): 3–19. The Psalms of Solomon have long been associated with the collection known as the Odes of Solomon. Early evidence exists for the sequence of Psalms of Solomon + Odes of Solomon in the copy of the Pistis Sophia preserved in Codex Askew, a Coptic manuscript which dates to the fourth-fifth century CE; Michael Lattke, Die Oden Salomos in ihrer Bedeutung für Neues Testament und Gnosis, 5 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck

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One question that this complex textual history of the Psalms of Solomon raises is how an ancient reader or hearer would have experienced this text? While a codex apparatus would allow for the possible experiencing of these compositions through random access, a scroll apparatus would not allow for such freedom of access, thus highlighting the importance of the order and arrangement of compositions, and the consideration of how emotions can build up over the course of the collection. Related to this question is also that of the effect of reading and hearing these texts, and certain limitations to how modern scholars imagine this process.

A GENERAL ORIENTATION

TO THE

METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Thirty years ago, Paul N. Franklyn’s study of the Psalms of Solomon helpfully highlighted how the Psalms of Solomon are liturgical—not simply literary texts—and noted the deliberate way the collection has been arranged.3 Franklyn noted with some confidence that the reading of the entire Psalms of Solomon collection would have taken approximately one hour: “It requires at most 55 minutes to read the collection aloud from start to finish in Greek, and even less in Hebrew; though the entire collection may not have been read at once in a worship situation.”4 His flat–footed assessment does not express any part of the degree or intensity of the performative act of ritualized reading. Michael Swartz does

3

4

& Ruprecht, 1979–1998), 1:24–31. There, the Ode that is labeled as the nineteenth one is not identical with what is known as the nineteenth Ode of Solomon to us today, and so is thought by scholars to be the long-lost first Ode of Solomon; idem, “Hermeneutischer Anhang zur gnostischen Interpretation der Oden Salomos in der Pistis Sophia,” 216–17; idem, “The Gnostic Interpretation of the Odes of Solomon in the Pistis Sophia,” 75. According to Lattke’s commentary, there is medieval evidence for the sequencing of the Psalms of Solomon after the Odes of Solomon. The fragmentary manuscripts known as Codex Nitriensis (“N”) from the ninth-tenth century CE and the later medieval manuscript known as Codex Harris (“H”) both sequence the Pss. Sol. collection after the Odes of Solomon, effectively renumbering the Pss. Sol. as numbers 43–60 in the combined collection of Odes + Pss. Codex N shows that Pss. Sol. 1 is copied after the last Ode numbered 42. While the manuscript is fragmentary, it is possible to see that the Psalms of Solomon follow the Odes. So too, Codex H is not a completely intact manuscript, but it is possible to see that the end of Ode 42:20 is followed immediately by the first Pss. Sol. which is numbered Ode 43 in the heading to that text. For further details on Codex N and H, see Lattke, Odes of Solomon, 4. Also, Angela Kim Harkins, “The Odes of Solomon as Solomonic Pseudepigrapha,” JSP 25 (2016): 247–73. Paul N. Franklyn, “The Cultic and Pious Climax of Eschatology in the Psalms of Solomon,” JSJ 18 (1987): 1–17. Franklyn, “The Cultic and Pious Climax,” 5.

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well to note that process of reading is far more complex from an integrative perspective than most text-based scholars may be willing to keep in mind: “Indeed, the force of recitation needs to be taken quite seriously as a potent form of ritual behavior and as an example of the actualization of sacred space in time. Memorization, recitation and performance, we must remember, are physical acts, requiring intensive preparation, stamina, and physical prowess.”5 The performative reading of the Psalms of Solomon involves the integration of the body and the mind. Included is also a level of cognitive engagement that literary theorist Anežka Kuzmičová calls “enactive reading,” a process by which the mind’s perception of sensorimotor experiences are at work during the imaginative reading of a text.6 In line with Swartz’s and Kuzmičová’s perspectives which attend to the embodied aspects of reading, this paper seeks to add a degree of complexity to how scholars imagine the experience of reading a collection like the Psalms of Solomon by examining the experiential effect of emotionally re-experiencing the events described in Pss. Sol. 8. This paper uses integrative approaches, especially those that attend to the body’s experiences of emotion, in order to texture and complicate how modern scholars imagine the effect that the reading of these Psalms of Solomon may have had on their readers and hearers. The push to recover the complexities of the “on the ground” experience of ancient texts within their readers and hearers reflects a shift that took place in the 1980s in the social sciences to move away from overdetermined models of social structures that presumably exerted influence on people through institutionalized practices and discourses (e.g., “political systems, kinship structures, cultural histories, symbolic meanings”). Scholars have done well to consider how embodied experiences and materiality might offer insights into the lived experience of religion.7 5

6

7

Michael D. Swartz, “Ritual about Myth about Ritual: Towards an Understanding of the Avodah in the Rabbinic Period,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 153. See too, Ophir Münz-Manor, “Narrating Salvation: Verbal Sacrifices in Late Antique Liturgical Poetry,” in Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity, ed. Natalie B. Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 154–66. Anežka Kuzmičová, “Literary Narrative and Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition,” Style 48 (2014): 275–93. See also Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); and the essays in Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative, ed. Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 96. An important texturing of the communities of D appears in Maxine L. Grossman, Reading for History in the Damascus

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While the recovery of individual experiences has long been recognized as difficult, not considering the subjective experiences of ancient readers as data for understanding the past can lead to over-determined monochromatic images of the other that inevitably reserve high-definition texturing such as complexity, contingencies, and ambivalence to the world of the modern interpreter alone.8 One way of recovering textured experiences of the past is to look to interdisciplinary explanatory theories of religion from anthropology and cognitive science of religion that seek to describe the range of bodily experiences that are involved in the processing of emotions and memory, and the formation of subjectivity.9 The interdisciplinary studies used here offer heuristic theories about human emotion and memory and draw upon ethnographic studies of contemporary societies that examine how highly imaginative embodied meditative practices and emotion contribute to the experience of simultaneity between the time of the ancient reader and hearer and the foundational scriptural event that is being evoked.10

Document: A Methodological Method, STDJ 45 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 184–209. It is worth mentioning the important contributions of feminist studies to these understandings of embodiment, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity—a point that was well made by Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Body in the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment,” JQR 95 (2005): 479. 8 Desjarlais and Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches,” 95–96; Stephen S. Bush, “Are Religious Experiences Too Private to Study?” JR (2012): 199–223. 9 Amira Mittermaier, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); eadem, “Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim Subjectivities beyond the Trope of Self-Cultivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2012): 247–65. 10 Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); idem, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Robert N. McCauley and Emma Cohen, “Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion,” Philosophy Compass 5 (2010): 779–92. Michael D. Swartz speaks about the experiential dimension of ritual simultaneity in “Judaism and the Idea of Ancient Ritual Theory,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, ed. Ra‘anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 315–16. Other useful anthropological discussions of compelling (phenomenological) experiences of performativity include Thomas Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18 (1990): 5–47; idem., “Imaginal Performance and Memory in Ritual Healing,” in The Performance of Healing, ed. Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman (London: Routledge, 1996), 91–114; Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witches’ Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); eadem, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Knopf, 2012); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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This essay is an exploratory inquiry into how integrative research into cognitive and emotion processes can shed light on new ways of understanding how these texts may have been experienced by the ancient readers and hearers. In our investigation of the specific composition known as Pss. Sol. 8, we will also examine the cumulative effect of reading and re-reading—one that is not typically taken up on the scholarship on the Psalms of Solomon, but which is a worthwhile consideration nonetheless. The re-experiencing of the emotions according to the theological pattern of covenant breaking and terrifying chastisement in the form of dispersion can be understood as constructing a malleable framework of vivid experiences within which each reader, even those who have not openly violated any law, could have imagined him- or herself.11

WHO ARE

THE IMPLIED THE

READERS AND HEARERS OF PSALMS OF SOLOMON?

Various references throughout the collection known as the Psalms of Solomon suggest that the implied speaker understands himself as a ‘righteous’ person; even so, it becomes apparent that this ‘righteous’ individual is wrestling with the problem of lived suffering. As Kenneth Atkinson has well-noted, the question of soteriology is a central concern for these texts.12 The righteousness of the authors of the Psalms of Solomon is made clear in the opening to the collection in which the speaker states: “He will hear me because I am righteous; I reminded myself that I am indeed righteous; hadn’t I prospered and given birth to many children?” (1:2–3). Such a statement epitomizes the classic wisdom ideal of the worldly manifestations of the person who is reckoned as righteous by God. The Psalms of Solomon go on to describe what it means to be considered righteous by contrasting the righteous readers and hearers of the collection with those who are not righteous. In Pss. Sol. 3, the speaker states that even though both groups may experience the same stumbling, the righteous respond with an even more scrupulous examination of their 11

12

It is in this way that the present study shares the concern of Angela Kim Harkins, “The Emotional Re-Experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives Found in the Admonition of the Damascus Document,” DSD 22 (2015): 285–307. Kenneth Atkinson, “Enduring the Lord’s Discipline: Soteriology in the Psalms of Solomon,” in This World and the World to Come: Soteriology in Early Judaism, ed. Daniel M. Gurtner (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 145–63.

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deeds, while the wicked are led to sin even graver sins as a result (Pss. Sol. 3:3). In other words, according to the Psalms of Solomon, to be counted among the righteous does not mean that one lives without suffering or without blame. The righteous are also said to be disciplined (quietly) for mistakes done out of ignorance (Pss. Sol. 13:7–8, 10). The implied readers and hearers of the Psalms of Solomon collection are described in highly esteemed terms as “a firstborn son” (Pss. Sol. 18:4), one who is chastised. Of this group, we read that God “brings back the one who heeds well from stupidity and ignorance” (18:4). In addition to having the qualities of righteousness, the readers and hearers are also called “the pious ones of God” (8:23, 34; οἱ ὅσιοι τοῦ θεοῦ). Several recent studies have explored well the topic of language and identity, especially during the late Second Temple period.13 These studies are relevant given the passages that suggest the speaker’s self-understanding as a righteous diaspora Jew who strongly identifies with Jerusalem. Various textual markers and appeals to what can be known about the larger historical context of first-century BCE Jerusalem support the widely recognized dating and locale for the Psalms of Solomon.14 The first century shows evidence of a sustained interest in the Hebrew language as the preferred language for religious writings, a phenomenon that is borne out by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Even so, significant Jewish interest in Greek language texts can be observed during the time that the Psalms of Solomon are thought to be produced. Examples of this include the Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever, which revises the LXX of this collection in light of the text tradition that we know as the MT, along with the various additions to the LXX which begin to emerge during this time.15 First-century Jerusalem was a diverse urban context in which Jewish groups took serious interest in the LXX and in the production of Greek texts. 13

14

15

Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); Chris Keith, Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee (New York: T&T Clark, 2011); Michael O. Wise, Language and Literacy in Roman Judaea: A Study of the Bar Kokhba Documents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Kenneth Atkinson, “Psalms and Odes of Solomon: Psalms of Solomon,” in DeuteroCanonical Scriptures, vol. 2 of Textual History of the Bible, ed. Matthias Henze and Frank Feder (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 332–50, esp. 336–39. The discussion of the Greek of the Psalms of Solomon indicates that the translation of these texts into Greek must have been very early in the transmission history. See, for example, Adrian Schenker, “What Were the Aims of the Palestinian Recensions, and What Did They Achieve? With Some Biographical Notes on Dominique Barthélemy,” in The Legacy of Barthélemy: Fifty Years after Les Devanciers d’Aquila, ed. Anneli Aejmalaeus and Tuukka Kauhanen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 14–22.

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The beginning of Pss. Sol. 9 also makes clear that the speaker is in exile. Scholars have observed that the Greek of the Psalms of Solomon shows a preference for LXX phrases and wording, giving witness to a larger interest in the Greek. Even so, the content of the compositions themselves are Jerusalem focused, with strong concerns for the Temple and a desire for the in-gathering of the exiled righteous and Jerusalem’s restoration (17:30–31). These observations offer important insights into a more complex understanding of the speaker or putative author of these texts by challenging long-standing assumptions about language, locale, and identity that restrict and oversimplify cultural identity and regional markers.

HOW

A

TEXT MAY GENERATE EXPERIENCE

Embodied reading which vividly enacts the experiences that are described (also called enactive reading)16 allows for the formation of egocentric episodic memories that are crucial for the mind’s ability to anticipate future events such as the divine punishments that result unfailingly from treachery. One of the aims of the vivid imagery found in the Psalms of Solomon, I propose, is to encourage those readers who are already counted among the righteous to an even more intense scrupulosity by generating a vivid, palpable presence of a deity whose presence in history is either punitive or providential. Reading about the speaker’s bodily experiences in this psalm can assist in the cognitive process of enactive reading, one that engages the regions of the brain that govern motor and sensory processing. In this sense, emotion and the strategic arousal of emotion can be said to generate first-hand experiences of the events that are described, including the perceptible presence of a deity who is otherwise invisible. Sensations of presence are conveyed by suggestive words of physicality that reference the deity’s embodiment: God’s fiery manifestation causes the earth (and the speaker) to tremble (Pss. Sol. 8:1–4), God mixes and gives a drink in a cup, and God’s deeds of righteous judgment can be viewed or “beheld” by the speaker (Pss. Sol. 8:25). The vivid sense of presence of an otherwise invisible deity can assist in the cultivation of a religious subjectivity that is predisposed to obey the law (without 16

During enactive reading, compelling reference to an object can stimulate sensory and motor areas in the brain that govern the appropriate visualizing and phenomenal handling of that object. It can also arouse other bodily states, including appropriate emotional responses; see Anežka Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment,” Semiotica 189 (2012): 23–48, esp. 25–26.

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predetermining obedience) because the invisible God knows all things that are done in hidden places, even those under the earth (Pss. Sol. 8:8–9). For the spiritually elite readers and hearers of Pss. Sol. 8, the text may be able to generate an ever more intense scrupulosity and conscientiousness to follow the law. The image of the mighty foreign leader being led securely to Jerusalem (8:19) in order to deliver God’s righteous punishment to its inhabitant, alludes to the providential way that God provided for the Israelites to be led during their wanderings in the wilderness. Again, God’s presence, either providential or punitive, is made perceptible to the readers and hearers of this text.

AN APPEAL

TO THE

DEUTERONOMISTIC VIEW

OF

HISTORY

The Psalms of Solomon were used and read long after the presumed composition date. In this paper, rather than mining the Pss. Sol. for historical references that date to the time of the putative author, I wish to explore how the imagery and intertextual references in this psalm might assist the later readers and hearers of this text to cultivate the subjectivity of the implied speaker—biblical Israel. One way in which this is done is through the use of common theological traditions such as the Deuteronomistic view of history, which emphasizes the righteousness and mercy of God and the sinfulness of the people. Such allusions could be considered as aids to help readers experientially recover access to foundational events in Israel’s history or to God’s primeval deeds, but especially important here are the foundational experiences of covenant breaking and re-making. Such an inquiry into how the past would have been experienced in the time of the reader is guided by the text itself which appeals to God’s judgments since the beginning of time (Pss. Sol. 8:7). Scholars have long observed the strong Deuteronomistic understanding of history in these texts, which, in the case of Pss. Sol. 8 is epitomized by passages like verse 29: “We stiffened our neck, and you are the one who disciplines us.” In Pss. Sol. 8, such statements are accompanied by repeated references to God’s righteousness judgments which are heavily concentrated in the latter part of Pss. Sol. 8 (8:7, 8, 23, 25, 26, 32, 34) and which are intended to give a vivid and lasting impression of the otherwise invisible God’s role, both punitive and providential, in history. A Deuteronomistic view understands the experiences of chosenness and chastisement together as driving the recurring pattern of covenant making, political disaster, and the expectation of covenant re-making throughout

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Israel’s history. The events recounted in the center portion of the Pss. Sol. 8 of the mighty foreign ruler can be understood as the agent who fulfills the Deuteronomic curse that Israel will become conquered and besieged for not obeying the covenant law. This ruler who is said to have peaceably entered Jerusalem (8:15–18) has long been identified as Pompey, whose entry into Jerusalem marked the end of the Hasmonean dynasty in 63 BCE.17 There are as many as 5 underlying Semitic allusions here to the root form of Solomon’s name (‫)ש׳ל׳ם‬, both in the name of Jerusalem and also in the references to “peace” in Pss. Sol. 8:15–19. “My ear heard distress and the sound of war” (Pss. Sol. 8:1–6) The composition known as Pss. Sol. 8 uses vivid imagery of the body to describe events that are situated in Jerusalem and the temple. Rather than examining the historical allusions found in this composition, a concern that has been well executed by many already, it is worthwhile to consider how language is rhetorically expressed to arouse certain emotional states within the reader and hearer of this text. In particular, I wish to examine how the images in the opening of Pss. Sol. 8 might assist the speaker and reader in cultivating the subjectivity of Israel. It is not unimportant that the Pss. Sol. 8 concludes with a verse in which the “pious ones” stand in synonymous parallel to “Israel.” Battle imagery is viscerally mediated to the reader through the experiences that take place in the speaker’s body: the sounds of warfare are made manifest in the physical tremors in the speaker’s loins, knees, heart palpitations, and rattling bones. Terror is especially expressed in the weakening of the speaker’s loins, which are otherwise the seat of courage and manly strength. These opening lines of Pss. Sol. 8 also allow for the reinvigoration of the experiences that are associated with the covenant making and covenant breaking experience in Exod 32/Deut 9. The mention of a “sound of war” (φωνὴ πολέμου) referenced here at the very opening of Pss. Sol. 8:1 is the very expression used in the LXX account of Joshua’s report to Moses, just prior to the realization that Israel has 17

Pompey captured the walled city (8:19), killed its leaders (8:20), and slaughtered the inhabitants of the city (8:20). The psalmist speaks from a state of dispersion when he petitions God: “Gather together the dispersion of Israel with mercy and goodness, for your faithfulness is with us” (8:28). These general events can be situated within a Deuteronomistic understanding of history in which the experience of dispersion in the present is understood as a fulfilment of the curses for disobeying the law as stated in Deut 28:25—“And you shall be in dispersion in all of the kingdoms of the earth.”

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engaged in the making of a false calf cult (Exod 32:17–18). The shaking that is called to mind by the speaker’s report of his own bodily tremors anticipate both the dramatic events that unfold on the mountain, but more importantly, introduce stereotypical language for theophanic experiences and call to mind the encounter with the terrifying warrior deity who causes Israel and all of creation to tremble at Sinai (Exod 19:16, 18). This phenomenon can be compared to other biblical references that speak of the effects of trembling during the moment of encounter (cf., Judg 5:4–5; Joel 2:10; Isa 13:13).18 The internalization and vivid imaginative re-enactment of the perceptible effects of a theophanic encounter are expressed in Pss. Sol. 8:4–5: (4) I heard a sound in Ierousalem, city of a holy precinct. (5) My lower back was crushed from the report, My knees weakened; My heart was afraid; My bones were shaken like flax

Just as the earth trembles at the approach of the great warrior deity, the psalmist describes his/her own body’s physical and psychological (heart) response to the encounter. The speaker’s emotional experiences mirror the commonly known response of the created world and also script an emotional response within the reader who could take on these experiences through the first person ‘I’.19 Allusions to Sinai, the site where Israel encountered the invisible deity, reinvigorate foundational memories of covenant-making and also the grave cultic apostasy that took place there. The psalmist speaks of “the roaring firestorm sweeping down through the wilderness” (Pss. Sol. 8:2; ὡς καταιγὶς πυρὸς πολλοῦ φερομένου δι᾿ ἐρήμου), thereby simultaneously evoking the wilderness of Sinai (Exod 19:1; τὴν ἔρημον τοῦ Σινα) and the foundational event where “God descended upon Mt. Sinai in fire…” (Exod 19:18; τὸ δὲ ὄρος τὸ Σινα ἐκαπνίζετο ὅλον διὰ τὸ καταβεβηκέναι ἐπ᾿ αὐτὸ τὸν θεὸν ἐν πυρί, καὶ ἀνέβαινεν ὁ καπνὸς ὡς καπνὸς καμίνου, καὶ ἐξέστη πᾶς ὁ λαὸς σφόδρα). 18

19

Samuel E. Loewenstamm, “The Trembling of Nature during the Theophany,” in Comparative Studies in Biblical and Ancient Oriental Literatures, AOAT 204 (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1984), 173–189. According to Loewenstamm, the image likely comes from ancient Akkadian literature (e.g., “The Prayer to Ishtar”). On the effects of the psalmist’s first-person voice as a performative scripting of emotional experiences, see Susanne Gillmayr–Bucher, “Body Images in the Psalms,” JSOT 28 (2004): 301–26; Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, Ekstasis 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 69–113.

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Language and imagery can work together to arouse similar emotions that were had by the Israelites at the foundational covenant moment at Sinai. Because emotions are refelt in the body with the same intensity whether they are first-hand or second-hand experiences, the imaginative re-experiencing of events as they might have been at Sinai can assist the otherwise spiritually righteous and pious speaker and readers of Pss. Sol. 8 to imaginatively cultivate the subjectivity of what it would have been like to stand trembling at Sinai, a cultural and religious event where every Israelite stood guilty before God.20 The golden calf was a scandalous event of cultic apostasy, closely identified with Aaron, the progenitor of what would later become Israel’s priesthood. The first five verses of Pss. Sol. 8 allude to the foundational event of theophany and covenantmaking, and also point proleptically to the foundational event of cultic violation by the priest Aaron, the eponymous ancestor of the priestly class of Israel. These elements fit well the psalmist’s special concern to highlight the cultic pollution of the Jerusalem Temple (Pss. Sol. 8:12). Physical tremors move through the speaker’s loins, knees, heart, and bones. While various parts of the speaker’s extended body are enumerated, interestingly, there is no report of visual perception here; the speaker does not refer to what he sees, only to what he hears. On the one hand, the absence of visual references could suggest some distance between the speaker and the events that are being described, possibly indicating that the speaker and the readers themselves presumably are not close enough to the events on Mount Sinai to see what is transpiring. On the other hand, the bodily range of perceptions that are reported themselves suggest a very close proximity to the events themselves. Such a strategic location could allow a reader or hearer to imagine himself as one of the Israelites at Mt. Sinai whose position at the bottom of the holy Mount would have prevented them from fully viewing the events that transpired at the top of the mountain. In other words, the bodily experiences can help to imaginatively cultivate the subjectivity of what it would have been like to have been physically present at the golden calf apostasy, where a position at the base of the mountain was the closest that one could come to the terrifying theophany that was taking place at the top of the mountain. If we think too about the reception of Pss. Sol. 8 by later communities in the 4th–5th centuries, other theophanic mountaintop events 20

Of course, only Moses and Joshua were absent from the cultic apostasy at Sinai. For a similar study of the emotional re–experiencing of Sinai, see Harkins, “The Emotional Re-experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives,” 299–307.

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such as the Transfiguration (Matt 17:1–9; Mark 9:2–10; Luke 9:28–36) also presuppose that the witnesses (Peter and the sons of Zebedee) fall face-down on the mountainside (Matt 17:6), a posture that prevents the complete visual apprehension of events. Even so, the absence of visual detail here in the opening scene suggests some removal from events and possibly expresses the psalmist’s experience of exile from Jerusalem—an inference that is also corroborated by Pss. Sol. 8:28, which assumes that the speaker is among the scattered of Israel (“Gather together the dispersion of Israel with pity and kindness, for your faithfulness is with us”). Notably, it is only at the end of this psalm, after the multitude of references to the decisive acts of the warrior deity, when the speaker reports that his visual apprehension of the mighty God through his magnificent righteous deeds; it is only at this point that Pss. Sol. 8:25 states, “Behold, now, O God, you have shown us your judgment in your righteousness; Our eyes have seen your judgments, O God.” The Sinai event is one of Israel’s foundational experiences. It can be understood as a malleable frame through which the contemporary experiences of the psalmist during the first century BCE can be understood, and one which the later readers and hearers of this text could imaginatively access. The set of emotional experiences that fit into this Deuteronomistic understanding of history effectively constructs a malleable framework of experiences within which each reader and hearer, regardless of his or her spiritual standing, could imagine him-/herself.21 In this way, foundational narratives can be updated to accommodate changing circumstances while retaining the powerful emotional contours of the foundational event.22 Embodied reading which vividly enacts the experiences that are described (enactive reading)23 can allow for the formation of egocentric episodic memories that are crucial for the mind’s ability to anticipate future events such as the divine punishments that result unfailingly from treachery.24 These egocentric imagined scenarios of God’s punitive judgment can thus function effectively as a constraint on behavior and 21

22

23 24

Laurence W. Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Religious Knowledge,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 5 (2005): 23. Pascal Boyer, “What are Memories for? Functions of Recall in Cognition and Culture,” in Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3–28. Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative,” 25–26. This kind of ego-centric foresight is often referred to as mental time-travel in the literature and recognized as exerting an important force in moral decision-making; Boyer, “What are Memories for?” 13–14.

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contribute to the moral decision-making processes of the readers and hearers of this psalm. Because ritually aroused emotions are re-experienced in the body, even community members who had never committed open treason against the group could have imagined the decisive consequences of disobedience with the vividness of first-hand events. Rebecca Sachs Norris writes: “That emotion can be refelt in the present when it is recalled enables religious feelings to be layered and developed, because each time a ritual gesture is repeated the emotion is recalled and new emotional memories laid down in association with the old ones to be recalled the next time.”25 The emotional re-experiencing of the events in Pss. Sol. 8 could thus effectively shape future decision-making processes by predisposing pious community members to obey the laws of the covenant, (without predetermining that they would do so), perhaps resulting in an even more meticulous scrupulosity among the righteous readers and hearers of these psalms. Age-old Crimes against the Covenant: “I considered the judgments of God” (8:7–14) The next unit of the psalm about the wicked in 8:7–14 shifts from the psalmist speaking about his own experiences to describing primordial crimes against the covenant—offenses that have the capacity to defile the sanctuary. This unit begins by mentioning various sexual and moral sins that are hidden but which have become exposed to the light of day. These sexual sins have the capacity to compromise the holiness of the land.26 The specific view that the sanctuary of the Lord was polluted by these sexual sins was shared by the Psalms of Solomon and other Second Temple texts known as the Testament of Levi and the Damascus Document.27 The orientation to a primordial time resembles the admonitory narratives in the Damascus Document.28 Scholars have previously observed the striking similarities between the Psalms of Solomon and the Damascus Document, especially in the way it conceptualizes sin (CD 4:13–18, cf. Pss. Sol. 1:7–8; 4:5). These associations with the Essene communities 25

26

27 28

Rebecca Sachs Norris (“Examining the Structure and Role of Emotion: Contributions of Neurobiology to the Study of Embodied Religious Experience,” Zygon 40 [2005]: 192–93). NB, instead of emotions recalling memories, it is better to think of emotions as reinvigorating or reconstituting them. Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43–60. Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, 56–60 (e.g., T. Levi 9:9; 14:5–15:1). Harkins, “The Emotional Re-experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives,” 287–95.

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described in the ancient sources are interesting, especially in light of the speaker’s own account of being at some remove from the city of Jerusalem, although as scholars have noted before, these connections are inconclusive.29 Pss. Sol. 8:7–14 identifies three types of sins that resemble those in the Damascus Document as the “Three Snares of Belial”—namely, fornication, wealth, and defiling the sanctuary (CD 4:13–18). This same passage speaks of incestuous relations (8:9–10) and other forms of sexual pollution (8:12) done in secret.30 Jonathan Klawans observes that sexual sins become more prominently associated with the defilement of the sanctuary in Second Temple times (in contrast to having only an effect on the land).31 The specific sin of improper sexual relations, expressed by the language of “mingling” (συνεφύροντο) in Pss. Sol. 8:932 is the same one that appears in a passage detailing the sexual transgressions of Israel in Hos 4:14,33 a passage that can be understood as a further layering of the foundational cultic apostasy – the golden calf. The bovine references in the book of Hosea, especially at 4:12–19,34 alludes to the calf cult at Sinai and also strongly indicts various northern shrines of Gilgal and Beth-aven (also known as Bethel), and reinvigorate images of Jeroboam’s calf cults of at Bethel and Dan (Hos 4:15–19). These apostate cults were understood to be the cause of the division of the United Kingdom according to the Deuteronomistic Historian (2 Kgs 17:16, 21–23).35 29

30

31 32

33

34

35

Kenneth Atkinson, I Cried to the Lord: A Study of the Psalms of Solomon’s Historical Background and Social Setting, JSJSup 84 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 220–22. The speaker states “with menstrual blood they defiled the sacrifices as though they were common flesh” (8:12). Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, 59. The passage is: ἐν καταγαίοις κρυφίοις αἱ παρανομίαι αὐτῶν ἐν παροργισμῷ· υἱὸς μετὰ μητρὸς καὶ πατὴρ μετὰ θυγατρὸς συνεφύροντο (Pss. Sol. 8:9). καὶ οὐ μὴ ἐπισκέψωμαι ἐπὶ τὰς θυγατέρας ὑμῶν, ὅταν πορνεύωσιν, καὶ ἐπὶ τὰς νύμφας ὑμῶν, ὅταν μοιχεύωσιν, διότι καὶ αὐτοὶ μετὰ τῶν πορνῶν συνεφύροντο καὶ μετὰ τῶν τετελεσμένων ἔθυον, καὶ ὁ λαὸς ὁ συνίων συνεπλέκετο μετὰ πόρνης (Hos 4:14). It is possible that this passage from Hos 4 is the scriptural allusion that stands behind CD 1:12–2:1; see the analysis by Maxine L. Grossman, “Cultivating Identity: Textual Virtuosity and ‘Insider’ Status,” in Defining Identities: We, You, and the Other in the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Florentino García Martínez and Mladen Popović, STDJ 70 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 6–10. This intertextual connection between Exod 32 and 1 Kgs 12 (see Exod 32:4, 8 and 1 Kgs 12:28) was well noted by Moses Aberbach and Leivy Smolar, “Aaron, Jeroboam, and the Golden Calves,” JBL 86 (1967): 129–40; and has since been discussed by Nicolas Wyatt, “Of Calves and Kings: The Canaanite Dimension in the Religion of Israel,” SJOT 6 (1992): 68–91; Gary N. Knoppers, “Aaron’s Calf and Jeroboams’ Calves,“ in Fortunate the Eyes That See: Essays in Honor of David Noel

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Notably the catalogue of sins that are done “in secret” (Pss. Sol. 8:7–14) are also the transgressions that the invisible God has full knowledge. These sins are also not incompatible with the crimes done at the foundation event of covenant breaking of the golden calf event at which moment the newly created covenant was polluted. The suggestion of sexual impropriety can also be seen in the golden calf event in which the people sat down to eat and drink, and then arose “to play” (‫ ;וַ יֵּ ֶשׁב ָה ָעם ֶ ֽל ֱאכֹל וְ ָשׁתוֹ וַ יָּ ֻקמוּ ְל ַצ ֵחק‬καὶ ἐκάθισεν ὁ λαὸς φαγεῖν καὶ πιεῖν καὶ ἀνέστησαν παίζειν) in Exod 32:6. The verb that appears here has a sexual connotation in Gen 26:8: “and after Isaac had been there for a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of a window and he saw that behold! Isaac was playing with Rebecca his wife” (pun in Hebrew on the name of the patriarch, ‫ יִ ְצ ָחק‬and the verb for “playing” ‫)מ ַצ ֵחק‬. ְ 36 This is often taken to refer to some kind of sexual playing or fondling, as it is at this moment when King Abimelech realizes that Isaac and Rebecca are husband and wife. These allusions to the sexual crimes and cultic pollution during the foundational event of the golden calf apostasy are not incompatible with the general crimes that are highlighted in these lines of Pss. Sol. 8. The specific language that is used in this part of Pss. Sol. 8 is notable as it reinvigorates memories of the dramatic Sinai event in multiple ways. In the verses 7–14, the language succeeds in constructing a perception of the deity’s presence through active language; God is the one who “exposed their sins before the sun” (8:8); and “mixed for them a spirit of confusion” (8:14); and “gave them a cup of undiluted wine to drink” (8:14). God’s active role in the exposition and judgment of these secret sins thus creates the perception of his presence in his absence (invisibility). In this way, the text contributes to the cultivation of virtue in the reader and hearer; this predisposes him or her to do the law, even if no one appears to be watching, since the invisible God sees all sexual transgressions done in secret—and distributes justice accordingly, even though he himself cannot be seen. In this way, the text can assist in the construction of an ethical constraint on decision-making for an individual who vividly imagines the things described in the psalm.37

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Freedman in Celebration of His Seventieth Birthday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 92–104. ἐγένετο δὲ πολυχρόνιος ἐκεῖ· παρακύψας δὲ Αβιμελεχ ὁ βασιλεὺς Γεραρων διὰ τῆς θυρίδος εἶδεν τὸν Ισαακ παίζοντα μετὰ Ρεβεκκας τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ (Gen 26:8). Boyer, “What are Memories For?” 13–14.

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Honor (τιμή) and Faithfulness (πίστις) The final section of Pss. Sol. 8 returns to the imagery of God as a military warrior. Pss. Sol. 8:26–28, the image of God as the military warrior returns the reader back to the opening of the psalm. The speaker states, “We have justified your name which is honored forever” (8:26; ἐδικαιώσαμεν τὸ ὄνομά σου τὸ ἔντιμον εἰς αἰῶνας) and pleads for “God’s mercy and compassion towards us, in gathering the scattered of Israel with mercy and kindness, because your faithfulness (ἡ πίστις) is with us” (8:28; ὅτι ἡ πίστις σου μεθ᾿ ἡμῶν). The word faithfulness (ἡ πίστις) has wide-ranging meanings. Αmong its many connotations in classical literature is the expression of confidence in the success of the military leader in battle.38 The effect is to contrast the reign of God to that of a tyrant in whom the people do not have faith. In so doing, the text draws readers and hearers to respond to the described event and participate imaginatively in the covenant relationship. In Pss. Sol. 8, there are two places where the Greek mentions “God’s pious ones” (οἱ ὅσιοι τοῦ θεοῦ) and notably, both instances are associated with the praise of God. The first appears in Pss. Sol. 8:23 in which the speaker says that “God’s pious ones are like innocent lambs (οἱ ὅσιοι τοῦ θεοῦ ὡς ἀρνία ἐν ἀκακίᾳ ἐν μέσῳ αὐτῶν) in their midst.” The text goes on to say that the LORD is worthy of praise (αἰνετὸς κύριος). Later in Pss. Sol. 8, the “pious ones” are again associated with the activity of praising God. In the Pss. Sol. 8:34 it is said that “the LORD is worthy to be praised (αἰνετὸς κύριος) for his judgments by the mouths of the pious ones (ἐν στόματι ὁσίων).” The association of the “pious ones” and the praise of God can perhaps indicate that the very act is itself worthy of emulation as the “right response” to divine chastisement.39

CONCLUSION How were the Psalms of Solomon experienced in the ancient world? While we cannot answer this question with absolute certainty, it is worthwhile 38

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Teresa Morgan, “Is Pistis/Fides Experienced as an Emotion in the Late Roman Republic, Early Principate, and Early Church?” in Unveiling Emotions II: Emotions in Greece and Rome: Texts, Images, Material Culture, ed. Angelos Chaniotis and Pierre Ducrey, Heidelberger Althistorische Beitrage und Epigraphische Studien 55 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013), 199–200. The reference “pious ones” (οἱ ὅσιοι), interestingly, is the same term used to refer to the Essenes in a quote attributed to Philo, preserved in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 8.11 (see also Pss. Sol. 8:34: ἐν στόματι ὁσίων).

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revisiting the ways in which we imagine the reading process to have taken place in individual readers and hearers of the past. For a collection like the Psalms of Solomon, the predominance of scriptural language and the dramatic and vivid style of the text suggest that the text aimed to have a desired effect upon the reader and hearer that goes beyond the simple expression of content or the rote recitation of the psalms and moves toward an integrative experience of the text that imagines how embodied cognition work together in the cultivation of an experience. This paper has examined how language about foundational events can rhetorically construct experiences about the body that have the vividness of first-hand experiences. Language and imagery along with a Deuteronomistic theology could have aroused emotional states that are not incompatible with the foundational experience at Sinai: the covenant making, apostasy of the golden calf, and covenant remaking. The effect of active imaginative engagement of Sinai could help to make present an otherwise invisible deity through the reinvigoration of tales of his providential and punitive presence in Israel’s history. This emotional re-experiencing of the otherwise invisible God can participate in guiding an already pious reader or hearer to an even more intense scrupulosity since even those who have never openly committed the sins against the covenant that are detailed in Pss. Sol. 8:7–14 or of apostasy could know with a first-hand intensity what it was like to be guilty at Sinai and to receive a righteous punishment from the hand of God.

RITUALIZING JESUS’ GRIEF AT GETHSEMANE The scene of a grief-stricken Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane was one that generated controversy and questions for ancient readers, both Christian and pagan. The divergent accounts of this prayer in the Synoptic tradition, as well as John’s allusion to the scene (John 12:27), suggest that this unease was felt as early as the New Testament period. Jesus’ excessive display of pathe in Gethsemane raised significant questions about his self-understanding, his motivations, and, according to some ancient readers, even his masculinity.1 For these ancient readers of Mark 14:32–42, Jesus’ behavior was unseemly and expressed cowardice and self-interest; his excessive emotional display was seen to be effeminate.2 Some pagan readers were extremely critical of Jesus’ grief in scenes like the prayer at Gethsemane and polemicized against a divine male figure who engaged in such unseemly displays of emotion.3 Not only did Jesus’ emotional prayer raise questions about his divinity; it also challenged cultural expectations about gender in the Greek and Roman world.4 Jesus’ emotional prayer and the image of his fallen body on the 1

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Karl Olav Sandnes, Early Christian Discourses on Jesus’ Prayer at Gethsemane: Courageous, Committed, Cowardly? NovTSup 166 (Beaverton: Brill, 2016). Sandnes’ recent study of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane examines the controversial ways that Jesus’ emotions were received by readers of this text (Early Christian Discourses on Jesus’ Prayer at Gethsemane). Other studies of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane include André Fueillet, L’agonie de Gethsémani (Paris: Gabalda, 1977); Jung-Sik Cha, “Confronting Death: The Story of Gethsemane in Mark 14:32–42 and its Historical Legacy” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1996); Oda Wischmeyer, “Prayer and Emotion in Mark 14:32–42 and Related Texts,” in Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions, ed. Reif and Egger-Wenzel, DCLS 26 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 335–49. Origen tells us that Celsus found Jesus’ mourning, lamenting, and praying at Gethsemane to be inconsistent with him being a God (Cels. 2.23–24). Celsus survives only through the references that Origen has made in Cels. (248 CE). Graham Ward, “Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,” in Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism: A Critical Reader, ed. Björn Krondorfer (London: SCM Press, 2009), 96–112; Kathleen E. Corley, Maranatha: Women’s Funerary Rituals and Christian Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010); Brittany E. Wilson, Unmanly Men: Refigurations of Masculinity in Luke-Acts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Masculinity studies have grown out of feminist studies in the last twenty years; see Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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ground would have defied ancient pagan gendered expectations of a hero according to the noble death tradition.5 Ancient pagan readers were not the only ones who did not understand such Second Temple rituals and emotional prayers. Modern biblical scholars have also not fully appreciated the Second Temple ritual context for Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane.6 In his commentary on Mark’s Gospel, M. Eugene Boring says that “falling on the ground is not the normal posture for prayer.”7 Yet, remarkably, the practice of falling on the ground in prayer (Moses in Deut 9:18, 25), and doing so in the vicinity of the Temple (Ezra 10:1) or in synchronicity with the Temple sacrifices (Jdt 9:1), was indeed a well-attested practice and one performed by significant figures during pivotal moments in Second Temple works. This study proposes that the Second Temple ritual context is an overlooked but potentially fruitful one for understanding the ancient controversies concerning Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane. We will argue that the cultural specificity of emotions can help to account for why later Greek and Roman readers experienced such sharp and divergent responses to Jesus’ prayer and ritual practices. The first part of this study discusses Second Temple penitential prayers and the crucial role of grief in these rituals. These prayers re-enact foundational events, including those of covenant making and re-making, and the performative ritual emotions allow for the experiencing of these events with a first-hand vividness. These Second Temple prayers are widely attested and highly stylized theological accounts that emphasize the reliability of the prayer and its tangible effects from God and from the people. The second section analyzes Mark’s account of Jesus’ grief-stricken prayer at Gethsemane, with special attention to those features that it shares with Second Temple penitential prayers, especially Second Temple versions of Ezra’s prayer which reenact the paradigmatic covenant re-making ceremony performed by Moses. This discussion of Mark assumes Markan priority and will also engage briefly how Matthew can be said to make improvements to Mark. The third and final section of the article discusses the cultural specificity of emotions, especially divergent gender expectations of the 5

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Brittany E. Wilson, “Gender Disrupted: Jesus as a ‘Man’ in the Fourfold Gospel,” Word & World 36 (2016): 207–11. Stephen Voorwinde, Jesus’ Emotions in the Gospels (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 111–13 is a recent study that is helpful in cataloguing the range of emotions associated with Jesus, but it does not offer an analytical frame for thinking about their ritual or performative function. M. Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 397.

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ritual performance of grief. It is here where we suggest that Jesus’ griefstricken prayer was the most controversial to early readers who would have held a clear gender expectation for these emotions. While Second Temple penitential prayer rituals were routinely performed by male leaders (Ezra, Daniel), such ritual expressions of public mourning would have been enacted by women in a Greek and Roman cultural context. Our study concludes that Jesus’ emotional prayer at Gethsemane can be contextualized within a larger Second Temple ritual context that would have been unfamiliar to non-Jewish readers, and that the diverse gendered expectations of grief would have made this scene controversial to early readers of this text.

SECOND TEMPLE PENITENTIAL PRAYERS AND RITUALS The close of the twentieth century decisively acknowledged the Second Temple period as a critical one for understanding early Judaism and the Jewishness of early Christianity, but studies of Second Temple ritual and prayer have not yet made a significant impact on how scholars understand the NT. New attention to the post-exilic period is due in large part to the manuscript discoveries in the Judean Desert in 1947, which shed greater light on Judaism during the period just prior to Christianity’s emergence. This discovery also post-dates many classic historical-critical studies that had already been formulated during the early twentieth century.8 The renewed attention to the Second Temple period during the last quarter of the twentieth century has become the occasion for a fresh examination of prayer texts that had until then been largely overlooked by biblical scholars.9 The category known generally as ‘penitential prayer’ 8

9

Hermann Gunkel, Einleitung in die Psalmen: Die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1928). As many as thirty volumes of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert were published since the late 1990s, thus flooding the scholarly world with texts and effectively creating the specialization of Second Temple Studies. Significant studies of prayer include Daniel K. Falk, Daily, Sabbath, and Festival Prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ 27 (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Rodney A. Werline, Penitential Prayers in Second Temple Judaism: The Development of a Religious Institution (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); Mark Boda, Praying the Tradition: The Origin and Use of Tradition in Nehemiah 9, BZAW 277 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999); Judith Newman, Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999); Michael Duggan, The Covenant Renewal in Ezra–Nehemiah (Neh 7:72b–10:40): An Exegetical, Literary, and Theological Study (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001); Esther G. Chazon, ed., Liturgical Perspectives: Prayer and Poetry in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Proceedings of the

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is one way of referring to an identifiable group of emotional prayers that is well-attested among Second Temple writings, but largely ignored in many classification systems designed by early form-critical scholars for multiple reasons. These early historical-critical scholars and those who had relied upon their work sought first and foremost to understand the origins of ancient Israel, and so were disinterested in the Second Temple period. This was not, however, without ideological motivation to emphasize Christianity’s dramatic and unique emergence from its Jewish context.10 Such factors resulted in the neglect of Second Temple ritual and

10

Fifth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 19–23 January 2000, STDJ 48 (Leiden: Brill, 2003); James L. Kugel, Prayer that Cite Scripture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Markus H. McDowell, Prayers of Jewish Women: Studies of Patterns of Prayer in the Second Temple Period, WUNT II, 211 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); Mark J. Boda, Daniel K. Falk, and Rodney A. Werline, eds., Seeking the Favor of God, 3 vols. (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006–08); Angela K. Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, Ekstasis 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); Michael D. Matlock, Discovering the Traditions of Prose Prayers in Early Jewish Literature, LSTS 81 (London: T&T Clark, 2012); Jeremy Penner et al., eds., Prayer and Poetry in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature: Essays in Honor of Eileen Schuller on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, STDJ 98 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Jeremy Penner, Patterns of Daily Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2012); David A. Lambert, How Repentance Became Biblical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Stephen C. Reif and Renate Egger-Wenzel, eds., Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions: Emotions Associated with Jewish Prayer in and Around the Second Temple Period, DCLS 26 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015); Mika S. Pajunen and Jeremy Penner, eds., Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period, BZAW 486 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). That the study of biblical prayer forms has been profoundly influenced by the ideological biases of the modern interpreter has been well noted in the literature; see Samuel E. Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 1–32. J. Hempel lamented the fact that prayers had been held in disdain in a post-Enlightenment milieu, especially among scholars who preferred rational intellectualism over piety; J. Hempel, Gebet und Frömmigkeit im Alten Testament (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1922), 3. Others have noted the ideological bias against religious practices in the academy; e.g., Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Temple and the Magician,” in Map is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 172–89; idem, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Greenberg had also critiqued the scholarly bias in favor of “simple spontaneous heartfelt prayer” and against formal prayers (Moshe Greenberg, Biblical Prose Prayer as a Window to the Popular Religion of Ancient Israel [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], 39). Recently, the discipline’s longstanding prioritization of religious thought (teachings, doctrines, texts) over religious practices (rituals, rites, liturgy) has continued to be critiqued in the past twenty years, in part due to the increased globalization of the study of religion which has increasingly incorporated scholarly perspectives from practice-based religious traditions like Islam; e.g., Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 202–36; eadam, The Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

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the omission of these prayers in many classic form-critical classifications, which were focused almost exclusively on the psalter.11 Even to this day, Second Temple prayers found in certain canonical texts (MT) are regularly prioritized over other literary contexts that are outside the Tanakh, such as the Deuterocanon/Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. It is also the case that prayers remain a significant portion of the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and that these are seldom incorporated into discussions of Second Temple prayer. The methodological approach of form criticism routinely severed penitential prayers from their larger narrative context. In the aim of studying them like the psalms, this approach stripped away important narrative details of the body’s preparatory performance of funerary practices.12 Astonishingly, scholars to this day, relying upon the scholarly categories that predate the 1940s and subsequent ones that were strongly influenced by those early twentieth-century models, continue to raise questions about the validity of ‘penitential prayer’ as an actual formal category of prayer. New Testament scholars following the religionsgeschichtliche Schule also bypassed Second Temple Jewish contexts in favor of drawing comparisons to pagan Greek and Roman religions. While the History of Religions School’s emphasis on a broad examination of the diverse cultural contexts of the New Testament has certainly enriched the understanding of these texts, Second Temple Judaism has not historically been

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(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Phenomenological understandings of religion from an embodied and integrative perspective have emerged to balance a longstanding preoccupation with texts alone; see Armin Geertz, “Global Perspectives on Methodology in the Study of Religion,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 12 (2000): 49–73; idem, “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 304–21. Angela Kim Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study of Penitential Elements and Their Strategic Arousal of Emotion in the Qumran Hodayot (1QHa cols. 1[?]–8),” in Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions: A Study of the Emotions Associated with Prayer in the Jewish and Related Literature of the Second Temple Period, ed. Stefan C. Reif and Renate Egger-Wenzel, DCLS 26 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 298–99. The severing of the prayer from any literary context and with no regard for the nonverbal performative or ritual aspects of prayer were typical. Form criticism’s emphasis on form and setting in life has dominated the study of prayers (Gunkel, Einleitung in die Psalmen). Mowinckel (The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, 2 vols. [Nashville: Abingdon, 1962, repr. 1992], 1.12–22) critiqued Gunkel for overemphasizing interiority and disregarding the significance of ritual contexts. Even so, the analysis of form without content is still the prevailing way of thinking about biblical prayers. These biases about the study of prayer extended beyond the biblical literature to the study of ancient Jewish prayer. Uri Ehrlich (The Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to Jewish Liturgy, TSAJ 105 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004]) discusses how the preoccupation with the verbal with no regard for the performative has also characterized the study of rabbinic prayers in the 19th century.

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recognized as a significant cultural framework—an oversight that this study seeks to address.13 The ritual performance of falling on the ground is only one of a wideranging constellation of practices of self-diminishment that are associated with these prayers: crying out, fasting, ashes, weeping, torn clothing, sleep deprivation, pulling hair.14 Second Temple prayers that are associated with these mourning practices fall under the category of ‘penitential prayer’ and include supplicatory prayers, petitions, and confessions of both sinfulness and praise of God. These narrative-embedded emotional prayers were variously referred to in the literature as ‘prayers of repentance’ and ‘prayers of confession’.15 All of these practices and prayer elements, while wide-ranging, can be understood phenomenologically to cultivate a state of liminality and self-diminishment. This ritual functioned purposefully as part of a social mechanism in Second Temple Judaism to achieve important theological and socio-political ends by allowing for the emotional re-experiencing of divine presence and foundational events in Israel’s history with first-hand vividness, which served to deepen covenant commitment after the exile.16 13

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Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “Kyrios Christos in Light of Twenty–First Century Perspectives on Second Temple Judaism,” Early Christianity 6 (2015): 30–50. The long-lasting influence of scholars like Wilhelm Bousset (Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenäus, ed. G. Krüger, FRLANT 21 [Göttingen: 1921]. Repr. as Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. J.E. Steely [Nashville 1970, repr., Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013) of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule can be seen in the recent republication of his influential work, Kyrios Christos. The early Christian recognition of Jesus’ divinity was viewed by Bousset as being a second-century development, while others hold that this was a feature of the earliest Christian ritual practices (see Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003]). Saul Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Jeremy Penner, “Nocturnal Prayer in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Studia Liturgica 44 (2014): 234–46; Eve-Marie Becker, “Κράζειν and the Concept of ‘Emotional Prayer’ in Earliest Christianity,” in Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions, 351–66. Schuller speaks about a lack of coherence in the formal scholarly descriptions of these prayers and is reluctant to identify an actual literary category of penitential prayer (Eileen M. Schuller, “Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: A Research Survey,” in Seeking the Favor of God, vol. 2 of The Development of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism, eds. Mark J. Boda, Daniel K. Falk, and Rodney A. Werline [Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007], 1–15). On this point about classification, see Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study of Penitential Elements and Their Strategic Arousal of Emotion in the Qumran Hodayot (1QHa cols. 1[?]–8),” 298–99. While the Sitz im Leben of penitential prayers has not been conclusively identified, these prayers were frequently associated with covenant renewal experiences during the Second Temple period; see Odil H. Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967), 134–35; E. Lipinski,

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The ritual experiencing of emotion was a strategy by which communities after the rupture of the Babylonian exile were able to access with first-hand vividness an experience of continuity with foundational events, either real or imagined, from a long-ago past. Key emotions of grief and desolation cultivated self-diminishment and the decentering effects of liminality, thereby creating a heightened receptivity to the ritual moment. While the effects of the penitential prayer ritual are diverse, they share a desire to bridge the Second Temple period to the foundational narratives of the past and the experience of God. The performative emotions that are strategically aroused by the retelling of Israel’s history of past failings are key in the ritual’s effectiveness because they allow individuals to access key foundational narratives from a distant past with the vividness of first-hand experience (Ezra 9:1–10:8; Neh 9:1–37; Jdt 9).17 Second Temple texts depict these rituals as having a certain and reliable prosocial effect. For example, the ritual appears regularly as a feature of a much larger social mechanism that compels the people to re-affirm their commitment to the covenant (Exod 33–34; Deut 9; 1 Kgs 8//2 Chr 6–7; Ezra 9; Neh 9–10; 1 Esd 8; Bar 1:15–3:8). These texts often describe the strong pro-social effects of the ritual by including detailed descriptions of the people’s reaffirmation of the covenant, an effect that is most clearly seen in Shechaniah’s declaration that he will support Ezra (Ezra 10:2–5) and in the roster of names that appear at the conclusion of this book (10:9–44; also Neh 9:38–12:47; cf. 2 Chr 7:3, 9–10).18

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La liturgie pénitentielle dans la Bible (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1969), 37–38. Thus, the ritual appears in religio-political contexts in 2 Chr 6–7; Ezra 9–10; Neh 9–10, but also in contexts that speak of the generation of prophetic and visionary experiences (Dan 9; Bar 1:15–3:8); and in the ritual re-experiencing of foundational narratives for the sake of emboldening readers during times of distress (Jdt 9). Performative emotions are ritually scripted emotions; see Gary L. Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse,” History of Religions 39 (2000): 211–46. For example, Ezra’s prayer (Ezra 9) is an emotional look at the foundational experience of wilderness rebellion and the Deuteronomic teaching concerning intermarriage; Neh 9–10 refers back to the foundational experiences in the wilderness when Israel first entered into covenant relationship with YHWH; and the prayer in Jdt 9 harkens back to the righteous anger which Simeon and Levi experienced over the rape of their sister Dinah in Gen 34. For a comparison of Ezra’s prayer with the pro–social aims of Solomon’s prayer in the Temple in 1 Kgs 8// 2 Chr 6–7, see Angela K. Harkins, “The Pro–Social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer,” BibInt 24 (2016): 466–91; and for a discussion of Neh 9, see eadam, “Religious Experience through the Lens of Critical Spatiality: A Look at Embodiment Language in Prayers and Hymns,” in Experientia, vol. 2, ed. Colleen Shantz and Rodney A. Werline (Atlanta: SBL, 2012), 230–37. The detailed list of names can be understood to contribute to the realism of the covenant renewal event. Ancient readers of the text would likely see these details in a compelling

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For our purposes, it is significant that these highly-stylized theological texts depict these rituals as being largely successful in achieving some certain sign of divine or angelic presence. For example, in the Second Temple retelling of Solomon’s penitential prayer in the Temple (2 Chr 6:1–7:22), the ritual achieves the sudden and sure sign of fire that blazes down from the heavens to consume the offering on the altar as the glory of the LORD fills the Temple (7:1–3). In Daniel, the emotional prayer and ritual mourning succeeds in generating an experience of encounter with the angel Gabriel, who then brings a prophetic interpretation of Jeremiah’s prophecy (Dan 9:1–27).19 Another late Second Temple apocalypse known as 4 Ezra also layers funerary practices and prayers. Here the figure of Ezra engages in multiple self-diminishing practices of fasting, weeping, sleeping in a field, abstaining from meat and wine, and praying throughout his visionary experiences. Ezra offers a prayer “just before he was taken up into the heavens” in 4 Ezra 8:19b–36, which includes a lengthy series of petitions and detailed confession of sin (8:24–36). Penitential prayers may have diverse effects such as the re-making of the covenant or visionary and prophetic experiences. Their use of grief-stricken emotions speaks to a common desire to re-experience foundational events with the first-hand vividness during the Second Temple period and the way in which emotions related to mourning were instrumental in bringing about other possible experiences. Although these texts describe cases where Second Temple penitential prayers successfully produce reliable and measurable effects (e.g., visions, roster of names), individuals are not pre-determined to have religious experiences; at best, we might say that religious prayers and practices cultivate the necessary predispositions that allow for the possibility of

19

way, moving them to their own renewed commitment to the covenant; see Angela K. Harkins, “The Pro-Social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer,” Biblical Interpretation 24 (2016): 478–79. The reenactment of mourning rituals can be understood as precipitating the visionary experience. Merkur compared this process to the naturally occurring experience of bipolar episodes (“The Visionary Practices of Jewish Apocalyptists,” in Psychoanalytic Study of Society 14, ed. L. Bryce Boyer and Simon A. Grolnik [Hillsdale: Analytic Press, 1989], 119-48, 134). In contrast, Harkins proposes that the ritually induced state of mourning can bring about the naturally occurring cognitive state of rumination which includes as one of its effects the vivid experiencing of presence from absence (“Ritual Mourning in Daniel’s Interpretation of Jeremiah’s Prophecy,” Journal of Cognitive Historiography 2 (2015): 14–32; eadam, “The Function of Prayers of Ritual Mourning in the Second Temple Period,” in Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period, ed. Mika S. Pajunen and Jeremy Penner, BZAW 486 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017], 80–101).

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experiences.20 Second Temple texts, however, should not be read as we would read modern clinical reports of a ritual’s efficacy; rather, they are highly stylized theological accounts. In other words, Second Temple ritual texts aim to persuade or to compel readers. What is notable and important for us to keep in mind as we begin our discussion of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane, is the way in which these Second Temple texts overwhelmingly speak to the reliable effects of the penitential prayer. When performed by a highly esteemed figure, often there is a clear and positive response by both God and the people. It is this expectation of the ritual event that Mark exploits and overturns in his account of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane.

THE LITERARY CONTEXT OF GETHSEMANE (MARK 14:32–42) By expanding our scholarly approach from an examination of the strictly formal components of prayer to include the larger phenomenological practices associated with these texts, we can recognize how Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane resembles the well-attested Second Temple penitential prayer ritual. Recognizing Jesus’ prayer as a ritual re-enactment also means that the expression of grief in this prayer has the quality of performed emotion, but this is not to say that the ritual performance of prayer precludes any individually felt experience. The ritual features of Mark 14:32–42 have not been adequately examined because little attention was given to Jewish prayer and ritual and there is a long-standing view that Jesus is displaying a spontaneous expression of emotion.21 What we wish to highlight is this: the disturbing silence that Jesus receives from both God and the people in answer to his prayer in Mark 14:32–42 breaks the strong expectation of the Second Temple ritual’s efficacy. Mark understands the power of this prayer and uses it to his purposes in his Passion Narrative (PN). The absence of a response successfully highlights the theme of abandonment during a key moment of desperate need. If we assume Markan priority, we can see that each Gospel writer shows some awareness of the controversial nature of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane 20

21

Constance Furey, “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” JAAR 80 (2012): 7–33; Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 60–68; Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” 202–17; eadam, The Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 140–47. Cha reads this passage strictly as an eruption of interior emotions (“Confronting Death: The Story of Gethsemane in Mark 14:32–42 and its Historical Legacy”).

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(Matt 26:36–46; Lk 22:39–46), including the author of the Fourth Gospel (John 12:27–29). Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane occupies a critical position in the PN found in the Gospel of Mark. In Mark, the scene follows immediately after Jesus’ Passover meal at which he speaks prophetically of his abandonment. The Gethsemane event fulfills this prophetic expectation by depicting the failure of his closest disciples (Peter, James, and John) to stay awake and God’s deafening silence vis-à-vis Jesus’ prayer. These details draw us powerfully into the dramatic irony of Mark’s PN and the key role of prophetic fulfillment. While Mark does not explicitly cite scripture, he scripturalizes the PN by recasting recognizable words of scripture so that the events at Gethsemane speak powerfully to the prophetic expectations of Zech 13:7 that are alluded to in the preceding passage (Mark 14:26–31).22 Mark’s account draws on the well-attested Second Temple ritual which is known for its reliable results, thereby allowing God’s silence to speak to the events that have been foretold by the prophecy, namely Jesus’ seeming abandonment by both God and his friends.23 Mark’s account uses the strong expectation of the ritual’s efficacy and turns it on its head. This fits well the Gospel’s performative qualities and its heightened sense of ironic drama.24 Matthew accentuates the ritual features of the event to make the effect of Mark’s account even more explicit. In this way, Matthew makes improvements by helping his readers to recognize more easily the ritualized features of the scene. Luke, on the other hand, recasts the prayer in a completely different set 22

23

24

This may also be an allusion to 2 Sam 15:16–30, when David’s friend Ahithophel betrays him by joining Absalom, David goes up barefoot to the Mount of Olives to weep and pray to God. Boring notes this scene in his discussion of Mark 14:27 (Mark, 393). David’s prayer appears to have the same aim as the penitential prayers, namely a desire for some sign of recommitment, which David does receive in part in the form of Hushai’s allegiance (2 Sam 15:32–33). Mark Goodacre writes, “Neither Jesus nor the reader hears God’s voice, in answer to this prayer, there is silence [sic]. Now God’s will is established by what already stands written in the Scriptures.… The Scriptures are the answer to Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane” (“Scripturalization in Mark’s Crucifixion Narrative,” in The Trial and Death of Jesus: Essays on the Passion Narrative in Mark, ed. G. Van Oyen and T. Shepherd, CBET 45 [Leuven: Peeters, 2006], 38). Sweat describes well the significant role that God’s omnipotence plays in how this scene should be understood (The Theological Role of Paradox in the Gospel of Mark, LNTS 492 [London: Bloomsbury, 2013], 13–27, 115–32; on abandonment in Mark 15:34, see Campbell (“‘Why did you abandon me?’ Abandonment Christology in Mark’s Gospel,” in The Trial and Death of Jesus: Essays on the Passion Narrative in Mark, ed. G. Van Oyen and T. Shepherd, CBET 45 [Leuven: Peeters, 2006], 99–117) and Rindge (“Reconfiguring the Akedah and Recasting God: Lament and Divine Abandonment in Mark,” JBL 131 [2011]: 755–74).

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of circumstances. Some say that Luke had a special concern to distance Jesus from any display of grief (λύπη), since this would have been negatively viewed in the Hellenistic world.25 While it is not possible to speak precisely about the demographics of Luke’s readers, his version of Jesus’ prayer at the Mount of Olives speaks well to the expected effects of this Second Temple ritual since it also ties the prayer to prophetic and visionary experiences.26 While some manuscripts of Luke omit this detail, one of the effects of Jesus’ prayer is an encounter with an angel (Lk 22:43–44). Other echoes of Mark’s Gethsemane event have been recognized by scholars beyond the Synoptic parallels. It is possible that the Fourth Gospel is aware of the controversy generated by Jesus’ prayer and that it voices an objection to a misunderstanding of Jesus’ prayer at John 12: 27–29.27 Nevertheless, because the actual details of the prayer are not provided, it is not possible to know this with certainty.28 What is notable for our purposes is how the brief scene in this Gospel makes it clear that Jesus’ prayer was efficacious, for it is met with a response from God and is also heard by the crowd. This is, in fact, the only passage in John where God breaks through and speaks: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (John 12:28). Many in the crowd are said to also hear this sound which is likened to thunder (12:29).29 In addition to John, an even more distant echo may be acknowledged in Heb 5:7–9. There the 25

26

27

28

29

Joel B. Green, “Jesus on the Mount of Olives (Luke 22:39–46): Tradition and Theology,” JSNT 26 (1986): 29–48; Jerome H. Neyrey, “The Absence of Jesus’ Emotions: The Lucan Redaction of Lk 22:39–46,” Biblica 61 (1980): 155–59. For a discussion of the negative connotations of λύπη in Stoic philosophy, see John Gavin (“‘The Grief Willed by God’: Three Patristic Interpretations of 2 Cor 7:10,” Gregorianum 91 [2010]: 427–42); for a discussion of the diverse cultural understanding of λύπη among pagans in the Roman Empire, see Laura Nasrallah, “Grief in Corinth,” in Contested Spaces: Houses and Temples in Roman Antiquity and New Testament, ed. D.L. Balch and A. Weissenrieder, WUNT 285 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 109–40; both essays speak about λύπη in the context of 2 Cor 7. While some manuscripts of Luke omit this detail, one of the effects of Jesus’ prayer is an encounter with an angel (Luke 22:43–44). Green understands Jesus’ prayer largely through the lens of martyrology; the assistance from an angel appears in 3 Macc 6:18–29; Dan 3:25 (“Jesus on the Mount of Olives,” 40–41); we maintain, however, that the association between prayer and visionary experiences is an expectation that is stronger in the Second Temple penitential rituals, e.g., Dan 9:20–23; 10:2–9. “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour” (John 12:27). Mary Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 269–70. We will not engage with the details in John 12 as they might relate to Mark’s Gethsemane, but only note that these verses speak to the controversial reception of this prayer even during the time of the NT writers.

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author states that Jesus “offered up prayers and supplications to the one who was able to save him from death, with loud cries and tears, and he was heard because of his submission” (ὃς ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ δεήσεις τε καὶ ἱκετηρίας πρὸς τὸν δυνάμενον σῴζειν αὐτὸν ἐκ θανάτου μετὰ κραυγῆς ἰσχυρᾶς καὶ δακρύων προσενέγκας καὶ εἰσακουσθεὶς ἀπὸ τῆς εὐλαβείας). Commentators on this passage have long observed that the Gethsemane scene was the most likely source for this reference.30 The insistence that Jesus’ prayer was heard flies in the face of the account given in Mark and Matthew, yet comports with John 12:27– 28, which speaks to the efficacious effects of the prayer against the reading of abandonment that is crucial for Mark’s Passion. Second Temple penitential rituals are well attested and speak to the reliability of the ritual in producing two effects: a response from God and a pro-social effect among the people, both of which are not achieved in Mark 14:32–42. The silence from God and the disappointing behavior of the disciples underscore the ironic way in which Mark’s PN understands Jesus’s Passion as a necessary fulfillment of the total abandonment prophesied in Zech 13:7 (Mark 14:27–30).

JESUS’ PRAYER AS A SECOND TEMPLE PRAYER (MARK 14:32–42) Discussion of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane (Mark 14:32–42) must begin with the observation that the image of Jesus presented by Mark, both here and throughout the PN, departs in a striking way from the image of Jesus as a powerful healer and exorcist that prevails in the earlier chapters of 30

H.W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989) discusses the possible understandings of this passage, including that this alludes to a “divergent Gethsemane tradition” (148), preferring to see these verses in light of “a traditional Jewish ideal of a righteous person’s prayer” (148–49). While we cannot decisively determine that the Hebrews passage (5:7–10) refers to Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane, it is fitting to include this passage as an echo of Gethsemane. Another possibility is to understand Heb. 5:7–10 as influenced by the prayer in Ps 94:6 LXX (δεῦτε προσκυνήσωμεν καὶ προσπέσωμεν αὐτῷ καὶ κλαύσωμεν ἐναντίον κυρίου τοῦ ποιήσαντος ἡμᾶς), which includes penitential elements like “weeping” that are absent in MT Ps 95. This is relevant since the LXX Ps 94 is given extensive discussion in the immediate context of Hebrew 5:7–10 (at chs. 3–4). Several scholars have noted positively the connection between Heb. 5:7–10 and Gethsemane, including Joachim Jeremias, “Hbr 5:7–10,” ZNW 43–44 (1950–53): 107–11; Reuben E. Omark, “The Saving of the Savior: Exegesis and Christology in Hebrews 5:7–10,” Interpretation 12 (1958): 39–51; Feuillet, “L’évocation,” 49–53; Ben Witherington III, Letters and Homilies for Jewish Christians: A Socio-Rhetoric Commentary on Hebrews, James and Jude (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2007), 200–01.

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Mark’s Gospel.31 In the PN, Jesus is thoroughly humbled and completely stripped of the extraordinary power he displayed during his ministry. Without engaging in the significant source-critical questions behind the strikingly different portraits of Jesus in the ministry portions of the Gospel and the PN, it is sufficient to say that the strong image of Jesus that appears prior to the PN fits well the ritual requirements that the prayer should be enacted by a highly esteemed religious leader. According to Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ prayer takes place at night in a garden called Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives very near the Temple. Jesus is with the same three disciples who were present with him at the Transfiguration scene in Mark 9:2–8.32 His prayer is introduced by the prophetic words that the disciples who are with him will all become deserters (14:27–30). Here the author of the second Gospel places in Jesus’ mouth the prophecy that the shepherd will be struck down and the sheep lost.33 While readers of Mark’s Gospel have been prepared well for the inevitable death and resurrection of Christ with the three predictions in 8:31–9:1; 9:30–32; 10:32–34, the Zechariah passage underscores the fact that the events that follow should be understood as fulfillment of prophecy. Jesus adds yet another reference to his being raised up and his plan to go before them to Galilee (14:28), thus directing the reader’s attention to the future events of the cross and resurrection. At this point, Peter passionately insists that he will not desert Jesus, to which Jesus foretells Peter’s three-fold denial, a response that is met with Peter’s further pledge of loyalty (14:31). These events which introduce the Gethsemane scene set the stage for the total abandonment of Jesus in the PN writ large. In a sense, Zechariah’s prophetic words of total desertion finds their immediate fulfillment in the disciples’ three-fold failure to stay awake at Gethsemane; indeed, they will also completely desert him at the arrest (14:50), and Peter will also deny him three times. It is also the case that Jesus’ prayer in Mark 14:32–42 receives no immediate response from God, thus mirroring Jesus’ abandonment by his friends. The scripted words of the psalmist are placed on Jesus’ lips in the crucifixion scene: 31

32

33

Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 676. There are some intertextual links between the Transfiguration and Jesus’ prayer at the Mount of Olives in Luke’s Gospel. The second person plural aorist imperative in Zech 13.7 (πατάξατε) is revised to the first-person (πατάξω, Mark 14:27), in order to more clearly express in the words of Jesus that God is the one who remains in control of the events that strike down the shepherd (Jesus); see Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Ada: Baker Academic Press, 2016), 81–82.

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“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34; cf. Ps 22:2; LXX Ps 21:2) and express the depths of Jesus’ suffering.34 While the tearing of the temple curtain or the empty tomb can be seen as God’s immediate response to Jesus’ cry on the cross (15:38), there is no clear immediate response to Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer from God.35 For the reader of the Gospel, Gethsemane is understood through the lens of the three Passion predictions; the suffering and death of Jesus is necessary to fulfill the prophetic expectation. Gethsemane is notable for the dramatic display of emotions expressed and the petitionary language used. The scene begins with a clear statement of Jesus’ emotional distress (Mark 14:33–34). He separates from these three companions after urging them to stay awake and falls to the ground (ἔπιπτεν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς; 14:35). His prayer consists of three petitions asking God—“for whom all things are possible”—to spare him the suffering that is to come (14:35–36, 39). The words in these petitions have been 34

35

There are diverging views about how to understand Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross, which is itself a reference to MT Ps 22:2 (LXX Ps 21:2). Various scenes from Mark 15 draw upon the language and imagery in this lament psalm: dividing Jesus’ clothing (LXX Ps 21:19 and Mark 15:24), wagging heads (LXX Ps 21:8 and Mark 15:29), cruel taunts that Jesus should save himself (LXX Ps 21:9 and Mark 15:30; LXX Ps 21:9 and Mark 15:31b), reproach (LXX Ps 21:7 and Mark 15:32b); see Holly J. Carey, Jesus’ Cry from the Cross, LNTS 398 (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 140–43 for a full discussion. Some of the debates about reading Mark’s PN through the lens of total abandonment go back to early studies that puzzled over the implications of seeing the Gospels as a fulfillment of scripture: does this mean that the Gospels are solely and simply mythical (non-historical) stories based on the prophetic traditions or do they speak to some historical event? See Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1926), 156–78. That Jesus’ cry on the cross expressed his deeply felt human experience of abandonment by God and his friends is a common understanding; see, e.g., John D. Crossan, “Form for Absence: The Markan Creation of Gospel,” Semeia 12 (1978): 41–55; Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, 2 vols., ABRL (New York: Doubleday, 1994). Some have strongly resisted seeing Mark’s crucifixion scene as a story of total abandonment by God. For Hays, Jesus’ crucifixion does not have to be read as a total abandonment if we assume that Mark understood Jesus and God to be one and the same (Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 79–86, esp. 84). Donahue and Harrington take the view that the citation of this verse from Ps 22 (LXX Ps 21) speaks of total abandonment, but the intent is to draw upon the culmination of the Psalm which speaks of “confidence in God’s power to act and to vindicate the suffering righteous speaker” (The Gospel of Mark, Sacra Pagina [Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002], 451). These topics are well navigated by Carey, Jesus’ Cry from the Cross. It is possible to imagine the illocutionary force of Jesus’ words in Mark 14:41–42 as expressing the effect of a renewed resolve to face what is about to happen. Jesus says: “Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up! Let’s go! See my betrayer is at hand!” (14.41–42). Perhaps the effect would resemble that of Judith’s prayer which emboldened her to face the difficult events that followed (10:1–5, 19, 23); I wish to thank Chris Keith for this suggestion.

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studied in light of the petitionary language in the Lord’s Prayer known from Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark.36 Each of Jesus’ petitions is followed by the report that the disciples were sleeping. They had all failed miserably to keep Jesus’ command to them to keep watch. The orchestration of events indicates that the Markan author wants us to see the disciples’ three-fold failure as part of the ironic and notable fulfillment of the foretelling of desertion in 14:27, which is realized at Jesus’ arrest (Mark 14:50) and, of course, in Peter’s three denials (14:68, 70, 71), all of which reinforce the understanding that Mark’s PN is programmatically a story of prophecy fulfilled. Most commentaries understand Jesus’ grief-stricken emotions as the spontaneous eruption of his interior weakness and evidence of his human fear.37 The following sections present Jesus’ bodily experiences, including his emotions, and words as evidence that Mark understands Gethsemane as the scripted re-enactment of a penitential prayer. This is not to say that ritual re-enactment of grief precludes any first-hand experience of anguish, nor is it the case that Jesus did not experience any actual suffering in the Passion, but rather to note that Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane has many scripted elements, including the scripting of emotion. We have previously discussed (section 1) how a phenomenological and integrative understanding of the experience of prayer is preferable over a strictly form-critical understanding of prayer which only considers words apart from bodily practices. Thus, in contrast to most studies of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane that focus almost exclusively on the petitions or the words of Jesus, we begin first with the details that are given about Jesus’ bodily posture before turning to the words of Jesus’ prayer in Mark 14:32–42.

RITUALIZING JESUS’ BODY AT GETHSEMANE Modern assumptions about prayer often understand it as an authentic eruption of interior thoughts, desires, and feelings. This is especially true in the case of expressions of mourning in which the body’s display is 36

37

Elements from Jesus’ petitions in Mark’s Gethsemane have been seen in the petitionary language found in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and Luke; calling God “father” (αββα ὁ πατήρ; Mark 14:36), God’s will, and the reference to temptation. See M.D. Goulder, “The Composition of the Lord’s Prayer,” JTS 14 (1963): 32–45; Graham Smith, “The Matthean ‘Additions’ to the Lord’s Prayer,” ExpT 82 (1970): 54–55; S. Van Tilborg, “A Form-Criticism of the Lord’s Prayer,” NovT 14 (1972): 94–105; W.O. Walker Jr., “The Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and in John,” NTS 28 (1982): 237–56. Donahue and Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, 411; Boring, Mark, 398.

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taken to be the outpouring of the interior grief that is felt. In the past twenty years, scholars have noted well that the body’s practices are not produced by interior thoughts, but rather religious practices are the very mechanism by which interiority is generated. The move to recognize the importance of religious practices has become a marker of the scholarly discussions of religion since the early 2000s, largely resulting from the increased globalization of the academy to include contemporary forms of religion that are heavily practice-based.38 Ultimately such practice-based models of religion are more useful for thinking about the study of prayer and ritual during the late Second Temple period. With respect to the body and its display of emotions, this section will consider Mark 14:32–42 first and foremost as a ritual performance of a significant Second Temple prayer for covenant re-making. Both Mark and Matthew depict Jesus as having “fallen on the ground” (καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπιπτεν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς καὶ προσηύχετο; Mark 14:35 // καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ προσευχόμενος; Matt 26:39), a prayer posture that is ritually important in Second Temple prayers. According to Ezra 10:1, “Ezra prayed, and confessed, weeping, and collapsing before the house of God” (i.e., the Temple; ‫ֹלהים‬ ִ ‫ּומ ְתנַ ֵּפל ִל ְפנֵ י ֵּבית ָה ֱא‬ ִ ‫ּוכ ִה ְתוַ ּד ֹתֹו ּב ֶֹכה‬ ְ ‫)ּוכ ִה ְת ַּפ ֵּלל ֶעזְ ָרא‬. ְ The word that appears here and translated as “collapsing” is the same word that is used for Moses’ intercessory prayer of re-making the covenant after the golden calf (Exod 32–34), an event that is retold in Deut 9:18, 25.39 It is also noteworthy that the verb for “collapsing” in prayer (‫ )התנפל‬appears only in these two contexts in the entirety of the Tanakh, the same two See Mahmood, The Politics of Piety. Critiques of the modern West have come from non-Western scholars and have been voiced in postcolonial studies, the most influential of which is Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); for a summary, see Julian Go, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 39 Harkins, “The Pro-Social Role,” 486–90. Deut 9:25 reads: “I collapsed before the LORD; for forty days and forty nights; that I had collapsed because the LORD said that he would utterly destroy you (pl.)!” (‫ת־א ְר ָּב ִעים‬ ַ ‫וָ ֶא ְתנַ ַּפל ִל ְפנֵ י יְ הוָ ה ֵאת ַא ְר ָּב ִעים ַהּיֹום וְ ֶא‬ ‫י־א ַמר יְ הוָ ה ְל ַה ְׁש ִמיד ֶא ְת ֶכם‬ ָ ‫)ה ַּליְ ָלה ֲא ֶׁשר ִה ְתנַ ָּפ ְל ִּתי ִּכ‬. ַ Instead of a verb for collapsing in prayer, the LXX of Deut 9 uses a word that is the same as that used for Moses’ intercessory prayer in Exod 32:11, making the connection more explicit between these two scenes: “Moses implored the Lord his God” (καὶ ἐδεήθη Μωυσῆς ἔναντι κυρίου τοῦ θεοῦ; LXX Exod 32:11; cf. MT Exod 32:11, which reads, “Moses implored the face of the LORD his God” [‫ֹלהיו‬ ֑ ָ ‫הו֣ה ֱא‬ ָ ְ‫ת־ּפ ֵנ֖י י‬ ְ ‫)]וַ יְ ַ ֣חל מ ֶֹׁ֔שה ֶא‬. It should be noted that the verb for “implore” (‫ )חלה‬is also brought together with the verb for collapsing in prayer (‫ )התנפל‬in 1QH 8.29. Significantly, the language of collapsing in prayer appears at 1QH 4:30; 5:12; 8:24 in certain Deuteronomic prayers at Qumran; see Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study,” 306–07. 38

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passages that speak about the emotional covenant re-making ritual that Ezra and Moses perform at Deut 9:18, 25 (twice); and Ezra 10:1. Matthew routinely revises several Markan references to “falling” as “prostration,”40 an improvement that results in a more ceremonial retelling of the Markan versions. It is notable that Matthew chooses to preserve Mark’s language of “falling” here at Gethsemane41 because falling is the distinctive feature of this ritual reenactment. The characteristic feature of Mark’s account of Jesus’ bodily posture at Gethsemane, namely that Jesus fell to the ground in prayer, can be compared with this Second Temple scene of Ezra’s prayer, itself a reenactment of Moses’ paradigmatic prayer after the golden calf incident. Notably, the LXX of Deut 9 and Ezra 10 do not preserve a word for “falling” or “collapsing.” Moses’ prayer uses a word for imploring (δέομαι) at LXX Deut 9:18, 25; while the LXX Ezra 10:1 has the word προσευχόμενος, the same word that is used for praying in Mark 14:35// Matt 26:39. Nevertheless, the image of Ezra falling or collapsing during his prayer is preserved in a Second Temple text known as 1 Esdras, a Greek work that revises various events that took place after the return to Judea.42 In that text, the figure of Ezra is elevated even higher than his already esteemed rank in the familiar accounts of his deeds known from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Readers of 1 Esdras are given the additional detail that the garments that he tears in preparation for his prayer (Ezra 9:3) were “holy garments” (διέρρηξα τὰ ἱμάτια καὶ τὴν ἱερὰν ἐσθῆτα), a detail that is mentioned twice in 1 Esd 8:68 and 70. This term can be understood as an equivalent to the “holy garments” reserved for the high priest Aaron and his sons according to Exod 28:4.43 Thus, it is noteworthy that 1 Esdras elevates the figure of Ezra beyond the status he enjoyed as a skilled scribe (Ezra 7:6, 11; cf. Neh 8:1, 4, 13; 12:36) and 40

41

42

43

E.g., The phrase, προσεκύνει αὐτῷ in Matt 8:2 revises γονυπετῶν αὐτόν in Mark 1:40; προσεκύνει in Matt 9:18 revises πίπτει πρὸς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ in Mark 5:22; προσεκύνει αὐτῷ in Matt 15:25 revises προσέπεσεν πρὸς τοὺς πόδας αὐτου in Mark 7:25. Some form of προσκυνέω appears thirteen times in Matt 2:2, 8, 11; 4:9, 10; 8:2; 9:18; 14:33; 15:25; 18:26; 20:20; 28:9, 17; in contrast to the two appearances at Mark 5:6; 15:19. R.M. Lozano, The Proskynesis of Jesus in the New Testament, LNTS 609 (New York: T&T Clark, 2020). According to Japhet, the author of 1 Esdras “was not satisfied with the picture of this period portrayed by his predecessors and wished to correct it—while nevertheless making abundant use of his predecessors’ work” (Sara Japhet, “1 Esdras: Its Genre, Literary Form, and Goals,” in Investigation into the Priority and Nature of 1 Esdras, ed. Lisbeth S. Fried [Atlanta: SBL Press, 2011], 209–24, here 210). Japhet, “1 Esdras,” 219–20.

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priest (Ezra 10:10, 16; cf. Neh 8:2) in the Tanakh to the status of high priest (ὁ ἀρχιερεὺς) in 1 Esd 9:40. For our discussion of Jesus’ prayer posture, this account of Ezra’s prayer according to 1 Esdras 8 preserves a reference to him collapsing in prayer, a curious detail that we have already noted as absent in LXX Ezra 10:1, but present in MT Ezra 10:1. According to the NRSV 1 Esdras 8:91 (LXX 1 Esd 8:88; Vulg. 3 Esd 8:92), Ezra is said to be praying (προσευχόμενος) whilst having fallen down on the ground (χαμαιπετής) in front of the temple. While Ezra was praying and making his confession, weeping and having fallen on the ground before the temple. (καὶ ὅτε προσευχόμενος Εσδρας ἀνθωμολογεῖτο κλαίων χαμαιπετὴς ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ ἱεροῦ; LXX 1 Esd 8:88; Vulg. 3 Esd 8:92)

The word that is used here to describe Ezra’s bodily posture is based on the same root, πίπτω, that appears in both Mark (καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπιπτεν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς καὶ προσηύχετο; 14:35) and Matthew (καὶ προελθὼν μικρὸν ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ προσευχόμενος; 26:39). The version of Ezra’s prayer in 1 Esdras preserves the verbal link to Moses’ prayer after the calf, in which he was also said to have collapsed to the ground, a detail found in MT Ezra 10:1 but not in LXX Ezra 10:1. How a reader might visualize Mark’s account of Jesus’ nighttime anguished prayer in the vicinity of the Temple is not dissimilar to the way one would imagine Ezra’s prayer in 1 Esdras, an event that was ultimately a Second Temple reenactment of Moses’ foundational covenant re-making prayer. Jesus’ bodily posture, the nighttime setting of his prayer, and the location of the scene near the Jerusalem Temple are all details from the Gethsemane scene that point to a Second Temple ritual context. Modern scholars, strongly shaped by a strictly canonical perspective, may not have been familiar with the strong links that Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane has to other Second Temple ritual texts.

JESUS’ WORDS AT GETHSEMANE According to Mark 14:33–34, Jesus “began to be greatly disturbed and distressed” (καὶ ἤρξατο ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν; 14:33b). After this opening detail about Jesus’ emotional state, Jesus says: “My soul is deeply grieved unto death” (περίλυπός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου; 14:34// Matt 26:38). The Markan author does not offer this as a quotation of Jesus’ own words which erupt from within him; instead they are the scripted words of the psalmist. This is a well-recognized reference to the

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refrain of the individual lament in LXX Ps 41:6, 12; 42:5 (MT Ps 42:6, 12; 43:5).44 Notably, Mark’s account of Jesus’ words on the cross is also enscripted by the psalmist’s words from Ps 22:2—repeated also in Matthew’s crucifixion scene (LXX Ps 21:1). The use of the psalmist’s words speaks to evangelist’s understanding that this scene was scripted by prophetic expectation and that the events of the PN are a fulfillment of scripture (Mark 14:49b). So too, the three-fold repetition of commanding the three disciples to remain awake (Mark 14:34, 38, 39), and finding that they have fallen short of this command each time (vv. 37, 40, 41) contribute to the quality of this scene as a ritual performance. The psalmist’s word for ‘deeply grieved’ (περίλυπός; LXX Ps 41:6, 12; 42:5) is a relatively uncommon word, appearing only eight times in the entirety of the LXX, and only four times in the NT.45 Two of those instances appear in the version of Ezra’s penitential prayer found in the Second Temple text known as 1 Esdras which is a retelling of Ezra’s prayer described in Ezra 9–10. In 1 Esdras, Ezra is said twice to be overcome with “excessive grief” (περίλυπος): 71

As soon as I heard these things I tore my garments and my holy mantle, and pulled out hair from my head and beard, and sat down in anxiety and grief. 72And all who were ever moved at the word of the Lord of Israel gathered around me, as I mourned over this iniquity, and I sat grief-stricken until the evening sacrifice. (NRSV 1 Esd 8:71–72) καὶ ἅμα τῷ ἀκοῦσαί με ταῦτα διέρρηξα τὰ ἱμάτια καὶ τὴν ἱερὰν ἐσθῆτα καὶ κατέτιλα τοῦ τριχώματος τῆς κεφαλῆς καὶ τοῦ πώγωνος καὶ ἐκάθισα σύννους καὶ περίλυπος. καὶ ἐπισυνήχθησαν πρός με ὅσοι ποτὲ ἐπεκινοῦντο τῷ ῥήματι κυρίου τοῦ Ισραηλ ἐμοῦ πενθοῦντος ἐπὶ τῇ ἀνομίᾳ καὶ ἐκαθήμην περίλυπος ἕως τῆς δειλινῆς θυσίας. (LXX 1 Esd 8:68–69; Vulg. 3 Esd 8:72–73)

Matthew can be said to improve Mark’s account for his readers by accentuating the connection to this Second Temple ritual performed by Ezra by emphasizing Jesus’ emotional state. He revises Mark’s words “distressed and dismayed” (ἐκθαμβεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν) to “grieved and troubled” (λυπεῖσθαι καὶ ἀδημονεῖν), effectively doubling the language of grief in this passage and reminding readers of the two-fold reference 44

45

Richard Hays, “Christ Prays the Psalms: Israel’s Psalter as Matrix of Early Christology”, in The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 101–18; Goodacre, “Scripturalization,” 33–47; Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 387–433. Gen 4:6; 1 Esd 8:68, 69; Tob 3:1; LXX Pss 41:6, 12; 42:5; LXX Dan 2:12; Matt 26:38; Mark 6:26; 14:34; Luke 18:23.

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to Ezra’s excessive grief (περίλυπος) in 1 Esdras. While modern scholars have strong disciplinary biases in favor of the MT and LXX versions of books that are preserved in the Tanakh today, it is reasonable to think that the ancient evangelist was familiar with broader Second Temple traditions, such as that preserved in 1 Esdras. Gethsemane was controversial for early readers because Jesus’ emotional display and petitionary language was seen to be unseemly for a divine man. Assuming Markan priority, it appears that Matthew has further emphasized Jesus’ grief-stricken emotional state—something that was problematic for early Greek and Roman readers who had a strong social expectation that the display of grief was women’s work. We propose that Matthew’s change is best understood as an improvement because it accentuated the scene’s scripted ritual features. For Mark’s and Matthew’s readers, Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane could have been understood as a reenactment of an important ritual act that was well-attested in Second Temple literature.

ENGENDERING RITUAL GRIEF Ritual grief was widely practiced in the Second Temple period in ways that would have been distinct from the classical expectations held by the ancient Christians.46 Prayers and practices in early Judaism strategically layered the emotions associated with grief with prayers that further cultivate the experience of self-diminishment. The stock features of these Second Temple prayers (viz., lament, petitions, confession of sin/confession of God’s greatness, retellings of past failings from foundational narratives) all cultivate the experience of self-diminishment and liminality. They appear alongside funerary practices that also contribute to the experience of liminality (viz., weeping, ashes, lowering the self onto the knees, prostration, falling on the ground). These prayers and practices were performed by high-status individuals.47 Worthy figures such as Moses, Ezra, and Daniel offer prayers and perform ritual acts that re-enact the desolation and anguish of the foundational experiences of loss that accompanied the initial breaking and re-making of the covenant in the wilderness 46

47

Gary A. Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press), 1991; Olyan, Biblical Mourning. While ‘mourning’ refers to the social practices attached to grief; ‘grief’ is the emotion of desolation and feeling of loss. The modern period frequently pairs bereavement and loss with the impairment of agency and normal functioning.

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and the sixth-century experience of exile and loss of the Temple. Their prayers were scripted to cultivate self-diminishment, but they were not autobiographical because these individuals were not confessing their own personal sins. Rather they were confessing the people’s failure to obey the covenant (e.g., Moses in Exod 34:9; cf. Ezra 9:6–15//1 Esd 8:74–90; and Dan 9:4–19).48 Second Temple references to ritual mourning practices and prayers differed strikingly from other classical expressions of grief, which overwhelmingly associated such practices with women. Plato looked with disdain upon practices of public mourning and consigned these roles to women and to low-status men so that viewers would not be encouraged to imitate them (Republic, Book III.387a–388c). Plutarch expresses similar views in his Letter of Condolence to Apollonius (§ 113): They say that the lawgiver of the Lycians ordered his citizens, whenever they mourned, to clothe themselves first in women’s garments and then to mourn, wishing to make it clear that mourning is womanish and unbecoming to decorous men who lay claim to the education of the free-born. Yes, mourning is verily feminine, and weak, and ignoble, since women are more given to it than men, and barbarians more than Greeks, and inferior men more than better men.49

Classical antiquity disdainfully regarded these ritual practices when they were performed by noble men because high-status men were expected to express their grief in more fitting ways—through measured and eloquent forms of speech. It was unseemly for a noble man to display unrestrained grief because it was associated strongly with the public mourning behaviors of women—this does not mean, however, that ancient men never wept in public.50 It is important here to emphasize that these gender-specific social expectations for public mourning should not overdetermine 48

49

50

Moses draws himself into the events, even though he is not guilty of any crime, by saying: “If now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance” (‫אתנוּ וּנְ ַח ְל ָתּנוּ‬ ֵ ‫וּל ַח ָטּ‬ ְ ‫ וְ ָס ַל ְח ָתּ ַל ֲעוֹנֵ נוּ‬Exod 34:9). So too, Ezra, as an outsider who has just been sent to Jerusalem, has not personally violated the laws concerning intermarriage. Daniel is also noted for his commendable virtue. The confession of sins and petitionary language in these prayers were scripted elements that functioned as a strategy to achieve the effect of liminality and were not necessarily autobiographical outpourings of the pray-er (Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study”). Frank C. Babbitt, trans., Plutarch, Moralia, Volume II, LCL 222 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 165, 167. See Seneca, Letter 99, “On Consolation to the Bereaved,” in which a friend named Lucilius is scolded for behaving like a woman by displaying unrestrained grief; for discussion, see Stephen Barton, “Eschatology and the Emotions in Early Christianity,” JBL 130.3 (2011): 571–91, here 584–85.

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our understanding of actual ancient peoples, whom we would expect, of course, to be free to weep and wail regardless of their gendered state. Embodied displays of grief and anguish that were enacted by important male leaders in late Second Temple texts (e.g., weeping, wailing, fasting, tearing clothes, positioning the body in a humbled state) were, by and large, behaviors that the classical world would have closely identified with women’s work of ritual mourning.51 In the ancient world, emotions “looked more to agency and effect on social standing than to one’s inner state.”52 Studies of emotion in recent years have demonstrated how the English language masks the complexity that these embodied and cognitive experiences had in the pre-modern world.53 Modern understandings of emotion do not align with pre-modern notions of the passions and the affections. Looking at emotions from a historical perspective is, therefore, a significant way of considering them, although such historical studies do not claim to diagnose actual individuals and their bodily experiences of emotions, but only how select people chose to disclose and represent how they felt in the texts and other media that have survived.54 So too, modern discussions of grief consider the ways in which grief is and is not an emotion. In the classical world, grief (λύπη) was ambiguous. It was not classified by Aristotle as a passion; instead, it was understood to resemble a physical pain in so far as it was experienced by all, irrespective of social standing.55 It is significant to note that even among the Greeks, grief had the capacity to cause other physical conditions and cognitive states; in other words, grief itself was a generative state insofar as it could bring a person from one experience to another.56 David 51

52

53 54

55 56

Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (New York: Routledge, 1995), 98–126; Corley, Maranatha, 21–64. In his homily 62 on John 11, Chrysostom speaks of professional mourning strictly as women’s work and critiques the ways in which it is conducted in his day (Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Guiding Grief: Liturgical Poetry and Ritual Lamentation in Early Byzantium,” in Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After, eds. Margaret Alexiou and Douglas Cairns [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017], 199–216, here 199–200). Again, these references speak to a general cultural expectation for gendered behavior in public mourning— these expectations should not lead to the conclusion that individuals never acted contrary to these social expectations. David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 258. Thomas Dixon, “Revolting Passions,” Modern Theology 27 (2011): 298–312. For a historical study of emotions and their manifestation in certain social groups, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context 1 (2010): 1–33, here 11. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, 244–58. One of the dangers of grief was its ability to incite the passion for revenge. Galen the ancient physician understood grief categorically as a cause, not an emotion, which could

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Konstan writes, “The Greeks and Romans recognized the power of grief, and devised ways of assuaging it, from philosophical advice to official limits on the period of mourning.”57 For the purposes of our discussion, it is clear that grief in the ancient world was engendered differently by Greeks and Romans than by Jews. Significantly, all groups in the ancient world acknowledge mourning as a performance, thus highlighting how ancient attitudes differed from modern expectations, which tend to regard expressions of mourning strictly as eruptions of an interior state. In both Second Temple Judaism and classical Greek culture mourning rituals were heavily regulated by social conventions and public policy. Rituals of mourning frequently employed acts of self-diminishment in which the mourner’s own body was made to express the liminality of death and to demonstrate the loss of power in this world (e.g., covering oneself in ashes, tearing the hair, being brought physically lower than full upright posture.58 Performing funerary practices along with discursive penitential prayer traditions (e.g., confession of sins and petitions) are two different strategies for layering experiences of grief, understood here to be desolation marked intensely by loss. Such an experiential effect may account for the references to covenant experiences that often accompany penitential prayers in the Second Temple period, because the phenomenal experience of diminishment assists in reconstituting the moment of covenantal encounter as one finds him-/herself in the presence of a terrifying sovereign deity.59 By expanding our scholarly attention to the phenomenal experience of these Second Temple prayer forms, we can more profitably examine the relationship between ritual practices and their meaningful function within larger social mechanisms. Scholars have already observed that penitential prayers were frequently associated with covenant renewal experiences that re-enacted the encounter between Moses and YHWH in the foundational covenant re-making experience (Exod 32–34; Deut 9). These performative emotions allow for the act of re-experiencing foundational events with a first-hand intensity.60

57 58 59 60

then lead to various other physical and emotional states; see Daniel King, “Galen and Grief: The Construction of Grief in Galen’s Clinical Work,” in Emotions in Greece and Rome: Texts, Images, Material Culture, vol. 2 of Unveiling Emotions, ed. Angelos Chaniotis and Pierre Ducrey (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2013), 251–72. Konstan, The Emotions of Ancient Greeks, 257. Olyan, Biblical Mourning; Lambert, How Repentance Became Biblical. Harkins, “A Phenomenological Study,” 303–04, 310–12. The ability to immerse oneself in reading does not depend upon the text being historically true. According to Cain Todd, “Attending Emotionally to Fiction,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 46.4 (2012): 449–65, humans have the natural capacity to suspend disbelief, even when the content is known to be fictional.

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CONCLUSION While classical historical-critical scholars often examined biblical prayers with methods like form criticism, they seldom studied Second Temple prayers at any length due to a scholarly bias that favored the study of ancient Israel’s origins over later periods. The narrative details that surrounded these Second Temple prayers often contained references to funerary practices that included weeping, fasting, and collapsing on the ground, all of which aimed to cultivate a strong emotional state within the pray-er. And so, while it is valuable to recognize the formal literary features of penitential prayer, recent scholarship on prayer literature from the Second Temple period suggests that prayers and their performance were not fixed in a rigid way but were creatively redeployed during this time. For example, the prayer in Ezra 9 lacks a petitionary element.61 It is more helpful to think of Second Temple penitential prayer as a recognizable set of phenomenal experiences which included prayer elements like the confession of sins and petitions along with various bodily practices that cultivate liminality and self-diminishment. As a set of recognizable acts, mourning rites and penitential prayers could be creatively redeployed and adapted to changing circumstances during the Second Temple period. Just as these components come together in something that is more than just the sum of its parts,62 the enactment of mourning rites and penitential prayer speaks to a larger phenomenal ritual experience that served diverse purposes in the Second Temple period, including covenant re-making, prophetic and visionary experiences, and experiences of transformation. The culturally specific emotions associated with Second Temple rituals did not easily translate from one cultural context to another. The increased scholarly attention to the Second Temple prayers and rituals during the past fifteen years makes this present inquiry into Jesus’ emotional prayer at Gethsemane a timely one. Various features in Mark’s Gethsemane account align with the Second Temple penitential prayer recorded in 1 Esdras 8:68–96, but this association may have been overlooked because 61

62

Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kgs 8:22–53 and 2 Chr 6–7 is not always included in penitential lists, but it does contain many features. See Boda Praying the Tradition, 209–13; Newman, Praying the Book, 24–52. According to emergence theory “religious experiences are best termed emergent precisely because the mixture of cognitive-emotional processes will not account for the complex, dialogical characteristics of religion” (James W. Haag and Whitney A. Bauman, “De/Constructing Transcendence: The Emergence of Religious Bodies,” in Religion and the Body: Modern Science and the Construction of Religious Meaning, Numen Book Series 138 [Leiden: Brill, 2012], 37–55, here 53).

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of a scholarly predisposition to turn first to the texts in the Tanakh or to the LXX texts that overlap with them. Mark’s ritual details are further accentuated in Matthew’s version, which effectively doubles the grief that Jesus experiences at Gethsemane, thereby highlighting a ritually significant emotion for his readers. Recognizing the ritual elements of Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemane casts light on how the author of Mark’s Gospel could be said to present the entirety of the PN as a carefully scripted story of prophecy-fulfilled which was focused on the cross, ultimately understanding the re-making of the covenant in the crucifixion.

STICKY EMOTIONS FROM SECOND TEMPLE PRAYERS: A STUDY OF PAUL’S GRIEF IN 2 CORINTHIANS Krister Stendahl begins his essay “Paul at Prayer” with the observation that we do not really know how Paul prayed because he did not leave behind any writings or collections of what we would classify formally as prayers.1 Stendahl comments that “none of the thirty or forty Pauline entries is what we would call a prayer.”2 Even so, Stendahl goes on to say that Paul’s writings are themselves “saturated by prayerful language” that reflect a deep awareness of Jewish prayers and prayer practices.3 This is true even though Stendahl notes that Paul’s prayers depart from Jewish prayers in notable ways, specifically when they are addressed to Christ instead of to God the Father. This essay uses Sara Ahmed’s theory of ‘sticky emotions’ to examine how the grief of Second Temple prayers of mourning can be said to have adhered to Paul and be present in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence, specifically in 2 Cor. Because grief is evoked in covenant renewal and remaking rituals, it is relevant given the occasion of 2 Cor, which seeks to repair the relationship between Paul and his community. The emotions and grieving dispositions that Paul describes and displays to the Corinthian readers map well onto the covenant remaking prayers and practices that are described in various Second Temple texts, and they offer a fitting theological context for Paul’s correspondence. This study proposes that the Second Temple ritual emotion of grief has been overlooked by modern scholars who prefer reading Paul’s emotions in 2 Cor exclusively as spontaneous eruptions of personal grief. I do not deny that Paul experienced genuine heartfelt personal pain. Instead, this discussion makes the simple point that emotions are more complicated than our commonplace understanding of them as individual eruptions of interior subjectivity, moving from the inside-out. Sara Ahmed’s theory of the stickiness of emotions and her understanding of groups as emoting

1 2

3

Krister Stendahl, “Paul at Prayer,” Interpretation (1980): 240–49. Stendahl, “Paul at Prayer,” 240, here is writing about the work of Donald Coggan, The Prayers of the New Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 87ff. Stendahl, “Paul at Prayer,” 240.

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agents4 are used as the foundation for my proposal that Paul’s grief can also be understood as a manifestation of the ritual emotions associated with Mosaic covenant remaking scenes (Exod 32–34; Deut 9), reflected in such Second Temple prayers Ezra 9–10 (cf. Neh 9) and in certain prayers from the Dead Sea Scrolls, like the Qumran Thanksgiving Hymn in column 8. The study of ancient Israelite and early Jewish prayer has been a largely neglected topic in biblical studies, and so it remains far from exhausted. In the case of the prayers from the Hebrew Bible, scholars seldom investigate the corpus apart from the biblical psalter. Samuel Balentine writes the following about this omission in the history of scholarship: Quite a number of studies on prayer tend to attribute both previous neglect and previous misunderstanding to something generally referred to as “Protestant bias”. One of the earliest references belongs to J. Hempel. In a 1921 lecture entitled “Aus dem Gebetsleben des Alten Testaments,” Hempel attributed the neglect of prayer both in biblical theology in general and among evangelical scholars in particular to two interrelated causes: (1) the emphasis on “intellectualism” inherited from the Reformation and the Enlightenment; and (2) in keeping with this intellectual orientation, the Protestant preference for investigation of doctrine or theory rather than issues associated with living piety.5

According to Balentine, the omission of prayer as a topic of investigation is due to the general currents in historical-critical scholarship, which tended to move toward specific intellectual topics, avoiding ritual and liturgically based aspects of religion that were suspected of superstition or emotionalism. Scholarly understandings of Paul, perhaps more than any other corpus of texts from either the Jewish or the Christian Scriptures, have focused on his thought, his theology, and the historical reconstruction of his missionary travels. Studies like Colleen Shantz’s breakthrough discussion of 2 Cor 12, Paul in Ecstasy, take up new explanatory and embodied approaches associated with religious experience.6 Her study departs from the mainstay of scholarship on Paul’s texts, which often disregard Paul’s embodiment in order to analyze texts exegetically, rhetorically, 4

5

6

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, 2014). Samuel Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 10. Balentine writes, this lecture was published together with “Die Bedeutung des Exils für die israelitische Frömmigkeit” as Gebet und Frömmigkeit im Alten Testament (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1922), 3. Colleen Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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and doctrinally.7 The omission of spiritual or “non-rational” aspects of Paul’s theology can be contextualized in the discipline of biblical studies and especially in the treatment of ancient Jewish prayer, which, as Balentine reminds us, emerges from a modern rationalist context.8 Prayer can be added to a number of common phenomena in the ancient world that have been ignored by modern scholars who viewed with disdain the irrationality or excessive emotionality connected with ritual practices. For example, many of the issues concerning rituals dealing with purity and impurity and matters of exorcism were commonplace in the ancient world.9 The supernatural and superstition also highlight the tension between ancient and modern assumptions. Dale Martin describes ‘superstition’ as “beliefs or practices that presuppose a faulty understanding about cause and effect, usually by assuming notions of causality that have been rejected by modern science but may represent long-standing popular beliefs or practices.”10 He points out that, unlike modern peoples, ancient peoples did not object to the idea of the supernatural and its agency in this world.11 In the case of ancient Judaism, Rebecca Lesses and Richard Sarason remind us that ancient Jewish ritual texts are better analyzed as performative texts than as literature.12 Michael Swartz expands this to urge us to remember that the study of all recited texts should allow for the physiological demands of performing them.13 7

8 9

10

11

12

13

Shantz writes, “Paul is disembodied by exegesis that is restricted to the analysis and comparison of texts. I hasten to add that these questions and approaches are not wrong in themselves,” Paul in Ecstasy, 3. Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 1–32. See E.P. Sanders, “Jesus, Ancient Judaism, and Modern Christianity,” in Jesus, Judaism, and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament after the Holocaust, ed. Paula Fredriksen and Adele Reinhartz (WJK Press, 2002), 31–55, esp. 35–41 on ritual and 41–42 on exorcism, which is noticeably brief in its treatment of the topic. See also G. Bazzana, Having the Spirit of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020) for an extended discussion of the phenomenon of exorcism and spirit possession. Dale Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10. Martin, Inventing Superstition, 16. Martin uses the language of “supernatural intervention” to speak about the agency that the supernatural has in this world. Rebecca Lesses, Ritual Practices to Gain Power: Angels, Incantations, and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism, Harvard Theological Studies 44 (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1998), 161–62; Richard S. Sarason, “On the Use of Method in the Modern Study of Jewish Liturgy,” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism: Theory and Practice, 6 vols., ed. William Scott Green, Brown Judaic Studies (Missoula: Scholars, 1978–85 [1978]), 1:97–172, esp. 131–37. Michael D. Swartz, “Ritual about Myth about Ritual: Towards an Understanding of the Avodah in the Rabbinic Period” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 135–55.

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While Paul speaks of his prayer life and offers formulaic prayers on behalf of his churches in his letters to them, our study does not focus on a particular prayer of Paul. Instead, I examine the effect that Second Temple covenant remaking prayers and narratives may have had on Paul given the theological occasion for 2 Cor, which is to restore a broken relationship. I argue that the grief referenced in 2 Cor can be understood as both Paul’s own heart-felt grief and as an emotional residue of the sticky ritual remembrances of covenant remaking scenes found in various Second Temple texts that speak of covenant-remaking. The letter known as Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians details Paul’s deep desire to repair his broken relationship with the church. The grief that Paul puts on display in his letter is the same that is ritually cultivated in Second Temple covenant remaking prayers and rituals, such as Ezra 9, which reenacts Moses’s remaking of the covenant after the golden calf, and the Qumran prayer found in column 8 of the Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns. Grief is a sticky emotion that adheres to these ritual remembrances and leaves its residue on Paul, deepening the emotions that he feels personally and giving them a theological dimension. Paul not only expresses his own heart-felt grief; he functions as a conduit of these Second Temple ritual remembrances to the Corinthians. Furthermore, Paul’s grief not only taps into this deep ritual remembering of covenant remaking, but also connects culturally with the city of Corinth, which was already strongly connected with grief.

GRIEF AND SARA AHMED’S CULTURAL POLITICS OF EMOTIONS One challenge of applying emotion and affect theory to texts from antiquity is in overcoming the specific modern assumptions that we bring to the topic. In the modern world, the tendency is to assume that emotions are highly personal, deeply individualized and interior experiences; however, emotions do not need to be spontaneous eruptions in order to be ‘authentic’ and real.14 Our modern context prevents us from appreciating 14

This preoccupation with distinguishing ‘authentic’ emotions from fake ones is a modern concern that is unhelpful when discussing ritually performed emotions. Ebersole critiques the modern assumption that emotions are unchanging and timeless; see Gary L. Ebersole, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse,” History of Religions 39 (2000): 211–46; reprinted in Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 185–222.

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the way emotions were regularly performed and cultivated in ritual contexts.15 This is especially true in the case of grief. Practices associated with mourning were used for various social mechanisms, not only for lamenting the deceased. The repetition of the self-diminishing practices of weeping, praying, confessing sins, and kneeling highlights the highly ritualized and performative dimension of grief in the ancient world. For example, public displays of mourning were used throughout the Roman empire in the context of various social mechanisms, including judicial proceedings.16 These practices functioned strategically within social mechanisms, going beyond the simple expression of personal anguish.17 One way to circumvent these modern assumptions about the interior individual experience of emotions is to turn to post-modern theories of emotion. Sara Ahmed introduces a different lens for thinking about the ways emotions exist within social groups, by describing a type of porosity that is associated with nations that are denigrated as being ‘soft’. Her work stems from her lived experience in Australia and modern Britain, but her observations apply well to any modern post-Enlightenment society. To be a ‘soft touch nation’ is to be taken in by the bogus: to ‘take in’ is to be ‘taken in’. The demand is that the nation should seal itself from others, if it is to act on behalf of its citizens, rather than react to the claims of immigrants and other others. The implicit demand is for a nation that is less emotional, less open, less easily moved, one that is 15

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Ritual includes the emotional reexperiencing of the text on the part of the religious practitioner; see Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). Christopher Degelmann, “Symbolic Mourning,” in Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics, ed. Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, Emiliano Urciuoli (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 447–67. In the Roman republic, close relations were permitted to display public signs of mourning to arouse compassion in the courtroom and in the streets outside of the courthouse (448). These practices of what Degelmann calls, “symbolic mourning” took place among social elites and was used to sway popular opinion, especially during times of election. The practice relied on literary traditions and lived experiences that were mutually reinforcing (452). Gary Anderson, A Time to Mourn, a Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Saul Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Angela Kim Harkins, “The Function of Prayers of Ritual Mourning in the Second Temple Period,” in Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period, ed. Mika S. Pajunen and Jeremy Penner, BZAW 486 (Berlin: de Gruyter Press, 2017), 80–101; eadem, “The Pro-social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer,” BibInt 24 (2016): 466–91; eadem, “Ritual Mourning in Daniel’s Interpretation of Jeremiah’s Prophecy,” The Journal of Cognitive Historiography 2 (2015): 14–33; Degelmann, “Symbolic Mourning,” 447–68.

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‘hard’, or ‘tough’. The use of metaphors of ‘softness’ and ‘hardness’ shows us how emotions become attributes of collectives, which get constructed as ‘being’ through ‘feeling’. Such attributes are of course gendered: the soft national body is a feminized body, which is ‘penetrated’ or ‘invaded’ by others.18

Groups—not just individuals—can experience and generate emotions. Ahmed’s study of social and cultural politics points out that emotions participate in the enscripting of thoughts and dispositions that later become normed in larger social groups.19 To be sure, such processes do not predetermine individuals in society to have these norming experiences, and they also do not prevent individuals from deviating from such experiences. In fact, one of Ahmed’s points is that individuals respond emotionally in very different ways and with varying degrees of intensity to the same event. But what Ahmed argues for, and what I wish to highlight, is the effect that emotions that begin ‘outside’ the individual can have on an individual when they move from the group into the individual.20 Ahmed is right to emphasize that this is a process of deep experiencing, since emotions are not a trait or characteristic that is simply possessed by a group or an individual. Theoretical models that commodify emotions as things that can be passed along like objects to be possessed smack too strongly of the modern individual who possesses and acquires things and property—a framework that is unhelpful for the study of ancient people. Instead, Ahmed writes that emotions are not possessed by us, but they are the experiences that allow us to recognize our responses and thus an awareness of our distinctiveness apart from the group. She writes, “It is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and ‘we’ are shaped by, even taken shape of, contact with others.”21 According to Ahmed’s model, the individual subject is something that is generated. She does not begin by assuming that the individual is present as an discrete agent. Instead, both the individual and the group are porous and emergent. Paul’s strong response of desolation in 2 Cor highlights for us as readers how his perceptions of his role and relationship with the Corinthian community differed strikingly from how the Corinthians likely received his first pastoral letter. Emotions heighten the contrast between Paul’s 18 19 20 21

Ahmed, Ahmed, Ahmed, Ahmed,

The The The The

Cultural Cultural Cultural Cultural

Politics Politics Politics Politics

of of of of

Emotions, Emotions, Emotions, Emotions,

2. 12. 8–10. 10.

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self-perception of his role in Corinth as the founder of that community and their perceptions of his authority, which diminished in comparison to his more robust Jewish rivals.22 Discussion of Paul’s emotions in 2 Cor often focuses on passages like his ‘letter of tears,’ a letter identified arguably as 2 Cor 10–13. Passages like this have often been understood by scholars as pure, genuine outpourings of affect.23 This view of Paul’s grief as a spontaneous eruptive experience appeals to most modern understandings of emotion, but it underappreciates the way emotions were rhetorically used and strategically deployed to persuade and to elevate social standing in the ancient world. Even in those larger cultural contexts that analyze Paul’s emotions as rhetorical tools, there is still the assumption that the emotions are generated rhetorically by the individual. In the specific case of Paul’s ‘letter of tears,’ Ryan Schellenberg’s discussion of Paul’s emotions in 2 Cor 10–13 departs from this trend by helpfully taking into account Paul’s marginal social status when discussing his emotional self-deprecating speech.24 Schellenberg notes that a significant number of studies of Paul’s ‘letter of tears’ has approached it as an eruption of his personal interior state: “the striking rhetorical features of 2 Cor 10–13 were considered artifacts of affect, the fossilized record of Paul’s subjectivity at this one moment in time.”25 Schellenberg’s study of Paul’s ‘fool’s speech’ (Narrenrede) offers a rhetorical analysis that further complicates how we understand the apostle’s formal rhetorical education. Schellenberg helpfully nuances the position commonly held by most scholars, who compare Paul’s speech to that used by social elites, often praising 2 Cor 10–13 as a masterful rhetorical composition.26 Ryan Schellenberg’s work attends to 22

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Jerry Sumney, Identifying Paul’s Opponents: The Question of Method in 2 Corinthians, JSNTSup 40 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990). Lawrence L. Welborn, “The Identification of 2 Corinthians 10–13 with the ‘Letter of Tears’,” NovT 37 (1995): 138–53; Ryan S. Schellenberg, Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education: Comparative Rhetoric and 2 Corinthians 10–13, ECL 10 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013). Schellenberg, Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education. In many ways, Schellenberg’s work analyzes Paul in a way that attends to his specific embodied social location, not just as a mouthpiece for a systematic theology (318). R. Schellenberg, Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education, 2. Schellenberg offers a helpful analysis of the ways Paul’s “letter of tears” (2 Cor 10–13) expresses rhetorical skill and training (Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education, 57–77). Schellenberg uses various cross-cultural examples to illustrate that the rhetorical persuasiveness of 2 Cor can be understood within Paul’s marginal social context; it does not rely on his having received an elite rhetorical education. Schellenberg, Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education, 243–308, esp. 243–54; and his later essay, “Paul, Samson Occom, and the Constraints of Boasting: A Comparative Rereading of 2 Corinthians 10–13,”

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Paul’s specific context as a marginal figure, a point that we will return to later. More than other Pauline scholars, he adds greater complexity to how we understand Paul’s emotions in 2 Cor by acknowledging his embodied social context and by nuancing how scholars have otherwise accounted for his rhetorical power. Sticky Emotions: How an Individual is Moved from the ‘Outside-In’ Sara Ahmed’s theoretical framework invites us to recognize that there is a deep ambivalence in emotions that can move both from the ‘insideout’ and from the ‘outside-in’. She write, “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.”27 This theoretical model builds on Silvan Tomkins’ and others’ understanding of affect as a social contagion, something passed along from one thing to another, with the capacity to effect an emotional change in an individual from the ‘outside-in’.28 Ahmed reminds us that emotions can also be possessed by a larger culture, such that they can then impact an individual from the ‘outside-in’. The first way that Ahmed’s work broadens our understanding of Paul’s emotions in 2 Cor is by expanding the usual way emotions are identified solely with an individual’s experience of subjectivity. She writes, “The nation becomes ‘like the individual’, a feeling subject, or a subject that ‘has feelings’.”29 This configures the larger culture to operate in a way that is similar to a massive organism, theoretically allowing for non-persons to have the capacity to express and participate in affective experiences—not just individuals. Ahmed’s framework allows for the city of Corinth to be understood as a massive grief-emoting non-human subject. This may be extended to how Second Temple affective remembrances of

27 28

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HTR 109 (2016): 512–35; cf. Hans Windisch, who had identified 2 Cor 10–13 as a Narrenrede; Der zweite Korintherbrief, 9th ed., KEK 6 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1924), 316; R. Schellenberg, Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education, 59; also Ben Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 373; Margaret M. Mitchell, “A Patristic Perspective on Pauline περιαυτολογία,” NTS 47 (2001): 354–71, here 354. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 29. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 36. Ahmed builds on the work of others who have drawn attention to the larger social dimensions of affect: Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, Vol. 3: Anger and Fear (New York: Springer, 1962); Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, “Emotional Contagion,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 2 (1993): 96–99. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 13.

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covenant remaking rituals can also be understood to generate affect within Paul as well. Ahmed’s model decenters the individual human agent of emotions and allows for the emotional agency of the larger social group, enabling us to understand the ancient city of Corinth as emoting. Laura Nasrallah’s study of grief in Corinth offers a detailed examination of the multiple ways that grief and mourning were manifest in and effected by the material culture at Corinth in the first century C.E., including reports from ancient writers who viewed the city itself as “an emblem of grief.”30 Nasrallah writes that while grief was naturally occasioned at the individual personal level, for example by the death of a child of one who was highly esteemed, it was also closely connected to other communal experiences of loss and distress. These emotional effects were generated by the Land itself and by those inhabitants within it who included the marginalized and disenfranchised: those who were in exile, political destruction, slavery, or any kind of physical injury.31 Most notably, non-living beings such as the well-established mythic ties that Corinth enjoyed with the famous tragedy of Medea’s betrayal and subsequent violent murder of her own children secured the city’s mythological ties to tragic loss.32 Devastating desolation and loss were experiences that were securely tied to the city by its long-established legends and the political circumstances of the Roman occupation of that region. Nasrallah’s study gives a marvelously thick description of a diverse first-century Roman context for Paul’s statements about grief in the Corinthian correspondence, which are particularly dense in 2 Cor. Her discussion of Corinth as a city emblematic of grief calls to mind Sara Ahmed’s point that emotions can adhere to and be effected by non-persons, including the environment, and to others besides Roman citizens, including the disenfranchised and marginalized, thereby working from the ‘outside-in’ to effect dispositions and experiences. Emotions do not need to have been generated by a specific individual, but rather can be effected by a nation or a social group, like the ancient city of Corinth. So too, Ahmed’s framework allows us to theoretically 30

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Laura Salah Nasrallah, “Grief in Corinth: The Roman City and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence,” in Contested Spaces: Houses and Temples in Roman Antiquity and the New Testament, ed. D.L. Balch and Annette Weissenrieder (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 109–39, plates 1–5, here 113. Nasrallah cites ancient informants such as Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, “Grief in Corinth,” 114. Both Euripides and Seneca wrote versions of this legend about Medea; Nasrallah, “Grief in Corinth,” 125–32.

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construct an understanding of ‘Israel’ in the Second Temple period as an agent of emotion. It offers a way of speaking inclusively about the porosity of Israel during this time as including a wide range of constituents: men, women, and children who are free and enslaved, Jewish and non-Jewish, practicing and non-practicing, Hebrew-speaking and non-Hebrew speaking, including all of the disenfranchised constituents. Conceptualizing Israel with ‘soft’ not ‘hard’ boundaries also allows for the inclusion of a wide range of daimones, different types of beings who can be good, called angels by some, and evil, called demons who are mischievous and envious. Yahweh, and, of course, the environment, the Land—its vegetation and the creatures in it––are among its constituents as well. Together, they collectively express this idea of the porosity of ‘Israel’. While this seems strange to modern thinkers, it is one way to incorporate postcolonial perspectives that take seriously non-western understandings of the world that see more than just a select, elite group of human beings as the ones who possess agency, emotions, and power. Second Temple texts indicate that angels, demons, and the invisible God have agency, revealing themselves to chosen individuals and interacting with them.33 As noted by Dipesh Chakrabarty, a worldview in which “gods, spirits and supernatural agents (exist) alongside humans” is difficult for modern post-Enlightenment scholars to imagine.34 Ancient peoples 33

34

Much of the recent attention on angels and demons illustrates this Second Temple concern. This literature is vast and quickly growing. Some representative studies include George W.E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001); Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, ed., The Fall of the Angels (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); eadem, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Gabriele Boccaccini and John J. Collins, The Early Enoch Literature, JSJSup 121 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); F. Reiterer, T. Nicklas, K. Schöpflin, The Concept of Celestial Beings: Origins Development and Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007); Claudia Losekam, Die Sünde der Engel: Die Engelfalltradition in frühjüdischen und gnostischen Texten, TANZ 41 (Tübingen: Francke, 2010); G.W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 37–82, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012); Angela Kim Harkins, Kelley Coblentz Bautch, John C. Endres, The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014); A.K. Harkins, K. Coblentz Bautch, and J.C. Endres, The Fallen Angels Traditions: Second Temple Developments and Reception History, CBQMS 53 (Washington, D.C.: CBA Press, 2014); Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014); Matthias Henze, Mind the Gap (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 87–114. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: University Press, 2000), 11.

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understood this kind of complex world to be active and to intervene in day-to-day realities. As a quick example, Ahmed’s framework enables us to understand Paul’s churches as porous, allowing for the agency of Satan to torment him with an unnamed affliction (2 Cor 12:7). While Paul prayed to God to be relieved of it, the suffering is afflicted from the outside in—from a supernatural cause to Paul. Ahmed’s model of the porosity or ‘softness’ of the larger nation arises from her study of the dynamic way emotions adhere to and move between individuals and groups, effecting changes within them. Her theorizing about the porosity of the nation allows others beyond its citizens to be active participants: illegal immigrants, foreign-born naturalized citizens; it also makes space for different and non-binary expressions of intersectionality. It is capacious enough to also include the geography and mythic and ritual remembrances. Using both post-colonialism and intersectionality, Ahmed’s work highlights how our scholarly tendency is to privilege pure categories of agency, namely a citizen of the modern nation state, while ignoring alternative ways of imagining agency and emotions in geography, peripheral and supernatural beings, and in disenfranchised beings. According to the philosopher Bruno Latour,35 modern scholars insist upon pure systems that people outside of the academy, both past and present, do not adhere to since ordinary people constantly negotiate messy or mixed systems. In large part, it is modern western scholars who seek to systematically separate different critical stances in the hopes of establishing what Latour calls a ‘purification’ of theoretical perspectives.36 Ahmed’s theorizing decenters the restrictive model of the impermeability or the ‘hard’ boundaries of the modern xenophobic nation state and replaces it with a more porous idea of social groups. This idea of porous ‘Israel’ or Paul’s porous ‘churches’ in the Second Temple period is one that allows for the agency of supernatural and other experiences and events to effect emotional dispositions and changes in individuals, from the outside-in. According to Ahmed, emotions are sticky—they adhere to groups, things, and individuals, effecting dispositions and changes, and moving from the ‘inside-out’ and the ‘outside-in’. 35

36

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76. Latour writes, “Our intellectual life is out of kilter. Epistemology, the social sciences, the sciences of texts—all have their privileged vantage point, provided that they remain separate. If the creatures we are pursuing cross all three spaces, we are no longer understood,” We Have Never Been Modern, 5.

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Ahmed’s post-modern theorizing of emotions as experiences that move from the ‘outside-in’ can help us to move beyond the limitations that our modern worldview brings to the study of the past by giving us a way to imagine how emotions move and effect changes that complicate our usual modern tendency to limit emotions to private, personal, and interior experiences. This fresh perspective can help us to better understand how the larger Second Temple ritual context can be said to have emoted grief and moved Paul from the ‘outside-in’. In the Second Temple period, ritually enacted grief played a role in various social mechanisms, one of which is the remaking of the covenant, which was ritually modeled on the foundational remaking of the covenant after the golden calf by Moses. Here we begin with Paul’s reference to two distinct types of grief in 2 Cor 7:10: “for godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death” (ἡ γὰρ κατὰ θεὸν λύπη μετάνοιαν εἰς σωτηρίαν ἀμεταμέλητον ἐργάζεται· ἡ δὲ τοῦ κόσμου λύπη θάνατον κατεργάζεται). While Corinth was an ancient city that was immersed in multiple ways in the communal experience of grief, mourning was used in different ways in Second Temple Judaism. Jonathan Kaplan’s salutary study connects Paul’s use of the language of grief and comfort to Second Temple traditions from Second Isaiah and Lamentations in its emphasis on comfort.37 In addition to these theological reminiscences, we propose that Paul’s letter exploits the culturally distinct role that ritual mourning and grief played in Second Temple Judaism in the context of covenant re-making. Key Second Temple passages illustrate how the re-enactment of the foundational event of Mosaic covenant re-making was ritually remembered during this time.38 Covenant re-making prayers are accompanied by the ritual mourning practices of fasting, bodily lowering, and weeping (Ezra 9:3–5; 10:1; cf. Neh 9:1), all of which illustrate how Second Temple ritual reenactment sought to cultivate a desired affective state. Thus, we will discuss how Paul’s grief in 37

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Jonathan Kaplan, “Comfort, O Comfort, Corinth: Grief and Comfort in 2 Corinthians 7:5–13a,” HTR 104.4 (2011): 433–45. See Angela Kim Harkins, “The Emotional Re–Experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives Found in the Admonition of the Damascus Document,” DSD 22 (2015): 285–307; eadem, “The Pro-social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer,” BibInt 24 (2016): 466–91; eadem, “A Phenomenological Study of Penitential Elements and Their Strategic Arousal of Emotion in the Qumran Hodayot (1QH cols. 1[?]–8),” in Ancient Jewish Prayers and Emotions: A Study of the Emotions Associated with Prayer in the Jewish and Related Literature of the Second Temple Period, ed. Stefan C. Reif and Renate Egger-Wenzel, DCLS 26 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 297–316; eadem, “Ritualizing Jesus’ Grief at Gethsemane,” JSNT 41 (2018): 177–203.

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2 Cor can be said to have reflected this ritual reminiscence of Second Temple covenant remaking. Such a theological context aligns well with his desire for relationship remaking with the church in Corinth. Paul returns to the language of grief time and time again in 2 Cor and, in doing so, he gives us an opportunity to consider the complex ways that the emotions associated with loss and longing would have been experienced by him and by Roman Corinth. Language about grief and longing appears multiple times in 2 Cor 7:8–13a. 8 ὅτι εἰ καὶ ἐλύπησα ὑμᾶς ἐν τῇ ἐπιστολῇ, οὐ μεταμέλομαι, εἰ καὶ μετεμελόμην· βλέπω γὰρ ὅτι ἡ ἐπιστολὴ ἐκείνη, εἰ καὶ πρὸς ὥραν, ἐλύπησεν ὑμᾶς. 9 νῦν χαίρω, οὐχ ὅτι ἐλυπήθητε, ἀλλ᾿ ὅτι ἐλυπήθητε εἰς μετάνοιαν· ἐλυπήθητε γὰρ κατὰ Θεόν, ἵνα ἐν μηδενὶ ζημιωθῆτε ἐξ ἡμῶν. 10 ἡ γὰρ κατὰ Θεὸν λύπη μετάνοιαν εἰς σωτηρίαν ἀμεταμέλητον κατεργάζεται· ἡ δὲ τοῦ κόσμου λύπη θάνατον κατεργάζεται. 11 ἰδοὺ γάρ, αὐτὸ τοῦτο, τὸ κατὰ Θεὸν λυπηθῆναι ὑμᾶς, πόσην κατειργάσατο ὑμῖν σπουδήν, ἀλλὰ ἀπολογίαν, ἀλλὰ ἀγανάκτησιν, ἀλλὰ φόβον, ἀλλὰ ἐπιπόθησιν, ἀλλὰ ζῆλον, ἀλλ᾿ ἐκδίκησιν. ἐν παντὶ συνεστήσατε ἑαυτοὺς ἁγνοὺς εἶναι ἐν τῷ πράγματι. 12 ἄρα εἰ καὶ ἔγραψα ὑμῖν, οὐχ εἵνεκεν τοῦ ἀδικήσαντος, οὐδὲ εἵνεκεν τοῦ ἀδικηθέντος, ἀλλ᾿ εἵνεκεν τοῦ φανερωθῆναι τὴν σπουδὴν ἡμῶν τὴν ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐνώπιον τοῦ Θεοῦ. 13 διὰ τοῦτο παρακεκλήμεθα ἐπὶ τῇ παρακλήσει ὑμῶν·. 8 For even if I grieved you with my letter, I do not regret it, for I see that I grieved you with that letter, though only for a moment. 9 Now I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because your grief led to repentance; for you felt a godly grief, so that you were not harmed in any way by us. 10 For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death. 11 For see what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what zeal, what punishment! At every point you have proved yourselves guiltless in the matter. 12 So although I wrote to you, it was not on account of the one who did the wrong, nor on account of the one who was wronged, but in order that your zeal for us might be made known to you before God. 13 In this we find comfort.

While grief-language is fitting given the occasion of the letter, it is worth considering how Paul’s language of grief rhetorically resonates with the culturally dense ways in which grief was also enacted and evoked in Second Temple ritual contexts. In the context of the letter, grief can be understood as a means by which Paul uses emotions to compel the Corinthians to move beyond their cultural understandings of grief to the transformational ways that ritual grief was experienced in early Judaism.

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The story of the golden calf in Exod 32–34 and re-told in Deut 9 stands as a pivotal moment in the foundational narrative of Israel’s beginnings and is an event that Paul returns to in his Corinthian correspondence.39 Paul references the golden calf in 1 Cor 10:6–13. Citing the LXX Exod 32:6, Paul writes: “The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play” (ἐκάθισεν ὁ λαὸς φαγεῖν καὶ πεῖν καὶ ἀνέστησαν παίζειν, 1 Cor 10:7). These sins are also not incompatible with the crimes committed at the foundational event of covenant breaking of the golden calf event at which moment the newly created covenant was polluted. The suggestion of sexual impropriety can also be seen in the golden calf event in which the people sat down to eat and drink, and then arose “to play” (‫ ;וַ יֵּ ֶשׁב ָה ָעם ֶ ֽל ֱאכֹל וְ ָשׁתוֹ וַ יָּ ֻקמוּ ְל ַצ ֵחק‬cf. καὶ ἐκάθισεν ὁ λαὸς φαγεῖν καὶ πιεῖν καὶ ἀνέστησαν παίζειν in LXX Exod 32:6). The verb that appears here carries a sexual connotation in Gen 26:8 where it says: “and after Isaac had been there for a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of a window and he saw that Isaac was playing with Rebecca his wife!”—a Hebrew language pun on the consonants in the name of the patriarch, ‫ יִ ְצ ָחק‬and in the verb for “playing” ‫מ ַצ ֵחק‬. ְ 40 This is often taken to refer to some kind of sexual playing or fondling, and it is at this moment when King Abimelech realizes that Isaac and Rebecca are husband and wife. Paul’s citation of Exod 32:6, a reference to Israel’s apostasy of the golden calf and sexual immorality, speaks well to the sexual crimes of the Corinthian community that he has just addressed in great detail in the previous chapters. The Corinthians, like Israel, was newly founded when these covenant-breaking events took place. Israel had been newly brought into the covenant with YHWH at Sinai when Israel lapsed into idolatry and sexual immorality during Moses’ absence— so too, the Corinthian community had fallen into controversy and discord shortly after Paul left it. Paul returns once more to the foundational story of the calf when he provides an extended discussion of Moses’ shining face in 2 Cor 3. The theological story of the golden calf, which is the foundational event that necessitated the remaking of the covenant at Sinai, contains elements (e.g., radiant glory, covenant remaking, and transformation) that emerge 39

40

See G.H. van Kooten, “Why did Paul include an exegesis of Moses’ Shining Face (Exod 34) in 2 Corinthians 3?: Moses’ Strength, Well-being and (Transitory) Glory, according to Philo, Josephus, Paul, and the Corinthian Sophists,” in The Significance of Sinai, ed. George J. Brooke (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 149–81. ἐγένετο δὲ πολυχρόνιος ἐκεῖ· παρακύψας δὲ Αβιμελεχ ὁ βασιλεὺς Γεραρων διὰ τῆς θυρίδος εἶδεν τὸν Ισαακ παίζοντα μετὰ Ρεβεκκας τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ (Gen 26:8).

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completely anew in Paul’s interpretation in 2 Cor 3:7–4:6. When read in this Second Temple context, Paul’s self-referential language about the magnitude of his own tears, his anguish, and his self-abnegation in the form of his remembrances of his own bodily sufferings, allow Paul to step into the role of the community founder, a type of Mosaic role. To be sure, Christ is presented as the counterpart to the veiled Moses, whose ministry Paul calls the “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets” (2 Cor 3:7). Christ of course is the one who remakes the covenant in a cosmic sense. Even so, Paul speaks of how he, and others, who see the glory of the Lord with unveiled faces, experience a kind of transformation (“all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the spirit.” 2 Cor 3:18). As a community leader, Paul describes how his role is a conduit for the power of God, a power that does not come from him (Paul) but rather through him, like a hollow clay jar (2 Cor 4:7). Paul’s account of his own transformation allows him to assume a Mosaic role in the covenant remaking with the Corinthians.

GRIEF AND RITUAL MOURNING IN SECOND TEMPLE JUDAISM We turn now to investigate how grief was experienced and ritually performed in distinct ways in Second Temple prayers and remembered in texts. The bodily display of grief was ritually performed and not simply an eruption of interior affect.41 These ritual practices could in turn heighten receptivity to other states but did not pre-determine that they would occur.42 Ritually performed grief likely involved a deep experiencing of an individual’s lived-experience of personal loss. Mourning rituals were heavily regulated by social conventions and public policy in antiquity.43 Rituals of mourning frequently employed 41

42

43

This can be seen in part in the social regulation of grief which indicated the political and social functions that mourning had in the binding of groups to one another within a classical society; e.g., public displays of mourning were tied to the right to inherit, and they were also thought to incite revenge and desire for blood guilt; Gail HolstWarhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992, 1995), 116–18. E.g., excessive mourning was thought to bring about deleterious effects—a self-consuming grief (Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 108), or a blood-thirsty desire for revenge (117–18). David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

174

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

acts of self-diminishment in which the mourner’s own body was made to express the liminality of death and to demonstrate the loss of power in this world (e.g., covering oneself in ashes, tearing the hair, being brought physically lower than full upright posture).44 Performing funerary practices along with prayer traditions (e.g., confession of sins and petitions) are strategies for layering experiences of grief. These mourning practices coupled with prayers may have generated an experiential effect of diminishment that could be understood to reconstitute the experience of covenant encounter as one found oneself in the presence of a terrifying sovereign deity.45 Deuteronomy’s understandings of Israel’s history as a pattern of sin, punishment, and covenant remaking had a lasting impact.46 According to Deuteronomy 27:1–8, the covenant must be remade upon entry into the land. Deuteronomy’s innovative legislation of multiple covenant-making ceremonies was influential for late Second Temple groups. Various Second Temple texts illustrate how grief and mourning were scripted ritual performances that called to mind the role of Moses in his remaking of the covenant after the golden calf. This foundational event was certainly influential for those Jews associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls (e.g., 4QMMT and 1QS),47 but also more broadly, as can be seen in 44

45

46

47

Olyan, Biblical Mourning; also David Lambert, How Repentance Became Biblical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). While the Sitz im Leben of the penitential form has not been conclusively identified, Steck and Lipinski have proposed locating it in Second Temple covenant–renewal ceremonies; a suggestion that is worth considering given the mention of covenant that appears in 2 Cor 3:6, 14; See Odil Hannes Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des deuteronomistischen Geschichtsbildes im Alten Testament, Spätjudentum und Urchristentum. WMANT 23 (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967), 134–35; E. Lipinski, La liturgie pénitentielle dans la Bible, (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 37–38. See A.K. Harkins, “The Emotional Re-Experiencing of the Hortatory Narratives,” 285–307; Karin Finsterbusch, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Deuteronomistic Movement,” in The Hebrew Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Nóra Dávid et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 143–54. Finsterbusch’s work also builds upon the earlier proposal made by Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten. Steven D. Fraade, “Law, History, and Narrative in the Damascus Document,” in Meghillot: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls V–VI. A Festschrift for Devorah Dimant, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher and Emanuel Tov (Jerusalem: University of Haifa Press/Bialik Institute, 2007), 35–55; idem, “Deuteronomy and Polity in the Early History of Jewish Interpretation,” in Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 211–26, esp. 219–20. Others have recognized the importance of Sinaitic themes and Theology in other late Second Temple writings from the NT, such as the Gospel of Luke; see David P. Moessner, “’The Christ Must Suffer’: New Light on the Jesus—Peter, Stephen, Paul

STICKY EMOTIONS FROM SECOND TEMPLE PRAYERS

175

passages like Ezra 9:5–15.48 Ezra’s prayer in Ezra 9:5–15 is prefaced by stereotypical mourning practices of fasting, tearing of clothes, and the lowering of the body. The prayer itself uses language of liminality in the confession of sins that Ezra offers on behalf of the people and the language of enslavement, which he applies to himself (9:9). Ezra’s postprayer transformation into a Mosaic lawgiver can be seen in a shift in the language found in Ezra 10, which reuses phrases from the Deuteronomic retelling of the golden calf episode. Language reserved for Moses is now used to describe Ezra’s ritual gestures of mourning after the prayer. For example, after his prayer, Ezra totally collapses before the Temple (‫ומתנפל לפני בית האלהים‬, Ezra 10:1), in the same way that Moses had collapsed during his prayer after the golden calf (Deut 9:18, 25 [twice]). In the entire Tanak, the hitpael form of the verb ‫“( נפל‬collapse”) is reserved only for Ezra and Moses, appearing only in these places, Ezra 10:1 and Deut 9:18, 25 (twice). After his prayer in chapter 9, Ezra is depicted with Mosaic language in the description of his fasting in Ezra 10:6: He (Ezra) neither ate bread nor drank water because he was mourning over the exile. ‫לחם לא־אכל ומים לא־שתה כי מתאבל על־מעל הגולה‬

This is a noticeable shift from the reference that appears prior to his prayer in Ezra 9:6, where Ezra says simply, “I arose from my fasting” (‫)קמתי מתעניתי‬. In chapter 10, Ezra’s fast is described with the same language used to describe Moses’s fast immediately upon hearing of Israel’s crime of the golden calf. Moses says: “I neither ate bread nor drank water” (‫ ;לחם לא אכלתי ומים לא שתיתי‬Deut 9:18). Such shifts in the language used for the ritual act of fasting signal to the reader that Ezra has been transformed into a second Moses. Paul’s references to the foundational covenant remaking events in 1 Cor 10 coheres with these passages which highlight Deuteronomic theology. Distinctive Mosaic language associated with covenant remaking also appears in what is commonly known as the first group of Community Hymns in cols. 4–8 of the Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns, a feature that sets these compositions part from the rest of the scroll.49 It is only in this

48

49

Parallels in Luke-Acts,” NovT 28 (1986):220–56; idem, Lord of the Banquet: The Literary and Theological Significance of the Lukan Travel Narrative (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989). The following discussion of Ezra’s transformation is taken from A.K. Harkins, “The Pro-social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer,” 486–90. Harkins, “The Community Hymns Classification,” 121–54, especially the discussion found on pages 138ff.

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group that one finds an explicit reference to the name of Moses (1QH 4:24). While this is an especially fitting citation given the Deuteronomic allusions that prevail in this section of the scroll, such explicit mention of any illustrious figure from Israel’s history is a notable departure from other compositions in the large hodayot scroll from cave 1. The classic Deuteronomic theme of ‘loving what God loves’ and ‘hating what God hates’ is present in 1QH 4:36; 6:21–22; 31–37; 7:30–32.50 Also, passages like 1QH 7:23 resonate especially well with the covenantal passage found at the beginning of the Community Rule, both of which appeal to the Deuteronomic imagery of loving God first with the heart (‫ )לב‬and then with the soul (‫)נפש‬. Such a theme appears in the opening of 1QS 1:1–15: “to seek God with [all the heart and soul] doing what is good and right before him, as he commanded through Moses and through all his servants the prophets, and in order to love all that he has chosen and to hate all that he has rejected, keeping away from all evil and adhering to all good works.”51 In this same hodayah entitled ‘Request’ in column 8, language that is redolent of Moses’ entreaty in the golden calf episode appears with two negative petitions in lines 33 and 36, shortly after the above-mentioned reference to collapsing (8:24), begging for mercy, and seeking a spirit of understanding (lines 24–25). This same passage, 1QH 8:24–36, references covenant demands and obligations in lines 29–33: 8:24 And as I come to know all these things [I] will find the proper reply, collapsing (‫)להתנ֯ ֯פ ֯ל‬ ֯ and […] for my rebellion, seeking a spirit of […] 25 encouraging myself by [Your] h[oly] spirit, clinging to the truth of Your covenant (‫)בריתך‬, [serv]ing You in truth and a perfect heart, and loving [Your holy name. ] 26 Blessed are You, O Lord, Creator of [a]ll things and gr[eat] in deed because all things are Your works. Behold, You have determined to b[e] merciful [with me] 27 and be gracious to me by the spirit of Your compassion and [the … of] Your glory. You alone possess righteousness, for You have done al[l these things. ] 28 And because I know that You have recorded the spirit of the righteous, I myself have chosen to purify my hands in 50

51

An example of Deuteronomic language can be seen in the following petition found in the first group of CH: “Strengthen [his] loi[ns that he may sta]nd against spirits [and that he may w]alk in everything that you love and despise everything that [you] hate, [and do] what is good in your eyes” (1QH 4:35–37). Mermelstein’s discussion of the social-construction of emotion in the hodayot and 1QS is a useful way of imaging how the rhetoric of emotion appears in these passages related to covenant; Ari Mermelstein, “Love and Hate at Qumran: The Social Construction of Sectarian Emotion,” DSD 20 (2013): 237–63; also for a discussion of the Deuteronomic themes in col. 4 of this section of the hodayot, see A.K. Harkins, “The Community Hymns Classification: A Proposal for Further Differentiation,” DSD 15 (2008): 121–54, here 145–54.

STICKY EMOTIONS FROM SECOND TEMPLE PRAYERS

177

accordance with Your wil[l. ] The soul of Your servant a[bho]rs every 29 I know that no one can be righteous apart from you, and so I entreat you (‫ )ואחלה‬with the spirit that you have given to me that you make 30 your kindness to your servant complete [for]ever, cleansing me by your holy spirit and drawing me nearer by your good favour, according to your great kindness [wh]ich you have shown 31 to me, and causing [my feet] to sta[nd in] the whole station of [your] good fa[vour], which you have cho[sen] for those who love you and for those who keep [your] commandments [that they may take their stand] 32 before you forever, and [atone for iniquity], and savou[r] what is pleasing, and mingle myself with the spirit of your work, and understand your deed[s] 33 l[ ] not y [ ] w and let there not c[o]me before him any affliction (that causes) stumbling from the precepts of your covenant, for [ ] 34 your face. And I kno[w that you are a God ] gracious and compassionate, patient and abounding in kindness and faithfulness, one who forgives transgression and unfaithful[ness ], 35 moved to pity concerning a[ll the iniquity of those who love] you and keep [your] commandments, [those] who have returned to you in steadfastness and (with) a perfect heart [ ] 36 to serve you [in to do what is ] good in your sight. Do not turn away the face of your servant [and do no]t reject the son of your handmaid.52 (1QH 8:24–36)

The language for ‘entreating’ or ‘mollifying’ (“I entreat,” ‫ )ואחלה‬that appears here in line 29 is uses language from the paradigmatic scene preserved in Exod 32, where Moses returns from his stay atop Mount Sinai only to find Aaron and the Israelites down below engaging in a flagrant worship of an idolatrous cult. In that remarkable moment of intercessory prayer, Moses entreats the LORD his God (‫אלהיו‬ ָ ‫)וַ יְ ַחל משה את ְפּנֵ י יהוה‬ to put aside his righteous anger and to not destroy Israel, even though such destruction is exactly what Israel deserves.53 Not surprisingly, the passage in Exod 32:11–14 references characteristic features of the penitential category of knowledge: a petition, acknowledgement of guilt, participation in acts of mourning (Exod 33:4–6). Here too Moses’s prayer includes priestly language of expunging the sin of the golden calf; he says that 52

53

Translation taken from DJD 40:117 has been emended to read “collapsing” instead of “falling prostrate” at line 24, in order to highlight that the Hebrew word here is identical to the one discussed above in Deut 9:18, 25 and Ezra 10:1. The golden calf episode has a strong Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic association, and it is commonly recognized as a commentary on the illegitimate cult established by Jeroboam in 1 Kgs 12. Nicholson (Exodus and Sinai in History and Tradition) argues that there are signs of Deuteronomic editing of Exod 19:3b–8 and Exod 24:3–8; so following a line of scholarship set by Perlitt, Bundestheologie im Alten Testament, 190 and the discussion of the identification of D elements in sections of the Sinai pericope (Exod 19–34) by Blenkinsopp, “What Happened at Sinai?” 155–74. See also Hayes, “Golden Calf Stories,” 45–93.

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perhaps he can make atonement for Israel’s sin (‫את ֶכם‬ ְ ‫אוּלי ֲא ַכ ְפּ ָרה ְבּ ַעד ַח ַטּ‬, ַ Exod 32:30).54 Significantly, these elements precede the singular experience of divine encounter both in the form of beholding the divine effulgence (Exod 33:18–23) and in the form of a covenant experience in the making of the second set of tablets and the reception of Laws in Exodus 34. The radiance of Moses’s face can be understood as a manifestation of the transformative experience of the encounter with the deity on the mountain, a bodily sign of the arousal of emotion in response to his experience of the real presence of the deity. Presumably, God is so moved by these acts that he restores the covenant with Israel.55 Notably, in the version of these events found in Deut 9, it is Moses who performs the penitential acts of prostration and fasting (Deut 9:18–25), even though he himself is not guilty of the sin of idolatry. Second Temple passages like Ezra 9–10 and the Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns from col. 8 return to the foundational event of Moses’s covenant remaking. The emotions of grief that are aroused simulate the sensations of smallness that would accompany an encounter with the sovereign deity, thus experientially recreating the conditions of covenant-making after the exile.56 As a performance, the penitential features are scripted reenactments that do not simply reflect personal grief felt over the guilt of actual sin. These esteemed figures—Moses, Ezra, and the hodayot hymnist—make public declarations of sin, even though they themselves have not engaged in the disobedience that is confessed. Their display of guilt is one that is ritually performed and not the expression of their personal regret. 54 55

56

Hogewood, “The Speech Act of Confession,” 81–82. So too, the description of God that appears in the aftermath of the golden calf is also echoed here in this hodayah: “The LORD, the LORD, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation” (Exod 34:6–7). The arousal of grief can lead to other experiences that are of interest to a Second Temple context. While the range and duration of bereavement is a highly individualized experience, recent studies have shown that the intrusive cognitive process of ruminating that often accompanies the grieving process can contribute to phenomenal cognitive experiences that can lead to posttraumatic growth. While rumination is typically conceptualized as “repetitive negative thinking,” similar to worrying, scholars have recently highlighted how the cognitive and affective processes associated with rumination resemble those of problem-solving. A new study by Eisma et al. has shown that the process of rumination after loss can be a significant means by which grieving individuals continually confront the events related to the loss, allowing them to move on in healthy ways after a death. When grief is understood in light of the phenomenal cognitive changes that accompany the emotional state, e.g., rumination, we can imagine the concurrent rise in scripture interpretation and rewriting that characterizes the Second Temple period.

STICKY EMOTIONS FROM SECOND TEMPLE PRAYERS

179

EMBODYING RITUAL GRIEF Ritual grief was widely practiced by different early Jewish groups in ways that would have been distinct from the general expectation for the display of grief held by Romans, which regulated its public expression. Prayers and practices in early Judaism strategically layered the emotions associated with grief. The stock features of these Second Temple prayers (viz., lament, petitions, confession of sin, and retellings of past failings) appear alongside funerary practices and were enacted by high statusbearing men.57 Worthy figures such as Ezra and the Thanksgiving Hymns hymnist offer prayers and perform mourning acts that have long been associated with the desolation and anguish of the foundational experiences of loss in the wilderness, reenacted after the exile during the Second Temple period. The emotion-filled narratives of the golden calf story found in Exod 32–34 and retold in Deut 9 are commemorated in these passages linked with various Jewish groups during the Second Temple period. In 2 Cor, Paul presents himself to the Corinthians as a man overcome with weeping and stricken with grief. Paul writes in 2 Cor 2:3–4, 3 καὶ ἔγραψα τοῦτο αὐτό, ἵνα μὴ ἐλθὼν λύπην σχῶ ἀφ̓ ὧν ἔδει με χαίρειν, πεποιθὼς ἐπὶ πάντας ὑμᾶς ὅτι ἡ ἐμὴ χαρὰ πάντων ὑμῶν ἐστιν. 4 ἐκ γὰρ πολλῆς θλίψεως καὶ συνοχῆς καρδίας ἔγραψα ὑμῖν διὰ πολλῶν δακρύων, οὐχ ἵνα λυπηθῆτε ἀλλὰ τὴν ἀγάπην ἵνα γνῶτε ἣν ἔχω περισσοτέρως εἰς ὑμᾶς. 3 “And I wrote as I did, so that when I came, I might not suffer pain from those who should have made me rejoice; for I am confident about all of you, that my joy would be the joy of all of you. 4 For I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain, but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you”.

Here and elsewhere (2 Cor 2:3–4; 5:13; 7:8–12; and 10:9–10), Paul makes reference to a ‘letter of tears’ which is now lost. According to David Fredrikson, Paul’s ‘letter of tears’ “sought to arouse the indignation of the church against the offender. To accomplish this, Paul presented himself stricken with grief because of the church’s indifference to the offense committed against him. Corroborating evidence for the forcefulness of the grieving letter is found not only in the church’s subsequent discipline 57

‘Mourning’ refers to the social practices attached to grief; ‘grief’ is associated with the emotion of desolation and feeling of loss. The modern period frequently pairs bereavement and loss with the impairment of agency and normal functioning.

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EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

of ὁ ἀδικήσας but also in the pain (λύπη) Paul admits that the letter inflicted on the church (2:4; 7:8).”58 Paul’s behavior and mannerisms would have been culturally-coded to ancient readers as generally unseemly behaviors for a freed-man in Roman Corinth. Paul also makes extensive reference to his bodily pain: “afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger” (2 Cor 6:4–5), which brings the presence of his physical body to the reader’s eye as one that is no different from a slavish or low-status bearing man.59 While it is true that both flesh-andblood men and women were capable of performing mourning and funerary rituals in Rome, there remained a strong social expectation of general restraint for men, an expectation that was likely heightened in accord with an individual’s social standing. Paul’s mourning is in accord with behaviors that were associated with slavish men or lower-class men in the Greek or Roman world, reinforcing what we already know of Paul’s socially marginalized status in the Roman world. What we wish to point out is that these same behaviors are associated with high status-bearing men (Moses, Ezra, hodayot hymnist) in Second Temple Judaism. Second Temple references to ritual mourning practices and prayers differed strikingly from Greek and Roman expressions of grief, which associated such practices with women: “Mourning is something feminine, weak, ignoble: women are more inclined to it than men, barbarians more than Greeks, commoners more than aristocrats” (Plutarch, Letter to Apollonius).60 Classical antiquity disdainfully regarded these ritual practices when they were performed by noble men because men with status were expected to express their grief in more fitting ways—through measured and eloquent forms of speech. It was unseemly for a noble man to display unrestrained grief because it was associated strongly with the mourning behaviors of women.61 Embodied displays of grief and anguish 58

59

60 61

David E. Fredrickson, “ ‘Through Many Tears’ (2 Cor 2:4): Paul’s Grieving Letter and the Occasion of 2 Corinthians 1–7,” in Paul and Pathos, ed. Thomas H. Olbricht and Jerry L. Sumney (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2001), 161–79, here 166. See Jennifer Glancy (“Slaves and Slavery in the Matthean Parables,” JBL 119 [2000]: 67–90) and her discussion of the corporeal vulnerability of the slave in the Roman world. “Demosthenes said with a flourish (22.55) that the greatest difference between the slave and the free man is that the former ‘is answerable with his body for all offenses.’” (84). Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 98. See Seneca, Letter 99, “On Consolation to the Bereaved”, a friend named Lucilius is scolded for behaving like a woman by displaying unrestrained grief; this example and others are discussed by Stephen Barton, “Eschatology and the Emotions in Early Christianity,” JBL 130.3 (2011): 571–91, here 584–85.

STICKY EMOTIONS FROM SECOND TEMPLE PRAYERS

181

(e.g., weeping, wailing, fasting, tearing clothes, positioning the body in a humbled state) enacted by esteemed male leaders in late Second Temple texts were behaviors culturally associated with the work of women and socially subordinate men (slaves).62

PAUL’S POROSITY Paul’s self-referential language in 2 Cor 4 and 5 employs imagery for the self that is imagined as hollow and inhabitable. He likens his body to a ‘clay jar’ (2 Cor 4:7)—a clear allusion to the creation story of Gen 2, but also an image of a receptacle that is filled by some liquid. The other reference that he gives for his body is a ‘tent’ (2 Cor 5:1–2), a kind of dwelling that is transitory and ephemeral, which is also inhabitable. These references that Paul makes to himself resonate with Sara Ahmed’s discussion of the porosity of the self, allowing for emotions to penetrate from the ‘outside-in’. It is significant that the word ‘passion’ and the word ‘passive’ share the same root in the Latin word for ‘suffering’ (passio). To be passive is to be enacted upon, as a negation that is already felt as suffering. The fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others. Softness is narrated as a proneness to injury. The association between passion and passivity is instructive. It works as a reminder of how ‘emotion’ has been viewed as ‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason. To be emotional is to have one’s judgement affected: it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous. Feminist philosophers have shown us how the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body (Spelman 1989; Jaggar 1996). Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement.63

This model of the porous self casts Paul as someone who has a self that can be possessed, a dramatically different way of understanding Paul from the theological portraits that often circulate in modern scholarship.64 62

63 64

Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 98–126. This association of performative mourning as the work of women and subordinate men (slaves) does not predetermine that men could not engage in those practices. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 3. Here, I refer you Giovanni Bazzana’s excellent study of spirit possession and exorcism which challenges how Pauline scholars imagine the Apostle, Having the Spirit of Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

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EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

As founder of the Corinthian church, Paul is a high-status bearing individual who displays grief, which can be considered as a costly display insofar as such actions reorganize the power and prestige that these figures routinely enjoy as earthly sovereigns or esteemed leaders.65 During Second Temple times, the performance of self-abasement and the generation of a subjectivity of smallness could have staged a phenomenal experience of being in the presence of the deity.

CONCLUSION Mourning appears in Second Temple Jewish contexts as a set of practices performed by elite men. Foundational narratives surrounding covenant making and re-making can be understood to have persisted as ritual remembrances that were sticky with the emotion of grief. The effect of such prayers and practices was to access foundational events from the Mosaic period with the vividness of first-hand experience. Mourning was ritually performed in ways that re-enact foundational events and experiences that are important to Israel’s self-understanding in the Second Temple period. The Second Temple figure known as Ezra re-enacts Moses’ actions after the golden calf. In the case of the Qumran hodayah in col. 8, emotions that evoke the foundational event of Exod 32–34 in a similar way appear within a literary context that describes covenant remaking. The Qumran example illustrates that the emotion of these ritual remembrances adhered in memories held broadly by Jewish groups. The grief that adheres to these ritual remembrances could have moved an individual from the ‘outside-in’. These cultural memories of foundational events could have been sufficiently re-constituted with the compelling emotional force of the past by later readers, who updated and made them relevant to the ‘demands of a new way of life’ after the exile.66 Sara Ahmed’s post-modern theorizing about the social and cultural politics of emotions allows us to conceptualize how emotions from nonindividuals adhere to groups and to mythic and ritual remembrances, thereby emotionally moving individuals from the ‘outside-in’. Ahmed helpfully expands how constituent members are understood within a group and extends emotional agency and capacity beyond people to include 65

66

Useful here is Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993), 125–67. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 144.

STICKY EMOTIONS FROM SECOND TEMPLE PRAYERS

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objects, the land, and other non-human entities, including memories. Our discussion has emphasized how grief may be said to adhere to the mythic and ritual remembrances of the ancient Roman city of Corinth and the Second Temple stories of covenant remaking. Doing so acknowledges the social complexity of Paul’s emotions and avoids reading them purely as eruptions of his own affect. In closing, we have argued that the broader Second Temple Jewish context of ritual mourning is a fitting social and theological context for understanding Paul’s grief in 2 Cor.

PART II

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF SPACES AND THE EXEGETICAL GENERATION OF NEW TEXTS

EXPERIENCING THE SOLIDITY OF SPACES IN THE QUMRAN HODAYOT This essay proposes that Second Temple narrative prayers in first-person voice seek to make otherworldly spaces accessible with first-hand vividness, what we might call an experience of presence. Presence is a cognitive state in which a reader gains awareness of ‘being’ in a particular narrative world or otherworldly space.1 The first-person voice is the mechanism by which a reader could gain access to an immersive experience of the narrative world of the prayer, thus experiencing in part the things that the speaker describes with the vividness of presence. This study uses relevant aspects of cognitive literary theory to consider how spaces are described in the Qumran hodayot2 in such a way as to allow for the phenomenon of immersive reading. How might a reader become lost in a narrative landscape? These questions about how otherworldly spaces achieve the quality of solidity will rely on observations and strategies that literary theorists have made for the writing of fiction and fantasy literature, both of which seek to create compelling narrative worlds for readers. Our discussion will begin by examining elements that encourage the readerly response of ruminating on the text itself, seeking to understand it. The first of these include the effect that bizarre and counterintuitive features of the 1

2

Anežka Kuzmičová, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for Motor Enactment,” Semiotica 189 (2012): 23–48, here 24. The English translation of the hodayot used in this essay is my own, based on the reconstructed Hebrew text edited by Eileen M. Schuller and based on the work of Hartmut Stegemann, which was used in Qumran Cave 1. III. 1QHodayota with Incorporation of 1QHodayot b and 4QHodayot a–f, ed. Hartmut Stegemann with Eileen Schuller; trans. Carol Newsom, DJD 40 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), and available now as The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms): A Study Edition of 1QHa,” (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012); H. Stegemann, “Rekonstruktion der Hodajot: Ursprüngliche Gestalt und kritisch bearbeiteter Text der Hymnenrolle aus Höhle 1 von Qumran,” (Ph.D. diss.; University of Heidelberg, 1963). It is the view of the present author that the first group of Community Hymns known as 1QH cols. 1–8 may not have been part of the Cave 1 hodayot based on material and literary arguments discussed in Angela Kim Harkins, “Another Look at the Cave 1 Hodayot: Was CH I Materially Part of the Scroll 1QHodayota?” DSD 25 (2018): 185–216. This essay continues and improves the general argument presented in eadem, “A New Proposal for Thinking about 1QHA Sixty Years after its Discovery,” in Texts from Cave 1 Sixty Years after Their Discovery, ed. Daniel K. Falk et al., STDJ 91 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 101–34.

188

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

landscape might have on a reader, leading to a slower reading pace that allows for more cognitive and emotional engagement with the text. Then we will consider how the first-person voice allows a reader to enact the experiences of the hymnist who describes being in a particular narrative place, thereby enscripting the prayer’s embodied experiences for a reader to enact. These embodied experiences will be discussed as either interoceptive experiences (awareness of bodily experiences associated with the viscera, including pain, hunger, temperature, and also emotions) or proprioceptive experiences which presume an extended body moving through space (awareness of movement, balance, and any kind of kinesthetic action). The first–person narration that is characteristic of prayers provides many details about the interoceptive and proprioceptive experiences of the hymnist, thus giving access to what it might be like to experience the narrative world of the hodayot. The possible effects of reading 1QH 16:5–17:36 on the people who read and transmitted them seeks to take into account the embodied (biological) and cultural contexts of the people of the scrolls, who were living in an ancient Mediterranean culture.3

COUNTERINTUITIVE ASPECTS OF OTHERWORLDLY SPACES The hodayot are narrative prayers that describe various scenes of otherworldly spaces which include strange and counterintuitive details. For example, the hodayah in 1QH 11:6–37 makes explicit reference to an otherworldly netherworld space that has “eternal bars” for imprisoning 3

Armin W. Geertz, “Religious Bodies, Minds and Places. A Cognitive Science of Religion Perspective,” in Spazi e Luoghi Sacri: Espressioni ed Esperienze di Vissuto Religioso, ed. Laura Carnevale (Santo Spirito (Bari): Edipuglia, 2017), 35–52, for an updated discussion of integrative approaches to the study of religion, like cognitive science of religion. The basic point that is being made here in this study, that texts can express a vividness and an experiential quality of presence, is comparable to what is known in the classical world as the various literary strategies that achieve vividness or enargeia. See Ruth Webb, “Imagination and the Arousal of Emotions in Greco-Roman Rhetoric,” in S.M. Braund and C. Gill (ed.), The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 112–27; G. Zanker, Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); see too the application of classical enargeia to early Christian writings by Jane Heath, “Absent Presences of Paul and Christ: Enargeia in 1 Thessalonians 1–3,” JSNT 32 (2009): 3–38; Dionysius of Halicarnassus speaks of enargeia as a literary style that has the effect of making the reader “suppose that he is seeing the things being presented actually happening,” (De Lys. 7.14.17–15.1) discussed by Heath, 9–12; also Harry O. Maier, “Vision, Visualisation, and Politics in the Apostle Paul,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 27 (2015): 312–32.

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(11:18–19) and also “cords of death that bind with no (hope of) escape” (11:29). The text goes on to describe the “fiery rivers of Belial that will bubble over the riverbanks” (11:30), devouring everything as far as Abaddon (11:33). The mental image of the landscape engulfed in flames during the conflagration (11:32) is one that stays with the reader; it is also reminiscent of apocalyptic visionary texts of otherworldly scenes.4 Recognizable references to the landscape in 1QH col. 11 present the reader with familiar geographic components. The swollen rivers in line 30 as well as the mountain and expanse of land referenced in line 32 are presented to the reader in such a way as to appeal to our lived experience of such landscapes; yet the conflagration and details that suggest that this is a place of imprisonment remind readers and hearers that this religious geography is not the world as we know it. These spaces not only effect a strong emotional response in the reader—fear or terror—they stimulate the naturally occurring associative processes of memory reinvigoration. The process of remembering is surprisingly imperfect, “not a literal reproduction of the past, but rather… a constructive process in which bits and pieces of information from various sources are pulled together.”5 The first-person narration of experiences can also simulate episodic memory construction and reconstruction which is a highly adaptive cognitive process that simulates the imagining of personalized possible experiences set in the future.6 Such striking images of a burning landscape or of eternal bars for imprisonment, remind the reader that this is not the world as he or she experiences it. According to Laura Feldt, one strategic effect of counterfactual or surprising details, like those that appear in 1QH col. 11, is to generate confusion and destabilize the reader.7 Narratives that include disorienting and counterintuitive elements slow down the process 4

5

6 7

For a discussion of how the landscape in this hodayah in 1QH col. 11 resonates with the otherworldly scenes described in the Enochic Book of the Watchers, see Angela Kim Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions, Ekstasis 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 141–47. Daniel L. Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 773–86, here 773. Schacter and Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory,” 778. Laura Feldt, “Religious Narrative and the Literary Fantastic: Ambiguity and Uncertainty in Ex. 1–18,” Religion 41 (2011): 251–83, 255. Feldt’s work successfully applies the theoretical framework of fantasy literature found in the work of Renate Lachmann (Erzählte Phantastik. Zu Phantasiegeschichte und Semantik phantastischer Texte [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002]) to the supernatural elements in the plague narratives of the book of Exodus. Fantasy literature in particular is well-suited to the study of apocalypses which also uses bizarre and counterintuitive elements. Such writings have a greater chance of generating cognitive processes that seek understanding.

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of reading and function to allow readers to engage the text more deeply at an emotional level, perhaps moving readers to go back to re-read or to ruminate over the unsettling passage. Counterintuitive elements and the role of suspense slow down the pace of reading, allow for rumination, and invite deeper thinking about a passage. Disorientation can lead to further experiences of meaningful contemplation. The generation of interpretation from such a process remains an undetermined process since emotion’s naturally associative function in memory reinvigoration would engage the remembering of texts and experiences at the level of the individual.8 Turning now to the well-irrigated garden in 1QH 16:5–17:36, the landscape here can be said to optimize environmental features that befit the culture and historical period of the scrolls. Even so, cross-cultural studies of otherworldly spaces like paradise note the similarity between the general features of the narrative landscape and its notable differences in specific counter-intuitive ways that remind the reader that this is not the world as we know it.9 Cross-cultural narratives about paradise include counter-intuitive elements like divine inhabitants, exotic cultivars, and the absence of conflict, disease, or perishability, all serving to remind readers that this is an otherworldly realm.10 The hodayah in 1QH 16:5– 17:36 makes mention of a number of features of the landscape: 16:5 I thank [you, O Lo]rd, that you have placed me at the source of brooks in a dry land, (by) a spring of water in a parched land, and (by) a watered 6 garden, and a wetland °°°° the field, (you) plant cypress and elm together with boxwood for the sake of your glory; trees of 7 life at a spring of mystery, hidden in the midst of all the wetland-trees. And they were there so that a shoot might be made to sprout into an eternal planting. 8 Before taking root, they sprouted out and stretched out their roots to the strea[m]. And its stem was exposed to the living waters, 9 and it became an eternal source. All the an[ima]ls of the 8

9

10

Feldt, “Religious Narrative and the Literary Fantastic,” 275; on emotion’s naturally associative function in memory construction and reconstruction, see Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 69–113, esp. 94–96. Jani Närhi, “Beautiful Reflections: The Cognitive and Evolutionary Foundations of Paradise Representations,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008): 339– 65. On the counter-intuitiveness of religious concepts, see Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); idem, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and P. Boyer and Charles Ramble, “Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross–Cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-Intuitive Representations,” Cognitive Science 25 (2001): 535–64; and Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Marjaana Lindeman, Timo Honkela, “Counterintuitiveness as the Hallmark of Religiosity,” Religion 33 (2003): 341–55.

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forest grazed on its leafy shoot. Its rootstock was a grazing place for all who passed on 10 the way, and its branch is for every winged-bird. And all the wetland-tr[ees] towered over it; even though in their planting they grow tall, 11 they do not stretch out (their) root to the stream. The h[o]ly shoot is made to sprout into a plant of truth; it is concealed. It is without 12 regard and not perceived, it seals up its mystery. And you, [O G]od, have fenced in its fruit with the mystery of strong warriors, 13 spirits of holiness, and flaming fire moving every which way (‫)מתהפכת‬, so that no [stran]ger might [come] to the fountain of life, nor with the eternal trees 14 drink the waters of holiness, nor bear its fruit with the plantation of heaven. For he sees without recognizing, 15 and he considers without believing in the source of life, and so he gives away the pro[d]uce of the eternal sprout. But I became like the things [wa]shed up by rivers 16 swollen-by-floodwaters, because they cast their mud on me. vacat

In this detailed description of a wetland garden, the hymnist describes the various types of vegetation within it, including the exotic cultivar known from the Garden of Eden, the trees of life (16:6–7). In addition to the wide range of vegetation, both thisworldly (e.g., “cypress,” “elm,” “boxwood,” mentioned in 16:6) and otherworldly cultivars (“trees of life,” ‫עצי חי֯ ים‬, 16:6–7) are specified in this passage. Also, a clear reference is made to angelic beings: “strong warriors, spirits of holiness, and flaming fire moving every which way,” (16:13) in a manner which recalls the image of the cherubim with their flaming sword “moving every which way ( ‫)ה ִמּ ְת ַה ֶפּ ֶכת‬ ַ to guard the entrance to the garden of Eden.11 The hodayah then moves from a detailed description of the lush garden to the hymnist himself. The speaker makes a self-referential remark about his God-given teaching being like the soft rain showers that keep the wetland-garden moist and which supplies the waterways of the landscape: “But You, O my God, have put (your teachings) in my mouth, like early rains for all […], and a spring of living waters. He will not fail to open the heavens, they will not languish, they will become a torrent overflowing ov[er all the ]wetland [trees] and (pouring) into seas, without end” (16:17–18). The name Eden appears in 16:21 and also in a previous hodayah which identifies the garden that produces the “eternal planting” as Eden (1QH 14:18–19; cf. 16:7). Perhaps in a manner not unlike the thematic turn found in the Genesis story of Eden which culminates in a series of curses, the hodayah also shifts to an extended lament of the hymnist, language that will be investigated in the second half of this study. The focus of the text abruptly 11

Gen 3:24, ‫ת־דּ ֶרְך ֵעץ ַה ַחיִּ ים‬ ֶ ‫ת־ה ְכּ ֻר ִבים וְ ֵאת ַל ַהט ַה ֶח ֶרב ַה ִמּ ְת ַה ֶפּ ֶכת ִל ְשׁמֹר ֶא‬ ַ ‫ן־ע ֶדן ֶא‬ ֵ ַ‫וַ יַּ ְשׁ ֵכּן ִמ ֶקּ ֶדם ְלג‬.

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turns to the speaker’s affliction and misery, poignantly depicted in 1QH 16:26–17:7. The core imagery of the hodayah has now become the hymnist’s anguish. One of the effects on the reader of this unexpected change in tone is confusion and disorientation about why this has happened. The tension generates a deeper desire to understand the speaker’s experiences and slows down the pace of reading, perhaps even inviting readers to re-read or to ruminate themselves over why this has taken place. This can be said to resemble the readerly experience of fantasy narratives which also routinely utilize destabilizing strategies. Such strategies, according to Feldt, seek to pull the reader in more deeply into the narrative world.12 As a reader, the heavily emotional and personal first-person narrative invites a searching for an explanation for the speaker’s agony and it also leads us to contemplate more deeply the speaker’s experiences.

ENACTIVE READING THAT IMMERSES THE READER IN A NARRATIVE WORLD Literary theorists argue that heavily detailed descriptions of spaces alone are insufficient in generating an immersive experience of reading; it is the enactive process of reading first-person narration that is crucial. The landscape described in 1QH 16:5–17:36 is more than just a literary backdrop for the events that take place in the foreground. The wetland garden that is described in 1QH 16:5–17:36 not only gives us a detailed account of an otherworldly space, it also includes a significant description of the speaker’s physical and emotional experiences within those spaces as well.13 The narrative world, the landscape, the environment and geography, and also any non-human beings that are encountered within that space, can take on a quality of solidity as readers gain information about the experiences of the hodayot hymnist who interacts and emotionally responds to the space. 12 13

Feldt, “Religious Narrative and Literary Fantastic,” 272. Nancy Easterlin gives the example of a preschool in her explanation of what is meant by ‘environment’. When she speaks of a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ environment for a small child, she is not referring to just the condition of the furniture or toys in a classroom, or where they may be located. She is thinking comprehensively about an overall experience of the child in that environment, one that includes the relationships had with the people in those environments, the events that took place there. Easterlin gives the example of being bitten by another child, and the child’s own emotional responses to those events. Nancy Easterlin, “‘Loving Ourselves Best of All’: Ecocriticism and the Adapted Mind,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 37 (2004): 1–18, here 8–9.

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These narrative worlds, sometimes referred to as “possible and fictional worlds” by critical literary theorists, are described as experientially fluid spaces that are generated in part by the text and in part by the reader’s imaginative experiencing of the text through what are called enactive processes.14 Texts provide only a glimpse of a narrative world that readers must then extend and complete in their imaginations. Marco Caracciolo illustrates this phenomenon in the following way: “Just as you don’t need to download, say, the entire New York Times to be able to read it on your desktop, so you don’t need to construct a representation of all the detail of the scene in front of you to have a sense of its detailed presence.”15 A reader knows intuitively that there is much more to the Times than what can be seen, without having been shown its entirety in excruciating detail. So too, the narrative world is extended and completed when it is enacted by the reader’s imagination. In other words, detailed descriptions of spaces alone do not create immersive experiences; it is the description of those spaces as they are experienced and enacted by the figures in the text. Critical literary theory as it is applied to narrative spaces is an integrative approach that emerged in the late-twentieth century.16 It considers how the embodied experience of reading could engage immersive cognitive processes of mental imaging through practices, like enactive reading and enactive perception, and through the first-person voice. Enactivism is a way of speaking phenomenologically about the mental imagery that

14

15

16

Helpful is the discussion by Marco Caracciolo, “Ungrounding Fictional Worlds: An Enactivist Perspective on the ‘Worldlikeness’ of Fiction,” in Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology, ed. Alice Bell and Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 113–31. Caracciolo, “Ungrounding Fictional Worlds,” 127; he borrows this example from Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 50. Stephen Kaplan, “Environmental Preference in a Knowledge-Seeking, KnowledgeUsing Organism,” The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 581–98; Glen A. Love, “Ecocriticism and Science: Toward Consilience?” New Literary History 30 (1999): 661–76; Nancy Easterlin, “‘Loving Ourselves Best of All’,” 1–18; eadem, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); also the essays in Lisa Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Karin Kukkonen and Marco Caracciolo, “Introduction: What is the ‘Second Generation’?” Style 48 (2014): 261–74; Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); Marco Caracciolo, “Cognitive Literary Studies and the Status of Interpretation: An Attempt at Conceptual Mapping,” New Literary History 47 (2016): 187–207.

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is generated in varying degrees during the activity of reading.17 The cognitive processing areas of the mind are engaged by language about the sensory experiences of the body, which can be described as proprioception, which includes experiences that are kinesthetic and movementrelated, and interoception, which describes sensations had through the skin and viscera, and embodied emotions.18 This cognitive process of enactive reading about proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences can heighten a reader’s ability of having an immersive experience of the text. Language about these sensory experiences of the hymnist can be enacted in the imagination by a reader, thus making the two-dimensional literary environment of the garden into a three-dimensional space. The first-person voice can also intensify a reader’s experience by providing access to the elements that we associate with consciousness, the interior emotional experiences (interoception) and the presumption of a fully extended sensing body (proprioception). The more a reader is able to imagine the hodayot hymnist with a fully extended physical body and with the complexities of an interior consciousness, the more likely it is that a reader will be able to deeply empathize with the hodayot hymnist. We do well to remind readers that the ancient readers of the 1QH 16:5– 17:36, of course, were never pre-determined to have any particular kind of reading experience. Awareness of the literary details that best encourage enactive reading processes can draw our attention to the question of how a flesh-and-blood reader might have experienced the hodayot.19 Cognitive literary theorists like Anežka Kuzmičová and Marco Caracciolo argue that the phenomenon of immersive reading, that is, achieving an experience of presence in a narrative world, relies on first-person narration 17

18 19

Anežka Kuzmičová, “Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition,” Style 48 (2014): 275–93, here 275–76; also eadem, “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative,” 23–48; Nicole K. Speer et al., “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science 20 (2009): 289–99. Kuzmičová, “Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition,” 275–76. Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007); David S. Miall, “Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses,” Poetics Today 32 (2011): 323–48; Marco Caracciolo, “Fictional Consciousnesses: A Reader’s Manual,” Style 46 (2012): 42–65. According to Caracciolo, vivid language about a character’s bodily and emotional experiences, allows us to construct an idea of that character’s consciousness, “readers experience the fictional world through the consciousness of a character… Readers can enact a fictional consciousness, they can perform it on the basis of textual cues,” (43). So too, the thesis of Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, that the first-person voice allows readers to emotionally reenact the experiences of the text.

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of interoceptive and proprioceptive experiences. Cognitive literary approaches remind modern western scrolls scholars of our interpretive bias that privileges a sensorium that limits discussion of sensory perception to just the five senses that are highlighted by Aristotle: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Using cross-cultural anthropology and literary studies of the Hebrew Bible, Israeli scholar Yael Avrahami similarly challenges the classic model of five senses in her study, The Senses of Scripture.20 Avrahami argues persuasively that the Hebrew Bible repeatedly conceptualizes how the human body is able to know and understand experientially and to perceive through a sensorium of seven senses: “sight, hearing, kinaesthesia, speech, taste, touch, and smell” (emphasis mine).21 Cognitive literary studies emphasize the strategic role that descriptions of interoception and proprioception provide in constructing immersive narrative experiences. Interoception Interoception complicates the ways we might imagine the interior consciousness of literary characters in ways that are helpful for thinking about the hodayot hymnist and his emotional experiences because it integrates the physiological basis for emotional processes. Interoception refers to an individual’s “sense of the internal physiological condition of the body,” but it could also be extended to include sensory experiences that we would perceive through our bodies, like “temperature, pain, itch, tickle, sensual touch, muscular and visceral sensations, vasomotor flush, hunger, thirst.”22 It is the case that these physiological states are evaluated by the self and inflected with some kind of motivational or emotional quality. For example, both extreme hot or cold temperatures are disliked or avoided. The arousal of certain emotions like fear or anguish can have a visceral and physiological basis and so, can be considered to be part of an interoceptive experience.23 Herein lies the Hebrew idioms for emotions that locate these experiences in various internal organs (heart, liver, 20

21

22

23

Yael Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible (London: T&T Clark, 2012). Avrahami, Senses of Scripture, 2. These seven are discussed in chapter 2 of her book, 65–112. A.D. Craig, “How do you feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 655–66, here 655. Anil K. Seth, “Interoceptive Inference, Emotion, and the Embodied Self,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17 (2013): 565–73.

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belly, womb).24 Mark Smith’s anthropology-based discussion of emotion language in the Hebrew Bible begins with the classic example of Lam 2:11, a passage that makes multiple reference to the viscera in its poignant description of anguish over the people’s political destruction: “My eyes are spent with weeping; my belly is in turmoil (‫;)חֳ ַמ ְר ְמרוּ ֵמ ַעי‬ my liver is poured out on the ground [‫ ]נִ ְשׁ ַפְּך ָל ָא ֶרץ ְכּ ֵב ִדי‬because of the destruction of my people, because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city.” The hodayot hymnist gives readers access to his interior emotional state through his references to the body and its physiological experiences. Vasomotor experiences may be described as blushing or the blanching of the face which are uncontrollable yet visible manifestations of a range of interior states (e.g., shame, shyness, embarrassment, and even fear) that point to complex human experiences of self-consciousness. So too, emotional states associated with the viscera are counted among interoceptive experiences and speak to the ways in which our experience of emotions are profoundly located within our physiological experiences. Experiences of having “knots in your stomach” or “feeling sick to your stomach” can express the depths of dismay or regret. Such access to the interoceptive experiences of the speaker of the hodayot assists greatly in how the hymnist can be imagined with all of the complexities of human interior consciousness that we might associated with our own lived experiences and emotional states. In the following passage (1QH 16:26–17:16), the speaker moves from a poignant description of his own personal anguish and torment (esp. 16:26–17:7) to an emotional state of hope and confidence in God (17:8–16):25 In 16:27 the heat, its leaves wither and are not restored by the spri[ng of water … my] dwelling is with the sick, and [my] heart k[no]ws 28 agonies. I have become like a man who is forsaken by […] there is no refuge for me. For my agony breaks out 29 to bitterness, and an incurable pain without stopping, [… ro]ars over me, like those who descend into Sheol. Among 30 the dead my spirit searches, for [my] li[fe] goes down to the pit […] my soul is faint day and night 31 without rest. And my agony breaks out as a burning fire shut up within [my] b[ones] whose flame consumes for days on end, 32 putting an end to my strength without ceasing and destroying my flesh without end. The billows break over me 33 and my soul is completely worn down. 24

25

Mark S. Smith, “The Heart and Innards in Israelite Emotional Expressions: Notes from Anthropology and Psychobiology,” JBL 117 (1998): 427–36. See the notes on the translation in Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 231–32.

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For my strength is departed from my body, my heart is poured out as water, 34 and my flesh is melted as wax. My courage (literally, “the strength of my loins”) has become terror, my arm is shattered at the shoulder, and (I am) [un]able to stretch forth my hand; 35 my [foo]t is enfettered, my knees buckle like water and are unable to take a step—there is no sound to my footfall 36 … are pulled loose by stumbling chains, and my tongue that You had strengthened in my mouth, is no longer, it is unable to make 37 a sound and (unable) to give forth its voice for instru[ction] to revive the spirits of those who stumble, and (unable) to encourage the weary with a word. The sound of my lips is silence 38 […] with chains of judgment […] or in the bitterness […] heart … dominion 39 […] the earth […] 40 […] they have been silenced as not 41 […] humankind, not …. (vacat?) 17:1 […] 2 […] by night and […] 3 […] without compassion. In wrath He awakes mistrust and completely […] 4 the breakers of death and Sheol are over my couch. My bed lifts up a lamentation, [and my pallet] a sound of groanings. 5 My eyes (burn) like a fire in a furnace, and my weeping flows like rivers of water. My eyes fail to rest, my [strength] stands 6 far from me, and my life has been put to the side. But as for me, from ruin to desolation, from pain to agony, and from travails 7 to torments, my soul meditates on Your wonders.

This is perhaps one of the most moving passages in the hodayot scroll. Emotional responses are a significant part of how a literary environment is experienced, and they can be far more compelling than a physical description of a building or landscape and the things found within it. The hymnist gives a palpable account of his anguished emotional state, making several references to his visceral sensations of anguished emotion. He writes, “my agony breaks out like a burning fire shut up within [my] b[ones] whose flame consumes for days on end” in 16:31. Shortly thereafter, we find the literal expression, “the strength of my loins has become a terror,” expresses some kind of visceral fear in 16:34 which has been translated here as “my courage has become terror”). Through the first-person voice, the hymnist discloses a great deal about his emotional experiences of distress, fear, and worry.

Proprioception Proprioception includes the embodied sensations of moving through space that are often reported in apocalypses that detail otherworldly journeying. Proprioception can refer to both conscious or unconscious and active or passive experiences. In general, it refers to the embodied self in a spatial realm, as it moves and experiences the environment around it.

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The speaker’s extended body is described from head-to-toe in some of the most poignant descriptions of personal distress: “my arm is broken at the shoulder, [and I can]not raise my hand; my [foo]t is enfettered, my knees buckle like water, and unable to take a step—there is no sound to my footfall” (16:34–35). Such experiences correspond to the five senses of the body—seeing, tasting, touching, hearing, smelling—and also include the extended body in motion, which is further specified as kinesthetic perception.26 The hodayah in 1QH 16:5–17:36 emphasizes the visual details of the wetland garden, but they are also accompanied by other wide-ranging details about the hymnist’s proprioceptive experiences of physical embeddedness within that otherworldly environ. In addition to reporting his interior emotional responses to the things that are seen and experienced, the speaker describes how his extended body interacts with the wetland garden. The hymnist reports, “when I stretch out a hand to hoe its furrows, its roots strike into the flinty rock.… When I withdraw (my) hand, it becomes like a juniper [in the wilderness, ] and its rootstock like nettles in salty ground” (1QH 16:23–25). Because the well-irrigated garden is described only in piecemeal in 1QH 16:5–17:36, the reader must extend the fragmentary references to imagine the speaker’s fully extended body in a larger otherworldly landscape. These spaces and the events that take place in them elicit an emotional response from the hymnist, although the otherworldly spaces are only partially described in the hodayah. Both interoceptive and proprioceptive experiences are described by the hodayot hymnist in great detail. For the person who imaginatively reads this text, the repeated use of the first-person pronoun serves as a reminder to him or her that these are eye-witness reports of an otherworldly scene. Reports of these interoceptive reports in first-person voice can greatly facilitate how the vision might be experienced in the body of a subsequent reader with an intensity that conveys a quality of presence.27 26 27

Cf. Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture. Aldo Tagliabue, “An Embodied Reading of Epiphanies in Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales,” Ramus 45 (2016): 213–30, here 214. The visual perception is enhanced by the convergence of other bodily senses in the narrated experience, an important one being that of motion. See also G. Gabrielle Starr, “Multisensory Imagery,” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 275–91 and eadem, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). For a description of the enactive mental imaging of a scene, see the detailed description of breakfast in Hemingway’s novel the Garden of Eden in which a wide range of sensory imagery achieves the state of experiencing

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This process of enactive reading is one in which interoceptive and proprioceptive experiences are processed by sensorimotor areas of the mind in such a way that the embodied mind experiences in part the action that is being described.28 Cognitive literary theorists who study the experiential effects of reading emotionally-arousing fantasy literature note that language about the emotional experiences of the protagonists assist in deepening a reader’s immersive experiences. In such studies, “immersion ratings were significantly higher for fear-inducing than for neutral passages.”29 Both enactive reading and enactive perception speak to the ways that first-person referential descriptions of embodied experiences contribute qualities of vividness and also solidity to the spaces in 1QH 16:5–17:36.

CONCLUSION Scholars of the scrolls do well to consider how emerging cognitive approaches might contribute to our study of the past in a way that textures and complicates the experience of reading. Such approaches profitably expand the way we conceptualize the emotional and sensory experiences that are described in the hodayot, and work to overcome a problematic Cartesian dualism that severs the mind from the body. Michael Swartz does well to remind us that the process of reading is itself far more complex than most text-based scholars may be willing to keep in mind: “Indeed, the force of recitation needs to be taken quite seriously as a potent form of ritual behavior and as an example of the actualization of sacred space in time. Memorization, recitation and performance, we must

28

29

the breakfast (taste, smell, touch, movement) in Anežka Kuzmičová, “Does it Matter Where You Read? Situating Narrative in Physical Environment.” Communication Theory 26 (2016): 290–308, here 223. This kind of phenomenal experience is related to imitative and mirroring processing in the brain; see Elhanan Borenstein and Eytan Ruppin, “The Evolution of Imitation and Mirror Neurons in Adaptive Agents,” Cognitive Systems Research 6 (2005): 229–42. Marie-Laure Ryan uses the term, mental simulation, to refer to this phenomenon in immersive reading in which the reader mirrors the emotional experiences or consciousness had by the characters in the text; “The Text as World: Theories of Immersion,” in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, 61–84 esp. 78–84. Speer et al., “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences”; Vittorio Gallese, “Embodied Simulation and Its Role in Cognition,” Reti, Saperi, Linguaggi 13 (2018): 31–46. See Chun-Ting Hsu, Markus Conrad, Arthur M. Jacobs, “Fiction Feelings in Harry Potter: Haemodynamic Response in the Mid-Cingulate Cortex Correlates with Immersive Reading Experience,” Neuroreport 25.17 (2014): 1356–61, here 1356.

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remember, are physical acts, requiring intensive preparation, stamina, and physical prowess.”30 Swartz’s comments highlight the various performative and embodied aspects of reading prayers that I think are helpful for thinking about how we might imagine how 1QH 16:5–17:36 was read. The activity of reading and pondering destabilizing images or counterintuitive details in the hodayot can generate a state of rumination and deeper contemplation of what is described, allowing ancient readers access to experiences of presence of otherworldly phenomena and beings. Literary theorists who study the phenomenon of immersive reading look to neurological studies of the brain and its cognitive processes of spatial reasoning and remind scrolls scholars that texts are experienced in complex ways by flesh-and-blood readers. The descriptions of imagined spaces and places can generate various effects on a reader’s imagination; the landscape is more than just a literary backdrop for staging the main action of the narrative. How the hodayot hymnist interacts with the spaces that are described can significantly enrich how readers might imagine the hodayah with an immersive quality and invite deeper emotional engagement on the part of the reader. The spaces in 1QH 16:5–17:36 gain solidity in conjunction with the dramatic and poignant descriptions of the hymnist’s interoceptive and proprioceptive experiences of the garden in first-person voice. This integrative approach to understanding reading offers a potentially rich way to conceptualize how flesh-and-blood readers might have read a text like the hodayot immersively, with an experience of presence. Even so, as with most ritual practices, the necessary predispositions must be cultivated over time through formative behaviors and within communities; immersive experiences of presence are not instantaneous effects produced at will by merely imagining intently.31 Even so, such experiences of presence could be said to contribute ultimately to the cultivation of emotional predispositions needed for courage and perseverance in the 30

31

Michael D. Swartz, “Ritual about Myth about Ritual: Towards an Understanding of the Avodah in the Rabbinic Period,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 135–55, here 153. See too, Ophir Münz-Manor, “Narrating Salvation: Verbal Sacrifices in Late Antique Liturgical Poetry,” in Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity, ed. Natalie B. Dohrmann and Annette Y. Reed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 154–66; notes at 315–19. Tanya M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020); eadem, When God Talks Back (New York: Knopf Books, 2012); Luhrmann’s study discusses a multitude of practices that individuals engage in within communities that regularly experience moments of presence during prayer. Again, as Swartz’s comments indicate about religious reading, these formative prayer practices are both mentally and physically intense.

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201

face of adversity or uncertainty.32 In closing, the compelling quality of the hodayot may have very little to do with its presumed historical author,33 and more to do with the text’s ability to create compelling experiences of presence for the reader.

32

33

This emotional effect of reading narratives with strong emotional overtones is described well by Ari Mermelstein, “Constructing Fear and Pride in the Book of Daniel: The Profile of a Second Temple Emotional Community,” JSJ 46 (2015):449–83, who uses a social-constructivist understanding of emotion to consider how emotions are used in the formation of common values and beliefs (450). The ability to immerse oneself in reading does not depend upon the text being historically true. According to Cain Todd (“Fictional Immersion: Attending Emotionally to Fiction,” Journal of Value Inquiry [2012]: 449–65), humans have the natural capacity to suspend disbelief, even when the content is known to be fictional. Also Angela Kim Harkins, “The Pro-Social Role of Grief in Ezra’s Penitential Prayer,” Biblical Interpretation 24 (2016): 466–91, esp. 490–91; and Sarah Iles Johnston, “How Myths and Other Stories Help to Create and Sustain Beliefs,” in Narrating Religion, ed. Sarah Iles Johnston (New York: MacMillan, 2016), 141–56; eadem, The Story of Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

THE PERFORMATIVE READING OF THE HODAYOT: THE AROUSAL OF EMOTIONS AND THE EXEGETICAL GENERATION OF TEXTS1 They have made [my] soul        like a ship in the depths of the sea,        like a fortified city before its [enemies]! And I was in distress        like a woman laboring for her firstborn! (1QH 11:7–8)

The collection of prayer texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls known as the hodayot or the Thanksgiving Hymns has been known to scholars since the late 1940s, yet very little attention has been given to how these texts may have been experienced by the covenanters of the Qumran community.2 In this article I propose that the hodayot provide an interesting test case of an ancient practice of performative reading, a generative practice which could result in a new text.3 Key in this process is the reader’s reenactment of the text. Many scholars have commented on how references to the body in the post-exilic prayers suggest that the reader was expected to re-enact physical details of the text, such as imagining the posture that 1

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3

I wish to dedicate this essay to Eileen M. Schuller, O.S.U., in honor of her 65th birthday. I have learned so much from Eileen’s careful work on prayers from the Second Temple period, especially her work on the hodayot. Ad multos annos! This work became part of a larger monograph study of the hodayot and religious experience, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot through the Lens of Visionary Traditions, Ekstasis 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). The hodayot have frequently been engaged from the perspective of their material reconstruction or as literary exegetical texts, but seldom as liturgical or religious texts. For a recent discussion of the hodayot as liturgical texts, see Esther G. Chazon, “Liturgical Function in the Cave 1 Hodayot Collection,” in Qumran Cave 1 Revisited: Texts from Cave 1 Sixty Years after their Discovery: Proceedings of the Sixth Meeting of the IOQS in Ljubljana, ed. D.K. Falk, S. Metso, D.W. Parry, and E.J.C. Tigchelaar (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 135–50. I follow Alan F. Segal and hold that it is possible for a text to reflect actual religious experience and also show signs of complex literary development; see Alan F. Segal, “Religious Experience and the Construction of the Transcendent Self,” in Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, ed. April D. DeConick, SS 11 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006), 27–40. For an excellent discussion of reading as a performative phenomenon, see Seth L. Sanders, “Performative Exegesis,” in DeConick (ed.), Paradise Now, 57–79.

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is described in the penitential prayers in Dan 6:10 and Ezra 9:5. Here, I wish to propose that in addition to re-enacting the body described in a text, a reader was expected to re-enact the appropriate bodily emotions. I begin with a discussion of a text that I believe was used for meditation, 1QH 11:6–19. This brief prayer text uses three standard images for distress: a birthing woman, a ship on the sea, and a city under siege. I then present a model for the enactive and performative reading of this text. By re-enacting the strong emotions that are reported in the text, the ancient reader was capable of creating a subjectivity that could have predisposed him to have a religious experience of the text. I propose that the composition 1QH 13:22–15:8 is the text that was generated from the performative reading of 1QH 11:6–19.

AN ANTHROPOLOGIZING TECHNIQUE: THE STRATEGIC AROUSAL OF EMOTIONS THROUGH THE RHETORICAL ‘I’ Terrifying images in the Qumran hodayot are intensified by the process of anthropologizing. George Nickelsburg first used the language of anthropologizing to describe the literary maneuver of applying the first person ‘I’ to otherwise impersonal cosmic experiences.4 I propose that the anthropologizing technique appears in the composition known as 1QH 11:6–19. The speaker identifies himself with three stock images of terror through the strategic use of the first-person ‘I’. The rhetorical force of the ‘I’ in 1QH 11:7–8 intensifies the affective experience of the one who enactively reads upon this hodayah. The reader’s emotions allow him to enter deeply into the world of the text and enable him to experience 4

G.W.E. Nickelsburg, “The Qumranic Radicalizing and Anthropologizing of an Eschatological Tradition (1QH 4.29–40),” in Ernten, was man sät: Festschrift für Klaus Koch zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, ed. D.R. Daniels, U. Glessmer, and M. Rösel (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1991), 423–35. This essay was republished as “The Qumranic Transformation of a Cosmological and Eschatological Tradition (1QH 4:29–40),” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid, 18–21 March 1991, II, ed. J.C. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner, STDJ 11 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 649–59. In these essays, Nickelsburg uses the older numbering system for the hodayot which is associated with the critical edition published by Eliezar Sukenik. In that system, the composition known today as 1QH 12:30– 41 was numbered as 1QH 4:29–40. The numbering of the hodayot in the present study follows the system of columns and lines found in DJD 40. For further discussion of the anthropologizing technique in the Hodayot in 1QH col. 11, please see Angela Kim Harkins, “Reading the Qumran Hodayot in Light of the Traditions Associated with Enoch,” Henoch 32.2 (2010): 359–400.

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205

the extraordinary things that are described. The arousal of powerful emotions is therefore a key aspect of performative reading. I propose that this anthropologizing technique, especially when it is used to arouse emotions of fear and terror, could have aided a reader in re-enacting the necessarily bodily emotions. Doing so would have led to a deeper experience of the text and the generation of new texts. The readerly meditation upon 1QH 11:6–19 led to the generation of the composition 1QH 13:22–15:8. In the hodayah known as 1QH 11:6–19, three terrifying images are anthropologized and presented as experiences of the speaker through the use of the first person ‘I’. The speaker is “like a ship on the depths of a sea” (‫)כאוניה ֯ב ֯מ ֯צו֯ ֯לות י֯ ֯ם‬, ֯ “like a fortified city before an enemy” (‫מלפנ֯ י֯ ] צר‬ ֯ ‫)וכעיר מבצר‬, and “like a woman birthing her firstborn child” (‫( )כמו אשת לדה מבכריה‬see 1QH 11:7–8). Two of these images, the pains of a birthing woman and the terror of a ship tossed on a stormy sea, take on an acute intensity as the composition continues. The speaker describes the pounding pain that racks the woman writhing in labor (1QH 11:8–13), and the sea becomes an increasingly ominous setting as it comes to be described as “towering waves and crashing breakers” in 1QH 11:16–17.5 Emotions of fear and terror are further intensified in 11:30–33, which describe a cataclysmic scene of annihilation complete with fiery rivers and smoldering mountains.6 All three images anthropologized in 1QH 11:7–8 are stock images for terror and political defeat that are familiar from the Hebrew Bible.7 While 5

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1QH 11:14 “And the foundations of the wall break as a ship upon the water, and the clouds thunder with a roar. Those who sit in the dust, (15) as well as those who go down to the seas are terrified by the roar of the water, and their wise men are for them as sailors on the deeps. For (16) all their wisdom is swallowed up by the roar of the seas, when the ocean depths boil over the springs of water, and they are tossed up to the towering waves (17) and crashing breakers by their roar. And when they are tossed up, Sh[eo]l [and Abaddon] shall open.” 1QH 11:30, “The rivers of Belial will flow over all the high riverbanks, like a devouring fire in all their channels (?), finishing off every tree, green and dry, from their canals. (31) It spreads by tongues of flame, until all who drink from them (are) gone. It devours the foundations of clay (32) and the expanse of dry land. The bases of the mountains are set aflame, and the roots of flint become torrents of pitch. And it shall consume as far as the great deep. (33) Then the torrents of Belial shall burst forth to Abaddon, and the schemers of the deep shall roar with a clamor of those who spew mire.” For a complete translation of the text of 1QH 11:6–19 and 1QH 11:20–37, please see Harkins, Reading with an “I” to the Heavens, 160–65. A direct quotation of Jer 13:21; see too the other allusions in this hodayah to 1 Sam 4:19; 2 Sam 22:5 (twice), 6; Isa 9:5; 37:3; 66:7; Jer 4:31; Mic 2:10; see Carol Newsom, Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran, STDJ 52 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 246–53.

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each is well attested in early Jewish literature, they do not appear together in other texts apart from their reappearance in 1QH 13:22–15:8. Hodayot scholars have observed that the relationship between the three images is not readily apparent, but all of them are powerful examples of life-threatening danger and all are grammatically feminine.8 Amy Kalmanofsky cites the arousal of specific emotions as the goal of the rhetoric of horror.9 In discussing the image of the woman writhing in labor, she writes that the prophetic literature employs such images to deepen the horror that would have been experienced by the predominantly male readerly audience. While these three images may appear to be distinct and unrelated images to the modern eye, they would have evoked deep psychological associations of fear and political defeat for the ancient reader. The bodily experience of birthing characterized by palpable physical pain and emotional fear and uncertainty dominates much of the hodayah in 11:6–19. As Kalmanofsky has demonstrated, the image of birthing is a stock image of terror from the repertoire of the biblical prophets which functions to underscore the pain and fear that is often associated with experiences of warfare and military defeat. In apocalyptic texts, it can mark the eschatological moment or the appointed time, such as the moment of the enthronement of the chosen one.10 The pains of the birthing woman are appropriated by the hodayot hymnist who declares himself to be like one in labor. Through the use of the first person ‘I’ the reader can imagine the violent contractions that rack the body of the pregnant woman as moving through his own body as he utters the conflated verses from Jer 13:21 and 4:31.11 By anthropologizing the laboring woman, the 8

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Newsom, Self as Symbolic Space, 242; E. Glenn Hinson, “Hodayot, III, 6–18: In What Sense Messianic?” RevQ 2 (1960): 183–204, here 201; Julie A. Hughes, Scriptural Allusions and Exegesis in the Hodayot, STDJ 59 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 190. Amy Kalmanofsky (“Israel’s Baby: The Horror of Childbirth in Israel’s Prophets,” BibInt 16 (2008): 60–82) writes, “In summary, the image of a woman writhing in childbirth demonstrates the power and genius of the prophetic rhetoric of horror. The physical characteristics of labor—screaming, panting and writhing—describe the manifestations of the fear and panic of invasion. The emotional experience of childbirth—feelings of being overwhelmed, vulnerable and weak—also informs the image and reflects the emotional experience of invasion” (74). Such a moment is assumed in the Enochic booklet known as the Similitudes when it states: “And pain will come upon them as (upon) a woman in labor, when the child enters the mouth of the womb, and she has difficulty in giving birth,” (1 En. 62:4). The hodayah in 11:6–19 begins with the speaker making an opening statement that positions himself in the role of the laboring woman: “And I was in distress like a woman laboring for her firstborn” (1QH 11:8, ‫)[ו֯ ֯אהיה בצוקה כמו אשת לדה מבכריה‬. This statement is an allusion to the prophet Jeremiah: “Will not pangs seize you like a woman in labor?” (Jer 13:21, ‫אחז֔ וְּך ְכּ ֖מוֹ ֵ ֥א ֶשׁת ֵל ָ ֽדה‬ ֱ ֹ ‫)הל֤ וֹא ֲח ָב ִל ֙ים י‬. ֲ Not long after this allusion, the Jeremian term “birthing woman” (‫ )אשת לדה‬is abandoned in favor of the referent “pregnant woman”

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reader of the hodayah is able to enter into the text and access the intense emotional and physical experiences that are described. Like the image of birthing, the reference to a fortified city is also metaphorically and grammatically feminine. After its initial appearance in 1QH 11:8, it is mentioned briefly in line 14 where it is connected with the image of the ship on the tumultuous waters: “and the foundations of the wall tremble like a ship on the surface of the water.” Consistent with the author’s use of double entendres throughout the composition, elements of a fortified city, such as locked doors and secured city gates, also possess a range of meanings.12 In the Bible, the phrase ‘fortified city’ is usually a foreboding one that anticipates a military invasion, and it was not a phrase that was uniquely applied to Israel.13 These three anthropologizing statements appear alongside other references that arouse intense physical and psychological anguish.14

12

13

14

(‫)הריה‬, which is then used frequently in this hodayah at 11:8, 9, 10 (twice), 12, and 18 of this column and also in the overlapping text from fragment 4Q428 4:1, but never anywhere else in the Qumran corpus. This would not be unusual apart from the fact that “birthing” and “laboring” actually describe the experiences of the unidentified figures in the hodayah far better than the referent of “pregnant.” The highly elusive language of the two births and the clear literary shift from the Jeremian reference may suggest that the two births belong to an excerpted apocalyptic text that is being expanded by the hymnist. The association between the image of a fortified city and the feminine is one that has been examined by Cynthia Chapman in her recent study of reliefs depicting the brutality of Assyrian warfare. See Cynthia Chapman, The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter, HSM 62 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2004). Her study begins by noting that gendered language is used to describe power relationships, especially asymmetrical ones (pp. 3–13). In Isa 1:8, daughter Zion is compared to a city under siege. References to a fortified city’s door or walls can also function as veiled references to the female genitalia. In biblical texts like Song 5:4–6, references to city fortifications become double entendres that allude to a sexual encounter. See Marvin Pope, Song of Songs, AB 7C (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), 678–83; Carey Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 112–13; Carol Meyers, “Gender Imagery in the Song of Songs,” in A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs, ed. Athalya Brenner, The Feminist Companion to the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 201–04. So too, the fortification of both doors and walls in Song 8:9 serves as an expression of protecting the chastity of the little sister against unwanted advances. Such is the case with Ps 60:9 (=108:10), which anticipates an attack against Bozrah the capital of Edom. And so, in light of the dual meaning of secured doors and reinforced walls in the Song of Songs, Chapman argues well to read the account of the conquest of Nineveh in Nah 2:7 and 3:13 as also capable of functioning with sexual overtones. The invasion of the city in Nah 2:6–7 and the opening of her floodgates to her enemies in Nah 3:13 are references to the dreaded experience of political conquest that may also be seen as gendered descriptions that tap into the deep psychological experiences of terror. The fleeting reference to “a fortified city [before (its) enemy]” that appears in 1QH 11:7 is a feminine metaphor that further heightens the experience of distress and fear. Such examples include the reference to the deafening howls of horror in the description of the otherworldly scene of conflagration: “the schemers of the deep shall roar with

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The anthropologizing of these non-human experiences onto the body of the hodayot hymnist localizes and intensifies the affective experiences for the one who is reading these compositions. The first person speech and vivid dramatic language are not signs of the authenticity of an autobiographical composition, which is how traditional hodayot scholarship interprets them,15 but rather, I argue, a rhetorical feature that allows the reader who performs these texts access to the powerful experiences that they describe. The embodied practice of the enactive reading of these prayer texts has the capacity to generate within the reader a particular state of mind that would have allowed him to embark on a religious experience. I propose these anthropologizing statements could have functioned as cues that aroused strong emotions in the reader, thereby assisting him to embark upon a religious experience. The efficacy of these rhetorical features is suggested by the speaker’s reports that he finds himself in the company of angels and able to see otherworldly sites (1QH 11:20–21; 14:9–22).

EMOTIONS AND THE GENERATION OF NEW VISIONARY COMPOSITIONS: MEDITATIVE READING AND THE FORMATION OF SUBJECTIVITY Performance studies have case new light on the role of emotions and techniques to train and discipline the emotions, which in turn can shed light on how references to the body can be understood in the hodayot. Strong

15

a clamor of those who spew mire” (11:33). The reference to mire and slime is one that is more commonly associated with descriptions of Hades found in traditions of Orphism. See Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 107 n. 10. There she references Plato, Republic §363c–d; and Phaedo §69c. Traditional hodayot scholarship has favored the view that certain compositions in 1QH were authored by a figure known only as the Teacher of Righteousness, a figure who is known from other Qumran texts (1QpHab). The most recent study to argue in favor of this view of authorship is Michael C. Douglas, “The Teacher Hymns Hypothesis Revisited,” DSD 6 (1999): 239–66. Douglas’ essay returns to an early view proposed by a series of interrelated German studies from the 1960s: G. Morawe, Aufbau und Abgrenzung der Loblieder von Qumrân: Studien zur gattungsgeschichtlichen Einordnung der Hodajôth (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1961); G. Jeremias, Der Lehrer der Gerechtigkeit, SUNT 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963); J. Becker, Das Heil Gottes: Heils- und Sündenbegriffe in den Qumrantexten und im Neuen Testament, SUNT 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964). I discuss the problems of such a view of authorship of these hodayot and propose that these early scholars were influenced by the idea of the author familiar from Romanticism; see A.K. Harkins, “Who is the Teacher of the Teacher Hymns? Re-examining the Teacher Hymns Hypothesis Fifty Years Later,” in A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, ed. E.F. Mason et al., JSJSup 153/I (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 449–67.

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emotions such as fear and terror are especially prominent and could have assisted an ancient reader in becoming one with the imaginal body of the text.16 The ancient reader would have associated his own affective memories of personal terror during the reading of the hodayot, thereby intensifying the experience of reading. As the ancient reader sought to become one with the rhetorical ‘I’ of the text, he fashioned for himself a subjectivity that fits that of the imaginal body in the text. In doing so, he came to experience what the text describes. In the ritualization of meditative reading, the ancient reader used the hodayot prayers as a script to be performed and re-enacted. The process of ritualization could have formed within the reader a subjectivity that was predisposed to religious experience, without predetermining it.17 The body imagery and the use of the first-person voice 16

17

By imaginal body, I mean the spatial and phenomenal body constructed in the text which an ancient reader seeks to re-enact. For a discussion of the term imaginal, see Henri Corbin, Temple and Contemplation (London: KPI in association with Islamic Publications, 1986), 263–390. Corbin uses it as a way of avoiding the misleading term “imaginary.” The term imaginal is used to speak of the phenomenal experiences of the Temple (Imago Templi) within mystical experiences. Important too is the discussion of Corbin’s work by Elliot R. Wolfson in “‘Imago Templi’ and the Meeting of the Two Seas: Liturgical Time-Space and the Feminine Imaginary in Zoharic Kabbalah,” RES 51 (2007): 121–35. For the use of the term in Qumran studies, see E.J.C. Tigchelaar, “The Imaginal Context and the Visionary of the Aramaic New Jerusalem,” in Flores Florentino: Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish Studies in Honour of Florentino García Martínez, ed. Anthony Hilhorst et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 256–70; and Joseph Angel, Otherworldly and Eschatological Priesthood, STDJ 86 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); and A.K. Harkins, “Who is the Teacher of the Teacher Hymns?”. Amy Hollywood, “Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization,” in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, ed. Ellen T. Armour and Susan M.St. Ville (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 252–75, here 268. Important here is the work of Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and her discussion on pp. 220–21. Elsewhere Amy Hollywood discusses ritual and bodily practice and writes that “It is through bodily practices that subjectivities are formed, virtues inculcated and beliefs embodied,” in “Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Ritual and Bodily Practice,” in Difference in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip Goodchild (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 73–83, here 74. Hollywood expresses views about the body and performance that have been expressed by Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), where Butler writes, “Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability; a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal conditions for the subject. This iterability implies that ‘performance’ is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualized production” (95). See also Saba Mahmood’s critiques of Butler’s work in “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16 (2001): 202–36; eadem, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Like Butler, Mahmood also uses habitus theory as an analytical framework for understanding how exterior bodily practices become a means for interiority, but she makes an important critique of Butler’s post-industrial

210

EXPERIENCING PRESENCE IN THE SECOND TEMPLE PERIOD

are the rhetorical features in the hodayot that could have assisted in the formation of the appropriate subjectivity. In the case of the biblical psalms, Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher comments on how the bodily references are an invitation for the reader to re-enact the text and to participate in the world of the text.18 She writes: All aspects of human life, its fear, desire and joy, as well as its most intimate thoughts and emotions are portrayed with the help of body language and body images. With this kind of description, the readers can hardly maintain a distanced point of view; rather they are forced to add their own body experiences while they hear and read the text. In this way the readers are enabled to overcome the distance and to re-enact the text.19

Body language should not be restricted to references to the physical body, its parts and its posture; I argue, it should also include the somatic emotion experiences which the reader is invited to re–enact. Scholars have long observed that visionary reports, texts that describe religious experiences, are themselves detailed accounts that make many references to the experiences of the seer’s body or to specific bodily practices which a reader can then imitate and re-enact. Richard Valantasis described ancient reports of religious experiences as “highly imitable.… performances within a dominant social environment intended to inaugurate a new subjectivity, different social relations, and an alternative symbolic universe.”20 These details may include vivid descriptions of the specific behaviors that the seer performed to prepare for the vision and, I argue, the specific emotions that the seer experienced. Because they invite re-enactment, visionary reports themselves can generate new visionary experiences. Studies of how ancient visionaries achieved experiences of ascent and journeying indicate that the meditation upon established visionary reports was key. Daniel Merkur writes that Jewish apocalyptic visionaries meditated upon tried and true visionary traditions: “The seers rehearsed what they knew in order to encourage their psychic states to manifest further and unknown matters on the same topics.”21 In the case of the hodayot,

18 19 20

21

assumptions about agency which determines in advance that the formation of subjectivity is necessarily oppositional; see Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 136–39. Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher, “Body Images in the Psalms,” JSOT 28 (2004): 301–26. Gillmayr-Bucher, “Body Images in the Psalms,” 325. Richard Valantasis, “Constructions of Power in Asceticism,” JAAR 63 (1995): 775–821, here 797. Daniel Merkur, “The Visionary Practices of Jewish Apocalyptists,” in Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 14, ed. L. Bryce Boyer and Simon A. Grolnik (Hillsdale: Analytic Press, 1989), 119–48, here 141. More recently, Merkur elaborates on these practices

THE PERFORMATIVE READING OF THE HODAYOT

211

the reader’s meditation upon the emotionally charged experiences described in the text known as 1QH 11:6–19 results in the exegetical generation of a new text which shows signs of associative memory recall (1QH 13:22– 15:8). The arousal of the appropriate emotions in the ritual process of meditative reading can allow a reader to embark upon a transformative experience wherein he becomes the ‘I’ in the text. The emotions are an important bodily way of knowing that has wrongly been contrasted with other cognitive processes. Antonio Damasio’s work has been most influential in arguing that the traditional divide between the emotions and reason is an “artificial opposition.”22 Emotions are a series of physical responses that take place in the body. Stimuli are detected by the “emotionally competent” receptors in the brain; they are then processed by the body somatically prior to intellectual awareness. Emotions are strictly understood as bodily expressions of changes in heart rate or responses to various endocrine changes which result in heart palpitations, physical trembling, or blushing.23 According to Damasio, the conscious awareness of emotions, known as feelings, is experienced after these varied somatic experiences, and the intellectual processing of these feelings comes even later.24 Contrary to traditional understanding of the mind that isolate the emotions from reason, Damasio’s research has emphasized the important role that the emotions play in reasoning and decision-making processes. Emotion experiences are automatic biological responses and lie outside one’s conscious control. Negative emotions, particularly those associated

22

23 24

and extends his examination to later Jewish and Christian mystical traditions—Merkur, “Cultivating Visions through Exegetical Meditations,” in With Letters of Light: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish Apocalypticism, Magic, and Mysticism in Honor of Rachel Elior, ed. Daphna V. Arbel and Andrei A. Orlov, Ekstasis 2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 62–91. For an excellent example of recent examinations into the neuropsychology of religious experience, see Colleen Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Antonio Damasio, “A Second Chance for Emotion,” in Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, ed. Richard Lane and Lynn Nadel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12–23, here 13. Edmund T. Rolls, Emotion Explained (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 51–52. Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (London: William Heineman, 2003), 29. Here Damasio corrects previous thinking about the relationship between the emotions and feelings. He writes, “The centrality of feeling obscures the matter of how feelings arise and favors the view that somehow feelings occur first and are expressed subsequently in emotions. That view is incorrect, and it is to blame, at least in part, for the delay in finding a plausible neurobiological account for feelings. It turns out that it is feelings that are mostly shadows of the external manner of emotions.” (29)

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with fear or distress, are especially compelling, with many neuropsychologists favoring the view that they serve an evolutionary purpose; the ability to identify and avoid dangerous situations would have been important for survival. Emotion is also powerfully connected with memory, which is associative. Prior experiences that relate to certain emotions will spontaneously be brought to the fore. Even though emotion experiences are automatic and beyond human control, it is nevertheless possible to arouse a particular emotion through the careful manipulation of the body.25 Yet, because of the innate capacity that humans have for imitative behavior and vicarious learning, these otherwise subconscious bodily experiences can become learned behavior, although it is important to note that the acquisition of automaticity requires much repetition and is a relatively slow process which requires detailed visualization.26 The body and its behaviors exert a tremendous influence over consciousness and reinforce the observation made by ritual theories that repeated bodily practices effectively shape and powerfully influence the formation of subjectivity and religious meaning.27 Research into human emotions and cognition fits well with post-structuralist understandings of subjectivity which argue for the priority of the physical body over the cognitive in the making of subjectivity. In the context of ritualization, the repeated movement of the body in the performance of ritual actions is what is important. Frits Staal writes, “Ritual… is primarily activity. It is an activity governed by explicit rules. The important thing is what you do, not what you think, believe or say.”28 Damasio’s research into human emotions and cognition fits well with theories of performance and ritual which argue for the priority of the body (emotion) over other cognitive processes (belief). Ritual studies have been influenced by inquiry into the emotions and their role within performance theory. The method acting approach associated with Constantin Stanislavsky is especially useful for 25

26

27

28

In a famous study by Paul Ekman, subjects were asked to move specific muscles of their face in a drawn out series of behaviors such that their facial expressions eventually came to take on a resemblance of certain emotions like happiness, sadness, or fear. Subjects were not asked to contemplate an emotion as they moved these isolated muscles, but it was determined that the feeling associated with the expression inevitably came to be experienced. Ekman’s findings illustrate how the manipulation of the body in precise ways can generate emotions which then become experienced as feelings and then as thoughts. See Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 71. John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand, “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” American Psychologist 54 (1999): 462–79, here 476. Gavin Brown, “Theorizing Ritual as Performance: Explorations of Ritual Indeterminacy,” Journal of Ritual Studies 17 (2003): 3–18. Frits Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26 (1979): 2–22.

THE PERFORMATIVE READING OF THE HODAYOT

213

thinking about how texts like the hodayot may have been used to generate a religious experience. Method acting emphasizes the role of the body and the emotions in the performance of a script.29As Damasio has shown, once an emotion is aroused, memory’s naturally associative processes will lead the actor to recall additional experiences that match that emotion. In general the experience of emotion is a spontaneous and subconscious process that happens automatically, but through much repetition the arousal of emotions on cue can become learned. Method acting uses a set of visualization techniques which train the emotions to respond to various stimuli at key moments during a performance. By mastering one’s emotions, an actor is able to enter deeply into the scripted role. Studies of the role that emotions play in human cognition and also in the formation of subjectivity are helpful in building a model for how meditation upon otherworldly experiences could have generated new visionary experiences. According to Stanislavsky, and individual’s emotion memory can be recalled and merged with the temperament of the character in the script to intensify an actor’s ability to fully experience the role that is being performed. This results in the merging of the actor’s personal memories with the experiences of the script that is being enacted. In the case of the hodayot, the ‘script’ that is being used for performative reading, 1QH 11:6–19, is the framework for the exegetical experience that is recorded in 1QH 13:22–15:8. The three anthropologizing images become intensified and personalized as the hodayot reader re-enacts the intensity of the emotions described in the hodayah, eventually resulting in his entry into the world of the text and his transformation into the ‘I’ of the text. This model for ancient performative reading is generative in that elements from a reader’s own emotion memory may eventually become incorporated into the new visionary experience. Christopher Rowland describes the complex relationship between the reader’s imagination, the text, and the recollection of memory: Such meditative practices have been a key part of religion down the centuries and became the cornerstone of the religious life in the late medieval period, though the practices were rooted in a long tradition. The exercise of imagination involves the visualization in the mind of objects, inspired by what is read in texts or in the external world. 29

The method theory approach to acting, associated with Constantin Stanislavsky, has been critically re-engaged by recent scholars. See Sharon Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009) and Rose Whyman, The Stanislavsky System of Acting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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It has a close relationship with the visionary and the dreamlike, therefore, though in the latter the process is usually less deliberate than would be the case with an exercise of imagination.30

Rowland emphasizes the importance of the role of visualization in the recall of memory and the dynamic process of the creation of mental images which allow for the associative reconsolidation of related memories. He proposes that this associative and dynamic process of recall results in exegetical creativity as well.31 Rowland concludes by proposing that this dynamic process of meditation and memory recall may explain why apocalyptic literature often contains instances where the exegete is not only a detached interpreter, but frequently a participant in the vision as well. Such experiences may for the visionary have their origin in an approach to texts in which the pursuit of the meaning of the text is not a detached operation but may involve the interpreter as a participant in the narrative of the biblical texts (such as John’s experience of realization in his own vision of what had appeared to Ezekiel in Rev. 1 and 4). Thereby he… becomes a recipient of insight as the text becomes the vehicle of an imaginative transport to other realms of consciousness.32

Rowland’s observations about apocalyptic literature like the book of Revelation fit well with these Qumran hodayot which vividly describe otherworldly spaces and scenes. According to the method of reading proposed here, the repeated practice of reading is a performative activity which arouses certain emotions in the reader that stimulate memory’s associative process of reconsolidating memories from personal experiences that have a similar emotional valance. In this process, new visions may be generated. Like other apocalyptic text, the visionary may imaginatively incorporate elements from personal experience into the first-person narration of the apocalypse, not unlike an actor who is trained to recall emotion memories from his/her past in order to intensify the performance of a script. So too, an ancient reader can associate personal memories of fear or terror while reading and meditating on a passage of anthropologized images written in the 30

31

32

Christopher Rowland with Patricia Gibbons and Vicente Dobroruka, “Visionary Experience in Ancient Judaism and Christianity,” in Paradise Now, ed. DeConick, 41–56, here 54. Rowland et al., “Visionary Experience,” 51. See also the work of Mary Carruthers who also describes memory and memory recall as primarily visual, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68–69. Rowland et al., “Visionary Experience,” 55.

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first-person voice. This process is generative and may produce experiences that expand or elaborate on the otherworldly apocalyptic scenes in the text.

PERFORMATIVE READING AND THE EXEGETICAL GENERATION 1QH 13:22–15:8

OF

Given what we know about memory’s associative processes, I propose that it is possible that a performative reading of 1QH 11:6–19 led to the exegetical generation of the hodayah in 1QH 13:22–15:8.33 The same three anthropologized images from 1QH 11:7–8 take on a more personalized quality in 1QH 13:22–15:8. The two compositions that are being discussed—1QH 11:6–19 and 13:22–15:8—are composed by two different authors who composed their compositions with different orthographic systems which were copied and not systematized by the early Herodian scribe of 1QH into a single uniform system. The orthographic system in 1QH 11:6–19 consistently favors the expanded orthography for the words ‫( כיא‬five times at 11:6, 7, 8, 9, 10) / ‫( כי‬once at line 15) and ‫כול‬ (four times at 11:12, 16, 17, 19) / ‫( כל‬zero instances). In contrast, the orthographic system for 1QH 13:22–15:8 is as follows: ‫( כיא‬never) / ‫כי‬ (12 instances) and ‫( כול‬18 instances) / ‫( כל‬never). Because the composition in 1QH 13:22–15:8 is considerably longer, data are also available for ‫( לא‬5 instances)/ ‫( לוא‬once). The shorter composition 1QH 11:6–19 favors an expanded orthography, while 1QH 13:22–15:8 consistently uses a composite system which uses the defective spelling for certain words (‫)כי‬, and the expanded spelling for others (‫)כול‬. These orthographic divergences suggest that these two hodayot were probably not composed by the same author, but rather copied by the scribe of 1QH who reproduced exactly what appeared in the scroll’s Vorlage. The interlinear scribal corrections in a separate scribal hand suggest that the text of 1QH was being edited and prepared for recopying during the early Herodian period.34 33

34

While both 1QH 11:6–19 and 13:22–15:8 are represented among the fragments of 4Q428, the oldest Cave 4 composite collection with both Teacher Hymns and Community Hymns, it may be that the mythological imagery in 1QH 11:6–19 is exceedingly old and that the exegetical composition that resulted from meditation upon this ancient text was generated as early as the middle Hasmonean period. See the discussion of orthography in Angela Kim Harkins, “Another Look at the Cave 1 Hodayot: Was CH I Materially Part of the Scroll 1QHodayota?” DSD 25 (2018): 185– 216.

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The imagery and language in 1QH 13:22–15:8 repeat key lexemes from the anthropologizing statements in 1QH 11:7–8, but consistently expands them in a personalized way that intensified the emotional register of the images. While these three images of a ship, a fortified city, and a laboring woman share an impersonal and otherworldly context in 1QH 11:6–19, they appear to be personalized in 1QH 13:22–15:8 and contextualized in a scene that resembles less of an apocalyptic mythical scene of conflagration and more of a this-worldly scene of distress. Mythological references to a woman in labor become fittingly transformed in the second hodayah into “an incurable pain and a tormenting agony in the bowels (13:30, ‫ …)ותהי לכאוב אנוש ונגע נמאר בתכמי עבדכה‬with ruin and desolation, burning pains sei[ze me], pangs like the contractions of one giving birth” (1QH 13:32–33, ‫( יולדה‬33) ‫ זלעופות ֯אחזוני וחבלים כצירי‬.‫)עם שאה ומשואה‬. In this passage, the image of birthing reappears, but it is transformed into abdominal pain which could be said of any reader. The second anthropologizing statement of being “like a ship in the depths of the sea,” (1QH 11:7, ‫)כאוניה ֯ב ֯מ ֯צו֯ ֯לות י֯ ֯ם‬, ֯ also appears as, “like a ship on the surface of the waters” (11:14, ‫ )כאוניה על פני מים‬becomes personalized in the declaration that the hymnist is “like a sailor on a ship on the churning seas.”35 Again, the shift from a “ship” to the more personalized, sailor on a ship, is a move that transports the speaker into the scene as a character. This is also true of the third anthropologizing image of being “like a fortressed city under siege,” (1QH 11:8, ‫מלפנ֯ י֯ ] צר‬ ֯ ‫)וכעיר מבצר‬, which becomes transformed into, “I have become like one who enters into a fortressed city and hides behind a high wall until his escape.”36 In all three instances, the speaker of 1QH 13:22–15:8 takes the anthropologized image and firmly situates himself as a character in a new scene that is easily recognizable as a terrifying scenario from a this-worldly landscape. In addition to these transformations of the anthropologizing statements, other personal details from the reader’s affective memory that correspond to the emotional register of the text, such as betrayal by friends,37 or being subject to taunts, are brought in during the associative 35 36

37

The Hebrew for 1QH 14:25–26, ‫( ימים‬26) ‫ו֯ ]אני היי[תי כמלח באוניה ֯בז֯ עף‬. The Hebrew for 1QH 14:27–28, ‫( כבא בעיר מצור ונעוז בחו}}ב{{>>מ