Early Israel: Cultic Praxis, God, and the Sôd Hypothesis

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Early Israel  offers the most sweeping reinterpretation of the Pentateuch since the nineteenth-century Documentary Hypothesis. Engaging a dozen-plus modern academic disciplines―from anthropology, biblical studies, Egyptology and semiotics, to linguistics, cognitive poetics and consciousness studies; from religious studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis and literary criticism, to mysticism studies, cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy of mind―it wrests from the Pentateuch an outline of the heretofore undiscovered ancient Israelite mystical-initiatory tradition of the First Temple priests. The book effectively launches a new research area: Pentateuchal esoteric mysticism, akin to a "center" or "organizing principle" discussed in biblical theology. The recovered priestly system is discordant vis-à-vis the much-later rabbinical project. This volume appeals to a diverse academic community, from Biblical and Jewish studies to literary studies, religious studies, anthropology, and consciousness studies. Cover Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Preface: The Pretext Prologue: The Subtext – When Israel Was Young Introduction: The Text: Israel’s Unparalleled Communication Across Millennia Gatekeepers of Jewish Ancestral Tradition “Fiction of Actuality”: Literally True—or Fictionally True? Of Higher-Scalar Effects How Many Jewish Mysticisms? Interrogation of All Possible Interrogations, the Interrogation of God: Are Humans Capable of Literature? Notes Part One The Context 1 The God of Moses Versus the “One and All” of Egypt: From the Magic of Hypostatized Spirituality (Egypt) to the … The Enigma of Ancient Israel Hieroglyphic Images as a Target of the Second Commandment “Holistic” Pictorial Communication Versus Alphabet-Based Sequential Verbal Narration Magical Consciousness and Cosmotheism: The God of Moses Versus the “One and All” of Egypt A Semiotic Perspective: Iconicity and Symbolism (Egypt) Versus Indexicality and Allegorization (Israel) Notes 2 At the Primal Scene of Communication: The Question of Israel’s Esoteric Referent Of Primal Scenes Staging a Scene Five Scenes, All Up On the Edenic Stage Scenes of Writing, Instruction, and Interpretation, Juxtaposed The Scene of Origins, Or Historical/Literal Truth At the Scene of Communication The Literal-Fantastic Versus the Figurative-Logical A Feeling of Wrongness Is There a Literal Reference for a Figurative Expression? The Literal/Nonliteral Divide and the Question of Literary Competence “Trajectories Not Previously Entertained in the History of the System” Notes 3 On the Notion of the Sôd: YHWH’s Garden Versus the Rabbinical Orchard The Unaccounted-For Mystery of Ancient Israelite Religion Rabbinical PaRDeS, an Orchard of the Uninitiated Dual-Channel Narration: Fixedness Versus Violations and Shifts in Unconscious Contexts Unthinkable Power and Cooperative Communication Notes Part Two The Metatext 4 Tracking the Sôd Through Emergence of a Complex System: Accessing the Torah’s Veiled Axis of Communication Can a Meta-Account Approximate Initiation? Eschewing Reduction and Choosing Emergence Epistemological Blockage, Delayed Response, Delayed and Deferred Categorization Intention and Agency Apropos the Sôd: Authorial Action Versus Sentiency of the Reader Utterance Interpretation: Epistemic Asymmetry of Speaker and Hearer Presentation Versus Representation: Between the Warm Flesh of the Literal Event and the Cold Skin of the Concept Concealed Axis of Communication and Its Traces: A Metachronic Approach Notes 5 The Sôd as Poiesis: Probing the Sôd’s Poietic-Tropological Structure and Multiscalar Power Dynamics Positioning the Sôd Within the Pentateuch The Sôd’s Three Continuums Hyletic-Noetic-Noematic Perspectives The Sôd as a Poiesis: Poetic Function in Its Role as the Message Expressing Things By Indirection “Trajectories Not Previously Entertained in the History of the System” The Telltale Word From the “System” The Sacred as a Cognitive Boundary: On the Allegoricity of the Pentateuchal Mimesis Anttonen’s Theory of the Sacred as a Cognitive Boundary The Esoteric Source Domain of the Pentateuchal Text Principal Characteristics of the Sôd’s Poietic-Tropological Structuring: Select Literary Stratagems Multiscalar Allegorical-Parabolic Projection Indirect Indexicality Markedness as a Crucial Scheme Asymmetric Noetic Parallelism Notes 6 A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch: Israel’s Universe of Discourse; a Replica of the Torah; Acquiring an Apposite … A Theoretical Model of the Pentateuch Jakobson’s Model of Literary Communication (Continued) A Husserlian Reading of the Pentateuch (Continued) The Question of Grounds The S-Code, the S-Addressee, the Addresser, the S-Context Components of the S-Code: Semantic Fields The Addressee of the Sôd The Addresser: Pentateuchal Authors Rethinking Context and the Referential Function “Footprints” of the Sôd: Deictic Inferentiality, Connotational “Conferentiality,” and Denotational “Deferentiality” Deixis as Access Referential Function (Continued) Research Methodology Framework: “Pointers,” “Locators,” and “Identifiers” of the Sôd Discourse Deictics Traces of a Disguised Deictic Center De Dicto: Setting-Indicative Pointers as Indexical Coordinates of the Noetic-Inferential Continuum De Re: “Content-Communicative Locators” as Symbolic Coordinates of the Noematic-Conferential Continuum De Re: “Metacommunicative Object Identifiers” as Iconic Coordinates of the Hyletic-Deferential Continuum Notes Part Three The Urtext 7 The Pentateuchal Noetic Signifier: Retrieving the Torah Within the Scripture The Study’s Research Questions Primary Question: Is There a Deliberately Concealed Alternative Narrative in the Pentateuch? Secondary Question: Does the Conjectured Concealed Stratum Concern a Mystical Initiation System? Selecting the Research Method Survey of Available Textual Research Methods Research Method Selected: Customized Noetic-Literary Textual Analysis Assumptions and Limitations The Study’s Assumptions The Study’s Limitations The Pentateuchal Noesis as the Study’s Data The Who[SETTING] The Whereto[SETTING] and the Why[SETTING] The What[SETTING] The How[SETTING] The Where[SETTING] The When[SETTING] Notes 8 Israel’s Noematic Signified: Reverse-Engineering the Pentateuchal Deific Numinous Recovery of the Sôd’s Noematic Signified: Emergence of Pentateuchal “Content and Meaning Given in the Act” Overview of the Sôd’s Noetic Signifier The Why[TOPIC] and the Whereto[TOPIC] The Logic of a Means of Access to a Supramundane Entity The What[TOPIC] and the Who[TOPIC] The Where[TOPIC] The Body of a Would-Be Initiate The When[TOPIC] and the How[TOPIC] Notes 9 The Mysterium Tremendum of the God of Israel: Recovering the Esoteric Referent of Ancient Israelite Initiatory Praxis The What[OBJECT] Excursus: Deconstructing Belî Mah The How[OBJECT] The Where[OBJECT] Seven Etheric Knots of the Body The Image of Elohim The Why[OBJECT], the Whereto[OBJECT], and the Who[OBJECT] The When[OBJECT] Notes Part Four The Code-Text 10 Externalizing Israel’s Ineffable: Complex Tropological Entextualization Strategies for the Pentateuchal Numinous The Code-Text: Figuration Set Free and Reassembled as Tropological Paradise The Question of Israel’s Ineffable Why Is Figuration Invisible in the Pentateuchal Text? Narratives (Plots) as Series of States of Consciousness in Conflict: Source Domain of Key Pentateuchal Narratives Characters and Locations as Series of Asymmetric Noetic Parallelisms Space (Locations) as the Setting for a Series of Scenes of Numinous Experiences Time Intervals as Successive Expansions of the Initiate’s Self-Consciousness Oscillating Metalepses of Colliding Narratives Notes 11 In the Garden of Sacred Semiosis: The Conundrum of the Eleventh Commandment, Eden’s Theater of Ruptured Doxa and … The Perils of a Restrictive Concept of Experience The Meaning of Priestly Praxis Slippages Between Systems and the Phenomenal Realm Bypassing Intellects, the Senses, and (Even) Language World of Symbolization: The Veil of Maya Bio-physiology of Understanding and Meaning: States of Consciousness, Shifts in Attention and Noticing The Ineffable World Superconsciousness: The World of the Hyperrational and Suprasensory Human Being, “Liberated in This Life” Wilfred Bion’s “O” and Rappaport On Lies and Alternatives The Experience of Being (Being-Itself) Ultimate Sacred Postulates The Eleventh Commandment Analyzing God’s Epistemic Diktat Edenic Narrative’s Three Paradoxical Paradigms The Grand Edenic Megaphor: A Reenactment Rupturing the Doxa, Fracturing the Epistêmê, and Going Beyond Intuition Notes Postscript: The HORS-TEXTE: Are We Greeks? Are We Jews? Fast-Forward to Today Earning the Right of Closure: Does the Recovered Sôd Stratum Represent Closure for the Text of the Pentateuch? Open Access to Information Versus Limits and Liminality Are We Greeks? Are We Jews? But Who Are We? The Study’s Implications Notes Bibliography Index